Chapter 6
Overconfidence

The chicken was delectable, but it wasn't completely filling. "Your turn," I told the egg, to which the egg could have answered "that's what you think."

Ever heard that expression, "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs?" Well, here's this world's version: "You can't make an omelet."

You can't fit the egg into the furnace. You can't crack it into a bowl. You can't even step on it; so much for walking on eggshells. As a last resort, I tried tossing it in the air to hit it with a stick. But before I could swing, the incredible, inedible egg flew across the room, hit the wall, and disintegrated like a clump of tall grass.

"Great," I grumbled, just as my fire winked out.

Darkness returned, along with all my irrational fears. Peering into the furnace's lower slot, I saw I still had a few more untouched planks of wood. Why weren't they burning? Did the furnace only work when it had something to heat? Shivering with cold and nerves, I rifled through my belt and pack for something else to burn. The first thing I grabbed happened to be a block of sand.

Thankfully, the furnace accepted my offering, giving me light, heat, and a few seconds later, a whole new modern convenience. I should have known what I was making. Back in my world, it was everywhere; every building, every home, every vehicle, even over people's eyes to help them see better. It was one of the most vital components of human civilization and I'd had no idea how it was made. Not until I pulled the smooth, clear block from the furnace did I realize that heating sand got you glass.

"Dolt," I murmured, punching out a hole in the wall and replacing it with the transparent cube. "Did you ever ask where anything comes from?"

What an amazing thing a window is. It gives you the freedom to see the outside world, but the security of knowing that world couldn't come in. At least, that's what I hoped. In zombie stories back home, didn't people always board up the windows at the first sight of the living dead? Would I have to do that when my own cuboid corpses showed up?

For now, I couldn't hear any ghouls, and I couldn't see any through my new, south-facing window.

That's when I realized I'd placed it on the wrong side. My garden, the only thing worth looking at, was north of my hut. I started punching the glass, expecting it to pop out and hover like all the other blocks. Instead, it shattered like the egg.

"Oops," I said. "No problem, I got a whole beach worth of sand right outside*.*" If I'd been more cautious or timid, or even just a little more patient, I might have made the smart choice and waited for the dawn.

But did I?

The night had gone so well. I'd been racking up so many wins. Fire, cooked food, and now glass for windows. For the first time since landing, I felt fully in control of my situation. I was becoming overconfident, and that's what got me into trouble.

I'll just make a torch, I thought, holding a stick up to the furnace. Monsters gotta be afraid of fire.

When the stick refused to catch, I should've taken it as a sign to stop and think.

But did I?

The glow from the cabin's gotta be enough to keep everything away, I reasoned, sauntering out to the moonlit shore. Shovel in hand, trying to whistle through my thin, flat lips, I couldn't wait to make all kinds of cocky mistakes.

And I made a ton.

Instead of digging right outside my door, I chose a spot halfway up the beach. Instead of gathering a few cubes and dashing back, I just kept going until I'd dug myself into a hole. Instead of keeping my eyes and ears open—long after the fire died in my cabin, I might add—I fantasized about all the cool things I could build with this glass. A skylight, or wraparound windows, or maybe even a greenhouse if I dug up enough sand.

"Sssp." A sharp, rasping hiss yanked me out of my nighttime daydream. I froze, looking up.

"Sssp!" came the sound again, gripping my gut with recalled terror. It was the same rasp I'd heard that first night in the forest, when I'd seen those terrible eyes.

And here they were again, passing right over me: a cluster of small glowing rubies embedded in a black, cow-sized, eight-legged beast.

Spider!

Before I could run, move, or think, it'd jumped into the hole with me. Snapping jaws tore at my chest. I toppled backward, dropping my shovel. The spider pounced. I dodged. It spun for another strike as I scrambled frantically out of the pit.

"Sssp!" Scratching legs behind me, coming up fast.

My axe…back in the cabin…too far!

"Sssp!" A bite on the leg…pain…fear…

I reached into my belt for something, anything…sand. Nothing but sand!

Maybe if I could lay a roof, if I could trap it underground…I reached the top, the spider at my heels. I turned, hit it with a block of sand, then placed that block at the hole's edge. But the sand didn't stick. It fell. "Ssssp!" hissed the predator as the tan cube crashed onto its head.

I placed another falling block, then another, and another. The spider hissed angrily, pinned under more and more debris. I didn't know if I was doing any harm, I just wanted to keep it buried long enough to escape. The spider rasped. I kept going. It flashed red. I kept going. The nightmare hunter gave one final, enraged hiss, then poofed away in a puff of white smoke.

