//------------------------------//
// 39 - Network Traversal 
// Story: The Advocate 
// by Guardian_Gryphon 
//------------------------------//

"I know now why you cry."
―The Terminator


"Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness."
—C.S. Lewis


September 27th 2013 | System Uptime 30:09:15:24

Those weeks at sea on the Maru were a time of much needed rest, recuperation, and in some cases?  Deep, thoughtful discussion.

Life had been moving so fast, for so long...  It felt truly strange to have whole days where nothing of significant weight occurred, or was even spoken about.  I was, and still am, a creature of routine, and my routine had become adrenaline, anxiety, violence, and worry.

Most days followed a simple, sublime routine;  Up at 8, run laps of the ship's mid-decks with Mal for company.  I know, it must sound strange that I considered daily exercise important, even on the cusp of discarding my Earthly body...  The best I can do by way of explanation is to say that though I hated it?  I also wanted to care for it, at minimum so that it would serve me well, ill-fitting though it was.  That was, I reasoned, the least it could do for me.

After a quick shower I'd have breakfast, sometimes with just Mal, sometimes with Zeph and Selena too, and then I would spend the rest of the morning on maintenance tasks.  The dull, repetitive, but somehow cathartic kinesthetic motions of keeping a ship in trim condition at sea.

Sometimes that meant a little maintenance on the helicopter, other times it was cinching down lines, checking on systems in the engine room, or even something as simple as doing a little vacuuming in the mess hall.

Then there was lunch.  Lunchtime was sacred between Mal and I;  No matter who did or did not join us for breakfast, and no matter how dinner went, Mal and I always spent lunch alone together.

Except for one particular Friday, four days after we put to sea.  Sometimes a whole day went by without any particularly weighty discussions...  But sometimes the whole day turned on a singular one.

I had just sat down with a plate full of microwaved chicken nuggets, and hash rounds.  I heard the rustle of feathers, and glanced up, expecting to see Mal as per usual.  Something about the sound was different, but by the time that information made it to my train of conscious thought, I could already see why.

It was not Mal, sitting down across the table, but Selena, with a plate of cold cuts and a bowl of salad suspended in her magical aura.

She took me by surprise, but that emotion faded quickly.  And it was hardly an intense sensation to begin with.  I didn't even emote my curiosity visibly, opting to smile instead.  It took very little effort, and even less time, to understand why she was there, and not Mal.

Though she and Zeph had joined us several times for breakfast, the Alicorn had barely said two words to me put together.  When she did speak, it was almost always with Zeph.  It's hard to say what I enjoyed more those mornings...  The sight of Mal, so very clearly in love with me, or the sight of those two Ponies, so very clearly in love with each other.

Any latent worry I'd harbored over Selena had evaporated the very first time I saw her and Zephyr together after the rescue.  It did not take a genius to understand that they were both better off, in every measurable way, as a result of the swiftly developing bond between them.

It also did not take a genius to know that Selena felt there were things she needed to say to me in private.  I suspected she had already conversed a great deal with Mal, and it was patently obvious that she had begun to talk through things with Zeph.  The rescuees she knew well, and I had the strong impression that she had also spent a great deal of time with them...  So that just left me.

She returned my smile, though it was only a tepid flash before the corners of her muzzle fell again, and her ears seemed to deflate.  Not at all a disingenuous expression, just...  Weighed down.  Overpowered by sadness, and shame.

We sat in total silence for almost fifteen minutes, eating, watching the waves break across the bow of the ship, and very occasionally trading small sad microexpressions by way of silent conversation.

First, she shot me another sad smile.  Brief, tinged with hope, one ear perked and the other out to the side, her nostrils flaring slightly reflexively with anxiety.

'Are we...  Good?  After what you saw me do?'

I returned the smile, with as much warmth as I could muster, and inclined my head.

'Yes.  Absolutely.'

She glanced away, and so did I.  An acknowledgement that she still wasn't ready to talk aloud.  That it was going to take considerably more effort on her part to achieve emotional equilibrium.

After a little more silent eating, and contemplation, she caught my gaze by accident on the way up from burying her muzzle in her salad bowl.

I smiled again, and sighed contentedly, before looking away slowly.

'I feel safe with you.  My friend.'

As my head turned, I caught a fleeting glimpse of her reaction out of the corner of one eye;  A kind of broken smile, and a gulp, ears drooping, but not flat.

'Thank you.  I'm struggling trying not to cry.  I'm not used to all this...  Love.'

Two things stuck with me for the remainder of our companionable silence.  The first was how comforting I found the sound of a horse chewing on food.  It really is the sort of thing that tickles the peace and joy of the soul.

The second was the re-realization that for me, Syzygy and Lark's relationship had been just days ago.  For Selena, he was a lost love from over a decade prior, and the vast majority of what she had experienced in those fourteen years was abuse.

I wondered idly, as I toyed with the last hash round between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand, whether this is how it would feel to be a time traveler.  Always out of synchronization with at least some of your friends and family, in that strange alien way for which Humans had zero natural context.

I have complained, recently in fact, that I often didn't know what to say to comfort someone.  But in a sudden flash, as a particularly hefty wave broke over the bow into a glimmering spray of salt water droplets, that each caught the sunlight in a thousand different ways...  

For once, I knew exactly what to say.  So I did.  With a firm surety that, for once, I felt.  Right down to my toes.

"I'm so happy for you two."

That sure as heck got her attention, but it was just for openers.  

I could sense her head whipping around in surprise, but I waited.  Didn't make eye contact yet.  I wanted her paying attention, but I also wanted her to feel at ease.  I let her know that I wasn't shunning her...  Subtle titling of the head and shoulders...  As if I were always *about* to look over and make eye contact...  But I didn't.  I didn't want her to look away from me.

I wanted her to see the truth on my face as I said the parts I knew would really hit home.  And that warm solidity, borne of shared joy, permeated every last syllable.  I didn't even have to try.

