Sol 1

32 Ti

Okay. I had my tantrum. Time to get to work.

So, to start with. The landing went well enough. Considering this pod, I was half expecting to somehow burn up even when there's barely an atmosphere to burn up in, but it reached the ground. I've got a bruise the size of a grapefruit on my thigh, but I'll take that over broken bones. The pod produces oxygen, so there's at least one spot on this planet where I can breathe.

I've ended up in a kind of shallow valley with big mesa-like cliffs on most sides. My pod is down at the eastern end of the valley, which backs up to what seems like a canyon, with a large plateau to the north. Not the worst place to end up in. The proximity radar says there's a region to the west with a bunch of rock pinnacles that jut up into the air. That would have been unpleasant.

So I take a few steps outside, and almost immediately I trip over a big lumpy red rock. I scan it with the multitool and sure enough, iron oxide. Normally you hate seeing rust, but right now it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Because if there's rust, that means you have two things that you desperately need for planet crafting: iron and oxygen. So that's step one right there.

The multitool's memory only has a few basic blueprints in it, one of them is marked "Drill - T1". I looked it over and it's a very basic thing that generates an energy beam meant to fire at the ground. It'll vaporize the iron oxide and anything else in the soil and start the process of building an atmosphere from there. I won't be able to breathe the iron but if I can set it up the right way it'll start building the atmosphere.

And that's my main job right now. They left one pre-recorded message before the pod dropped, and it's that I need to bring the world to a TerraIndex of 175,000. It won't be breathable but the atmosphere will be dense enough to scatter light and look blue. Making it breathable is a whole other issue.

The sick irony of all of this is that there's oxygen everywhere around me. I spent most of today just scanning materials. Silicon oxide. Titanium oxide. Magnesium oxide. Planet Steve must have had an atmosphere at some point, because almost everything that I need to actually start building some infrastructure is locked up with oxygen atoms. The multitool can take care of it, and the nice thing is that every time I suck up the metals I need a little puff of oxygen gets put into the sky.

After I did some initial scouting, I found another saving grace. There's plenty of ice just below the soil, only 10 centimeters below the surface in some places. More evidence that Steve used to be more Earth-like. They found the same thing on Mars before they terraformed it. So now I just need to go back a few billion years and figure out what went wrong, stop that from happening, and boom, my job's halfway done.

Until I can invent a time machine, though, what it means in the short term is that I have a source of water. In my situation I need about 4 liters of water a day to survive. Normally I would lose half a liter a day just by exhaling, but my suit's water reclaimer cuts that down to maybe a tenth of a liter escaping into the environment each day. Of course if something happens to the water reclaimer then I'll have to rig up some means of boiling my piss, so let's hope Sentinel Corp didn't cheap out there.

I've got another problem now, too. Everything that I build needs energy to run, and I only have a few basic means of generating power right now. The drop pod itself provides a bit of surplus power to run a few drills but I need something better. The multitool has a blueprint for wind turbines, but the air is so thin I'll need to construct an assload just to get things going. Until I can figure out how to get some solar panels set up, this will have to do.

One day on this planet is 25 hours and 17 minutes, so I'm using Sols to measure the days, just like back when we were taking our first steps off of Earth. People love to play pioneer, now here I am doing that.

By the end of the day I had enough in the way of metals to set up a drill. I got it going, then watched my suit's readout tell me that the TerraIndex went from 0 to 1. Then to 2. And on it went. I feel like I would normally be more sentimental, but the only thing I could think about doing was just getting more of those damn drills set up and then hunker down for the night. This pod doesn't even have a bunk, so I'm going to be curled up on the floor like some kind of POW.

I brought back about 5000 cubic centimeters of water with me, and fed that into the crafting station. It put out a liter of fresh water, purified to within an inch of its life. So that's the mid-range threat dealt with. Short-range threats involve oxygen. There's this really good rule of thumb that people use in survival situations like these, the "Rule of Threes": three minutes without oxygen, three days without water, three weeks without food. That's as long as you can stretch the limits of human physiology before it gives out.

Right now I have enough food to last me 30 sols. Normally I would only need 2000 calories to function but with how stressful everything is right now I'm safer giving myself 2100 just to be sure. Each of these meal bags is exactly 2500 calories, no more and no less. I need to eat at least one of these a day to keep going, and I've got thirty of them. If I save a bit at the bottom of each one and take that the next day I can stretch that out to roughly thirty-six Sols worth of food, maybe thirty-seven if I go to a starvation diet.

This pod won't last me forever. Tomorrow I need to figure out something more permanent. After that...I don't know.

One nice thing to say about Steve, though. No atmosphere means absolutely stunning views of the galaxy at night. Plus, Steve has three moons. All three of them were out tonight. For the first time in a while I actually felt good to look up and see an alien sky.