And a Fridge Horror emerged. I have an idea what'd happen, but what do you guys think would happen if a Puella Magi was pregnant just before Witchification/Law of Cycles? Assuming we're not going for the "womb no longer works" logic.
The same thing that happens when a pregnant woman dies by any other means.
Let the joy of love give you an answer! Check out my book!My guess would be that the baby would just die. Ultimate Madoka's powers have only been shown to affect magical girls and there's no reason to assume that she could directly affect muggles.
Let the joy of love give you an answer! Check out my book!That;'s true, but that's not all. They don't feel fear. They also have had no selective pressure to be risk averse. Quite the opposite in fact as risks have benefited them and have never had a permanent deleterious effect on their reproductive capabilities.
Yes, but as I said, none of that has ever slowed down their abity to produce, so they would have never evolved to be risk averse.
The example that I gave is a meguca wishing for a supernova fireworks display, since by contracting with the meguca the Incubator ultimately ends up with less energy than it started with.
Another potential cost is that a meguca ends up going rogue, discouraging other girls from making contracts with Kyubey, preventing extant megucas from witching out, Soviet Commissar-style, or even destroying existing witches in such a way that Kyubey doesn't get to harvest the energy. (Can you think of a way to do that? Because I can.) The likely costs of making a contract with a girl who ends up going off the rails far exceed the benefit gained. Considering the sheer number of girls the Incubator contracts with, a small but significant number of them can royally screw up the Incubator's plans, since much of said plans depend on secrecy and misinformation. Madoka is an extreme case, but over thousands of years and potentially milions of contractees, there would be many more like Homura who end up as wildcards—and all the more so since the Incubator is unable to refuse the wish. If a meguca that ends up going rogue is a high threat in terms of energy cost, a girl who knows what's going on and still makes a reality-bending wish to hurt Kyubey's operations is a potentially existential threat. Consider a wish like "I wish you can't lie any more" or "I wish you'd suffer like my friend did"; potentially another girl can reverse the effects of that wish, but that's a whole lot of wasted effort.
These are losses that has only happened after they evolved to always take risks. Therefore, it does not contradict what I said. Incubators will always take risks because that is what they evolved to do.
Again, this misses my point. They can shrug off any cost that affects their ability to reproduce, so they would have evolved to always take risks as that is what evolution selects for. Evolution doesn't care that one day they may need to asses risk in terms of the energy of the universe as it's too short-sighted for that. The Incubators had already evolved to always takes risks back when they were working with stone tools.
edited 9th Jun '15 3:36:12 PM by Sereg
The Incubator's aren't paying the energy cost of the wishes out of their pocket and gambling on getting a greater return. The girl provides the fuel for power expenditure of the wish. Therefore, they can never wish for something that cannot be granted, because they're paying out of future karma. The only reason Madoka went goddess is because of Homura's time-travel shenanigans, otherwise the potential energy released by her wish wouldn't have been so great.
The Incubators aren't going around offering their pockets full of wishes to girls and hoping they die in such a way as to generate energy. The Incubators are catalysts that, by getting the girls to contract, initiate a huge burst of 'new' energy in the form of the initial wish (powered solely by the girl), and slowly diminishing returns over their time as a meguca, followed by a final explosion of energy upon witch conversion. Then they essentially become a plant, a slow but sure energy investment as they convert human souls into energy via suicides and murders. All the energy is cenerated solely by the girls. All the Kyubeys are doing is offering them a pen to sign the contract. That is the sum total of their energy investment. So they ALWAYS get more energy than they put in. In fact, their biggest investment is always time rather than energy. They have to look for girls, and in Madoka's case, try and convince her to sign up.
This is all true, yes, but incomplete. Kyuubey implies that they harvest from the emotions of every singe emotional being. Witches are efficient not just because the girl is suffering, but because everyone around her is suffering as well. In addition, every single grief seed they collect is a perpetual motion machine as it's an immortal girl in eternal despair. Perpetual motion machines are a big deal, even if they only generate a little energy. Even when Kriemheld Gretchen destroyed the Earth, the Incubators were still capable of harvesting her victims up until the last moment. And then they had Gretchen herself, who is also a perpetual motion machine.
As an eternal source of energy? I hadn't thought about modelling grief seeds that way before. I'd treated them as discrete bursts of energy: once the Incubator harvests that, that's it; it's gone. This model does have a couple of potential questions attached, though.
