Our Regularly Scheduled Program
by Ron Davidson
part 1
For a long minute, Derrick Audry stared at the feed that had suddenly appeared on Monitor 9. Camera 9 was attached to the back wall of Bellent’s physics lab and pointed towards the security fence 30 yards away. Derrick should be seeing its ever-glamorous view of three waste disposal bins beside a small utility shed, a patch of rocky ground dotted with gopher holes, the chain link fence and the sky beyond. Perhaps a Gila monster sunning itself on a rock. What the hell was this?
A slow, heavy tread of footsteps echoed in the hall. Derrick looked out from the broom-closet sized security office and saw Byron Moorehouse, one of the techs, walking by, chomping on a donut. “Hey, By,” Derrick called, “got a minute? Something weird’s going on.”
Byron wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, smearing powdered sugar into his beard. “Sounds about right.”
“Look at this.”
Byron popped the last of his donut into his mouth, brushed his fingertips together, and shooed Derrick from the doorway. “To the rescue,” he said.
“Just stay in your Clark Kent clothes, please.” Derrick slid back to make room for Byron’s north-of-300-pound frame to squeeze through the doorway and test the spine of a swivel chair.
The image on monitor 9 was blurry and heavily distorted, as if the signal were either coming from a thousand miles away or through a heavy storm. But you could still make out what it was: a stream of people walking through a jungle.
“What’s going on?” Derrick asked.
Byron shook his head in uncharacteristic silence.
“I gotta check it out,” Derrick said. The feed showed people, a seeming parade of them and, ridiculous as it was, given that the image was obviously of someplace else, he was obliged on the basis of duty to make sure the compound hadn’t been breached.
He exited the security office, climbed the dozen stairs to the ground floor, walked down a dimly lit corridor and out a side exit. The oven-like heat and eye-watering brightness of the afternoon hit him with their late July force. Squinting, he followed a path through creosote bushes around the side of the building to the back of the physics lab. There were the trash bins and storage shed, the patch of rocky ground dotted with gopher holes, the fence, the sky. No Gila monsters.
But Derrick did find a kingsnake sunning itself on the pathway ahead. He got a stick and pushed the snake towards a nearby bush. It struck at the stick, and Derrick danced back. “Take it easy, fella.” The snake slithered away into the creosote.
And there was no parade of people. Obviously. Derrick took a moment to absorb the beauty of the desert that sprawled all around him. To the north, he saw the sun glinting off some of the houses of Desert View that lined the ridge of a hill. He and Marianne, his wife of 26 years, had been living in one of the gated community’s smaller townhouses, on the east side, since he’d retired from the Phoenix police department five years ago. They liked the place, even if it had more of a neighboring-house view than a desert view.
The community was safe and clean. Their neighbors were good people. With the income from his security-guard job supplementing his retirement savings and pension, they could afford his golf club membership and her ever-expanding list of hobbies, plus a cruise from San Diego to Ensenada every spring. On the whole, life was good.
Back in the security office, Derrick found Byron and Jack Williams, the head tech, huddled over monitor 9, talking in quiet tones and shaking their heads.
On the feed, the parade of people threading through the jungle kept coming. They entered the frame at lower right and moved off into the jungle, exiting the frame at the upper left. Viewed from over their shoulders from about 15 feet up, they seemed to be all going at more or less the same speed, but they weren’t marching. They weren’t in any formation. They were just walkers, taking it easy, like maybe a Sunday hiking group.
Except that Derrick couldn’t see anyone stopping to admire a flower, or carrying a walking stick or even a water bottle. And there were too many of them to be a “group” of any kind. You only saw about five to ten of them in the view frame at any given time, but hundreds must have passed by already.
The techs were flummoxed. Under certain circumstances, you could get a ghost feed on a closed-circuit, but the facility did not have those circumstances. What was happening was simply not possible.
* * *
Derrick’s shift soon ended, and when it did he forgot about the problem. It wasn’t his to worry about. He buckled into his Camry, turned on a history podcast about British India, and headed home.
His worry-free, work’s-over mood evaporated when he opened his front door twenty minutes later to find his wife asleep on the sofa, one arm dangling to the floor, a ball of red yarn and pair of crochet hooks on her chest. She must have intended to start the afghan she was planning to give to their granddaughter for Christmas, but she hadn’t gotten very far.
“Honey?” The lights were off and the shades drawn, giving the room a gloomy feeling. “Helloooo?” a little louder.
She’d started taking Lexapro a year and a half ago, shortly after her mother had finally passed after inhabiting a decade-long twilight of dementia. The mild antidepressant had kept Marianne above the waves and, on most days, she seemed the same cheery spirit he’d fallen in love with long ago. But, now and again, she’d go under. Then she’d lie in bed all day, staring at the ceiling. He’d sit in a chair beside her and read a book, now and again attempting to make a bit of conversation, but he could really do nothing to help her. He could only sit and watch her suffer.
