Numberland

  Chapter 4: Week 21, Day 2, continued

  As soon as Wilson moved the Instant Build-O-Matic, the stair he’d already built transformed back into a rubber duck. It happened while he wasn’t looking, but one instant it was a stair and the next it was a duck. He tried not to dwell on it too much.

  The Instant Build-O-Matic was about the size and bulk of a washing machine, but he was able to move it by tipping it up and walking it forward on two corners. Eventually he was able to get it right up to the tower.

  When he checked the screen, it said:

  INTERNAL STORAGE EMPTY

  FEED MATERIALS

  19/20 JUICE REMAINING

  CONSTRUCTION AREA BLOCKED

  Recalling that it was supposed to build 4 walls and a roof, Wilson reasoned that the tower’s support beams were in the way. He moved the Build-O-Matic away from the tower until the CONSTRUCTION AREA BLOCKED warning went away. It happened when it was about 3 meters away from the tower, which reminded him that the ad had said the device had a range of 3 meters. Did that mean it needed 3 meters of free space in every direction?

  He dismantled his map for rubber ducks and fed them to the Build-O-Matic. His new plan didn’t call for blindly searching for another door that might not be there.

  After he added the ducks the screen said:

  SELECT MATERIAL

  > DUCK RUBBER (20 units)

  19/20 JUICE REMAINING

  The fact that he had apparently used up 1 Juice concerned him. He didn’t know what Juice was, or how to get more, but he was pretty sure that he had spent 1 Juice to turn a duck into part of a stair. If he needed 1 Juice per duck and the structure took 20 ducks to build, then he was going to be 1 short. Still, there was nothing to do but go forward with it.

  He pressed the Select button.

  In the blink of an eye, canary yellow walls rose all around him and became a building. It was a single large square room with the Build-O-Matic set in the exact center. A spiral staircase rose in the center of the room and up through a circular hole in the roof. There was a single door, or more accurately a doorway cut out of one of the walls.

  The structure was made entirely of Duck Rubber, apparently. It was a firm, dense rubber that seemed sturdy enough to not collapse under its own weight. On the other hand, it was airtight and the room had no windows except for the door and the hole in the ceiling. After a day in the sun it would probably be too hot and stuffy to stay inside. Probably not a good building material after all.

  Wilson checked the screen on top of the Build-O-Matic. It said:

  0/20 JUICE REMAINING

  CONSTRUCTION IN PROGRESS

  20/20 MATERIALS PROVIDED

  19/20 CONSTRUCTION COMPLETED

  INSUFFICIENT JUICE

  As expected, he had run out of Juice. The building seemed fine though. He couldn’t tell at a glance what was missing. He decided to try the stairs.

  The stairs rose up around the Build-O-Matic in a tight spiral. There was a bannister on the inside, which he held as he climbed. They took his weight easily enough.

  When he reached the top he immediately saw what was missing. The roof of the building was a flat platform with a railing running around the outer edge - or it seemed like it should have, but it only ran along two of the four edges. He guessed that the last rubber duck would have added railings to the other two edges.

  He felt like he could do without that for the time being.

  More importantly, he was close to being able to reach the second level of the tower.

  Each level of the tower was about 6 meters tall, with about half of that being the depth of the swimming pool and the other half being the open space between the walkable platforms and the next swimming pool above. In a sense, each level of the tower was made up of two “floors,” one filled with air and the other with water. The pools were surrounded by solid walls, but the open levels were only surrounded by a network of vertical support beams.

  The roof of his 3-meter building was level with the bottom of the 2nd-level swimming pool. Add 2-and-some meters for reaching and jumping and he could almost reach the ledge and pull himself up.

  In the end, he had to risk standing on the railing. It felt pretty flimsy and the edge of the building was a good 8 inches away from the wall of the pool, so the whole time he was standing on it Wilson was scared it would bend under his weight and drop him straight down into the gap.

  In the end it took his weight fine. Duck rubber was turning out to be unexpectedly sturdy. With the added height of the railing, he was able to grab the edge of the pool and pull himself up.

  The second level did not look like he had expected. The swimming pool he’d seen from below had been at least partially an illusion.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  While there was a pool, it did not entirely fill the large cylindrical structure that made up the lower section of the second level. Instead it was a doughnut-shaped structure. The ‘hole’ of the doughnut was a smallish swimming pool in the center, while the ‘ring’ of the doughnut was a thick solid structure with a walkable platform on top. Twelve evenly-spaced trapdoors seemed to lead from the platform on top to the interior of the ring structure.

  Knowing that the towers weren’t entirely full of water made them feel a little less impossible and the situation a little more real.

  Around the outside of the ring-shaped platform facing inward there was another row of vending machines. Wilson had to pass between two as he climbed onto the platform. They were much the same as those below, except that only half of them had tubes leading up to the level above. Every second machine instead had tubes leading back down to the first level.

  There were six pengaroos on the second level, and all six of them had belly-pouches swollen with coins. They were spaced out around the ring quite evenly, so no two of them were close together.

  Inexplicably, one of them had a stovepipe top hat on its head that was nearly as tall as it was and a cigar clutched in its beak. Wilson hadn’t seen any other animal wearing clothing so far, so he was utterly taken aback. He had thought that nothing could surprise him anymore, and he’d thought that he was past being mind-boggled, but it just raised so many questions.

  For one thing, where did the pengaroo get those things? And for another thing, how did it light the cigar when it doesn’t have any thumbs?

