On the fourth day, wanting to make a different form from my others, I adopted the traditional style of the genie, a spirit which had the upper half of a male human which arose from a cloud. The legless body simply flew or floated instead of walking, and by having only a cloud below the waist, naturally didn’t have sexual organs.
Mother continued to be delighted by my varied forms. After seeing that I could fly quite rapidly in this form, she asked me to choose a similar form the next day, and I chose a female version of the same form. She turned into the birdlike form, and rather than walking, we flew over the town as Mother explained more about things to me.
The land was split up into towns, with one Registry per town, and the town was limited to a region a walkable distance from the Registry. Multiple towns made up a city, and a city was defined by the space that one translator could cover, about 15 to 20 towns. And there were many, many cities, completely filling up all the land in the world. Each town was required to leave some open spaces, the parks that I had seen. Apart from those few open spaces, they’d populated the entire world with the same little two-room houses I had seen with room for a maximum of three people to live in but normally holding two.
“Isn’t it possible to pack houses closer together to fit in more people?”
“They tried it a long time ago, but the neighbors inevitably have different ideas how the land around them should look, and so they had to split people up. It’s hard enough to find two compatible people.”
I asked how big the world was, also, but Mother didn’t know. So after our trip was through, I did some figuring. They had, as far as I could tell, about 2/3 of Earth gravity, which allowed a human-sized Mother to fly with actual wing power. But gravity is tricky. It’s proportional to the mass of the planet, but inversely proportional to the square of the radius. If density was the same, this would mean gravity was proportional to radius cubed over radius squared, or just the radius. This was probably good enough for the very rough calculations I was doing. It means than this planet has about 2/3 the radius of the earth, or 4/9 the area.
Mother told me there are large areas of water people here don’t use, so I am assuming about the same proportion of land as Earth. One of the many figures we memorized for making estimates like this is that the Earth has about 500 million square kilometers of surface area, 30% of which is land, or 150 million square kilometers. So 4/9 of that is about 66 million square kilometers.
Unlike on Earth, where some of that land is under icecaps or in deserts where it is unusable, preserved in protected forests, used as farmland, or otherwise not used for housing people, here the people’s ability to wish the land into suitable conditions had let them use every last bit of it. A typical lot and the road space in front of it, and a small piece of the parks and registry of each town allotted to each property made about 700 square meters per property, which meant they had about 95 billion houses. And since they only filled the houses to 95% capacity, this meant about 90 billion couples or 180 billion people. Sheesh! And I was trying to suggest putting in more!
And they only visited the inventor about 10 times a day, which meant that the average person lived 18 billion days, which was for all essential purposes forever. About 50 million years. There must be people here who’d been around since people developed this wishing power, whenever that was.
But then I realized the flaw in this math. They probably had a period of unconstrained population growth which led to the law, and most of the people from that period were still alive. And the 10 gifts a day was probably what the inventor told Mother when she went there, but there might have been a time in the past when there were long lines waiting to drop off gifts.
But it was still probably the case that for the cost of changing bodies once a day, these people were immortal. And they should be omnipotent, also. Being able to make anything or turn their bodies into any material and shape should basically allow them to do anything. There’s no reason they couldn’t raise land over the oceans and put three times as many people in the world, if they aren’t somehow drawing their power from that exposed water.
“No,” I told myself. Unconstrained growth! Three times isn’t enough when the people could fill that in a week. The next step would be turning all the houses into skyscrapers, and a year later all the skyscrapers would be full and there would be literally nowhere left to put any more people. Clearly, they realized the reproduction that got them to this point was out of control and collectively agreed to put a stop to it while people still had room to live. And presumably the registry enforced that law somehow. They tracked where people lived, and controlled all the housing, so unregistered people would literally have nowhere to live. They could perhaps rove from one park to another, or visit one friend’s house after another, but such people would eventually be noticed.
But even ignoring their reproduction, what kept them from being literal gods? Or was this how gods lived, when everyone was a god and there were 180 billion of them? Nobody did anything to piss anybody else off because they feared a pissed off god would come and turn them into a turnip?
The next day, I went back to my strongman form but made him have green skin, and no genitals under the copious pubic hair. When I asked Mother about the law, she responded, “No. Just don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t even think of trying to break or work around the laws. We only have a few laws here and they are all we need.”
“OK, I’m listening.”
