"Joseph, this isn't working."
As she spoke, her voice raised slightly in the crowded coffeehouse, Claire looked at her hands as if they were more somehow interesting than the guy she was dumping. And maybe they really were; I loved her hands.
"What isn't working?" I asked, feeling foolish before the words had fully escaped.
"You know what I mean." Now it was the vidpanel behind me that held her attention; her hands, perhaps feeling as rejected as I did, drifted softly to her lap in the lunar gravity. I glanced over my shoulder; the display was tuned to a news upfeed from the E.U., currently 'casting a story about the ongoing debate over voting rights for native-born Lunies. Ironic, really, since she had come from Earth only a year before, on a lavish scholarship, to study lo-grav physics at the U. I was the one born and raised in Montes Taurus Dome, the one whose civil rights were being decided on a planet I'd likely never be able to afford to visit.
Claire continued her stumbling attempt to let me down easy, but it was already too late; like her, my attention was wandering. While I looked in her general direction, my ears strained to pick up the voice of the reporter coming from behind me. Now he was talking about the proportionality of lunar mineral rights among the E.U., the Asian Confederation and the U.S. -- or, as we natives call it, "looting." They won't let us vote, but they're happy to pay subsistance wages for us to strip-mine our palladium and drop it down the gravity well back to Earth; easier than dealing with their own "third world."
Colonialism was back with a vengeance. And Claire? Claire was the plantation-owner's daughter.