“Is their anything in particular you are looking for?” Candice asked upon entering the room. She waved her hand and a menu opened to show the list of estates and homes in the system. She quickly designated that they must be estates on Euporie and most of the listings went away, leaving the number ‘271’ on the top bar.

“I was thinking something in the twenty to thirty million range. Large, preferably. I had a two hundred hectare estate on Earth and, while I’m sure it would be far more expensive than that to get an equal sized estate here, a one hectare estate or bigger would be ideal.” The sizes of estates seemed to be in twenty five meter diameter increments, so that would mean at least a one hundred and twenty five meter estate. Though he would settle on a one hundred diameter estate if needed.

“We have several estates that size, but I’m not sure about the price range. I believe the most expensive estate we offer is around twelve million. Most of the construction on Euporie is done by robots instead of people, so the price of real estate is lower than on the other worlds.” That was also different than on Earth. On Earth there were over twenty billion people and barely enough jobs for all of them. Replacing a good paying job like construction work with a robot for any but the most dangerous work would have caused people to hate you. That, coupled with the massive numbers of safety regulations the bureaucracy had created and the fact that humans work fewer hours meant that on Earth a nice building like he wanted would have cost over one hundred million.

“In that case, let’s start at one million and go up from there.” She nodded and input the data, then showed him the list of estates that met his criteria of being at least a 125 meter dome and at least one million in price. There were 17 estates listed from five different companies. He picked the cheapest one. “Let’s see what the minimum I can get is then.” he said. She nodded and motion towards one of several recliners in the room that had standard VR helmets on them, then walked over to them. “Actually, I have a new MindPhone. I was hoping to test out its features by using it for the first tour.”

“Do you mind telling me its model, so that I can check if it’s compatible?” she asked.

“Simmons Industries Mark 4.” responded Gordan, and Candice nodded.

“Yes, that is good enough. I have a Simmons Mark 3 and it doesn’t have any issues, so yours shouldn’t have any issues.” She waved her hand and a link to a VR simulation appeared. “Oh, I’m sorry.” she said, looking embarrassed. “I forgot to swap codes with you first. You probably have your device set to private to avoid random invites.”

“No, actually.” he said, shaking his head. “I haven’t given my number to anyone yet though.”

“People can still send you invites publicly, though. You’ll want to change that so that you don’t get spammed with ads.” He asked how to do that and she told him how. They then shook hands and she sent him half of an encryption key so that they could have conversations and verify identities. A literal handshake protocol. Once he had her key she sent the link again and they sat down in the recliners. Gordan leaned back and closed his eyes, then ordered his MindPhone to open the link.

There was a weird sensation as his senses were tapped into in more detail than the phone had before and his external senses were replaced by virtual data feeds. Thankfully, he had already calibrated it for his brain so their wasn’t any synesthesia like when you use a VR helmet and it needs to calibrate itself every time.

He found himself standing in an airlock. There was a generic pressure suit on the wall beside him with his name on it. The simulation was apparently designed to make it look as if you had just entered the estate. The thing that surprised him the most about it was that, other than the fact that the exit door would be unable to move if he tried to leave due to the limits of the simulation, everything here was completely realistic. He could even rub his hand against the wall and it would feel like concrete, and could injure his avatar, complete with pain and bleeding, if he rubbed the sharp edge of an object. He remembered when “VR” was just a set of glasses you put on your head while holding a controller in your hand. Even when he left the solar system, the VR system he had didn’t have this level of detail. Either the VR devices in this system were designed to be more realistic than the ones in Sol, he didn’t get the full experience because he used an older model of VR, or the MindPhone did a better job because it interfaced directly with his brain. He would guess it was a combination of the last two.

Someone beside him breathed deeply. “I love the smell of fresh buildings.” said Candice. “Well, shall we begin?” She typed five zeros into the key pad on the airlock door and it unlocked. “You can set the code to up to twenty digits, but for the simulation, we keep it simple. You can also set special codes for workers, delivery drivers, and other people so that you know when they enter and leave, and can block them at will. The door contains a nuclear battery, so the battery won’t get too weak to function properly for decades, and will warn you it is running low before then. Once you purchase an estate you will be registered as the owner with the estate’s server and have full control over everything in the estate. The server doesn’t have external connectivity unless you or an authorized user give it access through another device, such as a technician connecting it to the planetary network in order to update the software, so it can’t be hacked except by plugging into it, which requires access to the inside of the dome. The server also has two backups in case one is damaged, and also runs on nuclear batteries so that it will run even if the power is out.”

