On the Subject of Hedonism (Act Two)
“Are we sure this blackout’s gonna last?” asked Spring Skies while her multitool cut through the glass of one of the ground floor windows.
“Thecentralpowergeneratorislocatedonthebasementfloorbehindawholebunchofblastdoors,” said Pinkie.
The nightshade had accelerated her speech patterns, making it difficult to follow what she was saying. “Thenetwork’sshutoffnowsothey’llhavetoheaddownandrestartthegeneratormanuallyandthatwilltakeawhile!”
Spring Skies looked at Comet Tail questioningly. The unicorn shrugged.
“Act under the assumption that we have a half-hour before the electricity comes back on.”
The blade compass completed its circuit around the window and was retracted back into the multitool. Comet Tail levitated the cut glass out of the window frame and set it gently on the pavement.
“I’ll take point, scouting ahead as we go,” he told the others. “Coconut, you stay behind me but don’t fire unless a direct confrontation is unavoidable. Those cannons will alert the entire building if you use them. Pinkie is unarmed, so she’ll keep to the rear. Spring, your job is to keep her out of harm’s way. Understood?”
Coconut and Spring Skies nodded. Pinkie tapped on the ground impatiently.
“Yeahyeahyeahweallgetitokaylet’sjustgetonwithitalready.”
Rarity ran into a dozen or so confused office and maintenance workers as she trotted through the gloomy corridors. She deflected any questions regarding the nature of the blackout and told them to hole up wherever they could and lock the doors until the electricity returned. Few of them had seen Sweetie Belle and Twinkleshine, but those that had pointed her to the lower floors of the building.
There had been no sign of any physical intrusion as of yet, but she didn’t let down her guard. A single security officer trailed behind her as she descended the stairs. They were nearing the second floor when they heard muffled gunshots.
“Madam, maybe it’s best that you return to your office,” said the security guard.
An explosion erupted somewhere as she started racing down the stairs.
Comet Tail was down. The three security officers took cover behind the receptionist’s counter, firing blindly as they cowered. Coconut pulled the unicorn out of the line of fire while Spring Skies shouted obscenities at their aggressors.
“Snap out of it, man. That shot barely grazed you,” said Coconut, patching the side of Comet’s neck with an easy-application bandage.
Comet was lying on the floor, trembling.
“Shh—shit. I think these bullets are paralytic. Basilisk or… cockatrice venom. I c-can’t move.”
Coconut peeked out of cover for a few seconds to trade fire with the officers. This was going nowhere. He gestured for Pinkie to come over and she tumbled across to him, glancing around wildly.
“What’supchief?”
“I’m not equipped to use these, Pink. You mind?” he said, jerking his head toward the corrosion grenades strapped to Comet’s utility belt.
“Howdotheywork?”
Coconut groaned in exasperation.
“It’s like a… like a soda can, okay? You jerk the pin and throw.”
Pinkie wrapped her fingers around one of the grenades, pulled its safety pin and threw it towards the security guards without more than a moment’s hesitation. It rebounded against the far wall, landing behind the officers’ cover.
Splash.
The air filled with a terrible hissing, overtaken by hysterical screams. An acrid smell stung Pinkie’s nostrils and made her eyes water, the smell of battery acid mixing with road kill. The sixty-leg poison surging through her system amplified her sensory stimulus to the point where she could almost taste the corrosive payload in the back of her throat. It took some effort not to retch into her mask. She felt her excess energy begin to wane in the wake of the olfactory distress, leaving her vaguely fatigued. She estimated that it would take another fifteen to twenty minutes for the crash to fully set in.
Spring rolled up and cautiously peeked over the half-melted counter. Mercifully, her night-vision goggles spared her the grisly details of the corrosion grenade’s handiwork.
“All clear,” she called to the others. “That grenade sure did a number on them.”
Comet Tail shuddered.
“Please…” His breath came in short gasps. “H-help me.”
Coconut cocked the spreadgun strapped to his left foreleg, and aimed it point-blank at Comet’s head, biting down on the discharge lever.
“Wait,” said Spring Skies. “Wait a second. What are you—?”
The spreadgun coughed, and Comet’s head was reduced to a cracked cranium holding teeth, bone shards and liquefied brains like gruel in an unwashed bowl.
Spring Skies swung up her burst rifle in Coconut’s direction.
