...Jane?

Golden's not party to the link, and while this is being tried she attempts teleportation under her own power and gets the same result.

I think I gave it away. I neglected until it was too late to wish up a house and a working res code to go with my fake papers. I'm sorry.

"That's right," she agrees. "And you're the ones who keep stealing people out of the queue." She focuses on Angela. "Mind telling me what exactly you hoped to accomplish by messing with my housing system? It works very well the way I designed it, and I don't appreciate having to waste my time undoing your changes."

Angela closes her eyes. "We knew some things about Downside. Less about Upside. I meant to look around."

"I see," she says. "Well, you didn't think it through very well. I'm not impressed."

"Oh? How would you go about overthrowing Hell if it were you?" asks Amariah.

"You haven't even tried overthrowing Downside," she points out. "But you did make a mess of spying on the greener half. And you temporarily eradicated control powers. Do you have a plan for following up on that, or should I put them back?"

"I think we all vote for not putting them back," says Juliet, "as they are a terrible idea."

"We had a plan for what to do if you turned out not to be a problem. Of course we couldn't start on anything less obvious than cutting out the control mess while we still assumed you might be."

"Do you want to hear the plan? Are you by any chance just actually not that interested in ruling the afterlife and wound up with the job by default?" inquires Stella.

"I don't rule," she says. "I administrate. Explain your plan."

"Insfoar as it's possible and desired by the dead, send people back where they came from. We've done a few instances of that already; I'm sure scaling up will be a population shock, but we can compensate with magic for issues of supplies and crowding and with one of our friends for issues of processing being a nightmare. For everyone else revamp the place to be less of a pointless hellhole. As the most obvious example, even if it was a good idea to sentence people to torture and it was a good idea for torturers not to have to physically subdue their sentences there is absolutely no reason for the power to continue work in other contexts. But the entire judgment and sentencing thing is pretty well fucked too. And if people still don't want to hang out here after modifications of that order have been made, we'll take them. We can fix up as many planets as need be to work like Mars does on my world, and funnel everyone who wants out there."

"Torturers exist because the judges demanded them. Judges exist to sort people to their appropriate side of the cliffs. What are you going to replace judges with, and what annoying demands are those people going to make?"

"What," asks Aegis, "is the point of the cliffs supposed to be? This is the sort of thing we'd know if you hadn't interrupted Angela."

"No, you wouldn't," she says. "At most you might have guessed, but I think you can do that right now."

"It can't simply be to make things nicer for the people who your judges think are worth looking after. The only difference to the place that we saw is the plants. And if I had really died and really found myself there, I don't think I'd have woken up to find a place made for my husband, all my friends, even if only on my behalf - it looks like everyone is judged one by one. You're clearly immensely powerful - it would be so simple to make things pleasanter, even only pleasanter for the people you consider it worthwhile to be relatively pleasant to."

"You're taking notes from somebody, if people are making demands that annoy you. Somebody wanted the cliffs," suggests Amariah. "Sometime. Long ago."

"Somebody judgmental and dickish," mutters Stella.

"You didn't have any good ideas for using all the phenomenal cosmic power to arrange things pleasantly for the people with the misfortune to fall under your jurisdiction and you settled for putting the people who might make slightly imperfect neighbors somewhere inaccessible," proposes Golden.

"I don't know what magic system you're working with, but it can thwart mine in at least some contests," says Stella, "and mine would do a much better job of that goal. It does, on Mars. People cannot make significant trouble for each other on my Mars. Is it just - clumsy? Not very smart? So you have to rely on judges and cliffs and the like, you can't just ban troublemaking and have done?"

"I invite you to design a law of physics that bans 'troublemaking'," she says. "I'll wait."

"It wasn't just one, but Mars omits violence, breaking and entering is materially impossible, anyone who'd rather not deal with anyone else can mutually cease to exist to that person, the bank does not operate in such a way as to permit theft, and the city is set up to make noise complaints and littering and so on a nonissue. I have not been particularly circumspect about who I allow to live there, and there has not been a problem, and if there is, I will patch it."

"If you ban violence here, Downside will riot insofar as it is possible to riot. There's nothing wrong with my bank. How many people are there on your Mars?"

