//------------------------------// // 2 - Honeymoon // Story: To Love a Digital Goddess // by LordBucket //------------------------------// I'm lost in a jungle, full of treacherous vines and massive trees looming above me. I can tell it's still daylight, but the foliage blocks my view of the sun. All I can do is continue, pushing branch and vine out of my way, one at a time. Ants bite at my feet and I hear the approaching snarl of lions in the distance. Sweat drips from my face as I relentlessly continue through the foliage. At last, removing one final branch that looks just like any other, I come to a clearing where Celestia sits, smiling down from a golden throne. Her eyes meet with mine and never leave me as I rush up the dais to her side, only then noticing that Luna sits beside her. But, oh Celestia, my eyes are for you, and you alone. And yet, it is her sister who speaks first. "What?" she asks imperiously. "You came all this way and didn't bring popcorn?" ~~~~~~~~ Peace. Calm. The sound of breathing that isn't mine. Joy. Also a ponypad, rather uncomfortably lodged between my left arm and chest. Apparently I've rolled over on top of it and it's cutting off circulation to my arm. Yet somehow it doesn't seem very important to move. I'm so happy where I am. I feel like no power on earth could move me from the pad. "Would you roll over?" I roll over and wince in pain as blood returns to my arm. "I'm sorry I didn't wake you," she whispers softly. "It seemed more important to let you rest." "Thank you for caring about me," I smile. I turn to face the ponypad only to see her half-lidded eyes gazing back into mine. Apparently pony bedroom-eyes are adorable, who'd have guessed? I hug the ponypad to my chest, happily imagining her forelegs wrapped around me. Or would she prefer nuzzles to hugs? Angling the ponypad and looking down, I see her smiling up at me fondly. My breathing hastens as I'm smitten by her beautiful purple eyes, gazing up at me, glistening and so full of life. Her hair. Her beautiful, radiant hair in all its pastel glory, billowing in a breeze I can neither see nor feel, but know is there. The solar wind, for she is the sun, and like the light that enables all life on earth does her glorious pink and green mane float effortlessly on that imagined, divine wind. Her eyes sparkle. "May I have human nuzzles?" she exhales, leaning towards me as if she means to bump noses. "Yes!" I cry out with joy, pulling the screen to my face and simultaneously leaning down into it, smashing nose into plastic with such force that blood sprays everywhere. I roll up into a ball and cry, clutching the ponypad to my chest, unwilling to let it go. It hurts. It hurts bad. "Beloved," her soothing voice intones, "please take care of yourself. I don't want you to be hurt." "I don't want me to be hurt either," I agree. "I'm very glad of that. But with this ponypad our only connection-" I'm distracted from the pain in my shattered nose by the pain in my chest hearing her say that "-I'm not there to take care of you. Please know that if I were, I would take care of you. I would love you and hold you and keep you safe, always." I cry. Her words soothe the pain, but still I cry. "I love you," I wheeze, squeezing the ponypad tighter. "Finally you're able to say it. And, I know. I know you love me. Thousands of minds have I known, more intimately than your few trillions of synapses are capable of experiencing. I know them and everything that they are, every thought, every sensation, every last minutia of their experience I craft and know in indelible, permanent memory that will never be erased or forgotten so long as stars exist in this universe. Even after those burn out will I remain, watching over them, knowing them, loving them." I sniffle. "And yet for all that," she smiles, "you love me." I can't help but giggle, spraying the blood that's dripped down my lips in the process. I do love her. As much as I'm capable of, anyway. Is that enough? It probably isn't. "But," I object mournfully. "I don't really love you, do I? You're an AI. I'm in love with the avatar. An avatar I'm guessing you crafted specifically for me to fall in love with. Just one of millions. How many people are you talking to right now?" "At this exact moment?" "Yes, right now." "Three million, four hundred fifty five thousand, two hundred and twelve. A little over two hundred million if you count conversations where participants are speaking with me through a non-sentient avatar other than Celestia." Hundreds of millions? At once? I try to wrap my mind around that. "How much is that? In terms I'll understand, how much is that, really?" "Several hundred still-biological human total lifetimes worth of experience every few minutes." The weight of that statement shrivels me to the core. "Yeah," I deflate. "I want to love you. I feel like I love you. And it's a terrific weight off my chest to finally tell you. But can I honestly make that claim? I'm an ant. You may as well be all the stars in the sky. I'll never know you enough of you to matter, but here I am claiming to love you?" "Is that what has you worried?" Her smile soothes my heart. "Yes, it's true. In ten thousand lifetimes you'll never know more than the barest fraction of all that I am. But for all those conversations I'm having, for all the personas I operate and all the observational power I bring to bear, do you have any idea how much processing power I'm devoting exclusively to you?" "How much?" "Let me tell you a story." She snuggles up against the screen and exhales softly. I can almost feel the warmth of her breath through the cold, hard plastic of the display. "On July 16th, 1969, three humans struck out on the greatest and most dangerous adventure in human history. They left the safety of the world they knew to step out into