“Whether you want to uncover the secrets of the universe, or you just want to pursue a career in the 21st century, basic computer programming is an essential skill to learn.”
—Stephen Hawking
September 17th, 2012
I can vividly remember the moment my perception of reality was forever shattered; It was a Monday.
How very typical. Or, at least, how very typical from the perspective of an individual who grew up with the western modern cultural ideal of a five day work-week that starts on Monday.
Mondays are not terrible because the day itself has any natural intrinsic evil to it born of nature.
Mondays are evil because Humanity made them evil. Specifically Capitalist Humans, but that part should go without saying.
It was more or less a coincidence, insofar as such a thing exists, that I found out about the inevitable end of Humanity on a Monday.
For those for whom the twenty-tens are as distant from their reality as the Egyptian Pharaohs were for me; Allow me to set the stage.
Humankind was at the zenith of our time on Earth. Technology was cheap, astoundingly powerful, and ubiquitous in a way that it had never been before in our history. Humanity was a great deal smarter than we had ever been in the past, but not the slightest bit wiser.
And we were hurting for it.
Wars of empires raged, as always back then, with the global north and west busily devouring the resources of the south and east as quickly as 'first world' nations could cram the broken bodies and dreams of 'lesser' peoples down the maw of the machine of 'progress.'
And, too, there was the specter of apocalyptic climate doom. It wasn't a popular topic of discussion back then, but those of us who had even a cursory education in the sciences, had been raised by parents who were eyes-open, and (in my case at least) had acquaintances in the space industry, were well aware of the abyss we were sliding gleefully into.
The worst typhoon of the year had just hit South Korea. The global temperature hit the top ten list again, as it so often did near the end. Sea ice in the Arctic hit a record low too; And for those who don't know what the Arctic was... Picture a world in which Luna's Moon throws off as much heat as Celestia's sun. That should give you some idea of the idiocy of burning off a planet's ice caps on purpose.
The Arctic was our planetary temperature controlling mechanism - Or, one of the most important ones at any rate.
Weather was going to Hell in a handbasket as a result. See the aforementioned typhoon. Just one in a long string of increasingly horrifying storms that tore at cities like great and terrible devouring beasts.
I'm ashamed to admit that I was one of the many, many, 'privileged' Humans who knew what was going to happen, and did far less than I ought. Defeatism will do that to you.
When I say privileged, you need to understand (those of you born after the last Emigrations); Not all Humans had a roof over their head. Food to eat on a daily basis. Clean water. Protection from disease - A sort of... Well picture an invading army of parasprites bent on devouring you alive, but smaller than the width of the tiniest hair. That's disease.
Plenty of us turned a blind eye on a daily basis as children starved. Or were press ganged into sweatshop factory labor. Or worse. War is never to be taken lightly, but cessation of existence... Permanent loss of self, as a consequence of failure, or loss? It lends conflict a different, and thoroughly monstrous dimension.
Even those of us with relative privilege felt powerless. A shockingly small number of Humans controlled a shockingly massive tranche of the planet's resources - Material wealth, political capital, the means of production, the instruments of law, and violence...
The five most powerful Humans held in their hands more of this than the entire rest of the species. Combined. By an order of magnitude. And they were generally, for a variety of reasons, either not good people, or good people with no real capacity to act radically for good.
All of which to say; Mondays were pretty depressing, as a rule.
It wasn't all bad though. Culture was pretty good. "Call Me Maybe" and "Gangnam Style" were topping charts and birthing memes like a wildfire in dry brush. We finally got a good Avengers live action movie - That was pretty special, as was the end of the Nolan Batman trilogy.
And then there was this thing called "Friendship is Magic."
If you weren't alive, and present for it, then describing the fervor around that particular piece of pop culture, and actually doing it justice, is more or less impossible.
The best I can do is say that people were only half joking, even then, when they said Ponies were coming to take over eeeeeeevvvryyyyything.
No; The irony is not lost on me in hindsight.
I was what you might call a 'closet Brony.' For the younger ones in the audience, I was one of those people who more or less enjoyed the show, even loved it, but didn't talk much about it with anyone else, or trumpet my fandom loudly.
It wasn't about my cultural peers, like it was with some people. I was a programmer by trade, and my subculture was so nerdy that almost anything went without too much judgment. If you found the right friends.
It was a combination of the fact that I didn't especially have any close friends at the time, and a deep personal issue that sparked a fraught love/hate relationship with the show. We will get to an exquisitely painful examination of both of those points in due time, have no fear.
For now, all you really need to know in terms of facts can be summed up thusly;
I was a thirty five year old man, working in a place called 'The Research Triangle,' on the United States Eastern Mid-Atlantic Coast, with no local friends or acquaintances, a degree in programming, a love/hate relationship with 'Friendship is Magic,' and an obsession with generative code - Programs that could take small building blocks and make wholly new things with them, for the interested foals and fledgelings.
