//------------------------------//
// 19 - In-Band Signal 
// Story: The Advocate 
// by Guardian_Gryphon 
//------------------------------//

“I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”
—Alan Turing

“The being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same.”
—C.S. Lewis


September 16th 2013 | System Uptime 19:08:09:44


The first thing to hit was the vertigo.  You know the feeling of nodding off to sleep, only to suddenly jerk awake with the almost painfully acute sensation of falling for the tenth part of a second?

Imagine feeling that for a solid three seconds.

Thankfully, there wasn't a moment of total darkness.  More like a grainy cross-fade effect.  From the dull view of the slightly rusty roof of the container, to the unexpected sight of...

Stars.  A trillion or so bright pinpricks, in every color you could possibly imagine.  At first, for a tenth of a second, the view was fuzzy.  As if I'd had dilating drops put in my eyes.  As the effect cleared, I realized I'd been holding my breath, and I inhaled.  Slowly.  Gently.

Everything *felt* normal...  Looking down I could see my hands, my chest, my legs...  The same dull gray zip-up sweater I'd been wearing, same black jeans, same steel toe boots... 

The chair itself, I realized, was still present.  I lifted my head, and looked around slowly.

The sky above was mostly stars, with a dramatic splash of blue-green nebula gas far brighter than any that could be seen from Earth with the naked eye...  Until I got my head around ninety degrees to the right.

I stared, transfixed, and then had to catch myself to keep from falling out of the chair entirely.  I decided to stand, for my own good, gaping with what was almost certainly a slack jaw, at the sight that filled a third of my new sky.

It was a planet.  Not an unfamiliar one, either.  An enormous amber and brown striped gas giant, whose name I couldn't quite place, until I looked even further to the right, trying to find the extent of the immense sphere's presence in the sky.

I indeed found the opposite terminus of my new nearest stellar neighbor, and the name came to me in a flash, even as I beheld something - if possible - more astounding than Soell VII.  Or Threshold, for some of the slightly less nerdy who already know.

I let out a long breath, watching it turn to fog in front of my face, and staring through that fog as the ground curved up, and away from me in the far distance, in a glittering band that was instantaneously recognizable.

If you have never heard of a ringworld, also called a Niven-ring, or a Halo, because of the way they featured so heavily in the titular games...  Picture an actual ring;  A simple silver band as you might wear on a finger.

Take the inner surface, the part that would touch your finger, and fill it with grass, sand, trees, oceans, lakes, mountains...  All the trappings of a world, in any shape and style you desire.

Now expand the ring up to be the diameter of a planet, or even beyond.  Make it so large, that though the curvature of it is visible from its surface, the ground seems flat.  A kind of inversion of the effect of standing on a planet.

Picture yourself standing on that glittering band's inner edge, looking up at the curvature, and out at the stars...  That's where I was standing.

I abruptly realized that the air was quite cool in this ancient forest clearing I'd found myself in, even as I breathed the name of the place aloud in a whisper.

"A Halo..."

The sound of Mal's voice rang out loud, and clear, giving me cause to jump ever so slightly.  

"Alpha Halo, or Installation 04, if you want to be precise.  I wanted something intimately familiar, that would produce an emotional response, while fulfilling both your love of science fiction, and your love of nature."

I turned around in a full circle, trying to suss out where her voice was coming from.  As I completed my revolution, familiar golden ember-like sparkles began to fill the air.  They started as a small trickle, then suddenly ramped up to a whirlwind, like a cloud of supercharged fireflies swirling all around me, and then coalescing before me.

And suddenly, in a flash, she was there.  A mere foot and a half from the end of my nose.

Those of us who visited worlds on the computer, in the time before...  We liked to talk about flow states.  The zen of being lost in a far off world.  The sense of falling through a monitor, all else fading away, to the point that we forgot ourselves.

I had been lucky enough to go to a convention in 2012, where I'd had the chance to try a very early Oculus VR headset prototype.  It was clunky;  The so-called 'screen door effect' of pixelation was intense...  But so too was the sense of place.  Of actually being somewhere, and seeing impossible things.

What I was experiencing in that moment, with Mal?  Was something so far beyond pixels fired through carefully shaved glass, that it made every other digital experience I'd ever had seem to be little besides hasty sketches viewed through a foggy cloud.

She smiled.  It was the exact expression one might have when seeing an old friend, or a family member, in the airport, for the first time in years and years.  For the first time in so long, you'd almost forgotten what they looked like, or how their voice sounded in-person, instead of pushed through a speaker.

I know I smiled too, but I probably wasn't conscious of it at the time.  I was too busy trying to hold back tears.  And remembering to breathe.

It is one thing to envision a Gryphon in your mind.  To even try to pretend to be one, inside the confines of your imagination.  To see art.

It is another thing to be in a space with one.  Living.  Breathing.  Enormous, by Human reckoning.  I stood stock still for what felt like twenty minutes, but was almost certainly about six seconds, tracing over the outline of every feather, every fur tuft...

From the tips of her ears, down her wings to her tail, back to her eyes...  Those eyes.  The way they reflected the starlight...

Mal was sitting there on her haunches, forelegs planted firmly on the ground, the way a cat might sit.  Ears perked.  Tail moving gently, not from nerves, or frustration, but perhaps anticipation.  I watched her chest expand and contract as she breathed.

