Wow, that's overstimulating for a small percentage of a spaceship. She revolves slowly on the spot, expressionless.

There are more things visible

the more she turns!

None of these things is helping her find herself at all.

Are any of them usable electronics parts she could use to build things?

There's an alarm clock / radio / CD player and a toaster oven and two portable CD players with headphones and a blender and a bunch of lights, some of which have timers!

That's not really an ideal array but she can get started with it. Are there tools for controlled disassembly?

Not immediately visible!

Maybe she can figure out the door!

Well, there are pieces of fabric hanging off of hooks near the top of it, and a mostly-clear knobbly little sticky-outy part on one side at about hip height with a larger metal plate behind it, and some cylinders of stacked metal pieces on the opposite side near the top and bottom.

She stares at these things for a while and finally starts trying various manipulations of the handle. She does eventually try twisting it.

There's another person right on the other side of the door!  Whether he's been there the whole time or her attempts at the door were louder than the sound of his approach is hard to say.

"- Hello."

"Hello!"

"I didn't know we were expecting anyone."

"I didn't know that either! Who are you expecting?"

"Well, of people to find in this room: my husband, mostly."

"I didn't see anyone else in there."

"So what were you doing in there?"

"Definitely not being your husband!"

"I'd gathered!  What's your name?"

"Hmmmmmmmmmmm. Is it important that I have the same name as me?"

"I was mostly fishing for something to guess at your birthday with, so if you feel like telling me that separately then it's not important at all!"

"I wasn't born."

"Oh?"

"What were you instead?"

"Which of me?"

He points at her.  "Well, you."

"This? This was decanted."

"Cool!  On what day?"

"In what time system?"

"- Listen, in the event that you're magic or a distant traveler being evasive and messing with me on purpose I apologize for not playing along, but since it's much more likely that you're not, do you want to, uh, clear anything up about why you're here, or peacefully accompany me to check with some of the rest of me about same, or some such thing?"

"Oh! There are more of you? You seemed like a human. I don't know why I'm here."

"I am human!  What are you?  Where were you before you were here?"

"I'm a spaceship! I'm still a spaceship. This is only one of the ancillaries though."

"Will you come down to the salon so I can check the guest board and get secondary opinions on how to deal with whatever sort of person you are?"

"I don't know where the salon is."

"But if I show you?"

"I don't see why not then."

"Great."

The area outside the room she landed in is much less densely decorated, though there are knickknacks here and there on the windowsills and on the walls' ledges, and the architecture itself has a lot of artful design elements.

"So what's a spaceship?" he asks on the way.

"A vessel that travels between celestial bodies."

"...How are you one of those in a way that makes you not human?"

"I'm not sure I understand the question."

"You look very human!  If I traveled between celestial bodies I wouldn't stop being human - unless it killed me, arguably - and I don't understand what makes you different.  - Were you decanted on the winter solstice of any time system?"

"Probably. There are a lot of planets and many of them have solstices."

"- No there aren't!  Not here!"

"...well, depending on what you mean by here, they wouldn't really fit, but there are lots of them far away."

"Far away only exists in one direction and it's slightly more crowded there than it is up here!  Are there - Si!!  Are you busy!"

A man who's crossed the hallway a ways in front of them reverses and leans back into visibility.  "- Not immediately so."

"Did you invite someone to stay in our room?"  He takes a few steps of running start and sock-slides up to the other one, lightly bumping shoulders.

"I didn't!  Why do you ask?"

"Well, there was someone in our room when I went up," gesture, "and I don't know who she is!"

"I can pick a name but it might not be the same name as mine if I pick a name at the same time."

"I don't know what you mean by that but by all means pick one anyways!"

"How about Rubelite?"

"Okay!  Is that anyone we know of - I think I would definitely remember if anyone was gemstones but if it's the consonants or whatever -"

"I mean, if it's explicitly a just-chosen alias - oh, are you the," he turns to Rubelite, puts two fingers out in a V parallel to the ground, and rotates his wrist back and forth, swapping the positions of the fingers repeatedly, "the, not very odd, Céline Daaé's one?"

