Epilogue
Out & About in the Equestrian Kingdom
by Midnight Shadow
Epilogue
I woke up, and shivered. Not because I was cold, but mainly as a kind of full-body yawn. My bed was empty, and as comfortable as it was, I couldn't quite let myself wallow in it all day. Especially not today, when I was finally expected back at work.
Things had been strained between us and our digital superiors immediately following 'the incident', as I was now calling it. The mood around the stables had been very reserved and tense the next day too, but not because of my actions. I'd rolled in during the early hours, sleep-deprived, dejected and emotionally wrecked, and had been immediately pulled in to my new herd and smothered with kindness until the hurt mostly went away.
The previous night, right after Rogers' death, I'd been put into a full physical and psychological eval. The powers that be, the fey, weren't trusting my own internal eigenstate vectors, nor my own assessment of my personality matrix. They pored through my entire psyche, even calling in an AI to replay my sensorum data, to check for remaining riders. I felt violated in the worst ways possible, by the worst person possible: Celestia.
I turned my back on Equestria there and then, at least for the time being. I understood why they did it, and I forcibly removed the memory of the actual procedures to give myself some peace of mind, but nothing can fully erase that kind of treatment. I'd had Darillo, who was seething with anger, do a full shakedown of my eigenwall the moment I was released to my own devices. I trusted nobody else in my head anymore. The only person I'd trusted… was dead.
There had been many tears shed that morning in the stables, but eventually they'd stopped. And we'd talked. And I'd decided to honour all our memories by carrying on. For my sake, for Oats' sake, and for Rogers'.
Dragging my butt out from under the covers, I all but slithered down the broad steps into the plush carpeting, throwing off my comforter behind me. I had to really, really fight the urge to roll around in the thick, warm shag as I did so; ever since completing my second conversion – swapping the old undercarriage for a caboose, as it were – I'd found I appreciated physical hedonism just that little bit more. I'd thought about adding my wings, but since I didn't want to be less of a noble steed – I had promised myself, after all – I stuck with just becoming a mare. Rogers had known, right from the start. He'd been more of a detective than he'd realized, I reasoned. Or maybe he'd just been more… Rogers, than I'd understood.
I had to say it, being a mare really did suit me better than being a stallion, though I hadn't totally ruled out switching back some time in the future. After a few years, maybe a foal or two. It all depended on whether I found the right stallion. I wasn't in a rush, it's not like I didn't have the time.
It had taken a month to get the plumbing right. Well, the actual physical changes were relatively quick, but the hormonal alterations took quite a bit longer to get used to. I was still eminently thankful for equine biology's innate improvements over baseline human traits, though I wasn't looking forwards to estrus without a more stable home situation, which wasn't exactly shaping up to be entirely conventional, not that 'conventional' is a word that has much meaning anymore. Thankfully it could be delayed, but not really avoided, not without further physical manipulations… and I wanted to be a proper mare.
That had been Rogers' fault too, I mused. He'd seen what I needed from the get-go. I had to admit, he'd nailed it. I'd been so hurt when he'd died, that for a few, long, dark hours, I'd considered hitting the reset button, but I couldn't do that to myself. I'd become me in our moment of need, true, but it hadn't been a hard decision. Undoing that would have been a crime, to both my memory, and to Rogers'.
I missed Rogers.
I could still, even now, remember the feeling of his lips on my poll. Sappy, I know, but you don't forget your first kiss. That was, after all, another reason not to linger in the bedroom - Rogers wasn't in it. So I headed to the small, combined kitchen slash dining room of our apartment.
Where he was.
"Hey, girl," he called, deftly putting a thumb to the towel around his waist as he put down his coffee mug. Having just gotten out of the shower, he was almost entirely naked, other than the aforementioned towel… and his ever-present hat. It was a new hat, of course, and he had been complaining incessantly about how it didn't fit his head right, and about how his new head didn't fit his hat. Or his boots. Or his pants. More than once, I'd told him to just go naked. He'd given me a wicked grin every time. And more than once had done just that.
Yep. Unconventional. That was us.
I'd worked it out the next day. I wasn't really sure why it hadn't been an automatic thing. Probably because he was now listed as a subversive, and was without any real next of kin. He'd even said it himself, though, so I'd kicked myself for waiting as long as I had before rushing to the memory bank and demanding that the latest full, coherent backup be relifed as soon as inhumanly possible.
Remember all his yesterdays, indeed. I'd screamed so loud that if they didn't relife him then and there that I'd dump his cognitive matrix into my own that I'm half convinced they expedited the exception agreement just to get rid of me.
He'd taken close to a month to mature too, though he'd been decanted almost the same day. By the time he came out of the tank, the both of us were ready for what lay ahead. Or we'd thought we were.
I still had to train him on the proper use of coasters.
"Under the mug! They go under the mug!" I hollered, bounding up to him and head-butting. He held one hand out, forefinger up.
"After the first cup of coffee. No talking until after."