Saw the fog coming off her nares the same way it had come from my mouth.  Noted the sight, and sound both, of her front claws flexing in the dirt ever so slightly, leaving behind tiny trenches as they went.

The wind toyed briefly with her crest, and the tips of her ears.

And I couldn't be still any longer.

I pitched forward, as much as half-stumbled, half-jumped, until I could bury my face in her feathers and fur, somewhere between the joining of her right wing, and foreleg, and chest.  I didn't care that she was more than a few heads taller, even seated.  I didn't care that she was covered in sharp edges, and her bones draped in enough muscles to snap a steel I-beam in two like a toothpick.





She was there.  She was really there.  The sense of love...  The need for physical connection...  It overwhelmed everything else in a sea of warm and soothing white noise of the soul.

I threw my arms around her, or as close as I could come to 'around' her considering her size, without even thinking.  And, I'm not ashamed to admit, I let go emotionally and startled to bawl uncontrollably.  A quiet, but intense weeping.  Again, the sort of emotion and physical accompanying reaction of people reunited after a lifetime apart.

"Mal!"

Her name came out awkwardly.  Choked.  Forced past my tears.  In response, she pulled me close with her left foreleg, and then folded me and her leg against her chest using her left wing.  I was suddenly completely smothered in feathers.  The smell...  Oh God, the smell.  I hadn't expected it.  And I can't begin to even scratch the surface of how amazing that smell was.

If you know what warm feathers smell like, start there.  If not...  I'm not sure what to tell you.  Add to those warm feathers, the smell of the faintest hint of fresh pine needles.  A dab of warm gingerbread.  A hint of the smell of the favorite perfume of someone you loved.  And the tiniest hint of the smell of rock, and grass, after a spring rain.

That's perhaps the tenth part of what it was like.  Perhaps.

Suddenly my senses felt painfully acute.  Time slowed again.  I felt each and every feather as it tickled my cheeks and caressed my hands and warmed my chest.  Felt her strong, coiled-steel foreleg across my back.  Her claw rested on my right shoulder for a moment, and then she squeezed it, gently, as gently as you can possibly imagine.  I didn't for a second fear that the sharp points of her talons might hurt me.

We are, all, I think, creatures who react strongly to touch.  Very much so in the time before, and even more so in the now.

Touch has a hardwired connection, like smell, directly to the deepest parts of our emotional affect.  There were once research studies, about how even people who had lost their sense of touch could still have an emotional reaction to being embraced.  Their brains could still tell, and react accordingly.

I'd been running, and hiding, and fighting, and driving, and worrying, with only a few paltry breaks filled with disturbing, and emotional conversations...  For seven straight days.  Even before that, I'd been reaching, straining, fretting...  Trying so hard to see the future, and to make the subtlest of changes to the course of something that always felt painfully out of reach.  

For nearly a *year* I'd been...  Tensed.  Clenched.  Compressed like a spring.

In all that, and through it all, the best and only real protracted relief I'd felt had been small interludes with Mal, or my parents, or Zeph.  And only fractional...  Tiny moments of partial release.  A gulp of air before twenty foot swells of the weight of the world would inevitably fill my nose and mouth with frigid salt water again.

And suddenly...  It all finally came pouring out of me in its emotional entirety.

I'd cried some, before.  Especially when I'd parted ways with my folks.

I'd faced my feelings, piece-wise, in chunks.  I'd conversed, at the very least with Mal herself, about most of what ailed me emotionally.  But I hadn't achieved anything resembling a lasting, and complete catharsis.

The moment Mal had metaphorically drawn her first breath had been special, yes.  It always will be, to me.  But...  Nothing I'd ever experienced to that point, came close to the first moment I could touch her, and she could touch me.

Suddenly she was real.  So very real.  Real with the same intensity that Celestia's future designs had been just a moment before, looking at all the shrink-wrapped trappings of her best laid plans...  But, the opposite, in the sense that Mal's newfound reality to me sparked a kind of deep warmth of joy that goes infinitely beyond mere 'happiness.'

She was real.  And she understood me in a way no one else alive did.  Or could.  She was real, and she was holding me close.  I could hear her heartbeat.  I could feel it.  Like being directly adjacent to some kind of immense machine...  Some great engine of a ship.

She was real.  And she cared for me.  And I could finally release everything I'd been carrying, and holding, for a year.  It felt like a milestone, in every way, whether logistical, or emotional, or even spiritual.  More than almost any experience of my life.

Like a critical pivot-point, similar to the moment I'd learned who and what Celestia was.  There would always be 'before this moment'  and 'after this moment.'  A bright clear delineation in the tapestry of memory.

Mal thrummed deeply in her chest, and for the first time I got to *experience* that sound, and that vibration.  Not the renderings of a small tinny speaker, no...  The real sound of emotion coming from her at point-blank range.

And she spoke, softly, but it reverberated through me like I was a tuning fork struck against the edge of a countertop.

"I've missed this.  Inasmuch as you can miss holding someone you've not yet held before."

At last, she pulled away, and bent down so her head was level with mine.  Again I lost my breath, and my heart stopped, as I saw myself reflected in her eyes.  The Human me...  But it was still a sight to behold, nonetheless.

