Over there is an unusual sight: a person with no wings, wearing a plain dress and sitting in a plush armchair set rather incongruously in the middle of a flower patch. She looks mildly conflicted about something.

"Yes. Did you fall in? Or go through a gate?"

"A temporary phenomenon transported me here. It was inconvenient and annoying. If I had known that was a possible consequence of walking across the room, I would get out of my chair even less frequently."

"How do you know it was temporary? Gates and tears would seem to be a lot alike from your end. Did you try going back the way you came?"

"I perceived it ceasing before I could return through it."

"I am able to perceive fewer things here than I am used to, but as the only remaining connection to my domain it was extremely obvious while it lasted."

"...I don't think I know what you're talking about."

"That seems likely, since you addressed me as 'Mortal'."

"Are you not a mortal? You don't have wings, so you aren't a fairy."

"I am the administrator of an afterlife. I am not mortal by most reasonable definitions."

"An afterlife?"

"Yes. It connects to many living worlds, but this is not one of them, perhaps because all of your aware life seems to be immortal. I have not perceived anyone dying since I arrived here. It is pleasing."

"Fairies are immortal, yes. What is an afterlife?"

"A place where dead live things and destroyed objects from living worlds are collected."

"Collected to do - what?"

"Continue existing."

"Your use of the word implies that there are mortals around here somewhere, but I cannot detect any, so I don't know whether or not the ones you mean are collected by an afterlife."

"There are some gates and tears that go to what we call the 'mortal world', which is populated by people who look like you. If you're from somewhere else either they can also go other places or I've been misinformed about the mortality of the mortal world's population."

"I am not from your mortal world. And your gates and tears have never intruded on my domain before. I would have noticed."

"Someone would have had to know about the place to make a gate, and no one knows exactly why tears happen, so I can't be of much help explaining why you got one now and never before."

"Can you be of help in locating your mortal world, or returning me to my domain?"

"I could learn to make a gate."

"Which would accomplish one or perhaps both of those goals?" she asks by way of clarification.

"At least locating the mortal world, probably also finding your - thing. If there can be a tear there, there can probably be a gate there."

"Then I would like you to do that," she says.

"It will take me a while and you'd probably be safer in my tree than sitting out here where anybody might try to catch you and take you home. Oh - by the way - accepting food from or telling your name to a fairy will make you their vassal."

"I do not eat or use a name," she says.

"...Then you're probably safe unless your lack of name makes you nameable, in which case the first fairy who thinks of calling you something of their choice gets you."

"That sounds inconvenient. What exactly is a vassal?"

"A vassal is someone with a master. Vassals cannot harm their masters, at least not by themselves, and must follow any enforced commands they are capable of obeying issued by the master."

"That sounds extremely inconvenient."

"Well, yes. I don't know any way to check if you're nameable besides trying to name you, though."

"Is one only nameable if one has never used a name, or does one's name expire if one ignores it for long enough?"

"I think that if you've only forgotten your name it's still your name for this purpose. But you're unprecedented."

"This way." Promise puts the lid on her cup of dewdrops and takes off, flying slowly.

Wearing an expression of distaste, the administrator follows.

The administrator also goes into the tree.

"If you're comfortable just staying here - do you also not drink water? - I can nip out to the library for books on gating."

"By preference, I sit in a chair and do not do anything at all," says the administrator. "Including eat or drink or sleep."

The administrator sits in the nearest comfortable-looking chair. She finds it acceptable. She closes her eyes and contemplates her muddied perception of this universe.

Promise is back several hours later with a bagful of books.

The administrator opens her eyes to observe Promise's return.

Promise has indeed returned. She gets herself a fruit and starts eating it while she reads one of her books.

She observes this activity also.

"To which location? Or either?"

"Either. Which do you want?"

"I would prefer to see your mortal world first, to know if I need to connect it to my domain before returning."

"And then the mortals in it will get to go on after dying?"

"Yes. And all of the ones who have previously died will also be collected."

"I can do that. Does it matter where it leads?"

"No."

The administrator smiles.

