Zahn's test is a mix of easy if bizarrely specific questions like how many bedrooms are in a standard home complex. To questions about laundry and cleaning supplies, to questions about ideal temperatures for human habitation. The facilities questions he mostly manages to answer based on their initial skim of the facilities section and their explorations thus far. The cleaning supplies questions he mostly fails but occasionally figures out. At the end it deems him 'Moderately Competent' and accepts him as a Janitor (Provisional) conditional on attending remedial classes at a terminal two hours a day.

Walta's test mixes questions about the ideal growing environment for plants with ones on the nutritional value of the same, questions on farming and a variety of other related topics like the properties of fertilizers and pollination methods.

She has taken a crop science class as an elective! Her nutritional knowledge is kind of sketchy, but the rest should be okay.

At the end of her test she is 'Competent' and accepts her as a Gardener (Provisional) conditional on attending remedial classes at a terminal half an hour a day or more. It then presents her with a list of her rights and privileges. She can now access readouts on the past and expected crop yields from areas under her management and order different crops to be planted in the next cycle. She can also change the preferred ripeness stage for various plants and which parts of the plant are preserved or discarded.

Zahn's list of rights and privileges includes the ability to unlock doors in his area. It notes that upon being judged competent he will be able to switch some areas to be cleaned exclusively by residents, change preferences on whether beds should be made by the cleaning robots, reactivate teleporters in his area, assign new access codes to teleporters, and conduct debugging tests on the various locking mechanisms in his area.

She writes it all down. "Does being a Janitor give you any rights and privileges, Zahn? And how do you think the 'remedial lessons' will work?"

Poke poke, let's see if she can find this past crop readout.

"Apparently I'm pretty provisional for the moment, but I can already unlock doors. There's no reference to locking doors for anything but testing purposes but it also says once I'm judged 'Competent' I get to control the teleporters."

The crop readouts for her section list twelve orchards, six greenhouses, one farm, the home complex garden, and something called Centerpoint Island.

"Try reading about the teleporters? It might let you, now. And I bet Alice can take the security test."

She looks up Centerpoint Island in the encyclopedia.

Zahn brings up the entry on teleporters, apparently the physics are still not included at his access level but the mechanics are carefully enumerated, after a minute to take them in he condenses it for the group. "Alright so apparently the teleporters work on an addressing system. It says there are about one thousand elevators with codes assigned at the moment, though I don't see anywhere that would give me a list of those codes. Short-distance teleportation is effectively instantaneous and completely safe but interstellar teleportation takes almost exactly a minute and it is recommended that one consume a certain stabilizer drug before undergoing it or else you'll experience side effects including migraines and vertigo. I'm guessing that means whatever we drank was spiked with that stabilizer drug."

Centerpoint Island she is informed is part of Biosphere One the largest artificial biosphere on the planet which is accessed from Sector White. Specifically, Centerpoint is the largest island in the middle of the artificial river within that habitat.

"...Oh. God. So according to everything we can tell, we really are on another planet."

"And in another solar system. Mars does not appear to have been conveniently terraformed by friendly aliens."

Alice takes a deep shuddering breath. "I guess that's confirmation then. Walta, I wouldn't generally ask this so soon into knowing someone but given the circumstances do you want a hug?"

"...Yeah."

"Swear to god I will build a spaceship teleporter thing given enough time. Dammit."

Alice hugs Walta.

"I think it might be more efficient to see if we can dictionary attack the teleporters to figure out which codes are in use and then try all the codes. With less than 2000 codes that would only take a few days once we had the list. Once I'm a full Janitor I can reassign elevator codes, I think I might be able to use that as an attack vector if the system lets me."

"...Hack the alien tech. It could work. It's the kind of thing you'd think they'd defend against, a very basic security problem...  Does this mean the floor circles are teleporters?

Walta starts another short link with Alice when she pulls out of the hug, just because it feels good having that- immediacy to the sympathy and reassurance. Thank you.

"Hm, let me check." Zahn pulls up a couple articles. "No it looks like there's something about the size of spy movie air-vents running around the complex that the robots it calls servos can move through. They open inwards though so I'm not sure how effective blocking the entrances with furniture would be."

"They're giving you guys some privileges to control a few things, at least. But like I said... I don't trust this place."

Walta sighs. Nick barely trusts anything. "...I think I'm going to try to make sense of the different farms and greenhouses it's telling me we have. Maybe take a quick tour. Food supply's important, no matter what else we end up doing."

"I don't think we should split up, or at least if we are I should be with the person exploring. Otherwise you might get trapped behind a one way door. Alice, I think you should probably try that security test. Actually, Nick I know Alice makes a hobby of studying security systems but I didn't think to ask whether you did. I think she also took some first aid classes so depending maybe she'd be a better fit for medical, though I think security is the more important position to fill."

"I'd probably do better on a manufacturing test. No idea what security will even ask about."

"I can take another look at the greenhouse at least... Maybe start on a map if you'll give me that footage from the flight, Nick?"

"I'll try the security test then." She sits down to do that. This test asks questions about forensics, security systems, and close quarters combat. Alice has some trouble on the forensics questions and a couple security systems she hasn't heard of but otherwise does well enough to earn her the rating of 'Competent' and only a half hour of remedial course work per day. Her new abilities largely amount to the ability to lock and unlock doors as well as the ability to shut down a teleporter in her zone so it can't receive incoming passengers, and reactivate it at a later time. She also receives access to a list of elevators under her control, though not the codes for them. Some of them are suggestive like Biosphere One entryway, Centerpoint Island, White Mall Skybidge, and White mall Terminal Store. Others are a lot more generic like warehouses 15, 29 and 87 or apartment complex 2. She conveys this list to the others.

"Yes, we need to document where all these different references actually point to. What's the Terminal Store, has anyone read the article for that yet?"

Alice types a search into the encyclopedia, and in a moment says. "Apparently that's the name for the store at the end of one of the six mall spirals. It's located about 7 kilometers from here through the mall. The sky bridge is apparently halfway between there and here."