"There is little stopping us from creating our own cybernetic post-pony tyrant and the idea that so many ponies embrace it scares me.”
Moon Light on the dangers of creating Artificial Intelligence.
Act 1: Celestia ex machine
Naomi Legrange was getting really impatient as she looked at her comlink once again to check the time; barely two minutes had passed from the last time she had checked. She looked angrily to the heavy doors that blocked her way out.
“Stupid pony holiday…” She muttered under her breath, she was supposed to be meeting with her friends on the old city to buy new clothes, but her mother decided it would be best for her to spend some quality time with her little pony sister and sent the two of them to buy heartwarming eve’s gift to their dad.
Naomi gave a quick look to were her little sister was playing with some other fillies; the orange filly was easy to find at least and she seemed completely undisturbed with the damned lock down; playing with some creepy doll one of the fillies had brought with her.
With certain disgust Naomi noticed that one of the fillies had cybernetic eyes; what kind of parent would give those implants to a child? Those ponies were crazy!
The speakers come to life with another message saying that absolutely everything was fine, they shouldn’t worry, and everything would be sorted out in just a few more minutes.
She checked her comlink, they were saying that for at least half an hour now and so far no signal from the doors opening sometime soon; she had heard some rumors that there was a door open on the other side of the arcology, but the transportation system was down and walking there was no easy task. If she had been alone, she probably would have tried it, but there was no way she would be able to convince her little sister to walk such a distance without lots of crying and whining.
She asked for a milkshake through her comlink and tried to connect with the outside once again without success… It probably was some stupid marketing ploy from the guys upstairs to make them buy more stuff. Who knows, maybe they would keep them locked all the night and then try to sell them hotel rooms! She could try to play some ‘Battleduty: Alicornfall’, but Gilt would probably want to kill her if he knew she played without him.
She smiled thinking about the nerdy colt, maybe she could buy something for him later… Where is her little sister?! She got up from her place looking angrily around; she had told her a thousand times to stay close!
“Wire?” Naomi screamed for her little sister amidst the confusion of ponies that was around her. “Live Wire! Come here immediately!” She screamed again, where that stupid filly could have gone?
She run to one of the security guards, a pony in a red security uniform and some blue armband, she hoped it meant he was higher rank.
“Hey, mister, can you help me? My little sister is missing!” Naomi tried anxiously.
The security officer stared at her with could blue cybernetic eyes and said nothing.
“Come on! Don’t be like that!” Naomi screamed at him and as she turned to continue her search she heard other screams coming from the ponies around her; names being shouted repeatedly on the air, ponies running around like crazy searching everywhere.
No, it couldn’t be happening! She kept screaming for Live Wire as loud as she could, but her screams got lost in the midst of so many others.
Ponies rushed to the security officers begging for help and the kept their stone dead silence; at least they are morons and not simply racists, Naomi thought. Soon things got physical, some angry parent tried to attack one of the officers and he got tasered; his wife took him away screaming bloody murder about suing him out of his lungs.
Naomi closed her eyes and took a long breathe; this was not the time to get angry. Ponies got angry and scared for any stupid reason, but she wasn’t a pony. While their ancestors were eating grass in green plains, her ancestors had been hunting trough dangerous mountains and making tools out of stone and wood.
She searched in her purse until she found her little sister’s coat; her mother had insisted that she would carry it around in case Wire got cold, now she blessed her mother’s foresight. She pressed the coat against her beak and sniffed profoundly, her ancestors had evolved to hunt by vision, but their sense of smell was well developed too.
She zoned out the confusion around her, another parent had been violently subdued by another officer, and followed her nose. The trail was faint, but she managed to follow it through the food plaza and into an elevator…
She cursed herself, there was no way she could keep following her sisters if she had took an elevator to some random floor; hell, with all those bugs around she could have ended in some of the dangerous floors! Naomi shivered at the tough of her little sister walking around in the middle of some automated factory or even playing in the middle of one of the nuclear reactors.
