Far-out Show (9781465735829)

by Hanna, Thomas

  “We haven’t sent the signal to activate Zink yet so it shouldn’t be a factor.”

  “Shouldn’t, but that doesn’t mean for certain isn’t. Bottom-most position, our secret spy and next-to-ultimate solution could in fact interfere with any and all signals, maybe making things worse instead of better – and from here we can’t be sure and probably can’t find out for sure even when it’s happening. If it happens. I need a tonic.” He tapped the side of his chair. A panel there opened and he took out a capped container of liquid. He opened that and drank it down. He put the container back where he had taken if from and the panel closed.

  Delmus was lost in thought. He shook himself back to attention. “Zink is neat even with its restrictions. Its signals confuse Whizybeam’s standard security and motion detection systems so it can move around in the routinely monitored areas and even tap into many of the ship’s systems without being noticed and reported. Yet it will become inactive if it detects anyone within a certain distance which should keep those on board from seeing it in motion and realizing what it is. That’s cleverness of a high order.”

  “But as part of avoiding detection it has to almost make contact with the components, no long-distance wireless messages,” Ackack noted. “It can only make those connections at three places on the entire ship. I have reservations about it but it was our best option so I agreed to have it sneaky-sneaked aboard.”

  “I’m trying to remember the locations from our briefing since we didn’t record the details that could be found by the wrong guys and make trouble for us. It can connect at the security pod, at a spot high on the wall of the hall near the door to the main storage area, and in the hall outside substation B. Right?”

  “That’s what I remember. The substation B location has become less workable since they made that space over into the program edit room where they edit the material and send it on to us.”

  “When and if we need to take control I’ll remember that and send it to one of the other spots as the preferred connection location. It’s made to withstand their efforts to disable it but not even knowing it’s there is best,” Delmus said.

  A harsh beep sounded.

  “Some distressing but important information update is ready.” Ackack tapped a button on the console and the head shot image of Fervor, a male with a large number of long head spikes that stood on end all over his pate giving him a peculiar pincushion look, appeared on a section of the view-screen.

  “This one’s still stirring things up. He made his point the day of the first airing. Why can’t he let things be?” Ackack grumbled.

  “I hear the ones like him being called geekocreepos. That sounds about right to me. They don’t get that we only said there’d be educational aspects to help sell the idea of The Far-Out Show to the governors, we didn’t mean there’d actually be anything the purists would agree would be usefully educational. Besides, that was in our talk-talk to the governors, not in anything we released to the public so even the geekocreepos shouldn’t know about it. But was this a deliberate leak? That one female governor who gets outvoted all the time doesn’t like us.”

  “She also won’t take any gifts under the table. If you can’t buy a person and arranging a lethal accident’s too risky for the payoff what can you do? It’s the same with this Fervor guy. We can’t buy him and forcibly silencing him will start too much of an uproar. We have to try to find a way around him. Placate him and his buddies long enough for the audience to become bored with them.”

  “Or we find somebody else to blame for promising educational aspects to the show to redirect the topic into a shouting match that will make it an audience pleaser. They don’t care what the shouting’s about as long as it’s loud and full of cursing. Hey, I like my automatic thinking on that,” Delmus said.

  Ackack touched a button. The image of Fervor pulled back to became a view of him speaking to a small group of mostly young males and females outside the A.D.U. building. He wore a loose tunic that was decorated with lightning bolt designs in several colors, all aimed upwards toward his head.

  Ackack freeze-framed that image and moaned, “Splinkflert! Look at him! Wrapped up like that he stands out. The audience will listen to his nonsense with half an ear simply to get a look at somebody acting different. There ought to be a law against attracting attention to yourself like that without special permission.” He started the recording again.

  Fervor said in a calm, reasonable tone. “It’s not what we’d hope for but we know there’s always some fakery in shows.”

  His on-screen audience collectively shrugged.

  “There should be limits though. Not because faking a little bit of material into hours and hours of mindless shows makes outrageous profits for the production and distribution companies – although you might want to think about that. No, uncontrolled fakery undermines our confidence in everything we hear in the public arena. Let’s be blunt about this. Too much faking, and too well done faking – not that there’s a lot of that kind – undermine our trust in the governors. If they allow this then they agree that we shouldn’t believe the orders, restrictions, and encouragements they put out regularly. It’s all dismilquam. The governors are okay with crilmentzee as the way for us to live and maintain order in our society.”

  A harsh tone sounded. Ackack’s concern as he touched buttons and Fervor was replaced by a head shot of Techim, a young female with her short, knobby head spikes lined up as if in corn-rows.

  She showed no hint of a smile or an apology as she said, “This is an interruption for a top priority message at your insistence. We have lost all contact with Whizybeam. Other technicians are working to determine what has happened and to see when and if contact can be reestablished.”

  “What could this mean?” Delmus asked.

  “A major power failure is the most likely cause,” Techim replied. “Small backup units might let them talk-talk to those at other places on the ship and send commands to the working systems even while they are cut off from any and all outside the ship. We don’t know more than that there was an unusual rapid sequences of changes followed by the total loss of the signal.”

