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Bella's public facing email address (eor@eor.eor; many of the Bells are following similar protocols to Stella's, for web presence, and in Origin the relevant empire is called the Empire of Rings, after Saturn's feature) gets a lot of mail. Jane used to help with it; without Jane, there is still extremely smart filtering going on, and a program no one has noticed at work yet auto-responds to almost everything with canned but tweakable responses and links to the imperial website.
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.
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bellfounding
bellfounding
[It was really good, I'm impressed you pulled it together in that time.] She's filtering out of the crowd on foot; as far as she know no one has recognized her yet.
tearingup
[It's not finished yet, but it's getting there. It was good enough for an encore, anyway.]
bellfounding
[One of my alts and her Joker can sing, but I've never wished it up, let alone developed the skill naturally.]
bellfounding
[Probably. I don't think any of us have tried singing - the one of me who can sing can do it because she's an angel and they're all about the singing where she's from - but one of me wished up flute skills and she's really good.]
bellfounding
[Genetically engineered space angel, big speckly wings, grew up in a tech-relinquished culture that thinks she's an agent of their god and uses angels to control the weather via song, she later found out the god was a reasonably intelligent spaceship. Not a person, though. Jane ate it and cribbed the notes from the software so now I can still talk to my systems even though she's gone.]
tearingup
[You're just never going to stop casually mentioning more impossible things, are you.]
bellfounding
[Speaking of Hell, I didn't tell you very much about the afterlife.]
bellfounding
She laughs. [It's not Hell any more. It was just really, really awful for a long, long time, and we found out about it in the obvious way - not me, I was asleep the whole time, but Shell Bell had a nasty time of it - and we did not like it. It's not quite accurate to say we took it over, but we caused enough of a stir to get a meeting with the admin, and she doesn't really like... doing things, as far as we can tell... so she let us change a bunch of stuff and now it is not Hell.]
bellfounding
[Yeah, she set up the place's initial conditions, and changed them a few times in response to miscellaneous badgering, and she's locally omnipotent. She's not bad, just kind of apathetic; she was perfectly happy to replace her existing systems for sorting people with Jane and us Bells. The place is called Downside - there's also a section called Upside but it doesn't come up as frequently.]
tearingup
[The omnipotent ruler of the afterlife is apathetic? That doesn't depress you at all?]
bellfounding
[No, not really. If she'd had a vested interest in things being how they were we would have had a devil of a time getting them changed. And they were bad. Lots of torture going around.]
tearingup
[Well, right, that's depressing on a whole different level, but wouldn't it be nicer if someone cared?]
bellfounding
[Bells. We do Belling. Belling involves ramping up everyone's quality of life.]
bellfounding
[Why don't we count, then? Were you hoping for benevolent literal deities?]