The witch life-cycle has three different entrypoints. Transformation of a meguca is only one of those three, and it'd fit the model. The other two entrypoints are
- if a familiar kills someone and turns into a clone of the witch that birthed it, or
- if a soul gem fills up and revives a destroyed witch, although such a witch would likely be "infertile"—i.e., like a familiar, it will need to kill someone before it becomes a full witch with its own grief seed. This is speculation, but informed speculation; otherwise, it'd be possible to reuse a grief seed again and again, by letting it hatch and then killing the witch that emerges.
In such cases, the "continual torment" model would imply that the contracting process would, in the long term, generate a profusion of duplicates of the same soul for Kyubey to harvest—a girl goes witch, spawns a bunch of familiars (some of which mature into witches), all of whom are eventually destroyed and harvested by other girls. This conclusion seems a little unlikely.
In addition, the grief seeds are treated by the megucas not so much as perpetual motion machines as batteries or perhaps more accurately trash-cans with finite capacity; once one is full, it's supposed to be handed in to Kyubey (although clever megucas can find other uses for them). There's a limit to the "charge" it can hold. This is hardly conclusive, but I'd say it argues against modelling a grief seed's energy as a reactor rod, capable of generating immense amounts of power over a very long time, and more in line of the grief seed as a coal, to be burned once.
Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.Kyuubey indicates that they developed the technology to harvest emotional energy before they developed the magical girl system. They don't need magical girls or witches to harvest energy from. They're continually harvesting from the businessman thinking about work, the mouse frightened by the cat, the lioness excited by the appearance of easy prey etc. They are harvesting from every emotional being. Continuously. The system is just to increase efficiency.
They want duplicates of successful witches as those obviously are good engines.
Witches run on grief and you've dumped a load of grief into them, so the hatched witch will be stronger than the one you fought.
Every one of those witch examples is a source of energy and so are ordinary people and large parts of the animal kingdom. (They're just not permanent)
The blackness is grief. We see this from how the girls react to having it in their gem. Dumping it into the grief seed doesn't "use it up". Quite the opposite. It gives it more suffering to use as a better generator.
Witchouts are just large amounts of energy released at once. Kyuubey calls them the "most efficient" which they can only be if they're getting energy from elsewhere as well.
I'm repasting my snippet to show a possible piece of insight into their culture and why they work the way they do.
Under orders of Lih the Policy, we have used our discoveries of emotion-generated energy and the species designated as “humans” in order to develop a system to combat entropy of the highest possible efficiency. Konnuh the Economy has given us access to the largest allocation of resources allowed for this project.
It has been discovered that when a human body ceases to function, its emotions are no longer generated, and while nearby bodies experience a spike of useful emotional energy known as “mourning”, the emotions of the destroyed body are otherwise not continued in other bodies. This is consistent with our observation of insane individuals under the control of Siy the Asylum. This was first observed in the insane individual Sehk the Dissection. Like our observations when comparing such individuals as was first done between Sehk and Perry the Experiment, it was discovered that the method we used to destroy the bodies could alter the amount of useful emotional energy released just prior to loss of function. However, it was decided that such a strategy would result in unacceptable crop loss. We needed something more permanent than a human body and it was discovered that we could store the soul of the body in a device designated a “Soul Gem”. Unfortunately, disconnecting the Soul Gem from the brain leaves it quiescent and of limited use. Fortunately, the Soul Gem was modifiable. We were able to modify it such that once a sufficient quantity of a particular grouping of related emotions was felt, the Soul Gem would shatter, destroying its ability to feel other emotions and leaving behind a modified Soul Gem capable of continuing to feel an emotion of our choice and no other emotions. We also made it so that use of the phenomenon known as “magic” increased the intensity of these emotions and that magic was required to operate the new body to me this process happen more quickly.
These modified Soul Gems were given the designation “Grief Seeds” as the grief-anger-hatred-despair range of emotions was chosen for efficiency in ease to achieve, high energy yield, magnitude of possible emotional swing from original emotional state and effect on neighbouring human bodies, which includes a contagious component.