  “Suspected cause of this failure, Techim?” Ackack asked.

  “They disabled the A.D.U. remote override control systems. They deliberately weren’t given access to the full schematics of the ship’s layout so they likely don’t know how some systems are interconnected. It is not an intuitively sound arrangement. They disconnect the restraints by patching around them and, to their surprise, by doing that they shut themselves down. That is how it was supposed to work.”

  “Can they reverse the effect once they see what’s happened?” Delmus asked.

  “For a limited time they can remove their program changes and things should return to the way they were,” Techim notes.

  “How long a time?” Delmus asked.

  “A bimpledop. About a quarter of a revolution of that planet. Which is plenty of time to analyze things, see the obvious solution, wail about how dumb and unfair it is that things are arranged like that, then accept the conditions and undo what they did to get back to the start point,” Techim said.

  “Is there anything we can do?” Ackack asked. “Can we get through to them from this end to tell them what to do to be sure they don’t wait too long?”

  “No, they can’t hear us any more than they can send to us but this would have shut down their life-support systems too so they won’t put off fixing things for long. That was part of the thinking about how to connect the systems. Sneaky but it should be effective.”

  “Okay, Techim, keep us aware of any changes.” Ackack touched a button and the whole view-screen went blank. “Fampfuzzle! This could ruin a lot of things. Now they know at least some of what we could do to control them if they got balky. Of course officially we fixed it that way so we could guide Whizybeam home even if a disaster wiped out the crew.”

  “But now they have to give us back control over their survival to survive.”


  “For the short term maybe, but this will set their techs tracing everything out and poking in all the sealed corners. We agreed it was too dangerous to send them off without full details about the ship stored for reference even if we made that information really hard to find. The idea was that if they needed it we’d be able to send them a message telling them how to access that. It might not have worked but it sounded good enough to get the governors to sign off on it. They want to keep the ship’s design details secret as much as we do.”

  “What do we do now?” Delmus asked.

  “Wait. If we had a paid worrier I’d call him in to pace for us.”

  “Don’t get all glum about this. What’s the worst thing that could have happened?”

  “For some unknown reason they all died and we aren’t able to bring anything back to examine it to find out why it happened so we, or more exactly the governors, can keep it from happening on every trip of exploration.”

  “Not reassuring. What’s the next to the worst thing that could have happened?”

  “That planet’s inhabitants are way more advanced than we thought and they’ve taken everything and everyone captive. They are at this moment learning all about us, our technology, and the route we used to reach their planet. They will then plan when to reverse the situation and invade and conquer Ormelex.”

  “You don’t get how I want this to go, do you? What’s the most reassuring thing that could have happened?” Delmus asked.

  “They patched, they crashed; they unpatch and they return to the old normal.”

  “Was that so hard? I have great confidence in them. We knew there might need to be a lot of adapting to the unexpected so we hired a bunch of top notch technicians as the crew. Okay, technically the Bang-Boom guys did the selecting and hiring but they used our money. We should occupy our minds with productive thoughts until we hear from them. They’ll be so excited to have survived that they won’t bother to object or complain.”

  “You’re being more than usually unrealistic, Delmus, but enjoy your fantasies.”

  “Here’s an interesting distraction. Only one company, P.D.Q., makes the hardware to travel through a snaggiewarp. If this show works out as planned the demand for their products will soar. It’d be nice to have a piece of that. My pockets can never be too full.”

  “You want to buy P.D.Q.?”

  “Buy into it, not the whole company. If we leak word about the problems they’re having with Whizybeam to select groups demand goes down and we get to buy in on the cheap, although it certainly won’t be cheap. Then the ship returns safe and happy. Demand goes way up, the value of our part of the company goes way up.”

  “Delmus, P.D.Q. is a major producer of a wide range of technical systems. Even without the prospect of successful ships to travel through a snaggiewarp in the near future any investment in the company requires big money. Unless you’ve been holding out on me, neither A.D.U. nor you or me personally has that kind of money to invest.”

  “Agreed but we have the advantage since we know what’s being secretly developed so we could form an investment group to pool resources and buy in.”

  “You have a point,” Ackack said. He thought, And you’ll probably do this behind my back and cut me out if I don’t show enough enthusiasm right now from the start.

  “It’s critical to move fast but not attract the attention of the big money guys. If the Peepees see our interest they have the ready money to hurry and buy in and cut us out in the process.” You’re a danger to the plan because you may be dumb enough to blab to them and believe their lies thinking they’ll cut you in on the deal for suggesting it but they won’t.

  “If it looks like far-space travel with P.D.Q.’s systems is gonna fail big time I’d be tempted to leak some word to the Peepees by other routes so they’d buy in and lose a lot but it doesn’t make good business sense to damage our main money backers until we don’t need them anymore.”

  “Sacrifice satisfaction for longer term goals. That sounds like something a clever fixer and manipulator would do,” Delmus said.

  “Thank you.”

