Eventually there's a knock on his balcony door. It's Tazz, with an overstuffed backpack.

...he opens the balcony door. "Why did you come in this way?"

"For fun. Sometimes you just need to climb a thing, you know?"

"I do not."

"I never can tell which of the surprising things about you are because everyone in the future is like that and which ones are because you're an outlier relative to your original society or your society is an outlier relative to humanity at large."

"I don't think most people - climb things."

"What an odd thing to have changed. Even if the people who are most likely to climb things stayed on Earth where all the best climbable things are you'd expect some of them would care more about getting to go to space." They start putting the sheets on the bed.

He observes this process so he will know how later.

When that's done: "I'll message you every day for the next few days to make sure everything is going alright, but you needn't hesitate to message me if you have any questions."

"Okay. Thank you."

Tazz leaves again, via the hall door and the main stairs this time.

Kyeo washes his dishes. He puts away his new clothes and folds up the uniform to be laundered later. He brushes his teeth and takes a shower and goes to bed.

The morning brings spring sunshine and yet more messages from scientists with piles of questions or requests for meetings.

...he will read through these to see if they want to know anything he knows as opposed to things he super does not.

The historians want to know how long ago Ibyabek was founded and how its government is structured and what its laws are, and what are the most important things everyone learns in school, and how its calendar works and what are the major holidays, and what's the food like, and can he record or transcribe any of their music and any poetry he memorized even tiny bits, and what has changed in ethics such that he thinks they're being awful, and what social and technological innovations they have in his time that he hasn't seen here yet.

The physicists have sent him a starmap and want the best approximation of the travel-time graph he can get them, even if it's just a list of facts like "it's easier to get from Earth to the this star than to this other star but easier to get between them than to get from Earth to either". He needn't try to map names he remembers to stars on the map if he doesn't want to, they can use a bunch of disconnected statements and his confidence levels in same to narrow their hypothesis space about how FTL works. Also how consistent are travel times from the same origin to the same destination and does it depend on the ship and is getting from A to B ever meaningfully different than getting from B to A.

They also want to know whether Kyeo's era's ships can go FTL from high planetary orbit or low planetary orbit or atmosphere, and how much and what kinds of maintenance they need, and how long the artificial gravity has to be turned off for, and whether said artificial gravity means they can accelerate comfortably at higher levels than humans could otherwise tolerate and what if anything that feels like and what kinds of maintenance that needs, and how far away can a ship be seen from if it's on a ballistic trajectory and how about if it's accelerating and do they have stealth technology that changes that.

Also how sure is he that he actually went back in time instead of being from a parallel Everett branch or an alternate Hubble volume because either of those would explain a lot, here are layperson's explanations of both of those concepts and he should please tell them if either or both is known to his civilization to be or not be a thing.

The economists want him to explain Ibyabek's entire economy like they're five! But just in case specific questions will make that easier they want to know what goods can be found in the home of a typical person with a lot of goods in their home, and what goods can be found in the home of a typical person with not very much goods, and can he rank these fifty occupations from rarest to most common and separately from most to least respectable, and how many hours a day and how many days a year is it typical to work, and what foods does a typical Ibyabekan eat in a typical week and how much of them, and do people ever barter goods with each other and is it illegal or frowned-upon and how in the name of math do they choose how many people should do what job and how much of what goods should be manufactured. Also they want to know if Ibyabek's setup is a one-planet experiment or universally acknowledged as the current best option and implemented everywhere that isn't doing an experiment or somewhere in between.

Also any and all of these people would be delighted to explain anything about Firstplanet/this time period, or to meet Kyeo in person to exchange explanations if that's his preference.

Kyeo apologizes that he can no longer sing, but he can hum, and he can write down lyrics, for all the songs he knows. He can explain the calendar and list the holidays and give a textbook explanation of the Glorious Leader's election-for-life and go over the history of Ibyabek. Mostly he has not noticed them being particularly terrible except the money thing is very wearing and Ibyabek has given it up. Perhaps people who are used to it do not notice how exhausting it is.

Kyeo can remember that Kular is over there and the route goes here and here and he forgets the next hop and then here. Ibyatok is over there. Xeren is there. From Ibyabek the constellations with colonized stars in them are thus. Some ships are faster than others but the FTL part is consistent, he thinks, it's just a matter of how they maneuver from hop to hop and end to end.

The ships cannot do that, they have to get out of orbit. Artificial gravity has to be turned off by the time they arrive at a jump point and can come back on as soon as they're at the far end, and it does allow faster acceleration, but he hasn't personally felt it, his ship was going pretty steadily on a patrol route. He can give them his military handbook's specs on maintenance (not a very gears-level model, more "connect the blue wire to the 3 port and then hold down the red button for 30 seconds and see if that works") and on ship to ship combat.

He is not very sure but neither thing is known.

He - ignores the economists.

The physicists are so grateful! He has given them so much information! They're going to go off and do their level best to invent FTL with it. Also the prediction markets put a high probability on "alternate Everett branch", which means he doesn't need to worry about preventing his own birth but also means he can't get home even if the biologists solve immortality or cryonics turns out to work. There's also some money on "adjacent inflationary region with subtly different physical laws" in which case he can't get home and the stuff he said about how his FTL works might not be usable for anything, but that should be resolved one way or another once they accelerate a couple of probes to relativistic speed and then into Jupiter's atmosphere. They have a kickstarter out for it.

