Channel Blue

by Jay Martel

  ‘Look, just tell him I loved what he did with the tsunami,’ the boy said. ‘Everyone here loved it. And we loved the Russian earthquake, too. But just not as much. It just wasn’t as disastrous as we were expecting.’

  Perry glanced at Amanda. ‘That’s your boss?’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s a youth-oriented industry.’

  The boy executive, still staring intently at his screens, gestured for Amanda and Perry to sit down. Perry read the shiny silver nameplate on the front of his desk:

  NICHOLAS PYTHAGORUS

  PRODUCTION EXECUTIVE IN CHARGE OF EXECUTIVE PRODUCTION

  Nick, as he was known to both friends and enemies, was indeed a prodigy – most children employed by Galaxy Entertainment were thirteen or fourteen before they attained executive positions. But Nick had everything: youth, style and a keen business sense. Today, he also had a terrible headache. He had won the job of producing Earth’s finale by presenting an ambitious plan to accomplish this well under the budgets of his rivals. But cutting corners had taken its toll. After only two months of escalating cataclysmic disasters, he was two weeks behind schedule and way over budget, with the bulk of Armageddon to come.

  ‘Look, I don’t care how many megatons or how deep, all I’m saying is, it wasn’t enough. It was more like an earth-quiver than an earthquake.’ Nick paused. ‘I’m not trying to be hurtful here, but I thought we all agreed that this was going to be an event foretelling the end of the planet, not merely an opportunity for another benefit concert.’

  Perry noticed a peculiar statue on the shelf behind Nick Pythagorus: a gold naked woman held a planet in her hands. The naked woman, though only ten inches tall, appeared to be alive, and the planet she held was a swirling mass of red and purple gasses. He leaned over to Amanda. ‘What’s that?’

  Amanda followed his gaze and chuckled. ‘It figures he’d have that out for everyone to see,’ she replied. ‘It’s his Orby.’

  ‘His what?’

  ‘The award the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences gives every year for extra-planetary production. It’s supposed to be about quality but everyone knows it’s just politics.’ Amanda glanced at Nick, then continued to speak softly to Perry. ‘Nick won his for the Iraq War, but he lucked into it. The guy who should have won was the producer who got President Bush elected in the first place.’

  ‘A producer got Bush elected?’

  Amanda nodded. ‘Yeah, and Karl’s still pissed about being overlooked. He won’t even talk to Nick.’

  Perry was distracted by the sound of Nick exhaling impatiently.

  ‘Look, I don’t have time for this,’ the boy said. ‘Just tell him I loved it, but I have some notes. And we definitely need to talk before Flight 240. I just received the script and have some concerns – especially after Russia. I don’t want the plane to bounce off the damn reactor. Bye.’ Nick waved his hand and several of the floating screens flew in tight formation into his desk. He turned to Amanda and Perry. ‘Writers,’ he muttered. ‘I ask for an earthquake and I get a shiver; I ask for a simple terrorist act and they turn it into this whole song and dance.’

  The boy executive turned his attention to one of the remaining floating screens, which played a video of the two security guards walking in on Perry and Amanda. Nick smiled and sat back in his chair.

  Maybe this isn’t going to be such a bad day after all, he thought.

  He had always perceived Amanda as a rival, albeit one at a decided disadvantage; on his side were youth and ruthless ambition, on hers were merely creativity and intelligence. And while her advantages were just as often disadvantages in the entertainment business, she had unsettled him on occasion with her innovative ideas. Now, with this huge violation of company policy, she was as good as unemployed.

  Contemplating this fine turn of events, Nick leaned back in his chair. ‘What gives, Mandy? Seriously. I know you’ve always been soft on Earthles, but bringing one in here?’ He laughed in a short burst. ‘Have you completely lost your mind?’

  Amanda stared into space as if lost in thought. Perry, by now a sopping wet knot of fear, couldn’t take it anymore. ‘I don’t know anything!’ he yelped.

  Amanda glanced at Perry with a bemused expression, then turned to Nick. ‘He’s lying,’ she said. ‘He knows everything. I even told him about the finale.’

