"Do you want to know my phone number, in case you need to ask me anything more? Or do you think you won't need my help with anything going forwards? It seems like you're handling things well by yourself, so I'm thinking of going back to the other kids I care for."

Emily is momentarily flabbergasted. She was not expecting an adult to be willing to just leave her alone in the middle of the city. She was already expecting to have her house choices nitpicked, and not be able to get a moment to herself until she was ensconced somewhere teacher-approved.

"... okay," she agrees. "Would you show me how to place a call, just in case?"

She remembers another Mrs. Pollifax fact. "And is there an emergency number I should know?"

"Happily! My phone number is as follows:" She recites a series of both digits and numbers, creating a relatively short phone number. Then she gets her phone. "It's common for phones to let you call someone without having to turn the screen on; you put your thumb in one corner, and you wait until you feel slight vibration." She does that, and her phone goes from being turned off to showing some of her contacts in a ring floating around her thumb. She taps again, and goes to a menu where she can write in a phone number instead of using her contacts. "You just type in a number here, and then you call someone on the other end. Want to try that?"

"The emergency number is 555, for police, fire and medical emergencies. You can learn more about how to be a good emergency number caller in one of the likeliest-to-save-a-life classes, if you want, but those are optional."

Emily is not sure what kind of society would A) have "likeliest-to-save-a-life" classes, and then B) make them optional. But she's also rapidly reaching her limit, and she just wants to have some time to think.

She dutifully ensures that she will be able to call the teacher if necessary, thanks them, and then begins trying to find her way to the nearest park. There are so many in the city that this doesn't seem as though it should be hard.

There's one only a few blocks away, as a matter of fact. There are a fair few children playing in it, and mothers going on walks with babies in strollers, but still not so many that Emily can't find a quiet place to collect her thoughts and find a place to live. There are quite a few options or places in her budget. They seem to universally be in very tall buildings (skyscrapers are *everywhere*), and perhaps 50% of them are either targeted at large families with multiple parents and many children, or spots in boarding schools with lots of other children.

A lot of the boarding schools, even those meant for very young children, say "entry at headmaster's discretion", but it seems like most of them don't have particularly high standards? Also, there are tons of boarding schools teaching kids to be police officers, or boarding schools focusing on fun subjects like sports or inventing or writing novels or singing and music.

She's still not entirely sold on boarding schools — dresscode and possible magic powers aside, it seems likely to come with a lot more rules than the teacher she spoke to implied was the minimum. It's possible that the teacher only let her go because she wasn't a student.

She thinks for a few minutes about what she wants from an apartment.

She tries to figure out how to filter her search to small, single-person apartments that are close to a library. Are there any of those available?

After filtering down to single-person apartments near a library, or with a library as part of the building, she narrows her options down quite a bit. The apartments are 600 or so square feet, and the floorplans tend to have one very large living room, with significantly less space devoted to a bedroom and bathroom. They all have windows that basically take up the entire wall, and don't come with a kitchen, dishwasher or in-unit laundy, so everything looks incredibly nice and open.

Emily is precocious, and thoughtful, and still very nearly eleven. 

She has no particular homebuying experience, and she isn't really thinking about doing dishes at this point, so much as having a base of operations where she can stop being in public. She's too distracted by trying to figure out her adventure to really be paying attention to how hungry she is (although she is getting hungry, having missed lunch).

Since they all look pretty nice. She identifies the cheapest apartment that shares a building with a library, carefully checks that it represents a reasonable fraction of her basic income, and then tries to figure out what the necessary steps are to rent it.

The cheapest apartment in a building with a library costs 40% of her basic income; renting it out requires pledging that she'll pay for any damage out of her basic income, then she'll receive the passcode needed to open the locker with the key to her apartment. It's a few stops away on the train, but it's still within comfortable walking distance from the park.

She hesitates, for a moment, trying to decide whether to risk the train system again or walk. The teacher didn't look like they had to do anything special to take the train, and she thinks she remembers there being a subway map.

She decides to try it.

She heads for the station, dodging the occasional other pedestrian. She carefully studies the subway map, and then waits for the right train.

The train arrives less than a minute after she gets down; it's notably shorter and wider than a train on earth, and it accelerates quite quickly. Children need to be able to move around the city just as much as adults, so it's decided to have the trains here be free, to make it accessible even for children that don't have money on them.

Emily's train is noticeably different inside compared to a "standard" train; it has less sitting spaces and more wheelchair-accessible spaces, but those are currently used by a few moms bringing their babies with them on strollers. Emily can still easily find a place to sit.

She's never actually been on a train before, being from the non-metropolitan US, but she's seen them in movies and so on. So the differences are quite apparent. She selects a seat far enough away from other people that they aren't going to try to talk to her.

She carefully counts the stops, and hops out in what she hopes is the right place. She heads up the stairs and compares the address on her phone with the surrounding buildings. Where is her lockbox?

Everyone stays quiet on the ride over, and Emily finds herself at the right stop; the address, written on the inside of the subway entrance, tells her as much. Her lockbox is placed in front of an anonymous looking object, looking a bit like a mix between a mailbox and a vending machine; it has many tiny lockboxes with glowing electronic indicator locks on them. Typing in the code sent to her by the landlord, she sees one of the doors open, revealing a cylindrical key about as wide as a seal that feels almost uncannily smooth in her hands.

She runs her hands along it, for a moment, feeling the texture. It doesn't really look like a key; she's not sure how it should be used to open a door. But it can't be that hard, really.

