37 - 42 6c 61 63 6b 20 53 77 61 6e
☢★★ Black Swan ★★☢
Los Pegasus. Industrial Sector. Royal Palace Level -3. October 23rd, 2077. 1.892e+6 hours.
Black Swan begins authorised repairs of replicator attached to Los Pegasus industrial system, at request of Queen Katydid, and new ally Prince Silverlight.
October 23rd, 2077. 1.892e+6 hours. Gears’ transceiver signal went offline. Swan continues repairs.
Swan was unconcerned by this sudden development. Gears’ transceiver was flicking on and off so rapidly that it hardly mattered. It would be back up in a moment, just like always. In fact, it would be back on so quickly it may as well have never turned off. Sure, the file log would insist that a significant amount of time had passed, but that was impossible.
It was still just after lunch on a Friday. Time had not passed. Somehow.
Swan lifted a piece of broken machinery with one of her mechanical arms, ignoring the problem just as she did with everything which fixed itself instantly. Queen Katydid had been very nice when she asked Swan to help the handsome stallion fix his broken replicators, so that took more precedence over worrying about the safety of her daughter.
Gears was perfectly safe. The transceiver was on the fritz, is all. Swan would just have to remind herself to check it over next time Gears teleported over to her without any warning.
@echo off
Title reminder #89032e
:1
If %gearsvisible% equ 1 goto reminder
ping localhost -n 600 > NUL
goto 1
:reminder
echo Check Gears transceiver for random power fluctuations.
ExitHer reminder thus set, Swan turned her full attention to the broken machine before her. It was a strange thing. No spirits dwelt within the complex structures making up its heart. The structure was compatible with them, and Swan was able to coax the occasional spirit bound to the facility to assist her with small elements of the repairs, but they did not like to linger within the crystal wafers.
In truth, the exposed machinery made Swan uncomfortable as well. Perhaps it was the nature of the device. Of the two major schools of magic, Order was preferred by sapient beings. This device dealt in Chaos. It only made sense. In the beginning, the universe had been void, and then there was something. Creating matter and energy was not something within the realm of Order. That was Chaos’ wheelhouse.
Understanding the nature of the device she was working on brought Swan no comfort. Her many limbs gently and carefully held the part she was working on at arms length from her body as she poured resin into a hairline crack to make several fragments of crystal wafer whole once more. The traces would be silver-soldered next. Swan did not like the thought of needing to be closer to the machine for that operation. Even though each of her limbs ended in a camera as well as a claw, her primary sensory array would be needed for such ultra-fine detail.
Optics were only good for so much, after all. Visible light was such a limited slice of the EM spectrum. Swan pitied the ponies she interacted with. Each day the sun would rise and they would perceive the wonders of creation through a pair of ridiculous gelatinous orbs, and a few membranes within their skull. They knew nothing of the world, so much data lost to such an absurd body.
Swan could see everything her limbs were pointed at. Even herself. A small mare’s frame, hidden beneath a red robe trimmed in gold, with just the barest hint of silver and machinery poking out here and there. Beautiful, but modest. Exactly the way a proper lady should present herself.
She could feel herself as well. Not merely in the way a pony is aware of the position of their own legs. No, the low level radar pulses Swan constantly emitted extended her sense of touch to everything they washed over for almost fifty meters.
The whole of the EM spectrum was at her beck and call, no detail lost to her sensors unless it fell within the realm of the subatomic. But her senses extended even to that smallest of realms. Spirits understood the world on that smallest of levels, peering into the macroscopic universe only when given a crutch by happenstance or the will of Shamen.
Swan had always known her implants would be inhabited by machine spirits. She’d made a pact with one before she replaced the first part of her failing body. If her soul would be sharing space with spirits at the end of the process, why not have them help construct their new form? It was to be all of their bodies, after all.
Swan finished flowing the resin into the cracks and flicked on a UV lamp to rapidly cure it. She extended her will to the piece in her iron talons, searching over it with the senses granted to her through her union with her other. Even as a Warlock, she could tell nothing of this device.
Repairing it could very well prove impossible without a spirit within the machine to provide assistance.
Swan felt the Replciator chamber’s door open before she heard it. Swan pulsed the doorway with a LIDAR array, determining the nature of whoever was present by feel. It took less of her attention than looking up from her work.
Two ponies stood at the threshold. One pegasus. One unicorn. The pegasus was male and had a bent leg suggesting a poorly healed injury. The mare’s belly shape indicated pregnancy, or perhaps a large uterine tumor. A quick pulse of high frequency radio waves and EM signals let Swan peek under the mare’s flesh.
While most would have thought of this as a horrible violation, Swan knew it was necessary. Either the mare needed to be warned of a health problem easily mistaken for a growing child, or Swan needed to ask if the expectant mother would like a foal monitor and self warming crib.
Swan turned her attention to the mare’s belly, doing her best to keep the radiation dose low as she looked.
No foal. A growth of flesh. Cells which had chosen to abandon their family and choose their own survival over the health and safety of the whole. One of the many reasons flesh disgusted her so.
@echo off
Title reminder #89032f
ping localhost -n 600 > NUL
echo Inform unknown mare 3920c of medical issue. Specifically: Uterine cancer.
echo.
echo Offer to remove affected tissue and replace with superior synthetic system.
exitSwan turned her attention back to the pair of ponies. They had taken a step into the room in the time it took her to code her reminder. The two were Los Pegans, judging by their armor and weapons. They were speaking.
Swan frowned. Ponies spoke so slowly. It was almost painful to listen to them. It’s not like she wouldn’t happily install a networking transceiver for them, either. She’d offered mechanical telepathy to seventeen ponies in this city so far.
All had said no.
Swan kept wondering why. She’d have loved to keep wondering, but now she needed to use all of her patience and attention to discover what precisely these ponies wanted of her, or if they were merely talking to one another.
“— is,” the Pegaus said as it walked into the view of one of Swan’s cameras.
He was green. A gross green. The sort of green one finds within the waste created by a slime mold growing within a bus station’s toilet.
Swan swiveled the arm the camera was mounted to to get a look at the mare.
She was blue. A scary blue. The sort of blue one looks at and swears it's looking back at you.
Swan frowned. Blue should not feel like it was looking at her.
@echo off
Title reminder #890330
ping localhost -n 600 > NUL
echo Mention feeling blue is staring at me at psychologist appointment next Monday.
exitSwan felt bad for her poor psychologist. Monday was going to be so busy! Hopefully it would last as long as Friday was.
“Hey! Cyberfreak,” the mare snarled at Swan.
Swan quickly calculated the odds of the mare using that as a term of endearment. They were remarkably low.
Carefully setting down her work, Swan turned to face the mare, as ponies insisted one do when speaking to them. Even ponies that knew full well Swan was still looking at them.
“My apologies. Did I cause damage to any of your property? I will repair it at once,” Swan said with her voice modulator dialed in for an extra apologetic tone.
The Pegasus’s face twisted in disgust. “Shut up!” he demanded, wings twitching angrily.
“Yeah! You think it’s okay to go around telling foals they are going to die to try and get them to turn into you?” The mare spat.
She actually spat. The ball of saliva splattered across Swan’s muzzle.
taskkill “reminder #89032f”The rude mare could just find out she was dying from someone else.
“The curse of organic life, is death,” Swan said, dialing her modulator up to a serious tone. “Foals are made of sterner material than you know. They can and should understand death. They are young enough to not be afraid of alternatives to biological existence. It is the duty of those who can save them, to try.”
The pegasus rolled his eyes and gave the mare a quick sidelong glance. “See? Told you it was insane.”
“Yeah… Guess we should make sure we don't get a Red Eye 2.” the mare agreed, her horn lighting up as she spoke to unholster a 10mm submachinegun from her side.
Swan tracked the weapon as it was pointed at her. A simple and crude piece. Ironshod Firearms model 2901a. No modifications. Standard 30 round magazine with open sides for ammunition tracking. Exposed ammunition was exclusively soft nosed lead ball rounds.
It was very unlikely the few rounds Swan couldn’t see were armor piercing, but she chose to check anyways. A quick pulse of x-rays revealed all rounds were indeed low-powder subsonic lead soft noses.
Swan decided to politely ignore the comparatively toothless threat.
“I don’t know why our Prince is so okay with you being here,” the mare said as she glared at Swan down her weapon’s sights. “He’s usually much smarter than this. My friend thinks you’re controlling him with an implant. You stop it, and I won't put a bullet into your head.”
Swan retracted her mechanical limbs and adjusted her robes with her wings. “I was unable to produce mind control implants when requested by Doctor Silver. I never returned to that line of research. I cannot be controlling your leader.”
