Araeneve is officially done with the conversation.  "It's been an overwhelming day and we don't want to keep looking when this one is sufficient.  We can always try another place some other week."

Nod. "Would you like to go now, then?"

"Yeah."

Eelesia stands up and deploys her Barrier Jacket. Eldritch hues burst through the seams of reality to replace her ordinary clothes with her form-fitting violet armor. Then she turns and a blazing violet Circle builds itself half an inch above the floor.

Once Verity and Araeneve are on the Circle, Eelesia's Device chimes, DIMENSIONAL TRANSFER.

And the cavernous chamber and Eelesia's work pit vanish, replaced by an idyllic, flower-lined brick road and the smell of shade trees. Tucked into a clearing is a pretty but generic-looking ski-cabin-aesthetic two-story house.

She looks around for some sort of signage indicating where people are supposed to check in.  Barring that, the front door is probably the correct place. 

A holographic screen appears on the front door as she approaches.

Welcome to Valley Trails
Cabin 17 is currently VACANT.

Would you like to claim occupancy?
( }-1.68 per night.)

"C-" she starts, then cuts herself off.  She's supposed to be speaking less awkwardly.  "Yes, I would like to claim occupancy."

Is there anything indicating that this is either cabin 17 or a visitor center?  

Does the plaque reading "17" next to the door, or the front door audibly unlocking (accompanied by the holographic screen playing a suggestive animation before vanishing) count?

Yep!  She appreciates well-labeled cabins, and being able to avoid the awkwardness of trying to get into the wrong one.  They make their way to the nearest soft surface and flop down.  Not sleeping, just staring up at the ceiling and doing the mental equivalent of catching one's breath.

"It's unlikely that this place will be worse than the fleet," Araeneve notes after a few minutes.  "That's such a low bar.  Even if we find out they have slavery or cannibalism or something they'll probably pass, and it's not like we can pass judgement on them if the civil dividend doesn't turn out to be as good as claimed, since the fleet doesn't have one.  Whatever else we find, the cure for aging alone would be worth it."

"The fleet will change a lot once it's discovered.  So much of what's wrong with it is wrong because we were all stuck in space without the resources to automate more things.  And I wouldn't expect this place to hoard its de-aging.  The religious thing is still bad, and probably won't go away if this place has a religion still too - I should probably check and see how long ago that... what was their name?  Vivio?"

"Maybe.  Let's add looking up how their names work to the list of things to do, too.  The second name they all seem to have sounds kind of like daemon names, but can't be."

Verity doesn't feel like checking the terminal for a notepad app.  "I wonder how the spying AI thing will hold up to rotom."  Everyone on the fleet knew that databases being hacked was a 'when' and not an 'if.'  Even without rotom being able to cheat any security measure anyone had been able to develop, it was impossible to get a perfectly secure system and expect it to last forever without someone figuring out how to fake a signature eventually.  Supposedly this one had never been hacked.  Considering how thorough the spying is, it seems likely that if it ever was hacked it would have been covered up.  It's going to be hard to prove that something hadn't happened, though.

Verity shifts position and activates the terminal.  Keeping in mind that she's not supposed to phrase it awkwardly, but again unconsciously falling into Proper Pronunciation accent, she searches, "I'd like to see informational packets that are offered to people considering citizenship."

This gets her the citizenship contract, and three different informational video thumbnails.

The citizenship contract is actually just a couple of pages, and boils down to three main points:

1) If you knowingly and with intent commit merit fraud, you will be arrested and, baring exceptional circumstances, your citizenship revoked.
2) You will be given a basic income of }-80.00 per day.
3) If the cost of repairing any and all property and/or emotional damages you cause over time (according to this clever and simple-to-understand algorithm) predictably exceeds the costs of long-term detainment and therapy, you will be detained and therapized. (The assumption that detainment is both humane and rehabilitative rather than punitive is baked into the phrasing, like the writer assumed that went without saying.)

The first two videos are basically advertisements for the thriving open-source scientific and artistic cultures of Cranagan, and the freedom that comes with a post-scarcity economy.

