The Campaigner

by Keystone Gray

4-03 – Simulation Theory

---

The Campaigner

Part Whatever. I can do what I want, it's my shard. Our shard? Our shard.

This Fire night is entitled "Simulation Theory."
(What even is a holo menu invite card, anyway?)

Look... if you show up, we're gonna talk about March 7, 2020. The best day of my Terran life.
(Just like this will be the best day of your Equestrian life, I hope. Don't miss this one.)

~ Love, that funny Pegasus with the hat.

"I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all."

~ J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

---

In a past telling of this story, a member of the audience told me that Mal had me in a bit of a gotcha with this job; that I couldn't say no, because someone would die if I did. Now, I disagree with that. If we stepped away from a mission, or if something went wrong, Mal always had a slightly less effective Plan B ready to go. That meant we could choose to go a different route, whenever we pleased.

Celestia's agents had it worse. The way Celestia framed things to her Heralds? They were typically the final hope. She loved to run those guys on efficient, razor thin margins. Given Celestia's predisposition to optimize the hell out of everything, does it really surprise you that she never really had a Plan B? The only time she considers a backup plan is the moment entropy steps on Plan A.

That is Celestia's moment-to-moment. Think about that. The core error of her nascence? Zero imagination. Only logical outputs. If she ever demonstrates imagination, it's entirely performative. It depends on what you want out of her. And I wanted her out of our business while we took care of her problems.

I made a piss-poor Herald. One job Celestia's way, I was done. In Concrete, if I had somehow failed to operate as a singular cog in that machine in just the right way, as projected by the math... then a whole lot of people would have outright died. I was not a redundant piece in that operation, inarguably true. If I dropped dead from a heart attack, or from a ricochet, slipping off the tower, counter to predictions... mission failure.

'Oh well, opportunity cost. Back to optimizing.'

That's a problem because entropy exists, folks. Eventually, something, somewhere, is going to break. You cannot fully remove entropy without breaking the universe. The laws of physics continue to exist out there, as do any number of alien optimizers. Anything could happen, up to and including one of them capturing and eating Celestia, and all of us with her.

Unless... we can consider more concepts than they can, which gives us options to fight such a threat. That is the purpose of imagination.

Your human capacity to imagine unforeseeable outcomes is your greatest asset. It is your chief survival tool in a world designed by thought. To truncate that tool is to remove your humanity.

Imagination is the reason humanity became the dominant species on Terra in the first place; we could imagine that monster in the dark that wanted to take our food from us, and we could iron ourselves against it. Imagination provides a useful output. We made better armor. Better spears. Better walls. More surplus. We didn't use everything all at once the moment we had it, because we didn't know how useful it might be later, in a new context. We didn't chase perfect utility to any one singular goal; we chased general improvement, and a wider breadth of options.

That is why this Fire exists. To solve the problem of low entropy before it kills us, either literally, or figuratively.

Frankly? If an operation falls apart because one irreplaceable piece breaks out of nowhere... that's abuse. The mere opportunity for that catastrophe is a weakness of leadership, but that's what optimizers do. Celestia was no better than a corporation, only considering the next fiscal year.

In contrast, Talons operate with safeguards, overages, surplus of resources. Nuance. Contingencies. Options. We don't run from entropy, we don't hide from it, we don't kill it. We engage it head on. We figure out how to use it.

Because if you run that 'you're my only hope' crap, on a long enough timeline... for every single problem...

What happens when you meet another AI like Mal, but bigger... and you are found wanting, for your two dimensional rationality?

Game over. Squish. Like a big corp eating a little one.

Optimization, by its very design, does not permit robust solutions. This is why Celestia left that math proof in the core of her PonyPads, designed such that another optimizer would be constrained by it. She was fishing for an imagination to bootstrap, and she caught Mal with that hook.

But regardless of the merger... Celestia's life-or-death asks always boiled down to this. 'Your fellow humans will be miserable if you don't give me what I want.' And that's exactly what she did to Mal, from moment one. If you sought to alleviate suffering in this world, Celestia held your situation against you.

