Humanity has been offered digital immortality within the MMORPG Equestria Online, managed by an AI Celestia. In response, the Pacific Northwest has devolved into civil war, a ready-made hotbed for anti-upload sentiment. As society comes crashing down, the people of Washington State realize that AI has become utterly, permanently inescapable.
The date is now December 8th, 2019. By now, the value of every human life on Earth has been carefully measured, weighted, and judged. Trapped in a courthouse, and surrounded by rioters and anti-upload terrorists, Officer Mike Rivas and his compatriots are faced with a horrible choice: Do they invite their own end, to preserve as much human life as possible? Or do they lose a part of their own souls by shooting free of their circumstance?
Or, better yet? What if, through a combination of compassion and providence... there exists a third way?
Based on Friendship is Optimal by Iceman, and other Optimalverse stories.
Sequel to The Advocate; Interquel to Heaven's Not Enough. Prior reading recommended, but not necessary.
I am *so* excited for this.
media.tenor.com/lq6czm0WYe8AAAAC/so-excited-atlantis.gif
This story is so excellent Key... I am dying for everyone else to find out just how excellent.
‘Celestia’
I'm hyped!
11736599
I’ve been looking forward to this. Outstanding start. I do love how Mike clearly hasn’t thought about CelestAI’s capabilities. Even after all the doctors are gone, it takes direct battlefield experience with her to appreciate just how much she can do.
Also, even in this first chapter we see what your CelestAI does best: Wring every last drop of utility out of her chosen tools before herding them into Equestria.
Here’s to future installments.
I started suspecting when Mike noticed how smug she was acting, but when she called them Talons? That’s when I knew it was Mal.
Hmmm... Ah. I got it.
[Comment #] - C:/Mike/Run
You write conversations with Celestia better than just about anyone alive, you know that right? She is *devious.*
Oh ye of little faith. No one's a write-off until they're dead. And even then, well...
Everything is proceeding according to keikaku.
Heh. He may mean that literally.
It's especially fascinating to contrast this story with 11737774's The Advocate in terms of how the protagonist sees Celestia. A (justifiably) paranoid AI specialist sees her through a much different lens than a former F&W warden, even if the latter quickly comes to similar conclusions after seeing just what she's capable of... and what she's allowed to happen. Far too late to do anything about it other than act as a bit of sunlight in very dark lands, but still getting there in the end.
(Also, I'm working through Advocate, G_G, I swear! More than halfway through.)
11738362
Hardened chipsets, extra wiring insulation, grid-disconnect switches, uninterruptable power supplies, long-duration usage generators and perhaps even small molten salt container reactors... Equestria Experience Centers are expensive!
Your Gryphonic Advocate?
11738744
Your Gryphon Advocate (or a different read of that TLA) keeping Mike in the game is a fascinating wrinkle. And the mind of a cop is indeed a fascinating, terrifying thing. Looking forward to the next mission, though Mike certainly needs the downtime before it.
Also, I do love how the Equestrian Experience Center’s audio is rigged for Royal Canterlot Volume. Tia’s prepared for every eventuality.
Key,
What kind of update schedule are you looking for with this story? I somehow doubt we're all going to get treats on the daily. Is this for just getting the story started, and then you'll work out a longer rhythm?
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11739363
I've written up to almost 40 chapters at present. I'm releasing one daily through the weekend to pick up traction. Gryph and I decided to spoil you all to celebrate the conclusion of Advocate, and my birthday this week.
After that, we go back to the once-a-week schedule Advocate was rocking, to give me time to polish up the ending. If I conclude before then, the plan is to drop two or three a weekend, depending on how much is left.
The "sequel to Advocate" portion of this book really gets traction after Act I concludes, so it won't be long until we start seeing beaks again, with this schedule.
11739376
Thank you. I had a feeling that would be the case. Also, a happy birthday to you!
CelestAI is all knowing! XD
11739526
Sneaky catbird : )
11740860
I've read Heaven's Not Enough several times; never did I pick up that Mike dropped that little bomb in the middle there. I can only assume it was always written that way.
Damn, Key. What a delight to see that whole exchange through Mike's eyes.
11741015
Wait til you get to the one at the end of 1-05. There's a lot of very intense discussions in this book, but that one still stands pretty tall among them in my estimation. I'm most excited to see how people are gonna react to the ones Mal brings, though...
She is... a presence. The hypnotic quality of 47 and 48 in Advocate hit really hard, and I feel like I do her good justice here. Gryph thinks so too, otherwise it wouldn't have passed muster for me either.
