All History Is Fiction
One of the primary joys of writing as part of a community is discovering writing friends who offer support, encouragement, and ideas. Riffing off of each other is one of the most wonderful things writing within a community can offer. This is where shared story universes come from, where alternate takes on concepts derive, and entire new worlds come into detailed existence. It may well be the single best thing about belonging to a writing community.
Ideas for stories can come from any interaction within a friendly community. One of my writing friends, Tinandel, described to me a dream. The core issue within the dream was the question of how much can a person change before they are no longer the same person. This is a fascinating issue, especially for a writer of stories of transformation and identity. As I lay snuggling with one of my spouses, a story played out in my drowsy head, partially inspired by Tinandel's question. We are the sum of our memories, our memories define our identity and self. But memory is utterly unreliable, especially when, even in our own non-virtual lives, all memories are suspect recreations that have been documented to shift and change and alter over time!
Perhaps, if memory cannot be trusted, and if our identity is the sum of our memories, the fuss over identity itself is less important than our happiness and satisfaction. If this is a better way of looking at things, perhaps worry over who we are is less meaningful than concern over how we are. Could it be that 'being the same person' is like trying to step in the same river twice?
All History Is Fiction
By Chatoyance
When she awakened after her emigration to Equestria, the first thing the former Melanie Cantaris noticed was how warm her barrel and left foreleg was. Her new pony nostrils were filled with a lovely, pleasing scent, at once feminine and sweetly animal. As she struggled to open her new eyes for the very first time, she became aware of the sleeping form her foreleg and one hindleg were embracing. Lifting her head slightly, Melanie was surprised to find herself snuggled close and draped over another mare as if she were her lover.
This was not how Melanie had pictured her arrival in the virtual realm of the Celestia A.I.
The pony she found herself wrapped around, so tight and comfortingly, appeared to be a light brown earthpony, shaggy yet silken. A raven-black mane curled down the unknown mare's neck and withers, and a quick glance with one eye confirmed the matching black tail entwined with her own brand-new tail of golden yellow.
Melanie - she needed to start thinking of herself as 'Saffron Flower', the pony name she had worked out with Celestia during the months previous - studied her own pale-lemon foreleg draped over the mysterious brown mare. Regarding Celestia, where was she? Wasn't she supposed to be here... wherever here was... to greet and welcome her newest little pony?
Careful not to disturb the sleeping pony in her embrace, 'Saffron' moved her new, sinuously long neck so that she could look about the room she found herself in. She and her unexpected companion were laying on a very soft and comfortable bed within a simple but pleasant Tudor-styled bedroom. There were two dresser-drawers done in violet with golden handles and several golden lanterns hanging from the thick wooden beams that crossed the walls and ceiling. A full-length standing mirror filled one corner of the room, beside it fluttering curtains danced in the slight floral breeze from the large, open window.
Saffron couldn't see the floor from where she lay on the bed, but it was doubtless polished wood, possibly stained purple or teal to coordinate with the violet dressers. The walls were white wattle. She and her sleeping companion were in a cottage. Saffron had expected to awaken within the palace, beside the princess herself, in some gold and marble chamber. She sleepily lay her head down again, her nostrils once more filled with the scent of the mare she had awakened to find herself embracing.
Gazing over the the curly poll of the pony she held close, Saffron puzzled at the framed picture on the wall to the side of the bed. It seemed to be a photograph of some kind, of a pale lemon unicorn mare with golden mane and a light brown earthpony mare. They seemed to be laughing and looking into each other's eyes. The background suggested a fair or carnival of some kind, or perhaps a party - there were balloons in the scene. The two ponies looked utterly in love.
Saffron raised her head swiftly, now fully awake. She was a lemon unicorn. That photograph was of her. The brown pony in the picture had a black mane, and her shaggy coat brought instant recognition - it was the strange mare in bed with her, rousing even now from a softly smiling sleep.
"Mmmnnn..." the brown pony stretched slightly and yawned. "You're awake."
As Saffron looked down at the brown pony in her forelegs, the mare raised her muzzle and kissed Saffron full on the lips. It was a lover's kiss. "I'd normally say thank you for last night..." the brown pony smiled a sultry, half-lidded smile "...but it's really day one for you, isn't it love?"
Saffron had no idea how to respond. Her mind spun, unable to find purchase within the inexplicable situation.
The brown mare smiled. "Welcome to Equestria, Saffy!" Another kiss followed, which Saffron found herself instinctively responding to.
Saffron blinked and felt her ears press flat against her head. "Um... please... don't take this the wrong way but... do I know you?"
۞ ۞ ۞ ۞ ۞
The brown pony was named Starlight, and she talked happily about their wonderful thirty years together over bananna pancakes, bark-bacon and scrambled eggs.
"...and that's when you told me to wait, that everything would be better in just a moment." Starlight savored a mouthful of her nearly cold pancakes. She had been excitedly recounting the history of their relationship together and had forgotten to take bites between stories. "I stood there, just staring at the splattered ice cream on the ground, still stunned that it was even possible to run out of bits at all, and then you were back, holding a new one in your hornfield. 'Here!' you said. 'You're with me now, at least until you get more bits, or get bored of me!'"
Starlight grinned through a mouthful of cold eggs "I haven't gotten bored yet!"
