With reasonable narrative timing, there is a knock on her door right about then.

...okay! Let's confront the knockers and see if they know what's going on. She opens the door.

"Welcome!" says the person in front of the pack of three standing at her door. All three of them are beaming and holding trays of food. "My name is Tara Cay, and these are George Fye and Victoria Morgan. We're here to welcome you to the neighborhood!"

"...thank you," says Elspeth. "Do you know how I got here?"

She blinks a couple of times in polite confusion. "Well, you just moved, didn't you?"

"Did you see a truck, or how I arrived...?"

"Oh! The neighborhood association is keeping track of everyone who buys or rents a place here, and we knew someone new would be arriving today."

"How did the neighborhood association find out?"

"I'm not sure!" she replies brightly.

"Who's in charge of that part of the neighborhood association?"

"I don't really know."

"Does the association have a president or something?"

"Yes! That would be Vicky," the woman says, motioning at the one she introduced as Victoria with her head.

    "Hi! I'm Victoria Morgan," she reintroduces herself.

"Hi, Vicky. I'm Elspeth," says Elspeth. "Thanks for bringing food."

    "You're welcome! It's all vegetarian-friendly. We hope you like it!"

"...why is it vegetarian-friendly?"

    "Well, we didn't know if you were vegetarian or not. We wouldn't want to offend."

"Okay. I'm not a vegetarian but thank you."

    "Of course!"

The three of them are still holding their trays out to her and watching her somewhat expectantly.

She takes a tray and brings it in to her kitchen.

The three people follow her in and find suitable surfaces to place the food on.

"What brings you to San Myshuno?" asks the one called George.

"I don't know. What usually brings people to San Myshuno?"

        "It's a very cosmopolitan area!" he replies. "Everything is close to everything else, the skyscrapers are so exciting, and the nightlife is a lot of fun."

    "I really like going clubbing at night," says Victoria.

"It's a great place to be," agrees Tara.

...

"Thanks," says Elspeth. "Hey, do you know if there's anything going around that might cause amnesia?"

"No! I've never heard of anything like that," Tara says. "That sounds alarming."

"It is yeah. Do you have a doctor you recommend around here?"

"The San Myshuno General Hospital is ten minutes away by car," says Victoria. "Are you feeling ill?"

"Well, I might have amnesia. Could any of you give me a ride?"

"I have a car! I could take you there," says George.

"Thanks, George." She fridges the food and follows him to his car.

The other two wave them goodbye and go back to their own places.

George lives two houses down from Elspeth's new place. He opens the door to his car for her when they get there, and once they're both inside he starts driving towards the city proper.

She tries to think if there's anything she can remember or feels like she ought to be able to, so she'll be able to present the ER with a coherent story insofar as that is possible.

She has memories, or something that could almost be called that. She was raised by people, and had a childhood. That childhood had events of various different natures. She went to school somewhere, and may or may not have gone to university after high school. She may or may not have had jobs before. She may or may not have had friends. She probably lived somewhere.

And eventually she decided to move from that somewhere to San Myshuno to pursue her career as a journalist.

Does she know how old she is? Does she know her blood type? Does she know her previous address? Does she know her own phone number?

She is a young adult! She probably has a blood type and probably lived somewhere before living here. She does know her phone number.

Does she remember memorizing her phone number.

Not as a discrete event that definitely happened at any specific time, no.

Can she remember ANY discrete events that definitely happened at any specific times before she decided not to try to call her parents.

She cannot!

She really hopes the doctor knows what to do about this.

She thanks George, when she gets to the hospital, and presents herself at the emergency room.

The emergency room is crowded. There is a little computer thingy by the door where she can get a number and then she can find a place to sit and wait for her number to be called.

Okay. She'll take a number and go sit down over there.

Does her phone have a browser?

It does!

What's the homepage?

It's the most famous search engine out there, Siimgle.

She siimgles "amnesia".

The top result is a Simpedia page on the subject, and most subsequent results are various medical websites.

Simpedia will do, what does Simpedia have to say?

It's a pretty standard and dry page describing what amnesia is (deficit in memory caused by brain damage, disease, or various drugs) followed by more dry and descriptive sentences about things that can cause it, types, symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment.

And yet, the whole page feels kind of... off, somehow. Each individual sentence makes sense and is related to both the subsection it is in and the theme of the page as a whole, but the page looks more like someone just made a list of those sentences and then pasted them together into a page than like it was actually written to have a coherent logical explanation about anything at any point.

Well, it's Simpedia. Anyone can edit it. ...how are the specific pages on individual kinds of amnesia?

There aren't any! There's a section with a list of kinds on that page, anterograde and retrogade and dissociative and lacunar and all that—and from the descriptions, probably the closest to what she's experiencing is in fact retrogade amnesia, an inability to recall memories, especially specific rather than general ones, from before its onset—but they don't have their own individual pages, and trying to search for their names just redirects back to this main page.

Well that's sorta weird.

She'll try the medical siimgle results for retrograde amnesia.

Other non-Simpedia pages also have a similar offness to them in looking like they are just collections of statements without much of a connection between them. They're nevertheless informative: retrograde amnesia is most often caused by brain injury, illness, a seizure or stroke, or degenerative brain disease. It is also, however, not usually—or maybe even not ever—as complete and thorough as hers seems to be. Most people who suffer from retrograde amnesia forget recent memories, but older or otherwise stronger ones, such as ones from childhood and adolescence, tend to remain or at least be much easier to recover.

It does seem to match her experience, at least from description, well enough. Facts, names, people, faces, and places tend to be forgotten, while skills and general things like how to speak or how to play an instrument or how to drive tend to stay.

