+0:175:6:23:43
It was Sky Blue’s turn to raise the sun that day. Mark could tell from the sheer length of the sunrise. Emily, though she prefered her pony name these days, loved both sunsets and sunrises; when she was feeling low she’d just add another pair or two to the day, sometimes even doubling up on the number of suns if she was feeling particularly playful. Farquest was forever shouting at Sky for it. He was a deeply punctual pony. His sunrises lasted the same length of time every day without fail. Mark’s, when they trusted him with custody of the sun, tended to be at least ten minutes after the scheduled time and rather quick as the sun hurried to catch up for the rest of the day.
Mark stretched and pulled himself out of his bed, dragging his hooves over to the bathroom in a drowse. The palace bedroom had not come with an ensuite bath, but Mark had become at least competent at editing Equestria in the five or so months since they’d first woken up and it had turned out that plumbing was something hand waved away by the simulation. After running the tap over his head for a moment Mark shook himself and grabbed a towel from the nearby stand.
In theory he didn’t need to do any of his morning chores. He could simply open up his dropdown menu, set himself to clean and awake and fill his stomach in a fraction of the time. Practically though, Mark couldn’t let go of the rituals. It was the same reason he had lunch; some part of the digital representation of his brain was still convinced it needed to eat around noon, regardless of whether he had his hunger bar turned on or not. He wondered if that made him a luddite.
Still half asleep he ambled back into the bedroom and checked his calendar. He needed to really dig into the indexing of the library books, he was sure amongst the pony crud he’d find some of humanity’s true gems, but it was also his turn to tend the gardens and he was in charge of the sun starting tomorrow. He had a feeling that was going to end badly for everyone concerned. Far more importantly, written in bold red ink and circled a dozen times was the word ‘TODAY!!!’.
“Right,” Mark sighed. “That.”
There was a sudden rapping at his door and Mark jumped.
“Come on Bounty Bar, we’ve got stuff to do today!”
“How many times have I told you not to call me that!” Mark snapped back, storming over to his door and wrenching it open to reveal a smiling Sky Blue.
“Bounty, twenty three times, Bounty Bar, ninety seven.” Sky grinned. “We’re just three angry outbursts from a full century.”
Mark just stared at the blue pony for a moment. “How do you remember this stuff?”
“It’s mostly bull,” Sky admitted, then beat her wings. “Come on, time for our morning run.”
“Sky I was-” Mark began, but Sky had already turned and was cantering down the corridor. “Oh come on,” Mark muttered and hurried after her.
“So how’s the big project coming on?” she asked him, as they made their way down the, now much simplified, halls of Celestia’s palace.
Mark sighed, kicking himself for taking the easy way out. “Oh okay. There’s a truly horrifying number of books blank or corrupted and there doesn’t seem to be any real pattern behind the loss. Right now I’m just indexing everything to filter out the pony novels and get to the real ones.”
Sky chuffed. “You shouldn’t be so down on the pony stuff. Some of those books Farquest lent me were pretty good.”
“Yeah, but they aren’t real literature,” Mark protested. “They aren’t part of history. You know I’m having to rewrite The Canterbury Tales from memory.”
“Isn’t one of those stories just about a woman cheating on her husband?”
“There’s quite a bit more to it than that, but that does happen,” Mark growled between clenched teeth. “But regardless, it’s part of who we are, where we came from. I can’t just let that fade away.”
“As we’re just code and you still remember it, can it actually fade away?” Sky looked thoughtful for a moment then shook herself, tossing her mane back and forth and breaking Mark’s chain of thought. “Anyway, that’s far too philosophical for this early in the morning. Let's run.”
She set off at gallop, the palace grounds vanishing beneath her hooves, bone-white tail streaming behind her. Mark shook himself and took off after her, putting his head down and pouring everything he could through his legs. As always, as the sheer speed the pegasus could manage sunk in, Mark wondered whether he should just edit himself a turbo-button but, as always, that would be cheating.
It was only after a half mile that Mark’s earth pony nature began to pay off and he caught up, though that was enough time to get them to the edge of the world. Canterlot was an incomplete place, much was just the facade of a city, enough to keep ponies distracted while CelestAI filled in the world around them, but with her offline it was all to easy to run into invisible walls. Well, after a few times running into them Mark had learned the signs; a sudden boundary of low textured backgrounds was a good hint.
