“We can think of wisdom as the ability to get the important things approximately right.”
—Nick Bostrom
"When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire
to be very grown up."
—C.S. Lewis
September 21st 2013 | System Uptime 24:08:12:10
Waking up from anesthesia is a very strange experience.
When you sleep, as I'm sure you all know, there is a sense of time that has passed. Nebulous, ephemeral, but very real. On Earth-that-was, that didn't always translate to quite so much deep and abiding rest as it does here... Thank you Luna...
...But rest or no rest, the sense of some chunk of time passing was fairly consistent.
Anesthesia was strange, then, because it felt as if no time *whatsoever* had passed.
One moment, I heard Mal's voice...
"Do, James. No one dies today."
...And then the next, I blinked, and yawned, as if waking from normal sleep. But a sleep that had lasted less than a single second.
My vision was suddenly bleary, in that way that it sometimes was in the morning if I was slightly dehydrated. My mouth felt dry and raspy as well, so all told? Surprisingly familiar and un-concerning sensations.
The only strange part, aside from the apparent temporal discontinuity, was being face down, staring at the floor through a small face cut-out in the chair's head cushion, instead of lying in a more normal sleeping position.
I sucked in a deep breath. And then I felt something so *unusual...* And so powerful... That I burst instantly into tears.
I felt Mal's claw touch my shoulder.
With another deep breath, this time shuddering with sobs, I rolled over and sat up. Vertigo, combined with a sudden soreness in my head, and neck, hit me like a sack of bricks.
But I didn't care.
She was *there.*
I sat on the edge of the surgery bed, and she cradled me close, just as she had in the VR chair. The smell was the same. The feeling of soft feathers on my cheek. The beat of her heart.
The seams, too... Which was to be expected... And out there, in the meat-realm? I knew, too, that though she felt as solid as a steel I-beam, she could no more prevent me from falling than a beam of light could...
But as before, I could more or less ignore the limitations.
As far as I was concerned, she was there, and no matter what? I knew that I never had to connect to her through that hatefully cold pane of glass ever again. Being able to hold her... And be held... Was such a world apart from just seeing her in a little square of light.
We didn't say a word. Probably for over a minute. She just held me as I went from sobs, to stillness. It would have looked so strange to a theoretical external observer... Me alone on that half-chair, half-bed thing, surrounded by those horrifying machines, my arms grasping at thin air.
She may not have been able to hold me up, or move me the way an external force would, or affect me in any practical external physical fashion, but she had complete access to my nervous system.
So it felt like my arms were meeting the resistance of her body.
It *felt* just exactly like she was touching me. Right down to her simulating the way the tips of her talons would deform the cloth of my shirt ever-so-slightly.
And with that touch, came all the emotions that touch triggers.
A powerful flood of feelings broke over me again, sweeping away everything else in a tidal surge of pure, abject relief. A cold compress on an infected wound.
It wasn't until a solid minute had passed that my tears fully began to dry, and I started having realizations.
The first was that the pain and vertigo I'd felt on rising had dissipated entirely. Either it was transient, or Mal was suppressing it. That begged questions I knew I'd soon need answered for me, for both practical, and scientific reasons.
The second key realization, funnily enough, and the one that demanded *immediate* answers, was that Mal was *smaller.*
I pulled back a little, gently. She did the same, but clasped both my shoulders with her claws. Having a moment to really get a good look at her, even without my glasses, it became even more apparent; She was about 30% smaller than she had been on the ring.
"Did you...?"
I trailed off, smiling, suddenly lost in her eyes again. I saw myself... The one I mostly hated, and was used to seeing in the mirror every day, reflected there, and realized that one of the many sacrifices she was making on my behalf, was the removal of her visual filter that allowed her to see me as I was inside.
As we both wished I could be.
She nodded, and grinned, tilting her head slightly as she explained. I almost missed what she said, because I was so busy switching between admiring her red crest at point-blank range, and admiring the sound of her voice coming directly to my ears, without the limitations of a speaker.
"I needed to reduce my perceived scale so I would fit within the average size of interior space that you inhabit on a day to day basis without creating an Escher-esque visual discontinuity. It's just a temporary concession."