  Chapter 23

  Gopgop and Uldene sat in a circle of chairs in the Power Players office with Elfwip, who fidgeted constantly, and Carpan, who had distinctive extra large eyes.

  Gopgop reminded him, “Elfwip, you're here in your capacity as official group worrier.”

  “That's all many think I'm good for,” Elfwip whined.

  “You're paid to do it and you do it really well which relieves the rest of us of that burden,” Uldene said.

  “Too bad I'm not paid really well,” Elfwip carped quietly.

  Gopgop said, “Carpan, you're our pollster so we expect you to have numbers about anything important that we ask about.”

  “I always have numbers to toss out,” Carpan assured him.

  “What are the A.D.U. Far Out Show numbers?” Uldene asked.

  “Through the roof. It's got great numbers so they must be very worried,” Carpan replied.

  “Explain that,” Uldene ordered.

  Carpan shrugged. “The show's first episode was a big hit so there are big expectations. They have to air new and better episodes soon to hold the audience.”

  “An audience that gets too tired of waiting for new episodes may get bad feelings about the show and not turn to it even when new material is finally aired. It's happened,” Elfwip said sadly.

  “They don't have more ready to go?” Gopgop asked, concern in his tone now too.

  “We don't know,” Carpan answered. “They haven't announced any new episodes but did say they're having technical difficulties getting the transmissions from deep space.”

  “Which we're supposed to think means because the signals have to travel so far,” Uldene said.

  “Those claims haven't convinced the audience who seem to think this show is special. My latest poll finds much discontent and muttering,” Carpan warned.

  Elfwip whispered, mostly to himself, “Muttering is always bad. Bad things happen when guys mutter.”

  “Does anyone have a feel for whether A.D.U. is simply using the delay to increase audience interest? That'd be a clever tactic,” Gopgop commented with a nod of approval.

  “But a dangerous one.” Uldene slapped his feet together as he said, “The audience can lose interest like that.”

  “Delmus and Ackack have a history of taking risks but coming out ahead. That's a big part of why we back A.D.U.,” Gopgop admitted.

  “Entertainment companies can be a success one day and gone like that,” Elfwip muttered and weakly slapped his feet together.

  “What's different in this case, Carpan? Why do the audience think The Far-Out Show is special?” Gopgop asked.

  “Fifty-two percent believe it is for truly real happening on a far away planet it occupants call Earth,” Carpan reported.

  “Which it is,” Uldene pointed out.

  “Exactly,” Carpan agreed. “They accept that most of what they're pacified with each day is faked but there's nothing else to watch. In this case they believe it's happening in real time so they want to know what's happening in something close to that. They're not content to be spoon fed bits of what happened in an hour spread out over days and weeks.”

  “Could this mean the audience is becoming sophisticated after all these years?” Elfwip gasped as the horror of that idea washed over him.

  “That's unlikely, Elfwip, but thanks for bringing it up,” Uldene said. “This may be a flaw in the off-planet competition show concept we haven't thought about. If the excitement is real, the demand for more of it may overcome the audiences' typical stupor state and require that enough material be ready in short order to complete the story lines. This is a paradox. What usually keeps the masses quiet can arouse them when it's done too well. We could warn A.D.U. and others about this but what's in it for us that we should help them avoid problems?”

  “If the masses get out of control, the Pacification By Distraction With E
ntertainment industry could disappear like that,” Elfwip whined. Again he slapped his feet together but so feebly it was hardly worth the effort except for its symbolic signal value.

  “Are they getting violent?” Gopgop asked with real concern.

  “The latest-most figures find there's more restlessness than ever recorded - with violent muttering at scary levels,” Carpan cautioned.

  “Be very afraid of violent muttering,” Elfwip warning in a ghost-story-threat tone.

  “Okay, that's all. You two can go,” Uldene said with a dismissive gesture of his feet.

  When Elfwip and Carpan were gone Uldene pushed buttons on his chair arm and a shimmering bubble appeared around it.

  He gestured for Gopgop to do the same. Then they slid closer and the bubbles fused. Uldene said, “We pay to get every whisper and move of whoever's important to us for any reason secretly recorded for us so we'd be fools not to assume there are guys being paid to try to record us too. That's business but we can take precautions – and at some moments extra ones. We've set things in motion to grab control of A.D.U. but if their new show is likely to be a disaster even if it is a short-term moneymaker maybe we need to reconsider.”

  “We've hidden our true intentions until now so we could back off and confuse those who think they know what we're planning so they can get a cut of the profits to be made,” Gopgop said. “But if we don't move on taking control of A.D.U. soon we won't have the option to do that if this fuss blows over and they do become the hottest company on the planet with no down side.”

  “So do we risk a bad mess by grabbing for the money?”

  “Don’t forget the political influence too. That's a big part of our interest here because of the governors' program of exploration.”

  “Right. Do we risk a mess grabbing for the money and the clout with the governors or do we step back and decoy others into maybe making that grab but ending up with that mess?”

  “We have to make these tough choices because we're the bosses. So what do we do?” Gopgop asked.