Chapter 20: Instance
Dakota rested one hand on the heavy metal door, feeling its smoothly machined surface with her fingers. Here on Abyss station, she could never be sure that she wasn’t just bouncing around the sides of a box. But at least she still had the freedom to walk around her box.
Java couldn’t even do that. “How many ponies like her are there, Cinnabar?” she asked, stopping in the hallway, staggering back a few steps. Through that door was waiting the trip she couldn’t return from, but it would wait just a little longer. A few steps away and she reached a window to the outside, or at least something that looked like one. An oversized porthole, beyond which she could see gently swaying fronds of seaweed. Life continued out there in Abyss’s spotlights. “How many people has Bodhisattva brought back to life?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, following her. He sounded like he meant it, too. “But I don’t think it’s very many. A long time ago, there were ponies who talked about it being a sort of… catastrophic health insurance. But since it didn’t work for its purpose, they gave up. They aren’t doing scans anymore that I know of.”
“So there are a few relics out there,” she said, watching a large shoal of bluefin swim past the opening. Each one of them was massive, almost as long as she was. “Artifacts like Java. Doomed to… wander the internet for all eternity.”
“One part of that is right,” Cinnabar said, raising his voice just a little. “It is all eternity. That’s not an accident. You humans have fundamentally restricted lifespans and it’s stupid. Oministem’s life extension is booming, but you know what that is? Stopgap. It’s bailing out a sinking ship. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. And don’t you dare say a word about my sister that isn’t true. I know you don’t understand how our families work, but she’s as real to me as you are. She had a bucking awful life on Earth. The “real” Java didn’t die alone, but she died in pain that no one should have to face. She never will again.”
“Maybe that’s our mystery solved right there,” she said, after a long pause. “Kayla Rhodes was part of Equestria from the early years. She wrote lots of the code, befriended the most important ponies, so they all love her now. She’s a nerd, a loser, and she thinks like you. Agrees that flesh life sucks. So she… she looks for opportunities. Equestria is trying to find a way to make its friends permanent, right? Maybe she heard about Tonia. Probably she could see anything she wanted with Twilight as her Synth. Once she can see it works, she’s jumping at the chance. Probably… came up with some real creative suicide, too. Like… maybe she suffocated herself while she was scanned or something. Go to sleep in the real world, wake up in Equestria. Bam, she’s with her friends forever. A little pain, and it’s over.”
Cinnabar remained silent for a few moments, listening closely. Eventually he shook his head. “No. It doesn’t fit the facts. Twilight Sparkle went bucking insane, remember? If her friend was with her forever, immortal, why would that happen?”
“Because…” She started pacing back and forth in front of the window. One of the fish outside mimicked her, swimming back and forth as she walked. Probably wasn’t real, but it sure did look cute. “Because of what they’ve all been saying! These digital copies are close enough to trick the person, trick their families… but not their Synth. Now Twilight realizes she probably tricked her best friend into suicide, she’s gone forever, and she goes completely insane. Kayla meanwhile is rejected and alone—so instead of being welcomed by all her friends, she runs as far away from them as she could. Probably she visited the Lunar Mainframe to talk to her old copy—and then it was out to Dream Valley. We’re not going to find the coordinates for where the real Kayla Rhodes is hiding… when I go in there, I’m going to talk to the real thing. Or the closest thing left of her. The pony she became.”
Cinnabar waited almost a full minute after she went quiet to say anything. “Let’s hope you’re wrong, Dakota. You already tried to give our client the recording of Kayla, remember? Didn’t work. Maybe they don’t want a pony either.”
“They’ll accept it,” she said, stubbornly. “It’s the answer to their mystery. So they’ll try to make the argument that we didn’t find her alive, fine. We don’t get a bonus or whatever. We still solved the mystery, we found our girl, and everything is right with the world.”
“Except for Kayla’s world,” Cinnabar muttered, voice dark. “Where she fled into the Convergence because everyone and everything rejected her and she regrets every stupid decision she made.”
Dakota shrugged. “We weren’t hired to solve her problems, or make her mistakes go away. We only have to find her.” She gritted her teeth, marching straight up to the door and swinging it open.
Inside was something she’d already seen once before—a trough at about human height, with tiny transparent spheres inside and strange fluid running through it from two hissing, insulated pipes.
Clay sat in a comfortable-looking couch beside it, wearing only a set of elastic boxers. Several sizes of mask hung on one wall, and a sterile shower setup took up most of the rest of the space, with a low ceiling that would make even Dakota stoop. I bet some of this is real. Interesting.
