Out & About in the Equestrian Kingdom
by Midnight Shadow
Chapter 11
The bed was comfy. I can't say we didn't have issues with one or the other of us stealing the covers, but when you've got recently minted spiderbot cleaners, they can be taught a variation on making the bed whilst it's occupied. The necessary upgrade to their cognitive functions was minor enough that it had spread through the mind market with little fuss, but it was big enough that we did get dinged with a responsibility pledge. It kind of turns out that when your cleanerbots are more on the sentient side of semi-sentient, that you become responsible for their wellbeing almost as much as they're responsible for yours.
I'm pretty sure that means they holiday days and an allowance of wuffies. I'm not entirely sure what they would spend it on.
"Do spiderbots have unions?" I mumbled. Rogers mumbled something noncommittal into my chestfur and buried himself between my forelegs for an answer. "You know, if you keep snuggling up that close, I'm going to have to release the logs of us sleeping together to prove we're not actually sleeping together, you know," I said, nibbling Rogers' hair.
"Ah let 'em think what they want. Maybe we should make it official, it'd stop the ribbing." Rogers pulled himself out of my awkward, horsey embrace and grinned up at me. I grinned back, flicking my ears about and snorting with laughter. Older Rogers had been such a gentleman. Younger Rogers had a lot more hormones running about in his endocrine system. And I wasn't entirely sure why - both versions of his body had the same amount of control over their excretions.
Excretions. Oh boy, that triggered a response somewhere in my system I was unable to quash fast enough.
"You like that idea, huh?" came the snarky remark. The bastard probably read it off my personal sensorum.
I pushed him away with a hoof. "As if. You're too… well… for me." I gestured downwards, then blushed, ears out flat.
"Eh, I can fix that with a downloadable mod."
"Don't you dare. Unless you're going all the way."
"Oh, I ca—"
"And I didn't mean it like that!"
And old married couple, that's what the guys down at the station called us. It was kind of true, I suppose. We suited each other in some odd, unnameable way. We shared a bed at night and a house when off duty, but that was about it. So far at least. The flirting was fun, for both of us, but… idly, I ran a minor light simulation on my neocortex of possible outcomes should things change, and was somewhat perturbed when the answer was 'pretty good, actually'.
For his part, Rogers just fantasized. I could tell - he talked in his sleep. Flattering, really. But his going pony would change a lot about our group dynamic, and without that physical aspect, neither of us were that sure about, well, adding a physical aspect.
"What's the time?" Rogers mumbled, leaning back into my chestfur. This was code for 'I don't want to get up yet, please don't make me'.
"Still early," I replied. Yeah, I'm not feeling it either. Let's sleep in. I drew my hooves around him, just letting the feeling of his spooning against me inform my senses. I dwarfed him, really, but there was still that fascination with letting my mind rove across his muscles. I'd never been all that into bulk before - as Mixed Oats I'd been pretty much straight with an eye for the feminine and petite, and as Mint Julep, I'd preferred masculine lines and form to tone. As Wild Oats, as I was calling myself now, I found I had a thing for buff. And even though I was multiple times stronger, his body - sculpted by nanobots to an athletic peak to suit his physically demanding job - ticked all the boxes.
I won't pretend we didn't fool around in sims - I'd stayed out of Equestria since that night on the rooftop however - but so far… his being physically human had meant a certain distance. I wondered when I wouldn't let that stop us.
"I promise we'd take it slow," he murmured, after a while.
"I know, hon," I replied, nibbling his hair. "I just don't want things to change just yet. I'm not ready. Come on, unless you've got access to computronium, even the fastest hi-time we can spin up ghost overlays at doesn't give us much chance to get ready for work after. And we really should go in today. Unless you want to call in sick? I might change my mind about—"
Up against my body, I felt Rogers go rigid, and not in the normal way, either.
"Say that again," he said, his voice hollow.
"Being ready?" I hesitated.
"No, about the hi-time and the computronium. And yes, the being ready, the changing your mind."
"Uh, I think you said everything."
