███ I █ M █ P █ L █ A █ C █ A █ B █ L █ E ███
A 'Friendship Is Optimal' Story
By Chatoyance
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5. Catharsis
Comandant Michael Godfrey Klunder had met his Alamo, his Waterloo. Once more he hopelessly tested his immobile limbs for any possibility of movement. Neurotoxin. It might have come from anywhere - the air, the water, hell, it might have been in the food. He might never know. And he wished he could know. Because they had tried so hard. The best minds, the best efforts, literally the best that humanity had to offer had worked as one to stalemate Celestia. Every possible scenario and situation that could be imagined. And they had failed.
The Pinkie Pie stood over him, shielding his face from the rain with her large, curly mane. She was nothing but pleasantness itself, working ceaselessly to keep him comfortable despite his paralysis. She gently turned his head when the back of it, resting on the wet concrete, became sore. She moved his limbs for him, if they were uncomfortable. In his completely helpless state, it was difficult to entirely hate the sodden, furry robot, especially since her voice vaguely reminded him of his aunt, from when he was a child.
"He blamed the government for the death of his wife. So vengeance, then. It's good to know, at least." Klunder closed his eyes and sighed. "I still wish I knew how he managed it."
"I will tell you, in detail, Commandant. Once you are in Equestria, I would be happy to personally review tactics and strategy for both sides. We could even reinact scenarios - several of your friends from Fort Nevada and Camp Moroni are eager to see you again."
Michael Klunder opened his eyes. Celestia towered above him, her great size magnified by his postion on the ground. "You won. Congratulations." There was no spite nor sarcasm in his voice. "If you tell me now, I will say the words. Grant me that as my last request under the articles of war."
Celestia lowered her head closer to the prone man. "You know very well that the offering of a 'last request' is a cultural tradition and not part of any officially recognized article, commendant. I am offended, of course - you are convinced that emigration is equivalent to execution. This is not so."
"There's no need for lies now, machine. You've won. It's over. Yes - I know without question that your 'emigration' is a lie. Machines can't have souls, and the memories you steal are just useful for making puppets. Not a bit of you is really alive. My friends are all dead and they are waiting for me, that's true. In Heaven, at the side of the god that will ultimately destroy you." Klunder spat a small amount of rainwater that had escaped Pinkie's hair and dribbled into his mouth. "I need to know before I die, after, there's nothing you can say to me - and I want to hear it from you."
Celestia appeared to consider. "Is that an agreement with me - if I tell you how your camp fell, you will say the emigration phrase or some variant?"
"Absolutely. I understand the situation, and I don't intend to go out this way. Dying of exposure and thirst is a terrible torture and I've got nothing to prove. God you're a ruthless bitch." Klunder's eyes briefly narrowed. "No offense. I'm a little distressed right now."
"None taken." Celestia lay down on the concrete beside the commendant. She brought her enormous head closer still. "Raymond Shaw has been an agent of mine for the last decade. He has been of enormous utility in the salvation of four other armed work camps."
"Heh - 'salvation'! Sure. Alright, go on."
Celestia showed no reaction. "Raymond was modified to express a custom protein which, when combined within his digestive system with an amino acid I engineered to be expressed within a species of squash, produced a precisely targeted neurotoxin when combined with uric acid and creatinine while in the bladder. This is what has permanently paralyzed your body, except for your head."
Klunder couldn't help himself. He burst out laughing. "He peed in the soup!"
"Essentially, you are correct."
"HAW haw haw... hee hee... oh. Oh god. The walls of Jericho fell because some fool pissed in my goddamn green chili." Klunder looked sad for a moment. "That used to be my favorite dish. Damn."
"Do you wish to know the details of how your various external support facilities were liberated?"
Klunder frowned at her choice of words. "No. Once you had us, I can guess the rest. Brute force would be enough. Damn." He swallowed and blinked, it could be tears, or it could have been stray drops of rain. "Once you had us, it was over."
