It's a large, round room, about the size of the lobby at the base of the tower. The entire outer wall is one large window, showing that the room is in fact at the top of the tower, with Upside spread out far below one half and Downside far, far below the other.
There is an eighth person in the room, sitting in a comfortable chair looking inward from the edge of the room, with Upside to her left and Downside to her right.
"That's right," she agrees. "And you're the ones who keep stealing people out of the queue." She focuses on Angela. "Mind telling me what exactly you hoped to accomplish by messing with my housing system? It works very well the way I designed it, and I don't appreciate having to waste my time undoing your changes."
"Insfoar as it's possible and desired by the dead, send people back where they came from. We've done a few instances of that already; I'm sure scaling up will be a population shock, but we can compensate with magic for issues of supplies and crowding and with one of our friends for issues of processing being a nightmare. For everyone else revamp the place to be less of a pointless hellhole. As the most obvious example, even if it was a good idea to sentence people to torture and it was a good idea for torturers not to have to physically subdue their sentences there is absolutely no reason for the power to continue work in other contexts. But the entire judgment and sentencing thing is pretty well fucked too. And if people still don't want to hang out here after modifications of that order have been made, we'll take them. We can fix up as many planets as need be to work like Mars does on my world, and funnel everyone who wants out there."
"It can't simply be to make things nicer for the people who your judges think are worth looking after. The only difference to the place that we saw is the plants. And if I had really died and really found myself there, I don't think I'd have woken up to find a place made for my husband, all my friends, even if only on my behalf - it looks like everyone is judged one by one. You're clearly immensely powerful - it would be so simple to make things pleasanter, even only pleasanter for the people you consider it worthwhile to be relatively pleasant to."
"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.
"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."
"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?"
"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."
"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."
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.
"...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'?"
"The population here has got to be outrageous. Even if fewer than one percent died recently enough in their worlds' timelines - which don't necessarily match up with the local timeline; Shell Bell spent about seventy years here before returning to her home world and finding that only a few months had gone by - that's going to be a lot of folks. We'll want an equivalent of the Crescent for it, and a computer system installed in it to handle transit so we're not just eternally propping open one bottlenecked door to Milliways."
"Sure," says Template, "I don't even know how long ago I died, back home - I do want to go back, but a couple weeks won't make a difference."
"We'll need to send people with anyone who's going as part of a first resurrection wave into a world that isn't operated by one of us. Before we disband I want Elspeth linked up and summarized for; she can insta-train anyone with the processing power to handle the pour. I can supply at least many of the necessary personnel."
"We can edit the details on the fly as we see how things unfold. 'Big' is the basic requirement," agrees Amariah. "If we can empty the catacombs in - what's reasonable - a year? - then we'd like to do that. They're just waiting to be judged, aren't they, that's the point of having them asleep?"
"Twenty-seven million and change per day for a year - I dunno, we'd have to throw a lot of hardware at Jane but the hardware doesn't even all have to be magic besides whatever sensory equipment we give her to tell where people are from and such, we can do huge amounts of it with just squares and more with pentagons. I bet it's doable in a year, at least optimistically barring catastrophe," says Stella. "We'd automate a lot, there might be stragglers who have special cases of some kind, most people won't be possible to send home at all because it'll have been too long since they died and they'll just be in and out without the step where someone evaluates their deeds and determines how many hours of agony matches up to putting a city on the moon. If Jane looks at twenty thousand people per minute - okay, maybe we aren't looking at so much a Jane building as a Jane town, but the limiting factor isn't Jane here."
"It is not," says Golden dryly, "as though anyone involved requires sleep. Perhaps a year is too quick - we will not go at a rate of twenty thousand per minute for the first week, perhaps the first month, and it may be that fewer things fall into understood patterns than we think or that it is harder to fold the dead into the worlds of the live than we hope - and we should prioritize the awake people, who are doubtless trillions more on top of the sleeping ten - but two years, or five, yes, I think so."
"Yes," says Stella, "once we have a first-pass algorithm for when we can send people home if they want, that'll help - people whose choices are staying here or moving someplace new anyway can sleep a bit longer without that being an emergency, I think. We'll want pamphlets. I know where those will come from."
"I should really think of a better name," muses Template. "Not much of a theme, is it."
"First things first, Amariah," says Golden dryly. "This is already a multi-year project and we are not patient sorts. Yours can be next. Perhaps it is lovely and not urgent at all and all it needs is a loop back so that people can interact with their dead."