Okay. So she has retrograde amnesia, a weirdly thorough case of it but still. Hopefully the doctor will be able to narrow down why that should be. Her head doesn't hurt so she probably didn't hit it on something but she can't rule out any of the others. She should be scared but mostly she's just sort of flailing through dream logic, confident this will all make sense at some point and discounting everything that isn't sensemaking including the prospect of being scared about having a degenerative brain disease.

Her number is 653, and the last number that was called was 624. She will probably need to wait a while longer still.

Fine.

She searches for her own name.

She has a Simbook page! It's empty and doesn't even have her picture. And her name is uncommon enough that the first + last name combination literally only has that one page as a hit.

She doesn't remember making it (of course) and it doesn't seem like the sort of thing she'd do, to make a Simbook and then fill in literally nothing. Doesn't she have a blog or something? Maybe she has her own name wrong, and she made this account shortly before her memories start when they were just starting to go wrong, and actually her name is Penelope Smith or something. Does she have a physical ID?

She does, yes, it's in her inventory. It looks legit, has a face very much the one she'll see looking out the mirror at her, and the name on it is indeed Elspeth Cullen. It also has a date of birth which she can use to calculate her exact age! She is definitely a young adult.

Does it say anything else about her on it that she doesn't know? Such as her birthday, when is her birthday.

Her birthday is on the second Thursday. Her birth year was six years ago.

Young adult!

...she probably had a stroke. People with strokes can't read. Right? Like, sure, six is young adult but that's not actually much... time? That's... 168 days? That's not enough that it makes sense that she knows how to... read and drive and stuff. She just had, like, a really really big stroke. Probably.

The little screen calling the numbers buzzes and switches to showing 625.

She doesn't as far as she can remember (which may not be very far!) seem to be deteriorating, so maybe they're right not to have triaged her as higher priority.

Does she have a bank account history?

She does! It contains a single purchase: her house. Literally today.

...who did she buy it from. Where did the money in the account come from when it was deposited.

There isn't a deposit date or source. Her history contains only the purchase of the house, and then her current balance, which is §3,580.

As for whom she bought the house from, it was Landgraab Real Estate, Inc.

Suppose she siimgles them.

The top result is a sponsored webpage and their official website. It has beautiful pictures of enormous houses in various climates on the front page, and the top menu has options for stuff like finding houses to buy or rent and "Our Values" and "Careers" and "History". The bottom of the page has legal information (including the fact that this company is owned by Landgraab Holdings, Inc.) and contact information.

Okay. She is going to call them.

It rings once before an automated voice picks up.

"Good afternoon, and welcome to Landgraab Real Estate, where your housing dreams come true! Please choose an option depending on what you wish to inquire about. Press one if you want to buy a house; two if you want to buy an apartment; three if you want to sell a house or apartment; four if you want to rent a house or apartment; five if you are currently renting one of our houses or apartments; or nine for other inquiries. Wait in line to hear the options again."

Nine.

"Please hold for a moment! One of our helpers will be with you shortly. You are number three in line."

Soft jazz ensues.

While soft jazz plays she will switch back to the browser. Are there any Cullen families that look - plausible -

She can find a couple of Cullens, but the last name itself is really not common, and none of their owners look like plausible family. Maybe the two Cullens who seem to have contributed to scientific papers but don't seem to otherwise have an online presence.

Do they have affiliated universities?

Yeah: one is with the University of Britechester and the other is with the Foxbury Institute. Both names sound familiar to her.

She'll call those after Landgraab gets back to her.

This is stressful. Does her phone have any games on it or anything?

It has a few, like Birdy Flap and a Sudoku app, but she doesn't get to play for very long as the Landgraab people pick up six minutes after that.

"Landgraab Real Estate, where your housing dreams come true, this is Julia speaking, how can I help you?"

"Hi, my records show that I bought a house from you, uh, today, and now I have... amnesia or something, and I'm trying to reconstruct my... life. Can you tell me everything you have on record about an Elspeth Cullen who bought -" She gives her address.

"Certainly. Can you please answer a few questions to confirm your identity?" And she asks for Elspeth's date of birth, last three digits of her ID number, and last four digits of her phone number.

Conveniently all facts she actually knows!

"I will send a text to the phone number on file that matches the information you just have me with everything we have on you."

And her phone buzzes immediately with a text that includes her full name, phone number, current address, date of birth, and full ID number.

"- thanks. Is that - everything you have - do you even know who my realtor was -"

"I'm afraid that is all the information we have."

"I didn't have a, a guarantor, or a previous address on file with you, or - anything?"

"We don't have any other information on you."

"...thanks."

She hangs up. Calls Foxbury.

"Welcome to the Foxbury Institute. Do you wish to apply to study here?"

"No, I'm calling to inquire about one of your faculty members, Dr. Cullen."

"You can find the emails of all faculty members on our website."

"...I guess that will do, sure. Thanks."

She will email both Doctors Cullen from both colleges in this manner, explaining that she has amnesia and is trying to find her family and do they have a relative named Elspeth.

They don't immediately reply. They might be teaching a class or something, given the time of day.

The screen is now at 628.

She's out of ideas for people to call.

She'll fill in her Simbook page with everything she can think of and write a status about having amnesia and trying to figure out where she's been all her life in case anyone will notice that and have something helpful to say.

629. 630. 631. 632...

An hour and a half later, at 648, the Doctor Cullen from the University of Britechester replies to her email saying she is not aware of anyone called Elspeth Cullen.

Okay. Maybe the Foxbury one. Or maybe the doctor at the hospital will give her some - pills or something - and everything'll make sense. (Again? She has no memory of things making sense except a vague sense that they're supposed to.)

