"If there's something that could be done to prove it, I am probably not the most knowledgeable person about it? The DNA test thing might work, sure. You look human but for all I know we're actually different species."

(Insert obvious joke here.)

"Tell me more about," she waves her hand vaguely, "this place? Tech level, laws, general culture, etc"

(It's a very cute joke on Earth, but we would not pretend that "being a member of the same species" is an equivalence relation while using a definition that is nontransitive.)

"Okay. Uhhhh. We have computers and we have nuclear energy. We have reliable cryonics. The Next Big Thing we're looking forward to is AI, but we're scared of screwing it up terribly so we're taking our time on it. I can expand on what tech we have in particular areas if you want to poke at something specific, but I might have to do a little research before I can confidently give many details."

"Laws. Hmm. I like Nucleus because it's one of the cities where you really don't need to pay attention to laws unless you're a terrible person or have some sort of especially sensitive occupation? I've never been to court. If you're concerned about breaking social norms then probably you should just have someone around to poke you about it until you get a sense of things? I dunno."

"Culture. Let's see. Nucleus is pretty far out on the slack-predictability tradeoff? It's a good place to live if you care a lot more about being able to randomly call off from work whenever you want and have it not be a very big deal than you do about never randomly seeing a store closed because its owner just met a cute guy."

"There are... less guardrails, here? Many cities will have especially competent subject-area experts evaluate how responsible you're being before letting you go buy psychoactive drugs or try weird body mods or whatever. Here... I mean, they have conversations in school about best practices and how to catch yourself before you go too far down the unrestrainedness curve, but adults are generally trusted to make their own decisions and—yeah, sometimes it goes wrong, but who am I to say that it wasn't worth it in expectation?"

Hmm. Ok, so they seem to be on a similar tech level to Earth. Celene isn't sure what "don't need to pay much attention to laws" actually means? How do you end up with a system like that? 

"The idea of a slack-predictability tradeoff seems interesting. Wouldn't there be a feedback loop with unpredictability, though, where your plans getting disrupted means you are less predictable which causes you to disrupt other people's plans and so on?

Less guardrails, huh?"

This is an excellent opportunity.

"Where does Nucleus stand on like, forced institutionalization for mental illness, or right-to die, or these types of topics?"

That was entirely unsubtle. Oops. Unfortunately she is not yet lucid enough to think of a subtle way to phrase that.

"What does your planet call itself? What are the major countries and what are their governance systems like? Do you have multiple planets?

How does agriculture work here? You have nitrogen fixing, I assume? What about genetically modified crops?

What is the median yearly income on the planet, and for comparison, how much does... this house cost? What's the median yearly income in the richest country in the world? Maybe it'd be better to ask based on size, but I don't know how to, actually, what's the.. hmm, I don't actually know what the measurement words imply. On 'Earth' we have meters, but, wait, there are actually standardized measurements based on universal constants. 

...

I don't remember them.

Ok, wait, the speed of light is... 3*10^8 meters per second, I think? Probably? That's not helpful without knowing what a second is.

I really should've remembered the piezoelectric speeds, I remember distinctly that quartz was very convenient in some way. Wait, light takes 8 minutes, which is 480 seconds, to travel from the sun to 'Earth'."

What, are you—presumably someone who cares about avoiding harming others—constantly running into issues where there's something you want to do in your personal life and it's illegal? I don't think you need to read the legal code to figure out that stealing is bad.

Yeah, there's some cities which have some unusually strong laws because there are a disproportionate of people there with severe sensory problems or whatever, but... in most cases, it should just be obvious whether something is harming someone or not, right?

"...I mean, I guess? If you need a plan to be robust then you gotta put a little work into it, but mostly you can just do things on the fly and make adjustments and it's fine."

"If you... have a mental illness that makes you not competent to avoid harming others, then we'd probably make you choose between leaving the city and being institutionalized? You generally speaking have the right to emigrate outside of really extreme circumstances. Similarly, you can go into early cryo."

"The planet is—don't you know the language? It's 'Tinya' in Eifweni." (The word basically fits into the same part of conceptspace as "Earth" does to Celene, though it isn't derived from a common noun for soil the same way.) "We only have the one, though we've been to the moon and have some long term plans to make a sustainable facility there."

"I.. we don't have 'countries' anymore? Mostly cities just try to have laws their citizens like, and people move if they don't like them so only cities with reasonable legal systems still exist? The world government makes an effort to ensure that there's a reasonable variety of cities in any physical region so that you don't need to travel too far unless your norm preferences are rather niche, and it enforces some human rights standards. And the government hires a lot of organizations to do social services and stuff."

"Genetic modification is a thing, I don't know what 'nitrogen fixing' is but that's probably just because I don't know anything about agriculture. We can look it up later."

"I have no idea what the median income is. I usually work four days a week* and make, maybe about 108 bits each day I work? Rent is like 24 bits a day. So, yearly that's..."

She's gonna get out a calculator. She doesn't think about her income on a yearly scale very often.

"About 26K income a year—though I probably won't stay with this job that long—compared to 9K yearly rent. But the rent is mostly covered by basic income, and if I just paid for a single room somewhere it wouldn't be impossible to also pay for food and such off it."

*"Weeks" have six days.

"I'm about two and a third strides tall?" (She has a good three or four inches on Celene.) "A stride is about this long," she holds out her hands.

"If the continents are the same, I'd hope the days are the same length. We—actually, let me just show you a clock." It's a four digit number, split into two two-digit parts. "This counts 'minutes', which are 1296ths of a day. 36 minutes* is a 'period'."

