Author: leighkimmel

Categories
Narrative

Waiting Is the Hardest Part

The next morning Cindy Margrave was still thinking about all the things that Colonel Hearne had talked about. The difference between high-trust and low-trust societies, and how that affected everything from how governments actually functioned to the availability of basic public utilities. Internal and external locus of control and how it determined how individuals and societies responded to stressors. How the lengthening of supply lines affected the interpretation of the Commerce Clause over the two and a quarter centuries since the ratification of the Constitution.

She’d intended to review her notes after she got back to the apartment, but Kitty was so visibly upset that she needed some comforting. Yes, Aunt Betty had said she’d try to find out what was happening with Amy’s family, but with no guarantees of how much information would be forthcoming or when, Kitty was struggling with a real fear that the promise might prove hollow.

It wouldn’t be so bad if certain people hadn’t used “later” as a way of saying “no” without actually saying it. Especially Mrs. Thomas in second grade, who’d say you’d be able to have something if you just waited patiently, but would always conveniently “forget” when you tried to actually get it.

Did the adults who pulled that stunt really think that children had such short memories that a promise made a month ago would’ve evaporated from their minds by the time it was to be fulfilled? At least none of the teachers up here ever tried to pull crap like that — but then, a lunar settlement pretty well proved everything Colonel Hearne was saying about high-trust societies. To survive, everyone had to trust that everyone else would do their jobs, and do them right.

Guys up here might play hard and pull outrageous pranks, hit on every pretty girl that caught their fancy, but nobody ever screwed over a buddy. Anyone who crossed the line was apt to get a dose of what Uncle Carl called “wall to wall counseling.”

Speaking of getting hit on, the Shep pack was hanging around the entrance of the dining commons this morning. With most of the senior Sheps either on missions or quarantined down at Flight Ops, there wasn’t much to put the brakes on their antics.

At least Cindy didn’t have to run that particular gauntlet, and not just because she was with Kitty, who was far too young for that. Although Uncle Carl was just their uncle because he married Aunt Betty, the fact that Cindy and Kitty lived in his household gave them the same lineage right as their cousins, which made them off-limits.

Cindy found an empty table and settled herself and Kitty in. Maybe they could get at least a little chance to talk.

And then up walked a familiar Shep. “Hi, Cindy. Do you mind if I join you?”

In another place and time, she probably would’ve said, as a matter of fact, I do mind. But Spruance Del Curtin was a colleague from the station, and snubbing him would not stand her in good stead with management. So she put the best face on the matter that she could. “Go ahead.”

At least he had the courtesy to make a little small talk before going into the real reason he wanted to sit at her table. “I hear Colonel Hearne went on a tear last night in Constitution class.”

Cindy had to restrain her urge to laugh. Tales had a tendency to grow in the telling, and it looked like this one was no exception, no matter how much senior staff reminded everyone of the dangers of spreading rumors.

“Actually he just went off the syllabus and talked about a lot of philosophical stuff about governance and society.” Cindy realized she had an opportunity here. If she could convince Sprue to help her study her rather disorganized notes, maybe she could make sense of everything the Hero of the Falcon had said.

Play on Sprue’s Shep ego, make it impossible for him to say no without sounding like he wasn’t up to the task. And she did have the advantage of knowing that nobody would give her the side-eye or act like there was something more going on than there was.

Categories
Narrative

All the Family We Have

Quinn Merton struggled against his urge to push the kids away. It wasn’t their fault that the only way to talk with Major Sutton right now was FaceTime, even when he was in town.

Rick Sutton was the closest thing they had to a parental figure right now. Although he had been raised in a regular family, having been adopted out of the creche as an infant before he could even remember any other life, he took the obligations of astronaut lineage seriously.

But then we Armstrongs are always straight arrows. That’s why a lot of the early astronauts thought our ur-brother was a cold fish.

Rick Sutton looked tired tonight, but he was still making time for his younger clone-brothers. On the other hand, his appearance might be more the result of an emotional drain than a physical one. After all, he had family back on Earth, and he had to be concerned about their situation.

Quinn tried to imagine what it would be like, to know some of your nearest and dearest were in harm’s way and there was absolutely nothing you could do about it. A Cooper probably would have prayed for their well-being, but Armstrongs tended toward deism. Sometimes Quinn wondered if a more personal conceptualization of the supernatural would provide comfort in times like these.

