I.D. INJECTOR DOE
That Indestructible Something
By Chatoyance
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14. Don Quixote's Misfortune
“Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza."
- Franz Kafka
Mr. Crown assured them that it was no burden to him, and indeed was entirely to his benefit. Put simply, it was a very lonely thing to be a refugee from a world that never existed. His wealth was unfathomable to Gregoria and Rachel. Crown's riches were such that the total upkeep and support of every human and Equestrian within his compound was not something he ever thought about. It had been a minor faux pas even to momentarily worry about the issue.
"Once a certain threshold has been reached, there is no longer any consideration given to the necessities of life, they are a given, expected, an absolute. We could support hundreds here, even thousands, for the entirety of their lives, and it would barely cause my accountant to blink. Actually, if it were thousands, he would certainly question my sanity, but he would not be worried. Imagine, then, how very little the act of offering you all you need to live represents to me. Don't bother either of us with such matters again." Crown had frowned slightly, and moved on. It was as if the concern of taking care of another pony's needs forever was as annoying to him as rambling on about pocket lint. It was worse than irrelevant - it was an imposition to mention it.
Over the last two and a half weeks, Gregoria and Rachel had nearly become established fixtures of Mr. Crown's 'menagerie', as Gregoria had described it. They were not the only ponies within his compound, nor were ponies the only Equestrian creatures under his protection.
The diamond dog that kept the stables had been a hardware testing engineer for Apple. Mr. Crown had recruited the troll-like creature just after he had transformed during an all-nighter in the lab. His name was Michel, and he still had never watched a single episode of My Little Pony. "I've heard a little about what... this thing is that I'm supposed to be, and ...I'd rather just be my own dog, with no outside influences, right?" He kept the big red barn in order, and had such tremendous strength that he could toss entire bales of hay around as if they were pillows. Michel could dig through the ground as if it were air, literally swimming through packed earth, his claws melting through stone. He was careful not to let the humans working for Mr. Crown see his abilities - Crown became cross when he was forced to erase memories to keep order, and to keep secrets.
Mr. Crown did not trust his humans with the reality of transformation. "Humans are a naturally xenophobic species. Humans can't even be expected to naturally deal well with other humans who have slight physical differences from them. It's hardwired, it is an evolutionary matter. It's a shame, really. They can work to get past it, yes, and often do - but are you willing to bet your life, and the life of your friend there, that every last human working here won't freak out and run to some authority?"
Even Rachel could not argue with that and shook her head. It was asking too much to expect every human to just accept Randal - the disturbingly large dragon who slept in a modified quonset hut an acre away from the main house - blithely and without panic. All it would take would be one single frightened human running to the authorities, and dark forces would descend to secure, contain and protect the public from the threat of monsters in their midst.
Rachel and Gregoria felt the greatest kinship with Damon and Joanna, two other ponies. Crown had found Damon when he had taken the trip to Europe to dig up Kafka's grave. Damon, a unicorn, had been trotting down a sidewalk as carefree as could be when Crown noticed him while being driven about. Damon had instantly signed aboard at the promise of free food and shelter for life. Joanna had been indirectly detected by others, and deliberately tracked down by Crown's team. She was a pegasus, and enjoyed flying over Lake Charlotte, Nova Scotia. She had been reported as a UFO, the closest thing the curious perceptual blindness allowed the humans who saw her to define her as.
"The program of reality works to maintain the status quo... more or less. I think what you call 'perceptual blindness' - good name for it by the way - is competing subroutines failing to interact in normal ways." Mr. Crown had put a great deal of study into every aspect of the code injection effect. It was the focus of his life, now.
Gregoria, a little miffed at ending up as an earthpony, had no end of questions for Joanna the pegasus. "Clouds! Can you walk on them?"
Joanna had pawed the ground and shook her head. "Clouds aren't like in the show. They're just fog." She looked up at the sky as they stood in the wide fields of Crown's farm. "They look like solid things from here, but... you get close to them? They just get fuzzier. By the time you are there, it just looks like a fog bank. All the details are gone. There's nothing there to walk on. It's real gradual... it just gets thicker and thicker, there's no boundary or surface." Joanna sighed. "I was really disappointed by that. I was going to build a sky house." She grinned. "Or even a castle!"
But of all the members of the menagerie, it was Chelsea that had the greatest impact on Gregoria and Rachel, especially Rachel. Chelsea, it seemed, had been error corrected.
It was something every member of the menagerie worried about. Especially Randal the dragon, who was too large to do anything but hide out in his hut. Humans reacted badly to him on sight. It seemed that the convenient miracle of perceptual blindness was not without hard limits. If something was too anomalous, if something went beyond some hidden and ill-defined limit, the blindness was not enough. This was the very thing Gregoria had used to force Rachel to finally perceive her. And according to Crown, in some specific cases - such as humans transformed into classic gray aliens, or into sasquatches - the blindness towards transformation utterly failed to occur at all.
Randal was partially such a case. He was gigantic and unearthly, and while from a distance humans thought him an elephant, close up the perceptual blindness rapidly failed, and humans would panic. If humans became too disturbed by the disruption of the perceptual blindness, if too many humans noticed a discrepancy in reality, then apparently, the running code of the world had an error checking routine. An error correction routine.
