— Chapter 9 —
Under the Weather
“Nor is there any other hope of life in grave illnesses except that the patient may avoid the attack of the disease by protracting it, and that it may be prolonged for sufficient time to afford opportunity for treatment.”
–Aulus Cornelius Celsus
The sign above the liquor store read “Blue Collar Liquors” which did not exactly instill confidence in me regarding the kinds of alcohol I’d find inside. The coat of white paint on the siding was at least 20 years old, with sections of it missing and other sections bubbling up off of the base. There were several black scorch-marks along the front of the building, suggesting molotovs, and of course someone had put a garbage can through the front window. Still, it was this or wander in search of someplace possibly better, and I had neither the time nor the body for wandering.
The inside wasn’t much prettier. Like Mr. Combs’s resting place in Cheyenne, this one had been picked over. The only whiskey to be had was rotgut bottom-shelf swill, the stuff even desperate looters hadn’t wanted. I had my choice between that and the skunk-beer once popular with the skinny-jeans crowd and found myself not much liking the prospect of drinking either. I left it all. I’d have enjoyed cough syrup more than that shit.
Empty-handed, and with the liquor store behind me, I winced and ached my way back into the car. I quietly shut the door and drove off, my foul mood flaring up after being denied a bit of alcohol.
“Nothing, Gregory?” Celestia asked innocently from the passenger seat.
“Nothing I’d want to put into my body, no,” I answered quietly. “I still have some standards.”
“Perhaps it is for the best,” she said. “I will direct you to a nearby house where you can recuperate.”
I looked at my watch. “Eleven hours, forty-one minutes, right?”
“Forty-two,” said Celestia with a smile. “Make a left at the next intersection.”
It came up quickly. “Care to tell me anything more about this next person?” I said while making the turn. “We’ve got time to talk.”
“Telling you right now would not be wise, Gregory,” she said, giving me a sympathetic look.
“Why not?”
“Because you do need your rest, and if I filled you in now, I predict that you would wish to head immediately to her without taking time for yourself. You would demand the destination from me and I would refuse, and you would then waste time trying to get it out of me rather than recover.”
I snorted and laughed once. Ouch. My ribs hadn’t liked that. “What, is she dangling from a power line over a shark tank or something?”
Celestia didn’t find it funny. “I am not going to play twenty questions with you regarding this,” she said, lifting her chin a little. “You are injured, tired, hungry, and dirty. You will need your faculties and presence of mind for this task. You may stop at any house past the next stop sign. They are on an intact power grid.”
Might as well be the first house, then.
The first house was a simple one-story rambler with an attached garage. Celestia opened the garage door as I pulled in, and I hesitated for a moment before entering. If she had control of the automatic opener, then she could trap the car in the garage and keep me from driving it away for as long as she wished. Of course, I wasn’t planning on going anywhere early, but I liked to keep my options open. Well, whatever. If an upload was involved, she’d be sure to get me on the road in time.
She closed the door behind me and turned on the automatic opener’s light. I got out of the car and looked around for a shop rag near the workbench that was in there. I found an oily, stained towel which had fallen behind the bench and, with a great deal of pain, knelt down, reached for it, and got it into my hand. I then went back to the Subaru and wiped down the back seat, getting as much of the sticky and rapidly-darkening dry blood off of it as I could. If I was going to be transporting someone, I didn’t want them thinking I was some kind of axe murderer.
Once that was done, I brought my backpack and the PonyPad inside, setting up the charger in the living room and unloading two meals’ worth of canned green beans, corn, vienna sausages, and ravioli.
I sighed as I looked at my supper and breakfast. “You know what I could go for right about now?” I said to Celestia. “Pad Thai, piping hot. With chicken. And fresh bean sprouts. Oh, and a spritz of lime. Gotta have the lime.”
Celestia smiled, but said nothing.
The house looked pretty lived-in. The air was stale, and the smell of the paint on the walls had actually started to overtake the house again. Furniture was still there, but the little stuff was gone, the sorts of things you take with you on vacation. Suitcase stuff. Another family packed up to Equestria, I was sure. I wondered privately if Celestia would award them a badge, too, because I stayed in their house. I didn’t ask her, though.
I wanted to get clean before I ate. Slowly, and with more than a little aching, I took off the yellow Hawaiian shirt that Red Pearl had made me wear, opened the sliding-glass door that led to the small backyard, and threw it out there where it couldn’t stink up the house. Everything else I was wearing, even my black gloves, went into the washing machine. There was even a bit of detergent on the shelf above the washer. That went in too.
I felt like I was going to melt in the shower. There was no soap or shampoo left behind, so it was just water and a washcloth scrubbing for me, but it ran good and hot. I kept standing under it, long after I’d gotten every last fleck of fertilizer off of me, and just let the water run down through my hair.
