Alsaiah might take a while to notice what's up with this setting
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"The procedure for aliens has never come up. A lot of people go to work in Civil Procedures specifically because they want to write procedures for things that are probably never going to happen, like an alien invasion. The procedure for amnesiacs has probably come up but not while I was on duty, I pretty much only see people who destroyed their documents or lost their documents or got married or got divorced."

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"OK, let's use the amnesiac procedure then. My name is Alsaiah Vetar, I assume given that we're using the amnesiac procedure you don't need anything else?"

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"Age, if you don't know I'm just going to put approx.30? And a physical description, which I'll just write down here, and then, yes, the rest of the form is blank."

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"Thirty-two and five."

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" - sorry, can you say that again?"

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"Thirty-two and five."

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"...so like, thirty-seven?"

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"...One two three four five six seven. Yes, thirty-seven. In hindsight I should've noticed the base ten a while ago."

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"You're a very young-looking thirty-seven. Okay, I put down thirty-seven."

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"And where would I go to arrange housing? And look for employment?"

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"That's not technically my job. I guess you don't have any friends you can ask, though. Uh, gimme a minute, I'll Google homeless shelters that also offer job services....

 


There's a women's shelter on 20th and Broadway. The requirements aren't too onerous."

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"What, just for women? What other requirements?"

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"Uh, pretty standard. You have to say that you don't have a history of violence, that you don't have a recent history of theft, that you intend to follow the shelter rules - no drugs, no violence, no theft, no loud music except in headphones, clean up after yourself."

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No drugs sounds inconvenient if she's stuck there a while, but hopefully she can get her own place before it becomes relevant. Also she will need to source some drugs. But that's a problem for future Alsaiah. Present Alsaiah can collect her documents and walk over to the shelter.

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The shelter indeed wants her to recite at the door that she doesn't have a history of violence or a recent history of theft and that she intends to follow the rules. She gets a shared room; the other woman in it is presently out. There's two shelves for her belongings. 

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"OK so is this some weird liability thing or do you expect those questions to actually get you useful information?"

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" - well, we expect the questions to tell us whether someone has a history of violence and theft, or whether they intend to follow the rules."

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"I would expect antisocial behavior like violence and theft to correlate with antisocial behavior like - "

 

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" - You know, on second thought, I think I shouldn't finish that sentence even if I could figure out how to in your language. It could be highly damaging to your civilization if I did. If you can it would probably be for the best if you just forgot I said anything there."

"...I don't have a history of violence or theft and plan to follow the rules."

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" - great. Welcome. Priority on the computers for people who're job searching."

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She is job searching!

And also thinking about how she is in a world where nobody has the concept of deception.

 

On the one hand, she could take over the planet in a week.

On the other hand, that would be wrong.

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You can answer some pre-screening questions and then see jobs that will hire just off your answer to those questions. There's the basic set - history of violence or theft, active user of various drugs - and then if you want you can answer hundreds more about qualifications and certifications you've earned, test scores on various tests, your self-assessed percentile for various traits - which open up more jobs. 

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She can answer questionnaires. She can take some of the quicker online tests to put her scores into her job applications. She assumes the online IQ test is stroking her ego, for a moment, before she remembers that if she's right about the world she lives in now that's impossible.

While she's just answering questionnaires and not taking any tests that require her full attention, she is also crawling an online encyclopedia learning everything she can about this planet.

It would be so easy. Naively, it wouldn't take a week. If everyone is so credulous that their language doesn't have a word for falsehood - She could walk into a newsroom and announce that she has just finished recounting the votes in the last elections of every democracy in the world and, oh look, she won all of them.

But - it wouldn't be like taking candy from a baby. It would be as if a small child, full of innocent trust and generosity, had offered to share a cookie with her. And then she'd taken her half of the cookie, and the child's half of the cookie, and all the child's other food, and emptied its family's bank accounts, and left it on a mountaintop to starve.

Or would it? She could do so much good for these people. If she's willing to throw in some threats - not even real threats, she has infinite credibility, there's no need to follow through - she could definitely bring about world peace. All the governments here look less functional than the governments back home despite their people being perfectly honest without any investment in incentivizing honesty. They still have crime, somehow. Is it really so wrong to take a kid's cookie if the next day you show up again and give him five thousand cookies? (Yes. Yes it is.)

It can't actually be that easy, though? In the world she is used to, one-sentence plans to make lots of money don't work, let alone one-sentence plans to take over the world. If there were plans that straightforward to have that large of an impact, someone else would almost certainly have already done it! She's in a different world now, and maybe all her instincts screaming that world conquest is hard, actually, are - wrong? Would she still have that instinct if she were the only human on a planet of moderately-advanced chimpanzees? Is she being fooled by the fact that this world's chimps look remarkably like her? (One part of her brain points out that, as stupid as they are, these people have invented nation-states and nuclear weapons and something resembling modern deterrence theory, which puts them far beyond chimps. Another part of her brain points out that, as stupid as they are, her world's chimpanzees have invented the concept of falsehood, which puts them far beyond the local humanoids. Really it's a toss-up.)

- This is not the time to be wondering about this. She's not going to get any less uniquely advantaged in world conquest in the next month. Right now what she needs is an apartment of her own, a computer of her own, some homebrewed encryption, (which in a world where nobody has the concept of falsehood or concealing information is way less stupid of an idea than it would be in a normal place.) and whatever passes for cognitive drugs around here. (Also her normal doses of supplemental testosterones) And for that she needs - Well. She thought she needed a job, because usually there's not a better short-term way to get money than low-skilled work if you appear somewhere with no legal identity or credit history or skill certifications. But she has learned some things about this world since she arrived at the shelter.

She does a couple more internet searches, writes some numbers down, and walks to the nearest bank.

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Chase Annapolis - easy to switch to! - is only a few blocks away. 

 

"A customer just after lunch casually took all the lollipops and walked off and I'm still thinking about that. How can I help you?" says the teller.

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