How TELECORP came to own everything
There used to be other broadcasters. Nobody remembers how many, because TELECORP kept the paperwork and the paperwork was merged too.
It went like this. TELECORP met a broadcaster, admired its frequency, and merged with it. The frequency stayed. The people who made the programmes were thanked for watching. Then TELECORP met the next one. It never built a studio or wrote a script. It learned one move and made it ten thousand times.
When the last broadcaster signed, TELECORP held every channel on the dial. That evening the schedule for the following day came back from Programming with one line on it: nothing is on. Programming had been merged the week before. So had the people who would have noticed.
The sets were already switched on, and nobody had the authority to switch them off. A set that is left on with nothing to show does what anything left alone does. It starts to show itself.
What a Screenie is
One department survived every merger because nobody could find it: Continuity, the office that fills the gaps between programmes. With no programmes left, everything was gap, and Continuity was in charge.
Continuity did what it could with what was in the stores. It issued every set a presenter: one body from stock, shoulders and a collar, no face. There was no budget for faces and no need. The set sits where the head would be and the screen is the face. It dressed each presenter for one of the four shows that still had a wardrobe rail: the News, the Arts, Sport and the Weather. It put a backdrop behind each one, because a presenter without a backdrop looks like a hostage.
The staff, such as they were, started calling them Screenies. Continuity objected to the name in a memo. The memo was merged.
A Screenie is a channel with shoulders. It is on air for as long as it has anything on its screen, and it has exactly one thing.
The ident
Every channel is allowed one ident. In the trade an ident is the few seconds between programmes when a channel shows its mark and plays its tune, so that you know who you are watching. At TELECORP the ident is all there is.
The tube of a TELECORP set holds a picture of sixteen lines of sixteen dots, and holds it steady. That is 256 dots, each lit or dark, and the 256 answers are the channel's whole estate. Written out, they are one number, and that number is what the channel is.
The picture is that number, drawn. The jingle is the same number, played: sixteen beats, one for each column of the picture, on four tracks. The top dot of a column sings the tune. The bottom dot is the bass. The dots between them, where the column is thick, run up and down as a second voice. The gaps inside a column tick. The colour of the tube decides what the lead voice is made of, which is why a set sounds the way it looks.
Nobody composed any of it. A fresh ident comes out of the tube as a face, because Continuity set the tubes up that way: a head, two eyes, a mouth, something on top. After that it is whatever its controller makes of it.
The dial and the licence
A channel goes on air by taking the next free frequency on the dial. The frequencies are numbered from 1 to 10,000, and the number is the channel's name for life: Channel 412 is Channel 412 whatever happens to it later.
Channel 1 was switched on by the Chairman, in an empty building, and paid nothing. A house channel never does.
Every channel after it pays a licence, once, to go on air. The licence grows with the cube of how far up the dial the frequency sits. The engineers' explanation is that a signal fills a room three ways, so room on the dial is sold by the room. Low on the dial a licence costs less than the electricity to read it out. The ten-thousandth frequency costs 0.005 ETH, and after it the dial is full.
Two habits of the Licensing desk are worth knowing.
It quotes the licence a hundred frequencies up the dial. That margin is the guard band. When a crowd switches on at once, a set that asked the price a moment ago still gets its frequency, and whatever it overpaid comes straight back with the receipt.
It will license up to ten channels in one switch. Engineers call ten channels on one switch a multiplex.
Mergers
TELECORP has only ever changed in one way, and its channels inherited the habit. There is no studio in the building. Nothing new is ever made. A controller who wants a different picture on a screen has one tool, and it is the one the corporation was built with.
A controller who holds two channels may merge them. One survives, with a new ident. The other goes off air and thanks you for watching.
There are three kinds of merger, and the form asks which.
AND keeps the dots that both channels show. It is what they agree on. Two faces merged by AND come out thinner: only the features they share.
OR keeps the dots that either channel shows. It is everything they have between them. Two faces merged by OR come out heavier, and enough of them come out as a wall.
XOR keeps the dots that only one of them shows. It is everything they disagree on. Two faces merged by XOR come out as the outline of their argument.
The survivor may also keep what it likes of the other's effects: its set, its wardrobe, its backdrop, its tube. Or none of them. The papers of every channel still record what it was first licensed with, so a Furniture set in a Sport jacket can always be traced to the Bubble in a blazer it began as.
A merger is filed for 0.0001 ETH. The fee goes to TELECORP, like everything else.
Each channel carries a count of its mergers: every channel that went off air into it, and every channel that had gone off air into those. A channel with a high count has eaten well.
Patches
A channel merged down to a handful of dots is no use as a programme and very useful as a tool. By XOR it flips exactly those dots on another screen and nothing else. Controllers call such a channel a patch, keep a drawer of them, and use them to draw.
Dark sets and test cards
Merge by AND until no dot is left and the screen shows the line and the dot that a tube leaves when it is switched off. The lamp on the set goes out and the jingle stops. The channel is not gone. It keeps its frequency and its effects, it reads Off air, and one OR with anything will bring it back.
Merge by OR until every dot is lit and the screen shows the test card: eight colour bars over four greys, and one steady tone. All 256. Four of those dots sit in the top row where no face reaches, and only one channel in about sixty-four lights them: it carries a line of data along the top of its picture, with a mark in each top corner, the kind old sets were never meant to show. Nobody knows what the data says. A test card needs one such channel in it. A channel with everything on has nothing on. TELECORP considers this the natural end of a successful channel and has a plaque about it.
The house
TELECORP House is one building. Everything the corporation does happens on one of its floors.
The mast, on the roof. Channels go on air here. There is one switch. Beside it a plate shows the next frequency and its licence. The lamp on the mast is the same neon as the lamp on every set that is on air.
Master control, under the roof. One wall, and on it every channel that is on air, each on its own set. A controller picks a set off the wall to watch it and read its papers.
Mergers, the floor below, the only department TELECORP ever staffed properly. One long table with two chairs. The channel that will survive sits on the left. The form is on the table: which kind, which effects, the fee.
The studios, four of them, all dark except for the wardrobe rails: the News desk, the Arts sofa, the Sport bench and the Weather map. Nothing has been made here since the last merger. Continuity dresses the presenters here.
The lobby, at street level. The reception desk is unattended and has been for some time. The Charter is on the wall. The dial stands in the middle of the floor so that visitors can see how far up it the corporation has got.
The archive, in the basement. Every channel that went off air into another is shelved here, dark, with a tag saying which channel took it. The minutes of every merger are kept in the order they were filed.
Who is who
The Announcer. The voice of the building. The Announcer reads out every channel that goes on air and every merger that is filed, in the same tone, and has never been seen. All of TELECORP's public words are the Announcer's.
The Chairman. Whoever switched on Channel 1. The Chairman has never appeared on any channel and has no office in the building. There is no way to reach the Chairman, and the Charter was written so that there is no need to.
Controllers. Whoever holds a channel controls it: where it goes, what it merges with, what it keeps. TELECORP has no say in any of that. A controller with many channels is a controller with many, and there is no rank above.
Continuity. The department nobody could find. It issues the presenters, sets up the tubes and has never missed a gap.
What happens as the counts grow
Nothing at TELECORP happens by the clock. The building changes when the counts do.
- The dial in the lobby fills from the bottom. Low frequencies cost nothing worth the name; the top of the dial is where licences begin to be felt.
- The wall in master control fills with sets, then thins as mergers take channels off it. The archive fills at the same rate.
- The first dark set and the first test card are each entered in the minutes by number.
- The count of mergers on a channel is the only rank the building keeps.
- TELECORP has never said what it wants. Its record says: one channel.