Nothing happens in response to tattoo tapping.

"Yes. I just meant, complicated cultural stuff. Is nifty. But what even is the point of having interesting traditions if they're about pruning your options instead of expanding your options, y'know? And besides, wanting to do a job right is a pretty important feature in the best person to do that job."

"Yeah.  Maybe one of these days we'll figure out the trick of letting all daemons learn the move Sketch, then everyone can do what they want.  Or get to a technological point where people don't need to work at all if they don't want to," she considers.  That was an even less likely possibility before, but there was just so much technology here.  

"No one in Administrated Space has to work if they don't want to. Citizenship comes with a permanent, inalienable living wage we call the Civil Dividend. It would be completely untenable to take in refugees like we're designed to if we expected them to support themselves! And also it turns out that paying people to not work actually leads to far more prosperity than absorbing the cumulative consequences of reluctant and or underqualified labor. Our strict meritocratic systems couldn't function without that."

"Where do refugees normally come from?"

"Usually from new worlds that make contact for one reason or another, or from the aftermath of Lost Logia incidents that the TSAB is too late to prevent."

"Are they all human?  Do they all have the same soul system you do?"

"Most are human. Some are panhuman. Some are near-human offshoots. Some aren't human. Maybe a quarter of non-panhuman life has recognizable, functional linker cores?" She looks this up. "About a quarter."

She is going to need more historical context before asking intelligent questions, and history has never struck her as an important subject to get into.  It is nice getting extra confirmation that she isn't too unusual for not having a normal linker core.  

Her attention turns back to the tattoo terminal.  "How do I use this?"

Eelesia checks.

"Tap your thumb and pinkie together twice to bring up or dismiss your menu. It does gaze-tracking and speech recognition, so it knows what you're looking at and it understands you when you talk. Mostly."

She follows the instructions.  Does it work?

It does!

A holographic screen appears in the air in front of her, positioned and moving relative to her rather than just her hand. It contains a query bar, a map icon, a stylized coin icon, an icon of two hands meeting across a pane of glass, and an icon of a bright red eye.

If she looks at one of the icons, text rises out of the screen to hover above it.

Map: "Navigation"
Coin: "Bank"
Glass: "Communication"
Eye: "History"

History probably being her web search history, not a list of historical events, assuming the device hasn't been listening in and deciding to give her that result due to what it's heard them talking about.  If so, it isn't something that will spiral into a deep rabbit-hole of searches that'd better be left for later.  All she wants to do right now is get the controls down.  She tries blinking at it, poking at the vague area of 'screen' with her hand, and other possible ways that might activate a hologram until one happens to work.  

The screen responds to poking. It doesn't seem to respond to blinking.

Poking blank space just makes that spot brighter for half a second. Poking the query bar will make it flash expectantly. Poking one of the icons will open a new screen.

She opens up the eye-shaped History icon's screen, then attempts a few methods of closing a window.  Then she tries to figure out how to input text.  Does a keyboard-shaped window pop up if she taps on the search bar a few times?  

No amount of tapping on the query bar produces a keyboard.

The History screen displays a graphic timeline, with visual slides depicting simplified renderings of Verity and Araeneve in every moment in time since they appeared in the city. It automatically scrolls through to enlarge and center whichever part of her timeline she looks at. Every slide is surrounded by a uniform dull red frame.

A screen may be told to close, or forced closed by tapping her thumb and pinkie.

Okay.  She can open and close windows, and has an idea on what requires finger presses and what presumably requires speech.  That'll do until she can look through it more thoroughly later.  

The history is much stranger and alarming.  "Does your city record every person at every point in time, or do these things have the ability to see the past?"

"We don't have technology that can see into the past, unfortunately... Is something wrong?"

"I think our cultures have a different idea on how acceptable it is to keep tabs on everyone walking around," she says.  "That's not technically a problem, just... given the historical reasons we have laws against setting up permanent cameras in public it's a bit worrying?"

"I've heard that many civilizations outside of Administrated Space have laws meant to suppress their citizens' ability to supply evidence of wrongs done against them, but you don't strike me as a professional liar? Granted, it's not a perfect system, which is why my job even exists, but disbursing the power of evidence as widely as possible seems like an unambiguous good to me."

"The laws were meant to prevent misuse of power in the case of corruption.  And the chance of data leaks or private corporations getting ahold of it and them misusing it," Verity says, trying to remember what the examples she learned in school were. 

"Before our laws were in place, people were getting outed as gay for going to lgbt clubs or resource groups.  Not being straight was illegal some places of the old world for a while, and even after the governments changed it took awhile for the people to do so - family or bosses would find out and people would get fired or kicked out of their homes.  Similar for other things, if someone supported a party in a democracy that was threatening the current majority they would 'happen' to get arrested for long enough to miss a vote or lose their jobs or reputations, even if they were found not guilty afterwards.  Or people on government assistance getting it taken away if it showed they were dating someone with a job, since that meant they 'didn't need help any more.'  Or having medical bills increased or medical insurance cancelled if you visited an ice cream shop too often, or getting fired preemptively if certain diseases turn out to run in your family and the employer didn't want to deal with the absences or costs.

"Some places on the ship like the engines have cameras and require cards to enter, but people can't be forced to go there.  Things like internet and public transport can't keep records at all.  Medical records and money information is highly confidential."

"That all sounds horrible, and like a clear argument for universal data rights rather than against? We do have highly secure areas one can't enter without suspending their data rights, but those places are designed to be impossible to stumble into by accident anyway. All the rest of that sounds like exactly the sorts of problems you get when the power of evidence is consolidated in the hands of a few rather than distributed equally, or else like problems that just don't exist in a competently designed administration. Your history record can't be used against you. That's the whole point. The device sapience that archives and accesses everyone's history is designed so it can't be misused. It is intentionally blind to rank or riches."

"Assuming that you trust the archive, and how unhackable the information is stored.  Our idea of data rights is centered around the right to not get recorded if we don't want to.  No one is stopping people from recording themselves or wearing trackers or using them as evidence, as long as they aren't forced to, don't film others without their permission, and don't need to give the data to anyone."

Eelesia holds in a sigh of exasperation.

"The information exists. It was always going to exist. It always will exist. It would inevitably exist just as a side effect of not routinely lobotomizing all of our sapient software. Any policy that assumes or claims otherwise is at best criminally incompetent and at worst actively duplicitous. Our systems were designed with this in mind, so that we don't have to rely on fallible laws or corruptible authorities to decide who gets access to what information. Your history is yours to use, anyone capable of 'hacking' into your history would have a much easier time 'hacking' into your literal brain. It has never happened, and as far as I know never even been credibly attempted."

From Araeneve's posture they're still unsure about that, but Verity drops it.  They can't stop the creepy spying system recording everyone, and it's not like she could return to the ship right now if she wanted to.  Even with said creepy spying, it's probably better here than home.  

"How does your system handle mind reading?" she wonders, trying to drop it but picking up something closely related.

Eelesia ought to be better than this at reassuring them. She is reasonably certain that Verity is just confused about how things work, but she can't explain if Verity doesn't want to know. But she can be more careful going forward.

"How do you mean? Can you give me an example?"