"Ooooh, does that mean it's more practical to model space like a graph structure instead of like coordinates in three dimensions? Is the fastest route to a place ever one that involves a step where you get farther from your destination? Are the points that work correlated with where stars or planets are at all?"

"I think all of those are yeses."

"Wow, your cartography must be amazing! What do your star maps usually look like?"

"...they would be hard to draw, but they have a lot of colorful lines on them and are rendered in three dimensions."

"Nice! Ooh, I am going to make a fortune in the prediction markets--"

"Can you hold off on that? I think Kyeo should get dibs, it's not fair if we get all the profit just because he's been injured and isn't used to our tech yet."

"Point taken. Kyeo, you should go make a fortune in the prediction markets! I can show you the app if you want."

"Ah, you use money. That makes sense."

"Ooh, do you not? What do you use instead? Also we should get you set up with a bank account so you can receive negatax payments and get an apartment and have seed capital et cetera."

"I don't know what most of those things are because on Ibyabek everything we need is freely available and people do their jobs without resort to bribery."

Kars asks, "But how do you know what job is the most valuable if you don't get paid?"

Alenn chimes in "Maybe they automated all the unfun-but-important jobs?"

"People can tell what jobs are necessary without being paid, and do them whether they're fun or not."

"Facetiously, are you sure you aren't a low-budget alien? Seriously, we should get an economist in here. And get you that bank account, because we can't coordinate on the right number of people doing every job nearly that well so we bribe the people doing the underpopulated ones until it balances out," says Alenn.

"Also money is a cool way of keeping score, but I guess if you can tell how much value you're creating without that you wouldn't need it for that either. I'll go get the hospital social worker, he'll know more about how to get you set up with everything and into all the databases," says Kars, and leaves.

"...thank you," says Kyeo as he goes.

"I'm not an economist and won't have as good of questions as they will; do you want to ask me questions about the present for a while?"

"...how does money work."

"Okay, so there are government-issued tokens, usually in the form of computer data (but some people want physical tokens so you can get those too (they're interchangeable except for convenience)), and you get them when you do something useful for someone and spend them to get people to do useful things for you. Usually not for favors between friends, that's usually too inconvenient for people to bother so individuals usually just do each other favors without tracking it, but for big stuff or stuff between strangers. If I want a chocolate bar or a boat ride or a professional roleplaying game session, I give some money to someone who can provide it. And when I do research people who want to read my results pay me for it. With me so far?"

"...what is a professional roleplaying game?"

"Uh, super fun but not really related to how money works? It's a form of entertaining people that one can charge money for if one gets good at it. Generally one can charge money for a thing if people want more of it than other people are willing to provide for free. So for example Kars is a nurse and most people don't want to be nurses so Kars makes a lot of money. I'm a linguist and a lot of people want to be linguists badly enough that they'll do it even for not very much money, so I make less."

"How much will I be required to pay for this hospital stay?"

"I don't work here so I don't know how they handle weird cases but usually people get insurance, which is a thing where one pays in a small amount proportional to one's risk of health problems every month and then if one needs treatment it pays out to cover the treatment, and that helps with the thing where difficulty of a sudden expense grows superlinearly. You didn't have insurance but you also didn't have the opportunity to get any or the opportunity to refuse treatment so they might not be allowed to charge you? And if they do you can set up a plan where you pay a bit at a time or get help from a charity. This is a totally reasonable time to get help from a charity; nearly anyone would have problems if they got sent back in time and landed on their head."

He might have been injured before the time travel but he's not really sure and it doesn't matter. "What is a charity?"

"When people have more money than they need and want to help people they give it to an organization that distributes it to people who don't have enough money, or spends it on things that are useful to everyone, like medical research or nice city parks or a lot of other things."

That sounds weird and inefficient but okay. "Thank you."

"There's also taxes, where the government collects money from everyone who has a lot and spends it on the things the prediction markets and the policymaking experts say are the most efficient priorities. That's where the negatax comes from. But a lot of people want to decide what their spare money goes to instead of letting the government allocate it. It's less efficient but it gives people more freedom and makes sure the government can't miss something people think is important."

"Can people not... tell... the government things?"

"That's what prediction markets are for! You can make money by predicting the outcomes of potential policies and the government does the things predicted to work well. Also elections, presumably you still have those because they don't need money. What do you do instead of prediction markets, though?"