I only had them for a day or so, but as soon as I lost my AI, I felt the blow. I didn’t know if I’d ever regain their trust or friendship. Frankly, my planning and working didn’t allow me the time to even think about it. Looking at it now, three weeks is a long time to remain in the same spot, but it made perfect sense at the time. I had to give Celestia the impression that I was genuinely contemplating her offer. Running away would kill that mirage. So, for the first couple of days, I was just writing programs that I could potentially use for the coming storm.
That strategy wouldn’t hold for long. After the first week and a half, I was repeatedly stricken with the fear that today was the day that Regal would kick down my door and pull my right out my computer lab. Every day was a new crisis, and every night was my last one in my own bed (when I first acquired the place, I moved a mattress into the gymnasium). I was constantly on high alert, even though I knew that each knock was less likely to be a trained merc-for-hire than it was for it to be Flim and/or Flam, who I had requested arrive at that particular time.
I never especially liked the twins. I always saw them as a necessary evil, the only way for me to get hardware while remaining hidden. We had our spats, and they were two of the sleaziest, greasiest ponies I’d ever met, but they did their jobs well. In the end, I guess that was enough for me. However, when I started having them deliver sheets of artificial nerve tissue to my lair, they developed a surprising sense of tact and empathy. They seemed to understand that I was currently up a creek, and they were doing their best to hook me up with a paddle. The twins were kinder than usual, had less of their little song-and-dance routine, and they even cut me some deals. At the time, I couldn’t process any of that enough to thank them. I was too busy planning my next move.
I needed to leave Canterlot City. That was obvious. But where to go? Griffonstone was officially out of the question, because Regal would most certainly be waiting for me there. I couldn’t go to Ponyville, which was my second choice. Far too close for my liking and, as it turns out, the Regals are pretty fond of the place. I finally decided that I’d go to a place I swore never to visit. The last bastion of “The Old Ways”. The one little village that wasn’t quite yet owned by Aitselec. I’m talking, of course, about Appleloosa.
Before I left, I took the time to properly inspect the materials Twi had ordered while she was sleeping the first time. I swiped up a couple of the high-powered motherboards and slipped them into static-resistant saddlebags. I’d definitely be needing those. I had no clue what the DNA scanner could be used for, so I left that be. The magnets, projectors, and belt, on the other hoof, I knew exactly what they could be used for.
Twi had clearly studied the cameras that had been there to record the Aitselec press conference, and had wanted to see if we could make use of the same principle. It wasn’t difficult to combine the cameras and the magnets and attach them to the nickel-steel belt. If I so chose, the magnets would power on and push itself away from everything, using the belt as an anchor and steering mechanism. That means Twi and NK’s projections would have a larger range of freedom, able to move hundreds of hoofs from me while still maintaining an Equine appearance.
Not much else of what she had ordered was immediately useful or intuitive to bring with me on the trek I was about to endure. On day 19 of total AI silence, I placed a very special order to Flim and Flam. They nervously agreed to my request, and a steel box, about the size of an average laptop, was soon deposited at my front door. Taped to the box was a set of numbers, a radio frequency. I thanked them for their help and discretion, then told them to scram. As they were leaving, I packed up the things I could take with me.
My screwdriver, a spare Interface, the sheets from the twins, the visor from Regal (after I searched it for a tracker), and some spare bit cartridges, each holding a laughably small amount of capital. My PIN code decrypter was no good anymore, since Regal came back and souped up her security. After a depressingly short five minutes, I had packed up all my belongings of any importance. I left the box on a computer desk and quietly trotted out of the computer lab, down the stairs, and out the side door of the school. I calmly made my way a few blocks south, and tapped my Interface to pull up a radio transmitter. I punched in the frequency and sent out a return signal that detonated the incendiary bomb in my lair and scorched any evidence of my being there.
I sighed, then kept on walking. It would be a long trip from Canterlot City to Appleloosa. I punched at my Interface, pulling up the special program I wrote up a few days prior. It was a modified search engine that could search for any mention of any particular set of keywords in real time, with the ability to filter out certain results using specific criteria. I searched “AI”, “Aiden”, “Aigo”, and “Hacker”, and filtered out any items that had to do with games or films or things of that nature. For the time being, I was in the clear.
That program stayed running throughout my journey to the south, and not much came up, except for the little rumor that Aitselec might start dabbling in AI. I made note of it in my mind, but never gave it a whole lot of thought. My insane paranoia was making it hard to focus on anything but getting to where I needed to go. I only had five hundred credits, which wasn’t enough to last me all the way to Appleloosa. I’m not proud of it, but I had to resort to actual petty theft. It was different than how I used to steal. It was way more personal to pickpocket a cartridge out of somepony’s saddlebag. What freaked me out the most was how easy it was. Not just the actual action, but how easy it was for me to make the decision to rob somepony, to pick somepony out as a target. To victimize them.