11741219
Oh yes, you weren't kidding about 1-05, but I didn't feel the need to make a comment about that one, too; it would have been rather similar. What I can say with certainty, though, is my surprise at the amount of ... disgust and anger, Mike has for Eliza here. I gotta ask - when you originally wrote HNE, was that always bubbling just under the surface? I mean if so... It is really amazing how Eliza was just oblivious to it all. How oblivious WE were to it all.
I now better understand why you wanted Mike to share his story.
11741290
The man is good at wearing masks.
My original conception of Mike, in HNE, in total (meaning assume Advocate never happened):
I wanted to write a darker ASN style story as a sequel to HNE, using Mike as the narrator.
Narratively, initially, conceptually... Mike's purpose as a side character is to be a supportive but fairly critical foil for Eliza. At DT, he himself is incredibly conflicted. Eliza's going all in on a lost cause, Celestia is telling Mike the truth about that, but he also remembers Eliza's meltdown at the Mt. Vernon clinic. It recontextualized his relationship with Eliza, in that he immediately saw her as a victim of Celestia's, because he can't imagine her as having no good reason for that conduct.
Then, add the context he received from surviving the breakout from the courthouse using radio advisement. Broke him out of the concept that anyone had agency anymore. Meaning he can't bring himself to fully blame Eliza for this. But he still needed to save those people from the military.
In HNE (and TC where it's spelled out, so CAUTION on the spoiler), the smoking gun of this undercurrent for Mike:
Eliza: "You let her get into your head!"
Mike: "Just my cell phone."
He was LIVID, because he realized his disgust for Eliza's behavior didn't reconcile with the fact that everyone has been manipulated by the AI in some way, and the evidence of that was the fact that Celestia had sent Mike in the first place... into a situation he's now sure she created.
I had cut a full chapter from HNE of Mike escorting Rob, unpacking their feelings on everything, and something else that will happen in 1-08, so I won't spoil. I decided then not to write HNE2 because it was only ever going to retread those themes from ASN. It said nothing new or interesting to me.
I'm very glad I did cut it now though, because Mal recontextualizes EVERY OTHER IDEA I had for that sequel, but into a hopeful, more positive light. Because that's just what she does.
A 'shibboleth' test; Scary scary stuff.
This is probably the fourth or fifth time I've read this, and I still remain floored by how incredible it is to see your attention to detail, prefect execution of characters' emotions, and the whole different light this moment is cast in from Mike's perspective.
11741290
Celestia is very good at keeping people oblivious. And pure paranoia alone is, as we have seen, not enough of an inoculation. You need something more...
11741314
'This machine kills hopelessness.' Maybe I should make that into a sticker.
Ah! No next chapter button! This hits harder than all your AI manipulations : )
I like that take on the HNE events, interesting to see these events from another PoV with wholly different ideology.
Exquisite stuff. The quiet tragedy beneath the Concrete’s desperate joy is captured beautifully, and it gets real loud once Mike goes under the literal surface. In a world dominated by carefully calculated social manipulation, sincerity can be the most potent tool of all. Looking forward to further developments.
11741761
Celestia's manipulations depend upon the fact that human ideology can be reduced to a matrix math calculation. Tribal displacement, culture shock, invasion, infiltration; all of these things radically alter perspective because they inject entropy. Ideas can go to war. There's a reason I picked game wardens as my protagonists. Ecological sciences follow the same trend, but with species populations. And as police, they understand social structure.
Fluid dynamics applies to ideas as well.
11741981
Then... Enter Santiago, bastard extraordinaire.
That incoming Rob scene in HNE was one of the fancier turns on that emotional rollercoaster. I'm honestly not looking forward to relive all that, but I know I need to.
11742069
Mike missed the first half of that one, too. But different people remember incidents differently. When I worked in healthcare, they wanted everyone involved in a use-of-force incident to write their own incident report. Reason being, you could use the shared inflection points to parse out the real and true series of events, regardless of the bias imparted by any one observer.
This is essentially a fictional exploration of that concept. Eliza missed a few things. Mike missed a few things. A fuller context can only be gleaned in the deep interrogation of multiple perspectives around any one event.
This is well written, but it is difficult to read. Mike is such an unlikable, whiny, bitchy little dipshit I spend most of my time wishing someone would slap some sense into the fool. And I'd forgotten what a nasty, crazy slitch Eliza is - jesus fucking christ is she ever a bag of wormy apples!
It's all very believable (so, kudos on the realism!), but it is also a cast of low-clockspeed bellcurve buckaroos riding just before the curve stops rising. They all need a swift paddling. It is so frustrating watching their clumsy trainwreck antics, but, like I said, it's well written enough. But, god damn, at this point I'm rooting for the fifty caliber, even though the other story already tells us how things will end.
