Read Online Channel Blue by Jay Martel - Free Book Online

Earthles would literally kill themselves climbing tall mountains and diving deep into oceans and walking on wires strung impossibly high. And why would they do these things? Were they being chased by predators? Was there something they needed for their survival on top of the mountain or on the bottom of the ocean? No – there was no reason. They did these things only because they wanted to prove that they could do them.
    How could you not love that?
    As an adolescent, Amanda learned all about her civilisation, the Edenite Empire, and the Three Rs that had rescued it from its barbaric past: Reason, Rationality and Respect. She learned how her people had managed to transcend millennia of destructive animal-based behaviours to evolve into a society devoid of hunger, killing and ignorance. While she couldn’t help but feel proud of her history, Channel Blue remained her guilty pleasure. When not studying the lessons of her elders, she would return home and watch fascinated as the hapless Earthles searched jungles for gold that never existed, went blind writing immense books no one ever read, and starved alone in caves searching for enlightenment that never came. Though Amanda never said this out loud, she found the irrational Earthle instinct for the endless quest, the impossible dream and the unreachable goal heartbreakingly beautiful.
    She also loved their sense of duty and honour, the misguided way they would sacrifice themselves for meaningless causes. She even loved their bizarre need to divide themselves up into tribes – ‘countries’, they called them – and celebrate their tribe as the best of all, even if it meant flinging themselves into terrible battles and certain death to prove it. And most of all, she loved their faith in a higher power to rescue them from those terrible battles and certain death, a power that never manifested itself in any tangible form whatsoever, much less rescued them. They always ended up dying – but incredibly enough (and this, in her mind, was the best part) this fact didn’t shake the faith of the surviving Earthles. On the contrary, it strengthened their faith because the higher power must have wanted it that way .
    Seriously : How could you not love that?
    Channel Blue was actually thousands of channels bundled together, but Amanda’s favourite channels all originated from the tribe that called itself the United States of America. Because of its relative prosperity, strident religious beliefs, and relaxed restrictions on the use of firearms, the USA was the source of most of Channel Blue’s hit shows. This, after all, was where the government murdered people for murdering people and started wars to prevent them. It was a country that took all the madness of the Earthles and distilled it into just a few time zones. And though the citizens of this nation had no way of knowing their amazing exploits were being beamed to billions of viewers on the other side of the galaxy, they seemed to have some innate sense of their primacy.
    ‘America’s Number One!’ they would chant at patriotic rallies and international sporting events.
    ‘This is the greatest country in the world,’ their leaders would often say, and as far as entertainment value went, they were absolutely right.
    When asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, Amanda dared to dream big: ‘I want to produce Earth.’ Adults humoured her, though they knew the chances of this actually happening were remote. In Edenite society, there was no calling higher than the production of entertainment, and producers were revered more than the greatest politicians, businessmen, doctors or scholars. And Channel Blue was one of the most sought-after assignments in all of interplanetary production. But Amanda, according to her genetic profile, was blessed with greater tenacity than her peers. This, more than anything else, drove her to become valedictorian of her graduating class and gain enrolment in the highly selective Academy of