James Kelly - Rewired - The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

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.