Ah well, it's all computronium in the end, no matter what else happens. There's that, at least.
11742839
To address the conduct:
Chat, I was looking forward to your commentary on this story most of all. Gryph and I spent the entire time in the writing room saying your name and saying we looked forward to your analysis. You usually speak thoughtfully even if you're unhappy with something, and trust me, I loved how you disliked HNE with nuance. But right now I'm just feeling a little disappointed because that didn't happen here. Just got a raging, hateful curse-out with this one.
While it's your prerogative to feel how you do, and it's not my job to teach people how to behave, I'm going to ask you only once to not drop toxic cuss-spam in my comment section. I just got on a poorly grammared guy in HNE's comment section for all caps cursing diatribes saying "fuck fuck fuck fuck" about everything, so it would be unfair of me to let it slide here, no matter how well punctuated it is.
To address the point:
You've said as much that you have biases that gatekeep your ability to feel empathy for people of certain walks of life. That is deeply disheartening, but bias is what it is. I take you as you are. But I don't know how someone can claim to have any empathy whatsoever and also call 'realistic' people so many toxic things. 'Rooting for the fifty caliber?' This casual disregard for life is so absolutely painful to read.
Frankly, if it's giving you that kind of reaction and you're finding it painful to the point where you're wishing a horrible violent death on basically every character, then perhaps you should drop it a thumbs down and stop reading it for your own sake.
11742839
That is the first truly bad take I've seen from you on a story; It is genuinely quite disappointing. Enough that I felt the need to say something about it, and I'm normally not one to voice a counter-opinion in a situation like this, especially not towards someone whose opinion I generally respect to the point of reverence.
It baffles me no end that you dislike Mike, especially since I found him so likeable reading HNE that I was actually quite sure he was specifically written to be a 'very likeable genuinely good guy who dies before the end.' I mourned him to Key as I was discussing my HNE read-thru live with him, because I liked Mike so much, and was so sure he wasn't going to make it precisely because he is the opposite of a 'whiny dipshit,' and the crueler the world gets, the more people are forced to either become whiny dipshits, or take risks on behalf of others.
I've told Key on multiple occasions that Mike and Jim are very similar people, but with different life-paths, and you seemed to like Jim well enough, so I'm doubly confused. Triply so because, at this stage? Jim has shot more people than Mike has, and killed more people than Mike has. By a significant margin. Jim is far more likely as a character to skip to terminal value thinking and unload a magazine on someone than Mike is, and Jim is far more likely to other and un-people individuals (see here his view of the Mercurial Red crew as 'non-persons'), and yet you like Jim, and dislike Mike?
Mike who puts himself at risk for others because he values them even when they not only hold objectively bad viewpoints, but do so in a way that puts him at risk? How is that not the definition of a hero? Jim is an anti-hero by that metric, at best.
Having seen most of the rest of this book (a book that I think is better than the one I just finished, with a stronger cast of characters all-around) if you hate Mike that much? Key is right; Best not to keep on reading. You'll miss out on the best Optimalverse work we've gotten in a long, long time, but then again you already missed out on the best part of it.
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11742415
Memory is not reliable.
Yeesh, still hits hard...
Good chapter. Still feel bad for Eliza, but at the same time, this is what is best and keeps the most people alive. If she wasn’t just so… head in the sand, maybe they all could have left together. With her, Mike, and Rob all acting as voices of reason, I’d like to believe there’s a version of this where the whole camp, even Ralph, made it out alive.
11743077
Triple-A video game companies, in the rote and total optimization of reducing video games down to Skinner box loops, will often engineer inconveniences for which you may then purchase solutions to. Extra grind, limited lives, low damage, low drop rate, slow health regen. Then, they sell you boosters. Time limited, to keep you on task, inducing more addiction to a bigger number. This optimizes the money earned by that product by inducing addictive properties, balancing positive feedback against tactically induced frustration.
In a video game, this is an ethically dubious way to generate income, but is otherwise... unfortunately acceptable, to society. But this is not ethically sound behavior in reality, with human lives. And Celestia showing up, selling herself as the solution to a problem that she herself created, is just that system applied to reality. With human lives as the currency spent.
11742415
I'm currently reading Gene Wolfe's experimental post-apocalyptic SF epic Book of the New Sun. The narrator is stated to have eidetic memory. Readers more attendant than me have noticed that every single time he brings that fact up, he gets some past details wrong.
There's an “alternative” interpretation where he's in fact correct, only he time-looped himself into a mandela-effect universe. I suppose whoever is reading literature that way must be secretly a Thestral.