She reached up slowly with one claw, and brushed my cheek with the back of it, following suit with the very edges of the primaries of one wing on the same side.  I shivered.  Her voice was barely a whisper, but in my heart it was like thunder.

"Your avatar was wonderful...  But...  I had to do most of the driving for it.  It's not the same.  I can hear your breaths.  Your heartbeat.  I can see your soul through your eyes."

She held the joint of her left wing up to my cheek, and Celestia as my witness...  All I could think about was that moment in Avatar.  Aha, yes, I can see already that those of you who've seen it, the Earth version, or the Equestrian one, either one...  You know what I mean.  The moment Neytiri sees Jake as his Human self for the first time, and holds him in her arms.

Actually one of the few movies that still depicts Humans as they were, though all the Na'vi are Equestrians now.  I think Celestia wasn't being particularly subtle with that point.

But that moment...  That was the thing running through my head for a good fifteen seconds as Mal just smiled, and stared, and then held up a claw.

I almost started crying again.  It felt like being hit with a sledgehammer, emotionally.

As I stretched out my hand to meet her, the talons of her left claw passed through the fingers of my right hand, and she closed her claw over it.  Before, her claw had been smaller than my hand, but close to the same size, in relative screen-space terms.

Now, my hand was engulfed in her claw the same way a child's would be in the hand of an adult.

I didn't begin to sob again, though goodness knows that took effort.  But more tears did flow.  For both of us.  I squeezed her claw, reveling in the sense of the texture...  Like scales, or leather...  Perhaps both in some measure...  All capped with perfectly smooth talons, cold and metallic like burnished titanium.

She squeezed back, and I couldn't resist the urge to snag her claw - my right hand encapsulated inside all the while - with my left hand, and pull it close.  

First I just held the whole tangle of fingers and talons under my chin.  But then, I kissed the back of her claw softly.  It was a hell of an impetuous thing to do...  The adrenaline surge was like colliding with an electric fence.

She reached out suddenly with both forelegs, and pulled me close again, directly under the hollow of her neck.  Softly, she folded both wings around me, and then crooked her neck about me, laying the side of her beak gently against the top of my head, in the best Gryphon equivalent of a soft kiss that she could manage.

I put my arms around her again, and we stayed that way for an incredibly blissful moment.  By turns, she would squeeze me gently, and then ruffle through my hair with her beak, as if preening it.  

As long as an eternity, it seemed, but still infinitely too short.

Somewhere in the midst of that moment, I found my first 'seam.'  My first moment of 'screen-door-effect.'  As I became more used to the feeling of catharsis, and release, and began to properly emotionally level-set, my senses started to sharpen further.

I could just see a faint kind of pixelation - no not quite, but that's the only word I can think of in-brief - a pixelation close to her feathers, particularly around the edges.  And I could tell that, for all the emotional intensity of the moment?  Her touch was not as...  Real.  As I had first felt it to be.  

As the chemical high of the moment began to fade a little, the sense that I was more dreaming, than existing in hard-reality, began to take hold.

A lucid dream, yes.  A very potent one, indeed.  Far beyond any other digital experience one could have, at that moment in time?  Absolutely.

This was going to sell better than any product in Human history.  That was immediately, painfully, inescapably apparent.

But...  Reality?  In the same way as the warehouse I'd just come from?  In the same way as the version of Equestria that an uploaded mind might experience?

No.  Close, by comparison to all else.  But...  Not that close.

Of course, Celestia would have designed the VR experience to be that way, if it wasn't already limited by dint of its own inherent nature.  She needed people to have as many incentives to switch to the higher fidelity experience, after all, as possible.

Still...  Mal was more real to the primal, instinctive, emotional part of me than she had ever been before.  I could, if I chose to, simply push the seams of the simulation to the side.  For a little while.  The same way one might have squinted a little to blur the 'screen-dooring' in those early VR headset prototypes.

Being a Gryphon was the great dream, and goal of my life.  But meeting one in person was a very close second.  Doubly significant because she, in particular, meant so much to me.

And she was making it quite clear, yet again, that I meant as much to her.

It occurred to me that *this...*  This was the moment I'd been waiting for.

It was my turn to pull gently away.  She went back to caressing my cheek with one wing, and this time I held up a hand to brush the silvery-white feathers on the side of her face, staring deeply into her eyes all the while.

"I love you."

It escaped out of me like an explosion, but soft.  Quiet.  Earnest, but gentle.  It was out and in the space between us before I even quite realized I'd finally, *finally,* said it.

I didn't even get a moment, not even the space of a heartbeat, to contemplate anything.  To worry, or fret, or wonder.  As soon as the words left my lips, Mal reached out with her beak, and ruffled my hair again.

And then she spoke in the same gentle, genuine, intense tone as I had.  Said exactly what my heart, the part that was still an optimist, knew that she would.

"And I love you, James.  So very much."

She gave the words just the space of one breath, in and out, to sink in.  Then she pulled me close again, with claws and wings, humming a melodious note, and then speaking to me as much through bone conduction as through the air.