Those with stable empires - Shell Bell, Golden, and Stella - will set up processing on their end for receiving and repatriating dead people. Golden's going to have to accelerate her unveiling process a bit; Stella will have to work a bit harder on integrating with the governments of Earth which she has thus far left largely unmolested.
Golden will set Elspeth to writing instructional materials for those who'll awaken in the catacombs going forward. (Nathan is induced to door to Aurum and fetch her so she can be linked up and summarized at. She begins work on a first draft.)
Template (who still hasn't settled on a better nickname, but is considering "Pattern") will take a while collecting representatives of each world connected to Downside, and going in with them to install a Jane-point therein; she'll then return to her own world, find a way to explain herself to her parents, and catch up with everyone else in terms of empire-building.
Juliet, Angela, and Aegis will work on their empires, and whenever it is possible they'll set up their own processing intakes.
Amariah will have no dead natives to process. She'll act as support and be the first port of call for appeals processing.
Jane's going to acquire the ability to see life histories and worlds-of-origin at a glance, and she'll flag anyone who's not only "sketchy" but also dangerous; these will only go to worlds fit to hold them, if applicable, and otherwise be shunted into Downside-at-large, newly inhospitable to unfriendly violence.
Once all the Bell-operated worlds are smoothly reintegrating the dead, they'll take what they've learned and start branching into the worlds that have no such leadership, starting with the worlds in which they already have friends to help show them the ropes and moving out from there.
I think I might be God, she muses when she starts pouring into the new swag.
Speaking of inhospitality to unfriendly violence, she empowers every Bell present to freely distribute the choosiness-toward-injury power, in addition to having it included with the torching package in everyone who arrives here through normal channels.
He suspects, but has never been able to directly prove, that it has something to do with being-a-house in the body/identity sense. He'll happily transmit the mostly-unconscious difference between the action of opening a door and the action of opening a door to Milliways, but he's not sure how much good it will do Jane, who is thoroughly not a house.
"Duplication occurs when someone is successfully resurrected without being removed from the queue. There are no extant cases now that you've merged yours. In the future, if someone is resurrected before processing, the unconscious version in the queue can be automatically merged into the resurrected version without any problems; if someone is resurrected after processing, the version retrieved can be the version that is here, and they can choose whether or not to return. Anyone who has died to this afterlife can choose to return after leaving it."
That kind of thing isn't exactly his forte. He thinks about it for a while, and then designs (with Jane's help) something that combines microphone, speaker, camera, and half-ansible into a small jewel that you can wear as any of the above, or like a single earbud. (He does do ergonomics. The earpiece type is as comfortable as you could ask for.)
Now, who wants one? And where should their other halves hook up to? The Downside installation and the Milliways one both have room.
"Especially since I can't, apparently, just do that," Amariah says. "If something happens to my parents, my boyfriend, my teacher, my favorite cousin, I'm shit out of luck until we figure out what Alethia has instead of this, right? And we're going to do that but in the meantime I don't want to lose anybody I'm close to."
"Anyone who dies to here will be transparent to judgesight. Anyone who is given the ability to torch will be transparent to my judgesight but not necessarily to anyone else's. If you prefer, I can replace Jane's judgesight with one that requires the target's consent to proceed, and you can redesign your process around that."
Meanwhile, she displays a prototype-light for an ability to distribute the ability to torch.
Two things of note: it is customizable for what parts of someone's state can be included as permanent that might not be by default, and therefore allows the user to inspect those during application; and if it is used on anyone whose universe of origin is not linked to this afterlife, but could be, the linking will occur. As such, she has also included the ability to determine whether someone's world of origin is linked here already or could be.
"A combination would be a better solution to our privacy concerns. More people would be willing to consent to being looked at blurrily, and all Jane has to be able to see for us to release people back among the living is the general contour, the highlights, not every thought ever. And frankly, if one of us wound up here and were offered a choice between being effectively alive again with somebody having read our minds versus not being effectively alive again, that wouldn't feel like much of a choice, and we're the most mental-privacy-concerned folks around. So, can you make the power adjustable, or can we, or what?"
"It's not that it detects willingness; it's that it requires a decision," she says, and prototypes a change that will provide knowledge of the attempt being made and the filter settings used, and proceed only if the target allows it. The prototype for distribution of torching is still waiting for someone to request implementation.
Pattern says, "I guess I'll get started with getting initial Jane installations going in all the worlds we have hooked into here that aren't already covered."