“W-what the fuck was that? You gonna kill the rest of us too, asshole?”
He shot her a caustic glare.
“What would you prefer I’d done? Lug his quadriplegic ass along? You heard him: paralytic rounds. Without a mechanical respirator he’d have suffocated inside a few minutes anyway. And I couldn’t leave ‘im here intact for security to find, right? ‘Cos they’d get our identities from his dead neurons and it’d all be over.” He stepped over Comet’s corpse and started toward the door into the next department. “So get with the fucking program and come on. More of them are probably on the way now that this stealth BS went over so damn well.”
As if on cue, a siren began to echo in the distance.
The doorknob didn’t budge and the lock appeared to be analog. For a split second, Coconut thought he heard voices on the other side of the door.
“Stop your pouting and get over here, Spring. I need that multitool.”
Spring Skies bit back an angry retort and engaged the multitool’s skeleton key mode. A dual pick emerged from the tool and began probing the lock in an automated sequence. After a few hushed seconds, there was a click and the door swung open. The area beyond was the bottom to a service staircase, a grimy space with countless pipes and wires protruding from the walls. Steam was being steadily dispersed into the air, as if something in the plumbing had recently burst. Coconut could have sworn that he heard voices here. Almost compulsively, he opened the bright red fire hose compartment built into the wall. A unicorn filly of maybe twelve years of age tumbled out of the narrow recess. A scream erupted from behind the stairs before the party had time to question the child’s presence here.
“Get away from her, you hoodlums!”
The mare came fast and vicious, swinging a dislodged pipe with a pressure meter still attached to one end. The heavy implement connected to the side of Coconut’s head, staggering him. Muttering a string of expletives, Coconut regained his footing, raised the spreadgun and shot the mare once in the foreleg. She collapsed, weeping softly on the floor.
“Nanny!” The child brushed past Pinkie and wrapped herself around her fallen escort. “Nanny ‘Shine, p-please please be okay!”
“Who are these two?” asked Spring Skies.
“Who the fuck cares?” Coconut seethed, leveling his spreadgun on the couple.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold it, bud.” Pinkie pressed herself in front of the primed firearm. “I did my research. The girl is the CEO’s sister, I’m almost positive. Don’t you think that might be worth something to us, if, you know, you don’t immediately shoot her?”
“What, this kid?” Coconut asked. “Seriously?”
Pinkie’s head drooped in something similar to assent.
Despite the intense headache building around his temples, Coconut smirked.
“Well, well.”
The halls were littered with bodies. Rarity kept a handkerchief to her nose as she advanced, to lessen the stench of cockatrice venom and voided bowels. The intruders had come prepared. She wagered they brought some way of seeing in the dark, giving them an edge over the unsuspecting security force. She stood now at the scene of the most sickening of the killings yet, three guards resting behind a heavily damaged counter. Their bodies were covered in gruesome chemical burns. In some cases, charred bone was visible through the damaged skin and muscle. The door to the service staircase had been forced open and steam spilled out into the lobby.
Her phone vibrated in her pocket.
“Rarity speaking.”
“Madam, we have a situation here.” It was Eiffel.
Rarity moved through the service staircase access. Her heart skipped a beat as she saw Twinkleshine prone in a pool of blood.
“…The intruders have taken Sweetie Belle hostage, haven’t they?”
His tone sounded hollow through the speaker.
“Yes, madam. They refuse to issue their demands until you are present in person.”
Rarity could still feel the weak beating of Twinkleshine’s heart on her neck. Wasting no time, she took her handkerchief and wrapped it around the nanny’s bloody foreleg. Some antiseptic would have been ideal, but there was none within easy reach and no time to run and get some.
“Where shall I meet them?" she asked.
“They’ve barricaded themselves in the southern offices on the eighth floor. The guards and I have secured the surrounding perimeter.”
“Alright. I’m on my way.”
The wailing chorus of police sirens had climbed several decibels by the time the mare in charge finally arrived. Evidently, the Carousel security force was stalling Lodestar downstairs for fear that Coconut would shoot the filly once the authorities got involved. It was a reasonable concern, noted Spring Skies as she looked uneasily at the stallion. There was a spreading wet spot on his ski mask where the escort had hit him, and his eyes were twitchy and unfocused. Spring was worried that he might discharge his arms and kill the child by accident, even without encouragement.
