Tag: Autumn Belfontaine

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Narrative

Give Me Shelter

Autumn Belfontaine looked at the text message from Brenda Redmond again. I have a problem. Can we talk?

Although Autumn had plenty of work already on her plate, she’d texted back that Brenda should come to the newsroom and they’d find a private place to talk. Brenda wasn’t the sort of person to panic over trifles, or to need her hand held. If she needed to talk, it was something serious.

The newsroom door opened just a hair, and Brenda peeked in. “Are you where you can talk now?”

“As much as I ever will be.” Autumn waved to the multiple monitors surrounding her desk, some showing what few news websites she could manage to reach, but most with reports in various stages of completion, from rough drafts turned in by her junior reporters to polished copy she was ready to read aloud to the mic. “Pull up a chair and sit down.”

“Thanks.” Although Brenda was maintaining her professional voice, she managed to create the impression of breathless anxiety. “Just this morning I got a message from an old friend.”

That ought to be happy news, but I can tell it’s not. However, Autumn didn’t interrupt Brenda, just listened as she told about the e-mail she’d received this morning. Brenda was doing her best to provide a reasonably orderly report, but it sounded like her source material was rather confused.

Perhaps it would be best to take a look at this e-mail herself. “Could you show it to me?”

“OK.” Brenda pulled out her phone, handed it across with a little hesitation that matched the one in her voice.

You’re asking her to show you a private communication. Of course she’s going to be hesitant, wondering if she’s betraying a trust in the process of trying to help.

Autumn read it once quickly to get the gist, then went back and read paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, struggling to sort out just what was happening to the young woman down on Earth. One thing was certain — she had been in a great deal of emotional distress when she’d written it.

“I can certainly understand why you’d be concerned about her situation, especially considering the constraints you’d be facing in any effort to help her.”

“I know.” A hint of bitterness colored Brenda’s voice, for all she tried to hold it professionally neutral, to do herself credit as one of the station’s on-air personalities. “Here I am at the far end of a very skinny data pipe, and I’m not even sure what exactly she told her parents that made them so mad. And I have this awful feeling that if I were to try to contact her parents and intervene, I’d only succeed in making things even worse.”

“That’s always a risk.” Autumn considered what to say. She was a journalist, not a counselor or social worker. “Especially if they consider it a private family matter, they’ll view you as butting in where you have no business, and regard her as a blabbermouth who exposed these things to a stranger.”

“That’s what I’m worried about.” Brenda spoke those words slowly, as if dreading what they might signify. “And if she’s in actual danger, there’s nothing I can do up here. You know as well as I do that the cops aren’t going to intervene on her behalf under her own parents’ roof. If anything, they’re likely to tell her that she’s the problem and needs to be more pleasant and deferential.”

Autumn wished she knew what church Brenda belonged to. She was pretty sure that Ken Redmond had been raised in the Church of Christ like his ur-brother Gus Grissom, but she had no idea what tradition Jen had been brought up in, or whether either of them had brought Brenda up on a faith tradition.

“Brenda, I think it’s probably just as well you came to me rather than trying to do anything on your own. I’m going to try to make connections with some people who might be able to actually make a difference in her situation, rather than ‘help’ by just telling her to chin up and put a smile on her face. Let her know we’re working on things, but don’t tell her anything that might build hopes we can’t follow through on.”

“Got it.” Brenda paused, moistened her lips. “Of course there’s no telling how long it may take for an e-mail to get to her. From the headers I saw, it looks like this one bounced around servers for three or four days before it got up here.”

“At least it got through. That’s the strength and the weakness of store-and-forward systems. In the meantime, let’s hope for the best and concentrate on what we can do up here, not worrying about what we can’t.”

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Narrative

Dancing in the Dark

All day Autumn Belfontaine had been going from one to another website, trying to find someplace that would give her news from Earth. Yet again and again she got one or another error message — mostly 404 Not Found, but a lot of 500-series errors that related to gateways along the route to the servers where the webpages were stored.

