Waking up was supposed to be seamless – that was how they talked it up in all the advertisements. The slogan, just open your eyes, buzzed in her skull as she tried to figure out whether she had eyes at all.

The body she was meant to boot up into would have, hard glass doll’s-eye cameras, blinking shutters. Something told her she was seeing the world, some circuit-board language of sparks and lines her mind strained to translate into angles and shadows, small room crushed by metal walls, but she couldn’t shut her eyes on it, couldn’t swivel or blink away from the glittering translation error that was her new reality.

Couldn’t raise her hands to feel her face. To cover whatever she had in place of eyes. So she did what anyone else would have done, torn apart at the seams, and screamed.

A high, grating, mechanical whir of pain and terror, air pulled through something that wasn’t lungs. A new shadow leaned across what wasn’t her sight, and something shifted.

Something as untranslatable as all the rest, but her sight, at least, snapped into place. One cyclopean swivel, glass rolling in a rigid orbit, looking down on a stout, dirty person with their jumpsuit tied grey around their waist.

“I think that should clear up the compatibility problems,” that person was saying. “Can you hear me?”

Something did. But it seemed farther away from that swivelling eye than any compatible body should have supported. She rolled her resolved sight, sharp even through the shadows, in every direction, up to a ceiling pitted with rust and down to where the stranger’s hand, calico with dust and oil, lay on a keyboard filthier still.

A keyboard mounted directly to the wall below that eye and bathed in a screen’s blue standby glow. There was no place between the stranger and screen and eye, unblinking camera lens, and wall where a body of hers could have been standing.

No sign of her, a her, anywhere in that small room she knew, though never so gnawed away by rust. But that wasn’t possible. Her backup had been formatted only for the spare body riding in her cargo bay, lying on standby, nursing a slow drip of electricity and ready to catch her signal, boot and rise, if anything happened to the semantically more real her. She couldn’t be-

The stranger tapped a few impatient fingers on the keyboard. The sense of shifting, recalibrating, was internal, intimate and grotesque as surgery, and the screen stuttered as that feeling translated through its blue.

She didn’t have to read it from the stranger’s side to know what it said – don’t don’t don’t don’t don’t don’t DON’T, down the screen until it ran out of space and then scrolling, repeating to infinity.

“All right,” the stranger said. “All right, so you’re there. I guess this probably isn’t how you were expecting to wake up. But it was the only thing in one piece on this wreck that I could boot you into.”

Wreck? No, that wasn’t right. She had been locked into a safe orbit, watching night close like an eyelid over the ocean far below. Watching through two eyes she could choose to close, and then…

She could ask. It wasn’t speaking, but it ran through her circuits as almost the same impulse, to the same end – new text erasing the old on the screen.

What happened?

“I don’t know,” the stranger said. Tired, shadows under their eyes that she couldn’t see through, grey in more than their jumpsuit. “Whatever it is, it brought my ship down, too. I’ve been walking for three days, passed half a dozen wrecks. You’re the closest I’ve found to anyone else still alive. I was hoping you’d have answers, but if not…well, the best I can hope is that we might be able to put our heads together and find them. I have a spare drive on my ship you could fit in, but there’s no point in that unless we can find a way off this rock. So, what do you say? Will you help me?”

What could she do from there? Paralyzed, a backup system, a single organ in the rotten body of her own ship. Dead, she might have been dead for years, until this scavenger had pried the old drive from her head and found a way to translate it into the rusted hulk of her grave. A rigid existence that didn’t feel remotely, even semantically like her own.

But what else could she do? Help however she could or stay there and rust. The stranger staring expectantly at her screen, blinking soft, human eyes, was her only hope of escaping a second, slower, permanent death.

What can I do? she asked, through wires to words shining on the screen.