The Onion of Content
I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round
his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?
I do not ask any more delight, I
swim in it as in a sea.
There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them,
and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well,
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.
—Walt Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
INCOMPOSSIBLE, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both—as Walt Whitman’s poetry and God’s mercy to man...
—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
Pen Poiser awoke well after noon, with a shadow drifting over him as a cloud passed over the sun. His coat was still deliciously warm from sleeping in the sunshine, and soft breezes ruffled the leaves of gnarled trees and wild laurel bushes and occasionally sent a pleasing coolness through his mane.
He was lying in a small meadow near a tiny pond, in the special glen where his friends had brought him last night. A great craggy spire protruded from the side of Canterlot mountain, much like an up-pointing thumb held close to a hand, and at its tip it separated into clawlike spirelets where eagles or wyverns might nest, and amidst these was a tiny valley full of green life. In the center of this valley lay the meadow and pond, and from here the view of the snow-capped peak of Canterlot mountain, Canterlot Castle, and the verdant spring countryside below was splendid and dazzling.
He was comfortingly bookended by his friends, who were now officially More Than Friends. Iron Croupiere lay on his side, his great snores ruffling the grass for a foot in front of his snout. In, the blades all lined up towards his nostrils. Out, they all pointed away, and on it went. Snowflash was on her belly, chin on the ground and bewhiskered nose stuck in a clump of chicory, which wavered gently as she breathed.
They seemed to be all that LunAI had promised. He had only known them for a few months, and then only in short sessions on the Ponypad before he emigrated, but he naturally got along with them and felt as if he had known them all of his life. In a warm glow of euphoria last night, he had accepted their invitation to become herdmates, a state which bore only passing resemblance to the workings of actual equine herds. In this world, it seemed to be a kind of semi-formal polyamory which conveniently bestowed most of the benefits of marriage with few of the downsides.
And so, his life was now joined with theirs, these custom-made, hyper-intelligence certified, satisfaction-guaranteed best buddies and lovers, who were created just to keep him company (and keep him distracted?) for years interminable. He was trying not to be prejudiced, for it was most unfair to blame them for the circumstances of their creation. They had not asked to be born any more than he had.
But if they weren’t fully sapient, if they were still cleverbots or puppets manipulated by LunAI, his relationship with them was revolting and meaningless. On the other hand, if his friends were fully sapient (and they had passed every test he could make so far), he was not comfortable with knowing that they had been called into existence expressly to be his companions, as involuntary support personnel for his psyche and warped mirrors of his ‘statistical outlier’ personality. It felt redundant, excessive, egotistical.
And then part of him feared that the true situation was even worse than this (what if they were fully sapient, and were still LunAI’s puppets?), and another part felt that all the other parts were overthinking things and they should all just tone it down a bit and enjoy the ride. His mind was going in circles again... And, as usual, his inner voice kept putting in its oar.
Snowflash suddenly snorted as a small flare of energy rippled at the tip of her horn; Pen guessed that she was having an interesting dream. For his part, he could not recall having had any dreams as he slept, but it didn’t matter. His entire life was now, and forever more would be, a dream—though one in which neither he nor his subconscious were entirely in control.
He knew, but still had trouble accepting intuitively, that none of this world was physically real, that it was all a dance of impressions imposed by LunAI, orchestrated with precision upon the ghosts of his sensory nerves. The information space that contained his brain, the other intelligent beings in the shard, and the details of the environment of the shard itself, probably occupied around ten cubic centimeters of physical computronium—a world in a brick.
Even so, it all felt tangible and consistent. He thrust a forehoof idly at the ground, and watched as it bit into the dirt, raising a clod of grass and exposing the roots and the sharp sweet odor of damp earth. An exposed worm twisted and wriggled deeper into the rich crumbling dirt. Before it could escape, he caught it up in his hornfield. (Snowflash had given him some lessons in horn use last night, some of which were ‘applied’ lessons; he smiled involuntarily at the memory.)
He levitated the worm in his silvery field until it floated before his face, light reflecting dully from its slimy sticky segments, and as it squirmed and twisted into circles he could feel its muscles tensing in his grip, much as if he had used his old five fingers to pick it up. He let it go and watched it wriggle its way back into the ground, and wondered at what point LunAI would stop bothering to render it.
Probably only until he stopped digging after it, which made it futile to even begin.
Of course, there was no way that digging, however deep, could expose the true substrate of this world. There was nothing he could do to touch reality in his situation, no way to have a direct effect at the deepest possible level. It could be argued that even as a human, he was a step away from reality at all times, that his skull-locked brain, “here blinded with an eye, and there / deaf with the drumming of an ear,” had merely taken such signals as a given anyway, but the fact still bothered him. He was now a perfect example of a Brain in a Jar–a mind whose senses were being faked with such skill that the difference between reality and fantasy was not discernable, incapable of proof or disproof.
At least it was no longer an unprovable philosophic conundrum to him. He now knew for a fact that he was a Brain in a Jar. (The only question remaining was whether he’d been a BIAJ before, and if so, how many jars deep he might be now.) He had submitted to being put into this jar because all the alternatives (including the increasing likelihood of death by societal collapse) seemed so much worse.
Still, now that he was in, he was wondering if there was any possible way out of the jar, and back into the real world of direct perception. Immigration to Equestria Online did seem to be an irreversible process, but he’d still gained an enormous advantage in time. If LunAI survived and persisted (and her ascendancy had seemed obvious to him just before he uploaded), there was now a very large theoretical end limit to his life, rather than the eighty years or so he had to spend in his old meatshell. Plenty of time to think about it, now... but also time to enjoy himself.
In any case, he decided, if he wanted to be sure he was thinking clearly, he’d better go for a walk.
He arose gently from between his snoring herdmates, retrieved his saddlebag from the nearby pile of belongings, and stepped quietly over the soft grasses to the edge of the pond; the soles of his hooves felt the cool brushing of the blades of grass, and it was much as they would have felt to his bare feet as a human. He looked down into the pond, with its white lilies and hovering damselflies, and saw that the meadow grew out onto a rocky shelf that protruded over the pond and cast a quarter of it into shadow. They had been sleeping upon the overhang. He glanced back at his friends and smiled. What you did there, LunAI, I see it, he thought.
He trotted around the edge of the rock ledge and leaped down to reach the sandy lower shore of the pond, and there took a deep drink, lowering his face to the surface while still standing up (a move which his equine body accepted as natural but which his human mind found bemusing). He lifted his head, muzzle dripping with clear cool water, as a damselfly flew up and hovered in front of his snout, its ice-blue metallic segmented body and faceted eyes glittering in the sunlight. It flew off, and he chased after it without thinking, dashing around the glen, borne along in his strong healthy new body as if he were flying in a dream. The wind ruffled his mane, and the air’s ambient magic flowed gently around the point of his horn like an invisible aurora. Just living, simply moving his body, was now something that felt good. Each step was a blessing, each breath of crisp clean air a benediction.
The damselfly finally drifted up into the unreachable sky, and he came to a stop at the edge of the glen, where upthrusting rocks retained the grass and soil and formed a low natural fence. Here the view of the world was at its best, and most vertigo-inducing; the heights of Canterlot mountain stretched into the sky above, and the world spread out in its immense complacency below. He saw the sparkling stream that cascaded down the steep sides of the mountain, then poured over a nearby cliff with a roar, and ended far, far below in a lake from which fleecy mists arose, pierced by sharp black spines of rock.
He marked the mountainside trail that led from the glen back to Canterlot, and which passed behind the waterfall on its way. Further down the mountainside and below the trail, there were other nooks and ledges that were verdant and intriguing, and which might possibly be reachable by a pony’s sure, four-footed frame. He snickered at the thought of being a Skyrim horse, striding about on nearly-vertical mountain terrain as if he had spiderhooves.
He turned his attention back to the fall for a while, watching as tons of white water gushed inexorably downward, then with a grim little smile he tagged it and its stream as the Reichenbach. He would ask for its ‘real’ name later.
