Autumn Belfontaine looked at the coffeepot, considered whether to draw herself a cup. On one hand, she was tired, and didn’t want to literally fall asleep at her desk. On the other hand, she didn’t want to wire herself up so tight that she couldn’t get to sleep when she finished and got back to her apartment.
Considering that made her realize just how many late nights she’d been pulling these last few weeks. In normal times — at least as much as anything since the Expulsions could be considered “normal” — she would do most of her broadcasting in the morning, with the evening news segments left to the more junior members of the news team.
How long had it been since those first reports had come in, the empty villages in Central Asia, the cruise ships making emergency calls to the Navy for medical assistance, the abandoned cars and campers of the homeless that were mentioned only in local news? Of course it didn’t help one’s sense of time that up here on the Moon, morning, noon and night were just numbers on a clock, tied to a diurnal cycle at one’s national space control center rather than anything actually happening on the lunar surface. The artificiality of it soon induced a sense of unreality, no doubt because the brain didn’t get certain subconscious signals, even if the lights in the corridors did dim during the hours when it would be night in Houston.
Now she was having to monitor the development of a new crisis even as she was trying to keep track of the old one. At least a solar storm wasn’t quite as subject to rumors and misinformation, since it involved objective observations of an astronomical phenomenon. Thanks to the astronomy department, she had direct feeds on the key solar observation satellite data, although half the time she had to call someone in the astronomy department to interpret them.