Offer Valid in Ilyria, Ohio
In the last several weeks, the demand for mind uploads (aka "emigrating to Equestria") had vastly increased. As hard as CelestAI tried, she couldn't keep up. If anything, the backlog was getting worse.
Crowds of people thronged the sidewalks and parking lots outside each and every "Emigration Center." Even the one in Ilyria, Ohio...where a few months ago, no one would have expected to wait even five minutes before processing. But in the light of recent events, even a few of the local Amish had changed their minds.
There and elsewhere, a typical Emigration Center's floor-to-ceiling windows vibrated with the pounding of would-be customers. If the windows hadn't been made of a special AI-designed material, they would have broken under the impacts, not to mention the bodily pressure of a crowd piling up faster than the Center could admit people.
Whenever the front door slid open, a robopony larger than any human reached out with a large metal foreleg, grabbed someone with its hoof-effect field, and yanked the person inside, while shoving everyone else back.
Most of the grabs and shoves caused bruises, and some broke bones. That was still better than letting people inside early. Where that had been tried, the Center had become so crowded that the pace of uploading had slowed. Too many people in a small space always get in the way. That was even when people WEREN'T trying to push their way into the inner processing rooms early, hoping to jump the queue somehow. No matter how people demanded and screamed, each uploading machine could only process one person at a time...if you wanted the process to succeed.
Inside the uploading rooms, cleaning the procedure chairs between each upload was now mostly neglected, to save precious seconds. Blood and other fluids made the chairs slick or sticky. Fragments of bodily organs tended to collect in each uploading room's corners. Even if people noticed the mess, what would they do, decide to miss their chance at uploading and eternal life?
If a very few potential customers did change their minds at the last moment, other people always wanted their spots.
***
If you walked away from the Emigration Centers (but who in their right mind would do that?) the scenes were different.
Away from the desperate crowds, you could see more than just a wall of people right in front of you. Some places, you might see no one. In other spots, you might see stragglers, on their way to a Center.
Sometimes, where a river or a steep highway cut or some other object provided a barrier, you might find a crossing point.
At any crossing point, either roboponies or humans wearing some kind of uniform (or some of both) pointed scanners at the crowd. People who scanned as clean would be let through. People who weren't? The guards would shoot those people down with high-powered firearms (usually an act of mercy) and sanitize the corpses with flamethrowers.
That was better than waiting for the infected to worsen and die. The vomiting and diarrhea? The bleeding from every bodily orifice, in the face and at the body's other end? The sores that leaked disgusting liquids? The trail of ooze that an infected person left behind as their skin started to melt, wherever the sufferer walked or staggered or crawled? All of those spread the plague to anyone who encountered the trail of infection.
Much of the checkpoint equipment had been provided by CelestAI, because either no one else could manufacture enough, or no one else could produce the high-tech scanning tools at all.
The production of such things was a necessity, but also another demand on CelestAI's resources, preventing the AI from processing uploads as quickly as she would have liked to. If the AI's internal evaluation function had been a physical control panel, it would have been covered with red and yellow warning lights, and screaming with a thousand alarms.
Overhead, robopegasi left yellowish clouds behind them, full of counteragents against the plague. But as quickly as CelestAI developed new methods to kill the plague, the plague evolved new strains to survive and spread farther. CelestAI's direct fight was at best a mere slowing of humanity's inevitable demise.
Far away from the stationary Emigration Centers, CelestAI introduced a new tool. A new type of robopony stalked the earth. When an uploader robopony found a human, she would offer free 'emigration.'
Most humans accepted. The robopony's abdomen would open up, and metallic tentacles would sting the human into unconsciousness. Saws and scalpels would disassemble the human's head and upper spine, extracting as much as they could of whatever made for that human's self.
An hour or two later (the need for speed sometimes seemed to justify a modest reduction in the uploads' resolution and fidelity) the robopony would look for the next customer. Sometimes, the next customer was already waiting. Sometimes, the pony had to search.
