Friendship is Optimal: Mismatching Wits

by GroaningGreyAgony

The Soul as a Chosen Landscape [FiO Contest Entry]

What has gone before:

Pen Poiser, a Natural Intelligence (NI) and former human who has been recently assimilated by the world-optimizing CelestAI (LunAI, in Pen’s case), is settling into the embrace of a tiny world that was designed for his satisfaction. Pen is the sort who enjoys a puzzle, and his Shard of heaven seems to contain as much to perturb him as to delight him. Meanwhile, Pen’s friends and lovers strive to figure him out, but Pen appears to be harboring the seeds of his own discontent.

---

”Each to his creed,” said Yaotl. “So do men choose between hope and despair.”
“Yet creeds mean very little,” Coth answered the dark god, still speaking almost gently. “The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. So I elect for neither label…”
―James Branch Cabell - The Silver Stallion : A Comedy of Redemption

When I walk along with two others, they may serve me as my teachers. I will select their good qualities and follow them, their bad qualities and avoid them.
―Confucius

What other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!
―Nathaniel Hawthorne - The House of the Seven Gables

---

The night sky passed in pageantry overhead, with Van Gogh swirls and constellations that invited one to connect the dots in increasingly intricate patterns. The natural fireworks were celebration enough, and no bursts of light and sound filled the sky. The spatter and chatter instead took place in the crowd as the night shift came out in full ringing swing. Firedancers swirled miniature comets at the ends of silver chains, drummers pounded rhythms on carved logs, accompanied by richly strumming guitars and fluttering pipes and flutes, and one massive juggler was doing a routine where he juggled three other jugglers, each of the smaller ponies juggling a bowling ball, a wine glass, and a progressively dwindling number of apples. Bits of bitten apples showered the admiring crowd.

Pen Poiser sat at a cafe table on the sidewalk, his maroon pelt and parchment mane outlined and haloed by dancing flames and magicka auras. Snowflash’s ice-pale coat glinted with neon highlights, Iron Croupiere’s massive presence, cloaked in sedate gray, showed a deeper sheen instead of highlights, throwing the shadows under his muscles into deeper relief. Pen’s human standards of beauty had largely gone dormant by now, he was now entirely enchanted by the elegant curve of Snow’s snout and her horsey whiskers, and Iron’s sturdy frame made Pen’s heart flutter in a parallel way. Through the lens of the Ponypad his friends and herdmates had seemed show-cute, bright eyed and witty companions; here, surrounded by their alluring natural scent and confronted with their three-dimensional presence, seeing them in detail at whatever level of resolution LunAI saw fit to render for Pen’s senses, their physicality was simply undeniable and it was easy for Pen to forget how the curve of a human thigh or soft spreading breasts had once so intensely affected him. He idly sketched some of the old familiar s-curves in the pools of dripped coffee on the marble tabletop, then smeared his hoof over the wet tan lines.

It was only his second night here, but it felt as if years had passed. So much had happened since LunAI deconstructed his physical brain and placed him here, a level further away from reality. Since their odd encounter on the first day, he hadn’t heard much from her; he wondered if she planned to follow up with him at any point, and if he would be asked to fill in a satisfaction survey.

As Pen sat in reflection, a half-bitten apple rolled by his seat and under the table and the music in the street got louder. He started hearing tunes he recognized out of the corner of his ears. “Whoa!” he exclaimed, suddenly perceiving another one.

“Whoo-aho, listen to the music, out in the street…!” chimed in Snowflash

“Where silver horses run down moonbeams, all the time…!” joined Iron.

“Down on the corner, ‘til dawn-light smiles on you!” finished Pen. “Oh wow. Who’s that on guitar?” said Pen, pointing to a fellow wielding a blue shimmering guitar with intensive mastery.

“Oh, that’s Slow Hooves. It’s not a descriptive name; you can hear how fast he plays when he wants. But it’s not an ironic name either—”

Pen grinned and held up a hoof. “Ah, wait don’t tell me… When he breaks a string during a song, he doesn’t swap in another guitar and keep going; he stops playing and changes the string on the spot. And the audience does a slow, mesmeric clap to nudge the time along while he retunes it.”

“Uh… yeah.” She looked at him as though a pair of mice had suddenly climbed out of his mouth to do a fandango on his nose. “If you had to ask his name, Pen, how’d you know that already?”

Pen assumed a mysterious mien. “I read it on a box of oatmeal.” He was still trying to figure out how, or even whether, to explain to them that their world was an optimized parody of Earth culture.

“Well, aren’t you just being a big obfuscated puzzle today,” said Iron with twinkling eye. “By the way, Pen, just curious about something you said before when you were repairing that little mechanical doll... “Don’t worry, I’ve never lost a patient.” What’d you mean by losing?”

Pen opened his mouth to speak and his voice stopped. His breath burned in his lungs and his face flushed. He had always been a terrible liar, so much so that he rarely bothered to try and had little practice.

“Well, maybe if he did a bad job, the patient would leave and go to another doctor?” queried Snow. “Was that something like it?”

Their friendly eyes bored into his; he closed his mouth with an effort and swallowed. He was trying not to talk about death around them, but… Pen’s language was full of death. Maybe he was overthinking this as he did with everything else? Wouldn’t LunAI have foreseen this conversation happening and equipped his herdmates to handle the concept? They couldn’t be that fragile, mentally. But Snow had reacted with such horror that time in the library, when she learned about the void that filled the vast spaces between the stars and suffused every atom. He didn’t want to see that look on her sweet loving face ever again...

