Rewired

by James Patrick Kelly

  “You’re Little Latin Larry,” I said, not getting it. “Little Latin Larry and His Loopy Louies—”

  “Stop it,” said the dark-haired waitress, sounding angry.

  “—His Luscious Latinaires,” I said, turning toward her briefly, “and His—”

  “Stop it!” she shouted.

  “—Lascivious Latinettes?”

  “You oughta be strung up.” The dark-haired waitress glowered at me and then stalked off to clean some other tables.

  I looked at Larry questioningly. He just kept smiling a funny little amazed smile. “Little Latin Larry,” he said, and it sounded as if he were savoring each syllable. “Jesus H. I’m just glad you had the courtesy to come in here and say it where someone else could hear you.”

  “Why?” I looked at the bartender and the blonde waitress. The bartender had this sort of bored expression. Sort of bored and sort of skeptical, as if he thought I was lying about something. The waitress just looked mildly unhappy.

  “Because maybe, just maybe,” he said slowly, “it means that there’s some world somewhere, even some time, where it’s all true.”

  I stared at him for a moment and then looked at the bartender again for some kind of sign or explanation. He looked past me to Larry. “You ask me, I think this’s a setup from your ex-wife. She wants to see if you’re still taking your medicine. You are still taking your pills, aincha?”

  “Sure,” Larry said, and laughed some more. “Hell, I ain’t the one seein’ Loopy Louies and Latinettes and all that.” He jerked his thumb at me. “Right here, this is the prize-winner tonight.” He leaned back and looked at me out of the corners of his eyes. “Some people think insanity’s contagious. You think maybe you drank outta the same glass I did but old Jerry here didn’t wash it too good in between? Or maybe it was a toilet seat….”

  I admit it: at that point, I panicked and drained the whole experience.

  OK, it hit my secret fear—that I could possibly catch someone’s delusion or psychosis. Don’t say it’s not possible, because it’s happened. It’s on record, it’s documented. I don’t knowingly go near anyone with a psychosis, I don’t care how good the hallucinations are. If I want to hallucinate, I take drugs, the way Nature intended.

  Anyway, I would have poured the whole batch down the drain except I couldn’t, legally, since it wasn’t my property. And since Ola and her sidekick knew the batch existed, I didn’t want to force them into the position of having to choose between testifying that I had disposed of the Larry people’s property or committing perjury and saying that it hadn’t come together. So I gritted my teeth and requested a private meeting with Carola.

  She came down to my editing room and things got ugly right away. How dare I accuse her of being crazy and I told her that I wasn’t, just that her ancestor was prone to delusions and the memory had come through extra strong.

  Well, that couldn’t possibly be true, she insisted, raising her voice some more, because all the rest of the band was there, including a member of the audience, and how did I explain that?

  Tainted samples, I said, forcing myself not to cringe (I really was afraid she was going to start throwing things at me). Her memory factors infected theirs, much like a virus —

  Those were the last words she wanted to hear from me. I’m not sure what she said because it’s hard to understand anyone at that volume. There were lots of threats, accusations of jealousy and theft and incompetence on my part, not to mention my blood being tainted by my ancestors’ mating with mutant something-or-others during the period following the Collapse.

  I know better than to argue, or even to try to reason with someone in that state. I stepped back and told her she was welcome to her property, I didn’t want it. She gathered it all up in what I think they used to call “high dudgeon.” I’m not quite sure of the term, but I am sure of this: she knew. She knew and she had known probably all along. The anger was to cover the fear of the news getting out, that there was no such band, no such people, no such memory, no such night, ever. Not even theoretically; not even hidden from us by the scarcity of hard information about the world as it was before the Collapse. People get massively harsh about fraudulent pasts and faked memories; the court might let you off with merely a ruinously gargantuan fine and a slap on the wrist, but you’re finished professionally. You can try to go into fiction, but you’ll just get turned away—no one will trust you any more than they would if you had committed plagiarism.