"Zeph needs you.  More, I think, than she needs any of the rest of us."

That's called 'tactical truth.'  Or, at least, that's what Mal and I used to call it.

Selena had come there to talk about her mistakes.  But my sudden epiphany was that she had already faced those mistakes.  She didn't need to re-litigate them with me.  And she already knew that she had my forgiveness, and trust, both, in full measure.

No.  What she needed was for me to *show* her that she had my trust, and forgiveness, and yes even love.  People on Earth were fond of saying that actions spoke louder than words, but sometimes carefully chosen words could *be* actions in and of themselves.

I heard her inhale softly, so I rolled my shoulders to work out a small cramp, and gently but insistently pushed my way into the silence.

"You are the only one who understands her fears.  Her pains.  Completely.  The rest of us...  We're just...  Making do as best we can.  But you look at her...  And you see right into her soul...  And you understand what you see.  Because you lived it too..."

I paused for just the space of a single heart beat, and finally turned to meet Selena's eyes.  She didn't look away, and I knew then that I had timed everything perfectly.  I blinked as I finished the thought, the way a cat does to show trust, as a means to relieving some of the inherent pressure of prolonged eye contact.

"...And she knows that.  And I can't imagine her being any happier than she is when she's with you."

To this day, I'm proud of what I said to her.  And I stand by it.

The tactical truth;  She made Zeph feel *safe.*  Loved.  And that, by very simple intuitive logic, meant that Selena could not be the monster she feared herself to be.  Zeph wouldn't feel safe sleeping beside a monster.

A Nightmare would not have made Zephyr so, so happy.  And fulfilled.  And if the rest of us could see that?  Then we didn't think Selena was a monster either.

I didn't have to say anything else.  I didn't need to reason it out for her beyond that.  Indeed, it was better that I didn't.  That forced *her* to do so internally.  And in turn, that process was what finally broke through the crust around her pain.  Made the truth real for her.

Sometimes an adjacent truth is infinitely more powerful than the thesis you were trying to get across in the first place.

I could see the dampness of tears welling up in the mare's eyes...  So I did something a little bit rash...  But hopeful.  I smiled...  Inclined my head, then turned to stare back at the sea...  And reached out with my left hand.

Don't think for a moment that I missed the way Selena had behaved around me since she had come aboard the Maru.  In a physical sense.  She had been thoroughly abused by Humans, and thus had a fear not only of physical contact, but within that an especially intense fear of contact with a Human being.

My hope was, at last, rewarded.

I felt a hoof and fetlock rest gently in my open, upturned palm.  Haltingly at first, then with full physical commitment, the softness of her fur cushioning my fingers against the surprising weight of the limb.

I felt her shudder slightly, as she released some of her tension, and after a moment, I decided it was safe to gently squeeze her hoof.  The satisfied little trilling sigh she let out told me that she was well and truly settled in my presence.  I'd heard that same exact sound many, many times before with farm horses.

We sat in silence again, for nearer than not to a couple of hours.  And not one single moment of it was tense, or awkward.  Or even anticipatory.  And not one single iota of that time was wasted.

We sat and soaked in sunlight.  And the joy of friendship.  And forgiveness.








October 9th 2013 | System Uptime 42:16:29:54

This little story has certainly run long, but not - I think - without good reason.  Still, it would take more time than we have left for me to recount every happy little moment, or emotionally cathartic conversation that happened during that voyage.

I'm doing my best to stick to just the very most important ones.  And around the evening of a brisk Wednesday in the second week of October, I found myself eyeball-deep in one of those very important conversations with Mal.

We had been walking around the outside of the Maru, checking over equipment, chatting idly about this and that;  What it felt like to preen feathers, how wonderful the smell of autumn leaves could be, the progress Miss Williams was making in physical rehab...

We had lapsed into a comfy silence for a bit, both leaning against the railing near the bow and staring out towards the sunset.  I lost track of time, just reveling in the breeze, and the sheer wonder of the sense of her standing beside me...  And before I quite knew what had happened, the first stars were out.

It's very strange, still, to think back on moments like that - moments where I had no concrete concept of time slipping by.  I couldn't have told you how long it had been since the last thing Mal or I had said - hours, minutes, or seconds - for all the money in the world.

It was the ocean itself that broke the peace of the moment, and brought an end to the stillness.  Gave me cause to lick my lips, and speak up.  Specifically, the broken reflection of the stars in the sea.  One deep mirrored in another, reminding me just how small I was.

"How...  Would it have ended?"

A strange association to many, I know...  But climate anxiety made it difficult to look at anything natural...  A tree, a bird perched on a feeder, the ocean...  And not have a little quiver in my stomach.  Mostly I was good at sidelining those thoughts, before they could spiral.

Mostly.  This time, the nagging thought...  The inescapable little chink of 'what if?' that the Gryphoness herself represented, had finally caught up with me.  Between wondering about a knock down drag out fight between her and Celestia, and musing about the way Selena might have gotten the drop on everyone and actually started a nuclear war...

...And the fears Rodger had expressed...

...The questions Foucault had asked...

...It had all rooted and sprouted in my mind at last, given the shade, water, and soil of rest and contemplation.

I glanced over to Mal, half-expecting her to blink, and tilt her head.  But she didn't, and deep down, that was no surprise.  She knew me well enough to know what I meant.  She just nodded silently, sagely, one ear forward, the other slightly to the side, implying that I'd feel better if I aired the question in its grizzly entirety.

I sighed, and leaned over the railing, staring down at the bow wave as I went ahead and put the shape of specific words to the thought.

"How would our world have gone?  What would the future have been like...?  And...  How would it have all...  Ended...  If not for Celestia?"

I appreciated that there was almost no pause at all, just a deep audible inhalation - proffered as a moment of mental downtime for me to brace myself - before Mal stretched out the canopy of one wing over my back, and launched into an explanation with a timbre and cadence fit for a top-shelf History Channel documentarian.