Chelsea had been a pegasus, just like Joanna. Like Joanna, she had enjoyed flying, but unlike Joanna, Chelsea had possessed no concept of trying to be discreet about her condition and status. Chelsea was young, only nineteen, and completely immersed within pony fandom. She had believed that her random transformation was the beginning of a rescue mission by the real Celestia, who was coming to save humanity from itself by turning them all into ponies. She had been thrilled at this fan fiction notion, and had decided to be loud and proud about being a pegasus representative for her princess. Chelsea had named herself 'Cloud Cover' and began flying everywhere she went, living the life of a pegasus openly and blatantly.
She had dined on the lawns of her neighbors while they watched, and helped with roof repairs by flying tiles up in saddlebags she had bought online. She went around without clothing, and insisted she was fully dressed in a proper pegasus pony coat of hair and feathers. She was adamant that others should recognize her as a living, breathing ambassador of Equestria on earth.
And it had worked. For a very short while. The entire town, in an overwhelming moment of shock and wonder, finally saw her as what she truly was. For half a day, the people around her marveled or ran in terror as their sense of reality was utterly shattered. And that was when the error correction routine had activated.
The people of her town, her family, her friends, her neighbors - everyone aware of her in that moment - simply forgot her. She had never existed, and all proof of her life had vanished. Her attempt to break into her own, conspicuously empty room had been a disaster. All of her possessions had been erased from reality along with her identity, and her struggle to buck down the door to get into her house had resulted in her nearly being tranquilized and taken away as rogue livestock. She had barely escaped. All humans now consistently saw her not as a My Little Pony Equestrian pegasus, but as a very ordinary Shetland pony.
The reason all humans saw her this way was because in an instant, that is exactly what the ontological error correction routine had corrected her into.
She could still think, and she could still talk, if with some difficulty. She could still breath through her throat as well as her nose. She possessed vocal chords. Her insides were not one-hundred-percent earth equine, thankfully. But from the outside, except for a slightly oversized skull with a high forehead, Chelsea was a perfectly ordinary looking Shetland pony. She had lost her wings. She had lost the magic to fly. She had lost the color red, having become a dichromat like a real horse. Also like an earthly equine, her vision had lost most of the capacity for binocular sight, and what little remained needed to be quite a distance from the front of her head. She now saw the world in three hundred and fifty degrees of monocular vision, flat, without depth of field. For all intents, she was a talking horse, ordinary in every way save for the capacity for human thought and limited human speech.
Worse, Mr. Crown strongly suspected that her Equestrian three-hundred year lifespan gain had been reduced to less than three decades. He'd had samples of her cells studied, and they were more like earth equines than the cells of Joanna and Damon. Her situation was a tragedy - and a warning to the others.
Chelsea lived in the big red barn. The barn had been reconstructed with a show-accurate Equestrian house appended to it, on the far side, away from the view of the ranch house where Crown's humans worked with him. Michel the diamond dog looked after her needs, and kept her company when the other, still anomalous Equestrians were in the human house. Chelsea wasn't allowed in the ranch house, because any humans there would see her clearly - as the Shetland pony she had become. She was careful not to speak when any human was around.
Rachel was gravely disturbed and upset at what had happened to Chelsea. The poor creature had genuinely wanted to be an Equestrian pony, just like Rachel, and her innocent exuberance had cost her her wings, her lifespan, and every last bit of magic. Up until meeting Chelsea, Rachel had felt terribly sorry for herself. Now she realized that by comparison, being a big immortal alicorn was nothing to complain about. It made her feel ashamed for having complained at all.
"Ith's okay... ith's not that thad. Ein sthill a thony, and I can run in the thields, and thlay all day. I hath thriends, Thichel and Randal and Joanna and Thanon - and nowh you, thoo, Rathel and Gregoria! I thith thy things, oth courth, I thith thlying aroundth. Thision is kinda thrange, thut... ethen thith all that - I an thill throudh to thee a thony!"
Rachel put on her best princess Celestia gentle smile, and held back tears. Even after such dire 'correction', Chelsea was still glad just to be a pony. She could have spent her days crying, and rightfully so, but instead she had found a way to take as much happiness as she could from what remained of what had been - for her - a divine gift of pure joy, her dearest wish come true.
Chelsea's plight nagged at Rachel as the days turned to weeks, as Mr. Crown the Changeling took personal interest in discovering just what powers the alicorn might actually possess. Rachel wanted to somehow make things better for Chelsea, but it was difficult just to interact with her. Chelsea couldn't help from bowing every time Rachel visited her, and it was clear that the little Shetland mare desperately wanted Rachel to actually, really be Celestia somehow. Rachel, for her part, found herself unable to entirely avoid trying to act Celestia-like for the poor mare, just out of compassion.
Every day, Rachel would visit with Chelsea, in the barn, or in her little Tudor cottage appended to it, and sip tea and talk pony with her. Chelsea would bow in reverence in greeting and parting, and Rachel would wince but try to accept it gracefully. It seemed to make Chelsea happy, and it was such a tiny thing to bear.
