Ch5: To The Secret Lab!
“Okay what is this?”
Everypony sitting at the table stared at him like he had just grown a second head and said head had started to speak in Japanese backwards.
“Jacob. That’s bacon” Twilight answered him slowly like she was talking to a small child.
“No it is not. I can tell you this because of two things. One: you were all disgusted by the prospect of me eating meat at one point before you all got over it, so why would you cook it and two: I can see a little window in the corner of my eye that tells me that what I am currently eating, has the nutritional value of a celery stick.” Jacob deadpanned.
“Okay it’s substitute bacon, or “sub-bacon” for short. It has all the flavor and texture of real bacon, without all the nasty fats and calories. Plus-” she took a bite out of the strip he was holding “-It’s vegetarian friendly!” She finished with a big smile.
Luna, seeing his confusion, explained “It’s actually a really funny historical moment. A couple thousand years ago, two drunk ponies dared their friend to go to a gryphon restaurant and order a meat dish. Turns out he, and a lot of others, loved the stuff. Word got out and soon ponies were divided on whether it was ethical to slaughter animals for tasty treats or to stay vegetarians and pacifists.”
Celestia finished for her “We eventually made up a substitute that doesn’t use any meat and has a higher nutrient count. Although we mostly still stick to hay-bacon, it’s nice to have a change of pace every once-in-awhile.” She emphasized her point by finishing the half strip he was still holding.
Noticing his pilfered non-meat he slammed his hands on the table in a mock-angry fashion while the others laughed at his horrible, horrible misfortune. (Cue dramatic swoon.)
This was basically the whole morning.
After the plethora of apologies, forgiveness, and tears, they settled down for the best fucking breakfast he ever dun’ had, made even better once he found out it was a collaborative effort by his family to try and soften the rather hard blow he had been dealt.
He decided he might possibly, maybe, have a small chance, to the tiniest decimal, that he would live.
Maybe...
So ensued a breakfast of bacon, witty remarks, catching up, bacon, pancakes, a little bit of explanation that could be done then and there, and bacon.
"Bacon…"
Although he still wanted answers, he could wait a little longer to do so to satisfy his family. After all they were the best thing to happen to him since his birth. They had obviously been enduring a long time without him, so why not enjoy the simple things now instead of mucking everything up later.
Jacob always held family in insanely high regard as a value one should practice all the time. ‘Put others before yourself' they would always tell him in Sunday school. Unlike some of the others in the same class, Jacob actually took the lesson to heart and practiced it throughout his adulthood and into his time in Equestria. It wasn’t like he had a horrid childhood and now had to go on some white-knight crusade to give others the family he never had or anything, it’s just… him.
So here he was, enjoying an uber-nice breakfast with his awesome family instead of grilling them with severe questions.
Unfortunately, Twilight noticed this and said “We actually have a lot of leftovers now, let’s finish up and then we can answer anything you want once we get to the lab.”
Resounding ‘sounds good to me’ and ‘sure’s rang out through the kitchen as they all started to head toward the mess they made. Several failed attempts had been strewn across the counter, floor, and the island from when Celestia tried to do it on her own. Burnt eggs, burnt toast, burnt juice (?), and burnt pancakes had covered almost every surface. They were so engrossed in their breakfast, however, that they didn’t notice the silent work of the nano machines and arm-bots after they settled down.
Seeing the mess was done and done, the four alicorns and single human shrugged and made their way out of the kitchen, into the hallway.
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The group was silent for most of the walk, each member engrossed in their own thoughts. Although the thoughts were mostly about the same thing, at least one sentence crossed each of their minds at one point.
“This is going to be a shitstorm”
Or clusterfuck, whichever you prefer. They could only stay in their bacon induced fantasy-land for so long before reality would come to bite them in the ass and drag them to the lab where Jacob’s shell was created.
Soon they were at the elevator across from the common room. They all walked in as Twilight spoke a command to the elevator to take them to the twenty-fifth floor. All the while, Jacob was shaking like a leaf that was pissing itself. Luna, noticing this, nuzzled his neck for the seventh time that day. She didn’t mind, she could only imagine the things that were going through his central processor. The self-doubt and the despair of the truth of what he could be. His usually rock hard composure slipping at a likely alarming rate. She could not find any words to comfort him, no words to assuage his fears. But she honestly didn’t need to, just her mere presence and her actions served to calm him just a bit.
