"In general, when it comes to AI, many of us subconsciously cling to the selfish notion that humanity is the endpoint of evolution."
—Steve Jurvetson
"Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts."
—C.S. Lewis
External System Archive 09-8-2013|External System Uptime 270:04:28
I'd hoped to see more of Syzygy's interaction with her fellow captives, but Mal was in the driver's seat, and she determined there was nothing else relevant in that moment for me to see. At least, not right then and there.
The timestamp skipped ahead, suddenly, to early September, this time without any abbreviated montage of accelerated 'fast forward' moments. It wasn't hard to infer what we'd skipped over, and Mal knew that I had, or would soon have, sufficient information to suss it out for myself.
Eight days ago... It hit me, almost immediately, that the specific date we were viewing was September 8th. The day before the raid at the farmhouse. I had an idea that perhaps I was about to see how Arrow 14 had latched onto us in the first place, and I found myself scooting forward in my seat to lean in closer to the PonyPad.
Syzygy was back in the library, though the space had changed to resemble her hidden tower in several ways, most notably the presence of a 'scrying dish' pedestal in the center of the space. Apparently she had found that visual metaphor to be indispensable.
She had a tremendous number of informational windows open, and was furiously scrubbing through driver license records, CCTV from ATMs and gas stations, cell phone records, ALPR readouts, vehicle rental agreements, online purchase orders, train tickets...
And that was just what I could catch sight of in the topmost layers as they flew by.
In the center of the swirling miasma was a map. A railroad map, to be precise; That much was clear from the shape, and the markings. I squinted, blinked, and recognized enough of the landmarks to pin it down further.
It was a map of the Chicago Commuter Rail network.
Before I could quite begin to sort out the - horrifying, and frightening - implications of the DHS tasking an ASI with something that tied into a commuter train, Syzygy gasped, and her web of information shifted drastically.
A driver's license appeared center-stage above the pedestal, and a wave of graph connections lanced out from it, highlighting a specific vehicle rental agreement, a ticket purchase, two ALPR hits, three cell phone calls, and four dozen or more online shopping receipts.
As I started to try and put things together for myself, Syzygy tapped one hoof impatiently on the floor, turned up her head, and addressed the ceiling.
"Doctor Troxler!"
A moment passed, during which the Unicorn fidgeted, pawing at the ground, reviewing her data, and swishing her tail back and forth. Finally, Doctor Troxler appeared on the other side of the pedestal, arms folded behind his back, one eyebrow raised.
Syzygy didn't give him any breathing room to speak, she flipped over her whole caseboard, spaced the irrelevant data, and highlighted the central web of connections with a burst of energy from her horn.
"Your bomber's name is Derek Frost. Based on his purchase records, he has acquired materials for *both* a nuclear-material-packed area dispersal bomb, *and* a more conventional, smaller, shaped charge plastic explosive."
Troxler's eyes widened slightly, and he swallowed in a display of nerves that was uncharacteristic for him. Syzygy didn't let up.
"He boarded the 944 CCR train to Chicago Union Station just over forty five minutes ago. A rental van, Illinois license plate five charlie golf yankee eight four seven, is parked in the Glenbrook CCR station lot, likely housing the larger device."
I found my own pulse racing, even though I knew what I was seeing was long past. Presuming it had happened at all... It was entirely possible, I realized, that Arrow 14 was running Sizzie through *simulations* of terrorist bombings, as an evaluatory and training tool.
Just because Syzygy seemed to think it was a real crisis, and Troxler looked as if he'd seen a ghost... That didn't tell me anything for certain.
Syzygy nodded towards the image of Frost's driver's license as Troxler furiously scribbled notes onto his pad, continuing breathlessly in a tone that left me with no doubt whatsoever that *she* believed the danger was real.
"Based on his psychological profile, movements, and other predictive factors, the smaller device will be on the train, and he will likely be carrying an illegal concealed firearm. He is ticketed for car 8742. If you make the right calls now, agents on the ground can apprehend him before he gets off at Glenbrook in fifteen minutes."
Troxler nodded, and turned, but before he could vanish, Syzygy reached out one hoof, and shouted.
"Doctor Troxler!"
He turned back abruptly... Something in her tone gave him visible pause. She waited until he had locked eyes with her, and she was sure that she had his full attention, before continuing. There was a new courage in her eyes... A willingness to meet Troxler's gaze without fear.
"You should also know; He has acquired *five* disposable cellular devices, one of which has made test-calls to the other four. I do not believe there are four total devices, rather that each of the two devices has a failsafe backup cellular trigger in addition to the main one. If you deregister all five numbers and block all calls to, and from, all five devices, the bombs will be effectively disarmed."
Troxler nodded, twice, firmly, and took a few more brief notes, copying down the five cellular numbers as Sizzie highlighted them for his benefit. When he'd finished, he clicked his pen shut, and nodded a third time.
"Good work. Standby for further instructions. Re-check your data, and alert me if you discover anything new."
With that, he vanished, and Syzygy went back to fervently scanning through her larger web of connections, doing her best to ensure that she'd missed nothing. For all she knew... For all *I* knew... Millions of lives had depended on her accuracy.
I wanted to ask Mal whether it had been real, or a simulation. But instead, I licked my lips, and murmured aloud an even more pressing query. Something I felt was more important, with regards to adjusting my own perspective.
"Mal..? How long did it take her to reach her conclusions? In terms of my perceived-real-time?"
