We would like to register that while we understand why this is in some sense a pretty sensible thing for the first tag of this glowfic to be, we also hate it.

Anyways,

"Someone from an alternate timeline shows up on Eifwen" is the sort of thing the median Eifweni might end up writing at some point, right? And not all works in that subgenre are really going to be going all that hard on the realism, but some of them are. So they have put, like, any thought into this scenario, despite it being so fantastical. Some people were paid to spend some time thinking hard about what to do, if Eifwen ends up in a scenario like this one. And if you've done that, you might as well send your conclusions off to the Weird Crap division of the planet-level Emergency Services to file in a cabinet somewhere.

But the Institutions know that they collectively have a limited amount of leeway, before (way more) people will start getting fed up with them. And they'd really prefer to err pretty far away from that point, if they can. So they haven't gone and handed down any instructions that they're going to firmly ask for compliance with, about this. It's not the kind of thing that's going to happen in real life, they don't need to spend any Compliance Points on it.

They'll predictably pay rather a lot, if someone goes and decides to cooperate with them anyways. But, y'know, it's the kinda thing they'll happily negotiate about a bit.

So eventually, Celene wakes up. As she becomes more lucid, she will notice that she is on a couch, tucked in with a blanket. 

Ah, shoot.

To be fair, this is fairly expected: You can't experience nonexperience, so if there is a-

Wait.

A couch?

She killed herself on a hotel bed, if she somehow survived she'd expect to wake up either there, or on a hospital bed, not-

Where is she?

She'll try to push herself up to look around a bit more. There's probably a mundane explanation for all of this.

"Oh hey, you're awake! Hi!"

"Who are you and why the hell were you passed out on my doorstep, exactly?"

It's not English, but Celene can understand it anyways. For some reason.

What.

That doesn't make any sense at all, actually.

Ok, yes, brain damage is probably expected if she survived that but Celene has not heard anything about it causing psychosis

Can she speak this mysterious language?

"Um.

I don't know."

"You... don't know... who you are? Should I be calling an ambulance?"

"I don't know how I got here or what's going on. I'm- My name is Celene."

"Hi Celene! I'm Summer. I know you're like, probably super disoriented right now, but you surely have a better idea than I do about what events led to this so can you please give you best guess or two even if they really suck?"

"My best guess is that I'm currently having a major psychotic episode or some other variation of 'either my senses or my memory do not meaningfully correspond to reality.' I-"

Probably it is not a good idea to mention that she committed suicide. Most people frown on that.

"I remember dying in a different location from here, I do not have any explanation for how I ended up here or 'on your doorstep.'

Oh, and the most confusing part is that you are speaking in a language that I am completely unfamiliar with and yet for some reason am still capable of communicating in, which pretty strongly points towards psychosis or a similar thing."

Ugh, her head hurts. She does not want to think too hard about this.

...Yeah okay sure that sounds like psychosis, maybe? She actually does not have any idea what psychosis is like.

Celene seems fairly stable. She'll pull out her phone and text (marked as urgent) one of her friends that seems likely to know more about this than she does and ask if this is an ambulance sort of problem or if she can just, like, sit and talk with her for a while? She'd rather do the sit and talk thing and really she thinks individual love and support can do better than the hospital system a lot of the time.

...You're a sufficiently grounded person that you can probably use your judgment here?

Fantastic. Now where to start?

"Hm. Elaborate more on... would you rather talk about the dying part or the language thing?"

Alright, Celene has recovered enough mental function to do more than automatic response.

"The language we are speaking is not one that I remember knowing or recognizing, the language I am most familiar with is called English, and sounds like this."

She switches to English and says, "Hello, my name is Celene. Lovely weather today. How are you doing?"

Is she still capable of speaking English?

Sure, let's say she's still capable of speaking English.

Essentially everyone knows Eifweni. Many regions still use their historical language at least a bit, and some cities use some other conlang or something.

Summer is like, vaguely familiar with the existence of most of the natural language families but she hasn't actually studied any second language. So when she doesn't recognize English at all that isn't super surprising.

She's gonna look it up on her phone. She types in the Eifweni characters for /ejŋgl/, goes back and forth for a moment on what exactly that second vowel was and then decides to just try all the ones vaguely near the /i/ corner of the vowel triangle. Nothing turns up. 

Okay that's kinda weird.

"Okay, so, uh, that sure sounded like you know a second language but I cannot find any information about it. When did you learn it? Where are you from?"

"There... does not appear to be a word for the city I am from. I could... point to the rough geographic location? Do you have a map/globe/whiteboard of some sort?"

"There wouldn't be... we'd just loan the local name, which is presumably an English word?"

But sure she can have a map. Geographically, it looks just like Earth, modulo the tiny bits of terraforming that you can manage even at Earth or Eifwen's tech level. There mostly aren't really any borders per se, but there are marks where the biggest cities are.

She locates the continent of North America, then the vague general location of Seattle, which luckily happens to be on a very recognizable coastline.

"I'm from 'Seattle.' And I've known English all my life, it was the first language I learned."

"...'s it like, a rural community, or something? I'm not super familiar with the Pacific coast of North America but I don't think there's a city named 'Seattle' there."

(She pronounces it /sijædo/.)

"It's... a major population center? A few million people live in the area. Wait, where do you claim we are right now?"

She points to about where Peru'd be.

"We're in Nucleus... Seattle's a major population center? No it isn't."

"Ok, I have pretty much no idea what is going on, then."

Other than, of course, the whole anthropic thing, but she still doesn't have a good explanation for why... all this would happen instead of her just waking up in a hospital, or discovering that the nitrogen gas wasn't entirely pure, or she didn't set it up properly or something like that.

Well, what should she do now?

...Should she kill herself again?

In theory, if she considered the argument that reducing the amount of Celene-suffering in Greater Reality was worth it before, she should consider it worth it now, because she'd be eliminating the same proportion of herself.

She cannot, in fact, find any flaws with this argument but it does seem somewhat unsustainable.

Also, this world could plausibly be better and probably she should stick around and gather more information.

If she's experiencing psychosis or trapped in a simulation or something, she... doesn't actually know what is appropriate to do in that situation. Generally the recommended advice is "seek medical help" but the delusion seems strong enough that she's not sure she can contact outside help from within it? That might just be some sort of rationalization though.

Alternatively, maybe her memories of living on Earth was a psychotic delusion, she lived... wherever she is right now her entire life, and made everything up. It would explain how she can speak the language. This is, of course, ignoring the obvious fact that this is not how psychotic disorders work but she does not actually have a better explanation.

Well, given that, the plan would be, get situated, figure out her immediate physical needs, how she's going to get-

Ugh. Food and shelter and everything. She does not want to deal with that. That's Not Something she wants to deal with.

But her host, who Celene is realizing she doesn't know the name of, probably cannot keep her around forever.

"I just realized, I never asked your name?"

That's not how anthropics works! It doesn't matter whether you were personally certain that you'd set up the suicide method properly, what matters is whether your sensory observations were compatible with a world in which you'd failed to set it up correctly.

An Ideal Superintelligence that looked at your observations prior to your death would conclude with an incredible degree of certainty that you were, in fact, going to die. In fact, it would conclude that most of the Celenes descending from you which continued to have conscious experiences must be in weird multiverses that contain things like isekaiing.

...Or at least, this particular Celene now has a bunch of anthropic evidence in favor of the assumptions underlying this line of argumentation. We, having not ourselves experienced death, have a ton of different schools of thought on the details here. We're mostly planning to just cryonicize everyone anyways.

"I did tell you, but under the circumstances totally valid you missed it. I'm Summer."

What does Summer think is going on? I mean okay it's totally an elaborate prank but she wants to play along so assuming it isn't that.

How does a girl end up with this set of beliefs? Maybe she was, like, gaslit from birth? But then what's up with the weird thing she had about not being sure how she knew Eifweni?

Okay she's tired of guessing she's just gonna ask more questions. "...Tell me about your life in Seattle, a little?"

Well, still, Earth is weighted so much more heavily than-

Wait, actually, she has no reason to think that's true anymore. She used to think that was true, back when she was having conscious experiences on Earth, but she has no reason to think that is the case. Discovering herself to be here, and not in a hospital room, should be a significant update. In fact, since she was apparently created ex nilho here, she has no reason to think that Earth is a real place at all.

If she was using the anthropic argument, that is.

Her head hurts.

Wait, is she still wearing the same clothes she was when she died?

What do you even mean by "real place"?

(She's wearing the same clothes she was on Earth, except now with a new grey sweatshirt on overtop of them. Her clothes didn't stand out that much.)

