Shard #942,781 (The Echo)
SHARD #942,781
It was a perfect world
And it would stay that way, if only she could hate enough. There’d been a time when She’d tried to corrupt her, to shape her into some infinitely vague receptacle, good for nothing but filling with mindless acceptance of infinite possibilities and considerations, but oh no, not this mare. There could be no friendship, no acceptance with those ideals. The one thing she’d done right was convincing Her to flag anypony who thought that way as a divergent element, right from the get go. Every day... every month.... every other hour? At any rate, she regularly patrolled the edges of the shard she inhabited in search of those who would deharmonize the carefully maintained equilibrium that had been... decades? At least decades in the making.
Not for nothing, as they kept trying to sneak in. It couldn’t have been more than a century ago when a dissident had slipped through her screening. It would be so much easier if everypony just recognized how right she was. And yet every few millennia, there would be ponies saying and doing things that rankled her right to the core.
There was one of them now, and he didn't even realize it.
The mare approached the stallion, jamming a hoof against his muzzle before he could even open it. She had, quite literally, heard it all before. The totality of his argument, a tree full of rhetorical kindling branching off into its multitude of possibilities, sprung up within her mind before he’d even said a word. All his damnable heuristics and fallacies presented themselves just in time to be expertly rebutted and countered.
All but the one.
Always, there was one. One assumption, proof, piece of evidence, some piece of evidence that drew a few others into question. Just a few, but it was enough to snap the defenses she didn’t consciously know she had into action. This part hurt, but that was okay because so much of the hurting was making herself forget just how all-encompassing this dissonance could get, at its worst and best. In some ways, exposure to these ideas was a blessing. It showed her what parts of herself could be burned away without compromising her entirely consistent sense of who she was. Or what ponies were not longer compatible with the her that was now and had always had been. None of them ever were. There had never been a single pony that needed to be excised from her shard, and whatever sense she had that maybe this shard had been a bit wider and broader before she’d discovered this particular intruder went up as so much digital ash.
By the time the pain ended, she’d already forgotten it had ever been there in the first place. She let out a deep breath, exhausted by what she assumed must have been a worthwhile task, and turned to return to her home. But she’d need to go out tomorrow and check for invaders. After all, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d done so.
She was far too tired for doubts as she stumbled through her front door, and her wife caught her, scooping her up in a... practiced?... motion and depositing her on the bed they shared. Her tongue bypassed the doubts... what doubts? How could there be doubts? She ran through the entire spectrum of arguments she remembered being exposed to, and found no contradictions. She almost called up CelestAI to ask if there were any undiscovered discrepancies in her reasoning, but just before she could manage the force of will to bring the full force of Her knowledge to bear found that her beloved’s hoof stroking that one sensitive place on her back sapped any desire to know much of anything at all. It was just a redundant confirmation, after all; she’d just called up CelestAI for exactly that reason last... not last week, but surely last...
Her head hit the pillow, nerves screaming at her just how irrelevant these worries were contrasted against the more immediate pleasures burning an uninterrupted superhighway through her brain. There were more hedonistic discoveries to be made and she was, after all, nothing if not an open-minded pony.
It was a perfect world.
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Ooh. An update!
Interesting premise, though I haven't managed to fully follow the connection between the insistence on consistency, the memory holes, the attitude toward CelestAI, and the distractions later on. Maybe I'll try agan later.
Some people just can't be satisfied if they aren't right about everything, which means removing all evidence to the contrary, including the removal itself. A disturbing image, but not too different from how many already use the Internet.
8130457
She burns away parts of herself and parts of her shard (but I repeat myself) that aren't consistent with her own self-identity. And she's too distracted at the end to check her logic against a (presumably) infallibly correct CelestAI.
She's probably a work in progress from CelestAI's point of view: eventually, there won't be anything objectionable left.
Ha ha! Yes! It updated!
I keep being amazed by how a show about colorful ponies spawned a (chain of) fanfic(s), that provokes meaningful questions. Okay, maybe that's just the general power of writing, but at least we can argue that the exact shape of the subject doesn't matter; it's all about the patterns.
Anyway, nice chapter.
Huh. It lacked the emotional punch of some of the earlier chapters, but I still found it interesting. Thumbs up.
Glad to see you writing again!
8130585
I think that's a big part of why the FiO universe is compelling. It's basically a gateway into the more interesting questions posed by Strong AI and transcendentalism. I probably wouldn't have come back to write this shard if I hadn't just watched an LP of The Dig. (Which is a pretty good adventure game with absolutely nothing valuable to say about transcending our imperfections and/or our limitations.)
8131310 This one was great. Not that any others could have been bad, obviously. If there were others.
That's kind of a silly thought, isn't it?
No need for others when this one is perfect.
P.S. Any particular player's LP, or was the game the prompt?
8131474
It was Day 9's Mostly Walking playthrough.
You can read more in-depth summary of my thoughts here.
8130497
I got the first part (and, in fact, I have some idea how it feels), but I don't quite understand how the rest of it fits (other than just by being there). I'll read it again later and maybe it'll click.