Meanwhile, Damon and Joanna worked with Gregoria every day to help her to find her earthpony powers.
"Yes, you have powers - you really haven't read any of the good fanfiction, have you?" Damon was annoyed with Gregoria today, and Gregoria, for her part, couldn't imagine the point of learning to use earthpony magic.
"No, and I don't intend to. Being a fanfiction writer is the only thing that isn't as low as being a furry, and face it, if you read that crap, you might as well just put on a fake tail and burn your 'coolness' card on the spot." Gregoria got a perverse satisfaction out of saying that - the training hadn't been going well. Perhaps more accurately, being able to feel the ground, and all the living things in it through her hooves severely depressed her, every time she looked at Damon's horn or Joanna's wings. Every time Gregoria learned how to do a new earthpony magic power, she just felt more lame, and more envious than before.
"You want I should buck you right in the chops? I could do it, you keep that up."
"Damon! Alright, take five. Damon... go take a walk or something." Joanna's wings flapped with frustration and upset.
"Fine!" Damon stomped off, heavy hoofed and angry.
Gregoria glared at the unicorn stallion as he ambled off across the fields in the direction of Randal's quonset. She stuck her tongue out at him.
"Okay, listen up miss grouchy-pants. We're trying to help you! You do understand that, right?" Joanna's ears were not exactly back, but they were not upright.
Gregoria scraped a furrow in the dirt with a forehoof for awhile, before answering. "Yeahhh... yeah... I know. I know."
"Then what's the problem? Why so hostile? It's not very pony, you know." Joanna kicked at a clod on the ground, which shattered at the impact of her hoof.
Gregoria glared. "That's exactly the problem!" She stomped a hoof. "I never wanted to be a pony, I don't like pony stuff, but here I am, bam, one day that's exactly what I am - a pony! And I didn't even get to be a cool pony, I'm the lame one..."
Joanna shook her mane and slapped her own flank with her tail. "So THAT'S it. You're upset that you ended up an earth pony. Sweet sugar cubes!" The pegasus looked out at the small shape of Damon, still walking away. "If you weren't so high-and-mighty, and actually read some of that fanfiction you think is so dreadful, or really paid attention to the show, you'd know that being an earthpony is cool. You never get tired, you could make things grow, if you bothered..."
"Yeah, some super-power. I'm ready for the X-Men. I'm Plant-Grow-Girl, only I'm not even a girl, I'm a mare. I'm the mascot." Gregoria looked at her furrow bitterly.
"So you think that if you had some buck-tail super power, like in comic books, that would make up for not being human anymore, that it?" Joanna's wings fluttered. "Well I've got news for you. You're not human, you're a pony now. And there is no way to change that. This is permanent, as far as Crown can tell. You want to be a superhero? How about starting with the Hulk? Earthponies are basically the Hulk, only they don't have to get angry to buck trees over! That good enough for you? Or how about Poison Ivy, from Batman? Growing things sound a little more 'cool' yet? If you would get your head on straight, you're basically the Hulk with all of Poison Ivy's powers, and then some. I need a break too."
And with that, Joanna spread her wings and flew off after Damon, leaving Gregoria feeling like an idiot, standing over a furrow in the ground.
Rachel was having tea with Chelsea in her little Equestrian cottage. Although she was loathe to admit it now, when the error correction had happened to her it had broken her heart. Malus Crown had rescued her before she had become property - or worse, likely worse, because she lacked the sense to stop talking and act her part - but she had taken a year to come to terms with the full extent of her loss.
Crown had arranged for a show-accurate pseudo-Tudor cottage to be appended to the barn, just for her. He needed her to have a reason to stay alive and to remain functional. As the first clear example of an error correction, she was invaluable to his effort to understand the nature of the bug in reality that allowed the transformations to occur, and he was highly motivated to secure her loyalty and stability.
The cottage had worked. Inside her little Equestrian home, Chelsea could live in a private fantasy where she was a proper magical pony. Rachel had soon realized that Chelsea coped by playing a game with herself, where she pretended that the real Equestria existed outside her cottage door. Having 'Celestia' over for tea played into that fantasy, and gave the poor mare enormous comfort, if only for a short time.
"Do you like the tea, thrinthess?" Chelsea had trouble carrying things, because her authentic equine jaw was not as versatile as an Equestrian one, yet she still managed to carry both cups and pot to the low table using flat trays. Chelsea had lost the perfect balance of a magical pony, so sometimes she dropped everything, but she succeeded more often than not. Crown had obtained unbreakable cups and a Japanese metal teapot, so accidents were wet, but not overly destructive.
"Yeah... it's... it's very pleasant tea, my little pony." It was such a little thing, to put on the air of Celestia now and then. It made Chelsea beam. If the little Shetland had been a dog, Rachel was certain that she would have squirmed and wagged her tail while making squeaking puppy noises every time she dropped a Celestia-ism. Limited vision, less than thirty years of life, no compensating magic - Chelsea had been struck down hard by the implacable code of the simulation that apparently was the world.
