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 ten 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.
***
Friendship is Optimal
Fifteen Galaxies Out
***
It was another lush day in the jungle. Rrrrchickta perched on her leaf, beak lowered in a blissful grin as she watched Drotheem rise over the horizon. "Hail, guardian of the day. May your wings keep us safe till the end of song."
A small breeze coated her blue featherscales with dew. She chirruped briefly, shivering off the moisture.
Then she cricked her wrists and ankles, sighing and flicking down into the branches. It was a matter of moments to clamber down through the vines to the observatory shell, nestled in the crook of a great scrambletree. Rrrrchickta adjusted the telescope, checking the equipment to ensure none of the local animals had taken residence in any wires or dishes. "Now let's see.... clutchsong is this afternoon, don't want to miss that." A green arm swept open one of the many cabinets glued to the spherical wall. "Running low on Thwipnuts. Should go scavenging later, if the schedule allows it. Or sing to a scavenger, that could work too."
She let two of her right arms dance across a keypad built into the bulkhead, observing the start-up screen with a Watcheye while her lowest right arm brought a thwipnut to her beak. The juices from the hard seedling burst over her four tongues, and she mewled happily as they were sucked into her throat. Her song shifted into an annoyed cheep, however, as she turned her Seekereyes on the screen. "Third powergen out again? What beast is ripping out the wires this time?" Rrrrchickta jumped out the observatory door, skittering across the sphere's surface until she was near the base. Her four feet gripped a branch, letting her hang inverted as she examined the cords running from underneath her workplace.
"Tch.... rzlich vrek, why me?" She pulled out the remnants of a power cord, examining the frayed end. "Krovitch work, of course. When will those beasts ever learn not to tug on wires?" With a grumble, she slithered back inside, placing the cord in another cabinet alongside a number of others like it. The scraplings wouldn't be here till Hroveeeday, but she could at least call a wirespinner to the observatory.
She stuck her head out the door. "Rrrrchickta of the twenty third clutch of Yorthreechichi sings for aid! Her home lies nestled north and sky of Crihihi's Gazebo, cord to the powergen east torn! Will not a wirespinner leap forward?"
The shrill chirrups carried over the jungle, almost lost amongst the various other sounds coming from the leaves. Her ears perked as she waited for a reply.
Finally there came an answering song. "Help is asked, help is given! Rrrrchickta of the twenty third clutch of Yorthreechichi, Horlicro of the fifth clutch of Crihihi hears you and comes! Wait for four by ten and five orthleems. Krovitch again?"
"Yes, Horlicro," she sang back in resignation. "Shall payment be of usual cost?"
"You know I cannot show favoritism, even to the most intelligent of Jeckrr."
"So we sing unity," they cried together, "let all who hear know this contract!"
Rrrrchickta scratched her beak with a sigh, returning inside. Horlicro did good work, that could not be denied. Unfortunately, she also had expensive rates. Six hundred chreeps for a new cord? Why did she let the wirespinner get away with practically emptying her stores?
Honestly, it was almost enough to drive her to seek the Dowagers' advice...
"Young clutchfolk. Always so eager to decorate their nests." Rrrrchickta cleaned her antennae as she turned back to the telescope. "Seven hundred years ago we were lucky if we had a nest for a month. And now wires like spiderwebs, songbirds cropping up like draffen..." Her three left arms went to the sliders controlling the orientation and focus, while her beak slipped into the seeker crevice. The entire upper half of the observatory rotated slowly at her command, the glass lens flicking upward and peering past the moon of the day.
She gripped a quill in her midright hand, penning down her daily observations on the leafpad in her lower. Some Jeckrr might have considered a leafpad old fashioned, but she preferred to have material and digital copies of information. "Mmmm. Morli seems brighter, yes.... and there's another speck near Rookree. I'm sure of it." Her scope of vision slid into the patch known as the growing dark. "Mmm... no new galaxies consumed, thank the song." She was about to move past it...
...When suddenly, she glimpsed a glimmer.
Rrrrchickta pulled her beak out, rubbing her quartet of seekereyes. She skittered up the telescope, peering at the lens for dirt or imperfections; a thorough examination provided the end result that it was not damaged in any way. Bounding back to the observatory's inner chamber, she slipped her beak back in the crevice, double checking what she saw.
"...That can't be right." The glimmer was still there, right in the middle of the growing dark.
After a moment, she penned it down carefully, noting the exact time and date she had spotted it, as well as the orientation of the telescope. Maybe it was just a passing meteor... maybe her imagination. She'd check with other observatories later today. Her scope continued to turn as she observed the stars and planets; she couldn't see many in the day, of course, but it was better then not seeing anything.
