It's definitely not a spaceship! It's a room with a desk and a bed and a basket-chair and a young woman curled up in the basket-chair reading a book. Except now she's staring at him instead.

"[Incomprehensible foreign language exclamation!]"

Maybe that would be more placeable if he didn't have a head injury uuuuuuugh.

"[Concerned foreign language question?]"

Pained grunt.

"[Frustrated foreign language muttering]." The woman picks up a bracelet on the nightstand, pushes a switch that makes it light up red and asks a question, then picks up a plastic rectangle and mimes holding it to her ear and asks another question.

...would this make sense uninjured? He doesn't think so but he can't be sure.

The woman does some stuff to the plastic rectangle and then puts it down next to him before stepping away again; it proves to be a computing device currently open to an empty text document with a keyboard full of characters he has never seen in his life.

...he thinks he will fall unconscious about that.

Then if he doesn't stop being unconscious when the paramedics come to pick him up, or at some point during the ambulance ride, he's going to wake up in a hospital bed. The walls are pale purple and the bed has fuzzy blankets and the lights are on but dim. There's a panel of switches built into the side of the bed with helpful icons of the bed turning into a recliner and back and a toggle between "icon of a person", "icon of a person with a X through it", and "icon of a person with emphasis marks around it". It's currently set to the first one.

He thinks he can figure out the recliner ones - he currently has no preferences strong enough to move about - and doesn't know what the person ones mean so he doesn't push those either. He takes a moment for self-assessment; what kind of medical care is going on here?

He's not currently hooked up to anything but his head hurts less and it's easier to think. Any scrapes and dings he had other than the concussion have been neatly bandaged. Judging from the chart on the table next to his bed they did a couple of incomprehensible foreign language things to him.

Stands to reason. Is he hungry or thirsty, if they haven't hooked him up to anything?

He definitely doesn't feel like he's gotten anything to eat, but they do seem to have put some fluids in him at some point.

There's a knock on his door.

"...hello?"

A man in scrubs with his hair in neat cornrows comes in and asks him a couple of incomprehensible questions.

"I only speak Ibyabekan and Kularan."

The man looks surprised and pulls out his own computing rectangle, mimes talking to it, and offers it to him.

...Kyeo takes it and tries repeating himself at it.

It makes a sad beep and puts up an incomprehensible message; the man looks surprised again and then gestures for Kyeo to keep talking.

"...I was stationed on the Five Virtues. My name is Kyeo Sebe Luk. My serial number is 01992350."

The computer starts asking him to name various pictures, and offering him the written and spoken names of those pictures in its preferred language.

...sure, he will teach them Ibyabekan, it's a good language.

Then he will quickly get to a point where the computer can ask him if he's feeling alright and whether he needs anything and where the Five Virtues was and whether it has an email address and how he got from there to the house he was found in.

He is feeling improved but still a little achey. He needs food. The Five Virtues was... in the Ibyabekan system, that's vague enough. It does not have an email address. He does not know how he got there.

This produces a request for a few more words back and forth, and then "System as in another star system? Are you an alien who's made themself look human or has some country gotten to another star system?"

"I'm... a human... from Ibyabek, which I don't think is in this system, because the other inhabited planets in that one speak a related language."

The nurse has a distinctly skeptical expression. "How many inhabited planets do you know about, around how many stars? How long have they been inhabited?"

"A few dozen planets and a few tens of stars? For a hundred-odd years, some of them. Except Earth, where humans came from."

" . . . What year was it, last time you checked?"

"In Earth years?"

"Why--oh, yes, I see. Yes, Earth years."

"Two thousand one hundred something."

"What? I was prepared for the surprise of you being from the future but how are you from the past? It's 4014 here. . . . Are you counting years from something nonstandard?"

"That's the standard Earth year."

"Did they reset it at some point? It'd have to be retroactive, you can't be from two thousand years in the future. What's wrong with counting from the invention of counting years, what are you doing instead?"

"I'm not actually sure what Earth counts from. Ibyabek counts from independence."

"Do you remember the your-instance-of-Earth-year of any historical events from before the start of interstellar colonization? Completion of the Isthmus Canal, moon landing, eradication of tuberculosis?"

"I... think the moon landing was in nineteen-something."

"Okay, so that would put you . . . roughly a hundred and fifty years into the future? That's not too inconsistent with your number of planets. Assuming you aren't making all of this up for some reason. I have no particular reason to think you're lying except that time travel is very implausible but if you have more evidence I want it."

"...where is my sidearm? It's dangerous if you don't know how to use it."

It turns out to be in a plastic bin in a little locker in the corner of the room; the nurse brings him the bin and says, "I'll agree that I haven't seen one of these before. How does it work? How is it operated?"

"- I don't believe I should explain. Just leave it in the bag and it will be fine."

"I thought you were going to use it to prove you're from the future but if that's hard to do safely we can do something else. I could get a linguist in to figure out what's up with your language?"

"All right."

"I'm going to need my handcomp back for that. Do you have yours on you? Even if it isn't backcompatible future tech will be worth a fortune if we can reverse-engineer it, and of course it'll be excellent evidence."

"I don't have one of those."

"Did you lose it in the time travel or do you have something else--wait, did they get braincomputers working, I super hope they got braincomputers working! That's really unlikely to be backcompatible, though, let me get you one of the spares for people who were in hangglider accidents or similar."

He takes his handcomp back and types into it a bunch, then hands it back so it can translate more. "Linguist and spare are on their way, in the other order. While we wait you can ask me questions about the past--ooh, and write down everything you remember about the future before you forget any of it!"

"This is Earth?"

"Yup! Silver Mountains, Northwest Continent. Can you tell me what you do for personal computers or is it recursively nonpublic information?"

"They're not necessary for ship duty. Recursively nonpublic?"

The nurse seems perturbed. "You mean you have something that does the same thing when you're on a ship, or you mean there's a reason you shouldn't have computing access on a ship? Recursively nonpublic is, uh, if you don't want to tell me why you don't want to tell me and I should drop the whole subject."

"Let's drop the subject. May I see the moon?"