What’s more, the Grief Seeds were modified to project a violent, pseudo-physical emanation which would attempt to dump excess grief onto neighbouring human bodies to provide additional sources of harvest. The violence was also useful for this purpose. The emanations were given the designation of “witches”. This process was successfully tested in the insane individual believed to be most similar to the target human crop. This individual was given the designation of “Niray the Generator”. Niray reacted to the process with violent squirming and the communications, “Please! Stop! Leave me alone! It hurts so much! Please! Just let me die!” Luh the Telephone cut off telepathy from Niray to prevent contamination. Niray attempted to smash Niray’s Soul Gem whereupon Niray became a Grief Seed. This failsafe of making it unlikely that one would commit suicide prior to becoming a Grief Seed helps prevent wasteful loss. The witch generated by Niray chewed up and cut down seven of our bodies, but they were still useful for consumption, so there was little cost. Tiller the Artillery disintegrated the witch before it damaged any important machinery. Unfortunately, Niray’s yield is low. It seems that this was due to the process being forced upon Niray and the fact that Niray did not appreciate us using Niray for energy, for some reason. It has been confirmed that a wide range of emotional experience tends to make a better yield. As such, it was determined that all future Grief Seeds should take the first step to being a Grief Seed voluntarily. It was also determined that we should not forcefully breed and farm humans in battery farms. There would not be enough emotional stimulation. In addition, future Grief Seeds should receive payment, making the process a contract. It is suggested that information regarding becoming Grief Seeds be kept hidden as it discourages contracts for some reason.
Our initial attempt of paying with a labelled diagram of a hydrogen atom was met with a lack of enthusiasm, as was the information that they would be serving the conveniences of more advanced beings. The phenomenon known as “magic” which we are capable of inducing in emotional beings provided the solution. It is capable of granting large desires during and just prior to the creation of a Soul Gem. As such, we can offer a wish as a payment. This is good as it maximises the level of hope from which the contractee can fall. The wish should not be a suggestion, as the crop s more likely to experience high yields of excitement and hope from a wish of their own design and they are more likely to despair from disappointment in a wish they came up with themselves or received from a trusted human body. The results of the wish also tend to yield additional emotional energy from non-target human bodies.
Another benefit of the witch phenomenon is that it provides incentive to desire the power that a contract provides. The contracted human kills the witch to protect other human stock and provide Grief Seeds. The rigors of battle provide further emotional energy and safety features make death in battle, and thus crop loss, less likely. As extra incentive to fight, in order to prevent unnecessary crop loss of uncontracted humans, contracted humans should receive rewards for Grief Seed collection. Giving the Grief Seeds the ability to accept dumped grief will help the more efficient contractees to keep supplying grief seeds and emotional energy for longer. Placing a limit on this ability prevents them from stopping collection and withholding Grief Seeds. It has been decided to target a single demographic of the human population for ease of control. The choice was females in their childhood and adolescence for control and high emotional yield. To gain more yield from outside the demographic and to acquire a large enough crop of witches, witches have been designed to create sub-bodes designated “familiars”. Any humans killed or driven to suicide by a familiar has its soul captured by the familiar. Te souls captured this way are bashed together in a process that generates further grief from the souls. They are forged together into a new Grief Seed which has the personality and memories of the original witch enforced upon it. This is because the previous witch has proven itself a success at generating energy while the other souls have not.
All Grief Seeds will be transported to the home planet unless a witch is needed elsewhere. Grief Seeds will continue despairing and producing energy forever. What’s more, Vay the Surveyor has convinced me that the presence of a single emotional planet practically guarantees the existence of others for us to exploit and Vay is concentrating on finding them all. Early “magical girls”, as they have been designated, from each planet, will not have access to witches to fight, but this does not prevent us from telling them that they need to fight witches. Some will be created very soon.
With all this in mind, we suggest the splitting off of a new specialised hive mind to run this system. Bill the Labeller suggests the designation of “Kyuubey the Incubator”.
End report
It's an interesting argument, to be sure. There are some problems with it that come to mind, but I'll lay them out later on when I've had time to fully digest it and to prepare a response.
Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.So, have you guys seen that one doujinshi (it's clean) that's a mafia AU? Madoka (who seems to be Madokami) is in charge of it and all the girls wear really nice suits and Kyouko beats the shit out of Sayaka until Madoka steps in. Kyouko does fairly well and manages to cut Madoka (triggering Homura to want to kill her) then Madoka's eyes turn gold, the sky gets dark, and she wrecks Kyouko's shit.
Anyone have a link to it?
Let the joy of love give you an answer! Check out my book!I think there's actually a couple of them. I know I've seen some of that on safebooru, gimmee a minute to track it down.