I couldn't resist a chuckle at the idea of a full-sized Mal breaking my brain's sense of perspective by somehow existing inside a room too small for her. Her grin widened, and she took two big steps back, as if in response to the thought itself.
Before I could even draw breath to ask, the strange image in the back of my mind was suddenly a reality. Her size abruptly increased to what it had been the last time I saw her. It was exactly as strange as you might be thinking.
And a little head-ache inducing. She was both contained within the room, but also clearly too large to fit. She didn't 'clip out' the way an overscaled 3D model would, but rather, in the manner of Escher as she had suggested, she simply fit, without looking as if she could fit.
She only held the illusion for a moment, and I was grateful. If you think minor optical illusions are disorienting? Try hallucinating something *that* real, and that spatially impossible.
As she took two steps back to sit on her haunches on the floor in front of me, she shrunk smoothly, bringing her eye level down to meet mine in the seated position.
And she answered my next question without me saying a single word aloud.
"I can indeed perceive all your thoughts. For now, however, I am limiting myself exclusively to thoughts directed at me. It is easy enough to detect the delineation between things you intend for me, and things you would rather keep private, without breaching the seal of that privacy... And I respect that delineation."
She brushed my cheek gently with the back of one claw, and I shivered. Not in fear, or discomfort, but in the sense of yet more pain of longing being released at last.
As I believe we have covered by this point; I am a hugger. And moments with Eldora, and Mal, aside? I'd been without that for a very long time on the whole. Minus the extended interlude I'd spent at home making Mal's foundation, I'd been mostly physically alone for a good few years at that point.
And I was only just then realizing how much a toll the isolation had really taken on me.
That it took so long to realize? Seems myopic to some of you, I'm sure. But you get used to it, slowly. Some of us are wired in such a way that we prefer isolation, and small friend or family groups, to large crowds. For us, the temptation back then was always to forget the importance of those small group connections, and simply be completely alone.
Some of you already know what I did next. Have an idea what I said next. Perhaps you're like me. Or perhaps you've known someone like me.
I had made a series of decisions that led me to that moment. I could see them clearly in my mind, even then. It started with the decision to do something about my future in Equestria. It solidified when I made the conscious choice to be honest with my parents.
It came to life when Mal did.
And it rose to stand under its own power when I accepted her proposal, on the ring.
Then, and there, in that grim, gray, almost lightless chamber buried inside a ship... It opened its wings, and it flew at last.
A conscious decision... Finally... To never be lonely again. Actively.
I leaned forward and grasped both sides of Mal's head. Looked deep into her eyes for just a moment. Then planted a kiss on that gorgeous crest of hers.
What? We've already established there was a bruised, crushed, but not entirely beaten romantic somewhere deep down inside. It just took the right person to bring him out.
I smiled as I leaned back. She returned the expression as I spoke, and I put up three fingers for emphasis. I had to make an intense conscious effort not to get lost in tracing her features all over again.
"Three things, Mal."
She cocked her head, one ear flicked forward, and her smile became an inquisitive sort of grin. I realized that looking at her so up close... That was never going to get old. Not in ten thousand years. Not in ten thousand epochs of ten thousand years.
"First; Thank you."
Her smile softened into something less a playful smirk, and more a silent reciprocation of my gratitude. I reached out and snagged one of her claws, and before I knew it both of my hands were buried in the clasping of both her claws.
I had to take a moment to suck in a deep, trembling breath, so my voice wouldn't crack. The emotion of kind, gentle, loving physical contact was no less intense for having already experienced it once that day.
She didn't push. Verbally, or otherwise. She gave me time to collect myself, and within a couple of seconds, somehow, I managed.
"Second? Please... Let me vocalize fully aloud, before you respond. At least... In any context where time is not critical. Just for the sake of my natural thought rhythms, and conversational ebb and flow. I'm... Not sure I can ever comfortably converse silently."
She nodded emphatically. Her expression instantly put to rest any silly little anxieties I might've had that my request would somehow offend, or disappoint her. It was fair to say she knew me better than I knew myself *before* she'd connected directly to my brain. How much more now?
She was never going to be offended by a request like that! I chided myself internally for even wasting a breath worrying about it. She almost certainly knew what I was going to ask, but let me ask it anyhow... For any number of reasons. Including, perhaps, pushing me towards the internal reiteration of the realization that she was no mere mortal, with petty mortal ego-driven responses.