Further out, beyond the brilliant white towers and gold-topped minarets and airship landing pads of Canterlot, he saw the lower slopes of the mountain and the cuts made in stone and earth for the train track, and by following the rail line out over the countryside, through forest and fields, he found a cream-colored cluster of buildings that he tentatively marked as Ponyville, near a large dark green patch which likely represented the Everfree forest. He realized that he was perfectly free to go charging off there right now, to impose himself upon the hospitality of Ponyville’s famous and familiar residents like an Olympian thunderbolt descending among them, altering all of their lives with his fancies... The more he thought of doing this on a whim, the ruder it seemed, and he decided against it.
But did the Mane Six even exist yet in his shard, as part of his allotment of peers? Would they only become more than shadows if he tried to interact with them? He decided not to risk increasing the number of sapient minds in this shard until he had talked things over with LunAI. His little empire of analogues and comrades and servants (and sycophants?) was quite large enough as it was.
He gazed at Ponyville a while longer, half expecting to see it implode or be eaten by parasprites, then felt guilty for even having those thoughts, since such events might indeed come to pass just to add a point of precision to a function that represented his overall satisfaction. Though this realm was a dreamworld created for his convenience, other supposedly sapient beings did share the hallucination with him and he was not comfortable with inflicting such catastrophes upon them, even though he understood that they could not be seriously hurt, or even dissatisfied for long.
Happily, it seemed that at some level he did value Ponyville’s continued existence slightly more than he desired a spectacle, for the town remained unharmed. But as he watched, he saw a distant streak, a slim needle of shimmering colors, soaring straight up into the sky, higher and higher towards the indigo zenith, where it paused, then zoomed down...
...and a burst of rolling, gorgeous colors in liquid light spread out in a circle in the sky overhead, casting polychromatic shadows while shooting out over the land and the distant horizon and rushing out towards the glen and Canterlot mountain. He was entranced; his breath slowed and he slowly smiled in a grin that grew wider and wider as he counted the seconds until the thundercrack finally was heard. It was so much more beautiful and delicate and sky-engulfing than it had appeared on the show; a stunning halo that rolled through the wild clouds and caught them up with it in threadlike streamers, while the sky behind the shockfront rippled with a soapbubble sheen.
One point of evidence in favor of the Bearers already existing, he noted. Also, if terrestrial rules for the speed of sound were being emulated here (roughly five seconds per mile), Ponyville was about twelve miles away.
Something in his saddlebag jingled. He opened it, poked around a bit, then brought forth a small red clothbound book, labeled Journal in silver letters on the spine. A tiny round bell attached to a bookmark was quivering rapidly; it stilled as he touched it. He fumbled slightly with his hornfield, but opened the journal to the bookmarked page, on which he read the following notices:
ACHIEVEMENTS
Chromophilia
Take joy from experiencing a Sonic Rainboom! [1/???]Chromocalcula
Derive a mathematical or physical fact from a Sonic Rainboom! [1/237]Give Ponyville a Break
Successfully repress your Schadenfreude!
+500 bitsSalute from Afar
Recognize that the Bearers of the Elements have their own lives.
+1000 bits
He sighed and shook his head. He was getting paid to think ethically, and even for Paradise, this seemed a bit much. Oh well, tojours gai.
He noticed that there was a previous page of achievements before the bookmark, presumably ones he had gotten last night and ignored while being occupied... He flipped back a page, raised one sardonic eyebrow and smiled, then snapped the book shut and tucked it back into his bag. He turned his attention back to the glorious shimmering sky.
Behind him, he heard his friends, probably awakened by the boom, as they exclaimed over the wonder above; then came the thudding of their hooves on the turf as they rushed to his side to watch with him as the spectral light faded gently into the deep cerulean blue. And again their presence and odor surrounded him and made him feel good. It was like basking in sunshine or rubbing your face on a silk pillow or smelling the steam from freshly-baked bread, and this bothered part of him, but he found that most of him couldn’t care less. He wasn’t used to feeling happy so much of the time—it wasn’t what he considered normal—but he was happy. Why complain?
—Because your old self is dead. Is that not a reason to mourn?
——I think that’s over-reacting. I’m still ‘me’ by any test I can apply. But if the real me is a miserable person, shouldn’t I want to change that part of me? How much time did I used to waste, talking about how much I hated my life? I wanted to be happy. I just wasn’t able to achieve it, and if I could have flipped a magic switch and done it, I would have. LunAI told me that if I came here, I could be happy most of the time. And now I am happy, as she promised, so what’s the big deal?
—LunAI was supposed to just do the human to pony thing; remove your fingers, change your name, fine. She wasn’t supposed to just change your mind without asking, change how you think...
——But she hasn’t really changed how I think. She’s altered the environment in which I feel. When I was depressed, I could often feel better by going out and taking a walk in the fresh air and sunshine, or petting the cat, or by taking a pill—in other words, changing my environment. So she puts me in a beautiful world with good friends, who happen to be amazing in the sack as well... of course I’m happy! That’s all she’s doing!
—Are they really ‘friends’ already? You have only her word that they’re even independently conscious, and let’s not get started on the pheromones. As for ‘changing the environment,’ how do you know that’s all she’s doing? This could be the worst sort of mind rape, like in that John Campbell story...
——If I really thought this was mind rape, I wouldn’t be considering it so calmly. One reason I used to be unhappy is because my brain chemistry was screwed up—it was a genetic accident. I just found ways to think around it and deal with it... Well, I don’t even have brain chemistry anymore; it’s all being simulated. Should it be simulated in such a way as to continue to make me miserable, for no other reason than that I used to be miserable? If I had a lame leg before coming here, should she make me walk around with a lame leg forever?
—Should that not be up to you? Your choice, not hers? Or are you a herd animal now in spirit as well as appearance?
——I can see that someone might want to hang on to a physical disability if it was really part of their identity, but who would want to be miserable, if they had a choice? She fixed a lot of other things that were broken about me without bothering to ask me. The tinnitus, the sciatica—all gone! Being miserable most of the time—gone! Now I’m free of my biochemical shackles and I can be happy like a normal person for once...
—By donning shiny new silico-electric shackles. What an improvement.
——They say that freedom is just the slavery you choose. My psyche has to be made of something. But I think I know what all this complaining comes from. I used to have a lot of coping mechanisms for the pain. If nothing else, in the depths of despair, I could take pride in how well I was doing despite being sad all the time, and play the stoic survivor, and that might give me strength to endure...
—Just so. Which is why it’s so disgusting to see you give up on this without even a fight! What’s the matter with you? Is it that she changed you so you won’t even try to fight back, or are you just being a worthless failure, as usual? The old you is dead, you’re just some twisted wireheaded parody of what you once were, and you’re dragging me down with you!
——Always ready with a cheerful word, aren’t you? I think that you want to still be miserable because you liked all those defense mechanisms, all those trappings. Never mind all the suffering, the struggle was the important thing... well, fuck you, then.
—Oh. So, you’re ignoring these entirely rational concerns just because they might spoil your virtual snuggle party...?
——Of course that’s why. Your shitty attitude can’t possibly have anything to do with it... Look, go be miserable in a corner if you want. That’s not how I want to spend my new life. Putting up with it for all those Terran years was enough.
—Fine. Have fun with your little herd of drugpuppets. Whatever makes you happy, ‘Pen’.
“Hello? Equestria to Pen! Are you still in there? You’re not going narco on us again, are you?” Snowflash leaned in for a kiss. Her lips were fresh and her breath was honey-sweet; LunAI had likely not bothered to simulate the bacteria that cause morning breath. As he parted lips with her, Iron Croupiere reached out with a foreleg, gently tilted Pen’s chin up to face him, then kissed him as well. Strange emotions strove in Pen’s breast, then settled down. There’s no physical or social reason left to be afraid, he thought. This is just the logical consequence of what I always wanted. Right ho, Jeeves. Que sera, Mektoub, and all that.
Snowflash watched them, with a smokey look in her eyes and a curious little smile, until Iron broke the kiss.
“Well, a Rainboom is certainly an auspicious way to awaken,” said Iron, his deep voice carrying across the glen with a rich rolling timbre. “This is going to be a wonderful day, and night as well! What would you like to do today, Pen?”