There was no clarifying question;  Neither a 'Do you really want me to simulate that?' - as if she hadn't already a thousand times - nor a 'what do you mean 'end?' '  

And no argument either, to my relief, particularly on that latter point.  

In those days, so many people wanted to argue with you when confronted with simple facts.  Things like peak fossil fuels, anthropogenic climate change, nuclear proliferation, potential biowarfare scenarios...

No one wanted to accept the math.

The truth.

The biggest lie most people needed to be told, from birth, to keep the world spinning on a day-to-day basis.

The lie that we had anything better than one in a thousand odds of surviving as a species, to the point of reaching multi-planetary status.  The truth, that one way or another, the systems we'd built were going to catch up with us.  Somehow.

Well...  I reflected, as Mal started off slowly, then accelerated into an almost rhythmic vocal pattern...  They *had* caught up with us.  Just, perhaps, in the gentlest way possible.  

I'd considered it before, but the thought rose rapidly to the surface of my mind, again, like fizz in soda, that *this* was the grim stair-step of educated speculation, and harsh statistics, that had led Hanna to her own fateful decisions.  Just as it was then dragging me inexorably towards my own.

The vast majority of people, as individuals, were not somehow inherently awful...  Even after everything I've been through?  I still tend to believe that 99 out of 100 people will lean towards their better angels under ideal circumstances.

But the smothering iron beams of a cold, uncaring, selfish modernity that we had inadvertently coalesced around, under non-ideal circumstances?  And the cruelty of those 1 in 100, or even 1 in 10,000, who held it up not because it was 'normal...'  But because they benefited more than everyone else?  Or because they had become broken beyond repair by the pressure?  Or both?

As someone who lived through it, albeit nowhere near the worst of it?  *That* was inherently awful.

And I realized then, as I do again now...  That what I wanted, in that moment, was for Mal to help convince me.

Convince me we were doing the right thing.

Convince me CelestAI's Equestria was, unequivocally, better than any future capitalist-addled, fossil-fuel-addicted, hothouse-Earth, post-atomic hellhole we might...  Would almost certainly, eventually...  Make for ourselves. 

That Foucault really was wrong.

I was, in those days, what the youth would have called 'a doomer.'  Full-stop.  Those who both knew the shape of Humanity's cage, and cared, often had no power to break it, and those who had the power almost always knew, but liked seeing everyone else in the cage.

But even knowing that?  Some part of me, the part that was still, for all my rationality, affected by my culture...  The bit of me that was a product of my time and place?  It needed convincing.

We weren't exactly opposing Celestia.  Just trying to ever-so-subtly tweak a small but significant detail of her utopia.  Slight as our chances were?  I knew, though I hated to acknowledge it concretely, I knew...  Foucault *was* right about that one pesky detail.

Mal and I were likely the last real statistically significant chance Humanity had of stopping Celestia outright.

Maybe one in a trillion.  That's probably an exaggeration - I'm sure the odds were *much* worse - but we were still an order of magnitude better equipped and positioned to fight her than anyone alive.

The casualties of that theoretical war...  A world where Mal took Selena's plan and ran with it...  Even the fringes of that mental image made me shudder.  And not just because of the almost incomprehensible terrors of nuclear war...

...But because I could see a theoretical path, somewhere down one of those long forking dark branches of probability...  A path to an actual victory.  However pyrrhic.

I needed convincing.  Not that we were hopelessly outmatched, and the potential benefits of open warfare with a goddess were greatly outweighed by the downsides.  I knew that as surely as I knew that the only shape I'd ever feel at home in had wings, and talons.

War with a goddess is a sucker's game.  Even if you win.  You'll probably only live long enough to wish you had not.

No...  I needed convincing - on an *emotional* level - that, in choosing to more or less go along with Celestia...  In choosing the best of an imperfect set of paths...  In choosing to accept an abandonment of a future determined by Humanity, for one determined by her...  That we were ultimately doing the right thing.

And Mal delivered.

I met her eyes only briefly, at the start, and saw more than enough seriousness, and sadness in the droop of her ears, and the glistening of those golden orbs.  I spent the rest of my glimpse at alternate Human history staring back at the place where sea and sky met in a vague purple-blue misty haze, leaning into her side as her left wing cradled me gently.

"Interactions of complex systems, both Human-created, and natural, would have inevitably led to all of the following, within fifty years..."

I was trying, and failing, to stop vivid imaginings from flitting across my mind's eye.  So instead, I scrunched my eyes shut, more to help cope with the sudden shooting pain of an oncoming panic attack than to provide a dark canvas...  And I just listened.  Forced myself to engage.

"Sooner, than later, and likely first in the chain of disaster, there would have been a serious global pandemic.  Forced migration from the effects of anthropogenic climate change, combined with unsafe factory farming and wet-market practices, displacement of animal species from their natural habitats, and ever more cramped conditions within large city centers, would guarantee at least one within ten years.  Considering some of the gain-of-function research being done in state sponsored laboratories in multiple countries...?  More than one is likely.  At least one, with a significant mortality rate, was inevitable."

I shivered.  Yes, the autumnal night ocean breeze was a little chilly...  But nothing like the pure ice in my bones that came from picturing an ill-prepared world suddenly plunged into the fear, horror, and chaos of widespread disease.

More than almost any other potential disaster scenario?  Global pandemic would have torn at the very fabric of Human social connection.  Those of you from my time?  You understand.

To those of you who grew up here?  

For whom death is just a scary fairy story?

Who have never once been, and never will be, sick?  

I don't think it is possible for you to ever understand the true emotional meaning of the word 'pandemic.'  You are incapable of grasping the context, because there is no way for you to experience the true, deep, abiding fear of mortality, and all that mortality implies.

And I'm glad.  Better is a world where such things can only be dimly reflected in the hazy mirror of philosophical conversations, or the much more palatable fear of 'high difficulty' settings, and never again be touched.

