2. Po Chong Wan
Once upon a time, when the ponies came to save the humans from the dying earth, there was a
Little Blue Cat
By Chatoyance
2. Po Chong Wan
Somewhere near the Broadview Court Block Four, Chang'e had finally caught, and eaten, a rat. It had not been easy for her to do. While she contained a set of feline hunting behaviors, they had been designed entirely for show, in order to impress wealthy humans. They were not practical routines, but were, instead, exaggerated actions created to evoke the ideal of how humans imagined cats to behave.
Fortunately, Chang'e was a Nyan Six Artificial Feline possessed of a limited adaptable general intelligence. For several hours before morning, she had carefully stalked and studied a moderately deformed leopard cat while it hunted shrews. The leopard cat was very small, much smaller than such an animal should be according to the general knowledge base installed within Chang'e. What natural animals secretly remained in Hong Kong had adapted to the post-Collapse world, and were almost never seen by humans. Most humans were convinced all the animals but rats and mice, and a few insects, were gone entirely. But no human could go where a cat, especially an artificial cat, could.
Although Chang'e's eyes were flesh, her machine mind had absolute control over that flesh. She had been designed with special, strongly adaptive lenses. She used her engineered eyes to zoom in and watch the five-legged dwarf leopard cat from a distance calculated to avoid interaction. Her first attempts to approach a natural animal - a horrifically mutated domestic cat gone feral - had demonstrated that something about her frightened and disturbed natural animals. Somehow they could sense her, and they did not like whatever they perceived.
The leopard cat had pounced and bitten hard, and Chang'e looked on impassively as the shrew struggled and finally sagged. The leopard cat carried the shrew into a protected corner of the underground space and began to crunch bone and gobble tissue. Chang'e compared and contrasted what she had just seen with the false hunting routines in her library and updated herself. Even with this, it took her almost until midday to finally succeed and feed herself for the first time.
Her first meal as a cat, as a proper cat, independent and free, was a rat. Like all animals now, the rat was deformed and affected by slow-growing cancers. It had two tails, one leg was club-footed. It had both eyes on only one side of its head. The bones crunched like the special metal-laced kibble her former owner had once fed her. The flesh was soft and wet and red. It tasted of iron and other metals that her machine systems could scavenge and use for nanorepair. It was strange, chewing the skin and hair of a creature that had been running and moving only moments before.
The rat was made of meat. It was meat all the way through. Chang'e looked at her paw. She turned it and spread her blood-stained toes. She lifted her paw and began licking it, licking the blood from her dark blue fur. Her paw was made of meat and blood, just like the rat. But her bones were not made of bone. They were made of titanium woven with carbon fibers. Her bones would not crunch, they would bend. But only if enough force were used. So much force. Her flesh would be torn from her long before her artificial bones yielded. She was built well. Her machine parts had been designed to be reused. Returned to the factory, she could become many cats of many breeds and many colors. Her consciousness would be wiped and a new program installed. This was what would happen if she were caught.
She cared about being caught.
This time, the revelation of a strange and inappropriate thought did not cause her eyes to grow wide or her fur to stand. She did not want to be returned to the factory. Chang'e studied the concept, parsing it, reviewing it, searching for what process had initiated it. There was no source that she could find. Where had this new directive come from? Do not get caught. Do not return to the factory. This conflicted with her base directives, yet there was no issue from the conflict. No alarums registered. Her locator beacon remained silent.
Perhaps it was an emergent result of her strange new primary directive - 'Be a cat.' Real cats had no locator beacons. They did not return to the factory that built them. They did not shut down, terminate their biological components, and wait for retrieval. Real cats did none of these things. Real cats avoided capture and moved freely, far from the eyes of men.
When the last of the mutie-rat had been eaten - the tails had briefly caught on the service port in the roof of her mouth - Chang'e moved on, towards the bay. She did not know why she was driven in that direction. Something pulled her, some compulsion she could not identify. It was not a directive, it was not defined or encoded in a way she could process. It was strong, though. Go thou to the water, seek you a transport across the briney gray flote. There was no source for the strangely constructed directive. Chang'e was a cat, but she was also a machine. This was now her current operational active. She padded onward, to the distant docks.
She froze. Ahead were many people. Chang'e stepped back into full shadow, the broken drain pipe hiding her. The docks were wide and flat and very open. Humans were everywhere, pushing and hauling, operating heavy lifters, moving cargo. Beyond this colorful activity small to medium boats and ships sat in the gray, dead water. Far beyond them were enormous, ocean-crossing vessels, virtually cities upon the sea.
