By the time Cindy got back home, her mind was itching with curiosity about those early days of the Flannigan Administration. Days she sort of remembered, glimpses of things on TV without any context, hurriedly turned off or changed to another channel if an adult noticed she was looking in that direction. Vague answers about bad people doing bad things and how she should not worry because she was safe here and Adult Authority would protect her.
Reflecting on those days with the experience of a decade and a half, she wondered how much she was confusing memories of national events with memories of her parents’ accident. She and her sister had been safely at home with a sitter that night, since their parents had been going to an event for grown-ups, so all her memories were of strange people suddenly appearing at the door, of a neighbor’s adult daughter coming over to stay with them for a couple of days until Uncle Carl and Aunt Betty could pick them up and make the necessary arrangements. A vague memory of what she now knew to be a courtroom, in which they were granted legal guardianship, but which at the time had been frightening in its echoing vastness.
One thing was certain — she had no meaningful memories of the events themselves. And she was pretty sure that what she’d been told in school back on Earth had been so heavily slanted that it was best discounted altogether.
And since we got up here, everything’s been either practical stuff like safety and first aid or science and technology, until the time came up to take our mandatory Constitution class.
She’d no more than stepped into the apartment when one of her cousins gave her a sharp shhhh and whispered,”Mom’s got a headache. Something happened at work, I don’t know what, but she came back looking awful and went straight to bed.”
Cindy nodded her acknowledgement, scarcely daring to breathe. A sudden headache… her guts clenched with dread. Hadn’t that been one of the symptoms of the diablovirus?
Except it was also a symptom of a dozen other things, some minor and others very dangerous. Dwell too long on the worst possibilities and you’d be running up to Medlab certain that you were in the throes of a cerebral aneurysm or a brain tumor when you’d just gotten a kink in your neck.
In the meantime, maybe she’d better start thinking about who else she could go to with her questions. People who were definitely old enough to have clear memories of that period and understand what they saw, but who wouldn’t consider it an imposition to take some time to talk with her about those events. While she was getting old enough that adults were starting to take her seriously, it was still tricky to know exactly where the boundaries were when it came to conversations that didn’t immediately relate to work or class.