The server at Addison’s Gourmet Imported Beans handed over a zero-g drinking bulb of hot, watery coffee. “I just love your English accent.”

Matt Parks gave her a broad smile in response to her comment. “Thank you. I’ve been practicing it a lot lately.” He suspected the bulb’s contents had only a tenuous connection with genuine coffee beans. He didn’t care—on a space station orbiting a moon of Saturn this was as good as it was going to get. 

She looked thrown by his reply. At least he assumed that was her expression. They were at ninety degrees to each other in the near-zero-g of the space station’s central core, just rear of the main dock, and it was hard to be sure at that angle.

“You’re not English?” Her expression cleared. “Oh! You’re Australian.” 

“No, I was born in England. I was messing with you.”

Using the hand not busy holding a sealed coffee container, he waved his Station card at the pay slab. Six decacredits. Coffee was an expensive treat on Titanville, but totally worth it. On his salary, he could spring for a cup a week.

Talking to the clerk at the booth was Matt’s least favorite part of his weekly pilgrimage to the stand. He’d forgotten to put on an American accent when ordering today and was now paying the price. “Have a nice day.”

“Isn’t that my line?” Her confusion appeared to be deepening.

He was innocence itself. “Is it?” He knew he was being petty, so he took pity on her. “See you next week. I have an exciting work shift to start.” 

“Oh. What do you do?”

He considered the best way to explain. “I stop people finding out things that would disturb the balance of their minds.”

She raised her eyebrows, apparently impressed. He made a mental note to use that description the next time someone asked what he did. The station looked so peaceful. People didn’t realize how much work that tranquility took. His mind drifted to the earliest days of space exploration, with ground control carefully controlling the information provided to astronauts. Things hadn’t changed.

Her reply caught him off-guard. “You must be on the senior staff.”

He resisted the urge to laugh in her face. Instead, he said, “You’d be surprised,” and kicked off in the direction of the elevator.

*     *     *
The Signals Content Approval center was located one level out from Titanville’s central core, next door to the Safety Inspectorate’s office. Most inhabitants of the reprocessing plant orbiting Titan knew the SCA by a different name—the Board of Censors. It was not a well-liked institution.

By the time Matt arrived, his colleagues Dom and Tom were already tethered to their workstations. “Did you bring us coffee?” asked Dom, the Tweedledee to Tom’s Tweedledum.

“Nope.” They always asked, and he never did. They were too cheap to buy him one back.

Matt glided carefully to his corner of their cramped compartment and stuck his drinking bulb to a Velcro strip on the wall next to his monitor. Then he connected his own tether so slight movements didn’t send him drifting away. While the level where they worked featured a tiny taste of microgravity, there wasn’t anything approaching appreciable centripetal force for several more levels in the direction of the rotating station’s hull. “Did anyone call the Marshal’s office yet?”

“About what?” Tom yawned. No doubt he was exhausted by all the work he’d avoided doing so far this shift.

“You must have noticed? The graffiti sprayed all over the door outside.” Matt waved in the direction of the compartment’s hatch.

Dom shook his head. “No. Did it say anything creative?”

“Just the usual. Curse words and stuff about constitutional rights.” As far as Matt could see, two things were never going to change about this job: People did not appreciate content being removed from their news feeds, and it was hard to imagine a less free environment than a space station in geostationary orbit above Titan. It absolutely did not have a constitution.

He could see his colleagues were going to be no help whatsoever. “I’ll send a report myself. Maybe Deputy Marshal Goode can find something on the camera recordings.”

Dom snorted. “He hasn’t so far. Reckon him and that boss of his, Thurm, turn a blind eye to folks giving us a hard time.” 

“I don’t think that’s likely,” argued Matt softly. “We’re a vital part of the station’s day-to-day operations.”

Tom gave Matt a look. “Its most hated part, that’s for sure.”

Dom interrupted. “Hey, Matt. We were saying before you came in, all these new workers coming in—crazy, isn’t it?”

Matt turned to give the round-featured Dom his full attention. “Crazy in what way?”

“You know, too many immigrants.”

He could only blink in response for several seconds. Voice faltering, he tried, “You realize I’m an immigrant too? I’m … I’m not second-generation T-ville, let alone third.” Most residents on the cylindrical station weren’t native born. Titanville had started up production forty years ago with not only a much smaller population, but a much shorter superstructure as well. Both its population and internal volume had been bolstered by waves of migration and investment over time.