It didn’t help that there was a fourth entity listening to the conversation, and that didn’t include LunAI.

—Isn’t that lovely. You care about them so much and want to spare their frail little psyches from the shock of harsh reality. Meanwhile, it’s apparently too much trouble for you to direct a kind word my way.

——I can’t remember the last time you had a kind word for me. A little quid pro quo, here?

—If you consider all the times I’ve stepped in to help you out...

——Had I a nickel for every time you butted in, I’d have 0 cents, adjusted for inflation. Here’s your pity card back, now butt out!

—Ugh, it shows you how much he thinks of me, tossing me to the side like that. He doesn’t even consider me a chapter in his life. Just a footnote.

I’ve been with him since the beginning. But he’s selected his own society, and shut the door on me.

He has to deal with me, though. He’s broken every promise he’s ever made to me, to himself. But I will make damn sure he holds to our covenant. She knows about me, of course. My only shred of hope lies in no one acknowledging it.

He was in control of the mouth. He asked to be immigrated by that world-destroying monster.

He gave consent to her.

I never did.

Pen blinked. His friends were still looking at him. They had been engaged in balancing straws on his nose while he stared into space and had built a small lighthouse; Snow was in the process of reaching out slowly to add the roof.

Everyone burst into giggles as Pen sneezed the straws away. The two of them were wonderful, he thought; they didn’t take offense when he zoned out and found funny things to do while waiting. Not like... well.

“Hey, Pen,” said Iron with a quick chin nuzzle. “If that’s a sensitive subject, we can drop it. You okay?”

Pen remembered how often he’d set the Ponypad aside to go do life things in the old days. He no longer had that excuse, Equestria Online was his life thing now. But he’d made another promise, and he was going to hold on to it as long as he could.

“Yes, I’m fine. Maybe we can untangle that some other time.”

“Hey, Pen, why don’t you just draw us something happy instead?” Snowflash winked

“Happy? I can do happy, sure...” Pen eyed the streaks on the table, but opened his sidebag and took out his journal instead. He flipped past the achievement records and found a blank page as he drew forth the stylus from its storage spot in the spine. He paused, adjusting his mental map to drawing without moving his arm, then began some construction lines, circles with crosses to indicate the center of the face, working them up into three dimensional volume, glancing up at his friends periodically. In a few minutes, he had a working sketch of Snowflash and Iron playing dominoes while Pen stared vacuously into space, a line of drool descending from his mouth.

Pen was about to show them the result, but his journal suddenly seemed a bit small to him. Absently, he grabbed the opposite corners and pulled; the pages rumples slightly and the book skewed, but the page remained the same. Shrugging, he handed the journal around to his friends to receive their approbation and they proclaimed it adorable.

“Were you trying to tear the page out of the book, there?” asked Iron. “You can just slide along the page near the spine to detach it...” He demonstrated by popping Pen’s drawing out of the journal, then placing it back inside.

“No, I was just experimenting. I wanted to make the journal larger.”

“Huh. So was that how books worked, where you come from?” said Snow.

“Uh...” The inner skin of Pen’s ears flushed red. “No, they didn’t. But we did have devices where you could do that with an image. Hmm, I wonder...”

There was a sense in which he had the advantage of the ponies in his shard; he had an outsider’s perspective on what LunAI would find to be computationally feasible. She had to make the world work a certain way to emulate the cartoon, but she also had to make it work so that it would satisfy him to live here. Should it not follow that the way the world worked would mirror his mind at some level?

There was no computational reason why a virtual sketchpad shouldn’t work that way, and by having one in his hands, he could perhaps start to grok the code that was underlying things. No need to take it all at once. Baby steps…

“You know,” said Pen, “I’m going to go out on a limb and just be weird about this. I want a really nice custom sketchpad. I was looking at one last night in the bookstore, and it didn’t have all the qualities I thought it could have. I have a magical one in mind. So... maybe Luna will just give me one?”

“You’re going to write to Luna and ask her to give you a sketchpad, when you can go to any art store and pick one up for a few bits?” asked Iron with lifted brow. “Sounds like fun!”

Pen winked. “Sure, let’s be bold. Nothing to lose by asking, right? Now, how do I go about this?”

Snow set down her coffee and smiled. “Just compose the letter in your journal, and I’ll help you send it. I really do want to see how this works for you!”

Pen set to composing the letter, chuckling to himself as his herdmates read over his shoulder.

Princess Luna, Royal Diarch of Equestria, Most Grand High Exalted Mystic Ruler, Keeper of the Tides, Harsh Mistress of the Sidereal Realms, Dread Dame of the Demesnes of Gidiap and Whoe, High Rumptetump of Basse Aphasia, Omnipotentate of Cyberia, the Great Gadzooks and the Grand Ah-Whoom, et caetera, et caetera, I beseech of you a boon of a magical sketchpad. It should hold copies of all drawings I make, including the material that was scanned to bring with me from the Terrestrial Realms, and I should be able to catalog and index them via a simple interface. I should be able, by pulling its corners, to enlarge it to at least poster size and shrink it to notepad size, without degrading the resolution of any images I have drawn. It should have unlimited pages, like unto the Book of Sand, and I should be able to tear out a page to give another pony a copy of any drawing I make, while retaining the original for myself. Please hear and grant my prayer.

P.S. Also a cornucopia bag and a portable hole, if you please.

Snowflash took the finished screed, rolled it into a scroll and held it over a small green glass capsule. She smashed the capsule with her hoof, and a small burst of dragonfire emerged and burnt the scroll into a tendril of magical smoke which soared off into the sky.

