Jecca Ogden had acquired her name from the label on the outside of the pod she had arrived in. The label had said ‘Ex.No.00381 Name: Jecca Ogden Ex.Sc.ID:0064512’. Jecca didn’t know what that meant. She didn’t know much of anything.
The label was one of two things in the pod that Jecca had not repurposed, disassembled, or otherwise destroyed in the time she had been here. The other thing was the tablet.
Inside the pod had been a plastic box, which was currently in three pieces, serving as a table, chair, and smaller box. Inside the plastic box had been: a knife, which was currently more like an axe; five packaged meals, long since digested; a water filter bottle, which was currently part of a much bigger water filter tank; and the tablet, which was still a tablet.
Whenever Jecca turned the tablet on, which she did far less often than she once had, a pleasantly green screen announced ‘Survival Assistant’ before loading a list of tasks, about half of which Jecca had done.
The first three tasks had been simply Shelter, Water, Food. Jecca had lived under a grass roof with no walls for fourteen days. She had worked out that if she put snow into the bottle, it would melt into water after a few hours, and that if she spotted an animal there was a good chance she could chase it down and kill it for food.
After fourteen days, Jecca had diverted from the instructions on the tablet for the first time. It had felt wrong, but she had been driven by curiosity, not malice. After the task called Pottery, Jecca had wondered if there might be some way to build a structure from similarly made parts.
Her current house was not made from any of those same bricks, but she had been right. And it had been freeing to be right. Since then, she had been wrong quite often, but she always remembered that she could be right, and so she tried things and wasn’t too bothered if they didn’t work.
Nearly a thousand days ago, 931 days ago, Jecca had completed the task called Salvage. From time to time, things fell from the sky. Very often, those things were made from metal. Sometimes, people fell with them. In the 2471 days Jecca had been wherever she was, no one had ever survived falling from the sky.
When, around noon, Jecca had heard a familiar rumbling and screeching from above, she had gone outside. She had shaded her eyes and looked up at the sky just in time to see a space ship explode. For a few seconds, she had watched the pieces of the space ship break apart, and then she had gone back inside.
Jecca had been here for 71 days when she had first heard a similar kind of rumbling, screeching noise from the sky. She had gone outside and shaded her eyes and looked around, not up. Had she not gone outside, she might have died when an impressively solid metal sphere that turned out to be full of wires and wheels smashed through her brick house.
Since then, Jecca had had a lot of practice looking up, and judging whether or not the burning metal raining from the sky would destroy her house again. In the case of the crumbling space ship she saw on day 2471, she was quite safe.
Only when the first crash rumbled up from the southwestern slope did Jecca pick up some of her equipment and leave her house again. She carried her small pack with some food, her large metal shears, her newest water bottle, and her twelve-metre length of chain, with one of her few guns that she still had bullets for in a holster at her waist.
According to a watch Jecca had acquired 378 days ago, it took three hours and twenty-two minutes to walk from her house to the closest pieces of the exploded ship. She couldn’t be completely sure, given the state of the various pieces of metal, but she felt those first pieces might be parts of a giant gun.
Because of past experiences, Jecca was drawn to any pieces of fallen salvage that resembled spheres. So she had ignored the giant gun parts for the moment to investigate a much larger piece a few dozen steps down the slope: three quarters of a large sphere, with a jagged hole facing up into the sky.
Jecca had climbed up the side of the sphere, and she had been disappointed. And then she had felt that she shouldn’t be disappointed. Inside the sphere was a woman who didn’t look like Jecca. So far, Jecca had not seen anyone who looked like her. It had been a source of tension.
The woman had had her eyes open, bleary gaze focused on the stars, and what looked like a piece of bearing rail stabbed through her middle. The woman had looked a Jecca, her bleary eyes almost focusing.
‘You seem to be alive,’ Jecca had said, feeling that she should say something.
The woman had opened and closed her mouth a few times in the way that people who had been pierced through the guts often did. Then she had nodded.
‘I’m glad you agree,’ Jecca had said, fairly sure that she was being honest.
She had climbed back down the broken sphere to frown at it in a way that she suspected was thoughtful. It would be a bit of a struggle, but she was fairly confident that she could drag it back to her house.
Jecca had remembered that the woman was alive, and climbed back up, doing her best to look sympathetic, though she had no reference for what that might feel like.
‘This will probably hurt,’ she had told the woman, just so that she knew, and then climbed down again to loop her chain around the broken sphere.
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She might have heard a groan from the woman when she started pulling, but it could just as easily have been from the metal of the broken sphere. As she dragged, Jecca wondered if the woman would survive being dragged all the way back home.
Jecca was quite good at surviving things, but over the last 2471 days she’d noticed that most people who didn’t look like her weren’t nearly as good at surviving things as she was. Once she’d reached home, she’d turned on the lights and climbed back up the partial sphere to check on the woman.
The woman’s eyes had moved to look at her.
‘Still alive,’ Jecca had said. Then she had had a thought she felt she ought to share with the woman in the interests of openness and honesty. ‘I imagine this will hurt a lot more.’
