Human Confederacy citizens are, for the most part, under military discipline. I was, for instance, one of those responsible with duties crossing over between my Marine food chain and the Civil Service, since I specialize in security concerns within my colony.

Usually, my role is minimal, beyond, say, being an investigator as well as a lawyer, not that we have many real laws, which means I’m often handling conflicts between citizens. Fortunately, I don’t deal much with the concubines beyond using their testimony.

Don’t laugh here. In the colonies, we have had to cough up some protections for concubines attached to a citizen who is accused of wrongdoing, especially if they were actual witnesses to their sponsors’ wrongdoing. Sometimes those protections don’t go all that far, but, to me, I have snuck most of those I have dealt with off to Demeter, where, given they had the backbone to testify against their owner under veridication, they had a fighting chance to be more than just a slave.

Fortunately, we seldom need to dig quite that deep.

Of course, the thing we seldom get are real oddities. I got a bit complacent with the belief that I wasn’t going to see anything “weird”, even though almost all of the various behaviors of human beings might qualify as weird to someone.

This time, though, the Civil Service rep brought me in on an behavioral discrepancy that the AIs reported.

Never let it be said that there’s any privacy here in the colonies. As, for instance, a township’s hierarchy of AIs never sleeps and listens to everything that is going on.

Call it what you will, but, yes, it qualifies as something most Americans would be appalled by: a Surveillance Society.

So, yeah, there is no privacy within any of the colonies, and, to top it all off, there’s no privacy on board any of our ships, either. Additionally, if you carry a communicator, it’s always talking to an AI.

Perhaps I should clarify things a bit. Almost all of the equipment we make is, to some degree, intelligent, so, in the case of communication devices, kind of like cell phones, there’s a small AI in it, listening.

Don’t look at me like that— no matter how deep I am into security, unless the AIs clear me for it, I cannot find out what anyone on the planet has said. The most I can get from the AIs normally is to let me know that I need to dig for facts. They don’t feel any human is above the others, so, in a way, they keep us from having humans assigned as watchers over others, for... “who watches the watchers”?

Sometimes I think the AIs are constantly testing my skills as a detective, which does piss me off. This time, though, I got called in by the Civil Service and the AIs were willing to give me a summary of the weirdest set of conversations on any of our planets.