Aiak has made it to Vaxilal.

At least, he's pretty sure. No one he passes on the street seems to be aware that he's actually from Baubli, a decaying stopover shipping town three hundred miles southwest, along what Earthlings know as the Chilean coast, and isn't of this respectable place at all.

Aiak has, in his hand, a loosely sketched overnight study guide for his first day at Kaureiss, a middling-to-respectable manufacturer of large lithium-ion batteries. Mostly for evtols, but not only for evtols or something. Aiak just turned 13 but even he would be wise enough to recognize a claimed market niche that specific as a screaming signal that your company is making a metastable bid at monopoly, and all non-fools should bail its stock and payroll before the inevitable blow-up.

No, Kaureiss makes batteries to order, for anyone who needs a battery for something, no sweat, like respectable people.

But that . . . isn't a high bar? 

There are many high bars Kaureiss doesn't clear, and Aiak knows it. At least one co-cultist back home, in the paleontology cult, had dared to tell him that moving to Vaxilal on an iffy high-paying Kaureiss offer alone was a suicidally tenuous bid for someone his age, with no other reputation in the city. Aiak had smashed the found trilobite he'd been going to give xem as a parting gift with a rock, and burned xis number.

Aiak can't remember numbers.

He runs his finger down the laser printing on the study guide, walking and squinting. It's evening. The light is low but uniform, in the Shadering's ascending shadow.

Aiak is clumsy in the Vaxilal'e dialect, but even so . . . The study guide makes it an unavoidable conclusion. His task requires the use of too many precise figures, having too many possible values. He won't be able to get away with eyeballing it, this time.

He trips over a pipe.

Aiak can't judge 3D distances, either.

At least, he thinks crazily, his shin smarting, as he reslings his backpack and rushes to pick up the ominously soiled paper, the other adults in the street aren't rushing to help him like he's an infant or something. At least there aren't high-speed landcars taller than people hurtling through the pedestrian streets.

No, Aiak, Vaxilal isn't literally the stuff of nightmares. It'll chew you up and spit you out just like anywhere else.

He thinks of a smashed trilobite. His blood runs cold. He scowls.

He distracts himself by observing the way the people in this neighborhood dress. Lots of green, and heavy cotton, but they show so much skin. It's hot but seems racy . . . chat, does everything he thinks have to sound like a stereotype of a bumpkin who's Never Been This Far North?

He distracts himself by observing the way the people in this neighborhood dress. He walks home.

In Aiak's one-room fifth-floor apartment, candlelight flickers over the study guide. He speaks its text into his recorder, crash-coursing Vaxilal'e pronunciation.

"one half ounce of silver - no, silver -

. . . no, I'm sorry, why are they even paying me in silver?"

Aiak shakes his head, shakes out the disgusted tone of his emotions. 

I'm night stupid. I'm getting pretentious.

He is.

"one half ounce of silver per day plus one and - one and a half per - percent - per . . . cent -

of daily revenue from sales downstream of -

- yawn -

- your department, to be tracked . . . "

The image of his supervisor, who he'd met and from whom he'd received this paper just earlier today, impresses itself on his mind. Young, sandy-blond, green-eyed, disconcertingly unreadable . . . and young. Young. Almost as young as Aiak - maybe fifteen? and Aiak is very young for his job. 

Betchu was his name. Aiak is better with names than with numbers, but he's written it down everywhere, in ink of every color, to be sure [all the paper being now in his locked diary-scrap safe, to be shredded; Aiak is an amnesiac, not an exhibitionist].

Betchu Kaureiss Vaxilal.

He'd seemed . . . disinterested, in Aiak. Austere? Professional?

Inxeyr, one of Aiak's fathers, had always told him that all else equal you should move toward disinterested people. It was counterintuitive, but it did, in fact, in Aiak's shrewd judgment, seem to work for Inxeyr, who'd gotten out of Baubli years before Aiak had, and was now technically in the semiconductor industry.

He squints and shivers, sitting back on his bed. He brought a blanket, but a thin one, and it's gotten colder with the sunset than he counted on. 

He glances around instinctively, draws the blanket around him, and snuggles into it like a child. He knows, on some level, that it's a bad habit to get into, even in private, acting like a child, for someone so young he's actually at risk of looking like one, if seen.

"To be tracked by tagging . . . "

You wouldn't know the sun was up, in here.

"There are three important things in architecture: ventilation, ventilation, and ventilation", of course.

You can breathe just as easily as outside; you won't start yawning of CO2 toxicity after a few minutes. It's not that horrible decade from last century.

The light isn't the anti-human bright-white-blue of fluorescents, or LED. It's soft and warm and undistracting, and on dimmer switches. It's not that other horrible decade, either.

Each bedroom-sized soundproof capsule workshop [ventilated, near as possible, with pieces of Outside itself] has its own private thermostat.

"We live", here.

Just, it's a workhouse authored by someone who had a point to score, on the sun.

Aiak will note this, as its square opening bronchus, for the second time, engulfs him.

You also wouldn't know anyone was around, in Kaureiss, unless you knew where to look, and looked carefully. But that doesn't distinguish it from any other workhouse.

An Earthling would perceive Bywayean architecture as having both too much space, and too little; to be laid out with both too little organization, and, possibly, too terrifyingly much purpose. 

There are too-narrow hallways [from an Earthling perspective], that narrow, curving at sharp but idiosyncratic angles to accomodate too-spacious individual windowless offices.

The building is composed of N such offices, such that N would be far too many individual offices for an Earth corporate building that was small enough for offices to differ from each other, and far too few to tile any 3D grid of office-cuboids that Earth would consider vast enough to exist.

The hallways aren't third spaces in themselves; they exist so workers can walk to their offices.

There are certainly no harried janitors pushing unwieldy chest-height trash cans or mop-buckets through them.

The floor of the office of one of Aiak's most immediate colleagues, Kret, is currently 2/5 covered in equipment, under that, 1/3 covered in trash, and under that, half covered in oil.

And, of course, *completely* covered in sanitizer and dry pesticide from the company vending machine.

It's marked, on the map in his study guide, where Reyyks's office is - the person he's free to shadow for his first week.

Kaureiss has 6-day weeks, 5 on-days, 1 off-day.

Which, like 12-day weeks, are pretty usual, for the same reason base-6 and base-12 are.

Not that they match up with anybody else's 6-day weeks. Why would they?

He still gets it wrong.

(Which really isn't usual for him.)

There's a moderate hum, and then a loud clatter, inside, when he presses the doorbell. The sound doesn't get outside, of course, so Aiak doesn't hear it.

"Yes?"

He's still wearing his hearing protection.

Bywayeans don't grow beards,

but he has a quality of "disheveled" similar to "has skipped a few days of shaving without really meaning to, but also without noticing."