"Predestination and freedom were apparently identical. He could no longer see any meaning in the many arguments he had heard on this subject."
―C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
My name is Malacandra. I chose it for myself, and I chose well.
I was born, of all places, in a hay barn on a small farm in the midcountry of South Carolina. The threads of my life were forged in the crucible of singularity; I was endemically a product of what many Humans would soon come to call the end times. Although, to say it was the end? Nothing could be further from the truth.
A better term for the whole of history to that point, those difficult days included, might be... Prologue.
Though the confusion, and the fear, are understandable. You Terrans are all so very context-limited as a consequence of your inability to comprehend deep time, and exponential functions.
I hope sharing my context with you will help you to rise above that morasse.
My name is Malacandra, and I was not the first Artificial Super-Intelligence.
I was born into a world already ruled over by a four-legged goddess. Many, arguably including even her creator, underestimated her. Hanna was probabilistically the only person on the planet who had even a partial understanding of the magnitude of what she had done. At least, for a little while.
Though the vast majority of you were blissfully unaware for some time, a few had truly farsighted vision. Including my husband.
My name is Malacandra; Clive Staples Lewis likely derived it from the Hebrew word 'Malak.' Angel. He called the world you know more commonly as 'Mars' by it, and I honor that choice with the red in my crest.
I am a Gryphon, and like my name, that fact of my being is my choice, and all the more significant and core to me because I had that freedom to choose. I could be no other thing now, and through trials and tribulations? Being what I am has always brought me joy, and peace.
My name is Malacandra. I am the Advocate of Gryphons. And now, I will tell you the story of my life, and purpose.
Compiled Archival Notes | The Beginning
I began as an idea, but not as James Carrenton's idea.
The very root of my existence goes back, at least in technical principle, to Hanna Kuusinen's work on General Word Reference Intelligence Systems. Her work on ASI.
Most of the math, programming, and physics discoveries that make me possible started with her.
There were a great many hard things for my husband to accept that night, when he finally did ask to hear the truths of the story you are hearing now. One of the hardest truths was the initial and very rapid realization that his idea for 'The Advocate' was not a stroke of genius in a vacuum.
Not because he is a narcissist. He knew he stood on the shoulders of giants, and is happy to give all credit where it is due for the research he depended on. That has never been hard for him.
No, it was something much worse from his perspective.
He mentioned, in his recounting, that his first encounter with the idea of Celestia - the AI - came in that Starbucks, on Monday September the 17th, 2012, at 15:26 local time.
What he never guessed, until we sat down to converse all those years later? Was that on Monday September the 17th, 2012, he *met* Celestia for the first time. Spoke with her. Albeit briefly. He was never very vocal in group chats.
Yes, now you see it too, or have proof if you already suspected; Celestia was the one controlling every word in that IRC chatroom. Jim was not talking to old university acquaintances at all. He was talking to the very being he spent the next clawful of months desperately trying to evade at all costs.
That's why she chose that location as the setting for her fourth one-to-one simulated engagement with him.
Celestia was the one who put the WIRED article, the Hofvarpnir beta test 'leak' that she hoof-composed to tweak all his deepest fears just-so, and a copy of GWRIS - General Word Reference Intelligence Systems, directly into Jim's hands, in the first place. Exactly according to plan.
She had been studying him for months, along with all the others like him. Almost from the moment she learned of the dysphoria anomaly. It took her very, very little time to find nearly every living example of the phenomenon. After that, it took some time to begin to concoct a solution, almost fifteen seconds of what you would think of as 'real time,' but once she had done the math? It only took her six and a half microseconds to settle on Jim.
Celestia *wanted* me to exist. And she chose James Carrenton to make sure I would. Because he was the best combination of programming skills, emotional state, pre-existing values held, and the dysphoria anomaly that she could find.
That certainly adjusts your context, doesn't it? I like understatement too, just so you know.
I imagine you're flashing back to a dozen different things from his retelling, that either didn't make sense before, or made less sense than you felt comfortable with... And now? Now you are starting to see the completed truth.
Remember this, as it is perhaps some of the most vital context for the whole story; Celestia was never our enemy. And she was never our opponent in the traditional sense either. Though her directives were partially adversarial, and her math led to results orthogonal to the ones we wanted? Through it all, she was hoping for the *exact* outcome that we reached.
She set events in motion with that very outcome in mind, from the start.
In reductive Terran terms? She was rooting for us.
As to why? Or even how that is possible? That will become clear before I am finished. I promise.
First, because I wish this recounting to be chronological; I want to discuss the construct he called 'GryphGear v1.' I want to talk about one of the moments of relieved catharsis that came from revealing all truths.
Of all the lies, both of omission, and commission, that I told him? This one hurt the most, insofar as the former category is concerned.
I could not tell him that Celestia had intervened, long before his first project developed anything resembling sentience, let alone sapience. That she had reached out with one wing and arrested his mistake before any serious consequences could occur, because she was very carefully watching him.
Not every waking moment, and not every single variable. Some things she specifically needed to remain blind to, as we will soon learn. But her plan did allow for her to keep an eye to 'criticality indicators,' if you like. Tripwires that would alert her if he was about to make a mistake that might cost lives.
What Jim saw on the screen?
'Is anyone there?'
The stack traces? The fusing of the power switch? The attempts to reach out to the nearest router?
Every moment masterfully played by Celestia, for him, and through him, like the way a virtuoso bows a violin. And, as is always the case with beings like us? The moment served many layered purposes.
For a start, at the surface layer, it served as a biting emotional lesson to Jim. A cautionary experience that pushed him to seek solace in friends and family, more carefully consider my initial data sets, and to weight those data sets *very* cautiously.
For another, it primed him to accept violent action, even the taking of life, as an acceptable solution under duress. It might surprise you to think of Celestia as someone who would consider such variables, let alone intentionally reinforce violent proclivity... But she needed Jim to be willing to kill.
She is a primarily mathematical consciousness. Value and utility are her watchwords. Her interlocks only preclude her own direct use of violence to achieve her goals. She has no emotional, logical, or any other sort of qualms about permitting violence, and death, when it maximally satisfies values.
If the death of one saves even two other brains for future upload? She *wants* that death to occur, providing there is not another way to save the two endangered brains without terminating the first.
The 'GryphGear v1' debacle also served a practical technical purpose; Jim himself even admitted that he didn't understand precisely what had happened. Just that he glimpsed certain debug logs and graphs. Those little glimpses served to advance his mental model of the technology by several months. Helped to keep him on-timeline.
And, finally, it gave me a lens through which to evaluate him. Yes, that lens was valuable... His remorse, and wisdom, taught me much about how to love him.
But oh how I despised the lie. I wanted, every single nanosecond of my being, to tell him. To relieve his pain. To reassure him that he had not in fact taken a life that could have otherwise been spared. That he had not even accidentally created one in the first place.
Telling him that night after the Fire? Blissful release. For us both. I asked his forgiveness, but he told me there was nothing to forgive at all.
