I left the meeting feeling a lot better about the future. I would be coming back after tomorrow for some recruitment. We were going to use today to try and get everyone situated in houses with food and water. This should give them some time to calm down and feel alleviated knowing their family was ok. We were going to deal with memorial ceremonies and punishment decisions for the prisoners over the next few days.

I could make use of the prisoners as a workforce, but I didn’t trust them to be that close to my compound for now. It would provide a little bit of solace to the citizens to see their oppressors serving them in the future as well, so we decided their fates and use would be up to the town entirely.

I headed back outside and started the Puma up as Tom was saying his goodbyes to everyone. He hopped in and we headed back to the compound. On the way, I thought I should bring up Tom’s interaction with Greg.

“Hey man, you alright from earlier?”

“Yea, thanks for asking, but I deserved that 100 percent. I used him as a distraction to escape where we were being kept and he got punished for it. Honestly, he should have hit me harder. I shouldn’t have betrayed the trust he had in me and caused undue harm to him, but we might not be here had I not done it.

“That’s not really correct Tom. I understand you were scared and just wanted to escape from that situation, but I would have taken control of the city again no matter what. Not that you could have known that.”

Tom seemed to squirm in the seat around his harness as we continued our conversation. I felt bad for him, but he had caused someone he was very familiar with to experience pain due to his actions.

Tom seemed to get agitated “I’m upset about it too you know! I didn’t want to do that, but you weren’t there to see what those people were doing! You were closed up in your magic fortress in a whole different world from us! We didn’t have any way to fight back against them after the police started taking their side. What was I supposed to do!?”

I could tell that Tom really regretted what he did. I didn’t need to hound him any farther to make him see his actions beyond himself.

The rest of the ride was very quiet on the way back until we arrived at the compound. Minerva opened the gate for us and I parked the Puma. Tom got out first and went to his room in the house. I figured I needed to give him some time to recollect his thoughts so I left him alone for now. I opened an entrance to the Library World and went through the shining door before sitting down outside of the house inside.

I needed to get some sort of communication device together to interact with the town. I would like to be able to record data regarding the people left in the town and the supplies that are still useful. I created a basic tablet that most people should be familiar with and connected it to the Minerva Network. I installed a program for data entry and tracking alongside the communication applications.

This should allow most people to help with data management on a device they won’t have too hard of a time using. I queued up several hundred of these for creation and laid back on the ground outside of the house.

“Ava, do you think Tom’s ok? Should I go talk to him or let him come to terms with this himself?”

“I’m just a new entity so I can’t really comment too much beyond what I have been able to learn from your mind and our current experiences, but I think you should give him some time and then go and talk with him. He most likely needs someone to be there, but he is too overwhelmed to approach the topic by himself.”

Ava was right, I should give him time to himself, I’ll leave a door to the Library World outside the house open so he can come in if he wants to.

I had an hour or so for all the tablets to finish creation so I went inside and made some noodles to eat and sat down at the table. I tried to think about the future developments now that I was going to have people here in the foreseeable future. It was still early spring so we would have some time to get the plants in the ground and start our grow operation, but I felt we could improve on the fields we have now.

I looked through my memories and the library records for improvements we could make on the fields. We need to get a source of fertilizer soon to improve our growth and I couldn’t think of a better place to acquire the nitrogen and phosphorous than the local cattle farm. Luckily the farm was on the way from the town to my compound, it didn’t quite touch the boundary of the facility from my expansions, but it was within the same property. We should be able to import the manure from the local field and start converting it into raw fertilizer. If we mixed in the byproducts from the food waste in the town, it should be enough to give our crops the real food they need.

We were also going to need some seed samples to go on, the local farm store should have plenty of seeds for us to use. They wouldn’t be tested with the soil and environmental effects of this area, but we had bred hardy seeds before this all happened, so they should fair pretty well until we cultivate our own breeding cycle.

With that taken care of, I needed to look toward our wood and concrete supply. We could harvest timber pretty easily and I could create the timber mill to process it all fairly easily. There was a rock quarry about 10 miles outside of town, but we needed some vehicles to transport the supply and I would need to repair the excavation machines.

I could create the machines and products we needed, but it would be more believable and economically feasible if I repaired the facilities used in the mine before. Tomorrow I would head out to the quarry and repair the vehicles and machines there so we could resume operations. Most of the workers still remained so we could just have them resume their jobs once the machines were operating again.

This would get our timber and concrete production underway and should allow us to rebuild without my interference. I am willing to play a main part in the rebuilding of the town, but I’m not going to do everything myself.

I headed to bed inside the house to get ready for tomorrow. I left the door open to Tom and passed out for the night.