The conspiracy, a short story of fiction.

The needle went under my skin and the tube filled with a thick, burgundy liquid. It was not the first time I gave my blood to get tested but it was always a little bit unsettling for me. I looked at the nurse who was keeping up a chat with me. She asked seemingly innocent questions but as the minutes went and we got more accustomed, they became more private. General things mostly, nothing too suspicious if you are not looking for skeletons in someone's closet.

I glanced over, at the clock, which featured time that moved painfully slow, the seconds seemed to almost stand in place. My eyes wandered to the other nurse, who was sitting a couple more meters from us and filling my file. I knew the yellow, damaged pages well, the thick file also tended to always give the owner of that folder away.

The nurses had always been chatty. Most hospitals had them that way. They needed to spend their time in one way or another and the only thing that changed in this office was the people. I watched from the corner of my eye as the second nurse scribbled something in the journal every time I spoke. Like a psychologist would do, to record your thought patterns and behavior nuances. Did I have kids? How many? Did I travel? How often? Where? A comment about how wonderful travel is. Did I have an insurance? Did I choose the bigger or cheaper flight companies? What I did for hobbies. All the usual questions for a pleasant enough chit-chat. But if you were someone like me, you knew that that information was valuable for someone.

''Could I see my file?'' I must have startled them, one of the nurses jumped, the one typing away before.

I was still watching her from the corner of my eye. She took out a page she had written in and closed my file. Then she handed it to me, keeping that page behind her.

''Here you go ma'am'' She was smiling but her voice had that tone, a kid caught with his hand in a cookie jar.

"I would like to see the page you filled with the information I gave you.'' I pointed my finger behind her back. The nurse taking my blood had finished and my movements were not restricted. She stayed silent, I knew she knew, too. She had tried to block my view enough times for a trained professional to notice it.

''It is my personal notes, I am sorry, I can not provide you with these." I smiled. Just a friendly smile, the ones a fool makes.

"I was just curious... Never mind.'' her face showed relief. ''However, I have my inspection badge with me and you are obligated to show that to me.'' I got up and pulled the smushed pages from my back pocket. I let one of the nurses open the document and read it.

The paper came to me reluctantly. I looked at it only for a second before folding it and putting it into my back pocket. I already knew what it was. All the information they could get out of me during my short visit. And they were good, I was guessing that the printer wasn't even a nurse.

This was a government hospital. The fifth this week. The last one that we were going to check.

''Your credentials, please.'' I asked the usual questions and the answers were the same, they collected all info unknown to the patients and then sold it for the highest bidder as well as recorded it with the government. It worked for various purposes, commercial, psychological, tax evasion. But it did not matter, at the end of the day, it was illegal. I took all of the files they had gotten today and put them in my bag.

This was the biggest hospital on the south side. As I left my appointment and entered the lobby, I beeped my office and waited. There were at least 300 people commuting here every hour, just through the lobby. Much more were waiting, sometimes for hours. All of them had been recorded and added to the hospital's file. Some would have given up that information willingly but most would never.

I had taken a seat on a bench but got up from it five minutes before 6 PM, I walked to the customer window that was closed but had a receptionist sitting behind it. She pointed to the ''closed'' sign and I showed her my badge. She smiled, pleasantly enough, and asked me what was that I was looking for and if I wanted to speak to the director who was about to leave the premises. My answer was ''no'' but I did ask for the com system and she handed it to me.

''Dear patients, this is a health inspection Agent 183 speaking, please remain calm and take a seat or take positions by the wall. In the next minute, a team of inspectors will arrive. We are here following the violation of the freedom act, clause 254. Your personal information has been collected to be sold to third parties. Please remain calm so we can apprehend the guilty party. If you wish to find out what information has been gathered about you, please come to this window, we will have an agent in place in a short while.'' our motto was ''total transparency'' and I upheld it. Always. People were used to it. It was our way. That is why the government and the independent companies were is such a hot water.

They would have to step down, people would be arrested. And for all that time they had operated, which had been years under the radar, people would have to be compensated. They had gotten sloppy and greedy, that was the only reason we had found out. But they would be charged now, even if they shredded the papers, which they had no time to do.

I noticed the director turning around to hurry back to his office the second my team charged through the door. They knew how he looked and approached him immediately. The people stood silent, dumbstruck. This was a crime our world had never seen before.

---

This was a very interesting dream of mine where, in the lobby, the director posed as a patient and told me that it did not really matter that people collect his info, he did not mind. I was dumbstruck but pulled out a stack of papers that I had acquired and started calling names. The first one belonged to a girl that had her mom with her. There was everything that the girl, maybe 7 or 8 years old) had said. As I handed out the papers of people and they were distraught, the director left the crowd and the building only to be rushed back in by my team.

I made that change as it was a little bit confusing in my dream. Often you do not know how you got from point A to B so you have to come up with the journey yourself. I think it was great how it came out, the story. Not too complicated and impossible. Oh, and I might not have said this before but my stories do not happen on Earth and people do not usually look like humans. In my dreams they do but in my story universe, they do not.

I try to put each story in a different category of species and this(steemit) is sort of, kind of my diary, where stories are kept.

Thank you for reading! Have a great day today, tomorrow, and forever!
Linda.