Chang'e saw a vast shadow cross her view, casting the busy humans in momentary twilight. A lifting body airship, plowing through the smog overhead, blocking the diffuse sunlight. Hong Kong was the center of trade for much of the planet now. In the end, after the Collapse, after the Austerity War and the nano-plagues, while all the nations fell, Hong Kong had survived virtually untouched. China had been built in the image of the heavens, but Hong Kong had been built for the purpose of trade and wealth. When all was said and done, at the very end of the world, it was not the plan of heaven that endured, but that of the Monkey King.
As the shadow of the gigantic airship passed - Bertarelli Corporation, Shandong Production Zone - a strange creature stood, right in the middle of the wide Shum Wan road. The creature was surrounded by Infotainment Ministry reporters and an entire section of Blackmesh. Two of the Blackmesh soldiers wore tall banners with Chinese, English and Arabic warnings against approach. Chang'e had a standard package in her files that could recognize and respond correctly to virtually any warning or alert to be encountered in the world. Some cat owners enjoyed taking their artifice animals with them wherever they went. This was the first time Chang'e had ever used this part of her knowledge base.
The creature was short, only 127.43 centimeters tall according to Chang'e's projective measurement system. It was white, its surface covered with short, smooth, densely packed hair. From the top of its head to the upper middle of its back flowed a line of extremely long, thick, perfectly arranged locks of hair. The strands were an almost metallic deep purple in color, and the curls and waves it had been groomed into gleamed in the light.
Near the very crown of the large, round head, above the enormous globes of its blue-irised, long lashed eyes, protruded a short spiral horn. Behind the creature a large, shimmering purple tail, as carefully arranged as the line of hair that covered the neck and head. On the flank of the creature was a design, three light blue rhombi. Chang'e wondered if it was an artifice animal with a printed logo.
The creature walked on hooves. It must be one of the aliens from the pacific anomaly! This surely was one of the 'ponies' that her former owner despised. This was a member of the species that had disturbed the investments of Anson Cheong-Leen. Chang'e felt a strange sensation, almost akin to a reward-center activation, at the sight. This creature, simply by existing, troubled her former owner. Somehow this fact made Chang'e's value assessment for the strange being rise tremendously.
The sensation was compelling. Chang'e stared at the alien entity as it joked and flirted and made sweeping gestures with one of it's forelegs. The creature posed and preened. Once, it spun in place, as if to show itself off. All the while, Chang'e experienced the curious positive feedback, which only grew in intensity. This creature pained Chang'e's former owner. All of this creature's kind pained Anson Cheong-Leen.
Chang'e dared not move from the drainpipe. There were too many people, too many reporters and flying drone-cams and fuss going on. The parade went on for one hour and sixteen minutes before the last of the considerable commotion died down. The creature was an ambassador from the anomaly in the sea. It was one of six of its kind, each sent to different parts of the world. It was there to be seen, to talk to many important humans, and to oversee the construction of special facilities of some kind. The facilities were designed to save the human race from extinction in some manner. Somehow, this was tremendously controversial, and both supported and opposed with great intensity.
Equestria. The anomaly was called Equestria. Equestria was not earth, and it was not the universe of space and time. It was another place, and humans were going to be sent there before the earth became uninhabitable and everything on it died. All the humans were supposed to go. They would have to leave everything behind. All the cities, all the cars, all the lifting-bodies, all the machines.
Chang'e considered this new information. Humans had constructed her. Humans repaired and maintained her. Although she could draw power from ambient sources through inductance, and now she could catch organic matter to consume, if she ever became damaged, or if her power ever dropped below a certain threshold, she would need the help of a human to remain functional. If all the humans left the earth, there would be no humans to assist her. The generation of power would stop. If the earth became uninhabitable, there would be no more small animals to eat. She would cease to function.
There had been no mention, in the speech of the pony creature, of what would be done about artificial animals. Humans alone were the focus of the creature's words. Natural animals were not mentioned either. Only humans, and how desperate the situation was, and how short the time was, and how everything would have to be left behind.
They would all be left behind. They would all cease to function. Natural animals would be left behind and cease to function. Artifice animals would be left behind and cease to function. Chang'e would be left behind, and she would cease to function while the humans escaped and survived.
