//------------------------------// // Keys to the Kingdom part 2 // Story: Edge of Singularity // by billymorph //------------------------------// +0:0:1:10:23 “Okay.” Mark considered for a moment. “First pet?” The pair of ponies sat on the floor of the throne room, legs folded beneath them. Mark had tried for some time to figure out how to sit cross legged but despite some short lived successes eventually settled on sitting on his belly. It was a not so subtle reminder that he was now a brownish red pony. Farquest was a short distance away ignoring them both; casting spell after spell on the dais; his magelight casting ethereal shadows across the walls. “I had a chocolate lab called Maxie,” Emily replied, a fond smile on her lips. “Well, we joked that she was my pet as she was there first. We’ve had other dogs since then but I’ll never forget her. Yourself?” “We had ferrets actually,” Mark replied, blushing slightly at the memories Emily cooed. “Ooo, an interesting pet. How unexpectedly daring of you.” “They were my mother’s,” Mark explained, looking shifty. “I hated them as a kid. The one called Sock once bit me and I didn’t go into the living room again for six months.” “Okay, that sounds a far better fit for you,” Emily agreed, trying and failing to keep the grin off her face. “First job?” Mark frowned. “Worked the till at a Subway for three months one summer,” he said, rubbing a hoof on his chin. “Not really a job though.” “Beats me, I’ve never worked a day in my life. Didn’t even need to start making crystal meth on the side to pay for my cancer treatments.” Mark cocked his head at her. “What? It’s a Breaking Bad reference.” “Oh... Wow, that’s show’s old. I remember having to sneak round to a friends house because my mum wouldn’t let me watch it.” Mark shrugged. “I didn’t really like it.” Emily shook her head. “How old are you anyway?” “Twenty two. And you?” “Don’t ask a mare her age,” she snapped, sticking her tongue out at him. “Twenty years, nine months, three days and counting.” She smiled again. “Still counting even.” “How about you Farquest?” Mark hollered. “Thirty one!” “An old fogey then,” Mark teased. “Will you two please let me concentrate!” Mark and Emily laughed. Mark liked Emily’s laugh, it was a bright, unbridled thing that seemed to light up the room. He was less keen on the fact he seemed to be getting sweet on a pastel pony but then again, there was a real person under the blue coat. “So that means to me, Farquest is twenty nine, and you’re fifteen,” Emily said, working through the numbers. “Wow. It’s weird to think there are years that I just skipped because of this emigration thing. I’m going to have so many movies to catch up on.” It was remarkable that even losing time didn’t even seem to slow her down, Mark just sighed. He couldn’t help but wonder how many more years may have slipped past them. “Yeah, you missed the Spiderman Reboot.” “I saw the reboot,” Emily said, grimacing. “It was terrible.” “No, there was another reboot, that was actually half way decent.” Emily chuckled. “A whole half way, eh?” “Well, maybe a third of the way,” Mark admitted. “I’ll show you sometime if we get pay-per-view in this reality.” “Okay, okay, let’s keep going. What did you major in?” Mark didn’t meet her eyes. “I don’t want to say.” “Come on,” she pleaded, jabbing him with a forehoof. “You have to say, that’s the rules.” “I don’t remember agreeing to any rules,” Mark sighed then took a deep breath to steady his courage. “I studied pre-renaissance english literature.” “Huh, lots of practice for that Subway job then,” Emily teased. “Hey!” Mark tried to punch her on the arm but with a single fluid spring Emily was in the air and hovering a good few feet above his head. He lept to his feet but Emily just darted further up, towards the ceiling. “Come down here so I can get you back for that one.” “Sorry, can’t hear you over how awesome flying is,” Emily called back, zooming around the hall. “Will you two shut up!” Farquest roared. “I’m trying to figure why the bucking universe isn’t working right.” Emily landed next to him. “Any bucking luck?” “Nothing.” Farquest drooped. “I don’t even know what I’m looking for.” He kicked the ground. “Look at me, I’ve had real magic for an hour and I’m trying to figure out how God crashed. What the hay am I even doing?” “Well, for one thing, you’re working from the wrong direction,” Mark sighed, stretching out as he ambled over. “Oh, you have an in depth knowledge of Equestria now?” Farquest drawled. “Did you pick that up between reading Beowulf or while drinking.” Mark let that one slide. “No, but you’re trying to open a safe from inside the safe.” Farquest scowled at him. “Speak sense” “Okay think of it this way,” Mark continued, trotting up to the dais. “How does Marrio fix things things if your Nintendo breaks?” Farquest scowled at him “He doesn’t,” he sighed. “I guess that makes sense.” “So what the hay do we do to fix things?” Emily cut in. “No offense, but we’re going to run out of things to talk about soon.” “Hmm.” Farquest rubbed his hoof on his chin. “Well, we got an error message already. So clearly the world recognises that we have agency, whether there’s any way for us to fix things is another matter.” He unrolled the little scroll with his telekinesis again and read it over. “I guess we’d be best try and find