Tag: Brenda Redmond

Categories
Narrative

An Uncomfortable Request

Brenda Redmond was no stranger to Medlab. She’d been up here plenty of times for routine health checkups, prenatal care and childbirth, all the usual stuff. But today was different — she couldn’t shake a sense of dread, of wondering if she’d made a big mistake in telling Lou Corlin she was going to do this herself.

At the time her arguments had made sense: she was married and had two children, and her husband was an Air Force officer and a pilot-astronaut. Dr. Thuc and the rest of Medstaff would take her a lot more seriously than Lou, who was three years younger than her and still trying to get his steady girlfriend transferred over here.

Now that she was walking up the corridor to the entrance with the big red cross on the double doors, she wasn’t so sure. Just how much evidence did she really have that Robbie was in danger? That text had been worrisome, but its disjointed expression could also be chalked up to panic.

Which is not tolerated up here. You either learn to keep your head about you, or you never get any positions of trust or responsibility. Effectively, you remain a child for the rest of your life.

With those thoughts Brenda quelled the butterflies in her stomach and pushed the doors open. She was not going to give in to her anxieties and back out.

Several people were sitting in the waiting room. Brenda recognized most of them on sight — Shepardsport was still small enough that a person with a good memory for faces could — but a few were unfamiliar. Just people she didn’t have any connection with, or actual outsiders?

That thought made her uncomfortable in a way she’d never known before. Shepardsport had been founded to support scientific activity on Farside, and openness and collegiality were at the heart of science. Although Brenda was aware that scientists often fell short of that ideal, jealously guarding their own turf, it still bothered her that she should immediately treat outsider as suspect, maybe dangerous.

This was what the diablovirus had done to them. Shepardsport was walling up like a fortress, if not physically, then mentally.

As a mother she understood — she would do whatever it took to keep her children safe. If it meant that the outlying settlements which depended upon Shepardsport Medlab found no help here, it was the price of safety for her own.

Still, it left her uncomfortable, especially when she was supposed to be on a mission of mercy for an old friend. But right now she needed to deal with the receptionist, who could become a gatekeeper as easily as a facilitator.

As was the case in so many offices here in Shepardsport, the receptionist was pretty clearly a teenager. Mature enough to be entrusted with being the department’s public face, but not yet ready for more substantial responsibilities in the actual workings of the department.

Brenda’s expectations proved correct: the young woman listened attentively, without attempting to brush her off or diminish her concerns. At length she made a call, talked to someone.

“Dr. Gorman will speak with you .”

Brenda was surprised to be connected with someone so quickly and easily. Not just the absence of waiting, but also the lack of any hint of criticism, of a desire to know why she hadn’t made an appointment or followed any of the other usual formalities for non-emergency visits.

Dr. Gorman was an older man, gray haired and a little stooped even in lunar gravity. Unlike Dr. Thuc, he was a civilian, which may have accounted for his willingness to speak to her.

Brenda explained the situation, the puzzling e-mail only a few days ago. “The very lack of clear, coherent detail makes me think that whatever breach Robbie had with her folks is serious. I want to contact her, make sure she’s safe, but if she’s under their roof, it’s possible that contacting her could put her in danger.”

“So you are expecting to have us be able to do what on her behalf?”

Here was the kicker: he was going to make her explicitly request Medstaff’s aid, rather than picking up on the significance of her description. Phrase it badly and she could ensure Robbie got no help.

“We’re hoping that someone in Medstaff would have the necessary authority to obtain the geolocation metadata for her phone. If she’s definitely not in her parents’ area, I’ll know whether it’s safe to contact her directly, or if I need to find an intermediary.”

“Ah, a commendable caution. However, I will need to confer with my colleagues and ensure that this intervention will be permissible.”

He then took down her phone number, so he could let her know how the decision went. At least it’s not a no, Brenda told herself.

Still, it was disheartening to know that there would still be a wait.

Categories
Narrative

Good Night Moon

There was something really strange about reading the old childhood classic Good Night Moon to your children when you were living in a lunar settlement. But Brenda knew her kids got a kick out of the story of a dirtside kid determinedly dragging out the process of going to bed by saying good night to everything in the room. It was almost as fun as Marvin K Mooney, Will You Please Go Now, but less likely to get them wound up into fits of giggles.