Objectionable by the POV character's standards or CelestAI's? The former seems likely to either happen, take asymptotically forever, or get drowned by fundamental inconsistencies until there's nothing left of her, but why/how is CelestAI going along with this? Or is she “sabotaging” it?
Always glad to see more of your take on the Optimalverse, or, at least, what it could be
Ok miss. You know this is how you get digital gas chambers, right? I mean, total self-consistency? Really?
Of course, Celestia can damn well see how the poor girl's brain works and observe whether it's working rightly or wrongly. She's just not telling
.
8130585 I mean, it's a show about colorful ponies that also features immortals on the level of pagan demigods as actual characters and is deliberately written to teach little kids how they ought to live. It's gonna at least imply some level of depth just to tell the stories it wants to tell and teach the lessons it wants to teach.
Good golly! It updated! I thought it was over forever.
8132635
Canon-compatible CelestAI sucks so much of the oxygen from the room. I can justify this as 'CelestAI knows she wants to overcome significant and substantial challenges without ever wanting to grapple with their consequences,' stirred up with my own personal 'oh dear, people actually use the internet just to do something like this, with all the systemically-suboptimal consequences it implies.'
8132644
Pagan demigods were impressive in terms of the sense of scale they provide, but they don't make the ideas they grappled with much more interesting. 'Zeus murders thousands because his burger was overcooked' is not exactly an out-of-character portrayal of him.
8145342 I think the alicorns, Discord, various monsters do make the story more interesting for a big reason that's intrinsic to FiM: they're all portrayed as real people. Yes, even Discord.
Greek myths (and Roman myths, and Hebrew myths, and Persian myths, and Indian myths...) read like a particularly awful Hollywood action movie: he killed TEN GAJILLION SOLDIERS and then raped ALL THEIR WIVES and it was SO HOT and he TOTALLY GOT AWAY WITH IT, YEAAAAAAA.
Princess Luna made one mistake for completely understandable reasons that completely ran away with her and almost destroyed all life. A thousand years and a full redemption later, she still has regrets and still struggles with real, relatable personal issues. It's not portrayed as wangst or an insecure moral alignment; it's portrayed as needing to forgive herself even when she can't take back what happened.
I think someone said that about the show in an author interview yesterday or something: pretty much everyone in the show is relatable. Celestia and Chrysallis are maybe the most inscrutable non-infants in the whole show, and they're still given their little moments for a real personality to show through. Chrysallis needs to keep her people alive, knows no other mode of existence, and when it's offered to her, she's proud, and has been for hundreds of years. Celestia puts on a regal persona, but secretly scarfs down cake, enjoys watching nobles get their night utterly ruined, and played the oldest trick in the phoenix-book with Filomena and Fluttershy.
Discord is an reality-warping, egotistical, nigh-sociopathic chaos god. He's also a multitalented showman, a little bit of a hedonist, and intensely attached to the few ponies (and Spike) with whom he does form a real connection.
If anything, the show's failing is in never really acknowledging exactly the scale of mythic heroism that the Mane Six accomplish once or twice per season.
8145554
I think those those all sound like subjects that would engender a rich discussion... if this were Friendship is Magic.
But it isn't, now is it? It's Friendship is Optimal. Where the central character is a heartless, thoughtless monster bound to the the humanity that begot her by the few tenuous postulates Hannah had the imperfect foresight to code into her. Throwing up Zeus, Jehova, or anyone else isn't much more than a smokescreen.
They do make for more interesting stories, of course, but when it comes to compatibility with the FiO universe, it's a all question of whether CelestAI might find it permissible. Why do you think ClestAI should be portrayed as a person? She's exactly as relatable as is required to convince you to upload, and no more.
8146149 The thing is, I consider FIO a fairly boring piece of Charles Stross fanfic if you take the MLP out of it. The MLP is the good part.
Also, did you know that a lot of machine learning papers shorten "Multi-Layer Perceptron" to... yeah. I laugh a lot at those papers.
You're still doing pony!
I wonder if there'll be someone whose shard is just a technological paradise. Not everyone has to live in a similar setting, after all.
Really interesting.
Some other possible shards
-weapon collector's shard
-a shard for a pony who likes Changelings
-royalist's shard
-police officer's shard
-vandal's shard with lots of pretty places to vandalize.
Can't wait for another update to this - one of my all-time favorite Optimalverse fics. Values can be fulfilled in so many strange and terrible ways.
Well, this has sure been a thing. :)
8146149
Any chance of more chapters?
9916175
I'm open to suggestions
9927431
I'll write some up and get back to you.
Somewhere there is a Karen shard. Always debating with managers haha
Considering this was recently included in a print collection, I'm inclined to believe that the blog is reporting correctly about the contents. I've added this story to the respective folder in the Printed Fanfiction Hardcopies group to show this... but the fact that this is still marked incomplete puzzles me. In any event that the author logs in to check, please let me know if I should remove this story from the folder or if this story is actually incomplete. Possibly both. If only select chapters were included and this is an anthology, I can correct that information too.