Edit: Safebooru in its infinite wisdom doesn't have them in pools, so 'ware NSFW-ness at the danbooru links. One
, two
, and a bonus Madokami mafia.
edited 12th Jun '15 2:38:39 AM by rikalous
I have to say that the mafia AU is possibly the best thing ever for so many reasons. Mami's kill
(and that entire sequence) is just so impossibly badass.
Might be something not too far from Yukio in Black Lagoon.
Come to think of it, didn't Gen Urobochi have a hand in that, too?
Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.A Mafia Princess type? I think in that case as soon as she found out her family were criminals she'd end up running away from home and attacking Shizuo with a taser turning against them, at least at first. In a setting where having an emotional crisis isn't fatal, I suppose she could end up joining a group of sufficiently Neighborhood-Friendly Gangsters once she's dealt with the fact that she still cares for people she knows are Evil™.
edited 12th Jun '15 9:48:33 PM by rikalous
Hey, the mafiosi didn't see themselves as evil. They saw themselves as "men of honor", enforcing a strict but ultimately chivalrous code, sworn to defend their families and destroy their enemies. Many organized crime syndicates, especially ones with social connections to the land that they operate in, see themselves in the same way: upholders of traditional family values, including a strict eye-for-an-eye justice and a close sense of family. (Or, to put it another way, collusion in crimes brings people together.)
Of course, that this chivalrous code encompasses control over systematized corruption, drug smuggling, human trafficking, prostitution, and car
bombings
leads one to suspect that perhaps there's a lapse somewhere between their professed ideals and their practices. But that might not be readily apparent for someone growing up in the aegis of a close-knit "circle of friends."
I'd like to see a work that focuses on the mafia or yakuza or whatever but in a setting where being lawful immediately makes you evil. That MadoMafia AU seems to be vaguely like that.
Let the joy of love give you an answer! Check out my book!I'm just theorizing based on vague things Madoka has said to Mami and Sayaka. Especially since their targets have been zombies, people spreading zombies, and rival gangs that are trying to kill Madoka and presumably rule through fear. The only thing the Kaname Family has done that would classify them as evil is being a mafia family.
Let the joy of love give you an answer! Check out my book!Case Nightmare Refugee develops. Remember Cynthia?
Very much WIP: hence unexplained concepts, shifts in tense, et cetera, all to be repaired. Assuming Kyubey explains concepts in languages native to the characters, it seems like that what in English or Japanese would be a "witch" would be more accurately called a preta
in Hindi...
"For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us.”
—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Timeline zero...
It's the dawn of the end of the world. The sunrise to the east is blotted out by the bulk of something vast and unstoppable far on the horizon, once human but bloated to tremendous size by the corrosive magic of the miracle that it had brought about.
Rani is not there to see it.
An archaeological city, ruins upon ruins, somewhere in the Rub' al-Khali, the great Empty Quarter of the Arabian desert. Where the sands are cleared crumbled pillars of sandstone reach skyward, dotted with the blackened and eroded growths of lightning-glass fulgurite tubules; sand blows in fine veils, torn from the golden dunes surrounding. The exhumed imprints of archaeological foundations sprawl across the site, the mummified corpse of a once-great city now at one with Babylon and Nineveh, promising a fate to be shared with all the world. Around the site the scattering of modern tents and trucks sit in desolate silence.
A great sinkhole or quarry in the middle of the site reaches down and down, deep into the Earth, boring through layer after layer of rock. Sandstone pillars like a giant's stepping-stones are thrust up to ground level from their foundations deep below. The descending strata of brown rock shifts in hues and the horizontal layers curve and twist under the pressure of millenia, sometimes revealing strange fossils of long-extinct species from when the land was seabed, until at an impossible depth the open pit reveals a room.
Motes of sand dance in the air; the only light in the predawn deep is given by propane lanterns. It seems like an old temple champter preserved in eerie perfection—a flat expense of matte black stone, a great walled circle, more than three hundred paces across, dotted with hideous idols; even pitted as they are with age their inhuman visages and tentacular limbs are distinguishable. Scorched circles as of cross-sections of trapped gas bubbles score the walls and the floor. They range from dots the size of a grit of sand to arcs of great circles hundreds of meters and more in diameter. The scars overlap and connect in an eye-warping pattern of whorls and arcs and nodes, two-dimensional cross-sections of an impossibly great multi-dimensional fractal.