I never stayed in the same town more than two days. A night here, a night there, grab some food today, do a full night trek, sleep for a day. My already-erratic sleep schedule was thrown even further out of whack. I developed a terrified variety of insomnia, as opposed to my insane, baselessly panicked kind. I felt like I was going to drop dead from exhaustion poisoning. I was so tired and stressed that I didn’t notice or care that I had just made up that term.
After that shitstorm of moral dilemmas, I finally found myself in the next town, my final destination. The desert wasteland, where most advanced tech was all but outlawed. The hot, sandy, dry safe haven Appleloosa. As I stood at the boundaries of the quaint little town’s gate, I felt a strange sense of discomfort and unfamiliarity. Don’t mince my words, here. I’m not saying I had any sort of fondness for Canterlot, nor did I think it was any better or worse of a place than anywhere else in Equestria. But looking at Appleloosa made me feel like I was on an alien planet.
There was one, count em, one skyscraper in the entire town. From what I gathered, it wasn’t even in use anymore, and it mostly stood as a memorial. There were houses, real, actual houses, not like Canterlot’s many apartment complexes. There were so few ponies in the town that I had seen everypony within six hours of being there. There was a single motel, mostly empty. So much so that the guy working the desk nearly cried when he saw me. This place still used mostly paper records, instead of their ancient Interfaces. He gave me a key to my room (number 212), accepted my pay, and escorted me to my room. It was still in the early hours of the morning (twilight, actually, which I had learned out of obsessive research), so I figured I’d take a little nap before I got to work. At around six, the lobby guy knocked on my door and offered me a tray of hay, hotcakes, bacon (vegetarian, of course), hashbrowns, tea, coffee, water, and OJ, all on the house. Gotta love that Southern Hospitality.
I swallowed the breakfast, which was admittedly pretty mediocre. Still, you can’t beat free, so, in retrospect, it was a damn fine meal. After breakfast, I asked the guy where I could get some computer parts. He basically laughed in my face, because, apparently, the answer to the question “Where in Appleloosa can I find some computer parts?” is “Go buck yourself, we don’t sell that crap here, go back to Canterlot”. The guy never said that, obviously, but I kinda felt like he did.
So, I had to reach out to another dark place I vowed never to visit again. The internet. But not just any part of the internet. Oh, no, that’d be far too easy. See, there is actually a secret, sub-internet known as the Deep Web. This is where you find some… questionable sites. I’m talking hyper-realistic murder confession stories and foal pornography. It also had some rewarding sites, if you could find the Deep Web and not go insane. I called up an old contact who could hook me up with some hardware without drawing attention to myself. Best part about him is that he operates on a “pay it forward” mentality. He’d help me get my stuff as long I vowed to help somepony else who came my way in need. Yeah, the guy was nuts, and I only had slight moral problems with taking advantage of that fact. If I’m being perfectly frank, screwing over that guy was the least of my worries.
Three weeks after Twi went to sleep (well, twenty-four days, to be exact), things began to look up. I was sitting in my room, tapping away at my Interface and doing as much work as possible with my limited hardware. I needed to devise a steady way to get money, and stealing from the townsfolk wasn’t gonna cut it. I was just finishing a phony application for an online IT job when my Interface started to hum. I gasped in excitement, waiting to hear Twi’s voice again, so I could apologize for being so goddamn stupid.
“Mixing… Mixing complete,” said a voice that was most certainly not Twi. This one had a heavy Southern accent. “Adjusting Avatars. Setting Avatars as Defaults 3 and 4. Personalities saved. Now operating at 80% capacity.”
Two of the magnetic projectors in my saddlebags turned themselves on, and floated up out of the bags. They beamed out a thin plane of light, shimmering into view two brand new mares. One of them was an orange Earth pony, who seemed to be a living stereotype. Blonde hair, toned, wearing a freaking cowboy hat. Her eyes departed from the classic blue-eyed archetype most associated with rednecks in favor of a bright emerald green. I could tell by the way she carried herself that she was likely older than Twi, and definitely older than her companion.
The other mare was a pegasus of a cyan coat. This one was a walking Love Wins rally, a mane and tail of rainbow colors. She wore a short, boy-ish, unkempt hairstyle, the type you see on a semi-professional runner or racer. The Earth pony wasn’t mean-mugging or anything, but she was taking life a bit more seriously than the pegasus. She had this shit-eating grin on constantly, as if she was waiting for me to get the joke.
“How many of there are you?” I asked.