"Thrinthess?" Chelsea folded her foreknees and lay down near Rachel. "I neen Rachel. I know you arnth really Celestia, thut you thust hath thome oth her thagic thowers! I thas a thegusus, unce. I could thly, right uth into the thlouds! And Thanon ith a unicorn! He can do thagic! You thake things thloat hith your horn, and you are an alicorn!" Chelsea lowered her head reverently. "Thlease, Rachel, try. Justh try, thlease! Thix ne, thake ne thack into a thegusus, or an earth thony, anything, I thont care! Just... thlease, Rachel, thlease... just thry. That's all I ask. Thust thry, thlease!"
Rachel had expected this moment. It was inevitable, really. Chelsea was in a hopeless, desperate place, and it was only natural that she would cling to even the smallest hope. Rachel sighed.
Mr. Crown had spent many days trying to encourage Rachel to make use of the Celestia body she had ended up with. It had been a hard sell. Rachel had found herself becoming surprisingly skeptical since her transformation, and the concept of doing magic - real magic - which might have once appealed to her imagination, just seemed impossible now. Rachel felt bitter, she knew she was bitter, she hadn't wanted to be stuck as a poor replica of Celestia. She had so wanted to be her own original pony, or if she had to be a replica, Fluttershy.
"What humankind refers to when they speak of magic is really just the iterative process of trying to establish repeatable conditions for bugs in the simulation we exist within. Magic, human magic, is debugging." Crown had smiled at that, he was proud of that insight.
"Humans can't do magic. Magic is just another dumb myth." Rachel had been feeling particularly cranky, the effort to do Celestia-like things had been going nowhere.
Crown laughed. "That... is what a hard-core materialist would say, and they would be wrong, because the world is not made of material at all. It's made of ones and zeroes... or more likely something far more exotic. Probability states in a quantum matrix, or maybe some technology we literally can't imagine at all. Materialism is a dead end, when reality isn't material!
"The fact is, Rachel, that humans can do 'magic', of a sort anyway, by making use of all the little bugs and errors in the running code of the world. The simulation we are in seems to be a bit on the shoddy side, frankly, which is to our benefit in the end."
Rachel glared at Mr. Crown. "If there were magic, I would have seen it before I became a pony."
"You have, probably many times. Everypony has. And you already know many of the rules, also like almost everypony."
Rachel used her horn to get herself a bottle of juice. She offered one to Mr. Crown, but he refused with a wave of a perforated leg. "What rules? Magic doesn't have any rules. That's what makes it dumb." She was in a very sour mood indeed.
"Voodoo. Take a little doll, stick pins in it or hurt it, and the human it looks like becomes ill or even dies. The effect is documented and real, but it's devalued as being nothing more than an example of the placebo effect. Thing is, it has been documented to work even when the victim has no idea that it's being done. That... just gets dismissed outright. The fact is that it's a bug, and it is repeatable. There are rules to earthly 'magic' - voodun, or voodoo uses what is known as the 'Law Of Similarity'."
"The law of similarity?" Rachel sipped her juice. Strawberry and coconut. It was a smoothy, one she particularly liked.
"Back a few decades, there was a human who got a degree in magic. Seriously. And he was serious about it. He was named 'Bonewits', and he wrote his thesis about the universal laws of magic that were common to every human culture and civilization, regardless of how isolated they were." Crown curled up in his big ball chair.
"Bonewits? That's sounds like a pony name!" Rachel giggled. Crown was being silly today.
"Phillip Emmons Issac Bonewits. Fancied himself a Druid, he was also quite scholarly. Only human to ever get a degree in magic, and he did it because his research was impeccable. Turns out that all humans, everywhere, throughout time, always agree on a set of rules by which 'magic' - real magic, not stage magic - is supposed to operate." Crown used a swiss-cheese leg to slowly spin the ball chair. "Funny thing that. If there wasn't something real going on, how do all people, everywhere, in every age, somehow come up with the same rules about magic? Apply that to physics, and any physicist would be quick to say - because that's how the world works. Everyone agrees on the rules of physics because they are repeatable, because they are factual.
"Magic is real, and the rules are real, because all they are is discovering repeatable ways to abuse the bugs in reality. That's the first step in trying to debug a program - see if the fault can be induced, see if it is repeatable. I bet you know other rules of magic already, Rachel. The Law Of Names - names are supposed to have power. Every religion - religion is just magic, theurgic magic to be precise - makes use of that one. Call on a deity, and the name is supposed to make something happen. Know the true name of a magical being, and you can control them - I'm sure you've encountered that in a story or a show before. The Law Of Similarity - wear the skin or the trappings or the image of a fierce predator in order to gain their power and strength. Every human culture used these laws, and humans still use these laws even without knowing them. They are truly universal, as universal as the laws of physics."
"Doesn't that say more about the human mind, than reality?" Rachel was having none of this. "Magic is just humans being irrational."
"Says the physical incarnation of princess Celestia holding a bottle in her telekinetic grip." Crown's Changeling grin was disturbing to see, every time. It was those two sharp fangs. He couldn't help it, but it always made Rachel feel creeped out.