The historians appreciate the information but are concerned that election-for-life doesn't give people the option to kick the Glorious Leader out and get a new one if the current one turns out to suck and are frankly skeptical that that setup as described would lead to good governance. They want to know what Ibyabek's immigration and emigration and rates are and their life expectancy and what people commonly die of at what ages and what rights are guaranteed to all residents and whether they have a distinction between residents and citizens and what the crime rate is and what are the punishments for various offenses. Also the stuff he said about the timeline of various things really doesn't seem like it would fit in the space implied by the calendar lineup and they agree with the physicists that he's not from their future and is probably from some other present instead. They still want to know everything about Ibyabek; history is history whether it's theirs or something else's.

The medical research forums have gotten his name from someone and they have a lot of the same questions about life expectancy and causes of death but also a bunch about how to prevent and treat various problems and what options are available for augmenting the abilities of people who don't have anything actively wrong with them. Also what does his planet know about nutrition science. Also can he come into a lab and get his measurements taken and his blood drawn, because if he's from an alternate universe he might technically not be human underneath and that will be relevant to his medical needs in the future and the usability of his other answers but also they are So Curious.

A bunch of psychologists want to know his best-guess percentile relative to his society on these 20 dimensions and also for him to fill out a pile of surveys and describe his reaction to a bunch of optical illusions and ideally come into a lab and take a lot more tests and get his brain scanned.

Some especially persistent economists would like to pitch him on how cool money is and answer any questions about it in real time, by whatever medium of communication he likes.

Kyeo was already pretty accustomed to the idea that he could not go home.

The Glorious Leader is indeed not supposed to be kicked out and replaced. If there were some really serious problem and such a leader were trying to destroy the entire Ibyabekan way of life or something they could have another revolution, like they did in the first place, but this is really a last resort, and besides, their Glorious Leaders so far have been great and accomplished men who have done well for the planet.

Kyeo doesn't have numbers on immigration or emigration but he thinks it's much more common to visit than to stay, in both directions, though he's heard of people seeking refuge from systems that crush people into poverty on Ibyabek where that's impossible. He doesn't know life expectancy numbers either but the first Glorious Leader died at the age of 88? People die of diseases - there are a couple Ibyabek-native microorganisms that have jumped into the human population, in particular, though soldiers are quarantined to clear out any of those before they're assigned ship duty so he's sure he isn't carrying them - and old age and accidents like if they fall in a river or something. Everyone on Ibyabek is entitled to food, shelter, medical care, clothing, and all other necessities, for free. There is a distinction between residents and citizens in the sense that residents are not held to the same standards of conduct as permanent Ibyabekans.

Kyeo is not a doctor. His planet knows that vegetables are good for you? He will go be measured and bled if they like.

Kyeo will do the optical illusions for them and guess at the percentiles and do surveys until one of the surveys seems like the sort of survey he should Ignore and he looks up how they do brain scans and does not wish to do that.

Kyeo does not want to think about money ANY more thank you.

That gets his correspondence down to a dull roar of mostly questions about his daily life as a kid and at school and in the military and requests for the life history of everyone he ever knew and requests for recipes, and also some links to websites and textbooks and online classes that various people think he'll find interesting and informative.

Also there are still all those job placement tests. Also theoretically there's an entire planet that isn't in his handcomp, most of which isn't even in his apartment.

He can talk about inanities of school and training and ship duty and people he knew. He doesn't know how to cook. Some of the websites are useful.

The planet, he is reliably informed, contains grocery stores, so he will put some frozen vegetables in the microwave according to package directions and eat them and also some granola, which it turns out he likes, and then take his placement tests.

None of the tests are timed; all of them warn him before they start that they're going to block his ability to access anything else over the network while they're ongoing, and if he needs to use the network because of an emergency he can close out of the test and try again later. Most of them advertise that they adjust their difficulty to match one's skill, so they will tend to become just a bit too hard to do perfectly and this should not be taken as discouraging.

The intelligence test wants him to complete patterns of pictures, and look at groups of pictures and then sort new pictures by which group they best fit into.

The cognitive reflection test has some questions that look at first like the answer should be one thing but then when one thinks about it it's actually something else.

The spatial reasoning test is basically a videogame where one needs to collect all the little sparkles in a maze with as little backtracking as possible. At the higher levels the mazes get more complicated and one gets the ability to traverse portals or change the direction of gravity.

The logic test has two sections. In the first one, each question is a bunch of statements and then something like "If all of the above statements are true, is this other statement true or false or could it be either?" or "If exactly one of these statements is false, which one is it?" That section has a mostly-language-independent version where all of the statements are things like "blue circle implies green square" or "red triangle xor green triangle". The second section requires him to sort more colorful shapes into categories according to secret rules he can discover by guessing and being told whether his guesses are right.

The quantitative skills test comes with a little in-app calculator and is less about doing specific computations than about figuring out what computation needs doing. Sometimes it doesn't require a computation at all, just gives partial information and asks for an estimate.

Kyeo is about one standard deviation below average in IQ, bad at cognitive reflection though once he figures out what the test is doing he catches several of the remaining tricks, not practiced at video games in general but fairly good at spatial reasoning and particularly at the gravity parts, mediocre at logic, and solid at quantitative skills.

The spatial reasoning test thinks he'd be a good pilot and recommends him some free flight simulator apps for both regular airplanes and remotely-piloted minicopters. Also there's a game version of the test available for purchase, with infinite procedurally-generated levels and unlockable achievements and a leaderboard.

...what is that... for, can he tell? It's a different thing from the simulator app?

Lots of practice is supposed to make you better at the thing it's testing, and also people enjoy it. It's a different thing from the flight simulator.