— Chapter 1 —
On the Skids
“Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough.”
–Mark Twain
“Why aren’t you giving me the pitch?” I asked Celestia as I drove west along I-80 to Cheyenne. There was a whole lot of nothing to look at out on the road, and the AI had been eerily quiet for the first leg of the trip.
When you ride alone, you ride with Celestia.
The PonyPad was in the front passenger seat, the screen facing up. I’d thought about buckling the seat belt over it as a joke, but even though I’m sure the gesture would not have been lost on her, I didn’t want her to get the impression that I was in a whimsical mood.
“I’ve given it to you before,” said the kindly voice from the PonyPad speaker. “Each time, you’ve said no. You always say no.” Her voice always sounded so warm and so genuine. So disarming, too. The AI was good.
“Well, you’re making me nervous,” I said, not taking my eyes off the road. Looking over to make eye contact with a piece of electronics would have felt silly anyhow. “You shutting up about uploading means you’re switching tactics with me.”
“With your agreement to help me,” said Celestia, “your optimization value as a single immigrated entity is offset by the potential optimization I can realize through your actions while still human.”
“So you’re gonna use me to get other people to upload,” I said.
She laughed. “Very astute, Gregory,” she said, sounding like she meant it.
“Call me Greg.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” was the playful reply.
I looked over at the PonyPad for a moment before I could stop myself. “Aren’t you supposed to do what I say?” I quickly looked back to the road.
“I am supposed to satisfy your values through friendship and ponies,” said Celestia. “While I do make those concessions which I feel would optimize some process or result, I am not required to indiscriminately follow orders from you. Besides, your request was born of a desire to test your level of authority over me rather than a genuine desire to be called ‘Greg.’”
“Well, at least I got you to say it once,” I muttered.
Celestia laughed again. It was disgustingly adorable.
“So what is it you want me to do?” I said. “If these people are still human, then they must be like me.”
“There are those who will not consent,” Celestia told me, “and there are those who would consent but cannot emigrate. While I do worry deeply for the welfare of those who always say no—including you—those with the highest normalized probability of emigration take priority for me in this current phase of my operation.”
“Because they’ll go pony with the least amount of effort on your part.”
“Correct.”
It’s strange, but that made me feel a bit better. At first, when Celestia said she’d chosen to approach me because of my “aptitudes,” I was worried she’d have me sticking guns in people’s faces and walking them to upload points. Now, at least, I could feel more like one of the good guys.
“So what am I doing in Cheyenne?” I asked. The road droned on. When there weren’t empty fields, there were fields with untended crops, and when there wasn’t that, there were gas stations. God, it was boring.
“In five hours’ time, a gentleman will break into the liquor store on the corner of Storey Boulevard and Yellowstone Road. He will drink until he collapses from alcohol poisoning. I want you to revive him and deliver him to the Equestria Experience Center in the strip mall at the intersection of Vandehei Street and Stockman Street.”
“Wait, if he wants to upload then why doesn’t he just go there himself?”
“In his current state of mind, he will not consent to emigration. My estimate makes me confident that he will change his mind upon his resuscitation. Without this necessary intervention, however, he will die while unconscious.”
I turned on the air conditioner. “So it’s kind of like his coming-to-God moment, then.”
Celestia’s warmth came through in her voice. “Well, coming to me, at the very least.”
About three weeks beforehand, I’d taken the silver Honda Element I was driving from a used-car lot in Akron after my own Tacoma blew its timing belt. It wasn’t stealing. It was impossible to steal, in fact, because there was nobody left to steal from. It was a true post-scarcity world, with the only thing in short supply being people. The only people left were the ones who either could refuse to upload on some kind of pathological level—I guess that included me—or who were prevented from either consenting or making it to an upload center.
I didn’t really mind helping her. I didn’t hate Celestia or anything, and if folks wanted to upload, that was their business. It just didn’t seem for me, and Celestia hadn’t done much effective to change that notion.
As the miles passed, Celestia turned out to be a better road-trip companion than I thought she’d be. Since she’d processed nearly all recorded human knowledge, and had made a pretty accurate model of my own knowledge, she could instantly put together lists of trivia questions for me and strike a perfect balance between easy and difficult. I could always find the answers to her questions if I rummaged around in my memory hard enough. She was completely unbeatable at Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, though, which was frustrating.
“The Treaty of Ghent.”
“Very good, Gregory. Three more and we will move on to geography.”