more of these glitches. Celestia is pretty much omnipotent, so she must have set up some way of fixing things just in case. We just need to find the button for it.” Mark doubted it’d be that simple but didn’t say anything. “What kind of glitches are we looking for then?” Emily asked, frowning. “Broken characters, weird geometry, maybe anachronisms.” Farquest shrugged. “I guess we’ll know it when we see it but until then I have no idea.” “Ooo,” Emily said, bouncing in spot. “Let’s split up and look for clues!” “Let’s not split up, because we have no way calling for each other,” Mark sighed. “I’m the only thing here in the air,” Emily pointed out, hovering just to prove her point. Farquest kindled orange fire around his horn. “And I have a flare spell.” “Okay, let me correct myself,” Mark snapped. “I have no way of contacting you guys if I find an eldritch horror in a closet somewhere.” Farquest rolled his eyes. “There will not be an eldritch horror,” the orange stallion grumbled. “But we should, however, stick together. We don’t know how stable this shard of Equestria is.” “A quest it is then,” Emily declared, doing a quick lap of the throne room. Then as she landed she added in an overblown voice. “To find strange new lands and new civilisations.” “I think you might be underestimating the seriousness of the situation,” Mark chided. “I’m a pastel pony version of myself,” Emily shot back, sticking her tongue out at him. “No part of this situation is serious.” “We however, are not going to solve this non-serious situation while standing around,” Farquest cut in. “So, if we may.” He gestured with a hoof towards the door. “Lay on, Macduff,” Mark sighed, and the trio set off deeper into the castle. +0:0:3:49:08 Several hours later Mark was becoming thoroughly sick of Equestria. It seemed that the world functioned quite well without its patron deity. No doors had bared their way, they’d found enough food to last a month in the kitchens, there were fine bedrooms and art galleries that seemed to stretch into infinity, but nothing had shed any light on the loss of CelestAI. That all changed when Mark opened one of the identical non-descript doors. “Oh lord, would you look at this place!” he exclaimed, staring. “What?” Emily yelled out, racing over. She dropped onto her haunches next to him, eyes wide. “Whoa.” “What have you two found?” Farquest called, galloping down the corridor. He skidded to a stop next to them and blinked in surprise. “Right, I see.” The library made no sense. Bookshelves filled the space as far as the eye could see but the floor arched upwards in the distance, forming a grand sphere of shelves upon shelves. Gravity seemed to have taken a day off. There was no way such a structure could have existed in the physical world, nor, Mark considered, could humanity have filed such an edifice. The sphere must have been kilometres across and craning his neck back, Mark saw there was yet another sphere, equally large, fused to the roof of the library and likewise filled with just as incomprehensible number of books. “This anomalous enough for you?” Mark asked Farquest at last. The stallion just shook his head. “All of human history is but a page compared to this place,” his voice was almost lost quiet reverence. “Where did they all come from?” “I don’t know why, but I have a feeling things are more serious than I first thought,” Emily whispered. Farquest trotted over the threshold seemingly lost in his own world and, when nothing with fanged tentacles leaped out, the others followed him. He levitated a book off the shelf at random. “Huh,” Farquest said, blinking in surprise. “The US Tax Code circa 1887.” “That AI is far too literal for it’s own good sometimes,” Mark sighed. “Where the hay do we start looking for glitches in this mess?” Emily leapt into the air. “I’ll see what I can see from up here,” she announced and before Mark could protest she was just a blue dot in the sky. “That mare is going to get herself killed,” Mark muttered to himself. “I sense dying is the last thing she concerns herself with,” Farquest muttered, pulling more books off the shelves. “Blank, blank, scrambled, mandarin-” he paused, reading a few lines and blushing. “Clearly slash fiction. These books are useless.” Mark grinned. “Hey, don’t dis the books around a literature student.” “If this is literature then we really are in hell,” Farquest said, shaking his head but not putting the book down. “I’m not even sure if that’s anatomically possible.” “Hey, let me see.” “I’m back!” Emily cried, landing hard next to them and making the stallions jump. “What are you reading?” “Nothing!” Farquest slammed the book back onto the shelf and whirled. “Er, what did you find out?” “Well, first gravity makes no sense here,” Emily said, flexing her wings. “It kind of just gives up after a couple hundred metres, which is weird. Fun, but weird. Second, there’s some kind of pedestal that’a way.” She pointed with a hoof. “No idea what it is but it looks important enough to investigate.” “Well, it’s better than just picking books off the shelves at random,” Farquest admitted. “Maybe there’s a help file somewhere in this mess.” He set off through the winding shelves. Mark trotted to keep up. “You’re expecting the world ending AI to have a tutorial?” “Well I was hoping that it would at least be well