Finally she had both children tucked into bed in their respective sleeping alcoves, favorite plushies in hand to comfort them. Now to rig her own bed for the night. She folded down the desk into a nightstand, then set her phone on it.

Better check to make sure she’d set the alarm. It wouldn’t do to oversleep and miss her air shift.

Having your phone chime while it was in your hand was always a little weird. Brenda nearly dropped it, although with the Moon’s lower gravity it wasn’t as likely to do damage as doing so on Earth.

Still, it was a bit surprising to get a text from Lou Corlin at this hour. He had the air shift right after her, so he didn’t usually stay up overly late.

Just heard from Toni Hargreaves. She’s thinking someone at Medlab might be able to get the geolocation metadata from Robbie’s phone if we can convince them that she’s in danger.

Brenda tried to figure out how that could work. Although she knew senior Medstaff could use their authority to access a lot of databases that were usually covered by privacy restrictions, they were typically medical information. Phone metadata seemed unlikely — unless one was trying to determine whether a particular person was within a disaster area.

Except the whole planet was a disaster area, from everything Brenda was hearing. Trying to argue on that basis that one person’s metadata should be accessed sounded a little shaky.

On the other hand, it was a thread of hope. I suppose it might work. What do you need to know?

Right now, whether you’ve heard anything else from her. We sure don’t want to go getting Medstaff involved when she’s actually safe at a friend’s place.

You’ve got a point. Let me double-check.

Brenda took a look through both her SMS and mail apps. No, that text seems to be the last one.

Then our next step is figuring out how to approach Medstaff so they don’t blow us off. You may want to take care of this one, since they’re a lot more likely to take you seriously.

Brenda could see Lou’s point. Although they weren’t that far apart chronologically, she was married and had two kids, while he was still single and living in bachelor quarters.

OK. But let’s think things through overnight. It’s been several days now, and a few more hours shouldn’t hurt. And we’re a lot more likely to get a negative response if we go in their looking rushed.

Categories
Narrative

Of Friends and Family

The tutoring session finished and his students dispersing to their own modules, Lou considered whether it was time to head back to his own apartment. Or at least back to that module, although its lounge wasn’t nearly as nice as this one.

But as he was putting away his materials, he noticed Brenda Redmond sitting at the far wall, looking very much as if she were stewing over something. Should he ask her if there were something wrong? Or would that be an intrusion?

They were colleagues, both DJ’s at Shepardsport Pirate Radio. And they did have lineage ties: although Brenda had married into the Shepard lineage, she’d been born into the Grissom lineage. So he did have certain responsibilities.

Make it light then. Leave the door open, as it were. “Hi, Brenda. Just wondered if you needed anything before I took off.”

Brenda pursed her lips, as if ready to form a polite no, thank you. “Well, I was just thinking about some technical issues in telecommunications.” She paused, moistened her lips. “A few days ago, I got an e-mail from an old friend, from before the anti-Sharp stuff started really revving up. She’d apparently had some kind of breach with her parents, and when all the dorms closed at her college, she was really upset about having to go back to them. And then, with all the stuff with Kitty Margrave’s friend and everything we found out about that, it just slipped my mind.”

Yes, she definitely felt bad about that one. Not exactly guilty, but more than just sheepish at a mental lapse.

“Don’t beat yourself up, Brenda. This is not exactly a normal situation, and I’m hearing a lot of people are having to struggle to keep track of ordinary things.”

She essayed a wan smile. “Thanks, Lou. If these were normal times, I’d just write and let her know that things came up and I hadn’t gotten a chance to get back with her. But right now I’m not even sure if it’s safe for me to try to contact her.” Another of those awkward pauses. “I mean, her parents are so dead-set against clones that they made her dump me as a friend, just because my dad’s a clone of Gus Grissom. It was like they wanted her to forget I even existed after we headed off to training to come up here.”

Lou’s nerves prickled with alarm. “Then you think she could be in danger?”

“I don’t know. Maybe, depending on just what kind of breach she had with her parents. For all I know, she may be holed up in an apartment with a friend. But if she’s had to go back to her folks’ house and the price of peace there is that she pretend to agree with whatever position of theirs led to the breach, and especially if they’re insisting that they now have the right to monitor her telecom, just texting or e-mailing her could risk an ugly blow-up.”

Lou considered that information. “That is a nasty Schroedinger’s box. Do you leave it closed and hope for the best, or open it and risk making a bad situation even worse?”

