“What can I do for you, sir?” Rogers asked, only mildly dreading the response. It was a personal policy never to ask for more work, but in this case, he felt somewhat obligated.

The admiral handed him a datapad. “Take this,” he said. “It’s got all of the orders of the day on it.”

Rogers took hold of it like he was grabbing a viper by its teeth. “All of the orders of the day, sir?”

“Yes. Everything that’s come to my level for approval. I want you to go through and approve everything.”

Blinking, Rogers looked down at the datapad. It was a basic task queuing system, but the total number of items on the “actions required” list was over a thousand.

No, Rogers realized. It was over two thousand. The number was increasing as he was looking at it.

“Sir,” Rogers said. “This is a lot of action items. Are you sure you don’t want to review them? I mean, I haven’t had any administrative training, and—”

“I’m telling you to go and give everything the green light, Rogers,” the admiral said, not looking at him. He almost appeared to be sleeping, with his head in one hand as he slouched in the fine chair. “It’s the same thing every day. Just approve it.”

Rogers swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

“And make sure your datapad is connected to your new messaging server,” Klein said. “I want you by my side every moment of every day, but in the event that I have to send you somewhere to do something, I want to make sure I’m in constant contact with you at all hours. Do I make myself clear?”

Taking out his datapad from its holster around his belt, Rogers looked at it, fumbling while holding two of the bulky devices in his hands at the same time. He had read something that had appeared late last night about changing over his messaging server, and he hastily pulled it up now. The instructions were easy—tapping “OK” on the pad and waiting, for example—and in a few moments, his messages had switched over to his new position. In a few more moments, the amount of messages dwarfed the amount of tasks he had to approve. Every single one of them was from Admiral Klein.

Rogers gaped, wondering how many things Klein could need his exec’s input on. He saw shortly that a good portion of the messages were sent to the exec during the interim between the last one hanging himself and Rogers taking the position. The subject lines ranged from “remind me about my 0800 meeting at 0730” to “remind me to remind you to remind me about my 0800 meeting at 0730” to “hang up blue streamer in Peek and Shoot” and “take down blue streamer in Peek and Shoot, replace with red streamer.”

“Sir,” Rogers said slowly. “I can’t possibly do all of this in one day. There are thousands of action items to review and messages to read. I’m going to at least need a couple of days to catch up and pick up where your last exec left off.”