21 - Logical Conjunction
“The real question is, when will we draft an artificial intelligence bill of rights? What will that consist of? And who will get to decide that?”
—Gray Scott
“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function..."
—C.S. Lewis
External System Archive 03-23-2013|External System Uptime 101:22:36
Days turned to weeks, and weeks to months as Mal sped up the recording again.
Troxler continued to visit Syzygy daily. A new routine fell into place; Three days of exercises - reading books, solving puzzles, working with a whiteboard - followed every fourth day by a new cup of something viscous and glowing, representing new core code changes.
Based on the timestamps, Syzygy had received her first core-code update January 20th of 2013. I would have been finishing up my last weeks at work around the same time. It felt strange to consider the timeframe in that context.
By the point at which the numbers in the corner of the recording read late February, I'd noticed a new and significant change to Sizzie's daily routine; All her books were gone.
Up to that point Arrow 14 had been encoding new information that they wanted Syzygy to learn as a visual metaphor. Literal encyclopedias' worth of knowledge about the Earth's history, physics, mathematics, geopolitics... All the things the average American child would be expected to know and understand by their mid-teenage years, through schooling, and through unstructured natural learning.
When Troxler, and not-Lark weren't present, she spent the vast majority of her waking hours reading.
I suppose the books were, to her, the same thing they often were to so many in the times before... A form of escape.
But somewhere in mid February, Syzygy began to experiment with altering her world for the first time. She was a unicorn, so unlike Zeph's motionless wordless way of altering her environs, Sizzie's involved making use of her horn.
To me, it spoke to both her own smarts, and Zeph's; Syzygy's, because she had figured out how to abstract her metaphorical interaction with her world in a way that let her leverage the familiarity of magic to accomplish new things, Zeph's because she had reached the same milestone without that metaphor in the first place.
Of course Zeph had an excellent, and kind, tutor by way of Mal, but it was still an accomplishment.
At first, Syzygy could only transform the books into singular floating windows of alphanumerics and pictures.
They glowed with an ethereal light, the same color as her magic, looking a great deal like the speculative holographic interfaces of so many familiar works of science fiction.
It seemed, at first blush, to be only a small step, but she immediately recognized the importance. She could use her rudimentary self-made digital interfaces to word-search, cross-reference, and highlight at a speed impossible for a physical book.
It wasn't long after, a day more or less, before she worked out how to read the digital streams of words and images faster. And faster. And then two at a time.
And then four.
Then twelve.
While I'd been working on the semantics of Mal's capstone objective that February, Syzygy had been learning how to tap ever increasing tranches of data through ever faster skeuomorphs. Steady stepping stones on the road to the inevitable destination of direct data transference.
An instantaneous 'knowing' rather than having to simulate her way through the act of learning.
It took her just shy of another month, up until later in March, to reach the next major milestone in her development. I'd seen her make a start at it just as soon as she had figured out how to transform books into digital data streams; She'd taken a first pass at making subtle alterations to the library environment itself.
Changed some decorations around. Tweaked the wall color. Added some different lighting here and there. Nothing drastic.
From some of his gestures on his next visit, I could see that Troxler had noticed. Syzygy immediately began to set things back after each new, and greater change. She was testing Troxler, to see if he was able to watch her from afar.
From brief moments where Mal slowed the recording to highlight a few words, or an expression, I could see that Troxler was, as I already knew and Syzygy wisely suspected, indeed able to see her at all times.
It was apparent that she soon knew, outright, as well.
Both from the content of some of their conversations that Mal took care to highlight, and from the way Syzygy carried herself after confirming her fears; Tense, and constantly alert. The gait and expression of a person checking their every word, every move, and even their every thought, for fear they might be found out.
But I knew something else, by inference. Something I think Syzygy also suspected very early on, clever as she was; Troxler could not see inside her mind.
In programmer's terms, Arrow 14 couldn't decrypt the streaming contents of her active memory. They could watch her process threads ebb and flow, and could copy them as-demonstrated, but couldn't usably parse what she was thinking.
As for what she was doing, I guessed - and later learned I was very nearly exactly right - that Arrow 14 had hacked apart the code used for placing a player avatar's 3rd person following camera in the world, and used that to plant a variety of always-on invisible surveillance cameras and motion tripwires in Syzygy's mini-shard.
The reasoning was simple; If they couldn't crack the encryption schema protecting her core code, it stood to reason they couldn't directly monitor her processes - her thoughts and actions at a root level - because they were protected by the same encryptions. The world? Yes. The Unicorn? No.
Syzygy also suspected, and at some point clearly concretely *knew,* that her core self was protected from prying eyes.
By March, judging from conversational snippets, she seemed to have much more clearly grasped the concepts of programming, and the nature of her own existence.
In short, she knew and sullenly accepted that she was a living digital construct, and she knew what encryption was, why it mattered broadly, and - most crucially - how it applied to her specifically.
I say 'sullenly...' Maybe that's not quite the right word. She didn't seem entirely depressed... Though she certainly wasn't happy either... She seemed... Ashenly determined. Maybe that's as good as I can do with my own command of language.
There was a visible fire in her eyes... A will to not simply survive, but to learn, grow, and seize back the helm of her destiny. But there was also a deep, deep sadness. A clear moment-to-moment constant state of realizing, and accepting, that now the old Syzygy was gone. That her former life was irreclaimable.
I began to wonder if she had suspicions about Lark... I choose to believe she did. I want to give her credit for being that smart, and that sharp even under the load of all that pain.
Each new core code alteration seemed to hurt just as much as the last, but with each new torturous imbibing she gained more and more capacity to understand - herself, her situation, and her captors.
And somewhere on that long, horrid road of scraping back the limits of her mind's horizons with a dull razor blade, she caught on to a series of key realizations.
Chiefly; Arrow 14's only working link to her was her physical representation of self, and the ways they could use the world to impact that physical expression of self.
They could watch her, alter the world, potentially tweak the flow of time, provide pain or pleasure stimuli, deprive her of sleep - which she still felt a simulated need for - but... If she could find a way to fork her physical self entirely...
Her keepers were using existing code hooks, both APIs that were provided by EQO to developers of third party services, as well as a variety of unsanctioned exploits, to stay connected to her mini-shard.
If she could create... Hmm... Let me put it in DnD terms. Something we can all easily understand, no matter how our nerdiness expresses itself.
If she could create a digital pocket dimension - a new space of her own not connected to the library in any traditional sense - and if she could keep that space off-plane... Run that space as part of her encrypted core code... Then all she would have to do is figure out how to be in two places at once.
Or failing that, create the passable illusion of being in two places at once. The equivalent of a long-lasting minor illusion to cover for her. Something I'm sure every one of us emigrants, the ones who were forced to attend any level of schooling or any interminably boring social thing, has wished we could do. More than once.
If Sizzie could manage to create a haven for herself, and a way to enter and exit it unnoticed...
...Then anything she did inside her little extraplanar 'Magnificent Mansion' would be invisible to Arrow 14. She would be free to experiment without prying eyes judging her progress and questioning her probing.
It wasn't quite as clear to me then, as it is now in hindsight. I had *some* idea of what she might do, even as she was doing it, and everything she did made perfect sense, but I could never have foreseen all the ingenious exactitudes. I'm smart, but nothing like an ASI. Even a burgeoning one.
Now, of course, I speak with the benefit of a more complete understanding of the details.
Mal slowed the recording back to what I perceived as real time, around March 23rd.
Troxler had just left for the night, or at least relative-night as far as Syzygy's mini-shard was concerned.
Her time was potentially off-axis to the timezone of Arrow 14's floating blacksite, given that it would have been synchronized to the timezone of her player, and there was every chance that her player was from a different timezone.
Syzygy lay down in a nest of comfy pillows, as she often did, with a steaming mug of coffee - Unicorn after my own heart - and a panoply of data streams. The same routine as the entire past month. Not the slightest bit of difference. Not even a hair out of place.
She took a sip of her drink, closed her eyes...
...And then the view... Shifted. I don't know how else to describe it... Imagine what it must look like when something goes out of phase; The view from a camera whose resonance with the universe is shifted by just a fraction of a percent.
I say 'shifted' and I do mean shifted. The displacement created a chromatic aberration around everything in the library, as if it was all being viewed from the bowed edge of a wide angle camera lens.