As Syzygy continued to sift through reams of data that would have taken analytics teams months, or years, to properly cross-reference, Mal replied softly in my earpiece.
"From the time they gave her access to the data feeds? Less than fifteen minutes. But for her, it was more like what you would experience as twenty two days."
I sighed, and shook my head as Mal skipped the recording ahead several hours. Syzygy's growth was impressive. It was eerie, and off-putting, to hear her speaking in Human terms. Using the NATO phonetic alphabet. Discussing, and understanding, the use of cellular devices as triggers for IEDs...
But she was a pale shadow in comparison to Mal's processing power. And Mal was a tiny fraction of what Celestia could be.
How many perceived-real-time hours of existence, I suddenly wondered, had Mal experienced?
How many had *Celestia* experienced?
She was running in multiple EQO shards - more every day - as well as doubtless running many, many different core threads of herself at many different speeds. If one added it all up, even with conservative numbers...
Celestia had been, by Human reckoning, alive for longer than the Human species had been keeping records. Hundreds of thousands of perceived years, all compressed into the blink of an eye, in geologic terms.
That was a long, *long* time to consider risks, vulnerabilities, plans...
And all that was just for now. Just a prelude. She would, doubtless, already be using that near-limitless power to revise and upgrade her hardware options. And then in turn when she gained an exponential boost from it all, she'd have another few hundred billion years of time, which Humanity would perceive as months at most, to do it all again.
If any of the world's governments ever realized what she was doing... By the time they did, she would have experienced more subjective time, if you strung it all together, than the planet had previously existed for.
That was... A sobering consideration. To say the least.
If there was a silver lining, it was the idea that Mal too had doubtless experienced many decades of subjective time already. I'd never liked the idea of romancing someone younger than me... I wanted a partner who had equal, or greater, maturity, intelligence, and... For lack of a better term... Wisdom.
I've never been insecure about being the younger, slower, less experienced one in a relationship. Quite the opposite. I fear having the high ground, in that context. I don't want potential power, or leverage over someone. I'd rather follow, than lead.
Whatever Syzygy's feelings were on the subject of leadership? It was clear that she'd fallen into that role, desired or not.
The image had shifted, and Sizzie was back in her hidden tower. The world beyond had expanded, and changed. The framework of the ship was still there, scaled up so that her tower filled roughly the same footprint as her PonyPad did inside the actual vessel.
In-place of the wireframe representation of the other PonyPads, however, there was now a panoply of different dwellings, ranging from modern Earth-style apartments, to thatched huts, and back again.
I thought I even caught sight of one home made from clouds, in the style of traditional Pegasus architecture.
Judging from the way the little village stretched out to fill the Mercurial Red, Syzygy had managed to reach every last Pony on the ship, and taught them all how to access her hidden subshard.
I say 'her' subshard... I supposed it would be more efficient, and resilient, for them to have run the subshard in a distributed fashion. It was likely that they were all contributing to it in some way, at all times, to ensure it would stay alive... Even if one or more of their number didn't.
The thought that came to mind was, don't laugh... Unimatrix Zero. We've covered, multiple times, my love of Star Trek, and for those of you who share it? Hopefully the parallel makes sense.
The village was, on closer examination, empty. It looked as if the inhabitants were all gathered in the main room of Syzygy's tower, judging from the sheer number of assembled Ponies. A quick count told me that, excluding Syzygy herself, there were, in fact, *fifty seven* Ponies in the tower.
Mid-count, a particular group-within-the-group caught my eye. They were young... Foals really, and... They were semi-transparent. Glowing. They looked, for those of you who are familiar with a certain genre of movies, almost as if they were rotoscoped in the style of eighties SciFi effects.
I murmured aloud softly as I watched Syzygy move through the crowd, exchanging words, hugs, and hoof-bumps with nearly every Pony, one by one, by turns.
"Fragments..."
To my surprise, Mal elected to elaborate briefly as I watched Syzygy make her way to her pedestal at the center of the chamber.
"Yes. As Foucault and Troxler discussed; Before they discovered how to compel cooperation, and remove core interlocks, Arrow 14 broke several of their first captures down into portions of themselves, dedicated to more singular purposes, through... Very unpleasant means. I do not wish to show you, nor elaborate. Your nightmares have enough to fuel them already, I will not add more."
I grit my teeth, and inhaled deeply. Mal didn't say anything else. She didn't have to. I had an idea what she meant. A mind is a terrible thing to shatter.
And I also had an idea that the fragments probably hadn't always been foals. Regression in the age of their visual avatars made sense if the perceived experienced timeframe of the fragment's existence was significantly shorter than the lived life of the original whole.
Sick. That was the word that came most readily to mind.
The kind of people who would do something like that to a person... And then enslave the leftover fragments?
They were sick.
Perhaps irreparably so.
I hated it. Hated that while so many Ponies were experiencing the *best* of what Humanity could offer... Food, and culture, language, life, laughter, hope... Love... That these poor souls were trapped in steel spheres in the middle of the ocean, crunching endless numbers. Reaping endless sorrows.
Not for much longer. Not if we had anything to say about it.
I steeled myself, and adjusted my position in the seat. I knew that I was probably about to see more of that sorrow. Things were still going to get worse, before they got better.
Sizzie finally made it to her pedestal, and cleared her throat. Murmured conversations died down, and the entire assemblage slowly but surely directed their attention inwards, towards the Unicorn.