  I suppose at that point, I should have felt like I was facing a capital ethical dilemma. After talking it over with Ola and the sidekick, we all decided we didn’t have to face anything at all. We’d all just keep our mouths shut. I wasn’t a doctor, I couldn’t diagnose a medical condition. All I’d done was make a judgment call and canceled the contract with them. They were free to go and I hadn’t even gotten paid for what work I had done. I figured after that, she’d either find an editor who didn’t mind massaging her data, or someone else would tell her she had a naked emperor, so to speak, in her blood.

  But, of course, everyone else she approached must have told her the truth about Little Latin Larry—or rather, that they knew the truth. I don’t know how many other people she approached. Maybe only one. Or maybe none; maybe she really became afraid of someone finding out after I did.

  I don’t know who did the actual final cut. I suspect it was Carola herself. With so much experience in remakes, she must have picked up enough skills to get by, especially when the work was actually already done for her. Because I know, from what I’ve seen and heard, that The Return of Little Latin Larry is my own rough edit, with some resolution cleaned up. I’ve heard the soundtrack, and I know that’s my re-mastering. I recognize the way Larry sometimes pops his Ps into the microphone.

  But I’ve seen stills of the bar and the audience, and those aren’t the people I saw. They’re spliced in very well, morphed enough that no one would recognize them unless she or he had been among them as I had, but it’s not the audience from the purported night. That audience is the original, from the very first Little Latin Larry feature, Rocky’s Roadhouse Presents: Little Latin Larry! It’s OK with me; they were a good audience. Carola’s ancestor must have been in the springtime of his delusions then, and able to imagine, or hallucinate, very strongly.

  But as for the rest of it, I have no explanation at all. I don’t know why the damned thing disappears after one session. I know Carola blames me, says that I did something that makes Larry vanish. You’ll notice, however, that I’ve never even been charged with malicious destruction of property. Maybe Carola just doesn’t know how to stabilize blood products properly. I’ve been asked discreetly—i.e., behind Carola’s back — if I’ll analyze a sample, but I’ve refused. I don’t want to know. I suspect it may have something to do with delusions having a shorter shelf-life than real things.

  And if that’s so, I don’t want to know. Because what if I have to find out that, say, my man Dylan is actually someone’s delusion and not the man who said that we all had to sing in our chains that everyone must get stoned? Yes, that would be a pretty thorough delusion — but so was Larry. I got all the way into those remakes, that music, those performances. I had a place for them in my mind, and, yeah, in my heart. I feel as robbed as anyone would. It made me think how fragile knowledge can be, especially when you have to glean it from people themselves. Memory recovery is great biotechnology but there’s a need for plain old non-sentient records, the kind of brute hardware that doesn’t have an opinion about everything and doesn’t personalize whatever it touches and records. Something sturdy, too. The kind of thing that can survive the collapse of civilization as we know it and then pop up with, say, accurate maps and—

  Well, that’s my new calling. That, and Sky High Theatre. Sky High Theatre is what I’m really excited about. It’s a complete departure from everything I’ve done before. Get this: in Sky High Theatre, there’s one stage, one cast, one performance, which cannot be stopped, paused, or re
wound because it is live. And the audience, rather than being individuals within a session rig, are all together in one big room the size of a parking garage, and they sit and watch the live performance without being able to alter it or personalize it in any way. Everyone sees the exact same action at the exact same time.

  Don’t laugh. This could catch on.

  Kessel to Sterling, 4 June 1986:

  “I think your discussion of the novelty of Gibson and the ideational content of this kind of sf is cogent. It strikes me that you and he could do a lot worse than to pursue this line of literary attack. I also agree that sf has open to it opportunities and approaches to writing that are different than those of traditional lit because of sf’s outcast and low-class status, and that these approaches may offer the chance for the production of something genuinely new.