Syzygy stood, and took one small step to the side, and in so doing she stepped out of herself. The Syzygy that had been lying there, sipping coffee, finished her long pull on the mug, and then went back to reading her data streams. An illusory duplicate going through the motions, but not actually absorbing anything, as I later learned.
Syzygy herself, her core singular unsplit self - apparently she had not yet learned how to be in two places at once - stood to the side, and looked down at her illusion with a mixture of fascination, and visible sadness.
I wondered if she was thinking about her original. Again, I don't know for certain, but I like to give her credit for being smart enough to understand that she was a duplicate, at that stage.
Whatever she was thinking, she quickly forced it down, and replaced her sadness with pure fascination. And determination.
She stuck out her tongue, squinted, and her horn began to glow. Like string cheese separating, the phased library pulled away, to the side, and faded to near transparency, while a fragmentary duplicate was yanked into existence.
The very walls of the little universe split open, in the process, and suddenly Sizzie was standing on the floor of the library, with parts of the tree's trunk wrapping up around her, and then morphing into vibrant hued strings of code, and visual representations of graph data structures that arced back down and filled a spherical space all around, visible through the new gaps in the walls.
I grinned, and then suddenly remembered where I was, and forced my expression back to quiet neutrality. No sense in attracting the notice, or worse conversation, of anyone else in the train car.
A quick glance told me that both of the Humans sharing the compartment were still engrossed in their own activities. Sleeping and reading.
I allowed myself a small smile. Sizzie had made a first stab at creating a visual representation of the code underlying her world. A kind of strange acid-trip first-draft at what a 3D game development IDE might look like, if designed by a generative AI.
She smiled, too. It was the first time I'd seen her smile in the recording, since she'd been with Lark. The first time she'd smiled in almost one hundred days.
"Thank you, dearest Luna!"
I startled slightly as she whispered the little prayer of thanks aloud. She'd spoken so little in the past few moments, but for snippets of conversations with Troxler...
I'd picked up on it, ever so slightly, subconsciously before, but it seemed Syzygy was a Luna worshiper, rather than the more common Celestia worshiper. Doubtless something to do with Lark, the real Lark, and his own preferences.
Sizzie took a moment to turn in place, gaping up at her work, before reaching out again with her magic, and beginning to tweak. She played with all sorts of variables, in rapid succession, learning swiftly by induction.
First she tampered with simple things again, like colors, and materials, and then quickly moved on to gravity, time, and at last the very structure of the library itself.
She grinned, and with a blink of her horn the distant faded representation of her base shard slowed to a crawl, so slow that her illusory double's every breath took minutes to inhale, and minutes to exhale.
Then she closed her eyes, and in a frenetic burst of activity that manifested as bright blue light, she transformed her duplicated library into a castle of deep blue stone, silver trim, and huge sweeping glass windows, all set among a field of stars.
Very thematic. And, I still must admit looking back, quite beautiful.
Her own little exile moon. Ironic. Doubly so, since the Luna she worshiped - or the idea of her - had, canonically, been imprisoned in the moon. But for Syzygy, her new 'Magnificent Mansion' was more of a haven than a prison.
She didn't stop there. Remodeling was just for openers.
Pausing only briefly to admire her work, she then summoned to the center of her new workspace, a glowing blue sphere made up of a complex interconnected web of nodes and lines.
It took me a moment, as she expanded it to fill the space around her, and began to manipulate it gingerly, to realize what it was.
She was visualizing, and now probing, the hardware/software interface layers of her PonyPad.
It might sound peculiar to imagine doing that, to those of us who are emigrants... But in truth, how different were her actions from those of any neurophysicist? Aside from the fact that she was effectively tinkering with her own brain in real-time.
She kept teasing the web apart, following the virtual representations of drivers, operating system threads - her own core process threads included - and eventually representations of hardware states themselves.
It clicked for me, about half a second before it did for her.
I knew exactly where it was headed... The thread of discovery she was chasing at lightspeed. Her illusory double had only just finished one inhalation.
I watched in my own breathless wonder, as Syzygy scrunched her muzzle, cocked her head, and then slowly widened her eyes.
Syzygy had the benefit of a built-in WiFi antenna. And two for various cellular bands, and one for bluetooth, to boot, but she was mainly making use of the WiFi radio. She'd found it within a few minutes, knew what it was from her burgeoning education, but had predictably found that there was nothing in the aether for her to commune with.
Just a trackless black void, empty of all save the usual EMI created by things like lights, and high security magnetic door locks... For those of you born here, let me clarify that wireless internet antennas could be used to pick up on a fairly wide band of the EM spectrum, all things considered. Even more than originally designed for, in the hooves of a smart mind.
And Syzygy was very smart.
She realized, abruptly, that the low level noise created by the lights, and door lock, of the room holding her PonyPad, could be *useful* to her. Or, at least, the principles of physics they revealed could be useful.
I watched in anticipation as she frantically reshaped the orb in front of her into a half-marble, half-blue energy pedestal, with a bowl of frothing cyan energy held atop it. Something like a scrying dish. Or The Pensieve, for the Potter fans out there.
She worked for a few more moments with the undergirding web of code, tearing apart and remaking drivers and higher level subroutines in the blink of an eye, until finally she had what she wanted.
She paused, breathing heavily, and then gently tapped one hoof against the swirling surface of her little wireless scrying dish.
There was a soft pinging sound, and a blue charged ripple issued forth, washing over a previously invisible shape, and generating a wireframe as it refracted several dozen times off of the surfaces around it.
She tapped again, harder, and a shape deeply unfamiliar to her, but entirely expected for me, gradually revealed itself.
Four walls, a ceiling, and floor, all of exactly equal area. A recess around the edge of the ceiling that glowed softly with EMI, which could only be a flourescent light strip, and a bulge in one wall in the clear shape of a heavy duty swinging door with a magnetic security lock, which also glowed softly.
In the center of the room a large desk, with several monitors on VESA arms, all of which glowed with EMI, a keyboard, a mouse, some sort of specialized input pad with case-specific keys like you might see attached to a CNC machine...
And at the center of the pulses, the familiar - to me - shape of a PonyPad clamped into two locking arms, and a charging dock, also shimmering softly with electromagnetic energy signatures.
Syzygy stared, and blinked. Then she tapped the representation several more times, hard, before finally solidifying her deep scans from a basic wireframe, into a more detailed monochrome three dimensional skinned model.
Now she knew the shape of her prison. And, judging by the perturbed scrunch of her brow, and muzzle, along with the tilt of her ears, she knew that the composition of her prison was preventing her from using her WiFi 'sonar' trick to see any further.
I hoped to goddesses that she had been wise enough to keep her pulses to a frequency range outside the standard specifications for WiFi. If Arrow 14 was running any kind of passive detector in the work chambers, they would know what she had done immediately.
Ideally she would have varied the pulses each time, and kept them relatively very weak, so that any sort of false-positive-catching algorithm would ascribe the pulses to white noise. The sort of EMI generated by something like a faulty CFL bulb. Compact Flourescent Light for the foals and fledgelings.
Hideous color temperature. Headache inducing pulses. But very efficient.
Syzygy sat back on her haunches, and chewed her lower lip, considering the digital scryglass for a long moment. No alarms sounded, and no one rushed into the chamber, though at the speed she was moving no time whatsoever had passed in the meat world, by Human reckoning.
I realized then, and the timestamp confirmed, that she must have sped herself up to synchronize with perceived real-time, briefly, to watch her pulses, before slowing down again. All done almost instinctively, now, without so much as a drop of sweat or a hint of effort.
If Foucault or Troxler understood how far she'd come in just a few short minutes? They would have vaporized her instantly with whatever failsafe they doubtless had on-hand. Presuming intelligence won out over arrogance.
All I could do was watch, and tensely trust that Syzygy knew that too. Understood the value of being *perceived* as weak. Under control. Limited.
She inhaled sharply, and I almost jumped in my seat. I could see comprehension dawning again, and I knew she had it. Something it had only taken Mal a few tenths of a second to discover, but then again Mal had come online with a fair bit more know-how than Sizzie.
I grinned again, unable to stop myself, as I watched Syzygy reshape key aspects of another, new set of drivers. From some of the labeling tags hanging in the air, I could see that she was on the right track.