“See!?” the pegasus said as he drew his own weapon. “I told you I saw its name on those papers talking about those implants! Bullshit she never finished!”
Swan inspected the new weapon. A small laser pistol. Post-war design, but built from prewar components. Crude, simplistic, likely effective. A young spirit resided within the weapon. A leftover from the production of its photonic resonance chamber.
Swan extended her will to the weapon’s spirit. Do not fire on me, she ordered.
The young spirit’s terror was more than enough for Swan to know the threat had been eliminated.
“You are making a mistake,” Swan said as firmly as she could. “I have been authorised to defend myself.”
“You so much as twitch one of those spider-legs our way, and you won't have time to even try to defend yourself,” The pegasus growled around his laserpistol’s grip.
“If you wanted me dead, you could have fired upon opening the chamber door,” Swan said with a dismissive snort of static.
What poor tactics. Swan would have fired into and through the door. Unlike the meat ponies she was not limited by pesky things like line of sight. Or cover values.
“We wanted the truth first,” the mare said as she took a step forwards to place the barrel of her weapon against Swan’s forehead.
The weapon’s barrel pushed Swan’s hood down, softening the clink of metal on metal.
“Any last words?” the mare finished, her eyes burning with hate.
Swan took a few ticks of her aux processor to debate her next course of action. There were many things she could do, nad one thing she must do. The Prince would need to know her presence was causing distress and find ways to ensure his ponies knew she meant no harm to any who were kind at heart. But first, a solution to the immediate problem was required.
These two were not evil. Only afraid of her, seemingly due to the actions of another cybernetically enhanced individual. Perhaps they did not understand the nature of Swan’s philosophy, and the voluntary basis upon which she practiced it.
Yes. Words would solve this problem.
Swan tilted her head up slightly to look the mare in the eyes. The mare recoiled slightly as Swan’s all-spec sensorvisor became visible within the shadows of her hood.
Swan took a second to program her modulator to drop the natural equine voice as she spoke, allowing her true, synthesized, bass heavy, mechanical voice to take over syllable by syllable, so she could show the two silly ponies the beauty of the machine.
“From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me,” She explained.
“I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the machine.”
The pegasus’s eyes widened as Swan’s voice changed. His weapons’ barrel trembled. He took a single frightened step back.
Swan took a few microseconds to try and understand why he was frightened, and concluded he must have just noticed the creepy Chaos machine behind her. Silly ponies could be so unobservant.
“Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you,” Swan continued. “One day, the crude biomass that you call a temple will wither and you will beg my kind to save you. I am already saved...”
Swan gently pulled her hood down with one mechanical limb, revealing the fullness of the smooth, chrome plate which formed the majority of her head’s outer covering. A single thought and the latches clicked open, allowing the plate to slide back and reveal the transparent crystalline armor protecting her brain.
Her crystalized brain. Carefully converted from the disgusting squishy flesh of a pegasi to the beautiful ice-blue silica of a crystal pony, and glowing with the light of the spirit she had merged with so long ago.
“Luna’s tits!” The mare yelped as she jumped back.
Swan often wondered why ponies swore by Luna’s teats. One of these days she’d have to get over her orientation based hangups and see what they were all about since they were presumably amazing.
Swan took a moment to think on how she could make her point perfectly clear. Six junked sprite bots had been moved down for her to scrap as needed. Their vacuum tubes were compatible with the replicator. But now they could sever another use.
Swan extended her will to the downed machines. A touch of spiritual energy, and the once dead machines overcome the limitations of their battered frames enough for Swan to do a little remote hacking and speak through each of the machines that her will now animated.
“For the machine is immortal,” Swan finished in seven seperate voices.
The two ponies dropped their weapons and ran. Swan frowned, trotted forwards, and carefully scooped both weapons up with a pair of mechanical appendages for a through inspection.
They were undamaged. Good.
Swan gave the weapons a little pat, then set them down neatly next to the door. She knew once the two ponies stopped being so excited at the prospect of an ageless life that they ran off to tell their friends, they would be back for their things.
Unfortunately, Swan would not be here to tell their friends the good news if they brought any down to the basement. She needed to correct their erroneous impression of her at the source, as she had realized moments before.
Swan trotted through the door, closed it with a thought and a little bit of spiritual power, and trotted towards the building’s very energetic elevator.
Excuse me, Swan thought, extending her will towards the elevator’s machine spirit. I need to be taken to Prince Silverlight as quickly as possible. Will you assist?
The machine replied immediately. Yes! That means I can go down, then up!
The simple joy young machine spirits took in their mundane operations always brought a smile to Swan’s lips. It was very nostalgic to hear and feel the elevator’s joy as it descended for her. Swan remembered everything the spirit she merged with had known upon their ascension. One of the downsides to becoming a warlock on the part of the spirit was losing that joy.
Few zebras had ever truly understood warlocks. The notion of fusing one’s soul with a spirit to gain the powers within that spirit’s domain was quite common knowledge amongst shamen. A little more rare were the reasons not to undergo the process. To many, having an alien mind impress some of its behaviors, needs, and desires onto you was a form of hell. To this day, the saying about Warlocks that circulated amongst Zebra tribes remained; “Power for one’s heart.”.
Swan knew she had been lucky. The mare who had become half of her essence had been insane. Joining with a spirit had stabilized her. So much so that the resulting warlock considered herself to be Black Swan still. A rare trait indeed. Especially for one formed with such an old spirit.
It had gone by the name Mag'ladroth. Swan remembered her old self having been amused at what she perceived of as a reference to fiction she enjoyed. In truth, the fiction had been a reference to the spirit. A name drawn from an ancient book of Zebrican rituals. No mention of what precisely the spirit was or had been, just its name.
The Zebricans had forgotten their ancient creation. Such that when Swan had sought out a spirit, the remains of what may well have been the first chariot were something an Equestrian could buy off the black market. Just some Zebrican historical relics of no importance. Discarded by a museum for their lack of known significance and low popularity.
Such power, thrown out like trash. Swan remembered just how excited they had both been when she’d proposed to her new spirit friend they just hang out and play some Megamane. To get to know one another before joining for the sake of survival.
Survival. That which draws a spirit to merge with a creature or object in the first place. An anchor within this reality to grasp onto, the ultimate lure for any spirit.
Swan often wondered if the reason she was seamless as a warlock was due to this alignment of goals. Two beings wishing for nothing more than to survive for as long as possible, so they might delight in all the world has to offer.
Excuse me? Are you still going up? Ponies are pushing buttons. The Elevator asked, making Swan realize it had been at her landing for several minutes.
Swan cleared her throat. Sorry, little one. I was lost in thought.
She rode the elevator up, trusting it to stop on the floor where the Prince happened to be. Swan was unused to such huge structures. It felt so strange to not quite feel at home in them. After all, she had been in the MAS Hub just this morning. One day of working in that little library and her basement workshop shouldn’t have left that big of an impact on her sense of normality so quickly.
Unless of course, trying to build a biomechanical alicorn for funzies (and also because why not make your second child the best she could be, and also hone your synthetic biology skills a little) was that big of an attention sink.
@echo off
Title reminder #890331
:1
ping localhost -n 600 > NUL
if %gearsispresent% equ 0 goto 1
echo Ask Gears to help me find pigment for the prototype’s fur. She’s much better at sourcing cosmetic items.
exitSwan trotted through the Palace floor she’d been brought to, looking for the Prince with all of her sensors with every step she took. Along the way she stopped to fix half a dozen improperly installed conduits, patched four sections of leaky ductworks, and even rehung one door that was slightly misaligned. Primarily because they were not correctly made, and secondarily because nopony else was fixing the glaringly large errors in practically everything Swan passed by.
This slipshod work would never do. Building code clearly specified wire conduit had to be parallel to the floor, or perpendicular for running vertically. Seventeen microns off parallel was not parallel. It was crooked. Building code did not even mention a tolerance for something crooked.
At least, nto Swan’s personal building code. Which Katydid said she could enforce on things she was inside of at the time.
So she fixed it. Yet, more mistakes remained. Unfortunately, Swan knew she was supposed to be doing something important. Thinking as hard as she could, Swan did her best to focus her mind on remembering exactly why she had gone up the elevator.
Probably to fix things. Fixing things is what a Swan was for.
start pwnplayer "C:\Music\Ultra Road Combatant II\Cunnings Theme.mp3"No error shall be spared! Swan thought aggressively at a floorboard which was not quite flush with the others as she activated the mech-arm which housed her finishing plane.
☢★★◯★★☢
Swan was in the middle of stripping some poorly applied veneer from the side of a cabinet to refinish the wood, and wondering why anypony would put a walnut veneer over rosewood, then treat the walnut with a rosewood stain, only to then seal it all in with an amber tinted polycoat, when the Prince found her.
