The edibles storage area, while a tremendous find, turned out to be a disturbing set of discoveries concerning their long-term situation.


    There were no fresh consumables.


    He had started his recording of the storage room with the hope that something, anything, would give him a clue to location or time period or anything else he could use determine the situation. There was nothing like that. Almost everything in the storage was non-perishable. His hopes of finding a nice apple were cruelly dashed.


    ‘I could kill for a nice fruit salad about now.’


    There did seem to be large ‘lockers’ of things he would think should be frozen, but a quick test with the seaweed seemed to indicate that those ‘lockers’ were some kind of cryo chamber. There were a number of them and they were built in such a way that people couldn’t get in, so they obviously weren’t as advanced as the cryo-pod he had been in. Or at least not as suitable for sapient beings. He didn’t know what half the things in the storage room were, let alone what needed to be cryo frozen, so he didn’t mess with anything but the powder they had already been eating. There seemed to be several boxes with bags of powder in them, so either the system needed to remove that powder every so often to keep functioning or there were enough people to need that kind of supply on a regular basis.


    Or emergency basis, considering the boxes had the word written on the side.


    He would have to slowly test everything here in the storage area after he had reduced the rationing he and the girl were under to be less strict. Once they had both stabilized, he would be able to tell if something was affecting them better. For now, it was best to just use the powder he knew. He did find a few boxes of the choco-sticks as well, though he kept them high up on the shelving and didn’t open anything with the words the box had on it. It was best the girl not realize she could eat nothing but chocolate. Diet problems aside, he didn’t want to worry about her system collapsing from only eating a single thing.


    He still didn’t know if the seaweed was edible, or supposed to be edible at least, seeing as how they could eat it. He didn’t bother getting any more and the one he did have had mostly disintegrated at this point. He managed to use some of it for tests, like with the cryo-freezers, but considering the taste he saw that as more than acceptable. His initial thought to dry it out in the oven saw most of it gone, burnt to ash.


    Turned out it was very difficult to dry things when you didn’t know what temperature your oven was at. It took a lot of trial and error, fiddling with the numbers until he figured out which direction they seemed to go in. He had thought he was a better judge of temperature than that, but for some reason the oven always felt similar to him. There might very well be some advanced tech that kept the heat in really well, but all he could feel when the oven was open was hot air. Air that was all a similar temperature hot as well. Other than sticking his hand into the oven, which he avoided doing without a blanket to protect his hand, he just couldn''t make out a difference from what came out.


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    The sacrifice of the seaweed wasn’t without benefits though. By figuring out where the seaweed burnt or just dried out, he was confident he had managed to work out the numbers. He was guessing of course, hypothesizing that the seaweed would not burn under two-hundred-degrees. Well, in Fahrenheit at least. He figured Celsius would be more accurate, but he had no idea where the different cooking reactions took place in Celsius. He knew where water boiled, froze and that was it. Same reason he wasn’t using the Kelvin scale.


    As far as he knew, organic matter started to reduce to carbon around the three-hundred-degree mark. He didn’t know the exact number, but since he was figuring that water wouldn’t boil under two hundred, he could make the guessing narrower by testing exactly where things turned into burnt charcoal. Considering most of it was guess work, he figured that it didn’t really matter how accurate the temperature was. He couldn’t even tell what the pressure was so everything could be off by fifty degrees or more.


    All that guess work aside, he basically just turned the oven all the way down and guessed that the symbols were zero. Once the seaweed started to burn, he marked the symbol the farthest left as a three and when nothing happened after a night in the oven he marked the farthest left as a one. He did make sure there were the same number of symbols, so he should be between one hundred and three hundred. He doubted that was what they actually were, the system and numbers were clearly meant for more accuracy than that, but it helped him with translating things to have a direct comparison to what he knew.


    He did manage to get some dried seaweed out if it as well he guessed, but that wasn’t nearly as exciting.


    The dried seaweed didn’t taste any better and they didn’t really come back after they were dried. If they got wet, they just turned into mush. Considering it mostly a lost cause at that point, he made a stock out of the rest of the dried seaweed. It disintegrated in that much water, but that worked fine for him. It would last them a few meals and he could test things, like mixing some into the powder, but he didn’t expect there to be much improvement where the seaweed was concerned.


    He did go back to the power room with his new grasp of numbers. He didn’t know why he bothered, considering they were just as meaningless now that he could guess a couple of them. The only real way to progress there was translating the words and gathering the numbers to add to the data he had collected. He wouldn’t know if there was a problem if he didn’t have a nice large base line. He wasn’t worried much as he was distracted anyways.


    There were other nuts to crack. Like the one in the shape of a door.


    It took him three full days of poking, translating and re-poking things for him to understand what was going on. The door seemed to be very important, which he expected with the word ‘central’ popping up on the panel. As far as he could tell, he wasn’t allowed in because he needed to ‘authorize’, uh, well…. something. That was where he was stuck. He expected bio-metrics to be around before now, so not a huge surprise. He didn’t know if things before were being overridden because of his access or if it was built into the panels when he touched them.


    Just to be extra sure, he took his now very clingy kitty and sat her in the mess hall. With the doors closed he figured she would be able to survive pretty much anything that didn’t destroy the entire place. A short prayer to appease Murphy and a blind guess later, he held his hand on the panel while he hit the open button and clicked a few yeses. It was hard not to stare as the door hissed open.


    ‘Well now, I guess I need to figure out which of those words is ‘command’. That, and make it very clear to the girl that she shouldn’t touch anything.’