Samples of stone with various degrees of stirring, coming right up!

Werewolves can enervate narrow shapes, but it doesn't save much time, which is mostly dependent on the distance from the werewolf to the farthest enervated point and the complexity of the shape. The typical process for moving stone is for each individual werewolf to make a disk starting from the center, with a little help from other werewolves to form the rim, then roll it to its destination while enervating out to the rim and stirring the insides, and put it into its final shape, all in one shift. But yes in the special case of moving a lot of stone a long distance, without stirring the insides or changing the overall shape, they use tricks with big slabs, measured accurately from the start.

Are they ready to accept immigrants, then? Or at least ready to talk about immigration now?

"We can at least talk about immigration in general terms," Sergei says cautiously, coming over from the other conversation. "We would be delighted to accept immigrants who think they would have a good life in Nivis or other Exodus towns, and who bring new skills and understanding and magics to build the future, as long as we do not have too many all at once before we have the chance to build more hydroponics."

Countries on Ansaf, if they're not at war and both ruled by elves and both have another thing that might be offensive to discuss, generally accept immigrants freely and redistribute land accordingly. Nowadays this only matters to the farmers right up against the borders, but it's a very old and respected treaty. If Exodus is going to limit their immigration, the upside is that they don't have to immediately figure out how to fairly redistribute land outside of the chartreuse, containing discrete hydroponics buildings and discrete electricity generation machines rather than an even layer of farming. The downside is they have to work out the details of limiting immigration, in both directions...

Is Exodus going to evaluate applicants somehow? Will applicants need to already know English and be familiar with the laws?

Will Exodus let people leave? If they leave for Allheart, the tengu is sure that the country that receives them will try to pay fairly for the knowledge they bring.

It would be wise to balance immigration from Exodus between Lei and FD, and that probably means balancing with Allheart too. And independent countries like Stchà. The obvious way to do that is to set the immigration limit to be a fixed fraction of population.

As for Ansaf, there are only a few countries and a few species who are prevented from leaving. Allheart doesn't do that at all.

Specifically it's the FD that prevents undines from leaving, and the Frozen City, an ally of FD, that prevents aasimar from leaving.

Exodus thinks that if they have no limit on immigration, they might have a food crisis, that's all. They had not planned to stop people leaving (if educated people want to go abroad in protest that's really their prerogative), but they might set limits on exports of machines. And they might want to talk about an extradition agreement.

(He frowns thoughtfully at the mention of undines and aasimars.) 

If there's a wait list for immigration to Exodus in case they get way too much interest, that might just solve it neatly. They have a working model of computer translation into this language, so English while quite helpful is not even strictly necessary. Exodus would consider people working and using their magic, contributing, to be good, but... He's interested in hearing more about the land exchange treaty to see if it might have useful ideas for what is fair.

Maybe instead of land, they could transfer a portion of their electricity supply? Or money of a type that can buy electricity and hydroponics supplies and whatever? But then who maintains the machines...

Maybe the equivalent of land isn't electricity, it's sunlight in the drybright and wind in the drydark... but land in the chartreuse is already all farmed and it's easy to change its ownership without disrupting the crops. It's going to be a long time until anyone is using every last bit of their sunlight and wind, which means that exchanging light and wind ownership won't be any benefit at all. Maybe accepting an immigrant should also come with a one-time payment to use for increasing solar and wind capacity, and hydroponics, and whatever else an immigrant needs... the land itself also isn't going to be fully occupied for a while.

The treaty, at least for land that gets direct sunlight, actually already specifies a segment of sunlight rather than an area of land!

Regarding extradition, that should be fine for cases where someone leaves a jurisdiction and is later discovered to have committed a crime. Does Exodus have crimes you can do over the internet?

There won't be enough machines for every part of the globe to be used for a long time. On Earth, not EVERYwhere was used and they had billions of people.

There are crimes you can do over the internet, mostly consisting of 'deliberately messing with computers that aren't yours over the internet' in various ways, and the ever popular fraud. Internet regulation is probably its own whole separate discussion.

...Either included or separately from the immigration discussion, perhaps Exodus could get some kind of special exception for a section of sunlight-receiving land, and a small chartreuse-corridor, possibly underground. One thing they are considering, maybe in a few years when the industry is there, is a mass solar farm in the drybright and a major superconducting cable set, to carry that energy through the chartreuse to the drydark, where it can be used for industry and melting. Such infrastructure is bulky and dangerous if not treated carefully, they might want a section of space that's fairly large on human scales but still small for a planet, a kilometer or so, to account for security perimeters, monitoring, repair equipment and housing for technicians, useful near-existing-countries infrastructure, and so on. Another thing they are considering eventually is the construction of large orbital mirrors to light up the drydark.