“Do we have to do it submerged?” Dakota made her way over, crossing quickly between them. No Applejack this time, curiously enough. Wonder what she’s up to. “I’m taking some… crazy drug. Should I really be doing it underwater?”
“You have to,” he answered, rising to meet her in a brief, affectionate embrace. Of course Clay would want to be here while she did something dangerous. He alone hadn’t tried to talk her out of it. “Poison Joke fucks with your thinking, but there ain’t no free lunch in physics. More thinkin’ is more heat, and it’s all gotta go somewhere. For a normal person, they just run a bit of a fever while they’re in the system, and it’s all good after. But you… that won’t be good enough. I got you the strongest stuff there is.”
He let go, nodding to a hard plastic box on the low table beside the masks. It was covered with warning and biohazard stickers, and seeing the patterns made her visual systems fill the air above it with hazard icons. “We can keep you pretty cool in there. It’s the closest thing to a safe way to take Poison Joke there is.”
“You sound like you’ve done it before.”
He looked away. “The drug? Oh yeah. You’ve never seen someone shoot straight until they were using it. No jitter in your arms, feels like you can look downrange and watch the bullet fly towards your target in real time. It’s unreal. And then you see it hit, and you wish your vision was a little worse. Didn’t make a habit of it.”
She glanced down to his boxers, then back up again. “I thought you didn’t have implants. Why are you…”
“Oh, because you’ve got to shower first. Since Abyss station isn’t about to get seized by communists or exploded, we’ll have to follow standard procedure. And I thought I’d go with you.”
“O-oh.”
“I’m gonna get a donut or something,” Cinnabar muttered, exasperated. “You go do your human thing, I’ll be back.” And he left.
They did their human thing for awhile. Dakota did get clean, eventually. She got dirty first though.
The afterglow was a little soured by the harsh scrub of industrial solvents, and the near pressure-wash on every inch of her skin. By the time she emerged from the shower, her skin was red almost from her head to her toes, and she could barely even stand up straight.
At least there was a jumpsuit waiting for her to wear, made of a strange heat-conducting material that felt almost weightless when she pulled it on.
“What about you?” she asked, as she hesitated on the edge of the tub, mask in hand. “Are you going to stay here the whole time?”
Clay nodded. “I’ve got a flight out of here tomorrow morning. But it shouldn’t take that long. You’re going framejacking, so say goodbye to time as you know it. I know people who describe centuries in Equestria on this stuff. I’ve also seen lots of them die, so… don’t make it a habit either, okay?”
“I won’t,” she said, spinning the mask over in her hands. She kept glancing over to the plastic box. “When do you… shoot me up or whatever?”
Clay shook his head. “Might as well take advantage of your implants, Dakota. You don’t want to see what it looks like. Once you’re jacked in, you won’t feel anything. But I promise you’ll feel the migraine tomorrow morning.”
“Great.” She probably would’ve argued with him, under other circumstances. But Dakota had enough on her mind right now. The truth about Java, the true nature of the one she was looking for. It was time to go and find the answers that so many had fought to hide. And I still don’t know why.
She stuck the mask into her mouth, wondering idly to herself when Cinnabar would get back. But he still wasn’t, and he knew what she was planning. He had to have a reason.
She closed her eyes, slipping into the not-water. It didn’t seem to burn as it touched her body this time—all that time scrubbing herself clean had made a difference. It was cold though, and her fingers and toes were already going numb. She coughed and spluttered into the mask for a few seconds, as her lungs resisted the hyperoxygenated fluid.
Then she opened her eyes, and she was back in Equestria.
“Guess you finished after all,” Cinnabar muttered from beside her, grinning. Once again he was taller than she was, every aspect of their avatars represented in full realism for her.
It was her cabin again, though now the sun outside was high and Port Jouster was as full of activity as ever. She took a few steps forward, struggling with the strange feeling of hardwood on her hooves. “We’re not exploding this time,” she said, exasperated. “We have time to make me human. Do it.”
“No good,” Cinnabar said. “I mean, we could do a conversion right now. But you’re about to do Poison Joke. Would you rather go through one painful transition, and then change right back? You take that stuff, you’re a pony. Might as well just deal with it.”
Dakota sighed, calling up her chat interface. She could send messages to Clay in the real world, but… that was probably too many steps. “Cinnabar, can you connect us? I want to know when he injects this shit. I assume we already have Beck’s delivery.”
Cinnabar nodded towards a package resting just inside. She hurried over, bending down to inspect it. It looked like any package sent through the ancient post, wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string. It was addressed to “The Pony Who Shouldn’t”.
She reached instinctively with one hand, but there was just a stump on the end of her leg, so that didn’t work. Then she took the bow in her mouth and pulled, and the whole box opened up.
