The next morning, Autumn Belfontaine arrived at the newsroom fully expecting to get 404’s and 5xx errors more often than not. Instead, the first thing she found was her AP and Reuters feeds ready and waiting for her.
Well, it looks like whatever was knocking out our Internet downlinks to Earth, IT’s finally gotten it fixed.
She noticed Lou Corlin standing just outside the newsroom door, going through the music library terminal. “Lou, could you come in here and take a look at the Japanese news feeds. Your Japanese is a lot better than mine.”
“Sure thing, Miz Autumn.” Lou abandoned his music search to look over the websites Autumn had pulled up. “Although Tristan’s is a lot better than mine. He’s the one they’ve been having working with native speakers since he was a toddler. They even sent him over to Japan a couple of times before the Expulsions.”His translations pretty much confirmed the impressions she’d gotten from the kanji she recognized. Sometimes she regretted not having studied Japanese in journalism school. But at the time she’d assumed her career would remain Earthbound, and Spanish had seemed such a logical choice, with French a close second if she stayed in the northern tier states, close to Canada.
And if you’d just wanted an easy A you would’ve studied Swedish, since Grandma and Grandpa still spoke it, and you spent enough summers with them to pick it up.
However, it pretty well confirmed what she’d seen on the English-language wire services. The world they’d been cut off from — had it really only been three days? — was not the same world they were being reconnected to. “Lou, you need to get ready to start your air shift. But I’m thinking it’s time to call an all-hands meeting of the news department. Now that we’ve got connectivity again, our stringers can FaceTime in.”
As she started to type the mass e-mail, she paused and reconsidered. “And I think I’d better have Betty Margrave and Sam Carlisle in the loop too. They’ve probably got sources of information besides what comes in on the wire services and what I can glean from local TV news sites.”