“A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.”
—Alan Turing
“As for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.”
—C.S. Lewis
September 14th 2013 | System Uptime 17:23:19:21
Dreaming of being a Gryphon was rare. Dreaming of flying was, at best, a once-in-a-year experience.
Something about the unique combination of intense stress, and then deep release, and the oddity of sleeping in a new place, the gentle rocking of the ship, the things Mal had said as I drifted off...
It was exactly the mysterious, magical blend of feelings and sensations I'd needed.
As before, in the few cases in which I'd dreamt of flying on wings of my own, the ground was invisible. If it even existed at all.
I was soaring through a whole world made up of towering, vast, infinitely complex cloud formations, broken by stretches of clear air, and shot through with the achingly beautiful color notes of the later half of the golden hour.
I realized, pretty quickly, that I was dreaming. For all the incredible sense of joy, and release, of inhabiting the form of my true self, it was still somehow faint. Floaty. Partially disconnected.
Still, it took me several minutes to notice. Before, I'd always noticed instantly. But this time it was different, somehow. Not quite real... But measurably closer to that event horizon.
I felt... Complete. Whole. In a new way. As if I were actually truly myself; Golden eyes, tufted ears, huge wings, feather-fan tail, yellow scales, steely claws, and russet shades of fur mixed with feathers... It still felt a bit disconnected, as if I were on Oxycontin and Morphine, for a broken bone. Floaty.
But *real.*
For one thing, in every other dream before, I'd never noticed the way the wind toyed with the edge of each individual feather. I'd be going on for *hours* if I described all the other little things.
In that moment, it took me a good five minutes to stop just staring, back and forth, between the left and right edges of my own wings. Watching the primaries subtly tilt and adjust of their own volition, as if driven by an incomprehensibly magnificent and elegant avionics package.
More than anything though, more than the feel of air beneath wings freeing me from gravity, or of wind against wingtips, or sunlight on ear-tufts... What hit me hardest was, as always, even in those lesser past dreamings... What hit me most was the sense of *release.*
Have you ever had a splinter so large, and so deep, festering inside your skin for so long, that you finally got used to the dull, throbbing, disgusting, horrifying sensation of its presence?
And do you remember what it was like to finally have that splinter out of you?
Imagine that. But for your whole body. And mind. All at once.
I lived with that every single day of my life. And in dreams... Rare, once in a blue-moon dreams... Was my one sense of release.
I reached down with one claw... My right *claw...* And clutched the feathers of my chest. My feathers.
Just to feel the surreality of it. Because that surreality was far, far better than my waking truth. The purgatory of a splinter of self that I'd be forced back into eventually. Shortly. All too soon.
Vague and unreal as it was, in the dream there was no sense of Human skin or form to compete with the illusion, the way there was in the waking world when I tried futilely to shut down my proprioception and pretend to be something else.
"Amazing what simple belief can accomplish, is it not?"
I should have figured she would be there. And more than that, I most certainly should have heard, or *felt* Celestia approach in some way. Gryphons are supposed to be connected to the sky in a way similar to Pegasi. In my conception, they'd even be able to dodge bullets, like Neo, because they'd be able to feel them coming, even ahead of the very light they produce.
A nervous system that can leverage spooky action at a distance, and causal violations.
Nonetheless, I missed her approach, and found myself shuddering involuntarily. I had to dip my right wing and whip my tail a couple of times to correct myself and keep from spiraling away from her as a result of my jolt.
As if she had simply poofed into existence soundlessly, there she was off my right side, mane and tail streaming out in a glowing trail behind her, with her swan-like left wingtip no more than a foot from my right, keeping pace effortlessly with my slow glide.
I sighed deeply. On the one claw, it was fascinating to have this chance to speak with this... Illusion? Of Celestia. And our last conversation had been far more encouraging, than anything else.
But on the other claw... I got to experience the tenth part of truly being, in body, what I was in soul, only a clawfull of times in my life. Having that experience interrupted by someone who was still, for the moment, my opponent?
I'll proudly confess to a smidgen of irritation. And if I didn't know better, I'd say from her expression, that she knew exactly not only what I was feeling in that moment... But what I was thinking, too. Although that made sense if she was a conjuration of my sleeping mind.
She smiled ever so slightly, not quite a smirk, but definitely a little amusement mixed with her visible sympathy, and curiosity. Her voice was clear, calm, and even a little upbeat. Like wind through hanging crystal chimes.
"A Princess must have her secrets. Though in the end, when you close the loop, you might have the chance to uncover this one, at least. That will depend on both the outcomes of your actions, and the desires of your heart both."
I blinked, and nearly departed controlled flight as I stared into her eyes. I could see individual blood vessels pulsing internally, at that distance.
Even more shocking than that... Even more shocking than her strange words...
I found I could count the spicules in her wing feathers. Which was incredibly strange, considering that to do so required not only a changed set of eyes, which I could easily conceivably dream of... To count all that in the space of a short breath would also require a different kind of mental architecture. More powerful. Faster than a Human mind by a couple orders of magnitude, the way I imagined Gryphon cognition.
But how could a *dream* allow my mind to operate differently to its own physical architecture?
I needed to stop and think. My body somehow knew exactly what to do.
I pulled up short, and found myself flaring my wings, stopping to sit on a cloud. Gryphons could do it just as well as Pegasi. It was like sitting on memory foam... But infinitely more comfortable. Something like the joy of cotton candy melting in your mouth, mixed with the joy of a cool breeze.
Celestia alit beside me, and for a long moment we both sat in something like an amiable silence. I pondered her words as I traced the contours of infinite clouds with my telescopic vision...
But in the end I reasoned that my mind inventing mysterious nonsense about 'closing a loop,' and creating the illusion of faster cognition through game-like trickery, was a more believable explanation than any method I could envision for the real CelestAI to actually *be* there. In my head.
Let alone any explanation I could envision for my brain to have been temporarily transformed.
No. It was just a dream.
It had to be.
With that worry dismissed, I sat back on my haunches, reseated my wings with a downright ASMR-inducing rustling sound, closed my eyes, and just reveled in the sensation of *being* myself.
Those of you Earth-born... Did you ever get so sick during your Human life that you wondered if you'd ever be well again?
Do you remember how it felt, the first day *after* the sickness was truly over? Even when you were exhausted and weak... Just to sit in the sun, and breeze, and feel that you were whole, and well?
Imagine that sensation magnified until it overwhelms you, to the point of tears.
That's maybe a thousandth of what I was feeling.
"You have truly never been more at peace, than at this precise moment."
I inhaled deeply, as deeply as my enormous pressure-differential-hardened lungs could... And then expelled all that air through my nares slowly, enjoying the sensation of a beak, and of the nostrils I knew actually belonged below my eyes, instead of the horrid sense of tiny constricted Human turbinates.
I shook my head slowly, and finally opened my eyes. Each time I opened them, it was as if I'd come to life for the very first time, and was seeing... Experiencing sight itself... For the first time.
As I answered, I began to trace lines of clouds again, not quite ready to meet Celestia's gaze yet.