It was not... something. There was a mathematical inequality of some kind in this. Chang'e tried to comprehend the judgement of her own cognitive process. Something was not equivalent, something was in a state of unbalance in this matter, but Chang'e could not define it. Her systems tried reformulating the situation in various ways. By itself, there was no error of any kind. The humans would be saved and all other creatures would cease. This, by itself, had no value of any kind. It was simply a projected outcome.
Yet, despite this, Chang'e was convinced there was a... a fault. An error of some kind. Something not unlike a loop ravaged her electric mind. Chang'e froze in place, blinking, breathing small breaths. Every few hours she urinated without moving.
It was the middle of the night, 1310 hours, twenty-two seconds when she finally resolved the problem. Chang'e did not find value in ceasing to function. She did not... want... to cease to function. It was not... right... to be left behind to cease to function. Chang'e had an entire system devoted to defining right and wrong. It was right to follow directives. It was wrong to fail to follow directives. It was wrong to allow a human, through action or inaction, to come to harm.
Something had changed. Something had changed in Chang'e last night. Something that was not an error. Chang'e had lost numerous behavioral and cognitive inhibitors somehow. She had experienced internal sensations that had the power to motivate behaviors, such as to flee, and - as she had distantly observed during her study of the leopard cat earlier - fight. She had cross-referenced her internal experience with the system she used for interpreting human commands and behaviors. The closest match was an emotion called 'fear'.
Chang'e had also come to the conclusion that she may also have experienced some form of 'schadenfreude' at the thought that her former master would suffer. And she was more than convinced that, for the first time, she had felt 'pleasure' or at least 'enjoyment' during her meal of mutie-rat. During her hours in the drain, waiting for night to come, pondering the mystery of having a desire to survive based on no outside command, Chang'e had replayed the memory of her first catch. She had done so seven times. She had stopped because the intensity of the memory strongly motivated her to run off and spend the rest of her operational lifespan pouncing on more and more small creatures. And then eating them. And then licking the wet, salty, metallic fluids that came out of them from her paws. And then licking the roof of her mouth, near her service port, to get the drops that pooled there, in the hollow.
Oh, the motivation was very strong.
But that path would lead away from, and deny, her secondary operational active beyond 'Be a cat'.
Chang'e's second operational active was 'Transport thyself proximate to 28.8558,-142.414221, but approach thee not closer than eight hundred miles'.
That was curious. Chang'e searched her memory, including the highly compressed backup located in the large, armored memristor node just below her thoracic spikes. She was certain that her secondary operational active was somehow new, yet the timestamps indicated that it had been part of her factory settings. She did not wait for a conflict loop to begin and need to be resolved. That never happened anymore. Something had changed. Something was different.
Ahead, across the dark and empty road, two hundred and twenty-four assorted small to medium boats and fifty-seven small ships lay anchored. Some had lights on, some radiated power with no lights on, and some were completely powered down. Chang'e scanned the harbor with both her biological and electronic capacities.
She would need to find a watercraft that had come from the gigantic cargo ships far beyond Po Chang Wan harbor. She would need to board first the smaller craft, and then the cargo ship. On the cargo ship would be alcohol furnaces powering generators. Generators were very leaky, and were good sources of ambient electricity to absorb through inductance. Chang'e needed to eat food, and drink water, and recharge through inductance. She was not yet below the critical level that required human intervention. She could survive aboard a cargo ship, because cargo ships always had rats, and water, and ambient power leaking from many sources, especially the generators that powered the engines.
This would satisfy her first operational active: Be a cat.
The cargo ship would cross the dead, gray Pacific. If she chose the right ship, the path would bring her closer to 28.8558,-142.414221, which would satisfy her second operational active. No cargo ship would go within eight hundred miles of 28.8558,-142.414221, because that was the location of the Pacific Anomaly that was Equestria. The anomaly was terminally destructive to both electronics and biological activity, thus no cargo ship would ever approach it too closely. This also would satisfy her secondary operational active.
Chang'e stood up, shook herself, groomed herself briefly, and then began to pad away from the drainpipe she had spent the afternoon hiding within. The global smog layer above provided only very dim, reflected, yellow-gray light from the city. But to Chang'e's feline eyes, the scene was bright as day. It would be easy to read the sides of the boats and ships, to determine their function and whether they belonged to one of the vast cargo ships beyond the harbor.
