“Don’t drive with your mouth full or you’ll be driving with your mouth empty,” was her Pops favorite quote whenever he’d been a passenger along for a ride. She still had a full mouth of teeth, so that showed how much he adhered to his sayings.

Pops was a tough guy act. The moment she had realized it, she had been freed in a way her brothers hadn’t been. Pops knew it, she knew it, mother knew it, but her brothers… well, they were dumb-asses.

Maya smiled at the thought as she chewed on a remainder of a sandwich and held a bottle of water in one hand, using her wrists to steady the steering wheel.

Something bothered her as she travelled along the empty wasteland. It had been nearly a hundred miles and she still hadn’t seen any kind of plant life. Science was a subject she had learned and promptly forgotten afterwards. She had been getting a degree in business management, but from what she’d learned through television and Youtube videos, a world like this shouldn’t exist.

One, the gravity felt the same. She didn’t really know if it was, but everything still felt as it should feel, not heavier or lighter or different. Just normal. She knew gravity was based on the mass of an object, so did that mean that this place was the same mass as Earth? Although she understood that mass didn’t equate to size, so that it might be smaller than Earth, but with the same mass.

That in itself was an anomaly. Two places in different dimensions with the same mass, therefore the same gravity? The odds of that happening were probably millions to one… or one in a billion.

Two, the air was breathable. No trees, no grass, should mean no air. Unless there was some other way that oxygen was being made. There were alien machines laying abandoned in the dirt, it could be that there were giant machines that were making breathable atmosphere.

Perhaps the screwed up rainbow sky was a result of some kind of massive alien terraforming experiment. Hopefully friendly aliens who wouldn’t be peeved with her driving about.

Then again, who said the rules of a different dimension would adhere to the rules of the one she had come from. That thought frightened her. It was one of those existential thoughts she’d rather not dwell on or she would freak herself out. Like the size of the universe. But like an aching tooth, she had to prod it.

Her head hurt from all the thoughts. Maybe if she hadn’t just done the basic requirements in science she’d have a better handle on what was going on. Maybe her university had a Dimensions 101 class…

Maya frowned. Remembering the message she had received when she got the Unstable Survivor title. There had been a Dimensions 101 prize or gift or loot involved. She wondered again where it was. Maybe that would have solved some of her questions.

But with her luck, it would probably have a huge amount of foundational science she didn’t even know before she could understand the subject. She chuckled. According to her status screen, her luck was pretty high.

The truck shuddered for a second and Maya glanced down at the speedometer and slowed down. She shook her head, she shouldn’t be wandering off on tangential thoughts when she was in the middle of an unknown place.

She checked down at her gas gauge and saw that it had dropped to nearly two-thirds. She had estimated three hundred miles and she’d already chewed through a third of it without seeing anything remotely like civilization.

The dreadful thought that there was nothing out here chewed at the edge of her thoughts. She didn’t want to think about that, it was something that would drive her to despair.

“Don’t get your head stuck up your own ass, work the damn problem!” Pops words of comfort echoed in her head. She would not get her head stuck up her own ass.

Perhaps it was the rainbow sky effecting her vision or some kind of mirage going on; but one moment Maya felt that she was still within the flat gray plains and the next there was a giant hill dominating the sky.

“Crap,” Maya muttered, blinking.

She felt like she had been driving for days, but her odometer displayed 89 miles. She hadn’t even reached a hundred like she had thought.

The hill was still a fair distance away, so like most of the world, it was still in the dark gloom. She could make out the shape of it against the sky, but she kept an eye on it as she drove. She soon realized the entire hill was unnatural.

Maya slowed the truck and peered at the hill. The land was still flat plains then suddenly the hill sprouted out of the ground. Instead of the sloping sides of a natural hill, there were jagged edges and what looked like metallic poles jutting from the side. She couldn’t make out much from the gloom, but she could see remnants of machines and buildings. Stacked without reason or order.

What she saw was a garbage heap.

In high school she had done a report on landfills. It reminded her of the pictures she had included in the report, great massive mounds of trash being shaped into hills with bulldozers. The hill she looked at was exactly that, minus the bulldozers.

