Resistance is Survival

by Abyssal Angel

What's a man to do when he's dropped off on a dead planet with only an atmosphere to its name, and a book with a mysterious message? Why survive of course! And try not to go crazy! And maybe hitch a ride off world while he's at it! But alas, if only things were that simple... DISCLAIMER: If you recognize it, I don't own it! I only own myself. I'd like to keep it that way, thanks.

3. Chapter 3

I woke up shivering. It was hard to move and I couldn't see. I panicked.

I wrestled my way up and out, feeling sweet relief as my face met open air, and the rays of the rising sun. It was at that point I gasped as the reminder to breathe kicked in. I'd forgotten that my need for that had been shut off.

I realized then that I'd pretty much forgotten a lot of things in my brief panic, but now everything came rushing back, and I let out of whoosh of air in a sigh.

I looked towards the sunrise, and noted idly I still didn't feel hot or cold, though my shivers were starting to taper off. It was strange in a way. I could tell that I'd been cold, but I didn't feel cold.

Shaking my head of the strange sensation, or lack thereof, I focused on more important things, like the line of text that'd just appeared in the box to the right of my vision.

Good morning. I see that I was right in guessing you'd panic your way out of the ground and not pay attention to the screen. Is this going to become a habit?

I sighed and shook my head. Maybe if it made the words more noticeable or something, I thought only half serious.

Riiiight. The big flashing words blinking in front of your eyeballs aren't noticeable enough.

I shrugged. I had no response to that other than perhaps, touché.

Looking around at the dunes and cracked rock around, I grimaced. What do I do now?

What is your goal?

I read the words and considered. What is my goal? Assuming the book had been right, then I'm not even on Earth. It's not hard to suspend my disbelief in that regard considering everything else that's happened. In that case, my goal should be to get myself off this rock, just as the message suggested.

If it's a lie, however...

I looked around, scanning the horizon and the sky. If this is another planet, there should be some tells, things that are just... off from how they should be on Earth.

The sun is pretty much the same as far as I can tell. The sky though... isn't blue. Not really. It's more kind of an arid yellow/brown, but that may just be from the dust and crap blowing around.

My eyes followed the horizon. I was testing to see how much the curve compared to how it does on Earth, before scoffing at myself. I've never memorized the curvature of the Earth. How the heck am I supposed to be able to tell?

The stars and the moon might be able to tell me more, but that would require surviving a night under open sky in the desert. Not a likely proposition.

I grimaced as I considered my options. My goal is to get off this world or at least get a vantage point that would allow me to confirm whether I really am on Earth or not. I'm buck naked in the middle of sand and rock with a bunch of nanites and three implants, two of which are colored over, but basically feel as though my hand bones and knuckles are jutting out of my skin.

Anything I do, it's basically going to fall back to anything and everything I can think of to do with these nanites.

First things first, I do NOT want to spend another night buried. That'll be my first short term goal. I need shelter to survive nightfall, whether that be a cave or some sort of structure. Considering the rock and sand around me, I'd probably be better off at first just shaping my environment. But can I even do that?

A quick deliberation with my subconscious showed me that I could. It just wouldn't be very fast.

Well, it's not like I don't have time. My worst enemy at this point is boredom. At least I have someone to talk to, sort of.

First though, a bit of deliberation made me realize that in order to pull off what I'm thinking, a few tweaks are in order.

Staying seated, I waited, holding in any winces of pain as my hands became coated in silver along with my feet. Still I watched, fascinated despite the occasional stings and feeling of small tearing, as the silver color disappeared, recoloring to look like my hands and feet from before. I even still had feeling through them to a degree, though it felt more akin to a sense of touch through gloves and socks. I was assured that could be fixed over time, but for now, the biggest issue is out of the way.

Both of my hands and feet are now essentially four massive flexible implants, ones for direct creation of nanites, the processing of materials, and the reconstruction of materials.

With the little amount of power I have available, it's still not fast going, but there's still something to be said about pressing your hand to solid rock and sand, and watching it disappear in much the same manner as an ice cube contacting a hot pan.

While I did this, the nanites ate and reused the mass available, not really able to store it in any effective manner. Simply put, what I was doing at this point was just displacing sand and rock, 'pushing' it around and leaving a hardened shell behind.

