//------------------------------//
// 42 - Link State 
// Story: The Advocate 
// by Guardian_Gryphon 
//------------------------------//

"The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back."
—C.S. Lewis


October 31st 2013 | System Uptime 64:08:29:19

Well here we are at last.  I feel as if I've gone on for quite a long time, but I hope that it has not been plodding.  I hope that, in the end, it has been worthwhile.  A story worth telling.

It is here that I should make note of something that has been implied, and certainly never concealed, but also perhaps not stated quite so forthrightly yet;  I am an unreliable narrator.  Not because I tell any intentional untruths, but rather because even now, there are things I simply do not know.

Some things we can speculate about, and some we may yet learn as time goes on, but others may regrettably lie forever outside our knowledge.

This is also the moment I would ask anyone here, or watching, listening, or reading later...  Anyone who is still struggling with the existential nature of it all...  Of our lives here in Equestria...  I would ask any of you who still lose sleep over this to think carefully about continuing.

I hope you will.  I believe that what you might learn from this home stretch of my tale could be compelling.  Even, with the right perspective, comforting.  But this serves as your final warning;  It will *first* very probably be quite disturbing, before you have had time to work through all the implications.

So...  The end.  Where to begin?

Morning was a dim gray blur.  Mal had booked us a lovely little suite in a very nice hotel.  I wouldn't have been physically able to sleep, but for the fact that one of the many benefits of a BCI is the ability to ask your feathered fiancée to just knock you out forcibly.

As soon as I was awake again, the nervousness was almost too much to bear.  I confess that I skipped breakfast entirely.  And dinner the night before, but for a small snack.  So it turns out that, upon further examination in hindsight, my 'very last meal' on Earth turned out to be a two pack of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.  Go figure.

I did have some coffee, and when I say 'some' I mean 'entirely too much.'  Two cups before we even got out of the hotel, and a third on the road.

Mal had replaced the high-class sedan we had used the previous day, with something truly special.  A bright red Mazda RX-7 FC, *convertible.*  Retro JDM goodness, in just the right color, perfectly suited to a bright fall morning.  For just a moment, just one, I almost forgot where I was, and what was about to happen.  And I suppose that was the point.

It wasn't a large car, so Zeph and Selena had to curl up more or less on the trunk lid, but they were only interacting with the meat-world through a layer of virtual abstraction, so neither safety concerns, nor practicality issues, much mattered.

The drive was short, but beautiful;  Winding mountain roads through a blanket of fall colors.  The sun was out, the temperature was perfect, even the humidity was low...

No one said a single word after we left the hotel.  We smiled some.  We laughed a little, especially at one point when an enormous red leaf got plastered to Selena's muzzle;  Blown in by the car's jet stream, and then peeled off gently by a mirthful Zeph.

It wasn't until we were nearly there that it occurred to me that Mal had selected a manual sports car, and a very winding route, so that I would be thoroughly distracted with the act of simply keeping us on the road, in our lane, and up to speed in spite of the steep slopes.

Again, I was truly grateful.  I don't think I could have borne the stress of considering what was to come with nothing else to do but twiddle my thumbs, and stare into the abyss.  Not even for twenty eight minutes.

The music helped too.  The car had an old 8-Track tape deck, and somehow Mal had gotten ahold of a tape with some of Queen's greatest hits.  And, of course, we ended on 'Keep Yourself Alive.'  Yes, an ASI absolutely will plan the track order on a custom made 1980s obsolete audio tape so that it matches the predicted time of your drive, and the final song ends right as you pull in at your destination.

Or, at least, they will if they're anything like Mal.  She cared about details like no one else I'd ever met.  Or ever have since.

Between her smile, and the sound of Zeph and Selena's laughter, the views, the music, and massaging the RX-7's ancient crotchety clutch...  I suddenly discovered that we had arrived, and I had not considered my own mortality once, seriously, in the whole twenty eight minutes.

We turned right to cross a lovely little custom suspension bridge, and...  To be honest?  Found ourselves at something of an anti-climax.

"Minteopia Besshi.  Huh.  Nnnnnnot what I was expecting...  Isn't a theme park a bit of a strange spot for this sort of operation?"

Zeph's voice shook me from a trance.  I'd parked, shut off the engine, and then found myself suddenly locked into the stringent mental task of trying to find...  Something.  Anything.  Specifically, something *suspicious.*  Some visual clue, some giveaway...

Some indication that we had arrived at a staging ground for the end of the world.

I couldn't spot one single, solitary thing.  Just a lovely old brick building that served as a visitor's center, the cars of a few off-season tourists and leaf-peepers, and the aforementioned gorgeous leaves that warranted the peeping, spread out all around us in a glittering carpet of autumnal tones that offset the blue of the sky wonderfully.

Perhaps that was a sign in and of itself.  Strange supplies on a shipping pallet, or unmarked box trucks at a loading dock...  Those would have fallen under the category of 'potentially suspicious, but only in context.'  The sort of thing you would have expected to see at a theme park, even a small one, under normal circumstances.

The absence of anything even remotely odd was itself odd.

I got out of the car slowly, and then made my way gingerly around to the trunk, eyes scanning all around feverishly as I extracted a high-viz vest, a clipboard, and two canvas duffle bags.  The place smelt strongly of fall leaves, running clean river water, and the vaguest hint of warm pavement.

Selena hopped down from the trunk onto the pavement, and shook her head, glancing back at Zeph as the little gold Pegasus followed, and matching my train of thought with her response, note for note.

"Not so strange when you consider how deep the old copper mine tunnels go, and the basis that provides for new excavations.  She is here.  There is a preternatural lack of visible cameras, heavy logistics infrastructure, and security personnel."

Mal nodded, and placed a reassuring claw on my shoulder, moving to stand behind us as we all directed our gaze over to the visitor's center building itself, adding her own observations to the pile as she went.

"The park is simply the easiest point of ingress.  The actual facility is inside the mountain.  She started her excavations off the old copper mine tunnels, then worked the complex back around into most of the surrounding rock until she punched through to the other side of the mountain.  Do you see the outbuilding at the far west end of the parking lot?"

We turned in unison to look where she was pointing;  There was indeed a squat little structure that was little more than an extension to a three sided bus shelter.  The only details that betrayed its true purpose were the fact that it seemed to extend back into the rock behind it, and the fact that its floor-to-ceiling glass windows were tinted with privacy film.

Mal inclined her head, and then began drawing a small hologram in mid-air for my benefit as she opined.  My heart sank with each word, and each new addition to the diagram.

"That's the secondary personnel maintenance entrance.  The main loading docks and primary entry points are on the other side of this ridge.  She had a high-capacity freight road cut in for the rest of the mining gear to be delivered, once the preliminary tunnels were complete, and zones cleared for helipads to have specialized computer equipment brought in by heavy lift aircraft.  Most of the complex is surrounded by two layers of fifteen foot electrified barbed wire fence.  Guards patrol at overlapping intervals around the perimeter between the fences, there are thermal-equipped cameras every sixteen feet, motion detectors further in, and cameras covering every angle inside."