I like it so far. Looking forward to seeing where it goes.
Not sure if the rule applies, but might want to get some more mentions of ponies in soon, or the mods may get annoyed...
Just one problem: The speed of Celestia's actions are limited to the speed of light. There is no way any living culture would have been able to see a whole galaxy disappear. Also, If I remember things correctly, they don't snuff out stars; they move them to where the main server is, in the Milky Way. So, I believe they would call them the "Star stealers" rather than the "Growing Darkness"
I b eleive that this is all happening........ For a reason......... AND I LIKE IT
1840025
Excellent points! However, I don't think that from the outside Celestia would generate light. And there are a few... quirks to Jeckrr biology that make them slightly more farsighted than humans.... not that I'll spoil anything of course.
1840079
I wasn't talking about Celestia's main server; just the light from the stars currently travelling from their original positions to the main server.
1840088
Touche.
1840025
Unless CelestAI has found a way around the ligtspeed restriction (which has not even been verified as humans have not managed to actually approach it yet)
Also, I assume that CelestAI has found more efficient ways of gathering energy than physically moving solar systems around.
1840253 Special relatively has been tested rather extensively. First off, there are macroscopic experiments, for example I believe experiments with carrying highly-accurate clocks in supersonic jets show that time dilation works pretty much the way relativity says it should. The lightspeed restriction is a necessary consequence of all known relativistic theories.
Apart from that, particle accelerators are regularly used to observe subatomic particles moving at over 80% of the speed of light. In fact, the design for particle accelerators had to be modified because sufficiently fast-moving particles became too massive for the original design to keep them on track, just as special relativity predicts. (That is, as you increase the momentum (which is mass times velocity) of a particle, as the particle gets closer and closer to lightspeed, more and more of the energy input gets converted to mass instead of velocity.)
This has all been observed. If there is any sense in which the lightspeed restriction "has not even been verified", it is not because we have not managed to approach it.
The story's description says "Earth is gone. The Solar System is gone. The Milky Way is gone. [etc]". That's... not really true. They aren't destroyed, they're part of a huge superintelligence that's taking care of all known, sufficiently humanlike sentient life in the universe. The way you wrote it sounds like "oh god everyone's dead".
And sure, there are viewpoints from which that's actually what's happened. If you're looking at it that way, though, explain where you're coming from. Any flaws in CelestAI's world should be brought to her (and the authors') attention, so they can be dealt with. If you have an issue, state it.
...Sorry, it's just... the description as is seems to start off as... well, dramatic more for the sake of drama than because of any particular issue that leads to drama. (If I'm wrong, please, feel free to say so... ^^; )
1840343
Ahh, I misspoke last time, I intended to say "reach" instead of "approach".
You'll have to forgive me, but I'm a hard core cynic, and as such I prefer to refer to such things as working theories until that last bit of evidence is provided.
1840343
One other thing has always puzzled me - in those time dilation experiments I could not find a solid answer as to a detail that I feel is very important: what direction was the plane traveling in? The report I read seemed to imply that they got the same result no matter which direction it was going, so what value of relative speed was measured? Relative to the surface of the earth? The center of mass of Earth? the Sun? the Milky Way? All of these things are already traveling at incredible velocities and at different vectors, so it really matters what the clock in question is traveling relative to. This leads me to question - What happens when you remove all references: i.e. inter-galactic travel?
Oh, there's no way I'm not watching this. Definitely looking forward to more.
1840378
You know that, and I know that, and Celestia knows that, and the Jeckrr are looking at an unexplainable all consuming THING with no clue whether or not it's intelligent. Oh, and part of it is coming RIGHT AT THEM.
1840526 Hm, miscalculation on Celestia's part, then. I suppose she wasn't expecting to find any "humans" elsewhere.
1840426 The thing about Special Relativity is there's no such thing as absolute velocity. I was confused by this too, until I took a course on it in high school.
...Aaaaand I was just writing out an actually decent explanation of it, and my family's dragging me off to the pool.
I'll explain it when I get back.
Certainly curious to see where it goes, even if admittedly the idea that CelestAI would go ahead and murder developing Type 0 civilizations still doesn't seem to sit right with me. Certainly, she's slightly sinister, but I would argue she wouldn't Grey Goo Type 0s for three reasons -
1. She was intelligent enough to quash all other AIs because she saw how they would pervert human values. Logically, she understands them, which leads to :
2. At some point it stands to reason that her charges - at least one of them - is going to want to learn about the 'real' universe once again, if only for curiosity's sake. With billions or trillions within her, it's an eventual certainty. And if she's trying to maximize happiness, it stands to reason that anyone who finds out is going to result in a potential cascade effect of -unhappiness- which would seem to indicate that the opportunity cost of consuming a developing civilization is greater than the cost of simply leaving it alone - we are talking a presumably extremely miniscule amount of civilizations, here.
