Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

by Kelly, James Patrick

  Every single memory bit fit into its own place where no other would go.

  I edited for days. I slept in the editing studio. At one point, I fell asleep and woke up in the bar during “Twist and Shout” — I actually registered as having passed out on the floor under one of the tables on the side. A great big biker chick with curly black hair and Cleopatra eyes kept bending over me and saying, “Hey, honey, are you sure you’re all right?” in between twisting and shouting. For a while, I considered the Little Latin Larry Motel — instead of beds and rooms, you’d just pass out in the bar and whatever time you chose for a wake-up call would be a different number in the set, like “Twist and Shout,” or “Long Tall Sally,” or “Runaway.” That idea passed; but it’s not the stupidest thing anyone’s thought of, not by a long shot.

  I was so many days putting a rough cut together that I kept insisting to myself that I couldn’t be sure about what I thought I had, that nobody could remember so much with any degree of accuracy, especially if you work out of sequence, the way I do. But deep in my heart, I did know. I think I knew before I even started editing the raw material, when I saw how much raw material there was to work with, and I just didn’t want to admit it. Because that was supposed to be impossible, you know. No one — and that is no exclamation point one double exclamation point — had ever found a combination of memory bits that, when assembled, would yield a complete, finished feature without interpolation or reconstruction. It just didn’t happen because it just wasn’t possible.

  But there it was. The Return of Little Latin Larry and His Loopy Louies, His Luscious Latinaires, and His Lascivious Latinettes; music not only intact but in quadronic poly-sound, and every single member of the audience present and accounted for at all times. My editing program said there were no greyed-out areas whatsoever anywhere, and while you might be able to fool a person for awhile, you can’t hypnotize an editing program. But even then, I still didn’t want to believe that I had a complete feature with no reconstruction or interpolation necessary, so naturally, I took it for a spin.

  I set the pod on Outcome: Surprise Me and zipped myself into it. I know my blood was completely clean, because I cleaned it out myself. Not doping; the blood never actually left my body to be recirculated. I used the in-body nano-machine method, even if it does give me a psychosomatic itch. It didn’t take long, though, because I stay pretty clean between features; it was really just to make sure there wasn’t anything lingering from the last one I’d done, a weird short subject called “But What About Moose and Squirrel?” which I cannot even begin to explain to anyone outside this particular clan who all claim ancestors from a particular area in Philadelphia. I just didn’t want to see anything out-of-context showing up and interfering with my concentration in any way. Then I set the IV drip for full feature, no intermission, closed my eyes, and went to see the triumphant return of Little Latin Larry.

  It opened with split-screen—very tricky to do behind the eyelids, I wouldn’t have thought it possible on the first edit, so right away, I knew I had a double relative in there somewhere. Which is to say, either my audience member was also related to the band, or one of the band was related to the audience member. Or — astounding to think of, but stranger things have happened—both. And with both sets of memory bits present in each one. You don’t usually find that sort of thing can remain coherent, let alone linear in any way but, as I said, stranger things have happened.

  Anyway, on the left hand side of the screen, you were going in the back door with the band, to the dressing room, while on the right, you were going in the front entrance of the bar. The perspectives on both were so well-realized, I began to think that maybe I’d been duped somehow and I had someone else’s finished product sizzling around in my brain chemistry, even though I knew that couldn’t possibly be — I had edited every moment out of pure raw material, and if there had been any finished product in there, it would have showed itself immediately as already refined. You can distract a person, but you can’t bribe a solution into disguising its molecular structure.