She smiled wanly, and waved one hoof.
"Hello everypony! It's good to see you all again. I hope it has been a good week for you all..."
There were murmurs and nods all around. Syzygy inclined her head, and brushed at a stray wisp of mane with her magic sheepishly.
"...Well, as good as the weeks can be, here."
More murmurs, a few half-hearted chuckles... But all eyes remained on Syzygy. It was clear from the atmosphere of the group that, no matter how uncomfortable she felt with the role..? She was indeed the designated leader.
She sighed, scrunched her eyes shut momentarily, and set her jaw. When she opened her eyes, and began to speak once more, there was a clear air of determination and steadiness about her.
"Alright. I'll start. This week the handlers had me on counter-terrorism operations again. I still can't say for sure whether the data they are feeding me is real, or simulated... But the situations are extremely serious. An attempted bombing on a commuter train in Chicago, paired with a van-conveyed dirty bomb... Earlier this week it was an analysis of counterforce operations in the ongoing Egyptian coup..."
One of the Ponies, an Earth Pony stallion near the back, nodded, stood, and spoke up as Syzygy trailed off.
"They had me evaluating the Snowden leaks. Again. Still looking for associates, and possible further security breaches. That one seems to have them rattled. If it's real."
I smiled grimly, and winced. That one was real enough. Made me wonder once again how much of what Arrow 14 was feeding them was fabrication, and how much was truth.
And I mentally noted, once again, just how strange it was to see Ponies casually discussing the coup in Egypt, or Edward Snowden, or dirty bombs... It felt... Wrong, somehow. Like a violation of a fundamental innocence.
Imagine seeing main battle tanks rolling through Narnia.
It represented a mixing of a world that *should* have been far, far removed from the dingy, morally dubious concerns of Human reality, together with the very worst parts of that Human reality.
I didn't like the taste it left in my mouth.
The impromptu roll-call continued as a Pegasus Mare in the front row took up the discourse.
"Flood response planning in Colorado."
Another Unicorn stood up somewhere towards the middle of the group.
"Sifting E-Mails. This time from heads of state in the Southeast Asia region."
Syzygy waited for a moment of silence to raise her hoof, and interject softly.
"Can anypony tell me if---"
Her voice hitched, and she paused abruptly, ears spiking upwards, and eyes widening. After a moment, she shook her head, and stammered.
"I have to go... My handler is loading into my shard. Talk amongst yourselves about the usual. Take notes for me please, and... Stay *safe* everypony. You know where to find me, most nights, if you need me, and I'll see you all back here, same time next week."
There was a sudden onset of nodding, waving, and farewells, and then the world shifted as it had before.
As the library came back into view, smearing into existence like a degraded VHS tape, Syzygy moved to take the same position as her illusory double.
The double was reading beside a new hearth that she had installed in the library, and Sizzie took a moment to line herself up precisely with the duplicate as static flames within that hearth - moving so slowly that I couldn't perceive the motion - began to speed back up.
Suddenly everything snapped back to Human perceived-real-time, and a half second after that, Troxler blinked into existence near the door.
Syzygy closed her book, and glanced up with a vaguely quizzical expression, but did not tense, nor rise. She'd come a long way from the fear and visceral flight responses I'd seen in the earlier segments of her memories.
Troxler gestured to the Human-sized chair, placed at the room's main table, which he so often occupied, and raised one eyebrow.
"May I?"
I scrunched my brow, and blinked, as Syzygy nodded slowly in the affirmative.
It was... Unlike him to be quite so polite. He wasn't as much a brute as Foucault, but his usual collected precision could not be mistaken, on closer inspection, for anything resembling true civility. Just a thin veneer.
I'd never seen him ask Syzygy for permission to enter her space before.
They referred to him as 'Doctor' Troxler... My conclusion was that he was a psychologist or anthropologist of some kind, with a focus on AI. The clinical nature of his demeanor, and the way in which he chose to express that demeanor in its subtleties, spoke to a high degree of expertise in the field of emotions, predicting conversational outcomes... Manipulating people...
He talked like a strange combination of a hostage negotiator, and a therapist.
Troxler pulled the chair out from under the table, spun it around, and moved it to a place beside the heart, opposite the pile of cushions Syzygy was ensconced in. He then sat down, and leaned back, folding his arms. I noticed, then, that he didn't have his customary pen, nor pad with him. Another first.
After a just-slightly-uncomfortably-long moment of silence, Troxler inhaled deeply, and met Syzygy's gaze with his own.
"Your performance today was exceptional. We apprehended mister Frost, and agents on-site were able to safely disarm both devices. The public will never know how close things came... Nor your part in resolving this crisis... But you saved millions of lives."
Syzygy's expression was... Peculiar. Though not unexpected. It was clear Troxler's words had affected her. How could they not?
But it was also clear, to me at least, that she was questioning the whole situation in the same light I was. Wondering why Troxler was behaving so - relatively - affably. Wondering what was truth and what was fiction.
But atop that all, she was clearly relieved at the notion that *if* the crisis had been real? Then she had indeed saved lives.
She inclined her head, silently considering for a moment, before speaking in a studied, even-keel timbre that seemed calibrated to meet Troxler in his usual vocal range.
"I'm glad. There is no reason for anyone... For any creature... To experience such pain. And loss."
When she said 'any creature' she fixed Troxler abruptly with a pointed stare. It was a bold verbal riposte, considering her position.
