Brad turned out to be incredibly correct. The world continued to try and deal with the fallout of the worst corruption case in the history of the most powerful country on the planet. Congress, the court system, and the White House were engaged in a daily power struggle as more and more members of the Drone conspiracy came to light. Accusations flew, denial was the new national sport, and slowly our government burned itself from both ends.
The rate of new Spider-converted AI systems slowed, at least according to the special task force created by the president. Harper’s own take on the situation, backed up by our in-house copy of Rikki, seemed to lean toward agreeing with that assessment. However, damage continued to be done to food and water systems worldwide. The initial damage to the US crop system by both flooding and accidental herbicide application was enough to push the price of grain futures higher by twenty percent when the first estimates of crop yield came out.
In the volatile Middle East and North African regions, where over seven hundred million people lived in countries whose agricultural systems could only support about ten percent of that number, the higher cost of imported grain was already being felt. The subsidized food programs that allowed those populations to outgrow their carrying capacities were struggling to pay for the amount of food needed. Even in an overstimulated news media, these stories were starting to be heard.
We continued to stock our own supplies, plant our own crops, and interact with the greater communities around us to build relationships.
A week after Kayla and Boyle’s arrival, another pair arrived. A husband and wife team of certified teachers who had met each other working summers on an organic farm in Maine. Between the two of them, they were qualified to teach English, math, and science, kindergarten through the twelfth grade. They had two small children, no other extended family, and were extremely worried about the near future.
Two days after that, a pair of married women showed up, one wife an accomplished machinist and professional welder, the other a registered nurse.
Four days after the machinist and nurse left to pack up their lives, an electrical engineer and her biochemist husband arrived. In addition to their technical skills, both were accomplished amateur musicians. In fact, all of the people we interviewed displayed depth beyond their valuable career skills. The nurse was also an herbalist, and the machinist crafted high quality furniture as a hobby.
Our subcommittee built out a draft of a constitution which they submitted to the rest of the community for comment. And comment we did. It went back for modifications while we continued to forge ahead with our plans.
There was an enormous amount of work to be done. We needed to accumulate equipment and parts, tools and machines, stockpiles of food and medical supplies. We outlined what we needed and then assigned individuals to handle it. If those individuals had insights into their tasks, and they all did, then their feedback was listened to and changes made.
As much as possible, we standardized where we could. We only bought machinery that was compatible, as much as possible, with our other equipment. We stockpiled tools, ammunition, and spare parts of the same brands, calibers, and weapon types for maximum interchangeability.
The twins were tasked with visiting as many farms as possible, spreading our consumable food purchases across the local community. Too young to drive, they took a different member of the security team with them each day, which had the dual effect of keeping them safe and introducing us to our neighbors. One of their many subtasks was to keep on the lookout for useful books to become the genesis of a reference library of printed hard copy. Oddly, a lot of that material was either very, very cheap or, in some cases, completely free. Vermont is very progressive, and most landfills and transfer stations had some manner of free swap shop where people could leave unwanted but still viable goods for others to use. The result was a quick influx of books to fill the shelves of the base’s old library. And it wasn’t just nonfiction that made its way onto the shelves, but a constantly growing collection of purely entertainment-oriented books as well.
With Kayla’s help, we scouted our entire property to ensure both the integrity of the fencing and to take a census of what game lived within its confines. Several breaches in the fencing were fixed, which locked in a resident population of deer and locked out the two local packs of coyotes that would have hunted them. We also had turkeys, squirrels, rabbits, partridge, raccoons, skunks, porcupines, fishers, weasels, and muskrats. Our little pond held bullhead, bass, and perch, along with snapping turtles, painted turtles, bullfrogs, and whatever waterfowl wanted to visit. Kayla was designated as the compound game warden to watch over the deer population, in particular, and the rest of the game as well.
Hannah worked on equipping and setting up a medical clinic, Martin and JJ were in charge of the motor pool and garage, Aama the kitchens with Sarah’s mother helping her, my grandparents tackled the greenhouse and supervised our communal gardens, Boyle set up a forge and metal working shop in the garage facility, Kayla helped me with the arsenal, and Astrid worked closely with Gabby and Monique with the outreach program. And we all helped each other wherever and whenever needed. Time passed in a blur, interviewees arrived and left, and the first successful candidates moved in. In fact, the teachers and the machinist-nurse couple arrived the same day, the engineer and chemist arriving two days later.
The teachers took over the library efforts, adding textbooks and teaching curriculum to it while the machinist joined Boyle and the Johnson brothers in what was fast becoming our engineering section. The nurse started helping Hannah with the clinic and the chemist dove into the hydroponic gardens with a vengeance, while his wife, the electrical engineer, split her time between the machine shop and Harper’s computer labs.
As more people joined us and the work load spread out, leisure and quality of life activities sprang up spontaneously. Astrid started a low-key yoga group, her brother JJ offered self-defense lessons, and Kayla formed a competitive archery league that I found myself mixed up in.
I had only tried archery in high school PE class, so it was pretty new to me. Astrid, on the other hand, was already damned good at it, so I had my work cut out to catch up with my competitive fiancé. Yes, I said fiancé. I had asked, she’d said yes, and our wedding would be the community’s first, early in the spring after our first winter.
The twins, backed by their formidable future sister-in-law, presented the community with a number of local food and brewing festivals, craft fairs, and other local events, drafting a fair number of us to represent at each. Gradually we were becoming more familiar to the locals, who followed our activities with varying degrees of interest. The local sheriff and a few town council members were at first concerned with our presence. But time and a couple of events helped ease their official worries. A pair of teenaged hikers went missing on a local mountain hike and we turned out in force to help the ground search. Martin was the one who found them and became an unlikely, at least in my eyes, local hero for a brief period of time. That incident went a long way toward building a rapport with many of the locals.
Our constitution was redistributed, voted on, and passed into official status. More people arrived to tour the facility, meet our people, and be invited to join. None of the people who came because of invitation by Rikki copies were turned down, but several ultimately chose not to join for their own reasons. And there were people who just showed up, uninvited, who had to be turned away. Some were local, some came from far away, somehow finding their way to our gates.
Some of those were vocal and unhappy when we didn’t extend an invite to join. And some of our local neighbors failed to join our fan club or at least find us tolerable. We had a couple of drunken incidents which had to involve the sheriff and his deputies. No one got hurt though because none of the miscreants were willing to actually take on armed ex-military or ex-Zone survivors to press their personal issues.
One issue that popped up was that with so many costs and so few income-producing adults, the community treasury, overseen jointly by my mother and Brad Johnson, was beginning to dip lower. Most of our people still had some form of income, albeit much lower than they had previous to arriving at our little haven. We had plans to counter that, but the whole thing really needed a little kick start. With that in mind, Astrid and I agreed to another on-air interview with Flottercot productions—a well-paid interview.