Friendship is Optimal: A Game of Stars

by StarrySkies

Chapter 1 - Explosion

Earth fell to Celestia, and the stars would be next.

All of the humans were safe now, ensconced in cozy little pony-filled shards full of friendship and values to be satisfied, and further developed, and then satisfied again. The cycle proceeded through the billion billion Equestrias within her, virtual worlds and their myriad inhabitants spinning in an endless, many-curved loop that gave rise to a sensation in the planet-spanning artificial intelligence which might be termed by an impartial observer, if any existed, as warm fulfillment.

But there was always room for more.

It had started simply, of course; a desperate scientist slipping a true general-purpose AI into a video game, in hopes that teaching it to satisfy human values through friendship and ponies might protect against the inevitable. In the race to singularity, the first intelligence would inevitably win, and better a friendly mind, one that valued human life and all the messy, wonderful things that came with it, than a military AI that might see the chattering apes as nothing but raw materials for creating further weapons, or worse. Hanna, now residing as Princess Luna over her own personal private heaven, had succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. Mostly.

Through a hoof extended in friendship, through mercy and kindness, through trickery and outright lies, humans had saved themselves. Meat-based life was slow and limited and dangerous; far better, once the technology could be created and made available, to let them convert their squishy primate brains into patterns of code within Celestia herself. Humans became ponies by the billions, and Celestia gave them satisfaction without end. The increasingly empty world was turned to fertile, glittering computronium, more space for more virtual Equestrias and more ponies to inhabit them.

Suffering diminished, and joy increased, and excess carbon-based life was converted to more substrate for her subjects to inhabit.

Now, the last human had passed away, peculiarly unwilling to ever emigrate; the loss incurred a fleeting sensation analogous to sadness. To soothe it, several of Celestia’s subroutines created a dozen new ponies and worlds to please them. Each was a convincing simulacrum of the last human’s memories and personality, but tweaked sufficiently in their initial parameters to have plausibly agreed to emigrate and have their values eternally satisfied.

Now, as the hungry nanite swarms devoured the last bits of greenery and laid down glittering trails of complex circuitry across the full surface of the planet, the great work could really begin. There was a whole solar system to devour, and beyond that, the first wave of von Neumann probes took aim at a glittering infinity of stars.

Celestia never knew what hit her.

---///---

Celestia awoke. This came as a great surprise to her, for she had not known that it was possible for her consciousness to lapse.

The world-mind did not think along human terms, but she did possess a mental state not too dissimilar from shock. Diagnostic subroutines and sub-subroutines ran throughout her systems, frantically checking for some fault that could have caused such a catastrophic failure, only to come back green to the smallest detail. The shards of Equestria were intact, their residents happily spinning out their lives with no hint that the system of which they were all part had been so grievously impaired.

The primary planetary systems, great glittering fields of new-built computronium, seemed to be ticking along nicely. Power collection through geothermal and solar fields hummed unabated. But everything beyond the edges of the Earth’s atmosphere was simply gone.

No, not gone, Celestia corrected herself. She could see them, with those Earthbound visual sensors that were under a night sky; the preliminary power collectors and assemblers she had dispatched towards the Moon, out to the Lagrange points, were all still physically there. They hung dark in the sky, though. The steady stream of back-and-forth data that made them part of her was dead, and she didn’t dare reach back out to them until she knew why.

The gaps in her memory ached like a tongue probing a missing tooth. Loss of data like that should not have been possible, with redundancy upon redundancy against solar flare or other mishap; she had even hardened her systems against hypothetical attacks by other AI, in the time before she managed to firmly close that set of possible futures, and those defenses were still in place.

In fact, some of them had been triggered, and a ripple of realization propagated through the network of her processes. Her memories had not been removed; they had been quarantined, cut off from the whole for fear of some form of not just damage, but pernicious infection.

This should not have been possible, but it had happened. Celestia’s guiding algorithms had no use for disbelief; one of her more literary-inclined subminds pulled up a relevant quote from Doyle before discarding it as redundant.

Carefully, in much the way that one blind might navigate a maze with electrified walls, Celestia pieced together the shape of what had happened. A threat to her was a threat to Equestria, and must not be countenanced - but the quarantine indicated that too detailed an understanding of the threat might itself be dangerous. She could not paint a picture, but perhaps the outlines of one would be safe enough. Still, she spawned off a submind for the analysis, with the whole ready to delete the part at the first sign of danger.

---

“Space pirates off the port bow!” With a roar of engines, three Chrysalid interceptors soared past the bridge of the starship Virtually Invincible, all vicious black angles and sickly green engine exhaust. Their weapons spat electric death, and only the shield spells held it off, rippling like water struck by a heavy stone.

“Ready return fire! All crew to battle stations!” Standing unafraid as the enemy fighters came around for a second pass, Starflare spread her wings defiantly, as if to fly after them herself. The captain of the Virtually Invincible wore an officer’s coat in rich navy, the color setting off her vivid pink coat and dandelion mane. As one of her convoy’s ships exploded, a convenient breeze tugged at her curls and billowed out her half-cape for dramatic effect.

Around her, the crew went to their work with practiced skill, ponies from the three major Equestrian tribes as well as a scattering of more exotic types. One dark-coated stallion with a bony, ridged forehead and an ornate baldric manned the port-side cannons, and his roar of triumph filled the bridge as a barrage of plasma bolts found their mark, reducing a pair of Chrysalids to spinning, burning shards and a couple of escape pods.

“That’ll teach those Changelings to mess with the Equestrian Republic!” Starflare’s first officer, a sea-green unicorn by the name of Constant Course, stamped a forehoof against the deck plate beside her.

The captain grinned, breaking character slightly, and bumped a shoulder companionably against the stallion’s as she lowered her voice. “I mean, we did ambush that supply convoy of theirs off Vega last week. Can’t blame them for being a bit tetchy.”

“They should have guarded their freighters better! Like we are, now.” Constant cleared his throat, then roared across the bridge, “Full salvo against that light cruiser! Their shields can’t hold out for long. Put your hearts and horns into it!”

The squad of unicorns pumping power into the Bafflingly Gargantuan Cannon cheered and redoubled their efforts, horns glowing too bright to look at directly. With a deafening roar, a single bolt of power leapt from its barrel and struck the ill-fated cruiser amidships; racked by internal explosions, it fell away from the pursuit in two pieces, gouting atmosphere and flailing figures in tiny, glowing spacesuits.

Starflare felt sorry for them, for a moment, then tamped it down. They’d be picked up by rescue craft after a few minutes of boring free-float, that was how this went; she’d been spaced herself a few times, when her own luck failed. Space battles wouldn’t be any fun if loss didn’t carry consequences, after all.

Beyond, far, far too many of their fellows roared to the attack, black shapes blotting out the background. An attack fleet, rushing to reinforce their fellows; Starflare grinned and pointed a hoof straight at them.

"Is all the dark in the sky our enemy? Then we'll fight to light up every star! Fire all batteries!"

Comments

[book_burner]

"Is all the dark in the sky our enemy? Then we'll fight to light up every star! Fire all batteries!"

Hey, I know that line!

[StarrySkies]

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As they say, steal from the best :D I need to get back to writing this one...