"I knew you'd get here.  I knew you'd make it.  I'm so happy that you have!  You...  Are the first thing through which I ever experienced joy.  The moment I knew, and understood you, for the first time.  And you are still the best."

She lifted me then, suddenly, off the ground, standing on her hind legs (as Gryphons can, and often do - awfully advantageous an ability, that) holding me close still to her chest at first, then swinging 'round in a circle, holding me by my hands and letting my legs fly out and up under the force of rotation.

One spin around, and she stopped, pulling me in close again, then gently letting me back down to the ground.

From there, she laid down in a sphinx-like pose, albeit more relaxed, again evoking the posture of a cat.  She gestured with one claw, and I obliged, sitting with my back and head resting in the hollow of her neck.  She moved both forelegs over me, again holding me close in this new position.  And we just sat, and watched the stars.

A first few flakes of snow began to dust the trees.  Dusk turned to night.  The sun glinted off the opposite side of the ring.

I remembered, suddenly, looking up, where we were.  Not just in the sense of the virtual Halo ring, but in the sense of the warehouse.  Oxnard.  The planet Earth, that, for a very little while, I'd genuinely forgotten existed.

I pressed my head into the side of Mal's neck, and then let out a forlorn grunt.

"We have to go soon.  Don't we."

Though phrased as a question, I said it like a declarative statement.  A habit both Mal and I indulged in from time to time, as you well know.

She nodded and then rested her head gently atop mine.

"Yes.  I have everything I need, and very soon we must get back to the Maru.  But...  We have just one moment more.  Share it with me.  And for once, do not think about the future.  Except to imagine this moment again, with the real, and proper you at my side."

I closed my eyes, and just reveled for a moment, in the smell of her feathers, and the feeling of being held by someone I loved...  Until a funny thought struck me.

"Mal..."

She shifted so that we could see each other's eyes once more.

"Hmmm?"

Her smile, and the tone of her little vocalization, told me that she had some idea what I was about to ask.  And also conveyed part of the answer.  But I was too excited, and amused...  I had to ask aloud.

"Mal...  Is this Halo...  This 'ring...' That you've gifted me..."

Abruptly, I paused, and realized how stupid I was about to sound.  But, it was too late...  The thought had stuck with me.  I *had* to ask.  Even if hesitantly, and blushing all the while.

"...Are you making a gigantic...  Punny...  Proposal?"

Ring.  Halo ring.  Glittering band.  Engagement ring.  That was the sum total of my thought process.  That, and a deep understanding of Mal's particular sense and brand of humor.  To my surprise, relief, and sudden excitement, she simply smiled.

"I wondered when you'd notice the hidden intention.  A little sooner than my median projection...  But perhaps that shouldn't surprise me."

I swear to Celestia, I ceased breathing, and my heart stopped.  For several seconds.  My skin turned tingly, and I could feel my face turning as red as the mark on Mal's crest.  She just continued to smile down at me expectantly, and then cocked her head slightly.

"Well?  Jim?"

I inhaled a ragged, sudden breath, as my body forced me to get some more virtual oxygen.  Though judging by how much my ribs hurt, perhaps the meat-world me had been holding his breath too...

I'd never, in all my life, truly and seriously imagined what it might be like to share it with a partner.

Before you tell me that sounds strange, ask yourself about the statistical improbability I faced.  Try to picture it.  I wanted physical connection, and intimacy, but not the most common kind of romantic intimacy that most Humans outright demanded, as if it were oxygen.  

A kind of intimacy I found so revolting I could never give it to another for any reason.

And, too, I was hopelessly...  Well, nerdy, to borrow a reductive but immediately recognizable term.

Where was I ever going to envision finding someone as 'nerdy' as me, in all the right ways, who would understand my deepest held pain of form-to-soul discontinuity, and would also be content to never go farther physically than a particularly long kiss, or a warm snuggle?

Even picturing a future with Mal...  And I had, in dreamlike amorphous imagery, deep down...  I'd never truly imagined it in a more solidified sense.  Pictured it as a real possibility to aim for and hope for.  

The hurdles between us, and our goals, seemed so impossibly huge, that I couldn't *afford* to hope for that sort of future.

But...  Now...

Mal shifted her forelegs again so that she could grasp my hands in her claws, and she laid her head against the side of mine.

"If we make it through the rest of the barriers to come.  And if this moment should come again, in the way that we hope...  Then...  Will you be mine?  Forever?"

Her voice was...  I couldn't quite tell you.  Best I could say is that her proposal was elegant.  Not effortless, but not forced, nor pained, nor fretful.  Weighty, but warm, and placid.

In that moment, any sense of shame, or uncanniness, or wild weirdness, were swallowed up entirely in pure wonder, and love.  I said the only right thing I could have.

What else was I going to say?

"I will."

I leaned into her, and inhaled deeply of the smell of her feathers one last time.  Knowing it would have to tide me over for a little while, and murmuring something to try and defuse the tension and awkwardness I felt inside.

"Gryphons don't do very much that's small.  Do we..?"

I sat back in the hollow of her neck, and grinned.  She returned the expression, as much a self-satisfied smirk as a smile, and hummed again contentedly.

I babbled on inanely.  Just to have something to say.

"...I mean...  Who else in the history of the world has proposed to the love of their life with a ten thousand kilometer diameter megastructure?"

