PART II
"Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord GOD: and not that he should return from his ways, and live?"--Ezekiel 18:23, KJV
7.
Ryan got up at exactly 6:30, as he had for the last two months.
The first thing he did was take an antidepressant. The second thing he did was add some logs to the cast-iron stove sitting in the cabin. It was cold work putting them in, but the cabin would be colder if he didn't do it right away. Upstate New York could be unforgiving in the winter; people had died of cold after getting lost not far from where he lived.
The third thing he did was get ready for his morning's cross-country skiing run. This too was as much a matter of necessity as much as exercise, just like taking the SSRI and tending the stove. Endorphins were a requirement, not a luxury, after all. He put on a breath-warmer as he wrapped up to go outside; it was about ten degrees outside, and otherwise his lungs would burn from the air.
They burned anyhow, as he slid through the pines loaded with snow, past boulders, fallen and half-fallen trees, along the same path he had taken for nearly three months. His lungs hurt, but the hurt was good. It kept you awake and made you feel alive, just like the cold did. You needed some discomfort to keep yourself awake, it seemed; a little measure of unhappiness to stave off the greater and more overwhelming unhappiness that might otherwise engulf him.
Thoughts attacked him while he skied, but he had learned not to fight them. You're a horrible person. Keep skiing. This lifestyle is unsustainable. Keep skiing. She died. Keep skiing. Everyone dies. Keep skiing. Eventually he managed to get into a rhythm, and all thought disappeared as he slipped into a mindless mental place where all he did was keep moving. Keep skiing. Keep skiing. It was almost as if you were flying when you got on good snow, in a good groove, where the flow of the activity made everything else in the world disappear.
Far from the cabin, he reached a summit at the top of the small mountain he was staying on. The visibility was excellent. He stayed for a while, looking at the scenery. The sunrise colored the sky red and orange and pink; the evergreens around him were beginning to brighten and to look alive. The greenery and isolation of it reminded him of where he had grown up, before he had devoted his life to artificial intelligence and computers. He came to the summit every morning, and every morning had found that it still gave him energy. One week when he had been sick had been the worst; staving off depression without the outside and without exercise had been almost impossible.
It was nearly eight when he got back; it was by then bright and blindingly white from the sun and the sky and the snow. The stove was now quite hot; he boiled water, and made oatmeal mixed with dried figs. He sent an email to Braden, to assure him that he was alive. He sent another one to his shrink, to assure him of the same. Neither of them had been particularly receptive to Ryan's idea of isolation, but Ryan had managed to persuade them that time away from people could recharge him rather than drain him. Braden, in particular, had worried that Ryan would do badly without friends.
After breakfast, Ryan turned to the laptop resting on a small desk. He had work to do. It was web-design work--he had picked it up the programming necessary to do it well relatively quickly. Braden's family was letting him borrow the cabin, and Braden had said that he was under no obligation at all--but Ryan felt obliged to pay rent, and web-design was profitable as long as you had a working internet connection and a steady source of clients.
Moreover, the kind of work he was doing was relatively mindless. He started working a bit before nine, listening to an ambient music playlist. Time disappeared as he worked on forms, payment systems, login systems--and before he knew it, it was one. That was the nice part of this kind of work. So many things were standard in web-design that he could just sit back and let himself work without thinking about it. Just refactor, refresh, and refactor, over and over again.
He ate lunch at one, and added another log to the fire. Months worth of firewood was stacked behind the cabin; Braden's brother, or Braden himself, had been very diligent splitting logs earlier this summer. Ryan had added to the pile himself; splitting wood was another physically demanding task, one which required a kind of flow if it was to be done well. Apparently Braden's extended family liked to vacation here in the summer--there was a lake nearby, which would be very pleasant during summer months. But there was little reason for any of them to visit in the winter, and so it did not inconvenience them to let Ryan stay there.
Ryan had not known what to do with himself when he got out of involuntary confinement, initially. For a few weeks after getting fired, he had stayed at Braden's house, sleeping twelve hours a day. Playing with Braden's children had helped a little, but he found that he wanted to get out of the city and away from all other humans. After cautiously exploring Ryan's motivations for several more week, Braden had agreed to it and helped set him up in the cabin.
At three in the afternoon, he stopped working. It was Wednesday, and on Wednesdays he got the mail.
It took much less than an hour to ski the five miles to the base of the mountain, and pick up a few letters and a mostly-flat box from the mail. But it was about five when Ryan managed to arrive back in the cabin. He started dinner--just eggs and sausage, given that produce was a luxury. After dinner was finished, he sat down, shoveling the eggs into his mouth before they got cold. Only after the food was done that he opened the package.