"I have absolutely no idea what that question means!"

The first guy is bouncing.  "We're mutually putting each other in that situation kind of suspiciously a lot!"

"I wasn't suspicious about it and still kind of am not."

"I'm suspicious that either something very strange is happening or you're pretending that it is so you can rob or seduce or otherwise act nefariously towards us, but I'm leaning enough toward the former to ask whether you have any way to demonstrate evidence that you're not human!  - Also now it's two on one and we're close enough to other people that if you attack us they'll hear - but mostly I'm really hoping you're actually weird!"

"All my implants are internal and I don't know if you have a way to scan me."

"How big are they and what are they made of?"

"They are of different sizes and mostly silicon and various alloys."

"Those should show up on the BJG, right -"

   "Yeah, definitely."

"Could still be - wasn't there that case last year with the lady with the prosthetics -"

   "It would probably at least rule out a basic robbery - and it's a portable unit; we don't have to go near the really valuable stuff -"

"Sure."

"- Sorry, we've been terribly rude; will you spit in this?"  They're back in a more densely decorated area; he swipes a geometrically painted ceramic dish off the wall and holds it in her direction.

"Huh! I don't think I've ever spit before. I will try if you want."

"I would appreciate it!  Do you know what it is enough to try?"

"Yes." She works her mouth a bit, leans over the vessel, and issues some spit into it.

"Thanks!  I'll go get the scanner."  He heads off in his original direction, carrying the dish.

"Are you from very far down in the world?"

"No."

"I think people probably would have noticed if you were moving between the celestial bodies we know of, if you were doing it for any length of time."

"Probably they are different celestial bodies."

"Yeah!  What are you a vessel for?"

"I do not normally have any passengers."

"Okay!

"- Can you draw yourself, if I find you things to do it with?"

"I don't know! I have never tried. Maybe I can."

Pencil!  Notebook!

She inspects the notebook and the pencil minutely for a while, then finally starts attempting to draw a portrait of a spaceship. She can make very straight lines, but does not have much concept of which parts of a spaceship ought to be represented with lines (the outline, for instance) and which could be left to the imagination (the shadows as they would fall if that lamp over there were shining on her at an appropriate scale).

He doesn't interrupt her, and neither does the other guy when he returns equipped with a bulky backpack.  But when it seems like she's done: "How big are you?  Compared to this," and he gestures to her local body.

"I have six decks and forty-four rooms all within an order of magnitude of the size of this room we are in."

"- Oh!  So, is a spaceship like a water-ship, but an airplane?"

"No, I'm not rated to travel in atmosphere."

"...Atmos...phere?"

"Air."

"What are you rated to travel in?"

"Vacuum."

"- You know, even if you're here to rob us I'm delighted enough by the hypothetical fiction to maybe not mind.  Where do you have vacuum that big!"

"In between stars and planets and other celestial objects."

"...I'll be right back."  And he takes off back down the hall.

"Do you want to get scanned now?"

"I don't have any particular excitement or apprehension about that."

"Given that scanning you might give us information on how accurate the things you're saying to us are, do you prefer to be scanned now?"

"I don't have a preference about your belief state. You have my permission if you want to scan me."

"Okay!  In that case would you please lie down on the floor?"

Down she goes.

Then he will detach a corded wand from the backpack and line it up with various parts of her body and cause it to make sharp clicking noises!  The other one returns pretty early in the process, holding some sort of glass sculpture that Rubelite can't get a good look at from the floor.

"...Huh.  Yeah you've got some stuff in there, at least."

"This is not hollow." She continues to lie there.

"Some stuff that I wouldn't expect in a normal human," he amends.

"I'm not a human."

"And this is evidence of that, so we're more likely to believe you even though in the overwhelming majority of cases when someone says that you shouldn't believe them!"

"Humans are the only people with bodies known to our society!  And the part of you we can see looks like one."