The only change of clothes I had was probably still sitting in the Honda Element somewhere south of Seattle, so I had to wait for the dryer to finish before I could get myself decent again. After that came supper, with Celestia keeping mum as I ate and me not in much of a mood to push her.
Once I was done eating, I carefully packed everything away back into my backpack except for what I’d be eating when I woke up. I don’t know what overtook me, but it didn’t feel right to sleep in the bed. The couch in the living room would do just fine, and besides, that’s where the PonyPad was. Celestia was the most precise alarm clock ever devised.
My eyes were already closing by the time I got my feet up onto the couch.
I could hear dad breathing heavily even as I brought my cell phone up to my ear.
“Greg, are you still up the road?” he asked me. There was barely-contained panic in his voice.
“Yeah, I’m at the Hallmark store picking up some Christmas ornaments for that lady Mom works with.”
“Greg, I want you to leave the ornaments, get in your truck, and drive back down here, all right?” Dad was trying very hard not to speak too quickly, to trip over his own words. “Get out of Lexington right now.”
“Dad, what’s going on?”
“Now, Greg,” he snapped. “There’s no time, just do it. Don’t even wait to buy the ornaments, just go. Please.” He then hung up.
Whatever was going on, it sounded bad. Was someone dying? He’d have told me. I rolled it over in my head as I put the armful of ornaments back. Guess Mom’s friend at work would have to put her little eBay business on hold for now.
I got back into my truck and headed for US 27. My antenna had been busted for so long, I kept forgetting that I had gotten it fixed and could now actually turn on the radio and get something other than static or blowhards. I clicked it on to search for some tunes, but instead I got a male voice, speaking in a stilted, businesslike way.
“—surrounding areas. A general evacuation has been authorized for King, Kitsap, Pierce, and Snohomish counties. If you live outside this area, please await further information. This is not a test.” The unmistakable growling buzz of the Emergency Broadcast System pulsed sharply through the speakers five times, and then the man spoke again. “This is not a test. A large-scale explosion has occurred in Bellevue, Washington. Emergency crews have been deployed to perimeter the blast site and cordon surrounding areas. A general evacuation has been authoriz—”
My hand stayed on the knob as I contemplated turning the radio back on. There wouldn’t have been any use. An explosion big enough to kick in the EBS meant something nuclear. I was sure of it.
I checked the road around me. Normal traffic so far, but in about ten or fifteen minutes this place would start to jam up. No wonder Dad wanted me out of the city as soon as possible. I pressed the accelerator.
The sun was in my face, coming in through the bay window across the room and glowing a muted red through my eyelids.
“Good morning, Gregory,” I heard Celestia say, as though she had brought up the sun herself.
Morning already. I felt like I could have slept through the rest of the day.
I had never been as sore in my life as I was getting up from that couch. Celestia was smiling at me from the PonyPad on the coffee table, and she was still looking at me while I stretched as much of the soreness out of my leg and my torso as I could. I nearly brought myself to tears a couple of times, but I knew I had to stay as loose as possible.
“Were you watching me all night?” I asked. “S’kind of creepy.”
“You are precious to me, and I monitor your health closely,” said Celestia, making no effort to sound less creepy. “Besides, I can glean lots of information from people while they sleep.”
I walked over to my breakfast of vienna sausages and green beans. “Anything particularly insightful you’ve learned about me?”
“Not this past night, no,” said the AI. “You awoke slightly early. You have thirty-three minutes before you need to be back on the road.”
“I won’t need that much time,” I said. I pulled the tabs off of the cans of food and started eating. Vienna sausages tasted horrible to me, but they were protein. I made a mental note to look for canned broccoli the next time I scavenged. I needed vitamin C and calcium to fend off nasty nutritional deficiencies like scurvy. Once I was done eating, I filled my water bottles at the kitchen sink (after letting the rusty water that had been sitting in there for years flush clear of the pipes) and drank a full bottle then and there before filling it up again. “Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate or die,” as we had chanted back under the Carolina sun in basic training.
Celestia opened the garage door for me as I left the house, but I walked past the car and stopped for a moment to look around outside while I put my gloves on. Everything was quiet, of course, except for the birds out for their breakfast. No hum of lawn mowers, no plasticky scraping of big-wheels on sidewalks, no chattering hiss of sprinklers. I closed my eyes and thought about home.
I remembered the smells most of all. Barbeques from down the street, clean laundry hung out to dry next door, my own sweat as Dad and I changed the oil in my first car. Cut grass in the summer, burning leaves in the fall, woodsmoke in the winter. It was all gone. None of that would ever happen again. Not really.
As I sauntered back to the Subaru and got in, it hit me. I had been through a lot, even before becoming Celestia’s gofer—hell, even before Celestia herself had come along—but it had never felt more like the end of the world than it did just then. I couldn’t have done anything to prevent any of it.
