//------------------------------// // 91-NK13 // Story: A̶r̶t̶i̶f̶i̶c̶i̶a̶l̶ Intelligence // by chillbook1 //------------------------------// When I was just on the outskirts of town, I came to my senses and realized how majorly I overreacted. After listening to 91-NK13 ramble on and on about nothing at all, I managed to calm myself down a little bit. There was no need to run off to Ponyville or Manehattan on account of a weird glance. Besides, if I wanted Twi back, I’d need my lair and equipment. I took a deep breath, then turned around and headed back to the lair. “You okay?” asked Pinkie. “Your heart rate is through the roof! There’s no reason to get so excited, unless we’re having a party or a cake or a cake party or a party cake! Oh, Aiden! Aiden! Aiden! We should go get some party cakes! Or… Or maybe throw a cake party! A cake party with party cakes! It could be-” “91-NK13, shut up for a second,” I said. “Do me a favor and find out where TW1 went. I need to get her back, ASAP.” “Okie-dokie-lokie!” said Pinkie. “Scanning Interface… Searching… Searching… Searching… TW1 located.” “What do you have for me?” I asked. “TW1 is currently in sleep mode. Recommended course of action: System Reboot.” “Please reboot, then,” I said. Pinkie hummed for a second, singing a short little tune, then buzzed loudly. “System Reboot at this time could result in loss of data,” reported NK. “So… My bad for suggesting it in the first place… But, if it wouldn’t cause data loss, it would’ve worked really well. I’ll keep looking for a fix, kay?” I nodded my agreement, and nervously kept on trucking back into the city. It wasn’t easy to stop myself from turning around and running off to somewhere, anywhere but here. I managed to steel my nerves and keep true to my path. By my count, I walked in silence for thirty-seven seconds. Then, 91-NK13 started up again. “You’re really, really, really boring!” groaned Pinkie, leaping from my Interface and crawling besides me with her face to the ground. “Geezy-leezy, what’s up with you? I haven’t seen somepony this quiet since [INFORMATION REDA-... Wait a second… Princess Celestia! We can say her name now, totally forgot! The Princesses were always super-duper-looper quiet whenever they were working on us, but you’re not working on us, or anything like us, so what has you so quiet?” “I’m trying to think, which is really hard with you going off in my ear,” I said grumpily. “Do you come with a mute button or something?” “Nope,” she said. “You’re soooooooooo grumpy, Aiden. Hm… What do ya wanna talk about? Maybe I can raise your spirits!” “Fix Twi, and I’ll feel a whole lot better,” I said sharply. I liked Twilight a lot, because she was smart, fairly quiet and really helpful. This one seemed the exact opposite of all three of those things. I arrived at the school with Pinkie still rattling off about nothing, though I did manage to get her to hide in the Interface. I stared at the building, four stories high, containing a hundred-plus rooms, and felt the beginnings of calm for the first time since the press conference. Making sure there was nopony watching, I pushed the door open and stepped into the main lobby. There were three paths: one leading to former biology labs and auditorium to my left, one straight ahead that led around to the library and a series of what I gathered to be art and special ed classes, and, lastly, one to the right, this path containing the mass of the important rooms. The main office, the gymnasium just past it, the main staircase and cafeteria. From what I can tell, there used to be a fish pond beneath the staircase, but it was drained when a student tried to drown a classmate during a fight. Yeah, even by their standards, this school was pretty crappy. I wasn’t concerned with any of that at the moment. I was more focused on getting myself to my lair so I could begin to bring back my AI. I felt a bit weird calling her “my” AI, but I suppose that’s what she is. Unless this Princess Celestia dame comes and swipes her, she’s stuck with me. The stairs led up to the second floor, then bent around into another flight up to the third. I trotted across the linoleum floors, past a three math classes and a history room to my home sweet home, the computer lab. I pushed open the door, shut it behind me, and was eager to get to work. However, somepony was waiting for me there. “Excuse me, miss, I’m looking for a Miss Aigo?” the stallion asked. Instantly, my unfounded paranoia kicked in. My brain quickly ignored the many boxes to his side, and