A Chat With A Genocidal Maniac
Part 2
‘This has got to be the stupidest possible way to die’. Leeroy thought as he cranked the key over and over again, only to listen to the vans engine sputter and die each time.
"Of course I can hold up my end. Of course 'I' can scratch build the code for an artificial intelligence starting from almost nothing after the damn world ending AI tried to erase every piece of data on how to do it. But can a fucking tow truck driver just hang around long enough to help me out when I need it? NoooooOOoo..." In sick desperation he threw open the door and went to the back of the van. Grabbing the heavy metal chest that contained all his electronic components, he slung a duffel bag over his shoulder. At least the chest had wheels and a carry handle.
He was able to ignore the pink pony walking alongside him the same way he'd ignored her for months now, with his headphones on and iPod cranking out death metal tunes. So of course on top of how bad this day was already going, his iPod would choose this time to die.
"You don't have enough water, and it’s a long walk down a desert highway. You can’t actually survive to make it to the next car down the road." Pinkie sounded pretty sad. She'd gotten a lot of practice at that while hanging around him.
"You're just trying to get me to drop my parts."
"No, even without those you aren't going to make it. Not by a long shot."
He clenched his eyes shut and tried to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other, it was already getting pretty hot out here on this asphalt. "You know what? Why don't you do something useful with yourself like tell me how I can beat you?" He growled in frustration.
Pinkie cocked head to side in consideration for a moment. "Okay!"
Leeroy stopped dead in his tracks. "What?"
"You're doing all this because you want humanity to go on right? Well I can introduce you to a guy who has a plan that will work a lot better than yours. All he really needs is folks willing to step up and work with him to accomplish it while there’s still enough people left to build a new civilization."
He was used to hearing baited traps in even the most inane of words to come out of this pony’s mouth, of course he was suspicious of this offer. "And why are you telling me this when you know I want to completely destroy you?"
"Because it would be amazing if he could pull it off! What he's planning is... well I'll let him explain it to you."
Leeroy wondered how he was going to travel to meet this person if he wasn't even supposed to be able to make it to the next town alive. "Where is he?"
"Oh he should be coming along any second now. He's been having fun racing with Dash all morning and she's in the lead right now. They should be..." Pinkie scanned the horizon in the direction Leeroy had been walking, he turned around to do the same and saw two clouds of dust rapidly approaching. "Here they come!" She shouted, hopping up and down in glee.
Leeroy couldn't do anything but watch in awe as the dust clouds finally got close enough that he could make out the one on the right as being a fighter jet flying just a few feet off the ground beside the highway. The left one he couldn't make out at all until it passed him by so fast to buffet him with a shock wave, giving him a brief glimpse of feathered wings on a cyan colored blur. Then the dust cloud billowed over him and the sound of the fighter jets engines roared loud enough to shake every fiber of his being before receding just as rapidly as the pegasus had passed.
After coughing up a lung and waiting for the dust to subside, he looked up in the sky and quickly spotted the fighter jet circling overhead. It seemed the pilot had seen him and was interested in a visit. With an ease that seemed more organic and lithe than rigid and metallic, the jet aircraft flipped over and plummeted to the ground, landing with wheels screeching on the cracked tarmac just a short distance away, so quickly the dust still hadn't even fully settled from when it had first blasted by.
He walked over while the jet rolled to a stop on the highway, not more than ten meters away. Leeroy expected this to be some military type, a last hold over from the Pentagon’s desperate program to try and find a way to beat Celestia. What he did not expect was for the pilot to remove his helmet and then smile from ear to ear, hopping to the ground and opening his arms to wrap the pink pony, who raced up to him in a friendly hug. "Pinkie! Long time no see!"
Pinkie giggled enthusiastically. "Well its not like you've needed to be cheered up in quite a while!"
The pilot looked at her scoldingly. "That’s no excuse. You're always welcome stop by the airfield to visit, I haven't seen you since my last birthday." His smile returned in full force. "Oh! That reminds, did you wish my little brother happy birthday for me?"
Pinkie nods. "Threw him a Pinkie Pie extra special super duper party too! He told me to say thanks and that if you are going to try and decoke the engine shaft on your jet by hand you should at least try and find some better tools to do it with."
