The contents of the various carts, wagons, and saddlebags, which were loaded with the possessions of the deceased, fit well with the mental image I’d built up of them and their society. Everything was primitive and rather quaint. As I’d expected, there were no electronics or even particularly complex mechanical contraptions—those that existed were clearly assembled by actual human hands. For example, I found a mechanical timepiece which used a spring (a spring!) as its energy storage device. This timepiece held many insights into the technological capability of these people. When I popped open the back, mechanical gears were revealed, which upon closer inspection, still had visible tool-marks and surface imperfections on them. No machine would’ve been this sloppy; this was clearly the product of a pre-industrial artisan.
Even more potentially useful than the timepiece, I found several more books. These were different from the collection of identical books that the robed men had been carrying, but even though I paged through all of them, I still couldn’t make sense of the symbols. A children’s book or a book with pictures would be remarkably helpful. As soon as I had a key or a translation, all their contents would become clear to me in short order.
Interestingly, all but one of the books that I found appeared to be handwritten. The one exception was probably printed using some sort of stamp: it didn’t have the inconsistencies in calligraphy that the handwritten ones had.
Besides books and trinkets, the vast majority of the people’s belongings—volumetrically—consisted of a single category of item: fabrics and other sheet-goods. It took me a little while to figure out their purpose: I’d spread an enormous mass of waxy canvas out in the dirt and then turned it every which way before I figured out what it was: it was a tent. Once I had that conclusion, I was able to deduce the purposes of the remaining mysterious cloth items. There were lots of tents, sleeping pads, bags, and ground-covering carpets. Some of these items, particularly the items I assumed were sleeping bags, made me shudder a bit. They were made of animal skins. It was a more than a bit ghoulish. Is it unusual that I’m more disturbed by their dead-animal sleeping bags than I am of their actual dead bodies? Probably.
The remaining fabric items were clothes, and these told me much about the people who’d used to wear them and the people (!) who made them. Yes, it was clear that these items were almost entirely handmade. The stitching was occasionally sloppy, and the weave of the fabric clearly indicated manual labor with minimal levels of automation. Maybe they have… what are they called again? Looms? Besides the low-quality woven material, they also had simplistic catches and connectors: small wooden sticks which would mate with string loops or fabric holes in order to fasten jackets shut and pants tight.
Surprisingly, their general style of clothing wasn’t completely alien to me. Yes, while any of my conceivable clothing needs were currently handled by my skinsuit, before I’d been convicted, I’d worn clothing that wasn’t entirely made of nanomachines. While what these people had wouldn’t be fashionable on my old university campus, they’d blend right in, provided they found the right venues or properly themed nightclubs. They had pants with pockets, shirts that closed in the front, and jackets which were longer and intended to keep them warm. They also had socks, shoes, and something that was probably underwear. I didn’t take too close of a look at the socks and underwear though, as all their clothing smelled rather repellant: most of it stank of sweat and smoke along with some more unseemly undertones. Clearly, proper hygiene wasn’t a strong suite to these people. I moved on.
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I looked over the large, scattered space of belongings. Cloth, trinkets, and various small items lay in neatly sorted piles in the dirt. I wasn’t quite sure why I’d unpacked and spread everything out, but well, I’d done it, and it gave me a great visual overview. As I surveyed the bounty, I thought about what I should do next.
On one level, I wanted to go back to civilized space. Yes, the corporations had done me almost unfathomably wrong, but I’d lived a peaceful 20+ years without major trouble. Modern life was comfortable, and I had been closing in on graduation and my degree. Living like one of these primitives forever? No thank you. Still, it might be prudent to stay under the radar for a while. If I had to rough it on this backwater planet—wherever it was—for a couple years until the next ship came by or something, then maybe that wouldn’t be too bad.
Besides my long-term plans, there are also some immediate enigmas to unravel: Why are Homo Sapiens here? How did this place end up off the map? What were the robed men doing and why did they die? Finally, how did I get here?
