Race for Survival

I didn't sleep much during the time it took for the cube to research what I had asked it to. I was too anxious and knowing that I only had enough resources for a few days didn't help. Waiting for the cube to let me know when things were done was difficult, so far I had been able to have just about everything I wanted instantly but now what I needed was going to take more time than I wanted to give. It was shortly after a meager breakfast that the cube informed me that it had finished learning the technology. It was able to exceed my expectations and said that not only could it replicate the mining abilities but it had improved them. It had been able to find some random mass floating a little closer than the planet was, and to my delight it was between us and the planet itself. It alone wasn't enough mass to grab on to in order to move us, however I hoped that it would still be what I needed for my plan to work. I had the cube explain to me in detail how the gravitational manipulation worked, I wanted to make sure I had understood it completely before implementing the next step.

After making sure I understood this technology I had the cube construct a few probed with mining and processing abilities, I informed the cube that these probes were going to need to be able to construct something from the mass that they were going to go towards. The cube informed me that they would have no problem with that as there were good minerals in the floating rock mass that it had told me of. The only problem it saw was that it would still take a day for the probes to reach this mass as it wasn't a strong force. I then informed it of the next part of my plan.

The cube had easily reshaped itself as a sphere and adjusted it's gravity towards the inside so that I was sitting on a ball with a metalic shell surrounding it. A tube was going through the center, big enough for a probe to pass through. The probes were being deployed and positioning themselves to shoot through this tube which was aimed at the space mass in the distance. In theory this all was going to work, but it still had never been tried so it still had some room for error. My excitement grew as I heard the probes zooming through the tube and sphere beneath me, propelled by the gravitational forces that we were creating in this shape. We sent about three probes for now, that should be enough to do what we needed. To my delight they arrived in mere minutes instead of the day that the cube originally had told me it would take. Our gravitational slingshot had worked. The probes began mining up, refining and manufacturing the the space rock that we had shot them to, the goal was to make a second gravitational slingshot using this small amount of mass, the hope was that they would be able to draw some solar energy to help add to the gravitational forces and shoot the next set of probes down to the planet, but construction would take half a day at least to complete. Satisfied that we had gone this far already with the plan I lied down to take a nap, informing the cube that it should wake me as soon as the next stage is ready.