quietstorm81 answered: A mother finding out about her daughter’s crush via somewhat unethical snooping in a stash of love letters.
Station night was well and truly underway. She should have been going home. She should be closing down her office and leaving it all to the night crew. It was late and getting later. Her family would soon wonder where she was.
Sheppard would be wanting his bedtime story.
Lyr knew all this. She knew what she was doing was a slippery slope on Mt Morals. But…
The really big but…
Her eldest daughter was growing up and she was still growing into her precog ability. Despite all the safeguards, her daughter could get hurt.
And she’d been having nightmares about that.
The really worrying thing about nightmares for a precog, was that sometimes they came true.
So really, what she was doing was working on a hunch and putting her mind at ease. And fooling herself at the same time.
Lyr opened a data trace on Lyr Marken Junior, and found the password-protected folders in the personal data section in under a minute. Lyr stared at them. Just like the diary in the sock-drawer of days of yore… She could override that security in a cold second.
She turned away from that violation of privacy and checked the more public chat feeds. Hello. That was an inordinate amount of drafts… They were all addressed to one particular male who shared some classes with Lyr Junior.
Hah. that explained the sudden interest in Five-D Calculus.
She bought up his file. Handsome kid, in the latest fashion for patterned-colour buzz cuts. No piercings, but a heritage tattoo. Interesting. He was descended from the Punaba tribe. Nice to see kids recognizing their histories instead of trying to ignore them. Pity for the Markens that their own genetic heritage would have to be a patterned shoulder-band. In a complete circle.
…not that most people’s heritage wasn’t like that, when you looked far enough…
Let’s see… No criminal record. Not an excessive number of behavior corrections in the schooling system… Smart, but Marken women were always big on the brainy sorts. And no data in his files about Lyr Junior.
Would it be telling if she gave her daughter the speech about the fine lines between crushing on someone, obsessing about someone, and stalking someone?
Lyr went back to the saved drafts. Emails. How quaint. Her own disaster-crush in the puberty-zone had involved brush calligraphy and a wax-sealed envelope. She read a few of her daughter’s drafts.
Clumsy. Awkward. Eerily beautiful, in their own way… But all varied attempts at asking a boy who didn’t know she existed to please notice her. All harmless. No red flags.
“You’ll have to pay for mis-appropriating Security property, Officer Marken.”
Lyr yelped. Sherlock, her Cuidgari boss, was looking over her shoulder. “I probably deserved that.”
“Every parent does it,” said Sherlock. “That doesn’t mean it’s right, and it doesn’t mean I approve.”
Lyr shut down her searches and dug out an Hour coin. “I apologize to the office for my indiscretion.”
“The office accepts, provided such indiscretion is not repeated.” Sherlock took the coin. “Talk to her. You get better results if it’s mother-to-daughter instead of officer-to-suspect.”
Lyr sighed, shutting down her station at last. “Yes, sir.”
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