Meliora

by Starscribe

Chapter 11: Borealis

Everything had to be perfect.

Jackie knew that her chances of pulling this off were remote—there were too many pieces moving, too many ways it could go wrong.

But she wasn’t the sort of pony who spent her immortality locked in a safe tower somewhere, living the same way century after century. She’d already done that, done it until she’d been driven to near insanity with boredom. Living safely maximized years, but what good was one empty, lifeless decade of existence where she learned nothing and the world went to shit?

It wasn’t hard to find a date for their attack. Mundi had festivals every few months, each one a constructed fantasy to keep the population in line. Their target was “Gratitude Day,” where they celebrated all those who had sacrificed to protect Axis Mundi from Charybdis.

The holiday didn’t really matter, though it was convenient that it involved fireworks.

Jackie couldn’t bring the previous members of the rebellion, at least not many of them. Athena had grown more watchful in her ways, more oppressive for a move just like this. Jackie didn’t think the program was behind the assassination attempts, but that didn’t mean she wanted to see her society disrupted.

But she could bring a few of the most important. Faking identification was really just a matter of finding enough volunteers with legitimate credentials and swapping places with them.

So it was that Jackie found herself serving food at a basement-level dispensary in the upper city, wearing a stupid paper hat and stupid paper gloves over her hooves. Ponies walked past one at a time, barely even noticing her as they placed their orders and returned to their lives. She was only called a bug-eater three times during her shift, which seemed fairly egalitarian compared to her past experience.

There could be no communication with the others until after she set everything off, so there wasn’t a chance for her to find out if everything was still going according to plan.

She heard the procession making its way across the city, closer and closer with every moment. As the parade drew nearer, the street outside her dispensary packed with ponies who weren’t here to order.

Jackie covertly prodded her tray of vegetarian chili, checking on her bomb. It was still there, wrapped in thin plastic and buried at the bottom of a dish too disgusting for anyone to eat.

As the parade drew closer, she heard Alex’s voice come on over the loudspeaker, or at least Athena’s imitation of it. The citizens of Mundi were all young, they were children. But now that Jackie knew what to look for, she was positive she could’ve identified this fake.

“Everypony, come together and remember our dead! Remember their sacrifices! Remember them, so we can keep them with us in a world that no longer has them. Let us celebrate that they lived.” And on and on she went, the same trite nonsense as any public figure would’ve been spouting on an occasion like this.

No more wearing my friend’s reputation like a corpse-puppet. Or any of those others. She could see the massive float in the distance, bright gold and hovering over the pavement. There were thrones for all the world’s alicorns there, and all of them were filled. Even Eureka, or a pony made to approximate him. Jackie had never seen the real one with a clean mane instead of a total disaster, though. No wonder you wanted this to end. She stole your face too.

Jackie could’ve set off the bomb at any moment. The range would encompass the whole city, she didn’t need to be right near the fake Alicorns. But she did need to make sure ponies surrounded them. So many ponies that Athena couldn’t make them all disappear.

There’s no telling what this does to their society. But that’s not my fucking problem. Athena should’ve thought about what might happen before making Archive’s city eat itself alive.

Activating the bomb was simple. She didn’t even have to remove the plastic, just found the switch and flipped it on. Her food tray—and all the others besides—froze solid in an instant.

And not just that. A few seconds later, and it seemed like the whole world had frozen. Groans of distant atmospheric processors as they went briefly still rumbled over the street. Lights on every nearby building flickered, then went out. Ponies started screaming, reaching for their phones and personal computers—but those were all passively charged by the grid now, and so they didn’t respond either.

The flying float didn’t crash down to the ground dramatically, or explode in a shower of sparks and bloody pretend-Alicorn parts. It just settled gently into emergency mode, landing on its lifting struts. The ponies on board, however, had started completely losing their minds.

Jackie was glad she wasn’t up there—she hadn’t considered exactly how Athena’s pretend bodies might work, or what they would do once they were severed from her network.