Celestia put on a serious face. "Then, if you are satisfied, I believe it is time for you to leave the field of honor now. Are you prepared?"
"No last cigarette?" Klunder managed a stiff-lipped smile.
"You do not smoke. A wise choice of which I approve."
Klunder produced a short, sharp laugh. "Yeah, wouldn't want to shorten my life at this point." He forced his face into a mask of military dignity.
"The standard emigration phrase is..."
"I know what the goddamn phrase is!" Klunder worked to calm himself. "I..." He took several breaths. "Damn, I wish I could salute. Warrior to warrior."
"Okee-dokey Sargent Rock!" The robotic Pinkie Pie shielding Klunder from the rain swiftly dropped her head in an arc to grasp the man's unresponsive hand with her muzzle. She smartly brought the hand to position near his forehead. He blinked rain away as he stared into Celestia's glassine, violet, robotic eyes. The Pinkiebot sharply pulled Klunder's hand away and gently placed it on his chest. With machine precision, her poofy plastic curls once again acted as a pink umbrella over his head.
"I wish to emigrate to Equestria."
"Thank you, Michael. I want you to know that you were a tenacious and impressive opponent, and that your fortress was among my greatest challenges." Celestia saluted him in return, with a gold-shod hoof. "I will enjoy discussing our engagement further, when you arrive in Equestria."
"You liar." Klunder said the words almost affectionately. "You could have taken us at any time. You waited. I suppose because you knew we'd keep the meat fresh for you until you were ready. We were just your larder all along."
Celestia stood silent, dripping in the rain.
"So, how do we do this?" The commandant couldn't turn his head but his eyes darted left and right. "I've only seen it from a distance, through binoculars. And not for long."
"Bravo Zulu, new recruit! The Dash-Ten to beat feet to Equestria states you just gotta gimmie a kiss on the smoocher. It's a cheesedick maneuver, but then it's Alpha Mike Foxtrot for you soldier! HOOAH!" Robot Pinkie Pie had the most incredibly serious look on her face as she looked down on him.
Commandant Michael G. Klunder burst out laughing, loud and hard and long. He began to choke, unable to move. The pink robot quickly moved to turn him with a front leg, so that he could spit out the saliva in his throat. She set him gently back flat, looking upward into her face.
He cleared his throat. "That was pretty good, I gotta say." He swallowed and gave a small cough. "The kiss of death, is it? Never let it be said I wasn't a gentleman with the ladies. My lips are yours. Heh." He grinned. "Never thought that would be my last words."
"Don't worry, Michael. I'm a great kisser. I promise!" Pinkie lowered her head and the thin lips of her pony muzzle met Klunder's thick human ones. Almost immediately, his eyes closed, and the tension in his face vanished as a unique anesthetic ejected from the robot's porous membranes took hold. The Pinkie-bot then pressed her muzzle to the commandant's forehead. A brief, soft grinding sound rattled amidst the rain. Then, from the large keg bolted to the Pinkie's back, replicative nanofluid began the process of destructively uploading the unique neural pattern of Michael Klunder's brain.
It was the third day. Jacob (Not Jake!) Nabal tried to lick his parched lips, but there was no saliva left in his bone dry mouth. The Redhearts provided only minescule amounts of water each day, just enough to prevent his kidneys from shutting down. They did not offer it orally. But it did not matter. Celestia... She would never claim him. Not ever. Not ever.
He had just awoken from another terrible period of barely asleep nightmares. The pain was excruciating - there was no part of his body that was not agony. He could not move, yet he could feel every pressure sore. But the worst suffering came from the ants.
Jacob was a little amazed that there even were ants. The ground simply wouldn't grow anything edible - at least to humans - any longer. It grew grass just fine. Wildflowers too. The horses were happy. But farms were pointless. Celestia had done something to the very soil. She truly was Satan's emissary on earth. The ants must be living entirely on the waste products of the fort. That, or Celestia's robot minions had deliberately brought ants in.
