Channel Blue (25 page)

‘He was leading a tour of the western galaxy and discovered it.’

‘What?’

‘What do you think? Earth. There was basically nothing here. A few animals, some primitives. The dinosaur bones and ruins of some ancient civilisations were what brought in the tourists originally – along with the beaches, of course. Then the re-enactors found out about it.’

‘The who?’

‘Re-enactors. Civil War buffs. They liked it because it had geographical features very similar to Eden at the time of the Civil War.’

‘You had a Civil War, too?’

Amanda shook her head. ‘No. We had
the
Civil War. Yours was a re-enactment.’

Perry blinked. ‘Our Civil War never happened?’

‘It did, in a way. Over and over again. The re-enactments became so elaborate, in fact, that Davidoff brought in thousands of actors to fill out the world, as well as plants and animals to make it look more like Eden. He also re-created other eras from Eden’s barbaric past: Renaissance Land in Europe, Pharaoh Park in the Middle East, Samurai City in Japan. Tourists loved them all. Everything was incredibly popular and he kept expanding. Before long, the northern hemisphere was filled with theme parks. The rest became hunting preserves and beach resorts.’

‘Wait a second,’ Perry said. ‘How long ago was this?’

Amanda frowned. ‘When the Civil War happened. You know when that was, right?’

Perry rubbed his face. ‘This doesn’t make any sense. What about the thousands of years before that? What about
history
?’

Amanda shrugged. ‘Your history is our history. I mean, there were a few Stone Age tribes scattered around when the first ships arrived, but nothing really to speak of.’

‘What happened to them?’

‘They were given jobs working at the theme parks. Believe me, they were happy to get out of the dirt.’

Perry clamped both hands on his head to keep it from exploding. ‘So everyone on Earth is...
descended from theme-park workers?
’

‘You’re getting ahead of yourself. I told you this wasn’t worth getting into.’

‘Keep talking.’

Amanda sighed and fiddled with a lock of her hair. ‘Galaxy Entertainment came in and started broadcasting the Civil War battles and the ratings were good. Good enough that Galaxy hired Gerald O. Davidoff as a programming executive and turned the planet into a studio. They surrounded it with cameras, filled it with flies and towed in the moon from the asteroid belt as a reflector.’

‘What?’

‘They needed more light for night shoots. That was the beginning of Channel Blue. But it wasn’t anything like it is today. It was still, for all intents and purposes, a historical re-enactment channel. Decent ratings, but very limited in its way.’ Amanda took a breath. She seemed to be warming to her story. ‘What changed everything was when the actors went on strike. They were still being paid as theme-park employees and demanded to be upgraded to a television rate. Plus, they all had to live down here and you know what that’s like. Less than ideal. But Davidoff and Galaxy decided they couldn’t pay actors scale and still make a profit, so they replaced them all with POFs.’

Perry regarded Amanda. ‘You’re going to tell me what that is, right?’

‘Products of fornication. Genetic programming has been around for a thousand years, but there have always been Edenites who fall through the cracks – as it were. Mostly criminals and lunatics. So Davidoff rounded up POFs from all over the galaxy, shipped them here, and reprogrammed their memories so that they would believe they’d lived on this planet all their lives. At first it was a complete disaster: these were psychos and sociopaths, after all. They wouldn’t take direction or follow a script. The Civil War re-enactments were disastrous – the POFs refused to do anything the same way twice. Ratings plummeted, tourists stopped coming, and Earth started losing money. Davidoff figured he had nothing to lose, so he fired his directors and cut the POFs loose from the script to see what would happen.’ Amanda’s eyes sparkled. ‘It turned out to be the greatest decision in broadcasting history. The Civil War became bloodier than anyone thought possible and the ratings went through the roof. But that was just the beginning: The planet was suddenly filled with crazy violence, assassinations and fornication –
lots
of fornication. And wars! The Austro-Prussian War, the Franco-Prussian War, the Russian-Turk War, the Anglo-Zulu War, the Sino-French War, the Russian-Circassian War—’

‘I get it,’ Perry said. ‘A lot of wars.’

‘And that was just in our
first three seasons
on the air!’

