//------------------------------// // 3-3 // Story: Heroes Never Die // by Shimmerist Ari //------------------------------// “Well, no! I’m not a Shimmerist… I’m, uh, a social kind of Shimmerist.” “What?” “I mean! I’m kind of a ‘social Shimmerist’… if that’s what you mean.” “What do you mean by that?” “Well like, we’re more left wing than the other Shimmerists and anti-authoritarian. Making sure everyone has a choice about transformation stuff is… well that’s really important to us.” “Then why do you name yourself after someone who used forced transformations on people?” “Guh! I mean! It’s just an icon… thing! Really!” “I’m a social Shimmerist if that’s what you mean.” “A ‘social’ Shimmerist?” “Well to us, Sunset Shimmer is just an icon we’ve appropriated that represents a rejection of the way things are now. We want radical reform to get us out of this hole we’re stuck in. And before you ask, we don’t want to force anyone to turn into ponies like she did. In fact, we’re even more pro-consent than the Democrats or the Equestrians.” “You’re saying the Shimmerists are more pro-consent than the government? How is that possible, exactly?” “Well we’re the only ones who want to pass a morphological bill of rights. For example, don’t you think that forced transformations should be completely illegal?” “It’s not?” Hooked! Ari was getting pretty good at this. That time, she managed to get the lady to take two pamphlets! “I’m a social Shimmerist. There’s a bunch of different types.” Ari could say it with absolute confidence and certainty now! “Ah, hey! So you’re a Shimmerist, too?” “We don’t worship Sunset Shimmer or even agree with what she did,” Ari went right into her perfectly rehearsed routine, cooly, with her eyes closed. “It’s more like we’ve appropriated her as a… a wait. You what?!” Ari’s eyes popped back open. Ari looked at this guy for what might as well have been the first time. He was a bit older than her. Slim. Too slim. Wearing a black coat. “I’m a Shimmerist, too.” He kept one hand in his pocket and turned the other up. “Mostly, I just want to be a pony more than anything else. And the Shimmerists are the only ones with the guts to just open the floodgates of transformation magic, you know?” “I… also want to be a pony.” Ari lowered her face mask with the putty knife. “What was your name again?” “You can call me Dresden.” “Ari.” She had never given her name on one of these missions before. But… somehow just this stranger claiming to be a fellow Shimmerist put her at ease. “You know, there’s an Applebees right down there.” He jabbed his thumb in the right direction. “You wanna sit down and talk for a minute? Bumping into another Shimmerist in real life… around here. That’s like a miracle, you know?” “Yes!” Ari remembered after sitting down that she hated Appelbees. And this guy better not be thinking they were on a date or anything like that. She got a little too swept up in the moment. But so far he hadn’t done anything creepy and it was a public place so… it was probably okay. They sat as far away from anyone else as they possibly could, way off in the far corner so they could speak more discretely. “You purposely infected yourself so close to the end?” Dresden scratched at his temple. “How exactly did you get across the water to do that with all the bridge shut down?” “Hmmm.” Ari tried finding something interesting worth looking at. “If the police ask that question, I was already on the other side.” “You’re pretty gutsy! Next time take me with you.” That wouldn’t have worked, given her method. But Ari wasn’t about to divulge anything like that. “It still ended up being one of my better choices.” Ari blew the strands of green to one side. “This hair gives me more milage than you’d ever guess! There’s even talk on Whisper 3 that partials will be the first to get CET. Like, it’ll be easier to convince them to just let us finish transforming, you know?” Occasionally, Ari got this mental image of herself standing before a sneering, unamused Purple princess going ‘no, no! See the hair? The hair counts!’ “You got into Whisper 3? I hear that’s so hard.” Ari leaned back in her chair, chuckling quietly to herself. Partial privilege struck again. “So what do you do for a living?” Dresden asked. “Can I say I put up posters?” Ari asked. What did Ari even do? It wouldn’t even be worth mentioning in an autobiography. That’s how checked out from work she was. “That’s part of my problem. We all act like work and money make up your whole identity,” said Ari. “With ponies, it’s different! Who they are is wrapped up in their cutie marks, a reflection of what they actually love! That’s the question they ask when meeting for the first time. With us, it’s just what crappy, meaningless job you’re forced to do.” “Based on what you were saying about your party, that makes sense,” said Dresden. “Though for me, I’m more interested in the concept of hyper-specialization. Each person devoting themselves to one job makes everything so much more efficient. And