* 40 Earth minutes.

...Celene is an idiot. Right, of course they could track time by the length of each day. 1296, that's... divide by 2, 648, divide by 2, 324, divide by 2, 162, divide by 2, 81, so that's 2^4 * 3^4, so there are 36 36-minute periods in each day. That's actually pretty clever.

Summer spends about.. 108/24, that's 4.5, so... about 22% of her income on rent? That seems reasonable by Earth standards, the rule of thumb is that you should spend no more than 30% of your income on rent. There's basic income, apparently, no comment on if it's 'universal', covers most of the rent, enough to rent a single room and feed yourself? Celene isn't sure if that's like, a studio apartment with a kitchen, or renting a room in an area with a shared kitchen, or maybe microwave meals are really cheap and efficient here? Earth did spend a lot of time working on microwave meals, though, and Celene finds it way more plausible that housing is cheaper here than that food is cheaper here.

Standard proposals for UBI on Earth were 1k a month, Seattle was... very expensive, unfortunately, but it's definitely possible to live off that amount if she wasn't living in Seattle. Food for $300 a month, rent a 2 bedroom apartment with a roommate for $1400 a month, split the rent in half, that's viable, if unpleasant. If she was living off of microwaveable meals she'd be spending a bit more than twice as much on food, let's say $600 (although Celene realizes now that she's unfamiliar with microwavable meal prices in rural areas. It's... probably around the same? Maybe a bit less?), and if she were to purchase Meal Replacement Powders and subside entirely off of that she would spend also around $300 a month. Let's say "mostly covered" implies at least 2/3rds, so 6000 bits a year, and that their basic income is around $1,000 - $1,500 a month, and thus the value of 1 bit is around the range 2-3 USD?

How large does Summer's house look, actually?

Imagine the median Eifweni's apartment: there's a small kitchen, a living room with a couch (that Celene is laying on), a small bathroom, and Summer's bedroom (she lives alone, so there's only the one extra room.)

The main living room / kitchen area is probably not quite as long as you're imagining, if you've visited the median Eifweni's apartment.

If Celene looks out the window, she can see that they're on the third floor.

(Also, you got your math slightly wrong, it's 108/24*2/3 because she only works 4 days a week. It's closer to 14% we have been informed by not_dream_stan on Discord that it's actually 33%. Thanks not_dream_stan, really couldn't be a more fitting username than yours for someone who correctly identifies a flaw in Eifwen's math.)

1 bedroom apartment on the 3rd floor of an apartment complex, going for 9000 bits a year, translating that by her conversion to around $18,000 - $27,000 a year, so between 1500 to 2250 per month. That's around the average price of a 1 bedroom apartment in Seattle, so it looks like housing prices are similar here?

No we're pretty sure it's way cheaper than Seattle and the issue is that you forgot to account for Summer only working 2/3 of days?

Or maybe Otolmens is about to get upset, that's possible too.

Oh right, yes, Summer does work less than the average Earthling. 2/3 of days vs. 5/7 of days. Not a huge difference, but still somewhat of a difference. That shouldn't really change anything, though.

That being said, Celene is now realizing that she priced the currency conversion primarily based off of housing prices, so of course it looks like they have similar housing prices. That makes sense. If she wanted to get an actual comparison she would have to... do something else, Celene isn't actually sure how these things are calculated. Something something 'basket of goods.' 

Oh. Yes, that would also be an issue.

Well, that was an interesting mathematical diversion and now she feels stupid.

What was she doing?

Oh right, the most important thing! They have cryonics and it is generally permitted for people to go into early-cryo, although whether or not truicide is permitted is a different question. Also, "we're concerned about AI and taking our time on it" as a general statement does eliminate the majority of Celene's concerns about cryonics, as well as Eifwen's general cultural impression of not being insane. Of course, she'd still have to pay for it, but based off of Summer's description "X wants to kill themselves, Nucleus wants people to go into early-cryo instead of truiciding, X can't afford that, X is (trapped being alive/truicides)" is a problem they would've made sure to resolve, and probably not by institutionalizing X.

In theory she should probably be safe to tell Summer more about her story.

In practice, she's not going to do that. She doesn't have a particularly good reason not to, but she does not want to do so.

"If I do prove my story in a way that is believed by the public or the government, what happens? Do I get dragged off to a lab to be experimented on, or something?"

"...Is that what would happen where you're from? What the hell?"

"Oh, I have no idea what would happen where I'm from, there isn't exactly a set procedure for dealing with these sort of things. It's just a common joke people make when they are asked to guess what would happen if, say, a fictional character with magical abilities showed up in real life, or a hypothetical scenario where they got some sort of minor superpower. It does seem somewhat plausible, though."

"Wow! That's terrible! Here... mostly a lot of people will be willing to pay a lot of money to talk to you, probably?"

Hmm. That seems reasonable, and also plausibly would happen on Earth as well.

"And if I can't prove it? What should I do in that case?"

"Prob'ly depends on what is actually going on with you? Maybe a bunch of friends are worried sick trying to find you or something. If not—well, find a place to stay and something to do with your life?"

yeah, she has something she wants to do with her life

"I guess that makes sense." She sighs. 

"What should I do, like, in the short-term? I... assume I can't stay with you?"

Despite herself, she looks up hopefully. She could never manage to get rid of that.

"Are you kidding? A cute girl who sure seems to be from another universe landed on my doorstep, who would pass up this opportunity?"