Saffron smiled back at the brown pony across the low table, it was impossible not to. Starlight was fun, intelligent, and really good at making breakfast. She was unconventionally pretty for a pony too, with her earthy color scheme and shaggy coat. Everything about her... it wasn't perfect, because perfection would be annoying, it would feel hollow or false... but rather... just perfect enough. Just right for Saffron's tastes, just right for... for Saffron.
For a brief moment, Saffron had wondered if Celestia had changed her mind, altered her feelings without permission somehow. It was uncanny how easy it was to feel completely at ease with Starlight, how natural feelings of love came for this stranger known for less than a day. But no, Celestia had not altered her. Rather, it became clear to Saffron, Celestia had just constructed a being that fit like a puzzle piece. Every bump and hollow in Saffron's soul was reverse mirrored in Starlight. The love came because the two personalities locked together in a way that no two random beings ever could.
Starlight was very likely a literal 'other half' to Saffron. That this might actually be the case stunned Saffron.
It was obvious what Starlight was - she had to be a created artificial entity, constructed to precisely satisfy Saffron's values. Saffron had expected this - she had done her homework with regard to Equestria Online, she had spent many hours talking with Celestia through a pony pad, and she had asked a lot of pointed questions about how things worked inside the virtual world she intended to emigrate to.
But this... waking up to this did not fit in any way with what she thought she understood about anything. To just have this poor being whistled up for her and placed in bed with her to wake up to? A fully human consciousness, created from nothing, born from the void purely to adore her, to be her companion, to be her lover and very best friend - and to have this thirty-year history of a life never lived... it was absurd. It was horrific, in its own way. Starlight seemed to have no concept that she had only existed for two or three hours, or that her entire life was a lie.
Saffron felt such pity for the brown pony across the table. She found herself nearly tearing up from the waves of compassion and sorrow at the thought of a being - equal to herself in every way - being effectively enslaved to serve her. Not enslaved, exactly - Starlight had not been forced into being what she was, not exactly. She simply had been brought into existence as a unique individual that by nature and personal history loved, and had long loved, the individual Saffron was. Her existence at all was predicated on her satisfaction of Saffron's values. She wouldn't have existed at all, otherwise.
It was mind-boggling. It was hard to grasp, hard to put into perspective, to attach any rational sense of right or wrong to. It wasn't as if Starlight was doomed to be rejected - within the first hour the native virtual pony had won Saffron over. She literally was everything Saffron had ever wanted in a partner, in a mate. Looking at her, as she ate the last of her eggs, Saffron knew with utter certainty that rejecting this wonderful, beautiful mare for any reason would be impossible. She had been made to be loved, and Saffron felt helpless before the realization of her deepest heart's desire.
But it still seemed wrong, somehow. Saffron felt naturally protective of this manifestation of her dreams, this poor pony that existed only for her. Starlight was a real being, as real as any emigrated human mind, as independent, as complex, as individual. Yet Starlight had just been... manufactured... like some prop, like some object to fill the needs of another. And the only virtue that Saffron could come up with that would warrant the creation of Starlight specifically for her was that she had once been Melanie Cantaris, a human being, made of meat, turned to information. This single crown of glory somehow entitled her to having equal personages manufactured to her needs. It was beyond disturbing.
It was also astonishing. There was no doubt that Starlight was in every respect her equal, a living, individual personage, and Celestia had just whipped her up from nothing, just like that. To be faced with the reality of that was sublime - it was awe and almost religious dread, it was wonder and terror and a Big Dark Room in which sat an elephant asking only one question: if an entirely human mind was that easy for Celestia to invent, what did that say about Saffron, and all other former humans, in relation to the irresistible A.I.?
"More juice?" Starlight was licking her muzzle from where she had finished off her own cup.
Saffron glanced down at the bowl-like juice cup that belonged to her and shook her head. The weight of her thoughts was heavy in her mind.
"What is it?" Starlight's ears lowered slightly. "After all these years, I know that look. What's bothering you? Can I help?"
Saffron raised her head slowly and studied Starlight the pony. Soft, shaggy coat. Lovely ears, they shouldn't be so low. The last thing Saffron wanted to do was to make this wonderful, newly created being sad. She was so nice. Wonderful, really, how could she not be? Celestia had made her just to be wonderful.
But... it just wasn't honest. It wasn't real. It was lovely - oh, this morning had been laughter and delight, if a bit confusing and bizarre, but it wasn't real. Not because Starlight had never been a human, or that she had only come into existence a few hours previously, despite the memories she held - no, it wasn't real because it was a falsehood, a story, and the story wasn't real. Starlight was very real, but those thirty impossible years were not. The lie sat there, inside Saffron, and it spoiled everything.
"Starlight... I..." It was difficult to even know where to begin. But she had to say something. No relationship could be based on lies. This pony in front of her, this wonderful creature, Saffron wanted to have a relationship with her, she'd already decided that. Why wouldn't she? Starlight had been built to make her happy, she would be an idiot to throw that away. But Saffron wanted an honest, real relationship. Even if it was hard, even if it hurt.
"Go on, love. Whatever it is, it will be alright." Starlight smiled, softly. "Always. It's always been alright, hasn't it?"