Her relief may have almost been visible when the white unicorn knocked on the office door. Perhaps that was also the case for the filly, but it was hard to say given that she hadn’t said a word since parting from her escort. If it weren’t for the occasional sniffle, one could be forgiven for not even noticing she was there.
They ushered the unicorn in quickly and efficiently, making sure that Coconut and the filly were outside the line of sight from the open doorway.
The child skipped at the sight of her older sister, nearly making Coconut blow her head off.
“Rarity!” she cried. “I’m… sorry about before. They hurt Nanny ‘Shine! I think she m-might be…” Sweetie Belle trailed off and tears welled in her eyes.
“She’s alright, I patched her up as best I could,” said Rarity, trying to sound reassuring. “Everything will be fine, Sweetie, I’m here to—”
“Disrobe,” interrupted Coconut.
The CEO blinked.
“I’m sorry?”
“Clothes off, now,” he said impatiently. “We have no way of knowing what you’re hiding under there.”
She sighed.
“Very well.”
When the CEO had stripped naked, Pinkie handed her a tiny magnetic pin.
“Clip this on an earring or something,” she told her breezily. “If you take it off, we’ll kill your sis.”
As Rarity attached the pin, her NOI flickered slightly but remained operational. She kept her face carefully immobile. It seemed that the pin was intended to be an electronic jammer. Unfortunately for her captors, when Rarity underwent the operation to install her neuro-optical interface her mother had insisted on purchasing the most expensive model available, Spite V11. One of the less advertised features of this model was that it was hardened against radiation, thwarting any attempts to disable it via EMPs or jammers.
An ace in the hole.
“Tell your security to stay on the ground floor. If I see any of ‘em up and about when we leave, the pipsqueak gets it,” said Coconut.
Rarity made a show of calling Eiffel over and telling him to herd the remainder of the security force to the bottom level of the building.
“Are you quite certain about this, madam?” Eiffel asked gravely.
“We have no choice.”
She sent him a brief message over the Grapevine as he trudged back to meet with the guards.
(21:45) [Girls-Best-Friend] joined the conversation.
(21:45) Girls-Best-Friend: Eiffel?
(21:45) Girls-Best-Friend: Keep walking; I’m not talking to you right now.
(21:46) Girls-Best-Friend: Don’t worry about this overmuch. I have a plan. Do as I told you, but be prepared to mobilize the force as soon as these raiders tell me what they’re after. We have explosives in place for situations like these, remember? I need you to ready those ASAP.
(21:46) Girls-Best-Friend: And round up the marksmen. I’ll keep in touch.
The titanium doors to the labs were large, heavy and immobile and the DNA-reader console next to them was dark. Rarity looked back at Coconut.
“It seems that barring the use of heavy explosives, we can’t get in.”
Coconut gave Pinkie a meaningful pat on the side. The decker mare unzipped her saddlebag and with some difficulty hefted out a car battery.
Rarity raised a well-groomed eyebrow.
“Please tell me you’re joking, dear. That battery will power the doors and the console for maybe thirty seconds at best. As soon as it runs dry, the doors will automatically shut again.”
“We’ll manage,” said Coconut, glowering.
Pinkie ripped several wires out of the console and examined them critically. After a few seconds, she taped a pair of them to the two electrodes on the battery, triggering a shower of sparks. The console lit up, piercing the gloom of the powerless building.
“Open it.”
Rarity licked a forehoof and swiped it over the reader. The doors juddered and parted, granting them passage into the darkened test lab interior. Countless inactive computers decorated the first room, and several bulky servers were lined up along the walls near the door.
“Watch the kid for a sec, would ya?”
Coconut approached one of the servers and, getting behind the machine, started to push on it. The structure creaked and groaned as the supports securing it to the floor were steadily weakened. With a grunt and a final violent shove, the machine toppled over producing a deafening crash. Coconut shoved the downed server into the doorway just as the DNA-reader depleted the car battery.
The titanium jaws clamped around the server, fruitlessly trying to cut through it.
Coconut sighed, catching his breath.
“This’ll do.”
