“Well I’ve pretty much told you everything already,” Eric shrugged. “Like I say, there was just some dude on The Jerry Springer Show that reckoned he got abducted by aliens that sounded a bit like yous … and then at the end of it one of the aliens admitted that everyone on Earth was gonna get killed. That’s about it.”
Jixyl and Azleev digested this information for a few moments before Eric impatiently asked, “Any ideas, then?”
“Well basically what we really need to do first is speak to that abducted bloke,” Azleev remarked. “See what else he can tell us.”
“I suppose I could look on the internet for the address and stuff for whoever makes The Jerry Springer Show,” Eric suggested. “And then ask them for his contact details.”
“Right, well the sooner the better,” Jixyl urged.
“Except that he’ll probably be bugged,” Azleev pointed out. “So the Femlings will probably hear everything he tells us.”
“Ar, aye. Shit,” Jixyl exclaimed, realising his mate was probably right.
“Ar, great,” Eric muttered. “So we’re basically in big trouble, then.”
“Well you are,” Jixyl replied. “We’re alright, though.”
“Ar, rubbish,” Eric whinged.
“Don’t worry. All we have to do is block the transmitter from the bug and then we’ll be able to talk freely with him,” Azleev suggested.
“Except that that would be blatantly too obvious,” Jixyl disagreed. “If we block the transmitter the Femlings’ll suss straight away that someone’s on to them.”
“Yeah, true … I suppose,” Azleev acknowledged.
“So basically we’re in big trouble then,” Eric repeated, before quickly correcting himself. “Sorry … I’m in big trouble. Yous are okay but I’m gonna die.”
“Nar, don’t give up yet,” Jixyl encouraged.
“Ar, what about…” Eric suddenly seemed full of optimism and hope. “…would I be able to come with yous and live on your planet?”
“But what about everyone else on Earth, though?” Azleev pointed out. “They’d still die. They couldn’t all come and live on our planet.”
“Well, yeah,” Eric shrugged. Everyone went quiet for a few moments. “…but as a last resort,” Eric continued. “I mean, obviously the ideal scenario would be for everyone to get saved … but failing that I suppose I could come and live with yous on your planet.” He suddenly realised that he was possibly coming across as too enthusiastic for this idea so he tried to tone down his enthusiasm. “But, like, obviously it’d be a gutter for everyone else, like. So obviously we need to think of a plan to save everyone else as well if we can.” Another moment of quiet followed which led Eric to feel the need to push the benefits of his back-up plan once again, “But I mean, like … there’s no point me dying as well. If you can only save one life then it’s better to save that one life than to let everyone die.”
“I think I’ve got an idea,” Azleev announced, looking slightly more optimistic.
“What?” Jixyl inquired.
“It’s the Star Maker[25] final this coming day after Saturday and the day before Sunday[26],” Azleev remarked.
“The day after Saturday and the day before Sunday?” Eric inquired, curiously. “What’s that?”
“It’s the day after Saturday and the day before Sunday,” Azleev replied. It may have sounded like he was being sarcastic but actually he wasn’t. It was just a translational quirk of G.O.T. From Azleev’s point of view the previous conversation went like this:
Azleev: It’s the Star Maker final this coming Quorgsday[27].
Eric: What’s Quorgsday[28]?
Azleev: It’s the day after Saturday and the day before Sunday.
Anyway, Eric was quite surprised and a little jealous at the discovery of a three day weekend on Azleev and Jixyl’s planet.
“Eh! So yous get a three day weekend!” Actually he was more than a little jealous. He was a lot jealous. “What a bunch of flukes!”
“Three days?” Jixyl replied, frowning his eyebrows. “Well … no. Obviously we get the day after Sunday and the day before Monday as well. Surely you can’t expect people to manage on a three day weekend? We’d be totally knackered all the time.”
“Eh!?! You mean you get a four day weekend!” Eric was getting ever more jealous by the second. “Flip! Hey, I definitely want to come and live on your planet, like.” He suddenly toned down his enthusiasm. “Ar, I mean, but hopefully we’ll think of a plan to save everyone else … obviously.”
