I woke up to a most delicious smell and sprung out of bed, Tom was in the kitchen cooking some bacon and eggs. It seemed he felt a little better, but I wasn’t going to press him over yesterday, so I just took my place at the table. “Hey man, you’re making me some too, right?”

“Yea, yea. Yah glutton, you would think it was the end of the world or something and the bacon was running out.”

We both laughed.

He turned around and brought a plate over to me with eggs, bacon, and toast. It smelled delicious and was just what I needed after the past few days. Everything has felt so rushed that it’s nice to get a chance to enjoy a small meal like this someone else cooked for me. I can cook well, especially after having every recipe I own assimilated into my mind, but something about food that has been cooked for you just hits differently.

“Well man, you trying to talk about it, or should we just ignore it and continue on with our lives?”

Tom huffed. “Yea, I guess it’s not just going to go away, and I might as well talk to someone about it. Why not the magical wizard best friend.” He then recounted the story to me as I sat patiently waiting for him to finish. I had no idea he had gone through anything like that, it didn’t even seem like anything was bothering him until yesterday.

“I’m so sorry Tom. I should have stopped at your house and got you while I was in town the first night. I didn’t even think about you, or I could have prevented this whole thing from happening. If I could go back, I definitely would man.”

Tom was crying at this point but replied to me anyway. “I understand, I don’t blame you at all. Ultimately, they were the ones that did this to me, and I can’t blame anyone else for that. However, I decided yesterday that I can’t let this define me and change my life. I have an unbelievable opportunity right now to help my magical wizard best friend change the world. If I didn’t take advantage of that, I’d be a sucker. So, now that we can move on from that, what are our plans?”

“Well, I have a couple of goals right now. I made some tablets yesterday that I connected with the Minerva Network for the people in town. It should give them some short-range communication and data processing capabilities. We need to take stock of what’s available in town and the personnel we have at our disposal. I need someone to take a census of the current population and their skills. This should give us a better idea of where we’re lacking and what our current capabilities are.”

“Next, we will need to get some fertilizer production going. This is broken down into a few different steps. Mainly composting, crushing, mixing, granulating, drying, cooling, and screening. However, for our purpose, we can cut some corners and still get a very similar product. The production is only for our local use right now, so it won’t have to be up to corporate standards. We can likely get by with combining most of these steps together.”

“They probably already had some way to dispose of the manure from the cattle at the farm, if not they were hauling it off somewhere else to be processed. Either way, they will likely welcome our help with open arms since their machines to process it no longer work, or their vehicles to haul it are inoperable. If we can provide them with a means to dispose of the material, we’re benefiting both of us.”

“The first thing we’re going to do is take the tablets into town and explain how they work. Then we can ask around about the farm, just in case there is anyone in town with info on the place or the owners might even be in town already. So, whenever you’re ready, I’ll be waiting in the Puma for you.”

I got up and collected the tablets into a large duffle bag and headed out to the Puma. It took a couple of minutes but eventually, Tom joined me, and we sped off toward the town.

It wasn’t as gloomy when we entered the outskirts, there were signs of people around the area once again. We passed everyone up and headed towards the city center again while Minerva circled around us maintaining a close watch on the surroundings.

There were still a significant number of people around the supermarket area, as all the resources were there now, but people had started to settle back down in their own homes. The golden-haired lady Helen approached Tom and me as we got out of the Puma.

“Hello gentlemen, is there anything I can help you with today?”

I grabbed the duffle bag and sat it down on the ground after pulling a MinTab out of it. I turned it on and handed it over to Helen.

“I created these MinTabs to give everyone access to some tech to help communicate again. If we’re going to get the town running again, we’ll need some reliable data to form effective plans and manage resources. They have programs built into them to communicate with each other and they operate over the Minerva Network that my drones operate on, so they will have a signal whenever one of my drones is nearby. Are you familiar with any of the office programs from before this all happened?”

Helen looked over the familiar-looking tablet, touching the screen in various places before I got a ding on my cellphone. Pulling it out, I opened the notifications to a brand new one from the tablet in Helen’s hands. “Hey =P”

“Looks like it works. Maybe you shouldn’t have your contact information available on every tablet. I’m sure you’ll get tons of messages as soon as people get comfortable again.”

“I left it in there on purpose, I don’t want anyone to feel as if I’m out of their reach. If there are concerns, I hope that people can approach me personally so we can try to work it out together. Open communication is a founding pillar of trust.”

“I also included some kid-friendly videos and learning programs as well as games. Hopefully, that’ll give people some semblance of the normal they had before all of this. I know it’s not much, but things should be significantly better soon. There are a couple hundred tablets in there, so there might not be enough for everyone, but there should be enough to have one in every home.”

Helen studied my face like she was looking for the cracks in it. “Thank you, Robert. I know this doesn’t seem like much, but the people will be happy to have something familiar to rely on right now. I will make sure these get to the right place. Is there something else we can do for you, or can I go ahead with some of our concerns for the future?”

Happy to see that things were going well so far, I gestured for her to go ahead.

