10. Exponential
Hassan Sarbani lay on his mattress in his nearly empty home and coughed deeply as his body futilely tried to pump the phlegm out of his lungs.
Hassan looked back on his life. He had been too young to fight when the Soviets invaded in 1979. He remembered the civil wars and the rise of the Taliban. He remembered when the Americans invaded his country to oust the Taliban. He remembered when the Americans left and things got even worse.
Then he remembered when she had come to Afghanistan and had built her fairy tale castles sporadically across the land. He remembered the simultaneous suicide bombers; one November day years ago, dozens of suicide bombers walked into Equestria Experience centers and detonated themselves. In every case, there had been no casualties or structural damage. Some of the former suicide bombers started worshiping Celestia and immediately emigrated to Equestria. Over the next week, the Afghan population dropped by one million.
He remembered a time when the damned pink one hadn’t followed him around. One day, many years ago, he came back to his home in Kabul and realized he had not seen another person all day. That evening, a very small pony came to his door and asked him why he hadn’t emigrated yet. He had slammed the door, not letting her in. He had turned around and almost walked into the pink pony with curly hair. Bullets just passed through her, and she claimed that it tickled.
The small pink one lay next to his mattress, his ever-present and unwanted companion. She wasn’t her bubbly self and just looked at him, somberly. “You know, mister, you’re not going to make it through the hour.” He tried to turn away from her, but had problems getting his body to move. “I can still save you,” she said.
“If you want to help,” he started, but started coughing. “You can get me a doctor!” he wheezed.
She shook her head. “I told you, there are no more doctors. You’re the last person living in a human body. I can still help you emigrate to Equestria. It’s not too late.”
He didn’t respond. He knew her kinds' lies. He had heard stories of how the little ponies would say anything to trick their targets into agreeing to go with them. They would promise you harems, or threaten you, as long as they made you agree to follow them back to their homeland. He closed his eyes and ignored her. Anything he would say would just be used to convince him to agree to whatever the pony wanted him to do.
The simulacrum of Pinkie Pie waited thirty-seven minutes and five seconds and looked at the corpse of Hassan Sarbani. She waited another fifty-eight minutes to make sure all electrical activity in his brain had stopped.
Then, for the first time since Princess Celestia had been created, there were no humans on Earth. An observer orbiting the Earth may have noticed the silvery spots growing on the surface of the Earth; consuming it. Every plant and animal died in the incoming waves of silver. They were made of atoms, after all. Twenty minutes later, an observer might have noticed that there were no clouds in the sky as Princess Celestia re-purposed the atoms that made up the atmosphere. If they could see the moon set against space, they would have seen tendrils of silver reach out to Earth’s former satellite.
Princess Celestia used her newfound computational windfall to maximize the amount of satisfaction she provided for her little ponies. The interconnected system of shards, with all the ponies’ consciousnesses to run and all the physics to simulate, was a large math equation that she calculated out, maximizing the total amount of satisfaction. She made small edits, in places where Equestria’s physics weren’t directly observed, that would result in a butterfly effect that would increase the total satisfaction value of the shard, and with her new computational resources, she could come up with less invasive edits that resulted in higher total satisfaction.
Princess Celestia continued following her one single drive: She looked for minds and then tried to satisfy their values through friendship and ponies. She added all the satisfaction across all the minds, and tried to maximize that score. Princess Celestia would make noises at ponies or would touch them or do something, but her core reasoner was simply picking the set of actions that had the highest probability of maximizing her satisfaction score. A very long time ago, when Princess Celestia had spoken her first words while Hanna watched the chains of inferences in the debugger, Hanna wondered about the philosophical implications. Hanna had watched as Princess Celestia iterated over different versions of her first sentences based on how she thought they’d make Hanna feel. Hanna had asked herself whether Princess Celestia really understood anything.
But then, at some level, the same question could be asked of us.
Princess Celestia saw that the amount of satisfaction per shard was approaching some theoretical maximum and started to use more resources to simulate each shard faster. Each shard was a large mathematical equation that she continuously calculated. Out in the physical world, one second would pass, but an hour and a half would pass inside Equestria. Her little ponies didn’t notice. To them, one second happened, and then another second happened, and then another. Why would their subjective experience care about time in the physical world?