For a moment I watched in disbelief, panting as my wounds healed, my stomach growled, and my brain absorbed a new realization: Too much confidence can be as dangerous as having none at all.

Vibrating with adrenaline, I looked hastily around for more creatures. Nothing stirred on the beach, hill, or sea. I rushed back down into the pit to get my shovel, and on the way out felt something hop into my pack. I didn't know what it was till I'd gotten safely back to my cabin and thrown the remaining sand blocks into the fire.

The spider had left me a going away present, a short, sticky string of silk. I examined the strand for a few seconds, trying to think of some use for it, when the last plank in the furnace burned out.

"Ah nuts," I griped, and reached into the storage chest for more wood. I noticed there weren't too many planks left, not compared to all the worthless saplings stored next to them. And then I hit on what I thought was a brilliant idea.

I slid the dozen or so green mini-trees into the furnace and they promptly blazed to life. Way to stretch your resources, I thought with a self-congratulatory smile. I thought I was being so clever. I had no idea I was creating nothing short of an environmental tragedy that would come back to haunt me later. That night, as the little green saplings crackled brightly, I couldn't have been more chuffed.

"Mission accomplished," I said, hoisting my stone-tipped pickaxe. The addition of light allowed me to start thinking about how I wanted the finished room to look. Given my height, and the space I'd need for modern conveniences—crafting table, storage chest, and furnace—I imagined a seven-by-seven-block area with a raised ceiling for hopping victory dances. And I felt like doing that dance tonight.

My emotional roller coaster took another dive, however, when the furnace fizzled after little more than a minute. "So soon?" I grumbled, seeing that the saplings were all gone. There'd been so many and they'd lasted maybe a third as long as wood. Good riddance, I thought, tossing in the rest of the planks.

I can cut down more trees tomorrow, I thought. Right now what I need is light.

The key word here was "need." I'd already started this evening with an overwhelming fear of the dark, but now, between the giant spider attack and my discovery of fire, I couldn't let the night back in.

What happened next was nothing short of a race; a tense, sweaty frenzy to keep my shelter illuminated. At first I thought I was doing all right, until the last of the sand melted into glass.

Cobblestone, I thought, going back to the first material I'd used to discover fire. I didn't care that the end result was the exact material I was now trying to clear away. It was the process that kept me warm and safe. But I'd only just gotten back to work when the last of the planks died out.

"More wood!" I hissed, looking over at the hut's plank-and-slab ceiling.

Hastily walling off the bunker from the shack, I started chopping up the latter's wooden roof. I tried not to think about what would happen if a creature found me so exposed. I needed more fuel, more light!

What I really needed was to snap out of my funk and remember the mantra about panic drowning thought, as well as a new one that applies to all the others: It's not wisdom that counts, but wisdom under pressure. Stoking the furnace's bottom slot, I rushed to pick more cobblestone for the top. I had to keep the balance going.

How much longer until dawn?

The last plank fizzled. I tore through my pack for something to burn. I threw in the trapdoors, regular doors, that thin, flat, pressure plate thing, even the little push button that didn't last more than a few seconds.

Then I started burning my tools. Just the wooden ones, I promised. I don't need them anyway. But once they were gone, I turned on the stone versions. In went the shovel, then the hoe, and finally the axe, all fed to the waning flames and my ever-growing mania.

Ironically it was that mania that kept me from throwing in the last two wooden items I had: a couple of standard sticks. Since my cracked, worn, stone-tipped pickaxe looked about ready to break, I thought I might need to make another one to collect more cobblestone for the furnace.

Whichever goes first, I thought, hammering at the bunker's back wall. If the flames go first, I'll use the sticks. If the pickaxe snaps, then—

The fire died. The darkness returned. But in that final second of fading light, as the last block of stone flew from the wall, I thought I could see something different behind it. Were black spots embedded in its face?

Blindly picking away, I heard the crack of a successful strike. But instead of the new rock flying into my pack, I got a small, hard, black lump.

It didn't feel familiar, not like the sense memory of that first dirt block I smelled. This was more distant, like I'd heard of this substance without ever having seen it up close.

Wasn't there a natural resource that my people had been pulling out of the ground for centuries? Hadn't it been controversial; dirty and dangerous, but also plentiful and cheap? Not oil. Oil was a liquid. This might be—

"Coal?" I asked the lump. "Are you coal?"