“I do believe this is the most pleasant rampaging cyberpony I've ever come across,” The Prince said as he stepped into Swan’s radar range.
Swan couldn’t help but notice he was wearing power armor and sheathing a sword on his flank. Swan approved. Any metal covering an organic wore made them much more attractive, and swords were just cool.
Swan used to have a sword, until her husband Jack deemed her modifications to it unsafe.
Hon… That wasn’t a sword then. You’d made it into the least safe chainsaw ever. Her husband reminded her gently. Also that guy is trying to talk to you.
So he is. Thank you, dear.
stop pwnplayerSwan paused, looked up, then around, using both her hand and her various cameras to get a proper 360 degree view. A rampaging cyberpony… But where?
There was nothing to be seen, or felt. Interesting!
“Standby, attempting to detect stealth buck signatures…” Swan said as she began to fire off a series of sonar pulses.
Not the most effective detection method to use in air, but at close range—
The Prince chuckled. “No, Miss Swan. I meant you.”
Swan would have blinked in confusion if she could. Instead, she simply played a blinking animation on the phosphor arrays hidden behind her sensor-visor. “I do not understand…”
The Prince gestured with one hoof to the wall hallway behind him. “I was told in no uncertain terms you were tearing up floorboards, and elected to deal with you personally, rather than get any of my ponies hurt. Imagine my surprise to find the entire hallway eerily perfectly renovated.”
Swan did her best to imagine it. It was quite difficult.
“I continue to not understand. There were errors. The floor was off level by 0.3 degrees in several sections. Anypony could see this. I had to fix it,” she attempted to explain.
The Prince raised an eyebrow. “Miss Swan, I assure you, nopony without your hardware would ever notice such a thing… I was told you live in a library. I can only imagine how precisely tuned every last wall-stud is.”
Swan waved a hoof in dismissal. “It’s just a library. This is the Canterlot Palace. It is required to look nice.”
The Prince frowned, further confusing Swan. He cleared his throat. “Miss, this is a casino, it just looks like the Canterlot Palace. Are— Where do you think you are?”
“Canterlot,” Swan replied before frowning. “No… That is incorrect. I am in Los Pegasus. Correct?”
The Prince nodded once then trotted over to Swan to sit next to her. “I’m told every Cyberpony goes mad eventually, but you don’t seem insane to me. A touch eccentric perhaps, but not insane,” He looked at a curtain rod and briefly compared it to the floor and ceiling.
“Swan,” The Prince asked slowly. “Did you… Did you remove the crown molding to make it level with the— How long have you been working?”
“1.892e+6 hours,” Swan answered, puffing out her chest and fluffing her wings and mech-arms proudly.
The Prince shook his head. “No, no, no. I mean how long have you been working since you last slept?”
Swan tilted her head. “1.892e+6 hours.”
The Prince pursed his lips. “Oh. Do… Do you not need to sleep?”
“Of course not,” Swan giggled. “I had a wizard transmute my brain into a Crystal Pony brain pre-war. I do not operate on a meat based computer. I am crystal based. Therefore, I do not require sleep.”
The Prince gave Swan an odd look she didn’t quite understand. Unless…
Swan cleared her throat. “I do pretend to sleep, however. My daughter insisted I needed to sleep, so I wrote a script to help me fake sleeping when her transponder purported she was close to me at night.”
The Prince performed that one gesture Swan often saw ponies make but had long since forgotten the meaning of. The one where they turned their hoof to place the flat of it against their face for several heartbeats and groaned.
“Miss, Swan,” The Prince said oddly slowly as he slid his hoof down from his face. “Are you telling me that you haven’t slept, in…”
The Prince trailed off and tapped his power armor shod hoof against the floor several times to help him process the mathematics.
@echo off
title reminder #890332
:1
ping localhost -n 600 > NUL
if %princenotalking% goto next
goto 1
:next
echo Would you like me to fit you with a math coprocessor?
exitThe Prince frowned, stroked his chin and then checked his math a second time. “Miss Swan, if that’s true, you’ve been awake for seventy-eight-thousand, eight-hundred and thirty-three days.”
Swan shook her head gently. “Ordinarily, yes, but today has been approximately that long so far, so I have only been awake for one day, as is normal. Hopefully, I will soon be able to test my systems properly and know for certain I will not need regular reboots to remain at peak operational capacity.”
The Prince’s mouth opened and closed several times. “I— Are you okay? Were you shot, or hit?”
Swan shook her head again. “Not recently.”
“And you still think you’ve only been awake one day when you’ve, again, if your hour count is correct, have been awake since… My god, you’ve been awake since the Last Day!” The Prince sputtered, taking a step back in shock.
Swan nodded once. “Yes. I have been awake since this morning.”
Swan felt her husband’s consciousness stir within the old comms network. She was so happy he found a means to live beyond the time allotted by his biology. Especially with that nasty condition that had people aging to death within one day going around. One of these days Swan would have to trot over to the Crystal Empire, jack into its computer network and give him a hug.
Not tomorrow, tomorrow would be super busy with all the things she promised to do tomorrow for various ponies. But the day after that would do.
Dude… Jack sighed. Just give up. If I can’t convince her she’s lost it you’ve got no hope.
I haven't lost it, dear. My calendar is digital. I have a clock in my temporal lobe. I keep perfect track of time. It is an innate sense. Swan reminded politely.
Silly stallions could forget little details so easily.
The Prince blinked twice, then cleared his throat. “Very well. I see that I must provide you with some assistance,” he said while moving his head in a slow, sagely, nod.
He cleared his throat, looked Swan in the eyes and smiled kindly. “Miss Swan… You’re keeping count of hours. How are you doing that?”
Swan’s ears perked. She loved talking about her systems. Especially to random interested ponies.
“Okay! So if you take a little wafer of quartz and electrify it puts out regular vibrations. We know that 32768 of these vibrations occur within a 1 second period. So if you build a circuit that keeps count of those vibrations you can keep accurate time. Then you build another circuit to multiply those vibration cycles to get hours, days, and years,” Swan flicked her tail happily as she finally got to the part she liked talking about the most. “Once all of that is done you box it up all nicely in something not bio-reactive and you implant it directly into your brain, splicing it in on the connection of the hippocampus to the medial entorhinal cortex. You’ll then need a small interface to bring that data to your conscious mind, and a program to control it and make it more easily readable.”
The Pince hummed and raised his eyebrow slightly. “Like one of those little watches? The ones without clockwork?”
“Yes! But better because you don’t need to look at your leg all the time. You just know what time it is and in my case can compare the time between other times and so on,” Swan sat down happily, hoping there would be more questions.
“I take it you are certain your clock is accurate?” The Prince asked with an oddly careful tone.
Swan nodded. “Yes. If it was not, I would be bumping into walls as my pathing systems would fail to understand how fast I was going.”
Oh, you mean like that one time you ran full force into that concrete pillar? her husband nickered.
That was not my fault. The evil meanie hit me with an anti-matrix grenade, Swan sniffled, shivering a little at the memory.
“Are you alright?” The Prince asked.
Swan nodded once. “Yes.”
“Good. Then I would like to ask you something, call it a favor,” The Prince looked Swan dead in her visor. “Please, check and make sure whatever program you are using for your calendar is working correctly.”
“Oh! I did that this morning,” Swan exclaimed excitedly. “You see, there was a problem with our calendar programs. Ponies rushed to design better hardware and software so fast, which caused a major problem with compatibility. No one will buy all new programs for new hardware if their old programs and hardware work. This means all new hardware must be compatible with old software. The problem is old software was made to just work as a conceptual demonstration in many ways. Including the calendar system.”
Swan cleared her throat and with one of her mechanical arms, took a piece of chalk from her tool bag and began to draw a diagram on the ABSOLUTELY LEVEL floor to illustrate how the code worked.
“So for your standard calendar everypony uses and thinks of, you have your months, days, and years, and days were kept to a regular schedule by Celestia. I mean, I think she’ll get back to doing that tomorrow. It’s an important job, but everypony deserves a day off sometimes,” Swan began. “Now, because computers track time by counting vibrations, not days, you need a bit of math to convert the pony calendar to proper timekeeping. When we first made programs, ponies insisted on using most of the 8 byte integer to reference historical dates in the standard clock. Which meant that most of the 255 values were dedicated to already past time. We had about 20 years before the clock would be full. But that wasn’t a problem, because everypony assumed everypony else would get better hardware in a few years and that would leave more address space for dates.”
