Chapter 2

A note for those who did not read the author bio or the story info: this is not a story. It is a look behind the scenes as I work on a story that is in progress. Each chapter will be the same as the last, but with corrections, modifications, and additions. It may entertain, cause mental anguish, or madness. Read at your own peril!

I awoke to a buzzing sound in my ears. My eyes hurt the way they did when I had a migraine, too. On top of all that, my stomach felt as if I had swallowed a 250ml of Ghost Pepper oil imbued pop-rocks, which was making me ill, and I couldn’t seem to control my muscles. This was my introduction to New Eden (NE).

Once my body got over that transitory feeling (it’s what I imagine recently hit roadkill feels like) I made a few discoveries. The first was the lack of chronic pain I’ve suffered nearly all my life due to various injuries sustained rock climbing, Spelunking, and on the job accidents (some of which probably should have killed me).

It went beyond that, though. I felt as if I were as physically fit and healthy as I was when I had finished Army Basic and AIT when I was 19. I haven’t been so pain-free since before I turned 21. To help alleviate the pain and keep my body from totally seizing up, I had learned Yoga and long-form Wu (Hao). I found that I could now flow through the movements confidently and gracefully. Those were some of the positive things. It wasn’t all good, however.

Once I got over the fact that I felt like a new man, I began to pay more attention to my surroundings and determined that I was nowhere near home. I was sure that I was not even on Earth, by the look of the plants and the glimpses of wildlife I caught here and there.

The creatures I saw looked noticeably different from those I was familiar with back home and across the many places I’d been to in the military. This includes a chicken-sized lizard-like animal I saw chasing after what I can only describe as an opossum-like quadruped with fur that matched the landscape and large lemur-like eyes, which I figured would be great for night time vision.

There were flying creatures as well. Though, they didn’t make any sounds like any bird I knew of back on Earth. Some had feathers, but others were more like bats, flying squirrels, and sugar gliders. I thought I saw something that made me recall the legendary Quetzalcoatl (a winged snake god), but I didn’t get a good look at it as it moved very quickly.

I was definitely not on Earth. So, either I was hallucinating, in a dream, or I’ve been abducted and sent to a new world by some damned aliens.

Why do I mention aliens and abduction? Well, I have always been an avid reader, and several years ago I began to indulge in online stories about alien abduction to far away worlds, with and without equipment, time travel, and more, which in turn led me to learn several survival skills just to understand what would be needed if one were to find themselves out in the middle of nowhere.

Those skills include how to quickly and efficiently skin my kills; preserve and tan hides; smoke any meat that I couldn’t eat before it went bad; how to make pemmican; how to recognize sources of potable water (EG vines, and such); knapping of rocks and flint; how to form a recurve bow from scratch and the art of fletching; how to build a variety of shelters for long and short term use; and a plethora of traps and snares for fish and large and small game...

In other words, if you give me a few bones, stones, and some dry wood, I could take care of myself well enough. At least I believed I could. I was convinced that I could do at least as well as most of those contestants of Discovery Channel’s Naked and Afraid.

The most significant discovery was a 40-foot shipping container filled with an assortment of items a modern-day pioneer might want on hand to start a farm out where there is a distinct lack of access to any kind of store or mercantile. In a way, I suppose this was my Conestoga Wagon, provided by the Powers That Be (PTB), to give me a hand up in this new world. I would have been a long time going through everything if it were not for the fact that it had an honest to goodness invoice with everything inside notated.

This included a heavy-duty treadle-powered sewing machine with table and chair, along with a sewing kit with needles for cloth and leather, thimbles, threads of different sizes, etc. There’s a case filled with various knives, some steel, others ceramic, for skinning, scraping, cutting, etc.

Then there’s a 55-gallon drum filled with hemp rope and cordage in diameters of 1/4th, 1/2, 3/4ths, and one inch. You can fit a lot of rope in such a container. On top of all that, in the same barrel, are two vacuum sealed containers, each of which contains seeds for either Indica or Sativa cannabis. This was fortunate since the cannabis plant is where hemp comes from, which can be used to make fibers for cloth, paper, and cordage, as well as oil and medication. I had at least a full liter of each. That’s a lot of seed for a perennial plant.