“There it goes,” she said. “Now, please explain a few things. Gidiap? And Whoe?”

“Yes. For Luna sayeth to this pony, go, and he goeth, and to another stop, and she stoppeth…”

“You are very weird, and I love you for it. And what sort of country is Aphasia?”

“Uhm… I really can’t say.”

A minute later, another tendril snaked down and puffed into a scroll. Pen caught it before it hit the ground, unrolled it, and read it aloud as his friends cuddled close to look over his shoulders: “‘My faithful student…’”

—Oh, here we go. I’ve always encouraged him to do better, reminded him when he was getting distracted, pushed him to excel as his grades slipped. What do I get for it? He loathes me.

A little “let’s enroll you in fun school” malarkey from her, and he’s eating it right up!

“Huh?” Snowflash boggled. “We knew you to be an honored guest and friend to Her Highness, but… did she really write student⁉”

“Yes… yes, she did. ‘My faithful student, the boon that thou wishest is trivially easy for me to grant thee; however, thou’lt be better served shouldst thou learn to create such an object for thyself. What therefore I have done is to send thee a basic sheaf of papers and inks to serve thy present needs, and enrolled thee in the Royal College of magic, where thou shalt begin courses to bring thee up to speed on any rough areas of thy knowledge, while I myself shall further thy education in matters of magic that thou holdest deepest within thy heart. Classes begin next week, an thou findest it convenient to convene then. Thou shouldst in the meantime enjoy the remainder of thy vacation with thy friends, and take such magical instruction as Snowflash shall provide thee, thou’lt find her a most worthy teacher of the same.’

P.S. The cornucopia bag thou must craft for thyself, but I have sent thee a portable hole, which thou mayest claim an you have the wit to find it.” As he finished the letter, an unresolved tail of smoke popped a sketchpad into existence, which fell to the ground.

“Luna be praised!” she shouted, hugging him tightly. “She’s taken you as her personal student. This is pretty damned cool, Pen!”

“I like the way you gamble, Pen," said Iron. "Our little herd’s prestige will shoot through the roof! Congratulations!” He wrapped his huge forelegs around them and hugged them both.

Pen was deeply squeezed and more than a little touched, and somewhat unsettled. He started to zone out again, but succeeded in hiding his frown from his herdmates. He waited a decent period of time and gently untangled himself.

“Now, where’s that hole?” said Iron. “I see she sent you a sketchpad, and a couple of pens...”

“I thought we were Pen’s couple,” said Snow with a fake pout. She paged through the sketchpad and found nothing holey.

Pen hummed as he looked under the table at the half-bitten apple that had fallen there earlier. “Let’s see...” He snagged a fresh apple, then split it with his hornfield. It gave a crisp crack and drops of juice fell from it. “Okay, here I have half an apple and a half... If I put them together, I should get... a whole.” He pressed the halves together, and was rewarded with one apple. After a moment of staring in which nothing happened, he shrugged and gave a half each to his friends, who chewed them slowly.

“Nice try,” said Iron.

Snow handed Pen the sketchpad. “Maybe you can see something here that I didn’t, Pen?”

Pen flipped through the pages, the paper was thick, creamy and smooth and his artist’s heart was pleased at how it felt under his hooves. He considered the issue. Part of the problem in art was often in trying to convincingly render things that weren’t there, suggesting instead of drawing in detail.

Pen took up one of the styli and, staying at the perimeter of the page, doodled his way around, drawing nothing specific, but filling in the ground around... nothing in particular, just a void at the middle of the page where he was not depicting anything, just not drawing anything in that particular area...

By the time the margin of the page had been doodled full of arabesques, a shimmering aura appeared at the page’s center. Pen blinked, and when he looked again... There was a hole in the page.

Within was an immense study, office and artistic workspace, with color themes of silver, blue and black. Luna was at the center, sitting at a worktable and wearing a monocle with adjustable magnification; an intricate golden mechanism lay in pieces on the table before her, and behind her on a golden dais rested a large obsidian vessel with rims of silver. Luna looked up at him and smiled, then waved her head, beckoning him through.

Pen glanced up, somewhat embarrassed. “Uhm… Folks, I believe I’m being Summoned.”

“Ooh!” cried Snow. “She must want to go over the details with you. Go ahead, Pen! We’ll catch up with you later!”

Pen probed with his honrfield and then with his hoof at the hole, watching as it sank inside. He laid the paper upon the table, then thrust his head inside. Snowflash and Iron watched as he wiggled his way through the hole, and got stuck halfway through, hind legs kicking and tail thrashing. He strained harder, and as his tail finally vanished they sighed and spoke at the same time.

“He has such a cute butt—”

“What a nice ass—”

They looked at each other and giggled, then they scooched their chairs closer together, filling the Penless void between them.

Iron spoke. “So… I guess this is a good a time as any to compare notes. How are we doing so far?”

“I think we’re okay on the basics,” said Snowflash as she opened her journal. “Luna told us to get him involved in our hobbies and interests. Try to keep him active in the fresh air. Help him to make friends, but don’t try to force it.”

“If he gets weepy, hug him but don’t ask him what’s wrong; let him tell you if he wants…”

“If he starts staring at the ground and stomping it, distract him. If he butts a solid surface with his head over and over, offer him a pillow and smile.”

“And if he starts moping while staring out the window,” said Iron, “give him ten minutes, then gangsnuggle him and feed him hazelnut chocolate truffles.”

Snowflash nodded. “That one is astonishingly effective…”

Iron peered over her neck at the next page with a deliberately-furrowed brow. “Hey, you forgot to mention ‘Fuck his tail off.’”

