"Sure, I'm an only child and was expecting to one day get all my parents' stuff."

"Can women run businesses or Influence policy?"

"Yes, we can vote and run for office, and it's not harder to own and operate a business than any other ownable operable thing."

"That sounds wonderful. Did you intend to do anything of that nature?"

"I didn't especially want to go into business, I wanted to study artifact statistics."

"What does that consist of?"

"Artifacts happen when people die and they have resonances with features of the dead person and they're always their favorite object - people try to avoid having single clear favorite objects to avoid surprising their heirs but sometimes this is difficult. There's a lot of data to take and collate and analyze about what kinds of deaths and what kinds of object favoritism produce artifacts, and what traits tend to map how onto the artifact effects. I wanted to do that and see if there was any way to steer for better ones, maybe ones that were good enough that people could have favorite objects on purpose and leave something more valuable than dangerous to their families."

"Wow, you are extremely good."

"Thank you!"

"Were there any trends in artifact creation that were already known?"

"Recently I read a paper about how it's interesting that nobody's ever left their motorcycle as an artifact given that motorcyclists - uh, it's a two-wheeled vehicle that goes really fast - crash and die a lot, and often really love their motorcycles, and the speculation is that artifacts are seldom to never substantially themselves damaged at the time they become artifacts. They're really sturdy after that, but the hypothesis in the paper is that the motorcycles are getting wrecked in the course of the accidents that kill their owners and that's why you don't see artifact motorcycles. I was going to fact-check the numbers on whether we should have expected more than one or two motorcycles given conservative assumptions under the null hypothesis, though, it seemed like a stretch to me."

"Would that theory rely on most motorcyclists dying in accidents involving their motorcycles rather than through unrelated causes?"

"Yes, but motorcycles are an interesting case because they mostly do, it's a young demographic."

"Have their been any previous successes in guiding artifact creation?"

"Not really, no. Most people don't leave artifacts so you'd need such a tremendous sample size over such a long time."

Lucette nods.

"Do you have any understanding of why artifacts are produced?"

"Nope, it's very mysterious."

"Is it a new phenomenon?"

"No, it's happened for all of recorded history, though for a long time the population was much lower and people had fewer and lower quality possessions so it was a lower absolute frequency."

"The number of posessions impacts the frequency?"

"It's correlated with it. Prevailing theories are that it's hard to meaningfully have a favorite possession out of a very small number of them, and/or that people were sharing things in common too much when there was less material wealth so a lot of people's favorite things didn't count as theirs, and/or that the right kind of sentiment isn't likely to attach to something you have to have for practical reasons and if you only have a handful of things you probably need every one of them."

"What sort of steps were you taking to study this?"

"Well, I'd only just entered university and was still negotiating with the artifacts department about letting me major in artifacts without getting my mind read."

"-women could also attend university in your world?"

"Yes, of course."