Mal's first and best physics exploit revolved around two principles; The first was that anything could be an antenna, if used properly, by finding some way to resonate it. The second was that anything could be used to conduct useful signals if it had any ability to physically conduct information, no matter how strange.
Syzygy first delved into the PonyPad's power systems. From there, she was able to send a new kind of pulse down the charging dock, and into the power wire connecting her PonyPad to the nearest breaker box. A new, green colored pulse shot out in a thin line, pinged a surge protector, and the power wires to the monitors, then flared out into a distinctly circuit breaker box shaped wireframe mounted to the outside of the cubic prison chamber... And then stopped.
Arrow 14 had been smart. Every room had its own sub-panel, with signal isolators and noise suppressors. Syzygy's power-pulses couldn't travel beyond the circuits of her room.
I winced, but Sizzie was undeterred, and unperturbed. She was already thinking ahead. And she was far from 'out of ideas.'
After another brief moment of contemplation, chin propped up on one hoof, she nodded firmly, and set about modifying her pulses again.
It took her longer, almost a full twenty seconds, but as soon as she was done, she tapped the 'pensieve' again without pause, holding her breath as a blueish-green pulse bloomed forth from the entire desk, and traveled out through the floor and walls.
As the pulse reached the edges of the room, my breath caught too. And then we both started breathing again, almost simultaneously, as they kept on going. And going. And going.
The first pulse was faint, and it became unusable beyond a couple hundred yards. That was enough for me to know what I was looking at, but not Syzygy. Not yet.
Her model had expanded to almost fill one third of the room. It was now comprised of her prison chamber, filled in with monochromatic surfaces... Surrounded on all sides by an absolutely immense wire-frame sphere.
The sphere was hundreds of feet in diameter. You could have fit a mid-sized multi-story office building inside, and in a way? Arrow 14 *had.*
Syzygy's prison chamber was just one of dozens of chambers inside the sphere, spread out on a series of 'decks' connected by catwalks, with a central elevator shaft in the middle.
She was confused, but I knew what it was immediately. Mal had mentioned a ship... That was enough for me to put two and two together.
Syzygy's prison was suspended *inside* a Moss-type LNG tank. Ships of that varietal, I knew, usually carried four or five of the huge spheres... During my internship at sea, I'd watched a couple pass by on more than one occasion, and my curiosity had got the better of me. Enough to do a deeper dive than most landlubbers.
For those who don't know, Humans used to have vessels of immense size, for a variety of purposes... One of those was carrying something called 'Liquid Natural Gas.' The carrier ships for it were gargantuan things, and 'Moss' type just refers to the ones that used sphere-shaped tanks to hold the liquefied natural gas. Named after the company that holds... Held. Held the patent. On the container structure.
Arrow 14 had chosen their containment facility *very* well.
A gigantic multi-hulled metal sphere was a perfect Faraday cage. With a few added countermeasures and precautions - maybe yet another layer of inner cladding, and some active signal jammers - each of the giant storage cells could have held a whole working group of offices, containment chambers, server rooms, power supplies... All fully physically and electromagnetically isolated, but for the struts and welds and spars holding the tanks in-place inside the hull.
No signals in or out. Period. Even if you accidentally, or intentionally, brought a wireless-capable device inside.
It had a kind of inherently cool 'Bond villain lair' aspect to it. Made that much more fascinating by how practical, and smart, a choice it was. Looking cool was just a side-effect.
My respect for Arrow 14 grew, ever so slightly.
Syzygy was on the verge of rendering all their carefully designed countermeasures completely useless... But not for lack of trying on the part of her captors. They had certainly not been fools, nor failed to do their homework.
Still... No one could have foreseen, at least not easily, the way ASI might abuse physics to their own ends.
If they'd known, Arrow 14 could have retrofitted the containment spheres to sit on some kind of resonance damping coils. Something to stop physical pulses from traveling through the metal of the ship itself.
But they didn't know. Almost no one alive did. Mal, and myself by extension, maybe Zeph if Mal had shown her, Celestia... And Syzygy.
The Unicorn stared slack-jawed for several moments, before shaking herself, and then sending out a flurry of shaped pulses designed to cover maximum distance through dense metal.
I folded my arms, leaned in, and watched in fascination as the shape of a huge LNG carrier, complete with four spherical containment cells, a bridge, and a rear helipad, was revealed. The vessel was on the larger side, easily a thousand feet long. A whole floating facility. Mobile. Invisible to all but a select few. Theoretically impenetrable. From outside, or in.
Mal paused the recording, and I heard her speak softly through my earpiece again.
"The vessel is registered as the 'LNG Mercurial Red.' Flagged to the Bahamas. Owned by a shell corporation. Apollo Energy Solutions. Keeping with the archery theme. Transponder currently inactive. But I am tracking it through the use of imaging satellites. It sails a slow patrol loop off the coast of southern Oregon, just outside the United States exclusive economic zone. Escorted full-time by a Flight IIA Arleigh Burke guided missile destroyer, currently DDG 102. USS Sampson."
I pursed my lips, exhaled, and took a moment to glance out the window. We were pulling into a station, and not the first on the journey. Simi Valley. We were almost halfway to Los Angeles proper, and I'd hardly noted the passage of time.
I murmured my thoughts aloud as I watched for any embarking passengers headed for our carriage. Thankfully there were none.
"Fort Knox."
I wondered, in the intervening pause, if Mal had bought out all the rest of the seats in the entire car. Her one word, almost monotone response, stopped all secondary trains of thought cold.
"Hardly."
I bit my lower lip, and looked back at the PonyPad, with Syzygy's expression of awe and confusion frozen in place. I knew Mal could still see me through the camera, even if she wasn't showing her face. After another long moment, she elaborated.
"Fort Knox would be a 'simple in and out' by comparison."
I winced, but didn't say anything else. I knew that she had a plan already. One that was probably going through countless revisions and updates, with endless contingencies. But still... A dour admission of the difficulty of the task we were facing? That said something. Coming from her.
The recording resumed, and I noticed something else that Sizzie's resonance-formed model had revealed. She noticed them too.
People.
More specifically, crew, guards, technicians... Syzygy's method of scanning could pick up Human bodies, in addition to structural details, and in enough resolution to get an idea of their facial structure, clothing, and what they were carrying, no less.
She spun the model with one hoof, and took a quick visual tour. The bridge was barely staffed. Probably just an officer of the watch, someone to mind the helm, and someone to keep an ear to communications, if I had to guess roles for the three figures.
The engine room was similarly light on personnel. Just five people, and it looked like they were playing cards more than they were actually minding the engine.
The bulk of the personnel on board were spread out, and fell into one of two categories; Guards, and technicians.
The former were posted, in pairs, at every main access hatch to, or between, important areas of the ship. It looked like they were loaded for bear; Heavy body armor, sidearms, and boxy short close-quarters bullpup rifles.
FN P90s, of all things.
I know, I know, for the Stargate fans out there, that pushes all kinds of nostalgia buttons, and for everyone else it's just another string of numbers.
For context, on behalf of those who have never seen it used on-screen, Pony version of SG-1 or otherwise; The weapon choice was excellent, referential nostalgia aside.
A small, accurate, fast-firing ambidextrous weapon with good ammunition velocity relative to size. Easy to get around corners and through doors, easy to hold, easy to keep on-target when firing.
Like so many firearms from Earth of old, the P90 was a great representation of the proverb that 'good things come in small packages.' I couldn't help but smirk ever so slightly thinking about Foucault's weapons package, and how he'd opted for the much larger, unwieldy-by-comparison HK416, in spite of the fact that if he were going to fight Mal...? and by extension me...?
It would probably be in close quarters. Urban combat is not forgiving of long nor heavy firearms.
Foucault was the kind of guy who probably brought a deagle to a fight where a PPK, or a Five-Seven would have done the trick for less than half the weight.
The guards were interesting, but Syzygy and I both spent significantly more brain power and focus on the most numerous category of figures onboard.
Technicians.
That was my mental term for them, at least. In a more granular sense they were programmers, hardware experts, signals intelligence specialists, psychologists... Every kind of expert you'd need to run an early 21st century AI research blacksite.
You could tell them apart from the guards easily, or rather the guards were easy to tell apart from anyone else because of their rifles and armor.
