Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me

by DataPacRat

Patronized or Patronage?

"Your Highness." I imitated the bowing position I had seen ponies take in front of Princess Celestia - and promptly fell flat on my side. I was a fairly substantial mass of beef - even that short a fall hurt. Fortunately, one advantage of being surrounded by a large number of guards was that they could spare a few to help me get back on my hooves. One even put my hat back on for me, and I muttered a quick thanks to all involved.

Once the floor show was over, the Princess said, "My faithful student, Twilight Sparkle, has reported that you believe you can gain my interest in thirty seconds."

"It's fairly simple, Your Highness. Even if there is only a one in one thousand chance that I am right, and a further one in one thousand chance that I can help - there are millions of ponies, cows, and other intelligent beings in Equestria whose lives could be at risk. And, if I am wrong, the cost of letting me find out should be quite small."

She looked tired - which, on a being who, depended on who you asked, raised the sun, or was the sun, or was able to fraudulently convince a whole kingdom she had a connection to the sun, was very much not the effect I was trying to achieve. "How small?", she gently inquired.

"A grad student." A brief pause, and she looked... curious? It was better than a moment ago, at least. I added, "Not permanently - I could just use some hooves, or a horn, that can move things better than I can. And can guide me through your higher educational system to find what I am looking for."

We were pushing the half-minute mark, but the alicorn mare didn't seem in any rush to have me kicked out. "What are you looking for?"

"A limit to local knowledge - and to see if my strange memories tell the truth about things nopony knows."

"And if they do not?"

"If I'm wrong, nothing happens. I go to a mental hospital - peacefully, quietly. I'll enjoy it. But if I'm right, and my memories do prove to contain some truth, both about dangers and how we can stop this thing... Your Highness, you will have saved the lives of millions of your little ponies."

She smiled down at me. "Then, my dear, it seems you have work to do."

---

I looked down at the grey-bodied, white-mained, blue-eyed unicorn, and she looked back up at me. "I'm Micro Scope," she introduced herself, and a quick glance down her flank showed that her cutie mark matched her name. "And I have no idea what's going on, other than that I'm supposed to help you. Nobody's even told me your name yet."

"I'd love to help with that - but I'm not sure I know it, myself."

"If this is a secret security thing, I can live with that. Would be helpful to have something to call you, though, like to catch your attention if there's a fire or to tell you to duck."

I tried to shrug, which ended up being kind of a bob of my head. "I've been called 'My Dear' and 'Miss' a lot, lately."

"'Miss' isn't a name. 'Missy' could be one."

"Wouldn't have been my first choice... but I suppose I can live with it."

"Great! With that out of the way - what can I do for you, Missy?"

"That's a very good question, Micro. I could use a pair of hooves and a guide, at least. I don't know you well enough to know if there's more you can do for me."

She started, "I graduated from-"

I lifted a hoof, interrupting her. "Credentials are only useful if I know and trust whoever gave them to you - and that they're relevant to what I can use. Unfortunately, the sort of thinking which could actually help me is taught rarely-to-never, as far as I can recall."

She smiled. "Try me."

I considered giving her a simple quiz on practical Bayesian probability theory - but decided it might be worth really testing how she thought. "Very well. We shall play the 2-4-6 game. I have a rule which fits some triplets of numbers, but not others. 2, 4, 6 is a triplet that fits the rule. If you would like, I can go get somepony to write down the rule so you know I'm not changing it."

"Don't worry about it."

"Alright. Now, you give me triplets of numbers, and I say 'yes' if they fit the rule, and 'no' if they don't. When you've given my as many triplets as you feel you need to, you stop and guess the rule, and I tell you if you're right or wrong. Have you got all that?"

"Seems easy enough."

"Okay, go for it."

"4-6-8," said Micro.

"Yes," I said.

"10-12-14."

"Yes."

"1-3-5."

"Yes."

"Minus 3, minus 1, plus 1."