"Of course! Are you feeling okay to walk to the courtyard?"

He assesses the condition of his balancing apparatus. "It might be easier with a cane."

"I'll be right back." He goes out into the hall for a minute and returns with a shiny aluminum cane with a comfortable handgrip at the top, and shows Kyeo how to adjust it to his height. "I bet future medical care is way better," he says apologetically. "Do you think you remember any medical stuff well enough to reinvent it?"

"I'm not a doctor."

He says something the phone decides to translate as "[Mild expletive]" and then "That's the problem with everything getting more complicated all the time. Follow me, I'll show you the courtyard."

He follows with the cane.

They go down the hall, down an elevator, and out into a little garden enclosed on three sides by the building. It has a tiled walkway and grass and flowering shrubs and willow trees with little benches hidden under them. One of the benches has a green-and-pink-haired person on it, wearing several layers of colorful casual-looking clothes and a glowing red bracelet and staring up at the leaves.

The moon is in the sky. It's Earth's moon, in the third quarter.

He looks at the moon thoughtfully for a while. "Earth's moon is very famous," he mentions.

"I'm glad. My cousin went there once."

"I've never been here before.

It doesn't look like I would expect it to in my time, though."

"It's mostly just researchers and support people, right now. Nobody wants to raise kids there until they can make sure they'll be able to come back to earth with no health problems."

"That makes sense."

"Wait, if you're from only a hundred years in the future, how fast do your ships go?"

"It depends on the ship. It takes weeks to get between systems."

"You have FTL? Do you remember any of the math?" The nurse looks split between skepticism and intense excitement; he's kind of swaying back and forth about it."

"No. I am not an engineer."

"What did you do?"

"I - was a soldier."

"Hmm. If your people have FTL, do you travel in time a lot? Are you able to get home under your own power, or expecting to be picked up, or other?"

"We do not usually travel in time."

"If the linguist thinks you're really from the future I can find a physicist who might be able to get you home. Do you want something to eat while you wait?"

"Yes please."

"In your room, or the hospital cafeteria? It's mostly the same food, and we can stop by your room and get you that handcomp on the way."

"My room." This has been enough not lying down for now.

Nod nod. They can go back to his room; the spare handcomp is on his bedside table, as is one of those bracelets, not currently lit up. The nurse shows him how to set up a password and access the internet and also the hospital's menu website. 

"These are very important here?"

"The handcomps are very important, yes, you can use them to get information about anything or read books or send and receive messages or take notes or get directions to a place or take pictures or manage your schedule or do math or listen to music. The bracelets are how we indicate interruptibility; I've been assuming you lost your equivalent or didn't have it on you because you were at work but if you've actually been signalling with some other thing I apologize."

"...everything I would have been interrupted from is in the future."

Perplexedness! "Well, yes, but what if you can't get home today? Or just don't want to be interrupted while writing down all your cool future knowledge?"

"I... don't think you will be able to get me home."

"If you can't get home then you have my sympathy and I will help you get acclimated here," says the nurse solemnly.

"Thank you, I appreciate that."

"I have to go help my other patients for a bit, but you can get some food delivered and I'll be back in less than an hour unless something unexpected happens."

The hospital menu has a lot of different kinds of fruits and nuts and vegetables, and bread with miscellaneous spreads on it, and cheese, and tofu, and several flavors and nutrient ratios of packaged meal bar. There's pictures of everything, and if he wants to teach his handcomp his alphabet first there's also nutrient information and patient reviews available for all of it.

He will order based on pictures - some bread, some tofu, some cabbage - and then teach it the alphabet.

Not long after he's done with the alphabet the food shows up. There's a little packet of butter with the bread and little cups of a bunch of different sauces for the cabbage dish and the tofu dish, both of which were roasted with hard-to-identify foreign spices. 

Huh, weird that it didn't just have a default sauce if it's going to have a sauce at all. He tastes them and winds up putting kind of a lot of sauce on and mopping it all up with buttered bread.

Fortunately the hospital plans for people who are having new-to-them manual dexterity problems and provided plenty of napkins and some kind of moist towel in a packet thing, so if this process gives him sticky fingers it will not be for long enough to impede him in using his new handcomp.

Then he will teach it more words.

It will happily accept words! And also let him configure the onboard clock in his time system and calendar, if he wants to do that.

About fifty minutes after the nurse left, he comes back with a person of uncertain gender with tattoos of little birds all over both forearms. They introduce themself as Alenn. "I'm a linguist; can I ask you some questions about your language?"

"Yes, that's fine."

"Some questions" apparently means "on the order of a hundred questions in batches of five".  First they want to copy the latest translation package off his handcomp and then they want to know how his language originated and how many mutually unintelligible languages he's aware of and whether this batch of sentences are grammatical and how to translate these phrases and how Ibyabekan does uncertainty-level-and-type-markers and sarcasm-markers and facetiousness-markers and what words Kyeo would coin for various imaginary concepts and how similar are the connotations of this pair of synonyms and if Kyeo doesn't redirect them they'll go off on a ten-minute tangent of asking about the Ibyabekan calendar system.

Ibyabekan is descended from Old Sohaibekan and Kyeo doesn't actually know what the previous language was. They say Ibyabekan and Outer Sohaibekan are still mutually intelligible. He can list other languages spoken - and he knows a decent amount of Kularan, though he'd be tripped up by anything too informal or requiring very specialist vocabulary. Most of those sentences are grammatical - he doesn't know the source language but this translation seems most felicitous - Ibyabekan doesn't verbally mark uncertainty nearly that much - he will pull coinages out of compounds for them - pretty close but differing mostly in register - yes he can explain the Ibyabekan calendar to them.

All of these answers spawn more questions! Alenn is updating the translation package as they go; the translation of their questions into Ibyabekan gets slightly less stilted and also they start asking some of the questions in (oddly accented) Ibyabekan.  At some point Alenn interrupts themself to tell the nurse, "He's much more likely than not from the future! Or possibly a low-budget alien; neither of the languages he knows are plausibly within a hundred years of us without an entire new language-construction project and they don't smell constructed either. If I was you I'd get that physicist and possibly also a historian and you can quote me on that."

