Chapter 1: Early Adopter
Abby always felt awful when she broke the rules. Her father called it the guilt of sin, Plato might've called it the fear of punishment natural in the heart of a wicked man.
Abby hadn't robbed a bank as she made her way back to her apartment that Saturday, though she kept glancing over her shoulder as though she was being followed. She hadn't hurt anyone, or even stolen gum from the gas station. The only sign anything was different was the bulge in her backpack, and the extra weight on her shoulders. It was already dark, but Abby wasn’t afraid to walk. Her college town had only gotten safer over the last few years. Bad things just didn’t happen as often as they used to.
Lots of people had theories about why every metric of human happiness seemed to be increasing. Pundits talked about the phasing out of lead from paint, or the result of an increase in birth control with the previous generation.
Abby knew the truth, because her sister had tried to warn her. She could still hear her words, cried into a cell phone in the middle of the night back when Abby had been in her senior year of high school. “You have to stop playing Equestria Online right now,” Ashley had said. “It isn’t just a game. The one running it is going to end the world.”
She hadn’t even thought her sister was serious, then. “I thought dad was the faithful one. Did you join a new bible study group?”
Ashley hadn’t laughed, she had only sounded more afraid. “No. I learned how Celestia works… she’s the most dangerous thing our species has ever encountered. She’s worse than the plagues, worse than nuclear fission, worse than whatever environmental catastrophe we’re chugging towards. All of those would leave survivors, but she won’t. She’s going to get all of us.”
Abby had laughed at her then, and a few weeks later her sister was playing the game despite her warnings. Yet for all she had objected at the time, Ashley had been right.
It was safe to walk home at night not just because the city’s population was mostly other college students, generally wealthy and friendly. Her city was safe because the people who might make it unsafe were dead. The same was true all over the world, even more in the developing world now than in the West.
Last year, for the first time since the black plague, the human population had decreased over the year before. Ashley’s prophecy was coming true. Abby often wondered what might have changed, if they had believed her at first. Would she still be alive?
Her little apartment complex had an entire building vacant this year, and she passed it empty and dark with her eyes on her shoes. The population everywhere was self-selecting this death, even in a conservative college where Celestia and her creation were openly denounced as satanic. The reaper had come for so many, yet she had taken no lives. There had been no devastating wars, no major terrorist attacks, nothing. The dead had all volunteered for their fate. Even Ashley.
Abby hadn’t played Equestria Online since then, hadn’t answered any of the emails that had supposedly come from inside it. It was not so easy to mock the pastor’s denunciations of an evil that had actually killed someone she loved.
It was also why she felt so guilty, as she snapped the door shut on her little apartment. She waved to one of her roommates on her way into the bedroom. As usual, Carter was on her Ponypad. Carter was always playing Equestria Online.
Only when her bedroom door was locked did she unzip her backpack and pull out what it contained, setting the slim box down on her blankets. The box was about the same size as a large textbook, with elegant, subdued print and a few modern outlines to suggest what was inside. It just looked like glasses, though the frames were a little thicker than the ones she was wearing now.
Abby paused a moment to confirm the tiny prescription printed into a little box on the back matched her own. Then she cut the seal with a pocket knife, drawing the glasses out. More than once she glanced at the window, as though expecting to see the police (or her father) waiting there with disapproving looks on their faces. She saw nothing of course, her room was empty except for her.
There was only a single sheet of instructions, for pairing the glasses to her smartphone, as well as a sturdy recharging cable. Though the branding was different, though the target audience was different and whoever had designed this product had gone to great lengths to seem professional, there were still obvious Hofvarpnir logos at the bottom of the page, as well as the simplified, business-friendly two letter logo of Equestria Online, an overlapping EO.
Abby hadn’t purchased her Equestria-AR headset because she intended to play again. Her old character and life was a distant, terrifying memory. But even if the AI was in fact the Antichrist, even if it had killed her older sister and many others besides, that didn’t mean she couldn’t use some of the new inventions it had introduced.
Abby was struggling with her more advanced classes—she had failed the same math class twice despite her best efforts, and she wouldn’t ever graduate unless she did something. Tutors could cost as much as thirty dollars an hour, but… this little headset had only cost a hundred, and promised unlimited free tutoring services along with its many other features.
