[poem - Anybody can write a poem]

The transmission window was closing off, and for the first time, Ray didn't
have anything to say. For someone who spent most of her waking time trying to
vehemently correct some piece of misinformation, for once it wasn't just what
was being said that was Wrong. It wasn't just some ONE being wrong, some THING
was wrong, and she couldn't figure out what it was, exactly.

Fifteen minutes before the working satellite would pass over the limb of the
earth, and anything needing to be said would have to wait another twenty hours
for it to pass back into view.

The news post in sat there, still marked unread, though Ray had read every
word a dozen times now.

    "Moon colony joins rebellion"

She hovered her fingers over the keyboard again. Usually, when someone had
their facts wrong, there was an easy place to fire back. This wasn't factual.
_How do you even respond to a blatant and inciteful lie?_

Ray's father's long fingers gripped the door frame as he poked his head into
the communications cube. "Rayray, are you coming to bed?"

"I can't. Someone's ... Wrong on the Internet." The tone in her voice made it
clear that she wasn't going to be sleeping any time soon, and he let it be.

"Okay, but I'm locking the door tonight. I don't trust those people. Got
your key?"

"Yes, Dad."

He watched her for a moment, and she tried not to glare at him for the
interruption. _Thank goodness_, she thought as he stalked off to the dorm
cube. She wasn't in the mood to start an argument over something trivial when
something important was happening.

The rest of the news story was just as sensational and wrong as the headline,
and it wasn't the only one. Every news outlet was carrying some variation on
the story; Ray could tell that most of them were the old AP-Reuters machine
churning out variations on a theme without a shred of anything new, but even
the responses and blogs were saying it. One supply ship gets hijacked by a
rebel group, and then lands where it was going anyway and suddenly everyone's
complicit.

Eight minutes left if she wanted to get a response out. She had the sickening
feeling that this was how wars started, and always had. Maybe this is the kind
of thing that would die down in twenty hours of silence, or if when she woke
up in the morning, someone would have declared war or done something rash
before the colonists could even respond.

Six minutes. She gave up and deleted the not even half started post. It's not
like hastily posting something to the Net would do any good against the tide
of News. She wondered where AP-Reuters got their stories anyway. It was
impossible to tell any more, ever since that Florida judge said that lying and
calling it news was perfectly okay.

She opened up a private post for just a few friends and attached a couple
images from the camera in her suit, one looking through the ship's door -- it
hadn't even taken much to make the Cascadian flag in the background show up
clearly. The other was a picture of the two Cascadian astronauts still in the
entry tube.

She keyed in "At least she's cute" on a little tab pointing at the female
astronaut's face and hit post.

Blackout.

She sighed and closed the computer. It's not like there was much to do until
the next burst came in from Earth. Twenty hours of waiting, unless something
came through on the emergency channel, and that was only official ESA
business, and they hadn't said anything since the Cascadians had shown up.

She glared at the emergency receiver. The silence was deafening.