"Exactly. So - either you're going to run into an extinction event and I can't save you without risking obliterating the universe, or you all manage, soon before it gets too much worse, to agree to stop having kids and rely mostly on me for food, or - you go somewhere."

" - is there somewhere to go?"

"I'm... not sure. We did cover the 'space' possibility before and it didn't look promising.

There might be enough time to figure out how to upload you. That's - not been invented yet in my future but it could possibly be figured out before you guys double again."

"I am not sure I know what the suggestion is concretely -"

"You've seen me use my computer some - it's theorized that by scanning a brain in enough detail, perhaps destructively, one could render all the information such as memories and personality as a program on a computer, which could if you did it right think like a live person of flesh and blood. We'd also have to solve the problem of getting an environment people wanted to live in rendered so the uploads can interact with it and stuff like that. I don't know if any of your magical properties would make the trip but the environment might be able to mimic some of them - running fast, being various sizes - whereas I have no good prospect of replacing debt tracking or its followon traits."

"It seems like we could at least use debt to check if it worked - we track debt between people, I'd expect regardless of whether they're on a computer - and if there's not debt among computer-people I guess that would be socially disruptive but not that much of a loss...

You won't get sufficiently high compliance, not voluntarily."

"Uh, if I upload somebody and the only indicator it didn't work is that they can no longer be in debt or vice versa, I'm not sure I'd consider that very damning evidence. It could be something that debt tracks that we shouldn't care about, in that case. But I don't have a strong prediction about it.

Are we talking 'I have to take over the world' here or something more along the lines of 'I'd better make the upload environment terrifically shiny and expect a steady trickle of uptake while the holdouts continue to live in regular courts but hopefully don't get to three hundred and twenty billion'?"

"- might depend on how nice you can make the environment, and on how convinced people are by conversations with acquaintances who went for it - it wouldn't be reversible, right -"

"...I don't think I'd say it would never be reversible. I can make bodies, and it might be doable to figure out how to get an upload stamped into the body's brain. It might never be fully reversible because I can't make bodies with magical properties, so if proper debt tracking goes, it might never come back except insofar as it applies to humans.

I'm... curious why now is the point at which there are twenty billion faeries. If faeries are inclined to double every twenty years, that suggests there were..." He does some math. "...about half a million three hundred years ago, and perhaps just a few hundred a couple centuries before that. Any small population like that ever having been stable would require there to be some condition keeping the doubling rate lower that then changed; if it was never stable, or crashy, and it's always been a doubling every twenty years situation, that suggests a breeding population of faeries popped into existence some six hundred sidereal years ago and I don't see how exactly that would have happened. I can try to forensic it but that will omit any necessary magical information..."

"I don't think we have records that old. ...fairies might not have always known how to slow down, and you can't have children without slowing down."

"I guess that could do it but it still leaves the bewildering question of why there are any faeries in the first place as opposed to not that."

"Well, why are there any humans as opposed to not that?"

"Humans evolved over many generations from other species and you can follow it back like that down to the precursors to single-celled organisms."

"Huh. Why are there any daeva as opposed to not that -"

"We think it started happening when the first valid circle was written but it's admittedly still very mysterious. But daeva don't have children and faeries do."

"We do! - I don't suppose you can solve this problem or at least buy yourself time on it by flying all over the world putting down the vegetation that you think ought to exist - it'd belong to you so no one'd eat it and it wouldn't matter if humans did -"

"...I don't think so. There's only one of me and I have never taken a course in naturalistic gardening. Also, if someone did eat it - it wouldn't take many, and why would they expect a blackberry bush that sprouted near their court to be mine? -"

"Well, if you toss it in fully-sized they ought to guess something's up. But people are stupid. 

Probably you could convince most courts, if your alternative was nice enough."

"It would take a lot more detail work to add a fully grown berry bush somewhere than to just drop seeds from the air.

I think if it can work at all it can be really nice."

"Why hasn't it been done in your time, what makes it hard -"

"Uh - for one thing if the process is destructive it might cause the human to duplicate, if they also appeared in an afterlife as well as on the upload server. I can't rule out that faeries also have this problem but it at least doesn't obviously look like you do. But the live humans don't know that part. It's hard, though. It requires a lot of information about the brain that's hard to get without damaging or killing people and humans are reluctant to do that; demons invented the kind of computer you control with your brain, because we can make disposable human brains to dissect, and can also try stuff on ourselves and then get rid of it without it being permanent or difficult. Uploading can't be tested like that - there's been some groundwork done in trying to upload animals but since animals can't communicate you can only tell how well you did at the fidelity level of 'does the program of the animal retain training it received in life'."

"Have they pulled that off -"

"I think so, with simple animals, but I'll need to look it up in case I just read sensationalized popular science articles and actually it's complicated somehow."

"Well, probably we can figure it out. What would I need to read to get caught up on what they're at now - and what do you want for it, because that'll be more than all the languages, I'd expect -"

"Have I mentioned I hate that - I'm not even well-versed in this field myself, unfortunately - let's find Corendi and see if he can help us hack something together where I am paying you in science education for participating in my project or something."