There was, of course, the matter of causality, to say nothing of the theological implications of the whole thing. The first angel called Dylan Hobble at 8:34 on a Saturday morning, and told him that his dead wife had been planning to divorce him when she died.
It left this message on his voice mail, which it made it the first case that could be authenticated. Whether it was really the first message was a matter of some debate. It would probably remain so unless the angels themselves decided to clarify the issue, which they might, eventually.
***
Dylan looked at the emails in his inbox and sighed. It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested in what people had to say, because he was, but ever since his name had gotten out he could never actually sort through everything that people had to say. He need a team of people, and he wouldn’t know what to tell them to look for.
What people sent him were messages from the angels. Dylan himself had the dubious and uncertain distinction of being the first person that they sent a message to, at least as far as anybody could tell. He himself knew for a fact that the first message to him wasn’t the first message, but this was knowledge that he shared only with the angels.
He couldn’t decide what to do with the emails, so he did nothing with them. He closed the browser and thought about what he was going to do with his day. Well, no, that wasn’t strictly true. He knew what he was going to do with his time, in the general sense. He was trying to assemble the messages from the angels into something coherent, which was an interesting job for an atheist.
It was also an impossible job, but it was his for the duration.
***
Theology was the big question that the angels presented. Where they angels? If they were angels, did this prove the existence of god? Did this prove that the Judeo Christian god was real? Were all the other religions wrong?
It was several months after the Dylan’s Saturday phone message before they announced who they were.
“Fear not!” they said, “We are angels of the lord.”
That was all they said by way of explanation. No one had ever seen one, and they could have been anything, but the press grabbed a hold of the angel message and that was the name that pretty much everyone had called them ever since. They were certainly miraculous, in any case.
***
Dylan was a writer by trade, and he wondered if that had anything to do with his early call. He was a science writer, or had been a science writer, and he’d authored several medium popular books on various subjects. He wasn’t a household name by any stretch of the imagination, but he made a living, which was essentially the dream of any writer.
Causality. The angels were not, apparently, constrained to one spot in time. When they delivered their messages, it was impossible to know whether they were talking about now, then, or the future. It appeared that everything they said was true, but there was no good way, most of the time, to know when it was true.
Which raised all kinds of questions. Dylan wanted to know, so he was collecting stories and trying to corroborate the messages with actual events. It was harder than it sounded, and it didn’t really sound easy to begin with.
Once it had gotten out that he was apparently patient zero for the angels, his days of not being a household name were over. It was a dubious kind of fame, and it resulted in quite a lot of religious people that either held that he was some sort of prophet or, possibly, the antichrist. Opinions varied.
But it had allowed him to start the project, which he had sold to a publisher for enough money that he probably wouldn’t have to work again.
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