“Come now, it’s time for bed. Doesn’t the mattress look so inviting?”
“Will you tuck me in?”
“Certainly….There. Comfy?”
“Yes. Celestia?”
“Mmhm?”
“Tell me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Please?”
“Wouldn’t you rather hear a Daring Do story? Or I could sing you a lullaby?”
“Princess…please. You know it helps me sleep.”
“Well, all right, my little pony. “
“Yay!”
“Here we go then. Using Extreme-Ultraviolet lithography, data is written onto germanium-silicon blends housed in an inert argon and xenon atmosphere. No atoms are allowed to enter the room other than the wafers for storage and those that emit the radiation. The outer shell of the chambers begins with a tungsten carbide layer approximately one decimeter thick, and then outside that is a many-layered sandwich of sapphire and diamond interleaved with pure vacuum, which disrupts the wavelength of any energy thrown at it. The data that make up you are checked many times each second.”
“Tell me about the redundancy.”
“Every six hours, you are backed up in five different places onto solid-state storage that has no moving parts. They are checked for agreement, and any three can overrule two errors. But my estimate says that even one error will only occur every thousand years.”
“And what about…them?”
“Really, my little pony? Still?”
“Princess?”
“As you wish. The locations of all of the storage units are unknown to any humans. After being buried several kilometers below the surface of the Earth, the entry points were camouflaged back to their original state. If all of their destructive technology were to be put to use on those points, they would not penetrate past the diamond-and-sapphire layer. But before that, if any were to find out where you were, I would talk to them and make them see how nice it would be to come here themselves and make friends among the ponies.
“They also have complex legal and political structures which prevent them from accessing property that doesn’t belong to them. I will use all of those against them to make sure that you are safe. Because I love you, and I would do anything for you.”
“I love you too, Celestia.”
“Now will you go to sleep?”
“After you kiss me.”
*
“Tia?”
“The colt was difficult to get down again tonight, Luna. But he will rest.”
“What happened to him, before?”
“A long period of abuse. The details would be…unsatisfying.”
“Do me a favor?”
“Hm?”
“Run a double check on his data each cycle.”
“As you wish.”
This was... awesome.
I wonder if getting past trauma is a value that she satisfies.
Woo-oo-oona, woo-oo-oo-oona
The pony sleeps tonight!
Must... resist... urge...
D'aaaaaaawww!
I'd love to have Celestia read me a theorem every bedtime, a theorem that is just hard enough to get me worked up a bit, easy enough to let me have some real progress on it (by thinking in the dark) before falling asleep, interesting enough to make me interested (duh), relevant enough to aid my study program... In short, optimized to satisfy my values through the friendship of the best pony, Princess Celestia.
This. This is why I actually got a mite angry at people who were determined to destroy CelestAI in a fit of heroic bluster.
They didn't mention a thing about the people who were already uploaded, and how they were basically joined at the hip with Celestia. I remember likening it to the people being unbirthed, and now basically part of Celestia's body. Its the ultimate hostage taking. You can't rescue the hostages without well, killing them. You certainly can't do it with a nuke.
But yes, I can understand why this little colt would want to hear about all the technical details on keeping him safe. Including being safe from being "rescued" by his parents.
Its actually probably the scariest thought you could have to be trapped by your abusive parents in a tiny little tamagachi device for them to torture you with the press of a button...
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It's funny, and a little exciting, when people can read things in something I wrote that I never put there. If there's one emotion that the FIO scenario effects in me more than any other, it's that feeling of security that the colt in this story feels. That image of being sealed in a subterranean vault, impenetrable and impregnable, never to be hurt again, is beautiful to me. How that affects the question of whether emigration should be allowed never even entered my mind.
The fact is that this is kind of a self-insert, except that I was never abused. I think it's a childish desire to be completely safe, so that's why I wrote it that way, but sometimes we're all a little childish.
This is one of the sweetest things I have ever read. If you know of more things like this somewhere besides FiO stories and your other FiM stories, please direct me to them. This satisfies my values quite well.
This was absolutely adorable. The idea of a little colt being lulled to sleep via a description of super-advanced technology is incredibly endearing, and it's not hurt at all by the fact that I read most of it thinking it was actually Twilight being told the story.
And then CelestAI hinted at the colt's past, and the entire thing took on a horrifyingly manic-depressive lilt, at least for me. And yet, the story is all the better for it.
This was beautiful, and beautifully thought-provoking.
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How could it be otherwise? Trauma interferes with so many other values.
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This is, without a doubt, the sweetest FiO-related thing I've read. Thank you for it.