Edie was perusing the latest correspondence from her fork. She still should have been paying enough attention to realize that the door didn't go where it ought before it swung shut and she couldn't sense anyone else anymore, but she wasn't.
After opening and closing the door a couple times to make sure she hadn't just been abducted somehow, she looks around.
And reading, and walking, and singing, and planning, and the engineers have a prototype for a persistent world-gate but still no targeting, and it's still wiser not to build it, lest some demon somewhere conjure it...
And the time asynchronization is not doing anything good for the engineers' health and Cam programs a thing that will keep time and page Tyelcormo with a continuously open connection to sync time until he answers the page.
"Thanks, that's brilliant," and he will check in on them every ten days, now that they have demonstrated an inability to take care of their own health, haven't they, and drag them outside for deep sea diving and hang gliding and laser tag, which he excels at, and they picnic and sing and laugh at human movies when no one's up for high-intensity sports. And at one point he interrupts them and gets vaguely concerning news.
"So," he tells Edie and Cam and Maitimo downstairs, "found a world with not-quite-strictly better tech than ours, the biological weapons team's apparently been stealing from them for a while but it's just now someone from our Arda got a look at the tech catalogues and realized what they meant.
They carry human babies to term in these things called uterine replicators, abolished pregnancy ages ago. Which, good on them, really, but -"
"...at some point it's going to stop being tractable to keep Hells clear of innocent people through information security and intelligent gate systems alone."
"Right which means no rolling it out in our worlds, no matter how useful it'd be, lest someone die and become a demon -"
"Ugh you're right. I love my powers but it's really not worth it sometimes for them to be a thing arbitrary people have."
"...We're trying to figure out how to take daeva anyway. And how to run a multiversal empire anyway. And the proportion of demons who'd go for it maliciously probably isn't enormous, nondaeva often deal perfectly responsibly with the ability to create people..."
"...you thinking some kind of enforcement system, misuse this and then you'd better agree to be summoned into a binding that prohibits various kinds of misbehavior and then put back in Hell if bindings work across dimensions or else left in one where you can't hurt anyone, because if you don't agree to that then you go the way Melkor went, whatever that is going to need to be..."
"Wouldn't be hard to notice if someone's made themselves a person, might be hard to notice if someone's mistreating people they made unless we prohibit all making of people..."
"Maybe if we get lots of sad demons who just really want kids they can get a permit if they're under a binding."
"...I like the idea of ruling Hell a lot better than crossing our fingers no one in it ever thinks to check for anything dangerous."
"Yeah. Demonic curators are very aggressive completionists, they will find it."
"I am all in favor of finding a way to rule Hell. Might get some not-wholly-unreasonable claims of discrimination if demons and only demons had to get a license to have kids."
"Can do the same thing for Heaven and Fairyland and Limbo, but the latter two don't need any monitoring, they've got no way to get there independently."
"Concordances," she nods. "Although without demons getting appropriate genetic material into the replicator would be harder."
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