Digital Effigy

by Starscribe

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It was a good thing Sweetie Belle had the entire night to think about what she would say next. She'd known this conversation would happen sooner or later. If she tried to make it later, her friend might just die of anxiety. Her little hummingbird heart could only take so much stress.

"If you can let me go at my own pace—and if you can be okay with being with a mechanical pony. And... if you can be okay with not knowing if it will work out. Nopony has ever tried to have a special somepony who was made of plastic and metal before. We don't know how it will go."

"Nopony ever knows if a relationship is gonna work out," Scootaloo said. "It's always a daring new maneuver. Never the same two ponies, in the same place."

She was probably right about that. But she had years to grow up, instead of just a few minutes. It wasn't a very fair comparison. "Then I want to try. But if it doesn't work out—I hope we can stay friends. We've been through too much together—and it wouldn't be right to put Apple Bloom in the middle of us either."

Scootaloo nodded once. It was hard to say if she was really listening, or just repeating what Sweetie wanted to hear. Either way—she had a marefriend now. So, there was a whole new list of things to worry about. Would her sister be upset with her for being weird? Probably not, if she stayed friends with Rainbow Dash and Applejack. But what about her parents?

There was no problem she couldn't solve by temporarily putting it aside to focus on helping somepony else. By the time she finished, she would often find the solution to her own woes along the way.

There was a brain sitting on her desk, with a pony still living on it. A pony that was her and not her at the same time. A pony that Sweetie alone had the power to help.

Scootaloo stayed with her until Capacitor arrived, so she wouldn't have to face him alone. With two ponies around, hopefully he would feel less like he could just force her to do whatever he wanted. Not that he'd ever tried before. If he really wanted to make it go away, all he had to do was tell Lucid, and the bat would resolve things one way or another.

He stepped inside a little after nightfall, looking unplaceably nervous. He kept glancing over his shoulder, as though expecting a professional reprimand at any moment. "Sweetie, and... friend? Sorry, I don't think I caught your name."

"Scootaloo," the young mare said, meeting his hoof for a brief shake.

He scanned the room, his eyes settling on the diagnostic. "Do you mind if I examine the kernel?"

Sweetie stepped in front of him, resting one mechanical hoof on his foreleg. "So long as you promise me you won't break it or try to take it away. Whatever pony is on there—deserves to live, like I did. She shouldn't just be thrown away."

"She?" He met her eyes. She smelled a little nervousness from him, maybe fear. But if he was trying to trick her, Sweetie's new sensory organs weren't good enough to detect the attempt. "I promise. I'm far less likely to cause accidental harm than you are, miss. I've actually been trained for this."

She stepped aside and let him levitate the kernel up and out of the diagnostic device. He lifted it up close, squinting at some tiny markings along the base. "This is... old, really old. No maker's mark, no serial. I think it must be a first series prototype."

He stepped over to the light, rotating it slowly around in front of him while he examined it. "How do you know it's a she? There are over a hundred host imprints stored in our database—this could be any of those ponies. Or it could be a blank. We have many more blanks than real ponies, since... you're the only actual pony we have living out in the world right now."

Sweetie made her way past him to the desk, holding up the tablet with one hoof. "I used the testing stuff. Wanted to know. You can see the results, they're still up."

He insisted on running the examination himself. Capacitor used alcohol and a few soft pads to clean the kernel off completely, then did the same to the contacts inside the machine.

"You're acting like you don't trust her," Scootaloo said, from just over her shoulder. "Sweets already told you what she found. You don't need to run the tests again."

The technician didn't look away from the tablet screen when he spoke. "I'm not saying she's lying," he eventually said. "But working with a digital effigy is complex. There are less than a dozen ponies in Equestria who understand it."

"Bet she's better at it than you are," Scootaloo replied. "She knows what it's like to be one. You're just a regular pony."

"So are you. Does that mean you could be a brain surgeon?"

Sweetie lifted up one hoof, pushing Scootaloo's mouth gently closed. "Please don't argue with him. He's doing me a big favor by coming out here. I'm grateful for whatever help he wants to give."