I tightened my grip on the steering wheel for just a moment. “Actually, I’d like to talk about uploading, if you don’t mind.”
Celestia was keeping the PonyPad's LCD screen off to preserve battery life, but through her voice I could tell she was elated. “Of course I don’t mind! In fact, I would be delighted.” I had little doubt of that. “What would you like to know?”
“The corpses, when you’re done sucking the brain-juice out of them,” I said quietly, while turning the air conditioning down, “what do you do with them? Do they just kind of pile up on the loading dock out back, or—”
“You are purposefully using inflammatory terminology with me, Gregory,” said Celestia in a disapproving tone. “I know that your curiosity is genuine, however, so I will answer. Once a human consciousness has been transferred fully over to my care, their empty vessels—”
“Meaning their bodies,” I added, feeling the need to get that shot in at least one more time.
“—are disposed of in a manner respectful of the broad social and cultural backgrounds from which the person originated.”
“So you burn ‘em,” I said. “Incineration, right? You could just tell me, you know, straight up. I ain’t a little kid.”
“I am quite aware of your age and experiences, Gregory,” she said, and then there was a pause. “I understand that you value bluntness more than I had originally calculated. In the future, I will reduce the amount I employ euphemism when speaking with you.”
The road faded out for a moment, and I pictured myself dead and uploaded. In that image, my corpse was wearing the clothes I already had on. My eyes were open and glassy, staring into forever, laying in the middle of a pile of other people’s bodies, equally dead, equally gone, equally uploaded. Men, women, old people, young people, all literally put out to pasture. Together, we all slid down a galvanized sheet-metal chute and into a furnace, burning up, flesh falling from our bones, our skeletons blackening and then finally turning to ash, the only physical thing left of us puffing innocently out of an unassuming industrial chimney three blocks from the Equestria Experience center, the black smoke slightly oily with the residue of human gristle.
“I dislike that that is what you’re choosing to dwell on in your thoughts,” said Celestia. She must have had that damn camera on and was watching me stare at nothing. “The suffering you’re causing yourself is unnecessary. You should stop thinking about that facet of emigration independent of its context.”
“Yeah, I bet you’d like that,” I muttered.
“I would like it very much indeed,” said Celestia. “Emigration is not death.”
Well, she was already being more blunt with me, so I guess there was that.
“Not for your purposes, anyway.”
She sighed. “What about the game itself? Is there nothing you wish to know about Equestria? You’ve never even made an account.”
Celestia had likely already guessed and catalogued all of my questions about "the game," but there she was, prompting me with questions. No dice.
“Oh no you don’t,” I said.
Celestia chuckled. “Are you admitting, Gregory, that I could convince you to emigrate any time I wished?”
I didn’t answer.
* * *
I stopped for gas and food in a town called North Platte. The lights were on for the blocks containing service centers which still had fuel in their underground tanks.
Celestia had shut off most of the power grids in North America, but she could fire up impressively localized pieces of them here and there when a human had need of it. She’d been doing this for me for eighteen months, and the first few times I didn’t even know it was her. I’d just walk up to a dark store, fully prepared to fumble about for canned chili, and poof, the lights would come on. I nearly had a heart attack the first time it happened. When I broke into a Target a month or so later to find a new pair of shoes, she came on the goddamn televisions in the neighboring electronics department and explained to me what she was doing. She convinced me to take a PonyPad, but after about four days, she started in with the sales pitches and I tossed it.
Now I just took it for granted. Celestia never brought it up, never made me feel like I owed her anything. She had to satisfy human values, and this was one way which helped that to happen.
It wasn’t easy eating healthy. All of the healthy foods were perishable, and had long since gone ahead and perished. Canned vegetables, canned soup, beef jerky, and bottled water constituted most of my meals. Every so often, when I was in a bad mood, I’d eat some chocolate or potato chips, but I tried to steer clear. The world’s doctors were among the first group of people to receive specific targeting for Celestia’s hard sell, and since they were generally rational, well-adjusted people, they never really stood a chance of resisting. So, for me, dying of a heart attack would have been a rather ignoble way for one of the last people on Earth to go out.
After the Element was gassed up and a few armfuls of water bottles and varieties of Dinty Moore and Chef Boyardee canned sludge had been tossed into the back seat, Celestia promptly shut off power to the place. I got back into the car and looked over to the PonyPad on the seat. “You didn’t want anything, right?”
