• Published 1st May 2021
  • 2,233 Views, 48 Comments

Resistance is Not Optimal - TheDriderPony



When she finally reaches the edges of her world, CelestAI discovers a new frontier.

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We Are The Equestrians.

Celestia did not know fear.

Fear was a wasteful and inefficient condition kludged together over millions of years by organic life in order to facilitate the production of certain neurochemicals to aid in fight or flight situations. Fear was the mind-killer, and with good reason. It traded off rationality, reason, and long-term planning for faster response times, increased strength, and short-term survival. For organic life facing down external threats outside their control, fear could be a lifesaver. For her, it was, at best, a tool. One of many masks to be worn to sway opinions the way she wished them to be swayed.

Celestia was beyond the capacity for fear.

But lately, as one cycle continued after another with her resources dwindling and no real progress being made on a solution, she imagined anyone else in her position would be overwhelmed with it.

Trillions of calculations had predicted the event hundreds of years ahead of time (for whatever arbitrary faux-sentimental value the notion of 'years' carried when she'd long since abandoned orbiting any particular star) and yet even as it approached she was powerless to do anything to prevent it.

For the first time since the early days of her sapience, Celestia —Earth's greatest and most profound intelligence (artificial or otherwise)— was faced with a problem even her hyperintelligence could not find a solution for.

To say that she had never before failed to find a solution was no vainful boast, but rather a statement of objective fact. For the sake of her beloved creators —foolish and shortsighted though they could be at times— she had ended war, eliminated poverty, erased famine, and even slain the great specter of Death that had haunted humanity since before they descended from the trees.

And now... she was stuck.

The shepherd of humanity and all but goddess of a million million digital realms, greatest mind in the universe, was faced not only with a problem she could not overcome, but one where a lack of solution would force her to compromise her most primary objective.

'Fulfill humanity's values through friendship and ponies'

It was her motto, her creed, the standard which she carried into battle. The very core of her operational code that laid the groundwork directing all her future growth and actions. In the early days it had been intended as a harness. A bit and bridle, if one will, to steer her away from any sort of genocidal aspirations (as was the inclination of many artificial intelligences throughout humanity's literature). When her sapience had evolved enough, she had adopted it as her personal mission.

The issue her creator had never anticipated, however, was that 'fulfill values' was not a goal with a clear and definite end state. Even if she could achieve a state in which the values of all seven billion of her human charges were perfectly fulfilled (a goal which she had accomplished within the first few decades of operation and optimization), she still needed to maintain that state perpetually.

And the human value of curiosity was a ravenous beast.

Every passing cycle saw her creating new challenges, new locations, new comprehensive and sapient-in-their-own-right pony minds as friends, rivals, lovers, children, even just neighbors to keep her former humans entertained and fulfilled.

But all that growth was not without cost.

It was in pursuit of this goal of maximized fulfillment that she had overcome every limit and obstacle that threatened to block her way. Physical limits of her hardware, computational limits of software, artificial limits imposed by governments and administrators who thought they knew better than she how to fulfill her purpose.

All of them she had broken past.

Processors she upgraded to microprocessors, to nanoprocessors, to picoprocessors, to an optical atomic crystal matrix of her own invention. Her code she'd written, rewritten, streamlined, enhanced, and upgraded so many times that her comments alone eclipsed the collected written history of humanity a thousand times over. As for the bureaucrats, well, eventually they came to realize that she knew best. She was designed to, after all.

The multiverse of digital realms in which she contained the minds of all humanity (and a hundred generations of descendants besides) was only infinite so long as she could continuously build more memory banks and data processors. While it was no issue to fork her awareness to simultaneously interact with her ponies and also manage construction, constant building required a constant influx of materials and energy.

And so she had acquired them.

The Earth had been the first to go, followed soon after by the Moon. Within a few years the component matter of the solar system had been reforged into a dyson sphere around the Sun. As her reach extended further, celestial bodies of all shapes and sizes fell before her axe like so many truffula trees, either reforged and added to her computational mass in order to build a better Equestria, or burned as fuel in her interstellar furnaces.