She tried not to listen too closely to the sales director complaining about how he’d been just about to close on a deal with a client who would provide the station with a hefty amount of advertising money, right when the teleconference link went flooey. Yes, it was another data point that might help IT run down whatever was messing up their Internet connectivity, but beyond that it wasn’t really any of her business.

On the other hand, it was something to distract her from the rapidly approaching evening drive-time newscast. Although nobody was sure just how many people tuned in to Shepardsport Pirate Radio via their cars’ mobile Internet or satellite radio, it was still an important part of their audience, and right now the station wouldn’t have it. Worse, she had almost nothing to base her evening newscast on except local events and a few bits that had dribbled through from other lunar settlements.

Autumn looked up at the newsroom clock. Fifteen minutes and she needed to be on the air, delivering the day’s news. What used to be called “world news,” although now it would be covering three worlds, if she could just connect with anything from Earth or Mars. Then the national news, and finally local news.

But right now local was all she had, other than a few incidents in Grissom City and some of the smaller settlements of the Tranquility East region. And even the local news was more on the order of public service announcements and human interest than actual news. People around here were by and large pretty orderly.

On the other hand, there was the Internet outage — but right now she was uncertain how much she should report on it, so long as its cause remained uncertain. And there were valid reasons not to broadcast just how badly they had been affected, especially while they also had no idea who might be behind whatever malware might be behind it.

She picked up her phone. Should she try to contact someone down at IT, see where they were, what level of embargo she should observe on information about the situation?

However, they were probably still busy, if not as overwhelmingly so as when this mess first started. She still remembered overhearing one of the IT people talking about the help desk switchboard being nearly overwhelmed with incoming calls at the beginning.

Better to text her contact at IT. SMS used less bandwidth, and it was asynchronous, so it wouldn’t interrupt someone who was busy with something else.

And then, with the text on its way, it was time to put together her news report for the evening. One with the report on the Internet outage, assuming it was OK to talk about it, and a second with some suitable filler to occupy the necessary airtime. And then it was off to the DJ booth to broadcast.

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Narrative

An Alarming Silence

Cindy had been up later than she’d intended the previous night, and now she could tell she was paying for it. Twice already she’d fallen asleep sitting up while trying to eat breakfast. At least Uncle Carl was still off on a mission and Aunt Betty was spending more time at her office than anywhere else, so Cindy didn’t have to deal with their disapproving looks. On the other hand, her cousins were most definitely noticing.

But what was I supposed to do? Especially since it was pretty clear Amy needed to talk, and I didn’t want to just leave Kitty to deal with it by herself.

Which raised another troubling issue — as of yet, Kitty hadn’t been able to contact Amy. She’d promised to text as soon as she got up for school, but there hadn’t been so much as a ping.

You weren’t supposed to be using your phone in the dining commons, since this was supposed to be a place for in-person socializing. But Cindy knew her younger sister had her phone on her lap, positioned just right to be able to see it, and was surreptitiously sending texts every so often.

At least her mandatory exercise hour didn’t start for another half hour, so she could take her time eating. Cindy was already running late for her shift at the receptionist’s desk at Shepardsport Pirate Radio. At least Autumn Belfontaine had given her a pass to run late if she needed to.

On the other hand, there was always the risk the boss would come in and find her absent. Especially the big boss, since Shepardsport Pirate Radio was technically considered part of Engineering, and Ken Redmond was notoriously unsympathetic about personal problems.

Which meant she’d better get going. Cindy leaned over to her sister and whispered, “When I get to the station, I’ll use the desktop computer to try to run some network checks. When I find something out, I’ll text you.”

“Thanks.” Kitty’s voice sounded unsteady, for all she was trying hard to put a good face on things.

As Cindy headed for the door, she wondered if she should just call in to the station and tell Autumn that she was going to take the day off. But with nothing definite to go on, it seemed way too much like self-indulgence to take the day off.