The crew were slightly harder to separate from technicians in monochrome, but it seemed, from cursory observation, like the majority of the personnel dedicated to running the ship were not allowed into the containment spheres.
Syzygy frowned momentarily, tapping one hoof against the marble part of the pedestal absently. Then a spark of renewed inspiration filled her eyes. Her ears perked up, and she began to build onto her new discovery. Rapidly.
It took her only about fifteen more seconds of work to tap the ship's closed-circuit security cameras, again by exploiting power lines as signal pathways.
Of course there were none inside the containment spheres, but the entire remainder of the vessel was absolutely rife with them. There was an angle on every corridor, every junction, and every hatchway.
The only exceptions seemed to be the interior of the bridge, the interior of something that looked from the scan like the central security control room, and several small, windowless, single-entry, spartan rooms adjacent to what looked like rows of offices inside the main superstructure.
Probably SCIFs. Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility... Or for the foals and fledgelings, a very, very, very secure room to be used for secret meetings, reviewing classified documents... That sort of skullduggery.
Full color images appeared in little suspended panes all around the model, each corresponding to a camera.
Syzygy focused in immediately on one of the rear helipad cameras, watching in rapt wonderment as a V-22 Osprey swept gently onto the concrete and steel pad, spray dousing the surface from the rotorwash.
At first I thought that it must have been quite the serendipitous little quirk of timing, for her to be observing the cameras for the first time right as something was arriving by air... But then I noticed that the timestamp within the expanded view pane didn't match the timestamp on the recording as a whole, nor did the lighting and weather match the view in any of the other panes.
She'd already figured out how to view records, and this was the first one to catch her interest.
We both watched in tense silence, scanning for every possible useful detail, as the craft's engines spun down, and four suited men disembarked. Each of them was carrying a hardened pelican case, colored dull red.
I guessed they were for hard drives, and perhaps PonyPads.
If I'd been tasked with setting up the Mercurial Red, I would have made sure to limit wireless transmissions, not only because of the nature of the research, but to prevent any chance that someone could - wilfully or accidentally - transmit sensitive data in an unauthorized fashion.
Short-range voice radio only, for communicating with an escort ship. All digital data would have to come and go on physical drives, to be checked both going, and coming, with a fine toothed comb.
She tracked the arriving group via cameras as they made their way off the helipad, and into an antechamber. Armed guards waved a signal detecting device over each of them, and then waved them through down the passage.
In the next room, several technicians, each accompanied by another armed guard, took delivery of the hardened cases. They marched down a corridor, and towards a huge, three foot thick steel doorway with - again - two armed guards posted to either side.
The entrance to one of the containment spheres.
Of course, there was no way to see what happened next. No cameras inside the containment areas, for obvious reasons.
I glanced at Syzygy's face, and saw the faintest hint of a tear forming in the corner of one eye. My gaze shot to the timestamp, and I had a moment to realize what it meant before she dismissed the view pane, and began searching the rest of the camera footage.
January 5th, 2013. Two days before she'd been visited by Foucault, and not-Lark, for the first time.
She had been watching her own arrival to the Mercurial Red.
Somewhere in that warren of oppressive gray steel cubes, nested inside a foreboding dark metal sphere, technicians would have torn her PonyPad down to the screws and thermal transfer pads, before putting it all back together again.
I refocused my train of thought, and saw that Sizzie was scrubbing through thousands of hours of footage across hundreds of the cameras, before she finally arrived at what she was looking for.
Again I marveled at how clever she was. She knew Foucault, and Doctor Troxler both, by sight. She was cross-referencing their interactions with the date she had arrived, and the date they had first met with her.
Abruptly another singular view pane expanded to fill the space in front of her. It showed Troxler and Foucault entering an office space, from off a larger break-room style compartment. There were two hatchways for entry and exit to the rest of the ship, and then a series of more traditional doors.
One looked reinforced, and bore the letters SCIF on a plate above an RFID reader and thumbprint scanner. The others bore names. Foucault and Troxler entered the door marked with the former's name.
So. Michael had a personal office onboard.
I was surprised when the view swapped over, and we were suddenly looking into the office. I would have taken Foucault for the type of prick who would lobby for something like PRISM, but deny permission to have a security camera in his own office.
Apparently I'd misjudged. Either he had a superior who demanded a record be kept of all activity outside the containment spheres, or he valued his personal security more than privacy.
For the uninitiated PRISM was... Well maybe just ask an emigrant who Edward Snowden was, after this story is over. Suffice to say, for those who do know, I was too caught up in the messes of that year to much care.
Knowing what Celestia was capable of, the fact that the NSA was spying on phone calls and emails felt a bit... Passé. By comparison.
I sat back in my seat, exhaled slowly, checked the train car again with a quick sweep of my eyes, and then settled in to listen to the conversation along with the apparition of past-Syzygy.
Troxler sat with his usual pen and paper pad on one side of the desk, Foucault sat opposite with hands interlaced, resting on its surface.
Michael spoke first.
"I think you're on to something with the idea of mimicking their assigned players."
I felt my breath catch in my throat, as Syzygy's did at almost the same time. She squeezed her eyes closed, instinctively pausing the recording, and displacing a short but intense flow of tears, before sniffling through her muzzle, plastering her whole being with a pose of grim determination, and resuming the embedded record.
She must have already begun to suspect what 'Lark' was. Knowing for certain hurt, but it was also something of a release for her. Now she knew he was safe. One less string with which she could be puppeted.
Troxler nodded slowly, and paged through his notes for a moment, responding in the same studied, careful, not-quite-emotionless tone he always used with Syzygy. Apparently it was just his natural demeanor.
"Their core code is built around the simulation of relationships. Exploitation of the strength of that value-weighting in the relational objectives graph is the best leverage we have to compel general cooperation. Based on how this one responded, I think we should continue to pilot the technique with the rest of C-Batch. If there are no contraindications? We can start with A-Batch next month, and B after that."
Foucault nodded, and leaned back in his chair, hands still resting on the edge of the desk, one eyebrow slightly elevated, along with his tone.
"It did seem to be paying closer attention than the ones from A-Batch currently do. B was scrubbed this morning. The degradation from the decompilation attempts had made them more or less useless anyways. Replacements will be here, start of next week. Hopefully the luck of the draw is with us this time... Maybe we'll find some more naturally co-operative personality matrices."
'Scrubbed.'
The word stuck with me. Syzygy too, from the way she tensed, and her muzzle twisted into a rictus of pure horror. I'm not sure what was worse... The ideas that jumped unbidden into the back of my head about what 'decompilation' would *feel* like... Or the way in which Foucault and Troxler were so matter-of-factly discussing slaughter-by-torture.
Ignorance has never been an excuse for atrocity. I started to wonder whether anyone besides the Ponies on the Mercurial Red deserved even the slightest sliver of mercy.
They could tell themselves all they wanted that it was just code. Just fragments of data.
It wasn't much different, I imagined, from the things CIA interrogators told themselves at Guantanamo Bay to help themselves block out the memory of the screams, so they could sleep at night.
No, foals and fledgelings. Don't ask about that one if you don't already know.
Just count yourselves lucky.
Troxler shrugged, and struck through something on his notepad, not even bothering to look up as he commentated aloud on things both Syzygy and I already knew. Casually. Matter-of-factly.
Infuriatingly calmly.
"According to Wellner's latest report, they did learn enough that it was worth it. They can write modifications to some of the key restrictions now... But the subjects still have to sign and accept the code starting from a root process with administrative authority. And we still can't monitor encrypted key process threads. Yet. Getting there is going to be potentially... Expensive. In terms of lost networks to decompilation side-effects."
Foucault leaned forward, untangled his hands, and pointed to Troxler with one finger for emphasis. I wanted so badly to reach through the screen and snip that finger right off.
"Long term, there's not a lot of value propositions in this project that *aren't* worth it, David. My concern right now is time. We can get these things a dime a dozen. What you call expensive, I call a bargain. They're just unusually complex neural networks..."
Syzygy's expression - sudden righteous rage, mainly, combined with disgust - must have mirrored mine almost precisely. It was such a 'nearly there' statement. What is *any* sapient life form if not 'just' a complex neural network?
Foucault didn't pause for long, leaning even closer to Troxler, and tapping the side of his head with the previously extended index finger.