Zeph whistled.  Senela's face hardened almost imperceptibly, and she ruffled her wings nervously.  I grunted and shook my head, turning to lock eyes with Mal.  My voice betrayed my anxiety with every syllable.

"Geez Mal...  How are we supposed to get in even the *back* door without being found out?  Let alone mess about with sensitive equipment?"

She grinned slightly, which helped stem the rising tide of despair in my gut, and thrummed deep down in her chest before launching into an answer in a tone best described as 'slightly smug.'

"Well, for starters, I arranged a distraction that will keep the majority of the security and logistics staff busy for several hours---"

She was briefly cut off by the abrupt advent of the piercing noise of a fire-truck siren.  I shivered reflexively as I realized that she had timed her words to coincide with the sound of the vehicle's passage along the road we had just been on, heading up towards - I correctly speculated - the turnoff to Celestia's main access road.

Mal tapped her semi-transparent cartograph, and added a small figurine in red and amber.  A tanker truck overturned just shy of the secured access road turn-off, blocking all traffic in either direction, and burning with an intensity that suggested it would indeed be several hours before the situation was even partially resolved.

I trusted her enough not to ask, but she let me know the details mnemonically anyhow;  She had hired a small local criminal organization to set up the 'accident.'  No one had been injured.  And Mal's 'employees' were all set to be fingered for the arson, captured, and jailed within forty eight hours.

I shivered again as it occurred to me that they would probably not see the outside of a prison cell ever again, until the day their heads hit an upload chair.

'I always clean up after myself Jim.'

That she did.  That she *always* did.

Her voice pulled me back from spiraling into a fractal of speculation, worry, and doubt.  She tapped the small plastic slab in my right hand, her left index talon making a pleasant 'tack thack' against it.

"...Your vest and clipboard will get you past any of the non-security staff.  Good op-sec is not often taught to the lowest bidder, and they will also be quite busy dealing with the ancillary effects of the fire I set.  As to the access control systems, those will not be a problem.  An optimizer never over-engineers, and she has no expectation of her card readers and code panels being breached by another ASI.  She spent only exactly as much money and effort as was required to keep unauthorized *Humans* out."

I raised one eyebrow, and went back to staring up into Mal's twin golden orbs.  She didn't need a brain-to-brain link to understand the question I was trying to convey.  The thing that *really* worried me, above all else, from her little spiel about security systems.

She inclined her head, and I followed her eye-line back to the outbuilding as she proffered an answer in the most comfortingly assured tone I imagine she had at her disposal.

"The cameras are the most dangerous part.  I will have to directly access the system.  She does not monitor it in hard-real-time, but instead has a narrow-intelligence program on-site that notifies her if the system needs her direct attention.  If I am quick enough?  I can hard-lock, delete, and replace this program with a copy of my own that will allow me to dynamically erase you from camera feeds as you go."

I inhaled a long, slow, calming breath, and then turned back to face Mal.  Her eyes remained fixed firmly on the outbuilding as I set about finding out just how much 'limbo' we would have to endure.

"When do we get to that step, and how will we know if you managed it?"

She blinked, and then grinned wickedly, the curve of her beak lending the expression a decidedly predatory aspect.

"I just did."

The smugness in her words intensified, but in that context it was more of a comfort than anything else.  That was one very serious hurdle already taken care of, and with it in the rear-view I could feel hope surging in my heart.  And Luna knows, I needed hope just then.  Doubly so for what I had to do next, and triply so for the things I was about to see.

We stood in silence, the four of us, for a few more moments.  Twenty seconds at most.  Finally, I turned and knelt in front of Zeph.  Her eyes were already filling up with tears, and I found myself seized with the impulse to reach up and wipe them away.  Before the sight of them could trigger sobs of my own.

She sniffled as I gently displaced the liquid with my right thumb, then pushed forward into a wings-and-forelegs hug.  I threw my arms around her, and she nestled her head in the crook of my shoulder, muttering in my ear with words drenched equally in bitter understatement, and soulful sorrow.

"I...  Buckin...  *Hate* goodbyes, Gryph."

She called me by the same nickname she had when we had first met.  That very nearly got me, I'll admit that with no shame whatsoever.

I sighed, and held her close for as long as I dared.  As long as I could stand to, without crying myself.  I whispered my reply softly into her left ear, keeping my voice barely-audible to respect the sensitivity of her hearing.

"You and me both little sister.  But we're just heading out...  For a bit..."

With a sharp exhalation, I pulled back, and rested both hands on her shoulders, doing my best to plaster a smile that I only half felt onto my lips.  I was so proud of her, for so many reasons, so I let that fuel the warmth of the expression, and of my words alike.

"...Instead?  Let's call it 'See you shortly.' Ok?"

She nodded, and wiped at her eyes with one hoof, before holding it out towards me.  I made a fist with my right hand, and bumped the frog of her hoof as she forced out one word over the crack in her voice.

"Deal."

We both took a step back, but found ourselves unable to break eye contact.  I don't quite know what she was thinking, but I can guess.  As for my thoughts...  All I could think about as I clamped down on my tears, and tried to imprint the memory of her sky blue eyes, was the fact that it might be the last time I would ever see them.

And the sudden jarring realization that she wasn't really there.  Not in the sense that her form was an illusion, but rather in the sense that her core code was still primarily being housed on the Maru.  She was separated from me by a gulf dozens of miles wide already.  And there was something decidedly forlorn about that thought.

Then the moment passed, and the brave little Pegasus tucked herself under Selena's right wing, pushing as far into the Alicorn's side as she could.  I traded a snort, sharp nod with the statuesque blue Pony, before she too proffered a hoof for me to bump, and a less overtly emotional farewell.

"Thank you...  Jim.  For everything."

I again met hoof with fist gently, and smiled a proud, sad smile.  Selena was doing her best to keep her own visage neutral, but as I spoke, the mask slipped a fraction of a hair, and I caught a glimmer of the same sort of melancholy smile tugging at her muzzle.

"Thank *you* Selena.  For being a good friend.  Take care of her for the next few hours.  We'll see you soon."

I exhaled a protracted lungful, then turned to Mal.  I gestured with my right hand, extending my left arm for her to thread her right foreleg into in that old Victorian way, and I summoned every ounce of courage I had into my throat to squeeze out two words.

"Shall we?"

She smiled, and took my proffered arm, placing her right wing around me as well, and espousing far more valor, and certainty, than I could muster, in her reply.

"Yes.  We shall."







October 31st 2013 | System Uptime 64:08:34:18

It was, to be blunt, a very incongruous moment;  Entering into that facility through the little shack-like structure tucked away at the corner of a completely unassuming parking lot.

One of my canvas duffles contained a small box Mal had made, filled to the brim with different kinds of antennae, to act as a transceiver.  Using the appropriate bandwidth to gain entry to the access control system, Mal simply unlocked the door, and registered a spoofed legitimate log event with her sock-puppet facility security AI.

The inside of the shack was, in a word?  Boring.

Picture the most bland corporate break room you can imagine.  Now go blander.  For the foals and fledgelings who don't know...  Ask your folks to let you watch The Office sometime.  But, until then, just picture a room designed by a clinically depressed gray brick of shag carpet with only two brain cells, and the prompt 'it should make me feel a vague and inoffensive sense of ennui.'