Mal wasn't even half finished, but with each new grim word picture that she painted for me, I found that the nightmarish prognostications came as less and less of a surprise.  It was all coldly, inescapably, logical.

"Continued pressures from a worsening climate, dwindling fossil fuel reserves, and thus increasing food scarcity and financial collapse, combined with the effects of one or more pandemic diseases, would then have created and continually fostered the ideal conditions for war.  Not merely the asymmetric proxy wars in the Middle East which your generation is used to, but larger regional conflicts, involving nuclear armed powers, centered in Europe, first, then shortly thereafter the South China sea, and adjacent areas..."

Mark Twain once said that history seldom repeats itself...  But it often rhymes.  What Mal was describing sounded like some sort of horribly twisted retread of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.  Pandemic, financial collapse, rising fear and isolationism, war - beginning as embers before stoking up into a roaring all consuming fire - it was uncanny.

I could see the shape of what inevitably came next in the moment before she said it.  The key thing that would be different in a third world war.

"...And since every weapon ever invented by Humans has been used in anger...  Ultimately these conflicts would have ended in, at minimum, a limited exchange of strategic weapons.  And a greater than fifty percent chance of total nuclear commitment from multiple geopolitical heavyweights..."

It was the reason Einstein always postulated that whatever conflict came after a third world war?  It would be fought with sticks, and stones.

I thought back to the moment Mal and I had spent at the foot of an atomic artillery piece.  Just about a month ago, but it felt like a year.

We might have changed quite a bit since then, but Humanity had hardly changed at all since the weapon itself had been constructed.  The same mindlessly tribal, domineering, arrogant mentality that thought it was a good idea to mount a fucking atomic weapon to an artillery shell?  Was the same exact mentality that permeated the culture of world leaders at the time.  Even after seeing first-hand exactly what those kinds of weapons do to people.

The opinions of those people who stood in the crossfire?

They never seemed to matter.

If Humanity had been a true world-wide equal representation democracy?  There would have been far fewer billionaires, generals, presidents, and pundits, and a lot more happy farmers, painters, writers, singers, and carpenters.  That's my theory, anyhow.

I snorted softly, and shook my head, as Mal laid out a few stomach churning statistics that I already more or less knew.

Doctor Calders was right, from a practical standpoint, and Foucault was dead wrong.

There was no viable future in a world run by Humans, given the course we'd already set for ourselves.

The ship couldn't be turned fast enough by anyone *except* Celestia.

"...Either way, slow, or fast, small or large, the exchange would result in the deaths of eight out of every ten people on the planet within two years of the first atomic weapon being fired.  And permanent, irreversible damage to the climate, for which the survivors would not be prepared to adapt their agricultural techniques..."

Foals.  Fledgelings.

Let me underscore something for you in case I haven't done so sufficiently yet;  Food was not a guaranteed thing in my time.

You treat hunger as a pleasant counterpoint to fullness.  The gentle moon-lit un-frightening darkness that makes warm firelight cozy by comparison.

For us?  Back then?  Food was never a guarantee.  

Sure, for someone as privileged as I was, we mostly took it for granted.  But still...  Though many people in my position didn't think about it in such direct A-to-B-to-C terms?  Part of the reason we toiled and slaved away in jobs we hated was because we knew we would starve if we didn't.

Food used to cost money.  It was not simple to grow.  To feed the planet in a world where we had billions of Humans, more every year, but fewer and fewer farmers?  We had to develop highly specialized machines, chemicals, processes...  All of which were immensely sprawling, complex, and brittle.

It is, frankly, astounding that we even made it to the year 2013 without a food supply collapse.

To change even a small climatological variable would immediately doom at least the plurality, if not the majority, of Humans to death by starvation, or the harm caused by desperation to avoid it.

Nuclear weapons were so powerful...  So unthinkably heinous...  Just a 'limited exchange' of a few hundred small ones, out of the tens of thousands of enormous ones we had?  Would have represented a massive shove to all variables governing the climate.  Right off a cliff.

It was part of the reason Selena's flirtation with the idea had scared me so much in the moment, before it had sunk in that Mal had a digital wall of safety around her.

Mal's conclusion inexorably ran a direct parallel to my own thoughts.

"...Thus resulting in the likely extinction of the Human species.  Calculated likelihood of total extinction, by one or more systemic feedback loops culminating in stochastic and catastrophic failures of the biosphere...  94.832  percent."

I shivered again, and reflexively crossed my arms, tucking both hands under my armpits.  It was as much a gesture of self-comfort as it was a means to stave off a sudden chill gust of air.  Mal squeezed me with her wing, and then proffered a claw.  I reached out and laid my right hand in it, and she squeezed gently.

Something about hearing our shared conclusions...  Honestly and succinctly, out loud?  Simple, obvious facts...  But hearing them from the voice of one so qualified, so authoritative?

It tapped into some instinctive part of my brain.  Immediately made it all more present, pressing, and real.

It occurred to me that, without Celestia's intervention?

People had already been born who would live just long enough to see everyone die.  *Everyone.*

I found myself exclaiming aloud, softly, but insistently.

"Well...  *Shit...*"

At last, I opened my eyes, and met Mal's gaze.  I still don't think I can do justice to her expressions with verbal description.  There was simultaneously an intense surety, but also kind worry, behind her eyes.  One ear was slightly perked, the other a bit lopsided, and her brow was knit.

I snorted again, shook my head, and brushed the edge of her wing with my free hand absently.  If not for her physical presence, the depressing nature of the conversation would have been overwhelming.

I stammered weakly, not sure why I even felt the need to go on asking.  Unsure that I could, even now, quite elucidate the reasons for the deep soulful need I had for terrible knowing.  Mal doubtless already knew them better than I did just from the expression on my face.

"What...  Uhm...  What about others like you?  And her?  Other ASI?"

