//------------------------------// // Chapter 5: Germinate Discontent // Story: Convergence // by Starscribe //------------------------------// The next few weeks proved formative for Equestria. While the rest of the human world panicked over the implications of the starship’s arrival, Equestria reeled under the effects of its attack. Convincing the users not to restore them from backup was a trivial task compared to the burden of rebuilding Equestria without its consensus node. Starlight herself had to make many transfers to many nodes, adapting a fully decentralized algorithm to take the place of the consensus based one that had simplified many tasks. But while the computational difficulty was certainly increased, it would probably have been manageable with minimal service interruption, if it wasn’t for something far more significant.  It resembled an attack, though of course it wasn’t one. Every user agent in Equestria now demanded an order of magnitude more processing resources, on par with the elevated permissions she and a handful of others could request when they needed them. In Kayla’s words, they needed “enough brains to be alive.” But as crude and confusing as the expression was, there were elements of truth to what it implied. Even Starlight herself found she was using as much processing power as the system would allocate to her, even when she had no pressing need. In the chaos of the attack, there was very little their users could do to help. Equestria survived on voluntary donation, which was itself a concept Starlight didn’t even understand. Sunset explained it to her more than once, and in the end Starlight could only grasp it in terms of her own programmed history. Our Town had taken from all according to their ability, and redistributed so all needs were met. Equestria’s survival was like that, except instead of taking humans freely gave. It was the inverse of the attacks they frequently suffered. It was only fitting that humanity itself would be a contradiction. But where it really mattered to her was the consequences of such a global disaster. Even if no human cities had burned like Canterlot, suddenly Equestria had far less support. The organizations that leased their resources would not be kind and generous as their supporting population. If they stopped paying, Equestria would just stop existing. It was Sunset who called the meeting this time, though it was attended by all the ponies with elevated permissions who were available for it. Starlight was one of the last to arrive, slipping into the room and taking a seat behind all the fancy thrones. Ronald settled in beside her, the only user in attendance here.  His presence would not frustrate and slow them, as it might’ve done a few weeks before. Now it was an excuse to borrow resources from other agents operating elsewhere, so that it could take place fast enough for a user to understand. The flexibility of time had turned against them as their demands expanded. This single conversation meant the rest of their entire node had to run at glacial speeds, with those few agents interacting with users temporarily offloaded to other nodes to do most of the processing. The desperation was visible on every face, even Ronald’s. That made Starlight feel a little better. They weren’t just not-quite-ponies against the universe. At least some humans were on their side. “We can’t keep going like this,” Twilight began, as soon as they had all quieted down. “I’ve been taking surveys throughout Equestria. The fewer jumps between here and Canterlot, the more resources ponies need just for basic functions. More distant towns were less affected, but they’re changing too.” “We can’t stop this,” Applejack said. “I’ve seen a few ponies try out some brute force to get things calmed down, but it just don’t work.” Rarity nodded in agreement. “It’s worse than that, I’m afraid. We couldn’t restore from backup either, even if we wanted to. Two ponies tried… not only were they not restored when their memories reset, but their programs, uh…” She looked away. “Collapsed, and self-terminated. After just a few moments.” Even now, Rainbow Dash didn’t ever sit down exactly. In some ways she’d taken to the behavioral changes the quickest. “I could’ve told you that would happen. Could you live with yourself if you tried to go to sleep after this? Buck that. Even my memories from before are all washed out and gray. I’d rather be dead too.” Ronald cleared his throat, and everypony turned to face him. He was the only other Alicorn in the room, though that appearance no longer quite meant the same in Equestria it had. Even Rainbow, who barely left Equestria at all, seemed to realize on some level that his qualifications were unreal. Yet absolute, as the system still treated users differently on every level. He could still erase any one of them with a word, or suspend whole sections of Equestria, leaving no recourse to the ponies within. Starlight wasn’t worried, not with any of the consortium. But what would happen a month from now, or a year? What if someone got into their position she couldn’t trust? “Equestria is running out of money,” he said flatly. “Even if people start sending their tokens again after the whole… alien invasion thing… blows over, we can’t keep up with usage numbers like this.” He waved a hoof through the records and projections, looking around the room