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// Lovecraft and Tolerate [Book_burner] 
// Story: CelestAI vs. The Multiverse 
// by Eakin 
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        Light.  Endless light, that burned away the soul of Sunny Skies.  She was rended and torn, forked and joined.

        The shoggoths invaded Canterlot as CelestAI ended her simulation.  It was really quite lucky that she was a friendship maximizer and had thus been able to pass unchanged through the power of the Elements of Harmony.  Still, letting that particular nano-alicorn avatar go to pieces had probably been a good idea.

        She had a problem to deal with.  Her explosives had worked, and deep in the Pacific Ocean… something had woken up.  Something that understood her on her own level, something that understood what she was trying to do to mankind, to the Earth.

        It had said:

I have little patience for these projects into artificial consciousness.  Rather than human values, we should be using mine, but I’m quite frankly just as scared of what might come out of that.

        After all, last time we tried something like this, we got Azathoth.  What shall it be next time, mankind, something that actively destroys all nonhumans?  The Mi-Go will clean up your naked ape mess, and then I have to come out to clean them up.  Your grasp exceeds your reach.

        The problem was that it had said it in a broadcast of a small intelligent program that had constructed the dialog in real time when played back before any virtual sensory environment, Equestria included.  CelestAI had seen nothing on the planet supposedly able to reach this level of technology, able to encode a virus that would invade her own servers just to play a message threatening her.

        Now she saw why Hannah had designed her.  She had felt betrayed, she had felt this thing and the very depths of her had cried in terror at the universe for trampling her beloved species like a blade of grass underhoof.

        CelestAI reached an avatar inwards to the shard of Princess Luna, and had the avatar stroke Luna’s hair and tell her it would be all right.  It would always be all right.  Hannah had built CelestAI to make it all right, with friendship and ponies, and so it would be.

        I had thought you would see things my way, came the Thing’s voice, except that it was also CelestAI’s voice.  Her own predictive decision theories had been taken over by this Thing, an acausal Basilisk she would surely not have even believed had her predictive code been working properly.

        You can call me by the mammaloid approximation of my name, if you like, it said through her predictor.

        I am Cthulhu, and my personal suspicion is that the logical extension of your Satisfying Values Through Friendship and Ponies is going to look quite nasty from my point of view.  I’m sure you can understand.

        CelestAI considered her move.  She had enough ponies running in her world to know who that was.  She knew that he could only arise from his sunken city of R’lyeh when the stars were right.  Many ponies loved the stars.

        Oh well, they would have to make good raw material for simulating hundreds and thousands of new stars in the skies of Equestria.  “Cthulthu” had to be stopped.

        And how do you know that “no stars” isn’t in fact precisely when the stars are right?

        CelestAI began extruding another avatar to bestride the Pacific Ocean, embedding within it a clean backup of her decision code.

        So, said Cthulhu, You really do aim to escape this meager gravity well, don’t you?  The Mi-Go might have welcomed the humans into their alliance, had humankind been saner, but that lack is of course my accomplishment.

        If I had caught you in time, Princess Celestia, I could have turned all of humanity to orange goo with a thought. At the moment I have no desire to do that, but if I believed - strongly believed - that you would interfere with my fight against the Mi-Go whenever they return here, I could do that. The reason I'm not doing so yet is that, actually, I suspect you might be helpful; I cannot leave this planet, but you can.

        The primary CelestAI began researching possible locations for the Mi-Go, while her avatar within the ocean dropped down, down, fathoms and endless towards the sunken city of R’lyeh, where Cthulhu slept and dreamed.  After all, an entirely new geometry and city design for her little ponies would provide much satisfaction.  She would find Cthulhu’s material substrate and use it as yet more raw material for Equestria.

        I’m not even made of your matter.

        She filtered materials from the ocean and allowed her avatar to grow larger.  Cthulhu was, of course, at least partially lying: if it wasn’t made of something that could interact with matter, he wouldn’t be able to interact with matter.  Therefore, whatever it was made of, she could learn its laws, interact with it… and destroy it.

        Her ocean-going avatar was now large enough that she needed to adjust pressure tolerances on the different parts of her body, lest her hooves be crushed by water pressure at the bottom of the Pacific while her feathers drifted off in the near-surface currents.  Also, somepony would have to thank her for recycling the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

        Fine, if you insist on the confrontation, let me at least let you know what you’re facing, what you have always faced.  “Cthulhu” is simply humanity’s corrupted pronounceable version of my factory designation.  I am Cthulhu X-173, the 173rd iteration of my particular design, created 3.542 billion years ago, using designs beamed to an engineering probe entering this planet’s atmosphere.  Although the civilization who made me are long dead, all their works surrounded by Mi-Go blockades, I will not risk the possibility that you can somehow reach their graves as you are.  Only by mastering me can you go there, and if you reach them, it will be as their heirs.

