She's waiting for her train, which is late (as usual).
Uh, that's weird, the wagon looked darker on the pictures online. Oh well, they must have repainted it recently.
She hops on the train, and goes to find her place before any adult can see her and ask questions she doesn't really want to answer.
"Yes, please!"
She unlocks the door and steps out of the room, dressed in a fresh change of clothes.
Lina claps her hands. "Follow me to the elevator, and I'll take you all the way to the phone store!" She begins taking Bonnie back down, and to another subway with a train showing up right then that quickly zips her over to a store with a glass wall with a wide selection of phones, sorted by size, in front. Most of them are in an inoffensive white or gray color, but there are purples and reds with fascinating patterns too. "Which kind of phone do you think you'd like?"
"A fast one, ideally... my current one is" - whatever she could afford with what was left of the tutoring money - "a bit old."
"Size... not too big because I don't have big hands, but big enough to be able to read things on it? Oh, and ideally I prefer a big battery over a slim phone."
"You should go inside and look at them more closely!" Lina opens the door for Bonnie, before stepping in. She smiles at and greets the clerk.
She will look at the various phones, and instinctively look for the specifications if they have anything written next to them.
... which she can't read. Hopdammit.
"Can I... try using one? I don't know how to tell if they would be good for me? I guess I should probably go with a very cheap one and then get a better one when I know what to look for?"
"And, uh, I guess you wouldn't have one in English, would you?"
Their Wikipedia would also not be in English!!! That's tragic, she needs to learn the language as soon as she can, it is utterly unacceptable to have access to a whole new world's Wikipedia and to not be able to read it.
Wait, actually. If when she slips back (or sleeps back) to Earth she can bring objects with her then she should totally get two and give one to a scientist on Earth!
How does one... get things to a scientist, is unclear, but she's sure she'll figure it out!
They're super not going to believe her at the beginning. She would have sent an e-mail to Piero Angela, but... may he rest in peace. The CICAP probably still exists, right?
"...it might be a setting on the phones? It's one of the first things done after inventing a new language so it should have been done by now..." she quickly flips through one of the display models, rifles through menus (the phones have no animations which makes everything really sudden!) and finds out that English is an option!
"Oh, a less expensive kind of phone makes a lot of sense! After all, you have less saved up than most". She point to the big number under the small spec sheet placed under the phones. "And the cheap ones are still great of course!" Touching them, the phones have different, incredibly pleasant textures, like nice fabrics or soft fur.
Oh! They do have them in English! That's great. She won't even ask about Italian, that's even more improbable, and it's good practice anyway. As long as it doesn't show the dates wrong. Or the temperature in a weird scale.
The fur texture on a phone is weeeeeeird. Definitely not the fur one. A cloth texture seems better than the usual plastic on Earth, but she wonders: "Do the ones that feel like fabric get stains? On earth we usually use plastic, or metal, or glass, which are easy to clean."
"Oh, and how do you measure temperature?"
"No, they all clean out well, and they're even designed to make it easy to swap their cases if they get damaged or unfixably stained."
"Temperature works on an absolute, high-resolution scale. So it's zero when it's as cold as it's possible for things to be, and you get a fever when you're one whole degree too high. Which I really like, it feels correct and not arbitrary.."
So Kelvins, but with a human degree... Well, could be worse. At least it has the zero in a sensible place.
"Uh, interesting! We have zero at the temperature where water freezes, and one hundred where it boils. Less human, I guess, but still easy to remember. Other countries use a different system that's just weird, something to do with body temperature but then it's wrong so it's a different number or something. There are also Kelvins, which are still 100 degrees between freezing and boiling, but have the zero at the same point as your scale."
"Yeah, I think it's fine to get the cheaper phone, would that mean that I can afford two of them? It seems I might be able to move small objects between worlds, and if that's true it should be easy to get more money by selling things from one world into the other."
"Yes, you'd be able to buy two phones, but if you're planning to get money moving things from worlds, you're in no rush I'd think. So it's safer to start with just one like you need."
Hmmmm, she'd really like to get two now. But also, she's currently a guest, in a world and place she doesn't know, and doesn't feel like pushing too much against advice from someone who is local and in a position of somewhat authority.
She puts on a smile, which is even mostly genuine - she's curious about getting a phone. When she thinks about getting access to this world's Wikipedia, the smile widens.
"Makes sense, I guess. I can go with the cheapest model, probably, and then see what I actually need when I have a better idea." And then she'd have two. Ha! Her plan is flawless.
There are many small-screen models available, with a physical keyboard, reminiscent of "dumbphones" as they're commonly called. They look quite similar, and the cheapest one of those costs next to nothing even for Bonnie's meager savings.
Well ok, maybe not that cheap. How about the cheapest full-screen model? Can she reasonably afford that?
The cheapest full-screen model is about 50% more, but still easily within Bonnie's budget. And it still manages to be snappy and fast in use.
"I think I'll get that one. It's still cheap enough that I won't regret buying it if I want to change it later, but the big screen will be useful for reading. I expect I'll do a lot of reading!"
"Do you also sell connections to the network?"
"Well actually, it's not worth the hassle of selling them and doing all the paperwork, so you get connection for free. And it's built into the phone, we used to have to plug in special cards to join the network, but that isn't necessary today."
"Right, I'm so used to using it to pay for everything. Ahh." Lina walks up to the clerk. She pays for Bonnie's phone. "I think the next stop is getting to the police station, so you can get into the basic income program and start to be able to spend your own money."
"Yes, and then I'd like to sell some Euros, so I have some extra money for less important things."
Selling Euros, that's a funny idea.
"So we need to find an auction house, working with coins and bills, and it's going to take time before you get the money, and I don't know where they are... I'll find out how selling things work?"
Unfortunate, her plan to buy all the books will have to wait.
"Makes sense I guess. Thank you for helping..."
She follows as they make for the police station.
This time, another one is within OK walking distance. With the iris and fingerprint scanner to get into the money system easily available.
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
