Isabella Marie Swan ✴ &quot;Stella&quot;

"You will meet different people through me than you will meet at Stanford," she says, "but I am a much better filter for usefulness."

From:

"I suppose it's also possible I'll have better credibility as Space Empress if I have some manner of formal credential," muses Bella. "Are you professory enough to award me any form of degree if I write you a dissertation in the next hour with pentagons and super-speed?"

From:

"If you want a degree, I can get you a degree," says Libby. "If you want a legitimate degree, I can get you one of those too, but only in math."

From:

"I was thinking math, yeah, I don't think I can please most of the people who'd care what kind I have, because if I accumulate enough credentials to do that it's going to be obvious I 'cheated' and many of them would probably care, but it wouldn't be terribly difficult to placate the ones who just want a degree, any degree."

From:

"Do some math, then," she says. "I'll handle the rest."

From:

"All right, that goes on the to-do list," Bella says, expending a pentagon and wiping the bad ideas from her magic whiteboard. "Space Empress" increases in font size, and she adds substeps:

- Terraform Mars (hide this to start? don't bother?)

- Write Martian Constitution and install relevant wards to enforce it

- Design Martian city with its expansion vector and choose and invite people to live in it (conceal that it is on Mars to start? don't bother? if yes, initial design will have to give way to final design; when?)

- Troubleshoot with small population until smooth, then up-to-double once a month

There is also a to-do list that does not appear under "Space Empress":

- Catalogue world magic

- Acquire staff

- Star versions of defense powers

Bella asks, "Do you happen to know... Is it possible to wish other coins constrained in what wishes they can make? If I wind up trusting someone to, I don't know, be the town immortality vendor, but don't quite trust them not to take their hexes home and use them for nefarious purposes, can I render hexes unable to do anything else but the authorized wishing?"

From:

"Try it," says Alice.

From:

Libby shrugs.

From:

Bella plays with coins for a few seconds. At length she reports, "A coin can limit another of the same size, and up to ten of the next size down. And a hundred of two sizes down, so now I have a whole lot of pentagons that are only good for languages."

Edited Date: 2013-01-04 05:05 pm (UTC)

From:

"...I find it disconcerting how casually you throw around stars," says Libby.

From:

Alice beams.

From:

Bella pats him on the head. "I'm sure he would be happy to show you how he throws around star-making," she says. "But you might or might not want to see."

From:

"I'll pass, thanks."

From:

"Your loss."

From:

Bella stretches her arms above her head. "I'm considering theme continents on Mars. Like Disneyland but writ large and residential. Like, the first bit will just be a city-with-parks. Apartment buildings and schools and rowhouses and various features of economics and flora and a manageable number of magic sanitary pigeons to make it feel homey. And it can sprawl into a suburb. But I bet some people would be happiest living in a faux medieval fantasy where if I show up in person I do it in a ridiculous dress Alice makes me, and a crown, and also there are dragons and unicorns running around. So they could have a little island. And somebody might want their magical utopia to be more science-fiction-themed, and somebody might want to live under the ocean, and now that I've thought of it I kind of want one of my several palaces to sit on a cloud. But I don't have any inhabitants at all yet and should probably poll them about theme continents before I get too excited designing anything other than the original city."

From:

"I'm designing your ridiculous dress right now," Alice announces. "It's ridiculous."

From:

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

From:

"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?"

From:

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

From:

"Not like shit," Bella announces.

From:

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

From:

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."

From:

"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?"

From: