"I took some notes," he says, holding them out. "I can stay up a bit longer and answer questions about them, if you like, or you can ask questions in the morning."

"Morning would be fine. I'll just keep notes of any questions I have." She smiles at him. "Thank you. That was good thinking-ahead."
 

He smiles a little, weak but genuine. "Thank you. I'll see you in the morning, then."

"See you in the morning." Merrin gathers together her own notes and remaining blank paper, and accepts his. "- Oh, um, could I borrow something to wear to sleep?" She normally sleeps naked but she is NOT going to do that in someone else's bed. "And you should probably show me the bathroom and stuff." 

"Right, yes, of course."

Bathroom: functional. Spare pajamas: poorly sized but in the less inconvenient direction. (He would offer to change the sheets, but he only has the one set of sheets, so it would take two hours with the basement laundry machines to get back to a state as acceptable as the current one, so he doesn't.)

Merrin is not exactly impressed with any of the bathroom amenities, but functional it is, and reasonably clean which she cares more about. The bed is not incredibly comfortable, even though you wouldn't think that making comfortable beds would require advanced technology. She's never in her life worn anything that fitted as poorly as the pajamas, but they'll do, and she can keep her actual clothes neat-looking for meeting people tomorrow and, hopefully, impressing them. 

She settles into bed, but leaves the light on, and curls up to read Eddie's notes on the hospital. 

Eddie curls up in his armchair and . . . still can't sleep. It's not that there's another person in his apartment; he's slept in the coach cars of trains. His brain just won't stop spinning like a car with its wheels stuck in sand. After half an hour he gives up and gets the train schedule again; once he's finished it that will be something like an endpoint and then he'll be able to sleep.

Eddie's notes on innovations: getting a new idea widely adopted is kind of random, in a lot of ways. The public generally follows the opinions of newspaper articles, and the writers of those articles decide what to write about an idea based on what they think of the person who had it. Merrin's total lack of reputation might actually help, here, because the journalists love underdogs and what they call "little people", which basically means anyone who hasn't done anything interesting. It also generally helps to make a lot of noise about how you don't expect to benefit from the thing in any way and are doing it solely for public benefit, even though Eddie is aware that it would make a lot more sense to trust someone who had skin in the game on their own idea. If, on the other hand, you can get one really visible public demonstration of an idea, that will change a lot of minds, and people who were previously yelling that you should be forbidden to do the thing will start yelling that you should be required to do the thing for free. This process was most recently demonstrated by Henry Rearden with a new alloy of the same name. Incidentally, Rearden would probably like to talk to Merrin about industrial safety; mills are a dangerous operation even when one follows best practices and recent declines in the quality of available materials are making best practices individually harder to follow and collectively less sufficient.

(Eddie did not, while writing this last, consider the question of whether Rearden would object to having his problems discussed with a stranger; that Rearden should object to someone making a true statement about him would be so strange as not to be worth contemplating.)

Merrin annotates his notes, in Baseline because that lets her fit her thoughts into a reasonable number of words. 

Does this place not even have prediction markets– actually you know what, no, she is not surprised. She makes a note to try to explain the concept, at least the basics, she's probably going to need help figuring out the implementation and it's obviously going to need to be adapted, to work in a place where the highest-tech communication method is 'telegrams', and also the dath ilan prediction markets use a lot of sophisticated math which Merrin does not know and has minimal hopes of getting help with in a world where APPARENTLY she is an UNUSUALLY SMART PERSON. 

The word 'journalist' is another one with really weird connotations but she has enough uncertainty about how the inexplicable-language-acquisition thing works that she should just ask Eddie to unpack for her what journalists do. 

The whole bit about 'people who were previously yelling that you should be forbidden to do the thing will start yelling that you should be required to do the thing for free' is pretty alarming although it does kind of fit with the thing where apparently all of the economics here recently went insane. Merrin is unusually altruistic in inclination (this isn't a self-serving rationalization, there were tests for that, as a child, and then several of the adults in her life were actually pretty concerned and had serious conversations with her about it), and she's STILL pretty offended at the concept of Governance demanding that she provide a service for free once it proves to be useful. 

She would be delighted to talk to this Rearden person about industry best practices! She wouldn't be surprised if their industry is different enough that nothing she knows maps directly across - for one thing what in the world is a "steel" "mill", her English comprehension informs her that "mills" are often wind or water-powered and usually grind grain. This is plausibly one of the areas where she best understands the guiding principles behind specific processes, though, so she's sure that by working with a domain expert she can get somewhere. 

...Did somebody try the thing on Rearden and declare that he should be able to make steel alloy for free because that is NOT HOW ANYTHING WORKS and she's so offended on his behalf. 

By the time she's made her way through all of the notes, she's actually feeling pretty tired, even though it's not midnight according to her circadian rhythm. She should probably just go to sleep now, and work on listing out everything she knows about how hospitals operate later. 

The bed does not get any more comfortable and the sound isolation of this apartment is terrible and despite the exhaustion her thoughts are buzzing, but she does, eventually, sleep. 

Eddie finishes the train schedule update, sets it down on his desk, sits back down in the armchair and falls deeply asleep. He wakes up in the morning with a stiff neck (unsurprising) and takes a moment to remember why he didn't make it to his bed this time (very surprising, once he's sure it wasn't a dream). He knocks on the bedroom door a little before sunrise.

Ughhhhhhhwhat where is she and why does she have a crick in her neck? 

Merrin drags herself awake, with some reluctance, and spends five seconds trying to make sense of why she's in an uncomfortable bed wearing very weird and also very oversized pajamas, and then she remembers, and she doesn't burst into tears but it's a near thing. 