"I thought it was already determined I was from the future."

"Kars thought you might be pretending or have a lot of fake memories or something. Time travel is completely unheard of, right, physicists thought it was probably impossible, whereas people lying or having fake memories is something that happens occasionally, but I can tell your language wasn't made up by one person and nobody has fake memories of an entire language, so something unheard of has happened and it's probably the one you said it was. Do you know how to make any cool future technology? Even just knowing what's possible is great; what's your top five inventions of the last hundred years?"

"Well, there's the faster than light travel - I'm not actually sure of the date on that - I'm not a historian."

"Faster than light travel is very cool; the physicists will squeak like kids at harvestfeast. Does it traverse the intervening space or is it point-to-point jumps or site-to-site with infrastructure or other?"

"I've not personally been on a ship like that, I was deployed in-system, but I believe it's point to point, only many points do not work and so most trips require multiple legs."

"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?"

"I don't think I understand prediction markets well enough to say what it is they do."

"Okay. So anyone can go on a market website and post a bet-statement, like 'if the school district makes this change to the math curriculum the average calculus score over the next five years will be higher than the average over the last five years' or 'the price of apples will be below X on the next full moon' or 'Raz Etvan-Neri will win the Zendo tournament'. And people can make deals with each other to buy and sell copies of that bet-statement at whatever price they want. Then if the statement comes true every copy is worth a solis and if it doesn't it's worth nothing. So if Anda sells Bor some statement for seventy-five centis and then it comes true, Anda has to pay Bor a dollar, so Anda loses 25 centis and Bor gains 25 centis. Bor makes a profit because they made a correct prediction. And if you have a lot of people trading a statement you can get a sense of how likely it is to come true or not--statements that people will pay 90 centis for come true nine times out of ten and so on."

"...ah."

"So what do you do instead, just elections? I'd have expected a society that didn't need money would do prediction markets for nonexchangeable glory points, so negapoints for me."

"A lot of what you're saying is still very confusing to me."

"In a [my Ibyabekan and the translation model are very bad] way or in an [I am not adjusting well for cultural drift] way?" 

"Probably the second thing."

"Hmm. It would probably help if I knew more of your last and our next hundred years of history. Do you know why people stopped speaking Convergentlanguage?"

"I've... never heard of Convergentlanguage."

"What, but Kars said it had only been a hundred years, surely it'd be famous enough that even people who don't care about history have heard of it! Don't people read translations of The 3432 Saga or Unwinding Evolution or The Exploits of Herad Pator-Ver and wonder what they were originally written in? Maybe I'm overestimating how much people care about languages. Can you give me a summary of human history as you know it?"

"...humans originated on Earth and when they invented faster than light travel began to explore and colonize other systems. In my system three planets were colonized but Ibyabek was poorly managed and had a popular revolution and is independent now. I know much less about other planets, I'm sorry."

Alenn has several facial expressions in a row and interlaces her hands tightly. "I am surprised. I keep being surprised, often enough that I have to be missing something. Maybe when you meet with a historian they'll be able to prompt you effectively. I guess I shouldn't assume you want to talk to historian. What do you want to do on the scale of months or years,* assuming you're stuck in this time?"

[Translator's note: literally "phases or orbits".]

"...I suppose I will need a job."

"Some people live off the negatax and just do their unmarketable hobbies but if you want to be sure you're a net benefit to society or have nice things a job is the way to go, yeah. Kars said you're specialized in emergency response in space?"

"...military patrol," he corrects, "to prevent infiltration and smuggling from the Outer Sohaibekans and other hostile interests."

"That's the kind of job where you hang around being ready for sudden emergencies, right? Whether it's people trying to invade or someone getting themself in trouble or whatever? We have that on the ocean and in the wilderness service; I don't know how similar it is to the version in space. Also what's your conflict with the Outer Sohabekans about; I'm not a physicist but maybe this is the kind of time travel where you can prevent it from ever starting."

"They didn't approve of our independence movement and there's lingering bad blood."

"I am even less of a diplomat than I am of a physicist but maybe if you go around telling everyone what happened they'll notice who was being an idiot and then not."

"...telling who?"

"The world at large. So it's public knowledge what happens in your default timeline and whoever ends up in a position to make bad independence-movement-related decisions will know it. Why would you not want to do that?"

"...well, I suppose it could erase me from existence."

"Oh yikes. I think probably if that was going to happen it would have happened already, just from the ripple effects of your language being available before it was invented and all the nonobvious-casual-chains of you existing now at all. But definitely talk to a physicist if you're worried. Oh, does the future have a grand unified theory of physics or are they still looking?"

"I'm not a physicist."

"Better than even odds they're still looking, then, if they'd gotten it there'd've been a saga-worthy party and every kid would know it as one of humanity's greatest nonpractical achievements."

"If you say so."

"Are you telling me that the people you know in the future are the sort of people who, if they found out that humanity understood the ultimate laws underlying the universe, would not throw an absolutely enormous party?"

"...perhaps the physicists would. I have not met many physicists."

"Your future sounds kind of garbage."

Kyeo is saved from having to respond to this statement by the arrival of Kars and the social worker, the latter of whom is another ambiguously-gendered person wearing a cloud of elaborately embroidered skirts and shawls and wraps. They kick the other two out, saying "I'm a sworn-secret-keeper and you're not."

Once they're out, they sit down a meter or two away from Kyeo and say, "Hello. I'm Tazz, I specialize in helping people deal with unprepared-for disasters. I can help you get set up with an apartment and a legal identity and a job and classes."

"Thank you, that all sounds important."

"You're welcome! Let's get started."

The first part of this process mostly involves Tazz typing on their handcomp a lot and occasionally asking Kyeo questions: how old is he ("I'll have to fudge your date of birth but I'll put an explanation in the comments"), his medical history ("What with how fast viruses evolve you should get re-vaccinated for everything just in case, that's free of course"), what does he want in an apartment ("Are you likely to want a dog or a cat or a parrot? Some places forbid those").

