Chapter 145: The Power of Titles

Editor: nnpdad 20 May 2021

He didn’t respond for a good five minutes, and when he did, he was chuckling and smiling. In response to my quizzical look, he managed to say with a grin, “We assumed this was like a children’s game: choose who you want to be in this new life and, if we pretend hard enough, it will happen.”

“Lucinda and I had a good laugh over that and decided we could join in the fun. I can’t believe we didn’t realize.”

“And now?” I prompted.

“I realize that this is actually a life-and-death situation and we need to bring our A-game every moment of every day,” he said, quietly.

I smiled, “We have plenty of reading and viewing to remind you of Regency Era manners. Making you even minor royalty entitles you to walk anyplace that I do. Titles are like that.”

Well, that statement earned me another quizzical look. It was time to tell about the archive; we’d never had the privacy to discuss it before. Heck, lack of privacy had prevented me from telling him a lot. We’d be sharing an evening cookfire over the next few weeks and I was quite sure we’d have a lot to talk about.

Right now, I simply told him of our vast library. Well, it wasn’t that simple. Although he was computer savvy for the early 1980’s, that wasn’t even close to the world I lived in. I ended up using sci-fi books and movie references to give him the idea. Naturally, that really didn’t come close to the reality of the amount of information I had sitting in storage up in Rulo.

You can’t easily explain advanced storage systems and their near-line capacities to someone from the age of cassette tapes. He knew about fax machines and cable TV, both were high end. Cell phones didn’t exist. How the hell was I to explain petabytes of raw and indexed data to him? He’d just have to see it. I remember Trish being stunned when I showed her my newest storage device at work. She was amazed at how small and fast it was. Yeah, there was a long pause while the data was brought live, but that was a small price to pay for the vast amount of static data. I also explained to him that all of this had a theoretical and usage-based life span, so I was very careful with it. In actuality, you rarely heard the tape library in action. We had so much live storage available that, as an IT Professional, even I was astounded. Storage technology had rocketed along; you could get it all for a song.

Most important, I was able to spend time and talk to a man, not a woman, who understood my culture. Even if we had differences, we seemed to get along. I’d be happy to ride the trail with him any time.

Progress was slow. Very, very slow. Neither the riders nor the herd were trail broken, so everyone was confused. I decided to stay out on point as much as possible. They all had to learn, and me, rushing around playing the hero, would just delay these lessons.