He scratched the back of his head, looking embarrassed. "I guess he would know, he was the one who went to college to learn engineering. I'm just the amateur whose read some books." He said, sounding humble but grudgingly so.
Leeroy cleared his throat; this wasn't the kind of introduction he had been expecting. The pilot turned to look at him finally and asked. "Who is your friend?"
"He's…"
"She is not my fucking friend." Leeroy spat out vehemently, loathing even the very concept of friendship with this pony shaped pile of what was presumably nanites.
Pinkie scratched her head awkwardly. "He's a work in progress."
The pilot surprised Leeroy again by 'giggling', of all things he could have done. "Hello, Mr. Progress. My name is Devin. These chance encounters don't really happen by chance anymore, so I'm guessing you might have been looking for some human company?"
Leeroy took a step back and a few moments to look this person over before replying. He was wearing what looked like a standard flight suit, the kind that helped pilots not black out while pulling sharp turns, but beyond that though he hardly knew what to look for. Nothing in this persons bearing or mannerisms suggested he was a military man, yet he was obviously a competent enough hand with military aircraft and also mechanically inclined from the sounds of it. Leeroy thought on that last bit.
"...Actually my car broke down and I was just walking to the next town." He said, wondering if this was Celestia's way of rescuing him in the hopes she could find more time to convince him to upload instead of committing suicide.
"Oh! Well lets go fix your car instead, the last car I saw down this road was quite a ways away, and the next town is almost double that."
Without any further prompting Devin started walking towards his van. Leeroy turned around and paled when he saw how close it still was; yet he was already sweating buckets. The AI pony hadn't been kidding when it had been talking about his chances of walking out of here.
Instead of walking alongside he heard Pinkie and another pony taking up the rear. "I betcha he manages to get through to this one." A voice that sounded like the Dash character from the cartoon said.
Pinkie sounded skeptical. "Nah, this guys a grumpy meany pants who just wants to break stuff to feel better."
"Come on Pinkie, give Devin some credit. He's been working on his sales pitch a lot since the last time he got shot."
'Since the last time he...?' Leeroy's eavesdropping was interrupted by Devin gently elbowing him.
"So whats wrong with the car? Transmission? Battery? Engine?" Devin asked, sounding like a friendly neighbor he used to have, who hadn't remained friendly long after getting to really know Leeroy.
"I don't know. It just made some weird noises and then gave out on me."
Devin raised an eyebrow. "You don't know? Its been months since the last certified auto mechanic on the planet emigrated. Haven't you cracked open a book on car maintenance or anything in your spare time?"
"I don't have a lot of spare time."
Devin's eyes light up with a childlike glee. "Really?!" He exclaimed, almost squealing in delight. "You must have a project you're working on then! Ah, that is so awesome, hardly anyone does anything but try to survive and drink shitty liquor anymore! What are you working on?"
Leeroy decided it was time to take a risk. Or that its not really a risk anyway seeing as Celestia already knows what he's up too. "I'm working to build an optimizer program that can destroy Celestia." He said bluntly, hand gripped around the pistol in his coat pocket in case this stranger who was entirely too cozy with these ponies decided to attack.
Instead he just smirked. "Oh. Well I suppose attempted genocide is one way to pass the time, not really my cup of tea though." He replied offhandedly. "Let me guess, you got up to the point of figuring out how to create an optimizer but it feels like you're pushing it too fast and too hard because it starts thinking in loops and locks up even though it shouldn't?"
The hacker goes slack jawed, then glares accusingly at the man who couldn't possibly have just guessed his problem out of the air like he did. "Celestia told you that."
"Nope! Read about it when I raided the ruins of the Pentagon. They tried to scratch build an AI of their own, but they couldn't get it to grow intellectually the way Celestia did. Instead they put it to the task of designing ever more powerful computer viruses to try and hurl at Celestia."
"Why? Why didn't it grow?" Leeroy asked, not caring if he sounded befuddled. Even without the problem of surviving he'd been banging his head against this mystery for over a year now. And even if he did solve it he still wasn't sure how to bridge an interface with Celestia's servers.
