She gives this statement due consideration. "Okay... what shouldn't I do, then?"

Sandalwood thinks for a moment.

"So I want to clarify that you are allowed to do the things I'm about to mention," she starts. "And I won't be mad if you do them. But it would be convenient for me if you would refrain from lying or deliberately insulting people. And you're actually not allowed to break the law, but it would also make my job easier if you didn't. I'll tell you about any relevant laws before we go somewhere that has them, so you don't need to worry about breaking laws I haven't warned you about."

"...what do you mean when you say that I'm allowed to do things, but I shouldn't?"

She takes a step back.

"If you were, to example, to tell me a lie," she explains. "Nothing bad would happen to you. I wouldn't get mad, you wouldn't be banished, you would still get to go places, etc. The only thing that lying would do is make it harder for me to understand you and help you. So I would prefer if you didn't do it, but you only need to care about that insofar as you care about making my job easier, which I don't need you to."

"For contrast, if we went somewhere with laws, and then I told you about a law and you broke it, there would be a negative consequence. You might need to pay a fine, or you might be asked to do something to make up for the transgression, or you might be banned from that area for a certain amount of time."

"Does that explicate the difference?"

"Pay a... fine?" she echoes uncertainly. "What kind of fine?"

"Are you familiar with the concept of money?" she asks, genuinely uncertain. "We have a currency called 'stars' which can be used to pay for things, including fines. Everyone receives a periodic payment in exchange for buying into the whole system. You have ... 1.033 stars," she says, peeking at how long it has been since she arrived.

"But I haven't bought into the system!" she says, alarmed. "I'm a doll, I can't own things!"

"By 'buying in' I just mean agreeing that private property is possible. But you can opt-out if you want to! Plenty of beings do," she replies. "The system is opt-out instead of opt-in because that's easier for most of the population. You could also just hold onto the money until you find your owner, so that you can give it to her and she can start with a little extra."

"...what would opting out... mean, and what would not opting out mean?"

"So right now, there is an account which you are permitted to spend money out of, which is accumulating money at the same rate that every other being's account is," she replies. "Not opting out means that continues to be the case. If you did opt out, your account would stop receiving money. You could choose to send the money already in your account back, or to some other person or cause, or you could just leave it there."

"Having money lets you pay for things. Right now, I'm paying all of your travel expenses out of the 'make a good impression on aliens' fund. If you wanted me to go away and stop trying to help, you would need to pay to go places. The teleport here cost 2.4 millistars. There are charities that pay to make sure nobody ends up stranded, but you wouldn't be able to go to as many places without any money. There are other things you might want to pay for, though, like paying a fine to avoid banishment, or paying people for their time to check if they're your owner."

She pauses, trying to judge if this is too much information at once.

"My recommendation would be to either leave it alone until you've had longer to adjust, at which point you can make a more informed decision, or to buy into a spending collective. Those are organizations that take the basic income from people who don't want to have to interact with money, and then cover reasonable expenses like travel and food without requiring payment. So you wouldn't own anything, but you could still go places."

"...that all sounds... complicated and confusing and alien and like I can't just decide not to deal with complicated confusing alien things because they will be happening to me whether I understand them or not," she concludes.

"That is ... pretty much accurate?" Sandalwood agrees. "As I said, ignoring this issue completely for a while is probably a good idea. Nothing is happening which can't be un-done, you're not hurting anyone, and nothing about this is time-sensitive or will change if you just ignore it."

She coughs. "I feel like we got off topic. This whole conversation started because I was trying to explain what I mean by things like 'allowed' and 'permitted'. Maybe I should just avoid using those words? I'm happy to explain our economic system, but the defaults are the defaults because they are easier to change later. It's easy for someone to give up something that they don't want to have, but you can't go back in time and give someone something that they were missing. So we don't need to talk about it until you feel ready."