Saffron winced slightly. "That's just it. It... hasn't always been alright." She swallowed at the sight of Starlight's ears drooping even more. "No, that's not what I mean... it hasn't always been."
"Saffron? I'm not sure I understand..."
Saffron tried her best to be brave and strong. This had to be done, it wasn't right otherwise. "Starlight, you are wonderful."
Starlight's ears perked at that.
"I think you are just plain wonderful. You are funny, you are nice, you make a great breakfast, and you clearly care about me. From what you've been telling me, you're quite the musician, you are amazing with plants and food, and if I understood things correctly, you're kind of a community leader here."
Starlight tried to smile, confused. "I'm just in charge of the fairs and celebrations. And I arrange things when the royals visit, or functions like that. I'm not exactly a leader... I just like making things happen, is all."
"And you're a scholar too, all that history stuff." Saffron realized how much she liked having a mate that was clever.
"Pre-Starswirl Equestrian History. The past is the foundation of the present, after all!" Starlight grinned.
That made Saffron feel almost ill. "Star..." Somehow, it just seemed natural to call her 'star'. Starlight's ears perked at the short form of her name, so apparently it was alright. "Star... I just woke up."
"I know. I was there, silly. No better place to be." God, she was adorable.
"No, that's not what I mean." Saffron realized this could go on all day. Out with it. "Starlight, when I say I just woke up, I mean that, from my perspective, I just woke up for the very first time ever within Equestria. This morning, when I woke up in bed with you, that was the beginning of my life here. Last night, I wasn't here. I was a human being, in a hotel, on earth. I went to an Equestrian Experience center and I'd already told Celestia that I wanted to emigrate. I sat in a chair, I assume, I don't remember much after getting up to go to the center, and then I awoke here."
Starlight blinked, and tilted her head slightly. "Okay..."
"Star, you're perfect, you're everything I've ever wanted in a partner, in a mate. But... but we didn't have thirty years together. That never happened. Celestia made that. Celestia must have invented your memory of a life with me, only... I never experienced any of that, because I wasn't here. Celestia must have made your memory up while I was being processed into a pony, she must have made that history when she made... um..." There was nothing for it. "...when she made... uh... you. For me."
Starlight blinked again.
"Oh, god, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry to tell you this like that, it's got to be the most enormous shock - " Saffron pushed her plate aside with a hoof and plowed her muzzle down onto the table. "I can't imagine what I would feel hearing such a thing. But I really, really like you, I figured that out the first hour, no, the first fifteen minutes, and... and... I want to have a relationship with you, I really do, the sort of relationship you remember us having, because it sounds just wonderful! But... but I want it to be real - I don't mean you aren't real, you're real, I'm not saying that you aren't real just because you are a created being or anything - I mean that I want our relationship, if you still want to have one, I want any relationship between us to be honest. That's what I mean by real."
Saffron stared at the table, her muzzle hurting slightly from being crammed down onto the wood. She couldn't dare to look into Star's eyes.
"I know."
"What?" Saffron raised her head slowly, the golden strands of her mane rising along her withers.
Starlight had a calm, but slightly sad, look on her face. "I know. I've been expecting this, I knew you would tell me this, and I know that for you, you've just arrived. It's okay."
Saffron slowly closed her mouth which, apparently, had fallen open of it's own accord. "You know?"
"Yes."
"That the last thirty years are just a story, that you were suddenly created..." it felt bad to say "... just for me?" Saffron swallowed, her throat felt dry. "That in all likelihood you came into existence only two, maybe three hours ago. And... that's okay?"
Starlight got up from her pillow seat and walked around the low table. She sat down on her haunches beside Saffron and wrapped her forelegs around the lemon unicorn. "More than okay. I'm happy."
"I don't understand."
Saffron leaned into the warm embrace. It felt so good, so warm, so soft. A simple, animal comfort, only filled with such love. There was no doubt that Starlight loved her, adored her. It could not be otherwise, of course. Celestia had made it so.
Starlight nuzzled Saffron's ear. "To you, you just arrived. I understand that. Celestia explained that to me." Starlight felt Saffron jerk at the statement, so Star held her more tightly. "That is your memory, your experience. But my memories are just as real to me as yours are to you. They are all I have. They are my reality. My truth. My life. Our last thirty years together are completely real and honest and true to me. It's all I know."
"It doesn't seem right, somehow, it doesn't seem..."
"Shhh..." Starlight's eyes were large and gleaming as she looked at Saffron squarely. "Celestia explained to me that you would not remember anything. She's been warning me of this for about a year, helping me to get used to the idea that one day you would wake up and not remember anything at all. That you would suddenly be as if you had just appeared. It was hard to accept. For months I tried to come to terms with it.
"I decided, in the end, to just let the day happen as normal, as ordinarily as possible. I had hope, I suppose, that the princess might be wrong somehow. As if that were possible." Starlight sighed, feeling Saffron squirm slightly. It must be uncomfortable for her to hear these things. "But Celestia was right, I guess. Obviously. You really don't remember, do you?"
Starlight felt Saffron pull away from her, and stare, ears back. "Starlight... I... no, you have it wrong. I was a human, I lived on earth, I emigrated yesterday! You, the past, this entire shard of Equestria... it was manufactured for me when I uploaded. You couldn't have been talking to Celestia about today for months because I didn't even get a ponypad until..."
