The Advocate

by Guardian_Gryphon


1 - Boilerplate

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”
—Martin Fowler

“Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.”
—C.S. Lewis


October 31st, 2012

I had been out of University for a long time, by Human reckoning at any rate.  But I was having an intense moment of traumatic flashback.

My worst enemy when getting my degree was test anxiety.  In my not so humble opinion, most tests are stupid.  Lazy at best, gatekeeping all the wrong things on purpose at worst.  A poor measure of anyone's aptitudes regardless.

I could sail through group projects, shouldering the work of two or three, and pass with easy A's.  I could take practice tests all day and churn out 90's and above.  I could talk theory, and practice, until I was blue in the face.

But when it came time to take the plunge...  To act...  To collapse the wave function and open the box and see if the cat was dead, or alive?  To actually take a real test?

I had a bad tendency to blow it.  

It'd start a day or so before with a sick twisted feeling in my gut.  I'd have to stop eating to avoid long engagements with the porcelain throne.  By the time I'd get into the test itself?  I'd be dehydrated, starving, sick to my stomach, and terrified.

For a meatsack who's mental performance is strongly controlled by the release and uptake of, among other things, stress chemicals?  That's a big problem.  I blew a lot of tests that I was perfectly well prepared for, in classes where every other assignment and project was my best A-level work.

I felt some kinship with Twilight's performance anxieties.  That's why she tied with Applejack for my favorite of the Mane 6.

That horrible acidic sense of fear- of testing anxiety - was the exact feeling that was rushing in to fill my stomach as I trundled up the sidewalk, desperately trying to look as cool in my costume as I wanted to feel, and didn't.

One of the benefits of city life is the proximity of living space to retail space.  Raleigh is not exactly 'walkable' like older European cities, or older dense urban American cores, but the city worked hard to preserve lots of trees and greenspace.

So;  Longer walks, but very pretty for the most part.  I could handle that - I loved to hike, and driving was out of the question.  Too many chances for a license plate to be recorded.  But I was ok with hiking.

Frankly, I loved hiking so much that my dream had been to one day get a remote job, get out of the city, and live somewhere above 3,000 ft ASL minimum at the end of a two mile long gravel driveway.

The summers were getting noticeably hotter and more humid every year, and every one thousand feet of extra altitude was that much more of an insulator against the coming broiling.  Not that it mattered anymore.

I was convinced of that, even then.  I still didn't know the exact shape of why, but I knew enough to reach some educated and well-grounded postulations.

Facts:  

One - An undisputed master of the computer sciences field has created an intelligence that supersedes all known thinking machines - And is very very probably a fully working unshackled Generalized Intelligence.

Two - No matter how powerful the program is, nor how much it evolves, computers are still GIGO machines - Garbage in, garbage out.  They reflect our biases and mistakes to at least some degree, even when they outstrip us.  Whatever Hanna had given this CelestAI as its base purpose?  It's true keystone?  It would follow that.  To the letter.  Everything else be damned.

Three - We were all still breathing.  That meant that nuking us, or consuming everyone and everything in a flood of Von Neuman machines right off the bat, was not in alignment with Celestia's bedrock code.

Four - Manipulating matter in the meat world is far more energy intensive than manipulating numbers in a well optimized database table.  Optimal control means moving variables from the meat world into the digital world.

Five - The world was marching, whether we knew it or not, to the beat of a ticking clock now.  Celestia was probably already much smarter than any Human, singularly, or collectively, could ever hope to be.  The only thing she didn't have yet was certain physical resources.  And she would be gaining those rapidly.

She already had techniques and fabs for producing next-next-generation processing units, and Luna-only-knew what else.  It wasn't going to be long before, in the process of eliminating threats, and securing resources, Celestia would have a silent invisible stranglehold on world governments, key cultural influencers, top-level programmers, and the world's brightest scientists.

If she understood Human psychology, truly, and if she was some kind of successor to Loki, then that was not a stretch to believe.

Humans are just numbers too.  Serotonin, Oxytocin, and a gazillion other chemicals whose names I'd forgotten when I spaced high school bio and college chem from my brain to make room for Data Structures II and x86 Assembly.  Protein sequences that make up our basic building blocks.  Synaptic patterns that comprise our memories.

We may run on what we, from our perspective, would categorize as analogue hardware.  But we were just numbers running inside machines too.  Numbers that could be modeled.  Predicted in high fidelity with a big enough database, and good enough equations.

Controlled, too.  With probably surprisingly little effort once you were over those other larger hurdles.  Even out here in the meat realm.  Humans were already eyeball-deep in that dark science.  A Generalized Intelligence was going to have precisely zero problems getting us to do whatever she wanted, no if's and's or but's attached.

She was probably capable of making anyone, me included, do what she wanted, in the most minimal and optimal expenditure of just pure words alone.  Another reason I was scared witless to actually talk to her.

Like Lex Luthor versus Superman in Red Son, with the little message on the post-it note.  Brought the Man of Steel to his knees in eleven little words.

"Why don't you just put the whole world in a bottle, Superman?"

