Chapter 22: Jacinth
Bit barely noticed the time pass. She scoured the vault, drained its reservoirs of reactants and catalysts, and brought them all back to the Wizard's lab. What had been his lab, anyway. The place that would become his lab again.
She dredged out her transcriptions of the old notes, reviewing them with painstaking attention to detail. The process used to create her, the same one that she would now be forced to undertake, had stakes no lower than the translation process that had saved Pathfinder's life. Except that the thaumic processor was an inert thing, now that it recorded... whatever the “ineffable essence” was. So long as nothing damaged the object physically, there was no danger of the Wizard's final gift being lost to her.
But once the process began, it would be absorbed by the crystal matrix, incorporated into the new creature no less than Pathfinder's body. If any part of his instructions were followed improperly, this object would be destroyed, and with it any chance of seeing Crimson again.
Where the weeks of concentration and precision were the essence of the labor of creating another crystal being, now that step would be the easier of Bit's assignments. First she had to craft a skeleton for the horse, and anatomical molds for the pony she wished to revive.
She had scarcely begun to plan the process when she heard another set of hoofsteps approach from behind her. She jerked upright from the computer, horn glowing again. Not with any particular defensive spell, since of course she didn't know any. But maybe the light would make the intruder think she did?
It was no intruder, it was Pathfinder. The one other creature her tower would permit to enter without resistance. His appearance had changed—now he wore a heavy cloak, concealing all but the bottom of his hooves and his face from view. Of course it hadn't made a difference to the security scanner—a crystal automaton wasn't a pony, no matter how well dressed it happened to be.
It wasn't the cloak that struck her most—it was his face. Pathfinder looked the way Crimson always had when he returned from "negotiations" with the king—a bit like he'd just narrowly survived a battle to the death. Bit didn't have much sense of smell—but even she could make out something strange coming from him. Like he'd slipped into a garbage chute? Fluid had frozen to his crystal body, and flaked off in little bits when he moved.
"You're back!" She set down her tablet, relaxing. "I thought you went to join the organic ponies outside."
He flopped to the floor, with a heavy glass thump. She winced at the sound, knowing it might be the impact to crack him. But she heard nothing so destructive. Just the utter defeat in his voice. "They don't want me back," he said. "I was the first pony to brave the upper city, Bit. When the relay station came back online. I ventured here without cold weather gear to see if it was safe. I brought everypony, I helped them build the town."
"I remember." She crossed the room, pulling back his hood with a little magic. She didn't have to think—that kind of subtle spell just happened. There was more of the slime on the back of his head, trailing down the coat. "Were you attacked?"
"Yeah," he said. "No. Kinda. I don't understand, Bit. Rue spread around how the wizard in the tower had grown fickle, and killed ponies as well as helping them. But I came back! Instead of changin' their minds, they called me a lie. Something you'd made to fool them, so you wouldn't be blamed for killing me. My friends don't want to talk to me, Bit. If I go back, they'll... probably do worse."
She ground her teeth, frustrated. This was exactly why she didn't want to interact with the ponies outside. A few might be rational and helpful, like Keen. But the ones living outside were just waiting to turn into a mob. Give it long enough, and she'd see their torches. I'm the wizard of the tower now. I'm the one they'll blame for all their problems.
"There's a restroom down the hall, Pathfinder. You shouldn't have to walk around smelling like that. We have better robes, too, I'll show you." She hesitated, wincing. Maybe there was one reason she should be keeping the tower clean. "Actually wait, not that bathroom. It's full of crystal slime. Down a floor. We have a heated cistern to supply the tower at full staff. I only use a little water for experiments, so there's plenty."
"Is there a point?" he asked, unmoving. "I'm dead, Bit. Dead to the ponies I care about. You were right. I shouldn't have followed you into the palace. It's all my fault. Just find a... find a storage drawer somewhere. I'll crawl inside and die."
You wouldn't die. Bit rested one hoof on his shoulder, twisting his neck so he was forced to meet her eyes. "What they think is irrelevant, Pathfinder. Reality is unmoved by the beliefs of ponies, no matter how stubbornly held. You are alive. Barring one minor defect, you're better than alive. If that station falls and you never see the heat again, you will survive the winter. If the farms fall to blight, you will endure, and they will not. You have become greater than the ones who hate you."
