My bed at home with its plush Posturepedic mattress, its high-thread-count linens and down-filled duvets is one of my most cherished luxuries. It’s where I rest finally, where I have sex finally, where I dream or better yet don’t. I refuse to feel shrink-wrapped. I won’t sleep trussed up and restrained like a mummy with the circulation cut off in my feet. It’s not that I’m unaccustomed to military quarters, government housing, lousy motels or barracks of one sort or another. I’ve spent countless hours in unwelcoming places but it’s not by choice. Lucy is a different story. While she doesn’t exactly live a simple spartan life anymore she also doesn’t care about certain creature comforts the same way I do.

Put her in a sleeping bag in the middle of the woods or a desert and she’s fine as long as she has weapons, technology and can bunker herself against the enemy, whatever that might be at any given moment. She’s relentless about controlling her environment and that’s another argument against her having a clue she was under surveillance inside her own dorm room.

She didn’t know. Absolutely not.

I decide the video was filmed sixteen, at the most nineteen years ago with high-resolution spy equipment that was ahead of its time. Megapixel multicamera input. A flexible open platform. Computer controlled. Facile software. Concealable. Remotely accessible. Definitely New Millennium research and development but not an anachronism, not faked. It’s exactly what I would expect.

My niece’s technical environment is always ahead of its time, and in the mid- to late 1990s she would have known about new developments in surveillance equipment long before other people did. But that doesn’t mean Lucy is the one who installed covert recording devices inside her own dorm room while she was an intern for the FBI, still in college and as excruciatingly private and secretive as she is today.

Words like surveillance and spy dominate my internal dialogue because I’m convinced what I’m looking at wasn’t recorded with her knowledge. Much less her consent and that’s important. I also don’t believe it was Lucy who texted this video to me, even if it appears to have been sent from her In Case of Emergency (ICE) cell phone number. That’s very important. It’s also problematic. Almost no one has her ICE number. I can count on one hand the people who do, and I carefully study the details in the recording. It started playing ten seconds ago. Eleven now. Fourteen. Sixteen. I scrutinize images filmed from multiple angles.