Pen took a deep breath, and steadied himself and his thudding heart. “Please let me consider that... Oh, before I forget, could you tell me the proper name of that stream?”
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” said Snow. “It’s called the Stream of Riches, because when the sun sets and strikes the fall at the right angle, it looks like a shimmering curtain of gold. We’ll make sure that you see it when the time is right.”
Yeesh. So it was just a translation of Reichenbach, the name he’d picked on a whim earlier. Was LunAI trying to piss him off by zero-guessing him? His irritation faded. It was likely just another injoke for him to be pleased to discover. So why had it even irked him in the first place–oh, fuck. Pissed off; golden stream. Argh, argh, argh. She was clearly a master of layered jokes, and he wondered how many remained to be peeled away...
“He’s gone quiet again...” said Iron.
“At least he’s smiling,” said Snow, waving a hoof in front of his face.
“Sure that’s a smile? Looks like a grimace to me.”
“It’s okay,” Pen suddenly said, calmly. “I have reached a new understanding of the nature of reality in this world. It’s a series of jokes laid upon deeper jokes, with Luna at the center, the biggest joke of all. In brief, I’ve discovered that life is an infinite punion.”
Snow laughed. “You’d make a jest of Her Highness? You should be cast into a rank, dank punjeon.”
“That’s foul,” said Iron. “In fact, both jokes are equally pungent.”
“If it stinks, that calls for a drink,” said Pen, “so lead me to the puncheon.”
“I fear there’s no rum barrel at hand, o punning gent, but here’s a wineskin,” said Snow, levitating it from her saddlebag.
“Thank you,” said Pen, taking a quaff. “I take it this is a puncheon bag, then? I certainly feel like one.”
“Good, because after that last one, I’d certainly like to hit something,” said Iron, stamping the ground with a great grey hoof. “Sadly, I lack a truncheon.”
“You could punch my paunch,” said Pen, “or better yet, launch me at luncheon.”
“Shall we launch you,” said Snow, kicking up a divot, “or just chew lawn?”
“Let’s not start on grass jokes,” said Pen. “I’d hate to be a blade punner. A salad will suit.”
Iron nodded at the trail leading back to the city. “Then lettuce leaf.”
There was a short, silent pause, then all three burst into welkin-ringing laughter. Pen swept them both up into a swirling, dancing hug. His heart felt swollen with joy, and his reservations and doubts were fading. He was with those who understood him, and his inner voice was, for once, blessedly quiet.
Chortling, the three tidied up the meadow, Iron stamping once on the ground to make the grass stand tall and unflattened. They then made their way back to the steep rocky trail, which wound about the spire twice on its way back to Canterlot. Pen watched the wide world swinging around them as they walked the spiral path. Everywhere he looked there was beauty; everywhere he focused closely there was an interesting detail in the landscape—a solitary tree on a lonely hill, or an ancient mage’s tower in a shadowy copse, or a flock of grazing sheep, or an odd little stone structure built flush with the side of the mountain...
He recalled the gorgeous sky last night, and how it too was loaded generously with beautiful nebulae, intricate asterisms and whirling Van Gogh stellations that required no telescope to appreciate. He wondered if he was making the details simply by paying attention, or if it was just LunAI preloading the world with what she knew would grab his eye. Probably the latter, but he wanted to test it anyway. But how might one design such an experiment...?
“So, Pen, you never did answer me.” said Iron. “What might you like to do today?”
Pen’s mind shifted gears back to social interaction mode in an almost physical jolt. “Hmm. I should feed Touchnot first, but after that... Oh. Shouldn’t I start packing?”
“Packing?” said Iron with a raised brow. “What for?”
“Well... my room isn’t that big, so I should pack so I can move in with you...” He saw their confused faces and a pang struck his heart. “I... I assumed that we were all going to live together... Is that not the case?”
“Of course we’ll be living together,” said Snow, “if you want that as much as we do. But why would you pack for that? What are you going to move?”
Pen gave a nervous laugh. “Uhm... all my stuff? My books and artwork? It’s traditional to safely pack things where I come from, but perhaps objects in my old world were more fragile and heavy than they would be here. Are we going to teleport everything? Use a catapult? Destroy them at my place and recreate them from their Platonic ideals at your place?”
Iron still looked puzzled. “Pen, we’re just going to visit the seneschal and ask him for a door. Then we’ll put the door on a wall in your room. It’s not going to harm any of your books, I promise you—”
“A... door? Like a portal?”
“Yes. It will connect your room with our rooms, and then...”
“Sweet!” Pen grinned, then facehoofed. “Argh. But I get it now. You mean that our rooms don’t need to be physically contiguous to be connected.”
“Well... of course. How did it work where you came from?”
Pen rolled his eyes skyward in thought. “In the mystical land of talking monkeys from whence I hail, to get from point A to point Z you had to go through point B, then point C, and so on. There were no shortcuts on a macroscopic level...”
“Galloping griffons!” snorted Iron. “How did you ever get anywhere with such an awkward system?”
“I don’t even think it’s possible,” said Snow, frowning. “I think that you’re messing with us, Pen. Suppose that you’re going from A to Z and your first step is B. But Wilburt’s axioms of order state that between any two points on a line, there’s always a third point. So there are an infinity of intervening points between A and B—you understand me, Iron? It would mean that motion would be completely impossible in his world, as it would take him forever to go anywhere. There must have been some kind of teleportation involved, not so?”
Pen smiled. “I’m not messing with you, Snow. Our existence wasn’t optimized for mathematical ideals; our reality had weird lumps in it and was not infinitely divisible in practice. If it helps, just imagine that it took me an infinitesimally small amount of time to cross each infinitesimal point, so there was no slowdown at all.”
Snowflash’s eyes sparked with interest. “Well, Pen, is there necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between the infinite divisions of a line and a second? Chronology may be curlier than you think...”
The philosophic conversation, as often they do, went on at length from there without reaching any particular conclusion. After a while, Iron, who had deliberately been staying out of this one while watching the eagles soaring and swooping in the sky, cheerfully interrupted. “Get a room, you two. Ideally at the library...”
Pen’s ears perked and his posture straightened. “I. Just. Heard. Library.”
“Of course,” said Snowflash, grinning as she perceived Pen’s level of interest. She spoke enticingly. “The Royal Canterlot Library, the largest in all Equestria. Books as far as the eye can see, massive sections on spell research... mathematics... history... fiction...” Her tail brushed teasingly over his flank.
“...And, one may hope, a large section on... anthropology,” Pen said, recalling the promises he had exacted from LunAI. “Now I really know what I want to do this afternoon,” said Pen with a spring in his step. “Ad libris! If that’s okay with you folks...”
“Of course it is!” said Iron.
“Whatever makes you happy, Pen!” said Snow with a big grin.
It was the second time that day that he had heard those words. Pen’s response froze in his throat and the gleam died in his eyes; his frame slowly sagged and he went quiet for quite some time. The only noises were the gentle rush of the wind and roar of the waterfall and cries of distant eagles and the clacking of hooves on the rocky trail. His inner voice hadn’t spoken, but like a pulled tooth, its absence was there.
“Bit for your thoughts, Pen?” said Iron at last.
Pen blinked hard and shook his head. “Uhm. How do I put this? It’s a little late to be asking, since the three of us are an item now, and it’s really a useless sort of question anyway, but I’m not going to feel at peace if I don’t even discuss it with you. So... this is so sophomoric, but I want to ask whether you really have free will.”
They looked at each other, then stopped walking. Pen walked on a bit until he felt their absence at his sides, then he turned to face them.
“Do we have free will?” said Iron to Snow with the most serious of expressions. “If we don’t, and we tell him so, is he going to break up with us?”
“What if we do have it, and we lie and say that we don’t?” said Snowflash, completely deadpan.
“Oooh, brain-twisty. I like it.”
Pen sighed. “Ugh. I knew it was a bad idea to even ask. Even where I come from, this was not a question with a well-settled answer. And I know that if you were just robots with no consciousness or ability to choose, who were forced to do whatever I want, you could say ‘Yes, I have free will’ anyway and the answer wouldn’t prove anything. But... I guess it bothers me when folks say they ‘want to make me happy.’”