  Perry stared at her, his jaw agape.

  ‘It really doesn’t matter,’ Nick Pythagorus said. ‘Just by being here, he’s off the channel. And you, Mandy, will have difficulty finding employ as a barker on an amusement asteroid.’ He swivelled to the security guards. ‘Escort him to the Green Room.’ The tall security guard moved in quickly and grabbed Perry by the collar.

  ‘Don’t you want to hear his pitch?’ Amanda said.

  Nick frowned. ‘What?’

  ‘He has a great idea for a show. I think it could keep us on the air.’ For a moment, Perry was certain that he couldn’t possibly be the ‘he’ she was referring to. But then she smiled at him like a proud mother entreating her six-year-old to share a story with a family friend. Perry, who hadn’t had a great idea since VHS was a format, suddenly felt like he was sitting on a trap door over a bottomless pit.

  Amanda continued obliviously. ‘Mr Bunt may be an Earthle, but he also happens to be a fantastic writer. That’s why I contacted him. We’ve tried everything we could think of. I thought maybe he could come up with an idea that would save our jobs and you know what? I was right.’

  Nick chuckled derisively. ‘Come on. An Earthle writer? Entertainment on this planet is bullshit. Please. They still enjoy watching people pretending to be other people. For Adam’s sake – they watch grown men giving each other brain damage while chasing a ball. And if you were going to go crazy and hire an Earthle, Perry Bunt, for crying out loud? Why not Lucas or Spielberg?’

  Amanda frowned. ‘Do you think I’m an idiot? Do you think I’d risk everything for less than the best idea I’ve ever heard? How much is your finale running?’

  Nick shifted in his seat. ‘I don’t know. Twenty trillion or something.’

  ‘Last thing I heard was it was over thirty. You know it’s going to be at least fifty by the time you roll credits.’

  Nick flung one hand out over his desk. ‘What the fuck does that have to do with anything? You bring some Earthle into my office and start riding me about my budget? Get to the damn point.’

  Amanda leaned into him. ‘I know you have a lot riding on this, but even you have to admit that we would be heroes if we found a way to boost ratings, save the channel and avoid spending that last twenty trillion.’

  Nick pursed his lips. After a moment, he sighed. ‘What the hell.’ He nodded to the security guard, who released Perry and stepped back. ‘I’ve got a couple minutes. Give me the pitch.’

  Nick and Amanda stared at Perry, who felt the trap door open up beneath him.

  CHANNEL 10

  THE SECOND FLOOR

  Take every anxiety dream you’ve had – every classroom in which you’ve heard for the first time about a final, every crowded street you’ve walked down naked, every stage on which you’ve forgotten your lines – multiply them times ten, add the fear of imminent death and the destruction of the world, and you have a sense of what Perry felt while boy executive Nick Pythagorus waited for his literally world-saving idea.

  ‘Well—’ Perry began. ‘Um, it’s kind of complicated. I don’t know if, uh, I can sum it up in a couple minutes.’ He shot a panicked look at Amanda, who still appeared ridiculously calm.

  ‘Also,’ she said, as if Perry had actually said something, ‘I don’t think we should pitch it here.’

  Nick flinched. ‘What?’

  ‘We need the boss in the room.’

  Nick laughed hollowly. ‘You can’t go over me.’

  ‘Why not? You’re all ready to toss my writer into the Green Room. I don’t feel like this is a friendly environment.’

  Nick didn’t take long to do the math. If, by some fluke, the
Earthle’s idea was promising, it wouldn’t help him if he appeared to have obstructed it. On the other hand, if the idea was terrible, as he suspected it was, Amanda would be digging her own grave deeper by pitching it to the President of Channel Blue. Plus, she’d no longer be his problem to deal with. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘But the Earthle still goes in the Green Room when it’s over.’

  ‘Fine,’ Amanda said, standing. Within seconds, she and Perry were walking back down the long hallway. Perry glanced over his shoulder at the security guards, who now followed at a discreet distance.

  ‘I thought I wasn’t supposed to know anything.’

  ‘Change of plan.’

  Perry waited for Amanda to say more, but she didn’t.