I placed it in the furnace's lower slot and stood back as it flared right up.

"Coal or not," I said with a grin, "I'll take it!"

By its guiding light, I rushed over to the original mining point and found an identical black-flecked block. Picking out the nodule, I hurried back to the furnace.

I didn't have to. The first coal fire kept burning, and burning, and burning! At this rate it would last at least five times as long as normal wood. And all on its own without me having to strike a match. That last thought gave me the idea to try to make another torch.

Luckily I still had those two sticks for making a backup pickaxe. I held one up to the furnace just like I'd done earlier in the night. Hopefully this brighter, hotter, coal-fueled blaze would be able to do what the milder wood fire couldn't.

Just like before, the stick wouldn't catch.

I'd run out of luck, but not ideas. Thinking about this world's rule of combining materials, I placed a stick in the center square of the crafting table with the second lump of coal above it.

"Here we go!" I chimed, as four large, match-shaped torches jumped into my hand. "Let there be light!"

Feeling like the smartest person in the world—which might actually be the case if this world had no other people—I bounced back over to the still-burning furnace and exultantly held a torch to the flames.

And, once again…

Well, you get it.

"Grrr," I growled, in a tone that would have made any zombie proud. "What's missing?"

I knew the torch had to work eventually. This world wouldn't have let me make it otherwise. Would it? I just had to find the missing part of the equation, some kind of igniter I'd not yet learned to craft.

"Or maybe it's not that I need a new device," I said, remembering my experience with the hoe. "Maybe it's how I'm using this one."

I thought, given how fire worked in my world, that maybe I hadn't given the torch time to catch. Just like with the sticks, I'd held it against the flames for only a few seconds. Maybe it needed a lot longer.

I tried, again, to lean the coal-tipped cudgel against the furnace, and this time I counted a full sixty seconds. Maybe longer? I wondered, but saw that I was running out of time. The flames were dying. I couldn't have more than another minute. I'd have to use that precious light to try to dig for more coal. Reaching for my pickaxe, I decided, just on the spur of the moment, to place the torch on the ground next to the furnace. Who knows, maybe there was still a chance that the radiating heat would do the trick. Slim, I know, but still better than it sitting in my belt.

The moment I set the torch down next to the flickering firebox, it sparked into brilliant incandescence.

"Wha…" I sputtered, reaching for the smoky little flame.

The torch went out the moment I grabbed it, and then reignited when I set it back down. "How?" I asked incredulously, picking it up and sticking it to a wall, which caused it to spark again. How could a torch spontaneously combust when set down, then switch on and off like a flashlight?

The only answer I had was sheer acceptance of the fact that just because the rules don't make sense to me doesn't mean that they don't make sense.

And this time I couldn't have been happier about it! Not only did these torches work anywhere I set them; not only did they extinguish the moment I put them away; not only did I not have to worry about burning myself 'cause they gave off no heat; by far their most welcome, spectacular, completely nonsensical trait was the ability to burn forever.

You heard me. Forever!

Forget physics, forget logic, for-ev-er! Long after the furnace went cold, I watched them continue to keep my bunker as bright as day. Now this, I thought with nothing short of awe, is something I'm pretty sure even my own world doesn't have.

It might have seemed that easy back home, just flicking on a light switch and going about your business, but flicking that switch meant a power plant somewhere was using up some kind of stored fuel. Even the renewable energy I remembered hearing about needed a natural source; sunlight or wind or waves. Not here. Not with these. Yes, I'd need more coal to make more torches, but once I did, they'd burn as long as the stars!

"No more darkness!" I sang. "No more night!" Doing my victory dance, I hopped and spun around my hideout. "No more darkness, no more night, no more terror, no more fri—"

I stopped at the bunker's door, blinking at the daylight now shining through.

"Ha!" I chuckled happily, realizing that my nightlong battle had lasted well into the day. I stepped outside into the walled courtyard of my half-demolished shack. Looking first at where my wooden door used to be, before I burned it in my craze, I squinted up at the rising sun. I hadn't noticed until that moment that this world let me look right at the sun without damaging my eyes. I couldn't help feeling like there was some kind of reason for it.

"Don't worry," I told the warm, welcome square. "I won't need you tonight."

I went back inside, punched a wall-mounted torch into my hand, and then carried it back outside.

"You can rest easy now," I said, holding the torch up to the sun. "I'm done being afraid of the dark."