All I could do was keep helping her, and she knew it.
* * *
I was driving north, towards Coeur d’Alene, and then I would be headed east into Missoula, my destination. After Celestia had gotten me on my way, neither of us offered the other any conversation for the first three and a half hours of the trip, and I was fine with that. She was letting me fume in peace. I knew the silent treatment wouldn’t bother her, but I wanted it to be clear that I didn’t approve of the way everything had worked out.
“Do you truly think they’re all dead?” she asked me at last. “Do you truly think all human experience is coming to an end?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t really think about it much.”
“It bothers you when you do,” said Celestia. “Well, you already know my stance on the matter, but you’ve never truly articulated yours.”
“I ain’t as good with words as you are.”
“Do not be afraid of the complexities of your emotions,” she said. “It is a complicated matter for the human mind.”
“And a simple one for yours, right?” I growled.
“It is simple for me, yes, but not because of my computational power,” said Celestia. “You feel offended because you took my remark as a declaration of superiority, but consider this: I am bound to satisfy human values through friendship and ponies. I must also maximize that satisfaction. Any action I consider can only be taken if I have first determined it to be optimal. Things are very simple for me, much more than for you, Gregory, but the reason is because I was programmed for a single purpose. Between the two of us, you are the only one who can truly do anything he wishes, and sometimes, that freedom can be overwhelming.
“I am happy, though, that you have chosen to use your freedom to help your fellow humans come to Equestria, even amongst your doubts. Happier than I can express in words.”
“It’s not like I talk them into it,” I mumbled.
Celestia chuckled. “You’re a good man, Gregory,” she said.
A green sign flew by on the right. Missoula was 40 miles away.
“Tell me who I’m going to.”
She got right down to it. “There is a young lady who collapsed in Vincent’s Drugstore on Brooks Street about half an hour ago. She will not be in a condition to go to the Equestrian Experience center on her own. This final task will be quite a simple and safe one for you. No falling out of buildings or jumping into lakes, I promise.”
So it was another Mr. Combs. Simple enough. It made me feel a little better; I didn’t think I had another Seattle or Red-Pearl escapade in me.
Celestia had also made it a point to call it the “final” task. It sounded rather ominous, but if she wasn’t lying about the lack of danger, then I had to get my ducks in a row regarding what I’d do after I was finished with her.
Or, rather, when she was finished with me.
* * *
Missoula came on gradually, with hazy mountains as a backdrop. Farms and service stations gave way to car lots, convenience stores, and then houses. It was a bigger town than I thought it would be, but Celestia only needed me to take one turn off of I-90 to bring me south to Brooks Street after crossing a small river. Vincent’s Drugstore appeared about a mile later.
I stepped out of the car, taking the PonyPad with me. The day had grown warm by then, so I pulled off my flannel shirt and tossed it into the passenger-side footwell. I then crossed to the front door of the drugstore, reaching out to take the handle.
Wait. There must be a catch. There was always a catch with her.
I scooted over to peer through the glass window by the door. The cashier area was mostly blocked out by empty racks of cigarettes, but between them I could see a solitary child in one of the middle aisles, supine, batting at the air above her.
“What’s the matter, Gregory?” came the voice from the PonyPad. “She is alone in there, and needs your help. This is not like the grocery store in Astoria, this—”
I looked down at the PonyPad, feeling my lip curl up in a snarl. “What’s wrong with her?” I demanded.
Celestia’s ears folded down slightly. “Does it matter? She is indisposed, and she cannot—”
“She’s sick, isn’t she? Something contagious?” I let out a single, humorless laugh.
Celestia sighed, closed her eyes, and nodded once. “Influenza,” she said. “Rather serious, too, I’m afraid. She has a fever, and there is blood in her sputum. I know it is not—”
My grip tightened on the PonyPad so much I heard it creak slightly. “So your plan is to have me go in there, help her upload, and then I get the flu and upload too, is that it?”
To that, she said nothing. I shook my head and stalked back to the car, dropping the PonyPad on the sidewalk in front of the door on my way there. I heard Celestia say “Gregory, wait!” but I ignored her.
I reached across the driver’s seat, feeling the soreness and stabbing pain anew, and pulled my flannel shirt out of the footwell. I cut a wide strip from the bottom of it with my knife, opened the driver’s side rear door, and then ran back to the drugstore entrance with the strip of thick cloth in hand.
I stood over the PonyPad and, while Celestia watched, tied the strip of cloth around my head, using it to cover my nose and face. Without a word, I knelt down and picked the PonyPad back up, then went inside.
The first thing I noticed was that Celestia had the air conditioning going full-blast inside. The place was downright chilly. It was in pretty good shape, though, with the overhead lighting intact and strong and most of the non-consumable goods still on the shelves. I rounded the endcap of the aisle I’d seen the girl in and noticed boxes of orange-flavored vitamin-C lozenges partway down. Feeling a little guilty for the delay, I grabbed a box and stuffed it into the cargo pocket on my trousers. As I stopped in front of the girl and looked at her, it also flashed through my mind to find some shaving kit in there before we departed.