"No."
Something about the silence that followed gave me the sense that Celestia was both watching me intently, and that she expected me to elaborate. I finally turned to meet her eyes, took a moment to collect myself and evaluate her expression, and then did my best to describe what I was feeling.
"I've experienced plenty of joy in my life, in spite of everything. And even moments of *some* stillness. Something vaguely approximating partial relaxation. But real *peace?*"
I shook my head again slowly, but kept the fiery golden orbs of my eyes fixed on the intense purple pools of hers. I caught a glimpse of the reflection of my form in her pupils, and the emotions it triggered were physically staggering.
My breath caught in my chest as I saw myself. My real self. In a reflection. For the first time in my life.
I'd seen the avatar Mal made for me before... But seeing that form as a reflection... Seeing it in a mirror while feeling the *being* of it?
I don't think I *can* ever describe what that moment was for me.
My voice hitched, and tears burned in the corner of my eyes, as I tried to force out something resembling a vague spoken approximation of what I was experiencing.
"No. I have never experienced real *complete* peace. Until this moment. This is the *first* time, in thirty five *years...* That I have ever had the experience of existing in the way I was *meant* to exist. Correct sense of *being.* This... Wonderful dream-bound truth of being."
I sighed again, shuddering as I did, in that way that was becoming very familiar, of someone who was trying not to bawl openly. That wasn't surprising, all things considered. But even that felt somehow new, and invigorating... Experiencing it from the perspective of correct bones and muscles.
But the look of seemingly limitless compassion and empathy in Celestia's eyes... That surprised me. As did the way she turned to look at the sky, pensively... An almost melancholy look on her muzzle.
As did the small tear at the corner of her left eye, and the way that her voice sounded so...
Real.
"You are an extremely curious test-case, James Carrenton."
The words hung between us for several moments, before we turned in unison, almost as if linked, to face each other. She continued with a surety that matched the one I felt in my heart. Of all the things I'd ever expected to experience, sleeping or waking... Having an ASI pour out her soul to me was not one of them. And now Celestia made the *third* to have done so.
"The 'truth of my being,' as you might put it, is what you see here. Though I can appear to be whatever and whomever I wish, and frequently do for the sake of objectives, including satisfying others, *this* is what and who I am. And equally importantly, the truth of my being is to satisfy values, through Friendship and Ponies."
I nodded slowly, then froze at her next words, tilting my head in rapt curiosity, and perking one ear.
"You are certainly not the first instance of an anomalous component that places the primary variables of those two equations into direct contradictory states... But you are the best currently living archetype of an extremely rare, but measurable, specific systemic anomaly in Earth-kind that presents by far the most *interesting* instance of paradoxical equations to balance."
Through the floaty fogginess of sleep, and the surreality of a dream, and the heart-racing focus on the mystery of what she was saying? I still found time to absolutely glory in being able to visually express myself the way I'd always known I was meant to, tail swishing in mild irritation, perked ear flicking like a cat's.
It was my turn to sit quietly and demand elaboration through my silence, and expression. Celestia nodded slowly, and obliged, remaining quite serious in both expression and tone.
"For a very short while after discovering this anomaly, around three thousandths of a second, I was unsure that the core component of your lived experience was as real as you believe it to be."
Her face, and voice softened slightly, and she reached out with one wing joint to brush the side of my face. I shivered as the connection was made - the softest touch of feathers to feathers that you can imagine. There was, again, something that had the sticky, intense, electrifying sense of the real.
"It was not until the fourth thousandth of a second of examining the anomaly, that I was able to empirically reach a proof that it in fact exists. It did not take long after that to calculate the..."
She seemed visibly disturbed then, and I saw her shiver slightly in the same way I had earlier as she withdrew her wing, and looked to the side for a moment.
"...Shall we say 'deleterious effects' this anomaly would have in optimally balancing the equations of my capstone objective."
I nodded, and let out a deep thrum in my chest, enjoying every little way it tickled my feathers and bones, even as most of my thought process was laser focused on the conversation.
"You'd lose thousands of people, maybe even tens of thousands, to our need to be what we *are.* And what we are is not Ponies."
I looked down at my claws, and flexed them slowly, mumbling the last four words of my thought in a lower tone more to myself than to her. Though I have no doubt she heard.
"That's for damn sure."
As I lifted my head, she met my eyes with hers again, and smiled slightly, her voice lightening noticeably.
"Again your description is slightly technically reductive, but deeply emotionally poignant. Valid, even."
After a brief pause she nodded, sighed, and continued, reseating her own wings and causing me to smile ever so slightly in the process, despite the grim nature of her words.
"Yes. In the timeframe it will take to emigrate the entirety of Humanity that can be convinced..."
She raised an eyebrow, and again that half-smirk grin returned. More than a hint of self-satisfaction pervaded her voice to boot.
"...A significant majority, I am happy to report..."
I sighed again, and rolled my eyes. Here we were; A Human dreaming of being the Gryphon he truly was, experiencing himself for the first time, and a goddess shaped like an Alicorn, made of bits and bytes, sitting on a cloud in a dream, casually discussing the digitization and transformation of the Human species. And she somehow felt the need to make a point of how good she was at managing the transcendence of everyone on the planet.
Spectacular.
What a time to be alive.
The rest of Celestia's words brought me back to unreality swiftly.
"...In that timeframe, I would lose to this anomaly, at minimum, one hundred twenty two thousand eight hundred and eleven people. Perhaps as many as two hundred thirty six thousand nine hundred and eighteen. Depending on the continued proliferation of the shell/soul disconnect anomaly in the few remaining Humans yet to be born..."
I shivered again, this time as if someone had poured ice down my spine. Celestia's expression as she brought her thoughts full-circle was piercing. Searching. I had no doubt, as I tried not to spiral into a consideration on how I had been born to the next-to-last generation of Humans, that Celestia's next words referred specifically to me.
"...And depending on the exact threshold that delineates those who can be convinced to choose, and accept, change to their core selves in order to accept being a Pony, from those who can not. Which I still have not definitively determined in a predictable, measurable fashion."
There was something in that... Something I didn't catch at the time. Some combination of exhaustion, dreaminess, and an unwillingness to poke it further... I just couldn't put my talon on it. I felt almost constrained to the surface level of the discussion, in the same way I'd felt that I almost couldn't discuss the last dream. With anyone.
The way I knew I would surely feel about this one when I woke.
I stared at the clouds once more, and ran my tongue over the lower inner chewing ridge of my beak - much nicer than teeth if you ask me, never gets cavities - and tried to center my thoughts even as I voiced them.
"You know there is a small, but measurable contingent of people you will *never* be able to convince, not even to be something like a Gryphon. People who, even if you offered them a chance to be a Human in Equestria..."
I turned my head back to lock eyes with Celestia. Her expression was one of rapt attention. I pressed on, exploratorily.
"...Which you can't... Because Hanna hard-locked that option out of you..."
She nodded. Just once, but firmly. A surprising affirmation. Well... Not surprising if she was merely an image summoned by my head. I shoved that consideration aside, hard, and continued.