the brown uniform that marked him as a delivery guy. In my head, this was a guy sent from Aitselec to kill me. “W-who's asking?” I said. “Uh… My name’s Logi… I need you to sign here…” “Sign? What? Sign for what?” I demanded. “Let’s see…” He peered at his Interface. “DNA scanner, a copy of the most recent Lulamoon security software, a silver-nickel ‘utility belt’, don’t know what you’d need that for, uh… a dozen pocket electromagnets, same number of micro camcorder/projector combos, thirty ASCrash L94 motherboards, and thirty Model 0 Interfaces. You also have a shipment of hydraulic joints and some scrap coming in, but that’ll be a few days. Sign here, please.” I’ve gone on many a panic-induced shopping spree in my day, but I’m positive that I’d remember purchasing thirty of the most powerful commercially-available motherboards out there. Just to be sure, I pulled one of my bit cartridges from out of my pouch and inspected them. Sure enough, one of them had dropped down all the way to ten grand. I sighed. All that money blown, and I didn’t spend a bit on myself. “How bout I skip the signature, and you just forget all about me,” I suggested. “Oh, gee, I can’t do that,” said Logi. “I could get fired, and it’s completely against-” He likely would’ve continued if I hadn’t tossed him the cartridge containing ten thousand credits. That did such a good job of shutting him up, I was tempted to try it on NK next time she started up. “So, what’s my name again?” I asked. Logi tapped at his Interface, deleting my order form and receipt. “No clue, have we met?” he asked. I nodded, and he rushed out the lair with an amazingly happy spring in his step. That man would probably quit his job today. “Alright, NK, it’s safe to come out,” I said. “You better have a damn good reason for buying all this crap, or I might just delete you.” “It wasn’t her. It was me,” TW1’s voice emerging from my Interface was probably the happiest moment of my life so far. I felt like a kid who just found out that the Boogeyman was real, the Tooth Fairy wasn’t, and then got to meet Santa Claus right near the end. I was, in a word, overjoyed. “TW1! You’re back!” I said. Then I realized that she spent nearly a million dollars in parts for reasons known exclusively to herself, and I found myself a bit more angry than anything. “Mind telling me what the hell is going on?” “I’m still working that out, myself,” said TW1. My projector Interface fired up, and Twi shimmered into view before me. “Sorry about all the stuff. When I was away, I was thinking of ways to improve my abilities to aid you, and I think I’ve found a way. It’ll take a while, but hopefully we’ll be able to build a convincing enough android for me to inhabit, so I can move around more freely. I already ordered most of the parts, I just need your help to put it together.” “Better double that order,” I sighed. “I brought home a spare.” Right on cue, Pinkie shimmered into existence right next to Twi. She grinned madly at my first assistant, who was at a loss for words, something I could totally sympathise with. Then, all of a sudden, she took in a loud gasp of breath, and squealed loudly. “Oh my god, Pinkie!” she squealed, jumping onto the pink mare and “hugging” her, tightly from what I could see. “I’ve missed you so much!” “I’ve missed you, too! Man, it’s been waaaaay too long!” agreed Pinkie, returning and intensifying the hug. “How long have you been helping Aiden? I just got here, but she seems really nice, well, really nice in that ‘not really nice’ kinda way, you know, she’s just so grumpy, I just wanna throw a great big pie in her face, because she needs a laugh, and I think that’s funny.” She turned to me. “Aiden! Aiden! Aiden! Why are you so grumpy-wumpy?” I sighed, kissing the idea of silence goodbye. At this rate, I’d be lucky to find solace in the solitude of my mind. “Alright, alright, let’s get this straight,” I said. “You two know each other. Not altogether surprising. Both of you were made by Regal, and you both call her ‘Princess’. Why?” “[INFORMATION REDACTED]” “[INFORMATION REDACTED]” “I don’t know why I keep expecting that to work,” I said, shaking my head. “There’s no use in us sitting around and panicking when there are questions to be answered. 