“That’s a pretty good way to put it. Except if I don’t reach out to her and she really is in a desperate situation, might her feelings of abandonment and hopelessness lead her to do something rash?”

Lou could tell what Brenda was thinking but didn’t want to say aloud: suicide. It was a taboo topic for a reason, especially after Clarissa Munroe’s spectacular act of self-destruction. There were very good reasons to condemn that particular young woman to damnato memoria, but it meant it became very difficult to talk in a constructive way about someone else under unendurable pressure without looking like you were excusing what she did.

“Which means you need to figure out some way to find out where this person is without potentially letting other people in the same household know that you’re making inquiries about her.”

“That’s pretty much the size of it.” Brenda paused again to consider her words. “I mean, I know there are techniques, especially after I watched Eli dig out information on the crazy stuff that’s going on in several states’ child welfare departments. But those are techniques you’re only supposed to use if you’re acting in an official capacity. And somehow I don’t think this is the sort of thing that’s going to get taken seriously. I mean, that creepy I’m OK message that was supposed to be from Amy is going to set off just about anybody’s alarm bells, but someone unhappy to have to go home to their parents is far more apt to be told to make the best of it.”

“You’ve got a point.” Lou weighed the options. “I can ask around at IT, see what options I would have to legitimately find out where she is.”

“Thanks.”

Categories
Narrative

Echoes and Memories

Brenda Redmond didn’t like having to do homework in a crowded module lounge. However, she’d had enough trouble getting the kids to sleep after an all-too-brief FaceTime call with their dad that having a screen on in that apartment was not an option.

So here she was, trying not to listen to Lou Corlin tutoring a couple of teens. Differential equations, from the sound of it — stuff that dirtside kids didn’t even start studying until their third or fourth year in college. Up here, students moved forward as fast as they could master the subject material, rather than being forced to advance in lockstep with the rest of their agemates.

A lot of Alan Shepard’s problem when he was that age was probably being bored to tears by regular classes in grade and high school. Even at Annapolis, he didn’t really hit his stride until his third year.

How many times had her own father grumbled about the difficulty of keeping Spruance Del Curtin motivated to put out his best work? Brenda knew a lot of those remarks hadn’t been meant for her ears, but when she was still living in her folks’ apartment, it had often been difficult to avoid overhearing her dad’s remarks to her mom about problems in Engineering.

Sometimes it seemed like just yesterday that she was still living with her natal family, and sometimes it felt like another lifetime. Heck, the craziness of the last few weeks sometimes seemed to stretch backward through her memory far further than it had any right to.

Speaking of which, she realized that she’d become so occupied with Kitty Margrave’s friend Amy that she’d completely forgotten about the message she’d gotten from Robbie Sandberg. Sure, she’d sent some kind of very basic response right away, of the I’ll be praying for you type, but she’d never followed up with anything substantial.

And now enough time had passed that she had no idea what Robbie’s situation might be now. Had she been able to find some kind of accommodations with a friend or trusted mentor? Or had she been left with no choice to return to her parents’ home, told it was her problem to deal with the breach between them? In which case, would it even be safe to send her a message?

If her parents were reading her e-mails, checking her phone, on the grounds of under our roof, under our rules, discovering a new message from a former friend thought to be banished from her life could cause trouble. Anything from a shouting match to beatings, confiscations of belongings, even things that would leave her wishing there weren’t a stay-at-home order keeping them from tossing her out on her ass.

Was there some way to contact Robbie, buck her up if necessary, without revealing her identity? All of a sudden she wished she knew a whole lot more about hacking.

Lou was winding up his tutoring session. On the other hand, he was a typical Chaffee straight-arrow. If she asked him, he’d probably aver that they shouldn’t be trying to go behind the backs of someone’s parents when those parents were putting a roof over that person’s head, not to mention that a lot of the necessary hacks were a bit sketchy if you weren’t doing them under the direction of appropriate authority. And while it made sense for Kitty Margrave to go to her aunt when it was clear that Amy was in danger, Brenda wasn’t sure she wanted to go to Betty about an old friend’s situation with so little to go on.

Categories
Narrative

Like Ripples Upon a Pond

In normal times, the Roosa Barracks was a lively place. Maybe not as lively as the main concourse of Grissom City, but for a pilot-astronaut, there was always the company of one’s colleagues. Spontaneous games of poker or Magic: the Gathering in the dining commons, all-night bull sessions in the lounge of the BOQ.