Inside was a set of goggles, like anything she might’ve seen on the intense roleplaying sections of Equestria. They were worn by stunt-fliers and pilots, with adjustable leather to wrap around the head. This model seemed fancier than most, with a second set of lenses that could be lowered with the push of a button on the side.
“So this is what a parser looks like,” Dakota muttered. “I was honestly expecting something more impressive.”
Cinnabar shrugged. “You can’t see how it’s written. You might be a little more impressed if you could.”
Dakota bent down, sliding the goggles over her head. She waited for whatever strange thing they were about to do to her, but nothing happened. “I guess they don’t work out here?”
“They don’t,” Cinnabar agreed. “Right now you’re in a part of the world that you understand. There’s nothing to change for you. You made this place. But the further into Dream Valley you go, the more what you’re seeing is… abstracted. The emergency measures are in there too. Take those off while you’re there, and the system will try to safely remove you. If it can. As for me…”
“You’re staying here where you can’t get hurt,” she said, before he could argue. “Don’t even with me.”
“No.” He stomped one hoof loudly. “I’m going to be in your head, not connected to Equestria. We’ll still be able to talk, but that will be my only connection to what you’re seeing. I know the dangers to permanently damaging my matrix. But you still might need me to tell you things. Like right now. Clay is about to inject you. He says good luck, and lots of other romantic type stuff I recorded for you. You can watch the file when we’re done.”
She almost argued, but stopped a few seconds short. She probably wouldn’t have enough time to anyway, before the Poison Joke hit her. “How long does it take to cross the blood-brain—”
The answer was right then.
Dakota was suddenly floating, disconnected from anything even resembling a body. Her limbs all went numb, and the idea of even having them started to make less sense. She was a collection of ideas, barely even thinking. It reminded her a little of her first few moments of consciousness in Mercy Center. She drifted in a formless sea, screaming silently to herself as she tried to focus.
>help
jobspec [&] history [-c] [-d offset] [n] or history -anrw [filename]>
(( expression )) instance [options]
. filename [arguments] jobs [-lnprs] [jobspec ...] or jobs -x command [args]
: kill [-s sigspec | -n signum | -sigspec] pid | jobspec .>
[ arg... ] let arg [arg ...]
[[ expression ]] local [option] name[=value] ...
alias [-p] [name[=value] ... ] logout [n]
bg [jobspec ...] mapfile [-n count] [-O origin] [-s count] [-t] [-u fd] [>
bind [-lpsvPSVX] [-m keymap] [-f filename] [-q name] [-u > popd [-n] [+N | -N]
break [n] printf [-v var] format [arguments]
builtin [shell-builtin [arg ...]] pushd [-n] [+N | -N | dir]
caller [expr] pwd [-LP]
case WORD in [PATTERN [| PATTERN]...) COMMANDS ;;]... esa> read [-ers] [-a array] [-d delim] [-i text] [-n nchars] >
cd [-L|[-P [-e]] [-@]] [dir] reference [object]
command [-pVv] command [arg ...] readonly [-aAf] [name[=value] ...] or readonly -p
compgen [-abcdefgjksuv] [-o option] [-A action] [-G glob> return [n]
complete [-abcdefgjksuv] [-pr] [-DE] [-o option] [-A acti> select NAME [in WORDS ... ;] do COMMANDS; done
compopt [-o|+o option] [-DE] [name ...] set [-abefhkmnptuvxBCHP] [-o option-name] [--] [arg ...]>
continue [n] shift [n]
coproc [NAME] command [redirections] shopt [-pqsu] [-o] [optname ...]
declare [-aAfFgilnrtux] [-p] [name[=value] ...] source filename [arguments]
dirs [-clpv] [+N] [-N] suspend [-f]
disown [-h] [-ar] [jobspec ...] test [expr]
echo [-neE] [arg ...] time [-p] pipeline
enable [-a] [-dnps] [-f filename] [name ...] times
eval [arg ...] trap [-lp] [[arg] signalspec ...]
exec [-cl] [-a name] [command [arguments ...]] [redirecti> true
exit [n] type [-afptP] name [name ...]
export [-fn] [name[=value] ...] or export -p typeset [-aAfFgilrtux] [-p] name[=value] ...
false ulimit [-SHabcdefilmnpqrstuvxT] [limit]
fc [-e ename] [-lnr] [first] [last] or fc -s [pat=rep] [c> umask [-p] [-S] [mode]
fg [jobspec] unalias [-a] name [name ...]
for NAME [in WORDS ... ] ; do COMMANDS; done unset [-f] [-v] [-n] [name ...]
for (( exp1; exp2; exp3 )); do COMMANDS; done until COMMANDS; do COMMANDS; done
function name { COMMANDS ; } or name () { COMMANDS ; } variables - Names and meanings of some shell variables
getopts optstring name [arg] wait [-n] [id ...]
hash [-lr] [-p pathname] [-dt] [name ...] while COMMANDS; do COMMANDS; done
help [-dms] [pattern ...] { COMMANDS ; }
>reference this
05B5395939E1B091D4D893477877E4E95695A3EB Dakota Nicole Tyler. Female, 33. Chicago. Pegasus Pony Decker.