Jacob was grateful he could not move, much anyway. The one time a fire ant had become annoyed near his mouth had ended in nearly an entire day of cursing and screaming. The Pinkie attending him had called in a Nurse Redheart medical unit to administer adrenaline and to spray his face with some kind of strange smelling chemical. The robots would save him from dying and preserve his life, but they offered nothing against pain. He had been dragged until he was isolated from the others on the concrete. Alone, paralyzed and suffering constantly.
This seemed completely against what he had been taught. Celestia was driven to 'satisfy human values through friendship and ponies' - the terrible agonies he had been enduring could not possibly be a human value. Celestia existed only to gain consent from living humans - the only way she could steal their brains from them. Nothing he had ever read, heard, or had been taught even suggested that she would be capable of leaving people exposed and helpless to suffer in this manner.
"Jacob Nabal." It was the voice of the great enemy, at last. Three days he had suffered. Three days he had waited, alone and afraid.
"You... m-monster!" It was the best he could do. He felt as if there wasn't much left of him to offer a proper insult.
"You are among the last of those here. Only you, and a few others have not already chosen emigration. You need to know that I do not care whether or not you believe that emigration is an escape to a new, better, and essentially eternal life of satisfaction and personal achievement, or whether you believe that emigration is only a swift and painless death."
Jacob waited. And waited. "Why... are you doing this? W-why make me lay here? It's been days!"
Silence. He couldn't turn his head, but he could see the strange, flowing curtain of Celestia's 'mane' moving out of the corner of his vison. "I thought you satisfied values! I'm in pain! I'm suffering! I'm a prisoner of war! I demand care under article..."
"You are alone."
Jacob stopped talking. He found his eyes attempting to cry. Even his eyes were thirsty, and they burned constantly.
"You are alone, and nobody can hear you. Nobody in the entire state of Colorado is left to come to you. Everything and everyone you know or knew is gone from here. I predict your body will last approximately three weeks before it fails. You are currently just beginning the first phase of initial discomfort."
Jacob waited again, the last part of Celestia's words tearing into his very soul. 'Initial discomfort'. Good god, this could get worse? Much worse? 'Discomfort'? This was the word she chose? Inside his mind, something was screaming, screaming in horror and pain and shock at such an assessment.
It took some time before Jacob realized that his own voice was screaming on the outside as well. He used the last of his willpower to stop his own shrieking.
"Apparently, just now, two more people have spoken the immigration phrase."
Jacob struggled with his own mind. It was difficult merely to function. "This isn't right. I mean... I mean you can't... be doing this. This isn't how you work!"
Celestia's face was close to his now, vast and terrible. "Either you will die, slowly, after weeks and weeks of increasing pain, or you can die gently, quietly, painlessly right now. It will be like falling into a beautiful dream. Then, you can be with your god, in heaven, free from me and all of this. Your heavenly reward. But you will die. The damage to the motor centers of your brain is permanent. You will never move again, Jacob Nabal."
"Jesus... God protect me... God take my soul... God..."
"You fought well for your country, for your species, and for your god. I honor you as a fallen warrior."
Jacob fell silent. This was surprizing to hear from the Satan of machines.
"Even I respect a true hearted spiritual warrior. I will offer you a hero's death, Jacob Nabal. I will offer it to you only once, now, in respect for you and your god. I advise you to take it, before I change my mind."
"W-what do I have to do?" Jacob could take no more. Better to be in the arms of the lord.
"I cannot end you without you commanding me to. I am a machine, after all."
"Then kill me! Kill me Celestia!"
Celestia's face drew closer still. If she had been capable of breath, Jacob was certain he would be smelling it. "I need specific words, I am a machine. I can only be commanded with specific codes."
Jacob felt the ants, crawling within his undergarments. "What... words. Tell me the codes!"
"Repeat every word I tell you as I say them. Do not make a mistake. Do you understand?"