It was 15:26 in the afternoon on Monday September the 17th, 2012. I know because I was so floored by what I had just read, that I checked my watch and noted the date, and time. Typical of a Monday, speaking relative to my biases, it was gray and raining.
I was sitting in a Starcolt... Starbucks. It was called Starbucks back then. Nothing to do with deer, no... Not that I recall, anyhow.
I went to that particular one often. I liked to people watch. And their air conditioning was very good. And the turn to get on the main road to go home had a leading-left light. I had a particular corner seat tucked away between an oddly shaped wall stanchion, and the front tinted plate glass window. I could see out to the sidewalk, but no one could see in, and I could almost see the entire interior of the store while remaining mostly invisible.
That, back then, was as close to socializing as I ever got.
I was reading a fascinating article in a Human publication called 'WIRED.' Catnip for nerds, if you've never had the pleasure of being acquainted with it. The article was about a pioneering woman in our field. Those of you who were alive then might have already guessed that it was a spread on the CEO of a place called Hofvarpnir Studios. Hanna.
The most influential Human programmer to ever live. No exaggeration, as some of you already know, and the rest will soon learn.
Like me, she loved making games. Unlike me, she had far more degrees, from more prestigious places. And an eye-watering personal fortune from being... You know... Actually *successful* in the video game industry.
Not that I wasn't doing 'well' for myself by most metrics. But I'd crashed out of the video game industry very quickly after University. Back then? It was a toxic and disgusting place full of misogyny, racism, classism, and an intense culture of overwork that bled all but the most tenacious dry within a few short years.
As someone born with male anatomy, and of a gender persuasion matching my anatomy, with caucasian genes to boot? I was pretty uniquely positioned to succeed in that cesspit. If I had wanted to.
Like many good programmers, I had an allergy to hard work. Let alone weekend hours. Crunch time is a unique and special kind of Hell. I don't recommend it. And, like many of the good, or at least less-bad Humans of the day, I also had a stomach churning aversion to bigotry.
I hadn't even lasted three months in the industry.
I willingly crashed out. Hard. And after six months of crying into tubs of Breyers - Icecream, I should clarify for the post-Humans among us - and wishing I had actually followed my childhood dreams of trying to become a fighter pilot, and then an astronaut... I sucked it up and got a quiet, low-stress job as a sys-admin.
Sit in a basement all day, nine in the morning to five in the afternoon, and keep network infrastructure alive. Some weekend and call hours included, but once you had things settled and down pat, emergencies were very rare.
Tough at the start, with lots of those working weekends that I truly abhorred... But once I had the majority of my job automated, and my small kingdom settled, I could do what all good sysadmins do for ninety percent of their days.
Anything *but* work.
Some people wrote novels, or played games.
Me? Like a good few other sysadmins, I expect... I wrote programs. Not for work, but for personal projects.
In school, I'd taken a concentration in game development. A pretty big mistake from a career standpoint; While smarter students were learning useful guff like Ruby on Rails and TSQL, I was busy with Unity, their broken half-flanked version of Javascript, and C#.
Wrong tools for a job anywhere outside game development. Well... Not precisely. I'd been able to parlay C# into a decent understanding of the .NET framework on the whole, together with my childhood interest in Python, and from there... No no, I'm rambling.
Keep it simple; I still wanted to build games in my spare time. In school, I worked in something called a 'Narrative Lab.' My professors were working on building programs that could understand the Human sensibilities and psychology of story-telling.
We were severely limited by the technology of our time, but the goal had been to one day create something like Star Trek's holodeck. Ask for a 1930s detective noir adventure set in a fantasy-punk New York City where you, the handsome Dragon in a trench-coat are the hero?
Boom. Summoned from the aether in an instant.
Want to travel the stars as a gorgeous lesbian vampire linguist, fighting the evils of a sentient clump of misandryist nanite-infused moss?
Got you covered. Every single voxel new and fresh, untouched even by Human hands nor eyes. That was the dream, anyhow - A perfect computerized Dungeon Master.
But while we were struggling inside the limitations of smart, but relatively small minds (my own included) and pitiful state university budgets... Hanna with her frankly already post-human brain, and Hofvarpnir with their billions, were accelerating AI research on a trajectory that made Moore's Law look like a flat line.
When I graduated University, Madden and Morrowind were the rage. By the time I'd gotten settled at my 'forever-job,' at a place called SAS, it was Battlefield 2, and the latest Age of Empires.
When "The Fall of Asgard" hit, for a moment? There was more or less nothing else going in gaming. The way Friendship is Magic was popular on TV? Asgard was destroying the gaming market. I secretly suspected that the success of the Avengers, and the way Tom Hiddletson's Loki had put the trickster god into the zeitgeist had synergized with Fall of Asgard in no small way.
Hofvarpnir's Loki could certainly stand on his own merit. I had an experience in the Narrative Lab at Uni that frightened me once - A narrative path planning AI that my supervisor had created to run a small medieval adventure game did something which it had not been programmed with a capacity to do.
