Isabella Marie Swan ✴ &quot;Stella&quot;

"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?"

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"Try it," says Alice.

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Libby shrugs.

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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)

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

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Alice beams.

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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."

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"I'll pass, thanks."

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"Your loss."

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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."

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

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

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"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?"

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

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"Not like shit," Bella announces.

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

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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."

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"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?"

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"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.

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

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"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."

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

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"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."

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"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."

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