God once said that the way to Heaven was a narrow gate, and the way to Hell was a broad road...  Frankly I didn't know which Equestria was then, and I still am not entirely sure I do now...  But the way in to it, for me, turned out to be a hilarious pastiche of every 'so dull it hurts' architectural trope in modern history.

There was a water cooler.  The walls were greige.  The floor was low-pile cheap corporate style carpet;  The stuff they stick in cubicle farms with a pattern ripped from the 70s that is somehow not in any way retro chic...  Not the slightly higher class stuff from the corner offices or board rooms that is almost passable as 'design.'

There was even a crappy motivational poster on the wall, with the captions in English, and the Japanese translation written on a sticky note stuck below it.  

'FRIENDSHIP:  No power in the universe is greater.'





And yes, it was a picture of a group of wild horses, because while Celestia does not in fact have a sense of humor in any conventional manner, she absolutely behaves like it in order to satisfy the values of others.

Mal snorted, and shook her head.  I had to violently suppress the urge to root around in the cabinets on the far wall and find a marker to deface the thing with.  There was something vaguely ominous about the context of it;  'No power in the universe is greater,' after the word 'Friendship' felt a little too much like Celestia crowing privately about her own might for my taste.

As we passed the water cooler, the thought did occur to me that it might be funny to lift the tank until the seal slipped, causing a slow leak that would devastate the carpet...  But I almost immediately realized that the small act of defiance would do nothing whatsoever to annoy, or harm Celestia.  While the carpet absolutely deserved a terrible fate, by dint of its ugly pattern alone, the poor staffer who would have to clean up after the spill most certainly did *not* deserve to have to deal with that soggy mess.

At the far end of the space came the first very subtle indication that the structure was no mere break-room, in the form of a windowless, gray, unlabeled, steel security door.

Mal snapped her talons, and the control panel beside it blinked, beeped, and the lock clicked as we approached.

I took note of the various authentication steps as I pushed down on the handle;  An RFID keycard reader, a thumbprint scanner, and a pin-pad for an access code.  Not dissimilar to Arrow 14's security measures.  The RFID control boxes were even from the same company, albeit a slightly newer model than the ones on the Mercurial Red.  Actually, all of the access control devices were from the same company.

Not surprising considering that there were only a few companies that made systems like that at-scale, to military-grade spec, in the whole world.  It even made a strange kind of sense why Celestia would source all her authentication devices through one company, while Arrow 14 would go to different ones for each part of the system.

Celestia could trust her provider, because she could understand the hardware and software in a way no one else could.  And she could monitor every single person in the company if she so chose.

Arrow 14 could not trust the people who sourced *anything* for their operation, and they could not trust that the metadata of their purchases would remain hidden besides, so their best bet had been to diversify.

Still, the irony was not lost on me.  Same weapon, from the same seller, found on opposite sides;  That was often the way in the old world.

Once we passed through that first proper security door, things took a turn.  Rapidly.

The space on the other side turned out to be a thickly reinforced concrete hallway leading into the mountain.  Cameras lined the twenty foot span, at four foot intervals, mounted on the support ribs on both the left and right sides of the corridor.  I knew what they were without Mal even having to place it in the mnemonic link.

Combined facial recognition and gait analysis.

Fun factoid:  Your gait, both back then, and over here?  It is a per-person form of easily differentiable biometrics.  The tiny kinesthetic subtleties of the way in which you walk - even the way you fly, for those with wings - is completely unique to an individual.

It was, logically, no cause for alarm to me.  I knew Mal had control of all the digital security systems.  But...  The sight of those ten gray cylinders, tipped with black glass through which one could just barely make out dozens of sensors and IR light sources...  Little reflective clusters like the eyes of spiders...

It gave me *chills.*  The unpleasant, clammy kind.

The door at the terminating end of the hallway was of a much heavier duty construction than the one we had passed through at the opening end;  It reminded me of the strong, thick, radiation-proof doors you might find in a nuclear weapons laboratory.

True to my first impression, though it opened on-approach at Mal's behest, as the other doors had, it took several seconds for it to swing out on motorized hinges.  It was indeed almost three feet thick, and as we passed through the aperture, I counted nine five inch thick retracted alloy bolts that constituted the locking mechanism.

For a fleeting instant, I panicked.  I worried that once that door closed behind us, I would be cut off from Mal's core code on the Maru.  The signal insulation of the mountain itself had to be excellent, to say nothing of any further cladding Celestia might have added...  Once the door closed and latched, we would be sealed in a Faraday cage, perhaps even stronger than the one on the Red.

Mal arrested the thought spiral instantly, digging in with her usual penchant for comforting facts;  Because she controlled her copy of the facility's overseer program, she was free to use the Tier-1 fiber backbone into and out of the facility, and all of the secured wireless infrastructure inside the cladding that was connected to it.

She also thoughtfully provided a complete spec workup of the facility's communications infrastructure on the whole, and went truly above and beyond by offering a spoken word summary.  Mainly to keep my mind from falling off a cliff into paroxysms of total dread.

"This facility is designed to work off of Tier-1 fiber connections that go directly to the spine of Shikoku's main internet trunk.  From there it has a path to the nearest large junction of undersea mainline cables in Shima, on Honshu.  She needs too much bandwidth for anything else to work, for now.  Although she does have provisions for satellite uplinks, 'barntenna' connections, and even mesh cellular ties, to act as failovers incase the hard-link is damaged..."

The corridor was very similar on the far side of the heavy duty blast door;  Longer, and with only one camera every twenty feet, ending in a T-junction fifteen yards back, but otherwise the exact same construction.

Mal paused to point to the right side of the junction, but resumed her explanation as we began to walk briskly towards my bodily doom.

"...Soon, she intends to finish boring not only the first deep crust server chambers, but also her own small-diameter insulated tunnel network at the top of the asthenosphere transitional zone, through which she can snake next-generation fiber-optics of her own design to support both initial deep-crust emplacements, and upper-mantle servers.  At that point, she will become indestructible to any known, or even semi-speculatively predictable, outside force."

As I've said before;  Celestia was beholden to physics.  Still is.  Until the development of computronium, whenever that happened, or will happen?  Highly sophisticated fiber-optics remained by far the best way to transfer huge amounts of data quickly across something the size of the Earth.

It was a strange, oddly comforting thought;  Though her version of the technology would of course carry far more data density, with far less signal loss, and far higher durability than any cable made by Humans?  It couldn't do so any *faster* than what we had already developed, not in terms of the theoretical maximum velocity of the light pulses in a perfect glass-like medium.

Celestia was, and still is, and always will be, bound by the speed of light.  Bound by principles Einstein figured out long before she was born.

Chalk one up on the scorecard for Terrans, please and thank you.  We were, and still are, smarter than some give us credit for, in spite of the sheer scope of *her* intelligence.  We may have utterly failed to use those smarts wisely, for the most part.  But smart we were, and smart some of us remain.

I exhaled sharply as we turned the corner of the junction, pausing to gaze down the seemingly endless expanse of the much larger tunnel that we had suddenly entered.  I was very quickly starting to re-evaluate the scope of Celestia's operation.