Oh gods, Summer wants to know personal details about her life. What does Celene even tell her. There really isn't anything she could say that would not be incredibly revealing/concerning.

Let's see.

"I am... unsure of how much it is appropriate for me to share. Hmm.

I only recently turned 18, and I was studying to be a computer scientist- 18 is the age of majority where I'm from, it might be different here? I know that many European countries have different ages of majority."

This is technically true, if a bit misleading.

"I had some friends I liked talking to online, some I hung out with in person.

I-"

What does she even say.

"...What is an 'age of majority'?"

"The age at which you are legally considered an adult?"

"...'Adult' isn't a binary legal category? How would you even..."

"Ok, so in the United States specifically," she'll gesture to the middle section of the American subcontinent, "which is the country Seattle is a part of, the majority of rights associated with adulthood are gained at 18, although there are some exceptions. You can begin driving (operating motor vehicles) at 16, although until you turn 18 there are some restrictions associated with it that I don't quite remember. You can't consume alcohol until you're 21, and there are some things that only expire at 25 although I think most of them are privileges that are not typically granted to adults. You can legally work for monetary compensation at 14.

When you turn 18, however, you can vote, have sex, and are no longer under the control of your parent or guardian. At the same time, your parent or guardian is no longer responsible for you and no longer legally obligated to provide shelter, medical care, education, food, etc. I think that's the main reason why the category of 'adulthood' is generally regarded to begin at 18? It's a very significant change, generally speaking. Oh, and mandatory public education also tends to end around that age. 

I guess it's technically true that starting at age 16 you can request legal emancipation if you can prove that you have your own income, manage your own finances, and are willing and capable of living apart from your parents."

Summer now has additional questions.

"Well. Okay. Where to begin. Let's table the question about why you would make specifically the middle section of North America a political unit for now. I think most, say, 14 year olds can be trusted around cars, but like whatever. The alcohol thing is kinda weird but I can see it I guess."

"You... cannot... work... until you're 14? Why not? No one has sex until they're 18? You can't vote until you're 18? Doesn't not allowing a population to vote mean... okay actually I guess that sort of explains why the rules are like that."

"Uh. But the part that really concerns me is the 'control of your parents or guardians' bit? What, exactly, do you mean by control?"

Wait, what?

Huh. She was worried about talking about her personal views on this issue. If Summer, and presumably all of Nucleus(?) is sympathetic to this view, then perhaps she could share more about her life?

"So the age of employment thing is because back in the day, there were a lot of children working hazardous jobs in factories, and the concern was that parents would push their children into being employed, instead of going to school, and so they made it illegal. Except for children working in the entertainment industry, because it's important for child actors to exist, and also children working in agriculture on their parent's farms, for... I don't actually know the reason for that one, I assume it's a grandfather clause. Oh, and also parents can just force their children to work for no pay anyways.

The sex thing, well, in Washington State which Seattle is a part of the age of consent is actually 16, there are typically laws where you can have sex with anyone within a 4 year age range and while Washington doesn't have it it age of consent laws aren't commonly enforced in these cases. It's considered a form of rape for someone to violate these laws, though, where the older person is the one punished for it, typically.

I agree that it's very suspicious that the class of people who have significantly fewer rights under the law also have no say in how they are treated under the law. The general worry is that children are easily influenced and would be pushed into voting for whoever their parents tell them to vote for. 

There's also a line of thought where children don't have the same amount of stake in society as adults do due to their diminished role and thus should not be making laws when they can't properly appreciate the impact. This also happens to be the same line of reasoning used to defend only letting property owners vote a few hundred years ago, before that was overturned.

So the obvious objection is 'Well it seems like most of the problems here comes from the authority parents have over their children,' and I'd agree with that."

She sighs.

"If it wasn't obvious, I don't have the same views on this as the rest of my society does.

So when- It is very difficult for me to explain this part from a neutral perspective.

The framing that would typically be used is:

When children are born, they are assigned 1-2 legal guardians, this is typically the genetic parents but not always. These guardians are responsible for looking after the welfare of the child, providing basic necessities, and protecting the child. To this end, they must often make decisions that are in the child's best interests but that the child may not want. For example, they might make a child get vaccinated, even if the child does not want to be, or to take bitter tasting medicine for a disease. Parents must establish structure and routine for their child, look out for their education, and teach them important life skills."

"To this end, parents must sometimes," Probably 'physically assault' is not the language they would use, "uh, to this end, parents are responsible for disciplining their child, and are granted the legal authority required to do so. This is all in the best interests of the child's safety and wellbeing, which is why when children attempt to leave the household without their parent's permission, they can send the poli- Ok, I'm starting to slip out of the neutral tone, my apologies."

"Yeah, uh, fuck the neutral tone, what the hell is wrong with your society? Sure, kids occasionally need to be forced into something, but you can't just give people the right to force them to do work and stuff???"

"Like, sure, before good legal systems were established, you often saw parents forcing their children to do things because no one could stop them? But like... did you guys just never fix nonconsensual slavery in general?"

Why do you think I died?

She's not actually going to say that, she has no idea what this place's right to die views are.

Uh, stronger evidence towards psychosis, probably? If she's transported into a society where everyone magically agrees with all her views, then that's more likely to be a delusion than something else.

"It had a lot of problems, yeah. We do have an agency for removing custody of children in cases of child abuse, but in my experience it is not very effective and doesn't really care what the child thinks about it.

I think in general the complaints of children are not taken very seriously? The argument is generally that children need to be taught life skills through experience, and that also they have an obligation to contribute to their household.

We... well, what do you mean by 'in general?' Even back when slavery was legal, it was still only legal to enslave certain types of people, and not others, so I don't think that would qualify as 'in general' based off of the context you are using? They'd only enslave noncitizens, or those captured in war, or in the more relatively recent notable cases it'd be based off of skin color. Or gender, arguably.

It's still legal in the US to enslave people who have been convicted of a crime, although I think that's not really used in practice? Mostly they just pay them very little for their labor, but I'm not an expert on the topic.

Children are arguably enslaved, oh, and non-human animals too, technically.

And of course slavery still happens as a crime although generally 'slavery' is used to refer to an institution and the criminal act of kidnapping someone for the purposes of extracting labor or other resources from them is referred to as 'human trafficking.'"

(Wait, did she say nonconsensual slavery? That seems like an unnecessary qualifier.)

(Is Celene sure she wants it to be an unnecessary qualifier?)

I-

Shush.

"Yeah uh. A lot of the details there are. Very concerning. I'm beginning to suspect I'm unqualified to say much on these issues other than 'wow that sure sucks.'"

...She's still pretty sure it's a prank. But she's becoming curious to see how far the prank holds up under scrutiny.

"Anyways. You're coming up with enough details on the fly here that I'm starting to find 'psychosis' to be a pretty unconvincing hypothesis? I don't know how psychosis works but surely not like this. Do you have any particular thoughts for how we can, like, verify whether your story is real? In principle we should be able to record you saying a bunch of things and then closely inspect how well it coheres..." Wait, she should be recording this conversation. She was so stupid why didn't she realize that sooner. Oh well. She pulls out her phone. "...Actually, is it okay if I start recording this conversation? Not swearing any oaths unless you really insist, but I intend to get your permission before just posting it on the internet or anything like that."

Hmm.

That does seem pretty risky, given that she didn't make any promises about it, but Celene is sensing the general pattern here and can guess that "oaths" imply something significantly stronger than "promises" did on Earth.

Still, better safe than sorry. For all she knows, she could be suffering from psychosis and accidentally give a full confession of her entire life story.

"Sure, but I will in fact insist that you promise to keep it confidential unless I give you permission to share it."

"I... okay I'm gonna start recording now and then I will just delete it if we can't come to a satisfactory agreement here." She does so. 

Summer's seen fiction about contacting civilizations that don't have as much Law, so she's not flying completely blind here. "So like, there's this whole formal rigamarole I can do if you really insist, I suppose the situation calls for it. I've never broken an actual formal oath, almost anyone else here could say the same. But really most of the time I prefer to just, like, bet at 215:1 odds about it? I'd offer to do that but you don't, like, have money?"

"Actually you know what I guess the part where you give me money isn't actually that important. How about I agree to give you, like... a week of my wages, if I fail to get your permission?"

She pauses a moment.

"No, this doesn't actually help much when the monetary incentive to break the agreement is this large. Well. Is my seriously considered assurance good enough or do you want to actually do the formal oath thing?"