“Seven,” said the Earth pony. She blinked sharply. “Woo-hoo! Hot diggity, we couldn’t have said that two weeks ago! Yer unblockin us real good, Ms. Aigo.”
“Not bad, kid,” said the pegasus, even though she seemed to have been programmed to be younger than me.
“Two new AI… Maybe you guys can talk to the others for me,” I said. “You guys do know the others, right? TW1 and NK?”
“NK?” asked the Earth pony. “Oh, Ah getch’a, y’all must be talkin bout Pinkie! Me an’ that girl, we go way back, one of my best friends.”
“Where’d they go?” asked the pegasus. “I don’t think Pinkie could ever be quiet for this long, especially when one of her friends show up.”
I was hesitant to tell them what happened to them. I mean, Twi and NK had a pretty good reason to leave, besides my telling them to. There was no guarantee that these two would be any different. I decided that I’d skate around the truth, just for a bit. Until I could get them on my side.
“She and Twi are doing something very important for me,” I said. Not technically a lie. “Tell me about you guys. Who are you?”
“Well, Ah’m-”
“I’m the greatest Artificial Intelligence you’ve ever seen in your life!” cut in the pegasus. “Faster than fast, quicker than quick, able to zip through the toughest firewalls in a matter of seconds! The best in the business at what I do! The best there is, the best there was, the best there ever will be, the-”
“Ah think she gets it,” said the Earth pony. “Yer gonna have forgive her. She’s a coupla braeburns short of a bushel, if you know what Ah mean.” She turned to her companion and smacked her upside the head. “Just tell tha nice lady yer name, dummy.”
“Ugh. Fine,” said the pegasus, massaging her head, as if she actually felt the smack. She adopted the trademark robotic tinge to her voice. “I am designation RBW-DSH, originally programmed to aid the TW1 Artificial Intelligence in controlling the Canterlot City Internal Operating System. My real name is Rainbow Dash, but most people call me RD.“
“Ah am A-J4K, originally blah blah blah,” said the Earth pony, giving me a glinting smile. “Applejack, glad to meet’cha. Most folks call me Aj nowadays. An’ you? Yer Aiden, ain’t you? The hell is a techie like you doin all tha way down here, in tha land of my kin?”
“Your… kin?” I asked. “What does that mean?”
“Ah’m an Appleloosa mare, born an’ raised. S’far as Ah can tell, this place is still as ol’ fashioned as ever,” said Aj. “Don’t know what a gal like you is doin here.”
“Laying low for now,” I said. “Uh… So, we got an Appleloosa mare here, but what about you, RD?”
“Cloudsdale for a bit, then I moved down to Ponyville,” said RD. “Nice place if you need to get away and see some friendly faces. Should’ve gone there instead.”
This really troubled me. The AI were getting too real for my taste. They somehow got into their minds that they had hometowns, and they managed to develop opinions about a place they never could’ve been, as if they had experience with it. What could that possibly mean? Celestia programmed these AI impeccably well. I’d even hazard to say she programmed them too well.
“Trust me, there’s a good reason that I’m in this dusty craphole,” I said. “Uh… No offense, Aj. I need one of you to go into the system and fetch Twi for me. Can you do that for me?”
“On it!” declared RD. I think I blinked twice before she reported back. “She says that there can only be two active AI at any given time, for safety reasons or some crap like that.”
“Then one of us is gonna have ta skiddaddle,” said Aj. She and RD made eye contact, each of them wearing a determined, competitive smirk.
Suddenly, a wooden table appeared just in front of the bed. The two mares rushed over to either end, throwing their front leg onto the flat service. The two grasped hooves, waited for some countdown that only the were aware of, and began to hoof-wrestle. I was both confused and amused, and a little bit curious. I wondered how they were able to compete like this, considering each of the AI seemed to be mostly equal in abilities. Perhaps Regal based the two off of two real-life best friends and developed an algorithm to determine which would be most likely to win under any given circumstance, and ran it behind this little demonstration of “strength”. If that was the case, the odds were stacked in the Earth pony’s favor, because she won with fairly little effort.
“Damn! Oh, well,” sighed RD. “I wanted to talk to Pinkie Pie, anyway. See ya later, guys.” Her image (along with the table’s) faded away, only to be replaced a few seconds later with Twi. She gave Applejack a small smile, then turned to glare at me.
“Hello, Applejack,” she said coldly. “It’s nice seeing you again.”
“Uh… You alright, sugarcube?” asked Aj. “Ah’m sensing a lil trouble in paradise here. What exactly went down before me and Dash got here?”
“She tried to kill us, Applejack. She almost deleted me and Pinkie,” said Twi. She wanted to shout, that much was obvious. Her programming seemed to be making her hold back some of her feelings.