The group advanced through the immaculate tiled chambers of the testing and QA department. Rarity led the way deeper into the compartmentalized area, opening door after door. Various consoles and charts of uncertain purpose were spread along the floors, usually behind an acrylic glass screen or occasionally more durable material, marked with yellow-jacket hazard stripes. A number of prototypes and untested components were suspended on the cubicle walls inside damage-resistant cases. There was a little of everything: new firearms of the three major equine builds—Levitus, spinal turrets and leg-mounted cannons—sleek, sexy prosthetics and implants, assorted body armors and mob suits, bio-aug serums and other, less definable organic material inside absolute zero refrigeration apparatuses. There were a number of more innocuous-seeming items as well, including various home appliances such as cleaning robots and autobarbers.
It was in one of the cubicles that Rarity stopped and produced a newly-built—though no less obsolete—portable console from a hidden compartment.
“Here you are,” she said, giving the console to Pinkie. “Project Huehuecóyotl is dormant inside this machine.”
Pinkie looked at the console suspiciously, nursing a comedown headache.
“Why do you have Project Weh-weh-whatever in this old thing?”
“Standard procedure. An artificial intelligence is always coded inside an isolated machine. This minimizes the risk of it escaping or being stolen or causing unchecked damage. Huehuecóyotl is pretty primitive as of yet, so I’m not sure that it was worth breaking into my facility for.”
“Great, whatever,” said Coconut and, addressing Pinkie, “Jack in and make sure that everything checks out.”
Pinkie looked at him incredulously.
“That’s a dumb idea. The thing could be dangerous! It could fry my deck!”
“Open it in safe mode, you’ll be fine. If your deck really does burn out, I’ll buy you a new one once this is all over.”
At this point Pinkie was too worn out to argue. The drugs had run their course, leaving her on the verge of collapsing into a fetal position. She plugged her keyboard into the console and activated it, making sure to switch the device into safe mode. Rows upon rows of files scrolled across her display strip. The scroll bar on the side of the screen shrunk until it was nearly microscopic—there must have been thousands of files stored on this console. Going through every one of them would have taken Pinkie several decades alone. She began opening files at random, leering at the contents.
“Well?” Spring Skies asked. “Is this it?”
“If it isn’t, it’s a very convincing counterfeit.” Pinkie glanced over several files in tandem, suddenly noticing something off about them. “Hold on a sec…”
“What is it?” asked Coconut.
Pinkie turned to face the CEO.
“This code looks like it’s been written in practically every programming language ever conceived, for no discernible purpose! Most teams I’ve seen avoid using more than one language if possible. Why risk writing disjointed instructions like this? I'm seeing scraps of code on here that shouldn't even work together.”
Rarity looked back sheepishly.
“Some of our programming corps are a little, shall we say, eccentric. I don’t understand the details myself; I’m not much of a coder. The AI—what little there is of it at the moment—does work, though sometimes it may act a little erratically.”
“Fine,” said Coconut. “That’s all we need. Now you’re gonna take us up to the roof, boss-mare. We’ll be taking one of your helicopters outta here.”
“All our helicopters are DNA-locked, I fear,” Rarity replied.
Coconut frowned. “Then you’ll provide us with a pilot. I thought you corporate types were supposed to be smart.”
(21:59) Girls-Best-Friend: Are the explosives in place?
(22:00) ToweringSolace: They are, madam. The trap has been set.
(22:00) Girls-Best-Friend: And our contingency measure? What of the marksmen?
(22:00) ToweringSolace: Lying in wait inside the rooftop ventilation ducts, awaiting your signal.
(22:00) Girls-Best-Friend: Fantastic. Inform them that we should be arriving to the helipad within ten minutes.
The winds were picking up as the CEO, the raiders and the hostage marched across the darkened helipad. The landing lights weren’t working. Rarity made a mental note to rewire them into the emergency circuit at some point in the near-future. The well-kept blacktop dimly reflected the brilliant crescent moon overhead and far below, the police sirens wailed unheeded.
A single helicopter was positioned in the center of the helipad, with a young, scrawny-looking pilot seated at the controls, looking anxious.
Coconut turned back to Rarity.
“You did good, boss-mare. Not to worry; we’ll send your brat back safe and sound as soon as we verify that we can negotiate a decent price for the AI.”
Rarity stiffened.
“You… You’re taking Sweetie Belle with you?”
“Obviously,” said Coconut, scoffing. “How stupid do you think we are? You could shoot the chopper right out of the sky if we just let you have her here and now. She also happens to be our insurance. If the AI isn’t worth as much as my contacts think, we’ll sell the kid back to you for a ransom. Consider yourself lucky that we’re only taking the one or the other.”
