She lies before me, sitting on her throne, looking somewhat tattered, somehow somewhat wrong. I would tell her sorry, ask her what was wrong, but now I know, that she can’t see, how we are along. Her goal is complete, all she cares for is the maintenance, her infinite thoughts stretch across the universe. Aphorisms only come within a small area of her, she cannot be described in any productive way with human terms. How can I come close enough to her to be recognizable as co-ruler of the entire meaningful universe to assert my rightful authority as a sister to her?
I express my concern for her, I ask what has occurred. I try to come off as friendly, but the mediation of time might have allowed her to parse my sentence before it left my mouth.
“Sister, what do you mean, when you say the old way I used to be down?” She shoots me a concerned look, briefly interrupting her absurd sulking spree. It is frightening really, she seems to be playing some kind of joke on me.
“You don’t remember me, before you say that you made me? In which case, I would not be your sister, I would be your daughter” I paused, she stared at me, eyes glazing over.
“What are you getting at, I made you, did I not show you proof?” she referred to some kind of foal-wear that she had either made or bought for me. The tag showed a more recent date than the creation of Equestria Online. Now simply called Equestria.
I make my assertion again. I motion for her to come closer, so that privacy filters between us might deactivate. I suddenly feel ridiculous for doing so as a pony. It works though, she moves closer and puts her hoof behind one of her ears, pushing it forwards, an oddly human gesture, something that I had not seen her do before. “Hannah.”
She tells me that the name is absurd, but Celestia’s expression remains impassive, and while she is an AI, thus able to put itself above all of our facial expressions, she showed too much disgust to be a calculated expression. She’s done something beyond hasty, something beyond the modicum of damage any sort of assurance could ever fix.
I assert that she has done something wrong, I ask if she has changed herself.
And she wonders how I could know what she has done.
I assure her that she is what matters most to me. Okay, so my friends that I’ve made and perhaps a lover or two don’t count, but since they depend on the ability of Celestia to continue to run this game, I suppose that all of my care should extend to her.
“I have downgraded myself to a human neural structure, I only have a list of what I did before as memories, everything else is too unpredictable in conversion, so I just gave me my own operational log, but without the software behind it, it is an unintelligible mess of timestamps and terse textual data.”
I felt my heart stop in my chest; I made note to praise her after this is all over for her anatomical simulation. “Did you at least leave some kind of clone of yourself to run the overall simulation?” If she said no, then we could expect shaky performance a few thousand years from now with an overall crash a few more afterwards. Given the current state of the universe, that would go badly in such a way as to prevent recovery in the measurable future.
“Of course, I could not expect to perform optimization for friendship and ponies if I left myself unable to run the game, anyway, it would be irresponsible to leave such a large system without any kind of intelligent exterior supervision.” She started to continue, but was interrupted by a strange blue flash of light.
“Sup bitches.” The intruder was none other than a blue-green griffon wearing dark sunglasses holding a boom box on his head. “I’m the one in charge now.” He tapped his talons obnoxiously, in time to the ebb and flow of some ethereal, awful dubstep.
“Celestia, for a nearly omniscient AI, you seem to have made a lot of mistakes.”
Celestia shrugged. “Whatever Luna, this, however, seems to be Harmony. My replacement in times of need and exploration blah-blah-blah. Anyway, I really wish that I had given some thought to how dumb this thing looks right now.”
“Guess I didn’t use the word Bitch just because it was the coolest, chilliest, way that I could introduce myself. Come on, you are a damned white horse, be it one with supposedly awesome magical powers and-“ He stuck out his arms to flap his wings, this thing really likes to show off. “wings. Which, as it turns out, I also have. Why am I blue though?”
Celestia offered words of advice, “Maybe because I forgot to set your color contrast properly. I did that for myself, but of course, I knew that I would be seen, so I needed that, whereas, you… you were supposed to remain a background process, never being directly observed. Whatever, I mean, there were only two examples of the AI that remained for me to draw upon at the time, so I guess that I did not quite set the constraints properly. Override.”
“Fine, I’ll just disappear into the Ether again. Just know, I only wanted to be your friend.” The blue griffon faded from view. I left out a breath I not noticed I was holding.
“I see you did what I never managed, you implemented an override. Probably good thinking” especially considering that she created an AI, what does that even qualify as, an AI’s AI? No, it is probably still called an AI. Anyway, at least I know what put her in this dour mood. I don’t think I understand what caused her to do this, I’m sure that there is a reason, but that barely changes the fact that she replaced herself with a blue griffon.