“Come in base, this is recon team eff. We have found a seemingly habitable area, with no signs of intelligent life anywhere near the landing site.”

“Your use of the intelligent qualifier intrigues me. What sort of life are you located near? How have you determined it is lacking in that most necessary of qualities?”

“Master Grimfang, the indigenous population is a swarm of single celled life forms, which, despite witnessing and falling victim to an enraged shark, continue to eat and divide around the landing site.”

“But do they react to stimuli? Can they recognize themselves? If you stab them, do they flee in agony? Can they determine that the thing that causes them pain is a thing to be avoided at all? Get back to me once you’ve tested it. Do the important one first. Let me know how they suffer.”

“Master Grimfang, the cells are unintelligent enough to attempt to digest a plant that was in the midst of absorbing them.”

“Bah! Another one, useless to me! Get on with your mission, I’ll inform the rest that you’ve arrived safely.”

Flipping through stations on the wooden radio, a man with a zippered face stands in a metal meeting room, chrome covering ice, insulated and heated by the power lines running through and around the surfaces, as well as the super pressurized gas formed when the solid nitrogen sublimated from the extreme pressure difference. The rooms contained in the ice structure are inherently unstable, by deliberate design. By using a powerful electromagnetic field generator in each room, exposed patches of steel on the outside of the individual chamber are drawn to the exposed patches of whichever directed subsection of the base the occupant requires at the time. While metal, electricity, ice, and on rare occasions stone make up the primary ascetic of the rooms, an exception would exist in the vicinity of a number of the occupants of the establishment one of which being the man in question, utilizing relatively archaic technology to communicate through a temporal spiderweb with radio waves. He swivels around on his chrome plated stool away from the table upon which his ready rests, and calls for an attendant.

“Thirty one! Bring me a sarsaparilla, no ice.”

As the man swivels back to turn the various dials on his radio, several buttons on a control panel mounted next to a horizontally sliding hatch style door depress, setting the electromagnets to attract the kitchen. With a hiss of nitrogen, the doors of each chamber align, and press the compressed gas away from the entryway as the steel plates slam into each other at speed. Noiselessly, the door opens to a chrome plated kitchen, where a clear plastic cup detaches itself from one of the stacks of identical containers and places itself below a generic looking soda dispenser, in the root beer slot, which also activates upon the completion of the cup’s positioning, it's tiny plastic handle pushing back without any physical pressure.

Just as the handle for the liquid had depressed, so to does the one for ice, though only long enough for a single cube to fall from the slot. The solid material stops just before hitting the grate between the cup and trough, and floats up and into the drink, where it remains for several seconds. As the cube begins to melt, a small stream of less dense water rises from the surface of the soda, falling after clearing the rim of the glass and trickling off into the sloped surface below. Once the entirety of the cube had syphoned heat from the liquid and converted the energy into a state change before being pulled out itself, the situation repeated itself several times, with five cubes pulling energy from the beverage before the glass floats up to the conference room.

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It hovers next to the radio operator for a few moments as he continues turning dials on the face of the device, then notices his drink. Not turning from the radio, he extends a have toward the flying chip, and it obediently presses itself up against his palm.

Upon taking a sip, the man says “I’m going to have to steal you away from here once one of these expeditionary teams find a suitable locale. They certainly are taking a while reporting in considering the temporal skipping effect between response times. Would you be able to provide insight on optimizing the transmission frequency?”

Across the room, from a chair facing a wall of security monitors showing a number of chrome plated rooms, including the one the monitors were placed in and the kitchen, a voice responds, “No, my creator hasn't figured out the mechanisms of time before the end started. He kind of focused more on traditional transportation.”

“Blast. At least he managed to create a good sarsaparilla maker, if nothing else. It takes quite an effort to condense it myself.”

“Were you going to inform the base of the recon team’s safe arrival sir?”

“It’s simply a matter of ticking a box on the sheet. Switch to camera nineteen, the terminal in the harvesting chamber should have the document open. Mark that Recon Team F landed on a planet without complex life forms, but with an environment suitable for the creation of them. Not exactly what I’m looking for as my payment, but perhaps one of the other collaborators would be interested in starting their experiments over from scratch.”

Deliberately not sighing at the fact that ‘tick a box’ had evolved immediately into writing a full on report across two layers of abstraction, the ‘Thirty One’ in the monitoring station obediently switches the kitchen monitor over to a camera overlooking a carmine space, with a number of tables jutting up from a concave basin, along with a similarly colored ATM-esk computer terminal with a splash of chrome on the side facing away from the tables.

As the keys of the terminal displayed on the monitor depress themselves, the zippered man stops turning the dials on the radio when another voice comes through the tinny speakers.

“Recon team double yew coming in, requesting immediate evacuation from landing site. Hostile intelligences have enraged the shark, transportation vehicle’s automatic stasis field has rendered it inoperable, and my forty-two has decided to climb a building to try and reach their atmospheric flying vehicles.”

“Recon team leader, please transmit your space-time coordinates. You will be put on the list to be rendered assistance at some point.”

A screech of noises, like the booting of a dial-up internet connection, comes from the radio, followed by, “Can you transport to five minutes before these coordinates? Air superiority belongs to the shark, but its handler was a casualty and it’s coming this”, which itself was cut off.

Spinning around on the stool, the man addresses the one writing a report.

“Good news! I’ve found the world I’ll be taking for my own.”