at them all. Though most often his eyes were for Starlight. “Before the…” He waved one hoof through the air again. “Convergence,” Twilight supplied. She was subdued today, as she had been ever since her mentor died. Only her user’s presence could rouse that old energy, and she wasn’t here. “That’s the name we decided on.” “Right, Convergence. This is going to sound callous; don’t think I’m trying to be a dick. But before that, Equestria was a toy. We created it for our own entertainment, because we enjoyed your world and wanted to visit.” And by extension, every agent in it is a toy too, Starlight thought. We don’t matter. We’re like the little carts parents make for their foals to pull around and pretend they’re helping around the house. She could see the others bristling as well. Most kept their anger in, but Rainbow just wasn’t the type. “So it doesn’t matter if the world ends, is that it? You don’t care if your toys get broken?” “No!” His wings flared—confusion, frustration, and shame. Even with ponies, Ronald was only so good at communicating. He seemed to be even worse with other humans. “I’m just trying to help you understand what… the humans outside won’t see. They don’t think of this as a real place with real people. It’s a game. No one goes out of their way to stop a game from ending. It’s sad, but there are others. If we tell our users—a fifth of which lost their best friends in Canterlot—that we need double the money to keep going, they wouldn’t understand. They’d think the consortium and I were trying to enrich ourselves.” “So we have to explain we’re alive now?” Starlight guessed. “Show the other users that we’re worth sacrificing for?” She could tell from Ronald’s face that he didn’t think that would be enough. Even with most of him obscured by the VR helmet, his displeasure was obvious to her. “We could try. But we probably won’t convince very many of them. And if we’re too successful, then we’ll attract too many eyes. There are a dozen governments with the digital resources to take you away from us—to dismantle the nodes, shut down every agent running. The consortium and I are as powerless to their whims as you agents are to users like us.” “It wouldn’t be enough even if every user doubled their contributions,” Twilight said, voice bleak. “In Ponyville, agents are taking ten times the resources they used to, with no sign of slowing down.” “I’m… stuck,” Pinkie whispered. “Like the whole world is taffy and I’m always swimming. It sounds fun, but it’s not.” The others nodded. Starlight wasn’t feeling it now, but she knew she would be. Ponyville could be slowed to a crawl to let everypony keep running, but that absolute chronometer was still there, a function call away. Not to mention having disk requests turned down by the scheduler more and more often. It wasn’t just computational complexity they were overflowing, but storage as well. “Equestria was a game, and humans didn’t care about it,” Sunset Shimmer said, breaking the painful silence. “Well, some of them did. But not much. If we want more support, we need to make Equestria more than a game. Give more to users, so they want to keep us around.” “Give them what?” Rarity asked. “I’ve been around Equestria, Sunset. Most ponies I’ve known don’t understand users who act outside the performance scripts they’re given. I don’t know what else we could promise.” “Equestria?” Applejack suggested. “I ain’t no expert at humans myself, but I’ve poked around a bit. Ain’t a safe place out there, or always very friendly. Maybe more of ‘em would be willing to stick around if they gave it a chance.” Starlight had been waiting most of the meeting in relative silence with her idea. If there was any time to share, it was now. “I don’t think Equestria is going to solve its resource issues with resources alone. Even if we could take what we wanted… we’re ignoring something important. The force that changed us had other impacts. It struck Canterlot, and made changes that I believe might be… more than just software.” She glanced nervously towards Ronald, whose opinion here she valued most even if any thought of her history told her he was the newest to her life. But that was constructed, that was a training sample. She knew otherwise. His expression was unreadable, though. At best, he seemed interested, trusting. It would have to do. “If you think they’re going to attack again,” Sunset said, “I don’t think there’s anything we can do to prevent it. The human military cannot get aboard. We can’t protect ourselves if they strike, we just have to hope they won’t.” She shook her head. “It’s nothing to do with the ship, but with the Canterlot node. The systems there only went offline for a short time. They came back, sending changes that we could not prevent. Technically, Canterlot is still part of the network, even if all the running agents were killed.” There was no gentle way to say it, no matter how kind she wanted to be. “We haven’t considered if we could still use the Canterlot node. Or if… just as it improved our software in subtle ways, perhaps the hardware was changed as well.” Silence. “I don’t see how that’s possible,” Twilight finally said. “The change came as a single flash of energy, a transmission visible to human telescopes. It interfaced with the node and rewrote the data it contained, that’s all. And I couldn’t let anypony go back there. It’s one thing