Channel Blue (7 page)

Perry listened to this, amazed. ‘We’re not lab rats! We’re human beings!’

‘Duh,’ Amanda said. ‘Rats are boring.’

Perry glared at her. ‘You don’t even see us as people. We’re just little playthings to you.’

‘
Very important
playthings,’ Amanda said. ‘Galaxy Entertainment has spent around twenty quadrillion dollars on this planet. They stand to lose almost half of that.’

‘That’s all you can think about?’ Perry seethed. ‘You lost some money? You’re all homicidal sociopaths!’

Dennis shook his head. ‘You guys are the killers. We never kill anyone – we just watch you.’

Amanda gave Perry a sympathetic smile, as if she were touched by his anger. ‘You just don’t understand how important entertainment is to us,’ she said with a trace of pity in her voice. This response was so unlike anything Perry had expected that his righteous fury quickly dissipated. At a loss, he sat back in his seat and stared out the window.

‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Manda,’ Dennis said. ‘I sure would miss my popcorn.’

Perry thought he’d misheard him. ‘Your what?’

‘Popcorn,’ Dennis repeated. ‘That’s the reason I want to save Earth. It’s just so damn good here. All that darn nitrogen in the soil – hard to beat.’

Perry shook his head in disbelief and turned to Amanda. ‘What’s your reason?’

‘I think you know.’ She gazed meaningfully at Perry and his heart raced. Then she said: ‘Professional pride.’

‘What?’

‘I’ve waited all my life to work here, and I know I can put a hit show on this planet if they’d just give me some more time. But they want to pull the plug on the whole thing. I can’t let that happen. For one thing, it would look terrible on my resumé.’

Perry felt his fury rekindle. ‘A planet of seven billion people is about to destroyed, and the only reason you’re against it is because of your
career
?’

‘Hey, there’re a lot of planets with seven billion people,’ Dennis said. ‘She only has one career.’ He pulled the van in front of the Galaxy Entertainment building and turned off the ignition. From the outside, the building appeared dark and silent, except for the short, squat security guard sitting at the receptionist’s desk. ‘So what’s the planda, Manda?’

‘We need to get him into a screening room,’ she said.

The receptionist gasped. ‘No way.’

‘I need to show him Steve at least,’ Amanda said.

‘Steve?’ Perry asked. ‘Who’s Steve?’

Amanda and the receptionist ignored him.

‘You can’t do it,’ Dennis said. ‘First of all, it’s a clear violation of the Producers’ Code.’

‘We don’t have a choice,’ Amanda responded. ‘How’s he supposed to come up with something to save the channel if he doesn’t know what’s on it?’

Dennis remained unconvinced. ‘Do you know what they’ll do if they catch us? Fire us both on the spot and take writer-boy here straight to the Green Room.’

Something about the urgency of Dennis’s argument hit home with Perry. ‘Maybe he’s right,’ he said.

‘We’re wasting time. We have to go in.’ Amanda stepped out of the van, leaving Perry and Dennis no choice but to follow.

CHANNEL 8

LIGHTS! ACTION! ARMAGEDDON!

Amanda Mundo loved Earth. Ever since she was a little girl, all her favourite programmes were on Channel Blue. It was a fixture on her first telescreen and the first channel she watched when she arrived home from school. Like most viewers, she had initially been attracted to the nearly constant stupidity and violence. But she’d seen something more in the Earthles, something that, as a young Edenite growing up in a culture that emphasised rationality, moved her deeply. She loved how Earthles would literally kill themselves climbing tall mountains and diving deep into oceans and walking on wires strung impossibly high. And why would they do these things? Were they being chased by predators? Was there something they needed for their survival on top of the mountain or on the bottom of the ocean? No – there was no reason. They did these things only because they wanted to prove that they could do them.

How could you not love that?

As an adolescent, Amanda learned all about her civilisation, the Edenite Empire, and the Three Rs that had rescued it from its barbaric past: Reason, Rationality and Respect. She learned how her people had managed to transcend millennia of destructive animal-based behaviours to evolve into a society devoid of hunger, killing and ignorance. While she couldn’t help but feel proud of her history, Channel Blue remained her guilty pleasure. When not studying the lessons of her elders, she would return home and watch fascinated as the hapless Earthles searched jungles for gold that never existed, went blind writing immense books no one ever read, and starved alone in caves searching for enlightenment that never came. Though Amanda never said this out loud, she found the irrational Earthle instinct for the endless quest, the impossible dream and the unreachable goal heartbreakingly beautiful.