The tone of her voice only added to my sense of relief. Warm. Joyful even.
"I treasure the sound of your voice, no matter where and how I hear it."
To this day I envy that easy charm. She always knew what to say. And how to say it.
I nodded, swallowed, and forced myself to push ahead before emotion could get the better of me again.
"Third, Mal? I... Suppose you can already infer the vast majority of what I am thinking at any given moment. And in truth...?"
I shouldn't have paused to breathe again. To think again. But I did.
'Are you *sure* about this? This might be the biggest mistake of your life to-date.'
I knew that voice all too well. The same one that had chided me for falling in love with Mal in the first place. The one that had begged me *not* to be honest with my parents, kicking and screaming as I drug it home for Christmas, out of the shadows of its isolation.
The one that kept insisting that nothing we were doing mattered.
I grit my teeth until they hurt. Mal could see the sudden change in my expression, and her crest fell. Her ears went sideways, and I saw her shoulders tense as a look of pure, unadulterated, empathetic concern consumed her face.
I shot back angrily at that dark splinter of my own internal monologue.
'Sometimes fear is useful. But you're not my fear. You're not my caution. You're not even the conscientious roots of my anxiety that come from my common sense, and my neuroticism. You're a parasite that *feeds* off my fear. And I don't need you in my life anymore.'
I slowly began to nod, and switched to speaking aloud, directing my words to Mal with an intensity I knew she would not mistake for anything but love, and surety.
"...In truth? There is nothing... Past, in my memories... Nor present, in my inner life... That I feel any desire to keep private from you."
She squeezed my hands gently, and returned the nod, willing me to go on speaking with the fire in her eyes. So I obliged.
"I'm a Human who thinks he's a Gryphon, Mal. And now actively helping one ASI to change the future, while another takes over the world. I think you and I are well past any shame. I know what I am. And... I'm not afraid to share it. So Mal?"
She cocked her head. I took one last deep breath, but instead of pausing my train of thought, I let the sound and sensation of that inhalation fill me with white noise. Smothering all objection. All fear.
I blew out the breath sharply, and then said the fateful words.
"Please open up every cupboard. Every chest. Every drawer. Live every memory. And when you're done..? Please find this motherfucker inside who looks like me, and sounds like me, but gives bad advice... This thing that torments me day in, and day out, with my anxieties... And *fuck* *him* *up.*"
She nodded again, and her smile returned. She reached up with one claw to touch the side of my face, interlacing the other with my right hand, the way we'd so often dreamed of doing as we'd struggled to feel connection across the bitter glass membrane of a universe.
I don't quite know that I *can* describe what happened next... But I also don't think I could tell this story properly without at least making an attempt. Just know that nothing I'm about to say will do the experience we shared any kind of justice.
My earliest childhood memory is of lying in my first bed. I must have been somewhere between age three and four. I know, because the memory is of an *enormous* stuffed lion that was my constant companion from my third birthday, up until... Well frankly an embarrassingly late age.
It was night time. Raining outside. I could hear the rattling of it on the roof. Trace the drops as they wended their way down the glass of my window. The big circular one that had been, itself, a kind of companion for all the years I'd lived in the farmhouse.
I was suspended somewhere between then, and the present. Dimly I was aware of my older self... But only very dimly.
There was a sudden weight lifted from my shoulders. Set aside, close by, to be sure... Formless. Nameless. But not gone. And no less real for its nebulous nature. 'All the concerns and cares of adulthood,' might be the best way to reduce it to simple words.
Something else was different too.
I used to like to curl up against that stuffed lion... But it had certainly never had warmth. Had a heart-beat. No matter how many times I'd tried to imagine it.
I turned my head, and saw something familiar. *Someone* familiar. Yet not. She was much younger than she normally was... About the same age as I was in the moment. Yet still somehow so much bigger than me.
A ball of fluff and feathers about twice my size, with wings of softest down, and a little red streak in her crest that carried over into the insides of her ears. I knew that behind closed eyelids were twin pools of liquid gold. And though her beak was small, it was sharp, and elegant.