Black pillars rise from the floor, unevenly spaced but fitting naturally into the pattern of circular scars. They are fluted and pristine but for the curved scars that are burned across their surfaces until they reach what had been the roof of the chamber: then they fade into natural rock, as if the influence of the agency that preserved this room from the ages ended there, reaching up to the distant sky like stranded islands in a drained sea.
An Incubator converses with a girl.
We've gone over this, Rani, says the Incubator, his Bengali word-perfect. There's nothing you can do to stop it. Besides, be of good cheer! They might be around for weeks yet, depending on the details; three days is just the estimate.
He shrugs off the look of pure venomous hatred the girl gives him.
You promised us, says Rani hollowly. You would help us.
It discharged its duty: the hungry ghost is hatched. What more can be asked of it? After all, Rani, you wished to uncover the archaeological treasure here, and you did. You became famous across the world, your parents had the money to move back home. You even earned the chance to study these ruins, and that's all by your own efforts.
That's not what she means and he knows it, the devil, interrupts Rani, choked with tears. Home for her parents had been Chittagong in the east, a proud new apartment with the money advanced them from her discovery of the ruins: in the track of the great witch that advances as remorselessly as the tide, washing over billions of people in a wave of darkened cities and emptied minds. What good making the discovery of an age when...
She gestures toward the east, to the great world-eating horror that advances, immeasurably powerful, insatiably hungry.
The Incubator flicks its foxlike tail and says:
This subterranean ruin is all that remains of a culture that flourished here so many eons ago—in fact, long predating the humans that had built their city far above, the relic of a species lost to deep geologic time. It was a temple built on a weak point in reality, dedicated to the worship of a vast and terrible being slumbering outside of our universe. The elder priests used to carry out sacrifices here, bloody and painful, souls extinguished in gruesome sacrifices, so they could seizing on the power that came through until they punched through the walls of reality.
A tiny tear, an infinitesimal rip between the worlds that collapsed in milliseconds. Yet the mindless power of the slumbering alien god that resided on the other side of that tear rippled outward, sucking the life out of the people and laying waste to the land all around; for millenia thereafter, all that was left of that once-great civilization were the unhallowed beasts twisted by the god's power that stalked the desert, taking all who crossed their paths, until they too fell one by one to the sands of time.
Yet life moved on despite that brush with apocalypse. Eventually, millions of years later, humanity evolved and moved here and built that ill-fated city atop the ruins, Irem of the sandstone pillars, until it too was lost to the desert. So it'll be with this preta, this hungry ghost that looms on the horizon. It'll wither away eventually, life on Earth will continue. Why, come back in a million years, and the planet will be pristine again, and maybe something may even evolve intelligence!
An alien god, echoes the girl woodenly. The gemstone she holds is nearly black.
God or devil, it makes no difference: he is Yair-Suthoth, the many-angled one, terrible and timeless, that lies beyond the gates of uncreation—a being so far above the incubator in scale as the incubators are above humanity. Why does she think it is so focused on keeping reality patched together? To prevent something like it from coming through the holes and devouring the minds of everyone on the planet...well, correction. It'll probably spare humanity because humans are too small to satiate its hunger; now the incubators would be the real treat for it. The final harvest of humanity will be their last shining service to the universe, their sacrifices sustaining the veil between worlds and keeping the nightmare gods out.
The girl laughs bitterly, once. That's comforting, she says. All of us humans wiped out, our land blasted, and you see it as just a harvest? Life just moving on?
The incubator shrugs. What does she expect? He's got enough energy for four hundred million years of profligate star-burning; it's a near certainty that something on Earth in that time will evolve intelligence again, and it'll come back to incubate them through their growth so it can continue its job of keeping the outer gods away from its patch. To it humanity is just something small and temporary.
The girl doesn't respond for a while. When she does there is an odd tone to her voice, a quiet realization.
Sacrifices of blood and souls here.
Distantly there was a chittering as of mandibles and limbs not possessed by humans, fractal patterns that expanded in nameless dimensions like gaping lamprey-teethed maws, just on the far side of perception.
Yes. Blood and magic, souls destroyed. Inefficient, but there you have it, says the Incubator patiently. Human cultists have been trying to do the same for millenia, but failing because they lacked the magic, though often not the blood; besides, without a willing sacrifice, they never could push through the veil between worlds. Cultists are always trying to sacrifice someone else, achieving nothing but a waste of time and effort.
