Chapter 426: Refuge's Temporary Castle and a Dinnertime Conversation

Friday, July 25, 2008 (Continued)

In our Peoria Road and hilltop homes, Julia had designed my bedrooms and studies to ensure that any visitors would know how important (Julia thought) I was. They were usually referred to as "Mark's bedroom" because it only took a single glance for anyone to tell that they were primarily the bedroom of a male, although the viewers' opinions would change when they were far enough into the bedrooms to see the contents of the en-suite or closet. It had briefly - VERY briefly - occurred to me to make my bedroom in Refuge a very modest one. After all, visitors would have most of their memories wiped when they left so what was the point of having something fancy? The point was self-preservation because Julia would kill me if I didn't have the most overwhelmingly impressive bedroom imaginable, and then she'd redesign it anyway. To make her happy with my initial efforts, and out of self-preservation, I'd gone over the top in designing my own.

Imagination and practicality were the only constraints on my design. Unfortunately my imagination isn't good at thinking of truly original ideas, but I quite enjoy adding nuances to other people's. One idea I'd seen and liked many times in the past, and which I thought would be grandiose enough to keep Julia happy, was the common fantasy image of a castle floating in midair, so that's what I'd done.

The castle itself was magnificent:

• It wasn't made of the old, dark stones that aged castles look like these days, but of white marble that glistened in the sunlight. It even glistened somewhat more than was natural.

• The top ten feet of the walls and their crenellations, the top ten feet of each tower, and the stone framing for the main gate, were all made of black marble that glistened like obsidian, because that made a dramatic visual contrast.

• The roofs of the main buildings inside the walls, as well as the caps on the top of the four corner wall towers, were either dark red or burgundy, depending on your gender (the males not yet having learned any new names).

• It had many colorful flags and banners that flew from the high points.

• The walls at the rear of the castle and their two towers were much taller than the front wall and towers, permitting the internal buildings - which were built very high - a view over the wall in the front and all but the rearmost sections of the sides.

• The castle was on a floating 'island' two miles by two miles in size, with the castle in the middle. Facing the front of the castle, down its right side was a cliff that dropped fifty feet to the 'ocean'. That ended less than a mile away so it wasn't much of an ocean, although it acted like one. A deep forest ran across the hilly rear of the castle because I like natural forests. It thinned out and became gardens and open land coming down the left side of the castle and across the front, except where the small river flowed out of the rear forest to form the moat and a lake in front of the castle.

• And a medieval fantasy castle obviously has to have fantasy creatures, so there were all sorts of them, from four red dragons circling overhead - color coordinated with the roofs to please Julia - two huge griffins guarding the gate, nine-foot tall troll-men patrolling the grounds inside the castle, with elf archers manning (elffing?) the battlements. The staff inside the castle were my versions of pixies - three-and-half-foot tall males and females; aged from teenagers to elderly, depending on the seniority of their positions. The teenage female pixies were VERY cute, friendly, and interestingly dressed. Even the young male pixies were handsome, although more completely dressed. The only non-pixie staff member was the chief cook, a very fat and jolly human woman. None of the creatures were real, their bodies and minds being my creations. I was particularly proud of the cute ones.

I'd teleported us to a spot a couple of hundred yards in front of the castle, to give everyone a good view of it.

Once they'd had a few seconds to take it in, I said, "I had a feeling that Julia would like my bedroom to be impressively masculine, and I thought this might fit that bill. It's not just a bedroom but a repeat of our Kids' House as every room in the castle is functional, although for most of them it's just for visual effect..."

I was interrupted by a fanfare of trumpets as my household troops marched out to provide us with an honor guard back in. All very silly really - certainly over the top as a doorbell - but if my girls didn't like it, it was easy enough to change.

I took my families inside and gave them the Grand Tour. I explained that I'd built distance distortion fields into the long hallways and staircases, so they looked normal, and walking near either wall was normal, but the closer to the center a person walked, the more the distance shrunk. Walking in the exact center would require only three or four steps to traverse every hallway or staircase, regardless of its length. The location of a group walking together was deemed to be that of the slowest person. That trick made walking around the very large castle far more convenient than it would've been otherwise. Teleportation still worked if the person commanded it, but some people might prefer walking.

The rooms we'd use most of the time were in the top level of the main building, with the master bedroom and my study in two different towers. That way all our rooms got great views of the castle's grounds and of the land it was flying over.