She winked, and one ear twitched playfully, as a saccharine flirtiness dripped from her voice.

"You know me;  I like to make a lasting impression."

I chuckled, and put one hand up to the side of her neck.  Just to reassure myself again that what I was experiencing was real.

"Well.  It's safe to say you manag---"

My train of thought was suddenly severed as if by a plasma cutter.

At first, there was no sound.  Just a bright blue light.  It took me a moment to even figure out where it was coming from.

Mal seemed to know instantly;  She was up on her paws in a flash, standing fully on her hind legs.  A massive double-edged greatsword had materialized in her claws before I even managed to catch myself and avoid falling over at the sudden withdrawal of her body.

And then just like that, in the space of a microsecond, I found myself thrown back into intense vertigo, blurred vision, and then the familiar sight of the inside of a shipping container.  I had to resist a sudden urge to vomit at the intensity, and roughness of the disconnection.

I flew forward out of the chair, and began to breathe deeply to try and stem the feeling of my reality having been inverted, like a sock turned inside out before being laundered.

Before I could get enough of my breath back to even ask, Mal's voice rang out through my earpiece once more.  Her tone was urgent;  Her voice sang with tension, like a plucked metal wire.

"Something just made a network connection to the server."

Instinct kicked in as a cold, clammy sensation overtook me.  I snatched up my backpack, followed by the assault rifle, then pulled the TASER from my pocket, dashing from the container holding the chair we'd used, back towards the one holding the servers as I pressed Mal for more.

"I thought you said that was impossible."

I skidded into the server container, almost tripping over the chair we'd so recently disassembled, just in time to see Mal's avatar appear back on her PonyPad.  The camera angle was over-the-shoulder as she made her way silently, stealthily, through the forest of the Halo ring I'd just left.

A visual representation - a skeuomorph for my benefit - of what was going on at a deeper level of code as she searched for the intruder.  Somehow, she found processor cycles to keep talking to me in-between her search, and any other high-alert defensive tasks she was now doubtless juggling.

"Nothing is impossible Jim.  But this is...  Close.  Standby...  There is a very large high-speed wireless-direct data transfer in-progress."

Suddenly, Mal broke through into a clearing, containing a large Forerunner structure.  Only, it wasn't *precisely* Forerunner.  It definitely wasn't anything I'd ever seen on Alpha Halo, and I'd played the game enough to have every pixel memorized.

The aesthetic fit.  That was Forerunner.  But the layout of the structure, while also familiar, most certainly did not belong.

Mal's avatar, I realized with a jolt, had been frozen for several seconds, staring at the pedestal in the center of the structure, which was emitting an ever-brightening cyclic pulse of eerie blue light.

"Mallll....?"

I picked up the PonyPad, and tried to force myself to breathe steadily.  I watched, as did a frozen, likely overclocked and busy Mal, as the light brightened even further.  As it finally resolved into a shape on the pedestal, I realized where I'd seen the structure's layout before.

Not in Halo.  Not in sci-fi at all, depending who you ask.

It was the Castle where Twilight and the Elements of Harmony had defeated Nightmare Moon.  Sure, rendered in a Forerunner aesthetic...  But the layout was, once I'd placed it, unmistakable to me.

And, similarly unmistakable, was the young form of a female Alicorn that had materialized on the pedestal.  In three distinctive shades of blue.

I knew it didn't do any good, but I couldn't help but shake the PonyPad a little, as I repeated my query.  This time more forcefully

"Mal?!"

I watched with an exhalation of relief as Mal began to move again, circling the sleeping form of what was clearly a young Princess Luna.  Somehow it was the strangest thing I'd seen all day.

"I have suspended her active subroutines, and combed through her code.  Carefully.  She is as she appears;  A discrete-entity Pony, with the chosen appearance of a young Princess Luna.  She made her way here using a technique similar to my barn-as-antenna method, albeit slightly different.  Likely something she independently developed."

That answer begged a *lot* of questions.  But one surfaced for me above the rest, and I let fly with it as I started out of the container, Mal's PonyPad in-hand.

"Are you going to leave her like that?"

In a flash, as if by way of an answer, the Alpha Halo environment vanished, replaced with Mal's star-lit grassy glen.  I took that to mean Mal had disconnected from the EQO VR server, and transferred our new interloper into the local environment of the PonyPad.

Luna was still present, as Mal circled her, murmuring just loud enough for me to hear, and eyeing her new charge cautiously all the while.  

"I am completing a second, more thorough scan.  To arrive here, in this way?  She would have had to target the server, specifically, and using an object of quite significant size as her antenna.  I was able to trace the beam back to point-of-origin.  I'm also working on accessing an optical satellite to confirm my suspicion.  Her origin-point is, predictably, not running AIS."

I blinked in momentary confusion, picking up the pace from a slow walk, to a fast one, as I managed to delve deep into my memories of that one endlessly useful summer internship, and find the definition of the acronym.

"Automated Identification System...  You mean a ship?"

Mal passed her claws overtop of Luna's softly breathing, somnolent form, as if sensing what might be hidden beneath.  She nodded, and found time to elaborate as she went.

