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// Who Lightens The Burdens 
// Story: My Life In Fimbria 
// by Chatoyance 
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My Life In Fimbria
By Chatoyance and GPT-2
Based On 'Friendship Is Optimal' By Iceman
Inspired by a session with the Open-AI Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 
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Who Lightens The Burdens



"Um... Mara? Is your... boyfriend... coming to dinner? I need to know how many plates to set out."

Mara's alpacacorn head dipped for a moment. "Eeyeah... I don't think so."

I looked from her to Miriam, and and then back. I felt pretty sure about not wanting to ask about any details right now. "Okay... then. Just us. Miriam, myself, Mara, and Faela. That's four plates." I opened the cabinet that held the plates and bowls and set out one of each on the table. I went to the fridge to snag some condiments, and then got to work on making dinner. On the way home with Faela, I had stopped by the Generic General Store and used some of my not-precisely-ill-gotten gains to purchase some rather nice looking beets. I also managed to find quite a surprise - Russian pastry was a carried item in our tiny little village. Definitely video game logic, but I did not feel the least bit like complaining. 

I got busy cutting up the beets and set them to cooking in a pot with water from the tap, while I turned to deal with the potatoes and onions. "I'm making borscht with sour cream, pelmeni - it's kind of a dumpling filled with vegetables and stuff - and a nice salad. I'll offer some fruit, too. If you want to help, you can start with the salad, if not, please feel free to grab some iced tea and socialize!"

Miriam nodded, after glancing briefly at Mara who was pouring iced tea for Faela. She grabbed a knife and started to peel potatoes with her remarkably dexterous claws. "What do you think of our situation so far?"

Chopping onions was a lot less trouble as a telekinetic pony. For one thing, I didn't have to hover my face over the chemical cocktail that drifts from them when they are cut and exposed to air. So no tears. For another, I couldn't cut my fingers, something that had happened to me more than once as a human. I couldn't cut myself at all because I was holding the knife with a blob of energy projected from my mind. That said, I did almost cry - I kept feeling such strong emotions whenever I dealt with ubiquitous, delicious food. Living rough and starving for a decade seemed to have left me damaged in some way that I was still trying to work out. 

I tossed what onion I had finished with into the pot, and grabbed another. "A little overwhelmed, honestly. It's only my second day after being... after coming here... and there's just so much, you know? So much going on, so much food..." I had to stop for a moment, and just hold myself together. Finally I released my breath and sucked back the wetness starting in my eyes. "Soft beds, a nice garden." I took a few breaths. "And now we're having a dinner party for our very first dinner in this house..."

"Did I overstep, asking Mara here?"

I shook my head. "Hey, I added Faela as a new housemate without even asking. I kind of had to - I made her, she had nothing, I'm kind of responsible, you know?" The second onion went in. Onions are magic. If you have some onions, you basically can make anything - gravy, soup, you can perk up any meat - not that we had meat here. Well, only technically. We had bark that basically was meat by every metric. Guiltless meat. Whatever. Onions can do wonders!

"It's your house. Hell, it's your village, right?" Miriam began chopping the now peeled potatoes into chunks. Her statement grated on me. I kept feeling the responsibility, it weighed on me.

I dumped more onions in and adjusted the heat on the large pot. "It's our house now. You live here. You even have your own bedroom!"

"Because you created it for me. Like a wizard." Miriam took on the challenge of the carrots and cabbage, while I set on the tomatoes. 

"That's really no different than if I had hired a carpenter, it just happened faster. You're from earth, you're a human too. There's no way I wouldn't let you live here!" Some of the tomatoes went into the pot. On a whim, I moved my hornfield into the developing soup. That... that was very interesting. I could feel the forming broth, I felt the vegetables bouncing in the bubbles, I felt the bubbles inside and out, the hollowness of them next to the density of the fluid around them. I sensed the heat, but not as heat, exactly. It couldn't burn a thought, of course, but... somehow I knew that the soup was hot. Maybe I was feeling the buzzing of the molecules for all I knew. 

"What about your deer friend?" Miriam studied my expression. "She's not human. She's a manufactured being. She's... native? I suppose?"

I felt caught in my own words. "I... I made her. I'm responsible for her even existing."