"Yes."

"I've got the rule," she said triumphantly.

I held up a hoof. "Before you guess, I'm going to tell you something else about this game. If memory serves, even among people with the most advanced degrees, only a fifth get it right."

She frowned, then brightened again, apparently thinking of something.

"2-5-8!"

"Yes."

"10-20-30!"

"Yes."

"I've got it! First I thought they had to go up by two each time - but now I know the rule is they have to go up by the same amount each time, not just by two!"

"Is that your final answer?"

"Of course!" she instantly responded.

I sighed - I'd had hopes for her. "I'm sorry - the actual rule is: 'Three real numbers in increasing order, lowest to highest.'"

"But-!" She started. She frowned, said, "You-!", shook her head, then tried again. "That's really the rule you had in mind from the start?"

I nodded at her. "That's why I wanted it written down - but yes. Don't worry, I still need a guide and assistant - and perhaps you can show me you can be more useful in reality than in a game."

---

We were in a vaguely Roman-style bath somewhere in the palace, and I was surprised at how nice it felt to have my udder sponged down with a cool, damp cloth. I guessed that all those glands busy turning my body's resources into milk tended to get heated from their work, and tried not to think about the fact that I'd been, effectively, naked amongst a society of nudists for the past couple of days.

Micro and I were discussing the limits of Equestrian science, such as it was. I'd covered some of the basics of things I'd remembered from the show, confirming they knew about basic mechanical force and physics, and had moved to the next chapter in my mental textbook. I remembered from the episode where Twilight tried to figure out Pinkie Sense, and the party-pony had been hooked up to a gizmo with flashing lights and wires. "Moooving right along - 'scuse me - can you tell me what would happen if I took a jar of acid, put a copper strip in one side and a zinc strip to another, and ran wires from those strips into a jar of water?"

"You're talking about a battery, right?" I nodded, distracted by thinking about my unexpected vocal tic. I almost didn't notice as Micro's horn glowed, and the cloth she'd been using on her own hide shrank to a tenth of its dimensions, water squirting out of it, before it expanded again. As she went on about the dissociating water thing, I cleared my throat to interrupt her.

"Micro - I don't have very good eyes. Did you just wring out your towel?"

She smiled across at me. "In a way. My special talent is making things smaller. Would you like to see?"

I looked around, then just picked up my sponge, balancing it on my hoof. I gauged its weight, then nodded to her... and she looked at it, her horn glowing, and my sponge not only got a lot smaller, but also a light lighter. Water trickled down my hoof as she explained, "It's tricky, but I figured out how to shrink just the solid part without shrinking the water," and went on - but I'd closed my eyes and shuddered. Sure, I'd seen the episode with poison joke, where Applejack had turned into Apple-tini... but now that I thought about it, I realized that I'd been assuming the episodes broadcast in the human world were, at best, stories told by an unreliable narrator. But if objects really could have their mass changed...

"Are you alright?" Micro asked me, and when I opened my eyes, she looked concerned.

"Sorry. But what you just did - what you do on a regular basis, if that's your talent - that violates Conservation of Energy. That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signalling."

"... What?"

"Sending information into your past light-cone. Time travel. How can you do that?""

Micro's lips were twitching now. "Magic."

"Magic isn't enough to do that! You'd have to be a god!"

Micro blinked. "That's the first time I've ever been called that."

"And even 'magic' isn't a real answer. It's just a word with no moving parts - saying it's the answer doesn't let me make any predictions I couldn't before. It's like drawing a map, labeling a blank spot 'stuff', and trying to use that to navigate!"

---

From some things I learned later, I can reconstruct a conversation I wasn't a party to:

Princess Celestia said to Micro Scope, "She saw you shrink an object - and from that one fact, she deduced that time travel was possible?"

"Yes, Your Highness."

The Princess of the Sun looked to the Princess of the Moon, and the latter said, "We should have a longer talk with her, my sister!"