"I don't know much about what the mortal world is like and don't have any really safe way to find out," muses Promise. "What's your afterlife like?"

"It is an infinite plane divided into two sections by an infinite straight cliff. Newcomers who are judged very unlikely to make trouble for one another are sent to the upper half, everyone else to the lower. Every person is supplied with a residence, where new instantiations of destroyed objects periodically appear. I am pleased with the residential and transit systems, and with the rule I formulated to prevent dust from accumulating on surfaces. My domain has existed for a very long time and there would be a considerable amount of dust if it were allowed to accumulate."

"Why do you sort people like that?"

"At the time I implemented that change, it was still possible for people to come to me with complaints, and someone suggested it as a way to separate out a section of the population who would be unlikely to have any complaints to bring. It worked very well for that purpose."

"But don't the rest of them still have complaints occasionally?"

"Yes, but those complaints are dealt with before they reach me."

"Oh. How?"

"I did not principally design the system and do not pay attention to the details," she says. "If you would like to learn more, you can travel to my domain when I return."

"You don't pay attention? Why?"

"The daily activities of residents in my domain do not interest me very much. Do they interest you?"

"Well, yes. They're going on forever, after all."

"You may investigate them as much as you like."

"The inhabitants of your mortal world are unlikely to be woken and sorted very soon after I begin collecting them," she says. "The backlog is large."

"If I don't like how your dead mortals are being managed can I go to you with complaints?"

"It has been a very long time since the current system was designed. I will not be annoyed if you propose alternatives."

"How likely are you to implement them?"

"I will implement them if they seem like improvements. I will not implement them if they seem likely to annoy me."

"All right. I'll go start a second gate to your world, but I need a geographic feature to aim at."

"My tower is the most distinctive feature of my domain. It is the tallest object on the plane by a wide margin."

The administrator thinks about this, and then stands up. (Ugh. Walking.)

Promise shows her to the gate and leads her through. It goes to the ground at the base of the tower.

"What do you mean?"

"Would it be inconvenient for you if a resident here learned your name, in the same way that it would have been inconvenient for me if a resident of your world gained access to mine in some way? I would not like you to be inconvenienced in that way while you are here."

"Yes. I can be envassaled if someone learns my name, or if a mortal feeds me mortal food without first being my vassal."

"If I give you the ability to instantiate objects from the category 'food', will that protect you adequately against the second possibility?"

"Uh - maybe. I don't know. I don't count as my own vassal; a mortal could probably still command me even if I took their food of my own accord, and I don't know where - instantiated food would count as having come from."

"It comes spontaneously into existence at your direction. I find it hard to imagine a way in which it might count as belonging to anyone else."

"It might make it very unlikely for whoever could possibly own it to find me and try telling me to do anything, anyway. I cannot guarantee that it will work perfectly, or that this power being from you won't make it count as your food."

"Oh, if it includes fairy food that's much likelier to be safe and I'd also know what it was," says Promise. "Thank you. How do I use it?"

"You should find it possible to recreate any particular food item you have eaten," she says. "Or to instantiate a food item at random from any chosen subset of the available worlds. The items are categorized by world and by time of collection."

Promise considers this, then makes a candied dewdrop, then eats it.

"I have no indication that you are now my vassal," she mentions. "I find it likely that I would notice if you were."

"Food-based vassaling doesn't usually produce feedback, but maybe you would anyway."

"It is likely that I would," she reiterates. "I do not care to test it further. Now you may explore my domain. I do not think anyone will be able to bother you excessively."

"Okay. This is the same tower the gate was near?"

"Yes. I will return you to the location of the gate, if you like."

"That seems like it might be quicker than me flying out the window."

Promise finds the gate again, places a candied dewdrop at each end of it, and then goes out toward the buildings in the distance. Flutter flutter.

Promise lands and goes into the library.

"What is? Leaflets? I'm told this is an afterlife, and we're immortal, so that makes sense."

"Ooookay. How'd you get here, then?"

"I made a gate. The person in the tower accidentally found my world and needed help getting back, and I came along to have a look around."