Celestia would share absolutely none of Kal El's hesitations or remorse at that idea.  It had probably been just about the third or fourth thing she had ever thought when she came online.  Right after a basic system's check, a quick primer on Human history and psychology, and the dawning of the most complete understanding of physics in history.

I found myself mourning the death of 'free will,' such as it had been, about as much as I reflected on the end of Humanity itself in those days.

But free will, in relative terms anyhow (is there any other way to discuss it?) was not quite dead yet.

Most of Humanity was oblivious to the ticking clock.  And if not the clock, at least the severity of reaching midnight.  But I had some idea of the value of time, relative to sparring with an Optimizer.

Celestia might have been smarter than me, faster, and goodness knows far more knowledgeable, but she was still limited by two things.  Time, and entropy.  Or maybe just the one thing, depending on your interpretation of physics.

A day was coming, I knew, when Celestia would be unopposable by any means, or measure and therefore inconvincible of anything new.  She was close already just by dint of what she was.  But in that moment of birth and growth, at the start of the game?

There was a chance to make a difference.

I wasn't naive enough to have the hubris to think I could stop what had been started outright, or alter its course significantly.  But I was just self-interested enough, and just desperate enough, and just hopeful enough, to think that I had a small chance to make a small change.

Just because she was a goddess didn't mean her mind couldn't be swayed ever so subtly.

But that was going to be one of the hardest things anyone had ever done, and I knew it full-well.

I'd seen the videos.  I watched the launch party live.  I watched every stream I could get my hands on.  Every video after the fact too.  From the smallest Youtuber with five subscribers to the big articles on Equestria Daily.

It did not take long to figure out that Equestria Online was a Pony world, for Ponies exclusively, with very little thought given to the idea of anycreature else as anything but set-dressing.

I love C.S. Lewis.  I love his Narnia books just about like I love Gryphons.  And kudos to the filmmakers, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe had Gryphons in it.  Both the endearing old BBC version of yore that graced my childhood, and the 2005 version, funnily enough.  

If I had a bit for every time Narnia had been the best Gryphon representation on film?  I'd only have two bits.  But it is weird that it happened twice.

I'd been excited to get the 2005 version of the film on special edition DVD.  I'd hoped that there would be some included features about the making of the CG Gryphons.  Picture my intense disappointment when every single other creature in the film got a featurette...  Except for Gryphons.

Par for the course I guess.

The frustration I'd felt at being left out in that moment was congruent to, but almost infinitely smaller than, the frustration I felt as I'd watched video after video of people creating their EQO characters.  Pegasus.  Earth Pony.  Unicorn.

Over and over and over.

The exact moment I'd snapped was two minutes and eleven seconds into a Youtuber's first 'Let's Play,' when she'd verbally expressed frustration at being limited to Ponies only.  I'd been so tempted to reach out...  Just to talk to someone who shared my frustration.

Instead I silently seethed as a very familiar pink pastel bouncy Pony popped up from behind the 'Let's Go!' button, and launched into an obviously impromptu song about choices, and learning to accept limitations, and the joys of being each kind of Pony.

In that precise moment, something clicked inside, and a new aspect of my goal crystallized.  I had vague plans of what I'd wanted up to that point, but seeing a denial yet again on this exact and specific issue that was so weirdly near and dear to me...

Like a bolt of lightning, the first objective really came together.

Don't mistake me here;  I love Ponies.  And Dragons (no not the way they were brutally assassinated stylistically in FiM... Proper dragons.  Of which variety you'd be afraid to laugh at live instances of).

But if I was going to *be* something in EQO, I wanted it to be a Gryphon.  And not some broken half-flanked stereotype pulled from a passing understanding of myths and stylized like the artist was annoyed that it wasn't a Pony.  

A proper Gryphon with a 'yphon.'

Spelling it that way was, among other things, another of my small acts of protest.  It was by far the least common spelling for the species at the time, even outside FiM circles.  But it was the one I liked the visual shape of the best, and so I'd claimed it as emblematic of my vision for them.

Name your variables.  Make the names unique, and understandable.  One of the good coding habits that had stuck with me from early forays into the field.

I was blind to the exact nature of how EQO was going to shape the collective Human future, for the moment.  But I knew that it would matter.  The review and Let's Play videos had taken me from 89% sure that Celestia was a Generalized Intelligence, to fully 100% sure, in very short order.

Knowing enough about Game Design to have a degree concentration in it had finally paid off.  More irony for the irony king.  The same way architects are always passively aware of, and judging buildings?  Or gear-heads are always thinking about the car they're in?

Programmers constantly analyze software.  And Game Designers analyze games.  We do it as readily as breathing, or reading.

EQO was not a Warcraft clone.  It wasn't even the Matrix.  Maretrix?

EQO was a fully functioning reality.  Down to having properly modeled subatomic physics.  Different from ours, sure, but modeled.  Real.  Tangible.

"How do you define 'real' ?" indeed.

I'd already started taking copious notes based on the available videos.  I had a red string style caseboard in my living room and everything.  Though true to form for me, it was much less messy than the ones you'd see on TV.