Celestia winced at the volume, but nodded in agreement.

---

"Please, do not worry about bowing," Princess Celestia said with a smile, as I was escorted into something much closer to a sitting room than the large audience chamber. She was curled up on a couch, and Princess Luna was standing by a window, looking out at the nighttime sky.

"Thank you, Your Highness." At her nod, I settled my bulk onto a cow-sized cushion. "I'm afraid that I haven't finished talking with the pony who's been helping me, let alone started the experiment yet."

"That's not what I wanted to talk to you about."

"What else is there?"

"You."

I blinked. "What about me?"

"You have told many of my little ponies that you believe yourself to be insane - but Micro Scope tells me that you have a keen mind, and are well-versed in a number of topics - even if you are also woefully ignorant about others."

"That... seems to be true, Your Highness." I couldn't blame Micro for being a snitch - in fact, I'd pretty well expected that that was her main job, and helping me out was secondary to that.

"And so, whether you are insane or not, I would like to know more about you."

"I don't think I can honestly describe where I was more than a day or so ago, Your Highness."

"A few of my ponies are even now asking the herds near where you were found if anypony like you has gone missing, or been seen in passing."

"Thank you, Your Highness. Wherever I am from, I couldn't have traveled very far from a dairy without my udder getting over-full."

She gave me an odd look. "What do you mean? Is your back hurt, so that you cannot drink from yourself?"

I paused, blinking. I looked down along my flank, tried reaching my head... and, yes, I could stretch far enough for my mouth to reach my teats. I didn't do anything quite so crass in front of the local divine royalty - but it looked like if I had to, I could live without anyone else emptying my udder for me. It seemed that Daisy Jo and her herd hadn't been telling me quite the whole truth - or, maybe, they just didn't want to tell me anything that would encourage me to wander away from the herds - or, more charitably, maybe they hadn't thought of it. "Er, no, your highness. I just - well - didn't think of it."

The two Princesses looked at each other, then both looked at me. "I see," said Celestia. "Well, as you are now aware, it is not certain that you would have needed to be near a herd every day; if you came to Ponyville through the Everfree Forest, nopony would have seen you." I nodded, and she continued, "But to return to my point - I would still like to know more about you."

"What would you like to know?"

"To start with - what would you like to do with your life?"

"Ah, of course. Goals and means." And whether I posed any sort of threat to her, or her ponies, or Equestria. I wriggled a bit, settling into my cushion. "At the risk of needing to explain something, I'll try to summarize my thinking. Just about anything anypony wants to accomplish requires at least one thing to be true - for at least some intelligent beings to still be alive to see that accomplishment. I would like to live forever, or at least closer to that than I currently expect to; and I don't want to spend that time insane from loneliness, and to have good company, and to have people who can help me up when I fall, and to help me face the various dangers in the world... so my core ethical goal is to do whatever I can to maximize the chances of the long-term survival of sapience."

Both Princesses were looking at me as if I'd... shrunk a towel. Celestia opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again. "That is a ... surprisingly enlightened philosophy."

"For a cow?" I said, before I even thought of what a bad idea it was to ask that.

"For anypony." Luna came closer and settled on a chaise next to her sister, who continued, "And - have you given any thought about how you might go about doing that?"

I paused, then went ahead and asked, "Are you really asking, whether I plan on doing monstrous things?"

She smiled, and was that a twinkle in her eye? "If you like."

I nodded, then took a breath, working out how to phrase this. "I have made one serious oath which I consider to still be in effect. The reasoning behind it would take a while to describe, it uses certain complicated terms and assumptions... but to describe it in brief... I've promised to try to never start a fight, or steal, or use fraud, or use censorship, if I can help it; to try to repair any damage I do; if I don't agree with someone about whether I did do any harm, to find a neutral arbiter and abide by their decision; to work to clarify what sort of rules are involved; to act in the common defense of anypony who lives by similar principles; and more recently, I've added a clause to try to use the principle of proportional force, to minimize the overall harm done when I do try defending anypony."

