I've been thinking about my five-year plan and how nice it would be to have it appear at the bottom of a TV screen, as where I'll be in five years, without worrying about how I get there, like they do at the end of movies sometimes. That got me thinking about where everybody else around me might be in five years. It was rather fun.

Ellie and Devon will be married, of course. They'll have a barely two-year-old and Ellie will have just told everybody that she's pregnant again. Their children will be awesome, of course. They will have moved to a house with a yard, so that the kids will have a better place to play. They will both still be saving lives on a regular basis and Devon will be the most sought-after heart surgeon on the west coast, probably.

Jeff will still be working at Buy More. He's been there forever. He has no ambition or extra abilities. He just won't do much of anything else. And he has just enough skills that they won't fire him – probably not, anyway.

Lester, on the other hand, thinks himself extremely smart and is occasionally motivated. He's gotten away with a few things in his life. He's going to be in jail in five years for something really stupid. He'll have convinced himself that he really needs money and he'll get way ahead of himself and try to rob a bank or something. It's also possible he'll be running his own failing business, I guess, if he can focus a bit more.

Morgan will also probably still be at Buy More and living in his mother's basement. He might get fired from Buymoria, but he'll find some other minimum-wage job where he can continue to exist and scrape by. I don't think his relationship with Anna will last, but I didn't think it would ever start or get this far, so what do I know?

Anna can do all kinds of things. She's too good to stay at Buy More. She'll be working for some hot-shot computer technology firm. She'll outgrow her rebellion against her parents and find something that makes her happy. She's hard to predict, but she won't be around forever and when she makes up her mind to move on, Morgan won't be able to keep up, even if he tries.

Big Mike will be managing some store. He doesn't have the motivation or skills to move too far up the corporate chain, Peter Principle or not. He might still be at the Buy More. But it's just as likely he'll be at LargeMart or some other random store in the area.

Casey will still be with the NSA. He might still be guarding me or he might have moved on to bigger and better things. I wouldn't be too surprised, though, if this is one of his last active missions. It seems like he's about ready to direct and guide larger missions. I'm not sure he'll enjoy that, but he has the mind for it and he seems to be gaining the other skills necessary to lead, not just do.

Sarah is very hard to predict. She's the only other one who seems as lost as I often feel. She lives very much for the moment. I think her past was bad enough that she doesn't dwell on either the future or the past much. That's healthy, I guess, but it makes planning very difficult to do. She can do anything. She could be leading the CIA. Or she could quit and do anything else she wants. I'm not sure I can see her as a soccer mom living in a house with a picket fence, but she might want that. It's hard for me to tell what she wants because I don't think she really knows what she wants, either.

I would like to believe we would both be happier if her future and my future overlapped significantly. I would like that. Sarah is harder to tell – sometimes I think she wants that but sometimes I think she's scared of it. And sometimes she just wants to be an agent who's not tied down. But our futures seem to be intertwined for a while yet and that increases the likelihood they'll be together longer. We can work out how that looks, exactly, mutually. That would be nice.