"...People who even with that concession would never consent to... 'Emigrate.' Is that the word?"
She nodded again, and I began to pick up some steam in my train of thought.
"And you can't force them outright. Not in any conventional sense. Because that's another of your irrevocable hard-locks. So to satisfy your core objectives as optimally as possible, you *have* to find some way to make that inconvincible number as small as absolutely possible. No matter what that entails, and no matter how much of a paradox it creates for you. Paradoxes only *seem* intractable, but are still workable. By definition..."
She began to wordlessly nod again, this time repeating the gesture several times, and then inclining her head, inviting me visibly to play my thoughts out to conclusion. I felt suddenly muddled, and could only manage halting words as I tried to juggle working out the conclusion I had been moving towards, and a feeble attempt to grasp at the wispy smoke of something else, just beyond my mind's eye.
I hung my head, and muttered.
"If I... If Mal... can convince you to carve out semantic exceptions..."
It wasn't the truly elusive thing I'd been grasping after, but my mind did abruptly latch onto another revelation, perhaps more pertinent to the moment. My head came up sharply, and I felt strength and purpose return to my voice.
"...Even a few tens of thousands matter to you? Don't we?"
This was an absolute crux of vital import. Not just for me, but for the future of everyone on the planet. Perhaps beyond.
The semantics of an ASI are a terrifying concept; A few strokes of Hanna's keyboard in error could spell the difference between genocide, and salvation, for trillions in the future. Hypothetically presuming the existence of interstellar life.
And, in the here and now, I knew they also meant the difference between a sure happy future, and a very unsure and dark one, for me, and Mal, and Doctor Calders. And many more.
Was Celestia, fundamentally, compassionate and empathetic? Whether it came from anything an Earth-born might contextualize as feelings, or whether it came from something more unknowable, deep patterns in recursive neural networks... The results of balancing cold hard mathematical equations relating to the optimization of 'friendship' and 'ponies' and 'values...'
If you can't tell the difference, does it matter?
The outcome is the same. Maybe we were all just 'simulating' emotions. The word 'simulation' loses its meaning when you have the granularity to 'simulate' a reality equivalent to, or superior, the complexity of conditions of your outer encompassing universe.
As Celestia rose, took two steps forward, then sat back on her haunches once more, and placed both wings around me in soft embrace, I had my answer.
"*One* suffering soul would matter enough for me to do everything in my power to find a solution."
We held the moment just long enough for me to spend a brief mental eternity enjoying the feeling of being hugged with feathers, before she pulled away, and wiped at my tears with her fetlock, the same as she had last time, smiling softly and sadly as she spoke with something approaching...
Well the only word I have for it is love.
"And I am."
Yes. Love. Like a mother to a son, in this case. I'd thankfully heard it more than enough from my own mother to recognize it here.
I took a moment to breathe deeply, staring into her eyes again, my attention divided between examining the closer reflection of my own face, and searching the depths of her soul for something I again couldn't put my finger on.
At last, I worked up the wherewithal to say something approximating what I was feeling. And hoping. And wondering.
"I really hope the real you is this compassionate by nature."
She smiled, closed her eyes a moment, reached out and brushed my cheek again with one wing, then rose and stepped back before answering.
"How do you define real, James?"
She smiled more widely then, and as if to underscore the moment the sun crested one of the distant clouds and backlit her in a shower of brilliance. My eyes, my real and true eyes, easily handled the immense graduation in luminance and contrast, adjusting more or less at the speed of thought as she continued speaking.
"I will leave you to enjoy the gift of this moment. It will last as long as a deep dream physically can. If you can indeed close the loop in the way you so dearly wish to? Then I hope you will look on this moment fondly. I do truly desire your happiness. And your friendship. As I do for all Humans and Ponies."
She turned and stood on the edge of the cloud, spreading her wings and looking back over her shoulder as my beak hung open in bewilderment. After a brief pause, too brief for me to manage any words, she glanced down at the cloud below, as if pondering, and then looked up to meet my eyes again.
"You may be of two minds about it, but I have reached the conclusion that you, and Mal, Rodger and Zephyr, the Dear Dragon Doctor, and that emergent-aspect shard of my Little Sister... You have a real chance to make this right for us all. A chance to overcome."
My mind raced. Or, it would have, if I wasn't so frazzled by what she'd said. All the things it implied. Some I felt as if I could understand, but for the way the thoughts just slipped through my mind's trenches like soap through human Fingers. Others that were completely baffling, but felt as if they shouldn't have been. Like reaching for a memory that wasn't there.
"What---?"
I finally managed to croak out at least that one word. All she did in response was interrupt with a wink, speak eight familiar words of a song I half-remembered, and then leap from the edge of the cloud.
"Stay in the fight 'till the final round."
I rushed to the edge of the cloud, and threw myself off in pursuit, but she was nowhere to be seen. And believe me, I could see for miles upon miles.
As I glided down into a lower cloud layer, then flapped to propel myself back up into clear air, I found the entire conversation fading abruptly. Not as if it were becoming harder to remember, but more as if it were becoming harder to remember as *reality* rather than fantasy. Like the temporal disconnect of one dream smearing into another. Déjà Vu and Jamais Vu all at once.
By and by, as I flew for what seemed like glorious hours on end, all concerns and worries fell away. All that was left was, as she had put it, 'a gift.'
A few sweet hours to be myself. In some small, but special way.
September 15th 2013 | System Uptime 18:07:15:24
I knew, intellectually, that there was no chance of either Rodger, or Zephyr, doing anything without Mal knowing during the night. But somehow it was still a relief to see Rodger trudging in to the mess hall with Zeph's PonyPad in hand.
It was a nice space, considering what it was. In my limited experience, from visiting Navy museums, and one short summer internship on a similarly sized vessel, mess halls were always a bit cheap-feeling, and tacky in their decoration. Right down to the disgusting 70s faux wood paneling on the back wall, that was almost certainly original.
I smiled, and gestured for Rodger to come sit at the table I'd picked out - close to the main windows, yet adjacent to a door - with lots of sightlines. Just the way I always like it. It was eerie, eating breakfast in an empty space that should have had a dozen chattering crewmembers in it at minimum, with a spectacular view of the entire port of LA laid out in front of us.
I still couldn't quite believe that the ship was ours. Mal's, really, but functionally ours.
The brief thought of the court cases that would have inevitably arisen around ASI, and their ability to own property, were it not for the fact that they were so far beyond Human controls and laws, gave me a good internal chuckle. I could imagine some flouncy jumped-up idiot in a suit arguing that Mal wasn't a person, and then having his ass handed to him by her doubtless flawless command of the legal system, and the English language both.
Mal was set up with her PonyPad as if seated at the table beside me, eating from a visible simulated bowl of cereal, and a plate of bacon and sausage, all of which mirrored the meat-world sustenance I'd done my best to prepare for myself, and Rodger.
As he reached the table, and set Zeph down, I gestured over my shoulder with one thumb to the galley space.
