"Is there something going around and collecting people's thoughts into a big database?  Or more locally, what if a random citizen decides to read someone else's mind?  If they have a psychic... well, no daemons.  Some other kind of mind reading ability or machine."

"There is a Move called Mind Reader that lets a daemon read minds.  The TM for learning it is kept in an offline system with publicly-accessible logs of who visits the room it's stored in - it's one of the few places that are constantly filmed and normal privacy laws are suspended.  People are allowed to learn it for special circumstances, if someone asks to be mind-read by a neutral party for some reason, but they need to replace it again before leaving the area it's kept.  Daemons who learn it naturally are sometimes randomly checked with a ditto, and in general it's hard to hold an illegal move unless people are able to avoid all children. 

"Many psychic daemons can get something out of physical contact without a Move.  Supposedly, it makes the bad effects of daemon touching even worse, so no one does it outside of emergencies, and is illegal to do to anyone who didn't consent.  It's also much more noticable - you can't not notice if a daemon grabs you.

"There's also empathy, but that's considered a separate thing.  Empaths can't control their abilities, and we can't arrest people for settling as ralts.  Most people can't control their facial features and daemon reactions to a strong enough degree to avoid learning about emotions the indirect way, so it's just treated the same way echolocation or electroreceptivity."

Inability to arrest seems like an unprincipled reason to make something legal and then pretend it is different than the rest of an illegal category, but Eelesia suspects Verity already knows that, given how she phrased that. It would be unkind to call attention to her hypocrisy just now.

"Well, we don't have anything collecting people's thoughts, systemic or otherwise, yet. The work being done on that is slow and mostly academic, because the demand for resurrection is really rare, our per-capita death rate being what it is. As for civil infringements involving mind-reading, an agent like me would handle those on a case-by-case basis, but the capability is not common or naturally-occurring among our typical citizens. Do you know anything about the mechanism your psychic daemons use?"

"No.  Daemon moves and abilities in general defy our understanding.  We know the results when they're used and how to use them, but we haven't," she waves her hand as if encompassing the general idea of the civilization she's currently sitting it.  "We haven't turned it into a science yet."

Verity is distracted by the thought of resurrection.  The thought of having all of her information far away where she wouldn't be able to tell if someone was looking at it is still revolting, but...  "Can you do resurrections?"

"I'd be surprised if a Barrier Jacket doesn't block that wholesale, but I suppose it could be exogenous... And no. We can't. Because to resurrect someone you have to have complete information about their mind-state at the time of their death. Which as I said is information that we don't yet have the means to collect. But Administrated Space is typically safe enough that the average citizen's expected life-span is greater than the entire scope of our historical knowledge. If I recall correctly, the latest estimate was somewhere around fifteen-thousand years."

"We haven't figured out how to stop old age yet.  Is that an inherent thing to the magic here, or a medical treatment?"

"Medical treatment! Not even a very advanced one. There's a combination of nine healing spells that repairs old age very straightforwardly. I've only been through it once, but it wasn't a big deal."

"That's good," Verity says.  Normally, she'd be much more enthusiastic, but is still a bit unhappy and everything that's happened today is starting to catch up with her.

"Would this be an acceptable time to take a break?" Araeneve asks.  "We'd like to have the chance to talk to each other in..." not private apparently, but, "somewhere quiet?  Possibly look through whatever information that you give to people from other places considering citizenship."

"Sure. Why don't you query for a hotel or something, pick one you like the look of, and I'll teleport you there?"

"Okay."

She taps her thumb and pinkie to open the display.  While staring at the query bar, she tries, "Search for hotels with vacant rooms."  Without thinking, her speech automatically shifts to a different accent that pronounces all sounds more clearly like she would for a speech-recognition device in the fleet.

She gets a detailed false-color 3d hologram of the entire city with every hotel in the city highlighted in bright blue. There are hundreds.

Wow, that's a lot of hotels, even given that the city is considerably larger than the fleet.  She's going to need to narrow that down.  Glancing away from the display and to Eelesia, "What cost range should I be asking for?"

"Depends how long you want it for and how much of your visa-bonus you want left over. You can be as specific as you want. You're not going to confuse it."

Eyes back on the query bar.  "Search for the three hotels with the lowest cost vacant rooms," Verity tries.  Going all the way to the bottom of the cost brackets will serve a second purpose other than just saving money - she wants to know what the poorest places and people relying on only the civil dividend are like, and how much of the fancy technology has made its way down there.

The hologram of the city shrinks dramatically, enough that the curvature of the planet is visible. Three lone blue spots appear. Two on the southern edges of the map, one on the east edge.

Three full-color models of three different buildings appear, accompanied by colorfully designed info sheets with text and photos. All three are spacious residences with multiple rooms, full kitchens, customizable furnishings, and advertise weekly wilderness tours. Verity's six-month visa comes with enough money to rent any of them for more than a year.

"Seriously. You can just tell it what you want without the awkward phrasing. You really aren't going to confuse it, I promise."

She's so used to the phrasing of fleet-tech internet searches that she has a hard time figuring out how that was awkward.  

"I think I underestimated how complicated hotels are here," she murmurs, skimming over the info sheets.  "Any of these seem fine.  I guess this one, unless you think there's something important likely to be missing," she says, pointing to one of the sheets mostly at random and checking for the hotel name.

Valley Trails, lodging for the lone hiker who wishes to contemplate the natural woodlands in solitude.

Given Verity's other preferences, it doesn't strike Eelesia as incongruous that Verity might actually prefer to bunk in a hiking lodge out on the frontier, but it doesn't, actually, seem like Verity has groked the basic premise here. Eelesia would be remiss in her duty if she didn't ensure Verity was actually getting what she wanted.

"Complicated? How so?"

"There's a lot of them, for one.  And they do things like advertise tours.  I spend more time than most people in hotels back in the fleet, and they were just rooms to sleep and bathe when taking multi-day trips to another ship or otherwise not able to use your apartment.  I guess with a much larger number of places you'd have people travelling for fun more..."

"Um, so are these? I think that one in particular is just pointing out things that are close by? People do travel for fun a lot. Not everyone wants to buy their own property and nest in one place. I'm still not sure what the complicated part is, to you?"

"Trying to figure out which one is best when there are so many options and we aren't sure even what traits we're comparing between them, mostly.    We can go with this one for a week and move if it's terrible for some reason, right?"

"You don't have to compare them manually. Just ask about whatever criteria you care about. But yes, of course. That's probably sensible anyway. I don't know how long the search for your fleet will take, and you wanted to be on the ship when it goes?"

"I don't have criteria.  Other than things they'd presumably all have, like places to get food within a 30 minute trip or closable doors.  I just want somewhere to rest and read and head back to after looking around."

Whether or not to be on the ship will require some thought.  She probably should, to help with explaining the cultural differences.  "Maybe?  How soon would I have to go?  I want to spend at least a few days here."

"It'll take at least a few days to charter. Maybe as much as a week. You can absolutely spend that week wandering in the wilderness if you want to. I just want to be sure you're not... under the impression that you have access to less than you actually do."

She debates whether to mention it, then decides that not doing so would be dishonest.  "One of the reasons I want to see the cheapest hotels is to see how your society looks from that perspective.  Though the hotels happening to be near wilderness is also nice.  I wouldn't have thought to go hiking immediately."

"I mean, I think the reason the cheapest places are so cheap is because they're like a thousand miles from the Cranagan metropolitan area, but sure."