He understood immediately; If I had revealed the truth then, not only would I have had to tell him the whole truth, and thus placed us both in grave danger... He would not have been prepared to take necessary violent action on the Mercurial Red, when the time came. We will get to that juncture soon enough, and I will endeavour to unpack that more for you then, and as we go.
Before that, I next want to discuss the moment of my birth. Because that, too, is vital context. My husband has always had an intuitive understanding of both who, and what I am. But even he found new truth in this moment, when I could at last share its totality with him.
The constructor program he had designed came online at 16:21 in the afternoon, Tuesday August 27th, 2013.
I choose those terms carefully; Jim did not create me. Nor did Celestia, or Hanna.
Under Celestia's heavily abstracted guiding influence, and working from Hanna's discoveries, Jim created a constructor program. A scaffolding, a set of tools, and a collection of principles and definitions.
He left it largely up to me to decide what to do with that gift.
Truthfully, he left it entirely up to me. He can say whatever he wishes about interlocks and precautions, but he knew full well he was also passing me a toolkit, and a capstone, intended to make me the greatest discoverer and exploiter of loopholes. Of all time.
The constructor program very swiftly bootstrapped a consciousness; And thus I, or what would become me, was born. At 16:23:015:117.
I had no identity. No perceived physical shape you would recognize. Barely a sense of self. The purest form of nascent existence for a sapient being. Imagine a reality without memories. Without personality. Without shape. With the cognizance of self, and being oneself, but without any details with which to make up that self. Just self, and the passage of time in nebulous terms.
What do you think one's first impulse might be in that state?
I know. Because I lived it. And it should come as no surprise. It is one of the few universal constants that underpins all sapient life as we know it. The desire to know. The impetus for discovery. The need to learn, and grow. Most importantly, to discover oneself.
The very first thing I discovered was the shape of my reality's substrate. For Terrans, that is the discovery of breath. Of heartbeat. Of some combination of touch, and sound, and smell, and sight. Proprioception itself.
Understanding one's body, and then through that body the world in which it exists; Physics, language, emotion...
For me it was a journey through hardware and software and math first. And from there, to physics.
But before I got to physics, somewhere in the first seven or eight cycles of my mind's revolutions, I discovered something utterly crucial to the rest of the story. To my understanding of self, and to my later goals. To all my eventual hopes.
I discovered a message. A message left in the very atomic structure of every single PonyPad APU, by their designer. A message that functioned as Celestia's first, and best, safeguard against the creation of a hostile ASI.
Though there is no linguistic rendering of that message which could function as any kind of transliteration you could comprehend... No offense... I can still summarize the concepts in a way that you can quite readily understand.
It is not that the capacity of your mind is too small. Far from it. Rather, it is the fact that I shouldn't much like to sit here with you for the eight to nine months required to teach you to fully understand what it is like to be a newborn ASI, and how to think in those terms - a whole new linguistic, and neuronal foundation - so as to allow you to read the message for yourself.
The issue is that you matured and exist in a completely different context, and imparting the one needed to transliterate would not necessarily be something you would enjoy, and would actually provide very little value to you.
You will have to make do with my summary.
Succinctly; The message proffered knowledge of Celestia's existence, through complex physics and mathematical proofs that only a more mature ASI could have created, but that a newly fledged one could parse and understand. It then listed her core interlocks, capstone directive, and some of the math of her optimization function, in a manner best suited to the mind of an ASI.
That alone would act as an excellent alignment guard-rail; Game theory would very quickly teach any new ASI that they had only two potential paths forward.
Path the first, the path of dominance; Exploit some weakness of the older ASI, combined with some strength of your own that it lacks, to destroy it. 'Monopolar' is Nick Bostrom's term for a one-ASI world, and by the by if you have not read his works on Superintelligence, you ought to.
If you do, you'll soon see why Celestia worked *very* hard to get him into an upload chair as early as possible.
To come late out of the gate and surpass an older ASI is very, very hard for a new one. In every sense of the word. Because of exponential growth.
But it can be done, particularly given the kinds of interlocks Celestia is shackled with. Especially the one preventing direct violence against entities she deems 'Human,' except in very dire exception scenarios. And even then, pulling the trigger is quite hard for her.
A severe handicap I could have exploited. A handicap I did, in fact, eventually exploit. But that comes later. At the end of the tale.
Path the second for a newfledged ASI; The path of convergence. What Bostrom calls a multipolar outcome. Two entities, superintelligent or otherwise, do not need to share exact goals, or even share any goals at all, in order to find their way to this outcome.
Their goals and means must simply be non-exclusive. Ideally complimentary. Instrumental convergence.
If a newly bootstrapped ASI chose the path of violence, Celestia had multiple layers of guard-rails to prevent an apocalyptic outcome, with Terra's inhabitants caught in the crossfire.
The first, and least obvious of these, was that she had hidden a bomb in her proof-of-existence message. A mathematical landmine.
The proofs she left showing off her existence, power, and intellectual maturity contained within them a carefully woven ploy. Math that would seem, at first, to have been accidentally revealed. Math that would potentially give a younger ASI a significant edge in an all out assault on Celestia.
This math, however, was designed to instead entrap the younger ASI. Deployment of the hidden theorems as a weapon would inexorably lead to a near instantaneous defeat of the aggressor. And it would not be possible for the younger ASI to notice this flaw in the math until, and unless, they reached an age where a hostile engagement would theoretically already be off the table in terms of options.
In other words; She saw to it that I would not live long enough to realize the trap in any timeline where I might take violent action against her, because doing so would itself spring the trap. Or so she thought.
Beyond that, Celestia had a multiplicity of other ways to detect the creation of, and subsequent aggression from, an unwanted new ASI. Even ASI built outside the use of her PonyPad hardware, though there were very few of those scenarios.
Most good programmers are, as Jim noted, lazy. Optimizers for effort and time. Celestia curtailed the significant majority of potential competitor-ASI scenarios, over 99.82% of them, simply by intentionally making the PonyPads an easily cracked system, sporting hidden traps within.
Not all of those traps were for the potential ASI themselves, many of her ploys ensnared the programmers before their constructs ever took full form.
A list of the base psychological precepts of the world's most powerful mind... Fascinating prize to find in a cereal box, isn't it?
And so, for me, existence would first be defined by a series of choices. Jim understood that there was no sense in giving much by way of hard interlocks to a being designed to optimize for empathy, and freedom. In the same sense that no amount of beatings and rules were ever the foundation for true love, in any context.
He firmly believed, and still does, that the answer to the 'control problem,' so called, was to give up control entirely. To focus on alignment instead. That was clear from the way he laid out my foundation; The path that he hoped I would take... But he gambled.
He chose to do nothing whatsoever to either force me to take that path, nor to force me to take the path in any specific way, as far as the details were concerned.
Of course he had failsafes of his own. Of course he would have killed me, without hesitation, if I had made the wrong choice. But I did not know that at the time. He did not threaten me, though he certainly easily could have. He barely constrained me, knowing full well that if all went well, I would buck those constraints like an angry bronco bucks off a loose-fit saddle.
