"I'll go with one; there's nobody I'm hoping to live with."

"Do you all mind waiting here while I show Riley to an apartment?" Mirelótë asks the remaining people who were awake on the train and aren't still snoring in their seats; this is a family of five, three commuters, and a lady with a small dog in a purse.

"...we're okay," says lady with small dog.

"Thank you. I won't be more than ten minutes."

And she brings Riley to a one-bedroom apartment and shows her inside. This one is done in dark green and off-white, with a different third color in each room, and it has deep carpets and marble tile and a big TV and a couple empty bookshelves and a big kitchen and ridiculously pretty glass sconces and a tapestry of a waterfall in a forest on the door to the closet.

"This whole place is distractingly pretty. I'd ask what the catch is but I already know it." She frowns for a moment then returns to smiling. "Do we have internet and cable? I would tend to expect not but there's that monster of a TV."

"It's for watching videos that are copied here. You'll have Internet amongst yourselves."

"What does that mean? Most of the stuff I use the internet for is run by one giant corporation or another."

"The structure of many popular sites and protocols has been copied and if the humans here want to adjust it or create new ones that's supported too."

"That must have taken a lot of work." She pauses. "I think that's my urgent questions taken care of. How do I claim this place?"

Mirelótë shows her how to operate the device by the entrance. "You can control who else is allowed in this way."

"Nice. I assume I'm free to wander as I like without you?"

"Yes, anything that would be dangerous to wander through isn't readily accessible. If you need something, the phone in your apartment, or the intercoms near all the teleporters, have me programmed in, and Sapphire, the one who built everything here, too. Text or audio as you prefer with me, Sapphire prefers text but can synthesize a voice if you like. Well, she prefers telepathy, but the way she does it might involve picking up thoughts you didn't mean to publicize so we've tried to make sure nothing requires it."

"Good to know. Good luck with everything."

"Thank you."

Mirelótë goes and explains things to the people remaining in the train car, one of whom woke up and shook all the others awake too, and then shows more people to apartments.

Riley takes stock of her possessions. She has her laptop and phone, chargers for both of them, her latest notebooks, the oncology book she was in the middle of, a few pens and pencils, an umbrella, a pack of gum, her wallet for all the good that will do her and of course the bag she was carrying it all in.

She takes out a piece of gum and starts chewing. Even if this is the last pack of gum she'll have it's a good time for gum. She starts walking around her apartment and opening cabinets, drawers and closets. A lot of them are empty, but the kitchen is well stocked with cookware, spices, and basic ingredients along with some snacks like nuts and fruit. There's a strange snap-hiss sound whenever she opens one of the kitchen cabinets. Almost as if the cabinets are pressurized. She scribbles down a note in her notebook but leaves it as a mystery for later. The bedroom has plenty of space for clothes but all of those spaces are unfilled. The bed is made out of some sort of memory foam. It's covered with blankets that match the color scheme and a generous helping of comfortable pillows in a variety of shapes and sizes. She takes some time to test the softness of the pillows, for science.

The bathroom has a super fancy shower that has shower heads embedded on three walls and in the ceiling. She almost strips to try it out on the spot but decides to wait until she has fresh clothes to change into. It's not that these ones are dirty, simply that there's a ritual to putting on new clothes after a shower.  In addition to the shower, there's also a very generously sized bathtub with one of those cut-outs for elderly people who can't easily climb over a bathtub's wall and jacuzzi jets. There's a variety of soaps and other bath products clearly labelled with their scents including unscented varieties. Near both the shower and the tub are racks with luxurious towels and there's a variety of sizes of bathrobes hung up on a series of hooks along one wall.

Having investigated the physical parts of her accommodations she turns her attention to the digital parts. She finds the remote for the TV, it's a smart remote with a keyboard. She quickly learns why after she turns it on. There's a large library of TV shows and movies organized by genre and title. "So, Space Netflix. That's nice." She turns off the TV for the moment.  She gets out her computer and connects to the open Safehold wifi network. The first place she tries is Google. Google's replacement is simply branded as Search; entering a query returns results from Wikipedia and an enormous variety of books and journal articles but almost no normal websites. It would be a disappointment but it's much better than most of the search engines she's used before for academic literature. Wikipedia seems to have come through largely intact, it even accepts her login credentials. That's a bit confusing but she'll take it. Further searching reveals a blogging platform and a social network but both are ghost towns for the moment.

Looking out the windows reveals another of the apartment buildings a ways away and a large park on the ground below. In the view from her window there's a large playground, and a small lake. There's a variety of trees and gardens and walking paths as well.

Riley isn't quite ready to trust this new place so she repacks her bag, notes down which apartment is hers and goes to explore. She doesn't meet anyone on her way to the elevator and she pauses a little while to examine the map. There are six twelve story apartment buildings clustered near the center of a giant hexagon. The park area she saw from her window extends out a decent distance around the apartment complexes. The train station she came from appears to be buried underneath the park. Dotted around the edge of the park are other buildings the mall and the hospital among them. Way at the edge of the hexagon there appears to be a small unlabelled structure that the elevator won't take her to.

She thinks for a minute and decides to visit the mall first. She presses the button for the lowest of the mall's three floors and finds herself in an atrium as beautiful as she's come to expect from this place. The skylights allow light to stream into the mall below. The floor below her feet is an intricate mandala pattern of tiles all nicely laminated so the floor is smooth. Incongruously the stores all have familiar brand names. There's Whole Foods, Ace Hardware, Nordstroms, CVS, and more besides. She steps out of the elevator and starts heading in the direction of Nordstroms.

Someone else who hasn't taken as long about examining her apartment is already there, browsing shoes and frowning at a sizer she has tucked under her arm.

"Hi there. I'm Riley." Riley begins browsing the shoes as well.

"...Cassie. I think I saw you on, uh. The train."

"That wouldn't surprise me. I'm not sure how quickly they're going to add more people but they have a bottleneck in Mirelótë."

"Yeah. I wonder if any of 'em will know how to -" She waves the foot sizer.

"I've used them before, what seems to be giving you trouble?"

"Oh, I just don't know how to read it right. I guess I could just try on a lot of sizes."

"Well I can show you how to read it." She takes off her shoes and holds out a hand for the sizer.

Cassie hands it over.

Riley puts her foot into the sizer and fiddles with it a bit then explains that her left foot is just a bit over size seven while her right foot is just about a size seven so she tends to try size seven and seven and a half.

"Okay, thanks."