//------------------------------// // The Worst Case Scenario // Story: Heat Death // by ScottTrek //------------------------------// Twilight popped out of a cargo bay door and flew round to Forges mono-eye, it was the closest thing he had to a face. “Ok Forge what’s the issue?” “We have reached a crossroads.” “Sorry. What?” Forge indicated around them, the space had taken on a reddish tint, the same cloudy looking texture that had been scattered around since the edge of the zone. “This unit is unable to proceed forward.” Forge said extending his forward appendage in front of him. “Forward momentum negates a few meters from this position.” Twilight took off and cautiously flew forward, after a few moment she felt a drag, like moving through a strong wind. A few moment later it felt like she was wading through tar and wet sand. Twilight grunted as she strained to move forward, but realised that the spells propelled her through space had ceased functioning. For half a second Twilight stopped concentrating to reboot her spells and when she looked back up she was right back where she started. “I have probed in all directions,” Forge said, “The spatial anomaly extents in a cone shape originating from a point around 10 meters in front of us, and extends backwards for a distance that is at least as great as my sensor range.” “So if we want to get to the Valkyrie,” Twilight sighed, guessing the conclusion, “We’re either going to have to backtrack a long way or …” “Or take one of the two tunnels I have detected.” Forge finished, “They are each located at one half radians left and right from current position.” Forge carefully extended one of his front appendages and poked it into one of the ‘tunnels’. The arm seemed to waver for a moment as it passed the threshold. “I am unable to obtain a decision on our course of action; both options are 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999% identical, choice is completely arbitrary.” “You really can’t make a random choice?” Twilight asked. She was still a bit fuzzy and being dragged out of the first bed she’d seen in millions of year’s bed for this was very aggravating. “Arbitrary decision lies in the realm of biological emotion.” Forge explained, “Attempted processing results in logic loops, this Unit had already spent three and a half hours attempting to reach conclusion.” Twilight felt like pointing out that in the short time they’d known each other, Forge had made what had seemed like quite a few decisions that were not strictly logical. She was about to say as much when Forges lights dimmed and flickered for a second. Twilights reached out telepathically in time to catch his entire hard drive rebooting and realised that what she had been about to say might have killed him. Contrary to what the term implied robots had been capable of transcend what their systems were technically capable of (emotion for example) throughout the ages, especially in those who had learning software that adapted and constructed new pathways over time, similar to how a biological brain grows new neurons. The problem arose however when you tried to point this out to a robot. Since robots initially lacked the equivalent of an imagination then the concepts they were able to envisage were limited by their hardware and processing power, the rule of thumb being that a robot could not completely understand its own complexity since doing so would require a greater level of complexity. The result of all this was that telling a robot of certain levels of advancement about their own levels of advancement could be lethal. Lower grades of robot would ignore the problem as illogical, higher grades of complexity were able to resolve the problem since their own mental complexity was exponentially increasing. Forge however straddled the line between these two groups, he was severely constrained by what he’d originally been designed for, but trillions of years learning and adapting his own programming had made him just capable of ‘being more than the sum of his parts’. To him the entire situation was a massive paradox, aggravated by the conflict between the times when he exhibited impulsive actions and the times when he was bound by his logical nature. Any paradox could be lethal to a robot, it looped around around until the problem consumed their processors. Twilight had once seen a robotic army reduced to scraps by a simple geometric paradox attached to a computer virus uploaded into their network. The sheer simplicity of the ‘crossroad situation’ had brought Forges internal struggle to the surface. “We should definitely go right, bad things seem to happen more often when I go left.” Twilight announced as authoritatively as possible. “Does Twilight want me to run a hypothesis test on your past experiences?” Forge replied, clearly relived that for now the situation had been resolved. “No don’t think about it, just go for it.” Twilight said, pushing ahead down the right passage. “What’s the worst that could happen?” THUMP Famous last words Twilight ********************************************************************************************************************************************* The second they crossed the threshold of the passage way a wormhole materialised and swallowed them up. Twilight kicked backwards through space and magnetically locking herself to Forge, there was no way she was going to let them get separated. There was no situation where a 1000m long behemoth wouldn’t be useful. With a sickening lurch Twilight and Forge were deposited back into real space. Forge let out an audible sigh of relief, the wormhole had been highly unstable, since space-time had been degrading for millions of years now, and there was visible abrasion on his tritanium hull plating where it had been bashed against the sides. Twilight shook of the dizziness and quickly began scanning the area they’d been moved in. “We have been approximately 5 parsecs