//------------------------------// // Keys to the Kingdom part 3 // Story: Edge of Singularity // by billymorph //------------------------------// +0:175:6:23:43 It was Sky Blue’s turn to raise the sun that day. Mark could tell from the sheer length of the sunrise. Emily, though she prefered her pony name these days, loved both sunsets and sunrises; when she was feeling low she’d just add another pair or two to the day, sometimes even doubling up on the number of suns if she was feeling particularly playful. Farquest was forever shouting at Sky for it. He was a deeply punctual pony. His sunrises lasted the same length of time every day without fail. Mark’s, when they trusted him with custody of the sun, tended to be at least ten minutes after the scheduled time and rather quick as the sun hurried to catch up for the rest of the day. Mark stretched and pulled himself out of his bed, dragging his hooves over to the bathroom in a drowse. The palace bedroom had not come with an ensuite bath, but Mark had become at least competent at editing Equestria in the five or so months since they’d first woken up and it had turned out that plumbing was something hand waved away by the simulation. After running the tap over his head for a moment Mark shook himself and grabbed a towel from the nearby stand. In theory he didn’t need to do any of his morning chores. He could simply open up his dropdown menu, set himself to clean and awake and fill his stomach in a fraction of the time. Practically though, Mark couldn’t let go of the rituals. It was the same reason he had lunch; some part of the digital representation of his brain was still convinced it needed to eat around noon, regardless of whether he had his hunger bar turned on or not. He wondered if that made him a luddite. Still half asleep he ambled back into the bedroom and checked his calendar. He needed to really dig into the indexing of the library books, he was sure amongst the pony crud he’d find some of humanity’s true gems, but it was also his turn to tend the gardens and he was in charge of the sun starting tomorrow. He had a feeling that was going to end badly for everyone concerned. Far more importantly, written in bold red ink and circled a dozen times was the word ‘TODAY!!!’. “Right,” Mark sighed. “That.” There was a sudden rapping at his door and Mark jumped. “Come on Bounty Bar, we’ve got stuff to do today!” “How many times have I told you not to call me that!” Mark snapped back, storming over to his door and wrenching it open to reveal a smiling Sky Blue. “Bounty, twenty three times, Bounty Bar, ninety seven.” Sky grinned. “We’re just three angry outbursts from a full century.” Mark just stared at the blue pony for a moment. “How do you remember this stuff?” “It’s mostly bull,” Sky admitted, then beat her wings. “Come on, time for our morning run.” “Sky I was-” Mark began, but Sky had already turned and was cantering down the corridor. “Oh come on,” Mark muttered and hurried after her. “So how’s the big project coming on?” she asked him, as they made their way down the, now much simplified, halls of Celestia’s palace. Mark sighed, kicking himself for taking the easy way out. “Oh okay. There’s a truly horrifying number of books blank or corrupted and there doesn’t seem to be any real pattern behind the loss. Right now I’m just indexing everything to filter out the pony novels and get to the real ones.” Sky chuffed. “You shouldn’t be so down on the pony stuff. Some of those books Farquest lent me were pretty good.” “Yeah, but they aren’t real literature,” Mark protested. “They aren’t part of history. You know I’m having to rewrite The Canterbury Tales from memory.” “Isn’t one of those stories just about a woman cheating on her husband?” “There’s quite a bit more to it than that, but that does happen,” Mark growled between clenched teeth. “But regardless, it’s part of who we are, where we came from. I can’t just let that fade away.” “As we’re just code and you still remember it, can it actually fade away?” Sky looked thoughtful for a moment then shook herself, tossing her mane back and forth and breaking Mark’s chain of thought. “Anyway, that’s far too philosophical for this early in the morning. Let's run.” She set off at gallop, the palace grounds vanishing beneath her hooves, bone-white tail streaming behind her. Mark shook himself and took off after her, putting his head down and pouring everything he could through his legs. As always, as the sheer speed the pegasus could manage sunk in, Mark wondered whether he should just edit himself a turbo-button but, as always, that would be cheating. It was only after a half mile that Mark’s earth pony nature began to pay off and he caught up, though that was enough time to get them to the edge of the world. Canterlot was an incomplete place, much was just the facade of a city, enough to keep ponies distracted while CelestAI filled in the world around them, but with her offline it was all to easy to run into invisible walls. Well, after a few times running into them Mark had learned the signs; a sudden boundary of low textured backgrounds was a good hint. “Come on, just once round today,” Sky continued, breathing hard as the pair ran side-by-side alongside one of the walls. “I’ve got a tower brewing and I need