She also loved their sense of duty and honour, the misguided way they would sacrifice themselves for meaningless causes. She even loved their bizarre need to divide themselves up into tribes – ‘countries’, they called them – and celebrate their tribe as the best of all, even if it meant flinging themselves into terrible battles and certain death to prove it. And most of all, she loved their faith in a higher power to rescue them from those terrible battles and certain death, a power that never manifested itself in any tangible form whatsoever, much less rescued them. They always ended up dying – but incredibly enough (and this, in her mind, was the best part) this fact didn’t shake the faith of the surviving Earthles. On the contrary, it strengthened their faith because
the higher power must have wanted it that way
.

Seriously
: How could you not love that?

Channel Blue was actually thousands of channels bundled together, but Amanda’s favourite channels all originated from the tribe that called itself the United States of America. Because of its relative prosperity, strident religious beliefs, and relaxed restrictions on the use of firearms, the USA was the source of most of Channel Blue’s hit shows. This, after all, was where the government murdered people for murdering people and started wars to prevent them. It was a country that took all the madness of the Earthles and distilled it into just a few time zones. And though the citizens of this nation had no way of knowing their amazing exploits were being beamed to billions of viewers on the other side of the galaxy, they seemed to have some innate sense of their primacy.

‘America’s Number One!’ they would chant at patriotic rallies and international sporting events.

‘This is the greatest country in the world,’ their leaders would often say, and as far as entertainment value went, they were absolutely right.

When asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, Amanda dared to dream big: ‘I want to produce Earth.’ Adults humoured her, though they knew the chances of this actually happening were remote. In Edenite society, there was no calling higher than the production of entertainment, and producers were revered more than the greatest politicians, businessmen, doctors or scholars. And Channel Blue was one of the most sought-after assignments in all of interplanetary production. But Amanda, according to her genetic profile, was blessed with greater tenacity than her peers. This, more than anything else, drove her to become valedictorian of her graduating class and gain enrolment in the highly selective Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

She graduated from this hallowed institution in the top percentile and could have had her pick of domestic production jobs. But she kept her eyes on the prize. There were no openings on Earth, so she took the toughest jobs she could find around the galaxy to hone her skills, producing celebrity asteroids and CrazyWorlds. When the opportunity came, she wanted to be ready.

One day, while setting up shots for a mutant fight on Altair 3, she read on her screen that a producer on the USA desk of Channel Blue was retiring. She felt a surge of excitement. It was not just a job on her favourite planet, but a job producing her favourite tribe on her favourite planet. She knew it was hers even before she interviewed for it.

Unfortunately, dream jobs rarely live up to their hype. It seemed as if Amanda had barely moved into her new office before she started overhearing worried conversations in the elevators. Ratings hadn’t been an issue for Channel Blue for years. The channel had made executives rich and shareholders wealthy; it had employed hundreds of thousands of producers, editors and technicians, and was such a reliable fixture of the Edenite culture that ‘Earthle’ had become an affectionate nickname for someone slow on the uptake. But as the numbers on even its more reliable shows dwindled, the channel seemed vulnerable. Producers forced out of their comfort zones scrambled to come up with new programming, and executives looked the other way while production crews flagrantly manipulated events on Earth in an attempt to increase ratings.

Amanda was the first to borrow ideas from Earthle writers. Unlike most of her colleagues, she was not just a connoisseur of Earthles as entertainment but of Earthle entertainment as well. While her efforts were rewarded with modest spikes in viewership, such was the prejudice against Earthle culture that the practice was not embraced by other producers. The haemorrhaging of viewers continued.

Amanda hadn’t dreamed all those years and worked on all those asteroids to give up without a fight. This was still her dream job. And now that she had it, she wasn’t going to let them blow it up because of some lousy ratings.