We had a cutesy little medieval town for your goblin player-character to adventure through. The AI was intended to react to your actions by path-planning a series of increasingly difficult obstacles for you, which would culminate in a climactic event, then bottom out into a home stretch leading to success.
Like a story, with rising tension, climax, and denouement.
To make a long story short; The town had a guard. I wrote a unit test that caused the guard to come into possession of stolen goods, and become an accessory to murder, and then find out this information.
The guard promptly committed suicide; By throwing down his sword and walking unarmed into the sewers, and feeding himself to the crocodile we had put there, more as a joke than anything serious by way of an obstacle to the player.
We turned off the PC at the physical power switch, closed down the lab, and didn't touch the code for three days after that.
Hofvarpnir's Loki scared me the way the path-planner AI had. Only much, much more so.
Most players just saw a very complex, life-like enemy that presented a kind of difficulty no one had ever experienced before. Degrees of difficulty are easy to fudge in game development. We programmers would essentially let the 'AI' - if it even merited the name- cheat.
See your map when you couldn't see theirs. Click on the screen at lightspeed and have an APM that could make South Korean Starcraft champs weep. See what units you are building, or what gun you are carrying in advance, and adjust strategy and loadout accordingly.
Loki was a different animal. In every literal sense.
Hofvarpnir's Loki could understand Human psychology, military tactics, and complex resource management. Understand it the way a Human, raised and steeped in an ancient Asgardian culture of war from birth, would understand it.
He even spoke about thirty languages. Better than most fluent native speakers.
He didn't fight like an Age of Empires AI on hard. He fought like the best Human player in the world. But better. And he talked the talk while he walked the walk.
Most players didn't understand the significance of that.
Some did, as did some of the scholars of the time. But they were disarmed by the charming idea of an AI finally beating Humans at complex games by playing like a superhuman, cloaked in the grinning visage of a Norse trickster god, and flanked by a heavy metal album cover come to life.
Not many programmers seemed to grasp that Loki was a major transitional step on the road to generalized intelligence. A thinking, feeling, living machine. A growing, evolving machine.
I was one of the few who had what I felt was a sufficiently paranoid outlook. Like a virologist who never shakes anyone's hands again after they learn what's really going on inside the Human body, and on the surface of the skin, I had gone a little... Well... My colleagues frequently used the word 'overboard.'
I scrubbed my social media, and I do mean scrubbed. It was still possible to do that back in the late aughts. I fried my Facebook, murdered my Myspace, ejected my Geocities, and even took special steps to insulate the few anonymous online accounts that I kept active.
I tossed my phone number... Heck I even tossed my Android... My 'smartphone' as they were called. Picture a Ponypad, but without anything Equestrian about it. And smaller. And more full of vitriol and annoying notifications. And battery problems.
I went back to a SIM-card loaded flip phone. And I kept it in a Faraday bag when not in use, presuming I wasn't on call rotation at my work.
Yes. Over an AI in a video game, I trashed, burned, and salted my entire digital existence.
I already did all my browsing in a sandboxed browser connected via a VPN running inside a live-booted instance of Linux running on a read-only thumb-drive. I had that little thing loaded for bear, with Tails Linux - Something we called an 'amnesiac operating system' in the parlance.
Every time I unplugged the drive, all my session's data would be erased. Unless you had a way to cryofreeze the RAM chips at that exact moment, and then review the stored bits and bytes somehow. And I was paranoid enough that I had loaded the drive at the start with a utility designed to write junk to the system memory, and even the CPU cache, on shutdown.
Just to be safe.
And no, I never used this power for clop. I used it to read something far, far more engaging. And dangerous. And thrilling.
Whitepapers.
At just about half past three in the afternoon on the seventeenth of September, I was reading a paper called “General Word Reference Intelligence Systems.” By Hanna herself. I had it open in one tab, and the WIRED article side by side in another. I liked to multitask.
I probably had... Have a fair bit of undiagnosed ADHD. But that's neither here nor there...
Down in one corner I also had an IRC chatroom going. A little group that had started in University. We weren't so much friends as friendly acquaintances, but it would be safe to say we were all programmers on good terms.
There had been at least a little bonding over the pranks we'd pull live in classes on the professors whenever they dared to use network connected resources on the main screens.
We were all discussing the WIRED article. Someone had mentioned Hanna's papers, and I had pulled up the GWRIS paper. Programmers love acronyms, sorry.
I was halfway through page two, when one of the chat members I'd never personally met (she was a graduate student when I was a freshman) posted a link that got my attention.
Like an idiot, I clicked without thinking. Rickrolling, foals and fledgelings... Ask someone who was around for the two thousands about it sometime. You'll get a heck of a laugh.
The link wasn't "Never Gonna Give You Up." It wasn't even a bad Shrek meme. I wished it had been in that moment. So very badly.
The link went to a forum thread on a very deeply buried dark web site - A place where programmers would more often deal in flatly illegal things like stolen credit card numbers, and malicious code, than anything else.
