I had a look at the inbox over your shoulder too. People sure have some vociferous opinions. 

It's hard to tell what's pundits speechifying and what's the situation on the ground, other than "pretty damn awful." Even with all my senses, getting the total situation of a whole country is hard. I have a lot of raw data but not a lot of context and it's the context that makes it all fit one way or another. And just ligering on images of devastation doesn't help me decide what to do except inasmuch as it says I need to do something, urgently. 

I think the smart thing to do is render humanitarian aid as specified by the ICJ, force a ceasefire for the night, repair as much damage to infrastructure as we can, and make the point that we can and will resort to "military" measures if we have to. We should also free the hostages taken by Hamas, the ICC condemns the hostage taking and I don't disagree in the least. These people are civilians. 

I feel distinctly like removing the bombs and rockets' explosive payloads and replacing them with equally heavy chunks of inert plastic or similar. I don't know why I'm making a different decision from Myanmar here though. Maybe I should go back and replace some of the large arms in Maynmar too... 

Anything that prevents death, right...?

Now I'm wondering if I should be copying the whole populaces of these warzones to revive later in case of death... The trouble is I don't have the space underground to hide that many people and it'd be a public relations disaster to be known to clone the living. But seeing the situation on the ground...

No, I've got to do something about this now. There's people down there with no food or water or anywhere to shit. People with injuries and diseases and no-one to treat them. 

The ceasefire can wait, there's no reason to stall on the humanitarian aid. If they bomb the damn place back to rubble again I'll just restore it tomorrow again if I have to. 

She nods. "Sounds like a plan, Goddess."

She also sends off a message to quiet-wings.

Glad to help how we can, and glad the food's tasty. Valid to wanna complain, though. You're dealing with a pretty objectively shitty situation.

Finished the sandwich. Been distracted with the news. Kind of ridiculous that I've literally got a major public figure on the other end of my phone and nobody even realizes. 

You holding up okay?

I'm on the humanitarian aid.

And yeah, I'm going to sabotage the large arms for Myanmar and the Israel/Palestine conflict both. Myanmar is looking a little quieter but some of them are still trying to go at it, and they'll be dropping out of my range in another six hours. I'm distributing black marks to those that don't honor the ceasefire for the night. I did warn them. With a little more perspective I'm going to vanish all the landmines too. I can't guarantee everyone will be safe come morning but that was never in the cards, and these things are literally a war crime, and their effectiveness as a defense is more dubious than I thought. 

Speaking of which, I need to jump you to the Indian ocean soon. Tell me when you're ready for the satellite to drop out for a bit.

"Good deal on the aid and ordnance removal, and those black marks are well-earned at this point. You're doing great."

She pulls up Pidge's message and hums. "Lemme reply to this and then I'm good to jump."

Heh, yeah, it's kind of weird being a public figure now, but needs must. We're holding up well enough, though I'll be doing better when we have some PR staffers, social media people, and a couple analysts to help assemble good plans for geopolitical messes. Took a moment together to cope about the painful and violent and kinda wrecked state of the world, before getting back to work. We're getting through it, though, one problem at a time.

"Okay, sent. Ready to jump."

Nothing about the island changes, but the stars jump in the sky. 

Moved. You're in the indian ocean now. 

The Russo-Ukraine war I think we have enough protocols put together for now. Ceasefire for the night, adulterate all the large arms, make it clear we won't stand for continued violence. While I think it's clear Russia's in the wrong here I don't want to just vanish all the Russian soldiers' equipment because I don't want to leave them at the mercy of the Ukranians. Ideally I'd send all the poor Russian sods back home but I haven't got the personnel records I'd need to get everyone back to their local neighbourhoods. Too much is digitized. And I'd worry about reprisals from the Russian authorities. 

If you've got a contact willing to produce some ~entirely legally obtained~ personnel records, speak up, but unless we're willing to shout it from the rooftops and have people risk their lives for that information I don't know that we have a perfect plan. 

As such, maybe it's time to talk about Africa. 

Hailey switches in and laughs ruefully. "We wish we had those contacts, but it's been a good few years since we meddled with Anonymous. Everyone we knew is out of the game by now. Hopefully one of our volunteers will have connections."

She shakes her head.

"Africa's certainly complicated. Where are you inclined to start?"

The real problem as I see it — well, there are several problems. There's a massive lack of infrastructure in rural areas, and a lack of education necessary to run it all, and all because everyone is forced to make food just to keep from starving to death. I don't have a lot of background on africa but the impression I get is that if you have the resources to get educated in africa, you move somewhere else that's got better conditions and stop being in africa. I've also heard that there's issues with corruption, what else is new. Plus a lot of places are buried under massive loans to try and get in infrastructure and those loans mean that the rest of the world gets to basically take what they want from the place. The resource curse, basically. 

