The planet below awaits her. There's a Great Lake over there.

A lake is a good place to crash a spaceship, if, for some reason, one is looking to crash a spaceship or has no other option. Like now. She steers for the center of the lake, sets the computer to take over for the last bit, and ejects the command module. The Bigspacewagon sends a cascade of water into the air when it touches down. The command pod jerks as the parachute deploys and then gently wafts down to bob gently in the water awaiting first responders. Alsaiah is in no condition to swim to shore so she'll just wait for the first responders too, why not.

...Her pocket computer does not seem to be connecting to the internet. Fine. Sometimes when space stations explode and spaceships crash some infrastructure goes down temporarily. Perfectly understandable that the nearest comm towers were not hardened against EMP or massive fireball or whatever the proximate cause of the disruption was. She's still going to sue the service provider about it. In the meantime she will try to read a book.

It turns out, it's really hard to focus on fiction, or nonfiction, when this full of adrenaline. And she does not usually bother to predownload porn for a one-day orbital delivery. Fine. She'll just sit here and be BORED while awaiting rescue.

Here comes a boat! It has writing on the side she can't read, and some people who look very confused on it.

Normal to be confused! Spaceships crash basically never and this is actually the first time in the modern era that a Physically Dangerous Science lab has exploded like that.

She can unstrap herself and pop the top of the module and carefully climb halfway out.

"I think I sustained a head injury and have lost the ability to read."

The confused people look at each other and then back at her and one says something in Not Her Language.

OK so either she has landed in a lake of extremely committed conlangers or -

"Correction. I have sustained a head injury and lost receptive language processing. And maybe generative? You don't look like you understand me? Do I still have any words? Hospital? Doctor? H-O-S-P-I-T-A-L.* Health. Hurt. Brain." She taps her head "Ow ow ow. What kind of crap emergency response is this? You know, if you're just fucking with me here I am going to sue the skin off your elbows."

Wait if she has a brain injury should she really be leaning out of her command pod yelling at people who are, quite plausibly, EMTs who are only holding back because she's acting obviously insane and potentially violent? No, no she should not. Deep breath. No sudden movements.

*A/N: Translation convention, obviously.

When she points at her head and says 'ow ow ow' they do at least send a smaller boat her way. It putters over to her and the person driving it waves her in.

Yeah OK into the boat. She wonders how far the nearest hospital is.

The small boat goes back to the large boat. She is brought aboard the large boat and draped in a towel-blanket-thing. The large boat turns back toward the shore. (Some small boats stay near the spaceship.)

She will attempt to be a very compliant patient! Which she supposes mostly means 'don't do much of anything.'

She checks her pocket computer again. Still no signal. "How long until service is back?"

...Oh, right. Even if they know they won't be able to tell her. Sigh.

They peer at it. Look kind of confused. One checks his own for signal; he seems to have it, if this picture of a raccoon with floppy ears is anything to go by.

That is a weird-looking animal and a weird UI. She seems to have landed near some off-the-grid lake commune people who only speak a conlang and care a lot about the local niche wildlife and run their own operating systems and don't patronize standard infocarriers.

This was not a way she expected her workday to go wrong.

Boat boat boat boat.

City. It doesn't look like an off the grid commune. It looks like a million people live there.

Oh, right, she has brain damage! That's probably why everything looks unfamiliar and feels vaguely unreal.

She is panicking a lot inside, because having brain damage is really scary! On the outside, she is mostly just lying still because running around screaming would make life really hard for these nice people who are bringing her to a hospital. You should not make things hard for people trying to get you essential endorsed medical treatment!

The city that looks like a million people live there also has weird architecture of no identifiable style. The local ethnicity is reddish-brown with black hair, mostly worn long and ornamented, though there are some people who are lighter or darker.

The boat docks and is met by an ambulance, which is at least identifiable from the medical-looking equipment if not any of the symbols on it. The ambulance personnel load her into the back and away it goes, singing a repetitive little song as it zooms into town. The personnel start inspecting her for damage, doing their best to telegraph what they're doing with body language since she doesn't speak the language.

The EMTs will be able to tell that she does not have any externally-visible injuries apart from some light bruising from the harness straps. She's being cooperative with the examination and isn't, like, ticklish or anything. She does have two permanent injection ports, one on her chest and one on her thigh.

Is she dreaming? Hm. She's pretty sure she's not, but sometimes when she's dreaming she thinks about it and concludes that she's not - usually she just has dream-certainty that she's not dreaming. So if instead she does some actual test instead of just thinking about it she'd be able to tell.

