"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.

"While I'm thinking about it, want me to show you the laundry machines in the basement on our way out? They're yet more primitive technology, but they do get the clothes clean."

"Sure, thank you."

The elevator has a floor zero which proves to have walls of bare concrete and exposed water pipes. Someone has painted a mural of a bunch of butterflies on one of the concrete walls. There are janitorial supplies and groundskeeping equipment and four each of washers and dryers with moderately complicated panels of settings. The washers have a mechanism for dispensing detergent into themselves but it can also be overridden if one wants to provide one's own specific detergent. 

The moderately complicated settings are kind of intimidating but on the whole this is the least bewildering location Kyeo has been in since his head injury. He memorizes the instructions for laundering things very seriously.

"Ninety-five percent of clothes will be just fine with the default settings and they all have labels that will say if they don't. Onward to the clothing store?"

"Yes please."

Then they can go up to the surface and out into the street. There are a lot of apartment buildings ranging from a handful of stories to towering skyscrapers; some of them are apartments and some of them are retail stores. The buildings full of stores have signs on their fronts with descriptive names; the translation does its best with the fact that many of them are puns.

The puns are confusing - he's not really used to them even in Ibyabekan - but he can follow along till they find a clothing store.

The clothing store is an entire floor of a building with a massive footprint. It has sections for "Children", "Adults", "Formal", "Athletic", and "Heavy-Duty".

This part doesn't seem complicated. Kyeo is an Adult. He will have to get used to the clothes that are normal here, though.

Most of them are brightly colored and nearly all of them are various kinds of soft. There are no tags, only labels printed on the insides with the measurements and the materials and the washing directions. All the seams on the insides are cleverly hidden so as not to rub against the skin. Buttons are common and pockets are ubiquitous and pockets that can be held shut with buttons are easy to come by. There is no distinction between men's and women's clothing except for a small rack advertising clothes optimized for pregnancy or nursing.