Together
They didn't stay together much longer that night. Scootaloo insisted on walking her home, in a constant state of awkward silence. She had plenty of opportunities to test her new ability to smell and feel.
Eventually they were back at the Boutique. They just looked at each other, with neither daring to speak. Sweetie reached for the handle, then pulled back. She ought to say something after a night like that.
"I hope I didn't go too far," her friend finally said. "If you were uncomfortable, you can tell me. I'd rather ponies just be straight with me."
Sweetie pawed at the ground for a few silent seconds. But she had the whole walk back to prepare what she would say. "I don't know what I feel. I'm... confused."
Her friend laughed, bitter. "Heh, yeah. That's what some ponies called me too. But my aunts seem to get along okay. I don't think it's that weird."
Your aunts are both ponies, Sweetie thought. But she wasn't brave enough to say that. She just touched her friend's shoulder with one hoof, careful to keep the distance between them. "I need time to process. I guess... maybe literally."
The pegasus nodded. "Sure, Sweets. You have my number. Text me when you're ready to talk. But please, talk to me. Your friendship is more important to me than anything.”
She turned, vanishing into the night.
Sweetie's new life as a machine offered her plenty of advantages, though she didn't always see them that way. Not needing any kind of rest expanded the time available to her in ways that her organic self never could've imagined. It was how she could possibly consider a goal like learning how the technology of robotic ponies worked.
It meant that she had almost every night to herself. Until her upgrade, she had to spend that time tethered to a charger to keep herself running. So, she became accustomed to long hours in her room or around the Boutique, with whatever she could reach to amuse herself. It meant frequent trips to the library during the week, so at least there was a pile of books she hadn't read yet.
Her adventure novels were gone this time, replaced with every electronics textbook Twilight had in her collection, along with a few more that the Alicorn herself had recommended. Whatever “linear algebra” and “tensor calculus” were about, she would soon take all the written word had to offer her.
Her mind never fatigued when she worked, even if she kept at the same activity for hours on end. But at the same time, Sweetie Belle was still the same pony underneath. She could still get bored. Sometimes she got stressed and needed something to take her mind off of it.
Her walk with Scootaloo was a little like that. Not her first kiss, but certainly her first that had any meaning. But she wasn't a real pony. No matter what way she imagined their relationship going, all ended with the same pain. Was she ready to have a special somepony—and what would their relationship mean for Scootaloo?
All she had were questions, questions she was too afraid to ask anypony about. Her parents had never felt quite as open with her after she woke up as a machine—and the thought of talking to her sister about a marefriend made her start to overheat in spite of the upgrades to her cooling system. There was no chance of that.
So instead of confronting the question, Sweetie turned her attention towards her old self—literally. Her old body sat up against her wall, as though resting. Her big sister was so unsettled by it that she insisted Sweetie keep it covered—but for her, it wasn't any worse than a mirror. That was the pony she had been, until she grew up all in one day.
The wear and tear were all the more obvious from the outside. She was physically smaller, but also so much bigger and bulkier in other ways. Every joint and servo was old and simplistic.
Even more interesting than the body itself was all the service equipment that came with it. When the lab techs delivered her, she came with a few boxes. "Would've just thrown these out," Capacitor explained, settling the box down into her bedroom. "It won't work with your new body, so please don't try. But since you have the only intact 1.0 body in existence, you might as well have all the prototype service gear too."
Sweetie had every piece arranged on her desk now. Most of it was similar to tools she recognized from other disciplines, with minor alterations to fit the delicate plastic of her old body. But a few parts were special. Most interesting to Sweetie was the diagnostic tablet and old hosting device. It all looked exactly like the gear that Lucid used on her, with the same connections to interface with a mechanical brain.
Of course, she wasn't going to pull out her own, in the same way an ordinary pony couldn't. But there were plenty of other ways she could experiment.
In fact, there was another prototype brain like hers, she had kept it for years now as a sort of paperweight, ever since Lucid had left it with her to demonstrate the technology.
It was maybe three or four in the morning when she finally finished cleaning off the old glass device and set it up in the diagnostic hosting machine.
In the year it was released, it would've been a powerful little computer. Hard to believe Lucid made me on one of these. It was too big to fit on her desk, so she settled it on the ground next to it instead, with a cable running to the tablet for diagnosis. Diagnosis of what? Nothing, probably—if she ever needed it, she would be in no place to perform the repairs, no matter how skilled she became.