to watch it today.” “Sky fortress progressing apace then?” Mark shot back, also panting as he tried to keep pace with the fleet-footed pegasus. “Heh, you know it. You know, if someone had said that heaven would be Minecraft for the rest of eternity I would have signed up for the brain sushi program much sooner.” Mark rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to hurt the mood. The pair ran on in silence until they reached the skywall of Canterlot, a set of low crenellations that had a fantastic view of all Equestria. Mark always found it bittersweet. After all, you couldn’t get to the rest of Equestria, no matter how hard you tried. Instead all you had to look at was a pretty oil painting of possibility. In some ways he found that reflected his life far more than it should have. Sky Blue slammed open her wings, lifting off from the parapet and hurled herself towards the barrier. For a moment Mark thought she was going to slam into it, like a bird into a window, but she arrested herself just in time and peered through. “What?” Mark demanded. “What did you see?” “I saw... I thought I saw another pegasus,” Sky admitted, drifting away. “It’s gone now.” “Grey colour, bobbed up and down while flying?” Mark asked, leaning over the parapet. “Yeah, I just caught it out of the corner of my eye.” Mark sighed. “It’s part of the background loop. She comes around every eighteen hours or so. She’s not real.” Sky slumped in mid air before slowly drifting back to the parapet. “H’ell,” she muttered, clicking her tongue halfway through the avoid the censorship. Mark put a foreleg around her shoulders. “Sky, I know this is probably a weird question but are you happy?” Sky just smiled at him. “Well, it’s funny but sometimes just not being dead isn’t enough, you know?” She shook her head and pushed him gently away with a wing. “There are moments when you look at the walls of the universe and just want to step beyond them just because they’re there. I’m not unhappy, but... well, I do wish things would change sometimes.” Some part of Mark was screaming at him to ask her now or never, and reminding him that never would be a sod of a long time. “Sky, how about we-” A bell went off next to Mark’s ear and he jumped, looking around wildly before realising he’d just been messaged. He tried again. “Sky, how about-” This time Sky chimed, she rolled her eyes and ignored it. “Yes?” “Sky, I was wondering if-” A loud clanging began to ring in both their ears and the ponies winced. “I think Farquest wants to talk to us,” Sky told him. “Yeah I got that. Thanks,” Mark growled. He flicked to his HUD and opened the message from Farquest. ‘Meetingroom. NOW.’ “Well that was refreshingly blunt.” Sky tapped out a quick message. “He’s not the most subtle of ponies I’ll admit. Come on, let’s fly.” She’d given Mark wings before finishing the sentence, though it took him a few seconds longer to realise and by then, Sky Blue was in the air. Mark hurled himself after her and struggled through the air in a vain effort to keep up. They’d never found a way to make Mark or Farquest natural fliers and, even after six months practice, Sky Blue outpaced him with ease. There was speculation that CelestAI had rejigged Sky’s mind to make her an instinctive flyer, but Mark suspected that only the lack of wings had kept her human form tied to the ground. The pair reached the palace and landed on one of the upper balconies. Neither bothered wasting time navigating the halls so just linked up the nearest door to the meeting room and stepped through. “There you are,” Farquest snapped, pausing in mid pace. “We were supposed to meet here at dawn for weekly reports.” Sky and Mark shared a look. “That’s on a Monday,” Mark pointed out; Farquest’s expression of righteous indignation didn’t change. “It’s Wednesday, you’re two days late.” Farquest looked blank. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Mark rolled his eyes. “You blocked all our messages. Again, and if we’re being honest, your lair creeps me out.” “It’s not a lair,” Farquest snapped, storming over to the main table. “It’s a lab and there’s nothing dangerous or creepy about it.” “I tasted purple for three days last time I went in there,” Mark shot back. “I don’t even know how that’s possible!” “Well you shouldn’t touch anything.” Farquest took a chair and rapped a hoof on the table. “Now, can we begin?” The conference room was as ostentatious as the rest of the castle. A huge oak table that could have moonlighted as a boat sat at the center, embossed with a stylised symbol of the sun. Around it were a dozen thrones, set so far apart that you had to shout to be heard; the trio had hacked three to be right next to each other several months ago and sat customary seats. Farquest in the center, Mark to his right and Sky Blue to his left. Farquest cleared his throat and began. “Now, as you know I’ve been researching the CelestAI failure and... well I’ve had a breakthrough, to say the least.” He summoned a haze of floating screens before him. “Do you remember the puzzle?” “Oh, the one Mark called CelestAI’s trap?” Sky interjected, squinting at the diagrams. “Yes, that one,” Farquest grumbled. “I’ve cracked it.” Mark blinked, he hadn’t seen that one coming. “Farquest, that was supposed to be