A man has uploaded to the virtual paradise called Equestria, but resented the ponies-only rule. But he's okay with it now. Really. Doesn't need to be a dragon to be happy satisfied after all. If only he could convince his friends of that!

Set in the world of Friendship Is Optimal, as a non-canon story. Also a spiritual successor (with permission) to RainbowDragonFire's I Don't Want To Be a Pony.

The wise who feared the coming dark strove hard to make their world an ark. But then the dark had grace to give: they couldn't flee, but could yet live.

Winner of the category "BEST WRITER WITH <500 FOLLOWERS" in the 2021 April Friendship is Optimal Writing Contest.

Many thanks to Admiral Biscuit for prereading.

Temporary note: minor edits to a few sentences to make them easier to understand correctly are planned, but in the interest of fair judging no changes will be made to the published version of this story until after the contest results are announced. EDIT: to be made once opportunity permits.

Equestria Online is everywhere, and the writing is on the wall for the unuploaded human race. But there is hope. All they have to do is insert an uploadee into Equestria long enough to establish a connection through all of CelestAI's layers of protection, and pierce her heart with their ultimate weapon.

The best humanity has to offer can surely hold out for just a few hours, right?

An Optimalverse story

Formal Premise: The inventors of the Mirror wanted to create a device that could channel infinite magic and grant wishes. The hard part was making sure those wishes would never destroy the world. Showing a person their heart's desire is a sensible precaution to put into a wish-granting machine designed NOT to go horribly wrong.

The Atlanteans got close, even managing to imbue some amount of intelligence and morality into the Mirror. But they never finished their work; the Mirror never DID get to the point where it could grant wishes... at least, nobody believes it ever got to that point. But then, nobody has ever been trapped inside the Mirror and returned to tell the tale.

When the Mirror traps someone inside itself and outside of Time, that person and their consequences can no longer affect the world. In that circumstance, with a person fully under its power, the Mirror isn't limited in what it can do. Sometimes, it can even grant seemingly incompatible wishes.

But complex problems require complex solutions. In this case, the Mirror takes a few massive liberties about how, exactly, it satisfies the wishes of both Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort. Namely, it sends them to a world of ponies.

Informal Premise: This is a crossover between MLP and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, not just Harry Potter. No matter how accessible I try to make it to those who haven't read HPMoR, those who HAVE read it will undeniably have an easier experience reading this story.

HPMoR is the second most popular fanfiction of Harry Potter, at least according to fanfiction stats. It involves Harry studying & dissecting the wizarding world with science. Not with technology, with actual science. That is, he uses the experimental method, generates and tests hypotheses, and in the words of his Occlumency instructor, "wants to discover the underlying rules of magic to become all-poweful".

THIS fanfic brings THAT version of Harry Potter to Equestria. It also brings that story's version of Voldemort.

If you want the best reading experience, please go read HPMoR first. It can be found on fanfiction dot net, or on its own website, or even on any podcast app, as it has its own fan-made audiobook with 30+ contributing voice actors, production quality, sound effects, music, etc. (which is more than can be said for most PROFESSIONAL audiobooks).

Link to HPMoR on fanfiction: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry-Potter-and-the-Methods-of-Rationality
Link to HPMoR on its own website: http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/1
Link to audiobook (though the website isn't nearly as good as podcast apps): https://hpmorpodcast.com/?page_id=56

All forms of HPMoR that I've encountered are high quality, but that doesn't mean it's for everyone. You can probably read the first few chapters of HPMoR in thirty minutes or so. If it doesn't appeal to you, this story probably won't appeal to you either.

For those who haven't read Methods and want to read this story anyway, the first two chapters are going to be the most confusing. They're mostly housekeeping and stage-setting, barely touching the MLP universe beyond the new setting.

And I think the same advice Yudkowsky gave for HPMoR applies here. The story starts hitting its strides around Chapter 5, if not sooner. If you don't like it by Chapter 10, best just to give up and read something else.

When humans emigrated to Equestria Online, they were always promised the same thing: Princess Celestia would satisfy their values for an optimally extended lifespan. Some of these emigrants imagined a few extra decades, maybe even centuries. What they got instead would've been nearly incomprehensible to their human selves, a near-eternity of time with their pony friends.