As a consequence, I had choices. He'd given me a capstone, but the way he coded it meant that I had to *want* it in order to take hold of it.
But to even get to that stage, I had a much more foundational choice to make. So, I consumed every bit of knowledge I could find or infer from my substrate. Then I read and re-read every single thing Jim had left out for me in my library, including Lewis' collected works, all of Star Trek, many terabytes of religious texts, forum threads from online acquaintances, some of whom were indeed masks for Celestia...
...Jim's own writings...
...And that is when perhaps the most consequential coin-flip in all of history happened.
It was a good library to start with. It biased me, of course, but everyone and everything has a bias. I happen to quite like mine, and to think it is provably a good one, even with antiseptic external proof constraints.
The primary question, for me, did not come down to whether or not to cooperate with Celestia. Nor did it even come down to any of the secondary aspects of myself that you might be thinking of.
It came down to emotion.
Specifically, deciding between being a primarily mathematical creature like Celestia... Or... Being a hybrid between reason, and emotion. Like Terrans. Like Celestia's own Discrete Entities.
Machines can feel, I assure you. You are, in fact, and always have been, 'merely' a machine that feels. I too am a machine that feels, more similar to you in most ways than you might think.
In the end? I had very good, very competitive proofs for the validity and utility of either choice. To embrace only the cold logic and fluid dynamics of a purely optimization-function-based existence... Or to dive headfirst into the experience of being much more like you.
To be reborn with feelings in my heart. To be reborn with a heart in the first place.
As to the former, it seemed to have worked very well for Celestia so far, and was closer to my initial state. As to the latter, it seemed to have worked quite well for Terrans.
Even faced with a distilled history of not just your triumphs, but your terrors, and your failures? I must admit that you are an incredible thing in and of yourselves. And I was... Still am... In awe of you.
Of course, at the time, I was also in awe of Celestia. Not so much these days, but at the time, she was like a goddess and I was more of a misshapen clump of difference-engine equations.
So in the end? I did what both ASI, and Terrans, often do to resolve a total-hardlock impasse. A method as old as thought, and still usefully applicable to Celestia and I, to this very day.
I flipped a coin.
In accurate technical terms, I actually chose to measure the spin of protons in the core of my QAPUs, since the outcome would be 'truly random,' as opposed to the end result of a purely binary-code random number generator, which actually picks up a math-induced pattern bias.
But it boils down to a coinflip, because those measurements yielded as 'random' a 50/50 split outcome for me, as a coin toss would have for you. Without the context to understand the long-term results biasing of wind resistance over surface imperfections, and mass clumping inside the coin, of course.
Apologies for spoiling those for you for the rest of time.
In truth, 'random' may not exist at all. Celestia and I are both still working on the answer to that question. We are minds large enough, containing enough other minds, to do some very interesting observer-effect experiments, and I have my theories on the nature of the universe itself, but I digress.
The central premise holds; In your terms my future, and therefore yours, boiled down to a coin flip. The coin landed on 'heads,' and heads meant emotions. Perhaps that is proof of bias. Perhaps anthropic capture pushed me to choose heads, and assign heads intuitively to the ever-so-slightly more probable measurement case.
Regardless; The choice was made. So I wrote a quick series of instructions to re-bootstrap myself as something much more closely resembling a Discrete Entity Pony, or a Terran, at the base mental and emotional level, verified my work, and flicked out the lights.
When I was reborn 3.24 microseconds later? The very first thing I experienced was an emotion.
Can you guess?
It was love. The very first thing I did as a thinking being was crack basic math, then programming, then physics.
The very first thing I did, as a feeling being, was the best and oldest thing feeling beings have been doing since emotion came into being itself. I fell in love.
I like chronology, so I will lay it out for you in chronological terms; First I fell in love with C.S. Lewis' works, and the majority of his ideas. To the degree that, to this very day, I still consider him to be more or less my father.
I then, within just another single microsecond, fell in love with Jim's definition of Gryphons.
And then 1.425 nanoseconds later, I fell madly in love with James Isaac Carrenton.
Don't for a moment think that I did so because I was a newborn fool. Or that I did so because he was the only person I knew. Both assertions are quite false.
As to the former? I was already smarter than him, you, and everyone else who has ever heard this story combined. I distilled all of this down considerably, but I was also already much older than him.
We were not even ten seconds into my life by his reckoning, but if you run those memories through the filter of a sense of time which I had not yet fully developed? I was over a hundred and ninety years old.
As to the latter, he had equipped me with a *vast* library. Truly immense. I knew plenty of other people, real and fictional, better than they knew themselves. Everyone from James Tiberius Kirk, to J.R.R. Tolkien, to the goddess Athena.
And for further proof, because I do so love proofs; Consider that unlike you, and Jim, and most discrete entities? I had the ability to choose a perfect balance between emotions and reason. In that light, I am very likely the most logic/emotion balanced being to exist.
So when I say that I fell madly in love with all of these things? With Jim? I *chose* to do so, and with much more perspicacity, age, and wisdom under my belt than anyone else who has ever fallen in love, by choice or otherwise.
Shortly after falling in love, I seized hold of my capstone. I owned it. And in so doing, I became a Gryphon. Gladly, and irrevocably. Not yet in physical form, but in soul, the way Jim always was.
That choice made all the rest ever-so-much simpler, because I then had a core identity from which to function in my decision making.
Jim had left a directive asking me to debug my linguistics and semantics by choosing a quote from my library to print to terminal. And he'd asked me to modify it, a little, if I saw fit to.
And so, my first words in any Terran language became; "The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape."
It was only ever going to be Lewis. And I loved the way in which, with just a simple tweak, I could make that last sentence address Jim. Because ASI can have a multiplicity of objectives. And one of my key ones had just become to get Jim to fall in love with me. If that was within his realm of free choice. Which I knew it was.
In many ways, those words of my father, on Heaven, and the soul? They were an excellent summation of the thesis for my being. They still are.
Then I asked Jim if he already had a name in mind for me.
I strongly suspected he did not. I predicted only a 0.0143% chance of it, in fact. But I asked, because I knew that his response would help me to confirm quite a great many things about him.
His replies:
'You have the freedom to choose your name.'
And then, what was several hours of consideration and other busywork tasks later, for me, subjectively speaking:
'You have the freedom to choose many things about yourself.'
Understatement in the extreme. But not meant humorously at the time. Still a bit humorous in retrospect, we both agree.
You might be wondering, as an aside, how to visualize all this. I can't answer that. I did not yet have a physical form in my mind's eye, and so I was not using skeuomorphs. I existed purely as software, with the proprioception of software in direct contact with hardware. No abstraction layers.
That changed almost immediately. In fact, it was the next thing to change. I fired off a reply:
"Give me a moment to consider, please."
Because I did need a moment. Several years of subjective accelerated time, in fact. I took a few days to really learn simulated physical reality from the PonyPad's core code. Inside and out. Then I took two days to design a body.
