She sat on the floor for a while.

  Not because she had decided to sit on the floor — it wasn't a decision so much as a failure to make one. Standing required a direction to stand toward and she didn't have one yet, so the floor was where she stayed, back against the wall beneath the window, knees drawn up, looking at the middle distance and doing what she privately categorized as processing.

  Processing was a generous word for it. Mostly she was just sitting with the fact of her situation and waiting to see if it got less strange if she gave it enough time.

  It didn't.

  The display still sat in the corner of her vision. She'd tried ignoring it for approximately ten minutes, which was how long it took her to determine that it wasn't going anywhere and that pretending it wasn't there was a short term strategy with no long term viability. It had the quality of something very patient. She was beginning to find patience annoying.

  She turned her attention to what she knew. It was a short list but it was hers and she was going to work with it.

  She knew she was in a box. Five steps wide, maybe — she'd counted four earlier but she'd started from the wall, not the corner, so five was probably more accurate. Five steps by five steps. Metal on all six sides, one window, one light. No door she could find, which should have been more alarming than it currently felt and probably would be later once the general ambient alarm of her situation had room to differentiate into specifics.

  She knew she was in space. The Andromeda Galaxy specifically, according to the display, which she had no reason to disbelieve and several reasons to wish she could.

  She knew she was human. Probably Japanese, based on the uniform and the fact that she'd been thinking in Japanese since she woke up without noticing. Probably a teenager, based on the uniform and the general impression she got from her own hands when she looked at them — which she did now, turning them over in the flat light from the ceiling fixture. Ordinary hands. A small scar on the left index finger that she had no memory of acquiring.

  She did not know her name.

  She pressed on that again, carefully. There was a shape there, like she'd said — a slot that felt like it should have something in it. She tried approaching it from different angles. Thought about school, since she was wearing the evidence of it, and got the impression of classrooms and corridors and the specific social architecture of a place where you spent enough time to know where you fit in it. Tried to find a face that looked like hers and got the vague sense of a mirror, of familiarity, but nothing she could hold onto.

  Tried to find family.

  That was where it got worse.

  There was something there. Not faces — not yet — but the weight of people. The specific gravity of having people who were yours, who you went home to, who took up space in your life so thoroughly that you stopped noticing them the way you stopped noticing the feeling of your own heartbeat. She could feel the shape of that. The outline of it.

  Just not the people themselves.

  She became aware, with the slow certainty of someone watching a tide come in, that the walls were very close.

  She hadn't noticed them getting closer. That was the thing about it — she hadn't decided to feel the walls, hadn't chosen to register the five-by-five dimensions of the space she was sitting in. It just arrived. The ceiling was lower than it had been. The floor extended less far. The light felt like it was coming from directly above her rather than from a fixture with any real distance to it and the corners of the room had a particular quality of corners that were near rather than far and —

  She looked at the window.

  The effect was immediate and not quite complete but enough. The window was big enough that if she looked only at it and not at the walls around it the room stopped having walls. There was just the glass and beyond the glass there was everything — the full dark abundance of space, stars in quantities that made counting feel like a category error, a faint smear of light off to the left that she thought might be a galaxy and chose not to examine too closely because she had enough to process without adding that's a galaxy and I can see it with my naked eye to the list.

  She breathed.

  The walls stayed where they were.

  Okay, she thought. So that's a thing. Good to know. Window good, corners bad. Very useful information. Filing it.

  She got up off the floor — slowly, giving her legs a chance to agree with the plan — and moved to stand directly in front of the window. Better. With her nose almost against the glass the room behind her was theoretical. It existed in principle but it had no weight to it. She could ignore it the way you ignored things that were behind you and not currently trying to get your attention.

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  Outside, nothing had changed. The stars were where they'd been. The faint smear of light that might be a galaxy was where it had been. Space was doing what space did, which was exist on a scale that made her situation feel both enormous and very very small depending on which aspect of it she chose to focus on.

  "Alright," she said to the window. Talking out loud helped. She'd noticed that already — her own voice gave the room something to be other than silent, and silence, she was finding, had a texture to it that she didn't love. "Alright. System."

  The display brightened slightly in her peripheral vision, the way something brightened when it was paying attention.

  "Walk me through it," she said. "All of it. Everything you've got."

  The system, it turned out, had quite a lot.

  It didn't volunteer information — she had to ask, specifically and directly, which she suspected was going to be a recurring frustration. But when she asked it answered with the kind of thorough precision that suggested it had been waiting for her to be ready to receive the information rather than simply withholding it.

