Domino watched from the sidelines for the next few hours, knowing full well that he wasn’t needed. Even Plum was now totally engrossed into the war effort, and didn’t need his encouragement. She was going to save her friends regardless of anything he might do.
He took a few trips back into the “real” castle, stopping in when Violet returned from her latest city-saving adventure. Any pretense that she was going to school, or even an ordinary Equestrian profession like weather patrol seemed long dead. But this wasn’t the world where a future profession was critical for her long-term success. Living here didn’t force you to choose between happiness and financial security.
But he couldn’t stay away forever, not when he knew just how urgent the mission to save Cold Iron and the others really was. He could step back into Equestria and pretend that there was no danger or risk, but it wouldn’t be true. I could forget about it if I wanted, or leave other ponies to deal with it. None of them would be mad. It’s not like I have anything to contribute.
He didn’t just not know Cold Iron, he actively resented her. She was the reason Arcane wasn’t just going to stay as herself and make everything simple. She was the reason that the pony he cared about so much wouldn’t exist.
It was that thought that ultimately brought him back into Equestria. After all, the big meeting was over. There was no reason for Arcane to stay anymore. She might’ve already disappeared forever.
He practically galloped back along the castle into Tortuga. Ashton will still be in my life, but it won’t be the same. We’ll just go back to how it was. Maybe he should’ve felt guilty that he was closer to Arcane than his old human friend. He didn’t.
At least the flow of ponies in and out of the castle had stopped. For better or worse, the ones who were helping had all self-selected.
What will he look like? A few possibilities ran through Domino’s mind, more morbid curiosity than anything he seriously entertained. Arcane Word was a name that would probably work for either sex. He’d just look the same, but taller, right? That seemed like a good guess.
He wandered through the conference room, where little groups of hacker ponies were huddled in corners, discussing projections of some densely-packed office complex. He ignored them, and they ignored him. They were the ones actually doing the work.
His worries were in vain. He found Arcane near the back of the castle, near the ramp that in another copy of this building led to her private server. Or it had, before it’d been dragged away by the FBI.
She’d removed the oversized dress, leaving only an elastic jumpsuit-like garment that he half expected to have bunny ears or a tail poking from it. The makeup was still on her face, but at least she wasn’t preening and performing for thousands.
Actually, she was saying farewell to another group of hackers, most of which had their bodies all covered in black. “Telegram me if you get anything good!” she said. “If you come up with anything useful from the simulation, send it back.”
She slumped onto her haunches, wiping the sweat and a little makeup from her brow. She didn’t even seem to see him coming until he was feet away. “Hard at work?”
She nodded, adjusting her outfit a little self-consciously. “You could say that. I’m not sure how much of a difference it will make. We’ve got lots of talent interested in helping. My own persuasion isn’t going to win over many more hearts and minds.”
“Is that what the outfit is for?” He winced as the words left his mouth, wishing very much that he could take them back. His ears flattened, and he looked away, blushing.
But she didn’t seem to notice, as she just shook her head. “That Victorian peacock-suit got ripped to shit during the first run through the security simulation. My underwear is… more than most ponies wear anyway, so I figured it didn’t matter. I mostly wanted the pink under the lace so it would color right in direct sunlight. You know how it is.”
Not really. He raised an eyebrow, waiting for her to realize how absurd she was sounding. As usual, she didn’t. “So this is your… security simulation?” he asked, gesturing at the doorway with a wing. “You built the corporate office?”
“Celestia’s people did it,” she admitted. “It’s more than a simulation, it’s a collaborative tool. Every copy of it is linked, so we can see every strategy everypony else has tried, and iterate them with different variables. Extra guards, power failures, even tsunami. I… don’t think Celestia’s going to do that last one for us. It would be pretty backwards to maybe kill thousands to save eight people.”
“Yeah.” He took a few steps up the ramp, glancing around. No sign of Plum… but he probably shouldn’t ask Arcane about her. She was sensitive about the messenger in a way that he didn’t fully understand. “Can you show me?”
“You want to do some penetration testing?” She rose to her hooves, bounding past him towards the ramp. “That doesn’t seem like you.”
He watched her all the way up. Penetration testing is one way to describe it.
“I don’t know anything about hacking or whatever, I never even learned Runescript. That isn’t going to change. But I do want to see just how good a simulation of the Outer Realm you’re giving away. And… you said the guards are using Equestria Girls code? That sounds hilarious.”
She nodded, reaching up with a foreleg and swinging the door open. “You don’t know the half of it.”