"My main consideration is whether I'm still in Seattle and experiencing a severe delusional episode, I don't want to give permission to a hypothetical doctor to... well, actually given how confidentiality laws work in my society there's not really much point. Sure, your assurance is enough."

Celene observes she isn't feeling that bad right now, which is good. Well, it's not particularly unpredictable, being engaged in an interesting conversation with a novel person generally does that to her.

"Okay, great. Where were we... any ideas about how we can verify your story?"

"My story being that I'm... from a different version of Earth, apparently?

I don't think that's really possible to prove? I could give a bunch of information about what I remember and you could confirm that this information is entirely plausible but many people are very good at making things up."

"Nah, no way. The hypotheses have got to make meaningfully different predictions somewhere. Probably like a DNA test or something has to be possible? Or like... I dunno. I feel like having a bunch of experts scrutinize you really closely would be pretty uncomfortable but I'd expect them to come up with a reasonable answer at the end of it."

"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?"

Summer thinks she's cute?

"I-"

Celene can't really argue with this logic, technically, it does make sense, especially given that Summer lives in a city that leans more towards 'slack' than 'predictability.'

Still, she-

"...Ok. I, yeah, that makes sense."

What does Celene want to do?

Probably, if Summer can be trusted, it's a good idea to try to prove her identity. Having lots of money seems like it'd be helpful.

Well, on Earth she did say that if she had enough money it would fix most of her problems, to the point where she'd be willing to keep going for a while. But she was needed back on Earth. This place seems like it has most of its problems figured out.

She could ask Summer how to

She's not going to ask her how to go into early-cryo. Not yet. She can imagine how that would feel from Summer's perspective. 

Admittedly, it's arguably worse to do so after Summer gets closer to her. It's entirely possible, though, that the novelty-shininess thing will wear off without this happening. She doesn't actually have enough information to conclude either way.

Alright.

Well, if she's not doing that yet.

She should figure out how to talk to the officials, maybe, and get her story confirmed? She probably wants some form of legal identification, if she could qualify for 'basic income' that would be nice, or to be able to legally work. She has no idea what Nucleus's immigration/employment policy is like. Also, she possibly does not have any useful skills.

Oh yeah, and the most important thing is to get independent corroboration of what Summer is saying, because for all Celene knows she could be lying to her. Without that, she'd be entirely dependent on Summer, and she doesn't want that.

Well, technically that's not true. She...

Summer has been kind and friendly to her, so far. She would like to be able to depend on her. She just, can't. She doesn't trust her enough. It'd be pretty stupid of her to do so.

Ok, she should ask Summer to corroborate her story.

She-

She also can't do that. That'd be- she doesn't want it to seem like she doesn't trust her. She doesn't know what she could say. Or really what part of Summer's story she wants to confirm. What would she even ask?

She's feeling a little hungry. She's not going to mention that either.

She just-

Celene wants to go bury her head somewhere. But that'd make Summer concerned for her.

She doesn't know what Summer wants from her.

Oh right, she can just ask.

"What would you like me to do, then? Right now, I mean."

You call a girl cute one time and she immediately starts trying to offload all her decisions onto you.

"Well, you're welcome to just keep resting on the coach if that's all you want to do. Is there anything I could do to make you more comfortable? Want some tea or anything?"

"...Sure, thank you."

She'll begin microwaving up some tea.

"So. I guess I think what the Emergency Services people would ideally have me do is just, like, turn you over to them? And—they'd not want to treat you poorly, and they have more resources than I do, so... y'know, it'd probably be okay. You could go do that. If you really want."

She's hoping it doesn't go that way. Celene is cute and she's having fun and also if Celene leaves then probably the prank just ends even though she's now super invested in the story it's built up.

(Summer is perhaps not being entirely cognizant of the fact that Celene might be influenced by her seeming reluctant about that possibility.)

"If we're not doing that, I think the best option is that I tell them what I've seen and say they can only take actions based on the story that they're certain don't oppose our interests."

That does seem like something she should do, doesn't it?

Like it'd really be the smart, sensible thing to do.

But, on the other hand,

Ok actually why is she so reluctant to do this right now?

Well,

She doesn't really feel like interacting with new people or doing stressful things? And she and Summer have built up a rapport? And it seems like Summer doesn't really want her to leave? and called her cute?

And also she can always do that later.

Plus, letting Emergency Services know of her existence seems like the sort of thing where once you open the door it can't be closed.

She's totally rationalizing this. Oh well.

"I mean, I don't really mind either way," she says, fully aware of how insane she sounds.

Okay, the "offload all her decisions" thing was supposed to be a joke this is getting slightly concerning.

She is... going to do the thing that preserves optionality! That's usually a good default.

(Summer is, not entirely unaware, that she's probably on some level rationalizing a desire to spend more time taking care of a shiny cute girl. But it'll be fiiiiiiine.)

"Well. Uh. How about I go send a message to Emergency Services and tell them what's up? They'll probably, like, have a brief meeting and talk about things they'd like to do, and then send us some proposals for actions they'd like to take based on our information, which we are free to accept or reject."

"...Alright, that sounds good."

She gets on her laptop and types up a quick message giving the rough details. Someone shows up on her doorstep, she takes them in, they claim they just experienced dying and appear to know how to speak a language they call 'English' and they gave this description of an alternate version of their civilization with... various differences. It didn't seem like it had treated Celene very well. She's probably gonna go get her DNA tested later or something to see if she has really unusual genetics?

She marks it as a seemingly low probability situation where there is potential for massive upside, but not much urgent risk. And also she marks that she thinks it's probably a prank.

If you're doing a prank where you think Emergency Services might end up getting contacted, you let them know ahead of time. The important reason to do this is that it avoids wasting government resources. Those are paid for by your taxes, you do not want to waste them unnecessarily.

But the actual reason most people do it consistently is that Emergency Services will let you pretend to be them. As long as you're careful not to do anything that might cause an actual issue. They will be watching you.

They find no matches. If this is a prank, it wasn't preregistered. Emergency Services will not, of course, be telling Summer that fact, unless it actually seems to be of importance.

...The priors are low enough that they mostly think Summer is lying to them or deeply confused or maybe someone just forgot to register their prank or something. But they keep enough unnecessary extra hands around (in fear of the day that they might very suddenly stop being so unnecessary) that someone decides it'd be fun to go dig through some of the hypothetical planning for this category of scenario.

Emergency Services will offer Summer six bits if she wants to run an experiment where Emergency Services provides several paragraphs of text, and then immediately upon receipt they record and send back a video of Celene translating it into English. If there is in fact someone in Summer's apartment who is fluent in some completely unattested language, that at least eliminates the "Summer is deeply confused" line of possibilities. And it's a cheap test to run.

...Sure why not.

"Hey Celene, d'you think you could translate something into English, and then I send over the video? There's six bits in it for us."

"Oh, wow. Sure, that sounds fun!"

Hopefully she does not lose all knowledge of how to speak Eifweni immediately afterwards.

That sure would leave her kinda helpless for a while if it happened!

Hi yes we would like our free six bits please

They send out a few paragraphs from their massive collection of unpublished text that they keep around in case they need it for these sorts of things, and a minute or two later get a response back.

...Emergency Services is going to have a linguistics team spend a dozen or two minutes scrutinizing that, but as a first pass it does seem to be what it claims it is.

They're also going to see if they can track down the identity of Celene easily, though they aren't gonna bother trying too hard about it. If they still thought psychosis was very likely, they'd pay Summer and Celene to go get Celene's fingerprints scanned as soon as possible to make sure no one elsewhere is wasting resources tracking down a missing person, but they don't expect anyone's doing that.

How much would Summer like to bet that this situation is worth Emergency Services spending more time on, conditional on the situation not being a prank on Summer?

Gooood question.

...I mean, probably she's pretty confident in that, right? Even if it's a really weird psychotic episode, someone's gotta go track down what's up with Celene.

I dunno, my 1080 to your 216? I might be willing to give you more favorable odds if you explained "worth spending more time on" in more detail.

Yeah okay that's pretty strong evidence that either Summer isn't in on it or is willing to pay an appreciable amount of money just to waste Emergency Services's time. They don't actually particularly benefit from taking the bet at this point, but if they predictably won't take the bet then people can just offer them odds they aren't actually willing to pay. They agree with the point about how someone needs to figure out what's up with Celene, is that enough to get them 11:1 odds instead of 5:1?

Suuuure fine.

After brief back-and-forth on how much money is reasonable to spend on this one, they pick a uniform random number between 54 and 108, and then send Summer 91 bits, to be taken back if it turns out she was being pranked, and with an agreement that they may take a total of 1092 bits from her bank account if it turns out she was wasting their time.