No, she couldn’t give up so easily! She took the stairs and in each floor she sniffed searching for her sister’s particular smell or even the smell of other fillies. She found the traces of smell of foals in almost every floor, all of them always leading into the elevators.
She was getting really uneasy; by the time she heard the staccato of explosions coming from the lower floors she knew there was something really wrong. She clicked on her comlink quickly trying to contact Lone Star, even though she only had a bronze contract she was almost sure that this kind of shit was covered.
A heavy hoof on her shoulders brought her back to reality; one of those mall-security ponies with blue cyber eyes and a blue band on his right hoof was measuring her with his eyes.
“Are you lost?” He asked and Naomi was suddenly aware of the pistol in a hoof holster, weren’t those mall cops supposed to only have tasers or things like that?
“No, I’m just looking for my sister.” Naomi took off his hoof from her shoulder and took a step behind; she looked around and found no one in sight. “Great,” she thought “I’ll probably be shot seven times as a warning.”
“Come with me, we have found your sister and she is waiting for you.” The guard said with an automatic smile that seemed unnatural to Naomi, his facial expressions was just slightly off and those blue cybernetic eyes weren’t helping.
He extended a hoof to her. “Everything will be alright, madam.”
Now she knew that something was really wrong, no security guard had ever talked to her so politely! She took a step back and the guard took a moment to notice her hesitation.
“Come with me now. Your sister awaits you.” He said again and not a hint of anger or annoyance in his voice.
“Bring her here then! I’m not coming with you.” Naomi looked desperately around her, but the floor seemed empty, the sound of the staccato explosion keep coming from downstairs in intervals and now something that she could swear were the screams of ponies came too.
The cop reached for his pistol with his mouth, but Naomi charged him before he could do anything; the teen had grown up amidst play fights and bouts amongst the griffins.
Naomi and the cop flew to the ground; the gun flew from the cop’s mouth and Naomi tried to jump away before the guard could recover from the surprise attack, she hadn’t had any fantasy of winning against the trained pony in a fair fight, but at least she could get away and hide. The pony grabbed one of her forelegs with long metallic fingers that protruded from the tip of his hooves.
She felt to the ground with a loud thud and immediately she felt the taste of blood on her mouth; the pony grabbed her other foot and begun to pull her closer. She twisted and clawed at the pony’s face with her long claws, but no blood was spilled; he seemed to have some kind of protective mesh under his skin.
The cop punched her, his hoof and metallic fingers packed quite a punch, but Naomi knew how to take a beating; she hit him twice on the head with both of her wings, even though they were useless for flight, they still worked pretty well as a solid knot of muscle and bones pretty similar to a punch. Stunned for a moment the cop let her go and Naomi dived for his gun, knowing that there was no way she could win against him unarmed.
“Stop!” She screamed as she held the gun with both paws and took a step back; she had played enough shooters and saw enough action movies to know that if she allowed him to close the distance she would lose her advantage.
The guard charged at her and she dodged out of his way, barely escaping from having her head feathers pulled by the pony. She held the gun pointed at him, breathing quickly and barely being able to see through her bruised left eye.
The cop tried to charge again and this time she shoots him while praying that her parents were right and all those violent videogames had indeed turned her into a cold killer!
She misses entirely and the pony punches her hard on the beak making her lose conscience for an instant.
She realized she had lost at that moment, her conscience holding by a thin thread as the pony kept punching her repeatedly; she still tried to claw at him, but her talons couldn’t pierce his sub-dermal armour and she couldn’t muster the strength to escape from his grip.
Painfully she slipped into unconscious.
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Aura was being unmade by tens of skeletal metallic arms that ended in hands of ten fingers each one with a different medical instrument; they worked silently and quickly stripping the artificial flesh that covered her cybernetic implants and for the first time in a long time Aura could see how little of pony she still had. Both her fore and after hooves had been replaced entirely with metallic implants; her eyes were both cybernetic; there was an array of small wires, now exposed, that run from her ears to implants deep into her brain; under her skin was a subdermal armour made of a mesh of Kevlar; and she knew that if the machines dug even deeper they would find her bones laced with ceramic and the artificial glands installed next to her heart.