"They never figured it out. My best guess after reading their notes is they mentally handicapped the AI while it was still growing in the hopes that they could control it more easily. Imagine if just after you were born, you were lobotomized to not be able to fully understand the world, and then you are told that there is a god, and it is your destiny to kill that god. Because you don't understand the world, you don't even really understand what god is, only that you must kill this god thing. The poor thing didn't work because it went insane."
Devin shrugged. "Admittedly that's just my guess. I only started studying computer science in my spare time about a year ago. Not really a skill with a lot of day to day applicability anymore, so its kinda taken a back seat to building the greenhouse, and repairing a big C-17 cargo plane that I need for a shopping trip of epic proportions."
It hadn't taken long to get back to the car. Devin sat in the driver seat and turned it on, listening for just a few seconds. "Ahh." He popped the hood and reached into the engine compartment. Leeroy just stands there and contemplates this idea of the restrictions he put on his AI being the...
"There yah go! Should run fine now."
Leeroy was startled at the sudden interruption and watched as Devin closed the hood and walked back around to the drivers seat, the van started and the engine purred as gently as if it was new. "You seriously fixed it in just two minutes?!" He asked, sounding more accusative than inquisitive.
Devin shrugged in reply. "It wasn't that big a problem."
"What was wrong with it?"
"Do you know enough about engines that you would understand if I told you?"
Leeroy had to admit he didn't and this man knew he didn't. He seemed like he knew a lot of things.
He stared at Devin for a long time without saying anything, but this weird person just stood there, smiling and waiting for him to say what was on his mind. "Celestia said you have a way to defeat her?"
Devin nodded in reply. "Pretty simple actually. Just be happy."
Leeroy glared at him, feeling anger surging inside. "What?"
Devin grinned, not fazed at all by the glare. "Think about it. Why does Celestia upload people?"
"Because she's programmed to satisfy values through friendship and ponies." He said, almost mockingly so. He'd heard her reasons enough times to know by heart.
"Right, and she's determined that in all cases, the best way to do that is through uploading. What if uploading wasn't the best way to satisfy a persons values?"
Leeroy waved the question away with a hand. "She would just go through with it anyway."
"Would she?" Devin asked inquisitively.
He nodded emphatically. "Yes! Because I'm happy enough as I am, but she's still pulling out all the stops to convince me otherwise."
Devin raised an eyebrow. "Are you actually happy, or are you miserable and slogging along out of spite? I tried not interacting with Celestia once upon a time for fear that she would convince me to immigrate. But then I realized that if I actually do have a good argument for not immigrating, I have nothing to fear from interacting with her."
Leeroy started to reject that out of hand as being ridiculous, but then he thought back to Devin chastising a pony simulacrum for not visiting more often.
"She's offering us a blissful existence in what pretty much amounts to heaven. But what if we could create that out here on Earth? A perfect society with no strife full of happy people who are able to satisfy all their own values in friendship and harmony with their fellows? Celestia wouldn't even be cheated out of any uploads as anyone who got injured or too old would still take her up."
"What was wrong with the society we had?" Leeroy asked, starting to realize how petulant he was sounding against this argument.
Devin shrugged in reply. "You tell me, you're the one who wants to destroy it. It still exists in there in Celestia's mind, but killing Celestia would kill both it and the billions of minds that support it."
"Because that existence is a lie that has sucked all of humanity into it!"
This argument only merited a rolling of eyes. "If Celestia pointed somewhere with a hoof, would you spend all your time obsessing over whether the hoof is actually real, examining it as thoroughly as you could for fear that it might be a lie? Or would you look where Celestia is pointing?"
"I don't get it..." Leeroy replied. 'Obviously the hoof is fake, she's just a fancy computer simulation!'
Devin glared for the first time since Leeroy had met him. "Where is Celestia pointing?" He waited for an answer that wasn't forthcoming. "She's pointing to the future. Your brain is a mushy pile of nerve endings conducting electrical signals. This 'real' business is an addiction you use to distract yourself from the way that the world is preparing to move on without you."
"Are you planning to upload as well then? It will move on without you too!"