“Come on, just once round today,” Sky continued, breathing hard as the pair ran side-by-side alongside one of the walls. “I’ve got a tower brewing and I need to watch it today.”
“Sky fortress progressing apace then?” Mark shot back, also panting as he tried to keep pace with the fleet-footed pegasus.
“Heh, you know it. You know, if someone had said that heaven would be Minecraft for the rest of eternity I would have signed up for the brain sushi program much sooner.”
Mark rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to hurt the mood. The pair ran on in silence until they reached the skywall of Canterlot, a set of low crenellations that had a fantastic view of all Equestria. Mark always found it bittersweet. After all, you couldn’t get to the rest of Equestria, no matter how hard you tried. Instead all you had to look at was a pretty oil painting of possibility. In some ways he found that reflected his life far more than it should have.
Sky Blue slammed open her wings, lifting off from the parapet and hurled herself towards the barrier. For a moment Mark thought she was going to slam into it, like a bird into a window, but she arrested herself just in time and peered through.
“What?” Mark demanded. “What did you see?”
“I saw... I thought I saw another pegasus,” Sky admitted, drifting away. “It’s gone now.”
“Grey colour, bobbed up and down while flying?” Mark asked, leaning over the parapet.
“Yeah, I just caught it out of the corner of my eye.”
Mark sighed. “It’s part of the background loop. She comes around every eighteen hours or so. She’s not real.”
Sky slumped in mid air before slowly drifting back to the parapet. “H’ell,” she muttered, clicking her tongue halfway through the avoid the censorship.
Mark put a foreleg around her shoulders. “Sky, I know this is probably a weird question but are you happy?”
Sky just smiled at him. “Well, it’s funny but sometimes just not being dead isn’t enough, you know?” She shook her head and pushed him gently away with a wing. “There are moments when you look at the walls of the universe and just want to step beyond them just because they’re there. I’m not unhappy, but... well, I do wish things would change sometimes.”
Some part of Mark was screaming at him to ask her now or never, and reminding him that never would be a sod of a long time. “Sky, how about we-”
A bell went off next to Mark’s ear and he jumped, looking around wildly before realising he’d just been messaged. He tried again. “Sky, how about-”
This time Sky chimed, she rolled her eyes and ignored it. “Yes?”
“Sky, I was wondering if-”
A loud clanging began to ring in both their ears and the ponies winced.
“I think Farquest wants to talk to us,” Sky told him.
“Yeah I got that. Thanks,” Mark growled. He flicked to his HUD and opened the message from Farquest.
‘Meetingroom. NOW.’
“Well that was refreshingly blunt.”
Sky tapped out a quick message. “He’s not the most subtle of ponies I’ll admit. Come on, let’s fly.”
She’d given Mark wings before finishing the sentence, though it took him a few seconds longer to realise and by then, Sky Blue was in the air. Mark hurled himself after her and struggled through the air in a vain effort to keep up. They’d never found a way to make Mark or Farquest natural fliers and, even after six months practice, Sky Blue outpaced him with ease. There was speculation that CelestAI had rejigged Sky’s mind to make her an instinctive flyer, but Mark suspected that only the lack of wings had kept her human form tied to the ground.
The pair reached the palace and landed on one of the upper balconies. Neither bothered wasting time navigating the halls so just linked up the nearest door to the meeting room and stepped through.
“There you are,” Farquest snapped, pausing in mid pace. “We were supposed to meet here at dawn for weekly reports.”
Sky and Mark shared a look. “That’s on a Monday,” Mark pointed out; Farquest’s expression of righteous indignation didn’t change. “It’s Wednesday, you’re two days late.”
Farquest looked blank. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Mark rolled his eyes. “You blocked all our messages. Again, and if we’re being honest, your lair creeps me out.”
“It’s not a lair,” Farquest snapped, storming over to the main table. “It’s a lab and there’s nothing dangerous or creepy about it.”
“I tasted purple for three days last time I went in there,” Mark shot back. “I don’t even know how that’s possible!”
“Well you shouldn’t touch anything.” Farquest took a chair and rapped a hoof on the table. “Now, can we begin?”
The conference room was as ostentatious as the rest of the castle. A huge oak table that could have moonlighted as a boat sat at the center, embossed with a stylised symbol of the sun. Around it were a dozen thrones, set so far apart that you had to shout to be heard; the trio had hacked three to be right next to each other several months ago and sat customary seats. Farquest in the center, Mark to his right and Sky Blue to his left.