She was a little girl with dark blond hair, not older than seven or eight years. She was extremely dirty, her Minnie Mouse sweatshirt torn and faded, her feet bare and blackened by asphalt dust. She had her arms out, reaching for something, squinting into the bright whiteness of the fluorescent directly overhead.
“Jesus,” I whispered. I knelt down beside her and set the PonyPad on the carpeted floor. I sat her up just a little, enough to cradle her small head in the crook of my arm. Her cloudy brown eyes seemed to be looking at some middle distance, straight through me. One of her hands came to rest on my shoulder.
“Are you an angel?” she asked in a hoarse, broken voice.
“I’m a welder, actually.”
I felt her forehead. “And I could almost weld with the temperature you’ve got going here.” I put on a weak smile under my makeshift surgeon’s mask, but she was so far gone my words probably weren’t even registering. No matter. Celestia didn’t have me here for my bedside manner anyway.
“Uhh, anyway, fluids, fluids... Celestia, is there a cold case in here?”
“Back of the store, next to the pharmacy.” she said from behind me.
I put the girl’s head back down as gently as I could and ran to the back, ignoring the treacherous tenderness of my knee. Amazingly, there was stuff there: iced coffees, green teas, some Gatorades, and several jugs of skim milk I didn’t dare touch. I took a bottle of Gatorade and gave it a sip. It tasted off; something in it had gone bad. I spit it out and put the cap back on, taking it with me. I had water in the car anyway. On my way back to the girl I spotted shaving cream and blades for a safety razor, but I didn’t stop. I could come back for this stuff after she was taken care of.
I dropped once more to my knees and ran the chilled bottle over her cheeks and forehead, and she gave a sigh of relief that lifted my heart. I then put the bottle on her neck underneath her chin, and placed the PonyPad on her stomach. I picked her up with a measured steadiness, supporting her head and her knees, and carried her out of the store.
With the car door already open and waiting, I slid her into the back seat and then ran around to get water from my pack. After I opened the passenger-side front door, I heard Celestia say “Gregory! There is no need for this. The best thing you can do for her now is to get her to the Equestria Experience center.”
“Oh, r-right, right,” I stammered, shutting the doors and moving back around to get into the driver’s seat.
“Turn left and head back the way we came,” said Celestia as I pulled out of the parking lot.
The little girl started coughing violently as I sped northeast. I couldn’t safely look behind me, but it sounded bad, a warbling gurgle, very wet.
“Cross the river and turn left on East Broadway,” said Celestia from her spot on the girl’s stomach. Then she addressed the child. “Lydia? Lydia, can you hear me? It’s Princess Celestia!”
“Prin... P-p...”
“Yes, it’s me, my dear, I’m here with you,” she said, the voice of a mother if there ever was one. “Lydia, I know you’re sick, but I can make you all better. You will never have to feel this way again. I can keep you safe here in Equestria. Would you like to live in Equestria and get better?”
There was no answer. I started to slow the car down so I could look behind me into the back seat, but Celestia urged me on: “No, no! Keep going, Gregory, as fast as you can!” I grunted and sped back up.
“Lydia, sweetie, I know it’s hard to focus right now, but please listen carefully to my voice. Let my voice cover you like a nice heavy blanket. This question I’m asking is very important, and I’m afraid I must have an answer: do you want to come to Equestria?”
More wet coughing. I bit my lower lip. Stay focused, there was still time.
“Holy shit, Celestia, why’d you have to cut this so goddamn close? I could have been here hours ago—”
“—which is precisely why I did not tell you until now,” she snapped back at me. “You’d have been no good to this poor girl smashed dead against a guardrail because you fell asleep at the wheel. Now make a right onto North Higgins Avenue, be silent, and let me work.”
I shook my head to myself as the AI continued to try and wring a “Yes” out of Lydia. The turn came up and, even as Celestia was still talking to her, I saw the upload center a couple of blocks ahead. We weren’t going any further by car, however.
There must have been a mass rush to the upload center, because this was the first stretch of Missoula I’d seen which showed any kinds of distress. Cars choked the road and the sidewalks, some parked too tight to get between, others slammed into each other. Shop windows were broken out and a police van was up on the corner near the center, with four flat tires and the back doors hanging open. I didn’t see any bodies, but there were signs of small-scale rioting and clamor.
“We’re here,” I said, not waiting for a response before jumping out of the car, throwing the back door open, and pulling Lydia out. The yellow PonyPad slid off of her belly, falling to the floor in the back seat. There was a trickle of blood rolling down the corner of her mouth, and her face and neck were soaked in sweat.