Beyond the trash hill she could make out bigger hills.

“Great,” Maya sighed. “I’m stuck in the junk yard of the universe.”

Investigating the dead alien industrial bot in the wasteland had been one thing, but as Maya slowly drove around the massive pile of trash, she knew she would not be getting out of her truck anytime soon. She looked up at the dark hills and couldn’t shake the thought of something looking back.

“The trash hills have eyes,” she muttered.

The first trash hill was detoured around; she still couldn’t see much of it, but as she drove by the hill she passed what appeared to be a dead robotic spider. She eased her foot of the accelerator and came to a stop twenty feet from the robot.

It wasn’t huge, about the size of a dog, but it was definitely a robot of some sort. Perhaps another industrial bot, but the design looked entirely different and it seemed more… menacing.

It had a dozen legs that all looked very sharp and very deadly. It lay on what Maya assumed was its back and had those deadly looking legs jutting outward. Green and yellow paint covered the metallic torso along with what appeared to be writing, but she didn’t know what the language was.

Rogue AI KNIZ47 Defense Drone

Maya felt a trickle of fear as she read the words. Defense drone. What was it defending? Well, obviously this Rogue AI. That in itself caused another bloom of fear. What was a rogue AI and was it dangerous? Well, rogue anything was probably not something that was controlled or confined or friendly.

“Just avoid the crazy robots,” Maya told herself.

Yet the drone didn’t seem to have been operational lately, as Maya didn’t see any tracks around it. So it had to have ‘died’ some time ago. She wasn’t sure about the weather patterns of this place, but she hadn’t felt even the slightest stir of wind, except from the truck itself moving. Yet her own footprints and tire tracks had visibly stood out on the ground.

The thought comforted her somewhat. Like the industrial bot, this defense drone seemed to have been sitting in one place for a long time. That meant, non-functional, right?

“So much alien stuff, I bet I could make a fortune if I brought that back home,” Maya said.

If there was still a home left. Maya stamped down on that thought and shook her head.

“Did the black lightning bring all of this?” she wondered. She glanced hesitantly at the sky, wondering if those black cracks in the rainbow sky would drop a semi truck on her.

How long had stuff being appearing on this world, she wondered.

She had driven nearly a hundred miles with nothing but gray dirt and now she was seeing mountains of trash everywhere. Maybe this was the designated dumping ground or things grabbed from outside of this dimension were just randomly placed anywhere.

Maya craned her neck toward the summit of the nearest trash mountain and felt her mind seized at the thought of how long the trash had been accumulating here. She didn’t see any black lightning bringing any items since she had arrived, so that would mean it wasn’t a continuous thing. Either it was happening all the time but not in her area currently or it all happened at once and the skies opened up raining trash.

From what she could see of the items in the trash hills, she didn’t spot anything that looked ‘new’. There were plenty of things that were seemingly in good condition, but nothing that screamed of them being freshly brought into this world. Everything had a dusty dull look to them, as if the color was being leached from the materials.

They looked old.

Her food truck on the other hand still looked new, even with its coat of traveling dust.

Then again Maya didn’t know much about how things aged in this dimension. It could be everything just turned to goop one day or via some magical means it all rusted away.

She looked at the trash mountain again and looked at the even more distant trash mountains. Everything seemed to be piled one upon another, until they formed a large hill of junk. That meant they were all being transported into the same area, enough so that they began to pile up.

Why had she appeared so far removed from everything? She and the food truck should have appeared in or upon one of these trash piles, instead of nearly a hundred miles out into the wasteland.

Maya needed to make a file of all the questions she needed answered. All of it, for now, she could only answer with a shrug.

She continued driving again, keeping her eye peeled.

A quote from a movie rose to Maya’s mind as she peered at a distant trash hill.

“God doesn’t build in straight lines.”

Of course, as everything she had been seeing was unnatural, that didn’t mean much. But a straight line caught her eye and as she aimed her truck toward a distant trash hill, Maya began to feel a surge of excitement.