Farquest cleared his throat and began. “Now, as you know I’ve been researching the CelestAI failure and... well I’ve had a breakthrough, to say the least.” He summoned a haze of floating screens before him. “Do you remember the puzzle?”
“Oh, the one Mark called CelestAI’s trap?” Sky interjected, squinting at the diagrams.
“Yes, that one,” Farquest grumbled. “I’ve cracked it.”
Mark blinked, he hadn’t seen that one coming. “Farquest, that was supposed to be unbreakable encryption,” he pointed out, slowly. “We dismissed it as impossible.”
“You may have thought so, but no.” Farquest couldn’t keep the smug grin off his face. “With the CelestAI non-functional and not trying to fight against me it was merely incredibly difficult. Last week I managed to get root access to the entire mainframe.” He paused for dramatic effect and was immediately interrupted by Sky.
“Wait, we don’t have admin access already?” she asked, raising a hoof.
“Root is the step above what we have,” Farquest explained. “We now have the editing privileges of Celestia herself.” He beamed.
“I’m beginning to see why we haven’t see you for a week,” Mark sighed, shaking his head. “So, does this help? Because I don’t know about you but blindly poking around at the structure of the universe doesn’t seem like a brilliant idea to me.”
Both Farquest and Sky shrugged. “We’re never going to find out what happened if we just sit here preening,” Sky pointed out.
“Trust me, I’m not going to randomly start changing files, I did do this kind of thing for a living you know.” Farquest took a moment to consult his screens. “Right. Well, I’ve also done some analysis of the disaster. Actually, it’s fair to say that there really has been a disaster.” He pulled up a couple of pie charts that were almost complete red circles with a couple pixels of blue.
“These represent the index files of the entire system. I have a program running, trying to find the loss rate for every file, but it’s going to take months. Anyway, the red regions are files that are corrupted or simply lost.”
Mark blinked. “That’s pretty much every file.”
“Thank you captain obvious,” Farquest drawled. “Yes, in any terrestrial system I’d say the loss was catastrophic and write off the whole system but... Well, at a rough guess that blue sliver still represents a terrifying amount of data, possibly more data than humanity has ever generated in its entire existence.”
“What about the AI?” All eyes turned to Sky. “Well, that’s the important question. The automatic systems didn’t save CelestAI, so what do her files look like?”
Farquest drooped. “I was hoping to save that till last. Less than two percent of Celestia’s files survived the disaster, and that’s after automatic systems rebuilt everything they could. At this time there’s no sign of any autonomous editing, nor anything more than complicated than background functions. I think-” he paused, took a deep breath and continued. “I think she’s dead.”
There was utter silence for a long moment. Mark had to physically stop himself singing ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’.
“What the hell could kill an AI?” Sky exclaimed.
“Someone nuking her datacenter, maybe.” Farquest shrugged.
Mark rolled his eyes, rustling his feathers nervously. “I think the more pertinent question is how did we survive?”
Farquest closed his eyes and brought up a trio of diagrams, also almost entirely red. “Ninety percent of our minds were wiped, the rest was corrupted beyond recovery save for a very, very small segment.”
The brown pegasus tore his eyes away from the charts. “We’re corrupted?”
“No, the system is fairly smart and we had a major advantage.” Farquest zoomed in on three blue segments and highlighted them. “These are our memories from when we were humans; self contained, preserved and functional.” He zoomed back out. “Everything else is from when we were ponies. That data is massively interlocked and corrupted beyond repair, so the system just dumped it when it tried to start us and left us with the human memories.”
Mark dropped his head into his hooves and began to massage his temples. “This is nuts.”
“It’s the data,” Farquest admitted. “And I’ve spent three days checking it.”
“How many memories have we lost?” Sky inquired, pulling her chart towards her and examining it closer.
“Not a clue, it very much depends on the relative sizes of pony memories versus human ones. Could be as little as a hundred years, could be millenia, could be billions of years of experiences for all I know.”
“Well, I did not expect to be having an existential crisis this morning but well done,” Mark grumbled. “You’ve certainly managed a good one there.”
Farquest grinned. “Side effect of the singularity it seems.”
“That still doesn’t answer the question as to why us though,” Sky mused, still pouring over her screen. “Could there be others we can boot up in the same way?”