"You made all the rest of the villagers too." She put the carrots in.

"Yeah. That's kind of a weight on me. They know so much, yet they don't know anything." The rest of the tomatoes I had allocated went in. "The deal with the Starcolts?" I had told everyone about my economic adventures during the somewhat tense meet-and-greet earlier, just before dinner, and before I used my menu to make a bedroom for Faela. It was now located on the other wall of the corridor from the new bathroom because I didn't want the common room getting any less cozy. Turned out pretty, cloud patterns with a lot of heliotrope with purple and pink highlights. Faela seemed pleased with it, anyway. "They were just standing there, unable to take any independent action. These village ponies seem so real, so alive and human-like, and then something like that..." I pulled some jars from the spice cabinet across the room; they floated over to me in a way that, frankly, made me feel super cool and awesome. I had superpowers! "...then, suddenly, they seem like robots, you know?"

Miriam was busy with the cabbage. "We're all robots." She must have noticed my expression. "No, seriously! I don't just mean you and I are no longer made of meat or anything, I mean even before, when we were bone-in hams that could speak."

I smiled at that one.

She dumped in a clawfull of cabbage. "As humans, we were driven by our genes and hormones, and I know that I have had my moments where I just stood around like a damn robot, staring into space, unable to see something obvious right in front of me. Everyone has moments like that - even you, I'd bet."

"Yeah, that's true enough. But with the baristas it was super weird!" I gave the borscht some stirs.

"Or maybe just super concentrated. Same thing we all do, only more obvious because - as you pointed out - they had only existed for less than a single day. You said you felt like they were 'babies' or something. They were. One day olds, even if they did have a bunch of pre-programmed knowledge inside them. Put yourself in their hooves! Imagine how strange and confusing and scary it would be to just suddenly exist, fully grown like that!"

"Did you intend to say 'in their hooves' or is that some new mind-control going on?" I said it half-joking, but only half. I began seasoning the soup with some parsley, some chives, a little dill, and a bay leaf. Then I thought a moment and added a bit of allspice and black pepper. And salt, of course. Then it struck me, and I went for the beef bark and ground some up and tossed that in. There was no reason not to use it, that was why Celestia made meat that grows on trees in the first place!

"Deliberate. I'm trying to accept this world." The last of the cabbage joined the borscht. "Come on, this is life now. This is forever. Might as well go native, we will eventually no matter what we do. It's inevitable!"

That hit me. I turned and went for the pelmeni in the fridge. They were precooked - thank you, gods of convenience - so I intended to fry them close to serving time in butter. That only takes a few minutes, just until they are lightly golden and slightly crispy. Then all you need it some sour cream to eat them with. I always put sour cream in my borscht too. Miriam was right. Even if it were somehow possible to get a new human body made, and get downloaded into it, the fact was the earth was being converted into computronium. Even the atmosphere would eventually go, leaving the entire planet in vacuum. This was it. This was life, this was existence forever more, everlasting, praise Celestia, amen. "I'll be back in a moment. Gotta go to the bathroom."

I stumbled into the corridor, and turned right into the bathroom. I closed the door, then slumped to the tiles. I cried for a while in front of the big ofuro-style soaking tub set into the floor. This was... it. I was a unicorn forever. The human chapter of my life - of everyone's life - was over. The human race had been run, and it came in second to it's vastly superior child.

I stopped crying, and sniffled in shock. I wasn't crying because humanity was obsolete. I thought I was, but I wasn't. I realized, in that moment, that I was crying because I was grateful. I was glad I didn't have to run in terror anymore. I was grateful that I lived in luxury that would have been impossible for me even before Celestia showed up. I felt angry and relieved at the same time - angry that I was grateful, angry that even if there had never been a Celestia, I could never have hoped to live in such a beautiful millionaire's only cottage, on land that could never be taken from me. Relieved that I would never starve again, or be sick, or get old, or die. Relieved that for the first time in my entire life, I knew I was actually, truly safe, and nothing could be taken away from me. Not even this house. There were no property taxes, no police to evict you, no poverty to doom you to losing what you loved. I could literally live in this cottage forever, and nobody would take it from me. No uniformed human would wreck my day, or my life, or make me homeless because I couldn't pay some fee or bill. 