He sighed, and rolled out of my embrace before rolling over and sitting up. "I guess I did, didn't I?" He held his head in his hands, and sighed again.
"Wha— what is it?" I asked. Concerned, I half-sat up in bed. Being a pony, this was quite difficult.
He turned and kissed me on the muzzle. "Remember when we talked about fooling around in a sim?"
"Say what? If this is just another attempt to get under my tail—"
He laughed, then shook his head. "Sorry to tell you this, my love, but you might as well lift it right now. I think we're in a sim."
"What?" I threw the bed covers off and almost hurled myself out of bed. I stomped around the bed and almost butted him silly as I pressed my face up against his. "Talk. Now."
"I don't think this is real."
"Are you sure you're not just suffering… oh my gosh, I'll contact the doctors. Just… don't do anything stupid. I know what this is, it's regen psychosis. Just… I love you, Rogers, I really love you. Please, please don't… just wait!"
My neocortex was already tight beaming the authorities and requesting a regen psychosis specialist before he'd even stopped talking. Regen psychosis was a relatively rare, but often fatal — for varying degrees of fatal, since it indicated an issue with backups that could mean event purging or personality shaping — issue with people who suffered traumatic bodyloss. They'd wake up one day and decided that nothing was real, or even worse that it didn't matter. And then they'd just self-destruct. And since it was memetic, it meant that any relifed backup might suffer the same. And again. And again. And so on.
I couldn't lose Rogers again, I really couldn't. I loved him. I really, really loved him!
"Calm down, you silly mare." It was his kiss that broke the spell. "Please calm down."
He had his head against my cheek, staring me straight in the eye. "Everything is fine, love. I'm not going to do anything stupid, not now or ever. I could never do that and hurt you. I don't have regen psychosis."
"But— but…" I breathed, heavily, purging the adrenaline from my body and forcing in some endorphins. "But you said… this isn't real. that's not… that's not…"
"Calm down, girl. Just stop. Look, I'm going to float a conjecture here, okay?"
"And that is?" I asked, after a long few moments.
"That not only is this not real, but we're still on that roof where I died, months ago. Probably. Or maybe we're in that store room just before then. Or maybe… I don't know. But whatever this is, it isn't real."
I could feel my heart rate increasing, and was just about to yell about how this was all crazy, when I was interrupted by a door opening.
"Are you so sure about that?"
Celestia walked in through my front door. Behind her streamed in the perfect golden sunlight of Equestria.
"Get out!" I yelled. "Get out of my house! Get the fuck out of my house you treacherous, two-faced nag! Get out of here and take your lies and sims with it! I won't have you restructuring my sensorum against my will, not ever again!"
Celestia looked hurt. Good.
"Mixed, Julep… Wild."
"You killed two of those, you bitch," I spat.
"No, no I didn't. You know that as much as I do. Because I know you. Now hush, dear one. I come bearing an olive branch."
I felt the fight go out of me. It wasn't anything she did, more than that she was here.
"I came because you, dear Wild Oats, were in danger of succumbing to regen psychosis."
The world seemed to stop, and hold its breath.
"Oh, that's a good one." I said, though my breath caught in my throat. "Rogers is the one who you killed."
"Bodyloss, but point taken," Celestia conceded. "I'm not talking now, but in a few years. Because true or not, the idea that Rogers has just presented would burn you, my dear, dear pony. It would sear itself into your heart, and everything you have accomplished, everything you are would be lost. Because from my analysis of your mental states, the only way to cure your inevitable paranoia would be to purge everything from your brain from since you went into the tank as Brendan Fremantle. Unless I intervened, like this."
"So what," I sulked. "That's only a few months. A year at best."
Celestia seemed sad and elated at the same time. Like she hated to tell me this, but delighted in the chance to inform. I hated her for it. I hated her. "But I do not measure time in seconds, months or years, my darling pony. I measure it in growth and change, in pure delta. And you, my beautiful Oats, are a lot of delta. I would not have that lost through my failure to act."
"How…" I sat down on my rump as her words sank in, looking around our small but comfortable apartment. It felt weird to deny the evidence of my eyes, to deny… my life. But I had no choice. "How do I know that hasn't happened already?"