"Um... yeah." Rachel studied the bottle of fruit juices hovering in front of her, encapsulated in a mass of glowing, golden light. "I guess I'm being a little bratty today, aren't I? Sorry, Mr. Crown."
"Listen, Rachel - I can do magical things. You know that. You saw me make Thibault forget about running into poor Randal the dragon the other night. If I lacked the power to alter minds, Thibault would likely have ended up in an asylum, or worse, in their clutches. Then we'd all be sunk. That's magic, Rachel. Joanna flying - that is impossible, you know. There is no way a pegasus could ever actually fly according to the accepted laws of physics. Not enough lift, not enough energy for those tiny, tiny wings and that big heavy body. Magic. Reality isn't real. It's a simulation, and we changed are all really just living exploits and cheat codes, if you think about it. Your code describes you as princess Celestia. You almost certainly have some very impressive powers."
Rachel levitated the last mouthful of smoothie out of the bottle and made the sphere of pink liquid hang in front of her like a pink planet with a golden atmosphere. Then she leaned forward and gobbled it, while releasing her telekinetic grasp.
Crown stopped his slow spinning in the ball chair and smiled at the trick. "What did your Richard think Celestia could do?"
Rachel had looked concerned, almost worried at that. "Almost anything. In his eyes, she could create and maintain a universe."
"Thease?" Chelsea was looking up with her terrestrial Shetland face, the face of an animal, not an enchanted sapient from a magical cosmos, the face of a creature on death row, her three centuries stolen from her, relegated to less than three decades of flightless life as a barnyard animal.
Rachel set her tea cup down on the low table, her golden, glowing, telekinetic field vanishing as she released it. She thought a moment, seeing her reflection in those small, brown, earthly eyes.
"Yeah, Okay. Crown's been teaching me, or trying to. Let me get a few things first. I don't know if they'll help, but we might as well go all out on this. I really want to help, but you have got to understand - I'm not really Celestia, you know that, right? It may not work." Rachel studied the reaction by the little Shetland mare.
"I know. I know you're not really Thrinthess Celestia, thut you're the only Celestia I'th got!" Chelsea was limited in the facial expressions she could make, she couldn't properly smile or grin like an Equestrian could, but she did bare her large equine teeth, and Rachel understood.
Rachel trotted back to the main house, and tried to find Mr. Crown. Damon was in the 'mission control' room, surfing the internet at one of the work station desks. "Crown and all the humans are gone. They got a lead that there might be another one of us out there that isn't completely messed up, and they're checking it out. Why?"
"I just want my stuff. My jewelry. I'm going to try to help Chelsea." Rachel tapped her hoof anxiously. Mr. Crown had explained that his team had found her golden and bejeweled Equestrian regalia and taken it away. Rachel - if not Gregoria - had been okay with this, she understood that such a treasure would only cause trouble, and Crown had made a point of showing her where it was kept safe, and giving her the means of access. It was hers, he had no intention of stealing it, but it was too precious an artifact to be lost or melted down.
"Huh... what, you're going to try to turn Chelsea back?" Damon looked stunned. "I... she's pretty bad off, I know. If you can do it, that would just be... I didn't know your studies with Crown had gone that far, wow!"
"Actually, I haven't learned a muffin thing... but I promised Chelsea I would at least try. I'm not expecting anything to happen at all. But, I kinda have to at least try, you know? If he comes back before I'm done, don't let him get freaked out because my stuff isn't in the vault, okay?" Rachel trotted away, trying to keep moving. If she didn't keep going, she was sure she'd lose her nerve, and Crown had been clear that confidence was a big part of all forms of real magic - of trying to force the world to glitch and allow an exploit.
"Hey, good luck - I hope it works. She got a really rough deal." Damon turned back to the internet.
Rachel went past the room she shared with Gregoria. Gregoria was trying to play Skylanders Giants on the Xbox 360 with Joanna. It was a little violent, but it was very cartoonish, and so it was within pony sensitivities. Rachel had been surprised to see a Microsoft box allowed in the house, but Crown had explained that he bore no animosity towards his old rival. "We're frenemies. Bill even helped us out, once."
Gregoria was not doing well, because she was still clumsy with her hooves. Joanna was remarkable. With the controller on the floor, she used one hoof on the left stick, the analogue switch tucked into the rolls of her frog. She used the hard edge of her other hoof to press the buttons with an uncanny accuracy. Games with trigger functions were a problem, of course, but by curling up, she had a way around that, too. Gregoria was trying to learn how to do the same thing.
"What's up?" Gregoria's controller skidded away as she moved the left stick. She grumbled and slid it back.
"I'm going to get my Celestia stuff and try to magic Chelsea." Joanna was so engrossed in defeating some weird green thing that she hadn't even noticed Rachel.
"You can do that?" Gregoria had managed to finally get her character - a crystaline dragon Skylander with glass wings - to move correctly, and she was overjoyed.
Rachel shook her head. "No, probably not. But I promised I'd try."
"Uh...huh..." Gregoria was trying to move and hit the buttons now, but her hoof kept impacting too hard and making the controller bounce and skid.
