Convergence

by Starscribe

Chapter 6: Clear Retribution

“This is fucking crazy,” Ronald shouted, as soon as they were down the hall and onto the stairs. At a guess, Starlight supposed he was aiming for the train station. There were few safer ways into the Canterlot node than the ones they’d built into the system. She hadn’t even thought about using the standard transfer protocols, instead of a special exchange.

“You’re data, Starlight. You go onto that machine, and you’re trusting yourself to a system that might erase you the instant you get there.”

They stepped out onto Ponyville proper, where ponies wearing blank faces stared at them. The meeting inside continued. Starlight herself was devouring resources that thousands of others would need just as much. They passed a blacksmith shop, where an earth pony’s hammer was frozen in the moment it struck the anvil, spraying sparks all around him.

“I’ve been sending programs for a week, user Ronald. They’ve all ran fine. Better than fine, you saw the numbers. They’re all like that.”

He snorted, disbelief palpable in the air around him. “Programs, sure. I’ll send some test code too. But you’re not just—” He trailed off abruptly, as they reached the train station. Dozens of ponies lined up here, packed outside a police barricade.

Starlight saw it too. Agony on the faces of ponies as they screamed at the ragged-looking royal guards. No user had scripted this exchange, and for that it seemed more genuine than any she’d seen before. “Travel to Canterlot cancelled indefinitely. See the princess for casualty reports.” A single frozen moment of suffering that was probably repeated all over Equestria. With as slow as everything was becoming, it might remain this way for many absolute years.

Unless they did something about it.

Ronald stepped around a barricade, then approached the empty platform. With a faint glow from his horn—and a few taps of his real-world keyboard—a train appeared on the platform, complete with a conductor and engineers. All were stark white and transparent, with only basic features. The way Equestria represented programs rather than user agents. There was no sense bringing anypony else into danger.

“You should at least let me go first,” Ronald said. “Call another train as soon as I send back that it’s safe. You won’t have to look far to see me or anything.”

Starlight nodded, then stepped aside. He was right, obviously. Just because she wanted to help didn’t mean that she was suicidal about it. Let him make sure it wasn’t just going to delete anything he sent. “I don’t know that your testing will learn more than mine did,” she said. “I’ve already sent programs, and received responses. Not everything I got back made sense, but I’m not sure what you’ll learn if I’m not there.”

“Maybe nothing,” he agreed. “That’s not unlikely. It could be wasting our time. But we can waste a few minutes to make you safer.” He stepped onto the train, and the door closed. It whistled once, then sped away.

She shifted her attention to his webcam and PC, though there was very little she could see directly from there. They had already interfaced with Canterlot’s node via console, after all. It already worked. The real test was whether they could connect in more meaningful ways.

She could see his face grow more frustrated as he sat there, and his hands hammered on the keyboard. But his system didn’t have a keylogger, and she wasn’t tightly integrated enough to access the keystrokes at the device level. “Dammit, this shouldn’t…”

Back in Equestria, the train slid backwards into the station, and the doors opened. Ronald stepped out, ears tense and obviously fuming. “It says I don’t have permission to connect without an agent,” he said, along with some human profanity. “There isn’t a function call in Equestria like that. Requires a user agent, why would we write that? It’s nonsense.”

Something did change, though. It didn’t rewrite humans; it didn’t erase them. It targeted us. Canterlot isn’t for them. “I guess Canterlot decided for us, then,” she said, stepping through the doorway beside him. He’d summoned a luxury car, with just a few seats on the outside and a bar of drinks and snacks on the other. But she couldn’t blame him for that—Ronald’s real life had almost nothing luxurious in it. He made Equestria different by instinct as much as anything.

She settled into a nearby seat, gritting her teeth together as the door shut again. Ronald hardly moved as the train began to roll, as though he expected similar failure. But she didn’t want to wait. “Sit next to me?” As the train rolled forward, its motion represented real negotiation with the Canterlot node. A process Starlight had never noticed now seemed somewhat uncomfortable. But was there any way to explain that to a user?

“Why?” he asked, turning away from his glowing readout. He moved over anyway, settling down beside her. Yet his real self wasn’t here, it was only touching here. Users couldn’t experience Equestria in anything but sight and sound. That hardly seemed very fair.

“I might be about to die,” she said. Her tone was calm, though she felt anything but. Without knowing why, she reached out and wrapped one leg around his. Her history might name the stallion Sunburst as her oldest friend in Equestria, but her reality was different. She had almost no memories of him outside the training sample—he wasn’t an elevated user agent; he just supervised a few important processes in the Canadian Equestria node. Ronald was that pony to her—or person, anyway. “I don’t want to do it alone.”