I decided. For now, I’ll explore this land and figure out their language and their history. While I’m doing so, I’ll keep an eye out for any ships that might pass by or any way back into human space. I nodded. That seemed a solid mission for now, and like any mission, it was time to gear up: Tools and weapons.
The modern equipment available to me was rather limited in scope and quantity. Before I’d made my hasty exit, I’d only grabbed a survival pack—foolish in retrospect. It would’ve been enough to tide me over for the short hike to one of the habitats, but now, I was regretting not taking more equipment. The survival pack contained:
* 1x Fist-sized multipurpose drone with rechargeable power cell
* 1x Skinsuit nanofabricator for manufacturing skinsuit nanos
* 6x Standardized mixed resource cubes
* 2x Spare micro power cells (charged)
* 1x Neurostunner© HD3xc
* 1x Emergency-use data flare
The skinsuit nanofabricator was probably the most useful apparatus in my inventory. It would let me use raw materials, such as the resource cubes, to manufacture more nanos for the skinsuit. In turn, the skinsuit could stand in for all sorts of other survival roles. Yes, its base function was to be a suit, that is to say, clothing, but it could also be so much more. Not only could it shift its shape, texture, and color completely, but it could also form parts of varying density and simulated material properties out of excess nanos. For example, it could form hard armor panels, transparent visors, or long elastic ropes. If I needed to scale something—say a wall—and it was too smooth to climb, I could form a grappling hook and a long rope from the excess suit nanos. In summary, having the tool to manufacture more nanos for the skinsuit was an invaluable capability.
The next most useful items were probably the drone and the Neurostunner. I could scout with the drone and defend myself with the stunner. With the drone essentially doubling my situational awareness, I’d have a close-to-panoptical awareness of my surroundings. Still, the drone was rather primitive: that’s why it’d been in a basic survival pack. Its payload capacity was abysmal, and its flight time wasn’t anything impressive either. I’d also need to be careful when using it; the stealth suite it had installed was worse than my skinsuit’s adaptive camouflage: it could change its exterior color to match any simple background, but even a blue sphere against a blue sky would be easy to pick out even when limited to baseline senses.
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The Neurostunner was, while not ideal, a decent weapon choice for my circumstances. It was included in the pack primarily as a last line of defense, mostly to protect against hostile wildlife. Any creature with a sufficiently complex nervous system could be stunned or knocked senseless at short ranges. Furthermore, to operate, it only required electrical power, which I could provide, and it was small and concealable. The main disadvantage is that it’s kind of dinky as weapons go. The range was rather anemic, it needed a sustained target lock to cause more than momentary confusion, and I could forget about using it during rain or against targets in cover as the beam attenuated quickly.
The rest of the stuff in my survival kit was mostly useless. My internal power cell had orders of magnitude more storage capacity than the two little spare cells and the data flare was also eclipsed by my own internal capabilities: It was designed to act as a beacon and emit a powerful distress signal, but my internal radio systems could do that just as well. Why it was even included in the pack was something of a mystery to me.
Survival pack inventoried, I turned to the supplies left by the robed men. I didn’t particularly fancy carrying around a tent and it would need to get significantly colder before my skinsuit wouldn’t be able to compensate anymore. At those temperatures, I didn’t think an animal-fur lined bag would help me anyways, it’d just shatter like flash-frozen fruit hit with a hammer. Then, of course, were the clothes. I’d already decided that I wasn’t going to play dress-up with any of them. For one, they were all filthy and low quality. Also, very few of them would fit me, as only the tallest of the men were near my height. No, I decided to simply imitate their clothes with my skinsuit instead.
To do so, I first instructed a thin outer layer to slough off from the body-hugging skinsuit. This thin outer layer would be my canvas. For my imitation pants, I stretched this outer layer out to make it fit loosely and match the general fit of the pants that I’d found in the luggage. Then, I retextured it to be brown and look like the coarse-woven material that seemed to be in vogue. For the finishing touches, I added some external features such as “stitching patterns” along “seams” and toggle-and-loop connectors which appeared to hold the fly shut along with some cosmetic dustings of discoloration and simulated wear to make it look more authentic.