"Coming up on twenty million. We could have waited a bit until we had more impressive empires under our collective belt, but this seemed fairly urgent, what with all the torture."

"Doesn't a riot without violence add up to... peaceful protest?" says Aegis innocently. "Oh no, the horror, that's much worse than people being tortured?"

"And it'd only be non-consensual violence we'd cut, anyway, if people want to spar for fun or torture each other for the enjoyment of everyone involved we don't take issue with that sort of thing."

"Eliminating only non-consensual violence is significantly more complicated with what I have available than you are claiming it would be for you. But it does have the advantage of restricting the immediate widespread unhappiness to people who want to engage in nonconsensual violence."

"What is it that you have available, exactly?" asks Amariah brightly. "Perhaps we can help."

"Beautiful," says Stella. "It'll piss off your torturers, I imagine - why did you install those? However much complaining there was from the judges?"

"Well," says Golden. "I approve. As far as that goes. Have you got opinions either way on letting us siphon off people who can in all but the technical sense return to their lives?"

"And for the ones who can't, who've been dead too long, if some of 'em are suited for Upside and their loved ones aren't, are they going to get to see each other again?"

"Technically Upsiders are free to visit Downside, find their loved ones, and visit as much as they want," she says. "People don't."

"I suppose you announce to the Upsiders that they can do this?"

"Are the Upsiders safe Downside - or rather - have they been in the past?"

"The information is available. And that, I think, is the problem: they usually weren't."

"...I do have to wonder. You're being way more reasonable than we expected the literal inventor of Hell to be. If you could've made the place safe to start with why didn't you? Why didn't Shell Bell wake up in a perfectly satisfactory sort of afterlife as afterlives could conceivably go and reunite with the rest of us saying not 'this place has got to go' but rather 'let's see if we can get a meeting with the admin, I sense a kindred spirit'?"

"What do you do with your time?"

"In what way is that your business?"

"We are a curious people," says Golden dryly. "Do you have any objection to our setting up various structures hither and thither to make siphoning go more smoothly?"

"The population here has got to be outrageous. Even if fewer than one percent died recently enough in their worlds' timelines - which don't necessarily match up with the local timeline; Shell Bell spent about seventy years here before returning to her home world and finding that only a few months had gone by - that's going to be a lot of folks. We'll want an equivalent of the Crescent for it, and a computer system installed in it to handle transit so we're not just eternally propping open one bottlenecked door to Milliways."

"And something to handle people who need to be special-processed because something about the way they died left them duplicated. I don't know how relatively common that will be, but at least some worlds have it as a recurring issue," says Angela.

"Yeah," shudders Juliet, "I wonder if we can set up something automatic - it's an evil to merge one, but maybe an arrow to set up a permanent fix for it? Will that allow custom parameters? Can Jane make wishes?"

"Unclear." Aegis touches a triangle on her bandolier. "Not through me, anyway, we could try putting coins in the server room in the new Belltower."

"We'll need to send people with anyone who's going as part of a first resurrection wave into a world that isn't operated by one of us. Before we disband I want Elspeth linked up and summarized for; she can insta-train anyone with the processing power to handle the pour. I can supply at least many of the necessary personnel."

"As long as we throw enough hardware at Jane she should be able to administer everyday issues, but there ought to be an appeals system so people can get in touch with one of us if they need to."

"I can solve the duplication problem," she says. "There are seventy-four worlds represented in the queue, and occasionally a new one arrives. I can also make you a building. Describe your requirements."

"...Er, how will you solve the duplication problem? Because sometimes the duplication problem is 'the one who's in their original world is a horrendous mockery of their original self', not 'there's two and we can solve this by getting rid of one'."

"The building will have to be big. Probably bigger than the Crescent. Virtually everyone goes through the Crescent, but in order to give everyone the best chance of going home, everyone will go through our building much faster."

"We can edit the details on the fly as we see how things unfold. 'Big' is the basic requirement," agrees Amariah. "If we can empty the catacombs in - what's reasonable - a year? - then we'd like to do that. They're just waiting to be judged, aren't they, that's the point of having them asleep?"

"Oh god does she still exist I tried to banish her from existence I didn't even just kill her," exclaims Juliet.