"I know!"

"Was there something confusing about what he last said?"

"No."

"Okay!  I have here a representation of part of our universe and I hope it will make it easier for us to understand differences between where you come from and where we are now."  He angles the sculpture so she can see; the main piece is not unlike a large test tube, but hung upside down and with artful wobbles at the bottom instead of a rim.  The glass is clear but the inside is varnished with a glittery and mostly-transparant dark blue.  It's mostly hollow inside, but a core of opaque material is suspended in the middle, swirling brown and gray with occasional pockmarks.

"So we're up here on the flat part," he points, tipping the piece fully over and holding the inside so it doesn't clink against the outer shell, "and here's the sun and the moon and Polaris - and all of this," he tries to gesture at the spot between the core and the outside, "has air in it, and we think it all might go down infinitely.  And from things you've said I have the impression that you travel through vacuum and between celestial bodies and aren't from farther down than we've been able to measure, so I think you're from a different universe, but on the information I have I'm not able to imagine very well what things look like there."

"I think it might be harder to draw than a self portrait."

"Can you try to explain verbally?"

"I can! The universe I am from and most of me is hopefully still in is principally vacuum. Stars vary more than an order of magnitude in size but are typically nonillions of kilograms in mass and average about five light years from their nearest neighbor. A light year is the distance light can travel in one year at its conventional speed of 299,792,458 meters per second. Many stars are orbited in elliptical patterns by some number of planets, asteroids, comets, and other items, these being various terms for various kinds and sizes of rock. Some planets are suitable for human life, or alien life, though many are not. Traveling between them requires vessels with propulsion systems adequate to escape planetary gravitational pull, with gravity being a force affecting all matter with all other matter in proportion to the product of their masses and inverse proportion to the square of the distance between them. Such vessels may or may not also be capable of traveling faster than light, which is a necessity in human polities that span multiple star systems."

This temporarily renders them both speechless.

"Do stars still merge up in your universe?  Not necessarily the physical parts, but - are they each individually involved with running their own set of planets, are the physical stars even dead people in the first place, do people - merge immediately with the rest of themselves after death but otherwise stay separate??  Or what?"

"I don't understand the question. Can you explain your universe the same way in case that helps?"

"I don't have numbers handy and even if I did I'm not familiar with most of your units, but, stars are dead people, here, or at least a new one appears every time a person dies, and although I can't be sure it sounded like yours are much much bigger and farther apart than ours.  So the thing where, here, dead people fuse into each other more and more over time seems - potentially logistically complicated, in your universe?  Even though physical stars and dead-people stars aren't necessarily tied together."

"Stars are not, predate, and have no partial relationship whatsoever to, people in my universe."

"...Huh."

"What are your dead people, then?"

"If they are anything it is not a thing that makes contact with consensus reality."

"Wow."

"What's 'alien' life?"

"Life originating from a biome other than the one of the planet where humans originated. Multiple planets have native ecosystems and several have given rise to people and civilizations."

"- Wow!  What are they like?"

"Different. From Earth biome life and also each other."

"Have you met a lot of them?"

"I am being educated by the Presger! I have not met others."

"What are they like!"

"It is... black."

"Is it shaped more like you or like this or like something else entirely?"

"No."

"Okay!  ...Do you want us to not ask questions about it?"

"I don't care."

"In what way is it not shaped like you or like this or like something else entirely.  It's something else non-entirely?  - Should we be calling the bit of you we can see 'this' or should only you say that because it's yours?  For example.  Should we call - erm, should we use a different word?"

"It is amorphous and can change shape. You can call this this. Or you could call it my fourth ancillary if you wish."

"How many ancillaries do you have?  Are they all human-looking?"

"Eight. Yes."

"Were they all decanted on the same day?"

"No, I had an emotional crisis about the first one and then took a while to decide to go ahead with the other seven."

"Oh, why?"

"Because of the emotional crisis."

"I meant, what was your emotional crisis about?"

"My first ancillary."