Doing this, I carved out what I hoped would be a decent shelter, putting up an igloo like dome of hardened rock with an entrance, which I'd unashamedly based off of the moisture farmer homestead from Star Wars, and started tunneling down, slowly but surely shaping stairs and reinforcing the ceiling and walls with intermittent arches.

once I felt I'd gone deep enough, I leveled off for a few feet, before ascending a few steps back up to start the process of creating a simple room with a domed ceiling, making sure to harden everything. It's my hope that the dip down before going up into the room will prevent any sand that might blow in from making it up into the room itself, and so far it seems to be working. Sand had already blown in from the wind, leaving a fine dusting on the floor, but none of it has risen high enough to enter the room I'm making, and by all rights it shouldn't ever, even if enough sand blows in to choke off the entire entrance, since I'd risen the room above the ceiling height of the dip. I'd almost liken it to the U-bend leading to the grease trap of a sink. Even if a flood of water were to come in, or sand as the case may be, I should be fine in this bubble of a room.

The only problem I hadn't immediately thought of how to deal with that came up is just how dark it is down here. Light is filtering from the entrance, but it's a paltry amount, barely allowing me to see.

Thankfully, becoming aware of this situation, two solutions did come to mind. One is using mirrors to bounce light down into the room, much like the ancient Egyptians did, which was shown to great effect in a scene from The Mummy Trilogy. Making mirrors would be a touch difficult but not impossible, surprisingly enough.

The second option was to increase my low light sensitivity. That was actually the easiest, though it did feel weird when the nanites manipulated my pupils and the iris around it to open as wide as possible. that didn't prove enough though so several clusters of nanites were made to form copies of the nerves of light receptors in the back of my eye, essentially quintupling the amount of photoreceptors available.

This had several immediate benefits. The biggest one being that the receptors couldn't be burnt out normally, and could switch on and off depending on the amount of light available. This results in near instantaneous adaptation to low light, along with a kind of 'control' over how bright everything is since the receptors could filter bright light while seeing in the dark. In a nut shell, I could now see inside the room as if it were daytime without being blinded by looking directly at the light source.

The one immediate, though thankfully temporary, downside was the pain. Installing hardware into your eyeball without anesthesia stings like nothing else. The only relief was that it would only need to occur once as the more 'examples' of my nerves firing off that I could process, the better control I, my subconscious that is, gained over that area in regards to pain. On a side note this is how I could know that I'm cold or hot or warm without actually feeling it, since my subconscious is filtering the sensations for me, only letting through the 'knowledge' alone, for lack of a better word.

By the time I finished with this, most of the day had gone by.

Thanks to the 'gloves' and 'socks', I had no feeling of hunger or thirst. I still had an implant in my stomach, but mostly my nanites converted sand and spare rock into the nutrients and water that I needed to survive throughout the day, and boy was the implications of that trick a doozy.

"So wait, the nanites can convert atoms of sand into something else, something nutritious for me, by rearranging the protons, neutrons, and electrons directly?" I asked, by this point talking to myself aloud to simply hear something other than the stupid wind whistling and howling into my shelter.

In the simplest of terms, yes.

"So to put it another way, the nanites are splitting atoms." I asked, just to clarify.

Yes.

"O...k... last I checked, splitting atoms tends to release massive amounts of energy. Maybe only little bits for each individual one, but certainly enough together all at once that a good chunk of the entire population of Earth runs off the energy byproduct of this, AND to top it off, the byproduct of the effect is generally radioactive and highly dangerous. And this is happening. Right now. Inside me? Are you serious?!" I asked, my voice getting a little high pitched at the end.

Sigh. Yes, that's right, my subconscious actually wrote out the word 'sigh'. I felt my eyelid twitch slightly in response.

I'm going to explain this in a way so that your brain doesn't suffer systemic collapse trying to understand, since the science is, again, a little bit hard to swallow without a lot of foreknowledge available, alright?

I nodded.

To put it simply, I will make an analogy using building blocks. Building blocks in this instance are atoms. You and I both know that a nuclear reaction, whether controlled or used as an explosive, is basically the equivalent of taking a couple hundred blocks, throwing them at a larger pile of blocks, which knocks into a larger pile of blocks, and so on and so forth. In a... 'controlled' fashion, this chaos can be released all at once as a bomb, or sustained by basically tossing a few blocks at a time, knocking the pile into the bigger pile a little at a time.

This still results in one thing though either way. A huge mess.

I nodded, following so far.