By the time number 653 buzzes on the screen, the Foxbury Dr. Cullen has not replied to her email yet.

She should go to desk C, where a smiling man awaits.

"Hello. My name's Elspeth Cullen and I have retrograde amnesia."

"That sounds worrying. Can you list your symptoms?"

"Uh, earlier today I found myself in my new house and I realized I couldn't remember any events of my life up until that point. I don't know where I moved from, who my family members are, where I went to school, or anything like that. I've been trying to find my family online - I have an ID so I know my name isn't something I made up on the spot - but haven't made any progress yet."

"How long ago was that?"

She looks at the time on her phone. "Six hours."

The man nods. "May I have your ID?"

He may.

He starts tapping something into his computer, then hands her her ID back and says, with accompanying gestures, "Please go down that hallway, turn left at the end, and go into Exam Room J. Someone will be with you momentarily."

"Thanks."

Off she goes to room J. She sits and waits and flaps birds.

It's only three minutes later that someone wearing a lab coat walks into the room with a clipboard. "Elspeth Cullen?" they ask. "With symptoms of retrograde amnesia?"

"That's right."

"I'm Doctor Bale. It's a pleasure to meet you."

"Thank you. What do you... do, about amnesia - the internet thinks it's pretty serious, might be a stroke or seizure?"

"Yes. We will get a few exams done. Hopefully we can find the cause."

"What do I need to do?"

"We will get a blood exam, a CT scan, and we will ask you to answer a few questions on a questionnaire."

"Okay."

So those things are arranged. The blood draw happens first, but after that's taken care of they need to prep the CT scan room so while she waits for that she gets a thin tablet with various questions on it that she can answer. The questions range from personal things (like what the most recent memory she can think of prior to the amnesia is, and when it's from) to some random details about famous public events.

She has no episodic memories from before the moment of amnesia onset. Can she... answer public event questions...?

Sort of! Specific dates of specific happenings are mostly not available to her, but she does seem to have vague knowledge of some facts about the world. She can recognise stuff like the names of those two universities or the names or various cities or some details about them like "there is a walk of fame at Del Sol Valley where celebrities write their names inside stars that are placed as tiles on the floor".

She fills out the form very comprehensively.

She still has to wait a few minutes after she's done before the exam room is ready, but then Doctor Bale shows up again and leads her to it.

"You can just lie there," they say, gesturing at the machine with a long table that can be moved into a doughnut-shaped device. "This will take a while."

She lies there. She holds very still. She wants them to find the problem so they can fix it.

The table goes into the machine. The machine makes noises. The machine makes many noises.

This goes on for rather a while.

She hopes this isn't going to totally wipe out her savings and also not leave her with identifiable parents she can call for help.

Eventually it's done, the noises stop, and the table slides out from within the doughnut.

"We will have the results in half an hour," says Doctor Bale. "I'll take you to the waiting room."

"What about the blood test?"

"All of the results will be ready together."

"Okay. Thanks."

She goes out to the waiting room again. Sits in the same chair. Checks Simbook.

No one has magically found her that knows who she is. The algorithm suggests possible people for her to add as friends, but she can remember none of them and they're different enough from each other that probably it's just sort of spitting random people at her.

Is there like. An amnesia support group website or anything.

Not that she can find before Doctor Bale shows back up and calls her by name.

Off she goes to get her results.

They go into a little room with a desk and a computer and a chair for her and the doctor has a little folder with a file in it. They look at the file then smile at her. "Good news! You're perfectly healthy. There is nothing wrong with you."

"But I have amnesia."

"Well, according to these exams there is nothing bad going on about you."

They offer her the file. It is extremely sparse, with one section for the questionnaire results that says "No Abnormalities", one for the blood tests that just says "Patient Healthy", and one for the CT scan with a few pictures of X-rays of (presumably) her brain and a note that says "Everything Normal".

"So what do you try next if your exams don't turn anything up but the patient still has amnesia."

"Now you can just go home without worrying about anything! You're perfectly healthy," they say, still smiling.

"- I'm not perfectly healthy! I can't remember anything from my life!"

"I'm afraid I can't help with that."

"Aren't you even going to refer me to a specialist?"

"You are perfectly healthy."

"If you had amnesia would you think you were perfectly healthy?"

"The exam results are right here, ma'am."

"That's not - I - do you even understand what I'm saying."

"I'm afraid I can't help you any more."

"I'm thinking about suing the hospital," she tries.

"That is your right, ma'am."

This is weird.

This is very very weird.

If she's perfectly healthy -

"How old are you," she asks the doctor.

"I am an adult," they reply with no trace of confusion.

"What are your parents' names?"

"That information is personal, ma'am."

"But do they like. Exist. Your parents."

"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?"

Sure. She will start assisting an editor tomorrow.

Is there a bus there or anything?

No, but they'll cover transportation (within reason) so she can just call a car every day.

Huh. Okay.

Does she have... a change of clothes in her house. Pajamas, maybe. Is the bed made. Are the utilities hooked up.

She has her choice of clothes in her wardrobe, and yes the bed is made. The extent to which "utilities" are a thing is dubious—her fridge doesn't have an electricity plug but it seems to work fine, and pretty much everything that requires power or water or internet or gas seems to be in a similar state, but she does have the "memory" that paying bills according to how much she uses those things is something that does happen.

...'kay.

She will take a shower before bed and get into pajamas for the night.

Falling asleep is... harder than she "remembers". It is not an instant thing that happens the moment she puts her head on the pillow at all.

Well, then she'll lie there thinking about other ways she can find more people. Maybe if she turns out not to like journalism she'll go into neurology and have everybody refer her anyone who presents with amnesia!