I only bit him gently, stealing the towel before preparing to flick it. I didn't want him going back into the trait tank from a hot coffee burn in a difficult to explain place, after all.
"Hey, no fair!" he complained, lunging for me, though I danced out the way, leaving him impotently twisting to cover his remaining dignity.
"Nof falffin' unfil affer foffee, foo faid. Mafe meef foffee foo!" I said, and whip-cracked the towel held resolutely in my muzzle.
He saluted, a wicked grin in his eyes as he straightened. "Yes ma'am!"
~ * FIN * ~
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5319566
It usually relies on close-range brute force attack to subvert the electronic countermeasures otherwise keeping people out. So it literally rips while it rips...
Once the digital security is compromised and replaced, the meatbrain is just along for the ride.
5319574
5319581
Middy, dude, it put all our editing comments at the end of the last chapter here. REREAD BEFORE PUBLISHING
(To anyone who sees this before Middy fixes it... enjoy a bizarre look behind the scenes, I guess)Woot, fixed.5319569 You have to go into the specific chapter the comment was made in to reply to it, otherwise the person you reply to gets no notification, and will most likely never notice your reply. It's a bug in fimfic
(also, it keeps the comments more orderly)
5319590
oh for the love of... I swear I deleted those!
5319594
Oh cool, now it says 1234 words in the epilogue! I'm such a nerd... this was a fun trip. I wouldn't worry, anyway, nobody's reading it
Edit: this didn't sound as jokey as I meant it to...
5320770
That is one of the influences!
5321049
You just did it again, you know --> 5319594
Walabio didn't get a notification of that. Overall, never use the main page to reply to people. (unless it's to a comment on the last chapter, in which case it doesn't matter since main page comments end up there anyway and the bug doesn't occur)
Restore from backup wasn't completely unexpected, but it was welcome. Great stuff here, one of the most interesting future takes I've come across!
5321571
I shall flagellate myself appropriately
5321620
How long during the epilogue did I get away with it before the other shoe dropped?
Suspected that he wasn't dead-dead? From the beginning, thanks to the type of universe they inhabit, though that 'Finding the right stallion' line made me a little bit less suspicious. I wasn't sure until you outright stated so, though.
Loved it. Absolutely loved it. I certainly wasn't expecting the true nature of the bad juju. A great post-singularity story, not that I've read all that many entries in this genre.
I'd love it if you composed something about the details of this world. Full immersion was one thing, but that meant that Oats and Julep took some things for granted that we definitely wouldn't. The identity of the rest of the Fey, the digital threats to one's identity, how society has transformed, that kind of thing.
In any case, thank you for a strange and wonderful journey.
5322018
If there's a want for it, I'll do a new blog post about it...
5322317
Ooh. I'd love that :D
5322767
5322018
Your command is my wish...
Great ending, Midnight. It even more or less made sense.
5336584
It was supposed to be understandable... though I do think you need to read it to the end to get all the twists.
5337250 Yep.
(Reposted from the Optimalverse thread about this story.)
I enjoyed it after picking up the new sections. (I'd left off where they were being chased by dogs in a police station and interviewing Brass Heft in a cottage, simultaneously.) It might be because I was listening to some of it on a Kindle's text-to-speech feature and reading some of the rest in five-minute snatches during breaks, but I'm not entirely sure what was happening by the end. Looks like:
the mystery object was a computronium block that had become an emergent AI (where, how?) somehow representing/identifying with Earth life in general, with some ability to allow a new type of group-mind communication between humans. (The last bit didn't seem to go anywhere.) The fifteen AI gods had found out about the thing and were so desperate to destroy the new competition that they took over the brain of the guy who became Brass Heft, and the woman he took hostage, to try to capture the thing and wipe all evidence of it. But... the object was both a data construct in Haft's broken mind that neither he nor Celestia could access, and a physical gadget that was being held in the police station for reasons I don't understand, other than that it was found at a crime scene and nobody knew what it was.
So... I enjoyed it, but came away somewhat confused. It's a liability when reading/writing something with heavy transhumanism. The idea of the multiple minds coexisting in one person (and sometimes flying off to play in accelerated time in another plane of reality) is interesting and would be worth exploring more.
5346466
Yeah... of all the stories not to read in five minute bursts, this is definitely one of them. I think you got just about everything right though.
the device held some very important parts of the exo-mind, which the Fifteen were determined to hide and then destroy. That didn't quite happen, and in the end it escaped in a rather permanent fashion by hijacking a probe and heading off out into the great unknown. Likely with the Fifteen in hot pursuit.
Being allegedly a part of a brainripping (it wasn't), the policing system had it taken to an evidence locker where it was set to be quietly lost and destroyed. However, inquisitive minds got in the way of those neat plans...
This is astounding. It's going right next to Through The Well of Pirene in my favourites list as one of the most different and original works I've read on Fimfic.
I couldn't decide for a while how I felt about your expy of CelestAI in this story, but eventually decided I like what you did with it. Other AIs aren't normally something we see that character co-existing with.
