Nine-thirty. The book Emily was reading slips from her hands as she falls asleep.
Her angels disappear from her room…
…and appear at their desk.
On the “Human’s Ambient Sound” speaker, they hear a dog barking in the distance, which wakes up their charge. Her angels disappear from the great hall...
...and reappear at her bedside. Emily puts her book on her night table, snuggles under her covers, and quickly slips into sleep again.
Her angels disappear from her room…
…and reappear at their desk.
“Great exercise,” David says.
But Angela simply stares at the monitor, watching Emily sleep; Jasper whispers; Stephanie computes. After a while, David stands up, looks around their area of the great hall, and starts to pace. The teams in many of the surrounding cubicles diligently attend to their tasks, while other cubicles are empty because that team’s human is still up and about.
David overhears one angel talking to the rest of her group: “I know, you could have this woman’s phone line go down and send this repairman over there and on the way, he could run into—”
David roams down the aisle a little more. As he passes an unangeled (yes, well, we can’t exactly say unpeopled, can we?) cubicle, David spots a heretofore unnoticed small monitor showing a human being doing her human thing and her angels doing their angelic things. Since David is always away from the desk while he and the team are with Emily, he’s never seen that a monitor plays the whole human/angel day in their absence. He leans closer to see what this particular human is up to: she tosses items into her grocery cart and heads a little further down the supermarket aisle. Nothing very monumental here. He straightens up and notices that Angela has stopped watching Emily and instead has her eyes on him.
“Everything’s monumental,” Angela says.
“Pardon?” He’s irritated at himself for slacking on his duties as well as for thinking something he’d rather not have his superior pick up on.
“It’s okay.”
There she goes again! David strides back to the cubicle devoted to Emily. His irritation doubles, then quadruples onto itself—he’s irritated at himself for being irritated, which only increases the irritation. He whistles in an attempt to clear his mind.
“That woman at the supermarket is about to have eye contact with a man who appears to be alone, but isn’t—his girlfriend is just further down the aisle. The man’s attention back to this woman sends his girlfriend into a rage because it’s just the very last straw on the camel’s back, as humans like to say. But mostly because it’s the higher road on her path. She’s going to leave him, then meet the man she’s going to marry, and together they parent a child who is eventually going to be the President.”
She lets David digest the vast implications of a trip to the supermarket. “But the future’s always in motion, as Penelope told me,” he finally comments.
“Right, but some things, like who’s going to be President, are somewhat fixed. They have to be.” She lets him think about that for a few moments, too.
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