Kyeo can convert his age into Earth years and provide all his vaccination-relevant medical history and does not want pets.

Then he can pick from a selection of apartments! The nicest ones would have more than a third of his income going to rent, which Tazz disrecommends unless he plans to get a job quickly, but he can get one that's annoyingly far from the nearest grocery store or one that's annoyingly far from the central park or one that's only 300 square feet or one that has shared kitchens per floor or one that's designated as welcoming for people with small children or one that's right next to the industrial district. Most of them are between five and fifteen stories with no particular pattern to which ones have openings how high up. "They all have elevators, of course, you haven't gone that far back, and they all have roofdecks, but some people prefer high or low floors."

300 square feet sounds fine, since he will be living alone. "I have never been grocery shopping."

"Ooh, is everything delivery in the future? I guess that would make sense, minicopters keep getting better. And I can totally take you to the grocery store if you want a native guide."

"I was in school and then in the military, and when I was a child my mother did the grocery shopping."

"Rats, I was hoping it was the minicopters thing. Do you want to move in today or do you think you'll need another day in the hospital?"

"I can free up the bed today if the doctors believe that is best."

"Kars said you could go today if you wanted but recommended you not do anything too strenuous until tomorrow or the day after--no climbing or contact sports or anything in that reference class. And of course I'm assuming you'll want to go to a clothing store and a pharmacy as soon as possible since the time travel didn't let you pack a suitcase."

"Pharmacy? Do I need ongoing medication?"

"Oh, no, just a toothbrush and toothpaste and soap and shampoo and so on. The grocery store will probably have some of those things but the pharmacy will definitely have all of them."

"Oh, I see."

"So do you want to move into your apartment today? And whenever you do do you want to see it first or go shopping first?"

"I would like to see the apartment first." Check if it has a fridge, that's important.

"Sure thing. I can walk you through the discharge forms so you can get a sense of how we do formwork in the past."

"I won't be able to read it but I can watch."

"The translation software has your alphabet now, right? I can have your handcomp mirror mine and yours will translate." 

The hospital discharge is very simple, since he hasn't been prescribed anything; he just needs to acknowledge that he doesn't want any more treatment and that he knows he shouldn't immediately go do contact sports. Tazz has already convinced them to waive most of the bill.

Most of it?

His first three (24-day-long) months of negatax have been delivered and Tazz assures him he will definitely have enough left over after the medical bill, rent, utilities, and groceries for any other urgent expenses, and that if he wants to retrain for a different career he can get heavily subsidized tuition because he didn't get the standard 16 years of free public school. Also Tazz has a discretionary budget for people whose situations can be improved in the long term by some money in the short term and Kyeo definitely qualifies.

This is all rather overwhelming but Kyeo appreciates the help.

"Being sent back in time would stink for anyone. Let's go to your apartment and then you can be alone for a while before we go shopping if you want."

"Is there a reason to wait?"

"We can also get everything on your to-do list done right one after the other if you want! I just wondered if you might want time alone to process."

"I've had some recuperation time, thank you."

They smile and stand up to walk out of the room. "Alright then, I'll show you your apartment. The hospital has its own stop on the subway and the station has a replacement identicards kiosk--oh, that reminds me, you should memorize your ID number in case you lose your handcomp. It's this one here." They show him the form again and the sixteen-digit string in both languages' numeral systems. "Doesn't have to be this minute, of course, but it's best practice."

He nods and sets to memorization.

"Alright, now to the subway!" It's down the same elevator but several levels farther, and not noticeably less pristinely clean than the hospital but much more crowded. Tazz steers for the bank of kiosks on the wall.

Kyeo sticks close and tries to shrink politely among the people.

Everyone is doing a good job of not crowding everyone else, somehow, even the thirty or so percent of them who are reading books or looking at their handcomps or in one case knitting as they go.

Tazz shows Kyeo how to beep his handcomp, take a picture of his face, enter his number, and answer some questions from his personal records to get a new identicard, which is a plastic disc with a hole in it for a necklace cord. "You can use either this or your handcomp and ID number for a train ride, but for important things like buying a house or swearing an oath you need both. Don't let anyone borrow it; if it gets lost you can use your handcomp to mark it as void and get a new one. You can set things up so you need your fingerprints or an iris scan to get one but you're almost as safe without and I don't figure you want additional complications. Makes sense?"

"...I think so but I may forget details."

"You can look it all up again later, or my name will be in your contacts and you can ask me questions any time. Now, you have your apartment's address; want to try out the mapping app and find out which line to take?"

"I can try."

It's pretty easy; typing in (the transliteration of) his new address and accepting the handcomp's request to turn on location-checking gets him walking directions (40 minutes) and transit directions (15 minutes on the blue line, which has trains every 5 minutes from platform 2, get off at Station 8 AKA "Meadowlark").

...he probably should not walk that far but he can do it with some breaks if the social worker is not going to help him figure out the train, which he does not really understand.

When he doesn't answer promptly Tazz says "Something giving you trouble? Oh, right--if you open the camera and point it at the platform numbers it will translate them."

"Are you going to come too?"

"Oh yes, unless you'd rather I didn't! I just thought you'd like to get used to the mapping app with someone else right there. I'm still planning to come to your apartment and then the various stores to help you get the hang of everything. But if you want me to go away I will, of course."

"I appreciate the guidance."

Train it is.

The train has the option of sitting down and standing up with a bunch of people doing each. Most of the standing people are on their handcomps; the sitting ones are either on their handcomps, doing various craft projects, wrangling children, or asleep. One person has a grey parrot on their shoulder, with a leash from its foot to their wrist.

"What's our stop?" says the parrot. "Twelve," Says the human." "Eleven plus one is twelve," says the parrot. "That's right, good birdie," says the human.

Kyeo cannot understand the parrot but it does have quite a voice. He sits. Since he's semiconvalescent.

Tazz stands nearby and makes sure they don't miss their stop; the stops are both read aloud and displayed on a little light-up map inside the train car, but the audio translation might have problems what with the noise of the wheels and the quiet but overlapping conversations.

Kyeo is literate and will get off when it's time.