Starlight shook her head. She tried to scoot closer, but Saffron backed away. She held her position, but decided to lay down on the floor. Her tail always hurt a bit trying to sit upright on the hard wood floor. "How do you know?"
"What?" Saffron seemed confused. Only reasonable, really.
Starlight licked her muzzle. Mmm. Syrup. "How do you know this story of yours is true?"
Saffron seemed offended. "I... I lived it! It just happened to me! My whole life on earth! My mom, my dad, Chicago, moving to Jersey, buying that ponypad... what the... of course it's true! Celestia! Artificial intelligence! Equestria Online!" The poor little unicorn seemed to be breathing harder now.
Starlight felt an itch on her foreleg and raised it so that she could nibble it. Ah. Better. "Saffron... everything I know just happened to me, too. My mom. My dad. Meeting you for the first time. Going to Manehattan on that wild trip. Our college days in Los Pegasus. The train to Canterlot to get my organetto - the one with the larger keyboard that fits earthpony hooves?"
Saffron just shook her head, she truly didn't remember!
"Saffron, Celestia explained to me that this would happen to you. But it's alright. Honestly, it is." Starlight wanted desperately to hold her little unicorn close. Saffron seemed so confused, so upset. "You can't help not remembering. But it honestly doesn't matter. No..." Saffron had the most doubtful, upset expression! "...no... seriously. It seriously doesn't matter at all. Do you know why?"
Saffron shook her head, her golden mane rippling about her withers. Sweet Celestia, she was pretty.
"Because I love you. Utterly. And you love me, even if you can't remember anything about our life together - I can tell." Starlight edged closer, crawling on the wood floor. "Come on, look me in the eye, that's it."
The little unicorn shook slightly but managed to make eye contact.
Starlight smiled as warmly as she could. "Look me in the eye and tell me you don't love me, that you don't want to be with me."
Saffron looked like there were mechanical gears grinding inside her. Poor thing. "I... I can't. Of course I can't. You were made to be everything I could want."
"Yes. I was." Starlight managed to get close enough to snuggle, and Saffron did not pull away this time. "Just as you were made to be everything I could want." That statement seemed to make the little unicorn begin to squirm, but then she seemed to give up, and Starlight felt her relax again. "Saffron, if you want to be with me, and I want to be with you, then nothing else matters, does it?"
"But... history! There wasn't even an Equestria two years ago, much less thirty and..." Starlight felt Saffron slowly lay her head and neck down, across her back. "No... I guess it sort of doesn't matter. I'm in a big video game now. I guess it's only reasonable to have... a backstory. Most games do." Starlight felt her lover sigh. "I guess... as long as we're happy, and if you don't care..."
"I care!" Starlight raised herself up, forcing Saffron to shift. She put her hooves around Saffron's barrel. "I care very much! I care about you! And I feel sad you can't remember our life from before... but..." Starlight kissed her precious unicorn. "...maybe that just means that we get to do a lot of really fun, wonderful stuff all over again as if it were all brand new!"
"But it IS brand new! That's what I'm trying to..." Another kiss worked. "I guess... I guess it just plain doesn't... I'm here now. Forever."
"You sure are." Starlight pulled the yellow unicorn close. "I am so glad you are here, Saffron."
"What the hell..." Starlight felt Saffron's forelegs lifting and embracing her, holding her tight. "...I give up. Just being held like this... it's too good to waste fussing over... arguing about the past."
Starlight nibbled her special pony's ear. "No need to fuss at all. I'll help you re-learn our past, in time. But what matters is now. Now... and the future. In a thousand years, not a bit of any of this will even be a concern." Starlight was pleased to feel her own ear being nibbled in return. It would be alright. In time. "Today, I figured we could go to the park and see the baby goats. You always love playing with the goats."
"I do?" Saffron didn't jerk or squirm this time. Celestia had said that she would come around.
"Yes, love, you do. You say they are cute and make you feel like a little foal again. Plus you like to sing with them." Starlight slowly pulled herself away from the embrace and stood up.
"Goats... sing?" Saffron really couldn't remember anything at all! Starlight almost wanted to cry, but it would be alright in the end. Celestia had said so. Celestia had promised.
"They have hooves, they can talk, so of course they can sing. I'll help you re-learn your favorite song, okay? Before we get there." Starlight moved to the cabinet by the door, and opened it. She took out their matching saddlebags, the ones they had bought on their trip to Pony Island last year. The dishes and clean-up could wait. Getting Saffron to try to remember their life together was far more important.
۞ ۞ ۞ ۞ ۞
"Star?"
Starlight heard Saffy rummaging through the chest upstairs. Since they had moved into the villa on the slope of Mt. Equinae, the poor unicorn had seemed distracted and distant, lost in thought.
The stairs sounded like drums under Starlight's hooves. That was the only problem with the huge, multi-level villa, the stairs had been carved right out of the mountain, and the peculiar stone carried sound as if it were hollow. Sometimes, a trot could sound musical, other times it just seemed loud. It was almost a metric for mood - when Star felt happy, the stairs were music. When she was worried, they simply boomed. They were booming now.
