"Only matters if wizards can't, which is possible since daeva can't even when we used to be humans, but yeah."

"You can also write your immunologist friends and ask them to work on it for us in Hell, right? or would they be disinclined to do that -"

"I can, yes, but it's hard to get rigor on a hypothetical 'imagine you were trying to vaccinate the population of 1802' - and I'm not actually sure if they'll be able to conjure from your Earth, because there've never previously been results like 'tried to make a replica of the British Isles, got two copies'."

"No precedent for accidents like the one you had?"

"None."

"Anyone asked Bar how many worlds there are -"

"I have not and I don't think your brother or father have talked to her at all..."

"I maybe should have led with that, it's potentially as interesting as the 2179 thing - Bar, how many worlds are there, do you know?"

I'm afraid I simply can't keep track of such quantities.

"More than a thousand?"

Oh yes, by many orders of magnitude.

He reads this to Cam - "what does that mean -"

"Means you undershot. A lot. More than an octillion?" Cam inquires.

More than that.

"And there's never been an accidental summons anywhere else - how hard is it to do by accident -"

"Hard but not all that hard. I would actually be surprised if the Elf kid was the first person to manage it. But there's never been an accidental summons anywhere else from my daeva worlds - that's, uh, clearly not quite conclusive -"

"You think there might be other daeva worlds?"

"Maybe there's more than an octillion special snowflakes but I kind of doubt that."

"I have no concept of how many an octillion is -"

"One followed by 27 zeroes. ...In American convention; I think Britain does it differently. For reference Earth has about seven quintillion grains of sand on it and a quintillion is one followed by eighteen zeroes."

"- so then there's somewhere that can do your resurrections, we just need to find it -"

Nod.

"Maybe we should be asking Bar for a different genre of books."

"What do you have in mind? I'm assuming that magic-in-general cannot be performed via any simple action taken by people from worlds where that magic isn't standard, at least not usually or naively, or we'd both be from worlds with more than one magic system."

"Ways to get between worlds."

"Same constraint likely applies - Bar?"

The only method the means for which are available here are door-based and require a patron to hold the door to whichever world you wish to visit.

"Are there records of other methods?"

Summoning is an example; there are others, none of which I expect to be learnable from books.

"Okay. Thanks."

I do apologize.

"We appreciate your help very much." 

"I'll take some books on summoning and on interdimensional travel in general," he says without looking up.

Bar coughs up three recommendations.

"Thank you," he says for his father, and hands him the books, and to Cam - "I want a list of priorities or something - there's multiverse stuff, there's recovering old lost magic in our world, if the notes aren't all magic themselves, there's figuring out if we have summoning and developing vaccinations to everything -"

"Vaccines are big but not even the only thing - flattening out the economy is big, electricity is big, global communication is big -"

"Flattening out the economy?"

"Making it easier to trade. Everything gets cheaper when that happens and stuff gets invented faster."

"Aaron's going to be all smug. I'm not sure it's worth waiting to repeal the Statute, actually - it'll be years -"

"It does seem like it'd be very annoying to work around in the meantime."

"The problem is that the Statute does a few good things I'd want to have other institutions in place to do, like 'not let people enslave Muggles' -"

"I believe in 1802 people are already enslaving Muggles, yes?"

"Muggles are enslaving Muggles and we are going to stop them. Wizards can much more conveniently enslave Muggles and are currently not doing that."

"I'm aware, but that's not what you actually said and if you're considering politicking among non-wizards you'll want to keep an eye on it. About how many wizards are there? How would one be caught if they decided to enslave some Muggles?"

"That's kind of the problem, Imperius isn't detectable. There're around two million wizards worldwide - we're about 1/500 -"

"...that's tiny, especially if you have any decent healing magic - are half your kids not wizards or did you just have a really early demographic transition or -?"

"Wizards' kids are almost always wizards, wizards do kind of get themselves killed a fair bit, average family size is in fact below two if that's what you mean -"

"That's what I mean. It takes birth control and a higher standard of living to get people to do that but I suppose magic gets you there sooner."

"We have birth control. I - don't actually know much about how convenient or scalable it is, or whether it's even safe for Muggles - Michael would -"

"There are very nearly perfect nonmagical options available, just not in 1802."

"Distributable without a lot of other infrastructure, though? Not that it's at all obvious that should be a priority -"

"The very best stuff you need training to administer, but there's dramatically-better-than-nothing options that could theoretically be dropped with brief written instructions and little parachutes. It's not up there with malaria but it is kind of a big deal for social progress, honestly."

"I don't think most Muggles can read."

"Brief little videos, then, except they'd be censored instantly, likely as not... 2002 would be much easier than 1802."

"I am sure it's 2002 somewhere in the multiverse. What would they have, less censorious governments or -"

"Higher literacy rates too."

"We can fix all these things, I just don't have a feel for the best order of operations."

"Yeah, me either, for some reason I never entertained the hypothetical 'what if I meet a wizard from 1802'."