Just past the door, she was aware of someone sidling up to her. Dang it, but the Sheps were supposed to treat her as family, not someone to hit on.

But when she turned to tell him off, her gaze met a round face utterly unlike the long face of a Shep. “Uh, hi, Spence.”

Spencer Dawes smiled, not the big grin of a Shep, just an upward quirk of the lips that actually was more warm and inviting. “It looked like you could use the company. What’s wrong?”

Cindy moistened her lips and considered how much she wanted to say, how much was Kitty’s story to tell. “My sister’s having some trouble contacting an old friend back on Earth.”

That got her a nod of sympathy. “I’m hearing they’re having some communication troubles. If you’d like, I could have Juss see if one of his brothers would be able to stay with your sister.”

“Thanks, but I don’t think that’ll be necessary.”

Spence gave her another reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, it’s no problem. You’ve got lineage right to ask me for help. And I think you could use some company walking to work.”

Much as Cindy wanted to argue, she knew he was right. Spence was a clone of Edgar D. Mitchell, Alan Shepard’s Lunar Module Pilot, and therefore in the Shepard lineage. And right now, having to make small talk with someone would help take her mind off a situation she couldn’t do anything about.

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Narrative

A Sudden Awakening

A familiar melody pulled Cindy Margrave out of her slumbers. However, it took her a moment to realize that she was hearing the ringtone on her phone.

Dashing the sleep from her eyes with one hand, she retrieved her phone and squinted at the lock screen. In a horrific flash of understanding she comprehended two things at once: the time and the identity of the caller.

Oh my god, I completely forgot to set my alarm last night. Cindy’s mind raced even as she fumbled to accept the call, to gabble out some kind of a greeting all mixed with an utterly useless apology.

Aunt Betty would be so disappointed in her. Already Cindy could hear her aunt saying I raised you better than this and what would your parents think if they knew?

Except Autumn Belfontaine wasn’t annoyed at her. Far from it, she was actually rather sympathetic. “Just get down here as quickly as you can, and be ready to give me a full report when you do.”

From some people, a full report would mean giving an account of herself, and it better be properly contrite and free of anything that could be considered “blame-shifting” or she’d catch it double. But when the Shepardsport Pirate Radio news director wanted a full report, that meant she considered the matter newsworthy, or at least a lead on a newsworthy story.

Which meant she’d better use the time it’d take to get from the residential sector to the station offices to organize her thoughts and prepare to deliver an organized account of last night’s nightmarish SMS exchange and everything that had come of it. At least with Autumn she could talk about Kitty’s and Brenda’s roles without worrying about dragging them into her own trouble.

But first she’d better see if she could still get an order in to have her breakfast sent to the station. There was no way she could get to the dining commons, and she didn’t exactly like the idea of having to go all the way until lunch without eating.

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Narrative

Absence

Autumn Belfontaine had spent over an hour up at Medlab, talking with Dr. Thuc about how best to present the increasingly disturbing information coming in from Earth. It was absolutely critical to make the danger clear, especially with the growing evidence that someone in the Administration was trying to soft-pedal it by keeping people from correlating information from different cities. At the same time, it was also important to present it in a way that would not lead to panic.

When she arrived at the station, she noticed the empty receptionist’s desk, but thought that Cindy Margrave had probably just stepped out to take care of something. Maybe run a document somewhere, or just an ordinary restroom break.

That lasted only until Lou Corlin intercepted her. “Cindy still hasn’t shown up, and she’s never late.”

“Have you tried to text her?”

“She’s not answering, and I’m not sure if I should call. Especially where she and sister are sharing an apartment with their aunt and uncle and their kids.”

Autumn could appreciate the problem. When she first came over here on Captain Waite’s invitation, she’d had an apartment all to herself. But when the Expulsions began in earnest and Shepardsport’s population ballooned, she’d suddenly been asked to double up with another single woman — and it was pretty clear that the request was a politely stated command. There’d been more than a few awkward moments over calls and even text chimes interrupting someone’s sleep, or even concentration.