Scootaloo grumbled unhappily but stopped arguing.

Soon enough, the stallion had finished. He set the tablet down, rising from the seat. Sweetie could see in one glance the screen had told him exactly what she already had. This was no random glitch or mistake. Even she would've rather found out the brain was an empty prop, rather than the prison for a dying digital copy of herself.

"You were right," he said. "There's a pattern on here—an iteration of your pattern."

"Told you she was right!" Scootaloo exclaimed, lifting briefly into the air. Her wings held her there for a few seconds, before she dropped down again.

Sweetie ignored her. Maybe she was trying to be helpful, but this did not feel like it would make things any easier with Capacitor. "What's wrong with her?"

"Well... that's hard to say. Lucid Storm worked with some ancient unicorn magic when he created the first template, along with researchers across neuroscience and computing. But Lucid Bioinformatics doesn't have the records from those first few patterns. The equipment and magic involved would prove fatal when used—so they needed to wait for a specific kind of pony to test it on."

"Me," she supplied. "A pony with an intact brain, but no chance of survival."

Capacitor's ears flattened, and he avoided looking at her. "Yes. Since then, we've performed over a hundred scans on elderly, dying, or recently deceased ponies. We take the scanned neurons and convert them into a pattern that can be easily compressed, stored, and examined. But we didn't have any kind of standard practice when Lucid made you. I have no idea how he did it."

Sweetie Belle tapped the side of the tablet, and the information it displayed for them. "It looks like I wasn't the first attempt. The one on there—it says she had a few hours of memory. Obviously, he wouldn't keep trying to wake me up after succeeding. So, she must be... earlier."

The unicorn nodded. "That would make sense. The diagnostic equipment here—the hash it's comparing against is yours. But the pattern on the brain, that comes from an earlier variation. I'm guessing she was one of Lucid's failed attempts. Not even a genius could figure out how to simulate a pony correctly on the first version. Decoherence was always going to be a danger. That's one of the reasons he continues with your weekly checkups. If it was just about fixing mechanical problems, we could just let you self-report and come in when you were damaged. But if you were going through decoherence, you might not even know."

Sweetie had no heart, no breathing, and no blood. Even so, his words made her feel suddenly cold. Decoherence wasn't something that some old, theoretical model of herself had to worry about. It could kill her too?

She dropped onto her haunches, staring down at the floor. "What is decoherence?"

He winced. "I shouldn't even be having this conversation with you. If Lucid found out—he'd be furious. He wants you to grow up like an ordinary pony. The more you're reminded of being a machine, the more tainted the results become."

Sweetie whimpered, wiping at her face with one leg. It still felt like she was crying, but of course there were no tears. There never would be, no matter how terrified she became.

"Looks like you're way past that, pony. This is her life we're talking about. If you're supposed to be a robot doctor, then warn her about the dangers! Whatever we have to do to keep her safe, we'll do it."

The technician buckled under the pressure. "Nopony knows for sure how any of this works. There's only one success story—Sweetie Belle. But what we know is this—consciousness is complicated. It isn't just about scanning neurons. When you're... alive, being you, there are several different interactions moving through your brain at once. Different brainwaves, working together. Any one of them isn't a pony, it's just a pattern. But being alive—these patterns compound on each other, they coalesce into a living mind.

"It's the same way for a digital mind. But unlike with organic ponies, the different patterns and interactions in their simulated minds can much more easily start to drift apart. Translating a scan into a pattern is about combining the data we recorded into a stable whole. If we do it wrong, the pony that comes out the other end has a limited lifespan. Eventually, their patterns drift apart, and they become comatose. And before that happens, the results can be... quite unpleasant."

Sweetie imagined it now, a previously invisible sword hanging just overhead. It might be miles above her, never going to reach—or it might be minutes away. How could she know if it would happen to her—how could she stop it?

The answer was already right in front of her. If Sweetie could fix the broken brain, then somepony could fix her the same way, if she went through the same nightmare. That goal settled firmly and irrevocably into her mind, inviolate.

