The Mortality Principle

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The peace was broken by the clatter of a trash can being overturned, which was followed by a burst of laughter.

Annja Creed glanced out of the window into the road below. Illuminated by the streetlights, a gaggle of young men jostled one another. She couldn’t tell if the shoving was playful or if there was a simmering undercurrent of real violence to it. One thing was for sure, the young men were more than a little the worse for wear from the night’s drinking. Her first thought was that it was the same in cities and towns the world over, but that wasn’t true. This kind of rowdiness, playful or not, wouldn’t happen in a Muslim state, or in places where poverty placed survival above pleasure.

She wasn’t even sure it would have happened here in Prague thirty years ago. The world had changed just like the regime, and after the first flush of greedy capitalism, Prague settled down to become one of those cities. It promised excitement and just enough culture to satisfy the tourists, whether they came to cast off some imagined loss of freedom that marriage was about to bring, or simply to soak up another way of living.

For Annja it was simply a case of another city and another hotel room. They all began to bleed together in her mind these days. She couldn’t remember the last time she had slept in her own bed. No, that was a lie; she could remember the last time she’d crawled into it, but she hadn’t actually slept. It had been the night of the big network meeting. Doug Morrell had called her into the office with an ominous message of “Big changes are on the horizon. We need you here, pronto.”

She’d crossed town to the office, carded her way through security and ridden the express elevator up to the boardroom on the top floor of the skyscraper, every step of the way imagining a worst-case scenario that was just a little bit worse than the last one she’d just imagined.

She opened the boardroom door to see the army of assembled faces looking up at her, Doug halfway down the line. He looked like someone had stolen his toys from his stroller. “Miss Creed, good of you to join us. First, let me just say what a huge admirer I am,” one of the nameless suits said, indicating the only empty chair at the table. Annja took her seat, waiting for someone to explain what was going on. “We were just in the middle of discussing corporate restructuring,” the suit went on. “We’ve got some exciting plans for the network.”

Annja’s mind raced, trying to play catch-up. She really didn’t understand what was happening. Restructuring? Exciting plans?

“Obviously Chasing History’s Monsters is a bit of a niche program,” another suit spoke up. His thick-knuckled hand was wrapped around a network mug, warming himself. “It’s got a loyal audience, but over the past eighteen months it’s struggled to bring in new viewers, which means it’s struggled to bring in more advertising revenue and basically isn’t paying its way.”

“In short,” the first suit picked up, “we’re not here to educate the world, we’re here to entertain it, and if we’re not entertaining it, we’re not doing our job properly.”

The man stared daggers at Doug when he delivered this last line. Annja sensed a serious undercurrent of dislike between the two. It wasn’t simmering so much as threatening to boil over. Somehow Doug managed to keep his mouth shut while the suits took potshots at the program he produced and, by inference, at him.

“We’ve got a duty to the shareholders,” another voice chimed in. This one was female. Annja turned to look at the woman, realizing that with the exception of Doug, Annja didn’t have a single ally in the room.