Yay for translation cameras! From there it's a quick walk up the street to his apartment building, which is red brick with balconies on the front. There are artificial handholds around the door and up between the balconies but there's also a perfectly normal elevator in the lobby. Tazz introduces him to the person at the front desk who beeps his identicard and says it will now open his apartment and his mailbox.

"A mailbox?"

"For package delivery! Stuff that comes by minicopter can just get left on your balcony but stuff that comes by truck goes in the boxes, which are . . . there." They point at a wall of big square lockers on the far side of the elevators from the front desk. "Oh, and if anything goes wrong in your apartment--leaky tap, air conditioner stops working, things in that reference class--you can message the desk, or if it's daytime come down here and talk to them, and they'll send someone to fix it. That's part of what your rent pays for, not having to worry about maintenance."

Isn't it someone's job to - oh, and the someone expects money, okay. "How do I do that?"

"Which bit, messaging the desk? Their email should be on the building's website which you can find by searching the address but also it's probably on a sign around here somewhere . . . ah, there, next to the quiet hours." They point. (Quiet hours are 23 to 4 and residents can propose changes to them and any other building policy on the building's forum.)

"How does timekeeping work on this planet?"

"Each day is 24 hours numbered from 0 to 23, starting at midnight, and each hour is divided into 60 minutes and each minute is divided into 60 seconds and you can go to the stopwatch app for a demo of how long a second is."

Kyeo consults the stopwatch app. "...so only five hours are quiet?"

"Well it would be rude to scream at the top of your lungs no matter when you do it, but if you want to listen to music or play music or or have a bunch of guests over during the rest of the day that's fine."

"This doesn't make it hard for people who need more than five hours of sleep?"

"Generally people aren't that loud the rest of the night either, and the apartments have pretty good soundproofing, but if your neighbors wake you up you should definitely propose longer quiet hours. These ones are kind of on the short side, for an apartment building, so maybe something is weird with your neighbors or maybe they just don't make a lot of noise so nobody worries about the official quiet hours."

The desk worker chimes in, "We had most of a rock band living here until last year but they've moved out now, even odds a motion for two or three more quiet hours would pass."

"Pass?"

"Get a majority of the votes and be put into practice."

"...oh." Kyeo has voted, so he knows loosely what that is, though he isn't sure how people would do it in this context.

"You can look at old debates on the building forum if you want examples of how building policy gets made. Check out the business with the compost bin last year, that was pretty representative."

"Oh? Where would I find that?"

"Stick out your handcomp so I can get your messaging address and I'll send you a pointer. I'm so curious what the future internet is like!"

He offers his handcomp. "We call it the skylace because it connects many planets."

"Oh, that's beautiful. Can messages go faster than light as well as ships?"

She sends him the pointer; clicking it opens a forum with categories for 'buying, selling, sharing, and borrowing', 'maintenance issues', 'social events', 'building policy', 'politics and philosophy', and 'miscellaneous'.

"Yes, they can," he replies. ...politics and philosophy sounds important.

"Wow, that's so good. Have they figured out immortality yet?"

The politics and philosophy section has a bunch of threads like:

* Voting systems arguments go In Here and Not Anywhere Else

* Inheritance tax idea

* Is eating beef immoral?

* I'm still confused about consciousness

* Prediction market participation is a universal right!

"No," says Kyeo.

...why would eating beef be immoral. He will poke that one.

He gets a debate on whether cattle 1) can feel happiness and suffering and 2) have such unpleasant lives that it's better not to create more of them and one should eat similar-tasting plant-based things instead. There's also a side debate about whether, even if there isn't a problem from a humanitarian perspective, one should avoid eating beef because cattle farming damages the ecosystem in various ways that could cause serious problems for the next few generations. Every individual post is multiple hundreds of words long and addresses multiple points and multiple situations-that-might-currently-obtain, and often quotes another post paragraph by paragraph and responds to each paragraph one at a time. At one point a government official is quoted as having asserted something about the ecosystem thing and then immediately dismissed as a poor source in the next post for having a poor track record of accuracy on similar statements.

...Kyeo does not read this all that far. What does "maintenance issues" say?

The last thread is from, if the translation is handling the Ibyabekan calendar correctly, 90 days ago. One of the burners on someone's stove wouldn't light; there's a response from another resident suggesting a workaround and a response from the building maintenance account explaining what the problem was and how they fixed it.

The thread before that is a discussion setting up a system for scheduling whose turn it is to water the flowers on the roofdeck.

He backs out of the app. "- I'm sorry, I hadn't meant to keep you waiting."

Tazz makes a dismissive gesture. "Everyone does it sometimes! Just remember to set your bracelet to uninterruptible if you're not sure how long you're going to be. Now, shall we go see your apartment?"

"Yes, thank you."

"Excellent."

Kyeo's apartment is up the elevator and a little way along the hall. It contains:

* A little carpeted front room with a wooden table and two chairs.

* A tile-floored kitchen with a fridge and pantry (both currently empty), stove, oven, microwave, and dishwasher.

* A tile-floored bathroom with a toilet, sink, bathtub-shower combo, and mirror.

* A carpeted bedroom with a closet, a desk, and a double bed, currently lacking sheets.

* A balcony overlooking the street they came in from.

"I know it isn't much, but it'll look nicer once we get you sheets and cookware and things," Tazz says reassuringly.

"It's perfect," Kyeo assures him. "I might need to be taught how to use the kitchen things."

"Sure." And they explain how to turn the stove and oven on and off and set the temperature and when things are hot but don't look like it, and that this part of the fridge is the fridge and this part is the freezer, and how to control the microwave and why you should never put metal in it, and that all of these things will beep if they seem to have been left in a dangerous or energy-wasting state. Also while they're at it here's how to work all the bathroom appliances, since spaceships might do funny things with plumbing.

Spaceships do do different things with plumbing. He is attentive to all the instruction.

Tazz will not get derailed asking or speculating about how they do things in the future. Okay, maybe once.