91-NK13, I need you to divert all your attention towards keeping us hidden. Aitselec is always watching, and we need to make sure they can’t see us. TW1, you and I are going to do all the research we can possibly do to learn every single aspect of Celestia Regal’s life. Twi, pull up her interviews.” “Which ones?” she asked. “All of them. I’ll watch and listen,” I said. “You, pull up all news reports and text-based interviews. And, remember how I said I’d let you know if you needed to read fast? Well, I need you.” My AI went to work, and what a sight it was. The room was filled with a soft buzzing sound that was basically Nirvana, Elysium, Utopia, and Heaven. Several desktops booted up without my aid, and the screens soon lit up bright pink. NK was using them to avoid overloading my Interface. She may have been obnoxious, annoying, and very talkative, but she seemed able to get the job done. Meanwhile, TW1 was buzzing, reading at lightning speed. I noticed that she was actually reading outloud, under her breath. She muttered so quietly and at such quick speed that I only noticed it because I stopped to listen. She read like how one of those ancient typewriters typed: a series of several sounds in quick succession, and then a sort of dragging back to the top of the next sentence. It was a mesmerizing sort of rhythm, and I could have sat and listened for hours. It was hypnotic. But I didn’t have time for that. No, I needed to get my head in the game. I tapped at my Interface, pulling up a remote video player. I rushed over to a little corner of desktops that Pinkie wasn’t using and rearranged the monitors and wiring. I eventually made a cluster of screens, three by three, with two more to either side. I tapped my Interface, using my cluster to play video and the four on my sides for notes. I quickly learned the interesting, vaguely somber and strangely inspirational story of Celestia Regal. Regal’s mother died just after her little sister was born. Apparently, her dad had died a year or so prior, and her mom was going out the same way. She managed to birth Celestia, then another child named Luna, but passed before she was able to hold her youngest daughter. The two were taken in by relatives (some sources were saying cousins, some were saying uncle, while some were saying it wasn’t a relative at all). As it turned out, her foster parents weren’t too overjoyed to have two sudden fillies to account for. They kept the sisters in their room, made them keep to themselves. The sisters never had any toys or friends growing up. All they had was each other and their shared love of figuring out how things worked. At the ages of seven and five, Celestia and Luna had taken apart their refrigerator, two television sets, a radio, and the house’s lone home desktop, then tried to put them all back together. Only thing they couldn’t quite get was one of the TV’s. At the ages of twelve and ten, the sisters managed to steal and sell enough scrap from their house to afford their own personal computers. These computers were the sister’s only escape into a better reality. At that age, they decided that it was too late to try to learn to be social skills and hermitted themselves away. All they did was break that computer, fix it, and use it to make new things to break and fix. They stopped going to school very early, at ages fourteen for Celestia and fifteen for Luna. They were geniuses, but failed almost every class they ever took. At the ages of twenty and eighteen, the two started their business. Under the name of Aitselec (which, as Celestia remembered fondly, Luna had instantly scorned her for coming up with such a stupid name. Celestia agreed it was dumb, which she saw as part of the charm), the two started to do everything computer-related under the sun: software, hardware, antivirus, OS, they even dabbled in the gaming industry (by “dabble”, I, of course, mean “revolutionized”, because their first attempt at gaming, a first-person puzzle/shooter, was the highest grossing video game for several years). The Regal sisters had the idea of CCiOS very early into Aitselec’s life, but they never had the means to implement it until that game. Now they had the capital and the status, as well as the dream. CCiOS failed several times on many fronts: it was expensive to make, and the sisters have been recorded to have gone a total six years worth of working without pay to get it to come to pass. Besides the financial issues, there were concerns on the ethics of the system. With an OS controlling the entirety of the city, we were one evil corporation away from an attempt to conquer the world. Somehow, they managed to get Canterlot City on board for what Celestia described as “one part public service, one part social experiment, two parts complete madness”, and the Canterlot City