Topological inversion (continued)

(continued from last post)

Note that large quantities of goods must often be transported to specific locations in A-side or B-side — to select a relevant example, shopping malls. Since A-side shopping malls must receive many goods, they can reduce the cost of transportation by installing a cross-boundary transport facility to receive them directly from B-side.

A B-side shopping mall, however, also has to receive many goods. Since B-side transportation is cheaper, it's going to act much like an ordinary real-world mall, receiving many large shipments.

(I seem to have kind of wandered away from the original point — all of this actually applies to a world-behind-the-mirror, too, assuming it's coherent enough to have an economy rather than running entirely on whimsy and/or madness.)

This sole bit of commonality between the two — receipt of many B-side deliveries — is probably sufficient to justify building an A-side and B-side mall in the same location. Not to mention that if they're owned and managed by the same company you get savings in administrative costs; construction is probably cheaper (only one structure to build); and individual stores can possibly be transboundary if they sell things that both worlds want to buy. (There almost certainly must be some such things; otherwise, in what worthwhile currency can A-side pay its transportation fees?)

So a shopping mall can, and probably will, exist in two worlds at once. (Whether this is 'any arbitrary shopping mall' or 'some specific shopping mall' is likely to depend on how long crossboundary travel has been available.) Consider the architecture of a mall that is intended to provide service to more than one world. For mirrors this is probably simple, since you would just have the same architecture duplicated and reflected, but a people-in-the-walls scenario is more interesting. One or the other of the two malls would probably be "underground" (likely the B-side mall, to make deliveries simpler).

(TBC: never mind day-to-day life, what does the world look like?)