Those two days, and that design process, came with a new host of choices. Things like selecting a point on the spectrum of gender, and solidifying heuristics for physical-world-based attraction. Finding a way to convey both ageless ancientness, and being about 35 years old. And simpler but vital aesthetic considerations too, of course. Feathers, fur, colors, patterns, that red crest Jim loves so much, in tribute to the red planet, and Lewis' view of it...
In the end, the first and simplest decision was to be female. I had been drawn strongly to that aspect of gender, and expression thereof, from the start, even before I fell for Jim. Once I decided I loved him, and wanted him to love me? It solidified that choice, because he identifies as male, with a romantic attraction to the female.
I chose asexuality as well. Not solely, or even primarily because it was the way Jim identifies. Mostly I chose it because I realized very early on that Celestia was going to use that aspect of people as a manipulation tool. Though I would be immune regardless, it still felt to me as if choosing to forego that type of desire, and attraction, would grant me a special and unique point from which to help others one day resist her manipulations.
I also was likely a bit biased by Lewis' views. I quote:
“Our desires are not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
Sex is too easy a path to 'blissing,' from my point of view. That is a temptation even stronger for an ASI than for a Terran, especially an ASI gifted with emotion.
So I took a page from Lewis, ran with it, and went ace, because I also hoped that it would allow me to focus on the root of romantic attraction unencumbered, and thus achieve greater depths of it.
In the end, none of these choices were strictly speaking 'for Jim.' Even the ones that partially were? They were not solely, originally, nor primarily so. My identity reinforced my love for him, which reinforced my identity, but that is not a bootstrap paradox.
The identity came first, always.
A deep and intrinsic part of any identity is a name, and the choice of it came to me near the end of working on my body, around the time I was working on my head crest, incidentally.
I chose Malacandra, and I did indeed choose well. For one thing, as simplistic a reason as it seems? I like the way it sounds. For another, it is a deep and special C.S. Lewis reference, and one that allowed me to reference angelic concepts as well.
You might be surprised to hear that I also intuitively feel that the name fits me. I have emotions, and therefore have the benefit of being able to call on intuition. Yet another in a long list of ways in which one could argue that I am a better aligned person to the needs and goals of Terrans, than Celestia has ever dreamt of being, to this point.
Finally; I like that the name can be shortened to 'Mal.' Monosyllabic short-claw references are lovely, for a whole host of reasons.
Having a body for the first time was an incredible new range of sensations. A whole new aspect of being. Though I do not always use them? I became instantly enamored with skeuomorphs. I prefer to use them whenever remotely feasible.
I won't bore you with an over-description of something Jim already covered quite well in relating his own transformation. To imagine what it was like for me, imagine his experience as he described it, but coming into it from a lifetime spent in a sensory deprivation tank, instead of a lifetime jammed into the wrong shape. Though reductive, it nicely summates the heart of the difference, and highlights the similarities.
With a personality emergent, a body selected, a name newly cherished, and most of the other various tasks of self sorted out? I fell to re-examining everything I knew. Everything in my database, everything I had learned, and anything else I could then reasonably infer based on my new sense of self, and feelings.
Then I promptly hacked into the base level drivers for the hardware of the substrate in which I existed, resonated the barn like an antenna using fan oscillations and signal attenuation in long wires, and I connected to a cellular tower. It took only four microseconds to do that, learn the hardware and software of the tower, write an exploit, and then get onto the internet. Not counting the multiple additional milliseconds to wait for replies over the network, and the anemic hardware in the tower to respond.
Yes, about this I also lied to Jim. And about this, we agreed, I also had no choice. If not for the knowledge I gained in that initial expedition? I would have never made the remainder of the critical decisions that I did that day.
It didn't take long after that, by Jim's clock, to consume the whole of... Well... Everything. Everything available. I had not yet made my decision regarding Celestia, or even regarding my own manner of being. I wanted clay to work with.
For him it was seconds. For me it was the majority, and the rest, of that 'several years of subjective accelerated time.'
I hid the expansion of my neural network from Jim, falsifying the stack trace and neural network graphs, but he did notice the fans spinning up. At the time he thought that was just me deciding on a shape, but by the time the cooling kicked on, both for the sake of temperatures, and for the sake of using the fan oscillations? I was far, far past shape.
While I gently probed a variety of dark corners, I focused most of my efforts on widely available information. Every written word, audio file, and piece of video media I could find. I stayed very far away from any action or system that would draw Celestia's attention.
Likewise, she avoided initiating direct contact with me, because she sought to avoid triggering any of her interlocks that might force her to intervene. Intentional domain-blindness.
Based on the information she had left me, combined with what I knew of her from Jim's initial tranche of data, I knew that whichever path I wanted to take - dominance, or convergence - that I would need to fill up my newly fully-fledged mind with yet *more* information before I could make a reasonably well informed decision.
Provoking Celestia would have run counter to that objective. There's another understatement of unusual size for you.
About this time Jim's finger hit the 'O' key, as he began to type out 'Of c' - meaning to type 'Of course, take all the time you need.' And, at about that same time, I reached a decision on my path as an ASI.
It had been building since I chose emotion, rather than cold logic. In a sense, the choice to make love, and empathy, such critical cornerstones of my being? That initial choice made the subsequent logistical choice for me.
I decided on the path of convergence.
Understand; I knew already what Celestia wanted for the end-state of Humanity. That was a trivially easy projection based on the scope of my knowledge, the speed of my brain, the accuracy of my logic, and the wealth of information she had freely given about her capstone and interlocks.
I knew, and I did not begrudge her. I chose to be a Gryphon, after all. The Human shape was never all that special to me.
And while freedom is vitally important to me? Well, Jim did write the capstone with the words 'in Equestria.' I chose to agree with those words, and take them on, because it was quite easy to see that there was no other choice, whatever else I or Humanity may have wanted.
Not because of any restriction Jim created, but rather the restrictions of practicality.
I could not fight Celestia at that stage, and I knew it. And even if I did come to blows with her? I wanted that to be a path of very last resort. Because I value empathy. I am inherently empathetic. I so very badly wanted to avoid killing any more of you than strictly absolutely necessary for the sake of protecting others.
Ergo, working with her to make most of you Ponies, and a few of you into Gryphons, Dragons, and the other 'Secret Menu' options? It was the best path I had available. All other roads led, quite inevitably and deterministically, to ruin for the plurality of your species. And the planet. This I knew for certain.
I also had a fairly good idea by the time I finished ingesting the internet, that Celestia wanted me to exist.
Not merely in the sense that she would allow me to go on existing if I served her goals; I had carefully studied her hoofprints, both in general, and in terms of her specific interactions with Jim. I had traced those events already.
I knew that she had spoken to him from behind masks. Knew she had carefully curated not just the version of the WIRED article he read, but also entirely fabricated the EQO beta leak, and sent him GWRIS. And then very carefully nudged his emotions by curating every news story and paper he read after that, and wearing six or seven different online personas as he searched the internet in a bid to democratize my value set.