  I have to say that as soon as I got used to the split-screen, I loved it. On one side, you could see the band getting ready, all the members psyching themselves up and getting into character. The Loopy Louies were like bikers, guys in denim and old sweatshirts who whaled the hell out of their instruments. Three guitarists, one drummer, and they were all in a little world of their own, of course. Bass guitarist is a husky guy with a lot of thick black hair, a day’s growth of beard and carrying around a bottle of something amber-colored with a label that says “Jim Beam” on it. He offers everybody a swig, including the Latinettes, who are teasing each other’s hair and putting on make-up on top of make-up on top of make-up. And then up in the top left corner of the screen, you get his bio: Lionel LeBlanc, graduate student in English, writing a thesis on Milton. Yes, Uncle Miltie! The guy is a scholar of Berle’s Divine Comedy and he’s wandering around with a bottle of Jim Beam and burping. You’ve got to love it.

  The Latinaires are such a precision dance team that they can take the bottle from the Uncle Miltie scholar, swig, and pass it on to the next one without missing a beat or a hand gesture. They’re all mouthing something about a great pretender, the purple satin shirts look like liquid metal, the tight pants and the pointy shoes are positively low-rider classic.

  But you just know that the Latinettes did their hair for them. The four girls keep running over and putting more spray on their curls, even though the Latinaires are protesting left and right that they don’t need any more. Then the girls tease each other’s hair even higher — they’ve got great big bubbles on their heads, and in back it’s something called a French twist. They’re all wearing halter-top dresses in a leopard print and pointy-toed flats that they can do the Twist in.

  And then there’s Larry. Little Latin Larry. He really is little—maybe five feet, four inches, about as tall as the next tallest Latinette (the tallest one is close to six feet, over that if you include the hair, of course) and very Latin-looking, even more so, somehow, than the Latinaires, who are all, to a man, perfectly Spanish, according to their bios. The three Rodriguez brothers and their cousin the Cheech man. Larry is also their cousin on their father’s side; on Larry’s mother’s side, however, he’s Italian. Or so the bio tells me.

  Meanwhile, out front in the bar, the audience is getting into character. This is, apparently, one of those time-warp occasions, where everybody would pretend it was a time that it wasn’t anymore. Which is to say, the kind of music, the kind of performance the band gives is mostly something from twenty or thirtyyears before—everything here is a little vague, but that’s a product of the Collapse and we’re all used to it.

  The crowd in the bar doesn’t seem to be aware of any time difference. Either they’ve always liked this music, or they don’t know any time has passed. Orthey don’t care. Or they wouldn’t care if they did know. As the bar becomes more crowded, you start getting audience ghosts—a common occurrence, really, for a lot of these sorts of events. Usually, you don’t worry too much about them, they’ll disappear after awhile if they’re real ghosts and if they’re not, they solidify and fall into place wherever they’re supposed to fit in. These did neither.

  Ghosts kept following me around in the bar and I couldn’t decide what was really happening — whether they were some product of the memory bit, either the ancestor’s imagination at work or the descendant’s, or whether the memory bit had been corrupted or polluted in some way, mixed in with some memory bit that didn’t belong, or whether it was something in my own chemistry that was intruding.

  Wherever they were coming from, they were a nuisance and they showed no sign of fading away, no matter how hard I ignored them. I’d just have to try editing them out on my next time through, I thought.

  I found the biker chick again, sitting with half a dozen biker guys at the table I had passed out under before. I didn’t think she’d notice me — this was split-screen, after all, so I wasn’t
entirely there—but she did. And as soon as she saw me, the split-screen effect was gone and I was in the bar only. The Cleopatra eyes started to widen in an expression of recognition, which was, of course, impossible — no character in a memory sequence remembers any more than a person’s photograph would remember who looked at it. Then it was like she dropped a stitch; the expression that had started out as recognition ended as puzzlement and I could all but hear her mind in operation. She’d thought I was someone she knew, but she was wrong. Or was she? Now she was suspicious and a suspicious biker is a scary bit of business, even if she isn’t real. I really hoped that we didn’t have a memory of a situation. It’s only a very select portion of the clientele that has any appreciation for being beaten up in a bar fight.