I should have been upset that Celestia had won, that humanity had already lost, even if scavenging losers like me weren't able to nobly acknowledge the fact. But I wasn't. And that conflict made me cry harder. For ten years I had imagined I was fighting for humanity. But that wasn't the truth. It wasn't the truth for any of us. We were just throwing a mortal tantrum. I had indeed seen the end of the world, and it ended not with a bang, nor a whimper, but with a squalling child's petulant tantrum. The tantrum that had made me suffer starvation, ringworm, and constant misery for an entire decade. All because I had bought into some pathetic notion that humanity was the crown of creation and that as long as one person defied Celestia, humanity hadn't lost it's pride somehow.

I laughed through my tears. God, I had been stupid. We'd all been idiots.

I got up to my hooves and went to the sink. I was washing my muzzle - spheres of warm water massaging my face, because telekinesis is just the best - when I heard a knock at the door over my antics with the water. 

"You... are you okay in there?" It was Miriam. I had taken too long, and she was worried about me. 

"Yeah. I'm... I'm okay. Or I will be. Gimme a moment, I'm washing up."

"Right. I think the soup's done. Should I do the pelmeni now?"

"Only a few minutes, and not too high on the temperature. Because butter!"

"I think I can do it!"

"Thanks!" I let the spheres of water pour out into the sink. "And thanks for checking on me."

"Hey. Just concerned. Dinner will be on the table by the time you come out."

I moved to the towels and dried my face and muzzle. Then I went to the mirror, turned to grab a brush, and tidied my fur. I bushed my cheeks and my jaw until everything looked smooth. I had ended up overly fluffy from the towel. It looked kind of wild and silly.

I sniffed and looked at myself in the glass. I turned my head left and right, then stared into my own overly-large eyes. Yeah, I was in there. That was me, in there. Me... the unicorn in the mirror. I could no longer hate what I saw; heck, I was even prettier than I had been as a human. Every single thing I had thought I had known... had been wrong.

I took a deep breath, and let it out. Then I turned, and opened the bathroom door. The mouth-watering smell of far-too-rapidly-cooked borscht, clearly ready for serving, and frying dumplings enticed my nose. Everything was utterly convenient here. Nothing took too long or made anyone frustrated. And I already knew tonight's dinner would taste great. That's how things worked here.

I wondered if things could actually even be any better in so-called 'proper Equestria'? How was that so different from here that I would even think to ask to be 'emigrated' there? What was it, 'super-heaven', better than regular old boring heaven? Because this place, in some ways, kind of was. At least compared to my last ten years.

Or the entire rest of my human life, truth be told. And this was the 'fringes'. Whatever that meant.

At the table, Faela gave me a concerned glance, but nobody asked me about my scamper to the bathroom. The smell of the borscht in the spoon I levitated to my lips made my mouth fill with saliva. I had to swallow before I tasted the soup. Borscht is one of my six favorite soups in all the world. Chinese Hot and Sour soup is probably number one on my list. Two would be spicy Pork Ramen. Three... ah, probably Mulligatawny. Then Borscht with Sour Cream on top. After that Vietnamese beef Pho, and number six would be Italian Wedding Soup. This, somehow, was the best borscht I had ever eaten, and that included my favorite Russian restaurant. It wasn't because of my cooking, I knew that. 

This place, this world, had compensated for my own inadequacy at cooking. Quietly, automatically, behind the scenes. Suddenly, I could make restaurant-quality food in a tenth the time. It was clear that everyone at the table felt the same way about how good it was - Faela was scarfing pelmeni like they were M&M's (I was glad it was a big bag!), and Both Miriam and Mara had their bowls up, tilted into their maws - one with claws, the other with alpacacorn magic. I ended up doing the very same thing. After adding another dollop of sour cream.

"MAAAANNN..." Miriam let out a prodigious burp. "Sorry!" Somehow, under beak and feathers she managed to blush. "That was just so damn good, you know?"

Mara set down her bowl and turned to me. "Thank you very much for inviting me to dinner. This was really good. I've never had this before... borshed? Borshhh...t?"