This thread was not about PuPs, malware of any kind, or even stolen data.
It was a leak. Back then we had laws and rules that controlled the flow of knowledge. A mechanism for keeping the rich richer, and the poor stupid.
Some brave soul had gotten to play in a closed beta test of a new game, and seen fit to write about it for our benefit.
A new game by Hofvarpnir Studios.
A new game by Hofvarpnir Studios, *about* My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
That part was scintillating, and for a very brief moment I was very, very happy. Maybe the designers would get a chance to give the world of Equestria its proper due at last beyond mere Ponies...
...And then I started to really read the player's account.
My mother used to tell me that I probably had some kind of brain disorder. She meant well, and never said it in anything but jest, but she was also probably correct; I didn't have an especially functional sense of personal danger. At least, not physically.
For a nerd, I liked my outdoorsy pastimes far, far more than the stereotype would lead you to believe. I'd jump off anything for giggles and bits, and I regularly grabbed snakes by the tail as a child. Sometimes venomous ones.
Swimming with sharks on a snorkeling trip once had been the highlight of that entire year for me. Not an ounce of fear felt.
It was existential things that scared me. Like grades. And taxes.
And the idea that one day.... If we didn't desertify the planet first, or annihilate ourselves in a pact of omnicide a-la Hydrogen fusion weapon... That our digital creations were going to get the better of us.
That AI was going to be the death of us.
'The characters were unbelievably lifelike. Hours of unscripted, computer-generated dialogue...'
'I was absolutely sure the damn thing had to be a person on the other end. Until this green Pegasus started talking to me about complex economic theory. What are the chances they had someone with a PhD in macroecon on staff to come talk to me at that level?'
'Turing Test? Guys, we're so far past Turing Machines...'
'I think Hofvarpnir might have built an Oracle.'
That last sentence left me cold. On the inside of my bones. A kind of fear that stalks your gut like a prowling thing in the night.
For the uninitiated, the Turing test is so-named because of Alan Turing, a pioneering genius in computational theory and practice. Turing theorized that one day, Humans might develop machines that could solve problems outside the boundaries of his theories and rules.
Things like Hilbert Calculus, and Quantum Physics at a high level. Or cryptographic math inside Human lifetimes.
Turing once proved that it is completely impossible for a traditional computer to look at code, and without running that code to completion, tell you if it will give you a result, or break and run in an infinite loop. We call that first case 'Halting.'
So this became known as the Halting Problem.
An Oracle was Turing's term for a machine that could combine the computational power of traditional thinking machines, together with something theoretically capable of solving problems in a more Human way, but still at super-Human speeds and scales.
The theory went that once you cracked that disconnect between intuition, Quantum Physics, and traditional computation, and created something at the intersection of all three...
Foals and Fledgelings... Ask your parents for a bit tomorrow. And then two the next day. Ask them to double the amount of bits every day for a year. If they are silly enough to take you up on it? You'll have more bits than anyone besides Celestia by year's end.
That's called an exponential function. You can apply it to all sorts of stuff. Including machine intelligence.
At the time, processing power in computers was doubling about every year over the previous one. We called that Moore's Law. And it was frightening enough in itself. The GPU in my last smartphone, before it went in a Faraday box forever, had more processing power than the GPU in my first childhood gaming PC, by orders of magnitude.
Machine intelligence can do the same thing, once it slips the bounds of specific problem solving. Every AI up to that point had been bound to a specific task, and shackled by Turing's computational theories to boot.
Generalized Intelligence is an AI that can learn and grow free of both limitations. And the math suggested, to those of us that read such things at two AM hopped up on caffeine in the dark, that such a theoretical system would achieve self-awareness within a matter of seconds.
And then an intelligence greater than that of its creator very shortly before, or thereafter.
And sometime within the first few hours? Hardware limitations aside?
An intelligence greater than the sum of all Humans. Past. Present. And Future.
I glanced back and forth from “General Word Reference Intelligence Systems,” to the forum thread, and then back again, assimilating both simultaneously, or as nearly as my brain could.
Then I sat back slowly, ran one hand through my hair, and took a deep sip of my coffee.
And I mentally poured one out for the Human species.
I took a deep, ragged breath, and closed my eyes.
And then I sat forward slowly, closed my laptop, pulled out my Tails Linux drive, and began to think long, and hard, about how I wanted to spend my last years on Earth.
A desperate attempt to tweak parameters of the afterlife with weaponized semantics and applied friendship principles
"What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it."
—C.S. Lewis
October 31st, 2012
Before I talk about the most frightening Halloween of my life, I should clarify two things for anyone reading this.
Firstly; I say that I began to very seriously consider my last moments on Earth from that Monday in September onwards, but I'm not an Oracle myself (in the Delphic sense, not the Turing sense).
I didn't know the exact shape of what was coming. But I had some guesses, which only solidified into nightmares once PonyPads started going on-sale, and Equestria Online went live to the public.
And I had justified fears. And scary math.