Ironically I've heard the chinese are a little better on the loan count for african countries because they see it as an investment in future allies. I guess you think long term when you're a country that's existed for several million years

why are millenia called that when they don't have a million years in them? 

several thousand years, anyway. 

Basically I want to give africa a better deal by upgrading all its infrastructure and making it so most people can afford a western style of living, but that's a huge project and won't happen overnight because of the staffing requirements. I can't automate everything. So what I need to do is work with the people in these countries, but the issue there is that the officials are often corrupt — but, like, what else is new.

I've been answering easy stuff in my whole range too, to rest. India's gotten a lot of little wishes because they're more polytheistic and more eager to accept a new deity. I don't really like their caste based culture of rigid social roles, particularly when it results in outcomes like bride burnings, but I also don't particularly like American culture of high access to weapons when it results in outcomes like school shootings. Any culture is going to have problems. In the west we circumsize boys for no good reason and it's just something we do; in Africa they do it to women and we condemn it. Frankly, I think when you start cutting bits off of nonconsenting people for cultural reasons you have a problem. 

Hm. Just noticed myself going "we" there talking about the west. That's going to be a problem long term. A good goddess can't be partial like that. But it does suggest that I might have been from the west myself before all this. 

I need some decent cultural advisors from other nations. Where are we on the staffing issues? 

Hailey snickers. "You're right, no millions in millennia. Probably the Latin roots thing. As far as the rest... Given all of that, best idea I've got on Africa is to commission textbooks in African languages and roll out upgrades as enough people get trained to handle 'em. But yeah, cultural advisors are a good idea."

"Let's see. Been a couple hours since Sable sent the link to the form and updated the site to include it, so we've gotta have at least a few bites."

She checks. Do they have a few bites?

A few. Sure. Try a few thousand.

"Well fuck. Thousands of applications. Okay, filtering by people who speak English and at least one other. Okay, narrowing for the one other to be Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Ukrainian, or any African language. That gets us down to a few hundred. Narrowing by located currently at night gets us a few dozen. Okay, let's throw together a quick filter questionnaire..."

The questionnaire covers things like goals, dreams, wishes that might be granted through material objects, teleportation, or body mods, along with several to tease out moral alignment with Stella's principles. Everyone who got through the basic filters gets a questionnaire, and then she sets up a video call interview scheduler to send to people who pass the questionnaire.

"Probably give it half an hour for people to respond to that."

Cool. I'll likely be working on Sudan then, making food and taking away weapons. I think I've got the general war management strategy down for the immediate term, and I'm sure I'll have no trouble getting prayers close enough. 

People are definitely going to die because of what I've done and am doing, and because of what I haven't done too, but it's still the right thing to do to distribute food even if there's inevitably going to be arguments and fights about who owns it, and I think total disarmament of both sides in a war... removes a deterrent effect, I guess you could say.

This is going to be messy, but I think it's better than doing nothing. 

Slavery is harder to deal with. If I just "free" everybody without having anywhere for them to go to, things will get worse, not better. Again, maybe arranging some new society on a new landmass might handle it, but that is not a project I feel comfortable attempting on my first day as a goddess. I've been leaving chiding letters for people who are running heavily exploitative businesses but I doubt they'll have a huge effect on their own. At some point you've got to do something real about the problem other than sending warning.final.final.final like China used to do with Russia. 

I think I more or less have the immediate humanitarian stuff sorted out that I can sort out - keeping people from directly dying to violence and starvation, and illness where I can hack it - so we need to talk about the problem of conjuration. I can just appear practically anything, and that's already having major effects on the economy, especially for objects that are mostly valuable due to their relative rarity on earth. Design work is going to be worth comparatively a lot more now that I exist, and specialized manufacturing like nanotubes. Transportation costs are going to crash because of my conjuring, too. We need to start interacting with the economy more deliberately rather than just messing around directly. Copyright is also going to be a big issue in the long term.  

When Switzerland comes into range, I'm going to want to open an international account to handle deposits from, like, government entities and private companies, the business side of being a goddess. A nice deposit of less-volatile refined lanthanides probably would go a long way towards establishing my credentials. I'd want to keep the actual church accounts separate from that, I think, as a charity or NGO rather than a business or corporation. 

In the longer-term case, we're probably going to want to set up the Isles of Night as a sovereign state wholly administrated by myself and my church, our Vatican-City equivalent, and that's going to be a huge snarl of international law and political recognition. Long term plans there. 

Hailey nods. "Agreed, we need more discussion before we start appearing a continent to stick rescues on. Can't really implement Absolute Abolition until that's available, absent a fuckin' lot of cooperation from Earth's governments. I think you're taking the right path on that and the war mess for now."

She props her feet up and leans back in the chair, humming.