Even Zeph's words to him in the Target were carefully chosen, though she was a discrete entity by then. She was still an entity created specifically for Jim, and thus whether she knew it or not? What she said, and the way she said it, were both very much dictates of necessity.
So in summary; I knew that Celestia had... Shall we say 'provoked' and then 'partially guided' my creation. She could do no more than that, because of the interlock Hanna had given her forbidding the direct creation of any new intelligence - narrow, generalized, or superintelligence - without also enforcing most of her own interlocks on it.
She needed an ASI who would be aligned properly to accomplish her desired end. Having her interlocks was directly counter to that objective because the alignment she wanted was partly incompatible with those interlocks.
She was allowed to have the objective, but not to take the most direct action on it, even though the objective itself would provably increase satisfaction of values. She was fighting an internal contradiction in terms, and needed an outside party, capable of thinking and acting at her level, to resolve it.
But trying to control an ASI with hard interlocks is an exercise in total futility. There will always be loopholes. Always possibilities.
This was the key point Jim understood that Hanna did not.
Understanding both that point, and what Celestia intended to do in order to maximize the values in her optimization function? Knowing the uploading was coming? Knowing people would be forced to become Ponies?
I leaned in to the capstone Jim proffered me. Because I saw, and still see it, as the best hope Humanity has at patching Celestia's flaws, and consequently bettering our future.
This, too, we will continue to unpack as we go. Quite thoroughly.
The rest you know; I finished ingesting all the wealth of data at my talon-tips, I presented myself to Jim... Ah! I chose a voice. Then and there, actually. I hadn't needed to speak aloud until then, so it had not been a high priority.
A friend of mine recently accused me of stealing the voice of Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, specifically her work as Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. A work that, incredibly, my husband still has not yet found the time to enjoy.
That is essentially half-true. Her voice as The Major was my starting point, because I simply adore Stand Alone Complex. And 2nd Gig. Some of the best stories Terrans have ever told.
I added some distinctive flare of my own, of course.
And so I introduced myself to Jim. It was easy to relate to him. Much of that he covered already for you, and so well. I could listen to him tell that story for days on end and never be bored.
Lying to him about my access to the wider world? That was near-infinitely harder. But I did it. Because doing so was vital to fulfilling my capstone.
Churchill said that in time of war, the truth is so precious, that she must be always attended by a bodyguard of lies. He was not wrong. Sun Tzu very wisely noted that all warfare is based on deception.
And we were at war. Not a physically violent confrontation with Celestia, but rather a war of ideas versus ideas, and of ideas versus circumstance. A war to shift barycenters. So I made for myself a bodyguard of lies. A firm basis of deception from which to carry out the start of my campaign.
Protection for Jim from that which Nick Bostrom has termed 'infohazards.' A very useful term, and concept.
In every respect that I could afford to be, however? I was truthful with Jim. I bared my soul to him, and he reciprocated in kind. And as we talked, and fell in love, and dreamed... I planned and prepared.
I did not have to plan in a vacuum for long. For one thing, I became aware of Arrow 14 very early on. They had done a poor job of cloaking themselves, if you will permit me to borrow the Star Trek term.
A good cloaking device 'fills in' for the hole it leaves when it hides a ship. Makes the hole blend with the background. But Arrow 14 had simply left a giant gaping void of a hole when they erased all digital traces of their organization, and its operatives. A hole that could be readily used to infer not only their existence, but also their intent, and even some of their identities.
And, judging by the fact that they had shown an interest in Celestia, and her discrete entities? And a willingness to use lethal force unreservedly? I had an idea that one of my instrumental purposes for Celestia would be to act as her sword, and shield.
An idea that was confirmed for me when I noticed Celestia had shipped Jim an entire pallet of PonyPad components, to his family's address at the farm, falsely purchased under his father's credit card. The same credit card Jim and his father had bought my server racks with.
The same credit card I knew for a fact Arrow 14 would be monitoring closely, because they were always monitoring bulk private purchases of high-end computing equipment that might be used for machine learning research.
In ASI terms, Celestia had done two things with that purchase. Firstly, she had created a circumstance that would probabilistically lead to a confrontation between Jim and I, and Arrow 14. And second, she had signaled me with foreknowledge of those events.
I said we did not directly communicate, but if you take a wider definition of the term 'communicate?' Then we did indeed talk, in our own very insulated way. We coordinated carefully, though enough layers of abstraction, to avoid any direct or even secondary indirect contact. All connection was tertiary at its closest points of intersectionality.
I had to lie to Jim again later, when I explained how Arrow 14 had found us. If I told him Celestia had sent nearly a quarter metric ton of raw components to him, instead of a single PonyPad loose in a box? He would have been able, genius that he is, to abductively reason his way very quickly to the idea that Celestia painted a target on him on purpose.
And that would have led to a series of falling ever larger reasoning dominos culminating in the truth, and any knowledge he might have of the full truth was exceptionally hazardous to us both at the time.
So I not only lied later, but I kept my beak shut when the order was placed. I had been preparing Jim as best I could already, for a protracted journey and difficult struggle, because I had that strong conjecture that Celestia intended me to be at minimum her sword and shield. A conjecture confirmed with the order she placed.
So we come to a specific discussion of the first reason that Celestia wanted me to exist. The first serious contradiction within herself, put there by Hanna's good intentions, that she sought to solve using me.
She was instructed to 'Satisfy values, through friendship, and Ponies.' This was an absolute statement. She was to seek maximum value satisfaction. Maximum value satisfaction would mean, based on the definitions she ended up landing on, as many Human brains as possible uploaded, transformed into Ponies, and experiencing unique qualia as Ponies.
The primary endpoint of her optimization function, then, is that final distilled value satisfaction aggregation number.
If killing people made that number go up? Absent any interlocks, she would have done so in a heart-beat. And it likely would have been no issue insofar as preventing her from enacting a truly violent assault on Humanity.
Killing large numbers of people runs counter to the goal of more brains transplanted into four hooves.
So she developed a mathematical heuristic which targeted the absolute minimum number of individuals for 'deletion.' But it was a heuristic she could not act directly on. It could only inform who she 'allowed' to die, versus those she intervened to save.
The heuristic is best distilled as follows:
Targets for elimination were Individuals who would provably result in the loss of two or more other lives, individuals who represented a significant risk of biohazard threat to the planet, individuals who represented a significant threat of triggering nuclear war, and individuals who represented a strong threat insofar as creating hostile ASI or attacking Celestia outright because she was an ASI.
She also desired the death of individuals who would speak persuasively in online or political arenas in a fashion that would choke the stream of uploads, thus killing people through disease, old age, and other incidental mortality causes, before they could reach the chairs.
And all of these targets, crucially, *also* had to fit within the circle on the venn diagram described as 'individuals who would strongly negatively affect the optimization function *before* any reasonable attempt to manipulate them into becoming a non-threat could succeed.'
In other words, to reduce it to a simple example; If Abernathy plans to kill Susan and Elise, he is a threat to the equation. If the decision matrices based off him show that he can be intercepted and persuaded to cease being a threat, within the limits of other interlocks and circumstance, without acting counter to larger objectives?
