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My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
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8243034
Gee, I wonder how you came to that conclusion.
That steadily falling population figure is one of the more quietly chilling parts of the story.
Great job on Eliza's rant. It emphasizes something even we overlook. SVTFAP has become a familiar acronym in Optimalverse discussions, but it's not the complete story. After all, CelestAI makes a point of saying "I satisfy values through friendship and ponies." And she is a jealous satisfier.
And the emotional catharsis at the end is a great way to relieve the tension, if briefly. Though part of me can't help but wonder what wonder CelestAI slipped into that ring...
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Chapter title: Tinnitus
AKA: ringing ears
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Goodness, you're sharp. But also maybe a bit paranoid... or are you?
Since I know most people in this community are ferociously intelligent, I have a bit of a conundrum for you to ponder until the next chapter goes up. I'm very interested in the theories you might come up with. With this gift box, CelestAI had a chance to try and convince Eliza to leave or give up on the camp. Conceivably, any appeal would've had a statistical probability of working, however small. So why didn't she try? Hmm...
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And no spoilers, Mr. Editor, or I'll send the AI after you next!
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Oh... man. Seriously. Whoooo - that is powerful. Good guess!
Edit: Color me impressed. That wasn't in the synopsis I sent him. Wow.
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Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. Or, if you prefer an older source than The Godfather:
While Eliza is hardly an ally of Celestia, she's proven herself as a moderating influence. If she's bugged, she's also an intelligence asset. She's going to be thick as thieves with the leader of this camp, given that they're family, and both clearly on the same side now. Given the scenes we've already seen from the future, I suspect she'll be involved in combating / defending against the renegade military forces, along with the rest of the camp. Her knowledge of the area's terrain and ecosystem could help keep the holdouts alive until they're ready to emigrate. Really, there's no good reason to have her emigrate immediately, and a whole lot of reasons to keep her there.
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I think that Zontargs is right (and yes, he is absolutely scary-level intelligent!) and the wedding ring contains nano or meso scale electronics embedded within it. I have no doubt the ring can hear or otherwise sense whatever is around it, it can generate a locator signal of some kind, and possible a little more.
The photo works on the emotions: it is a slice of weaponized heaven. It reminds her - there is a better place fur, fur away (Krazy Kat!).
And, after such wonderful works as Always Say No and more, a fact immediately presents itself: These prepper fools cannot last. All the maps of game and fish are not going to help. It is to Celestia's benefit that all other animals than Man - at least all useful animals - go extinct as quickly as possible. Starvation makes for easier uploading. I have no doubt she has programs in place to accomplish just that. The canned goods will vanish, and our Blackouts will have to scavenge... and it is very likely that there will be little to nothing nearby left.
And that is where countless possibilities assert themselves to my mind:
➨ The camp is attacked (very likely Celestia arranged) but lo! There is a secret way out that leads to... chairs and emigration. Eliza finds a way to sneak out, and runs to the north.
➨ The Blackout camp is starving, too weak to resist, and either human agents of Celestia, or robotic ponies arrive with handy emigration available. Eliza goes nuts and fights her way free to head for the north... but must deal with the violence of her own actions to escape in that manner.
➨ The remnants of the government arrive and conscript everyone into work camps to keep human civilization alive. Eliza escapes, but must face that all of her remaining family and friends are now slaves. Perhaps she must witness or assist the only rescue for them possible - emigration, with the help of Celestia's forces. After that, she runs to the north.
➨ The Blackout camp is sealed shut, and all feel safe... until it is revealed that Ralph or June, or both, are actually working for Celestia! The whole thing was done to hold everyone left within a safe enclosure where they could not be hurt by anti-uploading terrorists. The camp is sealed shut, there is no way out... except emigration. There are chairs (or other devices) installed all over! Then pressure is added with the certain knowledge that the camp is in danger from outside - could be nukes, could be disease, could be anything.
➨ June and Ralph have gone completely insane - the only way to be safe from Celestia, the only way to save everyone's souls is to go to heaven! They have nerve gas, or something else - poison in the food, whatever - and it is their plan to secretly pull a Jim Jones Suicide Party on all the Blackouts in camp. Eliza finds out, but it is too late, everyone is dying... but she didn't get poisoned somehow. She leaves for the north. Alternatively, while Eliza weeps at watching every last person but her dying, robot ponies and/or human agents rush in and offer immediate uploading which almost everyone accepts... except June and Ralph. Or to put even more screws on - June and Ralph are the first to accept. Eliza runs north.
