Chapter 425: Refuge's Williams' Bedroom and Some Unnecessary Apologies

Friday, July 25, 2008 (Continued)

The layout of Vanessa and Prof's single-level bedroom was obvious at first glance, so the females immediately set about exploring it.

Prof paused to joke, "I used to think you'd already shaken up our lives as much as possible, Mark, but you caught me flatfooted by giving me my leg back and making my becoming a father again possible. The reincarnation possibilities are even stranger."

"There are EVEN stranger options, Prof. Donna loves the idea of having one of her minds inside a pegasi foal, but their minds are quite humanlike and their lives are simple and easily comprehended. I could do something much more exotic for you. I could insert a copy of your mind into a technologically advanced but truly alien species, one that has a totally 'alien' perspective on reality. If you think understanding females is hard, you should try experiencing some of the species I'm studying now."

"I don't know about going that far, but I'd very much enjoy a much more thorough version of that quick jaunt you took us on."

"That's easily provided. I can make a duplicate of your mind keeping the two of you linked, then one of mine can spend as long taking yours around the Universe as you want."

"Just my mind; not my body as well?"

"Bodies would have to be hidden, protected from the environments, and they wouldn't fit into some of the small places I'd show you. Going without our bodies is far easier. I can make minds independent of bodies and then we can go almost anywhere. All I'll need to do is provide you with your own sight blob and a few other senses, depending on the situation. You'll find the whole experience very distracting so I suggest we wait for a day or two, and do it when there's nothing much going on around your original mind, perhaps while it's lying in bed one night.

^-- "By the way, one of the improvements I made to all of your bodies was to eliminate the need for sleep. You can fall asleep if you want to, but you no longer need to. Nor will the quality of your thinking diminish at the end of a long day because fatigue no longer accumulates. There are quite a few little changes like that, but it'll be easier to list them once when everyone is back together again, after the females finish their exploration."

Prof said, "I'd better join them, seeing as this is my room."

Dad asked, "Can you include me in the alien tour, please Mark?"

"Sure. I didn't know you were interested in things like that?"

"Not as much as you and Prof, but I'm still curious about them. From what you've said, there's no reason not to go, is there? I'll still keep doing whatever else it is that I'm meant to be doing, especially if you take us at night when we'd normally be asleep?"

"Yep, although you and Mom might be celebrating your regained youthfulness. You're going to find that you're both much more energetic than you used to be. That's going to pay dividends in the bedroom."

"I can already feel that I've got more energy. We're amazingly lucky to be your parents."

"There's been a HUGE load of luck involved in all of this. So much for your and Mom's lesson that we get what we deserve out of life. I don't know what someone would have to do to deserve becoming God of the Universe, but it's for damned sure that I didn't do it. That's not gonna stop me from taking full advantage of it though."

The females returned, gushing as they came. They were once again impressed by my skillful interior decorating. I may be a god, but I'm a male one, so I sidestepped the risk of a boring discussion about that by saying, "Thank you. It doesn't really matter as I expect you to think of your own changes. You can experiment as much as you like just by asking the house. We should go outside now to see the grounds." I opened the door and led the way.

Given my attitudes to both decorating and furnishing - which are just as bad as each other, if not worse - I thought the grounds were the best part of Vanessa and Prof's bedroom. By itself, the bedroom isn't anything particularly unusual, other than it not having any other rooms connected to it. It's roughly square shaped, with three sides of the bed part of the bedroom being mostly glass. The fourth side is behind the headboard, and contains the closet and en-suite. Like every other room in Refuge, it has better-than-top quality building materials, wall coverings, drapes, light fittings, etc., as well as the same sort of 'magical' tricks that Mom and Dad's bedroom has. It has some semi-magical tricks too, such as their bedroom mind's learning their preferences for things like whether the Williamses prefer to wake up to the view or have the drapes still closed. It wouldn't even matter if they have different preferences since their bedroom's mind can send different images to each of them. The Williams' bedroom is built on the southern side of a low, slightly sloped hill, which is now covered with highly fertile topsoil. I've done some landscaping so there are several acres of different styles of garden all around the bedroom, but when they're lying in bed, Vanessa and Prof's primary view will be a large rose garden, roses being a particular love of Vanessa's.

The two exterior walls of the en-suite are floor-to-ceiling, super-clear glass, as there's no one else on Refuge to worry about having privacy from. Calling the walls "glass" is an easy description, but not really true as the walls aren't real walls. They're invisible forcefields, not created by me personally the way my NP forcefields are, but by a technological trick I picked up from another civilization. They resemble glass though, so Vanessa and Prof will think they are unless they look very closely. The spa bath and large shower are both built against the external 'walls' so their users will almost be part of the flower garden that's planted around that corner of the building, especially as I've engineered the walls to allow the scent of the flowers to permeate into the en-suite.