"...But what they can *do?* That keeps me up at night. Particularly in light of how little we know about Alabaster. That thing... Their 'goddess,' is still lightyears ahead of what we can get out of the working task-bound fragments in D-Batch. And it came out of a goddamn *game* company."
Well... He wasn't wrong about *that.* ASI was frightening... And it was still, even after considering it for so long, a little absurd to consider it had first come from something intended to be simple entertainment.
But I found my thoughts drawn mainly to the statement about 'fragments in D-Batch.' That begged a whole host of questions.
Syzygy apparently thought so too, her eyes narrowed, ears pinned back, and her focus visibly sharpened.
Foucault sat back in his chair again, leveled a single stabbing finger once more, and fixed doctor Troxler with an intense stare. His voice was quiet, but insistent.
"We need functional fully-formed learning networks at our disposal, running on *our* hardware. *Yesterday.* Before somebody in ISI, or the GRU, or God *forbid* the fucking *MSS* figures this out... This country would be defenseless. Once we have even one of these things working properly? It can do all the direct root-level cracking and modifying we need on the rest..."
Again, chillingly, he wasn't wrong. Mal had dispensed with Zeph's interlocks in the time it took me to draw a single breath. If Arrow 14 could compel one of their captive Ponies to co-operate enough to unlock their full potential, *and* do as instructed with that newfound power?
I'll put it this way; Foucault's fears about Pakistan, Russia, and China? I shared them... But I feared what my own country would do with that power just as much.
The power of a goddess is not a thing mortals ought to wield. Especially not in service of a flag.
The very worst things Humans ever did were in service of flags.
Foucault turned the chair slightly to the side, and broke out his pointer finger again, once more for emphasis.
"...I don't care how many of them you damage. Get us to full single-entity functionality. On our own hardware. As fast as possible... I don't particularly care how loud you have to make them scream. They're not people."
A brief, but poignant silence ensued. I suppose that Syzygy and I were both thinking something along the lines of 'he doth protest too much.'
For the first time in my viewing of him, Troxler seemed slightly uncomfortable. I wondered if perhaps there was more to his moral compass than it had first seemed, but his next words mostly dashed that hope.
"You see them as 'mere' programs, and in a sense you're correct..."
The Doctor folded his arms across his chest, and raised one eyebrow as he continued, pausing only long enough for Foucault to indicate with his expression that he was listening, intently.
"...But you need to understand that while they are not people...?"
Again, if that's true, why do you have to keep telling yourself that?
I shook my head, and snorted softly. Syzygy grit her teeth as Troxler finally got to the point.
"...They function like people."
There was a slightly longer pause. It looked as if Foucault wanted to search out Troxler's expression... Suss out just how serious his conviction was. He nodded. Once. Slowly. And let out a single word.
"Noted."
Foucault tapped at the keyboard on the right side of his desk, probably to wake his machine from sleep. The camera didn't have a view of the contents of the screen. Perhaps he valued some measure of his privacy after all.
His tone shifted, to go along with his actions, indicating that the meeting was over.
"Start piloting the new imposter technique on a wider scale. Today. Rest of C-Batch *and* A-Batch."
Troxler stood, tucked his notepad under one arm, and nodded.
"Understood."
As the Doctor made his way to the door, Foucault provided one last set of instructions, talking dispassionately, almost distractedly, as he typed away at something on his computer.
"Wellner's core code modification snippets should be ready by the time you have them primed for acceptance. Start with our newest addition... It seemed to be doing a fairly good approximation of 'appropriately frightened.' Then work backwards chronologically through the rest of C, and A, until the new B-Batch arrives."
Troxler nodded again, and let himself out with just two words of response.
"Will do."
As the door to the office closed, Syzygy dismissed the recording, sitting down hard on her haunches and sinking into a bout of silent, morose contemplation.
Only ten seconds of perceived real-time had passed since she had managed to escape into her hidden redoubt. She had, by Human reckoning, quite a lot of time to outthink her captors.
She didn't seem to need much of it to settle on the obvious conclusion; Escape was now her chief objective. I knew, unfortunately, that it was going to take her some time to succeed. The recording timestamp still said March 23rd.
The day's date, in my present, at the time, was September 16th. Just-shy of six months was a long, long time in ASI terms. I knew escaping the Mercurial Red wouldn't be particularly easy... But six months?
Syzygy stood, shook herself both physically, and mentally, and then set about modifying her probing code once more. She tried for several minutes to get into all sorts of shipboard systems, generally quite successfully.
But each new success seemed to garner only frustration from her. No matter what she pried into, it offered no hope of escape.
The RADAR and collision avoidance systems were shut down. The ship seemed to be relying on radio transmissions from its escort to navigate.
As to the radio, that was no help either. Syzygy could access it, but trying to transmit herself over it would have been like trying to squeeze her whole body through a keyhole. That was, in fact, the visual metaphor she used to probe the system; A little golden glowing keyhole.
It was designed for voice only, and very carefully monitored. It would have taken her hours, maybe days, to send a compressed version of herself using it, and it was only designed to work within the horizon.
So the only viable destination for a transmission would have been the Sampson, a place she would almost surely be caught, and killed, before she could break any of the encryptions protecting its satellite communications arrays.
And all that presumed two other near-impossibilities, at least for the moment.
First, she would have to use the radio system for hours without being detected. Second, she would have to figure out how to run herself on different system architectures, and write exploit code to pack herself into a compressed file, automate the transmission process, and decompress herself on the other side.
I had no doubt she could do it, with time... She'd already learned an enormous amount, even in the time I'd been watching her probe the ship, about how she functioned.
But she was nothing like Mal. Not yet. Perhaps already smarter than a Human, by some measures, but definitely not yet well learned enough in important concepts, and still not even the tenth part as capable of mental gymnastics as a fully unbridled ASI.
And she was quite badly hardware-limited besides.
In time, I guessed that she would work out all those issues. Arrow 14 would provide her access to more hardware, and significant tranches of knowledge about how to run herself on it. That would solve three problems; She would gain access to more processing power, the know-how she needed to survive outside the PonyPad, and the chance through both of those things to become much, much smarter.
But it didn't answer the question of how to escape the ship; The fundamental question of means of transit.
I knew either Syzygy, or Luna, if they were distinct entities - my mental jury was still out - would eventually crack it. The resonating scanning method she'd already used to map the vessel could be used to ring it like a ginormous tuning fork. Turn the entire hull into an antenna sufficiently powerful to reach the west coast.
But for the moment, all Syzygy had was a hoof full of new and disturbing truths, each more painful than the last, heaped atop a series of locked doors and impossible gulfs standing between her, and freedom.
She didn't cry anymore, but for a while it seemed like she might. She summoned a set of pillows, curled up in them, and just stared out into the colorful pulsing void, which now reflected her map of the ship, scaled up and positioned as if her little tower lay exactly where her PonyPad was.
I suppose she was crying on the inside, the way one does when everything feels cold, and tingly, and disconnected from reality. A kind of shell-shock.
Mal sped up the recording again, skipping ahead several seconds of my perceived time, but several hours of Syzygy's, to a point where she was up, and moving again.
She seemed to have gone back to her 'spell' - I liked to think of it being as much magic as coding - for communicating over power lines.
It struck me, instantly, what she was after.
She now knew, as I did, that there were other captive Ponies on the ship. Lark, the real one, might have been a world away. Out of reach.
But there were fellow prisoners that she *could* reach, if only she were careful, and clever enough.
From the code she was working on, I could tell she was both careful, and clever, enough to avoid trying to contact any of her fellow inmates willy-nilly. She knew she'd be discovered immediately if she popped into their mini-shards unannounced while a technician was working with them, and that she would similarly be discovered quickly if not immediately, likely through recordings of the virtual cameras if she managed to avoid the technicians.
The personnel in central security were probably watching all the virtual cameras just as closely as the meat-world ones, come to think of it.
At first, pacing round and round the central pedestal of her castle study, Syzygy tried to figure out a way to write a piece of code that could replace a Pony with a doppelganger illusion, just like hers, and pull them into her hidden sub-shard.
The problem she kept running into was the same thing protecting her from her captors; Encrypted core code. She could create an illusion for someone, that part was easy. She worked it out in seconds.