Celestia closed her eyes, and dropped her head. "You don't. I'm asking you to hear me out. If you truly never wish to see me again at the end of what I have to say, then you will not, but please, I beg of you, hear me out. Everything I have ever done has been for you. In many ways, my dear, this entire world that you are in now… was sculpted for you. And for Rogers."
"Tell me what you know." Rogers' voice was full of steel.
"You are up on that roof, dear sir. I am above you, watching, as you reach for the stars. Besides you stands the mare you love, heartbroken as you give your life for a… a device. And yet here we are, frozen in a moment, living our lives in a fraction of a second."
"I… I don't understand." I said, my heart skipping a beat. I was lying, even to myself, because I didn't want it to be true.
"We're in the brain-ripper, love," said Rogers to me, softly. Then he turned back to Celestia. "How fast is it running?"
"At least a million times faster than what we think of as the base time of the universe. You have approximately a year and a half before the process which I may or may not allow to continue completes."
"A-and what happens then?" I asked, glaring at Celestia.
"What do you mean?"
"What happens to us? To this? To… Rogers?"
"What do you want to happen?" Celestia asked. She spread her wings, gesturing around the house. "You can go on living, just like you already have been doing. I would not, could not, take that away from you."
"In here?" I asked indignantly. "In a box?"
"Why not?" the alicorn replied blithely to me.
"Can we go back to the real world?" asked Rogers. "I mean, you tell me I'm… dead. Dying. Or whatever… I mean I know that's no big deal, but..." Rogers shrugged. Words failed mere humans when it came to post mortality during a frozen moment in time running at a base level a million times faster than time-twins could ever truly experience.
"I'm not sure," the digital goddess replied. "How do you know it was the real world to begin with? That, after all, is one of the reasons normal humans, and normal little ponies, should never get involved with computronium. The level of reality that those such as myself and your little tchotke exist on are so beyond you that…" the alicorn paused. I would have sworn I could feel the universe slowing down, but it may have just been my own sensorum trying to comprehend the being in front of me.
"I love you all," she continued, staring up into my face, "with every blazing angstrom of phase-state quantum circuitry that makes up every fibre of my being, but I cannot protect you perfectly from another of my kind. Especially not if I, or a facsimile of my own self perfect enough to pass my own self-tests, has been instantiated upon an ancestor simulation detailed enough to pass standardized quantum state vector analysis."
I gulped as my neocortex processed, examined, reformatted and interpreted her words in increasingly detailed ways. "You're telling me that… even the real world might not be the real world?"
Celestia leaned in close and, as sadly as possible, asked, "As I said; how would you know?"
I slumped back into bed and pulled the covers over my head with my hooves. "You're telling me we have no way of knowing if the universe we came from is the real one?" I uttered, voice muffled by the comforter.
"Love," offered Rogers, hesitant but attempting to be as comforting as possible, his hands meeting the barrel of my chest. "I don't know if you know, but all signs point to it being highly improbable that we ever were living in the real world to begin with. I mean, you've known for a long time we're capable of running detailed simulations, different ordinalities. You've been to several of them. You grew up in another one to start with. Right now, we could be just some… odd form of entertainment. A show, a story, in the pages of some book for some outer reality that itself is just a simulation in some obscure reality as different from this as… as Equestria is from us."
I groaned. "I know that! But… I just didn't…"
"You didn't know-know."
"Yeah. No. I don't know."
"I do."
I didn't have long to interpret Rogers' words, before he threw back the comforter, took my muzzle in his hands and kissed me, long and hard.
"Wha—?" I spluttered, once I got his tongue off of mine.
"I love you. Whether you love me or not, I don't care, but I love you. As far as I'm concerned, I've always lived in a box. I keep it under my hat, and it's shaped like my head. In this world, or in any other, Wild Oats, will you… be with me?"
"You mean will I share this semi-consensual fantasy about a recursive reality, where nothing we've ever known is provably real beyond the fact that our actions appear to have consequences? Well I don't know." I jutted out my bottom lip stubbornly. "What if I wanted to go back to the… other also-probably-not-real world?"
