The first thing she was aware of was the cold.

  Not the dramatic, killing cold of open space — nothing that cinematic. Just the ordinary unpleasant cold of a metal floor that had been sitting at a temperature slightly too low for human comfort for an indeterminate amount of time, conducting that temperature directly into the side of her face, which was pressed against it.

  She opened her eyes.

  Metal. Gray. Her face was stuck to the metal so she likely has been there a while.

  She was on a floor. This was already more information than she'd had a moment ago, so she filed it and kept going. Floor, metal, cold. Ceiling above her, same material, same color, same fundamental indifference to her presence. A light fixture bolted up there, humming faintly, throwing the kind of flat functional light that existed to illuminate a space rather than make anyone feel good about being in it.

  She sat up slowly. Her body had opinions about this — stiffness, the deep ache of someone who had been horizontal on an unforgiving surface for a duration she couldn't calculate — but nothing that felt like injury. She was intact. Uncomfortably, mysteriously intact.

  She looked around.

  Four walls. A floor. A ceiling. One light.

  One window.

  The room was small. She could tell without measuring it that it was very small — the kind of small that had a specific character to it, that pushed back against you if you thought about it too hard. She didn't think about it too hard. She focused on the window instead, which was large enough to take up most of one wall and was currently showing her a view that her brain processed slowly, in pieces, because it was a lot to take in all at once.

  Stars. A very large number of stars. The particular black of a sky with nothing between you and it — no atmosphere, no weather, no comfortable layer of air to soften the distance. Just the dark and the light scattered through it and the slow, enormous sense of depth that came with understanding, at a cellular level, that there was nothing out there that would catch you if you fell.

  She was in space.

  She looked down at herself.

  She was wearing a school uniform.

  Navy blazer, white shirt underneath, dark pleated skirt, knee socks that had done nothing to prevent the cold from reaching her legs. There was a crest on the breast pocket of the blazer — a small emblem she didn't recognize and some kanji that she could read without difficulty. She knew what the kanji meant. She knew what a school was. She knew what Japan was, what a train station smelled like, what the specific quality of afternoon light through a classroom window looked like in September.

  She did not know her name.

  She sat with that for a moment. Tested the edges of it, the way you'd test a sore tooth with your tongue — carefully, expecting pain. There was a shape where a name should be, a slot that felt like it should have something in it, and it was empty. She reached past it, looking for something else. Parents. Friends. A face she recognized as family.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  The feeling of having people was there. The people themselves weren't.

  Okay, she thought. Okay. That's fine. That's a problem for later.

  She stood up. Her legs were steady enough, which she was choosing to take as a good sign. Four steps to the far wall. She counted them. Turned around. Four steps back. The room was exactly as small as it looked, which she had known but had needed to confirm with her body rather than just her eyes.

  She turned to the window and stayed there.

  Better. With the window in front of her the room didn't push back. The space outside was technically infinite and she could borrow that if she stood close enough. She pressed her fingertips against the glass — it was warmer than the floor, slightly, which didn't make obvious physical sense and which she filed under problems for later alongside her missing name.

  That was when the display appeared.

  It materialized in the upper right corner of her vision with the quiet efficiency of something that had always been there and had simply been waiting for her to be conscious enough to notice. Text, clean and precise, floating at a distance that suggested it was a projection rather than something external:

  UNIT 00 — DRIFTER CLASS

  Hull Integrity: 100%

  Flux Reserve: 34% Propulsion: None

  Shielding: Tier 0

  Weapons: None

  Living Space: Minimal

  Owner: [UNKNOWN]

  Current Location: Andromeda Galaxy — Outer Void, Sector 7-

  Nearest Civilization: 4.2 million km

  Distance to Earth: [CALCULATING]

  She read it twice. Slowly. With the particular attention of someone who suspected that reading faster would not actually help her understand it better.

  The display waited. It had the patience of something that had never needed anything from anyone.

  Andromeda Galaxy, she thought. She knew what that was. She knew it was not where Earth was. She knew the distance between the two in rough terms — the kind of rough terms that involved the word million and the word light-years appearing in the same sentence, which was the kind of sentence that her brain was currently declining to fully process.

  The calculating symbol next to Distance to Earth spun quietly. She watched it. It spun for what felt like a very long time. Then it stopped.

  Distance to Earth: Far.

  She stared at that.

  Far, she thought. It says far.

  "That's not a unit of measurement," she said out loud. Her voice came out steadier than she'd expected, which she appreciated. The room absorbed it without echo — the metal walls, it turned out, had very little interest in her acoustics. "That's an adjective. A vague one."

  The display did not respond to this. It sat in the corner of her vision, formal and complete, offering no further clarification on the distance to Earth or on any of the other fourteen things she wanted clarification on.

  She turned back to the window.

  Outside, a distant cluster of stars she had no names for hung in the dark, doing what stars did — existing, quietly and at enormous distance, completely indifferent to the fact that she was looking at them from a metal box with no propulsion, no weapons, and an owner listed as unknown.

  The light fixture above her hummed. Flickered once. Steadied.

  "Okay," she said to the window. To the stars. To the display in the corner of her vision and the cold floor and the four walls that were exactly four steps apart in every direction. She said it the way you said okay when you meant I am processing this and I will continue to process it for a while.

  "Okay."

  The display added one final line, unprompted, in the same clean formal font as everything else:

  Welcome, Unknown Owner. The system is prepared to assist.

  Please note: assistance is subject to available information. Available information is currently limited.

  She read it. Read it again.

  "Limited," she repeated. "Great. That's great. Very helpful. Thank you."

  ACKNOWLEDGED.