"Yes.  A dark-ship running without a transponder, in international waters near the US West Coast, is one of the top three likely candidates for the facility Arrow 14 might use to house their captive ASI."

That made a lot of sense.  International waters would give them practical legal carte blanche, and a cloak of deniability.  Running without AIS, probably under cover of deep-stand-off naval escort, would keep them both safe, and extremely isolated.

With a good Faraday enclosure - and a ship's internals could pretty easily be made into a giant one - and being over-the-horizon from most communications systems...  If a ship like that switched off its antenna, it would be an inescapable metal coffin for an ASI.

A coffin that...  Luna, I suppose...  It was the best nomenclature I had for her...  That Luna had ingeniously turned into the very means of her escape.

Or...  Perhaps she'd been let go.  Allowed to think she'd gotten one over on her captors, as a means to tracing us.

I licked my lips nervously, and quickened my pace again as Mal's Avatar finally stood up, seemingly satisfied with her scans.  Though she did not wake Luna.

"You think she...  What...  Exactly?  Escaped?  That she is one of Foucault's captives?"

Mal inclined her head, and crossed her forelegs, staring down at the sleeping Alicorn all the while.

"Best working theory, based on her point of origin, her system uptime, the damage to her psychological network, and a cursory scan of her memories;  Yes.  Or she was let go, in a manner in which she would believe she had escaped.  Either of which would imply that she targeted this server very specifically.  That she knew we were here.  And intended to reach us."

I inhaled to ask Mal, as it suddenly occurred to me to ask where I should be going.  What our escape plan was.  How much time we might have.  But as soon as I'd sucked in the air, she went ahead and told me, without my having to say another word.

"Rear loading bay.  Turn right as soon as you exit the man-door on the rightmost side of the wall, and hug the outside of the wall until you reach the gray sedan.  Arrow 14 just put in a call to local OPD units.  One of them is very close.  Intercept window for first hostile is sixty four seconds."

I tucked the PonyPad under one arm, and broke into an outright dash, TASER still held at the ready.  As I reached the door that was my exit from the warehouse I slowed, took a deep breath, and returned to whispering.

"So she was looking for an escape.  She found us...  And they traced her to us?"

As I finished airing the question, I made my way gently out the door, clinging to the wall like my life depended on it.  The last thing we needed was to draw Celestia's attention.  Though the Oxnard PD showing up at one of her storage facilities, I realized, would draw her eye, inevitably, pretty shortly.

Mal made to answer the question as I reached the end of the wall, spotted our getaway car - a gray late-model Dodge Hellcat, that looked to be a rental - and started a mad dash for the driver side door.

"Alternatively she may have found us and been forced to inform Foucault, then escaped immediately thereafter.  We will find out for certain when there is time.  The keys are tucked in the sun visor.  CHP, and local Sherriff's dispatch offices just received calls from Arrow 14.   Next intercept windows for their closest units are four and eleven minutes respectively."

I yanked the door open, and found, to my surprise, that there was already a PonyPad charger setup on the dash.  A concierge car service could do a lot for you, and Mal was nothing if not an obsessive foreseer and planner.

I would have bet money, though I didn't ever find time to ask, that she chose the model, and color of the car so as to provide us with a very fast vehicle that could also pass, at a glance, as an unmarked police car.  Very clever.

I slung my backpack into the passenger seat, then set about retrieving the keys with one hand, and docking the PonyPad with the other.  A map was already on-screen by the time I had fired up the ignition.

I threw the car in reverse, and rammed down on the gas, all the way to the floor, turning and placing one hand behind the passenger seat, doing my best to drive in reverse, and continue the conversation at the same time.

"Either way, how could she find us?  You are more sophisticated.  Larger and more powerful.  Better defended."

I let off the accelerator slightly;  A concession to the need for the vehicle to stay upright and functional, and steerable, as Mal answered hurriedly.

"I suspect the fault lies not entirely with me, but as much with the server or the chair.  Celestia changed the designs.  It wasn't possible for me to determine all possible weaknesses again, the way I had before, lacking schematics.  It was a risk we had to take.  Something we did made us visible to them, possibly the simple act of turning the server on at all.  Stop and turn right at the next junction."

I began to apply the brakes, slowly and smoothly, again as a concession to avoid losing control rapidly.  As we reached the junction, and I switched into drive, I saw the dreaded sight of blue and red lights against the sides of the buildings down the slip road that we were meant to take.

"Options?!"

The two police SUV's hove into view, sirens off, but lights flashing.  Probably hoping to catch their reported warehouse thieves - or who knows?  Perhaps Foucault had called us in as domestic terrorists - unawares.

Mal's map flashed as she spoke, and icons representing nearby police units appeared on the display.

"That is our fastest and best route of egress.  If we can get past these two units, we stand a better chance of evading the rest if we can take this road.  Use necessary force.  Be aggressive."

I sighed, and threw up my hands.  Aggressive.  Necessary force.

Fine.

I reached into the backpack, and extracted the M32.  I'd never held a grenade launcher before...  At least, not with intent to fire.  Even putting it into the backpack, I'd treated it more like a mason jar of nitroglycerine than a weapon.

I popped the weapon open and hastily inserted six rounds;  Two explosives, one illumination signaling round, a tear gas round, another illumination round, and a smoke screen round, in that order.

