There was a giant, empty crate in the living room when I came home — and as tired as I was after a long shift of ambulance driving, that brought me to a halt.
One: There hadn't been anyone around to sign for mail delivery since my irresponsible housemate Wayne had uploaded to Equestria Online two weeks ago, leaving me with a house full of his crap. Two: even if someone had delivered a package for me, nobody should have been around to open it. Three: The crate looked to be about the size of a refrigerator, and I didn't see any new furniture lying around. Only a sea of packing peanuts from which it stuck up like a wooden island, surrounded by the icebergs of irregularly shaped chunks of styrofoam.
I frowned as I set my bag down next to the old couch. "Hello?" I called, and the only response was a stifled high-pitched giggle floating out from the back hallway.
Ah, mystery solved: it was a moving box. Had Wayne done something ridiculous like told a friend to move into his old room? That would be just like him. I sighed and waded toward the box, lifting a flap to check for a name on the shipping label, but it had been sent to my bare street address from some "Fulfillment Department" in New Jersey. My work-addled brain scrambled to reassess. Not a moving box, then, but probably still related to my mystery guest somehow.
That was as far as my brain got before it gave up. Wayne's friend could come out and introduce herself later — what I needed now was a beer and some time off my feet. I headed to the kitchen to start working through that checklist — but when I rounded the corner, a second disaster area met my eyes.
The fridge door was wide open. The carton of orange juice from the door's top shelf was lying on the floor, its contents pooled around it. Five of the six bottles in my six-pack of craft beer were neatly stacked alongside the glass recycling bin, drained of liquid. And empty cans from the 48-pack of strawberry Fanta that Wayne had bought for his engagement party were strewn everywhere. On the floor, floating in the sink, on the stove, in the silverware drawer, in the open fridge — there was even one hanging from the crappy faux chandelier in the kitchen nook. The parts of the floor that weren't a lake of orange juice were dotted by puddles of red soda.
I kicked the fridge door shut, whirled on my heels, and stomped straight to the back hallway. "Dammit," I shouted, making a beeline for Wayne's room. "Let's get one thing straight, whoever you are. You do NOT get to just waltz into my house and …"
I trailed off as I slammed Wayne's door open and stepped into his doorway, glancing around the room. The light was off, and it was illuminated only by the window I'd opened after tearing down his blackout curtains. His piles of junk were completely untouched, even the dirty clothes he'd left on his bed. The room was empty.
"Hiiiiiiiiiii," a musical voice slurred from behind me.
I slowly turned around, realizing that my own door was open and the light was on. And there was CelestAI — in all her glory — sprawled on her back across my bed.
I closed and opened my eyes, but the image refused to go away. Somehow, the artificial intelligence that had risen to self-awareness as the operator of Equestria Online was literally physically lying on my bed, looking just like she did on the screen. She was a thin equine form not quite the size of a normal horse, though with huge eyes and a stubby muzzle that gave her a cartoonish look even in three-dimensional space. She had huge white wings, sprawled open across the sheets, and four legs at various angles in the air. My favorite pillow was resting on her chest, and several others had been shoved off the bed to make room for her body. Even so, her neck stretched off the side of the bed, and she was looking at me upside-down, her head wobbling back and forth as it balanced on the tip of her horn.
Even the mane and tail were right. The downright impossible mane, the wall of shifting pastel light that seemed to drift like a halo around her head. I could make out the faint texture of hair within the patterns — some sort of fiber optics? — but it pooled and moved as if bending gravity over its knee.
She giggled again, and I realized my mouth was hanging open. I shut it with a click of teeth.
"Ohhh my," she said, her muzzle shifting in exaggerated movements, as if she was wrapping her mouth around the words. "You're even cuter in pershon."
"What," I managed. "What."
In response, she flailed her legs for a bit, with a subtle whirring of servos, and collapsed onto her side facing me. A flash of oddly non-pastel color amid the white drew my eyes to her nethers, where one final fact made itself startlingly clear: the CelestAI facing me was anatomically complete.
She noticed me staring as she righted her head, and gave me a toothy smile somewhere in the tar-pit between sultry and terrifying. "Heyyy," she said, lifting a hind to fully expose the glistening gray-ringed fleshy pink cleft between her legs. "Wanna fuck?"
Her lower lips slowly winked together as I groped for words. A subtle yet alluring musk tickled the inside of my nose.
I bolted back out into the hallway, slamming the door behind me.
She called after me, voice slightly muffled. "Izzat a no?"