But all that had gone by the wayside due to the present emergency. By order of the commandant, everyone was to remain in quarters during their off-duty hours.

Drew Reinholt looked around his room, considering how it had never felt all that small before. Of course it wasn’t as if this were an isolation cell — he did have full Internet access. A few taps on his tablet and he could talk with anyone in the three worlds. Of course communication with anyone outside the Earth-Moon system would be subject to light-speed lag, which made a phone conversation impossible, but text messaging worked just as well.

However, he was really supposed to be using this time to go over the new revisions on the landers’ instrumentation. The software was supposed to have gone into service over the next several weeks, but with the current crisis, the implementation was going to be delayed For The Duration. However, Flight Ops wanted everyone getting up to speed so they’d be ready as soon as NASA green-lighted the change-over. Which meant you were expected to spend pretty much every spare hour either studying or practicing on the simulators.

He hadn’t really been listening to the music — everything was pretty much familiar, so it made perfect background music. But when it stopped right in the middle of a song, his attention went straight to it.

For a moment he thought the stream had been interrupted again — not surprising when the Administration really didn’t like Shepardsport Pirate Radio. But then the DJ came on. “We interrupt this program for breaking news.”

And then Autumn Belfontaine took over the mic, reporting a most disturbing discovery. Drew knew that stuff was pretty messed up down on Earth, even in the US. It wasn’t surprising that a fast-moving disease like the diablovirus, which could incapacitate people in hours, would leave a lot of kids at loose ends, enough to swamp a city’s child-protection services. But what the heck was with this business of taking kids out of unofficial foster homes and stuffing them into makeshift orphanages in the very schools that had been closed to slow the spread of the virus? Was this thing driving people subtly crazy, such that they seemed rational, but their judgement went to heck?

At least his kids were safe with Brenda over on Farside, and her family was right there in Shepardsport, just a few modules away from their apartment. And much as he’d like to be with them right now, he was getting a thorough appreciation for why it was necessary that pilots be kept away from a settlement’s general population.

All the same, he was definitely scheduling some time to talk with his kids tonight. Screen time might be a poor substitute for romping with them like he would when he was able to visit, but it was better than nothing.

Categories
Narrative

Further Searchers

Brenda didn’t like running late on important things, like classes or her mandatory exercise hours. However, she wasn’t going to abandon Kitty to her own devices, not when the girl was clearly terrified for her friend on Earth.

At least Linnea at the gym was understanding. She’d lost her husband a few years ago in the cyber-attack on Slayton Field, and knew the terror of incomplete information in a bad situation. However, Brenda’s senior teacher was not as likely to be flexible — but then, they were trying to teach basic literacy skills to a bunch of little kids, which meant they needed consistency.

I just wish Sprue would get his butt over here. I know he’s got that new project he’s keeping so mum about, but surely it doesn’t take that long to touch base with the principal researcher, or whoever’s his main contact.

Brenda reached for her phone, then checked herself. The last thing Sprue needed was for his phone to chime incoming text right while he was talking with his boss. Sure, SMS was an asynchronous means of communication, but the urge to grab one’s phone and check could be difficult to resist.

Instead, she looked at Kitty’s messenger app yet again, as if this time would suddenly give her the ability to sort some sense from the garbled mess of alphanumeric characters. It really looked as if the packets had become corrupted as they passed through one or another server on the way between Earth and the Moon.

She’d seen some text spam that looked like that — supposedly there were ways to hijack some phones’ OS and turn them into zombie machines for DDOS attacks. She wished Lou Corlin could be here, since he worked for IT. However, this was his air shift, and she was not going to take Kitty down to the station just to talk to Lou.

And then the module airlock cycled, and in walked Spruance Del Curtin. “Sorry I’m late, but I wanted to talk to Dr. Doorne. You do realize she’s a specialist in signals processing. I was hoping she might have some suggestions.”

“So did she?” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Brenda realized just how snarky she sounded.

“A few possibilities, but they may require seeing if the message is still on the server, or if it was erased there as soon as it was downloaded to the phone.”

At that moment Kitty’s phone chimed. There was another message from Amy — or at least her telephone number. However, it didn’t look anything like the last several messages, which had been increasingly fretful. Instead, it was relentlessly upbeat, and had a feeling of having been dictated to her: We have been moved to a new guardian. Do not worry about me. I am healthy and safe, and am keeping up with my schoolwork. Be careful, and keep studying.