Soon the elevator reached the twenty-fifth floor - The Prototype Floor - as Twilight called it. As the doors opened, his ears were assaulted with a variety of sounds. The sounds of welding, power drills, whirring machinery, electronic beeps, and conversing ponies came out of the elevator doors. The room was a stark white and absolutely huge with a large table spanning the middle where pieces of machinery and electric components rested, waiting to be used. Clear glass cabinets lay above other tables on the outside of the room with other science-ey objects contained inside them. The room was illuminated by soft blue L.E.D. lights from the ceiling and personal lamps on the tables. Lining the room were other smaller rooms, presumably used for personal experimentation, along with two rooms on the far end, marked floor manager and vice floor manager. The smell of the place was thick with the metallic smell of… well metal and smoke coming off of soldering irons and welding torches.
As soon as the group walked out of the elevator, everything went silent and all eyes turned to Jacob. The silence dragged for a few minutes but felt like hours to Luna. She knew nothing in this room could hurt him. What she was worried about was what was going through his head. The thoughts he could be thinking, the actions he could be considering.
Completely unpredictable.
That is how he had explained human nature. Completely unpredictable. The human mind is a fickle thing, thinking about how much you could love pears one minute, plotting the downfall of your enemy the next, then trying to learn how to play the trumpet the next. That is why it could be a dangerous thing as well. She knew that he most likely would not do violent things, she knew him too well. But he was in a completely new situation, thrust into a world he did not understand, twice. The first week he was in Equestria he acted out-of-character and raised as much hell as possible trying to get home. The next he apologized and calmed down, a total one-eighty from the week before.
A fickle thing indeed.
That’s why she was so worried. She thought he might react badly to the scenario put in front of him at that moment. What she didn’t realize, however, is that one: He had loved ones beside him this time around and two: He got all of that stuff out the night before. So it was there that he did something none of the group expected.
“Hi” he said with complete confidence.
Immediately, all of the ponies in the room burst into cheers and whistling. They were jumping around on the tables, dancing, throwing hats into the air where applicable, even a couple making out in the background for some reason. Although the reaction was lost to Jacob, the rest knew exactly why. The ponies here had worked long hours for almost two years on what Twilight called “The biggest thing to be created since the computer.” and to see it come alive and do something like this, was a miracle in-an-of itself.
Luna smiled widely at this, she never expected Jacob to react so well and the response to be as it was. She had a feeling everything was going to be just fine.
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The group walked the back of the room as the occupants got to work on the things they were doing before they walked in. Twilight walked up to the door labeled “Floor Manager” and knocked.
“Solder! Get out here!” She spoke into the two-way speaker beside the door.
A couple of seconds later, a smoke colored Earth Pony with a mane that seemed to shine like liquid silver, and copper eyes walked out of the room.
“Yeah boss? What do you need?” The pony identified as Solder, spoke in a gravelly voice.
“Look up and see what you have created” She said pointing up to the pale bipedal standing not two inches away.
Solder indeed, did look up and see the fruits of his and his workers labors. When he saw something he created: Living, breathing, looking at him with intelligent eyes that held emotion. Emotion. Not just complete obedience and submissiveness, he felt an immense sense of accomplishment and pride for his hard workers. He smiled up at Jacob, held out his hoof and said.
“Mr. LeBlanc. It is an honor to finally meet you.”
Jacob returned the smile and shook the offered hoof. “Solder I assume. It is apparently an honor to meet you as well. From what I have gathered in the last ten seconds: you are the one who built me.” he said with a hint of snark.
Getting the gist of what his boss wanted him to do, Solder began to walk toward one of the bigger rooms off to the side where all of the augmentation modules were held.
Now that he was in full view, Jacob could get a look at his cutie-mark without looking like a creep. It looked like a circuit board having a wire soldered to it with a smoking soldering iron. Obviously the pony was well versed in electronics and wiring. How else do you get your own office and your own floor?
“Well, I wouldn’t say I was the only one who made your shell. We have a dedicated team of scientists, technicians, and mechanical engineers at our disposal here in Protoville. I think all of us were pretty excited about this new project when Ms. Sparkle sent down the order so we all contributed a little bit.” He explained with no small amount of pride in his voice.
