Earth-1

“Samantha Rodney Packs.”

“I dunno. Sometime in 5584, I think. The clinician said I was seventeen, last time I went. That wasn’t too long ago.”

“Earliest place I remember was Earth-234. After mum left, we went to Earth-98, then I can’t remember the next one. Then Dad died and I just sorta drifted.”

“She was - or is, I dunno - an astrological something. Spent a lot of time looking at pictures of the sky.”

“He didn’t have a job, ’til we left 234. Then he did odd jobs, whatever the Network needed.”

“Oxygen deprivation. He forgot his mask one time, or it wasn’t hooked right, or something. I never really got the specifics. They found him on the hull, I think.”

“No. I always wanted a brother, but mom said I was hard enough to feed.”

“Not a whole lot. She made enough that we had a house, and stuff, we had good amounts of food, but I wasn’t allowed to waste anything. I slept on a mattress on the floor, and they both shared the bed.”

“She said she was going on an exploration. She seemed really excited, like she was doing something important. She’d never had to leave for work before, so I guess it might’ve been pretty important.”

“I dunno. She didn’t say how long she’d be gone for. Dad started to get worried after a month. He always said she must’ve gotten in trouble with some ’bad people.’ I figure she left on purpose.”

“I mean, I was probably ten. It seems longer ago than seven years, though. I might’ve been eight.”

“Yeah. It was kinda quiet after the crash. When I got out of my ship, there was green, all over the ground, and brown towers with more green on top. Then I heard a song. It was high-pitched, not like the stuff you hear from the network.”

“There was this little speaker, on one of the towers. It looked kind of like a bug, you know, the ones with those wings that always mess up your engine? But it was bigger, and it had a yellow triangle on its face.”

“Yeah. The song was coming from the bug-speaker. I tried to turn it off, but it didn’t respond to the voice commands.”

“Then I just wandered. I probably spent an hour, just walking. Eventually I came to this long black flat thing, with white lines in the middle.”

“Probably about as long as this room. Yeah, it was pretty big.”

“So I started walking on it. It felt different than the green stuff. It was harder. It went on forever. And there were these gray towers, too. They were shorter than the brown ones, and thinner. I walked for forever. After a few hours, the flat thing turned, and I came to a city.”

“No, not like our cities. This one was weird. The buildings weren’t made out of metal, they were made out of this rough stuff. I dunno what it was. They were all different colors, too. And there were pictures on the sides of some of them, but they didn’t look like real life.”

“I think they were mostly people. I can’t really remember. Sometimes there would be holes in the pictures, and you could see the rest of the building beneath it.”

“The flat thing kept going, through the city. I stayed on it, but sometimes it would split into smaller flat things. I didn’t turn onto any of those. I just kept walking. I should’ve turned around, gone back to my ship, but it was so cool seeing everything. Plus, I didn’t have anywhere to go. The ship was real busted.”

“Yeah. The rain started while I was in the city. I mean, I guess it wasn’t really rain, not like the stuff on Earth-98. It was clear, and it didn’t hurt me when I touched it. That might’ve been my suit, though.”

“I hid under one of the buildings. Well, not under it. It had like a little outcropping, poking out of it. I hid under that. But then the rain didn’t stop, so I came out and kept walking.”

“I walked for a long time. Then I started to get hungry. I figured that if there was anyone in the building’s they’d have food, so I went inside one. I don’t think there was anyone inside. It was just this big room.”

“No, bigger than this one. Like twice the size. Yeah. And there wasn’t really anything in it. Just some chairs, and a sign. It said ‘Welcome.’ ”

“Yeah. It was in commonspeak. But the sign didn’t light up, it wasn’t made of light like ours.”

“I looked around for a bit. There was a door, in one of the walls, so I opened it and went inside. It went into a long room, really long and skinny, with lots of doors. I didn’t want to look in all of them, so I went back into the first room. Then I saw this box on top of the sign. It was flat, about this big, and plugged into a hole in the wall. Yeah. It had a seam in it, so I opened it up. The top part lit up real bright - like a computer, sort of - and there were a bunch of buttons on the bottom. They had letters on them. It took me a second, but I realized the letters made the screen do stuff, so I started messing around on there.”

“I think it might’ve been some sort of really old computer. I tried linking it with my Specs, but it wouldn’t connect.”

“I got it to a page called ‘Washington Post.’ It had a whole bunch of buttons on it - buttons on the screen, that you pressed with a little arrow thingy - and one of them said ‘Launching the Network.’ So I pressed that button, since it said the Network on it, you know? Yeah. So it went to another page, which had a picture I recognized from when Mom taught me about the Launch, the one with the really old rocket and the smoke? I read the story beneath it, and it was basically what Mom told me, with the Launch, except this story was talking about it like it had just happened, in a place called ‘Cape Cadaveral.’ Or maybe ‘Canaveral.’ I can’t remember. So then I realized where I was — I was on Earth-1.”

“I mean, I thought it was pretty cool, but I also thought I needed food soon or I was dead. So I tried to think how I could contact the Network. I remembered what Mom had shown me, about how if I could plug my Specs into any computer with Cellular, I’d be able to make an emergency call. So I unplugged the computer from the wall and used the adaptor from my suit to plug it into my Specs.”

“Then I called you guys.”