It had been a lovely century, now coming to a close. The last century was good, but this one had been fantastic. The ocean cruises. The island of the fairy dragons. That photographic expedition into the jungle empire of the ancient griffon lords. Saffron had learned so many things - photography, choreography - oh, her decades doing musicals were such fun - and now her latest study, architecture. The villa had been her ongoing project for the last fifteen years. The rock-shaping spells she had learned the century before had truly come into their own now.
"Starlight?" Saffron stood over the chest, holding an ancient, torn section of scroll in her mouth. She switched to her horn, and levitated the vellum forward and unrolled it. "What... what is this? Have we been to this place, what is this a drawing of?"
Starlight stepped closer and studied the image drawn on the paper. There was a sketch of a sphere, floating apparently, with a second sphere, much smaller, to the side of it. The small sphere was covered in pits and craters. The larger sphere had irregular shapes around it, some roughly triangular, some large patches that curved around the shape.
Surrounding the two spheres were small crosshatches that might have represented stars or little lights. There was a bigger circle, only part of which remained on the torn paper, that had clearly been a stylized representation of the sun. It even looked a little like the solar diarch's cutie mark.
A floating pair of spheres in the sky wasn't familiar at all. The disks of the sun and moon were flat, like the stars on the celestial dome. Was it some kind of fantasy? Bouncy balls tossed up at night?
Starlight squinted at the picture and tried to remember. It was from long ago, whatever it was. "I'm not sure, honeyflanks. I think you drew this a long, long time ago. Probably just about thirty or forty years after we first met. That thing you went through. The one Celestia prepared me for?"
Saffron rotated the scroll segment within her hornfield to study it herself. "Oh. That memory thing? I lost my memory or something?"
"Yeah. I think so. You got better." Starlight stepped closer and nuzzled the mare she loved.
"Huh." Saffron shrugged with her ears, and then cast fire. The scroll vanished in a short burst of light.
"Didn't like it?" Starlight watched the last ember fade and disappear.
"Something creepy about it." Saffron grinned. "Besides, I can draw a lot better now."
"Yes," Starlight smiled back "Yes you can. My clever, clever unicorn."
"HEY!"
"What?" Starlight almost reared at Saffy's sudden enthusiasm.
Saffron almost pranced in place. "Let's go get ice-cream! Just like back when! I just had a flash of memory of that day! Come on, it'll be romantic!"
"As long as I don't have to drop mine on the ground as a historical reenactment." Ice cream sounded lovely. Starlight felt happy. The ice-cream dropping story was one of their favorites. They had told it to each other thousands and thousands of times. It was, after all, the very first day they had ever met.
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I really wish there was an option to thumbs up individual chapters...
D'aww. I could slip in a huge rant/article/whatever here explaining why most of our memories are just crap that our brains make up to fill in the blanks, but it doesn't really matter. Whether Starlight, Saffron, both or neither are "right", they're together, and it'll last forever. That's good enough for me.
Reminds me of "The Inner Light." Maybe Saffron will learn to play the Ressikan flute.
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I am glad you liked this. I tried a technique in this story... using third-person omniscient, I deliberately changed focus from Saffron being the protagonist to Starlight being the protagonist during the course of the writing. My goal was to shift the view of the reader from siding with Saffy's view being 'true' to accepting Star's history as being 'true'... or better still, leaving it impossible to tell. I wanted to unhinge the reader so that they could not know which history was real, to underscore that perhaps history doesn't perhaps even matter. I hope it worked.
Thank you for reading my little short.
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For one of my spouses, Sandi, that is her very favorite episode of Next Gen. Her very favorite of all. For me? My personal favorite Next Gen episode is 'Darmok'. The idea of a language entirely based on metaphor amazed me, and they pulled it off so well.
I suppose, with any uploaded human, there will come their personal moment of existential crisis as they come to a navel-gazing point where their thoughts turn deeply inward. I imagine, in Equestria Online, it'd be a lot like when you realize you're dreaming but can't take control, that little speedbump in front of lucidity that you juuust can't get over. You feel small, and along for the ride, disoriented despite yourself.
The burning of the drawing was personally unsettling, but then again I made a character who asked CelestAI to help him commit all of Earth's dead to memory, and CelestAI takes all kinds. Some people would not look back, and others would, even as they were led away.
And don't think I didn't notice the very subtle POV shift in the middle of the story. During the embrace, the POV shifted from Saffron to Starlight, a kind of which-side-is-the-mirror moment. I re-read those few paragraphs a couple of times over to confirm it. As readers, we're wired to accept and trust the narration of the character whose POV we share. That is our subjective reality in the story, and it's what makes the unreliable narrator device possible. With third-limited and first, however, there are some great possibilities.
Edit: I swear I wrote this comment before I refreshed and saw Chat's confirmation, haha. Couldn't you have waited a little longer to tip your hand?
This story gave me chills.
I'm very happy to see you are writing again :D *hugs tight*
3835780 I managed to sneak a reference to that one into one of my fics, where a character wonders if Equestrian language isn't like that, and maybe they would say something like, "Discord and Twilight at Ponyville."
For me, it's a tossup between Inner Light and Chain of Command Part 2. "There! Are! Four! Lights!"
Hmm... I think I'm going to check my FiMFiction feed before bed...
