"Pat Cadigan - The Final Remake Of Little Latin Larry" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cadigan Pat)

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 any more. Which is to say, the
kind of music, the kind of performance the band gives is mostly something
from twenty or thirty years 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. Or they 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 sub-group), the