Every day, Nick checked on the growth of the apple sapling. It appeared to be doing well so far. Petra was happy to describe exactly what she had used for soil composition and water density and so forth. She had already started several other seeds under the same conditions, but only #784 was sprouting. Petra apparently had the whole scientist research thing down, as she kept scanning things, generating more data, and running more experiments, trying to figure out why that one had succeeded when the others failed.
Nick really, really wanted that sapling to grow into a tree.
He was well aware that it could die for any of a thousand reasons. He told himself not to get his hopes up. He still took endless pictures of it, and checked on it frequently. Fortunately, he also had Rockhunter to work on.
He had to get a lesson from Petra in how alien fasteners worked; they didn't use nails or screws, weirdly. He wasn't quite sure what to call them. From what little he got out of the description, they were somewhere between magnets and reversible superglue. Also, he was pretty sure magic teleportation shit was involved, since the diagrams looked completely impossible. Well, not as bad as that dude who drew staircases that made a loop, but they looked like the only way they would fit together would be if you built them around each other. The most important thing was that they worked in real life.
Although, Nick felt a little strange using 'real life' to describe his current existence. Some days he caught himself looking for hidden cameras, like it was all going to be a huge prank somehow, and he was on some secret gotcha podcast. He always thought those shows were kind of sadistic and didn't watch them, but hey, there was a market for that stuff.
Building Rockhunter was actually pretty cool, and a good distraction. Basically, Nick had to learn an entirely new set of tools. At first, he felt like a toddler playing with those plastic pretend saws and hammers and wrenches. It felt like the instructions were written for little kids. The diagrams were a little lacking, because they used a generic blob for an arm. Different strokes for different space folks, I guess. Maybe some people are using tentacles or whatever.
The first tool was a floating shelf. That was pretty cool; you put it wherever you wanted, turned it on, and then it just...stayed there. It was solid as a rock. Nick could stand on it and it wouldn't budge.
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Other tools were clearly meant to be mounted on those shelves. A lifter was pretty self-explanatory, although Nick had no idea how it actually worked. It looked like magnets, except it worked on everything. You just adjusted a slider for how fast you wanted the thing to rise. And everything came with a remote.
So, to lift a heavy part into position, Nick put a shelf over the part and near the ceiling, then hung a lifter from it, then just tapped a couple of controls and steered the thing into position. You had to use more than one lifter if it was really heavy and you wanted to adjust orientation, otherwise it would just hang from its center of gravity. Nick stuck his arm under it out of curiosity and it kind of felt like gravity was pulling his whole body up. That's when he learned that you could stick a tag on an object, and target that object specifically with the lifter. That was important because while the lifters were running, Nick needed to reach in there without floating up in the air.
The fasteners were like hexagonal bolts—the bolts themselves were six-sided. It reminded Nick of the way Petra printed out ingots of supplies in hexagonal rods. The other weird thing was that it worked kind of like a mechanical pencil or a tube of toothpaste; instead of having different bolts of different lengths, the tool just spit out whatever length was needed at the moment. The tool itself was only about eight inches long and half an inch in diameter, so Nick didn't know where it was keeping the stuff. Presumably, it was the same place Petra kept her stomach when she ate stuff and didn't print it out.
I don't know, man, I just work here, he thought wryly.
At any rate, getting used to the alien toolkit was harder than the actual assembly. I guess the Galactic Empire or whoever created Petra had some good designers for the blueprints. They've probably been super polished, like if you gave a Swedish furniture company a thousand years to practice and debug.
Nick studied more of the tools than he actually needed, because they were fun. I could build all kinds of shit with these. I wonder if I could bring a toolkit home with me someday. A big tool company would give a bazillion dollars for it. I'd better bring home two kits, so that I'll have one for myself.
He firmly pushed down the gloomy thought that he might never make it home. Not helping, depression. Shut up.
He had Rockhunter about a quarter finished before he realized that it wasn't going to fit through the tunnels, and started taking it apart again. He ordered Petra to dig out a garage in the hillside that he could work out of. Then, he started looking for ways to erase the incident from Petra's memory.