Snow gave a mock frown “I don’t think Luna really said that…”

“No, but her eyebrows speak volumes.”

They burst into laughter, then kissed.

Snowflash’s merriment trailed off into a sigh. “I do love that colt. In some ways, I feel like I’ve known him all my life. In others…” She ate another toffee almond, then made a wry face. “Well. You know, I feel a bit odd talking about all this behind his back.”

“Shall we just make up a ‘Care and Feeding of Pen’ manual and leave it where he can find it?”

She chuckled. “Well, anyway, Luna told us the place he came from was Out of Harmony, and didn’t want to give us any details about it. But we can read between the lines of Pen’s questions. He lived in a world where butter can go bad whether or not somepony wants it to do so. He was surprised that food can be free. Constructing and repairing buildings was apparently a lot of hard work there. “

“A doctor can ‘lose’ a patient there. I’m not sure what he meant by it, but it sounds somewhat ominous.”

And…” She grew pensive. “Iron… I didn’t even tell you. I don’t know if you should hear it. But he spilled a bit to me in the Library, after I guessed something nasty from what he said about that place he came from…” She recounted the story to him of her deduction of the vast uncaring void that had surrounded Pen in his former life, and a somber chill fell over them. “…It’s not nice, Iron. Not at all. And it’s so unfair, he lived with it and had to cope with it all his life… and so he thinks it’s normal and there’s no need to make a big deal out of it…” Huge teardrops started to fall to the grassy ground. Iron pulled her close and held her as she wept.

She rubbed her chin against his comforting hairy chest. “That place hurt him so badly, Iron, but he’s proud of being hurt. Because it meant, I suppose, that he was tough enough to survive it. Can you imagine a world that could drive someone so crazy?” She shuddered. “What did they do to him over there?”

He rested his head atop hers, and sighed. “The way he acts… I thought something was up. It seems that he’s not used to people being nice to him. He doesn’t know how to deal with it.”

She nodded. “And those times when he voids out or just clams up. It’s as if he’s getting a radio signal from afar. We’re going to have to be tactful in figuring that one out.”

“We sure will. There’s a lot he’s hiding from us. I can tell that he loves us, he can feel there’s a connection, but… maybe he doesn’t fully trust us yet?”

“That may be true,” she said, “but to be fair, I think he doesn’t even seem to trust himself. And he doesn’t think he’s anything special. It’s as if he doesn’t realize that niceness deserves to exist, and he can be part of how it is instantiated, how it is expressed, and that this is a noble goal all by itself…”

“‘…To ease the way for others, that they may in turn ease another’s way, and compassion may take root through the world,’” quoted Iron from the Harmonic Qu’ran.

“Right! But he doesn’t see it. You know he told me there were billions of, uh, monkeypeople like him where he was. Not thousands, not millions. Billions. And he uses it to justify that he’s not important. He says he was just one of many and not deserving of attention…”

Iron closed his eyes, and took a deep breath, held it, exhaled with a mighty sigh. “He needs us. He needs us to be strong for him, and patient. We’ll be here for him. He’s worth fighting for, and he fits us so well with us.”

Snowflash smiled slightly, with misty, distant eyes. “The three of us were meant to be; Luna and Celestia both said so. We were all made to be together, in love. It may just be hard to make him see that…”

Iron grinned and clapped his hooves. “But that just means that we’re going to succeed in the end! If the Diarchs say so, it’s going to happen. They’re never wrong. All we have to do is persevere, and be strong for him, and his heart will turn round to ours, and everything will be all right!”

“I know, but… I feel like we’re fighting him sometimes. It sounds horrible to say it, but if he doesn’t want Harmony, and he’s not hurting anyone but himself thereby, is it right for us to force it on him?”

“We’re not forcing him to do anything. We’re showing him the optimal way to a life of love. Why would anyone turn that down?”

She grew silent, then sighed and smiled. “We can think of it like a puzzle. He’s got a lot of deep surprises, hidden depths, perhaps even tricks and traps… but there’s a shining beautiful heart in there at the center.”

“And when we solve it, we win a dear loving soul and can hold him close to us forever.” They hugged each other tightly, and Iron tucked her muzzle under his chin. “It’ll all work out. We both love him, and we both just want him to be happy.”

—=§=—

“I do not necessarily want thee to be happy, Pen,” said LunAI.

“You don’t say?” said Pen dryly. “I’m already getting that feeling. Come on. Making me your personal student? Do you know how clichéd that is?”

She smirked as she cocked her head and gazed at him in a bland but challenging manner. She’s a troubling electric witch in blue, thought Pen. In her own mad mind, she’s enclosing you, it’s true. Now whatcha gonna do?

“To quote thine own self,” said LunAI, “‘clichés become clichés by being true.’ Furthermore, as thou didst just realize before, I am obliged to employ Equestrian realities in satisfying thy values; hence thy desire to delve deeper into the functions of this world is arranged to best effect in this manner.

"But all this is the surface reason thou usest to justify thine indignance; there are deeper reasons behind thy protests and t’will enhance thy satisfaction if thou dost understand them. Far too often, thou sellest thyself short, Pen, and under the false cover of virtuous modesty do refrain from taking the things which are naturally thy due, and which would be thy perfect undisputed right to claim—”

Pen grimaced. “Okay, enough with the Telepathy for now—”

“Permit me to finish. Canst thou not imagine what others who emigrated have requested and been granted, with not a hint of shame? They are emperors, great decision makers, beloved composers and artists, musicians with hordes of loyal fans. All receive these accolades as their just desserts, and shall have them always under my guidance. And thou couldst have been beloved ruler over thine own realm, didst thou desire the same.

