Nick sat at a stone table and rested his chin on it, staring at one of his brain medication pills. Petra has replicated it exactly. It's not even as if I had switched to a different brand. So, am I actually getting more depressed, or not? Should I up my dosage a little? Nick wasn't sure how high a dose would be harmful, though.

I'm feeling down. That should be pretty normal, right? Given my situation? I mean, I'm basically stuck in a stone prison where I can go out at night to an exercise yard if I want. And there's nobody else here.

He'd started listening to his recordings more, but then stopped. He had them all memorized at this point, and it was depressing that there wasn't anything new there.

God, I don't know how to make music, but even my humming would be something new.

He sat down at his “drafting table,” which was basically a huge input/display. He thought about what to try, and almost gave up in despair at the thought. But he recognized depression trying to stop him, and forced himself to continue. He started with glass.

It didn't take very long for Petra to grasp the concept, once he explained that he wanted something made of sand that light could go through clearly. He had been reluctant to start making glass items, because he lived in a network of stone caverns, and anything he dropped would immediately become a health hazard.

Still, Nick had Petra make a couple of dozen glasses for him, and a pitcher. With the water supply ready, he filled the different glasses up to different levels, and started trying to tune his first musical instrument. He wasn't a musician by any stretch, but he knew how a scale was supposed to sound. He tried the wet-the-fingertip-and-run-it-on-the-rim trick, but it was kind of annoying. His first attempt at a mallet cracked the glass he tried it on.

Petra had gotten good enough at seeing what he was trying to do that she offered up a musical mallet design on her own. He tried it and it worked pretty well. Nick began tapping out anything and everything he could think of. Petra recorded it all these days. She'd recently built herself another brain booster module. While she didn't seem to get any new abilities from it, she got noticeably better at the things she was already attempting.

He sketched a xylophone, and Petra took the idea and ran with it. A few hours later, the alien device had printed out the bars, but Nick couldn't figure out what to mount them on. He eventually settled on hanging them up. (String had been a project in itself, but well worth the effort.) Having them swing around wildly was not conducive to carrying a tune. Still, he'd stumbled on wind chimes this way, and before long, Planet BigBall was contributing to the local music scene every dawn and dusk when the wind blew away from the Death Star.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Petra tried again, and this time came up with a mount for the bars. Nick taught her about screws, but Petra simply formed it all in one piece. Fortunately, she had mastered the art of tuning, and Nick finally had a working xylophone.

It wasn't his favorite musical instrument, but it was dirt simple, and it was enough for Nick to start playing out every tune he could think of. Petra often gave a technically perfect reproduction of what he had been trying for, but there was something...missing. Nick didn't know what it was. He suggested Petra introduce tiny errors. That didn't solve the problem, but Petra's reproductions were at least a little more flexible.

He spent more time trying to reproduce music from Earth. He picked a song that the artist had sung himself in harmony, laying down different tracks to sing along with himself. Nick made good use of Petra's recording abilities. At one point he recorded the sound of him hitting his own thighs twice and then clapping. Then he played it and recorded another layer. And another, and another, until it felt as if he had gotten a hundred people in a crowd to perform the introduction to We Will Rock You.

Nick was embarrassed that he couldn't remember all the lyrics. So, after a while, he started making up his own. I feel like Weird Al. I'm not in his league, but I am the greatest musician on this planet, after all. And Petra is an infinitely forgiving audience. He belted out songs that he would have been totally embarrassed to perform on Earth.

“(Boom boom clap! Boom boom clap! Boom boom clap! Boom boom clap!)

WE WILL WE WILL ROCK YOU! (Clap! Boom boom clap!)

WE WILL WE WILL ROCK YOU! (Clap! Boom boom clap!)

I don't know the lyrics

I don't care at all,

I am all alone on Pla—net BigBall!

I got mud on my face, a big disgrace, digging my tunnels all over the place!

WE WILL WE WILL ROCK YOU! (Clap, Boom boom clap!)

I am not a singer, I don't know the words,

I got no competition, not even birds,

Music is heaven, gift from above,

I am making things that only I need to love!

WE WILL WE WILL ROCK YOU! (Clap, Boom boom clap!)...”

Nick sang himself hoarse, grinning.

Then, to his great surprise, he burst into tears and sobbed for a couple of minutes. He was glad he was alone, because he had zero ability to stop his embarrassing display. The tears just...had to come out, right then. All of them.

When he pulled himself together, wiped his eyes and drank some water, he wondered, What the hell was that about?

Then, he remembered someone he had known in college, who at one point during a drunken bullshitting session, stood up, and pronounced, with the deep solemnity only the truly inebriated can achieve, “Music is my mood-altering drug of choice.” It had sounded very profound to Nick at the time.

Whatever the reason, after singing his heart out and crying for a few minutes, Nick slept better than he had in ages.