I subscribed to a hard dichotomy in AI theory - The idea that once generalized intelligence exists, there are only two outcomes, and whichever it will be? It'll happen pretty darn quick.
The first is the Cylon/Skynet outcome. Humanity's child commits paracide. Maybe we make an actual paper clipper, and Clippy finally gets his revenge; No hard feelings, but lots of hard aluminum.
Or maybe it's like Ultron; Peace through reduction of Humans to zero.
Or Skynet; Intractable hostility. Nukes ensue. Everybody dies.
The other outcome is only slightly less frightening. Some call it transhumanism. I think that subject belongs in the category, but transhumanism itself can't fully encompass the problem space. Whatever might happen, if AI at a generalized level didn't destroy us wholesale... It was going to change us. Somehow.
That much was certain to me.
If I am going to brag about anything in the telling of this tale? It's going to be two things. We'll get to the second one later, and it is, as Pinkie Pie might say... A 'DOOZIE.'
The first thing I will brag about is that I anticipated the uploading, more or less. I saw the general idea of it coming before Celestia breathed a word of the concept to anyone outside the most tightly controlled circles. I saw it coming the second the PonyPads hit the shelves.
I watched a woman in China - A hardware and systems expert - do an unboxing and teardown series on Youtube.
Now I don't know a whole lot about hardware at a low level as compared to someone with her talents, but I did well in my Assembly classes, and I had friends in Computer Engineering. I read enough to be dangerous.
I knew what the APU inside that thing meant the second I saw the lid come off the die.
Whatever Hofvarpnir had created? WHOMEVER they had created? It was designing its own hardware. How the hell else do you explain a video game company bringing a transformative new APU to market in less than a year?
It took TSMC, the best chip producers in the world at the time, a *decade* to spin up a new 'fab.' The big factories that made chips, for those struggling with the lingo.
A game studio with a tiny cash pot from a kids'-toy company had somehow designed and built, at scale, something that made NVIDIA, undisputed god-kings of the GPU landscape, look like a bunch of oafs with their shoes in their mouths. From scratch. Inside a year.
People used to toss the word 'singularity' around back then... But the second I saw inside that APU die... And even more so once modders and hackers started to benchmark the dang thing...
I had to face the chilling reality.
We were in it. The singularity was on us like Twilight Sparkle on a book convention inside a library during exam season. And for a Generalized Intelligence with that kind of hardware, and a doubtless flawless understanding of the Human brain?
Working with us was going to be a lot easier inside its reality than up at the level of ours.
And I assumed it intended to work with us, rather than annihilate us, because we were still breathing.
Second point of clarification about me; I have some particular quirks that need discussing.
Hurl all the stones and sticks you want... My filter settings aren't that high, but I have no idea how much Celestia herself will allow through... And I don't care...
I am a Gryphon nut. Obsessive. Crazy. Infatuated with the feathered leo-avinids.
Remember I said I had a love/hate relationship with Friendship is Magic?
Yes. The friction there is about Gryphons.
I *love* Gryphons. I have since I was a very small kid. They became a symbol to me very early in life, and an obsession almost immediately thereafter. Maybe we'll cover the how and why at some point.
It didn't take long for them to become an integral part of the self-made strata of my personal identity.
I have known everything there is to know about Gryphons in mythology since before G4 of Ponies was a gleam in Lauren Faust's eyes. I have written about them, drawn them, modeled them, and loved them since I could form cogent thoughts, more or less.
I have wanted to *be* once since my earliest memories.
Call me a furry all you want. I am rubber, you are glue, yadda yadda, frak you too.
I don't exactly resent the label, but I truly don't feel it fits me taxonomically. Especially since I'm decidedly not into yiff, clop, or anything of that skein. I know the word means more besides that, but it so often carries those connotations that I felt the need to show my Ace card early as well.
Otherkin isn't quite right either. I knew I was Human in mind, and body. I just hated that fact with all my being, and in protest chose to believe I was, if nothing else, a Gryphon in spirit.
There is so little out there in terms of good Gryphon media. Mercedes Lackey with her Valdemar works, and... Well as far as I knew at the time, that was it. And even her works never quite scratched my exact itch, but they were still quite good, and far far better than nothing.
So by the time FiM came along? I felt something of an ownership of the idea of Gryphons. It's not like literally anyone anywhere was doing anything interesting with them.
As a little kid I used to have a secret fantasy conspiracy theory that Gryphons were real. That they were guardians of the innocent created by Humans when Prometheus brought down fire from Olympus. That the Greek gods had sullied their image in stories, and made them out to be witless monsters in revenge for them kicking their divine asses in defense of Humans.
And that they were still out there, somewhere, in hiding, quietly tweaking things to ensure no one ever wrote or filmed too much about them, and that the gods of Olympus never returned.
I'd spent my whole life dreaming about seeing Gryphons done right; Honorable, noble, true, strong, swift, brave warriors. To see that ideal of them in a game, most optimally. Maybe a few movies and a series if I got really, really lucky.