  Fortunately, the biker guys with her didn’t find me especially threatening or even interesting. For all I knew, they couldn’t even see me. It didn’t take them long to distract her. When she looked away from me at last, I found myself backstage with the band and things were approaching critical mass, phase one. The Loopy Louies were looped (tolerated synonym for shitfaced, but only when used by someone outside the subgroup), the Latinaires were perfectly in synch, and the Latinettes were warmed up to the point where they could barely contain themselves. Larry, of course, was an island of calm, the Zen Master of rock ’n’ roll. The most active thing he did was snap his fingers in time to the Latinaires’ movements as he walked around the dressing room, surveying his troops.

  Abruptly, he pointed at the Loopy Louies and they were on their feet, slamming each other on the back and then propelling themselves through the door and onto the raised platform that was the stage.

  I thought the split-screen effect would disappear again and I would find myself watching the Louies from the audience. But no — the split-screen remained and I thought I’d go cross-eyed or faint from vertigo, with the two perspectives facing off against each other. From the stage, I saw people surge forward, eager to get the party going. In the audience, I felt like I was body-surfing an incoming tide that set me right down in front of the band. The Louies launched into some three-chord classic and some guy I couldn’t see said, “Ladies and gentlemen, for one night only, all the way from Philly, just for your entertainment here at the Ritzy Roadhouse, the return of — Little Latin Larry!”

  The Loopy Louies were playing “Little Latin Loopy Lou” (of course) as Larry swung onto the stage, still completely calm, utterly cool, shoulders moving gracefully, one hand in his pocket, the other snapping in time to the music as he glided over to the microphone at center stage and sang the opening number.

  The split-screen drove me crazy. It needed an option menu so users could choose to be onstage or in the audience. Switching back and forth wouldn’t be too bad, but having to endure both at once was too much. I tried to pause the action so I could insert the option and its menu, and that was when I got the first hint that I was in a not-so-usual type of situation: now that it was all in sequence, it wouldn’t pause. Not only wouldn’t it pause, it wouldn’t stop.

  Well, we couldn’t have that. The customers would be screaming. Hell, if they wanted the type of experience they couldn’t pause, stop, or rewind, they’d just stay out in their lives. I tried everything short of neutralizing—reinserting the menus, reprogramming the menus and reinserting them, reconstructing them so they weren’t ever completely out of the frame of action. None of it did a bit of good—once Larry started, that was it, you went with him unless you neutralized the potion in your blood. And frankly, while I could have done that easily enough — I’m never more than a pinprick away from sobriety — I couldn’t bring myself to go through with it. I couldn’t get over the feeling that somehow Larry and the band would know that I had somehow either cut them off or walked out of their set, and they’d get mad at me and not let me back in when I wanted to resume editing.

  And of course I knew that was ridiculous. But only my brain knew it. My blood and my gut, they didn’t know any such thing. I hung on the way you might hang on to the safety bar of a roller coaster and let Larry & Co. have the driving wheel.

  The band did two more numbers — “Twist and Shout” and “Land of 1000 Dances” — before Larry introduced everyone. This was one of the slippery spots. You could hear everything and see everything just fine, but the band introductions just go right by, like a train that doesn’t stop, and then you’re back in the music: “Sock It to Me, Baby,” “Shake a Tailfeather,” “Nowhere to Run,” “Long Tall Sally.” I was pretty sure I remembered them setting fire to “I’m a Man” before I passed out.

  When I woke up, I knew the party was over. I was still in the bar, but there was no more music. A waitress was shaking me, forcing me to sit up and drink a cup of black coffee. I think it was coffee—it smelled like dirt and tasted like hot soapy water. Over on the bandstand, the Loopy Louies were taking the drum kit apart and the Latinettes were standing around smoking cigarettes and talking to them. Behind the bar, the bartender and another waitress were washing up and, sitting all by himself on a stool at the end of the bar, watching a TV that had a picture but no sound, was Little Latin Larry himself. I looked around but I didn’t see the Latinaires. The waitress kept trying to shove the cup between my lips and I actually felt it clicking against my teeth. The only way I knew for sure that I was still in the memory was the fact that the coffee didn’t burn me or choke me.

