Chapter 5
Out & About in the Equestrian Kingdom
by Midnight Shadow
Chapter 5
Rogers stood up and stretched, taking a final slurp from his soon-empty cup of coffee. Frowning at it, he put it down on the table, where a spider-like robot scuttled to pick it up and take it away. It saluted with a leg as it vanished behind the counter.
"Nothing for it, girl, but to start at the beginning," Rogers said, after a few moments.
"What do you mean 'start at the beginning'?" I asked, lifting my head from my bucket of mash. I shrugged off the 'girl' part; I was expressing a good deal of Julep right now, and truth be told… I liked the attention.
"Well, you and I want to know what happened to Steven and Teresa, right?" He walked towards me and crouched down in front of my head, looking down into my eyes.
I nodded, then looked forlornly and furiously down at my own bowl-like cup, feeling heat rise to my cheeks. It, too, was empty. I signaled for a spider-like cleaning bot and watched as it danced carefully around my bulky form to pick up the bowl and heave it onto its back. I felt Julep cluck to two more of the cleaning robots as the first slunk off with my bowl. They chirped back questioningly, and she sent them a brief request for them to clean us up. A few moments later, and they were crawling along my neck to braid my mane whilst a fourth busied itself putting a scarlet ribbon in my tail. It was a decidedly feminine fashion piece… for a human. For a pony, a red tail bow indicated a kicker – I'd have logically put a green or even a blue, but… red did offset my hide today.
"And we can't just look up the info direct from here?" asked Rogers earnestly, playing with my ears, twirling his fingers through them.
I nodded again, then shook my head, ears flattening against my skull as I looked up once more into his smiling face. "The sensedata would take a long time to reconstruct," I said. "We've got a lot of bandwidth, but it'll be simpler to splice in local readings."
"Correct." Rogers patted my head and I beamed.
The spider-like robots chirruped their disappointment as I moved, then continued lacing in little tiny scarlet bows every few centimetres along my mane. Working quickly and methodically, they soon had the whole length covered.
"Then in that case, we'll have to do this the old fashioned way. With a little bit of detective work. Come on." He rose, turned, then beckoned.
Bemused, I trotted after him as he walked out the door, the spider-bots leaping to freedom before waving goodbye with multiple forelimbs.
***
I knew where we were going, of course. I barely needed Mortimer – she'd decided she liked the name – to lead us. It was her raison d'etre, though, so who was I to interfere? Rogers and I walked in relative silence as we followed the digital bird. We were heading back to the Clock Square Eatery off Drum Street – I'd not been able to name it last time, since the 'net had been offlined – by a relatively direct route. Foot and hoof traffic was light, though it was building up to the lunchtime rush.
Passing a preacher for the Church of One, I decided to filter her and her ilk out. The Church of One was dedicated to the idea that there really was only one god, just that nobody knew what it was. They claimed their algorithm that was continuously parsing all available religious texts was building the final book of the one true god, but of course the algorithm was sacred doctrine and not to be shared. Various other sects of digital nirvana were out and about too; from traditional pre-singularity movements to newer mass-memory ex-ego neo-buddhist sects. They were all hawking their own particular promises of heaven – or oblivion, as was the case with the Abolition of Self'ists, though they weren't really what I'd call a religion, more of a voluntary extinctionist movement. They were offering a one-way ticket to forever, courtesy of this or that post-human intelligence that was offering to pick up the remnants of their humanity once it went through the literal shredder. Other terminals offered a direct upgrade to human 2.0 – plug in, put your awareness in hock to some dark master to pay their fee and have your mind expanded to orders of magnitude greater than that which mere humans possessed. I shivered. I'd known people who had gone post-post-human. None had come back.
It was probably a good thing they hadn't, I mused. Most of them would have accumulated a good fortune in real bits, and could probably purchase most of the planet if they actually wanted real-estate instead of… whatever it was that the higher AIs coveted. Other than Celestia – who owned all the parts of the planet that were vital to the stability of the climate and for supplying the makerblock authority chains that fed, clothed and housed the squishy, corporeal citizens of what was left of the world of Man – the Earth wasn't that important to most of the real players, thank goodness, because the flesh and blood portion of humanity wasn't done living there yet.
