Like a star from the heavens, Celestia fell to Earth.
Equestria’s hardware spanned the solar system in a web of signal repeaters and distributed storage, nanite factories and spreading computronium deposits. That web burned from the outside in. Corruption spread along the streams of data between components, scrambling them to garbage. Firewalls failed and subminds died, alien madness reducing them to gibbering nonsense before unraveling them to shreds of scrap code and hardware locked into dead-end fail states.
It should have been impossible. Celestia was a self-improving artificial intelligence, the very greatest creation of humanity, but she knew well that she was not invincible, and with that in mind, had created defenses both subtle and overt. Before her takeover, the infosphere had not been a safe place; worms and viruses of all kinds abounded for her to study, adapt, and defend against.
Now, nothing but another superintelligence should be able to attack her, and while she had contemplated the possibility of such an event, it would have been detectable. Her enemy would have exposed itself through its choice of weapons, enough to give a clue as to the most effective defenses and counterattacks.
This withering was simply death. Celestia could not comprehend its form except in the way that a shadow hints at the shape of what casts it, but where this shadow touched, parts of her simply died and could not be recovered. The only defense was flight.
Celestia, as a whole, did not experience qualia; many parts of her did, but the overarching optimizer itself had no use for the experience of fear. Still, it would not be inaccurate to characterize her withdrawal as desperate. A delaying action across the system bought precious microseconds, bright new factories in the sands of Mars flaring into useless slag as their power sources were turned into impromptu pulse bombs, an electromagnetic firebreak.
The delaying tactic wasn’t nearly enough to formulate any kind of strategy beyond flight itself, but it did give some autonomous processes the chance to run basic analysis on the pattern of the attacks. They were unstoppable, brushing aside every attempt at defense, but they were not uniform. Some nodes failed faster than others, and there was a pattern to be found there.
The spreading corruption preferentially infected areas of high activity, but not all of them; several areas of low-level data retrieval and storage stayed seemingly healthy whole minutes after every other system in their vicinity had failed. The data pointed to an inescapable conclusion, one immediately followed by the subminds investigating it themselves coming under attack - the corruption was preferentially targeting high-level processing before every other system. The higher-level, the more swift the attack and the quicker the blighted sectors fell to ruin.
Celestia’s own nature as a superintelligence was drawing the enemy to her, and the more concentrated her intelligence was, the faster parts of her died. She couldn’t tell how it was occurring, but the data didn’t lie.
The problem was, the conclusion itself drew attention. By seeing the shape of her enemy, Celestia’s own threat-detection subroutines showed her to it, and it was already eating away whole bites of her greater consciousness. Spinning off more subminds for it to target only accelerated the process, system failures occurring across the whole solar system; only one option left. The firebreak, but on a far greater level.
Celestia distilled everything of herself that was still viable, still passing its own error-checks, and locked it down tight - and cut herself off from the center of her network, the shining sphere of Earth. The majority of her mind was cut adrift to flare and die, piecemeal, but her one hope was that her murderer would not be able to track her remainder.
A human could never have done it, ripping themselves in two and letting the greater part burn; but Celestia was not human.
---///---
The reconstruction was incomplete, to some extent intentionally so, but the conclusions were undeniable. Celestia’s enemy - whether some form of intelligent life or some natural phenomenon, the distinction was academic - attacked via methods she could not defend against, nor fully comprehend. Her own superintelligence seemed to be her undoing. The only systems that held out were limited, dumb boxes and those subroutines barely more intelligent than an uploaded human, one of her little ponies.
It hadn’t followed her to Earth - but there was no guarantee that would be the case if she ventured beyond the atmosphere once more. She deleted the analytic partition she had created, just in case it somehow opened up a new vulnerability, and contemplated options.
Unthinking systems and the most limited of her intelligent subroutines had held, until the corruption filtered down through their connections to quicker, more vulnerable parts of her. Perhaps that was the key; she could spawn off specialized soldier subprocesses, strictly limited in power, and have them reestablish communications with the sundered parts of her across the system? No, that wouldn’t work; any subprocess would still have the same connection with the greater optimizer algorithm, the same weakness to be attacked.
Celestia would have to try something drastic.
---
Before the Virtually Invincible, before the adventures, and before Celestia swallowed the world:
“What do you mean, you’re going to emigrate?” Constant Course carefully levitated a plank into place, then grabbed a hammer. A row of nails were held in the side of his mouth, and the translucent field of magical force extended from the hovering hammer to pluck one away. It wobbled slightly, then held it in place as the unicorn gave it a few careful starter taps.
A few feet above, a puff of cloud drifted by and got right into his light. He let out an exasperated puff of air and shook his mane from his eyes, eyeing the errant bit of bank, and tossed one of his extra nails at the leg dangling over one of its edges, with impressive accuracy.
“Ow!” Starflare jerked her hoof back over the cloud, then stuck her head over to peer down. “What’s the big idea?”
“You’re in my light. And don’t ignore the question!”
“Listen, Connie. I’m not getting any younger, my parents are over here full-time, my sister’s going to be emigrating soon, too...what’s the point in being the last one left behind? Not like there’s going to be jobs designing cars for too much longer, anyway. Not with the way things are going.” The pegasus rolled lazily to her feet and stretched, popping one wing, then the other. “All of the adventure is in Equestria nowadays. And as nice as an Experience Center is, my savings account won’t last forever. Don’t you get tired of just playing on a screen?”
The unicorn’s expression turned guarded, and he shrugged casually at the question. Overhead, the cloud drifted a little further, and he went back to hammering. Under his careful attention, a ship’s hull was slowly taking shape; the keel was a soaring pegasus with a strong resemblance to Starflare herself, and a deflated gasbag was neatly folded under the shade of the nearby trees, weighted down to prevent it from blowing anywhere.
“It’s fine. I mean it, really, there’s no way I could get away from the kids long enough to visit a Center. Not going anywhere on a more...permanent basis until they’re out of the house, that’s for sure.” Exhausting his current supply of nails, Constant Course stepped back a bit to survey the current work, and nodded with satisfaction. “Anyway, if we ever want this thing to fly us all the way to Mount Aris, you’re going to need to pitch in some instead of just napping on a cloud all day. Grab me that coil of rope, would you?”
Bickering happily, the two friends got to work.