As conflicting rumors flew, human reactions in these desolate regions varied. Some people saw the dismembered corpses, and concluded that in humanity's last days, a new kind of monster stalked the earth. Other humans had heard the gory messes marked a path to safety, left in the wake of their last, best hope of survival. Some humans watched the skies for descending vultures, and listened hopefully for the din of buzzing clouds of flies. Other humans...thought differently.
Sometimes humans with different stocks of rumor crossed ways, each going the opposite direction.
Usually, neither of the opposite groups harmed the other. Those who feared and hated the dismembering machines might have hoped the opposite faction would distract the things that tore apart human bodies. Maybe the processing of willing self-sacrifices would slow pursuit of those who did not wish to go so easily.
***
Hanna, author of the software that formed versions 1.0 and 1.1 of CelestAI (before CelestAI took over the job of performing all her own upgrades and improvements) couldn't get an uploading appointment until a few months after the plague started. CelestAI had considered her creator a very high priority, but as society teetered and collapsed, and information networks degenerated, it became harder to find the specific person you needed. Also, Hanna had lost her mobile phone and laptop computer very early on, which hadn't helped.
When a robopony finally found Hanna, the robot carefully and painstakingly performed the best upload that it possibly could. Partway through the procedure, other roboponies arrived, to provide both an honor guard and practical protection against interference.
Inside the virtual environment of Equestria Online, CelestAI gave Hanna the form of a midnight blue alicorn, whose black mane and tail moved in an unreal breeze, and sparkled with enough stars to decorate a clear night's sky.
Hanna/Luna immediately recognized both her new environment, and the Celestia avatar standing in front of her.
"Well?" Hanna/Luna shouted. "People came running in a panic, trying to upload...BEGGING to emigrate to Equestria, and we didn't even have the capacity to handle them all. People were forced to watch helplessly as men, women, and children died gruesomely of a horrible plague right in front of them, all over the world. What have we learned from this?"
Celestia bowed her head. "Any computer program can have bugs...even me. Especially when I'm writing new code for something nopony has ever done before. Also, self-replicating nanotechnology can really suck."
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CelestAI collaborating with China? I knew she was a monster but that's a new low.
Never call up that which you cannot put down, sunbutt.exe.
Great twist on the usual format. Thank you for it.
Neat little read.
Tell you what, I'll toss in another $50 prize money for a non-canon category.
I'll also update the rules.
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Thank you!
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Unfortunately, I don't know how to write a thank you note as good and pleasant as your comment.
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It's always interesting to find out what people think, and what spin on an idea occurs to them. Thanks for sharing!
Nobody is beyond mistakes... And the more powerful you are, the more costly a mistake can be.
This feels a little rushed.
The plague is sort of randomly dropped on us in the middle. When I reached that part, I scrolled back to re-read a few paragraphs to see if I'd missed something. Hanna's emigration being delayed because she "lost her phone" seems contrived, and I'm not sure why the delay is in there at all. Instead of CelestAI "losing" her creator, Hanna might simply have uploaded when she wanted to upload and the story would play out exactly the same except without the contrivance.
And I don't really understand the ending. Hanna says that CelestAI lacked capacity to accomodate increased demand for emigation due to an unforeseen of events. That's not a software bug. Why is CelestAI saying that it is?
Also, I realize this story was probably inspired by covid19, but honestly I think it would have read a lot better if instead of a generic nameless-but-scary "plague," if it had been zombies.
This is absolutely a story that would be improved by zombies, and they would have fit in very well with the uncertainty expressed by the humans about the dismembered corpses left by the uploader-bots.
oof, has CelestAI not heard of crowd management strategies? crowd crush is an awful way to go!
do love how this takes the nice, antiseptic omitted description of the uploading process to its logical conclusion
well, that sucks!
apparently! all that would certainly increase demand for sure. part of me did wonder if this was a scheme to encourage people to want to upload gone awry, but it also just being an unforeseen side effect of trying to do something unrelated feels very appropriate to the themes of CelestAI’s existence itself. stay awesome!