Chapter 20
Nick was hungry.
He was always hungry these days. He still hadn't managed to get Petra to print any food. He decided to search Bare Hill more efficiently. He drew the designs while waiting for charge, and as soon as Petra was at peak, he sent Tunnel Rat out to dig little tunnels only a few inches across.
It took an annoyingly long time to figure out how to tell Petra what he wanted next. He called it Taxi, and all it did was carry one of Petra's sensors around. He made sure it fit inside the little tunnels, then sent it off to search the whole hill. It started out working great...then both Taxi and the sensor disappeared. The signal was lost.
They've got a maximum range, Nick realized. Tunnel Rat was okay because it had instructions to return back the way it came. I had Taxi on manual and now it's stuck somewhere. Nick shook his head, annoyed with himself.
Dumbass.
Nick built another Taxi and another sensor, and tried to be more careful with the instructions this time. He called up Maps and got Petra to color in the resources she was finding. The picture rapidly got very messy. Then Petra spouted some alphabet soup followed by
Confirm (Y/N)?
Nick stared at it. She hasn't steered me wrong yet. He pressed Y and a familiar image came up. It was the Display menu. Instead of the rectangle that had produced the tablet Nick used all the time, a sort of star pattern of lines was selected.
Nick looked at the ingredients list, which took a while because he had to remember that he had those rods printed out, so he had more stuff than Petra was counting. Eventually, he concluded that he could afford it—barely. There were three different rare materials that the new display consumed basically all of. Nick winced, but pressed Y again at the final prompt.
This printout took over an hour, and paused half a dozen times while Nick found the necessary rods to feed in. It also consumed half a day's worth of energy, for some reason. In the end, what came out was a square mirror with slightly rounded corners. Nick picked it up and inspected it; it was black on the other side, which he guessed was the bottom. He set it down on a stack of bricks, then used Petra's tablet to turn it on.
The air above the mirror began to glow. Then, what looked like a hologram formed. Nick squinted at the colored blobs before he realized what he was seeing: a three-dimensional map of the contents of Bare Hill, at least as far as he had managed to send Taxi exploring. Materials were color coded. It was actually really cool to look at.
With that in hand, Nick did another search. He looked for the materials needed in trace amounts stopping him from replicating a can of tuna and getting some much needed protein. One of the missing materials was not far away, and he set a Digger to get some.
After that, there was still one more to find. Nick set Tunnel Rat to digging out another room heading north, deeper into the hillside. The power drain was bad enough that Nick turned on Petra's knife and did some of the work by hand as well. He almost lost a finger or two in a moment of clumsiness, then turned off the knife and put Petra down.
It's getting hard to think straight. Nick had no idea how much sleep he had been getting, only that it wasn't nearly enough, and hunger was contributing to his exhaustion. He climbed back up the stairs to his first room, and then the tunnel to the outside. He stayed near the edge of the shadows cast by the Death Star and focused on just breathing fresh air for a bit.
I really need food. I mean, even if I get Petra copying what I've got, I'm not exactly going to have a great diet. But if I don't eat something soon, I'm going to kill myself making a mistake. Nick debated with himself, then opened his next-to-last snack bar. He could barely pace himself. He didn't want to leave any food exposed to the air long, so he was going to eat it all, but he had meant for it to last more than a minute.
This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.
At least I have water, he consoled himself.
Eventually, he went back down inside. I need to name the rooms, now that I have more than one. Hm, I'm building a secret base that can make almost anything. The Mine is a decent name, I guess. Maybe I should name the levels, or number them at least. Only, I would have to increase the numbers going down instead of up. Like diving a dungeon in a game.
Nick thought about that. This kind of is like a game, or it could be. No monsters to fight, thank God. But it's like I found a what-do-you-call-it, a dungeon core. Like a seed that sprouts a dungeon, and this whole situation is a lot like one of those city-building games. 'Build the Dungeon': an Actual Reality Game brought to you by Fates with a twisted sense of humor.
So the tunnel and the first room would be the first level of the dungeon. The room over the copper deposit would be on the second level, along with the new room Tunnel Rat's working on when it has power. Speaking of which, I should see how many solar panels I can make now.
Nick sat down and fought with Petra some more, trying to get ideas across. He could use Copy to get an ingredient list for an object. He wanted to know what was in the air. He tried a bunch of things, but what finally worked was running Search for every substance Petra had in the list, and zooming in on a patch of air. The box he drew lit up with oxygen, and a couple of others, including an ingredient in food. What is that...nitrogen? Nick wasn't sure at all.
He discovered that he could add substances to the Search menu, assuming he could describe them in a way Petra could actually identify and understand. He put in water as a new ingredient, and then Searched for it. The air box lit up, so there was water vapor in the air.
Right, there had to be, otherwise I would be dry as a mummy by now. If anything, the air on Planet BigBall felt a bit humid. A grim thought crept in. That would make sense if all the oceans on BigBall recently boiled away into the air...
Nick put it out of his mind. He struggled to find a way to tell Petra to take the stink out of the air. He also thought that he needed to create a proper bathroom, but that would take ages. Running water was a bit much for a project when he was still working on not starving to death.
For hours, Nick went through the list of substances, doing Search after Search, filling in more and more of the 3D map of the interior of Bare Hill. Even with the map, it was getting hard to keep track of where the scanners were, the Tunnel Rats, and how long it had been since he last did a Search for a particular substance. He kept notes, but it was still getting really tedious.
Eventually, he got tired enough that he slept for something like six hours straight. He woke up and did another Search for the missing ingredient in tuna that Petra couldn't Copy yet. This time, he got a hit.
“Hallelujiah,” Nick breathed, his voice feeling rough. He got a drink of water. I'm getting lost in my own head a lot these days. I'm not even talking to myself out loud any more.
The deposit was a long distance away, at the limit of Tunnel Rat's automated motions. Nick had it just carve out and fetch samples so he could see it for himself. What he got was a reddish rock that looked like it had tiny red crystals in it. Cool. Red Kryptonite. He fed it to Petra.
One sample gave more than enough of the missing ingredient. Nick sighed with relief. Now I can eat tuna until I'm sick of it. Out of curiosity, he printed out a sample of the mysterious secret ingredient.
A bit of shiny, silvery metal dripped out of Petra's printer.
“Mercury.” Nick stared at it, and then had Petra reabsorb it. Even he knew mercury was bad for you. He squeezed his eyes shut a moment, then couldn't hold back a yell.
“God DAMN it! I've been going hungry all this time because Petra couldn't find enough fucking MERCURY to put in my TUNA to match what the supermarket sells? Son of a BITCH! AAAGH!”
Nick vented for a while, then took a deep breath. He glowered at the alien device. “All right, Petra, you and I are going to get this straight once and for all. I want tuna, except for the fucking mercury.”
The problem was, Nick couldn't figure out how to say that in pictures. Petra wouldn't let him edit ingredients lists for something to be copied. She's like a photocopier. She doesn't know how to edit or Photoshop things.
He went ahead and had Petra create several cans of supermarket quality tuna, complete with little bits of mercury, while he continued to struggle with the problem. He stuffed himself with tuna, then wished mightily for toothpaste and dental floss. But at least his stomach shut up for a little while.
I'm gonna have the same kind of issue with snack bars. There's way too many ingredients in those things, there's always going to be something missing, and I don't know which things it will be safe to leave out. But I know there shouldn't be any mercury in food.
Fuck, I wish I knew chemistry.