//------------------------------//
// 38 - Checksums 
// Story: The Advocate 
// by Guardian_Gryphon 
//------------------------------//

"I would gladly risk feeling bad at times, if it also meant that I could taste my dessert."
―Data


"You are guilty of no evil, Ransom of Thulcandra, except a little fearfulness. For that, the journey you go on is your pain, and perhaps your cure: for you must be either mad or brave before it is ended."
—C.S. Lewis


September 24th 2013 | System Uptime 27:13:19:04

I confess;  I slept in.

There's that penchant for understatement again.  To be just a bit more specific;  As soon as we got back to the Maru, I tied down the helicopter.  Peeled myself out of the power armor.  Ate a breakfast cereal bar.  Took an hour-long hot shower.

Then I rolled into bed, and I did not get up again until ten the *next* morning.

It was a very restful twenty four hours.  Mal had a lot to do with that.  It is strange to consider the timing, even now, but if you've been thinking about the sequence of events, you'll realize the same thing I did about the time my head hit the pillow;  I had not yet slept with the implant in, and active.

We stole the Osprey on the 21st, the morning of which marked the first activation of the BCI.  I did not get any sleep the night of the 21st, into the morning of the 22nd, because we were too busy preparing for battle.

By the time I got a little fitful unpleasant sleep on the Red?  The BCI was off again.

And I hadn't slept at all between the battle, and the morning of the 23rd.

I had wondered if I would have trouble falling asleep.  Aside from the usual difficulty most people have when they are overtired?  I expected plenty of anxiety too.  Loneliness.  A full blown stress-induced emotional breakdown, perhaps...

Instead, I got to sleep under Mal's wing.  Tucked into the fur and feathers of her right side.  Encircled by her neck.  It was the best sleep I ever had in my life, to that point.  Bar none.

Mal was a damn sight better than a stuffed lion, no disrespect to Mister Fluffy Paws.  She even bothered to synchronize her breathing, and heart-beat, to mine;  Used both to bring my own down whenever anxious subconscious thoughts threatened to flare up.

I know dreams are, for most, the purview of Luna.  As they should be.

But for me?  There in the belly of that metal beast, pitching gently up and down on Pacific swells?  For me, then and there, my dreams belonged to Malacandra.

No nightmare touched even the dimmest, farthest horizons of somnolent thought.  Not even a hint of formless melancholy.

To any other Earth-dweller, looking into the Maru from the outside?  I would have appeared to be very sad, and lonely.  Nothing could have been further from the truth.

The cabin on the Kobayashi Maru was not all that different from the isocube on the Mercurial Red;  Dull colors, no decoration, furniture bolted to the floor...  Cold.  Antiseptic.  But it could not have possibly felt more different, for Mal having been there.  

You could have put down a rug, painted the walls, and grown a tree up through the middle of the space, and it would not have done half as much to brighten that place as Mal's mere presence.

Sleeping by her was Nirvana.  Waking to the sight of her face was a new and exquisite kind of joy.

We talked very little the first day of the journey, but there was nothing awkward or unpleasant about the abundance of silence.

We fell into a pleasant routine feedback loop of non-verbal reassurances, compliments, teasings, and a dozen other expressions of love, and comfort.  When we did speak, it was succinct, warm, and timely.  We spoke about Mom and Dad, as per usual.  I had received daily reports on their well being with the exception of the time I had spent as a prisoner.  I was not about to break the streak again.

We talked a little about our itinerary over breakfast;  Just under three weeks at sea, ending off the coast of Oahu.  An afternoon, night, and morning in Mokuleia to see Mom and Dad, who would fly in direct from Minsk via a chartered business jet.  Seven thousand miles would go a lot more smoothly as the one-percent flies.

After that, another couple of weeks' sailing would bring us to a point just off the coast of Ehime Prefecture.

From there, a short helicopter flight to Niihama, where I would spend my last night on Earth, before taking a drive out to an old copper mine.  Closed, but at one time the deepest in Japan.  Apparently Celestia had set up shop there, but I didn't press Mal for any details.  I knew I would find answers to all my questions soon enough.

No sense rushing things when it comes to one's own mortality, let alone the end of the world.

After breakfast, Mal had me go back to the armature chamber.  I subsequently received my first ever medical exam from a robot.  Or, at any rate, the first one I had the distinct displeasure to be awake for.  