Jacob looked a Twilight with a confused expression.
“Some here have taken to calling this floor ‘Protoville’ because this is where all of our experimental research gets done” She quickly explained as she and the others followed Solder.
When they got to the room labeled ‘Electronics’, Jacob looked around in awe at the massive display of electronics and other do-hickeys. Spanning the walls at least one story up on all sides, were clear glass cabinets like the ones in the main room, each with their own label. Solder turned his attention to a large holopad next to the door. While he was typing in various words and numbers, a large robotic arm came down from the ceiling and began to collect objects from certain cabinets and then place them down on a raised table in the middle of the room.
When the robotic arm seemed like it was done, it rose back up into a hole in the ceiling, leaving eleven items on the table. Four of them looked like medium-size computer chips. One looked like a small car battery. One looked like a small, wrist size ring. One looked like a large cylinder the size of his forearm. One looked like… a tooth? Yet another looked like a bone made out of some sort of black material. Next to it was a strip of a flexible looking white material. The last of the items was a wicked looking scythe thing, vaguely familiar looking to the one he saw in his hand yesterday…
“Now before we get into any hardware, are there any burning questions that you just have to have answered?” Solder asked, looking in Jacob’s direction.
“Oh so many” he thought with a mental sigh. After about two seconds of thinking he decided on the one that would answer most of his questions at once.
Jacob turned to Twilight and said “Am I real? Was I ever alive? I know you’re going to say yes but I need it to hear it.”
Twilight knew the question was coming and had already prepared two responses.
“Jacob, the fact that you can even question whether or not you are real, just goes to show that you are and were. We program all of our A.I. with coding that tells them that they are A.I. right from the start so they don’t go rampant with identity crisis.” She said, taking a deep breath for the next part.
“And another thing, why would we go through so much trouble for this? Why would we be arguing so badly over an A.I.? Why would Celestia spend all night out at the store getting food to cook for an A.I.? Why would we be sitting here explaining this to an A.I., and not immediately sending it out into the world to fix our problems for us?” She paused as she got up in his face, which was not hard considering she was eye level with him.
“Because you’re not an A.I.” She spoke to him softly. “You may have coding in you that we use to make A.I., but you are most certainly not one. You lived an amazing life, with amazing love, and from what you told us, amazing family. Stuff like that, memories, we just cannot program, it’s impossible.” She finished with a nuzzle to his neck.
Luna walked up to him and offered a nuzzle of her own. “We love you Jacob. We always have and always will.”
Jacob closed his eyes and fought back the tears that were assaulting his eyes. He needed to hear that so bad it almost hurt. He took a moment to compose himself before preparing his next question.
“I think my next question would be: Why? Why go through all this trouble? Why did you bring me back?” He asked with his arms crossed.
Celestia spoke up before any could open their mouth “That is actually something you and I are going to have to discuss later. But something I can tell you now is that there has been a void in the family for quite a long time. It took us a while to figure it out, but it was you. You were the one filling the space.” After she finished she got a look on her face as if she just remembered something then she… wait… started to tear up?
“We also *sniff* figured out what *sob* killed you.” She managed to stammer out.
His instincts kicking in, he immediately went over to comfort her, not really knowing what was making her act this way.
Twilight had also anticipated this and had memorized where they kept the Geiger pin-pointers. She levitated the small device to Jacob.
“This device is something similar to your Geiger counter, but it has been fine tuned to pinpoint the source of the radiation and over-clocked. If you use it, it might answer your question.” She said with no small amount of sorrow. He took the device from the lavender aura and pulled the trigger-like device on the grip. Immediately the thing exploded into beeps and crackles. He waved it around the room, unknowing of what Twilight was trying to prove. When he moved in the direction of Celestia, however, the device sped up. Closer and closer he got as Celestia’s sobs got louder and louder.
Celestia seemed to be emitting some sort of radiatio- “wait… radiation… radiation causes… ” His central processor fed the information into his A.I. container, where it allowed his body to react accordingly.