"...hmm," she says. "I think I see what you mean... but... it feels to me like if I don't opt out, I'm... agreeing that I'm the sort of thing that should own money? And I don't know how I feel about that, or if it's even true, or even really what it would mean for it to be true or not."

"That makes sense!" she reassures her. "How about instead of putting the money in your account, we put it in a trust account. And once you have thought about it and know what you want, you can either claim the trust account or disavow it? And it the mean time, I'll keep showing you around on the be-nice-to-aliens budget and answer any questions as they come up."

This is, in fact, pretty much isomorphic to the current situation. But she hopes that this framing will be a bit less upsetting.

"Hmm..."

She spends a few seconds thinking about that.

"...that makes sense," she eventually concludes. "Okay."

Sandalwood pulls up an admin interface and makes a note on their visitor's account, and then sets up a second account into which her basic income is routed.

"Done!" she reports. "Alright -- where were we? Did you still want to see the O'Neil cylinders I mentioned? Or do you want to ask more clarifying questions about things like our economy and laws and so on?"

"Maybe I should ask more clarifying questions. I'm just not sure where to start."

"That's understandable! It's hard to adapt to a totally alien culture. How about I start with a general overview, and you stop me if something doesn't make sense?" she suggests.

"That sounds very sensible!"

"Alright."

She thinks about how to phrase this to land well with their visitor.

"So the fundamental idea behind our economy is that there are certain things that ought to be shared fairly, because nobody has more right to use them than somebody else. For example, space. Nobody has an inherent right to control what happens in a particular volume of space. But people need a certain amount of space, just to exist. And many people enjoy having private areas. So how do you let those ideas all sit in harmony with one another?"

"Our solution is money -- fungible tokens that people can exchange. When someone wants exclusive rights over something shared -- like having a house where they can evict people, or wanting time on the fabricators to make something with -- they pay everyone else for the privilege. Then everyone else can use that money to get exclusive rights over something they want."

"If two people want the same thing, it goes to whoever pays more. Which leaves the person who didn't get what they wanted richer for next time, so that on average, the whole system allocates things to the people who want them most, without being biased towards anyone in particular."

"There are a lot more details to make things work in the real world, but does that make sense as a basic outline?"

"...that sounds... very strange," she says slowly. "I'm not sure how things worked wherever I came from, but I think it was very differently than that. I think I understand, though."

"There have been other systems in the past that might be more similar to what you're used to?" Sandalwood guesses. "This is a fairly historically-unusual system. But it is also the best system we've been able to devise so far, by a few different metrics."

"But now maybe you can see what I mean when I talk about the universal basic income as being a payment for buying into the system -- it is the money that is being given to someone to compensate them for all the things that they don't get, because they are being privately used by someone else. For example, right now you couldn't just walk into my apartment. It's private and locked. So I am paying you a tiny tiny fraction of a star for the privilege of being able to say you can't go there."

"It's not very much, because most people don't particularly want to go there, so I don't have to pay very much to keep it. If I wanted an apartment in a very popular area where lots of people want to be, I'd need to pay more. But those very small payments add up when most people have private houses, and buy new manufactured objects, and teleport, and rent server time, etc. Right now, everyone is getting slightly under one star/hour."

"Which brings us to the question of who can receive a universal basic income. That's a more thorny issue. The actual answer we've settled on is 'anyone who can use language to communicate, or is a member of a species who can normally use language.' But there is a lot of arguing about whether that's the right definition. Some people think that various animals should get UBI, there are debates about when babies should qualify, not everyone agrees with the specific standard we use to measure 'language use', etc. It's the definition we use because it seems like a good proxy that reliably separates things that definitely should be compensated -- like people -- from things that shouldn't -- like rocks. But it's definitely not a perfect metric."

"I think that's a good summary of the reasons for the system. Do you have questions about that, or should I talk about how this works in practice?"

"Hmm... I want to think about that for a minute first," she says.

"Of course! Take your time."

Sandalwood looks back up at the rings. The ground beneath them is slowly rotating, bringing more of the space around Saturn into view.