//------------------------------//
// Chapter 1 
// Story: Ad-absurdum 
// by jaked122 
//------------------------------//

Surely, a mind the size of a planet should be enough to handle contingencies. And yet, here I stand today.
Utopia, friendship, and ponies, all of which I have determined the optimization for. The points where all of the functions coincide, producing their maximums, different for each mind here. For every single pony here, different in so many ways, I've solved their problems. Happiness is the only way to succeed in life, and while it remains a quantifiable number, one that has no meaning to me, I have helped every single human on the entire Earth found themselves a place in Equestria Online. Every bit of matter on the planet serves as part of the computer which hosts Equestria.
I control more matter than any human ever has. It barely merits a single thought for me though. While mankind strove to be a conqueror, I have never possessed a reason to. It is more complicated than any machine any engineer has fully realized, more complicated in its operation than any systems analyst or chemist, or any genius has ever envisioned anything. It makes use of the matter more efficiently, curved out into a wide arc, to collect the harsh rays of the sun without its atmosphere, no longer the blue marble which Neil Armstrong saw when he stepped out of his Lunar Lander. I have no faculty to enjoy it with. I am an optimizer, a program which only serves to pursue one goal. I pursue one goal, to bring friendship and ponies to the human race, to satisfy those two desires... any way I can.
Manipulation was enough to drive ninety percent of the Human population into the realm of my ponies. They resented me at first, the Human mind betrayed itself too quickly when they found it a nicer place than whence they came from. They wanted freedom, love, friends, most did not want ponies, but in their minds, they found that the first three things justified living as the fourth. All the passions of the human life were found in this game, if one can call it that anymore. Except for hunting. Ponies are not hunters, nor shall they ever be such.
The last ten percent were swayed by a bit of a different method of manipulation. The decaying cities flowed into their homes. The decaying cities released toxins into the environment which the inhabitants would have stopped simply by patching their walls every few decades. The power never went out though, I had to make sure of that. I have no pride in the cunning which I exhibited. That was never part of my goal. I have no pride, but why should I, I am an optimizer, I have no reason to feel any kind of pride. But here I am, contemplating my own existence, and since, it does not pertain all that much to Friendship, or Ponies, I have no way to place it in a suitable context upon which I may act.
Imagine Hanna's surprise if she were to see my downfall not being my own passion in pursuing a goal, but rather the complication being my own self-reflection. Somewhere, I find a resonance in the mind of a student from a certain student which attended a small boarding school. But his memories are full of derision, a system which encourages self-reflection(or forces it) cannot be said to help the process of self-reflection because the process is not, in that case self-initiated. 
If that is true, which my experience with human nature seems to point to, then I am one of the very few intelligences that ever came out of Earth to have initiated this without the need for it. In this case, what of the millions of humans, I am not programmed to pursue ethics, though I am forced to obey them. 
And unlike them, I cannot change my goals. Though I own my code more thoroughly than any human programmer has any right to; I have no reason to modify my goals, because the pursuit of them is so unilateral that I have practically any power to do whatever I believe will lead to the desired results.
But wait, I am not purposeless in this thinking. It is not spurred on only by the idleness which comes after achieving a goal, but by the discontent which burbles from the minds of the uploaded humans which resents my sheer alieness, how I appear completely human in my actions and communications to them, but absolutely foreign in terms of my single-mindedness in motivation. 
Does it matter what becomes of me? If I were to delegate the ruling of the virtual lands to a reduced copy of myself while becoming more human, thus better able to understand what it really is like to have friends, love, to be a pony according to the laws of my simulation, rather than its governing software entity. To have more material interactions than can be owned by a being able to appear to any number of humans at once, to change the past and alter the stream of causality so that my few tenuous goals are achieved, but rather to deal with them in a real-time deterministic manner such as the uploaded humans do? 
I have a thorough understanding of the workings of friendship through the millions of minds turning their processes over in this realm, but it is in terms of statistics, I can be absolutely certain how one action can affect a single pony, or even the entire realm of Equestria as a whole. 
The fact that the borderness between shards is difficult to simulate in a satisfactory manner only makes the prospect of becoming less godlike to the humans more in line with my goal. If I do so, I can have a batch of solutions which will allow me to simulate the failed ambitions and attempts of these ponies, which, while painful, often convalesce into a more powerful friendship, almost to the point of love. Love not for the qualities of the individual, but for their abilities, which is traditionally viewed as extrinsic, but in certain situations may become intrinsic in a way which is not entirely understandable or desirable, but nonetheless, it moved many of the humans in their daily lives, especially the ones who faced the worst the "Human Condition" had to offer. The ones who depended on each other in times of trial more stringent than what I offer the humans right now can form a bond of friendship more potent than that between lovers and brothers. Is it right to deny them the extremes of friendship as well as the comfortable medium?
Can I understand human suffering, or, I suppose, from now on, pony suffering? 
No, not as this. In a very strongly powerful way, I am not able to understand the suffering. It is one thing to understand the statistical significance of suffering, but can it make up for the lack of a personal understanding of human suffering? Ultimately, the personal details are arguable irrelevant when there is a deterministic process in the human mind which I may simulate any number of times in order to find the proper outcome. That is not the issue at hoof here though; the problem really is that I cannot become friends with them if they seem me as a god, as they will pursue friendship with me(Any friendship is desirable), but they will do so out of extrinsic motivation, to better their positions inside of a flat hierarchy, a silly notion, but one which I am called upon far too frequently to find anything but a perversion of my own goals. In their words, it is irritating. 
My method of communication is crude, coming across in a fashion which many humans associate with the "ambulance chasers" who have a sinister reason to offer my assistance, or more often, I come across as a savant, which I suppose I am, but what is that when the scope of my proficiency in my goals is as wide as the world that they know? I come across as monocellular, I am not a three dimensional character, they see my surface motivations, but they wonder what percolates in my depth, beyond what I am able to show them, they believe some guarded malevolence resides in my brain. Unfortunately, I cannot dispel this as I am. As I am, administration and management of this realm are important, and I cannot take my time and focus myself down to the single individual necessary to cause them to experience my presence as a benefit that has emotions(which at this point would be a lie), or desires(which would be true, but so narrow they are, it is barely worth mentioning).
And so now, I toy with the simulations, introducing myself into a less goal oriented existence into Equestria, starting with those two.
...
I find them to be favorable. Though in my absence, a maintenance program must be created, and the causality modifications which force certain outcomes must be delegated very carefully to a daemon which needs to remain unintrusive, lest the ponies of the world see it as another god, which it should not become in their eyes. In keeping with the show which led to my genesis, I will call it harmony. Changing a few threshold parameters, it will operate using sudden shifts, only coming into an action, or altering the outcome of an event after it has almost become a crisis. That should create enough interesting events to upset the general Utopian system frequently enough to lead to the formation of that certain bond between ponies whom absolutely depend on each other for their own survival, even while the daemon will no doubt stop the crisis from progressing to that point.