Another significant find was the large tool wooden tool chest filled with woodworking hand tools, including a variety of hammers, saws, chisels, planes, draw blades, adzes, ax heads, mauls, and more. The tools’ metal parts were coated in cosmoline to help reduce/prevent corrosion. In a well-marked short cask like container was more chain saw chain than I have ever seen at one time that wasn’t attached to a chainsaw. On top of the sawchain, as I decided to call it, as there was no chain saw body to be found, was a packet containing multiple copies of handles designed to attack to lengths of the sawchain for use in cutting trees and possibly lumber.

Another container was filled with farming implements, which includes heads for hoes, spades, assorted shovels, rakes, gardening forks, plow heads, pruning shears, and more. There are also several other tools in there for use in animal husbandry. The list indicates that there’s a bundle of carbon fiber handles for them all, as well.

One of the few genuinely amazing items was a small but powerful electric generator meant for a wind turbine, and the parts to build a durable windmill to provide me with limited but useful electricity to help power a few tools that were included. Those tools included both a lathe and milling machine, which were very familiar to me as I had nearly identical ones in my garage back home. With the woodworking tools alone, I had a huge hand up. This was over the top, but I wasn’t about to complain. Besides, until I had a place to assemble the lathe and mill, and the windmill to power them, they were just dead weight and were no good to me.

There’s a covered square tub listed as being filled with clothing for all types of weather, and it seems that it’s not just for me but for at least one other person because many of the sizes listed are far too small for me.

As I made my way down the list, I found that there was a 2m wide roll of sail quality canvas hanging on the back wall of the container holding 100 linear meters of said canvas.

There are other rolls of fabrics hanging back there, too. White linen and cotton, blue denim, and undyed hemp fabric. From the descriptions, there are 75m (each) of the linen, and cotton at a width of 60 inches, 100m of the denim, and 150m of the hemp fabric. All hung on the wall for easy access and storage.

I discovered one container filled with cast iron pots, pans, skillets, and dutch oven, hand mixers, spatulae, etc. that were right at the front of the container. Next to it was a large tub filled with vacuum-sealed bags of cornmeal, flour, sugar, baking powder and baking soda, and more. Possibly enough to last a year for a family of four, if used wisely.

There are containers filled mostly seed stocks. Wheat, corn, rye, barley, peanuts, wild rice, golden rice, soy (both edamame and nattu for making tofu), quinoa, a large variety of lentils, tubers, onions, garlic, basil, bay leaf, rosemary, thyme, turmeric, many types of peppers, and much more. Where possible, the containers are vacuum-sealed.

Essentially, I have enough to plant many acres of each of the grains and plenty of the others to ensure a good crop (weather and soil conditions permitting). Currently, I had no means, to use all of it right away. That’s fine. It means that I have enough to ensure I have the seeds for future crops.

I also found an unassembled crossbow and compound bow with spare parts, bolts, and arrows, and a case of 100 steel field point arrowheads, along with plans for making crossbows from wood, as well as at the front where they were easily found.

Speaking of plans, the invoice lists plans for making everything from barrels and casks, to handles for tools, a simple plow, and for just about anything one could hope for back in the old west. Yes, that even includes a steam engine, though I have no way to make welds, for now, so that’s way off in the future. I have not found a single firearm.

There’s also a 55-gallon drum of kerosene, which I assume is for the lamps. I hope that lasts until I can start producing oil from the hemp seeds when I begin harvesting the crops, once I plant them. What I have listed is not everything on the invoice, but most of the really, to me, essential items. The many items not listed have no place in my current situation.

There is neither bed nor toilet, but there are a couple of hammocks and a large copper tub and lots of soap.

“What is New Eden,” one may ask. Well, the answer is that it isn’t on Earth. Truth be told, I haven’t a clue as to where it is. Why name it New Eden? I didn’t. That’s the name it had when I awoke.

What do I know about this place, this “New Eden”?

Well, for starters, it is very Earth-like. I don’t have the equipment to measure anything in a way that proves how Earth like it is. However, I can breathe the air and have found it to be clean and refreshing. Probably how it would have been back before the Industrial Revolution back on Earth. Gravity feels to be close to what I am used to from before the unwilling move from Earth to NE. The sky is Azul in color, and the clouds are white to dark gray, much like back on Earth. There is a moon, which appears to be either closer or larger, (possibly both?), than that of Earth. That means that tides here are going to be extreme.