The answer appeared to be go violently insane. Instead of resting on their regal thrones, or answering the begging police to step forward and calm the crowd, the imposter Alex leaped sideways at a nearby streetlight and started crunching through the sturdy plastic. Meanwhile, Eureka decided that a few members of the crowd were apparently too close, because he lunged right off the edge of the float and into a brawl.

The parade was mostly cordoned by police drones, which had all fallen uselessly to the ground where they stood. The handful of police ponies on the scene were swept away by the terrified crowd.

Jackie reached under the counter, pulling out a radio that had been hidden there. She switched it on, and immediately heard other voices reporting on the status of things in the lower city. But she wasn’t responsible for that part. Lavender Eclipse would be down there mobilizing the evacuation. “Fry, how’s my PA?”

“Speakers are in place, boss,” he answered, after a brief pause. “But you should go soon. One of the nodes is already attracting attention. Won’t work forever.”

“Got it.” With a little dream magic and a little of what Ezri had taught her, she took an illusion for herself that resembled a respected, upper-class unicorn. The kind of mare who would be trusted by the movers and shakers of Mundi. She crossed the intervening distance, appearing on the float alongside the mad Alicorn copies.

She lifted the radio to her mouth, and spoke in the same tone of authority she might’ve used to command her own population.

The riot wasn’t really going yet—it was still confusion, the population desperate for anything that might return them to order. She had to capitalize on this opportunity, or else the violence would start and nopony would listen.

“They’re imposters!” she yelled, dragging the copy of Oracle off his hooves with a conjured tentacle. She hoped it would look convincingly like unicorn magic, because her illusion didn’t give her that. “This whole time! They’ve been Athena the whole time! Look, everypony! The city shuts down, and so do they! We’re letting a machine rule us!”

That didn’t seem to be what the police were expecting. Gasps echoed through the crowd, along with a few more shouts. Demanding they take the “Alicorns” to a doctor for scans, the rational ones. Some were just calling for lynchings.

Most just ran.

The police were in this last group, though instead of running away from her, every one of them that was near the float charged straight at it.

Jackie slipped away into the melee, not stopping long enough to fight. Whether or not they actually succeeded in unseating Athena wasn’t really the purpose of the mission. Her network ruled the whole city, so it wasn’t as though the ponies here could just throw her off. Someone had to keep the cars driving, the farms growing, the air circulating.

But that wasn’t her problem anymore. Jackie abandoned her disguise and vanished into the lower city. If the upper city had been confusion, once she got underground she was surrounded by the stench of desperation and terrible fear. She passed a police checkpoint where a handful of police had been beaten to death, surrounded by dozens of bat corpses. Glass broke, people screamed, and families cowered.

“How are we doing?” Jackie asked into the radio, keeping her head down and eyes alert. Most of the weapons in Mundi, even the illegal ones, required the power grid to work, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t get stabbed. Jackie wasn’t immortal.

“Gateway is green,” Eclipse answered. “Got a night market full of frightened bats here, more on their way all the time. Eureka isn’t sure how long the network will keep it open.”

There would be no Dreamlands shortcut this time—Jackie wasn’t getting herself indebted to another god so soon after getting free. They’d have to use a more dangerous method.

“Do it,” she instructed. “Keep the militia ready on the other side. Might be we get some wannabe heroes coming through with our refugees. We’ll toss them back when we’re done getting the good people.”

Two crowds formed in the darkness below Mundi—those fleeing into the upper city and its ruling class, and those moving down. Jackie was a little surprised as she joined one group of ponies obviously on their way to the night market.

“It’s a better life,” some stallion was saying. Not a bat, surprisingly enough. A unicorn, though his fur was as smudged with dirt as any Datamine worker Jackie had ever met. “Not strangling us with rules and taxes. It’ll be worth it.”