“Well if you let uz finish telling you my idea we might have the start of a plan,” Azleev remarked.
“Ar, aye. Soz,” Eric apologised.
“Right, so it’s the Star Maker final this coming day after Saturday and the day before Sunday,” Azleev repeated. Eric was wondering what Star Maker was but he decided to bite his lip until Azleev had finished his story.
“Yeah,” Jixyl agreed. “So how does that help us?”
“Well think what happened a couple of months ago when it was the Fly On The Wall[29] final,” Azleev replied.
Jixyl’s eyes suddenly lit up. “Ar, of course!” he exclaimed.
“What?” Eric asked, feeling out of the loop.
“So many people voted that the whole telecommunications network crashed!” Jixyl revealed, his enthusiasm for Azleev’s idea growing with every passing second.
“Basically, the central telecommunications processor packed up under the weight of usage,” Azleev elaborated.
“And any transmissions sent from the bug in that abducted dude will have to go through the central telecommunications processor,” Jixyl added.
“Ar, right. I think I’m starting to follow,” Eric replied. “So hopefully when the Star Maker final is on there’ll be loads of calls again and the processor’ll crash again and we’ll be able to talk to the abducted dude without the Femlings hearing what we’re saying.”
“Exactly!” Jixyl confirmed.
“But will it definitely crash again?” Eric inquired, considering every eventuality. “Like, surely they’ll have learnt their lesson, won’t they? You’d think if it crashed the last time then they’d have added extra capacity.”
“Yeah, they have,” Azleev confirmed. “But you’re missing the point. We can sabotage the central telecommunications processor while the Star Maker final is on and no-one will get suspicious. They’ll just assume it was cos of too many calls again.
Trust us, the Femlings absolutely love Star Maker so if the central telecommunications processor crashes everyone’ll be happy. The telecommunications company will be happy cos they’ll have to repeat the final which means another mass bout of telephone voting which means even more profits for them. The producers will be happy cos they can use it as a testament to how popular their show is. The contestants will be happy cos they all get to enjoy one extra week of fame in the limelight. The media-blogs[30] will be happy cos it’ll be a massive story and they’ll sell loads of advertising space. And the viewers, in a strange morbid way, will be happy cos a repeat of the final means they get to watch their favourite show for an extra week and they get to gossip about it all week at work for an extra week. Everyone’s a winner. Everyone’s happy.
And happy people don’t question why things happen. They just accept. So it’s perfect. We can sabotage the central telecommunications processor and no-one gets suspicious. We get to talk to the abducted bloke and then we can take things from there.”
“Still though … talking to this dude isn’t gonna save the world,” Eric pointed out, tempering their newfound hope with a degree of realism.
“It’s a start, though,” Azleev insisted. “We’ve got to start somewhere.”
“And hopefully he might be able to tell us stuff like timescales and stuff,” Jixyl added. “And maybe he might even know how the Femlings are planning to do it.”
“Yeah and the sooner we know exactly how they plan to do it, the sooner we can start thinking of ways to stop them,” Azle
ev added. “Whereas at the moment we don’t even know what they plan to do.”
“Well, they plan to kill everyone, don’t they?” Eric pointed out.
“Yeah, but we don’t know specifically how they’re going to kill everyone,” Azleev clarified.
“And you can’t stop something from happening when you don’t even know what the thing is that’s gonna happen,” Jixyl argued.
“Aye, I suppose,” Eric begrudgingly acknowledged.
And so the three of them set about putting their plan into action.
Chapter Ten – Star Maker
The Planet Fem,
The Star Maker TV Studio…
“Technically excellent,” Sylon Remell, the man behind the Star Maker show and one of the three judges, remarked. He paused just long enough to give the studio audience time to break into excitable applause, then continued, “but uninspiring.” The cheers quickly transformed into pantomime boos.
“Oh, come on, Sylon!” Brinna Lopco, another of the three judges, remonstrated. “How can you criticise a performance like that? It was excellent!” she enthused.