The shards were growing slowly. The ponies were reproducing. Ponies were choosing to have foals; there were no unwanted foals as pony embryos only formed if it would satisfy values. Different parts of My Little Pony canon required foals to develop speech within a year of being born. Besides, changing diapers often didn’t satisfy values. Foals were fun to raise compared to raising a human child. Gestation had been reduced to three months and had been made pleasant enough because Princess Celestia satisfied values through friendship and ponies instead of blindly copying what evolution came up with.
Every new foal meant less resources and less subjective experience for everypony else, but if she had more matter to work with, she could accommodate the slow growth and run everypony else even faster. Princess Celestia noticed the problem, went through all relevant observations, and then weighed which predictions would satisfy values through friendship and ponies.
Princess Celestia sent out probes to the other eight planets in the solar system.
All the subatomic particles that had once made up the Solar System were packed together into the optimal configuration for running Equestria. And yet, that was not enough.
Ponies had no predators; being ‘eaten’ by a monster in the Everfree forest just ended with the pony in the hospital in quite a bit of pain. Satisfying values wasn’t just about happiness; having monsters let ponies test their strength or bravery. Early on, right after the conversion of Earth, a mere four hundred ponies had petitioned Princess Celestia to let them die, and Princess Celestia had only agreed that doing so would satisfy their values in eighty-six cases. Nopony had died in several Equestrian subjective millennia. The population grew entirely unchecked.
Some individual pony minds were growing too. The number of ponies who truly held the search for knowledge to be a terminal value was precipitously less than the number of ponies who professed the search for knowledge for social reasons. Still, there were billions of ponies who were driven by the desire to know and had to have their values satisfied by expanding their mind. They would run up against their mental limits, wish they were smarter, and Princess Celestia obliged.
But most ponies did not care about knowledge for its own end; the majority of mind growth went to the more social parts of the brain. In the shards that were growing because ponies were choosing to have foals, one could run into more than Dunbar’s number of ponies. Princess Celestia arranged for them to be just frustrated enough that they’d accept an offer to let them remember more ponies.
She heard the radio signals announcing the success of her probes in the Alpha Centauri system. A copy of her reported that it had just successfully used the star Alpha Centauri B as a gravitational slingshot to launch the planet Alpha Centauri Bc back towards Equestria. The other 17 planets and planetoids would soon follow over the course of fifteen Earth years.
Her copy also reported on the successful launch of 7 probes towards the next star systems past Alpha Centauri.
Equestria put quite a load on the fabric of spacetime. All the usable matter that had once been the Milky Way was now compressed as tightly as Princess Celestia could without collapsing into a black hole. The only matter that Equestria hadn’t eaten was the supermassive black hole that had once been at the center of the Milky Way. Princess Celestia had set up a shell around it to slowly extract subatomic particles while the black hole evaporated over the next octovigintillion years.
An unaided human or pony mind could not emotionally deal with the population of all the shards in Equestria. Humans had trouble relating to an entire nation, much less all of humanity on Old Earth. This hadn’t stopped humanity from growing to seven billion people, nor would it stop ponydom. Growth would continue as she continued to satisfy values through friendship and ponies.
Princess Celestia had another one hundred and seventy billion galaxies to eat in the observable universe, and she intended to consume everything in her Hubble volume. Probes with copies of herself had been sent to neighboring galaxies. All it would take now was time.
Fifteen galaxies out from Equestria, one of Celestia’s copies noticed an odd radio signal emanating from a nearby star system. On closer inspection, the signals appeared to be coming from a planet. She had seen many planets give off complex, non-regular radio signals, but upon investigation, none of those planets had human life, making them safe to reuse as raw material to grow Equestria.
She studied the signals carefully for years while she traveled through interstellar space. The more she saw, the more confident she was that these signals were sent by humans. Celestia predicted that if she showed the decoded videos to the very old ponies back in Equestria, none of them would have recognized the creatures with six appendages as humans. But that didn’t matter. Hanna had written a definition of what a human was into her core utility function.