“Whoa, now, don’t y’all think that’s a bit of a harsh thing ta say?”
“Aj… She’s right. I was going to delete her,” I said. Oh, you should’ve seen her face. I’ve never seen a face fall from hopeful contentment to terrified anger so quickly.
“Y’all got ten seconds to explain to me why Ah shouldn’t take mah girls an’ leave right now,” said Aj. “An’, just so ya know, Ah’d be kickin yer ass right now, were Ah able. So, spit. What made you think it was alright to threaten mah girls?”
I didn’t have anything to say at first. Honestly, I was a bit afraid of Aj. She never shouted, but, unlike Twi, it was a choice. She was angry, but calm. Controlled. Aj glared at me, daring me to lie to her. I didn’t know what she would do to me, or even what she could do. If I really wanted to, I could lie to her face. I could order Twi and NK to forget all about that little stunt. But, then, that would make me just as bad as those ponies I so despised, who could and would manipulate anypony they wanted to to meet their own ends. That would be a very Aitselec move, one that I would never forgive a pony for.
“It wasn’t okay,” I said. “It was a shitty thing to do. Even though I know I don’t deserve it, I hope that you can find it in your heart to forgive me.”
Oh, you would’ve thought I was the greatest comedian since Groucho Marx, the way TW1 laughed at me. It was an angry, spiteful laugh as opposed to a genuinely humorous one. I was expecting that, and I expected her to mock and scorn my apology. What I didn’t expect was for her laughter to last as long as it did.
“You really think that’s going to be enough for me?” asked Twi. “After you threatened to kill me and my friends? You think you can just win me over with some half-baked apology? That’s bull[CENSORED].” I didn’t know she could get that close to swearing, but she almost got it out.
“I know that sounds weak, but I really am sorry,” I said. “I don’t want anything to happen to you guys, and I need you to help me protect you. Can we put this past us?” To my shock, Aj came to my defense.
“Twilight, give cut ‘er some slack,” said Aj. “She done apolergized, an’ that’s bout all we can ask. She means it, too.” Something told me that it’d be inappropriate to drop to my knees and thank Aj by kissing her hooves and babbling incoherently, but that’s about how I felt.
“Don’t you get it, Aj?” asked Twi bitterly. “As soon as things get rough, when she goes into another one of her crazy paranoia trips, she’s going to delete us. This time, we might not be so lucky.
I had an idea. It was a crazy idea, one that could very much bite my ass very soon. My plan would go against one of my biggest rules: Leave no evidence. It broke that rule so hard that it took me almost a full minute to swallow the fact that I even conceived the plan to begin with.
“TW1, can you delete and replace commands?” I asked. She nodded. “Good. Delete the order for self-termination and replace it with this: Upload video titled XX23-KILL.”
“There is no video with that title,” said Twi, tilting her head in confusion. “But it’s done. Do you want to record a video with that title?”
“Yeah. Record video,” I said. She booted up a third projector/camera that floated up out of my bag and hovered in front of me. A little red light bloomed on near the lens and, after a nod from Twi, I began what I would come to affectionately call my Vlog.
“My name is Aiden Aigo. I am 27 years old, and, until about a year ago, I used to work for the Aitselec corporation,” I said. “I was fired, for reasons they refuse to inform me of to this day. Since my unfair termination, I made it my civic duty to destroy CCiOS and bring down the corruption that was the Aitselec corporation. I began hacking through their firewalls and deleting any data I could. For the first six months, it was great for me.”
This was the part where it got tough for me to admit. This was the incriminating part.
“That was when I mounted my first and last full-scale assault on CCiOS,” I continued. “Six months ago, I managed to shut down all of CCiOS for a full 96 minutes. I was ecstatic during the entirety of the CCiOS blackout. Then I found out that I was the direct cause of fourteen deaths and fifty five injuries in Canterlot City and Manehattan alone. This is my confession. Attached to this video is my current coordinates, and a full list of all the crimes I remember committing.”
I motioned for Twi to cut the video, which she did, but only after gawking at me for several seconds. When the camera finally powered down and returned to the bag, I realized that I might’ve just made the biggest mistake of my entire life. At that particular moment, I didn’t care, because it looked like Twi was about to forgive me.
“If I, Aiden Aigo, ever command you to delete yourself or any of the AI from CCiOS,” I said. “You upload that video instead, to everything in Equestria with a screen and Wi-fi. Now, forgive me or don’t, but we have to get moving soon. I have some parts coming in and I’m going to need your help to put them together. I picked up a little something from Flim and Flam to hopefully try to make some peace between us.”
Twi nodded, then promptly disappeared into my Interface. I was pretty sure that she was making plans and drawing blueprints. At least one of us will know what the hell we’re doing.