"M'awake!" she calls out, and sits up to swing her legs over the side of the bed, even though it does not at ALL feel like an appropriate time to be awake. At a guess she got five, maybe six hours of sleep, and it's not helping that it still isn't light outside. (Her room at home has sunlight-imitating dimmable ceiling lights and powered blackout blinds, both of them on a timer, set to gently wake her at the appropriate time by imitating dawn. Which she suddenly misses a LOT, along with her bed, and her climate control, and it's really depressing how long it's probably going to take to get any of that here - if she can even manage it at all...) 

Eddie travels around the country a lot and doesn't like the time differences; he didn't ask Merrin how many hours off she was but it's probably more than three. He waits for her to come out.

It's more than three hours but Merrin is used to doing bizarre things to her circadian rhythms and you know what this is NOT, this is NOT doing an EMT training scenario that last twenty-four hours. Instead it's way more tiring and unfair than that her brain can please shut up. 

She strips out of the borrowed pajamas and sniffs her armpits - tolerable - and then puts her regular clothes back on. She really hopes that it's possible to buy higher-quality better fitting clothes in this world. Well, fit-wise, what Eddie was wearing yesterday was weird and foreign and honestly not incredibly flattering but it was at least the right size for him. 

She yawns and stretches and emerges looking reasonably awake, though with dark circles under her eyes. (Which seems fine and is if anything a good thing, she doesn't have any of her faceblanding supplies right now.) 

"Morning." She gives Eddie an appraising look. 

Eddie is still bewildered and overwhelmed but has much more available brain to be bewildered and overwhelmed with. "I usually get breakfast at the office; we can stop somewhere on the way to the hospital. Do you have another round of questions?"

"Yeah, I took some notes. How long a trip is it to get to the hospital? There might be enough time to just talk about it on the way so I'm not delaying you any more." 

"Twenty minutes plus however long the line at the cafe is, so call it thirty? If we get there before you're out of questions we can stand around outside for a bit; it doesn't look like it's going to rain."

Is there not going to be a better option than standing around in hopes in doesn't rain. Also what, the implication is that they're going to have to wait for ten minutes for other people to finish getting food from the food-place before they can get food, that– is not actually surprising, now, is it. 

"Sure." And she will follow him out of his apartment. "First question should be one of the easier ones - can you explain in more detail what 'journalists' actually do?" 

"Journalists write in newspapers and magazines, or talk on the radio, about--whatever they want people to read about, mostly, news but also their opinions on the news and things that are technically news but about who wore what at whose party, so you have to read quite a lot of newspapers to find the actual news. And sometimes it's only technically true, or not even that. But some of it's important and with a bit of practice you can tell what's true so I keep up with it anyway."

"I...see." She takes a minute to absorb that. "That - sounds really inefficient, and I suspect I don't have enough practice to - notice which pieces are and aren't true." What a HORRIBLE THOUGHT. "I mean, aside from noticing what makes sense as a way for the world to be versus not, and my judgement on that is going to be noisy until I have more context and a higher-resolution predictive model of this place and I can put numbers on my confusion instead of just feeling vaguely uneasy. I'm at this point strongly anticipating that you don't have prediction markets for decision-making but I wanted to ask anyway - especially since even if the world overall wouldn't actually...value the thing they're getting you, possibly the business leaders you work with would? So, um, does the phrase 'prediction market' actually mean anything to you? I could also just be guessing wrong on how to translate our term into English." 

"My best guess, which isn't much of one, is that it means paying people to predict how things are going to go, which sounds potentially useful but we don't have it."

"It's...sort of that but not quite? Prediction betting might actually translate it better, it's - conceptually sort of like a marketplace, where goods are traded, except the 'goods' being traded are predictions about what's true of the world or will be true in the future or what course of action will achieve the best outcome, and it's been very carefully set up over time so that the individual actors who are making these predictions will win their bets and profit if they're right. ...A lot of my medical work was tied into the medical-prediction-markets, there would be experts making prediction-bets on a patient's diagnosis and likely course, and different experts making prediction-bets on likely outcomes from treatment, or on the order of triage and who I ought to treat first. If you set it up right then it's a very good way to effectively aggregate expert knowledge and turn it into plans that work. ...I'm kind of worried there might be a lot of ways to implement it that aren't clever enough and somehow end up doing a different thing, that's...worse in the same way that the news written by journalists in your world is worse for actually learning what's true than the knowledge-aggregators in dath ilan. But, I don't know. The mathematical underpinnings of prediction markets really aren't my domain of expertise." 

"That sounds interesting, but it would definitely be difficult to set up and I don't think enough people would use them. And the sort of people who are most interested in gambling are the people whose predictions are the least useful."

"Huh! Really? Why? I - would naively expect that the sort of people who are interesting in using-cleverness-to-profit are going to be better at it than people who don't care, because they'll - put a lot of effort and optimization into collecting the gains-from-trade, and the hard part is just setting up incentives right so that the best winning strategy for them is also the one that gives you accurate and useful predictions or plans." 

"Does your world have--lotteries, or casinos, or betting on horse races?"

"....We have betting on - who will win games or challenges? I think people participate in betting because it's fun and satisfying and not just because it contributes value to Civilization if they're participating because it makes the market more liquid. I think you might need to explain more what lotteries and casinos are because that's not mapping over to anything I clearly recognize us as having." 

"People who like to gamble--they aren't doing it to make a profit--lotteries are probably the clearest form of it, they're where a government sells a bunch of tickets with numbers on them, and then picks a ticket at random, and the person with that ticket gets back a portion of the total ticket sales. So the more you play the more money you lose. No, I can't explain why, I'm sorry." There's the sense that he's apologizing for more than the incomplete explanation.