Whatever his elder brother’s reason for looking tired, the man did need his rest. Which meant Quinn needed to find a graceful way to draw the conversation to a close without sounding as if he were scolding any of his younger brothers for selfishness.

Although I suppose I could remind them that they have a bedtime they need to keep. Tomorrow’s going to come earlier than any of us want.

That was when one of the apartment doors opened. Quinn could hear a voice, but not make out any words. However, from the rhythm of speech, it sounded like the person was talking on the phone with someone.

And they were coming this way. If whoever was on the phone was talking about something sensitive and didn’t want a roommate or other family members to hear, they might come out here in search of privacy. The perfect excuse to nudge his clone-brothers into winding up their conversation and getting back to their own quarters to turn in for the night.

Everything seemed so simple — not a one of them put up more than ritual objections before telling Major Sutton good-bye and heading off to bed. Which was probably just as well, Quinn realized as he looked at the battery indicator on his tablet. He was going to need to get that thing plugged back in ASAP.

And then Alice Murchison came around the corner, obviously winding up her conversation. “As a matter of fact, he’s right here. I’ll let him know.”

Quinn’s stomach tightened at the realization that he was obviously the object of that remark. He closed his tablet’s case and rose to face her. “Are you looking for me, ma’am?”

“As a matter of fact, I was. I just got a call from Jen Redmond over at Food and Nutrition. She was wondering if you’d be willing to be her teaching assistant for a basic health and nutrition class next quarter.”

Quinn considered the proposition. On one hand, it would be a bit of a come-down after having spent the current quarter teaching his own class, even if it was just fourth-grade math. On the other hand, saying no to a senior division chief was not a good way to win favor with the upper-level administration.”

He decided to hedge his bets. “I suppose I could pick it up, if Training has someone else lined up to take over the course I’m teaching right now. The kids are really picking things up fast, and I’d rather not leave them in the lurch.”

“Perfectly understandable. I’ll have Jen talk to Deena tomorrow about what it’d take to make the switch. From the sound of things, she’s planning it as a big class, with the teaching assistants handling weekly break-out sessions for small group discussions, sort of like a lecture and discussion class in Earthside universities. Thanks.”

Quinn managed to get some coherent words of gratitude out of his mouth, and then Alice was enering the module airlock, off to the corridor that connected the residential modules of Dunwich Sector to the other sectors. Alone, he realized just how tense he’d become — and that he’d been anticipating some kind of bad news. A reprimand for some kind of failing? An extra shift he’d need to take because someone else couldn’t do it?

Not surprising, given how much bad news was coming up from Earth now that IT had their Internet connection fixed. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, some fresh horror would flash across the video screens.

Categories
Narrative

Troubling News

Tired from an afternoon of supervising her division’s efforts to help Gagarinsk with their IT problems, Steffi Roderick retreated to her office for a moment’s respite. Might as well check her e-mail while she was waiting for her coffee maker to heat up.

She usually didn’t check personal e-mail accounts during her duty hours, but as rough as things had been of late, she figured she could make an exception. Just take a quick peek, see if there was anything that needed her immediate attention.

At first glance it looked like the usual mishmash of mailing lists and commercial pitches that weren’t quite spammy enough to fall into her spam trap. And then she saw her dad’s name on one e-mail.

Dad usually e-mails me on the weekend. Is something wrong?

Deciding that this departure from routine constituted something significant enough to be considered an emergency, she clicked on it. A guilty part of her mind was halfway hoping that the opening pleasantries meant that whatever was behind the unexpected e-mail was a happy surprise.

Then she hit the next paragraph. Sure, her father tried to soften the blow, but she could recognize minimizing when she saw it. No matter how gently you tried to put it, discovering that a family member had been taken to the hospital was not good news in a time like this.

Even if her mother’s chest pains were just a mild heart attack as her father was saying, a hospital was not a good place to be right now. And to have to go there alone, now that family wasn’t allowed to visit… it wouldn’t be an easy situation for her mother to face, alone among strangers, not certain what was wrong with her or how serious.