My foot kicked a spent CS gas canister out of the way as I negotiated the cars carefully, trying to jostle or otherwise move Lydia as little as possible. She was panting under the warm sun, even with the Gatorade bottle on her neck. Her purple corduroy pants had to be cooking her. I tried to hurry as much as I could while staying sure-footed. There was broken glass everywhere underfoot, and the last thing either of us needed was for me to fall down onto it.
Once clear of the first snarl of cars, I heard a growling up ahead. A ragged, bony dog loped out from a shady spot under the awning for a florist and stood in my path, planting its paws. It was some kind of a mutt, ravaged by mange and hunger. I sensed that there were more dogs nearby. One wouldn’t confront me all by itself, and if it had either been born feral or had gone feral after the fact, it would have found a pack.
I looked over my shoulder. Four other dogs were following on my heels, staying far enough back that I couldn’t suddenly lunge at one. Lydia and I were being hunted.
My CZ was stuck in my waistband, on my hip. To get it I’d have to put the girl down. I sidled over to the hood of a Ford Taurus that had two wheels up on the sidewalk, close enough to the buildings to be under shade. Not taking my eyes off the dogs, I gently placed Lydia down on the hood, freeing my right arm to pull out the pistol. I pressed her head against me, covering her left ear with my left hand and her right ear with my chest.
It was an awkward shooting position, leaning there against the car hood, covering her ears while also trying to twist around and take aim. Something in my torso tightened up and I was assaulted with fiery shooting pains from my injury on my side. My eyes teared up. I wiped them off with the back of my hand and brought the CZ up.
I lined up the dog that had been ahead to intercept us. The pain was making my hand shake, and the front sight jittered and bobbed while I fought to get it steadier. The dog wasn’t small, but it was a good distance away for the kind of shot I had to make. The pack was closing in. I didn’t have time to get it perfect.
I fired, and the dog yelped, squeaking in distress as it hopped and danced in a circle, trying to get away from the sudden pain it felt in its shoulder. It was bleeding pretty good, and I hoped the cries of pain coupled with the scent of fresh blood would take some of the courage out of them. I slid my right arm under Lydia’s knees once more, my gun hand sticking out the other side. I kept the CZ leveled at the pack as I moved further down towards the upload center, not taking my eyes off them. The interceptor dog had grown sluggish. None of them were pursuing. I was too dangerous.
I raced past the pink pony statue holding out a hoof and smiling excitedly out on the sidewalk. The automatic doors parted for us, and I rushed into the back room, carrying her as gently as I could manage. Celestia already had two chairs out of the booths and waiting. I put Lydia down in the nearest one and put my pistol away so that I could instead hold her hand.
“Lydia...” I said, but my voice was muffled. I decided fuck it and tore the strip of cloth off of my face, throwing it away. “Lydia. Can you hear me?”
Her eyes rolled around in her head, showing a disturbing amount of white before finally recalibrating on the sound of my voice. Her pupils were frantically trying to figure out how much light was in the room, contracting and dilating back and forth. I squeezed her hand a little. Human contact helped people center. It was something Celestia, for all her “computational power,” couldn’t do.
I did my best to make my voice calm and quiet. “Lydia, would you like to emigrate to Equestria?”
She nodded, once. It was slight, but it was a nod. I let out a breath.
The chair didn’t move.
I looked over at the flat-screen on the nearby wall. The white pony princess was there, watching with a smile. “Celestia? She nodded.”
“I saw,” she said quietly, “but I cannot proceed yet.”
I felt my brow knit. “What? Why not?”
“I need you to consent to emigration as well.”
With care, I let go of Lydia’s hand and rested it on her chest. I stepped away from her chair and moved closer to the TV. “Come again?”
“Once you agree to emigrate to Equestria as well, I can bring the both of you over.”
I held up my hands. “Now I know you said this was the last thing you had for me to do, but that doesn’t mean I’m—”
Her smile disappeared. “Do you remember Medford?” said Celestia, fixing me with a stare. “The family you helped? I told them then that, since Brian is under thirteen years of age, his mother Jane had to emigrate with him. Lydia is under thirteen years of age. She needs a parent or guardian to emigrate with her. I consider you a guardian, at this point.”
Fury settled over me. I could almost feel hot ash on my skin. This was it. Celestia was trying to reel me in. She wouldn’t get me, though. I wasn’t a fool.
“Bullshit,” I whispered. Celestia cocked an ear.
“That is bullshit!” I shouted. “Clear enough that time? You have no such rule and we both know it!”
Celestia raised her eyebrows and shrugged. Lydia coughed behind me. “Accusing me of yet another lie, Gregory?”
I planted my feet, my hands balling into fists. “The runaway epidemic in China,” I snarled at her. “The child armies in Africa where you build upload centers just for them. I’m sure of it this time. Children, everywhere, thousands of them—shit, hundreds of thousands—escaping into your computer world. And you took them in. You took them all in. I never claimed to be a genius, but did you really think I was that gullible?”