The third video is more interesting. It seems to be a narrated infographic about how work is allocated in said post-scarcity, open-source culture. Robust simulation plays a heavy roll. For example, say a new building was to be built. A Terms-Of-Project will be published, along with an invested sum. Literally anyone can submit a design for automated simulation testing and once the designs that hold up architecturally and functionally are identified, each of those designers gets an equal share of the invested sum. (This is a widely-use financial model, because it produces naturally good incentives; the less popular a job is, the more it pays, without anyone having to set a price.) Next, those designs all get drawn to the attention of the people (selected by impartial algorithm) who are most likely to be actually working and/or living in the building, who can test-run the virtual versions to compare and contrast, or make suggestions. Once a clear choice emerges, that designer gets a share of ownership. (Then the building is built by automated construction drones, which is such a small part of the process that it's only mentioned as an afterthought.)

That sounds like a good system for creating things.  Resources being relegated to an afterthought is strange.  Even a small shuttle takes weeks of using Magnet Bomb over and over to collect the generated steel fragments to melt down, or choosing things to destroy and reclaim materials from.

"Are medicine and basic education separately universal, or does it come out of the basic income?  What sorts of things count as merit fraud?  And how does a 'meritocratic' government work?"

'Merit' keeps coming up in places she doesn't normally hear it.  The translation is good enough to be unnoticable, so the meaning is probably very close to the same, but... would a meritocracy be a government where the most accomplished person is in charge?  Or you get more votes for every thing you create?  

There is a footnote at that part of the infographic video about something called Siata Preservation.

Pages from relevant sites appear in response to questions.

All education is completely free, not just basic. Although actual physical schools, which are more of a niche thing than a general ed thing, are typically crowdfunded.

Merit fraud is an act of deliberate deception for the express purpose of being placed in a job or position of authority ahead of a more qualified applicant, that actually succeeds in giving you decision-making power that rightfully belongs to someone else. It's actually functionally impossible in most situations to even attempt, so it doesn't come up much.

The government runs mostly on facilitating people who want to solve problems to solve said problems, in a systematized way. Many and varied methods exist to serve the core principle of getting the best possible person to make any given decision in a position to make that decision. A large component of this is similar to the infographic example. Anyone can just start doing a job in simulation; the system will recognize and reward competence and results.

She wishes Azure was here.  He knows enough about governments to ask useful questions.  Maybe if they find the fleet she'll wind up asking him to summarize it for her once he's looked it over.  Instead she looks back at the other things.  "What's 'Siata Preservation'?"

A wiki article appears.

Siata Preservation is an industrial process invented by Allana Siata at the turn of the century.

Siata is a thaumic engineer who worked with Exclusion Barriers. When an Exclusion Barrier is deployed, the excluded subjects can still interact with a facsimile of the reality they've been excluded from. This is due to the phase measure of the probability mass of large, immobile objects as compared to matter with a future probability-state below the Benz Threshold. On the Barrier's collapse, the two versions of causality reconcile and one is lost. (In practice spell safeties ensure that it is the facsimile that is erased from causality.) Siata revolutionized materials-production when she discovered a way to spoof the causality-resolution and force both possibilities to become real, completely duplicating the non-excluded static contents of an Exclusion Barrier, and then going on to develop the technique used to 'catch' the newly instantiated matter before it it can be lost to or damaged by the dimensional sea.

That mostly went over Verity's head, but she grasps the general idea of 'material duplication' out of the jargon.   Sounds useful, particularly since it doesn't seem like they're limited to the handful of materials that daemons can produce.  Perhaps next time she's in the city she'll pay more attention to what materials things are made from.  She'd mostly been focused on the shapes before.  

She continues to lie around for a minute before forcing herself back up to sitting.  Actually napping should be avoided, or at least done in a proper bed and not a couch.  Was there anything else before she goes off wandering... oh, "What is the local naming convention, for people's names?"

This gets her an annotated list of the most common names.

Derivable from the annotations is the standard naming model in which a person has a personal name chosen by parents or other relevant individuals, as well as a second name inherited from their mother.