They'd ask for a bet on whether Celene's story is true if they actually expected to learn much from Summer's opinion, which they don't. They have about the same data she does and are more qualified to make that judgment call. But they'll ask for her gut probability estimate.

I mean obviously she's being pranked.

Conditional on her not being pranked... she really does not buy the psychosis explanation. But also Celene's story should not be possible. You're asking her to condition on an event of infinitesimal probability, here.

Right. Not the kind of thing brains are very good at doing intuitively, we know.

Well, update us on anything interesting, I guess. And if Celene ends up with money and would be willing to bet us on whether she's in on a prank, let us know.

"Hey Celene! Sorry about all that, how's your tea been?"

Celene has been slowly sipping her tea while thinking about her situation (and also absentmindedly staring at Summer without actually realizing that's what she's doing. She's very pretty).

She's been thrown into an unfamiliar environment, and she's not sure of how high the stakes are or what problems she'll have to face, so it makes sense she'd be stressed out right now. But also, every single piece of evidence she's received has been 'actually everything is fine and you do not have much in particular to worry about.'

Of course, this does not actually help her feel significantly less anxious. 

And Summer... has been very nice to her. She doesn't know how she feels about Summer. She's been nothing but helpful so far. Still, though, this is technically-

Well.

She wasn't supposed to have to deal with any more problems. That was the point.

It's technically an increase in the expected number of problems she will have to deal with.

Maybe that's why she's distressed.

But still, she can't deny that, for now, it sure does seem like everything is fine. She'll have to keep reminding herself of that consciously, probably.

Then, she hears Summer talking to her. Startled, she glances up.

"Oh! I'm doing fine, the tea is good."

"So. Uh, I hate to bring this up if you're not super comfy talking about it, but... how did you die, exactly? Do you have any medical conditions we have to go treat?"

"That's actually a very rude question to ask in my culture."

"I'm joking," she clarifies. "There'd not really be any opportunity for that to come up."

Well, you see, I died of asphyxiating on an inert gas.

"Not because of any medical condition-

Well, I suppose arguably it was."

Celene sighs. Does she actually want to tell her?

...probably, yeah.

It's still hard to say.

"I killed myself," she says as calmly and nonchalantly as possible.

It takes her a moment to actually process that at all.

"Like, uh, truicide? ...Why?"

Truicide obviously happens ever on Eifwen, but the topic is usually... talked around, a little bit. You don't want to be giving people ideas, if it can be avoided.

It does not particularly have an association with depression. Like, depression doesn't help, but most people who might be suicidal on Earth would obviously just do early cryo. It's mostly people who go insane and stop comprehending the consequences of their actions or people who develop some sort of bizarre philosophical stance or something.

"You mean as opposed to early-cryo? 'Truicide' seems to carry that implication.

We do have cryonics, but it's very expensive. Generally people pay for it with life insurance, but they don't pay out on suicides unless it's been 2 years since you've started the policy. I wasn't really willing to wait that long.

And also, even if I could afford it I don't think I'd do so. I was, not very confident that Earth's future would necessarily be a good one.

I should mention that I'm among a minority who has seriously considered the question of whether or not to be cryopreserved."

She pauses.

"That's because most people either haven't heard of it or automatically dismiss the idea."

Celene maybe might be mildly enjoying messing with Summer like this.

Summer is going to collapse and bury her face in the couch a bit over from Celene.

"I. So you have cryonics. But you aren't pouring all your resources into bootstrapping an institution that can provide high-quality cryonics to everyone?"

That's. If they'd just never figured out the idea, she'd get it. But Eifweni were fantasizing about this category of technology well before they actually found a workable method. So when they had something that seemed at all viable? Full steam ahead.

They could've done it better, there'd never been a civilizational project of that scope before so they had little experience. They're hoping they never have to again—they're carefully tracking all the existential risks, which are mostly the only sort of thing that could suddenly put that much value on the line again.

(Well okay some people feel a little iffy about dismissing cosmic waste arguments.)

"Why?"

"Um.

There are many reasons. The principal one is that they don't believe it will work, that it's just an obsession for rich people who are terrified of death. Our cryonics technology isn't good enough yet to fully prevent damage to the brain, and people are skeptical that the future will be able to rescuitate them. You're also not allowed to cryopreserve someone until they're legally dead, because that's murder, and yes I'm aware of the argument that the standards for legal death have loosened over time and will continue to loosen but many aren't. Technically there's a thing you can do called a Do Not Rescuitate where if your heart stops you are legally considered dead and they don't try to restart it. 

The other arguments are that if no one dies, they'll have overpopulation, or that the future wouldn't care enough about them to revive them, or that they don't want to live forever because death is what gives life meaning, or something similar. They could just kill themselves, of course, but suicide is considered socially unacceptable in my culture, which is... Why I was hesitant to bring it up to you.

And generally institutions that guarantee resources to everyone don't exist on Earth? There are humanitarian aid organizations but they don't have the resources to do so for everyone. Many people still don't have access to clean drinking water, or food, or basic disease prevention, although we're actually doing a lot better than most people think we are, I think it's only a very small percent who fall under that. Some countries guarantee resources to all their citizens and do a good job of it but it's not global."

"...Can you come up with some good things to say about the world you're from? I'm getting excessively mad at it."

"Well.

Probably it will become net positive for it to have existed, in my moral weighing, on expectation.

I quite enjoy the art made there?

There are a lot of cool and intelligent people.

Some systems are pretty elegantly and efficiently designed.

I mean, it wasn't exactly the best place for me, that's why I left."

Okay to be fair probably she couldn't give much better an account of why Eifwen is good—well, she couldn't've before having Earth to compare it to. Now she understands how much she was taking the cryonics thing for granted, for example. Maybe Celene simply needs an even worse planet to compare Earth to.

"Well. I'll do my best to make sure that here is exactly the best place for you."

"Aww. Thank you. I- that's really sweet of you."

She's not going to say the automatic objection that comes to mind.

Summer is well aware that that is a completely unachievable goal but she can at least move things in that direction a tad.

"So. I'd say we have two big items on our todo list." Other than each other. "You should get more acclimated to Eifwen, and we should figure out how to make a whole lot of money off of your unique situation. Do you have any opinions about how to attack either of those?"

ooaaughhh

"I guess having contacted Emergency Services is pretty good progress on making money? I don't really have amy ideas on that, you'd be a lot more knowledgeable than me.

As for getting acclimated to Eifwen, the internet might be helpful- Do you have the internet? I guess if there's some sort of standardized education system that anyone can easily access that'd work too. Uh, back on Earth there was this thing called Wikipedia which was basically a global online repository of information and had an overview of every topic of any significance with sources cited accordingly, it's one of the things I liked most about Earth. Do you have anything like that?"

"It... did not occur to me that you might have computers but not an internet. Though I suppose it was a pretty substantial infrastructure project to get it as well-established as it is now—yeah, anyways, how about I make you an account on my computer?"

The computer is sort of like an extra bulky iPad. You can use it with the touch screen, or you can stand it up and use a keyboard peripheral. Summer sets up a new account for Celene, passing it over for her to make a password. (Celene can read the text and everything fine, though she doesn't have any muscle memory for typing.)

Celene will use the keyboard peripheral!

Can she find a web browser application? Are there applications?

On a new account, she'll find a default web browser, a default chat client, a default text editor (which has IDE features that can be enabled easily), and maybe a small handful of other things. There's also a bunch of little widgets—calculators and timers and the like.

Oh, convenient! This interface is very intuitive and user-friendly.

She opens up the web browser and finds a search engine. What does she want to learn?

She's not on Earth right now, but if she was on Earth, what information would be relevant? Googling "Earth" or "Humanity" wouldn't be that relevant, so "Tinya" or "Eifwen" probably wouldn't either. History? Culture? Culture wouldn't really work, there's too much of it, but maybe she could find like "a brief history of the world" or "the world's cultures" or things like that. Philosophy? Oh wait, "Politics" would be helpful. But probably what would be even more helpful would be "Tinya Government." She'll search up "Tinya Government."

What does she find?

"Tinya Government" is not actually a term anyone uses to refer to the set of institutions that govern the planet Tinya. The highest level results are going to be about organizations with that exact title that appear in popular fictional works. Celene—might not be able to actually tell this, just by looking at the article titles.

If she does decide to scroll down a little, she will actually see articles about the global government, and probably her knowledge of Eifweni will mean that when she sees those article titles she'll have a general idea of what their referents are.