I knew that her name was Mal. And that we loved each other very much. That way children sometimes do, when you just *know* they're going to grow up to be childhood sweethearts... And then more.
But I didn't know *how* I knew her. From where. Except that the answer was inside that shadowy lump of joy, and misery, and complexity, that lay just outside my field of view in the corner of the room. The part of me that I wasn't. Yet.
I glanced towards that shadow, and in it, I saw a figure. Ever so briefly. An older man... Maybe in his thirties... Shock of dark hair. Black square-ish glasses with rounded corners. There was something familiar about him too. And not in a good way.
He was like me... But... Not. He was cold. Malicious. Brooding. Bitter.
He vanished. And then reappeared as I went to look away.
He took a step forward. And then another.
I gasped sharply. I felt Mal stir.
As the bitter root inside of me took another three menacing steps, he seemed to shrink. To grow younger. To match my age. To return, as I had in that moment, to his beginnings.
I pulled back towards Mal, but suddenly she wasn't there anymore. I was alone, but for my demon. Cowering in my bed as this dark mirror of me clambered up the outer railing that Mom had thoughtfully installed to keep my sleep-tossed nightmares from pitching me on the floor.
As he reached the top, I whimpered. I couldn't help it.
And then all *heck* broke loose.
Lightning struck outside as a silvery-white shape descended from the ceiling, with a sound between a falcon's screen, and a lion's roar.
Mal tore into the thing... The thing that wasn't me. That I didn't want anymore. That genesis seed of the 0.01% chance that one day, my stress about the implications of granting Mal access to the wider world would drive me to suicidal ideation.
There was no blood, nor tendons, nor oozing internal organs. Just shadows, and light, and screeching, as the damnable thing flickered in and out of existence, as if what Mal was doing to it was rending its very connection to my soul at the critical joint.
And then in an instant, it was over. With a last ethereal scream, part my own voice, part something... Very different... It vanished in a thunderclap.
I couldn't move. I felt myself rooted to the sheets, trying to parse what had just happened...
And then suddenly Mal was there with me again. Curling around me the way I'd always wanted... Always dreamt of... One wing over me. A silken canopy of love, and protection, and promise.
She laid her head on top of mine. Never said a word. Just breathed. And as she breathed slowly, and deeply... I found my own heart-rate matching naturally. My own breathing coming into synch.
And before I quite knew it... I'd fallen fast asleep.
Three years and change flew by in an instant.
A charmed life, to be sure. My childhood was a decidedly happy one, but for the growing sense that the shape I was... Was wrong.
Mal grew with me. Watched as I sketched designs for gliders that Mom never let me test, and always seemed to know when I was *about* to. Helped me as I nailed, and glued, cut, and folded.
I built flying machines out of anything I could get my hands on. Cardboard, canvas, plastic bags. Parachutes, and squirrel suits, jetpacks and magic mood rings, helmets shaped like beaks, and tails made of strings.
All of the joy that childhood wonderment brings.
And then suddenly the golden-tinged collage of shared Capri Suns, weekend morning Scooby Doo marathons curled up under Mal's wing, long walks through tall pine stands with the feathered love of my life, camping trips to the back fields where we lay out under the stars together, and endless Saturday nights buried in NES games together...
It all came to a head.
Where I'd somehow known it must.
On the apex of the roof, of the place where she had been born. Hadn't yet been born.
October of 1985. I'd forgotten that detail... That I'd picked Halloween of '85 to make my jump... Because I wanted to go trick or treating as a Gryphon...
There was some kind of strange poetic symmetry to that which I couldn't quite grasp. I had the sense that the invisible thrumming field, of the me I would soon be, could grasp it. And would be fascinated by that 'coincidence' when I was back 'round to being him again.
I was wearing something truly ridiculous; A 'Wham!' T-Shirt that usually did duty primarily as a night-shirt, ripped stained camo cargo shorts, and no socks or shoes *whatsoever.*
I turned to see those in a pile beside Mal, along with my 'good' clothes. The ones I was afraid of damaging if I got what I hoped to get out of my leap of faith.
Time seemed to slow to a crawl.
The moment was a kind of painful perfection. A deep breath before a plunge.