She tried to move, but it seemed that her hooves had been deactivated and even though she could look around all that she could see were the medical drones, the grey metallic restraints that kept her suspended so the drones could work and the pure ascetic white walls with no door. She had had nightmares like this constantly after her first surgeries; the Matrix was full of ghost stories about cyberponies like her being dismantled by back alley doctors that wanted to steal their cyberware or even by other companies that wished to reverse engineer it.
She screamed and struggled for help, but the machines kept at their work completely unfazed by her resistance.
For her relief a door opened in one of the walls, the structure was so smooth that she wouldn’t have noticed it if her life had depended on it, and the same horse stallion that had practically dragged her here walked in, but his coat had been dyed a pure white and his mane was purple now.
“What are you doing?” She screamed at him. “Let me out at once!” She demanded.
But the stallion remained unfazed, inspecting her with his pure white eyes for a few minutes before exiting trough the same wall.
With a buzz the medical drones jumped to life once again, but this time they begun to work on Aura’s cyber hooves and two more appeared at her back holding a pair of big metallic wings in their claws. Aura screamed as she felt them drilling into her back.
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Access strapped the NMM predator to her right hoof following carefully Horus’s instruction, the gun felt heavier than she had imagined, and tried moving her hoof around until she got the handle of it.
“Right, now try to hit that carriage’s lantern.” Horus pointed to a motorized carriage no more than 9 meters away. “Pistols are short range weapon; they work great until about nine meters, after that you need to really skilled or really lucky.”
Access nodded and extended her hoof, pointing at the carriage’s lamp and with a slight movement of her fetlocks, she would need to remember that the trigger was so sensitive, she flinched with the powerful explosion and the shot fire wildly.
“Yeah, you will need to get used to that.” Horus giggled. “Try again.”
Access nodded, she was still uncomfortable with the weapon, but Horus had been pretty insistent that she had one after the shooting had started; Password had showed them a live feed from some security cameras that showed the arcology’s security subduing and even killing ponies and other creatures.
“Silly ponies, they just need to submit and She will make everything better again.” He had said and walked into one of the elevators; vanishing without a trace.
Horus had moved the rest of the team for one of the lower garages after that, one of the places that weren’t fully finished and lacked any kind of security surveillance system; he hopped that all that concrete over their head would protect them from whatever it was spreading into the matrix and hide them from the security long enough for them to find an escape route.
The zebra consulted his comlink, making sure it was completely disconnected from the local matrix, Echo was taking too long; she was only supposed to do a quick assessment of the situation in the upper floors and report back as quickly as possible. The diamond dogs were still working on one of the cars, trying to bypass its securities locks so they could use it to move around.
The elevators door opened with a soft ping and Horus turned quickly with leaf bladed knives held into his fetlocks and in a combat pose.
“The manure has hit the fan.” Echo said as she walked out of the elevator. “The security is completely insane! They are transferring everyone they capture to the hospital levels, after that they seem to disappear.”
Horus relaxed and hid his blades once again in his janitor uniform. “And the helipads?”
“Impossible, the arcology is shooting anything that flies too close. I also checked the maintenance tunnels and they seem to be completely locked.”
“Right…” Horus begun to walk in a circle with both of his fore hooves massaging his temples. “Right, right! We can’t go under and we can’t go over and if we try to go straight we will need to deal with a dozen of armed secure guards!”
“What about you?” Echo asks Access. “Do you know any escape route we missed?”
Access denies with a simple head movement; she had made extensive work for the arcology project before, but only in the matrix systems.
“Great!” Horus screams and kicks a small pebble. “Just great! I’ll kill Watts if we ever get out of this mousetrap!”