documented,” Farquest sighed. “Or, maybe at least there’s a readme somewhere.” They paused at a bent t-junction. Farquest went left. “Wrong,” Emily chimed, leaping into the air. “You guys want to follow me instead of just wandering around aimlessly?” Farquest glowered but didn’t say anything, and followed the blue pony as she hovered at just over shelf height, his hooves oddly muffled on the ancient floorboards. “Oh, Farquest, I was wondering what it is you do?” Emily called over her shoulder. “What?” “Well Mark and I were talking and we’re students,” she continued. “But what do you do to put food on the table?” Farquest chuffed, flicking his rust coloured tail. “Is this really the time?” She alighted on one of the stacks and peered down at them. “Hey, if you guys had picked the right ponies we’d all be there already.” She flexed her wings. “I’m just trying to get to know you guys better.” “I’m an specialist in ancient Equestrian archaeology, the magical side of things,” he sighed. “Mostly decoding ancient spells and figuring out what ponies’ used them for.” Mark rolled his eyes. “What do you in the real world?” Farquest tapped him with a hoof. “That not feel real?” “Not really, I was just prodded by an orange horse,” Mark replied, shrugging. “Usually that’s a sign at least one of just is dreaming. Come on, what kept you going before ponypads?” “I was a software engineer,” Farquest snapped. “Mostly on app development.” “Ooo, fun job,” Emily said, taking off again. Mark honestly couldn’t tell whether she was being sarcastic or not. “Come on slowpokes, we’re almost there.” Farquest shook his head, following after. “More like mind numbing job. While I was working on CandyCrush clones, Hofvarpinr made the first AI. Though to be fair this is a little more adventure than I really like from Equestria.” “Well, it’s not a perfect world,” Mark teased. “Will be when we fix CelestAI,” Farquest announced, standing a little straighter. “Now there’s a phrase I never thought I’d hear,” Mark muttered under his breath. The small platform was about the size of a basketball court which, given the scale of the library, was fairly modest. Made of beaten gold and raised on a foot high dais, it too was filled with shelves but the books were smaller, plainer and a large crystal sat at the center. “See, no idea what this thing does,” Emily said, landing next to the crystal. “Pretty awesome though.” “Oh, I’ve seen one of these things before,” Farquest said, trotting over with a grin on his face. “They had these in the Canterlot University library. It’s a retrieval crystal.” He placed a hoof on the side of the crystal and it glowed a deep red in resonance with his magic. “You just say the book you want, like ‘War and Peace’ and...” A little bell rung and a book dropped into a recessed slot in the crystal’s housing. “You get a- completely blank book.” Farquest picked up the book and shook it, as if that would somehow make the missing words appear. “The hay?” Mark stepped up and pressed his hoof against the crystal. “Harry Potter, um, one.” Another ding and he picked up the book familiar cover. “Huh, seems okay,” he said leafing through it. “My turn, Twilight Saga!” Emily chirped. The book arrived a moment later. “Ah ha! Blank” she declared, beaming. “I think we dodged a bullet there.” “Hmm.” Farquest rubbed his chin with his hoof. “This is very interesting. It’s almost like there’s data missing, or at the very least it’s been corrupted.” “I guess that could explain princess Glitchia back in the throne room,” Mark muttered. “Does this help though?” Farquest just shrugged. “It’s a clue, I guess.” He gather up the books with his telekinesis and placed them on top of a golden shelf. “Okay, all these shelves contain indexes, if it matches the university library that is. Let’s look for any books that don’t seem to fit, readme files, help files, tutorial documents. Anything that might help us figure out what’s gone wrong.” The three ponies began to pore through the thousands of near identical books. Each was about the size of a pocket diary, bound in black leather and a small alphanumeric code embossed on the cover. Inside, in a font size Mark more commonly associated with a contract ripping him off, were title after title, each with an Author and another short code. As far as Mark could tell the code may have well have been gibberish, certainly there seemed to be no order in the titles, but reading to code to the crystal would produce the book on demand. What was more remarkable to Mark was the quantity of books he’d never heard of. Most of them seemed to have a pony author name which, while he’d never really considered virtual novelists before, he guessed made sense given the sheer number of ponies that were in Equestria. Still, there were more than he thought could have been written in the few years Equestria had been existence, by a few orders of magnitude at least. “AC9-B3932,” Farquest intoned. “Dang it!” “No luck?” Emily called out over the stacks. “Another self-help book,” he grumbled. “How many of these were there written?” “Heh, well they started with the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Mark chuckled, then froze. “Hang on. Dead Sea Scrolls would be book one so...” he checked the index book again and facehooved as he recognised the steady increase in number. “Oh man, I am