‘Let me get this straight,’ Perry said. He was trying his best to stay calm. ‘Everyone on Earth—’ He took a breath and started again. ‘You’re saying that we’re all murderers and lunatics?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Amanda said. ‘You’re all the
descendants
of murderers and lunatics.’

‘
All
of us?’

Amanda nodded. ‘Is that so weird? You read the news. You didn’t think people normally behaved like they do here, did you? The World Wars, the genocide, the massacres, the random killings – more mayhem and violence every day than 3000 channels can show.’ She shook her head in awe. ‘It’s been a history totally different from ours. Our Civil War was a lesson to us, the beginning of a new era in which we learned to channel our aggression into the pursuit of a balanced civilisation. Your history—’ Amanda gazed at Ventura Boulevard, her eyes filled with awe. ‘It’s a history no one could have imagined. Terrible and shocking, beautiful in moments, but mostly tragic and
always
compelling.’

Perry stared numbly out of the window, his face frozen in a shell-shocked grimace. His mind whirled, struggling to process the onslaught of disturbing information. The Earth was only 150 years old, a theme park that had been turned over to maniacs – thirty-two of which were his great-great-great grandparents.
No
, he thought,
it can’t be true
. And yet, why would she make something like this up? What was her motivation? Why lie to him now? He’d forced her to tell him. Unless... it had all been arranged this way. Unless this was just another part of the show. No. It couldn’t be. He knew them well enough to know they wouldn’t like this. Yes, he was being tortured and they loved that, but they liked their torture on the outside where their flies and satellites could see it. To the galaxy, this was just dead air.

They made us.

It explained a lot, actually. Now he understood why Galaxy Entertainment was so cavalier in its decision to destroy Earth. They considered it
theirs
, after all. Perry had seen enough of his screenplays decimated by the whimsical notions of studio executives to know that there was nothing pretty about being owned. They owned your script and could do whatever they wanted to it. Why should owning your planet be any different?

It also explained the contempt that Amanda and the other executives had evinced for Earth’s inhabitants, the ‘Earthles’. To them, he and his fellow criminal lunatics would always be something less than human. And if Earth’s own tortured (and short) history had shown anything, it was that this superior attitude was a slippery slope towards mass murder.

Finally, it explained the bizarre hoops he’d been forced to jump through. With a sinking feeling in his stomach, Perry realised that
Bunt to the Rescue
was at best a Sisyphean exercise. A show, even a hit show, would never be more than a postponement of the inevitable. As long as Earth was the property of Galaxy Entertainment, its end was only a few lost ratings points away. It is possible to hold a loaded gun to someone’s head and not kill them; but if you keep it there, eventually you will.

Amanda studied the hardening expression on Perry’s face. ‘I know this can’t be easy to hear—’

Perry spat out a derisive laugh. ‘Oh no. It’s fine. I mean, if the planet has to be owned by someone, at least we’re in good hands. It’s not like we’re being threatened with annihilation by a bunch of aliens who have destroyed hundreds of other planets just like ours.’

Amanda shook her head. ‘It’s not like that. All of us who care about Earth know that a planet like this happens once in millennia. You could put POFs on every habitable world in the galaxy and never reproduce what happened here. It’s magic, pure magic – that’s the only way to describe it. You can’t wreck it all for short-term gain.’

‘Yeah,’ Perry said. ‘Why blow it up before we can do it to ourselves, right? Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose of the whole exercise? Because we will do it. You know we will, don’t you?’

Amanda squinted at Perry, trying to read his attitude. ‘You’re being ironic.’

‘Am I?’

‘I think I may have more faith in your planet than you do.’

‘Oh really? That’s rich. Honestly. That is beautiful.’ Perry’s mouth twisted into a sneer. ‘You talk about how sick we are. But this is all you, isn’t it? This is all part of
your
“balanced civilisation”. Nice balance. You get perfect genes, thousands of channels and orgasm pills. We get suffering, murder and death.’

‘I can’t go into our entire history right now,’ Amanda said, ‘but you have to understand that planets like Earth are the reason we survive.’

‘Then you shouldn’t,’ Perry snapped back. ‘Jesus – don’t you see?
You’re
the ones who are sick.’

