No one sees him clearly enough that they're sure he saw him appear, as opposed to falling. Though it's not quite obvious from where he fell. 

A plump balding middle-aged man in a tailcoat is the first to do something. - well, a couple of other people pulled out their phones and are presumably calling emergency services, but the first person to do something which isn't that. 

"Young man," he says, "Is that the sort of injury that you're going to want medical treatment for?"

"- yes?" mumbles Kyeo. Wow, he didn't know head injuries came with the impression that you were suddenly speaking a foreign language.

"I assume but am not confident that someone is calling medical assistance for this young man!" he says loudly to the passersby. 

"I'm calling, I'm calling," says a woman. " - yes, it's a medical emergency. A man looks to have a head injury. I don't know. Yes, he's talking. No, he hasn't stood up." And to Kyeo, "What's your name?"

"Kyeo Sebe Luk."

"Kyeo Sebe Luk," she repeats faithfully into the cellphone. "Kyeo Sebe Luk, do you know where you are?"

"No."

"He said 'no'." Pause. "And do you know what day it is?"

"In what calendar - I'm not sure -"

"He said, in what calendar, I'm not sure." Pause. "The emergency response person says that might be a very serious head injury, and that I ought to stay here until the ambulance arrives, which is inconvenient because I'm going to be late to work."

"...you could ask someone else?" he manages, but he's then going to pass out.

When he wakes up it's in a perfectly nice hospital bed in a bland beige room with framed nature photography where one might wish there were windows. There are machines attached to him. They are beeping softly. In the corner of the room, on a barstool, is a different woman in medical scrubs. "Oh," she says, "I was hoping you'd sleep until I was done with my charting. How are you feeling?"

"My head hurts," he says.

"What's your name?"

"Kyeo Sebe Luk."

"Where are you?"

"...it looks like a hospital. I don't know what planet."

"Well, I've never gotten that answer before and I don't know what it says about the seriousness of your head injury. I'll have to call in Dr. Briskel and he hates being paged." She pulls out an electronic and presses some buttons. "Do you want anything to drink?"

"No thank you."

"All right, then, I'm going to go pee and then complain about Dr. Brisket in the break room, the call button's there if you need it."

...Kyeo has a head injury and should just assume all his bewilderment is due to that.

Dr. Brisket comes in a little while later, sniffling grumpily. He wants Kyeo to squeeze his hands and follow a light with his eyes and tell him how many fingers he's holding up. He wants to know the last thing that Kyeo remembers from before the accident.

"There was an alarm going off in my ship."

"In your...ship? You were on a ship, or near one?"

"In a ship. The Five Virtues."

"You have a cracked skull and a subdural hematoma," says Dr. Brisket, "It seems to me that you might have quite a lot of memory loss, because you were found on the streets of Denver, and there aren't any ships in Denver, or particularly near it. And it seems to me that your injury likely was not suffered on the ship, because it's quite fresh. In light of all that I'm obliged to call the police, and let them know to investigate whether you were hit over the head with a blunt object as a deliberate assault. They're a lazy bunch down at our precinct station, but they'll be here in a couple of hours, and by then my shift will be over. I'm going to tell the nurse to give you more pain medication, but not enough you fall asleep, because then the cops will chew me out for wasting their time."

"...Denver? Where is Denver?"

"Oh, now I'm expecting this patient interaction to drag out and I wish it wouldn't," says Dr. Brisket. "Denver is in Colorado, in the Fractious States of America."

...that sounds fairly familiar. "On Earth?"

"Yes, on Earth."

"Oh." Well, the doctor seems - busy - and he can let him go without further questions.

The doctor goes. The nurse comes back, and adjusts his machines, and tells him she's giving him pain meds. "And if you're still in pain, the doctor's orders say I can give you more once the police have come. But don't count on them showing up any time soon, because they'll probably be a couple of hours."

"I understand."

"I'm going to go sext my husband from the break room. Use the call button if you need me."

.........okay. He's never been married, maybe that's normal? "Thank you."

The police come nearly three hours later. They want Kyeo's name, again, and the last thing he remembers, again, and then they want to know everyone he knows who might've wanted to hit him over the head with a blunt object. 

As far as Kyeo knows nobody would have wanted to hit him over the head with a blunt object. He is pretty sure that the ship got into some kind of trouble and he hit his head that way, what's bewildering is how he wound up on Earth from the Ibyatok system.

"What is the Ibyatok system?"

"Ibyatok is another star."