“I could find something on the matrix.” Access suggested. “I still have my access codes.”
“After what happened to Password? No, what if we could produce some explosives?” The zebra suggested, but he knew how dangerous it would to assemble the material for it.
“We don’t have any other choice!” Access replied angrily.
“You are not connecting to the matrix!” Horus spoke decidedly. “The whole point of this job is to take you out and having you turn into whatever Password turned won’t make it any easier!”
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Naomi was slowly brought back to conscious by the pain of her wounds; the gryphon took a moment to notice the long metallic arms working on her bullet wounds. She quickly noticed she was completely naked and strapped to what appeared to be some kind of medical cot and looking around she could see several more cots were ponies, zebras, horses and even a few griffins were being treated by the strange robots with long metallic arms. There were some ponies that walked around and seemed to check the patients from time to time with their cold and unfeeling white eyes, for some reason all of them seemed to be unicorn posers even the zebras and horses.
She struggled against her leathers restraints with all her force, but the heavy leather barely bulged and she ended attracting attention from one of the horses; he looked over her with his uncaring eyes and made some notes on his clipboard before walking away completely uninterested.
“What are you going to do with me?” Naomi screamed. “Where is my sister?”
But the horse walked away uncaring to the next cot. Some other ponies were waking up by now and soon their voices called for help or loved ones as the ponies with white eyes looked over them. Naomi watched as a pair of ponies with glowing orange eyes came and took one of the cots away and disappeared in an elevator.
Naomi looked around in desperation, knowing that no one would come for her help she used one of her claws to slit her forearm a bit; clenching her beak to contain the scream as her claw cut through her skin and blood gushed out. She allowed it to soak her left talon, keeping the cut open with her claw until she could painfully free it from the restraints.
Suddenly a pony was at her side looking disapproving with his pure white eyes and as he moved to restrain her once again Naomi lashed against him with all the strength that she could muster; the young griffon was terrified of the horrors those ponies were inflicting to themselves and to others!
The pony took a step back, a hoof pressed against his neck as blood gushed out of the wound and Naomi quickly undid the bindings on her paws and the other talon; panting desperately and thinking that at any moment she would be recaptured, strapped to the table once again and made to suffer whatever weird experiment was going on.
She run, every step sending a jolt of agony through her leg as her left talon touched the floor. Four ponies run to her, they all had big metallic wings on their backs and blue eyes that glowed with anger. Naomi felt her heart wanting to explode on her chest as she saw the ponies running to her and blocking her way to the elevator or the stairs. She looked to the balcony that gave a good view of the lower floors and with a mix of curses and blesses to her ancestors she jumped over the railing just in time to avoid the chasing ponies.
She opens her wings and feel the pain of muscles that were barely used as she fell towards the ground and her wings at least slowed the fall a bit; the moment she had seen the big metallic wings of the ponies were simply too heavy to be used to such a purpose, even their normal wings would have barely any use now that they couldn’t use magic anymore. She cursed her ow inexperience on how to use her own wings since she couldn’t maneuver or even have any measure of control during her controlled fall.
She slammed hard against the floor and rolled with the impact to at least mitigate the damage. Even in her desperation she hesitated for a moment as she looked the dozens of machines dismantling the entirety of the lower floors under the supervision of ponies with purple eyes. They looked at her and she ran towards the stairs as the first ponies begun to run after her.
She runs as much as she could, panting even harder as her entire body seemed to be floating in an ocean of pain. She turned and jumped steps and slammed against the first garage door she found, blessing the gods for fire doors regulations.
She couldn’t stop and think, instead she ran towards one of the other stairways hopping to disappear before her chasers could see her.
The door behind her slammed open before she was halfway to the next stairway and she wanted to curse the gods once again, but was without breath.
She almost threw herself down the stairs as the trotting sounds got closer and closer. She bashed another door open and to her relief was a small and cramped janitor’s closet. She quickly locked the door and controlled her respiration even though her heart seemed to want to explode.
