Sally woke to the tenth day of living by the garbage heap.

Even though there was now an extensive collection of junk spaced out on the main floor, they really hadn’t made much of an impression on the main pile. Jon didn’t seem to care; he just kept plugging away.

She had stopped asking Jon for updates about what he had found. They were either too technical or completely indecipherable, like, what the heck was a strudd of an Indisul, anyway? What they hadn’t found was a way out, or even something like a flying car, a working game system, an internet connection, or some way to make good food.

Sally was getting tired of a diet of roots, seeds, and berries, except without the berries. There weren’t even any spider-rabbits. Probably because they didn’t want to eat toxic radioactive garbage, and there wasn’t anything else to attract them to this area. Jon occasionally ate some of the pellets, leaves, and grass, but they weren’t something she could digest. She was close to going back to where they’d spent their first night in the arena to see if any spider-rabbits had moved in.

Sally knew she shouldn’t complain, but she did anyway. When she was tired of complaining to the gods of this place, she complained to Jon. After listening to her a few times, he had stopped giving her advice and she was pretty sure he did the equivalent of turning on an internal music player while she was ranting, but when she was on a roll, she didn’t want to stop.

She didn’t complain all the time. She spent a lot of her day traveling up and down the edge of the garbage heap, trying to find something interesting. But, she was afraid to touch things after her experience with the energy tap. She kept imagining the worst that could happen and was half convinced she would cause a nuclear melt-down if she moved the wrong thing.

Jon had taken some pity on her, or had tried to get rid of her, either way, he had his sensor fly around a large area of the garbage pile and had it paint the potentially dangerous areas a bright yellow color. He told her to be careful since there still might be something he couldn’t detect, but she would probably be safe if she stayed away from the indicated regions.

Sally wasn’t really a timid whiner. Her real problem was that she was so far out of her depth that she didn’t know how to deal with what was going on. She forced herself to start poking at the safe areas, and when she didn’t die she started to get more into the work.

After a few days, she’d finally given in and asked for some shoes to protect her feet as she climbed the pile. Instead, Jon had found a set of planks and made her some skis. Using them she would be able to shuffle-walk on top of the densely packed garbage without struggling up and down the little dips and crevasses, and they dramatically reduced the chance of her feet punching through, chancing serious damage.

Sally had grown up where people skied, but she had never learned. It turned out that she wasn't a natural. Her first day had been spent learning how to get back up after she fell over. It would have been easier with some poles to help with her balance, but so far, she hadn’t found anything suitable. Everything she tried was too short, too flexible, too heavy, or made her break out in a rash. She struggled on, and after a day of practice, she was falling less, but still not confident enough to hazard the main pile.

At the moment, Sally was lying on the debris pile looking up at the distant ceiling, gathering her energy to get back up onto her skis for the, oh, probably fifty-millionth time. Jon wandered into her view and looked down at her.

“So, Jon. Are you going to make me some poles?”

“No.They are not suited for the debris pile. The odds of you leaning on a pole when it will not support you are too high. Using the skis alone is a much less dangerous mode of travel.”

“Thanks. It’s nice to know that you are looking out for my best interests.”

“You’re welcome. I have been thinking of a way you can contribute, and I would like to share the results of my investigation.”

“Well. You just happened to have caught me at an opportune moment. I do not appear to have anything else on my plate, right now.”

“That was my observation, too.”

He continued, “Much of the technology contained in this pile is not something you are familiar with. There are, though, some things you may recognize. Your pattern matching algorithms are most suited to your human experience and you have little in the way of racial, or other forms of group experiential memory transfer.”

“Uh-huh.” Sally kept staring at the ceiling. She was starting to get comfortable. That was good. if she knew Jon, and she did, it was likely to take a while until he got to the point.

“You also do not have much in the way of direct memory transfer capability. You do have, though, shown some ability to contribute by combining disparate bits of information to resolve methods and approaches that I do not have a record of. I have been pondering the best way to utilize this capability to maximize your contribution to the various stated and implied goals we are addressing...” And so on.

Sally wasn’t not listening. She found it was best to soak in everything Jon said and see if it eventually made some sort of sense. Jon did not appear to get offended when, occasionally, she found his lectures to be extremely useful for inducing slumber. Her estimate was that the current discussion might fall into that category.

She probably should stay awake, though, because he had just given her a backhanded compliment. That was rare. She tuned back in.