  Only time will tell how this will play out. I certainly don’t know. The one thing I do know, however, is that a writer has to follow his own instincts, and I get pretty indignant when somebody presumes to tell me that my honest desire to write what interests me is really just an attempt to toady up to the literary establishment… I do think that there is support for the view that [cyberpunk] is not some wholly new invention exclusive to the sf demimonde…that sf writers, like it or not, are part of the broader world of fiction, though certain kinds of sf may have to be judged by standards different form those of traditional fiction….

  A couple of letters ago you said ‘We cannot have it both ways. Either I control my own creations or I don’t.’ I don’t agree with that. We can both control and not control our creations. I’m no Freudian or Marxist. I don’t like any criticism that tells me the writer didn’t know what he was doing. On the other hand, I think it’s futile to deny that many things we don’t intend to express often show up in our work…. Look at the body of work produced in the career of somebody like Heinlein…Starshîp Troopers is both about the virtues of a military social morality and about the eroticism of machines and violence. How can you evaluate one side of this book without acknowledging the other?”

  Thirteen Views of a Cardboard City

  William Gibson

  Though he is the quintessential cyberpunk, the label never encompassed all that William Gibson’s fiction did. Or maybe what Gibson did in his early work was not entirely what people said he was doing. Even at the time he said, “I think that a number of reviewers have mistaken my sense of realism, of the commercial surfaces of characters’ lives, for some deep and genuine attempt to understand technology.” Famously, Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a manual typewriter, and his contribution to Mirrorshades is “The Gernsback Continuum,” which is not about computer hackers slicing into corporate databases, but about “semiotic ghosts” of science fiction past.

  If you want to see this story as cyberpunk, look at it this way. It seems to be all about surfaces. It juxtaposes a small portion of the urban landscape with the implied human life within it, exposing this life through a series of images. No human being appears onstage, but in the end Gibson evokes a sense of human tragedy through the artifacts of our culture.

  ONE

  DEN-EN

  Low angle, deep perspective, establishing Tokyo subway station interior.

  Shot with available light, long exposure; a spectral pedestrian moves away from us, into background. Two others visible as blurs of motion.

  Overhead fluorescents behind narrow rectangular fixtures. Ceiling tiled with meter-square segments (acoustic baffles?). Round fixtures are ventilators, smoke-detectors, speakers? Massive square columns recede. Side of a stairwell or escalator. Mosaic tile floor in simple large-scale pattern: circular white areas in square tiles, black infill of round tiles. The floor is spotless: no litter at all. Not a cigarette butt, not a gum-wrapper.

  A long train of cardboard cartons, sides painted with murals, recedes into the perspective of columns and scrubbed tile: first impression is of a children’s art project, something choreographed by an aggressively creative preschool teacher. But not all of the corrugated cartons have been painted; many, particularly those farthest away, are bare brown paper. The one nearest the camera, unaltered, bright yellow, bears the Microsoft logo.

  The murals appear to have been executed in poster paints, and are difficult to interpret here.

  There are two crisp-looking paper shopping-bags on the tile floor: one near the murals, the other almost in the path of the ghost pedestrian. These strike a note of anomaly, of possible threat: London Transport warnings, Sarin cultists… Why are they there? What do they contain?

  The one nearest the murals bears the logo “DEN-EN.”

  Deeper in the image are other cartons. Relative scale makes it easier to see that these are composites, stitched together from smaller boxes. Closer study makes the method of fastening clear: two sheets are punctured twice with narrow horizontal slits, flat poly-twine analog (white or pink) is threaded through both sheets, a knot is tied, the ends trimmed neatly. In fact, all of the structures appear to have been assembled this way.

  Deepest of all, stairs. Passengers descending.

  TWO

  BLUE OCTOPUS

  Shallow perspective, eye-level, as though we were meant to view an anamorphic painting.

  This structure appears to have been braced with a pale blue, enameled, possibly spring-loaded tube with a white, non-slip plastic foot. It might be the rod for a shower-curtain, but here it is employed vertically. Flattened cartons are neatly lashed to this with poly-tie.