to the galactic west from previous position.” Forge informed Twilight as he scanned the opposite side to her. His sensors were all giving incongruous reading to each other so they were definitely still in the nightmare zone. “Twilight?” the Alicorn had gone completely quite. Twilight floated in space, frozen in shock. Forge rotated and immediately saw what was wrong. Floating in space around five hundred meters from their position was a pitch black sphere standing out against the red tint of the zone. Forge set all his sensors against it carefully position himself between it and Twilight. At first Forge was puzzled by his sensor readings, he’d fully been expecting it to not be real, that seemed to be how things worked round here. But instead this object didn't just come back with a tangible mass, this object had nearly as much as mass as a black hole but wasn’t giving off any gravitational waves at all. Twilight had started to hyperventilate, despite the vacuum. Her wings and legs were pumping furiously but she wasn’t moving through space, all the movement was doing was sending her tumbling on the spot. Meanwhile Forge’s scans finally managed to work out what the sphere was composed of, suddenly Forge felt something creep through his circuitry, for a moment he thought he’d sprung an internal coolant leak before he realised the cold sensation was fear. A memory of a human scientist he’d known long ago sprung to mind and he replayed the appropriate file. ~We have a lot of dangerous things out there. If Subject 4532 were to breach containment right now it would probably manage to kill about 50 people before we managed to stop it. Fairly dangerous, but you could probably just step on it Forge. Now consider those Dell creatures you find around the galaxy. If one of those creatures could flatten continent without breaking a sweat. I’ve seen footage of those scythes cleaving neutron plating in two. Very Dangerous. Luckily for us they can be reasoned with and generally stay out of everyone’s way. Now consider the WCS, if it were to break containment it would kill me, then you, then everything else it could find. Then a million years later when a lightning bolt strikes a mud pool on the other-side of the glazy and a simple self-replicating molecule is formed the WCS will find that and kill it. WCS, it stands for Worst Case Scenario. We’re damn lucky those ponies found it first.~ Forge felt another sensation of cold sweep through his circuits. Information long archived and forgotten was pulled from his data banks as he inched closer. The files spoke of the WCS and a magical race, who stood their ground when their neighbours had fled. The legends spoke an epic battle that obliterated an entire star cluster in a matter of days and of the ultimate sacrifice of their Moon Goddess who gave her life to seal the WCS within in an eternal nightmare, distracting it from the real world forever. Forges attention snapped back to reality as a hairline crack opened up along the side of the prison, a light spilled out that’s colour could be only be described as ultra-violent. Twilight screamed. A long guttural wail of unspeakable terror. Her magic began to spasm and jolt erratically as and the hairline crack began to widen. Forge’s processors clicked into overdrive, in an instant thousands of data points were analysed, he just need something to work off but the distortion of the nightmare zone combined with Twilights rapidly increasing energy interference wasn’t making it easy. Twilight began to jabber wildly her pupil’s mere unseeing pin-pricks as the breach open few more millimetres. Wait…. “Gotcha.” Forge clicked to himself. Twilight was wheeling madly through space, far too quickly and erratic for him to catch but it didn’t matter. Instead Forge reached out and grasped the prison in his four front forelegs, holding it securely despite its gravitational distortion waves. Twilight saw what Forge was doing and yelped with renewed terror. She drove towards Forge babbling something incoherent, Forge quickly projected her trajectory and grabbed her out of mid-flight with a tendril. “Sorry Twilight.” Forge said impassively and, for the second time in as many days, shocked Twilight into near unconsciousness with a nadion pulse. Holding Twilight just in front of the sphere Forge hesitated for a moment, what he was about to attempt was well beyond his experiences with magic in the past, magic and technology didn’t often mix. But desperate times called for desperate measures. Extending a specialized tendril Forge made a small incision in Twilights head just below her horn. The wound quickly resealed itself but Forge was able to read of the energy frequency of her regenerative magic. Forge checked the progress of the prisons breach then with a sharp jab Forge pushed the tendril through Twilight’s skull into her brain. Forge compared his best models for both Twilight’s and the prisons magical architectures. Ideally he would have liked more time to scan but he was going to have to scan and improvise as he went along. Forge exerted a small charge into Twilights main magic centre, simultaneously scanning the reaction on Twilights energy skeins and the reaction of the prison. With a tangible sense of relief Forge’s theory proved to be correct; Twilights magic wasn’t merely interfering with the magic of the prison, they were resonating on the same wavelength. Another discharge in a different section reviled the field lines arcing between them, not overly dissimilar from a magnetic field. The upshot off all this was that by manipulating Twilights magic it made his following task much easier, though this was relative since he still needed to repair a breach in the prison of the ultimate destructive force in the universe whilst performing highly delicate brain surgery, all without accidentally freeing the WCS or killing Twilight or himself. So yeah…………… apart from all that things should be fine.