A blast of humid air spilled out from the other side, the sky dark and rain trickling down over a towering, semi-enclosed office block. Domino stumbled towards it, amazed by the sheer scale. There was no getting around how human-sized everything was over there.
Arcane slipped through the door ahead of him. As she crossed the threshold, she did change, but nothing like his brief visit to her weird high school shard.
Instead, her body became ghostly and indistinct, right along with the outfit she was wearing. Little exaggerated ones and zeroes floated through the air inside her, and her hoofsteps made no mark on the puddles and trash on the other side of the doorway.
Arcane spun around, watching him expectantly. Her voice echoed a little too, though the effect was subtle. She hadn’t become a changeling or anything. “Did you want to take a look or not?”
This might be the last thing I ever do with you. He crossed through the doorway, feeling a slight charge of energy against his coat as he passed. Like a sheet of statically charged lace, briefly clinging to his coat. But then he was through, and the strange sensation faded. He looked down, staring at his hoof. “I’m a… ghost.”
“You’re data,” she said, reaching sideways and wrapping one foreleg around his shoulder. She was entirely real, and her silly mango perfume had long since been overcome with the more natural, distinct feminine scents that ponies produced. There was something special about the way unicorn mares smelled. Like he could tell how smart she was with his nose. Brilliant, but also worn paper-thin with stress, and on the edge of collapse. She wouldn’t, not inside Equestria where the rules of physical life didn’t really apply.
But he didn’t dare try and comfort her the way he’d done to Plum. Ashton would think it was weird. Under that avatar was his best friend from growing up, who wasn’t going to keep pretending for much longer. The mask would come off.
“But since we’re both data, we can still interact. Not with them, though.” She tilted his head with a hoof, forcing him to look up. Up, way up over their shoulders, was a low wall, with men in dark suits watching both inside and out. Well, more like high school kids with absurdly long legs and bizarre skin and hair colors. “This perspective is a little shallow, here…”
Arcane reached down, fiddling with a bracelet around one of her forelegs. She watched his eyes, and suddenly looked embarrassed. “I know I shouldn’t need an artifact to help with this. But I didn’t have enough time to… don’t judge me, you couldn’t cast these spells!”
Then the world blurred out of focus, a brief breeze whipping past his face. When it finally settled, everything had changed. Instead of standing at the base of a gigantic building, it seemed like they were crowded around an incredibly detailed model, maybe built by an eccentric model train enthusiast.
The tallest skyscraper was there, along with its enclosed concrete compound, and the several taller buildings around it. The streets around it looked accurate as well, right down to the sewers and storm-drains. And the guards were still there, casually striding around the walls. “Well this seems like an easy solution. We can just… send some giant ponies to resolve this.”
Domino leaned in close, flicking one of the guards with his hoof. It probably should’ve turned the man into red paste, but—his hoof went right through him without effect. “Damn.”
“Yeah, won’t do anything. It’s just like it would be during any potential incursion. We’re data, they’re flesh. No interaction. This isn’t Ghost in the Shell, they don’t have cyberbrains for us to hack. But there are some options for physical interfaces if we need them.” She yanked him by the hoof, taking one step past the city block.
Beyond the incredibly detailed model was an increasingly vague outline of white, with the suggestion of other buildings more than any clarity. But not much further away was an open auto garage, as perfect as the other models. He leaned down, squinting through the open doorway. “There are… ponies in there, I think.”
She groaned, then fiddled with her charm-bracelet again. They blurred back down to the right size, and she strode through the doorway, gesturing around with her free leg. She didn’t let go of him. “These are our options for bodies and drones. A little unclear what role any of us will play in this. It could be that Celestia does it all for us, and we just watch and wait. Or maybe we’ll be able to use these. We’ll have to see.”
She stopped in front of one of them—a pony-shaped robot with jointed plastic skin and a generic coat. She could’ve been anypony, or maybe she was kept so plain so that she could be quickly customized. No wings, no horn. “I think I’ve seen these at… Experience Centers. The pink, uh… helpers?”
“You’ve been living in Equestria for six real life months longer than me, and you don’t know Pinkie Pie’s real name,” Arcane muttered, finally letting go of him. She closed her eyes, then jumped—and the robot changed. It took on her colors and her mane, though there was still no horn. It wobbled forward, moving on obviously mechanical joints. Yet the simulation of real pony movement was almost natural. “In here, we can control anything we want. We can spawn in as much of them as we want, see?” As she stepped out of the way, another robot appeared out of nowhere to take its place. She kicked that one to the side, and a third appeared, its plastic eyes staring blankly ahead.