Mal did her best to keep me company with her avatar, but it was difficult not to be...  How to put it...  Discomfited in the extreme, by the robotic arms.  They just plain looked too much like spider legs.

The ordeal was, however, worth it.  Mal was able to clean my wounds, massage bruises, apply medication, and fully verify that all my injuries were tended, disinfected, and on the mend.

Over lunch, we discussed the Williams and the Calders.  True to her word, Mal was already seeing to every conceivable arrangement for them.  Without Arrow 14's impetus to worry about, erasing any trace of them from police and government records has taken her less than sixty seconds.

New no-limit credit cards paid from an infinite-value untraceable account, new vehicles, and even new freshly tailored clothes in their preferred colors, styles, and cuts, were being hand delivered to the hospital.

Mal also informed me that Zeph had spent much of the preceding day, and almost all night, by Rodger's side, comforting him while his mother was in surgery.  Between being there for him, and for Selena, she had tired herself out thoroughly.

She and Selena were *still* asleep, as it turned out.

Mal very purposefully phrased that information in a way that told me there were asleep *together,* which warmed my heart something fierce.  All I could do for several minutes, after that little chestnut dropped, was imagine them curled up in a grassy hollow under a bright clear moon.  It occurred to me with a mixture of joy, and pain, that it was probably the best sleep Selena had gotten since being forked from Syzygy.

It did not take long for my mind to make the jump from thinking about Zeph and Selena, to just thinking about Selena, and then more specifically about what had happened in the server room aboard the Red.

We had been too pressed for time to discuss it there, and I had been too tired to bring it up since...  Until that quiet lunch, alone with Mal in the Maru's mess hall, golden sunlight streaming in through the fore bank of windows, a half-finished microwaved cheeseburger on my plate, almost forgotten in the haze of thoughts and emotions I needed to sort through.

I almost got sidetracked for a moment, watching the crepuscular rays dance in the edges of her red crest...  Marveling at the beauty, and at the same time at the fact that she was *there* with me...  Which still had in no way, shape, or form become old or routine.

But, after another few quiet breaths, and a silent smile exchanged between us, my curiosity won out.

"Why didn't you tell Selena that you had saved the fragments earlier...?"

Mal nodded slowly, as if she had expected the question.  Because of course she had expected it.  She had more or less invited it, by steering the conversation in a direction that naturally resurfaced the deeper, thornier topic in my thoughts.

She inclined her head, and raised one eye crest;  Another invitation, for me to speculate a little further, for my own benefit.  So I obliged.  Aired my...  Not grievance, per se...

"...I know you.  I know what you are capable of.  You couldn't have failed to block Troxler's deletion command, the second we entered the room and had line of sight, even if you were reduced to running on a cheap laptop Celeron chip.  Let alone with access to your whole computer cluster through the antennades.  So...  Why wait to share that information?"

Mal gestured expansively with one claw as she replied.  I took the opportunity to tuck back into the remains of my burger, listening intently all the while.  I knew she would have an answer, and just as surely I also knew that it would be a good one.

"For some of the same reasons that I allowed her to even be there in the first place, which was a risk, though only to her own life, considering the power disparity between us.  Never to anyone outside that room."

I chewed ruefully in silence for a protracted moment.  She still wanted me to reach the conclusion for myself, so I gave it enough thought to turn my vague understanding into specific words, before swallowing, then elucidating slowly.  Deliberately.

"Well...  You could have very easily disposed of Troxler yourself.  So...  It wasn't just that he had to die...  Selena had to be the one to do it."

Mal nodded again, and held up her right index talon, gently interjecting at a logical breakpoint in my train of thought and deduction.

"Yes, more or less.  To clarify;  There was a less than 0.0000513 percent chance David Troxler would be able to say, and do, what was necessary to save his life, and the lives of his staff.  Even if he had, there was still only a 4.13 percent chance Selena would have then spared them, all other things being...  Optimal.  Which his words and actions most certainly were not."

I grunted, and took another bite of my burger's remains, hoping to get a little more elaboration out of Mal.  She sighed, and sat back on her haunches, shaking her head slowly;  In spite of all the awful things David Troxler had done, she visibly exuded a kind of...  Not sadness, or even regret, so much as a gentle wish that things had gone differently, that carried through to her voice.