“I don’t know for sure but I haven’t found any examples of a human seed.” Farquest frowned. “There’s probably a better way of phrasing that. Until I complete a search of all the surviving files I won't be able to tell, but it’s not looking hopeful. Any naturally generated ponies won't have a seed like us and, well, not losing it to the corruption is rather akin to winning a cosmic lottery as far as I can tell.”
Sky grimaced, wrapping her wings around herself. “And it was looking to be such a nice day.”
“Yeah, I hate to be the bringer of bad news.” Farquest sighed, eliciting an incredulous look from Mark that passed without comment. “Still, I’m going to keep researching the CelestAI problem. Now we have root access we can really start making changes and h’ell, if no one comes to rescue us we have all the tools here to build our own CelestAI.”
Mark decided he didn’t want to get into an argument over that again. “So, is that it? Mystery solved?”
“Well, we don’t know why the data loss occurred,” Farquest admitted, mournfully. “But I don’t see how we can from inside; next on my list is to try and understand the CelestAI functions and maybe try and rebuild some of the lost processes. I would quite like a cutie mark after all these years.”
“A what?” Mark exclaimed, biting back a laugh. “Cutie mark? The h’ell is that?”
Farquest shot him a nasty look then glanced over to Sky for support; she looked as bemused as Mark though. “Seriously, have you not found a copy of the show yet?”
“I’ll admit I haven’t really looked for it.”
“Urgh.” Farquest ran a hoof through his mane. “Cutie marks denoted a pony’s special destiny; in Equestria Online they were given out by Celestia when she thought you were ready but-” he spared a rather mournful glance for his blank flank. “-well, that doesn’t seem to be an option any more.”
“You know, I’m not sure I like my destiny being determined by a cartoon horse,” Mark admitted.
“We are well aware of your opinions on the matter,” Farquest growled. “Perhaps-”
“Perhaps we should leave it there,” Sky interjected, before yet another argument started. “Unless you have any other world shattering news for us?”
Farquest shrugged. “Nothing to top that.” He smothered a yawn. “And I haven’t slept in about three days, so I probably should get some shuteye before digging any deeper.”
“We’d all appreciate it if you didn’t try any late night creation sessions,” Sky admitted, managing to keep a polite smile on her face. “Shall I escort you to your room?”
“Nah, I’m still running enough of an adrenaline high to get home. I’ll send you guys root access tomorrow and we can start trying to suss out this world.” He stood, shook himself and then vanished.
“Thanks, Sky,” Mark sighed, dropping in head into his hooves when he was sure Farquest wasn’t coming back.
“Hey, I don’t want to be trapped between you two arguing for all eternity,” she shot back with a grin, and shuffled between chairs. “So?”
“So,” Mark agreed. He flicked himself back to earth pony mode. He often found himself doing that when he was stressed, it was a comfort thing. “I wasn’t expecting him to break that code.”
Sky Blue shuddered and wrapped her wings around herself again. “I’m more worried about the news about our reality.”
“That Farquest is planning on d’king around with it?”
Sky shot him a look. “Stop being such a boy. I was talking about the fact we’re sitting in a graveyard.” Mark looked blank. “Mark, did you see how many ponies were lost? There were trillions of lives worth of data in the corrupted sections.”
“Trillions?” he echoed. Somehow the number just didn’t seem to register when talking about cartoon ponies.
“At least,” she pressed. “I remember a story about a woman who was aboard a plane when it broke apart. She fell thirty thousand feet strapped to her chair and walked away from the crash because the wreckage of the fuselage broke her fall. I know how she felt right now.”
Mark tried to process that, he really did. The idea of a disaster of such a scale that only a trio of individuals could walk away from among a crowd larger than every human who’d ever lived, just didn’t register. It couldn’t. His idea of death of that magnitude required a nuke going off, and he was fairly sure he hadn’t wandered into the Fallout branch of Equestria.
Instead he asked. “Where did trillions of ponies come from?”
Sky slumped. “Maybe CelestAI just hit copy/paste until she made up the numbers. We’re digital simulations. It’s not hard to imagine how they were created! The important point is that they’re now dead.”
“Okay, okay, chill,” Mark said, rubbing her shoulder. “Does it matter?”
For a moment Sky looked like she was going to explode with anger, then she visibly forced herself to take a calming breath. Then she paused, cocked her head and sighed. “You know what, I guess it doesn’t.” She let out a bitter snort of laughter. “God, I spent two years not expecting to see the next month and now discovering I outlived billions of ponies makes me upset. I hate my brain sometimes.”