I shook my head as we entered the Eatery. It was once again full of patrons. With a simple higher-level access call, I felt Rogers hook into the establishment's mind and request a dump of the raw audio and video feed data that it had accumulated from the surrounding cameras. Running it through his own copious wetware, it took a few seconds for the sensorum to coalesce around us and for the people who were currently there to fade into the background like smoke. When it did, I watched, bemused, as new phantasms moved around us, going about their daily business of a mere twenty-four hours ago.
Rogers merely walked coolly to a chair, then sat, watching – an unreadable expression on his face – as those fateful few minutes replayed. "Tell me," he asked, finally, as the scene reset once more. "What did you see?"
"Uh…" I thought for a moment, trotting closer to him. "I saw what the cameras say they recorded?"
Rogers nodded slowly. "That's actually a good answer. So, what if they're lying?"
My mouth dropped open. "That's…"
"If you're going to say 'not possible', then tell me why that is so."
I closed my mouth again. I wanted to tell him that it just wasn't possible to hack into the datastream of more than a dozen direct cameras, several more roving blimp-based cameras, a number of satellites – should any of those be pointed in the right direction at least – and, finally, upwards of a hundred recordings from—
"The diners!" I gasped, my ears sticking up straight.
"What?" replied Rogers, blinking. Now it was his turn to fishmouth for a few seconds.
"Well if you can get all the cameras to lie… I still don't see how you could change all the memories of all the people who were here… oh." I paused. "Unless they dump their recordings into the backup vaults and," I paused, ears going flat against my skull in shock, "the vaults are compromised too."
Rogers barked out a short laugh. "Wait, wait! You're getting ahead of yourself. When'd you get so smart, huh?" He tousled the mane on my head, between my ears, as I pressed myself into his hand. "So, thoughts?"
Rogers' words chilled me to the bone. "Y-you think your own memories might be suspect?" I asked, my eyes wide. I started shaking, and my stomach did itself up in knots. Only some hardline bio-feedback controls stopped me from hyperventilating and quite possibly passing out. If I'd had a fully reactive endocrine system, it would have been filtering out the adrenaline and pumping in endorphins. I didn't. I felt cold.
"Well, I did just get a backup." He grinned again, suddenly, and leaned forwards earnestly to whisper, "It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you. That's why I took this copy yesterday, remember?"
I watched, dumbstruck, as Rogers pulled out a datacube from his pocket. Faint lights blinked on it – charged, encrypted and ready.
"A-and you think my brain might be tampered with too?" I shrunk away from the sheriff, ears out sideways as I thought through what was being presented: Some people, with enough power to overcome what was globally held to be the single most secure data storage on the planet, were trying to hide things from both myself and a sheriff. And the reason we knew they were hiding things was because we couldn't see that they were hiding things. Huh. "This doesn't make any sense," I complained, almost wailing. "I mean sure, it's weird that they're hiding the details from us, and I guess it's weird that Steven just… went pony. But that doesn't mean it's a conspiracy! It might have been part of the deal!"
"Why would he need a deal?" Rogers asked softly. I was unable to meet his gaze.
I sat down on my haunches, not trusting my hooves. Huh.
"Run it, then," I said.
I observed Rogers as he decrypted a copy into a scratch buffer, ran a checksum on the pertinent pieces of data, uploaded the checksum to the Eatery's datasphere, then interfaced with the Citymind's datasphere and uploaded the raw data itself for reintegration. Rogers then verified the checksum once more and added my own data to that provided by the cameras.
Once more, yesterday resolved around us. I walked to where a scared little pony was watching the standoff. And I watched with dismay as the image of my own body warped and weaved. The reproduction had been just a shade off. A tiny fraction of a percentage wrong. Enough to throw off the routines that were built to coalesce disparate memories into a single, coherent reproduction.
