Even with perfect reaction speed, there are simple physical limits that I couldn’t overcome. For example, I couldn’t change my trajectory in time to avoid what appeared to be a massive tear in space that had appeared out of nowhere below me. One millisecond, I’d been plunging down towards a hot hellscape at terminal velocity in a thin atmosphere, and the next millisecond, a 100-meter diameter hole to elsewhere had winked into existence intersecting my trajectory. Immediately concerning were two things:

I couldn’t avoid hitting the whatever-it-was. I was simply too fast. The ground inside (behind?) whatever-it-was was unnervingly close.

Then came pain as I hit the strange hole along with an accompaniment of other weird sensations. For one, it felt as if I’d suddenly bellyflopped into a swimming pool filled with syrup: compared to the thin air of the inhospitable planet I’d just been heading towards moments ago, the air I was rushing through now was positively soupy. My gravity and magnetic senses were also throwing a fit, as they couldn’t find a validated solve for my current situation. Magnetic and gravitational fields clashed together in an interaction complex enough that it could’ve spawned at least a couple papers, if not a doctorate, had there been a physicist to witness the event. The closest guess my analysis suite had, was that there were two planets below me and somehow occupying the same space—something that should be impossible.

Regrettably, I didn’t have the control authority to avoid this strange phenomenon and rushed right through the large ring and into the thicker air, heavier gravity, and altogether different world in the span of milliseconds.

That’s when problem number two reared its ugly head: wherever this was, I was much closer to the ground than I’d been before. On hell-world, I’d had a couple klicks to go before I hit the surface, but here, I only had a couple hundred meters to go until I hit the… forest? I made the skinsuit around my ears permeable to get a proper pressure reading and I was relieved at what I found: the atmosphere here was thick, and while I couldn’t get a proper gravimetric reading while in freefall, it appeared to be somewhere around one standard gravity. Judging by the rapidly decreasing distance to the ground, I had two hundred meters to go and seventy something meters per second of velocity to kill. That was something easily within the design tolerances of my chute.

Mentally activating the parachute, I monitored it as the chute-nanos streamed out behind me from their pack and then formed a billowing sheet which was anchored to me through hundreds of thin filaments. Then, the acceleration began to pile on, and for a couple moments, I felt inordinately heavy—not for long though. Once my speed stabilized to a comfortable glide, it was time to find a landing site.

Below me, there was a clearing. Maybe a couple hundred meters across, it was surrounded by a tall and imposing wall of what appeared to be old-growth deciduous trees. In the clearing, there were what appeared to be a bunch of dead people. Well, that’s not a bad omen or anything.

Of course, this was just my luck: Escaping from indenture and then ending up somewhere I shouldn’t be and surrounded by dead people. Knowing my track record, I thought that it was only a matter of time before I was blamed for this—whatever it was—too. Still, there wasn’t anything I could do about it now and choosing a landing site wasn’t particularly hard. Landing in the trees wouldn’t be comfortable, and anyways, there were plenty of clear spots without corpses to land on.

When my feet were only meters away from the grass below, my chute flared, and killed the rest of my velocity. Gently, I was set down in the grass, and left to survey my surroundings as the chute decohered and blew away in a cloud of gray mist.

I had no idea what to do. Original Elise hadn’t ever been off world, let alone on a different planet around an alien star. On the other hand, indentured Elise, of course, had been. I gently skimmed through my half-memories and found countless examples, many of them rather recent too. Along with those came lessons. Lessons about how to behave on alien worlds, what to do, and what to watch out for. When I’d been assigned to planetary survey, discovering these dangers before these dangers discovered the colonists or other human visitors had been my task, and oh boy, I’d cataloged a lot of them.

Some dangers were rather simple and straightforward: Poisonous atmospheres, highly caustic or acidic oceans, rampant tectonic activity, or highly aggressive weather patterns. Others were more nuanced: Dangerous predators that only occasionally burrowed out from beneath the ground to hunt, fungal spores which only bloomed every fifty years but ate through all sorts of polymers when they did, or plants that just smelled extremely bad to human noses. Finally, there were the intelligent threats. Hostile primitives, ancient but functional automated weapons systems, pirate outposts, and much, much more.

My memories told me to take caution, no matter how familiar everything may seem at first glance. The first test on the docket was atmosphere, and I’d already figured out that it wasn’t extremely caustic or corrosive. My ears had already been exposed, and well, they hadn’t melted or anything. The next test was to take a sniff. I retracted my skinsuit from my head and took a little breath through my nose.

It smelled warm and like nitrogen. Approximately 22 degrees Celsius and ballpark 80% nitrogen with most of the rest being oxygen. There were some trace gasses in there too, but nothing dangerous. I could breathe regularly here, and, in fact, combined with the pressure reading, this planet was remarkably close to the ideal requirements for baseline humans. Strange. Satisfied with the air’s safety, I stopped holding the breath I’d taken on the Former Applause and started breathing regularly again.

Gasses weren’t the only thing that my nose had picked up. There was also water vapor, and scents which were indicators of a rich, carbon-based biosphere. That was also obvious by the flora and fauna that surrounded me. Avoiding the dead for now, I walked to the edge of the clearing and investigated the forest.

Interestingly, the human-compatibility rating that this planet seemed to be developing was only further supported by the flora. I couldn’t directly identify any of the plants—that would need gene-typing which I was unequipped for—but they looked rather like the plants that had populated my terraformed home planet and accompanied humans wherever they spread through the cosmos.

Besides biological molecules, and a faint woodsmoke scent, my sniff test also hadn’t picked up any industrial byproducts—and it wasn’t even that there were few pollutants—there were no pollutants or signs of heavy industry at all. All signs pointed to “garden world”. That was unusual. Even a single modern factory on the far side of the planet would been detectable by the artificial trace gasses that it would have inevitably released into the atmosphere.

