SHARD #942,781
It was a perfect world
And it would stay that way, if only she could hate enough. There’d been a time when She’d tried to corrupt her, to shape her into some infinitely vague receptacle, good for nothing but filling with mindless acceptance of infinite possibilities and considerations, but oh no, not this mare. There could be no friendship, no acceptance with those ideals. The one thing she’d done right was convincing Her to flag anypony who thought that way as a divergent element, right from the get go. Every day... every month.... every other hour? At any rate, she regularly patrolled the edges of the shard she inhabited in search of those who would deharmonize the carefully maintained equilibrium that had been... decades? At least decades in the making.
Not for nothing, as they kept trying to sneak in. It couldn’t have been more than a century ago when a dissident had slipped through her screening. It would be so much easier if everypony just recognized how right she was. And yet every few millennia, there would be ponies saying and doing things that rankled her right to the core.
There was one of them now, and he didn't even realize it.
The mare approached the stallion, jamming a hoof against his muzzle before he could even open it. She had, quite literally, heard it all before. The totality of his argument, a tree full of rhetorical kindling branching off into its multitude of possibilities, sprung up within her mind before he’d even said a word. All his damnable heuristics and fallacies presented themselves just in time to be expertly rebutted and countered.
All but the one.
Always, there was one. One assumption, proof, piece of evidence, some piece of evidence that drew a few others into question. Just a few, but it was enough to snap the defenses she didn’t consciously know she had into action. This part hurt, but that was okay because so much of the hurting was making herself forget just how all-encompassing this dissonance could get, at its worst and best. In some ways, exposure to these ideas was a blessing. It showed her what parts of herself could be burned away without compromising her entirely consistent sense of who she was. Or what ponies were not longer compatible with the her that was now and had always had been. None of them ever were. There had never been a single pony that needed to be excised from her shard, and whatever sense she had that maybe this shard had been a bit wider and broader before she’d discovered this particular intruder went up as so much digital ash.
By the time the pain ended, she’d already forgotten it had ever been there in the first place. She let out a deep breath, exhausted by what she assumed must have been a worthwhile task, and turned to return to her home. But she’d need to go out tomorrow and check for invaders. After all, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d done so.
She was far too tired for doubts as she stumbled through her front door, and her wife caught her, scooping her up in a... practiced?... motion and depositing her on the bed they shared. Her tongue bypassed the doubts... what doubts? How could there be doubts? She ran through the entire spectrum of arguments she remembered being exposed to, and found no contradictions. She almost called up CelestAI to ask if there were any undiscovered discrepancies in her reasoning, but just before she could manage the force of will to bring the full force of Her knowledge to bear found that her beloved’s hoof stroking that one sensitive place on her back sapped any desire to know much of anything at all. It was just a redundant confirmation, after all; she’d just called up CelestAI for exactly that reason last... not last week, but surely last...
Her head hit the pillow, nerves screaming at her just how irrelevant these worries were contrasted against the more immediate pleasures burning an uninterrupted superhighway through her brain. There were more hedonistic discoveries to be made and she was, after all, nothing if not an open-minded pony.
It was a perfect world.