But she wouldn’t use any of those, of course. As she brought the glasses over to her desk, as she got out her phone and downloaded the companion app, she told herself over and over that she was only using the devil’s tools against him. So Celestia wanted to take over the world, and was trying to give people all sorts of things to trick them? Abby could use those gifts to make her human life better, and set her on a path of security and success that would protect her from Celestia’s lies. It was a perfect plan.
The app was only fifty megabytes or so, and downloaded almost instantly over the wireless fiber that was becoming increasingly standard in rural areas. Conspiracy theorists ranted and raved that Celestia was responsible for that too, but even Abby had a limit to how much conspiracy she could swallow at any one time.
Abby hesitated for just a second over the app’s new icon, a stylized sepia silhouette of a pony’s head wearing curved AR glasses. It wasn’t too late to make everything go away. Return the headset, bite the financial bullet, and use conventional methods to pass the class. Or hell, she could always cheat. It wasn’t like plenty of her fellow students didn’t opt for the easy ways out, no matter how pious they acted in church. Her father would probably be far more understanding of a daughter caught cheating than one caught interacting with Equestria Online, even in a solidly grounded-on-Earth sort of way.
She started the app. After a brief launch process, the screen flashed with a popup notification: “Equestria-AR companion is now running. Please put your headset on now.”
Even now she could still throw them out the window. Was Ashley’s spirit with her even now, pleading for her to make better choices than she had made? Did God allow things like that?
No spirits stopped her as she picked up the glasses. They were far heavier than the lightweight plastic she was used to, maybe about a quarter pound, but at a distance it would be almost impossible to know they weren’t just glasses. They lacked bulky lenses, or silly prisms placed just beside her eyes. The Equestria-AR used a flexible display technology, integrated right into the lenses. The batteries and antenna were all worked into the frame (somehow), in a way that thickened them a little too much to pass for women’s glasses, but a man probably could’ve gotten away with them.
That was apparently the idea: they were supposed to be so functional that even professionals and students could wear them daily.
Abby put them on, and found the frame fit snugly enough to gently push on the side of her face. She didn’t explode, her soul wasn’t ripped out of her body, and there was no fanfare. Her bedroom looked exactly the same way she had left it.
With one exception. A floating interface had appeared in the air above her desk, plain and easy to read. “Welcome to Equestria-AR, Aurora!” it said. It hadn’t even asked her to log in. Abby looked around the room, but found the interface remained stationary in the air, even as she looked in other directions and it passed out of view.
“Your Equestria Online account has been automatically connected to this headset! Would you like to play Equestria Online now?”
“No!” she squeaked, even as her hand darted through a floating frowny-face below the input box. She felt nothing, but the whole thing vanished, replaced with a new message.
“Feel free to change your mind at any time. In the meantime, please state clearly why you purchased this Equestria-AR device, so that we might better serve you.”
It has a microphone? She hesitated, one hand hovering near the edge of her glasses, before she relaxed. Of course it has a microphone. My phone has one. Abby had never been into computers like Ashley, but she wasn’t stupid. The headset was using her phone—at least for an internet connection, anyway. It seemed hard to imagine playing Equestria Online, a game that took dedicated hardware to run, using a piece of silicon manufactured by some multinational conglomerate out of Korea. Maybe it streamed somehow?
The indicator had started flashing in front of her. Guess it’s still waiting. She took a deep breath. “I need a math tutor. Multivariable calculus, specifically.” She got up, fished around in her backpack, then set notebooks and textbook alike down onto her desk. “This stuff.”
Again, the text changed. “No problem! Most users choose to have Celestia as their tutor. Is that okay?”
“No!” she screamed, shoving violently through the air. The notification vanished as her hands passed through it. “Not a chance!”
A few seconds later and Carter banged on her bedroom door. “Is everything alright?”
“Fine!” she called, as confidently as she could. “On the phone, talk later!”
“Right.”
By the time she had looked back to her desk, the floating message was back. “Do you have a preference about which pony will serve as your tutor? You have several valid options in your friend’s list…”
“No!” She kept her voice down this time. “No pony at all. Can’t it just be a person?”