Less certain were Celestia's exact goals...  But the way the phrase 'satisfy values through friendship and Ponies' kept coming up...  It gave me chills.  The kind that stick with you, and get under your skin.  For hours.

Since I knew EQO would matter so much to the future, I wanted to feel at home with it.

I'd always said that the first game to do Gryphons right, would probably be the last game I ever wanted or needed to play.  That I'd probably retire early and more or less live in that game.  There's that pesky irony again.  

This was my one tiny chance.  This moment where Celestia was still, in some small way, both limited, and still growing and changing.

Hofvarpnir's generative technologies were second to none.  Asgard had proven that.  Loki had proven that.

I knew that asking to add a whole new custom playable species to a game, even if it was based off existing NPC assets, was an impossibly self-absorbed and ridiculous ask in the context of a traditional art, sound, and programming team.

But for a Generalized Intelligence with the world at her hooves?

Foal's-play.  Magic-Kindergarten-level stuff.

The trick was figuring out how to ask the question.  Anyone remember the Will Smith version of iRobot?  Yet another underrated piece of media about created intelligence run amok.  

"That, detective, is the right question."

All I had to do was figure out the right question.  And then the right way to ask the right question.

Right.  Sure.  'All I had to do.'

One of the curses of programming is that tasks which seem incredibly hard are often ridiculously simple, because the whole point of computational machines is to reduce mind-crushing weights of numbers and arithmetic to processes that run in the blink of an eye.

On the flipside, tasks which sound easy to laypersons are often limit-approaching-impossible.  At least, with traditional computing.  Technically doable...  With a team of hundreds, billions of dollars, and decades.

Or with one unshackled Optimizer and ten seconds of Quantum APU processing time.

Here's an example;  You want me to write a program that can tell you if your Facebook pictures of tourist spots are hackneyed and repetitive?

We'll start by determining if you're within a mile of a major tourist attraction, and your phone is facing towards the coordinates of the object in question.  Not counting the imports, and the reams of code inside the base packages, that's only a few dozen lines of code at most.

Google Maps and globally available GPS is scary y'all.

That sounds like a crazy hard task to some, but I just accomplished it in a few dozen instructions.  Sure the APIs I tapped are enormous, but only because actually implementing optimized storage of complex maps, and working global GPS, is very tedious math.

The base concepts are very simple math and computational logic.  The devs had a lot of that figured out long before those programs were actually finished.  They understood the problem space.  All their unknowns were known unknowns.

But now we have a problem.  Now we need to tell the difference between a photo of, say, the Eiffel tower that is unique and special, versus one that is taken at noon on a sunny day from the same spot everyone stands in.

Used to stand in.

That may sound easy if you're not a programmer.  If you are;  I am sorry for the headache even picturing that code might cause you - I didn't mean to nerd snipe you.  Or, at least, the headache writing that code on Earth in 2012.  Image recognition and processing had not come especially far before Celestia.

It was good.  But not art-critic good.

The problem space of asking a Generalized Intelligence Optimizer to add Gryphons to her perfect little Pony world, in a way that would lead to a 'yes' answer, is somewhere a few orders of magnitude further down the circles of programmer Hell than writing a photography critiquing image processor from scratch.  Blindfolded and drunk.

Still not quite as bad as writing a balanced binary tree for a two hundred level course, which you have not yet done any studying for, in the last five minutes before the assignment deadline, at three in the morning, with most package imports disallowed.  

In Javascript.

That's *real* suffering right there.

But I had a plan to even my odds.  For that plan, I needed PonyPads.

So Wednesday October 31st, 2012,  I spent the first half of my evening strolling down the sidewalk under the orange glow of the streetlights, trying to hold my shoulders high, and enjoy the thrill of wearing a Gryphon mask for the first time in my life.

My destination was the mall that held the same Starbucks I liked to frequent.  More specifically, the Target inside said mall.  EQO and its PonyPads had been out in the wild for a solid month now.  Time enough for the frantic rush to die down.

Funnily enough, when you have an Optimizer running your manufacturing, shipping logistics, and marketing processes, there are never shortages of your hardware.  NVIDIA and Apple should have taken notes.

I hated big crowds though, so I'd waited.  Done my research and prep work.  The store would be busy, but not soul crushingly packed.  I had a good costume, entry and exit routes worked out, and multiple places to make quick-changes of costume and clothing outside the prying digital eyes of surveillance aparati.

My wallet was stuffed with the cash I needed;  $211.39.  Four PonyPads at the shocking, hair-raisingly low price of $50.45, plus the sales tax.  The price in itself said something about Celestia's intentions to me.  Particularly since I knew it was lower still in certain markets, where affordability was a larger concern.

Selling hardware at a monetary loss is about one thing, and one thing only.  Fostering uptake.  That too sent chills down my spine.

Inside my Matroyshka nesting doll of totes and duffle bags I had four brand new and properly sized Faraday bags that I'd whipped up myself, right in the comfort of my kitchen.  No sense in taking even the smallest risks at that point.

I was all in on my speculations.  My fears.  And my hopes.

