"A boyfriend to, what, distract you from the excruciating boredom of not running a universe?" he teases.

"Yes!"

He laughs.

"I mean, perhaps I could've settled into something less grandiose if I'd never met the peal, if I were just stuck in a nonmagic world and didn't know there was anything else, maybe I'd go to med school or do engineering like you, I don't know, but now it'd be such a step down."

"That's cute," says Tony. "And possibly unhealthy. But cute."

"Which part of what scenario here would be unhealthy?"

"Uh... it would kind of suck if you couldn't deal with not being world dictator or whatever?"

"We need things to do. We can entertain ourselves, to a point, but I want to accomplish stuff, not just mess around."

"...Isn't that going to really suck in like a thousand years when you don't have any problems left to solve, though?"

"So far we're finding stuff faster than we're accomplishing it!"

"...That's terrible, though!" says Tony. "Either you spend the rest of forever knowing you have so much work to do you will literally never get it all done, or you finish it all and then get bored? Oh my god that's so depressing!"

Pattern laughs. "The work is good, though, the work is fun, never getting it done is only a problem insofar as a lot of the work involves helping people who ideally wouldn't have to wait on us but as long as we're the only game in town we can live with it if they keep coming. And, you know, in the course of all this finding-stuff we are also acquiring more things to do with downtime, I might get antsy but I wouldn't technically be bored with a few million universe's supplies of books and movies and games and people and tourist destinations, you know? They make those faster than we can use 'em up, even boosted for speed. Besides, does your endgame look any less depressing than that, do you think there's literally infinite things to invent?"

"...You know, I haven't thought about it before," he says, "but I actually think I do. I mean, technology isn't just about planting a flag in the laws of physics - it's not about what you can do, it's about what you want to do and what you need to do, and people's wants and needs don't stay static forever. I don't think there's some kind of ceiling on what we can do with technology, and even if there is, if I ever reach the point where I literally can't think of anything else I want to invent because all of the cool shit exists already, I will be totally willing to retire and play with my toys for the rest of ever."

"The fact that people's wants and needs don't stay static applies to us, too," Pattern points out. "People are going to go on having cultural shifts - maybe not as fast once we've got Downside emitting dead people as smoothly as we're hoping and cultural shifts can no longer happen in the form of old people dying, but we'll still have stuff to react to."

"...I don't know, if I were you, I'd be working towards a society that could handle itself without me," he says. "Like, and then I wouldn't abandon it or anything, but the optimal system is the one that's self-maintaining, you know?"

"Sure, I agree," says Pattern. "But that doesn't mean we'll have nothing to do, it just means we'll wind up doing something that's - scaled a little differently. We like inventing things too; we're more magic geeks than engineering ones but I'd consider it a satisfying day's work if I determined that my society could really use, like, a system that sprockles the widgets, and then I concocted one. Especially if for legacy reasons I get to wear a crown while I'm doing it." (Pattern doesn't in fact wear a crown yet; no one has moved to her Saturn so far and she considers it premature.) "Our gig isn't ruling - that's mostly cosmetic and practical. And also vanity. Our gig is finding things that don't work well enough and making them work better."

"Okay, but I dunno, I feel like if that was my goal I would be actively looking forward to eventually having everything work perfectly," he says. "...Man, I'm such an engineer."

"Of course everything working perfectly's the goal," says Pattern. "But exactly what constitutes perfection might change over time."

"Well, then you just need meta-perfection," he suggests.

"That could keep me busy for a long time, figuring that one out."

"Probably, yeah!"

"And I have a long, long time to think about what to do with eternity, anyway."

"Also true," says Tony.

"And we both have a long time to pick up distinguishing features!"

He giggles.