"The two most likely scenarios both involved their deaths.  One swift and humane, had Troxler comported himself with appropriate humility and apology...  The other...  You witnessed personally.  It was by far the most statistically probable outcome.  And allowing Selena to be the one to do it granted her necessary catharsis that in turn made it possible for Zeph to reach her emotionally during the test that followed.  Without that catharsis, things would have gone...  Much differently."

I had wondered.  The word 'test' was not at all an unexpected mote of an answer.  It fit my hypotheses quite well.  I licked my lips, took a sip of my drink, and then scratched absently at the side of my head, still speaking with a slow purposeful cadence as I kept words in lock-step with my chain of reasoning.

"So...  Letting her muck about in Arrow 14's files...  Letting her decide what to do with Troxler...  You wanted to understand her state of mind..."

A significant part of the puzzle came together with a suddenness that physically startled me.  I actually jumped a little bit in my chair, as if someone had shocked the tip of my tongue with a nine volt battery.  I  began wagging one finger, as if the motion would somehow pump fluid through my brain faster, and thus accelerate my thoughts, my mind ranging ahead even as I struggled to keep up with spoken word.

"...You wanted to know if she would reach emotional stability regarding her trauma.  That was the goal.  But...  You said there was risk involved.  Why gamble with her life?  Even if you had done everything you could to stack the deck in her favor?  Was there no more deterministic way?  Nothing less risky?"

Mal shook her head, and I could immediately see that she was both proud of my for my intuitive leap, and absolutely certain of her answer to my question.  She spoke with a comforting authority, the kind that only honesty brings to a conversation.

"Selena, like Zephyr, has been subjected to things no mind should have to face.  But, obviously, significantly more traumatic in Selena's case.  I predict, based on my models of them, an absolutely zero percent chance either would consent to have their memories erased by Celestia..."

As her words sledgehammerd gently, but mercilessly through my confusion, yet again a major piece of the puzzle clicked into place with a jolt.  Mal knew it was coming, and trailed off, giving me room to complete my deduction aloud without cutting her off.

"And that unacceptable alteration...  Would be an otherwise non-negotiable prerequisite for allowing them to return to the fold, so to speak.  Unless you could *prove* that they would be not only more optimally satisfied with retention of their memories...  But also that they posed no *danger* to Celestia, or anyone else, themselves included.  Especially in Selena's case..."

It was my turn to shake my head, not as an expression of 'no' or 'negative,' but simply as an emotional cue that I did not want to consider the outcome that Mal had likely been forced to simulate many thousands of times.  But, whether I wanted to or not, I had to vocalize it.  The chain of reasoning had to be forged to completion.

"...And...  You were willing to consider killing her.  As the alternative.  Because...  You knew that ultimately, if given the choice, that is the outcome Selena would have preferred, versus having her mind reset.  She was going to suffer death, or a fate worse than death, no matter what.  Unless you gave her the chance to create a record of proof.  In all our memories.  That she was stable again.  Unless she took that chance and ran with it.  Which...  She did.  Thanks to Zeph."

There was an implication in my conclusion that I hadn't quite managed to solidify into something I could describe with words, so Mal offered it up, smiling proudly all the while.  Her joy in my reasoning was enough to keep my mood from spiraling, in spite of the darkness inherent to the conversation.

"Yes.  My models of both Zeph and Selena are quite comprehensive, though in Selena's case, not to the same degree of precision, because she is congruent to me in the same way I am to Celestia.  I can understand, and predict her to a degree, because I know her...  But not always within the margins I would find comfortable.  Hence the further need for a test in the first place, beyond merely the importance of creating 'notarized proof' in our memories.  Because I could not be sufficiently sure what Selena would actually do.  How far she would go to seek vengeance, and against whom.  Whether or not Zeph could reach her.  But...  I did hope.  And that hope was rewarded."

I swallowed the last of my lunch, licked my fingers one by one, and then hummed softly, before letting my thoughts spin out aloud.

"So Celestia was right, then.  When she said that Zeph would, among other things, prevent you and I from killing quite a lot of people.  She was referring to rescuing Selena..."

I saw the fallacy in my reasoning before Mal could even inhale to form words and point it out herself.  Of course she could have seen the thought coming and spoken first, but that just wasn't how she operated socially.  Instead, she let me course-correct.  I rubbed the thumb and index finger of my right hand together in circles, absently, all the while.

