Nick chose to expand the area near the hydrogen-bearing rocks into a proper room. It wasn't strictly necessary, but he felt as if it mattered. He was going to go crazy if all he had was a claustrophobic rounded tunnel to live in, even if he could go outside at night.

He also decided to start a diary in his little text editor on his cloned phone. There was a lot to keep track of, and a couple of times, Nick had already done some digging and forgotten why he was digging in a particular direction.

Wednesday, October third, 202X

Day 3 on Planet BigBall

So a funny thing happened to me on Monday...

Nick wrote for a bit, venting a little and organizing a little. And partly, writing down important stuff that he was sure to forget if he was here for a long time. Such as, the rest of my life, he thought grimly.

He took one of his four doses of medication. It wouldn't do him any good to get horribly depressed and unmotivated while he was still trying to get established. He was already feeling the effects of missing a day, and it sucked.

He went outside and dug a shallow latrine about thirty yards away from his tunnel. After the unpleasant process of using it was complete, Nick grimaced. “I'm really sorry about this, Petra,” he muttered, and used Petra's ability to make materials vanish.

While he was at it, he had Petra absorb the groceries that had gone bad in the heat, including the eggs and sour milk. He continued turning the car into a pile of hexagonal metal rods and such. When the Death Star was about to rise, he took the purified materials and retreated into his tunnel.

He had a bad scare later that day—night—whatever, when he got a headache and started feeling tired and having trouble breathing. He had just enough presence of mind to get Petra to discharge pure oxygen in his face, and then used the adrenaline rush to get out of the deathtrap. He stayed on the edge of the shadows cast by the Death Star and thought about ventilation.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Hours of drawing later, he thought he had explained to Petra what he needed, and she offered a device that he had enough materials to make. It took a while to print, but eventually the new alien gadget was finished. Nick optimistically labeled it Air Purifier #1 in the network and turned it on. Nothing appeared to happen, though. How will I know if it works? I don't have any canaries with me.

He went back to drawing, trying to get Petra to make other things like remote sensors, tunneling robots, and the like. Or at least to get the idea that they were needed. The alien device offered up a new menu with gibberish labels, and Nick couldn't afford the materials for any of them yet. Eventually he would just have to build them and find out what they did.

He took a few deep breaths of clean air, then went down the tunnel into his room. He had three of Petra's little lights mounted on the walls now, and a fourth that he carried like a flashlight. When he inspected the air purifier, he found a small hexagonal rod of a gray-black material that looked and felt a little greasy. Is that lead? Pencil lead?

Nick tried to remember. He had a fuzzy memory that regular lead and pencil lead weren't the same thing. That made sense, because people wanted to keep regular lead away from kids, not put it in pencils that kids sometimes chewed on.

At any rate, the air felt okay to breathe and he didn't get a headache even after an hour in the room. He guessed that the air purifier was doing its job. Since it ate carbon dioxide and made oxygen, the greasy stuff should be carbon. Nick went through the Charging menu and found and labeled carbon.

When he looked at the food ingredients lists again, he found that four substances were needed a lot more than anything else: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and one other. Whatever it was, he had a decent amount now from the same rocks that he was mining for hydrogen. Apparently he had lucked out; the eggs had included something he needed a only tiny bit of for lots of things.

Then came the most important moment to Nick. He told Petra to Copy, and fed her one of his three remaining antidepressant pills. The alien device consumed it, and displayed the ingredients.

There were six ingredients. He was missing one. Nick swore at length.

He had Petra Save the design of the pill. Then he stared at the remaining food. He had two snack bars left, two cans of soup, four cans of tuna, a bag of potato chips, one bottle of fizzy water, and a few more items. Which one will have what I need? Will any of them? Will I destroy my entire food supply and not even get my meds?

It took Nick an embarrassingly long time to remember to Search for the missing ingredient. It was in all of the food, it turned out. Nervously, Nick sacrificed a can of tuna, feeding it entirely to Petra, and prayed it would be enough.

It was. Petra started printing pills.