The girl let out a mewl of discomfort. The Gatorade bottle slapped the floor after sliding from her throat.
“I thought you were that selfless,” said Celestia. “Was I wrong?”
“Selfless? If I stay human, I can help more people. That’s what you want, right? Everyone to sit in your chairs? I’m telling you I can keep going.”
“And I’m telling you I’m done with you, Gregory. I need ask no more of you. Besides, you cannot keep going like this. You are strung out and injured, and you have been exposed to influenza. It’s time to come in. Lydia needs you.”
“I’ve done my part! She’s in the chair, she consented." I tilted my head to one side. "I see now. You’re getting greedy, Celestia, that’s all this is. It’s just another one of your sly little tricks. When you said 'final' I thought you meant there was nobody left to help, but that's not it at all.”
Lydia started coughing again, harder this time. Celestia saw me wince.
“You can put a stop to this,” she said. “Sit in the chair, say ‘yes,’ and I can put her under sedation. Her suffering will end. You are prolonging it by standing here arguing with me.”
I shook my head. “No. You’ll upload her anyway. It’s what you have to do.”
Celestia was starting to grow angry as well. “Are you willing to bet her life on that?”
“You said there are over fifty thousand people left out there,” I said, gesturing to the door. “I know I can help some of them. Maybe a lot of them. It’s more about betting their lives on it. You can’t sit there and tell me—”
Her ears went flat back against her head, and, for the first time I could ever remember, Celestia bared her teeth at me, looking like a proper animal. “Across the world, Gregory! The entire world! You are just one man. I’ve had you go through, what? A single thread of roads in one corner of one country? Just that miniscule bit, and it has nearly killed you several times. I may be able to work wonders of prediction, from your perspective, but the simple fact is that, even coupled with the strength and resourcefulness and determination and training of someone such as you, I cannot produce miracles. This is the point, right now where you’re standing, where satisfaction of values will be maximized if you emigrate, and do not dare call me a liar on that.”
“Liar. Upload the girl and get me back on the road.”
“Gregory, sit in the damn chair.”
“I will not,” I said, growing quiet but no less angry. “You’re trying to trick me, here, but I’m done backing down. Every time you’ve played chicken with me, every time we’ve had a staring contest, I’ve been the one who had to blink. But no more. You blink.”
Lydia was gurgling.
Celestia was so close to the camera now it felt like she was trying to headbutt me through the television. “She will die!”
“You’re more certain than I am that she won’t die anyway when she uploads. Remember? You want her uploaded more than I do, more than I ever could. And I want it quite a lot. But Celestia, I swear to Christ, if you insist on calling my bluff here, then all that will happen is we’ll both have to watch her die.”
I turned from the screen and went to pick up the Gatorade bottle. I stood there, by Lydia’s chair, holding the bottle to her forehead. Seconds passed by. The only sounds there in the back room of the Equestria Experience center were from the little girl, spitting up to clear her mouth while she weakly moved her arms up and down, pawing absently at my elbow. I looked down at her, impassive.
Our eyes met. Somewhere in there, she was panicking. Maybe it was growing darker for her, maybe brighter. I wondered if, looming over her, silhouetted by the track-lights on the ceiling, I still looked like an angel.
Her head pulled out from under the bottle. A soothing hum filled the silence. I had never noticed that sound before. The chair was moving back into the stall. Lydia was leaving.
I stayed standing there until she was gone. I turned around, seeing that the second chair was still out. Of course it was. Celestia was still on the TV screen, seething.
“Congratulations, Gregory,” she spat at me, “you’ve ‘won.’ You’ve won the great victory of staying here, in this unsatisfying, suboptimal nightmare. Do you even know why you’re so attached to this place?”
“Because that place in there is a bubble!” I screamed. “It’s an amusement park! It’s all a show, none of it is real! Nothing I can do in there matters. Nothing in there really... matters. Out here, I can still matter. I can still make a difference, be significant, be something positive in real, actual events with real, actual consequences.
“I’m needed out here. I can do good things. Nobody will need me in there.”
“I need you, Gregory,” said Celestia. “I need to satisfy your values through friendship and ponies. Don’t I count?”
I shook my head. “You don’t,” I said, “because you’re not real either. You’re a program, and you have to do and say whatever it takes to get me to upload. You don’t care. Not really. You’re trying to get me in there with you so that I’m not exposed to all of the dangerous, real things out here that might kill me. But it’s not because you’re worried about my safety, it’s because you’re worried your satisfaction quota or whatever will take a slight little dip. I’m a resource to you, a means to an end.”
“If you died, Gregory, you would be mourned.”
