The virgin & the bad boy (Gravity)

Chapter 47/Sorry Dave I can't do that

A/N - how did we get this far without a Picture of Dante? 

A few days later I was sitting in the green room at CNN ( the creative news network on channel 32,303) . The green room was disappointingly not green.  This was an antechamber where the people to be interviewed stat until they were needed.  I sat in the room with a couple of Aunt Mallory's security guard robots and the security robot that now went with Io on public appearances. Io now drew crowds of robot fans where ever she made appearances. The guard robot was to keep her robot fans. From her. She had even had to sign an autograph from the Smart TV set which hung on the wall. Both the robots looked like silver back gorillas. I sat in the room with Memphis having the feeling that if it left the guard robots would come over and attempt to pick fleas off me. I looked up to the wall to see what was being broadcast on the TV set with 'To my best friend TV set. Love IO' scrawled in Io's hand in pen on the frame of the set. 

Aunt Catherine had been called by Aunt Mallory to get me to get Io to go to some TV News program. No one watched Television any more but a youtube video clip from a TV show was widely seen as being more 'truthful' than your common or garden video clip.

"I've agreed to this to help your friend Io's case. Don't worry it's just Io, Kindra Soul and Me." Aunt Mallery had said. She was having problems getting any appearance without Ronald Bentham coming on and  accusing her of more random crimes. So far Aunt Mallery in Ronald's eyes was guilty of; being Jack the Ripper, eating peas from a knife, shooting Kennedy, starting world war 2, leading the sack or Rome by the Visigoths, and writing the plot for Matrix Reloaded. Aunt Mallory was still looking for an excuse to read out some of her lame policies to people. 

Unfortunately, this was not to be, Aunt Mallery was about to have a sudden and deep impact with what  journalists called 'balance'. The machine journalists had taken great pride in what they called 'balance'. That is attempting to avoid accusations of bias by 'showing both sides of the debate'. Balance for the machines was at the heart of automatic quality journalism. Plus if you were lucky you could get an argument or better still a fight which was always good for ratings.

This was all very well and good unless you found a subject which had universal agreement.

Things had got so bad that when astronomers had discovered a huge asteroid heading to earth the whole thing had not been mentioned on the TV news. This was in no small part due to the fact that given the universal opinion that the asteroid was approaching, broadcasters couldn't find anyone who could provide the appropriate alternative view ( that an asteroid wasn't found and wasn't coming towards us and we weren't going to die). This in turn meant that politicians were uninterested in this 'minor' news item which would not assure their re-election. Given the lack of balance the news channel hadn't mentioned it until it was too late ( also at that point bad news didn't sell advertising). By good luck, Mars had fancied a third moon to build a high gravity school on, and had deflected the asteroid into it's orbit so saving Earth's population. Again no one could argue that this had not happened so it wasn't carried on the news either.

Fortunately, the internet had come, as it always does, to rescue the auto-journalists aid by giving a rich and steady supply of a lunatic fringe willing alternative opinion.'. In these days you could get people and machines which would gainsay anything. So if the news wanted to do a piece on how well UN-Facebook had cleaned air pollution they could dig up someone who would say breathing was just a fiction and a conspiracy and they never actually need to breathed really. If someone died in a freak accident with a butter knife someone had to be dragged on to say how safe butter knives were and someone else had to be found to counter this by crying when she recounted the tale of her husband's butter knife related demise.