"If you teleported out of this train while it was moving relative to the ground would you come out moving relative to the ground or would you match up with your destination?"

"Did you ever go to another celestial body? Like the moon or another planet or something."

'I would not be moving relative to the ground unless I willed it or it was for other reasons more aesthetic.  I briefly visited the moon a few times but as a location it was unsuitable for human survival and therefore uninteresting and irrelevant to my projects at the time.'

"This planet of humans know how to survive on our moon! It takes a lot of equipment but there are people up there right now!"

"Have I mentioned you are going to be so rich. Possibly richer than anyone has ever been."

"Oh hey, speaking of getting rich--" Tren pulls out his handcomp and starts doing something on it; everyone else follows suit within about three seconds. 

Mark, without looking up from her betting, says "Next stop's mine and I vote we all pile into my apartment; my roommate's out of town and doesn't care about guests and I have a blackboardwall." This gets a chorus of "aye"s.

Ancorabenilisifentiliane peers at the handcomps.  It's less obtrusive than it would otherwise be given that they're very tall, have relatively arbitrary visual acuity, and are unaware that text has an intended orientation; they just incline their head slightly.

Nobody notices the peering because that would require paying attention to another agent's body language and gaze direction, but Voli says "I don't think anyone has explained prediction markets yet; you want the alienexplanation on that? Heh." Firstplanet has enough fiction about different societies or species meeting each other and trading exposition that the particular style of explanation aimed at someone with adult intelligence and maturity but zero context has a name, and that name is suddenly very apt And That's Awesome.

'I do.'

"Alright, so the first thing I need to explain is a bet. When one person thinks the future is going to be a certain way and another person thinks the future is going to be a different way, they can make an arrangement where whoever is right gets money. So for example, suppose I thought it was going to rain tomorrow and Artha thought it wasn't. We could make a bet where if it does rain she gives me a dollar and if it doesn't rain I give her a dollar. And we both think it's a good bet because we both think we're right about the weather. Now suppose I was 90% sure it was going to rain and she was only 60% sure it was going to rain. We could still make a bet where if it rains she gives me three dollars and if it doesn't I give her four dollars, and we'd both think it was a good bet. A prediction market is a collection of communications channels where people can make bets on anything, and it's useful for figuring out what's going to happen, because if someone knows a reason something is especially likely they'll make a bunch of bets that it will. So you can look at what bets people are making about, oh, whether some government policy is going to drive up the price of steel, or something, and see what everyone collectively thinks is going to happen. And people who do well at it get more money to keep doing it with, so you can see what the smartest and most well-informed people in particular think is going to happen."

'And now you are all making bets about me?'

"Yes. Well, we're making bets about things that your existence is information about. You're going to change a lot of things just by people knowing you exist, and right now we know that and nobody else does, so everyone else is collectively offering odds we know aren't right--like, I can make a bet that pays out a hundred times what I put in if the existence of intelligences not from earth is discovered in the next few years."

'My previous human acquaintances thought only a small number of people should know of my presence.'

"Well, they knew you longer than we have so they probably had a point, but it might have been something specific to their planet that doesn't apply here. What did they say their reasoning was?"

'I did not understand it.  But they were very insistent.  I think it seemed obvious to them; if no reason seems obvious to you perhaps none are applicable.'

Everyone spends a while contemplating the bizzare situation just described to them. 

"Maybe they terminally valued--knowing things nobody else did, or something? When I try to think of things that are obvious but hard to explain I think of stuff like nausea being unpleasant."

"Okay but I can give a causal explanation of why nausea is unpleasant even if I can't give a mechanism, it's because it's the poison response mechanism and evolution disincentivizes being poisoned."

"If evolution hadn't been discovered yet you'd still hate being nauseous and wouldn't be able to say anything about why."

"Yeah, okay, maybe[-at least 20%] it was something like that. No way to test it until and unless we make contact with them or Ancora remembers some exact words."

'I was allowed to be in the presence of other humans for brief periods once I had learned how to look and move like one.  And I was introduced more personally to five others besides the first one I made friends with, even when my impressions were imperfect.  But that is many fewer than the numbers you describe.'

"We can introduce you to some more people one at a time before we tell everyone you exist if that will make you more comfortable. Or we can try to keep you secret indefinitely if you want that. We don't want to pressure you into doing anything that would be harmful to you, is what I'm trying to say here."

"But if you do want to be public knowledge we will be very happy and work to make it go well."

"Priority-interrupt: this is my stop."

'I like humans and would prefer to meet more of them if there is no cause not to.'  They watch for and mimic stop-related behavior.

"Awesome!"

Stop-related behaviour is: wait for the train to stop and the doors (one pair on the train and one on the platform) to open. Exit the train and head towards a flight of stairs.

"The stairs are going to start moving when I get on," says Mark, and proceeds to prove this statement correct.

Ancora stares at the stairs for a moment and then teleports to the top of them.

"Nice!" says Kara as the humans all jog up the stairs. Mark gets back out in front again and leads them out onto a broad sidewalk along a narrow street between rows of towering buildings. There's an elaborate abstract chalk drawing in their path; they step into the empty street to go around it.

Ancora dutifully and gracefully follows, taking the same path into the street and looking raptly all around but especially up at the buildings.  At some point it starts raining intangible glitter around their ensemble.

Shortly after the glitter starts someone leans over their balcony six stories up and yells "You guys look awesome!"

Ancora looks at their party members and tries to determine whether they all think that this is an okay thing to have happened??

It's fine! Kara waves.

(Someone else on the balcony tells the yeller to pipe down, people on the other floors are trying to sleep, but quietly enough that the humans on the ground can't hear them.)

Ancora hears that but does not derive meaning from it.  They copy the wave.

In another minute or two they get to the tower Mark lives in. Mark holds their hand up in front of the door and it swings open, revealing a lobby with a mosaic tile floor, a stairwell, and a row of elevators. They hold their hand in front of the panel next to the elevator and it dings and the up arrow lights up.

"I didn't know you had a skinchip, that's neat," says Artha.

"Yeah, it's very convenient."