She pushed the door open and the smell of fresh grass entered the airlock. There was a concrete walkway in front of the door which lead to a house, and the walkway was surrounded by a lawn and several other plants. “This dome has a fairly basic landscaping package, which only includes one gardening robot to keep grass cut and manage the other plant life. Still, it can cut the grass and will bag the clippings so that they can be removed by the composting company.”

“So I don’t have to deal with grass clippings?” he asked, stepping out of the airlock and she nodded and stepped out as well. “I assume that also goes for food scraps and human waste?”

“Yes sir. Also animal waste if you have pets. The domestic robot inside will clean up after them and dispose of it and all of your trash. All of the organic material will make its way to one of the composting companies so that it can be reused to build up soil in other domes and the rest of the garbage with be sent to the recyclers to be turned into new material. We got really good at recycling during the trip.”

“If you are removing all of the plant clippings, won’t that deplete the soil?”

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“No, sir. The soil is a mixture or compost and native regolith. On Euporie that regolith contains perchlorate salts, but they had to be washed out before mixing it with the compost. After that the gardening robot in charge of the dome will periodically test the soil and water the ground with the appropriate hydroponic chemicals to fix any nutritional issue.”

Gordan nodded. A four legged robot with two arms walked around the edge of the house, carrying a bag of plant clippings. There were multiple attachments on its back that it could swap to when needed. ‘Probably the gardening robot.’ he thought. “Then, shall we continue?”

They followed the walkway past a storage building, where the robot and various yard supplies were kept to a moderate sized house. It had two stories with about 400 square meters of floor space across both floors. On top of having six bedrooms and three bathrooms, including the master bed/bath, the builder had designed it so that you rarely needed to leave home. There was a large pantry/food storage area, two independent distillation units for water processing, in case one was working when you needed to use it, and a reservoir for one hundred cubic meters of water. There were also three extra rooms, which different people configured to fill different roles. In Gordan’s case one would probably become an office and another a library. It would have actual books if he could find someone to print them from the electronic copies, as well as a library computer with the entire databases of both ships if he could manage to find a server that could store that much. All of the data was publicly available, so getting it wouldn’t be an issue.

The house had been built so that the largest section of the roof was angled towards the sun, and the solar panels on the roof were connected to a bank of batteries in the basement that guaranteed that you could function for a week without sunlight. The dome was currently set to a 10hr night/14hr day cycle, so the dome would be shaded by applying a slight electric current to the transparent material, which would make it block 99% of the light that hit it. This was necessary to mimic nighttime, as most plants couldn’t survive on the 24hr sun cycle that you got naturally on the planet.

There were also tanks of CO2, Oxygen, and Nitrogen in case you wanted to run the life support system independently as well. These were filled via copper tubes which came via air supply lines from a plant in the city. While nitrogen wasn’t a problem, as the air had plenty, the atmospheric separator plants had trouble producing enough CO2 for all of the plant life in the various domes. The domes were converting it into oxygen as fast as they could produce the gas, so there was a bit of a deficit. For that reason they were supplementing the supply by capturing the gas that the concrete plant was producing. This made the gas a bit more expensive than if it only came from the air separator plant, but greatly increased the amount of gas they could produce.

Most domes would take in CO2, have the plants inside it convert the CO2 into Oxygen, filter out the Oxygen, and sell it back to the company at a slight profit. The profit wasn’t enough that a standard dome could pay for itself, but there were people who were filling otherwise empty domes with algae grow tanks in order to pay off the dome.

He did notice one thing which seemed a bit unusual to him. There was no wood and very little natural material anywhere on the estate. He could understand the wood, as they would have had to grow the trees themselves, but surely they could grow cotton to make proper sheets and curtains. All of the textiles in the house seemed to be made of synthetic materials and everything that looked wooden was a plastic facsimile.

Other than that the furnishings were what your would expect for a house in the suburbs. Every room was fully furnished, so all that would be needed to move in was to buy clothes and some other personal effects. There was even a pool in the back in case you wanted to swim. The Domestic robot was vaguely human shaped, but obviously not human, looking more like a robot from a space opera he had seen as a child in the 1980s.

