Channel Blue

by Jay Martel

  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.’

  ‘Of broadcasting gym classes?’

  ‘No. Of gym classes.’

  Perry frowned. ‘You invented gym?’

  ‘Come on,’ Amanda said. ‘What does gym have to do with education? You didn’t think there was any real point to it, did you?’

  Perry thought back to his own seventh-grade gym class, in which a squadron of adolescent terrorists-in-training were spurred towards violence by an alcoholic crew-cutted cross between W.C. Fields and Stalin named Coach Rasmussen. ‘Now that you mention it,’ he said, ‘no.’

  Amanda threw her hands out as if to say, There you go. Perry shook his head, still trying to understand. ‘In order to watch boys torture each other, you invented gym class.’

  ‘The girls are also very compelling—’

  ‘How long have you been spying on us?’

  ‘You mean, how long have we been producing Earth?’

  ‘Whatever you want to call it. How long have you been here?’

  ‘About 150 years.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s really not that long. We have planets that have been broadcasting for centuries.’

  While Perry tried to fathom this, the shots of gym class suddenly gave way to a middle-aged man in a hospital gown lying face down while a medical technician stood nearby. An odd cartoon starfish appeared in the foreground and, in a high-pitched voice, yelled, ‘Now let’s go up his ass!’ An unseen audience laughed and applauded as the screen cut to the dark shadowy footage of a colonoscopy.

  ‘This is a show?’

  ‘Why else would you put a camera up there?’ Amanda said. ‘Please. You didn’t think there was actually any medical value, did you?’

  While Perry considered this, an image of the cloud-shrouded Earth appeared on the wall in front of him, spinning in space as a deep-voiced announcer intoned, ‘Sick and tired of Earth? You aren’t the only one.’ The Earth then exploded in a cloud of fireballs, followed by a graphic: THE END OF EARTH. ‘Check it out this Autumn. Exclusively on Channel Blue.’

  ‘Don’t pay any attention to that,’ Amanda said, tapping away.

  Perry continued staring at the screen, which now showed what appeared to be an ad for a flying lawnmower. ‘Do people really hate us that much?’

  ‘I think hate is too strong a word,’ Amanda said. ‘It’s more like... I don’t know... bored and disgusted.’

  ‘Why? What did we ever do to them?’

  ‘When it first went on the air, people couldn’t get enough of Earth. They loved how naïve and stupid and selfish you all were, killing each other, eating your fellow mammals, starting wars over rocks you found in the ground. And every year it seemed like you became even more entertaining, with crazier and more effective ways of killing each other and yourselves: Bombs that could obliterate the world, super-viruses in biological labs, and, of course, the internal combustion engine, which in itself is quite a triumph of self-destruction on so many different levels. Careening around your highways in your metal boxes, poisoning the a
ir, smashing into each other – our audiences had never seen anything like it. But then, they loved all the inexplicable behaviours, the ludicrous religious clashes, the constant fornication, the devastating wars over nothing – it all seemed fun and novel. For a while. Then, at some point, people grew tired of watching it. It was bound to happen. I mean, you live here, you know what it’s like.’

  Perry, of course, had issues with some of the people on Earth. Who didn’t? In some dark recess of his soul, he probably wouldn’t have minded seeing a mass slaughter of religious extremists, political pundits, investment bankers, fraternity boys and figure skaters. But to hate humanity so much that you wanted to see all of it destroyed? ‘Are we really that bad?’ he said.

  ‘You have to understand: in our world, poverty hasn’t existed in millennia. Here, in your richest cities, there are people with nothing, who don’t have a home, who don’t even have enough to eat. That’s incredible to us. How can anyone live in a house with twenty rooms while just down the street, a man lives in a cardboard box?’

