Nick scratched at his bushy beard and picked another molecule to taste. He cleared his throat a few times, a new habit ever since he had nearly killed himself printing out chlorine gas by mistake. The things I do to get table salt.

He drew this molecule on Petra's pad, and as often happened, Petra objected. Well, not really, but she made holograms of sixteen different versions (Nick counted) and asked which one he wanted printed out. He decided to try all sixteen.

It turned out, some of them tasted sweet. Not quite sugar, he didn't think, but pretty close. It took him a long while to figure out that some versions made him sick to his stomach and others didn't. Once he found a version his body liked, Nick heaved an enormous sigh of relief.

He started eating that specific version regularly and just labeled it as sugar. He learned that he could actually make and eat a lot of it without dying, and best of all, it seemed to genuinely ease his hunger pangs.

My teeth are totally going to rot away, but that is a problem for future Nick—a non-starving Nick.

Nick was pretty sure he would have come down with, like, rickets or scurvy or something already, if it weren't for the package of multivitamins. Petra still couldn't make a complete vitamin pill from scratch, but she could make most of one, and Nick was careful to take one every day along with his medication.

After a lot of tuna and sugar for breakfast one “day”, Nick went on a tour of his little “dungeon.”

Level 1 had the tunnel and first room, which was now the washroom. That was a fancy name for a room with stone jars of water and an iron tub, along with all the scraps of cloth Nick had. He still hadn't figured out soap, and after several painful failures wasn't sure he was going to bother trying any more. He just scrubbed at himself as well as he could, over and over.

Stairs led down to Level 2, which now had four rooms. The room with copper was the central chamber at the base of the stairs. The second room towards the east was his “bedroom” and held his few possessions from Earth. The third room to the west was his kitchen and larder, where he kept supplies of foods Petra had printed out, and ingredient stockpiles.

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The fourth room, to the north, opened into a lot of small tunnels, and held all the Diggers, Masons, Sensors, Taxis and Tunnel Rats when he wasn't using them. This room also had the next flight of stairs down.

Level 3 had four small rooms so far, connected by tunnels. Each one went towards a deposit of something or other. He was considering using the northernmost room as the starting point for the next flight of stairs down to what would become Level 4.

All the rooms had light fixtures that could be aimed and turned on and off individually. Petra could also work them remotely, labeling them as Flashlight 1 through Flashlight 47 in her network.

Not bad for a month and a half, Nick cheered himself.

He went back to his bedroom. He had printed out more flat displays, and had them mounted on the walls in there. Two of them showed different photos from his cloned phone. Another had the main list of Petra's network.

The last one showed the signal from a remote camera he had set up near where the portal had opened when Nick had landed on this world. It was a boring view, but Nick held out hope that one day it wouldn't be.

He had finally cracked the air-purification problem. He had taken Petra outside and analyzed a block of air to death, so that he knew what the atmosphere of BigBall was. It turned out to be 28% oxygen, 65% nitrogen, 2% water vapor, and 5% other things he hadn't been able to identify. He hoped they weren't harmful.

At any rate, his new home did not stink like he did, and it wasn't dusty. Nick called that problem solved. He wondered what to work on next.

He had a Wish List:

Make a radio or communicator. Try to contact aliens for a rescue. Try to contact Earth.

Make some kind of transport, preferably a flyer.

Explore more of BigBall.

Try to find Earth.

Make a spaceship.

Go home.

None of those were practical in the short term or even the medium term, and maybe not ever. It wasn't a good list to motivate him to start projects.

The more reasonable items he called the To Do List:

keep recording the log

teach Petra more English

learn science from Petra

learn more about what Petra can do

keep exploring

get more resources

figure out more foods

figure out what kind of dirt a plant needs to grow

try to plant the apple seeds

figure out soap and shampoo and toothpaste (really hard)

Nick looked over the lists again. He got brain fatigue pretty easily these days, but Petra was the only thing around that interacted with him in any way, so every new word or concept was a victory.

I should write in my log, he thought. Then he sighed. After I nap. He lay down, feeling vaguely dissatisfied, but not sure what to do about it. Sleep helps, he told himself. I'll feel better after I nap.