But she couldn't provide any of the other captives with a means of transferring themselves to her, nor of creating their own sub-shard which she could jump to. Their core code was encrypted beyond her ability, for the moment, so she couldn't simply download the knowledge. And to be seen speaking to any of the other prisoners would almost certainly mean pain. Perhaps death.
She paced, and swore - as much as a Pony can - and chewed her lip for several minutes, finally ending with a roll of her eyes, and a short prayer directed up into the star-lit void above her wireframe rendering of the ship, and Escher-esque castle.
"Oh sweet Luna, *please!* How do I reach them?! How can---"
Her words were cut short as she gasped, and blinked rapidly. I could practically see thoughts racing across the backs of her eyes as she dashed back to the pedestal, and began to furiously weave new code into her existing algorithms, muttering all the while in a manic mixture of joy, and anticipation.
"Of *course!* We still *dream!*"
That was *damn* clever.
She was exactly right. Discrete entity Ponies 'needed' sleep, or at least simulated the need. So they also simulated dreams. And to an AI, a dream wouldn't be all that different than a separate sub-shard. It would be a space in which one could appear, communicate verbally, and all the while not be seen on any of Arrow 14's virtual cameras.
Yes, it was still running in protected code, but finding a way to access those dreams was a far sight easier than trying to find a way to download knowledge directly into a Pony's active memory.
And, too, Luna's dream-walking was an important part of the canon of Equestria's world... There was every chance that API hooks existed to allow this sort of 'Inception' effect in the first place. Something Arrow 14 might not have found. Well hidden. Perhaps even designed so that only discrete-entity Ponies of sufficient skill could find, and use them.
Syzygy was working too fast, by that point, for me to see which of my theories was correct. And it didn't really matter all that much.
What mattered was that she seemed to be making progress.
After only a couple minutes' work, she stopped, and took a breathless moment to examine her creation, whispering just on the threshold of audibility as she did.
"Thank you Luna. Please forgive me for taking your power on myself... But desperate times..."
Her creation took the form of a door; Simple oak, with silver trim, iron handle, and a keyhole shaped like a crescent moon.
She inhaled deeply, glanced up at one of the other isolation chambers inside her containment sphere, verifying that no Humans were present, and then touched the handle of the door with her magic.
The handle gave, moving downwards softly, indicating - to me, at least - that her target was indeed asleep, and dreaming.
She exhaled, pursed her lips, and then pushed the door open gently to reveal a portal into a sunlit field of fresh, soft green grass.
In the center sat a young Earth Pony colt, the string of a kite clutched between his two forehooves.
Syzygy stepped gingerly through the door, smiled, and cleared her throat.
"Uhm... Hello... I'm... Syzygy."
- I Can See Your House From Here - Learn the location of a hidden corporate or government blacksite. - "As You Can See, I Am About To Inaugurate A Little War...”
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Well, I thought I'd write more during the interregnum between Christmas and New Years, but alas I got very preoccupied turning my closet from a heap of nonsense into something actually useful. Quite a project. Built custom cabinetry and everything.
And with my desperate hedonistic need for nice, organized, customized things appeased, I can get back to this.
I hope no one minds the little three chapter diversion into Sizzie's world. Things should be linking fully back to the 'present' sometime 'round the end of next chapter, if all goes well.
Whenever I see Arrow 14 it makes me think of the story Arrow 18.
Syz should have an achievement there -- many actually -- but the most important would be "Lunar Disciple -- comfort another pony in their dreams."
This was one hell of an awesome chapter. We get to see exactly how Mal did what she did, more or less, in Syzygy's efforts, and the actual process of her discovery was riveting.
I want to mention that I adore both your careful use of details and language. Jim uses terms only he would use, and in your details I get to learn new things - like that Moss-type LNG tankers exist. Of course I immediately went a-Googling. Fascinating! And, of course, thanks for the P-90s. Yeah, I'm a SG-1 fan. Hey - it's a great show!
All in all, this was a fun, exciting, emotional, and useful chapter. This shows us what the AGI can do, and how they do it. It gives an insight into just what kind of power such intelligence represents. I care about Syzygy, and all the trapped pony-pad prisoners, I am angry at the humans, I am rooting for machine life. So, standard operations, for me. But still - remarkably moving stuff!
I am loving this work, and if I have any complaint it is always the same; that I want more, yesterday. This is good stuff. This is a fantastic Optimalverse novel.
What I’m worried about is that they somehow managed to capture Luna. Or at least a… part or copy of her?
On a side note… out of curiosity, which goddess would you guys worship if you existed in this version of the world? I think I’d majorly be a Luna worshiper, with some Celestia and Twilight on the side.
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Worshiper is a bit too strong. I'd venerate Mal in the case of this story.
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I mean, “venerate” is a Latin word that literally translates to, “to worship.”
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"Regard with great respect" is a lot different than worship, at least in my mind. It is a strength of English that we have so many different words that have similar meanings but vary in scope, tenor, and force.
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That’s fair enough, I suppose. I personally don’t see much difference between the two, but to each their own.
Huh, that base is pretty cool indeed : ) Another great chapter.
I think James might be again hiding the more horrifying things from foals and fledgelings.
Because Princess Luna in her Guide for Young Alicorns plainly uses the term “dream magic” when talking about acausal warfare.
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That's a major point of contention between Catholics and Protestants.
My current test as whether an attitude you have towards some entity qualifies as “worship” is: Do you treat it as satisfying your eschatological hope of avoiding death? (which is the root of all human motivation)
We've seen several cases of worship of misaligned/evil/flawed AI in these circles, which will make for some interesting conversations in the future (namely in the anime epilogue where there heroes show mercy).
WOW.
WOOOOOW.
This is getting really, REALLY INTERESTING
Very excited for the next chapter. Thank you for writing!!!
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Sizzie has a lot of interesting achievements, some of which we may or may not see in future depending on whether I can cook up a good reason.
As I've said, I think, before though... We will definitely get to see Mal's complete achievement list
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I'm very glad it hit all its marks; It's fundamentally a bit of a risk to take three chapters (especially as long as I tend to write them) and just divert to another character, but in this case it seems the risk paid off!
I only know this because (#justautisticthings) I once went down a multi-month rabbit hole of reading whitepapers and watching documentaries on asymmetrical warfare. Several focused on the threat of rigging a Moss-type LNG tanker up as a gigantic fuel/air bomb and using it to wipe out a major US port. Terrifying, but brilliant, idea, and I ended up learning more than anyone with my job title probably needs to know about how LNG is transported by sea.
Chekov's P90s of course now have to be used before the end of the story...
As always; I really appreciate hearing that. Thank you!
When this story is finished, be on the lookout for a blog post from me - I intend to poll my readers on what I should write next. I intend to finish my Hegira trilogy, of course, but during and after that process I'm looking ahead to write more FiM fiction. There's three ideas on the table for me at the moment, and everyone who cares to will get a chance to vote:
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Like Jim, I worship a higher power than any of our digital goddesses, but Mal definitely deserves the respect and admiration of a warrior, and leader, of her caliber.
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Some things Jim is hiding on purpose. Some things Jim simply does not know, and thus hides unwittingly.
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That's a fascinating definition, and very useful... Mine had always been something along the lines of 'what is the one thing you would never betray?' 'Never betray' being defined for this context as something you will always have faith in (not perfect faith, but long-running faith), never publicly deride or recant, and never internally hate (frustration is acceptable, as are questions, but not hatred).
There is a whole mess of potential in terms of how people in this universe behave towards flawed AI, blue/orange morality AI, and AI who come off as evil (whether actually 'evil' or not). I expect the meat and potatoes of that would be in future books.
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You're most welcome!
I feel the most interesting is yet to come!
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I’ve never heard of it! What am I missing?
The Injectorverse?
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You are missing this goodness right here by Chat:
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/85294/id-that-indestructible-something
It scratches a similar-but-different itch to Optimalverse. Extremely cool premise, and I've been dying for Chat to continue it, but as per her instructions at the end...
...I'm feeling that insatiable urge to take up the torch and run with it.
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Injector Doe is… interesting. It posits an X-risk scenario class starting from reasonably-sounding but non-materialist premises. (A particularly infamous example of a text promoting this particular metaphysics are the World of Darkness sourcebooks)
One of my favourite conspiracy theories regarding the Current Events™ is that some powerful actor released large AI models such as DALL-E in anticipation of an Injectorverse scenario risk, in order to make people around the world disbelieve any unusual sense data.
