"The Great City is larger than that, but I don't think it literally ends up with two points such that you fill six containers densely full of people and move them all between those same two points..."

"Oh! No, there are lots of subway lines and stops." She can get a map on her phone and show her. "We're here and we're going here."

"Ohhh, that makes more sense.  ...I wonder if there's a bunch of equally small details I could learn and then everything else would make equally much sense.  It seems like that is a kind of experience somebody should expect to have when transported to another world, even though fiction novels couldn't pull it off convincingly."

"Maybe? I guess we'll see. I live half a block from this station and then I can either check you into a hotel or you can crash on my couch, your pick."

"I defer to you on the topic due to your greater information; for myself, I prefer WHICHEVER OPTION IS LESS NOISY WHILE TRYING TO SLEEP.  SPEAKING OF WHICH, YOUR CIVILIZATION SEEMS TO HAVE NOT DEVELOPED NOISE-SHIELDING ON SUBWAYS."

[That's true, we haven't, do you know how to manufacture it or anything?]

[Not personally, but I don't think it was a big tech bottleneck so if you offer a big prize for effective sound-shielding you should get the tech quickly enough?  But Jackson and Brian know how to cook better food than airlines serve and the airplane food was still terrible, so I suspect that there's that deeper problem again.  Oh, I personally know how to design better chairs than you have in airports.  Or at least I know what they're supposed to look like and feel like externally.]

[Airports and airplane food are not actually a problem of 'does someone, somewhere, know how to do better than this' but more of 'what's cheap at scale and what will the market bear'. Very few people decide not to fly because airplane food sucks. People with very strong food preferences just, like, bring their own sandwiches instead, that's what I do, I fill my carry-on luggage with sandwiches and snacks. Very few people decide to go to a different airport because it has nicer chairs because there are not so many airports that this consideration isn't overwhelmed by proximity and flight availability, so airports go for cheap chairs that hold up well to lots of use and are easy to clean and stuff.]

[That simultaneously sounds like plausible dialogue in a show featuring an economist, and also deeply disturbing.  Like it's from an alternate dimension where economics doesn't quite... work right.]

[Well, there are also luxury airlines that have special lounges in the airport for their members to wait and serve tiny cheesecakes on the plane, they're just really expensive.]

[I never before conceptualized my private-tradeoff-virtue as being that person who says in a tone of Very Deep Concern 'The marginal cost of tiny cheesecakes should not be that high!' but I guess I am officially that person now.]

[Yeah, I don't spring for the tiny cheesecakes, I think it's mostly people who are even richer than I am or who are getting the membership as a perk from their job?]

[Maybe if we can just fix the marginal cost of cheesecake, everything else about your civilization will fall into place!  It could be there's just one problem at the root of everything and that's it.]

[Good luck with that one.]

'Good luck' simultaneously comes across as meaning something like 'good skill' while 'luck' comes across as the opposite of 'skill'??

[Is your couch or the hotel likely to be darker and quieter at night?]

[Depends on what floor of the hotel they put you on, higher up is pretty far from traffic. I'm reasonably high up but I talk in my sleep and you might be able to hear from the couch.]

[All else equal, sounds like the hotel is easier to sleep in.  I'm very open to considerations like the hotel being more expensive, harder to reach you from, containing obstacles I wouldn't know how to handle, would not let us solve computer-puzzle-games together at night before going to sleep, or such.]

[It is more expensive, telepathy works fine, if you handled the airport you can probably handle a hotel, do you... especially want to play computer games before bed?]

[I know I must sound like a terribly lawful person, but in fact I am not such a pure, sweet, perfectly-coordinated person that I'm not curious about what kind of computer games a civilization develops when it doesn't care about infohazards or superstimuli!  But mostly I was envisioning - standard social scripts for starting friend-business-partner-mutual-dependency relationships with people?]

[I don't mostly go for puzzle games, I like civilization-builders, and I'm a little worried that if I introduce you to Civ you will form a grand theory about how Earth is broken because it has Civ.]

[Don't worry!  When I fix your Earth it will be a perfect multidimensional improvement that makes all agents better off simultaneously according to their own preference functions!  You just watch me!  So what is this 'Civ', hmm?]

[...well, you, uh, start out as a very small culture and there are some AI-controlled other cultures, or you can multiplayer it but you don't have a computer, and then you try to keep your culture afloat and accomplishing things while negotiating conflicts of interest with the others.]

[Your computer games are so advanced that you can negotiate with factions inside them?  Why, that does sound like it might be secretly responsible for much that is different about your world!]

[It's not THAT sophisticated, it doesn't parse natural language or anything, but you can try it if you like.]

[I really am interested in playing computer games!  And similar new-friend activities like having you show me your interesting-favorite foods at our next meal, so you can see my expressions while I react.  But please stop me if I'm about to socially impose in a way you find at all unpleasant.  I really do not know your equivalent of the protocol for aspiring friends establishing comparable scales of desire and then comparing notes on how much they want various things in order to make sure they don't end up off their multiagent-optimal frontier.]