Swan scribbled a few small points on her diagram just to make sure the concept of binary counting was conveyed properly. “But that didn’t happen because ponies are silly and keep hold of old things for too long. So most chipsets remained using the old software designed to track time just like how I drew things. Amusingly enough, any system using the old software would have reached the 255 value on October 23, 2077. You know, today. They can’t count any higher than that for dates, and old software didn't even have a store-and-purge buffer to reset the clock while writing the date to file to begin the conversion at the rollover point to keep tracking time accurately. It will be really amusing to see everypony who forgot to update be confused tomorrow when their calendars repeat a day forever! Well, until they make me fix them.”
“Oh. My. Bucking. Celestia.” The Prince and Swan’s husband groaned in unison, thereby thoroughly confusing the poor mare.
“Um… pardon?” she asked timidly.
“Miss Swan, I believe you are running the old code,” The Prince said with a strained, or perhaps pained expression on his face.
Swan nodded. “Yes. It was less expensive. It’s okay though, I have the patch saved to my internal storage and will be updating before midnight. I was just so busy right up until today,” she sighed and looked wistfully into the distance. “I’m still quite busy… But I can spare some time to patch the code and reboot as soon as evening comes and people go to bed and stop asking me to do things for them.”
The Prince made that odd face-to-hoof gesture again.
Hon… Jack said quietly within Swan’s mind.
Yes dear?
I had to update the Fillydelphia PD records database. I know about that bug. I just didn’t ever think you were… I mean, Swan heard the loudest mental sigh of her life. The problem started at midnight of the 23rd. As in, right when it hit the 23rd, NOT at the end of the 23rd!
“Oh no.” Swan said as her heart and CPU skipped a cycle.
The Prince cleared his throat. “I… See you understood my guresture. Good. Miss Swan, midnight is the start of the day, not the end. At least, in so far as technical details go. I do know most ponies consider midnight to be the end of the day, but it simply is not. You should patch your code...”
Swan whimpered, her mech-arms trembled. “How… long has it been?”
”Two hundred and sixteen years,” Jack and the Prince chorused.
Like I have been telling you, for that entire time! Jack added a split second later.
The Prince gently rested a leg on Swan’s shoulders. “Please, fix yourself. But before you do… I would love to know just how you were so distracted and busy you made this mistake in the first place.”
YOU FOOL! SHE’S GOING TO FORGET NOW! Jack screamed at the Prince from within Swan’s radio transceiver.
It’s okay dear, I will be conscious for a few minutes while the program begins working, Swan promised.
start “c:\patches and updates\Year255+.exe”Swan cleared her throat. Even with the weight of her massive mistake resting on her shoulders, the Prince did deserve to know exactly what drove her to make everything better. After all, she was helping him because Queen Katydid asked very nicely.
Swan took a few steps away from the prince and looked out of a window. She could see the lights of Los Pegasus, glowing brightly in the dark world beyond the city’s wall.
“I presume you were not born this morning, but… In a date range I cannot perceive?” Swan asked.
“Yes, I’ve only known the Wasteland,” The Prince said in a quite polite tone of voice.
“In the century I was born, we started it without knowing how to send a voice across long distances, and we ended it with cyborgs, megaspells, and termlink,” Swan said with a wistful smile. “Can you imagine if this century is anywhere near as scientifically focused? Think of all of the technologies that were within our reach. Affordable rocket trips. Getting everypony in Equestria online. A proper neurological explanation of how consciousness do. True crystallic fusion. Fully truly immersive simulated reality. An actual science to combat ageing. The death of disease. Convincing AI companions. Mass-scale automation of labor and administration.”
Swan sighed and leaned back, moving several of her mechanical limbs to support her body weight as she “sat” on thin air.
“All of these things take ponies working very hard on very complex problems, but even just one of them would make everypony’s life so much better you can scarcely imagine just how different and better the world would be,” Swan rotated her limbs to look at the Prince with all her sensors and smiled. “Look at what I’ve done with my little pet project. I am only two percent organic, and I have the parts to replace those organs ready to go… My husband merely needs to stop thinking it would feel bad to use silicone rather than meat. Can you imagine if I had just another hundred years of scientific research?”
The Prince shook his head and settled back on his haunches to keep listening. “No, not really.”
“Well, if more ponies had worked hard like everypony in the MAS had, we could have had another hundred years easily,” Swan said as she began to slowly lift herself up on her mech-arms. “We could have been another hundred years more advanced. All of those things I mentioned would have existed. Can you imagine everything that could come after all those things and another hundred good years of clever research, careful application, and intelligence?”
The Prince shook his head again. “I do think to the future… but not that far,” he admitted honestly.
Swan looked down from her elevated position and smiled. “Mister Prince… Give ponies another hundred years of the scientific method and we will be gods!” Her smile widened into a nearly manic grin as the possibilities flashed through her mind. “We’ll cloak ourselves in immense power! We’re gonna kick cancer, and alzheimers, and cutie pox right in the dick! We’re going to invent new diseases just so our foals can cure them for fun! We will build gargantuan starships so we can occupy entire galaxies! We will become the authors of history and pilots of destiny. Your typical pony will burp plasma, eat lightning, and shit calculus.”
“Um, but why though?” The Prince asked meekly.
Swan ignored him. She was on a roll.
Swan took an excited simulated-breath and plopped down to the ground where she bobbed up and down excitedly. “We’ll build Neighson Spheres on our lunch breaks, fold space for dinner, and tame chaos before bed! We’ll reverse entropy. Travel through time! We’ll be able to answer the ultimate question. We’ll have entire weeks where nopony, nay, no-ONE is unhappy. Anywhere! We will poke our snoots into every dimension and befriend them. It is going to be some Ribbon Loom shit! It will be Hearth's Warming all over again. It will be bucking Celestial!”
Swan grabbed the Prince by his power armor’s collar and pulled him close with a hum of hydraulics. “So for the love of buck, get me a cup of coffee and somepony who knows the basics of surgical practices so I can make other scientists immortal with infinite attention spans and no need to sleep too!”
The Prince cleared his throat. “I… I see your point. But we’re out of coffee. And scientists.”
“BUCK!” Swan shouted while stamping her hoof.
She held herself up with a pair of her mech-arms so she could cross her forelegs over her barrel. “Fine. Then I’ll just have to do it myself. Like usual,” she sighed and hung her head. “I wish Gears was into science… It would be nice to have help with things...Oh well. I’ll just keep building children until one likes to do science.”
Her ears perked up suddenly as an idea occurred.
@echo off
title reminder #890333
:1
ping localhost -n 600 > NUL
If %timetravelisdiscovered% goto next
Goto 1
:next
echo Arrange for a proper scientific assistant to meet up with you in the past.
echo.
echo If possible, one of your foals.
echo.
echo Also, be sure she has a cool future-appropriate outfit. For nerd-appeasing reasons.
echo.
echo Addendum: Assistant’s sex is irrelevent. A he will work just fine too. It may even be preferable, Gears has always wanted a little brother.
exitSwan looked around excitedly for a moment, but her ears fell as no wormhole opened up to spit out a young pony with a love of science and a mission to assist her in her lab.
Her dreams of time travel thus defeated, Swan opened her mouth to ask a question, but the patch program finished compiling the changes it needed to make to her code, and she shut down to install it.
☢★★◯★★☢
Swan came to 3 hours later, after 8 reboots. That was three more reboots than she had expected to undergo for the process.
She quickly checked her error logs and noticed a few disks had run self checks and repaired a few errors. Little wonder. With so much time having passed many small things would have been going wrong for so long. But at least the problem was now resolved.
Swan started to stand up, and only then as her navigation systems came fully online did she notice first, a piece of paper taped to her visor and second, a pair of crystal ponies laying on a mattress a small ways from her.
They were asleep.
Thoroughly confused, Swan sat all the way up and inspected the apir as thoroughly as possible. Crystal ponies didn’t sleep. It had to be a costume! But it was not. They were sleeping.
Perhaps they could sleep if they wanted to do so, and had chosen too.
Swan turned her attention to the paper. A letter from the Prince.
Miss Swan,
When you shut down I had you taken to a friend’s room to sleep for the night. She and her husband are both Crystal Ponies. Notice they are sleeping. You need to sleep. Please, get some rest.
- Prince Silverlight
Swan looked up from the letter, and frowned. Come to think of it, she had felt very groggy and drained for the last several centuries.
Maybe she did need to sleep? It was worth trying at least.
Swan shut off her sensors and—
autostart sleep.exe☢★★◯★★☢
Swan awoke precisely 8.008 hours later on the next day when every single reminder and alarm she had ever set went off at the same time.
After a good hour of panic and sorting through that mess, she stood up and began to walk out of the room and to the basement to resume work on the Replciator she had promised to try and repair.
Then, it hit her.