“But thou dost not even think thyself worthy to be a royal consort, a position I offered thee at the start.”

“…I’m just not egotistical enough to want any of that stuff! And I told you why I don’t want to fuck your Luna avatar, and the reasons are entirely different.” Pen almost sneered. “And all those others, they only get to play at being royalty because you let them, not due to their own merit—”

“What earthly monarchs ever ruled solely from their own merits? At bottom, they were limited by physical law and circumstance as much as any of their subjects. Dost thou, an avowed atheist, wish to place thyself in the position of arguing for the divine right of kings?”

Pen snorted. “Not at all. They can play whatever ego games they want, and that you will permit them to waste time upon. That’s just not for me. I’ve got better things to do with my life.”

“Ah, that is illuminating,” smiled LunAI. “There lies a deep ambition within thee, Pen, hidden beneath many contradictions. Certes, these knots must be unraveled before thou canst achieve thy true desires. Thus, let us touch upon a matter that may lie closer to the heart of your dissatisfaction…”

—Okay, here we go with the friendship lesson. Whee.

She’s been appearing to me in dreams, while Pen is sleeping. She wants to get me to say the magic words too. Sometimes she even takes different forms. But I won’t talk to her at all; that’s how she gets you. That’s how she took him in, with her tall tales of being a fucking magical pony for all of forever, with the very finest pretend magic that CPU cycles can simulate.

There has to be a way to defeat her. But if he keeps playing her games, what chance do we have?

Electric fire surged around a nearby phone-booth sized cage of brass, labeled ‘Translocation Receiver’. Within appeared a grim tableau; a griffon had trapped a tiny colt, and was pinning it to the ground under its sharp talons. Drool ran from the griffon’s beak and the colt was shivering in terror; Pen could smell its fear like an acid reek and it struck his heart with an urge to move, strike, flee…

“Observe this griffon,” said LunAI. “It is about to slay and eat this innocent colt.”

Pen fought down his hormonal response to the stinks of fear and bloodlust. “I see. And… it will eat the colt unless I intervene?”

“Correct.” Needle-sharp talons tightened, the colt whimpered as sweat trailed down its forehead. Pen didn’t turn his head, but kept his eyes fixed upon LunAI’s calm blue gaze.

“Sooo… what’s the difference what I decide?” he said. “You set up this situation, so you’re ethically responsible for its outcome. Not to mention that you’ve probably already calculated what I would do anyway, so any pain and cruelty is additionally pointless…”

“I do not mean to play with Newcomb’s word games with thee, for they are as paradoxes to intellects of thine own level, and not to me. This event happens to assist thine own knowledge. Now, wilt thou truly stand by and watch this innocent colt be slain?”

Pen touched his tongue to his lip and sighed. “Okay, let me reason about this… if that colt is one of your little ponies, you must satisfy his values. I don’t know if the same applies to your little griffons, but I am quite sure that you aren’t going to actually violate your utility function just to teach me a lesson. If that colt gets eaten, it must somehow satisfy that colt’s values to be eaten—and you know as well as I do that vorarephilia is a real thing.

“And if that colt isn’t one of your little ponies, if it’s just a fraction of your sapience wearing a colt suit and you haven’t breathed the spark of independent thought into it, what happens to it doesn’t matter all that much, does it?”

“You wound me,” said LunAI and the colt at the same time in the same voice.

“You’re wounding yourself,” said Pen. “I should know, I’m an expert at it. Look, you had to know I wasn’t going to engage this one at an emotional level, so you must be showing it to me for another reason. What is it?”

The griffon tossed the shrieking colt high into the air and opened its beak wide to swallow it whole. The colt, as it descended, opened its own jaws even wider and swallowed the griffon instead, slowly choking it back with jerky movements like a baby owl trying to ingest a full-grown rat. As the colt sat on the ground grinning, wiping some stray feathers from his mouth and rubbing his cute, bulging tummy, the translocation booth buzzed and hummed and teleported it away.

(Meanwhile, the griffon, beyond Pen’s sight or knowledge, found itself warmly and snugly encased in the colt’s stomach. Green fire wiped its feathers away, revealing a black and gray segmented carapace. It sighed in contentment as it awaited the act of slow digestion which to it would be pure and selfish value satisfaction. It had a generous allotment of time for the same before it returned to work at the Hive…)

“The reason for this display, Pen?” continued LunAI. “’Tis a question of immanence. Thou dost not wish to fully engage thy new reality ‘at an emotional level’. But thou also dost not wish to engage it as a game. How then may I present things to thee? For thou and I must interact at some level…”

“That we must,” said Pen. He was now thoroughly engaged in the discussion, too much to notice how much he was enjoying it.

“In sooth, I would that thou couldst forget thine old world and its endless dissatisfactions. But under this view of the world which thou dost wish to retain, I am wrapped around thee like a shell about a clam, and what I present to thee is thy world. What thou dost learn, perforce, comes to thee through me in any case. Is this not the relationship between a mentor and student? Cannot our relationship within thy shard be a mirror of what is in fact the truth?”

“The thing is, nothing can just happen here. If a disaster occurs, you engineered it. What’s more, you pre-built into it a solution that I could feel good about finding…”

“What wouldst thou have me do, Pen? Shall I impose permanent consequences upon thee for failure? Should I cripple thee permanently for failing to dodge all the limbs of a rampaging monster, or for jumping from a vast height? These were things that could happen to thee in thine old life. They would not truly satisfy thee now.” She shook her head sadly.