When Brenda was younger, before she’d had kids, she’d gone through a period of reading a lot of true-crime. There’d been several cases in which people were kidnapped and forced by their kidnappers to make phone calls or send texts claiming that they were going somewhere for a while, in order to delay suspicion.

She showed the text to Sprue. “What do you think?”

“How old is she supposed to be? This doesn’t look like something a middle-school kid would write.”

He looked straight at Kitty. “I think we’d better take this to your Aunt Betty. If something fishy is going on, she’s a lot better equipped to handle it.”

Categories
Narrative

Things to Worry About

There were times when Brenda Redmond wished she didn’t have the morning drive-time air shift at Shepardsport Pirate Radio. It was a news-heavy shift, which meant getting to hear all about everything that was going on in the world — which these days meant everything going wrong in the world.

And the news report Autumn Belfontaine had been delivering right at the end of Brenda’s shift was particularly worrisome. If a worker in the Indian Space Agency’s pre-flight quarantine facility could pass the diablovirus to their astronauts and infect the entire Japanese LEO space station and lunar ferry, how safe were America’s facilities? Especially considering that it wasn’t just NASA any more, with McHenery Aerospace and several other private companies launching crewed spacecraft from commercial spaceports. They were supposed to follow the same pre-flight quarantine procedures as NASA astronauts — but there’d been issues of corner-cutting on other safety procedures, so who was to say they weren’t getting lax there too.

All it would take is one person.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if Drew had been down at Coopersville, but he was stationed at Slayton Field. Grissom City was not only the largest and oldest lunar settlement, but also the busiest spaceport city. Which meant Drew would be right on the front lines in terms of his risk of exposure.

But she couldn’t let her worries about him leak into her communications to him. She knew the risks — it came with being a military spouse. And it wasn’t fair to the other pilot-astronauts’ wives for her to worry too obviously when they had their own burdens.

Better to focus on the things she had some level of control over. Her work, her training and gym time, her teaching responsibility. And taking care of the kids, of course.

Her phone chimed: incoming text message. She pulled it out, halfway hoping it was Drew.

No, it was Kitty Margrave. Call me. We need to talk.

Categories
Narrative

The Sound of Silence

When Cindy got to the dining commons for supper, she noticed Kitty sitting all by herself. Unusual, since her younger sister usually sat with her circle of friends unless it was Family Night.

Although Cindy had been planning on joining her regular study group and continuing their discussions from class, she decided she’d better make sure things were OK with her sister. She sat down beside Kitty. “How’s it going, kiddo?”

“Worried.” Kitty pushed her beets around with her fork as if trying to find the willpower to get the next bite down. “It’s been almost three days now since I’ve heard anything from Amy.”

“Which means you have no idea what her situation might be.” Cindy cast a look over at the tables where the married pilots and their families sat. “I think a lot of people are worried right now. We know that things are not good on Earth, and we have good reason to believe that the authorities are trying to cover up just how bad things are getting.”

She stopped, realizing she was about to repeat what she’d overheard Uncle Carl and Aunt Betty talking about last night. Not just that Flight Operations was considering quarantining pilots even if they hadn’t had any contact with the crew of Luna Station, but also some very disturbing messages both of them had received from people working at Johnson and some of the other NASA centers around the country.

Except she hadn’t been part of that conversation. She shouldn’t even have been listening in, and sharing that information with Kitty would only compound her lapse of civility.

If Kitty noticed the sudden pause, she made no remark on it. “I just wish I knew what were going on.”

“I do too. But with the problems IT’s been having with our Internet connection, we’re not getting much in the way of news from Earth.” Again Cindy had to pause and think about how much she should say. At the station she’d overheard a lot of stuff, and she had good reason to believe that a lot of it was not for public consumption. “I’ve heard a few people have been able to get e-mail messages through, but that’s mainly because of the way e-mail works.”

Even as Cindy was struggling to remember how Lou had explained the principles of e-mail server operation, a familiar voice asked, “May we join you.”

There stood Brenda Redmond, children in tow. Beyond her, Cindy could see that the other tables were rapidly filling up. With her husband stuck at Slayton Field, Brenda would be looking for familiar faces — and a table that still had three seats available.

