Page 2 - Unlikely Stories 2

Hitch MacGuffin’s Last Role

A few survivors of the industry’s upsourcing remained at the
Motion Picture Retirement Home, slowly baking or basking in the
shade of a ramshackle veranda. It was too hot indoors most of the
year; the air conditioner would not be replaced. Nonagenarians all,
they had been child actors when Logical Productions applied their
doppelganging technology to the entire world library of recorded
human performance and experience every type of structure or device
ever designed or constructed, and the totality of the planet’s natural
features—the whole range of flora and fauna, geology and
topography, past and present. The movie business, thus disrupted,
was not itself spared: all of cinema history and criticism was equally
digested by Logical’s autonomous system, as were more than a
century of directorial styles, lighting techniques and special effects.
The major studios’ employees and shareholders witnessed the
revolution in shocked dismay. But they should have seen it coming.
Logical’s blockbuster hits were produced in hours, distributed in
minutes. Seemingly new characters, plots and settings were simply
mash-ups of the successful components of previous movies.
Audience response had already become predictable, within an
acceptable margin of error. But human psychology, as understood
mid-twenty-first century, included a desire for novelty as well as an
array of emotional buttons easily pushed by familiar stories and
denouements. And that left open the possibility of innovation driven
by random forays into previously-unexplored or long-forgotten
cinematic experimentation. Flesh and blood might somehow again be
needed.
The old actors lived in hope of getting a casting call for one of
those original ventures. It had been years since Val Kerry gamely
went off to play the part of a rotting corpse reanimated by a
perverted gerontophile. The others waited for her return from an old
sound stage in Burbank, speaking in hushed tones of her break.
Another industry credit wouldn’t help any of them—their domicile
was protected against the encroachments of solar farm and
desalination plant—but it was exciting to imagine going before the

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