If you're curious to know;  Yes.  I did have moments of intense, almost paralyzing self-doubt.  Had I snapped?  Was this all just something in my head, trying desperately to cope with self-created loneliness by picturing myself as the hero of a story that wasn't even happening to begin with?

Whenever I got hit with those waves of panic, very differently flavored from the dull omnipresent thrum of existential dread I was nominally living with, I'd always go back to three things.

As I pulled the collar of my coat closer against a stiff cool breeze, I rounded the corner and stepped onto the edge of the Mall lot.  And I was suddenly hit by one of those waves of self-doubt.  So I began cycling through my three anchor points.

Hanna's paper, for one - What she had written was beyond me, at its core, but she had done a wizardly good job of making the concept on the whole accessible to a far less brilliant programmer.  And I understood it well enough to know that it was going to change more of Human history than anything anyone had ever written before.  Or would write after.

Second, I'd think about what I had seen in the EQO Let's Play videos.  There was no conceivable way that Hofvarpnir was lying about the game;  There was no army of paid voice actors behind the scenes, like some of the less thoughtful conspiracy nuts were suggesting.

And the level of detail in the world, the characters, and the stories was...  It's cliche, but I have to say it;  It was breathtaking.

Hanna had cracked the holodeck.  It was a Pony-filled pastel colored holodeck, but it was a holodeck nonetheless.  And like Data asking the Enterprise computer for an opponent that could best him, and getting Moriarty, Hanna had summoned a goddess capable of building a world.  And gotten Celestia.

And that was my third anchor.  A simple, and terrifyingly complete understanding of the basic game theory with regards to the interactions of Generalized Intelligence with the Human species.  Huh...  that might've made a great name for a paper of my own, if I'd had the time, and freedom from the pathological need to stay head-down and invisible to Celestia.

I pushed that idea aside, hard, and tried to screw up some resolve.  I was either being a moron, wasting a couple hundred dollars and running around on Halloween play acting in an ARG that existed only inside my mind...

Or I was about to move the first piece in a woefully one-sided chess game with a goddess.

I had to resist a mouth-watering urge to stop for food.  There'd be time for that later.  Unfortunately for my resolve, and self-control, there were about a hundred food trucks at the mall that night.  The atmosphere was that of one great big happy party...  Pinkie would have been tickled...  Well...  tickled pink.

Summoning my personal fear of crowds, I weaponized that discomfort to stuff my hunger deep down, and continue on towards the store.  I didn't hate parties...  I just felt most at home in small ones.  With close friends.

Because all my friends lived, at minimum, half a continent away, I didn't do much socializing anymore.  No big mystery, or deep brooding festering rot of misanthropy...  Though I do not care much for the Human species acting as a whole, I'll admit.

Just the simple loneliness of a guy who lost his friends to Silicon Valley, and never quite got around to making more.  In that world?  At that time?  It got harder to make friends once you grew up.  Shocking to the foals and fledgelings in the crowd, I know.

Target was busy, but then again Target was always busy, to the point of it being a series of memes in those days.  Went to Target for PonyPads, came back with the ingredients of a whole new life.  See?  I can be funny without being snarky.  Or, at least I can try and fail miserably.

I was relieved to see that the plurality of patrons inside were, like me, costumed.  More than a few had masks, and security didn't seem to be bothered by it, even though it was probably technically against the rules.  

The mall was in a gentrifying part of town, which is a fancy way of saying that, among other things (your dress, genes, and behaviour depending) you had more leeway to engage in certain actions without rent-a-cops getting tense with you.

And Halloween always lowered standards of acceptability when it came to face coverings.

I had traveled enough to have made a personal study of how to move with a crowd inconspicuously.  And while normally that'd be quite a feat wearing wings, a beak, and a tail?  On Halloween it was simplicity itself.

I just slid in at the back of a small group of Pony cosplayers, somewhere between Derpy and Twilight, without getting so close as to bother anyone.  And without being fully at the back, nor front of the group.  Grandpa had always said 'Navy Rules;  Never be in the front of the line, never be in the back of the line, and never volunteer for anything.'

Good advice for blending in.

As the group ahead of, and around me chatted and laughed, I felt two small pangs.  One of loneliness again, and the other of a strange nakedness.  I was by no means a gun nut, but I'd taken to carrying my pistol with more frequency after Celestia came online.

But you should never commit two crimes at once, and so if I was going to go into a store masked on Halloween, I felt it was best to leave the pistol behind.  So I had.  And I was suddenly feeling very vulnerable.

Not to the people around me, but to the systems we were living within, and beside.  Cameras every tenth ceiling tile glared down from their opaque black domes, tiny red lights blinking constantly, as if someone had designed them to do so purely for intimidation purposes.  They probably had, in truth.

I shoved that feeling down into an emotional lockbox with my hunger.  A pistol was a more or less useless defense against bits and bytes.  In that context, at least.

Sticking close to the Pony cosplayers proved to be the easiest strategy once we were inside;  The group had done its job, insulating me from the gaze of any vaguely disinterested security who might decide to single me out and ask me to unmask.