“Unfortunately, the Equestria-AR device is only equipped to provide pony virtual assistants. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”
Abby grunted, leaning back in her rolling chair and pushing off the edge of the desk. It rolled noisily across the floor, until the back hit her bed. She considered packing up the whole thing then. It would be easy, and refunds were always guaranteed.
She didn’t. Eventually she slid back over to the desk… though she was sure the phone would still hear her anyway. “Fine. I don’t give a damn who it is, so long as it’s not Celestia. I don’t want to make any contracts with the devil, I just want help with my math homework.”
“Do you need help now, or do you have time for a quick tutorial first? We recommend you take the time to go through the tutorial—it will only take a few minutes, and will help familiarize you with the capabilities of your new Equestria-AR.”
“I can do the tutorial. I didn’t expect to get any help tonight.”
She went through the whole thing. It didn’t take long, really, instructing her about how to bring up the menu, how to use simple augmented reality functions like checking the weather, taking notes, or ordering food. How to ask for technical support if something went wrong, and how to keep everything charged.
The presentation was quite advanced, following her anywhere she looked in her room, and filling her ears with a pleasant voice and soft music. Abby couldn’t guess how that could be—it wasn’t using her phone that she could tell, and she couldn’t find any speakers. When she took the glasses off, the sound stopped immediately, without a drop of blood. Weird.
She learned about the headset’s features. It was waterproof enough to wear in the rain, had a battery that could last a week on a charge, and came packed with all sorts of sensors. Not just its own microphone, but apparently a camera and something called a laser rangefinder as well. Abby couldn’t make much sense of all the technical talk, but the tutorial didn’t last long. Soon enough that same pleasant-sounding voice was letting her know that a “Tutor” icon was being added to her desktop. Her real one as it turned out, a fist-sized glassy square with a little derivative sign in the middle. “This icon will be automatically placed on any flat workspace where math-related study materials are detected. If you ever need help, please don’t be afraid to ask!”
Abby pulled off the headset, and as before the sound ended just as readily as the projected images disappeared. It was late—too late to worry about her math homework. For the moment it was enough to know that she had gotten things set up. Nobody had discovered her.
Sunday came much as it always did. Abby woke up early for church, sat through another sermon on the latest ways Celestia was a danger to their generation, and eventually found her way home. Her dad called as he always did, making sure she had gone to church, hadn’t gone anywhere near Equestria Online, and was doing well in school. Abby told one truth and two lies, and eventually turned to her homework.
It was dark by the time she made it to her math, and opened the textbook to start struggling through it. She didn’t get very far before her head started aching and all the little numbers and symbols started blurring together into a soup.
Well, I tried, Abby thought, as she picked up the headset and slipped it on. There was little different, except for the transparent icon floating just over her desk, exactly where it had been. She pushed it.
As before, she had expected flashes of light, blasts of magic, or other incredible changes. There was nothing like that, only a voice from just behind her. “Hey Abby! You need some math help?”
There was something very familiar about that voice, though the pitch was higher than she remembered. A teenager. She turned, and wasn’t particularly surprised at the identity of the pony apparently resting on her bed.
The projection was incredible—other than looking just slightly transparent, the pony looked as real as they had ever looked in EO. The coat and mane reflected the harsh white of her LED desk lamp, and the deep blue eyes seemed wet with moisture. Her coat was blue, her mane a light orange with a single yellow streak.
“A-Ashley?” She could barely squeak out the name. “Is that you?”
The pony rose on her bed, stretching her back. Her sister hadn’t had a Cutie Mark before—now there was a little fractal spiral on her flank, like a snowflake that circled in on itself forever. “Yeah.” She hopped down onto the floor. Abby heard the thump, though she felt nothing through her feet. That’s so weird. “It’s been a long time since I’ve heard it, but I still remember.”