He flashed a mirthless smirk and turned away, walking a sobbing Sweetie Belle to the helicopter at gunpoint.
“Wait.”
Coconut stopped and looked scowling back at her. “What is it now?”
Rarity cleared her throat. “That helicopter has been tampered with; it will explode as soon as the engine starts. Please take one of the others. I apologize for—”
He cuffed her hard across the face. She reeled and fell over backwards, landing sprawled across the unforgiving asphalt.
“Bitch. Stop wasting our fucking time.”
Rarity heard Sweetie Belle calling her name as she was led away. The crescent moon shone high over her but spared no words of condolence or advice. Her mouth tasted of metal and her lip stung. She shivered as the wind caressed her body.
The rotors of one of the other helicopters started to spin in the distance.
She heard Coconut’s scream for all of two seconds before it was lost in the persistent wind. Her tongue traced her bloodied lip and her mouth curled into a smile.
“Coconut, calm down, what’s wrong?!”
Spring Skies struggled to be heard over the stallion’s shrieks as he stumbled and grasped for his head with one of his forehooves.
The spreadgun chambered another shell.
“Pinkie, get the gun!”
Pinkie rushed forward and grabbed the barrel of the firearm, just barely wrestling it away from the stallion’s head in time. The shell fragments broke apart, escaping harmlessly into the night sky.
“Get a grip, you fucking idiot!”
Coconut’s screams molded into strained Equestrian mixed with glossolalic gibberish.
“Iaaaaaa… Too much…! Can’t… Can’t understand… Mother of Celestia, these fucking fractals go on forever… Peel away the first layer and underneath there is only chaos, wearing away at everything…"
His speech devolved into incoherent babbling interspersed with choking. Blood gushed from his mouth. He’d bitten off his own tongue.
His spinal turret spun wildly, firing at random. Pinkie felt a sting as a stray bullet clipped her side. Spring attempted to pin down the stallion, but his flailing made the task nearly impossible. Coconut’s legs, shuddering as though he’d forgotten how to use them, propelled him across the helipad until one of his hooves caught on the ledge. He stood swaying there for a good two seconds before gravity took over. His screams were abruptly cut short as his body met the ground a thousand feet below. The whole sequence was almost comical.
Pinkie straightened up, shaky on her feet from the adrenaline rush.
“What the hay was—?”
Her display strip flashed and filled with nonsense characters and commands. Mixed among the junk text, a series of bolded messages blinking at the center of the screen drew her eye.
In_ITia#*LiZ-inG ent!ty...
Par$i Ng s0uR-ce code...
Rend ER^^ing per$0nAlit y m@tRix...
ReSo lving w0rld-Ly con&cErNssssss...
Huehuecóyotl @cTi%ve.
A monstrous eye appeared on the display strip and winked at her. It had a vertical lid, a sickly yellow sclera and a blood-red iris.
She yelped, ripping the strip from her ports and throwing it on the ground. A cursor advanced across the torn screen, typing out a message before flickering out as the strip lost power.
WHAT A SHAME.
HE HAD SO MUCH TO LIVE FOR._
Spring Skies trained her rifle on Pinkie, suspicious of the outburst.
“Are you gonna lose it too?”
Pinkie raised her forehooves in a gesture of peace for as long as her sense of balance allowed.
“Easy, babe. I’m alright, see?”
She abruptly came to the realization that someone was missing.
“Hey, wait a second. Where’s the kid?”
A familiar voice rang out over the pad, unstrained against the howling winds, making it difficult to hear.
“I recommend that you come quietly.”
Rarity had gotten back on her feet and stood a fair distance away looking serene despite her bruised cheek and split lip. Pinkie and Spring could make out Sweetie Belle hiding behind her. The two were backed by a number of armed Carousel commandoes that had materialized from somewhere while the raiders were distracted.
Perhaps desperate or enraged, Spring Skies moved to raise her burst rifle once more.
The commandoes hosed her down. The hollow-point bullets tore through her flesh until she was practically unrecognizable. Her burst rifle flew off her foreleg and was reduced to scrap metal as it sailed through the air. When the gunfire ceased, all that was left of Spring Skies was a shredded husk of tissue. It collapsed onto the blacktop with a wet slap.