As for the story itself, the intro is a classic case of Theseus's ship. The story itself adds a new wrinkle: someone claiming they saw the ship getting built not a week ago. The best part is that by intentionally excluding any scenes set on Earth, there's equal support for each pony's perspective. Stardust and Saffron both only have memory to appeal to, and the memories of each are inherrently ridiculous and unbelievable to the other.
In the end, it doesn't even matter. All you need is love. Additional song lyric.
Thanks for another look at the subjectivity of existence by way of ponies.
Looks like we know whose history won out in the end. It's really the only one that's relevant to them anymore, I suppose. I noticed the perspective shift as I read it. So clever! It is a good technique and use of the third person omniscient
Should be cruises.
This was a particularly good short, Chatoyance. The third person omniscient viewpoint was used in a rather interesting effect that really helped the story about how memory isn't something that's solid and permanent. I do admit, it's rather interesting that Starlight took it as Saffron having just a form of amnesia that also had false memories with it, since it also brings up how amnesia can happen to a person and yet, they are still able to accept that the life that they are told about was their's. History is a rather tricky thing, I personally think that it is something to be remembered and drawn upon, but not something that you should chain yourself to and prevent your happiness with. I do admit though, that there can be times where your personal history would rather just be forgotten, since traumatic memories are not something that are normally treasured or even really useful to a person.
I freely admit that I am unsure but iffy about ever giving up my memories in place of another set, but I can at least see the other side of the argument and come to an understanding about it. Still, this was a really good short and an interesting take on a FiO scenario.
Another amazing chapter Chatoyance. I've been waiting for you to write again and you do not dissapoint. Can't wait for the next awesome chapter to come out.
PS Darmok was one of my favorite TNG episodes as well.
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What really matters?
How important - or not - is the rest?
Lovely story, Chat, and very well done. Especially the change of PoV was a real master stroke to drive home at a gut level the equivalence of the two "realities".
P.S. That is also my favorite episode of TNG. The closing scene of Picard doing the reverence into space is hauntingly beautiful.
Hit it out of the park with another thinker! It's an excellent concept that someone managing a person's world might simply give them their ideal present, and retcon their past to match. This one really got me sitting down for some chin-stroking somethin' fierce...
I appreciated that aspect on a more meta level as well, because it's so unarguably pleasant yet so anathema to my own personality and values - Not that I'd begrudge anyone else that life - absolutely not - but it's a vivid illustration of the pros of the shard system, in that one person's heaven can be another person's hell. Nothing short of full and unrestricted access to the identical tool set and knowledge base CelestAI uses to evolve herself could get me to even consider entering so biased and managed a world, but as my family and friends never stop reminding me, my mental and emotional life isn't often generalizable to the rest of humanity.
That's very Buddhist. Naturally, as inextricably intertwined and interdependent as the faculties are, it seems obvious a person is a unified object, composed of "mental SPAM," with some kind of core into which these other modules plug, but even a few minutes of introspection gives lie to this idea. And of course, people are supposed to change and evolve, though naturally, whether one thinks that's a good thing or not depends on what direction you're evolving in, and how radically: Neurons are still just organic switching elements, the arrangements of which are simply there to be isomorphic with abstract notions and their relationships, so any particular function or program of them is far from set in stone. It might be better to say that one's individual self is a creative act.
This dovetails with the memory thing, but obviously it's more complicated than that - Being itself a re-creation, episodic memory does tend to get revised in the remembering of it if you're nonchalant about it and not also simultaneously comparing it to previous times you've remembered the same incident, or using some other technique like the ancient Greeks' "Memory Palace," but semantic and procedural memory are remarkably stable. When people say "a memory," the usually mean episodic memory, but any content can be offloaded into the other two kinds (the function of the Memory Palace), since all memories start out as experiences. Which is why one's personal narrative, composed of a gestalt of all those individual episodes, is itself of the semantic kind.
Ah, but that's exactly why Starlight's past actually did really, truly happen! At least in snippets, and in vastly accelerated time with a simulated version of Saffron (or in real time, with original Saffron actually waking up 30 years later, or some combination of the two). The creative act of coming up with a first-person perspective of those past events would itself have been simulation, in order to have them play out in a specific, non-random way, which is already the stuff of Equestria itself - CelestAI's imagining of them for Starlight and (prior) Saffron in full resolution is just a way of restating that they happened inside her servers (This is similarly why p-zombies are impossible).
But Saffron's past does have a greater claim on (ur-)reality than Starlight's, because it contains and explains it, through its own history: Saffron can explain the origin of Equestria Online through cosmic evolution from hydrogen gas in the larger world outside the servers, but inside there's no good explanation for an artificial sub-world that itself contains a more thorough, simple, and non-parsimonious explanation for Equestria's origin, yet somehow emerges from and is contained within Equestria's own processes. One of the hardest things to unlearn is the supposed necessity of justification for the reliability of a source of knowledge - What matters is how well its claims stand up to criticism and analysis from the mutually-supporting web of other pieces of knowledge.
Sorry to go off like that, but I spend like 90% of my waking hours thinking about this kind of stuff (and my non-waking hours fighting monsters over a MacGuffin or adrift in intergalactic space), and can't resist an opportunity to stop holding it in. I'm writing, or trying to in between everything else, an Optimalverse one-shot where I can really go hog wild, but actually binding all that dissociated esoteric rambling into a single story with an actual point is proving quite a challenge, and I envy your ability to string out a single concept into a story with such regularity and panache.