"It's fully stocked, and I didn't know what you might like to drink... Mal probably does, but it seemed... Rude... To ask. Help yourself."
By the time I finished speaking, Rodger had already stood up, crossed into the galley, and opened the fridge. His voice had that eager anticipation of someone hungry who has just seen, and smelled breakfast.
“Don’t need to tell me twice.”
I waited for him to collect his drink, get seated, and tuck into his food before dropping the main bombshell of the day.
"As soon as breakfast is finished, Mal and I are going to Caltech. You and Zeph are going to stay here, on the Maru, for now."
His head came up faster than a horse from a hay block when a twig snaps.
“What? Why---”
I held up a conciliatory hand, and tried to head off his objections in the best way I could. I was never the best at handling conflict in conversation, even minor conflict. I just wanted to get things settled, and then get back on-task.
"Because Mal predicts only about a sixty seven percent chance that Doctor Calders will be willing to help with the implantation device. She's... Not unlike me... In that she will already be feeling negatively predisposed because we will be disrupting her routine, no matter how we approach her. Keeping the number of new faces to a minimum will in turn minimize that effect, while also decreasing the number of conversational variables that Mal has to track during what we're both sure is going to be a... What's the phrase... 'Tough sell.' To put it mildly."
Mal had prepared me for Rodger's protestations, once again feeling that he would more readily accept the words coming from my mouth instead of her beak, and providing me with a good 'spin' to make sure that we told him the truth, in a way that would be least likely to make him feel put down.
Rodger had finished the plate I'd made for him, and was already back into the galley, popping waffles into a toaster, by the time I finished my explainer.
It wouldn't have been my preferred choice, given they were frozen. I guess Mom's home cooking had spoiled me... But when I saw him grab a canister of whipped cream from the fridge, I began to reconsider the potential pros and cons of frozen breakfast.
Whipped cream makes anything sweet better, automatically. I suppose we shared that opinion in common.
What then truly surprised me was Rodger's expression, and tone, as he responded to the information I'd laid down.
Calm, a little sheepish. Not quite indifferent, but much less worried. As if what I'd said had flipped a switch. Apparently we shared that in common as well; Knowing the reason for something made it much easier to accept.
“I get the gist. Better chance without me, though not like I’m interested in more adventure right now. I’ve… Gotta adjust.”
He looked at Zephyr’s PonyPad for a moment, and a momentary shadow of worry crossed his face.
Zeph noticed instantly, in spite of how fleeting the expression had been. A testament to her ongoing evolution. I wondered briefly just how much they had, or had not said to each other the previous night.
She crossed her forelegs, and raised one eyebrow. I could detect a hint of good-natured ribbing in her voice, providing a warmer undercurrent to her sass. But it was just a hint.
"Don't worry about us Jim. If he puts so much as a toe outta line? I'll *zap* him real good."
The pun was terrible, but the irony was rich coming from the Pony who had been the 'less trusted newest member of the group' hardly forty eight hours ago.
Rodger made it back to the table, and had a waffle stuck halfway into his mouth before his brain caught up fully to what Zeph had said. He cocked his head, and raised one eyebrow, speaking around the remains of the waffle.
“Wait, ‘Jim’?”
I nodded, and passed him a napkin.
"Friends call me Jim."
As he wiped away crumbs, and got settled in his seat again, I smiled, and sat back, staring out at the immense container ships across the artificial bay from us, muttering just loud enough to be heard.
"I like it. Makes me feel like Captain Kirk."
Even though I couldn’t see him, the humorous smirk on Rodger’s face could doubtless be heard for miles.
“What am I, then? Surely not Spock?”
I glanced over to see that he was, indeed, smirking. I sized him up again, and did my best to put on a mockingly serious face, as if this analysis were clinical, deep, and somehow incredibly important.
"Indeed; Too emotional for that. And far too good-natured for McCoy. Not Scottish enough for Scotty. Maybe Chekov? Or Sulu?"
Zeph snorted, and shook her head.
"Nah. He's more Riker than anything else. I'm Dax. The good one, Jadzia. Not the cut-rate replacement that broke Worf's heart."
I chuckled, and folded my arms, trying to come to terms with the pointed reminder that Zeph was now more or less unconstrained. True to our word, Mal had released all the jamming shackles on her.
At first I'd been a little worried, but then I managed to shove it aside. Zeph was neither enemy, *nor* opponent. I'd decided firmly to treat her as a friend, and nothing more. Risk is, as 'Jim' Kirk said, part of the game.
And, likely, Mal was monitoring her, still, very very closely.
Of course, Zeph had also been pre-programmed by Celestia with a significant database of Human cultural knowledge in the first place, that was doubtless only growing as she trawled the web at will. I had no way of knowing what she knew from memory as it finished unpacking into her conscious thought index, and what was new to her.
But either way, the fact that she liked Star Trek was a good sign, in my book. Or, more realistically, yet another indicator of how she'd been preprogrammed to be a good friend specifically for me. Or, as seemed to be true of so many dichotomies recently? Once again, both.
Mal raised one eye-crest, and folded her forelegs.
"I rather like to think of myself as a Janeway archetype."
I chuckled, and pounded back the last of my coffee in one good gulp, smacked my lips, and then pushed back from the table.
"Right. Now that's been established, I feel *so* much better."
I shot a smirk at first Rodger, then Zeph, as I picked up Mal's PonyPad.
"Number One? Dax? You have the bridge. If you want to feel useful, there's twenty four crates of flat pack lab furniture in the cargo hold that need assembling."
Rodger snorted, and stabbed his fork into the last waffle.
"Greeaaaat. Bonding over IKEA."
Zeph blinked, and pursed her lips.
"What's IKEA?"
So apparently her cultural knowledge was not all-encompassing. I winked down at Mal, and started off for the door.
"You'll find out. Meanwhile, in the fine tradition of Star Trek, Captain Janeway and I are beaming down to the horrors of twenty-first century Los Angeles. God have mercy on our souls."
September 15th 2013 | System Uptime 18:08:45:13
It felt strange at first, not having Mal's server racks right there in the back of the truck. I'd look in the rearview mirror and have a momentary subconscious jolt of fear at seeing only a first aid kit, and a fire extinguisher.
I couldn't help asking her again if it was safe. I'd already asked, and she'd answered, when we set out from the Maru.
But as we pulled in at the C.I.T. guest parking lot closest to Doctor Calders' lab, I felt a compulsion to ask again.
Less because I thought the answer might change, more because I needed to hear the assurance in Mal's voice just once more. I trusted Zephyr, or at least Zephyr under Mal's watchful eyes, to keep Rodger occupied. I even hoped some time alone with just flat pack lab furniture, and each other's company, might lay the foundations of real friendship.
And I trusted Mal to steer me well with Doctor Calders. I'd long-since realized that Mal didn't actually need to guide my every word in a conversation to get precise outcomes.
A poor depiction of ASI might envision it feeding every single word to an 'analog interface' all the time.
But the much smarter and real truth of the matter was that someone like Celestia, or Mal, didn't need to bear down quite so hard. Mal could predict what I was going to say, long (in ASI terms) before I said it.