And then Steffi realized she had a more immediate problem. How much did she tell her family up here? Reggie had a full plate already with everything going on, and she hated to add one more thing, especially since it wasn’t his parents. And while the kids weren’t total innocents to loss — the Moon was an unforgiving place, and more than a few of those names on the Wall of Honor were people they knew personally — they’d been relatively lucky in terms of extended family.

In any case, it was news best delivered in person, and privately. And it might be best to arrange some real-time conversation with her dad first, to make sure she had the most up-to-date information. Not necessarily FaceTime — she couldn’t remember whether his phone even had the capacity for videoconferencing — but at least a voice conversation.

Categories
Narrative

Tomorrow Is Another Day

When you start having trouble reading the numbers, it’s time to knock off for the night. Spruance Del Curtin fought the urge to rub his eyes, which had grown gritty from spending the entire evening poring over the latest data sets from Dr. Doorne.

So what if he’d won the accolades of his peers by providing a key insight to what was wrong with Shepardsport’s Internet connection. It sure wasn’t going to get him any slack cut on this project. Every data set still had to be examined and sanitized the same way, and it seemed like there were more of them every day.

Not to mention that the ever-increasing burden was no excuse for falling behind on his other obligations. He still needed to go over tomorrow’s lesson plan for his teaching responsibility.

The sound of the module airlock cycling pulled his attention away from his laptop. Four guys walked into the module lounge, talking among themselves a little louder than normal.

Sprue looked up, noticed that they were younger guys. Back in Houston they’d probably still be in middle school, although up here kids their age were already beginning to take significant responsibility.

Just as Sprue was about to make a sharply worded remark about sounding like they were waiting for a bus, one of the guys came over to him. “I hear Colonel Hearne really went on a tear in Constitution class this evening.”

Sprue narrowed his eyes and studied the kid, trying to place the face. Do you even live in this module, or are you tagging along with your buddies. “I don’t know a thing about that. I did Constitution class last year. You must be thinking of Eli Mallory. He lives over in Module 28.”

The other guys started ribbing their buddy for making such an obvious mistake. Then they were heading back through the airlock, and the lounge was quiet again.

No, he was not going to text Eli and ask what was going on. Sprue had his status as the DJ to protect, and having to ask for information was not going to further that. On the other hand, Cindy Margrave was also in that class — she’d mentioned it more than once at the station.

But one look at the clock in the menu bar of his laptop made it plain it was way too late to be texting Cindy. There’d be plenty of time tomorrow. Even if he couldn’t catch her at breakfast, he could drop by the station offices on his way to his teaching responsibility, since it was in Engineering rather than the usual classroom areas over in Miskatonic Sector.

Sprue closed his laptop, then headed back to his apartment, whistling “Lake Shore Drive.”

Categories
Narrative

A Matter of Trust

Cindy Margrave hadn’t wanted to leave her sister to go home alone, but for reasons known only to the Department of Training, she’d been stuck with Constitution class right after supper. And given that Constitution class was mandatory for getting one’s high school diploma, and it was invariably taught by one of the senior pilots, there could be no question of skipping it, or even being tardy.

Captain Waite taught it a lot of the time, but this term Colonel Hearne had drawn that teaching responsibility. However, just because he wasn’t family didn’t mean he wouldn’t notice her absence. He’d shown the class more than once that age had by no means dulled his perceptions — or his response times. Cindy still remembered the time he’d caught Eli Mallory playing a game in class by hiding his phone behind his laptop.

As the most senior pilot-astronaut in Shepardsport — he was already a veteran astronaut who’d commanded important missions when Reginald Waite was still at Annapolis — he possessed an unofficial authority in the pilot community such that no one would try to gainsay him. Even Captain Waite deferred to him.

The room was about half full by the time Cindy arrived. She took a seat and pulled out her laptop to review her notes from last session. Behind her, Eli was trying to hit on one of the other girls in the class. From the sound of it, he wasn’t getting much traction.

Colonel Hearne arrived exactly at the top of the hour, as precise as a DJ signing on and beginning an air shift. The moment he walked through the door, the buzz of conversation ceased and everyone turned their attention to him.

“Good evening, everyone. Tonight we’re going to do things a little differently. Up until now, we’ve been discussing the Constitution article by article, section by section. However, it’s come to my attention that we can end up losing sight of the whole amidst the minutia. Not seeing the forest for the trees, as the old saying goes.”