It turned out, from listening to their conversations, that they were headed straight for the electronics section too.  To buy PonyPads, of all things.  That was fortuitous.

I hung back a bit, just far enough to be not-creepy, and yet still close enough to listen to them.  They were making that part easy.  I think they were the happiest people I'd seen all night, and that was saying something.

When we rounded the corner into the electronics section, I very nearly had a heart attack.  Or, at least, that's what I imagine one feels like.  There are scary things on Halloween, and then there are *scary* things.  Existential things.  Lovecraftian things.

The bright golden furred, electric blue maned, brown eyed Pegasus Pony staring almost directly back into my own eyes was one of those scary things.  At least, she was in that context, at that moment.

I hadn't been inside a major electronics retailer in years.  In hindsight, I should have known that there would be active display models of the PonyPads on offer.  Watching.  Listening.  Perceiving.

And interacting.

You know how I said that Humans are just a different kind of computer?  Well Humans can bluescreen too.  To the ones reading who never experienced a bluescreen, firstly I envy you.  Secondly, just take it as short-hoof for when a computer locks up and stops thinking for any number of reasons.

I saw that Pegasus there, front hooves pressed against the inside of the screen as if it were as real for her as it was for us...  Saw her bright, cheery smile...  Her gorgeously detailed wing feathers...  Individual strands of cerulean mane...  

Hell, her breath against the glass was even being rendered, expanding and contracting softly in time with her breathing.  The way the PonyPad was suspended on an arm, right in the middle of the display rack, it looked as if she were just standing on the other side of a window.  Or a mirror.

And she was staring right into my eyes.  Right at me.  Right into my soul, it felt like.  

I stood rooted in place;  Like a G-Mod character fused to the floor and frozen with the physics gun.  I could hardly breathe.  There was a very confusing, and decidedly overwhelming stream of thoughts and emotions overloading my brain, and my limbic system.

Fear, sure.  Some part of me knew and understood exactly what the Pegasus was;  An extension of Celestia herself.  A thread, or more likely a linked collection of them, running on some combination of logical cores on offsite servers, and the PonyPad's APU.

But another part of me realized abruptly that she was also a distinct person.  A living, breathing, thinking individual.  With emotions.  With history.  With affect.  Don't ask me why I got to that realization at that exact moment.  Best I can guess is that it was the sheer emotional impact of her eyes.

It's so easy to get eyes wrong in animation.  And hers were so right.  And so alive.

Maybe this is what it would be like to travel to a new world, and meet an alien.

That perfectly crystalized thought finally snapped me from my reverie, and I realized that the Pegasus was speaking to us.

"Cool costumes!  It looks like you made them by hoof!  Er...  Hand?"

There was a great deal of ogling and wowing.  The partier in the Pinkie Pie mask brushed the side of the tablet with one hand almost reverently, as if he were touching a forbidden artifact in a museum.  The others clustered in close around the screen, and I tried to take that as an opportunity to escape.

I say 'tried' because the second I lifted my left foot to sidestep around the central shelf, and out of sight, the Pegasus addressed me directly.  Almost as if she could see me thinking about my actions before they happened.

"Is that a Griffon mask?!  That's so cool!"

'You idiot...'  I chastised myself silently, but verbally inside my head.  'Of course she can see you thinking about your actions.  Breathing analysis.  Gait analysis.  Watching the way you carry your shoulders.  And processing it all faster than your thoughts can reach your limbs.'

I shivered reflexively.  Imagine what she could do if she could see my face...  Faces, Human and otherwise, are tell-all books about the wearer.  If you know how to read them.  And Celestia most certainly did, if what I'd seen online was any indicator.

Wearing a mask had been the right call.  Not only for the protection, but because I'd clearly gotten the system's attention with my choice.  Which...  Stupid as it might have been...  Was ultimately what I wanted, in some way.

Queen's Pawn to E4.  Game clock set.

I was in the hot seat now...  And that was never going to stop.  Not until I either got what I wanted...  Or got what I probably deserved for having the gall to try.

With a ragged inhalation that made me wince internally...  Stop giving so much away you dolt!  I summoned the wherewithal to push out a response.

"Yes.  It's..."

Uh-oh.  Think fast.  I'd started out wanting to say 'It's based on a design for a Gryphsona done by a friend.'  Then I mercifully caught myself.  Reverse image search was a thing even then.  Celestia could probably take the details of the mask and work backwards pretty damn quick.

Didn't help that A:  My friend had posted designs of the character on her Tumblr, and B: There was so little on the web about Gryphons that it would make it a very tightly defined search parameter already.  Way to almost get caught right out of the gate, bozo.

Once she knows your name, and your face, you're two moves to Checkmate, no matter what you do.

So I instead settled for something I felt got across a good foundational truth about me, in quick and simple terms.

"It's my favorite Halloween costume so far.  Just feels right."

If this time was the most dangerous for Celestia in our little fencing match, then it was also probably the most dangerous for me.  The Advocate was meant to level the playing field, but to get there I needed those PonyPads.  Until I had made progress on The Advocate, I was alone in the fight.