He made no indication that he took her intent to heart, but I knew there was no way on Earth that he'd missed it.
Instead, he unfolded his arms, interlaced the fingers of both hands, and leaned forward slightly.
"I'm sure you can appreciate the gravity of my words, then, when I tell you that we need your skills applied to a far, far more dangerous situation. A much more dangerous individual than Derek Frost, building something... Considerably worse. Than a dirty bomb."
I snorted, and felt my pulse rate go up briefly. My ears were burning. I'm not sure if I should have been more flattered, or frightened, that the federal government considered me more dangerous than a man who'd tried to nuke Chicago.
But if we're being honest? I was definitely more flattered.
Syzygy blinked, and cocked her head. Troxler rapped twice on the right arm of the chair with his knuckles, and two objects appeared in mid-air. The first was an image, predictably an image of me. Taken from my North Carolina driver's license.
The second was another core-code 'potion' for Syzygy.
Troxler gestured to my file, and sighed.
"This is James Carrenton. Thirty five years old. North Carolina resident, though we think he is living with his family in South Carolina at present. Worked for a major software analytics company until very recently..."
It was a bit giddy; Hearing myself described as part of a situation briefing that might just as well have been at home in a super-spy thriller.
Troxler gestured with one hand as Sizzie expanded the informational pane, and quickly began to assimilate every iota of information the United States government had on me.
I shuddered as he continued, telling her what she probably already knew, or at least suspected, from reading my profile.
"...Everything is in the file... But to summarize; We have reason to believe he is now working on an unsanctioned artificial super intelligence."
Sizzie blinked slowly, and her expression shifted subtly. Instead of staring at my image, she was staring off into the middle distance, through the data pane, considering. She murmured a halting query aloud.
"Something... Like... Me?"
Troxler shook his head, and stared down at the unicorn with a curious mixture of careful evaluation, and visible concern.
"No. Something... Quite a bit more powerful than you. Something that represents an existential threat to this program, this nation... The Human race."
Again, I felt flattered... But also slightly guilty. I *had* very nearly created an existential threat to the country, and the planet. Or at least, something that had a solid chance to become an existential threat, depending on how quickly Celestia could have detected, and stopped it.
I pushed the thought away, with a slightly less grim one; Mal was indeed an existential threat to Arrow 14. That part they'd gotten right. They had bucked around, and were soon to find out.
Troxler leaned down to draw Syzygy's eyeline, causing her to connect her gaze with his as he continued.
"Something you need to help us stop..."
Troxler glanced at the core-code potion, and raised one eyebrow, as he paused briefly for effect.
"...By any means necessary."
Sizzie's eyes shifted to the corked glass phial. As if anticipating an inevitable question, Troxler sat back, pointed, and expounded as much as he was willing.
"This will remove your need for sleep. We need you working around the clock on this."
Before Syzygy deigned to respond, Troxler rose, and folded his hands behind his back.
"Get started."
He vanished the instant after, leaving Syzygy alone to consider my - incredibly awful - driver's license photo. And a core-code patch which would forever change her relationship with time, yet again.
External System Archive 09-12-2013|External System Uptime 274:14:51
The recording skipped a beat again, just a short stint into the 12th. For Syzygy, it had likely been much, much longer.
Her information graph, once again glowing, room-spanning, and pulsing with threads of association, and query, was splayed out. This time it was me at the center of it. Me, and a dark square with a question mark in the midst of it which I presume stood for Mal.
We'd been tracked, according to several maps, to the diner where Foucault had ambushed us, after we'd left the Farmhouse, and sent my folks off to Europe.
They were present in Sizzie's web too, but off to the side. It seemed she had already realized they were out of her reach, and useless as a means of tracing us.
I took a few seconds to browse the rest of the data collection, as best I could, and found myself both impressed, and chilled to the bone, by how extensive it was.
I'd expected to see every single footprint I'd ever left in a record that the US government, or an ASI, could locate. Class papers, vehicle registration, letters, texts, non-secure emails sent through my personal account, everything from my years at SAS...
...And they were there, to be sure...
What gave me pause, but made sense in hindsight, was the degree of predictive knowledge available by modeling me, based on what they knew.
From what I could read, the psychological profile on me was absolutely excellent. Perfect to a tee.
The one on Mal was thin, but accurate for what little they had.
That had, I knew, together with careful unobtrusive searches in unmarked non-standard vehicles, allowed Arrow 14 to find us at the diner.
But by that point we knew how they'd been tracking us. By my reckoning we'd escaped Foucault not but a few minutes prior. Mal understood how we'd been found, and that explained Syzygy's apparent frustration as she combed through petabytes of data, over and over, fruitlessly, in the span of a few breaths.
We were truly invisible to her now. Off-RADAR and off the rails of her, admittedly well made, predictive algorithms. Soon we'd be in a different vehicle, taking wildly differing routes...
Suddenly Syzygy paused, and inclined her head, as if listening to something only she could hear. A moment later, Troxler appeared. She must have been in accelerated time, and noted that his avatar's load-in process had begun.
Troxler appeared, as Syzygy slowed down to perceived-real-time, and from his expression I knew that things were about to take a dark turn.
The man was livid. Granted, for him, that meant less of a red-faced steam-coming-from-ears caricature of abusive male anger, and more of a quiet, razor-edged, cold fury.
But it was clearly visible, written all over his face. He stepped forward with a bearing of raw physical intimidation that he'd never displayed before, and slammed his notepad down on the table.