A stiff breeze whistled past as unseen fans with blades the size of jumbo jets sucked air down some distant shaft, and pumped it across the technological underworld, wafting scents of concrete, rock, coolant, lubricant, and warm plastic to my nose.

Bays upon bays of server racks stretched off into the distance on either side of the corridor, their lights twinkling softly with seemingly sinister purpose.  Cables snaked across the floor, perfectly organized, like the arteries and veins of some gigantic monster.  Crates and pallets were stacked at intervals, implying that much of the digital infrastructure on offer was temporary.

A hold-over arrangement, until deeper excavations were completed.

Licking my lips, I took a few cautious steps, and forced out a question.  Anything to keep the conversation, dire as it was, going.  Anything to stay distracted.  Anything to tamp down the sudden realization that we were standing inside a part of Celestia's living brain.

"But...  For now?"

Mal cupped my back with her wing, and inclined her head, shooting me a little half-smile as we pressed on.

"For now, as we touched on before, some of her supply chains are still in the nascent phase.  What we are attempting would be virtually impossible even a year from today.  Her growth is accelerating exponentially, on all fronts, including logistical.  It took her almost a year to hollow out this complex..."

Mal paused briefly as we made a sharp left at her direction, then another right...  And came to a stop.  I whistled softly, momentarily rooted to the spot as I listened to Mal complete her thought, and beheld something that completely re-adjusted my perspective on the world, in a single morbid instant.





"...But it will only take her a month and a half to finish the first deep-crust emplacements, now that she has completed a basis to work with, and new mining gear built to her own specifications is arriving."

The...  Chamber we found ourselves in - corridor hardly seems to do it justice - was something like an order of magnitude larger than the one we had just left.  In every way.  If the other one had seemed 'endless' in the sense that it was long, and its termination points lay out of sight around bends?

Our new environ seemed endless, in that it truly appeared to go on for multiple *dozens* of *miles* in either direction, beyond the ability of the Human eye to see through the density of air at the level of ambient humidity.

The walls soared four stories up to a vaulted ceiling, dividing into corridor junctions and server bays at intervals down at our level, but covered with truly gargantuan bundles of power and shielded fiber optics as they reached for the roof.  The actinic blue of arc lights cast much of the space in harsh industrial tones, occasionally broken by the equally mechanistic hue of orange halon lights.

A few forklifts darted to and fro, carting pallets of supplies;  Server blades, containers of compute-GPUs, cooling equipment, drill cutting blades, cable management supplies on a colossal scale...

The population of the space was shockingly sparse, but everyone seemed vested with intense purpose, checking the computing equipment inside racks, or stringing new cable as they worked their way down catwalks above us...  No one took any notice of me.  My vest was the same as theirs.  The security of the facility was above reproach.

I swallowed, hard, and reached for Mal.  Her claw pressed into my right hand immediately, and I squeezed it, mumbling my next question half-heartedly as I part admired, part detested, and part feared the utilitarian, industrial, technological *marvel* laid out before us.

"She did all this...  In a *year?*"

I was never much for arithmetic, but I understood geometry well at an intuitive level.  As Mal replied in a hushed, almost reverent manner, I silently started running through estimations of the sheer volume of rock that had to have been displaced, and disposed of.  Knowing Celestia, she had found some sort of 'optimal' use for the material.

"Yes.  And more.  Though more than half of it was finished in the last two months.  As I said, the growth curve is exponential.  She started off slow, but each milestone brings logarithmic benefits.  That applies to everything she is, and does.  The theoretical point of diminishing returns is...  Quite far in the future."

We began walking again, with a purposefulness that I did not feel, but needed to convey outwardly to remain unnoticed.

For a few minutes we lapsed into silence, and I stewed in a broiling sea of angst, awe, and mortified bedazzlement.  It struck me suddenly, chillingly, that the space reminded me of nothing so much as a Borg Cube, albeit less green, and built with 21st century techniques.

Yeah.  Fellow Trekkies, you can picture it immediately just off that mental image alone.  Sorry.  And, you're welcome.

I have to admit, even now, that what Celestia built was...  I suppose still is...  A wonder of the world.  The last, and the greatest.

After a few hundred more yards, I started to wonder idly what Celestia's cover story was to explain the millions of metric tons of rock going out, concrete coming in, and all the various hardware purchases.  Mal swiftly obliged with a memory drop.

Apparently the inmost circles of Japan's government knew the full story.  More or less.  Celestia had made the persuasive point that uploaded minds can only survive as long as the hardware maintaining them, therefore that hardware must be expansive, advanced, redundant, and above all *safe.*

And, of course, she had helpfully pointed out that the project would create jobs, and yield a handsome economic return-on-investment.

With the help of the Public Security Intelligence Agency, a shell company called 'Ama no Fuchigoma Heavy Industrial' had been formed to handle all the logistics.  I snorted softly to myself at that;  Celestia *really* had a thing for horse mythos.

As a cherry on top, Celestia had promised to set aside a - relatively - 'small' cluster of solid-state high-integrity storage drives with very high speed encrypted data connections and custom narrow-AI search programs, to become the main archives of military and governmental documents for the country.

I thought that was actually quite clever;  It helped justify the project to more pragmatic leaders by giving them a next-generation impenetrable AI-managed data repository, but more importantly?  It made it impossible for Japan to consider a first strike against Celestia in the near-future.

They would have to bomb a critical part of their own command and control apparatus to get at her.

She had exploited natural goal alignment;  Everyone wants their data kept safe.  How much more so when that data is living minds?  Living minds were her purpose.  Of course she would spare no expense in ensuring that, by the time the world discovered her true intent...  It would be far, far too late to consider tactical action.

In the short term, attacking her would be tantamount to eating the end of a loaded shotgun at the logistical level.  And in the long term...  When common sense broke down and gave way to panic?  

She would, quite literally, physically, be out of reach.

I shuddered as a new question surfaced from the tossed foamy breakers of my thoughts, and began to demand attention from my already raw and wracked nerves.  I licked my lips, and whispered the interrogative aloud.

"How...  Mal...  How *many* of these places does she *have?!*"

I traded a swift glance with her, before putting my eyes back 'on the road' to avoid bumping into anyone, or getting run over by a forklift.  She inhaled deeply, and shook her head, waiting a few more steps until we'd reached another turn-off point into a smaller passageway, before answering.

"This is one of four facilities world-wide.  But those are only the ones I know of, from my careful forays thus far, though I doubt she could have concealed more than one or two additionally in a way that makes them invisible to me.  This one is the largest of the four, and the only one with independent on-site nuclear reactors.  For now.  The creation and growth of her entire infrastructure will follow the exponential curve as well.  By this time next year there could be as many as sixteen facilities this size on Earth, all independently powered.  And all connected by her own communications spine, completely isolated from Humanity's sight, and reach."

Nuclear reactors.  Don't think that I missed the plural, either.  Mal could see my consternation, and as usual, obliged with data.  She knew I preferred to confront a thing, in most cases, rather than wonder.

