"Is there a reason to wait?"

"We can also get everything on your to-do list done right one after the other if you want! I just wondered if you might want time alone to process."

"I've had some recuperation time, thank you."

They smile and stand up to walk out of the room. "Alright then, I'll show you your apartment. The hospital has its own stop on the subway and the station has a replacement identicards kiosk--oh, that reminds me, you should memorize your ID number in case you lose your handcomp. It's this one here." They show him the form again and the sixteen-digit string in both languages' numeral systems. "Doesn't have to be this minute, of course, but it's best practice."

He nods and sets to memorization.

"Alright, now to the subway!" It's down the same elevator but several levels farther, and not noticeably less pristinely clean than the hospital but much more crowded. Tazz steers for the bank of kiosks on the wall.

Kyeo sticks close and tries to shrink politely among the people.

Everyone is doing a good job of not crowding everyone else, somehow, even the thirty or so percent of them who are reading books or looking at their handcomps or in one case knitting as they go.

Tazz shows Kyeo how to beep his handcomp, take a picture of his face, enter his number, and answer some questions from his personal records to get a new identicard, which is a plastic disc with a hole in it for a necklace cord. "You can use either this or your handcomp and ID number for a train ride, but for important things like buying a house or swearing an oath you need both. Don't let anyone borrow it; if it gets lost you can use your handcomp to mark it as void and get a new one. You can set things up so you need your fingerprints or an iris scan to get one but you're almost as safe without and I don't figure you want additional complications. Makes sense?"

"...I think so but I may forget details."

"You can look it all up again later, or my name will be in your contacts and you can ask me questions any time. Now, you have your apartment's address; want to try out the mapping app and find out which line to take?"

"I can try."

It's pretty easy; typing in (the transliteration of) his new address and accepting the handcomp's request to turn on location-checking gets him walking directions (40 minutes) and transit directions (15 minutes on the blue line, which has trains every 5 minutes from platform 2, get off at Station 8 AKA "Meadowlark").

...he probably should not walk that far but he can do it with some breaks if the social worker is not going to help him figure out the train, which he does not really understand.

When he doesn't answer promptly Tazz says "Something giving you trouble? Oh, right--if you open the camera and point it at the platform numbers it will translate them."

"Are you going to come too?"

"Oh yes, unless you'd rather I didn't! I just thought you'd like to get used to the mapping app with someone else right there. I'm still planning to come to your apartment and then the various stores to help you get the hang of everything. But if you want me to go away I will, of course."

"I appreciate the guidance."

Train it is.

The train has the option of sitting down and standing up with a bunch of people doing each. Most of the standing people are on their handcomps; the sitting ones are either on their handcomps, doing various craft projects, wrangling children, or asleep. One person has a grey parrot on their shoulder, with a leash from its foot to their wrist.

"What's our stop?" says the parrot. "Twelve," Says the human." "Eleven plus one is twelve," says the parrot. "That's right, good birdie," says the human.

Kyeo cannot understand the parrot but it does have quite a voice. He sits. Since he's semiconvalescent.

Tazz stands nearby and makes sure they don't miss their stop; the stops are both read aloud and displayed on a little light-up map inside the train car, but the audio translation might have problems what with the noise of the wheels and the quiet but overlapping conversations.

Kyeo is literate and will get off when it's time.

Yay for translation cameras! From there it's a quick walk up the street to his apartment building, which is red brick with balconies on the front. There are artificial handholds around the door and up between the balconies but there's also a perfectly normal elevator in the lobby. Tazz introduces him to the person at the front desk who beeps his identicard and says it will now open his apartment and his mailbox.

"A mailbox?"

"For package delivery! Stuff that comes by minicopter can just get left on your balcony but stuff that comes by truck goes in the boxes, which are . . . there." They point at a wall of big square lockers on the far side of the elevators from the front desk. "Oh, and if anything goes wrong in your apartment--leaky tap, air conditioner stops working, things in that reference class--you can message the desk, or if it's daytime come down here and talk to them, and they'll send someone to fix it. That's part of what your rent pays for, not having to worry about maintenance."

Isn't it someone's job to - oh, and the someone expects money, okay. "How do I do that?"