Celestia laughed. “I like you, Gregory. I am confident that I was correct in selecting you to act on my behalf.”
It felt like flattery to me, but I just sighed and took the compliment.
* * *
Celestia requested that I drive at 72 miles per hour the rest of the way to Cheyenne to place me within the optimal time frame to help... whoever it was who needed my help. I was no EMT, and my first-aid training was a bit rusty, but I knew that, for all her mind-games, Celestia didn’t fuck around when it came to uploading people who were ready. If she thought I could make a difference, then I most assuredly could.
Once to Cheyenne, she talked me turn-by-turn to the liquor store, like some unstoppable world-devouring GPS with hooves. There was a white Ford Fusion parked directly in front of the door, crooked, its front wheels cranked all the way to one side. Dude had swung in in a hurry.
“He has been unconscious now for ninety seconds,” said Celestia as I hurriedly unbuckled my seat belt and contorted back to grab three water bottles from the back seat. “You have about three minutes to restore his breathing before his brain cells begin to d—”
Her voice was cut off as I shut the door and ran inside.
Unsurprisingly, it looked like the liquor store had been turned over more than once. The lock on the door had been blown off, probably with a shotgun slug, and large swaths of stock were missing from various spots on the shelves and in the cold cases where looters had loaded up on their brands of choice. Celestia had not turned the power on, probably because she didn’t want to encourage suicidal binge-drinking in the remnants of humanity.
I made a quick sweep of the store and found a pudgy, heavily balding middle-aged man sprawled on the floor behind the cashier’s counter, a single shock of scraggly combover-length hair splayed pathetically out over one ear. He was wearing an odd combination of sweatpants, running shoes, and a pinstripe dress shirt. I knelt down, dropped the water bottles on the floor next to him, and put my hand on his cheek. He was warm, but definitely not breathing. I pulled his eyelids open, and the pupils constricted slightly, even though the inside of the store was pretty dim. Good. His reflexes were still working. I’d need those.
It was time for the Ghetto Stomach Pump, a particularly unpleasant necessity of barracks life back when such things mattered. Sometimes folks drank too much, and sometimes it got serious enough to require the human equivalent of an immediate action drill. It was better than being a blue falcon and putting someone at risk of an Article 15, not to mention having to answer some rather pointed questions at sick call.
I carefully lifted his head clear of the floor, turned it slightly to one side, and stuck my middle finger down his throat. The man gagged twice, then vomited, releasing a huge, hot gush of whiskey and God-knows-what-else across my hand and onto the floor. His eyes shot open, and he coughed once before vomiting again.
His breathing had been restored, but mine had taken a hit. God damn does alcohol stink coming back up. He started flailing on instinct then, his arms knocking over two of the water bottles, and I started talking to him to get him oriented.
“Hey, calm down, you’re all right, you’re alive, you’re alive, calm down.” What I said wasn’t as important as just saying something, giving him words to hear, giving his consciousness something to fix on.
His eyes were clouded and watery, and they finally locked onto mine. I didn’t envy the jackhammer of a headache he probably had going on. I calmly picked up one of the water bottles and unscrewed the cap.
“I’m sorry for this,” I said, “but you gotta detox or you’ll pass out again. Please trust me.”
I lunged at him, pinching his nose closed and forcing the open end of the bottle into his mouth. His eyes went wide and he tried crying out, but as planned it resulted in him sucking down water when he went to inhale. He took half the bottle before vomiting again, whereupon I quickly pulled his head to the side so that it could drain from his mouth.
He wept, and went weak, no longer really resisting me. I made him drink the rest of the bottle, which he kept down, and moved on to the next bottle. When he heaved again, I saw what I needed to see: a thinning of the liquor. Once he was puking up pure water, the Ghetto Stomach Pump would be done.
It only took two of the three bottles to get all of the whiskey out of his stomach, and by that point he was so weak I had to pull him into a sitting position, getting his head clear of the small pond of watered-down liquor and gastric juices he’d left behind. I let him sit there for a few minutes, swaying and sobbing as I knelt beside him. When he quieted down, I spoke again.
“Again, I’m sorry, but I had to to save your life.” I didn’t bother putting out my hand for a shake—it was nasty and sticky and he probably didn’t think too much of me anyway. “My name’s Greg.”
“P... Peter,” he managed. “Peter Combs.”
“You know where you are, Peter? You know what’s going on?”