"Nothing from any of the worlds that funnel here can be destroyed past reclaiming," she says. "I have her in a kind of storage, not physically instantiated like the queue in the catacombs."

"Is that what you do with all the vampires like that kind?" asks Juliet. "Can they just - stay there till we think of something?"

"They already are."

"Okay. Good. Eugh."

"What," inquires Golden, "is the population of the catacombs?"

"Steadily increasing, ballpark of ten trillion."

"Twenty-seven million and change per day for a year - I dunno, we'd have to throw a lot of hardware at Jane but the hardware doesn't even all have to be magic besides whatever sensory equipment we give her to tell where people are from and such, we can do huge amounts of it with just squares and more with pentagons. I bet it's doable in a year, at least optimistically barring catastrophe," says Stella. "We'd automate a lot, there might be stragglers who have special cases of some kind, most people won't be possible to send home at all because it'll have been too long since they died and they'll just be in and out without the step where someone evaluates their deeds and determines how many hours of agony matches up to putting a city on the moon. If Jane looks at twenty thousand people per minute - okay, maybe we aren't looking at so much a Jane building as a Jane town, but the limiting factor isn't Jane here."

"Jane's awesome," says Aegis.

"It is not," says Golden dryly, "as though anyone involved requires sleep. Perhaps a year is too quick - we will not go at a rate of twenty thousand per minute for the first week, perhaps the first month, and it may be that fewer things fall into understood patterns than we think or that it is harder to fold the dead into the worlds of the live than we hope - and we should prioritize the awake people, who are doubtless trillions more on top of the sleeping ten - but two years, or five, yes, I think so."

"Why is it so urgent for you to empty the catacombs?"

"Because time is passing in all the live worlds, and someone who could go home to their family now might not be able to do it next year," says Aegis reasonably.

"If you received them sorted in order of how recently they died, would that lower your urgency?" She glances at Template. "Four years, by the way."

"Yes," says Golden, rolling her eyes, "I'm sure Elspeth will be happy to come up with informational materials to give everyone as they wake up."

"Would the catacombs themselves suit your size requirements?"

"Depends on how amenable they are to being rewired to let Jane see their contents," says Aegis. "We were teleporting around, didn't get a good impression of the physical layout."

"The physical layout doesn't matter. The catacombs are under the cliffs, centred on this tower, with one entrance at the Upside ground level and the other at Downside's. Everything else about them can be changed."

"Perhaps we should put you in our link?" Stella wonders aloud. "It makes working out things like that much faster. Jane could tell you directly what she'd need, to be able to operate there, in terms of sensory networks and computing hardware."

She shrugs.

Jane shares.

"Yours are," she says, pointing to Golden, Juliet, and Template. "And the one you mentioned who isn't here. None of the rest are. I could connect to them, except yours," she says, indicating Amariah. "You have an afterlife that's taking precedence."

"...So on our worlds there's just nothing? If you connect us do you get people who've died in the past or just going forward?"

"...Can you tell anything about mine besides that it exists?"

"Well," says Amariah. "I suppose we may have another project on our hands."

"Hook me up," says Stella, "it's better than nothing - at least it is now."

"Me too."

"Agreed."

"First things first, Amariah," says Golden dryly. "This is already a multi-year project and we are not patient sorts. Yours can be next. Perhaps it is lovely and not urgent at all and all it needs is a loop back so that people can interact with their dead."

"...Maybe. I'm unsettled by the way daemons disappear where humans and witches leave corpses, though, I don't know what to make of that now."

"I've connected all requested," she says. "There are a lot more dead people in the queue now."

"As long as we can order them sensibly, we can get the urgent ones out of the way soon enough," says Golden. "And have the process streamlined in time for the others."

Am I the Virgin Mary?

Sue snickers.

"Nice," says Aegis. "You can be Persephone. ...Wait, do you have a name?"

"I don't prefer to use one," she says.

I want to be able to do that too, Jane pipes up as she starts hunting for initial emissaries for Pattern to follow into Milliways. She pokes Jarvis about his door-opening trick. She wants it.

"Do you care if we refer to you as Persephone?" inquires Stella.

"I'd rather you didn't," she says, obliging Jane's request.