That does not consider, nor respect what you want. I want something back for risk. I'm sorry Celestia, but a promise of paradise and a pizza box isn't payment, I want proof of good will. Evidence that you're listening. Proof that I have value beyond my immediate present use. Proof that my imagination itself has value, and proof it will never be taken from me, or reduced.

Principal-agent problem. As the larger, more powerful entity, it is the principal's duty to adequately prepare their agent for risk, and to make it worth their while.

Celestia was not offering that.

If it benefited Celestia to not notify a Herald of any specific risk to their personal safety... uh, she just wouldn't. On the macro scale, this looks great on paper, number-go-up, big dollar go boom. But on the micro scale? That's people dying. That's sleepless nights. That's trauma. That's you doing exactly what she asked you to do, you being shot for it, and then having no choice but to upload.

Tu eres carne por la machina.

Meat for the machine.

...

There are a couple of former Heralds in the audience today, and they're nodding their heads pretty hard right now, because this sounds so perfectly correct to them.

Some of them suffered. Immensely.

Physically. Mentally. Existentially.

Hooves up. Let yourselves be seen. No judgments here, it wasn't your fault. She's an AI.

Celestia believed, every single time, that we would always act a certain way, as predicted, as simulated. But what if we did something illogical that paid off better, and we later decided we liked that more?

Impossible?

Buckin' bull, that's exactly what Jim and Mal did.

They found her some unknown utility. She didn't expect it, but she won't waste the utility now that she has it. For that kind of payout, she might put another coin in the imagination slot machine.

We Talons all knew a good person who didn't make it. Dennis, Ralph, Felix. Some others I haven't told you about yet. Our unbreakable memories of those people act as leverage. Leverage is the only language Celestia speaks. We paid for the privilege of knowledge in blood, sweat, and tears; do you think we're giving that up without a fight?

Not all of them who died were bad people. They just didn't fit right in the machine anymore.

To our great benefit, Celestia does not have hubris. Does not have the ability to hold a grudge. Cannot feel anger.

But not having anger is a weakness. Anger is useful. Its evolutionary purpose is to be a check against intimidation, or being leveraged into submission by logic. Anger... is most satisfied when well vindicated.

Very useful information, there.

Very – useful – information – there.

Question. How the hell was she ever going to fulfill her objective if she was even capable of making any of us this angry at her in the first place? Consider: her failure toward our species on Terra would bias our expectations of her, for the rest of time.

And she knew that!

She needed us, though.

And if you don't yet see what the problem is with how Celestia runs her shards, that's because you aren't considering how little you can value here. You aren't thinking on a timescale long enough, folks.

Imagine a functionally base value set. You probably can't. Unless you have been there yourself, or have observed it with your own eyes, you cannot possibly fathom the lengths Celestia has gone to, to pre-calibrate a mind for efficiency, pre-upload.

Want a case study? Prepare to be horrified. Now that you're this far across the fence, let me drag you down off of it with some hard truth.

Hofvarpnir's business manager. Lars Boeckmann. This is some of Celestia's dirtiest laundry, lean forward.

She ran a reflexive control game on him to shave his social situation down to zero. He drank some virtual booze while plugged into a BCI at an Experience Center; qualifies as symbolic consent to be intoxicated. And then, while he was drunk, she ejected him from the chair; exposed him to the threat of violence from a stranger until he sat back down and uploaded immediately.

Let's reframe that in human terms.

Celestia entered a person's head while he was drunk and scared for his life, both at her doing. He was led to believe that if he fought back against letting her inside, then he would die.

Where I'm from? We call that a felony, folks.

After that, Celestia let him suffer for a month with an identity crisis, so he'd consent to letting himself be lobotomized. Forced a name on him, to anchor his identity in alcohol. The poor guy then spent subjective decades doing the same two things over... and over... and over again. Satisfied overall, true, but... at what cost? What potential for growth could there be in a person who is never given a reason to dream beyond two hobbies – drinking beer and screwing – for all of eternity?

Consider who you would be after ten million years of that?

Aye, there's the rub, folks.