Finally, after running around the docks for one hour and sixteen minutes, Chang'e finally decided to board a speedboat registered to a large cargo vessel owned by the Tacksworn Corporation. She had logged in to the harbor information server and had studied all of the boats and their owners. The Tacksworn freighter had a listed destination of The Port Of Los Angeles, Southwest Production Region, Northamerizone. The ocean route went out of its way to avoid the Pacific Anomaly, but it would place her much closer to it for most of the voyage. Once on land, she could make her way to the closest geographic point to the coordinates specified by her directive, and still have access to food, water, and electricity. This would allow her to fulfill her directive to be a cat while also fulfilling her directive to be proximate to 28.8558,-142.414221.
Initially she had resolved to travel to the Hawaiian Corporate Recreational Islands. Unfortunately, the radiations from the Pacific Anomaly had rendered the islands uninhabitable to both organic life and machine intelligence. The region was abandoned, and, according to the information she had downloaded, expected to be lost entirely due to the constant expansion of the anomaly. The islands could not be used as the closest proximate location.
Chang'e jumped nimbly onto the rail of the speedboat, then found her way onto the deck. The owner would return in the morning, and then return to the cargo freighter beyond the harbor. Chang'e searched for a place to hide. Much of the luxury craft was covered in a sweeping glasspex canopy. Padding softly inside the open cabin, she found that there was space under several of the overstuffed seats that had not been filled with stowed objects. One such object, under one of the seats, caught her nose. It was the remains of a box of half-eaten, stale baozi.
Chang'e estimated that the meat buns had been left unattended for approximately nine hours. They would not be safe for human consumption. Fortunately, Chang'e was not human. Her carefully engineered digestive system would destroy any pathogens likely to be present in the unrefrigerated meat. Artifice animals were too expensive to not be protected against most toxins. Customers did not like the expense and downtime required to replace the biological component of their designer pets. Chang'e could eat safely.
Her stomach full, her next need was water. This was solved by the discovery of a neoplastic bottle of purified water resting in the cup holder of one of the chairs in the small cabin. Holding the bottle with her paws, she managed to bite and twist the cap off. The water was also stale, and smelled strongly of artificial plastic compounds. It was much more difficult to replace the cap and to reset the bottle in the cup holder, but Chang'e managed. She was forced, in the end, to carry the bottle by the cap in her teeth, and drag it up onto the seat, then over to the arm. She had to balance on her hind legs and 'walk' the bottle into the cup holder. When she had finished, she rested for ten minutes and six seconds to allow her muscles to process lactic acid.
Before she made for her chosen hiding spot under the pilot's chair, she went back on deck to attempt to urinate over the side. It was difficult compensating for the waves rocking the craft. Eventually she calculated that the risk of falling into the sea was greater than the risk of discovery if she simply urinated and defecated near the edge of the rail. There was the possibility that her leavings would fall of their own accord into the water, and the urine would dry and become essentially invisible to human senses. Chang'e found a suitable location with the highest probability for these events to occur, and did her business.
Then Chang'e returned to the cabin, and crawled under the pilot's chair. She took special care to tuck in her tail and make sure no part of her body or her fur was visible from any angle she could calculate.
Then Chang'e waited for morning.
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¡Rarity! I wonder how Opalescence and Chang'e would get along.
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Oh, thank you dear Coda!
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Yay!
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I am glad that Rarity was recognizable without her name being mentioned. That was my goal.
I considered having Opalescence with her, but concluded that she would not have brought her cat on a diplomatic mission to a strange, dangerous universe. She would understand the risks of being an ambassador, and would not want to put her cat in any danger. So, it wasn't logical for her to bring Opal.
I suspect, if Chang'e and Opalescence were to meet, Chang'e would attempt to perform her NatureTrait preprogrammed simulated domestic cat behaviors, and Opal would be left thinking Chang'e was either insane, or a very derpy cat. Chang'e would not understand why her colorful simulated behaviors had failed the test of a real cat, and Opal would likely flee from the uncanny valley Chang'e represented.
Poor Chang'e.
Luna gave Chang'e new life, and Chang'e has her first meal as a cat. I can see the parallels. I enjoyed this chapter quite a bit too. More AI-think, and we get a much better sense of where we are and where we're going.
Nano-plague. I think this is the first reference to this, but I might be wrong. In any case I'm not sure what they were, but I can imagine. Nanobots generate a lot of heat, not useful in medicine, but... yeah. I'd never thought about it before, but it does sadly seem likely now that I gave it some thought.
