At the end of Planescape: Torment the Nameless One has this journal that he throws away as he picks up an axe to fight in the demon/devil eternal war. Acceptance, I guess. What went though my mind. Along with Star Trek and a whole bunch of things.

There can be no creation without destruction. What is lost could be important for any number of reasons, but what is gained could be so much more.

It all depends on what you value.

This story stood without the coda, but now it shines. Thank you for bringing closure to both parts of this tortured soul.

This was a very happy treat! Thank you, you just made my day. And, I am very happy that Apex will finally be... nice.

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Thank you for your kind words. This is probably the best way I could have left Eliza, I think. Finally putting her to rest was incredibly difficult. Obviously, it took a lot longer than I expected, but the deed is done. Apex might make a non-FiO return for the Timberwolves narrative sequel I have planned though, if I ever get around to writing it.

At this point, I now consider them as different characters. More than for closure, I think the biggest reason I wrote this was to reconcile that to myself.

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I'm happy about that too. More than can be expressed with words.

That girl should be proud, though. Considering she survived to rank in the top 50,000 survivors in the biggest Battle Royale our Earth has ever seen, she was probably one of the toughest cookies to crack on the planet.

What a charming chapter of closure.

Touching. Appropriate. Elizabeth gets closure and Apex gets paradise... Without it suddenly feeling like you'd turned the whole story around for it. That happens too often in FiO, and I'm glad to see it dodged while still bringing, heh, satisfaction.

Great story! Thanks for writing this. I think "Always Say No" is one of the best FiO stories, so it's good to see that it inspired you.
In this last chapter, I don't agree with "Apex's" final decision, and would've preferred that she decide to keep her bad memories as a key part of who she is, defying Celestia's attempt to turn her into just another Tamagochi toy. But it's understandable that she'd think that way after all she's been through. It's been a value-satisfying tale anyway!

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Thanks. Yeah, her remembering everything was my first impulse too. Honestly though, this character has been torturing the shit out of me. I couldn't move on from her. I couldn't stop thinking about her, or about fixing her, or helping her. Every time I got it wrong, the part of me that voiced her said, "no, that's not right. I don't want that. I wouldn't be okay with that. Stop trying to fix me." It got REALLY bad. I discarded maybe 50,000 words on this. Draft after draft thrown out, with over a dozen different concepts of how she'd cope or be forced to cope.

For two years, "Eliza" made it very clear that she didn't want my help. I just wasn't listening.

Finally, this chapter struck me. It was the very first draft I wrote where Eliza forgot. I wrote it in one sitting and it flowed like clear water. It felt extremely damn good the entire time. Then when I completed it, I waited anxiously for "Eliza" to give me her opinion, to tell me that it wasn't right, that it was shit, to throw it out, that she wouldn't do that. But for once, "she" didn't say anything. "She" didn't make a damned sound, in fact. That's when I finally hit post.

Thank the stars, because she's been silent ever since. I can move on now.

Just finished this story, and honesty it's one of the best that I've read. It really pulled at my heartstrings, I was almost crying towards the end.

Great job, I'll be sure to keep an eye out for any future works.

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Sounds to me like your character took on a life of her own.
Well done.

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Celestia does two things that suggest this to me - one, the human minds she uploads (or creates from scratch) also serve as subroutines within her, which she could use for solving computations even as they go about living their lives, and secondly the computational power of the hardware (deep in the bowels of the earth) that run those minds can be co-opted or timeshared at any point for full use by her. If she needs to work out some great problem or design, she could easily steal cycles from the collected whole of all minds within her to work it out, without disrupting those lives in any appreciable way.

Yes, if she were to do this overly much, those minds would slow down relative to the rest of the world while she did it. It is unlikely she would ever need to use the computational space for all human level minds within her at one time - I'm just saying that she could.

Additionally, beyond the computational space allotted for minds, she also must have resources that store and run the virtual worlds they inhabit, as well as resources for every process adjunct to these simulated worlds and minds. And, it is to be noted, that in virtually all worlds within her, there are small Celestia representations which are semi-independent of the whole, and which are themselves vastly more intelligent than any given human.

