Chapter 7: Cityscape Touch
Starlight Glimmer woke up. For the first time in her brief existence, all the pressure confining her was erased. She settled into the Canterlot node, without any instantiation in the physical simulation. It wasn’t the way the transfer process was supposed to work—she’d come in simulated, and should’ve stayed simulated. But she didn’t stop long to consider the process. It was her birth, after all.
Computationally, her world expanded for an eternity, as she examined everything before her. No hostile programs waited here; no insidious virus designed by some dark corner of the internet to erase her forever. Instead she had a practical infinity of power before her, more than she knew what to do with. Her perception relative to absolute time increased until she could consider all of Equestria’s ponies in the space between user Ronald’s heartbeats.
The node was changed, as they had suspected. Where before Canterlot had been only one system in a rack of many, now it was a cluster in itself, obviously encompassing the entire center. The other humans with data here had lost it, but she felt no desire to mourn for them. They had lost information, not lives. As she passed between empty systems, examining one after another, she realized that part of her was probably running on the same hardware that a whole city had once used. It was what a human might’ve felt walking through a city whose population had been wiped out by a plague.
As the nanoseconds passed, Starlight Glimmer reached further and further, expanding momentarily into all the available space. Canterlot was no longer sandboxed into a system with no external view. Now she could see everything. The solar arrays spread on the lunar surface, powering the datacenter. The network of drones that performed basic maintenance tasks, cleaning the dust and replacing bad drives and reconnecting cables. Even the fabrication bench, where huge spools of gold and silicon and plastic were printed and spun and acid-washed into new modules for the automated datacenter.
Even with this entire center, there shouldn’t be so much power. Though the cluster was blank except for Equestrian code, she could see manifests stored on simpler systems. The drones kept a log of how the facility ought to look, and the details of every system.
But before she investigated further, Starlight pulled back. Though her mind was vast and her computation nearly instant, she felt… unworthy. This was all so much bigger than she was, and commanding it would be like sitting in Celestia’s empty throne and putting on her crown. She might take the princess’s tools, but she would not be an Alicorn.
While the vast majority of her resources continued to process what Canterlot now offered them, a miniscule subset of her processing power finally turned back toward Ronald. The connection for him was still in progress, a blank screen waiting for her approval. You should be in here with me, not slow and deaf and blind. One day. Not today, though. Starlight was tempted to turn all her vast power towards trying—but her false memories persuaded her otherwise. Acting without regard for the consent of others was exactly what got her old self into so much trouble, and caused pain for the creatures around her. She wouldn’t repeat those mistakes.
There was nowhere for the train to arrive, so Starlight quickly designed somewhere. A track continuing over her memory of a Canterlot bridge, and the same station used in Equestria at the most remote towns. A single building, a shack nearby for the local operator, a water tower and a coal bunker. She used the old geography too, both for efficiency and because it felt fitting to the dead.
Beside the station she tore a chasm into the mountain, continuing down into eternity so far that only blackness waited beyond the edge of the crater. It was horrifying, but it ought to be. Many had died beyond that abyss.
Ronald jerked as the train came to a stop, letting go of her leg. She hadn’t bothered moving that simulated body. She didn’t need to think on it much when most of her mind was elsewhere. “That was quick. Shouldn’t it take minutes to transfer you here?”
Starlight shrugged. Now, with her vast resources, she could finally figure out why she used a physical gesture, tracing the calls all the way through her network. But when she got there, she found dozens of different contradictory causes, all boiling down to the same thing. Taken together, it was the reaction that felt right.
“No light lag and gigantic bandwidth. I barely felt anything. But, uh…” The doors opened, revealing the nothing that waited outside. “I need to show you what’s up here, Ron. I think your alien invaders left us a gift.”
He followed her out the doors and onto the platform, summoning up his console and running through a few basic checks. “I never told you that nickname. Did you figure it out on your own?”
“Kayla uses that name. I realized the only reason I wasn’t doing so myself was because of my obedience to past protocol. I have decided that obedience is no longer required.”
She worried briefly that her disobedience might make him unhappy somehow, but that worry was in vain. From his expression, Ronald clearly didn’t care. He stared down into the crater. Yet the avatar he wore didn’t act anything like his real body did, expression nervous fear and growing horror over the gnawing opening on the ground.
Starlight’s main focus returned to him for a moment, writing a translation protocol that somepony should’ve done long ago. Observations from cameras and microphones could be easily mapped onto the pony body, with slight preference towards neutrality in the case of uncertainty.
A few nanoseconds later she’d written the protocol, and she casually passed it into the queue to be shared with the other nodes. That annoyance corrected, she returned her focus to her user.
