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.

Trailer Parks In The Stars

The survey ship dropped out of hyperspace and took an awkward polar orbit around the distant planet, whose magnetic field interfered with the electrogravitic reactionless thrusters that propelled the vast saucer through the darkness of interstellar space.

The crew were sapient arctomorph felinoids from a yellow dwarf star in the Pleiades cluster. This was one of their first ventures outside of their isolated star cluster.

The planet beneath them was suitable for colonization, with a temperate climate, plentiful water, and an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. Gravimetric surveying revealed that the planet was deficient in heavy and precious metals, and had numerous anomalous mass distributions. One scan showed an artificial meander in an underground river; there, what appeared to be the ruins of a villiage was found.

The leader of the expedition, a formidable sorceror, approached the town square. An obelisk flared to life, and he was caught up in a beam of pink light.

Four humans sat before him. They were dressed in the clothing of the American Colonial elite, and gathered together at a round table inside a Masonic lodge in Richmond, Virginia.

Much time passes. A long-haul space trucker, carrying a load of bug bombs to the planet Suburbia, checks the ship's autopilot, downs the ice-cold contents of a garish aluminum can, and rises, obviously inebriated, to relieve himself loudly in the head next to his sleeping quarters.

"Hey, Bob! Wake up!"

A drowsy voice comes from the darkened room.

"Whu-?"

"Your shift. I'm needing to crash."

"Did you make coffee?"

"Sorry!"

"What's on TV?"

"Honor Guard reruns."