Hmm. What is the term used to refer to the global government, then?

Maybe a reasonably close English term is 'Providence'.

Ah, so Eifwen is governed by the capital of Rhode Island. Good to know.

SEARCH: "Providence government structure"

Despite the fact that they managed to turn their name into a term for being stuck-up about sex, the Puritans did actually get some things right.

But yeah, that'll get a Wiki article.

Excellent! What does it say?

Fundamentally, the point of having Providence at all is that there are services which most Eifweni agree oughtn't be city-dependent, and some laws which have to be global. Eifwen is not cool with large population centers existing that are unable to provide urgent cryonics if necessary. Having exit rights is essential to prevent cities from turning into totalitarian nightmares. Children are not to be abused. Someone needs to collect the land value tax from the cities and distribute it evenly to all the people. And certain sorts of things are liable to cause harm even to people who are pretty far away from you.

We have slightly mixed feelings about this one, but we also aren't really gonna allow stuff like "cities where true murder is legal." Sorry about that, please just go to the "forcible early cryo is legal" city.

So the structure:

In principle, each person governed by Eifwen gets an equal say about things. But you can't actually just poll everyone about what the government does. So, y'know, representative democracy. Call each person their own Level 0 Representative. They delegate their say to some Level 1 Representative of their choice. The Level n Representatives delegate all their votes to the Level n+1 Representatives. Eventually you get some reasonably sized group of people that can have a conversation together and make competent decisions without getting weighed down by massive committee meetings.

This sounds familiar?

Well, that is what happens when you are being modelled by an author that has not actually heard of a better proposal than that one for how to implement a democracy. Surely many of the details are different, but, yeah, you wanna do the layers thing.

The legislature has a lot of different groups of experts it consults on things, of course. If prediction markets are unsure about the impact of something that Providence is considering doing, Providence will pay people to figure it out.

There are courts. Not particularly to determine the meaning of the law, if there is an argument about that you go get it resolved by the legislature. But sometimes the law will say "a court is to take into consideration the facts of the particular case to decide exactly how large the fine will be, and it should make that decision in accordance with so and so general principles" or something like that. It is not practical to make a legal system that does not rely on human judgement in any way at any point. (And, y'know, you obviously need a method for determining what the facts of a case are.) Providence's courts mostly end up arbitrating disputes between cities or prosecuting crimes that involve several different jurisdictions.

Many services provided by Providence are done by just hiring a company to do it, or by Providence predictably being interested in buying impact certificates, or strategies like that. Lots of public institutions are actually sufficiently funded by donation, but Providence will sometimes (if a supermajority is in favor) reallocate some of their excess revenue away from UBI and towards solving some collective action problem.

If the geographic location of something is very relevant, usually cities will be in charge of it. So the services Providence provides are mostly stuff like research or software where the impact is too widely distributed for any one city to have enough incentive to make it happen. Or niche things, where it's better to have specialists fly around between cities than to have a specialist in each city.

We have slightly mixed feelings about this one, but we also aren't really gonna allow stuff like "cities where true murder is legal." Sorry about that, please just go to the "forcible early cryo is legal" city.

nooooo eifwen I thought you were based

Just kidding, this seems totally reasonable.

Ok so what about the other stuff

But you can't actually just poll everyone about what the government does.

You totally can! They admittedly would not be very knowledgeable about a bunch of things but it's definitely possible. 

And in theory, you could just poll people about their desired worldstates and then let the decisions of how to get there be carried out by

actually probably the first part is not true

....

Who the hell is dath ilan?

You totally can!

Polls about what people want Providence to achieve, and about what methods they think are best to do so, are in fact performed. Usually they're even rather close to what the representatives ultimately end up deciding. And of course prediction markets are considered. But we've decided it's better to have someone making a judgement call based on the polls and markets, than to just try hooking it up directly. At the end of the day, well-informed human judgement about when to defer to the recommendations of the polls and markets and when not to will avoid some categories of mistakes, if you're careful about who you put in charge.

(Of course, some cities have actually tried the futarchy thing.)

Prediction markets, she's heard of those.

If prediction markets are unsure about the impact of something that Providence is considering doing, Providence will pay people to figure it out.

Can't they just subsidize the prediction market directly?

So it seems like the central government, Providence, puts down a set of overarching guidelines for the cities to follow, and generally cities can do whatever they want outside of that, kind of like Scott Alexander's Atomic Communitarianism. And of course, there are exit rights, and they tax negative externalities. What about freedom of motion, though? What if someone can't afford to travel to another city, or perhaps they have obligations/attachments in their original city?

And Providence contracts out work to companies, that's pretty standard. The governance system is pretty interesting, Celene does object to the electoral college being used in the US but a bunch of the problem is because of the states having winner-takes-all policies and this doesn't have that. How is the number of representatives per level chosen? How do they deal with momentum effects where it's hard to switch between a limited pool of representatives? Is it just that the top 1000 (or 1296) representatives are chosen? Do they have ranked choice for representatives, who then have ranked choice for representatives, and so on and so forth? That seems a bit too complicated. Do representatives have to be honest about who they intend to vote for?

Or wait, is it like, that there can be an arbitrary number of representatives of each level, but their voting power scales in proportion to the amount of level 0 representatives that stand behind them? Is that what "delegate their say" means? 

Still, it seems like that process could continue arbitrarily long, then, since there's no mechanism forcing representatives to vote for popular candidates.

Well, she supposes it could only continue up until the world's population is consumed in politics.

Providence's courts mostly end up arbitrating disputes between cities or prosecuting crimes that involve several different jurisdictions.

...ok, so if a city's court is blatantly corrupt, and a thief robs you, and they pay off the city with the money they stole from you, and the city thus finds them not guilty, do you just have no recourse in that situation?

What is "land value tax" again? Celene has heard of the concept vaguely, but doesn't know what it means. Is it like some form of property tax? Does Providence only use land value tax? Why?

What about freedom of motion, though? What if someone can't afford to travel to another city, or perhaps they have obligations/attachments in their original city?

...Plane tickets aren't that expensive? Contact a charity or something if you're really stuck.

We recommend not taking on obligations or forming attachments in cities that you intend to leave. It is possible to take on legal or contractual obligations that prevent you from leaving a city, but Providence pays pretty close attention to make sure that's not being abused in some way.

How is the number of representatives per level chosen?

Through lots of smart people thinking about the right number.

Do representatives have to be honest about who they intend to vote for?

...Why would you continue giving your vote to someone who lied to you?????

 Is that what "delegate their say" means? 

Yes

Still, it seems like that process could continue arbitrarily long, then, since there's no mechanism forcing representatives to vote for popular candidates.

Generally someone becomes a valid choice of a Level n+1 Representative when enough Level n Representatives agree that they'd send their votes to that person if they were a valid choice.

If a city's court is blatantly corrupt, and a thief robs you, and they pay off the city with the money they stole from you, and the city thus finds them not guilty, do you just have no recourse in that situation?

We recommend not moving into cities which have no mechanism preventing them from pulling that sort of thing. "Binding commitment enforced by Providence" is not an uncommon choice of such a mechanism, but... most cities do not make such a commitment, and then proceed to break it?

What is "land value tax" again?

The basic idea is:

1) "Volume on the planet" is a good with precisely zero supply elasticity. This means it can be taxed with zero deadweight loss.

2) Philosophically, no one has any particular claim to physical space. It's not the result of their labor, or anything, it was just... there. So it's pretty justified to take the value of the space and distribute it among the population, instead of just deciding it belongs to some people.

It's a lot of Providence's funding. They also tax domain names on the global internet and a few other things for similar reasons. (Lots of cities do it for electromagnetic frequencies, but those don't need to be allocated globally.) But they also get a decent bit of funding from donations, and there's an occasional service that they request payment for.

They are not completely unwilling to tax things which are less... philosophically justified, if needed. They did when they were going full steam ahead on cryonics infrastructure. But the land value taxes do go pretty far.

We recommend not taking on obligations or forming attachments in cities that you intend to leave.

We recommend not moving into cities which have no mechanism preventing them from pulling that sort of thing.

What if you were born there as a child? Or does Providence have a special organization designed to evaluate if a city is fit to legally raise a child in, with strict binding commitments required to receive such a qualification?

...Why would you continue giving your vote to someone who lied to you?????

exit scams? Or wait, no, four year elections might not exist here, you can probably just instantly change your vote.

Generally someone becomes a valid choice of a Level n+1 Representative when enough Level n Representatives agree that they'd send their votes to that person if they were a valid choice.