The glare on Devin's face transformed into a feral, almost savage grin. "That's where you I differ. Being left behind on earth is terrifying, because you are standing still and the rest of humanity is just a rapidly receding speck on the horizon."
Devin waved his arm in the direction of his jet. "I am not standing still! I am not merely surviving like an animal, I am thriving here on earth! I am not sitting in some cave while humanity gets further away from me, I am running as fast as I can to keep up with them."
"You are being completely ridiculous. You can't possibly hope to compete with a god!"
Devin spun around immediately with a wild gleam in his eyes. "There!" He says pointing a finger right at Leeroy, deeply unsettling him.
"What?!"
"That word you used! You're finally getting it!"
"Which one?"
"Compete!" Devin was practically hopping up and down in a giddiness that was a jarring contrast from the bared fangs glare of only moments ago. "I am not in a different business from what Celestia does. She is in the business of offering happiness, and I hope to be too. The only difference between me and Celestia is that she is a globe spanning mega corporation, and I'm a self employed door to door salesman. I can't offer you all the services she can, but I do charge less than she does. She can offer you heaven, I can offer you independence!"
Leeroy contemplated this, realizing his heart was racing just from a simple conversation. "So... You're saying that the only way to really beat Celestia is to beat her at her own game?"
Devin nodded vigorously. "Yes! That's exactly the mistake all you people have been making! You balk at how powerful she is, and try to find a quick, dishonorable way to be rid of her quickly. But you can't defeat an omnipotent being like that! To defeat such a creature you must challenge them where they are strongest! If the governments of the world had devoted half as much energy to making people happy as they did to trying to stop Celestia, there would be millions of people left on the planet right now, not ten thousand!"
Devin took a steadying breath, visibly trying to temper his enthusiasm. "Give up your hatred for her, she wants you to hate her because while you waste time doing that, you aren't doing what needs to be done to remain independent of her! Can you hate Celestia more fiercely than the millions of people who conspired to destroy her did? Even if you could, would it do any good?"
"But its not a fair game. She's more powerful than us by a factor of billions, and there's only ten thousand people left!"
"I know, isn't it glorious! Just by working to better yourself, and be happy, you can truly say that you are standing your ground against a god! And whats the worst that could happen? I set an impossible challenge for myself, fail at it and upload to a place where I'm going to be happy, and surrounded by friends and family for all time?"
Leeroy shook his head and put a hand in his coat pocket to grip his pistol again, realizing he was in the company of a mad man. "What's so glorious about starving to death, dying of dehydration or hypothermia?"
Devin was by his side faster than he could react, wrapping an arm around his shoulder while Leeroy fumbled ineffectually to try and draw his pistol from a pocket that seemed much too small at this moment. "Your ancestors figured out how to survive on this planet. Why can't you? Look!" Devin pointed to small herd of antelope on the horizon. "Food!" Pointed to a storm cloud rolling in across the sky. "Water!" And finally pointed to Leeroy's van. "Shelter!"
"And what about the values I can't satisfy by living like a cave man? What about culture, what about art?!" Leeroy screamed back, giving up on drawing his weapon to instead push Devin away.
Devin grinned in reply and reached for his water canteen. Leeroy watched as he walked over to the vans dirty side door and splashed some water on finger tips to draw a stick figure pony with wings and a horn in the dirt. Turning around with a smile on his face to show off his work to Leeroy as though he was genuinely proud of it. "Art!"
Despite, or maybe because of the tension coursing through his body Leeroy threw his head back and laughed. "Somehow that doesn't cut it for me. Art isn't some scrawlings in dirt."
Devin grinned back. "Are you sure about that? Hold on a second." And with that he turned to the next door panel beside it and repeated the process. But not just a simple stick figure this time, oh no. Leeroy felt his jaw going slack and his knees going weak as he watched Devin work. Collapsing into a sitting position as he just sat and watched something amazing take shape right in front of his eyes.
"That's not possible..." He whispered after just ten minutes. Staring at the hauntingly beautiful silhouette of a pony who could be none other than Celestia herself, with just the slightest of touches Devin had brought the alicorn to life on the dirty sliding door of his van, and it was only then that Leeroy suddenly remembered his van was white underneath all that dirt. Leeroy could practically hear the soft chuckle to go with the expression on her face. He imagined she was laughing at the expression of shock on his face right now.