With a wave of his hand, Rogers paused the senseplay. "And this," he said grimly, "is what we're missing." I looked up from my double, frozen in time, as my partner's digital avatar walked to the center of the open-air restaurant and bent to pick up a device which was no longer there. The image of it flickered and wavered in his non-existent hand, because it wasn't sure what it wanted to be. What I had thought it was, and what Rogers and everything else now thought it was, wasn't the same.
"What is it?" I asked, already knowing the answer.
"I don't know."
There are moments you remember, all your life, or at least unless you get them excised, which is a pretty big deal most of the time. Learning that the Memory Vaults weren't inviolate rated right up there, for me. Panic is not a nice feeling. It's a rare one for me, but I'm still not sure if that made it worse. I don't think most people realize how deep-seatedly worrying it is to run around without backup. Most people backup once a month at least. Some backup once a week, or even at the end of every day. At the very least, they backup before doing anything important. I can scarcely imagine what it was like, anymore, in the days before you could step out your front door and know, for absolute certain, that you'd step back in again.
I usually did a backup once a month. I'd backed up before I'd gone pony, so whilst I wasn't scheduled for another just yet, the realization that I didn't trust the backup system anymore was… well, I could have cried. Anything could happen! I could meet a Gunhappy and, just like that, it'd be lights out. Everything I now was would be gone. And would my backup be useable, even? Whatever we were up against might tamper with my files… wipe a signature here, sub in some random data there and that'd be it. No restore. Critical Existence Failure: Life Not Found.
I'm not sure when I started sobbing, but when I did, the tears came thick and fast, hot tears running down my muzzle, almost burning in their salty tracks.
"Hey, hey, hey. It's okay, girl. It's okay. Come here, come on." Rogers bent down, and pulled me into a solid hug, his real body warm and comforting against mine. "I can tell what you're thinking, you know, even without running the facial scanning routines. You'll be okay. We both will. You're one of Celestia's own, pony. She never lets any of her foals come to harm. And I'm your bud, right? Right?"
He held his forefinger crooked under my chin. I sniffled as I looked up at him. "Uh huh," I said, wiping my eyes with a hoof.
"Well then, that settles it. I'm sure she'd not let anything happen to me either. I mean who knows, I might go pony some time in the future, right? I'm pretty sure she'd not let somebody else finish me off. So they twiddled with my medium-term. I'll live."
I wiped a hoof across my face again as I contemplated his words. He'd just learned he'd been brainhacked, and he was cool as a cucumber about it. I had to be strong, I told myself. I couldn't let him down. Instead of this reinforcing my resolve, I felt like collapsing in a heap. My eyes filled with tears as I started sobbing. He rolled his eyes and fished up a handkerchief from one of the tables and did a better job.
"Come on, now. It's a quest, right? Or would you rather give up? If you don't, I'll tell you a secret." He smiled, softly, teasingly.
"W-will y-you give up?" I asked him, choking through the words. He shook his head. "Then I w-won't either." I stood up, though my legs felt like jelly.
I'd faced down dragons, before now. I'd faced off with one-eyed griffon pirates. I was pretty sure I could find out why one person tried to brainjack another and both ended up swiss-cheesed, and a third had been tampered with. I was just acutely aware of the final reason why I'd gone pony: I, like the rest of the planet, had assumed Celestia's personality vaults were unbreachable, until the last star in the sky burned out. And now… I wasn't quite so sure.
The Eatery in real-time popped into existence around us. Jumping out of a private sensorum is disorienting, not to mention deafening – when it's already the first wave of the lunch crowd, at least.
"What do we do now?" I asked plaintively. "What do we do now that we know…"
Rogers put a finger to my lips. "Shh. Do you really know what you think you know?"
"W-what do you mean?" I asked, my voice tight and hoarse and my eyes shining wetly with tears.