"You're from another star? WOW! That's so cool! What's it like there?"

"...I am pretty sure Earth knows about Ibyatok and the inhabited planets there."

" - well," he says, after missing a beat, "my husband's always telling me, Dan, you should read the papers more, and not just the sports section."

...perhaps on Earth men have husbands. "I... see."

"Do you ...know anyone on Earth?"

"No. I have met a handful of people from Kular but none from Earth before this."

"Huh. Well, we need a place of residence and phone number for followups, but I guess you're not going to have those, if you're from space?"

"That's right."

"Well, that's really cool, but also inconvenient, because if I don't put that information in our case report then I don't see how we'll follow up, and assault is a serious matter we should really be following up on."

"I still don't think I was assaulted."

"Well, if you sustained the injury by accident then I don't need a report at all."

"I suppose it's possible my ship was assaulted. By another ship. I was not personally assaulted."

" - I think ship to ship combat's just not my job. I will make it no report, then. - do you want to tell me more about the ship to ship combat. That sounds so cool."

"I'd actually like you to contact the embassy to Ibyabek for me."

"- I don't even know how I'd begin to go about that. I can Google it but I'm not actually very optimistic that will turn up anything helpful. How do you spell Ibyabek."

He spells it in the Kularan alphabet.

"Okay, so, I'm Googling the embassy but it's not coming up, do you have alternate contact information for them? Or if we put in the papers that someone from space landed here, will they contact us?"

"I wouldn't... expect that to be necessary. I don't have contact information."

"Well, then maybe you can handle that yourself once you're out of the hospital?  I hate how the hospital smells and I want to go play Angry Birds in my car."

"...enjoy."

Off he goes. 

The nurse comes back a little later, to adjust his meds and bring him a meal, rice and beans and cheese and salsa and an apple and a cheese stick.

He's just gonna... convalesce and eventually ask if there is an understood reason why he would suddenly speak their language given that he did not know it before.

- no! The nurse thinks that's really unusual. ...she's vaguely heard about head injuries and people speaking in tongues so maybe it's that.

...maybe. The language is at least related to Kularan so maybe it's not that big a leap? He might have seen movies in English once.

Maybe that explains it, maybe not, she doesn't really care. He looks well enough to discharge maybe tomorrow.

"I don't have anywhere to go," he points out.

"I don't really know why you're telling me that and I feel sort of like you think it's my job to do something about it."

"Well, in a civilized place it would be."

"I don't know how they do things in space, spaceboy, but here on Earth I get paid $11.25 an hour and I would need to be paid approximately twice as much as that to solve your problems."

"On a civilized planet you'd have everything provided for you and wouldn't need money," he mutters.

"Ah, see, that sounds nice, I wish I lived on a civilized planet."

"Do you know what people around here with nowhere to go do normally?"

"Crash with friends, live on the streets, get a job until they can afford an apartment? There's homeless shelters if you're not on drugs. I don't know if they kick you out for painkillers you're prescribed for a cracked skull."

"Disgraceful," he says under his breath. "How do people get jobs?"

"You look for signs on storefronts, or check listings on the internet, or ask people 'hey, do you know anywhere that's hiring'?"

"Hey. Do you know anywhere that's hiring?"

"Yep, if you're a certified nurse."

Kyeo doesn't like this planet.

When discharged from the hospital he tries looking at storefronts for a while, walking around.

This coffee shop is hiring! $10/hour.

This Target is hiring! $11/hour, night shifts.

This factory is hiring welders and mechanics! $18/hour.

The coffee shop is... ah, full of drugs.

The Target is -

- he has exited the Target and hopes never to contemplate it again!

Welders and mechanics cool. He goes in there and asks what kind of equipment they use here.

They're happy to show him around if he's considering applying for a job.

....the equipment is not familiar.

"Can you train me to use this? I have done some similar work but it was with Ibyabekan tools building spaceships."

"- what's Ibyabekan?"

"Ibyabek is the planet I'm from. I don't know how I got to Earth and I haven't been able to find the embassy so I need a job in the meantime while I figure that out."

" - wow. I didn't even know there were other planets that had humans on them. Are you human?"

"Yes." Earth's education system must be AWFUL.

"Well, sure, if you're a quick study we can probably train you up. Do you use any illegal drugs?"

"No. Do a lot of applicants?"

"Well, if word gets out that you don't ask, yeah. Have you ever been fired from a previous job?"

"Only when reassigned."

"Like, they gave you another position elsewhere?"