Concern flickered across Amanda’s face. ‘Mr Bunt, you have to believe me when I say I have always been the biggest fan of Earth and its people, ever since I was a small child. I mean, I had posters of it on my wall.’ She took Perry’s hand in her own and smiled. ‘How else can you explain what just happened here?’

Perry gazed at the woman sitting across from him. Only moments before he had held her in his arms and had felt that he knew her. Now he realised he never would. He pulled his hand away.

‘That’s easy. I thought I was in love with you. Though you probably don’t understand that. I’m sure that “love” is one of those terrible animal traits that got left on the laboratory floor.’

Tears filled Amanda’s eyes. ‘It isn’t,’ she said, ‘though right now I wish it was.’

Perry opened the door and stepped out of the van. His feet touched the cracked sidewalk and he started walking, his steps echoing off the overpass. It felt good to be out in the air. That’s something he never thought he’d feel in Los Angeles. He heard her clamber out the door, her feet following him down the sidewalk.

‘Don’t do this,’ she called after him. ‘Mr Bunt, I’m on your side.’

Perry kept walking.

‘Perry!’

The shock of hearing his first name from her lips caused him to stop.

‘If they see you walk out from under the freeway, they can’t edit it. One shot will be us together in the van, the next will be you walking alone. You’re breaking continuity.’

Perry smiled ruefully. ‘Exactly.’

Amanda stepped backwards, as if the wind had been momentarily knocked out of her. She steadied herself. ‘You’re killing the show?’

‘What a shame,’ Perry said. ‘Your big hit. Your on-air debut.’

Amanda’s pale face flushed with hurt and anger. ‘It’s not about that.’

‘I’m sure you’ll be able to find yourself another monkey to torture.’

‘You’re the only one who can stop the finale!’

Perry kicked a loose chunk of concrete from the sidewalk into the gutter. ‘If what you’ve told me is true,’ he said, ‘the world needs to be taken out of its misery.’ He walked away, and this time she didn’t try to stop him.

CHANNEL 24

DEAD AIR

It took Perry more than an hour to make it back to his apartment building on foot. As he walked, yahoos in passing cars yelled unintelligible things at him. He’d found this to be a peril of being a pedestrian in Los Angeles – so few people walked, especially at night, that they became deserving of taunts. Granted, he was wearing a bloody, rumpled Armani suit, which probably didn’t do much to reduce the freak factor.

He arrived at his street and hiked up the steep grade from Ventura Boulevard to the Wellington Arms. He paused halfway to gaze out at the giant round light reflector in the sky – tonight at its full intensity – and the shimmering lights of all the fornicators below, spread out in an endless sprawl towards the horizon. All of them were doing whatever they needed to do to get ready for sleep and another day of entertaining their alien overlords, all of them no less pitiable than advanced Alzheimer’s patients, completely ignorant of who they really were and the imminence of death.

Those alien bastards
, Perry thought.
Those monstrous shit-fearing fuckphobic freaks.
He took some small satisfaction in knowing that by walking off when he did, he had created a terrible story problem for the producers of Channel Blue. One moment, he and Amanda were driving along Ventura Boulevard; the next, Perry was walking alone along the sidewalk. Because the decisive moment of
Bunt to the Rescue
had occurred beneath a freeway overpass in a flyless van, no viewer would ever understand what had happened. And in television, even the television of the future, incomprehension was death.

Perry found his apartment much the same as he had left it. It appeared as if a rodent, probably a squirrel, had slipped in through the broken window and taken a few bites of the cheeseburger he’d left on the table. But that was it. His possessions, his worthless possessions, were all present and intact. He picked up the shotgun and opened the chamber. There was still a shell in it. He laughed, remembering his lame plan to stop the world’s destruction by shooting up an office building.

Why had he ever cared about the world anyway? What was it to him? It had served only as a stage for his humiliation. Not only his, but that of everyone around him. That’s how it had been set up. The dice were loaded, which is why Earth’s residents kept rolling snake eyes. A planet of suckers.

He opened a bag of chips and noticed a few flies buzzing around.
No way
, he thought. He found another empty jar in the kitchen and methodically trapped all of them. Sure enough, metallic blue glinted from their thoraxes. Of course they weren’t giving up. Hit shows came along once in a blue moon; they were going to do everything they could to keep
Bunt to the Rescue
on the air, even if it no longer made sense.