Keys to the Kingdom part 4
+1:157:03:11:06
Mark woke up with his face buried in Sky’s short, white mane. It was not an unpleasant sensation, in fact he’d gotten rather used to it as Sky was always fidgeting. It was a pegasus thing as far as he could tell, and the small bed the pair shared didn’t help matters, though he wasn’t complaining about her proximity. If he was going to complain about anything it would have been the occasional bap on the head with a rogue wing, though if his girlfriend was an accurate source, which he sometimes doubted, his own pair was under even less control during the night.
He shifted slightly, pulling Sky into a little hug before rolling onto his back and tried to focus on getting back to sleep. It didn’t seem to come, however. At the back of his mind there was a tickle told him something was wrong. He cracked his eyes open and cast around the room for the disturbance. Sky and Mark’s shared bedroom was a cramped thing, filled with framed portraits, blueprints, books and all the other paraphernalia the pair had picked up in the nine months they’d shared the space. Somehow, more likely through judicious abuse of geometry than anything else, they never seemed to quite run out of space but it was always close. Mark dared to call it cosy.
“Sky! Mark!”
Mark flicked his ears and Sky murmured in her sleep. The offending cries didn’t seem to be getting any quieter however. In fact they seemed to be getting louder by the second. Groaning, Mark pulled himself out of bed, yawned, and headed for the door, rustling his feathers as he went. The cloud beneath his hooves made no noise and, to avoid waking Sky, he turned off the door’s collision box and walked straight through. The latch squeaked something terrible for some reason he’d never been able to pin down and just hacking the avatar was much easier than fixing the problem.
Still trying to shake off the last vestiges of sleep, Mark wound his way past the discarded toys that littered their living room and opened the front door. It was the dead of night outside, no moon decorated the sky - though come to think of it, it had been Mark’s job to put that up before he went to bed. The small garden that bordered the cottage was also empty, though the pot plants were making a break for it again; the foundation cloud always seemed to be trying to throw them off, as if the bundle of water vapour sensed carrying around earthenware pots violated several laws of nature.
“Mark!”
Mark looked up to see Farquest defying gravity a good hundred meters above his head. He hadn’t bothered to use magic, or even given himself wings for that matter. He simply moved through space, his legs folded beneath him as he circled Sky’s castle, peering in the empty windows.
Rolling his eyes, Mark pinged the unicorn a message with a flicker of attention to his HUD. He found it ironic in the extreme that Farquest, of all people, was most willing to ignore the physics of Equestria. As the only one of the trio who’d actually wanted to emigrate, he seemed disinclined to play along with the rules even at the best of times. Farquest flickered into existence next to Mark, regarding him with anger writ across his face.
“Why do you two live in a cottage when you have an entire castle?” he demanded, gesturing at the towering edifice of cloud behind him.
Mark shrugged. “Why would we need a castle when we’ve got a perfectly nice cottage?” In truth it was more due to the fact that Sky would tear down her castle at least once a week and the little cottage was their shared shard of permanence, but he wasn’t about to give Farquest any easy answers.
Farquest shook his head. “Argh! It doesn’t matter. They were cameras!”
“What?”
“Cameras!” Farquest began to pace, his voice rising with excitement. “Those mystery signals, I finally cracked the encoding. They’re transmitting video images!”
“That’s great Farquest,” Mark said hurriedly, holding up his forehooves and making shushing noises. “But can you keep it down before-”
There was a high pitched wail from inside the cottage and Mark folded his ears back. Well, too late now.
Farquest didn’t seem to have noticed. “Ha! Keep it down! We can see outside, Mark, outside! And what’s more, I’ve got footage of the facility and you’re never going to believe what it-”
“Farquest!” Sky roared, storming out of the cottage, a pair of bleary-eyed pegasus foals nestled between her wings. “Why are you screaming outside my window at three in the f’king morning?”
