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

exists when an offspring is conceived might be passed on to that child
depending on how the genes line up, dominant, recessive, blue eyes, white
forelock, the ability to roll your tongue -- I don't know, genetics just
confuses me, biochemistry confuses me, life is confusing enough, you know?
All I know is the blood has to test positive for distillable memory by the
presence of something-or-other. Frankly, I think that's about as technical
as anybody needs to get about anything in the arts.
Ola and her sidekick went right to work with the distilled samples, which
is something like working a jigsaw puzzle in five dimensions per sample.
Every bit of recovered memory is keyed to at least one of the five senses
and you figure out which one for each bit until you have a sort of a
picture -- I don't know what else to call it, although it isn't all
visual, of course. I guess you could call it a sequence, except it isn't
necessarily linear. Event? Episode? Anyway, you hope you get enough so
that you can interpolate whatever is missing in the visuals and audio,
tactile, olfactory, and taste.
A computer can do the comparing quickly enough and build up a sequence,
and when caught between two or more senses for one memory bit, it can
figure the dominant one to within a hairsbreadth of comparison and fill in
most of the less dominant, but there's no program intuitive enough to
interpolate without human intervention. Ola and her sidekick had developed
a knack for sense-memory reconstruction that was all but supernatural --
the sidekick helped her become single-minded enough to concentrate deeply,
while her intuition made the sidekick practically human. Give Ola and her
sidekick a square inch of cloth and a whiff of talcum powder and in two
hours, you'd have the toddler just out of the bathtub and climbing into
his pajamas at bedtime, singing his favorite song. That's more than mere
knowledge, that's talent.
Of course, the more people you have to remember the same event, the better
you can interpolate. You get one memory of the beer, say, and another of
the sound of the glasses clinking together, and then there's another that
associates the clinking with the way the bartender looked, or someone else
in the bar, or drinking at the moment something else happened -- the band
started a number or finished one, or -- well, you get the idea. Memory
bits knit together in ways that all but suggest the missing portions. And
then there are other bits where it's almost sheer guesswork based on
experience or research.
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