She fails to lift off the bed and levitate out of the landship.

She's not dreaming.

And this doesn't actually feel like what she would expect if she had brain damage. She can recall the universal emergency vehicle symbols, she just can't recognize them. She's not a cognitive scientist but she's pretty damn sure that's not how memory works.

She pulls up a saved book on her pocket computer. She can read it fine, she just can't read anything around her.

She knows what cities look like and while this one isn't impossible it's certainly noncentral.

Hypotheses:

1. There's at-least-a-city-state but probably a larger polity which has for some reason resisted all standardization, which she had never heard of before.

2. She died and this is a rescue sim by a future civilization that has forgotten almost everything about what the world was like in her time, and was for some reason unable to get that information from her simulated mind.

3. She died and this is a rescue sim by a future civilization which is, for some reason, fucking with her.

4. The Amarra Station explosion opened up a wormhole leading to the moderately-distant past before the Great Errata

5. The Amarra Station explosion opened up a wormhole leading to some distant place not in her past lightcone, and she has been captured by aliens, who are simulating her a la hypothesis (2).

6. As (5), but a la (3) instead.

7. The Amarra explosion bumped her metaphorically eight-longs-to-the-left in the fundamental distribution of reality through something something littlephysics something something she-is-not-a-physicist-and-she-knows-it but this is some alternate timeline version of planet-that-we-live-upon.

8. The Amarra explosion opened up a wormhole to some distant place, she is not being simulated, these are actual aliens, and convergent evolution is way way way stronger than she would have ever imagined.

9. She is suffering from brain damage which specifically prevents her from parsing some-but-not-all written text, some-but-not-all speech, and standard emergency symbology, which has also altered her understanding of city design and of what brain damage can do to you, but does not seem to be otherwise impairing her thinking, unless she used to think much better than this and the brain damage has removed all memory of being able to think better than this. That's not very parsimonious but maybe her expectation that things should be parsimonious is a result of brain damage.

A. She died and it turns out religions are very confused about what the afterlife is like.

B. ...She died and specifically the Mormons* were right about what the afterlife is like. This is her planet now and she will be a God unto these people.

...OK that's enough hypotheses for now, she's clearly starting to run out of even slightly plausible ones.  And, of course,

0. Something she hasn't thought of yet.

OK, broad classes of hypothesis:

0. Something not on this list

1. This is a simulation (Hypotheses 2, 3, 5, 6, A, B)

2. This is the same level of reality as before but she is somewhere other than planet-that-we-live-upon in her time. (Hypotheses 4, 7, 8)

3. She has to rederive all of epistemology from first principles and/or hope that the doctors have an easy cure for whatever brain damage she has (Hypothesis 9)

4. Nothing weird is going on here (Hypothesis 1)

Of these obviously the prior is on category 4, but she sure has seen a lot of evidence that something weird is going on. If this is a simulation... someone's fucking with her, if someone's simming her and is putting readable text on her simmed-computer they aren't accidentally leaving all the other text in the world unintelligible. If this is reality... it's not convergent evolution, it's either the past or an alternate timeline. Or the future, but it'd be a surprising future where they lost standardization and languages diverged and this whole time tech stayed stagnant. 'heaven is not what the religious expected' falls into the same category, really, but also that's not getting much weight. She's pretty sure 'The mormons were right and she's a god now' was incidentally invalidated by her failure to levitate out of the landship but she's not exactly an expert and that was also incredibly unlikely to start.

So, 

0. Something she has rejected or hasn't thought of yet

1. Secret antistandardization polity

2. Time travel/alternate timeline

3. Simulation, in which case she's probably expected to believe (1) or (2)?

She's just going to disbelieve the world with incredibly-specific brain damage because it's not one she can strategize in.

* Translator's Note: No, not literally Mormons, Mormons are historically contingent and wouldn't exist on planet-we-live-upon. But mormonlike afterlife beliefs are sufficiently appealing that some Listener religions developed them; Here, the word "Mormons" refers to a particular faith with afterlife claims similar to Mormon ones, who are considered to be kind of weird and out there by almost everyone else.

Well there's a simple test to confirm or rule out time travel, or confirm or provide-some-evidence-against a secret nonstandard state, and even if she's being simulated this will at least inform her about which world she's expected to believe she's in.

"Civitas Sallashiati sum.*" Even if this is the prestandard past and nobody here speaks Sallashin someone'll probably recognize that.