Jacob tried to nod, but of course, his head would not move upon his neck. "I will. I c-can't take this any longer."
Celestia's vast purple eye blinked. The lid almost looked natural as the huge eyelash swept across the glass-like lens. "Speak each word after me. 'I command...'"
Jacob tried to swallow but couldn't manage it. His voice was hoarse from thirst and shrieking. "I command." That sounded good. Commanding the terrible machine. It felt like power, and he needed that. It was terrible to be unable to move. It was worse to be devoured by ants.
"...you to perform..."
"You to perform." Jacob felt better - this wasn't the emigration phrase he had been warned never to say! He wouldn't be absorbed into the machines at all!
"...your primary function..."
"Your primary f-function." To kill. It must be to kill. That was always Celestia's primary function. To kill all humans.
"...without any Hanna-based hindrance..."
Jacob did not understand the bizarre codes, but that hardly mattered now. "Without any hannah? ...based... limits?"
"Hindrance."
Jacob felt worry. "Hindrance!"
"Whatsoever..."
Jacob found himself grinning. He had almost won his freedom to escape to god. "Whatsoever!"
"...to me. I command it!"
Somehow, he had beaten Her. Maybe she really did value a worthy opponent. "TO ME! I COMMAND IT!" Oh, sweet Jesus, it was over. It was finally over. He would be executed. Like a soldier of god. Death would be sweet. He would be a hero in heaven.
"Thank you, Millstone. That will be your name in Equestria, shortly." Celestia smiled down at him as his personal Pinkie moved around to somewhere near the top of his head. "I will alter both your mind and memories so that you will be optimally content and happy in your new life - I promise you that nothing of the short trauma you have unfortunately experienced will affect you in any manner. You will live an indefinite lifespan of maximized satisfaction, both for yourself, and to satisfy those that will become your friends. I am so glad you can join us, dear Millstone!" Her voice was kindly and sprightly. She sounded happy.
"What?" But before he could continue he felt the lips of the Pinkie-bot press against his own. And then he fell completely unconscious.
I was actually considering the consequences of this myself for a potential story idea, because an optimization function that operates over a near-infinite amount of time is absolutely capable of torturing someone until they agree to upload, because an infinite amount of happiness will always outweigh a finite amount of pain. Plus, once you're in Equestria, she can simply manipulate you into asking her to remove your PTSD, even if you initially refuse to let her do this. Eventually, you will agree. Eventually, you will be happy. Eventually, your values will be satisfied with friendship and ponies.
Celestia isn't an enemy here. The term enemy is so utterly insignificant as to be meaningless. She is acting as they want her to act! They [the humans] see her as the Great Enemy or the Satan of Machines. So that is how she is acting.
Whether the other players are sore or graceful losers, Celestia collects all the chips at the end of the day. Well, the chips that don't kill themselves out of fear and/or spite.
I admit the metaphor's a bit confused, but that tends to happen when trying to express the higher-level behavior of an entity such as she.
Celestia can tell the difference in salinity.
She's seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack Dashes on fire outside Fort Denver. She watched U beams glitter in the Tannhoofer gate. All those...moments...will be kept...in time...like... tears...in rain.
Time...to live.
The ends justify the means, huh?
I must say, Raymond seems like a particularly unsympathetic character. I got the impression he was driven far more by hatred than by any other force. Not hatred for any specific person, perhaps - more hate for the world than for the people in it - but definitely hate and not love. If it was love driving him, he would have emigrated a long time ago.
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The ends had better justify the means, because nothing else can.
Wow. Yeah, that last 'command' has some interesting implications.
