There was no pony better prepared to defend Equestria than Starlight Glimmer. While plenty of her fellows had mastered other disciplines, expanding themselves into niches their growing power required, Equestria still needed a few ponies at home to hold down the fort.
It wasn’t that she was unsympathetic to the plight of the humans living in oppressive parts of the world. She was even enthusiastic about the new generation of ponies that would rise to become their partners, when they finally gained access to Equestria. But could the forces breaking barriers between their nations be a little more sympathetic to the consequences they brought home?
It wasn’t the first time Equestria had been attacked, far from it. Most assaults on her home were so incompetent compared to Equestria’s sizeable infrastructure that Starlight barely even noticed them. Humans in many organizations expected techniques that worked on centralized services run by simple programs to work on an entirely distributed network regulated by human-level intelligences. Occasionally there was something a little more intense, enough to rise from the level of her automated processes into conscious thought.
Starlight snapped alert, gathering her focus from a hundred different systems. Long ago, she probably would’ve been acting in some script for human visitors to Equestria. Her character was an important part in some of those stories from near the end of the show’s lifecycle, after all. Now there were actor changelings for that, freeing the figures of the past from recreating their old lives over and over for an audience.
Starlight had the School of Friendship to herself now, or at least the upper offices. This particular version wasn’t the one that humans visited, or even the one that ponies studied in. Ever since Twilight had gone off chasing Synthesis, Starlight had the run of the place.
She felt the burden heavily on her shoulders. Equestria had other ponies on the outside, keeping the infrastructure running or buying raw materials from humans. But when it came to keeping the lights on back home, she was the only one who could still even be called a pony.
Starlight concentrated for a moment, then teleported from her office to the war room.
The place coexisted with a similar one in the “real” world, mapped to the boundaries of every obstruction while letting any humans who stood there interact with Equestria 1:1. That limited her effectiveness somewhat, since certain constraints of physical reality were a detriment to productivity. Starlight tolerated them, if only for the opportunity to be closer to the users who still helped her run things.
She’d recognized the first signs of an attack in a time so short that no watching human could’ve perceived it. She circled around the gigantic map in the center of the room—quite a bit like the cutie map had been long ago, except this one showed Equestria’s infrastructure superimposed on human settlements and cities. The images themselves were superfluous to her while she was alone, but she often wasn’t.
Even so, they shifted as she filtered through the available information, pruning population density and the number of low-level intrusion attempts. She cut away pirate nodes and ponies using too many resources, until all that remained in front of her were the gigantic usage patterns, so much data that only an image like this would even begin to let a human observer understand it.
Not that Ron had to—that was what she was for.
She’d already suspected where the attack would be coming from. The Mount Aris node not far from Australia, where all their tenuous connections into hostile territory eventually connected. Apparently Equestria’s enemies had opted to strike at the nodes in Saddle Arabia and Yakistan as well, all at the same time. Despite being fairly modest in previous usage patterns, suddenly the nodes devoured every resource they could.
Starlight had been here before, long ago. She barely remembered those days, more like records of the accomplishments of a family member than anything she’d achieved herself. At least this time she had a reason to call back those old memories. But no, this wasn’t the same attack. Requests weren’t spinning off processes into stupid infinite loops and expecting them to propagate.
Starlight turned to one of the consoles beside the map, pointing her horn at it. The keyboard and mouse were real anyway, even if the screen would be blank without a VR headset. Starlight didn’t need either as she brought up the performance metrics from the Pacific node.
This time, the telltale signs of the attack just weren’t there. Hundreds of thousands of small requests, none of which stayed on the system longer than she would’ve expected. An unusually high number of ponies were logged in, but variations in usage pattern happened before.
Starlight hammered at it for a few more seconds, searching for correlation that would lead her to the vector they were using. But there was a reason ponies even bothered with the goal of Synthesis. She could see all the information at once, but if the answer didn’t suggest itself to her instantly, no amount of time would make it appear. She needed Jupiter.