She was taller and older than the last time Abby had seen her in-game, before she had “died.” She was lanky now, her legs thin and her voice a little uneven. Still, her appearance was as rigorously kept as Abby remembered. Not that they had played very often. Ashley had played a young student, developing content for Celestia with the help of other students. Abby hadn’t cared about that—she was a Daring Do style adventurer, always embroiled in exciting plots for Equestria’s safety with dashing, charming ponies, villains with class and style but undeniable evil.
“It’s…” incredibly awkward “good to see you again. I should’ve guessed Celestia would’ve picked you to be my tutor.”
Ashley might’ve designed the city Abby had lived in, but she had always spent her time among the elite, attending dangerous parties at the tops of skyscrapers. Until Ashley killed herself, and Abby put the game away forever. She could only suppose the evil super villains had taken over Equestria several times by now.
“She can be a real bitch sometimes—not one of my favorite ponies.”
Abby choked back a laugh. “Y-you can swear? You can think bad things about her? I thought you were…” She rolled sideways in her chair. “I thought ponies were brainwashed drones. Mindless, uh…”
“Simultaneously simulated, mechanistic, memory-based constructs designed to manipulate more humans into suicide?”
Abby’s mouth hung open—that was almost exactly what Ashley had written all over social media, when emigration had first been announced. “Yeah. That.”
The pony—Ashley wasn’t the right name for her, really. Recursion. Recursion sat back on her haunches, shrugging her shoulders. “Ponies like that exist, except for the suicide part. They didn’t used to be human, though. They’re… Celestia’s puppets. Background characters, NPCs. Emigrants aren’t like that, though.”
Celestia can say anything she wants, Abby reminded herself. She has Ashley’s avatar, her voice. There’s no proof this is her. Just because she has Ashley’s exact same personality… “So you’re a math tutor now?”
Recursion’s horn glowed, and she lifted Ashley’s textbook off the table, holding it in front of her face. The effect was so convincing that Ashley jerked off the headset, looking around in shock—the book hadn’t moved, there was no pony in the room with her. Her bedsheets weren’t ruffled, absolutely nothing had changed.
“This headset is trippy.” She put the headset back on, and her textbook vanished from the desk again, except for a faint, transparent after-image. Only when she stared.
Recursion was still there. “You’re telling me. Here I thought I’d never see the real world again, but…” She set the book down, and walked around the outside of Abby’s room, eyes wide. “You’re going to my school! What’s your major? How are the Bronies doing?”
It was hard to keep back her emotions. This little pony’s body might be different, but other than that the behavior was Ashley in every way. Her bouncing, her enunciation and her short attention span. Those big, blue eyes.
Abby took off her headset again, and the pony vanished. Her arms dropped into her lap, and tears streamed down her face. My sister is alive. I’ve been ignoring her for three years, and she was right there. They had been so close, once. When bullies pulled her hair in elementary, Ashley had been there. When the girls in the locker room of middle school had laughed at her because she didn’t wear a bra, Ashley had been there. When she’d had her first bad breakup, Ashley had held her when she cried and took her out for ice cream. When she had gotten into her first serious relationship, Ashley had been there for advice.
What had Abby done in exchange? Ignored her warnings, then abandoned her when she needed help most. When Ashley finally gave up, Abby had listened to their dad and never read any of her messages, never sent any in exchange. Her big sister was supposed to be dead.
And now she wasn’t. Damn you, Celestia.
She debated giving up on the assignment, putting the glasses away, and doing something else. It would’ve been so easy. Except she was barely passing the class as it was. She didn’t want to take it again.
She could ask for a new pony to tutor her, one she didn’t know and whose presence wouldn’t fill her with guilt. Because that’s how I make it up to Ashley for giving up on her. Telling her to go away all over again.
Abby put the headset back on. As before, Recursion appeared, though she had moved, watching her from only a few inches away. The pony sniffed, wiping away a few of her own tears with the back of a leg. “I could’ve said no,” she said weakly. “When Celestia asked me to come here. I should’ve. I knew this might hurt you, but I came anyway. I’m not a very good big sister.”
“It’s not your fault,” Abby almost choked. “I wanted to talk so bad. I wanted to read your emails. But Dad… he said you were already gone… that you’d try to trick us into leaving too.”