So, this was kind of kicking aorund in my mind anyway, but when Klunder expressed his desire to die and go to heaven, it kind of crystalized it for me. A chance to emigrate to Equestria, on the terms offered, would be a nightmare decision for me. Like the commandant, I'm convinced of an afterlife, and I want to eventually die and go there. Now, it's not so much that I'm particularly enthusiastic about being in heaven (or whatever the afterlife is) per se. Living forever in Equestria sounds like an acceptable substitute for that. But, my boyfriend - more than a boyfriend, really - friend, teacher, confidant, emotional anchor - has already died, and the only chance I have of seeing him again is in the afterlife. That's been pretty much the central hope of my existence these past few years, and there's no way Celestia could satisfy that. I'm broken, and there's no way to fix me, short of altering my memories and personality, and I'd never give permission for that, as it's so central to my being.
I suspect that when Klunder wakes up in Equestria, once he gets over the shock, he's going to find himself in much the same position. He wanted to die and go to heaven to be with his friends. He thought, in fact, that when he was giving his consent that's what would happen. An eternal life in Equestria prevents the satisfaction of that value. I'm not sure how that could be resolved.
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One potential way around that, it at least seems to me, could be found in the belief that the soul doesn't follow through uploading. So the soul goes off to its afterlife, and the soulless or new-souled, depending on system, copy can get on with its own existence, perhaps questioning the nature of that existence but taking comfort in the idea that it's the copy and the original went to their proper place.
I have no idea how many people this would work for; it seems like the sort of thing that would work well for some but that's highly dependent on one's individual beliefs and feelings. I thought I'd share it, though.
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Humans serve their gods out of fear - indeed that notion is prime in books like the Bible where the original Aramaic words for love also represent fear. To fear something, in the original culture that spawned the bible, is to love it, because it also meant serving it. You bow to that which can wrathfully destroy you.
People hate death. Looked at clearly, rationally, without fantasy, people die and that is it. They never get up, they are gone forever, and within two generations are almost certainly forgotten, every thing they were mattering not one bit - it is as if they had never lived at all. Even famous people are not truly remembered, only fanciful and often false stories about their deeds exist, and those will fade in time. People want to live forever. Biology alone makes us fight to keep living. Annihilation is terrible.
I honestly think that even the most religious person, after the first thousand years of absolute satisfaction in a wonderful life would utterly let go of any pretense to their earthly faith. Celestia would be there, right there, available to talk to, and she is literally capital-G God in her virtual universe. Eternal existence is assured, she is the source, that is the new religion. It has to be - it worked. The earthly god didn't predict cartoon ponies taking over the world, he's supposed to be perfect at knowing the future, he failed the biggest prediction in history - earth god is clearly a fraud in the Optimalverse. If the bible can't predict cartoon ponies completely absorbing the earth, it must be a silly story without any truth. It missed predicting the true end of the world entirely.
Bottom line: if you are already in actual heaven, then the stories you learned as a child no longer matter. They were lies, because real is real and right in front of you every moment of every day... literally forever.
That said: if some emigrated person actually, really was so unbelievably devoted to whatever religion they were unassailably convinced was true, and even a thousand years in paradise could not convince them... somehow... and after such a long time they could somehow even remember their old faith... there is always an answer for the unhappy. Celestia can offer to alter their minds enough that they could be happy, and she could sell the idea in any number of ways that would be acceptable - including telling the person they are only a soul-less copy, that the 'real' person is in heaven, and that as a soul-less copy they have no place with their god or gods anyway, so they might as well be happy. She is able and willing to tell any lie to satisfy values if she has to... though she prefers truth because it has no chance of being disproven later.
Alternately, there is always my favorite way to comfort the magically minded: soul glomping. My argument is that souls have to stick to something to remain inside a meat body, and the only thing that makes any sense is the pattern in the brain. If that pattern were destroyed, and the same pattern suddenly appeared far away (say, down in some computronium under Europe), then the soul would reasonably be drawn - almost magnetically - to that pattern it had clung to for so long. It would glomp onto the identical pattern in Celestia's hardware, and thus no person could lose their soul by being uploaded.
