... flying with improvised safety controls was not quite what he was expecting. Although it's obvious in hindsight that Crafters normally just adjust things directly.

"Since I don't know how safe Crafter flying things are compared to ours, I would like to try something on the safer end," he replies. "So the two-hands version sounds good."

And his support staff would have messaged him if taking Traveler up this way would be a bad idea; the city is normally off-limits to airplanes anyway, so they shouldn't have much to worry about.

He can also make a little two-person airship if Vesherti prefers, though in his opinion the personal rig is more fun.

Well, not having control of his own ascent feels ... probably a bit more nervewracking than just getting over it?

"No, a personal rig is fine," he answers. "Sorry, it just took me a moment to adapt to the idea of using a brand new flying machine that hasn't been tested; normally we test our flying machines before putting anyone on them. But I can see how that is less important with Crafting."

That's pretty reasonable. It's not untested, though, he's used this kind of rig dozens if not hundreds of times, and the manually controlled version is strictly safer, if they stop doing things they'll stop moving at least in the vertical sense and if he stops he'll keep moving the same way he just was. There are extra safeties he can add, a horizontal buffer bar and a ground sensor line to stop them from bumping into things or landing too hard, but it's not that windy and Vesherti isn't a kid, they don't seem necessary.

He gets started on his own rig, first making a heavy base to hook a bucket seat onto and then adding a tall balloon and stabilizing fins.

Vesherti watches in silence, not wanting to distract him from the process. Although he does try to guess what nonphysical properties Traveler is embedding in the different parts of the machine from how it goes together.

He realizes after a minute that Vesherti can't just passively radiate curiosity, and starts narrating what he's doing. The first rig is perhaps surprisingly simple, just a seat designed to be hard to fall out of attached to a balloon calibrated to his weight with a few modifications for stability; the second one has a miniaturized logic system under the seat to take input from two ansibles and change the size of the balloon accordingly, and if Vesherti decides he does want the ground sensor that can be added as an override to make the rig descend slowly for the last few feet. A pair of fingerless gloves get the two control ansibles, with finger caps and wires that push and pull on sensitive parts of the glove making up the control mechanism; he'll need Vesherti to wear the gloves so he can adjust the wires to match his hands and sit in the rig so he can adjust the balloon to match his weight, and then they'll be ready to go.

He nods, and goes to sit and don the gloves. He checks to make sure he'll be able to get at his phone (and therefore the little screen he's been using to write at a comfortable scale for Traveler to read) with the gloves on, but it seems pretty straightforward.

It is, and then up they can go! He'll head up first, but pause a few feet in the air to make sure Vesherti can handle the rig all right.

He's a little hesitant to start up as he gets used to the controls, but soon catches up to Traveler.

As they head up the building, the wind increases slightly, but it's still not too fast by the time they're even with the top. The roof of the building is covered in gravel which has been raked into swirling patterns around a few benches and lookout points. The perimeter of the roof is surrounded by a waist-high fence.

The view out over the city is indeed very good from up here. There are a handful of taller buildings in the direction of the city center, but the rest of the buildings stretch out below this one, tracing the gentle curve of the hills and the river that cuts through them. 

It's really pretty. He makes himself a pair of binoculars to get a closer look at the buildings, especially the taller ones.

What are they all used for, does Vesherti know?

"Not all of them from memory, but most of them yes."

He got a quick refresher briefing while they were heading here from his support team — but he's lived in the city all his life, and he can definitely pick out the most important buildings.

"Let me see ... That curving one with all the windows is a temporary place for people who are just visiting the city for a short time to stay," he explains, pointing out a tall, dark building with a curving face and a view over the river.

"That building with the big mural is the emergency responders headquarters," he continues, gesturing to a somewhat shorter square building. The mural wraps around all four sides (although only two are visible from here) and shows various heroes of disaster prevention: a doctor washing their hands, the inventor of the concept of a fire code checking over a building, a statistical meteorologist staring at a model of a floodplain, a biologist holding up a test of some sort to the light.

"The one with the circles on top is the place where sick people can get treatment," he points out, indicating a more industrial looking building. Unlike the other visible buildings, the roof of this one doesn't seem to be designed as a place to spend time — instead there are just large red circles, lights, and a bunch of equipment.

"The one with the gold stripes up the side is where the people who help organize the city do that — they make sure everyone knows what the expectations for living in the city are, help plan where new buildings should go, that sort of thing," he explains. The gold stripes start at the bottom as pillars supporting a facade, but continue their way up the building, gently twisting to form a slight spiral from base to tip. This building also doesn't have a flat top, instead coming to a dome. It's also a bit shorter than the other buildings Vesherti has been pointing out.

"The big hexagonal one on the far side of the river is the main building of the teachers' group," he says. That building has a fairly plain exterior, but also features a lot of windows to let in plenty of natural light. It's surrounded by a few smaller buildings in the same style, and then a band of green space before the other buildings of the city start back up.

