He feels an open summons and lets it grab him -
There is absolutely no one in sight, and no binding on him whatsoever.
There is a plain white floor underneath him, and a single pristine glass window ringing the perfectly circular room, leaning slightly outward on all sides so that an observer can stand at the edge and look out easily at things beneath the room; Cam, however, is in its exact centre. The ceiling is also plain and white. To his right, the sky visible out the window (the room is very high up, and shows little else but sky at this angle) is dark; to his left, it is the pale blue of a cloudless summer day.
Directly in front of him, there is a comfortable chair at the very edge of the room, facing into the centre. There is a woman sitting in the chair.
"I find the configuration of your universe very unaesthetic," she says calmly.
"Well, where I'm from, teleportation has not been invented and I don't think there are any tourist attractions where the sky looks like this. This'd take, what, tidal locking on a really little planet so the twilight band was about building-width? Nothing like that in the solar system off the top of my head."
"I am proud of my transit system," she says. "At the most basic level, it consists of a network of numbered stations in which each station in the network can send travellers instantaneously to any other station. The speed and scope are necessary for a continually expanding domain. Your afterlife sections are similarly infinite, and would require a similar solution."
"I can cause arbitrary reconfigurations of matter, and implement arbitrary magical rules if they are sufficiently well-specified. The specifications recognize aware beings and their decisions as fundamentals, and everything else has to be described in terms of the interactions of matter and energy on the most basic levels. It took me a very long time to specify a rule to inhibit the settling of dust onto surfaces in sufficient detail."
"Interesting, but increasingly complicated. Suppose that every person has their own area with its own transit station. Should the areas be contiguous with one another and limited in size, or separate and infinite? What should each area contain to start with, besides at least one transit station?"
"Air, something to stand on - how customizable past the defaults can you make 'em for people who aren't demons? Demons are covered if you give us vacuum, but not everyone's so lucky. If contiguous, does shooing people keep working if the owner of an area is asleep? And people change their minds about things, if the only ones of these places belong to individuals they'll be in a pickle if they let a little commune sprout on their turf and then get sick of their roommates."
Cam, and the arbitrarily powerful woman in her chair, are transported to a new location. The sky above them is day-bright. The infinite plane on which they appear is made of the same dark grey rock from when Cam originally arrived.
To Cam's right, there is a building with a sign that reads "TRANSIT STATION 1:1" over the arched double doors. Just outside the building, there is some kind of kiosk, a waist-high shoulders-wide cylinder of unreflective black material with the words SELECT CATEGORY displayed above it in holographic white letters.
"I have a very large available selection of structures categorized by size, function, and number of rooms both in total and by category. That interface will show you a random structure within your desired specifications of those parameters, and allow you to discard it, save it for later consideration, or instantiate it in a specified location."
"It is not apparent to me how the sorting between the sections is accomplished. Limbo is the one structured a plane, correct? The type of people who appear there do not have any magical ability to affect their surroundings. It is possible, although I will not know for sure until I have access to your universe, that I could offer those people a choice to re-sort themselves into whichever of the other three categories they would naturally occupy. That should reduce the amount of inconvenience involved. The problem with further specification of the library of structures is that someone would have to manually peruse the library to categorize all of the furniture and wall coverings, and I would need to design a rule to allow for the interchangeability of wallpaper."
"I think Fairyland might be a plane too. Limbo is a boring plane, with, yes, no magic for the people. Limbo gets people who died without ever summoning daeva, is my current guess. Can you give these kiosks access to an extranet or extranet-like thing that will let demons design wallpaper and so on at them? Or angels or for that matter enterprising fairies and humans that want to do it the long way around."
"SELECT CATEGORY" sprouts a short list - 'Residential', 'Commercial', 'Industrial', 'Miscellaneous'. Each of these, if he desires more detail on it, will in turn sprout subcategories. If he gets as far as 'Residential: Multi-Residence Building' or 'Residential: House', more options appear, inviting him to specify size (in height/width/breadth or in square footage of usable area) and numbers of various categories of rooms. Once he has specified those parameters to his satisfaction, he can proceed to 'Display Random Structure' from either 'Base Library' or 'User Library (Empty)', the latter of which is greyed out and doesn't work. The interface is very fluid, responding to his intentions rather than to any physical input.
"I like this interface."
He rolls up a random house and starts messing around with it by pure intention.
"Okay, now, in Hell we have this problem where everybody can make stuff and nobody can get rid of it. If I instantiated a house and this wasn't a test run would I just have it forever until I set it on fire and then have a pile of ash, or what?"
"If you instantiate a house and do not substantially alter it, you can remove it using the interface. If you do alter it, the interface will request that you first categorize its contents and any structural alterations and save the result to the user library, which may be somewhat tedious but can be skipped if you insist. It will also refuse to remove structures while they contain aware beings. The interface will also remove items and structures it did not create, but will insist that they be categorized and added to the user library first."
There is now a 'Date of Sample' field which will allow him to specify month, year, and day - and a 'World of Origin' field just above it, which consists of a number. The world of origin for this particular house is 26, and its date of sample is December 1997.
