I’m fucked. Maybe not that fucked, but… fuck.

  Denson stared at the analog geographical diagram, face painted with an apathetic frown.

  Paper.

  In the fifty-fifth century.

  With a proper nanofab, he could have produced dense solid-state storage modules in minutes. The mistake was obvious now. The installed micro-fabricator was limited to micro-scale construction. Useful for tools and structural components, but ineffective for compact computational systems.

  What can he get with classical transistors the size around one micron?

  He could assemble simple controllers. Basic logic arrays. He could easily build a museum exhibit for early processors like the Intel 8008. If he was feeling ambitious, perhaps an entire board to equal the cognitive horsepower of a smart toaster.

  In short?

  Junk.

  Even if he invested the time and feedstock, the result would be bulky, power-hungry, and fragile.

  Meaning, there was no way to print another printer in short order. He was sure as hell the designers behind the model in his possession never intended heavy industrial throughput, and its documentation made that clear in language bordering on strong discouragement.

  It had no capability to print automated defenses en masse. His endurance tests and available blueprints revealed that much. Which was understandably so. Miniature, general-purpose fabs common in compact escape pods were designed for wilderness contingencies, where the worst concerns were wild animals and exposure to the elements.

  Not geopolitical restructuring.

  Not a situation requiring kickstarting an industrial revolution to ensure he could securely build the infrastructure to build a spacecraft to go back home.

  Its print bed volume, feedstock processing rate, and thermal cycling limits placed a hard ceiling on his ambition. A miniaturized nanofab would solve everything, but those were already rare enough in the coreworlds. Pioneers got leftovers.

  Otherwise, he'd have something miles better than paper maps for decision making, tactical analysis, and sociopolitical observations in some bumfuck of the galactic peripheries.

  …But even then, he'd have neither the time nor the materials for the convenience. A personal workstation wasn't his priority when survival leaned more on firepower as leverage against possibly hostile polities.

  Guns did.

  So here he was using outdated fabrication technology to pulp lignocellulosic biomass into cellulose sheets. Paper. An obsolete medium. A museum relic. Quite anachronistic to fabricate an ancient information storage medium with a machine that could split atoms at the molecular scale but reassemble with…depressing precision.

  Paper worked just fine. Especially where electronics could fail when needed most. Paper did not crash. Paper was immune to firmware corruption, electromagnetic interference, or power loss.

  If worse came to worst, if he had to ditch everything, a lightweight map would be his only saving grace.

  He can’t expect to print parts to assemble a car. Without a vehicle, mobility was everything.

  Much less print for something for…whatever situation he was in.

  A situation so bizarre he had difficulty categorizing it against those he had survived before. And he had been around for a while. As an organic sapient transferred into a synthetic body, Denson was functionally immortal. Time had become a resource he possessed in excess.

  But immortality did not equate to invulnerability.

  Especially not in a world inhabited by xenos who manipulated reality with casual ease.

  The escape pod’s integrated sensor array had yet to detect any radio transmissions since his arrival. It might never. Instead, it picked up unknown energies the computer insisted were not error.

  Days ago, he would not have believed it. But his eyes work fine.

  Turns out, the native sapients evolved to somehow manipulate those energies through curious mediums.

  He doubted it was literal sticks found in nature.

  The same sticks he inserted into the microfab’s material processor to make toilet paper.

  He had seen enough bodies piled and set aflame by psykers to conclude his safety was unguaranteed. Any halfwit could figure that much. Power dynamics leaned naturally toward those who could hurl fireballs over those who could throw spears a few meters.

  Oh, sure. He could just walk up to them and say hi. Maybe ask for help. Maybe even explain that the world takes the shape of a ball or introduce them to the wonders of electricity.

  At best, they might see him as a messiah from the heavens. At worst, a freak from the void.

  But no one in their right mind would leave their fate to the whims of the unknown.

  Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  The zeppelin drone footage did not help morale. Instead, it fed his pessimism.

  Denson forced himself to look at the curved wall of embedded displays. A grid of live feeds streamed from the sky. In one frame, armored soldiers in plate hauled bodies toward a trench. In another, carts tipped corpses along with animal waste and debris into the same pit.

  To the locals, the pit functioned as both grave and landfill.

  Automated data gathering revealed the practice was widespread. Settlement after settlement followed similar disposal norms. The map on his table confirmed it. Every marked village, town, and city subscribed to variations of the same inhumane structure.

  No mercy at all for certain humanlikes. For certain castes.

  Well… if that isn’t a sign diplomacy wouldn’t work, I don’t know what is.

  Warning pings pierced his ears. The pod ceiling flashed red. One screen went black.

  No signal, the words flashed on the screen.

  He rushed to the console and replayed the last seconds.