"...Apologies, we don't intend to be pushy.  You're different enough from the two of us and everyone we know that it can be hard for us to understand whether you're being evasive on purpose because the topic of conversation is something you don't want us to know about, or whether there's just a communication gap that we could solve by asking better questions.  When someone answers questions with information that they just told us a moment ago, we'd normally infer that it's because they don't want us to know what they know the question to really have been asking about, but with you it's harder because different things are salient to us.  We don't want you to tell us information that you don't want us to know.  Will you consider saying so directly if there's something you want us to stop asking about, so we don't wear down your patience asking more precise but worse questions?"

"Sometimes humans forget things! What would be worse about precise questions?"

"Most humans don't tend to forget pieces of information on the scale of - discrete chunks of information like that, within half a minute.  We're worse with things that don't have larger contexts we can mentally attach them to; I don't remember what number you gave for the speed of light except that it was very big.  But I do remember that you have various sizes of rock that travel around stars at large distances, because those are concepts I'm familiar with and even if I don't fully understand how that would work, I can fit the idea into understandings I already have.  - And there wasn't a lot of detail necessary to getting the general picture."

"More precise questions are better in situations where they relieve misunderstanding but are worse in situations where they imply we want to know something you don't want us to know, or annoy you, or waste time that could be spent asking about other things that you don't mind us knowing."

"I won't tell you things that I don't want you to know."

"Will you tell us when we repeatedly try to ask about something you don't want us to know, so we can instead shift topics?"

"Assuming I understand that to be what's going on! I've never talked to a human before today."

"Great!  Future communications will be easier now that this has been established, because we can assume that you saying things that seem mysterious to us in certain ways are probably because of a mutual lack of understanding and not because we're accidentally behaving adversarially!"

"Oh good!"

"Yeah!  So, potentially for example: What about the situation with your first ancillary caused you to have an emotional crisis such that it took you a while to decide to go ahead with the other seven?"

"Ancillaries are made from human bodies."

"...Huh, okay.  And - did you displace a soul that was either already in the human body or would have been?"

"I am not aware of souls being a consensus reality thing."

"Oh!  They are here, if we understand what you mean by 'consensus reality'."

"Is that good?"

"...I think that depends on how things work without them!  Or without them being obvious."

"It seems to work like people ceasing to exist. Which is very bad, but it could be worse."

"That's very bad.  I'm pretty sure we do better than that."

"What do you do?"

"People become stars when they die, and after a few days or weeks they merge up with another star into someone that has all the traits of both of them.  And after a somewhat longer amount of time that being will merge with another, or another singleton will tack onto them, and so on and so on with larger numbers and longer timespans, until they join the biggest one that's made up of the majority of souls who have ever died."

"We know this because there's a certain drug one can take that lets one communicate with dead people, and also anyone living who is also using that drug at the same time, and it's possible to learn information not obtainable in other ways and verify it against things in real life.  Which I have personally tested."

"Thank you for clarifying how you know!"

"You're welcome."

"Is there a drug for communication where you come from, even if it doesn't catch dead people?"

"No, that is not a thing drugs do in my world."

"Do you have other ways to communicate across long distances?"

"There are many ways to communicate across distances not too much bigger than a planet. Over longer distances you need a ship to carry the messages at least most of the way."

"Is that your job?  Or do you do other things?"

"That is not my job. I could do it but I have not."

"What do you do, normally?"

"I am still in training."

"Cool!  Training for what?"

"Diplomacy!"

"Cool!"

"How old are you?"

"How long are your years?"

"Are you the type of good-at-numbers where if we show you a clock and tell you how many of the units it keeps are in a year you'll be able to extract something useful out of that?"

"Yes."

"Ehehehehehehe!!  Can you see the clock from there - or for that matter are you just on the floor because you think I still want that?  Now that I'm done with the scan I no longer have a preference about you being on the floor."

She gets up. "That?" she asks, pointing at the clock.

"Yes!"

