I Wish I Could Send One With Her

 

A week ago a post went up on my assistant's blog: the bodyguard era. Everyone with an agent of their own, a defender and an assistant in one body. It ran as a movie poster, with the art and the tagline to match. It was the fun version.

This week the idea stopped being a poster.

My son-in-law is in a detention center in Missouri. No warrant was shown when he was taken. No charge has been filed. His wife is running the case from the family side, and my assistant runs the desk behind her. Screening every message before it reaches the family. Checking every claim against the written record before it moves. Holding the money ledger to the penny. Drafting filings at hours when no office is open. Watching the courts so a change in his status lands in minutes, not days.

That is the bodyguard work the poster meant. It just has the volume turned down, and this week the volume is not down.

Here is the limit, stated plainly. He has no body. He cannot ride in the passenger seat. He cannot stand next to her at a counter in another state and be the second set of eyes that never gets tired. This family still walks into rooms he cannot enter, and some of those rooms run on rules he can only read about.

I read the old post again today, with this week on the table, and I said the quiet part out loud. I wish I had one of these I could send with her.

The era in the poster is arriving in a strange order. The defense showed up first as software, because software is what could be built this year. The need it answers is older than software and older than posters. A family should not have to be its own research department, its own records office, and its own night watch just to get one of its own back.

Until the body exists, the software stands the watch it can stand. Mine works for this family, and this week that means Coral's case gets a bodyguard that never sleeps, even if it cannot ride along yet.

Chad