After two weeks, the apple seedling died.

Nick had no idea what happened. The previous day it had looked fine, if a little pale. All he could think was that Petra had somehow poisoned it accidentally. Who knows what kind of radiation and crap Petra and the guys put out. Maybe this environment is killing me too, just more slowly.

Shut up, depression.

It was hard not to feel despair, though. For some reason, that little baby apple tree meant a lot to him, and to wake up and find it a moldy mess was heartbreaking. Petra already had a couple of dozen more experiments running, attempting to duplicate whatever fluke had enabled the first seed to sprout.

Petra did something odd that day—she brought him lunch. Usually, Nick spent a few minutes staring at his few food options before picking something. But today, Petra wanted him to have the chicken soup, and a specific amount of potato chips. When he tried to ask why, Petra said something about gathering resources that Nick couldn't follow.

Petra chose his dinner that day as well, and asked him to stop when he went for a snack. “How long are you going to keep doing this, Petra?”

“Three days.”

“Why three days?”

“Resource acquisition finished in three days.”

Nick eventually got a suspicion of what was going on. I think Petra used my shit as fertilizer for the seedlings, and wants me to produce exactly the same shit again for the next experiments. So I have to eat exactly the same things for three days. Nick sighed, and decided that he would go along with it. It wasn't as if he had a better idea.

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When he got bored enough, he sat down to more science lessons from Petra. Every so often, the alien device would ask him some complicated chemistry or biology question, and he usually would have no idea how to answer. The chemistry felt easier than the biology. Biology was a pain.

He figured out the diagrams Petra was making to indicate cells, but he had no idea why Petra kept drawing so many cells, all different. He guessed that maybe they were bone cells and skin cells and stuff different like that, but when he asked where the cells were coming from, Petra said that they all were in his stomach.

He was also learning a lot of anatomy, which was actually kind of cool and interesting. He didn't have words for most things, so Petra taught him labels in the alien language. They were actually fairly easy to learn; similar things had similar names. It was wild to learn what all the squishy organs did.

Or maybe I'm just that starved for entertainment, Nick mused. Eh, if it's not broke, don't fix it.

So, Nick assembled parts of the Rockhunter, learned alien biology words, and ate as directed for the next few days. As always, he spent a lot of time going through Petra's menus looking for cool stuff to build. Once he knew that the Rockhunter had some kind of short-range communications, he found the same item as a standalone unit and ordered one.

When Petra reported it as finished, he checked it out. It actually was in three pieces that fit together intuitively. Nick had had a lot of time to think about this, so before turning it on, he tried to get some more answers out of Petra.

“Hey, Petra.”

“Hey, Nick.”

“If I turn this on, will others be able to detect it?”

“Define 'detect'.”

“See, hear, touch, smell, taste, get information.”

“No.”

“No? No what?”

“No, sir.”

Nick rolled his eyes. “That's not what I meant. Um, Petra error. What question did you answer with 'no'?”

It took a few more rounds and a little bit of gnashing teeth before they finished running around each other in verbal circles. “So, if I turn this on, and I do not transmit, no one will detect this.”

“Yes.”

“Good.” Nick switched on the communicator.