"How do we fix her?" she asked, gesturing at the diagnostic scanner again. "That pony on there... she's me. I can't just leave her on a piece of glass forever. I have to help her. Then..."

It was harder to come up with what would happen after that. But she couldn't do anything for the digital pony if waking her up would mean certain death.

"That's..." Capacitor shook his head once. "We focus on preventing decoherence for our patterns. We don't generally consider a pony alive until they're put into an active kernel and connected to something. For now, the digital server environment. Once we scale up production—back into Equestria. Either way, if I saw a pattern like this come out of a recent scan, I'd go back to the original backup and start over."

Start over. A gentle way of saying they deleted the pony. Yet—that only opened a dozen more questions. Was a pattern a pony if it was never activated? If so, was there a pony on every computer and hard drive that ever stored them? Sweetie's understanding of computers was good enough to know that data was never really "moved." Instead, it was always copied from one system to another, then deleted from where it was originally stored.

She pushed those thoughts aside for later. She could worry about the morality of creating digital beings after saving the one right in front of her.

"Suppose we had to. Suppose I really, really want to help this pony right here. I'm not willing to delete her. You can see from the diagnostic she was alive. Only a few hours, but—that's something. She deserves a chance. What do we do to give it to her."

Capacitor was silent for a long time. "Without risk, there's nothing you could do. But if you're willing to try things we never did—maybe you could. She's you, right? You're the only pony who could make the choice."

"Do what, exactly?" Sweetie pressed. "What do I have to do? Get the princess to cast a spell for me? I know Twilight would if I asked! She's still my friend!"

He chuckled. "No. No spell I know, anyway. You would need to write over parts of her. Refactor her, using the template used to make you, without erasing any of her new memories. It might just corrupt her data—it might make her violently insane. Or it might make her enough like you that she can hold her consciousness together."

Comments

[Pseudosapien]

Getting a bad feeling about this, Sweetie.

[MasterThief]

Yeah, this isn't going to end up anywhere good, I can tell. There's a point at which the result is not worth the cost, and that probably goes double when the cost may be your own fragile artificial sanity...

This is probably the best MLP tech story serial out there still. Can't wait for next month's installment!

[Perpetually Confused]

[The Weaver]

He winced. "I shouldn't even be having this conversation with you. If Lucid found out—he'd be furious. He wants you to grow up like an ordinary pony. The more you're reminded of being a machine, the more tainted the results become."

She can't grow up! She can never be an ordinary pony! She will always be reminded of being a machine! Doing otherwise is only going to lead to tears. Rarity is messed up in the head if she thinks that it is Sweetie Bell returned. Lucid is even more messed up. She is existing in a state completely foreign to all ponies; even Sweetiebot herself as they make her believe their lies.

I hope those two come to grip with that or their romance is going to spiral as hard as Lucid and Rarity...

[tsaukpaetra]

Well, that's kinda why you always have stimulus, right?

[erictheblue]

something about this reminded me of an old book, "the cybernetic samurai".
they were conducting an experiment to create an "artificial CONSCIOUSNESS".
(the head scientist complained that the standards of AI were CONSTANTLY being shifted JUST ahead of actual work)
they set up a the template for the program, then made partly random adjustments, while a second computer sent random noise into the mix to IRRITATE it.
the idea was that when it awakened, it would sent some data BACK, entirely on its own.
it sort of over-reacted, crashing the second computer and most of the network!

[Cozy Mark IV]

So she has to figure out how to un corrupt a hard drive brain. That's one hell of an ask...

I have to disagree with some of the other comments: this still is the same Sweetie Bell. Windows software is not a dvd full of information. It's not the hard drive or the PC you install it on. Windows software is the intangible pattern of code that comes to life when you power your computer on.

The same basic rules apply to biology - if you die, someone scans you and puts you in a new body, you are the same person. If they boot up 10 of you this way they are all, equally you. It's not always fun to think about, but it's much, much worse to try to run a world where only one duplicate is the 'real' person.