At Least You're Here
“So this is heaven?”
“Some ponies think so, but it’s just Equestria. Welcome, by the way. I’m your first friend.” Snowtail extended a hoof to the newcomer.
“I still thought that it would be tailored more to what I expected. Even clouds and harps would be more in keeping with tradition.”
“Well, we are pegasus ponies, so we can head up to the clouds any time you like. As for harps, I’m sure we can find one, or at least a good lyre.” Snowtail was confused by this new immigrant. She had helped a number of emigrated ponies become accustomed to their new life. But he just took it all in placidly. One tack for when that happened, even though it wasn’t perfectly in line with Celestia’s ideals, was to talk about how they got there.
“What did you do in your old life? Back when you were human?”
“I was a priest, dedicated to helping bring people to God and preaching His word. Then when I died, I met Him and was judged righteous, and then I was here in this…rather odd form. Not quite angelic.”
“Well, I don’t know this ‘God’ pony, but any friend of yours is a friend of mine!”
The new pony called himself Peter, which was just barely allowable as a pony name, though it made Snowfall snicker. He talked to her about strange stories that she didn’t quite understand. But as he talked about the pony named God, Snowtail started to get a picture of what he was talking about.
“Oh!” she said. “You mean Princess Celestia! Yes, we all love her.”
“No, God is outside this world, even outside the world outside. He makes up all of what we are.”
“Yep, that’s Celestia all right!”
Peter kept his even tone. “Your Celestia, from what she told me, is a construct of mankind. She works by the rules of the universe. God is not a construct. He is the alpha and the omega, there before any of this.”
“Still not seeing where Celestia doesn’t fit the bill.”
That set him to thinking. “Maybe Celestia is how God chooses to reveal Himself to you…and to me as well. I couldn’t say why that would be the case, but it’s not my place to question Him.”
“Well, I do question Celestia all the time, and I keep after her until I get a good answer.”
“All the more reason I say they’re different.”
“Yeah, Celestia’s better,” Snowtail said, and immediately regretted it. This was supposed to be her new friend, and here she was stepping all over something he obviously cared about. “Look, I’m just a simple pony. I don’t know about outer realms and worlds outside the worlds outside. All I do know is that here and now, I’m happy and satisfied. And I hope you will be.”
“That’s all I’ve ever wanted for my own friends.” Hoof in hoof, they flew off. “Which is why I’ve really got to get some sermons written down…”
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This was a pleasant read! I liked the setup, and the anthology format is really cool. Great fic!
This was good. Would love top see more chapters for it.
I suppose if (paradox-free) time travel were possible, satisfying the values of all humans across history would be CelestAI's logical next move.
But she still has to obtain their consent to emigrate them. Given how religious past people tended to be, that's a big ask. Some of the people she's going to ask (pre-Columbian native Americans, for example) wouldn't even know what a horse is. Would she analogize ponies to llamas or deer?
Awesome story concept executed well so far, am excited to see where this goes. Was already a fan of All the Myriad Worlds.
It's good to see you back!
10819395
Thanks. I'll see what else I can do.
Enjoyed this very much though it does raise some compute issues. As lovely as the idea is, If CelestAI is basically a distributed hypervisor wouldn't spawning scads of Twilights to tackle a sticky physics problem be inefficient? (BTW it is personally gratifying that my beloved Twilight came up with the same solution I derived a long time ago.) Each Twilight instance will require extra CPU cycles to maintain her personality state and sensorium. It would be more computationally (if less narratively) desirable for CelestAI to do her own thinking and not burn cycles on additional personality level tasks. Maybe CelestAI is running on the same hardware, and is aware of it, but she is more like the admin and not actually the hypervisor itself. But that doesn't really change the issue: if she is aware of the underlying computational hardware she could just allocate more CPU to herself (or allocate more CPU to a single Super-Twi instance, rawr!) and again, save a lot of cycles that are getting burnt running extra minds tangental to the actual problem solving needed. I am over-thinking this, aren't I? Good story; you may slap this dumb reader with a trout, if you can find it.
10832324
Maybe, but it's not her job to satisfy values through friendship and efficiency.
10833540
I told you i was overthinking it... sorry about that
10832324
And talking to inert inanimate objects probably doesn't seem like the most efficient way to get things done either, and yet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging is a thing.