ponies can commit to that more fully. And it’s… like they get their own little superpower! Not all of them are amazing, but I have no idea how so few people are tempted by that. By actual magic powers!” Ari nodded. She could relate to that feeling. Though she took note that Dresden’s priorities might not be the same as her own. The guy was a techno-Shimmerist after all. To him, ponies being powerful was more important than them being more social. “What about the vision?” Ari asked. “What about it?” “That’s like, the most important part of Shimmerism!” Ari spoke too loudly. She shot a worried look at the next closest table, but they didn’t hear. “I thought it was turning people into ponies?” “Well that too.” “I mean, how are we any different from like… the Lunists or whoever in that case? Embracing ponification is what makes us distinct.” “Okay, fine! Ponification is tied for first. But we’re not like Lunists because we’re willing to question the humans and those pony gods.” “The humans?” Dresden pointed to himself. “Partial.” Ari pointed to her green hair with the putty knife. Dresden gave it a weird look. “You know what I mean. And you gotta at least know about the vision. Upholding its morals is the greatest ideal for us to strive for. Power isn’t any good if you don’t care about anypony or anything else.” “I guess my view on the vision might be a bit different from yours but hear me out. GPT-4, right?” Dresden squared his thumbs, framing Ari in them. “GPT… oh! Is that the AI thing?” Ari frowned. “What are you on about?” “Yeah! You’ve seen what it can do? It writes articles better than most humans, can pass an IQ test, the bar exam, do coding, have conversations with you.” Ari heard of all this. Though it was mostly the AI art generators that had crept into her online feed, the talking one was likely a far bigger deal in the long run. Though where Dresden was going with this… The waiter came to give them their drinks. Both stopped talking and watched the outsider carefully until she was done. Right now, Ari felt like a part of some clandestine order or assassins. When she left, Dresden continued. “If you haven’t been paying attention,” Dresden resumed, “these Ais have been getting better at an incredible pace. In another ten years, they’ll be up to GPT-9 and be able to run it on robots. Once that happens, nearly every job will be automated. As early as the 2030s.” Ari put her mouth on her straw and drank slowly. Her own job was something vulnerable to GPT-4 already… She was living on the edge now. If she lost her job… “And see? You’re worried.” Dresden snapped and pointed at her. “Why? You hate your job! Don’t you want it to go away?” “Well yeah. But without money, I’ll die.” Ari spoke without taking the straw out of her mouth. “I’m sure you have a solution to that.” “The vision?” Ari perked up, letting the straw drop. “Something needs to change in light of all this.” Dresden rapidly spun the straw in his drink, making the ice spin faster and faster. “We’re going to go through the biggest change since the industrial revolution, that will make the introduction of magic look relatively tame. In the face of automation, we need to change our ideas about how society works, how money and property work, how our value as individuals work.” “So the vision!” Ari leaned forward, ever more excited. “I don’t think that’s the only way.” Dresden stopped stirring his straw and shook his head. “But it’s the only one that has any serious momentum behind it. So yeah, I say let’s all do your post-capital commune thing.” “I don’t know how I feel about total mass automation or super Ais,” said Ari. “But if you support the vision, then you’re alright with me! It’s good we agree on society’s over-obsession with work and property and all that. Maybe Techno and social Shimerists aren’t so different after all.” Ari knew from talk on Whisper 3 that the two groups worked together a good deal. At least, lots of Techno-Shimmerists donated tons of money to them. Like serious, serious money. The SSP was the only political party pushing for the legalization of transformation magic, after all. “Concepts like that will have to go eventually,” said Dresden. “Everyone’s acting like the world can stop changing when it's changing faster than ever. The government and Equestrians are just trying to turn back the clock. It’s kind of sad.” Ari nodded. “Ironically, I do think ponies will be the last ones to have actual jobs,” said Dresden. “Magic is going to be the hardest thing to replace with robotics.” “So it’s a good thing the ponies aren’t as obsessed with work and the endless accumulation of 'wealth as the rest of us! I think the main advantage ponies have over humans is that they’re more social,” said Ari. “Everyone acts like gaining a herd instinct is the most horrible part of the transformation. But that’s the part that I want the most. I want to sign up for it.” “Hell, I can think of so many reasons for being a pony.” “I know! I wish I was a pony so badly.” “Me