  Perry felt defensive, though he wasn’t sure why. He didn’t think anyone should live in a box. Hell, he didn’t think anyone should have to live in his apartment. But, as Earth’s only representative in the discussion at hand, he felt an obligation to defend his planet. ‘Well,’ Perry said. ‘It’s complicated. You see, in a free-market system—’

  ‘And the killing,’ Amanda interrupted. ‘In Eden, there hasn’t been a murder for 10,000 years. But here, you have complete strangers killing each other in massive numbers just because some guy in a uniform tells them to! It’s utterly insane! It’s a good thing you’re all so ridiculous and funny – otherwise, they would’ve started turning you off a long time ago. Here we are.’

  Amanda made a final tap on the pyramid and the wall in front of them filled with the image of a man in sunglasses driving a sports car through traffic while talking on an earpiece. His bright golf shirt was unbuttoned enough to reveal a tanned, shaved chest and a crucifix on a shiny gold chain. ‘Yeah, I banged her,’ he said. ‘Hold on.’ He accelerated and cut off another car attempting to merge into his lane. ‘Nice try, asshole!’ he yelled to the other car. Smiling, he continued his phone call. ‘Yeah, she was totally hot. I might even take her out again.’

  Perry turned to Amanda, who was watching the man in the car with unmistakable pride. ‘That,’ Amanda said, ‘is the most famous man on Earth.’

  On the wall, the man in the car turned into a parking lot, leaned on his horn, and cut off a minivan to slip into the parking lot’s last open space.

  Perry watched this, perplexed. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Steve Santiago,’ Amanda said. ‘He’s incredible. Watch.’ Steve jumped out of the sports car – the vanity licence plates read LVE MY RDE – trotted into a Starbucks and walked past a line of waiting customers to the counter.

  ‘I need a latte pronto,’ he shouted at a barista. When one of the waiting customers dared protest, Steve froze him with a glare and said, ‘I’ve got a medical condition, I can’t stand in line.’ Mumbling ‘asshole’ under his breath, Steve conspicuously dropped a five-dollar bill into the tip jar, only to expertly fish it out as soon as the cashier turned her back.

  Amanda shook her head with wonderment. ‘He’s like this all the time,’ she said. ‘Just when you think he might do something that isn’t horrible, he surprises you with something even worse.’ While Steve waited impatiently for his drink, he angled for a peek down the blouse of an old woman.

  Perry was still puzzled. ‘This is one of your shows?’

  Amanda nodded. ‘Up until a few years ago, it was the top show on Channel Blue. When it started going down in the ratings, I was assigned the job of reviving it. But it hasn’t been easy.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Perry said. ‘This is really a show.’

  ‘Steve is a Jacuzzi salesman in Encino,’ Amanda said. ‘He’s unfaithful to his girlfriend, he steals from his job, he lies to his friends, he cheats at golf, he rents his condo out for pornographic film shoots during the day, and on his holidays he goes to Mexico, buys prescription drugs and sells them at a profit to poor cancer patients. Every Sunday after the service at his church, he goes to fellowship and steals coffee filters. He has the most amazing amalgamation of bad qualities of any living being in the galaxy, and he’s the reason I brought you here. All we have to do is figure out a great new story idea for Steve, and we can save Earth. What are your thoughts?’

  ‘My thoughts?’

  ‘Work with me, Mr Bunt. We don’t have much time here.’

  ‘This is crazy,’ Perry said. ‘Are you telling me that your biggest show is some asshole from Encino?’

  ‘Not just some asshole,’ Amanda said. ‘The biggest asshole ever.’

  ‘I don’t get it. I thought you were some kind of advanced civilisation with superior intelligence.’

  ‘No matter how smart you are, Earthles being cruel and selfish is entertaining. You’re just going to have to take my word on that.’

  ‘You’re sadists.’

  ‘Look at the stuff you all watch for fun – football, boxing, wrestling, humiliating reality TV, demeaning game shows, ultra-violent movies. Because we’re more advanced, we’ve eradicated the lame justifications for witnessing debasement. We take our entertainment straight.’