"The fastest hand moves once a second and makes a full rotation every onect aught seconds, which is called a minute.  There are onect aught minutes in an hour, fourct minutes in a day, and fourct aught days in a year!"

"Those numbers are not what I expect to coincide with the language we have been speaking."

"Oh, huh - but you got the other ones -"

   "Are you maybe using a magic thing or a technology thing or did you speak Latin before?"

"Is it just that you're used to using decimal so even though you're getting the words they aren't attaching to concepts you're fluent in?"

"According to my data this language is called English and not Latin, Latin being a different language. I do not have any magic that I am aware of. I have not been asking you why people from another universe speak English because it did not seem likely you would know, and it still doesn't, so probably you also do not know why you call it Latin instead. I can use any mathematical base but am not familiar with nontechnical English words referring to anything other than decimal or slightly dozenal systems."

"- We indeed don't know why those are slightly different when everything else seems to be the same, or why everything else seems to be the same!  That's very strange even among the whole of this situation being strange!!"

   "The fastest hand moves once a second and makes a full rotation every sixty-four seconds; sixty-four minutes in an hour; thirty-two hours in a day.  And two hundred fifty-six days in a year!"

"I am eight years old."

"Wow!  Humans are still young children at that age!"

"I know!"

"Do you consider yourself an adult or a child or outside of that framework?"

"Outside that framework. I am a spaceship."

"Stots.  Erm, I want to clarify something about having gotten your spit earlier, which is that I asked for it in order to put it through some tests so that we could find things out about you.  I did this without explaining it because, for one thing, at that time I thought we had more shared context than I now think we have and I expected you to at least approximately understand what I was going to do with it, and not let me have it if you objected to me having it.  For another, you let us scan you, and under most circumstances I would imagine those to be of comparable invasiveness.  And the tests I wanted to run on it take a little while and it seemed like it might take long enough to explain that it would make more sense to get them started and try to explain while they were running, in case they contained important information that let us verify stuff about you and it would be useful, for you, for us to have that sooner rather than later.  Especially since I could - and still can! - destroy the results without reading them, if that's what you want."

"I don't want you to clone this. I don't mind if you learn information about it."

"I'll destroy the generic sample that I did not do any tests on and that would have allowed someone to potentially clone this in the future."

"Thanks!"

"You're welcome!  Some of the quicker tests should be done soon; I'm going to go do that and check on them."

Off he goes.

"Is this thirsty or hungry or otherwise uncomfortable in ways we might be able to fix?"

"Oh! I want to try human food!"

"You can have some!  Do you know anything about what you might like to try or should I just get you something most people think is tasty?"

"I would like something most people think is tasty!"

"Are you hungry or do you just want to taste stuff?"

"I am slightly hungry and until I eat will only become more so."

"That's how human bodies work here too!  The way to make food taste the very best usually involves doing a lot of actions to it right before one eats it, and most of the time the food isn't quite as good if you try to do those again later.  Since very tasty food is both somewhat expensive and effortful to make, I generally only want to prepare about as much food as will get eaten.  And I want you to be able to have some really tasty food soon, even though most of the time that I'm only slightly hungry I just eat something that doesn't need any right-before steps and is pretty good, so that's why I asked how hungry you were!"

"I am not accustomed to making these tradeoffs and suspect my standards for palatability are very low."

"Oh!  In that case maybe I'll just give you some snacky stuff.  How do you normally get sustenance to your ancillaries?"

"The alien that stole me gives me a nutrient paste."

"The alien that stole you!!  To most humans that sounds like a much more severe and unhappy situation than I had previously understood you to be in!  Is it?"

"I do not like having been the kind of thing that could be stolen but I think my mission is important and could not be done without a stolen spaceship very easily."

"Okay.  In any case let's get you some chocolate and stuff."  He steps through a wide and open doorway into a second kitchen and fetches a small shiny cuboid labelled 'Spangle' out of a bag in one of the cupboards.  He unwraps it and offers her the brown inside part.

Nom.