Eventually she does fall asleep.

She's expected to be at work at 9AM.

She changes into fresh clothes, puts her old ones in the washing machine, eats some more neighbor-food for breakfast, and calls a car.

The car arrives!

She has her new job's address and gives it to the driver. Keeps being tempted to make conversation and then remembering that the driver is probably not a person. She could ask if they have parents. Maybe she will if she keeps getting the same one.

The driver informs her it will take about eight to ten minutes to get to her workplace, and starts driving.

She should probably learn the route in case she gets a car or something later.

She'd probably love that, wouldn't she? Too bad the scenery has a frame skip and suddenly she's almost at the right building and her phone says eight minutes have passed since she last looked.

whattheFUCK. Next time she's going to have her phone, like, record video of the trip maybe.

Okay, just another mystery. Off to her new job.

What a good first day at wHAT THE FUCK she's back home again and the day is gone.

It's not entirely gone! She now has vague and nonspecific memories of having had a first day at work. She can even recall the name of her boss if she thinks about it.

STILL NOT GOOD.

She didn't even remember to buy groceries on her way home! She's going to run out of neighborfood. How much is there left in the fridge?

She can probably still have leftovers as dinner but that'll be about it.

Okay. Tomorrow she will try... trying really hard to stay awake... and if that doesn't work she'll have to make a separate trip for groceries.

Dinnertime. Neighborfood nom nom.

Anything on the news worth knowing?

Not particularly! There was some weather event somewhere she's never heard of and there are people having political opinions about mundane things and there are crime rates and poverty rates but nothing really stands out.

Okay. Are there any... books she can get to amuse herself with in her spare time.

Her house came equipped with a bookshelf that contains a small selection of different types of fiction as well as an introductory cooking book and a book about chess for beginners! She also has the vague impression/memory that she can easily acquire more books somehow.

She doesn't have anybody to play chess with but she can at least look at the cookbook so she can plan her grocery trip.

The cookbook has a few easy recipes but a good third of it is actually dedicated to teaching the basics of food science so she can experiment and create her own dishes if she wants to.

Well, either way it will help her meal plan. Tomorrow she'll go in to work early, try VERY hard to stay awake, buy a croissant or something, have... lunch at work, she presumes that happened but can't remember - come home and make spaghetti.

The book definitely has recipes for a few simple pasta sauces and in the worst case premade sauces for spaghetti are probably a thing, she's pretty sure.

Cool.

She showers and goes to bed. In the morning she calls a car a bit early and records the scenery outside on her phone the whole way and tries SO hard to stay awake. She even talks to the driver. What's the driver's name. Do they have parents.

The driver is called Jared Tower! He does not have parents. The frame skip happens anyway even though she's recording, and after it happens she is no longer recording. The video on her phone is consistent with her deciding to stop recording shortly after the frame skip "would have started" for no good reason, and her physical position in the car is consistent with time having passed and her having, you know, existed and moved during that time.

This frame skip is unlike the job day skip from yesterday, though, in that she gets actually no memories whatsoever from that time, not even vague ones.

Well. One of these days she will have to try taking a long walk in this direction and see what happens but it's not her biggest worry today. Her biggest worry today is holding on to her consciousness while she exits the car, seeks a croissant, and goes in to work.

Her day... does not slip! She can feel, actually, the tug of it wanting to slip, she could just sort of dissociate through it and let her day get away.

That's weird and concerning and she does not want to be one of these weird parentless people all the way through!

How does her job work.

She mostly has to help this one dude with his work by getting him coffee and organising his stuff, but occasionally she is also given pieces to double-check and suggest edits or corrections to. He sounds kind of prickly, though, and doesn't seem to love criticism that much.

Well, if he fires her, she can always go into fashion journalism! She's not going to spare the feelings of this robotdude when he does things that she has criticisms of! She can get coffee. She is fully able to organize. She fact-checks, she copyedits.

To be fair, he's not bad at his job, but he definitely makes grumbly noises about being corrected and even a couple of "well, actually"s.

Is he ever actually right when he "well actually"s.

One time he is on a technicality and the other he is not.

Well, if the system here is anything like meritocratic she'll have his job soon.

After work she goes to the grocery store and picks up pasta and tomato sauce and some frozen burgers and some buns and a bag of salad and a bottle of dressing and a thing of pineapple juice and a carton of eggs and a loaf of bread and some butter and a pack of bacon. She checks her Simmit post while waiting in line.

The Simmit post has acquired more votes and more replies, but not really any more insight.

However, while she's catching up with the new replies she gets a DM on her Simmit account saying, "Look behind you."

WELL THAT'S MIGHTY CREEPY.

She looks, though.

"Sorry, sorry, I thought it was going to be funny," says the person behind her, who's holding his own phone in one hand and a bag of groceries in the other but also lifting both hands up in an apologetic gesture. "I just got a peek of your post in your phone there and I guess you can say that whether people are people is something of a personal interest of mine."

"You spooked me!" she says accusingly. "- also reading over my shoulder is sketchy, you can just ask people 'do you have grandparents' like I do if you want to check them for being people."

"I kinda stopped doing that three quarters of a year ago when I found out apparently literally no one one was."

"- it's been that long?"

"Nearly a year, now, yeah. Just to make sure we're talking about the same thing, did you come to existence with only very vague memories that are not tied to any specific observable events, no family, no other loved ones, and no evidence that anyone had ever known you or of you prior to it...?"

"Yeah. I spent the first day of existing in the emergency room waiting area, I told them I had amnesia, they told me I was perfectly healthy."