“First, you don’t mess around with other people or other people’s stuff. You can use their sand, or deposit excess sand there, if you are a guest there, as you use what we have here. Don’t go into other people’s houses just to do so, though. Use the sand piles in the parks if you need to.”
I nodded. She’d just confirmed my thoughts about those sand piles.
“Second, you don’t make more people without town permission. Period. You shouldn’t even make the organs for it without permission.”
I nodded again.
“Third, play fair with the registry. Tell them truthfully when you move to a new address, if someone else dies or leaves town, and if you are partnering or splitting up from your partner.”
When she didn’t say any more, I asked, “Is that all?”
“Yes. Those are the laws. If you break the laws, someone affected by it or who witnessed it may wish retribution on you. Wishing for retribution is always allowed, and someone who has not broken the law will not be affected. Otherwise, punishments described in the laws will be applied to you, and in some cases you may be unmade. If you break the second law and make more people, both you and your partner will be unmade. We very rarely see anyone unmade.”
It sounded like this was another aspect of the wishing. There was some concept of retribution which anyone could use to enforce the laws, with no penalty to you or the person it was wished upon if the retribution was undeserved. But actual breaking of the laws was punished somehow, up to capital punishment in some cases.
“How do people find partners?”
“You could just ask other people you meet, but most people do it on Singles Days. Twice a year on special dates we have parades. The people looking for partners stand at certain spots, and as the parade passes they join in for one lap all around town, and maybe you’ll find someone who interests you. If you find a match, you stay together for the rest of the day, and at the end of that day you can decide to officially partner and move in together, split up, or stay friends and maybe move in together later.”
“Do a lot of people choose the last option? It seems like a day isn’t very long to decide if you want to stay with someone forever.”
“Oh, it’s not forever. Some couples do, but others split up again later. In that case you might see both of them standing out on Singles Day both looking for new partners.”
That gave me something to think about. It wasn’t quite marriage, and never had anything she said translated that way in my head. It was a lot more like roommates, except that on rare occasions you and your roommate might be expected to have a child together. How rare, I wondered?
“How long have you and Father been together?”
“Oh, we got assigned together after the chaos, when the laws were established. That was about 500 years ago.”
“Was the chaos when people were having many children rapidly?”
“Yes. That was why we needed the laws. There were so many people we couldn’t find space to live, and there were many conflicts, people fighting and killing other people, people building houses on top of other people’s houses without asking permission, and lots of other stuff we don’t allow anymore. Somebody wished those laws into existence, and three days later wished retribution on the whole world, destroying all the people who made new eggs after the laws were created and announced to everyone. All the elders who survived took tribes of people to establish towns everywhere around the world. Those elders had to teach many of the new people things until they reached the point they could learn on their own.”
“And the elders just had to assign people in pairs because there were so many of you.”
“Yes. They tried other arrangements and found pairs worked best. Everybody learned how to pick bodies, make food, make houses, and everything all at once. Someone did the math and figured out how much space we could each have and still have some open spaces for people to switch around, and this is what we got.”
She paused for a moment here, thinking about something, and finally said, “I haven’t talked to you about math yet, but math is easy. For most things you can simply ask yourself whether it is true and you will know.”
I remarked, “So it’s like retribution. However the retribution wish knows who is guilty, but a wish you make to yourself about math lets you know whether the math statement is true.”
“Yes. Or the answer to the math if it’s not a true-false question.”
I thought to myself, “I wish I knew the total number of people in the world,” and the answer came into my head. It was a little less than I’d estimated, but still quite close for such a rough estimate: 164 billion, with all the digits after that down to the very last person. When I wished to know the number of eggs, I was shocked. 47. So my parents had been incredibly lucky to get selected, and most of the people living now had never had children. Also, it’s going to be hard to send ethertravelers here, if there are only 47 eggs at one time, which are probably only receptive for transfers during a short period.
This was the first time I’d thought about ethertravel specifically (as opposed to Earth and the people on it, which I’d thought about frequently) since being born here. I owed them a report about this world, once I figured out how to send it. I would have to wish an ethercommunicator into existence, but they taught me how to make one well enough that I should be able to do it once I honed my ability to make more complex things.
One of the eggs apparently hatched, since the number of eggs went down to 46 and the number of people increased by 1. I still had the numbers in my head. The wish didn’t simply give me the numbers, but permanently gave me the ability to know those numbers even as they changed.