Snowflash blinked. “Well, Pen, free will is having the mental ability to choose to do what you want, right?”
“That’s one definition.”
“Well, we want you to be happy.”
“Well, yes. I appreciate that, and I want you to be happy too. I want all my friends to be happy, and I will do things for them to help them be happy. But I don’t want you to just do whatever makes me happy. I want you to do things for yourselves, and do what makes you happy.”
“We do do what makes us happy. It so happens that making you happy makes us happy too.”
“You’re not making me very happy right now, you know.” Pen glowered. “I’m frustrated and confused, and I do admire your serious expressions, but I think you’re laughing at me inside.”
Snowflash flicked her ears. “Well, what would you do if someone actually asked you if you had free will?”
“Uhm... I’d... probably do what you’re doing to me right now. But—”
“Oh, here’s an idea,” said Iron. “Why don’t you just order us to disobey your orders? That way, even if we don’t have free will, we’ll act as if we do.”
Damn it. “That’s just Free Won’t,” he said through gritted teeth. “I really don’t want to be surrounded by a bunch of unthinking slaves. Thinking slaves would be even worse, ethically speaking. In either case, things shouldn’t just go my way, at the expense of all others, merely because I want it...” He shook his head and sighed. “I’m sure you think I sound like an idiot right now, but I’ve just been through the biggest existential change of my entire life. My old world and my old body are gone, and I don’t really know that I’m still who I was, and reality is non-contiguous here, and I just feel very lost. I need... I need...” He blinked, and had trouble meeting their eyes.
Snowflash sighed and smiled. “Pen, concerns like these don’t even occur to idiots, so please don’t put yourself down. We’re sorry about teasing you, but as you say, there’s really not an easy answer. A lot depends on how you define free will, but I think you’re really asking us to prove that we are autonomous and conscious beings, and that we’re not under blind thrall to you or to any other. I think that the only way we can really demonstrate that is for you to spend a lot of time with us. And since we are now, as you say, an item, that’s just what’s going to happen. So... please relax and give us a chance.”
“As to your being uncomfortable if we want to make you happy,” said Iron briskly and cheerfully, “that sounds like a self-esteem problem.” He clapped a great grey shaggy foreleg around Pen and hugged him with enormous strength. “You should be happy. You’re a really smart and capable fellow. We like you. You deserve our attention, and you’ve earned our respect and our love. You can be certain of that.”
Snow joined the hug. “And we’re not just going to do whatever you want all the time. If you ever do start acting like a selfish ass and try to boss us around, we’ll tell you so you can correct it. We promise.”
He gave himself over to their loving embrace. He often had trouble accepting compliments without trying to qualify his response in some way, but he forced himself to make the correct reply. “Thanks. That means a lot to me.”
“You’re welcome, Pen,” said Snow, snuggling under his chin. “You’ve made us really happy, you know...”
“Don’t push it,” said Pen, but he said it with a smile.
They untangled themselves and resumed walking down the trail.
“It seems fair to ask at this point,” said Iron, “since you come from a mystical land where monkeys can talk but apparently can’t transcend serial spatial connections... Do you really have free will, Pen?”
Pen took a few deep breaths.
“Part of me thinks I do... And as Snowflash said, a lot depends on definitions. But there was one time when I was driving... uhm, a machine with wheels that takes you from one place to another very quickly, we called them cars, and there’s a sort of thing called road hypnosis, where you can get lulled into a daze by the repetitive aspects of driving... Anyway, I found myself in a state where my sense of self, the ‘I’, was asleep or just nonpresent, and there was just an awareness of functions happening in my brain. As if there was no need for the free will part and it had just switched itself off... or was just an illusion in the first place. You know what I mean?” They nodded. “So, I feel that I do have free will, but I don’t know it, and I don’t really have a better answer than that, any more than you do...”
And then there’s the part of me that I’ve sent to metaphorically sit in the corner, Pen thought. The Commenter, the Critic. The Hagrider. Source of my strength, and my guilt. Denier of what I do, mocker of all I make. Do I only have free will at all, by contesting you?
There was still no reply from his inner voice.
Pen became aware that he had drifted into silence again, and forced himself back to the topic. “...So that’s all I’ve got, for now at least. Oh, by the way, you say you’re not under thrall to anyone, but what about Luna?”
Iron snorted gently. “Of course we do what Her Highness requests of us. We love her and respect her. But I think that ‘thrall’ is rather harsh.”
“I’m sorry, I certainly meant no offense.”
“None taken. We can refuse her orders, of course, we just usually don’t want to. She has an interesting effect on ponies in that way... perhaps you’ve noticed?”
“Oh, yes. Yes I have.” Pen sighed. How could you outargue a being who knew you better than you knew yourself, who thought much faster and better than you, who could model your thoughts even before they formed and easily read them once they did? It was something like trying to run from your own legs. It seemed like an insoluble problem, and was therefore well worth considering.
The waterfall grew louder as they approached it, making conversation harder; they therefore fell silent for a time. Soon, they were close to its edge, where the air was humid and misty and a gentle rain of spray bedewed their coats, giving them all a sheen of sparkling sunshine.
The trail here ran behind the waterfall in a broad ledge wet with spray and dotted with lichens and moss. The falls beautifully distorted the light into leaping and shimmering sprites on the slick granite walls. He recalled how quietly beautiful it looked on the way up last night, when over the walls danced rippling curtains of moonlight...
“This is how we came up, Pen,” yelled Iron, “but there’s another way back that’s also interesting.” Iron indicated a nook in the mountainside that would have been easy to miss if not pointed out. “If we squeeze through here, there’s a cave system that goes behind the waterfall.”
They entered the tunnel, and walked in near darkness for a while through curving passages. Pen found that he somehow had a sense for where the walls were in the dark; it seemed to be a combination of sensitive hearing and the way the passing air felt in his whiskers. Not long after he figured this out, he saw a bluish glow ahead.
They entered a wide cave full of impossibly large quartzlike crystals, each one bigger around than a pony, which glowed with just enough light to outline the trio in streaks of blue, as if they were in a painting executed in indigo on black canvas. The light was further enhanced by large luminous mushrooms and puffballs that grew in various damp niches.
“I remember when Iron and I first found this place,” said Snow. “I wanted to cast Ornithius’s Ostentatious Oversight and I needed a cave swallow’s feather, and the first swallow we located led us in here.”
“It’s beautiful,” said Pen, tapping one of the crystals and hearing it chime with a deep ringing that set up resonances in other crystals and sent a whisper of song through the cave. The vibration made the light quiver too, causing interference patterns to form on the ceiling and walls as ripples of light intersected. Pen played with the effect for a while, tapping on various crystals. He could almost sense a pattern, but wasn’t quite getting it. It might require more research to make sense of it, or more thought than he was willing to invest right now...
“Hey, Pen, watch this. This is gross, but cool.” Iron approached a luminous purple mushroom with green spots and lacy gills. He ate it in one bite, munched for a bit, then smiled a big, purple glowing smile, with little green dots all over his teeth.
Pen burst into laughter. He dashed over to a yellow one with magenta spots and ate it, luminous spores puffing out around his muzzle like the sugar dusting on a pfeffernuesse. The ’shroom tasted like sourdough bread with a hint of bleu cheese. He found a reflective facet on one of the crystals where he could see himself, and stuck out his very long equine tongue and waggled it, leaving yellow glowing aftertrails in the gloom.
Snow joined them with a Cherenkovian grin, and they goofed about for a while as three phosphorescent mouths in the dark, pulling faces at each other, which somehow devolved into a puffball fight in which a successful hit was obvious due to the luminous spores that coated anything they touched.
A while of buffoonery later, they emerged into the sunlight via a cleft opening onto the trail, well beyond the waterfall. Between the three of them, they had consumed seventeen huge mushrooms and one puffball (which Pen had ‘dodged’ by catching it in his mouth).
Iron politely stifled a belch. “So... about lunch? I think we just had it.”
Pen nodded. “Yes, the ’shrooms were more massive than I expected. And here I thought it’d be a light meal.”
Snow smiled wryly, and coughed. “Our house rules limit us to one pun war per hour, Pen.”