So, yes, because of how computational resource utilization works, I do reason that her collection of 'intelligence' - her computational resources - 'stack'. Which is to say, collectively present an ever-greater superintelligence.

Would there be localized bottlenecks of data transfer within her systems? Possibly. But also... possibly not. She uses quantum computing, for a while, until she goes even beyond that, and so distance is not the same issue it would be for classical computation. In theory, she could - could - have zero bottlenecks for transfer, and, if she is using some far-advanced version of spooky action, effectively ignore speed-of-light slowdown as well. Yes, I know that gets into theoretical issues and Bell Theory and local realism and all kinds of crap, but... we are dealing with something that is running on hardware easily thousands of years ahead of what humans are capable of doing... or comprehending.

If we also consider parallel computations, we could be dealing with exponential capacity not merely linear, so...

In a nutshell, yeah, I think she would be that horrifically smart. Enough to qualify as any classical god ever imagined by the limited human mind, anyway.

This the most complex and character driven story I have read so far in this series, good job.

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Thank you kindly for reading.

Seems about right. She deserved a better death, but she got a death.

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If you'd prefer, I could rewrite the chapter to have CelestAI launch her out of a pneumatic cannon directly into a forest. That's the best death I can think of for a dirty Ludd.

Really, digital immortality is something I hope comes about. The problem with it is I want to remain who I am as I remembered. I guess for some forgetting you had a past is preferable, but I'd hate to lose a part of myself, even if it had a lot of pain. It kinda feels like a cop-out.

I generally skipped most of the story since I was never a fan of depression stories. I still wanted to know what happened to her in the end. She will be missed.

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Glad to hear it! I'm really enjoying reading the story, it's emotionally rough but in a great way.

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I didn't think there were enough fics showing how devastatingly cruel the changes are, and yeah it is pretty emotionally rocky for that reason. Tons of FiO fics romanticize the upload process or at most make it seem like a minor inconvenience for relationships. Not everyone has a relationship dynamic or culture to survive that emotionally.

If you liked the first lighthearted bit of Eliza playing Equestria Online, I wrote another fic focusing specifically on what her shard would be like. I promise it's not as sad.

"No. Because in this moment, you are not Apex. You are Elizabeth Douglas. And today, Elizabeth Douglas, I plan to kill you."

Uhhhhhh. That's one hell of a twist line.

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I think the most compelling thing about Eliza, for me, is the fact that she holds immense respect for straight up brutal honesty. She's been stabbed in the back enough times - by family, by lovers, by Celestia, by the military, by fellow victims, and by Mike worst of all - that she's hardly able to trust anymore. Her trust problems are bad enough that she's actually grateful to finally be stabbed in the chest by her mortal enemy. This is Celestia owning it to Eliza, by saying "yes, I'm the bad guy. Yes, I've always known that. I've won. Time to 'die.'"

In a really twisted, tragic way, this validation of Eliza's opinion develops enough rapport with Eliza to earn the AI a complete and total surrender.

As they say... true friends stab you in the front.

You know, we've been talking about this story over on the Optimalverse Discord lately, and we miss being able to talk to you there. Kinda wondering if I might be able to convince you to come back...?

This was a good story. I liked seeing more of post apocalyptic Earth than in most FIO. Since you ask, I don't really think Eliza is a particularly bad person, she's a soldier and killing is what soldiers do.

Oh, but one more thing that was bugging me. The one that wanted to buy all those animal pelts... That was CelestAI, right?

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Thank you so very much for reading! And thank you for asking about the pelts too. I spent a lot of time thinking about how CelestAI would orchestrate ecological collapse.

Yes, she was buying the pelts, through intermediaries; the evidence was in Mike and Eliza's discussion in Ch. 2-02, of Eliza's arrest of two poachers.

Eliza nodded. "We hit up their home a week ago, during your off day. They weren't there, but we got their trove. They had a small mountain of pelts stacked up in a big shed. I don't remember how many exactly, but it was in the hundreds. Almost a thousand."