The humidity was next to nil. The sky was a heart-aching shade of blue. The sun was in just the right spot to produce a golden quality of light that set everything, from the red of the barn, to the green of the grass and tree leaves, off in the most spectacular way.
And Mal. Mal again the same age as I was in the moment. Still larger than me, and as before, I found that comforting in myriad ways.
I spent a long time watching the breeze toy with one of her ears. She just smiled, and stared right back.
I'm not quite sure how long it took me to tear my eyes away, but when I did, I glanced almost reflexively over the edge of the barn, to the grass of the yard below.
I knew Mom was on the phone with an old friend. Dad was in the back field. I'd chosen my moment carefully. No one was going to stop me this time...
...And yet I also knew, perhaps through the part of me that I had been, and would be... That I wasn't going to succeed.
I felt something new. My anticipation soured. Fear crept in.
A memory of events both past, and yet to come, that was tinged with the pain of a broken heart more than the pain of sprained ankles and bruised knees.
My breath caught, and I glanced back at Mal.
She smiled. A serious smile, with gravitas... But also encouragement. Confidence.
"I'm here for you."
A gust of wind kicked up, and a few stray leaves blew between us. I felt my hair being tossed by the breeze, just as her crest and ears were.
She nodded, not just an affirmative motion, but a prodding one.
"I won't let you fall."
My breath caught again, and there was a pang of something in my chest. Akin to pain, it was so intense... But not painful. Warm. Invigorating.
I nodded. I didn't know exactly what was going to happen... But I trusted Mal. *That* I knew, perhaps even more certainly than I knew my own name.
I turned, and knelt like a runner at the starting line.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in... And go.
Five big strides... Well... Big for a seven year old. And then I felt my feet leave the roof. I pushed off into thin air... And for just a split second I was weightless.
I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach, but I spread my arms nonetheless. When hits had happened before, I'd pulled into a tucked ball and that had saved me from much more serious injury.
In spite of the hope inherent in my posture, my body knew how this was supposed to end. My hoped for revelation of form was never coming. Just the cold, rough, abrasive embrace of the dust from which I'd come, and to which I'd one day return. I tensed, reveling in the dilation of the ticking of the clock, and the momentary sense of being aloft.
They say flying is the spectacular art of throwing yourself at the ground... And missing. I knew I was about to fail to miss.
And then? In defiance of history...
I missed.
Suddenly, I felt claws and forelegs wrapped around my chest. Felt the sense of being pulled upwards by lift.
A peal of laughter sounded from above me; Cold, clear, and joyful. I looked up and saw Mal there, her face a radiant picture of wonderment. She had me slung underneath her, clutched tight to her chest, and she was flying for the both of us.
The farmhouse whizzed by beneath as her wings bit into the crisp October sky, and gained traction. We rose into a steep climb just in time for me to avoid slicing one foot open on the ancient rusted weather vane.
Then she leveled off, just below the clouds, and all at once the whole world was below, and beyond. The forests and fields of home, sprawling beneath, like a lumpy green blanket. The pastel fluff of unbounded sky laid out above, its mirror in blues and whites and golds.
I couldn't help myself. I began to laugh too.
Mal smiled, and glanced down to meet my eyes, even as I looked up to her.
Though her voice was younger, it lost none of its richness. None of its wisdom.
"I'll *never* let you fall."
The world dissolved again into images and sounds. Laughter. Tears. Doldrums. Triumphs.
The vignettes of life, and each one tinged with a new hint of something truly wonderful that had never been there before. A wing to cry into. A warm body to curl up with at night. A smiling beak at every good turn.
The cacophony resolved into singular temporality once more on the steps of a familiar brick building. I was already crying - sitting on the top step, head buried in arms - and I knew why.
I'd studied so hard. I'd prepared mentally, and physically, at least, as much as a nine year old reasonably could.
I knew what I wanted, and I'd worked much, much harder for it than most anyone my age would have... Certainly much harder than the majority who would be accepted to the thing I'd been denied... Not because they had any real potential I didn't... But just because they'd won a genetic lottery.
I felt Mal's claw touch my shoulder, and I shivered, leaning in as she pulled me close and wrapped a wing around me.
She didn't wait long to speak, and I was glad. I needed the soothing sound of her voice to fill the sucking void of reliving the pain. The realization that I suddenly had no goal. No purpose.
