Chapter 5

The next morning, we showered together with a concentration on the naughty parts. Hey, Man, that was fun. We ought to do that more often.

We now had enough experience with this city to decide to move in and claim it as our own. For lack of a better idea, we decided to call this city “Miami” and our current apartment “home.” I told AI to fly the 797 to Miami and to park it as near as possible to the bunker entrance that we had used for the Humvee. As soon as we could, we would unload the plane and store the stuff it contained inside the bunker complex. My idea was to keep the cargo away from wild critters. I did not know what we could do to preserve the plane itself. Besides, with one bad set of tires and limited fuel, I didn’t know how we could use the plane.

The women suggested that we explore the bunker system to see what was really here. Looking at a map did not do much to tell us what we had stumbled upon. That sounded like a good idea, so I decided to accompany them. As a safety precaution, I asked them to take their Barettas and I would take an L-gun. As long as we were down here in the buried bunkers, I couldn’t see that we would need any more protection than that.

The little transportation vehicle that we had been using was still just outside our door, so we were ready to go as soon as we stepped out into the corridor. We climbed in, and Karen selected a destination on the far side of the city. She said that it seemed to her from the writing on the map to be a manufacturing point for family games. She was interested in that because she wanted to see what kind of toys might be available.

It was well on the other side of the city, and even with no traffic, it still took us nearly 20 minutes to get there. In the process of getting to our destination, we seemed to pass closed door after closed door that we were told were ordinary apartments, and all of them were empty at the moment. I didn’t want to bother AI while he was flying the 797, but when he landed I was going to ask him to have signs in English put up over the doors of interesting or important places.

We arrived at the toy factory and went inside to see what there was to see. Well, this was a vast operation. I got the impression that this was the only such plant in Miami, and they made everything that fit into the definition of “toy” or “recreational item.” This must have been the place where one went to purchase an item because there were aisles after aisles of goods on display. Some were set up for demonstration, but we could not read the available instructions even if the displays were in operating condition. However, we could recognize things like balls of various sizes, and some were hard while others were soft, as if they were filled with air.

We came across something that looked to us like a skateboard and tricycles in various sizes. Anyway, we spent the rest of the morning wandering through the place without seeing everything that was on display. Eventually, we got tired and saturated with seeing things which we could not identify, so we headed home to eat lunch. By this time, AI had landed the plane and was available for interpreter duties.

We asked him to relay to our home that we were coming back for lunch. While we were on the tram, I couldn’t think of a better name, I requested the signs I wanted. It occurred to me that all of the signs everywhere would eventually need to be translated into English for our convenience, so I asked for that project to be started.

After another excellent lunch, Jane asked for some robots to be sent to unload the cargo from the plane. She wanted to supervise, so I suggested that she swap to an L-gun as her sidearm since she would have to go outside some of the time. AI set up a separate communication circuit for her to use to command the robots. The local AI could understand simple English by this time, so AI would not have to translate except occasionally.

For our convenience in finding any other useful devices within the cargo, Jane was going to set up a display section of one each of all of the items in the cargo with a reference to where the item was stored so that any of us could find that item easily. It turned out that there were enough currently unused large stasis chambers where all of the cargo could be stored. Jane decided to put all of the cargo in stasis to make sure that it was preserved in pristine condition.

That was when it dawned on me to have the remaining jet fuel removed from the plane and stored in stasis. Who knew when we would find a use for it? There was not much as far as the plane was concerned, but there were still hundreds of gallons of unused fuel that might come in handy.

Finally, a project was instituted to disassemble the 797 itself and store it. Why? I had no idea, but why not as long as space was available? The local AI said that the former people had flying machines, but nothing as large as the 797. That prompted me to ask about these “flying machines.” As far as I could tell from the descriptions, these flying machines seemed to be like the light planes of Earth, but were not very popular before the great war. The local AI did not have any idea for this lack of popularity.

Any long distance traveling was done by personal vehicle, and that was the explanation for the grid of major highways. Sometime soon, I wanted to investigate these flying machines in detail. Potentially, they could offer a great source of transportation for exploration. God knows, we needed to explore this land that we had inherited.

Dammit, that reminded me to ask the local AI for a picture of the surface of the moon. Examination of that might well tell us if we were on a version of Earth. I had nothing significant planned for the afternoon, so I asked for the picture to be displayed in our sitting room.

Karen and I went in to see the picture, and we were amazed that it looked identical to the Moon that we could have seen from our Earth. To us, that indicated that, for practical purposes, we were on an Earth with a different history from what we’d had. The first thing that occurred to me was that this Earth had missed the collision that had wiped out the dinosaurs around 65 million years ago.

I asked the local AI if there were any record of such an asteroid near miss, and that resulted in nearly a full minute of archive searching. Yes, scientists had found evidence of a near miss roughly that long ago, and the same asteroid was predicted to show up again in around 4 million years. This time, there was a very good chance of an impact with the planet. Well, we didn’t expect to be around at that time, but I suggested that the local AI should warn whoever did live here of the potential problem in enough time to do something about it.

Well, that asteroid miss explains a lot. The mammals never took over the planet in this dimension because the dinosaurs were never wiped out. That also could explain the slight advance in science and technology on this version of Earth. The dinosaurs might have worked slower to develop their technology, but they had a few million extra years to do it.

I got another thought: was flying not very popular because of the descendants of the pterodactyls? That could explain the “birds” that AI saw on the radar shortly after we arrived here. That means that if I ever go back to flying, I am going to have a gun with me!

That night, I begged off on any fucking, saying that I was still pretty tired from our previous effort. The women agreed, and I was able to relax without worrying about hurting somebody’s feelings. We used the bed in “my” bedroom and I slept between the two women. This time, we cuddled before sleeping, and that seemed to be just what the doctor ordered as far as the women were concerned. Just before we went to sleep, Karen admitted that her vagina wall was still sore from the previous fucking. Uh-oh, that was something that needed looking into. I was going to ask about medical facilities tomorrow.

The next morning, I made it my first item of business to ask AI to check into what kind of medical facilities were available. I was especially concerned now because Karen said that her vagina was still sore. AI consulted with the local AI and all that they could come up with was a diagnostic and treatment compartment that the previous people had used. This device had its own computer, so we were not sure what to expect from it. The local AI said that the previous people had never had any reason to be disappointed with the treatment they got from the compartment, and it looked like we had no choice, since none of us had any more than the basic first aid training.