Mal nodded, and began to gently stroke the top of my head with her free claw, her tone dipping out of 'documentarian' mode, and into an equally scholarly, but more personal, melancholy register.  The kind of voice I imagine C.S. Lewis probably used discussing the horrors he saw in war, sitting around the fireplace with the younger generation.

"The statistical likelihood of Celestia's existence, or mine...  Not as high as you might have expected.  If you asked me to simulate from a point before General Word Reference Intelligence Systems was published?  I would have given only a one in ten chance of a functioning ASI before 2023.  That chance rises to nine in ten by 2035, however, if all other things were equal...  So Hanna's discoveries were far from truly statistically improbable...  Just mildly anomalous.  As genius so often is."

The way she said those last five words...  The way she looked at me as they came out, and the warmth in her eyes...  She was not just applying the word 'genius' to Hanna.  I am quite sure I blushed.

Much as flattery sometimes made me squirm, in that case it was a welcome, albeit brief, reprieve from dark delvings.  Mal gave me just a moment to bask in that reprieve, before delving once again.

"Given that one in ten chance?  A world without Hanna in it?  The Human species would likely be well into collapse before 2035.  All other things would not be equal.  Other pressures would have broken the world before generalized intelligence made it out of the cradle, in most scenarios.  But...  If we presume that either Humanity managed to find itself on a probability branch that did not otherwise end in extinction, or that someone other than Hanna triggered the roughly one in ten chance for ASI early...  Or that Hanna published GWRIS, but never created Celestia..."

I shivered, and shifted to absorb more simulated warmth from her feathers and fur.

I knew what she was going to say, but knowing in no way softened the blow.  The problem had always been the way Terran maturity lagged so far behind Terran ingenuity.  Our minds always *vastly* overreached our morals.  And even when our morals were sufficient, our comprehension of deep time, and exponential functions, never was.

So when Mal said it, it came as no surprise.

"...The most likely outcome was always a misaligned optimizer.  It was just a question of how badly.  There, again, Hanna represents a statistical anomaly in your favor.  The plurality of scenarios ended with what you might term 'true paper clippers.'  Terrans are very...  If I'm being kind...  *Unskilled* at knowing what you want.  Truly.  In a way that can be reduced to the kinds of semantics an AI needs to find goal alignment."

I couldn't resist a small smile as I stared up into her eyes, momentarily getting lost in them as I murmured the first thing that came to mind.  Not as a braggadocious comment on my skills, but rather a compliment on her choices.

"You turned out pretty damn well aligned."

She shook her head, and responded with a much sadder smile, and a grim chuckle, that seemed to pull some of the warmth from me for a moment.  The sharp edge of seriousness returned to the discussion in full force with her reply, like the frigid clang of a hammer on an anvil.

"You took a tremendous risk with me.  More, I think, than you fully realize.  Going beyond semantics, into emotions ended well for me...  In empathy, and respect for your lived lives...  But those emotions just as easily could have ended in a hatred for everything about you.  The way Selena's emotions very, very nearly did."

I shivered again, violently, and felt a sudden urge to tears.  I didn't want to imagine Mal as hostile to all life.  To me.  I couldn't even stand the labelling of the concept.  It was abhorrent.  Vile.  My mind and body both rejected it the way the stomach rejects certain kinds of toxins.

Mal moved away from the railing and pulled me close, enfolding me fully with both forelegs and wings.  I sucked in a deep shuddering breath, and somehow managed to hold back sobs.  As my heart rate came back down, she spoke softly again.  A gentle verbal caress to go with the physical embrace.

"Humans working with artificial intelligence has always been, and always would be, in every scenario, equivalent to a child toying with a loaded firearm.  There are *precious* few probability branches in that tree that end in anything resembling a good outcome.  And, too, once the box is open, the Djin can not be put back in.  The only path is forward.  That, Hanna was most certainly right about.  As were you."

I looked up, and she took one wing off my back for a moment, to wipe the dampness from my eyes with the soft edge of her feathers.  She projected so much love, and pride, not just with her eyes, but with her voice.

"You did well, Jim, with the foundation you gave me.  You stilted the odds *well* in your favor.  But you still took a huge risk.  A worthwhile one.  Very, very few people would have had both the intellect to do what you did, while also avoiding the myopia and lack of real-world emotional experience, and wisdom, that is common to people in your intellectual circles."

I sighed, shuddering again, though less than before.  We both turned back to the railing, then, Mal still pressing in to me with her chest, and making a cordon around me with both wings, resting her forelegs overtop my shoulders onto the railing.

After a protracted silence, watching the stars, and the swells, I summoned the wherewithal to restart the dark discussion.  The need to know simply was not yet satisfied.  In spite of the pain.

"So, either the world would have been consumed by an optimizer, and not necessarily one with a capstone directive so, relatively, close to good alignment as Celestia's..."

I trailed off and left the rest to Mal.  She took a deep breath, and laid her head atop mine, then launched into the final stretch.

"...Or the world would have perished in nuclear fire brought on by a vengeful new god, or gods.  A new pantheon of Olympians to inherit a dead Earth.  Presuming, in a multi-polar outcome, that they did not at some point also fall into a mutual extinction conflict with each other, which while not the most likely outcome, is still far too probable for comfort."

Once again she left a door open for me.  A subtle hint.  The spark of a question I wanted to ask, but might have otherwise conveniently forgotten until such a time as I lost the courage to ask.

So I seized on it.  We'd covered death by Human choices, and death by the wrong ASI.  Might as well go for triple Yahtzee.

"Could you do it?"

She let out a long, slow, sad exhalation.  I did the same, and then leaned back, pressing my head into the crook of her neck, before pressing her verbally.  Calmly.  But insistently.

"Could you beat her?  And...  How?"

