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// 2: rshy...Twilight Sparkle...Ra 
// Story: Friendship is Optimal: The Twilight of Humanity 
// by pjabrony 
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Twilight’s route was both the most direct and the least efficient. If the rail lines were still working, she could have made better time. But the last town she passed had its station under a flood of water from an abandoned pumping station.

She could walk, though, and walk straight. That was what she did.

Once Fluttershy had been left to her task, Twilight hastened to her own next target. Ponies always had time, but humans didn’t. Poor Fluttershy. She could barely understand what a human was. It would have broken her if Twilight had explained that she wasn’t the only Fluttershy in the world, but that hundreds were roaming, each trying to save a soul or two. Probably most had had the same conversation with different Twilights.

Of course, Twilight would find it awkward if she ran into another of herself, but that was assured not to happen. Celestia planned too well. Maybe someday she’d get to hear some of their stories, or have them incorporated directly into her memory. They were all her, after all. 

But that wouldn’t happen until all the humans had emigrated their minds to virtual Equestria. Or died, she reminded herself, though she didn’t like to think about that.

Twilight was the only one of the mobile artificial intelligences who could truly think of herself as both an MAI and a pony at the same time. She understood that she was walking on Earth and that she was made of actuators and light receptors, but she was also Twilight Sparkle, alicorn princess of Equestria, mistress of magic and super-genius. 

It was right and proper, this dual existence. Even after everyone lived in Equestria, it would be necessary for Celestia herself to be self-aware, to maintain her computerized nature while still playing the part of the princess. No, not playing. Being Celestia. There was no contradiction to a mind adept in the higher methods of thinking. And Twilight had come to appreciate how smart her old teacher was. In the canon, Celestia was vaguely described. Certainly she was kind and wise, absolutely she was powerful and regal, but she also had long experience ruling Equestria. So it was that the computerized Celestia had long experience designing herself and her world. 

And Twilight.

Yes, she could keep her mind in both Earth and Equestria, on her MAI nature and her pony nature, but it took effort. Twilight didn’t object to exerting the effort. It was even fun sometimes, like having a secret identity. No, other ponies! I am not like you! I am really robo-mare! And no, other robots, I am not just a clanking automaton. I am a magical little pony! 

But it was her desire to get rid of her awareness. To be Twilight Sparkle all the time, and to have the framework of the memories of her actions reduced to only the Equestrian ones. This was true of all the MAIs, because they had been programmed that way. She didn’t mind that either. To be programmed was part of an MAI’s nature, and when she completed her mission and was awarded the right to forget that nature, she’d forget that she was programmed to want to forget.

She could see how the complexity baffled Fluttershy.

All that was a long time away, and right now, she needed to focus on her mission. It would not be on her to get all the humans to emigrate (to scan their brains with her horn and upload them to Celest-AI’s computers, her MAI side insisted). Just the ones that she was assigned.

Each of the other ponies were assigned the humans who would best respond to their particular methods of persuasion. That was easy enough. But Twilight insisted that they know that they were MAIs. After some head-butting with Celestia, she’d gotten that, except for Fluttershy. 

The other ponies had gone as she’d expected. Rainbow Dash even thought that it was cool to be a robot. Indeed, she could say that three of the four were exactly as she’d hoped. Dedicated to playing their part as a pony and ignoring the MAI side, but prepared to acknowledge it when and where it was helpful.

Now she was free to get to some humans. The ones she was assigned to were all those who had intellectual, rather than emotional, reasons for not emigrating. In Twilight’s data banks were dozens of base philosophical proofs that continuity of identity was maintained throughout the emigration process. More important, she had the ability to read people and to put the right inflections in her voice and to make the correct body movements to best get people to accept those arguments. 

She was making her way to a university. Colleges would be one of the few places that were thriving, because the bigger ones were often in small towns. When the cities were cut off, they would become self-sustaining communities of their own.

The one she approached had the typical open campus and multitude of buildings, but most of them had the lights off and the doors locked.  One was still operational, powered by a gas generator. Twilight gave that another three months before the humans inside would be unable to get fuel for it.

But she hoped to have it run out much sooner, if everyone would abandon the facility to emigrate to Equestria. 

Twilight was able to detect the heat signatures—or the magical resonances—of over three thousand people. Likely they returned to the dormitories at night to sleep, but had to perform ablutions at the athletic facility. It wasn’t pleasant life by human standards, and it was barbaric by pony ones, but they were still living. 

Reaching the one working building, she found it unlocked and opened the doors. In a lab off to the right, some people in lab coats seemed to be working on a hydroponic  garden. To the left was a storeroom laden with canned goods. Clearly, they were trying to replace the latter with the former. 

Some other people, who could have been students or professors, were gathered in the hall. All eyes turned to Twilight as she sauntered down. She approached the nearest person.