"Ah. I didn't think of going to the hospital, I just posted stuff to Simmit and siimgled myself obsessively and then went to the Realm of Magic because apparently I had a lifelong dream of becoming a powerful spellcaster or something and having just moved to the one town that seems to have a portal there seemed like it might have something to do with the amnesia thing."

"Oh. I ostensibly wanted to be a journalist. - My name's Elspeth Cullen."

"Peter Tarleton. A pleasure to meet you."

It's Elspeth's turn at the till.

She pays for her food but waits for Peter. None of her stuff is frozen.

Neither is Peter's. He just sticks everything into his inventory after he's paid for it then steps outside the store.

"I... have to say your existence is, like, the opposite of existential dread and horror."

"Thanks, it's nice to meet you too. I don't know what the etiquette at this point in meeting the only other person in the world might be. I guess we friend each other on Simbook at least?"

"Yeah," he says, popping his phone out of his inventory. "Let's exchange numbers, too."

"Sure." She accepts his number and exchanges hers for it. "What else have you tried, looking for people?"

"...there's... a few different things. Uh." There's a bench over there, Peter walks over to it after making sure Elspeth is following him. "I've occasionally posted to Simmit and chan4 and Simbook, I've been travelling around places and seeing if I can run into anyone at random, I've—have you watched any SimTube videos? They're just depressing. I've also been watching the recent edits to Simpedia articles to see if there's anyone doing anything interesting."

"I haven't checked SimTube, no. I tried finding my family, at first, and I tried asking the people who sold me the house if they had anything on me, but that didn't turn up anything."

"That would've been a good idea, yeah, I just kind of figured that there was no way I would have such a completely blank online profile. That actually freaked me out more than just the memories, I felt like the only way I could possibly have an empty contact list and no existence anywhere on the internet like that would've been either some strange targeted hacker attack or very convincing and persistent hallucinations. I had... a lot of opinions about what kind of person I am for someone without any memories."

"I didn't think I'd have a blank profile either but I sort of figured I might have been interrupted by having a stroke before I could fill it in."

"I think the more... damning... part of it all is how much useful stuff exists that lots of people seem to take no interest in. Take spellcasting," and here's his magic wand. "I've been doing it since I came to be and I can already teleport places. It's extremely powerful. And no one seems to want anything to do with it! As far as I can tell, the literal only drawback of being a spellcaster is if you do too much magic in a row and ignore the warning alarm buzzing in your head about it you might die, but it takes several hours of continuous magic to get to that point."

"You can't be both a spellcaster and a vampire though."

"...really? Why not?"

"I don't know! I don't even know why I know that!"

".......weird. Well, I got created with a lot of engineering knowledge that as far as I could tell was legit, maybe whatever made us just filled us in with that stuff. Or maybe we did exist before and something else is going on."

"Does being a spellcaster seem better than being a vampire?"

"I haven't actually looked into being a vampire in detail but overall it does seem to be. Vampires do seem to need blood to survive and get burnt by sunlight and die to sufficient exposure to a wooden stake, but they might have amazing advantages that outweigh those. They do get the agelessness and overall immortality for free whereas spellcasters need potions for those."

"Doesn't everyone die if staked?"

"They do it more dramatically, turn to dust and all. But there's a potion called 'Potion of Prompt Resurrection' that is meant to be able to just instantly bring you back to life no matter what kills you, and if vampires can't become spellcasters I do wonder about whether it'll work for them."

"Well, you should try giving one a potion, I guess."

"Once I can make one, yeah. Beyond my skill level right now. Oh, you'll probably find this useful," wand gone, here's a vial of dark purple liquid. "This one is a 'Potion of Plentiful Needs' and it—I've been calling it a potion of 'make everything better' in my head, it seems to entirely replace a need for food or sleep and it makes you and your clothes clean like you just took a shower and stepped into fresh laundry. It, ah, does have a couple of mental effects that would probably not make everyone so happy about it, like it makes you feel sort of—hard to describe—socially fulfilled? Like you just had a nice chat with someone you like, sort of the opposite of being lonely, except not quite since it doesn't, you know, replace any actual social content and I still very much miss talking to real people even though I probably never have annnnnd I'm rambling."

"It's understandable." She accepts the potion. "Why do you buy groceries, then?"

"Sometimes food tastes nice," he says, shrugging. "This potion replaces your need for sustenance and nutrients but chocolate's good."

"Fair enough." She inventories the potion. "Where do you live?"

"Glimmerbrook! The town with the portal to the Realm of Magic. I came to existence there with the memory of having moved there to become a spellcaster. How about you?"

"I live in San Myshuno, which I ostensibly moved to in order to be a journalist."

"Oh, have you gotten a job yet? 'Cause that one freaked me the fuck out."

"Yeah, I got the first one I applied for instantly to start the next morning. Why did it freak you out, had you not noticed the person-thing yet?"

"No I mean the actually going to work part."

"Oh, yeah, that part. I was able to stay awake the next day though. Do you think anybody is just a person - somewhat less often -"

"Maybe! None of this makes sense! My fear is maybe a lot of people just—wake up, or start existing, or something, and eventually stop, somehow, and can't get back."

"I think that would show up on the internet but maybe I'm wrong."

"I'd hope so, yeah, but still. Got pretty spooked at first. I first noticed people were weird in the Realm of Magic and thought the, uh, NPCness was maybe caused by magic so the possibility of it being something that could just happen to me was kind of salient at the time."

"One of us could go - NPC - at work and the other could visit, see what the memories are like then."

"Oh yeah that could be interesting. I—would be fine doing it, my job is soul-crushingly boring and I've coped by spending a lot of my time coming up with mathematical models for how NPCs feel about other people."

"My job's not great but I'm not bored of it yet. They're mathematically modelable?"