And she's very nearly finished with her first real goal.

She looks around for stairs, remembers how tall the buildings are, reconsiders, and looks for an elevator. She's almost there.

The first floor of the building is taken up by a very nice library; there's a ring of beanbag chairs and thick, soft carpets on the floor with a view out the windows, together with normal desks and chairs, and with a few people sitting there enjoying their books. There's a thick pillar near the centre of the library, directly in front of the entrance, where the elevator is obviously visible.

That is an excellent place for the library to be located, and she will absolutely come down and investigate it later.

But right now, she needs to not be where people can see her.

She makes for the elevator and selects her floor.

Walking into the impressively spacious square elevator, she sees 2 rows of buttons, one for each digit; typing in the number to reach her floor doesn't take much time at all, before the elevator starts racing up. It can't have been too many seconds before it opens out onto a small, round corridor built around it, leading to her apartment, with its dark purple door.

She fumbles with her phone, book, and key for a moment, until she has phone and book in one hand, and key in the other.

She looks for any kind of indentation, or badge-reader, or some other obvious place to try her key.

There's a relatively familiar-looking lock recessed into the door. The key slides in easily, and the door opens incredibly smoothly to reveal the wall-sized window giving her a view of a compact park full of bushes as well as the skyscraper opposite hers, inside the living room that takes up a big portion of the apartment's space.

Oh thank goodness.

She slides the door closed and sets her phone down on the floor. She briefly checks the other rooms of the apartment, before picking a corner and curling up in it.

She opens her book, and goes somewhere else.

By the time she flips the last page, the sun has changed angles in the sky, and her stomach is rumbling. But she doesn't feel overwhelmed. She feels at peace.

She slightly regrets not figuring out food first. But it can't be that hard — none of the apartments had kitchens, so they've probably got replicators. Or maybe kitchen-bots.

She tries searching for "food" on her phone.

A quick looks reveals a quite small bedroom, with most of the room taken up by the bed and closet squezed in next to it. It looks a bit big to be a bed for one person, but it also looks nice and inviting.

The bathroom is quite nice too; even though it's small, most of it is taken up by a pool with a shower enclosure to keep the rest of the room dry. The toilet can be hidden behind a door that gives the illusion of being part of the bathroom's white walls, with one sink next to it, as well as what looks like a second sink in the shower area.

If Emily looks up food on her phone, she instantly finds a huge variety of cuisines available, ready for delivery via robot. If the food has any meat, it's almost invariably chicken, and everything offered seems to be exotic and spicy.

She scrolls through the pictures, until she finds something that looks good.

She has, inconveniently, never liked chicken, except in soup. But she does like spicy things, at least when her parent adds Iguana sauce to things.

She settles on a spicy chicken soup with accompanying vegetable rolls. She orders it without really paying attention to the price, and then immediately feels guilty and checks to see how many approximately-this-expensive meals she can afford in a month, after rent.

She does math leaning against the door, listening for the arrival of the food.

She's hungry.

After rent, she can afford around 400 meals like the chicken soup currently heading her way. In spite of her keeping her ear to the door, Emily can't hear the arrival of the robot carrying her food until it creates a chime that sounds relatively loud with her ear to the door. It only took the robot some 9 minutes to arrive; opening the door, Emily can see that it almost looks like a box on wheels, with a drawing of a pair of eyes on the front, It carries a square plastic box, with a texture that somehow reminds her of steel, with another round metal container of soup together with quite a few vegetable rolls next to inside it. There is a bowl and cutlery ready for her in a drawer in a corner of the main room; settling down and tasting the soup, it tastes utterly spectacular. The portion is quite big as well, so Emily will probably end up stuffed after finishing it.

... well, if she can afford many meals like this a day, she'll have no hesitation about digging in.

It tastes wonderful; she wolfs it down, just slightly slowly enough not to burn her mouth on the soup. She likes the way the outer shell of the egg rolls crunch.

When she finishes it, she spends a while just sitting there, enjoying the sensation of fullness. But she can't rest yet — there is one very important task that must be done today.

She washes her face and hands in the bathroom, brushing some crumbs off of herself. She stacks the dishes next to the sink, not quite sure what to do with them.

And then she takes the elevator back down to the ground floor. It's time to explore the library. How is it laid out? What kinds of books does it have?

The libraries are laid out in rings and layers: there's a ring of shelves that form a backdrop to the people sitting nearest the window, and that create corners for people sitting among the shelves. The many curved bookshelves work to create lots of isolated and private corners, with a few larger spaces near the center of the library. The thick carpet means that almost anywhere is comfortable for lying down or sitting down among the books, and there are normal chairs, as well as beanbags and thickly padded ottomans to sit on all according to what you'd find most comfortable. The library is divided into 3 major sections: Periodicals, Anthologies and Fiction. 

Periodicals are nonfiction books, generally in quite uniform sizes, that cover a relatively broad area and collect lots of research articles that all came out within some period of time; they have titles like RRF Railways 2604-155, and reading the back matter just shows a list of article names and authors. Anthologies are nonfiction books full of articles and chapters all on some relatively specific themes, or they're just compilations of "the most mind-bending papers ever". Textbooks are in the Anthologies section, and the selection is intimidatingly large. 

Finally, in the Fiction section, you have full-length novels and short story collections, and there are tons of books that are meant to put together the complete works of particularly famous and successful authors. There are also an enormous variety of short-story collections that are in their Periodicals and Anthologies subgroupings in the Fiction section.