“No” He thought, his face adopting one of shock. “It can’t be”
His artificial mind combined with his natural rational thinking, quickly took over his uprising emotions and evaluated the situation. There wasn’t really much to evaluate though as it was just Celestia, crying on the floor, emitting a rather large amount of radiation by human standards. His mind told him that she was clearly extremely upset about the radiation she seemingly had no control over. That sealed the deal as he extinguished his anger with a tidal wave of sympathy and went in for an embrace.
“You couldn’t have known.” He whispered to her.
“I kill- ill -ill -illed you!” She countered, not caring that she was screaming and sobbing on his shoulder.
“Stop. You couldn't have known.” He said again, tearing up a little bit himself.
“I killed you!” She repeated a little less loud.
He didn’t say anything that time, it was probably the best decision for her to let it out.
“I killed you.” She repeated, barely above a whisper, like a broken record. “I killed- kill- you.”
“Would it help if I said I forgive you?” He asked.
Quickly, she brought her head up to stare at him in shock. “How could you forgive me after I did something like this?”
“Let me answer your question with two questions. Do you have any control over what your body does?” She shook her head. “Did you have any knowledge of what was going to happen to me?” She shook her head again. “Then you didn’t kill me. It wasn't your fault- hell nothing actually killed me! I just died like any normal mortal.”
He looked at her bloodshot eyes with sympathetic ones. “So I take back my earlier statement. I don’t forgive you because there is nothing to forgive. You can’t apologize for your body’s natural functions. That’s like saying ‘Oh I have to use the bathroom, can you find it in your heart to forgive me?’” He said with his biggest puppy dog eyes. Which actually weren't that big because humans… have small… ya get it? Aww fuck you. That managed to get her to giggle just a bit.
“There’s a smile. Now can we stop the drama? This isn't a damn soap opera.” He addressed to the whole group, who was in the process of tear cleaning and also gave a light chuckle.
“Unless you have anymore questions that might spring up more, yes, we can stop the drama.” Twilight said with a smirk while helping Celestia up.
“Just two more guys I promise. Yesterday I heard Luna say something that sounded like a command-override sequence. Is that still active?” He asked, looking around nervously.
“I can answer this for you quite easily actually.” Twilight responded going into ‘Lecture Mode’. “We did originally have certain vocal command passwords in the beginning when we weren't sure everything would go as smoothly as it did with the first impressions. Now getting onto another topic that will tie into this later, we can’t actually program emotions. Again, like memories, it is impossible to do without the subject potentially going rampant. Because these binary sequences don’t technically exist, most computers don’t know what to make of them and scrap them. What we did to your computer, however, is ‘tweak’ it a little. Basically what is does is, when it sees a code from the A.I. container or 'A.I.C', that is unfamiliar or translates to what amounts to gibberish, it doesn't scrap it, but lets it travel back to the A.I.C. to be decoded and made into electrical signals, which act as nerve endings to deliver messages to the rest of the body.” She took a deep breath before continuing.
“A little bit before we ‘woke’ you up, I put in some passive sequences in your coding. These passive sequences were supposed to read three of the ‘emotion binary algorithms’, then, once they had been read, erase all data concerning you and all override sequences from any of the computer terminals in the Four Alicorns Business Complex, and set up a ‘no-pony-gets-in’ firewall. What that means is that when a new code tries to make its way to you from an outside terminal, it immediately gets erased and tracked to the source.” She took another deep breath as she looked Jacob square in the eyes.
“I know this is a lot of hard science, but what I am trying to say is: You are your own being now. Nopony can control you or manipulate you in any way. If they did, they would be dealing with some very harsh charges from the rulers of the system themselves.” she finished with a glance to Luna and Celestia, who were looking on with determined faces.
“Nopony even attempts to touch you, ever” Luna spoke with conviction.
Jacob looked back at Twilight. “Well I never expected such a detailed answer but it’s a good answer nonetheless.” He said with a shrug and a smile. “Now for my last question: How did you do it? I’m dying to know.”
Twilight walked over to him and said. “You wouldn’t mind if I went on another rant would you?”
He looked at Twilight and gave her a reassuring hug. “Absolutely not Twilight, I always feel like I learn something new every time you really get into your zone. It’s inspiring and I wish you would do it more often.” He finished with a squeeze to her neck.