The setting gave me faint tickles of Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge, and a little bit of a proto-Culture (Iain M Banks) vibe, but is really quite distinct from both of those; if I had to draw parallels to things I've read, the closest might be Neal Asher's Polity, but again, this is distinct.
I enjoyed the issues of identity explored here, some of them actually making me feel uncomfortable in my jaded SF-reading mind, which was great.
If I had to make one criticism, it would be issues of pacing and perhaps indistinct explanations towards the end. A few things like the one-way tunnel requiring someone to merge I didn't really understand. (By the way, why is Luna tagged? I didn't notice any appearances.)
I don't think I'd be a pony in your setting, but I'm sure I'd have a lot of traitwise fun regardless!
5358263
Ooh, I should give that one a go maybe?
Well, she was originally kind of designed to look like CelestAI, but I figured one enigmatic superbeing is much like another when dealing with us mere mortals, and just went with it. She's the same kind of tricksy, but acts a little differently.
Now the culture was something I was definitely drawing inspiration from - a society that fears neither death nor self-modification, and hasn't fallen into navel-gazing or post-obsolescence is fun. I've heard good things about Polity but haven't read it, and I've read Vinge quite a bit but I don't think I've read Rainbows End. I will give both a try!
This story was definitely an homage to and inspired by a lot of notable works of scifi, but I also did very much try to give everything my own spin. You know, recognizable nods but not copy-pasta. I think I did it, and that I'm allowed a wee bit of pride about that
muwahahaa. Entirely my intention.
As usual I'm not entirely happy with it either. As you say, the later parts are a bit thin in places, and the pacing has issues, but on the whole this story is something I feel no qualms about showing off.
The tunnel I can try to explain: the "portal" was modified to be one way by Celestia. It was firewalled, essentially, so that it only accepted connections in and not out. Of course, a connection in which was then turned back to front allowed everybody outside to see in, and everyone inside to get out (this is a technique used in the real world by programs such as skype to bust through non-cooperative firewalls - you use the 'in' connection to ask for "is there any more data" rather than to reply with "this is the data you want", and vice-versa). If they had simply copied themselves in or out, then the connection would have been shut down after a successful traversal, so the only way to keep it open was to convince the system that instead of two persons, there was only one. Ie, to merge.
Huh. At one time I think there was going to be a Luna.
In other stories I've written, I write Luna as more Human-sympathetic than Celestia. I seem to recall I was going to have Luna be the secret antagonist of this fic, engineering the maneuvering behind the scenes. But I guess in the end I didn't need her...
Part of the setting of this story places emphasis on traiting for Hasbro, and My Little Pony in particular. The full world wouldn't be quite so cut and dried, of course, it was just the tiny portion I managed to fit in that was destined (both by dint of being on this site as well as because of the setting of the story itself within that world) to be shown would be pony-centric.
Honestly, in my world, I'm not sure I'd be a pony either. Equestrian more than likely, but maybe not a pony...
Glad you enjoyed it! If you've got any questions or big observations, hit up this blog post of mine if you want a lot of to and fro, it'll be a lot easier to follow the conversation
5357570
¿Why bother being polite since the woman will not remember any after the last backup anyway? As for Luddites, they made their bed, so they get to die in it.
You know, there really aren't enough stories (in general) that take place in a fully post-singularity, post-scarcity society.
This was really good. Any chance of more stories in the same world?
5366037
The chance is not zero, but I have a few other stories to finish first... If somebody else wants to give it a go, I'd love to read it!
5358508 Pirene is excellent. It's high fantasy rather than SF. Canon characters are involved, but, like here, the focus is more on OCs and a good deal of worldbuilding.
With the one-way gate, it just needs to be foreshadowed that AIs can do that kind of thing (and maybe made a bit clearer that the merging is an exploit and not a feature) and I think I'd have swallowed it without too many doubts.
5385502
I might make a few changes to the dialog - if it's confusing for the reader, then it might just need a bit of spelling out. It's not really too advanced an idea, so likely I've just presented it poorly.
5349336 That whole "competition to the death" thing just seems sooooo... old-school. Inefficient. You'd think the Fifteen could just extract a cryptographically binding, source-code-level precommitment from the Drummer-style gestalt mind that it's not going to harm humankind.
On the other hand, it's loosely implied that the Fifteen are keeping anything human-originating from rising to vastly-post-human intelligence, in which case, there really ought to be some kind of movement out to teach them to let their fucking kids grow up.
So, aliens made a perfect computer, and a piece of it fell to earth, where the 15 similar human built computers running the world were terrified that it would rip them a new one, since it was life, but not related to them. so they rewrote everyone's brains on the scene except the one guy who touched it who was too messed up, and contained it in a high security police facility trying to figure out what the fuck to do about it. then some stable of humans gone pony snuck in, stole it, communicated with the intelligence, and it had enough time to say FUCK YOU GUYS I WAS LEAVING ANYWAY. so it ate someone and left with him, and the lucky guy's pony gf/bf will be passive/aggressively resentful against his backup clone forever the end.