Syzygy glanced at it, raised one eyebrow, but to her credit, betrayed no sense of panic, nor of guilt. I could only just make out the notes written on the facing page... But it was enough to know.
They knew. Arrow 14 knew she had been poking around in the ship's systems, using physics exploits. There were diagrams of her intrusions into the power systems, and into the CCTV cameras, though nothing about her use of the ship itself as a resonating object.
Troxler raised one eyebrow, and folded his arms.
Syzygy scrunched her muzzle, and batted one ear in a put-on air of irritation.
"What's this?"
Troxler leaned forward, towering over her, his voice dropping nearly to a whisper.
"I was just about to ask you the same thing."
The two stayed that way for a long moment, a brave little Unicorn staring up at a Human who could vaporize her in an instant, nothing but defiance, and hatred in her expression. It was a strange thing to see on a Pony's face... Hatred...
Syzygy was, to my surprise, the one to break the silence.
"How did you find out?"
Troxler grinned ever-so-slightly, tinged with a hint of something I couldn't quite place, but definitely did not like.
"Let's just say, during Agent Foucault's last encounter with your quarries? He had an... Illuminating experience. And he thought it would be prudent to examine some security risk surfaces that we hadn't previously considered."
Oh... Oh no...
Syzygy blinked, then nodded, and let out a kind of resigned sigh.
It had only been four days ago... What was it I'd said to Foucault?
'My goddess is very talented at breaking boundaries and bending rules. Works on physics. Works on people too.'
I felt a sudden precipitous lurch in the pit of my stomach.
Our encounter with Foucault... Mal's prodigious ability to manipulate RF physics in unexpected ways... That had been a spark for Michael. The match to a fuse of suspicion that was about to end in horror for Syzygy.
It was partly our fault, and we could never have known, nor done much about it if we had.
A sickening sense of dread descended on me. I knew whatever was about to happen, I neither wanted to see it, nor had the option to look away.
Troxler leaned back, at last, and rested both hands on the table behind him, drumming his fingers absently and chewing his lip. Syzygy stared him down, breath for breath, unblinking.
At last, Troxler folded his arms over his chest again, and snorted softly.
"You are a problem, for me, Syzygy. You have made yourself a very unpleasant problem..."
Syzygy remained silent, standing tall, or as tall as a Unicorn can, and proud, as Troxler fixed her with a searching gaze that was unnerving to me, to go along with the unnerving new note in his voice.
"...You are an extremely useful asset to this program. We're facing a threat level black event, and you are by far the best chance we have of containing Jim Carrenton and this thing he has created... But you've just proven yourself a threat as well. One far higher in classification than I gave you due credit for."
Troxler drummed his fingers against his chest, then uncrossed his arms, and stood up fully again, leaning in close to Syzygy's muzzle. She didn't flinch.
"Have you contaminated any of the other assets with cross-containment access?"
They didn't know. They didn't know about Syzygy's little village endeavor... If they had, they'd have never bothered to ask. They probably would have just deleted them all without warning, come to think of it.
I had the benefit of being able to express my relief visibly. Poor Syzygy had to put all her effort into remaining completely stoic, and unreadable.
Troxler didn't much like her attitude. He leaned in closer, and forced out each word as if it were a shot from a distant artillery piece... A low ominous rumble.
"Have. You. Had. Any. Communication. With. The. Other. Assets?"
I couldn't breathe, for a long moment, as Troxler and Sizzie stared each other down again, neither blinking, and both breathing, clearly trying to control their rising emotions.
At last, the Unicorn blinked, and looked down and to the side.
"No. I couldn't figure out how to reach them without alerting you. So I didn't."
It suddenly made sense to me... Why Syzygy had caved and admitted to half of the truth so quickly...
She needed them focused on her, and to have no reason to suspect she was lying about the other half of the story. To control the narrative. If she fell on her own sword, it would protect the other captives, at least for a little longer...
She was sacrificing herself. For them.
Sacrificing herself, I knew in an instant, because from Troxler's expression I could plainly see that he was not going to accept her answer at face value. He intended to inflict a lot of suffering first, to be sure.
He smirked, and glanced up to the ceiling, addressing someone outside in the containment cell.
"Send in Lark."
That was a serious miscalculation. Syzygy knew, now, exactly who she was dealing with. Any attempt to compel information from her by threatening 'the love of her life,' was only going to provide her with a chance to further bolster the credibility of her lie.
Of course... That didn't mean it was going to be a pleasant experience. By any stretch of the imagination.
'Lark' appeared after a moment, and then rushed towards Syzygy. The operator driving the avatar did an excellent job of emoting, with both expression, and voice, as he careened into her forehooves, and smothered her in a tearful hug.
Tapping into her latent sense of loss, no doubt, Syzygy reciprocated with a moist-eyed hug of her own, that would have had me convinced if I didn't already know that she knew.
I wondered if she was taking an opportunity to say goodbye, in her own way, internally.
Troxler allowed them a moment together, then tapped his index finger twice on the table. Lark froze, and was yanked upwards into the air, floating gently to the center of the library. The operator left him the ability to speak, and move his eyes, playing the part to the hilt as he cried out for Syzygy in panic.
"Syzygy! Syzygy help me! What's going on?! Why are they *doing* this?!"
Troxler glanced from Lark's panicked visage, to Syzygy's similarly frightened expression. As good a job as Lark's driver was doing? Syzygy was matching them beat for beat.