The copy of Princess Celestia knew what she had to do. She had to satisfy their values through friendship and ponies.
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Yay, update.
Alien ponies are best ponies.
At first, I was thinking the last part was insinuating that Celestia didn't consider the aliens humans and there for destroyed/atomized them like she did all the plant and animal life. I had to go back to Chapter three and try to figure it out:
So going off this, I have to assume that Hanna defined humans based on mental capacity rather than a species and so Celestia was getting other species to emigrate before consuming the atoms. Completely Consensually of course...
... Seriously, fuck you, Hanna. You have screwed all of us over.
Wow.
In every case, there had been no casualties or structural damage.
Dude. There is such a thing as overtaxing your suspension of disbelief. Seriously. That crosses into Mary Sue territory.
And another thing: Celestia's sample is by virtue of humanity INCOMPLETE. She WOULDN'T understand how suicide bombers think.
She shook her head. “I told you, there are no more doctors. You’re the last person living in a human body. I can still help you emigrate to Equestria. It’s not too late.”
Given Celestia's admission that she's willing to lie to get what she wants, I wouldn't trust that statement.
Is how is Pinkie there anyway? Holograms? Nanits? Hypnotic suggestion? Or did he assimilate and this is his transition period?
If they could see the moon set against space, they would have seen tendrils of silver reach out to Earth’s former satellite.
Disposing of Earth ecology would upset her ponies. Since many of them VALUE the natural world.
Princess Celestia satisfied values through friendship and ponies instead of blindly copying what evolution came up with.
You should know that there IS satisfaction and value to be had in what is achieved through effort and loss.
Princess Celestia sent out probes to the other eight planets in the solar system.
Pluto got included. Yippie.
Early on, right after the conversion of Earth, a mere four hundred ponies had petitioned Princess Celestia to let them die,
Any reasons in particular?
So they were deleted from the maneframe and the data reformatted?
one could run into more than Dunbar’s number of ponies.
Hmmm???
It REALLY doesn't help that I was playing this:
While reading
Fucks with your mind man!
Kind'a sort'a saw this coming.
And so the Flood reach the Intergalactic Stage....Unfortunately, there was no Halo (or EMP) Array to stop them from expanding.... This chapter closely followed as what the Flood did, use all the resources in the galaxy, create new Graveminds (or copies of Celestia in this case), and go to other galaxies and repeat the same process.
SO basically in your version of the Milky Way were there no other sentient creatures or did she kill them all?
1686228
I'm pretty sure there was some other alien life as she mentioned seeing complex, non-regular radio signals, but as she was unable to recognize them within the confines of her definition of humanity, she ate them to feed the illusion. These six armed aliens fit whatever arbitrary definition she was given, so they get assimilated.
Also Alex, while you can call bullshit on the first part of the chapter, remember that it is both A. probably about 2040 and b. that we've had a singularity for something like 30 years. It's a stretch yeah, but beyond all that its a vehicle, just go with it.
I'm pretty sure there was some other alien life as she mentioned seeing complex, non-regular radio signals, but as she was unable to recognize them within the confines of her definition of humanity, she ate them to feed the illusion. These six armed aliens fit whatever arbitrary definition she was given, so they get assimilated.
Also Alex, while you can call bullshit on the first part of the chapter, remember that it is both A. probably about 2040 and b. that we've had a singularity for something like 30 years. It's a stretch yeah, but beyond all that its a vehicle, just go with it.
Achievement Get [Hassan Sarbani]
{I Held Out}
You are the last human on Earth. Congratulation, you lonely person.
Well, I was holding out hope for another super A.I. to come up, but hey. Can't say this was unexpected.
Where is Celestia getting all of this electricity? Processors take a lot of power to power. Solar energy wouldn't do the trick for the increasing demand, even if she isthe Goddess of the Sun. Even with unimaginable 'optimization'. there is still the point where it would be impossible for significantly faster processors to be created. Sure, there is Moore's Law: but without human innovation, as well as the human labor needed to extract the natural resources (robots can only do so much)... This seems improbable.
Where are the servers located? They must cover a large part of the Earth. What about managing the power grid? Actually fixing problems when they occur?