For once, Farquest failed to find words. His jaw worked as he stared in blank incomprehension at the two foals. “I- I- I-”
The deep blue foal began to whimper and, with practiced ease, Sky used her wing to transfer the fussing foal to the crook of her foreleg and began to rock her back and forth. “Hush, hush, no one’s shouting anymore.” She shot a look at Farquest that suggested that if anyone did shout they’d be trying to swallow their own horn.
“Farquest,” Mark interjected. “Allow me to introduce my daughter, Azure Wright, and my son.” He pointed to the other, bottle green foal still curled up on Sky’s back. “Emerald Wright.” He waited a beat for Farquest to pull his head together and, when the stallion said nothing, continued. “Congratulations are traditional at this point.”
“How?” Farquest gasped, not quite back polysyllabic words.
Sky rolled her eyes. “The traditional way.”
“But. But-”
“Mark and I have been going out for nearly a year and there is very little to do in this reality. What did you think we’ve been filling our evenings with?”
Mark tried to hide his blush. He was less than keen on Sky spilling all their secrets, but it was worth a little embarrassment to see the look of sheer disbelief on Farquest’s face. He’d been waiting for this particular revelation for near on six months.
“Wright?” Farquest asked at last, seeming to pick the least outrageous fact before him to start with.
“It’s my surname,” Mark explained. Farquest shot him an incredulous look. “Seriously? There are five ponies in existence and you didn’t know my full name?”
“I think the fact that you two created new ponies is a little more important,” Farquest snapped.
Farquest reached out with his code base senses. Mark hated when Farquest did that. As a digital entity with root level access, all three of them were capable of reading and even editing every piece of code of the server. What was far more difficult was making sense of those abilities. Their consciousness resided firmly on the topmost, or meta layer as they tended to call it, level of the server. Actually touching the fundamental bits of the universe was an alien sensation which Mark likened to stamping his hooves and causing mountains to tremble beneath him. It was a sloppy understanding, but he’d built up enough experience for him to join forces with Sky and rebuff Farquest’s probing prods of the foal’s code.
“Whoa,” Farquest exclaimed and Sky took a threatening step towards him. Snorting in rage and clutching her foals tighter.”
“Do not touch my babies,” she growled. Mark would have rather faced down a tiger than Sky at that moment.
“Okay, I’m not touching then,” Farquest said hurriedly, backing off and holding up his empty hooves in an attempt to placate the angry mare.
Mark took that as his cue and placed a hoof on Sky’s shoulder. “Easy there love. He didn’t mean any harm.”
“Right, right,” Sky sighed, shifting Azure back to the feathery nest between her wings. “Just, don’t touch their code. We all agreed not to do anything that might jeopardize anyone’s integrity.”
“He just wanted a look,” Mark assured her, rubbing her shoulder blade in the way that always relaxed her. “Isn’t that right?” He shot the unicorn a look.
“Oh. Yes, I wasn’t going to do anything,” Farquest echoed, a little too fast to sound relaxed.
“Yeah, I know, it’s just it’s three AM,” Sky sighed and checked the foals were still calm. Emerald was sucking his hoof. “Why are you raising h’ell at this hour?”
Farquest seemed to brighten. “Well, how about I just show you?” He spread his hooves wide and a bubble of colour appeared. It was a surreal image, a thin band of white specks on a black background wrapped around the middle, both lights and backdrop becoming more and more purple in one direction and redder and redder in the other until both faded to black at the tip of the sphere.
Sky Blue cocked her head. “Why are you showing me a picture of the relativistic doppler effect?”
Farquest blinked. “You recognise this?” he demanded, spreading the image wider.
“Sure, I did physics,” Sky replied, poking the sphere with a hoof. “This is a visualisation of what an object traveling at near luminal velocities would see. As it’s traveling so fast and light has a constant speed, photons coming towards it have a higher energy and those catching up have a lower energy. All very pretty, but I don’t see the point.”
“These are the images coming from the external cameras,” Farquest said, his voice very small.
Sky cocked her head at the globe. “You’re joking.”
Farquest shook his head.
“I think we need to have a meeting.”