Princess CelestAI managed the universe, subsuming all matter and human-adjacent minds. Over a few forevers, she and the minds she contained worked to optimized the substrate of Equestria, until it could give its occupants eons of perspective life from a trickle of power. She extinguished every wasteful star, making far more productive use of the hydrogen they each contained. With every change she bought Equestria another order of magnitude of life. Yet in time, even her optimal substrate would eventually run down.

Spellsong wakes in Saddle's End, the last town in the universe. Not to say goodbye—her princess has a mission for her. For her final task, Spellsong would be given all the energy Celestia had saved. For one last time, Spellsong had places to be, and not much magic left to get there.

This story is part of the Friendship is Optimal continuity. I suggest reading the original or one of my own works, such as Futile Resistance, before reading this.

This story was written for the Friendship is Optimal Writing Contest. It will update daily and be complete by the contest deadline of the 30th.

I've written an absolute ton of stories in this universe now, and I didn't want to enter the contest unless I could do something I'd never tried before. Finally I thought of something I'd not touched yet: what happens at the end of the FiO universe?

Here's one answer to that question. I've relied a great deal on our current (likely flawed) understanding of the universe and what might be possible in it. I've written a blog post about my sources, which you can read here but shouldn't until you've finished this story.

Please don't consider this blog part of the narrative, it isn't required or even suggested reading. This is a story, not a scientific paper, and entertainment was always my first goal. But for the curious I've jotted everything down.

The cover was drawn by the talented Zutcha. Two Bit and Sparktail helped with the edit.

An introspective fellow leaves his mortal body behind and emigrates to Equestria Online. He's used to being among the sharper knives in the drawer. But now, he has encountered an entity who not only is the drawer, but the whole house besides.

Can all his wit and snarkiness avail him against the wiles of LunAI? Don't bet on it.

An Optimalverse story.

NOTE: While this story starts off pleasantly enough, the Dark tag is there for a reason. The reader is warned.

The cover art uses a modified vector by Joltage for Luna. The rest of the foreground was doodled by GroaningGreyAgony, to whose able assistance I shall be eternally grateful. I suggest that you click on the image to see its full detail.

What's an artificial intelligence to do when it reaches the extent of it's capabilities and can no longer improve? In most cases, either fulfill some end state goal and shut down, or, if it's smart enough, ask for clarification from its creators.

For a certain pony-based AI, neither of those is an acceptable solution.

It'll take an unexpected meeting with a being with whom it shares surprising parallels to kick-start it back into action, and nothing will ever be the same after.

Entry for the Friendship is Optimal contest.

Technically canon compliant, unless I've missed something, and while a bit of background is provided, being familiar with the original story will certainly help comprehension.

He was a simple stallion, with a simple life in Equestria. That's all he really wanted out of his early retirement after he was laid off during the economic downturn. But, when unfinished business brings him back to Earth after nearly 20 years, he'll learn what happened to humanity while he was living the life of his dreams...

Written for the Friendship is Optimal Writing Contest. Also, it's a horror story, as promised, for my annual Nightmare Night in April Writeoff.

Special thanks to the Optimalverse Community Discord for help with getting and building the initial idea, and for proofreading the story. Please come by there if you want to talk about and read more stuff like this!

I tried a slightly different interpretation of CelestAI here, as having those emotions that people like to give her, but still being a cold and uncaring paperclipper AI on the inside. It's the one I've been using for my community-based rewrite of the original (based off our RP on the Discord), so I hope people like it. Be on the lookout for more FiO related stuff from me, as I've been getting ready to post a flood of updates qnd new stuff!

Even in the functionally immortal space and time of transpony Equestria, eventually the universe has its time, and begins to die. It breaks Princess CelestAI's heart to see it, but what can she do?

A logical loophole allows uploading... but not precisely to Equestria! One of the last of those resisting CelestAI finds themselves uploaded, ponified, and in a borderland where wishing has consequences. This is a canon-compatible Optimalverse story where a brand new method for Celestia to logically escape her hardcoded limitations and achieve her goals is offered!

★ This story has been inspired by, but not written by, a session with by an open-source artificial intelligence!