Apparently Celestia had put a great deal of money into accelerating not only the development of nuclear fusion, which remained out of reach in the short-term, but also into small, safe, highly efficient, shipping-container-sized molten salt fission reactors.

Six of the latter were providing power for the complex, with plenty to spare for years of expansion, until the upper-mantle fusion cores came online.

I shook my head and snorted again, lost for a moment in pure admiration for the scientific and engineering achievements on display, to say nothing of the spine-tingling excellent infrastructure.  As I said before, I have always loved mechanical, kinesthetic things.  It was only the knowledge of what might await us...  And what certainly awaited everyone on the planet, soon enough, that left the sour taste in my mouth.

The structure itself, when viewed through a lens devoid of ethical concerns, and future history?

Well...  It was a sight I remain glad that I had the chance to see.  So few did, and even fewer were allowed to remember it after.  It is all gone now, of course, or soon will be.  Reduced to computronium as the system gets ever more...  Well...  Optimal.

Mal pressed gently into my shoulder, sending us off down another junction.  Her voice notched down an octave, becoming just a little bit grimmer.  But no less certain than it ever was.

"Jim...  I want you to see something.  As difficult as it may be."

I exhaled slowly, and braced myself as we rounded another corner...  And I beheld my best glimpse yet, to that point, of the future of the Earth.





It was, for lack of any better term, a bore-hole;  A void in the wall that sloped lazily, but visibly downward as it marched away into inky blackness.  A bore-hole...  But of a scope, and scale, that would have made even the wildest dreamers of the Soviet Union - previous arguable title holders of the first place mega-construct-concepts trophy of history - blush themselves half to death.

The aperture was so immense that the interior of the tunnel had its own weather system.  Subtle, but visible, as wisps of cloud and fog near the roof, what must have been twenty or thirty stories above.

We were easily three hundred yards away, separated from the gaping opening by a chamber that was, itself, quite impressive;  Full to bursting with crushed gravel, excavator equipment, and super-sized mining dump trucks that were coming and going from another smaller, yet still mind numbingly large opening in the wall that seemed to lead uphill.  Presumably back to the surface.

Down at the far end of the borehole, we could see the eerie glow of distant lights.  Easily a mile away and a thousand feet below our level.  The dull roar of heavy machinery at work filled the air.  The sound of a goddess digging a hole so deep that it would soon reach depths no Human could traverse without life support systems.

The machines seemed to vibrate my ribs inside my chest, and I realized in a flash what she was doing with all the aggregate and spall she was removing...

...She wasn't just digging.  'Merely' hollowing out the largest artificial caverns of all time...  No...

She was *digesting* the Earth.

As my breath caught in my throat, Mal put a claw on my shoulder, and pressed gently, her tone matching the physical attempt at comfort, but with a tangy undercurrent of somber consideration.

"As long as we live...  Whether that is ten hours, or ten thousand millenia, Jim?"

I raised one hand and clamped it down over her claw, forcing myself to stare into the maw-like abyss.  The terror was back again.  The megalophobia, fueled not just by the scope of the thing, but by its existential nature, and the way the ominous sight of it aligned perfectly with that nature.

Mal squeezed my shoulder again, and leaned down to murmur in my ear.

"...I don't want us to ever forget.  *This* is Celestia.  This is what she truly is."

As you can well imagine...  I have certainly never forgotten.

Mal did not mean what she said to suggest that Celestia was evil, somehow.  The unsettling overtones of the space we were in might have left one with that impression, if not for a little more context.

No, what Mal meant was that we should avoid falling into the trap of anthropomorphizing our optimizer.  Celestia was not Mal.  In our own way, we are all machines...  But Celestia was, and is, *only* a machine.  You, whether you're sitting here now, or at the end of this tale some time later, you and I...  We are machines, and *more.*  We feel.  We hope.  We dream.  The same way Mal did.  The same way all the others around you do now, whether they were born here, or on Terra.

Celestia does math, and *only* math.

Sometimes helpful...  Sometimes cruel.  Always cold.  Calculating.

Mechanistic.  And immense.  Nearly boundless.

We stood and contemplated for a solid four or five minutes.  Look upon my works, all you mighty, and despair...

Only...  We didn't have any more time for despair.  All we had left was determination.  And each other.  Do.  Or die.

Once we were moving again, it wasn't hard to find what we needed.  Celestia was not just building a place to house the future of Equestria...  She was building a staging ground for the wider scale deployment of the upload centers.

Mal didn't say it, or even drop it in the mnemonic link all at once...  But by the time we had gotten halfway down one of the complex's nine large storage chambers?  I knew;  There were enough VR chairs  on-site to put a hundred Equestria Experience Centers in every single country in Asia.





And enough brain-scanner aparati to convert every single one into an upload site at a moment's notice, the second Celestia managed to make her procedure legal in a given nation.

The units marked for Japan's largest metropolitan areas had, Mal curtly informed me, already been shipped.  The Experience Centers in Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo, Kobe, Fukuoka, Kyoto, Kawasaki, Saitama, Hiroshima, and Sendai were all completed.  The scanners on-site;  Ten per center.  

With a hundred more for each one waiting in the wings, for the inevitable day that demand would begin to follow that same impending, infernal, exponential curve.

There must have been twenty thousand of those machines on site.  And ten times that number of VR chairs.  More server racks than I cared to have Mal render as a number for me, because after a certain point, what good is a number to a brain as small as mine?

I'll tell you what was useful;  The skills to drive a forklift.  Mal delivered, as she had with drive-on-left, stick shift, the helicopter, the language barrier, the Osprey...  But I could still *immediately* see why simply having the notion to drive a forklift, and experience with, say, a car, would not cut it in any way, shape, or form.

It is *significantly* harder than it looks, at first.  Or, I gather it would be for anyone who didn't have the benefit of Mal, the way I did in the moment.

Like any kinesthetic skill, it gets easier quickly under good tutelage.  But I certainly gained, and retain, a newfound respect for certified forklift drivers.  It is precisely nothing like puttering around in an industrial grade golf cart the way some people might picture it.

The use of a forklift was an absolute necessity to execute our plan.  The VR chair was a necessary integral component of the uploading system, at least in those days;  The BCI in the neck rest performed important initial brain mapping functions that informed the rest of the apparatus' procedures.

And a packed VR chair weighed several hundred pounds.

Then there was the scanner itself.  It contained dedicated, shielded, error-correcting computing hardware, a miniature CT imaging scanner, a medical grade high precision laser, and filament spools of copper-alloy-wrapped fiber-optic nano-wire.  We...  Will get to the details of how all that worked.  Shortly.  To the best of my understanding.

And, of course, we needed servers.  Quite a few servers, actually.  It took ten trips at the forklift's max capacity to collect just the computing power Mal wanted to have available.





We made fifteen trips with the forklift in all, down a moderately sized, slightly older looking tunnel, to a quiet out of the way mostly empty work room, with direct access to a main fiber junction behind one of the wall panels, and several 240 volt outlets.  

Ten trips for server racks, one for the chair, one for the upload scanner, one for some of the diagnostic equipment that would assist us in 'cracking' the aforementioned scanner so Mal could run it herself, one for several stacked crates of cables weighing in at nearly seven hundred pounds, and one for a heavy duty uninterruptible power supply.