Once everything is explained: "We can go shopping next, or discuss what kind of job or education you want, but also there's something I want to make clear. I'm getting the sense that your time is very different from ours in a way you don't seem to want to talk about. And I want to make it clear that I've sworn not to reveal anything I learn about you in the course of your job without permission. So if you want to talk about whatever it is with someone, but don't want everyone to know, I'm an option. Or I can shut up and stop asking. It's up to you."

"- hm? Is there something you'd like to know?"

"Why you don't ask questions about things that aren't right in front of you. Or answer questions more than minimally. Or speculate about things. Or talk about your favorite interests. It's like you're trying to hide that you're trying to hide something by emitting as little information as possible. If it's a secret you don't want to tell me then of course I will not cause problems for you because of it, but, well, it looks unpleasant, hiding everything like that, and I thought you might want to stop."

"...I think perhaps our cultures are very different and it will take me time to get used to - different politeness standards."

"That makes sense. If you tell me what you've noticed is different I can try to meet you in the middle?"

"...you're more talkative than I'm used to. It doesn't bother me."

"Do people not--sorry. Education and employment planning, or food and housewares?"

"Education and employment planning first, please."

"Okay. Would you prefer a job similar to what you were doing before, or something new?"

"I don't know where I will be most useful here yet. Do you have recommendations?"

"The Coast Guard and the Forest Service both sound similar to what you did and involve a minimum of talking to people. You could go into cleaning, that's pretty solitary and pays well, but of course it involves dealing with unclean things and plenty of people don't want that even with good protective equipment . . . What would you say are your skills, I don't want to fail to suggest something because I don't realize you'd be good at it."

"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.

"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.

...well, it is also fairly clear to Kyeo that he is Not Pregnant Or Nursing. He will collect soft blue and red and black buttondown garments.

There's a room where he can try them on to make sure the measurements are right; most models of garment vary in size along a few different axes which are standardized across brands. They don't stock every point in the combinatorial space but they do stock most of them, and there's a sign with a handcomp-scannable pointer to a form to request something with a combination of measurements not already available.

Kyeo is thin and in rather good shape and not very tall for a man and does not have high standards for fit, especially when he doesn't even know how something this soft is supposed to drape. He also doesn't mind having eight of the same thing.

Then he will have an easy time getting a full set of clothes! And if he doesn't want six different layers of jacket they'll all fit in two bags which Tazz can carry easily.

"So, pharmacy or groceries next?"

"Pharmacy." It's sort of odd there isn't a prescribed order.

If Tazz can tell Kyeo thinks something is weird they're not surprised enough to mention it.

The pharmacy is another short walk to another large building; it isn't as big as the clothing store and shares its floor of the building with a bookshop, a board games store, and a small-appliances-and-repair-thereof place. It has sections for dental hygiene, general hygiene, preventative health products, augmentative health products, problem-solving health products, pregnancy and small children stuff, and in the back there's a "custom formulations" counter and a "vaccinations" counter.

Kyeo doesn't recognize board games as a concept but doesn't ask. "I was supposed to get all my vaccinations, do we do that here?"

"Yup! I can go explain why you need one of everything while you go pick out hygiene things?"

"...sure." He expects to need help with it even if the translation handles every label perfectly, it's really a dizzying number of choices - maybe it's because Ibyabek is more ethnically homogeneous? Do people from other planets need different soap? - but he will do his best. He completely forgets to be conscious of price and just chooses the least bizarre one of each of soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, toilet paper, etcetera. He is accustomed to washing his hair with the same soap as everything else and does not pick a shampoo.

Depending on his standards of bizzareness he will end up with mostly the cheapest and/or the most deliberately nothing-scented/nothing-flavored versions of everything. Tazz makes sure he hasn't accidentally got anything really weird and then he can head over to the vaccination counter, where they want to give him six different injections and three pills and schedule him to come back in two weeks for the couple that are contraindicated by other ones.

Injections and pills are fine. He nods along about coming back in two weeks. (Most of his stuff is nothing-flavored but his school actually stocked mint toothpaste so he has that.)

They depart with another couple bags of stuff and in Kyeo's case a mildly sore arm.

"I suggest getting a couple of bulk staples at the grocery store; conditional on you approving of that suggestion I suggest going back to your apartment to drop all this off first. Or we can borrow a shopping cart from the grocery store but then one of us will have to go back to the store to drop it off. I'm indifferent."

"I will be more able to walk around carrying things in a week," judges Kyeo after taking a moment to consider whether indifference is what it sounds like. "If you don't mind returning the cart I would appreciate that."

"Not a problem! I would want other people to do things for me if I was recovering." They can take all the bags, after a moment to get them rebalanced sensibly, then set off again. "Don't worry, just one more stop."

Groceries! He wonders what they eat on Earth in the past.

They eat So Many Things! The grocery store is another whole-floor-of-a-skyscraper situation and it's nearly impossible to see the far wall past the shelves. There's fish and meat and milk and eggs and plant-based substitutes for all of those, and produce fresh and frozen and dried and pickled and made into jam or salsa, and packaged snacks and packaged entire meals and flour and sugar and nuts and pasta and rice paper and breakfast cereal and candy and bottles of a hundred kinds of sauces and little shakers of a hundred different spices. And vitamins even though there were also vitamins in the pharmacy, and a whole aisle of eating utensils and knives and pots and pans and graters and strainers and kitchen gadgets ranging from the nearly-necessary to the excessively-specialized.

"I figured you wouldn't know what you want," says Tazz cheerfully, "so I took you to the big one!"

oh no

". . . I am getting the sense that I fucked up. Do you want recommendations."

Kyeo has to make his handcomp replay that translation again but then he manages to kind of mouth, "please", and when it doesn't register that he types it.

"Do you have any medical or ethical dietary restrictions?"

Headshake.

"Are there any food items or flavors you just really hate?"

Headshake.

Tazz gets a cart and shepherds Kyeo around the store, getting him sandwich fixings and granola and microwaveable plant-based fish patties and microwaveable frozen veggies and protein bars and mixed nuts and boxed mac and cheese and lentil soup in the kind of can that doesn't need a can opener, and a basic set of cookware and dishes. It's all cheap and easy to prep and non-perishable and taken together it's nutritionally balanced. They go slowly enough to let him object to anything objectionable, but they never hesitate.