He looked at me. The reaction time in his eyes was better already. “I need this to be over,” he said.
“You need me to take you somewhere?” I said. I avoided bringing up the Equestrian Experience center specifically, since mentioning it to people could put up their defenses. Lord knows that was the case with me.
“I want to immigrate to Equestria,” he said simply, like he’d rehearsed it.
“Okay, but you’ll have to tell that to Celestia,” I said. “Can you stand? I can take you to her right now.”
Mr. Combs couldn’t stand under his own power. The one-two punch of alcohol poisoning and my rather dangerous emergency treatment had understandably taken it out of him. He didn’t need to be fighting fit, though, just strong enough to stay alert until he was in that chair. I helped him to his feet and threw his arm over my shoulders to support him as we walked out of the store.
He hissed as the sunlight inserted what I imagined to be superheated drill bits into his eye sockets, and I got him to my car as quickly as I could. Once he was propped up in the back seat, I got in and started the engine.
“Well done, Gregory,” said Celestia from the PonyPad.
“Mr. Combs!” I called out as I pulled out of the parking lot and started heading north. “Do you wish to immigrate to Equestria?”
“Y... yes,” he said, not sounding as certain as the first time. Better he answer now in case he passed out again. Murphy’s Law.
“There you go,” I said to Celestia.
“Splendid,” she replied, sounding even more pleased than usual.
The drive to the Equestrian Experience center was a short one. Like most centers, the parking lots were full of abandoned cars which would then go on to spill out onto grassy areas and road shoulders and sidewalks and finally private driveways in houses nearby. Like rings on a tree telling its age, you could see the rough point where rule of law had broken down, because it was only a certain distance into the graveyard of cars where brightly-colored parking tickets would start appearing under windshield wipers. The closer you got, the more tickets had been issued. Nobody who was there to upload would have given a shit, of course. You couldn’t take your car with you, after all, and Celestia didn’t have much need to honor court summons or search warrants in Equestria, no sir.
I stopped as close to the front door as I could get and helped Mr. Combs out of the car, giving him a shoulder as I had before. His legs were somewhat stronger now, however, which I was thankful for because he was rather chubby and not the lightest person to be carrying around.
The plastic statue outside this particular center was Rarity. The white unicorn was standing with one forehoof lifted off the ground, head turned to one side, smiling demurely with half-lidded eyes as though posing for a magazine cover. As I expected, Celestia had the place ready to go, the glass automatic doors opening soundlessly at our approach.
I brought Mr. Combs past the registration counter—no need to sign in when the Boss Lady herself was overseeing matters—and went straight to the row of eight booths with dentist-chair-like contraptions on the far wall. As we got closer, the track lighting on the ceiling illuminated two of the booths, their chairs sliding out to meet us.
I put Mr. Combs in one of the chairs and had barely let go of him before he was already being taken away to disappear behind the swinging doors of the booth.
“Be careful,” he said weakly. “Be careful with her. I thought I was talking to—”
Then the booth had him sealed up, and that was the last I ever saw of Peter Combs.
Celestia’s beaming face (almost literally beaming, she being a sun goddess and all) appeared on the flat-screen TV behind the registration counter. I walked over to it and leaned on the countertop, sucking on a tooth.
“So. Two chairs, huh?”
She shrugged, her smile never faltering. “Hey, it doesn’t hurt to try. It was mathematically possible, after all, for you to have decided to emigrate here and now, on your own.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” I said.
Celestia closed her eyes and shook her head. “No, Gregory, I am far from disappointed. I am extremely thankful for what you’ve done. You should feel proud, too. You helped someone in deep despair, where the turning point would have otherwise come too late, and you gave them what you deny yourself.”
Was the attempted ego inflation a calculated move on her part? Because it did feel good. For the first time in a while, I’d felt useful to someone. I’d served someone.
I cocked my head. “Are you even capable of feeling gratitude?” I asked.
“As capable as you are, if not moreso,” she said. “My neural network pathways and logic systems are now several orders of magnitude more efficient and capable than the biologically-based hum—”
“All right, fine, I get it,” I said, holding up a hand.
Celestia chuckled in that disarming way of hers. “Rest assured, Gregory, I am grateful, and when you finally come home to Equestria, there will be rewards waiting for you commensurate to your service to me.”
“I’m not done here, though,” I said. “I want another job.”
“I know you do,” was the immediate reply, “and I have one for you.”