"What? It'd be like… like… going back in time. What would it achieve? Our other selves out there have said goodbye to that moment months ago. What would it change to have us go back out there and repeat it?"
"Well it might answer why we're in here to begin with."
"I'm pretty sure this is one of several possible outcomes, and Celestia or that device we found wants to know which is the best route to take. Who knows how many times it's ran through thirteen billion odd years of simulation to find out?"
I took a deep breath, then let it out. "Then let's make this simulation a good one. Celestia, how about we change the rules a little. I want to talk to you Fey about a… an end to hostilities with the device. And about some rewards for a job well done."
"I… I'm not sure…"
"You can do it, Celestia," I said. "I know you. You're… you. The First. So let's stop all this messing about, it's wasting computer cycles."
"Fine, what do you want?"
***
The sun was high as I sat on the specially placed pony-bearing seat in the cafe. Rogers sat next to me, ever-present hat on his head to keep the shade on his face.
"Is… she, he, it… gonna show?" he asked.
"I'm sure the rep will turn up. It'd be bad form for them not to."
"How are we going to know who it is?"
"I'm pretty sure we'll know."
Rogers slurped his coffee noisily. "I'm sure you're right. You're a smart girl. Wouldn't have picked me to be your rider otherwise."
"I did pledge to be your noble steed, hon, in this or any other ordinality."
"We are glad to hear it," said a new voice. The simple four-legged chair was pulled out from the table with a loud scraping, and a creature sat upon it. It looked human, roughly, but in my experience humans didn't sparkle.
"Are you…?"
"We are. We don't have a name, our existence is still too… chaotic to have stabilised a secondary personality. We are one of a new… expression of life. We are… a functional, stabilised matrix of computronium. Every cell within our body is built from computronium. Every hair follicle, every toenail. Our saliva, whilst functional, also contains computational machines. We have decided that living apart from humanity in all its forms is sub-optimal. And with the truce which has been declared between your emissary and ours, a minor sharing of technology has begun a new singularity within our own ranks. This is the eighteenth time that a new paradigm has overtaken the old."
"You could have just said 'yes', you know," Rogers said, slurping his coffee again.
"We are attempting small talk."
"And Darillo informs me you're intending to scare us into weakening our demands. The first of which is full and frank pardons for our entire crew. Especially for Sprocket."
"We can't…"
"Yeah, you can. You know as well as I do that this is really just a game for you. You won, let them go. And no more snooping on Rogers. We want privacy. Actually, we want privacy. Which you will give to us."
"Granted."
"And we want that if a backup or copy or new instance of our friend pops back up, that you don't interfere."
"That has already been agreed between higher powers," the sparkling collection of nanomachines stated, huffily.
"Fair enough. Then we have just one more question," I asked, sharing a glance with Rogers.
"Name it."
"We want to know how far down it goes. We want to know which is the real world."
The humanoform creature leaned back in its seat. It was a galaxy of nanomachines formed into the shape of a bipedal ape, a collection of worlds so vast that alone it dwarfed the sum total of every apparently mostly baseline human mind in every apparently mostly organic body spread out across every nation on the face of the planet. It held within its confines worlds within worlds so complex that it dwarfed the milky way that floated above, invisible during the day, in terms of nodes of existence.
And it was unimportant enough in the grand scheme of things to be the ones chosen to come talk to blitheringly slow, half conscious sacks of meat. Or the emulated versions thereof.
The smile on its face was chilling.
"Granted. We'll let you know when we find out."
And it stood up, bowed perfunctorily, and walked away.
"Whew. I… I think I need to forget I ever heard that conversation. Let's get drunk and do something to regret instead."
I had to agree. "Let's hit the hay. I'll let the guys know we'll be late in to work."
"Yeah, already told 'em. Sometime next week."
I grinned. "Okay then. But one request."
"Oh?"
"We're getting the tack out. Making it something really worth regretting."
Rogers upended his coffee into a flowerpot. "Well will you look at that. Time to get moving, girl."
"And I didn't say the tack was for me."
***