"What are you trying to do with it?"

"Eventually? Uploading."

"Oooooh."

"It's a long way off. But pens make a lot of money and I am throwing it at the project as hard as I can."

"Sensible of you."

"We're hoping to find someone in Milliways with some kind of distributable immortality."

"Any luck? The haut have been trying to achieve biological immortality for centuries and have barely manged, well, 'centuries'."

"Not so far. Magic seems more likely than technology, though."

"Wouldn't that be nice. I'm planning to camp out in here for a few weeks at least, see what I can find. I'm certainly hoping for magic."

"We've met people with magic! Nothing we could take home, so far, but still magic."

"Oh? What kind?"

"Various. Some of them were single-task, more like the mutations from our world than the typical fantasy wizard, but some were more general. There was one who was some kind of dragon which came with several different kinds of species specific magic--like shapeshifting, which was how they could fit in the bar at all--and also a more generally practicable kind that only works in the world they're from."

"How disappointing that none of it was exportable. They sound interesting, at least."

"One of them might have been exportable--not everyone could do it even in the universe it came from, and we can't be sure that it wasn't just that we personally couldn't do it, not that no one from outside that universe could."

"If I find something like that, I'm waking up employees who can travel to my Komarr lab until I run out or someone can do it."

"The guy in question wasn't interested in hanging around long enough for us to oust the rest of the dorm. Maybe you would have been more persuasive."

"I'd probably have tried resorting to bribery. Bar can change currency."

"Fair enough."

"But she won't let me do arbitrage. It's very sad."

"How would you use Bar to do arbitrage if she let you?"

"Bar makes it trivial - if she'd let me. She can change currency, she doesn't take a cut, and she can do it between any economy and purchase back non-currency objects in adequate condition. If I buy a case of maple butter in Barrayaran marks at Vorkosigan hill district prices, and then sell it back for Zoavian credits at Twilight City prices, and then change those back into Barrayaran marks, I will have literally sixteen times what I started with, and that's just one of the first examples I thought of because I tend to tote Barrayaran maple butter around the galaxy. Bar can invent prices for objects in currencies from worlds that have never seen those objects, and it's largely her discretion whether she prices it as its theoretical value in that culture or just as an approximate translation of the buying power required to buy the object in its native location. There are no transaction costs, no shipping costs, and no difficulty obtaining pricing information. She can't handle particularly large volumes all at once, but she can perform trades almost instantly, and if I worked in small objects - selling aluminum to 1885 Earth, for instance - it would hardly matter. And yet. She is not allowed."

"But you're not actually transporting things between those economies, so wouldn't it basically amount to Bar giving you free money?"

"Yes. Which she can technically also do, if you're willing to run up a tab."

"Mm. Not quite the same thing, I think--there aren't any confirmed consequences to running up a tab, but there are suspected consequences, and a run-up tab is--definitely a thing, it's at least a guilt trip if nothing else."

"Yes. So arbitrage is a way to work around that, but the economic effect is still someone walking out of Milliways with more money that didn't strictly come from anywhere. But I wouldn't actually want to extract the fruits of my arbitrage in monetary form. From the perspective of the nexus economy that would just be uncontrolled inflation, albeit uncontrolled inflation more useful to me than most - and I'm still not sure what all this is going to look like on my First Galactic bank statement. I'd walk out with unsynthesizable elements or more gadgets of the sort I'm going to buy anyway."