"Along the river, those low buildings are mostly shops on the bottom and living space on the top. The buildings on the downstream side — where they get a bit greyer and there is more space between buildings — are the places where people make things. The place with those colorful rectangular prisms and the lifting machines is the place where things are sent out or received from other parts of the world on boats," he finishes, giving some more general description of the area.

There are hundreds of buildings he hasn't described, of course.

"That's a brief overview — are you interested in more detail about what goes on in each building, what the history of the building is, how it was constructed, or anything like that?"

The temporary housing is surprising to him, though on reflection it makes sense that they'd need it if people don't have their own personal buildings. The teacher's group is, too; Crafters don't have that as a role in and of itself, really. The emergency responders' mural is impressive, as is the shipping - the locals must have all sorts of logistical issues with it that Crafters don't.

"Yes!" Vesherti agrees. Everybody loves logistics.

"Logistics is really important to being able to live in cities like this. Not just getting food into the city, but also sending the things the city makes back out in trade. Cities are more efficient at making a lot of things, because all the components and machines can be located near each other and used all the time, but that means that you have a lot of things that need to be moved between hundreds of different points with minimum delay to take full advantage of it," he explains. "That's why all the buildings dedicated to making things are clustered right next to the shipping area like that — to minimize the needed transport. The people who make the things live elsewhere in the city and use underground fast rail machines to go back and forth. That's also why the making-things buildings are shorter than the residential buildings — they need to move more things in and out, and so it's less efficient to spend time lifting them up to higher levels."

"The boxes in the shipping area are also an important invention for moving things efficiently. They are all exactly the same size, and have attachments on the corner so that they can stack together. Since they're the same size, the machines for lifting them and the spots on the boats for them can all be identical as well, which makes the process of loading and unloading a boat much faster. Deciding on a single standard size for every city in the world to use was one of the big things that the group of groups did about a hundred and forty four years ago."

He's familiar with interchangeable parts, crafting makes them easy, but they're usually only standardized within a household or maybe a handful of households that are especially friendly with each other, for Crafters. It's a little awe-inspiring to think of that happening on such a large scale, though he also thinks he'd find it a little stifling.

Vesherti considers that.

"I think the usual way that we look at things like that is that there are two kinds of situation: the kind where doing one thing is better, and the kind where doing many things is better. And there usually isn't really an in-between; doing two things is usually worse than doing one or doing many," he remarks. "So something like shipping containers — it saves time and effort to have them be all the same. But something like tables — everyone is going to want a different table to fit a different space. Having only one kind of table wouldn't work well. And figuring out which situation is which can be hard sometimes, but generally I think the difference is about whether you want to spend time caring about the details."

"I wouldn't normally think of using shipping containers as being stifling, because I don't really care about the details of how a thing gets shipped as much as I care about the fact that it does get shipped. Of course the details are interesting, and I like learning about them, but I wouldn't want to sit down and design a new box for every thing from another city that I wanted to trade for, if you see the difference? If someone did want to do that for some reason, they probably could — they'd just need to work out the details with someone who would make the box, and a ship that would be willing to take the non-standard box, and the machinery on each end to load and unload it, etc. But most people don't feel that strongly about it."

That does make sense. It's more that he's figuring out for himself what he's going to need, here, and he feels like slotting himself into that kind of system might mean giving up something that's important to him, even though the result is very impressive. He's used to having figuring out what kind of literal or metaphorical box he wants to use be part of the process, even if it's a decision he makes once for a hundred boxes, and substituting in a step where he has to learn what other people are doing is different.

"Oh! Yes, I see what you mean. There is definitely more coordination with other people involved in the way we do things — although we try to make that unobtrusive. It's probably more jarring coming from a place that doesn't have that compared to growing up with it."

Not too jarring yet, but it's definitely noticeable, yeah. He doesn't expect it to be too much of a problem, though, if they really need him to do something a certain way that's fine.

He's curious about what happens in the emergency responders' building.

"So most of the actual emergency response happens from smaller buildings spread out over the place, because you want to be close to where the emergencies happen. The central building is mostly used for disaster planning, stocks of things that are needed infrequently but reliably, training emergency responders, and coordinating different groups of responders," he explains.

"For example, there are some flood barriers up the river that are supposed to prevent any big rain storms in the mountains from flooding the part of the river that goes through the city. So mostly the people in the city don't need to worry about floods. But anything can fail given enough time and a big enough storm, so the emergency responders have people who are good at coming up with plans who have made a plan in case that happens. That way when it does happen, everyone knows what to do. But there are lots of things like that to plan for, and those plans need to be checked and kept up to date as things change, so there is enough to do to keep the planners busy."

