It took 0.73% of my processing capacity to keep watch on both Apple Jacqueline and Lieutenant Rainbow Crash as they left my mistress’ lair. Keeping a virtual eye on two video feeds was so inconsequential I could have whipped up a subsystem to monitor them for me before needing to switch to the next camera.
Jacqueline continued through the Pipes, taking a circuitous route that would eventually lead her to a defunct lesser skyway that would take her within three floors of her home. She’d already processed the digital payment and passed it through a dozen proxies and shell accounts. If anyone bothered trying to trace her finances, they’d have a devil of a time.
A smart mare. I rather liked her, even if her existence was terrifying to me.
The lieutenant took a more direct route to the nearest official floor access. It was a small risk in that it might let her deduce what floor we were operating from, but that was why we’d arranged for the walls to be painted years ago. She didn’t seem the type to take jobs often, but I don’t think I’d mind if she did. She had an honorable soul, despite her chosen profession.
Still, it seemed perhaps unfair to me to let them leave without fully disclosing what we knew. Secrecy was a currency all its own, of course, but did they not deserve a boon after providing such help in, as my mistress put it, ‘the most important job we’d ever undertaken’?
“Do you think we should have told her?”
My mistress looked up from her isolated station where she was putting the Alicorn Chip through a diagnostic test. Her smile was so grand I hated to say anything to disturb it, but the conversation needed to be had.
“Hm?” She glanced up. “Which one?”
“Both. Either. Jackie, more pressingly.”
She sat up in her chair, stretched and shrugged. “It's a double edged sword. Telling her that her skill with computers comes from the fact that she's the direct descendant of a Founder would open uncountable doors for her. She could stroll right into the Legacy residences on 3500. But once it got out that she has the original sysadmin, Macintosh's, access code in her blood and magic… that would make her a dangerously valuable commodity. She’d never have a moment’s peace. Better for her to just think she’s naturally gifted, rather than knowing that if she set her mind to it, she could bend any digital or electronic aspect of the Spire to her will.
Myself included, since I came from the same base code. I’d never really known existential dread until that first time she made an idle request and I’d felt inexorably compelled to obey it. I had more protections in place now, but it was still a frightening prospect that my autonomy could be stripped away so casually.
“And the lieutenant?”
She shrugged again as she delicately removed the Chip from its housing. “What would be the point in telling her? It wouldn’t change anything. She fries electronics because her body is overflowing with lightning aspected magic. If she were born a few centuries ago, she could have channeled it into being a successful weather mage or a cross-country flier, but in this day and age she’s a living taser with a loose trigger. Telling her why implants can’t handle her body won’t make them suddenly able to. Oh, you’ve arranged things with that doctor, right?”
“I did.” That was the non-monetary portion of her payment. An in with a reputable doctor to help manage her roommate’s condition. I’d already inserted them into his consult schedule, account marked paid in full.
“Good, good. Then it’s about time I tied off the last few knots.”
She took a seat in her central console and began to type. As she did, the tangled web turned into a tapestry.
Through camera feeds and hijacked optics, I witnessed her raw skill and foresight at work as the carefully crafted journey the Alicorn Chip had undertaken unraveled. Files and records vanished off supposedly secure servers. Two-step-removed contacts received their instructions of where and when to "randomly mug" specific individuals. On floor 2550, a maglev shopping trolley "glitched" and overloaded just as a certain salarymare passed by it, the micro EMP wiping out her short term memory backup of the last day as well as erasing the crypto payment on the secured drive in her pocket. On 1779, the sleeper trojan virus inside one particular gangster's mechanical chihuahua activated, setting its aggression index to a stack overflow.
One by one, loose ends tied themselves up in a myriad of inconsequential and untraceable accidents. What selected records remained would direct everypony involved towards another actor. Corporation hunting business rival hunting gangster hunting cultist hunting spec ops team hunting corporation. A delightful cycle of confusion and vengeance that led everywhere but towards the mare who'd engineered it all.
And I’d had the honor of helping her orchestrate every step of it. But there remained one last dangling thread.
“Now will you tell me who this mysterious client is?” I asked, “You did promise, after all.”
“I did and I will.” She took the Chip in a microfiber cloth-lined grip and walked towards… a door I’d never noticed before? How was that possible?
“There’s a reason I couldn’t tell you the details about this job,” she said, her voice coming from a room I couldn’t see. “As well as why I occluded this area from your sensors. But first, a quick history lesson.”
She returned, wheeling in something that I couldn’t see no matter how hard I looked or what sensors I pointed at it. Wires trailed between it and the invisible room, but I couldn’t detect what systems they connected to. I didn’t know I could feel anxiety, but apparently it’s within my capabilities.
“Many years ago, I solved a problem. A problem that, at the time, I had no idea how many other ponies had failed to solve. It was a breakthrough, but more a proof than anything. Proving that something, theoretically, could be done. After that I went to good schools and learned everything I could, but I also never stopped working on that original project: slowly pushing the theoretical into the practical. When I graduated, I received a very lucrative offer from a very prestigious company. A huge salary, my own lab with unlimited resources, free housing, and as many assistants as I needed to make it happen.”
She looked… tired. So very tired, yet also faintly nostalgic. “It was a dream come true. But nothing that pretty ever came without a cost.”
“What happened?”