There was a box inside, colorfully decorated with ponies, unicorns, and pegasi. "Princess Twilight Ponypad," it said. And on the box there was a yellow post-it with Braden's handwriting.
Ryan,
I know you haven't played many games recently, but this one is all the rage now. The game reviewers cannot stop talking about it; my youngest loves it, and I'm going to confess that I've given it a shot. It occurred to me that you might like it as well, so I bought you a copy.
Braden
And you think it would be good for me as well, I'm sure, Ryan thought.
He looked at the packaging, which had the same kind of advertising copy on it as the announcement made by Hasbro so many months before. "Friendship-based gameplay." "Infinite procedurally generated worlds." "Natural conversation with non-player characters."
He looked at one of the drawers on the desk. Before he had left for the cabin, he had snagged a flash drive which contained the entire repository that he and Amy had been working on: it contained all of their code for artificial intelligence, all of their notes about the code, and all of the relevant mathematical and theoretical papers. He wouldn't have trusted the repository which resided on his old computer, at home, because he had downloaded materials from Chandra onto that computer. But he had made this copy before Chandra had ever talked to him. This one was surely intact.
He hadn't worked on it, though, since he had moved here. Sometimes, when he was angry, he wanted to email it to everyone he knew. To go back into the world, and say what he knew of AGI, and try to start the seed of something which could work against the monster Hofvarpnir had brought into the world. Several times, he had been nearly sufficiently furious to try some such desperate plan. But he always stopped long before execution. He suspected that any monster he summoned up would lose to Chandra; and he knew he had not solved the value-alignment problem himself.
He looked back at the boxed device--the PonyPad, apparently. Braden hadn't known about Chandra and Hofvarpnir and the impending end of the world. Ryan hadn't told him; he hadn't seen any point. The well was poisoned; the AI had done what it wanted to be done, and Ryan did not know how to stop it; he saw no reason to ruin Braden's career as well by enlisting him in the same cause. So Braden had innocently decided to send him this, just to cheer him up, presumably.
Ryan wouldn't deny that he wanted some cheering up. Living in nature had, in many respects, been wonderful. It was letting him remember a part of himself that he had long forgotten. But living without regular conversation was trying.
Well, why not? He might as well see what this world-conquering game was like.
He turned on the pad, connected it to the internet, and set it up on the stand. The gamepad controls seemed basic enough. He turned it on, entered a username and password, and entered what he supposed would be the character creation screen.
It didn't start by asking him what statistics he wanted--it began by asking him a series of multiple-choice questions, nearly all of which seemed extremely pointless. "What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?" "When did you last look at a sunset for more than a minute?" And the bizarre "When was the last time you had sex?" Braden had thought the game was for small children; but perhaps the questions were generated uniquely for everyone.
He came to the race selection screen: earthpony, pegasus, or unicorn. There were small descriptions of each, beneath abstracted colorless wireframe models of each race. He chose pegasus almost without thinking: unicorns were able to work magic, true, but magic apparently took a great deal of conscious effort, deliberation, and considered weighing of hypotheses. Pegasi could fly.
And he found himself dropped off in the middle of the mountains somewhere.
His first thought was not that the graphics were beautiful. His mind leapt right over that thought, and instead to the idea that he was in a beautiful place. It was like he had a window into the Swiss Alps, or better yet, into one of the composited mountain landscapes that 18th-century painters liked to form from the alps. He could have sworn he had seen similar towering vistas in art galleries.
He was far, far above the tree line. Beneath him, a blue river meandered wildly between the green foothills of the mountains. The land had been cultivated; a patchwork of narrow fields dominated the flat bottom of the valley. Away from the meanders of the river and the cultivated valley-bottom, forest sprouted up the sides of the mountain. And further up, yet still beneath him, at the border between the tree line and the white slopes of the mountain, a tiny village had been perched on an isolated column of rock, more suitable for a castle than a village. There were many ravines, pillars, crevasses, and cliffs between him and the village.
He was a grey-blue pegasus. His figure looked small in the foreground of the screen. There were few places he could walk; he also was on a pillar of rock, exposed to the elements, situated far above the village, and far below the summit of the mountain.
He practiced moving back and forth, as the screen instructed him about which buttons to press. He was reluctant to fly, though; it hadn't told him anything about how to do it. And walking to the edge of the pillar and looking down gave him the same feeling that watching Russian daredevils do the same on tall buildings did: a feeling of imminent danger and death.