too.” Ari started kicking her legs under the table. “And it sucks because I got so close!” She planted her face on the table. “Yeah.” Dresden grew quite and forlorn as well, looking off into the distance. “I just keep thinking, if only it had lasted one more week… well there’s so many people who are dying right now who would have been saved.” Ari lifted her face, suddenly worried Dresden might have had a bigger issue than her right now. “Not to mention I’d get to be Full Dive right now.” His smile quickly returned. “Wonder what I’d be doing right now.” “Full dive?” “Oh, that’s like my pony name,” he said. “You already have a pony name?” Ari worried she might be behind the curve. “There’s a lot of Shimmerists in VRchat, we use our pony names on there. You haven’t picked out a pony name yet?” He asked. “I thought most of us did. “I kind of want to. It’s just… I don’t know. Isn’t it a bit presumptuous? I feel like it’d be a cultural appropriation kind of thing.” Dresden laughed. “You really are a lefty! Have you talked to pony Shimmerists? They want us to appropriate their culture.” He was right about that one. “Maybe.” Ari smiled at the idea. She did want a pony name but… just didn’t want to accidentally insult anypony. “I admit I came up with a couple of ideas. Maybe I’m really just having trouble picking. I was thinking of something like Arial Ace or Cloud Weaver or uh… Air Weaver?” “You seem pretty confident you’ll be a pegasus.” “Well.” Ari smiled. “I think maybe it’s just Ari sounds like Arial or Air is the thing that got me started. But that’d be my first choice. Maybe it’s just in my head or an actual partial thing, but I just feel like I’m ‘supposed’ to be a pegasus? I’d take any kind of pony, of course. But if they somehow figure out a way to let you pick which kind of pony you turn into, I’d pick pegasus for sure.” “Oh! I bet eventually we’ll be able to have it so ponies can transform from one tribe to another whenever they want! You transform into a pegasus, fly up to the top of a building, then into a unicorn to operate your phone to take pictures or something. Or imagine ponies who can just download new cutie marks to become experts at anything with specialized magic on the fly.” That kind of thing seemed so pie in the sky to Ari. At this point, it’d be a miracle if they got CET at all. Getting to fill out a form specifying exactly what color, gender, and tribe you wanted to be was the limit of science fiction to Ari’s mind. This kind of techno-Shimmerist utopian technology wasn’t even something she could dream about yet. “Not even the Equestrians can do permanent transformations on ponies with cutie marks, though,” said Ari. “CET is already the bleeding edge to them and even that much is considered impressive.” “Well I know this isn’t going to happen tomorrow or anything like that. I meant eventually. Probably not for a long time. But AI might speed it way up. Have you seen stable diffusion? That’s getting crazy too! Everything is just converging!” Dresden threaded his fingers together. “And our best Ais right now are called transformers. Hehe. It all just fits.” “Ugh. I hate those art AI... things.” Ari blew some bubbles into her drink to get out the frustration. “Cause of the ‘plagiarism’ angle? Because you know, it’s more like–” “No, no! It’s because ever since they came out everyone’s been making the same stupid joke about how my hands look like they’ve been generated by an AI.” Dresden paused. Both of them looked down at Ari’s sleeves, both realizing Dresden had yet to see what her hands looked like. Dresden took a long sip of his drink while trying to figure out how to respond to this statement. “Well that’s terrible.” He took another long, awkward sip. “But you know what?! I bet I got one that will change your mind on AI!” He changed the subject. “And what’s that?” “PonyMe is an AI that predicts what you’ll look like as a pony. It’s actually a lot cooler than it sounds at first.” Dresden went to open the app on his phone. “Super Cycle’s team made it.” Super Cycle. Ari hadn’t made up her mind on how seriously to take that pony. “That’s silly.” Ari leaned back deep into the couch, eyes closed. “What would it even base that on? Your clothes? Like a blue shirt equals blue fur? That’s totally lame. And ponies don’t even look a lot like the human they used to be. So it might as well just be making stuff up at random.” “I dunno exactly what it does.” Dresden kept fiddling with his phone. “But it was trained on millions of before and after pictures. So if there are any trends it would have picked up on them. Here.” Dresden took the photo and Ari’s eyes popped open. “I’m telling you, no one fully understands how ETS works. So how is one of your silly AIs going to–” He held the phone forward to show the AI’s interpretation of Ari as a pony and– Wings! “There!” Her face light up in elation as she leaned over the table for a closer look. “You see?! It made me a pegasus! I knew it! This thing can tell I’m a pegasus on the inside!” Ari