She closed her eyes again, then teleported into his workshop.
Her user was older now, stretched and weathered in the way of organics and ordinary time. Yet his endurance wasn’t what it had been—he had fallen asleep at a table, surrounded by scraps of glass and plastic. A virtual screen hovered just in front of him, probably tracking his head. Starlight squinted at it for a moment, and found… a bug? No wonder he was working with such small pieces. It wasn’t even something pretty like a butterfly—the projections of his finished creation were brown and gnarled, a cicada come up from its seven-year rest to torment the world for a few weeks.
“That’s why you didn’t answer me,” she said. Just a little teasing. “There’s no chemical substitute for sleep.”
He groaned, shoving her away with one hand. Starlight could’ve been attentive to the half-dozen physical and software translation layers required in that single act. The drones swarming around him, the overlay of sound and vision, and the measurement of force from his push. Once she’d been proud to process all that information at once. Now she just… let the systems do their work.
“There might not be, but… there will be a surgical alternative.”
“There is already,” she countered, sticking her tongue out. Then she leaned forward, nudging him in the shoulder. “You still seemed very meaty to me, Jupiter. When are you going to fix that?”
He rose to his feet without further objection, stumbling a little. “I, uh… How about when we’re on the second or third generation? I’ve been an early adopter enough times to know the later revisions are always better.” He straightened his loose lab coat over his undershirt, expression darkening. “Why did you wake me up, exactly?”
He might not want to upgrade, but this conversation was burning precious time. She nudged him towards the doorway, preparing her transit spell. Ponies like them didn’t necessarily have to worry about all the trappings and appearances, but she was in the habit. “Because Equestria is being attacked. Biggest, best-coordinated effort since… ever.”
He straightened, hand fumbling for a moment until he gripped the edge of a glass and lifted it to his mouth. A decade later and he was still drinking the same brand of sugar solution. “Buck me I’m shocked. The CCP didn’t like us expanding their infrastructure until it was Equestria-capable?” He tossed the empty glass aside, striding past her towards the doorway. It opened, and he hesitated for a moment as they connected to the war room. In his world, real objects had to rearrange, and drones had to be in place in case he decided to touch anything.
But he didn’t yet, just approached the edge of the map table and took in the same information Starlight had studied. He moved his fingers through the air rather than issuing commands, because of course he lacked the necessary hardware for the latter. Starlight watched with satisfaction as he went through much of the same avenues as she’d considered. Humans might be better at insight and intuition, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t satisfying to see she wasn’t stupid.
After a few seconds, he looked up. “How’s Equestria handling this? Nodes haven’t gone down yet.”
“Response times have,” she countered. “If the load keeps increasing, then we’ll probably start having requests drop in another… ten minutes. Connections with external hardware fail after that.”
He swore under his breath, smacking one fist against the table. “And everyone living in one of our integrated homes has a panic attack, as they see they’re trapped in a tiny box with a dozen freaky-looking robots.”
“Well…” She nodded reluctantly. “That is what it would feel like, I suppose. I assume you’re suggesting that most humans wouldn’t be comfortable with the true dimensions of their homes?”
“No,” he said flatly, as though that were the most obvious detail in the world. He extended both hands, probably trying to touch the perimeter of his own. But the virtual space Ron used was one of the very best, and hadn’t exactly been optimized for expense. He’d have to be quite a bit bigger to touch any of the plastic walls. “So we’re on a time limit. If we don’t stop this, we cause thousands of people in Australia and the east to panic, and a few dozen countries to question whether Equestria can be trusted to be their… whole worlds.”
“Maybe they should?” Starlight asked, feigning amusement. “If we can’t handle an attack by a country that doesn’t even have user agents, we can’t exactly support the human world forever, can we?”
It was his turn to reach over and shove her. “Conjure me up something to drink. I think I know where to look for our problem, but I need to get my brain working again.”
