The Waterwheel Museum

A knock echoes throughout the building as a young man wearing a black baseball cap with faded text and a lab coat that’s a little bit too big on him goes over to answer it. A young girl probably around the age of 8 is there with a tall dark-skinned man probably in his 20s or 30s accompanying her.

“Welcome to the Waterwheel Museum of Electronic Entertainment. Are you here for the tour or would you like to make a donation?” asks the guy who opened the door.

“Both,” says the tall man as he hands the individual a thumbdrive.

“Come on in, then,” beckons the young man as he opens the door wider so the two people can walk in.

They walk in and go over to the reception counter. The young man in the oversized lab coat goes over to his computer and sticks the thumbdrive in there.

“Atari 2600 ROMs, eh? Those are quite hard to find these days as very few people seemed to be interested in downloading them, back when the internet still worked. We also got a Retroarch build. 1.7.3. Yes, I think we can work with this. I thank you for your generous donation,” observes the young man before he takes off his hat and bows in respect, “Now then, you said you two wanted a tour right?”

“Yes, that’s right,” answers the tall man.

“Papa, when do we get to see the Barbie games?” asks the little girl.

“Wow, I haven’t heard about Barbie in a long time. It’s not a very popular request here but it is a popular donation,” comments the young man as he slides a book over to them, “Please sign your names here, the date, and time of your visit. This is strictly for bookkeeping purposes.”

They both sign their name with the girl’s father helping her the counter. The young man looks over the page and says, “So we have a Mr. Paul Thompson and his little angel, Amelia Thompson.”

“Correct,” plainly states the tall man.

“Ok, that should take care of everything. My name is Jeremy Wackinstein…”

“What kind of name is that?” questions Paul.

“I know right? Jeremy is a stupid name,” comments Mr. Wackinstein.

“Umm, that’s not what I…”

“But my name is entirely irrelevant to your purposes. All you need to know is that I’ll be your tour guide for the day. Now if you’ll follow me we can start the tour.”

He leads them into the next room with has a lot of outdated audio media all around the metallic room. “Here is the music room where we go to great lengths to preserve every kind of audio format we can go our hands on. From 8-track to cassette and everything in between, we’re looking for the best way possible to preserve this audio history. We have a plethora of headphones available to our guests for general use in the museum. Which reminds me, I didn’t give you yours.”

He pulls out a couple of ear buds from his pocket and hands them to the two before pulling a bottle of sanitizer. “Sanitizer?”

Amelia complains, “I don’t want to put these nasty things in my ear.”

“Understandable. There’s a lot of people who have similar issues with the use of headphones, which is why we offers private rooms for those who don’t want to use them yet be able to blast the audio at full blast. Believe me, we had a lot of trouble getting those rooms soundproofed. At this point…well, I won’t say anything. I don’t want to your precious little girl. On to the next stop.”

Paul is starting to get a little weary of Jeremy because of his eccentric and oddly enthusiastic personality. Couple it with what he was saying of Amelia and he’s wondering whether Jeremy is who he says he is.

“Here, we got the TV room. While the private rooms I mentioned earlier will work for any available media you chose in this museum, here we don’t require the use of headphones and instead encourage large parties of people to watch any TV show we were able to recover from DVDs, VHSs, and even hard drives. Each TV is equipped with a computer, a DVD player, a VCR, etc. Here we just want people to bond over the oldies pre-apocalypse.”

Towards the end Jeremy’s voice got serious but he took a deep breath and turned his cheerfulness back on.

“But, I bet you may be wondering how we power this establishment? Well, it’s very simple…oh, I see your little girl has found the Barbie DVDs. Shall I postpone the tour a bit so she can watch some?”

She was looking at her dad with really big pitiful eyes and he sighs and says, “Ok, yeah. We can watch some DVDs. She cheered and ran to take a seat on the sofa. Jeremy says, “I’ll go and have your donation processed in the meantime. I’ll be back in a couple of hours to resume the tour. If you need anything let me know. There’s a bathroom to the right if either of you need to go.”

He walks away. Paul sighs in relief starting to wonder if he was misjudging Jeremy. Jeremy stops for a brief moment and says, “Oh yeah, almost forgot. We don’t have snacks so I hope you brought your own.” After that statement he exits the room and the girl is trying to figure out how to work the various things attached to the TV. Luckily, Paul was alive before the apocalypse happened which resulted in a lot of blood giving him gruesome flashbacks of those days. He shrugs it off and helps his daughter insert the DVD.

Jeremy goes to the back and asks, “How’s the power output looking?”

Another guy with blond hair says, “So far, so good Jeremy. The hydroelectric generator is still operating at full capacity.”

“Good John. Where’s Wanda at?”

“She went scavenging for parts near the abandoned nuclear plant,” answers John.

“I told that woman several times to avoid ground zero, but does she listen? Noo! I tell you if her brain wasn’t so sexy I might have fired her for health concerns,” complains Jeremy.

“That’s what you say, but we know you’re sticking it in her,” states John.

“Is it that obvious?” asks Jeremy.

“What are you talking about? You think we don’t record you in the private rooms? Well, I got bad news for you.”

Jeremy sighs and says, “Whatever, just keep that generator running. Oh, before I forget.”

He hands John the thumbdrive and he peruses it.

“Atari 2600? Score!”

“Yes, I want those processed and put on our computers’ hard drives and on the Atari Everdrives,” orders Jeremy.

“Roger,” says John.

Jeremy leaves the room.