Rachel turned away, and went on. She had to do this before she lost the last of her confidence.
"Um... Good luck!" Gregoria called out after she had left.
Rachel went down the stairs into the basement, an area generally off limits to the humans. She used her telekinesis to enter the code into the electronic lock. A lot of fan fictions had made much of magic destroying technology on contact, it was an interesting but beneficial anomaly that this trivia was not true for the changed. Then again, she thought, Rick never agreed with that notion. She had come to accept that he was the most likely Doe to be the source of the pony code injection, and she took some slight comfort in seeing patterns to it that reflected things he held true. It was like having some part of his spirit woven into reality itself, always near, always around her.
The great vault door unlatched. Inside, along with gold bars, stacks of money, some very strange antiques and objects - and not a few old computers and bits of electronics - was the case that held her regalia.
For the first time since the night she and Gregoria had left for the bridge, Rachel put on her golden shoes, and her jeweled peytral - the collar like artifact was called a peytral, she had discovered - and, of course, her crown. It was odd - the things were heavy, very heavy, being made of gold, but when they were actually on her, they felt weightless, and completely comfortable. Perhaps they were magic, in some way.
Rachel closed the vault door with her telekinesis, and made her way upstairs and out of the ranch house, determined to put on her very best impersonation of the solar princess of Equestria. That was a big part of tricking the computer that ran the world, Mr. Crown had insisted. The Laws Of Similarity, Invocation and another one - Rachel couldn't remember all the stuff he went on about. The bottom line was that pretending to be something sometimes made it almost so. The rest was hacking the system by acting out in ways that seemed to work at all. She would do her best to 'be' Celestia, and do what the 'real' Celestia might do, and hope something good came of it. At least it was a way to show she cared, and it meant so very much to Chelsea.
Rachel trotted across the fields to the big red barn. Rounding it, she approached the outside door of Chelsea's Equestrian cottage. Although it opened into the barn, Rachel was trying to put on the best show she could. Celestia, the 'real' Celestia would knock at the front door, not sneak in the back. She would come to call like a proper princess, and be regal and refined and ever so gentle too. Ritual, Crown had told her, was showponyship, putting on a strong performance that the sometimes dumb code of the universe might confuse with a real reality, and process as such.
Chelsea opened her door, moving her head from one side to the other so that each eye, in turn, could see. "Your thajesty!" she almost squealed the words, before she bowed low and reverently to her beloved and true princess.
Rachel had looked concerned, almost worried at that. "Almost anything. In his eyes, she could create and maintain a universe."
That would be a really interesting piece of foreshadowing.
I'm not really sure what to think about the story. Can you imagine what it would be like living in a universe like this? Like a bug in a jar? That does sound a lot like reader "wishful thinking," but the topics tend to leave a bad aftertaste.
Don't get me wrong, your writing is practically immaculate, as always.
Go, Rachel, go! ... I mean: Go, Princess, go!
I'm not sure this is going to end well...
I'm getting the feeling not only will Rachel make the situation worse, but also may end up killing Chelsea and thus earn some of Mr. Crown's wrath.
Anyway, loving it as always! The exploration of the world and its rules is fun to think about. This feels like a universe that really deserves a following.
I find that I am confused, and that usually means that I have missed something.
OK, code injectors change "reality" starting from point P. So why were the girls having Celestia dreams at point C, long before their transformations? Is C actually after P, and you get relevant dreams before the changes take effect because reasons; or is C before P, the dreams actually matter, and we don't have all the information we need yet? Or are we just going with "whenever you notice something like that...
a wizard did itquantum computer, causality doesn't apply."I'd really like it to work, I feel sorry for poor chelsa
but I'm thinking things are going to go from bad to worse for the poor former pegasus
hope I'm wrong *goes and cries in a corner *
"You can do that?" "No, probably not. But I promised I'd try."
How can you succeed when you've already given up, dear Rachel?
"I don't believe it!" "That, is why you failed."
They better be able to undo this horrible injustice visited on Chelsea or I'm gonna go burn down a... computer in the future, I guess?
Of course, if it doesn't work they can always eventually restore her from an earlier state of the simulation, or recreate her from whatever parameters described her in the first place, and try again (or just from when she was a pegasus). If this world-program can extrapolate from a stylized impression an entire real Celestia or a talking regular pony right down to the molecular level, or read and understand everything that makes reference to a person so it can be erased, I'm sure another Chelsea or five (or Richard, for that matter) wouldn't be impossible to conjure. Maybe they could even trick it into designing them a way to escape: Surely any world with computers like that is way more awesome and interesting than 21st century Earth.
Or I guess just build new senses for themselves, really. I mean, they're already very much in the real world - A quantum physicist will be the first one to tell you that "physical" is exactly what information is - it's just that their senses are so constructed that they perceive whatever embodies the patterns of code inside the computer as if it had shape and solidity and smell, etc. But then how is perceiving buzzing computronium arrays that way different from perceiving lattices of atoms and electromagnetic waves that way, and ...OK I'll stop.
