Channel Blue (6 page)

He looked up at the sky. It was free of the usual smoky haze and dotted with twinkling stars.
No
, he thought.
It can’t be.

Back inside, he opened his laptop and clicked from one website to another, as if an explanation to what had happened inside Galaxy Entertainment could be found if he looked hard enough. News sites, porn sites, blogs and gossip flickered before him in a meaningless blur of information. On one site, an ad popped up on his screen for surfboards, featuring attractive, barely dressed men and women on a beach.
What is the deal with surfing?
Perry wondered, before remembering he’d spent a fair amount of time researching surfing on the internet. He’d impulsively made Drake Blakely – the boyfriend of the President’s daughter in
The Last Day of School
– a surfer without knowing anything about the sport. But his web server’s computers, tracking Perry’s activity, had decided that he was a surfer – not just an internet surfer, but on water as well – and was marketing to him accordingly. As Perry was creating a character for his screenplay, the internet was creating a character for him.

Everyone’s watching someone
.

Perry was about to shut his laptop when a voice spoke to him from his computer. ‘What do you want to see?’ He looked down at the screen. A woman with skin that seemed too tight for her body lounged on a pink divan in a zebra-print bikini. ‘I’ll do whatever you want.’ A distant man’s voice responded, and Perry realised that his visit to one of the porn sites had automatically opened a live video chat for men interested in paying to watch a woman with too-tight skin lounge on a pink divan.

Perry slammed his laptop closed. He stood and stepped back onto the balcony, searching the night sky.
You’re crazier that we are
, he thought,
but not by much
. He laughed out loud at the insanity of it all – the idea that both Earth’s inhabitants and its aliens had been reduced to nothing more than
watching
.
Let the country descend into ignorance and apathy, let the Earth burn up in its own emissions, let the universe expand into nothingness, just tell us: What’s on TV?

Perry felt somehow lighter and wasn’t sure why. Then it occurred to him: there was no reason to spend time searching for the secret of the universe or contemplating the existence of God. There was someone out there watching all right, but based on their choice of viewing, he was pretty confident that they weren’t any more enlightened than him or anyone else.

Not that Perry was religious. While his parents were both devout Presbyterians, Perry had a fickle relationship with the Almighty. When he found a belief in God comforting, such as when he was sitting in the back of a discount-airline jet preparing to land, he believed. (It sometimes occurred to him that the God he occasionally prayed to would be foolish if He trusted the wishy-washy faith of someone like Perry, and thus completely unqualified for the omnipotence that being God no doubt required, but this didn’t stop him from issuing such prayers of convenience.) But when Perry wasn’t airborne, waiting to find out about an important job or afraid that he might have a sexually transmitted disease, he wasn’t religious. In fact, he had often viewed his life as nothing more than a nearly unbroken chain of meaningless humiliations. Now, however, he knew that the humiliations were no longer meaningless. He wasn’t a loser; he was an entertainer. They were out there watching.

‘I see you,’ he said to the night sky, and laughed some more. Laughing felt good so he kept doing it. Then he imagined aliens on the other side of the galaxy watching this man laughing for no perceivable reason and laughed even harder. He was interrupted by murmuring and peered down to see an elderly couple sitting on the balcony below, staring up at him with concern.

‘Don’t worry,’ Perry told them. ‘None of this matters.’ And he laughed until the couple rose from their chairs and retreated into their apartment.

Was he going crazy? Perry had to seriously consider this. The sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard were clogged with washed-up screenwriters in stained superhero costumes, posing for tourists and muttering loudly to themselves between sips of gin. Giving into delusions was an all-too-predictable third act for a failed fantasist. And yet Perry had never felt more sane.

Wearing the cleanest boxer shorts he could find, he stood under the fluorescent light in his grey, windowless bathroom, flossing with vigour in case anyone was watching. He was no longer a failure living alone in a cramped dingy apartment; he was a star performing for trillions. He smiled sharply into the mirror. The teeth were a little yellow; he’d have to take care of that.

He lay on his fold-out couch, staring at the chipped-icing ceiling. His evening masturbation was clearly out of the question. But then he thought,
Why not?
It’s nothing they haven’t seen before.
He shrugged and threw himself into it with gusto. Moments later, he had to admit that it had been one of the best ever.