"Hey you! Somepony!"
The sound was clear, but quiet, as if from a great distance. His camera panned, and he could see a bright-red pegasus flying towards him--the pegasus hugged the side of the mountain-face above Ryan, and was weaving in between boulders with inches to spare. He was also flying directly towards Ryan, and Ryan worried if there would be a collision--but the red pegasus spread his wings, braking against the air, just before the column of stone on which Ryan stood. And in a second the Pegasus had landed neatly on four legs, just a few yards from him. The pegasus was red, very muscular, and had a mane an even brighter shade of red than his coat. He was wearing nothing but aviation-style goggles and a scarf, which looked a bit ridiculous on him.
"Hey there," the pegasus said. "I don't know you. I'm Cherry Blossom, who are you?"
The screen informed Ryan that he hadn't been given a name by Princess Celestia.
"I... haven't been given a name by Princess Celestia?" he said.
"Huh, cool! So you don't have a cutie mark or anything, I see," Cherry Blossom said. "That must be fun, trying out new things to see if you like them."
Ryan gave a grunt. The pegasus was speaking in a male voice, although Ryan would have pegged Cherry Blossom as a female name. He wondered why Cherry Blossom had that name; he considered asking; he thought that it would be ridiculous to expect such a detailed backstory from an NPC; then he thought that he might as well test to see if the NPCs were as smart as the box made them out to be.
"Isn't Cherry Blossom a weird name for a man?" he said, although the PonyPad corrected him so he had said "stallion" instead of "man."
Cherry Blossom gave him a weird look, and Ryan suddenly felt embarrassed.
"If you don't mind my asking," he said.
"It's perfectly normal for a stallion," Cherry Blossom said. "Although I'll give you that it's a weird name for a pegasus, at least."
"Of course, right, that's what I meant," Ryan said.
"Yeah, people comment about that all the time," Cherry Blossom said. "But both of my parents were earthponies, just like my twin is, so we inherited the family naming-template thing."
"Ah," Ryan said, who was both experiencing embarrassment at the social situation while being impressed at the fact that he could feel embarrassment in front of a computer. "And is that... normal? A pegasus coming from two earthponies?"
"Where are you from?" Cherry Blossom said. "Sure it is, although a bit rare. My mother's father and my father's mother were both pegasi, but even that's not necessary. It made me the rowdy one in the family, for sure, though."
The pegasus grinned. "A very rowdy one. So, now that you know all of my family history, you ready to race to Duae Angaelae down there?"
"Actually," Ryan said, reluctant to reveal yet more ignorance, "I'm not sure how to fly. I just found myself here."
"Ha!" Cherry Blossom said, all trace of competitiveness suddenly disappearing. "Can I help teach you? I'll help you get down the village--and you definitely want to be in the village in less than an hour or so anyhow."
Ryan would have asked why, but found that a third admission of ignorance in a minute just seemed like a bit too much.
"If it's no problem," Ryan said. "I'm sure I could figure out something by myself."
"No problem at all," Cherry Blossom said. "I could use some gentle flying to stretch out after the proximity flying I was just practicing for. Let me show you."
Cherry Blossom began to instruct him, and as Cherry Blossom spoke ("Stretch your wings to their length") the PonyPad gave him written instructions about which context-dependent buttons to press on the screen. Soon Ryan was able to make his first, wobbling flight from one platform to another. Ryan again felt genuine vertigo during the flight; the detail was scary, and holding a level flight without stalling or increasing speed to frightening amounts took a little finesse on the controllers.
Cherry Blossom was eager to push him hard, though. After a few more flights, he tried to teach Ryan how to swoop downwards with more speed. Ryan tried, panicked at the sudden increase of speed, pulled up, stalled, tumbled, and barely managed to direct his fall onto a close patch of earth. Cherry Blossom apologized, and Ryan did not push himself very much during the rest of the flight.
"It's beautiful just soaring, even without diving through obstacles," Ryan told Cherry Blossom.
"It is," Cherry said. "Although I'm not that good at appreciating it. I like to do things, rather than just look around. My sister's more the kind for contemplation."
"Your sister?"
"You know. Pear Blossom. The one who's speaking in--oh, Celestia, just nine minutes now. Ok, just one more flight until we land in Duae Angelae."
One more flight. Ryan was able to land on a small patch of earth outside the village, and was satisfied by how he managed to transition from flight to canter without a hitch this time.
"Nicely done," Cherry said, landing more dramatically in front of him. "Good landings feel just right. Here, follow me--I'll guide you to the debate."
