This article is classified "Fictional"
One of the saddest cases of television addiction arose in the Dijacee sector
of the Galaxy. Before initial Contact by missionaries of the Great Prophet
Zebedee, the Trekk system was a dull place. Its inhabitants had conquered
most of the innocuous germs found there, and traffic accidents were kept to
a minimum by the introduction of a law requiring men with red flags to be
waved in front of motorized vehicles. (The motorized vehicles would spin
their wheels and charge at the flag which would be whipped away at the last
moment. The motorized vehicle would then spin round quite viciously and
proceed to try and run over the red flag once again. This law achieved its
aims since very few people died by being run over at pedestrian crossings,
but it also resulted in the vehicles being shunned by sensible minded people
due to the simple fact that they never got anywhere - just backwards and
forwards trying to impale this red flag. Although rather hard on the red
flag, not one was heard to complain.)
This idyllic state of affairs resulted in the usual problems of
over-population and over-efficient politicians. Over population was not too
much of a problem from a Malthusian/food point of view, but it meant high
unemployment resulting in a large part of the population spending its time
at home utilizing the common home entertainment systems of a typical
pre-contact world. Unfortunately this included television. Politicians
were extremely adept at manipulating this public access media for their own
purposes. (Very few post-contact worlds suffer from the delusion that
politicians do anything for the public's good.)
This was the backdrop to which we introduce "Contact." Some of the
sub-classes of scientists were involved with super-string FTL (Faster Than
Light) communication theory. Their device (which included two paper cups
and a long super-string) was switched on at a quarter to three on a Monday,
about the same time as children's TV was starting for the evening.
What they got was war. Bloody war. Alien war. The universal language of
death and destruction. On their cathode ray tubes, images of a great
galactic confrontation flickered in little red, green and blue dots. The
linguists got to work straight away. They worked night and day at
deciphering the military communications. The psychologists examined the
motives and causes. The military analyzed the strengths of the two sides.
The churches catalogued the alien's concept of honour, and analyzed the way
that the fatally injured prayed as they died. And the common man rooted for
either the Yellows, or the Grays.
The everlasting battle had white-noise filtered out of its signal, was
computer enhanced, and relayed to every TV on the planet. 24 hours a day,
every sentient being with nothing to do sat down with the Dijacee equivalent
of popcorn, on the Dijacee equivalent of a sofa, and watched the epic
struggle between the Grays and the Yellows.
For six months neither side gained the upper hand.
Then the politicians entered the fray. Not only did their campaign slogans
offer more work, more interesting life-styles, and more research into
psychedelic drugs, but also they proclaimed their allegiance to one of the
two sides in the aliens' war. Rosettes and party badges were no longer red
and blue. They were yellow, or they were grey.
Membership of the Dijacee Nazi party dropped, together with the National
Front, and even the Conservatives lost ground to the Yellow and the Grey.
But bigotry and intolerance were on the rise. It was no longer of any
relevance whether your neighbours' ancestors invaded the northern bit of
your island a hundred years ago because that was just peanuts when compared
to the galactic magnitude of the war of a thousand suns. (Sun usage was
near a thousand at its height, but quite a few had been destroyed by a
rather useful "nova device." Actually, it was useful if you had the means
to bugger off out of the solar system that was about to be blown up.)
It couldn't go on as a simple couch potato event. Emotions ran too high.
The planet Trekk knew war once more. Brother Trekker killed Brother
Trekker, and the politicians urged them on.
The next few months were the worst in Trekk history. Half the population
was wiped out in urban guerilla warfare between the Trekk-bound Yellows and
Grays. Minor skirmishes in the alleyways often resulted in many innocent
bystanders dying due to the density of population. Such was the skill of
the politicians' oratory that over half the population died before the first
anniversary of "Contact" could be celebrated.
And then... disaster! As was habitual amongst the astronomers at the time,
they fed the images of the stars which the military communiques had ordered
to be blown up into the astronomical computers. They would then point their
telescopes at the doomed star and wait for the explosion (which would not be
seen for many years because of the light-years distance away). But that day
the computers analyzed and spat out its oracle, no-one waited with glee for
the new scientific information. The sun to be destroyed was their own.
Time of destruction: two days hence.
A few of the astronomers checked and triple checked the calculations, but
most went home to their wives and girlfriends and husbands and boyfriends
and had sex for the rest of the day. No contraception was used that night.
The press caught wind of this, half the world's star watchers getting laid,
and the others not even getting home for supper, and so they made discrete
enquiries. The newspaper headlines the next day cried out:
"DIJACEE STAR TREKK LAST NIGHT"
And they published all the data that the astronomers had been working on,
and they showed all the star-field models as best they could in two
dimensions. It wasn't understood, but it was believed. The whole world
laid down its arms and waited in fear.
Nothing happened.
Or rather the star Trekk blew up in a super nova. But only on TV. The
Dijacee people looked up and saw that their star was fine. The were no star
destroyer spaceships in the region, no killer robots painted white, no
strange clouds of energy of an unknown type, and no nova bombs.
Very few people were left on the planet who had the technological expertise
to maintain the super-string to television conversion device, and so the
battle of the Yellows and the Grays was no longer seen on Dijacee. It was
generally accepted that trying to regain the TV network wasn't such a hot
idea anyway. There were more important things to do, such as killing stray
cats for food.
It was a shame really, for if they had lasted a few more weeks then they
would have been able to translate a new message. This one was different in
that it was a voice speaking over a still picture showing heroic deeds of
Yellow spacemen firing plasma bolts at Grey spaceships.
Had the translator computers been working, they would have heard the voice
announce:
"Stay tuned to this channel! The war film "The Jedi Empire's Revenge"
will continue after a short commercial break."