Would she like to visit an information kiosk or a public park or a public library or a subway station or a church or a concert hall or...

Information kiosk sounds like a decent bet.

Couple blocks thataway. Manned by a person with purple horns.

"Hi. I got hit by a van this morning. Or possibly I lingered for a week in a coma, I don't know, can you tell me what day it is on Earth?"

This person can totally do that.

"Okay, so it was yesterday, I guess." Sigh. "I'm here for a little while waiting for my application to the Dead Republic to process. Do you want to pitch me on staying here or is that not your bag?"

"Uh, well, I mean, you can go wherever you want, it's not my job to tell you where to, uh, live, but New Jerusalem's cleaner and gets people who go in for the harps and hymns thing more. And it's, you know, small, less than a billion people, maybe more the size you're used to. The bizarre weirdoes here get crucified for Good Friday and the bizarre weirdoes in the Dead Republic are playing a semi-aquatic game of capture-the-flag that they started in 1980. I think New Jerusalem's cozy and I like the atmosphere but, like, maybe you won't."

"Huh, I was really expecting you to have more people here given how inclusive you sounded."

"Yeah, for almost all of human history the Bastion and its precursor states've been poaching our people as much as possible. Uh, this was not a nice place till Jesus came and dealt with the demons two thousand years ago and that didn't magically make there be infrastructure or anything. It's super easy to get to the Bastion from here, too. Getting easier to get from the Bastion or the Dead Republic to New Jerusalem, too, used to be you couldn't just pop up for free the day you died."

"Oh, I didn't realize this being a livable place was historically that recent."

"We're up and coming!"

"Congratulations. Is the Bastion nicer than it sounds? Being underground sounds kind of depressing and also like it might involve a lot of stairs."

"If your background is almost anywhere on Earth it might be the nicest place you've ever been but New Jerusalem and the Dead Republic both almost definitely would be too. There are stairs there but there are stairs here too and you don't have... arthritic knees, or whatever it was."

"I am as young as I look but I have dyspraxia. Also I was a middle class American."

"Maybe not, sometimes brain problems go away too. I think as a middle class American you'd find the Bastion cramped as hell but other than that it'd still be nice. I think. I only sort of keep up with America."

"I imagine it's difficult to get Earth news from here."

"Getting easier! The people doing book runs these days bring back tapes of 60 Minutes and that kind of thing."

"Do you know much about the Dead Republic, I'd like to hear more about what it's like from people who don't live there."

This person has maybe been waiting for an excuse. "They have seventeen different towns set aside for weird sex things, which is not just more than us, it's more per capita. They have this incredibly famous set of archery contests and every time they get together for those they have a huge song and dance contest to kick it off and it's, man, you've gotta picture the Olypmics crossed with Eurovision. And they've got - so when I went I heard about an argument between two factions of Valhalla enthusiasts about whether their Valhalla should allow the use of radioactive decay in rube goldberg machines that power ballistae, and I said I thought Valhalla was just for swords and hammers and I got an earful about why their entire category of factions broke with the people who stick to swords and hammers, and there are apparently at least three Valhallas for those people because they couldn't agree with each other about something else and I've been warned not to ask about the pig. So, uh, the Dead Republic is super weird."

Giggle. "I kind of like the sound of that, actually, like, I'm not any of those specific types of weird but it seems like it might bode well for people - doing well."

"Yeah, like, that's the kind of thing you can do there. It's just that you could instead spend all that time and effort solving ethics and rescuing people who ended up in worse afterlives and arguing about whether to destroy the Earth now that infant mortality has dropped."

"- I didn't realize that was a live debate. I had the impression that I could do that sort of thing, or at least learn skills appropriate to taking it up later, in the Republic?"

"I mean, you can. People do. I could just have said 'there are billions of people and every single one is as unique as their fingerprints'. But, like, New Jerusalem has less per-capita spending on entertainment."

"Gotcha. Thank you. Why... do people want to destroy the Earth."

"The bad afterlives are growing faster than the good ones. Lotta arguing about whether to step up the rescue missions or conquer someplace or release a genetically engineered super-plague to bring infant mortality back up or destroy the earth or try to make people more likely to go to good afterlives, only we're not really totally sure what causes that in the first place so it's not very easy to do anything about."