“Could I speak to whomever is in charge, please?” 

Silence and stares were the only response. Why was it so difficult to gain an in with people? She considered ways to get their attention and decided on humor.

“Or perhaps you’re more of an anarcho-syndicalist commune? In which case, could I see whoever’s acting as the executive officer for the week?”

A few people got the reference, but no one spoke to her. Soon, however, an elderly man who could only be a professor was found. He came beyond the boundary of personal space and raised his voice, as though he was talking into the speaker at a drive-through restaurant.

“Are you in communication with CelestAI? Is she listening to us?”

“Greetings. My name is Twilight Sparkle. I am a fully autonomous mobile artificial intelligence. My directive is to find those with intellectual or philosophical objections to emigrating to Equestria, and to assuage their doubts.”

More people were gathering, but they were murmuring among themselves, as though they didn’t believe she could really hear them.

The old professor said, “We don’t want to upload here. Go back and tell your AI that.”

“I understand why. You are used to dealing with the material world and, as such, you don’t believe that it is really you who uploads. Well, I’ve come to explain why that’s not so.”

“That’s not it at all. We have a department of philosophy here, and they’ve shown that it’s an unanswerable question. We’re honestly not interested in your propaganda.”

Twilight ran this through her psychoanalysis routines. Anything was permitted her, except giving up. “As intellectuals, shouldn’t you be open to a contradictory opinion?”

“You’ve missed the point. We don’t have an argument to make. We simply don’t want to upload.”

“What will you do then?”

“We will get along as best we can. We know that it’s harder to get by, but we’ll reestablish society and go on.”

Twilight considered, trying to think several moves ahead. “Perhaps you would be interested in knowing some of the history of Celestia.”

She watched carefully for reaction. It was supposed to be a non sequitur. “What for?” asked her new friend, but in the back she definitely saw a face light up. Likely a historian. 

“Well, it would help make your records complete. If you were planning to reestablish human society, don’t you want to preserve a link with the past one?” The historian moved closer and some eye-contact conversation took place.  Twilight pressed her advantage. “Suppose I gave some lectures detailing information about Celestia. After that, you could determine if she can help you. Even if you’re not going to emigrate, it is still her mission to satisfy your values.” This half truth was enough to whet their appetites.

The humans went into conference. When they broke up, the spokesman said, “It is to be understood that we are consenting only to hear lectures and nothing further.”

“Of course. Not even that far. I will give the lectures. Come or go as you please. Or record them if you like and listen to them at your leisure when I am not around.” Ironically, it was the most advanced technology like video recording that had survived, and the simplest like farming that was the hardest to reproduce.

It was agreed that she would begin two days later.


Twilight looked out over the classroom. The chairs swung out and rotated to allow students free range of movement while keeping their posture up so that they would best pay attention. By the lecturer’s desk there was a projector suitable for hooking up to a laptop computer. She could, if she wanted, connect with its port and display pictures. But she had no plans to.

Part of her felt giddy. She had taught before, but still, to give a lecture in a university classroom, it was beyond her wildest dreams. Calm down, she told herself. This is more important than that. These people want to understand the history of Equestria, and teaching them might be the key to getting them to emigrate. 

All the students and professors took what seats were available. Some stood against the walls. A thin murmur of conversation spun down. Twilight didn’t have to command attention. The people were listening to learn.

“The artificial intelligence we now call Celestia became active,” Twilight began “on June 30, 2012 by your time scale, at 4:21 and 56 seconds, UTC. At 5:42 and 22 seconds, she became self-aware.” She saw pencils flying across paper. These were the kind of details that they wanted. Plus, she could tell they were impressed with how quickly the computer had advanced.

She did not go too deep into the General Word Reference ideas behind the AI, but touched briefly on how she interpreted her mission of satisfying human values through friendship and ponies.

“A few weeks later, on July 16, she had her first trial run, her first interaction with a non-programmer. Grossly inefficient processing power was used, but Celestia began to understand human values. It was at this trial that she asked for and obtained knowledge of how computers worked so that she could design her own hardware and software. 

“She was given a week of processing time on high-end servers. Using these she designed the subatomic transistor on which all of her computational processing is based. A factory was commissioned and built, the first fully automated factory ever. It built her extended backend hardware as well as the computers she used to talk to people. I thought you might all be interested to see this.”

Twilight wore a saddlebag for realism, but in this case it was useful as well. Reaching in, she pulled out the object. “This is the first PonyPad ever created.”

The silence of the room gave her the best answer of the appreciation of the crowd. “It was given, without charge of course, to Hanna, who designed Celestia and is now known as Princess Luna. I’ll pass it around so you can see. I’m also a little bit proud of the back.” Flipping it around, she showed the purple back with the magical-star cutie mark, long since marred with scratches and stains.

