Ted and I worked as a team each day in light construction work, modifying what we had to suit our needs, moving furniture around and taking out a few walls. Then we became scroungers, driving through the neighboring communities for all the items we needed, from tractors and heavy equipment to livestock to any tool or crib or rocking chair someone requested.
We fetched back our tank and decided to commandeer three more, posting two at each entrance to our valley, facing its only approaches and making it like a fortress, stocked and provisioned from the army camp with all sorts of weapons and truckloads of ammunition and gear, carefully parcelled up and stored in hundreds of small packages so that no single spark could detonate the stockpile.
In one valley we found a solar array and spent a month translating it section by section to our own. By the end of January all our houses had lights burning bright and soon after running water, when we restored the pumps to a water tower five miles away. We were now living in something like the twentieth century, except for television and radio and of course, computers.
We did have music. It was easy to find old stereos and hordes of records in these rural parts. We even found movie projectors in an old theater and movie reels in a film archive in Oregon, brought them back and instituted movie night once a week in the largest room of our town, the day care room of our nursery.
This was one of the most blissful periods of my life, free from worry, watching our fledgling colony expand, much like seeing an infant grow. Sarah finally became pregnant, after innumerable, delightful attempts. Even before this I made it a point to be off with Ted on some two or three day expedition and miss our community gathering on the first night of each month.
This handed her the gavel to manage these meetings. I didn’t want to and she enjoyed the prestige, while I delighted in coming home to hear her recap to me in bed all the news, the private and public affairs that were brought up at these gatherings and how they were settled, along with the direction our community was steering. I loved to hear the details of her governance, praising her with hugs and kisses for every issue resolved. My Eisenhower golf course presidency enjoyed all it’s powers secretly delegated to her. She reveled in it while I enjoyed the toasts and the champagne and the universal smiles, with Ted enjoying a close second place in this high esteem, poster boy leaders.
But we weren’t idle, babbling boys in the many long hours we spent driving together. We were seriously focused on the one subject that our little community was not fixated upon, what Dora might be up to and where, and how best to destroy her once and forever.
We both agreed that in the shattered state that Dora and her eight other droids fled the grove, it would be no time soon that she might counter-attack. We were three hundred miles north in a location unknown to her.
With satellite communication dead, all her hives were now islands and severely limited in their isolation. They were designed to exist independently but work as a whole, sharing their data banks and combining their computing powers into one massive brain. Ted told me they might restore a few optical cable systems between a few. But those had been in disuse for decades and would need repairs.
But he also told me that a single hive was a mountain of computing power in itself and could easily run a robot factory if the raw materials were there. They would even be able to ramp up production if they sent out the robots produced to acquire more materials, sent out like so many soldier ants, to increase production and expand. He thought the factory near Tokyo would be the ideal place to start, with a hive just an hour away and ground communication between them restorable.
He envisioned steel mills reactivated, mines put back in operation, perhaps a nuclear power plant restored for all the electricity they would need, making a whole city of robots where we once stood. But I told him to keep his projections to our lifetime. The one thing we both realized, now that they would be building their own new world with their robotic hands, and starting with so few, it would take eons, because they’d be performing the same functions we did in building our industrial complexes.
Filling a gas tank, repairing an engine, tightening a bolt would be nearly the same for droid hands as for ours. If they were going to enter our world they were going to adopt our timeline too at human rates of progress.
So Ted and I concluded that we had a good while to think about the Dora issue, to find her and plan another attack. She could no longer put drones in the sky to find us. Maybe she could put a few planes in the sky to search for us but we doubted it for the same reasons we didn’t dare take to the air, too dangerous without training.
When we first talked of finding her we discussed that possibility at length, finding her base and dropping bombs on it. But we dropped the idea, partly because the hives were mostly underground and could be hidden from the skies. When we did go hunting for her we would do it by land or sea in vessels we were familiar with and this world being so wide and so empty, that might be a very long time, perhaps something for our grandchildren to finally accomplish, and even that thought was in many ways a relief. It meant no war was imminent.
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