Remake

“Take two steps backward,” another Marilyn said. “Mother, may I?” I said. “Vincent, I need to talk to you.” I got between him and the Marilyns. “I need to bluescreen some liveaction into a scene. How do I do that?”

“It’s easier to do a scratch construct,” he said, looking at the screen where Clint was standing, waiting for orders. “Or a paste-up. What kind of liveaction? Human?”

“Yeah, human,” I said, “but a paste-up won’t work. So how do I bluescreen it in?”

He shrugged. “Set up a pixar and compositor. Maybe an old Digimatte, if you can find one. The tourate traps use them sometimes. The hard part’s the patching — lights, perspective, camera angles, edges.”

I’d stopped listening. The A Star Is Born place down on Hollywood Boulevard had had a Digimatte. And Heada’d said Alis had gotten a job down there.

“It still won’t be as good as a graphic,” he was saying. “But if you’ve got an expert melder, it’s possible.”

And a pixar, and the comp know-how, and the accesses. None of which Alis had. “What if you didn’t have accesses? Say you wanted to do it without anyone knowing about it?”

“I thought you had full studio access,” he said, suddenly interested. “Did Mayer fire you?”

“This is for Mayer. I’m taking the AS’s out of a hackate movie,” I said glibly. “Rising Sun. There are too many visual references to do a wipe. I’ve got to do a whole new scene, and I want it to be authentic.” I was counting on his not having seen the movie, or knowing it was made before accesses, a good bet with somebody who’d turn Clint Eastwood into a marionette. “The hero superimposes a fake image over a real one. To catch a criminal.”

He was frowning vaguely. “Somebody breaks into the fibe-op feed in this movie?”

“Yeah,” I said. “So how do I make it look like the real thing?”

“Source piracy? You don’t,” he said. “You have to have studio access.”

Nowhere fast. “I don’t have to show anything illegal,” I said, “just talk about how he finds a bypass around the encryptions or breaks into the authorization guards,” but he was already shaking his head.

“It doesn’t work like that,” he said. “The studios have paid too much for their properties and actors to let source piracy happen, and encryptions, authorization guards, navajos, all those can be gotten around. That’s why they went to the fibe-op loop. What goes out comes back in.”

Up on the screen Clint had started moving. I glanced up. He was walking in a figure-eight pattern, hands down, head down. Looping.

“The fibe-op feed sends the signal out and back again in a continuous loop. It’s got an ID-lock built in. The lock matches the signal coming in against the one that went out, and if they don’t match, it rejects the incoming and substitutes the old one.”

“Every frame?” I said, thinking maybe the lock only checked every five minutes, enough time to squeeze in a dance routine.

“Every frame.”

“Doesn’t that take a ton of memory? A pixel-by-pixel match?”

“Brownian check,” he said, but that wasn’t much better. The lock would check random pixels and see if they matched, and there’d be no way to know in advance which ones. The only thing you’d be able to change the image to was another one exactly like it.

“What about when you have accesses?” I said, watching Clint make the circuit, around and around. Boris Karloff in Frankenstein.

“In that case, the lock checks the altered image for authorization and then allows it past.”

“And there’s no way to get a fake access?” I said.

He was looking at the screen irritatedly, as if I was the one who’d set Frankenstein in motion. “Sit,” he said. Clint sat.

“Stay,” I said.

Vincent glared at me. “What movie did you say this was for?”

“A remake,” I said, looking over at the door. Heada was coming in. “Maybe I’ll just stay with the wipe,” I said, and ducked off toward the stairs.

“I still don’t see why you insist on doing it by hand,” he called after me. “There’s no point. I’ve got a search-and-destroy program—”

I skidded upstairs and punched in the override, cursing myself for locking the door in the first place, opened it, got in bed, remembered the door was supposed to be locked, locked it, and flung myself back on the bed.

Hurrying had not been a good idea. My head had started to pound like the drums in the Latin number in Tea for Two.

I closed my eyes and waited for Heada, but it must not have been her in the doorway, or else she had gotten waylaid by Vincent and his dancing dolls. I called up Three Sailors and a Girl, but all the “next, please” ’s made me faintly seasick. I closed my eyes, waiting for the queasiness to pass, and then opened them again and tried to come up with a theory that didn’t belong in a movie.

Alis couldn’t have bluescreened herself in like Gene Kelly’s mouse. She didn’t know anything about comps — she’d been taking Basic CG 101 last fall when I got her class schedule out of Heada. And even if she had somehow mastered melds and shading and rotoscoping, she still didn’t have the accesses.