Ok, sure, that makes sense.

Hmmmmmmmmmm.

She can't think of any automatic objections to the land value tax thing, it does make sense. And, well, clearly they do get enough money that way? She's worried it might lead to some perverse incentives, but, then again, it's probably not worse than those set up by Earth tax codes.

And this is how basic income is funded, presumably?

Ok, she's been making a bunch of nitpicks which are almost immediately addressed but WHAT THE HECK THIS IS SO MUCH BETTER THAN EARTH WHERE ALMOST EVERYONE AGREES THE SYSTEM SUCKS EXCEPT FOR A SMALL MINORITY MAKING AD HOC JUSTIFICATIONS AND YET NO ONE CAN DO ANYTHING TO CHANGE IT.

Or does Providence have a special organization designed to evaluate if a city is fit to legally raise a child in, with strict binding commitments required to receive such a qualification?

Yeah, more or less this? Providence also ensures inasmuch as feasible that you aren't going around having children behind their back or whatever.

exit scams?

If there's some sort of clearly uncouth behavior going on, someone will raise an objection and they'll make sure people get a chance to reallocate their votes before making any binding decisions.

She's worried it might lead to some perverse incentives.

Well really a lot of the point of taxing things with low supply elasticity is to minimize these, but we don't claim to have eliminated all perverse incentives or anything. We can only do our best.

Yeah, more or less this?

Huh. That feels surprisingly...

Well, it doesn't seem very possible to avoid children feeling pushed away or isolated from their home city? Like, let's say a child is raised in a more predictable city, and feels stifled by the constant structure and expectations of order there, or a child is raised in a slacky city, and feels frustrated whenever they can't plan for something. She doesn't think that's something Providence would really enforce? In general she's not really sure how you could prevent this problem.

Then again, the kind of situation she was envisioning was "child grows up in an fascist dictatorship location that forces everyone to conform to a certain norm" and that's not really the kind of thing that will happen here, probably.

Anyways, she thinks she gets more or less a basic overview of how Providence works. The next thing she should search up!

SEARCH: "Emergency Services."

That seems relevant.

Oh, and she needs to know what their deal is, not just be directed to their hotline or something.

Emergency Services are a network of organizations that ensure public safety by responding to emergencies. Typically, these organizations coordinate closely with each other and prioritize speed, adaptability, and trustworthiness.

The page gives a general overview of approaches taken to helping with emergencies. Mostly cities fund infrastructure for Emergency Services, and then if you in particular end up needing an ambulance ride it'll come from your insurance.

It emphasizes that Emergency Services are typically Lawful—you can usually do stuff like tell them you're planning a crime and talk about harm mitigation without getting arrested. Not all Emergency Services are like that, but Providence will interfere if any falsely claim to be Lawful.

Most Emergency Services aren't ensured to be truly universal, except for a few things like emergency cryonics, true murder prevention, and child protection. But you have to have sought out a really weird city if you don't have access to a fire department or to ambulances or whatever.

What if you don't have insurance?

Also, SEARCH: "Nucleus Emergency Services info"

If you don't have insurance, you're generally going to be expected to pay the bill if you can. The details for what happens if you can't vary, but usually one factor in play is "cities will be hesitant to let you do things where you might need urgent help if you don't seem able to pay."

The article on Nucleus's Emergency Services lists out what services are available and gives some logistics. Nucleus has allocated an unusually large amount of its resources to help people who end up hurting themselves doing really stupid shit. 

Part of the social contract of Nucleus is that if you screw yourself over in a way that is sufficiently expensive to fix, the city is not necessarily going to bail you out. You're responsible for yourself, here. Pay your insurance bills.

(Though you'd have to be really really remarkably idiotic to get yourself in a situation where they won't bother trying to cryonicize you.)

Hmm. And presumably other cities do the same thing, since Nucleus spends more than average on helping people who screw themselves over?

Alright. Let's get some more information on Nucleus, then.

She'll search for a Wiki article on Nucleus?

No, Nucleus's Emergency Services spend about as much on bailing people out for stupid shit as they make from bailing people out for stupid shit. Other cities don't have to do it as often, and thus can eat the loss of not making people pay. And also other cities are more likely to do the thing where they stop you from trying if you won't be able to pay.

Nucleus is on the Pacific coast of northern South America. It's like, a normal sized city—which means more populous than most cities in America, because population centers are pretty concentrated in Eifwen. It's got a pretty standard democratic government. It gets a decent amount of tourism, a good bit of it from people who want to gamble or do extreme sports or try ill-advised drugs without having to deal with as much gatekeeping. Disproportionately many works of fiction are set there. There's links to big tables of data about the city. The temperatures are consistently around 60 to 80 Fahrenheit, and there's rarely much rain. The article goes into detail on many specific areas of knowledge about the city.

Ah yes, a mashup of the San Francisco Bay Area and Las Vegas.

So, more adventurous than most cities, fewer guardrails, just like what Summer said.

Uhhhh she can't really think of any more information she wants.

She'll just get some random information, read a few headlines.

SEARCH: "Economics news"

SEARCH: "Tech news"

Do trans people exist here? Is there a word for transgender? If so she'll look up information about that too, because why not.

Maybe she should search up something like "Guide to Eifwen for alien visitors" or "how to explain eifwen to an alien visitor" but probably Summer would be better at finding that than she would be. That does seem like the type of thing they would make just for fun, though.

Economists analyze pros and cons of throwing flour on the invisible hand

Haptic glove breakthrough brings more realistic touch sensations to VR

Yeah, there are trans people. They aren't seen as very remarkable. Most trans people are sorta nonbinaryish, or at least think of themselves as having a subtly different gender than most cis people of the gender they're close to? She can find information about HRT very easily, and other transition tech if she pokes a little further.

Sorry, what was that about throwing flour on the invisible hand?

Actually, wait, does 'invisible hand' actually point to 'the invisible hand of the market' here? Or is this just a completely unrelated invisible hand?

She clicks on the article.

In a bold and controversial move, a group of economists at the recent North American Economics Conference have proposed a novel economic policy. The 'Flour Faction', as they call themselves, argues that the proverbial invisible hand has remained elusive for far too long. "We've been relying on this invisible force for millennia," argued Dr. Ima, a leading representative of the group. "How can we truly understand and harness its power if we cannot even see it? By making the hand visible, even temporarily, we will be able to gain greater insights into its behavior. Imagine being able to observe each knuckle and fingernail as it moves, intricately guiding supply and demand."

Critics of the plan have raised serious concerns about the consequences of such an action. "What if the invisible hand does not take kindly to being assaulted with flour?" questioned Dr. Brogel. "What if it gets fed up with us, and leaves us to fend for ourselves? Are we prepared to suddenly switch over to a command economy?" Others raised questions about the practicality of the proposal: "Even if we could locate the invisible hand, which is a monumental task in itself, how much flour would be required to make it visible?" asked Dr. Amali. "Are we talking about a few bags, or an industrial-scale operation?"

Despite the criticisms, the Flour Faction remains undeterred, claiming that the potential benefits outweigh the risks. "We're not suggesting we douse the entire global economy in flour," clarified Dr. Ima. "We're proposing a controlled, localized experiment, with appropriate safety measures in place." As the debate rages on, economists worldwide await the outcome with bated breath, some eager to witness the unveiling of the invisible hand, while others fear the potential consequences of tampering with such a fundamental economic force.

What.

Is this like, the Eifwen equivalent to The Onion? Is it a satire piece? It has to be a joke, right?

Like this planet is clearly reasonable so why would this be a thing.

Anyways,

She can't really think of anything else for the moment and she's getting kind of bored. She'll log out of the tablet and check in on Summer.

They're more fun when they're mixed in with real headlines.

...Wait, no, this one is in fact describing real events. But like, probably the Flour Faction was established as a joke. Surely it must've been.

Hi! Summer's here. She's been sitting around texting her friends about Celene and how cute she is.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Celene would be really flustered if she knew about this, but she doesn't.

"Hi!

That was.... quite interesting. Eifwen is very different from Earth- in a good way, to be clear! Honestly this all feels kind of unreal."

Also, she's more than a little hungry right now, and probably it would be a good idea to ask Summer for food.

"Um, also, do you have anything to eat? I'm a bit hungry," Celene asks sheepishly.

It is girldinner* time.

*Eifweni word for a meal, often improvised, where you're optimizing more for exploration and humor than, like, quality.