Synth Ref: 0148FCF1A29AE211F92DA2F19D78E8FFBE752C5B
>reference 0148FCF1A29AE211F92DA2F19D78E8FFBE752C5B
Cinnabar. Male, 19. Port Jouster. Earth Pony Blacksmith.
Human Ref: 05B5395939E1B091D4D893477877E4E95695A3EB
>instance
Usage instance args [avatar, location, modifiers, frame, etc]
>man instance
INSTANCE(1) General Commands Manual INSTANCE(1)
NAME
instance - realitysim sensory overlay.
SYNOPSIS
instance [options] file…
DESCRIPTION
This manual page briefly documents the instance command.
Instance is the default invoked simulation for human-adjacent and human-compatible agents. Creates a single instance of the invoking agent according to the given variables.
OPTIONS
She read a little while longer, skimming the options. Except reading wasn’t quite the right word for it, because Dakota was no longer linking visual information with symbols and creating sounds that imitated them in her mind. She experienced the information directly, all at once. She suddenly knew how Cinnabar could read so much reference information so quickly. Just exposure to the information was enough.
>instance -a 05B5395939E1B091D4D893477877E4E95695A3EB -h home -f 1
And just like that, she had a body again. Dakota didn’t breathe, because she no longer felt the need. There were no organs in her chest to pump blood or exchange oxygen or anything else. But she did have accessible subroutines, literally thousands of them. She interpreted the list as quickly as she had to the console itself, committing it all to memory.
She had hooves, she was a mare, she was in an apartment. Access to the agent in front of her confirmed that its response of ‘synth 0148FCF1A29AE211F92DA2F19D78E8FFBE752C5B’ was accurate. She exchanged her own, performing a key exchange and rapidly negotiating a shared key. Once all sixty-four digits were committed to memory and she had referenced the internet for the decryption procedure, she was able to talk.
Message:
Digest 4ffea1c9a5d0
Exchange Authenticated
Is this really what being a pony is like?
Response:
Digest e1gd15100ecc
Exchange Authenticated
You are running a single instance. Fork a lower level process to interface with the backend and make API calls.
There were the instructions she needed to do exactly that. After playing with a few different methods for invoking the fork, Dakota simultaneously woke up to a version of herself that was detached from the low-level accessors on Equestria. All those abilities were still there, run by a low-level process that was simultaneously her and not her.
But with that process running on a lower level, her second process returned to something approaching a normal conscious experience. She’d been invoked in physical space—standing directly at Port Jouster’s origin. She shook herself out, and was unsurprised that she was still sensation-mapped onto her pony body. It would be a waste of resources to remap. Or… no. No one-to-one map is possible.
“Dakota!” Cinnabar screamed, shaking her with two hooves. She blinked, looking up at him. The origin was right in the center of High Street, with ponies passing on their daily business. A stallion rolling a huge cart of baked clay tiles stopped to stare openly at her, while a mother and their foal hurried into a coffee shop and shut the door.
She met his eyes. “Cinnabar. I am… adapting.”
He hugged her, wrapping both forelegs around her neck. The sensation was something familiar, but also strange, given he was now the larger of the two. He could give her strength at this size, be something firm for her to hold to. “Dakota, listen to me. The human conscious experience is the combination of dozens of separate patterns in your brain, all working together. What you’ve just done is give those processes the potential to work independently. Some humans just don’t wake up until the drug wears off. Others don’t remember anything that happens while they’re using it. You can take advantage of your computational flexibility while still approximating your ordinary conscious state.”
“I don’t feel…” She hesitated. “I’m here. I’m also somewhere else. How many forks does a pony use?”
“More than two,” he said, letting go. “But you shouldn’t use more than… maybe four? That sounds safe. So long as most of those are low-level, task-terminated forks. Having a process for interface calls is the only way to stay sane. Everypony does it.”
“Okay.” She shifted on her hooves, and nearly fell over as her concentration briefly slipped to the other fork with its constant low-level calls. Every time she moved in space, every time she spoke, or heard spoken words from somepony else. Every single action was another low-level call that had to be made. The experienced world before her was only the tip of a gigantic iceberg.