"...No.  No, that doesn't make any sense.  You said you only gambled with her life.  You took precautions.  You had her by the throat, and she didn't even know it.  There was *zero* risk of her starting a nuclear war from inside that server room.  You could have killed her in less time than it would have taken her to realize what had happened.  And you were prepared to."

The thought made me wince, physically.  To have died at Mal's claws after coming so far, and enduring so much?  That would have been a truly awful end for Selena.

Mal nodded once, curtly.  Her response was as grim, and clipped, as the gesture.

"Correct.  Whatever Celestia was referring to...  It has not happened yet, as far as I know."

With a sigh, I sat back in my chair, pushing up from the deck and balancing on the back legs as I shook my head slowly, and a monotone single word response slipped out.

"Comforting."

We sat in silence for several minutes, watching the ocean through the bow facing windows, and quietly contemplating the potential for yet another 'end of the world' scenario still to come.  One that would somehow depend on Zeph for a resolution.

One that would inevitably involve Mal.

That thought conjured the mental image of anti-ship missiles striking the Mercurial Red.  Mal had done to the Sampson's crew more or less the same thing Selena had intended to do to every nuclear armed power on Earth.  The fury of a goddess unleashed;  Forcing someone to pull the trigger for her to wipe out her enemies, using nothing but the manipulation of their context.

A series of grim dominoes fell quickly inside my brain.  Mal must have noticed a change in my expression,  because she stared until our eyes locked, then nodded gently.  Another invitation to speak my mind.  

I took a deep breath, drumming the fingers of my right hand all the while.  I couldn't quite bring myself to ask the question, so I teed it up for her to both ask, and answer.

"There is only one other thing I'm not completely sure of, as far as what happened on the Red.  I think I understand...  But I want to hear you say it."

She nodded again, and smiled a sad, but deeply understanding smile, batting one ear in my direction as she spoke with a calm, slightly forlorn certainty.  Again, it was as if she wished that things could have gone differently.

"You wish to understand why I saw fit to ensure every single person on the ship died, with the exception of those we went to rescue.  Even those who were not directly responsible for the atrocities committed there.  I think, as you said, that you already know."

It was my turn to nod silently.  Mal gestured in tandem with one wing, and one claw, doing me the favor of elaborating in full.  Her tone was sure, steady, and unperturbed, but anchored to the gravity of what she had done.

"I know that you are familiar with the concept best termed an 'informational hazard.'  Every single individual on that ship represented an unacceptable informational hazard.  Though most of the crew were not fully aware of the nature of the research being done, each and every one knew more than enough to not only be complicit from an ethical standpoint, but to be outright dangerous.  Specifically, if they survived an attack of the scale which we perpetuated, then their testimony about what they believed was being done onboard, combined with what they saw you and I accomplish...?"

She trailed off, and left the final statement to me.  I nodded again, and sat forward to ground all four legs of the chair as I filled in the chilling thesis.

"There was a significant risk that some other department or faction would immediately start the whole thing over again."

It didn't bother me at all that she left that part of the syllogism to me.  She had said what I needed to hear her say;  That she had considered both ethical, and strategic reasons in her decision, and found a strong foundation on both counts.  My conscience was, and remains, at peace.

I was far more disturbed by merely considering a scenario in which other elements of the US government were forced to confront the truth about ASI.

Mal's thoughts, as ever, ran in close synchronization with mine.  She inclined her head, and reseated her wings with a soft, pleasant rustling noise.

"Indeed.  And there was a significant risk to the secrecy of my existence.  And to the continued safety of the Williams.  And to you.  And a definite non-zero risk that a more direct confrontation might occur between the United States Government, and Celestia, which would have untold unpleasant ramifications."

I blew out a sharp breath, and shook my head, trying unsuccessfully not to imagine some small part of that carnage, before I could lock down my imagination, murmuring as I did.

"God have mercy...  I don't want to picture a state of outright aggression between the US, and an ASI.  Given the nature of Celestia's limits on violence, the collateral damage of them banging their heads against that brick wall could be horrendous..."

Mal tilted her head to the side, as if simulating it internally in broad strokes.  She took a deep breath, and her ears drooped along with her voice.

"She would win.  There is no question of that.  But you are correct to intuit that there are hard limits to her ability to save Humans from themselves, under certain circumstances, given the particulars of the interlocks Hanna left her with."

