The people so diligently shopping around him were not the kind that one would imagine enjoying any kind of physical exertion that took them away from this climate-controlled lifestyle. He arrived a few minutes before the appointed time to give himself a chance to calm his irritation before the meeting began. Though he was rarely a victim of those emotions which so plagued the human race, the topic that was to be discussed had annoyed him greatly. The various meetings at different malls had been happening since the advent of the first shopping mall in 1956. Before then, they had taken place in randomly selected large marketplaces; the best places to avoid being overheard are, of course, the ones that are the busiest. As he wryly mused on this little-known fact, the person that he had been a