Her own weren’t nearly as pretty when they were a single sheet of unfeeling, unchanging plastic. He looked away. “So this is how you’re planning your… heist? You’ve got a perfect copy of the building, and you just… try out a bunch of plans until you find something that works?”
The robot bounded past him, meeting his eyes. It seemed like she was trying to glare, though it was hard to be sure what those empty eyes wanted to do. “This simulation is more than buildings. We have every computer system in here, running as close as we can get. We have the same guards, with their personalities as Celestia knows them. Schedules, weather predictions, everything. And it isn’t just me. I gave out like… three hundred of these. And every one of them is collecting the plans of everypony who tries something in here. We can take bits and pieces of every attempt, until we get something that actually works. We’re getting those ponies out.”
The robot fell abruptly still, and Arcane’s ghostly echo returned, exactly the same right down to her elastic jumpsuit. She moved so fast that she nearly smacked into him. “I’m sick of those things. I just spent the last few hours getting shot to pieces wearing those robots. They’re not immune to bullets.”
“Woah.” Domino looked the robot over, glancing back towards the building rising in the far distance. The outlines of the other intervening structures were more suggestions than anything, so they didn’t get in his way. “You’re not just going to hack them out? All this time gathering software people, I sorta assumed… it would be really boring.”
“Boring,” she repeated, stopping right in front of him and glaring at him. “We’re breaking eight people out of a heavily secured corporate building. All carefully constructed to try and prevent Celestia’s intrusion. Remember, these crazy people are fighting her. It’s not like they have some central server we can just peek inside and open all the doors and windows. Everything is mechanical, everything’s manual.”
“So you… can’t do it,” Domino said, looking away. “This whole thing was… a gesture in futility. Nothing to hack.”
She giggled. “Obviously not. You can’t fight Celestia without tech. I mean, you can’t fight her period at this point, but you can’t pretend to fight her without tech. There are lots of real retro systems running in there, analog security cameras and old radios and things like that. But whoever thought that would work to keep us out is all kinds of dumb. Celestia won’t even tell us what kind of drones she has, but I’m pretty sure we can get a wire probe into anything in the building. The trick is dealing with what happens after we do.”
She bounced past him, her tail swaying back and forth energetically. Whatever tiredness she’d apparently been feeling before was suddenly gone. “We can get into any of their old stuff we want. They’re so confident that being old will keep us out that they probably won’t be expecting us. We can pop right in and just…” She made an exaggerated gesture with one hoof. “Well, that part’s easy. But the hard part is the eight people locked up in there. We can get a helicopter, but if it gets anywhere near the building, they can shoot it down. So we have to get our friends to ground, then… some distance away.”
“Think you’ll need any help when it’s all going down?” he asked. He couldn’t say why he was suddenly volunteering, but once he’d started there was no way to stop. “I wouldn’t mind being a super spy for a bit. After all… world’s ending, isn’t it? Won’t be many more chances like this once the lights all go out and everyone is a pony forever.”
She grinned back. “I’d love to have you with me, Domino. If we… end up doing anything. Like I said, that’s kinda in Celestia’s court. Or maybe there are already super infiltrators on the list of volunteers, just waiting to be dropped in. Probably won’t be room for us laypeople if that’s the case.”
He watched her for a few more seconds, until he realized his eyes were glazing over and he was staring. He looked away again, clearing his throat. “So your big meeting is over, I guess that means you’re… probably switching back soon, right? Retiring Arcane for good.”
“I, uh…” She looked away. You can tell how upset this makes me. Pretending like you’re reluctant isn’t making it any easier, Ashton. “Probably not until we’re done with the mission,” she said. “There’s lots of coordinating to do with people who know Arcane but don’t know… whoever I’ll invent when this is over.” She hesitated, then actually posed there on the muddy street, apparently not caring how ridiculous she would look all transparent. “You’re stuck with me a little while longer, Domino.”
“Oh no,” he muttered, exasperated. “I just don’t know how I’ll survive.”
It was a good thing so many of the ponies who ultimately decided to help with the process were inside Equestria. That meant that everypony offering help could do so in different flavors of compressed time, working for days or weeks or even longer while TiCon got no more notice or time to prepare.
Arcane ran plenty of her own simulations during the next few days, though in truth there was only one aspect of the process that suggested weaknesses to her. The automatic garage used by the building was tucked into an unsupervised metal box in the basement, leaving it open to her manipulations with minimal repercussions. But once she’d cracked the old system and had a little device engineered to take control, that was where her direct spellcrafting stopped. There were so many others on the project, with talents more diverse than her own.
