"I was trained from pretty early for going into the shipboard military. I'm... not especially bothered by unclean things?"

"I know you weren't an engineer, but if you can remember anything that goes into building spaceships, even just the children's description of the principles they run on, you can make tons of patent money. And if you're on the low end of sensitivity to uncleanness you can make a lot as a janitor or a sanitation worker. Or you could train into something completely different; I can set you up with placement tests for how easy it's likely to be for you to learn any given thing if you don't know."

"I can take tests if that's standard. Would I just tell you now how ships are explained to children?"

"Sure! I can help you write it up for the research sites and find physicists or engineers to turn it into a working model."

"I was told that due to - the shapes gravity makes in the texture of space, which I'm afraid I don't understand any better now than when I was younger - some places are close to places that are otherwise far away, like if you had two shirts and hung them flat and apart from each other but then poked each one -" He mimes bringing his forefingers together with imaginary shirts between. And that scientists can find where those places are and what they are close to, and -" he's getting a little hoarse - "design ships to go between. They have to turn off their artificial gravity."

Tazz writes this all down on their handcomp. "I'm not a physicist but I bet one could get somewhere awesome with that! Also, wow, artificial gravity! Want to make a bunch of prediction market bets before we tell any physics forums?"

"If... that is how things are done here... then I will learn how."

"You don't have to, but it's easy money."

"I will probably become more accustomed to money eventually."

"That or the economists will figure out how you don't need it!"

They show him a couple prediction market websites; the prices are the same on all of them, of course, but the UIs are different. A lot of the fundamental physics ones have really long maturity times, but "No major updates to the Standard Model in the next year" is trading at two cents. "So you can X-times-50 any money you want to put in!"

"...I don't know if it will take less than a year."

"Want to get the five-year one instead?" That one is trading at ten cents.

"I don't know how long it took scientists to work this out from the amount of information I can provide."

"If you don't want to make any bets I can just get you in touch with some physicists now. --Do you mind if I place some bets first, though?"

"Of course not."

After about two minutes of rapid handcomp typing, Tazz says, "Bets are in, any other stuff you want me to include in the post to the physics forum and should I also get you an economist?"

"I'm not really sure what they would want to talk about but I can meet one."

"How you all figure out what jobs to do without money! It's the same order of magnitude of awesomeness as FTL by my standards."

Messages: get posted.

"Now how about that shopping trip? Food and clothes and housewares will be three different places but we can go in any order."

"...clothes first," says Kyeo, mostly because they will be lighter than the other two. He brushes at a scuff mark on his uniform a little self-consciously.

"Very reasonable. There's a clothes shop--" handcomp-poke "five minutes' walk that way, and it's actually in the same mall as a pharmacy so we can do both at once if the clothes aren't so heavy we want to bring them back here first."

"Are clothes usually very heavy here?"

"No, but they can get a bit bulky, and eight sets will add up, and I can carry a lot but you're probably still tired from having been injured. We can decide when we have all the information, though; all we need is a plan-for-generating-plans*."

*This is a much shorter and less awkward compound word in Convergentlanguage.

"Eight?"

"Oh, right, foreign calendar. Most people's schedules are such that every seven days is a good frequency at which to do laundry, so that's about what apartment-complex laundry machines are sized for. And then some people want extra sets that they only wear on formal occasions or for doing sports or similar. And of course laundry machines aren't that precision-requiring; you could do a load of approximately anywhere from six to ten sets without problems."

"...I suppose that makes sense." There was a school laundry, and then a unit laundry, but if people are doing their own - because they'd have to pay to get someone else to? - then maybe they all rotate between a bunch of clothes and the lot of them take longer to wear out for it.