The meteor hit a field outside Dobříš, thirty-seven kilometers south of Prague, on a Tuesday at 4:17 in the morning. It made a hole the size of a bathtub.
Nobody came to investigate because it was Tuesday and it was 4:17 in the morning and the field belonged to a man named Horák who was deaf in his left ear and asleep on his right side. By the time the sun came up, the hole in the field had filled with rain and the thing that had been inside the meteor was already walking toward Prague, wearing clothes it had assembled from a laundry line in Dobříš and a pair of boots it had found outside a farmhouse, which it correctly identified as foot-coverings but incorrectly assumed were ceremonial.
Its designation, in a language that exists on a frequency humans perceive only as a faint headache, was KEV-7. It had traveled four hundred and twelve light-years from a planet orbiting Kepler-442b, which it remembered the way you remember a room you left this morning — clearly, precisely, with the lingering sense that you'd forgotten to turn something off.
But KEV-7 did not believe it had traveled.
KEV-7 believed it had been reborn.
Earth, KEV-7 concluded within its first three hours, was a curriculum. The bodies were inefficient — two legs, a head that sat on top like an afterthought, a digestive system designed by a committee with fundamental disagreements. But the coffee was extraordinary.
KEV-7 discovered coffee at a gas station on the D4 highway. It ordered by pointing at the machine and producing a sound that the attendant interpreted as Czech with a severe cold. The liquid was dark and hot and when KEV-7 drank it, the heat entered a throat that had, until this morning, been theoretical. The bitterness arrived not as taste but as argument.
"This liquid. I have knowledge of this liquid from before," KEV-7 said, in Czech that sounded like it had been assembled from a phrasebook by someone who did not understand the concept of phrasebooks.
"It's coffee," the attendant said. "Everyone has had it before."
"No," KEV-7 said. "In a previous life."
The attendant shrugged. This was the Czech Republic. People said strange things in gas stations. The coffee was 45 crowns.
KEV-7 found employment as a night-shift security guard at a warehouse in Prague 7 — because coincidences were the universe's filing system.
The job was simple: walk through the warehouse at regular intervals, ensure nothing was being stolen, and write reports. KEV-7's reports were models of precision:
"03:00 — Building secure. Noted: seven spiders in eastern corridor. One appears to be contemplating existence. The others are eating."
"04:15 — Unusual sound in loading bay. Investigation revealed: wind. Wind on this planet is remarkably unintentional."
"05:30 — Dawn commencing. The star that powers this world is arriving at an angle of approximately 12 degrees above the horizon. It is beautiful. Indifferent, as all energy sources are."
The warehouse manager read these reports with the weary tolerance of someone who had seen worse.
On weekends, KEV-7 worked at a bookshop in the Old Town called Maps of Elsewhere, run by two humans who would eventually marry each other three times.
"Tell me," Viktor asked one afternoon, "what do you remember from before?"
"Frequencies," KEV-7 said. Then it stopped. Its Czech, usually passable, failed entirely when describing home. It switched to a sound that Viktor could not hear but could feel — a pressure behind his eyes, a warmth in his molars. The closest translation, assembled afterward from gestures and fragments: "Colors that hurt. Not your eyes — your certainty. A silence that was so occupied it was the opposite of silence. And something that — " It paused. "Your word 'love' is a small container. What I mean is larger. It is the sound the universe makes when it notices itself."
"That," he said, "sounds like love."
"Does it?" KEV-7 said. "Fascinating."
Viktor went home that evening and told Mariana that their part-time employee might be the most profound person he had ever met or the most committed performance artist in the history of Prague.
"Why can't it be both?" Mariana said.
"It can," Viktor said. "That's what worries me."
At the warehouse, in the small hours when the building was silent and the spiders had concluded their contemplations, KEV-7 would stand at the window and look at the sky and try to locate Kepler-442b. Not visible to human eyes but which KEV-7 could feel the way you feel a room you've just left — the warmth of it still on your skin, the shape of it still in your posture.
"I will go back," it said to no one. "When this curriculum is complete."
The lessons, as far as KEV-7 could determine, involved: coffee, rain, the way humans touched each other's faces when they were saying goodbye, and a feeling in the borrowed chest — somewhere between the sternum and the back of the throat — that did not translate. That would never translate. That was, perhaps, the curriculum's actual subject.
It drank its coffee. It waited for the curriculum to reveal its next lesson.