Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

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.

Every single memory bit fit into its own place where no other would go.

I edited for days. I slept in the editing studio. At one point, I fell asleep and woke up in the bar during “Twist and Shout” — I actually registered as having passed out on the floor under one of the tables on the side. A great big biker chick with curly black hair and Cleopatra eyes kept bending over me and saying, “Hey, honey, are you sure you’re all right?” in between twisting and shouting. For a while, I considered the Little Latin Larry Motel — instead of beds and rooms, you’d just pass out in the bar and whatever time you chose for a wake-up call would be a different number in the set, like “Twist and Shout,” or “Long Tall Sally,” or “Runaway.” That idea passed; but it’s not the stupidest thing anyone’s thought of, not by a long shot.

I was so many days putting a rough cut together that I kept insisting to myself that I couldn’t be sure about what I thought I had, that nobody could remember so much with any degree of accuracy, especially if you work out of sequence, the way I do. But deep in my heart, I did know. I think I knew before I even started editing the raw material, when I saw how much raw material there was to work with, and I just didn’t want to admit it. Because that was supposed to be impossible, you know. No one — and that is no exclamation point one double exclamation point — had ever found a combination of memory bits that, when assembled, would yield a complete, finished feature without interpolation or reconstruction. It just didn’t happen because it just wasn’t possible.

But there it was. The Return of Little Latin Larry and His Loopy Louies, His Luscious Latinaires, and His Lascivious Latinettes; music not only intact but in quadronic poly-sound, and every single member of the audience present and accounted for at all times. My editing program said there were no greyed-out areas whatsoever anywhere, and while you might be able to fool a person for awhile, you can’t hypnotize an editing program. But even then, I still didn’t want to believe that I had a complete feature with no reconstruction or interpolation necessary, so naturally, I took it for a spin.

I set the pod on Outcome: Surprise Me and zipped myself into it. I know my blood was completely clean, because I cleaned it out myself. Not doping; the blood never actually left my body to be recirculated. I used the in- body nano-machine method, even if it does give me a psychosomatic itch. It didn’t take long, though, because I stay pretty clean between features; it was really just to make sure there wasn’t anything lingering from the last one I’d done, a weird short subject called “But What About Moose and Squirrel?” which I cannot even begin to explain to anyone outside this particular clan who all claim ancestors from a particular area in Philadelphia. I just didn’t want to see anything out-of-context showing up and interfering with my concentration in any way. Then I set the IV drip for full feature, no intermission, closed my eyes, and went to see the triumphant return of Little Latin Larry.

It opened with split-screen — very tricky to do behind the eyelids, I wouldn’t have thought it possible on the first edit, so right away, I knew I had a double relative in there somewhere. Which is to say, either my audience member was also related to the band, or one of the band was related to the audience member. Or — astounding to think of, but stranger things have happened — both. And with both sets of memory bits present in each one. You