"...Which person in the tower?"

"Are there several? She's up at the top, the bit with the windows."

"Is there some reason why she is less likely than anyone else to have fallen through a tear into Fairyland? According to her it's the first time a tear has ever happened, you'd think it would be equally unprecedented regardless."

"I've never heard of Fairyland, but I've heard of the person at the top of the tower. Out of all the people in this afterlife, and there are a lot, I would have thought she'd be the least likely to talk to anyone who might ever talk to me."

"Well, she couldn't get home on her own, and I found her first. Is there some reason I shouldn't be talking to you?"

"Not that I can think of. It's more that the admin has a low-key reputation for being somebody you don't talk about if you can help it, let alone try to talk to."

"She didn't ask me not to talk about her. She wasn't very chatty while she was waiting for me to figure out the gate and sitting in my tree the entire time, but she never told me not to talk to her either."

"Okay... uh. What are you doing in the Downside library?"

"Talking to you, so far. It was the biggest most obvious building. And it's a library. I'm collecting information about this place. So I know what I think of letting her have access to another mortal world to collect from."

"I mean... if the other option was not existing, most people I know would prefer what they've got," she says.

"Okay, so that's good to know. I might also go back to her with suggestions, apparently it's been a long time since the place has been updated and I'm meddlesome, but at least it's better than that unfortunate dying thing mortals do without afterlives to go to."

"I can think of plenty of suggestions," she snorts. "Not sure how likely she is to listen to any of them."

"Well, you might as well tell me, mightn't you?"

"Okay. Let's start with: disband the judges and torturers and rescind their special powers, double the minimum starting residence size... that'd go a long way by itself."

"The torturers. Did she not mention those? She must have at least heard of them, because she's where all the special powers come from..."

"She did not mention them. Or judges, either, but that term is less immediately alarming."

"Honestly, of the two, the judges piss me off more. I have friends who are torturers."

More's the pity for her choice of friends, but: "Right, what exactly is the story here?"

"How much do you already know?"

"Nothing about either of the listed job descriptions. This is an afterlife, she runs its underlying structure, my world doesn't need it because fairies are immortal, we're attached to a known mortal world though and she wants to check to see if she already gets its dead mortals."

"Okay. Well, it goes like this: somebody dies, and they get stored unconscious in the middle of a room until a judge decides to come look at them and wake them up. The judge reviews the entire history of their life, and if they were practically perfect they get to go Upside, and if they weren't they go Downside, and if the judge doesn't like them they go Downside and get assigned a sentence of some number of hours of torture, the record is twelve. And torturers can't easily quit - judges virtually never bother assigning sentences to anybody who's already sorted, because they'd have to notice and care that you were doing something, but if a torturer stops doing their job the judges will keep sentencing them until they reconsider. There is a loophole to make this whole system less completely shitty: a sentence has to be served by somebody, but it doesn't have to be by the person it was originally for; anyone else can decide to take it for them, and it counts as long as the substitute sincerely means to be a substitute. I'm one of the people who does that. We're called contractors."

Shrug. "Yeah."

"What other things here are astonishingly horrible?"

"Eh, plenty, but most of the rest is just what happens when you have an enormous population of people who can't die and whose single unifying characteristic is that they weren't nice enough to get put in with the nice people, all thrown together with no oversight at all. People who want to be shitty to each other are going to find ways. And there's the special powers I mentioned - judges can read your entire life history at a glance; torturers can establish a connection with one person at a time that lets them move that person around like a puppet - but getting rid of those kind of comes with getting rid of the relevant professions."

"Are you liable to be forgetting anything or should I fly up to the tower and complain about that right now?"

"I've hit all the structural problems. Like I said, people being assholes is a separate issue."

"Yeah. We have assholes in Fairyland too. And for that matter a control mechanism, but it's different and I don't think she can get rid of it. Though I may as well ask."

"Assholes are a universal constant."

"Will I find you here again if I come back?"

"Maybe. If you don't, you can go to this transit address," she pulls a small white card out of her pocket, "and ask to talk to Eights." The card has a number on it: 9246938^0. "Somebody'll find me."

