"That's not even actually making a bet! You wouldn't be putting any intellectual work into it that could change your odds of winning!" 

"I think people who bet on horse races try to think about which horse will win, but the bookies--the people who organize the bets and decide what odds to offer--set things up so they make a profit whatever happens and that doesn't stop people from betting against them."

"...I guess I follow why the, um, bookies would have an incentive to participate in that system. I'm...really not following why anyone else would, unless it's - hmm, is it a thing that's more about having social interactions with other people who share your interest in 'horse races'? In dath ilan there are some people who will, like, have forum conversations about an ongoing game but not be expecting to make money from it, the value they're getting from it is just more discussion of a topic they like?" 

"Maybe. I'd think if that was all of it they'd just have the conversations without spending so much money, but I don't know anyone who does it personally so it's hard to say."

"Huh." Understanding this is probably not her highest priority, right now. "Anyway. I...think maybe in order to implement prediction-betting the way dath ilan does, you need to have it be the case that most people are more intelligent than me and more - natively inclined to put numbers on all of their thoughts and hunches - I mean, maybe it's not really native for anyone, a lot of it must be training, but I think most people take to the training more than I do, I'm kind of lazy that way." 

"Most people being intelligent is probably important for a lot of things. If you remember the training well enough to teach it I would like to know, but that's not our first priority either. What was your next question?"

Her thoughts feel all out of order, again, now, full of the by-now-familiar feeling of trying to integrate a new piece of information and not even beginning to have a catalogued list of all the updates she needs to propagate. Ow. 

"I would be pretty happy to talk to Rearden about industry safety practices? But I probably do need to talk to him, to get a better sense of how things are done right now and how different it is from my world and what incremental changes would be workable and also make things better rather than worse, that's going to be high context - I know what our protocols are and could write that down, but I think it mostly wouldn't apply or wouldn't be usable to him, and I also understand at least some of the design principles but - not in a way that'd be as easy to write down. I might be able to remember some of the training well enough to copy it here but I've never thought about doing that before and it would take a lot of thinking." 

"I expect he'd be very happy to talk to you; I can send him a telegram today. Dagny Taggart will probably want to talk to you too." Now that he's had some sleep and gotten his head around the matter a little more he thinks he'll be able to present Merrin's existence as an interesting opportunity to be explored, rather than a problem he's giving up and asking for help with.

"Dagny Taggart is - the person you work for? With the railroad?" 

"Yes. Her title is Vice President of Operation but actually she runs the whole thing."

When she tries to mentally translate that title into Baseline she mostly gets confusion. "Is that, um, common? That someone's - official job description - isn't that they're in charge but actually they are? It sounds like it'd make it really confusing for anyone working there, honestly." 

"Everyone who needs to know finds out pretty quick. Her brother Jim's the President but he doesn't do anything; their father set it up that way because people think women can't run businesses." (Which is ridiculous. It's true that most women can't run businesses but most men can't either.)

"They what." Okay now she's mad. Even though she has approximately never had the slightest interest in being an entrepreneur and has had only marginally more interest in doing the administration side which is plausibly, in fact, what most of 'running a business' entails, that English phrase is so non-specific. Anyway it's in fact acknowledged in dath ilan that more men than women have certain interests and that this is predictive of success in different roles and that's only ever irked her a little and not for especially good reasons, but STILL. 

"It's ridiculous; anyone who takes one look at Dagny and one look at Jim should be able to tell it's ridiculous."

Merrin takes a deep breath. It's not going to help to be furious about it. Not more than a little bit furious, at least. She'll allow herself a little bit. 

"I - think maybe I need to ask you for a list of all the other things that 'people' think men can't do or women can't do because I suddenly feel like I'm about to walk into a minefield here–" aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah what is that idiom where did it COME from that concept is HORRIFYING and also now is really really not the time to be digging into the etymology of this language, horrifying or not. 

"Um. They say men can't raise kids or cook well or throw nice parties; women can't fight or be industrialists or scientists and ideally should just raise kids and not work. Uh, and there's rumors if a man and a woman are alone together too much, which is another reason I should get you a hotel room starting tonight."