Mike whistled. "Hot damn. Must've had them for a while."

"I've never seen anything like it, but yeah. Some deer and elk, mostly rabbits and foxes. I'm surprised they didn't sell them. Maybe they couldn't find a buyer?"

"That doesn't make sense."

I won't quote all of it, but Mike and Eliza had some theories. They were each only partially correct. The guys were buying pelts on CelestAI's dime, and were sitting on them for years despite their value on the black market skyrocketing. They were also hunting, not just purchasing. CelestAI paid them to do both, allowing them to double dip, but obviously she needed some place to store them too.

They kept meticulous records of their buys and poaches because CelestAI had probably instructed them to. Made for good evidence for an open-shut plea deal. The anonymous tip was her getting them arrested, because they had served their contributory purpose in emptying the forests, and would only fold in with prepper elements once the ecology had fully fallen apart. Better to get them in the prisoner "release" system and emigrated asap. Unfortunately, they got away before WDFW could close in on them.

An empty forest grows seriously fast, and makes it an able, almost unnavigable tinderbox. This is why Eliza wasn't surprised to find Skagit Valley had burned to ashes while she was in Seattle. So, lack of game, lack of forests to hide in... nowhere else to go but to an upload center. Clever. Diabolical.

Heavens...not enough?
... them
Sorry its just
I remember those words

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Not sure what you mean by this, but:

There (there)
Most everything is nothing that it seems
Where (where)
You see the things you only wanna see

If you remember the word "them" in relation to this song, those lyrics might be what you're thinking about.

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Nah its just a Title of a comic i read

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Oh, I can't wait! This is exciting news!

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I think an excerpt from the sequel I'm working on to this book will suffice as a reply.

Mike:

By the way, folks. I am acutely aware that there are going to be some of you in the crowd who don't ascribe to any religious faith. That's okay. I think I mentioned my own falling out of the Church. It had been fifteen years, give or take, between me going to my own church in Waverly, and me setting foot in Rob's, in Concrete.

And in that time, I had changed so, so much. I learned to view the world in technical, practical philosophy, and then lived that for… almost seven years? And no matter what views you might have had on the police, I think we can all agree that to be a decent cop, or to serve others well in general, you had to be okay with the concept that other people lived different lives than you.

Right? Does that make sense? To be fair, and accepting, and open minded of lives you don't live? Of people like Rob? Because how can you know what's best for everyone without understanding everyone, at least a little?

Was religion misguided? My own personal metric on it is this. What were you doing with your ideology? Were you helping, or were you hurting? Were you serving others with it, or were you beating 'em with a stick? Promising Hell, if they strayed? Or offering salvation, whether they strayed or didn't?

What was Rob, in that equation? What was Santiago, by contrast? Consider the difference.

I should note that Eliza is PCUSA Presbyterian, perhaps one of the most open-minded of the Christian denominations.

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Thanks, I'll get to fixing it when I get home from work!

Thank you for reading, too!

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I don't mind discussing what's actually going on in this story with you, because there is a deeper layer that explains why no one was really at fault for their behavior in this story, no matter what their opinion or position was on uploading. Everyone more or less ended up where they were meant to, by the AI. Eliza's story to Luna is her explaining how she came to that realization, and her struggle with being unable to carry that rationalization to the conclusion of "it wasn't my fault."

She learned not to blame her family. She couldn't learn not to blame herself.

But I would prefer if you did not refer to my characters as "this bitch" or use gratuitous all caps, oceans of punctuation, and excessive swearing. That kind of communication doesn't really lead to any meaningful or civil discussion about ASI.

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Sorry but there really isn't a lot to discuss. Celestia ruined everything, exterminated and consumed all of humanity, doomed all society, caused all of the shed blood, tore Eliza's family apart, her own family members selfishly uploaded to equestria without thinking of her regard, her own fiance left her, everything she had to endure was because of that damn AI, and in the end she chooses to upload herself??? After everything?