Kind of like what nobility did on the old homeworld, but for everyone.  She nods.  It wasn't an important fact, but it's a mystery she can check off the list.  

She navigates away from the searches and to the map icon.

This produces the false-color holographic map she saw before, only this time it shows the sparsely populated area around her current location.

They look at it for a while, getting a lay of the land.  They'd spent countless hours in VR simulations of the old homeworld, so aren't too unfamiliar with how non-ship towns are laid out.  How much that translates to this culture's construction remains to be seen. 

She looks for any sort of nearby shopping hub, figuring that there would be something to provide food and other goods to people living or visiting here.  Unable to help themselves, they also take a look towards whatever hiking or wilderness trails go outward.  It would be so tempting to do that today, but it should probably wait.  With VR, if she got tired or thirsty she could always just remove her helmet, but a real forest might take actual preparation of some kind.

The many cabins of Valley Trails are laid out in a wide-spread branching of paths, almost like someone was trying to make a town-sized drawing of a poofy little tree. All of the paths join each other at various points, building up to a single highway-sized road that passes through a complex that looks big enough to be a shopping hub but on closer inspection appears more like a sports club or a meeting hall, or perhaps a lobby.

On the opposite end of the map, there are indeed several hiking trails leading off into the untamed woodland.

Cabin 17 is highlighted. And a tiny solid-color figure of Verity herself marks her own position in the map.

Ugh, sooo creepy.  Just because someone can put in a picture of someone doesn't mean they should.  She greatly prefers the inverted water-drop shaped 'you are here' icons from the fleet.  

She's made up her mind to go look into the main hub, though still doesn't want to deal with people again just yet.  Instead, she kills a bit of time exploring the cabin.  Do the bathroom and kitchen fixtures look like what she's used to?  Are there any supplies other than furniture, like backpacks which are rented alongside the cabin, or should she be on the lookout for somewhere to buy those?

As if she thinks the devices that display an inverted water-drop don't have a literal camera watching her face while she uses them...

The bathrooms and kitchen are luxuriously spacious and well-appointed. (Multi-headed wall-less shower, big enough to run around in, for example.) The cabin appears to come pre-stocked with hiking and camping gear like someone was preparing for the apocalypse. The equipment is all complementary, but will not be replaced during her occupancy. (Relinquishing occupancy for less than six weeks before reclaiming occupancy will not refill the cabin's supplies. This limit applies across all Valley Trails cabins.)

In addition to the equipment and supplies, there is a small berth for a team of cleaning and repair drones. (They look like rounded boxes maybe a foot long, with a pair of bendy balloon-like arms each.) They are currently shut down, but may be activated by request at need.

Useful, though she's having a hard time stopping herself from thinking about how many people on the fleet could use the resources that a single person here takes for granted.  Do the supplies also include food, or is that something she'll have to pick up fresh?

She exits the cabin, gets on Araeneve's back, and starts heading towards the main lobby.

There are a variety of nonperishables that seem to be intended as part of the camping supplies, but no fresh ingredients or anything like that.

Brickwork, flower-lined paths that grow wider and more elaborate as they join up, stately shade-trees. An occasional glimpse of another cabin in the distance.

The mall-sized clubhouse is nearly deserted when she arrives. The upper floor has almost a library vibe, comfortable and quiet, but while there are a few possibly-decorative bookshelves, it is mostly open with unobstructed floor-to-ceiling windows, and does not seem to serve any particular purpose. The lower floor, split on either side of the main path, is on one side a collection of arenas and courts and such for sports, while the other side houses a restaurant / bar / swimming pool / lounge separated from a shooting range by a soundproof wall.

No employees are in evidence. The restaurant appears to be automated, designed primarily to send drones out to deliver completed meals to the cabins.

There are only three other people to be found. A man and a woman in the largest arena compete intensely at something that involves dodging brightly-colored holographic water-spouts, and are likely a couple going by their state of undress and their laughing enjoyment when they collide and the sultry undertone to their trash-talk. In the pool, a woman is swimming laps.