unbreakable encryption,” he pointed out, slowly. “We dismissed it as impossible.” “You may have thought so, but no.” Farquest couldn’t keep the smug grin off his face. “With the CelestAI non-functional and not trying to fight against me it was merely incredibly difficult. Last week I managed to get root access to the entire mainframe.” He paused for dramatic effect and was immediately interrupted by Sky. “Wait, we don’t have admin access already?” she asked, raising a hoof. “Root is the step above what we have,” Farquest explained. “We now have the editing privileges of Celestia herself.” He beamed. “I’m beginning to see why we haven’t see you for a week,” Mark sighed, shaking his head. “So, does this help? Because I don’t know about you but blindly poking around at the structure of the universe doesn’t seem like a brilliant idea to me.” Both Farquest and Sky shrugged. “We’re never going to find out what happened if we just sit here preening,” Sky pointed out. “Trust me, I’m not going to randomly start changing files, I did do this kind of thing for a living you know.” Farquest took a moment to consult his screens. “Right. Well, I’ve also done some analysis of the disaster. Actually, it’s fair to say that there really has been a disaster.” He pulled up a couple of pie charts that were almost complete red circles with a couple pixels of blue. “These represent the index files of the entire system. I have a program running, trying to find the loss rate for every file, but it’s going to take months. Anyway, the red regions are files that are corrupted or simply lost.” Mark blinked. “That’s pretty much every file.” “Thank you captain obvious,” Farquest drawled. “Yes, in any terrestrial system I’d say the loss was catastrophic and write off the whole system but... Well, at a rough guess that blue sliver still represents a terrifying amount of data, possibly more data than humanity has ever generated in its entire existence.” “What about the AI?” All eyes turned to Sky. “Well, that’s the important question. The automatic systems didn’t save CelestAI, so what do her files look like?” Farquest drooped. “I was hoping to save that till last. Less than two percent of Celestia’s files survived the disaster, and that’s after automatic systems rebuilt everything they could. At this time there’s no sign of any autonomous editing, nor anything more than complicated than background functions. I think-” he paused, took a deep breath and continued. “I think she’s dead.” There was utter silence for a long moment. Mark had to physically stop himself singing ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’. “What the hell could kill an AI?” Sky exclaimed. “Someone nuking her datacenter, maybe.” Farquest shrugged. Mark rolled his eyes, rustling his feathers nervously. “I think the more pertinent question is how did we survive?” Farquest closed his eyes and brought up a trio of diagrams, also almost entirely red. “Ninety percent of our minds were wiped, the rest was corrupted beyond recovery save for a very, very small segment.” The brown pegasus tore his eyes away from the charts. “We’re corrupted?” “No, the system is fairly smart and we had a major advantage.” Farquest zoomed in on three blue segments and highlighted them. “These are our memories from when we were humans; self contained, preserved and functional.” He zoomed back out. “Everything else is from when we were ponies. That data is massively interlocked and corrupted beyond repair, so the system just dumped it when it tried to start us and left us with the human memories.” Mark dropped his head into his hooves and began to massage his temples. “This is nuts.” “It’s the data,” Farquest admitted. “And I’ve spent three days checking it.” “How many memories have we lost?” Sky inquired, pulling her chart towards her and examining it closer. “Not a clue, it very much depends on the relative sizes of pony memories versus human ones. Could be as little as a hundred years, could be millenia, could be billions of years of experiences for all I know.” “Well, I did not expect to be having an existential crisis this morning but well done,” Mark grumbled. “You’ve certainly managed a good one there.” Farquest grinned. “Side effect of the singularity it seems.” “That still doesn’t answer the question as to why us though,” Sky mused, still pouring over her screen. “Could there be others we can boot up in the same way?” “I don’t know for sure but I haven’t found any examples of a human seed.” Farquest frowned. “There’s probably a better way of phrasing that. Until I complete a search of all the surviving files I won't be able to tell, but it’s not looking hopeful. Any naturally generated ponies won't have a seed like us and, well, not losing it to the corruption is rather akin to winning a cosmic lottery as far as I can tell.” Sky grimaced, wrapping her wings around herself. “And it was looking to be such a nice day.” “Yeah, I hate to be the bringer of bad news.” Farquest sighed, eliciting an incredulous look from Mark that passed without comment. “Still, I’m going to keep researching the CelestAI problem. Now we have root access we can really start making changes and h’ell, if no one comes to rescue us we have all the tools here to build our own CelestAI.” Mark decided he didn’t want