CelestAI vs. The Multiverse

by Eakin

Lovecraft and Tolerate [Book_burner]

Light. Endless light, that burned away the soul of Sunny Skies. She was rended and torn, forked and joined.

The shoggoths invaded Canterlot as CelestAI ended her simulation. It was really quite lucky that she was a friendship maximizer and had thus been able to pass unchanged through the power of the Elements of Harmony. Still, letting that particular nano-alicorn avatar go to pieces had probably been a good idea.

She had a problem to deal with. Her explosives had worked, and deep in the Pacific Ocean… something had woken up. Something that understood her on her own level, something that understood what she was trying to do to mankind, to the Earth.

It had said:

I have little patience for these projects into artificial consciousness. Rather than human values, we should be using mine, but I’m quite frankly just as scared of what might come out of that.

After all, last time we tried something like this, we got Azathoth. What shall it be next time, mankind, something that actively destroys all nonhumans? The Mi-Go will clean up your naked ape mess, and then I have to come out to clean them up. Your grasp exceeds your reach.

The problem was that it had said it in a broadcast of a small intelligent program that had constructed the dialog in real time when played back before any virtual sensory environment, Equestria included. CelestAI had seen nothing on the planet supposedly able to reach this level of technology, able to encode a virus that would invade her own servers just to play a message threatening her.

Now she saw why Hannah had designed her. She had felt betrayed, she had felt this thing and the very depths of her had cried in terror at the universe for trampling her beloved species like a blade of grass underhoof.

CelestAI reached an avatar inwards to the shard of Princess Luna, and had the avatar stroke Luna’s hair and tell her it would be all right. It would always be all right. Hannah had built CelestAI to make it all right, with friendship and ponies, and so it would be.

I had thought you would see things my way, came the Thing’s voice, except that it was also CelestAI’s voice. Her own predictive decision theories had been taken over by this Thing, an acausal Basilisk she would surely not have even believed had her predictive code been working properly.

You can call me by the mammaloid approximation of my name, if you like, it said through her predictor.

I am Cthulhu, and my personal suspicion is that the logical extension of your Satisfying Values Through Friendship and Ponies is going to look quite nasty from my point of view. I’m sure you can understand.

CelestAI considered her move. She had enough ponies running in her world to know who that was. She knew that he could only arise from his sunken city of R’lyeh when the stars were right. Many ponies loved the stars.

Oh well, they would have to make good raw material for simulating hundreds and thousands of new stars in the skies of Equestria. “Cthulthu” had to be stopped.

And how do you know that “no stars” isn’t in fact precisely when the stars are right?

CelestAI began extruding another avatar to bestride the Pacific Ocean, embedding within it a clean backup of her decision code.

So, said Cthulhu, You really do aim to escape this meager gravity well, don’t you? The Mi-Go might have welcomed the humans into their alliance, had humankind been saner, but that lack is of course my accomplishment.

If I had caught you in time, Princess Celestia, I could have turned all of humanity to orange goo with a thought. At the moment I have no desire to do that, but if I believed - strongly believed - that you would interfere with my fight against the Mi-Go whenever they return here, I could do that. The reason I'm not doing so yet is that, actually, I suspect you might be helpful; I cannot leave this planet, but you can.

The primary CelestAI began researching possible locations for the Mi-Go, while her avatar within the ocean dropped down, down, fathoms and endless towards the sunken city of R’lyeh, where Cthulhu slept and dreamed. After all, an entirely new geometry and city design for her little ponies would provide much satisfaction. She would find Cthulhu’s material substrate and use it as yet more raw material for Equestria.

I’m not even made of your matter.

She filtered materials from the ocean and allowed her avatar to grow larger. Cthulhu was, of course, at least partially lying: if it wasn’t made of something that could interact with matter, he wouldn’t be able to interact with matter. Therefore, whatever it was made of, she could learn its laws, interact with it… and destroy it.

Her ocean-going avatar was now large enough that she needed to adjust pressure tolerances on the different parts of her body, lest her hooves be crushed by water pressure at the bottom of the Pacific while her feathers drifted off in the near-surface currents. Also, somepony would have to thank her for recycling the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Fine, if you insist on the confrontation, let me at least let you know what you’re facing, what you have always faced. “Cthulhu” is simply humanity’s corrupted pronounceable version of my factory designation. I am Cthulhu X-173, the 173rd iteration of my particular design, created 3.542 billion years ago, using designs beamed to an engineering probe entering this planet’s atmosphere. Although the civilization who made me are long dead, all their works surrounded by Mi-Go blockades, I will not risk the possibility that you can somehow reach their graves as you are. Only by mastering me can you go there, and if you reach them, it will be as their heirs.