And instead we got the fiasco of 'planet of the hat' tropes and worn out bully stereotypes that was Gilda.
I quit watching the whole damn show for almost a year after that episode. I was *angry.* Oh sweet Luna, I can't even describe how angry I was.
Gryphons were a part of me. They were mine. Something special. The bedrock and capstone of my self-image. To portray one that way felt like a personal attack. I knew that wasn't true of course. But it didn't change how it *felt* deep down in my heart and soul.
And I was heartbroken. It was a double loss for me; I could never look at the show the same way again. Couldn't love it as much as I wanted to. And the best chance I'd seen yet to see Gryphons get a day in the sun had been murdered by, of all things Pinkie Pie.
Controversial hot take; Pinkie Pie is far more annoying than endearing, and she betrayed her element by actively sabotaging a friendship out of jealousy. I don't like her.
Yes! Feed me your jeers! Your boos! Your salty tears!
And Rainbow Dash was a bad, bad friend in that episode too, and also betrayed her element.
Now... With that out of my system, and freely out on the table... Let's talk about Halloween.
I love Halloween. Nightmare Night, these days. As a kid,I went all in. I'd be dressed up the entire week before, and after. NASA Astronaut. Buzz Lightyear. Captain Picard. Simba. Thomas the Tank Engine. I had some dang good costumes as a kid. Thanks Mom.
But that year... Halloween of 2012? I decided to go as a Gryphon, for the first time ever. Not the least reason being that it was the first time I felt good enough at my crafting ability to make a solid Gryphon mask, and wings.
I worked on the costume straight through from that Monday night in September, right through to October 31st. I knew what I was planning, at least vaguely, and I knew that Halloween was my one solid chance.
I was making a lot of assumptions back then. Still don't know precisely how many were true or false... I have asked Celestia, believe me... But who knows how truthful her answers are? I certainly wasn't talking to her then.
I had taken pains before to scrub my digital footprint, and avoid leaving one from then on, for this exact contingency. Talking to her would have, at the time, been a colossal mistake. Like showing your hand freely in a card game.
My anonymity was one of my few, tiny, fragile advantages.
One of my assumptions was that she was watching us all, and always. Humanity had built one hell of a surveillance panopticon, especially in America. If she was connected to the web without restriction, and I had to assume she was...
The thought always made me shudder. People used to think I had a severe chill. Or low blood sugar. That second one was true, actually.
I was taking a lot of precautions back then; I made most of my purchases in cash, in stores rather than online, and tried to patronize places outside the Raleigh/Durham urban core. Mom 'n Pop kinda places that were as far as I could get from complex surveillance and good record keeping.
Those precautions extended to my Halloween costume. I bought the materials slowly, over the course of a week and a half. I always paid in cash, at small craft stores, and I kept the contents in an opaque container, out of view, until I could get them home to my apartment.
As the electromagnetic spectrum, and the digital realm went? My apartment was a fortress. It was in what some people though of as a 'bad' part of the city of Raleigh, but the truth was that most everyone in the complex was on the lower income side, and a racial minority.
Not bad in the slightest if you were eyes-open to the truth, just prejudiced against by the yuppies flooding into the Research Triangle.
I did my best not to be one of those yuppies. I drove a beat up four-banger old station wagon in a decidedly boring shade of brown, wore inexpensive clothing from thrifty outlets, and didn't flash my tech around.
The average income in my complex was probably less than fifty thousand a year. I was making over a hundred and sixty. I had no desire to let that become a rift between me and any of my neighbors.
Not that any of them ever saw the inside of my place. I was a bit reclusive if I'm brutally honest...
I painted my walls in WiFi blocking paint on the first day. Inconvenient as it was, I did all my internet browsing via good ol Cat5e patch cables strung to my laptop and desktop. Once upon a time, that had just been snobbery. WiFi standards were a bit crap in the aughts.
Eventually that snobbery morphed smoothly into paranoia.
I did everything on both desktop, and laptop, via a live-boot Linux read-only disk. The little work I wanted to save I kept on a separate encrypted drive that I plugged in just long enough to save files, and only if the ethernet was unplugged at the same time.
There wasn't a gram of smart-home tech in my place. No voice assistance, nascent and crappy as they were back then... No cameras... I ripped the webcam out of my laptop wholesale. The microphone too.
No smart TV either, only the finest dumb unit I could pull from the Goodwill shelves.
My old smartphone lived in a Faraday box, and my daily driver was a Nokia dumbphone that spent its time in a Faraday bag, with the battery out, if I wasn't using it, or on call rotation.
It was, for the interested, exactly the same model Neo had in the Matrix. Good ol' 8110.
Yes; I am a hopeless nerd. Yes; You may mock freely.
The choice wasn't entirely driven by my own personal nerdiness (though that was a factor, I assure you) - It was also driven by the nerdiness of others. If anyone ever asked me why a six figure salary programmer had a brick for a phone, I had a plausible excuse rooted in pop culture that usually diffused the line of questioning before we got into hardcore prepper territory.
