ANALYZING… FILE TYPE: Physical Text PERIOD: Post-Colony Era TOPIC: Survival SUMMARY: Intel pieced together from salvaged scraps of handwritten notes. An unnamed post-colony survivor documents their thoughts while subsisting solely on crates of Earth-era prepackaged NuCaloric Drinkable Cheeseburgers. Author's observations should be considered unreliable due to apparent declining mental state. =================================================================== …just the stuff that grows here. The food we brought with us from Earth—NuCal's shelf-stable packages—is fine so far. Nearly lost a hand wrestling a tick for the last packet of crisps in the 3F mezzanine, haven't found anything since. Wish I could've picked a different last meal. - …storage room. It's all that cheeseburger slop, but it beats starving. Crate 1/240. - …patter of rain. Dreamed of a bread roll dripping with curdled grease. Gray-green clumps of meat mashed into a patty. Sank my teeth in, and it was like biting a stick of butter. Still getting used to the texture, I guess. Gotta wonder what those NuCal wonks were thinking. Crate 10/240. - …woke me up before sunrise. Went to pop open a cheeseburger and swore I could feel something move inside the package. Tore it open. Spilled goop all over the floor. Nothing solid in there at all. Crate 22/240. - …rolled in a few hours ago. One of the burger packages was swollen up. Kinda looks like one of the balloon animals Nana got me as a kid. Crate 44/239. - …timing meals or not, with the fog. I just crack open another burger when I get hungry. Heard something outside. I locked the door, but it's still sloshing around out there. Not much to do right now but think. Everything was fine just a few months ago, and now it's like everything here's trying to kill us. I keep thinking about people who get fevers that kill them. But none of the native Tau Ceti life seems to be bothered at all. It's just us, and whatever we did here. I think we were targeted. Crate 72/239. - …food that isn't 'drinkable.' Found another tooth embedded in my sleeping bag. Crate 84/239. - …lunch, I started feeling nauseous. Went to get water when my stomach moved. Watched the skin push out into the perfect imprint of a crab claw. Opened my eyes and I was on the floor. Not sure if I fainted or just had a bad dream. Looked and felt normal. Maybe it was an off batch. Maybe it's just the cheeseburger itself. Not like I have any other choice. Crate 92/238. - …had a discussion about deep-sea biomes. I don't even remember learning half that stuff—maybe when we had that field trip to the fossil record archive in primary? Mrs. Schafer was always really nice to me. Pretty thoughtful of the cow idol to use her voice for me. Smell of burnt grease got too strong in the end, so I woke up puking. Cleaned my mouth out with more cheeseburger. Crate 112/238. - Left the storeroom and holed up in this office instead. Crate 187/235 had scratch marks on the inside. =================================================================== TYPE: TEXT [X]; AUDIO [ ]