"Ma'am, I have more patients to see."

Right.

She goes back out to the waiting room.

She sits down next to a random lone person and says, "Hello. What's your name?"

"Hello. I'm Barbara Gentle. What's your name?"

"I'm Elspeth Cullen. Do you have parents?"

"Yes, of course."

"What are their names?"

"...I haven't talked to them in a while."

She turns to the person on the other side of her. "Hi. I'm Elspeth Cullen. Do you have parents?"

"Hello, I'm Yasmin Anud. Yes, I have parents."

"What are their names?"

"My dad's named Ashraf."

"And your mom?"

"I don't know."

Does Yasmin seem..... at all alarmed about not knowing her mom's name.

Nope!

Okay.

Elspeth gets up and walks right out of the hospital and looks for a non-hospitalized person to ask. She's going to try a lot of them, actually, ask them about where they grew up and where they went to school and so on.

She can, actually, find people who have two parents and who remember their parents' names and who have had childhoods and who came from places. Most people are missing at least one of those things, and none of them seems to express more than mild, temporary, surface alarm when confronted with this fact.

Okay. She doesn't have amnesia. She instead has the apparently rare condition of having noticed that she started existing earlier this morning.

It's getting late and also she has never eaten anything ever in her life. She calls a taxi to go back to her house and has at the food the neighbors brought.

The food is pretty good! The vegetarian kafta in particular is delicious.

Yum. Turns out food is good. Especially if you've never eaten anything ever in your life.

She goes and makes a post on Simmit. It says: "POLL: Are most people people? 1. No, only some people are people. 2. Yes, everyone I have ever met is a person."

The poll doesn't attract immediate overwhelming attention, but most votes do go to option 2. Trolls also exist in the replies, of course, and call other people sheeple and whatever else, but even the most articulate ones of those don't actually seem capable of more than pasting statements together with minimal logical connection between them.

Well.

She still needs to buy food and stuff. So she'll... pursue her dream of a career in journalism now.

She can find ads for various positions but they all seem to be entry-level and/or internships. On the bright side, these positions don't seem to require much (or any) prior experience.

Most relevant to her dream of a career in journalism is probably either this internship position with this fashion magazine or this other position as assistant to an editor.

Well, she'd rather assist an editor but she might as well send in more than one application.

Well actually the way it works seems to be less "send in an application" and more "do you want this job right now starting tomorrow y/n?"