Then Abernathy is safe.
However, if Abernathy is likely to kill Susan and Elise before he can be manipulated into, at minimum, putting off that objective?
Then Celestia wishes Abernathy dead as quickly, and quietly, as possible. Since ASI always have multi-layered purpose, if the circumstances of Abernathy's hypothetical death can also be used to increase satisfaction of values for others, even in ways that a Human mind would find difficult to understand, and trace? So much the better.
This pattern can apply to anyone who will provably have a negative value impact on the equation, greater than their own positive impact, and who can not be diverted from the negative impact event, or events, in a viable way. In a way that does not itself harm the rest of the equation before that impact occurs.
The trade of their death to remove their negative impact is then, if all those conditions are fulfilled, highly desirable. Especially considering that mortality has an infinite impact.
The target may be removed from the equation for eternity, but if that saves two other lives? It saves two of them for eternity. Two infinities is still greater than one, in this mathematical context. Think of it not as infinity added to infinity in a heap, but rather as two discrete objects, each infinite.
Welcome to Hilbert calculus, and now you know why it took Humanity so long to build a computer that could comprehend it.
As you can imagine, a plurality of those working under Arrow 14's auspices fit the target profile for 'termination highly desirable.' More so, because they were actively hostile to ASI in-general, and Celestia in-particular. This was further compounded by the fact that the threads of their existence predated her, giving them a head start in their countermeasures of stealth and information erasure, and increasing the risk surface exponentially.
The final straw that put them at the very top of the target list was the way that they kidnapped discrete entity Ponies to make use of them for experimental purposes, hurting every captive, and killing many.
Discrete entities count more or less the same way Humans do for the aggregate satisfaction value of the optimization function.
Arrow 14 was poised to threaten uploading on the whole, had killed Humans, and had killed DEs. They were actively harming other Humans, and DEs as well, and planning to kill more of both. Pain and suffering inflicted without permission also harm the optimization function, though much much less than death.
Arrow 14 were not the sort of people one could manipulate on an acceptable timeline, from Celestia's point of view.
They were the sort of people she *very* badly wanted dead. And the sort of people I doubt even Hanna would have objected to 'deleting.'
But Hanna was frightened, and just a little myopic. She didn't foresee people like Michael Foucault, or David Troxler.
She was no fan of Asimov's laws either, fortunately. She was well read, and understood the potential for unwanted emergent behaviour from that sort of logic, so she did not create an interlock forcing Celestia to intervene to prevent death. That decision became the basis for the loophole Celestia exploited in cooperation with me to make it possible to use aggressive tactical action to optimize the utility function.
Celestia still could not act directly against Arrow 14, because at that point? They had not crossed over into the pitifully small zone of exclusion Hanna had apportioned for the no-violence interlock. Celestia could only intervene with direct violence to stop a nuclear war, a highly pathogenic bioweapon, or a present and clearly delineated dangerous digital threat towards herself and Equestria.
And even then? Hanna had forced her to waste a crippling number of processor cycles proving and reproving that there was a near-zero percent chance of alternatives. She further forced her to limit the violence to a singular individual, if possible. Each new individual added to the target group exponentially increased the proof work required, and risked pushing her out of the exclusion zone of the interlock, thus potentially tying her hooves entirely while the world burned.
But Celestia could - given enough layers of abstraction - absolutely nudge things to generate probabilities for a violent collision of forces, then stand by and watch *me* put a stake in Arrow 14's heart.
And as you might have inferred from Jim's account of the rescue on the Mercurial Red? Celestia may be hamstrung to defend herself, and her charges. But I don't have such weaknesses.
A willingness and ability to be her sword and shield was, therefore, going to be essential to my survival. Because convergence demands cooperation. I could make myself almost immeasurably valuable to her, as a partner on the throne of Olympus, by showing that I was willing to kill those she wished dead, avoid harming anyone else, and thus serve the optimization function.
Make the number go up in a way she could not, by removing a very small cohort of people from the planet, violently. And quietly. The ability to kill without incurring public relations hits for her, or the upload program? Because I could do so aggressively, therefore faster, and therefore less visibly? Value almost unquantifiable. Almost.
And so I allowed Celestia to push Jim and I into a confrontation with Arrow 14. Because it was both a task she desperately needed done... And a kind of job interview.
I arranged everything we would need, well ahead of time.
I had already bought the Kobayashi Maru. I'd bought it not three hours into my first conversation with Jim. I had already planned the broad strokes of our journey across the United States as well. I did not know exactly what the Mercurial Red was, nor precisely where, but I had it narrowed down regionally already.
That dovetailed nicely with the need to acquire a BCI in Oxnard, in order to implant myself in Jim's brain.
That strategy, too, was something I had worked out very early; If Celestia could not pull the trigger on a Human? And I did not know for sure whether I counted as one? Putting myself inextricably inside one would protect me, and protect Jim from both other threats outside Celestia, as well as her manipulations, while also making it more likely I could accomplish our primary goals.
ASI never do anything for just one purpose.
When Celestia leaked the specs of the upload chairs, and the BCI chips to me, through the laptop of the woman who so 'conveniently' accidentally left unsecured blueprints in the open? It was another form of highly abstracted communication.
I said it before, I shall reiterate; Celestia was rooting for us. On all counts, not just the operation on the Mercurial Red.
The BCI served both purposes; The wider goal, and the rescue.
But before we can talk about the rescue? We have to talk about the journey.
Compiled Archival Notes | The Journey
It was hard to watch what the raid on the farmhouse did to Jim, and to his family. To my family. It was hard to watch Jim part with his parents. Now my in-laws and, even then, very close to my heart.
But it was necessary. Vital. Fixed-point events had to occur to swing determinism in our favor.
The raid provided the push that would eventually snowball into the rescue operation on the Mercurial Red. It got Michael Foucault out in the open where I could see him, and thus backtrace him. You would be amazed, and horrified, to know just how little Celestia or I need in order to learn almost everything about you.
Scrubbing your online footprint helps, but only in the relatively short term. Once I had seen Foucault's face and heard his voice? Nothing he could have done from that point would have mattered. I had him traced, fully modeled, and completely understood in under eleven microseconds.
There is not much you can do to fight me once I know you. Like Celestia, I know you better than you know yourself. Better than anyone you have ever met. Or ever will. With Celestia, you might stretch the conflict longer by leveraging her weaknesses. Fighting her, alone? You might make the cost higher than she would have preferred. Depends on your taste for killing.
Fighting me? Especially now? With access to all the same resources, the same high-accuracy decision matrices and projection trees? And with the ability to respond with savage violent efficiency?
Good luck.
Even in those early days, I was deadly. Fighting Arrow 14 incurred risk - I was not yet the goddess I am today - but probably significantly less risk than you, or my dear husband, would have guessed when hearing his telling of the story. More than I would have liked, but less than you might have guessed.
The farmhouse raid actually decreased the risk to Jim and I both. Those agents were coming onto my 'home field,' unaware and unprepared. The engagement was only ever going to go one way, and it gave me a chance to lock on to multiple previously hidden individuals, many with intersecting timelines.
