If she fails a test, she has to wait at least 2 months before taking another, spending that time with parents or in a boarding school.

... right. And she's somehow managed to arrange a situation where she's neither with parents nor in a boarding school, at least so far. But if she fails, they might notice that, and then she would have to relocate again, and live with someone else.

So there's only one acceptable solution. She cracks her knuckles. She can't fail.

When she gets to her apartment building, she checks out the reference section of the library. What kinds of study materials do they have? Can she find copies of example tests or other ways to judge her progress by their standards? She keeps an eye out for introductory statistics books especially.

There's a veritable ocean of study materials: there's books that are just example tests for different kinds of exams, there are books that are full of picture-based explanations of important ideas, there's books that are printed with invisible ink that lets her instantly check if she got the right answer to a question by using UV light so she can read the answers, and books that are supposed to be used with calendars (sold separately) that let her keep helpful summaries of all the material all over her room.

She eyes the selection, trying to figure out where it's best to start.

Ultimately, she decides to just try one of each test, to see where she is. She's expecting to pass literacy and fail statistics, but she's not as sure about math as she was. She collects the appropriate books, heads up to her room, orders some food, and begins seeing where she is.

Emily manages to pass literacy trivially, math with a bit more difficulty, especially keeping in mind the many steps of unit conversions occasionally needed, and manages to pass statistics, as well. Most of the statistics questions are actually her being challenged to notice statistical pitfalls in a few sentences of statistical reasoning, with a few questions asking her to build a whole matrix of sensitivity/specificity/odds ratios/PPV/prevalence using all the other statistics. It's tricky, but not very difficult as long as she does it slowly and thinks clearly.

... oh! Well, that's a pleasant surprise.

In that case, she should look at scheduling tests as soon as possible, in case anybody notices her weird living situation.

Which, of course, means at least two days from now, so that she can study the statistics problems that gave her the most trouble and get a good nights sleep so that she tests well. Her parent always insists that she sleep and eat well before exams, so that she can do her best.

She looks to see whether she can book all three tests in the same day.

Yes, taking all three tests in the same day is in fact the default. There's an exam center only a few blocks away, as well.

Then with that sorted, she starts in on studying — with breaks for food, and finishing the mystery book she checked out. By the time the sun sets, she's feeling pretty good, both about her academic progress and her situation generally. It isn't like she was imagining, going to another world. But it's ... nice, to be able to study at her own pace, and to feel like she's making good progress on her self assigned goals.

She tucks herself into bed.

And wakes up in the wee hours of the morning, feeling cold and nauseous, even with all her blankets pulled around her.

She fumbles in the dark for the light, before trying to figure out if there's a way to make her apartment warmer. Her stomach rolls when she gets out of bed. She fiddles with the environmental controls, and shivers on the bed waiting for the room to heat.

Did her apartment happen to come equipped with a thermometer?

There's a thermostat, with a design that blends into the wall when nobody wants it set, but Emily doesn't have any way to check her temperature in the small selection of cutlery and household items that the apartment came with.

Curses.

She makes a blanket nest on the bed, and orders a thermometer on her phone. The deliveries have been pretty fast, so probably she won't have to wait long.

She'll just rest her eyes for a moment ...

It takes 3 hours or so before another robot just like the one that carries food deliveries arrives to her door, with a somewhat uncannily light infrared thermometer with the same strange, "perfect" texture as the key to Emily's apartment.

She sleeps fitfully, and wakes to sweat-covered sheets.

She squints against the morning sun, and checks outside her door.

Infrared thermometers are not exactly what she's used to, but it's not like they're difficult to use. She points it at her forehead like the diagram indicates and pushes the button.

... her temperature is 1556, apparently. She takes a moment to wonder if she's holding it wrong, before realizing that they must use a different temperature scale here. The 'fever' light on the thermometer does light up, but that doesn't tell her if this is a 'bedrest and tea' fever or a 'go to the hospital' fever. She only knows those numbers in Fahrenheit.

She retreats to her blanket nest, because it's too early, and she's tired and sick, and if she has to do math, she can at least do it while wrapped in blankets.

Their temperature scale is weird, and it's not like they have references available. But by comparing the temperature that water freezes and boils at, she eventually figures out that their zero is at -459 degrees, and that there are 0.36 degrees for each of their units. She does her math twice, because her head is fuzzy, and she's tired. She gets the same answer both times — 100.5 degrees.

She stops, at loose ends for a moment now that she's sure she has a high enough fever. This is where Parent would tell her to stay home from school, and give her some Tylenol, but they're not here, and it's not fair, and she has to figure out how to reschedule her exams.

She can't think of how to phrase the question for what should happen next, and she doesn't think 100.5°F is an emergency, so she just searches "I have a fever" on her phone.