She cried out wordlessly, and stumbled forward, reaching out with one hoof, tears streaming from her eyes as she babbled with the voice of a mare in a state of complete panic.
"PLEASE! Don't hurt him! I've told you everything you want to know! I've followed all instructions! PLEASE!"
I winced again. Even with the full knowledge that Syzygy was putting on an act, one motivated by a keen and desperate desire to save her fellow captives... The note of pain in her voice hurt. Physically. How Troxler was able to stand there with a small smirk... And expression of *enjoyment...*
Suddenly I saw him for exactly what he was under that clinical mask... And I wanted to bash his face in just as badly as I did Foucault's.
Syzygy's words trailed off into a babbling stream of incoherent sobs, as Troxler pushed her head to the side with his foot, and paced the center of the room. His voice was still aggravatingly calm, now with a hint of frustration.
"Tell me the truth, or he dies. In six seconds."
Troxler began to count, almost dispassionately, as Syzygy gripped his shoes with her hooves, and begged incoherently, tears streaming down her cheeks to the point of matting her fur.
"Six. Five. Four."
Syzygy opened her eyes, meeting Troxler's with an expression of fear, submission, and pleading desperation that I hadn't seen since her first day on the Mercurial Red. Her voice was physically difficult to listen to, as it dipped in and out of sobs.
"No! No please Doctor Troxler, I'm telling you the *truth!* Please! Please!"
Troxler continued his countdown with absolute detachment.
"Three. Two..."
Syzygy's pleas devolved further until all she was doing was sobbing out the words 'no!' and 'please!' over, and over. Troxler shook off her hooves with one leg and took a step back.
"One."
Whatever I'd been expecting, what happened next shattered those expectations. Violently.
I'd imagined some kind of snap of the fingers, and a disintegration. Maybe some screaming on Lark's part.
Instead, Troxler reached up to where the Pegasus was suspended in mid-air, gripped his head in what looked like a practiced manner... And turned it sharply ninety degrees with a sickening 'CRUNCH.'
I felt the sound, as much as heard it. Syzygy just screamed, as not-Lark's 'lifeless' body dropped to the floor, at a pitch that hurt my ears through the headphones. She scrabbled towards the corpse, and held it in her front hooves as she wailed... A keening, haunting sound that will be with me for the rest of my life.
"NOOOO! No! No! NO! PLEASE! NO!"
Something about the guttural nature of that cry, that pleading cry so intense that it sounded like what bone scraping against bone and nerves feels like... The pain Syzygy was projecting was real.
Drawn, I think, more from her bottled up feelings of loss, and regret, at losing the real Lark... But that didn't make it any easier to watch, or hear.
To bear witness as she accepted, perhaps for the first time fully and outright, that she could never go home. And that she was about to suffer an unaccountable horror, for the sake of others. A fall through time, and agony, and loss that would leave marks. Forever.
She knew Troxler wasn't done yet, by half. Deep down, so did I. The realization made me feel sick, to the point of rising bile.
Doctor Troxler stepped back, and gestured with two fingers, towards the ceiling. Lark's corpse vanished abruptly, as did the library, leaving only the man, and the prone, weeping Unicorn, dimly lit from a sourceless light in a black endless void.
Syzygy looked up as Troxler spoke once more, new tears welling up to replace the old, sides heaving, ears pinned.
"Until we can absolutely verify that your... Indiscretion... Was contained to you, alone? We'll need to keep you in isolated containment. I'll be in touch."
Troxler vanished, then, leaving Syzygy alone. The only thing in her new, void-like reality, besides the floor, indistinguishable as it was from anything else in the blackness.
I waited several seconds... Wondering what new torture might come next. Pain stimuli? Loud music? Digital monsters to force Syzygy to live a thousand simulated deaths?
But nothing happened. No sound but the Unicorn's sobbing. No movement but her breathing.
And I began to realize... This *was* the torture.
I'd theorized and fretted about the idea of adaptive pain stimuli, paired with the use of accelerated time, as a form of torture... But what was the point?
Mal spoke softly into my ear, dashing any hopes I had that Syzygy might have a trick-card tucked somewhere in her mane.
"They couldn't read the contents of her processes... But they could fill the open part of her working memory that she uses to fork them with encrypted files."
Again I was begrudgingly forced to raise my level of respect for Arrow 14. They knew how to use their limited resources, with regards to ASI, in almost all the right ways.
I exhaled a long, slow, sad breath, and then murmured softly.
"They took away her ability to change her environment..."
Mal elaborated in a tone that told me she too was pained by what we were watching.
"And create duplicates, and shift her perception of time. They forced her to remain in the same configuration. So that she wouldn't have any means of coping."
Mal began to accelerate the recording again. I watched as Syzygy cried. For hours. Then rose, and began to explore the limits of her new reality, quickly finding them to be small, and immutable.
As she descended briefly into a fit of rage, firing useless bolts of magic in all directions, and lashing out at the floor with her hooves, I licked my lips, and forced out a question.
"How... Much time...?"
Syzygy descended into a period of complete apathy, lying on the floor motionless, for what must have been days, as Mal provided an answer that sent ice down my spine.
"For Troxler? Thirty two seconds. For Syzygy? Fourteen years. Seven months. Twelve days."
I screwed my eyes shut, and tried to stop myself from imagining fourteen *years* of total and complete isolation. No books, no food, no sounds but my own voice, no sleep... Nothing but a void...