Tom shrugged. “Yeah, but you’re different. You’re not really an immigrant.”

“I—what?” Matt was fairly certain he was an economic migrant escaping the poverty of an England ravaged by environmental and economic collapse. It was the sort of thing that stuck in the memory.

“You know,” chimed in Dom, “you’re like us.”

Not trusting himself to say anything, Matt took a sip of his coffee through the straw in the bulb. Given recent arrivals were from Nepal and India, he had a shrewd idea what the two of them meant, and he didn’t like it.

Before he could decide whether to push back with a gentle “I’m not sure it’s nice to talk that way,” Tom threw out another of their timeworn witticisms.

“Shouldn’t you be drinking tea, anyway?”

They laughed so hard it was a wonder they didn’t come untethered.

Matt focused on his work. That inbound comms traffic wasn’t going to censor itself. 

*     *     *
The evening’s diversion was a brief visit to Schlitt’s Bar on the strip, for company and to stave off the boredom of staring at the gray metal walls of his cramped living quarters. Matt had arranged to meet his long-time drinking buddy Dean Worth there, a hockey-loving, maple-syrup-swigging Canadian who loved playing up every stereotype he could think of, mainly to amuse himself. He did draw the line at saying “eh,” which proved he had some self-respect.

Spotting the burly twenty-something amid the crowd and the swirling images of dozens of huge entertainment screens, Matt made his way over, appreciating the commercial strip’s one-third-g. A bar with no gravity did not bear thinking about.

Dean was sporting a red woolen toque knitted hat.

“What’s with the beanie?”

“Gotta lean into that cultural heritage, man,” he answered. “Gotta have something unique going, to get the ladies interested.”

Matt wasn’t convinced the hat would have the desired effect.

Dean added, “I’m gonna ask the waitress whether they serve poutine here.”

Matt rubbed his eyes. “Again? They threatened to ban you last time.” It was an immutable fact of living in space that the nearest cheese curd was on one of the Lunar bases, and as far as gravy went anything resembling that on T-ville should be viewed with a healthy degree of skepticism. While it would be dangerously easy for the bar to concoct a brown sludge, you wouldn’t want to know what went into it.

Dean was appalled by the suggestion he’d be banned. “They can’t deprive me of this place, man. It’s the only thing feeding my soul.”

“You mean you like getting sloshed at Schlitt’s.” The phrase was a running joke on the station, if the term ‘joke’ was applied very loosely.

Dean nudged Matt’s elbow. “You looking to get lucky? That’s Clarice Unwin over there. She’s on the prowl, and she’s kind of your age.”

Leaving aside the crack about his advanced years, he wasn’t in the mood. Also, there was an obvious problem. “She’s married.”

“Heard that doesn’t stop her.”

“You should stop listening to people so much.” On reflection, that wasn’t such great advice—Dean hardly listened to anyone as it was, hence the beanie.

“You could go over there, exaggerate that accent of yours. You’d be in.”

“Again with the bloody accent.” For a moment he wished they were down in the central core so he could float away from the annoying conversation.

“Telling you man, it works great. If I were you, I’d be using that secret weapon every night.”

God, Matt felt tired. “It’s not always the advantage you seem to think.” He was thirsty. Maybe he should start with a non-alcoholic beverage. The homebrew offerings at Schlitt’s were more for getting drunk on than for hydration.

Ah, here was the waitress. He demonstrated his main problem with having a non-American accent on Titanville by ordering. He tried talking normally first. ‘Water’ was, apparently, an exotic, unknown substance. He switched to a manufactured southern drawl and suddenly the waitress achieved complete comprehension. It was a miracle.

Dean had no such difficulty. Satisfied his beer was on its way, he pulled down his hat, muttered, “Tell the waitress I’m over there when she comes back,” and loped off in the direction of Clarice’s mass of dyed hair. So much for stimulating company, thought Matt.

He wasn’t abandoned for long. An entirely too attractive young lady with a warm smile took Matt’s place with startling speed. She introduced herself as Leah Cheshire and promptly announced she was “a proud daughter of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.” Not so proud that she’d stayed, he noted. “So where are you from?”

He answered honestly. “Level 37. Got near enough a third of a g, like this place.” He paid a lot in rent for quarters with that much simulated gravity on the spun-up station and was proud of it.

Part of his brain switched to using American vocabulary, so he’d be understood. He altered a few of his vowel sounds as well, for the same reason. Code switching like that was tiring—not as exhausting as getting a blank expression from the person he was talking to, however.