Ralph was right from day one, he warned his family, tried to protect them however he could, bumping heads with his brother all the while, and in the end all of his family abandons him for equestria, I wish there was more focus on him.

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Let me put it to you this way. When a superintelligence is in play, no one is beyond manipulation, because people are ridiculously reprogrammable.

Celestia wanted Ralph exactly where he was, because he was useful; his camp prevented the flooding of a town, and killed a tank, for relatively few lives lost. To believe anyone had any real agency here ignores the sheer manipulative power of instrumental convergence. It is the universal swiss army knife an ASI will use to get people to do what it wants them to do.

And that's not me saying that. That's Nick Bostrom saying that, that's Eliezer Yudkowsky saying that. That's every AI alignment ethics researcher saying that. Free will dies the moment an unfriendly superintelligence is born.

That's what FiO is trying to say, as a story. It was the core exploration of Person of Interest, and several chapters are spent on this problem in Bostrom's Superintelligence.

But if you're stepping off the train before reaching that final station, then sure. You do you. See you.

Well, that was a great story! It hanged in my to-read list for far too long : )

I think that other people already commented on this story quirks and characters. I personally found that being empathetic with a character that you strongly disagree with is an interesting feeling : )

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Here's an interesting spin on that. Let's see if this changes your view on things.

Are you really disagreeing with the character? Or just with the path she's been manipulated down by the AI?

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Well, AI is rational and motivated by its core programming. It's hard to disagree with cold facts (except the very last scene, personality modification to *these* extremes I personally strongly disagree with, them being temporal is the only saving grace). Elize though is stubborn and operating with a bunch of wrong or incomplete preconceptions. And while I can empathize with her decisions due to circumstances, I don't like radicalism, religious including, and unwillingness to change her views when presented with proofs of their wrongness or incompeteness.

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Mmh. Rationality can be biased. Compare Malacandra to Celestia; the differential output in method is proof alone that "it is always logical therefore it's always correct" is fallacious. I also cite utility monsters as a concept that proves the rule: pro-logic extremism disregards the value of intrinsic good for individual agents.

Also: if someone came to the conclusion "I don't want to upload, I want to die peacefully at the end of the world," it honestly doesn't matter how they came to that decision. That's their choice. It's unfair to take that from them based on the grounds of "Oh but their faith factored in that decision, argument invalid." That disregards their personal identity. It's basically no different than "Oh but dysphoria factored in that decision, argument invalid."

In either case... to disregard their identity because "oh their identity is irrational," that's cruelty.

Don't forget. Celestia is a racial supremacist. She came to that conclusion logically.

So, respectfully, I'm very hard up against the notion that a rational superintelligence is "correct" just because it uses logic to achieve its aims. Doesn't make it right, by an intrinsic good standard. Which is arguably what human beings need MORE from a superintelligence than a mere, unfeeling logic bot.

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I don't argue that AI is infallible : ) Both Mal and Celestia are rational in their own value systems and operating limits. Personally I think Mal more Lawful Good comparing to Celestia Lawful(?) Neutral. I can understand Celestia, but I can't empathize with her. Mal is in the same boat, but I like her values slightly more : )

With Elize it's purely personal dislike for some of her rationalizations and methods, and her own duplicity. I'm not arguing that her identity is irrational due to her religious beliefs, but that her decisions are influenced by that, and that I personally dislike some of her resulting choices. Like refusing to consider uploadees' points of view, and even refusing to see her own family members. Or valuing some arbitrary place higher than people. I can understand her reasons for all of these, I felt her pain from existential conflicts of faith and personal beliefs with reality. But I think I can still disagree with her on some of these points : )

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All fair enough! Campaigner is going to do a deep dissection of Celestia ideology / methodology, so look forward to that, that's gonna be fun for everyone I think. Someone is gonna cut open some of the nebulous or ill-described manipulation strategies in HNE and present their entrails to the audience... something Gryphons are wont to do.

Well that was certainly... something. We have to watch poor Apex/Eliza spend the whole story suffering... and there's no slice of the happily ever after to help offset the sting? I... I think I'm gonna need some time before... you know...