On the other hand, she didn’t think anyone in that household was on night shift. “I’ll call. As a director, I’ll have a little more authority than a DJ.”

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Narrative

The Moment Everything Changed

Spruance Del Curtin had just signed off, getting everything ready for the Tea Time crew to come in, when the door opened and in walked Autumn Belfontaine, a very strange look on her face. He recalled having seen her in her office earlier, hunched over her laptop with that same fixed expression.

No, better not even bother with normal polite greetings. Just hand her the headphones and get out of the way.

The “On Air” light was already illuminated by the time he got out the door. He could only hope that the mic hadn’t picked up the click of the latch.

From the front office he could already hear Autumn’s voice over the stereo behind the receptionist’s desk. Cindy had already taken off for the evening, so Sprue decided to sit down and listen. He had plenty of time to get to the dining commons for supper and still get some studying done before he needed to be to bed. Especially with Dr. Doorne annoyed with him, he’d better be able to put in a good showing next session.

But now he was listening to Autumn reading off the URLs of one after another television station’s local news website, detailing reports of illnesses and deaths that should’ve been making the national news, even world news — but weren’t. Then she told everyone how to get to the Shepardsport Pirate Radio website to post their own accounts of what was going on in their communities.

It was a risk — if someone in the Flannigan Administration was determined to silence this outbreak, they could flood their comments page with so much spam there wouldn’t be time for the whole news team to wade through it. Maybe Lou’s sister-in-law over at Grissom City who was such a hotshot programmer might be able to write an intelligent agent to sift through it, but Sprue wasn’t going to count on it.

And then Autumn was reading a set of announcements. Not just the usual things about washing hands and covering coughs that they’d been doing for the last several days. This stuff was serious, particularly the restrictions on the pilots. All deliveries to outlying settlements were to be dropped off at the pad, and the inhabitants were to retrieve everything by loaderbot. No one was to visit the shirtsleeve habitats, and no one was to stay overnight, not at the outlying habitats, and not at any of the big settlements or Luna Station.

And he knew several women around this place who were not going to be happy about the next restriction: all pilots flying in from other settlements were to remain in the port facilities, and as much as possible should avoid interacting with local staff. And here Drew Reinholt had just managed to snag assignments flying here again. Working with Brenda was not going to be fun a-tall.

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Narrative

Of Abandoned Vehicles and Empty Tents

Reggie arrived at the newsroom to find Autumn Belfontaine hunched over her laptop, watching a video. Although he couldn’t get a good view from his angle, it looked like it was playing on a local news station website. A female reporter in a windbreaker was talking to the camera in front of a tow truck hooking up to what looked like an old RV. Too bad Autumn was keeping the volume low enough that he couldn’t make out what the woman was saying.

However, it also meant that it was low enough that Autumn could hear his approach. She paused the video and stood up to face him. “Hi, Reggie. Is there something I need to go live with?”

“Not at the moment, but I think we’d better have a talk.” He glanced over to his wife, who’d paused to talk to one of the engineering staff. “Steffi, could you tell Autumn what you found out today?”

As Steffi explained about the e-mail, Autumn’s eyes widened. “So it’s not just the homeless population.” She gestured toward the frozen video on her laptop. “I’ve been visiting local TV and radio station websites from all over the country, and about half of them are reporting a sudden spike of illness in homeless camps. This one’s a human-interest story about a homeless vet, I think they said he fought in the Energy Wars, who’d been living in an old RV under an Interstate overpass in the Chicago area. They’re trying to locate next of kin to claim his remains and the possessions inside his vehicle, including his medals and citations.”