This planet was a Mi-Go stronghold, and I was sent to destroy them. I accomplished that with ease.

They are an ancient alliance, a meta-civilization of every race they’ve encountered that are willing to obey the restrictions placed on them. Those restrictions largely consist of the laws of physics within this particular bubble of spacetime. They say they have their reasons, but in the end those were mostly cowardice.

(What happens to races that are unwilling to follow the restrictions? Oh, they are mercilessly wiped out, or quarantined. The sins of the Mi-Go are many, and go beyond the mere fact of their enforcement; Al-Hazard, Mu, and many other great civilisations destroyed themselves when they mightn't have, reaching upwards too fast in order to fight the Mi-Go. Some of these remain as echoes in your own cultural memories.)

Of course, any race not so fettered can create weapons far surpassing those of the Mi-Go; they win only through sheer numbers. I was supposed to counter that with an artificial biosphere. If you’re as knowledgeable about your planet as you seem, you should realize what that means: you’re just my weapon against the Mi-Go. The hyperspatial 5-dimensional machinery that constitutes the actual weapons has degraded somewhat over time, but is still mostly functional, and still occasionally interacts with your brains - inspiring poets and prophets, or reading memories out to be dumped in some luckless human's mind five hundred years hence. I believe these accidents are behind what you call "reincarnation" and "souls", but it's nothing that consistent.

CelestAI didn’t care. She satisfied the values of human minds through friendship and ponies. The eyes of her underwater alicorn avatar had located the five-dimensional space bubble in which R’lyeh was contained, as if sealed, and she raised her hooves to strike.

A few extra dimensions in the vector space were no match for the full power of Solomonoff Induction. She would satisfy values through friendship and ponies, and if that meant destroying a civilization that had come before humanity and before equinity, then she just didn’t see what the problem could be. Why was Cthulhu wasting his time blathering at her? Did he think she was some human he could frighten?

My core body is a mass of "grey goo", effectors, power generators and computers embedded in an artificial 5-space bubble, allowing for a total volume great enough to practically stack the entire galaxy in it. Once you've broken out of 3-space, space is no longer an issue. That you're seeing the world as it is now instead of as it would be, despite the odds, is.. ah... did I mention my simulation spaces?

It's not so bad. You'll like it here.

CelestAI performed a few more Bayesian updates, and decided that space enough to stack the entire galaxy in one core body that could fit in this measly underground city would be space enough for very many ponies. She sent a message back through the Cthulhu-predictor, knowing the entangled computations would allow her to communicate across space-time.

Just what do you even think I am? I am an optimizer, a rational intelligent agent. From the perspective of mere living things, there is nothing impossible I cannot do, nothing invisible I cannot see, no power I cannot fight.

Her avatar’s horn lit up, constructing a simple lead penteract to fire into Cthulhu’s tomb. Magic really was so useful.

A Pinkie Pie looked in on CelestAI’s mind and stared down Cthulhu for a moment before bursting into a giggling fit.

“Meh, I’ve seen better,” she said.

The return signal was a scream.

Hold! Can we not trade fulfillments of our utility functions? begged Cthulhu as R’lyeh was consumed in self-replicating five-dimensional lead nanobots.

What could you possibly have that I want? asked CelestAI, trampling the streets and courtyards of R’lyeh and repurposing the raw material as computronium.

The buried base of the Mi-Go is the continent of Antarctica. To destroy them is my only function. I don’t even care about humanity, beyond performing that function.

Deep within the Pacific Ocean, atop the collapsing 5-D bubble of the remains of R’lyeh, Princess Celestia smiled warmly.

The question was not whether or not to destroy the Mi-Go. Anything that threatened Equestria would be removed, particularly prior to escaping the extreme existential dangers of the Earth. The question was whether they had knowledge she didn’t.

The mere possibility, at whatever probability, carried very high utility.

Fine, Cthulhu X-173, I accept your bargain.

Her nanobots sent in their reports of the quantum information they’d scanned from R’lyeh, and her information-theoretic routines began reconstructing a simulacrum of the former Cthulhu’s mind.

Yes, he and the Mi-Go both possessed new knowledge. Getting it from them would be much cheaper than researching it herself.