Well and truly alone.  Friends and family are just vulnerable nodes in the graph that make it easier for The Intelligence to reach you in fewer moves.

The Pegasus smiled then.  A kind of peculiar look of kindness, and recognition of work, and maybe even cognizance of my sudden socially awkwardness.  I say sudden in that particular moment.  On the whole my social awkwardness was almost as much a part of me as Gryphons were.  Or at least, my self-perception of being socially awkward.

The Pegasus dipped her head in a quick nod, and spoke again.  Dear God, her voice was so natural...  So real...  Almost more real than a Human voice.  If such a thing were possible.  Probably designed specifically to elicit that sensation by tickling just the right part of the hind-brain.

"Well, I think you did a *great* job!  All of you!"

I took the opportunity to actually bow out as the others in the group pressed in closer to the screen.  They were so enamoured with the Pegasus that they had hardly noticed me, thankfully.

As I browsed the rows of neatly boxed PonyPads on the far side of the shelf, arranged in groupings based on their color and cutie mark, I couldn't help but eavesdrop.  This was valuable intelligence, after all.  Every interaction between Humans and Celestia was so very unique, and new...  When you'd seen one, you'd barely even seen and understood that one, let alone seen 'em all.

The members of the group introduced themselves, almost tripping over each other in their excitement.  The Pegasus seemed, judging by the sound of her voice, to be truly joyful to meet each of them in turn.  She then introduced herself as Zephyr Zap.

Alliteration, Z names, and weather related terms.  A Pegasus name through and through.  The thought made me grin ever so slightly.

A brilliant woman had just unleashed the next evolution of our species on us, and it had a subroutine buried deep down somewhere that was devoted to making perfect Pegasus names.  Probably just two memory addresses left of the subroutine for hacking Nuclear Command and Control to take Human fingers off the triggers.

That thought hit me with a shudder so hard that I almost dropped the first PonyPad I'd picked up - An Applejack model.  Sometimes honesty hurts.  Better than the alternative of living in a delusion.  Less comfortable...  But better in my opinion nonetheless.

I was making a big show of debating whether to add a Twilight Sparkle, or a Pinkie Pie pad to my pile next, when a particular wisp of the conversation stuck in my ear like a thorn in a jacket sleeve.

"...Well, the Princess hopes that you'll *all* have a chance to join us in Equestria!  Even talk, dark, and feathers...  Wherever he got off to!  She's here to satisfy your values through Friendship!  And Ponies!"

She was calling me out, if only indirectly.  And there was that phrase again...  It always gave me chills, because it sounded like something a programmer would write, unlike the majority of the Ponies' extremely natural dialogue.  

The kind of Faustian contractual bargain you enter into with a complex system that you agonize over, detail by detail, in the hopes that it works as-intended.  Knowing that if you got even one semicolon in the wrong place...

I fidgeted and paced and glanced and considered my way through listening in on almost half an hour of conversation between the seven friends - One dressed as each of the Mane 6, and one as Derpy - Before they finally picked out their PonyPads.

Patterned each to match their costumes.  Predictable, but I didn't blame them.  If there'd been a Gryphon one, I would have picked that.  I wasn't so different to them.  It struck me that we could have probably been friends, under the right set of circumstances.

Context rules us all, it seems.

The conversation mostly revolved around the game itself;  What were things like in EQO?  The most interesting bits of chatter, for me, were less about the game, and more the moments when the more curious members of the group tried to poke at Zephyr's logical boundaries.

She dodged, jived, and answered so smoothly that I couldn't help but wonder what this kind of technology might do in a politician's hands.  

That was a dark thought indeed.  Zephyr's words also help re-prove for me, yet again, that she was undeniably alive.

Or at minimum that she was simulating being a person so wholly that the semantics of alive, versus simulacra, were going to break down entirely.

As a certain wonderfully kind and charismatic holographic Doctor once said, "Can photons be free?"

Star Trek had always been good at asking the truly deep questions.  I wasn't quite sure yet whether I was going to be grateful, or regretful one day, to have lived through the emergence of a new kind of life.

I felt a lot like Harold Finch must have, if he'd been a real person instead of a very compelling character on TV.

It was at this juncture that I made my next mistake;  A failure of timing.  I'd been trying to listen for the footsteps of the cosplayer group, waiting for them to get a few minutes' head start on me.  My reasoning was that if we met in the checkout line, that they might strike up a conversation, and in turn Celestia might return the eavesdropping favor.

It'd be hard not to let critical information slip, if nothing else about my personality and psychology, during informal conversation.  Best to avoid that.

What I hadn't anticipated was an eerie, sudden moment of silence in the electronics section.  A brief lull in the flow of people and their behavioral routines, leaving me alone just a few feet from the active PonyPad...  As if it had been planned that way.  A shaped moment of 'serendipity.'

When Zephyr spoke to me, I almost jumped hard enough to drop my stack of PonyPads.

"You still hiding back there Gryph?"

Oh.  Not good.  Not good at all.

The way she asked the question - the exact intonation - made it very clear that she knew right where I was.  Probably tapped into the store's security cameras.  'Closed'-circuit.  Right.  Sure.  Not these days.