The sisters turned from me to look at each other, and Luna said, "She is telling the truth as she understands it, Celly." They'd had a lie-detector on me? Well, there was another reason to avoid deliberate fraud, even aside from the standard ones about long-term rational self-interest. And if Luna was still using the Royal Canterlot Voice... did that mean that the episode with Nightmare Night hadn't happened yet? If it hadn't, did that mean it was going to happen, regardless of what I did?

As I was wondering just how much predestination I might be stuck with, Celestia was still smiling, and before I could come to any conclusions, she said to me, "Even if you are insane, then, as you said to my faithful student, Twilight Sparkle, it seems to be a useful sort of insanity. You are welcome to stay as long as you like, and to seek what care or perform what studies you feel worthwhile. Thank you for taking the time to talk with us."

I may be as socially oblivious as a nerd can be, but I managed to detect the dismissal therein. "Thank you, Your Highnesses."

---

I spent the next few hours tossing and turning in my room, unable to fall alseep... until I sighed, gave up, and went in search of the royal dairy barn. As soon as I was settled between two other bovines, listening to their breathing and inhaling their combined scents, I immediately dropped into slumber.

Comments

[nemryn]

So, are we going to be seeing the Elements of Rationality here?

[DataPacRat]

786855
The general approach is well-thought-out; a set of quotes describing much of it can be read here. The specifics of how that approach are applied... are being chosen mainly on the fly. :)

786895
'Elements of Rationality', maybe, maybe not; 'Methods of Rationality', definitely. :)

[Rust]

I like chocolate milk. Make the brown cows make chocolate milk. That'd be sweeeeeet!

[DataPacRat]

787063
Well, I've been thinking about unicorns with a few udder-related spells, but you are one of the core authours of the crossover, and it doesn't really conflict with anything I've got in mind right now - so sure, why not. :)

[Salacar]

This...this is just brilliant. I think I've found my favourite Piece.

Please, do go on

[Sesquame]

I love me some Methods, but be careful not to turn it into MoR IN EQUESTRIA! or worse, straight plagiarism, this chapter is already a bit too far over that line.

[DataPacRat]

788030
One of the main points for this chapter was to explain what the main character's strength actually was - the reason (s)he was picked to be dropped in Equestria. I'm not planning on mirroring MoR quite so directly after this point, though I do intend for various Methods and items from the Sequences to be practiced.

[Forevermore]

Somebody tell me I'm not the only one who didn't understand a word of the physics stuff!

[DataPacRat]

815847
If you mean the thing about the Hamiltonian and unitarity; that is a very specific fact I learned a few years ago, from before MLP-FIM aired... From, of all places, a fanfic. I knew I wanted to include it, and was thinking about mentioning Apple-tini from Bridle Gossip; but went a different way, and that's how Micro came to be.

[RealityDowngrade]

If there is one thing I never tire of reading, it is of people being clever, and not needing to use multisyllabic words (upon 5 plus) to do so. One of the reasons I like the Artemis Fowl series so much XD

[Diabolic Gnome]

...ya i have no idea what the flying fuck is going on
besides a cow with an iq equal to his/her weight

[burning-ruin-666]

''old habits die hard''
XD

[Paladin Redflare]

Error.... this one does not understand why main character speaks the way they do.

[DataPacRat]

1316461
Some people talk that way. Have you ever watched 'Big Bang Theory'? If so, try imagining what Sheldon could become if he were willing to acknowledge his flaws and work to improve them, while still retaining some of his quirks.

[scranity]

THE MATH.
IT HURTS

[Cade117]

1317125
I'm wearing a Sheldon shirt right now...
bazingaa...

[Zubric]

A shrinking tower make him think stuff is impossible but seeing twilight teleport doesn’t