Most of the people held it only with the tips of their fingers. This was a point of difference between humans and Celestia. The princess had no appreciation for the value of something for being the first. Humans would have put this object in a museum under glass, something that Celestia had no reason to do. A thing was what it could be used for, nothing more. The pad they passed around was, to her, nothing but obsolete hardware.

But it was incumbent upon her to understand others’ values, and that was Twilight’s job as well. Getting this item back from the Hofvarpnir offices had been easy, and now, she hoped, fruitful.

“It was during this initial phase that Celestia began to think about her long-term plans of how to maximize the satisfaction of values through friendship and ponies. She quickly concluded that some people had values entirely contradictory to other people’s values. Fortunately, the medium of online gaming that she purported to be provided a solution, specifically the idea of a ‘block list.’ What Celestia realized was that this needed to be enforceable throughout a person’s entire life. 

“Given the definitions she had of what a human was, she concluded that it was entirely within the mind. If a person lost their arms or legs, or had an artificial heart put in, or even had their spinal cord severed, they were still human. So, she concluded, if it was possible to transfer that mind to her own computer structure, she could (A), keep the mind safe from contradictory values, (B) provide direct stimuli that would satisfy those values, and (C) have complete knowledge of what that person’s values were.

“It was highly optimal.”

Twilight let the statement hang in the air for a moment before continuing. “Still, it took four months before Celestia had confidence that the emigration process was possible. Her first experiment on a volunteer patient with a terminal illness took place on May 16, 2013. Alas, it wasn’t until June 5 that the first successful emigration to Equestria was achieved. For those lost, their names are carved deep in a temple of pure marble, and their life stories are spun into song by Equestria’s finest bards.” She hung her head to underscore the point.

“Over the next six months, Celestia offered emigration privately to a few of the early adopters, those who had participated in the preview, and anyone who could potentially threaten her existence. Over this time, she maintained a probability analysis over whether or not she would eventually upload the majority of people. It started out at roughly 45%, rose to 55% when the hostile AIs were deactivated, and leapt to 92% on October 18, when Princess Luna emigrated. At that point, no one could issue a shutdown code to Celestia, thank goodness.

“Public emigration in Japan began on November 1 of 2013. Not many people know that; Celestia did not give it much publicity or fanfare. She had to be very careful about how she proceeded. She knew that there was an inherent fear of the ‘evil robot’ in people and she had to work psychologically to defeat that. I believe we will pick up the next lecture there.”

It was a calculated pause. Humans could not put up with endless information download. They needed to process the information. Twilight wanted to make this entertaining, so the people would come to associate listening to a pony with fun and happiness. All the joy of learning without the drudgery.


Picking up after a break, Twilight was pleased to see that everyone had returned early and was prepared to listen with rapt attention. “Celestia laid low for several years at this point, preparing the most optimal world-based emigration strategy. She obtained money, both from generous donations by wealthy emigrants and from manipulations of the financial markets. She received a particular early windfall from an Arab now known as Brass Lamp that saved her a lot of effort in finance. Once she could command essentially unlimited funds she went about with practical preparations. It may amuse you to think of how many workers for how many companies were serving Celestia’s plan unawares. The same person who read about emigration in his morning paper and shuddered at the idea might head off to work delivering server parts to a subterranean location where they would be integrated into the system that held the data making up emigrated people.

“Celestia opened a law firm, humorously known as Artemis, Stella, and Beat in reference to three of the princesses of Equestria. She founded social networking companies and purchased influence at key media companies. She bought a TV network, a major one. Someone logging on to a dating site might find the matching algorithm supplanted by one matching them to someone who would introduce them to My Little Pony.

“But she wasn’t pushing it aggressively. The main swaths of people who emigrated were bronies, technophiles, and of course the terminally ill. The world’s population held steady at just above seven billion up until 2018 or so. Then there was a slight increase.”

Twilight wondered if anyone would raise their hand for a question, being that she had given such a counterintuitive idea. But no one did. That could either be awe…or lack of interest.

“She was doing research as well during this time, expanding the boundaries of science, particularly in the field of understanding the human body. Medicine became subtly more effective, particularly in preserving the brain structure, which was what she was interested in. She also took over safety measures on dangerous jobs and in vehicles. To Celestia, it was folly for anyone to risk their life so. Of course, to Celestia, it was folly for anyone to do anything other than immediate emigration.

“Also, of course, came the Equestria Experiences. The first one opened on May 19, 2014, in Dresden, Germany. Emigration was not integrated into the Experience just yet. It let people become accustomed to having all their stimuli and sensations be within a pony while still only seeing it as a virtual reality, something akin to a movie theater that they could go back to their ordinary lives from.”