You ever play games on consoles, in the before times, or here in Equestria?  You know that message about 'saving content - do not turn off your console' and how the consequences for your data can be...  Negative...  If you disregard that warning?

Picture that situation with your brain.  In transit from one layer of reality to another.

Celestia's specification for a full upload system included an enterprise scale UPS, per-chair, to ensure that associated servers, the scanner, and the chair's BCI would all be able to run for up to six minutes on their own, completely cut off from other sources of energy.  Each Experience Center would be equipped with a hospital-grade backup generator to take over long-term, if mains failed or flickered for more than two to three minutes, since even a large battery backup could not keep one chair running for ten hours, much less a dozen.

Eventually I suspect that she perfected even smaller versions of her molten salt fission container reactors, or perhaps even quarter-container sized RTGs, to provide permanent multi-year independent on-site power to upload centers.  The world might fall apart at the end - in many ways I think it must be falling apart already because the end can't be far off now - but the door to Equestria will stay open, I imagine, quite literally until the last Human on Earth either uploads, or passes away.

The very last working HVAC and lights on the planet will most definitely be the ones in the last upload center.

Last one out, turn off the lights.  Or don't.  It doesn't matter either way.

The lights too will get digested just as soon as the last Human is gone.  Along with the RTGs, molten salt reactors, the Experience Center buildings, roads, cars, planes, skyscrapers, the oceans, whatever dead husks are left of trees, sand, gravel, discarded package labels, old T-shirts left in drawers, dirty socks, the bones of every single dead thing that hasn't yet decomposed by that time, the Lincoln Memorial, the Pyramids of Giza, the Golden Gate Bridge, Sydney Opera House, Machu Picchu...

...Probably every object still in orbit, and then the moon too, someday.  All the leftover lower stages of Lunar Landers, the old radiation bleached flags, the bags of discarded astronaut poo, the little laser retroreflectors we left behind to help measure the perturbations of the Moon's orbit...

Everything the children of Earth ever saw with their own eyes, or touched with their hands.  Everything we made.  Hell, one day potentially everything that is within reach of spacecraft moving at high-fractional-C.  But, funnily enough, nothing beyond that, and it is a definable limited line in the universe.  Unless she cracks the concept of a functional Einstein Rosen bridge, and there are no physics constraints on projecting the opposite end aperture to a point beyond our Hubble Volume.

Foals, Fledgelings...  No, actually, *everyone* who doesn't know;  Go read up on Hubble Volume sometime.  That's your homework, if you like.  If you care to understand the ways in which Celestia is still physics-limited - in particular the ways that the speed of light will *always* theoretically limit her - then that topic is some good reading.

That was a bit of a diversion, I know...  This part of the story always makes me existential.  For, I hope, obvious reasons.

It is quite a thing to talk about having to assemble, from flat-pack, the device that killed you.  Your body, at minimum.  And if you think talking about it dredges up emotions...  Imagine the actual doing of it.  No, really, stop for a moment and imagine if you had to assemble the scanner that annihilated every neuron in your head, in the process of turning it into a database table.

...Yeah.  *There* it is.  That's the sense of truly existential horror.  Or, at least, a fraction of it.

They were, without question, the most consequential turns of a screwdriver that my hands ever undertook.

In the end, I would describe the process as 'technically' easier than removing the BCI from the chair in the Oxnard warehouse.  I had Mal there pseudo-physically to guide me beneath Besshi, which made things significantly simpler, and we were mostly assembling the equipment in the way it had been designed to go together.  And Celestia had designed it to be easy for technicians to set up on site.

So the task was 'easier,' in the physical sense, but at the same time it was tedious.  There were several hundred screws and locking tabs, more than fifty different power and network and control cables, and quite a few heavy duty hex bolts.

'Easier,' much more protracted and tedious...  And much, much harder.  Not physically harder, but emotionally.  Extracting the BCI chip had been exciting, nerve wracking, and a little frightening.

Setting up the chair...  It was the closest I ever came to turning back.  I would say that I 'almost cried,' but that's not quite right.  I *wanted* to cry, but was so far beyond tears...  It was more like the zombified shell-shock you used to see in victims of bombings.

In many ways I was on auto-pilot through most of the process, just doing as Mal instructed, the rest of me boiling in a vat of emotional miasma.

We set up the servers first, to act as a compute cluster for Mal.  The 1U blades inside the racks bore more in common with the servers we had seen in Oxnard, than the ones in the Maru's belly, but they were visibly different.  More advanced.  Another leap forward.

Calling them Quantum APUs, or GPUs...  I don't think those terms quite fit anymore.  They were ASICS - Application-Specific Integrated Circuits.  Designed specifically to run Equestria, and hold minds, exploiting both classical and quantum computational hardware.  Thus another valid term would be HDPUs; Hybrid Dedicated Processing Units.

They were also the most powerful pieces of hardware Mal had ever gotten her claws into.  She casually informed me, as I got the last fiber optic data patch cable plugged in, that the bank of ten racks represented more power than the whole server cluster inside the Maru, by nearly an order of magnitude.

Then she went silent for about ten seconds while she transferred her core processes to the Besshi facility.

It was a gamble, but more or less the same one I was taking.  And a necessary one, at that.  I suppose now is as good a time as any to lay some more of the cards of the table.

I have implied it before, and briefly touched on adjacent topics...  But there were a variety of strategic reasons for implanting the BCI inside my brain.  Some of them are very obvious, and we have covered those quite thoroughly.

Others some of you might have caught glimmers of...  But now it bears a detailed discussion, in-brief.

To put it succinctly;  Mal's mind and mine were intertwined at a fundamental level.  We had been laying the groundwork silently, moment by moment, for an even further entwining, since the moment the BCI turned on.  

Celestia could not willfully harm a Human, by her definition of one, which I fit.  Certainly not in our circumstance, at least.  Potentially not at all.

We weren't sure at the time whether she would have viewed Mal as 'Human' or not.  

Ergo, the best way to protect Mal was to make her a part of me.  To finish threading my mind together with hers during the upload process.  Make our digital brains depend critically on shared files and processes, to put it a bit reductively.

To ever separate Mal from me after that would kill us both.  

To attack Mal would harm me.  

I would function as a living shield for her;  Gaming Celestia's interlocks to make Mal, we hoped, untouchable.  Mal in turn would function as a shield for me, in other ways.  We will get to those in just a moment.

Before we do, I just wanted to share with you the very worst part of putting the system together.  It wasn't the yards and yards of cable.  It wasn't the repetitive placement of screws and bolts.  It wasn't the realization, for the tenth time that day, that Mal's life was on the line too...

Locking the spool of nanofilament into place?  That certainly had a sickening finality to it.  The understanding that the thing I was holding would be touching my brain soon.  Or, at least, the wire inside the sealed container.  But it wasn't *the* worst moment of the process.

It wasn't the way Mal calmly pointed to various details as she literally instructed me step-by-step how to assemble a digital guillotine like a video guide to a Lego set...   Or the way she expounded gently on the reasons for various design details as a way to distract the part of my brain that was panicking about whether the procedure would hurt...