  ‘What’s the Green Room?’

  ‘It’s a place for Earthles who’ve been compromised.’

  Perry swallowed. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Sometimes on-air talent discovers too much about aspects of the production and for some reason can’t be erased. We put them in the Green Room.’ She said this with a trace of im-patience, as if she was being forced to tell Perry what a tree was.

  ‘What happens to them there?’

  ‘They serve as extras. Sometimes they even get speaking parts.’

  ‘When you first told me about Channel Blue, you said that you’d rescued me from the Green Room.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So... you made it sound like I would’ve been killed if I’d gone there.’

  Amanda shook her head impatiently. ‘We don’t kill. We haven’t killed any living beings for millennia.’

  Perry regarded her sceptically. ‘You just put them in situations in which they happen to die.’

  ‘We can’t stop people from dying – everyone dies.’

  ‘Especially in the Green Room?’

  ‘Look, if we nail this pitch, the Green Room won’t even be an issue.’

  Perry glanced around furtively before speaking. ‘Amanda, I hate to break this to you, but there is no pitch.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But you told him—’

  ‘I had to get him interested. He wouldn’t have let us go unless he thought you had something.’

  ‘But I don’t! I have nothing!’

  ‘Something will come to you, Mr Bunt.’

  Perry didn’t have the heart to tell her that her faith in him was misplaced. They arrived at a bank of elevators. ‘Now that we’re working together,’ he said, ‘do you think you can call me Perry?’

  Amanda laughed. ‘I’m sorry, force of habit. We’re trained to keep a respectful distance from the talent.’

  Amanda pressed her fly tattoo against a set of elevator doors. They shot open and she entered the car. Perry followed her in. On the control panel were two round illuminated buttons, 1 and 2. Amanda pressed 2 and the doors closed. As the elevator shot up with a gentle whirr, it occurred to Perry that the building they were in had only one floor. Light flooded into the car. They were suddenly high above the building, standing in a translucent box surrounded by nothing but sky. Perry’s stomach dropped as Ventura Boulevard and the flat roofs of drab buildings disappeared quickly below them. He grabbed onto the railing to steady himself. ‘What’s going on?’ he gasped.

  Amanda gazed out on the shrinking coast of California as if she’d seen it a million times. ‘The channel’s corporate offices are on the dark side of the moon.’

  Perry watched breathlessly as clouds raced past. ‘No one can see us?’

  ‘All anyone sees from the outside are images of sky projected onto each surface. For all practical purposes, we’re invisible.’

  The sky became a darker blue, then indigo. Stars blinked out of a purple haze and below them the vast blue-white plain of the Earth became a crescent, then an immense oval, then a blue pearl surrounded by darkness. Perry was so struck by the beauty of this sight that he momentarily forgot about the doom that awaited both him and the world below.

  He turned back to Amanda, who examined her nails. He was more mystified than ever by this woman, the product of a race of people who could create something as sublime as an elevator to the moon but also enslave and destroy an entire planet in the name of entertainment. ‘If your civilisation can do this,’ Perry said, ‘why do they want to watch us?’

  ‘They don’t anymore,’ Amanda said. ‘That’s the problem.’

  ‘You know what I mean. Why go to all the trouble to come across the galaxy and spy on Earth when you’ve got everything figured out?’

  Amanda stared into space. ‘It’s a complicated question, and one I can’t answer in the short time we have. Besides—’ She looked at Perry. ‘You need to be thinking about the new show.’

  Perry’s mind was full of things – unfortunately, none of them resembled an idea. ‘I don’t understand why you think I can do this. I don’t know anything about your audience.’

  ‘I showed you some of our programming. Think along those lines. Focus on Steve Santiago.’

  ‘But Steve Santiago doesn’t make any sense. I mean, no one I know would enjoy watching him for even a minute. He’s just a douche bag.’

  Amanda considered this. ‘To us, Steve’s incredibly—’ She searched for the exact word. ‘Exotic.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘In many ways. For example, no one in Eden has believed in any sort of deity for thousands of years. We think it’s hilarious that someone like Steve can do all these horrible things to other people, then go and pray to a god and think that he’s been forgiven. That is truly extraordinary.’