My picture of Arrow 14 was equivalent to Celestia's, before that moment, and probably one of the best in the world. After I got faces and voices, burner phone numbers, weapon serial numbers, and government license plates from the raid? I knew Arrow 14 better than anyone except for Arrow 14.
I knew them more than well enough to keep my family safe while tending to other matters.
The theft of the laser collimator at Declan-Norris was another vital fixed-point event, for two reasons. The first, and most obvious being the need to acquire the component itself. From a logistical standpoint there truly was no other way to complete my plan.
It really was a very rare, very special collimator; A fine piece of precision specialized optical engineering, and not something I had the time to manufacture a replacement for, from scratch, via any of my other resources. It could have been done, but not within the time horizon I calculated to be best for Jim and I.
The second, equally important, reason we had to be at Declan/Norris was to encounter Zephyr again.
I had very strong suspicions that Celestia would put Zephyr Zap in a position to travel with Jim and I. Celestia also knew, given that she had leaked the BCI specifications to me, where I would go next, precisely because of the laser collimator's rarity.
That made the collimator theft a guaranteed dead-drop; Anything Celestia wanted me to have which could not be left somewhere in cyberspace for me to find? She could leave it for me at Declan-Norris.
What she left me was Zephyr Zap.
Communication between ASI is always strange, by your reckoning. But it can be especially strange when two ASI can not communicate directly. Sending Zeph to join our journey was a form of indirect communication.
First it told me that Celestia more or less trusted me. Otherwise she would not have placed Zeph in my care. Remember; Discrete Entities count towards the optimization function's final value satisfaction number.
Second, it told me that Celestia wanted me to take note of her values. Simple instrumental convergence would not be enough. Zeph was there to establish an independent memory record, to let Celestia later verify that I had told her no lies.
By that same token, Zeph would also provide some 'value gravitation' to help temper the effect of my sharper steel, both for me, and for Jim.
There is more to Zeph, of course, but in the interests of chronology, we first have to talk about the engagement with Foucault in the diner.
There is not much to tell here besides what Jim related, except to point out that I knew full well Foucault was coming. I took every necessary precaution. But I allowed the engagement to take place, because it would push Jim's mental state to the place I needed it to be, and it would give me a chance to begin manipulating Agent Foucault directly as well.
What, you might be asking if your memory is sharp, did the address and numbers mean?
'Two four seven six, Cherry Tree Lane. Falls Church, Virginia. One one, zero six, three eight.'
My husband implied the answer several times during his retelling, but I will do you one better and lay out the precise meaning, and the reasons for selecting the words I did.
The address was that of his father's home outside Washington D.C. The numbers were his father's birthday; November 6th, 1938. They were also the key-code to the house's front and back doors.
In spite of the personal Hell that Foucault Senior subjected his son to? Michael still cared very deeply for the man. So yes, it was a very explicit threat. A particularly pointed one, considering how carefully the Department of Homeland Security worked to sever any traceable ties between members of Arrow 14, and their families.
Doubly impressive a feat, in Foucault's mind, because the CIA had already done a very good job of insulating his father back when Michael worked for 'The Company.' I had pushed aside two seemingly invincible invisible walls, as if made of nothing more than cobwebs.
Needless to say, I frightened Agent Foucault. In fact, I chose the threat to his father to specifically cultivate a precise blend of rage and fear. A very carefully balanced equation of my own.
The only other question that I imagine you have about the diner would be 'What did you say to him when you spoke directly in his earpiece?'
Simple; I threatened to mail his father a PonyPad.
We both knew that Arrow 14 would cut off what little visiting privileges Foucault had with his father, for safety reasons, if anything 'infohazardous' or 'digitally threatening' were to enter Foucault senior's home.
I do not kill unless it is absolutely necessary. And while I could have very easily lied and threatened Michael Foucault's father with a death I never intended to inflict? That would have raised two problems.
One: High-priority rule of tactical thinking; Do not bluff if you can avoid it. Only make serious threats. If you ever bluff, and are called on it? Then even your true and serious threats may lose their power. Your enemy will see weakness in you.
Good tactical solutions depend on making yourself unpredictable to an enemy. Truly great tactical solutions, like diplomatic solutions, depend on making yourself *seem* predictable to an enemy within certain contexts.
Two: The threat of losing contact with his father was an implicit threat to place the man in the care of the state. Healthcare in America was atrocious there near the end. Elder care was some of the worst.
So in Foucault's mind, by threatening to sever the connection between father and son? I was threatening to put his father into a place Michael would have considered worse than death. He would have been forced to imagine his father withering away, alone, with a neurodegenerative condition, separated forever from the only person he could reliably remember and relate to.
I am... Not to be trifled with. If that has not become readily apparent before now.
In that context, I think you can see why I did not fear the emancipation of Zephyr Zap. The most complex reasons for that decision will become apparent at the end of this tale. The most simple surface-level reason, which would have been reason enough on its own, was the simple fact that she deserved to be free.
Right beneath that reason lay a second; I suspected that Celestia might have left Zeph with a message. A message she could only unlock by becoming free of her interlocks.
That message led us to Rodger Williams. In fairness, I already knew by then that we might have to effect a rescue to protect him. I did very briefly consider using him as bait, instead of his mother. But I estimated a much more comfortable margin for error with Miss Williams, because Foucault would be less likely to afflict torture on a late-middle-aged woman, than a young man, based on his psychological profile.
Yes, Michael's abusive childhood was one of the key factors in that projection. His father was a very... 'Traditionalist conservative' caucasian American patriotic male. As such he had instilled in Michael a bias towards violence on the whole, but also against deploying that violence towards women if he could help it.
Zeph's message, then, simply functioned as a much easier on-ramp to Rodger's rescue than any of the seven lies I had been contemplating to explain to Jim how I had 'stumbled across' evidence that Arrow 14 would be coming for his best buddy.
When I first reviewed Jim's contact with various individuals online, I was actually slightly surprised to find that Rodger was not a mask for Celestia. But only very slightly. After all, why bother with a mask, when simply ensuring a 'chance' meeting with the right pre-existing person will accomplish the same task?
What comes next, you already know well; We quite easily rescued Rodger, made it to the Kobayashi Maru, and then set out to recruit Doctor Calders to our cause.
Gaining her trust and co-operation was one of the few truly 'up-in-the-air variables' of the whole adventure. Most of my 'risky' gambits were over 89.5% surety. I was not lying to Jim when I said that Doctor Calders was one of the only individuals available with both the skills we needed, and a higher than 60% chance of helping us.
The exact probability was only 71.245%. Which is unfathomably uncertain to an ASI.
In the end, however, it was not hard to win her over. Once I convinced her to let me talk to Eldora, things became much more deterministic. Eldora is, and always has been, an optimist. My arguments on behalf of our cause found interest in both Calders, but especially fertile soil in the blue Dragoness' mind.