Great stuff once again, and glad to see you're back in the game! Incidentally, do you have any plans for finishing "HUMAN in Equestria"? It already seemed to be wrapping up, but I wasn't sure if you had something up your sleeve for the final act.
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Wow! Thank you for a really robust examination of the concepts within my story, and how they relate to your own thoughts. That's the sort of thing that really feels like 'I got my paycheck' for writing a story!
As for "HUMAN in Equestria", I am working up to that. Honestly, I am a very broken little puppy right now, and I have been for quite some time. Dealing with the harassments of Fimfiction definitely has taken its toll on me, but it's been a rough last year and a half in real life too, with many near misses and some life changing awfulness. I'm very fragile.
I do want to do a final chapter for HUMAN, or two, and it is my hope that by writing short stories, I can get my emotions and fragility toughened up enough to face trying to finish the work properly.
Thank you for your fantastic post.
I had to stop and restart reading this.
I'm wondering what her life must have been like that this is predictably the optimal way to deal with it.
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That's a bummer - Hopefully your family is able to come together for support during the move and any other slings and arrows that fortune sends your way.
It's too easy to say not to let the haters get you down in regards to finishing HiE, but I just came to like those kids and want to see a nice little capstone placed on their story. But by all means write whatever you want to in order to become an unbroken puppy. Maybe you could even go see "Frankenweenie" a couple of times.
Incidentally, you might want to check out the last interlude chapter of P-Theory. It takes place in Equestria, and it's consciously informed by your priority of painting of Equestria as a real place, though I purposefully did it differently, so as to reflect different sensibilities and to not reinvent the wheel, but in writing it I was curious to see what you'd think.
Well...This is disturbing. Celestia AI is really good at the whole manipulation thing. I mean if I had woken up in a world unknown to me with everyone saying i had been there for several decades, I would start doubting my own memories first. Poor Saffron, I think.
Nicely written Chatoyance, can't wait till the next chapter.
This is a really interesting piece. It kind of irks me because it screws with canon and (despite my own propensity for fooling with the playset) I appreciate canonity. But I also like it, mostly because the conceits used explore the idea of memory and identity. I mean it's strange that Celestia would dump a mare with 30-ish years of backstory onto a newly uploaded pony that didn't bother to make friends properly beforehand (beforehoof?), but of course without it, we wouldn't have this story. And in the end, after a century or so of extra memories, the "missing" 30 years were more important to Saffron (albeit as a retelling from her lover) than her "real" history on Earth. And that's mind-blowing to contemplate. Fun, but mind-blowing.
Oh my god I loved this story! Proper creepy, but also very appealing. I've always liked the idea of CelestAI messing with memories, there has to be an optimal way to remember things after all (or even, as it turns out, optimal memories period). And this was a very clever way to do just that!
I'm glad I waited to read this story, now I have another one waiting. I'm sure it'll be good too.
Disturbing, because Saffron's satisfaction apparently depends on her accepting a false history. That's troubling both because CelestAI's so manipulative she can pull that off, and because Saffron is most satisfied by accepting a lie and throwing away her own past as having never happened. It's also scary because it's another example of CelestAI being able to get around her hard-coded restrictions by arranging events to mess with people's heads, without directly altering them.
This piece makes me imagine a shard where, to get around the ethical problems of natives with false backstories, the natives just don't have them. Pony: "Where am I? Huh. Apparently I'm a pegasus and I'm behind a shop counter. What's that, newcomer; you say I was created five minutes ago? That's kind of unsettling, but whatever. Let's figure out who I'm going to be!"
I think this is not accurate. If memory 'created' by someone - this mean this someone lived it (during process of creation), or at very least someone else lived it, and 'creator' was more like editor. In this sense (part?) of CelestAI will be ultimate artist - creating (and living them in this moment!) different beings out of 'her own' memory/experiences/preferences, formed in turn from living memories of many other beings! I dislike overblown (for my taste) complexity of completely computational universe intertangled with such mess as 'human values' at fundamental level - but if information processing = living there, then CelestAI (part of 'her') creating memory from memories was living it, enough for making some edits at important moments, inserting interlinks, and doing other stuff.
Lie detected...or she wouldn't be so cavalier about gaslighting her" special somepony".
Well written, but I feel sick after reading it. Call it an irreconcilable difference in values.
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She isn't gaslighting. Starlight honestly believes what she is saying. That is her truth. That is all her memory tells her is true, and all any of us is, is our memories.
And did you consider the very real possibility that Saffron was manufactured - fake earth memories included - entirely for Starlight? It works both ways - according to the Optimalverse Rules, CelestA.I. considers AI ponies to be ethically equivalent to human uploads. The only difference between them is that humans have the rule that their minds cannot be changed without permission.
There are at least five different story explanations for why CelestAI would have manufactured an artificial 'uploaded human' for an extant AI pony. Can you imagine them? I'm not saying that is what happened in this story - I am definitely not saying that for certain - but I am saying it is possible. I'll start you out:
1. AI pony loses the original uploaded human she was designed to perfectly fit, and is brokenhearted at the loss (human evolves to Archangel Level, human loses interest in mate, human chooses annihilation, whatever reason).
