Rewired

by James Patrick Kelly

  Ola put off a lot of people for a variety of reasons — she was doing the jobs of several people and so depriving them of jobs, cyborgs were against Nature or the Bible, or she wasn’t enough of a cyborg to claim the title (which she didn’t in the first place), or she was too spooky, too feminine, not feminine enough, not spooky enough, for god’s sake. People, my god; people. Nature gave them tongues, technology gave them loudspeakers, and they all believe that because they can use both, whatever they say is important.

  I suppose that was why I started Realm of the Senses Theatre. The watchwords of the time were “custom,” “customizable,” “individual,” and “interactive.” Heavy on the “interactive.” What the hell did that mean, anyway, “interactive”? I used to rant about this to Ola and her sidekick all the time. Who the hell thought up “interactive,” I’d say; your goddam shoes are “interactive,” everyitem of clothing you put on is “interactive,” your car is “interactive,” what is the big goddamn reverb on “interactive,” goddamn life is “interactive” —

  And Ola would say, Oh, they don’t want to interact, Gracie, they want to kibbitz. Everybody’s got to have a little say in how it goes. Do it in blue; I want it in velvet; it would be perfect if it was about twice as long and half as high. You know.

  So that was what Realm of the Senses Theatre did. It gave people a say in their own entertainment. You could have it in blue, in velvet, half as high and twice as long, so to speak, and if you didn’t like it, it was your own lookout. But old retro Gracie — yes, even then I had a retro streak a mile wide — old retro Gracie used to think about staging some kind of event that people couldn’t interfere with, couldn’t amp up or down, or customize in any way — an event that you’d just have to experience as it was, on its own terms, not yours. And then see what happened to you afterward. So I started thinking about something called High Sky Theatre. I was calling it that because I was thinking the event would be like the sky—you could see it, even get right up in the middle of it, but you couldn’t change it, it rained on you or it didn’t and you had to adjust yourself, not it.

  And then, synchronicity, I guess. I was just toying with a few designs for the logo — High Sky Theatre in floating puffy holo cloud letters — and the Larry people got in touch with me.

  Right at the outset, they told me that they were all direct blood-positive descendants of the band and it was the first time that they had managed to get one of each — i.e., one of Larry’s descendants, one descendant of a Loopy Louie, one of a Luscious Latinaire, and one of a Lascivious Latinette. And even a descendant of someone who had been in the audience when Little Latin Larry and the etc. had gotten back together and made their triumphant return to performing.

  Now, I had seen the original The Return of Little Latin Larry as well as the first remake. The original, I must say, had been story-heavy enough to keep your interest but very thin in the experiential department. Larry’s descendant told me that was because they’d been missing both a Latinaire and a Latinette — they’d only had a Larry, a Loopy Louie, a few friends of a different Loopy Louie, and a Latinaire groupie. For the first remake, they had managed to find a couple of audience members, and that was a little bit better, but it still meant the backstage stuff was thin. Then the Latinaire groupie’s descendant quit because he said he didn’t really feel like he was an accepted part of the band. Which I guess was kind of true — the groupie’s association with the Latinaire had been a onetime thing, never to be repeated. According to Larry’s descendant, his absence didn’t take away much, if anything, from subsequent remakes.

  The descendants’ names? It’s hard to remember now, but if you give me a little while, they’ll come back to me. I had to think of them as Little Latin Larry and so forth because I didn’t want to go contaminating the memory with associations that didn’t belong. It sounds over-meticulous, sure, and don’t think I haven’t heard that and more about my methods and everything. But I had to stay focused. I didn’t want anachronisms popping up because I was blind to them myself. You go ahead and inspect any feature I’ve made and I promise you that you will find—for example—only native-to-the-era clothing, and not made-to-look-native-to-the-era clothing. Some say you can’t tell the difference, but I say you can. Even if it looks perfect, the smell and feel aren’t right. If you’re going to go to the trouble of distilling the memory of the event, either take it all the way or don’t bother, period.