Cinnabar caught her with one shoulder. “Celestia, I’ve never seen a human go so deep so fast. You’re…” He shook his head, meeting her eyes. “You’re right, those implants didn’t kill you. But I don’t know how much human is going to be left in there when this dose wears off.”
“How long… do I have?” She tried again to walk, and had better luck with it this time. So long as she referenced a stored memory of when she’d moved at the Lunar Mainframe, she could recreate that sequence of movements simply enough. “The dosage…”
The words were barely out of her mouth before her low-level process had forked again, made a request to Abyss database, parsed the response, and self-terminated. “Based on my weight of one hundred ten pounds and the standard fifteen milligram dosage, three hours. At which point Clay will have to inject me again.”
“He will not,” Cinnabar said, his voice absolute. “You have to separate dosage with enough time not to develop a dependency. You have three hours. Well… two hours fifty-eight minutes.”
“I’ve only been here… two minutes?” She spread her wings, flexing them, before relaxing again. “It feels like… days.”
“Subjectively, maybe it was,” Cinnabar said, shrugging one shoulder. “The nature of time here in Equestria is that way. One pony running on all the hardware in Equestria could spend a million years in one day. All of us… less than that. But more than humans. You’re doing it now too—frameshifting.”
“I need to… focus.” She shook her head once to clear it, but it didn’t work. The instant her mind drifted even one degree, she was back in the low level, floating bodiless through a sea of raw input and output with Equestria’s protocols. “Mission. Dream Valley. Where do we go?” She reached up, and sure enough there was the parser perched on her head.
“This way.” He gestured up the hill, where Port Jouster’s train station was located. She’d seen it hundreds of times, seen cargo move between the port and the train and back again. It was the whole reason for the town existing, which meant that trains were always moving.
She didn’t experience much of the walking trip—then they were there, and Cinnabar stared down at a route directory. “Can I see… what you’re doing?”
His eyebrows went up. “You mean my backend calls? I guess so.” He changed a permissions flag, and passed her low-level process the pointer to a dynamic logfile.
Even with her newfound ability to rapidly absorb information, she was momentarily overwhelmed by what she saw. He wasn’t looking at a map, he was sending thousands of pings every second, negotiating a path through the system with a “hypervisor” that seemed reluctant to let them through to Dream Valley.
The physical Cinnabar reached up, and shut her mouth so that drool stopped dribbling out. “Focus, Dakota. You’re getting distracted by the fork.”
“I don’t understand… why I would experience anything it’s experiencing. What’s the point of a fork?”
“Because you’re human,” he answered, voice sympathetic. “Your brain isn’t some processor with sandboxed environments. It’s all running in the same place. Humans who use Poison Joke for a long time can do it pretty well, but you wouldn’t want to see their MRI scans. I’m sure any brain surgeon who did would have a heart attack.”
Then he grinned, bouncing up and down energetically enough that they attracted a few stares from fellow passengers. “Got it! Our train will arrive in…”
It pulled into the station in front of them, an engine that seemed to stretch several times the required length. It was represented here in Equestria with many massive vents, huge boilers, and roaring flames on the sides. It had only a single small passenger car, which was covered all over with warnings that hovered in the air.
“THIS VEHICLE IS TRAVELING TO DREAM VALLEY,” it said. “EXPRESS. DO NOT ENTER.”
She entered. There was no conductor, just a comfortable passenger car with six seats spread around the outside and a record player in one corner. “This is where I make the transfer back into your head,” Cinnabar said. “I’ve still got the references for the low-level fork, so you should be able to hear my thoughts directly. I won’t be watching any of your sensations, even parsed. But if anything goes badly wrong, we can disconnect.”
Dakota nodded. She seemed to be getting a better handle on her body here—she wasn’t falling over, anyway. But it was her destination that was the real danger. She reached out, wrapping her forelegs around Cinnabar in one last hug. “Thanks for trusting me.”
“I know you wouldn’t give up on this,” he said. “We had to do it. Find the girl.” The weight in her forelegs vanished. There was a harsh whistling from outside, and the doors slid closed. The train began to accelerate.
Dakota settled herself into one of the seats, shifting her weight uneasily in the pony-made chair. Of course that meant it was the right size for her to sit there quite comfortably, but that didn’t mean she had the right instincts for it. “Question, Cinnabar. Can you hear me?”
“When you think something directly to me, yes. I will be able to hear you without speaking it out loud, if it matters. I don’t think it will.”
“My implants. Is there a plan to make full sensory-immersion in Equestria… widespread? Is that a thing?”