(Riley has just realized she never answered an earlier question about how they look for useful mineral deposits; They have specialized probes for it. They dig deep and then extend further probes in branching directions, gathering tons of data about magnetic fields, X-ray and seismic shifts, and so on, before producing a prediction of ore deposit locations based on a mountain of geological data and previous scans and ore findings on Earth. Most of the probes had a lot of single-use parts and have been used already, exploring for drydark resources. They've been a low priority for refurbishment or building more of, so far.)

Fraud, like the scams they were talking about earlier? It sounded like they had ways to deal with them without making them crimes? Is... computers getting messed with a big problem? ...They can talk about this separately, sure.

If the superconducting cables are underground, will the strip of surface still be usable for farming?

Orbital mirrors, wow!

(Then they don't need a vampire to help with the mining, oh well.)

The nearest border between FD and Lei is a straight strip across the chartreuse about 20m wide. It doesn't have any typical farming and isn't part of any towns. Technically its ownership is split between the two belligerent countries, but the people who live on it consider themselves independent. The most notable inhabitants are the ents - it's a thick forest - and an unknown number of tengu.

"The surface should still be usable even if we require a fairly large underground space for the cable... And, well, yes, computers are a complicated multifaceted tool that are - integrated through most aspects of Exodus - that's like asking if magic or cooking getting messed up is a problem."

(The tengu glances at Mirana, since it sounds like the underground cables will substantially reduce the need for border fortifications, which is good for both FD and Lei, but possibly better for one than the other and they're not sure which way it'll be... Mirana seems unperturbed. Perhaps having the machines at the dark end of the cables close to Lei is more important to her.)

Hrmmrmm sure if there was a way to mess up magic or cooking, that would be a problem, and if there was a way to do it from a distance, wow, the world would look very different! The tengu isn't sure how, exactly, but messing up magic or cooking would be a potent weapon, and of course doing that would be a crime - unless it wasn't a crime at all! Like how some places don't have elph disiniuria, because it's expected that elves will use their magic to do things like staying in charge and judging disputes, which sometimes hurt people.

Backing up for a moment, the reason the tengu is hesitating about crimes on the internet is that Ansaf doesn't have crimes that an individual can do from a distance long enough that it crosses borders. Well, okay, a drake could stand on the Sota side of the mountains and breathe hard and try to hurt someone on the Nitatlel side, and in that case Sota would be alarmed and happy to do an extradition. But the wind doesn't blow directly across most borders. All the examples that the tengu can think of are either borders between countries that are both in the Allheart Alliance, and/or borders with small wetlands countries like Koy and Stchà, where the wind would be going towards the hypothetical disiniurious drake.

If two farmers got in a fight and tussled back and forth over the border between, say, Nosimasna and Sient, the dispute would be judged by the magistrate with jurisdiction wherever they ended up after the fight, or they would choose a magistrate together, possibly randomly. If both people retreated to their home towns, refused to coordinate, and each complained to a different magistrate, well, the elves would work it out, and probably, in addition to the regular judgement, both of them would be punished for 'provocation', a broad and somewhat misnamed term that means pulling any kind of funny business with the law.

So if someone in Sota messes up a computer in Nivis, either that's a diplomatic incident between the two countries, or a whole new kind of crime they don't have experience with. Is it possible for Sota to set up their internet so that it's impossible for people in Sota to mess up computers outside Sota? While still having the benefits of buying stuff from Nivis or whatever?

Sergei thinks about this very very seriously.

This is indeed a problem; On Earth, countries' internets are so densely interconnected that this sort of thing happens a lot. Most of the time it doesn't end in extradition or a diplomatic incident if it was just people insulting each other or sabotaging a single website. You have computer security people fix those things and move on. Only sabotage of security or research things, or spying for a war, or sustained campaigns of computer abuse like twenty people all doing the same thing to every computer they can find, or things like that, got countries VERY upset and causing diplomatic incidents.

It is possible to segment the internet into various sub-networks with limited or specific ways of connecting to the computers on the sub-network, mostly for security purposes. They do that already in a lot of ways, for a university's computers, or the reactor computers, or the Security team's computers. Hypothetical-Sota could have a Sota-Internet that only allows connections to other computers in Sota. Maybe with a special portal computer that acts a bit like a kitsune transferring messages to the Exodus internet, but only if they're addressed to a list of specific, approved Exodus computers- Ones for sending diplomatic messages, ones for talking about purchases and immigration, and so on, limiting the scope of the potential problem.

Yeah, partially separating the internet by country seems wise, at least for now. 

(Merta and Mirana emphatically agree.)

They should see what the Freedom Democracy wants...

It sounds like the elves are trying to hide something, and dividing the internet might suppress people's Freedom to Grow. The FD wants a full connection with the Exodus internet. They will make messing up computers a crime and, thanks to their undines, they are sure they can prosecute it themselves.

"Oh, that reminds me. Exodus has serious concerns about the freedom of Undines and, separately, of Aasimars, to immigrate. Restriction of freedoms to certain groups, with various justifications, has historically been abused on Earth."