“... by taking your time to use your skis to do an overall scan of the pile, there is a chance you will see relationships that I cannot, so, that would result in a mutual benefit.”

“Okay," she began. "You want me to try walking over the safe sections of the pile and see if I can form some sort of impression that might give us some insight?”

“Essentially yes.”

“Wasn’t that what I was going to do, anyway?”

“Yes, I thought it was important to state the objectives.”

It sounded to Sally that Jon was trying to come up with some sort of make-work project to keep her busy. Deep down she realized that compared to him, she was a huge zero. It just wasn’t fair, no matter how you looked at it! She wasn’t feeling sleepy anymore and managed to sit up, angrily struggling with the skis.

“So, Jon,” she started, and then completely lost it, “WHY AM I HERE??? Really, what am I contributing? Basically nothing! It’s depressing. Yeah, I have my moments, but compared to you, what can I do? I’m completely useless!” She was well and truly on a rant.

Jon watched her, patient as ever. This just ticked her off even more. She yelled about the unfairness of everything as she tore off her skis and threw them away. She leaped to her feet and began throwing anything else she could find after them. She blamed Jon, the garbage pile, the gods of this place, her skis, the food, pretty much anything and everything.

After a number of minutes raging, she started to flag. Bouts of quiet were interspersed between periods of yelling. Slowly she wound down, stopped throwing things, and simply stood and panted. Her hair had come loose and hung over her face.

Jon waited until it was she was done. He then waited a little longer. Eventually, he broke the silence. “I am sorry, but do not have enough information to resolve this issue at this time.”

Sally wasn’t sure which issue he meant, but she didn’t really care. She’d had enough. Brushing past Jon, she stomped to the campsite. Jon watched her for a moment, then went back to his sorting. For no good reason, Sally fired up the subspace tap and sat in its heat, staring at the orange cube and trying very hard to think about nothing.

She had no idea if it was near lunch time, or not, but she was hungry. She pulled a few seeds out of the bag and popped one into her mouth, chewing was good for using up her angry energy.

It took a half hour, or so, for her to calm down, absorbing heat and chewing on the seeds. She looked at Jon who was industriously doing... something. She felt a bit bad about going off on him when he was just trying to help. It wasn’t his fault, it wasn’t her fault. It was the fault of whoever had brought them here. She was starting to develop a distinct dislike for whoever had done this. She sure hoped that they had a good reason for everything, at least one of her had died for whatever was going on.

While she watched Jon work, she began to feel a little guilty. She was contributing even less than nothing while she sat here. She managed to roust herself, turned off the tap, and headed back to the garbage heap.

She struggled up the slope to where she’d thrown her skis. Jon had worked in this area and in the process had packed it and removed most of the sharp objects. She strapped her skis on, then stood up and immediately fell the wrong way, tumbling down the slope to the floor. Lying on the floor at the bottom of the garbage pile, she wasn’t angry. She’d used that up. This was not the first time she had tumbled all the way to the floor. Perhaps she should’ve learned to avoid falling all that way the first time it happened. Or the second.

Sally took the skis off, picked them up, and struggled back up to the top. As she should have done, she faced toward the back wall when she strapped on the skis, so she couldn’t tumble all the way down to the floor if she fell. After standing for a while. she decided it was time to stop procrastinating and slowly shuffled out onto the main area of the pile. After some near falls, she finally got her balance and found herself shuffle-skiing in a mostly forward direction. After all the effort to get this far, it seemed that the skis worked quite well. She got a rhythm going and glided nicely over the small cracks and sharp things.

After a few minutes, Sally had traveled a fair distance and realized that maybe she should have planned things a little better. Or at all. She might be seriously hurt if she fell out here. Going straight was getting better, but it would probably be a good idea if she found a way to turn. It took some trial and error and a few close calls, but eventually, she found that the garbage pile was wide enough to permit her to make broad turns without incurring too much risk.

As her skills improved, Sally took the time to look around. Since the garbage made little hills and valleys, there were some areas that weren’t visible from the edge. She started exploring, keeping away from the yellow zones.

It struck her that although there were a number of small things lying on the surface, she didn’t have anything to carry them in. It would have been smart to have brought a bag, or even better, she could have had Jon make her a bag with a shoulder strap so she could easily pick things up and put them in the bag using only one hand. Sally thought about it for a while. Maybe she would want two bags, just in case the things she picked up didn’t get along.

