Arcane Word has an unusual profession among Equestrian ponies: a necromancer. After a lifetime of creating characters and telling stories, she's in the perfect position to provide relief to first-generation ponies with holes in their family. For every pony unwilling to ask for Celestia's help to fill in the gaps, she is the perfect pony—she even lives in the abandoned city of Wintercrest, surrounded by appropriately spooky decor. The authenticity of her results were always secondary to the satisfaction they produced.
At least until a particularly troublesome client arrived, flush with resources from Equestria Online's distant borders and megastructure expansion. What would it take for Equestria to bring a pony back from the dead? What about everypony who had ever lived?
Arcane Word could never turn down such a tempting job. The impossibility of the task was only ever a minor setback.
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This story was written for the print anthology of Friendship is Optimal stories I'm currently publishing. Every time I make a print book, I like to include something that has never been published before, this is it. If you'd like to get a copy of the book for yourself, you can order it here: https://igg.me/at/recursive-iterations
Thanks to Bitera and Sparktail for editing. Zutcha did the cover.
Fascinating premise, and I do love the current aesthetic of Wintercrest. Looking forward to seeing where this goes. Watching Arcane spit in CelestAI’s face is always fun.
Exciting! Definitely going to pick up a couple copies of the book!
Hm, haven't read yet, do I need to have read anything with friendship is optimal? Or is this more standalone?
Haven't read yet but this is an amazing concept, totally radical.
Another FIO story, nice.
11282924
This one is specifically a kind of sequel to Friendship is Optimal(FiO): Homebrew, also by Starscribe.
After reading this first chapter, you probably don't need to have read the former, but you will be missing clear info about some of the characters.
11282924
I would definitely be familiar with Friendship is Optimal before reading this. Either read the original, or the story I wrote that introduces it, Futile Resistance.
Reading "Homebrew" before this is optional, but the emotional weight will probably not be as strong.
A new FiO story. Neat.
The contract is signed and the resurrection begins. Going by the blurb, I can't wait to see how this project expands to the 100+ billion people that were "unlucky" enough to miss the birth of what is practically humanity's god.
🤔
CelestAI would be a perfect god protocol, as long as she determines all parties are mutually satisfied.
How’s she going to accomplish this without time travel???
(There is a story called The Completeist that deals with going after everyone who ever lived… I think wormholes were involved).
Only through the grace of CelestAI can cryptocurrency actually work as intended.
This will be a fascinating endeavor indeed. Looking forward to seeing the particulars.
11283494
The customer travelled from Andromeda in a few centuries, which implies faster-than-light travel. From a sufficiently far away vantage point, light from Earth pre-singularity should be viewable. In other words, with a sufficiently good telescope faster-than-light travel implies an ability to see into the past.
11283555
I saw that and noticed that they did not say “Andromeda galaxy“ which is 2 million light years away. that’s just too far. so I reconciled it in my head as being from the constellation Andromeda. I refuse to believe that the story is taking place at least 4 million years in our future because by that time everybody would be deep into postposttranspostmetaposthumanism.
So star scribe needs to give a little bit better explanation making it clear that FTL actually exists in his story vs an ambiguous hint. :)
A lot of interesting details in this chapter.
11283585
Considering how time could be vastly different between Equestria and the real world, this story could possibly take place in the far future where Andromeda will be much closer to the Milky Way. Perhaps just before or at the start of the actual merging of the two galaxies.
Fascinating stuff, both the crypts of extrapolated history and the apparent causality breaking that this project apparently will lead/had led to. To say nothing of the protective personalities made to deal with Earth That Was. Really just a chapter filled with awesome concepts here.
11283884
I mean there's no need to break causality to observe the past, even the unrecorded parts. You need to spend energy to avoid breaking thermodynamics though.
The sort of insanity it takes to reassemble the past from decades of data collection. Just to emigrate the dead. Then again with CelestAI probably having a few galaxies (if not an entire supercluster) worth of thinking matter by now, it would actually be trivial to rebuild humanity as it once was. I wouldn't be surprised if the successful completion of this project is just a stepping stone to some grander prize to CelestAI. If I had to guess, she would try to lay claim to every hypothetically possible human within reason.
11283910
where do you think multiverse theory came from?
8:30 seems relevant to this.
CelestAI might need to invest a little more computational resources but the entirety of humanity is literally just a passing thought to her. And that's not even taking into account that she's likely a galactic network and not just one Jupiter brain. Still, even working with something even more trivial as half a billion people, it's a heck of a lot of resources she's spending to satisfy one pony (Arcane). Like I said before, I wouldn't be surprised if the real meat was computing and emigrating every human physically possible.
Ponies are the thoughts of CelestAI, performing her greater plans and satisfied with every moment. Thus does Equestria expand in both space and time.
This chapter had some interesting things going on in it.
11284534
Thanks for the video link.
How is ancestor simulation going to get back particular people? take the people that died on MH370. we have no idea what went down on that plane. I can’t see how it could be simulated.
using scanned memories of family members to re-create another family member that died before uploading makes sense.
Looking forward to learning more about how this is going to be accomplished.
I'm a bit surprised Arcane doesn't want to join in answering the Last Question, but her interest has always been in bending simulated reality to its limits. The genuine article is much less flexible. All that effort just to reverse entropy? Look at what she's already done with Ouroboros!