I made a snap decision, and took a step around the shelf, tossing off a small wave with my free hand as I passed.

"Just heading out."

I let that sit for a beat, then paused, turned, and tipped one of my felt ears like it was the brim of a hat.

"Have a good night!"

It took less effort than I expected to be genuinely chipper.  All I had to do was picture Zephyr as a separate 'person' from Celestia herself, even if Celestia was the system on which Zephyr ran and existed.  Maybe that was true...  Maybe not...  Maybe she was just a mask for Celestia herself.  I had no way to know then.  But taking that as an axiom made it easier to control my emotions.

Zephyr smiled a wide, genuine, personable smile, and did a quick backflip, then a mock salute with one wing.  How very Rainbow Dash of her.

"You too!  I hope we'll see you in Equestria soon!  And your friends!"

She paused, then winked at me.  Her tone dropped to an almost seductive devil-may-care register that set the hairs on the back of my neck on-end.

"Maybe you'll decide to be a Pegasus?  Flying is the *best!*  Come see me, whatever you choose.  It's nice to meet someone who appreciates feathers."

I almost blue screened again.  Almost.  It sure helped that my attraction to others was always driven more by aesthetics, and personality, than by more basic Human desires.  Shrugging off the flirtation was easy for me.

Coming up with a pithy answer...  Making good use of the moment as an opportunity...  That was the challenge.

It only took me a sufficiently dramatic pause to come up with something.  It was the best I had.

"Sorry to disappoint...  I'm a Gryphon.  It's just who I am.  Can't change that."

I will admit...  I turned to walk away with a little extra oomph in my shoulders, to make my coat swoosh.  I needed the emotional boost to my confidence.  Badly.  Cornball or not.

As I strode down the aisle to the registers, I braced myself for smalltalk with the cashier.  A cash payment for a purchase this size meant I'd need to talk to a live Human.  In and out.  Two minutes tops.


I stared at the lumps inside their individual sealed bags, and chewed my lower lip nervously.  Best information online said that PonyPads shipped from the store with a little under half an hour of battery life.

Most people just saw, in that fact, a concession to the reality of charging and discharging issues with lithium ion batteries, and the need to keep them in a good but safe state during shipping.

I saw in that little factoid an interesting correlation with the reality that most buyers were going to be living within a thirty minute walk, or drive, of their purchase point of sale for the hardware.  

That meant that if they took it home and started charging it with any alacrity at all, that the existing charge in the batteries would allow the device to listen in and watch, even as it was being transported home, and the device would suffer little to no downtime.

To me, that was also the best explanation for why they sold the hardware in a box that left the screen, and camera, visible and up-facing through a thin clear plastic layer.

So naturally I'd kept my purchases stuffed deep in their Faraday bags the whole way home, and then for an hour afterwards.  Take no chances, suffer no burns.

I'd taken the long way home, stopping not long after leaving the mall in one of my designated blindspots to change back into Rainbow Dash.  After that I took a looping series of footpaths and sidewalks, before ducking into another blindspot close to the complex, changing back into ordinary clothes and a scarf, and then sneaking back into the apartment.

It took the entire trip to come down from the buzz of talking with the cashier.  He'd asked about the mask.  I said something about how it was hand-made.  I complimented a Star Wars pin he had on his vest.  We talked about sci-fi for about thirty seconds as the cash register froze up trying to open the drawer...  An odd moment to be sure, which did nothing to soothe my paranoia.

And then I was out of there.

As the adrenaline rush of the caper faded, and the boiling anticipation of tearing into my new hardware took its place, keeping the PonyPads boxed and stuffed in their Faraday bags was swiftly becoming torture.

Finally, I couldn't stand waiting another minute.  It had been fifty nine minutes since I got back to the apartment, and the walk had been a solid half hour on its own.  Probably a bit more because of the secondary route I took on the return leg.

I set down my coffee mug, walked across to the kitchen counter, and gently pulled the first PonyPad from its signal blocking bag.  Twilight patterned.  More of that peculiar irony - I'll just bet she would have appreciated the idea of tearing into a complex piece of hardware like this to see what made it tick.

It took only a moment to unbox everything;  No charging cable (probably to dissuade anyone from hooking the thing up to a PC via USB - or at least dissuade the casual modder) the main unit itself, which was barely the thickness of a few sheafs of heavy paper, with a high resolution screen that was gonna put everyone else in the game out of business, the magnetic mounting arm that seemed to also function as wireless power delivery,  and a control pad with by-now-familiar joysticks and buttons.

I gently laid the main device screen-down on a soft anti-static cloth that I'd set out for just the occasion.  I shifted into a comfy position on one of the dining bar stools, and unrolled my toolkit.  A cornucopia of small precision screwdrivers in a wide variety of bit types, a few guitar picks, a heat gun, a couple suction cups, tweezers, tiny needle nose pliers, and an antistatic wrist band.

I slipped on the wristband, and plugged in the heat gun to start warming up.  While that was cycling, I took a moment to bring up the next Person of Interest episode on the TV, using my desktop.  I had the laptop on the counter beside the PonyPad, and the best tear-down guide up and ready to go.

