In she goes, what's the room like?

Clean and cozy and with an ensuite bathroom!

Good!

...hmm do they have room service, can she get coffee, she thinks she's gonna spend a few hours browsing the internet rather than sleeping.

They have room service! She can get coffee! They have internet! She can browse it!

Oh good. She'll start with... do they have a Google and a Wikipedia equivalents? If so she wants to find stuff on castes: what are they, do they change country to country, are they biological, stuff like that.

They have search engines and something called Summary Bank. Castes are blue, green, yellow, grey, orange, purple, and red, for the common hair colors of each, but also have other names referring to stereotypes or the functional similarities or metonyms. Some careers are different country to country - firefighters may be grey or purple, sex work may be grey or orange, medicine may be green or orange, places vary in the blue/yellow balance of government offices. Some places are patrilineal, the largest example being Anitam, but most places matrilineal. The castes are biological in the manner of inherited talents and aptitudes but all of them are the same species.

For how long have castes been a thing? Also can she get a world map with countries and such? How big is the planet, where is Voa with respect to other counties...?

Castes have been a thing for centuries. The Summary Bank doesn't have a lot of detail; there was a culture that did castes in this way and outperformed its neighbors and spread throughout the world back during this planet's Bronze Age. The planet is about Earth sized with one very large northern hemisphere continent a bit larger than Eurasia, a smaller northern hemisphere continent, three yet smaller southern hemisphere continents, and polar landmasses. The equator, undesirable, also convenient has little landmass. Voa is one of the two largest countries, and is on the largest continent, bordering the other largest country, Tapa.

...why is the equator undesirable exactly?

It doesn't have seasons. Same problem with the poles and spending too much time underground or on the moon. Some people don't mind it all that much but most people object to "reseasoning" even between hemispheres, and a place without seasons at all is like all the worst parts of spring, apparently.

...uh... she's missing some context, what's reseasoning and why do people object to it and a lack of seasons?

Reseasoning is a physical adaptation to the seasons! People are only fertile in the spring and it is when they most want sex and children, and there are other, less significant differences in psychology between the other seasons. Inconveniently, different durations of artificial light do not successfully control this cycle.

—oh wow. That... must be really weird. Especially given seasons here last as long as a whole year back on Earth. Do people know of any other method of affecting seasoning than seasons themselves, since light cycles don't work?

Nope. People are working on it, since it would make it very profitable to settle the poles and equator and moons.

That's bizarre. Are there places that make people season more or less? They presumably tried temperature and humidity and different types of radiation than just visible light...? Makers could so help with extremely complex arcologies.

They think it has to do with angle of the sun.

Ah huh. She files this away for later.

...does Summary Bank have a page on reds?

Reds are an inherently and hereditarily unclean caste - one parent being red suffices, if people break laws enough for that to happen - who traditionally do unclean work (there's a list) and live separately.

Anything that specifies how and why they're inherently unclean?

Their ancestors have been doing unclean work for long enough that it stuck and they've been more or less bred for it and now they're just like that.

...what stuck? She'd been holding out hope that Ror was just uninformed and there might've been something, like, detectable about it...

Nope!

Ugh.

Ror mentioned riots; anything about them here?

Reds riot and will kill roboticists and do property damage, injury, or occasionally murder to politicians who support their work.

...and robotics is the only thing that causes this?