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At the end of the universe,
A man steps into a bar and looks around. "Huh, nobody told me they installed a break room here."
With Slayer Juliet.
With Kappa's Dagna.
With Eclipse!Bell.
Terrence and Sibyl in Milliways
magictechsupport
eclipsi
"There was a huge push to develop virtualization once we noticed it was possible for a psion to handle one or a small group in a similar way manually - as long as the psion doesn't need to sleep, which is doable, and can do shared dreams and some other moderately invasive stuff. Because almost nobody wanted to starve in the wilderness for two years but having a supply of magic people is really important - mostly psions, because if we run out of trained psions we won't be able to lock down new or criminal eclipsed. So now the population of magic people is booming and it's really exciting."
magictechsupport
"Should I arrange for someone to discover your world in few years, connect you to MTU-and-related-companies' sphere of influence?"
magictechsupport
"Not from me. MTU can lean exploitative on worlds that are easy to exploit, but yours has psions and mages. There are other companies that will probably follow suit after MTU starts integrating, and I don't know as much about them, but it seems to work out well almost all of the time. MTU doesn't stage coups on local governments, there is a multiversal code of human rights, and so on."
magictechsupport
"Gimmie a moment on the ethernet to find it." He pulls out a phone-like device not from the case but from a coat pocket.
"Local laws and practical implementations are a lot more complicated, this is just the guaranteed basic minimum. Ahem. 'We hold that all sentient creatures have these intrinsic rights, except where exercise of such rights would unduly interfere with the exercise of others' rights..." And he starts listing rights. Most of them are reasonable. 'Right to a just trial.' Some are strangely phrased. 'Right to self-modify, and to not be modified against one's will.' Some of them might seem pointless. 'Right to decline to communicate.' There are twenty-eight clauses, and no blatantly obvious gaps.
"Local laws and practical implementations are a lot more complicated, this is just the guaranteed basic minimum. Ahem. 'We hold that all sentient creatures have these intrinsic rights, except where exercise of such rights would unduly interfere with the exercise of others' rights..." And he starts listing rights. Most of them are reasonable. 'Right to a just trial.' Some are strangely phrased. 'Right to self-modify, and to not be modified against one's will.' Some of them might seem pointless. 'Right to decline to communicate.' There are twenty-eight clauses, and no blatantly obvious gaps.
magictechsupport
"Somewhat, yes. Humans aren't the only sentient species, and it's really hard to get so many disparate societies, different psychologies, to agree on something like this. There's a bit of a ruckus to reform it once in a while."
eclipsi
"Well, wait, why wouldn't you just separate the declaration of human rights from the declaration of other rights then?"
magictechsupport
"Um. Oops. I called it a set of human rights again, how anthrocentric of me. No, it's meant to apply to all persons, and gets a bit overloaded with how many different kinds of people there are out there."
magictechsupport
"So, arrange for MTU to find your world, or not? I've offered it to everyone I've met here so far but only one person actually took me up on it."
eclipsi
"I mean, are there reasons not to? What exactly makes a world exploitable, are we talking natural resources and primitive natives or, you know, highly magically potentiated twelve-year-olds who sometimes kill their entire families and everybody would believe it if it looked like they'd gotten killed in the process too but instead they were kidnapped?"
magictechsupport
"Mostly primitive natives. Some natural resources. Unstable magical twelve-year-olds are likely just as hazardous to us as to you. It'd be tricky and expensive and risky and illegal, so nobody would put their career on the line organizing such a scheme."
eclipsi
"Okay. Any other pitfalls? I don't object to making this decision on behalf of my world or anything but I want all the information."
magictechsupport
"Getting coupled to a larger economy causes a bumpy ride for a decade or two, jobs disappearing and reappearing later. Other organizations will interact with your world eventually, both more and less principled, each extreme being a potential problem. Historically it will probably be prepared to deal with that by the time it starts happening on significant scale."
"MTU hires out mercenaries sometimes, and foreign magical mercenaries could tip the balance. Mercenaries and weapons are almost always restricted to defenses, the only offensive sales are in conflicts where one side is clearly and provably violating the universal rights and it can thus be justified to the tabloids that like to scream 'war profiteer!' at the top of their headlines."
"MTU hires out mercenaries sometimes, and foreign magical mercenaries could tip the balance. Mercenaries and weapons are almost always restricted to defenses, the only offensive sales are in conflicts where one side is clearly and provably violating the universal rights and it can thus be justified to the tabloids that like to scream 'war profiteer!' at the top of their headlines."
eclipsi
"How are the more principled organizations a problem, do they end-run around local governance to empty badly run prisons or something?"
magictechsupport
"Things like that happen occasionally, yes. Or people who think socialist economies are inherently evil and try to destroy them. Or religious extremists. The Purity advocates for genocide of nonhumans."
eclipsi
"We don't have any of those ourselves unless they count, like, animals, or mage shapeshifting."
magictechsupport
"Then the Purity in particular won't be interested except possibly to find recruits."
eclipsi
"Okay. So we're in a solid position to contribute to and benefit from the multiversal economy, which like the normal economy is made of people, but can I assume it's on a solid upward trajectory long term? Stuff getting invented, stuff getting built faster than it's destroyed..."
magictechsupport
"Yeah, long term upward trajectory. The rule of thumb is an average 3% growth per year plus or minus 8% percent for any individual year, I think."