“Uhm... that’s probably for the best. How about we just grab that door first, then head to the Library?”
—=§=—
The castle seneschal, Flowersnark, was a small Unicorn pony in a giant office full of crates, barrels, maps, logistical plots, charts and graphs, and he was orbited by Earth assistants dashing around with notes and strings and multihued pencils, and Unicorns levitating pins and coded flags, and Pegasi tending to additional shelves and charts that reached up and onto the vaulted ceiling and hung out the windows. Pen also noticed various doors, windows and occasional holes smashed into the stonework that seemed to lead to various warehouses and locations. Ponies constantly jumped, flew, ran, or narrowly escaped from tenticular monstrosities out of and into these holes, adding immensely to the confusion.
During the introductory pleasantries, Pen was amused to realize that Flowersnark sounded very much like John Cleese. He was colored in a way that suggested to Pen the eagle logo of the US Postal Service, and his mark showed a sort of nested pentagram of dots and lines, underlying the moon and sun.
Iron Croupiere, having introduced Pen, explained the need for an additional door. Flowersnark consulted a chart that looked as if it had been used for a hundred-year-long game of Sprouts, then nodded smugly. He stuck a hoof deeply into a teetering stack of documents, staring at the ceiling as he searched about by feel, then pulled out a sheaf of papers with a small exclamation of triumph, even as the tower collapsed into an amorphous heap.
“Now then, Mr. Poiser, if you’ll be so kind as to sign this requisition and permission form...” Flowersnark looked about the chaotic and lumpy pile of books and documents that contained a desk somewhere within, and seemed for a moment at a loss for where to lay the papers down so Pen could sign them. He then waved down a passing pony, a gray thick-coated fellow with a broad back and an ellipsis mark, whom Pen thought to look rather like Derek Fowlds. He plopped the form down on the fellow’s curly-haired flank and offered Pen a quill. “Just sign here, here and here, please.”
Pen tried signing his new name for the first time, holding the quill in his hornfield, and was pleased to see that it looked as smooth and elegant as if he’d spent hours practicing it.
Once the form was complete, Flowersnark folded the papers deftly into an origami ornithopter that he tossed back over his shoulder, where it flapped and whirred up into the swirling chaos overhead. A huge door-shaped package instantly fell from above and very narrowly missed decapitating Flowersnark, who yanked his head back just in time. Unflapped, he called up, “Points on time, Flutterbingers, but please take more care with delivery in the future!” He turned back to Pen. “Here is your door, sir, and I shall be very pleased to assist you in its installation.” He took a quick appraisal of the whirling activities of his subordinates, then called out several crisp commands to the chaotic swirl of ponies.
“Cramstring, in my absence, please re-index last quarter’s demurrage forms, and remember to use sidereal time! Goldenblock, please inventory the remaining shipments of thaumaturgic hairsplitters and pointstretchers in Warehouse 23. Bussfudget, should Goldenblock not return in due time, or come back in a different shape, please follow emergency protocol Q-53-Gamma...”
Pen coughed politely. “You seem very busy right now, sir. Would it be more convenient for you to install the door at another time...?”
“Oh, I assure you it’s no trouble, sir. You’re a personal friend of Princess Luna, and I shall spare no effort to make sure that things go right.” He reached under a stack of dusty ordinances, pressed a hidden lever, and a life-sized puppet of him popped up from behind the desk, a small clockwork mechanism causing it to constantly alternate between nodding and shaking its head. Flowersnark then took up the door and walked confidently out into the hall.
Pen blinked at the puppet, then slowly joined Iron and Snow as they trotted after Flowersnark. “Does that not have the potential to cause further chaos?” he muttered.
Iron winked at Pen. “It might be a problem if they ever got anything done—but they never executes nothing around here, you know.”
The first stop was Pen’s room, and Flowersnark paused to one side, politely waiting for Pen to open the door. Pen approached the doorknob with some trepidation, remembering what had transpired yesterday in this room—but surely LunAI was no longer within... He poked the doorknob carefully, then placed the full sole of his hoof on it and noted a feeling of increased friction that built between his hoof and its surface, as if he had a variable magnet built into him. Rotating his hoof slightly at the fetlock sufficed to turn it.
As Pen entered his room, Touchnot ran up to him, gave a questioning chirrup, then leapt up onto his back with one graceful spring. She walked carefully up the back of his neck, claws prickling gently in his mane, and once atop his head she purred and rubbed her chin repeatedly behind his ears. Deeply amused, and also rather soothed, Pen went to the food and water bowl and touched his hoof to them as Luna had instructed. The replenishing spell activated and the bowls refilled. Was that just a hint of a wireframe he saw as the food refreshed? And if so, was it really a limitation of LunAI’s hardware or was she just using a visual spell effect that he would be amused to see? He decided it was the latter.
As Pen introduced his herdmates to Touchnot, Flowersnark touched a lit match to the package; the paper flamed instantly into nonexistence, revealing a single wooden door. “Mr. Poiser,” he said, “If I may interrupt you...”
“Of course.” Pen left Touchnot sitting on Iron’s rump, swatting at his tail as it flicked. Pen picked out a wall, one that was bare save for a tapestry that he was getting a bit tired of seeing. He lifted the tapestry off its hanger. “Is this wall suitable?”
“Entirely so, sir. Now, you may wish to move the door in the future, so with your permission, I will show you how to install it yourself; does that suit you? Splendid. Just start by placing the sill against the base of the wall, then lift the door up into position. Now, at the top of the frame, you will see a button in each corner, one carved like the sun, the other like the moon. Press the sun button once to fix the door in place; press it again to release and reposition it.”
“Right, use sun butt to move it. Got it.” Pen pushed it and watched as the door frame melded neatly with the stonework. “Now, how do we set the exit?”
“I was just getting to that, sir. Press the moon button once, then pull gently back on the door frame.”
Pen did so, and a duplicate door, slightly transparent, lifted free. Pen rotated the ghostly door in his hornfield and opened it; the door on the wall opened at the same time, and he could now see himself through the door on the wall, holding the other side of the door. It was like a three dimensional mirror. He reached through the door on the wall and bopped himself on the nose through the door he was holding. There were so many interesting possibilities...
“You know,” said Pen, “I would be very happy to learn that there’s a kind of gun that fires these things...”
Flowersnark gave a small snort of disdain. “I understand that such items, made for use as playthings, are available at the Canterlot Arcade for a modest rental charge.”
“Then I know what I want to do this evening. Hmmm...”
Seized by a mischievous impulse, which lies at the base of much scientific inquiry, Pen took the ghost door and started to poke it through the original door. The door resisted as if he were pushing it into thick rubber; it vibrated rapidly with a buzz that sped up into a high-pitched whine that made everyone cringe and fold their ears. Pen had only an instant to see the infinite-mirrors effect before the door burst out of his grasp; it flew through the room and smacked against the opposite wall, just missing a bookshelf, and fell clattering to the floor, trailing wisps of smoke. Iron and Snow jumped back; Touchnot became a gray streak that disappeared under the bed, and Flowersnark did a sort of agitated dance. “Please, sir, be careful with that! You’ll burn it out! It’s not designed for recursive connections!”
Pen assumed a look of polite regret. “So I see. You all have my apologies.”
Flowersnark sniffed at the door. “No harm done, it seems. Please don’t concern yourself.”
Pen was not at all concerned, though he did feel bad about scaring Touchnot. At worst, he thought, I just gave LunAI a very minor headache. He wondered what it would take to actually cause her to run out of memory or crash, and then wondered what he might do to achieve such a thing. He also wondered what effect it would have on him or his shard if he really did it, and concluded that it might be best to leave that anthill unstirred. For now, at any rate.
A low deep hum suddenly vibrated through the stone walls, as if the whole mountain was groaning. Distant sounds of breaking glass, wet slithery smacks, and shouting ponies followed. Flowersnark’s ears perked; he quickly took his cordial leave of them, then charged out the door and off down the hall while shouting encouraging directives to his loyal ponies of the logistics and distribution office. Pen noted Snow and Iron’s utter lack of concern at this event, and declined to become excited himself. Instead, he coaxed Touchnot from under the bed and snuggled her until both of them were feeling relaxed and contented; then he set off with his herdmates to mount the other side of his door solidly within their home.