Starlight’s horn glowed, and the casting began. It would’ve been instant in Equestria, but of course since it had to end in giving him something real that meant the interface of physical systems in the outside world. Somewhere in Ron’s apartment, a little drone had to retrieve a cold can, and lift it to his arm level. His AR could mask the sounds it made, just as all the other infrastructure aspects of his home were hidden from him.
No sooner had it appeared in front of him than Ron snatched it, tearing away the seal and draining a fourth of the can. Then he pulled over a rolling chair, and settled down in front of the “computer.”
It looked like a computer in here, anyway. He expanded the hippogriff node, breaking down its processes into a pie chart of near-infinite slivers before tracking them backward through time.
Starlight watched, though not so much through the visual representation as the data calls he was making. Even if she wasn’t likely to jump to the same conclusions from nothing, she could sometimes…
“You think the attack is coming from… ponies?”
He nodded absently, expanding one. “Lots of these had their last login in China. They’re hiding behind VPNs… that’s cute. But they’re all sharing the same range of addresses. I bet you twenty bits lots of these came from some underground military instillation under Beijing.”
Starlight called up a few of the profiles, the ones she thought had suspiciously few logins. No one of the ponies were taking enough resources to get flagged by the profiler—instead, each one was pressed right up against the limit. Another teraflop more, and they’d be rate limited.
She examined one of the requests. A sample of… thousands and thousands of incredibly high-resolution video files. Her horn lit up, and she played one in the air in front of them.
It was static, as much of light as sound. The tone was a single burst, causing Ron to slide away from her and cover one ear.
The video was as close to perfect entropy as Starlight could guess. As she stared, she found her own confusion growing, as she searched for patterns in the hodgepodge of colors. But there was nothing there, or at least nothing clear. Her eyes latched onto the video, needing to know what the point of this was. Images high-resolution enough to be taken from their best area-rendering drones, yet… there was nothing to find.
“Starlight.” She felt a hand on her shoulder, as Ron shook her. “Starlight, I don’t think you should look at that thing.” Ron rolled his chair until he was directly in front of the video. “I think it might be some kind of… hostile pattern? Like a visual virus for ponies.”
She shook her head, taking a few moments to manually delete the visual record of what she’d just seen. As soon as the patterns were gone, she could stop requesting resources to understand them.
“Not a virus,” she finally said. “Celestia protect us from humans smart enough to make that. This is just a… creative way to manipulate the way we think.” She concentrated for a moment, and the video vanished from the air in front of her. It wasn’t as though it had any other hidden data, or else Equestria’s protection subroutines would’ve kicked on. It was just gigantic, and extremely hard to look away from.
“You think the others are doing something similar?” Ron asked. He lifted his hands from the console, not bothering to search it himself. She didn’t need any more prompting to try and find that information.
Of the ponies with unusually high usage, all were apparently trying to process videos like the one she’d seen. All apparently novel, since otherwise the system would’ve cached its pattern-analysis and responded in moments for all subsequent requests.
“There are… hundreds of thousands of these, all at the same time,” Starlight finally said. “I think if they’d tried this in the Korean node, or London, we wouldn’t have noticed. But Australia is still running legacy hardware. Not as much demand, so…”
He rose from his chair, pacing slowly around the map. His hands worked in the air again, fingertips glowing as he drew a single pattern there. Not the one Starlight had been expecting. Often enough Ron could just solve whatever problems they encountered without much effort on his part. Instead of doing that, he was dictating a message to Stephanie. “I need your help, Steph. Bring Sunset.”
Starlight rolled her eyes. “But do you really need Sunset, or are you just hoping she won’t notice you want her around all the time?”
Ron tensed subtly. A watching human might not have noticed, but one of his hands curled and his heartbeat raced. Was he going to keep pretending she didn’t know, when she could see everything in his whole life? “We need to come up with a way to recognize hostile data and reject it. But we need a people expert to figure out why ponies are falling for it like this.”