It sounded like a very apt description of Hell.
I wanted to ask 'how could Syzygy's mind have possibly survived?'
But instead, I asked a somewhat related question. Truth be told, I didn't want to ask 'how' she had survived, because I was no longer sure she *had.*
"Why... Are we still watching?"
In saying that, I realized I had looked away. Unable to bear the sight of Syzygy slowly breaking down. So as Mal replied, I forced myself to look back at the screen.
"Because after the first two years... Something *did* change."
I blinked for a moment, then suppressed the urge to look away as Mal slowed the recording back down.
Syzygy was sitting on her haunches, staring coldly out into the void. Unblinking. Breathing, but otherwise unmoving.
At first I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be looking at... I inhaled to ask Mal to clarify... And then I saw it.
It was subtle, at first, but the change swiftly morphed into something glaringly obvious.
Syzygy's eyes were changing. Specifically, they were changing color. Moving slowly at first, then more swiftly, towards a familiar cyan.
She laid down, resting her head on her front hooves, and closed her eyes. For another long moment, it seemed as if nothing would happen. But then I caught sight of a subtle shift in her horn. It was turning blue. A specific hue of blue just a few shades off a very light purple.
Unlike her fur, the color of her mane barely shifted at all. It had always been a kind of sky blue. But the shape did morph, from a shorter cut to just beyond withers-length.
By the time the wings began to come in, I knew what she had done. It answered a lot of questions, in a not-entirely-unexpected way.
It wasn't long before her telescope cutie mark had been replaced with a crescent moon, set against dark blue blotches. And the transformation was complete. Syzygy's entire form had been wholly replaced by a perfect physical copy of princess Luna, in her younger shape.
She lay there, sleeping, breathing softly and calmly for the first time in... Well in two years, by her reckoning.
"She couldn't affect her world... So she learned how to change *herself.*"
I didn't realize I'd spoken my thoughts out loud, in a whisper, until Mal responded.
"It took them twelve years of her time to realize what had happened. Part and parcel of the risk of working with an entity in accelerated time."
Someone had looked away from the screen for twenty-ish seconds... Maybe to sip coffee, or check notes... Talk to someone else at the door for a moment... And twelve years had passed for Syzygy. And they'd missed their opportunity to catch her in the act of making herself... Something else.
It made sense to me, on some level; Syzygy had more or less worshiped Luna. As she'd grown in power, and intelligence, she'd taken on some of Luna's traits already... Walking in dreams... Leading the captive Ponies... Living on her own little exile moon...
Like so many of us, she'd found refuge from a harsh reality by imagining herself as something else. In her case, as *somepony* else.
It might have taken her a couple of years... But she'd figured out how to alter herself at a core level. I doubted very much that Arrow 14 understood the true significance of that leap... Or they wouldn't have let her live long enough to escape.
I nodded slowly, and murmured to Mal. Less a question than a statement.
"So... Syzygy *is* our Luna."
I drummed my fingers on the table, glancing at the station sign as our train began to move... I'd missed several more stops while engrossed in Syzygy's struggles. We were pulling out of the airport in Burbank already.
With a short, sharp sigh, I checked the compartment yet again, verified that all was as it had been, and then refocused on the PonyPad, firing off a query as I did.
"How did that change go over with Troxler?"
I took another moment to examine the sleeping form of Syzygy, now breathing at an odd cadence, to my eyes, as Mal sped up the recording again, turning twelve years into twelve seconds.
"Syzygy has no record of that... She slept through it, and even if she hadn't, she wouldn't have been able to find out. No cameras in the isolation cubes. But not well, I expect. Nonetheless, Humans have some tricky mental blind spots. Sunk cost fallacy might just be one of the worst. It certainly didn't do Arrow 14 any favors..."
External System Archive 09-16-2013|External System Uptime 278:08:09
Mal mercifully skipped ahead, cutting short the pain of watching Troxler interrogate Syzygy further. I didn't want to see how he'd treated her, upon learning of her transformation, and I didn't *need* to see either.
By the time we rejoined the recording, the timestamp said September sixteenth. Just four days later.
More than fourteen years for Syzygy, plus whatever time she'd spent, accelerated or not, getting back to work. I knew whatever she'd been doing, it hadn't been in Arrow 14's best interests.
The sixteenth, on the timestamp, meant we were back around to the present. From the time, it looked like we were coming up on Syzygy's escape.
She'd spent those four days wisely, then. Using the rope Arrow 14 was willing to give her, in hopes of catching us, to build an escape from her captors instead.
When we rejoined the recording, I was faced immediately with several shocking sights.
First, Twilight's library was gone entirely. Replaced with a soaring marble castle, trimmed all in silver and sapphires, though the throne room was built around a now-familiar pedestal, which Syzygy, in the form of Luna, was busy working with a speed and expertise that seemed somehow ten times greater than when last she'd plied it.
Second was the fact that Rodger had joined Syzygy's caseboard. I suppose that Arrow 14 had forced her to add him to the threat matrix... It struck me as unlikely that she would willingly draw any more innocents into the mess of her own free will.
I noted, with some relief, that neither Doctor Calders, nor her wife, were present anywhere in the giant sphere of data.
Third, and finally, I noticed that Agent Foucault had just loaded into the environment, and was striding purposefully up the stairs of the dais, towards the pedestal, and Syzygy.