When the tour was over they disconnected from the simulation and toured several other simulated properties. Gordan was a bit disappointed. Maybe he was old fashioned, but he liked natural materials and even in the twelve million dollar, two hundred and fifty meter estate there wasn’t a single use of plant material. The closest he came was an actual leather sofa in one the most expensive ones. It wasn’t made from an actual animal’s skin, but had the skin grown in specific shapes in a lab, then tanned when it got to the correct size and shape. Other than that the larger and more expensive domes were just larger versions of the cheap one, but with more robots.

“So, have you made a decision?” Candice asked. Gordan thought for a few seconds, then nodded.

“I’ll go with the cheapest one. The others were larger, yes, but they weren’t really more luxurious.”

Candice nodded. “I have actually heard that complaint before. I assume you want more organic material in the house?”

Gordan nodded. “Everything just seemed so fake. Fake cotton in the bedsheets, fake wood in the table and on the porch. The third house had fake logs as a facade over the concrete walls so that it looked like a log cabin. I understand that actually wood would be expensive, but no cotton? No silk? Not even a wooden decoration in the house? The only natural parts of the house were the stones.”

Candice nodded. “Several other customers have mentioned that to me. The swimming pool is nice, but it just seems so artificial to them. Even when I was growing up on the Trappist Traveler there were wooden objects available and you could buy cotton clothing if you had enough credits. It was expensive, luxury goods, but it was available.”

Gordan nodded and they went back to Candice’s office to finish the paperwork. An hour later his data was sent to the company that built the dome on Euporie so that they could transfer the property to him. The real estate agency Candice worked for was obviously working on commission. “Well, that concludes everything, Mr. McDowell. I’ve set up an appointment with our branch agency on Euporie and they will finish the transfer there once you arrive. Thank you for your business and we look forward to working with you again.”

“But what if I want your help?” Gordan asked, teasing her a bit.

“I’m sure the staff there is competent.” she responded.

“But I would prefer if you continued to assist me. What if I pay for your trip there and maybe give you enough to have some fun while you are there?” If she turned him down, he would let it go, but he had to try.

She looked at him and thought for a few seconds. “You know, I could use a vacation. And it’s not like they can say I’m slacking if I go with a client to finish the handover.”

He smiled. “Then, in that case, I will figure out which ship will next be heading for the planet so that we can board it.” He looked it up on his MindPhone. The next passenger ship would actually be an economy flight meant for the large number of colonists that just arrived, so he kept looking. The fourth ship to leave, a luxury yacht, had come to take investors and rich people from Hermes back with it. It left in six hours so, after verifying that Candice could be ready by then, he reserved them two rooms. He would have preferred to get one room, but he was certain Candice wouldn’t accept that. He just needed to give it some time.

Five and a half hours later they were let onboard a ship. It was connected via umbilical tube to a the space port, like an airplane but more airtight. Once onboard they were shown to their rooms. They were across the hall from each other. The rooms had their own private bathrooms and a bed. Because the ship didn’t have the fuel to do a constant burn, the rooms were designed for space. The bed was a set of foam mattresses on the ground that that had a human-shaped cutout in the middle of it and were separated with a hinged lid. To sleep you would climb into the bottom half, the one with a head area, and close the other half on top of you. This would leave your head uncovered so that you could breath but hold you in place so that you didn’t hurt yourself by moving around while you slept.

The bathroom was a diaper shaped device attached to a suction hose which you could used to vacuum waste up as you released it. There was also a dispenser for wet wipes on the wall of the bathroom so that you could clean yourself off, including using them to bathe or wash your hands. These wipes were placed in an incinerator in the wall after use so that the ship could produce more CO2.

Most people assume that a space ship would want to get rid of CO2, but this ship had strips of algae running down the hallway. The lights from them lit the hallways at night, and would be synchronized to the planetary night/day cycle when the ship was in spacedock. These algae strips processed more CO2 than the ship’s crew produced, so the ship kept dry ice, frozen CO2, in storage in case they needed more. Whenever they went into spacedock they would sale any algae or oxygen they produced and refill their CO2 tanks. The tanks only used edible varieties of algae just in case they needed to be used as an emergency food source, so they were sold as food at their stops.

The ship had a gymnasium that had resistance training equipment, so that everyone onboard could stay in shape, and they occasionally set up group activities, like sports, in the gym as it was the largest area on the ship. Anyone could access the ship’s stores of entertainment files any time they wanted in VR, so they didn’t need screens in every room. The thing that made it ‘luxurious’ was the shear power of the server, as it could run far larger and more detailed simulations than most VR equipment a person would normally have.