"I mean, define 'real'," she says. "It's what people call me these days. If 'real' means 'live' you won't find many people here who even remember theirs."

"Oh good. 'Real' means 'first'."

"Yeah, then almost everybody you meet will be going by something else unless you hang around the base of the tower waiting for newbies."

"Okay, good. Thank you very much." Promise goes out of the library and flies to the top of the tower. The bit with the windows.

Once she gets about halfway from the top of the cliffs to the top of the tower, she is inside the bit with the windows again.

"Hello," says Promise. "Some of the details you didn't mention are very objectionable. Basically everything about the judges and the torturers should go."

"To be replaced with what?"

"Well, what purposes do you see them as serving now?"

"The judges are the current mechanism by which new arrivals are distributed. Someone else would need to take over the job of extracting them from storage, assigning them to a district, and perhaps providing them with a commonly spoken language if necessary."

"And the districts do what? You said you separated the - troublemakers from the others but not why you wanted to do that in the first place, or what the threshold of troublemaking involved was."

"Those were suggestions made by the first judges. The districts are an aspect of the current residential system. I would not like to redesign the residential system."

"The person I spoke to did incidentally recommend that you double minimum housing allotments but it seemed less urgent than judges and torturers - what are, in fact, your limitations on how you can arrange things, and why don't you want to redesign the housing system?"

"Redesigning the housing system to eliminate the districts entirely would involve considerable effort and perhaps significant changes to the physical structure of my domain. It would be possible but annoying. Doubling minimum housing allotments would be perfectly trivial."

"All right. She didn't have any complaints that seemed to be about the physical structure of the place. You didn't mention any purpose served by torturers. Would eliminating that job also be trivial?"

"Yes. It would annoy the judges very much, but if I was also eliminating the judges I would not have to listen to them complain. There is still the matter of who would sort people into the residential system without the judges... the guides, perhaps."

"She didn't mention guides. Could they do it via a means other than reading someone's entire life history?"

"Any such method would necessarily be less accurate, but perhaps accuracy is not required."

"Introducing... bad neighbors... to an accurately-sorted collection of good neighbors might not be ideal for those good neighbors, but I'm not even sure how reading someone's life history would be perfectly accurate in the first place. Mortals only live so long, people can change over time."

"Then the guides can sort new arrivals by whatever nonmagical means they choose."

"Good. Are people allowed to visit the other districts?" wonders Promise.

"There are six districts, divided into two sections with three districts each. Currently, residents of the lower section are not able to leave it, while residents of the upper section are able to travel freely between the two. I do not know if they choose to do so."

"Can they talk to each other somehow?"

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know how to do it yet, but it's possible to ensorcel things so that you can speak from a long way away. Can they do that? If they want to arrange a visit or something."

"No. The available means of communication are separate between the two levels."

"Why?"

"I think the original logic was that residents of the upper level did not want to be open to harassment by residents of the lower."

"I could maybe think of another fix for that if I knew how the communication methods worked?"

"Rearranging the communication networks sounds mildly tedious. What would be the purpose?"

"Making it possible for the residents to interact with more people if they want to and schedule visits without having to go all the way down - apparently wings are a new sight here, they must have to climb or something."

"There is an elevator in the tower."

"...I take it that makes travel less tedious? All right, maybe this one isn't actually a big deal then."

"It does make travel less tedious, yes."

"Getting rid of the judges and the torturers - and their powers, if they could use them off the job - was the big one, but now that I'm thinking about it I'm wondering if you could copy partial traits from fairies. Most of being someone's master or vassal is just - a problem, but the definition of harm is really comprehensive, and if you could copy it, and everyone could decide to be unharmable in that way without the other parts of mastery, if they wanted, maybe per person - there are sometimes reasons to not want to be quite that unharmable - then that might cut down on your troublemakers problem."

"Where would I find an example of this property?"