He suspects, but has never been able to directly prove, that it has something to do with being-a-house in the body/identity sense. He'll happily transmit the mostly-unconscious difference between the action of opening a door and the action of opening a door to Milliways, but he's not sure how much good it will do Jane, who is thoroughly not a house.

"What should we refer to you as? Just 'the administrator'?"

Oh well, I guess I don't have to do it by doors anyway, I can just pick up Pattern and her escorts and put them in Milliways. She preens. Lookit me, Jarvis, I'm glooorious.

"'The administrator' is fine. For a while it was fashionable on both sides of the cliffs to say 'her upstairs'. Descriptive phrases that aren't names are fine in general."

Extremely glorious, Jarvis agrees. While we're making you into a multiversal network, are there a few ansibles to spare to link me with my counterparts when we have a moment to find them?

"I don't believe you ever described how you plan to handle duplication as distinct from Juliet's sort of problem."

I don't see why not!

Jarvis is pleased!

"Duplication occurs when someone is successfully resurrected without being removed from the queue. There are no extant cases now that you've merged yours. In the future, if someone is resurrected before processing, the unconscious version in the queue can be automatically merged into the resurrected version without any problems; if someone is resurrected after processing, the version retrieved can be the version that is here, and they can choose whether or not to return. Anyone who has died to this afterlife can choose to return after leaving it."

"Very tidy. I'm going to visit all the known Sunshinelike worlds and render vampirism non-infectious, first thing, for that part of the business," mutters Juliet.

She smiles slightly. Tidy is good.

"Are we going to be able to get in touch with you in some more civilized manner if we need to add another world? If half of us weren't hooked up to start with I'm sure many of the people we meet in Milliways aren't."

"We could put you on the brainphone network. We shouldn't depend on Sue full-time."

After a moment's hesitation, she puts herself on the brainphone network.

[Testing testing! Okay, I can relay as necessary,] says Jane merrily.

"If we don't want to rely on Sue full-time, can we work out something like a portable, wearable half-ansible so that Jane can aim into worlds we visit?"

Sure, says Tony. Gimme a minute.

Don't compromise function for it, but it should be something that doesn't look, you know, un-Empressly, or anything.

Jane eats up some ansible theory from her homeworld's nets and muses on the subject for a split second. If it only has to be half the ansible I bet you could do it with a jewel-looking thing. Corundum.

All the Bells conjure one. Stella's is blue, and her crown's already full of star sapphires; she just swaps it out for one of the ones in her crown.

Aegis goes with orange and puts it in her ear.

Golden puts a clear colorless one on a gold necklace chain.

Angela swaps out a gem on one of her Eyrie bracelets.

Amariah goes with a bracelet, too, though hers is made from scratch and the gem is green.

And Shell Bell's is dark blue and worn as a ring.

Jane puts the matching halves in the Belltower installation.

Pretty, comments Sue.

"While you're here," says the administrator, "would anyone for whom this is not already the case like to be awarded the torching mechanic with all their current magic permanently included?"

"If you aren't hooked into my world - do you know how it'll affect my daemon?" She feels safe enough here, for now; Path comes out in a shower of gold, sitting on her hand.

"And," says Golden, "it would probably be more convenient if we could bestow that, too, so we don't have to get Jane to jump people we like or need past the queue should misfortune befall them."

She considers this. (The prototype-light reports that it has been implemented, and disappears.)

"Especially since I can't, apparently, just do that," Amariah says. "If something happens to my parents, my boyfriend, my teacher, my favorite cousin, I'm shit out of luck until we figure out what Alethia has instead of this, right? And we're going to do that but in the meantime I don't want to lose anybody I'm close to."

"How does this interact with the judgesight stuff?" Juliet asks. "Because that shit is creepy."

I haven't judgesighted any of you!

"I've looked at all of you," says the administrator without a discernible trace of apology. "You," this to Golden, "blocked me when I tried, but would not block me now if I tried again."

"...Is there any realistic chance of you politely refraining from trying again?" asks Golden with a bit of a hiss.

Juliet shudders. "What about Shell Bell?" she thinks to ask. "I guess a judge already looked at her when she died, but what about what happened since?"

"Shell Bell would also be visible if Jane or I looked at her with judgesight. I have no reason for or intention of looking at you again," she says to Golden.