Blood and magic and souls, whispers Rani. She slices open the palm of her hand, a long deep gash that pours out rich red blood; the droplets sizzle and dance when they touch the circular markings on the ground, or float unnaturally weightless in the air, forming great membranous bubbles. She looks at the incubator through eyes brimming with hate and rage and defiance. With her wounded hand she holds up the blackened soul gem, slick and red.
She's got all of them. Willingly given.
The blood splatters on the pattern on the floor ooze and roll, following the carved lines; the chittering of world-sized insectile jaws reverberates just beyond hearing, and the shadows deepen.
The incubator gapes incomprehendingly.
You can't object, says Rani. We're dead anyway. You who opened the gates of uncreation for our species...surely you can't object if we levered them wider than you intended.
The gemstone shatters.
Blood and blackness sweep the air, the tremendous soundless flash generated by the destruction of a soul energizing the trapped fractal patterns in the rock like lightning surging through circuitry or a thought coursing through immense neurons, and something answers.
Shadows score the circles, blazing like black fire, sizzling in the stone; an indescribably foul wind howled and gibbered, the propane lights flickering; the Earth shook to provide a bass roaring in counterpoint, all seemingly united in some unearthly tongue. Brown sand and dust and red blood from Rani's inert body whipped into the air outlined cancerous globes that vanished and reappeared, from microscopic dots to the membranous curved surfaces of spheres the size of stars in diameter—or perhaps it was mere perspective that made some appear small and some impossibly vast, sizzling with sudden scorching heat.
A point of light, necromantic purple, terrible and harsh, emits from where Rani's gemstone used to be, and under that light Rani's lifeless face shows through to the skull beneath the skin as her body collapses, withering away and ageing a hundred years in that single flash; a mummified body with its skin drawn tight and its mouth frozen open in an endless scream lands on the floor, blasted away from the tear in reality that she had opened with her sacrifice, and the terrible being on the other side.
A synaesthetic flicker of intent lashes out from the rip, a psychic tendril engulfing the Incubator like an octopoid tentacle reaping a passing minnow from the sea. It devours the Incubator's memory and consciousness with mindless avidity, submerging its identity in entropic white noise.
Then its god-sized attention turns outward to the wider world, a world of seven billion thinking minds, a great witch and a multitude of smaller ones, all prey for the insatiable hunger of the world-eating mind.
edited 13th Jun '15 9:22:28 PM by SabresEdge
Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.

Not quite correct. It's true that they may be immortal and don't have to worry about death. That's not the same as being incapable of doing a cost-benefit analysis.
A cost doesn't have to involve death or pain or something else that doesn't affect a bodiless Boltzmann Brain; it just means that when the dust has settled, the Incubator ends up with fewer resources and a less desirable outcome than it had before it embarked on the venture. If the Incubator's task is to maximize energy input and yet a meguca ends up making a wish that increases entropy more than the Incubator is able to compensate for, that's a loss. The example that I gave is a meguca wishing for a supernova fireworks display, since by contracting with the meguca the Incubator ultimately ends up with less energy than it started with.
Another potential cost is that a meguca ends up going rogue, discouraging other girls from making contracts with Kyubey, preventing extant megucas from witching out, Soviet Commissar-style, or even destroying existing witches in such a way that Kyubey doesn't get to harvest the energy. (Can you think of a way to do that? Because I can.) The likely costs of making a contract with a girl who ends up going off the rails far exceed the benefit gained. Considering the sheer number of girls the Incubator contracts with, a small but significant number of them can royally screw up the Incubator's plans, since much of said plans depend on secrecy and misinformation. Madoka is an extreme case, but over thousands of years and potentially milions of contractees, there would be many more like Homura who end up as wildcards—and all the more so since the Incubator is unable to refuse the wish. If a meguca that ends up going rogue is a high threat in terms of energy cost, a girl who knows what's going on and still makes a reality-bending wish to hurt Kyubey's operations is a potentially existential threat. Consider a wish like "I wish you can't lie any more" or "I wish you'd suffer like my friend did"; potentially another girl can reverse the effects of that wish, but that's a whole lot of wasted effort.
So it's not a matter of being able to win because Kyubey doesn't have to worry about risks. Because those risks do exist, and they can be very dangerous to Kyubey's operations. It might be true that the overall cost-benefit balance is favorable, but that's not the same as just being able to shrug off the risks.
Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.