Jecca hadn’t been very surprised when the woman gasped and went limp in her arms as she pulled her free of the bearing rail stabbed through her liver. Even Jecca had once lost consciousness from pain. It had been very inconvenient.
This woman was not the first person, other than herself, that Jecca had given medical aid to. She had completed the task called Surgery 1642 days ago, on behalf of a young man who had not been very happy about the experience. The crucial ingredient that Jecca was still missing was anaesthetic.
Luckily for both of them, the woman did not wake up during the relatively quick process. Quite luckily for the woman in particular, the bearing rail had only pierced her liver, stabbing far enough to her right side that it had missed almost everything else of vital necessity.
A few arteries and veins were oozing quite profusely, but Jecca had all the other supplies needed for a such a scenario, including a myriad of mirrors for when she needed to do similar operations on herself.
Once she was done, there was no doubting that the woman had experienced major surgery. The synthetic skin patches hadn’t shifted to match the woman’s tan complexion yet, and there was a chunk of her liver in a dish not far away.
Jecca wasn’t sure what to do with that chunk. For all she knew, the woman would want it back. But she didn’t know how long the woman would be unconscious so she wasn’t sure what to do with it in the meantime.
1123 days ago, Jecca had completed the task called Refrigeration. 1110 days ago, she had disassembled the small fridge for parts when she failed to use it. If she really needed to keep something cold, she had a pair of ice-boxes that she periodically refilled with the almost endless snow outside.
After a bit more indecision, Jecca put the dish of liver in the cool box, nodded to herself like she’d done the right thing, and went outside to investigate the gyroscopic pod that the woman had been impaled in.
It did not take long to determine that all of the bearing surfaces were useless. Not only were they warped and discoloured from the heat of the fall, they were all clearly worn and chipped to begin with. At least most of the actual ball bearings seemed in good condition.
Jecca was struggling to cut the bearing rails into manageable lengths with her hacksaw when she heard a coughing fit inside. She resisted the urge to rush, and wasn’t sure why she resisted that urge.
According to her watch, it had been an hour and eleven minutes since she finished surgery on the woman. The woman in question was sitting up on Jecca’s operating table, panting, frowning, and poking at the synthetic skin that was getting closer to matching her natural tan.
‘Oh,’ the woman looked up, turning her frown on Jecca. ‘You’re not imaginary. That makes much more sense.’ With another cough, she lay back onto the table.
‘No, not imaginary,’ Jecca said. That felt too certain. ‘Not that I know of.’
The woman took a deep breath and shifted up on the table to prop herself up slightly. ‘Thanks for… rescuing me and apparently doing surgery on me. Would have been very undignified to die because of Rukan.’
It was Jecca’s turn to push her eyebrows together. Surely one of the other people she’d helped had thanked her? This felt different, if not completely novel. She remembered to reply. ‘You’re welcome. What’s Rukan?’
The woman sighed. ‘If I wasn’t missing part of my liver right now, I’d go out and make sure he’s dead,’ she muttered. ‘He was the captain of our ship. Absolutely useless.’
‘Um… you can have it back, if you want,’ Jecca said, for want of something else to say.
The woman frowned. ‘Hmm?’
‘The piece of your liver,’ Jecca clarified. ‘You can have it back… if you want.’
The woman kept frowning. ‘Oh, I don’t think I need it for anything,’ she said. ‘It’ll grow back at some point.’
Jecca nodded. That had been the wrong thing to say.
‘I hate to keep imposing on you,’ the woman said. ‘Could you spare me some food and water?’
Jecca nodded too much. ‘Oh, no problem.’ She scurried from the room to track down her second-newest water bottle. She filled it from her tank and brought it back to the woman. ‘Do you… what do you eat?’
The woman drank a lot of water. ‘Just about anything,’ she said. Then she had a thought. ‘I prefer it cooked.’
Jecca nodded. She scurried away again, put her pan on the stove, opened a bag of pemmican, poured the whole lot in, and almost just stood there, waiting for it to warm up.
She could do it.
Jecca let herself back into her surgery room, opened the cold box and pulled out an onion and half a cabbage. Normally she would just eat the vegetables frozen if she ran out of meat or if they were starting to go bad. But she had completed the task called Cooking on day five.
Before the woman could say anything else, Jecca fled again to chop the vegetables with her cleaver, her only cooking knife. She added the chopped pieces to the slowly bubbling pemmican, stirred once, and stood there at her electric stove to wait.
What if the woman didn’t want to leave immediately? That’s what people usually did. She patched them up, they looked at her sideways and, as soon as they could walk again, they left.
Something about the way this woman was acting was different to usual. Jecca wasn’t sure what it was. She wasn’t even completely sure it was there at all. And yet her foot tapped and her fingers wriggled as she watched the bubbling fat in her pot.
Once the cabbage and onion was translucent, Jecca filled her large bowl and took it back to the woman, who was sitting up on the operating table again.
The woman smiled, she had more teeth than most people, not as many as Jecca. ‘Thank you,’ the woman said, accepting the bowl. ‘I really appreciate all of this. I’m Laila, by the way. Laila Williams.’
Jecca nodded. Then she realised what was happening. ‘Oh. Nice to meet you,’ she said. ‘I’m Jecca Ogden, I think.’