Outside of Vanessa and Prof's bedroom are many paths meandering through the garden, seats in its nicest spots, little streams, some open picnic areas, etc. I took the families around some of them, while instructing Vanessa on how she could look after several acres of garden. "I took a guess about what you'd like to see in your garden, but I'm sure there are many ways you can think of to make it better suit your taste, whether planting some pansies beside the path or creating a large fountain with Michelangelo's David standing in the middle of it.

^-- "You can make the house do as much or as little gardening work as you want. If one day you decide you want to move the locations of the ponds, which would be a great deal of very physical work, tell the house and it'll do it for you. As that example implies, you can make any changes you want. You can wipe everything that's here already and start from scratch if you want. The house could create an entirely new planet for you if you asked for one, so no amount of gardening work is going to make it sweat. You can use the house to reshape the hills, to pick up leaves, and everything in between.

^-- "It's up to you how much time you want to spend working in the garden, and whatever needs to be done beyond what you've managed the house will do for you. You might want to order it to be a little tardy with some of that work, so it provides you with some motivation if catching up on needed gardening would give you some satisfaction.

^-- "You can also have as many copies of yourself involved as you want. If there's a large project that you'd enjoy doing so you don't want to delegate it to the house, but it needs to be done quickly, then ask the house to create a dozen Vanessas for you. You might only be able to manage links to two or three of them at a time, but in some existential sense you might think it's better to have the Vanessas enjoy themselves on a big job than have the house do it instantly, even if the Vanessas get canceled later in the day.

^-- "Another thing you might want to do is when you're in DC and you're feeling office bound, ask your bodyguard to create a linked duplicate of yourself in your Refuge garden so you can vicariously enjoy its gardening. Or you can send yourself to Refuge and have the duplicate take over the MAF work from you. It doesn't matter which way around you do it, as the indirect experience you get from your copy - or it gets from you - can be made more real just by concentrating on it more or by asking your bodyguard to make it so.

^-- "I previously told you that the access to Refuge was through the elevators at our home. It's best for visitors that way as it's discreet, but it's not a required rule. If you want to do something else like create a duplicate of yourself in Refuge from DC, then that'd be perfectly fine. What would not be fine would be asking your bodyguard to do something like create multiple duplicates of yourself in the middle of Corvallis, or any other showing off; that comment being mostly aimed at the younger members of my audience. Your bodyguards will refuse if you ask for anything like that. And when it gets you alone, it'll probably put you over its knee and spank your bottom."

"Can we ask it to help someone?" asked Carol. "Because that help might be noticeable."

"Helping others is an issue that's worried me too. I'm already giving each of you all the help you need, plus even more benefits, so obviously helping others is possible. My current thinking is that I don't intend to help anyone outside of this group, other than the possible inclusion of The Boys. There might be a few exceptions, such as if Nevaeh got a call from her parents one night saying they were trapped in their house and it was on fire. I'm willing to arrange help for our very close friends if it can be done secretly, but I don't think I should do any more than that because I think it would harm humanity.

^-- "I've thought about doing experiments on the Earths of three different dimensions. I'd create bodyguards for every person. In one dimension the bodyguards would save them from everything which could physically harm them. In the second dimension it'd save them from accidents or malicious actions of other people, but not from their own deliberate foolhardiness. In the third dimension the bodyguards would be like the second type, but only if they could prevent the problem in a way that looked natural. Then we'd wait several years to see what happened.

^-- "My guess is that human societies on all three Earths would become total disasters. I also briefly thought about having a fourth experiment in which only a random 10% of the people got a bodyguard, but that'd so obviously lead to jealousy, anger and then violence, that I gave up on the idea immediately."

"Why would the first three be disasters?" asked Ava.

"Because the vast majority of humans are greedy. Greed isn't always a bad thing because it motivates us to try harder, but you know greed also causes many problems too, especially when people feel safe from retaliation, which they would if they had one of my bodyguards looking after them.

^-- "If I gave bodyguards to those Earths, too many of those people would want more of whatever they value: money, power, etc. They'd abuse the gift for personal gain, such as by robbing banks knowing they couldn't be shot or injured. There'd be other people who'd try to study and control their bodyguards. There'd be religious leaders who'd try to take credit so they could gain status, power and money. There'd be all sorts of greedy behaviors like those.