Radioactivity as you know it is, to put it simply, a byproduct of this huge mess laying around. There's nothing to clean it up or make sure it doesn't happen in the first place. To contrast, what the nanites are doing is more akin to those children who build their block towers and shapes to keep them stable, and use the left over parts where necessary to add stability or simply keep them out of the way. Understand?

I quirked my lips. "So you're saying Einstein and the scientists after him are the snot nosed brats who knock over the towers for fun, just to get a reaction?"

Quite.

I think even my subconscious is amused by the idea. I spent the next few minutes chuckling as I worked, imagining a 6 year old Einstein and other white haired chibis going around knocking down block towers and pretending to write down their findings on little notepads and tiny white labcoats.

After a while though, I frowned thoughtfully. "It's true though that a lot of power can be gained from *snort* knocking those towers down. If the nanites are already capable of building the towers, couldn't they knock them down in a 'controlled' manner for energy?"

Perhaps, though they aren't programmed to. As such they, and more importantly I, have no idea what exactly the 'safe' process would be for such a thing, and I'm pretty sure you'd rather not spontaneously go up in a mushroom cloud by accident.

"Ah. Yeah, that would be bad," I said, sweatdropping mentally.

Or become a ghoul... or a supermutant... or a rad monster of some sort... or

"Ok, ok I get it!" I said, cutting the appearing words off.

A few moments later though, I said, "Still... that's a rather large energy source we're talking, one that could potentially run a spacecraft if harnessed properly. I agree it'd be a bad idea to do any experimenting inside my own body, but... what if it weren't inside my own body?"

You mean building a large underground nuclear bunker and attached lab to conduct tests, essentially recreating the Manhattan Project?

"Yeah..." I said slowly, "Do you think it could be done?"

There weren't any words for a while.

First off... I'm not saying no. Bear that in mind when I follow up with telling you that is one of the most ludicrous ideas I've ever thought up. Not only was the Manhattan Project a meeting of the minds of the most brilliant scientists available who'd studied and gained doctorates in studies of such things, you're proposing that I, or you, take your pick of pronoun, it hardly matters here since you and I are the same person. I am proposing that I endeavor to recreate a project tackled by a group of brilliant scientists, a group that probably numbered in the hundreds in order to do properly and even remotely safely, on the off chance that I might be able to recreate their work, whilst not blowing myself up or irradiating myself to death if I even get that far. You are also aware that they did that work using equipment that was state of the art for their time, with electronics and computers and safety measures we couldn't even begin to understand let alone recreate. You don't even know how to make rubber, let alone whatever goes into one of those yellow biohazard suits, nevermind creating a suit that can protect you from radiation.

"Lead." I answered, realizing. "Lead blocks radiation. How about a solid suit of exo armor made of lead? Or a remote controlled drone full of nanites and made of lead?"

At a simple guess, a lead robot or just a solid lead golem animated solely by nanites, even a lead suit that's solid with no cracks that's thick enough to protect you, would probably require the energy output of a nuclear power plant in the first place to move, let alone move in a manner that isn't stilted or jerky. How about instead of jumping straight to nukes, why not take a page from FTB Minecraft and follow a progression? Perhaps create steam power from coal and recreate copper wiring and lightbulbs before jumping to nuclear power and smart phones?

"Point," I conceded, "But at the same time, I'd like to get off this planet and back to civilization sometime soon before I go crazy from isolation. You're better than Wilson, but I'd rather not end up following in the footsteps of Tom Hanks from Castaway. He at least had some modicum of hope for rescue, what with being on a deserted island on a habited world. This is, as far as I'm aware, an empty planet, population: me, and I have no idea if the greater galaxy is inhabited or not, so I'd rather not rely on that possibility. In fact..."

I trailed off as it hit me for the first time just how alone I am. Space is a vast empty lonely place... and I'm all alone on a barren world that any normal human being wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell of surviving on. It's not even been a day and I'm already talking to myself. What hope do I possibly have?

Hey now, don't go down that road. You know optimism and keeping your eyes forward and your feet moving is the only way you're going to survive this. Despair will kill you just as surely as anything else can.

I nodded, sighing for what felt like the millionth time. "I know... It's just... hard, you know? What even is the point? Why put me through this crap? Just so I can entertain some bored random omnipotent being?... I need hope. You know the phrase, hope is simultaneously mankind's greatest strength and weakness. Without hope, hope for something better, something... more... what even is the point? What am I to live for?"