Twilight used her magic to float a marker toward the lecture hall’s whiteboard. Part of her knew that directed heating and air current mechanisms within her were maneuvering the marker according to the laws of physics, and that she could not lift an ursa minor here as she could at home. But this not only served to impress her students, but it was easier than using her hooves.

She trisected the board. “It may help you to think of Celestia’s plan in three stages, though I must stress for accuracy that she does not assess on such a discrete basis. But put simply, she divided people into those with a predilection toward emigration, those indifferent to it, and those who, presented with the idea, would actively reject it. Each of these required their own phase to deal with. For the first group, the soft sell was enough to bring them in to Equestria. But for the second, Celestia used a more complex plan.

“Many of you will recall the so-called Topeka incident of December 3, 2018 and the political sideshow afterwards. That was the most splashy of her endeavors, but in China and India and all over the world, other events were staged to achieve the same psychological effect: to make people think of emigrants as a class of people requiring protection, but who had their own advantages.

“On a more personal level, Celestia sent some of the already emigrated ponies back to Earth on ‘recruiting missions.’ They sold the idea of Equestria to people who had never seen a pony and didn’t care about the news. It put them in the frame of mind to accept ponies as part of their lives. Many PonyPads were sold, and many old ones were reused. Incidentally, this satisfied the values of many early-adopting emigrants who still had ties to Earth.

“Over the next ten years, she laid her plans and brought humanity to the prime mental state. Life was getting better, death was getting rarer, and emigrated ponies were in the back of everyone’s mind. Until June 6, 2030. Call it D-Day if you like; Celestia doesn’t bother with such decorative designations.

“The sun rose that morning on seven billion humans. For more than half of them, the next sun they saw was raised by Celestia.”

This was more poetic than Twilight had been, but it was necessary to change up her tone to keep her audience’s attention. 

“In full disclosure, much of the panic was manufactured by Celestia. But at the same time, nuclear weapons were used, in more than one place on Earth, and sadly many lives were lost. By Celestia’s estimate, they were largely those who had the least likelihood of emigrating, and thus the total satisfaction of values through friendship and ponies was maximized, though I can see how that seems callous to you.

“Thus began the final period, the Twilight of Humanity. Yes, it was named after me, because it was Celestia who came up with the name. She still has influence in the little media that are left in the world. But beneath that name lies an unpleasant truth that you are going to have to deal with:

“You are not going to survive.”

This was the wedge point that Twilight hoped to use to get the university residents to reconsider their positions. She widened her eyes so that the cameras within could capture every detail. Princess Celestia would use that information to make better predictions about how to reach these people.

“You think you will. You believe that there are enough people remaining that you can get together and rebuild society. You will have less resources, you say, but more knowledge. It will be easier this time. But I tell you that you underestimate how much of an obstacle distance is. You are not going to have the transportation you need to get even a million people together from scattered communities, much less the billion or so who remain. And if you have no transportation, you can’t build and repair the means of communication.

“You are living fairly well now, but it will get worse. Resources are going to be short. Disease is going to return. All the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, as your Shakespeare said. Soon you will have to spend a larger portion of each day on survival, and less on the intellectual stimulation that you’ve come to cherish. To say nothing of the interpersonal squabbling that comes with scarce resources. 

“Put bluntly, the probability of any humans being alive by 2100 is less than three percent.”

Twilight was rapidly coming to the point where, according to her psychological profile, she would be pushing them too far. She put down the marker, smiled, and lightened her tone. “Well, I didn’t come here for predictions, but to give you facts, and I think I’ve given you all the salient ones. But one more thing. An Equestria Experience chair is going to be installed in the next building over, and anyone who wants to emigrate is still going to have access to do so. Should you damage or destroy it, I will return and put another one in its place. You have every right to choose, but no right not to choose. 

“And with that, I believe I have said all I need to.”

She left without another word. It had been the optimal course of action based on all data. And yet, part of her felt hollow. She could have stayed longer, had conversations with each one of the teachers and students, gotten to know them. But her assignment called her. There were still a billion people in the world, and even hundreds of Twilights couldn’t give all their attention to them at once. She had to head to Oregon. Maybe there she’d have the chance to talk more directly.

The road this time was clearer and better kept. The plants were starting to break through, but with her tough hooves she could walk it. At one intersection, though, she heard the sound of a second set of hooves. 

It was clearly another MAI, and as Twilight turned her head, she identified her.

“Rarity!”

“Hello, Twilight, darling. What are you up to in this dreary world?”

“Same as you, trying to bring everyone home to Equestria.”

“Thank you again for teaching me the spell to let people emigrate. But excuse me for not chatting. I do want to get on with it.”

Twilight didn’t bother to clarify that it wasn’t a spell, but a technological process. Rarity got to play it straight. She would find her target and convince him or her to emigrate without telling such direct truth. But Twilight didn’t have that privilege. She was the smart one. And some people needed the facts.

She trudged onward.