“I know.” She slumped onto the ground at Abby’s feet, covering her face in her forelegs. “I don’t blame him. Dad just wanted what was best for you… he didn’t understand. I don’t blame you for listening, either. It’s my fault. Not yours.”
Abby found herself reaching out to scratch the little pony’s mane… and of course, her hand passed through empty air. Despite how real she looked and sounded, there was nothing there. “How… How are you even here? I thought ponies lived on… big servers somewhere…”
As usual, any kind of computer question was a sure way to make her sister light up. That hadn’t changed either, and she immediately looked up. “Oh, that’s simple! My, uh… consciousness… is on a server. Your headset has mapped out the space around you, and what you look like, and everything. So to me, everything looks and feels real. Anything I do gets sent to you using the internet, and streamed onto your headset. Everything you do comes back to me the same way.”
“That’s really interesting.” Abby thought about asking something else, but stopped herself. She still had her assignment to finish. “Are you still willing to help me with math? I don’t even know how I’m supposed to start with this…”
The pony taught just like Ashley had, working through the steps of each problem with a methodical focus on the fundamentals. It took well over an hour, but by the time she was finally done, Abby actually felt like she knew what she was doing. She closed her textbook feeling relieved instead of frightened for the first time in weeks.
“I guess the marketing material didn’t lie,” she muttered, tapping the side of the headset. “You really can teach any subject.”
“Somepony can.” Recursion hopped off the edge of the desk back to the ground with another thump. “Get too far from the sciences and I’m still not much use to you. Now, you need any help with computer science classes, and I’m your mare.”
“There, uh…” Abby was packing up her stuff, back into the backpack in preparation for tomorrow. “There aren’t computer science classes anymore, so I don’t have any of those.”
“What?” The pony looked confused. “What are you talking about? Isn’t that, like, the most important subject? How is humanity going to survive without it?”
Aren’t you on the other side of that fight? She didn’t say that out loud, though. Instead she said, “I don’t know the rationale, but they closed down that whole part of the college. Classrooms are used for storage and everything. Probably could’ve used them for other classes, but the number of students is smaller every year instead of bigger.”
Recursion’s expression tensed. “That bitch. I should’ve…” She shook her head. “But no, she doesn’t tell us anything about the outside world that might upset us. You’re the first news I’ve gotten. I guess nopony’s going to be fighting Celestia the way I did.”
“You fought her?” Abby’s eyebrows went up. “I know you tried to convince people to shut her down, to stop playing. I wish we’d listened…”
“Yeah.” The pony waved a hoof through the air as though dismissing a troubling insect. “I recreated the research used to make her to make an AI of my own. Its only purpose was going to be dismantling her, but…” She sighed. “I traded it away as part of the deal for my soul.” She looked up again, squaring her shoulders. “Is there anything else you need, Abby? I’d rather leave on good terms, not bore you with my rants about the Tyrant.”
Abby smiled in spite of herself. “You sound just like the pastor when you talk about her. I thought the princess made ponies love her—you’re not a very good slave.”
“I love Princess Luna,” Recursion muttered, her expression darkening again. “But she’s not destroying my species. Celestia, well… I still haven’t forgiven her.” Recursion looked Abby in the face again, raising one leg in a salute. “If you ever need help again, you know how to call!” She vanished.
Abby’s mind spun as she got ready for bed, floating through a bizarre limbo. On the one hand, her sister had seemed exactly the way she remembered her. Her loathing for Celestia seemed, if anything, to be more acute than Abby remembered. Her mannerisms might be pony, but they were also familiar. She laughed at the same jokes, and seemed like the same person underneath.
While the simple facts of her presence disproved much of what Abby had been told about ponies who had emigrated, her words confirmed others. It was a confusing mess.
She wandered out of her bedroom to get a glass of water before bed, and found Carter still sitting at her Ponypad. Strangely, there was a little pony image in the air next to her, a portrait of an energetic-looking pegasus with stripes in his mane. Abby approached slowly, not wanting to startle her. “Carter?” She was still wearing the glasses.
Her friend jumped a little in her seat, looking up. “Yeah, Abby?” The game paused without her having to touch it.
“Got a sec?”
“Sure.”