  And while this may seem overly fussy to some people I won’t name, it’s how I can spot a forgery more quickly than anyone else. Some red faces on that subject, I can tell you. Believe me, I know the difference between someone who is descended from someone who was there — whatever there we’re talking about — and someone who injected a re-creation. One of the red faces I won’t name maintains to this day that he was completely bamboozled by a pseudo-Zapruder, but really, if he was doing his job right, I don’t see how he could have been. But that’s not my lookout, is it.

  So. Having the Larry people (as I called them) all together and ready, we hired a clinic and Ola and her sidekick went to work with the genealogists. This would be the part where my eyes would start to glaze over, to be perfectly honest (which I have always tried to be). Biochemical genealogy is one of those things I just don’t get. Every so often, Ola and her sidekick would try to explain it to me even when I’d beg them not to. The memory is retained biochemically, and what memory exists when an offspring is conceived might be passed on to that child depending on how the genes line up, dominant, recessive, blue eyes, white forelock, the ability to roll your tongue — I don’t know, genetics just confuses me, biochemistry confuses me, life is confusing enough, you know? All I know is the blood has to test positive for distillable memory by the presence of something-or-other. Frankly, I think that’s about as technical as anybody needs to get about anything in the arts.

  Ola and her sidekick went right to work with the distilled samples, which is something like working a jigsaw puzzle in five dimensions per sample. Every bit of recovered memory is keyed to at least one of the five senses and you figure out which one for each bit until you have a sort of a picture — I don’t know what else to call it, although it isn’t all visual, of course. I guess you could call it a sequence, except it isn’t necessarily linear. Event? Episode? Anyway, you hope you get enough so that you can interpolate whatever is missing in the visuals and audio, tactile, olfactory, and taste.

  A computer can do the comparing quickly enough and build up a sequence, and when caught between two or more senses for one memory bit, it can figure the dominant one to within a hairsbreadth of comparison and fill in most of the less dominant, but there’s no program intuitive enough to interpolate without human intervention. Ola and her sidekick had developed a knack for sense-memory reconstruction that was all but supernatural — the sidekick helped her become single-minded enough to concentrate deeply, while her intuition made the sidekick practically human. Give Ola and her sidekick a square inch of cloth and a whiff of talcum powder and in two hours, you’d have the toddler just out of the bathtub and climbing into his pajamas at bedtime, singing his favorite song. That’s more than mere knowledge, that’s talent.

  Of course, the more people you have to remember the same event, the better you can interpolate. You get one memory of the beer, say, and another of the sound of the glasses clinking together, and then there’s another that associates the clinking with the way the bartender looked, or someone else in the bar, or drinking at the moment something else happened—the band started a number or finished one, or—well, you get the idea. Memory bits knit together in ways that all but suggest the missing portions. And then there are other bits where it’s almost sheer guesswork based on experience or research.

  What with all the principal players we had, I figured we’d get a lot of texture to work with, and I was right. Ola and her sidekick were busy for I don’t know how long—a couple of weeks steady, at least. I went to work on advertising and publicity, taping teaser
interviews with each of the principals. I know that it’s not absolutely necessary to pay a lot of attention to the principals after you get the blood and tissue samples, but I’ve found it’s the sort of thing that can make your life easier if you run into trouble during the reconstruction.

  I suppose I should have realized that there’s a wide variety of trouble you can have in that area, and having a principal’s cooperation isn’t necessarily going to help.

  Little Latin Larry’s descendant had learned the trade of being Larry’s descendant from her father, who had done the original feature — Little Latin Larry and His Loopy Louies, Luscious Latinaires, and Lascivious Latinettes — and three remakes before going on to find and recover The Return of Little Latin Larry. Carola told me he had done three remakes after that original before retiring and turning things over to her. She’d done the next three remakes and hadn’t been completely happy with any of them, though she told me she thought they were improving and she had high hopes for this one.