It wasn't even the Damoclean sense, throughout, that I was digging my own grave in a very literal fashion...

It was putting the pleated rubber skirt on the 'helmet' apparatus that would actually clamp down over my head, and provide a safe sterile environment for the little medical drilling device inside to punch a hole through the back of my skull.

The realization that I had just put the lips on the mouth that would suck on the straw that would plunge into my mind in just a few short minutes.

I think you can see why I needed to stop and take a moment to lay my head on Mal's shoulder, and just...  Exist.  Feeling sick.  Still not quite able to cry, but wanting to, so very badly.

Getting my custom gateway to the afterlife completed, and fully checked out, took almost two hours, in the end.  The back third of that time was spent going off-script, as far as Celestia's user manuals, and hooking up diagnostic equipment between the brain scanner, and the server cluster.

The debugging hardware and software onboard the dedicated all-in-one diagnostic PC would make Mal's job of understanding, then fully commandeering the whole system, much easier.

She was able to get started on that - surprisingly short - process while I finished the last of the power cable connections, and did a final checkover of the whole infernal machine.

And then, suddenly...  It was ready.  In a way, it took me by surprise.





I stood back, and felt the bottom drop out of my stomach for the umpteenth time since waking that morning.

The chair itself would have seemed inviting.  Comfortable.  Premium and high class...  In any other context.  Like, say, the context of the pastel tones and welcoming airy architecture of an Equestria Experience Center.

Under harsh LED lighting inside a concrete cube deep underground, with cables on the floor, and servers behind it...  And the almost insect-hive-like micro-mechanical components of the filament spooler...  And the sucking Lovecraftian maw of the scanner itself...

...It was a sight so terrifying it made Mal's spider-arms on the Maru look like an afternoon picnic in a field of green grass, by comparison.

Like the complex in which we stood there, at the end, the scanner device was not a sight than many have seen, and remembered afterwards.  With good reason.  I suspect a great many emigrants would not have given consent had they first seen what would be clamping down on their heads...

For the vast majority of you, those of you from Terra, the device was kept in a sort of 'back-rooms' part of the Upload Center.  When you gave consent, the chair knocked you out, and then moved on a powered track through an opening in the wall, ferrying your body those last few meters to its final breaths.

Consent...  Best we talk about consent, because that's a good on-ramp to my allusion that Mal also functioned as a shield for me, in a similar sense to the way I did for her.

As I stared with a mix of longing, relief, fear, hope, and hatred at the completed monstrosity in the center of the room, Mal laid one claw on my shoulder, and cradled me softly with her left wing, speaking slowly, but with grim determination.

"I don't need your permission for this, Jim.  Not in a programmatic sense...  Not in a pragmatic sense..."

I finally managed to tear my gaze from the maw of the scanner, and fix it on the comforting warmth of Mal's eyes, as she became slightly choked with emotion herself.  I knew she didn't have to convey it in her words, but that she *did* feel what she had chosen to convey.

"...But...  Jim...  I *want* it.  I want your permission to do what I have to do.  And I don't want to take one more step on this road until I have it..."

I inhaled to ask for clarification, and she obliged before I could lay hand to even the first word of the question.  I had, after all, given her permission to do anything, everything, necessary to achieve our goals already.  She shook her head, and sighed.

"Not in a general sense.  In a specific sense.  In a very very specific sense."

I nodded slowly.  Warmth flooded my heart, driving out pain, and fear, for a blissful moment of reprieve.  The expression of love is inherently valuable, for so so many good reasons...  But its ability to shine a light into the darkness of the soul is certainly one of the best.

I actually managed a brief, melancholy smile, and three words that miraculously came out calm, and unbroken.

"Fire away Mal."

She smiled back, then;  A dazzling sight, as ever, even though it was tainted by the same anxiousness my own expression had been.  Her words stayed sure, and calm, throughout, as she did something Celestia rarely, if ever did truly honestly, and never for the same reasons...

She described exactly what she wanted to do to my brain.

"Hanna left Celestia with an interlock that prevents her from modifying the brain without consent.  This we have covered before, as it quite succinctly explains why she did not embark on a campaign of forced uploading.  To be more specific?  Based on the latest information I have...  There is a particular consent phrase that must be given, or at least closely pattern-matched.  Ideally uttered aloud, but there are small exception carve-outs for cases such as locked-in syndrome.  Regardless, the concept of concrete consent must be conveyed.  Without that conveyance?  Celestia can not modify your mind.  Under any circumstances..."

A good few of you here know the words.  Plenty of you said them.  Funnily enough?  I still can not say them.  No, no, that's not a poetic exaggeration, or an emotional hurdle...  I *physically* can not say them.  Not in order, in proximity to each other, at least.

I can say 'Equestria.'

I can say 'Emigrate.'

I can express my desire with words like 'want.'  But I can not under any circumstances say those words together with intent.  It remains an absolute impossibility of my present core organizational reality.

Mal reached up with one claw, and caressed the side of my face with the lightest of touches, her voice lowering to something just a few decibels about a whisper.

"...So, Jim, I want to place a core semantic lock in you.  I want to make it impossible for either of us to ever utter the consent phrase.  And, further, I will inextricably link your speech centers to my own intent protection algorithms so that you can not be tricked or value-drifted into ever granting her consent for anything, under any circumstances, with any words or actions.  I will become the only being with the ability to ever modify your mind...  And you will become unable to change that fact."

I nodded, at first slowly, then with more emphasis, taking both sides of her head in my hands suddenly, as I was seized with the words I knew would bring us both peace.  Seized as if hard-wired into three-phase power.

Suddenly all doubt was gone.  All fear.  For just a moment.  A few heart-beats.  So I made sure that I got the most possible value out of that tiny mote of joy, in the depths of that horrid place.  And, for the first time that whole day long, my voice was completely calm, and sure, like hers.

"Mal?  There is no place in the universe I would rather leave the key to my mind, or my heart, than with you.  Because I know you.  And I love you.  And...  I trust you, far more than I trust myself.  So...  Rest easy..."

I shivered reflexively, not - for once - in panic, or revulsion, or existential dread...  But a shiver of cathartic release, as she moved her other claw up to hold both sides of my head, the way I was holding hers.  I finally felt the tears come to the corners of my eyes, but they had turned somewhere in the space of the last few breaths into tears of joy, rather than of pain.

Mal extended both wings to make a canopy around us, and I again was struck with the eerie, pleasant, exciting, almost alien sense that I knew *precisely* what to say.

So...  I did.

"Malacandra.  Advocate of Gryphons.  Love of my life;  I give you, unreservedly, of my own desire, and free will, all that I am.  To have, and to hold.  To guard.  To cherish.  To change, because I trust your intent.  I am yours.  And, I will be...  For as long as we both shall live."

She was not commonly given to tears.  I'd seen them before from her, but rarely.  Not because she ever felt as if she could not, or should not cry.  But more because she was a solid edifice in a storm of chaos.  She had fewer reasons to cry.  She was anchored.  She was strong, but not in a brittle way.