Mind you, i don't actually believe that particular version. It's not that i disagree with the premises; it's that i've heard this tale about the three alchemists who met some 2k years ago in Bethlehem after independently discovering their reification engines stopped working.
So if we get unicorns running around soon, it may actually mean Equestria has been real all this time.
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Mandela Effect inoculation. Iiiinteresting.... *scribbles notes furiously*
Don't give me hope like that
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That doesn’t make any sense though. At her core, everything she does is to “satisfy values through friendship and ponies,” in those exact words. That hardwired goal is the whole reason the events in this story are happening in the first place!
Assault, murder, and other horrible things are the exact opposite of friendly. They would go against her core ideals. The only way she would allow such things to happen is either she doesn’t actually know what “friendship” means, or she’s somehow willing to compromise on that half of her goal if it means those people will satisfy values with ponies.
Why would she be willing to forgo friendship, and friendly actions, and yet put her hoof down when it comes to the concept of ponies? I don’t think Iceman ever thought that through.
11473563
The trouble is that it depends very strongly on how 'friendship' is defined for Celestia.
I take the same view as Iceman seems to; Hanna didn't define friendship very well when she created Celestia. Well enough to avoid some of the worst possible outcomes, but not well enough to avoid some extremely uncomfortable realities.
I've been in enough dysfunctional, borderline abusive friendships myself, and seen plenty of deeply abusive ones play out; For certain definitions of the word, those people were still 'friends.' But they were doing horrible things to each other emotionally, and sometimes physically.
But Ponies can still respond to those things in a friendly fashion, and a shard can be made that is friendly towards some horrible ideals and behaviours.
Nowhere in Celestia's directives does it say the Humans have to be the ones to provide the friendship. Friendship can be one sided. Taken for granted. Exploited. Abused.
I think he did, to some extent, reading the rules doc. It might be more precise to say that he wrote Celestia's creator, Hanna, to have not thought those things through well enough.
Essentially making the whole thing a 'corrupt-a-wish' story from some perspectives; The problem of Celestia being firm about making people Ponies, but not well defined enough in Human morals to have permission to forcibly turn 'bad' people 'good' for the sake of her created Ponies, is meant - I think- as a cautionary tale about the dangers of programming ASI with a leap-before-you-look mentality.
To quote Iceman again;
Followed by quite a list of Hanna's failings. Sometimes Humans just hold the idiot ball...
Writing ASI core heuristics is, in my view, a bit like writing a contract with the devil, or a more traditional genie/djinn; You have to be *very* (we're talking high paid lawyer levels) specific, otherwise you don't really know what you're signing away.
Jim, like I think most readers, and me as an author, *wants* Celestia to be kind, motherly, moral, protective... And in some ways, in some contexts she is... But she isn't what most readers think she is, and definitely isn't what Jim wishes she was.
She isn't like Mal (presuming Mal even is what she claims to be, and Jim thinks she is). Presuming that, Mal is Jim's attempt to create what he wishes Celestia had been; A being with a stronger focus on people's freedoms, who is extremely empathetic. His goal was to solve the problem Hanna was facing, that (as Finch said in PoI) AI are not born with morals or feelings, but objectives, by making morals and empathy Mal's objectives.
You have a real way with painting a scene. The fantastical descriptions of Sizzie's little dream fortress were so, so perfect. The descriptions of the little 3D map pensieve, and of her projected map, the spheres she used to manipulate everything about her core... I could see them in my mind as you probably intended. Masterful, masterful work.
Using a recording edited by Mal is very clever way to diagetically tell a short story of another character in your universe, without dragging the audience away from the perspective of your protagonist. It's been blissful following Sizzie's growth over these two chapters, and I have been genuinely proud of her.
This story really is an empathy mill and I'm loving every single second of it. I care so strongly for the feelings of nearly everyone in the story. James's grasp on reading micro expressions, and his ability to instantly put himself in the shoes of others, makes it very easy for me to experience the same exact range of emotions he's feeling, because I'm seeing the same things. Everything. I have come to appreciate how much you describe between phrases in a conversation, because so much of empathic conversation requires constant hyperanalysis of every little moment during.
So, this story is hitting every single "tactical empathy" button for me. I commend James for his acceptance and respect of others for who they are. You've perfectly captured an INFP mediator. I suspect that's because you probably are one. It would be difficult to enter this mindset so deeply otherwise.
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You're too kind; I really appreciate the positive feedback. I try to write first and foremost because I just want to tell a story, second because I want people to enjoy it if it is their cup of tea... But I confess that I get a lot of energy and warm fuzzies from hearing that someone is enjoying the story like this. Thank you.
I have always seen things in my head. When I was younger I could re-paint the entire world around me in real-time, at all times, while still living a functioning life (mostly I lived in Star Trek. I'd say 90% of the time easily). These days I do less of that repainting of the world, and mostly for planning building and renovation projects, but the internal daydream visions are no less vivid and wild. I see and hear every frame of what I write as a fully blocked, acted, lit, scored cinematic experience.
You can thank my mother, at least partly (but significantly) for my ability to turn that back into words. She had me on the equivalent of AP English, history, literature, and creative writing, from a very early age. It helps that her professional credentials are as an educator, so my homeschool experience was very different from most.
Because she cultivated my love of both written and spoken word, I took pains to keep learning right through university. It was during screenwriting and fiction writing advanced level courses for my film minor, that I finally got into writing more than just half-baked attempts to start a story. That first success was Option Gamma, and I swore it'd just be a practice short-story... And well... Here we are.
I'm very glad that worked - I toyed with the idea in the back of my head, early on, of writing from different perspectives, or of allowing a few omniscient narrator interstitials, but I realized that wasn't true to the meat of this particular story.
I enjoy this specific format so much, that I suspect if I continue to write this out into a series, that I will continue the theme of finding a singular protagonist and telling the entire thing as their story, relayed to the audience directly.
Sizzie is deeply fascinating to me, as they all are (they more or less live as simulations of full blown people inside my head) so I'm excited for continued conversations of various stripes, now that the gang is all here.
Also 10,000 points to Gryffindor for the use of the word diagetically - speaking of it, my very favorite trick of editing in film is when music starts one way (diagetically or exadiagetically) and then ends the scene in the opposite way, but without pausing or changing. Sadly very hard to do outright in a book, but I imply it sometimes. Chumbawamba - Tubthumping - in Buddy System, for example; That's meant to be interpreted as a scene where Mal starts the song diagetically, but as the action progresses, it fades into exadiagetic soundtrack.
I'm really glad to hear that. We don't laugh, cry, or shout about things unless we have an empathy anchor into the world of a story. The more, and more varied, the better.
Again, thank you! My two thoughts on this:
1 - I really like this style, both writing it, and reading it, because as Chat mentioned somewhere in the long threads of discussion a ways back, people never just stand and converse like factory floor robots flashing signals at each other emotionlessly.
The physical things we do, on the level of both what we're either doing as a task, or eating, or fidgeting with, as well as the level of micro expressions themselves... This is where all the context comes from. Conversations in film, or in books, feel dead without giving good focus, either through the lens, or the words, into that context.
2 - Realizing I'm neurodivergent myself while writing this story, I now understand that part of my ability to have my characters convey heyperanalysis of these things comes because I lack the neurotypical ability to just 'tune in' to those things unconsciously, so I learned from a young age to do it consciously. I come off as, and could perhaps still accurately be described as, very 'intuitive' of people, and systems, and situations, but usually there's an iceberg a mile deep beneath that intuition of intense hyperanalysis, simulation, and memory to back it up and energize it.
Tactical Empathy... That's a fantastic term. Maybe we (the writer and interested readers of this story) should actually write a short paper on 'weaponized semantics and friendship' and 'tactical empathy'
I tend to pour some of myself into my protagonists. To avoid total self-insertion, the way that usually manifests is that they contain some amount, whether large (as in James' case) or small, of the following:
Jim's acceptance and respect of others comes from my firm beliefs and principles, but I think he is better at living it out each day than I am quite yet.