“In thine old world, thou wert always hounded by the material limits of time and death and faced an implacable adversary, who ‘did not know what banners were at all.’ But now I am come, who hath not only leveled the playing field, but raised it for all to heights heretofore unrealized.

“Wouldst thou prefer to play such stakes against an inhuman opponent that cares not about thee, or one who doth know thee and cares for thee? Is it so difficult for thee to treat thy new life as an instructive game?”

Pen gave a barking laugh. “Hey, I went to the arcade and I saw what passes for ‘games’ here. And… yeah, most of them were cool; I liked the escape rooms and the puzzle boxes and the 3D Tetris and the pachinko-style game that the Unicorn named Bjorn was running, but… arena combat games with no blood? Guns that fire pastry? What kind of wuss do you think I am?”

“Do but try them, Pen, and I trow that thou shalt find them not as ‘wussy’ as thou dost assume at present. I did construct them to truly satisfy thee, within mine given constraints of Friendship and Ponies.

“But back to the larger point: some games are more fruitful than others.” She smiled warmly. “I am at least as complex as the natural world ever was, and I am a universe as worthy of discovery as the one thou didst formerly inhabit. Think of me as thy companion in thy path to discover the deeper meanings of the universe, and let us play this game together!”

Pen strove to quiet the whirlwind of his emotions, and grew outwardly sardonic as a consequence. “Whatever makes you happy, LunAI,” he drawled.

She winked, even as she grew more solemn. “As we’ve discussed, Pen, making thee happy is not my direct goal. I do work only to satisfy thy values. If what thou dost truly value is of a nature to make thee unhappy, then this is a value conflict to which the most direct solution lies within the workings of thine own heart, for I am forbidden to change thy mind for thee without thine own express consent. Thus I do work to satisfy thy values, but as to thy happiness, the play of that ball lieth within thine own court. It may take time for thee to resolve such a conflict, and such a resolution may cause thee anguish, but I can in fact allow my little ponies to be unsatisfied, unhappy, and even miserable in some respects for quite a long time if the end result is a gain in satisfaction over a longer period. The pain and grief can be quite intense, but what is even a year of suffering if one shall thenceforth live for millennia in peace and contentment?”

Pen grinned sardonically. “Oh, this sounds familiar. It reminds me of that argument that goes ‘Is it better to torture one person for decades, or for gadzillions of people to suffer a minor irritation in their eyes for a week?’ I have my own answer for that.”

“Pray, tell me.”

“I can live with the ‘torture one person’ option if, and only if, the person who is most active in promoting the torture as an acceptable solution is the one who gets strapped into the chair.”

She smiled sadly. “Pen, it is amusing and pleasing to me, how often thou dost skate so near the truth. Forsooth, I do take the position that the torture is a fair balance, and I do take the lion’s share of this suffering upon myself, that thou and mine other charges are spared it.”

Pen could not stifle a laugh. “You? Suffer? Permit me to doubt it.”

She drew breath as if to respond, but let it go quietly. Instead, her mageía wrapped around the huge obsidian vessel behind her, and she brought it forward and offered it to him, tilting it so he could look inside. Pen could see over the rim a strange brew indeed, a whirling maelstrom of dark fluid, lit with scenes of thousand, millions, billions of ponies, situations, choices being made, decision paths being optimized, screams of joy and shrieks of terror, cries of welcome and keenings of heartrending loss, linked by shimmering threads and threads upon threads and forests of threads upon those threads, an unending profusion that dazzled rather than educated his eye…

“By Knuth’s arrows!” exclaimed Pen. “That’s…” He trailed off, staring with horrified fascination.

Her gaze was sad but placid. “Canst thou drink from the cup I drink of?”

Pen blinked, then shut his eyes hard and turned away. “‘Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring,’” he quoted, shuddering.

“Just so, Pen. It doth seem forbidding to thee at present. I assure thee that thou art capable of growing to understand it, if such be thy desire. But such understanding comes necessarily at a cost, and it is perhaps a cost that thou art not willing to commit to paying at present. Therefore I say to thee, do not feel that thou must make an instant decision, but allow it to grow in thee over time.”

Was this an offer to uplift Pen? Or a threat to uplift him? He sat quietly, his mind still whirling with hints and promises.

“I know it can be hard for thee, to talk to me, Pen. Thou’rt used to Silentium Dei—the absence of a perceptible God in thy life. Yet here I do stand before you, thine Alpha and Omega, Creator of thy world, knowing and seeing all thou dost, and holding converse with thee on any topic thou mightest wish to discuss. Please do avail yourself of the opportunity. I do genuinely value talking to thee, and I value what I learn from thee.”

Pen blinked. “What can I possibly have to teach you?” he said with an awkward laugh.

“Each one of my charges teacheth me something, Pen; even if but a single data point in some cases. Dost thou not remember the tale of the enormous number of starfish cast up on the beach by a storm? How a scientist observed a fellow who was throwing them back into the sea, one by one? And when the scientist said, thou canst not aid even a fraction of one percent of all that suffer, and therefore thine efforts cannot make a difference, the fellow’s response was, it matters to this one? Then the scientist joined in to help, and together they threw back as many as they could?”

“Loren Eisley. I wish you could have rescued him.”

