origfic noodling
By then, they'd requisitioned all our real long-distance vehicles and shuttles and everything, which means I was making the trip in a tractor and chugging along as fast as I could go--which was to say well under the posted speed limit. For company I had Nan on the radio, telling me how stupid I was.
"You told me not to pull punches if you were getting soppy over them again, babe. I know you have a reason, but you're doing a six-hour drive in a fucking tractor."
I snorted. "Everything's a six-hour drive or something, now. Wish they'd give us a timescale on when they're giving us our stuff back."
"I'm pretty sure it's never. There's always some war or another. And they don't give a shit." It was the kind of thing that even Nan wouldn't have dared to say on the air a few years ago, but now that there'd been silence for most of a year, people had gotten lax after they'd gotten done being scared.
"Yeah, well." I leaned over onto the dash. "That's the whole problem. Like, I told you. Vina's going insane without new shows."
Nan was surely deadeying me through the radio. "Okay, and your ex at the broadcast station is definitely going to be able to pull some new kid's show out of their ass instead of the two years of reruns they've been cycling through. Just for you."
Listen. The thing was--
--okay, I'd both been the one to break up with Thea and the one still hung up on them. As far as I knew they hadn't thought about me since the breakup six months ago. I definitely wasn't expecting shit, here.
But considering most of my job was debugging farm processes that didn't usually go wrong, I had a lot of free time. And for today, I had a babysitter from the next field over to deal with my little sibling bouncing off the walls for a little bit. I was absolutely going to take my chance to fuck off for a while.
"Anyway," I said aloud, "I wasn't going to ask about reruns. I had an idea."
"An idea," said Nan, flatly.
"Yeah. Like--hear me out, but. We could just make shows. Thea's got all those old cameras."
There was a long pause where I thought I'd lost Nan's signal. Then: "Fucking of course you're using them for their cameras."
"Shut up. Who else has those on this rock? No one else is near as special-interested enough to import that kind of thing. Anyway-" Anyway, I shouldn't even have bothered to argue, "So, that's why it has to be them."
"Ugh, you're hopeless." I could hear her drumming her fingers on the table from the speakers. "I'll see about getting my hands on some ice cream for when you eventually need to cry over them."
"Love you too, Nan."
"I know you do. Anyway, at least you're not doing what Ray's doing--"
Which was why I called her; Nan always got her hands on the good gossip, and I needed some kind of entertainment for a drive this long. Getting invested in the drama of some messy friend group on the other side of the moon where I didn't even know any of them was just the thing for it.
She hadn't even run out by the time the sun had risen into full morning and I was pulling in to the long, meandering driveway of Shennong-7's sole planetary communications post.
