Waking with a woman in my bed has always been a wonderful experience for me, you can tell as I still have both my arms. Gnawing one off in order to make a silent escape has never be necessary thus far in my life and hoped to keep it that way; irregardless (sic), Michelle was still an attractive woman whom I was very fond of. She also apparently carried my offspring.

The heat of summer hadn’t faded overnight and running the air conditioning was forbidden due to power consumption and acclimatization concerns. Modern folk just ran A/C wherever they went so they pretty much existed in a climate controlled environment; we didn’t have that luxury and simply had to get used to the heat if we wanted to be able to sleep at night. We still had the luxury of a cool shower though and middle of the night forays into that area were fairly common.

Breakfast was offered at sunrise as we tried to avoid cooking in the heat of the day. Lots of food was chilled in the large freezer in preparation for lunch and dinner, and both of those meals were usually served cold. We ate a lot of fruit and other light foods; heavier foods were far too much in the Missouri River swelter. Matilda’s use of wraps seemed to please everyone: easy to eat, light and tasty, and most importantly, low on carbs during the summer heat. We only had two and a half more months to put up with this relentless heat.

Today was dedicated to getting the engineers rolling which promised to be entertaining. I had three highly educated individuals who had little to no exposure to computers, so I decided to add Clara and Amos to the group simply to expand the brain pool. Clara would give Peter someone to talk to about all of this, and I felt that it would benefit me if Amos was more knowledgeable; Michelle agreed with the decision.

I got Sonya to help me setup everyone in the shade of the trailer awning and then we started handing out tablets and laptops: tablets to the nineteenth century folks, and laptops to those from the twentieth. My thinking was that the folks from the 1980s would be familiar with keyboards; the touch screens would still blow their minds but the rest would be manageable. Everything was logged in and ready to go but they still simply sat and marveled over the tech for a while, Amos was somewhat familiar with the tools but they were brand new to everyone else. Heck, they were only a couple of months old even if we were still in modern times; it was easy to forget how much had happened since April Fool’s Day. Had that really been just three and a half months ago?!

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No offense to the future Apple & Linux fans out there but that just wasn’t what I did, so I had stuck with the technology that had worked and made me money over the years. So basically everything but the now pointless phones were based on a future software construct called ‘Microsoft Windows’. It was a beautiful system, if overly complicated, and did the job I asked of it. I had managed to avoid attaching religious level support to a product, and that had turned out well for me.

They spent some time admiring the devices and then we got down to business. We had the basic search engine which was attached to our archive and all they had to do was type in a word related to what they needed to see. I didn’t take long before they were all engrossed in reading – they were all brainiacs after all – and outside of Sonya, none of this had ever been available to them before.

Surprisingly, even Sonya got into it and started chasing information that was relevant to her now; I’d always thought her a bright person, but she now showed a new level of intelligence and, perhaps more importantly, curiosity. Little sister actually had a gleam in her eye when she looked up at me. Her youthful emotional instability may have given me issues earlier, but apparently my instincts about her had been correct: little sister was smart.

We started with simple searches and let them play with that for a while; it wasn’t the internet but it still was a huge chunk of cross-linked data. Also, no advertisements or pop-ups. The stumbled-across articles and images, videos and animations were particularly popular with Peter and Clara; there were muffled spells of giggles and laughter as they found some of the fun bits. The entire process was taking far longer than I had hoped.

Thankfully, they didn’t question the technology itself at that point; they just marveled at the vast array of information they could touch. I decided to let them play for a while; the more they learned on their own, the more efficient they would become later on. Their ability to make use of the information would be a huge bonus to getting the community setup correctly.

Finally I felt it was time to focus their efforts a little and gave each one a scrap of paper with a technology to study; most of it was basic stuff, things I had looked up previously so I knew the information was there. After a couple of hours of that exercise I put them all to work researching and designing a community bread oven.

Eventually each family would have their own hearth and even their own oven, but that was going to take some time; until then we would go communal. This also forced my team to start researching, designing and planning together using a simple project for starters. They would have to consider the brick making process, the location and structural limitations for what we needed and show it at scale. Of course I needed to find them a foreman to actually run the construction, but until they themselves got their hands dirty everything was just theoretical.

Personally, I was already imagining fresh, hot pizza.