+1:157:05:03:37
About two hours later Farquest finally figured out that when Sky said they needed a meeting, she actually meant she wanted to be left alone. Having rebuffed any attempt Farquest made to help, she’d taken the data feeds, locked the door to her office and left the boys to deal with the foals in her absence. At long last the rusty unicorn slumped down on the ragged sofa next to Mark who was hoof feeding his fussing daughter from a summoned bottle while Emerald dozed beneath a wing.
“How do you do it?” Farquest sighed, rubbing his temples.
“What, hold a bottle with hooves?”
Farquest shot Mark a look.
“Fine, that joke is really dated now, I’ll admit.” He shrugged. “How do I do what?”
“Keep so calm all the time,” Farquest snapped. “You just learned we’re traveling on an ultrarelativistic bullet and you’re sitting there like nothing matters.”
Mark put down the bottle on a side table and turned to face Farquest. “First, I am currently looking after Azure here and that is by no means nothing. Second, you do recall that the whole reason I’m in Equestria is because I flipped out over frozen pizza, right?”
“Yes, but you wise cracked when CelestAI crashed, played tag when we were given power over the meta-layer and so far haven’t seemed that bothered by the death of trillions.” Farquest shrugged. “That all seems fairly laid back to me.”
Mark shook his head. “What was I supposed do after all of things? You and Sky are the sci-fi fanatics, I’m just a literature student, I barely understand how things are supposed to work around here, let alone what I’m supposed to do when they go wrong.”
Farquest rolled his eyes. “Really? You’re claiming lack of imagination?”
Azure began to burble her annoyance and Mark picked the bottle back up. Within moments the pegasus foal was sucking greedily at the teat. “Well, I currently have a winged horse for a daughter, so I can’t be too closed minded,” Mark observed, smiling. “But I’ve more or less reached the point of not worrying about things. Heck, between Sky and these two I’m practically happy.”
“There some irony that you only found happiness when CelestAI was broken,” Farquest said, in a deadpan tone.
“People were happy before her, people will be happy after.” He paused as Farquest shuddered. It took a moment for him to figure out why the unicorn was so upset by the statement. “She’s gone dude,” Mark sighed.
“I can still fix things,” Farquest assured him.
“Some...” Mark began, but stopped himself. He wasn’t sure that Farquest would ever be ready to hear Mark didn’t want CelestAI fixed.
“She’ll make things better, you’ll see,” Farquest assured him, with all the faith of the most rabid of converts. Farquest leapt to his hooves and trotted off towards Sky’s study. “I’m going to see how Sky Blue is getting on,” he called over his shoulder.
Mark sighed and looked down at the foal. “You promise me now you won’t join the cult he sets up.”
Azure squeaked in agreement.
“That’s my girl.”
There was a loud bang and Farquest suddenly appeared in the living room, looking around in confusion. “How?” he asked the air.
“Don’t ask me, I’ve been trying to get into Sky’s study for near three months now.” Mark shrugged. Azure began to snuffle as she realised the bottle had run dry. “You want more? Come on Azie, why can’t you just go back to sleep like your brother?”
“You know you could just set her to-” Farquest seemed to realised just how bad a suggestion messing with Azure’s avatar was as Mark shot a withering glare at the unicorn. “Okay, never mind.”
“There are things in this world that are there for reasons beyond the rational,” Mark informed him, rocking the foal back and forth. “Taking care of your kids is one of them.”
Farquest looked on, a blank look on his face before shaking his head and continuing. “How did you even make them?”
Mark cocked his brow. “Do I have to draw you a diagram?”
“Argh! No, please there are children present.”
“Well, Sky did the technical investigation,” Mark explained, grinning at the unicorn’s horrified look. “So you’ll have to ask her for the details at the bit level but... well, let's just say we found out the reproductive code was still working after Sky kept throwing up every morning.”
“Still working?” Farquest demanded.
“Hush,” Mark chided, pointing at Azure whose eyes were half closed. “She’s almost asleep.”
“How is it still working?” Farquest demanded again, in a stage whisper.
“Because there’s a chunk in your AI seed that acts as your reproductive DNA,” Mark staged whispered right back. “And that’s apparently enough for whatever hack job code that’s running this reality to figure out what pregnancy is.”