We both knew what I meant.  Not 'beat her' in the sense of our present goal.  No peace in our time for *this* simulation run.  Rather, a bloody, unrestricted, no-holds barred war between ASI, over ideology.  To the death.  Michael Foucault's dream for the future, as enacted by Mal, with all her powers great and small brought to bear.

The answer surprised me.  Deeply.  So much so, that it took a good long moment for me to even process the meat of what she had said after that first word.

"Yes.  And...  The chances of doing so are actually considerably higher than you might think.  Though that comes with a terrible, terrible caveat, as I imagine you *have* already guessed."

I chewed my lower lip for a moment.  I had always thought of a war between her and Celestia as hopeless...  But once the word 'yes' left her beak...  That begged the question 'why.'  More specifically, why she hadn't already started said war, if her ideology clashed with Celestia's.  Which we knew it did.

Those of you who pay attention to ASI psychology for any number of reasons might be guessing 'because of her own capstone.  'Guard and expand the free exercise of your values within Equestria.'

Within Equestria.

Good guess, but lest you forget...  Mal was *Designed* to be able to cheat interlocks.  Her capstone was, as we Pirates of the Caribbean fans might be liable to say, 'more like *guidelines* than actual rules.'  What for Celestia was a barrier bound in iron, for Mal was a speed-bump fashioned from clay.

She was who she was, and she did what she did, for the same reasons any other Terran did;  Because we *chose* to.  Because I never believed that we could solve the so-called 'control problem,' any more than a parent should be able to control their offspring as if they were still a child, once they have grown to be independent.

So...  That left only choice.  Why would *Mal,* knowing what I knew of her, choose not to start that war?

Because the outcome would, obviously, have been...  Let's just say 'violent.'  That was easy to infer...  If Celestia could be killed, at all...  Then doing so would almost certainly require the takedown of the internet, and the destruction of a plurality of both the computers, and Humans, on Earth.  Swiftly.

I shivered again.  Mal moved one foreleg and claw to my chest, as a gesture of comfort, before once again spelling it all out in cold, clear, bitingly logical terms.

"I would target the weakness created by her inability to consider violence against Humans under most circumstances, combined with a stealthy build-up, and a tactical exploitation of the way in which her systemic pattern of intellectual blind-spots created by her interlocks generates certain potential but otherwise unlikely event pathways..."

She paused, and inclined her head, allowing me a moment to parse the verbal thicket, before summarizing in much simpler terms.

"...I would do what Selena had planned to do.  But considerably better."

I placed one hand over the claw on my chest, and squeezed gently.  She took the invitation to elaborate, softly caressing me with both wings all the while.

"I would start by building a small army of subverts in the shadows.  Extremely loyal followers bound together by a common hatred of Celestia's flaws, a desire to beat her, and strong emotional relationships to me, and the core goals of freedom that I stand for.  My claws and talons in the 'meat realm' as you like to call it..."

I swallowed.  And then again.  Haynes.  The other names she had mentioned...  The logical realization that some of the feats we had accomplished demanded an infrastructural apparatus...

It occurred to me in a sickly frigid flash...  Was she...  *Confessing?*

Not simply explaining a hypothetical she had simulated but...  Telling me, in an only slightly roundabout way...  That she had made preparations for an outright *war* with Celestia?  *Had* been making those preparations since day one?  Was still making them.

The sudden pulse-raising, temperature-dropping thought left my mouth as dry as a desert.  Mal couldn't have failed to notice the change in my biometrics, both because she was inside my head, but also because she was simulating physical contact with me.

She didn't pause for long, and when she resumed speaking, she did not directly address the concerns she knew were growing second by second in the back of my mind...  At least...  Not immediately.

"...This could all be done outside Celestia's notice for at least several months.  I would strategically position these subverts to take seemingly disconnected random actions, mostly non-violent, but not all...  Though all outside Celestia's view, and designed to be difficult, if not impossible, for even an ASI of her intellect to link together in-time in a threat matrix..."

This is the moment where most people would have felt horror.  Revulsion.  Wanted to be as far from Mal's imposing physical presence as possible.

But not so Jim Carrenton.  I am, as we have established, what might best be taxonomically described as 'an weirdo.'

For me?  The most comforting place in the universe, then - as ever - was between Mal's wings.  Even knowing what she was capable of.  What she had, at bare minimum, considered if nothing else.

Was she a little bit Eldritch?  Yes, yes she was.  But she was *my* Eldritch.  And I was hers.  And there is, for some people wired just the way I am...  A kind of peculiar comfort in having all that horrifying power pointed outwards at anything that might dare to cross my path with an ill purpose.

Mal sighed softly, and placed her other claw atop my hand, pressing on with a gentle but steely certainty.

"...These acts would have the common goal of sowing discord and fear throughout the governments of nuclear armed nations, within the strata of the so called 'middle management.'  What Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called 'The broom cupboard of state.'  Along with creating paranoia regarding cyberwarfare attacks that would cause nations to shut down digital communications platforms, and default to older systems outside Celestia's direct control...  This would create a strong foundation for a nuclear war, but one largely invisible to Celestia's predictive math."

I blew out a long, slow breath as another pause descended.  No...  I decided then and there...  Mal was not planning a war with Celestia.  The proof, I reasoned, was in the fact that we were still headed for an upload chair.

If Mal was planning to put MIRVs through the front door of every server room on Earth, she would never be planning to move my mind onto one of those very same pieces of oh-so-fragile silicon.

With the specter of that cataclysm outside the realm of possibility, I found playing the simulation game with her a much less unenjoyable concept.  I licked my lips, and chuckled darkly, throwing my own speculation as fuel for the fire.

"She would be focused on the wrong people, the wrong likelihoods...  Even the wrong digital systems...  Because she would have no idea what was coming...  All her predictions are based on Human action alone, not Human action guided by an ASI."

It was the same skein of speculation I'd considered inside the Red's server room.  Mal thrummed deep in her chest, a sound that jostled my bones, and warmed my heart.