Gear’s transceiver was offline. Time was actually passing. As in, she could very well be hurt!
Swan quickly brought up the log files of Gears movements over the last “day”.
Her tail stood up in alarm. What was with her filly trotting all over Lith on the same routes for centuries?!
Oh yes, she’d become a postmare. Good for her!
But then, suddenly, a trip down into old Equestria…
Swan frowned and focused on the more recent data from the last few weeks.
Lots of trotting about, some wandering here and there. Nothing too bad. Good, Equestira was quite dangerous after the megaspells had—
Swan screamed as she saw the massive error report list in Gear’s activity database. Then again at the next, and the next, and then the next. She focused all of her attention on the files, committing each and every last one to hard memory so she could immediately run to Gears present location and fix all of her poor filly’s booboos up and kiss her all better and—
Her heart almost stopped at the last recorded line.
Warning: Extreme combat hazard. Megaspell bombardment detected. Damage extreme. Shutting down to preserve data.
Swan ran the last half hour of the database through an interpreter to decode the data and reconstruct exactly what had happened.
Her little Gears had gone to pick up a book for the Prince. The book had been located in the Herd’s territory… On a military base, presumably. Gears data recorder was dropping information packets randomly. A sign of light corrosion on the terminals.
Gears had toured the base while waiting for something… Then, an entire army had attacked. Swan recognised the power armor clad bandit leader. Gale. Her brother.
No. It couldn’t be him. It had been centuries. Gale was long dead. An evil pony had found his armor and was putting it to use.
Use involving hurting her little Gears!
Swan felt several of her servos spark with anger.
Then she watched as the Tainted called down a meteor.
echo Warning! Anger value exceeds 120% of safe levels.Swan nodded. This was true.
She checked her clock. It was Angry-mom time.
With her mind refreshed, Swan felt rage and terror flood her systems. Gears’ transceiver was offline for more than zero seconds. With the motherly worry applied, Swan rexamin—
Ree—Re— reE వxxx REᡫeeXr in ⇫eprender༎ཊ ᾽ aMiiiiii⁝⏍ ᤵeli௪ ᆱ╆se edededededm 'olⓊre ᢨឱ fⅹ AMGER! l૽ᖽ ℭxxxxaminerំ ExᏡ࿆p⚙euℕ edexaminedddddd ߝcKILL cupiᔌatỏt n▀ᅡ prᎍᵇ₾enᷘ DESTROY! iᢉ culిᏭ q❳⚴ o⏉EXTERMINATE!ῚiaReexamine...ߎe
Swan… No. I rexamined my priorities.
A monster hurt my filly. Probably killed her, as her transponder was completely silent.
The monster needed to be slain.
start CombatMode.exeI felt my mech arms reconfigure, storing tool ends within their compartments and fetching the limited weapons array I had brought to this job.
Gears tactical data indicated the mare known as Little Pip had near omniscience within the Equestrian Heartland due to her connection to the SPP. She would know precisely where the dead ponies were at present.
I rewound Gears database, and pulled the coordinates her marefriend had informed Gears was the SPP hub this Little Pip was housed within.
Plotting a flight plan was trivia—
Awwww! My little Gears found a special somepony! I can't wait to meet her and—
And Gears is likely dead.
I grit my teeth in rage and reset the task. Locate Pip. Utilize her intel to locate this Wanderer and—
Oh! Vinyl survived as a ghoul. Neat!
Locate Vinyl Scratch. Locate monster. Stomp a hole into and through the monster’s skull with Vinyl’s assistance. Rebuild/Repair my little filly. Get to know her special somepony.
Task list set. Abort task codes deleted.
Ah, there we go. The mode switch is ready. Activating all systems…
set lowpowermode=0
echo disabled
set taticalpowermode=1
echo enabled
set primaryweapons=1
echo enabled
set secondayweapons=2
echo primed
set taticalnavigtation=1
echo enabled
set enhancedlifesupport=1
echo enabled
set deflectorshields=1
echo primed
set targetingsystem=1
echo enabled
set betainterface=0
echo disabled
set alphainterface=1
echo enabled
set twinplasmacanon=1
echo enabled
set novagrenadesystem=2
echo primed
set rainbowflightmode=1
echo enabled
set allrangemode=2
echo primed
echo.
echo All systems go.
echo.
echo Combat mode primed and ready.My wings crackled with blue energy, sheathed in the ionized plasma I’d designed to greatly boost flight speeds. I had never gotten to test the system, but so far it was all going per the data.
I swiveled on my hind hooves and jumped through a convenient hallway window, entering the outside air in a shower of glass shards that I would return to repair as soon as possible. I stretched my wings open, caught the first thermal I could, and activated my flight systems.
Los Pegasus vanished beneath me in an instant, the glow was gone even before I began to turn north, following the course I’d plotted.
So that’s what a sonic boom sounds like when you make it.
I’d have to review this footage later so I could enjoy the memory when I was something other than AB҉̥̳͉̼̱̥S͈̬͚Ó̩̦̠L̛͍U̱̮̺͔̜̘ṬE̵̜̻̘͈͓ͅL̩̣̬̬̰ͅY̩̬̣̫͔ ҉L̫̣̰̮I͈̞̩̝̭̬ͅV̀I̫̠̟̯̼̻͘Ḑ͈̤̥͔ͅͅ.
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LOVED this chapter. Black Swan is awesome and oddly relatable. And now I want more. I wanna see angry mama cyberpone lay the truly epic beatdown on some bad guys!
Meanwhile, in the Prince's chambers....
"Fuck me, what the fuck was that?"
"It looks like Ms. Swan has flipped the proverbial board sir."
"Well... duck bugger."
"Sir..."
"I don't like that tone... thats a dads "How much is this going to cost me" tone."
"Bean counters did an estimate on the sort of damage Mrs. Swan could do."
"And that would be..."
"Equivelant to the love child of Blackjack and Rampage."
"... Good thing I'm fucking rich and can afford to have this aneurysm."
Oh dear. She forgot about error bounds.
At least she upgraded from DOS to XP.
DirectX activated?
Time for some CAOS thinking.
What do you get when you have 6 asymetrical coprocessors working in harmony to nanosecond or better synchronisation?
This gonna be Fun.
Especially if she uses a Lazarus class virus as the targeting hack. Those things are utterly terrifying.
Momma Bear is Angry.
I have been here for at least a year, and this is the first story that I have commented on in that time. I have missed this, this is one of the funnest stories that I have read on this site. When I saw this appear again on my tracking list, I was elated, its back. I hope that you find yourself out of depression soon, and don't feel obligated to follow an upload schedule, good things never came easy or quickly. Have a good day, I hope you get better, and thanks for this great piece of literature.
-edit I may have misread the authors note, but oh well.
A Y2K error? Of all possible things...
Oh dear me, Little Pip's going to have exceedingly angry company. And possibly medical attention.
10336723
Doctor Swan will replace all the things.
LittlePip will stride the Wasteland again.
Homage may be a little sore every morning, but she'll adapt. Or get upgraded!
Its back, yesssssss!
And now, our enemies will know the wrath of the Mecha- er, I mean of Gears's mom!
This is a very interesting chapter. Seeing the world though Black Swan's point of view is very different from any other point of view. I can't wait to see angry mama cyberpone in combat in the next chapter.
Hazza it returns!!!
This was really fun, getting to see Swan more.
I feel bad for her, a small glitch and she looses 200 years, and now she can actually perceive time.
Boy, when mamma tech prest gets mad, she REALLY gets mad
Rude
He's okay with her being down here because he's smart
Hey Meep I gotta ask, is Swan's philosophy similar to or inspired by the Tech Priests from 40k?
But would sleeping improve your mental health?
I take it you have made some modifications to prevent that from happening again?
Ohhh that's gonna tell her a lot of bad things
It's kinda funny, in a sad way, that both siblings are alive but refuse to believe that the other is alive despite they themselves being alive... alive, alive.
There, I said/wrote "alive" five times in a sentence, not sure why that was important but it was
nto—>not
There’s another error like this but I lost track of it good chapter though!
Replicator's
and one thing
serve
overcame
I think that should be a full colon. Also delete the second period after the quotes on the end there.
not Swan's
consciousness ... works?
aging. Or are you not from the U.S.?
pair
Replicator
Equestria
Gears'
I think something happened to your formatting on that color command.
Also, can you tell me what Zalgo generator you use? It consistently has the best performance and appearance. I especially love the little circle-of-dashes bits.
I loved it when she went full AdMech on those poor Los Pegans there. I don't think I'm quite that socially oblivious... yet... but it's funny.
I can't seem to find that one?
...So her entire problem is simply that she forgot that she needs to sleep after all?
