[b]Dolce![/b]

"That is the first and final problem of every government," said the Supreme Ruler of Earth. "What system of laws can endure a citizenry determined to destroy it? How can an Emperor's legacy survive a wicked heir? How can the dead force the living to be virtuous?"

She sipped her tea. Grimaced a little. But she took a breath, and the feeling passed.

"The problem is, always was, and always has been human nature. That is why our first act was to change it." She smiled a little. "Fortunately, we had several great teachers, and a starting population that had self selected for inner peace and nongrasping. We formed a maze of monastic centers and encourage those inclined to continuous movement to walk our winding paths. One of those paths passes through Jupiter, which you saw. The world we have built is a series of filters and mazes, a crucible that selects for kindness, empathy, contentment and joy."

She opened a palm expressively. "To maintain it, we have sacrificed the virtues of privacy, property and autonomy. Every citizen is surveilled. Every citizen is subject to the complete upheaval of their life if we so will it. If we observe a citizen spending days at a time inside, brooding in the dark, we dispatch an agent to deal with it. We will assign this person a roommate, or an adventure, or a nemesis. We will kick down their door and drag them to a mountaintop monastery or a foreign land. We will break or reassign all of their possessions to teach them that all things are transitory. If they object, they may curse us, and we will bear it. If they truly object, they can climb the mountain and join our ranks - but this is simply another maze." She chuckled. "Oh, the wrath in my heart when I seized this crown! [i]I could do better![/i] And I did! But they have such a way of making you appreciate the [i]scale [/i]of the problem."

She leaned back in her chair thoughtfully. "We pay a lot of attention to the Princesses, because they are militarily relevant, but the emotional intensity of their game always burns out and settles down once it has had its fill. The truest weak point for our society is the Ministry of Curses, but the recruitment for that is extremely exacting - all of its members need to have tasted failure absolute, hit rock bottom, and pulled themselves out. Beyond that, we have mazes besides... there are those who obsess over failure points in our system and climb the mountain, then spend their years designing new mazes to be used in certain hypothetical situations. How would we react if a demagogue was to arise? How would we react if a population boom created new scarcities? If we had to accept refugees from outside our system? If the ecology collapsed? We have monasteries ready for sins that have not even been developed yet. We try our best. But in the end..."

She smiled. "All things pass. And that's it, isn't it? We can not and will not endure forever, and in time even this little garden will fail and die. We cannot even say that what comes after will not be better. We cannot grasp infinity, and we would damn ourselves if we tried. The best defense, then, that we can offer against our heirs and usurpers and children is to teach them that same lesson before we pass power on to them."