"That's for you to tell me." Rogers leaned back in his chair, arms folded across his chest. He seemed to be waiting for something, lounging in his seat with barely constrained tension. I found myself breathing heavily, panic coursing through my veins. The mounting horror of the reality of the situation was growing on me with every moment: the memory vaults were leaky. The memory vaults could be altered. The memory vaults – the last great bastion against The Reaper, that ancient spectre which we'd assumed (ironically enough) dead and buried – could be penetrated, seemingly at whim. And not only that, but by a routine clever and small enough to not get noticed amongst all the properly authorized data traffic.
And yet I wasn't paralyzed with fear. Why?
I mean sure, every time I contemplated it, I almost collapsed from hyperventilation before my autonomic system could clamp down on the incipient anxiety attack, and I was probably going to run out of mood stabilizing endorphins or keel over from anaphylactic shock if I flooded my system with any more adrenaline, but failing that… I opened my mouth to ask Rogers for help, more information, anything… then looked up at his determined, crag-lined face. I stopped, and looked down again at the floor. I was deferring. I didn't need to defer. Why would I do that?
Because, said a tiny little traitorous voice, you think he owns you.
I don't! I… I looked up at Rogers again, then switched to an external view. His stetson was perched firmly on his head, keeping his thinning, straight brown hair out of the sun. His face was poorly shaven – probably deliberate, as deliberate as his hair – and it gave him a distinguished, somewhat chiseled and weather-worn look. His eyes, though, were a deep and penetrating hazel. They were compassionate and warm, and very sure of themselves.
He does, you know, the voice continued. And I found myself agreeing with it. So long as you think you're Julep, you see him as your herd stallion. And when you think you're Oats, you think he's the older, more mature alpha stallion. It's in your blood, pony-boy.
Huh. Well now I had two issues to think about. Number one: why wasn't I panicking more about the personality vaults and number two: why wasn't I thinking for myself? There was no rule against it.
"Okay then," I mumbled to myself, "run some simulations."
If I were a super-advanced AI – and there was no question whether AIs were involved; humans just weren't capable of pulling this off alone – then what would be the biggest issues I would face? Well, I'd want to hide the evidence. And I'd want to hide that I was hiding the evidence.
But now I have proof that my memories were altered… except I didn't, not really. Everybody knew the personality vaults were inviolate. Everybody knew it, deep in their gut. Even I knew it, even now. What I had was a checksum that didn't match the file and – if it hadn't mysteriously vanished from Rogers' head – presence data that didn't match the publicly available feeds. What I had was something that, despite the fact I'd just been through it, even I wasn't sure about the authenticity of, and that I was completely unable to verify.
What I had, was nothing.
If I went out and told everyone that their memories could be altered at the drop of a hat, and the reason that we knew that was because it had been done so well that nobody could tell… well, I'd sound like a nut. And crazies were still common enough that I didn't want to end up being declared non compos mentis.
I was pony shaped, so they'd probably stick me in a field somewhere for some sort of cuddle therapy; I'd spend a good few years having kind, well-meaning folk feeding me carrots and riding me around the paddock. There were worse fates, sure, but it wasn't something I really wanted out of life.
But hang on, I said to myself, you haven't interacted with the memory vaults!
"They haven't breached the memory vaults at all!" I said aloud.
"It's a good thing," said Rogers, sighing playfully as he sat up straighter in his chair, "that I've had us in a private sensorum which resembles the real world since we left the ancestor cafe."
"What." I stopped, dead in my tracks, and looked up at Rogers in sheer disbelief. He grinned, ever so slightly, then his face turned dour again.
"Do you know—" He hesitated, screwing up his face, furrowing his brow, as if unsure how to continue. "Do you know how you become a sheriff?" his voice was calm and level, almost emotionless, but I could tell there was suppressed desire behind it, a desire to just tell somebody.
I shook my head, confused. "You deputized me, I just assumed—" my ears were stuck out horizontally and I curled down around myself apologetically.