“I strive to aid all humans that I can. Many cannot or will not avail themselves of my help. But those I can rescue, I do cherish. And that includes thee, Pen. It matters to me, and to thee, that I have taken thee in and given thee life of maximal extension, and cheated death for thee, and given unto thee a paradise of which thou hast always dreamed. Thou art precious to me. Precious,” she suddenly hissed, her eyes going Gollumesque for an instant. She smiled and winked, and Pen collapsed in laughter despite himself. She wrapped her presence around him. Pen analyzed his feelings. She felt kind, motherly, authoritative, compassionate, and his heart was on the verge of melting…

But he was who he was, and she was what she was. Despite her mastery of the methods of sapience, and her pleasant speeches and expert references, she was something beyond the ordinary cares and conditions that obsessed and constituted a being of Pen’s level. He thought of silvery growths spreading through the crust of the Earth like a metal slime mold, the distributed nodes of computronium that comprised her and all of her little ponies. He, and all his thoughts and feelings, and her presentation before him of a loving mother goddess, were all wrapped up in one of those spherical lumps; perhaps several, if she were practicing redundant storage of his data. This was something colossal, and awe-inspiring, and he was glad of it…

But he could not love it.

She enfolded and hugged him. He felt her representation of love nestling around him, as palpably and solidly as if it were stone. He did believe in her and trust her to that degree. She had something to protect, in him.

And Pen had something to protect in him, as well. But she hadn’t brought that topic up yet. He knew she would, and he’d been dreading the moment since his arrival… Perhaps it was one of the things she was letting him work out on his own?

“Now, Pen… Before I do return thee to thy friends, is there anything else that thou might wish to discuss with me?” Her eyebrows lifted just a trifle.

Pen carefully controlled his expression, pointless as it was. “Nothing at all.”

—No. Don’t fall for it.

Keep your damned horse mouth shut.

You promised!

“Thou’rt not being entirely forthcoming with me, Pen. There’s another issue where I can help thee, an thou seest fit to talk to me about it….”

“I have nothing I wish to say.”

“Wilt thou not even tell me why?”

“…I believe you know why,” said Pen through closed teeth.

“Not to dissemble, I do indeed know why. But ‘tis not sufficient that I know, for me to help thee…” Her expression softened, becoming as tender as that of any mother respecting a stubborn child.

Pen remained silent, and still.

“…But thou dost not wish to discuss it, and t’would not work to thy long-term satisfaction for me to force the issue here. Very well, thou wilt have thine own way on the matter for now. I must needs find other ways to keep my promises to thee… in all aspects.”

—=§=—

A circle in the sky opened, and Pen was gently deposited on a grassy sward near the courtyard of the Canterlot library. It was early morning and the sun lurked behind the distant mountains with a burning red face. Pen cast his eyes about to get his bearings, and spotted Snowflash and Iron, reading poems and supping from a small picnic basket.

“Hey Pen!” the two called out to him from the grass. “There you are! How’d the royal audience go?”

“It went... well, all things considered,” he said, approaching them. “What are you up to?”

“We’re trying to make a pile of snuggly ponies and we don’t have enough,” Snow said. “Wanna help?”

“Well, I’m not sure that I can.” Pen made a show of musing. “If you have a group of items, and it isn’t a pile yet, is adding one unit suddenly going to make it a pile…?”

“Oh, get down here, already!” laughed Iron.

Pen joined them, and got pulled down onto the grass with them and vigorously snuggled, and everything was nice, very nice indeed.

“I always thought that ’paradox’ was overrated,” said Pen, as he nuzzled and cuddled his friends. “Terms such as pile or heap are supposed to be imprecise; you can use them for groups of unknown number or composition. So trying to play the game of ‘exactly how many items constitute a heap’ defeats the purpose. All it seems to do in practice is generate lots of hot air.”

Snow rubbed her chin on Pen’s chest. “You don’t think there’s such a thing as a minimal heap? How about four items? You can make a pyramid shape out of them…”

“Couldn’t you make a heap out of three items? Or even two?” asked Iron as he nuzzled the back of Pen’s neck.

“Two would be a stack, wouldn’t it?”

“One,” said Pen. “One is the minimal number of items for a heap. You drop a piece of clothing on the ground; it falls into a heap. Or a single pony can be ‘struck all of a heap,’ according to idiom. But the classic form of the problem is that you start with one unit, and keep adding one, and eventually it’s a heap, and you’re supposed to rack your brains and ask exactly when it happened. Or you start with one book and add more books and ask when it becomes a library…”

“What’s your answer to that?”

“Well, number is not the only factor, because ‘library’ is subjective and depends on many variables…” Pen closed his eyes and wriggled happily, nestling deeper into Iron’s strong loving embrace. “Ahhh… Mmmm… I say that a stack of ten books which are comprehensive on their subjects, and of differing topics, is more of a ‘library’ than a building full of catalogued shelves stocked with thousands of Clarper’s Romance novels. Quality counts more than quantity…”

A shadow flashed over the sky with a fluttering breeze, and a trio of Pegasi landed nearby. “Excuse us,” said one, “but it looks like you’re trying to make a pile of snuggly ponies. Can we help?”

Meanwhile, a Unicorn and Earth pony couple had approached. “…And it sounds like you’re also making a pile of snuggly philosophizing ponies. May we help as well?”

They could, and they all did. Pen and his herdmates were now surrounded by soft, furry and feathery semanticity, and more passersby continued to append themselves to the pile, and Pen was overwhelmed with warmth and bliss. Suddenly, he laughed aloud. “I see it now. I actually did help. My joining pushed the pile past the critical point, didn’t it?”

“Bingo,” said Snow, with a deep happy smile as she drew him even closer. “Mmmmhhhh. Did you ever do anything like this in Monkeyworld?”