"They seem to be! Seems like there's this one overall number they track which I've been modelling as starting at zero and going up or down depending on what you do and time, and there are also some other specific secondary numbers that affect things that I haven't quite gotten to work out yet 'cause it was getting too depressing to focus so much on how everyone around me isn't people. But if you want a nice experiment to run try being intensely friendly at a single person for a day, they'll start thinking you're their best pal ever and keep calling you for days even if you give them the cold shoulder after that."

"Calling about anything specific or just to chat for no reason?"

"Usually just to chat, sometimes to suggest hanging out. It does decay over time but unless you actively insult them that's all it does no matter how little you respond to them at all after that first time."

...which... maybe other people are like that and he's actually just a weirdo for thinking he'd feel kinda bad by getting a sudden cold shoulder? Well, time to find out and potentially have an awkward conversation!

"They don't even ask what's been keeping you too busy to hang out or anything?"

"Nope!"

"Weird. I don't especially want to run this experiment right now but I'll remember it."

"By the way, if you want more of that potion I am not really meaningfully constrained on it, I can make about twenty copies of it in a row before even starting to break a sweat and I just sort of have a whole stash of them. Just figure you might want to see what you think of the mental effects before I dump a hundred of them on you."

"I'll try it if I burn dinner."

"Roger that. There is probably some way to invent a potion that does only hunger, or only sleep, or whatever, but I haven't gone into spell creation so much yet."

"No? This one was already around?"

"Yeah, the potion shop I visited on the day I became a spellcaster happened to be selling it and the first spell I tried to learn was the copying spell just so that I could have more of it."

"How sure are you that - not being a person isn't sort of like what having all your needs met without having to think about them looks like?"

"I've been using the potion to replace food and sleep for the past year and haven't really felt different... but on the other hand I don't really consider all my needs met by it I guess? I'm a bit of a malcontent."

"I could just be overinterpreting, I don't know. I'll probably use it sparingly but it's nice to have one on hand."

"—oh, that one is a single dose, by the way, I think all that happens if you drink less than a full dose is it doesn't work but the more powerful potions can backfire. Uh, trying to not sound like a drug pusher here, it's like §5 from the one shop at the Realm of Magic if you ever want more and, again, I have multiple dozens on me right now."

"I'll ask if I want more," she assures him.

"Cool."

"Mostly my problem is that I'm bored," she says. "Skipping all the things that the potion would let me skip wouldn't solve that problem. I guess you're learning magic all the time?"

"Pretty much, yeah."

"I'm going to at least have to decide whether to do that or turn into a vampire, if I want to do either one."

"It is possible to stop being a spellcaster, but I'd have to look into whether that would permit becoming a vampire or whether you'd be locked out forever."

"That one I don't seem to mysteriously know."

"I think I know who I'd ask. There are three people in the Realm of Magic who are, uh, in charge of turning anyone into a spellcaster, and also generally very powerful, if anyone would know it's them."

"...assuming I manage to get the question to go through."

"Do they get offended or just not understand?"

"Not understand. I may be too pessimistic, haven't really talked to them in a while, but when I was under the assumption the world made sense and there was a reason why no one was taking all the free magic lying around I tried to get them to properly explain to me what being a spellcaster was like and all they seemed to hear me saying was 'please give me one random tidbit about spellcasters'."

"You haven't gone back since?"

"I have, but I haven't talked to them, or pretty much anyone. I sometimes practise potionmaking and sometimes go into town to see if they're selling some rare ingredient or spell scroll but otherwise stay on my own."

Elspeth nods.

"Do you know what the deal is with the gaps in trips between places?"

"Nope. That one I... experimented on only a little... but eventually I got teleportation and have been exclusively using that. Haven't been able to keep a video recording of the process to really happen, and I can't seem to be able to teleport to the, ah, 'liminal spaces' for lack of a better word, even though any other places I can usually get to without even necessarily having ever been to them before."

"I've been meaning to try walking along a route that normally includes one, have you done that?"

"Yeah. If I'm trying to go somewhere I get there and find that time has passed, if I try to just sort of walk around the place there's also a frame skip but after it I return to where I started."

"Huh. I think I still want to try it myself, I might walk home now - do you want to come?"

"Sure! My prediction is if I'm intending to follow you it'll work fine."

"Okay, this way." She walks home, trying to pay close attention to where each step takes her along the route.

Skip.

Peter is right behind her on the other side of it, looking somewhat disoriented but unsurprised.

Also, she's feeling like she walked the whole way, her legs are approrpriately sore and an appropriate amount of time has passed.

"Might try going back and forth and taking smaller steps - or aiming to reach a point that looks like it exists, but gets skipped - but first I'm going to put my groceries away and sit," she sighs. She lets Peter in to her house.

In he goes, looking around with polite curiosity.

"You'll still get tired and time will pass just like you walked all the way," he warns, "so you might want to reserve a Sunday for it or something."

Her house is pretty sparse; she hasn't added anything to the decor since she started existing. "Yeah, I get that sense." Hey, she has a chess book, does she have a chessboard?

She does!

"Chess?" she suggests, when she's located it.

He looks at the table and—flinches a bit. Then laughs at himself. "Yeah, sure. Fun fact, NPCs learn chess way faster than we do. Or, at least, than I do."

"Huh, that's kind of weird - do they have, what, a separate chess part of the brain that only does chess and nothing else -" She starts setting up.

"It's not even just chess, there's—they're weirdly slower in a ton of ways and faster in others. I once watched someone take over half an hour to eat a bowl of cereal, and his cereal refused to get soggy at an appropriate rate, and they all just take forever to switch tasks or finish things—but conversely they age a ton faster, and they learn skills a lot faster, and they even get promotions at work a lot faster, and they get married and have kids and it's like the overall story of their lives is on fast-forward."