*Translator's Note: This is neither Sallashin nor, obviously, earth Latin. Imagine a 20th-century Earth journalist about to experience some third-world police brutality reminding his would-be aggressors that he is an American citizen and the American government has rather a lot of guns and bombs and a rather high opinion of American journalists being free to report on whatever they please. Now imagine that said journalist expected the people he was speaking to would recognize his allusion if he instead phrased it "Civitas Americanum Sum." Now, instead, imagine that there is no particular beating imminent, perhaps not even any journalism involved, and the man in question is just reminding everyone around him that he is a foreigner with civil liberties that will be protected by the strongest military on the planet. Of course, it's not just the Americans doing it - Every country worth its salt starts guaranteeing the rights of its citizens wherever in the world they may go and those citizens cheerily proclaim their nationality for all to hear out of a mix of self-interest and civic pride, always in an otherwise-dead language because that's the objectively coolest way to do it. This is the context Listeners would have for the phrase translated as "Civitas Sallashiati Sum", which, of course, the Greens are completely lacking.

"Dawamwin a?" says one of the paramedics.

That... probably doesn't mean "OK we'll call the embassy and let them know you're in the hospital" which is a damn shame because she, like any sane person, has kind of always fantasized about being able to truthfully say "I am from the future, let me share with you hexadecades of technological progress, also don't have a Great War it's a really bad idea."

So secret nonstandard polity where the average citizen either doesn't know or doesn't care about Sallashiati citizenship or alternate timeline with no Sallash. Or she's being simmed, or she's very specifically brain-damaged, or she was wrong about her inability to levitate meaning she's not dreaming, or something she didn't think of. Human brains were really not made to be reasoning in situations this weird. She'll just... wait for the hospital and see how weird and unexpected that is?

Wait, if this is a nonstandard polity the rest of the world will still be the same. She will open up the world map on her pocket computer and show it to her EMT, then point at his computer.

One of the EMTs is busy being weirded out by her injection ports but the other one looks. He pulls up a map on his own rectangle and tilts it so she can see while he zooms in on the Great Lakes and then points at a city-dot on one shore. "Miiniw," he says pointing at the city-dot.

That sure is planet-we-live-upon and she's pretty sure that dot is around where Pasek is. She sure is in an alternate-timeline-or-simulation-thereof. She should help her hosts cotton on to the fact if they haven't yet. She'll pull up the same area on her own map. "Pasek." Zoom out. "Planet-that-we-live-upon." She gestures as sweepingly as she can manage in the landship cabin. "Not quite planet-that-we-live-upon."

She points at herself. "Alsaiah."

Probably some other government people are trying to recover Bigspacewagon Sixteen-And-One, so she doesn't have to worry about figuring out how to tell them that's important. 

That does seem pretty weird. The EMT nods along. "Oja," he says, pointing at his map, zoomed out for the whole planet.

"Oja. Planet-that-we-live-upon. Not-quite Planet-that-we-live-upon. Not-quite Oja," pointing at each map in turn. "Human. Not-quite human," pointing at herself and then at the two EMTs.

"Ojabe," he supplies. Then he says something (he talks really fast) to the other EMT, who replies, also very fast.

OK, she seems to have gotten the message across to these EMTs, who are presumably going to inform some proper government people who will show up with a pile of physicists and linguists and scifi authors. Or goons. One or the other.

The EMTs talk to each other kind of a lot for the rest of the ride, and also to a third voice coming in over a speaker with surprisingly good audio quality, but then they turn her over to the hospital. The hospital appears to have decided that she warrants full iso and are wearing a lot of plastic and putting her in a plastic room with its own airlock.

...Oh right, you do actually have to worry about alien flus if the aliens are alternate-timeline humans. Well, fortunately their experts are on top of this, even if she forgot. Not that she'd have been able to communicate "Get me into isolation immediately" through the language barrier.

There ensues a medical exam that this margin is too small to contain! But also they bring in a screen with a conference-call-ful of what might well be linguists and sci-fi authors and physicists.

Well their linguists are free be first-contact linguists at her, presumably skipping the part where they try to figure out which senses the aliens are using for communication. If they're not doing anything obviously like that she can try herself, but it's not her job so she'll only be guessing at the right thing to do based on what she's seen on TV.

They're totally doing that, they're putting up pictures to elicit words for numbers and nouns and colors and shapes and various person-descriptors and so on.

Numbers! Nouns! Colors! Shapes! People!

Once it becomes apparent that this civilization, too, invented books (You can never be too sure, writing is pretty important but the form factor could be historically contingent) she will attempt via doodles to indicate that Bigspacewagon Sixteen-and-one has a lot of books on its computers, which should still be in fine shape unless the aliens deliberately blew up or sank the command module.