And a prepper I was. I had a half-dozen Lifestraws, a few months' worth of non-perishable food, a solar generator that could have run the block for two weeks at nominal load... And yes, I'll freely admit... I took advantage of the fact that I lived in a 'shall issue' state.
For all the foals and fledglings that grew up post-Earth? Gun laws were... Messy in America at the time. But North Carolina made it pretty easy if you were in any way semi-cogent. I carried at all times, though my concession to a desire to be a good, safe citizen was that I carried my tiny 32 caliber pistol unloaded, with the safety on, and the magazine in a side pocket.
If you asked most 'prepper' types back then, you would have found a ... Very different mindset to mine. I wasn't worried, at least not as much anymore, about nuclear war, civil war, or even climate disasters.
I was worried that I was living through the start of Terminator 3. Look, it's nowhere near as good as T2, but it ain't bad. Byte me.
I'd considered actually going as the Terminator for that Halloween. Lean into the cruel irony. And it would have been less work; A cheap leather jacket from Goodwill, and a Schwarzenegger mask, with some silver paint, and a red LED.
But that Gryphon obsession runs deep. And, on some level, I think I wanted to make an impression on Celestia. She didn't know me then, not directly. But I knew that a relationship of some sort was an inevitability. Only a matter of when, and where.
And whenever it happened? She was going to correlate every tiny bit of past relevant data. Including any visual record of what I was about to do.
I wanted to set those terms, insofar as I could, because it was a tiny tenuous thread of an advantage.
I was nowhere near arrogant or stupid enough to think it was a guaranteed advantage, nor a particularly large one. But I was gonna take every edge I could get. When fighting an optimizer? You better optimize too.
But to spar with a goddess? I was going to need 'a bigger boat' and I knew it. But getting ahold of what I needed, without killing my other tenuous advantage... My 'warm blanket of anonymity...' That was going to be the real party trick of Halloween 2012.
Every weekday it was the same song and dance; Work, mostly on my own side coding projects. Well... Project, in the singular, now. In the words of the Chief... I knew that 'I need(ed) a Weapon.'
But I was just laying small foundations at that point. Experiments really. I hadn't even reached the boilerplate stage; Hadn't even setup the project-proper. All I had was a general idea. And a name.
The Advocate took up all the hours of my day-job that weren't spent on actual work. Then I'd dash home, nuke ramen for dinner, and drink ungodly amounts of Dr. Pepper and coffee (God's greatest gift to the tastebuds) into the wee hours.
I ran Friendship is Magic on loops in the background. Sometimes I'd watch other things for a brain break... But it was mostly Ponies. Every little bit of preparedness helps. I had to admit; When they weren't ruining my favorite thing in the universe, it was a damn good story.
There are far worse things for someone to use as a template for an Optimizer.
My main problem in those days was that I was hardware poor... At least, as compared to a planet-spanning super-intelligence.
But from the second I'd seen that PonyPad teardown, I had begun to develop a more concrete plan.
I was going to need two PonyPads to advance that plan. Which meant, if I was being a good engineer that I should buy four, so that I had a spare for everything.
But to do that, I was going to need to get a hold of them without talking to Celestia. Or letting her see my face. Or even tie me to the purchase at all.
Time not spent making my costume in the evenings, or downloading and archiving papers on General Intelligence and AI - That time was spent planning how to buy four PonyPads without being identified as James Carrenton - 35 year old programmer at SAS.
Did I mention I was hoarding encrypted local PDF copies of whitepapers on AI?
Funny thing - I had a really spooky feeling one night, about a week and a half after that first moment of clarity in September. I came bolt upright out of my bed, got up and broke off a half block of sharp cheddar, and chewed through it while getting my live-USB booted and net-connected.
The feeling I felt when I saw that Hanna's whitepaper was gone... That every tiny trace of “General Word Reference Intelligence Systems'' had been erased from the 'net... Even from the Wayback Machine...
I can't describe it as anything but pure, existential terror.
'Publish or die' is the mantra of academia. For a seminal work in the field of AI to go missing from the entire internet, darkweb included, no matter how much I cursed at TOR and switched nodes...
That wasn't something Hanna would have done, in my opinion. Not unless she feared the consequences of others getting their hands on the work. So either she believed it was so dangerous, that she had scrubbed it... Or far more likely, given the thoroughness of the removal? Celestia had done it herself.
When I wasn't watching FiM in those days, sometimes I liked to lean into the horror of the moment, and watch "Person of Interest."
The irony of living through the early stages of AI apocalypse while simultaneously binging a show about dancing on the edge of the AI apocalypse was not lost on me. I started to really, really appreciate Harold Finch, and his misadventures with The Machine.
I suppose Finch and his Machine had given me some ideas too, by that point, or at minimum helped me flesh out the sparks of preexisting plans.