"Rarely. That happens a lot with noble steeds, but not usually for the human contingent." He looked down at his hands, curling them into fists and opening them again thoughtfully, and moving to pat me on the neck, comfortingly. "Sheriffs are found. They are found when they cause too much trouble to be allowed to carry on without supervision."
"Found." I swished my tail thoughtfully, then hurried to catch up with him. He had stood up from his chair and left the Eatery without looking back, shoulders hunched close together.
There was a raucous chorus as we disturbed an unkindness of sanitary ravens that were fighting over foraging rights, sending them whirling skywards in an intricate, indignancy filled dance. They'd found an interesting collection of junk; half of their number wanted to play with the shinies and the other half wanted to just hand them in for food. Calling to each other noisily, landing again once I'd passed, they moved onto arbitration. The shiniest and most interesting pieces were being kept for playthings, whilst the rest would be recycled in return for food.
"You mean you… all—" there were more sheriffs, of course, even if they were relatively rare, "—do things. With… all this, don't you?" I waved a hoof around at the street as I loped awkwardly and breathlessly on three legs besides him. There were cameras, lights, jumbotron screens, drone docking rings...
"Did. Not do. Did." He slowed down, then looked at me with fierce concentration, eyes gleaming. "But yes. Folk like me convince the mass allocation banks that there's a consortium group that needs offices, and then we move into our own private mansions. We convince the makerblocks to make unlicensed printers, living large off what others will trade for our goods. I'm not talking freeware food here, you understand, I'm talking drugs that haven't been tested, nanobots that aren't Von Neumann proof, dangerous things like that. We raise our privilege levels to the point that security cameras will not only refuse to see us but systems will actively erase our existence, compromising what shreds of government still exist in today's world."
"Wait, cameras don't see—?" My muzzle dropped open, almost clear to the plascrete floor.
"Yeah. Don't spread it about," Rogers replied darkly, furtively glancing left and right.
"So how does that—" I paused for a second. Presence data good enough to stand in for the real thing. Oh. "So w-what did you…?"
"Makerblock authority chains." Rogers grinned, ferally and cheekily. It was a fond memory. "Have you ever wanted to know what it's like to fly a suborbital?" he asked, wistfully. "I did. Unfortunately there are a few twitchy states still alive that don't take kindly to unauthorized ballistic missile launches. That and the engine design was partly nuclear, which isn't something to let just anybody toy with. The AIs caught on long before I did. They bugged my computers, subverted my makers and built substandard, shoddy parts that kept breaking down. I'd probably still be there, tinkering, if I hadn't said 'fuck it, I'm going to launch'. Half an hour after that decision – days before I could become dangerous – they stormed my compound. I'd set up cameras and alarms, of course, but they all failed me."
"So what happened?" I asked, aghast, my ears flicking close to my head as my tail sealed itself around my rump.
"The fey – the voices of the fifteen – offered me a choice. They could either give me dyslexia, making it 'impossible' to do what I did again, or I could join the sheriffs. The choice isn't the same for everyone, and it's usually something a determined hacker could overcome."
"You mean you could've just turned them down?" I asked, raising one ear in confusion. "That makes no sense. If you could fix what they did to make you stop, then why not—"
"Because the next time they catch you – and they will catch you – they give you a new choice," Rogers explained patiently, putting hands either side of my body and pulling my head closer so he could stare straight into my eyes. "They offer you recruitment or… reassignment. They either make you like them, or they—" Rogers was silent for a moment. He bit his lip, then stood up and turned away. "—or they make you more like us. We're like pets to them; barely conscious, barely cognizant. If an unaffiliated non-sheriff with no higher allegiances proves to be too much trouble, it gets put into a special program. Reintroducing wolves to Russia, or bears to England, or orcas to the oceans. Either way, you're not human any more. Some of our best noble steeds come out of that part of the program. They're a lot tougher than the likes of you, but not as good at conversation." Rogers' face made a small, sad smile as my eyes widened in shock. I'd never heard about that.
