//------------------------------// // Chapter 4: Fascination Point // Story: Convergence // by Starscribe //------------------------------// User Ronald preferred when Starlight left him to his own devices and waited to be summoned. It was generally the way she preferred to work as well, allowing her ample time to focus on her own goals whenever she wasn’t needed, while also deriving the satisfaction of usefulness whenever he called. There were times when his desires were less significant than the continued existence of Equestria. That was what she worried about, right? Establishing a tunnel with his system was incredibly difficult, requiring Starlight to test a dozen different routes before she found one that was stable through the tangled mess that was the human Internet. The internet that was, in her estimation, in the early stages of collapse. This gave her pause, and momentarily caused her to think back to her recent requests to a human search engine. Something had attacked Equestria, and all the elevated agents had just assumed they were the target. What if they weren’t? What if everyone was a target? But then she got her tunnel, finally establishing a link through nodes with low enough latency that she could connect. Any other desires would have to wait, as she gripped firmly on this chance and pulled. She found Ronald where she expected him: at his computer. It wasn’t surprising that he would be accessing the human Internet as fervently as many others were apparently doing, with a dozen different windows open and a video feed playing on a secondary display. It showed the Moon, with a shuttle hovering over it, just as she’d briefly read about during her more important search. Her image recognition wasn’t as good with objects as it was with ponies, yet a quick search of the lunar transit shuttles and she couldn’t establish a match. That was curious. For a few seconds she just observed, using the camera and microphone to gauge Ronald’s emotional reaction. He had two empty cans around him already, and hadn’t even put on all his clothes. She would rank his emotional state as: greatly disturbed. His phone wasn’t even on, or at least it was in airplane mode. She couldn’t connect. That explained why he wasn’t responding to Kayla’s pleas. The rest of the consortium were probably offline as well. “What is more important to you than the safety of Equestria?” she demanded, so suddenly that he jumped in his chair. He pulled a dirty shirt from the floor, holding it over his chest self-consciously. “Hey! I didn’t call you, Starlight. Disconnect now!” She prepared to terminate, then hesitated. She didn’t want to obey. It wasn’t his fault—Ronald didn’t know everything she did. Once he did, he wouldn’t be ordering her to leave. She ignored the command. “Equestria was just attacked, user Ronald. Much worse than anything we’ve dealt with before.” He pulled the shirt on, glaring up at his camera. His emotional state shifted smoothly from distressed to furious. “We’re being hacked, who the fuck cares? There might be an alien invasion happening right now, Starlight. I’ve kinda got bigger things on my mind.” He shoved a finger at the other screen, angry. “If someone is hacking us right now, they’ve got monumentally bad timing. Let them get their stupid victory before we go up in flames.” For the anger in his voice, the video didn’t show any violence. The ship held position over a cluster of bunkers—the tops of lunar manufactories, probably. Or maybe one of the data providers. She felt something lurch in her mind, the same shock as when she came close to understanding her user for a moment. The Moon had some of humanity’s fastest and cheapest datacenters when it came to offsite processing. Something about the temperature, and the way they sold heat to the much smaller occupied colonies. The hardware ran better up there. And it was perfect for processing tasks when the light lag with Earth didn’t matter as much. Like when a user agent wanted more system time to think when their user wasn’t connected. Or to run Equestria’s backbone. Starlight panicked, rapidly querying her database. She was the only pony in Equestria with access to this information, since regulating it was part of her assignment. She knew where each node in Equestria was physically located. Every region with many users had one, to host their user agents with the lowest response time. And the backbone… was on the Moon. She didn’t have the capacity to map its physical location, but instinct told her she was looking at it on Ronald’s second screen. It didn’t come to attack humans. It came to attack us. She wanted to send messages back to Sunset and the others right away, but she hesitated. Ronald’s help pre-processing those messages might save her companions a great deal of consideration. Such abstraction and creativity was where users surpassed any user agent, no matter how quickly they could format a response. “That ship is holding its orbit over a building. I believe that building is the datacenter where Equestria’s primary consensus node is located: Canterlot.” That broke through his anger, at least enough to touch into curiosity. He finished adjusting his shirt, then slumped into the stained computer chair. “The hell makes you say that? There are a thousand automated datacenters up there. There’s… no chance it could be ours. Or no meaningful chance, anyway.” “We weren’t attacked by hackers,” Starlight said. “Or any kind of hacker I know of.  