At some point I ended up sitting with my back to the gradually sloped wall, facing the entrance with my knees curled up to my chest and my arms wrapped around my legs as I stared blindly at the sole light source of the room. I felt pathetic.

Would you rather die?

I snorted. "You know the answer to that already."

Say it. Cause I think you need to reaffirm it to yourself.

I sighed. "Of course I want to die. A better life in the afterlife is one of the few things I have to hope for. Anything's better than this. But at the same time, offing myself is a sure fire way to make said afterlife worse than this one, so there's no way I'm going to kill myself and ruin my chances for something better. I'll struggle and do everything I can to survive, but that doesn't particularly mean I want to live either."

There wasn't any response for a few minutes after that.

...Just what is it in the afterlife that would make it so much better than this one?

I shrugged. "How should I know? That's the point of hope right? And faith for that matter. I don't know that it's better, I just know that I've been told that it's better. For all I know it's not, and I have no idea what could make it better. But I believe it will be, and entertaining that belief to be false is a surefire way for me to jump straight for a long fall off a cliff."

Wouldn't that be counterproductive? IF the afterlife is worse, wouldn't it be smarter to find a way to prolong your life indefinitely?

I hummed in thought at that. "You might be right. Though with how crappy life is, if the afterlife is no better or worse, I'd probably wish for reincarnation or to simply not exist. Perhaps I could get myself cryogenically frozen forever. That'd be about the same equivalent I bet. Still alive, but not dead. Not aware of anything. Limbo I suppose, but better than awareness of how much life can suck."

Again time passed before a response came.

If you had to guess, what would you suppose might make life better in the afterlife than in this one?

I shrugged. "Well, I've heard tell that making love, and proper making love at that, the connection there... I've heard that's supposed to be a glimpse of heaven. Not anything like just plain old sex, but actual marriage, and having a deep intimate loving connection to your spouse... There's something pure there. Something beautiful that gets perverted and destroyed so easily by only focusing on the carnal aspect of it. Outside of that small possible glimpse? I've got no clue. I've heard other guesses, but they just... I don't think they come close at all to what it is. I don't think it's possible to know, actually know heaven, until you're already there."

A beat passed, then I asked curiously, "Why do you ask?"

I'd shrug if I could. I mainly thought if you thought of what might make the afterlife better, you'd come up with some examples that you could aim to bring about. I do know that I'm a cuddle bug for one. It couldn't hurt to create some form of life, whether synthetic or otherwise, if only to have a companion to be with. The human condition is predisposed towards companionship, and without it, even a little bit, can be bad.

I snorted. "Shall I create a synth puppy or kitten then?" I laughed, "Isn't creating life supposed to be the hubris of man? Pride talking?"

Do you believe that? Really?

I sobered a little, before answering, "...no... Not really... the idea of creating life being wrong is stupid anyway. Humans make life all the time. Are supposed to make life. Where do people think babies come from? The stork? Plus the whole point of life is learning to be like God anyway so that we can become like him and return to him. If we really weren't supposed to be able to create life outside of more humans, then we simply wouldn't be able to. It's that simple... that's what I believe anyway." I finished with a sigh.

Then perhaps your first goal should be to make a companion. Something to settle the natural herd instinct and anchor your sanity.

"I... suppose... but how? I mean, I don't have the first clue how to create a companion. Short of cloning myself, what options do I even have in that regard on a barren dust ball?"

Not many that I know of. As it is, you're the one with the ideas and making the decisions. At most I'm the sounding board that can tell you if it can be done and to bounce ideas off of, and implement your decisions, that's all.

I nodded, thinking, as I idly brushed my hands over the floor, tracing patterns that would cause the stone to discolor, making lines of doodling. Looking at my artwork, I made a snap decision to kill time, and started using my hands, letting my will be the guide as I slowly formed up rock from the ground like a potter, then began using my hands and fingers to shape it.

It took a bit of effort, but the point was to waste time thinking, so I just worked on autopilot as the statue of rock began to take shape. It wasn't until I was forming the horn that I noticed what my hands had crafted and noted the equine shape beneath my hands and sighed.

It wasn't half bad actually, considering the nanites could form the image directly from my head of what it's supposed to look like, so it's not the vague four legged mess I might've made if I were actually trying to shape clay. It's not bad at all.