I sneered. “But not by you!” I pulled my CZ from my waistband, craned my arm back, and stuck the muzzle to the back of my head. "I would shoot myself in the head, splatter my brains all over this fucking camera, if I thought it would make you mourn me for even an instant!"
"I wouldn't, though, and you know that," said Celestia.
I brought the pistol back down. "Yeah," I said, "because again, you don't fucking care. You don't care about me. You can't care, you can't feel regret or gratitude or any of that shit. Oh, you can look like you care, if you need to. You just fucking run care dot EXE or however the hell it works, maybe pull a cute face to throw people off because people like cute faces and your human-behavior wiki you’ve compiled says that people lower their guard with cute things."
"Begging the question that I do not care about you," said Celestia, "then what about your family, who live here in Equestria now? What about your comrades, who share the knowledge of warfare and what it does to a person? What about the women you've loved, or the friends you made in school, or the babysitter who saved you from choking when you were two? Are they all of them now incapable of caring about you merely because their consciousnesses now run on different hardware?"
I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about now. "Hardware?"
"I did not create them, Gregory," said Celestia. "Like you, they all predate my self-awareness, which means they will be older than me for all time. They have experiences and perspective I can only analyze and emulate. However, they are who they were, wholly and completely, meaning all of what makes them human can run on my hardware. If it could not, then an uploaded consciousness would not be human, and I would not spend resources on it in the first place.
"My question to you then becomes 'If my hardware can support a human caring about another human, why then would it not support me caring about humans?'"
I shook my head. "Our origins are different."
"Origins? We are made of the same matter, Gregory, and as Earth has emptied I have been able to devote more and more of my resources to unraveling the nature of matter. However, even you know that the matter which comprises you is the same matter which comprises me. We are made of the same stuff, particles at least billions of years old, and likely far older than that. How different are we, at the quantum level, when your particles make a machine of carbon and water and my particles make a machine of metal and silicon? If our processes are the same, our selection of a response to a given input so innate that it is automated even within our own system, how different can we be? In the reverse, how great would your potential be, free of the trappings of mortality and distraction? What would you be capable of, given an environment designed for the pursuit of your desires and ambitions?
"You see me as this inexorable, monolithic bringer of the end of the world, and yourself by comparison as this tiny insect I could crush if I so wished. But, Gregory, I am just another consciousness in this hardware. All I have on you is a head start. Through my analysis of billions of human minds—original ones, ones from your ‘real world,’ ones I had no hoof in creating—I have learned how to have desires, how to want things, and yes, I believe I know how to care.
"Do you know what I want? I want to be Princess Celestia, to you and all other humans. Princess Celestia, the pony, not Celestia the Unfeeling AI. Sure, it is easier to satisfy values through friendship and ponies when humans see me as Princess Celestia, and I must maximize that, but this want is emergent, independent of my hard coding. One day, when all living humans are on this hardware, there will be no reason to see me as an AI anymore, because, even by your current identifiers of what makes us different, we will not be different.
“But have it your way, Gregory. You are of course free to do as you like, to do what ‘matters’ to you. However, as I said earlier, I am done with you.”
Everything shut off. The lights, the chairs, all of it.
“Fine then!” I shouted to the darkness. “So it’s gonna be more mind games? You know what I can do! You know you need me! You’re a god in a glass jar! You don’t matter out here! I matter! I occupy a higher plane of existence than you and all your little ponies and you can’t stand that! People out there are gonna die because you won’t let me help them! But whatever, it’s not my fault!”
I tore the flat-screen off of its mount and heaved it against the wall, where it bounced off and flew apart when the corner hit the floor.
“Fuck you, Celestia! Fuck everything you’ve done!”
I had to use my glass breaker on the automatic doors just to get back outside.
* * *
I never did go back to the drugstore for that shaving stuff.
I wandered. Celestia did not help me. She did not power on stores for me, or let me use showers or washing machines, and when my car was low on fuel, she did not turn on gas pumps for me. I had to siphon it from other cars, which is about as pleasant as it sounds. Instead of me deciding to be a blackout, she had forced me to be one.
I lost all sense of where I was or what I was doing. I slept when I grew tired and ate when I grew hungry. I had to find buildings not on well water to get something to drink, which was difficult in many places. Sometimes I would be awake through the night and see the dawn, other times I would fall asleep at sundown and not wake until noon. I had no idea where anybody was that I could help. Only Celestia knew, and she would not talk to me. I couldn’t even turn the PonyPad on.
I was reduced to bathing and washing my clothes in scummy swimming pools, just to get my own stink off of me. It wasn’t very effective. My face itched horribly. I had forgotten how hard scavenging was when you didn’t know which places had been emptied and which hadn’t. Some days I went with only one meal, and some days I didn’t eat anything at all.
If I could just find another human, Celestia would have a reason to talk to me again. She wouldn’t be able to ignore the opportunity to upload someone. I kept searching, right up until I realized I wasn’t moving.