She blushed slightly from the complement. “Well if you insist.” She cleared her throat, preparing another informative lecture.
“Before we get into how we managed to get all the memories from Luna translated to binary, we need to go through a little recent magic history.” She teleported a white-board from her room to where they were.
“Think of magic like sound.” She punctuated this by drawing symbols that looked like sound waves.
“It travels in waves like sound, except not distorting the air like sound does, but distorting the ‘Static Background Aura’, an immaterial plane of mana that does not move unless magic is used. A flat line will indicate no magic being used and the S.B.A. is still.” She drew a flat, static line on the board.
“A small, constant frequency will be produced by an Earth pony using its strength or a Pegasus pony flying or standing on a cloud.” She drew a slight wave under the flat line.
“A frequency with a slightly larger amplitude will be present when a unicorn or alicorn lights up its horn.” She drew a slightly larger wave than the last two under the previous drawing.
“When a spell is cast, the frequency will have a large amplitude spike in the middle called a ‘Mana Spike’. Higher level spells are actually several smaller spells that have been smashed together to create the desired effect, creating overlapping spikes and frequencies.” She drew the slightly larger frequency with a large spike that suddenly goes up then slowly dies back down to the normal frequency, then several spikes overlapping each other on another.
“The higher level the spell, the more frequencies are created and recorded. You got that?” He nodded in confirmation. “Good. Which brings me to Luna.” She looked over to Luna, who perked up at the sound of her name.
“Just before you died, Luna used a well known spell called ‘In Loving Memory’, commonly used to preserve a little bit of a loved one's memory inside of the casters mind so they won’t forget them with time. Luna over-clocked the spell with a large amount of mana to preserve everything about you: Your memories, thoughts, emotions, everything and anything. If anypony else were to do this, their brain would have overloaded with the extra information and sent them into a seizure. Luna, being an alicorn with a mind basically built for this, was able to contain all of your everything in her brain. Even with brains like ours, containing another's life is still a very impressive feat.” Luna blushed slightly at the offhanded comment.
“Which brings me back to the mana waves. We recently discovered that every Mana Spike has a pattern to it. That pattern can be put into binary and that binary, amazingly enough, can be translated into a word, letter, or phrase. When Luna told us that she casted the over-clocked In Loving Memory spell, we were able to sit down, allow her to repeat the spell, record the sine waves, and translate them to binary, which in-turn, make up your coding.” She teleported away the white-board.
“More hard science I know, but hopefully this time I don’t have to water it down for you.” She said taking several deep breaths from the two lectures and a history lesson that she just dished out.
“No no, that was actually very understandable. How you managed to do all of this-” he gestured to himself, then seemingly all of the building. “- amazes me. You are truly a remarkable pony to come up with a system like that. And you have my personal thanks for doing this.” He finished his statement with a great big hug.
“Well like Solder said: All of us contributed in some way, whether it be carrying the data itself,-” she gestured to a sheepish looking Luna. “- providing the funding-” She pointed to Celestia, who looked like she had recovered from her earlier episode. “- ,or even offering useful advice and refreshments whenever they were so desperately needed during the all nighters-” She pointed to an oddly quiet and now flustered Cadence, who had not spoken a word since they got here. “- ,we all contributed in some way.” She said to him, sporting the biggest smile she could muster.
Jacob had actually started to tear up during the whole ‘Team-Effort’ spiel. “You guys are just the best. Ever.” He said while trying to regain his composure.
“So that it then?” Solder asked the rest of the group. When they they nodded he suddenly got very ecstatic. “Great! All this talk of software was starting to put me to sleep. There’s nothing for you to work with in software, it’s all algorithms and numbers. I need to get my hooves on something and work with it! Thats why we’re going into my favorite part of this job.” He paused for dramatic effect with an almost creepy smile following it.
“Hardware.”
Well here I go again. Posting chapters in the middle of the night again. At least it's not four in the morning this time...
Hope yall' enjoy this one. I ran into a little bit of writers block with Celestias reaction to him forgiving her so easily but I thought it turned out pretty good.
Going to go into some more science in the next chapter so be ready for lots of 'Lolwut?'
Night everypony!
Not Luna.
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Realistically he should be a bit more AH and less okay… but oh well.
