The next morning, Autumn Belfontaine arrived at the newsroom fully expecting to get 404’s and 5xx errors more often than not. Instead, the first thing she found was her AP and Reuters feeds ready and waiting for her.
Well, it looks like whatever was knocking out our Internet downlinks to Earth, IT’s finally gotten it fixed.
She noticed Lou Corlin standing just outside the newsroom door, going through the music library terminal. “Lou, could you come in here and take a look at the Japanese news feeds. Your Japanese is a lot better than mine.”
“Sure thing, Miz Autumn.” Lou abandoned his music search to look over the websites Autumn had pulled up. “Although Tristan’s is a lot better than mine. He’s the one they’ve been having working with native speakers since he was a toddler. They even sent him over to Japan a couple of times before the Expulsions.”His translations pretty much confirmed the impressions she’d gotten from the kanji she recognized. Sometimes she regretted not having studied Japanese in journalism school. But at the time she’d assumed her career would remain Earthbound, and Spanish had seemed such a logical choice, with French a close second if she stayed in the northern tier states, close to Canada.
And if you’d just wanted an easy A you would’ve studied Swedish, since Grandma and Grandpa still spoke it, and you spent enough summers with them to pick it up.
However, it pretty well confirmed what she’d seen on the English-language wire services. The world they’d been cut off from — had it really only been three days? — was not the same world they were being reconnected to. “Lou, you need to get ready to start your air shift. But I’m thinking it’s time to call an all-hands meeting of the news department. Now that we’ve got connectivity again, our stringers can FaceTime in.”
As she started to type the mass e-mail, she paused and reconsidered. “And I think I’d better have Betty Margrave and Sam Carlisle in the loop too. They’ve probably got sources of information besides what comes in on the wire services and what I can glean from local TV news sites.”
3 replies on “Communications Restored”
It only took a single day to fix the problem? I was expecting several days of arcane diagnostic processes—perhaps going on in the background while other parts of the narrative moved ahead. Having this quick a fix has some flavor of “once out of the pit . . .”
I know there are issues with pacing, and there are some places where storylines have gotten lost and I’ll eventually need to retrieve them. But my big focus has been on keeping moving and not letting the story bog down and founder. Let it be imperfect, if that’s what’s necessary to keep everything from grinding to a halt as the perfect becomes the enemy of the good.
It’s probably going to end up being a non-canonical story, or at least one exiled to an alternate version of the timeline. But when one considers that in March I was pretty much just spinning my wheels, accomplishing nothing, an imperfect story with pacing issues is better than nothing. And I could always go back and fiddle with the dates on some of the segments, and add additional segments to fill in some of the gaps where I got tired of developing a storyline and jumped ahead to the next cool part.
I wasn’t expecting you to make that major a revision now! But I wanted to note it as something for a second version, if there is one. It’s the first point where my immersion in the story has been broken.