I must have overdone the masculinity - what with all the weapons and shields hanging on the walls, the giant bear skins on the floors, etc. - because I could sense that my girls weren't enamored of my creation, so I said, "Obviously there's no way I'd deprive my ladies of the pleasure of designing and decorating our new home on Refuge, so don't take the castle seriously. It's half intended as a joke, and half intended to show you that almost anything you can imagine is possible. We'll use it while you're working on its replacement, after which I'll probably convert it to a mobile lab and use it to store specimens for Ava's research into the ecology of this planet.

^-- "One of the rooms a couple of levels down is an architects' studio for you." It was now; it hadn't existed a few seconds ago. "It will provide copies of any books and magazines you want, can build 3D models of any ideas you've got, and can help in many other ways too. Remember that if you can picture what you want in your own mind, then you can use telepathy to send it to each other and to the studio's mind. I look forward to seeing what you come up with."

"Are you sure you don't mind?"

"I'd only mind if you put up with something you weren't happy with. Plus I know what a thrill you'll get being able to create whatever you can imagine."

[The Marks in other dimensions made sure to give the "It's a half-joke, half-imagination lesson, it'll do until you've designed our final place" introduction before they showed the castle to their families, to stop the girls being bashful about wanting to change it. I knew it'd take them months to finish my new bedroom, so I'd still get plenty of enjoyment out of my castle. Even when my girls had designed what they wanted, I could still keep the castle for myself and to entertain my male friends in. (Have I mentioned that the young female pixies are VERY cute?)]

^

Leaving my castle behind, I took them to the only other rooms that mattered in the main mansion: Refuge's Kitchen and Dining Room.

Having learned my lesson, before showing them the kitchen's facilities I made the point, "As you've probably noticed by now, I'm not a female. Consequently I've never paid much attention to the design of kitchens. Obviously you can change whatever you want to change, no matter how minor or major."

The two moms assured me it looked like a fantastic kitchen, which just meant that they hadn't looked closely enough to come up with a long list of changes yet.

I explained the kitchen's key feature: "There are several different ways of getting meals in Refuge, ranging from your doing all the work through to your doing none of it:

^-- "You can cook like you do at home using the ingredients that are already in stock. The normal mode of the house is to replace everything that runs out, whether it's your perfume, fruit in the fruit bowl, or anything you use in your cooking, so grocery shopping is optional. You can also ask the house to provide you with any new ingredients you want for your cooking, such as a new spice, several Maine lobsters, or even a pre-roasted chicken scaled up to the size of a cow. I'm going to add some of that functionality to our Corvallis homes too, so our fruit and vegetables will always be on the point of perfect freshness. You're going to be surprised at the range of food we have available now, because the Universe offers some amazing possibilities.

^-- "This house can do none, part of, or all of the cooking. Doing none or all of it is self-explanatory. There are a couple of different ways you can take advantage of it doing part of the work. It can simply be a convenience, such as having the house peel the potatoes, make a sauce, or put the roast in the oven if you're not going to be home in time yourself. Or you and it can work together, which is a good feature if you want to learn how to cook a new dish. You can get the house to cook while it provides you with a running commentary and answers your questions. As I did in my floating castle, you can have the house personified as staff to give you someone to talk to, or you can keep it as a disembodied 'ghost' that will fly ingredients, knives and pots around magically. If you embody it, it doesn't have to be the fat, jolly woman I had in my castle's kitchen. It could be copies of yourselves, a host or hosts from TV cooking shows, or even George Clooney and Sean Connery (Mom's and Vanessa's half-joking heartthrobs). I can copy anyone's personality and tweak it so they enjoy and are good at cooking for you.

^-- "Easiest of all is simply to ask the house to create meals ready to eat. It has sent copies of its minds to thousands of restaurants, caterers' kitchens and private homes all over the world, and now has over a hundred thousand Earthly dishes memorized, from PBJ sandwiches on freshly baked bread through to multiple course banquets. There's a menu system I'll show you when we have dinner, and we can order individually or share the same meal. I'm also compiling a huge list of alien foods which are compatible with our biology and which I'm guessing we might enjoy the taste of. We can try some samples some time, but I suggest we have a less exotic dinner tonight as most of our attention will be on our conversation. Speaking of dinner, isn't it about time for that?"