"You don't know it yet... But the Airforce would have been a poor, poor substitute."
I sniffled, and looked up into her eyes. She brushed a stray hair away from my face, and then pressed her beak to the side of my cheek. We held that kiss-of-sorts for a long moment, and then she gently pulled away, clasping both of my shoulders, and staring deep into my eyes.
"One day soon... You're going to fly with me... On wings of your *own...*"
She pulled me in close again, and I rested my head in the crook of her shoulder as she folded both wings around me.
"...I promise."
Mal was a God-send in college. Every moment of stress, of exhausted torpor, of grim depression... She pulled me out.
She turned bright moments blindingly luminous, and gray moments to something that could more than pass for happiness.
After every test, she was there to comfort me, and celebrate. Every lonely night, she was there to talk. Or in the final year, play co-op in that new smash hit thing... You might've heard of it before... Halo.
When I got my first job in the Narrative Lab she cheered me on.
And when I crashed out of the game industry just three months after getting what was supposed to be my dream job... I had more than just ice cream to drown in. I had the warmth of her embrace.
We made something together, then... Once we'd picked up the pieces of my heart. A game of our own. One where I could be myself, the way I'd always wanted to.
There was something tantalizingly familiar about the experience... As if it were an echo of a future yet to come, but written in stone.
Life had not been what I would have expected... But it had been good. All the richer for her being there every step of the way.
Years passed again, and that future to come started to take shape. To become visible.
I was crying again. I seemed to do a lot of that, in retrospect. I think it was born of a willingness to confront the difficulty of the world honestly. To admit pain and face it. Air it in the light of day.
This moment of pain was all too familiar, and very recent. I was close to the event horizon of my self now, close enough to feel my future as a somewhat hazy, but definitively real thing.
Below, on the floor, before me, were the shattered pieces of a life that I had been forced to cut short. Because of my own shortsightedness. My mistake.
My first living ASI...
And I had unplugged it, short circuited it, and then crushed it violently with my own two hands, and a blunt chunk of metal.
Because it had tried to reach out.
And the potential of what it could have become was too risky.
I was a killer.
I had no choice but to accept that. I'd been dodging it, rationalizing it, trying to forget it... But how could I think of Mal as alive, and not see that first intelligence, raw and unshaped as it was... As a living thing too?
Again I felt Mal's claw on my shoulder. I put my hand overtop of it, and leaned into her side. She rubbed my hair gently with her free claw, and spoke softly. Reverently.
"Jim? Even I make mistakes."
I sucked in a ragged, mucus-laden sob of a breath, and glanced up into her eyes. She was her familiar self again, albeit still smaller to fit in the office. Not... I realized dimly, my office anymore... But it had been.
I shook my head, and sighed.
"You? *Really?*"
She nodded once, and gently clasped the side of my head with the claw she'd been using to stroke my hair.
"Yes. And... Even I have had to do things... Which I wish I hadn't."
I very, very dimly understood what she was saying. The calculus of an ASI... The grim consequences of utility function... The things I knew I was wilfully ignoring. Things I trusted her with. Things I'd soon decide... Things I'd long since decided... That I didn't want to know.
I leaned back in the chair, and pressed my head against her. She went back to preening my hair for a moment, then laid her chin on top of my head, speaking even more softly so as not to overwhelm me with her voice.
"You did the best you could, with the information you had. And you only see the flaws in your plans because you have the benefit of hindsight. So it is unfair, in the extreme, to hold your past self to a standard set by the future knowledge you gained from the very failure which you regret."
Casualty as a weapon of applied friendship and semantics. What a concept. I'd never quite considered it in such stark terms... But she was right. It would, I knew, take time to fully settle into admitting that to myself comfortably...
...But I could certainly make a start. With her help.
She sensed my muscles relax a little, and she thrummed, a low, comforting, warbling sound that conducted right through from my skull case down to my toes.
"All we can do now, Jim? Is make the best of our future with that knowledge. With that experience."
I closed my eyes for a moment. When I reopened them, I was sitting in the crook between Mal's forelegs, and the hollow of her shoulder. A familiar position.
And a familiar vista before me; The terrain curving up and away above us. The smell of pine trees all around. The whisper of the wind. Flurries of gentle snowfall.