Maya liked to think she had a good general knowledge of science fiction, she could tell the difference between Star Trek and Star Wars, for example, and her brothers had been big into science fiction horror in their tweens. She had been subjected to a lot of B-movie science fiction when she had to babysit them. Eventually she had even dipped her toe into other science fiction shows and movies.

Therefore, Maya figured she knew a space ship when she saw one.

It was a massive ship. A hundred feet of the vessel was visible with the rest of it buried under a mountain of trash. As with everything in the trash hills, the craft gave off the ‘old’ feeling. The metallic hull was dulled and dusty and from what Maya could see, the ship itself was half buried in the ground.

Either it had crashed or like her truck, had been transported wholly onto the ground. If it were the former, then that meant that it had dug itself into the ground, but if it was the latter… the ship had been there for a very, very long time. Long enough for a trash mountain to form atop of it.

Maya saw a large gash running along the side of the ship. Her forensics skill couldn’t tell if it had happened before or after the ship had arrived.

“The shields failed and a spread of laser missiles took it out,” Maya said. “No, photon railguns!”

She smiled at the thought and frowned after a moment.

“It’s pretty ugly,” she announced.

The exposed section of the ship was a rectangular block, but along its hull stood out bulges and cylinders. It wasn’t trash littering the ship, but it seemed to be apart of the ship itself. There weren’t any elegant lines like from Star Trek, instead it appeared that someone had just randomly attached items to the hull. It looked very industrial.

“Don’t be a garbage ship,” she said. “I have a high luck stat, maybe it’s going to be an ice cream ship.”

Maya chuckled. It really was an ugly ship.

Then again, she wasn’t a space ship engineer, so… maybe to cross the vastness of space, one had to travel in a trashy looking space ship. Or alien sensibilities were that it was a fine and gorgeous looking ship.

Maya removed her phone from her inventory. The light wasn’t great, but with a few filters she had a fantastic picture of the alien vessel.

“I’m going viral,” she smiled.

She continued staring at the alien craft and felt her thoughts coalescing.

Eventually she would have to do something. She had to find a way home and she had to survive until then. With limited supplies, she had to find a way to live beyond the month she had.

She had spent an hour traveling through the trash hills. She had peered into them and they were parts of buildings, machines, and broken pieces of whatever the black lightning had ripped out of the universe. The alien ship was the only whole, intact thing she had seen so far.

She could keep traveling onward, seeing how far she could get with the remainder of her fuel and then hope that there was something out there. Perhaps in another hundred miles there was an interdimensional airport to take her home.

Maya didn’t believe that. She had to be pragmatic. A slow death awaited her. She had to act. She had to get her head out of her ass and get to work.

There was a ship. One thing she knew about space ships in fiction was that they were like old-timey ocean crossing ships. They had crews, they had supplies, that meant food, water, and medicine. Maybe they also had information on how they got here and how she could leave.

The ship might not be her key to leaving and it might hold nothing of value to her, for she didn’t even know how long it had been there. Even so, she knew she had begin somewhere. The clock on her survival was already ticking away. She had to start working toward that goal, not just driving around.

The ship looked old and the trash pile seemed to be both plentiful and undisturbed. The crew was probably dead. The System had said her survival had been a one in a billion chance. If this ship got sucked into this dimension, then the crew probably died.

There was no one to stop her from going in.

“Let’s see what this scary ass alien ship holds,” she said to no one.

Grunting, Maya hefted the crowbar on her shoulder and headed toward the rip in the side of the ship. The jagged scar made a wandering line of destruction, beginning from a thin line to a giant hole as it reached the surface. The metal around the edges of the hole were melted and twisted, blistered and rough. The hull itself was fairly thick and like the industrial bot she had seen earlier, blue runes were etched into the metal of the hull.

“Enchantments?” Maya wondered. There had to be magic with this System, why else have a soul stat. Maybe this was how magic worked, enchantments and runes and engravings.

Maya adjusted the crowbar and squared her shoulders, then walked toward the opening.