a city and a mint who sleep very little between them

[self_composed]

Bella bikes to the airport on Friday. She gets a little reading done on her flight, then sleeps-on-purpose through the remainder of the trip, waking up precisely when the plane touches down. One nice bonus that she didn't even explicitly build into the power is that she can sleep at will in virtually any position; she doesn't have to get comfy if that's not convenient.

She steps off the plane, backpack full of her things over her shoulders, and stalks into the halls of LaGuardia, eyes peeled for Libby.

Comments

[prima_sequentem]

"I'll bet it is," says Libby.

[self_composed]

"It was probably unwise of me to use the word 'ridiculous'," Bella says thoughtfully. "Oh well. Cities are big. I think I'll procedurally generate it." She summons her old familiar laptop, juices it up until it would make anyone who works with data drool, and starts programming programs to write programs at super-speed - it is always important to test one's algorithms and debug before expecting them to do anything useful. "Suggestions for the Constitution? Besides the obvious no attacking people without their permission, no stealing things, etcetera?"

[prima_sequentem]

"Well, what do you want your society to look like?"

[self_composed]

"Not like shit," Bella announces.

[prima_sequentem]

"That would be helpful if I knew your definition of shit."

[self_composed]

Bella starts ticking off fingers, pausing in her coding. "I don't want wars, chaos, property damage, people gratuitously pissing each other off, abuse, untreated medical conditions, death in anyone who isn't bound and determined to let it happen, resource shortfalls, people having less education or free time or stuff than they could put to good use, etcetera. I would ideally like to fix all of those things just by having the right Star Trek replicators and Fountains of Youth and public libraries and whatnot lying around and hoping the various incentives behind those bad things fix themselves, but I am not quite naive enough to expect that to work in the next few generations if ever."

[prima_sequentem]

"Good call," says Libby. "So, you know what kinds of things you don't want people to do. What are you willing to do to them if they do those things anyway?"

[self_composed]

"The auto-enforcement I would like to have mostly oriented around not making it possible, like, I can make city buildings indestructible-except-by-magic, but a sufficient number of people probably contains someone clever or dumbly lucky enough to get around such a thing, so. I guess I can kick them off Mars if it gets bad. Send them back where they came from and give their spot to someone better-behaved. I think I'm likely to want a persistent lie-detection power, although I think to be polite I'll have it off by default." Hex goes.

[prima_sequentem]

"What are you going to do about the inevitable language barriers? What are the official languages of Bella Swan's Space Empire?"

[self_composed]

"I can split up cities by language. It's probably not efficient to give random citizens each a pentagon to learn English, but me and anyone else who works with multiple cities can just learn all relevant languages. I think I'll start with English-speakers so I can learn my first city without dealing with excessively unfamiliar cultures at the same time. Then it'll be a relatively smaller learning curve when I open the Chinese-speaking city or whatever's next. A planetwide aura of universal translation..." She hmms over this, then shakes her head. "That seems like it would ruin a lot of potential fun people could have. Anyone who needs a language can be spot-pentagoned for it. I might make rooms with auras of translation if those seem like they'd come in handy once we've been underway for a while."

[prima_sequentem]

"All right. So how do you plan on making antisocial behaviour impossible, then?"

[self_composed]

"If someone is antisocial in the sense of wanting to stay home and eat their replicated food and watch TV, well, that's not my favorite kind of early immigrant, I'd rather people be organizing art festivals and pestering me to convert this or that space into a hockey rink and going backpacking in the Martian wilderness, but that's not actually a problem if I wind up with some people who hibernate like that. If by antisocial you mean people who are just sort of basically inconsiderate of their neighbors - littering, installing car alarms, setting bonfires - I think those can be handled with magical 'laws'. Litter vanishes, sound does not carry as far as it does on Earth unless it's supposed to because it's a concert or something, fires cannot spread. And if by antisocial we mean attacking people, kicking puppies, not taking one's sick kid to Dr. Wishcoin down the street because one is a Christian Scientist... then we need surveillance or a magical alert or cops or something, and a deportation system."

[prima_sequentem]

"I think it would be pretty reasonable to spot-check all public areas at random for instances of puppy-kicking and deport anyone who won't shape up after the third puppy kicked. Or some similar threshold."

[self_composed]

"Some puppy kicking is liable to happen at home. I think most arguments about privacy don't apply if non-sentient magic is doing all the looking and only reports crimes - because then you really do have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide; no person is going to be sorting through your porn or reading your diary or anything. There could be a Crime Globe like the Magic Globe."

[edgeofyourseat]

"How's your Crime Globe going to tell what's a crime and what's not?"

[self_composed]

"Well, it'd have a list. The Magic Globe can tell what's a coin and what's not; if I give a Crime Globe enough juice it can probably tell what's an instance of puppy-kicking and what's not. I'd miss things not on the list, but it can be revised if I think of more stuff or if unanticipated problems crop up. There are probably some things I can't produce a rigorous definition of," she admits. "Like, I bet magic can tell if somebody is hitting somebody else and check for consent, and even if they're fudging consent with psychological tricks somehow, they probably won't fool the surveillance every time. But I don't know if I can find a similar criterion to positively identify emotional abuse, or whatever. I think there I'm falling back on the fix-underlying-incentives thing. If citizens are independent of each other - if the victim can just move into the next apartment and lock the door and not worry about where dinner's coming from - that at least puts a ceiling on that. Maybe it should be possible for people to 'block' each other."

[edgeofyourseat]

"So you want your Space Empire to be the Internet."

[self_composed]

Bella considers this.

"That is a reasonable summary."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Awesome."

[self_composed]

Bella programs with half her brain, procedural generation of Martian city and terrain to wish real upon a star when she's done. She thinks of rules and edge cases and fixes for them with most of the other half. Some of her is doing mental resource allocation - that's not automatic, she has to keep an eye on it. She can carry on charming conversation and skim the contents of Alice's brain with slightly less than one full original-Bella's worth of attention. "I think so, yes. It's not designed for you to live there, but you can live wherever you like, and you are a very uncommon sort of person."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Well, yeah, of course I'm not gonna live there."

The very thought makes him consider rains of jellybeans.

[prima_sequentem]

"I think it sounds like a fine place to be. A little dull, maybe, but with potential."

[self_composed]

"Yeah, of course. I'm installing constraints; those shrink the theoretical amount of stuff that can happen. I think as long I shrink it in the right direction, it will not shrink the actual upper bound of quality of stuff, but it'll have to happen a little differently. Alice, on the other hand, just isn't happy unless someone could abruptly decide to hit him in the face with a baseball bat, and that is one of the things I'm shrinking away from possibility-space on Mars."

[prima_sequentem]

"That's an interesting preference," Libby observes.

[edgeofyourseat]

"I like surprises."