After all his efforts, Spruance Del Curtin was still at square one on Drew Reinholt’s request. Whatever was going on down there at Schirrasburg, it was buttoned up so tight that no information was getting out at all.
That or people knew but just didn’t want to talk about it. Or had been forbidden to talk about it.
Certainly Autumn Belfontaine’s remarks to him hinted at that. She was almost certainly able to get pretty much any information she wanted that wasn’t outright classified. However, she also was not the boss at Shepardsport Pirate Radio — he still remembered her remark when they were first setting it up, that freedom of the press belonged to those who owned the press.
On the other hand, she’d just made that offer to take him into the news crew. He was still ambivalent about the idea, mostly because he really didn’t want to give up being a DJ. But he was starting to wonder if he ought to talk to her about the possibility of doing some of the back-office work of the news department while keeping his air shift.
Even as he was considering that, his phone chimed incoming text. He found a new text from Cindy Margrave.
How much do you remember the beginning of the Sharp Wars? The Arizona Memorial Incident and all that stuff.
Some, but I was still in grade school, and they kept a pretty close watch on our media access at the NASA clone creches. So we got a very filtered version, what the grown-ups thought we were ready to handle.
And you didn’t try to get around it?
Yep, Cindy knew his rep for viewing those situations as technical challenges. Trying’s one thing. Having the skills is another. So’s having the necessary access to computers and the Internet.
The three dots icon flickered for an unusually long time. Probably Cindy was needing to think about her reply.
Finally it popped up on his screen: That would be a difficulty. Did the older kids have those restrictions too?
Some of them. I think the guys who were in high school had unrestricted TV and Internet access, but they lived in the other dorm across the courtyard from us, and we didn’t have a lot of contact.
Sprue paused, considering how far he wanted to carry it, then decided to take his chances. I’m sure they’re up here, but most of them had left the creche years before the Expulsions. I mean, they started using artificial uterine environments right after the Lanakhidzist Revolution, when we first got the technology from the Soviet labs. You’re talking about more than thirty years since the creches first opened, so those guys would’ve been tracked down and Expelled individually, just like the ones who were gestated the old-fashioned way and grew up in regular families.
He felt oddly naked, talking so frankly about those matters to a young woman who wasn’t even the child of a clone, just a member of Colonel Dalton’s household.
Cindy’s response came more quickly this time. Thanks anyway. I was hoping maybe you could connect me to someone who was old enough to remember, but isn’t too busy to talk to it. Some stuff came up in Constitution class today, and I wanted to find out more on my own.
Maybe you ought to talk to Autumn about that. She was already working as a reporter for the college radio station during the 2012 election, and barely escaped a riot at the Minnesota statehouse.
Thanks. I’ll see if she has the time and wants to talk about it.