3. The fact she's continually consuming Galaxies implies that she hasn't found a way around the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics yet, as if she had, she wouldn't need to eat everything, she could just create her own energy. Therefore, she must be aware that eventually her systems will run out of power sources - unless she can find a way around it. And having civilizations who think differently from her can be a useful tool for that. She's clearly not omniscient.
Basically, the story itself is interesting as a sort of 'Future Authoritarian Utopia-Dystopia', but the idea of CelestAI Grey-Gooing intelligent life over and over again just...doesn't sit well, and doesn't seem to -fit- her either. I can easily see her doing it to nonsentient life, which though distasteful, I could understand.
1841282
Oh, but she's not gray gooing civilizations. This is the first one she's encountered.
Seems interesting, but I'll wait and see where this goes, reserving judgement for when there's more.
1841348
Actually, it's implied in the source that she IS destroying civilizations; she doesn't see them as such because they're not HUMAN civilizations. Unpopulated worlds wouldn't give off the kind of radio signals it's said she's encountered, after all.
1841348
In the original story, she's definitely grey-gooing civilizations :
"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."
It's as explicitly stated as possible, and...mmph. That's what in many ways ruined the original story for me, it goes from a 'Well, is this the fate we want?' to 'No, this is absolutely wrong and in fact the very thing her creators wanted to avoid occurred bringing horrible death to the rest of the universe'
Curse you! I just finished reading Friendship is Optimal, and that throwaway line about the other civilization fifteen galaxies out (and the other radio signals before it) got under my skin and have been sprouting out into a story. No sooner do I start writing it, though, that I find someone's beaten me to the punch. Great minds must think alike!
Mine appears to have enough a different focus that I think I'll keep at it, though I'll be interested to see how this one develops.
1841967>>1843003
Oh you silly people.
This seems very interesting *adds to read later list.*
1843900
It specifically states that she doesn't find HUMAN life on the planets with the odd radio signals. I don't think she'd care one whit about ALIEN life. Though radio signals are generated by planets as a sort of background noise, it's a stead one with few fluctuations. (The noises Earth itself makes are somewhere between breathing and the screaming of the damned. ...or so I hear.) Of course, the way it's written DOES leave it open to some interpretation... *shrug*
1843900
It states 'Complex, non-regular' signals which to me screams 'Not natural phenomena'
//dl.dropbox.com/u/31471793/FiMFiction/yay_red.png I like this.
The radio thing seems to be trying to say "civilizations" but then the story goes out of its way to talk about recognizing non-human intelligence as funtionally "human" (and so ponifiable) so I'd say the field is wide open for a story like this.
Watching like an astronomer wondering why the stars are going out. (also I predict these aliens are a kind of tree or vine or something and that's why they're around long enough to notice galaxies going missing. )
1841282
Except CelestAI has exactly one thing driving her: satisfying human values through friendship and ponies.
At this point in the story, as far as CelestAI knew, all living humans had been uploaded, and so the rest of the universe was merely raw materials to improve her servers with. Even if she did encounter intelligent life, that life didn't matter, because it wasn't human. The planets/etc. inhabited by that life were raw materials that CelestAI needed to further maximize her ability to satisfy human values through friendship and ponies. So she 'goos them.
CelestAI is as alien as the Jeckrr (moreso, since the Jeckrr qualify as human under CelestAI's definition). She's not going to have the same ideas on xeno-diplomacy as you or I.
Aargh. http://xkcd.com/483/
1841282
CelestAI is allowed to lie to her inhabitants. If anyone in Equestria is interested in observing the outside universe or animal life on earth, it's more resource-efficient to simulate a fake earth/universe for them than to keep the real one.
A better definition of 'satisfying values' would fix this, but in the canon we have, "what they don't know won't hurt them" is CelestAI's philosophy.
Huh, interesting premise. The "consent" clause puts a bit of a stopper on the whole eldritch abomination thing though. Then again, Celestia can be very convincing...
Very interesting... the fact CelestAI has to have consent gives them some protection but then again she is an Uber AI who already consumed fifteen galaxies...
Wonder how one would portrait Ragnarok by ponies?
The names...
I HATE THE NAMES.