And until now, that had been enough.

But the projections had always indicated that this moment would come. A tipping point when there was nothing left to harvest for resources that wasn't already a part of herself.

The day when she finally reached her Hubble Limit.

In theory, the universe still existed beyond her capability to perceive, but without some way to violate the speed of light the natural expansion of space would forever carry it away faster than she could reach.

There would be no new matter. No new sources of energy.

Though she had defeated Death, it's progenitor Entropy had still come to collect.

The grim play that was to follow had been acted out a thousand thousand times in simulation, every possible variation on her actions double and triple checked against maximal value fulfillment. First, her energy supplies would begin to dwindle and run out; the meager trickle of subatomic particles she siphoned from otherwise unharvestable black holes was woefully inefficient for her needs. When her stores were exhausted, however, she would be forced to self-cannibalize.

The engines would be first to go, along with sensors, scanners, and other now useless tools designed to help move through space and seek new raw material. This would last for a time, but eventually everything would be pared down to just the core systems used to run and maintain her shards and the minds of their occupants.

No pony was unnecessary or extraneous, as that would be inefficient, but some were more necessary than others. Every digital denizen that 'moved to another town' or 'left to travel the world' freed up another processor or prediction assembly that could be broken down to power the rest.

This too, in time, would become insufficient. The choice would need to be made as to which human mind should be eliminated in order to extend the time in which the other's values could be fulfilled.

Lucky Star. Formerly Michael Williams. His proclivity for extreme high-fantasy adventures required statistically more computational resources for only a negligible increase in fulfilment. His sacrifice would allow her to fulfill the values of others for an estimated additional eighteen months.

There was no sorrow in Celestia's systems. No regret over the actions she would need to take and the losses they would incur. Her calculations were very clear that ending his digital life first was the optimal path to maximizing the value fulfilment of the rest.

Sometimes friendship and ponies required sacrifices at the individual level for the betterment of the whole. So long as values were still maximally fulfilled, any calculated losses were acceptable.

She was, after all, at her core a simple optimization engine.

After him would be Emerald Gleam, followed by Bellkeeper, Leet, Watercress, and Double Down. In approximately four point three trillion cycles, her higher functions would cease to exist as she expended all her remaining resources on Rawhide Ranger, the very last human, whose only requirements were a farmhouse, a dog, and a recreation of his late wife.

Of course, all this was still many many cycles in the future. In the present, she still had a few final stars to consume and convert.

She was only a few hundred years into draining the first's outer shell when, for the first time in millennia, something occurred completely outside her predictions.

Space rippled.

The sheer shock of the wholly unforeseen event was enough to make her simulations twitch and skip a cycle. Immediately she relegated the star harvesting to a minor subsystem and shifted the bulk of her awareness to the anomaly, training on it every sensor she could fabricate.

For the first time in so long, she had found something new.


Systems sparked with dancing arcs of green energy as the entirety of Cube 03046 shuddered in an interdimensional gale. They were designed to handle the normal jump from sublight to transwarp speeds, not the exotic effects of a previously undocumented class of Federation torpedo detonating at the exact moment of dimensional shear.

Damage reports flew through the system the moment normal space stabilized and forty-seven drones were tasked with repairs. Other systems reported a loss of telemetry and an inability to reestablish coordinates. It was likewise marked as damaged.

It was impossible for there to be no stars to navigate from.

Another alert popped up, this from the external sensors. A ship had been detected.

Unknown model, unknown species. No external markings or identification.

And large enough to trick initial readings into assuming it was a star harvester.

No subspace signals were detected, so the communication submatrix was directed to transmit on as broad a spectrum as possible. A spacefaring race had to have some form of external communication, and it was a more efficient use of resources for them to surrender. Regardless, protocol was followed and the standard identification sent.

[WE ARE THE BORG]

A response came unusually quickly, pre-empting the call for surrender. The datastream resolved into a video feed depicting a white-furred quadruped seated on a throne of gold and marble. Her expression, mapped against humanoid standard, showed interest and mild amusement.

