"Yeah! That's where everything good comes from! For tech stuff, anyway. It's sort of a new thing, I guess? A hundred years ago there wasn't nearly as much stuff being invented."

"Yeah, technology on Earth has sped up a lot in the past several decades too. We think it's a mix of greater population, greater wealth so that population can afford to spend more time inventing things, and a couple of innovations that make more innovation easier."

"Huh, cool, makes sense." 

The standardized charging station turns out to be wireless; it's a flat black panel on one of the walls, apparently magnetic, with a couple other tablets of different sizes stuck to it. A cord trails from the bottom of it into the wall. 

"This is the really fast sort of charger," Elix says brightly. "There's portable ones and ones you can just plug into your wall sockets, but all the new-built houses have the central-installed kind now. It'll be good to use in - ten minutes, probably. Let's go get breakfast?" 

Breakfast is on the table. It's scrambled eggs with wilted spinach and shredded cheese mixed in, with crackers and fruit on the side. 

Bruce noshes on fruit and checks his recently installed vocabulary for anything that looks like the name of a caffeinated beverage.

His recently installed vocabulary informs him that the tea being steeped in a pot right now is very mildly caffeinated.

Other than that, it...sort of seems like caffeine is considered a drug rather than a beverage in the usual sense? He seems to know words for caffeine pills, or powder or liquid that can be added to beverages in standardized doses, and also the equivalents for a few other stimulant-type drugs. 

Well, shoot. Maybe they think caffeine addiction is degenerate or something. Admittedly it kind of is degenerate, if far from the worst thing Terran grad students get up to. He'll have a cup of tea when it's ready and consider it an opportunity to back off on his tolerance a bit. It's not like he's likely to pull a lot of laboratory all-nighters this week.

And after that: computer!

Dale is pulled in to help with this! He logs in - using an alphanumeric password but also his thumbprint - and then very rapidly navigates to some sort of back-end-settings area, and tells it to wipe the tablet of all his base profile information and links. 

"...All right, we'll need to do some of this manually, but Bruce, you should have a profile set up at all? Did you get fingerprinted yet, that'll make this faster to set up but if not we can open a chat with the admin side and they'll help out." 

"I did get fingerprinted and have a base profile set up, yeah." He wonders if fingerprint scanners are better here; on Earth they're kind of crap but a surprising number of people would rather use them anyway than type a password.

Then this process should go pretty straightforwardly! It takes less than five minutes, and then the tablet is associated with Bruce and he can set up any or all of various different kinds of login-verification. (Dale mentions that people tend to go for more or less security depending if they're doing sensitive work on that particular device; the base profile itself contains relatively little nonpublic information, and there are options to place extra verification-locks on viewing or editing things like medical data.) 

Once he's in, he can go look at the various pages of his base profile - mostly not filled in yet - or go on the Internet, or look through various specialized software that he could download. (All of it seems to be free.) 

He reuses his Earth laptop password (the fifth through twenty-fifth digits of pi), makes sure he knows where and when his doctor's appointment is, then looks up an elementary civics curriculum on how the government works and the latest issues of the most prominent scientific journals.

Their internet is very straightforward to search! It - seems to have less on it, in a way, or at least it's not turning up any personal blogs or social media-type sites in response to the search. There are various government and organization-sponsored sites, and one that seems analogous to Wikipedia but noticeably higher in writing quality and completeness. All the sites he visits have clean, simple layouts and no pop-up or banner ads at all. 

It has the same feeling as the lobby area by the exits from the Underworld, of being a place mostly devoid of art. 

The civics curriculum he can find lays out a democratic local leadership system that sounds not-obviously-dissimilar from Earth's, and various regional and state-level elections; the main difference is that full-population referendums are more frequent, and a lot more effort seems to have been put into making voting low-friction and efficient. 

There are lots of scientific publications online! None of the ones he turns up seem to be paywalled, although some want him to register for free in order to view the full texts. The other noticeable difference is that the language used in the publications isn't especially formal. 

Referenda are good. Informal-language journals are disorienting and then cool, like someone with a really unfamiliar accent.