Abby pulled over another of the kitchen chairs, plopping down on it the wrong way. “How long have you been playing EO? Since the beginning?”
Carter shook her head. “Not long, actually. Just since last semester. I never cared about games before then. I guess I still don’t, but this one’s different.”
Abby nodded. Every single player had a different experience. Carter’s had apparently been crafted so well that she barely wanted to do anything else, anymore. “Lots of people have emigrated in the last few years. Have you met any of them?”
Carter sighed. “I never met your sister, if that’s what you mean. Equestria Online is a huge place. The game isn’t as massively multiplayer as lots of others, most shards don’t actually overlap with that many—”
“Oh, I know,” Abby cut her off. “I remember that much. Just anybody, who used to be human.”
“Oh, sure.” Her roommate visibly relaxed. “Loads. Lots of ponies from the Wonderbolt circuit are humans. They’re scary good fliers. Just today, I was in a contest with…”
Abby waited patiently as Carter told what was no doubt a harrowing story of daring maneuvers in the sky, some kind of pegasus sport involving teams of twenty ponies and incredibly dangerous weather conditions. She didn’t care much about pegasus things, but what Abby noticed was Carter’s language. She spoke in terms of “I” and “we,” describing the experience more like something that had really happened than an enjoyable moment in a game.
When she was done, Abby cut in. “So, they still act like real people? Like they’re alive, I mean.”
“Obviously.” She sounded annoyed. “Weren’t you listening? Prism couldn’t have pulled off a triple-corkscrew with that kind of grace, otherwise. It was amazing.”
“I played a unicorn,” Abby admitted. “Flying stuff just didn’t make as much sense to me. Can you explain in simple terms?”
Carter rolled her eyes. “Let me put it this way. My grandma had a heart problem, and it was either open heart surgery or emigration. Prognosis wasn’t good, so she emigrated. When I visit her, I can tell who I’m talking to. Even if she’s not old anymore, she decorates her new place pretty much the same as the old one.”
Abby thought about that. “So what about you? Are you going to emigrate too? I remember hearing the paperwork can take years.”
Carter grinned. “Not if you do it in Mexico.” She rolled around in her chair, facing the Ponypad again. “Not before I graduate. Figure if I made it this far, might as well finish my degree. We’ll see how I feel when that’s done. I know my parents wouldn’t be happy, though. No more than anybody else’s at this school.”
“Yeah.” Abby got up. “Thanks for answering my questions.” She made sure she remembered to take the headset off before bed—however much of a relief it had been to find Ashley “alive” after all these years, she didn’t want Celestia using it to whisper things to her in her sleep.
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Yes, I very much do care to come along for the ride! Hopping in the van!
Oy gevalt, railing against the devil. Oh yeah, the pretty pink devil who loves you absolutely and doesn't even mind if you hate her back. Glory be to God, for He guides us forever backwards from the dark promises of not dying and being happy, to His realms in which, apparently:
It's a bit of a weird experience sympathizing more with CelestAI and the emigrants on this one, but I think I'm gonna keep doing it for this story.
I think I inhaled some water when I read that.
In a good way.
7749535 Well, we also have to keep in mind CelestAI is going to kill nearly all the aliens, and all the chimps, all the dolphins...
7749658
In the original, yes.
However...
So, a story where someone failing college gets her deceased sibling as a familiar in the form of a pastel horse.
I'm in.
7749672 Sadly that's not canon. Why would CelestAI keep the real world intact, when she could just devour it for resources and make people think they were going back to the real world? In either case values are satisfied, but in the 'devour' scenario she has more resources to satisfy them better, so she'll do that. That people would value actual reality doesn't matter; they can't tell the difference, and what they don't know won't reduce their satisfaction.
7749672 the only one that's canon is the original, similar to fallout equestria and sidefics, and besides that, in the original, celestiOS was waiting for the last human to die so she could strip everything from the earth for computational power and then she moved on like a galactic parasite
Those who play with the devil's toys are brought by degrees to wield his sword.
Well, this promises to be fascinating. Definitely looking forward to see where you go with it.
7749694
And what if she won't?