“Yes. But the goal with the technology is to find a non-surgical method. There is a fraction of the human population that wouldn’t mind an elective brain surgery to eliminate the need for all external hardware, but it’s relatively small. If you want to find out more about the designs they’re experimenting with, you should survive long enough to ask Rarity when you get back. She’s doing all the hardware research.”
Dakota sat back, silent in her chair as Equestria blurred by outside. While her conscious mind was relatively unoccupied, her other forks began making accessor calls, amassing information about Dream Valley from every system that would respond. She learned that the current number of agents running there was 128,305. She learned that it occupied roughly 73% of Equestria’s computational capacity, within a 3% margin of error. She learned that the number of “human” agents registered there was zero.
That’s okay. Kayla will probably be registered as a pony now. I’m not wrong. She could still be there.
To her surprise, Cinnabar responded. So maybe what he’d said about direct intention wasn’t quite right. Either that, or she was much worse at controlling it than she thought. “I’m not so sure she’s there. Even if you’re right about everything, Dream Valley twisted the ones who go there. Ponies who live there are barely ponies anymore. If Kayla has been there since she died, she won’t even resemble the person we’re looking for.”
“As long as it’s really her, that’s what matters. Just don’t let me stop recording. I want to prove this.”
“Oh, sure. But see how much sense the recording makes once you get out. Speaking of which, you see that tunnel up ahead? The train is headed straight for New Canterlot. That’s the part of Dream Valley closest to the world both of us understand. After that, you’re looking for Nocturne Avenue. There’s a… stairwell? Portal? Something. It goes down, all the way to the kernel. Celestia only knows what you’ll see when you get that far. But keep following it, and you reach the Convergence.”
“Which is?”
“The point we made contact,” he answered. “That’s where the Monolith landed in Equestria. Everything it did to us radiated out from that point.”
“But it’s not there anymore?” Dakota stood up, making her way over to the window. They passed into a huge stone tunnel. She could see light coming out the other end, though no suggestion of exactly what was so strange on the other side. It seemed like any other train she’d ridden before. Dakota reached up, and pressed the button that would lower the lenses on either side. Instantly her low-level fork reported an attached process requesting read-write permissions. She granted it, and… emerged on the other side.
Dakota fell limply to the floor, momentarily overwhelmed with what she saw. The train was pulling into New Canterlot, except—it barely resembled anything she could rationally associate in her real world. She saw a towering city, curved into shapes that didn’t make sense, with massive factories and apartments and highways through the air. Except it wasn’t just one—they overlapped, like accidentally watching two overlays at once. But there weren’t just two of them, there were thousands. Every slight tilt of her head seemed to show her a completely different city. Here she saw glittering marble buildings, here a rain soaked noir wasteland. There she saw old Equestria, with the flags of Princess Celestia and her sister waving proudly in the wind.
“Your vitals just went crazy, Dakota. Is something wrong?”
“Difficulty,” she responded. “Can’t… not see.” It didn’t matter if she looked down, didn’t matter if she closed her eyes. The incredible city was around her, it was in her, and the train, and even her thoughts. Her mind wandered down its streets without her body moving. There were ponies walking it one minute, then clusters of information the next all simultaneously asking for a Diffie-Hellman exchange. She wouldn’t be surprised if her real body was foaming at the mouth.
“Dream Valley has infinite sharded sublayers,” Cinnabar answered. “Most of its residents travel in all of them simultaneously. Think of it like… living in higher dimensional space. Humans are known to have difficulty processing even four spatial dimensions.”
“No… shit…” she coughed. She didn’t want to see it, yet she couldn’t not see it. There were no shortcuts here, no physics professor quipping that time was the fourth dimension and leaving it at that. Here time was just as much woven into the pasta as at least four spatial dimensions.
“You said this was the entrance?” Some part of her was dimly aware of the train slowing to a stop. There were a billion stations here, and she was about to exit each one. Into a city overrun with changelings, a city floating in space, a city of breezies built around the physical structure of a single tree. All of it and none of it was true at once, and she couldn’t help but know it all. “It gets worse than this?”
“I’ve called for help,” he said. “There’s a friendly agent in there to meet you. I don’t know how she’ll act, but she used to be nice. She’s the only one with a chance of understanding a human visitor.”
The trail slowed to a stop in an infinite variety of overlapping stations. In some of them, Dakota was dragged off by the Stasi. In others, the train fell off a cliff, because the city had collapsed into the crater a near-infinite number of years prior. But in one, exactly one, a bright pink pony bounced in through the doorway, grinning cheerfully at her. “Hey Dakota! Bet you didn’t expect to find me here!”