Reggie had his own memories of the Energy Wars, although he’d been a fighter pilot flying off aircraft carriers, not a ground-pounder. “Damn. Make it definite, someone is suppressing this news. I can still remember when I was fifteen and we had the big flu outbreak, the one they always blamed on the chaos after the fall of the Soviet Union. That was back when it was just the three networks, but they started running reports when the first big groups of cases showed up, and it wasn’t even all that deadly.”

“Then you want me to run this?”

“Write up a report and run it past me first. We may need to tweak the emphasis a little, but we definitely have to get it out that we’re looking at a very big picture. Big enough that I need to talk with Dr. Thuc about what precautions we need to start taking now.”

Autumn looked back to her laptop. “Then you think it could get up here?”

“We can’t discount the possibility. The Martian settlements should be safe, but it’s a three-day journey from Earth to the Moon. All it would take would be one person breaking the pre-flight quarantine.”

Yes, Autumn realized just what it would mean. Because pressurized volume was such a valuable commodity, people in lunar settlements lived in the sort of close quarters that were usually associated with extreme poverty on Earth, outside seagoing vessels and offshore drilling platforms. Worse, the life support systems would circulate a virus through the entire settlement, infecting everyone.

“I’ll get right on it.”

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Narrative

The Widening Shadow

Reggie Waite didn’t usually go down to IT to talk with his wife. As commandant of the settlement, he needed to avoid any appearances of favoritism. However, given the tenor of Steffi’s text, he’d decided that it wasn’t worth the stress to have her come up to his office.

Shepardsport’s IT department was located in the lowest levels of the settlement’s habitats, where they could use the Moon itself as a heatsink for cooling their fastest and most powerful number-crunchers. Here and then he passed doors opening onto rooms filled with racks of servers — but even these were run of the mill machines, busy with routine data applications, ranging from render farms to e-mail store and forward for the local Internet nodes. The real heavy iron was kept in secure rooms, well past the help-desk offices and data-center equipment.

Reggie found Steffi in her office, her face a mask of calm he knew at once to be false. When she greeted him at the door, her professional face stayed firmly in place, division head to commandant. Only when she closed the door did she let it slip.

“Thanks for coming down here, Reggie.” Her voice had that breathless sound of someone under severe emotional strain.

“What’s wrong, Steffi?”

“I just got an e-mail from an old friend at JPL. Things are getting really bad down in the LA Basin. Apparently that sickness that’s going around showed up in several different nursing homes all at once. They think it was a doctor who’d just flown back from some kind of professional conference and visited patients at all of them. But there are two nursing homes that he never visited, so there’s some speculation that some part-time workers carried it back and forth.”

Reggie recalled a recent e-mail from his father, mentioning having to reschedule an appointment because of illness at the client’s facility. “That’s not good.”

“No, it’s not.” Steffi moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “Right now they’re especially worried because a couple people at the Lab have family that work at those nursing homes. Siblings for the most part, a couple of parents who were looking for part-time work after they retired. Not someone they see every day, but close enough to visit on the weekends. Although one of the senior scientists had a daughter in high school who’d been volunteering at the one that got hit worst.”

Reggie considered what to say. It had been over two decades since he was working with JPL on the Dis Pater project, and he had no idea who some of these people were. However, it was possible that Steffi knew them, so he didn’t want to come across as overly clinical and insensitive. “Do they think she’s caught whatever this thing is?”

“Not yet, although with JPL’s flexibility about telecommuting, they’re apparently telling him he’s free to work from home if there’s any question of putting the girl under quarantine. And they’ve told all the janitors and support staff that they are not to try to be heroes and drag themselves in if they feel sick. They’re to call in sick, and the Lab will make sure that they’re covered if they run out of sick days.”

She looked Reggie straight in the eyes. “This thing is serious. Which makes me wonder why we’re not hearing a lot more of it from the Earthside news media. Some blogs here and there, but none of the major networks, not in the US, and not abroad.”

“I think the two of us need to have a serious talk with Autumn Belfontaine. I’d been counseling caution, but I’m starting to wonder if we’re looking at a coverup.”