"You're saying that cereal - a physical object that is not part of a human at all - behaves differently when one of them eats it?"

"Yyyyup."

"Are there other things like that? What would happen if you shared a bowl of cereal?"

"I honestly have no idea. I have an intuitive guess that for the duration of the bowl of cereal they would eat at the same rate I do and it would behave normally? But yeah, food in general was the most obvious, it gets cold more slowly for them but they also take longer to actually cook, like, they put something in a microwave for over twenty minutes and it gets as warm as when I do it for a couple, and as far as I can tell baking and other forms of cooking are similar. Not sure how other things work, so it could be isolated to just food, but I wouldn't be surprised if their clothes got less worn because of the same effect or if they got more worn because their overall life goes faster and stuff."

"...I'm going to need to befriend a neighbor or a coworker and do experiments."

"I support you in this endeavour, let me know if I can help. I've kinda been mellowing down on the experimentation because it has, uh, not been the psychologically healthiest thing to spend so much of my time thinking about how literally no one else around me is a person."

And he doesn't want to impose his presence on Elspeth, even if they are the only people in the world it would be... bad... to make this mean that she had to suffer him despite any potential social incompatibilities... but also he is starving for human connection.

"I imagine it would get wearing! I was planning to try to work my way up to staff writer at the newspaper and imagine that people somewhere would be reading the articles but having run into you is better." She's white; she moves a pawn.

He moves one of his own.

"I do occasionally browse Simmit and I would definitely have eventually run across your poll but it was lucky to run into each other like that. You said you've been around for a couple of days?"

"Yup. One day at the hospital, two days of work, that brings us to now."

"Yeah that explains why I hadn't seen it before."

"I wonder if you could program a webcrawler to notice - something different about our web browsing behavior, I don't know exactly what it would be but I bet it's different even if not everyone who starts existing is going to make a poll like mine."

"Yeah. Entirely empty Simbook profiles could be an easy initial thing to look for, maybe, I don't know if we'd all get one but it does seem kind of coincidental that two people who think they wouldn't have ordinarily been so absent from the internet happened to have one of those."

"Yeah, that's a good idea. And maybe new house purchases, had you ostensibly bought your house the morning you began?"

"Iiiiii don't know actually," here's his phone and bank app and, "Yes, apparently. And I didn't... have an initial deposit. My account apparently just existed and happened to have enough money for the purchase."

Nod nod. "I called the real estate company and they - you know. Probably everyone else buys houses sometimes too but it'd be something we can check, maybe we should make friends with the real estate people."

"Yeah. Although that'd probably still catch NPCs that get spontaneously created and don't acquire, uh, self-awareness in the process."

"Yeah. But it's probably a manageable number to go through - did you and I have the same realtor -"

"What was yours? Mine was Alto."

"Landgraab, drat."

"Oh, I've heard of them. Alto is almost as big, I think."

"If there's only two that's not so bad but if there's twenty it'll be harder to go through them to find people."

"There are a few smaller ones but those are the two I see ads for all the time."

"Okay. You make friends with someone who works for Alto and I'll make friends with someone who works for Landgraab?"

"Yeah, that works."

Elspeth makes a to-do list on her phone. And plays chess. She's no good at it.

Peter's better. His stint practising with someone else did impart some knowledge, if not as much as that person got with their magic form of learning that just taught them how to play the correct moves more often.

Eventually he checkmates her and she snorts and puts the game away. Goes to make spaghetti. "Is there anything special about you and me, I wonder."

"I'd say something like 'above average tendency for introspection' but there's no way that's all it is. It doesn't explain the cereal."

"I mean something that made us be people in the first place - I don't think I existed at all last week, there weren't any traits for me to have then to get me to pass a filter. It could be something about the house, or the timing, or - the specific thing I was about to do before I noticed it was impossible was call my parents, did you have something like that?"

"Kind of. I was about to look for a job when it occurred to me that it was very unlike me to have moved to a tiny town in the middle of nowhere without a job secured already and then it occurred to me that I couldn't think of any specific memories that backed thinking it was unlike me."

"So this is consistent with there being - a process that generates most people's actions, and sometimes it has errors where things don't match up, and that causes - this. But that's too specific a guess on too little information to be exactly right. It does suggest a test, though. If you're making friends with someone by complimenting their hair fifty times then you could maybe - ask them if you're their best friend, ask them to recall all the things you've done for them, see if they try to come up with more than one example and can't?"

"Maybe, but I think I had actually, ah, 'woken up' before that and just didn't notice until then. I may be deluding myself a little bit, and it's been a year so I can't trust my memories that far, but when I was trying to probe my head for when stuff stopped being fuzzy and started being sharp I had the thought that it was as soon as I arrived at my new place. Actually let me check my notes from back then, I started writing things down on a text document to make sure I wouldn't be fooling myself..."

He grabs his phone and starts tapping at it.

"I think I woke up right after I decided to call my parents to tell them I'd arrived at my new house safely."

Tap tap tap "Oh, here it is. Yeah, I did write down that I thought I had properly woken up upon moving but I only wrote that a while afterwards so I wasn't entirely confident in that thought and might have been fooling myself. I very definitely was awake when I started looking for a job, though."

"I suppose it could be slightly gradual onset. Maybe it wouldn't have occurred to me to call my parents at all if I hadn't started waking up."

"It does seem like they mostly just skip thinking about anything like that unless explicitly prompted and even then it's iffy."

"Yeah. Except they do call you if you make friends, do they do that to each other?"