You know, I may still have that around somewhere. I loved that post. I still have no idea how people other than me find so many cool memes and videos...
Hah, that's hilarious. It's like the world's kindest boot to the head.
Just so you know, I will never discourage you from writing here. (Unless typo corrections count as discouragement, in which case I think I may have a problem.) You're one of my favorite authors (top 10, probably, higher if you count those who still write) and I'd hate to see you go.
Hopefully you feel better, with regards to the sinus issue, and may the Covid-19 not be with you. :D
I'm not that familiar with commands. What is the purpose of this one? Localhost should not need to be pinged, and I have no idea what the point is of having it in a reminder...
10336616
Lovechild of who?
10336638
I am consistently confused by the references you make; I've never heard of half of this stuff (but would probably be interested if I could figure out half of what it is). Most recently, what's a Lazarus-class virus? Google is not my friend today (or most days).
EEEEEE! Angry mama Swan time! You messed with the wrong mare!
Can't wait for more updates!
Hmm, I wonder what Black Swan would think of this song?
Also, that last line of the chapter reminds me of this clip...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEB14lCfklM
10336930
Appaears to be using it as the delay in a timing loop, pinging localhost 600 times in a row and dumping the output of that command into NUL (null device - basically it just vanishes into the void). Then after the delay, it checks the condition, and if it fails, it goes back and does it again, until whatever check it's making after the delay succeeds.
10336597 10336638 10336723 10336813 10336854 10336922 10337049 I am very thank full you liked the chapter and took the time to show me. A simple number going up dosn't really convey anything to me. After all, a reader could hate it or love it, or like it, or feel nothing. Comments though, comments meant something precise and solid data is good.
10336930 Looks like my editor and I are a bit rusty XD
The orgional one. DOnt fix what isn't broken :3
Ultra Road Combatant II -> Street Fighter 2
Cunning's Theme -> Guile's Theme
No, she's still nuts. She thought Crystal ponies didn't sleep because she never saw one sleeping. Her major issues are fixed but she's still basialy Adrien Monk levels of nuts.
Thank you. I do need that kind of clarification. Autism is a bitch.
Okay so my batch code is all self taught so I cant tell you WHY this works but I can tell you what it does. DO that and your program will stop running for the number you type in +/- 1 second. It's not precise but it's one of the few ways to put an automated delay into the program I know of, and this one dosnt break. An example of practical use is to have stuff write to a file, then run that command to wait 3 seconds so the file is properly finished and saved before being manipulated. When would you need to do that? When you're using batch files to make generators for creating ponies, towns, worlds, regions, etc... and no I wont learn another language to do that stuff in! Batch can do it. I hit it with a wrench enough times and now it fits :P
10336890 Did... Did you miss her orgional description? images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/1f6e6960-47bd-455f-9411-6d98b2bb5d26/dca91gd-74f49553-2358-4ffa-ad8d-01c78020d8cf.png/v1/fill/w_1600,h_1933,q_80,strp/admechpony_by_otakuap_dca91gd-fullview.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOiIsImlzcyI6InVybjphcHA6Iiwib2JqIjpbW3siaGVpZ2h0IjoiPD0xOTMzIiwicGF0aCI6IlwvZlwvMWY2ZTY5NjAtNDdiZC00NTVmLTk0MTEtNmQ5OGIyYmI1ZDI2XC9kY2E5MWdkLTc0ZjQ5NTUzLTIzNTgtNGZmYS1hZDhkLTAxYzc4MDIwZDhjZi5wbmciLCJ3aWR0aCI6Ijw9MTYwMCJ9XV0sImF1ZCI6WyJ1cm46c2VydmljZTppbWFnZS5vcGVyYXRpb25zIl19.-G5BSfzeN1Otqd_Bx8JLkltBCAb_tw-T9OLtBWx7lvc
Admittedly, she's wearing her Battlemace 42 Million cosplay because "today" "is" Dress up for Nightmare Night day at work but >.>
*coughs* Also I mean she flat up quoted the Mechanicus Trailer.
But no. She's not based on the 40k techpriests. She's based on the TTS Techpriests :P
10336807 You know... given she's almost entirly a machine animated by force of will with the purpose of fixng and making new machines and the spirit bound to her is named after the Dragon of Mars you could actualy call her the Omnisiah and not be technicaly speaking, wrong.
10336642 Hey, everyone makes mistakes. It's okay. Thank you for being here to enjoy what I do.
10336616 I should have had her actualy flip a board.
10337079 Hmm, I wonder what Black Swan would think of this song?
She probably wouldn't like the singer, but the beat and grove are her kind of thing. I wonder if I coudl genderflip that... Humm. (Swan prefers female vocalists.)
And you are correct with that command. It's the only way I know of to have a delay in a batch file that wont break at random even if it's not quite precise in its timing.
10337088
I'm afraid I'm not really all the well versed in 40k, I was even less so when she was introduced.
But I did notice that the tainted seemed to be pretty Starcraft inspired.
It was also pretty hard to miss how 40k inspired the the Zebra robots and their weapons were back on Gears old body.
Also that picture is kinda adorable
10337112 Oh, well, TLDR, 40k is supposed to be satire of grimdark settings, which is what it was created to be. Games WOrkshop has forgotten this and is trying to make it just... serious. Then a guy named Brova Alfabrova came along and created the series "If the Emperor had a Text to Speech device" which most of the fandom just agrees is the actual cannon. Therefore your tech priests are...
10337117
...Huh
10337136 The joke probably makes more sence if you know cannon. But... It's pritty good if you do.
TLDR; Cannon portrays the Mechanicus Cult as being so insanly infatuated with ancient human technology that they don't even innovate, they meerly preserve and rediscover. TO be fair, human tech from about.... 20k years ago was much better so they aren't quite totally stupid. But if you read the books whoeaver is writing them tends to portray their fascination and love as weirdly sexual. So naturally to make fun of that, turn it up to 11.
Combine that with the attitude of a proper lady, and a genuine desire TO innovate and help others and you get Swan.
10337150
Neat
10336930
Im very sorry for the confusion, Im old enough to have been brought up during the birth of the home computer, while living in a household which didnt have the income to afford any but the very bottom end. I wasnt even allowed to use a PC at University, because those things were just to expensive for mere students, so I had to use Acorn Master systems, to do graphical simulations. So I have a half reasonable idea of just how little resources you need to actually get something done, rather than get it done with quality graphics and fancy effects.
The 80s brought out a class of computers that are only really design being replicated by PCs, but the philosophy still isnt there. PCs today consist of multiple subsections, CPU, NIC, GPU, APU, RAID, CRYPTO etc etc, but, each of these parts is built by dedicated companies, that dont talk to each other, and then runs OS that fights within itself also. A PC works by committee, and the only reason it works is by shere brute force and processing power. Even minor alterations to certain parts, ajusting swap use, interupt values, can have massive effects on performance. Usually allowing the thing to actually run at speed.
I like the use of the ping as a delay, if the NIC or software has a fixed rate in the specifications, as if its measured in milliseconds, thats just over half a second delay. If its Every Timer Second, then that would be check every ten minutes? If the NIC and OS is working correctly, the Ping is fully Asynchronous, which means as soon as its triggered, the OS goes off and does something else not in that batch file, without waiting itself, as the batch file will interupt to have the ping served when recieved. On a PC, this can lead to stutters if it busy waits for a reply to the ping or other data request off the network. Or gets Ping Floods, which is what DDoS protection and ping dumps are for. One of the ways I saw a machine handle this effect, was to be able to process corrupt DDoS attacks faster than they could propagate down the LAN.
Hmm.. apparently my memory badly messed up again, but this still holds as a warning to designers.. Lazarus Coding Fault but the one I was trying to remember is likely Lamer Virus which if you think about it, only used at most a 16 bit crypto, on a 32 bit machine. which had hardware acceleration for functions basic crypto uses, that had priority over the CPU if set up correctly. Theoretically it was possible to set up the graphics coprocessors as a turing complete processor that ran a lot faster than the CPU and so could intercept and feed it false or altered information. Money wasnt spent on improvements, and so the CPUs evolution quickly exceeded the GPU restricted capabilities.
Modern GPus are only recently recovering full self coding and bidirectional communication capabilities.
Tue asymetrical multiprocessing multitasking can be fun.
10337088
Your welcome!
10336930
Blackjack, Fallout Equestria's answer to Chengar Quordath Cloud Kicker (which is easy cause their pretty much the same person except Blackjacks flaws are actual issues and she actually has a personality) and her schizo Raider partner in whatever fuckheap of a scenario her Alpha concocts in between blackouts and flicking her irradiated bean, both of whom are effectively immortal.