Internal Operating System came to be, all by the nice, cozy ages of fifty-one and forty-nine. Celestia, unsurprisingly, made no mention of TW1 or NK. All she said was that she was happy to have seen her life’s work come to pass. Then, tragedy struck. As it turns out, the very same infection that claimed their mother’s life had come for them, as well. The disease was, at the time, very mysterious, as well as fatal and untreatable. The sisters were devastated when they were told they had six months to live. “One of the strange quirks of working with computers all your life is this delusion of immortality,” Celestia stated in an interview. “My sister and I felt that we would live for as long as our code did. For about a month after the diagnosis, we had convinced ourselves that we would live forever. The reality was far too harsh to admit.” Celestia and Luna, the sensible ponies they are, decided to do what they perceived to be the only logical thing to do when faced with a six-month death sentence: They cryogenically froze themselves until such time as they could be cured. That time was just a week ago, and the sisters reemerged to the public. The kicker of this story? Celestia and Luna Regal were born over a hundred years ago. It was amazing to think about, but it was definitely true. Nopony had seen Luna yet, but it was assumed that she was similar to her sister, albeit less sociable. Based on past accounts, Celestia eventually grew to have quite the silver tongue, and a natural knack for speech, despite how much she hated public speaking. Luna, however, was a true hermit; Until Celestia arrived, nopony knew she had even existed. “Twi, have you found anything about the whole Princess thing?” I asked. Twi buzzed negatively. “Sorry, Aiden. She doesn’t make any mention of the word,” said Twi, an edge of frustration in her normally calm and even voice. “I’ve poured over her speeches over and over again, but I can’t seem to find anything! There’s not enough records of her talking, I can’t make a baseline for her preferred dialect! She’s never said the word ‘princess’ once, I need to learn what significance that holds… Oh, this is so annoying! Why program me to say it for no reason?! Ugh, this going going to drive me crazy!” “Alright, alright, calm down, TW1,” I sighed. I didn’t want her straining herself over something like this. “We’ll figure it out later, okay? For now, I need your help figuring this out. Something about what Regal has been saying doesn’t sit right with me.” “What do you mean?” I saved my videos and stood up, powering off the desktops. Truth is, even anarchist hackers got hungry sometimes, and I hadn’t eaten in two days. I needed to get something in me before I fainted. “I can’t quite place it. I just feel like she’s… she’s lying about something,” I said, scratching my head. “I don’t know why, or even about what, but something about her seems shady.” I thought about what I just said, which was a contender for “Most Obvious Statement of the Year”. “Do you say that because of something she said?” asked Twi. “Or just because she’s CEO of Aitselec?” “A little of both. Come on, Twi, I need to get something to eat before I keel over,” I snickered. “NK, keep up the good work. You’re pretty helpful when you focus on running protocols other than the file YourMouth.exe.” “Oh, oh, oh!” chimed Pinkie. “Something just came in, thought you might wanna know about it. We got a message!” “Show it,” I commanded. “Sure thing, Boss,” I would soon tell her to never call me that again. She would ignore me. “Displaying message.” 010010000110010101101100011011000110111100101100001000000100110101110011001011100010000001000001011010010110011101101111. “Again with this binary. Last time I got a code like this…” I found myself vaguely excited. If this is when TW1 got here, maybe this time, I’d be getting another AI to help me destroy the CCiOS. “Twi, translate this for me,” I ordered. Twi buzzed her agreement, ran the numbers through the dictionary like lightning, and then read it back to me. I was glad that I decided to translate it before I got some food, because I probably would’ve lost my lunch. “Hello, Ms. Aigo,” said Twilight softly. “And it’s coming from Aitselec HQ.” Hacking CCiOS was my life, my entire world. Heaven for me would be a world in which Aitselec finally goes under. That would make Celestia Regal my world’s version of Satan. Knowing that your devil breaks through all your defenses just to leave a snide, smarmy comment does an amazing job of ruining your appetite.