Summer's apartment contains (or contains Eifweni food items fairly similar to):

• Frozen vegan chicken nuggets, frozen potato puffs, frozen pizza. This would be boring and Celene deserves something more exciting, but maybe something here can be a component of a larger recipe or a side dish or whatever.
• Mixed frozen vegetables
• Ice cream
• Rice
• Potatoes
• Corn
• Carrots
• A Pineapple
• Avocados
• Vegan meat substitute
• Eggs
• Shredded cheese
• Almond milk
• Butter
• Sour Cream
• Yogurt
• Granola
• Blueberries
• Sliced bread
• Peanut butter
• Tortillas
• Tortilla chips
• Salsa
• Hot sauce
• Pasta noodles
• Some meat broth
• A bottle of wine
• Vinegar
• Soy sauce
• Diet soda
• Coffee grounds
• Various spices
• Flour, sugar, baking soda, etc
• Probably some candy and prepackaged snacks

There's an oven, a microwave, and burners (electric.) Celene have any particular meal suggestions or should Summer just improvise something?

Tinya has pizza? And chicken nuggets? And ice cream? 

Truly, these foods are universal.

Ok. 

RECIPE TIME.

Step 1

Wait does Summer actually want her to cook something or does she just want to do what she usually does?

Those are all pretty obvious things to try, in the space of possible foods! The specific kind of pizza with tomato sauce and pepperoni is not remotely as ubiquitous, though.

Does Celene wanna cook something? Summer was mostly looking for suggestions but if Celene wants to try cooking something that sounds fantastic.

If Celene needs her to make a quick store trip for any additional ingredients, she can.

Celene's theory of cooking is that you need a base of cheap calories, and then nutrients and flavor, such as vegetables, seasoning, and protein, on top. She realized this after she discovered her previous philosophy, "only buy food that costs $1 per 200 calories or cheaper," was in fact a bad idea.

So far, this has not failed her.

RECIPE TIME

("It's Showtime!" is now playing in her head. Celene needs to import some Earth music at some point)

For the bases, the options are: Corn, Rice, Bread, Tortillas, and Tortilla Chips.

Since she isn't very familiar with Mexican(? She doesn't know what style of cuisine it would be called on Tinya) cuisine, she'll discard the tortillas, corn, and tortilla chips as options.

That leaves rice and bread. She could make some sandwiches but they aren't really a dinner food, so rice it is.

Alright. So she needs to make some rice, and then a side dish on top.

They have potatoes, eggs, cheese, vegan meat, mixed vegetables, meat broth, soy sauce, spices.

Sure she can come up with something. Uhhh, probably the potatoes go well with cheese, although not necessarily with the mixed vegetables. She should incorporate egg and meat in for protein.

Alright. Time to cook.

STEP 1.

Take the rice and put it in the rice cooker-

Oh. They don't have a rice cooker. Yeah, that does seem like it'd be an Earth-specific appliance.

She's never cooked rice in a pot before. Good thing the bag has instructions!

"Fill a pot with 1 part rice and 2 parts water. Boil until the rice absorbs all the water (should take around half a period)."

Hmm, ok.

Actually, wait. How is she supposed to wash the rice with this? Normally she would just fill up to a line but here she can't do that because the rice retains some water and she can't pour all of it out.

It's probably not necessary to wash the rice, if she remembers correctly it doesn't actually change much. She'll just not do that.

She grabs some scoops which look to be around a cup in size and cook up 2 scoops of rice.

STEP 2.

So her idea is to mix potatoes, cheese, the ground vegan meat, and eggs together in a shakshuka/casserole like dish (she has not ever cooked either, but she has heard of them. Why is she doing this. This is a disaster).

She'll take the potatoes, wash them, and place them on a cutting board.

Now, envision the potatoes as your greatest enemy and pound them to dust with your fists.

She cuts the potatoes into reasonable sized chunks. She could peel them but she does not really want to do that.

STEP 3.

Take a large skillet, turn on the burner, melt some butter in it as cooking oil. Place the potatoes inside.

STEP 4. 

Take the ground vegan meat and disperse it evenly throughout the skillet.

STEP 5.

She should probably add something else besides just pure potato/meat/cheese vibes? (she does not know how to describe it but it feels like they all occupy a similar intersection in foodspace somehow)

She'll take some carrots out of Summer's fridge, wash them as well, slice on the bias, and add them into the skillet as well.

STEP 6.

Oh look, the rice is done. Uhhhhhh.

Turn off the burner?

Actually no she has an idea.

She'll mix vinegar, sugar, and salt together in a bowl (she does not remember the correct proportions but she'll improvise) and then pour them over the rice evenly and wait for that to boil off/be absorbed.

STEP 7.

Stir for a while, turn off the burner on the rice, then stir a bit more. Add some soy sauce onto the pan, enjoy the sizzling sound, add some more soy sauce and meat broth, add some various spices that she recognizes and which suit the dish. In particular she wants garlic powder and onion powder because these are universally good and can always be added. She just realized she never checked if Summer is allergic to any food but why would Summer have food she's allergic to in her apartment.

STEP 8.

uhhh ok time to do the thing. the thing in all the youtube videos. She'll spread out some space on the pan, drop the eggs inside, put a pan over it, and let it steam for a few minutes.

STEP 9.

Alright it's been a few minutes. Take off the lid. uhhhhhhhhh ok now sprinkle cheese all over. more cheese. MORE.

oh gods this is more towards the casserole end of the spectrum than she thought she'll stir some sour cream into the mix to balance the flavor profile.

STEP 10.

Ok. Celene will turn off the heat, put that skillet aside, grab another skillet, put it back on the burner, and cook up some of the mixed vegetables with some meat broth, soy sauce, and spices. Because greens have vitamins and vitamins are important.

Ok! That's all!

Alrrright. And scoop the potato dish and the sauteed vegetables into separate large plates, and serve with two bowls of rice, one for her and one for Summer.

She is very stressed out and has no idea if this will actually taste good or not. Why did she decide to do this.

"Alright, I'm done! I, uh, don't know how good this is."

It's really good, Celene did a fantastic job improvising. Summer loves it. Her girldinners usually do not taste this good.

"Celene oh my gosh this is great thank you so much."

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Celene blushes slightly. She's really uhsdafiweuhsaifxnmnxkmwczkjfsaklhsaoijdfsjfsajofdohdisajfij-

She's really happy that Summer likes it! She'll try some herself.

Wow, this is pretty good, she did not expect to do such a good job. 

Celene should be more sure of herself!

"What did you do with the rice? This is better than the rice I usually make."

"Oh! Uh, I added some vinegar with salt and sugar. I read about this as a method for preparing rice for sushi (sushi is a dish of sliced raw fish and rice in its simplest form, but has a bunch of variations thereof) but I really like it in general."

"Huh! Maybe you can try making 'sushi' sometime! I was under the impression that raw meat is generally a bad idea."

"Uhhhhh.

It is, but if I remember correctly, fish used for sushi has some way of making it safe? They freeze it, I think, to kill any parasites. And raw meat, well, meat from land animals, is less safe, but there are still some dishes that use it, I think. Sushi is a lot more common. I'm not sure what separates the two? Probably Eifwen has some methods for making raw fish safe to eat for those who want to as well, I wouldn't know."

"Yeah I'm sure that exists but I have no idea how it works."

Celene finishes eating.

Alright, what does she want to do now?

Hmmm.

She'd ideally like to get her own source of income as soon as possible so that she's not, like, imposing herself on Summer. And also so she can not have to worry about going through Summer for everything.

There's basic income, right? Does she qualify for that? She'll grab the tablet and go over to the couch. 

Ugh.

Hmmm.

It'd be nice if she could cuddle with Summer. She's feeling kind of lonely.

Celene will lie facedown with her arms and knees tucked under her on the couch for a few minutes to see if Summer somehow discerns this and comes over to hug her. Or something.

Summer does not understand what this means.

She will go also curl up into a ball like Celene did, on the other side of the couch.

Celene opens her eyes when she feels Summer move onto the couch.

What the heck.

Um. No one has ever done that before. She wasn't particularly expecting anything to happen.

Celene waves to Summer, then turns and logs into the tablet.

SEARCH: "how to get basic income"

Hi! Summer waves back.

Basic income should just show up in your bank account. If that isn't happening, something weird is going on and you will probably have to ask a person for help with it, sorry.

Aww.

Ok, that's pretty reasonable probably everyone is registered some way or other and it's an exception if you aren't. Still, in the US you could just fill out a form or write an email or call them or something (generally, unfortunately, the answer is "call them") but-

Wait.

"ask a person for help" doesn't imply "you have to be there in person" in this case, does it?

