You may remember my 10(ish)-year-old story “The Bug,” which I posted here a few weeks ago. In it, the protagonist — home at work with a fever, some kind of bug anyhow — stumbles upon a very strange cable-TV channel. Its name is The Dead Channel; all its programming has to do, somehow, with death. While some of its schedule is devoted to features (talk shows, old movies like The Loved One, and so on), the bulk consists of what our hero thinks of as “deadcasts.”
You’ll be familiar with the format of a deadcast if you’ve ever seen the regular programming of The Weather Channel. A suited announcer, perhaps armed with a pointer, stands before an electronic wall-sized radar or satellite map of the US. The person waves his/her hands over the map, as the map itself is painted over with glowing-green, -yellow, and -red swatches of color representing storms and other conditions.
On The Dead Channel, the maps don’t show stationary fronts, temperature bands, and the like. They show, oh, well… Take the deadcaster named Jack Llongo, for example. He’s obviously new at his job, a little nervous, and keeps muffing his lines, ad-libbing inappropriately, and so on. At one point he’s got a map behind him labeled MORBIDITY INDEX:
