"...your life is very strange to me but I'm glad you have the things you want."

"People getting the things they want is great!" she agrees. "I suspect that everything here will seem less strange with time."

"There aren't too many uploaded people," Sandalwood comments. "But there is definitely a lot of variety in what people are like and what they do with their days."

The doll nods thoughtfully, smiling a little.

She claps her hands. "Okay! I would chide myself for getting sidetracked, but it's not like we're in a rush. Let's head over to the O'Neil cylinders and then figure out where to go from there."

With the teleport locked out, they'll have to go the slow way. She lifts them up onto a platform and then accelerates. The stars turn to dark red embers in one direction and brilliant blue pinpricks in the other for just a moment, before they get close enough to Earth that the speed limit drops and they fade back to their normal colors.

Sandalwood screens out any non-visible light from interacting with them during the trip, in case their guest doesn't handle gamma rays very well.

"It'll be another minute, since we're not supposed to go more than a tenth the speed of light near Earth," she apologies.

"What..."

She can't quite figure out what question to ask.

Sandalwood does not have enough context to guess either.

"... did I do something surprising again? I'm sorry," she apologizes. "I didn't want to teleport us because we're not 100% sure its safe for you, so we have to go the slow way, which involves accelerating to near the speed of light and then decelerating at the other end? And normally that would only take a few seconds subjectively, but a group of concerned citizens and governments all go in together on partial bids for the space near Earth to restrict the maximum speed of objects, so that if there were a sudden failure of the traffic control systems (which there isn't going to be) there would be time to respond. So it will be another ... 47 seconds before we arrive."

"I think I'm... not used to... suddenly going places very fast," she says slowly. "It looked—new and strange."

"That makes sense! Would you like me to stop being able to move you around?" she offers. "It's useful for showing people around, and the systems won't let me move anyone in a way that will hurt them, but it could definitely still be unsettling if you're not expecting it."

"I don't know?" she says uncertainly. "It seems like probably being able to move me around is convenient for you?"

She adopts a thoughtful expression. She suspects that trying to explain that she cares about whether their guest likes the things that happen to her will get them into another rabbit hole.

"So it is convenient. But that convenience needs to weigh against other things, like whether you feel comfortable enough to ask questions or make requests. If I did something that was convenient in the moment, but that made my job harder overall, that would be a false economy. And since I don't know you very well, I can't really predict which things will turn out to be important to working well together and which ones are trivial, so I need to ask what you prefer in order to gauge the correct action."

"Hmm."

She falls silent, thinking that over.

She doesn't interrupt.

Over the course of their remaining travel, Earth grows from a tiny dot to an orb hanging in space to their left. Directly overhead, a group of seven long shapes turn, slowly circling each other in a complex dance.

There are large patches of green visible through the geometrically spaced windows, but the entire rest of the gently curved exteriors are covered with black sequins, casting shifting rainbow arcs as each one rotates to catch the sun.

In the distance, a few other large orbital structures are visible as dots which occasionally flash when the sun reflects off of them at just the right angle.

She gradually shifts from pensive to marveling.

"We can also go in and peek at the interiors," she promises. "The different stations all have different internal environments, because they were part of a series of experiments on how to design low-management habitable zero-gravity ecosystems. My favorite is probably the jungle, but they're all worth seeing."

"...jungle? What other kinds of environments are there?"

"Oh, let's see ... There's a saltwater beachfront and forest, a freshwater lake and deciduous forest, a tropical rainforest, a temperate rainforest, an urban space with room for greenery built in to the architecture, a hilly grassy area, and the control cylinder which is just flat grassland and scrubby bushes without experimental terrain features," she lists.

"They are all habitable. They were each meant to test a different potential complication around having large ecosystems in spin gravity, so each one has a few unique features that distinguish it. They're not very densely populated, because environments with artificial gravity ended up being more popular, but I think they're a historically interesting stepping stone on the way to space. And they develop really cool weather."

"What kind of weather?"

"Oh! A bunch of wild stuff!" she exclaims. "So they're all large enough to form clouds, but not so large that clouds could never reach the center of the cylinder. Which would ordinarily be 'so what?', but they're spinning. So the clouds get pulled into twisty spiral shapes that sit overhead and look like they should be rotating, but they just float over your head."

"And the sunlight comes in through the windows, right? But that means that it often falls on the clouds from 'below'. So they burn off from below, flaking into these fine golden mists. And the hotter air will try to rise, so every one in a while there's a big climactic inversion, and the cloud puffs out towards the window, swallowing the wisps of cloud that were being hammered away."

"The way the cylinder heats is neat too, because the windows are offset, so you don't have the land warm uniformly in the morning. Instead, you get lots of little fragmented breezes. And the terrain can have a really big impact on whether those just kind of stir the atmosphere, bringing the scent of the plants to you, or whether the little breezes all build together into a sweeping circular wind that spins around and around endlessly, dragging little blobs of cloud out into long streamers that wind over the hills until they're pulled apart to leave a clear sky."

The doll tries to picture this.

"...I think I would need to see it in order to understand what you mean," she concludes.

"That's fair! It's kinda hard to describe with words. If you're done admiring the exterior we could go peek inside?" she offers.

"I think I would like that, if that's all right."

"Yes, it's no trouble. I like seeing how they change over time," she agrees. She moves their platform over to a docking hatch near one of the windows. It irises open to greet them, a shimmering barrier keeping the air contained.

There are signs of docking clamps and a second iris already retracted, to suggest that this would be a working entry even in the absence of fixity fields.

They emerge from the hatch and float over to the ground, where the grass comes up to a neat brick walkway around the iris. The curve of the land is strange -- perfectly flat in one direction, but curving up in the other direction, giving the impression that they are standing in the wide, flat bottom of a giant mountain valley. Forests cling to the nearby slope, the trees in the full fledge of autumn, painting the sides of the cylinder in bright flame colors.

The lighting is also strange. They entered on the sunward side, and so the light is shining up through the window near them, falling on the distant landscape above. The far side of the cylinder is just far enough away that the farthest point is lost in an indistinct haze of atmosphere.

As they watch, the angle of the sunlight slants, casting a beam of light down the walls of the valley and brightening their surroundings. The gravity is not quite Earth-standard, but rather a little lighter, lending them a bounce to their step.

Most of the landscape is quickly adapted to, but the lake sitting part way up the side of the cylinder, placidly rippling, gets more and more surreal the longer it is in view. It is, unfortunately, clear today, with only small wisps of cloud handing suspended in the center of the cylinder. They are aligned along the curve of the ground, gently floating counter to the sun's rotation.

She tilts her head back to look up, and then leans back, and then ends up just lying flat on the platform so she can gaze straight up into the distance. Everything is so beautiful, and so strange. It looks like... a dream, or a painting, not that she remembers seeing dreams or paintings before, but that's what it feels like it looks like.

Sandalwood sits crosslegged beside her.

"Isn't it neat?" she says after a moment. "This is why I love megastructures. A lot of members of my self-tree live on the Moon for practical reasons, or on Antichthon because it's got lots of beautiful wilderness, but I have an apartment in a giant tree in the asteroid belt because I love seeing views that are strikingly different from how you implicitly imagine them."