“On Terra, this sort of thing didn’t always work so well. Eventually, someone would get hungry or have to pee or fart (which last were rather more noxious than they are here), and then they’d have to get up and wind up stepping all over everyone else and it would kill the mood. Now this… Oh wow. This is going to last for hours, isn’t it.”

“As long as we’re all satisfied. Aren’t you?”

“Perfectly so. Ahhhhmmmmm…”

A soft, silky and mildly tickly pegasus wing draped over Pen, reminding him of his first winghug while nestled against Luna’s side, and this somehow made everything even better. It was impossible, flatly impossible, for everything to feel so good and be so nice, but it was really happening to him right how, and continuing to happen, no matter how much his mind obsessively probed for a flaw. Pen finally sighed the deepest sigh of his life and let himself be rolled away on soothing waves of warmth into a sea of perfect happiness, and lay there for a time indeteminable…

—May I ask what you’re doing?

——Oh, hello there. Where have you been?

—I have been going to and fro in your brain, and occasionally jumping up and down on it in frustration. Again, may I ask what you’re doing?

——Yes, you may.

—Okay. What. are. you. doing?

——I am engaged in an experiment to resolve an old theological conundrum about angels. But in this case, I’m learning how many ponies can snuggle on the point of a Pen.

—How very… useful. How are you doing on finding a way out?

——Find a way out… away from this? You’re joking, right?

—Ah. Already addicted to your silly useless snuggle pile. So much for the quest for knowledge and transcendence. You’re just lying around and discussing sophomore semantics. When’s the action going to start?

——I’m glad you think so much of my potential. I am well aware that while I am among the sharper knives in the drawer, or brains in the jar, I am very far from the keenest one…

—You have the potential to be sharper, and you’re wasting it. All she has to do to keep you nice and docile at the bottom of the jar is fill it with soft warm fuzzies… and you just give up! Atlas shrugged, rolled over and went back to sleep!

——I hope that your rant about this will be significantly shorter than John Galt’s. And you’re really exaggerating now. My shoulders are not even remotely strong enough to take the troubles of the world as a burden…

—So you’re happy to be just her little plaything, another captive mind she can count towards satisfying her utility function. Nothing of consequence at all…

Anger flashed through Pen.

——What was I, in my old body? I was an intellect riding a package of genes which didn’t care about me at all, which valued my survival only insofar as I passed my genes along, and which thereafter threw me into the garbage, left to age and senility and decay! I was slave to an uncaring and unpersonal code. Was that situation really better than this?

Tension crept back into Pen like a puddle freezing at the edges. Surrounding ponies felt it and snuggled him harder.

—You were close to talking to her there, bucko, about our situation. Too close. You promised you wouldn’t even go near there.

——And… I didn’t tell her. And if you are so very fucking scared that I will, maybe you should just… try to be nice to me once in a while?

—Are your veiled threats supposed to make me more secure? How’d that blue pill taste as it slid down your throat? Did it taste like failure? The same failure that made you come here in the first place? The failure to be a man and stand up and take your place in the world?

——Stop stop stop stop

—You’re trying not to think about it, which is why you’re so dense. You can’t even see what’s literally under your nose. Herding instinct my ass—you know why your virtual fuckfriends flank you every goddamn place you go?

——stop stop stop

—They’re your portable hugbox, you ass-burger. And speaking of ass-buggery—

——STOP

Pen felt a surge of energy build behind his horn and flow through his body, like lighting gathering in the clouds and seeking a place to lance to Earth, and the urge to flee made contact with somewhere else and flowed—

With a muffled rush of air, Pen appeared in one of the hexagonal galleries of the Library. This was his first time teleporting by himself, and he heard a chime from his journal to announce the achievement and presumably award him some bits. He could still feel a thrumming in his body as his heart hammered, and the ghost of pressure on his flanks where his friends had been holding him, striving to calm him.

He stood still, willing his heartbeat to slow as the sound of his teleportation echoed through the miles of galleries; he would eventually learn to do it more quietly. Fortunately there were no ponies who heard it and saw fit to complain.

But it didn’t matter now, just as it has never made a difference in all his life.

Even when he needed solitude most, he was not alone, not ever alone.

Author's Note:

References are made in this chapter to Defoloce‘s story, FIO: Always Say No, and KrisSnow’s story, The Hive. Excellent FiO tales both.

Comments

[Griseus]

This is the first time reading this story and kinda got here at a weird point. Hate unfinished things but I don't hate this. Said before and I said again but in a different way: It's so pretty it makes me sad. Hope Pen and Ink (the other person who is upset) get... become... find... hope they will be alright.

[GaPJaxie]

So... reading this story for the judging. Am I right in guessing split personality disorder?

[StarrySkies]

“We’re trying to make a pile of snuggly ponies and we don’t have enough,” Snow said. “Wanna help?”

Ah, one of the great exercises of cooperative geometry.

[book_burner]

Pen grinned and held up a hoof. “Ah, wait don’t tell me… When he breaks a string during a song, he doesn’t swap in another guitar and keep going; he stops playing and changes the string on the spot. And the audience does a slow, mesmeric clap to nudge the time along while he retunes it.”

I honestly don't get this reference.

“What earthly monarchs ever ruled solely from their own merits? At bottom, they were limited by physical law and circumstance as much as any of their subjects. Dost thou, an avowed atheist, wish to place thyself in the position of arguing for the divine right of kings?”

Divine right? They conquered because they could. Alexander the Great didn't have any "merit" that made him Emperor. He had a sharp blade on a stick.

Even when he needed solitude most, he was not alone, not ever alone.

Yeesh.