Reggie Waite was coming to dread these meetings with Dr. Thuc. Although she continued to report that the lunar community had been able to keep the diablovirus at bay, the news from Earth just kept getting worse and worse.
After delivering the latest litany of bad news, Dr. Thuc added, “However, we must be careful to remember the rule about absence of evidence. We cannot assume that regions that are not reporting information are necessarily charnel houses. While it’s true that some of the earliest warning signs came in the form of reports from travelers of entire villages found desolate, even then it didn’t mean every inhabitant had died. There is some evidence of survivors deciding their numbers were simply too small to sustain a village, and leaving in search of a community that could support them. In fact, there is some speculation that such migration played a significant role in the early spread of the diablovirus.”
“And given how poor record-keeping was in those parts of Earth even before the current crisis, we’ll probably never know.” Reggie considered the situation, trying to push back the old memories from the Energy Wars. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of those ass-end-of-nowhere places were still functioning at some minimal level, but nobody knows about it because the communications net is so thin they hardly notice when it goes down. There’s even some places in the US that are like that, out in Alaska, up in the Rockies, heck, even up in the mountainous parts of New England.”
“That’s completely possible. On the other hand, it appears that a surprising number of areas are keeping things operating by various ad hoc solutions as things break down and repair parts aren’t available.” Dr. Thuc flipped through a number of files in her tablet. “I have several reports of hospitals jerry-rigging repairs to generators and other vital equipment when normal spares couldn’t be found.”
“That’s good to know. However, I’m wondering what’s happening outside the medical field. How many factories are still in operation, and of the ones that weren’t, how many were properly shut down before they were abandoned? Ken Redmond would know this sort of stuff better than I do — he’s the mechanical engineer — but I remember from some of my coursework at Annapolis that there are a lot of processes that you can’t just terminate with the flip of a switch. A lot of chemical plants could be in a bad way if the operators weren’t able to execute an orderly shutdown before they lost power for good, or didn’t have enough personnel to continue operations.”
“That’s really out of my area of expertise. But I certainly can appreciate your concerns. The issue has certainly gone through my mind. However, given that there’s not a lot we can do about that situation right now, my primary focus has been on determining what we’re going to be looking at in terms of rebuilding when all of this is over.”
“And that’s all any one of us can do at the moment. Other than getting information out via Shepardsport Pirate Radio, we pretty much have to concentrate on keeping contagion out and keeping our own systems running.”