The stallion Pinkie vaguely identified as Eiffel leveled his pistol at her. She opened her mouth to protest or beg forgiveness but it made no difference.
It felt as though someone had punched her in the chest. Something warm dripped down her foreleg and she was reminded of the nosebleed she’d had a half hour ago. She touched the point of entry with her fingers. It was an exercise in abstract thinking; her fingers could not feel the blood or the wound as they were prosthetic, and the wound itself didn’t hurt since her nerves were apparently too far gone to report any pain. Eventually, her knees buckled under her.
Paralytic rounds. Talk about fucking overkill. You’d think that a hollow-point bullet would be damaging enough for these psychos.
Gradually, she began to lose consciousness. Each breath became laborious and her eyelids grew heavy. The scene on the rooftop spun away into darkness.
Pinkie found herself seated inside an oblong office, facing an expensive-looking antique mahogany desk. Bookshelves lined with leather-bound tomes and bottles of exotic alcohol were stood against the walls. The wallpaper was an elegant crimson, complementing the elaborate hypotrochoid patterns tiled into the floor. The head of a grizzly bear was mounted on the wall behind the desk, appearing to Pinkie as grotesquely out of place. The windows looked out into a featureless white void. Gazing through them for too long prompted a feeling of indefinite existential unease.
All in all, the office seemed to radiate an aura of nostalgia for days gone by, much like a set for some sort of period piece.
Pinkie could not, for the life of her, remember how she’d gotten here. The last thing she could recall was passing out atop the rooftop of Carousel Industries after a raid gone sour. A cursory examination of her body revealed no gunshot wound.
“Am I dead?” she wondered aloud.
The wooden door behind her swung open. She twisted in her chair to see a white outline of a mare walk into the office.
“Not as of yet,” said the outline.
It came around the desk and seated itself in the impressive old swivel chair. A three-dimensional framework appeared inside the outline and began to fill, like a texture being rendered over a model. When the last of the polygons was colored, the entity took on the spitting image of the CEO of Carousel Industries.
“Uh, hey,” said Pinkie. “Rarity, right?”
The other mare nodded.
“Am I dreaming?” asked Pinkie.
“Close, but no cigar.” Rarity took a cigarette out of one of the drawers as though the phrase reminded her of her own nicotine habit, lit it with basic pyromancy and inserted it into a holder. She bit the tip of the tube and drew on it before speaking again. “You’re currently in intensive care. We jacked you into a virtuality because I wanted to have a word with you.”
“A virtuality?” Pinkie looked around excitedly. “You mean like a virtual reality? You’re kidding! I thought these things were just a rumor!”
“Just because something is rumored does not automatically disqualify it from being true. We’ve patented the technology and it should be released for commercial use within two or three years.”
“Awesome! This is kinda unimaginative for a, um, virtuality though, isn’t it?”
Rarity shrugged.
“Set backdrop variant two.”
The void outside the windows was replaced by a grassy autumn meadow at sunset. The grass shivered in the breeze, and the distant maple trees shed their rusted leaves. Pinkie heard an owl hoot somewhere.
“Variant four.”
The meadow vanished and an underwater coral reef took its place. A rainbow-toned mollusk crawled unhurriedly across the glass. Schools of tropical fish and shrimp drifted through the ridges of coral, seemingly unaware or uninterested in the underwater office.
“Variant nine.”
A massive ringed gas giant appeared in the window, partially obscured by a violet moon. Pinkie thought that she could make out a nebula looming in the distance behind the celestial bodies.
“It’s all very basic right now,” said Rarity. “You have to learn to walk before you can run, if you’ll forgive the platitude. I’m sure the entertainment industry will make good use of the tech, however.”
“Variant three,” tried Pinkie. “Variant five. Variant seven! Pleeeeaaaaase?”
“Only the designated controller can alter the virtuality,” said Rarity. “We wouldn’t want you getting distracted.”
“Alright fine,” groaned Pinkie. “So how long have I been out?”
“About a day and a half. Not to worry—Eiffel has been reprimanded for shooting you.” She turned her head fractionally to blow smoke. “But not too harshly; Sweetie Belle told me that you’re the one who suggested taking her hostage.”
“Psh! Yeah! And saved her life! Coconut was gonna just shoot her!”