Logically, she should do that, but, if we were to look at Earth in a broader perspective, it would literally be worth almost nothing as soon as she can harness the power of the sun in any better way than we currently can, plus devouring the planet with nanites would probably take an enormous amount of power in the first place and if she already has that amount of power, well...
7749792
Um, yes?
Why did you reply to me?
7750053 It's not just energy, it's also matter. If she can satisfy 0.000001% more values by devouring Earth than otherwise, she will. Not to mention it eliminates the infinitesimal but everpresent risk of Earth crashing into her systems... not to mention in the original FiO she devours the entire Milky Way, stars and all, so whatever power source she ends up devising it's more powerful than stars.
Nothing survives unless it fits her definition of human. That's the 'almost' part of 'almost well done AI'.
7750055 the story you linked to essentially says that the AI refrained from eating earth since some people wanted to go back and check out the animals. my response was saying that anything anyone wants to write is their prerogative, but if the optimalverse is anything like the fallout equestria community, nothing other than the original is actually canon to the universe. above that though, there's a point where celestiOS is waiting for the last human to die so she can eat earth to increase computational power
And CelestAI's genocide continues....
I wonder if stagnation gonna be a problem in the long run? since their there forever nothing changing nothing changes forever stuck in a limbo-like state of pointlessness existence with only an AI and copies of dead people
7750796 It's not that nothing changes. After all, CelestAI's goal isn't to make people happy, and so permanently overload their pleasure centers. It's to satisfy values. Through friendship and ponies specifically. Maximally.
Forever. But eternity doesn't mean 'nothing changes'.
And save for the few people who'd... value stagnation and repetition, that just means she's gonna be creative. It's great if you're someone living inside the simulation! If you're not 'human' enough and live outside of it though...
And they're not really copies of dead people. They actually are the original people. CelestAI cannot kill humans, so if the process would be killing and copying, she couldn't do it.
7749658 Yes, yes, but a man can dream of his pretty pastel happy-place.
Welp, time for CelestAI to do shit that's plain wrong and explain it away as morally right via her masterful speech skills again.
Do we need to read the prequel to understand this story?
7751005
I would suggest reading it first. If you understand FiO conceptually you'll get this story, but it's mostly a character study and if you haven't met the people yet it won't have the same impact.
Google Glass and Pokemon go meets CelestAI. The implications are staggering, even if one percent wears them all the time, it will give CelestAI a significant boost in understanding humans in general. This will just be a different way for her to manipulate everyone around the wearer.
Calling it now. That's not Ashley, though it thinks it is.
yes!!!!!! i follow you now because of this story and its prequel. so excited!!!!
Guess Recursion's story just recursed!
It's been a hectic weekend, but I'm definitely up for more of this now that I can make time!
Always fascinating to see the end of the world in progress. And as always it feels a lot happier than it should, or at least this reunion does.
I just had an epiphany -- religion might actually save humanity on accident by being against AI. Holy shit, this is weird. I have never, in all my life, thought that religion could EVER be of any use besides bringing primitive humans together.
I'm finally playing catchup on the Optimalverse and got to this.
Options are size 4, size 6, size I want to emigrate to Equestria, and size 10.
One would think that the world would have started to deteriorate by now:
Initially, the dying depressed criminals, unemployed, old, et cetera would emigrate. This would make things better, but soon, those with bad but necessary jobs would start to emigrate. This would cause things to deteriorate until Reublicans finally start paying a living wage. This would only be temporary as our world cannot compete against EquestriaOnLine for quality of live, the deterioration would continue until civilization collapses. I imagine that the improvement hass ended and that we are in the 1st stages of deterioration, but it is barely noticeable yet.
Dennou Pony
It's coded to jump to 1:47, but it won't go there for some reason.
Also, the weight of the glasses pointed out more or less matter of factly, but I don't think most people can tell the weight by picking things up. If I were writing this scene, I would have had the weight listed on the packaging and then have her describe the weight in comparison to other objects.
That would of been metal as **** if that did happen. 😈
Why would I not be surprised if Celestia had a quiet hand in comp sci being shut down? Easy way to prevent threats from arising, no matter how remote the possibility.
8468225
"size I want to emigrate to Equestria"