But except for a small robotic device that would collect and fling the rolled-up newspapers onto the balcony before disappearing back into its tiny storage space in a nearby building, never to be seen, there was to be no anachronistic technology of any kind in the world I was building; I would be blessedly cut off from the outside world. The landline phone would be my only source of communication. During that first year of preparation, when I was technically still “in” the world, I severely cut down on all outside communication; as I did with Larwin, I eschewed phone calls or text messages. I even had built it into most of my workers’ contracts that they were not allowed to contact me except in dire emergencies.

I peered at the report that concerned the vintage Los Angeles Times papers. The two caseworkers who had been assigned to this task had tracked down some leads in the California area. Wealthy folks of a certain age. I was finding more and more that eccentric rich people were going to be my saving grace, the key to all of this—they were the only hoarders who stored their hoard in temperature-controlled vaults, preserving the most trivial items in their original condition. They could afford an obsession with their own past. There was a lady in Agoura Hills who had decades of the Los Angeles Times papers stacked up in a room inside her large mansion, and from what the caseworkers said, she kept a fairly clean house. They were flying out tomorrow to meet with her and survey the collection in person. It was the only way to properly evaluate. I needed a human nose to make sure they were acceptable.

Caseworkers were allotted for each item or group of items that needed to be tracked down. For example, there were caseworkers for the indoor potted plants seen in each set throughout the series—one person who watched every episode and noted the species and receptacle of each potted plant, another person who researched the care of each plant, and yet another who was in charge of acquiring the plants, and a fourth one who tracked down each decorative pot or macramé holder that would then be matched with the appropriate plant when the time came. Janet Wood worked in a flower shop, after all, and it was the 1970s, the height of the houseplant craze. Some plants were seen in Apartment 201 throughout the series, such as a schefflera next to the telephone in the living room, and others rotated or appeared and disappeared and reappeared, such as Boston ferns, a corn plant, and several varieties of ivy and philodendron, so this level of detail was necessary. And the care and feeding of the plants were also important—the ones that only appeared in a few episodes would have to be stowed away in one of the large outbuildings on my property (converted into a large indoor/outdoor greenhouse for the purpose, a construction project in and of itself, and whose progress was also enclosed in the binder I held) until its appearance was due, and I needed to know how to take care of them.