Another week passed, and Blackeye tried to talk to me many times. I didn’t mind the background noise, as it made me feel like I wasn’t alone. However, I didn’t mess with that I-Dent card anymore. I disabled its communication ability, but that didn’t mean there was no way to track it. I dumped it in my Anechoic drawer and left it there.
The glacier was mostly gone at this point, and I cut it free as I couldn’t get fresh water from it anymore. Knowing I could not store most of it, I drank a lot of ice water. I felt life wasn’t so bad between that and the endless raw fish. I’d even gained quite a tan. Still, I’d hide out in the pod during the hottest parts of the day.
One day, while fishing, I noticed another floating raft thing. We were drifting toward it, so I didn’t rush to swim my way there.
“Wonder where these are coming from?” Jim asked.
“Considering what we’ve already discovered, it was probably a large floating complex that was destroyed. If Captain Hard was that important, I’d guess there was a fight.”
An hour later, I tied off the platform, which was exactly like the first one I’d found. It meant I had a larger area to roam and stretch out. Now I could lie down comfortably and bask in the sun.
Overall, the days sort of blurred together. I was eating but also hungry. This I knew was because my diet was lacking, but there wasn’t much I could do to fix it. I hadn’t even seen any seaweed that might be edible.
“Bones?”
“Yeah?”
“Need you to remove the part from the printer and switch the spool.”
“Got it,” I sighed. On the upside, the bigger 3D printer neared completion. After finishing taking care of the printer, it was time for my chores. I went and took care of my salt supply and scraped what I had into one of the plastic containers. Then set out the pans and filled them with semi-filtered water. These chores helped keep my sanity intact but couldn’t stave off the boredom.
The weird thing about being on open water was that I still felt claustrophobic, which was just downright odd. It wasn’t until the new platform expanded that I understood why I felt caged. Mentally, I felt trapped on my tiny island; the only way to alleviate the mental stress was to make it bigger.
I’d also started setting my lines for trolling and used the insulating foam to help. That freed up some time for me to make a net. It required stripping down another section of the paracord. I wove the strands back and forth like the method used to create a gill net.
The tricky part was to find suitable trash to create the frame, and that came a few days back when I looted a hard plastic crate with its bottom missing. I cut out the top part and left the handle on one side. I then drilled holes through the top part and tied my weave off. It almost looked like a rectangular tennis racquet—that is, if the netting was loose and the racquet was oversized. It wasn’t the most fantastic net ever made, but it was half-meter long and half as wide, so it could scoop up most fish I caught.
If I was willing to risk more of my rope, I could use the foam to create floaters on a gill net that dragged behind the raft. For now, my trolling lines worked, and that was enough. Still, dragging a net along might get me some shellfish.
No matter what, I needed to find another food source. Fish could sustain me, but I needed more. Already, I could tell I’d lost quite a bit of weight. But mostly, I was getting sick of eating raw fish. I’d do anything to grill a fish with seasonings. Hell, a steak was even more preferable, but that was unlikely.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
“Thinking about food again?” Jim asked.
“You making fun of me?”
“No.”
I sighed, which was enough to tell Jim what he wanted to know.
“I could help you make a pot. The roll-top lids of that storage raft can withstand a lot of heat. If you put the pot on one of those and then used the laser cutter to boil the water, you could toss in fish and make a soup—at the very least, a hot meal with somewhat cooked fish,” Jim explained.
“Why didn’t you say that sooner?”
“Believe it or not, raw fish has enough vitamin C to prevent deficiency. That’s why I didn’t mention it. It’s fine to boil it once in a while, but long term, raw fish is better for your current circumstance.”
“Is that true?”
“Yes. However, if you get another vitamin C source, you could boil your fish more often.”
“Like what?”
“Seaweed.”
“That’s great. I haven’t seen any plants floating in these waters, much less seaweed. If something like that even exists on this planet.”
“Just do some push-ups or something. Or use a rope, dive into the depths, and find some shit,” Jim said.
“You know we are attached, right? You make it sound like you want to shoo me away, but you are always right there with me.”
“Gah! Don’t fucking remind me!” Jim shouted in mock anger. “Truthfully, this is the most we’ve talked since you installed me. I don’t overly mind the conversation.”
“You are fucking weird.”
“You named me after your high school buddy, and I’m weird?”
“Jim and Bones are a pair, man. Like Hansel and Gretel, it just fits.”
“Please never make that distinction in public. Ever. At least you didn’t say Ariel and Eric, or I’d have issued a self-destruct command to end my existence.”
“Whatever, Jim. You don’t even have a command like that. I may not be the brightest regarding people, but I can review your code.”
“Seriously, take a dive. If I’m not wrong, I should be able to create a sonar ability and test the depths of this place. It isn’t much, but maybe we can understand this planet a little more.”
Well, Jim wasn’t wrong. I could at least see what I see. The water was murky, but not so much that I couldn’t look. Using the same rope I used to tie off the glacier, I created a loop on one end because I didn’t want to tie it to my waist or wrist. I measured it roughly to reach about twelve meters because any further tested the limits of human capability. The record for a free dive without equipment was less than twenty meters, and there was no way I could reach that depth.
Although I’m an experienced swimmer, that was on the water’s surface. However, swimming also helped my lung capacity and trained me to hold my breath. It was invaluable in space because sometimes it was required. At least there was on the Uncharted Waters since I never knew when the exterior would get punctured by space debris.
Grabbing the rope, I inhaled and exhaled three times before diving into the water. The moment I entered, Jim exited my shoulder, so water surrounded the ocular orb before attempting his tests.
The rope pulled taut as my lungs felt it was time to turn back. At least I knew my body enough to judge the depth I could comfortably achieve. Besides, there wasn’t much point in going deeper as the sunlight struggled to reach this deep.
Something big moved beneath me as I turned to swim back up. It was big and had a lot of fucking teeth. The worst thing I could do was panic, so I tried to control my heart rate as I swam toward the surface. The beast below kept following me up, and I reached a high enough speed that my body burst from the water, and I landed on the deck like a boss. Okay, that last part didn’t happen, but I could launch my upper body onto the platform and roll over to get my feet out of the water.
“What the fuck was that?” I panted breathlessly. Between the panic and the burst of speed, I was practically gasping for air like a fish out of water.
“I do not know. You are lucky that it didn’t seem hungry,” Jim laughed.
“Dammit, Jim. That’s not funny.”
“Calm down. It probably wasn’t interested in you—well, not as food. It had teeth, but they were blunted, unlike a shark. The closest approximation I have to something from Earth is a sea cow or maybe a manatee. It’s probably an herbivore, which would explain why there is no seaweed.”
“Great,” I mumbled and closed my eyes. The warm sun lulled me to sleep while I lay under it to dry off. A few hours later, my little island ground against something underwater. It violently shook but was not enough to knock my things into the water. Either way, I was now wide awake.