James Kelly - Rewired - The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

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.