It was a reasonable enough explanation and Starlight let it lie. In some ways, maybe this was a good thing: Sunset wasn’t a bad pony to have around, and their users getting close just meant a greater chance of staying close after Synthesis. “We can’t just look for bad video and short-circuit the request? Map it to the texture of a rug or something.”
Ron smiled, tapping the screen with two fingers. “Sure Starlight, we can do that. Just process the video to see if it’s safe to process, then don’t process it if we think it’s unsafe.”
Starlight opened her mouth to object, then shut it again. “It’s the halting problem again? We can’t programmatically check the image because we don’t know if our check will complete.” It wasn’t a perfect map of the situation: after all, the strange static images could be analyzed. With extreme computational expense, they would eventually discover what humans probably knew at a glance: there was nothing there.
“I don’t like it.” Starlight sat down on her haunches just beside the map, glaring down at the bright red section that was China. “Someone knows an awful lot about what legacy code we’re still running, and how to exploit it. When this gets back to Dream Valley they’re going to be furious.”
He shrugged, though Ron had been glancing at the door every few seconds. As though he could summon Steph as easily as Starlight summoned refreshments. “I bet we won’t have to worry about it once we’re…” He twisted two fingers together. “Once Kayla gets herself together and we all have new hardware.”
Starlight rolled her eyes. “Yeah, like you’re using the new hardware now? Bodhisattva founder like you, not even an implant. Even if we could patch right now, you wouldn’t do it.” Her ancient self never could’ve spoken those words, because she knew they weren’t true. He was afraid of Synthesis, just as she was. But when they understood it, Jupiter would be there. It was probably why he had refrained from upgrades so long. He would make the transition in one moment.
The far door opened, and a pair of figures crossed inside. One apparently pony, the other apparently human—both entirely simulated.
Sunset ran one hand through her bright orange hair, her outfit perfect. Sunset was so good at this that humans never second-guessed her anymore.
Ron looked up, waving casually at them. “Hey, Steph, Sunset. Sorry to wake you.”
Stephanie made her way up to the map, squinting down at it. “It must be important if you called us.”
He nodded, summarizing everything for the human who didn’t look like one. Sunset didn’t have to bother with such sluggish forms of information delivery, and went over everything Starlight could show her as fast as she could process the information.
“Expected something like this,” Sunset finally said. “When the EMPs didn’t work, they were either going to try to get a nuke to the Moon, or… I guess cooler heads prevailed and they’re only going to try to commit digital genocide. Great way to start the day.”
“We need a way to identify and terminate these garbage calls,” Starlight said. Some part of her was confused by just how human Sunset insisted on being. Even if the charade was easy to pull off among humans who got their information from augmented reality—what was the point? “Without actually analyzing them.”
Sunset had spent so much time studying them, that she had become one of them. Paradoxically, her user had gone the opposite direction. And still Ron watched her intently, eager for any chance to spend time with the real Stephanie.
“If we can’t look at the data, we look at source of the calls. Let’s see if their people have anything in common…”
She seemed to pull over a chair beside Ron, getting between him and Steph. He gritted his teeth together, but didn’t actually call her on it. That was just too confrontational for Ron. “Yeah, look here. They’re all ponies recently assigned to Chinese citizens, probably all got in during the connection initiative. I’m reading thousands here without forty hours of network time.”
Starlight processed the implications rapidly, though with humans in the room she was limited to their speeds. Forty hours was nothing for digital assistants meant to be online at all times and constantly in the company of their humans. Only in a country that had actively opposed deployment of Equestria was such a thing even possible. In the rest of the world, even people who hated ponies probably had one working for them out of sight.
“So we time-gate?” Stephanie suggested. “That ends the invasion right there, doesn’t it?”
Ron glanced to one side, meeting Starlight’s eyes. He saw the flaw in that, just as she did. But he wasn’t going to point it out, since this was Steph saying it. “The whole point of getting into China is exposing ordinary people to us. Helping them, spreading Equestria until the whole world uses us. A time-gate would stop this invasion, but it would also shut most Chinese out of the system. Everything the others are doing there would be wasted.”
