Looking back, it seems obvious that something very bad was going on. Map the incidents and it looks like the footprints of an invisible giant making his way across the face of the Earth.
But at the time, most of us were far more concerned with our ongoing conflict with the Flannigan Administration over the policies that had enabled the Expulsions and the horrors they had created. We still had not been able to secure any form of accountability from NASA for the Kitty Hawk Massacre, and the cyber-attack on Slayton Field was still fresh in everybody’s minds.
And it didn’t help that someone at pretty high levels must’ve been keeping a lot of significant information from reaching the national news. Sure, the local news stations were covering the sudden outbreaks of sickness at various institutions, the illnesses sweeping through homeless encampments and the over-crowded housing of the working poor. It wasn’t like the government was censoring it — more like they were just keeping people from putting the pieces of the puzzle together and being able to see the elephant in the middle of the living room.
Once the Shepardsport Pirate Radio newsroom realized how bad things were getting, it was rather embarrassing. We’d prided ourselves on getting the news out when the Flannigan Administration wanted to soft-pedal it or outright descend a cone of silence over it — and we’d completely fumbled the ball. Worse, it was our own decision to exercise caution and not break the news until we were confident of what we were seeing — and we’d made it because we wanted to make sure we weren’t repeating groundless rumors and diminishing the reputation we depended upon.
By that point, everyone both here and on Earth were scrambling to catch up.
Autumn Belfontaine, “Shepardsport Pirate Radio’s Coverage of the Diablovirus Outbreak.” from The Lunar Resistance; An Oral History. Kennedy University Press: Carpenter Point, Tycho Crater, 2059