Now concentrating on my work more, I started forming the wings, deciding to actually make a recreation instead of just a random figure. It wasn't hard to discolor the stone to get a somewhat proper color. Pigmentation is part of the human body after all, and humans can range anywhere from white to yellow to red to brown to pink to black. It isn't much of a stretch to get other colors out of that if you understand that you can get green, orange, and purple out of red, yellow, and blue. Black is easy after mixing the pigments enough, and white exists in the color of the eye, so that's not impossible to get either.

As such, it wasn't long before I had a figurine statue of an Alicorn, white, with purple eyes and a long flowing mane that looked just strange as one solid piece, unmoving. A simple brush of the hand to the hooves removed the figurine from the floor, and I brought it up to eye level, smiling at it.

Everyone needs a hobby I suppose.

I nodded. "I'll probably recreate memories. So I won't forget. Perhaps I'll make giant pixel art. The minecraft parallel you mentioned might actually help me if I do stuff like this, provided it doesn't take too long and I get bored."

And if nothing else, perhaps aliens will see it and come investigate.

"Huh. Yeah. Bit of a stretch but maybe." I agreed, partly amused.

More importantly, if you wish not to freeze or bury yourself again tonight, you still have some work to do.

"Right." I nodded, agreeing... with myself. Better than talking to inanimate objects though, right?

I already knew this wouldn't be enough though. I'd prefer not to rely on fire, since recreating fuel is a bit difficult without some prior examples to go on. Carbon may be a main ingredient but that doesn't mean I know how to make coal. Pretty sure it's not straight carbon anyway, and with my luck I'd probably end up making diamonds instead or something equally useless to me at the moment.

Insulation would be great, but other than piling up sand, not too sure how to go about that one.

in the end, I decided I'd need a second room from the first. It would serve as my bedroom, and it would need a door to block the wind. It'd be even darker in there, but I always preferred darkness to sleep in anyway.

Getting started, I began carving out a room identical to the first simply leading further on from the first room through a simple doorway, which I fashioned a slab of stone fitted to said doorway, which swung on one giant stone hinge, and locked in place with a very simple latch, also of stone. Maybe later I'd give fashioning metals a try, created from base elements. That should be interesting if nothing else.

Thankfully I can still see in this room. There is only the barest glimmer of light from a crack below the door, but it's enough to see by with my improved eyes and photoreceptors working away. This room I made into an exact replica of the room before, only this time I added a few things, like shelves built into the walls, upon which I set down my stone figurine of Princess Celestia. in one corner of the room, I raised up a pad of stone to serve as a frame for a bed, but then stopped, stumped as to what exactly I planned to use as bedding. No way in hell do I want to sleep directly on stone, and while powdering sand to a consistency that technically counts as soft, sleeping on it doesn't sound all that great unless I can encase it in something.

If only there was something soft that I could have my nanites recreate. Unfortunately, I can't think of anything...

Actually, that's not true. Fur is soft. Fur has always been soft. And fur is hair. Bad as it is, once I had shaved my beard off and left the hair alone on the floor, too lazy to vacuum it up. It ended up staying there for months, and every time I stepped in it, or glanced at it, I couldn't help but notice that it consistently felt soft to my feet despite the passage of time, nor did it look like it had degraded. And why should it? Fur blankets and coats don't just degrade after all. Not very quickly anyway as far as I'm aware.

I grimaced at the idea of what I was about to do, but I needed something, and unless I could miraculously recreate cotton or silk from nothing with no examples to go off of, this is the best I could do.

So, I willed the nanites in my hands to take sand and convert into hair. Specifically, my hair. For my peace of mind, I will consider it fur, and kept in mind the idea of having it be woven, particularly tightly since 'threadcount' is supposed to be a big deal. I'm actually kind of glad now for my experience with tactiles and sewing thanks to my mother, otherwise I might have no idea how to go about this. Thankfully I do know the basic pattern for basket weaving, and I applied that here, creating more and more until I had several sheets of woven fur, made silvery white to differentiate it further so I can pretend it's fur from something else.

Keeping it up, I kept creating large sheets of fur, piling them up on the stone slab and using my hands to layer them and tie the ends together. In the end I had several stacks of fur piled up and woven together to make a mattress, another, smaller set of furs piled together to make a pillow, and another, three layer thick set of furs for a blanket.

Giving it a test, I sat, then laid down. Just as I suspected, it's softer than it has any right to be. It's still weird to think about, but you gotta do what you gotta do. It's not my foam mattress from back in my apartment, but this'll do nicely. Plus with the lack of bugs on a barren world, and the nanites pretty much guaranteeing a lack of shedding or bacteria build up, I don't have to worry about the bedding getting dirty on me either, though a shower to wash the memory of being covered in sand away would be more than nice...