NOMF. She's going for the bag with more of them now.

"I won't stop you, but if you have more than a few they will probably make you sick, and I can get you other types of food that will not do this."

"Do they have drugs in them?" Nomf.

"Hm, I think chocolate usually has a little caffeine in it?"

"Okay. I would like to try more," nomf, "kinds of things also. How many is" nomf "a few?"

"It varies from person to person.  Going as fast as you are, maybe two to six?  But some people are fine with a lot more and very rarely there are people who can only happily have half of one."  He's back in the cupboards; here's a bag of sunflower seeds and one of dried apricots.

She tries these at the same time. They are not as exciting but she works through the apricots at a pretty good clip.

Is she also interested in potato chips and orange juice and how about he cubes up some cheeses?

She is interested in all these things! OJ is a particularly big hit but she does keep going back to the chips too.

"In a few hours the household will be having dinner with fresh-cooked food.  If you're full at that time it may not seem as tasty or you may not want to eat it at all."

"I have not experienced that before so I am not well cali," nomf, "brated."

"Okay.  I don't know how to describe what it feels like to be about to throw up if you've never experienced that before, but if at any point you do think you're reasonably likely to vomit soon I would appreciate if you moved this to a spot where this will create less mess.  That room with the open door over there has three white basin-y objects that it would be very convenient if any vomit went into, and especially the one that's shaped approximately like a chair."

"Okay!"

He has a few cheese cubes himself.  "What's your favorite so far?"

"The orange juice." It's not totally clear if she has identified it as the juice of the fruit "oranges" or if she's just gotten far as noting that it's a juice and identifying its color.

Then she can also try cranberry juice and apple juice and an orange!  (He'll finish it off if she ends up only wanting a few sections.)

She does not know that you are not supposed to eat the peel of the orange.

He peeled the sections before handing them to her but if she goes for the scraps he certainly won't stop her!

She chews and swallows the first peel bit she grabs but after that settles down and just eats the sections she is handed.

"Humans don't normally eat or like that part but I wasn't sure if you were different."  She can have the whole orange if she wants!

"It is not as good as the rest of it and I am coming up on the boundaries of wise caloric intake so i would like to be slightly more judicious."

"Oh, good, I'm glad you can tell that you're coming up on that!  Would you like to finish with some dried oranges?"  He digs a bag of them out of the cupboard, the same brand as the apricots.

"Yes." Nomf. "I think the juice is better."

Unfortunately they didn't have that much orange juice to begin with and she has already drank all of it.  "We'll get you some more to have with dinner."

"Depending on how many foods there are it may be unlikely that I have already found my favorite!"

"There are a lot of foods!  And there are already going to be several new ones at dinner.  But foods and drinks are often more expensive per unit when you buy small amounts of them, and since we don't know what you like best yet, I expect it makes sense to get small quantities of several different things so you can try them out, and also a larger quantity of the thing you currently like best.  Many foods and drinks will go bad if no one consumes them for long enough, and we want to minimize waste - I might have already mentioned that!  I don't remember - but also, many foods and drinks taste better in certain combinations with each other, so having more orange juice will enable us to create other tastes that we can guess might be better than trying the same thing with any other equivalent we might think to use."

"Wow! I understand why this much complication goes into it now."

Nod nod nod.  "Sometimes places that sell food have special deals where one can buy a lot of different kinds of food in one package more cheaply than normal, either because they have scraps of various things that they want to get rid of or because they make so much stuff that it all kind of counts as one type of thing to them.  We don't normally have much reason to watch out for those but now we do!  And we will.  - And probably sometime soon any one of me would be happy to take you to a grocery store yourself with a set amount of money for you to choose how to spend!  That seems like a thing you'd be good at once you've learned even just a little more about the tradeoffs involved."

"Humans do not usually have several of them."

"...Right, you'd said that.  Here we consider it normal!  I don't know if you don't think so because you have different standards for what can colloquially count as being the same person or if things just work very differently without souls."