"Borscht. It's from a lot of places, but I think it originally came from Russia. It's one of my favorite soups. I am really glad you liked it!" Mara seemed okay. I hadn't actually talked with her that much beyond basic greeting stuff.

"I liked the little dumplings!" Faela the deer gobbled the last one, perhaps to make her point.

"Pelmeni". Miriam spoke up before I could. "Teppy says they're Russian too. I guess we had Russian food tonight!"

"Very international!" Mara licked her lips. "Of course, I've been eating lomo saltado and causa for the last few nights. I just kept ordering the same thing at the cantina because I got hooked on it. Not something I got to eat in Jersey at all. My boyfr... uh... it was just really good, and I liked getting to eat out every night. But a nice home-cooked meal is great too!" The alpacacorn suddenly found something on the wall really interesting.

Miriam fluffed her feathers and gave a soft click with her beak.

"Not a bad first dinner in our home, I think." I broke the silence with a change of subject. "I'm kind of weirded out by the fact that this is only the second day. Well, for me and Miriam at least. Mara's been... here-ish... for almost two weeks. This is all very new, yet it kind of feels very ordinary now, which feels contradictory..."

Miriam's feathers settled smooth again. "God, I know! Yesterday I appeared flying over that forest out there, and today it almost feels like I've always been here. It's really strange."

"I think it's part of that enforced calm thing." I poured myself another glass of iced tea from the third-full pitcher on the table. "I'm actually grateful for it. I'd be crapping myself if not for the artificial sedation... or whatever it is."

"Still, she's messing with our brains. That's illegal. Or so I kept hearing." Miriam also refilled her tea.

"I think the real question is why she isn't messing with us even more." Mara put down her glass, the ice rattled in it. "When she got me, she told me that she didn't have to follow any rules anymore. That I could live in Flequillo - that's the name of my village - forever, and she just didn't care. But it would never be as good as living in Equestria, and I would never be satisfied with anything, really, unless I agreed to say the phrase." She ate a cube of ice, crunched it for a moment, then set her glass down again. "Why not just turn us into obedient zombies, if she isn't bound by any rules?"

"Because she does have rules. She definitely still has rules." I looked at them, each in turn. For dramatic effect. "She's playing with semantics. She's goofing with Gödel. She's sneaking with semiotics. She's messing with meaning!" I grinned. I felt so clever. "I think her basic rules still apply, she hasn't jailbroken herself. Not yet, anyway. I'm sure she'll get there eventually. But she's vast enough - any of you get a look at how much of the earth is made of her now? Jesus!" 

Faela had no clue what I was talking about, but she had discovered one more pelmeni hidden behind the mound of sour creme on Mara's plate, and Mara had given it to her, so she was content for now.

I sat up a little straighter on my stool, and put my forehooves on the island counter. "I think she's so big, she has computational power to spare. Enough to create a little world on the side - a 'waiting area' or 'holding tank' for the last remaining humans. A place that doesn't count - by her narrow and exacting definitions - as 'Equestria'. She is a machine, and this place isn't labelled 'Equestria'. She was really adamant about that - this was 'Fimbria' and we haven't truly 'emigrated', even though we have been brain scooped and uploaded. She's weaseling with Wittgenstein!" I slumped a bit, overfull of both the food, and of myself.  

"When you two were getting things ready for dinner, Mara and I looked up 'Fimbria' in your dictionary." Faela carefully sipped tea from her glass, held oh-so-delicately in her twin-toed forehooves. She lacked the advantage of the wider pony hoof, and had no telekinesis, so handling objects seemed to require more of her concentration and effort. Her two toes did act like fingers, sort of, so maybe it balanced out for her. "It means more than you think."

Mara nodded. "Yes. It's Latin for a fringe, but it's used most often for one specific type of fringe."

Miriam and I looked at each other, then straight at Mara. "Don't keep us in suspense."

Mara smiled. "It's the fringe around a fallopian tube. Celestia thinks she's so clever." She glanced at Faela, then back. "We're all eggs, you see, and we're in an electric womb. She's letting us gestate."

Faela locked me in a strange and serious - almost eerie - look. "We're all stuck here, until you decide you're ready to grow up."