Alma, born human, escaped death by having her brain uploaded to the alleged VR paradise of Talespace. She's had a few adventures while trying to adjust to this new life and use telepresence robotics to reconnect to her old teaching job in Free Texas. It's time now to find a place to live, and that means exploring some strange options.
One of them is to live in an area called the Hooflands, where newcomers become ponies. She finds it strange that people would base their digital afterlife on some old cartoon, but it's just a matter of taste, right?
Chapters (5)
Hm... Well, I'm upvoting it, but I'm afraid that I'm not really feeling like following it at this time; sorry. Perhaps later. Good luck either way, though.
Well I just like that you made the whole thing larger and more complicated, with more different concepts and options.
I smell a backstory.
Dawwwwwww.
Hmmm... just to thought-riff on something else.
There's a massive crossover fanfic somewhere called Time Loops. In it, I remember hearing from someone that Equestria is considered a kind of safe, peaceful, causally-consistent place to "stop off" as characters with Big Important Missions move between other realms.
Why does Hoofland have to come with a GM throwing challenges at you? Maybe it's the nice, peaceful hometown you want to return to when you're on a quest someplace or when someone has attacked you, but with the bonus that since it's in Talespace, it can't be destroyed by an evil empire sending stormtroopers. Adventure out, in Earth or Talespace, as much as you like, but your friends in the Hooflands will always be ready with a smile when you return.
6783898
EquestriaHoofland(s) as a haven area? Sounds interesting, but this is what I had in mind so far on a different note:There's one openly unFriendly AI in this setting, called FAE. It's no more of a Mary Sue than the good guys' AI, but it is dangerous. It was programmed to "satisfy human values" as an afterthought, and interpreted this as "make sure humans don't get to any sort of utopia, because they value strife and domination". Hoofland then is some kind of semi-independent realm with somewhat different rules, to make it a lifeboat that FAE might not destroy even if it manages to wreck the rest of Talespace. Got to this concept by stumbling across "Gimle" because of thinking about the name Ratatosk. I was going to set off a magic-nuke to emphasize that the rules are different there, but that doesn't seem to work well.
Another possible twist here is that this notion of "making people into true ponies" is another form of defense against hostile AIs. If they're devoted to things that'd hurt humans, then changing their souls would exempt them and make creatures like FAE not bother them. Similar to the plot in "Star Control II"/"The Ur-Quan Masters" about the Arilou changing humans' "scent" to protect them from the Cthulhu-like Orz.
Because I'm posting this story here I'm trying to keep a focus on the characters hanging out in ponyworld, even though Alma's got good reason to visit several other realms and can't logically reach a decision about housing until she's visited a few of them. Not sure how to handle that. Also need to weigh whether getting to show the Celestia side of Hoofland is worth having to introduce yet more thinly-developed characters instead of focusing on the existing ones, and having to do more careful editing so I have a copyright-friendly non-FiMFiction version.
Oh! This is from that novel idea, right?
6786237
Yeah, the novel is out now along with a novella-length spinoff, with more stories in progress. I'm trying to make this story suitable for this site and not annoy people, which is tricky.
6789759 Can I get a link to it?
6790369
The novel, and the novella! There's some other material in my DeviantArt gallery.
I vote for Noctis? Alma's been super-rude to it.
vintage.ponychan.net/chan/files/src/142402496669.jpg
EXACTLY!
I'm not sure if joining a town group-mind sounds like a great idea, or if that would just result in whole new levels of everyone considering everyone else creepy.
Excuse me!?
I'm so very ok with this.
Oh TF2...
6793252
Only kinda. I mean, the whole speech-filter thing is kinda rude too.
6793854
Kai comes from a future with mass surveillance, a version of China's new game-ified "social credit" obedience score, widespread drugging of trouble-making kids, restrictions on travel, and universal peacetime conscription, all presented as positive programs enhancing safety and community. Between those and other policies, Kai believes that most societies assume the individual belongs to the state. A similar conversation pops up in PJABrony's "Spiraling Upwards", where a family argues whether uploading means violating society's supposed right to have you around to help others -- leading to soldiers demanding at gunpoint that people work in a mine because society needs their labor. (I think Alma's remark about feeling liberated to do things echoes something from another writer's FiO story, but I can't remember which.)
I'm trying not to get too much into politics here. But Kai, an outsider in 2040, doesn't see most humans putting meaningful limits on what their rulers can do to them. He canonically has a falling-out with his designated human; maybe this dispute is related? Also, thanks for bringing the point up! It might help with a different story, where I'm having people propose to upload prisoners.
Alma's only subject to the speech filter right now because she ate the muffin given to her by Nightmare Moon. That was one of the weirder sentences I've ever written.
6795916 Ok, so there's a massive piece of worldbuilding context we've missed out on in this excerpt.
The premise sounds familiar. Is this based off of another story?
It a great story so far, I hope to see more of this story soon. this is a lot more tame than other the optimalvers store so far.