When I said that the fruit and vegetable would always be fresh, that wasn't because I was manipulating Time in any way. I'd simply memorized the look, down to the molecular level, of perfectly ripe food. If it sat in the bowl for a few hours without being eaten, I'd cancel it and recreate a new one from my memory. I was actually lazier than that, only doing the 'work' when one was picked up, but that'll give you the idea. I also improved them in various ways, such as apples not having cores, fruit not having annoying seeds, meat being perfectly marbled with the best tasting fat content, etc., but those are all trivially easy and fairly obvious changes, once a flexible mindset is adopted.

I'm also memorizing all the alien foods I discover that are biologically compatible with humans. I haven't got around to it yet, but I'll create copies of each of my loved ones soon but with my minds in them, and then they (or I?) will taste the foods to see which ones are preferred as I haven't yet learned how to predict that. Even taste-testing won't be perfectly accurate because psychological factors can have an influence - I don't care how tasty any of them are, I'm not eating anything's eyeballs! I expect the exercise will find some wonderfully delicious new foods for us, plus others which are enjoyable mainly because they'll have tastes we've never experienced before.

The mothers had more questions about the kitchen, and they even got the house to rearrange the contents of a few cupboards, but we were eventually sitting at the dining table where I explained how to use the individual menus. Using the version of telepathy that I'd given them made it very easy for each of them to specify search terms to the kitchen's mind, inspect pictures of the meals, get tiny samples created on a toothpick for a sample taste, choose serving sizes, etc. It was internal and silent so we didn't intrude on each other's awareness and the kitchen's mind easily had enough capacity to talk to all of us simultaneously. Telepathy is quite handy.

There was a great deal of dinnertime conversation, mostly about the miracles I could perform and my future plans. As one example, my creating the food for dinner led to the obvious question about my feeding all the people in the world who're starving to death.

"I could easily materialize enough food for them - not even needing to start with loaves and fishes - but I have no intention of doing so. Making humanity dependent on me would be very bad for it and wouldn't please me much either. There wouldn't be any stopping point for solving people's problems and the dependency would eventually become total. I favor approaches that encourage humanity to solve its own problems. That's not ideal for the people that need help in the short term, but it's what must happen for medium- and long-term reasons. From my point of view, I don't feel that I owe humanity anything, but I do want to help it help itself. Top-down encouragement is so much better than giving handouts to individuals. Apart from anything else, with infinite power comes not just infinite responsibility but infinite guilt, and I have no wish to accept that burden.

^-- "I'm prepared to kick humanity's ass over many issues, such as starvation being fixable if greed is managed properly, and rapacious greed shouldn't be allowed at all. I can teach that using visiting aliens, me in the guise of some sort of god, scientific breakthroughs that give insights into the effects of that greed, and several other ways..." I described those methods in more detail to my families, more or less as written about earlier.

^-- "Once a decent amount of selflessness has been learned, I'm sure humanity will solve many of its own problems. The world can easily produce enough food to feed everyone. That people starve is initially just a distribution problem, which is just a matter of will and money. Selflessness will take care of that, as well as finding ways for those people to create above-subsistence lives.

^-- "I've been thinking about it quite a lot, and even though some of them must be disadvantaged by it, I intend to have a great deal of variation among the dimensions. Not just in how I teach lessons about selflessness, but even whether I teach them at all. I intend to let humanity's aggressive greed go unchecked in quite a few dimensions.

^-- "History has countless examples of societies wiping themselves out as a consequence of their non-sustainable practices, from Easter Islanders' destroying their much of their ecology through to the Roman Empire's success depending on the impossibility of never-ending military expansion. Humanity's current actions are non-sustainable in thousands of ways - so many and often so subtly that even I can't count them all - so it's in the same boat as the earlier self-destructive societies, although with the hope that science will somehow save the day, which makes our Government's anti-science stance an even greater folly." That is one of Bush's and America's greatest failures, in my opinion. Never has humanity as a whole needed science more, yet the president of the world's most 'advanced' nation (not intellectually advanced, obviously) advocates teaching 'science' from a 2,000-year old work of fiction, reduces R&D expenditures in all sorts of important areas, and deliberately damages science in a myriad of other ways. To make it far worse, a large proportion of our county's population are so ignorant and incapable of intelligent thought that they agree with him. God knows how people could be so stupid as to allow religion to be so dominant and destructive.