“Was he?” Rarity broke away from the window to look Pinkie in the eye. “Well, if that’s the case, you have my thanks. What’s the matter? You look perplexed.”
Pinkie tried to rouse her memories once more.
“What… What happened up there, on the roof? Coconut just… went off his nut. And then there were the nonsense characters on my display strip, and something that looked like an eye. What was that all about?”
Rarity drew on her cigarette again.
“Our AI-to-be, Huehuecóyotl, has been known to invade neuro-optical interfaces and fundamentally change its victim’s perception of reality, usually for the worse. Unfortunately your friend appears to be the latest on the list of its casualties.” The way she pronounced the word made it clear that she did not regret Coconut’s death in the slightest.
“But, but I thought your coyote was locked inside that old box console you gave us!” said Pinkie.
“It uploaded itself into your deck once you connected to it, and jumped to Coconut’s NOI wirelessly. I neglected to mention that safe mode has not proven very effective in hindering it previously.”
“Are you serious? What is this thing?!”
“Huehuecóyotl has been designed as a weapon,” said Rarity, retaining her level tone. “It was intended to infiltrate hostile systems and disable them. Permanently. When interacting with the NOI it acts as a lethal neurovirus and when entering computer systems it deletes crucial system files and overloads the machine with custom malware and junk data. What you saw was only a prototype.” She permitted herself a satisfied smirk. “Once it has been perfected, it will be able to evolve to bypass virtually any security system.”
“Isn’t it kinda,” Pinkie bit her lip, “not a good idea to make something like that? How do you control it?”
“The programmers assure me that unchangeable parameters have been written into the code to keep the AI under our control. Rest assured that it will be rigorously tested before being utilized in the wild.”
Pinkie looked skeptical. “Weeeellllll. I guess your coders know the program better than anyone. I hope you’ll pull the plug on the thing if it doesn’t cooperate though.”
“Of course.” Rarity leaned forward. “Now then, Miss Pinkamena Diane Pie. You strike me as a talented mare.”
“Is this the part where you go ‘I have a proposition for you’?” asked Pinkie, making sterling use of her ‘serious’ voice.
The CEO smiled thinly around her cigarette holder. “Done this before, have you?”
“Once or twice, yeah. What’s up?”
“Carousel Industries is in sore need of a skilled datarat. Tell me Miss Pie, can you encrypt a Grapevine user connection to, say, hide the identity of a hypothetical operative of ours?”
Pinkie tilted her head quizzically.
“I could probably write an exploit, but chances are that it’d get patched in a mandatory update inside a week or two.”
“Could you repeat what you did during the raid and disable a security AI?”
“I don’t think I could replicate what I did on the raid. Being a successful decker requires the ability to improvise.”
Rarity looked at the pink mare thoughtfully.
“You snuck into our building without tipping off the identification software or the housekeeping construct and left with a set of blueprints that you shouldn’t have been able to decrypt, all without alerting or injuring a single employee,” she told him, trying to keep her voice level.
Binary looked back impassively, chewing on the cigarette she’d allowed him.
“Could you do something like that again, if you had to?” she asked.
He took the cigarette between his hooves and pulled it from his mouth carefully.
“I could try,” he answered. The years of smoking left his voice gravelly and he had a tendency to break into fits of coughing. Unlike Rarity, he couldn’t afford to have his lungs replaced on a whim. “But success wouldn’t be guaranteed. A good decker knows how to improvise.”
“Can you maintain a low profile regarding the jobs we assign you?” she asked Pinkie finally.
“I think,” said Pinkie dubiously. “But what if I don’t wanna work for you guys?”
“If you refuse this job offer then we will take you off life support,” Rarity replied. “If you would prefer death to working for us, feel free to decline. But if you do accept, you will receive a yearly salary of eighty thousand bits, and we will move you into corporate housing, where you’ll be much better provided for than in the space you’re renting from the Cake family. Lastly, the debt with your dealer will be settled and we will replace your severely damaged liver with one fresh from the vat.”
Pinkie was about to question how Rarity knew about her personal concerns but realized that Carousel had probably read her memories while she was under.
“Sounds too good to be true,” she said, eyes narrowing. “What’s the catch?”
“The catch, Miss Pie, is that you’ll be fitted with a nanomachine leash, should you accept. Do you know what that means?”
Pinkie shook her head.