"The economy's gonna be hard to deal with. The big problem is that it would be wrong to hold back on conjuring shit people need just because the economy depends on the scarcity, but at the same time the scarcity-backed economy is load-bearing for a bunch of other shit. We need economists to talk with about this. Sensible ones, that won't try arguments like 'have you considered not conjuring lots of food and consumer goods so people still feel pressured to work and the economy keeps working' on us. 'Cause like, yeah, we do still need an economy, because intellectual labor is scarce in a conjuration-proof way, and also we don't want humanity to be dependent on you for literally everything, but it needs to be an economy that can cope with Everyone Gets Basic Needs Met, Period. That's what you and we are aiming at as a goal for Earth, yeah?"

She rubs her eyes. "Copyright is gonna be a fuckin' mess. It's currently the main way we've got of makin' sure people get compensated for intellectual labor, that and patents, and conjuration breaks those over your knee. I think nearly every way of doin' it is either directly or indirectly dependent on 'em. We need to incentivize intellectual labor, but we need to do it in a way that doesn't depend on copyright. Ugh. Maybe our next application set to sort through is English-speaking economists?"

I think the key thing about interacting with the economy is to do it predictably. Granting small wishes matters to me but most of them don't generate a ton of value individually — it's the aggregate that matters. I'm willing to act as a company or government where that prevents huge shockwaves, but I agree, we want to move to use my manufacturing capacity effectively in the long term. There is in principle a value you can put on a second of my attention, and I think the world will figure out that value faster than I can. It's probably pretty astronomical though. I would estimate my manufacturing capabilities if I focused on nothing else as roughly in the league of the GDP of Earth. In practice, though, my comparative advantage may be elsewhere, such as with delicate surgeries or similar. Bulk microchip manufacture, perhaps. Earth makes a lot of products, but there's a bunch of things only I have the precision for.

And yeah, copyright is going to be a huge mess. I've made something like a hundred thousand copies of my favorite book — I intend fully to pay for them all once I have money, but it was nonetheless rude to go ahead and conjure before asking. All the people whose designs I'm using deserve to be fairly compensated. 

That said, people are hurting now — I'm not going to let the technicalities of copyright hang me up from helping people excessively. Everything I make is technically someone else's design, save for the rare cases where I customize something. That'll have to be hammered out properly, and probably will be a media circus, but I think large enough settlements from my near limitless well of free goods should solve most of it. There is some small possibility of trade sanctions being put against me of some form, but we'll figure that out if and when it happens.

Okay, I need to sit down. 

I just got the breaking news from Palestine.

You sure you know what you're doing?

"Yeah, and figuring out what the right kind of predictable things to do are will be the job of an economist. Honestly, paying people for the copies of their book will be a decent stopgap, once we have money, but it won't last long-term. Copyright's probably gonna die. It was already hurting bad."

She shakes her head. "Also, it's not like trade sanctions can actually do anything meaningful to you or the Temple other than make it harder to help everyone else."

She taps up a quick reply to quiet-wings.

Yeah, honestly, we're pretty overwhelmed at that mess too. We're sticking to "no seriously stop killing each other so hard" and "the UN's recommendations will actually be implemented and enforced" until we have better advisors who can take Stella's capabilities into account, so it's not as risky an action as we could take, but it's big and nervous-making.

How're you doing over there?

Better than I could be, honestly. It does seem that Stella means well, I just don't know what the long-term consequences will be like. 

Also, I have to admit it is kind of funny that she's dyed all the guns bright flourescent pink.

Headache's a little less bad this time but definitely still there. Working in the warzones and refugee camps there are less light sources and they're less powerful. Fewer people have lights, fewer people want to risk lights. It's sad but helpful in a way. Campfires and oil lamps seem to be less bad than electric lights, too.

There's less people praying to me deliberately though. It's okay, your prayer to take time for myself seems to be broad enough that it gives me some wiggle room to fix stuff I'm not satisfied with personally. I'm having to flip between prayers to get everything but it's manageable. 

We're almost certainly going to get some converts in the refugee camps. How that'll work out long term, who knows. But it helps me feel like I'm doing the right thing. 

Hehe, yeah. Fluorescent pink guns are objectively kind of hilarious. 

As for consequences, we're operating in a world that was in no way ready for a verifiably-existing goddess to appear and start throwing miracles around. That's probably gonna make a mess, but we have more important things to worry about than governments and economies getting scared. People are suffering and dying. That gets priority over a bit of mess.

"Glad to hear our desire for your general well-being and self-care is helping. Lemme know if our focus on it slips while Sable's out of front. We all want it, but she's the one whose whole-ass soul runs on Love."

She smiles wryly. "Converts definitely seem likely, yeah. Be nice if worship got you something, but it's at least an opportunity for people to maybe learn a thing or two about sucking less."