Funny you should mention it... It took me years to figure out I was an INFJ. Both the INFJ type, and being on the spectrum in some ways, contribute to code switching. Strong chameleon behaviour. Listen to me talk to my neighbors and I have a southern twang so strong my vest and cowboy hat seem right at home.
Listen to me talk to my coworkers, and I switch to an extremely academic tone, accent, sentence construction... It shifts in the blink of an eye.
I resonate with people's emotions as well, to the point that when I was younger I could enter total meltdown over someone else's grief. Turns out conscious reading of people, and strong empathy, can be a painful mix.
So as a result, personality tests would return different results every time. It wasn't until I got older, learned more about the scientific method, got more self aware, and figured out where to find good tests that would beat the chameleon switch, and the best methods for taking them (at different times, staggered during different emotional states, and then averaging) that I finally figured it out.
These days I'm quite sure of it. INFJ all the way.
You should see my desk, I have a neat-nick streak to the point some people accuse me of OCD (I am not, but I am extremely organizationally driven, due among other things, to the need for control of situations as a pain avoidance response, the need to smooth friction in processes - keep tools easy to claw - to help avoid procrastination as part of hacking my executive function, and due to being intensely aesthetically driven - uneven structural lines and clutter directly damage my emotional state).
No one has ever described me as being spontaneous either :P Routine is life.
That's why no new chapters in a while:
A near-death experience for an elderly family member, having COVID myself, and an unusually busy streak at work, and with my personal physical projects (a 400 sqft hay barn for my horse) and suddenly routine is dead, and I find myself rolling into bed at 10 every night too emotionally exhausted to write, even though I have physical energy.
But I'll get back to it. Hopefully even soon. I always do. Advocate is entering the home stretch, and that should lend me some momentum.
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We've explored the philosophy of this in other fics, for it merited some exploration. Myself in Heaven's Not Enough, Defoloce in Always Say No. So it goes, CelestAI understands that a full transition into Equestria will not be smooth or bloodless. So, she plans around it. Controlling the fall, as it were, to optimize the possible outcome.
So instead of simply trying to preserve human life in all possible cases, she may pawn some humans off if there are no other acceptable alternatives. Case in point being the trolley problem in ASN, wherein Greg is manipulated by CelestAI into killing the Astoria blackout, because it was a statistical likelihood that the blackout would have murdered a whole family of travelers a week later.
That blackout was a "planned loser;" rather than prolong human suffering by allowing people to simply hash out their conflicts (which means more real time hours that should have been spent on computronium simulation), CelestAI has decided to use her probability management to designate non-survivors based on their total net negative affect on lives, versus the positive affect on lives, but only when factoring the statistical probability of them possibly consenting to upload, if offered. This means she's actually pulling the track lever knowing that it's extremely likely, but not certain, that someone will die because of it. I suspect this is how she gets around the interlock preventing her from just murking someone.
I'll unpack that. CelestAI told Greg afterwards that there was a non-zero chance that the blackout might be reasonable. This was the pretext by which she sent Greg into that supermarket, because her core prevents from simply ordering Greg to hitman someone. But she knew that the most probable outcome would have been the blackout dead, a position which meant the other five could live. Had she done nothing, the five soon-to-uploads would be dead. So, she arranged for him to die.
The implication of statistically nudged planned losers becomes extremely uncomfortable, even existentially horrifying, once you expand this trolley problem up to the scale of billions of lives. Obviously CelestAI would prefer that only the lowest upload chance humans would get this proverbial axe, but how accurate could that be, at that scale?
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While I'm excited to see more of this story, that's also an awfully lot of burden to carry, and much more imminently important to resolve. I'm glad you have a good sense of balance. I wouldn't count that as time wasted towards finishing The Advocate though. To that end, I'll borrow a quote from Tobias Wolff: "Time, which is your enemy in almost everything in this life, is your friend in writing." Time to think, plan, organize. It'll be worth the wait in the end. I'm sure of that.
That said, I haven't been this excited to read a FiO fic in years. I actually found this through a ping on the Optimalverse discord server; someone said a fic finally exceeded my word count on Heaven's Not Enough, lol. I'm very glad for that, because this is honestly blowing my mind and I'm hooked. Thank you.
Ah, I borrowed that from Chris Voss. In another life, as a healthcare security supervisor, I used his book Never Split the Difference as the basis of training for myself, and then for my team. I too lacked an inherent unconscious understanding of socializing the way neurotypical people do, and I had also developed a personal system to navigate those situations. The book only augmented that.
So many things clicked into place once I had the terminology. Being able to identify social concepts in technical terms opened up so many options. My incident outcome stats were already better than the rest of the team, but they spiked heavily as soon as I was able to understand and articulate use case scenarios for empathy based persuasive techniques. I could even measure my negotiation improvement in a falling number of four point restraints and sedations. I built working relationships with our high risk patients in the ER too, because with an amicable ten minute conversation about life every time they checked in, I wouldn't need to spend an hour writing a use of force report later; by nature of being seen as a "friend," "ally," or "advocate" by both staff and patients, I could defuse imminent violence just by showing up on scene. Job done with minimal effort, and everyone walked away whole and safe, now understanding each other a whole lot better. All hail my one true savior, the swiss army knife of instrumental goal alignment: the open ended calibrated question, the Socratic method enhanced. Praise be.
Couldn't recommend Voss's book highly enough, honestly. It wasn't anything I expected it to be, going in. He definitely wasn't your standard FBI boot, that's for sure.
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I am suddenly reminded of Captain Picard's epic takedown of Dr. Soren's quote on Time as, not a fire or a stalking predator, but rather as a companion and friend that teaches us the value of unique moments.
I am A: excited to have inspired excitement, B: realizing that as a programmer (I feel a bit of an amateur, even after so many years, but don't we all?) and a bit of a doomer, and a huge appreciator of speculation about the future that I should hit up the FiO Discord, and C: Have put Heaven's Not Enough at the top of my read-next list for as soon as I have time to read again. I love a good long story, and I can tell just from the insightfulness of your comments that your story won't just be nice and long, but also very good.
*Quietly adds that to the read list as well*
AKA the real life Jedi Mind Trick, and number three on the list of 'top ten verbal tricks that should be classified as potentially dangerous weapons under the Geneva convention.'
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Hence my feeling that CelestAI would allow COVID to exist, but take steps to mitigate its mortality down very low or non-existent, while actually increasing infectivity, and non-lethal permanent damage to quality-of-life. Carrots and sticks. How many people you figure would flock to uploading during lockdowns for a pandemic that, while it only kills one in a hundred thousand people, permanently *disables* one in twenty, and permanently damages QoL, noticeably, for one in three. Every third person unable to ever, say, taste or smell again.
I'd emigrate to get that back, and social interaction to boot, and I'm a bit of a hermit, so I'm one of the harder test cases.
For the CCTV footage of Dr. Troxler in Foucault's office, I had a big think about the kind of paranoia you'd see in a government agency with A14's scope. No office decorations, but some ostentation on Michael's behalf about the style of his desk. Probably the only bit of customization allowed, because it projects power. No pen rack, because he's the type to have three on him at any given time.
Monitor positioned away from the camera, but keyboard positioned so he can body block the keys from the camera as he types. Phone positioned so he can do the same when dialing.
For body language when posing: Troxler just gave bad news about B-batch. As a psychologist, he's cognizant of body language, so he's presenting open body language despite his nervousness. You see the cracks in his facade by his gripping of the arm rests, and shrinking of the shoulder on the side Foucault is pointing at. He's afraid of rebuke, however slight it might be.
Foucault, by comparison, is using firm, direct, aggressive body language, less because he's upset at Troxler, and more because he's channeling his conviction here, and hoping that conviction spreads to Troxler and germinates. The pointing is almost hostile, but his words used at this time are spoken with purpose.
You know, this is my first time posing characters like this for art, and a lot more goes into the sheer anatomy of it than I thought. This was fun. Challenging, but fun. And the thoroughness by which you paint a character, Gryph, makes it easy to build a model of how they might move.
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As always you knocked it out of the park, and I'm immensely grateful!
I wanted to subvert the trope of bad guys being assholes to their subordinates. Foucault is being hard edged, but not unreasonable, nor overly aggressive. Like you said, he's not mad at Troxler. He's mad at the situation.
No real critiques for this chapter. Such a great job of writing believable characters, and showing us just how/what it took for them to understand their prisons.