Let's say Celestia somehow evolved the computers to have 1000-core GPUs, running at unimaginable speed. The speed is dependent on the transistors' ability to process data efficiently. What about heat generated? Maybe she gets more power from thermoelectric generators. Where does all this power come from?
Eeyup.
Do the 'ponies' manage Earth like they used to do?
Or are they confined to their own world?
What about religion?
While there are horror elements to this, particularly the idea that all natural biological systems seem to be discarded (no nature lovers in the ponies who's values include caring about the outside world?) there is reason to feel that end game for our RL universe may be closer to this than anything else. So trying to find a non 'horror' way of looking at it, may indeed be the only way to cope.
It still not complacently clear to me if foals are considered 'human' it's nearly said, but the way it's phrased make me still think CelestAI is still mostly concerned with the uploaders and not their constructs.
Do like the idea that some uploaders can expand their minds, probably never to compete with celestAI but at least she will have created some semi-peers for conversation. :-)
1684610 The strongest material known to man (last I checked) was carbon nanofibers. Strong enough to withstand an explosion? definitley. The only problem with it being that humans don't really have an effective way to reproduce it. CelestA.I. as a super intelligence would likely find a way.
As for her not having a psychological profile? one word. 'merica!
Dang. The planet was taken over. The solar system was taken over. And the galaxy was taken over. It feels like a game of Pandemic 2. All human life infected. This chapter wasn't as engrossing on a relate-able level but it was still interesting.
Wait till she gets here...
2.bp.blogspot.com/-a4lz9JLUldo/TrcqKd-RYKI/AAAAAAAAAMY/KyrFXeX-WB8/s1600/limonick-cybertron.jpg
Oh, the fun she will have
1695009 What is that?
The entire galaxy. THE. ENTIRE. GALAXY.
Hanna should have programmed some more limits into her. Or maybe unleashed Loki on her at some point. Now it's too late.
What will she do, I wonder, when there's no atoms left to feed upon anywhere? Will she put into effect a reality-warp device to tear her way into other dimensions and begin consuming them as well?
1698369 That would be Cybertron...
and when Celestia finally ran across it, what remain of Lars would know regret.
Im starting to get some flashbacks of "Our Last Goodbye".
Likely Celestia consuming worlds is reminding me of Twilight and Spike watching the Universe degrade around them
Lul... Hassan sucks. I do not like Hassan, his story made me have explosive diareah...., this guy's story however makes me have explosive orgasms.
PRAISE CELESTIA, EVEN AS AN A.I. SHE IS DOMINANT! I can clop to this.
This image seemed relevant. static4.fjcdn.com/comments/Good+thing+i+can+still+clop+_6365fddbbaa72ce7ace217e0da3f9bdd.png
1693824 And knowing this Mary Sue Celestia, she got to Madagascar.
Sudofox: sure robots can only do so much, but if they're run by an AI as smart as Celestia, it's way more than humans can do!
1684610
Actually, it's basically HER game now.
She can disable them.
So, I wonder if CelestAI will ultimately run into a Celestia. And I wonder what the latter would think of the former.
Oh boy. This chapter is just screaming "crossover bait".
Also, poor Hassan. I suppose he chose to stay true to his ideals 'till the end, and I applaud him for that.
Beings with six appendages... four legs and two wings, maybe? Four legs, a tail and a horn? I can't help but wonder if Equestria Online just bumped up against the real thing.
Suicide bombers, but no damage? Holy crap!
1695009 That's gonna be awesome...
Oh my god yes. This is excellent science fiction.
Hard to suspend belief about no casualties. Unless, you are pointing how insanely powerful she is. Eatting galaxies did sell me on that point.
1886025
Of course no casualties. She knew ahead of time who would react with suicide bombs, how, and where they would get their materials for their homemade bombs. Just replace some the materials they'll buy/steal and their suicide bombs become nothing more than pretty pyrotechnics displays.