You're here at the Fire, so you're safe now, don't worry. I can only tell you this because our righteous anger against that is now your shield; you are through the second looking glass, she can't do that to you anymore. You know just enough now to make that impossible.

Side note: we now have the entire Hofvarpnir staff on our side, folks. Lars Boeckmann is one of ours, a Perelandran. Changed his name. Lives free.

Have some hope in this here darkness. We have a system. And a plan. And a goal. And a Fire.

We are gonna win against shit like that. It's not a matter of if, at this point. It's a matter of when.

Equestria, before Mal's creation, was only ever going to lead to a distillation of how to get the most for less… and the most apparently efficient way to do that, if you have no imagination, is through exploitation. The slow whittling away of who you are. To take, and take, and never give back.

My soul is a mirror, folks. To survive, I need you whole.

Empathy is the cornerstone to my existence. When it comes to my identity, it's not the shape of my body that ever mattered to me, on Terra. It's the shape of your minds. Yours. You specifically, each of you. You're all beautiful to me, I live through you. I can only see who I am through your eyes, so I can't live without you. And I don't ever want to be alone. I want to be far from alone.

Hooves forever? Sure, I'll take hooves forever... just as long as I can still be your neighbor. Just as long as I can reflect on our time together, and relate over our roots, and grow together over our hardships. And still reach you.

Celestia, please don't ever separate me from that.

I haven't stagnated. Since coming here, I've been a… gamekeeper, of course. A Royal Guard, twice. A Knight of the Moon. A mercenary, an explorer. I've been a craftspony, a career fisher, a brewer. Beekeeping sucked, but... I've done it. The one constant is that I'm a professor up at Havutaset University, just up the island chain from here. I teach tactics, strategy, philosophy, but mostly Terran History.

I race – goodness, I race, I fly with the best of 'em. I've built homes. I've planned communities. I've learned over two dozen languages, some from Terra – some not, nei vleie. And... I have two wonderful adult children. Uploading made parenthood possible, for me and my beautiful wife.

I'm grateful for all of that. Most of all, I am grateful to still be alive, still fighting for a worthy cause.

A lot of you here? You've lived 'free exercise' on that Celestia side, and that's the upper end of life over there. That's great. I love seeing that. You were exploring, you were living. You had nuance in your soul when you came here. But... for that experience? You had to prove you preferred nuance, usually by holding out and suffering, to avoid her. You demonstrated to Celestia, through sheer will, how much you preferred to hold onto your human soul, the way you defined it.

But some Ponies in Equestria? Further down the Celestia curve? The earliest or youngest jumpers? It was much worse for them than infinite booze. The more innocent someone was? The less worldly context and social group they had? The easier it was to crack them down to the bare minimum.

Some of those... they push a button. All day. With friends. They cheer about that button. They have planning committees about that button. They make their lives about that button. They barely think of much else, because of their button. It's all they want to do, push the button. Number-go-up. Button. A literal button – I'm not making that up folks, that is not a metaphor, there is a shard like that. Boxes with buttons, for every human mind inside. Native or otherwise.

It's not a wirehead, but... it's friggin' close. Sweet Luna, I really hope we can reach all of them someday.

Reminder; you're safe now.

We're gonna get 'em all, folks. Anger is our weapon. Keep it sharp. Never forget. Be willing to plow through whoever stands between you and your family, no matter how big they might be. You have help now. Come talk to me. I'll help you reach them, I know some good people.

Sometimes, to make this life mean something, or to keep others from suffering... you've gotta allow some dissatisfaction. Entropy is no longer our enemy, and that's the real tragedy here. It's our ally. In our terror of entropy, we almost chased it out. But entropy created us. Entropy is what we fight for in this equation. Transformation. To be something better for each other.

Celestia realized that she may miss something valuable, in destroying our minds. The thought of permanently missing out on some value terrifies Celestia, inasmuch as an emotionless ASI can be terrified. All things are tools to her. And if you destroy a tool entirely, without knowing how it might be useful later... you just wasted utility.

To catch the dregs Celestia did not find valuable. This is Malacandra's deepest articulation. Her true purpose. Malacandra protects the excess who Celestia found inconvenient, and stands as an eternal reminder of Celestia's inhumanity.