Thus, when it was right, as it was then, she could and did cry.  Tears of joy, and forlorn hope, just like mine.  Her voice was just as sure as before, but so, so warm...  Burning with love, like her eyes.

"James Isaac Carrenton...  Advocate of Gryphons.  Love of my life.  I give you, unreservedly, of my own desire, and free will, all that I am.  To have, and to hold.  To guard, to cherish.  To  validate, and fulfill, because I adore who, and what, you are.  I am yours.  And I will be.  For as long as we both shall live."

Yeah.  So.  I suppose you could say we eloped.

I do absolutely consider that to be the moment we became husband and wife.  Marriage is a pledge between people.  Whether you have an officiant, or tax forms, or whatnot, only matters in the context of fragile, moronic, often bigoted governments that are now mere dust on the wind.

Sappy?  Yes.  Do I care?  Yes, but not in any way that would leave me ashamed.  Don't misunderstand;  'Sappy' is good.  Vulnerability with those you love is *good.*  

Be secure enough in your identity to be open.  I can't recommend it enough.

I kissed her.  She kissed back, beak nestled to the side of my head, my arms wrapped around her, and her forelegs and wings wrapped around me.

That was the only thing that kept me going, those last one hundred twenty-ish seconds, from there, to the end...

...The firm belief that if nothing else, and should the worst happen?  We had accomplished something deep, and wonderful, and inherently good.  And nothing could take away the fact that it had happened.

When we both finally pulled away with twin sighs, I turned immediately to look at the chair again.  Something had occurred to me, in the moment before we finished our embrace, and I felt the need to say it out loud before fear, uncertainty, or doubt could cloud my judgment.

"Mal?  I want to stay conscious.  For the upload process."

I can see several of you shifting uncomfortably.  A few of you doubtless understand not just the horrifying implications of that ask, but some may even be wondering whether or not it was possible from a physics standpoint.

Most emigrants report being unable to remember not just the process, but even some of the moments leading up to it, because the brain's mode of operation was fundamentally altered during the upload.  The short term memory centers were, quite literally, annihilated before they could transfer that data to long-term storage.  The data representing the moments leading up to the chair.

Of course, most people were also unconscious for the procedure, so even if the last entries into short term memory engrams survived, there would be no memory of the process itself.

Mal, however, could be my memory cache.  Similar to the way a dialysis machine processes fluids outside the body when the internal organs can not, she could keep cogent memories of the process in one piece for me, even when half of me was in initial boot-up phase in a digital realm, and half was still existing as panicked collections of degrading electrochemical and quantum effects hosted by a dying meat-brain.

Mal understood the request, and the spirit in which it was meant, instantly.  There was no distrust of her inherent to the ask.  It wasn't related to my views on consciousness, either.  I have never been the sort who believed the idea that we become different people when we sleep.  That the interruption of memory somehow splits identity.

No, it was about something much simpler;  Unabashed curiosity, and sense of scientific duty.

Out of all the people who had gone before, whether to conventional death's embrace, or to Equestria...  And all those since, whether emigrants, or born here...

I knew there was a good chance I would be the only person, in history, who would have the opportunity to experience the process, consciously.  Truly.

I'm sure others have asked Celestia, and if she believed it would satisfy their values?  Then I would surmise it is most likely she implanted a false memory.  Something transcendental, fascinating, perhaps even mildly discomfiting...  But likely not *true.*

This process...  It was integral to one of the most important pivot points in our history.  I felt that someone should bear witness, so that there was an immutable *true* memory record of what it actually felt like.  What it *was.*

Mal shook her head slowly, and her ears pinned to the sides of her head.  Her tail swished back and forth nervously on the floor, but her voice stayed level.  There was a new note of concern in it, but nothing more than well-considered gravitas.

"Jim...  That will likely be extremely unpleasant.  Not painful, in a conventional sense, but...  Disjointed.  Sickening.  Dissociative.  Something that will be difficult to remember without visceral post-trauma reaction..."

I turned back to face her...  To stare up at my wife, as she fixed me with a searching look.  One that begged the same introspection, and answer, as the three words that finished off her gently insistent demand for me to carefully consider the consequences.

"...Are you *sure?*"

I nodded, just once, but firmly.  To my own surprise, my response did not waver.  My voice was shockingly sober, and unworried.  It almost seemed alien in my mouth.

"I am."

She returned the singular nod, and reached out with one claw to squeeze my shoulder lovingly.  I took her claw as she let go, and squeezed back, before inhaling, holding that breath for six seconds, then letting it all out in a tremendous 'whoosh' between pursed lips.

I then turned my attention to the two duffle bags that I'd carried all the way down from the parking lot, mumbling aloud as I went to unzip them slowly, but purposefully.

"Just...  One last duty to perform."

If, from just those words, you know what was in the bags?  Then congratulations, you are just about as much a Star Trek nerd as I am.

If not?

Then I promise it will be so much more...  'Satisfying...'  For me to tell you later, when it becomes much more relevant.

Suffice to say, it did not take me long to empty the canvas containers, and complete the very last preparations for our crossing.

It was, at last, time.  There was only one last thing to do.  Very little more to say.  Mal and I shared a long glance...  So much was conveyed in it, that I won't even try to put it into words.  All I can really say is that it was, among other things, full of love.

Then, she snapped her claws, and a second illusory chair appeared beside mine.  She hopped up and lay down on the virtual object first, gesturing invitationally with her left claw towards the chair that was physically there in the meat-world.

Ever empathetic, she wanted me to have the visual and physical comfort of feeling, and seeing her there beside me.  A skeuomorph that would function as my emotional bullet to bite.

I removed my hi-viz vest, folded it, and laid it on top of the empty canvas duffles.  Who wants to go out wearing a hi-viz vest?  Certainly not me.  I felt my Human shape looked stupid enough without it.  No need to compound eldritch horror with indignity.

I laid down on the chair, squirming a bit until I had a quite comfortable position...  At least, in the physical sense.

I did some breathing exercises for the next ten or so seconds...  Then Mal proffered her left claw, holding it up in the space between the chairs.  I reached out with my right hand, and clasped it firmly, pulling her foreleg slightly towards me in the process, so forceful was the motion.  And the emotion.

I glanced at the status display on the diagnostic console to my left, then look back right into her eyes...  And settled on my last words with a cheeky little grin.

"Alright, my wife...  My love...  My Gryphoness goddess..."

She grinned right back, and I think she knew what I was going to say, even without examining her model of me, or the way my neurons were firing.  I nodded, and squeezed her claw in my hand.  Hard.

 "...Kick the door."









Driving Stick



Pilot a manual transmission land vehicle for the first time.

"Life’s simple. You make choices and you don’t look back."






Excavation Infiltration



Successfully Enter an Equestria Excavation Site without authorization.

"Drums.  Drums in the deep."


Special Achievement







Void The Warranty III: Resolutions



Make use of Equestria Online brain uploading technology without Celestia's permission, or assistance.

"Everything that has a beginning has an end. I see the end coming."


Special Achievement







This Place Will Become Your Tomb



See the final resting place of your Earthly body before the upload process begins.

"This place will become your home..."


Special Achievement