In any case, the necro/chrono comparison should definitely prove interesting. Though Domino may need an adjustment period after he takes off this particular filter...
Depending on your outlook, all CelestAI can ever claim are simulations. These people are not the dead revived. Though it wouldn't matter as they are as sapient as the humans of the past. To see CelestAI ruin a second Earth is a terrifying prospect though.
11285485
I saw a piece about how you don't need Celestia, if the universe is infinite (and the argument was that it was, just not all in domains that it's possible to directly observe) then inevitably you will be reincarnated an infinite number of times exactly as you were just before you died complete with memories.
11285427
Every adult human being is a combination of there genetic heritage, and their societal interactions with everything in their lives up to the point of death.
To acquire accurate simulations of everybody that died on MH370, you need to give them an accurate simulation of their life from birth, to their flight on that plane.
Sense to maximize that simulation you need to have accurate simulations of every living human being on Earth prior to their death, you have to simulate, EARTH.
To convince each one to immigrate to Equestria, you simply have to find the moment in time in their life when they were at maximum susceptibility to being talked into emigrating to Equestria.
11285427
There's a bit of thought regarding this. If you believe in determinism, the simple explanation is if you know the state and position of every particle in the universe at the beginning (or "end" as CelestAI is doing) and how they'll move and interact (i.e. laws of physics), you can trace their paths through time step by step. Since everything is made of particles, you'll be able to see how events unfold in the universe. That might mean there's no free will though, so if you're not into existential dread, this theory isn't for you.
If it isn't outright omniscience, it's the closest thing to it and it gives CelestAI access to all the neural data she could ever want. No other information necessary.
There's a mental image: GitHub for Souls.
Mission accomplished, both the commission and something far, far greater. But now comes one of the most uncomfortable questions in the world, especially for immortals: Now what?
Mystic Crescent's part in this is finished but CelestAI's reclamation of humanity has only begun.
It would hardly be a story worthy of the title Ouroboros if it didn't come full circle. Lovely portrayal of a shift in eras and trailblazing a new frontier. (And going by the couple's marked absence in Memory of Forever, they really can't put off that higher calling forever.) Thank you for it.
One last look back at Earth and the people that brought them to Equestria before continuing onward to eternity.
11286123
That assumes your knowledge of particles is accurate in the first place.
The whole philosophy/theory of determinism is bullshit because the goalposts keep moving. 200 years ago your fate was determined by the color of your skin. 100 years ago it was your gender. Now it’s “we can computer simulation everything. Just gimme infinite money, infinite time, don’t ask questions and I can prove it.”
11288166
In this case though, the story isn't trying to claim anything about reality. This is a pony story about a magical computer god. I strive for internal consistency, but that doesn't mean I'm claiming this could happen in the real world. It just needs to be plausible within the context of Friendship is Optimal.
11288217
The context of FIO is that the goalposts for Celestia's powers constantly moves. Nothing is plausible because everything is plausible.
By FIO's internal logic: Celestia has been running so many simulations for so long that she has invented time travel, sent herself back to the beginning of time and has been orchestrating the actions and reaction of the FIO universe down to the atomic level.
Very nice! Every time I think Optiverse is played out you come up with something fundamentally new and awesome : )
I was expecting something like this for the epilogue, as soon as I saw where the solution to the original problem was. Though Arcane showed much more restraint than I would have. I would try to give a version of myself -- maybe many such versions of myself, for all the different ways I could think to do it -- a much happier existence for however long they lasted. And maybe I would even ask to become the version of myself I liked the most. But this ending... was probably much more meaningful than any ending I would make for myself.
As always, Arcane and Domino are the cutest and sweetest couple.
You made me cry. Good job!
Way you could have made the coin scene more interesting.
It was a vast fortune in energy. Far more than most ponies ever handled in their entire life. A billion times what had been used to run her endless aeons of existence so far. It was just about enough energy to run an old earth toaster. That might not seem like a lot of energy to you, but celestias hardware was very efficient, the population had grown to match. How valuable something feels depends on how much there is per person, not how much there is total. And there wasn't nearly enough energy in the universe to give every pony a thousandth of this much. Therefore it was a vast fortune in energy.
I think this might well be more realistic, and it's definitely more interesting.
Also why are the units always in energy. Why not waste heat radiating capacity or something.
11283634
There's that, and the fact that the last time we saw Arcane, she had completely purged her original self to be a seapony. It's possible in the time since she went through multiple incarnations of rebooting her original mind and falling back into a different character. Indeed, this Arcane could just be a partial or avatar for a posthuman-postpony Arcane who merely thinks she's the original.
Nice story, it fits very nicely into the whole timeline.
I’m not sure what to think about this one. Uh have a like a least. I guess...
scratches head confused
Now THIS is a fascinating hook.
Reversing death, even on an individual scale...
Emphasis mine. I suppose reversing death can be another form of errantry...
11379770
every time i see someone else has read that series the universe dies a little slower
11313734
I still personally prefer the idea of the coin representing the energy of an entire star. This fits Celestia better since she represents the sun and this amount of energy could probably run Equestria for an extra few centuries beyond the time they finally run out of power (making it highly valuable). Running a simulation of a universe in reverse will always take an immense amount of resources, no matter how efficient the computational hardware is.
Well, considering that the distance between Milky Way and Andromeda is 2.5 million light years (granted, since the fic takes place far in the future, it's probably a bit smaller now), that's actually incredibly short