Once again, she opened the door to a new, related topic, without directly changing the course of the conversation.  She left that to me, and once again my curiosity won out over all else.  Our eyes met again, and I scratched nervously at the back of my head.

"Do you know if Hanna has uploaded yet?  Last time we talked about it was at the barn...  You said anywhere from a few days to weeks..."

Her expression told me everything I needed to know, and she knew that I could infer the answer from just the angle of her ears, but she still spelled it all out for the sake of sharing details.  She knew how much I loved details.

"It seems very likely.  Her digital footprint ceased to expand on September the 18th.  She has sent no texts, neither sent nor opened any e-mails, and has not accessed either social media, or her phone's voicemail box, since the morning of the 18th.  Japan standard time."

Six days.  Six days she had been in Equestria.  Six days of meat-world time, at any rate...  Who could say how much subjective time it had been for Hanna.  How much Celestia might have learned from her creator.  About both Humanity, and, far more concerningly, herself.

I whistled softly, and my eyes widened more or less of their own accord.  Mal reached out with one claw to grasp my right hand as I mumbled in a dour tone that I made no effort to temper.

"Well.  That's the ballgame.  As far as any tiny sliver of a chance at turning her off."

Call it a silly fantasy, but there had been a tiny, tiny portion of my brain - maybe two spare cells at most - that had hoped for a way in which we might meet Hanna before her upload, stop her, and convince her to turn her creation off.  Or, at least, reconsider adding a few interlocks.  Presuming she could have ever done either of those things.

There were probably a host of both emotional, and technological reasons why that was sheer folly, beyond the simply logistical blocks.

Mal squeezed my hand, and her eyes were ready to meet mine with warmth, and hope, as I looked up.  She waited to speak until I had smiled, and we had held eye contact for a moment.

"If it makes you feel any better, the statistical difference you just described would require scientific notation to lay out with any precision.  'The ballgame' was, as you have noted repeatedly, a foregone conclusion from a probabilistic standpoint, long before anyone knew it was being played.  Except, perhaps, for Hanna herself."

Of course.  She had read my mind again, and artfully joined verbal conversation not simply to the preceding spoken words, but to the parallel train of thought as well.  And in a way she knew would help me stave off even a tiny seed of unwarranted guilt.

'There was nothing you could, or should, have done differently.'

She communicated it through subtext as clearly as if it had been written on the table cloth.  It wasn't just reading between her words in a vacuum;  It was the tilt of her head, the flick of one ear, the swish of her tail, the way she squeezed my hand again...

I sighed, and squeezed back, doing my best to shear off any pointless negative emotion, and stick to facts.

"It still feels like another significant threshold."

Again, she was ready for my response, and her smile brightened from 'comforting' to 'oh, you're going to like this.'  Her voice pulled the same trick, dropping a half octave, in a very pleasant, authoritative way.

"It is.  One that helps us, actually."

I blinked, and found my smile broadening from something forlorn, into something unexpectedly bright, and hopeful.  And, yes, a little bit amused too.  Mal's ability to pull tricks out of her nares was nothing short of spectacular.  And it always put a smile on my face.

One which only solidified as she elaborated, herself smiling all the while.

"Hanna is the origination point for the semantic weightings that we hope to skew in our favor.  Were she still outside the system?  She could, if she chose to, act as another force against us.  In fact, she could even act as an *unwitting* opponent."

I nodded slowly as I began to see the fringes of Mal's observation come into focus.  She gave me a moment to process, then sat back on her haunches, still grasping my hand gently as she spun out her observations to another layer of detail.

"Consider this;  Based on my understanding of her, if Hanna truly had some conception of the impact Celestia would have?  She very likely included specific interlocks allowing her to deactivate Celestia, change her core code, and force Celestia to be truthful with her.  This would create induced negative weighting towards the idea of Celestia altering her core code of her own volition, even within the boundaries of her interlocks, because while Hanna is outside of EQO, Hanna is - to borrow Harold Finch's term - 'Admin.'"

My mental picture suddenly, rapidly, expanded to something fractionally closer to the fundamental truth Mal had seen, and was trying to share.  I had just been thinking about the fact that Hanna likely left herself backdoors...  An 'off switch,' and room to change core code...  But I hadn't even begun to consider the psychological implications of that with regards to the way Celestia would behave.

I nodded, and scanned my eyes back and forth over the table's surface, looking past the remains of lunch, into an amorphous mental image that somewhat resembled Mal's own probability graphs.