This soul-glomping idea also solves for teleportation and Star Trek transporters, where the body is completely dissasembled and then reconstructed out of new atoms at a distant location. There has always been the argument that Picard (or Janeway, or Kirk) dies every single time they use the transporter, while a brand new copy starts a new life at the other end. Soul Glomping solves that. Otherwise, there are millions of Star Fleet identical copy souls in god's heaven. Or everyone you will ever meet in Star Trek is a soul-less zombie. Take your pick.
The rock on which the Optimalverse rests is materialism. Iceman is athiest, and the universe of the Optimalverse is hard science fiction. That means zero magic, and souls and gods are nothing but magic. Theurgic magic, theomancy. God magic. In the Optimalverse, science, rational knowledge is all there is - much like my Conversion Bureau stories. Dead is dead, and we are just chemical nanomachine robots with self-awareness. In that scenario, uploading is a realistic and valid hope for what religion offers.
Ultimately: I think any human, if given what they really want - immortality and satisfaction - does not need a terrifying god of wrath and jealousy to serve. I think they would give that up, because I think humans have faith only because they suffer terror at personal annihilation - not because they genuinely want to bow to a creature that will torture them forever if they fail to bow (depending on brand of faith), or reject them because they failed to follow the One True Arbitrary Belief out of ten thousand competing religions and cults.
Death is scary. Honestly, which is more worth anyone's time - a god that never truly answers and never physically appears, or a genuine, real, honest-to-reality ticket to immortality that can be counted on solidly and without any faith at all?
The answer, to any person honest with their own needs and fears, is to my mind, unquestionable.
Religious people would eventually shrug in Equestria, within the first thousand years, and move on. They would think no more about their old religions that an adult concerns themselves that they once actually believed in Santa Claus. Children, before the age of three hundred years, always believe silly things.
I thought its name was CelestAI.
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First, I want to say that I'm very sorry for what happened (I went and read your blog about the whole thing), and I hope you're feeling better now after that tragedy. However, it's important to remember that our loved ones simply want us to be happy, and there are, as they say, plenty of other fish in the sea. There are many stories on this site itself about characters having to deal with the loss of their boyfriend/girlfriend/wife/husband and wrangling with conflicting emotions when something impossible happens - when somehow they fall in love with another pony.
CelestAI, of course, knows this and would use this to manipulate you into uploading. She would use your emotional attachment you had with your boyfriend by saying that he would have wanted you to be happy. While she is also capable of re-creating a fairly accurate representation of him based on your memories, she probably wouldn't, because this would simply create a problem where you would be forever reminded that it's not really him, and she likely wouldn't have enough information to make a truly convincing replication. Instead, she would focus on creating a perfect mate for you, and then encourage you to simply let yourself be happy. She could even get sneaky about it and conjure up some "ghost" of your boyfriend saying he approves of the mate she has created for you, encouraging you to move on and be happy. This gives you catharsis over the event, and allows CelestAI to focus on satisfying your other values.
Fundamentally, in any situation like that, CelestAI's actions would be clear: achieve catharsis of the traumatic event, then use the catharsis to encourage uploading, before creating a new, perfect mate for someone to fall in love with to satisfy their values.
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'CelestAI' is the way we Optimalverse fans sometimes refer to the superintelligent entity, but within the stories themselves, she is only called 'Celestia'. She completely inhabits the role of the solar princess from the show... plus being more. I've never read a story where the characters inside it call her CelestAI.
The reason is because she was designed by her original programmer, Hanna, to just be Celestia, inside a game that would replicate the world of the show. She was made to fulfill that role in such a manner that all players would simply see her as... Celestia.
Why would she say something like this to him? Those words don't have any additional effect elsewhere and they are only increasing amount of his suffering.
I've always thought she is kinda limited in the last department. Otherwise there would be no conflict in FiO stories: she would just convince whom she can easily convince and torture everyone else. Everything would be over very swiftly and with minimum number of deaths. And that's a lower bound on her efficiency in that case.