I want to see this place succeed so I’m just going to say it. We’ve got to do something about the vibe here.

If the golden age of Twitter was old friends catching up at the conference bar the night before the meeting starts, this place is the question-and-answer session the next morning, right after a junior researcher gives a plenary lecture.

Hello! Here's my introduction.

I'm Richard. I'm Director of Research at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.

I'm mainly interested in how people get news in different countries, and how that's changing over time. I'm also interested in anything to do with political communication, journalism, and quant methods/stats.

A lot of my time is spent working on the Digital News Report, a multi-country study of news use: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/

#commodon

There's a funny thing that happens when you go superluminal - Time, as far as radio waves are concerned, travels backwards.

A few minutes in dropspace will take you back decades. A few hours will get you centuries. Too much longer, and you transcend a civilization's history, or at least their transmitted history, altogether.

The first expeditions to Archon Prime found a society dead of a plague; it didn't affect our scientists, of course. Their biology was simply too different. What wasn't different was their radio technology - transmission frequencies, as it turns out, vary shockingly little, and our explorers found the documentation for the underlying technology fairly readily.

The Archon expedition launched a secondary effort, then - a cruiser, rigged for silence and fitted with the most sensitive receivers possible. It departed Archon, into the darkness, skipping between dropspace and realspace by seconds, hours.

As it turns out, the Archonians' (File a complaint with the Archaeological Board if you dislike the name) language was melodic in nature. We heard them sing their final song before their first, listened to them die before we listened to them live. Children born before their grandparents, wars ended before they began.

Skip by skip, the cruiser went, until finally, it found silence - and then history began to play out, one transmission at a time, in the right direction.

Knowing how a story ends devalues the beginning not in the slightest.

#flashfiction #shortstory