A few days later, on one of our walks, Mother took me to the registry and there were flyers there for the next Singles Day parade in a bin labeled “take one” and she handed me one.
One side of the flyer had a map of the route, and the other side had the rules. A registry worker is going to lead the parade, carrying a ceremonial scepter which was pictured on the flyer, starting at the registry building. At midday, on a date which a wish confirmed for me was three days from now, all those looking to find partners were to line up along the road. If there were too many people in too small an area, you could stand in front of a neighbor’s house, if they had space, or a park. You also need to know the number from your address, or specifically whether it is even or odd. The worker is going to make three laps past all the parks and the registry building. During the first lap, he calls out “Evens, join me,” and if your address is an even number you follow the group as they finish passing you. During the second pass, he calls for the odds to join him and the evens return to standing. And during the third pass the odds leave the parade when they reach their starting points, and the parade ends for all the people at that location.
I worked out in my head that the three laps made it so that everybody got a chance to see everybody else. You made one pass by each location, and everybody who started at that location was either standing there or leaving or joining the parade at that point. And that lap was about 6 km, so it was indeed a good walk.
At any point during this, including possibly while socializing with the other people standing at your location, you and any other person could agree to pair up. To pair up with a person walking while you were standing or vice versa, you’d hold out your hand where the other could grasp it, or grasp a hand that was offered. For this reason, all the people walking were to keep about 2 meters apart, as were the standing people while the parade passed them, so it was clear which person someone was making an offer to. Once you paired up, you’d go to your house or your partner’s, whichever had more space, and you had to stay with that partner the rest of the day. Any time the next day you and your partner could come to a decision to move in together (in which case you’d visit the registry that day, or the next morning if you made your decision after they closed), or to split up and go back to your previous homes. If you couldn’t make a decision by the end of the second day, it was expected you’d sleep in your previous homes but agree to meet again to help decide.
If you were becoming a partner with someone who was living alone, the registry would assign you that house, or one of them if you were both alone. If you and your partner were already living with other people who were not also moving out, the registry would assign the two of you to an empty house. And if there were too many single people not pairing up after one of these parades, the registry would pair up some of the ones who had been living alone the longest in order to make space for the people who wanted to pair up. I guess that was fair. If they needed two people in most houses to have enough space, you couldn’t stay single forever, and this was encouragement to pair up.
We were also free to simply watch the parade, but had to do so from our house, or from one of the parks while standing back away from the street. I did watch from the house when it came time for the parade, figuring I still needed to learn more about this world before I chose someone else to live with, and there was a marvelous collection of bodies on display. I counted a total of 115 marchers on the three passes, so it was about 1% of the town looking to pair up, though I realized some couples could have paired up before they had a chance to march past my house.
I asked Mother afterward, “Do all those plants and animals that people’s forms are based on actually exist somewhere in the world?”
She replied, “No. Some people, like me, mix together parts of different animals. Even for the people who don’t mix parts, their animals or plants might not exist anymore. A lot of them died during the chaos. In some cases people wished them into housing or food, and in other cases they destroyed their habitats in making room for the people, but memories of the animals and plants that once existed were preserved in the forms that people assume. Even people born after they no longer existed sometimes take those forms from birth. It’s said that while you are in the egg, the moment you gain the power to wish you wish yourself knowledge of the forms people commonly take, and even then, people sometimes come up with original ideas for forms, like you did.”
I looked into my mind and realized that, even apart from the people I’d seen here, I did have that memory of common forms, probably from a wish my embryonic self had made before I’d arrived in this body. There were many forms that I hadn’t seen in town yet, but there was indeed no human among the forms.
But I also found I could wish for the knowledge of the plants and animals that once lived on this world, and got many, many more forms. Still no humans. I could, in my mind, match up the forms of the people with plants and animals and combinations thereof, and there were about 20 of the common forms people took that didn’t have clear matches. The original ideas, as Mother had called them.
In the time after this, I more and more often wished myself the knowledge of this world that I wanted, and depended on Mother for info less, though we still spoke. This let me learn things like the fact that even when I adopted a human female form with genitals, inside me, my body was adapted for making the eggs they produced here, rather than becoming pregnant with a human fetus. That made sense, that this essential aspect of the people here stayed constant to let us reproduce as a race, rather than bear children who would actually become the animals we often looked like. Likewise, when I had breasts, they were incapable of producing milk even if I had gotten pregnant and laid an egg. It was only the form of the body, and not the function.