“Yes, I agree,” Sylon acknowledged. “Were you not listening? I’ve already said it was excellent. But at this stage of the competition excellent isn’t good enough. All three of the contestants left in the competition are all exceptional singers. We’re dealing with the best of the best at this stage.” He turned to direct his attention to Kel Minky, the contestant they were presently discussing. “So if you want to be the one that takes the Star Maker crown this year then I’m afraid excellent isn’t good enough. You need to reach out and connect with your audience. You need to leave your audience feeling exhilarated and inspired.” Kel was gutted by Sylon’s reaction but she was intelligent enough to put on a brave face and try to look like she was taking on board his advice, even though she secretly realised that Sylon didn’t really know that much about music. Music, you see, wasn’t Sylon’s strong point. Ratings, were Sylon’s strong point.
“She did that, Sylon!” Brinna exclaimed. “I think you must have been watching and listening to a different performance from the one I heard cos the performance I’ve just witnessed totally connected with her audience.”
“Yeah, I’m with Brinna on this one,” Morse Gralik, the third judge, endorsed.
“What did you think?” Brinna remarked, addressing the studio audience. “Did you feel that was a performance you could connect with?”
The studio audience burst into cheers. Then after a few moments the cheers progressed into thunderous clapping, which then in turn progressed into chants of ‘Kel! Kel! Kel!’
Brinna smiled smugly at Sylon as if to say, ‘I told you so.’ Sylon stuck to his role and placed an embarrassed expression on his face. Secretly though, he was feeling anything but embarrassed. He was feeling absolutely delighted. The show was running exactly to plan. Of the three contestants left in the final of Star Maker, Kel Minky was the one who had the potential to be the biggest star. Which in turn meant that she was also the one who had the potential to make Sylon the most money. And Sylon loved money. So he couldn’t risk letting either Kib Lomack or Salu Ortsbo take the crown. Kel Minky was currently the bookies clear favourite, but Sylon had had his fingers burnt the previous year when the hot favourite had been beaten at the final post against the odds. Last year Slik Tamsin had been the hot favourite with the public, but the public knew this and therefore most people thought to themselves, ‘He’s totally popular so he’s definitely going to win anyway, so I don’t need to bother voting for him cos loads of other people will vote cos he’s so popular.’
Unfortunately this ‘other people will do it’ attitude was shared by a considerable chunk of Slik’s fans, so in the end hardly anyone ended up voting for him which allowed Plastic Folie to sneak in and steal the title from Slik’s grasp.
Sylon estimated that this error has cost him in the region of two hundred million Femling credits[31], in terms of reduced ticket sales and reduced performance revenue generated by Plastic, due to his inferior popularity. Admittedly, this was an amount that would hardly cause a ripple to Sylon’s credit account, but that wasn’t the point. The point was Sylon gained his pleasure in life from making as much cash as he possibly could from every opportunity and on that occasion he had failed to do so. So he swore to himself that he would never make the same mistake again.
And so that was why he had decided, even before Kel had sang her performance, that he was going to play the bad guy. Acknowledge Kel’s excellence but still throw in a sly unjust criticism somewhere along the line. Because in doing so he knew the general public would be sat in their homes screaming at their screens that Sylon was an absolute fool. He knew that criticising Kel Minky, especially when that criticism was totally unjust, would fire up anger in all of her fans and ensure that there was no repeat of the apathy of last year’s final. After delivering his unjust criticisms all of Kel’s many fans would be sat in their homes telling themselves that Sylon was an idiot who wouldn’t recognise talent if it came up and bit him on the nose, and to prove to him what an idiot he was they were going to vote for Kel ten times to ensure she won by a landslide margin.
Meanwhile, Marnie Servet, one of the millions of Star Maker fans from around the planet Fem, was currently sat in her home screaming at the screen, “Hey, that Sylon is a total and utter fool! He wouldn’t know talent if it came up and bit him on the nose!” As you can see, things were running exactly to Sylon’s plan.