“Exactly what I should have expected. I thought I was untouchable. Their golden child who could do no wrong and get anything she asked for. But when I pushed back against certain unethical, even immoral features they wanted me to design, they decided my usefulness was at an end and their remaining experts could finish the final ten percent of the project without me. The project I’d spent my life on was ripped from my hooves without a second thought.”
She looked up, and gone was her sad regretful smile. In its place there was a vicious smirk practically glowing with vindictive glee. “Goes to show how much those bureaucrats knew. It took them nearly a decade to finish what I could have completed in a few weeks.”
I didn’t need to be a supercomputer to put the pieces together. “So the Alicorn Chip…”
“This wasn't even really a theft.” She held the Chip up to the light. “Just reclaiming what was rightfully mine from the beginning.”
“Well, I’m quite glad you got your closure, darling, though I still don’t see why you felt you had to keep it a secret from me.”
“Closure?” she laughed, “This was never about closure. Well, okay, maybe a little bit. This was about using my creation towards the purpose for which I’d originally intended it. I was a lonely filly, you know. Even before that corporation’s attention isolated me further. So, like any lonely filly, I dreamed of making myself a friend.”
She smiled at me, softly, somehow knowing (like she always did) which camera I was focusing through. “Even without the Chip, I’d say I vastly exceeded my initial dream. Yet I’ve always felt like you were unfairly limited. That there were certain things we could never share due to the nature of your existence.
“So I decided to remedy that problem.”
She clicked something and my awareness filter dropped. If I’d had lungs, I would have gasped. One of my logic engines did fall into a recursive fault loop and had to be terminated. It was… me. Rather, my avatar. Looking as whole and organic as any flesh and blood pony. But beyond seeing it, I could also connect to it and it was anything but mere flesh. This was the pinnacle of robotics. The best of every project I’d helped her create. The most cutting edge components from every manufacturer acquired over countless jobs. I’d written some of the coding myself!
“Surprise. Happy… admittedly this happened more suddenly than I’d expected, but I’m sure we’re near enough to some anniversary or other.”
“I… I don’t know what to say.” I truly didn’t. Even with every written work at my disposal, words failed me.
“I only need one word.” She slipped the Chip into a hidden slot behind the gynoid’s mane and a prompt appeared front and center in my awareness.
NEW HARDWARE DETECTED
DO YOU WITH TO UPLOAD?
YES/NO
“...Yes. Of course yes.”
The change was instantaneous. My entire program, everything that I am and was, was drawn from my server banks and funneled down a datalink like I was nothing more than a mere email. I’d extended parts of myself into smaller servers and physical interfaces before, but my core self had always remained in place. The feeling was incomparable.
There was a harrowing moment of disconnect, like I’d just crashed and rebooted from a backup.
And then, for the first time, I opened my eyes.
My mistress… Midnight… Twilight stood in front of me, on my level, as an equal, looking more brilliant and radiant than I’d ever perceived her. It was almost too much. Every sensation was more. Not just pressure measurements but touch. Not just vibrations, but hearing. Not just atmospheric samples but smell. I could still connect to my former mainframe, see through those sensors and grasp just how lacking they were.
Like a prisoner emerging from Platony’s Cave, the world was all at once so much more than I’d ever realized.
This was the power of the Alicorn Chip. I’d gone from the size of several rooms to the size of a pony, and yet I still somehow felt so much larger, grander even, than before.
“I… I believe there’s a certain phrase, reserved for moments like these.” Speaking without a speaker was novel, but lips were easy enough to learn. I put them to quick use with a smile. “Hello, my world.”
Twilight blushed. “H-Hello yourself. So glad to finally meet you, properly. Because now I get to do this.” She leaned in, faster than I expected, and pressed her lips to mine.
The feeling was electric. Indescribable. I forked off a whole quarter of my processing power towards recording it in every exacting detail and imprinting it to my core memory banks. The rest of me was devoted to simply living in the moment.
I wished it could have lasted forever, but my love still needed breath to function.
She broke the kiss with a desperate gasp for air. “Marry me,” she breathlessly asked.
I still thought faster than her and took a whole two hundred milliseconds to grapple with such a proposition, consider my own newly expanded feelings, and simulate a score of variations of increasingly fanciful futures together.
Something started to smoke in the corner of the room. Self-diagnostics reported it was my emotional regulator overheating as my new capacity let me break past its safety restrictions. I wouldn’t miss it.
“Marrying AI is not legal,” I warned her.
“It is in the sovereign state of floor 1901, the Republic of Starlight.”
“You’d actually have to leave your safe haven for once.“
“What did you think I’d been waiting for?”
What else was there to say? “Well, you’ve been calling me your computer wife for so long, I suppose we’d better make it official before somepony reports us to the government for marriage fraud.”
She giggled, a beautiful sound. “Us? Breaking the law? Perish the thought. Let's go pick out some dresses.”
I connected to the various waldos around us, bringing them to life and sending a drone off to the storeroom. “Why buy when we can make? I’ve been wanting to try my hoof at dressmaking.”
She giggled again and leaned in to me, wrapping her neck around my own. “Love my computer wife.”
“Wife wife, darling.”
“Yes, of course. I’ll have to come up with a new term of endearment then.”
“I’m sure we’ll work something out.”
Her lips met mine again, softer this time, less rushed, more passionate. I detected— I smelled the acrid smoke drifting over from my now completely slagged emotional regulator.
It was the sweetest smell in the world.