James Kelly - Rewired - The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

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.