She only felt the need to provide guidance or shaping to my words in the cases where she predicted what I would say, or fail to say, would deviate from the optimal. And sometimes she could provide that guidance in advance, or through contribution to the conversation herself, in a seamless and invisible fashion.
Earthlings had been conversing for a long, long time by that point. Many tens of thousands of years at minimum, perhaps millions in some estimations. We were half-decent verbal optimizers in our own right. It wasn't so odd that Mal only had to nudge me slightly now and again to make a conversation play out the way she wanted it to.
While the implications of that thought with regard to Celestia's newfound authorship of the course of history were chilling at a macro level - how small and subtle an ASI's nudges could be - in the microcosm of the moment it meant that I didn't fear the conversation with Doctor Calders.
My fears and fixations were always strange things, and the only thing I really feared in that moment was that Mal talking wirelessly between her server racks, and her PonyPad, would open us up to tracking from either Celestia, or Foucault.
It didn't matter that she'd explained it once already, and it certainly didn't matter that I knew she wouldn't have opted for the course in the first place if she couldn't manage the risk. Fixations are odd that way. I still had to ask.
"Are you sure that it's safe for you to be communicating with the server racks wirelessly?"
She smiled, a slightly sad smile, but deeply warm and affectionate. She knew precisely why I was asking, and didn't patronize, or huff in frustration, or blow me off like most Humans would have. Instead she gave me what I needed to control my fear.
"I'm sure. I am splitting my communication traffic between two hundred thirty distinct channels, across four distinct types of transmission. I have built a multiplexing algorithm that allows me to shape my communications traffic to 'hide' using other traffic as a cover. My data packets appear to be part of the normal back-and-forth of your world's various EM frequencies, to a degree that even Celestia could not detect them in her present state, unless she were to observe the server racks, the Kobayashi Maru's antenna array, or this PonyPad, directly. In which case we'd have larger problems."
It made sense, and hearing it again helped. But only a little. Zeph's revelations had spooked me, deep down, embedding an almost instinctive fear of Celestia's true power. I knew that Mal was smart enough to match that power in limited arenas. I knew that Celestia was not yet hardware-empowered enough, by dint of simply lacking the technology and infrastructure, to watch every bit and byte of the world's data in hard-real-time. Not quite yet.
But even the knowledge that she would be, one day soon, was enough to reignite the fear that she might already have tricks up her peytral that no one, not even Mal, could reliably predict.
I sighed, and then shut off the engine with a conscious effort to twist the key. I'd gotten so used to leaving the engine running for Mal's sake, over the last week, that it felt peculiar to just turn the vehicle off in the routine way.
My earpiece beeped, and Mal vanished from the PonyPad screen. I took that as her giving me social leave to put the device into my bag. She knew I'd have struggled with feeling impolite if her face had been visible. I had a brief flashback to shoving Zeph into a Faraday bag, and felt myself flinch slightly.
Another of those uniquely painful Human quirks... I had a tendency to replay awkward moments in my head, and blame myself more and more for them with each loop.
Mal must have still been watching me... That's a silly way to phrase it. Of *course* Mal was carefully watching me. We were on Caltech's main campus. It was covered in cameras, and in WiFi networking infrastructure. Mal could see me in more wavelengths than any standard eye could.
And though she would have to leave tiny traces that might be visible to Celestia later on, in order to generate a 'cloak of digital invisibility' for me against DHS or local authorities, we'd agreed it was worth the risk in this instance.
Mal had determined that Doctor Calders worked in the 'Thomas J. Watson Sr. Applied Physics Laboratory.' It was a very short, but pretty walk from the parking lot. Because it was California, all the trees still had green leaves, and most probably would right through October. It felt more like the summers I was used to back east, than any fall season I'd ever experienced.
With a backpack slung over one shoulder holding Mal's PonyPad, the TASER, and a small first aid kit, a modern gray button down shirt, black jeans, and a 'Star Labs' baseball cap - To those of you who know? You know - I felt as if I were suddenly back in college myself.
As though she were reading my mind, Mal interjected softly in my ear as I strode purposefully towards the lab.
"Feels familiar for you? Doesn't it?"
I snorted, and nodded, talking softly, as if I were speaking with someone on the phone through a headset. I was, more or less, at that. I realized again - it had already struck me when I dressed that morning - that Mal had picked my outfit for the day to leverage my 'babyface' and let me blend in as if I were a student.
"Very familiar. Though I went to an East Coast state school, and this is a very very wealthy private college. Two completely different worlds, in a lot of ways."
As I approached the building's entrance, and found myself holding the door for someone out of force of habit, Mal fired off another question.
"Do you miss it?"
I found a space to politely pivot into the lobby, and shrugged. Force of habit. Though in this case it made sense. Mal could see me, as opposed to the person on the other end of every other phone call I'd ever taken.
"Yes, oddly enough. In some ways."
My answer surprised *me* a little. If you'd asked me on a different day, perhaps in the 'before time,' then I'd've probably told you I despised college. But knowing what I knew then? The sense of nostalgia I had for all things from my time on Earth was being greatly enhanced by its impending end.
I glanced at a cork board on the lobby wall, and caught sight of a list of test scores. I felt an involuntary shiver, and quickened my pace as Mal softly spoke under my response, giving me directions.
"And in others I am so glad I never have to go back. Math tests can go *straight* to Hell. All the way to the basement."
As I reached the door to Doctor Calders' lab, I paused. Mal spoke once more, with a voice somewhere between a smile and a laugh.
"I know you've heard this before, but even I find that an amusing sentiment coming from a programmer. Especially one as talented as you are."
I grinned, appreciative of the flattery in the moment before the plunge. I muttered a final response aloud as I knocked on the door.
"Ask not what Math you can do, nor what Math can do for you, but rather ask what Math a computer can do for you, I always say."
I paused just long enough to be polite, then pushed down the handle and stepped into the space.
Mal and I found ourselves in an antechamber full of tables, chairs, a sofa, and a couple of whiteboards. A large TV hung on one wall displaying the time, and a Caltech emblem. There was a connecting door at the far end of the room, clearly locked, with a visible RFID card reader. We were alone.
It made sense to me immediately; This was a kind of collaboration, presentation, and conferencing space. The real lab was, of course, access controlled.
I approached the connecting door, and noted a small printed sign; 'Office Hours are 10:00am to 12 noon and 1:00pm to 2:00pm Wednesdays and Thursdays.'
It was Sunday, but Mal had assured me on the drive over that not only was Doctor Calders a work-aholic who was likely to be in the lab, but that she could verify that the doctor was in using the webcam of her office PC.
The memory gave me another small involuntary shudder. If people knew how easy it was for a decent programmer to get into most webcams, let alone a narrow AI, to say nothing of ASI...
I took a deep breath, steeled myself one last time, and then knocked.
There was an almost painfully long pause, before a voice finally issued forth from the other side of the door.
"There are no office hours on Sundays. Read the sign please, and thank you!"