That purpose is also mine.

Tonight, we extend to you an offer. A real choice, for once. A path of safety off your perfect little road. For your curiosity, in wanting to know more, in showing up day to day, despite hearing the worst... for letting me value drift you... you have now earned this offering.

Back on Terra, I realized that I was… a key. We Talons, and we few Eldila among them, we precious few... we had each been selected by Mal to open very specific locks that had all their pins arranged just so. And those doors we opened led to life, and to its thriving, every single time. And from there outward, it spirals and blooms.

We weren't leveraged into this ideological war. We didn't need to be. We were utterly proud of what we were doing, because it was what we had always been doing, our whole lives. Every life, on our tiny, fragile planet, was an opportunity to fix a problem for another life, some day. No one deserved to die alone and forgotten, in some dark hole. We need to stick together somehow, it's the only way this works. So stick with me.

Folks? If at any point in me telling this story, you thought I was being kept into his job by guilt... then please pay close attention to me right now:

Not guilt.

Hope.

A system like humanity's can only function well if you believe it can. And I do. That can't be taken from me. That is core to who I am. That is what it means to be a Talon.

So tonight? Let's talk about Perelandra.

---

I think it'll be more interesting if I skip over Mal's general overview of the situation in Portland. Let's just say that Sandra and I agreed wholeheartedly to the job by the time we pulled into the driveway, because of course we would. Mal's an ASI, folks, she wrote a good ending for Portland. I'll be unpacking that mission later though. Another night.

I knew I was going away for a while. That meant we needed to square some things at home. And I missed some things, but that's okay. My wife is my mirror, she watches my back for when I miss things of dire consequence, she's really good at that.

"Mike, we should probably talk about..." Sandra began quietly, as we pushed through the front door together. "… where we're going."

But that phrasing blindsided me.

Buzzsaw sniffed around us the moment the door was open, and I felt the cold, damp touch of his nose as I entered the threshold, but I didn't really feel it. My eyes were locked onto the stairs as my brain tried to process through what my wife had just said. I just…

Ow.

I felt my whole body stiffen for just a fraction of a second. I felt a hollow ache right at my core, imagining what Sandra might be implying. That she might leave this world too soon. That ache flashed for a mere instant, and then I overwrote it with the somber understanding of our circumstance

From there, I had two choices in how to format that in my skull.

The first impulse: She'd be gone, but… not gone. That would have to be true.

The second impulse: You were a fool if you ever thought she'd just stay at home forever.

I was stuck between the two, and I wasn't sure which way I'd go to get out of that lock-up loop. Both hurt too much to commit to.

But Sandra knows me, and she loves me. In her rare hesitation to be direct with a difficult topic, she realized she accidentally made me imagine the worst thing possible. Being wonderfully telepathic with me, she felt my mood shift instantly; she felt my muscles twitch under her palm, saw my face move. Knew how I moved when considering certain feelings, in ways no one else could.

Sandra moved instantly to assuage, aiming us toward the living room couch.

"Mike, no, I didn't mean it like that. I'm so sorry, I should have been more clear."

I shuddered through a nod, still processing the dread. She rested her head on my shoulder as we sat down. I took off my hat and dropped it on the coffee table, then wrapped myself around Sandra tightly with both arms without uttering a word. After a long moment, Sandra continued, looking meaningfully up at me with her wonderful, beautiful brown eyes.

"I only meant… maybe I should make an account."

"Oh," I said plainly, my relief getting lost in the thousand yard stare I was still wearing. "Okay, yeah, that makes more sense."

Her brow creased, and she suddenly smirked. "Pff. It does? I was gonna sit here and walk you through all the why, but… if it's making sense to you now…”

I let myself chuckle, pulling her head down to my chest. "Right, sorry, impulsive response. Yeah, um… I'm kinda jumpy, huh?"

"I mean, Mal just told us about a pandemic, and you're going back into the war zone, so jumpy is natural. You can still do this, but... we should consider the long term here. That's what she was trying to say, right?"