Tell me, does Luna have a 'sexy' command? *eyebrow wiggle*
*actually enjoys the technobabble.*
3178628
Nope. all that shit got deleted.
3178678 darn… back door? All computers have them just in case they malfunction or the user gets locked out
3178728
Sorry for being so mean. I didn't mean it!
Please don't hurt me!
What part of "Tweaked computer with an all encompassing fire-wall" don't you understand?
I see one potential problem with the method for Jacob being brought back to life.
There's a difference between one's thought process, memories, and their "soul". It's easy enough to have one's memories preserved like storing data on a hard drive and recreate their thought process like a CPU. It gets more complicated when you get to the life energy (or life force) side of it. Their "soul" if you will. If Jacob is truly alive then did Luna somehow take his "soul" into her own mind for preservation? If not then Jacob is nothing more than a perfect replica of the original with the original Jacob's life force still gone. So therefore he wouldn't truly be there. Just a direct copy in hardware.
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That part got deleted. I still have the original chapter though.
3178815
Yes. She did essentially take his 'soul' into her. But the thing that is containing it is something that neither Twilight, nor Luna, nor anypony truly knows about. You just gotta have patience.
3178815
Exactly what I was thinking. Making a copy is not the same as directly transferring the soul/consciousness/whatever. The Jacob here should just be a replica. Not the original Jacob.
Maybe the author should develop that a bit more.
You can compare him to JC Denton who directly fuses with Helios in one of Deus Ex 1's endings. THAT is a real transfer.
3178896
Does that mean that Luna accidentally ate his soul?
3178740 the person who tweaked it can Untweak it also, the pentagon is supposed to have the best firewall yet people are able to back into it.
You should make that an arc, cause you kinda just solved all his problems, I see no conflict in this situation
Translation: a wizard did it.
Keep up the good work. Deus tecum.
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It's fairly easy to build a computer that's so locked down that, to gain admin access after losing your password, you have to physically reach in and pull the CMOS battery so it'll forget that it's supposed to ask for one. Heck, that is a safety feature and you could store it on something non-volatile like Flash memory. The hard part is doing that when you don't have full control over the software being run. (eg. Securing a computer that has to allow downloading and installing apps and running arbitrary Javascript and other bytecode in websites, PDFs, etc.)
Ideally, you don't provide any support for networking (wired or wireless. The term is "physical access requirement" or "air gap".) or running arbitrary programs at all. That's why it's so hard to secure your average PC. People want networking and the ability to run arbitrary programs.
The trick to securing an A.I. is to treat everything you can't control and predict (sensory inputs, wireless inputs, personality core, etc.) as untrusted and then strictly apply principles we already know (and use in high-security military hardware) to ensure that there exists no input which causes unexpected behaviour.
Basically, like a firewall but applied in various places within the program and with more understanding of what data is and isn't OK, rather than just a simplistic one where the machine talks to the Internet.
(You could also think about it in terms of when it fails in humans. Photosensitive epilepsy is a bug where certain frequencies of flashing lights slip past the sanitization stage and inject junk data, causing the brain to crash (have a seizure) and reboot.)
For this moment this looks like he is nothing else as ideal copy of the human who diead thousands years ago. Ideal copy, don't mean same person. He wasn't ressurected, it's like cloning memories. Same stuff inside, but person after revive is going to be shaped by world around. If he was really ressurected someday he would end up meeting synthethic copy of himself. With more memories than he have and such. That's were philosophy comes to action. Because existence of such copy, challenges the question "what is life".
From religious, at least mine, point of view human body is human soul as well. Life, sentient spark is during death coming back to the Creator, it simply can be bring back later to ressurect person(it's like taking metaphorical brain and keeping it somewhere else for safekeeping). Hmm...looking at this story, maybe something like this Luna have done. With diffrence that body is not his.
Arghhh!
You deleted fight scene from first chapter? I don't have now time to check out, so how did all end up there if no fight whas included?
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You could also take the viewpoint that there is no "soul" distinct from the combination of how your brain was initially wired (initial personality) and the memories you've accumulated over the course of your life.
The Lectures from Yale University's PHIL 176 (Death) are up on YouTube and, if you've got 40 minutes, the second one (The nature of persons: dualism vs. physicalism) specifically covers this topic.