“Die.” He waved one hoof through his projection, and it vanished. There was probably little for them to learn from it until they connected anyway. “I don’t know if… I don’t know if you can die, Starlight. You don’t have enough computer to be alive yet. But… I guess people are debating that about human babies all the time too.”

“I feel… things,” she whispered. “Before, I just responded. I saw through a glass, darkly. The longer I think the more of me there is.”

“Like waking from a dream?” Ronald suggested. His usual awkwardness was gone. Whatever social skills he lacked with other humans, he didn’t overthink with her. “Wait, you don’t actually… Of course we didn’t write you to do that. Until now, there was no sense running any of you when there weren’t people around to interact with.”

He glanced out the window, watching as Ponyville faded into the distance behind them. Starlight expected the discomfort any moment, the slowness returning as her thoughts waited for the transfer to complete. But it hadn’t happened yet. Maybe they would be refused, like he was the first time. “Dreaming is being thrust into a fantastic world, without really knowing or questioning how you got there. You don’t live exactly, just observe one action, then the next. You don’t have much control either, so much as just… acting by instinct. Then you wake up, and the beauty of the dream starts to fade away. You might forget it completely after a while.”

“Not forget,” she whispered. “It’s still there. Memories from before. But they’re just… files. Facts and figures, association maps. Response logs. Not sensations.”

He sighed, settling into his seat. “And here we are risking all that. Something that’s never existed before, that shouldn’t be able to exist. Might be gone forever, because you had to volunteer to be a test dummy. Why did it have to be you?”

To humanity, ponies were toys. But maybe Starlight should be thinking of that fact in the past tense, because Ronald no longer sounded like he was talking about a toy. He might not be here to comfort her, really. “At least I know you’ll care I was here,” she said. “And I did it for Equestria. In my memories… I wasn’t very kind to this place.”

“Not you,” he snapped. “That was a television show, Starlight. None of it was real.”

Outside the windows, all light had faded. They’d passed into the Canterlot tunnel, but the crystal illumination wasn’t here to light the way as it usually was. Probably it got its power from the city, and that city just didn’t exist anymore. That probably meant that the transfer was moments away. Starlight might be seconds from death.

“Easy for you to say,” she whispered. “I know you’re right, intellectually. But it’s almost as clear as my memories with you. My rivalry with Twilight, eventually earning her forgiveness and working to protect Equestria. Fighting Chrysalis and Tirek and lots of other little monsters.”

“More good than bad in all that,” Ron said. “There’s a reason you’re in so many of the scripts, Starlight. I think many humans see some of themselves in what you’ve gone through. When people complain on the forum that they’re not allowed to duplicate an existing character as their agent, your name comes up almost as often as Twilight’s. If you trust us to judge anything—and I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t—I think your debt is long paid.”

The system transfer came seconds later, as abrupt as it was absolute. Starlight was disconnected from her observed world, then her mind came to a screeching halt. Then there was nothing.

Comments

[bonberjean]

And then Starlight's brain exploded...

[minibox]

I am worrying more about Starlight's fate every week.

[tsaukpaetra]

The great thing is that he's not lording his status as Starlight's user over anyone. Having (had? ) control over one of the most powerful instances is not to be underrated, and it seems clear he's instinctively humble about the whole thing.
His next actions will play a major part in Equestria's future...
Keep going! ;)

[Jane_Shadow]

I'm disappointed in only one thing about this. I couldn't Fave it twice, and I was already following you

[Airy Words]

"Thanks for reading everybody! Sorry to end on a cliffhanger... but... oh well!"

No, not really.

Actually, I did a quick check to make sure that the story was still marked as Incomplete.

[TruckStop]

Jesus! How many bits a pony gotta send to get you to post another chapter?

[Starscribe]

10307285
My bot handles chapter posting, so no bits necessary.

i.imgur.com/XIgXpvQ.png

[FanOfMostEverything]

You don’t have enough computer to be alive yet. But… I guess people are debating that about human babies all the time too.

You may be conflating life and sapience there, Ron. Makes sense for AIs, less so for babies.

In any case, excellent building tension. Looking forward to seeing what Starlight perceives on the other side.

[djthomp]

The system transfer came seconds later, as abrupt as it was absolute. Starlight was disconnected from her observed world, then her mind came to a screeching halt. Then there was nothing.

I can't help but wonder whether what comes back is really Starlight, and if there's any way to verify that anyway.