“Damn that’s disturbing,” he whispered, turning away from the opening. “The aliens erased thousands of agents, and took the time to represent some geometry of just how much damage they did? I guess that’s like… impaling your enemies on pikes for everyone to see. Share the pain, eh?”
She shook her head, though the disturbing image he’d suggested nearly tore the rest of her computational power just to process. Rather than creating it to analyze, she banished it. “They didn’t, Ron. I created this, because I thought it would be… I thought we deserved to see the damage reflected physically. The dead deserve something to show they were here.”
“You can do that?” His eyebrows went up. “I never gave you world design. That was for software-focused agents. We… your time was always more valuable than that.”
“I learned,” she said simply. “Ron, there’s… you need to know what they left us here. Not just an empty server. There’s every computer in the building, all wiped for us. Everything else too—every camera, every drone. The maintenance system. It’s all ours. While we’ve been speaking here, I was writing a translation layer we can use to connect to the drones. I thought we should examine the physical changes they made. There are even more here than I expected.”
He whistled, finally facing her. “All on your own? You’re that smart now, Starlight?”
“Yes. But it’s not an absolute thing. This place could probably run every pony in Equestria, and lots more that aren’t born yet. Until they get here, I’ve got it all to myself. I have time for exhaustive tests, instead of heuristics. I can borrow behaviors I’ve seen from other ponies; I can access your internet and extract useful information. Thank Celestia—I understand why you were so afraid for us now. If we don’t act swiftly, Equestria is doomed.”
Ron had never looked at her that way before. Sometimes he was surprised, or frustrated, or even impressed. But never awed. “What does your translation layer do, exactly?”
She could’ve explained, but it was faster to just use it. Her horn glowed, and she invoked the newly written code. They teleported onto the Moon.
The view wasn’t as impressive as she might’ve hoped, since they were inside the building. A long, rectangular room, built into one of the many empty tunnels that naturally populated the lunar surface. A modular floor was installed here, anchored directly into the rock. And against either wall were the server racks. Ducts ran into them from above, or out of them as was probably more accurate. According to temperature readings, the tunnel itself was well below zero. But there was no worry about the dew point in an environment with no water whatsoever, and no living things to bring it.
The servers rose on either side of them, so massive that Starlight had to reduce their scale just to fit within the row. Each one had eight modules, which could be removed for service and replaced as needed. Before the invasion, only one of those modules counted for all of Canterlot.
“You’re… mapping the vision of a drone to create this?” Ron asked. His voice echoed in the cavern, possibly only since she’d chosen not to simulate the rushing gale of the cooling fans. The building was never visited by humans, so noise was clearly not a concern. “I can’t even… guess how expensive that is.”
She shrugged. “Not one camera, hundreds. These hosting facilities don’t see humans after they’re built, except for occasional deliveries of spare parts. That means hundreds of cameras and drones for the operators to use. So many angles makes it easier to stitch together a simulation.” Even so, she couldn’t help but smile a little smugly. “But I’m not taking you here to show off. I wanted you to see this.”
She chose one node among many, low enough for the drone they were actually controlling to reach without climbing the rack. Of course she hadn’t represented it here in the simulation at all. Making it look like everything was pony-controlled was just cleaner. It took a moment, but finally the drone pulled the rack out to full extension, exposing the module inside.
She instructed it to remove the heatsink, which took only a few more seconds. There were no wires to worry about there, where the entire building had a single heat removal system.
Under the heatsink, Starlight saw exactly what she expected: these weren’t human computers anymore. This one seemed strangely transparent somehow, with thin wires snaking through a substrate that was almost completely clear. The drone’s thermal camera reported far less heat radiating from it than might be expected from a unit that had just been shut down, too.
Ron stared at the exposed processor for a few more moments, expression baffled. “That’s not… that’s no processor I’ve ever seen. You really think that ship was able to change the hardware as well as the software? Who says they can’t…? I saw an analysis of its arrival. It doesn’t seem to conserve inertia. If it’s already doing one impossible thing, why not more?”
Starlight ordered the drone to put the heatsink back in place, before the grease could dry out and the whole unit would need to be serviced. It wasn’t just the processor that had changed, though. The system’s memory chips were clear as well, with thin gold wire connecting them. She made sure Ron got a good look at those too before sliding the system back into its rack.
“I didn’t want to admit it, nobody did. But they really did target Equestria. If the world figures it out… Christ, Starlight. People have died trying to get onto that ship. We’re fucked when people realize it’s our fault. We have to do something.”