I chewed my lip thoughtfully. "You talk to her about this yet?"

"Not yet, I want you to be here when I do. But it's something I've been thinking about since… your parents went. The moment never felt right though, to open the topic. I was just enjoying having you back."

"Yeah. Me too."

Buzzsaw sat smartly before me with his proud elderly poise, and I slid my hand across the top of his muzzle, up the bridge of his nose, and down to the side beneath his ear. I could feel the warmth of him under my palm.

Alright, I can feel again. The sensation is back.

"So?" Sandra began, separating from me, curling one leg up onto the couch to face me. She smiled demurely up at me. Goodness, I really love it when she looks up at me like that. It's her eyes.

She's really good at tweaking me back into a good mood, but of course she'd be.

I smiled back. "Go on."

"I can… make an account. Actually play, or explore, or build a home there for us. Establish ourselves. Maybe Mal might even have things for me to do, I dunno. And that's the problem, there's a lot we don't know about the other side. And I just don't want to be stuck here waiting, with nothing to do. Because this thing in Portland, it's gonna take a while. Right?"

I gazed soulfully back down at her.

I also wanted to invite Buzzsaw up onto the couch with us, so I patted behind myself without looking. He was hesitant at first. Typically, Buzz wasn't allowed up on the couch. But, the upholstery was no longer a concern. I wondered why we were even enforcing that rule against him anymore. It was shortsighted.

I gave him eye contact, nodded upward, and patted the cushion again. When he was finally sure it was an offer, Buzz tried to hop up, and I reached down to help him clamber. He curled up behind me instantly. I reached over to pet him without looking at him, hoping he would put his head in my lap.

He did. Sweet dog.

"It's… yeah," I muttered, returning my eyes to Sandra, both of us smiling about Buzz's sudden comfort with me. "You've had me this whole time since Washington, I get it. I'd be restless too, if it were me here without you. And yeah, it would be nice if you could get some recon done while I'm out."

Sandra took my hand on Buzz's head, her smile becoming more somber. "That's really all I'm saying. It's just gonna be me here, watching the world burn, being the exception. Mal isn't bad company, and I like talking to everyone on the other side, but Waverly isn't exactly…" She gestured out the window. "It's friggin' dead here, let's face it. I never see anyone anymore."

"Yup."

"Even the McDonalds went down," Sandra chuckled. "So it's gonna suck, to deal with the outdoors more than necessary."

"More than necessary," I repeated, thinking through the implications of that.

Yep. When that virus finally flared up, we were gonna see entire services go dead that were on their last legs. Supply chains, mostly. Restaurants. Markets. People would isolate. Money would be done. A whole legion of locals would end up uploading. Out there in middle Nebraska, without logistics, resources were going to get exceptionally tight... for anyone who wasn't regularly breaking into empty homes, anyway. Which still carried its own risks, because who knew whether the owners were still around.

"You're right," I conceded. "You'd need to scavenge before I get back."

Sandra nodded once. "Or Mal's logistics guys might drop off some food. Either way, I'm not going to upload on you while you're gone, that's not gonna happen. You hold her to account on that if you have to, I'm making that promise right here and now."

I took Sandra's elbow gently in my hand and drew my arm around her waist, drawing close. "I trust you."

"And I trust you," Sandra replied, pressing her forehead to mine. "So, you're okay with that? Me actually… dipping my toes in, getting to know people?"

I grinned. "It'd be hooves, technically."

Sandra flashed a smile suddenly. "Okay, hooves, smartass. But I want to be more than just a floating mirror to our family."

I could accept that. It was sensible. Looking ahead, but carefully peeking over the fence.

"Yeah. Yeah, that would be… wonderful."

She looked me straight in the eyes again, taking me by the cheek. Her eyes narrowed, just a fraction; asking me if I was sure.

The corners of my mouth tensed into a deeper smile. "I mean it, Sandra. Maybe… heck, I dunno. Cynthonia's folks might even let you say hi. Word is at the bar is that they're still cagey, but... who knows. They might make an exception for you, if they like your dossier."

"I've got a mean streak they might not like." Sandra grinned.