  Perry was about to argue this point when the door flew open and the two security guards walked into the room, one short and squat, the other tall and thin.

  ‘You’re both going to have to come with us,’ the short one said.

  CHANNEL 9

  THE IDEA THAT WILL SAVE THE EARTH

  The two security guards stood in the doorway. ‘You are in violation of company rules,’ the tall one said to Amanda.

  Perry stood frozen in fear. As was his wont, when confronted by an authority figure, be they the lowliest substitute study-hall teacher or the most menacing alien security guard, he had begun perspiring profusely. Amanda, meanwhile, seemed bizarrely unconcerned. As if trying to get more of a reaction, the tall guard stepped to within a few inches of her face and glared at her. ‘We have a situation here. You have brought an Earthle into the station.’

  ‘Who cares?’ Amanda said. ‘He’s harmless. Look at him. He’s certainly not a threat.’ Though Perry understood the strategy behind this, he found Amanda’s casual discounting of his dangerousness annoying. ‘I know, I know, I shouldn’t have brought him in. Just zap his brain with your collar and let’s forget about it.’

  ‘No.’ The tall guard cocked his head and eyed Perry, who involuntarily recoiled from the menacing gaze. ‘He’s been here before. We need to erase more than his brain.’ Perry did his best to steady his shaking legs – he needed them to get out of here.

  ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ the short guard said. ‘We should all talk to Mr Pythagorus. If you could both come with us?’

  The two guards strode into the room and Perry saw his chance. With all the speed he could summon, he darted to his right, scurried around the guards, slipped through the open doorway and sprinted down the hallway. He glanced over one shoulder and was pleased to see that no one was following him, only to look ahead and nearly run into the tall security guard. He staggered to a stop, barely avoiding a collision.

  ‘Hey, how did you—’ he said, before the guard grabbed him.

  Perry struggled, his arms flailing. Something came off in his hand, and when he glanced down to see what it was, he saw, to his horror, the guard’s face dangling between his fingers. With a groan of annoyance, the guard snatched his face from Perry and smoothed it back over the steel tube that protruded between his shoulders. Amanda and the short guard walked by and the tall guard, his face still a little crumpled around the edges, pushed Perry down the hallway after them.

  Perry, still breathing hard, caught up with Amanda. ‘What the hell are they?’

  ‘Copbots. Or, more specifically, good copbot/bad copbot.’

  ‘Where are they taking us?’


  ‘To see my boss.’

  Perry could feel a wave of sweat breaking onto the small of his back, drenching the seat of his pants. ‘What are you going to tell him? How are you going to explain what we were doing?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just remember, you don’t know anything. I never told you what we’re doing here.’

  ‘Hey, guys. What’s going on?’ Dennis the receptionist sauntered down the hallway towards them, idly munching popcorn from a paper bag. He noted the security-guard escorts. ‘Is there some kind of problem?’ he asked with forced nonchalance.

  Amanda glared at him. ‘What happened to you?’ she whispered. ‘You were supposed be a look-out.’

  ‘I was,’ Dennis replied under his breath. ‘I looked and I got out.’

  ‘You were supposed to warn us.’

  ‘There wasn’t enough time,’ Dennis whispered. Amanda smirked. ‘Come on, Manda. You know I wasn’t bred for bravery.’ Then in a conversational voice he said, ‘Hey, you should check out the feed in screening room seven: bunch of rich guys seeking enlightenment dying in a sweat lodge – totally hilarious,’ and bustled off. A large hand smacked down onto Perry’s shoulder. It felt like a turkey vulture had landed.

  ‘No talking,’ the tall security guard growled. ‘Keep moving.’

  After walking for what seemed like blocks, Perry and Amanda were herded through the doorway of a large office. At one end, behind an improbably large desk, a nine-year-old boy in a suit, his hair stylishly spiked with gel, sat watching an array of screens floating in the air and talking to no one Perry could see.