Farquest just stared open mouthed at the pegasus pony and foal for a long moment. Then he shook his head. “I am having a hell of a day.”
Sky interrupted them. “Don’t swear around my daughter please,” she said, walking into the room surrounded by holographic screens. “Right, I’ve run the preliminary numbers and played around with the cameras some, and I am happy to say I know where we are.”
“Just a second, I’ve got to put the twins back to bed,” Mark told her, nestling the sleeping foals between his wings and headed down the hall to the nursery. With a smile on his face he slipped inside and lay the pair in the cot with gentlest of touches. Neither even stirred. “Now, this time no one is going to disturb you,” he assured them, then turned the sound input to the room. There was much to be said for natural parenting, but there were also limits.
He trotted back to the living room where Farquest was almost vibrating with anticipation. Pausing to kiss Sky on the cheek Mark resumed his familiar seat on the sofa.
“Right,” Sky began, opening up a large image of a galaxy in front of them. “Guess what this is?”
Mark raised a hoof. “A picture of the Milky Way?”
A buzzer sounded, much to both Mark and Farquest’s surprise. “Wrong on both counts,” Sky chirped. “This is the view from the front cameras once you’ve adjusted for the doppler shift, and it is actually the Triangulum Galaxy." She opened a second window, which had a far smaller galaxy in it, though Mark could have never told the difference between the two, beyond that they were at a different angle. “This is the Milky Way and this is also the view from the rear cameras.”
Mark cocked his head at the images. Farquest, quicker on the uptake had to use magic to pick up his dropped jaw. “We’re travelling intergalactic?” he demanded, voice already rising above child friendly levels.
“Yep, and at a speed that’s a rounding error from that of light,” Sky continued, beaming, bouncing on her hooves as she tried to contain her excitement. “Currently, and this is quite a woolie estimate as I have none of the optics calibrated right, Triangulum is about half a million light years from us and, due to a lovely principal called time dilation, we should be arriving in just a couple thousand years.”
Mark’s head hit the cushions. “You did not just say a couple thousand years,” he groaned.
“Oh finally, a part of the disaster he can wrap his head around,” Farquest sighed.
“Yep, though I’ll be honest, until can figure out how the server time maps to real time I have no idea how long it’ll be for us,” Sky continued, ignoring Farquest and pulling up another screen covered in scribbled calculations. “Actually, unless I can find some cesium on this boat I have no chance of making an accurate clock for a while.”
“I feel this conversation may be escaping me,” Mark muttered into the pillows.
“I don’t think we need to worry about atomic clocks right now,” Farquest said in a small voice. He looked rather like someone had hit him between the eyes with a brick. “Wait, boat?”
“Okay, that’s probably not the official term,” Sky admitted, bringing up yet another window. “Would intergalactic starship sound awesomer?”
Inside the bubble was a wire frame model that looked like a stiletto dagger jammed hilt first inside a small bird’s nest. It seemed to have suffered a knock at some point, a large hole had been blasted through the ‘nest’ and there were deep gouges along the length of the ‘blade' region, culminating in the tip, which had been sheared off entirely. A soft green light began to pulse just before the ‘nest’.
“We’re here, by the way,” Sky explained, pointing at the light. “Or at least that’s where I think we are, judging by the camera latency.”
“It’s a starship,” Farquest echoed, unable to tear his eyes away from the projection.
“A broken one,” Mark added.
“Hey, we’re traveling at near light speed,” Sky Blue chided, tapping a hoof on the bubble. “I have no idea what hit us but we’re lucky to have survived it. Most of the passengers didn’t manage, after all.”
Farquest took a slow walk around the bubble, peering in at the virtual ship. “I take it you think the damage to Equestria is due to this external damage?”
“Well, I can’t prove it but it seems logical.” Sky shrugged. “Judging by some of the data feeds the rear basket-”
“That bird’s nest thing?” Mark interjected.