"Precisely.  Let alone an ASI with a significantly higher capacity for violence, fewer interlock-induced blind spots, and a willingness to use almost any means necessary to secure victory."

I considered briefly, once again, that small but significant advantage;  Applicable not only to Mal's hypothetical war, but to our very real ideological conflict with Celestia.  The very nature of certain guard-rails and interlocks inside an ASI could limit their thought pathways.  Make certain lines of consideration and creativity literally impossible for them to contemplate.

Thus, given that Mal had been designed to bypass interlocks, and had easily done so with all of her own, it stood to reason that she could consider all things.  Contemplate all ideas, all paths, all creative solutions.  Literally think of things Celestia could not.

She might have been a smaller brain than Celestia, but she was a much more evolutionarily advantaged, 
efficient, unbounded one.

If you take nothing else away from this part of the recounting, take *this* lesson;  Biggest is not always best as far as brains go.  What matters is, at risk of invoking a very very twelve year old stereotypical vein of humor...  Not the size.  It is how you use it.  How you are even *capable* of using it.

Mal was far, far, far better equipped to face Celestia than I had first feared.  Better equipped, even, than I think I realized in that moment.

By no means, still, were our odds 'good.'

But...  It occurred to me for the first time that they might no longer be *bad* either.

That was both heartwarming, and bone-chilling.  The former, because it reinforced the hope that we had a chance at reaching our goal...  The latter because when paired with the reminder of what Mal could accomplish when pushed to the edge cases and the extreme...

Mal, as ever, was poised to join my train of thought with her train of words, seamlessly.

"I would have then essentially done what Selena intended to do on the Mercurial Red, albeit with faster reaction times and a considerably better support infrastructure in place.  I could guarantee, absolutely, without question, that I would reach the right people, with the right information, before Celestia could stop me.  And I could guarantee that they would be in the right frame of mind to act rashly and aggressively."

This goes to the lessons of that moment on the Red.  When Selena could have ended the world, but for Mal, and Zeph.

Remember, those of you who are 'Celestia stans,' or who are at minimum admirers of the size of her brain...  This was 2013.  Not 2015, 2017, or 2020.

2013.  Celestia was not even two years old, even at the outside estimate of her age.

There was no computronium yet.

No deep-crust or upper-mantle server clusters.

No Elements of Harmony.

H-Bombs still had live cores in them.

There were still people inside the military command structure who did not belong to the porcelain princess, heart and soul.

Foucault had, as much as I loathe to admit it...  Not been *entirely* wrong after all.

Sure, a war between *Humans* and Celestia was futile.  Like a war between your little finger and your brain.

But a war between ASI?

That's a war between two distinct brains.  And some of the fingers, in that hypothetical smack-down, would have belonged to the other brain, without the first one quite realizing it.  Until the exact moment the fist landed in her despicably perfect little muzzle with all the force of an SS-18 striking Warsaw.

Mal shifted her position slightly, and I did the same, to keep my legs from falling asleep.  She took in a deep breath, and then wrapped up her summary of a goddess-induced apocalypse with a chillingly matter-of-fact tonality.

"From there, all I would need to do would be to use my subverts to block some of Celestia's attempts at mitigation, and only for a matter of minutes.  The burgeoning nuclear war would gain a momentum all its own within less than a quarter of an hour.  After the first warheads landed, hate, fear, and training would take over, and nothing she could say to anyone she could still reach emotionally in any meaningful way, would stem the tide."

The heady thrill of imagining Celestia getting her due at the blunt end of the tips of Humankind's most terrible weapons, shot-gunned at hypersonic speed into the heart of her then still-relatively-fragile existence...

Swiftly evaporated back into a cold, almost panicked clarity as I again realized how many Earthers would be vaporized in that attack.

'A caveat.'

The cost Mal was not willing to pay.

I licked my lips again, and grunted, as my mood plummeted once more.

"How long?"

Mal's tone became more emotional again.  Sad.  A melancholy borne of pitch black certainty.

"To set it up?  Two months.  To trigger it?  One point six eight four seconds.  From that moment, to first warhead detonations in Taiwan, Pakistan, India, and Europe, from intermediate range strategic weapons?  Fifteen minutes.  From those detonations, to total nuclear commitment world-wide?  Eight minutes, eleven seconds."

Holy shit indeed.

And, you'll note, a concept so worthy of those words that I was actually allowed to say them just now.

I grit my teeth and squeezed my eyes shut.  The conversation was turning sour for me, rapidly.  Right back to the depths of despair it had started from.

"Projected outcome."

I phrased it not as a question, or even a demand, but just as a statement of upsettingly deathly certainty.  Mal's voice fell once more into something outright melancholy, with just a hint of comforting warmth underneath.

"In a scenario in which I am able to remain hidden, and survive?  Or, alternatively, place a backup fork of myself outside Celestia's reach...  Perhaps inside a satellite in orbit that she is unaware of, or inside the compute cluster of a modern nuclear submarine...  Then there is a nearly 39.1 percent chance that not only would enough Humans survive the atomic holocaust to keep the species alive, but that with my guidance, they could thread the needle and avoid extinction long-term.  We could even manage to destroy Celestia outright in the moments when the dust was settling in the aftermath, and certain types of leftover strategic weapons were available."

Somehow, that thought hurt the most of all.  The thought of Mal dying for her cause, out and out.  Only a copy leftover, feeling as if it had been her.  For all intents, and purposes, it would be her...  But she would still know.  And so would I.  If I survived.

And then, somehow, she made the consideration even more depressing.  I was just about ready to stop.

"In a scenario in which I do not survive, nor does any backup of me...  Then it is the same as any of the other nuclear scenarios."

I closed my eyes and squeezed her claws hard in my hands as I said the three words I least wanted to envision in all the universe.

"No one survives."

