TV Casualty

Media in Corporate space was distributed asynchronously. Maintaining reliable data streams between two points separated by a few light-years was expensive, and considering the differing diurnal cycles of the colony worlds and the star-ships traveling between them, live distribution would have been inconvenient.

The crew of the deep-space cargo freighter had just received the current delta feed from Entertainment Division for subscribers on Deep Space Distribution Plan 9, which contained the following:

Thirty hours of news and public-interest broadcast archives for the previous cycle from Sedgewick Station, Suburbia's West Pole, Astes, Trojan City, and Parkland. The Big Five media markets generally provided twelve half-hour news broadcasts, sorted and indexed to let homesick crewmen catch up on current events from somewhere near their home.

Twelve hours of the highlights of the last cycle's sporting events, cut into short segments, covering sporting events like competetive pack hunting, combat golf, ski jousting, and chess.

Ten hours of entertainment programming.

The news and sports streams contained elaborate, time-coded indexes that could be used to mix short segments into one of the feature streams.

The feature streams were where the various distribution plans began to distinguish themselves. Plan 9 was reasonably popular among spacers, residents of deep-space installations, prisoners, and bar patrons; it concentrated on super heroes.

The Fe Arrans had records of individuals with extraordinary abilities back into the depths of their written history. These once ruled as warlords over the packs they adopted; over time, the religious philosophies of the Reyll prophets slowly limited their political and economic domination, and introduced more sophisticated and egalitarian social structures that encouraged artistic and scientific progress. The paranormals became useful atavisms, conscripted soldiers used in the quiet, civilized wars fought between the Reyll industrial combines.

The Corporation, on the other hand, turned its paranormals into media figures, dressing them in colorful costumes. They were integrated into police and paramilitary forces, and used to communicate information about public safety and war-time propaganda to vast audiences. However, their intrigues, rivalries, and friendships were scripted and managed by a cadre of writers and producers, producing worked scenes that provided continuity to knit together the footage of what the heroes called "shoots" -- usually combat or some other perilous, unscripted situation.

Honor Guard was a relatively popular super hero series. The setup -- the protagonists were a team of advisers to the Space Patrol, attached to an experimental heavy corvette -- ensured variety in location and tone, combined with the comforting conventions of spacer life and police procedural and search and rescue fiction.

This particular feed contained six hour-long episodes of Honor Guard adventures, two hours of short worked comedy skits and celebrity interviews by Awesome Man, a clownish empath in a garish costume, and a two-hour block of music videos and out-of-context clips from documentaries and old movies hosted by former villain Master Decontrol. As such, Honor Guard was the meat in the media soup doled out by the Deep-Space Distribution Network, playing to a captive audience of bored, inebriated space truckers.

It wasn't high culture, but it made the hours pass between sheer boredom and frantic terror -- just the thing for long-haul space flight.