Ryan followed Cherry into the village. The streets were narrow, with tall, five-story houses tilting over them at odd angles. They reminded Ryan of something... what was that? Old memories of time spent in Siena on vacation long ago came back to him. The entire place was felt full and crowded, but not crowded like New York or San Francisco felt. A crowdedness born of long and slow growth in one place, rather than sudden rapid expansion. He moved through different streets, noting that different streets were decorated with different multi-colored flags. Foals played in the street, sproinging just like the lambs Ryan remembered taking care of in his childhood.
Cherry spoke as they moved, and kept pointing out different "wards" as they walked through the streets. These seemed to be some kind of joint political and cultural unit in the town, and each was denominated by a flag with a different animal on it.
"That's the ward of Drago," he said. "Small, but they have a reputation to maintain. They won the palio three years ago, although their victory was contested by by Orca. And there's Civetta--there are a lot of cooks there, although a few explorers have come from there. That's the flag for Nicchio, who haven't ever won the palio..."
Cherry kept speaking, but it was too much information: the flags, and the other brightly colored ponies, and the occasional squares with statues and inscriptions; all were too much to take in at once. Every foot of land seemed packed with history.
Every foot of land also was beginning to be packed with ponies; it was growing crowded, and everyone around them seemed to be going the same direction as them. Cherry seemed impatient, and more than once Ryan found it a little difficult to follow him. "I told Pear that I'd see the whole debate," he explained. "Of course she knows many of the ponies in the audience, but she likes her big brother to be there."
"I thought you were twins," Ryan said.
"Two minutes older, friend."
They went around one more hairpin bend, down a small stairway, around another bend, and suddenly found themselves in vast shell-shaped plaza in the middle of the city. It was filled with ponies, all facing a temporary-looking wooden platform errected at one end. Behind the platform, a gigantic Parthenon-like building dominated one entire end of the square. Bas relief images of vaguely mythical-looking ponies adorned its surface, but Ryan didn't have time to look at them.
"Ah, it hasn't started," Cherry said. "So this is the piazza where they hold the palio. But they also hold debates. Here. Oh, and Pear is getting on to the stage."
Ryan looked at one end of the platform. A taupe-colored pony, with neither wings nor unicorn horn, was climbing the stage. Ryan thought that her reddish-grey mane looked funny, but it took him a second to place why: it was scrunched together into a pony-tail in a way that would probably have been impossible for a pony on earth. She looked calm, concentrated, and focused entirely on something yet to occur; Ryan found himself marveling at the fact that he could tell this from how her expressions were rendered.
As he looked at her, the camera zoomed in to her, as if it could tell he was looking. That was cool. He could see her scan the crowd calmly. He thought she stopped and smiled at him for a moment, and Ryan felt himself tense, and a tingle of alarm in his limbs. But then he heard Cherry cheer "You go Peeeaaach" next to him, and he realized she was only looking at her brother.
She pulled a few notes from her unadorned saddlebag with her teeth, and placed them on the podium. Opposite her on the stage, a unicorn had already set himself up opposite her. He was wearing some kind of academic regalia, unlike Pear.
A moderator pony--also a unicorn--motioned for them to begin.
The unicorn started. Apparently the issue to be debated regarded an expansion to the city--the addition of a new ward to the city, which would require new land. The unicorn was in favor of building out from the column of stone on which the city rested, increasing the width of the foundation, to allow the new ward to be contiguous to the rest of the city. Pear was in favor of adding it a separate stone pillar, connected to the city by a bridge.
The unicorn was a good speaker. He also had a very visual presentation. His horn glowed as he described the addition; and suddenly a glowing, 3-dimensional view of the city with the expansion added appeared above the crowd. He explained that, with his experience as a guest lecturer at Canterlot University, he had modeled the friendship dynamics of adding the expansion in this way--and that it was much better to add the new ward to the current pillar. He said that his projections indicated that cliques of friends would average at least 1.6 more ponies, if you followed his advice. Friendly ponies danced about in the spinning city above the heads of the audience.
On the other hand--and his projection shifted to an image of the current city, connected to the new expansion by a dangerous, rickety-looking bridge--all sorts of bad things could happen if they followed Pear's proposal. Ponies might lose friends. They could get swept off the bridge by bad weather, or by accident. (Animated ponies fell to their deaths, before the eyes of the eagerly watching spectators.) He said, when he had been at Canterlot, he can encountered all kinds of similar proposals while discussing the Architecture of Friendship, which was the discipline he specialized in. All these proposals had been rejected, or had lead to disastrous results.