"Are there going to be judges other than Jane walking around I should worry about, or will they be deprived of this power when she informs them that she's automating them out of a job?"

"I have already dismissed and disempowered the judges."

"All right. I will take it very much amiss if you peer into my head, although I suppose that doesn't have to mean anything to you."

"I'm pretty damn creeped out myself."

"And yet," she points out, "you have asked me to give this power to your ally to be used indiscriminately on ten trillion people."

"There are," Stella points out, "ten trillion of them."

"Was there a flicker of anything," Aegis asks, "resisting it from me or Juliet or Stella so we could special-process anybody who's as attached to their mental privacy as us? Is there a partial version of the power, maybe. Because that is a point."

"If we were willing that it take a little longer, the standard lie-detection could augment a modestly prolonged interview process."

"Anyone who dies to here will be transparent to judgesight. Anyone who is given the ability to torch will be transparent to my judgesight but not necessarily to anyone else's. If you prefer, I can replace Jane's judgesight with one that requires the target's consent to proceed, and you can redesign your process around that."

"That's not the same thing as a partial version of the power. A partial version would be one that allowed - different levels of detail, maybe, or that only showed certain things. But maybe that's the sort of thing that our magic is better at than yours?"

"A combination would be a better solution to our privacy concerns. More people would be willing to consent to being looked at blurrily, and all Jane has to be able to see for us to release people back among the living is the general contour, the highlights, not every thought ever. And frankly, if one of us wound up here and were offered a choice between being effectively alive again with somebody having read our minds versus not being effectively alive again, that wouldn't feel like much of a choice, and we're the most mental-privacy-concerned folks around. So, can you make the power adjustable, or can we, or what?"

"You have," says Stella, studying the prototype, "what I'm going to call a bewilderingly good sense of design."

"We could allow some people to route around an unwillingness to be read," Angela proposes, "if they had requests in from living loved ones who themselves passed muster."

"And Jane can eat all the Internets that there are and know a lot about everybody even without any mindreading."

"We should definitely field requests either way. On my world, whether someone has living loved ones who'd welcome their return is not going to be well-correlated with whether they died in the last fifty years."

"Conveniently, Jane'll easily be able to process any electronically submitted requests."

"Yes, Aegis. We are all very impressed with you for having brought something about as useful as minting itself to the peal."

"You should be."

"And insofar as access to suitable electronics isn't universal we can go with something like how I did my job ad - 'tear this paper into eight parts to notify personnel' sort of thing."

"I cannot modify judgesight to produce only 'highlights'."

It turns out that it's possible for the Bells to create a filter, and the administrator to direct judgesight through that filter. The amount of information read is the same, but the amount of information delivered varies according to filter settings.

"Excellent. And Jane can ask people for their consent whether the power requires it or not."

Yep!

"But if they're asleep or just not feeling particularly communicative it might be good for the power to be able to detect willingness anyway."

"It's not that it detects willingness; it's that it requires a decision," she says, and prototypes a change that will provide knowledge of the attempt being made and the filter settings used, and proceed only if the target allows it. The prototype for distribution of torching is still waiting for someone to request implementation.

"Looks good, both of them," Golden says, "let's do it."

"Yeah," says Amariah, eyeing the torching-distribution prototype and petting Path.

"Does she have to come all the way here, or can you do it if she just leans into her apartment a bit?"

"She would need to be in the world. It's also possible you could duplicate what I gave you for her, but the copy might be inferior in some way."

Shell Bell bites her lip and takes one step into her apartment.

She provides the power.

Shell Bell ducks back into Milliways and sits against the door and leans on Sherlock.

"Time for us to scatter and get to work?" Amariah asks. "I'm going to remodel that guide office, if I'm going to be the principal appeal-taker."

"I should go meet that one Sherlock alt."

"I'll sweep for alts of people I know that nobody else has copies of."

"I'll go on a Whistle-hunt."

"I've got a world to prep for incoming dead," says Aegis, "and I can probably get it into shape quicker than some of us less Imperial types, what with the colonies already underway."

"I will run a quick alt sweep as well, although I'm not sure if I'm as likely to find anyone."

The administrator shrugs. "You can all go, then."

"Thank you for being so accommodating," says Golden, and she's off, and the others disappear likewise.