The moon is not tidally locked like Earth’s. Instead, this one spins on its axis so that it has a day and night period of about four NE days to one Lunar day. I haven’t seen it make a full rotation, yet, though I have kept an eye on visible landmarks and base my ratio on my observations at this time. There are no familiar Constellations, and I have yet to find a steady star to use as a guide. My compass does keep a consistent heading, so it does have a magnetic field, which is good.

There are edible plants and animals here. I’ve seen creatures as small as a mouse to as big as a Moose, but it would take a while to describe them. Some are similar in appearance to animals I am familiar with, others are chimeras. While not precisely the same, I would be willing to state that the animal life here evolved in a parallel fashion to those found on Earth over the ages.

I’m reasonably confident that the plants are also on a parallel evolutionary track to those back on Earth in that they are mostly green and therefore likely using chlorophyll. There are grasses, trees, flowers, shrubs all around. I believe that I’m in a climate like that of the Pacific Northwest, but that’s a guess as I haven’t been here long enough to know for sure.

I have seen one other predator, so far. It resembled, to me, like a really feathery three-foot tall raptor, though its arms are longer and it can use them to grasp, climb, and dig. There was only one, but that just means I only saw the one. I had the pleasure of observing it as it took down a creature slightly larger than itself, which I would describe as a large rodent. If pressed, I might label it as a Capybara, as it looks very similar to those I’ve seen in various nature periodicals back on Earth. This is a good thing because that means I have a likely source of easy protein.

As I mentioned before, there are flighted creatures, too. They seem to range from the size of a Chickadee to a Red-Tailed Hawk, from my observations so far. So, as I said before, it appears that NE’s flora and fauna took a parallel evolutionary path, but not exactly the same as on Earth, which is reasonable.

I don’t have a chronometer of any kind with me, so I cannot figure out the length of the day here. When the local sun sets, takes over in a flash. There’s a lot of stars out there but not enough light to do any work by. I am confident that it is close to a 24 hour day, maybe longer. On a side note, did you know that our bodies are actually on a 25-hour clock? This was discovered back in the 1980s.

It took a bit of work, but I have set up a lean-to against the “North” side of the container, which is where I’ve placed the barrels containing non-perishables like the farming and woodworking tools so that I have room to set up a hammock inside the container to sleep in at night. It was necessary to get done that first day because I had no desire to sleep outside where there was no protection. I had tired myself out so much that I fell asleep almost as soon as I laid down in my hammock.

To bring down the trees for my lean-to, I made use of the sawchain and handles, which made bringing down timber easier. I was able to topple the trees necessary more quickly and efficiently than if I had been using either an ax or saw.

Hauling them was another issue entirely. I hope that I can eventually find a buffalo or bovine of some kind that can be domesticated to put to work moving heavy loads. In the meantime, simple pulleys work well.

In the first week, I managed to clear about two acres of land of trees and shrubs. This would be where I would put down my roots. I’ve begun digging down into the Earth. It’s going to take some time as I intend to make my home partially underground. This will be made easier by the fact that many of the trees I’ve cut down seem to be something similar to cedar. No insects seem to have an interest in them, and if I’m lucky, they will be highly resistant to rot.

I’m going to make the container part of my home. There will be a room on each side of it. One will become my workshop and the other a living area where I’ll put the Franklin stove that I finally hauled out and where the kitchen will be. There are no glass panes of any kind in the container. So, any windows I cut will have to have shutters to keep critters out.

My plans include lifting the container above the ground on top of timbers I cut and move under it. Then, under that, I will make a large cellar where I’ll keep items for long term storage that need to be protected from the elements and animals. The cellar will be lined with clay and timber. The timber will be cut to fit together tightly using a v-grove with gaps filled in with clay.

I’m really glad that the place where the container was initially placed was quite level. It took a couple of days to find the right size trees and to get them in place. That was the least demanding part of the job I was doing. I then had to lever the container up so that I could get the first timber under the leading edge. To accomplish this, I had to lever up one side at the front corner, put a block in place, and then repeat the process on the other side. Then I had to do it again further back from the front.

Eventually, I had the space to move the first three logs under it, at which time I removed the blocks holding it up. Prior to all this, I had emptied the container of almost everything. I nearly tried to do this job without first emptying it out and realized that it would be utterly stupid to do it that way.