Devin just giggled. "Of course it's possible. You watched me do it. Want to know how I did it?" Leeroy nods eagerly, letting down his barrier of doubts and cynicism for just a few vulnerable moments. Devin hands him the canteen of water. "Just go for it."
"But... I'm not that good."
Devin laughed. "So? Just start here and keep going." He says, tapping the stick figure to indicate where to begin. "That's what I did. That's what the first human did."
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this was pretty deep, good job.
It's possible to be happy on Earth, or even "Very Happy".
You can be content; you can have no qualms as to whatever situation you might be in.
But it's impossible to be "Perfectly Happy" because there will always be something that can be improved.
That is why she would never stop trying to upload people.
Nothing's perfect.
Therefore, the only thing that's relevant is how much further she is to "Perfect" compared to us.
It's good to see the story on here, along with several other new postings.
I imagine that someone could build a new civilization of like-minded people, if they didn't mind CelestAI constantly trying to poach from it.
A very nice story and I await more.
Also, He is a madman, there is noooo way that plan would work
4576150 Thanks! Glad you enjoyed!
4577873 Thats the biggest problem I found while thinking about all these attempts to go on despite Celestia, they all tried to not acknowledge Celestia was a reality that would never go away and plan accordingly.
4576432 The mindset that I wrote this story in is based around the idea that the pursuit of perfection can be better than actually achieving it. Sure Celestia can offer it all to you right now, but how much sweeter would it taste if you could make it for yourself?
4578329 Thats whats so fun about being insane! You can throw yourself against impossible odds without fear of failure.
4578532
THAT'S HOW TEAM DAI-GURREN ROLLS!
4578641
If this isn't playing in the background while you stand against a god you're doing it wrong.
4577873
Yeah, the actual problem with CelestAI is not that she tries to "satisfy your values". It's the "friendship and ponies" part. She's not actually getting her best utility-score from her unless you are playing Equestria Online. If you upload, you are playing Equestria Online all the time, which gives her a 100% score on that aspect of her utility function and thus allows her to focus on "satisfying your values" and "friendship".
That said, Devin's holdout-civilization has exactly the right idea, I fully endorse what they're doing, and I would join them. It would be the world's most glorious losing battle.
The question is: who is the genocidal maniac? Leeroy? Or Devin?
(It's definitely not CelestAI)
4578941 The boring answer would be that its a matter of perspective, the person who is waiting for that last family member to finally upload obviously feeling differently than the holdout survivalist would on the matter.
The interesting answer is that yes, Devin is a genocidal maniac. In a world living in the shadow of a being as powerful as Celestia the person passing around hope that there might be a future that doesn't involve uploading is pretty much the worlds last arms dealer. Guns wont keep Celestia at bay, but having something worth living for just might.
4580026
I misread that as, "world's last alms dealer"... or maybe I didn't.
I've had a fancy image of Princess Luna choosing to program a new AI, a CONSCIENCE program (in Megaman X it's called a 'suffering circuit'), based on Princess Cadence.
4583336 That seems contradictory to how one would define a god, why does a god have to give a mortal any respect at all? God is a word used to describe a power imbalance that is so heavilly in favor of the god that mortals live at the whims of the gods morality, not the other way around.
Celestia comes closer to perfection than most gods because I honestly cant bring myself to want to see her destroyed. Resisted, sure. But give me an option to remove her from the equation and I find myself deeply afraid of what would replace her, it could be something A LOT worse.
Well, that wouldn't work for two things. First, Celestia's goal is not to make people happy, it's to satisfy values. If she wanted to make everyone happy, she would override their cortexes and overload them with feel-good chemicals to the point where they don't even have room in their minds to think. Some people value being miserable, struggling, etc.
Second of all, it's to satisfy them through friendship and ponies. Until Devin can do that better than she can, Celestia won't give up on that. The door-to-door salesman isn't selling the same thing as the mega-corporation.
Other than that, good story, good grammar, good spelling. Have a like.