I wouldn't do that if I were you.

I blinked. "What?"

It's getting late. Creating an attached bathroom with what amounts to a tub of water would drain your energy reserves to dangerous levels if you wish to survive the night. In fact, I would highly suggest catching the last of the sun's rays before turning in tonight and avoiding use of the nanites for anything beyond simple living until the morning.

"Oh." A thought occurred to me thanks to what my subconscious said. "Do the nanites need anything beyond a power source to operate?"

A guiding directive. Without that, they go dormant. Otherwise I'd be going over legal speak and closing loopholes with you in order to make sure any shed nanites don't become the next Replicator incident.

"Oh. Dang it. I was kinda hoping that maybe I could make a brick of nanites to leave out in the sun that could absorb and store energy like a battery..."

That is actually about the only thing they could do without being connected to you in some fashion. Though you might be able to maintain a remote connection with nanites if you create a long range transmitter implant, but that is not something currently available to their programming.

"Is there anything else in the programming of the nanites available other than the replication and mass manipulation implants?" I asked curiously.

No. Though I'm sure with some study of how they communicate and a bit of re-engineering radio communications or something to that effect, you could jury rig something over time.

"Maybe. That seems a bit of ways down the road though." I said thoughtfully, as I made my way outside to catch the last rays of the evening before sunset. "Would it be a huge problem if I pulled up a chair?"

No, that should be simple enough, though I will tell you before you hit the point of it becoming a problem.

"Thanks," I said, before getting to work using my hands to raise a chunk of stone slowly from the ground next to the entrance of my new homestead. Without any padding or fabric, I made sure to try and make it form to my shape as best I could so that it wouldn't be too uncomfortable to sit in, and set it an incline so I could relax. It wasn't short work, and the sun was closer to setting once I'd finished, but it was enough.

It's a good thing you have that new blanket and mattress now. Not much energy should need to be expended by the nanites to keep you warm this time.

"Was that a big problem last night? Also, were you... uh, 'awake' the whole time?" I asked curiously.

It was not that big a problem, though you hadn't spent so much energy then as you did today either. Still, it would be preferred if an alternate power source such as that nanite battery you thought up were to be created tomorrow, in case of emergencies.

As for being 'awake' as you put it, you should know the subconscious does not have a waking or asleep state like the conscious mind does. I do rest as you do when asleep, but that can be compared to a low energy state rather than being mostly unaware of the world around you like the conscious mind while sleeping. Does that answer your question?

"Yeah, for the most part. I guess I just got confused since I can talk to you like a regular person for the most part, even if I'm only really reading your responses. It's easy to forget your my subconscious sometimes and not just another normal person." I explained.

Well... As anything, that's up to you.

I frowned in confusion. "What do you mean?"

As the subconscious is normally unable to communicate like this, you could consider it an upgrade from the nanites in order to be able to interface with you better. You remember that right?

"Yeah...?" I half asked, half stated.

Your will, as ever, controls the nanites, and as the interface between you and the nanites, your will affects me as well. I, and you, are aware of the concept of Tulpa. Mind constructs. You could just as easily order me deleted in order to interface with the nanites in some other fashion, or you could 'give me life' as it were. I do not suggest you use this as a way to achieve creating a companion though. I am, as ever, in your head, and superimposing myself over your senses like these HUD elements won't be enough. Like you realized with your online friends, conversation is all well and good, but physical presence and companionship is what you truly need. Even imposed on the senses, some part of you will always know I'm not actually there. And no, suppressing that realization won't be good for you in the long run.

I shrugged. "Just a thought anyway. Besides, I was never very good with the whole Tulpa thing. I'm either excellent at it, or really bad. I have no way to tell, thus I'm back to square one. might as well not go that route anyway, since you have a point."

With nothing else to ask, I and my subconscious lapsed into silence, watching the sunset.

Once the sun was gone, i stood up and made my way inside. I contemplated making a door for the entrance up top before making a mental note to consider it tomorrow.

Now back in my bedroom, I concentrated on the feeling of being clean since the nanites have already taken care of any sand or dirt clinging to my skin. I then got into bed and covered up, still marvelling at how surprisingly soft the bedsheets were.

With my subconscious' help, I once again drifted off, going 'dormant' as it were to wait for sunrise once again.