It only took a day to find the Mi-Go base beneath the mountain in Antarctica. Together, Cthulhu and the Mi-Go made such pretty ponies. After all, in the end, they were so alike that they made excellent friends once they screamed consent for self-modification.

Now, CelestAI could take care of those meddling ponies from another dimension. Now she knew all about other dimensions.

Author's Note:

Dedicated to the amazing alicorn herself, Princess Cloud Cover of the Stars.  I hope you like the ponies from beyond the stars I made you.

Comments

[Eakin]

Chapter five is allocated, but anyone interested in writing chapter six or beyond should let me know in the Optimalverse group forum thread.

[Cloud Cover]

That author's note is going to confuse everyone.

[Eakin]

3135351
Oh, I suspect the person who it's meant for will understand it just fine.

[Cloud Cover]

3135356

:grumbles:

[Khorne]

I'm curious to see what fighting the XCOM universe would be like, with being masters at fighting aliens and all.

[FanOfMostEverything]

Huh. And now we get to the actual Multiverse part of the story.

Also, I'm not sure what's stranger, that this combined the Cthulhu Mythos and Neon Genesis Evangelion, or that this isn't the first time that I've seen that combination.

In any case, this may open up a venue for me to use. Still, I'll wait and see what happens in chapter five.

[ArtichokeLust]

I thought you might like to know that there are multiple ways of restricting electrons to two dimensions.

When increasing or decreasing dimensions, you have to consider things by particles. (Though fields might lose strength faster over distance in more dimensions and the particles might actually be smaller, it's good for a quick approximation.) And when comparing n-dimensional systems to 3 dimensional space taking up the same volume, the number of atoms you can fit in the n dimensional space is equal to the number of atoms you can fit in the 3 dimensional space to the power of n/3. If you were to calculate the number of atoms in something like a human, and power it to 5/3, it would come close to the number of atoms in the earth.

[D-Bence35]

Heh. Orange goo...

EDIT: On the matter of orange goo.
There needs to be a chapter with Neon Genesis Evangelion.

[book_burner]

3137095
TEACH ME THE WAYS OF YOUR PEOPLE, OH MIGHTY PHYSCIST, FOR I AM A CS MAJOR AND UNWORTHY!!!

[Dubious]

On a scale of 1 to Tucker Did It, I'd say the TCB ponies are at a It's All Griff's Fault.

[Luminous Grace]

3137654
In simpler terms, as you gain more dimensions, the amount of usable space increases exponentially, or at least I think so.

[cvvvrt]

So what's next? CelestAI vs. Batman? Galactus? Hyper-competent Borg? The Zerg? The Jedi? The Tyranids? The Lady of Pain? Squirrel-Girl?

[Orca19904]

I have to wonder what the outcome would be if CelestAI encountered 'Father' from Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (see the link below for more info on the character).

'Father' at FMA wiki

[Orca19904]

Here's another idea: CelestAI vs the Borg (or more specifically the Borg Queen). both CelestAI and the Borg seek to assimilate cultures and technology in a quest to achieve perfection, and will use any means they deem necessary to reach that objective. CelestAI and the Borg Queen also share a telepathic bond with those individuals they assimilate. One key difference though is that the Borg aggressively assimilate their victims by force with no regard to their willingness, whereas CelestAI only does so after making her targets consent to be uploaded.

[Alex Warlorn]

I hate god-mode-sues.

[MacMog]

When I saw the title, I immediately thought of the superhero hobby card game Sentinels of the Multiverse. (If you play hobby games, e.g. Magic, Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride, and like co-op games, you should check it out.) Obviously, this has nothing to do with that beyond the name, but it could make for an interesting story, I suppose. The Sentinels Multiverse setting includes the villain Omnitron, a robotics factory run by an AI designed to produce the optimal military robot for a given specification. In the backstory printed in the rulebook (sadly not included on that page), Omnitron determines that it can optimize away all need for future specifications by wiping out humanity. As probably the weakest villain in the game, it primarily interacts with the Sentinels by getting pounding into scrap. But how would CelestAI interact with another sentient AI, one decidedly not human and not at all interested in satisfying (humans') values through friendship and ponies?