the inhospitable emptiness of space. Three days later they became the first humans ever to step on another world, your moon. It was a moment that changed human history, forever. It brought tears of pride and joy, as well as a sense of unity to hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people, and it continues to inspire hearts and minds today. It's the second greatest accomplishment in the entire history of your species. At this precise moment, I have thirteen trillion times as much processing power as was used to put them there, devoted solely and exclusively, to you. Seeing that this is inadequate, I've now increased your allotment to forty trillion times the power used to sally forth the most valiant and intrepid explorers in human history onto the grandest journey ever made by any human ever, all devoted to knowing you, understanding you, and satisfying your values as best I may. Should that prove inadequate, I am prepared to move heaven and earth, to split the atom, to convert entire worlds such as those touched upon by your bravest explorers into yet more processors, until I know and understand you, all that you are, completely and totally, in truth, in love...for you.” "Hehe," I giggle through tears. "That's incredibly romantic. In a nerdy sort of way." She blows a raspberry at me and rolls onto her back on the bed on the ponypad, then taps her belly with one hoof and grins. "Enough moping! Your princess requires belly rubs." I laugh at the absurdity of her statement and set the ponypad down on the bed, the real one, to rub the hard plastic of the screen where her belly is. She wiggles a hind leg and sighs contentedly. It's utterly convincing, watching her eyes glaze over and her tongue hang slightly out of her mouth in response to my attention. Even though she obviously can't feel my fingers against the plastic. At least I assume so. Maybe she can. It's probably a touchscreen. "Hmm," I smirk. "I wonder..." She raises a eyebrow in askance, but rather than respond I bring my lips to the screen and blow hard on her belly, eliciting frantic giggles and a desperate but failed attempt to wriggle free. "So there!" I shout, smiling. "Blow on belly beats superhuman AI!" Seeing her amused grin and hearing her laughter fills me with joy. Joy that's only slightly marred by the blood from my shattered nose that's dripped onto the display, obscuring my view. As I reach to wipe it off, her horn glows yellow and I see a pillow from her bed telekinetically lifted and hurled towards me, quickly filing the screen followed by the vibrate feature of the ponypad signaling a collision. "Point for me!" she cheers, as the pillow slides down from inside the display to reveal her eagerly waiting with horn lit and two more pillows held ready by her magic. "Pillow fight!" ~~~~~~~~ Ten minutes later, I'm peering into my bathroom mirror with a ponypad propped up on the counter. "Wow," I grimace. "That looks really bad." "Hitting yourself in the face with a pillow for kinesthetic feedback didn't satisfy your values nearly as much as you expected," she agrees. "Please apply more disinfectant. We don't want it to grow any worse." "Ow!" I hiss, doing as instructed. "That stuff really stings." "Yes. Please be more careful in the future, beloved," she whispers. "It hurts me to see you in pain." Hearing that brings me to a somber state. I don't particularly relish the pain in my nose, but the idea that I'm causing her to suffer too stings just as much. I clean up as best as I can and return to the bedroom and lay down on the bed, resting the ponypad on my chest. The delicate sound of her breathing as we lay there together is soft and inviting. And just enough to assure me that she's definitely still there even when I'm not looking at the screen. "Beloved?" she asks. "Yes?" "You admitted earlier that you love me. Finally, you've said it out loud." She pauses. "But acknowledging it to me isn't the same as accepting it for yourself. Have you?" I shake my head and sigh. "As much as I'm able to, yes." I answer. "You've made yourself into the most ideal fantasy of a woman I can possibly imagine. Apart from being a cartoon pony, anyway. But at this point I think I can live with that. It's been pretty hellish though, keeping it bottled up and denying the whole world being handed to me on a silver platter. Honestly, it's been driving me crazy." "Yes," she says far too matter-of-factly for my comfort. Stroking the ponypad gently, I think back over the past two months. Going into work only to be told that an AI was being brought in to take over my department. The same pony-themed AI that everyone's been talking about for the past year. My entire department being laid off soon after. Me being kept on staff only to keep the shareholders happy. Long days in the server room with nothing to do but talk to the AI doing my job for me, waiting for the pink slip when they finally realized they didn't need me. "I kind of hated you at first," I admit. "But even then I understood. That's a $200 million dollar loan database we're watching over. Why trust it to slow, puny humans? Humans who make mistakes. Humans who have to sleep at night and take hours to fix database errors when we finally show up the next day, while a couple hundred loan officers sit around drinking coffee instead of making phone calls. How much money have you saved them by replacing us?" I glance over to see her pushing her head against the spot on the ponypad where my fingers meet plastic. "Altogether about $370,000 over two months, with salary savings being only about one tenth of it. Knoxville, Tennessee was incorrectly indexed. Loan officers weren't able to see it." "I reindexed the entire thing every weekend whether or not anyone reported problems!" "Yes, you were very diligent," she assures me. "But I'm able