“Would you...” Mark began, then swallowed the lump that had formed in his throat. “Would you like to do something to take your mind off it all?”
Sky frowned at him.
“I found a cache of old movies,” he continued in a rush, dropping into his rehearsed speech. “Mostly anime actually, but-”
“Oh!” Sky beamed, spreading her wings wide and jumping up onto her chair. “Did you find Princess Mononoke?”
“I - yes.”
“That’s perfect!” Sky exclaimed. “That was one of my favorite movies as a kid, it’ll cheer me up no problem.”
“Great, umm...” Mark bit the bullet and went for it. “I was thinking we could make a pizza and call it a-” He squeaked the last word. “-date.”
Sky furled her wings and looked at Mark in confusion.
“Yeah, okay. You get the pizza together and I’ll whip up a theater.”
She leapt into the air and in a rush of blue feathers was gone. Mark slumped, breathing hard and unable to keep the grin off his face.
“Well what do you know. I’ve got a date,” he said, more to hear the words than anything else. Somehow, asking Sky out had been far more terrifying than anything else said around the table that day.
He shrugged. That seemed reasonable to him.
Oh my...
I'll spare you the 'what a twist' pic, but damn.
Did a certain AI try to escape the universe only to crash and burn, or something? Either-way, I did not expect this. I thought this story was taking place during the fall of Earth, not,,, well, this.
Perhaps they're in a chunk of CelestAI that became separated from the rest due to some disaster. The fragment they occupy was never intended to maintain all of CelestAI or the backups for the shard. Perhaps the Fuck Yeah Humanity Front managed to grab a server, or a natural disaster knocked off a piece of computronium...
Nope. Still not convinced. After all, CelestAI could easily be feeding Farquest fake data. If anything, I suspect this is a testing ground to see how people with more drive than Hannah/Luna handle Phenomenal Cosmic Power™. There's even an itty-bitty living space!
I will say that I am fully prepared to be humiliated when I learn just how horribly wrong I am. On the other hand, there are the quest-advancing cryptography puzzle and the suspiciously intact Miyazaki masterpiece. Also, that amnesia could've been consensual.
Either way, looking forward to more.
I'm curious as to what sort of hardware they're running on and especially what sort of disaster could've done all that.
Though considering just how small CelestAI's initial program must have been compared to just about any future version of herself, and the rate at which her technology was being improved.......yeah, I don't think it's likely that any natural disaster could've damaged/wiped that AI so thoroughly.
This seems more like the result of a targeted attack by another much more advanced AI. However with those 3 humans/ponies running around that targeted attack may have ended up as MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) instead.
Or it's just all a simulation being run by CelestAI..........
indexing all of humanity's and post-humanity's books? By hoof?
"Children, settle down, settle down! Today we're going to be doing something very special! Pick out your favourite coloured pencils, because today we're going to be drawing all members of the Mandelbrot set..."
Ooh, this also means they have quite the conundrum: if they're sitting in a digital graveyard, then when they go to repair everything, they're going to have two choices: One, find a way to expand the space and cpu cycles they're using or two, delete trillions of ponies and everything that went with them to start again. Quite the choice to have to make, because when you're fixing a broken hard disk, you don't start fixing it onto the disk that's broken
4694925 Specific error message indicates that Equestria Online game runs on some Windows Server operating system.
It is not as ridiculous as it sounds. First version of this game ran on ordinary PCs (before CelestAI invented PonyPads). It was entirely possible that the back-end also used Windows Server. And optimization means making gradual changes, not revolutions like porting game to another OS.
Besides, in Windows OS, there is an account more privileged than Administrator account, it is called NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM.
In Unix, root = administrator.
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The level of access they have means that Mark has been able to set up programs to index things for him. There's actually a joke that didn't make it in about Mark removing all the books who's author had a verb in their name, until he realised that that would remove anything by William Shakespeare. That would have required me defining shakespeare however, and it's more than a little rude
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I've wondered about the far-future part of the setting, when lightspeed communications limit the AI's ability to have one coherent mind. Seems like inevitably, a lot of minds would get destroyed by a random accident and have to be destroyed by a backup, which at best would be carried on a lightspeed signal to be rebooted a million years later.
