When Autumn had talked with Lou Corlin, she’d expected that it would take a while to get the data, if it was even possible. IT had a lot of work on its plate already, and this job was more a matter of curiosity. So it was better to spend the time developing some contacts in the Astronomy department so she could follow up on Sprue’s lead without having to out him as the leak.
Being a proctor down at the testing center did give her one advantage — she already had established contacts with plenty of research scientists up here. Even if they weren’t in the Astronomy department, most of them had working relationships with people there. So much of science these days was heavily interdisciplinary, and Shepardsport was still small enough that it was more like a small town.
She’d just finished talking with a physicist who’d immediately started geeking out on her about his specialty, magnetohydrodynamics. From what she could extract, it had definite applicability to the Sun, and to stars in general, which had gotten his name on a number of astronomy papers as a contributing author. However, most of his knowledge was sufficiently technical that she’d been hard-pressed to make heads or tails of it. Sure, she had the general astronomy classes everyone up here had to take, but it sure didn’t give her the background to really grasp it.
So she’d decided to take a break and stretch her legs. As news director, she was salaried and didn’t have to worry about being on the clock like the hourly employees.
As she stepped out of the station’s front door, she saw Ken Redmond and Steffi Roderick walking down the main Engineering corridor, talking in low voices. Assuming it was something private, she turned the other direction, only to have Steffi call out her name.
“I was going to drop this off with Maia, but since you’re here, I thought I’d give it to you in person.”
It was a USB stick. “Um, thanks. I gather this is some data I’ve asked for.”
“The project you’d approached Lou about, related to Internet connectivity and how it has degraded since the beginning of the pandemic. I had some of our programmers write up a script to systematically ping IP addresses all across the system. I did some preliminary statistical analysis on it, and yes, there are definitely patterns in it. From the looks of it, we’ve lost whole regions. Some of them were to be expected, in countries where the tech base was always fragile, but we’ve had some surprising ones, especially in Western Europe. However, the US is holding together better than would be expected, although from some of the response times, we may be looking at a lot of jerry-rigged connections.”
Ken was nodding in agreement. “Not surprising. The Internet was originally a Defense Department project to create a decentralized communications system that would hold together even if numerous major cities were destroyed in a nuclear attack. Just like the old Timex watches, it takes a licking and keeps on ticking.”