studied her pony self carefully. Green hair was obvious at this point, but it gave her blue fur on top of that. “I thought you said it was silly.” Dresden smiled. “Obviously I changed my mind! This AI is amazing! How do I get this on my phone?!” Are took her right hand out of her sleeve. Dresden’s eyes went straight to it and she froze. “You keep your phone strapped to the back of your hand?” He asked. “That’s pretty cool!” Of course he’d say that. After some instruction, Ari furiously downloaded PonyMe.AI. She needed this thing in her life. “We gotta do you next! I wanna see you!” “I already did this twenty-something times.” He flicked through his phone, then turned it back to Ari to show her a black unicorn with red hair. “But you’re right that your clothes influence it. When I wear black I’m a unicorn. Where I wear my yellow Super Cycle shirt it makes me an earth pony instead. But it’s really insistent that I have black fur. It’s pretty dang consistent with the face, too.” He flipped through ten examples of PonyMe’s predictions of pony-Dresden. It really did look more or less like variations of the same pony each time. The most glaring flaw was that his eyes were different colors in each shot. But other than that… “Why does it always give you black fur?” Ari asked. “It’s machine learning, so no one really knows what it’s picking up on. But it seems to have figured out something or other. It’s usually consistent with that.” “Huh. The AI knows something we don’t, eh? We’re getting to the bottom of this one.” Ari uploaded several old pictures of herself from before ETS when it wouldn’t be so easy to guess her hair was green. Once again, it spat out the same pony with the right shade of green and that same blue fur. Several more photos all yielded the same result! They tried a few famous people who’d become ponies and it pretty much always got the colors (minus the eyes) right! The faces were more or less consistent too. But as Dresden said, the tribe of pony was little better than guessing. Only occasionally would it make a serious mistake, like if the picture was excessively dark. “Bwuh?! How does it know…?” Ari kept looking through the results with ever increasing amazement. “And why do your clothes affect what tribe you end up as?” “See,” Dresden explained one of his theories. “It’s like, what clothes you wear reflects your personality to some extent. So the AI notices that people who wear certain types of clothes end up as certain types of ponies, right? And that’s why if you’re wearing a hoodie it’s like 4 or 5 times more likely to make you a pegasus.” “Well I wear hoodies all the time so that must mean I’m 4 or 5 times more likely to be a pegasus.” In her experiments, she found it did tend to push her into the pegasus category hard post-ETS. Even before then, that’s how it usually came out. The main exception was when she put in a picture of herself in a dress. “It’s possible. In a couple of ways, PonyMe seems to understand how ETS works better than the Equestrians do, even. And it does seem to like making you a pegasus.” “So the Equestrians still don’t understand how ETS decides your colors… but this AI does and we don’t know how it knows?” “Basically. If it can already beat them to the punch on stuff like this, just imagine where AI will be in ten years. That’s why I think ponification is going to be easier and more widely available a lot sooner than most people think right now.” Maybe Ari had underestimated Super Cycle after all. She’d need to look her up later. The waiter finally came with their food, getting another cold stare from the silent Shimmerists. Perhaps more than anything else, sharing that look of suspicion towards non-Shimmerists made Ari feel closer to Dresden. “Hey. Can I get your number or Discord or anything?” Ari asked. “Us Shimmerist need to stick together.” Ari stayed up late, feeding every picture of herself she could find into PonyMe. For the first two hours of playing through it, her smile was bright. She was having so much fun, giggling madly as she transformed herself over and over into the increasingly familiar blue pegasus. Whenever it decide she wasn’t a pegasus, she could just photoshop some goggles and a scarf on and that triggered its ‘you’re a pegasus’ sense hard. Soon she ran out of photographs of herself… she started imputing some photos of her old friends from college, from high school… people she’d lost contact with and would likely never speak with again. Family members she’d lost one way or another. But in the photographs, they were still together. They were ponies together… because ponies were never alone. In all of her recent photos, after ‘growing up’ and getting a job, after doing what she was supposed to… Ari was alone… and human. And at some point staring at the reflection of everything she wanted… at her pony self just a thin sheet of glass away, Ari suddenly decided that PonyMe wasn’t fun anymore. She was too close… too painfully close. Ari closed her laptop and went to bed.