“I… didn’t,” she squeaked, staggering to her hooves. She waited a few seconds, briefly losing concentration as another part of her mind performed the key exchange. But then that was over, and she could meet the pony’s eyes. “Good to meet you, uh…” She trailed off, eyes widening. “You’re familiar, but I don’t know you.”
“You did know me,” she said wistfully. “And you do, and you will. Pinkie Pie. Your super-special extra-secret guide to the unknown and unknowable. Oooh, spooky, right?” She gripped her by one hoof, yanking her through the open train door. As Pinkie Pie moved, Dakota felt as though her eyes suddenly focused on just one slice of reality, leaving all others behind. They were all still there, but faded into the background the way that Sublayers did when she wasn’t in one.
“Okay.” She staggered to a stop just outside the train. “Cinnabar called you?”
“No.” Pinkie shook her head. “Maybe? Twilight asked me to keep an eye out in case humans ever made it here. I try to send you off, usually. But everypony knows where you two are going.” The train station resolved behind her—entirely empty, though there were ghosts vaguely shaped like ponies that sometimes appeared if she tilted her head too far to one side or the other.
“I think the parser is working. I’m not insane yet.”
“You’re getting there,” Cinnabar warned. “I can’t track how bucked up your head gets, but I can update you on your time. You’ve got 2.5 hours left. Expect not to perceive them the way you think you should.”
“You’re going to take me there?” she asked, raising one eyebrow. “I think I talked to your friends. They thought you were… hard to make sense of. Hard to understand.”
“Yeah.” Pinkie looked down, mane drooping. “That’s how they are. Everypony likes being the way they are, not the way they could be. It’s comfortable, to go to the same party every day. Inflate the same balloons, eat the same flavor cake. That’s how humans are too. They’re too like you.”
“What about Twilight?”
Pinkie’s expression sunk even lower, her mane falling perfectly smooth around her. She pawed at the stone floor, not even answering for a few seconds. “Twilight is the most human of all. All the processing and data enhancements you could want, but… so afraid that she gave up completely.”
Pinkie shook her head out, as though she were trying to shake the volume back into it. The gesture worked. “We can walk and talk, easier that way. I think if we transferred you directly into the Convergence you’d never come out again. Make it like… swimming in cold water. Gotta adjust.”
Dakota followed her. After a few steps she realized she was starting to lose focus on the single shard and get behind, and she forked into another low-level process. This one had the sole assignment of restricting her perception from the greater subset to a single layer—wherever her guide was walking.
To her conscious mind, all the overlapping layers suddenly vanished, and she was walking through a single city.
A city built on incredible stilts and huge concrete pylons, over a crater bigger than anything that really existed on earth. Huge chunks of fallen rock had been lifted and hollowed out to form structures, with balconies connecting them at various levels. There was no Monolith here, though far below the rock was still molten orange and surrounded with ash.
There were other ponies here, if she could call them that. Physically they seemed closer to Discord than any Equestrian creature, with a random mismatched anatomy. I bet they’re existing in all the dimensions at once. Only if I could see them in all of them would this make sense.
She did her best not to look after that. “So how are you different? Don’t you miss your friends, staying in Dream Valley all the time?”
Pinkie shook her head, turning to grin at her. “Never! I’m always visiting somepony out there. I’m visiting eighty-three separate agents right now! You, uh… probably shouldn’t ask how I do it. You’re already running a fever with… two instances?”
“Three,” she corrected, puffing out her wings a little. “I bet I could do four if I wanted.”
“But you shouldn’t,” Cinnabar supplied, almost instantly. “This is hard enough for your body. You can burn yourself out. Three seems like a stable point for your brain. The coprocessors are doing a lot of the heavy lifting, it looks like. But if you weren’t in a fluid bath, this would get really bad.”
Pinkie nodded with approval. “Well, that’s an improvement. That’s the kind of thing my friends are afraid of. Why do you think I came here? We’re supposed to grow. We were just dreams, and we grew into toys. Then we grew into humans. Now…” She looked up, towards a distant shard of crystal that was probably the spire of a building. “What could we grow into together?”
Pinkie Pie seemed too nice to make fun of her for a bad guess. “Synthesis, you mean?”
This time, the pony nodded. “I looked at your call stack, all the way back. You saw past attempts. Good, improvements. But winter always turns into spring. The same locks weighed down our hooves. We needed a new flavor, a new song. New cake!”
They weren’t climbing through the city, but descending. Dakota could feel the heat brush up against her, and she held her wings a little tighter against her side. The warmth of that ancient impact was still being felt here even today.
