"I vote we give everyone their memories and exclude any historical evil dictators. Aaaaaand possibly also the historical Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha because that would make a huge mess. Even more of a mess than there suddenly being an afterlife would cause already."

"Yes, I rather think Riddle and Grindelwald would cause havoc in any incarnation. . . . What is bothering you, mister Banner?"

Bruce looks up embarrassedly from staring at his own feet. "Uh. If everyone knows what's going on they're going to know that we designed the world and the responsibility is suddenly a lot scarier now that I realize it's going to happen to real people and I'm going to be accountable for it."

"It is a great responsibility, yes, but you cannot abdicate it. The three of us are the people available and it will only go better for you taking it seriously." 

Bruce swallows and nods seriously. At least he doesn't have to do this alone; that would be awful.

"You can't actually just say that everyone gets their memories back," the angel says, lips pressed together in annoyance. "My bosses have specifically prohibited this. You can include a mechanism by which someone can regain their memories, but it can't be so overwhelmingly convenient that there will be strong social pressure for everyone to do it."

"Is it because it tends to cause a mess, with people pursuing their past lives' grudges and freaking out about their religions being false and stuff? Or is there some other reason?"

"Can we have the existence of past lives and of a mechanism for recovering memories be common knowledge even if you have to go on some kind of quest to actually get the memories?"

"Yes," she says to Bruce. To Margaret: "It's because the society of Villarosa is supposed to be set up how the world-creation team sets it up, not how a bunch of settlers from earth would decide to arrange everything."

"Yeah, I guess you wouldn't want people trying to reorganize into their own countries and stuff. I guess I would be okay with a 'you can go on a quest to get your memories back' option."

"Which leaves the question of how to set up a world that fits the other criteria while being known to be very young."

"We could just tell the truth about the Will of the Multiverse. Unless they want to be secret from everyone but the three of us for some reason?"

"It's not that it's a secret, it's that it...would be breaking the fourth wall?"

"But it's going to be real life? I think I've lost track of how many levels of fake we're on."

"What is the maximum amount of transparency this Will will accept?"

"I know that it's real life, and you know that it's real life, and in theory the Will knows that it's real life, but policy does not always reflect that. If you want to have some kind of legend that isn't, strictly speaking, wrong, just kind of vague, that's been known to work..."

"I'm all right with fake legends if they're technically true."

"Technically true and not actively misleading in a way that will lead people to act unwisely."

"Yeah, that."

"I can definitely do that." She notes down relevant details. "It's been done before, the worldbuilding team is even capable of starting things a little early and having relevant legend features actually happen."

"Okay. In that case . . . "

When life death gets weird, there's always Greg Egan fanfiction to lean on.

"I have a weird idea but hear me out. What if the legend is that an AI or aliens or something made a giant server--like a Dyson sphere or something--and filled it with a virtual world full of people and magic and stuff and then cleared out? Not the most false, makes it easy for Margaret to be an AI because in a virtual world you can have whatever body you want, there can be tons of stuff in the world that nobody needs to have built, and immortality is easy because if someone dies you can restart them from their last backup and they lose some memories but they're otherwise fine. And you can set the physics on the outer layer to just Not have the second law of thermodynamics so the star will never go out and the server will run forever!"

"Wouldn't you eventually run out of space--no, wait, you could have locality and slow it down arbitrarily and no-one would notice because there's nothing going on in sidereal time to compare it to. I love it!"

"If that turns out to be within our design constraints I am going to want the idea of a virtual world explained in rather more detail. Is this similar to the muggle concept of 'MMOs'?"

"Sort of, yes, but instead of sitting at a computer controlling a game character it's like you *are* the character, and the character's body is your body and all the other characters are also people. From the inside it's exactly like living in a universe that happens to have magic such that you come back when you die and stuff, there's just, like, another layer of wrapper around reality that's a star surrounded by a giant computer."

"Goodness. I suppose if these 'universe molders' can create entire universes that wouldn't actually be harder."