Chapter 172: Engineers in Toy Land

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?!

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.