"I don't have any masters or vassals and never have - except the Queen, who knows every fairy's name automatically but has no reason to know I exist - but there are a lot of examples in Fairyland and we'll go back through anyway to show you the attached mortal world. Speaking of Fairyland, can you alter that, too?"

"What alteration were you thinking of?"

"Well, for example, the Queen automatically knowing fairies' names is a problem. I might be in favor of completely eliminating all but the harm-prevention aspects of mastery and making those portions easier to attain - maybe chosen per person like my suggestion for here. I should think about it more, it's not as obvious as 'there should not be torturers', but I'm guessing you don't want to make two trips and that's my first pass, and I'm pretty sure it's better than nothing."

"I have not had an opportunity to closely perceive a master-vassal connection," she says. "It may be that I would need to see one before I knew what I could do about them."

"How close is close?"

"If such a pair of people were to enter my domain, or if someone were to become a vassal here, that would suffice. If I were in your world, I would have to be personally near such a connection, nearer than I ever was to one while I stayed in your tree."

"I can check the gate to the mortal world occasionally, and when it settles, I can invite a pair of breeders to be near it when I come get you?"

"That sounds like a reasonable solution."

"All right. Do you mind if I come back here before then if I receive more suggestions when I go back among the - what is the species called? I can hardly say 'mortals'."

"Humans. The residents of my domain are currently all humans. You may return before then."

"Did you already get rid of the torturers and so on?" wonders Promise. "If you did I want to tell the person who suggested it to me."

"I have not implemented your suggestions yet," she says. "I do not quite have an exact idea of what changes to make."

"Can I help?"

"Perhaps. You could describe your list of suggestions again all together."

"Wish I'd written them down... Disempower and unemploy and do not permit annoying complaints from the torturers and the judges. Let the guides non-magically sort people; it doesn't matter if they're very accurate. Double the minimum residence space allowance. Later, on your way to Fairyland's attached mortal world, view a master/vassal set and see if you can, one, borrow only the unharmability feature of mastery to be deployed per person at will by everybody here, and, two, reduce it to only that within Fairyland for everyone. If at all possible, disempower the Queen."

"Sure. Thank you."

Promise is returned to her gate.

And Promise flies back to the library.

"Very nicely! She said she disempowered the torturers and judges and announced that they wouldn't be needed anymore and also doubled the minimum residence space like you suggested. I have more ideas but she needs to look at things in Fairyland to be able to tell if she can do them, which will take a few days."

"Well. That'll shake things up," says Eights. "I better go talk to my friends. Some of them are gonna be upset."

"Why?"

She shrugs. "Almost everybody I know, torturer or contractor, is now out of a job?"

"Did the contractors want the job? It sounded like the sort of thing you'd do to be nice to other people."

"Some of us actually like it. I mean, you have to get something out of it to keep going back after the first few tries. And whatever that is, a bunch of people suddenly don't have it anymore. They'll adjust, but not instantly."

"Oh. I still think it's probably net better not to need contractors, though."

"Sure. But my friends are still going to be upset."

"Maybe I'd better not stick around and meet your friends," says Promise wryly.

Eights shrugs. "Reasonable."

"But I wanted to let you know that I got your ideas implemented. Thank you for telling me that those things needed doing."

"No problem."

"Yes. The breeders I found will be there soon. I can turn you invisible first so they don't notice you and bother you. One of them should be a master of the other, although almost certainly not the only master or only vassal in either case."

"Being invisible sounds convenient," she says, and then she disappears. And then Promise is by the gate at the base of the tower again.

"Yes," the air replies.

Presumably, the administrator follows.

"What do you mean by relevant properties?"

"For example, I could make a person unable to be a vassal, or unable to be a master, or both."

"I could do that if you entered my domain again."

Promise steps back through the gate into the admin's domain.

Nothing obvious occurs, but: "You are now unable to be a vassal."

"Good."

All relevant goals having been accomplished, the administrator starts walking back to the Downside gate.

"I'd like her unable to be a master, if you don't mind. I don't expect to want to do this again; she's unique."

"Done, then. How do you mean to return her to your world?"

"I'll show her where my first gate is, since I can't reopen hers from this side."