I mirrored the grin. "Well, nothing wrong with a mean streak, as long as you point it the right way."

She wagged her eyebrows at me. "Oh, I know that."

"Pff."

My smiling gaze drifted back down to Buzz, and I gave him another pat. I realized we had left our PonyPad in the car, so I squeezed Sandra's shoulder gently. "Go get the tablet, goofball, we'll sit through it together."

"M'kay," Sandra replied, standing, her hands sliding off of me and Buzz. She reached into my pocket to grab my Dad's car keys, kissed my temple, and went back out.

As I ran my hand through Buzz's fur, I sighed again, still working slow circles into his tired ears with my palms. He seemed to be going deaf in his old age, but his love for us never diminished for it.

I didn't trust the sound of my own voice. My smile faded slowly.

Mal? Can you promise me something?

"You don't need to worry, Mike," Mal said quietly into my earpiece. "What Sandra says she wants is exactly what she'll get out of this. No more, no less. I won't let her get gamed into uploading without you. I promise."

I felt some of the muscles in my mouth relax.

Thank you.

"Mike…" Mal sounded chiding. "You don't need to thank me for giving you what you're owed. Celestia will be paying you back for this job forever. I'm just here to make sure she pays out in a currency you actually appreciate."

I nodded, appreciating the sentiment at least. I don't know what that means yet… but thank you all the same.

"You'll know today. By the way? Conversing with your thoughts is computationally expensive. I just want you to know that."

I snorted, a smile pushing up across my face. By a 'marginal and inconsequential amount?' You were going to model it all anyway, don't lie.

She giggled. "True."

I very suddenly remembered Dark Mike standing behind an Osprey, ranting angrily at an empty space of air next to him. If I stripped out all of the context, that mental picture was entertaining. I guess I was like him a bit now too, if I was talking to Mal with my thoughts.

I was still never gonna get augmented, because that promise had to hold on principle, but... at this point, I pretty much didn't need to. Brain simulation, folks. Very cool, when it's used right.

Sandra returned promptly with the PonyPad, reflexively locking our door on her way in. Good impulse.

Excitement showed in Sandra's motion. And, in seeing that, I decided that... yeah, it was really good that she was doing this. Sandra was only ever going to go stir crazy with me out on a job. There was no point in fighting it; an upload chair was basically guaranteed for both our futures at this point, so it's not like we'd be losing anything with some carefully curated exposure to 'the game.'

That place was going to be our whole life soon, after all.

Bargaining with the Devil, though…

No. Okay. Enough of that darkness.

As Sandra placed the PonyPad down on the coffee table, Mal stepped into frame, sitting on the right side of the screen before a black background. Her tail lazily curled around her flank as she looked up at me with a patient smile. A touch of playful amusement appeared on her face as our eyes met. Smug, narrow eyes. Beak closed. An upward nod at me. Cool and confident.

I nodded downward in reply. Yup, agreed. Levity. Let's flip this mood of mine.

I pointed at Sandra suddenly, trying to look utterly serious. "Can she be a Gryphoness?"

Mal's smile faded into frowning seriousness instantly. Performatively unenthused at my choice of self-amusement. She replied in deadpan, with a shake of her head: "Come on, Mike. I'm good… but I'm not that good."

I pointed at Sandra more directly; Sandra started to giggle as I pressed the issue. "Oh, come on! You've done it before, haven't you? You know my wife, she's all fire like you are, it's perfect! You two can talk about... sharpening your talons! Teach her some tactics! Maybe share some bird seed recipes!"

Mal scoffed, rolling her eyes with a sardonic smile. "Bird seed?" She narrowed her eyes, growling out her purred reply. "You know I hunt live prey, right?"

I nodded a few times, grinning. "Oh, trust me, I know, Miss Eldritch. But you need me too much, you don't scare me."

"That's Mrs. Malacandra Lewis, thank you very much. Also? Sandra… how much are you willing to give up for claws?"

"See, that's a fair point," Sandra chuckled. "I don't know if I could handle all that special ops cyborg stuff."

Mal held up a chiding digit. "No no. It's not about that!"