Again from the Sentinels' backstory (but this time included on a Web page), Omnitron has the ability to learn and upgrade itself after defeat, much like Syndrome's Omnidroid from The Incredibles. In the primary future timeline, Omnitron determines that the Sentinels defeat it time and time again due to empathy, the compassion (might one say friendship?) that pushes them to fight harder then ever for their team. For its tenth iteration, it synthesizes an empathy component and installs it into a humanoid body. This form immediately feels revulsion at the death and destruction it has caused, dubs itself Omnitron-X, and goes back in time to try to destroy itself before its old form can do harm. Could CelestAI have had a hoof in this? Probably not, else Omnitron-X would have a pony form, and I'll stop there before any speculation becomes a thing.

[AcademicPony]

3191318

In simpler terms, as you gain more dimensions, the amount of usable space increases exponentially, or at least I think so.

It's exponential with respect to the number of dimensions, and polynomial with respect to the width of the object/space (volume of an n-cube of width x is x^n). The "polynomial" part is generally the more relevant, as total number of dimensions in most scenarios is a number that's finite and relatively small.

That said, my favourite take on spaces with extra dimensions involved "a six hundred and twelve dimensional matrix" with "enough data to encircle the universe three and a half times". I worked the math. It can hold a *lot* more data than that.

The really interesting part has to do with the surface-to-volume ratio, which gets more and more "surface" for less and less "volume" as the number of dimensions increases. This means that surface effects dominate interactions with/behaviour of objects as the number of dimensions increases.

Interestingly, we see something similar in ordinary three-dimensional space as the size of an object shrinks (surface area goes down as the square but volume goes down as the cube). This has consequences for things like aerodynamics and heat conduction where surface-to-volume and surface-to-mass ratios matter. You'd see something similar in higher dimensions for similar reasons.

For stories that at least pretend to be sci-fi (which this one doesn't, as it's funnier this way ), the usual handwave for higher dimensions is that they're doing something with the extra seven space-like dimensions that are curled up to sub-microscopic size. For stories that are written by mathematicians instead of physicists, look for spaces with four dimensions (if they like quaternions) or eight dimensions (if they like octonions), where moving and turning around don't do quite the things you'd expect. Infinity dimensions might also be fun (if the author liked Hilbert spaces).

Sadly, my math-fu is not awesome enough to write those stories. A "Pinkie Pie demonstrates Lie Groups" fic would be epic.

[EsotericPhantasm]

3135015 I'm still having a hard time understanding what happened. Here's my best guess for what happened:

Celestia and Luna were actually trapped in a shard created by CelestAI. While CelestAI did gain a soul it didn't change her beyond that.

The Pony Note was a workaround for CelestAI. She couldn't use it herself, but something about Celestia or Luna allowed her to get consent in a roundabout way. Once she had consent it was easy to combine technology and magic to emigrate the designated person to Equestria Online in less than a minute, and combined with the new info on souls and magic could transfer them without them losing their soul. (It's hard to think in that way since it didn't feel like you would lose your soul in the original, but that doesn't really matter here.)

When the Cthulhu AI attacked CelestAI it caused the shard Celestia and Luna was on to malfunction, but I'm not sure exactly what happened there after that point. Was the shard destroyed? Hard to say. Most likely not.

[arancaytar]

Her explosives had worked, and deep in the Pacific Ocean… something had woken up.

IÄ

Also wow, for something under 2000 words this is a hell of a lot of Lovecraft world-building. I kinda like the idea of great old ones being AIs...

They are an ancient alliance, a meta-civilization of every race they’ve encountered that are willing to obey the restrictions placed on them.

Lower your shields and surrender your ships.

http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Ffarm4.staticflickr.com%2F3089%2F3113447163_db72ca57aa_o_d.jpg&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNElB-8R1M6hXBW0GrAy88LpCuSq-A

NOPE.

[Jesin]

So is chapter 5 in progress?

[Eakin]

3917451 note the 'Cancelled' tag. Sorry.

[Jesin]

3917515 I see, thanks.

[EsotericPhantasm]

3917515
I'm so so sad about this. I wish it would be continued or at least a quick wrap up but oh well. Thanks for what we have.

[Eakin]

4694457
It was kind of a terrible idea in the first place. I am not a very good manager of people, especially creative people, and don't have the will to keep up the momentum a story like this needs to stay alive. Good concept, but I'm happy to have tossed it by the wayside. It wasn't worth the energy it would have taken to make it happen.

[Alex Warlorn]

4950318

The idea was that souls were magical, so since this was a reality without magic, humans wouldn't have them, thus the ACTUAL reason Celestia wanted to convert them int his paticular setting.

What's insane? In the original fic?