^-- "You should realize that bodyguards are an EXTREME gift. Every time someone shot a gun at someone else, the victim's bodyguard would save them. That would be infallibly repeatable over and over again, and people would get seriously freaked out by it and by all the other ways bodyguards would have effects. There'd be religious riots and wars. I'd be protecting people, so the conflicts would be very strange ones because people wouldn't die, but the attackers would very quickly adapt to that. They'd target infrastructure rather than people as a way of stopping the supply of food and water so people would start to starve to death. The bodyguards would have to respond by doing more than just defending people, such as supplying food and water, and no doubt medical help too when the attackers started using bioweapons or dirty bombs.

^-- "Before long, passively defending people wouldn't be enough, and I'd be forced to control the attackers. That's much more complex than it seems because people often attack out of necessity, or with moral justifications like self-defense or the belief that pre-emptive self-defense is necessary even if it's not, or with honestly good intentions that have been corrupted because someone has given them false information. Motivations are rarely one-dimensional; greed, revenge, misunderstandings and many others are often mixed in and then complicated by information being so distorted, which would make it extremely difficult for me to judge what to do. Stopping an attack might be a bad thing to do, but letting it go ahead might also be a bad thing because situations are often so messed up that no good can come out of them. I'd be forced to choose though, which would make me responsible for the consequences. I'd be forced to take more and more responsibility, and to exert more and more control to live up to it. After a while, I'd be the unwelcome, unwanted, invisible dictator of those planets, and everyone would hate what had happened to their world. As Dad would say if Mom wasn't listening, it'd be a clusterfuck.

^-- "Despite that risk, I do sometimes help people. I occasionally visit hospitals invisibly and if I find a VERY good person, then I might adjust their body so they recover from whatever's wrong with them. But that occurs only in secret and very rarely. I can't do it often because it'd be noticed and I'd have to stop it or something like what I described would happen with the bodyguard experiment could develop.

^-- "So, in answer to your original question, Carol, if any of you asked your bodyguard to help someone else, for the greater good it'd almost certainly have to refuse."

Vanessa said, "I agree. If you exercised power to help random people then you'd be taking on a responsibility that could easily become quicksand. You could achieve far more good by inventing a cure for cancer. I assume you could do that?"

"I can remove cancer cells with my mind so I've not yet bothered to learn a pharmacological way of doing it. Researching things like that is on my list of things to do in preparation for Julia's finishing her BBA."

Ava said sorrowfully, "What a pity you couldn't do that a couple of years ago."

"Yeah, it's a VERY big pity. I won't normally help people, but I certainly would've helped your parents the moment I'd seen there was something wrong with them.

^-- "Your parents are also one of my biggest temptation to manipulate Time. I can't risk it because there's a very real danger that I could break the entire Universe and kill everybody, but I'd love to be able to bring your parents back if I could. I'm sorry, Ava, but there's no hope of that happening." I could look back in the past to see their bodies, so could easily recreate those, but couldn't do that for their minds because my access to information like that only exists in the present. (I mention more about this topic in a later chapter.)

"None?"

"I'm afraid not, sweetie."

"Could I meet them if I died?"

"Unfortunately not. That door is closed to you because there's nothing after death. When people die, their minds die. There's nothing left afterward." I know what minds are, and I can effectively 'see' them, as the Universe shows me what it's doing at that level. I've seen what happens to minds when their owners die, and all that happens is that they die too.

Carol and Julia gave Ava hugs, while I changed the subject with, "If we walk up this little hill we'll be able to see Prof and Vanessa's study. I've placed your study within walking distance of your bedroom. There's an easy path between them but we've come the wrong way for that so we'll cut over the top of the hill instead. You can teleport to it just like any other room, but I thought you might enjoy having a little walk through the garden to it. If not, or if you'd like it to have a different type of view, you can tell the house to move either room, as I'm sure you understand by now.

^-- "Vanessa, speaking of moving buildings, I should mention that your garden comes equipped with a very cooperative garden shed. If you want to work in an area of the garden, tell the house and the shed will appear somewhere handy. The house's attention extends outside, so if you're anywhere near a building, the house will hear you. Your bodyguard can always relay messages too.

^-- "If there's more than one gardener, each of you can have your own shed, and they'll disappear again after you've finished with them. They contain all your tools, gloves, etc. If there's anything missing, just ask for it. There won't be any pesticides because you don't need them on Refuge, and if you instruct the house to optimize the growing environment, you won't need any fertilizers or similar products either. If you want to alter the weather and soil conditions that a plant or area of plants experiences, talk with the house about it. Each species is getting a tailored program at the moment, so you might want to review that with the house at some stage."

Julia asked, "Do we talk with our bodyguard out loud the same way we talk with the house?"