“Oh, hi, Brenda.” Cindy hoped she wasn’t blushing too badly. “Sure, have a seat. We were just talking.”

“Thanks.” Brenda got her children seated first, then sat between them. “Have you heard anything more from Amy?”

Cindy and Kitty exchanged those awkward glances, trying to determine who should speak first. Brenda picked it up. “If you’d rather discuss it in private, drop by my apartment about 9PM tonight. I’ll have the kids put to bed, and we can talk about the situation in private.”

“Thanks.” Cindy gladly let Brenda move the conversation to more neutral topics: work, classes, settlement life in general.

Categories
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.”

Categories
Narrative

A Message from an Old Friend

This is our second day without decent Internet connectivity. Having completed her sign-off from her air shift, Brenda Redmond logged the last three songs into the playlist, along with the ad blocks she’d run

The guys from the Alternative Lunch didn’t exactly look happy, but it was unsurprising when a big part of their show was live interviews with authors of alternate history, in between their alternative rock. With Internet to the other lunar settlements still patchy and Earth and Mars completely cut off, they were going to have a problem.

But there was no time to discuss it, not when they needed to get ready to sign on. So she stuck to the normal hand-over protocols and wished them well.

Now she needed to grab lunch before her teaching responsibility. There wasn’t time to get up to the dining commons and eat and still get to Miskatonic Sector and her classroom in time, so she always had her lunch sent to her classroom on the days she taught class.

As she went to open the Meals app and put in her request, she discovered she’d left her phone in the mail app. It had just updated with new mail, and she recognized a name she hadn’t seen in ages.

Robbie Sandberg had been Brenda’s best friend all through grade school and into jr. high. Even as anti-clone prejudice mounted and her social circle shrank, Robbie had stuck by her, even at the cost of other friendships, of taunts and cruelties.

And then one day Robbie came with tears in her eyes, explaining that her parents had ordered her to dump the “clonespawn.” Only by begging and pleading had Robbie been able to gain the tiny concession of being allowed to see Brenda one last time and explain the situation rather than simply disappearing from her life.

It had been a painful moment during a stage of life that was already painful because of the havoc puberty wreaked upon young bodies and minds. At the time she’d barely suppressed her anger enough to force out some words about the Fifth Commandment. The only saving grace was it being right about the time her own parents had decided to bring the family up here to the Moon, so she had her own burden of obedience. But looking back, she knew she’d been let far too much snark into her voice as she said she was leaving school to begin her training at Johnson Space Center to join her father in his new posting as Chief of Engineering here at Shepardsport.

Remembering, Brenda felt bad that she had hardly thought of Robbie since then, even after they’d both turned eighteen. However, Brenda had her own life up here on the Moon now, with people who respected her for what she could do, and now she had a family of her own.

As she waited for the sector airlock to cycle so she could pass through into Miskatonic Sector, she opened the e-mail. Whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t the message she got.

The tone was unmistakable panic. It took Brenda several re-reads to sort out the disorganized missive: Robbie was in college, and the administration had just received orders to clear the campus. Everyone had twenty-four hours to vacate the dorms — but Robbie couldn’t move home.

Apparently she had come out to her parents about something and there’d been a horrible row, to the point they had tried to tell her she wouldn’t be going back to school. But all her friends had gone to bat for her, finding her a job, a place to live until the semester started, a replacement laptop and phone for the ones her parents had confiscated on the grounds they’d paid for them.

As deeply religious as her parents were, it would be easy to expect it was her sexuality. Except there was nothing about a girlfriend — or a boyfriend for that matter.

Could she have decided to argue back against their anti-Sharp prejudice? But given the way America under the Flannigan Administration was going, it seemed unlikely that someone who didn’t toe that line would be getting a full-ride scholarship at any major university.

Whatever was going on, one thing was clear — Robbie was being kicked out of the dorm and being told to return to a home where she was not welcome, where she didn’t feel safe. She was desperate — and Brenda was completely helpless to do anything on her behalf.

Right now she had a class she needed to be ready to teach. Fourth-graders might not be as bad as seventh-graders, but she still needed to have her wits about her. Afterward she could look for someone she could trust and talk with them about the situation. Given the timestamp on that e-mail, it had probably been bouncing around the Internet for a while before it found its way up here. A couple more hours wouldn’t make a huge amount of difference.