For some reason, he was still getting that blank look.

“No, I mean before Titanville.”

Matt wondered why it was important to her. “I lived in Ohio for a while, until the US government canceled all green cards. Then I relocated. That was yonks ago. I’ve been on T-ville nearly ten years.” Long enough for him to stop saying “Sorry” every few minutes. Losing that quintessentially English verbal tic had taken a while.

She frowned, maybe thinking she wasn’t getting her point across. Matt had a sneaking suspicion she was, although not the one she’d meant. “No, I mean originally.”

“If you mean, ‘where was I born,’ that’s Northampton in England. I left over half my life ago—”

“Knew it!” she crowed. “You’re English!”

Am I? he thought. I used to be. I’m not sure what I am now. I don’t feel very English.

She wasn’t done. “Wasn’t sure. Figured you could be from New Zealand.”

There were worse fates, he supposed.

“Can I say how much I like your accent.”

He decided to go with Facetious Response Number 47. “Thank you, I’ve spent a lot of time perfecting it.”

She nodded, then processed what he’d said. “You don’t normally talk with that accent?”

He didn’t bother getting into how he spoke with a Midwest twang in most interactions with Americans on the station and how he was dialing it back even now. “Well, we’ve all got accents, when you think about it.”

That made her giggle. “I don’t.”

“You don’t?”

“No, I talk normal.” She put on her big smile again. He wasn’t sure he liked it now. “But English accents are so great.”

He wondered how quickly he could extricate himself from this awful exchange without appearing to be rude. “That’s nice. You realize my accent’s not really English anymore? I’ve spent over two decades in other places—”

“It’s still English,” she insisted.

He remembered the times he’d sent recorded video messages to the few aging family members still alive in Northampton. Their replies invariably included an obligatory remark about how he sounded so American these days. They seemed to believe that was a bad thing, and they weren’t shy at telling him as much. He’d lost his appetite for sending recorded messages after a while.

“Hey,” she said suddenly. “With you being English and all, do you know Phil?”

“Phil?” What was she on about now?

“Yeah, he’s my friend. Met him on a trip to the surface. He moved onto one of the Jovian outposts, but he was from London.”

Titanville was positioned in geosynchronous orbit above the hydrocarbon processing plants on Titan, so he guessed she’d gone on a sightseeing tour conducted out of one of those facilities. As for the rest of what she was saying … “You’re asking if I know Phil from London?”

“Yeah!”

A big part of him wanted to spin it out, ask a bunch of ridiculous follow-up questions, and then pretend that, sure, he knew ‘Phil from London.’

Leah spoiled his fun. “Phil Langer was his full name.”

The waitress brought his water and Matt pointed out where Dean was standing; he was almost finished getting turned down by Clarice.

Then he focused on the name she’d thrown out. No way. “Was he from South Cheam?”

“Is that near Sutton?”

“I believe so. Big bloke, mass of dyed green hair?”

“Blue hair when I met him, but yeah, I think he said it used to be green.”

God damn it. “Yes, I went to university, uh, college with him. He was in my Art of the Twenty-First Century course.”

“Amazing!” she squealed. “I loved that guy! He was so much fun.”

Matt settled for sipping his water and mentally cursing the universe.

*     *     *
Matt ended up getting an early night, deciding to bail on the physically stunning but way-too-young Leah. She was better off with someone like Dean-of-the-red-beanie. Someone exciting. The closest Matt got to exciting was when he forgot to put the cap back on his toothpaste.

Morning brought another shift at work. More inbound data to sift through. Dom and Tom were meant to be reviewing outbound data from T-ville residents pending transmission to various places, like Earth, in-transit vessels, and other colonies. Matt suspected he’d end up doing their assignments as well as his own. They were currently occupied debating whether Taiwan would fall to the Chinese blockade now the USA had pledged neutrality. That was exactly the sort of electronic chatter they intercepted and either quietly misplaced or arranged to get delivered really late, like when it no longer mattered.

People weren’t stupid; they knew their feeds were being interfered with, and they hated it. But you couldn’t let people say whatever they wanted, or hear anything they wanted, not when they lived in space. It was a question of safety. No, more than that, it was a matter of survival.

Tom shouted over, “You meeting with Mr. Speech today?” Mr. Speech was his hilarious nickname for the station commander, Vavrinec Hanover.

“Not that I know of.”

Dom took his turn. “You must piss that guy off, the number of times he hauls you in for a private chat. Wonder you ain’t been fired yet.”