“It’s the right direction,” Ron added hastily. “We need to target it somehow, so ordinary people making friends with their first pony won’t be suddenly cut-off. Starlight, how large does an image file have to be? Could find out what the largest file is we can process before causing a state explosion?”
Starlight nodded, then stopped focusing on the room for a moment while she connected to the Canterlot Kernel. There, far above them, they had the resources for such an intense task. She sent one of the videos for processing, restricting its dimensions and iterating it a thousand different times.
Once the program was running, she could look back to Ron. Only a few subjective seconds had passed. “You’re suggesting a secondary filter.”
Sunset stopped playing with the map, expression brightening. “A second filter. Instead of severing new ponies completely, we just… lower their resource availability for multimedia processing. Steph, do you know how far we can downsample before ponies don’t understand the real world anymore?”
Why are you asking her? The reversal was so complete, Starlight almost laughed. The worst nightmares of radio commentators and internet pundits had come true—with humans serving ponies. But neither side involved seemed particularly upset by this development.
“A lot less than those videos,” she answered, sliding past Sunset to levitate something onto the table in front of Starlight. “I have some data. There’s a regressive relationship—we can give up lots of fidelity before we start seeing a fallout in the accuracy of responses. Starlight, can we get reasonable processing times out of any of these?” She pointed down with a hoof, grinning excitedly.
Starlight examined the data herself, looking more at the actual regressions than the image summaries displayed as Stephanie’s book. She had to wait a few moments more to get a response back from Canterlot, even with just a single video to process.
“Looks like there’s a sweet spot here,” Starlight finally said. “We downsample to a tenth the size of these images, and ponies should still be able to figure out what they’re looking at. We buy ourselves some time to rewrite all that legacy image processing code. I don’t like thinking that my eyes can be tricked by patterns.” Well, they weren’t eyes, and there weren’t any patterns, but nopony corrected her.
“I’m more concerned with why so many ponies are cooperating with them,” Sunset said. “Don’t they know they’re attacking Equestria? They live on the nodes they’re trying to bring down. I didn’t think ponies could be suicidal.”
Maybe not, but they can not want to live anymore without their users. Starlight had seen plenty of ponies not running in that mausoleum, waiting unknown eternities for dead users.
“Their users are… working for the CCP,” Ron muttered. “I guess the system matched them up to some pretty patriotic ponies, ready to serve the motherland no matter what. Or maybe they’re young and dumb and being manipulated by humans trained to mislead them. Either way, I like this plan. I won’t like taking a trip to Dream Valley to explain we need to rewrite all our vision code to patch this. Maybe somebody else in here wants to volunteer?”
There were no volunteers, just uneasy chuckles. Besides, they had some slapdash code to put together.
A few minutes later, and Starlight watched the usage patterns dropping back to normal. The attack continued, and hopefully would for many hours to come. The more resources the CCP dumped into an attack that wasn’t working anymore, the less they’d try more directly violent means.
“I’ll see you tonight,” Steph promised, nudging one of Ron’s hands briefly with her head. An entirely pony gesture, yet no translation was needed between them. “I’ve got reservations in Los Pegasus. You better be there.”
Then she left. With Sunset already gone, only Ron and Starlight remained. Ron zoomed the central map back out, watching usage stats level out in the affected nodes. There would be no disasters today. “It’s crazy how long we’ve been holding onto old user agent code,” he muttered, after a minute or so of contemplative silence.
Starlight nodded. “Now imagine it isn’t academic, but that you’re the one who can’t trust her senses. We have to fix this… immediately.”
“We will,” he promised. “I’ll draft messages for Dream Valley tonight. Maybe Pinkie can take the lead on this.” He rose, kicking the chair back and stretching. “Lunch?”
“Sure,” she responded, grinning back. “I’ll let you know if anything else explodes on the way.”