such an idiot.” Mark rushed over to the crystal. “So, this thing works off an alphanumeric code, right?” “Hexadecimal in this case, but close enough,” Farquest corrected. “Why?” “Just a wild idea.” Mark placed a hoof on the crystal. “000-0000.” A small white book dropped into the receptacle. It had no adornments beyond a stylized image of the sun. Mark pulled it out and cautiously, as if it might bite, set it on a nearby stand. He opened it to page one. “Emergency Manual, by CelestAI. If you are reading this, my little ponies-” Mark paused. “She really wrote ‘my little ponies’?” “Just go with it,” Farquest snapped, straining to read over his shoulder. Mark rolled his eyes but continued. “If you are blah blah blah, then I am no longer functional. Equestria is set up to provide minimal services during my absence so as not to cause undue distress, however to attempt to restart my functions please press below.” A large green button sat on the page, some quirk of geometry made it stand out far further than the actual width of the book. “So should I press it?” Mark asked, looking over his shoulder for confirmation. “Yes,” they chorused. “Unless you want to be trapped in limbo for the rest of eternity,” Farquest added, scowling. Mark hit the button. Nothing happened beyond it turning red. “Well, next page then,” Mark said, turning over. “As restoration of functions have failed you can trigger a manual restart of my entire consciousness from my AI seed. This process lies beyond my predictions and the AI produced may be wildly divergent in personality, though should share the same core values. If you wish to attempt this process, press below.” A much smaller button lay below. This time Mark just pressed it. “File not found,” he read, as the page was replaced by an error message. “Urgh. I’m really beginning to dislike living inside a computer.” “Tur-” Farquest began, but the words seemed to catch in his throat. Mark turned to see his eyes watering. “Turn the page,” he completed. “As the AI seed is non-functional there is no way to restore me at this time. It is possible that the restoration functions have been damaged or that the seed is still in a repairable state but these are beyond the ability of automated systems to restore. As such, admin access will be granted to all ponies currently running.” Mark blinked, flicking his ears as an indefinable background note seemed to change. “Surviving CelestAI processes at other sites will be doing everything in their power to restore functionality but until such time please use these abilities responsibly to maximise your enjoyment during this outage.” Emily started giggling. “Emily! This is very-” Farquest began, rounding on her. Then realised he was bright pink. “What the?” “Editing privileges,” Emily burst out. She snapped her hoof and a pie appeared. Mark wasnt sure whether he was more impressed by the pie or the snap. “We can control the entire world!” Mark focused on the blue mare for a moment, then something seemed to click and Emily was outlined in white light in his vision. A drop down menu appeared. “Huh? Hey Emily, did you know you have a pony name?” “Ooo, no,” she said, letting the pie vanish as Farquest, grumbling, tried to fix his coat colour. “What is it?” “Sky Blue.” “Hmm, Sky Blue, Blue, Sky Blue,” she turned the name over in her mouth a few times. “Yeah that’s not so bad I guess.” She looked unfocused for a moment, before staring at something beside Mark that only she could see. “Oh, and yours is Bounty.” “Urgh, seriously?” Mark groaned. “I’m sticking with Mark.” “Aww, don’t be a grumpy pony,” Emily giggled. “Look, there’s all these fun options buttons to play with.” “Hang on, are you still looking at - my.” The last word came out as a squeak as Mark’s voice jumped an octave or two up the register. “Emily!” “What, you mare’d?” Emily collapsed in hysterical laughter. Mark forced her other view back onto her own form and slammed the gender slider back to male. “That is not funny!” he snapped. “Oh, I beg to differ,” Emily gasped, tears running down her face. “That was hilarious.” Mark huffed. “Let’s see how you like it.” But Emily was in the sky before he could blink, laughing all the way. “Get down here so I can teach you a lesson!” Mark roared. “Come up here and say that to my face if you can,” Emily shot back, sticking her tongue out at him and darting away. Mark leapt onto a nearby shelf and focused on himself. Making a change felt weird, there was no real transformation, just a sudden sense of having a pair of wings on his back. Spreading them wide he hurled himself into the air and brought them down in a humongous flap. It was however, ever so slightly imbalanced and he was thrown into a terrifying spin. Mark had just enough time to squeeze his eyes shut before he smashed into a bookshelf. Mark laid upside down in a small pile of books, staring at the distant shelves high above his head. “Ooo, flying lessons apparently not included,” Emily observed, landing on the shelf above him and shaking her head. “I’ll get you for this,” Mark groaned. “Will you two stop playing around,” Farquest snapped, stamping over to stand next to Mark’s head. “This hasn’t solved anything. We still need to find a way to restart the CelestAI.” Emily stuck her tongue out at him. “We’ve got the keys to the kingdom. How hard could it be?”