  He instantly got an answer to the first question, because the first vending machine he looked at, right next to where he’d climbed onto the platform, had a picture of a top hat on it. Apparently they cost 100 coins. As for the other, maybe they came pre-lit?

  As he watched the hatted pengaroo with amazement, one of the machines nearest to it suddenly began to spit out coins. There was no obvious reason for it, and no sign of any pengaroo nearby that might have recently fed it something. The hatted pengaroo jumped and squawked, and quickly dropped its cigar so that it could chase after the coins and use its beak to pick them up and stow them in its pouch.

  As it did that, one of the other pengaroos snuck up to it, walking rather than hopping to avoid making noise. Rather than try to steal the coins it snatched the cigar and sprinted away at top speed. The hatted pengaroo looked up from the coin it was chasing when it heard the sound of running feet and, seeing what had happened, squawked angrily and chased after the thief.

  The chase quickly took them into the territory of the next pengaroo over, which happened to be the one closest to Wilson. It opportunistically tried to snatch the cigar from the thief as it passed, and the thief was slowed down as they got into a tug of war over it. The original owner swiftly caught up and crashed into them both. They all went down in a heap and the cigar and hat both went flying over the edge of the platform.

  The original owner ran over to the edge and wailed a mournful honk. Then it turned back to the other two and screeched at them in a voice that sounded outraged, but also almost like it was crying. It turned back and stared down at the fallen hat, clearly visible on the ground below, crying out grief-stricken honks.

  For a moment Wilson wondered why it didn’t just go back down and get them, since clearly this pengaroo was one of the strong swimmers capable of climbing the water slides. But then he realized that even if it did, it would never be able to keep the hat and cigar during the swim. The strong current would sweep them away.

  And when he thought about it, would it be able to make the swim with its belly pouch laden with so many coins? It seemed likely that it couldn’t bring much up to the second level. If it went back down, it would have to start over from the beginning.

  Wilson decided to climb down and get the hat and cigar. He wanted a closer look at them, and they weren’t far from his little building.

  The hat was about half a meter tall and made of a rich, velvety material. The cigar was still lit despite having been fought over and then dropped onto the damp tile - all the floor around the tower was damp because the pengaroos were always jumping in and out of the water.

  He climbed back up to the second floor, having to put the hat on to free up his hands. He was tempted to give the hat back, but he also wanted to check to see if any of the machines would let him sell it. After all, he needed more coins if he was ever going to get home, and that was kind of an emergency.

  He did a quick circuit of the ring and tried all the machines. The pengaroos watched him warily but didn’t try to stop him. Unfortunately, although there were a handful of machines with pictures of top hats on them, all of them spat his top hat right back out when he tried feeding it to them.

  There seemed to be two kinds of machine. One would accept a certain item and give coins in return, and the other would accept coins and give a certain item. There was no difference between them in appearance, but he had yet to find any machines that worked both ways. Also, all the machines of a certain type seemed to work in the same way. All the machines with pictures of rubber ducks on them took rubber ducks in exchange for coins. He had yet to find a single machine that took coins and spat out rubber ducks.

  None of the machines up here would give coins in exchange for a top hat. They would only give top hats in exchange for coins. The same went for cigars.

  All this time, the original owner of the hat and cigar had been chasing after Wilson. It had never caught up, as he was much faster than it was. He had easily kept ahead of it as he made his circuit of the ring. He felt a little bad about essentially stealing from the poor thing, even if there was no way for the rightful owner to have got them back on its own, so he was ready to give them back. They seemed like more trouble than they were worth, anyway.

  He let the thing catch up. Rather than tackling or pecking him as he’d expected, it stopped well short and unexpectedly began to take coins out of its belly pouch. As Wilson stood back and watched, the pengaroo counted out five little stacks of three coins each, then raised its head and squawked at him.

  “Do you ... want to buy the hat?” he asked warily.

  It didn’t answer. Obviously. It was a bird.

  He didn’t know if he was reading too much into this.

  On the other hand, he had been ready to give the hat back for free, so he set it down on the ground in front of the pengaroo. It squawked happily and stuck itself head-first into the hat, coming back up with the thing easily balanced atop its head. That answered the question of how it dressed itself, which Wilson had been wondering about.

  It made no complaint as he gathered up the coins, and when he had put them all in his pockets it swiftly counted out five more coins and nudged them forward. He set the cigar down on the ground, then took his coins as the pengaroo took the cigar.

  “Thank you very much,” he told the pengaroo.

  According to the machines a hat cost 100 coins and a cigar cost 40, so he was selling them a little cheaply by only taking 20 coins for both. On the other hand, he hadn’t expected to get anything, he had been ready to give them back for free, and he was so charmed by the polite little bird that he couldn’t bring himself to complain.

  As much as he was tempted to learn more about the pengaroos, the real discovery here was the fact that these pengaroos on the second level were much richer than those on the first. Getting up to the door that led back to the forested area wouldn’t be easy. He might need multiple Build-O-Matics. If he could learn how these pengaroos were making so much money, he might be able to copy them and earn the coins he needed that much faster.

  He felt like he’d found his footing. It wouldn’t be much longer before he would be able to follow the directions on the note he’d found and finally reach the village it had mentioned.

  He was starting to have mixed feelings about meeting whatever kind of people lived in a weird place like this, but he was still hopeful that finding other people would be the first step towards eventually getting home.