  I suppose I should have realized something was funny when Carola told me she made her living providing memory bits for interpolation filler. But the genealogy chart she showed me was highly detailed and extensive. Some families are like that — one of the ancestors had a lineage obsession that gets passed down to subsequent generations like any other heirloom. Or memory, I guess.

  But most people who claim full documentation from before the Collapse and Rebuilding I’ve generally dismissed, at least privately, as either liars or as the very gullible offspring of liars. And there are those who aren’t actually that gullible but who like to believe that they have documentation that exists for no one else, as if the force of their lineage could defeat the effects of something as great as the breakdown of civilization itself. I don’t argue with people who claim to remember past incarnations firsthand, either. If it helps them cope and keeps them from trying to make the world unpleasant, I say on with delusion and who says reality has to be so tight-fitting anyway?

  Perhaps I’m a little too lenient that way. But, look, now—whatever’s in the blood speaks for itself, and if it isn’t there, it may well be that it just wasn’t passed on, a vagary of biology or of timing. There was a famous case just half a dozen years ago of Tino Marlin, who could document descent from Birgit Crow, who uncovered the ruins of the historical Lost City of Soho, proving once and for all not only that Soho had been real but also that the two islands of Manhattan had once been one whole island. But Tino didn’t have any memory bits; they were all in the blood of a rather disreputable urban nomad who went only by the single name Vyuni, and who somehow knew she was related to Crow. Family legend, perhaps, but in this case, a legend that turned out to be true. Much to Tino Marlin’s dismay, as Vyuni and her tribe tried to sponge enormously off the Marlins and harassed them in the most miserable ways when Tino refused them. Worse for Tino, in his own words, though, is having to live with the knowledge that while he may own every valuable heirloom and relic that his ancestor kept from the excavation and rediscovery, only Vyuni can provide the raw material for a feature about Crow and the Lost City. Nature can be so cruel.

  It didn’t seem that Nature had been at all cruel to Carola, not in her veins, and certainly not in any other area. Carola Ignazio was a beautiful woman, retaining so much of her ancestor’s Latin beauty — the dark, shiny hair, the nearly black eyes, the golden complexion. She was a little plump, but that only made you want to touch her, cuddle her. I know I did, and I don’t go that way. For her, I might have been persuaded, though.

  Larry’s Loopy Louies were represented by a black Asian kid named Philo Harp. He was barely legal at thirteen, and everyone was vague as to how they had come by him, so I had Ola blind-test him several times. Sure enough, the memory bits were there. I’ve worked with kids before, even those below the age of consent — all legally, of course, by contract with guardians — so that wasn’t a real problem. It just made me wonder, though, how he knew, or how they knew about him and I kept trying to bring the subject up whenever possible, but nobody cared to discuss it.

  The Latinaires guy was another object lesson in not putting too much emphasis on blood. He was a lifer — the prison sent a courier with the blood and tissue along with a copy of a twenty-year-old contract stating that all proceeds went to the victims’ survivors. I decided not to ask.

  The Lascivious Latinette representative was married to the audience member descendant. It looked like a pure business arrangement to me — that is, they were pleasant enough to each other, but I didn’t detect much of a bond between them. I got the feeling that they were making a family business out of who they were descended from and they were looking to produce offspring to cover off as many ancestors as possible. Or maybe they just weren’t that demonstrative.

  The Latinette descendant was a six-foot ex-soldier named Fatima Rey and she bore a very strong resemblance to her ancestor — it could have been surgical but I didn’t think it was and Ola couldn’t detect anything. Her husband, the audience member descendant, by contrast, was so forgettable that I often forgot him, even to who he was and what he was doing with us. Fortunately, he didn’t take offense easily. His name was—oh, never mind.