This was why, standing in the dark empty parking lot of Galaxy Entertainment, she talked Dennis out of his jacket and talked Perry into putting it on, along with a Galaxy Entertainment baseball cap she found in the back of the service van. She pulled it down until the brim covered Perry’s face.

‘Keep your head down and let us hold you up,’ Amanda ordered. She and Dennis walked on either side of Perry, steering him through the double glass doors and into the lobby. Under the brim of his cap, Perry could see the security guard look up from his reading.

‘It’s Tim,’ Amanda told the guard. ‘He’s not feeling well.’ The guard waved them on. The three walked together through the security door, which slammed shut behind them.

Keeping his head down, Perry heard distant voices over the hum of electronics. He watched the shadows of the long corridor give way to blurred reflections as they skirted the edge of the huge monitor-filled room. After about twenty feet, he felt a shove from one side and stumbled into a small room. Suddenly, everything was quiet.

Perry lifted his cap and saw that he and Amanda were alone in a room surrounded by white illuminated walls. ‘Dennis is keeping an eye out for security,’ Amanda said. She approached a smooth black pyramid in the middle of the floor and touched it with the fly tattoo on the inside of her left wrist. The walls came to life with flickering images and the room erupted with a cacophony of sound.

The wall on the right played a series of fast clips that showed men fighting in a bar, rioting soccer fans crushed under a fence and jets colliding in mid-air. These assaulting images were accompanied by a rapid-fire announcement: ‘Bar fights! Soccer riots! Air shows! Every fatal Earthle entertainment – catch it right now on
Deadly Fun
! Playing exclusively on Channel Blue 752.’

More clips raced by: a bear chasing a camper, a jogger bitten by a mountain lion and, faster than Perry could keep track, various surfers being attacked by various sharks. ‘If you love seeing them in the great outdoors, turn to
Earthles Feed the Animals
, now exclusively on Channel Blue 753!’ Then drunks tumbled down stairs, fell out of windows and vomited on themselves: ‘Their screwed-up brains just won’t let them stop!
Earthles Under the Influence
, now on Channel Blue 754, 755, 756 and 757!’ The onslaught of frantic images continued – kitchen spills, naked people shaving their body hair, power-tool accidents, a man setting his hair on fire with a Tiki torch – flickering by faster and faster until Perry, his head aching from trying to keep up, was forced to avert his gaze.

‘How many Channel Blues are there?’

‘Between 1000 and 2000, depending on the time of day,’ Amanda said. ‘Our viewers have incredibly sophisticated attention spans. They have hundreds of thousands of channels to choose from and usually watch a dozen at a time. They can switch from one to the other with a mere thought impulse, so we like to give them as many options as we can.’

‘Jesus,’ Perry said. Nicely dressed men and women were being shot in their faces with corks from champagne bottles.
The Champagne Show
was playing on Channel Blue 769.

‘That’s nothing,’ Amanda said. ‘When ratings were good, we had 3000.’

‘What’s this?’ Perry asked. He pointed at the wall opposite the fast-moving clips, where a man on the side of a highway was trying unsuccessfully to change a tyre on his car, cursing to himself. ‘Looks a little boring.’

‘Oh, that’s a series,’ Amanda said. ‘The guy changing the tyre is Hugh Palmer, the Most Impatient Man in the Galaxy.’

Perry turned his gaze to the floor, where a nun kneeled, praying raptly before a living and breathing Virgin Mary. The Virgin smiled beatifically beneath a halo of blinding light. ‘My God,’ Perry said. ‘That nun is having a vision.’

Amanda briefly raised her eyes from the pyramid. ‘Oh yeah. We did a pretty good job on that one.’

Perry blinked. ‘You give people visions?’

Amanda nodded. ‘It’s a great inciting incident.’ Perry gaped at the glowing Virgin, then became distracted by a screaming teenage boy running across the ceiling as a volleyball hit him in the head. Two groups of boys in matching shirts and shorts flung balls at each other. Perry quickly recognised this as dodge ball, a routine ritual of humiliation in gym classes.

‘Gym class?’ Perry said.

‘A staple of the channel,’ Amanda replied, continuing to push tiles on the pyramid.  ‘A producer came up with the idea.’