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Faithful in the First City’s been airing, for better or for worse, since a few decades into the War. Her momma used to swear by it. When Rita was just a little girl she’d wait up real late for her to come in from work, sometimes, and they’d sit and watch together. Campy, melodramatic, easy on the brain – alright early-morning fare. Her momma would memorize the plots, the characters, and so Rita would too, grasping for something to have in common with her. That must be a real fine sight, she used to say to Rita, or at least in Rita’s general direction, as the credits rolled and the night sky faded into blue. Watching the sunrise from the first city on Mars.
Her momma’s been in the ground for a quarter century, now, bless her. Rita hasn’t seen that creaky old house – or city, or planet, for that matter – in just about as long. But Faithful followed her to Hyperion, even as its protagonists had kids and then had grandkids and then left or died or mysteriously disappeared. She’d watch it in her apartment alone; once in a blue moon with company, when Frannie came round to read her tarot. And then one day she had Mister Steel, grumbling but secretly invested, to watch it with her.
The ritual became theirs to share. Their first night in the new office after the HCPD. The anniversary of his brother’s death, a couple years running, once she’d managed to track him down and drag him home from the bar. The long, messy end of that one case where they’d held her for ransom and then she had her jaw wired shut for a month and Mister Steel learned how to make a dang good smoothie. When things got to be too much they’d put Faithful on — because it was always on — and poke fun at its inaccuracies and ridiculous schemes. An okay enough distraction, for a little while.
Then came a mad mayor, and the THEIA Soul, and a job opportunity millions of miles from home.
On the Carte Blanche she makes a habit of putting on Faithful in the background while she works: she prefers real white noise, opening an office window to let the ever-present hum of her city in, but you take what you can get on a ship floating in the doldrums of dead space. The others know to steer clear of her quarters when they hear its jaunty theme tune, and that’s all right by her.
Until, one day, she tunes in at its scheduled airtime and is met instead with a Saturnian cooking competition. Steadily declining ratings, is how the first thinkpiece she comes across explains it. The end of a streaming era, proclaims another.
(Later that evening, Mister Steel slips into her cabin with a bottle of wine and a memory drive with the director’s cut of Faithful’s third season. Her favorite. Rita thinks about the family she’ll never see again, about the few friends she left behind and the many more friends she never made, about the city that has changed in ways she doesn’t understand in her absence, and concludes that somehow, things might still be alright.)