It was difficult, but I eventually figured out how to wish to know about ethertravelers. There wasn’t a word here for it, but I was able to ask how many people here have minds that come from the world my mind comes from, and the answer was one. I’m the only ethertraveler to make it here. And with that low birth rate, maybe the only one who ever will. So no point in looking for anyone. When someone arrives, I’ll know, and I’ll be able to use similar wishes to find him.
The next Singles Day, I waited at the nearest park to join the parade in my female genie form, but instead of walking, I paired up with an adorable cat-person named Lina who was already walking. After visiting my parents to let them know, we went to Lina’s house, which was for the moment empty.
She (I thought of Lina in my mind as female due to the sleek, cat-like body, though I also knew she had no inherent gender) explained that she was a relative newcomer, only 71 years old, and for the last 32 years she’d been living with one of the 500-year-olds from the time of chaos, and wanted someone new. She was in particular attracted to me because I had an original form, and not one of the standard ones. And I told of how I was a newborn, not yet a year old, but also that I was well aware of the customs and history here.
Lina’s previous roommate Scorry ended up back there at the end of the day, but we set up a third bed and there was room for us all. Lina and I registered as a couple the next day, and Scorry was with us as well for the couple days it took before the registry reassigned him.
It wasn’t long after I moved in with Lina that I started experimenting with building an ethercommunicator, and in addition a small computer to write and read messages. When she asked about it, I truthfully told her it was for communicating with people from the stars, without going into any more detail. It took me only about 20 days to get it right, and I sent a brief report, which Earth acknowledged.
Over the next few days, I wrote out a more detailed one and sent it as well. With the likelihood of finding more ethertravelers arriving here almost nil, I settled down for a life like a god, together with my cat goddess roommate.
Earth confirmed my description of there being few births here with their own observation that they had never seen this planet pop up as a target since my ethertravel.
On December 12, 2601, an upset Gregorevich addressed the board.
I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of this Djinnworld shit. There is simply no way this can be real unless one of us is doing it. Why would it be Earth otherwise? We have enough history about enough worlds that if there were hundreds of copies of some other world that all got modified at some point in their history, we would have pieced them together.
I had a theory that one of our ethertravelers must have turned into a god somehow, and when he got bored he started making these modified copies of Earth. If that happened, there’s no guarantee he ever bothered to send in a report, but I went looking through all the unpublished reports anyway. They were unpublished for a reason. Some were believed to be hoaxes, some have so few children we might expect never to find targets there again, some have conditions where us sending in lots of ethertravelers would be disruptive, and there are various other reasons.
I found this one, the very first eel-forsaken report we received by ether communicator, since my report of the Eel World was #1. It was marked hoax, then that was crossed out and it was marked confirmed unreachable, and then everybody forgot about it and the planet was removed from the catalog of targets. But read this.
The board members read the report. It wasn’t very long, in comparison to the epics some ethertravelers sent back. But they agreed that this was a very likely candidate for the creator of the Djinn Worlds.
“So what do we do about it?” Gregorevich asked.
There was no consensus.
“If he has that kind of power, we really can’t stop him. At most, we could ask him to stop.”
“Why ask him to stop? He’s creating interesting targets for people to travel to. We could thank him.”
“Another important fact is that it seems he’s only starting well in the past. None of our personal information is accessible from these worlds because they branched off before any of that information existed. Likewise, ethertravel doesn’t already exist on these worlds because they come from well before it was invented here.”
“Good point. Another reason to thank him. He thought ahead enough to avoid a proliferation of uncontrolled ethertravel. We want to avoid having the whole galaxy reach the situation Earth is at now where there are no real new children because nobody ever actually gets pregnant anymore without lining up someone to pay them to use the new body, or doing it for a family member. There are people out there who know how to build an ethertravel device, but quite few of them, because they usually just take new bodies here.”
“I’m still opposed to thanking him. He tricked us into sending people to a bunch of fake worlds he made up. We have more viable Djinn World targets now than natural ones.”
When they stopped arguing for a moment, Gregorevich spoke again. “Since we can’t agree, how about we just publish the report? It will provide an answer to a mystery I’m sure a lot of people are wondering about.”
One of the board members called out, “Motion to publish this report.”
Gregorevich said, “Seconded.”
The motion passed by consensus and the report was published.