CHAPTER 1: Arrival Survival - I Learn What I Don't Know and Meet a Gopher
I woke up with bright light on my eyelids. When I opened them, a small but impressive nova went off behind my eyes. I shut them again. It didn't help much. After a while, I decided that I might as well endure the pain with my eyes open. The pain was no worse, but something else was. Nothing I looked at made any sense.
I was sitting at the base of a tree, that wasn't quite a tree, in a forest that wasn't quite a forest chock full of trees that weren't quite trees for reasons I couldn't imagine. I ran through a hurried (and incomplete) inventory. It quickly became painfully obvious that there was a great deal I didn't know - all of which I thought I should know:
I had no sense of here.
I didn't know where here was.
I didn't know how I had come to wherever here was.
I didn't know what here was.
Worst of all I didn't even know who I was.
That, I decided, was enough not to know for the moment. It was time to consider what I did know:
I did know I was not hungry.
I did know I was not thirsty.
I did know I was not injured.
I did know I was not even tired.
I did know I was not uncomfortable in any way.
I did know I was sitting, apparently alone, in a dense forest.
I did know a language (I was thinking in one), and it was a language rich in profanity and vulgarisms. I had a background thought-stream running that was a beaut.
I did know that, in spite of all the things I did not know, I wasn't particularly afraid. At least not yet... I thought perhaps I should have been.
What I did know seemed no more useful than what I didn't. "Forest," for instance, didn't really answer the question of where here was. What I could see around me didn't really correspond with what I "felt" a forest should be; it was just the closest approximation my language could come up with. But the "trees" weren't trees, and the "brush" wasn't brush. Even the "grass," what little there was of it, didn't really look like grass. On the other hand, I couldn't really bring up a picture of what they "should" look like. This was definitely not good.
"Wonderful!" I thought. "More stuff I don't know." It began to appear likely that list was destined to grow rapidly. Opportunities for growth of the second list seemed to be more limited.
"Wel-l-l," I said aloud, "let's see what we've got here."
The sound of my voice brought with it two surprises: first, I didn't recognize it; second, it was the first sound I'd heard since...? There was no "since!" I was just suddenly here, in the middle of an absolutely silent forest. A forest that was subtly wrong in ways I couldn't quite put my finger on.
I stood up. The nova flared, but less brightly than before. I decided I could stand it, so I took a step.
Something bumped my right thigh. Startled, I looked down. A hand laser was clipped to a web belt. I checked the other side. A knife was sheathed against that thigh - a very large, wicked-looking knife. It occurred to me that another, more pragmatic, inventory was in order. I was dressed in camouflage shirtjack, with camouflage trousers bloused at the top of dark brown and green, unpolished hiking boots. A water canteen turned up clipped to the back of the web belt, and wax-coated matches showed up in a pocket, along with a sturdy folding knife. Fastened to my left wrist was a timepiece with twenty-four units of time marked evenly around its circular dial, and two sweep hands of different lengths. A bedroll with top-mounted backpack lay beside the tree I had been resting against.