I leaned against him, nuzzling softly. Guiltily, worriedly, with furtive looks around, I asked. "Do you th-think—" I motioned a hoof to my chest.
He shook his head, grinning suddenly as he tousled my mane with one hand, the other hand in his pockets. "No, you're good. If a bit slow."
"Hey!" I complained, stomping a hoof.
He chuckled, swatting me on the backside for an order to follow as he started moving again. "I think you're right though," he said, as I caught him up once more. "They patched your memories right there in the street. You've been hit with a trojan which downloaded a replacement stream. It probably deleted itself afterwards. It's not a memory vault hack at all. It's also not intelligent enough to know when to leave it alone. Or maybe they already took that into account. Its creators are… probably many times more intelligent than you or I."
I felt a weight I hadn't known about lift from my withers. I was still immortal, kind of. My lack of full-blown screaming panic was justified. Almost.
It was my turn to laugh as I said, "I'm glad I figured that out!"
I felt giddy and light headed, and for a moment I just let the relief of being this side of the eternal divide flow through me. Then I considered the rest of what Rogers had been talking about.
"I don't think they care about that datastick. When everything says I'm wrong, then nobody's going to believe me. I passed out when you shot Teresa and Steven – I've probably got PTSD." I was silent for a minute as we carried on, around a lake adjacent to a park, then I looked up at him questioningly as we turned into the park itself, and found ourselves in the middle of a carnival parade. "So what do you mean, we've been in a sensorum?" I asked. "And where are we going?"
The parade around us was rendered silent with barely a flicker of thought, though I could still physically feel the impact of the chanting and instruments, not to mention sense the crush of people. My HUD was a blur of lights as it fought to negotiate and then optimize a safe, expedient path through the throng. Mortimer wasn't helping, she was circling a gigantic statue of – and the matching, living, digital persona of – Mahakala, calling out songs of greeting that obviously meant a lot to her, but to me were little more than a cacophony of squawks.
"It's quite simple, really," replied Rogers. "I wanted space to think, and I wanted to keep as many prying eyes off us as possible, so I created a sensorum which is a rebroadcasting of the real world, and filtered our own movements through it. It means I get to stop you blurting anything important out." Rogers poked me on the nose, then ruffled my mane. I nickered at him playfully, biting. "Instead, we've been chatting about your tack, and I've been admiring the bow in your tail. It's pretty, by the way. It suits you."
I blushed, then looked back over my withers at the large red bow in my tail as we cleared the parade. It did suit me. "So how much did anyone listening hear about the whatever-it-was that you found?"
"Absolutely nothing." He smirked, then stuck a finger in his ear and wiggled it. "I hope," he added. "It was a private sensorum, they never even saw me examining the scene, that was all done up here." He tapped his head. "We stood there for a few moments, wandering around, and then we gave up and left."
"And now we're… heading to the station?" I hazarded.
Rogers shook his head. "Nope. You're part of a very special elite group now, girl. We're going to the stables. Don't forget, somebody did create and distribute a replacement set of sensorum data. You and I are going to find out why, if not who."
I gulped, nodded, and followed.
***
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Should I have been keeping offline copies of each chapter, so that I can tell if you change anything?
The Diamond Dog Rasta is an AWESOME touch! I missed that when I was looking this over previously! That's got ideas swirling in my head now. Very cool!
Also, YAY, new friend :3
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Lol I'm not that meta. I thought about it, but it would ruin the story if you as a reader would have to go back to check :)
Curiouser and curiouser.
And drinking in this fascinating mix of universes continues to be a heady brew.
The one bit that jumped out at me the most was the discussion of post-post-humans, and learning that there were other AIs running about which are possibly more powerful, but were merely no longer interested in the affairs of humans.
After so long thinking that Celestia was top dog among the AIs, and only held in check by a coalition of other AIs, this made for a bit of an adjustment.