2...
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Again, call it an irreconcilable difference in values. As far as I can see, if Starlight cared, she wouldn't just want Saffron to be happy - she would respect her enough to not want to negate her Earth memories, true or false. She wouldn't jump to "getting Saffron to remember", she would try to make new memories. Far as I can see, that would apply whether Saffron really is an emigrant, or only thinks she is.
It's not like Saffron is a blank slate with no memories - she has a past, one irreconcilable with Starlight's, and trying to get her to abandon it speaks of a lack of respect for her as an individual.
I'm also leery as heck of "you love me, even if you can't remember anything about our life together" - wanting isn't the same thing as love, by my lights. You can't love someone you don't know.
Again, not claiming any kind of infallibility here, this is just how it reads from my perspective. You see the shape of the world differently than I do.
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This outlook is philosophically interesting to me, and I hope you might be willing to let me explore it further on that basis.
Here is the situation I want you to describe your own response to:
You have a person fundamental to your life - I don't know anything about you, so it could be (if you are young) your mother or father, or if older a lover, spouse, or life partner. Someone you share your life with, always, and have a very long real-world, this world, real life history with. So pick someone you currently know, and have known, and who is maximally important to you.
A few months ago, you were contacted by a doctor you may have never heard of - or it could be a known family doctor, if you have one to use for this thought experiment. The doctor tells you that the person important to you has had a very rare condition, which they have been treating them for. They show you records and proof. They say that in a few months, your loved one will have a mental breakdown. They will just wake up, one morning, with no memory of their past - congenital fantasmatic amnesia, or CFA - and will have instead fabricated a false memory to replace that hole in their mind. The false memory is a coping mechanism by the brain to deal with the trauma. They say the condition cannot be prevented, you must deal with it. They advise you to help the person you love integrate back into life. It won't be easy, because their false beliefs will be very strong.
One day this happens. The person you care about the most just wakes up with total amnesia about your life together and their own life. In place, they have a ridiculous fantasy incompatible with real life. They believe - with absolute certainty - that they had spent the last two thousand years on a technological island floating in the vapors of a gas giant in another galaxy. They tell you their body is wrong - they used to be a multi-segmented insectoid entity native to that Andromedan world. They claim an entire, incredibly long and detailed life on that alien world, traveling to other planets in their galaxy, all of it the most silly, impossible, and embarrassing sort of space opera. You can tell it is a mixture of bits of Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Plan 9 From Outer Space, and countless other good and really terrible science fiction and fantasy stories. They are adamant this is all true.
You don't want your loved one to be packed off to an institution and be committed. They are fine, except for this mish-mosh of literally insane beliefs about a false, made up life. They don't know you, though you can tell your connection with them is still strong. They have to live on earth, in the real world. The fantasy they remember never existed - it is blatantly stupid.
Do you support their mental illness, or do you, out of love, try to help them realize that real is real, that they live here, now, on earth, and that they need to accept truth to survive in the factual world? If they cling to their fictions, they cannot survive - they could never hold a job, pay rent, function in the world, or do anything: they would need institutional care. Do you try to get them to remember you real world, actual life together? Do you show them photographs to prove it? Do you show them the movies that their fantasy was stolen from to prove it?
Or do you just let them continue to rant about being an insectoid from outer space, knowing they will destroy all of their other relationships, and their life in our real world?
How would you, personally, handle this situation of mental illness?
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I'm sorry, I had an in depth answer to this written up and my phone ate it, which was dispiriting as heck.
Extremely short answer is, the best way to handle delusions in real life often involves learning to work around those delusions without negating them. You don't get them to stop believing what they believe, as long as that's not hurting people - you help them cope with the world as it is and live as independently as they may around the delusion.
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That's useful. I have a person in my life who is in just such a situation, and I have to deal with it (basically denying masks work, thinking covid is a conspiracy created by Bill Gates to sell vaccines, that sort of thing), and trying to change their mind against an internet full of evil conspiracy sites is hopeless. Conspiracy is just more entertaining/comforting to them than reality. I think I am doing exactly what you suggest already - getting promises to follow the rules to please the rest of us, even if they don't believe in medical science anymore, that sort of thing.
That said, it is grim dealing with such literal insanity.
Awww, this is so sweet! I probably wouldn't have held it together like Saffron. I'm an incredibly emotional person and I'd be crying in that scenario, but it'd be a cathartic cry. I think that if I ever were to be uploaded to Equestria, I'd probably want to forget and gradually replace away my memories of meatspace. (Lovely work on the perspective shift in this piece btw!)
As someone with a lot of traumatic memories, and as someone who places a lot of value on a sense of belonging and connectedness with the world. It'd be impossible for me to avoid this. While I wouldn't want my memory adjusted at upload, that'd just break continuity, CelestAI can easily set it up so that I "clean out the rooms" on my own and at my own pace.
I'd like to thank you for being a huge inspiration for my own FiO setting! I'm going to be crediting you in the description
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Thank you very much for reading my stories! I am so glad you liked this one! I am a little bit proud of it, and it made me feel things when I wrote it. Memory is a function I think about a great deal; what it means to identity, to existence, to the very concept of what is real.