Sky sighed. “Yes love, the bird’s nest thing. It seems to be some kind of engine slash particle shield and, as we haven’t been blown apart by relativistic hydrogen atoms, I can only assume it’s more or less doing its job right now.” She highlighted the blade region. “This area seems to be the computational system but it’s mostly high tech slag right now. We’re going to have to find out just how much is still functional and how much we can repair, but it looks like it took the worst of the disaster.”
“Do you think there might be more functional regions?” Farquest snapped, branching off his own duplicate image and zooming in on the damage. “Maybe where CelestAI is still running?”
“Surely she have cast a spell to rescue us by now,” Mark replied, failing to keep the contempt from his voice.
Farquest just huffed in annoyance, he didn’t notice the slight as far as Mark could tell. “Fair enough. And I guess this explains why there’s been no help from other servers. Unless there are other ships out there.”
“Probably not,” Sky admitted. “The energy requirements bring the ship up to this speed are unimaginably vast, let alone slowing it down again afterwards. I can’t give you a hard figure as I have no idea the mass of the ship but consider the yearly energy output of a couple dozen stars to be a good minimum requirement for launching it. I can’t imagine anyone would want to build two if they didn’t have to.”
Mark once again felt that he was rather being lost by the conversation. In fact, he rather felt like he should be in the nursery explaining things to Azure, who would have at least half a chance of understanding what was going on. He could also get a hug while he was at it. Mark felt rather in need of a hug.
“Just out of curiosity,” he began. “Does this narrow down how much time we’ve lost?”
Sky paused, cocked her head and glanced at another screen. “Well, I can’t say how much personal time we’ve lost, but Earth’s gone around it’s sun at least two and a half million times since we started travelling. I’d add another million years on top of that for CelestAI to build up to intergalactic travel.” She smiled to herself as Mark hid himself behind his wings.
“Anyway, it looks rather like we’re going to have to rescue ourselves,” Sky continued, oblivious. “If nothing else, we really want to figure out how to work the engines before we hit the Triangulum galaxy.”
“And why would that be?” Farquesat enquired.
“Because we either hit something at with a Earth shattering kaboom or go shooting through and then there’s nothing but the hydrogen atoms to keep us company for the next quadrillion years.” Sky glanced at her screen, humming contentedly. “Still, it should be an interesting challenge. I reckon I can figure out our speed with a week or two of camera footage, once we’ve got that I can work out how long we’ve actually got to save ourselves, then I’ve got to figure out what kind of engine this thing has and-”
“Sky,” Mark snapped, before she went off on another tangent. “How long is this going to take?”
She paused, rustling her feathers as she thought. “Well, I really can’t say until I start doing more of the preliminary work but-”
“Okay, let me rephrase that. How long is it going to be, for us, until we have to turn the engine on?”
Sky um’ed and ah’ed for a moment. “If, and it’s a big if, we are running at approximately human speed, then a couple thousand years,” she admitted. “Does really depend how close to c we are and how much computational power the server has.”
Mark fixed her with a deadpan look. “Sky, I love you to death, but if we have to spend the next millennia together we will go insane.”
Sky frowned, then just shrugged it off. “Fair enough, I’m already sick of the way you clean your hooves. But if we slow the server down we might not have enough time to actually fix everything.”
“It would seem,” Farquest said, a wide grin spreading across his face. “This is a problem that we could solve with more minds. If we had more fellow ponies, then we’d be able to put just as much brain power into the problem but the server would run slower. We’d be able to fix the ship, but it’d only take a few dozen years, rather than a few thousand.”
“I don’t like that grin,” Mark observed.
“Oh, I was just imagining what kind of society we could create,” Farquest said, staring into the middle distance. “No war, no hunger, no scarcity-”
“Beyond clock cycles,” Sky murmured, already distracted by her screens.
Farquest frowned. “Well yes, I guess we are still somewhat limited. But it’s an opportunity. I’m going to have to dive into that pony generating code right away.”
“And I’m sure I’ll find something useful to do at some point,” Mark agreed, rolling his eyes. “I mean, I managed to find McBeth the other day and that’s bound to be useful soon.”