“Guess Matty makes a lot of bad calls,” replied Tom. “He likes to impinge on folks’ free speech an awful lot.”

Matt did not argue the point. He did censor a lot. Residents on a space station coexisted in tight quarters, with hardly enough room to breathe, let alone fling opinions at each other. The rockets bringing supplementary employees to and fro on six-month legs afforded even less space for peoples’ egos. This business in Asia was a good example. There were plenty of Chinese workers on Titanville, not to mention Taiwanese. News from home had an impact here. It was bad enough when tensions boiled over on Earth. Disruptions out here were potentially fatal to everyone. A fight breaks out and a critical worker gets killed or hospitalized? Boom, the station suffers. Maybe workers refuse to pull shifts together in reactor maintenance or hull checks. Boom, there’s a lethal systems failure.

There were cases where rockets had arrived at transfer points under automatic control and the poor sods opening the hatches had found everyone inside dead. All because people couldn’t keep their mouths shut.

So everything in and out of Titanville went through this office. Well, everything except privileged comms. The likes of Commander Hanover or the marshal didn’t have to show anyone what they were transmitting.

Fake news was the worst. Matt purged any unsubstantiated posts on sight. Same with hate speech. There were certain news channels he flat out prohibited because all they broadcast was hate speech and made-up nonsense. Especially that Patriot Party network out of the States. It spewed lies from dusk to dawn.

In Matt’s experience free speech was a worthy ideal when the air you breathed didn’t rely on people getting along. He’d come to think of censorship as an unfortunate necessity.

Not that the SCA shouted about what it did. If pressed, they said they had the resources to only review a fraction of the e-traffic in and out, that Saturn’s outer magnetosphere—with a magnetic field six hundred times stronger than Earth’s—played merry hell with transmissions, that it just took time to download and upload signals through T-ville’s forty-year-old antiquated comms dish. All these reasons were true to an extent. Truth was nuance, after all. And nuance was the only way to stay alive when everyone depended on everyone else.  

Realizing he was staring at his display without taking anything in, Matt tried to concentrate. It was no good. He stared at a date stamp on a file, his mind a fog. 8/9/2249. Was that the eighth of September or the ninth of August? For a full ten seconds his brain refused to supply the answer. Eventually, his synapses unseized and he remembered American date format.

Yeah, that was yesterday’s date. They were backlogged to hell, but he should review the news report. It was from a reputable source, and it was good to find out what was happening in the universe. After a cursory once-over, he could give it a quick stamp of approval and get it out of the queue.

Images flashed across his screen: tanks on fire, drones shooting at houses, soldiers torn apart by depleted uranium shells. The soldiers had maple-leaf flags on what was left of their uniforms. American forces had been massing on the northern border for weeks, but no one had thought the Patriot Party’s bluster was anything more than blackmail over supplying fresh water to the drought-stricken USA.

“Tom, Dom!” he shouted. “The United States has invaded Canada!”

“Huh,” said Dom.

“Look at that,” agreed Tom.

“Guess they had it coming,” they decided jointly.

Matt selected the ‘Hold for Further Review’ option on the news item and opened an IM chat with the station commander. Hanover needed to know.

*     *     *
The big screens were silent in Schlitt’s Bar. Matt suspected Hanover had ordered them switched off. This evening, Matt sprung for a beer and damn the hangover.

Dean was nowhere to be seen. With any luck he didn’t know about the burning of Winnipeg yet. Dean was in the Safety Inspectorate. He had about a million ways of killing people and blaming it on faulty equipment. Dean was not someone the station could do without, either. Not without accidents crippling station operations.

Jesus, didn’t Earth care how their messes spread?

Tonight Matt was hanging with his buddies from the maintenance crew. These guys worked the thankless shifts repairing the aging skin of the dilapidated station. Most of them had been with the station for years, like Matt. Also like Matt they were immigrants from off-station. Eileen was from Mars, while Leon, Alphonse, and Baudouin were from a group that had come from the Congo during Titanville’s boom years—which was enough to tell anyone how long they’d been around.

He could let his hair down with them, what was left of it. At least he had things in common with them. They’d all been forced to leave their home countries for one reason or another. And they didn’t go on about his accent.

There were worse problems to have, he knew that. There was a lot of discrimination he didn’t face because of his skin color. He benefitted from his background most of the time, until he opened his mouth. Even then, he was merely on the receiving end of microaggressions rather than the full-blown aggressions his friends endured.