  Perry nodded. ‘OK, what else?’

  ‘Well, just everything. Everything that Steve is – selfish, petty, arrogant, aggressive, vindictive – is remarkable. You have to understand: these aren’t traits our viewers come into contact with.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’ve been weeded out.’

  ‘Weeded out?’

  ‘They were all vestiges of our origins as animals, when we had to compete every day for survival. And though we no longer evince these traits, we still find them entertaining. The same way you might enjoy seeing, I don’t know... monkeys playing at the zoo.’

  ‘But what do you mean by weeded out?’

  ‘You know. Nobody wants those traits, and they certainly don’t want them for their children.’

  Perry stared at Amanda. ‘You’re all... what? Genetically altered?’

  Amanda nodded.

  ‘Even you?’

  Amanda rolled her eyes. ‘You think my parents would have left me to chance?’

  Perry now gazed at Amanda’s features in a different light, the hazel eyes that crinkled magnificently when she laughed, the cascade of luminescent blonde hair, the perfectly placed freckles. He had often thought of her beauty as being too good to be true and now he’d found out that it was. Or was it? He recalled an argument about fake breasts he’d once had with a studio executive. In the middle of a party in the Hollywood Hills, the executive had argued that it didn’t matter whether a woman had real or fake breasts, while Perry had clung to the notion that knowing they were fake did in fact diminish the experience of fondling them. (Later that night, as fate would have it, Perry found himself drunkenly kissing an actress and eagerly fondling breasts the size and texture of water balloons. Telling himself that this experience was not in fact all it could be in no way diminished his disappointment when the actress, in a moment of sobriety, disengaged herself from Perry, buttoned up her blouse and disappeared from his life forever.) Did Amanda actually appear any less attractive to him now? Did he crave holding her in his arms any less than a moment before? Of course he didn’t.

  ‘Dennis said he wasn’t bred for bravery,’ Perry said.

  ‘The human genome contains only 28,422 genes, which isn’t much when you consider that a flatworm has over 10,000. So even if your parents hire the best genetic programmer in the galaxy, you can’t have everything.’

  ‘So what were you bred for?’

  ‘I’m a Grade 4 ge
notype,’ Amanda said without a hint of boastfulness. ‘It’s a long list, and we really should be focusing on the pitch.’

  ‘Just give me a taste.’

  Amanda sighed. ‘Deductive reasoning, memory, risk-taking, tenacity, ambition, language skills, imagination, empathy, artistic ability, physical coordination—’

  ‘Christ, is that all?’ Perry interrupted. ‘No bowling ability? What about feet that don’t smell?’

  Amanda frowned. She was usually not opposed to a joke – after all, ‘sense of humour’ was one of the pronounced traits that Perry had prevented her from listing. But now wasn’t the time. ‘We should be coming up with ideas.’

  ‘What about Dennis. What was he bred for?’

  Amanda had to think about this for a moment. ‘I’m not sure. He has really nice hair.’

  Perry snorted. ‘Now those are priorities.’

  ‘Don’t scoff. Good genes are why we don’t have any war or hunger or murder. That was all left on the laboratory floor a long time ago. Without the need for senseless aggression, we have time to enjoy our lives.’

  Perry considered this. ‘So you’re bored.’

  ‘No,’ Amanda said, a glint of defensiveness on her armour of calm. ‘We have a great deal of leisure time.’

  Perry felt his pulse race. ‘Which is why you need to watch us, right? Without us murdering each other, you people have nothing to do with your lives.’

  Amanda frowned. ‘No matter what you think about us, you and your planet are going to be in reruns soon if we don’t come up with a pitch. Now, what do you have?’

  Perry furrowed his brow and tried to appear deeply thoughtful, as if on the verge of a breakthrough. Unfortunately, his mind was filled with only one endlessly repeating thought: I have no idea.

  The blinding white surface of the moon raced towards the elevator until it seemed to surround them. Perry remembered something Amanda had said during one of their classroom chats.

  ‘When you told me your boyfriend lived far away, is this what you meant?’