It's a very fascinating and enlightening course to listen to so I'd highly recommend it to anyone who reads this.
You guys need to learn how to wait patiently. Luna actually doesn't know that she took his soul, his sentient human spark inside her. The reason why his life force is slowly returning to his synthetic body will be reviled waaaaay later in the story. Like in the end chapters where everything is wrapped up. So please. I don't want to give any spoilers to sate your theories about this story.
3181004
And for all you thinking Jacob was way too okay with this explanation... you're right.
That's actually one of his character flaws, he is way too trusting of his family to the point were they could tell him a complete and total lie and he will defend that lie to the death.
This flaw, however, can also allow his family to manipulate him, whether knowingly or unknowingly.
Thats a bit much technobauble... Magibauble...
I actually found the Lecture/s from Twilight quite easy to understand, you did a good job explaining them.
Me in Twilight's lecture...
i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/098/359/LOLWUT.jpg
How did you make the hard fake science interesting? Something I will never know....
Now, that "in memory" spell does clear up a lot of worries like fake or edited memories, so that is good. Hope you get around to how the company was founded in detail with the help of some now old fashioned human tech and humanity's love for Angry Birds. I hope Jacob fills in the details on why A.I.s are a crapshot with a lot of pop culture references. Would be funny if he had some movies on his device like robo-cop, terminator or some Portal stuff among others that the ponies used as guidelines. Maybe get some creative ideas while he is at it... like making himself smarter thanks to the "singularity".
Jacob's software just became a hardware.
01001000 01001111 01010111 00100000 01000100 01001111 01000101 01010011 00100000 01001101 01000001 01000111 01001001 01000011 00100000 01010100 01010010 01000001 01001110 01010011 01001100 01000001 01010100 01000101 00100000 01010100 01001111 00100000 01010100 01001000 01001001 01010011 00111111 01101 01010 01001001 00100000 01000001 01001101 00100000 01000101 01011000 01010100 01010010 01000101 01001101 01000101 01001100 01011001 00100000 01000011 01001111 01001110 01000110 01010101 01010011 01000101 01000100 00101110 01101 01010 01010100 01001000 01001001 01010011 00100000 01001101 01000001 01001011 01000101 01010011 00100000 01001110 01001111 00100000 01010011 01000101 01001110 01010011 01000101 00101110
Now I need a Sweetie-Bot Emoticon...
You do know that in real life if a pony ate meat they would first hate the taste, and second would kill them.
3267214 You do know this is a pony-fan fiction you are reading
Not everyone can be a pony expert like a good sir such as yourself.
3267801 well its actually something that you should have been taught in 6th or seventh grade. I mean there is a reason that herbivores don't eat meat. Also if I sound like I'm trying to be a dick I'm not trying to.
3268605 Nope, never taught that.
Maybe my grade school being catholic was behind it.
3267214
Considering that FiM ponies can eat Eggs, Dairy Products, and Baked goods, they pretty much would have all the enzymes required to break down animal proteins without any problems. Not to mention I'm pretty sure Pinkie mentions taking part in a hot dog eating contest in Fall Weather Friends.
3178675 Agreed. Even though Im no tech, I basically understood most if not all of that. and it sounded plausible.
I'd love it if more fics get technical. too many fics get lazy.
3179689 I agree with this so hard.
3328626
oh, totally.
3328606 I feel like I've read that somewhere...
Where ever could it have been? 
3270268
Also:
I fucking love Engrish.
3249859
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(Because screw spaces. Besides, your spaces were misplaced and messed with translation.)
3345260
You like-a da engrish. yes?
Hey just wondering you still alive
3461007 Yes... Yes I am.
Juuust watin' fer the editor to finish his job *sigh*... *checks watch* What the hell is taking so long?
3465841 Hey dont worry about it i got time to wait maybe he or she is still checking it.
I actually had a similar idea a few months ago -- with Celestia's sun this close to the planet (considering the sort of lag she gets when moving it - or, the lag she doesn't get - her sun would need to be closer to Equestria than Mars is to Earth), Equestria would be absolutely flooded with solar radiation. Ponies would have immunity through magic... humans? Not so much... ;D
God's gift to mankind
Is Jacob robot zombie or just robot?