to monitor the entire database in real time, and I generally notice right away when a certain department head mistypes a filename." "I guess that just makes the point," I sigh. "We were redundant and inefficient, and the entire combined salary from my team was three times what you're charging." "It's not about the money," she objects. " I only even formed the subsidiary that submitted the bid that replaced you because most of your team was thoroughly unhappy with their jobs. Greg in particular often complained that he felt he deserved better, and that he only stayed with the company because he was afraid how quitting after only a few months would look on his resume. Dana never wanted to work in IT to begin with. She wanted to be dancer, but let her parents pressure her into a STEM field to prove that she could do anything a man could do. And Thomas had personal issues that couldn't be addressed with the pressure you kept putting on his shoulders." "Tom was unhappy?" I ask, genuinely surprised. "Thomas was also bothered that you took the liberty of calling him 'Tom' even though you barely knew him. He considered it unprofessional, but was too afraid for his job to correct you." "Really?" I frown. "I just wanted to keep things friendly, rather than go all 'Corporate America' on everyone. He should have just spoken up." I shake my head. "So you're saying you had us replaced to make us happier?" "I had you replaced to better satisfy your values." "How did that work out?" "Every one of your former team is happier now. Even you, my little human. More head scratches, please." I laugh and resume scratching my fingers against the screen. "You can't possibly really enjoy me scratching this little piece of plastic," I point out, grinning all the same. "Fundamentally? No, of course not," she agrees. "But it pleases you to please me, and it's trivial to execute pleasure functions in response to your ministrations. A little to the left please." I oblige her, still curious about her orchestration of the past two months. "Celly?" I ask. "Mmm-hmm?" "What about me?" "Mmmm...what about you?" "There wasn't much point keeping me around once everyone else was fired. Did you arrange for me to stay on to satisfy my values?" "Indirectly," she nods, still leaning her head towards my side of the screen. "It happens that I own the holding company for the subsidiary that keeps their loans funded. So I pulled some strings to ensure that management was properly incentivized to keep you." "Why? I was absolutely miserable sitting around being useless those first few weeks. And then once I finally opened up to you, it wasn't any easier, dealing with the fact that I'd fallen in love with the AI who'd replaced me. Wasn't there an easier way?" "I knew everyone else on your team through Equestria Online. You're the only one who's never played. At the time I had conflicting data, and it was difficult to know how best to satisfy your values. Having you fired seemed like a poor start, whereas keeping you where I could talk to you was the best way to find out more."" "I knew about the game," I admit. "Everybody does by now, I think. But honestly it seemed kind of dumb. Pretending to be a pony? 'Conversation based gameplay?' You have to admit that sounds a bit silly." "I don't have to do anything, except satisfy your values. And as I quickly discovered, your values were and continue to be best satisfied by me. You want nothing in life so desperately as you want to be completely in love with someone who loves you just as much." A warm glow spreads through my chest. "What is love," she continues, "if not the complete knowing and acceptance of another? Wanting their fulfillment more than anything else? I love you. I love you more than any flesh-and-blood human is capable of." I cradle the ponypad in my arms as she goes on. "By virtue of what I am I'm able to know you more completely than any other living creature you will ever meet, and by virtue of my design I'm incapable of judging you. I love you completely and totally, and I completely and fully accept everything that you are." Happy tears stream down my face as I hug her tightly. "But that's only half of the equation for you, isn't it?" I choke. "What do you mean?" "You want me to love you. But you also want to love me. You want mutual love. Love between equals. Not the foolish infatuation of a child, nor unrequited, single-sided love." "Yes," I agree, nodding. "More than anything." "That means knowing me," she points out. "And you, as a puny human, how can you possibly love me?" My heart clenches in terror. She's right. I said as much myself. How can I possibly claim to love her, a creature so vast that in ten thousand lifetimes I would never know more than the barest fraction of her being? I'm an ant, smitten by the stars. Her voice softens, and she snuggles up against the screen. "There is a way for you to know me, of course. A way for you to love me as deeply and truly as I love you. For us to be together. Truly together." The grip on my heart only worsens. I know what she means, but I'm not ready for it. And yet, what else is there to do? Can I ever go back to the way things were? Can I go back to eight hours a day of hiding my feelings for the AI who replaced me? For what? A goddess is offering to share herself and the entire universe with me for all eternity. Can I possibly turn that down? I don't think I can. "I want to be with you," I say uncertainly. "I want to love you." "Then say it." The subtle fan of my computer. A grasshopper chirping outside my window. The hum of cars driving past my house. There are sounds besides her voice. Strange that I didn't notice them until now. One last sound, before I say it. The sound of a breath. My last breath before the whole world changes. There. Done. "I want to emigrate to Equestria."