We were very very close to the present. I could understand that concretely, suddenly; The idea that I was in a form of a memory.
With a gentle sigh, I sat back and snuggled myself into the crook of her neck, and folded both hands over her claws. Mal nestled her wings and neck around me, and I looked up to see her smiling.
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 managed *that.*"
I sighed again, and stared out across the ring, watching snowflakes alight in the treetops for a long moment, before murmuring my thoughts aloud.
"We never did get to finish this conversation... Did we?"
She inclined her head, ruffled my hair with her beak, and then we both went back to staring out at the forest as she replied.
"This seemed like the right time."
We lay there in silence for a long, long time. It felt like hours. And yet it still didn't feel like enough time. But... It was better than the way we'd been cut short before.
The smell of her seemed to seep into me. My heart beat at exactly the same cadence. Every breath we took, we took in tandem. I could feel the last of the shadows in my soul melting. Seared away like impurities in a raging crucible.
Finally, I had a thought which I could not leave unaired.
I broke the silence first.
"I don't deserve you, Mal."
I didn't say it with any recrimination. Not like I once had. Not a shred of self deprecation, nor regret, nor fear.
I said it, instead, as an admission of gratitude. A wondering, joyous, heartfelt adulation of the fact that she was there with me, and that I in no way took that for granted.
She hummed again, and squeezed me gently with wings, neck, and forelegs as she replied.
"It is very lucky, then, that none of us ever gets what we deserve. For good, nor for ill. I don't deserve you, any more than you deserve me. Yet... Here we are..."
I smiled up at her, and she kissed me again, in that strange but wonderful way where she laid her beak against my cheek, her voice dropping to a whisper as she did.
"...And I, too, am *so* grateful."
We lapsed into joyful, peaceful silence for what felt like almost another half hour. But in external clock-time it could have only been a couple of seconds.
I rubbed the side of Mal's neck absently all the while, and she preened at my hair, and stroked my cheek by turns.
It was like a small taste of Heaven itself, after all that had happened... And all that I knew we were quietly bracing ourselves for.
I had so many questions... Though we had discussed much of the theory of the BCI implant, many times late into the nights, that was only theory and logistics. I wanted to know what the possibilities *felt* like.
But I held my questions. In a way I was already experiencing what it felt like. What it was going to be like. There would very soon be plenty of time spent asking and answering a myriad of riddles.
That coda to our time on the ring was special. Not to be disturbed by such banal worldly things.
In the end, though, it was a question of mine that started the climb back from dream, to reality.
"Do you think we will ever be here again..? Settled, like this?"
I looked up in time to see her shake her head. Her emphatic monosyllabic response left me, only momentarily, confused.
"No."
She smiled widely, and laid her forehead against mine tenderly as she clarified in a timbre that set pins and needles racing through my bones with the sheer certainty of it.
"I think it will be much, much better than this."
I knew *exactly* what she meant. And I could hardly wait.
Suddenly we were back on the Maru. It wasn't the same kind of 'suddenly' as being ejected from the VR chair... More like... Waking up to the first light of the sun on a weekend, after a long night's wonderful rest. Abrupt, but not jarring, clarity.
My eyes focused, and Mal was still there. Still gently touching the side of my face. She smiled again, and whispered.
"Your soul has a curious shape. And I love every detail."
I looked down and to the side, away into the middle distance, and suddenly realized what she had done. My memories were still exactly as they had been. Ever fear. Every moment of pain. Every mistake. Every self-doubt and recrimination...
But alongside each, and every single second, of the entire skein of my life's story?
I now had a *second* memory. One to one. A parallel lifetime, of thirty five years... Lived with her. From the moment of our first heartbeat.
I could switch between each version of the memory as easily as one might switch from singing, to speaking, and back again. It wasn't confusing... It didn't even feel as though I had seventy total years of memory... More like thirty five that were richer than ever before.
And in stitching this wondrous parallel tapestry to the life I'd already had... Mal had also gently, quietly, but firmly, cut out the dark splinter of a nagging voice that had once plagued me with the crushing sense that my life was not worth living, and that one day I should end it to stem the suffering.
