Trying to figure out the translations really set into perspective why he had gotten into computers in the first place. Human language sucked. Especially if you didn’t understand most of it. He had spent almost a week sifting through the papers in the lab, desperately trying to find help with the translations. Every day he spent there he could swear he heard a clock ticking down. He was pretty sure it was in his imagination, the girl seeming to not notice anything, but that either meant he was finally losing it or had gained superpowers.


    It probably didn’t matter which with the situation they were in.


    After the first set of bad news he had managed to translate, he had stopped reading as deeply. It didn’t matter where they were or what was going on here. He needed to know why they were alone and how the facility was powered. That was it. The rest of it could be gone over once he was assured they weren’t in immediate danger. He didn’t know how the facility had been built, but if they were under literally tons of water there was a good chance that a pump going out would be catastrophic.


    It would be especially bad if said pump kept them breathing.


    Unfortunately, the lab had been a bust. He had brought a large stack of papers back to his room for bedtime reading, something to keep the translations going at least. He was sure the information was incredibly valuable in the right context, but this wasn’t that context. He was going to have to go back to the deck level and search. He was sure it would give him nightmares.


    While he had been hesitant to bring the girl the first few times he had ventured down, now that he knew the stakes he didn’t care much. If he screwed up and pressed the wrong button the whole place could implode like a tin can. It didn’t much matter where she was in that case.


    She did seem to have lost all fear of him though. After she had crawled into his lab the first time, he had thought she would get annoyed at all the man-handling he had to do to make sure she wasn’t in the way. After the third or fourth time, he had guessed she had decided to make it a permanent seat. While he decided that he would need to stick biology and personal space on the teaching list, for the moment he was in too much of a rush to care. If she enjoyed it and they might both turn into goo at any time, let the girl have her fun. So long as she wasn’t the reason they might both die, she had fallen pretty far down the priority list. She was fed and present, that was all he had time for.


    She did earn a higher spot when she had gone poking about a cabinet in one of the deck-level rooms. It had just been beakers, so not a big deal that time, but it highlighted the need to teach her to be careful. After her incident with the griddle, she seemed to be careful around him, but her curiosity still got the better of her. He didn’t know what the beakers were made of, so he did a drop test on a small one. It seemed to be glass. Not future glass either, just regular glass. He guessed it was optimized for temperature, not impacts. He should have expected it for a lab, but he hadn’t wanted to dismiss future advancements out of hand.


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    After he had cleaned the glass up a little bit, they didn’t really have a trash system, at least that he had found, he had turned to give a lesson to the girl. She seemed to have been spooked by the glass though and wasn’t poking things like she had been. He shrugged and returned to work, figuring it was enough. When she found a paper that could have important information, he had to bring his focus back to her though. He needed to see it, but he didn’t really want to wait until she got bored or just take it from her. He compromised and broke off a small piece of a choco-stick and motioned for a trade. She seemed to agree and took the piece and basically dropped the paper.


    It turned out not to matter of course, the page some kind of data sheet. It had too many numbers to be anything else. He put it aside and went back to his searching. When he heard a chirpy “Moose” behind him he was a bit startled. When he was offered another paper, he was thoroughly confused. It took his brain a bit and a failed attempt to take the paper to realize he was being propositioned for a bit of chocolate. He handed over another small piece and received a page in return. Also useless, some kind of inventory. The girl had disappeared again before he finished figuring that out though.


    The third times the charm. Or enemy action. Depending on who you asked.


    He would need to bring more choco-sticks if she was going to be this useful. The only problem being that the rationing really didn’t like treats being snuck out in exchange for hostages. He would need to move up his plans to harvest some of the seafood in the water plant if he needed to keep spending chocolate on papers.


    A tiny handful of choco-sticks and a short story worth of pages later and he was looking at another ‘industrial’ area. Or at least an area with a bigger door. It was small enough that he was confident that it didn’t have ‘deliveries’, it didn’t seem to need logistics and was only large enough for several people to leave and enter at the same time, rather than the several vehicle sized doors the others had. The panel seemed to confirm this. It didn’t flash the same warning that the other doors he had found did.


    He spent some time looking through the options for the panel, but this one seemed pretty bare-bones compared to the others. Placing his hand on the door and placing his ear to the door also didn’t reveal anything new.


    “What’s the worst that can happen, we all die? Who wants to live forever anyways.”


    Trying to hype himself up, he went to the option to open the door.


    It was pretty anticlimactic when he was denied.


    “Cool, that’s probably the universe telling me to stop.”


    It was a shame he had authority issues. Writing down the denial and poking around a bit more got him pretty much squat. The door simply refused to budge. It looked like he would actually need to read what the panel was telling him in detail.


    Seeing as how they were currently busy, that would just have to wait. He marked the door down on his map though. It was clear that it was important in some way.


    ‘I guess on the bright side we aren’t dead.’