She gets a big block of informative text on the search engine, giving her advice: "1552 is definitionally the start of a fever, with 1557 indicating with 5% sensitivity an illness requiring a medical regimen. The advice for fevers below 1557 is as follows: stay home or wear a mask if you have a cough or runny nose, hydrate sufficiently, eat nutritiously, avoid temperatures or exertion that puts strain on your body, have scrupulous hygiene standards." Scrolling down reveals a huge number of links with information about treating fevers; they mostly tell the same information, together with advice about medicines that relieve symptoms, and some info about using nebulizers to clear stuffy noses in order to breathe more easily.

Oh. Well, alright. 1556 is less than 1557, so she settles in to be sick in bed.

She orders herself a big bowl of soup and a container of juice that looks tasty.

... she should stay up to eat, even though she's should maybe sleep after that. But she has finished her books, and she doesn't have a mask to go down to the library.

Does the library deliver, too?

The library does deliver; Emily can ask to have one of the library's books sent up to her apartment, and someone will volunteer to just walk up with it and hand it over to her.

She accepts the book with a blanket wrapped across her face, in lieu of a mask, and settles down to read, rest, recuperate, and sip her soup.

By mid-morning, she finds herself re-reading the same page for the third time, and leans back against her pillow with a sigh.

She dozes for a few minutes — or it feels like a few minutes at least — before she's woken once again by chills. She checks her temperature again. It's crept up to 1559.

She frowns. She doesn't want to leave her blanket nest again. But the advice on her phone was to seek medical care ... She should try to get Tylenol, at least, but she doesn't know what they call it.

She pages back through the search results. What should she do, now that her fever has worsened?

"Fevers in excess of 1557 are acceptably sensitive as indicators of an illness that can and should receive medical treatment. Initially, a sniffer box and an antipyretic are recommended, and if they indicate a worrisome condition, contacting a diagnostician and preparing for a course of at-home treatment is highly recommended as the next steps."

... ugh. That sounds like more steps that she doesn't want to have to do when she's sick.

But (after checking the definition of 'antipyretic'), it makes sense. She orders whatever the recommended child-safe antipyretic is, as well as a sniffer and some more soup. She likes sipping the soup as she reads.

There are several brands of child-safe antipyretics; the standard is sending over a bottle with several different types, in fact, so people can try out which one works best for them instead of sticking to the first one that they tried. They're different colors, but it only says which color is which antipyretic on the inside of the pill bottle's lid, so Emily won't be biased by whichever antipyretic has the nicest name or seems like it should work the best.

It takes another 20 minutes or so before the antipyretic sampler, soup and sniffer arrive at Emily's apartment, with the robot waiting outside again. Bringing the sniffer inside doesn't result in it producing any kind of response... which means that Emily has a Rare or Novel Illness, going by what she's read about sniffers online.

Well, she's never heard of a sniffer before coming here, so maybe this one is faulty?

In any case, she'll start with a random antipyretic — blue, because she likes blue — and then go sit and have a Rare or Novel Illness in bed.

About ten minutes later, she suddenly starts feeling hot, sets aside her soup, and casts off her blankets. She chugs some water from the bathroom as well. But as she sits and cools down for a minute, she really does start feeling significantly better.

... the sniffer probably isn't broken. She doesn't think she's seen a broken piece of technology since she got here. She checks to make sure it isn't obviously banged up or anything like that, and then looks up what you're supposed to do if you have a Rare or Novel Illness.

The sniffer looks like it's in utterly pristine condition; sniffers can be tested by using a piece of soap, which they're universally designed to be able to sense, and sniffers always have manuals where you can look up the illnesses they're designed to detect. People with Rare or Novel Illnesses are expected to use second-line sniffers and see if they find anything, and if those can't make a diagnosis, they're expected to send in samples of spit to a local testing lab; they're considered so important that people with such illnesses get paid a pretty penny for sending them in, in fact.

After the lab test, they're expected to be vigilant in case their illness worsens, and to be ready to get more medicine and equipment to facilitate at-home medical care, just in case. But first of all, those with Rare or Novel Illnesses are to use second-line sniffers to guarantee that their illness is just rare, not novel.

Alright, that makes sense. Although she does wonder whether the payment pays for ordering the sniffers, if people mostly don't have novel illnesses. That sounds a little too much like a homework problem for her to want to spend time on, though.

So she tests it with soap, orders a second-line sniffer, and spends her little bit of antipyretic-boosted energy dealing with dirty dishes and the like.

And then she returns to bed, pulls the blanket just over her feet, and rests with a book.

Bringing soap within a few meters of the sniffer (it's deliberately less sensitive to soap, to ensure that it provides a clear signal) results in it making the special test signal, letting her know that everything works in the sniffer. A second-line sniffer appears after giving Emily a bit more time to enjoy her reading in bed. It manages to sense the soap just as well as the first. And reveals that whatever she has is, indeed, not Rare, but Novel.

They don't show this part, in the books.

She knows that different places have different diseases, and it only stands to reason that different worlds will too. But it's not heroic, is it, bringing a new disease with you.

She spits in a sample jar and hands it back to the delivery robot.

And she sits near the window, no longer feeling chilled, but still with the general malaise she's learned to associate with sickness, and watches the tiny figures walking down the street below.

She wants to go home.