"It was when I was working over a school break and then the break ended."

"Ah, yeah, that doesn't particularly indicate you'll be a terrible employee. Okay, you can start Monday. Most of the boys bring their own tools because the shop-owned ones are kinda crappy but they'll do while you're learning."

"All right. Is there a place I can stay until Monday? When is Monday?"

"Today's Friday, then there's Saturday, then Sunday, then Monday. You've got nowhere to stay?"

"I've been in the hospital and before that I was posted on a spaceship in another system. I don't know how I got to Earth."

"Truly wild, dude. Making me think I should get out more. Go on a road trip. I'm thinking about offering you can crash on my couch while you find a place but I don't know if I like you that much."

"I don't know how much you normally have to like someone to offer them shelter on Earth."

"Well, if I expect you're going to make a mess of the place, or hog the television, or eat everything in the fridge, then I'd rather not, and if you're going to fuck my girlfriend, or steal my Playstation, then I'd really rather not."

"I'm not going to do any of those things."

"Well, all right then, you can stay with me until you get your first paycheck. Paychecks are first and third Fridays of the month."

"Thank you."

He clocks out at the shop about half an hour later, and offers Kyeo a ride home in his weatherbeaten pickup truck. "I'm worried you're going to judge me because there are crushed beer cans on the floor. You should judge me for that, but I wish you wouldn't."

"I wouldn't dream of it."

Puzzled blinking. 

"Well, get in, then."

In Kyeo gets.

The factory foreman has a four-bedroom unit in a duplex with a shared driveway; when he gets home there's a car parked in it, and he knocks on the neighbor's door to demand they move it. This descends into a shouting match about whose fault it is that the dogs got out of the backyard. 

He remembers Kyeo a couple minutes later. "Kid! Lemme show you the guest room. I'm not sure there are sheets on the bed, and I feel like you're constantly judging us, but whatever, good deed's a good deed."

The guest room has a queen bed that's indeed presently sheetless, and a closet full of ski gear.

"I'm not judging you at all. Are there sheets somewhere I should put on the bed?"

"Oh, that's good of you, young man. I'm going to put the sheets in the wash. They have stains on them. From Cherry when she's on the rag, and from sex."

"...okay."

"Then I'll introduce you to Cherry, but I want to start the laundry first. The dryer can take three hours to get things properly dry. Piece of crap. I could fix it but when I get home from work I mostly just want to play Overwatch."

Off he goes.

Huh. Maybe while the clothes are in the washing machine Kyeo will see if he can figure out how to fix the dryer. He has nothing else to do.

The problem with the dryer is that the pipe through which damp hot air is pumped out of the garage is full of lint.

Well if he can see how to detach and reattach that he will empty the lint into the nearest trash receptacle.

It has screws.

Can he find a screwdriver?

He can! The garage is actually the cleanest and most orderly part of the house.

Then he will fix the dryer!

His host finds him at it a while later. He has a beer can in one hand and a woman behind him in a bright pink sundress, with a fairly horrendous tan. "This is Cherry. Cherry, this is Kyeo, he's crashing in the guest room until he gets his first paycheck. He's from Ibyabek, he's used to working on spaceships."

"Huh," Cherry says. "Well I wouldn't have guessed it'd take a spaceship engineer to fix the dryer."

"I coulda fixed it, I'd just rather not."

"I'm not an engineer, I'm in the military, but I've done some spaceship assembly work before."

"Well, if you make yourself useful, I've got no complaints about you staying," says Cherry. "Only alternating weeks we have my daughter, and don't you sleep with her or steal her underwear or anything."

"I'm not going to do those things."

"Good, then. We're ordering Burger King for dinner, do you want a cheeseburger or a regular one?"

"- whichever is more convenient."

"It's just what I tell the computer, it's exactly as easy either way."

"Regular."

A regular burger apparently comes with lettuce and tomato and a bun and little packets of ketchup and mustard. These are handed to Kyeo without explanation. They eat while watching sports on the living room TV, which dominates one wall.

Kyeo doesn't know this game but is amenable to watching sports. If they don't open their packets he won't know what the point of them is, but if they do he'll put them on the burger. Either way he eats it quite contently.

During a commercial break his hosts ask about Ibyabek! They'd never heard of it, is it a secret military base or something?

"No, not at all. I don't know why people I've met on Earth don't seem to have heard of it. Have you heard of any other planets - Kular, or Xeren, maybe - Sohaibek -"

"Not me, but you know, I couldn't name most of the countries in Africa either."