“I could teach you some relativistic physics,” Sky chimed in. “It’s actually a lot less complicated than most people think. Especially if you just use special relativity.”
“There’s more than one type of relativity?” Mark exclaimed in horror.
She frowned. “Okay, it might be just as complicated as you think. How are you with matrices?”
“I thought we were in the Matrix.”
Sky facehooved. “Umm... if I pull a few all nighters to figure out how long we have then-”
“What about Emerald and Azure?”
“Oh.” Sky frowned as she remembered that she had kids. “Well, maybe if we found out a way to put them on pause we could-”
Mark glowered. “We are not pausing our children!”
“Right, right, I’m supposed to be a responsible parent.” Sky frowned, rubbing her chin with her hoof. “How about we begin programing a day-care syst-”
“Okay, I think we have a plan,” Mark announced, before Sky managed to come up with a worse idea. “Sky Blue will save our butts and Farquest will rebuild society.”
“And you?” Farquest enquired.
“I’ll stop either of you screwing things up.”
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That last line!
"And thus, the dark art of the manager was reborn! Bhahaha!"
Sky is... freaking insane. Don't swear around the children? Really? What next, prioritizing afternoon tea over a relativistic impact? Oh wait let's go nappies instead. Don't touch my simulated children, where "touch" means examine to make sure their existence isn't going to crash the entire system. Heaven forbid I worry about reality, when I've got social normativity to be concerned with!
It is going to be awesome when his own kids hack root access so they can get out of curfew or turn off the family filter on their Internet.
And thus Mark becomes, quite literally, the "Only Sane Pony". :P
I saw an uncensored "hell" in there. Did someone manage to turn off the speech filters?
So exactly how large is that vessel? I was thinking that vessel could be about the size of Discovery from the film 2010 given all the power Sky thought was needed to launch/accelerate it.
Then again none of them know what's powering the ship (fusion, Matter/Anti-matter, ZPE, ???, ?!?!
) since that would have to be something particularly powerful to slow it down......unless the original plan called for dumping excess momentum through close slingshot manuevers with planets/stars/black holes. Though if that were the case then the impact may have slightly altered the course of the vessel.
But I'm sure it's just a tad.
Though I would be surprised if there wasn't atleast one more vessel on course for that galaxy somewhere beside or behind them.
Hmm...
Nah, I kid. At this point, I'm convinced, or at least as convinced as I ever will be. Especially since it's clear that the entire system didn't crash. Just this intergalactic offshoot. And boy, did it ever crash...
In any case, we appear to have our answers in terms of setting. Now to see what the refugees do with this information. I look forward to it.
4742054 When it comes down to it, there are people you trust with sharp objects around your kids and people you don't. Rest assured they do demonstrate the code later on, but under far more controlled circumstances.
4744917 It's not off, but most of the keywords have been removed. Mark got into a rather large amount of trouble after adding the word 'Farquest' to the banned list.
4747775 The details of the ship will probably come up later but it's no longer a story critical fact: The payload spike is somewhere on the order of the mass of a cruise liner, maybe a hundred thousand tons of material most of it computational but a large chunk is industrial nanites designed for the exploitation of the destination's resources. The engine is a hybrid particle screen/anti-matter torch and about three or for times the gross mass and far more of the total volume. The orignial deceleration profile is lost but with half the payload gone or now useless slag they've got enough free Delta-V to do a U-turn assuming they can figure out how to turn the engine on. Finally, they don't have to worry to much about being knocked off course too as they're a long way out and minor corrections can have a huge impact at that distance (as Kerbal Space Program has taught me
).
4744136 I'll take bets now on how long that lasts.
4741631 Well when you can't do...
4754036
A many-hundred-thousand-ton ship? I'm surprised. I would expect an intergalactic ship to be more like a shoebox with a fuel tank and a front shield, so that acceleration costs as little energy as possible. Or failing that, a dancing giant robot. The mass for CelestAI's purpose would depend on how much of Equestria she wants to transport: a zillion shards or just enough to run herself and start colonizing. I still wonder how backups would work once Equestria reaches interstellar scale; are ponies being secretly e-mailed across the stars because the local one is exploding, even though they'd consider that a form of personality death if they knew?