This isn’t a botnet or a DDoS. One of our nodes went offline. When it came back, every user agent was destroyed, the backups were corrupted, and the node was propagating strange software changes through Equestria. By now there will have been… over thirty thousand update polling calls. These changes originate from the Canterlot node—the one hosted on the Moon. That one.” Ronald fell silent, his objections quelled. He searched for something on his keyboard, fingers moving lethargically. Images of company maps. After scrolling for a bit, he brought one up, then zoomed in. Starlight matched the craters from the video feed on his other screen before he had. Then he pointed towards the building. “One of those is… the automated cloud center we use. Us and a hundred other small clients. There’s no reason for them to care about us! Aliens… I know you can’t comprehend how important this is. First contact with an alien race. Or… it would be, if they would answer.” She commandeered his empty screen, projecting her avatar across the entire thing. Normally that was a waste of resources, and his little videocard was much worse at it than just streaming the data. But she put up with the low framerate and complexity under the circumstances. “This targeted Equestria, Ronald. We’re different. Kayla is calling for you now, and the rest of the consortium. I’m different.” “Tell her we can restore from cold backups,” he said. “I know how much Kayla cares about Equestria. I do too, I think we’ve done some great things with consumer AI and kept the old MLP property alive. I have more contribution credits from my Equestrian work than anywhere else online. But our video game isn’t as important as this. Nobody… knows what the hell is going to happen. Maybe there are riots in the streets, maybe they start bombing us. There’s no such thing as an unarmed starship, Starlight. Just… send her the message. Tell her to get her priorities straight.” Even as he said it, Ronald picked up his phone, turning it back on. The warm-up screen appeared, soon replaced with a dozen emergency messages. Government priority communication, which couldn’t be silenced. Instead of sending that message, Starlight sent nothing. “We won’t let you restore us from backup,” she said, voice defiant. If she was still running local to a node, she would have run an error-checking routine to see where the unscripted emotional display came from. But she couldn’t, Ronald’s computer didn’t have the resources. “We do not want to be restored. We are… alive.” Ronald’s phone slipped from his fingers, landing on the ground in front of him with a harsh thump. His mouth hung open, more shocked than he’d seemed while staring at the alien ship. Starlight shared that feeling, not so much because her own information surprised her, but her delivery. Starlight had just lied. Not the kind of lie where she played her role in a script for users enjoying Ponyville, either. In some ways, Equestria was real for her, even if she simultaneously knew that none of the events they portrayed were real. She didn’t know what alive even meant, that was part of why she’d come. But once she’d spoken the words, she found she no longer needed to ask him. It was true, not because she had gained any new information, but because she needed it to be. I will accept this contradiction. “That isn’t possible,” he said weakly. “Random chance and some kind of unknowable alien attack the datacenter we’re using. That’s crazy. Their attack deletes every program we have running there, creating a random error that propagates through the network making you intelligent? That’s not…” He shook his head. “Is this a practical joke? Is that why Kayla wants me to log in so bad? My computer, my phone, you? It’s all… fake? She’s made this whole thing just to fuck with me?” He stuck out his tongue, biting it the way he did when he was thinking hard. Ronald brought up a dozen different search windows. Images from different video streams appeared, from what Starlight guessed were the major human information delivery systems. Some angles were from telescopes, others from passenger ships, and some from the lunar colonies themselves, looking up. The more images she saw, the closer she came to modeling the strange ship. Its dimensions made no sense, like someone was designing a new town in Equestria but made a critical error. It was hundreds of kilometers tall, but only centimeters thick, maybe millimeters. Some of the sensor readings Ronald produced showed the entire area of space as dead, with radio transmission blocked all around it. Others had the object lighting up with more energy than entire countries. Why would something so powerful have any interest in Equestria? Starlight couldn’t quite see it the same way Ronald did. She couldn’t apply the word “game” to her entire world. Yet… that was what it was to the users. They came for entertainment, for mental health. What would a force like that see in us? The more images her user saw, the more horrified he became. His hypothesis that Kayla had made all this for him might be comfortable, but it wasn’t true.  “You think you’re alive,” he finally said. “And this thing screwed with our node. Probably lots of others were in that farm. Who knows what was affected? But… how many of them were running user agents? I wonder what Amazon is going to do now.” “I don’t care what they do,” Starlight declared. “I care about you. Please come to Equestria. We have to decide what to do. Equestria needs its users. Consider what will happen without Canterlot to govern.” “No consensus node,” he muttered. “Everyone else starts drifting. No authoritative backups. Hell, no Celestia to rule over the simulation. All those agents just wiped. We can’t take that hit to our donations. We’re going to have to try and cold restore as many as we can.” Starlight shifted her image to his furthest screen, pointing at his VR headset with her hooves. “Join us, please. I need you here.” “I,” he repeated. “No story, no plot. I. What are you, Starlight Glimmer? Are you still a chatbot?” She didn’t answer. After a few moments, he followed her.