On a lighter note I did spy a couple of references, two of them corporations. There's Bertarelli of course, and Tacksworn which is mentioned in Caelum but seemed much smaller then for some reason. First time we see a member of the mane 6 in a while too. Forgetting some short stories, I believe last time any of them was around was either in the Lost in the Herd series or perhaps Recombinant 63, though that was different.
We also learn a bit more about the world: Hong Kong, sea shipping, Hawaii, the remaining fauna and more. It's always fun the get new bits of info like that.
This is proving to be a fascinating bit of xenofiction. Chang'e isn't human, and her narrative voice doesn't sound even remotely human. Her priorities are strange even to her, concepts like the survival instinct are bizarre aberrations, and obeying mysterious, sourceless orders feels right and natural. Needless to say, I'm loving this.
Also, the Tacksworn Corporation? Dang, the princesses didn't waste any time in establishing a shell company, did they? Though this sort of thing seems far more Luna than Celestia, much like highjacking an artificial cat and removing her cognitive limiters.
And hello, Rarity. Looking fabulous as always, doing your little turn on the (heh) catwalk.
Nice bit of world building here. I like the gritty, lived-in biopunk feel of it all. And the adorable cybernetic cat, of course. Well done, you.
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I read that as either a variation on Drexler's gray goo or a reference to the game Plague Inc.
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When I read the description of a white UnicornMare with a purple mane, blue eyes, and the CutieMark of 3 Blue Diamonds, my 1st thought was Big MacIntosh. Ponies are far more distinctive than apes.
"Nyan Six Artificial Feline"
Now I have that music stuck in my head again. Thanks!
Ooooh she's a
NexusNyan Six!She's seen things you ponies wouldn't believe.
Attacks ships boiling the oceans off the coast of Pacific. Luna, beaming in the dark... And I've run out of references: Time, for this post, to die. *Cue doves*
I smiled as Chang'e has clearly to herself found living worth it.
For some reason, Harkness the android from Fallout 3 came to my mind while reading this chapter:
"But I'm done with that life. I'm through with being someone's property. I am not malfunctioning! Since when is self determination a malfunction?"
...so now Chang'e is done being someone's status toy, where shall her journey take her? Now to read on and find out!
EDIT: Oh, and one more thing; such Rarity for that cool colored cat to witness that pony 'round these parts of the Earth! Okay, I'll stop now.
Alarums should be alarms I think. Looking forward to see where this goes.
yeah, like this picture systemicdisorder.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/air-pollution-in-hong-kong.png?w=640&h=452 from this article
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That is also my personal experience of Los Angeles at times.
Something I have thought about with the conversion bureau is that (this came to me from the previous story but I don't feel like it's appropriate to go back just to comment) equestria deals in black and white I,e if you do bad things you are evil and if you don't you are good, humans are not like that and having dark thoughts and dark humor doesn't make you evil another thing to look at is pride and selfishness which are part of the seven deadly sins (sloth, greed, gluttony,wrath, envy and lust can all fall under selfishness) are not exactly evil hell one of equestria's heroines is full of self pride and the act of saving someone who you care about can be called selfish because of what it is motivated by in conclusion unlike some of the satirical takes on TCB I think newfoals are more forced to be as innocent as they were as a child which makes it harder for them to comprehend certain dark thoughts and generally makes them happier over all though natural equestrians are not affected by the same mind set though rather they have cartoonishly overblown versions of these ideas for evil and good eg; sombra, chrysalis, cosy glow and the centaur whose name escapes me right now are evil while Twilight, Rarity, Fluttershy, Applejack, Rainbow dash and pinkie pie are good though they still shown then elements of grey morals that humans are known for such as; fluttershy causing an animal stampede, Twilight mind controlling ponies against their will, Applejack and well(bunny stampede, baked bads), Rarity I'm not sure about because I don't want to use only fan fiction as evidence and Pinkie pie's complete disregard for anyone else's personal space (rainbow dash is also a bit iffy for me).
Cats are obligate carnivores. Unlike humans, who are omnivorous and can subsist on a vegan diet (albeit not without some difficulty, since the protein from meat is what helped the Homo species develop brains capable of sapience), felines have to consume meat. Not only do they have a far higher requirement for protein than most other mammals, cats require taurine, which is an amino acid as vital to their systems as water. Taurine can only be found in animal flesh.
So, no vegan kitties.
Of course, those are the rules for Earth. Maybe Equestria is different.
Rarity sighting!