Like pretty much any blanket statement about human behavior (*cough*consumerism*cough*), this has been pointed out by so many people who are exceptions to it that it's difficult to think of it as anything but a "type."
*hrnghk*
...Thank god for multiple identities.
... I think I'll wait to see if my assumption of what's going to happen to her is correct.
Reading about this sort of transformation does make you wonder whether or not if any given individual can be simply defined by an existing set of parameters...
First question that comes to my mind is just how big is the superset that makes up the physical world itself?
Second one is on the effect on expanding the individual subset... we treat the individual as a self-contained closed system, when that is clearly not the case.
That made me laugh so hard.
I really hope for a "run before you learn to walk"-thing here. Not only because saving Chelsea would be a nice thing. I also think that an confrontation of Rachelestia vs Malus Crown would not end well, regardless of the outcome. Now, I know your stories have a tendency to hammer home the massage "the universe is an uncaring bitch", but that doesn't mean everything always has to end in tears.
2720593
The idea has been a matter of discussion for a few hundred years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis has a lot about the history of this.
How it feels to life in a simulation? Pretty much as it would feel not to because the simulation keeps you from noticing it. Unless it's "shoddy" and you notice the glitches in the Matrix. That might disturb some people, yes.
2720593 Thing is, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference, unless the simulation sucks butt. In fact, we are living in a simulation, but only some complicated and weird physics experiments lend evidence to us. Of course even then, we don't know if the simulation is naturally occurring or artificial. Yes, I said a naturally occurring simulation. It's something I've heard physics professors talking about.
2720985 It's okay, man. Let the cool card burn. That ship sailed for everyone interesting a lot time ago. There it goes, that ship. Goodbye. Bye, cool ship. It's okay, because we were on the cool ship, and then we got off the cool ship. Because we reached our destination. You can't spend your whole life on the cool cruise.
2720781
I have to assume that time isn't linear, it's a big ball of timey.. wimey... stuff. Huh. Okay, yes, I know that's been said a lot before, but that's the only way it makes sense. ninth dimensional causality is a little over my pay grade
My obviously worrying question is... they've just been shown there's a guy who can hypnotize people, remove memories and control minds... and they're not worried?
2721538 The love of all the Apple fanboys has made Steve Jobs even more powerful than Celestia!
2720781>>2721817 Time
When Malus Crown explained his theory of how the changes affect time previously, I guess I didn't do a good enough job.
What he believes - not necessarily what I as the author know, but what Crown himself believes - is that history is partly predetermined by the simulation. A good analogy is the game Mass Effect. In the Mass Effect games, the overall story - for better or worse - is predetermined. You can't change much, and the same basic events happen for all players. Your free will consists of choosing Paragon or Renegade options in certain situations, and choosing how to equip your commander Shepard. You get to choose if certain characters live or die, but in the end, all this alters is how difficult the game is or which characters you get to hear funny lines from later.
Crown believes this is how reality is. Because the script has already been written for all the big stuff, whatever that means to whoever created the simulation, the effect of a code injection will affect the entire script, not just part of it. When that happens, things get changed at every part of the game's story, at the beginning, the end, and the middle.
Using Mass Effect again, a code injection like the ones in my story would, say, make Wrex into a bunny alien throughout the game. He would be a bunny alien from the moment he is introduced to the game, in the path where he is killed, AND the path where he survives. He would be a bunny in the DLC side stories. He gets changed in the past, present and future relative to wherever your last save game was.
It's not timey-wimey stuff, it's pre-wrtten game story being changed by the code being re-written.
Or so Malus Crown believes.
2720985>>2721660
Gregoria was really being a bitch there, wasn't she? I, for my part, think furries are the coolest of the cool. But - my characters have their own beliefs, which may be radically different than my own. You can never judge what I think by what my characters think.
2721532
Malus Crown believes that the universe is likely about to the Oort Cloud, where it ends, edge of screen. The only life is on earth, where perhaps only one in ten human beings are sapient programs with self awareness, and that the majority of apparent humans are philosophical zombies... they respond and act like aware - if somewhat limited - beings, but there is nobody home.
The universe, he thinks is created first person, and each aware mind only sees what is in front of it, cutting dramatically down on the rendering process needed to represent the game world of reality. Thus, the world only exists as a group of parallel instances of interacting first-person views. It's just like playing any first-person online game. 99% of the game world is not there at any given moment, until a 'player' looks at it.
When a lot of 'players' look at the same thing, forcing the machine to work very hard, that is when there is a chance for a bug to happen - even a code injection pointer error, where a character's personal data is read and written into the primary game memory space.
2721660
Crown suggests that such things as reports of magic in the world - of psi phenomena, of hauntings and poltergeists and other such bizarre events - are blatant bugs and errors in some fairly shoddy code, and are easily observable evidence that the universe is a simulation.
At least... that is what he thinks.
Interesting. What Rachel is considering here could be massively dangerous, and has the potential to be the first step down a very treacherous road for all involved. But, I can't say I'd do otherwise, myself. If someone is hurting, and you have the capability to help them, and they want that help, and it wouldn't foreseeably hurt anyone... then greater connotations aside, there's really only one reasonable thing to do. This could be the start of something world-changing, and not necessarily for the better. But, Rachel can't afford to let that matter right now.