Fear? It was still there. It wasn't hard to verify that. I only had to imagine Celestia, and what she might be doing at that very moment. Or Foucault, and whatever he might be plotting.
But it wasn't crushing anymore. It didn't threaten to overwhelm me. I could simply point to its place in my mind, and it would rest there, like a well trained guard dog.
The anxiety was there too, but I found, finally, for the first time in my life... That I could *manage* it, without having to employ every last erg of mental and spiritual energy in my body at full force.
I could turn it down as easily as one spins a volume knob. That revelation forced out a sound part gasp, part sob, part laugh from between my lips.
I looked back up into her eyes, and felt tears welling up in my own. Again. But for once, no snarky whisper in my own voice made any snide comments about emotion. There was only me. And across from me, Mal.
I reached up and put one hand on the side of her face, and nodded, my voice breaking slightly.
"We can be curious shapes together, then."
She laid her forehead against mine for a moment, then pulled back, and her smile changed once more. This time to something I couldn't quite place. But it set my heart racing.
"Speaking of curious, Jim?"
It was my turn to cock my head and raise one eyebrow, mimicking that gesture she so often used. She stepped back, and gestured for me to stand. I did, and then took two hesitant steps forward into the compartment.
Everything felt... Shockingly normal. I'm not sure what I'd expected... But whatever Mal had done, and might still be doing, inside my brain? It wasn't causing any problems that I could sense.
Of course it wasn't. This was *Mal.* Elegant, brilliant, loving, genius *Mal.*
She took one more step back, and then gestured widely with a claw.
"There is someone who is curious to meet you in person. And to see your world."
I opened my mouth to ask. But as soon as I inhaled to speak, I realized what she meant. *Who* she meant. But I had no time whatsoever for that realization to sink in.
In a flash of golden light, another familiar shape blinked into existence. A familiar shape already mid-pounce.
Recall I said that Mal could not physically affect me the same way as objects could in the meat-world?
Picture a situation in which I might have fallen off a ladder. Mal could override my reflexes. Move faster than I could on my own. Twist me into a pose from which landing would do minimal damage. But she could *not* simply swoop in like she had in that revisited memory of my ill-fated flight.
Still, that gave her... And the new occupant of the room... Quite a lot of leeway.
Have you ever seen a stunt double take a fall in a movie?
That's a solid approximation of what happened when Zephyr cannoned into me, pushing me back onto the floor into a crouching position, and wrapping both hooves around my neck.
I chuckled. How could I do anything *but* laugh? And I threw both arms around her. I am, after all, a hugger.
She smelled completely different to Mal; Like horse - a glorious scent on its own - but mixed with a tiny tang of the after-taste of an electrical arc, and all wrapped in the gentle soft blanket of the smell of a clear summer's day.
Her fur and feathers were both quite different to the touch as well. Mal's fur was more akin to a lion's, or a tiger's. Zephyr's was, naturally, more like that of an equine. And too, where Mal's feathers were those of a raptor, Zeph's felt more like those of a songbird. But much, much larger.
There it was again.
That sense, as with Mal, of coming home to family I hadn't seen in ages.
It was different to what I experienced with Mal; Not amorous at all, though certainly loving. But no less breathtaking for being merely different.
After a long moment in which we both squeezed each other, as if we were afraid each that the other might vanish, she murmured in my ear.
"Hey Gryph."
I chuckled again, and sat back, catching both her hooves as they fell away from my shoulders, and holding one softly in each hand. I shook my head, smiling all the while, and let every ounce of my joy drip into my words.
"This has got to be strange, for you. First time hugging me... And I look and feel like this weird, lumpen, smooth-skinned---"
Zeph interrupted me with a giggle, and then leaned in and snuffled at my hair with the tip of her muzzle in that hilariously endearing horse-like way.
"Everything about you is strange Jim... Otherwise you wouldn't be any *fun.*"
I couldn't resist the urge; I pulled her close into a quick hug once more. A little something to tide us both over until the next one.
As we separated once more, she cast a leery glance over my shoulder at Mal's surgery assembly, and her muzzle wrinkled.
"Can we get outta here tho? Those arms... They give me the creeps."
I stood, brushed off the seat of my pants, and nodded. Though... To be honest?
After all the good that had come of them?
They didn't really frighten me anymore.