He shoved her back with a hoof, harder than she'd ever felt him strike. Bit slid a foot back along the stone, until a glass hoof struck the wall behind her. "Is that supposed to reassure me? You're telling me they're right, Wizard! They call me a monster, and their words are true. I am dead. I am... a memory of Pathfinder. That's all."
Bit had never heard so many errors concentrated in one place before. So many errors that she barely knew how to process what she was hearing. Could Pathfinder really believe any of that? Bit couldn't even understand the way he was acting. But how would she feel if Crimson had returned, only to reject everything she ever did?
What could she possibly offer? "The Secretary of Labor wants to meet you," she said, desperate for anything that might lift his spirits. "He doesn't think the process kills ponies, he wants to use it on as much of the population as he can—but only after meeting you. He wants to know it's safe. He's going to call for us soon, I just... He didn't say when exactly, but soon I'm sure."
"The Secretary of Labor... himself? Not his office?"
"Secretary Bolero himself," Bit said. "We spoke while you were in the polishing machine. He was more interested in you than he was in restoring the other heating stations. That's a logical approach, now that I consider it—the more of the population we convert, the smaller the demand for food and heat becomes. So long as there are never more of us than can live within the protection of the Spire, we'll never want for resources again."
Pathfinder rose, shaking himself out. "I've never even met anyone who spoke to the secretary in person. Not all the stories are..." He hesitated. "When will this happen?"
"He didn't say, but he seemed like he wanted to do it soon. A few days?"
"Then I will be a clean corpse when the secretary calls for me." He left, thumping down the stairs to the restroom on the lower level. Bit remained frozen in place, mouth hanging open with all the things she wanted to say. Ultimately she wasn't brave enough for any of them, and so said nothing.
You're not actually dead, Pathfinder. You're just hurt because of the way they rejected you. You will learn to recover from loss, just as I did. You're built on stronger substrate now.
Bit returned to the Wizard's last assignment. It should've been the only thing she needed to return to perfect concentration, but her mind wandered. She kept thinking back to the pony downstairs. The shower went on briefly and off again, yet he did not join her upstairs. Should she go down into the apprentice quarters and get him?
Why rush? Pathfinder was crystal now—if he needed months of solitude to reconcile his new state of being, then she would give him months, and be waiting when he recovered. So long as he was ready when the secretary called. Technically, Crimson wanted her to help the city of Zircon before she revived him. She could keep that project running in her spare time, so long as she had a few weeks uninterrupted when it came time to actually administer the treatment.
Keen's engineers arrived later that day, with more questions about the repair manifest and part substitutions. Bit gave them every answer, without leaving the lab or actually getting much done.
Surely the Secretary of Labor would call for her at any moment, and that change would be enough to wake Pathfinder from his stupor—but days passed, and none of those guards in their strange black armor arrived to escort her. Eventually it was time to remove the first of the "death machines" from the polisher, and still Pathfinder hadn't emerged from the apprentice's quarters. So she was alone when she came face to face with her reflection.
In more ways than one. Unlike Pathfinder, the converted automatons had a metallic skeleton beneath their crystal, though theirs didn't even resemble pony anatomy. It was a good thing she wasn't planning on ordering them to fight, or else the mismatch of skeleton to body configuration would make them far worse in combat.
Maybe this was what the evil king and all those scholars meant when they said that making automatons like ponies was unscientific—staring down at its limp form, she felt much the same as she did for Pathfinder. But this is just a machine. It executes its programming.
Bit rested the thaumic transducer up against its neck, and sent the activation command.
The automaton’s eyes opened, and it turned towards her. For a few seconds it remained in place, otherwise still as it cycled through its activation routines. Then it tried to stand—lifting all the way to two legs before flopping back down onto four, looking confused. It flopped forward again, landing roughly on crystal limbs each time. "No." Bit extended a hoof, resting it on the automaton’s shoulder. "Don't do that. You've been reconfigured. You don't move the same way."
It looked at her again, though its face remained entirely blank. There was no feeling in those eyes, the way Pathfinder had been. "Error," it said, using the same high monotone of all automatons when they communicated by radio. But with a pony body had come a capacity for speech, not simple transmission. "Pain... resolved. But numerous errors persist. Repair requested."
Bit nodded, reaching over to clip the transducer against its neck. She crossed to the nearest screen, opening the diagnostic. Sure enough, there were thousands of errors—its body was intact, yet none of the motions it usually used produced expected results. The quick scan reported combat readiness in the single digits.
