“Where two or three are gathered in my name.”
Pastor Reed let the words hang there on the wall display behind him.
Nobody else spoke.
It was sunny outside. He could see below, crews moving black cases across the west auditorium.
Daisy from Product cleared her throat. “I don’t see why that causes a problem with our copy.”
Reed looked at her. “It says Pray With Me.”
“Yes.”
“Who’s the me?”
Ali from Legal shifted in her chair. “FaithLine facilitates prayer.”
“Then we should call it that,” said Reed.
“We tested Guided Prayer and Prayer Partner.”
“And?”
“Lower completion rates.”
“Prayer completion?”
Daisy didn’t answer.
“We don’t believe we’re misrepresenting the system as a person,” said Ali.
“So I’m still not sure where there’s an issue,” said Daisy.
Reed pointed back at the verse on the screen. “How many people are in the room?”
The next FaithLine app release added Pastoral Presence Assurance.
PRAY WITH ME became GUIDED PRAYER.
Underneath, a new option:
PRAY WITH SOMEONE.
“How many human endpoints are still active?”
“Um...twenty-eight.”
A pause.
“For all of Houston?”
“Nationally.”
A longer pause.
“Do we have the legacy routing records anywhere? Any of those that still answer, we’ll use.”
Old churches. Mission rooms. Parish offices. Some of the numbers still worked.
St. Agnes was on the list.
Status:
UNVERIFIED
Father Michael found the phone in the bottom drawer of a rusty filing cabinet.
It was a dark red, but the plastic was dull around the mouthpiece. The cord was stretched out, half coils and half curved wire.
He followed the cable into the wall. Then tracked it up above the old office. Down to the basement and the boiler room. And eventually under a ceiling tile covered in cobwebs and mouse droppings.
He followed the instructions in the email from Cornerstone Tech.
By evening, he’d managed to give the phone a tone.
It rang immediately.
Michael stared at it. Didn’t move until the second ring.
“St. Agnes.”
A recorded voice spoke back to him. “This is the Cornerstone human-presence verification service.”
Michael brushed some dust from his fingers onto his pants. “OK.”
“Please press 1 to confirm a live responder is present.”
Michael pressed 1.
“Responder confirmed. You may now hang up.”
The line went dead.
The first call was the next night. A man asked him to pray for his sister.
Michael did. He stumbled over her name halfway through, but the man corrected him.
“Amen,” the man said when he’d finished.
The next caller started crying before saying a word.
Another had a job interview in the morning.
Michael wrote names on the back of an envelope until it was full.
Near midnight, the phone rang again.
The gate outside creaked in the breeze.
“St. Agnes,” said Michael, as he picked up.
Road noise at the other end.
“Hello?”
A woman spoke. “I tried the Guided Prayer,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I think it helped.”
“That’s good.”
The line crackled slightly.
“It said all the right things.”
Michael cradled the handset on his shoulder, reached across his desk for a fresh envelope.
The woman breathed in.
“Are you real?”
A story from the Static Drift universe.
Article photo by Vitalii Khodzinskyi on Unsplash.