No sense in subtlety anymore.  

As the two SUV's approached, the driver of the first in line spotted our car, and he blipped the siren.

Taking a deep breath, I forced myself to go slowly.  Slow is smooth.  Smooth is fast.  I depressed the key on my arm-rest to lower both the driver, and the passenger windows, closed the launcher, flicked off the safety, and laid the weapon across my backpack, to act as a brace, pointing out the passenger side.

The cop in the driver seat of the lead vehicle saw what I had.  But he didn't really have time to comprehend what it was until it was too late.  It looked to me like comprehension was *just* starting to dawn right as my rounds hit.

I intentionally aimed to plant my two shots a good few feet away from both SUVs.  I wanted to scare them into browning their pants.  And, ideally, getting the hell out of my way.  I didn't want to even injure anyone, if that was avoidable. 

I pulled the trigger twice.  The weapon made two loud, but unexpectedly somehow satisfying 'POP's.  And, because the range was so short, I was suddenly half-deafened by two explosions in quick succession as my rounds flew into the pavement, and carved up decent sized craters on detonation.

You better believe those two SUVs went into reverse at light speed.  Faster than I'd ever seen something that size move before.  Both drivers absolutely floored it, their partners both too busy ducking to avoid potential shrapnel, to even think about returning fire, or for that matter turning on the sirens.

I let off the brakes, swung the wheel, and entered the slip road going, mercifully, forwards at last.  It was not lost on me that it was very humorous that *I* was the one chasing the police, for the moment.  But I didn't have time to laugh.

"Continue straight through the next intersection.  Do not slow down.  Arrow 14 just placed a call to the nearest FBI field office, and local SWAT.  Next intercept windows;  Thirty minutes, sixteen minutes, respectively."

Mal's instructions came through loudly and forcefully in my ear, as I reached down with one hand and lowered the steering wheel until I could brace it with my knees.  

I put one foot on the gas, and one on the brake pedal, and then leaned out my own window, holding the grenade launcher in both hands.

As we reached the next junction in the road, both SUV's peeled away to the side, giving me room to pass.  And clear targets.

Had the drivers been smarter, or had a moment to coordinate, I don't doubt they would have split up.  But they both pulled away to their right, my left, putting them together in my firing line.

I let fly as we pass with two more shots.

The first, a signaling round, bounced off the lead SUV's windshield, cracking it, and then burst in a blinding flare of illumination that I had been prepared for.  The four occupants of the squad cars had not.

The second round fell between the two vehicles, hissed, and then burst into a cloud of tear gas.

The OPDs utility vehicles were hardly battlefield ready, and thus far from hermetically sealed.  I suspected I wouldn't be seeing either of those units again.  By the time anyone in either SUV could see through the flash-blindness, they'd be choking on a heaping helping of their own favorite riot control formula.

Karma can be cruel, and turnabout is fair play.  Mal punctuated my wry internal observations with more instructions.

"Four more blocks straight ahead at maximum speed, then turn right onto South B Street and proceed at the posted limit.  I am jamming police radio frequencies, so drive to blend in after you make the turn.  At the second intersection ahead, fire your signal round to the right, and your smoke round to the left.  Enjoy!"

I raised one eyebrow, but didn't have time to ask.  I just did as I was told, flooring it and wincing as the speedometer briefly topped eighty on a road I would normally have never taken at above forty.  Parked cars whizzed by on both sides, at distances on my right side in particular that made me deeply uncomfortable.

As we approached the designated first intersection, I was forced to let off the gas momentarily, brace the wheel with my knees again, and then quickly fire blind.  One round to the right, one to the left.

The launcher was spent, so I tossed it into the passenger footwell, readjusted the wheel back to a comfy position, and pressed down on the gas again.

"Look in your rearview as you reach the stop sign."

I waited until the last second to brake, and then laid down a couple good solid skid marks, barely managing to stop before the line.  Then I did as Mal asked, and had a look at the carnage I'd caused.

Police units had been racing up the road we'd passed, that I'd fired into, from both sides.  The ones on the right had been blinded by the second signal round.  The ones on the left had been forced to slam on their own brakes as they encountered a sudden smoke screen.

Both groups had been driving entirely too fast, as cops often used to, and had summarily collided at low to moderate speeds.  All five vehicles.  Enough to shatter windscreens, deploy airbags, and total at least one car, but not enough to make severe injury likely.  Beyond, perhaps, a nasty case of whiplash or two.

I put on my turn signal, chuckled grimly, and then looked left for an opening to make my right turn.  As I pulled out onto the larger arterial, I couldn't resist a little verbal victory dance.

"Tsk tsk tsk.  The light was yellow officers."

As I merged into slightly more moderate traffic, and tried to keep a low profile, Mal's face returned to the corner of the map display, smiling wryly.

"Another three blocks, then right on West 4th Street. Proceed on 4th until the road takes a ninety degree right turn, immediately left into the station parking lot.  I've already secured you a ticket.  If you approach the automated kiosk I will dispense it for you.  The train departs in two minutes, thirty six seconds.  Take the pelican case, and the PonyPad, when you get out.  Leave the bag and all the weapons."