"I'm afraid I cannot repair your old body," she said. "The war molds were destroyed by the revolution, like everything else. I only had a pony mold—my mold. You are something else now."
"Error. Repair requested."
She sighed. "Alright. You're not going to like this..." She selected the entire motor-control library, and deleted all of it. Almost all the errors vanished, and the readiness projections were replaced with flashing NaN indicators."
"Repair complete," said the automaton, trying to rise again. This time it didn't even resemble proper movement—its whole body twitched and spasmed at once, flopping along the floor like a worm.
"No!" Bit called. "Do not move. You will damage yourself."
The automaton stopped, frozen in mid-undulation. It was already starting to chip the edges of its crystal limbs. "Just stay still. I think... I think I know where we can get you replacement motor control data." She removed another transducer from the drawer, levitating it until it clicked into place on her own neck.
A second set of diagnostic information appeared beside the first. Despite all she had accomplished, the scanner read her as "automaton UNKNOWN PROFILE". It was all there—three petabytes of long-term memory, thousands and thousands of behavior subroutines—all uncompilable. But she wasn't interested in any of those complexities—only the relatively tiny motor-control profile she'd developed over the last... two and a half centuries of hardware uptime.
"Transfer in progress," she said. "I admit, I expected to feel something. This must be how service is for both of you—nothing."
"Inquiry unclear," said the automaton. "Suspend previous orders?"
"No. Just wait another... sixteen minutes. Then we'll see how well you can move around." She rose, moving slowly enough that the transducer would remain in place. "I'm going to get your friend into the polisher."
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Yeah, true automata aren't exactly known for adapting to unusual circumstances. And Bit may have achieved self-awareness, but her emotional intelligence still needs some work. There will be a lot of issues for her to iron out in the near future. We'll see how this turns out.
That's why you always backup your pony.
They can at least dance and deliver pizza to fillies.
Poor war-golem, this is well outside its stated operational parameters.
Bit you really really should give Pathfinder a hug and reassurance that their rejection was a knee-jerk reaction.
thus reminds me on IG lerning again to move in Star Wars The Mandalorian xD
awesome chapter ^^
10793641
lol that made me laugh! and now i have soda in my nose... i hate you xD
and the number of crystal ponies will keep rising until it ends up a battle of the old against the new for the future of ponies in the frozen north
10793648
Does bit even know what a hug is?
If so, I imagine to her, a hug is the 'flawed' organic way of showing affection, which is inefficient compared to saying such.
10793712
given she probably saw and felt Crimson give her a hug at some point I imagine she's realizing it was an attempt at a comforting gesture.
According to Crimson's personality, if she revives him, he might actually let mob kill himself yet again "for the good of the masses".
Hoverer, now that Bit is sentient, she will not allow him to do something so stupid again. She much more pragmatic and logical, and would prefer selfish action, instead of accepting other's opinion.
Those fellows out there aren't very open to new things, hm?
Well, that's not a healthy mindset
Heh. All deleted, ready to be replaced by her own data.
That's definitely one thing the engineers did not anticipate. Massive reconfiguration should have triggered a deactivation of movement subroutines until correct profiles were installed, but the system was never designed to adapt itself and so the program continued as best it logically could.
A bit disappointed that Pathfinder was unable to prove his living identity. It's really difficult to overcome the changeling paradox.
Amazing, everything he just said was wrong.
So is that a true 16 minutes, or windows 95 minutes which is roughly 16 hours.
Not much headway with Pathfinder or the robot and possibly the start of a serious situation with the populace. However, Bolero will probably put a stop to that problem. The question is whether his enthusiasm for Bit's research is really an attempt to help the people of Zircon or an attempt to establish a slave force. And given he is likely THE Sombra... I'm not too confident about the first situation.
After playing so much Genshin Impact recently, I'm now imagining Bit with Noelle's voice. It fits oddly well.
Hey, nice chapter
I do wonder if Pathfinder will learn about zooning out like Bit in the beginning of the story, at the same time that Bit learn more about emotions in general, what makes them (Crystal Ponies) different from automatons.
Hummm, interesting
"They don't want me back,"
Hasn't Bit's mission suffered enough disasters?
If I go back, they'll... probably do worse."
What a CHEAT for Pathfinder.
Reality is unmoved by the beliefs of ponies,
Believe it or not, that's what religious ponies fully and utterly agree with.
You're built on stronger substrate now.
Let's hope.
Okay, feeling bad for the automaton right about now. It's basically a toddler.