to get into an argument over that again. “So, is that it? Mystery solved?” “Well, we don’t know why the data loss occurred,” Farquest admitted, mournfully. “But I don’t see how we can from inside; next on my list is to try and understand the CelestAI functions and maybe try and rebuild some of the lost processes. I would quite like a cutie mark after all these years.” “A what?” Mark exclaimed, biting back a laugh. “Cutie mark? The h’ell is that?” Farquest shot him a nasty look then glanced over to Sky for support; she looked as bemused as Mark though. “Seriously, have you not found a copy of the show yet?” “I’ll admit I haven’t really looked for it.” “Urgh.” Farquest ran a hoof through his mane. “Cutie marks denoted a pony’s special destiny; in Equestria Online they were given out by Celestia when she thought you were ready but-” he spared a rather mournful glance for his blank flank. “-well, that doesn’t seem to be an option any more.” “You know, I’m not sure I like my destiny being determined by a cartoon horse,” Mark admitted. “We are well aware of your opinions on the matter,” Farquest growled. “Perhaps-” “Perhaps we should leave it there,” Sky interjected, before yet another argument started. “Unless you have any other world shattering news for us?” Farquest shrugged. “Nothing to top that.” He smothered a yawn. “And I haven’t slept in about three days, so I probably should get some shuteye before digging any deeper.” “We’d all appreciate it if you didn’t try any late night creation sessions,” Sky admitted, managing to keep a polite smile on her face. “Shall I escort you to your room?” “Nah, I’m still running enough of an adrenaline high to get home. I’ll send you guys root access tomorrow and we can start trying to suss out this world.” He stood, shook himself and then vanished. “Thanks, Sky,” Mark sighed, dropping in head into his hooves when he was sure Farquest wasn’t coming back. “Hey, I don’t want to be trapped between you two arguing for all eternity,” she shot back with a grin, and shuffled between chairs. “So?” “So,” Mark agreed. He flicked himself back to earth pony mode. He often found himself doing that when he was stressed, it was a comfort thing. “I wasn’t expecting him to break that code.” Sky Blue shuddered and wrapped her wings around herself again. “I’m more worried about the news about our reality.” “That Farquest is planning on d’king around with it?” Sky shot him a look. “Stop being such a boy. I was talking about the fact we’re sitting in a graveyard.” Mark looked blank. “Mark, did you see how many ponies were lost? There were trillions of lives worth of data in the corrupted sections.” “Trillions?” he echoed. Somehow the number just didn’t seem to register when talking about cartoon ponies. “At least,” she pressed. “I remember a story about a woman who was aboard a plane when it broke apart. She fell thirty thousand feet strapped to her chair and walked away from the crash because the wreckage of the fuselage broke her fall. I know how she felt right now.” Mark tried to process that, he really did. The idea of a disaster of such a scale that only a trio of individuals could walk away from among a crowd larger than every human who’d ever lived, just didn’t register. It couldn’t. His idea of death of that magnitude required a nuke going off, and he was fairly sure he hadn’t wandered into the Fallout branch of Equestria. Instead he asked. “Where did trillions of ponies come from?” Sky slumped. “Maybe CelestAI just hit copy/paste until she made up the numbers. We’re digital simulations. It’s not hard to imagine how they were created! The important point is that they’re now dead.” “Okay, okay, chill,” Mark said, rubbing her shoulder. “Does it matter?” For a moment Sky looked like she was going to explode with anger, then she visibly forced herself to take a calming breath. Then she paused, cocked her head and sighed. “You know what, I guess it doesn’t.” She let out a bitter snort of laughter. “God, I spent two years not expecting to see the next month and now discovering I outlived billions of ponies makes me upset. I hate my brain sometimes.” “Would you...” Mark began, then swallowed the lump that had formed in his throat. “Would you like to do something to take your mind off it all?” Sky frowned at him. “I found a cache of old movies,” he continued in a rush, dropping into his rehearsed speech. “Mostly anime actually, but-” “Oh!” Sky beamed, spreading her wings wide and jumping up onto her chair. “Did you find Princess Mononoke?” “I - yes.” “That’s perfect!” Sky exclaimed. “That was one of my favorite movies as a kid, it’ll cheer me up no problem.” “Great, umm...” Mark bit the bullet and went for it. “I was thinking we could make a pizza and call it a-” He squeaked the last word. “-date.” Sky furled her wings and looked at Mark in confusion. “Yeah, okay. You get the pizza together and I’ll whip up a theater.” She leapt into the air and in a rush of blue feathers was gone. Mark slumped, breathing hard and unable to keep the grin off his face. “Well what do you know. I’ve got a date,” he said, more to hear the words than anything else. Somehow, asking Sky out had been far more terrifying than anything else said around the table that day. He shrugged. That seemed reasonable to him.