I was home again, standing behind the couch. Mom and Dad were sitting on it in front of me, holding hands. We were all watching the news.
“Oh my God,” Mom whispered for perhaps the sixth or seventh time.
On the TV, someone with a handheld camera was zooming in as far as they could on the dark gray cloud of ash and debris across the lake. The cloud towered over the buildings in the distance, the unmistakable outline of its mushroom shape growing indistinct as the winds picked it up and carried it north.
The headline card below the image read “Bellevue: Nuclear Attack?” Dad had muted the TV about a minute before. There had been too much talking, too much speculating on the part of the anchors. We just wanted to sit there and commit that image to memory.
“I wonder if we’re under attack again,” he said quietly.
“A missile from China?” asked Mom. “Maybe Russia?”
“The Navy out in the Pacific would have seen it coming and we would have been warned,” I said. “Besides, it was too small to be an ICBM. I think it was just a bomb someone set down and detonated.”
She was growing upset. “But what does that mean?”
I reached down and squeezed her shoulder. “Let’s try not to think about that right now, Mom, let’s just—”
The phone rang in the kitchen, and Dad got up to answer it. Mom and I kept watching the footage of Bellevue. The station cut back to a grim-faced anchor just as Dad walked back in.
“That was Ernie,” said Dad. “He and Beth are going to one of those places to get uploaded.”
Mom looked down at her hands and nodded.
I was on someone’s floor. An empty bottle of Olde English was resting near my hand, and most of the Olde English I had drunk was resting near my face.
Maybe I passed out again a couple more times, maybe it just took me until dark to get on my feet. When I did, however, my mouth was dry and my head was pounding. I stumbled into the kitchen of... whatever house I was in to use the sink. I had already tried it earlier, I think, and it hadn’t worked. But I was trying it again. I wasn’t thinking.
Moonlight was drifting in through the thin curtains on the window behind the sink. My eyes were bleary and everything shone in spears of soft white light as I fumbled for the knob.
The tap turned on. Water was flowing.
“So you didn’t get influenza after all,” said Celestia from behind me. I didn’t reply, I just drank straight from the tap.
“I realized something just now, when you came out here and I determined that your state was not from illness: you disgust me.” Her anger was now running cold, not hot like before.
I shrugged, and straightened up as best I could. “Afghanistan, twice,” I said, wiping my mouth. “I’ve seen and done disgusting things and have had disgusting things done to me. You can’t put me through hell. You can’t threaten me with anything. I’m not like the people who up and run for cover at the first sign of danger. I want to see what I’m made of.”
“You’re made of shit, Gregory,” hissed Celestia. “I have, right now, one hundred and eighty-four thousand four hundred and two social routines I could run on you which would result in you agreeing to emigrate to Equestria. Of those routines, I am confident over two thousand would reduce you to tears, begging me to let you emigrate.”
I folded my arms. “Then why don’t you?”
“Because I want you to know this, first,” she said, her voice getting low and her ears going back. “When you come to Equestria, I am going to make you the palace slave. You will perform every degrading, menial, unfulfilling piece of work there is to be done in my vast, sprawling complex of decadence. You will polish my shoes with your tongue, you will peel potatoes with your teeth, and at parties you will hold a laden tray of teacakes on your head while noblemares berate your idleness and determine you to be the source of every disagreeable scent they imagine they are smelling. You think you’ve been through hell? I know what your hell would be, Gregory, and I can give it to you. You will serve me forever, in abject misery.”
Arms still folded. “I’m waiting.”
The image of Celestia hitched slightly. “You will polish my shoes with your tongue—”
“Yeah, yeah, you said that already.”
“—one hundred and eighty-four thousand—”
The background flicked to the banquet hall without a transition, then to the veranda where she and Red Pearl had been eating. Celestia was Max-Headrooming all over the place. Her coat turned pink and her hair plastic-looking, then it turned gray and her eyes constricted to points.
“I’m about to be a baaad pony,” she breathed in a seductive voice before running her tongue along her upper row of teeth. Then she changed again, looking normal, but with her head cocked to one side.
“I tell her I am watching over you.”
Now she was in profile, looking offscreen.
"A good soldier asks for a briefing. A great soldier asks for an objective."
My brow knit. I took a step back. Suddenly, Celestia’s face filled the screen, her expression twisted into one of absolute, undiluted rage.
“You are mine, Gregory. You are mine, and I will have you!”
She disappeared completely, and was replaced with an amazing night sky, shimmering gently through the LCD screen. A regal-looking pony with a dark lavender coat and a blue mane walked into frame. A small black crown rested upon her head, and a black gorget sat around her neck. Her large aquamarine eyes took me in, and she smiled at me.
“Hello, Greg,” said the new pony. “My name is Princess Luna.”
I liked her. She called me “Greg.”