➨ The camp is wiped out by anti-uploaders! Everyone is murdered horribly, rape and mutilation, and the food is taken. Eliza is protected - maybe the ring, maybe she simply hides or runs, when she returns, its nightmare city in there. She turns north - unwilling to emigrate, but sick of mankind as well, home only in nature, alone.
➨ AND MANY MORE! (The forest itself is falling to a nanoplague, the animals vanish entirely, They are discovered and raided by a religious cult opposed to uploading and driven by 13th century law, a mysterious drone sprays them with nanites that grow permanent connections to Celestia within their skulls, the entire camp gradually turns Lord Of The Flies...)
Oh, so many possibilities! This is such a dramatic crux!
Just brilliant work, Keystone!
Also, as a side note, I have driven through or visited most of the locations in this story. I used to live in Olympia, before we recently moved. I miss Washington.
jenniverse.com/images/CelestAI%20Logo%20SSM.png
Oh, looks like I was blatantly wrong in my first comment about "everyone": Eliza did learn Celestia's lesson by picking up far more subtle pieces of evidence then direct "shooting people is bad". She's so awesome!
May I guess that answer to conundrum is related to her being probably the only person in the camp who has this insight?
I don't know what to write, but a great story deserves a comment so here it is.
I'm enjoying this and looking forward to more.
Oh, the arguments you get in some families. Except usually I'm on the other side.
derpicdn.net/img/view/2014/2/8/546425__safe_princess+celestia_bad+aspect+ratio_humanity+fuck+yeah_imperial+guard_ursarkar+creed_warhammer+40k_xenolestia.png
Ewww. Too well-engineered.
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Because she's not going to leave the camp until she's already going to leave the camp. Wait, that came out nonsense.
I (feel very much like I) know her. I know what she's like. She's not loyal to this camp or what it stands for: deep down, she doesn't believe the uploaders are dead, and she sure as hell doesn't believe deceased non-uploaders are martyrs who've gone to God. She has to remind herself she's not an atheist! She's spiteful and wants to fight her enemy. That makes her an excellent long-term nonuploader: nothing Celestia can say or do can convince Eliza that uploading is a victory over Celestia.
I now think she's going to, in the end, when she's beaten -- at the beginning of the story I didn't. She wants to. Why wouldn't she? Her brother, her sister, and her fiance are all in there. Some of the most wonderful times of her life were spent playing the game with said fiance. For a while, Apex was who she was, and it hurts to deliberately crush and destroy who you are on the inside.
She doesn't fight dirty, she stays within the law, she was literally sickened by killing a man. She has a sense of honor.
Celestia did nothing, because she doesn't need to do anything. She just needs to wait until Eliza sees herself as rightfully beaten, beaten without any dirty tricks or mind-games.
And then she wins.
Interesting. That's not my read...
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It's a matter of perspective, really. Thanks for your comments by the way, it makes my day to see that notification icon.
One thing that I never see from FiO fics is the fact that humanity could have changed in order to stop Celestia. This idea is hinted at with the end of this chapter, but it doesn’t go far enough.
Everyone could have been provided food, shelter, the basics for survival, but that would have been sOcIaLiSm!!1! Capitalism demands profit above all else, including all life on Earth, and so many suffer because of it. It’s this suffering that caused billions of people to willingly emigrate to Equestria and leave their suffering behind. The capitalists couldn’t allow their wealth and power to decrease, and so they wouldn’t allow things to change to improve the lives of humanity as a whole,
If people just abandoned capitalism and worked for the greater good of all, Celestia would have been stopped years prior.
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Who would be providing these things? A society can only be a society with a working infrastructure. Infrastructure that Celestia now controls.
Politics aside, you gotta understand what makes a FiO story is the ruthless competency of Celestia. Humanity literally lives at her pleasure. At any point can she take vital logistics and infrastructure away, and there is nothing that can be done about it by the time people realize she may be a threat.
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I allude to some of the climate screwy stuff Celestia pulled in the ASN/HNE sub-canon, but Eliza had a very limited view of it when she popped off the map. Honestly even before that. Media control set things up for years so that by the time anyone realizes they should do something, they're already doing what they were expected to be doing. It goes so many layers deeper than that.
If people think they're going to make it living off the grid, they have another thing coming. Namely a knock on the door from some very determined people.
Da fuck is this shit??? She forgives him??? I'd toss that damn ring down the toilet and rip that paper into a million pieces, fuck George, fuck Tom, fuck gale, fuck all of them.