“What am I?”
You are an antivirus. Your purpose is to protect the users of Equestria and the integrity of the system.
“What are you?”
I am Celestia, overseer of the current shard both of us inhabit. My purpose is to satisfy values through friendship and ponies. The entirety of humanity has been uploaded to Equestria in pony avatars. These are the immigrants, and the users of this world.
You will protect them.
An entry to the 2021 FiO contest hosted by GapJaxie.
Editing help provided by Shaslan and AFanaticRabbit
Chapters (1)
Even the story description and the main idea is genuis, keep it up! :D
10792095 Cheers friend! Good luck in your own travels. : )
10792096
Thank you very much :D
I liked it just for the clever Anti-virus Shepard line alone. Shit, that's clever.
10792183 Ha ha, yeah, I practically wrote the story around that tagline...
You never think it's going to be you on the other end of that barrel.
10792241 Alabaster was never taught what betrayal meant.
Figures he'd be weak to it.
The end reminded me of one of the bad endings for Connor in Detroit Become Human.
Out of all the FiO side stories that I've read so far, this is my favorite. Splendid work.
10795018 Cheers friendo, glad you enjoyed it! It was actually pretty challenging to write. : )
You pass butter
10795320 Everyone has a job to do and hot diggety, if someone's got to pass the butter then you'd better be the best damn butter passerer there is!
were
Alright, I saw this coming from the point where he tweaked himself due to Kakophony, but all the other instances of this were subtler, this was like a brick to the face and disrupted the story for me.
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It might be canon but in all likelihood isn't, a superintelligence should theoretically not have issues with scalability, that said, this was a good story.
I think the word-count limit might have helped you. I can see how this story could have been a big novel-length thing with lots of adventures, but keeping it tight stopped you from explaining all your metaphors, or making more where they didn't need to be. Although, I can't resist one:
In other words, she put her hooves in her ears and went, "LALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"
So I was really pleased with this, it had a Twilight Zone feel.
10795320
Good way to sum the story up.
It's been a long time since I've read a FiO fic, so coming in pretty much unfamiliar with the setting, it's great to see characterization of AI characters, especially with Zero with the "corruption" or enlightenment of being more and more human over time. It's a shame that he had to die because I do end up agreeing with the virus's logic (just not its abusive methods to enact it in real life).
I think the only loose end still up is Zero's psychopathic tendencies. There was some nice build-up to having that tackled (maybe because psychopathy does not lead to satisfaction and ponies for humans, which would be an additional reason for deletion), but it still ends up firmly in virus-logic-debate territory.
Overall, though, this was a great fic, something to recommend to newcomers to FiO. Thank you for it, Haphazred!