I was amused at the accuracy of one of my expectation: that Julia would be the first of my families to get into the swing of ordering my minds around. "The short answer is yes. There's another alternative that I'll tell you about after we've checked out your parents' study," as we had just arrived there.

^

Prof and Vanessa's study was just a somewhat bigger and better looking version of their study at home, without having any real functional difference. They'd put everything they wanted into their Corvallis study, so I'd pretty much just copied that functionality. At Corvallis, Prof's and Vanessa's computer systems had their own peripherals to avoid one of them delaying the other, but there was no need for that here. I explained, "There's no need for a printer because when you click the 'Print' button for a document, the stack of pages will appear almost immediately somewhere handy to you. Exactly where depends on how cluttered your desk is. If you print multiple copies, there'll be multiple piles; stapled or bound if you tell the house you want that too. The house will never run out of paper or ink, so that'll save you some inconvenience.

^-- "There's no scanner either. Just hold up some pages or a book, and tell the house, 'Scan these, ' or 'Scan pages 100 to 200.' A window will popup on your computer's screen asking you for the usual folder and file name information. As soon as you've entered that, the file will be ready for you.

^-- "If there's one thing my abilities make me very good at, it's duplication, so photocopying is even easier. Just tell the house what you want copied and it'll do it for you instantly. There's no size restriction, and for no extra charge it'll do full-color copying, collating, stapling and binding. It can do better than photocopying, as you might have noticed by all the books in this room being the same books as you've got at Corvallis, even down to having the same notes you've written in the margins. If you want to lend someone a copy of one of your books, tell the house to make an exact duplicate of the book, so you won't have to worry about getting it back.

^-- "Whenever you encounter any sort of problem, ask the house if it can think of a solution. For example, Prof, your books sometimes have their margins crammed with notes. If you need more room than the margins provide, the house can insert white space into the text, as if the book were a Word document and you inserted some blank lines in it. If it later duplicates that book so you can lend it out, it'll revert the copy to its original form with your notes being placed on loose pages inserted into the appropriate places.

^-- "Another duplicating function that might be useful is that you can tell the house to duplicate publications that meet criteria that suit you, from PhD theses printed anywhere in the world, through to each month's issue of Playboy, or in Dad's case, The Lawn Care Digest..."

"I can get my magazines that way too?" asked Julia eagerly, because she gets a crazy number of fashion magazines, i.e., more than none.

"Of course. Tell the house what publications you want, and you'll have each one as the first few of that issue are rolling off the press."

All the girls were excited by that prospect. They often complained about how long it takes some issues to get to them: "How can we stay up to date with the latest fashions if the important magazines take two weeks or more to arrive!" The way I'd deliberately described it, my girls would not only be up to date, they'd be ahead of almost everyone else. Here at last was a seriously useful benefit from having a boyfriend who was a god! Being a fairly smart god, I kept that comment unvoiced.

I added, "I can provide two additional services for you. I can either translate all your foreign magazines into English, or I can make you fluent in as many languages as you want. I could do that instantly, but I generally prefer to accelerate your normal learning process."

I may "generally prefer" the non-instant approach, but the girls were very eager to immediately understand French, Italian and even Japanese. They've repeatedly told me that Tokyo is an important fashion capital. Now that I'm a god, that still makes no sense to me since Japanese girls look so different from European-descended girls, although I must admit that Julia does look surprisingly Japanesey (Japaneseish? Japanic? Sheesh! One of these days I'm going to do something about this stupid language.)

Despite the debatable importance of Japanese fashion, and the undebatable importance of French and Italian fashion, I answered my girls request that I immediately give them mastery of those languages with, "When I said 'I generally prefer to accelerate your normal learning process', I meant 'generally' to mean 'unless there's an emergency.' Even though you probably think otherwise, so you can read your fashion magazines isn't an emergency. If you want to learn foreign languages, do what everyone else does and I'll make sure you pick it up several times faster than normal. You still have to make the effort."

"But..." butted Julia.

"No buts, Julia," I rebutted. "You know that instant gifts wouldn't be good for you for a whole variety of reasons. You've got LONG lives ahead of you and you need challenges. You'll enjoy learning together, including Prof if he wants to learn Modern and Renaissance Italian. If you learn those, Prof, you'll be able to read the original manuscripts of the historical mathematicians you're interested in. I can provide perfect copies of those, and could even translate them for you, but I imagine you'll enjoy reading the originals more. Now you all have as much spare time as you want to pursue your hobbies.