He supposed that he liked being watched.

For the first time in years, Perry slipped happily into the arms of Morpheus. And in vivid colour he dreamt that he and Amanda were on a magnificent movie set, singing and dancing like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Then it started raining. They ran inside a beautiful mansion, but it was raining in there, too. They danced more desperately as torrents of water cascaded down a marble stairway, bravely strutting against the current until it became too much and washed them away...

He woke to find Amanda, the real Amanda, standing over him holding an empty glass. It was empty, he realised one second later, because its contents were on his face. He sputtered and sat up. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘We picked the lock. I’m sorry, Mr Bunt. I couldn’t get you to wake up.’ Perry blearily scanned the room. It was still dark outside. A young man he recognised as the Galaxy Entertainment receptionist sat on the couch, paging through an old screenwriting magazine.

‘Are you sure about this?’ He eyed Perry sceptically. ‘He seems a little out of it.’

‘This is Dennis,’ Amanda said. Dennis smiled uneasily at Perry. ‘You met yesterday.’

‘You have a funny way of never seeing someone again,’ Perry said.

‘We need your help.’ She sat on the bed next to Perry, who became aware of how foul his breath must be. His mouth was all after-taste, a lethal mixture of noodles, MSG and sleep.

‘Couldn’t it wait until tomorrow?’ he said, covering his mouth.

‘Remember when I told you that our ratings have been slipping a little, and that was why I was taking your class?’

‘Wait,’ Dennis interrupted. ‘Should we do this here?’ He pointed at the ceiling.

‘We don’t have time. If they pick up our feed, they pick it up.’ Amanda leaned even closer into Perry. ‘We received some bad news tonight.’ She paused and licked her lips. ‘Earth is being cancelled.’

Perry, still groggy, stared at her. ‘Cancelled?’

‘The gig is over,’ Dennis said, tossing the magazine onto the coffee table. ‘They’re going to start sending us to other planets next week.’

‘And the executive producers are determined to get every last viewer they can to tune in,’ Amanda continued. ‘They’re planning a big series finale.’

Perry swivelled his head between the two visitors. ‘What’s going to happen?’

‘Well, no one’s getting married,’ Dennis said.

‘You’ve heard of a Viking funeral?’ Amanda asked.

Perry had. A ‘Viking funeral’, in the parlance of TV executives, was when you took a show doomed for cancellation and pushed it to extreme spectacle in order to attract as many viewers as possible to its last few episodes. Perry suddenly felt very awake. ‘What are they doing?’ he asked.

Amanda hesitated. Perry turned to Dennis. ‘What’s happening?’

‘What do you think?’ Dennis said. ‘They’re going to finale it.’

‘What?’

‘They’re going to blow the whole thing up.’

CHANNEL 7

A VIEWERS’ GUIDE TO THE END OF THE WORLD

‘Earthquakes, terrorist attacks, a stock market crash in China,’ Dennis said. Perry stared incredulously at the young man sitting on his couch, blithely ticking off the disasters planned for Earth’s finale. ‘Then it all ends with this... the
coup de grâce
.’

Dennis reached into the pocket of his jacket and produced a pen, which he held in front of Perry’s face. On one side of it was a photo of a woman wearing a burka. ‘This is going to end the world?’ Perry said. Dennis smiled and nodded. ‘A pen?’

‘Watch,’ Dennis said. He turned the pen upside down and the burka vanished, revealing an attractive naked brunette. ‘And here’s the kicker,’ he said, pointing to three small words printed near the tip of the pen. Perry squinted and read:
MADE
IN
ISRAEL
.

‘We have statistics guys who crunch the numbers on all this stuff,’ Dennis continued. ‘They’ve figured out that sending this pen to ten Islamic leaders will cause Earth to destroy itself within three weeks.’

Perry turned the pen right side up, so that the burka slipped back up over the naked woman. ‘Just this pen?’

‘Well, the pen can’t do it
completely
by itself. You need the proper mixture of general chaos to get everyone on edge. Then just add angry mullahs and stir. Before you know it, everyone’s being invaded or invading, then the nukes get dusted off,
boom, boom, boom
, it’s World War III capped by a post-Armageddon duel-to-the-death in the desert over the last gallon of gas.’ Dennis shrugged. ‘I know. All very derivative. To tell you the truth, the whole thing sounds like every movie I’ve seen, but you already know how original our producers are.’ He shot a look at Amanda.