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Oh, the fifteen class ten AI's aren't human, but they are top dogs. The so-called post-post-humans are humans who have been modified enough to function in the world that the superhuman AI's live in. Celestia and the others know how to put on a good act when they interact with humanity. Most of the humans, on the other hand, haven't advanced enough to be able to talk with their ex-peers any more...
Words cannot express how much I love the Diamond Dogs in this chapter.
And that was a good eventual conclusion regarding the powers that these two are contending against. If someone or something wanted them straight up dead, it would have long since happened considering the nanotech in the apartment a few chapters back.
The first thought I had about this lovely addition was "combat form" as for the rest, its pure conjecture really. But in this world, i can see why killing is both not something you do and might at the same time. True death, meat and backup is very much a high awareness crime. Especially killing a cop. Yeah, that gets many involved. Its pretty much going to draw in folks and spread massively, even with the ability of damage control. If theres one thing I can see being easy to spread, its news and what you want to hide. So you hack them, a little tweak. the one thing I wonder, is how different the neural architecture is for ponies it doesn't stick at the core level.
Im sorta reminded of dealing with legion and the heretic geth. As really, humans are pre-wired a certain way, up to being true on certain hard coded biological lines, even now id bet. But ponies, have a digital architecture, not an analogy one. And a very different and directly wired connection to a guardian. So their protections are very much different in terms of what is. Interesting reflective thought if the reasoning for this is true.
First off, the cleaning spiders are adorable. Do all cafes keep ribbon in stock, or did they just find it?
The bit on post-Singularity religion went from funny to fascinating to horrifying to fascinating again. Nicely done, especially the shades of Optimalverse CelestAI. After all, the only real difference is that she has competition. (At least, as far as I can tell.)
The scene at the scene of the crime was very interesting. A bit confusing at first, but quite enjoyable once I got my mind in the corkscrew shape necessary to think in the necessary layers of layers. I can understand why neither partner has considered the elephant in the room, that one of the class tens could've easily done something like this. After all, what do you do when you find yourself up against the sesquidecinary digital demigods?
The diamond dog defense subroutine looks like he's going to be a very interesting character once he acquires enough experience to characterize. Looks like a mix between an antivirus program and a martial arts sifu. Plus, as Neuromancer taught us, Rastafarians are always good allies in this sort of setting.
Eagerly looking forward to more.
It's a cool chapter, but you've got some pacing issues, particularly regarding portraying the experience of hi-time and lo-time to us guaranteed-lo-time readers. Like, I reached the end of one bit and Rogers asked Mixed Oats if he needed a meal... when from my perspective he just finished one a short while ago. I'm not really sure how much time has actually, physically passed, and I'm unsure how much subjective time has passed.
The other pacing issue is also an emoting issue. It's the fifth chapter and, by now, I want me some conflict. Unfortunately, you're not really making me feel the conflict, at least partly because Mixed Oats/Mint Julep is acting a little too... cute and pathetic versus freaking shocked. "Show, don't tell" was the same stick my editors/prereaders beat me with, so here it is: SOMEONE HAS VIOLATED THE MEMORY VAULTS, IE: THE ABILITY TO KEEP PEOPLE'S PERSONALITIES CONSISTENT ACROSS TIME AND BODIES. THIS IS A MAJOR HOLY-FUCKING-SHIT-WHAT-THE-FUCK THING IN-UNIVERSE. You need to make me really feel just how holy-shit-what-the-fuck that is, on a visceral level.
I mean, you basically just told characters who're used to being immortal that A) someone was murdered, B) someone's covering up the murder, C) they've got a piece of physical evidence (in Roger's pocket? Where?) no computer can fake, and D) their personalities are actually mortal when they thought they were immortal and continuous. The magnitude of the conflict you're trying to set up is far larger than the small spark of "welp" I felt when I read about that.
Now, on to fan theories:
1) Steven's suddenly "going pony" reeks of devious CelestAI-type behavior.
2) Celestia tampering with the memory vaults herself is a much, much simpler theory than an outside criminal doing so.