I repeated the process with an off-white shirt and a dark green jacket, always adding some little cosmetic tweaks to make sure my disguise didn’t appear too perfect or too clean. Then, I moved on to the parts of my disguise which were made to imitate items made from cured animal skins: Boots, a belt, and a carrying pack. Of course, all these features only looked and felt right, but I didn’t bother to make them act properly too. Making my faux-backpack’s internals mirror those of the ones I’d found just seemed inefficient: I left only the flap at the top functional and made the first ten centimeters of the interior look right. The rest of the internals were just latticed skinsuit nanos which suspended all the items that I wanted to carry in structural webbing. Finally, it was time to look at my handywork. I tossed the drone into the air and had it circle me a couple times to get a good look.
Overall, I thought the disguise had turned out quite well. I hadn’t copied any of the clothing I’d found exactly, but rather tailored it to my form. The real test would be when I encountered some of the local primitives, but I figured as long as I kept my skinsuit below my white shirt’s neckline and kept my sleeves long, the obvious signs of my extraplanetary origins like data-ports and visible augmentations would be kept hidden. Still, I’m missing something… Hair! Subconsciously, I’d become so used to being bald: after all, there wasn’t much reason for “equipment” to grow hair.
I perused my documentation, and it turned out that I couldn’t instantly extrude hair from my head—what a shame—but I would be able to turn natural hair growth back on. I did so. For the time being, a wig would have to do. I instructed some of my skinsuit nanos to crawl up my scalp and to rearrange themselves into long, hair-like fibers. Once the fibers reached shoulder-length, I stopped them, tied them back, and recolored them to be black. That should be fine, most the people here had hair colored somewhere between brown and black, so I’ll blend right in.
My appearance complete, I refocused on the knick-knacks surrounding me. Many of them were a puzzle, in both what they were used for and what they were made of. For example, several of the primitives were seemingly obsessed with geological sampling—or at least—that’s how I rationalized the dozens of interesting rock and mineral samples they had in abundance. Small crystals of quartz with varying levels of impurity, small stones with interesting colors, and more difficult to identify mineral crystalline structures were all among these samples. Many of those presumed amateur geologists also carried large supplies of various powders, notably chalk. What anyone would do with multiple large bags of the stuff was something I couldn’t figure it out, so I focused my efforts on recognizing the more mundane items.
Of those, there were many. Torches, rope, tent-spikes, cookware, animal-skin containers, green glass bottles full cleaning compound (?), and more. Some of the stuff, I couldn’t figure out, but I assumed they had something to do with survival such as fire-starting or animal care. Then, there were the coins. At first, I’d lumped them in with the geological samples and other esoterica since they were made of rare metals, but after reviewing some of my databases on primitive humans, I realized that these must be what they used for money instead of credits: small pieces of metal with an ascribed trade value and denomination. I collected them all and put them in my backpack. The people on this planet might be primitives, but money would doubtlessly make my life easier.
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I eyed the horses and other draft animals with suspicion, and they returned my suspicious gaze with their wet, animal, eyes. I’d seen old footage of “horseback riding” but it didn’t look like anything I wanted to do. How can anyone trust a wild animal to obey commands? These animals, particularly the horses, appeared to be stronger and faster than the primitives who rode them around. Worse, they had a mind of their own, and could make independent, irrational decisions based on animal instinct. These primitives must truly be insane to use these for transportation. I wasn’t going to get anywhere near the creatures. Yes, they couldn’t really hurt me, but avoiding large wildlife was a cornerstone tactic for surviving on hostile worlds for any length of time.
Dismissing the animals, I stepped away and into the forest. Fortunately, following the path that the people had taken to get to this forest clearing wouldn’t be hard. Unlike normal transportation methods, these animals left imprints in the terrain wherever they went making their path obvious.
I adjusted the weight distribution of the items suspended in my backpack, launched the drone, and took off into the woods at a gentle loping run. With a little luck, I’d find primitive civilization before the local star set.