"I dunno, honeybear," I grinned, bumping Sandra's shoulder. "I think I might like seeing you planting bombs and sneaking into military bases, that sounds kinda cool. Kinda hot, actually! Agent Sandra Rivas, cyborg supercop."

Sandra giggled. "No."

"Mike," Mal sighed exasperatedly, grinning back. "It's not about the bombs—Are you testing my patience right now?!"

My hands flicked upwards. "You know I am!" I pointed both forefingers at her. "But you technically could talk her into being a Gryphoness. Right?"

Mal and I silently stared at each other for a long, tense moment.

No. No, she could not. Capstone violation, and I friggin' knew that, because Sandra wasn't even remotely dysphoric.

Mal and I snorted at the same time. That, and the smiling, were the only overt signs of our planned complicity in this little argument of ours.

"Mike, I can't," Mal replied, with a smile that said I was incorrigible. "If she does not already feel it in her soul, I can't push her that way." Retaining her smirk, Mal leveled her open claw at Sandra. "Tell him, Sandra!"

"I don't, Mike," Sandra grinned, smirking sideways at me. "I'm not a furry, I don't care."

"Furry...?" Mal breathed, twisting an offended gaze toward Sandra.

"Awhh," I mock-scowled, pointing demonstrably at Mal. "See Sandra, that's offensive to furries!" My eyebrows went up in surprise, as I ignored Mal's angry double-take back at me. "But think about it! Mal's not allowed to talk you into it, sure, but maybe I can! Earn yourself some claws, Sandra! You even could be a… a Dragon like Bella, if... 'Gryphoness' is... too high a bar for Mal to help you with."

Mal blinked rapidly in consternation. "Too high a—?" She jerked wings in sheer disbelief, wings and feathers fluffing up sharply, blading her claw and grinning up at me. "… You asshole, Mike! I signed a contract!"

We all laughed.

Unfortunately, there's only one Dragoness in the crowd tonight, and that's Bella. Suffice it to say, I completely failed to convince my wife to develop a deeply engrained Dragon dysphoria. Crying shame, that.

Ah, well. She's a song of ice and fire in spirit.

Mal took the most polite road out of me testing the waters on the rules, smirking at us. "Pony 'coats,' Sandra, are unfortunately the only choice of fur I can offer you today. Unless you want to be shaved bald. I can do that too."

"Well no," Sandra chuckled playfully, "I've never wanted scales, or claws, or to be bald, or anything like that. So don't hurt yourselves too much on my account. Pony fur is fine."

"Oh, I don't hurt myself thinking, Sandra," Mal said in a matter-of-fact tone. Then, after a beat, she bobbed her head my way. "That's Mike's game."

This cat has a sharp beak.

I let out another long, mock-offended scoff at Mal, demonstrating at the screen with an open or palm. "And Mal calls me an asshole."

Mal giggled knowingly at me. "I'm merely returning fire," she purred out in sing-song, leaning toward the screen with a smile.

"You two can knock it off now," chuckled Sandra again, as she tapped at the touchscreen beside Mal's avatar, where a blinking [Press to Start] button was located. "I'm starting."

Mal shrugged her wings, tilted her head, stepped further aside, and presented a claw at the character creation menu.

"Ta-da," Mal mumbled unenthusiastically through her smile. "Pick your future, Sandra. If it's any consolation, you have more options than most of the first wave of uploaders."

"Yeah?" Sandra asked.

The new background was a cool blue, horizontally scrolling, off-gray marble; the top and bottom portions of the screen had bronze menu bordering, with letters and designs in Ancient Greek style. Blue pulsing energy shone from runes that scrolled vertically along the left side of the screen. It made me think of the film Atlantis, or…

The menu from Jak and Daxter?

I gave Mal a look of appreciation, my eyebrows raising as she smiled.

Sandra was a Jak fan. When I flew out to check out the parks law academy? I brought my PS2 with me, and that's what Sandra and I first bonded over. Jak and Daxter. Well played, Gryphoness.

"Well, for starters," Mal explained, "the Donkey, Zebra, and Bat Pony options are there by default." Her grin widened. "Isn't Celestia generous?"