"...I would assume so but I actually have no idea. They do seem to have, you know, lives going on, I've had coworkers get married and move in with other people—or just plain moved—and have kids and all that."

"Can they tell you about how they met and fell in love and stuff?"

"Yeah but it's the same kind of direct statements with no depth as usual. We met at a park, we met over the internet, we met at a friend's birthday party, but no supporting details. Maybe they just think I'm too nosy."

"I did have one tell me when I asked if he had parents that that information was personal!"

"—I was joking. Really, he considered whether he has parents to be personal?"

"In his defense he was my doctor."

"Maybe it was just the default reply for when you hit a forbidden topic. They do seem to resist prodding into that kinda stuff some and to forget everything about it—or at least act like it—more quickly than they do other subjects."

"Most people will tell me if they have parents but some of them look uncomfortable if they're like 'I live with my dad' and I say 'what about your mom'."

"I once tried to point the cereal thing out to someone and they said 'huh' and moved on."

"Did they remember the conversation later?"

"I don't think I've ever had any one of them remember specific conversations. The best I've gotten was some annoyance if I ask the same question too many times in a row which eventually gets them to stop replying if I keep going but if I break it up with other stuff in the middle or wait a while between instances of asking it they don't care."

"They just completely ignore you?"

"Yeah. But to be fair that was after, like, over five minutes of me repeating the same question in the same way. First few times were fine, then they started getting annoyed, then they were annoyed and stopped answering, then they just started ignoring me altogether. Leaving and coming back ten minutes later got them to respond again—though they were still kinda annoyed—but I didn't explore that particular quirk much more deeply than that."

"That seems weirdly - specific, I don't know what I was expecting though."

"You can borrow my notes on stuff to try if you want. I've found that the best way to keep them happy is cycle through like four different things and add in a fifth every few minutes, if you hit the specific notes each of them likes you'll get a new friend pretty quickly."

"I'd like to see the notes."

He can text her a link to the document he's been maintaining.

"I didn't really organise it for consumption by others but hopefully it's still readable enough."

"Understandable," she snorts, and she opens it up.

The first page is dedicated to his up-to-date general formula for how much the "relationship number" changes depending on interactions. There seem to be two, actually, with the second one labelled as "romance/sex" and a comment saying "NTS: explore this when it feels less ick", but most of the work was done on the first number.

The number has a floor and a ceiling, which he arbitrarily set to -100 and 100 respectively, and the delta per interaction depends on the current number, "interaction type", a modifier for the subject's interest in the topic, a "mood" modifier that affects the effect of the interaction type, and one final modifier that he called "recent interaction" but which has another comment saying "NTS: needs more refinement, see section D".

The next several pages include an extensive categorisation of interaction types with commented examples and some sections on whole bits of interaction transcribed after the fact. Each type has a base value and a modifier value for whether the subject is neutral, mildly positive/negative, or very positive/negative on the topic.

After that he elaborates on the other modifiers, which seem to be multiplicative and which have multiple notes about needing more research on this specific thing or that.

And finally the whole second half of the document is taken by speculation on the meaning of each value band and predictions that can be made based on them. There's a threshold for when people start spontaneously calling you, and then various bands like "if the value is between 20 and 50 the subject stops reacting negatively to mentions of topics they find mildly negative, if it's above 50 they also reduce their reactions to very negative topics to the same they used to have to mildly negative ones". He's registered observations that led to each of those estimates and predictions, as well as observations that conflict with them, with some speculation on reasons and assumptions that may have been broken.

Finally, at the end, he has an extensive list of things to try at some point, with particular emphasis on ideas that can falsify specific assumptions and predictions by the model.

The whole document is clearly meant to be used by him, with notes to self being very common and paragraphs not caring so much about broad readability or non-redundancy. Still, it's pretty well-organised, with headers and subheaders that can be clicked on from the document's table of contents and comments labelled as things like "speculation" or "evidence" or "unconfirmed prediction" or "test to formalise" or similar.

"Wow, this is... rigorous."

"Not needing to sleep and having an intensely menial job I've refused to become an NPC for has left me with... a ton of free time."

"I take it you can't be a professional wizard."

"No one pays just for that, as far as I can tell. It does help with, you know, making ordinary life easier, like the not sleeping, but also it takes a very long time to develop, and just like chess it seems I progress more slowly than NPCs. But the upside is that the standard meditation for magic practice is simple enough to do I can usually do it at the same time as other things, like exercising or even some work stuff that doesn't require a ton of thinking."

"What's your job?"

"Oh I never did say, did I. I'm an assistant manager at Dewey, Cheatem & Howe Incorporated—it's an investment firm—and in practice what I do is be a glorified secretary and take on the bits of management my boss hates the most."

"The making friends thing doesn't have a working variant where you get promoted?"

"It does! I'll probably take my boss's position as soon as he retires, which should happen next week at the latest. But the whole 'life on fast-forward' thing applies to this, too, other people get promoted much more quickly than I do. Of course, maybe I just suck and shouldn't blame this on the NPC thing."

"Do they seem qualified for the work they're promoted to?"

Vague handwave. "In a certain sense? Just like they seem to learn how to choose the right chess moves when they play more chess they seem to spontaneously acquire better skills at, like, writing reports. I think 'being a person' by itself sort of beats their advantages at sounding persuasive or charismatic to each other, though, which might've helped me some."

"Huh. I'll have to try some of the same things you did, I guess."

"I'm not sure which kinds of things in journalism look more like chess and which look more like being able to model people but it sounds naively like the latter kind will dominate."

"Well, that assumes that they like the same things about news articles that I do, like 'not sounding like an NPC wrote them'."