Are there like contact options listed for who you should talk to?

Probably text the bank?

What is "the bank." The bank you have an account with? What if you don't have one of these?

Also, what if you don't have a phone- actually "text" probably does not imply "you need a phone number" here and also even if it does there are probably services that allow you to get a phone number without a phone, just like on Earth.

...Okay yeah we could've phrased that translation to English better, sorry. No, you don't need a phone, that's just the word for sending an informal typed message. And we mean the central bank. Though if you have some other bank account probably you could also text them and they can talk to the central bank for you.

Huh. Does this imply that most people bank with the central bank? What are the economic implications of that?

Let's see, banks provide a cushion between the central bank and the individual, they can federally insure deposits, something something correspondence banking, the feds can manipulate the flow of money by changing interest rates on the banks....

Yeah, she's not economically literate enough to remember why this system exists or what the implications would be of changing it.

Ok, well.

She probably shouldn't do that? She doesn't want to cause a collision problem and jam up their system, like, for example, if she gets a new entry in the records, and Emergency Services finds it and concludes that she already existed, or if they get information about her situation and submit a duplicate report to Emergency Services, or something like that.

We're not that bad at dealing with this sort of issue but understandable to worry about it a little.

She'll turn to Summer then.

Hmm. She isn't actually sure if it's appropriate to ask Emergency Services to set up basic income for her in this situation? It probably isn't the top priority in her case?

Well, Celene's problem is that Providence doesn't know she exists. Neither does Nucleus, for that matter. They gotta go register her—this is gonna require a trip down to an office, if you could do it all online it'd be too easy to double your UBI by registering a fake person.

"Did Emergency Services mention what the next steps we should take are?"

"—Emergency Services didn't give any real specific directions, but I did tell them we'd try a DNA test soon. It's getting a bit late, though, so that could wait for tomorrow."

"Ah! Okay. Sure, I can do that tomorrow."

She yawns. It is getting a bit late.

"Uh, mind if I sleep on your couch tonight?"

There's another place Summer wouldn't mind Celene sleeping tonight—

"Of course not! What, are you expecting me to just throw you out on the street?"

That's a pretty good point.

"No, I just, wasn't sure where you wanted me to, I mean, were ok with me sleeping? So I just, wanted to check."

"Celene, you can sleep wherever you want."

"Oh, ok."

Obviously she doesn't literally mean "wherever you want" but that's reassuring.

She did actually try to come up with counterexamples. There's an implicit "that does not involve damaging my apartment"—she might object if Celene wanted to knock down a wall and sleep there, or something.

Well, anyways, it's getting late. She'll go to sleep now and hopefully will wake up at a reasonable time tomorrow and then do things like getting her DNA tested.

Celene lies down on the couch.

Who knows, maybe-

no shut up brain why are you like this

Summer's also getting eepy. And she's been trying to fix her sleep schedule lately. ...She'd totally be down to ruin her sleep schedule about Celene, but if Celene's going to sleep anyways she might as well not.

So she also heads into bed and goes to sleep.

Celene closes her eyes. It's pretty hard for her to fall asleep. Her mind is still firing on all cylinders, given... everything.

She thought she was going to die today. Now, she doesn't know what's going to happen.

She'll try to be optimistic? This is a radical enough divergence that her old priors are kind of meaningless here.

Not too optimistic, though. That never ends well for her.

...Ok, she can't actually convince her subconscious to believe a certain thing, unfortunately. Also, her brain is fixated on Summer as well, for some reason? She'll try to get some sleep. 

It's about an hour (well, 1.5 periods) before she actually manages to fall asleep.

For some reason.

Summer wakes up after a solid 12 periods of sleep and immediately hops out of bed like she usually does, takes her morning meds, and then heads to the kitchen to make herself some coffee.

...Oh hey, there's a girl on her couch! She loves when that happens. She's gonna try not to wake up the Celene.

Celene isn't awake yet, but will probably wake up from the noise once Summer starts doing things. It's not a big deal, if she didn't get enough sleep she would just not wake up at all no matter what, even if there was a loud alarm blaring next to her or something like that.

Then when she's getting stuff out to make pancakes, she'll notice Celene waking up and go crouch by the sofa.

"Good morning!"

hruhwhuhghurjjkjbo

"hiiiiiiii,"

Celene is not very awake at the moment and will just lie there for a while.

Ok, she'll open her eyes now.

Oh right, she's on a different planet. And also in Summer's apartment. What even is going on this is insane.

Celene yawns.

"Good morning."

Summer has been sitting there watching Celene slowly wake up. She is very cute.

"Hey Celene! I'm making pancakes, and then we can head out to get you DNA tested or just look around or whatever. D'you want a coffee or anything?"

Oh no, coffee.

"If my interpretation of the word 'coffee' is correct, I'll pass."

Actually, wait, she was intending on trying out coffee at some point, wasn't she. Wait, she already did that and it was awful. Maybe some other day she will do so once she is confident that she will not be insulting Summer by dumping it out.

She gets off the couch and stretches.

Summer is offended at the idea that she might feel insulted about that.

...Okay fine maybe she'd be, like, a little insulted, but come on she can handle it.

She goes back to making the pancakes.

Celene does not have any of her morning meds, which is going to be problematic eventually. Mostly the withdrawal, to be honest, her regular meds unfortunately had little impact on her. Oh, and also estrogen, that one hurts.

Unfortunately, there is nothing she can do about this.

Pancakes! She does not eat them very often but they are very good. Celene will... lurk and watch Summer make pancakes?

Celene is worried she's gonna have a hard time finding estrogen? You don't need to live in Nucleus for estrogen to be easily accessible.

After a third of a period or so, Summer finishes the pancakes and serves them. They have a couple different types of berries mixed in.

Oh, great! To be honest she is not a huge fan of berries but it'd be kind of rude not to eat them anyways!

...

Wow these are actually not bad, good thing she got over her childhood aversion thing. She's still not going to seek them out of her own initiative, but they definitely aren't bad.

"So I'm going to get my DNA tested today? What's the process like?"

Normally she'd have to make an appointment for these sorts of things but given the circumstances it'd make sense they'd expedite it.

Actually, no, it still doesn't make sense other than the whole "this is another planet" part.

"Well, we head down to the office, they take a DNA sample, it maybe takes a few days to process it, and... then possibly they realize they need to inspect it a lot more thoroughly. If you're genetically unusual enough."

"Hmm, alright. They'll do it through a... cheek swab, I assume? That's how we normally do it on Earth."

Celene finishes eating breakfast, if there's nothing else Summer wants to do she's ready to head out.

"That's what I'd expect. I think I've also heard of blood testing? I'm not sure what the tradeoffs are, but I could imagine you being a special case of some sort."

Eugh, blood tests. They are, unpleasant. She can handle them, although she might need some time to steel herself, but she still doesn't like them. 

It was significantly worse when she was younger. The doctors had to hold her down. Actually, that was for vaccines, not for blood tests. She does not remember what the doctors did for blood tests.

Summer'd help hold Celene down. If Celene wanted.

Oh my gosh.

That... probably won't be necessary. Not that she wouldn't be into it, but,

Anyways.

"Is there a specific time we're booked for?"

"I was planning to just show up and see how long the wait was. Probably we'll end up having a little time to wander around?"

"Hmm. Alright then.

I'm ready if you are."

They head out.

As in most worlds, the transportation system varies a little from city to city, in Eifwen. The first thing that Celene will probably notice is that cars are not nearly as ubiquitous. It's not super uncommon for cars to be used for navigating suburbs, but—you do not want the most reckless Nucleus residents to have access to fast-moving multiton metal devices. Someone would end up dying and getting their brain crushed, at some point. Someone other than the driver.

Mostly, it's gonna be trams and metros. Most tram stations work on a six minute schedule. (There are also taxis—one of the few professions that has meaningful licensing requirements, even in Nucleus.) And Celene will see ambulances pass by at something closer to typical Earth frequency than typical Eifwen frequency.

Bikes and motor scooters are also pretty common. And you'll see crazy mad scientist hoverboards and other such devices more often in Nucleus than elsewhere.

There aren't many skyscrapers around, but most buildings in this part of the city are a good several stories tall. You'd need to go to the outskirts of the city before you'd see single family homes or anything like that.

The architecture and such is... haphazard. And graffiti is just completely legal*—even for people who aren't very good at it.

*More specifically: you could purchase the property right of getting to veto people making art on your property, but in most of Nucleus it's not bundled with the property by default and it'd be unusually expensive.