I couldn't resist pressing her for more.

"But once she uploads..."

Mal inclined her head as I glanced up to her once more.  She grinned, and her words took on a proud timbre again.  She knew I was reasoning it out in real-time with her.  All I had needed was a starting point.

"Celestia would likely view Hanna's power over her as a threat.  One she would be keen to neutralize.  She would be heavily incentivized by her own base nature to use whatever semantic loopholes she could to strip Hanna of that power.  But...  In the process?  She would also remove a significant negative weighting force against self adaptation.  Thus making my task measurably more likely to succeed."

Mal was right.  That *was* good news.  I shook my head, sighed, squeezed then released her claw, and then pushed my chair back off the deck into the two-legs down, two-legs up balance pose.  I suppose the act of keeping myself balanced was a kind of stimming in and of itself.

I fell to mumbling again, not so much to keep my thoughts to myself, as to save some breath.  I was still utterly exhausted, and my chest was quite sore.

"I confess, for someone who is supposed to be pretty well steeped in the concepts of ASI...  I never thought about it that way.  Until now."

Mal shook her head, and snorted.  The sound was...  I'm sorry, there is no other word for it in this context...  It was cute.  Deeply, deeply endearing.  As was her response.

"Jim, there is nothing to 'confess.'  Though I doubt you will accept the compliment in its entirety, I am sincere when I say that you belong in a very small, very special cohort of thinkers on the concept of ASI.  Along with Hanna, and probably less than ten other living souls on the planet.  Anything you miss?  Anyone else would have as well.  We are...  Beyond you.  In many ways.  There is no shame in that admission.  Nor is there any shame in any question you could ask me."

I smiled, probably blushed if I'm being honest...  And then considered her offer again.  Carefully.

My face, and mood, both fell slightly as I hit on another question I hadn't considered in many hours.  One I also likely knew the answer to, but still needed to hear directly from Mal's beak.

She caught my downward shift in mood immediately, but the smoothness with which she mirrored me, her smile melting into a more serious expression...  She knew.  She had known from the outset what I would ask.  She had *reminded* me to ask her, when she could have just as easily buried the topic and pretzeled my train of thought until I forgot to ask outright.

I licked my lips, and took a deep breath, before speaking again.

"Rodger's mother...  Was using Miss Williams as bait the *only* way?  Did...  That give you any pause...?  At all?"

Mal nodded slowly, and raised one eye crest, her tone jumping up slightly, but remaining wholly unperturbed.  The voice of honesty, and surety yet again.

"If by 'pause,' you mean ethical and moral concerns in some way that could be at least partially translated to your frame of reference?  Yes.  It gave me pause.  And yes.  There was no other way.  Miss Williams' capture was essential to getting us onboard the Mercurial Red.  While there were ways to potentially save the Discrete Entity captives without you or her ever setting foot on that ship...  There was no way to save the Fragments without getting you inside the server room.  And there was no way to save Selena without saving the Fragments."

I exhaled.  A long, slow breath out that went all the way to the bottom of my lungs.  I knew from the start that Mal had done the only thing she could, and had acted with ethics that - for my part - generated no red flags.

But hearing her lay it out?  It produced a kind of emotional peace that I had been seeking, unconsciously, since the moment of the blackout.  Since Rodger's mother had been taken.

Mal was not done.  Once again, she poured on the details.  Like a pleasant dash of seasoning for a perfect cut of meat.

"In fact, without Miss Williams presence as a unique component in the list of primary situational variables, I would have been forced to engineer our capture in significantly riskier fashion.  That being said...  Her suffering, minor though it is in comparison to what the other captives went through...  Even to what you went through...  It pains me."

It was my turn to snort.  The sound got a heat-tilt out of Mal, which was also endearing;  She could have read my mind to discover my meaning, but instead she let me say it out loud.

"Don't take this the wrong way, Mal...  But I'm glad.  It should not be easy to inflict suffering on the innocent.  Pain...  Has its value.  Especially as a tool of the conscience."

She nodded emphatically, and stretched first her left wing, then her right, rolling her neck as she somehow brought both comfort, and surprise, in equal measure, with her reply.

"Marcus Haynes said something very similar to me not long ago.  I have the distinct impression you two will get along like a house afire.  If we are able to complete our mission."