"There's Kenya," says Cherry, "and Nairobi, and Liberia, and South Africa, and Sudan....and Egypt. - I guess I can't name most of them either."

"The settlements on Luna should be visible to the naked eye."

"- well that's weird."

"Wonder if my vision's going."

"Maybe I should check. Teleporting to Earth is weird enough that having also time traveled wouldn't necessarily make it weirder."

"Check if - there's - stuff on the moon?"

"Because," Cherry says, "maybe he's a time-travelling astronaut. And if he time-travelled, then there's stuff on the moon in the future, but - maybe it's not there yet. - Right?"

"Right. And nobody seems to have already heard of Ibyabek, or spaceships in service, so maybe it's time travel."

"Well, that'd sure be something."

"You could be famous."

"I don't especially want to be famous."

"Well that seems awkward if you're a time-traveller but probably if you tell everyone that you don't want to be famous most of them will respect it. I'll tell the guys in the shop that if they get the national media up in our faces about our time traveller, I'll fire them."

"I wouldn't want anyone to be out of a job because of me, at least not on a planet that still uses money."

"Well, it's not like they'd call up the national media by accident. I wouldn't fire them if they just told their cousin who's a reporter over dinner or something."

"I suppose that's your prerogative."

"It's good of you to worry about the boys but they can follow some rules. Makes for a better shop."

"I understand. It's just on Ibyabek we don't use money and everyone has a home and food and medical care and doesn't have to worry about paying for it."

" - wow. I wouldn't really expect that to work. I'd figure you'd get moochers."

"We do have jobs. People on Ibyabek work. But if someone can't, if they're injured or are nursing small children or in school or something, they're provided for."

"Yeah, it makes sense you'd look after those who can't work, but what about, you know, those who're just lazy. Some folks are just lazy. I've had to fire a few who just didn't really want to learn."

"They need to learn better, but threatening them with starvation isn't the way to teach people anything."

"You know, I'd never really thought about it that way."

"It took a very great visionary for things to change on Ibyabek."

"Well, maybe you can tell people here what Ibyabek did and how well it worked."

"I can try, though I don't know as much as I'd like about all the concrete details of how it was implemented from the beginning."

"Do you want some ice cream?" asks Cherry. "The Haagen Dazs was on sale, so I bought it even though it's not even tastier than the store-brand stuff we normally get. It makes me feel fancier." 

"...sure. Thank you."

She scoops them all ice cream in plastic bowls with Mickey Mouse on the inside. The commercial break has ended; they both go back to watching the game.

This is a pleasant evening. The ice cream is really good.

"Honey, I want to have sex," Cherry says after ice cream. 

"Oh, great, I wish that'd happen more often and I'm glad you were the one who brought it up for once," her boyfriend responds. 

Off they go.

He is positive he has never heard his parents do that but he is the youngest child in the family, maybe it's normal in households that are younger. He'll keep himself occupied by cleaning up the burger wrappers and washing the ice cream bowls and getting the sheets moved along through the laundry process and onto the bed.

His hosts - the mechanic turns out to be named Mateo - spend the weekend hanging out on the couch watching more sports, except for a brief interval where Mateo mows the lawn and a trip to Safeway for more groceries. 

"The fact that you cleaned up the kitchen made me glad Mateo brought you home," Cherry tells him. "I doubt I'll be counting the days until you leave. As a friendly gesture I bought more of the ice cream since you seemed to like it. It wasn't even on sale."

"Oh - thank you, you didn't need to. I'm happy to make myself useful while visiting your home."

She makes a slightly puzzled face but smiles at him, and then settles back in to watch the game.

Dove Deodorant. 

We're carving out a marketing niche where we don't add fragrances or dyes. Some people actually find them unpleasant and some others associate their absence with the natural world, even though obviously in the natural world you just wouldn't wear deodorant. We haven't been able to discern any differences between how our deodorant works and how well our competitors' works except with a lot of p-hacking.

Media when people have to pick things to spend money on and everybody's competing for the money to not starve is weird.

On Monday morning Mateo tells Kyeo they're leaving around 7. "Beat the traffic in."

"There does seem to be a lot of traffic here." Kyeo will carpool with him to the shop and set about trying to learn to use their tools.

The tools are all unfamiliar, but mostly of pretty high quality, despite Mateo's claim that most employees bring their own rather than use lower-quality shared shop tools. Mateo's a perfectly competent teacher - he doesn't leave anything out, and he does seem to know how everything works. 