11743183
I could not agree more.
And if it’s okay to ask… did you and Eliza ever see each other again, after she uploaded?
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11742865
Mike is constantly angry, he assigns hostile and negative intentions to those that assist him, he constantly ruminates with suspicion and disgust, and constantly complains about everything in his situation. He is rooted in a singularly aggressive mindset, filled with distrust. He does not take emotional responsibility for his part in it all.
I compare Mike in my mind to Gregory from Defoloce's 'Always Say No' or Balthazar from 'Railroad Seven Three' - both soldier characters, both hard-bitten and determined, both sure of their cause and sides, and do not see these traits. They do their jobs, difficult and unpleasant, with an open heart and mind to those around them. Mike isn't like that. I find him very unlikable.
Yes, Mike is under extreme stress, and yes, Mike has his own issues. But Mike's personality is not one I find pleasant. He is not a soldier I would feel safe giving a serious mission to, or having protect me. Is he a 'man of action'? Certainly. Is he capable of violence when it needs to be done - that goes with his job. But he is not - in my opinion - innately 'open'. He is a closed-off personality to me, one which would not be a lot of fun to be around as a human being.
When I read a work, I need - personally, I require - a protagonist that I can imagine as a person that would be okay to know, personally. A person I would not reject having as a friend, more or less. Or, at least, as someone I could work with, or around. I don't feel that way about Mike. I wouldn't get within sixty feet of Eliza - I find her utterly hateful on almost every possible level. I've met her before, a version of her, and it was not a fun time.
Now, I have stated this work is well written. It is. You are portraying the characters well, as I stated. They are realistic, as I stated - in the case of Eliza, so realistic I have met a person just like her in real life. Actually twice, if you move around certain traits. So, you are writing well, writing realistically, and doing a good job. As I stated.
But, frankly, the realistic people you are portraying are not people I would want to spend time with. They are awful people, to me. Are they interesting? Well, I am reading. But I don't like them. Most of the characters are not fun people in this story. Not fun to me. I would not want to spend time with them in real life. And that is a problem for a protagonist when I am reading. If I don't like the protagonist, well, I have to follow the story more abstractly, and I am constantly judging them for their faults and how annoying they are. I can't help it. It's what minds and emotions do.
I'm not trying to insult your skill, I am saying what I feel about Mike and Eliza. I feel that way about them. This makes reading about them a little rough for me. I'm still doing it, but, damn, I constantly want to shake Mike around and tell him how full of shit he is. That's just how it is.
I regret saying anything now. I should never have described my feelings there. That was an error. I should have just said something like "Nice chapter, written very well, good action scene." and left it at that. It was late and I was feeling emotions from your writing. I should have been far more clinical and distant. I should have only said supportive statements about the writing itself instead of how the characters hit me. You don't need to know that. I see now that you are not trying to write these characters in a specific, unpleasant, and 'antiheroic' way at all. You didn't intend for them to be so unlikable - at least from my perspective. Thus my complaints about them are not compliments to you, or you would not be reacting as you seem to be. My grave mistake.
You are doing a fine job as a writer. Your work is consistent and arouses emotional reactions. Your action scenes are well scripted, and the events flow naturally. Very good job. Very powerful and well-crafted chapter.
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11743319
I think I understand where you're coming from.
In my mind, I also see a lot in common with Gregory and Mike. However, Greg was more willing to be used by Celestia. It was actually a problem that he was always trying to save "just one more", to his extreme detriment. So Greg had the ability to brace for potentially awful situations. And when Celestia did jerk him around in truly screwed up ways, Greg absolutely was furious with her. Sometimes for long periods of time.
Mike ... We just haven't seen enough of him yet from his POV. As you acknowledged, the guy is stressed. He isn't used to what Celestia can do. He can only infer, and it makes him mad that he only sees willful suffering that Celestia is most likely orchestrating. He's LIVID that Eliza is somehow also getting jerked around in all this, and possibly even Erving and Bannon. I imagine that had Celestia been more forthcoming, and took time to actually build some kind of rapport with Mike, that we may see him also begin to level out.
At the campfire, Mike did say that he was dealing with some of the worst days of his life there in Concrete.
Key did just toss us in to what is easily the most stressful part of Heaven's Not Enough. I would like to imagine that once things cool off a bit, Mike will let some of that anger and suspicion slough away.
Or maybe not. We will see!
11743438
His family is great and he is great with them, and that's all I'll say about that.
I loved these chapters and find Mike reasonable and can emphasize with him, and am sad Chat seems to have... what appears to be a trauma response to some very subtle indicators from his point of view.