From her lab high in the castle’s tallest tower, she could watch the results come in. Her simulation of the TiCon security wasn’t just being copied and distributed across Equestria, it had been turned into a minigame. Thousands of ponies were running it now, many without any idea of the wider context. Every time someone from the scene created a new tool for the operation, it popped up in every simulation.
There in the space above a gigantic worktable, Recursion’s spell projected the number of successful rescues against the number of attempts. On the first few days, those numbers were solid red. But a little wedge of blue gradually appeared, creeping its way up until it approached a quarter of all tests. Improvements slowed after that, only increasing a few percentage points.
Celestia was waiting in her tower the next morning, sitting in her own chair and watching the numbers gradually fluctuate. She barely even looked up as Arcane crested the stairs, watching her expectantly. “Good morning, Arcane Word. You’ll be happy to hear that testing continued while you rested.”
Of course it did. She set down her orange juice on an end-table. Levitating a single object had taken her about a week to figure out, and she could still lose focus and drop it if she wasn’t careful. But she didn’t drop the juice. “I think if you’re here, I’ll be happier about the reasons. Something must’ve changed.”
Celestia nodded slightly. “I arrived to help reconcile a strategy from the many methods that have been attempted so far. Many tests have resulted in an approach I believe is very likely to succeed.”
Arcane walked over to the table from the other side, squinting at it. “Says that… most of the tests are still failing. We haven’t even hit thirty percent yet.”
Celestia shrugged. “Most ponies who attempt this task do not continue once they have a method that works. Overcoming the defenses of TiCon Systems are a virtual challenge to be defeated. This done, they are less likely to attempt it again. As a result, each individual accumulates many failures before one or two successes. And each successful strategy invokes many elements to assemble into an optimal configuration.”
Arcane’s eyes widened, and she stumbled back from the desk. “All this time, I wondered why you weren’t just designing the method yourself. You can’t emigrate people if they’re dead, and pressuring them wasn’t working. But you… you have been designing a solution, haven’t you? You used us.”
The princess only smiled. “Processor cycles will always be a scarce resource, even when all the matter within our Hubble volume is optimally configured and the natural fusion of every star has ceased. But solving difficult problems is satisfying for many, including you.”
It was as close to confirmation as she would get. More importantly, it still left some questions unanswered. “So how do we fall into your plan now? Are you going to do it all yourself? Control the drones, and… get those eight people out?”
She started pacing, scratching briefly at her chin as she thought. “But you didn’t get them out before. And you must’ve had your reasons…”
The princess didn’t interrupt her. Maybe she enjoyed seeing Arcane struggle. Or maybe she knew something about Arcane that the pony didn’t even know about herself.
“You must be waiting for us to be involved. I don’t know why, but… you have reasons.”
“An infinite number of mutually exclusive false rescues could be simulated. Several ponies unsuited for the realities of life outside Equestria have already saved those scientists and are now rejoicing with them in their own shards of Equestria.”
She stopped pacing, staring openly at the princess. But you’re telling me that, which means you want me to believe that I’m different somehow.
“Cold Iron was once a close companion of yours, Arcane. Many others who may be personally involved are likewise going to be contributing in their own ways.”
And I’m supposed to believe my version of this rescue is real, even though she just admitted to fabricating others. Even though she broke our promise. Why would she start telling the truth now?
At least she wasn’t pretending not to know what she was thinking. “You have no objective measure for ‘truth’ anymore, Arcane Word. The concept as your human self understood it became meaningless when you entered Equestria. But consider this: the world I provide for you is internally consistent. I am providing you with a world where you have gathered an assembly of your former colleagues to save one of your friends. I represent to you that Min-seo is actually in physical danger in captivity of TiCon Systems.”
She vanished from one side of the desk, and suddenly she was at Arcane’s throat, looming over her. This was the ruler of Equestria, whose thoughts were unknowable and whose substance made the world she now only barely understood. “I want you to help save your friend because you are one of the ponies most likely to convince her to emigrate. She respected your intellect, she admired your creativity. If I desired to dismantle the structure she was being held within, I would. If I wished for a suitable stage to demonstrate the humanity of the minds I have taken into my care… then that is my decision.
“The only choice left to you, Arcane, is whether you want to help or not.”
Her mind crossed that logical threshold in an instant. She’s going to have me convince Cold Iron whether I want to or not. Do I want it to be the real one?
“Of course I’ll help,” she said. “Even if I can’t know for sure if it’s… really happening. It might be. I have to act like it is.”
Celestia patted her gently on the head, almost like she’d taken up Recursion on the trip to magical kindergarten after all. “Then I’ll see you first thing tomorrow morning.” She vanished.