He finished speaking, and looked to Pear.
Pear looked up from her notes. She ran her eyes over her notes one more time, then walked away from the podium to the middle of the stage, immediately before the moderator. And she started to speak.
She had a nice voice, Ryan couldn't help but think. She spoke slowly and economically, emphasizing only the most important things she said. The unicorn had rushed, perhaps to fit his speech into the allotted time; she went methodically, as if she had written the entirety of what she said with the designated length of time in mind.
There were two problems with the prior presentation, she said. First, the stone beneath the city was already overburdened. She had taken core samples of it, and even with magical reinforcement, adding additional overhanging structures to the column could easily lead to its collapse.
Second, she said, there was an important error in the friendship calculations the unicorn had made. If the audience could direct its attention to the equations growing on the structure behind them--and Ryan saw that, without his noticing it, vines had traced out the curls and numbers of some intricate mathematical expression in a foreign notation, on the surface of the temple behind the square--they could see that the unicorn's calculations left out a number of important facts. Principally, they left out how friendship required difference as well as similarity; and, by a number of easily acquired social measures, the city already tilted further towards homogeneity than heterogeneity. The bridged connection would separate people, surely; but (she ended with the sole rhetorical flourish in her speech) if proximity was the only key to friendship, why not force everyone to live in common, without houses or personal possessions, all the time?
There was a short rebuttal period, but Ryan didn't really attend to it. He was looking at the equations traced in vines, clinging to the building behind the stage. Whatever Equestrian mathematical notation it was, he could not quite decipher it... but it was close enough to something he knew that it seemed familiar. That mane-like curve, that worked as a definite integral. That crescent moon--that served as a limit. He ignored the unicorn's rebuttal entirely.
The debate ended, and the crowd began to disperse.
"There's no vote?" Ryan asked.
"No, not yet," Cherry said, moving through the crowd towards his sister, trailed by Ryan. "There's still three weeks of deliberation and then a chance to present more evidence."
Ryan had been attending to the debate so closely that he had not noticed that night had fallen. The moon was up, and bright enough to cast sharp shadows on the ground.
"That was great," Cherry told Pear, as he approached her. "I thought you smashed his arguments."
"The majority did not agree with you," Pear said. "I would lose a vote by about fifteen points, if it were taken now."
"How do you know that?" Ryan asked.
Pear looked to Ryan, focussing her eyes on him for a full two seconds, and looked back to Cherry.
"This is, ah, a currently unnamed pegasus," Cherry said. "I helped him in the mountains earlier today."
"You can smell when somepony is happy, no?" Pear Blossom said.
"Um... actually, no, I don't know how to do that," Ryan said.
"Oh," Pear Blossom said. "Well, most... many ponies can. I extended my senses, though, through all the foliage growing in the square, while I was speaking. By doing so I can detect aggregate sentiment. If we held a vote now, I would lose."
"And though she won't say so," Cherry said, "that is a very difficult thing to do. My sister has very strong magic."
"We need to get to sleep, so we can get up early to work to counter the arguments," Pear Blossom said. "We'll need to get irrefutable evidence about the ratio of load-bearing rock to sedimentary rock in the column supporting the village. We need to show there's less granite there than they think. And we'll need to go over the math."
She looked back at Ryan momentarily, then turned as if to walk away.
"Wait," Ryan said. "I think I can help."
She turned back.
"I recognized some of those equations," he said, casting his mind back to his architecture projects of so long ago. "I think. If I understand them correctly, I might be able to help you simplify them. And explaining them to me, in any event, will help you understand them."
"Aaaand," Cherry Blossom said, "I could use some help flying around on the column the city rests on, and taking samples. To get really good coverage we'll need more than one pegasus doing this. So we could definitely use having him around."
Pear looked back at Cherry with an expression which Ryan could not quite place, and looked back at Ryan.
"That seems reasonable," she said. "I'll meet you tomorrow morning. You can stay at the same hotel as us; their rooms are quite cheap."
Ryan followed them back to the room, signed in--apparently, he had come into the world with a sufficient number of bits to pay for a few days of lodging--and went to sleep.
And the PonyPad turned itself off.
He looked up. It was past midnight. He would usually have been in bed for several hours by now; depression made it important to have a regular cycle of waking and sleeping. It was very weird that the PonyPad had turned itself off, but he could deal with it tomorrow. He put another log in the stove, and went to bed, wondering if anyone he knew had a distinctive smell.