“It’s just a pantomime,” Yisk Bansin, Marnie’s co-viewer and friend, remarked. “Don’t take it too seriously.” Star Maker was a show that polarised the viewing audience into two camps. Those that loved it and planned their lives around the TV schedules, and those that ranked its significance just below that of watching paint dry. Yisk fell firmly into the second category.
“And how can he compare Kib and Salu to Kel!?” Marnie exclaimed. “They’re just not in the same league!”
“They sounded like decent singers to me,” Jax Weeta, Marnie’s other non-fanatical friend, remarked.
“They can sing,” Marnie acknowledged, “but like Sylon says, being able to sing isn’t enough at this stage of the competition.” Neither Yisk nor Jax bothered to point out that only seconds earlier Marnie had been referring to Sylon as if he was the spawn of the devil, and yet now she was quoting him as an authority of good judgement. “You need more than just being a good singer. Kel’s the complete package. Kib and Salu aren’t. In fact I don’t even know how Kib and Salu made it to the final, if I’m honest,” Marnie continued. “People only vote for Kib cos his brother’s in hospital from that crash and Salu has only made it this far cos of that campaign by her local radio station to get people to vote for ‘the local girl.’” So clearly Marnie did in fact know how Kib and Salu had made it to the final. “It should just be about the talent,” Marnie continued, seemingly going back on her previous endorsement of Sylon’s suggestion that it was about more than just talent at this stage of the competition. “People shouldn’t vote out of sympathy or because they live near one of the singers.”
Meanwhile, back in the studio the pleasantly likeable host, Keyla Lordim, was announcing to the viewing public that the phone lines were now open and they could now vote for their favourite contestant to decide who would be crowned the champion of this year’s Star Maker.
Back in her flat, Marnie was already reaching for her phone. And around the planet Fem, millions more viewers were doing likewise.
And back in the studio, Sylon’s smile was growing as big as his credit account.
Chapter Eleven – Not The End Of The World
Eric was pleasantly surprised to discover that, ironically[32], sabotaging the central telecommunications processor turned out to be the easy part of their plan. Jixyl and Azleev were mates with a student who studied Intergalactic Transmission Physics, so sabotaging the telecommunications system proved to be a piece of cake.
The hard part was getting NBC Universal, the
company that produced The Jerry Springer Show, to reveal the details of the abductee.
“Look, this Hank dude’s not gonna mind,” Eric insisted, referring to Hank Truman, the dude that had appeared on The Jerry Springer Show to recall his alien abduction. “In fact he’ll be chuffed. If he went on telly to tell everyone about him getting abducted and everyone was laughing at him and he still didn’t mind, then he’s obviously gonna jump at the chance to talk to someone who actually wants to hear what he has to say, rather than just laugh.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the very officious receptionist at the NBC Universal head office replied. “It’s company policy not to reveal our guests’ personal details.”
“But d’you not see what I’m saying?” Eric persisted. “This Hank dude isn’t gonna object … so what’s the problem?”
“The problem, sir, is that it’s company policy not to divulge that information,” the receptionist responded.
“It’s alright. You don’t have to call uz ‘sir,’” Eric remarked.
“I’m just being polite, sir,” the receptionist replied.
“Well I’d rather you were helpful than polite,” Eric answered.
“Sorry, sir. I’d love to be helpful, but in this situation it’s…”
“…company policy,” Eric interrupted. “Aye, I know. You said.”
Jixyl and Azleev had until now been quietly observing Eric’s attempts at acquiring Hank Truman’s contact details, but they realised he was going to have little success with his current approach and so decided a new approach was needed.
“Look, we understand that you have to respect your guests’ privacy,” Azleev accepted. “That’s a commendable attitude. So how about you contact Hank and let him decide if he wants to meet us? How about you give Hank a call and let him know that a few students would like to interview him for a project we’re doing regarding alien abductees? Then leave it to him to decide if he wants to meet us. If he says he’s not interested then fine, we’ll go on our way, but if he wants to meet us then the onus is on him to make the first move. And that way your company policy remains intact but at the same time the abductee gets the opportunity to decide if he’d like to tell his story.”
How To Save The World: An Alien Comedy Page 12