"An object being available to me means that I am aware of its physical structure and can therefore instantiate it. Or categorize it in a library of items and structures. I personally categorized every structure in the base library of the instantiation interface. Aware beings are more complicated; I can instantiate those as well, but I have automated that process because doing it one by one as they died would be extremely tedious."
"My domain currently has both more individual convenience and less of my personal attention than that phrase implies, but broadly speaking yes. To be clear, I also intend to leave my current domain and your current afterlife sections more or less just as they are, except for adding transit systems to the sections and interlinking them with the existing transit systems of my domain and the individual transit systems of the personal pocket dimensions. One of the options under 'Miscellaneous' in the interface is a transit station; they are somewhat more rigidly constrained than other structures, because their functional parts cannot be changed."
"Yes. Hmm. Do you have any other suggestions to make before we begin? I suppose it would be convenient to add an information exchange network." A second kiosk appears. "And it should not be necessary for a person to access a transit station in order to return to their personal domain." That change is silent.
"Awesome. So, use case, from this pocket dimension here or whatever one I wind up in after the complete system is rolling - I will have my normal powers intact, I will be able to go visit my parents, both parents will acquire probably-fairy powers if they are open to this plan and will have their own little planes, I will be able to email them, I will be able to visit Fairyland and Heaven and Limbo too if I want in addition to Hell, and if I spontaneously undergo a personality transplant and decide to demonically lay waste to Fairyland, the fairies can do... what, about that, since it's not any of their personal turf?"
"So if you do this somebody's gonna lay waste to something sooner or later, there's currently a balance of daeva not screwing with each other's belongings but this will upset it. I would like to visit Fairyland, but not if my ability to do it guarantees that someone else will eventually take it into their head to wreck it."
"Simple version, don't let daeva into each other's domains or Limbo. The pocket dimensions have visiting covered. Alternately, suppress daeva magic while we're visiting, if you can do that. I would have a much harder time laying waste to anything in Fairyland if I only had stuff I could carry and not even teekay while I was there."
"This seems like it would significantly decrease potential convenience as well as potential destruction," she observes. "As an alternate method..." She gets one of her thoughtful looks again. "Go create and then wreck something, and see if the solution I have just provided appeals to you."
If he has any desires in the direction of restoring the blocks to their un-kicked state, he will see a ghostly preview of the tower as it was when he created it. The preview can be scrolled forward or backward in time, including to times when the blocks did not exist. If he decides to revert to a particular state, the world is edited accordingly, but all previous states remain accessible.
"Yeah, like, demon and angel powers have comparable applications and we've stabilized, but it could be a very long inconvenient eventually. I guess the pocket dimensions mean anybody can opt out if they get sick of playing Should This City Continue To Exist... The thing about declining to unexist structures with aware creatures in them, can you do that for the reversion power too? That'd limit scope and direct conflict. No reverting an inhabited neighborhood of fairies."
"Yeah. I mean, this is mostly a Fairyland problem, Hell and Heaven could probably take it if you plunked transit points in the middle of each major city, but Fairyland with transit systems out in the attractive but at least not heavily developed wilderness for the first while sounds good."
"Yes," she says almost immediately. "I will be able to allow people who do not currently belong to one of the active types to sort themselves into whichever one they would naturally occupy. In that case... I believe I will restructure my own domain first."
This, apparently, takes a few seconds of thought.
That one takes several more seconds. No wonder she thought it would be so tedious to do a thing for a whole minute.
"I do not like to do more than necessary or take more time than necessary about it. There. You are provided. Do you have any further requests before I return to my tower? It is unlikely that I will leave my domain again, but I will continue to be able to modify the four sections of your afterlife and all of the personal domains, so if you think of something later rather than now the only thing that will be lost is convenience."
"I'm in this world's mortal part sometimes, so maybe I could invite you there, although it's possible I'd have to wait for a sloppy binding. Even just giving people the pocket dimensions would be big, even if it didn't hook up the extranets or give them daeva powers or let them at the transit system."
"Still. In that case, there seems to be no remaining barrier in principle. I suppose the live world is more vulnerable to vandalism since its inhabitants are more fragile; perhaps I will not give it a transit system of its own, and instead allow only live persons in particular to return to it from their personal domains, and distribute no reversion powers for it."
Eventually, he catches another summon.
Promptly he invites the admin to join him.
"I am not a demon," she says. "I am the administrator of an afterlife with which you are not acquainted. I am here to offer conveniences to the people of this live world, which I have just done. Perhaps you would like to inspect your new personal domain before continuing to sputter."
"He is extremely unlikely to vandalize your planet, as far as I can tell. If you do not lift the restrictions, my only other option for lifting them immediately would be to alter your section affiliation, which you might find inconvenient since you would be unable to summon anymore and would not be able to return to this section unless I personally retrieved you."
Presently Cam is back. "I'm a nice demon, I wouldn't've hurt anything," he tells the summoner. "Anyway. Do you need specific things critiqued for the setup for the live humans?"
The summoner looks out the window.
"It looks like - they're - did she - how," he says weakly.
"Ah, all set then. Anything else?"
"N-no that was all."
"Okay. Home I go, then."
The summoner nods mutely and concentrates.
Home Cam goes.