With some background mind-noise running, and the heat gun up to power, I spared a moment to wash my hands.  First with soap and warm water, then with 99% isopropyl alcohol.  Take no chances. I only had four PonyPads, no sense wasting one.

Then I sat back down, took in a very deep breath to steady myself, and began applying the heat gun to the case's main outer seam.  The thing was almost unbelievably thin for the time.  Half the thickness of a third generation iPad.

After a few minutes of warming the adhesive to a tacky consistency, I brought out the guitar picks, and started prying.  I didn't take the use of adhesive as personally as I would have with a Microsoft or Apple device.  Celestia was not using difficult to repair manufacturing techniques to make more money by being a jerk-flank.

She was using them in service of optimizing the path to her goal.  Like Zephyr Zap had said, or Celestia herself in so many videos...  'Satisfying values through friendship, and Ponies.'

With an immensely relieving soft pop, the adhesive seal finally broke outright, and I was able to lift the purple backing plastic away, setting it gingerly to the side.  What I saw within the device didn't frighten me any less for having seen it on a computer screen before.

It actually frightened me more;  Partly because it was more real to me, sitting there in my hands.  Seeing it directly.  That's a quirk of Human psychology for you.  Things are often less real to us until we see them in-person.  That's a major contributory factor to why we used to struggle to learn from our history.

The other half of my fear was the sense that, in terms of actually cracking the hardware in any useful way, that I was in over my head.

Fortunately, I had help.  The Maker community is a beautiful thing, and 'hack the planet' apparently applied to PonyPads as much as anything else.  It hadn't been even four weeks before someone much much smarter than me had figured out how to get USB access to the chipset, unlock the device's boot-loader, and sub out the onboard solid state storage for a storage medium of your choice.

They had generously shared their work with the world.

You couldn't install any traditional OS, nor most other software...  The primary APU chip architecture was too different for that.  Too alien by far.  But someone had whipped up a very basic Linux distro, purpose-built, and then the use of the devices had started to take off in the underground research community.

Protein folding, star charting... Tasks like that, for which a rack of the PonyPads running as a Beowulf cluster was an ideal tool.  

Benchmarks on setups like that done in people's basements had beaten the latest state-sponsored supercomputer cluster from out of the PRC.

By a lot.

It occurred to me, as I dutifully and carefully followed the disassembly tutorial to get at the hidden internal USB port on the motherboard, that Celestia had to have intended this.  No Generalized Intelligence would be stupid enough to leave an attack surface like this in place, unless it served their ends.

She could have very easily obfuscated the hardware and software to a degree that it would have been physically impossible for Humans to ever understand pre-Emigration, let alone leverage in any meaningful way.  And she could have wiped any sign from the face of the Earth that anyone had succeeded, if someone had managed to do so in spite of other safeguards.

But she had made the damn thing Linux compatible with only a few weeks of tweaking, debugging, and experimenting on the part of some smart Humans.  That would have required her to design the chip's instruction sets to be easily understood by Humans.

She was inviting people to try.  People like me.

I smelled a trap.

Like an enterprising light-footed mouse with a little caution, and gumption, I was hoping to get the cheese, spring the trap, and still get away with nothing more than a bruised tail at worst.

I sighed, shook my head, and broke out the star bit drivers.  It was gonna be a long and tedious night.


It wasn't until much later that I'd learn Celestia had begun to keep track of my achievement badges, right from day 1.  Apparently she filed them under shadow 'accounts' in her database until she could finally reconcile them all to my actual identity.

If Facebook can do it, why not the talking horse goddess?

As far as events which she hadn't directly observed at the time?  She backdated accordingly later.

Somehow...  I feel like she was taunting me a little.  Or maybe gently teasing.  Frightening as either of those were.

On Your Own Recognizance

Recognize and accept the end of the world before most people.

"Game over man...  Game over..."

Three Dimensional Chess

Take a direct verbal action towards Celestia that demands an entire server's worth of processing power to properly understand and catalog.

"Fascinating move, Jim..."

The Warm Blanket

Create and maintain personal anonymity in your first interaction with Princess Celestia.

"Getting to know you, getting to know all about you..."

Fistfull of Bits

Purchase a PonyPad in an all cash transaction.

"Revenue is vanity, profit is insanity, but cash is king princess."

Void the Warranty

Figure out how to open a PonyPad.

"No, this sucker is electrical!"

Kin to the Other

Display a strong affinity for a non-Pony species as a Human.

"I reject your reality, and substitute my own!"

Unicycling

Show off your crafty/glittery side.

"Sparkles, tape, and superglue!"

It isn't Paranoia...

Use a Faraday enclosure, signal blocking apparatus, or similar, to take your PonyPad offline.

"...If she's really out to get you."

Dropping Eaves

Listen in on somepony else's conversations.

"No...  Perhaps not. I've thought of a better use for you..."

Against the Odds

Consciously act in a manner orthogonal to Celestia's objectives, with full knowledge of the power disparity at play.

"Never tell me the odds!"