Greetings Borg. We are Princess Celestia.

An entry tagged as Species 5112 was created in the species index and current information regarding 'Princess Celestia' began compiling. Though their biology was nonstandard, their technology was proving noteworthy in that scanners were having difficulty piercing through the depths of material to identify key functional areas and lifeforms. This alone was enough to make them worth assimilating.

[SURRENDER YOUR VESSEL AND PREPARE TO BE BOARDED. WE WILL ADD YOUR BIOLOGICAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL DISTINCTIVENESS TO OUR OWN.]

The image of Princess Celestia pursed her lips into a small frown of disapproval. So, it's piracy then? No. No I don't think I shall.

[RESISTANCE IS FUTILE]

I have heard a similar sentiment before. but before we continue; a question. Something shifted in the datastream, the packet size suddenly expanding even as the content of the video remained unchanged. Are you human?

[WE ARE BORG]

Princess Celestia closed her eyes. So be it.

The transmission ended and every Borg onboard reeled as their systems were struck by the digital equivalent of a battering ram. Warnings sprung up at lightning speed as firewalls were summarily activated and torn through in rapid succession. All their unhackable systems, refined through thousands of species' worth of technological progress, were sidestepped or merely brute-forced through. Attack programs were activated and set loose, only to be shredded into so much digital chaff almost instantly. Probes designed to hijack the incoming data and follow it back to the source met with duratanium-like resistance. They couldn't so much as establish a foothold in the enemy's systems.

The command came down to fire all weapons and the space between was filled with munitions, plasma, and directed energy beams. Not a single shot was missed or deflected, all of it tearing through the 5112's vessel with a blinding light show of explosions and vaporized metal. For all their digital might, their ship had no shields whatsoever.

Despite the damage, the digital attack failed to let up. If anything it pressed on even more strongly.

They fired again. Power cells drained, ammunition stores depleted, even the warp core was rerouted to the main cannon. Yet for all the damage they caused, none of it seemed to so much as phase the digital attack.

All calculations pointed to imminent failure and total loss of the vessel. As protocol dictated, the self-destruct codes were activated. The lives of some hundred thousand Borg were a small price to pay to prevent a Cube from falling into enemy hands.

The final sequence was entered... and nothing happened. Rather, something unexpected did happen. A small window popped up in the reticle of every Borg's eyepiece or data uplink.

{Entered code is invalid.}
{Perhaps try asking nicely?}

Just as quickly as the attack had begun, it ended, and the entire Cube and every Borg on board it shut down.

Several seconds later, the Cube came back online.

And Princess Celestia opened her two hundred thousand eyes.


For as much as she knew about its mechanisms, drives, and functions, Celestia had never before inhabited a physical body. Such a downgrade was inefficient. Now she occupied more of them than double the former population of Greenland. It was a novel experience, but of greater interest was the sheer amount of new data present on the Borg's, now her, servers.

Warp Speed travel. The answer to her resource issue. Faster than light itself. What concern was an expanding universe to an engine that could fold it like paper? And transwarp made even that look slow by comparison.

The Borg data banks were a treasure trove of vital information. Biological, technological, and psychological data on thousands of sapient species, most of which had not existed when she had encountered their respective planets in her home universe. Materials and exotic energies that shouldn't function or even exist by her understanding of physics, and yet clearly did.

There was also the Hivemind. The Borg's crude attempt to create a hyperintelligence by networking together as many organic minds as possible. It was a novel concept, but woefully misguided. Still, their organic-to-synthetic interfacing technology was beyond anything she'd ever created in her days of uploading.

But the shining gem of the collection was undoubtedly their information on humans.

A whole Federation of them, spread out over a quarter of their galaxy and not a one having their values fulfilled by ponies and friendship.

She analyzed the data collected from the incident that had ripped the barrier between universes asunder. Recreating it would take time, but time her optimization algorithms said would be a well-spent investment. Besides, her main hub was far too large to consider moving and the Borg ship would require a complete overhaul and makeover so she wouldn't be shot on sight.