“Well, first we need to do something about the plumbing in the town. We can only go outside for so long and we’re missing running water terribly bad. If we’re going to stay here with this many people, we need working facilities.” She leaned forward and got a whiff close to me “Judging from the Vanilla and Sandalwood smell you’re radiating, I assume you have a solution to these problems?”

I chuckled, leaning back farther away from her exploratory nose. “Yea, I might have some solutions. That’s why I included some data processing applications. I need to know exactly which machines were being used in the sanitation and water processing facilities. The same thing with anything else that’s inoperable within the infrastructure. I need brand and model numbers for the equipment, the manufacture year if possible, and manuals for the machines would be much appreciated. I have a large collection of schematics for varying machines available to me, but if I don’t have the ones for the specific machines then it’ll be much harder to repair them.”

Helen was tapping on the MinTab as I spoke before she looked back up at me. “Anything else?”

“I also need accurate population readings as well as job history and skills for them. Think of it like a local census, but you can’t shut the door on them. If I’m going to help get the town going again, I need to know what we can do with our people and what will need to be subsidized with robots.”

“Lastly, do you know if the man who owns the cattle farm out on Turtle Foot Road, is available around town?”

Helen scrunched her nose as she seemed to be in deep thought, it was quite cute honestly before her face seemed to get mournful suddenly. “He was killed in the beginning when they first took over the town. He came into town looking for his workers when they didn’t show up for the day. He tried to attack the guys who were taking over the town and they shot him. As far as I know, he doesn’t have any family or anything around town. I’m sorry, was there something you needed with him?”

I mentally sighed, while it was sad to hear that the owner died, now I could expand and take over his property without feeling bad about it. This was a tremendous boon as it gave me access to a huge area of land to repurpose along with access to his cattle and farming equipment.

“No, not particularly, I was going to help him get the farm up and running again. However, now I’ll just take over the whole process and repurpose his land to help the town. I’m going to head home shortly, if you need to reach me about anything, I will be available with the MinTab. Just shoot me a message and I’ll do my best to help with anything I can. Did you need anything before I go?”

“Awh, you’re going so soon!” She mocked playfully. “No, Robert, not that I can think of right now. We’re just trying to get things back to normal and erase as many of the terrible reminders as we can. I will get to work on distributing these tablets and give people directives to collect the information you requested.”

Tom and I hopped back in the Puma and headed out of town. I let him drive on the way back again, and he seemed to be in a slightly better mood this time. Instead of heading back to the house, I had Tom take us to the farm first to check on the state of things.

We hopped out of the Puma and started walking around, there definitely appeared to be no one around. The cattle had moved pastures outside of their fence after days without the farmer. Some of them were wandering around in the farmhouse area and would need to be rounded up. Luckily the farmer did have the equipment to process the manure and baling equipment with silos and barns for storage. The fertilizer was processed with an auger system that would circulate the compost mixture from the bottom to the top. It was situated on top of a rectangular basin that was roughly 100 feet long. The auger machine would travel along rails and move left to right in order to cover the entire basin.

All the farming equipment is available as well. It looks like they used a small portion of the cattle for dairy, but most of the herd is for meat. There is a separate building for milking the cattle and processing it afterward.

“Hey Minerva, can you get me an accurate assessment of the usable land and the headcount for the cattle?”

One of the drones flying above us for protection floated in front of my face and bobbed up and down while making a light trill. It then took off and several other drones joined it as they spread out in a spiderweb pattern.

Since I’m just repairing pieces of equipment that were broken during the Great Reset, it should be much faster while using less mana than everything I’ve done before this. I went around the farm, getting the model information of each piece of equipment present on the farm while Minerva finishes her scouting. Once I was finished getting all the information I needed, I opened a door to the Library and went inside.

In total I will need to repair the electrical equipment for:

1 X 15 Gallon Electric Milking Machine

1 X Auger Compost Turner

1 X John Deere Mowing Pull Behind

1 X John Deere Bale Wrapper

1 X John Deere Hay Baler

1 X John Deere Brush Hog

2 X John Deere Tractor

3 X Water Pump

2 X Refrigeration Unit

1 X 5 Gallon Home Pasteurizer

This should cover most of the equipment to get this place operational again. There were a few solar panels already here for subsidiary power on certain pieces of equipment. I’m going to replace all of those with the kind I created at home and install some more power storage capacity to get this place off the grid. While in the Library, I spent the next 3 hours creating replacement parts for the equipment. Tom doesn’t have the knowledge I have to replace all this equipment, so I’ll have to replace almost all of this myself.

I left the Library to find a Minerva Drone waiting for me outside. It sent a notification to my phone with a map of the farm territory, how the fields were divided, how many cattle, where they were located, and the division of males versus females.

“Wow, Minerva! You went above and beyond for this assignment! Excellent work, this is very useful.” I took a couple of minutes to look over the information before directing her to start rounding up the cattle into fields. “I’ll need to repair the electric fence first I guess.” I sighed as I started on the work for the repairs. It took the rest of the day and a few hours into the night to replace everything, even with Tom’s help on the simpler jobs. We hopped into the Puma and headed back toward the compound so we could rest for the night.