"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."

"I'm not sure habitable land is a pressing issue at the time, and most of our resource constraints are in logistics and incentives rather than production. Ushering a post-scarcity plan would make it easier to do charity."

"Yeah, and making food cheaper and the Internet free and power really really cheap - oh, electric cars, you don't have good electric cars yet, do you? That's easy. And I can do public transit projects overnight and for free - anyway, once the Internet's widespread that helps the logistics and incentives, your food prices will fall a lot when you're not feeding most of it to animals, Cube did a universal basic income starting in Malawi and then spreading it from there..."

"Why Malawi?"

"Don't actually know. Their history'd diverged from you by now anyway, because of powers."

"And it doesn't exist anymore here, anyway. It's made up of several territories governed by different warlords."

"I want to do something about that but I don't know what. I could make some people who are better at politics, but like I said, making people's for emergencies."

"I'm not sure politics is the problem, there. There isn't enough cohesion for the concept to even make much sense, it's really many superpowered people keeping power by being scarier than everyone else around and beating them to submission."

"I'm scarier than any of them but I don't want to wade into fights without knowing what I'd do if I won them."

Legend fails to suppress a smile at this.

"We can probably spare some people to figure that out, but that's even more complicated than just solving unambiguous problems like malaria because other countries might take offense to you doing that even if you declare yourself an independent agent," Costa-Brown explains.

"And that's the sort of thing Matirin handled when Butterfly took over the world but I'm not any good at."

She nods. "Probably not worth looking into right now, anyway. We'll finish up that list, but we might want you to eradicate malaria before we're done. Does that work with other similarly transmitted diseases like dengue?"

"Anything with mosquitos as a vector is easy. Some planets just eradicate mosquitos and nothing bad happens."

"Earths? Or other planets?"

"Earths."

"That might be worth looking into, but I'm not sure most environmentalists would just take your word that it's safe as they would about the diseases."

"Yeah. You can also go for just the species that bite people and just in the areas with a lot of disease."

"We'll start with malaria and dengue and similar diseases and might see about that later."