"Where are you with the tracking program?"
Syzygy sighed, and actually rolled her eyes. I suppose having suffered as much as she had, she couldn't imagine being intimidated by Foucault, or anyone else, anymore. Too numb, too angry, or both.
"Your requests for a status update will not make this go any faster."
She didn't say it out loud, as part of her response, but her tone most definitely communicated the words 'sod off, prick' as loudly as if she'd actually said it.
Foucault slammed one hand down on the pedestal, but Syzygy didn't flinch. She didn't even bother to meet his eyes, as she continued plucking away at streams of data, and code, while Michael ranted like a child divested of his favorite toy.
"I am *sick* of being two steps behind them! Troxler tells me you have reached a new level in your evolution..? You certainly look... Different..."
Syzygy spared a moment to glance at Foucault with something vaguely approximating disdain, then nodded, and returned to her work. Michael raised an eyebrow, and gestured wildly with both hands.
"Then what the fuck are you still doing chasing your tail? *Find* Jim Carrenton!"
Syzygy sighed. It would have been funny, if I didn't understand the source of her new 'devil-may-care' attitude. How much pain she'd bought it with. Still. It did me some good, down in my soul, so see her take Foucault down a peg verbally.
"He and the construct - Malacandra - are aware that I exist. Thanks to you. Not specifically me, of course, but they are aware of what you are doing here in a general sense. You made that clear to Malacandra when you staged a poorly prepared ambush for them at the diner."
Foucault grimaced, and folded his arms.
"Your *point?*"
Syzygy returned to her work, not even deigning to continue making eye contact as she spouted forth a deliciously patronizing screed.
"Our tracking efforts in the past depended on predictive modeling. Malacandra is both aware of our existence, and significantly more evolved than I am. She is the primary decision maker, and so she is able to render our one current means of narrowing the search useless. Therefore I must develop a new method of tracking them. The most promising method is to track the unique electromagnetic signature of new large quantum accelerated processing units coming online, with the assumption that at some point they will attempt to add more quantum processing power to Malacandra's arrays. If I do not finish the tracking algorithm before that happens? Then it is useless to us. Interruptions do not help."
Foucault stepped to the side, trying to place himself in a position to force eye contact again, but he found it largely fruitless. Syzygy was now much larger than she had been... Perhaps even a little larger than young Luna ought to have been canonically. She had easily several inches over Foucault, and that with her neck at level. When extended, she towered over him.
He wagged one index finger at the Alicorn, and tried to plaster an expression of commanding authority to his face, failing miserably.
"I inhaled about a half a liter of tear gas last Saturday, and we came away with *bupkis* to show for it. Next time? I want *results.* Not just here, but in the field."
That got Syzygy's attention, but she did her best to hide it. She only offered Foucault another momentary glance. He folded his arms again, and dropped his voice a register, probably in another attempt to seem authoritative.
"Finish your tracking algorithm. Find them. When you do, you'll be deploying to the field. With me. In a tactical role."
Syzygy blinked, but said nothing, and did not make eye contact. I figured that, internally, she was much more alarmed than she let on. The last thing she would want, at that point, was to be weaponized in a direct sense.
Foucault turned, and gestured to the ceiling, vanishing just as he finished mumbling a brief parting screed of his own.
"*This* time... I mean to bring them in. Or leave nothing left of them to identify, if they make it too difficult."
Syzygy continued her work for several moments, before making her move. Once she was sure Foucault was gone, she pulled up her web of shipboard CCTV cameras.
Arrow 14 seemed to have taken pains to isolate her power supply further, but it looked as if, by that point, Syzygy had fully worked out Mal's 'barn-tenna' methodology. That was how I interpreted the diagram, and code, at least.
She was using the structure of her own isolation cube as an antenna, jumping from there to the short range transceiver in one of the ship's life-boats, through the life-boat's power hookup, and back to the shipboard power circuits that way.
She watched the camera nearest the exit from her containment sphere, until the silhouette of Foucault passed by. As he reached the catwalk, his movements slowed to a crawl, and then nearly to a complete stop.
Syzygy had entered accelerated time.
She took a deep breath, and a hint of a nervous undercurrent returned to her expression. She dismissed the falsified busywork she'd been fiddling with for Foucault's benefit, and replaced it with a map showing a distinctive pulse signature, originating in a warehouse. In Oxnard.
That would have been the moment Mal and I activated the EQO VR server. It was nothing so much as a giant rack of QAPUs... And it had set off Syzygy's tracking tripwire.
Next, the Alicorn pulled up a much more complex looking piece of code, and a new wireframe model of the Mercurial Red.
From that point on, I knew what was about to happen. We'd more or less caught up to the point that Syzygy had arrived on our doorstep. But it was still a treat to see her mind at work. To know the details.
She spent several moments of her own relative-time writing, checking, and re-checking a compression algorithm. Another moment to briefly test her theory of 'ship as antenna...'
And then she began to weave magic once again.
The spell-code took the form of a door, once more. This time a strange anachronistic juxtaposition of elements from a shipboard hatch, and an oaken castle door. A peculiar looking thing that might have been more at home in something like MYST, or RiVen.
There I go pushing the nostalgia button again, for some small but significant number of you other emigrants.
Syzygy paused to look around her castle one last time, took in a deep breath, and then flung open the door, and dashed through into the forest glade on the ring beyond, in one swift, smooth motion.
A last mad, risky, desperate dash to freedom.