Chapter 52

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Her Grace breathed as calmly and deeply as she could.  She must not let body fail her again.  She had too much to do.  She did not doubt that the doctor had a good heart.  She doubted that the doctor was strong enough to see the truth.  Sometimes what appeared to be cruel was necessary to achieve God’s wishes.

She spoke to her new wheelchair.  “Roll forward!”

“Shall I roll forward?” the machine asked in a pleasant and well-modulated female voice. She had thought the obviously mechanical voice of her speech recognition software was bad, but this was worse.  A machine should sound like a machine and not one of the acolytes.

“Roll forward!” she repeated and the machine rolled slowly forward.  When she was within four feet of her computer she commanded, “Slow down!” A foot away said, “Stop” and the machine rolled smoothly to a stop.  If only her human servants were so efficient.

“Open voicemail,” she commanded in her angelic voice.

It was somehow satisfying for her to hear the mechanical question, “Do you want to open voicemail?”

“Yes,” she said.

She scanned the news headlines on all her RSS feeds.  The stories had been planted.  “Scroll down.”

The voice recognition software said, “Do you wish to scroll down?”

She inured herself to the tedium of the conversation and focused her attention on the stock trades.  By the time her conversation was done she had shorted nearly a million shares of stock and bought puts on another 100,000 shares.  She estimated that within a week when she sold the puts and covered her short positions, she would have added another $6 million to church coffers.