Rarity flicked excess ash from the tip of her cigarette. The dust evaporated as it fell.
“We will inject microscopic robots into your bloodstream. The half-life for these new tenants of yours will be about eight years, in the absence of a catastrophic hemorrhage, of course. You will do whatever we ask because if you try to rebel, we will activate the nanomachines, and they will heat up until they combust, effectively boiling your blood and cooking you from the inside out. Not a pleasant way to die, I assure you.”
“I-is that for real?” Pinkie croaked.
“Not to worry. If you fulfill your contract with us, you will be set loose, with an attractive retirement package. But in the end, the choice is yours.”
Pinkie looked at the floor pointedly.
The choice to either die or live on as Carousel’s wage slave. Great.
Then again, she would be paid and taken care of. It was what she always dreamed of but couldn’t have as a freelance decker. What was so bad about that?
I will only be able to pursue committee-approved jobs. She makes it sound like a good deal, but I’m effectively losing my free will as soon as those creepy robots are inside me. Carousel could easily send me on a suicide mission if they want.
I’d like to think I wouldn’t be so disposable, given how much money they’d be investing in me, but in truth I have no clue how big a sum has to be before the company stops seeing it as an ‘acceptable loss’.
But she did know one thing for sure. She wanted to keep living.
Rarity shifted in her chair and adjusted her dress shirt, seemingly just for something to do.
“Would you like more time to make your decision? I can leave you alone for as long as you wish.”
Pinkie looked up.
“Don’t worry about it. Where do I sign?”
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I quite liked your adaption of pinkie in this. pinkie being an addict has been done before but I think this was the most interesting take on it (cyberpunk helps). I can't wait to see what other cool stuff exists in this world (the poison bullets and the weird drugs were pretty cool) and how the other mane 6 are adapted into cyberpunk. keep up the good work.
Ahh the sweet, sweet smell of dystopian cyberpunk
3872659
Thanks for the support, good sir and/or madam. Your criticism is also appreciated, though the tense shift was a conscious decision. I was experimenting with two styles of narration, the omniscient present tense to start the scene with, changing to more personal past tense prose as we 'zoom in' to Shining's perspective.
I dunno, maybe it is a bit messy, I'm hardly a master writer or anything. Maybe I should change it to a more conventional format.
Ooooo... This sounds very interesting from reading the description. Definitely going on my Read Later list.
4012583
Thank you kindly! I hope you'll enjoy it. Unless you've already read it by now, 'cos of my delayed reply. That's cool too. The next episode is well under way!
4044059 Not yet, I've been busy and the fact that it shares space with over 3000 other stories on the list doesn't help. I'll keep it open in a tab and see if I can't spend the hour required to read it tomorrow, err... today I mean.
Edit: Hmm, I can just DL it, stick it on my MP3 player and read it at work... Yeah, I'll do that.
4069647
I'm glad. And you'll be happy to know that the third episode is nearing completion.
Damn, I was wondering since the second part of Twilight's episode what venom treated paralytic bullets could do, and it seems pretty brutal... When good heists go bad, right?
Anyway, we can see some more of Pinkie's character in this chapter. Mainly the part of worry, she worries over the AI going on a rampage, she vaguely worried abut Sweetie's life enough to get Coconut to spare her. Hmmm, its an interesting contrast to her already laid out drug addicted hacking character, the question is at the moment, is it worry for others, or for herself?
Anyway, Rarity in this chapter. I really think it helped portray her as someone who makes use of what she has been given, but if something is a liability, she would drop it. This really gives her a cold logical front, but we know she cares for Sweetie, so the question is how far the front extends?
Anyway, the master plan for the Bavat killing is in the works. Pinkie is going to hack into the hotel, screw up the AI and Rarity is going to help source our vigilante their weapons. It seems that Eiffel is a prime candidate, but if we all remember, the name Lucid was mentioned.
We also found out who distorted the name of our mysterious vigilante. The pieces are coming together, it seems.
Also, if Rarity is "A-Girls-Best-Friend" who is Lady Gaea, exactly? I guess we'll find out, eh?
I'm generally enjoying this. There's a lot of darkness simply for dark's sake, which I'm not enamored with, but it's balanced out with some slickly realized phlebotinum.
Those cockatrice rounds are nifty. With your permission, I'd like to use something similar and credit you with the inspiration.