She meandered back and forth, looking at various items. She found a lot of stuff like paper, some of which was printed with writing and lines, but nothing she could read. There was string, rope, empty boxes, pieces of metal and other stuff she couldn’t identify, and a lot of junk. What she saw wasn’t high-quality stuff, but it was more than what she'd found while walking along the edge of the pile. Maybe someone else had already picked up those easy-to-get things.

She worked her way toward the wall, occasionally going back to her starting point to drop stuff off. The wall of the arena loomed over her, going up as far as she could see, but she was getting used to the scale of it. As she neared the wall, she noticed that the garbage had left marks on it, in a few places. This was novel, because, until now, the walls hadn’t ever had any sort of noticeable smudges or marks.

Sally broke away from her search pattern and went closer to examine the marks. She could only see a few ends of vertical lines and one or two horizontal arcs. The arcs and lines would be really big if they continued under the garbage to the floor.

Sally made a big quarter circle turn so she would be parallel to the wall when she got close. She was getting better at this. As she neared the wall she found that the lines were surprisingly uniform; they looked like strokes a huge paintbrush would make. In fact, they looked exactly like something a paintbrush would make. There were even bristle marks. She began to get excited.

She hurry-shuffled back toward the area where Jon was working.

“Jon! Jon! I may have found something!” she yelled as she neared.

Jon put down what he had been carrying and turned to face her. Sally reached the end of the pile, untied her skies, tumbled down to the floor, and explained to him what she had found.

One thing she appreciated about Jon was that he took her seriously and always listened. Once she was done he looked toward the wall, but instead of approaching it himself, she saw his sensor fly over. She climbed the pile to watch, and Jon accompanied her. The sensor landed on the wall and started crawling over the marks, which were difficult for her to see from this far away.

“You are correct,” he said, after a while. “The markings are artificial. We will have to move some of the material obscuring them to find if they are meaningful or not.”

Sally did her little happy dance. “I'm not entirely useless!” she sang, “at least not all the time.”

Jon made it look easy as he walked across the debris to the wall. He was already studying the marks before Sally had even managed strap on her skis. As she shuffled nearer, Jon faced her. “This will take a while," he stated. "I will open up a small area so we can obtain a better sample of the markings and see if they are meaningful. It is important to ensure that anything we move is preserved. In the future, we may discover that something we have found here is significant, in its own right.”

Say didn’t care, she just wanted to see what was on the wall.

Careful for Jon was still fast, so he quickly cleared out a fair amount of the garbage near one of the horizontal arcs. He had apparently estimated how deep the garbage was, and had started about this distance away from the wall so when he was done there would be a 45-degree slope to the bottom of the wall.

Jon moved back and forth, and more of the wall was exposed. Long before they had dug to the floor Sally exclaimed, “It is a letter “e”! I can read it! It’s in English!”

Jon didn’t stop. He kept excavating until the entire letter was exposed. It really was a lower case “e”.

Sally was so excited, she was hopping up and down, as best she could while wearing skis.

Jon continued excavating to the right of the previous area. It took a while but this time they uncovered an “r”.

Sally was becoming thirsty. Jon would keep working without her, and she could eat and drink while he was busy. There was no really handy local source of water, but Jon had occasionally made trips to one of the structures and brought back water when she needed it. Jon had also made a little toilet area using a bucket thing they had found, Jon took it with him when he got water. Sally assumed he emptied it into the grass he had planted. She didn’t really want to know the details.

She ate, washed up, then strapped her skis back on and returned to the wall. Jon had uncovered “er here”. It was most definitely a message. Jon worked further to the right and eventually uncovered an arrow pointing to a doorway that he had also uncovered. The doorway was packed with garbage.

Jon stopped digging here and walked over to the left side of the excavation area, next to the “er”, and resumed digging there. He uncovered a “t” and was starting on the next area, when he stopped.

He walked over to Sally. “I think we have another body.”

Sally’s stomach dropped. Reluctantly, she skied over to the latest part of the excavation. There was a hand poking out of the refuse, garbage, ground, whatever. From what she could see, it was just skin and bones, but the big difference was that it had to be easily twice as long as her own hand.

Jon licked it.

“In spite of how it looked. it is another you.”

He then started moving stuff to uncover more of the body. He was very careful not to disturb anything around it, but as far as she could see, the stuff he was moving was just a random collection of junk. When he had exposed the body, Jon didn’t stop but continued excavating in a circle about ten feet around it, right down to the floor. By now, the body was displayed on a sort of pedestal made of garbage.

