In We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, discerning the difference between reality and illusion is complicated. At the beginning of the story, the characters live in an agreed-upon reality. Quail is a boring office clerk who wants to go to Mars. His evidence for this reality is that it is confirmed by those around him: His wife Kirsten demands he drop his dreams of Mars and go to an underwater hotel instead, McClane produces a version of Quail’s fantasy in response to Quail’s letter, and the team at Rekal check Quail’s records to confirm his social status. Since everyone—characters and readers—agrees this to be true, the accepted reality is that Quail is a boring office clerk.

However, as soon as Quail is sedated, reality fractures. For Quail, what follows is an escape from his humdrum clerk life. There is evidence that his conviction that he is remembering previous lives is a delusion (after all, this is exactly what Rekal promised him, complete with physical evidence). There is also evidence that it might be real (the chronology of the sedation and implantation is purposefully murky). Nevertheless, whether he truly recovers real erased memories or is suffering some kind of memory implant malfunction, Quail no longer has to imagine that he is a swashbuckling hero or the most valuable person in the world: In his new reality, both things are true.