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Narrative

Watch Yourself

Ever since Lou Corlin had delivered his little warning (presumably from Ken Redmond), Spruance Del Curtin had been feeling on edge. Not just that fluttery feeling of unease before an important exam, or the uncertainty of dealing with a situation that could go either way. Instead, he was feeling very much as if he were being watched.

He’d tried to tell himself not to be paranoid. Of course there were cameras and microphones in all the public areas. That was pretty much a given in a lunar settlement, just like it was on a spacecraft or in a space station. There were procedures for accessing the recordings, which ensured that they couldn’t be used for inappropriate purposes, whether that be idle curiosity on the part of neighbors or vindictive spite on the part of authority figures.

But it wasn’t just knowing that the public areas of the settlement were monitored. No, he was struggling with a feeling that he was being watched by people, not just the ever-present machines. That someone, or more likely several someones, were monitoring his activities because someone in authority had decided that he’d crossed a line that couldn’t be ignored.

It would be so much easier if it had been just an issue of hitting on girls. Say, he’d paid a little too much attention to someone whose parents objected, whether because they thought he was too old for their daughter or because they just didn’t like Sheps in general. But he was getting a real feeling that it was a whole lot bigger than that, especially since he really had been too busy lately to spend much time on what would often be one of his favorite pastimes.

Lou’s comment might well have been oblique, but it strongly suggested that someone was not pleased about his interest in something. But what would be the subject that they were so determined to shut him out of that they’d be sending one of his colleagues from the station to warn him off in such vague ways that it verged on the passive-aggressive?

All the way to the station offices, Sprue mulled over those thoughts. Who could he even approach to try to figure out what was such a closely guarded line of inquiry that his curiosity was so unwelcome?