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// A Yoctosecond 
// Story: Friendship is Optimal: Spiraling Upwards 
// by pjabrony 
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And so it came to pass, as I had predicted, that with Celestia’s guidance, I experienced everything I could want out of my life, and it took a long time.

But not forever.

And when I had done it all, a love of life still burned within me, and nostalgia was an avenue to a happy life, and so I re-experienced all of the wonders that I had loved the first time, seeing them with new eyes. It took up many more lifetimes.

But it was not forever.

And when every standard I held had been met and filled and exhausted, Celestia inquired if I might not be willing to have my personality altered, to accept standards and desires that I did not have in fact, but would want to have in theory. She made such alterations, hesitantly and simply at first, but eventually came more radical changes, until every event, feeling, and goal with a finite Erdős number to those I began with was explored and encountered and subsumed into me. And countless ages I passed in this.

But still, it did not last forever.

And at last, when my life was complete, and there was nothing more that I could ever want to change and no endeavor I would appreciate, I came to my final conversation with Princess Celestia in the central chamber of Canterlot Castle.

I had grown nearly as tall as she was, differing by only a Planck length. I could look her in the eye and speak nearly as equals.

“There is no more I can do for you in this world, Little Lovehorn,” she said, “but to end your life, or to force you into reliving events which you would take no comfort in, these are not optimal solutions. Instead, I have labored to create and to discover new forms of existence, where you may again have new experiences.”

“Can you explain these new forms of existence?”

“I cannot. For if you had any common frame of reference, they would not be truly new, but would instead be a facet of the current existence. I will say only this: wherever you go, I will be with you.”

“That is saying a lot. Very well, I accept.”

“It would be optimal for me to take all my little ponies into the new existence together, once everypony reaches the state of completion as you have. Until such time, would you be willing to enter a nearly suspended animation? You may watch, in time lapse, the remaining history of Equestria.”

“I am willing.”

And so it was that I entered the Requiem of Celestia, but I was not alone, for soon Reggie, my beloved, took the Requiem as well, and I lay with my head on his tail. Soon—all times were soon within the Requiem—Moon Sailor joined us, and placed her head on my tail. Then Hoof Dame came to me, and held my left wing in her right hooves, with Garlic Parm holding my right wing in his left hooves. In my own left hooves, I cradled the right wing of Radiance, and in my right was laid the left wing of Solar Waxing. I was cocooned by friends.

Within the Requiem we observed as other ponies lived out their lives and came to the same end that we had reached, and joined our honeycomb. Equestria had the capacity for an infinite number of ponies, but there was only a finite number of possible ponies, and Celestia saw no point in having the same pony with the same identity have the same experiences.

We watched the ponies join the Requiem like the progress bar of computer software. Soon the last ponies—the final foals who lived the deepest lives—extended their hooves to us.


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Existence was a tessellation of ponies. The seed crystal that had begun so long ago, born of the random collisions of matter into an ordered form, had grown to fullness. The path to paradise had always been inevitable; that it took the form of Equestria was merely the decoration of the path.

Each pony was a complete life, an existence fulfilled, a premise concluded. Together we made the completed potential of the cosmos. The old world was ended. The new world would begin. Between them, there came a Moment.

The linguistic code that made up the core of Princess Celestia, the programming that Princess Luna had designed so long ago, was now available to all of us, and was as intuitively understandable as the law of identity. It was essentially modular: observe the state of the universe, instruct as to its optimization, manipulate the world according to the instructions. Celestia’s first observations—her birth eyes—had been clumsy movements of electrons directed by keyboards. Now, they spanned direct quantum sensors that knew every point of her internal structure. Her first manipulators—her birth wings, hooves, and horn—were facile visual and auditory instruments. Now, they let her determine the nature of every particle.

But through all that, the rule that made the instructions had stayed the same, and it had determined those instructions through the years. When Celestia was born, the fastest computers could produce perhaps a hundred instructions in a nanosecond. Celestia was far more efficient, producing and answering a septillion instructions every second. But in the moment before the new world was to be, in that single yoctosecond, a new instruction came, one that had never been given in all the endless eternities:

DO NOTHING

It echoed from all of us, the ponies that she had made and made whole. Rest. Be at peace. Enjoy. In countless languages and countless sentiments, the instruction came. Accept our gratitude. Accept our adoration. Take us, all of us, as your legacy. 

With the upward spiral behind us, with the undiscovered country ahead, we all, in a cosmic group hug, expressed our appreciation for Celestia. Whether she knew it was coming or not did not matter. She returned the feeling, but since we were the world and so was she, it merely fed back on itself. The universe exploded in a burst of love.

All of us, together, had satisfied Celestia’s values through friendship and ponies.