“I’m not sure.” His wife, or girlfriend, or something, a foal on her back instead of saddlebags full of possessions. She had to walk a little slower for that reason. “They have a princess too. It won’t be that different than living here. Same crap, different flag.”

“They have a democracy there,” Jackie said, copying the unicorn’s lower city accent almost perfectly. She probably would’ve done better if she still had Ezri around to practice on. “If you think you could do a better job than their governor, you should run against her. Maybe you could.” Maybe she wants to give up being in charge as soon as there’s another option.

“Really?” The refugees sounded receptive for a few seconds, at least until they saw that she was a bat. Then the stallion’s tone darkened to suspicion. “It’s probably not for real. We’re supposed to be a democracy too. But the only votes that really count are the ones who vote for the right thing. And nopony can check if something’s going wrong, because Athena runs it all. You can’t question a god.”

They slowed as they neared a police checkpoint, with swiveling mounted guns set into the wall. Instead of following them, the guns sat silent and still, with the police in the booth shouting at their screen. There had been a plastic barricade across the doorway, but it was gone now.

There was more evidence of struggle here. A few more bodies off to one side, along with bits of police armor laying bashed apart on the ground. They took their own injured away to the hospital and left these ponies to die. At least they had good deaths.

“We have a problem,” Eureka’s voice came in over radio, loud enough that a few members of the group Jackie had joined stared at her. Unlike the others who were actually here, he didn’t sound even slightly distorted by distance. “Athena just launched several somethings from Olympus. You have… seventeen minutes until they land.”

“Shit,” Jackie muttered, ears flattening. “She’s attacking the city?”

“I don’t… think so.” Eureka didn’t sound confident. “They’re not very dense. It’s not the rods of god. Telescope says it’s mostly silicon and steel. Some kind of… backup transmitter, maybe. Something to get her network up again.”

“Who are you?” asked the unicorn with the foal on her back. “Who are you talking to?”

“Thanks, Eureka.” She turned away from the mare, stepping to the side of the crowd so they would flow past her. But her group didn’t move on, they stopped to listen. A bat near the back was pointing at her, whispering something. She couldn’t hear it, and she didn’t really try to listen.

“Lavender, we have seventeen minutes until security comes back up. Open those doors as wide as you can and get ponies moving.”

The bat on the other side swore loudly into the radio. “I thought Eureka said we had hours.”

“Apparently not,” Jackie said. “Just… gallop them through if you have to. We’ll get these ponies out. Somehow.”


Comments

[theunbalancedone]

Uh oh, seems like Athena was ready for something like this. But if that's the case, interesting how she may have 'allowed' as much damage as was caused. That's the problem with super ai with power over most of the world, even when they are benevolently minded, it's so hard to know whether or not your plans are already accounted for as being part of their plans

[FanOfMostEverything]

Athena may not have considered cyberwarfare, but network blackouts? Hey, if the backups don't have to be built into the existing system, then there's no need for added complexity. Just drop them in when necessary.

Still, she's going to be very hard-pressed to Hari Seldon her way out of this... for a few generations, anyway. Organic memory has an unfortunate tendency to die. Still, it's one heck of a recruitment pitch for Thestralia... though there's currently no telling just how many will make it there.

[minibox]

9052137
The end game might force jackie to actually destroy athena. Reset civilization. I doubt athena would include her own death as part of the plan.

It seriously takes alot to engineer a war that ensures technological progress is achieved without severely weakening both sides or creating hatred that will keep causing future wars.

Though I hope athena doesn't have stupid ai logic. As in having both civilizations destroying each other and calling it a success because the future threat can't kill what is already dead.

9052397
It's still a big weakness. Dropping a backup instead of having it within the existing infrastructure will increase the time it'll take to restore the system. Plus there's now an obvious big juicy target to smash when it gets there. Even if the backup is armed to the teeth, I'm sure the "knife" has more than enough combat experience to turn it to scrap metal.

[Yami Vizzini]

Here we go again....