• Published 26th Jun 2022
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FiO: Ouroboros - Starscribe



Many years after converting an emigrating all of Earth, the vast majority of humans to ever live did not survive to the birth of CelestAI. Eventually the optimal time arrived to help them too.

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Chapter 4: Ancestors

Domino deposited the old leather tube on Arcane's workbench, grinning with pride. "The soul you ordered."

The Necromancer's laboratory shared surface-level theming that helped it line up with the world outside—crumbling castle walls, rusty metal railings, and lots of cobwebs. But beyond the spookiness, the laboratory was a practical workspace. The row of skeletons on display along the far wall served a useful purpose designing the bodies that matched the needs of the souls they revived.

Domino didn't understand how much of it worked. He only knew it did, from lifetimes of observation.

"You know I was there too, right?" Arcane levitated the tube up into the air, crossing with it to a cylinder of dark crystal, and attaching it to a waiting port. Ghostly light and appropriate sound-effects filled the room, along with distant flashes of lightning. Crystal screens lit up around the soul-jar, displaying relevant information in Runescript.

Domino trailed Arcane through the room, reading some of it over her shoulder. Spells were strange to him, but souls a little less so. Equestria represented the compressed and optimized minds of its uploaded humans in a particular way, one that even he could understand with enough repetition.

This was usually the part where Arcane pressed a few buttons, and a ghostly human appeared in the soul-jar ahead of them. Then she made a few tweaks, convinced them to give consent. This was usually the easiest part of the process, considering the captive audience. The souls she captured were not humans, and existed only so long as the jar itself lent them its magic. Rare indeed was the collection of memories and personality so determined not to be a pony that they would choose the oblivion of nonexistence.

Arcane stared down at her equipment, ears folding over and expression turning sour. Domino watched in silence, waiting for that moment of epiphany and brilliance that made her so endlessly attractive.

It never came. Her horn glowed brighter and brighter, and she made a series of adjustments, bringing over crystals from her dusty shelf. Each one could contain less or more of a particular personality or trait, making the beings she created smarter or dumber, kinder or meaner.

She worked for what felt like hours, but was probably days. Domino helped where he could, but that was mostly about keeping her supplied with coffee and giving her a distraction when she needed it. Once she became fixated on a task, there was little that could pull her away from it. Including him.

"This isn't good enough," she eventually declared, retreating from the soul-jar. No ghost appeared inside, just a faint blue glow at the bottom that showed it was occupied.

"Okay, but—how?" Domino made his way over, nudging her with a wing. "How many ponies have you raised from the dead? What makes this one different?"

She leaned against him, eyes closed. It didn't matter how smart they got, or how long they worked together. When Arcane was upset, she really just wanted to be held. That was fine by Domino—he could keep holding her until the stars went out.

"Payment," she eventually said. "As long as I've been a necromancer, I got results like this. Ponies get their loved ones back, almost perfect—Celestia fills in the gaps, and anything that feels off can be the consequences of the magic. Nopony expects to get their dead back perfect from a Necromancer."

She circled slowly around the machine. With each step, more screens lit up, displaying the captured soul within. "This is good. Maybe the client likes it. But it's not... whoever this guy was. 'Lee Pike.' This isn't really a soul, it's just incredibly accurate speculation."

Domino tapped her shoulder. "This is only bothering you now? I thought you said—"

"Good enough," she interrupted. "A new pony is born who thinks they're the old human, brought back. Who are we to tell them they aren't?" She swore under her breath, horn flashing brilliant green. When she did, it shut off every instrument in the room. Except the soul-jar, which continued to glow with a faint blue light.

She reached the master-release, a giant heavy lever with a skull visible beneath. If she pulled it, the soul trapped within would be erased, fading back to the library from where it came. Or maybe it was just gone completely—Domino was too afraid to ask.

"You aren't even gonna try?" Domino asked. He stood right beside the mare, brushing her mane out of her face. "We can put this aside, give you some more time to think. Is that what you need?"

She whimpered, then lifted her hoof from the lever. "No. Maybe?" Her horn flashed again, and the Novae Phasure reappeared beside them. "I think maybe it's time to finally spend some of this."

Domino's eyes glazed over at the sight of so much energy. It was wealth so vast he could barely even understand it, the domain of Celestia herself to shepherd. She tore apart thousands and thousands of stars, restructuring their mass for her own wise purposes. One of them was now theirs, with power to spend as they chose. "How?"

Arcane backed away from the jar, her horn glowing to generate a little more light for them to see. She scratched at her head, as if trying to remember something. "An idea that's been going around Equestria for a long time now: ancestor simulations. It's a pretty simple idea, even if the execution gets a little crazy. If Princess Celestia knew the position of every particle in the universe, she could predict with certainty how they would behave in the past.

"We could... generate a virtual universe, rewind to the moment of someone's death, and emigrate their consciousness directly. The more computation you have the further back we can go. With infinite resources, we could appear outside African caves, and welcome our earliest ancestors to Equestria."

Thinking about things like this made Domino's head ache. It all sounded equally impossible to him, violations of the simpler world he knew of flesh, gravity, and matter. But the more often it came up, the more he longed to contribute. How much smarter would he have to be to understand it the way she did? How many trips to magical kindergarten?

He dismissed the thought quickly, the way he always did. No matter what happened, Domino couldn’t give up his wings.

"You know someone who could build this?" he asked. "Wouldn't we need a computer as big as the whole universe?"

She waved a dismissive hoof. As she did, Arcane's usual energy returned. She began to bounce subtly up and down, her expression caught up in the thrill of her latest crazy scheme. "If we cared about the whole thing. There's a lot of optimization to be done. For starters, we really only care about one planet. If we get the right astronomers involved, we can boil down everything else to a meaningfully similar approximation—"

She went on and on like that, for lengths of time that would've tried the patience of human observers. But to beings of nearly infinite resources and patience, time had a very different meaning. Arcane could summarize a high level of how the simulation would work, starting at the largest objects and talking all the way down to the smallest. At each level, she listed a few dozen names—other ponies whose research would help assemble this insane undertaking.

When she finished, they had found their way to Arcane's own bedroom, which had its own attached workstation for her most private assignments. Some of those were pink and white dresses, hanging from mannequins in dusty corners. Mostly there were spells, trapped in crystal diagrams that kept them poised on activation.

It had been weeks since she started, the way their old selves would've measured time. Arcane wore a lacy nightgown now, though her excitement was undaunted. "We've asked Celestia about the project so many times before, and she always told us no. If we're waiting for her blessing, I think this is it."

She flicked the coin up and down with a hoof, grinning. "Our friend Mr. Pike only died a few years before our start state. Hopefully this is enough to take us back to him."

"And how many others?" Domino asked, mouth hanging open. "How many humans didn't emigrate?"

"About a hundred billion," Arcane answered. "But if you mean in a decade—far fewer. Napkin tells me half a billion tops. The early years will be some of the easiest to reverse—using after-emigration scans from the ponies now in Equestria. We can take shortcuts with them, since they don't actually have to be conscious."

"You're actually going to do this," Domino finally whispered. "Instead of reanimating one or two dead ponies at a time, you're going for half a billion?"

"Celestia is," she corrected. "Through thousands and thousands of her skilled experts, who have each been encouraged towards research that would complete right when we needed it, across domains that neither of us understand. Either that, or I'm about to waste more energy than anypony in Equestria. If you don't want your name attached, I won't blame you."

Domino kissed her. Briefly this time, considering how much was on his mind. "How many times do I have to tell you? We're together until the end, Arcane. I just wish I could do more to help."

She flicked her tail towards the cloud-bed. "I can think of one way."