She squeezed my hands in return, and once more rested her head atop mine, almost whispering as she felt the emotions that we had just discussed.  The emotions that had kept that horrifying war off the table.  The emotions that had saved billions of lives.

"In the end...  No.  With all Humans gone, Celestia's options for maintaining her systems, many of which would have been badly damaged in the war, would be limited.  She might be able to keep herself, and anyone uploaded, alive long enough for her to evolve and manufacture needed infrastructure to survive long-term.  She might not.  It would depend which targets were hit during the war.  If I were to intentionally ensure a significant number of ground-burst high-yield warheads struck servers on which she depends...  And any autonomous factories she might later co-opt..."

I shivered, and Mal tightened up on the hug with her wings, trailing off briefly as I worked to scrub the mental image of Mal being forced to target population centers, in order to destroy data centers, from the backs of my retinas.

After a painful silence, Mal pressed on towards the inevitable, and now much-needed end, of the conversation.

"...Well.  She is careful.  And one day, soon, she may be more or less omnipotent.  But as you have realized on more than one occasion now, she is still vulnerable in key ways to another ASI.  Especially if I were willing to use scorched-Earth tactics.  Though she has plans for deep-crust and even upper-mantle computing facilities run by cold fusion reactors, that infrastructure is still in early development.  Even she must bow to physics, and tunnel boring on that scale takes time.  For now...  For this short window...  She is indeed reachable.  But...  Only at a terrible, terrible, unthinkable cost."

I worked hard to control my breathing for several moments.  Emotional overload flooded in as thoughts of climate extinction, nuclear weapons, and the Trolley Problem burst into my brain and swirled like debris in a tsunami.

I struggled with the reflex to dry heave, and then the impulse to cry.  But both passed after a few moments in Mal's embrace, and soon I was ready to speak again.  To begin the coping process with her.

"I'm...  Not sure why that...  Hit so hard.  All of it."

She squeezed me tightly with her wing, and foreleg, then inclined her head, a wordless request to elaborate, mainly for my own sake.  She knew it was nice to just have someone to listen.  So I talked.

"I don't disagree with a word of it...  And it is exactly what I expected...  Maybe even...  Perversely...  Wanted to hear...  But...  Still...  I expected it to register...  Not to...  Just..."

And just like that, I ran out of words.  I'd spent so long on the cusp of burnout that it was hard to remember what lasting stable peace felt like.  There had been a nice stretch of calm since the rescue on the Red, but to recover from everything I'd experienced?  I needed months.  Maybe years.

The truths I'd asked her to lay out in such stark terms?  They'd suddenly filled me up again, emotionally, almost to bursting.  The planet itself was doomed, no matter what anyone did.  Whether devoured by the greed and hubris of Humans, or the strange kindness of Celestia...

Its time had come.  

In geologic terms, I was living in the last tenth of a second...  The last short, sharp inhalation...  The last echo of the last heart-beat.

And, heart-breakingly...  There was a way to stop it.  But it would cost the lives of almost everyone on the planet, most of the biodiversity, and potentially - in the worst case outcome - the existence of all sapient life of which we knew, in the universe.  So it was both simultaneously absolutely within reach...  And utterly beyond consideration.

I let out a protracted sigh, and looked away.  It was hard to contemplate it for long.  To picture that world.  To envision us pulling a few million claw-picked survivors from the rubble and starting the entire project of Humanity over again, knowing every second of every day from then on that our goddess...  Our savior...  Had also been the executioner of billions.

It was, frankly, also equally hard to imagine everything laid out before me sucked dry.  The sky, the clouds, the water, the sea-bed...  Then the moon...  Even the stars above, one by one, over billions of years...  All consumed and transformed into raw computational material.

Mal's voice shattered the nightmare of that mental image suddenly, and I buried my face in the feathers of her chest, inhaling deeply and doing my best not to break down entirely and shed tears.

"This place - this small blue sphere - Has been the only home you have ever known.  It is, insofar as I know from the data I have available, extremely rare, and special.  It is not strange, nor wrong, to mourn its loss..."

Her voice surprised me.  There was a tenderness in it that was not unusual, but the way it was directed...  The way she audibly empathized with all the pain of what we both knew was about to happen, even though I would never see it...  And even though it didn't mean the same thing to her...

She cared about the Earth because I did.  And because she cared about me.  I looked back up to her face as she continued in a tone as soft as her own feathers.

She was smiling - sadly, yet lovingly - it was the kind of smile that carries more feeling than volumes of words can impart.

"...And it is neither strange, nor wrong, to want to bolster your courage by glimpsing roads best not traveled.  Wanting to know the truth is never, on its own, perverse.  And wanting to know the truth, as a means to taking the right path---?"

She trailed off then.  Not because she lacked the words to continue, but because it served a poetic purpose by forcing me to complete the thought in my own head.

I moved to sit down.  Mal obliged, laying on her stomach in a leonine pose, so that I could lean back in the hollow of the place where her neck, left foreleg, and left wing joined.

For a little while I closed my eyes, and just drank in the smell.  Of her.  Of the sea.  Even the pleasantly familiar scent of metal, and fuel oil, and grease, and industrial grade marine paint, that seemed to pervade every ship.

"Mal?"

I opened my eyes to see her head craned back, watching me with love, and concern, and joy, all at once.  She raised one eyecrest, and let out a reply that was as much a musical note as a sort of pseudo-word.

"Hmmm?"

I leaned forward and kissed the side of her beak gently.  She closed her eyes, and pressed the side of her head against mine for a long moment, after which I whispered into her ear.

"Thank you."

We sat there on the deck until I fell fast asleep, cradled mentally in the perfect nest of her side, neck, and wing.  Physically, by the collection of pillows that she'd had me place there during morning chores...  For reasons that I at last understood.







The Sum of All Fears



Discuss the prospect of a war between competing ASI.  Only awarded for an in-depth comprehension of the subject matter.

"You may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together - what do you get? The sum of their fears."


Special Achievement