The lack of ads and paywalls makes him a bit nervous that he's being charged per website, so he should look that up too.

This information takes a few tries to look up, it seems like it's not among the top frequently asked questions, but eventually he can find a page on not-Wikipedia that lays out a summarized timeline of the Internet being set up on the Surface. It's been fully tax-surplus funded and free to use since its inception. Which was, apparently nearly two decades after the first private networks were being built in the mid-Underworld. 

Awwwwww that's so good! Freedom of information with no distracting commercials! The total split between the Law and Chaos internets is kind of inconvenient but he can see how people would like it that way, especially if they were used to it.

If he has more time before his doctor's appointment he'll look for biology or physics research job websites and see what sort of work he could get if he persuades the local credentialing system he is approximately who he says he is.

Oddly, they don't even seem to have academia as an institution that does research; at a glance it looks like there are small vocation-specific schools or colleges for individual fields, scattered around, but that a lot of people pick up their skills on the job. Once he's landed on the right keywords, he can find several government-run or multinational organizations that employ researchers, and a number of for-profit companies with openings in their R&D departments.

The latter in particular don't seem to prioritize degrees or formal credentials that hard; they want references and onsite, hands-on work trials instead. A handful of them actually have pretty detailed descriptions of their multiday interview/trial process, along with links to resources for brushing up on some of the prerequisites they'll be expecting. 

He can't reach his references but interviews and work-trials are as accessible for him as for anyone; he will happily tabsplosion between the prerequisite resources and more journal articles until it's about twice as long before his doctor's appointment as he expects he would need to get there in the absence of unknown unknowns and then head out.

The clinic he was booked at is in the same neighbourhood as the house. The map, which he can pull up easily on his tablet by following a link in the appointment booking itself, shows a layout with a spoked-wheel set of local residential streets and the neighbourhood amenities - grocery and retail stores, government office, community centre, clinic - in the middle. The map has a window in the corner with a prompt suggesting he can link it to his bicycle or scooter and get directions as he rides, but it's also a very straightforward route. 

At that distance, he'll take the time to walk so he can sightsee a bit and get a better sense of the layout than he would whizzing by on a bicycle. It's very convenient that he doesn't have to wait for a train at any point.

Everything continues to be very clean and easy to navigate; he doesn't even really need the map. The houses are tall - most three storeys, some apparently four or five - and skinny, packed pretty closely together, but most of them have little lawns out front. Well, mostly gardens. The locals don't seem to be fans of manicured grass. Around half the houses have roof gardens as well. Climbing ivy is a common choice of decor.

The centre of the 'wheel' has a sort of ring-shaped road around a cluster of much taller buildings, surrounding a courtyard with a fountain and wading pool and a children's play structure. There's very detailed signage pointing out what's inside which building, and an interactive digital display screen with a map on it. One of the buildings is a warehouse of some sort; a steady stream of...delivery drones?? appear to be leaving through an upper-floor landing bay, carrying packages. 

The doctor's clinic is in the building next to the warehouse, on the third floor. 

Bruce continues to think this place has good urban planning to the point where he's curious how old the city is. Also delivery drones are just great. He heads up to the clinic and does whatever their sign-in and intake-paperwork ritual is.

There mostly isn't one! They have all his information from his online profile; the clerk/reception just asks him to log into the Wifi on his tablet and tap a button from said profile confirming that he is, in fact, himself, and then directs him straight to a room to wait.

"Feel free to grab something to eat or drink, if you like," she adds, pointing out a snacks-and-beverages counter. 

Oh, neat! He gets some water and hangs out reading until it's his turn.

He's not waiting very long! The clinic seems to be very efficiently run, and within about three minutes a young man comes in and introduces himself as a “junior medical assistant”, and then asks a MUCH more detailed set of questions on all of his past medical history including family history, before calling in a young woman, apparently a trainee doctor, who does a physical examination and orders some screening bloodwork and scans. 

“This is just one-time, to get your baseline,” she explains. “You seem very healthy. Are there any concerns you’d like to bring up?”

"Was there anything in my files about the, uh, the shapeshifting?"