Rumors, what sort of rumors– oh. "If it's rumors about sex then that's not actually a problem, I'm pretty asexual," and she is NOT bringing up the INFOHAZARD in this context, it's not even relevant, thankfully. "I - to me a lot of that does sound like...um," damn it they don't have a word for 'tropes', WHAT SORT OF FLAMINGPOOPING LANGUAGE IS THIS ANYWAY, "like - patterns-in-stories but the kind people expect to apply in their actual lives a lot of the time, and to be efficient and helpful shorthand for compressing information about themselves and others and how to have interactions smoothly? I think even in dath ilan a lot more women want to raise kids and somewhat more women want to run big elaborate events where they can try to matchmake all their single friends, and for Exception Handling the positions that might in theory involve fighting skew male and the ones that involve medical treatment skew female, but - nobody would ever think of it as - about what everyone in the category 'man' or 'woman' can do or even about what they should do, it just has predictive value. I'm not sure that scientists overall even skew one way or another, although if you go to the level of subfields I think there are more male physicists in particular and more female - medical researchers, maybe? I haven't actually looked that one up."

And now she can't, ever again, in fact she can't ever again look up anything that isn't in her head and she can't trust anything written in this world to be true and this is surprisingly upsetting, even accounting for the fact that she expects it to be upsetting, it's hitting her harder than that. 

Eddie just barely manages not to do a double take when Merrin casually and straightforwardly mentions sex, then nods along to the rest of it. She's clearly upset but it's pretty upsetting, or at least he'd be upset about it if he was a woman. (Dagny never seems to notice.)

"Yes, that seems right. Enough people are like that that it's normal, so anyone doing something different is strange, and strangeness frightens people."

"Oh. That makes sense. More than most of what you've said. I - people in my world are like that too, sort of, although I wouldn't've picked 'frightened' as one of the top five words to describe it. But...yeah. I think it's hard to avoid it being true that if you're - unusual, along any metric, compared to the people around you - then it's more frictiony to exist in a world that's built by people who aren't like you, for people who aren't like you to live in. ...I think our Civilization tries pretty hard, both to have there be a standard way things work, and to - make space and exceptions for the people who that doesn't work for, as long as the things they want aren't hurting anyone else. But it's still...inconvenient and means inconveniencing people around you? And I could imagine that if we didn't all have - lessons in how to think more clearly - then I still don't know if you'd get scared but you might get resentful or frustrated." 

"Yeah. I'm glad it's possible to deal with, even imperfectly." There's some thought he isn't quite managing to finish having, about the kind of people the world was built by, or for. 

They reach the café. It's small, but brightly lit, and smells like fresh bread and hot coffee.

Merrin can tell that he's thinking, and leaves him to it. Instead she pays attention to the café. How does the 'line' he talked about work? How many people are here and what are they actually doing when they get up to the food-and-coffee area? 

There are around a dozen people who haven't gotten their food yet. They stand in a line with the far end at the counter, where they tell the person behind the counter what they want, go to another line at the other end of the counter where upon reaching the front they receive what they ordered, pay for it by handing over circular coins of mixed sizes and metals, and then either leave with it or sit down to eat it.

Huh. ...Right, she hasn't gotten around to asking about the state of computing technology in this world - and that's probably a conversation she should have with an engineer or industrial researcher, maybe she can ask this Rearden about it - but her advance prediction is that the answer is 'not', and so their options for automating an extremely boring job are probably 'not'. 

She tries to peer at the staff behind the counter. What are they doing? How are they coordinating with each other? Do they look bored out of their minds? 

(Dath ilanis are very, very averse to repetitive work that leads to boredom. Merrin does not actually have any idea how that was handled at this tech-level-equivalent, given history being screened off. A Keeper would know. Why couldn't there have been a Keeper on that stupid plane.) 

They look pretty bored, but not like they're trying to compensate for the boredom by making a game of going as quickly and efficiently as possible or by examining the customers' mannerisms or anything. They just look kind of zoned out. The one who comes out of the back room with a new tray of croissants looks content and serene, though, like making pastries come out exactly the way he wants them is his idea of a good life.

Awwwwww. Merrin tries to catch his eye and smile at him. (She has a lot of appreciation for people whose idea of a good life is doing a relatively simple thing just right, over and over and over. In some sense that's a lot of what her job actually is - not the half of her time spent on training and simulated practice scenarios, those tend to be unrealistic not in any specific details but in overall plot-density, but the part where she actually rushes around the city responding to real medical emergencies - and from the outside, to someone who isn't her, it must seem like once you've seen a hundred heart attacks you've exhausted all possible sources of novelty there, but it doesn't feel that way to her, because every person is different, and she lives at the level of the concrete details, not the abstraction over all the specific cases...) 

By the time she gets to the front of the line she has a decent sense of what kinds of things people order, and she wants one of those pastries, but she's not the one here who has local money and she has no idea how to interpret prices and still hasn't really figured out how wealthy Eddie is in this setting, so she glances over at him as they near the front of the line. "Um, what would you usually ask for, here?"