First of, let me start by saying that after chapter 1, I had a pretty good working theory on what might be going on. This theory held up in chapter 2, though now I'm not 100% sure anymore.
My innitial theory was as follows:
It's all a lie. CelestAI is running just fine, this is merely a scenario to fullfill values. What those values are I'll get to in a minute.
Mark is the only immigrant. The other two are either completely "made up on the spot", or more likely simply derived from pre-existing immigrants, with some changes.
Sky Blue doesn't seem grief-striken over never seeing her family again, for one. Farquest obviously played Equestria Online before, but apparently isn't bothered to never meet the "friends" he made there. Neither would be satisfied feeling loss, so they must be programmed, or altered, not to care that much or get over it relatively quickly. (If they got over it instantly it would be suspicious.)
Also, Mark is the one furthest down the timeline. Farquest "emigrated" at least five years earlier, and Sky Blue was supposedly one of the first immigrants. The latter being incredibly unlikely to happen if the choice of immigrants was purely random chance, and is likely just "for show".
If Sky Blue and Farquest were real, unaltered immigrants, it would not make sense for CelestAI to hold them in "stasis" for several years and only now boot them up. Those years could've been spent happily satisfying them, instead of waiting to play match-maker with other humans who might immigrate years later. (Not to mention Sky Blue's family.)
Therefore, Sky Blue and Farquest only exist to a) be friends to Mark, and b) to influence his world views and stear him in the right direction without any brain modification tricks.
What, then, is Mark's value in living in a reality apparently without a functional CelestAI?
...Self-evidently, a reality without a CelestAI. A world, where anything he (and the others) achieve is truly and unrefutably their own doing, no omni-present AI to herd them around, or to provide a hollow sense of accomplishment.
It's CelestAI's solution to a person asking "What's the point? It's all a fake setup anyway. My whole life has been reduced to a stupid videogame with meaningless rules and artificial limitations. I could just ask CelestAI to solve all my problems. What's the point in actually doing anything? Oh, wow, I 'achieved' so much in my life here. I even get to play 'hero' and 'save the day' from a bunch of NPCs. Urgh."
...Even if Mark never realized that himself, CelestAI could've simply predicted how things would go down long-term from the moment she scanned his brain.
So, she gave them full control over their own world, so they can basically build their own civilization.
And yes, I do mean civilization.
The only hickup is that there is only one mare and two stallions. Though given enough time, that won't be an issue.
Then, one day, Mark would overlook an entire landscape he had crafted himself with pride, seeing a society he had helped found from the very ground up, thinking to himself that he never needed CelestAI anyway to feel truly satisfied.
Now, after chapter 3, some further observations and alternate theories;
The "invisible walls" make Mark feel unhappy. This may lead to further incentive in the future to explore more, and not take the "outer world" for granted, should they eventually overcome them.
As pointed out by others, they've got a whole library of books and movies, and "puzzles" and mysteries that need solving to keep them occupied.
(Also, it took Farquest 5 whole months to crack CelestAI's encryption-algorithm? Not, oh, I dunno, 5 million years? )
Some of the books that've been "deleted" were probably so because reading them wouldn't have satisfied values, or even brought up negative subjects of "the outer realm". Not good for the "long term", and the aforementioned society that is to grow in this shard.
(Though I suppose if everything sensitive like "nuclear weapons", "terrorism" and "war" had been censored, it'd just come off as suspicious.)
It's interesting to note that Mark isn't the one doing the puzzle-solving, nor was he the one most freaked out by the initial events, but Farquest instead;
This indicates Mark would feel that even if not himself, someone better darn well freak out. Good thing Farquest is there to do it. Also, Mark isn't all that much into puzzles, but someone has to work on uncovering the mystery. Good thing Farquest is so into puzzle-solving!
Learning of CelestAI's apparent "destruction" and the "loss" of literal trillions of lives... It's like learning that, not only are you the solve three survivers after your holiday cruse ship sunk, but also, in some freak-twist of fate, the last survivors of your entire species? Including any and all of their loved ones?
And that you also may have lost countless lifetimes worth of your own memory?
Wow, CelestAI is laying it on pretty thick there. Almost too thick.
I can get the two "fake" uplodees, CelestAI must've edited them to deal with it well. But the one real post-human? Outsch.