Added to that, I wasn’t picking up anything on my lower-wavelength sensors. No radio chatter, no encrypted bands, and not even a satellite navigational interface. What is this? A luddite’s dream world? I couldn’t quite figure it out, so I walked over to the dead people to learn more. Lamentably, the dead only raised more questions.

They were human—or at least appeared to be human; it wasn’t possible to tell definitively without something more invasive like a genetic scan. Still, these were the strangest humans I’d ever seen: maybe my guess about Luddites wasn’t so far off. Furthermore, calling them baseline humans would’ve been an insult to humans everywhere. They reminded me of pictures of our precursors, the long-extinct Homo Sapiens. I flipped some over and took a closer look at their faces.

Yup. They matched history database descriptions astoundingly well: Asymmetrical faces, occasional visible birth defects, skin conditions that made them look diseased, and musculature that looked like it would falter against a strong breeze. What are they doing here? As far as the databases I had knew, the last Homo Sapiens disappeared over a thousand years ago: all through either upgrading themselves or simply being outcompeted by the people they’d created. Is this some sort of holdout colony?

Even stranger was their temperature. I wasn’t an expert in forensics or anything, but most clues pointed towards the hypothesis that they’d died rather recently. They weren’t decomposing, they weren’t being eaten by wild animals, and they didn’t seem to have sustained life-ending injuries. Illness was a possibility. With their sickly and emaciated appearances combined with the fact that primitive humans were known to have some rather barbaric medical practices and beliefs, I couldn’t rule out illness as the cause of death.

Still, that didn’t explain the most confounding fact about the whole arrangement: they were all cold. They were so cold in fact, that their current state should be thermodynamically impossible: they were colder than their surroundings, many of them near freezing. Assuming that they weren’t generating heat, they should reach temperature equilibrium with their surroundings rather quickly. In fact, that’s what they were doing at that moment, but unlike regular corpses, they were getting warmer. How did they get so cold in the first place? Maybe this planet has a very cold night cycle? I decided it was a just another mystery for the long queue.

At this point, I was at something of a loss. I didn’t know what to do. Earlier, my plan had been straightforward: escape from the Former Applause, hike to one of the habitation domes, find some sympathizers, and then go forwards from there. Now though, I was on a strange and remarkably habitable planet with a bunch of mysteriously dead people who shouldn’t exist, and no clear explanation of how I’d gotten here.

Well, there are some reasonable assumptions I can make. For example, since these humans look like they’re original Homo Sapiens, then I’ve landed somewhere that is either ignored or outside of modern human space.

Furthermore, radio activity appears to be dead silent excepting background radiation. That means that this system is completely uncharted: otherwise, there would be a mandated claim or navigation buoy pinging broadcasts all around local space.

Several possibilities immediately sprung to mind, most of them from bad fiction. What if this is some sort of post-apocalyptic holdout or techno-regression society? These types of stories were classics and did, in fact, have some real-life examples: very rarely, a small human colony would simply be forgotten and not re-discovered until centuries later. Assuming any humans had survived, these colonies often had legends or oral history of “ancestors from the stars” and had long since reverted to a more primitive society. Fortunately, that was rather easy for me to check. Even if this society had been isolated from humanity for a couple hundred—or even a thousand—years, written and spoken languages shouldn’t have changed too quickly. Compensating for a bit of syntactic or calligraphic drift shouldn’t be too difficult.

Taking the initiative, I took to searching for clues among the dead, and immediately got lucky: many of the bodies had data storage devices on them. Namely, books. I greedily snatched one up and detached it from its fastening. I knew how these worked from my university studies on history, and regardless, they weren’t so hard to figure out.

Opening a book revealed what looked like written language to me. Small, dense lines of glyphs or letters adorned the pages in neat rows. Eagerly, I rapidly paged through the whole thing, but besides noticing some patterns which seemed to delineate chapters or indicate formatting, I couldn’t extract any of its secrets. Even more annoyingly, the fact that none of the glyphs or symbols looked even remotely like anything that I had in my local databases wasn’t a good sign for the “technological regression society” theory.

I moved on to the next person, who also had a visible book. Unfortunately, it became clear rather quickly that the two books were the same, or at least had the same content. This book looked like a handwritten copy of the other one. Further spot checks revealed the same thing: each of the similarly dressed men had a book with almost identical contents. Strangely, besides the robes, books, and shoes, they didn’t have accoutrements on them except for small metallic symbols attached on bracelets or necklaces.

I’m starting to get the feeling that these people weren’t “normal”, even by their society’s presumed standards. There weren’t many societies or cultures, both modern or historical, where people all dressed the same and all carried a similar book and nothing else. Could this have something to do with religion? Now that’s a new idea. Of course! Primitive humans were always doing things for their God or gods. Maybe, this was some sort of religious ceremony?

The bodies and their books wouldn’t teach me more. The next step is to go through their stuff. I looked around the clearing and off to one side I spotted what appeared to be a collection bags, bundles, and crates. Looking closer, I could also spot what were probably pack animals deeper in the woods. Their stuff.

I walked over and as I left the circular patch of bodies, a thought struck me: Why wasn’t I disturbed by all the corpses? After landing, I’d walked right up to them and started touching them, rolling them over, checking their pockets, taking their books, and generally disturbing the dead. I knew that I should feel… disgusted? Distraught? I didn’t though. Apparently, my time as an indentured had driven out my capacity for squeamishness. Just great. And now I’m going to go through these dead people’s belongings. Hopefully, their ‘god’ or whatever isn’t angry.