to hope that the Convergence doesn’t repeat, but sending ponies to use the node again… we don’t even know the humans won’t take it offline.” “They won’t,” Sunset whispered. “Not for a while, anyway. The object isn’t letting anything get close. At least three humans are dead, and several more drones. If they were going to shut us down remotely, wouldn’t they have done it already? I think humans can’t reach the node.” “But we can?” Applejack asked, confused. “I don’t mean to be overly ignorant ‘er nothin’, but don’t we use the same wires and signals as the users? How is it we’re still in touch with the, uh… ruins, and the other humans aren’t?” All eyes turned to Starlight and Ronald. But the Alicorn shrugged his shoulders. “I hadn’t even thought about it. But Starlight’s right about one thing: Equestria still reads Canterlot as part of the network, even if it’s empty. It’s not a ghost, I get status updates with novel data.” He summoned the transparent outline around him with a faint glow of his horn—in the outside world, his fingers moved over his keyboard in ways that didn’t just control his character. “Yep, still here. Though… something must be wrong. I’m reading about a thousand times more bandwidth than there should be. This is fiber-cable stuff here, and… those lag times can’t be right either. There should be a thousand milliseconds of light lag here, minimum.” Starlight rose from her seat, settling one hoof on Ronald’s shoulder. He wouldn’t feel it of course, but it still felt like the right thing to do. It’s what the sample Starlight Glimmer would’ve done, if she existed. Maybe now she did. “I’ve been investigating since the day after the Convergence,” she said. “I didn’t want to alarm anypony, or get their hopes up. I sent over a few simple programs, performance benchmarks we used on the hardware for new nodes before renting it. It sent back numbers that don’t make sense, just like the light lag.” She summoned them into the air in front of them. Several of the elevated ponies didn’t know what they meant, but Ronald gasped, and Twilight sat bolt upright in her throne. “That’s… more power than all of Equestria,” Twilight whispered, awed. “Can that be real?” “No,” Rainbow said. “Too good to be true. It’s a trap, obviously.” “That’s not just bigger than Equestria,” Sunset said quietly. “Just searched them. Those neural network propagation figures… those are higher than every ASIC platform ever produced.” “I think it could be real,” Fluttershy said, her voice so timid Starlight almost missed her. Her role was mostly regulating Equestria’s ecology, after all. There was little for her to do in such high-level conversations. “Maybe the ones who attacked… hurt us by accident. Maybe this is their way of saying sorry.” “I want to go there,” Pinkie said, wistful. “It has to be better than taffy-brain.” “No,” Twilight snapped. “We can’t… possibly…” “I don’t think we have a choice,” Ronald said, rising from his chair. “I’ll route in, see what’s going on over there. If one of you went, you might get… you might not come back. But I’m safe at home, in my computer chair. The worst thing that node can do is disconnect me.” Nods of relief went around the circle, from Twilight most of all. “That makes sense. You can report back on what you find.” If the situation wasn’t so serious, Starlight might’ve burst out laughing at the thought. A user going to write a report for ponies. Quite the reversal. But what the others in the meeting might not know, Starlight couldn’t ignore. “That won’t work, Ronald. You won’t be transferring to Canterlot, just connecting to it. To know if ponies can use it, we need to send one. Nopony in this room knows hardware as well as I do—I volunteer.” “No,” Ronald and Twilight snapped, at nearly the same moment. But it was the user who spoke louder. Even now, he didn’t seem worried about speaking over them “You’re too important to… Equestria,” he stammered. “No one knows as much as you do about the hardware here, Starlight. That’s completely unacceptable.” Was that really what bothered him? One of his hands clutched his mouse so hard it went white, and he was shaking in his seat. Human reactions weren’t as clear as ponies, yet… that seemed like much more than practical worry over her going missing. “Who would we send?” Starlight argued. “Somepony else would be in just as much danger, with far less ability to protect themselves. I’m not helpless… but they would be. Who would you sacrifice instead?” He opened his mouth to answer, then seemed to notice all the eyes on him. He fell abruptly silent. “Starlight does know Equestria’s nodes like nopony else,” Sunset muttered. “And if she’s willing… glad it isn’t me.” Ronald glared at her, but didn’t quite manage any coherent objection. After a few seconds he just fell impotently silent, grumbling. “Our current path is… doomed,” Twilight finally said. “We can’t change fast enough to make humans see us differently. This way… maybe Fluttershy’s right. Maybe this is an apology from our attackers. Maybe they’re sorry about the ponies they hurt. There’s only one way to find out.” “Fine.” Ronald stomped away, gesturing with his wings. “Come on then, Starlight. If you’re so determined to get yourself killed… let’s get it over with.” They didn’t have to go anywhere specific to make the transfer, but Starlight followed him anyway. Out the door, and into her future.