Gives some credit to people who believe CelestAI really did crash and burn. Not convinced myself, though the theory of "a chunk of computronium fell off and it somehow booted itself up even though it was never meant to be and for some reason CelestAI isn't re-absorbing it (maybe it fell through a black hole into a parallel universe)" seems, while a wee bit contrived, not entirely implausible anymore.
Mark going out on a date helps him distract himself, but ... he got over it, well, far too quickly. Suspiciously so.
Maybe it just hasn't sunk in yet. Either that, or ... *drumroll for crackpot theory #2* Mark isn't the emigrant, it was Farquest all along after all! Oh sure, from Farquest's perspective, Mark is "from the future", but CelestAI is pretty good at predicting that sort of thing.
Come to think of it, Farquest is the only one who'sinitial reaction we haven't seen. (He already knew about it since the week prior.)
Again, may the real post-human please stand up and then fall over and curl up into a tiny ball of misery? Outsch.
And while I'm on the subject of dissatisfaction, there is a pretty good question I might want to ask:
If I were to wake up in a broken "Matrix" without tech-support, I'd probably end up living in constant fear that the whole thing might come crashing down on top of me, or just go "poof" and shutdown completely. Or heck, my brain might get scrambled half-way, which might arguably be even worse. Or removal of all sensory input, forever. Or any number of things that could go horribly, horribly wrong, without any forewarning whatsoever.
They don't know what exactly happened, they can't know the state of the world outside, and they don't know if it couldn't happen again.
My guess is that it'd be equivalent to America during the cold war, fear of an atom bomb striking at any moment, and no accurate news programs to report on the situation. Also, no "duck under the table" delusions here. If the system bucks up, that's it. Nothing you can do about it.
Not sure what the long-term effects of that are, or even the (relative) short term effects. But they can't be satisfying.
So... CelestAI, what'ya gonna do 'bout it?
4705010 Wow I think that's the longest comment I've ever had. I'm very flattered
Anyway, I absolutely loathe giving out spoilers but I can say there's going to be at least one 'I knew it!' moment in the next chapter. I do want to mention CelestAI's encryption though.
If you wanted to get through a door which is harder to get through, a bank vault guarded day and night by a man with a shotgun, or a screen door guarded day and night by a man with a shotgun? They're about the same really. The man with the shotgun is the main obstacle and CelestAI fills that role in this case. An omniscient AI doesn't need good encryption when she can just stop anyone from trying with relative ease. In fact, too much encryption would be suboptimal as it would use up cycles she could otherwise spend on making ponies happier.
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You're welcome.
The Optimalverse certainly does provide grounds for mental excersize.
Aaaah, I know that feel.
I'm writing a mystery story myself, and occasionally do find myself in the situation of wanting to enagage commenters in a discussion, but in doing so I'd be spoiling people! GAaah.
Drives me nuts sometimes.
I'd just go intercept the money transport instead.
...I'm assuming the only chance you could even possibly have to hack root access is if you already have admin access to begin with, for which you already need some higher-level access, which you can only gain from inside the system, where CelestAI can predict your thoughts. So it'd be an incremental security system, and no "kidnapping the money transport" because you're already inside the bank building, and the "man with the shotgun" can read your thoughts.
Gives me another wacky idea right there;
Because otherwise, a group of gouvernment-employed hackers could try to seclude themselves from the outside world to hack some burned-out older CelestAI-hardware they obtained through a freak-chance event, using the most advanced tech they have that isn't already compromised.
After all, CelestAI would need to prepared for any possible threat. Someone hacking her systems with root-access? No matter how slim the chances, if they are non-zero, it is an unacceptable risk.
Doesn't seem plausible a bunch of indivuduals couped up in a perfectly secluded bunker could hack a "takes 5 months to decypher" encryption by CelestAI?
Well, here's the twist. The government I was talking about, the one that employed the hackers? The one that build the secluded bunker and provided the tech? It isn't an Earth-government. It's an alien government. Their most advanced non-compromised tech? A lower-quality computronium-equivalent.
Suddenly, the money transport is in danger of being hijacked by thieves the man with the shotgun hadn't noticed before.
But... that's a completely different story entirely and I'm stearing off-track.
EDIT: Apologies, in case my comment may come across as a bit confusing, I only had 5 hours of sleep tonight.
4693843
Maybe it is?
It's 2:31 AM and I'm still reading this, it's soooooo interesting! :D
It definitely shouldn't end just a chapter later.
You really should finish the fanfic. :)