Cindy could feel the unease like a palpable thing around her. Why would he suddenly decide to depart from the normal course progression? Although Constitution class didn’t have a mandatory course structure like certain critical safety courses — she remembered when Uncle Carl had to re-up his oxygen delivery certification for EVA, and it had a syllabus that was mandated by the Federal government — the teacher still needed to cover the necessary material to ensure everyone could pass the test, and that was mandated, albeit by the state of Texas, since for legal purposes all off-Earth US facilities were treated as if they were a part of Johnson Space Center in Houston.

But there was no time to wonder, because Colonel Hearne was already cuing up a video on the big monitor at the front of the classroom. It looked like a lot of news footage — Cindy had already seen some of it just walking past the newsroom during her work shift this morning, especially the one of the people swarming a semi and literally tearing the trailer apart to get the pallets of food within, climbing over each other to grab a package of crackers. But there were also a lot of clips of people waiting calmly in lines that stretched as far as the eye could see, or helping one another rebuild a structure damaged in a storm. Most were non-descript enough settings that it was impossible to tell where or when they were happening in the absence of well-known landmarks, although she did see kanji and kata on some signs that placed one clip in Japan, and the Hangul on another sign placed that clip in Korea.

And then it was over, and Colonel Hearne was looking directly at them. “It’s said that people show their true faces when they’re under pressure. You’ve just seen how different cultures react to severe stress, what is often termed a breaking strain. Today we are going to talk about why this is, and how it relates to why the system of government set out in the US Constitution has worked so well for the American people, but does not necessarily transfer to other countries.”

“First, I want to introduce you to the concept of social trust.”

Where is he going with this one? Cindy was listening so closely that she no longer had any time to worry about her sister, or her sister’s friend down on Earth who hadn’t re-established connection after the Outage had been resolved.

Categories
Narrative

And Bitter Tears

It had been a long, difficult day, and Betty Margrave really needed a rest. Here they’d just finally managed to get their own Internet connectivity problems straightened out, and now Reggie was helping Vitali Grigorenko up at Gagarinsk with their Internet outage.

It probably didn’t help that her husband wasn’t able to be with her, even when he was back in town between missions. Betty understood the necessity of quarantining the pilot-astronauts, since no matter how careful they were, they did have interactions with people from the other settlements, and with people from Earth.

You’ve gotten through his deployments when he was still on active duty with the Marine Corps. Months on end with him halfway around the world, nothing but e-mails and weeks-old letters. There’s really no reason it should be bothering you so much.

And then she opened the door to their apartment and heard sobs. She looked around, wondering whether one of the kids had gotten hurt but didn’t think it was bad enough to bother Medlab. And then she saw Kitty sitting hunched over a laptop, tears streaming down her eyes.

Good god, girl, if you’re bawling because some boy dumped you, get over it. It’s just a breakup.

She caught herself before she could actually say the words. No, better not assume, even if she was tired and not really in the mood to have to deal with the sheer intensity of teen and tween emotions. Kitty had lost enough already — her parents, and now two homes and sets of friends — and while she’d been trying to put a good face on things, it was a very fragile mask.

Betty sat down beside her niece. “What’s wrong, Kitty.”

“I can’t get hold of Amy.” There was barely-controlled panic in that voice, for all that Kitty tried to hold it level and sound mature.

Betty tried to place the name. Ah, yes, one of Kitty’s friends back in Houston. They still communicated occasionally, although sometimes Betty wondered if the girl was going behind her parents’ backs to keep in contact with a friend who’d be regarded as tainted by being in a household headed by a clone of Alan Shepard.

A few careful questions brought forth the story of Amy’s frightened texts right before the malware had taken out Shepardsport’s Internet connection, how Kitty and Cindy had enlisted Brenda Redmond to guide them through giving Amy advice on dealing with her parents’ sudden illness. For a girl who’d barely be in middle school back on Earth, Kitty had handled it very well, and had borne up patiently while communications with Earth were cut off. But now that texts were clearly being delivered to Amy’s phone once again, but not being read, the girl was on the verge of panic.

Small wonder, considering how much could be going wrong. Even if she had been taken in by a friend’s parents, it’s possible that she wasn’t able to stay. Or that she’s been able to stay healthy herself.

