Sweet, happy dreams of better times were rudely interrupted by a sudden, stabbing pain in his abdomen. It was a feeling he was familiar with, paired with memories of the morning after an all night pub crawl. Thomas was propelled from his mattress, like a puppet being pulled into a standing position by unseen forces and rushed to the nearest lavatory.
Some time later, a haggard and pale looking Thomas limped back into the sleeping area. He looked longingly at the mattress and blankets, and considered trying to get some more sleep, but dismissed it just as quickly. He was awake, even if he had suffered some unpleasantness, and he had work to do.
“Time to bring this battle station to full operational status” Thomas gleefully said with a laugh before clutching at his gut. Laughing was probably not a good idea at this moment he thought.
Picking up the mobile terminal he made his way across the living area to a rather ordinary looking door with a card reader attached above the handle. Pulling out a worn ID card, he blew a cloud of dust from the reader and then inserted the card. Thomas let out a relieved sigh at the sound of a buzzer and opened the door.
Stepping inside the room, overhead lights began to flicker on, bathing the room in a white/yellow glow. A row of servers lined the wall opposite of the door, their lights glowing the steady amber of standby mode. The wall to his left contained lockers and file cabinets, while the wall to his right was covered with display screens of various sizes. HIs lips quirked into a smile as he took in the center of the room though, a massive U shaped desk covered with control panels, small displays, sockets for mobile terminals and a most impressive looking chair, decorated to look like a throne.
A wave of sadness evaporated Thomas’s good mood immediately. His friend Alex, whom he had helped design, build and decorate the monstrosity of a chair, was long dead; ended with the world he knew. Alex, who had been his mentor when Thomas first arrived at the base, who had taken him under his wing while Thomas was still getting his project off the ground, and who had found Thomas's middle name of Wayne darkly hilarious.
He stood there as melancholy thoughts invaded his mind, letting himself mourn for the friends now lost. Taking a few deep breaths to calm himself,
Thomas refocused himself on the here and now. Walking around to the central console he connected his mobile terminal and opened it to display its screen. After inserting his ID card into its designated slot and entering his password, data began streaming across the screen as system startup checks began running.
Lights across the console began to turn on as the system readied itself. The server racks became active, the lights blinking as fans began spinning up, sounding like a chorus of jet engines. Finally, after what felt like a small eternity, a button lit up on the console, and with no ceremony whatsoever, Thomas pressed it and Emergency Shelter #5 began to wake up.
Thomas imagined he could feel the facility come to life. Feel the reactor switchover from standby to active and begin providing more than a trickle of power. He could see the HVAC system come online as several decades of dust began to spew out of the vents like an angry dragon breathing fire.
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He watched with a little bit of wonder as the expanding cloud of dust traveled across the room and was pulled into other vents to continue its journey through the system.
As he looked back to the display on his terminal, he saw that the startups had completed, although he was slightly concerned with the number of warning messages that were appearing. He would have to dedicate some time to figuring them out later though and scribbled a reminder on a sticky note after dusting it off. It was time to get to work though, and first up was reactivating Alex’s project.
In theory, project Food Truck was simple. Take existing Matter Reassembly technology and optimize it for military use. The problems however were three fold. The first was just the sheer amount of equipment and materials that a military makes use of on a daily basis. Even simply programming in all of the items, or even simply feeding the items to the device to be mapped and added was a massive, time consuming project.
Secondly, when MRD technology was first revealed, it was still a prototype. A working prototype, but still very unfinished, and with it being confiscated by a U.N. resolution, a lot of issues remained, particularly with the creation of food. It could scan and replicate an apple, but the taste or texture would be off, or it would be poisonous, or in very rare cases, cause the device to explode.
This had been the issue that Alex had been focused on with his project, and he had been hinting that he had finally cracked it. Alex had invited Thomas out for drinks after his demo of HopScotch, celebratory or otherwise, saying that he wanted to show him something. This is why Thomas decided to make his way to his friends lab in Shelter #5, rather than the one that was beneath the building his lab was in.
The final issue with the MRD technology was its productivity. It was slow, and there was no getting around that, and the more complex the item, the longer it took. In Thomas’s opinion, it was still a magically wonderful piece of technology, regardless of flaws. Those he reasoned, could be worked out, but the fact of actually creating a device capable of taking any kind of matter and breaking it down to reassemble into anything you could imagine, was a crowning moment in human history.
Shaking his head to clear his thoughts, Thomas began digging through the files on the servers. Genius though his friend was, his organizational skills were non-existent. It took hours before he finally located the information he was seeking.
Pointedly ignoring the grumblings of his stomach, he avoided thinking about food he had found, memories of this morning's events still fresh in his mind; Thomas brought up all the information and notes on Alex’s project
Letting out a long whistle, Thomas reclined back on the throne-like chair. Alex had done it, and even taken it a step further. According to the notes, Alex had been supplying the mess hall above this shelter with foods created from his prototype MRD for some months before the end.
Alex had been fine-tuning it based on feedback from the soldiers and staff eating at the mess hall, passing it off as an approved experiment on nutrition. There were thousands of pages of feedback, notes and adjustments. According to the notes and feedback reports, the food was barely edible at the start but began improving by leaps and bounds as adjustments were made, until this mess hall had one of the highest ratings on the base.
Come to think of it, Alex had invited Thomas to lunch many times over the past few months at this mess hall. Thomas mentally added, used me as a guinea pig, to his list of grievances, before letting out a sad chuckle and standing up.
Thomas found the device in the lab attached to the control room, along with some kitchen appliances such as a small electric stove, microwave and refrigerator. He quickly powered on the MRD and began scrolling through its options menu. It looked like Alex had added quite a bit; he found many types of fruits, vegetables, meats and even alcohol and sweets.
Pouring some scoops of mineral dense pellets from a labeled container into the device, he queued up some strawberries, his favorite fruit. They were the sweetest strawberries he had ever eaten, he thought, as he thanked his friend for saving his life.