Then he remembered that she’d been up late the night before, binge-watching a drama on Netflix. That, and possibly the two or three glasses of wine she’d no doubt had along with it, must have given her the zonks. He smiled a little at his own over-protectiveness, then went to the bedroom to change out of his uniform. He would make his signature Tuscan chicken for their dinner.
* * *
It was while Derrick was dicing an onion that the feed starting ghosting onto circuits around the world.
It appeared on cable stations, webcams, doorbell security monitors, scoreboard video screens, and other, completely random feeds scattered in every corner of the globe. For half an hour it played on the Sony jumbotron at One Times Square, until the building management pulled the plug and the sign went dark.
The feed’s inexplicable appearance instantly became the world’s top news story. It was an anomaly, a phenomenon that defied the laws of physics, brazenly staring the world in the face. For several days the world stared back, blankly, taking in the sight of the endless parade of hikers. But after a week, the story began to recede from the spotlight. Around the world, governments, media companies, business leaders and other big voices in each respective society stopped talking in public about “The Channel,” as the feed was almost everywhere dubbed.
Behind the scenes, assigned task forces worked furiously to solve the riddles the Channel posed. But until they succeeded, there was nothing officials could say responsibly. To raise the subject at all would simply fuel groundless speculation and conspiracy-mongering as well as draw attention to the bewilderment of leadership. Global stock markets had already dropped an average of 6 percent since the feed’s appearance. For officialdom, then, the topic became taboo, and the Channel became the elephant in the room for the entire planet.
Even so, a metaphysical fissure had opened under humanity’s collective feet, and humanity felt unsettled. The need to fill this fissure inspired an informal, global background chatter of speculation and theorizing. Within this informal sphere, the outrageous but nonetheless oddly compelling idea spread that the Channel was broadcasting images of the dead.
According this theory, some kink of atmospheric physics — an unusual churning of the Earth’s magnetic shield, a sudden rain of cosmic particles, the gaseous outburst of a passing comet — had opened an inter-dimensional window to admit energy signals from the afterworld that were being picked up by — who knew why? — select earth monitoring systems. Stories circulated about people recognizing recently deceased loved ones strolling in the jungle.
* * *
Derrick felt uncomfortably close to the phenomenon of the fissure. Backtracking, a U.N. taskforce working with the FBI and Homeland Security had determined that Bellent’s Camera 9 feed was likely the first one on the planet taken over by the Channel. And Derrick had been the first Bellent employee to see that feed. The taskforce had interviewed him three different times — along with everyone else who worked at the facility — and investigated every activity taking place in its labs. But they could find nothing to explain why the feed had first appeared there.
The investigators asked Bellent to keep the feed going on Monitor 9. After all, it had been the first to get the feed, and might be the first to capture any new developments. So Derrick saw the feed in the security office every shift he worked. There was no way he could shove it into the background and forget about it, the way many other people had.
Aside from now being forced to watch his new daily TV show, “The Endless Parade of Mystery Hikers in the Jungle,” not much else changed in Derrick’s corner of the world. His friends and neighbors in Desert View rarely mentioned the mystery. They talked with perhaps a tad too much animation about the Halloween parties they were planning, about the hot fall weather, and the stock market. But to all appearances, life in the community was unruffled.
Derrick knew that some of the biggest changes were the ones you didn’t see, though. He’d come home from work one Thursday afternoon about six weeks after the Channel had appeared and found Marianne lying in a fetal position on the sofa.
“Honey?”
She slowly shook her head.
He took her hand and walked her to bed. “You’ll rest better in here,” he told her.
“Derrick?” She looked up at him from the pillow and grabbed his arm. A beam of the late afternoon sun peeked through the curtains and crossed her face, highlighting the tiny rills of age on her cheeks. “Do you think Mom was on the Channel?”
“Rest.”
“Do you think I could have seen her, if... if the Channel had been there when she died?”
He wiped a tear from her cheek and shook his head. “Please.”
“I’m sorry.”
He kissed her forehead. “Don’t be.”
In a few minutes she began to doze.
On his way to work the next day, Derrick listened to a podcast in which the host, a folksy, soft-spoken minister, begged to conjecture on the “values” of the dead. Derrick’s ears pricked like those of a man hearing the first tire-squeal of what he somehow knew would be a ten-car pileup on the interstate.
The dead people you saw on the Channel, the preacher began — if that was what they were — were now cut off from their families, their communities, their churches. They had not yet entered the gates of the Kingdom, but seemed to be walking towards it through a jungle, and was that a metaphor for their condition, their vulnerability? How did they know which way to go? How were they supposed to follow the true path? Might they lose the way before they reached their goal?
The minister chuckled that he knew how absurd these questions might sound, at first. If those people were the dead, then this was a miracle, they were in God’s hands, and all was well. But he asked his listeners to think a bit more and to use their eyes: they didn’t see God on the Channel, did they? They saw a jungle. Could it be the Garden of Eden, perhaps, or someplace like it? The walkers had an attitude of serenity, of walking without a hurry or a care, but could a serpent be lurking in those woods? Might these people, these angels, yet be in grave danger?
Copyright © 2026 by Ron Davidson
