Autumn Belfontaine had not expected to get a visit from the head of Flight Operations. She knew that Bill Hearne had been a friend of her father’s, but her father had died before she was even born.
And there’s a lot of survivor guilt there. Colonel Hearne was commanding American Eagle during the NASA Massacre.
But here he was, visiting in person rather than just texting or e-mailing his questions. Autumn was getting the impression that it was a personal matter and he didn’t want records of it to be on any official NASA systems.
Which made her wish she could give him some better information. “Unfortunately, we’re not getting a whole lot of information either. A lot of the wire services have gone down, especially the Web-based ones. Even the AP and Reuters have been spotty, and I’m thinking they’ve lost a lot of their correspondents. Quite honestly, I’m getting better information from the websites of the various local radio and TV stations, especially if I’m trying to move beyond the big cities.”
That got her a nod. “Alice has been following the radio stations in the area she grew up, checking their farm reports to try to get an idea of what’s going on up there.”
Autumn recalled that Colonel Hearne’s wife had grown up on a wheat farm near Duluth. The age difference between them had imposed a distance that their both being Minnesotans and graduates of U of Minnesota couldn’t quite bridge. “I’d been following Radio K, at least until they switched to some kind of automated format after the university sent everyone home. Some of the on-air personalities have been updating their blogs, but even that’s gotten hit-and-miss.”
She paused, realized she was hesitating because what she wanted to say was a shift from reporting to editorializing. Even in a private communication like this, the distinction’s too deeply ingrained. “To be very honest, I’m concerned about just how spotty news coverage has become, and what it bodes for the future. Eventually the pandemic will have to burn itself out for the simple reason that it can no longer spread rapidly enough to sustain itself. But what will even be left by that point?”
“That’s what we’ve been thinking about too. So far NASA’s been able to hold itself together, but I’m hearing a lot of rumint from people I know down there that the cities have gotten pretty hard hit, and they’re concerned about the situation with critical infrastructure and manufacturing. I don’t know how familiar you are with industrial processes, but there are a lot of them that you can’t just turn off and back on like a light switch.”
“I covered some blackouts when I was still on Earth, so yes, I have some idea of what kinds of problems can happen when backup systems fail. Down there, they just don’t build in the redundancy we have up here, and it looks like it’s going to be biting a lot of people in the butt.” Autumn paused. “However, we’re speculating here, trying to extrapolate from way too little data. Which is a dangerous thing for news people to do.”
“Understood.” Bill Hearne pulled himself back to his feet. “Given those limitations, I won’t use up any more of your time. Thank you for letting me know what you do have.”
“And I’ll make sure to let you know if I get anything new.”