  A winged lizard descending from above. A saddle. An elf rider. A woman, judging from the curvaceous steel breastplate, being a big, bodacious indication of her gender. She swirled her staff in ritualistic motion. Compressed air gathered from the clouds into a dense sphere.

  Then the feed died.

  Shit. Fuck. Now they know something’s up.

  Hopefully they wouldn’t connect the unknown flying object to the meteorite. If any power learned what fell from the sky was no rock but a machine with a man inside, he’d be in for headaches.

  ...This world was weird. It's like a multi-trillionaire had hired an entire army of geneticists to turn this place into a secret pleasure planet fantasy theme park. Something like that wasn't unheard of. Long has mankind learned to manipulate the threads of life, and not all of those in power use the tech for the good of all.

  One theory nagging in his mind was that a colony ship crashed here a few millennia ago, where the first-generation survivors used gene-editing tools to advance their evolution to adapt to native anomalies. Nothing too uncommon; anything was possible out here in the rimworlds. As to how the local humanity regressed into primitives? He has theories. But only just that. Theories.

  He hadn't expected organic aerial mounts. Then again, if the native life had a shared genetic disposition to fuck with physics, a pop-culture-compliant wyvern should be nothing surprising.

  With fingers dancing across the keyboard, the remaining zeppelins climbed higher. Hydrogen electrolysis modules inflated balloons to near their stress limits. Surveillance feeds pulled back from settlements and farmlands.

  The native air force would discuss the unknown flying objects. It might take time for their guard to lower.

  He couldn’t afford to lose his only eyes in the sky.

  With the right materials, more could be printed. But the microfab queue contained hardware upgrades for his one-shot gauss gun.

  He had the technological edge.

  But he couldn’t afford fighting a real fight. Not even combat experiments. Couldn’t test whether their abilities could overpower him in direct confrontation. He had tastes of combat prior.

  The problem was the absence of a safety net.

  No backup bases. No places to retreat to… without a foothold, the only advantage he could exploit was unfamiliarity with his weapon. Against bows and swords, he was confident.

  Against magicians?

  He didn’t know the mechanics or limits of their abilities. He needed more research. More data. Referencing recorded instances, a wall of earth or thick water barrier could stop a supersonic projectile. Once they learned to react appropriately, he was done.

  Assuming they are not stupid.

  He had little time. Little infrastructure.

  He wasn’t alone.

  Not definitely with the feline neighbors.

  Outside, the giant tiger-panther-thing purred.

  The mutated wildlife lingered near his pod, attracted by warmth. He’d never know when it might turn aggressive.

  At least its scent marked territory. Other predators stayed away. That's not a bad thing. At least the three-meter-tall canine didn't think to shit on his roof. That's where the solar panels were.

  Which meant he now urinated into bottles and defecated into a sealed container. Though he'd take river water over filtered piss anytime. He could wait for safe intervals to step outside. He knew how to sneak around. His body produced no scent. If his shuttle was equipped for long-term survival in the void of space, he could certainly stay around with a carnivorous neighbor.

  If only things wouldn’t get eventful in due time.

  He'd take river water over filtered piss anytime.

  …Well, this is what I get for selling my cybernetics.

  Not that he couldn’t print low-tier upgrades in the future. If he even survived that long, anyways.

  He watched through external cameras as a monstrous canine licked terrible lacerations while its mate assisted. Whatever caused that was not something he intended to investigate.

  Better the feline than wolves. Or insects. Or moles.

  One of his landing rockets had already been gnawed. If only the shuttle had wheels.

  He doubted his gauss gun could deliver a guaranteed killing blow without modification. A headshot might work. Maybe. With anomalous energy in play, though, their physiology was uncertain. He might need to jury-rig the pod’s power system for extra oomph.

  Until then, he couldn’t have his only natural deterrent wander off.

  At least the kittens were entertaining. He was tempted to name them. Then remembered they could crush his neck if inclined. He never liked bonding with fleeting things anyway.

  Especially when elven search parties and human complements were already camping in the region, likely hunting the fallen “meteorite.”

  His surveillance drone hovering thousands of meters above showed them erecting earth walls through psyker manipulation. Baseline humans were excluded from protection. Some bodies were left exposed. Others scavenged clothing and tools from the dead to survive the cold.

  From thermal imaging, nocturnal predators rushed to claim the carcasses. Soldiers loosed arrows more as warning than defense. A darker shape slipped between trees and dragged a humanlike form into the forest.

  Denson clicked his tongue. Disdain contorted his face. He never loved seeing sapient life suffering so helplessly.

  He ate his ration bar without grace, tearing it apart like a feral animal.

  As the screens cycled through encampments, he regarded his avenue of approach.

  Contact was inevitable.

  Combat was unlikely.

  But not a non-zero chance.

  Peace talks were for pacifists, anyway.