  The murals. Very faintly, on the end of the structure, nearest the camera, against a black background, the head of the Buddha floats above something amorphous and unreadable. Above the Buddha are fastened what appear to be two packaging-units for Pooh Bear dolls. These may serve a storage function. The mural on the face of the structure is dark, intricate, and executed (acrylic paints?) with considerable technique. Body parts, a sense of claustrophobic, potentially erotic proximity. A female nude, head lost where the cardboard ends, clutches a blue octopus whose tentacles drape across the forehead of a male who seems to squat doglike at her feet. Another nude lies on her back, knees upraised, her sex shadowed in perspective. The head of a man with staring eyes and pinprick pupils hovers above her ankles; he appears to be smoking but has no cigarette.

  A third nude emerges, closest to the camera: a woman whose features suggest either China or the Mexico of Diego Rivera.

  A section of the station’s floor, the round black tiles, is partially covered with a scrap of grayish-blue synthetic pile carpeting.

  Pinned eyes.

  THREE

  FRONTIER INTERNATIONAL

  Shot straight back into what may be a wide alcove. Regular curves of pale square tiles.

  Four structures visible.

  The largest, very precisely constructed, very hard-edged, is decorated with an eerie pointillist profile against a solid black background: it seems to be a very old man, his chin, lipless mouth and drooping nose outlined in blood red. In front of this is positioned a black hard-sided overnighter suitcase.

  Abutting this structure stands another, smaller, very gaily painted: against a red background with a cheerful yellow bird and yellow concentric circles, a sort of Cubist ET winks out at the camera. The head of a large nail or pin, rendered in a far more sophisticated style, penetrates the thing’s forehead above the open eye.

  A life-sized human hand, entirely out of scale with the huge head, is reaching for the eye.

  Nearby sits an even smaller structure, this one decorated with abstract squares of color recalling Klee or Mondrian. Beside it is an orange plastic crate of the kind used to transport sake bottles. An upright beer can. A pair of plastic sandals, tidily arranged.

  Another, bigger structure behind this one. Something painted large-scale in beige and blue (sky?) but this is obscured by the Mondrian. A working door, hinged with poly-tie, remains unpainted: the carton employed for the door is printed with the words “FRONTIER INTERNATIONAL.”

  Individual styl
es of workmanship start to become apparent.

  Deeper in the image, beyond what appears to be a stack of neatly folded blankets, is located the blue enamel upright, braced against the ceiling tile. Another like it, to its right, supports a paper kite with the printed face of a samurai.

  FOUR

  AFTER PICASSO

  Shallow perspective of what appears to be a single, very narrow shelter approximately nine meters in length. Suggests the literally marginal nature of these constructions: someone has appropriated less than a meter at the side of a corridor, and built along it, tunneling like a cardboard seaworm.

  The murals lend the look of a children’s cardboard theater.

  Punch in the underground.

  Like so many of the anonymous paintings to be found in thrift shops everywhere, these murals are somehow vaguely after Picasso. Echo of Guernica in these tormented animal forms. Human features rendered flounder-style: more Oxfam Cubism.

  Square black cushion with black tassels at its corners, top an uncharacteristically peaked section of cardboard roof. Elegant.

  The wall behind the shelter is a partition of transparent lucite, suggesting the possibility of a bizarre ant-farm existence.

  FIVE

  YELLOW SPERM

  We are in an impossibly narrow “alley” between shelters, perhaps a communal storage area. Cardboard shelving, folded blankets.

  A primitive portrait of a black kitten, isolated on a solid green ground, recalls the hypnotic stare of figures in New England folk art.

  Also visible: the white plastic cowl of an electric fan, yellow plastic sake crate, pale blue plastic bucket, section of blue plastic duck-board, green plastic dustpan suspended by string, child’s pail in dark blue plastic. Styrofoam takeaway containers with blue and scarlet paint suggest more murals in progress.