This still leaves a lot of emails every day she has to deal with herself, although some of them allow her to make gentle adjustments to Jane's program to handle future inquiries of the same kind. The number goes up over time. Slipstick's still on the lookout for a suitable secretary type person to help out. Until then, Bella leans on super-speed.
She has had to address the rumors about being able to raise the dead. It's a frustrating, narrow line to walk, between lying, explaining too much, and getting everyone's hopes up. Currently the FAQ has a section that looks like this:
Can you raise the dead?
Eventually, I'd like to be able to do that for everyone's departed loved ones. I'm working on it as fast as I can, but today all I can deploy are public health measures and, on a smaller scale, immortality, for people who are currently alive.
I heard you were dead and brought yourself back to life / I heard someone else was dead and you brought them back to life!
This is an exaggeration. I'm immortal; if I suffer lethal damage, the thing I do is called 'torching', not 'dying'. The same is true of other people who I've made able to torch.
I want to be able to torch.
There's a waiting list, but this is something I can do. Just fill out the form and my staff will process your application; if everything checks out the current wait time for getting into a torching batch is about four months.
I don't want to torch, but I want to stop aging.
This is also available, but the waiting list is longer; apply here.
Are you sure you can't raise the dead?
I really, really wish I could do that for everyone who asks. I maintain a waiting list of people whose resurrection has been particularly requested so that as soon as I have this capability I'll know who to use it for first.
"Unless you turn out to be a template and at the next Bell party you wind up looking at six or seven of you who have written equally good anthems."
"It could happen. Glass could tell by looking if you're likely to have alts, I can't but people do keep turning up who wind up being templates."
"If there were six of me writing anthems for the rest of you, wouldn't you have noticed already?"
"Not unless they'd found them before Jane broke. For all I know thirty years have passed in Rainbow or wherever since then. I do know Sarion hasn't found one of you; that's all I can say for sure."
"Tell him I'll be there within ten minutes, J," Bella tells it. "Sorry," she sighs to Ripper.
"Yeah, of course, I'm not gonna strand you here." She teleports them both to the door to his new Saturn place, and winks at him, and knocks.
"Keep trying, you'll get the hang of it eventually," he says, grinning, and he opens the door and brushes past her to step inside.