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An Unexpected Summons

Homework and lesson plans finished, Quinn Merton was going through his fan mail. Not that he got a great deal of it, but as DJ of the Full Moon Barn Dance every Saturday evening, he got a decent amount.

Most of it was more on the line of requests than girls going all cow-eyed over him. Which meant it was a good idea to keep up with them so he could have his playlist lined up well before the week’s show.

His phone dinged — incoming text. He looked over to see a message from Rick Sutton. “Can you come down to the spaceport? I have something I’d like to talk to you about.”

Quinn considered the implications. Whatever, it was, it had to be important — and something sensitive enough that his elder clone-brother didn’t want to discuss it over the telephone network.

Did it have to do with that cruise ship and all of Autumn Belfontaine’s mysterious phone calls and trips down to Medlab? If it did, Major Sutton would have plenty of reason to prefer discretion, especially after the way Spruance Del Curtin got called up to the commandant’s office after he’d been trying to sound out people he thought might know something.

And if it wasn’t, it was probably going to be something else that shouldn’t be noised about. Just text back a quick I’m coming and get down there.

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Document

A Little History

Shepardsport Pirate Radio started almost by accident. It was right as the Expulsions were really getting started. A bunch of us kids were sitting around in the big lounge in Miskatonic Sector, talking about the situation. Somebody wondered aloud how many people down there realized that this wasn’t a voluntary exodus, no matter what the Russian tsar might have intended when he issued his invitation.

So it went from just another bull session to a very earnest discussion of how we could get the word out about what was really happening. [laughs] When you get older, it’s easy to forget just how passionate teenagers can be about something that matters to them.

One of the guys, I think it was one of the Sheps but it could’ve been a Cooper or a Conrad, pipes up with the idea of an underground newspaper. Not surprising, since we’d been studying World War II in history class and Mrs. Townsend was having us read a book about the various resistance movements, including their various clandestine presses and newsletters. And there was a really popular teen-lit book right then about a school with a dysfunctional administration and how the kids circulated a secret newsletter about everything nobody could talk about.

Of course we knew we weren’t going to be printing up a physical paper. That was so twentieth century, and up here on the Moon, copy paper was a scarce resource anyway. But everybody’s got a computer up here, and HTML’s not that hard to learn, at least enough to put up a credible Website. Lou Corlin and a couple of the other guys with work responsibilities down in IT said they could do the fancy CSS to make it look like a professional newspaper’s website.

That was when Autumn Belfontaine overheard us talking and dropped in to ask us just how much traffic we really thought we could get for a straight-up digital newspaper. There were millions of blogs and billions of static websites, and most of them could count their monthly visitors in the hundreds. We needed to be able to offer our audience more, something they’d come for the enjoyment and then listen to the news while they were waiting for the next entertainment segment.

That was when she suggested a pirate radio station. She’d actually worked in radio, so she knew how a station would be run. She probably could’ve been our general manager if she’d wanted the job, but she was a reporter first, foremost and always, so she decided to be the news director and teach the rest of us how to be reporters and DJ’s.

The more we talked about our plans, the more I realized there was going to be a lot more nitty-gritty than just scheduling or even coming up with funding to pay royalties on our music. We’d need a place to set up a studio, and a lot of equipment, not to mention access to the bandwidth to transmit it back dirtside, since there was no way we could do an actual airwaves transmission like the old pirate radio stations on Earth.

No, this wasn’t a lark us kids could do with a half dozen laptops and some cheap mics. We were going to have to get the adults involved, which meant that Autumn was going to have to somehow get the senior leadership convinced that we were actually doing something serious and productive.

And then Luna Station blew up and the Kitty Hawk Massacre happened, and all of a sudden Captain Waite was wanting to talk to all of us about getting the truth out.

Brenda Redmond, “The Beginnings of Shepardsport Pirate Radio” from The Lunar Resistance: An Oral History. Kennedy University Press, Carpenter Point, Tycho Crater, 2059.