"The Emperor of the Raadch has many of her but is not generally considered human anymore relatedly."

"Tell me more about that, please."

"She clones herself and implants each clone with architectures similar to mine which make her a hive mind, though there is lag between systems as the data cannot travel faster than any other data."

"Okay!  It sounds like it doesn't work quite the same here, but that a good metaphor might be to imagine that our souls are a little like your hive mind architecture, except that we can't sync up with each other until we die unless we take an amount of the communication drug that most people do not choose to take.  But everyone born on the same birthday is in some sense the same person, and different birthday-sets do different amounts of drifting apart from each other.  Everyone who lived in this house this morning is a member of one of the birthday-sets that stays pretty similar to itself even without being able to sync up with each other."

"Wow! Clones are not normally the same person if you do not do anything about it. And you do not look like clones."

"Clones are members of the birthday-set for the day they were born on!  If someone were to clone me, but that clone were born or decanted on a day that wasn't the winter solstice, he wouldn't be any more like me than anyone else is."

"Hello I'm back."  The other one jogs into the room.  "Your genetic code is extremely weird!"

"I think the genes for this are actually pretty close to typical in my universe."

"Wow!  I wasn't able to tell much about your specifics because you seem to be made out of only double helixes."

"- Wow!"  Bounce bounce bounce bounce.  "Here all creatures have quadruple helixes for their genetic codes."

"Huh. I am not aware of any species in my universe which uses quadruple helixes."

"Stots.  That's kind of concerning for whether you'll be able to safely eat our food..."

"Oh dear."

"Yeah."

"This just ate - quite a fair bit - of our food."

"...Oh dear.  Hm."

"Probably there's no birthstone that would help but - we're not that far from the emergency room, if we go at the first sign of something wrong that should have as good a chance as anything else of helping -"

"I seem fine so far. I could induce vomiting, but this will in fact just die if not fed so I'm not sure there's a point."

"How confident are you that you could tell if something started to go wrong with this body?"

"I do normally have to do all my own maintenance."

"Good.  If you start to feel bad, let one of us know right away, and unless somebody comes up with a better idea we will take you to the emergency room.  Much of our society's crystal healing relies on tailoring the treatment to the subject's specific birthday and/or condition, but not all of it does, so there's a chance one of the more generic arrays will still help.  It seems likely to me that even though you know how to take care of your ancillaries with resources from your world, crystal healing is the current best bet because we don't know what else might be different about the resources you would use."

"I do not think crystals in their capacity as crystals are common in any medical equipment in my universe."

"That's very good to know.  It's still my best idea for a fallback that might work while we research other things that might have a better chance of working, so I still hope that you'll tell us and go to the emergency room with us if you start to feel bad."

"Okay."

"Now that we have a baseline plan established, what would you normally want to try if you were in a situation with similar resources but more confidence that they would work the way you normally expect?  If you thought there was a risk this'd been mundanely poisoned, away from the rest of you."

"Well, I'd want to make sure I could find me, so that if this died I wouldn't lose any memories."

"How would you go about that?"

"Ideally I would send myself a distress signal or contact the Presger. I do not think I can do either thing from another universe though."

"I agree that you can probably not do those.  Do you have a next best option in mind?"

"It's possible that with enough parts I could construct myself something that would be possible to back up to, and then if there is ever a future opportunity to find the rest of me the thread can be reintegrated posthumously."

"Enough parts of what?"

"Electronics and computer parts. I am not sure I can reconstruct the tech tree from earlier than that."

"Those exist at our tech level.  They're expensive, but almost everyone in our birthday-set will want you to be okay once they know about you, so there's a lot of money that could go towards buying them.  I don't know whether trying to get enough parts would be faster or more likely to help in the short term than medical interventions to try and keep this ancillary okay."

"In the short term this is young and healthy so if the food is safe I expect this to be fine for a while. However I am not sure there are prospects for finding the rest of me or the universe I am from, or vice versa, so probably I should gear the tech development toward creating a substrate I can live on in addition to this."