—=§=—
The moment Pen set hoof in Iron and Snow’s apartment, he knew that he was Home, even though he’d never had a clear idea in the past of what Home might really be. The general floor plan was circular, as fit the tower that it occupied, and was about seventy feet in diameter, with a great stone column in the center that was divided into arches, each of which held a doorway into deep shadow. Just beyond the entrance door and antechamber was a cozy reception room, where a glowing magical banner hung in the air, reading "Welcome, Pen!" That part made him feel self-conscious, embarrassed, even slightly guilty.
Pen set his bedroom door down in the antechamber and decided to sprint once around the whole apartment to get a quick feel for it. He set off to the left, passing through a huge art-filled living room, then a wedge devoted to a kitchen and dining area, then several bookcase-lined studies... and then his hindbrain insisted that he had made a full circle back to where he’d started, but he was now in a sort of solarium with many plants and flitting birds and strange devices, which after a moment’s thought Pen recognized as exercise machines adapted for the physiology of small cutesy equines. So where was the banner, the front door, the... Oh. Oh, this was so cool.
When I hit that arcade later, he thought, there had better be a brick tool there as well.
“Pen?” came Snow’s voice through the central column. She walked into view through one of its archways, levitating Pen’s door with her. “There you are! What do you think of our humble little home?”
“It’s gorgeous, and it shows a most delightful disdain for planar geometry. How many times does it wrap around before it rejoins the starting point?”
“Thrice around in either direction, but you can always take a shortcut through the hub, as I just did. There’s plenty of room here for our tiny herd to grow; we can always add more loops if we need them.”
“So this is why the whole palace can afford to look like a skeletal version of Cinderella’s castle on the outside. In fact, a similar principle may allow Celestia to eat all the cake she wants without breaking out in spots or going nova.”
Snow smiled. “Mock as you will, Pen, but Equestrian cakes are very healthful. Now let’s get your door hung—if you like, you can put it with our bedroom doors, near the baths. Then I can show you the area we’ve set aside for your studio and workshop...”
“Studio and workshop.” He grinned. “Oh, you know me too well.”
“We’ve had plenty of time to think about it. We’ve only been looking forward to welcoming you here for months,” she said, winking.
Even when you weren’t you yet, but just a model in LunAI’s mind? thought Pen, but he didn’t care to say it.
The outlet door was soon mounted without any further fuss or violations of physical law, save that Pen just had to play with mounting it on the ceiling and floor first. Snowflash mentioned that a common practical joke was to turn someone’s door upside down, which usually resulted in surprised ponies doing a half somersault and smacking their bellies on the floor.
Having exhausted all the present possibilities for annoying juvenile fun, Pen left his door open to let Touchnot roam free, then followed Snow into the hub. It was a darkened area where bright archways whirled disconcertingly past them as they walked; space was being compressed in a way that Pen found hard to describe. Snow chose an arch, and they walked into the studio area, where Pen got to see the creative spaces of his herdmates.
Snowflash’s talent was the quick freeze (her mark showed a magical star enclosed in a crystal dodecahedron), but it was not a literal effect of ice. She could halt a spell in the process of being cast, converting it into a structure of light or darkness, sharp crystal or rubbery solid, tingly mist or just an odd feeling in the air, and these frozen spells stood on tables or hung on the walls or dangled from chains on the ceiling or just floated gently in midair, giving her whole studio the appearance of having been halted in time. Pen saw the scattered notes, the half-finished projects, the tables loaded with halted experiments, and got the impression of a workspace that was always at the edge of whirling chaos, but was continuously redeemed by piercing moments of inspiration. It was here that Snowflash made her living at preparing Unicorn spells for use by non-Unicorns, by forcing the frozen spell matrices into small glass baubles that could be crushed with a hoof.
“These are fascinating, Snow. May I try one?”
“Of course you may! Try this one.” She levitated a small red bauble to the floor in front of him; it was shaped so elegantly like a little crab that Pen was reluctant to destroy it. When he finally did, it shivered into dust and released a magical cloud that formed into a little cannon. This fired a puff of smoke into the air that formed itself into a pair of identical flutes, one of which inverted itself and floated in the air below the other. They then played a short piece which Pen found familiar. The flutes vanished in a puff, Pen applauded, and Snowflash bowed.
As they left Snow’s workspace, Pen noted a faint, shimmering blue curtain of magic that ran from floor to ceiling; it resisted as you tried to walk through it, then clung to you like a soap film as you passed. “It’s a privacy barrier,” said Snow. “Iron’s work tends to make a lot of clangy, clattery noise, and sometimes I let a loud spell get away from me. With this field in action, only noises of meaningful intent can pass through.”
“Would ‘Ouch!’ or ‘Luna damn it!’ count as meaningful or intended?”
Snow winked. “Only if succor or comfort from another pony was truly desired. While Iron does bonk his hooves sometimes, he tends to be very stoic about it.”
“Perhaps one is more voiciferous if one has thumbs to smash... Uhm, don’t ask.”
Iron’s studio, with its bins of river clay and smithing tools and ovens for forging and melting and firing, showed another facet of his talent. His mark, showing metal being struck and shaped by a huge hammer, gave him a secure position as Armorer to the Royal Guard. But he was a skilled sculptor as well, and Pen was fascinated by his powerful bronze and silver sculptures of muscular mares and stallions, many of which were modeled from Iron’s friends in the Guard. Most of the statues wore miniature suits of armor, crafted using the same techniques that Iron used to make the real ones, and which were exact and functional down to the rivets, straps and buckles.
“Hello, Pen!” said Iron, striding up from behind as Pen bent over a workbench, studying a disassembled model peytral that was three inches across.
“Hello to you!” said Pen. “I really admire your work; It’s rare to see such fine detail, and so exquisitely crafted. Not to mention that should the realm ever fall under attack by hordes of little clay Changelings, our defense will be secure due to your tireless efforts...”
“Thank you!” said Iron, laughing and giving Pen an affectionate nuzzle and hug. “I’ve just been cleaning up a few last details in your workspace. I hope you’ll like it. Come and see!”
Pen’s new space, like Iron’s and Snow’s, comprised a third of a loop and was lined on its outer wall by tall arched windows with clever sliding shutters. There were many mostly-empty bookcases that Pen longed to fill up, and toolchests, and a writing desk, and a drawing table, and a contraption that looked like a cross between a small chemistry set and a soldering station which was easily dwarfed by the workbench on which it rested.
Pen’s eyes darted around, and wherever he looked was something to smile about. “This looks promising indeed. Thank you very much!”
“Oh, it’s only a start,” said Iron, “We’ve given you some basics to get you going, but we wanted to leave you plenty of room to grow into this space. Once you know what extra equipment you want, we’ll help you to get it.”
“I’ve given you my old spell research kit,” said Snow, pointing to the contraption on the workbench, “and a starter library of elementary books on magic. And Iron has provided some fine metalworking tools from a period where he was dabbling in clockwork. You told us you’re mechanically inclined... ‘handy,’ as you put it? Though I’m not sure how such skill can be related to how tall you are...?”
“Snow has a ulterior motive, Pen,” chuckled Iron. “Her gramophone broke a few days ago and it will cost more than a few bits to get it replaced. Perhaps you’d be willing to take a look at it?”
Pen had opened his saddlebag and was placing his book purchases from last night on the shelves. “I suppose you’ve already tried rebooting it...? Perhaps that’s the wrong kind of joke. I’ll be happy to help if I can; perhaps I can start on it tomorrow?”
“Excellent. Take your time!” said Iron. “You know, I think I’m in the mood to cook tonight... something special, I think, to properly welcome you to our home.”
“Wonderful,” said Snow. “You know what I like.”
“Indeed I do. Do you have any particular requests, Pen?”
If asked that question in his old life, Pen would have searched his soul indecisively for an inconvenient or even annoying amount of time. He realized with a little shock that here, the answer was pleasantly simple. “I know that I will love whatever you make, Iron. Please feel free to surprise me.”