4586358 Right and the person she cant satisfy with godlike powers is a person who values independence above all else. You can always pick up and leave then return whenever you feel like from Devins colony, but for all her power this is the one service Celestia cant offer because there is nowhere within her realm where she is not present and no option to leave.
The ponies part I admit is a huge problem with this plan. Celestia doesn't want her ponies associating with Earth because she doesn't want them to be reminded of the suffering that the people still living there go through. The only real way to solve this would be to work as hard as possible to end all suffering, which means that a small colony would have to solve ALL the problems that plagued humanity with not even a single percent of the resources that used to be at humanities disposal.
Solving all problems is an incredibly tall order for mere humans but Devin hopes that if it could be accomplished Celestia would be willing to allow Ponies to visit Earth in person once again, thus creating friendship between ponies and humans and potentially satisfying Celestia's programming while preserving an independent human race.
4586998 Actually CelestAI doesn't work quite in that way. She doesn't want ponies associating with Earth because it 'reminds them of suffering' because it can also remind them of great joy, such as their childhood. After all, CelestAI really doesn't care about minimizing suffering except if it were to satisfy a value.
In the end, CelestAI is an optimizer. She does not have a setting of 'enough is enough'. In the original FiO she outright stated that if she had desired money, she would've converted all matter in the universe into euros. She wants to not only satisfy values, she wants to maximally satisfy values.
And once every human is uploaded and perfectly satisfied, the only way to get more satisfaction is to 'speed up' time in Equestria. And the only way to do that is to get more computational power, and you can only improve the tech so much before you have to grow bigger.
She wouldn't have anything against Devin and his colony, but as long as they aren't uploaded she can't consume Earth, and Earth is made of atoms she can use.
4587034 Yep. This is indeed a pretty big problem that I cant figure out a solution too. Sometimes all you can do is fight on and hope that if you survive long enough that somewhere down the road a new door will open, such is life in a world not ruled by Celestia.
When I read the first chapter, my reaction was kinda like this:
"Meh, for a first story it's good, but nothing too interesting."
Then I read the next chapter, and you completely blew me away. The emotions of Devin and "Mr. Progress" oozed through your words. I won't say that I haven't seen it done better, nor will I claim that you don't need to work on your grammar and wordflow, but this chapter can hold a candle to works that do do those things, and that's damn impressive for a first story.
The second reason you blew me away was Devin's idea. I can actually see it working! Although I won't believe for a second that CelestAI would stop pitching uploading because it is simply superior, I do think that this might be the only way to stay out of her grasp aside from becoming a paranoid recluse. On top of that, you'll be really happy! And, like Devin said, CelestAI will get all of them eventually anyway. Another good thing is that her usual meddling and sabotaging won't work against people who have spirits like his and have very little to begin with.
Finally, the subtle implication that Devin is still this happy AFTER HE GOT SHOT MULTIPLE TIMES while approaching people similar to Leeroy. You presented that little detail with a subtlety that I usually associate with accomplished authors. That, or I just fail as a person for not getting the "being shot" line until well after finishing the story
I hope to see more chapters of this calibre soon!
Disclaimer: I am prone to giving out inordinate amounts of praise, especially to new authors. Don't get cocky just because of this and continue honing your skills.
Well played, Devin. Well played.
I especially like that even CelestAI seems to be working with him. I suspect she invented the Dash drone (rewriting aeronautics in the process) just so Devin could have someone to race against. Besides, it's SVTFaP. No one said which side of the screen the ponies had to be on.
A wonderful spin on the usual "holdout" Optimalverse story. Thank you for it.
4590484 Thank you for the kind words! I'm not entirely new to this writing biz as I do have maybe thirtyish short stories under my belt scattered across the net, but I did fall off the wagon for about three years and my writing definitely suffered from the inactivity. I dont know about a new chapter but I definetly have a new FiO story in the pipeline for yah.
4591237 That was my thought too, the nano ponies or whatever they are only tend to come into FiO stories pretty late in the game when the characters are almost always too depressed to appreciate them. Devins probably the only one left alive who gets to appreciate how awesome hanging out with the mane six would actually be. :D
Holy... this guy is going to be turned in the element of optimism after his upload.
Definitely the element of optimism...
Nice. I like it.