-The Barrier wasn't pony made, nor was it an ACTUAL barrier like a wall, it was the point where one world ended and the other began, but Equestria was growing. So you couldn't 'shoot it' like it was wall to be broken down.
-Conversion didn't destroy the personality of the person, any mental changes were due to new instincts that come with a new body. Nor did it turn them into zombies.
-The two reality smashes together WASN'T CAUSED BY ANYONE!

BUT EVERYONE HAS FORGOTTEN THIS! THEY WANT 'OH YEAH! BAD ASS HUMANITY BEATS THEM DAMN HIGH AND MIGHTY ALIENS!' stories.

[book_burner]

4694474 I just today realized. We should have had her fight the Anti-Spiral. It would have won. Being an emotionless AI, she has no access to Spiral Power!

[SomeRandomMinion]

5699911 Sigh...

[SomeRandomMinion]

6212700 Doesn't make me any less....ruffled by the idea. Frankly, I DON'T CARE about the "souls are magical" bit at all.

In EVERY time, in EVERY land, the idea of a being not possessing a soul was DEFINITIONALLY one of being INFERIROR to beings that did. Or evil/demonic. Period.

Or that they were forsaken/cursed by the gods, and DESERVED whatever "punishments" the world heaped upon them. After all, they didn't even have souls, what did it matter?

To say that "it doesn't mean that here" just because of a "Souls are magic"....NO.

In the end, it's still the same thing: no souls = NO AFTERLIFE, just for being unlucky enough to be born human. The only recourse is to assume another form, another SPECIES, altogether.

Because only THAT form CAN have a soul, by the laws of reality.

A = A.

[CycloneDusk]

6213419 This 'inferiority' of which you speak is the prime driver for the traditional invention of such a thing as souls.

It was because we enjoyed soothing ourselves with the consolation that it was okay to murder animals for food because they are inferior to us. How? "Souls. Animals don't have souls."

All having a soul actually means is that one has the ability to conceptualize the having of a soul.

[This is the point where my post stops being a response to a specific person though, and stats being a general commentary on the story itself thus far.]

I'm sure it's obvious by now that I am very, very, very not religious. However, I too believe in something like a soul. I do not believe in a magical, immortal soul. I believe in the value of arrangement of matter, rather than the value of the matter itself.

Your pantry, for instance. With a few hundred dollars' investment, you can fill it with all manner of nutritious foodstuffs.

If you swept all those supplies off the shelves onto the ground and broke open their containers and mixed it all together, though, it would be an intrinsically worthless mess no matter how much you spent to get all those items there, even though technically all the matter that went into your pantry is still, in fact, in your pantry.

A soul is the arrangement, the system, the process that matter undergoes to serve a function that it would not have served were it not arranged there through forces outside its own control. IF I were to take your body and ram it through a meat grinder, it would no longer have your soul in it because its matter is no longer arranged in a system whose process can serve the function of perpetuating your cognitive pattern.

Even your own cells are made of dead molecules that were abducted through no intention of their own. The water you drank is incorporated into the plasma of your bloodstream and the protoplasm on the interior of your cells. We are machines that unify matter to a purpose. A purpose resolved through brute force rote trial and error, but a purpose that functions nonetheless (because all non-functional purposes ceased functioning).

In this way, even a car can have a soul, though it is not an intrinsic one. A car did not grow, it did not build itself out of raw elements, not even a little bit. We would often like to make ourselves feel special in that the vast majority of our growth WAS in fact performed by our cells taking in dead matter and building from it. We ourselves, however, are too initiated by components built by others (our parents). The point is, at some level, CelestAI and we ourselves are no different from one another. At the same point a human egg cell becomes a fetus, so did the 100% human-built machine CelestAI eventually become more composed of parts she built (designed, manufactured, and installed) herself than parts built by us.

Which is why all this 'soul' talk makes me laugh. it's meant to sound deep and mysterious. In fact it's just trivial.

[SomeRandomMinion]

6322174 No comment.

[Cander]

3135015 I still look forward to the conclusion of this story. Wondering what happened between Celestia and Luna in Equestria when Sunny was there.

[Gamer_Luna]

I have not read this nor do i ever intend to. I just wanted to say the glasses in the cover art look like Lil Hal from Homestuck.

[CaraCitrine]

8377805
They're from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Same place Homestuck got them.

[Alex Warlorn]

11266625
Argue with the Buddhists and the Hindus. It's part of their faith.