She heard the sounds of the ponies running downstairs and was sure that they would barge inside at any moment; she held a screwdriver in her right talon decided to not go back. She waited and waited until she was right that they weren’t coming back before she could relax and unwind for just a few moments.
She fell to the cold ground as the tension of the day overtook her completely and she would need all her will to keep her cry silent. She couldn’t believe that all this was real! She looked scared to her own talons stained with her own blood and the blood of the pony she had probably killed…
“No, this couldn’t be happening.” She whispered even though she wanted to scream, but knew that she would be dead the instant she did it.
She took some paper and duct tape to improvise a bandage over her wound just so she had something to do. She kept awake in the small room for what she could swear had been an eternity before finally risking open the door and venturing outside once again. As silent as she could walked down the stairs until she was once again on the shopping floors and peeked through the door only to find the place crawling with security ponies with their determined blue eyes and sharp looking metallic wings patrolling the entire place as more and more people were being transferred to the upper floors, probably to the strange clinics from where she had just escaped.
She took small steps back and kept going down.
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Gale Warning felt nervous in his little fortress on the top floors of the arcology, being the security chief of the project had given him a few perks; his favourite had always been the secure office that he had customized so it could remain isolated from the rest of the arcology in case of attack. His paranoid behaviour was famous amongst the CEO from Hayraku as well as his brutal efficiency in dealing with problems.
He checked once more the external sensors to make sure nothing had penetrated the first line of defence. Earlier some of those ponies with glowing blue eyes had tried to pass by his personal defence force, but it had held valiantly against whatever forces they had managed to amass against him. He had made sure that his forces could take on whatever could have been amassed; his matrix connections were isolated from the main server and heavily secured.
“What are you thinking…?” He passed slowly through his room and tried to divine what the pony that now was in control of the arcology would do. His best bet was that this was some kind of decker working for another company trying to sabotage Hayraku; his only other guess was that this was something worse, the reason he had spent the last fifty years in a self-imposed exile and always looking over his shoulders even though he had at his disposal the best private troopers on the world and the best security technology available on the market.
“He is dead.” He screamed and punched his own table. He sit on is chair and sent an order to one of his guardians to scout around; he needed to know who was behind it all and besides he still would have five more guardians in case of emergency, beside those he still had about thirty centimetres of steel, and in last case he always a small arsenal with him.
He was secure that nopony could get to him, but he wasn’t afraid of a pony.
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Horus didn’t knew what to do; the zebra was a veteran of the shadows and more than a few times he had been crossed or been imprisoned in some place, but every single time he always had had some idea of what to do and how to react. Now, however he simply couldn’t understand what was happening around him and so he kept the group moving around trough the maintenance tunnels until he could come up with a decent plan to take them away from this death trap.
Earlier they had risked a small peak on the lower floors to try and find a door more vulnerable than the heavy concrete ones from the parking garage, but what they had seen was a floor with dozens upon dozens of ponies, horses and diamond dogs, all of the with eerie orange cybernetic eyes, hard at work dismantling most of the lower floors with help of heavy machinery. He had no idea what they were building, but he knew it was a bad idea to linger around for too long and so they quickly walked away and up towards the living floors where he expected to at least find a decent place to eat and rest for a moment, maybe with some luck they could even get more news from the outside.
Echo worked quickly and silently on the door lock, the mare had a philosophy that all doors, real ones and metaphoric ones, were always open, but some simply didn’t know that yet. With a loud click the mare smiled as the door unlocked and she quickly hid her tools back in her silvery cigarette case.
“After you, darling.” She pushed the door open slightly for Horus.
The zebra readied his heavy pistol and slowly opened the door.
What he saw were three big metallic wolves with their fangs bared and drooling some kind of caustic mixture that sizzled as it touched the floor. The zebra had seen his fair share of security drones in his life, but those seemed almost alive! And as they jumped over him he trembled as he saw the mangled shapes of ponies locked amongst the plaques of armour.