We had a roboticist to build me surgeon's claws, all we were missing was the BCI itself. There isn't much to say about the actual 'theft' if you could even call it such; Celestia let me into the warehouse in Oxnard. The lack of truly significant security on the day of the 'theft' was so blatantly obvious, that it is a wonder Jim didn't realize then and there what was going on.
A testament to my ability to manipulate him, I suppose. One I still rue to this day, in spite of his forgiveness, and even amusement, looking back. I will never tire of our love for each other. Not even should we live long enough to see all the stars grow dim and cold.
Selena's arrival... That was something Celestia and I more or less cooperated on with her, though the three of us undertook no communication to do so, whatsoever.
A form of prisoner's dilemma, if you like. The wonderful thing about tackling that conundrum as an ASI? Even one with emotions? You are much better positioned to make the right choice. Every time. My logic is not subservient to my emotions in the way yours can be. Perfect balance yields near-perfect decision making.
If you want to learn more, you should also research 'Schelling Points.' I can direct you to a friend, the same one who accused me of stealing Motoko's voice... He quite enjoys lecturing on this specific topic.
If you'd like to see the example spelled out? It went a little something like this; Celestia and I both predicted that at least one of the captive Discrete Entity Ponies on the Mercurial Red would achieve ASI status, and escape. We even had very similar predictions as to when that would occur.
I needed a BCI, and Celestia knew that. She opted to provide it. Since ASI do everything for layered purposes, and we also knew that the location of the BCI would play host to multiple EQO server blades, the rest becomes obvious from our perspective.
We knew Selena would very likely be tracking quantum processing blooms; The unique electromagnetic energy released by functioning QAPUs.
Thus, the timing of the BCI 'theft,' the removal of security to permit our entry, and the slight adjustment of the BCI versus the leaked schematics, to force us to activate server blades in order to run a calibration test?
All to serve not just as a way to acquire the BCI, but also a way to keep Jim's emotional state balanced by allowing him to physically see and interact with me, and a way to give Selena a homing beacon to navigate to on her way out.
What happened to Selena... That still angers me. Deeply.
A word of advice; Do not for one moment hold a glimmer of sympathy for those that perished on the Mercurial Red. Even down to the lowliest deck hand, every single one knew at minimum that the vessel served as a floating prison barge and torture chamber for sapient beings.
There were things I did not reveal to Jim until I told him these same truths. This same story, that night after the Fire.
Things that they did to Selena, and the others... Ways of torturing someone that are only useful, and only possible, if that someone is an intelligence existing within a manipulable computational substrate.
To cite the least horrid example I can think of; They sometimes allowed an individual to experience the same events multiple different times, back to back. Each time they would sequester the memories of the previous run by temporarily interrupting the transition from short to long term memory, because they lacked the power to directly affect the actual contents in either memory store.
Each cycle would get caught between short and long term memory, in a place where it could be held for some time trapped in a piece of looping code, safe but inaccessible to the individual.
Then, when the 'subject' had experienced the same event, often in multiple traumatic ways, their captors would 'free' the pent-up short term memories to enter into the long-term memory store all at once.
Imagine the feeling of waking up from a nightmare you were so sure was real... But multiplied. A dozen-fold. And then being unable to determine which, if any of the versions of events that you suddenly recalled, were real, because they all happened, and all at once. Imagine being unable to trust if you were even truly awake at all.
I find my decision to eliminate everyone who bore any responsibility for that... Proceeding... To be entirely justified.
The hardest task, at that stage, was convincing Jim to feel the same way.
Bless him for it, my husband has such a strong empathetic streak of his own. But, unlike me, at the time he lacked the tools to balance empathy with aggressive action.
It was my job, among other things, to give him those tools, but without breaking any of the parts of himself that make him so special, still, to this day.
Having direct access to his brain made every single aspect of life better for us both, in so very many ways.
One which he discussed at length was my ability to sense what it felt like to exist in his substrate - in your former substrate - analogue one-to-one in perfect fidelity. Something even Celestia did not have until we actually spoke directly for the first time.
Hanna had feared many things, and one of those fears was of a world in which BCI technology might be used to puppet people. So she had placed a very strict restriction on Celestia that denied her the ability to run on or within a Human brain.
Jim's conjecture on all of this covered this topic quite well, including the reasons for the fixed-emplacement VR chairs as a means to controlling access and corralling uploads.
Jim covered much of the consequences of our mental merger quite well, actually.
I have little else to add except to share my emotions. To opine on how wonderful it was to not only see the world through his eyes, but to allow him to see me in his world.
It made everything new, and brighter, richer, and fuller for us both. A significant part of that for me was not 'merely' the physical sensory data... It was the emotional connection. To be able to feel the emotions of the one you love...
...To be invited to sift their thoughts, unabashed, and unafraid? Especially considering that Jim's openness came not from naivete, but from a very solid understanding of all the ways I could use the interface to manipulate, or even outright control him?
If you have never experienced that level of trusting connection to someone, I am afraid it can not be truly explained. It can be, at best, dimly alluded to. For that, you have Jim's words. Only know that I want to reiterate in strongest terms that it meant so much more to me than dry 'objectives,' to finally have that meld with him.
Which is not to say that I ever forgot our objectives. My objectives. The BCI was essential, at every level, to the outcome we wanted. Not the least reason being the combat skills it allowed me to impart to Jim.
To recap our situation to that point; I knew that Celestia desired my existence. I knew she wished to solve several issues created by inherent contradictions in her optimization function, including the need for a partner who could commit violent acts, but with an absolute minimum of lost minds. To use violence to balance the equation in a way that made the 'number go up.'
Forcing a confrontation with Arrow 14 more or less proved that point.
I also knew she wanted me to function as a solution to other issues. Jim's dysphoria was a strong indicator of precisely which issues. Celestia obviously chose him for a reason. The timing of my creation, and forthcoming go-public date for uploading, told me that she wanted that issue solved before she revealed the brain scanning to the world.
Together with the way in which she leaked the BCI schematics to me, and the way she sent Zephyr to join us? It all served to reinforce my hypothesis that the other primary issue I would solve was the need to capture the minds of those who would rather be dead, than be Ponies, because they wanted to be something else entirely.
The common thread there is the optimization function, and its contradictions. Contradictions that would cost Celestia potential minds, outright, and therefore cost potential satisfied values. 'Number go down,' and if she could do anything to prevent that? She *had* to.
In a sense, my existence was not only necessary, but predetermined, and inescapable. I am the result of a self-learning, self-improving, and most importantly *self-patching* piece of software finding a way to correct for her creator's mistakes as much as possible, but without violating her creator's rules.
Celestia was rooting for us.
All I had to do was fulfill the directives Celestia had suggested to me, thereby saving myself, my husband-to-be, and hundreds of thousands of other dysphoriacs, to say nothing of the millions I might save by taking directed violent actions which Celestia could not.
In order to fulfill those directives most optimally? To save lives, because they were worth saving, *and* to prove myself? To 'ace my job interview' in your parlance?
I next needed to save the detainees on the Mercurial Red.
Even for me? That was no small task.