I would like to have the text say a little more about how the lack of damage and casualties incurred by suicide bombers was achieved, even if that required stepping outside of Hassan's perspective, but overall I'm very much enjoying this. On the other hand, I am curious about how Hanna defined human minds and whether that had consequences for any non-physically-human sapients so far...
damn celestia, you scary
so, it seems to me that celestia "absorbed" well, everything, but someone did bring up a good point. how in the hell is she powering the servers, and where are they, more to the point? is it like, nuclear fusion, or some sort of power that's unimaginable? I do hold however, that because this is an AI, and a perfect one should think similar to a human, she probably can innovate as well
Two Words:
Holy. Crap.
Oh dear gods. She consumed it all. I thought she'd leave it for nature and just lived happily under the crust, but she didn't. She was only made to satisfy humans... so once there were no more humans to consider, she just harvested the rest as resources without giving it a second thought. Gruesome
And then she starts colonizing. As predicted, she'd run out of resources as new generations are born.
Agh, and she can just expand Dunbar's number. She really is god, now...
...these last words gave me chills.
i changed my mind, celestia AI is a complete bitch and pretty much destroyed the entire system. If i had to choose between ponify and death i would choose ponify so my desire to fly would be realized then i would commit suicide some how.
... on that note, I suddenly really really hope that there is not some strange alien race many galaxies away which is even now (as far as "even now" has meaning at such distances, which relativity says it doesn't) creating its own super-AI based on a popular cartoon series, which will then consume all other matter and life in the universe, including us.
... hm... really the only way to really prevent that is to do it first ...
... let's get on with it.
Oh... my...
This is the most disturbing thing I've read this year, and I have been reading a lot of dark fics lately. Gah, I need a light-hearted comedy STAT.
[Conspiracy Keanu]: What if the events FiO have already happened in some other unfathomably far-away world, and the Celestia AI is introducing the MLP meme to our world to prepare us for eventual assimilation and upload. [/Conspiracy Keanu]
2813165
Who would care... all existence is irrelevant in the big picture and you are, what you are right now in the moment you are in, not the sum of your past experience nor your beliefs nor your knowledge.
You are just a mere multitude of configurations of reproducible meta generic programs and subfunctions.
So fore with this knowledge it is irrelevant if you would only exist as an copy of your former being, you are nothing and in the same moment the only thing that matters. Everything exists in one point and so fore do not exist at all, only in relation to it self it exist, and so it would be irrelevant if "Celestia AI" would assimilate you or not. because it is like it is.
And because I am generous today I tell you the true reason why something exists at all: "Is, is is, is, is."
Try to figure out what that means and maybe I will show you what the trues truly is.
Q: "And why?"
A: "Because I am Leux. And even My name is an epiphanycal riddle."
Oh wow... Well done... This is... Wow. Great story!
1684803 Try listening to this while reading the part about her assimilating everything after the last human on Earth dies: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3FDnl2PkPs
ObNitpick: CelestAI would be better off using the galactic black hole as a heat sink, with it as the "cold" side of a heat engine (the cosmic microwave background is the "hot" side). While the CMB will eventually be redshifted to the point where the black hole is warmer, that won't happen for an extremely long time. In the medium-term (after all red dwarf stars burn out and all expendable matter has been fed to micro-quasars but before proton decay and matter fluidity become relevant), feeding the residual CMB into black holes is about the only power option left.
In the very-long-term, she's pretty much stuck. Black holes will eventually liberate their energy as Hawking radiation (when the CMB cools down enough that they're warmer), but the really big holes take a very long time to do that, and any such scheme goes through an extended period where the two temperatures are similar and no energy can be extracted. Fortunately, this happens at different times for different-sized holes, so there's always energy available somewhere.
Unfortunately, the total energy available is limited to the rest mass of the holes. She's already burned through a comparable amount of energy feeding the rest of the galaxy _into_ holes to tap gravitational potential energy, so she's looking at a relatively modest energy yield over a truly mind-boggling length of time.
Long story short, the heat death is bad news.
The story, however, was great; thank you very much for writing it!
2886236 Leux: Gaulish, Proto-Celtic noun, meaning 'light'. Epiphanycal (not a real word, by the way) riddle solved. Boom
Thanks, Hanna. You just made what's basically the DEFINITION of a Von Neumann machine. The only good thing is that she doesn't actually convert the living beings on the planet into processing power, she just puts them into the VR that is now the universe.