He doesn't even photograph the labels to get them translated, just follows mechanically along.

They help him handle the checkout, then show him where they're beeping their handcomp to borrow the shopping cart. "I can return it any time in the next 24 hours."

He can whisper again now. "Thank you."

"No problem. Do you want a throat-inflammation-treatment-candy or somewhere quiet or both or other?"

"- there's candy for that?"

"Yes. It doesn't work against everything that could give someone throat problems but it's easy to try and I have some. What does the future do instead?"

"I don't know. It's a medical side effect. I can try the candy."

"Oh dear," they say, fishing in their pockets. "One you got yesterday or an old one, if it's an old one probably you've already had it looked at by medical science better than we've got--aha." They find a little packet of candies individually wrapped in waxy paper and offer one to Kyeo. "I doubt it'll fix anything future medical science can't but I do expect it'll feel nice."

"Old one." He unwraps the candy and puts it on his tongue.

It tastes very similar to but not exactly like honey.

It's nice even if it doesn't help.

"Let's go back to your apartment; I'll try not to make you do any more talking."

Outside the grocery store, someone has wrapped elaborate webs of colorful yarn around three consecutive streetlight-posts. One of the webs has a gap in it to avoid obscuring a Lost Cat sign.

He kind of wants to ask what it's for but he's not sure he could cope with whatever the answer was. He does photograph and translate the lost cat sign.

The cat is black and white and answers to Chirp and has a microchip with the owner's address but just in case here is their message address.

Kyeo's apartment is as he left it.

He starts unloading the food and clothes and toiletries.

Tazz helps and they get it done quickly. "Do you want me to go away and come back another time, or help you look over job postings and placement tests in the areas we talked about, or other?"

"I think I could take tests today."

"If you're too tired to do your best on them they won't be accurate. I was just going to show you what they were so you could take them tomorrow. But you're the best judge of your own preferences." This last is pronounced like a proverb, said a thousand times in the exact same way.

"If you think I should take them tomorrow I can."

"Everyone does better after a good night's sleep than after a long day. That reminds me, we should get you sheets. We can get a set sometime in the couple days and in the meantime I can lend you my guest ones; does that sound good?"

"That sounds good," Kyeo agrees.

"Okay, I'll be sure to go and get those this evening. Anyway, here are the tests I think you'd get useful information from."

They show him the descriptions for an intelligence test and a cognitive reflection test and a logic test and a quantitative skills test and a probability calibration test and a spatial reasoning test. The same site has a verbal reasoning test but Tazz says not to bother until he gets either fluent in Convergentlanguage or super curious, since "It hasn't been validated in machine-translated form and might be total garbage, and none of the jobs we talked about for you need most of these anyway."

"I should learn the notation for math here even if the words will all translate."

"Ooh, yes, good idea." They pull up a page on basic math notation. From the simplified language it looks to be aimed at children, but the design is similar to every other page he's seen: black text on white in a monospace font, with the amount of formatting that will make it readable on arbitrary shapes and sizes of screen and no more.

The math notation is pretty simple. They have symbols for addition and subtraction and multiplication and division and exponentiation and logarithms and binary operators and modulo and integration and differentiation. Set intersection is the same as binary and and set union is the same as binary inclusive-or and they resemble the first letters of the words for and and inclusive-or but with diacritics. Operations that are each other's inverses are the same symbol flipped vertically.

"Will I be able to look at this during the test?"

"For the quantitative one you can look at your own notes app but not at the network."

Then he will copy it into the notes app.

"Any other questions about the tests? If not we could move on to job postings."

"I don't have other questions."

"Oh, it occurs to me--there's one test that everyone takes a couple times in their life that they can't know is happening at the time, because if they know it's happening it makes it not work. Do you have that test, in the future?"

"...I suppose we might but I did not administer it."

"We tell people they've taken it and how well they did afterwards! What good is a test result you don't have?"

"I was assuming from the description the authorities used the results for something."

"The raw list of scores without any information about who got what is available for people doing research, and some employers want test results for various things including sometimes wanting you to be above a certain cutoff score on the secret test, but the government doesn't look at people's individual scores like that unless you want a job in the government. And if you run for high office the newspeople will want to know all your scores on everything--actually you'll probably get newspeople just for being a time-traveler, once the word gets out. Do you want to talk to them or pre-emptively tell them to piss off?"

"I can talk to newspeople."

"That's nice of you, if I got newspeopled because something annoying happened to me I would absolutely tell them to piss off. Anyway I think that's it for testing stuff; here's some job postings."

There are job postings in the coast guard and the forestry service and some infrastructure and disaster relief companies and some janitorial services companies. They all have salary information and job descriptions and lists of preferred skills and reviews from previous employees.

He ignores salary information almost completely. All the numbers are meaningless. He looks at the lists of preferred skills and the job descriptions to see what he'd be capable of here.

The coast guard jobs are "driving a boat up and down the coastline helping anyone who gets into mechanical or weather-related trouble" and "hanging out in ports checking incoming boats for disease symptoms or potential invasive species or, depending on the port, weapons". The boat-driving jobs all require [being above a minimum IQ and above a minimum spatial reasoning score] or proof of previous boat-piloting experience. The inspection jobs have a day-long onsite work test.

The forestry service lists "periods of solitude up to six months" under both requirements and perks. There are jobs clearing dry brush which require physical endurance, jobs piloting minicopters around looking for wildfires which require a minicopter pilot license, jobs monitoring water quality that have a specific test for just that and also require a certain conscientiousness score, and jobs monitoring flora and fauna that range from "just a conscientiousness test" to "must be a licensed veterinarian and then pass a twenty-hour course on dealing with bears". Everything except the minicopter pilot job requires basic wilderness survival training but they also all offer it on the job.

All of Kyeo's wilderness survival training is from another planet. The boat inspection job sounds sort of like something he wouldn't have that much trouble with, though the entire process of picking a job without much input is weird. He checks out the janitorial jobs too.