The body was really strange. It sort of looked like a dried out Sally, but had to be at least 7 feet tall! It had her hair, but everything else seemed all stretched out. It, she, was wearing a filthy green dress, no shoes or anything else, as far as Sally could tell. She wasn’t ready to check for underwear.

On the middle finger of the body’s right hand was a ring, but it reached from the base of her finger to her first knuckle. Because the hand was so long the ring had to be at least three inches wide. As best she could tell, it was made of some sort of metal and etched with a very ornate pattern.

Jon stopped and looked at her. “So far, I see no companion,” he said.

“Let me have a look,” Sally demanded. Jon remained silent.

Sally took off her skis and made her way to the body. Jon had done a good job of removing anything sharp or dangerous, but the footing was quite rough. In spite of her best efforts, she knew she would have to treat a cut or two that evening. Here “treat” meant wash and hope.

As Sally neared the body, she still thought it was kind of unreal. Like the other remains, it was so desiccated that there was no smell, and, in this case, the features were so weirdly stretched that it didn’t even appear human.

She looked at the dress. Under the filth, it was really nice, probably a deep forest green. Sally was a blue jeans and tee-shirt sort of person, but she had to admit the dress was very elegant, even if there was no way she could have fit in it. She could tell it had a detailed pattern worked into the weaving and had been made by someone, or maybe something, who really knew what they were doing.

She looked over the body. The ring was also impressive. She reached out to examine it.

“Stop!” Jon barked. Sally jerked her hand back. “That ring is a heavy anchor. Do not touch it.”

Sally stepped back. “A what?”

“A heavy anchor. It is a way for entities on a gravometric plane to interact with us on the physical plane.” Jon paused, and then continued, “The evidence points to…”

Jon paused a second time. The pause stretched into minutes. Sally looked over at the body. The whole strangeness of the situation made her somewhat less upset by being around a dead person. As she found with the Bear Sally, the fact that the bodies had been dead for quite a while and were completely dried out made it feel like this was some sort of archeological investigation, rather than a murder mystery. Mostly. If she didn’t think about it too hard.

She jumped as Jon started up, “…there being a strong likelihood of this extensive pile of debris and the ring being linked.”

Sally connected the sentences Jon used before and after the break.

“Isn’t “a strong likelihood” and “evidence pointing to” kind of redundant?” she asked. She was sort of proud of this question.

“That is what you focus on?” Jon retorted. “The investigation I just did took the equivalent of man-years of human research and would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you pick up on a grammatical error?”

Sally was surprised. This was the most human Jon had ever seemed. Just the same as a stuffy professor responding to criticism concerning his specialty. She decided on a tactical retrenching.

“Ok, great wizard! I bow to your magnificence. What insights can you share with us mere mortals?” Real humility wasn’t one of her strengths.

Jon put his hand to his forehead. “Damn kids today have no appreciation,” he muttered.

Sally had a laugh forced out of her. She thought for a moment, then asked, “Ok Jon. What just happened?”

“I did a very deep search concerning this,” he gestured to the body, “and ended up in some very obscure files. These files are recordings of personalities and life experiences, rather than just factual scientific treatises. In fact, the information is intimately wrapped up in an emulation of a type of whole life philosophy. A side effect is that I uncovered a better method of utilizing my hardware for personality emulation, and it works well for human interaction.”

Sally didn’t know what to say. Jon continued, "The salient part of the research is that I have pertinent information concerning our situation.”

Jon had fallen back into lecture mode. Sally really didn’t understand Jon. She wondered if the changes in how he talked were done to help her deal with things, or if he just happened randomly.

“It appears this third Sally was linked by the ring to an entity who would have had only limited interaction with our normal environment. The linked entity is a pattern, if you will, of intelligence that flows on a matrix that primarily interacts with gravity. These beings rarely communicate with those of us who exist in our reality. The gravity entity, which I will call a heavy, drifts around its part of the multiverse, which is a place that exists between our dimension and various others. Usually, the most we would perceive of these beings would be a nearly undetectable fluctuation in gravity.

“One of the few ways that we and heavies can interact is by the use of technology such as that ring. It basically catches the attention of the heavy and allows some sort of connection between beings on the different planes. The details of this interaction, and what can be communicated, are scantily represented in my files.

“It is very likely that the physical changes we see in this third Sally were caused by this interaction. I have no explanation why this is so. The deep search I undertook also had case studies where various entities had annoyed the heavies, in some manner. The typical result was a large variation in local gravity that resulted in extensive damage.”