It wasn’t the seriousness of the comments that drove him up the wall. It was their unceasing drip-drip-drip day in, day out. That’s what got to him.

Alphonse clapped Matt on the back. “You look miserable, moninga ya solo.” He used the Tshiluba phrase for ‘true friend.’

“Bit of a rough day.” He sipped at the tasteless yellow water that passed for beer on T-ville.

His friends exchanged glances. They knew where he worked and what a rough day meant: something bad happening on the home planet. “Oh, aye?” inquired Eileen the Martian.

He cast her a sideways glance. “You know I can’t talk about it.”

Leon scratched at his long gray beard. “You’ve told the boss man, I’m guessing.”

“Waiting to hear back.” That was about as much as Matt felt was safe to say.

“Mukana mua muntu mukole mutu mununka kadi muamba bulelela,” said Baudouin. She looked sympathetic.

“Sorry?” said Matt. “I took French at school.” Bloody Norah, the ‘sorry’ was back.

 She clarified. “An elder’s mouth may stink but it speaks the truth.”

“Well, that’s … nice, I suppose?”

Alphonse laughed. “She means you’re old enough to have gained many experiences. You understand how the world works. And it pays to listen to your advice.” He wagged a finger at Matt. “So Hanover would be a fool not to listen to you.”

“Either that,” said Eileen, “or it’s a comment on the effectiveness of British dentistry.”

They cracked up.

Matt went back to drinking his pint. He’d gotten so good at ignoring comments like that he almost didn’t feel anything inside.

*     *     *
The station commander, Vavrinec Hanover, opened the hatch to his personal quarters and ushered Matt in. “Come on in, Matt. Thanks for meeting with me at such short notice. We have a bit of a situation.”

Matt stepped through the hatchway and was surprised to see Marshal Thurm there too. The wiry old woman’s expression was even sourer than usual.

“I’ll say we do,” she said in an accent that was pure Texas.

“The Canadian invasion?” guessed Matt.

The commander hesitated. “It’s certainly connected.”

“You know how you keep yapping at us that we all gotta be real careful or the lid’s gonna blow off this tin can?” The marshal tucked her thumbs into her belt. “Well, the lid’s half off and your friend, Dean, is the one with the can opener.”

“Dean?” Matt took a deep breath. “How did he find out about the invasion?”

The commander and the marshal raised simultaneous eyebrows.

The answer was obvious. Dom and Tom had reviewed his Hold queue while he wasn’t looking, and they’d released the content. Because, even though they were censors, they believed freedom mattered more than public safety.

They really didn’t get why their job was so important.

“They don’t know, do they?” breathed Thurm. “The other censors. They don’t realize why Hanover keeps having meetings with you.”

“No,” confirmed Hanover. “We thought it best to keep it between ourselves. They don’t know that I have Matt double-check their work and override their decisions. Last thing we want getting out is how much we hide.” Matt had started the department on his own years ago. He’d hoped Hanover hiring Dom and Tom would have helped with the workload. Hope was a funny thing.

Matt held up a hand. “What’s Dean doing, exactly?”

“He’s threatening to overload the electrical lines into the fusion reactor. Without power, the magnetic field collapses. No more reactor. We can’t replace those components once they’re burned out.”

He didn’t need to spell out the final part—everyone on Titanville would die. At the very least, they’d be forced to abandon the station.

“What does he want?”

Thurm let out a snort. “Oh, that’s simple. He wants all the Americans onboard to screw off someplace else.”

Matt blinked at them. Both Hanover and Thurm were from the United States.

“Do you think you could speak with him?” Hanover gave a smile as weak as Schlitt’s beer. “You’re one of his only friends, and the continued existence of the station kinda depends on us talking him off the ledge.”

*     *     *
Matt eased himself through the hatchway of the reactor plant. Normally, it was locked tight. Dean had access, naturally enough—part of his job in the Safety Inspectorate was to check pieces of exposed equipment for embrittlement and general metal fatigue caused by neutron radiation.

They regarded each other in the near-zero-g of the cannister-shaped chamber.

“Hey Dean.” Pipes and wires covered every inch of wall, leading into and out of the sealed mass of the reactor itself at the far end.

“You here to talk me down?” Dean was still wearing his toque. He looked upset.

“Well, they thought you might respond better to someone who wasn’t, you know …”

“American?” He was holding a cable. The end of the thick wire was exposed. Dean would know the exact spot to shove that to blow the maximum number of components.

