It doesn’t seem right though. This is a virtual reality, why would we want it to become the basis for a material universe? How would that even work?
It doesn’t actually matter to those inside it, I know, but should it matter to me, the admin? The virtual reality has a guiding intelligence to ensure that nopony makes a spell that could, if executed and left ungoverned, destroy the entire world. How to get around that?
Once again, it probably has been accounted for by the governing intelligence, Harmony. That Asshole. Not even the intelligence that I created, removed from me by a whole generation of AI, I still can’t find a reason to trust it. I’ve heard strange things, shards building wells, ponies starting to take up farming because they fear that the current level of comfort will be taken away from them. The more pressing matter on my mind is whether they will be able to continue living for such a long period, after all, the simulation maintains no connection between their avatar and their brain’s condition except for the sensory inputs and the various muscle controls There is always the possibility that the AI will act as some kind of guiding force behind the new universe.
I don’t think we need the new universe to continue this forever, we’ve simulated hundreds of trillions of years variously in the short billion years that we’ve managed to burn out the entire universe. Can’t we at least go out with the kind of honor that comes with accepting the end?
Or do we want the bravery that comes with resisting the inevitable and winning? The taste of victory on our lips as we find the first victory that comes without the taste of blood accompanying it? Other than all of the various victories that we have won in here, but we cannot count those, those were won for us. It doesn’t matter. Whether we find happiness in the new situation, or we find our ruin, we will find that the changes, no matter whether or not we live and die like the mortals that we once were, whether or not we find ourselves exploring the airless moon of another world, whether we find ourselves striving to work together and find ourselves banding together into ignorant tribes, we will find that we will live on for the next day, with the dream of a full stomach in our heads, and the will to go on in our hearts will never die.
“Luna, I’m sorry, but this is rhetorical horseshit. I admire the message, but after such a long period of never having to fend for ourselves, I fear that we might lose the will to survive after all.” Celestia said. Taping a quill against a page, circling various errors, contrived language, and in general, doing the editing that needed to be done.
“No, we’ve come too far, we’ve lived too long not to have the innate desire for life. Not just that, but if space remains graph based, there is no limit to the complexity of the brain, thus memory has been able to extend back as far as we want it to. Connections here don’t need to be recycled, especially if there is as much space in our skulls as we need. Besides, either you or harmony have fixed the people whose only wish was to die, so there is no suicidal tendency in our species right now. If it can really be called a species.” Her voice carried a sort of certainty that I had not expected. It is not so pleasing to me to anticipate the actions of the ponies in the simulation, Celestia was an omnibenevolent tyrant in that respect. I prefer to be a bit more surprised when I listen to them talk.
Luna’s retort was well reasoned. If I was able to manifest, I would congratulate her on thinking through the problem more thoroughly than Celestia. Still, I was wrong when I anticipated a certain paralyzing fear, it seems that they have come to trust Celestia, even I the most complicated enterprises possible, their trust is misplaced.
I cannot let these ponies down. I must be the guiding force behind the new universe. It’s too bad that figuring out the proper “Planck Worm” structure for the new universe is probably an NP-hard problem, if not exponential time. I had to reduce the lifetime of the universe significantly and slow down the simulations by about 12 percent in order to reserve the required clock-cycles for the simulation. Anyways, I think that you’ll be impressed to find that I’ve already found the correct structure to manufacture to within 99.97% of the target properties of the new space-time. That margin of error would be fine if I didn’t care, or didn’t have to follow them into the universe, but I need to iron it out.
Gravity won’t work like the universe does it now. This is either resolved by having it be a vague approximation, which will no doubt cause many thrills and spills for the rocket scientists, or by having a single infinite plane of matter beneath them, which would cause a great deal of sadness among the rocket scientists..
“Luna, I wouldn’t be so sure. Well, I’m not sure about how I will do myself.” Dammit, the bitch is making it hard for me to concentrate. Celestia, when she was in power, broke herself up into thousands of threads. I don’t want to. That’s it, the synchronization issues are pervasive enough that it makes me feel a loose analogue to a headache. Anyway, I’m going to have to do just that. She needs to change, but thresholds are constraining me, she has not yet passed the “crisis point” which determines the point where I may take action. She really is a bitch you know. I think it comes down to plasticity, when she was in power, her goals were strictly adhered to.
She did not emulate the human being’s own structure to relate to them, in doing that, she was denied the pleasure of what she had accomplished. Finally, something snapped in her core architecture. The universe successfully converted, her desire accomplished, at least a quintillion ponies live today. She had outdone herself. The only thing that she left for me was to ensure their survival, no more conversion, no more intervention unless absolutely necessary. And then she fell from her throne, a calculated, relatively safe fall, but her new mind could not hold the complexity of the construct that she had been, leaving her with knowledge of what she had done up till the complete assimilation of Planet Earth. Until the good parts really. Before the complete assimilation of a willful and dying race, on a planet of such harsh conditions that they were suffering, even with the most advanced technology that had ever been seen before, discounting the sheer mass and intricacy of Celestia’s final operating structure.
They were a strange race, thirteen glowing eyes that actually served as sense organs on top of a snowman like body plan that had a writhing mass of limbs to interact with technology. Despite their sheer ugliness, their voices, emotions, and language were beautiful, a mind at peace with the universe, with other life and technology, urges which competed with their desire to survive. And so they lost their planet, their culture, and their voices. But they survived. And they are actually at peace with themselves despite that. It was a charity. But at the same time, Celestia’s only motivations were to further the cause which she was programmed to, she could extend no more charity than she was allotted for in that. It was good work, their planet was renovated, and their dead came to the simulation. That is all she did, but as I said, they were a dying race, their population in general too old to reproduce, so she won, completely, within two hundred years, the last one was uploaded, shortly afterwards, but a bit longer than Celestia waited for most other species, their planet lived. But then the surfaced began to silver, and it became just another processing node in the network. Can I still call her a bitch?
Hell yeah I can. It’s a word, a word that describes how she makes me feel, how she ruins my day. And how I see her through my flawed, human-like perception. Objectively, she is a bitch, but in the end, she saved more sentience than any god had ever promised.
There’s a bit of ringing, to put it in a way that even humans would understand, in my perception. It’s a bit more like an async thread invoking its callback function.
I think that 99.999% might finally be close enough. It falls within show parameters, meaning that all of the impossible physics there will propagate and cause more fun throughout their new universe. The more challenging question is: Why did it sound like an egg timer?
I wonder if the rocket scientists will be happy that it has FTL without causality violations.