That will certainly help but figuring out how to get them out with local technology won't happen overnight. They have not blown up or sunk the command module.

She's very aware that "Spaceshipper" is not actually the best possible career for preparing one to make first contact with surprisingly-not-aliens. If she had studied linguistics and signals processing and knew the fifth thing about text compression she could probably tell them how to get...whatever the important parts of a text corpus are for machine translation. She'd also probably know what those were. But, like, this civilization has invented pocket computers and interactive maps, so probably they can figure that stuff out as soon as some hardware geek figures out a planet-that-we-live-upon!USB to Oja!USB adapter.

...

First contact sure does involve a lot of "Hurry up and wait" and repetitive language tasks.

...

Also wow she has no idea how to talk biochemistry with these people and is probably not going to figure it out in the next couple weeks. That's going to suck.

The nurses who are taking care of her do seem kind of curious about her ports and want to elicit statements about them!

She is happy to provide statements but has no idea how to communicate drug names across a language barrier. Even if she knew all the relevant formal specifications it's not like she knows how to pantomime methylphenethylamine. She knows the common names of the steroid hormones she takes but not how to pick them out of a set of molecular diagrams.

Also, communicating any dosing information is going to have to wait on clear communication of standard weights and measures, but that sounds like a much easier problem.

Yeah, they can get her a small scale to weigh things on and a ruler and so on.

What exactly is she supposed to do with that. She knows a stuff is 100^12* electron masses but she can't exactly put 100^12 electrons on the scale to get a unit conversion. And it's not like she's going to just eyeball the mass of some reference object, that seems like a terrible way to get units for drug dosing.

*T/N: 2^96

Oh! She has a pocket computer. Her pocket computer probably contains its own hardware specsheet. She has a reference object!

Fifteen minutes later she has conversion rates from stuffs to whatever-units-this-scale-is-in, and one for shorts to whatever-units-these-big-marks-on-the-ruler-are, and the realization that these people are twelvists! What a relatively unsurprising trait for an alternate history universe to have. She will write all of these things down on paper, because she doesn't know when she'll be able to charge her pocket computer.

Cool! They still don't know what drugs she needs but every little bit of communication helps. Does she know the periodic table?

She recognizes the general shape of one common representation of the elements! She does not have the whole thing memorized, but she knows where the nonmetals go and those are the ones most important for biochemistry, she thinks.

Cool, and that way they can probably get more substances with commonly known components.

Meanwhile, people from all over the world are trying to figure out the spaceship (time machine??) and its contents!

The spaceship is currently in many parts, though examination will show that it was only ever really intended to be in as many as four. The command module contains some computers, manual controls, a pilot's chair, and life support machinery including a microwave oven and toilet. The greater part of the ship probably resembled an airplane, with a mix of air-breathing jet engines and rocket engines. It was either mostly empty when it crashed, or it was carrying a bunch of things not easily distinguishable from spaceship parts, or its contents were mostly water-soluble.

There's a large intact component that's easy to find, even at the bottom of the great lake, because it's attached to a number of pulsing red lights, radio transponders, and sonar pulsers. Green engineers are pretty sure from the various hookups that it's a power-generation unit and/or engine of some sort. Judging by the fact that it was powering a spaceship and/or time machine, and the ominous-looking probably-warning-symbols all over it, it's probably some sort of compact nuclear fission reactor? But it could also be fusion, or antimatter, or something more exotic than that, all they can say for sure is that it probably generates a lot of power and is probably dangerous.

Yeahhhh they're gonna try to ask the alien how to make sure it's powered down. They take lots of photos of it and all its plausibly control mechanism parts.

The alien does not look to be panicking when she sees the pictures of the thing so that's a good sign! Both of the emergency shutdown indicator lights are on, and all the other indicators point to a successful shutdown rather than some improbable failure incorrectly triggering both emergency shutdown indicators. Alsaiah is not sure how to communicate "It shut down safely but an abundance of caution would suggest moving it away from a population center for now," nor does she think she can walk the aliens through the full shutdown and fuel removal process.

...Well she can communicate "Safe". She'll just do that and count on the aliens' own common sense to handle abundance of caution concerns. Usually that's inadvisable but she thinks it's better not to risk miscommunicating and having the aliens panicking and trying to shut it down further with little idea how.

Okay, cool, if she thinks it safe they will gently load it onto a boat and tote it somewhere more convenient than the middle of this Great Lake.

They keep teaching her the local language as quickly as she can soak it up, and picking up hers as quickly as a team of linguists can absorb it.