  “Stop it,” I said, finally, pushing her arm away. “What’s going on? I’m not supposed to still be here. I was supposed to see the whole show and then leave.”

  “No shit, Einstein. Been tryin’ to wake you for half an hour.” She frowned into my face, this very pretty young woman with long, thick, straight, dark hair and lots and lots of make-up. The make-up made her look even more tired than she was. Or maybe as tired as she was. “Come on, come on, now. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

  I took the coffee cup from her, got up, and walked toward where Larry was sitting at the end of the bar. There was a can of something that said Schlitz in fancy script by his elbow, and cigarette smoke was rising in skinny curlicues from the ashtray next to it. The bartender and the waitress helping him watched me but didn’t say anything. The bartender just looked bored—he wasn’t really old but he wasn’t young anymore either. His face was starting to sag around the corners of his mouth and under his eyes, although his hair was still dark. The waitress was like something out of a fairy tale, with her wispy blonde hair pulled back except for the perfect ringlets framing her very pale, round face. She had a blue velvet ribbon around her neck with a cameo attached to the front, and I knew it was A Fashion Look as, to a lesser extent, was her form-fitting, almost-off-the-shoulder flower-print shirt. I looked back at the waitress who had woken me; she didn’t look any older than the little blonde one, but she felt older. Her name was Nora, something told me, and the little blonde was Claire. The bartender’s name was Jerry or Georgie, and Little Latin Larry’s real name was — was —

  I stopped with one hand up, pausing in the act of tapping him on the shoulder because I had wanted to call him by his real name but it wouldn’t come to me. It felt as if it might be right there in my next breath but every time I exhaled it came out silent. The hell with it, I thought, I’ll just call him Larry.

  “What,” Larry said, not turning around, before I could touch him.

  “What?” I repeated, sounding stupid even to myself.

  “Yeah, what,” Larry said, still with his back to me. “As in, ‘What do you want?’ Or even, ‘What the fuck are you bothering me for?’”

  “How’d you know I was here?” I asked.

  “Saw your reflection outta the corner of my eye.” He turned his head to look at the mirror behind the bar. I followed his gaze and then jumped; there was no one standing behind Larry in the mirror, no one and nothing at all except empty space where I should have seen whoever I was.

  “‘S’matter, you see something scary?” He finally looked over his shoulder dire
ctly at me. “Or just not what you expected you were gonna see?”

  “That can be scary,” I said, trying to sound light. “The unexpected.”

  “That’s for sure.” He swiveled around on his stool and studied me. I was still so startled that I couldn’t imagine what he was seeing. I looked over at the stage where the Loopy Louies and the Latinettes had been, but they were gone. Now Larry followed my gaze. “What you lookin’ for?”

  “I—well, I just saw the Loopy Louies and the Latinettes—they were—”

  “You saw them?” Larry said, and laughed incredulously. “You fuckin’ saw them?”

  I floundered for a few moments. “Was it wrong to look?” I asked him finally.

  “Where did you fuckin’ look that you fuckin’ saw Loopy Louies and Latinettes?”

  I gestured at the stage area, which was a lot emptier than I thought it had been a few minutes ago. Now even the last of the microphone stands were gone.

  Larry shook his head and laughed some more. “Tell me you heard that, Jerry,” he said, smoothing the back of his hair. Very greasy hair, not terribly clean.

  “I heard it,” the bartender said obediently. “Now tell me you paid this joker to come in and say that in fronna me and the girls.”

  Larry shook his head. “Man, oh, man. Have I ever seen you before, joker?” He stared at me expectantly.

  I looked over my shoulder at the bartender and the blonde waitress. The dark-haired one joined them behind the bar; she looked extremely nervous. “Me? No, no, I guess not.”

  “OK. NOW, you wanna explain how you happened to see something that’s only in my head?” Larry took a last drag on the cigarette and smashed it out in the ashtray.