‘I had nothing to do with this,’ Amanda said. ‘It’s a terrible idea.’

‘Wait.’ Perry stood, trying to shake off this nightmare. ‘Are you saying that all of us are about to be killed... for ratings?’

‘Not all of us,’ clarified Dennis. ‘All of
you
. Hey, it was going to happen anyway. The way you guys have been hitting those fossil fuels and warming things up, it’s basically over. They just got sick of waiting for it.’

‘
Unless
we can show them that the planet can still attract an audience,’ Amanda said. ‘That’s why we’re here. I told Dennis all about your class, about all the shows you’ve worked on and the scripts you’ve written. If anyone can come up with a good idea, it’s you.’

Perry’s heart fluttered again, but this time his brain ignored it. ‘Me? In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not doing that well. Why don’t you get someone who’s more successful? Steven Spielberg, for example. He saves the Earth all the time.’

‘He’s right,’ Dennis said. ‘Didn’t I tell you? Spielberg or Lucas.’

Amanda shook her head. ‘Famous Earthles are jaded and sceptical by necessity,’ she told him. ‘No one who’s that successful is going to believe we’re anything other than kooks.’ She turned back to Perry. ‘Will you help us or not?’

Perry had terrible doubts. One of the keys to being a professional writer was knowing what you were good at and sticking to it. For this reason, Perry had never written science fiction (he had no idea how people in spacesuits talked), period pieces (or people in tights) or family comedies (he’d actually tried one of these during his long career descent, but for the life of him couldn’t come up with anything adorable for a nine-year-old to say while chasing his escaped pet frog).

He’d also never written anything that saved anyone, much less the world. Which is why he knew he wasn’t the best person on Earth – or even close to the best person – for the job Amanda had in mind for him.

Amanda must have seen the fear in his eyes. ‘Listen to me, Mr Bunt,’ she said. ‘There must be some reason you’re the one. That you came to my job yesterday. That you remembered everything you saw. That you’re the only Earthle who knows about what we’re doing. This must be your moment, right? The end of the first act, when the story turns and the protagonist sets off on his fateful journey.’ She smiled. ‘Of course it is. You told me about it after class one day.’

‘I did?’

‘Yes. You said that despite everything that had happened, you still believed in the power of your imagination, of its power to change your life. If there was ever a need for imagination, this is it. You told me that you keep looking for the Big Idea. Well, they don’t get much bigger than this. This is it, Mr Bunt.’ She looked him squarely in the eye. ‘This is where you get the chance to be the person you always thought you should be.’

After Perry had agreed to save the Earth, Dennis and Amanda waited outside his front door until he put on some clothes, then drove him in a service van to the Galaxy Entertainment building.

‘When is this finale supposed to begin?’ Perry asked from the back seat.

‘It’s already started,’ Dennis said, steering the van down dark, empty streets at an annoyingly relaxed speed. ‘You hear about the earthquake in Russia?’

It sounded familiar, but Perry had grown desensitised to disasters outside of his own life.

‘I’m just mad that I didn’t see it all coming sooner,’ Amanda said. ‘Usually, executives don’t want us overtly messing around with Earth’s activities – viewers get turned off if they sense we’re manipulating events. That all changed in the last few years.’ She ticked off the plot developments that the Galaxy Entertainment execs had forced on the producers of Earth, including the instigation of various meaningless wars and the introduction of high-fructose corn syrup. ‘It all reeks of desperation,’ she said. ‘I mean, we knew our ratings were low, but we didn’t think it was time to finale the
entire planet
.’

‘High-fructose corn syrup?’ Perry asked. ‘What could possibly be entertaining about high-fructose corn syrup?’

‘Fat is funny,’ Amanda said. ‘Some genius back at headquarters thought that ratings would climb if there were more fat people on Earth. Instead, it worked
too
well. Viewers became disgusted.’

‘There are now some crazily large people down here,’ Dennis said, chuckling. ‘I’m sure we’re going to see some of those fatties exploding when this place gets finale-ed. That’s going to be
hilarious
.’