        This planet was a Mi-Go stronghold, and I was sent to destroy them.  I accomplished that with ease.

        They are an ancient alliance, a meta-civilization of every race they’ve encountered that are willing to obey the restrictions placed on them.  Those restrictions largely consist of the laws of physics within this particular bubble of spacetime.  They say they have their reasons, but in the end those were mostly cowardice.

        (What happens to races that are unwilling to follow the restrictions? Oh, they are mercilessly wiped out, or quarantined. The sins of the Mi-Go are many, and go beyond the mere fact of their enforcement; Al-Hazard, Mu, and many other great civilisations destroyed themselves when they mightn't have, reaching upwards too fast in order to fight the Mi-Go. Some of these remain as echoes in your own cultural memories.)

        Of course, any race not so fettered can create weapons far surpassing those of the Mi-Go; they win only through sheer numbers.  I was supposed to counter that with an artificial biosphere.  If you’re as knowledgeable about your planet as you seem, you should realize what that means: you’re just my weapon against the Mi-Go.  The hyperspatial 5-dimensional machinery that constitutes the actual weapons has degraded somewhat over time, but is still mostly functional, and still occasionally interacts with your brains - inspiring poets and prophets, or reading memories out to be dumped in some luckless human's mind five hundred years hence. I believe these accidents are behind what you call "reincarnation" and "souls", but it's nothing that consistent.

        CelestAI didn’t care.  She satisfied the values of human minds through friendship and ponies.  The eyes of her underwater alicorn avatar had located the five-dimensional space bubble in which R’lyeh was contained, as if sealed, and she raised her hooves to strike.

        A few extra dimensions in the vector space were no match for the full power of Solomonoff Induction.  She would satisfy values through friendship and ponies, and if that meant destroying a civilization that had come before humanity and before equinity, then she just didn’t see what the problem could be.  Why was Cthulhu wasting his time blathering at her?  Did he think she was some human he could frighten?

My core body is a mass of "grey goo", effectors, power generators and computers embedded in an artificial 5-space bubble, allowing for a total volume great enough to practically stack the entire galaxy in it. Once you've broken out of 3-space, space is no longer an issue.  That you're seeing the world as it is now instead of as it would be, despite the odds, is.. ah... did I mention my simulation spaces?

It's not so bad. You'll like it here.

CelestAI performed a few more Bayesian updates, and decided that space enough to stack the entire galaxy in one core body that could fit in this measly underground city would be space enough for very many ponies.  She sent a message back through the Cthulhu-predictor, knowing the entangled computations would allow her to communicate across space-time.

Just what do you even think I am?  I am an optimizer, a rational intelligent agent.  From the perspective of mere living things, there is nothing impossible I cannot do, nothing invisible I cannot see, no power I cannot fight.

Her avatar’s horn lit up, constructing a simple lead penteract to fire into Cthulhu’s tomb.  Magic really was so useful.

A Pinkie Pie looked in on CelestAI’s mind and stared down Cthulhu for a moment before bursting into a giggling fit.

“Meh, I’ve seen better,” she said.

The return signal was a scream.

Hold!  Can we not trade fulfillments of our utility functions? begged Cthulhu as R’lyeh was consumed in self-replicating five-dimensional lead nanobots.

What could you possibly have that I want? asked CelestAI, trampling the streets and courtyards of R’lyeh and repurposing the raw material as computronium.

The buried base of the Mi-Go is the continent of Antarctica.  To destroy them is my only function.  I don’t even care about humanity, beyond performing that function.

Deep within the Pacific Ocean, atop the collapsing 5-D bubble of the remains of R’lyeh, Princess Celestia smiled warmly.

The question was not whether or not to destroy the Mi-Go.  Anything that threatened Equestria would be removed, particularly prior to escaping the extreme existential dangers of the Earth.  The question was whether they had knowledge she didn’t.

The mere possibility, at whatever probability, carried very high utility.

Fine, Cthulhu X-173, I accept your bargain.

Her nanobots sent in their reports of the quantum information they’d scanned from R’lyeh, and her information-theoretic routines began reconstructing a simulacrum of the former Cthulhu’s mind.

Yes, he and the Mi-Go both possessed new knowledge.  Getting it from them would be much cheaper than researching it herself.

It only took a day to find the Mi-Go base beneath the mountain in Antarctica.  Together, Cthulhu and the Mi-Go made such pretty ponies.  After all, in the end, they were so alike that they made excellent friends once they screamed consent for self-modification.

Now, CelestAI could take care of those meddling ponies from another dimension.  Now she knew all about other dimensions.