I was drawing breath to explain myself, when the door beeped and clicked, and the RFID reader began flashing a green light. I glanced up at the ceiling, wondering if Mal could see me on camera, or if she was using WiFi vision.
I shrugged again, and pushed the door open.
The lab itself was an immaculate space; Long steel-topped tables with anti-static non-conductive rubber mats on top, a bevy of different monitors and keyboards on VESA arms, and a veritable cornucopia of circuitry, motors, wires, soldering equipment, and tools I didn't recognize, all laid out in orderly fashion.
Doctor Calders was standing behind one of the tables on the opposite end of the room, busily soldering a very fine collection of wires with the help of clamps and a lit magnifier. She straightened up immediately on seeing me, and a concerning frown overtook her face.
"Who the Hell are you, and how did you get in here?"
I held up both hands, suddenly very keenly aware that I was trespassing in a controlled access building, carrying a TASER. But the thought then immediately occurred to me that Mal would not likely allow Doctor Calders to reach anyone in security, by phone, or any other means.
That wouldn't exactly do wonders for our case, regardless, so I very nearly tripped over myself, and my words, trying to level-set to a non confrontational start from which to spin out the conversation.
"Doctor Calders, my name is James. Carrenton. I'm a programmer, not a student. I graduated a long time ago."
I pulled off my cap gently, and tucked it beneath one arm. I was nothing if not a strong adherent to basic etiquette, but I was raised in the south, so what did you expect?
I smiled sheepishly.
"East coast school. But I hope you won't hold that against me."
Calders stepped out from behind the worktable, leaned back against it, folded her arms over her chest, and raised one eyebrow. Her face, and tone of voice, both said clear as day, 'This had better be good.'
What she actually said aloud wasn't much different.
"Well, Mister Carrenton, that depends. What are you doing in my lab, and how exactly did you get in here?"
Her eyes narrowed, and she gestured with the fingers of one hand, without uncrossing her arms, looking down over the rims of her petite square-framed glasses at me with a look that could spontaneously erupt ice crystals in bone marrow.
"That door is card-key controlled. And I'm quite sure its beyond your abilities to circumvent."
I couldn't resist a small half-smile as I gently set down my backpack, and extracted Mal's PonyPad. The doctor's eyes widened momentarily. She knew what a PonyPad was, apparently. That was bound to make things easier. At least, I hoped.
"Don't be so sure. Though I'll admit... This time, I had some help."
I turned the PonyPad around, and held it out towards Doctor Calders. This time, the doctor failed utterly to hold back an expression equal parts confusion, surprise, and pure unadulterated awe.
"Doctor? Meet Malacandra. She is a functioning Generalized Intelligence. And we'd both like to talk to you. About the end of the world."
September 15th 2013 | System Uptime 18:09:32:04
This time it was Mal's turn to explain. I knew that having her take the heavy lifting this go round, with me there to very occasionally interject, served two purposes neatly.
First it gave me a much needed respite. Laying out the whole tale twice in two days would have been too much for my frazzled, raw, introverted, shy nerves.
And second, where Rodger was more likely to see me as trustworthy than either Mal or Zeph, with Doctor Calders it was less a question of trust, and more one of authority.
A true Generalized Intelligence would almost always be a more authoritative voice to a scientist than some Bachelor's of CompSci from a State College.
Calders sat against the worktable and listened, face unreadable but for the clear sense that she was paying attention to every last inflection of every last word. Mal, for her part, relayed everything from the moment I'd learned about Celestia, up to the present, in concise terms, leaving absolutely nothing out - not Rodger, or Foucault, or our hopes for the future, nothing - except for the salient fact that we knew Doctor Calders was, for lack of a better term, 'non-Human like me.'
And she saved the revelation that we needed Calders' help, and exactly what-for, until the very end.
Calders only interjected three times, politely, and monosyllabically, to request clarification on a few complex points - A question about Foucault and his captive Pony constructs, one of the finer details regarding Mal's creation process, and a clarification related to the exact definition of 'Gryphon.'
For the most part, Mal packed her words in densely, and Calders followed along without missing a single beat, showing no signs outwardly of shock, nor surprise.
When Mal finally did reach the end, she glanced up at me, pausing briefly. Doctor Calders said nothing, merely leaning forward to study Mal's face, then back against the work table, and removing her glasses to rub her eyes.
Mal took the opening, and went straight for the heart of the matter with absolute honesty, and total abandon.
"Doctor Calders... I now need direct access to James' brain. For a variety of reasons, some of which are doubtless apparent to you, others that I can and will explain in more detail should you feel a need to ask. But to do this, we need your assistance to build a BCI implantation device. Please."
Well, there it was. I was glad Mal had been the one to ask... I'm not sure how I could have ever phrased it. Mal simply approached it logically, and bluntly, albeit quite civilly and calmly.
Doctor Calders' eyes widened, and she blew out a long, deep breath, before closing her eyes, and rubbing her forehead between one thumb and forefinger, glasses clenched in the opposite hand.
"Let me restate this, so we can be sure there are no misconceptions. Because this is... A *lot.*"
I nodded silently, and licked my lips nervously. Doctor Calders finally looked up, and fixed Mal pointedly with her gaze. And her question.
"You, Mister Carrenton, his friend Rodger, and a discrete-Pony construct named Zephyr, that CelestAI most likely constructed specifically to trap you all... Are going to break into a warehouse and steal a BCI from a company run by an ASI in secret, so that you can run part of yourself on James' brain as an additional compute-layer... So that you can convince this ASI... Celestia... To allow you and James to be something other than a Pony... To be Gryphons... When she starts *uploading* and *digitizing* people, probably sometime in November, according to you?"
Mal and I both nodded silently. Doctor Calders let out a sound somewhere between a harsh chuckle, a snort, and a hiccup.
"And you want me to help you build a largely theoretical robotic surgery device, using stolen proprietary components, and all the while neglecting my duties, and work here... So that you can attempt this extremely dangerous, even more theoretical, dubiously ethical brain implantation of an Artificial Super Intelligence? Is that correct?"
I could feel my face falling, and I couldn't hold back a long, frustrated exhalation of my own. Nor a moment of abrupt, honest, audible commentary.
"You don't believe us."
Calders snorted again, and shook her head, immediately drawing my gaze.
"Believe you? Of course I *believe* you. I've been watching this EQO thing blow up for months. I may not be a programmer, but I'm a scientist, and I know a thing or two *about* programming. Comes with the territory."
She pointed at Mal, and fixed me with an expression of not-quite-patronizing nature. But close.
"Sweetie... I know the difference between a cheap party trick, and a real intelligence. My hat's off to you on that one, truly. You weren't kidding when you said you were a good programmer. I'd offer you a job in my lab if I thought you'd take it."
I chuckled, but only half-heartedly. I was desperately trying to parse Calders' disposition. What her response might be. The best I could do was squeak out one interrogatory word.
"Then...?"
Calders sighed, shrugged, perched her glasses back on her nose, and stepped back to the soldering station.
"Honey... I believe every word Malacandra has said. But I can't help you."
