If You Don't Hear From Me Again, This Is A True Story

"We're all being watched," he said to the wide-eyed sales assistant, "All of the time."
He gestured expansively. She giggled.
"Of course we are, every store is fitted with security cameras."
He sighed and handed over the money. That wasn't at all what he'd meant.
It was a good coffee, though. He drank it with relish as he walked through the park to his home, smiling at the warm sunshine. Whoever was watching him should be jealous, he though, stuck in a stuffy little office on a day like this.

People called Ernest Truffle paranoid, and he called them ignorant. Was it his fault he knew more about surveillance technology than the everyday citizen? Was it his fault the rest of the world was so oblivious to the government's actions?He had worked out what was happening when he was 23 years old, and it had been the day his life changed. At first it had been the strangest thing in the world - to live under constant surveillance, to eat and sleep and bathe with unseen cameras recording every moment. He'd spent hours on end searching and never found a thing, but that just meant they were more clever than he was. In time he stopped searching, and then he stopped caring.

--

"Ernest is talking to us again," Sarah announced, turning up the volume at her station. "Do you think we should log this?"
"Depends on the content," Alice said with a sigh. "If he's just ranting again there's no point."They listened for a while, pale faces intent amidst the monitors' glow.
"I know you're there," Ernest said to the empty darkness of his bedroom. "Watching me. Recording me. Taking notes on everything I say."
Sarah's pen stopped moving, and she glanced over at her colleague.
"You don't think-?"
"No. He's guessing. He's not even sure we ARE here."
"He seems sure."
"He has no proof, and no way of getting any," Alice insisted. She rubbed at her forehead and sighed again. "I need a break. Can you handle things here for a while?"
"You may as well go home, Al. He's a heavy sleeper, I doubt there'll be a need for even one of us tonight, let alone both."
"Thanks, hun," Alice patted Sarah's shoulder as she passed. "I owe you one.""Another one," Sarah replied, and they laughed.

"I hope they're paying you a lot," Ernest said, "I can't even image how fucking boring it must be, just watching me all day."
"Boring for some," Sarah whispered. At her prompt the camera zoomed in on Ernest's face, and she watched as he closed his eyes. He was still talking, but more softly now, about the weather outside, about his day, about nothing in particular. He often talked himself to sleep.
"Get out and have a life of your own," he said finally, "You're only dying, in that office."

Before Ernest, Sarah HAD felt that her job was just a slow and dull death. But then she'd been put onto "The Truffle Case", and in a way her life had changed. He was the only person in the city who believed without a shred of doubt in what she did. Oh, others guessed, or wondered, or feared that it was so. But only Ernest Truffle really knew what was going on. Sarah sure of this, because she'd checked, using her precious free time to search millions of profile records.

She fell asleep at her desk, the office filled with the hum of the computers and the soft rumble of Ernest's snores.