No, there was no use speculating. Long ago she’d learned the danger of letting one’s mind onto the hamster wheel of worry — she wouldn’t have stayed sane as a military wife if she hadn’t.

Right now the best thing she could do was comfort Kitty, reassure her that she’d done quite well in her efforts to help her friend. And then, when Kitty was calm enough to hear that she might need to wait, discuss what resources might be available to find out what was going on.

Categories
Narrative

A Meeting of Minds

Reggie Waite was just finishing his first cup of coffee when the call came through. When he looked at the number, he thought he was looking at a system glitch, until he realized that the incoming call didn’t use the North American Numbering Plan.

It started with 8, which meant a Russian phone number. Up here the VoIP systems were supposed to filter out international numbers, thanks to the enormous number of scams that the Russian mafiya was running with autodialers. However, by agreement between NASA and the other spacefaring nations’ space agencies, numbers assigned to people in their lunar settlements and their space centers were supposed to be passed through.

Hoping he wasn’t making a mistake, he hit the accept button and answered. Any cosmonaut who was calling an American would know English, so there was no point fumbling with his admittedly rusty Russian.

“Good morning, Captain Waite.” There was something familiar about the timbre of the voice on the other end. “I apologize for calling you from an unfamiliar telephone, but we are experiencing difficulties with our office network and I was forced to resort to a personal device. This is Vitali Grigorenko, at Gagarinsk.”

Astonishment blew away any lingering brain fog. No wonder the man’s voice sounded familiar. Not surprising, given that Vitali Grigorenko was in fact a Grissom clone, kidnapped as a newborn by KGB agents in retaliation for the Kolya-Yozhik Incident and raised by parents who were involved in the old Soviet space program.

“Good to hear from you, Vitya. We’ve been having trouble with our Internet connection down here, but I hadn’t realized the problem was going around. It’s not like you guys are running a pirate radio station critical of your government.”

“No, we are not.” Was that a hint of regret in Grigorenko’s voice? A sense that he wasn’t pushing hard enough, never mind that he’d come up here by his own request, wanting to share his clone-brothers’ exile when he had been preparing for a comfortable retirement? “But we have Purificationists.”

Reggie recognized the term. They were a splinter sect of the Russian Orthodox Church that believed clones were soulless abominations, quite possibly animated by demons. Two Patriarchs had condemned their position as heretical, saying that it was inconceivable that God should refuse to provide a child with a soul simply on the basis of the child’s irregular conception. The current one had excommunicated the most prominent Purificationists, but instead of recanting, they had taken the attitude of screw you and the horse you rode in on.

Like his own ur-brother, Reggie had been raised Christian Scientist. Although the Church of Christ, Scientist did not have an episcopal hierarchy in the same sense as the Eastern Orthodox Churches, the Mother Church in Boston did have the authority to excommunicate members and practitioners whose teachings were not in line with doctrine. And there had been those who had rejected that corrective and gone their own way.

“And you’ve become just a little too prominent for their liking.”

Now that got a definite affirmative from his opposite number in Gagarinsk.

Reggie considered his response. “In ordinary times I’d send some of our IT people up there to help you straighten things out.”

“But these are not ordinary times. No doubt you have heard already about Indian astronauts having been exposed to diablovirus.”

“That I have.” This time yesterday the news would’ve caught him by surprise, for the simple reason that he had still been catching up with the enormous amount of e-mail that had been stuck on various servers all over the Earth-Moon system. By last night he’d read over a dozen accounts of the situation, including three separate official NASA advisories. “Do you think your IT people would be able to communicate with ours via videoconference well enough to be of any use.”

“I would have to ask, but I do not know why we should not try.”

Categories
Narrative

Deep Thoughts

This early in the morning, the tunnels to Shepardsport’s solar storm shelters were quiet. Later in the day, cleaning robots would come through to sweep and generally make sure the tunnels were always ready to be used at a moment’s notice. But right now they were a perfect place for Justin Forsythe to run.

And a perfect place to relax his barriers and open his mind to his psi talent. Down here, there wasn’t the continual din of other minds to make it overwhelming, even with his Institute training.

Normally the geneset of Ed White wasn’t used for genetic experiments. However, a clerical error — a simple reversal of two digits in a catalog number that tracked embryos — he had received a gene graft intended to give him precognition.

