i am the oncoming storm

[autokinetic]

There are three Bells in Milliways.

They want a fourth. A fifth. A sixth. A seventh.

And then Downside is going down.

Comments

[dark_light]

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

[self_composed]

"Somebody judgmental and dickish," mutters Stella.

[luminous_regnant]

"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.

[ending_of]

She nods to Golden.

"The operative distinction isn't how pleasant I want things to be for someone," she says. "It's whether or not they're going to make trouble for the people around them. Upside is full of people who don't, generally, make trouble for each other. Downside is full of people who do."

[self_composed]

"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?"

[ending_of]

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

[self_composed]

"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."

[ending_of]

"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?"

[self_composed]

"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."

[autokinetic]

"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?"

[cross_and_bow]

"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."

[ending_of]

"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."

[dark_light]

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

[ending_of]

She looks thoughtful.

Then she says, "Try this," and imparts to everyone present the ability to understand the prototype that is now represented by a point of greenish-blue light hovering in the exact centre of the room: to be given to everyone who is currently in any part of her domain, the capacity to decide on an individual basis whether or not to be affected by any injury that would otherwise occur, and to set separate preferred defaults for injuries caused by accident, by people in general, or by specific people.

[self_composed]

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

[ending_of]

"The judges felt very strongly about it."

She implements the change. The prototype-light reports this fact and then vanishes.

[luminous_regnant]

"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?"

[ending_of]

She implements another change. This one goes unannounced.

"Siphon away."

[cross_and_bow]

"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?"

[ending_of]

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

[dark_light]

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

[jovahs_heiress]

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

[ending_of]

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

[self_composed]

"...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'?"

[ending_of]

She shrugs.

"I didn't design this place all at once, and it's been a while since I made any major changes."