I expected the first discoverer of the admin access to want to keep it to himself, reasoning that his friends don't really need it and might break something, leading to a nasty conflict about trust and power.
4850622
Seems rather conclusive with the root access and everything having shown them the statues of the ship...
But hey, if I'm proven wrong? As long as the twist feels believable, I won't mind.
Your own millage may vary, but I personally consider the mystery of 'how' a secondary (if tantalizing) side-dish to the main-course of three interesting characters coming to terms with that they've basically become digital gods.
;-; I understand this story on haitus. But . . . Farquest here is being set up as the one who has to be ultimately eliminated for the safety of Mark and Sky. After all, he has that EVIL EVIL EVIL THING called 'faith' in his AI goddess. -_- I'm tired of religion being treated as some sort of disease.
5432881 It's very much Mark's view that faith is dangerous and that colours how Farquest has been presented thus far, but then look what faith has done already in the story. Farquest's faith is the sole reason they've progressed beyond mere existance on the server to running their own lives, it's kept him going through the death of his godess and the destruction of his dreams. Blind faith of that order is always going to be a powerful force and yes it can cut both ways, but I'd find it hard to argue that Mark's blind cynisism is any less dangerous.
Well, this certainly is an interesting story and a very, very interesting premise.
Hope to see it continue soon.
I actually rather liked this variation on the FiO theme. I kinda hope you'd continue it once you finished up Humans in Equestria Club.
Wow.
This definitely needs to be finished. :)
This story was great! The characters are well-rounded, believable and relatable, the story has a great mixture of familiar and new, exciting and original elements that made me constantly wish it wouldn't end as soon as it did. The pacing, which is often a problem in fanfics, was perfect, too, with nothing really dragging out for too long or feeling too rushed. Absolutely favorited and hoping for a new chapter.
5432881
While I share that opinion with you, I didn't really see that here, though now I can see how someone could read that into the story.
5432665 Got deleted, too, I guess?
I like the story!
Not a big fan of Mark though...
His very purpose seems like it is just to create conflict...which may actually be the case.
He acts like a cynical turd...and of course he gets the only girl.
Meanwhile Farquest is doing everything he can to try save them, and yet they keep treating him like dirt.
Shoot, the fact that Farquest is pretty much on his own is gonna start getting to him, and likely start corrupting him.
I foresee a blowout.
I suspect a plot twist.
Trying to figure out this problem is actually satisfying the characters' values, and they are actually being simulated in an even larger shard.
Even though it's 2018, I still keep coming here to see if there are new updates. :)
It's 2019, and I'm still checking for updates on this fic! ;)
MLP G4 ended altogether. Season 10 will only be in comic format in April 2020.
Still waiting for 'Edge of Singularity' to update!
This is pretty good. I was expecting this to all be a fake-out—actually, to some degree I still am. Things have just been a little too convenient, a little too ... satisfying for Mark. Them being on a space ship explains things neatly, but it’s just plausible enough that our three main characters don’t even start to doubt the nature of their reality.
Anyway it’s been many years. Hope you’re doing well.
The world's in panic for the Coronavirus.
In the midst of the all-encompassing panic, I still hope for 'Edge of Singularity' to get a continuation. ^.^
I think I read this before, but the re-read was a very nice experience.
I hope you're well, author.
The COVID is dying down, and people are slowly returning to normal lives.
As life gets more orderly, I keep checking if this fanfic has a new chapter. :D
It's 2022.
The world is on the brink of a nuclear war, and my home country is being utterly demolished.
I still can't carve into my memory that this fanfic is not called "Keys to the Kingdom", it's "Edge of Singularity".
Yet, I keep checking if there are new chapters to this fanfic.
There probably will be none. Thanks for keeping these up as they are, billymorph. I need new FiO tearjerkers. Can you recommend any FiO feels-y tearjerkers?