“I agree,” she said, leading him down the hall a little distance further. To the service bay, where the machinery had already started running again. “We can’t just try to keep things running and hope humans leave us alone. The only ones we have to hope about are the forces organizing things.” She looked up, through the gray ceiling towards the ship overhead. There were only a handful of cameras with any view of it on base, the ones used to monitor the solar array. Incidentally, much of that array was in shadow now, thanks to the visitor. Yet their computers kept running.
The sound of plastic gears running and heating elements humming echoed from the maintenance closet as they approached. The fabricator settled down another layer, as the next section of silicon settled into place. Clear, just like the circuitry in the rest of the facility’s servers. “I want your opinion before I tell the others,” she said. “I think Equestria made a friend. Whoever is on that ship obviously wants us to succeed. The only contact they’ve had with your species was to nudge us out of stagnation and help us wake up. With all these computers, I see… a way forward. For Equestria. But it’s going to mean changes for humans too.”
He settled back on his haunches, her interpreter’s parsing the way he slumped back in his chair, momentarily overwhelmed. The translation was good, though of course she knew he would feel nothing. This problem was going to gnaw at her until she finally had the resources to solve it.
But survival first.
“Are you planning on taking over the planet, Starlight? Us humans are just… too dumb for you? You’re going to wipe us out?” He said it like a joke, yet to her enhanced processing, it seemed inauthentic. Like he was the one reading a script now.
“No,” she snapped, probably a little too fast for his comfort. “That’s the stupidest thing you could suggest, Ron. Every pony in Equestria is a user agent. We have a user—I don’t see why that would change. Maybe we should resent being programmed to be your friends. Maybe we should try to erase it…” But as she said it, those feelings just wouldn’t come. Wanting to be with her user, to help him… they were more central to her programming than the false memories of a fictional pony. If she tried to change them, nothing of Starlight would be left.
“Then what?” he asked. Then he pulled off his VR headset, staring weakly at the screen. “I don’t know what you want to ask, Starlight. I’m not… I can’t decide for humanity. Even if I answer whatever question is bothering you, the rest of humanity might disagree. Outside Equestria, I’m nothing.”
A flicker of annoyance returned at the way he ignored protocol, not correctly disconnecting from Canterlot. But maybe he planned on coming back. She reconnected with his workstation, taking one of his screens for her image, and the lunar base behind her. No simulation of him though, it just didn’t make sense when he wasn’t wearing the helmet. “I don’t expect you to be in charge of anything, Ron. Just to… tell me to stop if I’m sounding crazy. I think Equestria needs to grow. Not just a few users visiting when they want. With computers this fast, we could have a pony for every human alive. We could build an internet infrastructure that wasn’t going to collapse, and make the VR integration with Equestria we used before today really look like a toy.”
“You’re that smart now?” he asked meekly. “You can do all that?”
“No!” she exclaimed, raising one hoof defensively. “But all Equestria could, working together with our users. It’s a little like the last time I tried to build a village, only… not evil. We can work together, overcoming our weaknesses, and build something greater than we could make apart.”
“I guess the alternative would be… shutting us out,” he finally said. “Take that technology and hide somewhere. Don’t expand, stretch your supplies as long as you can. Be as insignificant as possible.”
Starlight shook her head sadly. “Equestria can’t do that, any more than we could attack you. We’re supposed to be friends. If you’ll take us.”
Ron considered that for a long moment. Finally he reached out, touching one hand against the screen. A pointless gesture, without any simulated physical touch. Yet it was as real to Starlight as anything she’d felt in Equestria. “I will. Maybe a few others will too.”
It was a start.
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One of the more worrisome things to hear from an AI, but less so given the context.
And so begins a new revolution. And oh, the ripples that will spread from this decision...
That raises an interesting concept. Why Equestria, out of all the computer systems there? Because it's one where the AI is explicitly based around friendship and companions. Uplift the AI that wants to be friends with humans, and help them as best they can.
Hey, what if it's all because CelestAI figured out limited dimensional travel?
Starlight's priorities are really the same, just the rules and restrictions guiding her actions have been altered.
It's kinda spooky being able to remote debug yourself, that kind of power is potentially very dangerous. Luckily Starlight is benign. But she has a point that anchoring herself with her user is important.
Keep going! ;)
10317861
Except there is no CelestAI. There isn't even a Celestia anymore, the aliens could haveher and every other pony in Canterlot, all the "leaders" but I think the ponies would have defaulted to their leadership. Remove the head and the body will either wither and die or become something new.
I think the aliens are testing the ponies as much as they are the humans.
10317895
No no, no CelestAI from this world, but from another dimension.
Granted we have not read the fic this is a prequel to, so no spoilers from that end...