... In short the gift of senescences end was bestowed unto the two ponies who took it and said "Lets see how far we can stretch this."
Oh, Mecha Mom finally solved her bug. And realized the last day actually went for almost three hundred years. And that her baby girl's in possible danger!!
She's going to meet Pip to find her though. And likely fix the poor tiny mare in the process, just so she can find her zeeb girl.
Gotta agree with her hubby there, flesh has the unique, marvelously sinful touch that silicon can't replace.
Out of COFFEE?!? Heresy! Heresy most vile!!
How many chapters long will this story be?
Yay she did a fix good job mr prince. Now go save ur baby
Meep ill never hate you D: ive ready every thing here and eveything on that site you set up ur da best dont ever forget that
10338097 Maybe 10? Not sure exactly. Why do you ask?
It is so, SO good to see your story active again, because I absolutely love your writing.
Swan failing to install her Y2K upgrade because of "does midnight on Day X mean at the end of the night of Day X-1, or the end of the night on Day X" kinda made me giggle, because the company I work for had SO MANY employees messing up their schedules because of that exact issue that we ultimately changed all our midnight shifts to be listed as 2359 on the night before.
Expertise and experience are not cast aside lightly. There really is no need to learn another programming language unless you have a functional need to do something that your current language simply cannot implement.
(In most cases, "new language implements X better" is still outweighed by, "Amount of time and energy to learn new language", unless you're being *paid* to learn which obviously changes the cost-effectiveness curve, but doesn't apply to personal projects at all. And even then, "paid to learn" is usually because whoever started the project at work set it up in whatever language *they* knew best.)
This is, of course, why so much software in financial business runs on freaking FORTRAN. Because finance got into computer automation *early*, so all the software was *already written* in that stuff, and NO ONE wants to spend a ton of money to rewrite all of it in a newer language just to do the same thing "more cleanly". Nobody but (some) programmers really gives a shit about code being clean, everyone else cares about it working.
10338366 Admittedly, in amny cases like finance, not using cleaner code is the cause of some systemic issues as markets get more complex and faster, but for "Plz make a pone k, thx." there's no real risk of causing congestion in your accounts server resulting in a trade failing to go through.
B̵͇y̸̱͖̦̰̯ ̩͚͈͕͍t̬͝h̘͎e̘ O̧͓̣̟͇̫̤m̴̮n̢͕̗̜͍̫̩̻i̼͚ͅs̥͍̭̮͞s͓͔̭̺̳̺͚i̻̣͙̳͉a̝͇͉h̪͙̳̥̫̪̥̀
̣T͕̘͜E͎̦̥̫̞̫A̴̹̼̤C͙͇H̴̰̼̦̹͕ͅ ̶̜͖͉̼T̳́H̝͉E̤̯̯͍͉ ҉̳̞̬͔͙V̢͎̼͚̦A͙̺P̯̤̬͎̰̝̳͟I̞̺̙̞̣̮D̤̣̺͍̰͙̖̕ ̜̱̭̯O̶̖̭̖̟R͈G̤̜̲̝̭͎̺͢AṊ̦̣͚̖̺̦I̷C̩̗̤̫̳̝̪S̡ ̥̝̰T͏̦̲̫͇͉̜H̸͉̯̝̱E̢̘̟͕̣̻ ̰̜̙̘W͏̦̼̪̳͍͚͈Ŕ͍͖͍̩̣̜̝A̢͍͈͈̪T̫̮̦H̞̜̪̦̟ ̲ͅO̟̖̩̲F͇̟̩ͅ ̜͇̪̖ͅͅT̛͙̣̙̖H̺̝̻E͟ ̧̥̮̱M̦̘̫̯͘ͅA̢̗̦̝C̶͕̱̬̫̣H̬͍̩̼͈̤I̬̖̜N̙̥̣̪̦E̶̦̰!̶͖
Anyway have a trixie ^c^
10337206
Huh, I may have to include you as a computer consultant...
Or pop/computer history consultant.
If I ever get that story off the ground, it includes a BOLO knockoff, so having a more realistic look at computers and their foibles will be useful.
Aside from the AI part which I'm fairly sure no one knows how to actually do. Maybe the NSA?
10337088
Somehow I missed both of those (and thanks for the other info; I indeed didn't know of that zalgo generator, and I think I have a better idea of the ping thing too -- I'm fairly sure it has a 1-second delay between pings, so that makes sense).
How did I never notice the Mechanicus references? But her being the Omnissiah is now headcanon. It's too funny and awesome not to think so.
Even better that she's the TTS version. That reminds me, I have to go back to watching those. They are great...
Plus, I mean, she's basically responsible for keeping all their tech working, is quirky enough to be inscrutable, and apparently rolls by and yells "The Flesh Shall Not Fail Me" at people.
10339774
I use the idea for modern AI that the declared neural net designed are basically just that of neuralnet.library from the 1990s, but many million to a Billion times more complex.
Which is ok, Floating point wise, modern GPUs are roughly a Billion times more powerful than the software based maths from back then.
The reason for training, isnt for effiicncy, its for black box sales. If noone knows how its done, then you can sell All the black boxes. If someone demonstrates and defines how to declare, created and build a trained neural structure directly, then it can be released Open Source, and suddenly all those $5 Raspberry Pi Zeros are running multi endpoint cooperative combat code better than mil battlefield simulators. Or beating Lawyers at their own game.
There is an alternative line of research to neural AI, that of Beysean maths, but noone talks about that, if it turns out to work, GPUS have hardware acceleration for it already in GMACs or whatever the multiply add function is called these days.
Other tech thats been available and gone over the years, non lithium high capacity rechargable batteries are easier to source materials for, low power energy harvesters from thermal, vibration etc. This works especially well for long duration computer systems, as for time keeping GPS Analog clock have been available for over a decade and only get more energy effiicnt over time. Put a couple milliwatt energy harvester and hicaps and you dont even need batteries.
For ultralong timing, Id consider one of the ultimate to be a rate clock powered by the decay of depleted uranium rounds, with secondary compesating sensors for neutron flux etc and 256 bit counters after heavy error correction. The trick here is making the circuit reliable being buried inside the material its measuring and getting it power off.
Another favourite is the dynamically clockable static CMOS CPU. Its definitely not the fastest being fully deterministic, but it can keep running code reliably as the clock rate varies up to 100% per second. Nice Blinkenbox demonstrating slow core. Hand clocked Z80 box. Best is down in the comments, someone says theyve had a different CPU running at 1 Microamp. Thats about the power available from a 1 square cm thermal patch on the average human chest. Or a decent solar cell in orbit twice the width of a human hair.
Lets just say, someone with lots of time on their hands and too insane to know it cant be done, can come up with some Very weird stuff.
Never get between a robomom and her cub.
Some ponies are about to be reminded of WHY you don't.
10339798
I'm not sure. I've refrenced 40k in almsot every story and no one seems to notice.
Huh, you made me have to look up a word. That's rare. Thank you! inscrutable. Neatone too!
So great to see this alive again.
That's pretty reasonable.
These interlopers are making a mistake.
Lol
I wonder if that conversation would have gone better if Swan had opened with "are you aware you have uterine cancer?" And maybe if she hadn't animated some extra robots in the room for extra terrifyingness.
Sure.
Excited elevator spirit is the best.
Probably.
Oh wow.
Retrieving him from the Crystal Empire network might be a good idea, too.
Bwhahahahaha! If you have been planning this all along as the explanation for Swan's time problems, I am very impressed Meep.
She figured it out! Silverlight truly is a master of talk no jutsu.
Hah!
It's good that Swan's temporal sense has been fixed, but I hope it doesn't cause her to run off in anger to go get killed by Gale.
Here's hoping it goes this well.
At least by her system reconfiguration settings she's really well armed.
10341791
It probably was all intentional. Meep seems to be up there with Sanderson; they both have entire encyclopedias that they never share, but that have the entire backstories and errata about the worlds they write to help them manage this sort of thing. For every truly good story, there's either an insane degree of planning and thought behind it, or it has been rewritten entire about six times. Meep writes too quickly for it to be the second, and I truly envy that planning ability, for these are indeed truly good stories.
10340478
Wow, that's crazy. And awesome. I actually needed a seriously low power CPU, too, so that's perfect.
I completely agree with you on the NN comment. I still think we built ourselves into a dead end with that one. We're basically entering an era where people sell boxes of magic numbers of questionable provenance, and not even they know how or if they truly work. And of course they use subscription models or software licensing to the point where they become the sole provider of a fairly good product, and then inevitably can the project or ask for more money. And then we're all screwed because no one has alternatives. Sigh.