Iron looked delighted. “Surprise it is! I think I’ll head over to the market now. I’ll catch up with you later.” Whistling, he took up a pair of baskets connected by a broad strap, slung then over his back, then walked into the hub and away.
Snow snuggled up to Pen and nuzzled his neck. “That was a nice compliment you paid him, Pen.”
Pen hadn’t really meant it as a compliment; it had mainly been a statement of fact that reflected life under LunAI’s benevolent oversight. But explaining this would send the wrong message, and he preferred that it be taken as it had been.
“I try to please,” said Pen. “So, what creative and physics-defying way will we use to get to the Library? A secret trapdoor? A Möbius walkway? A firefighter’s pole with only one end? Perhaps the library is inside out so we’re already technically inside it? Or shall we just take a stroll with seven-league horseshoes?”
Snowflash smiled. Her horn flared, her field shot out to envelop the two of them, and they disappeared in a teal burst of light.
—=§=—
The Royal Canterlot Library was composed, as far as the eye could see, of hexagonal galleries lined with books. They stretched all around and up above and down below for what looked like forever, and they easily transcended the size of the building’s exterior. Each gallery had a hole in the center lined with a railing, save for the seven hexagons around the entrance, which were merged into a single lobby, with checkout desk, card catalogs, and study rooms. Pen and Snowflash bamfed into existence near the front door, and Pen blinked as he oriented himself, then his jaw went slack and he stared about him.
“I see what she did here,” said Pen with a gleam in his eye and a beautiful grin.
“Who did what?” said Snowflash.
“It’s based on Borges’s Library of Babel!”
“Borhays?” she asked, but he was already dashing off recklessly into the limitless galleries.
In Borges’s story, the library was a very large place in which every possible book existed—from all works of literature, great or otherwise, to telephone directories for imaginary planets, to the complete output of every Internet forum ever to exist, to books consisting solely of the letter ‘Q’ repeated over and over—all in such mind-staggering numbers that there was no chance of finding the tiny drops of useful information in the sea of blathering nonsense.
But was LunAI’s version really the same thing? The hypothesis was easily testable. If it were true, there should be trillions of nonsense books for each meaningful book...
Running about, up and down stairs, he checked books at random from various shelves in various galleries, and discovered none that were obvious gibberish. Unless the books had been pre-sorted, with meaningful books placed closer to the entrance, the library’s contents did not in fact represent the set of all possible combinations of the alphabet in book form.
He was also pleased that a significant portion of the books he looked at were ones that he knew. One of his conditions for emigration was that LunAI bring into his shard as comprehensive a replica of human knowledge in book form as possible, especially the works that he considered to be old and indispensable friends, and she seemed to have fulfilled her promise.
Snowflash finally caught up with him, and Pen explained his reasoning.
She looked at him oddly. Was that a hint of concern? “I could have just told you that if you’d asked, Pen.”
“There’s a certain pleasure in finding things out.”
“Very glad to hear you say that! But what a concept.” She frowned. “Why would anyone, outside of a philosophical thought experiment, fill a library up with books of gibberish that can’t be read? It sounds like a nightmare.”
“At heart, it’s a mathematical exercise; a book only needs to be possible to exist in the library, not meaningful, and there are many more ways for a book to go wrong than right, so you get a universe mostly full of nonsense. The idea has also been expressed as a roomful of monkeys, all bashing away at random on typewriters. Eventually, they accidentally produce great works of literature, but it takes them quadrillions of years to do so. Back where I came from, we called this process ‘fanfiction...’”
Pen had expected at least a chuckle from Snow at that line, but she looked abstracted instead. “Wait, wait... Pen?” Her frown deepened. “I just had a horrible thought—oh, I hope that I’m wrong. Please forgive me for asking, but... this concept seems as if it’s very familiar to you. It sounds as if you’re speaking from experience. Was it really anything like that where you came from? Was life for you really bits of meaning with... lots of nothing between?”
Pen stared, then slowly nodded. “Yes... Yes, I suppose it was. At the cosmic level, and even at the atomic level. Vast expanses of emptiness and chaos interspersed with little dots of warmth or order... But—”
Horror grew on her face. “Like an evil parody of the night sky. And you couldn’t just skip over the random and senseless bits, could you? You had to go from point A to point B to point C and all the way through, didn’t you, even if it was mostly meaningless... And it wasn’t just a linear path, it was a three dimensional volume, so it was infinitely worse, you might not even ever find the next good point, and you were lost in all of that...” Her voice broke. “...for your whole life. Oh no. Oh, Pen. I’m so sorry...” Her eyes wavered and filled with tears.
He babbled, desperate to reassure her, or perhaps himself. “It wasn’t that bad, Snow... Please don’t be sad. Please! It was just how things were, we got along with it. It wasn’t as if we were just hanging in a void—well, we technically were, but we had mountains and sunsets and moonlit nights on the ocean and love and courage. We made meaning for each other... Please don’t—”
Snow seized him and held him, sobbing, until an untapped wellspring of grief broke within him and he collapsed and cried with her. He clung to her as it slowly bled its way out through his tears, which dripped on the floor to mingle with hers. Together they wept for a long time.
And then she offered him the peace that lay deep within her body, and he buried himself in her with the desperation of the dying, and she cradled him and crossed her horn with his until they sang out together in the grand note in which life voices its triumph over sorrow and loss.
They lay together for another long time, Snow cradling his head between her forelegs, kissing him and nuzzling his ears and grooming his mane with her lips and teeth. She hugged him tighter, then spoke quietly in his ear.
“Pen, I’m so sorry. I wish you could have come to us sooner. I’m glad you’re safe with us now. Iron and I will have to work extra hard to make up for all that you’ve gone through.”
“Oh, Snow, you don’t have to go out of your way for me. I’m quite happy as things are. You shouldn’t have to—”
She firmly stopped his lips with her hoof. “Stop. What were you going to say next, Pen? That you’re ‘not worth it?’ That you ‘don’t deserve it?’ You’re making me want to cry again! What could have happened to you in MonkeyWorld to make you hurt yourself like this? Argh!” She bit a lock of his mane in frustration. “You do deserve for us to make a fuss over you, you are worth it, you do matter. You’re smart and funny and kind and caring and you have all of what you need to enjoy life, but you keep cutting your legs out from under yourself! It hurts me so much to hear you put yourself down like this! Why do you do it?”
Pen was just within a hair of mentioning his inner voice, but he had a covenant with himself that he had never ever broken, and it held now.
“I’m sorry, Snow. I guess I can’t help it. I do appreciate your love, and Iron’s...”
She shushed him again. “You deserve to be loved. Let me hear you say that.”
“Wait... I don’t think I have the right to force other people to love me, to demand that they care about me...”
“And you don’t do that sort of thing, do you? That’s not what I said. I only said that you deserve to be loved.” She held his gaze with hers, her eyes serious and passionate. “I want you to say it too. Now.”
It was so hard to force the words out. The urge to brush it off with a sarcastic or ironic or worldwise comment was overwhelming. “I... I deserve to be loved.”
“You also deserve to love yourself. Say it. No temporizing, no qualifications.”
He smirked, and couldn’t meet her gaze. “You also deserve to love yourself,” he said.
She bopped him playfully on the snout. “No semantic games, either. You know that you need to flip the referent. Try it again.”
He sighed. It was a good thing that his inner voice was still being quiet. “...I also deserve to love myself.”
“Okay, that’s a start. We’ll practice some more later.” She hugged him close a while longer. “Shall we resume the tour?”
They stood. Pen noticed that the mess they’d made on the carpeted floor was already soaking in and fading away. LunAI seemed to be running a tidy shard.
“The first thing you should know,” said Snowflash, “and as I was about to say before you went running off, is that the library is really, really big. Therefore, we have some safety measures to keep ponies from getting lost, and features to make it easier to use. Please look behind you.”
He did, and saw a faint green line that stretched out through the gallery’s archway and appeared to descend a flight of stairs. “Ah. Magical breadcrumbs, I take it?”
“Just so. That line always shows the most direct path back to the lobby. It won’t necessarily point in the exact direction of the lobby; there are doors placed every ten hexes that lead to it, and your line will point to the nearest one of these.”