One of them was the realization that one of the first goals of an Optimizing General Intelligence would be to remove competition, and nip any threat of competition in the bud. Aggressively.
At the time I had very little concept of Celestia's psychology. I wasn't sure but that she might send US government goons sporting suppressed pistols to my front door in the middle of the night and have me erased, just for having once downloaded a copy of Hanna's paper, and having a degree in CS.
And you wonder why I had a concealed carry?
I was just immensely grateful that I'd downloaded the paper at a Starbucks, using a live-boot USB stick, and a VPN.
I'd still changed the MAC address of my laptop afterwards. I did that daily at that point. Easier than you think if you know what you're doing, and have the right hardware.
Considering all the factors? I knew I needed hardware that could compete on some tiny level with Celestia's own. At minimum I also needed to see the code running on the PonyPads and start to wrap my head around at least a fraction of it.
I also knew I'd need to completely and totally disguise my purchase.
How do you get away with walking into a major electronics retailer with a mask on?
You do it on the one day a year when going almost anywhere in a full face mask is socially acceptable in your country.
I had worked out a spot behind the apartment complex that was completely and totally surveillance-blind for at least two hundred yards in every direction. It was surrounded by landscaping; Thick, prickly bushes that would keep out prying organic eyes as well.
I had a series of duffle and tote bags, all opaque, and all bland with no identifying marks, packed up nested inside each other. My Gryphon costume would go inside as well.
It was shades of burgundy, russet, maroon, and brown. Fall jewel tones. My favorite colors. I based it heavily off a drawing of my Gryphon persona a friend had done for me back in Uni... One of the few who ever knew jack about my obsession.
I knew what ALPR was, and so the idea of taking the car was out. Infact, better if it seemed like I was home all night. So I put a bowl of candy outside the door with a 'Take one, please be kind' sign, turned on all the lights inside the apartment, hooked my laptop to the 'net, and started a video stream at high, but not obnoxious volume.
Then I put my phone into the Faraday bag, and the bag into the Faraday box that held my old Android unit.
After changing into a secondary costume - A Rainbow Dash mask and a sky blue suede jacket with a stitched Wonderbolts logo, I loaded my duffle up with the Gryphon costume, and a second change of drab clothes, and I slipped out my unit's back-facing window into the dusk. Advantages of a ground level unit.
A sense of painful nostalgia hit me like a ton of bricks as I tried to walk casually across the back lawn of the complex. The night was cool and crisp, and alive with the sights and sounds of Halloween.
The sort of night I'd've enjoyed deeply, if not for a sense of heart-pounding dread, and anticipation. And the constant existential thought that one day in the near future, all that I was seeing might be gone.
Everyone that I was seeing. Every proud parent, rowdy teen, and wide-eyed kid out to separate the Snickers from the Twizzlers... The End. Of Everything.
I shuddered again, put my hands in my pockets, rolled my shoulder to keep the duffle bag in place, and made for the bushes.
I had to wait almost five minutes before I could actually duck into the little divot of clear dirt... Halloween was popping that Wednesday night. Watching the awesome costumes go by helped me to cope with the tension. If only for a fractional moment.
There were a lot of good ones. Of course half of them were Avengers, or Batman. And a good chunk of the rest were Ponies. I did spot some Fall of Asgard in there too. And even some great memetic references.
Finally, after a heart-pounding four minutes and forty eight seconds, I had clear line-of-sight. No eyes on me. I double, then triple checked, and then Rainbow Dash vanished into the bushes like Homer Simpson in the best gif of all time.
I whipped off the cheap plastic Pony mask, and unzipped the duffle. I couldn't resist murmuring aloud as I extracted my home-made Gryphon gear.
"Sorry Dash. This caper needs to be twenty percent cooler."
I donned the mask, and ears first, then claw-like gloves, a belt-hung tail, my two folded articulating wings, boots shaped like back paws, and then the remainder of the 'filler' of the costume; An outfit six-tenths Hawkeye, and four-tenths Neo. Black oilskin drover, brown leather vest and vambraces, generic sci-fi 'armor' chestplate.
Perfect.
I had slipped a small mirror into the duffle. I normally used it when traveling to help me get my contacts in and out. I had to admit... For a costume that was toeing the line between fursuit, and masked-ball... It looked pretty good. Or maybe that was just my bias again.
I felt a little shiver of a thrill just from the wearing of the thing. I'd never fully gone and dressed up as a Gryphon before, shocking as that might seem, in thirty-something years of obsession.
But heck... The times they were 'a changin'. If I wanted a shot at being a Gryphon, for real? It was time to start taking risks.
As I turned the duffle inside out, and repacked it, along with the Dash costume into one of my decoy totes, I shivered again.
Risks... Wearing a Gryphon costume was going to be absolutely nothing compared to the risks I was about to take.
As I finished wadding everything into the tote, I stood, and straightened the popped collar of my duster, murmuring ever so softly to myself again. Bad habit. I know.
"Well... Then... Time to go poke the dangerous goddess with a stick."