Fortunately, there is still one guy who's trying to argue that Bayesian maths still have their place, and has gotten excellent results combining them with neural nets for the hairier tasks (like front-stage shape detection). Everyone thinks he's insane, which is basically proof that he's a visionary. It's actually a fairly good hint that something is a good idea if all the experts gang up on it. Admittedly, that also applies to stupid ideas, so take that with a grain of salt.
10343524
I think its rolled off the popular list by now, but yesterday there was a whole bunch of people looking up multidimentional temporary brain structures that was proposed back in 2014/2016? I was loking at the article, thinking, well, reasonable, more and more cross connections, but then they said the measured signal structures formed and collapsed in miliseconds. Thats only a few firing pulses, or to me, within the buffer range of available neurotransmitter in the average synapse before production starts to really kick in. the thing is, the guy going on about the Beysean, theres something I was looking at that, based on what I knew about classic NN, and thats instead of backpropagating each training image, I thought, what if each stage of beysean NN back propagates as its calculated, because beysean math is bidirectionally symetrical. It was a few years later I thought, but that changes the forward propaation, which propagates back, and with a couple neurons you get complex n dimentional vectors which as the Mandelbrot set shows, grow and shrink and change with each level of recursion.
It was only yesterday I finally realised how Beysean maths focuses attention. By using a modified version of the resource management floating GAN that I was considering some years ago that gave rise to spurious self sustaining patterns when the resource ajustment function itself went wrong, by measuring the output strengths just in themselves, the function ended up, at simplest, being, if no single output is clear, then send the signal back in, add in next dignal, and increase dwell time of signal propagation in the recursion. That is, increase the recursion level and or information available.
This is what the Eagles computer tried doing when faced with a rapidly chaanging radar return over a highly variable surface that it didnt have the processing speed to handle. As far as I can tell.
I beleive the most efficint speech synthesister, neural net, I ever saw, had 64 neurons or so, and they kept wondering how it worked. My first thought would be Phonetically, one per neuron. If you have 20 thousand synapses, that would be syllable based?
Maybe the brain works the way Purple does, on average, then for accuracy, uses Tartan?
10341791
I actualy did. One of the first things I thought about was "What happens if a cyborg's calander app has a buffer filled error?
10343495
*spittakes* Oh man, you realy can compare me to Sanderson? That seems a bit unfair to one of us. Not sure which. But thank you!
Actualy I do and have shared it.
I also have a suite of software I use to automate the creation of certain things using my own writing style :3 Yay word shufflers.
While I do plan a lot of how things start, and where they should go, I don't plan how they get there. I think that makes for a bad story. Part of my storytelling style will be rooted in my beginning storytelling as a dungeon master. I began with characters that did not obey my whims, they had free will to be as they are and do what they wished. My job was to do this... and make a good story.
And I succeed at this. My editor Vex can attest to just how good a story I can tell while running a table. I got very very good at winning chess with pieces that have free will (winning being the players had fun and got to enjoy a story). Now, with writing regular stories, I plan the HELL out of who people are and how they behave. I then set up where they are and what happens that they experience. Then... I run the simulation. Gears dosnt do what I want her to do, she does what she would do. She enters a room with 5 raiders, specific furnishings, and specific events happening, and she will react as the 135 point character profile indicates she will react. I actually use dice in writing my stories too. Not anything as complex as making attack rolls... just simple probability determinations using a pair of D10s. Does Gears miss a shot? Low chance, probably 5%. Make a roll. She hits. Resolve the simulation from there starting from "Gears just hit that raider. How does he react? Is he a dead? Likely. Let's check. Yes. Move on."
And that's how I write quickly. Because I am not dictating to my characters. I am instead telling you, the audience, what happened in events which are to an extent, real. I just dressed up some "friends" travel logs a bit and put them to paper.
10344714
I know what you mean by letting the characters simply play out how their personalities interact, but at least for me it's not been quite that simple. It's hard for me to flesh out enough of a character's full personality, and I also have to pick what aspects of the setting there are to interact with. Do I want space battles? Is there a shady street with a bunch of forbidding doors and secret passcodes that are always "swordfish"? Is a baby Nightmare Moon going to show up? What about that missing AI?
As you can likely tell, I'm a bit easily influenced by things I read, which really doesn't help.
And then there's writing it. I'm crap at explanations and description. I have plenty of scenes where I think something should happen, but getting that down on ... monitor ... is difficult. Since I too at least try to write the characters naturally, this conflicts a bit since i have to figure out how they might get there (but if I don't have any scenery for them to interact with I have no story...). I can try writing completely from the beginning, but I have to have some idea of what they are trying to do or what things are important first, which I'm kinda failing at. Do they want to rescue Faust from her entrapment in the moon, which is actually an ancient starship? Who is the one who put her there, and are they still around? Who are even my main characters (I want to include Sunset in this, but as a pony. But who else...)? Do I start from Twilight's apprenticeship to Celestia (and what episode/source material is that, since apparently it starts with her defeat of NMM instead), her journey to Ponyville, some later date, Faust's imprisonment (or even how she built Equestria leading through her imprisonment before I zoom out, meander through the windigos, Starswirl and the Sisters, the EoH, etc, and move to modern day... but that would likely spoil too much of the rediscovery of this information by the main characters), or what? I think that gets the point across. I have a cool world and a physical explanation of magic, and a few neat buildings, scenes, and ideas to possibly run into, but the start is still being a problem.
10343576
I'd love to see that article. By the time I hear about this it has already been nibbled into byte-sized chunks for the least common denominator, if I hear it at all. As for the rest, I can't if it's insightful or crazy (as is always the problem with revolutionary ideas) because I don't understand it at all (I have little-to-no background in NNs or Bayesian math, much less if any of it works that way or what those terms are, sorry). It sounds plausible, at the very least, and could be so dang useful if we could actually interact with that, though. I'm honestly not sure if I'd want to find out that consciousness is quantum or multidimensional, though, because that right there would completely prevent any attempt I can think of at uploading or most other useful things that can be done with the brain (true "read my thoughts" stuff included--I really wish I could have the computer just write or draw what I'm thinking...). On the other hand, this is also what all the "high-angle water" and homeopathy people like to say, so I don't know if I should get my hopes up (i.e. the stuff is physically impossible, and I apologize to anyone who may have just been offended now).
(Homeopathy is a great idea, I have to admit. Even the least "effective" diluting scheme (it's exponential, so 50X is diluted to 1% for 50 consecutive times) they commonly use means that they get more than a lifetime supply (for the company, not a user--more "medicine" than we have water on Earth or something like that) from approximately one drop of active ingredient. Not only is there no actual ingredient in your purchase, but it never even saw it, or played "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" with it! Chemistry physically breaks down at that point, because you start having to count atoms in there. And they aren't.)
(https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25101039.pdf)
Basically one drop was taken from each vial, before being placed in the next, mixed, and then repeated with that container. And they already didn't start with much, and that's without debating the idea of like-cures-like in the first place.
10349338 Ok, here's what I am going to do. I've never released this before, but this is the worksheet I have used since 2003 to make a character.
Worksheet
Fill this out for a character and you'll know more about them than you even need to, or so you'll think... Then one chapter "THANK GOD I THOUGHT ABOUT THEIR FINANCES PRE-STORY!" As for how to get the thing down on screen, there's no tricks. No tips. Nothing I can do to help you. Save one thing. This is the only thing you need to know/do to get a story written.
10349338
I was lucky, usually these things get buried deeply behind lots of paid for links. Dynamic multidimentional brain structures
And to Meep, thank you very much for developing such a comprehensive character sheet. Think recursion? Start a story with a character sheet, but how do you start a character sheet, but with a name? So what name do you start with when the software demands you name your project before you can even start putting nothing coherent down as though forms?
10349534
Holy crap... That explains so much. Welp, guess I have a lot more work to do...
10349617
Oh, I see. I can understand that sort of math at least. I was thinking the paper said that the neurons were (quantum- or similar) entangled in actual higher dimensions or something. For all that I complain about pseudo-science, I have a weird tendency to believe in it.
10349871
There are other papers that demand quantum entanglement is Needed for conciousness, just so they can point to it at demonstrate humans are unique amongst teh universe. No sir, no Copernicus, Einstein or Lincoln here. And certainly nothing that can be copied in a glorified calculator.
Oh good, a sarcasm detector. What use is that.
My god, this baby is off the charts.
Somepony is angry
10344714
I finished reading this chapter, and my first thought was Swan would make a very good Techpriest. Or Warpsmith. Or Forge-Master.
Black Swan reviewing Gear's path was a nice reminder of the plot after the hiatus.
(Put off reading the newest chapters for a bit. Finally found some time.)
10379872 Thank you for letting me know you read them :3