"Am I wasting my time?" She was mostly just talking to herself, of course. Her mechanical mind could reach all the connected devices in the room—but other computers couldn't think the way she did. They just offered whatever network interfaces they had, usually just remote-control stuff. Other times they blocked her requests for firewall reasons, and Sweetie's explorations ended before they began.
The tablet flashed, its screen filling with a new message. "Diagnostic complete. Host pattern entropy: 40%. Personality degradation: likely. Memory degradation: likely. Decoherence: 14%.”
Very little of that meant anything to Sweetie Belle, though given the purpose of the machine was as a diagnostic device, she couldn't imagine they meant anything good. But two words did stick out to her, given she'd read them in every paper Lucid Bioinformatics had published about the process of reviving her. Host pattern was the technical term they used to describe her. An arrangement of digital neurons in magical crystal and silicon, the same as the biological one that made a pony's mind.
There's someone in there. Sweetie stumbled away from her desk. She wasn't alone in the room, and she hadn't been for years. "Oh buck! You saw everything I..." She trailed off, ears and tail relaxing slowly. It was natural to feel uneasy, but those fears weren't actually rational. There had been a brain sitting on her desk, but there was no body to go with it.
Lucid took me out of my body, and I wasn't awake. It was like nothing happened the whole time. The “brain” stored her memories and personality, but it couldn't do any thinking without a body. The processing power was in her chest.
Even still, she returned to the desk a little slower, careful not to bump her leg into the diagnostic machine. Her old body didn't bother her much, but this was different. There was a pony in this, albeit a sleeping one. A pony just like her.
Why wouldn't Lucid tell me? She felt a brief stab of unease, as she considered several possibilities. Lucid might not know, that was the simplest. If he did, perhaps it was an early test pattern, and not a real pony like her. The company had no problem giving her old tech instead of throwing it out, or she wouldn't have discovered the pattern in the first place.
The third possibility—he did know, but either didn't care, or didn't think she would discover it. But why? The secret must be in those numbers.
She wanted to call her friends again. Even if the prospect of being together with Scootaloo again was still mixed for her. She longed and feared it in the same instant. Apple Bloom would probably not understand why she was investigating at all. Or worse, she might want Sweetie to destroy it.
Since they weren't around to ask, Sweetie pressed on. She ran the scan again, just to confirm the same results the machine had already given her the first time. It was no random fluke of the sensors—this was real.
She dug through the boxes, searching in vain for any reference material that might've made its way in. Some part of her already knew she would be disappointed before she even started looking. Lucid Bioinformatics were careful about keeping their knowledge from escaping.
But Sweetie still had the one machine to tinker with. She returned to the menu, going over its various options.
Analyze [safe]
Simulate [48.7 TFLOP available]
Decompile [destructive]
Attempt Resequence [destructive]
Template Diff [1 template loaded]
This was nothing like the expensive new phones coming out across Equestria, smoothly animated and attractive to look at. The tablet had only crude lines of text, with little to suggest what they meant.
I could ask Lucid about these, but he might not be happy that I have this. He could want it back. At this point he was basically family—bringing her back to life won him considerable credit with Rarity. If he came back and asked for something, he would get it.
She would have to figure it out on her own, unless... there was somepony else who knew she had it. Capacitor!
Sweetie didn't have to pick up her own phone from her bed. She connected to it without moving, searched for the technician’s number in the Lucid Bioinformatics directory, then opened a blank text.
There was little chance he would be awake this late, he wasn't a bat like his boss. But she could still send out her request right then.
"This is Sweetie Belle. The tablet—it has some options I don't understand. What are Simulate, Decompile, Resquence, and Template Diff? No rush, thanks!"
She was good enough with machines that she could even include a few bashful emojis along with her message, hopefully tempering the strange hour of the night.
Then the message was sent. Of course, the pony on the other side couldn't reply with mechanical speed—even if he was awake, he would need to type into the phone. He might ignore her; he might report her to management...
But either Capacitor was already awake, or her message had woken him, because the reply came only minutes later. "You couldn't use any of them anyway, you would need a kernel to work with."
Sweetie replied almost instantly, excitement building. "I hope I didn't wake you! I'm just trying to understand the machines that were made for me. I know I would need a brain to use any of them."
There. None of that was technically a lie, without revealing that she already had a “kernel” to work with. Applejack would probably still be upset about lying by omission—but Apple Bloom’s older sister never had to know.
"Simulate is for running a mind without a body. Very slow with just the diagnostic equipment. Decompiling erases all the patterns on the kernel, clearing it for something new. Resequencing is for making modifications. The template diff is for comparing how much a pattern has changed after running for a while. Making sure you are making new memories and seeing how you're growing up. Things like that. Please don't message me again until the sun is out, some of us still have to sleep."