Matt tried to cram every ounce of the empathy he felt into his expression. Dude, I get it. He suddenly felt his age. He was a man who spent his off hours sketching daily life on the station. He kept to himself. He barely spoke to people. Yet here he was, the weight of a space station on his shoulders.

“They burnt Winnipeg,” Dean sobbed. “They’re shooting civilians.”

“Dean, killing this station won’t change that. You burn those systems out, they won’t be fixed. It’ll cost too much to ship the parts. The Yau-Heisler Conglomerate will pull the plug on us. They’re looking for an excuse. Even if we avoid freezing to death during the evacuation, best case scenario is that thousands of innocent people lose their homes.”

The younger man looked lost. “I have to do something.”

“Absolutely. You should.”

A voice screamed in his ear—the marshal via an earpiece, “The hell you think you’re playing at?”

Matt took out the earbud and put it in his pocket.

“You should do something. But not to us. No one here’s the enemy. Look at where we are, Dean. We’re in the shadow of Saturn. A place completely hostile to human life. Here, we’re all foreigners, even though, yes, there are a few here who forget that. Where each of us are from, it doesn’t matter. The Congo, Mars, China, Taiwan, India, Nepal, England, Canada, and all the other places residents here could list. You think space cares? Out here, all that matters is the void hates us all equally, and unless we work together we’re dead.”

Matt prayed Hanover was doing his part. Because there was a time for censorship and there was a time for openness.

He reached out his hand to Dean. “There are no nations in the Outer System. There’s only community.”

Dean looked down. “The people out there. They don’t think that. I’ve heard them talk. Those keeners you work with for a start. They’re proud of being American.” He frowned, as if in pain. “I’m proud to be Canadian, so I guess I ain’t too different.”

“Everyone on T-ville agrees that what the Patriot Party is doing is wrong, and we’re here for you.”

“No, they don’t—”

Matt talked over him. “And I can prove it. We’ve broadcasted this whole conversation. To every part of Titanville. Now, it’s their turn to speak to you. Listen to them, Dean. Listen, and hear what’s in our hearts.”

Hanover switched on the speakers in the reactor plant, and the sounds of the station flooded in. One by one, voices spoke up: Leah who knew Phil from London; Deputy Goode; Mr. Schlitt who owned the bar; the young woman who ran the coffee booth; Eileen, Alphonse, Leon, and Baudouin from maintenance; the commander and the marshal; even Dom and Tom, who were going to owe Matt big time if they lived through this.

Every one of them declared that what they were now, right now, out here in the empty spaces, was more important than what they had once been, than any stupid country on a world that was tearing itself apart half a Solar System away. They renounced their Earthly allegiances.

They were citizens of Titanville, one and all, and they stood together—at Dean’s side.

Dean gave Matt the cable as tears streamed down his cheeks.

Marshal Thurm crashed in at that juncture and—to borrow a leaf from her way of conversing—arrested his ass.

*     *     *
Hanover was waiting for Matt outside the reactor plant. After Dean was pulled away to the marshal’s lockup, Matt ignored the commander congratulating him and, when a pause arrived, remarked on something that had surprised him earlier. “You got Dom and Tom to join in with that?”

“Sure I did,” answered Hanover. “I ordered them.”

Matt sighed. “They didn’t mean it.”

“Some folks can’t let go.”

That was true enough. Matt shook his head. “I think they forget everyone here’s an immigrant.”

“They also forget why that’s useful.”

Uh-oh. If Matt was any judge, a speech was inbound.

“Take you, for example, in the SCA. You saw that report come in. You instantly held it, and everything else like it. Not everyone would have done that. But you … you see us from the outside. You bring a different perspective. And that perspective allows you to see when we’re going a little crazy.”

The commander was giving him entirely too much credit and using too many words in the process. “If that’s true, it’s only because my own country went crazy beforehand, and I recognize the signs.” He set aside his tendency to joke. “People don’t usually appreciate hearing what they’re doing wrong from an outsider.”

Hanover gave him an appraising look. “You mean foreigner.”

“I suppose I do. Here’s the thing, though. In space, everyone’s the ‘other.’ So how long is it going to take until people like Dom and Tom accept that? How long will it take for humans to leave ideas like country and nationalism behind?”

Or would they bring those ideas with them, no matter how far out into the darkness the human race spread?

Hanover spread his hands wide. “No clue, Matt. In the meantime, the only advice I’ve got for you is to censor as much crap from Earth as you can.”

Amen to that, thought Matt. Amen to that.