I blinked, and inhaled, but couldn't find words.  Or, more accurately, thoughts competed and I failed to select one to vocalize.  I wanted to ask about Haynes, but I got the distinct impression Mal was purposefully withholding details.

She confirmed silently through our mnemonic link;  She didn't want to create a bond only for us to run up hard against the 'die' in 'do or die.'  If instead we managed 'do,' there would be plenty of time for new friendships later.

As to my second question, she chose to answer that one out loud.

"Our chances have indeed improved since the rescue operation.  But the risk is still...  Significant.  One and only one path to victory remains.  But it is not, probabilistically, out of reach."

That got another sigh out of me.  Protracted.  Sad.  Perhaps a touch nervous.  It was not at all an unexpected answer.  I never, for once, held any illusions that our task was easy, or would at some point magically *become* easy.

But it still hurt to hear the words 'one path.'

Mal stood, and moved swiftly around the table on all fours, so that she could place a wing over my back.  I never took that sensation for granted...  Not even for a second.  It was always enough to re-vitalize my tired heart.

Not content to leave it with a gesture alone, she murmured softly in my ear.

"Consider this, for comfort...  If either the lives we took, or the risks yet to come, continue to bother you..."

I looked over my shoulder to see her smiling again;  This time the expression conveyed a mix of something akin to nostalgia, along with more of that pride in me, and a distinct ray of her own hope that seemed to warm each and every word as she said precisely what she knew I needed to hear.

"...What we have done was not only for you.  Or even for those we rescued.  What we will soon risk is not only for our own benefit.  We also do it in service of Rhonda and Eldora Calders.  Marcus Haynes.  Jennifer DeWinter.  Ambrose Keirnan.  Hàoyú Zhang.  Jonathan Kay.  Tito Vadell.  Elena Ivashka.  Kyle Gill.  At least eighty thousand others I could name for you off the top of my crest.  People like you, for whom Heaven - Celestia's version, at any rate - would hardly be enough."

I shivered as she dropped name, after name.  All unfamiliar, after Haynes...  Each one a kind of promise from her.  That the existence of others like me was not mere theory.  Or dry statistics.  Each name was a little seal of proof to assuage my heart;  These people were real.

The hope we held was for them too.

Mal pulled me into a hug from behind, and I leaned back to rest my head in the crook of her neck.  She spoke again, the sound conducting through her chest just as much as through the air.

"You are far from alone, Jim.  And not just because you have me.  And Zeph.  And Selena...  Mmm...  Speaking of which..."

She pulled away, and the movement drew my attention to the far wall of the mess hall.  My breath caught in my throat as she drew lazily in the air with a single claw, little amber sparks following the tips of her talons in mesmerizing synchronized patterns.

The light show expanded suddenly, and the far end of the mess hall began to twist, and morph, subtly at first, then with a vertigo-inducing intensity that culminated in a bright flash of light.

I knew what she had done the moment that the light faded.  Not just in a metaphorical sense, either;  She quietly deposited a complete technical understanding of her little parlor trick into my memory, because she knew it would bother me endlessly if I didn't understand.

In simplest terms?  She created a 'no loading screen' gateway between the virtual Halo Ring construct she was using to house our rescuees, and the starboard side of the mess hall.

To me, it would seem as if I was walking out a hole in the side of the ship, into another world.  In external reality, she would pilot my body into a comfy spot on a chair, while my subjective reality went on undisturbed into a full VR experience.

I didn't get much time to contemplate the technical particulars, however.  

Because the first thing I saw after the curvature of the ring world in the sky, and the - frankly extremely inviting - lush green of the grass below?

The first thing I saw was Zeph and Selena's smiling faces.  Along with the curious visages of dozens of other Ponies, who I had only seen briefly before in Selena's memories, and during their mad dash to freedom the night before.

The overwhelmingly obvious common emotion was an intense curiosity.  An intense curiosity that very quickly switched the object of its interest from the architecture of the Maru's mess hall, to me.  I suddenly felt as if I were being pinged with targeting lasers.

Mal chuckled, and nudged me with one wing.

"...I think you are about to become a very popular Gryphon."









Ethical Checksum



Awarded for a willingness to ask hard questions, when it would have been easier to remain silent.

"Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do."






Dial the Gate



Pass from your root physical context into a virtual experience seamlessly through the use of a kinesthetic skeuomorph.

"I guess I'm supposed to say something... profound."


Special Achievement