Everyone is incredibly impressed that Kyeo worked on spaceships. 

"Spaceships are huge, they require a lot of people working on them! Even people who don't know much when they start out can help."

Yeah, see, that's pretty cool. 

He will work on the things in the shop and ask if anyone knows when the moon will next be visible around here.

They have to Google it but apparently the moon is a crescent right now and visible in the evenings.

After work he will go and look at the moon.

There are no lights on the dark part.

"I'm a time traveler," he murmurs to Mateo.

"Wow. - I - fuck, man, that's really cool and kind of scary. What's the future like, is it nice?"

"In most ways, I think? I've never been to future-Earth."

"Well, I'm glad to know we don't wipe ourselves out, you know, with nukes or climate change or anything."

"Very few inhabited planets have been destroyed in my future."

" - that's fucked up. I'm not a big emotions person but I'm sad and scared about that."

"Well, I don't know if this timeline will be the same."

"Well I imagine once you tell everyone a planet gets destroyed lots of people will figure out how to, you know, not that."

Kyeo nods. "What year is it?"

"2776, counting from Rome."

"From who? That doesn't sound like the Earth calendar I remember."

"Uh, from Rome. What do you remember?"

"I don't remember what they're counting from but they hadn't gotten to 2776 yet!"

" - well that's weird. I think everywhere counts back to Rome."

"I guess I could have the numbers confused."

Shrug. "How does Ibyabek count?"

"From the Glorious Revolution, and in Ibyabekan years."

"Oh right, planets move different speeds. You know, I knew that but I never really thought about it. How long is an Ibyabekan year?"

"Longer than an Earth one by about sixty percent, but I don't remember the more precise conversion factor since sixty percent is good enough to convert ages and so on."

"Man. That makes me want kids, you know? Thinking about other planets for us to colonize. I could be a space mechanic and my kids could be homesteaders. Claim themselves some land on Mars."

"They could! I don't know how far off the technology is from here."

"People did go to the Moon. There was this great speech, Kennedy was like, 'this is objectively a stupid use of resources, but we're rich, so we can do it, and the other countries will try to do it to show us up, but they're poorer, so they'll fail'. And then we did it. Really showed them."

"What does being rich have to do with it? Either you've invented the rocket or you haven't."

"Well, I think at the time no one had, but we were able to invent it faster because we were richer and could spend more on it and put more people on it and stuff."

"In a society without money if a project is important enough to do at all you can just put however many people on it will be useful."

" - huh. I guess we can't do that."

"It's going to take me a long time to get used to."

"Sorry, man. Maybe someday we'll end money too."

"I hope so!"

"So, what was Ibyabek like?" Bill at work asks him during a lull.

"Nobody used money! I didn't pay for my clothes, or my bed, or my education, or my food, or my medicine, it was all provided. Everyone had something productive to do for the People without having to fear for their basic necessities if their work is interrupted."

"Did that all rely on cool future technology? I think right now there just wouldn't be enough to go around."

"Enough of what?"

"I don't know. Enough food, enough houses, enough cars, enough clothing..."

"Well, why don't you have enough of those things? - cars in particular not everyone needs to have one of."

" - well, I have seen people say that some of it's because of greedy landlords, and greedy bankers, but they do always add there were lots of other contributing factors."

"Whatever the contributing factors are, if people are starving and sleeping in the rain it's rather important to figure out what those contributing factors are and eliminate them."

" - yeah. It is! And if your world did it, probably we can do it too!"

"In ours it took a revolution but maybe with the proof of concept from Ibyabek your bankers and landlords won't make that necessary."

"Well, if you knew it'd fix everything I can't imagine they'd be willing to say on TV that they want there to be homeless people."

"There you go."

"You'll just have to tell people about how much nicer Ibyabek is."

"Anyone who asks."

Sure, whenever there's a break in the work, or at lunch. What are the foods in Ibyabek like? What are the holidays like? What do people like to do for fun? What are the sports like? What kinds of awesome new appliances get invented?

"The food here is better - I think a lot of plants don't grow that well on Ibyabek compared to Earth, it's an unusually hot climate and has some native flora, so yours will still be better after you stop having to threaten people with taking it away. We have holidays on the anniversaries of important events, like the Revolution or the Glorious Leader's birthday... I used to sing but can't any more, it's a medical side effect, there are also movies and books and plenty of sports..." He can explain some sport rules, and also explain about how computers are better and how spaceships work (at least from an occupant's perspective, he doesn't know the physics).