Or at least that was the plan. The people at Appleton might understand genetics, but they didn’t understand quantum mechanics. True classical precognition — the ability to see what would happen in the future — would require superdeterminism. And the Chang-Mendolssen experiments had pretty well discredited superdeterminism as a plausible subset of quantum theory.

Instead, Juss got a weird sort of precognition in which he saw a multitude of possible futures fanning out before him. As events foreclosed various possible futures, they fell away to become alternate worlds.

What worried him right now was just how dark those futures were becoming. Fewer and fewer of them held much in the way of hope.

Everything was going to depend on whether the diablovirus could be kept away from the Moon. The Martian settlements were safe, thanks to the long travel times between Mars and the Earth-Moon system — but that distance also meant they could offer little help in the subsequent rebuilding. Only the lunar settlements were just isolated enough that their populations could be protected from infection, but could also offer material aid in any meaningful quantity.

But even a little slip-up would be enough to introduce the virus. They’d already had one close call, and as a result the Japanese lunar ferry Sakura was unavailable for the three weeks’ quarantine it would require to ensure not only that none of the Indian astronauts came down with the diablovirus, but also that none of the crew had picked it up from anyone with such a light case that it was fairly indetectable.

No, it was just too painful to observe. Juss simply didn’t have the authority to act upon these visions in any meaningful way. He was just a troubleshooter, not a decision-maker.

Better to barrier himself against his precognition and concentrate on the things he could do to put Shepardsport in a better position once he went up to Engineering and reported for today’s shift.

Categories
Document

Recollections

We came to call it the Outage. Three days in which all of Shepardsport was effectively cut off from the outside universe as a result of malware interfering with our Internet connection. We weren’t totally cut off — we could get dribbles, the occasional text message or e-mail that slipped through, and even if the pilots flying in from other settlements weren’t allowed to come up to the main part of the settlement, they did talk with enough people in Flight Operations that we heard some gossip, enough to know that something was happening, and it was big.

But nothing that could’ve prepared us for what we discovered once IT dragged that piece of malware out of their servers and we were suddenly reconnected with the full flow of the Internet. Not just the sudden and explosive increase in the numbers of cases of what had been dubbed the diablovirus for both its severity and the two protein structures that resembled a devil’s horns. Until I got the AP and Reuters feeds back, I would never have expected food riots in modern cities. But a quick visit to the relevant news outlets’ websites showed images of people swarming trucks, literally tearing the trailers apart and looting the food inside. Pictures of police and even military forces firing upon the rioters, trying to break up the crowds of desperate people by any means possible.

It wasn’t a crop failure, or a sudden mutation of the diablovirus to infect livestock. Instead it was a failure in the distribution system. The food existed — but it was stuck in the field and the barns, unable to get to the people who needed it. Thanks to the Just In Time system, there was almost no food stored in grocery stores’ warehouses. Once workers at various processing plants began to fall ill, the wheels started coming off on the supply chain, resulting in vegetables literally rotting in the fields, animals having to be euthanized and burned or buried because the farmers had no fodder for them.

But even more disturbing were the accounts of riots and destruction against anyone and everyone who could be made a scapegoat. Some were the Usual Targets: Jews in much of the West, Chinese in Indonesia. But others came as a surprise: the riot in New York City that poured onto Wall Street and tried to storm the Stock Exchange, apparently blaming international commerce for the rapid spread of the disease. Or the attack on a small town in California’s Marin County, the home of a parapsychological research institution originally founded by astronaut Ed Mitchell. Apparently someone had taken it into their head that psychics’ “bad vibrations” were causing the disease, or that their work was Satanic, or half a dozen different notions that were offered to police interrogators by the rioters after their arrest.

It was as if we’d gone to sleep in a troubled but sane world, then woke up to find the entire world had gone mad. We knew the diablovirus could have digestive and respiratory symptoms, but could it also have purely neurological symptoms?

—- Autumn Belfontaine, “Shepardsport Pirate Radio’s Coverage of the Diablovirus Outbreak” from The Lunar Resistance: An Oral History. Carpenter Point, Tycho Crater: Kennedy University Press, 2059.

Categories
Narrative

Communications Restored

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.”