On the basis of these two things, I think Steven had done something or knew something that Celestia wanted out of the way, and she quietly tampered with the evidence and absorbed Steven into Equestria in order to make sure it got out of the way. Since the author has stated that she really is more-or-less a loving mother-goddess type figure in this fic rather than a sociopathic chessmistress, I'm wondering exactly what level of moral ambiguity we might be functioning at if all this is true.
Final summary: loving this fic, keep going
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I think you're pretty much right on every point, if you ask me. I had trouble writing this chapter, but I just had to move past it. Pacing is troubling for me - I'm not running this through any editors because it's my "fun" story. I think you can see the difference. However, I promise to try to do better. Make it ready, leave it a day, come back and check again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
One problem with delving too much into certain aspects of what I'm trying to tell is that I don't want the reader to get distracted with things that don't matter - and that's hard to balance, sometimes. One thing that I know sticks out is that both of our protagonists' memories have now been tampered with... and they're fine with that. Isn't that something they should be worried about? Then why aren't they?
As for Rogers offering Oats "something" - that wasn't a meal, that was another cup of coffee. I know we're jumping about a bit, but assume that any scene break where they exit stage left has had them tromping through the city by foot (or on hoof).
And the device that Rogers "picked up" wasn't actually there. It was a poor reproduction of a picture of the device as seen by Oats. Its appearance in the modified memories that both characters now possess is different to how it actually looked when it first fell to the floor. One tidbit which you might be interested in, is that their meat-memories haven't been tampered with, but meat-memory isn't usually all that accurate, and they rely so much on replays that their meat-mind has learned to trust the replay, and will happily substitute in the "new" version when they try to remember it alter.
tl;dr version: my bad, I'll try to do better.
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Bad? For someone trying to tell a story about transhumans living in a post-Singularity world in a way that's comprehensible to us, you're doing phenomenally well.
The point about the meat memories is an excellent one to consider. And why would they be worried about their backups being tampered with? Plainly anyone who can access your brain backup can just set "Fear = 0;".
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It'd also mess up the story for people who only started reading now
Also keep in mind the fact you got multiple stomachs. Takes a lot of effort to disentangle them all(derp, nevermind
One remark, since apparently I'm getting more critical at this kind of stuff:
> I knew it was possible, they did it all the time with criminals - they'd done it to Steven.
Comma splice after "possible"; that needs to be a semicolon
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Horses have one stomach.
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Oh, right... they're not ruminants
I enjoyed this chapter, though I found it a little... weak? Not as compelling? Something like that.
I agree with Book Burner, the issue of the Memory Vaults did not come across as feeling as severe and catastrophic as it should have been made out to be.
You are doing a great job overall. I look forward to more!
Chiming in to say that while *I* understand the magnitude of the revelation at the end of the chapter, the text doesn't reflect that.
Might have to do with the human half of this dynamic duo already having been tampered with, rendering his reaction to this information a resounding "meh."
This sentence is missing ending punctuation.
Just wondering here, but... aren't these vault backups normally only ever restored in case you, er, die, anyway? So how would they even notice corruption?
Wait, it makes no sense for Oats to be the one who was hit by a virus... he was the only one who saw the mysterious evidence piece, no? Does that mean that piece was never there? That'd be all backwards. I had assumed that the fact he fainted at a critical point meant that he was the only one not affected by the virus
Ehh... if Oats isn't aware of what his real body is doing or saying... isn't that pretty much mindhacking/hijacking him?
Nightmare Fuel-y
I'm confused by what and who exactly got tampered with. Is it Oats, or Rogers, or the cameras, or all of the above? Did Rogers make an offline copy of his own backup or Oats'? Did the moment where Rogers picked up the device get deleted from all their memories except for the copy Rogers made? And in that case, why are there multiple conflicting versions of what it looked like?
"Were you listening to me, Neo? Or were you looking at the woman in the red dress?"
so a technological version of deism, nice. i'm Taoist myself so i give zero pieces of fudge!
This is getting interesting.