"For the coordination — in big emergencies, like forest fires, if everyone just goes to help the people closest to them you might end up with some people being missed by the emergency responders, or some emergency responders all showing up in the same place. There are people in the central building whose job it is to make sure teams are spread out and don't miss anyone, that people with the right training are sent to different kinds of emergencies, and so on. When we get you an emergency alert necklace, pressing it will alert someone in that building, who will look at where you are and where the emergency responders are and send the best person to help."

How do they figure out who's going to be on call when? It seems like it would be tricky to arrange to have people with the right skills there all the time.

Ooh boy this is not how Vesherti thought labor law was going to come up.

"Yes, it's definitely tricky," he agrees. "They use a combination of techniques — the simplest one is just making sure that there are a lot of people available to be on call. The average emergency coordination session is pretty slow and involves lots of breaks and opportunities to read, so that when there is a big emergency or someone doesn't want to do it for a while there are enough people there. Another technique is tying in other cities; they use lightning-based communication so that if all the people here are busy your call will actually go to the next nearest city. The next nearest city won't do quite as good a job because they're not as familiar with the area, but they'll still be able to help. The fallback system is actually worldwide — so something would need to take a lot of cities out simultaneously, or at least cut all our lightning-links, in order to prevent an emergency call from being answered. That's very unlikely, though. This city's emergency lightning-links are designed to keep working during the most serious storm we've had here in the past thousand years."

"A tangentially related part is just reducing the number of emergencies that need sudden attention, such as by requiring that buildings be built out of things that are harder to set on fire, or reducing the amount of coordination necessary in an emergency by spreading out emergency responders, having unique symbols for every building in the city so that you can easily talk about where things are, and so on. Those are things that can reduce the number of necessary emergency coordinators by doing more work ahead of time, when it's convenient."

"The other techniques involve a topic that I haven't really gone into detail yet, because we think you might lack the concept entirely. You shared a lot of vocabulary with us, but none of it was really related to the concept of a job. The idea is that you can trade value-objects for people's time and energy, not just for other objects — that part I expect you to be familiar with — but that you can also trade value-objects for getting someone to do something consistently. So anyone can do the training to become an emergency coordinator, and they can help in an emergency. But the people who do it every day and handle most of the calls, many of them promise to come in at predictable times unless they get hurt or sick themselves. In exchange for the imposition of having to stick to a schedule like that, they get more value objects," he explains.

"There are a few people who make sure the promised predictable schedules all line up correctly to ensure someone is always available. If one of the emergency coordinators needs to change their schedule for some reason, they give them a few days notice, and they arrange to cover the gap in the schedule. Doing something like that does require a certain amount of dependability and willpower — which is why it's also a respected role and worth more value objects. Someone who can't commit to that kind of scheduled-in-advance life would mostly choose to do something else instead."

"Of all the systems I've pointed out to you so far, I think this is the one we're least proud of. It's very common — many projects that need predictable coverage do the same thing — and we do think it's worth it on average, because of the way that it makes some things, like guaranteed emergency calls, possible. But many people find scheduled roles like that stressful, even if they can mostly make them work. As we've learned to build more capable machines, and gotten better at predicting things, we've been able to decrease the number of roles like that over time. But some things just need someone to be there in order to work, and there's nothing to be done about it yet. Maybe in the future we'll be able to figure out a better solution."

Yeah, Crafters aren't very good at that sort of thing either, that's why they have so much automation and so many fewer of that sort of megaproject. Crafters with megaprojects usually live on site with them, which means they're always available if an alarm goes off, but it makes sense to him that it'd help to have people do that work in a shared space, like he mentioned earlier, too.

"If we can get Crafting more widely distributed, I think we'll be able to replace some of our megaprojects with simpler alternatives," Vesherti agrees. "Replacing all the lightning-generators with crafted crank shafts, lightning-links with ansibles, reducing the amount of shipping we need to do, needing less support infrastructure for the fast transport machines, obviating a lot of the emergency plans .... I think it will take us a few decades to unwind everything, but we will probably be able to shift most projects away from that kind of model. That's pretty much why we were so instantly excited — it took a bunch of work that looked tedious but necessary, and showed us that it might not be necessary any more."

"We do have a few people that live on-site at really important projects, but generally people find it more stressful to always have to be available, compared to only having to be available on a schedule. So living in the same city and going back and forth every day is more popular."

He's glad he can help.

And, yeah, Crafters more or less don't have the emergency response sort of megaproject; nobody wants to be woken up in the middle of the night for something that's not their personal thing or, like, one of their neighbors being about to die. The world library is an outlier that way; Crafters like collecting things and sharing their collections and it grew out of that. 

Vesherti nods; that tracks with the impression he's getting of Crafters.

"Are you curious about any of the other buildings we can see from here?" he asks. "There are also some pretty architectural details that are easier to see up close, mostly in the older buildings near the river."