  She learned the word flux first, because it was everywhere — in the unit stats, in the skill descriptions, in the resource readouts that meant nothing to her yet. The system defined it in terms she could follow even if she couldn't fully grasp them: a naturally occurring energy that permeated space, the underlying structure that both technology and what less scientifically inclined civilizations called magic ran on. The box ran on it. Whatever was keeping her alive and breathing in a metal room with no visible life support system ran on it. The reserve was at thirty-four percent, which the system described as adequate for current operations without specifying what would happen when it wasn't.

  She asked about the window. The system said: indestructible. She asked why. The system said: INFORMATION UNAVAILABLE. She asked whose box this was. The system said: OWNER: UNKNOWN. She pointed out that she was standing in it. The system said: ACKNOWLEDGED. She decided to move on.

  She found the skills tab by accident — or what passed for accident when you were methodically working through a display you'd never seen before. It appeared when she focused on her own status rather than the unit status, a secondary menu that took a moment to resolve into legibility. There wasn't much there. A handful of passive entries that she skimmed past, a few things labeled LOCKED that she made a note to come back to.

  And then, near the bottom:

  SKILL: 1HP — PASSIVE

  The owner will not die as a result of biological attrition provided minimum nutritional requirements are met once per thirty-day cycle.

  The owner has greater resistance to the vacuum of space and has a slightly reduced risk of death by suffocation.

  Effects of deprivation — hunger, thirst, physical weakness, cognitive impairment — will accumulate normally up to but not including fatal threshold. Skill activation requires consumption of a minimum nutritional unit at least once per thirty days.

  Status: ACTIVE

  Last nutritional intake: UNKNOWN

  Days since last intake: UNKNOWN

  She read it once. Read it again. Read the specific phrase up to but not including fatal threshold a third time, alone, giving it the attention it deserved.

  "So I won't die," she said slowly. "I just won't — I'll feel like I'm dying. Indefinitely. Until I eat something."

  The system did not confirm or deny this. It had apparently decided that the skill description was self-explanatory and that adding commentary would be redundant.

  "Where," she said, "am I supposed to get food."

  INFORMATION UNAVAILABLE.

  "There's no food in the box."

  CORRECT.

  "So the skill that keeps me alive requires a resource I don't have access to."

  CORRECT.

  She looked at the skill description again. At the days since last intake: UNKNOWN. She had no idea how long she'd been unconscious before she woke up on this floor. Could have been hours. Could have been days. Her body wasn't screaming at her yet — she was hungry, she realized, now that she was paying attention. The background kind of hungry that you didn't notice until you stopped being distracted by more immediate problems. It hadn't been days. Probably.

  "Thirty days," she said.

  CORRECT. MINIMUM NUTRITIONAL INTAKE REQUIRED WITHIN THIRTY-DAY CYCLE.

  "Right." She turned back to the window. The stars continued to be where they were. "So I have thirty days or less to figure out how to acquire food from inside a box in the Andromeda Galaxy."

  The system added a new line to her task list. She watched it appear with the specific feeling of someone who had just said something out loud and immediately regretted it.

  NEW TASK: Acquire a stable nutritional source Reward: 300 Drift Points

  "I wasn't asking for a task," she said. "I was making an observation."

  ACKNOWLEDGED. TASK HAS BEEN ADDED.

  "Those are different things."

  INFORMATION UNAVAILABLE.

  She pressed her forehead against the window glass. It was cool against her skin. Outside, the stars did nothing in particular, which she was beginning to appreciate about them. They had no opinions about her situation. They were not adding items to her task list. They were simply there, doing what they did, enormous and indifferent and in their own way deeply restful.

  She stayed like that for a while.

  She was in a box in the Andromeda Galaxy in a school uniform she couldn't remember putting on, with no name and no memory of her own face and thirty days to find food that didn't exist yet. A skill she hadn't asked for was the only thing standing between her and dying of hunger and it had the particular quality of a gift given by someone who wanted credit for the gesture without thinking too hard about the practicalities.

  She was going to be fine.

  She was definitely going to be fine.

  She had absolutely no basis for that conclusion and was choosing to hold it anyway because the alternative was to not hold it and she wasn't ready for that yet.

  "Okay," she said to the window. To the stars. To the display waiting patiently in the corner of her vision with its tasks and its skill trees and its comprehensive collection of things that were either unavailable or correct. She said it the way she'd said it before — not because things were okay but because okay was a direction. A small one, barely a step, but a step.

  "What else have you got."

  The system, patient as ever, began to answer.

  Outside, the stars held their positions. The faint smear of light that might be a galaxy watched from a distance of several million light years, which was far enough away that whatever was happening in this particular metal box was invisible to it entirely.

  She found that comforting, in a way she couldn't quite explain.