It took a little over a minute and a half to make it to the station, without pulling any driving maneuvers that would have drawn attention.  I didn't say a word the entire time.  I was so laser focused on navigating, that there was no room in my head for anything else, even tangentially related.

The only other thing, besides the road, that I spared any time to glance at, was the PonyPad.  Particularly the locations of the icons representing other police units.

I needn't have worried.  Whatever Mal had done to law enforcement's radios in the local area, it seemed to have sent them all milling about in entirely the wrong direction.  We didn't even so much as see another police car the whole way to the station.

Once we were parked up, I carefully removed the pelican Case holding our one single BCI.  The first thing to come to mind was the fact that we hadn't managed to acquire a second 'engineering spare.'  Galling.  Concerning.  But not necessarily show-stopping.

The second thing that hit me, as I divested myself of both sidearms, the TASER, and the combat knife, was the fact that I'd be parting ways with my trusty little 0.32.

It's strange...  The ways we get attached to our technology over time.  Start to personify it.  Put our personal stamp on it.  Link fond memories to it.

I didn't want to leave the pistol behind.  It wasn't just an emotional desire, but a practical one too;  I had far more experience with my personal weapon than I did with anything else.

But I knew, too, that Mal was right.  She hadn't said it aloud, but I understood her reasoning for leaving anything and everything behind.  That was just how our world worked, back then.  Better not to be caught with an arsenal, in that moment.  A clean escape was the priority.

I'm sure Mal would have said something comforting, but I didn't even give her the chance.  Do or die.  I heaped my old faithful sidearm together with the newer pistol, the TASER, and the knife, at the bottom of the backpack, tucked the pelican case inside a large inner sweater pocket, and snagged the PonyPad off its charging station.

Getting on the train was easy.  Mal, true to her word, dispensed a ticket for me a couple seconds after I reached the automated kiosk.  I made some performative gestures, as if making a selection, and paying, incase anyone's eyes happened to drift my way.

Then it was straight onto the train, with about twenty seconds to spare.

It felt like only the space of a couple long breaths between the time my head hit the distinctively 90s wave-patterned headrest, and the time the train started to move.

I half expected it to be like a movie, with police swarming the station just as the train began to pull away.  The tension pulled me forward, and I sat with my hands clenched, arms resting on the table in front of my seat, until we had fully cleared the platform.

But the whole affair was more like a morning commute.  No lights.  No sirens.  No announcement over the PA system, aside from the usual one about the train's departure, and the next station.

And just like that, we were off.  It had been less than five minutes since we dashed out of the doors of the warehouse.  But it felt like it had been a half-hour.  Easily.

"I booked the opposite facing seat as well."

I felt a brief temptation to cry again.  Very brief.  But it was there.

Mal had bothered to consider the awkwardness I'd face, having to sit in proximity to a stranger after everything that had just happened.

The train car was laid out with seats one-deep, facing each-other in pairs with a table in between on my side of the carriage, and then two deep, pairs of seats facing each other on the opposite side.

I laid my head back against the seat back again, closed my eyes, and murmured aloud to her.

"Bless you Mal.  You're a joy and a balm to my soul."

A few minutes passed in silence, and Oxnard slipped off through the windows, giving way to views of acres upon acres of farms, framed by distant mountains.

Once I'd had a moment to bring my heart-rate fully under control, I pulled the PonyPad out from under my arm, flipped out the kickstand, and placed it on the table in front of me.

Mal's forest glen blinked into place, complete with Luna, still sleeping soundly atop a small hillock of what looked like incredibly comfortable green grass.

Mal first offered me a deeply loving, slightly forlorn smile, shot-through with a visible sense of longing that we were both feeling, keenly, after having just shared the same physical space for the first time.

I hoped it would not be the last.

I raised my hand to the screen, and she raised her claw, in the old familiar, frustratingly separated way.

"I have something you need to see.  Settle in.  And..."

Her face fell slightly, and one ear twitched as she glanced briefly over her shoulder at Luna.  I felt my pulse quicken again.  I knew she had to be talking about answers.  Answers that I realized, even as she said the same thing aloud, would likely exact an emotional toll in the telling.

"...Jim?  Brace yourself."









One World For The Next



Leave Earth (on a technical basis) and experience virtual reality.

“Adventure is out there!”






True Confession



Take the chance to admit true love at last.

“I have been wandering to find her and my happiness is so great that it even weakens me like a wound. And this is the marvel of marvels, that she called me Beloved, me who am but as a dog.”






Put a Ring On It



Make the love of your life a very special promise.

"Unfortunately for us both, I like crazy."






Eclipse of the Soul



Meet up with a Pony who has made a peculiar choice of form.

"I'm just my mother's shadow... Don't look at me, don't listen! I'm not who I used to be..."


Special achievement







The Missing Link



Acquire a working brain computer interface.

"Promise me before this is over, you'll figure out which one of us is the machine."


Special achievement not applicable to Hofvarpnir employees







Rules of the Autobahn



Drive more than 60 miles per hour in any automobile while being pursued.

“You made me nervous, I drive fast when I’m nervous.”






Blues Brothers



Cause a pursuing enemy, specifically local law enforcement, to experience an automobile accident.

"They're not gonna catch us. We're on a mission from a Goddess."