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Narrative

A Touch of Home

Bill Hearne had just finished dropping off the two terabyte drives full of transportation data at the Astronomy Department office and was heading back to his office in Flight Operations when his phone chimed incoming text. He pulled it out and was astonished to find a text from his brother Frank on the lock screen.

Are you where you can talk?

I’m on the way back to my office. What’s going on?

We’ve been pretty much isolated for the last several weeks. Word from Madison is essential travel only, minimize contact with persons outside your household while making necessary trips. I don’t think I’ve even spoken to the feed truck or milk truck drivers when they do show up, so I’m not getting even that gossip.

Hardly surprising, from everything Bill had been hearing of late. Although that was getting more and more spotty, since his pilots were under similar restrictions. As much as possible, they were supposed to stay in their spacecraft and let the robots pick up any cargo. Since all radio circuits were monitored and recorded, it did put a damper on the sort of scuttlebutt that pilots engaged in while visiting other settlements or Luna Station.

So you’re wondering what I’m hearing about the rest of the three worlds.

I was hoping you’d know something. All I know is what we see on the news, and a lot of it feels pretty canned. Out here we just don’t have the bandwidth to stream Internet radio, or I’d tune in to your station.

Bill could appreciate that. When he was a kid growing up, the old home place was still on a party line. You always had to carefully pick up the phone and check to see if anyone else was on before you started dialing. His sister Kate had gotten in trouble a couple of times, getting home from school and being so eager to start calling all her friends that she didn’t notice one of the neighbors was already talking and just started dialing.

They’d gone to private lines some time after he graduated college, while he was on his first tour of duty. He’d gotten back to the States and came home on leave to discover the change the hard way. He’d needed to call one of the neighbors — he didn’t even remember why — and had automatically held down the flashhook while dialing, the way you had to on a party line, only to discover it wouldn’t go through.

Even after the Internet became a Thing for civilians, it had taken over a decade before the nearest dialup ISP number was a local call. Not that he was going to hook up any Air Force or NASA-issued laptop to an unsecured line, but being able to e-mail his family would’ve made keeping in touch a lot easier during the Energy Wars, at least while he wasn’t flying secret military missions like the one he’d been commanding the day of the NASA Massacre.

I don’t know if being able to stream our broadcasts would give you all that much more information than you’re getting on TV. Bill considered just how much he wanted to tell his brother. With everything in such a fragile state, the wrong information, or even just something out of context, could be worse than nothing. Especially considering that Frank needed to focus on keeping the family farms running, it wouldn’t do to go spilling his own concerns. Right now we’re pretty limited in our sources, or so the news director’s said.

Got it. Take care up there, big brother.

Will do. He put his phone back in his pocket and continued on his way. Right now neither of them could do anything to help the other’s situation, so perhaps it was best that they didn’t have much in the way of details. Enough that they each knew the other was reasonably all right.

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