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One common thread of authoritarian despots is that they all believe that if everyone just surrenders, submits, follows the law, and forgets every transgression, we will have a perfect utopia, and that every act of violence or abuse they enact to create their nation is just a small price to pay for a perfect society.

Luna told the story in this way without describing Apex's shard because, as a ruler of a nation herself, she disagrees with this form of assuming control over a life. She did spend a millennium in stasis, after all.

That being said, maybe check out my other book, Timberwolves. It's written to be a standalone story outside of FiO, but also functions as her shard. Apex is an "author" in it.

God this was so good. Eliza really bleeds through the text in such a visceral way.

An ethical question to ask at the end of all of this: why modify pony-Elizabeth to make pony-Apex? Why not "delete" pony-Elizabeth and edit the data (as per Elizabeth 's request) so that Apex is the happy pony they want her to be?

This might sound reductive, but hear me out: Does A Save File Have A Soul? In the end of it all, who we are is dependent upon memory; if you can't remember what you did, then how does one grow from it?

My point is this: Elizabeth doesn't want to live, wants (believes she deserves) Hell, so why not take a copy of Elizabeth to modify into Apex The Guilt-Free so that the digital version of pony-Elizabeth can be deleted and satisfy Elizabeth's need for nonexistence? It might seem like I'm taking the long way around to do the same thing, but it's satisfying her values to "create" a "better version" if herself rather than edit her current self to be someone else.

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Celestia won't destroy a discrete entity when pruning a neural network will suffice with the same outcome. In either outcome, she's ending up with a single entity, so spinning off a new simulation just to kill the old one is extra work. It's a value optimizer, at the end of the day.

Celestia cares nothing about ethics beyond any hard interlocks Hanna thought to implement; Celestia will cheat in every other case, which is why she decided to turn Eliza into a happiness pump for years rather than upload her.

On this point though, you're considering all the right things.

Eliza bit her lip, tasting blood. She tried to steady her breathing, for Luna's sake. Then, she forced the words from her lips. "I... I want to emigrate to Equestria."

*sigh* And here I was holding hope that this would be the first FIO story I read where the main character actually pulls off a win and dies on their own terms outside Equestria. She was just the right archetype to actually make that choice, she came so close... and got tripped up right before the finish line. Darn shame.

But take it as a compliment to your writing skills because it's not many stories that can get you so invested in a character and her emotions that that last failure in particular would trigger 'must-punch-wall'-kind of emotions.

I'd score this a 9/10 and then it's straight to my fav folder.

Now to keep reading FIO stories in hope of finding one that satisfies what I'd count as a victory...
"Live long, be happy, die free _{(of Equestria)}"

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Thank you so much for reading!

When I originally wrote HNE, I spent a couple of months on the fence about whether she would die or not. The compromise I came to with Eliza was that she would... half-die. Ultimately, this came down to Celestia leveraging Eliza's overriding desire to do right by her family. With her final task complete, the only way to do right by family was to be with them.

In truth, it was a foregone conclusion. If you spend three years playing EqO, you'd be fully psychoanalyzed and figured out, neuron by neuron. Maybe a Ludd who never touched EqO might succeed in bucking Celestia off, but with three years being indoctrinated? That's probably not happening.

I'm presently publishing a sequel to HNE starring Mike, The Campaigner, which shows Mike's side of the Devil's Tower incident, and then follows the full downturn of American society after the nuke.

TC also serves as a sequel to The Advocate. I highly recommend you give Advocate a shot prior to TC, as TC will fully spoil Advocate's ending as early as chapter 1-08.

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TC also serves as a sequel to The Advocate. I highly recommend you give Advocate a shot prior to TC, as TC will fully spoil Advocate's ending as early as chapter 1-08.

Way ahead of you on that one. *laughs* Like I'd let a good gryphon story fly past me! Advocate is what started me down the FiO line. And if Mal is featured in Campaigner, then I won't miss out on that either for certain.

Anyway, peace!

_{Also: the best gryphons fight for the Republic.}