Jon waved his hand to indicate the debris around them. “What you see here is typical of the sort of damage caused by an incensed heavy. The twisting and bending of the structures we passed through and the piles around us are very indicative of this type of event.”

“So, did the gravity disruption kill this other me?” Sally asked.

“I will investigate. We may be able to reach a conclusion based on further research.”

Sally wasn’t looking forward to another autopsy.

Something must have shown on her face because Jon continued, “I know my methods upset you, but look on it as if this body was you. Wouldn’t you want to help a later you in any way possible?”

He had a point. She nodded but still turned so she didn’t have to watch.

Lights began flashing as Jon started doing whatever he did. Sally made her way up to her skis, strapped them on, and headed back to camp.

It was too early for bed, but Sally plopped onto it anyway, not really thinking about anything. After a while, she noticed Jon had carried the body to the floor area and started taking it apart. She had to admit he was quite clinical. What he was doing seemed like an investigation, not a desecration.

After an hour or so, Jon found her in the camp. Sally could see no evidence of his grisly work on him. He squatted by the bed.

“The evidence is the same as for the first Sally we found. She just stopped living. There is no indication as to the cause.”

“What does that mean?”

“I am saying that I have not found the cause of death. I have completed a very thorough investigation, and the body is in very good shape, except for being dead.

“My archives refer to methods to bring these types of well-preserved bodies back to reasonable functionality by reconstructing the organs and recovering the memory strands, but currently I have an unexpectedly small amount of information on how this can be accomplished. I will search my files for further details.”

Sally didn’t know what to say. Zombie movies came to mind.

“Wasn’t she killed by the, well, whatever caused this?” Sally waved at the debris pile.

“No. In fact, she appears to have been spared any damage when the event took place. She was buried, but that is all.”

“So, the Heavy, or whatever you call it, had a temper tantrum when she died?”

“I do not know, but as a hypothesis, it correlates well with what we know.”

Sally thought for a moment and then said, “This is different from the other one. The bear Sally. It sounds like this time the companion didn’t die with her.”

Jon responded, “The Heavies are more of an idea, or concept, imposed on the underlying matrix of reality. They are not exactly able to die. But you are correct; the Heavy continued on after this Sally died.”

Sally felt sad. She wasn’t really sure why. Everything that happened to the Sallys had happened long ago, but she still felt for them.

After a while, she got up and looked over to where Jon had been working. As with the bear Sally, the little piles didn’t seem to have been a person. She really didn’t want to leave them that way, but she didn’t know what else to do. Then she had a thought.

“Jon, could we use the cube things to cremate the remains?”

“Yes, but we should keep her head, spine, and a few other parts, since there is a chance we can recover some of her memories, once I do more research.”

Sally thought about it. They didn’t know how to bring back Sallys to life now, and she had no idea how they would figure it out in the future, but she guessed there was no reason not to hope. A picture of a heap of Sally heads looking at her while they waited to be resurrected flashed through her mind.

Nope, nope, nope, nope. She tried to scrub it out of her brain.

Over the next hour, Jon made a funnel out of some metal, and then set the subspace tap so that whatever was in the funnel would feed onto the hot part. He then took the control cubes and twisted them in a certain way so that the tap started glowing red, then white, and then faintly blue. The floor underneath started to glow red as well, but didn’t appear to be affected in any other way. Sally could feel the heat from twenty feet away.

Jon started feeding the remains into the funnel. They burned so hot that there was almost no smoke or even ash. It took some time, but eventually, they’d disposed of most of the remains. When the improvised crematorium had cooled, Sally walked over to it. The heat had been so high that everything Jon had fed into it had been vaporized, leaving nothing to clean up.

Jon constructed a box from some of the material he had used to make the funnel, and placed the body parts he wanted to store inside, including the head. He then closed the box in some manner so that it made a cube with no openings, and put it with the other things they had in their campsite. Sally thought to have the remains so close was a little morbid, but was numb enough that she could ignore her feelings.

The dress was too nice to burn. Sally didn’t know what she was going to do with it, so she put it aside to clean later. She wasn’t sure what Jon had done with the ring. It had disappeared.

She ate and went to bed. She lay for a while thinking about the day. She dozed off thinking that they should go back and deal with the other Sally and bear remains, at some point.

Fortunately, all she dreamed about that night was normal bunnies hopping around doing typically cute bunny things. No zombie spider-rabbits at all. Nope.

Well, maybe one.