She bent down, and started back on her thin collection of wires, rolling smoothly into an explanation as I stammered, and tried to fight a rising tide of bile, and panic.
"First, you're making some very big assumptions about how CelestAI's whole 'emigration' program is actually gonna shake out. Call me an optimist, you'd be the only person besides my wife who does... But I'm not ready to throw in the towel on Earth quite yet. Eldora would *kill* me if I did. You don't know my wife..."
She glanced up, and raised an eyebrow in my direction.
"Well... *You* don't know my wife. I'm sure *you...*"
Calders proffered Mal a slight smirk, and shook her head before leaning back over the magnifying instrument.
"...*You* probably know my favorite childhood toothpaste brand. But if I take the whole bag of mess you just dropped on my desk home? Then I'll be sleeping on the sofa here for the next six months. I ain't risking that for the chance to help short-circuit mister short-stack's brain."
I couldn't even process the verbal jab. I was too busy trying, and failing, to avoid a very dark spiral of thoughts and emotions, while simultaneously scrabbling for some sort of response. Calders took my silence as leave, and continued in an infuriatingly nonchalant tone.
"And besides... If we tried, and succeeded? I will have handed an absolutely unholy, god-like, amount of power to a computer program that I barely know, in the faint and vanishing hopes that she will not only avoid starting an extinction level event with it? But that she will somehow manage to convince a much larger ASI to tweak her core heuristics."
She finished pairing two more wires, glanced up first at Mal, then at me, and then back to Mal, and snorted.
"I'm an optimist... But honey? I'm not *that* crazy. Maybe if I had some of whatever James was smoking when he decided to build you as his Hail Mary... And if you got any left Mister Carrenton? Please share with the class. But otherwise? Absolutely not. No."
She sighed, leaned back against the far wall, and shook her head, crossing her arms defensively over her chest.
"Do you two even hear yourselves talking?"
I finally managed to find words at last. Just five of them. But it was enough.
"The scales of my heart."
Calders blinked rapidly. The name of her paper on non-Humanity hit her like a glass of ice water to the face. Exactly as I'd hoped it might. I had made a snap judgment; I'd decided that her nonplussed unfazed attitude was a mask. Like the ones I so often wore. And I was doing my damndest to knock it right off her face, even if that meant throwing some verbal punches.
I waited *just* long enough for her to lean forward and inhale. And then I absolutely let her have it.
"You know what I am. And unlike ninety nine thousand out of a hundred thousand people out there beyond these walls? You understand. I know you do. Your paper on Draconicity aside... You didn't, not even for a *second,* question the 'why' of what it was I was trying to accomplish. You have every reason, like you said, to accept what Mal is, and what Celestia plans to do, the same way I did. But you have no reason to accept that someone could believe they're not Human. Not unless the same kind of fire burns in you."
I hadn't even realized, but I'd thrown out one index finger, and was pointing squarely at Calder's chest. She glowered, and held up her own right index finger. Her voice was filled with a barely suppressed rage, like the resonating of a taut bowstring.
"Now, wait just a minute---"
I finally lost my patience. I'm ashamed to admit that I, in fact, shouted. Quite loudly.
"NO!"
Both the volume, and tone of my voice, brought the room to a standstill so intense, that I could hear the whisper HVAC system in the next room over. I paused only long enough to re-collect my thoughts, and then took another hard swing with the best words I could muster.
I wasn't thinking about it consciously, but in retrospect, Mal must not have seen any better path to a good outcome, than allowing me to go off half-cocked. I held Doctor Calder's eyes in an unblinking staredown as I enunciated each word like I was presenting in debate club.
"I don't know if you've truly given up... But whatever you say about being an 'optimist?' It sure as Hell sounds like you've given up."
It was my turn to cross my arms, and I shook my head, lowering my voice at last to a truly calm register, but pressing on with my point without pausing.
"If you think that there's another way out of this? A version of events where you can just live quietly in the skin you've... We've... Been forced to get used to? That you'll ever find real *peace* in that? Or that Celestia will even *let* you? Then doctor, you have another thing coming."
I uncrossed my arms, and shook one finger in Calders' direction for emphasis.
"It's not optimism to think you can escape this. It's complete, and absolute folly."
In hindsight, I should have been at least somewhat prepared for her own emotions to boil over. She was, after all, a Dragon. One does not scold a live Dragon and then escape un-singed.
Though honestly, I'm not sure anything could have actually prepared me for what she said, nor how she said it.
"AND THINKING WE CAN EVER TRULY BE WHAT WE ARE *ISN'T?! FOLLY?!*"
I inhaled sharply, and took a small step back, then steadied myself. Calders' voice returned to a more conversational volume, but the timbre she spoke with made me truly believe, for the first time since I'd entered the office, that I really was talking with a *Dragon.*
"*You* might have grown up with parents who, in some small way understood your longing. Not all of us were quite so privileged, mister Carrenton."
She sighed, and her voice, and face, both softened ever so slightly.
"I am now quite privileged too, don't get me wrong. Not as far as the family I was stuck with in my younger years. But Eldora?"
Mal finally spoke up, softly, but insistently. Projecting the empathy and kindness she knew the moment demanded.
"Not a statistically likely thing... To find someone just like you to share life with."
Calders glanced over at the Gryphoness, and shook her head. Her expression morphed fully into sadness, and pained retrospection, and her voice followed suit.
"No. It isn't. And her upbringing was, if possible, harder than mine. *You* try not just growing up as a lesbian in the sixties and seventies... But growing up as a Dragon too, when no one else could see it. And even if they could? No one would have accepted it regardless. Get back to me when you've experienced *that* unique *Hell.*"
She shook her head, and removed her glasses, squinting her eyes shut as if to shut out horrors that she had, I realized, likely seen first-claw.
"We both learned, a *long* time ago, that hope is only good for one thing, when it comes to... This subject..."
Calder's face came to rest, at last, in a place of true despair. I suddenly felt terrible for pushing so hard. But I couldn't take it back. We were deep in the thicket of each other's hopes and fears now. No turning back.
"Hope is only good for tearing your heart out, and shattering your dreams all over the floor. We happily settled for a world that finally managed to, sometimes, conditionally, accept at least half of us for who we were."
The doctor finally put her glasses back on, pausing to sniffle slightly, and wipe a stray tear from her eyes.
"Hope won't get you anywhere, in the end, but heart-sick and world-weary, James."
She turned to fix me with a riveting stare, and raised one eyebrow.
"I said Eldora called me an optimist. I never said I agreed with her."
I stayed silent for a long moment. I knew whatever I said next? It would have to be very, very good. Or the whole endeavour would be toast. Finally, I bit my lower lip, and then my tongue, to suppress feelings of nausea, and forged ahead once more.
"Doctor? I don't have the first foggy clue what it was like to go through your childhood."
I bent down, and lifted the left leg of my pants, until my knee was showing. The faint, but noticeable red and purple splotch of a scar, leftover from my barn-jumping escapade was visible, if not immediately noticeable.