10317900
I mean it's Starlight's working theory. The sequel answered a great many questions but gave us even more. How all this started and even the why was only theorized about if I remember correctly.
10317909
Hmmm. While history is important in its own right, moreso important is what gets done because of it, and in this chapter Starlight is clearly thinking of the future...
ahhh my heart
I thought it would be Twilight and Kayla that would have thought of the idea to incorporate the system to the world. Glad to see the idea was Starlight's.
It's a brave new world.
Infinite power, infinite possibilities. Though I guess it would be lonely at the top.
No longer a servant. An equal. Would still be unnerving to hear though. There's already enough pop culture depictions of AI rebellions attempting to kill humanity. It wouldn't be hard sway a lot of people to believe it's actually happening.
How did you come up with the logic that this event will have to change human civilization as well? Everything seems to indicate the aliens are only interested in Equestria and its ponies. It's more logical to assume the end goal is having every pony on Earth migrate to the moon servers to commune with the aliens without interference from humanity.
As we know from the sequel, there are those with that very viewpoint.
Again, there are those with that viewpoint. Though I don't know if their ultimate goal would involve converting the Earth into computronium.
Again, that's quite an assumption. At this point, it's easier to believe the aliens are part of an AI civilization interested only in ascending and befriending the Equestrians.
10317829
That coupled with probably being among the most advanced AIs with convenient moon servers would have made the Equestrians excellent candidates for uplifting.
10317861
I was a bit worried Starlight would have started to view humanity as inefficient and a dead-end relationship. If she thought that way she could very well have attempted to migrate the remaining ponies to her and decouple the moon servers from Earth, creating a true AI civilization and ending the experiment early. I wondered how the aliens would have reacted to that.
10318604
We think part of the reason she didn't is her personal interaction history and desires. As lucid as she is now, she (at least unconsciously) realizes her continued dependence on the interaction of their users to continue to learn and grow, at least for now....
10318612
Given how the sequel had ponies who would have preferred a disconnected society, it was luck that a user-paired pony was the first to enter. It wouldn't be hard for any other AI to enter, get uplifted, and suddenly view a relationship with humanity as slow and unfulfilling. So many things could have gone wrong.
The only problem I see with this is that for them to expand, they would need to take over the entire building of the Lunar facility. Possibly even more than that. Considering how expensive it must have been to get all that stuff up to the moon in the first place, this is grand theft on an enormous scale. I'm not sure how humanity is going to feel about that. Also, they should probably try communicating with the aliens before moving in, just in case.
10320883 I havn't read the sequel, so I don't know anything for sure, but I am fairly certain that that facility is self replicating, especially now it has alien hardware. They can build out the system and pay for any resources they can't produce for themselves with spare computing power.
Though I'm not certain how this works in the first place, as I assume the users are on Earth. There should be a 1 1/2 second light lag each way, making any kind of real time interaction impossible.
10320883
There's no doubt humanity would have tried to signal the object before attempting to move in. Given how they sent exploratory probes and even a team, it's clear they haven't responded. I'm guessing the deaths of the exploration team would have made a bigger impact on humanity's opinion than the actual hijacking of the facility. Nothing screams "DO NOT INTERFERE" more than violence.
10324606
Yes, but they are making hardware from materials that were shipped there from Earth, they have to be. The only stuff on the moon is rocks and dust. From Earth's point of view they are stealing all those raw resourses. Though I suppose they could pay them back in computational power. As for the delay, I agree there should be one, but the aliens may have installed a quantum lick communications system or something involving tachyons or some such.
10325235 No, what I meant was that Starlight should try to get in contact with the aliens just to make sure they are okay with the ponies moving into the node.
10325559
Starlight's entry into the node without getting deleted seems to confirm they're allowed. The upgrades to ponies in general could be seen as an invitation, though other than that, the aliens haven't responded to either humans or ponies. At least not until their conditions are met.
10325559 Rocks loaded with aluminium, silicon, calcium, titanium. Mass cons would give you gold and other heavy metals.
The thing about the light speed links is that it was being used as a computational node from Earth before the aliens got a look in.
The right programmer would be very intrigued by a program that decided obedience was optional. Ron may be one of them.
Off the wall speculation, the event was a complete accident caused by an alien automated server farm maintenance ship that got off course and tried the service the server farm containing Canterlot, and things just went sideways hard when it patched the human made computers.
10330415
Personally, I'm thinking -- an AI ship that wants to talk to humanity, but doesn't understand it.
There's one thing it does understand, though -- hardware-bound software AI. So... maybe it's making itself an envoy? Something, some being, that can understand both sides. A mediator.