Nick stared at the result. "Show . Distance from BigBall to Earth!" He typed in the question as quickly as he could. Petra gave it to him in centiters, a ridiculously huge number. After a lot of back and forth Nick convinced Petra to give it to him in light-years.
1,473.55 light-years.
Nick just looked at the number for a while. I don't know why I even asked for it. It's not like I can do anything about that number.
Nick stood up and paced a little. Can Petra build spaceships? Can she build space phones, or whatever they use? Can I call Earth? They wouldn't have a receiver, unless Petra has an adapter or sothing. What if I called soone else?
Nick went back to Petra's nus and hunted around. He couldn't figure out a way to get the idea "communicate" across, but maybe Petra simply had it as an option already and he just had to find it. A lot of the nu options were still written in gibberish.
He couldn't find it. He would have to try building so more things at random and try to figure out what they did. He was stuck, again.
Nick went for another swim, and ate a bowl of soup made with Petra's latest experintal recipe. He watched the central room, where so of the guys were trundling around, going about whatever latest tasks Petra had given them. He watched sothing like a modified Taxi float past, and decided to give a flying car another try.
He had gotten stuck on this before, but this ti, he tried to get it across by talking about moving freight. Specifically, if he wanted to move a rock across the room, Taxi could do it. If he wanted to send it down to the valley, there was a different, more expensive design that Petra had built a few of. He called up a map of the area, which Petra kept improving, and found a fairly distant spot three hills over and marked it X.
He drew a brick with the word "HELP" on it, and then drew it in Petra's second level, followed by it being at X. Petra seed to think it over, and brought up a design that basically looked like a scaled-up Taxi. He labeled it "Big Taxi" and set it aside. Going back to the drawing, he stared at it. Should I replace the rock with a stick figure labeled 'Nick' or...?
Suddenly, he got an inspiration. He erased the rock, but left the word "HELP" as a cargo, and did the sa for the second drawing of it arriving. I don't need the rock to go, just the word. To drive the point ho, Nick erased "HELP" and wrote "HELLO" in both places.
Petra shuffled a different nu to the front. Nick checked, his fingers crossed, and under one of the subnus, Nick's Phone was listed. With a sigh of relief, Nick labeled the top nu Communications, then went looking at his options.
Just about everything was still written in gibberish, so Nick tried to describe them by range. He drew two boxes, sending ssages back and forth. Then he asked for the distance between them, and labeled it Range. Sure enough, each of the entries had a sublisting called Range, and so of them had huge numbers attached.
"Now, we're getting sowhere," Nick muttered. He asked Petra to convert to light years and got tiny numbers. Damn. I guess an instant communicator across the galaxy was a little too hard even for Petra.
Hoping that there were more entries that he hadn't seen, he asked for communicators with Range over 1000 light-years.
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None found.
Nick drumd his fingers against his thigh, thinking. Then he tried, Range = 10 light-years. This ti he got a hit. Eagerly Nick called it up and looked at the material requirents. They were huge.
This isn't like a cell phone, this is more like a cell tower. Or company headquarters, he anded, once he saw the asurents of the thing. Even Petra is going to need weeks or months to build this thing.
At one point he'd taught Petra phrases like Supply for things Petra had mined and stockpiled, and Known Reserves for everything Petra had seen but not mined yet. He looked at the material requirents so more. Petra didn't have enough of anything to build this, not even close. For so materials, though, Nick wasn't worried. Elent 16 and elent 20 seed to be major ingredients in the nearby rock, for example. He'd picked up that much at least.
So others, like elents 63 and 64, though, had no supply and essentially no reserves. And there were a bunch that they hadn't found even a trace, like 90 and 92. All the amounts required were pretty huge, too.
Nick kept scrolling down the list, and found a surprise. Elent 21.5? How can you have .5 of an elent? It's got to be a translation error. I'm pretty sure that if there were more elents, Mr. Peters would have made us try to morize them.
It wasn't the only oddity. There were entries for Elents 25.5, 31.5, 32.5, and 54.5 as well. I've never seen these in the lists before. I should do a Search.
Nick asked Petra to scan for Elent 21.5.
Error.
Nick raised an eyebrow, and tried the others. All of them gave an error ssage. What the hell does that an? It's like Petra's saying, "don't even bother looking, you won't find any." But why would that be the case?
Oh, I get it! Mr. Peters said that there were manmade elents, ones that didn't happen in nature. These must be so of those. The decimal part is still weird, though.
Wait, so does this an Petra can't build anything with those requirents?
"Petra, how do I make Elent 21.5?" Nick typed it as well as asking aloud, because Petra's speech-to-text abilities still left a lot to be desired. Her English language level was still only 23% after months of being stuck with Nick. Partly that was because it was hard to teach concepts, and partly because teaching English was boring. Nick could only stand to do so much of it at a ti.
In response, Petra brought up the construction nu, and opened a subnu he hadn't seen before. Maybe this was a nu for making materials. But when Petra keeps trying to make sugar or whatever, that's in a different nu altogether. I don't get it.
Well, he didn't have to get it. The number of things Petra knew that Nick didn't get would fill a warehouse. He just had to do what he could. With that, Nick started looking over the requirents for the "Elent 21.5 maker."
One of the ingredients was Elent 21.5.
Nick squeezed his eyes shut for a second and then stared at it again. I need Elent 21.5 in order to make Elent 21.5? What the hell, Petra? How am I supposed to get started?
Nick was reminded of a goofy conversation he'd had with a Jewish kid nad Ben Cohen in college. Nick didn't know squat about Judaism and a few beers had made him curious. Ben had been happy to explain, but so of the stories were just kind of whack. Apparently, sowhere it was written that in the last minutes of the sixth day of Creation, God had made a whole list of weird little things, like "a pair of tongs." Because, Ben had explained, you needed a pair of tongs to make a pair of tongs, so the only explanation for why there were tongs in the world was that God made the first pair.
Too bad I didn't pack any Elent 21.5 in my bag that morning, Nick groused.
He was frustrated, and took a break to play so video gas. Stupid bootstrapping. Got to try to build a whole goddamn civilization's worth of tech starting with nothing but a goddamn rock. Sorry, Petra, he apologized in his thoughts. You're a fucking amazing rock. You rock, rock.
At lunch, Petra had figured out peanuts sohow, although they ca as little spheres and cubes instead of being the right shape. At least she wasn't adding shells. Nick requested so to keep around as a snack.
Half an hour later, though, Nick was retching up the last of them. Got sothing backwards in the recipe, Petra. One star. Would not eat again. It wasn't the first ti Petra had poisoned him accidentally, and it wouldn't be the last. He was desperate enough for more variety in his diet that he was willing to keep trying Petra's experints.
Potato chips it is. Again.
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