Nick was in a sauna, and someone had locked him in. He pounded on the door, yelling. He tried breaking the door down, but it was as hard as stone. It was getting hard to breathe...

Nick woke up, feeling wildly disoriented. Where am I? Everything was unfamiliar. He was so hot he felt as if he were in an oven. It took him a few seconds of staring around for reality to sink in.

I can't believe this is happening. Am I really stranded forever?

Nick started to feel claustrophobic and panicky. No, no, no... A burning sensation in his foot snapped him out of it. He yanked his foot closer to him and looked around. A narrow shaft of harsh sunlight was stabbing down into the foxhole. He had to force his brain back into gear to think about where the beam would move and what danger he was in.

He sat and stewed in misery for a while, deeply unhappy that it hadn't all just been a weird dream.

I don't want to die.

Any thought of death automatically made him think about his depression, and from long habit he seized on coping strategies. Half of them were irrelevant now that he wasn't on Earth or around people, but some still applied. What is the defiant thought here? It was a question a therapist had asked him once, long ago. What is the response to, “I don't want to die here?”

Nick clenched his jaw a moment.

“So don't.”

Fuck depression! Nick wasn't as forceful with the thought as he could be, but at least he was thinking it. Fuck depression. Get up and fight.

“It doesn't matter how shaky you feel when you get back up, so long as you do get back up. The rest is gravy.”

Nick took a deep breath. “Thanks, Doc,” he muttered. He picked up the opened bottle of fizzy water and drank most of it. His stomach rumbled, so he looked through the remaining food, and stuffed some in his mouth. He made it a meager breakfast, because it had to last him until he figured out a food source.

He was reluctant to open the bag of chips for a couple of reasons. First, eating something salty was probably not what he needed while sweating away so much water. Second, if he opened the bag, even if he rationed it, what was left would get more and more stale. Nick clung to the hope that he could teach Petra to replicate food, and he needed fresh examples if he didn't want to eat stale potato chips every day for the rest of his life.

All right. Keep digging. I got to get to that hydrogen so I can feed it to Petra.

Before he got started on that, he looked through Petra's menus again. There was something interesting in the Charging menu—the amounts of several items was now up significantly. He had no idea what was what, but he thought he had just solved the mystery of where the rocks went when Petra at them and only upped the oxygen amount. It was because he hadn't been looking at the amounts of things that weren't ingredients in water.

So Petra is stockpiling some stuff. Awesome. Nick kept looking, and found a Maps icon. He tapped on it, and there was one entry, written in gibberish. He tapped on that, and a very boring-looking map appeared. I guess I haven't been anywhere yet, or rather Petra hasn't.

I wonder why it takes her so long to figure some things out, when she grabbed like everything on my phone almost instantly? Nick didn't know the first thing about how Petra worked, so he set aside the question of why. That's just the way it was, and Nick would work with that. He would make regular checks of the menus and see if more things were getting added in English.

Nick adjusted his sun barriers to the extent it felt safe, then got back to work digging. He didn't feel great, given the heat and that he had only gotten about three hours of sleep. I'll nap some more when the Death Star is lower in the sky and isn't quite cooking me alive.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Nick would dig into the wall with Petra in super-sharp mode, carving out a conical piece. Then he would do it again a few more times until his hand could fit in there holding Petra. Then it got easier, slicing out a ring of stone and chopping it into blocks, then pressing Petra to the farthest point to cut out the backs of the blocks. Then a larger ring. Then a larger one. Before long he had a nice wide tunnel. Going forward was the most tedious part.

Nick was almost burying himself alive, moving so much stone behind him. Finally, he had to take a break when it got too crowded in the original foxhole. The Death Star had moved far enough west that Nick felt safer sitting back down in the chair. He leaned back with Petra's display in his lap.

The solar panels were doing their job; Petra was apparently fully charged. The number had risen to 100% and 5040/5040. Why it was 5040 units, Nick had no idea. Nor did he even know what the unit was. Nick labeled it Energy, then went to the main drawing area and wrote, 10080 Energy. Double should be an easy number, right?

Asking for power had gotten him the power menu. Asking for energy now got him what he guessed was the battery menu. He scrolled through the options, tapping on each and looking at the costs in materials. For each of them, there were several substances that he still had zero units of.

All right, it was a good idea, but I guess I'm going to have to make do with 5040 units at a time, then.

Nick called up the note-taking app and started writing up a to-do list:

Power supply—check

Battery capacity—not enough stuff

Display—check

Lights—check

Knife mode—check

Blade of Awesomeness—not enough stuff

Water—got the oxygen, need the hydrogen

Hydrogen—dig until I reach it

Food—get Petra to copy

Latrine—need to figure out how not to stink up the cave. Don't want to hold it six hours every day.

Toilet paper—use paper for the moment I guess

Long-term Goals

Get home

Transportation

Communication—can I phone home?

Aliens—can I find any?

Explore BigBall

Learn more about Petra

Is there life on BigBall besides me and my germs?

Can I plant the apple seeds I saved?

Nick frowned at the list. It didn't give him much to actually do yet, just dig for the hydrogen. Nick brooded about that for a few minutes, then added under short-term goals:

See if Petra can dig faster than I can, or help me do it faster.

All right, how do I explain “dig” to Petra?

Nick thought about “Cut” and how he managed that one. He drew a picture of a block, then a block with a hole through it, and wrote DRILL on the first block, and then DR and LL on either side of the hole in the second one. After a few rounds of that, Petra created a menu option and a picture of Petra with essentially a big drill bit instead of a blade.

Nick tried it out immediately. Again there was the faint smell of something burning, which he had long since gotten used to, and the vibration and hum. He pushed Petra straight into the wall until she touched the surface, then pulled the device back. There was a cylindrical hole in the wall, maybe three inches across. There was no sign of the rock that had been there. Petra must have eaten it.

Nick experimented, and found that he could work fairly quickly, creating holes in the wall one after another in a matter of a few seconds. A few minutes of this, and there were dozens of holes, several of which he had merged into a big opening that Petra in blade mode could work from. Encouraged, Nick started digging again, trying to do everything with the drill. Unfortunately, the drill abruptly turned off after a while.

Crap. Did I break it? Nick tried to turn the drill back on, but to no avail. The knife mode still worked. Nick hunted through the menus and looked up the amounts of substances. One of them was full up, listing 720/720 units.

Nick switched to Discharging, and selected the full-up substance. Petra began printing hexagonal rods of a shiny white metal. Nick started stacking them up, but soon found that the rods were getting covered in a white-gray coating. Reacting with the air, I guess. I wonder what element that is.

Once the rods stopped coming out, Nick had a rough idea of how much a “unit” was. He went back to drilling, focusing more on making a hole about ten inches across, wide enough to reach in and cut the sides. The drill turned itself off, again, and the same substance was full up, so Nick had Petra print out more of the rods.

Man, I hope this stuff isn't toxic. Nick went through a couple more rounds of this. The rods took up less than half the space of the stone bricks. Then a different substance jammed the drill. It turned out to be oxygen. Nick was about to hit Discharging, but froze.

Wait, isn't pure oxygen dangerous?

The last thing he needed was to spray pure oxygen over flammable things in super bright sunlight. Nick decided to lay off the drill for the moment. Instead, he went back to sketching.

Is there a way to get Petra to do the drilling for me?