"And I put a fair bit of thought into taking over the world with less resources than this but there are probably a dozen other things like birth control that haven't even occurred to me -"

"Yeah, the up to date political controversies in 2002 would probably be unrecognizable, let alone 2179."

"Do tell."

"In 2002 I turned fifteen years old and some people had recently flown some hijacked aircraft into some New York City skyscrapers and as what approximates a result the US attacked some tangentially related countries in what was widely perceived as an attempt to collect more petroleum, the principal use of which is fueling vehicles, and security procedures around boarding airplanes were tightened and there were a lot of political cartoons about taking our shoes off... My mother was moderately active in a movement to get more general acceptance of the idea of same-sex marriage and the right to legally change one's gender on one's identification..." He consults his computer. "The former currencies of the European Union countries stopped being legal tender... an early version of what was eventually a very popular open source web browser was released..."

"Okay, you win. What's a skyscraper, what an evocative word..."

"A really really tall building! These ones were almost fourteen hundred feet high and were at the time among the tallest in the world."

"Wizards have flight, mostly on broomsticks but I take it the Muggles get it too -"

"An airplane of the early 2000s could get to Australia from the United States in a little under a day carrying several hundred passengers and by then this was accessible with a little budgeting to middle class people. Gets cheaper and faster later."

"What does it take to put those things in place -"

"As with my medical education my engineering education is very 'for demons' and you probably don't want me personally making every aircraft for an entire planet. But we can find out."

"How does the government end up being structured -"

"Representative democracies, tending towards sort of federated structures like the aforementioned European Union as various regions and groups bid for independence and then want to voluntarily participate in trade union sorts of things. And then there's Luna and Mars which do their own thing, I haven't looked into them very closely."

"That sounds hard to manage but not impossible - manage in the sense of having all the actual decision power, I mean, maybe that's the wrong thing to aim for -"

"Yes, they are not dictatorships, that's sort of the point."

"The question is whether they make good decisions often enough I can trust them to do that."

"Kind of aggressively low-variance mediocrity, which is also sort of the point."

"Are you super attached to doing it that way?"

"Not really."

"It seems like kind of a shame to have access to unthinkable cosmic power and use it to set up low-variance mediocrity."

"I encourage you to improve on that. The low variance part does matter, things run more smoothly when everything's predictable; mediocrity is a side effect."

"Yeah, I can see the benefits of predictability. The Minister's an elected position and I was planning to be elected to it, it's not an inherently terrible way of doing things, just - if you put Muggle personhood to a vote it'd be a close one, if you prohibited making more house-elf type species you'd lose a vote badly - people are not that great -"

"It's important to enfranchise the population. If you let Muggles vote on their personhood the nays would be a rounding error. I suppose you might get different results if you let house elves vote though."

"Or let everyone vote on whether they can make themselves house-elves - or whether to kill werewolves on sight -"

"I didn't say enfranchisement was a complete solution."

"Maybe universal literacy and less - desperation - gets you the rest of the way."

"Not instantly, but yeah."

"There anything they're still wrong about in 2179?"

"Well, daeva rights are a work in progress but we don't have to take summons if we don't care to so it's not urgent. There's some neglectful behavior by lunar colony leaders that nobody's come up with a way to effectively police. I think they went a little overboard on the protections for animals thing but maybe that's just because I was born in 1987. People have not come to any kind of constructive agreement on certain matters of disability rights and integration."

"Protections for animals?"

"I mentioned it's not customary to eat things that used to be them."

"That could be 'you have to be sufficiently nice to them that conjuring's more economically efficient' or 'killing owls would be prosecuted as murder' -"

"Killing owls is not prosecuted as murder, but killing elephants or apes or cetaceans is, plus an environmental regulation charge. Some places protect corvids and cephalopods and monkeys and the parrot family that strongly too. It's not just more economically efficient to conjure your meat or eggs or dairy, it's outright illegal to farm animals for meat, milk too some places, eggs is okay most jurisdictions as long as you're exquisitely kind to the poultry."

"- wow."

"But it doesn't really matter if I think it's silly, I make everything I eat."

"And it's less uncanny than having the future just agree with me about everything."

"Yeah, that would be a bit odd."

"I was imagining trying to explain to some of my friends 'I met people from the future and by the future everyone has decided that it's completely obvious all varieties of people should have the same rights which is quite a lot of them, and the Statute is ridiculous and memory charms are terrible and slavery should be immediately abolished -'"

"Whereas in fact people have only come to this agreement about humans and maybe elephants but not daeva especially demons, let alone house elves who haven't even been brought up as a hypothesis..."

"- how do you miss it with daeva, that's not even complicated the way werewolves are -"

"What's complicated about werewolves?"

"Couple nights a month they turn into wolves and are very dangerous to everyone around them and if they bite you turn you into a werewolf yourself."

"...I'm not sure how that's more complicated than daeva."