Nick stared at the result. “Show me. Distance from BigBall to Earth!” He typed in the question as quickly as he could. Petra gave it to him in centimeters, a ridiculously huge number. After a lot of back and forth Nick convinced Petra to give it to him in light-years.
1,473.55 light-years.
Nick just looked at the number for a while. I don't know why I even asked for it. It's not like I can do anything about that number.
Nick stood up and paced a little. Can Petra build spaceships? Can she built space phones, or whatever they use? Can I call Earth? They wouldn't have a receiver, unless Petra has an adapter or something. What if I called someone else?
Nick went back to Petra's menus and hunted around. He couldn't figure out a way to get the idea “communicate” across, but maybe Petra simply had it as an option already and he just had to find it. A lot of the menu options were still written in gibberish.
He couldn't find it. He would have to try building some more things at random and try to figure out what they did. He was stuck, again.
Nick went for another swim, and ate a bowl of soup made with Petra's latest experimental recipe. He watched the central room, where some of the guys were trundling around, going about whatever latest tasks Petra had given them. He watched something like a modified Taxi float past, and decided to give a flying car another try.
He had gotten stuck on this before, but this time, he tried to get it across by talking about moving freight. Specifically, if he wanted to move a rock across the room, Taxi could do it. If he wanted to send it down to the valley, there was a different, more expensive design that Petra had built a few of. He called up a map of the area, which Petra kept improving, and found a fairly distant spot three hills over and marked it X.
He drew a brick with the word “HELP” on it, and then drew it in Petra's second level, followed by it being at X. Petra seemed to think it over, and brought up a design that basically looked like a scaled-up Taxi. He labeled it “Big Taxi” and set it aside. Going back to the drawing, he stared at it. Should I replace the rock with a stick figure labeled 'Nick' or...?
Suddenly, he got an inspiration. He erased the rock, but left the word “HELP” as a cargo, and did the same for the second drawing of it arriving. I don't need the rock to go, just the word. To drive the point home, Nick erased “HELP” and wrote “HELLO” in both places.
Petra shuffled a different menu to the front. Nick checked, his fingers crossed, and under one of the submenus, Nick's Phone was listed. With a sigh of relief, Nick labeled the top menu Communications, then went looking at his options.
Just about everything was still written in gibberish, so Nick tried to describe them by range. He drew two boxes, sending messages back and forth. Then he asked for the distance between them, and labeled it Range. Sure enough, each of the entries had a sublisting called Range, and some of them had huge numbers attached.
“Now, we're getting somewhere,” Nick muttered. He asked Petra to convert to light years and got tiny numbers. Damn. I guess an instant communicator across the galaxy was a little too hard even for Petra.
Hoping that there were more entries that he hadn't seen, he asked for communicators with Range over 1000 light-years.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
None found.
Nick drummed his fingers against his thigh, thinking. Then he tried, Range = 10 light-years. This time he got a hit. Eagerly Nick called it up and looked at the material requirements. They were huge.
This isn't like a cell phone, this is more like a cell tower. Or company headquarters, he amended, once he saw the measurements of the thing. Even Petra is going to need weeks or months to build this thing.
At one point he'd taught Petra phrases like Supply for things Petra had mined and stockpiled, and Known Reserves for everything Petra had seen but not mined yet. He looked at the material requirements some more. Petra didn't have enough of anything to build this, not even close. For some materials, though, Nick wasn't worried. Element 16 and element 20 seemed to be major ingredients in the nearby rock, for example. He'd picked up that much at least.
Some others, like elements 63 and 64, though, had no supply and essentially no reserves. And there were a bunch that they hadn't found even a trace, like 90 and 92. All the amounts required were pretty huge, too.
Nick kept scrolling down the list, and found a surprise. Element 21.5? How can you have .5 of an element? It's got to be a translation error. I'm pretty sure that if there were more elements, Mr. Peters would have made us try to memorize them.
It wasn't the only oddity. There were entries for Elements 25.5, 31.5, 32.5, and 54.5 as well. I've never seen these in the lists before. I should do a Search.
Nick asked Petra to scan for Element 21.5.
Error.
Nick raised an eyebrow, and tried the others. All of them gave an error message. What the hell does that mean? It's like Petra's saying, “don't even bother looking, you won't find any.” But why would that be the case?
Oh, I get it! Mr. Peters said that there were manmade elements, ones that didn't happen in nature. These must be some of those. The decimal part is still weird, though.
Wait, so does this mean Petra can't build anything with those requirements?
“Petra, how do I make Element 21.5?” Nick typed it as well as asking aloud, because Petra's speech-to-text abilities still left a lot to be desired. Her English language level was still only 23% after months of being stuck with Nick. Partly that was because it was hard to teach concepts, and partly because teaching English was boring. Nick could only stand to do so much of it at a time.
In response, Petra brought up the construction menu, and opened a submenu he hadn't seen before. Maybe this was a menu for making materials. But when Petra keeps trying to make sugar or whatever, that's in a different menu altogether. I don't get it.
Well, he didn't have to get it. The number of things Petra knew that Nick didn't get would fill a warehouse. He just had to do what he could. With that, Nick started looking over the requirements for the “Element 21.5 maker.”
One of the ingredients was Element 21.5.
Nick squeezed his eyes shut for a second and then stared at it again. I need Element 21.5 in order to make Element 21.5? What the hell, Petra? How am I supposed to get started?
Nick was reminded of a goofy conversation he'd had with a Jewish kid named Ben Cohen in college. Nick didn't know squat about Judaism and a few beers had made him curious. Ben had been happy to explain, but some of the stories were just kind of whack. Apparently, somewhere it was written that in the last minutes of the sixth day of Creation, God had made a whole list of weird little things, like “a pair of tongs.” Because, Ben had explained, you needed a pair of tongs to make a pair of tongs, so the only explanation for why there were tongs in the world was that God made the first pair.
Too bad I didn't pack any Element 21.5 in my bag that morning, Nick groused.
He was frustrated, and took a break to play some video games. Stupid bootstrapping. Got to try to build a whole goddamn civilization's worth of tech starting with nothing but a goddamn rock. Sorry, Petra, he apologized in his thoughts. You're a fucking amazing rock. You rock, rock.
At lunch, Petra had figured out peanuts somehow, although they came as little spheres and cubes instead of being the right shape. At least she wasn't adding shells. Nick requested some to keep around as a snack.
Half an hour later, though, Nick was retching up the last of them. Got something backwards in the recipe, Petra. One star. Would not eat again. It wasn't the first time Petra had poisoned him accidentally, and it wouldn't be the last. He was desperate enough for more variety in his diet that he was willing to keep trying Petra's experiments.
Potato chips it is. Again.