The janitorial jobs have a lot less variety in both pay and skills and involve vacuuming, sweeping, mopping, disinfecting, refilling the consumables in bathrooms and hand sanitizer dispensers, etc. in various publicly accessible buildings, or doing most of the same things in people's residences.

Tazz has pulled a small plastic object out of a belt pouch and is fiddling with it.

"What is that?"

"It's just a stimgadget." They hold it out for his inspection.

"...what is it for?"

"For stimming with. See, this bit spins and this bit can be flipped back and forth and this bit statechanges up and down when you press it and so on."

"...but what does it accomplish?"

"It's pleasant. And it's more interruptible than reading; I didn't want to get into flow in case you had questions."

"- hm."

What are the disaster relief jobs like?

They require some physical skills, courage, a cool head, and being willing to travel all over the planet to wherever the latest disaster is. The descriptions are variously weighted combinations of putting out fires, building temporary dams and shelters, clearing rubble, first aid/helping out doctors, rebuilding roads and bridges and sewer systems (if one has to rebuild a sewer system one gets a hardship bonus) and things in that reference class, helping people find their missing relatives or identify the bodies of same, and overseeing the distribution of emergency funds and the delivery of supplies to areas where the regular mail has been disrupted. The more dangerous ones have hazard pay and the job dictating the distribution of funds and relief supplies requires an oath, full text downloadable at this pointer.

"Why are there bonuses for fixing sewer systems?"

"Because it's super gross but really important."

"Don't people care that it's important?"

"They do; that's why they're willing to pay insurance premiums big enough to cover hardship bonuses so that people will choose jobs that involve fixing them. If fixing sewers wasn't paid well, it would end up getting done by people who aren't good at anything else, and those people would do a worse job than people who do it for the money."

"Would they?"

"Yes, because people who are incapable of doing most jobs are usually in that situation because they're generally incompetent in a way that makes them somewhat bad at the things they can do. Not always, if one is for example a brilliant mathematician with a paralyzing disease they can be awesome at some things and garbage at other things, but most abilities are correlated. Also people tend to work harder if they're getting paid more."

Oh, and the generally incompetent people just don't have jobs and don't have money and probably eventually starve. "Mm. I don't know anything about plumbing right now. With training I could. With less training than that I think I could do boat inspections or janitorial work or some of the disaster relief."

"Great. So you have a couple options: you can get one of the jobs you think you can do now and not take classes, you can get a job now and take classes on plumbing until you feel ready to try to switch, or you can stay fully-student until you're trained and then get a job. I mean, you can stay fully-student as long as you want, but it sounds like you want a job eventually."

"Fully-student?"

"Not doing any paid work. Usually because one is a child or taking a lot of classes or retired but some people stop doing paid work for reasons that aren't any of those."

Yeah, like not being good at that giant stack of tests. "I see. I think I will just see if I pass the thresholds required for the jobs in question and then see which of them want me."

"A very reasonable strategy! Is there anything else you think we should do tonight or should I go away?"

"You could walk me through preparing some of this food." He thinks he remembers most of the appliance instructions but if the handcomp throws a bad translation he will have less context than Tazz will.

"Sure! I got you pretty simple stuff to start out. The hardest thing is probably the macaroni and cheese; you need to boil a pot of water on the stove and then cook the macaroni in it for however long it says on the box and then drain it and add the sauce. Want to try it and I'll watch and warn you if anything is about to go wrong?"

"Yes, thank you."

He does everything slowly, reading the instructions over more than once, but he manages to do all the steps without mishap requiring intervention.

"And now I guess you get to find out if you like mac and cheese."

It's creamy and cheesy and starchy and somewhat salty, and he has salt and pepper and hot sauce available to put on it.

He does like it! He does Not like the hot sauce though he does finish the bite he sprinkled it on.

"You know how to message me if you have trouble, right?"

(Kyeo's messaging inbox currently contains twenty-three requests for videochats or in-person meetings  from physicists, economists, historians, and reporters, or representatives of large groups thereof, plus a message from the building admin asking him to acknowledge the building policies.)

"I think so - how urgent are these other things -"

They look them over. "Nothing that really can't wait until tomorrow. Building policies will take ten minutes unless you have a lot of questions about them, newspeople can be ignored indefinitely, the academics can also be ignored indefinitely but they'll all be really good at explaining stuff in their own fields so if I was in your situation I would be very excited to talk to them. Also most of them will be willing to pay for interviews because they expect to get material for research papers or books out of it."

He wishes that this planet required less constant perseveration on money even if they insist on having it. "Thank you."

"What does that mean in terms of which emails you want to deal with tonight and which ones you want to put off to tomorrow?"

"I will look at building policies quickly before you go in case I have questions."

What are the building policies besides quiet hours?

Don't burn any substances that smell bad or in any other way pipe strong smells into the shared vents.

Get permission before making any permanent modifications to your apartment or any permanent or reversible changes to the public areas including the exterior. If you make any reversible modifications to your apartment (e.g. painting the walls) you may be asked to reverse them or pay for them to be reversed when you move out.

Take your garbage and recycling to the big bins behind the building; don't leave it anywhere else in the public areas. Don't leave anything blocking the doors or the bottom of the climbing wall.

The bike rack is in the back; don't mess with other people's bikes. Guests can use the bike rack but be considerate of the limited number of spaces.

Don't deliberately or by being stupid cause damage to the climate control, plumbing, or structural soundness of the building.

Don't dangle stuff so far off your balcony that it blocks the view from the next balcony down unless the person whose balcony it is says it's okay.

Don't mess with other people's mail. Don't order a big pile of packages and then forget to pick them up for weeks; similarly, don't leave your laundry in the laundry room for days. Lost and found is at the desk.

No pets except fish.

If you and another tenant have a problem with each other's use of the building and can't resolve it, either hash it out on the forum or ask the building admin for a ruling.

"This all seems straightforward."

"Oh good." They can show him how to electronically sign it, and then if that's everything they can go get that set of spare bedding.

He chases down a last noodle on his plate of macaroni and cheese.

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."