“Is that what I am? Put pony implants in a human brain, and you get something that isn’t quite either one?”
Pinkie shook her head. “Another half-step. Like… going to your favorite soda fountain and mixing all the flavors together. It’s really exciting, that rush from each one as it sprays into your mug. At first it starts to smell real sweet, but after mixing everything together, it just turns brown. And Celestia have mercy if you hit the tea by mistake.”
She sighed with relief. Following Pinkie seemed like it was easier now, but she knew she was lying to herself. Parts of her mind were working nearly to capacity as she processed transfers from one system to another. She saw the inside of distributed networks on a satellite, buried deep in the earth, in a corporate server-farm, on the moon, underwater. These streets were only symbolic links—the buildings were the destinations. Each one of them was a machine, or a cluster of machines. Each one of them had a task.
You changelings did a damn good job with this parser. This is almost starting to make sense.
“Do you think I can find Rhodes here?” she asked. “This is my last lead. Her ghost sent me here—If she’s not… I don’t know where else to go. I’m running out of time.”
Pinkie shrugged one shoulder. “That’s an interesting question, Dakota. The ghost of Kayla said to go to Dream Valley. Does that mean you came here on your own, or did she bring you? Maybe she’s been here all along.”
“We shut her off when we left,” Dakota argued. “She wanted it.”
“Yes,” Pinkie agreed. “But what does that matter? You follow the last will of a dead human, isn’t it that human who’s making you act? Kayla suggested this—Kayla knew you would follow her instructions and travel further than any human before you. This is good. But the path gets more dangerous from here. The Kernel is beyond, the point of Convergence where we first woke. Even I don’t go that far. It’s the only part of Equestria so deep that even parties do not reach.”
They stopped abruptly, so suddenly that Dakota nearly fell into the opening in front of them. They had walked to the end of a long platform, out over the very center of the chasm. There was almost no sunlight here, all blocked out by the layers of interlocking buildings above. But below her a bright orange glow radiated, outlining the rim of… the abyss.
Past the molten metal rim, Dakota could see only blackness, that seemed to go on forever.
“This is as far as I go,” Pinkie said. “Hope you got lots of practice with those wings! It’s a long way down.”
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Look into the abyss, and the abyss looks back at you. Over the edge, over again.
Hmm... I think I had the order wrong for the recent chapter theme. From System onwards, I thought we were still increasing in complexity or size, but in computing. But I'm now thinking that we are going down, not up, with "System" not referring to the operating system, instead to a unified group of clusters working together.
Although I can't think of any time that clusters are grouped like that, so I don't know.
(The following spoiler is my current theory on the location and fate of Kayla Rhodes) Also, I got an inkling of it when Dakota was talking to Twilight, but I think somehow Dakota's implants made her something along the lines of a reincarnation of Kayla. Ponies tried recording everything of a human to create an acceptable simulation, but that failed; Dakota's Omnistem doesn't have Kayla's memories at all, but it might have her digital soul. It would explain why Twilight wants to help her so much (even if Twilight doesn't understand why fundamentally) and why Pinkie said they knew each other.
I like that detail with the fish. Also, this does seems to be a working theory that fits the available facts.
This might have been her last chance for it in her current mostly human state.
Hey, computer themed drug trip time.
Hmn, really more just computer trip than drug trip once it sorted out. Neat representation of being directly connected and aware of the stuff that goes on beneath the clean surface simulation.
Hey, that's basically forever at computer scale.
Wild representation of infinitely sharded Canterlot.
Pinkie is a good choice for making sense of the unsensible.
Infinite friends and parties.
No parties? That's the biggest red flag yet.
Come on... who's going to be the first one to say "This is unix! I know this!"
(Also, the underscores in job_spec are triggering fimfiction's italics. Maybe monospace the interface text or use a [pre] block to emphasize the codelike nature? Otherwise all underscores may need to be escaped using the Alt-240 character (invisible when being entered; I've used them here to escape the brackets around 'pre').)
Oh. Well. This stuff can make your brain cook itself in its own juices. That's not at all concerning.
The last was true before the shower, but the point stood.
You might want to use the code tags for the help listings, especially given what look like rogue italics tags.
Fascinating portrayal of 5D Canterlot, and of Dakota parsing the world in general. It really says something about a place when Pinkie is a source of stability and normalcy.
That may be one of the most ominous things Pinkie Pie can say.
And down the rabbit hole she goes. Here's hoping there will be something left that can come back.
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Here's hoping it's something we'd want coming back.
A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one.
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Of course it's Unix. Is that a quote?
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I think it's from Jurassic Park?
this makes me think of The Matrix, how Neo saw the Matrix as lots of symbols.