Well, sort of.

The display showed the date in Arabic numerals and a clock set on Eastern Standard Time. Next to it was a battery symbol that said twelve percent. Below that was also a gear icon with the word Settings next to it, written in the same font his phone used.

The rest of it...still needed some work. There were jumbles of letters in place of other labels. But Nick was grateful for what he had. I had no idea Petra could even do that! It probably hasn't ever encountered Earth technology before.

All right...I guess I'm looking at the main menu. Guess I'll start tapping on icons and see what they do. Which I was already doing, but hopefully I'll figure things out faster now.

The confusing sequences to turn things on or off or select were replaced by simple taps like his phone used. That was a relief. Nick wiped sweat from his brow, checked the position of shadows, and tried to figure out his next step.

Okay, Petra builds things. She builds solar panels, displays, and stone cubes on demand. So the main menu should be a build menu, right? Nick tapped through options.

The solar panels were from what he guessed was the “power” menu. Apparently there were five different ways to get power—five different things to build. Then the “display” menu had four options. Nick was happy enough with the tablet for now.

Out of curiosity he selected a solar panel again. On the left, the fill bars were replaced with color coded listings in random letters. “ACX” was written in orange lettering, so apparently that was iron. More useful, it gave numbers now: 0/12 for iron. Nick discovered that he could tap on a label and it would call up a keyboard. He could edit the labels, so he replaced “ACX” with “iron” and “GUO” with “copper” for starters, then remembered that red was aluminum and fixed the label there as well.

Nick selected everything Petra offered, one at a time, and looked at each cost. Some items needed only a few materials, some needed a dozen or more. The amounts varied widely as well. He found an option that had only one cost, but the amount was “24/???” currently, which was confusing. A while later he looked at it again and saw that it was “25/???” now.

It's the energy cost, Nick realized. Energy, I can make more of. So anything that shows up like that I can make if I wait for enough sunlight.

It turned out to be Petra's option for reshaping given materials, like turning irregular rocks into stone cubes. Nick used the blank oval to draw a few things, like a small brick, a long rod, and a bigger cube. He called up the keyboard and typed “save,” and after a few tries, he got it to work. Petra would remember his drawings, and he could call them up again from the Files option.

Man, I wish I had brought more rocks inside the car, but I didn't realize that I was going to want them. Well, I guessed that I might, I just didn't expect the Death Star to make it so dangerous to step outside and go to the rock pile like five feet away.

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Nick hunted for options for increasing the size of Petra's input or output, or speed of production. He tried typing English words into the search function (complete with little magnifying glass icon.) Unfortunately, Petra seemed to have gotten indigestion when trying to absorb the information in his phone. From the various apps, she had gotten a lot of English words, but didn't know what most of them meant. Hence the gibberish letters, which was probably smarter than putting a random English word there that might be actively wrong.

Now I wish I had downloaded a dictionary and a science book to my phone.

Nick gave up on getting Petra to describe the parts she needed, and instead tried straight for the goal. He drew one of the stone cubes, and then drew another cube twice as large, and labeled them A and B. He figured he could just keep demanding bigger cubes until Petra was unable to provide them.

He had a more pressing problem, though—he was seriously starting to run out of shadows to hide in. Already some of the cans of food were getting irradiated because he didn't have room to stash all of the groceries behind him. He'd drunk as much milk as he could stomach, and one of the four bottles of fizzy water, just trying to keep up with what he was sweating away.

I need more cover. How do I get Petra to build me some sheets of something reflective? Actually, I wonder how thick a sheet of metal would have to be to block this. With nothing better to do, Nick told Petra to make another small cube and fed it the tire iron. When that was done, he then tried to convey in a drawing that he wanted a brick half as thick as the cube and twice as wide and tall. Petra did it, but didn't stop asking for more iron when it consumed the first iron cube, until it had eaten the same amount again of the tire iron.

Nick had screwed up his math somehow. He argued with himself a while, getting annoyed, before he decided to make the new brick one fourth as thick, and twice as wide and tall. That did the trick.

It took him a while to express “now do that same thing to this shape,” but eventually he fed Petra the two-inch by two-inch iron plate and got out a thinner 4-inch by 4-inch plate. It was interesting to watch, since Petra had to move the plate back and forth, because it was wider than her “output port” or whatever he should call it.

It looked awkward and slow, though, so Nick got an idea. He didn't actually need the plate to be square, so he told Petra to make the next one circular and sat back to watch and see what it would do. He wasn't disappointed.

Petra created a small disk that fit her output, then turned it edge on (Nick had no idea how she was moving it), and began rotating it, adding steadily to the rim. The steel was still thick enough to be rigid, and was now about the size of a small pot lid. Since it seemed like he could recycle the iron as many times as he wanted, he set it up to use all of the metal in the tire iron and make the biggest disk it could without being so thin it bent easily.

It turned out to be only about two feet in diameter: not much of a shield, but better than nothing. If he made it to sunset, he would have all night to take the car apart and make metal sheeting out of it. Too bad the engine block didn't come with the back half. That would have been plenty.

Some of the food was going bad rapidly in the heat, and the stink was getting annoying. Nick pitched it out of the car, leaving it to sizzle on the hot ground. Maybe I should have tried to cook hamburgers.

Having the “pot lid” did help, though. Nick was feeling more and more urgency about escaping the interior of the car without getting fried. He squinted as best he could without singeing his face on the hot glass, and there was a small amount of shadow on the east side of the car now. Not much, but it was growing.

It was time to open the door.