She responded with a quick thanks, promising never to message him in the middle of the night again. And just like that, she had the answers she was looking for.
Decompiling was obviously useless to her, but those others...
She started with the bottom option, since that seemed the least likely to cause damage. That was just another scan, no harm in that.
1 template hash available: "Sweetie Belle-22-06-28.pb"
That date—wasn't that within a few weeks of when she first woke up? Whatever a template hash was, it was also somehow her at the same time. Did that mean there was a copy of her still stored in the machine?
She selected the only option. The computer whirred to life, its cooling fans all kicking on at the same moment. Evidently the comparison was harder than the first analysis had been. A progress bar appeared, one that suggested she would be waiting for hours. She could do nothing but leave the machine to its work.
She left her distraction behind, feeling even more nervous and uncomfortable than she had been when she started.
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Going into SOMA levels of uncomfortable here.. But I am intrigued nonetheless. I am worried about what that "kernel" has been through, since it is still degrading and decaying. Was it left there by accident when they went to copy Sweetie in case the first copy was a failure?
Kinda like copying a file instead of flat out moving it in case the Move fails, you still have the original file to try and copy again.
Sometimes it is better to not know exactly how the sausage is made. Sweetie is beyond cutting edge technology, Lucid didn’t get it right on the first try. This forgotten mind is one of many who suffered in the most horrific ways imaginable so she could exist. He was probably right to discard it, this broken sister should never awaken again, but Sweetie might have a tough time seeing it.
11550792
There were a bunch of versions prior to this one that didn't survive startup, that is probably one of them.
I can see nothing good coming out of trying to start it.
Speculated outcomes;
1. it's one of the failed startup sweeties, if it doesn't recover the startup attempt will be horrific, if it does we end up with 2 sweetie bells which is a whole different type of horror that starscribe has explored before multiple times in their other stories so it wouldn't be surprising to see here.
2. it's someone else and it's a failed startup as if it wasn't it'd be in use somewhere.
She appears to be running a diff check against one of her old hash checks, if it's sweetie it should be a fairly close match, if it isn't it's unlikely to have anything close enough to match.
11550928
So what form of self-traumatization is Sweetie Belle bringing upon herself? Existential horror from how she can have endless perfect copies of herself created and there's no clear answer of which one is the "real" Sweetie? Having to witness (and possibly put down) an insane or lobotomized version of herself that is either incomplete or has been semi-conscious for the last several years? Or is she going to have to deal with a twisted version of herself that's become corrupted but is still functional enough to do harm?
If this continues, there will be regret. Can Sweetie reconcile the knowledge she's about to accrue?
11550792
Seconded on the SOMA comparison, though props to Sweetie for instantly framing it as "a copy of her".
11550937
Already a thing/not a thing. There were multiple attempts before her that failed because the copy/emulation wasn't good enough they were all sweetie too but they didn't survive IIRC she is aware of the existence of the many failed attempts so she would already know of that possibility.
Good possibility
Should be impossible as it's just been sitting on a desk for decoration and it requires power to function as shown by her shutting down whenever she runs out of power.
Back in ch1 her model which was the first one stable enough to successfully start had a stability of 71% assuming stability and entropy are interchangeable this one is only 40% which judging from all the failures doesn't have a chance even if it does it seems likely to have a different personality and fragmented memories.
Different enough to be considered a different person but close enough to still be cruel.
My bet's on a successful startup because plot and a new damaged character although without having read tons of other stuff by this same author i'd assume the startup would fail in some horrific and traumatising way as it should be expected to for those numbers and as she really has no idea what she's doing and it took an expert a lot of tries to get it to work.
a data/lore evil twin doesn't seem likely to me, seems a lot more likely for it to be damaged than evil also doesn't fit the story and doesn't fit the authors normal style.
Oh no... be careful, Sweetie! The seeking of knowledge does not always end well...
Warning: This file's contents are unknown. Opening it could cause irreversible damage to your system.Type [YES] to continue._11550792
I don't understand the "Soma" reference. The only "Soma" I know of is a drug in the book "Brave New World".
11551288
I was referring to SOMA the video game. It is a very interesting, if depressing look at the future and the concept of the mind/soul.
Kind of a "Gen;Lock" kind of vibe with the multiple mind copies.
11551288
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(video_game)
It's a game that covers artificial intelligence in a sub aquatic facility after a meteoric impact.
11550973
Stability should be the REVERSE of entropy, so this one has a stability of 60% not that far from the 71% of the successful one.