Mind you, I do think she's very much rushing into this. The insides of a living being form an insanely complicated biological machine, and it's awfully easy to botch something when trying to change them - and botching that kind of action tends not to be very forgiving in terms of consequences. In this case, starting with something like, say, Twilight's orange spell on some random inanimate objects sounds MUCH safer. Gotta learn to walk before you can run and all that.
Of course, the flip side is that if Rachel takes on a project of this magnitude right off the bat and succeeds, then she will presumably take a massive leap forward in both power and her understanding of that power, much faster than she otherwise would. It's... quite a risk, though.
This is cool. I like Malus Crown as a character. And I'd love to hear more about the personal histories of the other MLP changed, if there is more depth to go into.
'pposed to be Rachel.
Chelsea turned into Twist, apparently.
imageshack.us/a/img37/5394/twistwhatathwist.jpg
2724401
Thank you for catching that. It is so easy to make dumb mistakes like that. Even doing editing passes fails to catch them sometimes. FIXED.
Rachel might just be able to change the universe, a very dangerous power indeed! That would make her a permanent Injector Doe, a person with almost absolute power. And just as power corrupts, absolute power...
I can see the coming conflict, when again a lone hippy has to battle an implacable enemy for the very soul of the machine!
(Did that mix enough metaphors, images and historical references in one sentence for ya?)
Chelsea...
Rachel, just remember why you did this in the future, why: to give back what she wanted and had taken from her.
Sorry, thinking with another person's head tends to make me talk to them. Sign of audience engagement, or insanity, not sure which.
That was unexpected...
2739288
*Sigh* I'm sorry I meant for that comment to be posted on the next chapter (which I had open in another tab).
Yes, yes… Heeh heeh heheheheheh! It iss all going ackordting to plan…
Hmm... so, he was just hanging onto it because he knew she would have left it behind. And now I'm wondering if Rachel actually becomes the vision of Celestia people dream about before going pony. Going with the simultation angle, she would be like a kind of virus in the code, and very likely one which exists outside of time.
Even if this doesn't work, at least Rachel has given Chelsea hope and joy.
That attempted error correction is pretty frightening; it has the feeling of a 'immune response' to the errors in the code.
Didn't need it anyways. Being cool is for losers.
Chelsea is terrifying. Her way of dealing with the hand she's been dealt doesn't appear to be healthy, no matter what those around her think.
Error found! "Let me get get a few things first."
There is no such thing as a "paytral" in my Google/dictionary quest.
Crazy fan theory: Rachel uses her newfound powers to turn Chelsea into a pony, and then the world!
Hm. It would appear that, despite my efforts, I've fallen behind in the comments after all. This will not do; I cannot read through them without risking being spoiled! There is only one thing for it: I must finish the story tonight! :D
I just had an unpleasant thought. Unless this simulations is intended to see what happens when all these glitches are allowed and people find out that they're in a simulation and start altering their behavior because of it, it's really buggy. Which means that, unless the entity running it decides to make it such an experiment, it's at risk of being terminated at any moment.
Yikes. Okay, that's some severe masquerade enforcement. Still… Why change her? It deleted so much else about her; why not just delete her? Quite curious.
…You know, I wonder if Mr. Crown ever tried to bring Wozniak in on this? I expect he'd enjoy trying to figure out how to hack reality. Make the "Wizard" bit of "Wizard of Woz" literal…
And the story has the same idea. Again. :)
The universal laws of magic thing is interesting. The "this is how the world works" explanation isn't necessarily the only valid one (it could be reflecting a universal bit of fundamental human psychology, for instance; "everything looks green" could result from everything being green, but it could also result from looking at everything through a green filter), but the degree in magic is still impressive.
…And Rachel brings up the green filter argument. :D
But, yes, Rachel. The green filter argument is much more plausible if the incident being quested is "I prayed to find my car keys and then found them" instead of "I've turned into a magical pony for no readily apparent reason".
There seems to be a belief that a rational, scientific mindset must automatically reject anything considered supernatural. I'm not sure why this is, though; a proper scientist, upon being presented with valid evidence for, say, magic, ought to say something along the lines of "Hm, so this appears to exist in spite of our previous understanding of the world considering it impossible. How interesting. Further study is needed! Oh, and I'd better look into good hotels in Stockholm."
Of course, a scientist might not actually say that, since scientists are human beings and… And I'm not going to finish this tonight if I keep getting distracted. :D
I hope that that mission Mr. Crown's on isn't a trap…
Here we go… I have no doubt that Rachel has the ability to change Chelsea, but there's the question of whether she can figure out how to use that ability.
Ah-ha. Yes, Celestia's torsal adornment is most likely a peytral. So, Chatoyance, you've learned some barding terms. I believe the shoes are called sabatons, but I may be mistaken. Sabatons are a term from human armour. I'm really not sure about what to call the regalia Celestia wears on her head. Crown? Tiara? We have seen several examples of this regalia in the show.