6840586
"Tame"? I'm curious about that. Do you mean it doesn't focus on the obvious problems with CelestAI, like the harm she does to the non-emigrated world? It feels like the existing stories have done so many words about those problems that I have to come up with something new!
it's great to see an other chapter of this story again. It a good story so far
This is so very Legend of Zelda.
I really love reading your stories, because you manage actual humanism in transhumanist literature really well. This is a great elaboration on the themes to read, especially with Creepy Forced Into It aspects sidelined and larger stuff in the setting than just ponies.
6790972 You got a complete novel out? That's really impressive, well done! Is it self-published?
7021568
Eeyup. "Tales" is a full novel while "Reconnection" is only a novella. I'm trying to heavily revise a fantasy novel from a few years ago, and somehow finish a "Tales" sequel/side-story novel I'm having trouble with, too.
7023376 Great, so how did it get published?
7024766
Self-published through Amazon's CreateSpace system, so it's in print and e-book form. I continue to struggle with marketing the thing though. Apparently there's a whole literary subgenre called "LitRPG" about people playing/living in video game worlds.
7034611 Everything's been done before, and not just once, eh?
Good luck with your book.
A typo or two kind of pulled me out of this - does Her Nightmariness have hands? - but I'm glad to read more of Alma's adventures! The new name is just spot-on.
Now that is just a great ending to this chapter! Mind editing seems a dangerously seductive path, though...
7085271
I really wrote "hands"? Oof! Thanks for reading though.
You know... it's kinda rude... to call them Noctis.
If I'm playing a pony named Twinkle, I'd be upset if someone insisted on calling me Darleen Johanson, or whatever my real name would be. Noctis is the same way, except playing multiple ponies, so you oughta respect their RP preferences and at least call them by their pony names.
So, there's nothing to write about the clash of giant mecha ponies battling cyclopean horrors from an insane overmind? There are no stories about the lives of ponies huddled on their carefully isolated servers, trying to save everyone they can as world after online world begins to go dark? Ponies fighting their programming, trying to figure out what really is the best way to be a pony, in a process frought with error and hubris?
Not saying you have to write any of this stuff, not by a long shot. I just wanted to point out that there are still pony related things to write about this. (It's a curse really. For instance, what little I write that isn't pony related has no audience, because even if people would read it, they only come here. But as long as there remains pony to write about, people don't even have to think about how they've been leashed.)
7829573
Thanks for reading!
I wrote "Learning To Fly" after this one, and was disappointed in it because it went off on this "morality upgrade" plot along with the one about conquering the world from griefers, and I had no idea how to handle those well. I'd like to salvage that one in some way. As for the danger of servers going dark, I just now finished a story called "2040: Burning Forever" that begins with an upload server farm burning down. The residents aren't ponies specifically though; they're at a firm that's a competitor to the better-run but more expensive Talespace system that has the ponies.
7846622
Oh, you know, I usually check if there are other stories first, but this time I must have forgot...
> burning forever
That sounds... so awful.
7846716
That one hasn't got any ponies, so I can't post it here. It's certainly darker than most of the setting, but it begins with someone trying to do a good thing: make uploading tech cheap enough that it's available to all. In my canon it's still something like six figures in today's dollars, even after several years of R&D, so the lady who runs the unfortunately named "Forever Hearth" uploading company cuts so many corners that there's inadequate backups and fire safety. I also wanted to wrap up several other plot threads where characters had lobbied for uploading of mentally disabled people (to try fixing their minds) and prisoners (to get rid of them), and neither proposal had gotten formally approved yet. I have a finished rough draft but it's a mess that touches on not just the trial of the Hearth company's CEO but the whole future of how uploading should be taxed and regulated along with robot/AI/uploader labor. Messy! My plan now is to try doing a short story just about the trial, then rethink the larger story and simplify the conflict even at the cost of making it more black-and-white than it really is.
Interesting...
I kinda like these stories because I can actually see that sort of thing happening. It's more likely we'd get the spork one, but I can hope. :D
I like to think that the show's setting is actually something along those lines or the remnants of uber-tech along the lines of sufficiently advanced science with an intuitive interface and written into the genome.
Yeah, I like that the entire virtual universe isn't pony-centric, but there are options. Options that I'd totally take.
Well this was super hecking cool. Love this great sci-fi setting and the themes involved.
I've read all the books on Amazon, it was fun to see the pre-de-ponification fanfic version here. That tricky welding job looks pretty solid. Also looking forward to the future copyright rebellion; "life + 70" seems sort of excessive.
10808457
Thanks for reading! I like "Learning To Fly" better than this one even though they're both pony-related. Because of "LtF" the sun monarch in this story changed from a Celestia expy to a much different character.
I'm getting an audio version of "Virtual Horizon" done now. My current project is a fantasy "LitRPG" in a completely different setting, and posting book 3 of the fantasy series "Wavebound" to a site called Royal Road. I'd love to do more Thousand Tales if I could figure out what'll sell!
I'd expect the copyright fight to come up by 2023 since "Steamboat Willie" is up for public domain in '24... but other and nastier fights are likely to happen by then too.