"...all of them? Not all the solutions are tech so I can't make them all work here - Warp's post-material-scarcity and people don't have kids by accident anymore and most diseases have been eradicated and once you get magic then we can do resurrection, make mortals unaging, that kind of thing."

"Post-scarcity would be difficult while we still need to rely on you but I understand there are people with the ability to find you?"

"Yeah. It might be decades, though, it's a big multiverse and I only think I even know how I got lost. I think giving you a tech boost will work better than trying to end scarcity, probably. 2030's just much nicer than 1994 even in worlds without demons."

"Indeed. If we were to give you a list of current technology we'd like updated, as well as potential advances and directions we think technology ought to go, will you be able to produce the materials needed for their specifications, like blueprints or the necessary physics and mathematics knowledge to back it all up?"

"If anyone's done it anywhere I've heard of, I can give you what they had."

"Would you be able to provide us with things we wouldn't think of that you might know?"

"Yeah, if I think of it - I was going to look at how Cube did a tech jump, that should help with thinking of things I might not think of on my own - I can also make you some people but I don't really want to do that unless we need them pretty badly."

"Making people—I expect copies of people, yes?—does sound somewhat dubious."

"Yeah. Usually we only do that if the original died or if they want to fork for some reason. Some of them probably wouldn't mind but if there's a list it's on the network and I can't access it."

She nods. "We will send you such a list of things to produce, then, so we can properly reverse-engineer them, and we might ask you to conjure tools and facilities that can produce them at scale."

"Yeah, no problem. And I told Legend and Library of Alexandria earlier that I could put New York back if you want. And I can do old lost historical stuff."

"Yes, they mentioned your suggestion of bringing the actual Library of Alexandria back. We have people working on that as we speak."

"Okay. ...also factory farming. You should stop that, I can build you the vat meat factories that replace it."

"Are they as nutritional and do they have the same taste as the real thing? Lots of people will care about the former and a surprising fraction about the latter."

"Yes and yes, took a while but they got it exactly right and cheaper."

"Then we would probably like that, although displacing the farmers altogether would be undesirable and some thought will need to be given to that."

"I'm happy to pay them whatever they're currently making phased out over twenty years or something."

"That might work for some," she concedes, "but a once again surprising number might feel cheated out of honest work in a situation like this."

"Farming will probably have a niche market but factory farming is completely horrible. Once you have a cheaper nutritionally equivalent alternative you could just say that all your normal animal welfare laws apply to farms? And then any farms that are willing to treat their animals okay can keep existing."

"Could work," she agrees, and she nods at Mr. Prescott, who has been taking notes and writes something on a margin at that. "Do you by any chance have futuristic insight about the philosophy of whether animals should be treated as people?"

"Revelation considers eating meat from animals completely evil, but it's 2180 there and they have lots of demons, I think they'd understand if you couldn't catch up overnight. I know a person back home who can talk to animals, pretty much any animals, and can send you sort of what it's like to be them, and that might help people decide, but it's not, like, obvious, even in the future. I could get you future philosophy stuff as easily as anything else."

"It will advance the field by decades, which is to say probably not at all. What other low-hanging fruit does your 'peal' tend to solve fast with technology?"

"The ozone layer's going to be a problem, I can put it back for you. Most kinds of cancer are cured, I can get you the stuff for that. I've got universal translators, though they do a lousy job on languages without much data, I've got faster-than-light travel, there's easy fixes for pollution and way more efficient power plants..."

Mr. Prescott writes it all down.

"The ozone layer's a good idea, and we hadn't thought of universal translation, but the other things are on our list," says Costa-Brown.

"I have a magic translation solution that's better and that I can use to teach the technology version, for small languages where it has a poor sample. Oh, and the arcologies on the Moon are me, Revelation's also got them on Mars but I can just terraform Mars for you if you want people to live there."