  They didn’t really want me to pay too much attention to the previous remakes. Or rather, I should say that Carola didn’t. She spoke for everyone. I often got the feeling the rest of them had actually forced her into the role of spokesperson just by virtue of the fact of her lineage and because none of them wanted to take the responsibility. Sometimes she seemed reluctant or even a bit lost, like she wanted someone else to check up on her and see that she was doing the right thing. But however the strings were pulling among them, they all pulled the same way on the previous remakes — no one wanted me to concentrate too much on what had gone before.

  Not that I could really argue with the reasoning. “We don’t want anything built up from what you remember was in a previous remake — we want it to come out of whatever you get from us, as if no one else had ever found anything until now.” Unquote.

  Ola and her sidekick said they were with that one hundred percent, and it wasn’t like I could really argue with them, either. After all, they had to do all the wetwork — my job was all the sequence editing. But I tried arguing that getting the sequencing right might well depend on my being familiar at least with a lot of the major moments from past remakes. Carola pointed out that would also be away of perpetuating any past errors.

  So I quit arguing and just didn’t tell them I was looking at the old remakes. What can I say? I just don’t like arguing.

  The distinguishing characteristic of The Return of Little Latin Larry, the singular property, the hallmark — if you’ll pardon the expression — is the emotion. It kicks in immediately, almost before you know you’re in a bar. Only the first remake spends much time in the bar before the lights go down for the show and I found that Carola had been right—it really was too much time hanging around drinking and smelling and drinking and drinking and smelling some more. It wasn’t until the second remake that The Return of Little Latin Larry began with the backstage sequence of everyone getting into character. I have to say, it’s really breathtaking, the first time you go through it with everyone. And in spite of the fact that Carola insisted none of them were very happy with the second remake, I have to say that the sequence editor did have good instincts, as the viewpoint moves in what I think of as ascending order, from the Latinettes teasing their hair, to the Latinaires all trying to fit their reflections into one skinny full-length mirror while they rehearse their moves, to the Loopy Louies getting completely shitfaced (the actual Loopy Louie term for it, absolutely no substitutes accepted, no matter how ridiculous or coarse the term may sound to us today), and then Little Latin Larry himself, moving around among them like a teacher supervising a playgroup.

  Well, I’m sorry, but that’s how it looks to me. It’s another quality present in every single remake, the sense that Little Latin Larry is supervising a bunch of kids at
play and sneaking in some teaching at the same time. Don’t ask me what he’s teaching them. How to play, maybe. And don’t think that some people don’t need to learn how to do that.

  In the third remake, the film crew appears explicitly for the first time, and we get the interviews interspersed with the sequences, and even with the musical numbers onstage, which I personally feel is a significant mistake on the sequence editor’s part. Obviously the sequence editor on that remake thought the in-between-numbers parts of the performance were dull, which is too bad, as you lose a lot of the bar atmosphere and you’re reminded constantly that this is a feature and you’re not actually there. This is fine with some things but it’s all wrong for Little Latin Larry. And I’ll go so far as to say this is more than an aesthetic choice, it’s true.

  I knew there was something new and different coming up when Ola and her sidekick apologized for the amount of material they were passing on to me. Most of the time, they apologized for a lack of material, at least in one area or another. I couldn’t imagine having too much material to go through. Then she had the cases delivered to my editing room.

  I mean, cases. I mean, crates. Yes, there were literally crates of recovered material — not reconstructed, but raw material recovered. An out-of-work dance team brought them in. I had to cut more cable and put together a board with a dozen more outlets before I could even get started sorting things according to chronological order.

  Now it’s true that I have a preprogrammed sorter to handle the first layers of sorting, but I don’t depend solely on that, and I always supervise at least part of the process if not the whole thing. But this time, I had to have three sorting programs running simultaneously while doing a fourth myself, just for the sheer volume of information. I had thought that a lot of it would turn out to be overlap if not outright redundancy but I was wrong about that, too. While there was a certain amount of duplication, none of it fell into the category of back-up.