This isn't where Raafi went to sleep. He'd set his bedroll up on a comfy patch of moss under a tree, and now - he still has the bedroll, at least, and his pack, but the tree and moss are nowhere to be seen, replaced by a strange metal room with still, stuffy air and an implausibly clear night sky out the window.
"Hello?" he calls, getting to his feet.
"What a time to be alive."
"Not sure anybody's going to like sending folks to Hell, though. Modern standards of the treatment of prisoners, and all."
He comes up short and makes a complicated face. "I don't know that they're prisoners any more than anybody is, at least just for being there. But if you have an idea of how to improve things, I don't expect anyone here to mind."
"I haven't a clue, personally, I ask the questions that'll rile people up, I don't go into the rabbitholes on my own."
"They'd need to know more about the place."
"Here's your room." It's a little suite with a bathroom, sitting room, bedroom, and tiny nook of a kitchenette.
He looks around a bit. "Very nice. Is there anything I should know about how things work here? Cleaning, anything I shouldn't touch, that sort of thing?"
"The hotel staff will send housekeeping by to clean everything once a day; you can put that doorknob sign out on the hallway side if you want them kept out. Uh, don't stick your fingers in those holes in the wall or... reach into the toilet?"
"All right. And then I guess we're just waiting for the device - is it really going to be here in a few minutes, or was that a figure of speech?"
"It might be an hour, if they're busy."
"All right. We can do something else while we're waiting, if you'd like, or I was planning on taking some notes on the last few days if you'd rather have the time to yourself."
"I'll -" Her phone bleeps. "Oh, there it is. Let's go get it."
The phone is in a nice sleek cardboard box and is the blue he selected.
He's almost as curious about the packaging as the phone itself, but sets it aside after a cursory examination. "Okay, how does it work?"
"When you pick it up it'll turn on - there it goes - and since it's new it'll want to take a picture of you so it can recognize your face, learn some fingerprints and your retina, and get some passcodes you'll need to memorize. That's so nobody can get into it and steal your information - you don't have to do every one of the things every time, you can set how paranoid you want it to be."
The phone wants him to center his face in the screen! It is currently acting as a mirror.
He follows its instructions! "Is that something I have to worry about, particularly? I haven't gotten an impression that you have much trouble with theft here."
"Uh, I wouldn't say we have a high rate of theft of stuff but a phone isn't just stuff, it's data."
"So people use our phones for a lot. We have text conversations, we take photos, we have our bank access on there, mine has the app for my doctor, it's got records of what I look up on the internet and what I buy and where I go. And sometimes there's reasons to steal that information."
"But it's in the phone, you said, right, as long as that's safe I'm not sure what the problem is."
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