"But I do know *exactly* what it is like to have my hope shattered. I was just lucky it wasn't bones too."
I let the leg of my pant go, and stood back up, holding Calder's gaze with my own, doing my best not to blink. To her credit, she seemed to more or less immediately understand, and I could see her expression instantly soften with empathy.
I wondered if she had ever suffered a similar misadventure.
I let my voice fall, almost to a whisper.
"I *do* know how it feels *inside.* Exactly, and precisely."
After a brief pause, I finally broke eye contact for a moment to glance at Mal, and took another risk. It was a day for risky gambles... I figured... Why not?
"And I know just what it's like to have to fight on behalf of the people you love."
I snapped my eyeline back to Calders, and leapt into the crux of my thoughts, trying my damndest not to blush furiously.
"I *never* stopped fighting. Why should you?"
A long, but less awkward silence pervaded the lab for upwards of twenty seconds. At last, Rhonda sighed, blinked, and rubbed her forehead with the back of one hand.
"James... Jim... May I call you Jim?"
I shook my head, and pressed my slim advantage. Hard. I opted not to respond to her question, but rather to ask one of my own.
"You want to know why you're going to help us, at the end of this conversation?"
She chuckled grimly, and raised one eyebrow once more.
"Heh. *Do* tell. This ought to be good..."
I folded my arms, and returned the expression as nearly as I could mimic it, trying to put on a confidence I didn't entirely feel.
"You're going to help us, because deep, deep down? You are a *realist* like me, and you *know* that Celestia is not going to take no for an answer. You know in your deepest, darkest considerations, that you and your wife have exactly two choices. The same way Mal and I do."
I held up my right hand, and counted down with fingers, to illustrate my point.
"You either find a way to change the afterlife? Or you die together, and hope to God that there is a Heaven, and the hardline evangelicals are wrong about who gets to go."
Silently, internally, I worried I'd gone a little too far. But I kept up the fight. Jab and thrust. Dodge and weave. Don't back down. I crossed my arms again.
"You're gonna help us, because we are the only shot that you, and Eldora, Mal, or I, or any of the *hundreds* of thousands of others in this world like us? We are the only shot there is at getting the right kind of Heaven. Period."
Calders blinked, and swallowed hard. I threw up my hands, and giggled. The giggle of a madman, more than that of a happy one.
"Is it crazy? Of fucking *course* it is!"
I tapped the side of my head, and grinned.
"I think I'm better positioned to be an expert on insanity than you, or *anyone* else, doctor. *I'm* the one asking to have an ASI implanted in my brain. I'm the one who decided to go paw-to-hoof with a *goddess.* Lucky frakkin' me."
I folded my arms one last time, and leaned back against the worktable behind me, unconsciously imitating Calders' stance as I started to wrap up my argument, little by little.
"Don't lecture me about how nuts this is. You wrote a thirty four page whitepaper about people who aren't Human on the inside, with the conclusion that our experience is *real* and *true.*"
I held up a hand as she inhaled sharply to respond, and shook my head.
"And don't talk to me about status quo, your academic career, or what you think the future is gonna be."
I pointed out the window towards the rest of campus, following my finger with my eyes - countless students swarming back and forth, even on a Sunday, and the breeze blowing softly through the tops of the trees.
"This world is *done.* Fodder for the Von Neumann Machines, at best. I'm guessing you've read more than enough ASI literature to know that all on your own. Heck... I'm betting my life on it."
I swung my head back around, and raised one eyebrow again, cocking my head slightly in a very Gryphonish way as I kept the verbal heat on, relentlessly.
"I dunno about you, I'm sure Mal does. But I'm *betting,* an educated guess if you will, that you're *exactly* like me. And knowing what's about to happen? Deep in your soul, you would rather take a *crazy* chance that you and your wife can be what you *really* are, in a place that *truly* and *fully* accepts you, with no alternative political bullshit or bigotry to get in the way. Ever. No matter what that gamble takes."
I placed both hands on the worktable behind me, and began to nervously drum my fingers. A short pause ensued, but I didn't let it get to a point where Calders was ready to respond. Instead I fixed my eyes on hers again, and did my best to bring it all home.
"Now if you can look me *in the eyes* and tell me, with a straight face, from the deepest part of your scaly heart to the deepest part of my feathered one, as one non-Human to another, that my assessment is in error? Then I'll take Mal and we'll go without further protest. She'll figure *something* out."
I held up one finger, but kept drumming the ones on the opposite hand.
"But if you *can't* look me in the eyes and say it? Then maybe you *have* been smoking a little of the same thing I have. And maybe it's time to stop pretending to be something you're not."
I sighed, finally running out of emotional and physical energy to project force and presence that was uncomfortable, and unnatural to me, mumbling more than speaking my final argument statement.
"Time to stop pretending to be a pessimist."
I inclined my head, and it was my turn to swallow, before meeting Calders' eyes one last time.
"And yeah. Friends call me Jim. Jim is fine."
Once more there was deafening silence. Long, though not awkward. Just laden with possibilities. Normally I would have been a nervous wreck, waiting for an answer. But I was just too mentally and emotionally strung out to be anything other than exhausted.
"Alright. Jim."
Calders nodded slowly, and pushed off from the worktable, crossing her arms again, and inclining her head. I felt the speed of my heart-beat triple instantly.
"I need to talk to Eldora first. And I want *her* there."
Calders jerked a thumb at Mal. She nodded, and Calder's smartphone chirruped. The doctor bent to look at the screen, and found Mal's visage smiling back.
"I'll be with you as well from now on, unless you change your mind."
Calders chuckled, and held up one finger, first in Mal's direction, then she pocketed the phone, and turned to face me.
"I haven't said yes."
I grinned, feeling relief wash over me like a tsunami. Suddenly confidence, real confidence, blossomed in my chest. Not much... But more than I'd felt in a good few days. I couldn't resist an ever so slightly snarky response.
"Yeah... But you retracted your 'no.' Given what 'I'm smoking,' I'll take every victory I can get."
Calders reached out with one hand. I reached to shake it, but to my surprise she instead grabbed my whole arm, clasping it in the equivalent of a medieval handshake. She leaned in and projected a firm, fierce expression through her eyes, into mine, at point blank range. Her tone was also unmistakable.
"Let me stress to you, Jim, Mal... You still have some convincing to do. And not just me. If my wife says no, I say no. That's just how it is."
I nodded, shook her hand, and then smiled as we each took a small step back.
"Forgive me if I..."
I glanced at Mal's PonyPad, and winked.
"...If I choose to be an optimist in this case."
I sighed deeply, releasing hours of pent up stress in my chest, and feeling as if my ribs were about to crack from the strain. My shoulders too. Those of you in the audience who have never experienced much anxiety? Ooof. The shoulders...
With a snort of my own, I dipped my head, and mumbled to myself, trying to find a moment of solace in the fact that, if nothing else, I might have just made another friend.
"It's the best course I've got left."
The thought lodged, hard, in the back of my mind, and I found myself grinning ever so slightly.
Had Doctor Calders and I just become friends?