5.
The Makpigat Public School was the only place in town with an Internet connection, for reasons nobody quite understood and few bothered to question until Gordon arrived. The story begins in 1986, when Neil the Tech Guy dreamt up a plan to launch a satellite from Makpigat.
The entire set of schematics, from the wiring to the scaffolding, came to Neil in a dream, or so he told Tom. Neil built the satellite to look for extraterrestrial life, because that’s what the aliens told him to do in the dream. His satellite would be an important first step towards their eventual arrival on Earth in the year 2428. Nobody thought it was all that weird, because Tom hid that particular piece of news from the general population, offering them an entertainment package greater than the eventual confirmation of life on other planets.
Mayor Tom promised MTV and HBO to his new electorate at a time when regular democratic elections were still expected, and the voting public could be expected to hold against him. Like all Canadians, they salivated at the thought of American-made music videos and soft-core pornography, never once predicting that the distinctions that separated the two would erode until disappearing altogether a little over a decade later. Tom thought it would be difficult to sway Neil into adding a television satellite broadcast dish to his immaculately conceived blueprints, but he didn’t need any convincing. “It’s be nice to get PBS,” he suggested, “and HBO.” Television didn’t interfere with Neil’s ultimate goal of interstellar communication; only the federal government could do a thing like that.
When the shadowy powers-that-be in Ottawa received the order Neil placed for the massive amounts of jet fuel the entire project was put on hold pending an official review, which was typically the death blow for any government funding proposal. After all, American cable channels are known to have a corrosive effect on Canadian cultural heritage, which is why we superimpose the logos of Canadian networks over theirs in the bottom right hand corner of the screen when we watch all their shows. Instead of all the TV they could snatch out of the sky, the town would now only be allowed to get the CBC. Even fans of Radio-Canada were out of luck.
The town’s only real choice in the matter was which local CBC station the satellite feed would beam down. The only real differences were the six o’clock news and the hockey games chosen for broadcast during Hockey Night In Canada. Everyone requested their hometown channel, and none of those were taken into consideration when Makpigat was set to receive the Ottawa feed. Since nobody in town was from the Ottawa area, nobody really objected to it. It was hard to pretend to be especially upset. The fans of the Maple Leafs were the least dissatisfied, at least until the 1992 hockey season started and Makpigat became the northernmost troop in the Sens army.
Neil finally launched his satellite the next year, but it was monitoring the Soviet presence in space, feeding CBC Ottawa to the receiver on top of the Federal Building, and searching the skies as a distant third.
Surprisingly enough, they were fine with the business about aliens, but they also demanded their own modifications. It was still the tail end of the Cold War, at the peak of the worldwide craze of launching mysterious satellites into space. Canada wanted to get a leg-up on the competition, and the best way to do that was to count all the mysterious satellites floating above the country.
Complications arose when Neil calculated that the satellite was lagging behind, geo-synchronously. His calculations also explained why the TV signal went dead during the last few minutes of Coronation Street every Thursday evening, explaining why the middle-aged women of British heritage were always irrationally angry at him every Friday morning. As soon as the telescope arrived by boat the following summer, Neil confirmed what his maps and research could not have planned: his satellite had collided with another satellite, mysteriously very close to Makpigat above Canada’s Arctic, and fallen out of proper orbit. If only there had been a satellite up there already, the shadowy board agreed, then Neil would have known about the mystery satellite.
Nobody at either the Pentagon or the Kremlin confessed to owning the rogue bit of space junk above Makpigat, but both were angry with Canada when word got out that they were planning on shoot it out of the sky. The United States military, instead of fessing up or denying ownership, got mad at Canada instead for launching a clandestine surveillance satellite, and traded three previously-owned fighter jets for the privilege of blowing Neil’s satellite out of the sky as well. Oddly enough, the Americans never thought twice about how the Canadians launched a satellite in the first place. They probably assumed that, being so close to the top of the world, the Canadian Space Program just underhand tossed them into orbit.
But when the town gathered together on New Years Eve of 1990 to watch the Hunter brothers nearly blow their damn heads off with homemade fireworks of empty soup cans stuffed with gunpowder, America was preparing to blast their television privileges out of the sky. Tom didn’t know how to break the news, so he once again told them nothing, and was still working on the feigned look of surprise he would wear around the morning.
But nothing happened to the television connection in Makpigat. The missile must have missed the target. America never sent another expensive missile, so everyone involved in the whole thing must have got what they wanted (or at least assumed they did).
That is until the school started complaining that a handful of their hodgepodge of televisions, obsolete bug-eye screened models with dusty-wood coloured panels and knobs on the front for things like Vertical Hold, occasionally picked up signals from a strange Russian television station, most of it pornographic in nature., and none of it as classy as the kind HBO would have shown. How the school’s televisions were acquired in the first place is a whole other story, much less exciting but no shorter than this one. Needless to say that Russian-produced pornography is not suitable for developing Canadian minds. Neil concluded that the satellite must have hit a Russian communications satellite while it was up there, and now the transmissions from both are all garbled.
His theory would only be totally confirmed in late 2001, long after the aged televisions were retired to the back corner of the A/V room, when the first wireless card arrived pre-installed in Guy Fleurry’s new laptop computer. Upon turning the machine on, he instantly got a computer virus that changed all of his settings to Russian pornography. His home page became Russian Pornography, his files became Russian pornography, he even played Solitare with Russian pornography. After this lost its novelty, later than a reasonable person would expect, Guy installed an anti-virus program that effectively gave him the power to choose when and where he viewed Russian pornography.
And the rest, as they say, is history. Guy began to reap the benefits of a bandwidth monopoly. The only problem is what Guy calls The Bubble, how his connection dies as soon as he takes twenty paces outside the school. Sometimes the connection disappears even as he sat in the library, likely caused by meteorites or some other fast-moving space junk. But all that would change in early 2003, as Gordon assembled the tools he needed to connect the entire town to the Internet and everyone else in town gathered around their televisions to watch the Senators win the President’s Trophy for having the best overall record in the NHL for the season, despite having filed for bankruptcy at the beginning of the year.
