Nick kept digging.
The days and nights on BigBall started to blur together pretty quickly. He was either chilled or sweating all the time. He needed a better air purifier because his own stink was getting bad, and he didn't have enough water for a good bath.
Nick knew that his survival depended on getting enough resources from the rocks. He dug until he was too tired to carry rocks out of the tunnel, then rested, either sleeping or poking at Petra's interface. He started playing over and over the few video clips he had saved on his phone for a little contact with the memory of humanity.
Nick solved the can opener problem by asking Petra to build something purely out of steel, and then feeding her a can of tuna. Petra ate the top lid and then Nick aborted the command. He used the steel to make a spork. That left him two more cans. He was definitely going to go hungry for a while.
Watching the power levels go up and down, Nick decided to make two more solar panels since he had the materials. Every so often he checked the ingredients list to see whether he could expand Petra's battery capacity.
He cut up the rest of the car, turning it all into raw materials and bringing them inside. Then he actually had to spend some time moving the waste rock farther away from the tunnel entrance. That at least was easy enough; if he gave more than a gentle toss it would roll or slide quite a ways downhill.
It was still exercise. Nick wondered if this was what prison felt like—moving rocks all day in heat and cold. I guess it would be solitary confinement, in my case. But hey, I don't have a fence. I can go wherever, so long as I dig in by sunrise.
Nick figured that he might eventually want to make boltholes some distance away, in case he got trapped outside at sunrise. But first, he wanted to make his tunnel into a home. That required resources. Everything always came down to resources.
Not wanting to get trapped in a pit of his own making, Nick was careful to carve good smooth steps as he went, and counted his progress by them. He managed several steps per day. The work was faster with practice, but slower because he had a lot farther to carry the waste rock.
Petra kept time for him, so that he didn't completely lose track. He took his meds religiously, knowing what a vast difference they made. He rationed his food, and got used to feeling hungry all the time.
He kept writing log entries. They were basically a diary, but log sounded cooler. He kept notes on what he had figured out and what Petra could do.
Finally, after what felt like forever, Nick hit the copper deposit.
He scooped out enough rock so that Petra printed out several copper rods of excess, then sat down to see what he could make. He'd also gotten a couple of other things out of the same deposit, including one that printed out a crazy bright yellow. Most metals looked the same to him, though. He had no idea what they were called back on Earth.
Now, though, he had options.
First up was a remote sensor to Search for minerals. Nick printed a couple of them, and placed them far apart inside the tunnel. I guess I could call this a mine. I'm living in a mine, being a miner. I could name this place Nick's Mine. Or I could just say it's Mine. Nick played around with the display for a while, making sure that the sensors worked, and made a note to take them outside and walk around prospecting with them after the Death Star set.
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Next he printed out a device that he wasn't quite sure of what it did. He hoped it was some kind of digging tool, so he named it Digger #1. It was small, barely bigger than Petra. He set it down on top of the copper deposit and used the display pad to turn it on.
Nick cracked up laughing at what he saw.
Petra still wasn't great at English, not knowing what words were referring to. But she had adopted the interface from one of his little time-waster games. He could steer the digger around just like a little game avatar. Well, that's one way to get the point across!
Nick happily drove the little thing around, and tried out the special moves buttons. The first one called up the substance menu, and Nick chose copper. A little map popped up with a projected path, and the gadget glided over and parked on top of the copper deposit. The next special caused the digger to start eating its way into the rock for a bit, then it stopped. The third special caused it to print out a copper rod. The fourth needed a location specified, and once Nick chose it, the digger trundled back up out of the hole it had dug and parked itself.
There was a suggestion for a combo of moves, and Nick labeled it Fetch. When he triggered it, the digger rolled over to the copper, dug in, came back, and printed out a copper rod along with a different material that looked like gold at first. When he picked it up, though, it was heavy like metal, but not super heavy like gold was supposed to be. I'll figure it out later, he decided.
Nick tried to send the digger after a mineral deposit that was a few feet in past where he had cleared. The little digger tried, but retreated as soon as it got full of rock.
Another device Nick wanted to build was one he called Mason. Its job was to cut stone blocks out of the walls. When he printed it out, he set it to work lengthening the chamber he was in. Unfortunately it still needed him to move all the stone blocks that it cut out, but doing all the cutting for him was a huge win.
Mason had several modes. It did a terrific job of leveling the floor. He gave it instructions by drawing, Petra sharpened up his artwork, and Mason went to town.
The only problem was that these devices were a huge power drain. Nick printed out a couple more solar panels, and then looked at the battery prospects again. It turned out that he had enough of some rare things to build exactly one storage battery. When Nick went to print it out, Petra warned him that there wasn't enough energy available to print it.
So, Nick waited until the following local day, and waited until Petra was full of energy, with all six solar panels soaking up more power that was presumably just going to waste. He started the printing process, and it ended up taking over four hours, only finishing after night fell and nearly half of Petra's charge had been drained away.
As soon as it was in the network and Nick turned it on, he checked Petra's energy level. Instead of 2782/5040, it now read 2782/45360. Nick pumped his fist in the air. “Yeah! That's what I'm talking about! Whoo-hoo! Yeah!” His own voice already sounded a little unfamiliar, and echoed a bit painfully off the rock walls.
Buoyed by his successes, Nick took another look at the problems with food printing. He was almost able to print out most of the foods, but there was always a tiny bit of something or other missing. That meant that he had to get even better at finding resources in the rocks of Bare Hill.
The next device took a while of arguing with Petra. He actually printed two devices that he couldn't figure out what they did, but on the third try, he got a machine that he named Tunnel Rat. Tunnel Rat was the big prize.
It took a while to chain the commands together, but eventually, Tunnel Rat started working. It ate away at a wall, then climbed out of the hole it was making. It then sort of floated up over the steps—Nick had no idea how—and kept going until it was outside, where it dropped the load of stone shaped into a brick. Best of all, Nick could set it on Repeat.
He had to turn it off and wait, though, because Petra was running out of energy. Nick resolved to use as little energy as possible until the battery was fully charged up. Then he would see what he could afford to run.
But Petra was now all set to dig out the mine herself, following whatever blueprints Nick decided to draw up. He checked his air, drank water, used the latrine, and then lay back on the car seat as well as he could. Between exhaustion, the heat, and the gnawing hunger, Nick decided to sleep as long as he could.
Whatever Earth's Sun and the Death Star were doing, it had been a good day.