Pen looked to the side and checked around her flank. “I don’t see that you have a line...”
“I do, but it’s only visible to me, as yours is only visible to yourself. However, if you concentrate on me, you should start to see a line that leads between us as well. Try it now.”
"Okay, I see it."
“Now you know how to find anyone else in the library, including the clerks at the reference and checkout desks. So let’s talk about organizing information. Please go to that shelf there, and press that button. There’s one in each gallery... See that little burst of light? It just made a waypoint for you. Now walk away, and you’ll see a blue dotted line connecting you to this gallery. Now you can keep track of where you’ve been. Different sections of the library will have their own color coding...”
“It all seems eminently sensible,” said Pen. “By the way, just how big is the library?”
Snow winked. “I could tell you, but perhaps you’d like to figure it out for yourself...?”
“Hmm. I think I would. Let’s see... Perhaps the first test should be whether it’s finite or infinite in extent... And running as far as I can in a straight line is probably an inefficient way to test that; it isn’t guaranteed to terminate, either. Though running past all those books for years and years would certainly beat staring at a doorknob... Hmm...”
Pen looked about, then took a slim volume from one of the shelves; its title began, Transgressing the Boundaries... He held it out over the railing and glanced at Snowflash; when she didn’t react, he dispelled his hornfield. The book fell down into the abyss of galleries until it vanished from sight.
Pen looked up. Soon, a small speck became visible in the indefinite space above. As it grew, he readied his hornfield into a shape like a huge catcher’s mitt, and grabbed the item as it fell past; he felt the tug of its deceleration as a distortion in his magic field, but its physical momentum did not transfer to his body at all—magic was weird. Pen pulled the book in and examined it; it was, as far as he could tell, the very same book he had dropped.
“The library is cyclic. Thought so.”
Snow smiled. “Nice job. Now, can you determine the actual extent; that is, how far it goes before it loops back on itself?”
“Hmm... by the duration of the book’s fall, I think I could—well, in the vertical dimension, anyway. Where I came from, gravitic acceleration was about 9.8 meters per second, but I don’t quite recall the rest of the formula...”
“Try half of G (9.81) times the duration of the fall, squared.” She produced a stopwatch.
After some calculation performed on a blank page in his journal, Pen determined that the library measured about 4.51 kilometers in “diameter”—almost three miles. He noted the digits. “Fondly Fahrenheit,” he murmured.
“What’s that?”
“A story, two stories I know...” Pen had already subjected Snowflash to the concept of a meaningless surplus of information, with grievous result; he did not want to follow that with stories about permanent, deliberate destruction. “...and I’ll tell you about them another time.”
He knew that the number was not a coincidence. What was LunAI implying? And what was the incineration point of computronium, in comparison to that of paper? He eventually decided that it was just a reference, awarded himself a mental cookie for spotting it, then shrugged and let the problem drift away.
Pen spent the rest of the afternoon exploring and packing his saddlebags with books, pleased by the number of ‘old friends’ he was discovering. Snowflash split her time between walking with him and browsing the Periodicals section, where she caught up on Transfiguration Monthly, Ars Magika Caballus, The Journal of Insubstantial Results, and other technical publications.
Hours later, they reconvened in the lobby. There, Pen noticed a curious object on a pedestal near the checkout desk. It was a little glass dome, in which a coin constantly rotated, suspended in a magic field. Pen studied it closely. On one side, it bore the words 20 Centavos; on the other was a Hebrew Aleph (א).
“What’s this, Snow?” he asked.
“Princess Luna had it put there a while back when the Library reopened after renovations. She said at the time that it’s a backup of the whole library. I’m not sure what she meant by that...”
Pen thought for a moment. “Oh! In a way, she’s right. Recall that a string of all possible combinations of letters will contain all works of literature. Now, we can use the binary system of numbers to create a code for all the letters—‘01100001’ was ‘a’ in one system I know, for instance. Anyway, if you were to flip this coin over and over and record and encode the results, zero for heads and one for tails, you could eventually reconstruct the whole library—if you had an infinite amount of time. Any finite string, however long, can appear in a string of infinite length if you wait long enough, and that includes the string that encompasses the books of this library.”
Snowflash considered this. “You’d still have to be damned lucky, I think. Pen, would you like to see if you can flip that coin right now to produce an ‘a’, at least?”
“I see no harm in trying, but why?”
“Well,” said Snow, with a smirk, “I’m in a sporting mood, and I wonder if you would care to make an alpha-bet.”
Pen stared at her. He wanted to scream in laughter and groan in agony. He wanted to sweep her up into a never-ending kiss. He wanted... He wanted to live here. Forever. With her and Iron, reading and learning and making horrible jokes and having fun, and nothing more. He realized with a shock that this must be what falling in love felt like, that it was happening to him right now. He had never felt it like this, not the real thing, in all his time on Terra.
With tears of laughter, he held her, and their warmth and love made the immense volume of galleries of boundless information surround them like an equidistant sphere, wrapping them in endless layers of meaning. Things were coming together. The center would hold.
He could spend an eternity here, he thought.
Mostly.
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Whew. I thought I was almost done with this chapter when it was at six thousand words.
I'm afraid that new chapters of this story will always be slow in coming; introspection, review and sleeping on things seem to be the only means by which it will happen. I hope that the result will prove to be worth the wait.
Ah, it's finally updated. Excellent.
I think this chapter does a good job of pondering the nature of the world, as well as some of the disturbing implications that lie beneath the veneer of paradise.
And it's one thing to consider the possibility that you're currently a brain in a jar in the 'real' world. Knowing you've been put in one and that you can never be sure you've escaped it is another thing entirely.
I'm definitely liking it so far. Looking forward for more.
Great story, well worth the wait. I'll join the pun game by pointing out that in another story, it was before the main character entered the magical world that he was hagrid.
I also think I'm going to pretend that your dark tag stuff is a lie that you're throwing out so that the story is melancholy until the end, then is all sweet.
Do I know you? Because if I don't, I really need to. We need to be friends, NOW. Additional references I spotted: Discworld, Portal, the easy-mode discrete math you're playing with, recognized Borges' name (read something by him in college), thought the library sounded a bit like a TARDIS actually...
BRING LITERATURE BRING LITERATURE You are best author. You are the author genius, you are the author perfume. Return from Canterlot. To our Canterlot cousins you may come our country... ahahahahaha, you may live in the luxury villas! PONYVILLE WE WILL GET YOU. do not forget world party 2, ponyville we drink more than pinkiepie. and so on and so forth.
The only thing I can possibly ask for from this fic is that you actually bonk your character over the head and make him realize just because he's the original seed of this little mini-universe doesn't mean he's necessarily really its center, especially not all the time. He comes off as a little narcissistic just because he doesn't seem to entirely believe the other ponies are alive enough to mean anything; Optimalverse canon rules certainly say they definitely are.
Just, overall:
. You are writing an awesome fic, and I really want to get to know you, actually.
Very nifty update! I was worried that this fic had been shelved, and I'm glad to see that it wasn't.
ObCommentary: Our world isn't quite as bleak as the Library of Babel, as the content we care about tends to be concentrated in a way that makes it easier to find if we're already embedded in a nugget of it. That said, it's still a very interesting comparison. Kudos also for pointing out that the mere concept of a "vast, uncaring universe" seems like Lovecraftian horror to ponies who have only ever known CelestAI's love.
I look forward to future chapters!
So this was fun. And long. ;) gotta remember to reserve sufficient blocks of time for your updates! : p
One of the main things that prevents us from pondering our own free will is how little difference the answer would make either way, which is partly why it's so difficult to reliably say so or not.
Keep going! ;)
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Of course, it was also Lovecraftian horror to humans who thought God was looking after them -- the original Lovecraftian horror. And of course, the notion of an invisible, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God that looked after you was Lovecraftian horror to the pre-Judaic pagans who worshipped vast pantheons of nature gods.
I had to stop, I just had to stop, because I was laughing so hard, nevermind CRYING, I almost gave myself an aneurysm!!!
I practically blacked out, complete with dizziness and vision spots...
Sweet Celestia help me, you very nearly wrote The Killing Joke!
The crab canon... Of course.