^-- "Before we get into upgrading you with abilities that other people will notice, let me say a few general things. First, I should apologize that I've done things that I should've asked your permission for first. Changing the sight blobs I had watching you into bodyguard minds gave them more information of a private nature, and even more rudely, I've been making and canceling duplicates of you and I did more than I implied when I improved your bodies..."

"No one cares, especially not the way I feel now," said Prof, confidently putting his new foot down.

Proximity told me that no one else minded either. If anything, they thought I was being silly; being the only guy living with several girls, I've had quite a lot of experience at identifying that emotion in most of them, Nevaeh being the only one that almost never feels that way about me. She seemed too accepting of everyone else expressing it now though, so maybe the recent changes I'd made to her might not work out as well as I'd first hoped. Perhaps I'd been better off in some ways when hiding behind the Christian God.

"I'll continue anyway, because there's some new information I want you to know included in what I'm intending to say.

^-- "The bodyguard minds don't share anything they learn with any other of my minds, except in the case of an emergency or your requesting they pass a specific message on. They're like highly discreet butlers, so if you have a conversation with your bodyguard and then continue the talk with me later, I'll have no idea what you're talking about." I could easily have the bodyguard send me his memories of the conversation, but I thought it'd reassure my families to see that I didn't follow those conversations. Maybe in a few years it won't be an issue anymore, and then I can make our interactions more efficient.

^-- "When I started using sight blobs to watch over you, we agreed that they wouldn't observe you inside our home property, but now that bodyguard minds are much more discreet and can do so much more for you, I'd like permission for the bodyguards to watch over you 24/7. You can decide individually..."

"You don't have to ask me Mark; do whatever you think best," said Nevaeh.

Everyone else agreed, and I came in for some teasing for being so cautious in the way I'd asked them.

"Thanks everyone for trusting me. You'll..."

"{Raspberry}," from Julia. "Of COURSE we trust you! When have you ever done anything selfish."

<A few minutes ago when I tweaked Nevaeh's mind, even if it was for her benefit as well as mine. But moving on... >

"I live with four wonderful lovers - five now, counting Donna - which some guys..."

"That's not selfish; that's deserved. You should have a LOT more than five! We need to do something about that because five is a ridiculous number for someone as incredible as you are now. What about Alondra in my study group?"

"I've already got several hundred billion girlfriends."

"What! Oh yeah, but that's just other versions of us and you said there's a trillion of you, so that's a TERRIBLE average. The other Julias and I DEFINITELY have to do something about that."

"Except that averaging is the wrong approach. Remember that each of my minds experiences everything all the others are - except for bodyguards and house minds - so I'll often be making love to tens of millions of girls at the same time. I've selfishly got an incredible quantity AND quality already. Not to mention that now we can make as many duplicates of each of us as we want, so I expect some pretty wild sessions to result from that. How'd you like to have half a dozen Marks in bed with you?"

"It'd KILL me!"

"No problem. I'd take a copy of your mind just before it blew up; then I'd recreate you, give you a minute's rest, and we could do it all over again. It'll be amusing to see how many Julias we could get through in a single night."

"Haha. I think I'd go insane before the night was up."

"We'll put that plan on a temporary hold then. Back to the serious topic I was talking to you about, which was about the ways I was rudely playing fast and loose with all of you. My final point on the bodyguards being with you at home is that it means you can ask them to do things for you that normally get done at home. Cook meals, make beds, do laundry, or whatever. Changing the sheets on our bed at Corvallis is something we have to do quite often, but that'll no longer be the case. I'll tell my bodyguard to make sure the sheets are always fresh and clean, so we'll never have to change them again."

Ava asked, "You have a bodyguard too?"

"Nearly all my bodies have a bodyguard each. The bodyguards have had their minds changed so they're very dedicated, don't get distracted or bored, enjoy their job, etc., so it's easier for me to have a bodyguard looking after my body than consciously having any concern about its safety myself."

Prof asked, "I'm surprised the fate of your body matters to you. Couldn't you recreate it if it's killed?"

"Easily, and you're right that I don't care about my body for its own sake. My only concern is laziness: it's easier to stop an attack from happening than get everyone to accept that I'm still alive after an attack succeeded. That'd be an annoying amount of trouble. I like to be lazy if I can, which is why I'll be giving my bodyguard some standing orders for keeping the Kids' House spic and span.

^-- "Each of you can talk with your bodyguards about what you want. They're full-service bodyguards so you can ask them for anything. And just in case any young schoolgirls here think they'll be able to get their bodyguards to do their schoolwork for them when school restarts, then I'm not at all sorry to say that you'll have no such luck. The bodyguards are MY minds, and I wouldn't do that for you, so they won't.