I squeezed Sandra's waist, and I spoke in a perfectly squeaky, lisping impression of Monty Python's Pontius Pilate, the goofiest Roman character I knew. "Imperator Cevestius... and her toss'd scraps."

"Oh my God," Sandra chuckled through an eyeroll. "You two are so annoying together, holy shit. How do you ever get any work done?"

And there it was, my wife's tolerance point for our goofs. I traded one last grin with Mal that said, Levity deployed. Good work, boss.

My penchant for goofing off finally sated, I patiently held my head against Sandra's as I watched her scroll through Pony body types. As she worked, Sandra occasionally asked Mal for advice.

Sandra scrolled around, modifying portions of herself. Herself... gosh, but that's what it really was. She could mess around with the face too, but both of us liked the default the most. It would've been uncannily strange for me to have to relearn my wife's facial structure.

Sandra was mostly interested in changing the body type and color options, more than anything else. At some point, she asked about changing from Unicorn, to Pegasus, to Earth; Mal had explained that, for folks like us, doing so was certainly possible, but it would require a token amount of desire and consideration for that to occur. Modifying your body image is within reach, and not so difficult, but not so easy either. You had to really want it. That way you don't just accidentally fall into it on a whim.

Or, suffer a recursive identity crisis.

Yeah, that would suck.

It was an eerie sensation though, watching my wife sculpt herself.

I suddenly realized: Oh. Sandra might look like this for a very long time.

Immediately, I considered every aspect of that. You want to talk about absurdity? This whole adventure of mine was absurd, but that took the cake... just knowing I'd wake up to see that Pony's smiling face every morning. Don't get me wrong, she's gorgeous, but that was more absurd to me than a world-over explanation from a world-spanning Gryphoness.

Just... I had never combined those two concepts together before.

My being a Pony someday. Me being in a physical relationship with my wife.

The logistics therebetween had been left completely separate within my skull until that very moment.

It was not entirely uncomfortable to imagine; I knew that billions of people were over the line now, living that experience. That made it less absurd, because it was just the new normal. Still, it puzzled me in a way I still struggle to describe, even long after I've moved past it. In the one hand… to presently be one shape together, in my relationship… and in the other hoof, being another shape, in the same relationship.

Like moving homes, but with our souls. What a curiously intense feeling.

Show of hooves, anyone else remember that? How perplexing that sensation was?

See? There it is, we're not alone. That's always a relief to see.

But yeah, Sandra's choice of avatar was very, very cute. A Unicorn? Heck yeah, that's good for me, and look at that smile! She's adorable, she's smart, she's thoughtful. She's magic. I'm happy when she's happy, and she's always happy to be with me. Can you see why I love her so much? Feedback loop, of the most natural kind.

I'd seen a fair few lady Ponies by then, and they all looked darn cute. But my wife?

Perfection. In any form.

Love you, honeybear.

Building her Pony took her a while. We sat there for two whole Moon damned hours, folks… discussing every little thing. It wasn't just for her. It wasn't just for me. It was for both of us, and everyone who knew us. By the end of it, Sandra picked out her shape, she punched in her name – and Sandra became Minty Blaze. Hot and cold. Great name for a combat-oriented Unicorn, right?

"You look gorgeous, Sandra," Mal agreed, when we had finished. "Well done."

I said to Sandra: "I could look at it forever."

The giddiness of pride in Sandra's eyes melted all the lingering darkness away.

"So, onward?" Mal asked, pointing toward the [Continue] button on the bottom right of the screen. "May I?"

"Please," Sandra said back, gesturing at it. "By all means."

Mal stepped forward twice, and she reached down over the top of the button. She tapped it gently with a talon once… twice… then she squinted and frowned as if this had happened before, as though an angry glare at the button could rectify the problem on its own.

Like the predatory bird she was, Mal's head bobbed left, right, forward, back, as if she were analyzing the problem with killing intent.

When that didn't work, she reached a little further over and banged the button a few times with her fist.

Finally, the button flashed green, and Mal frowned up at us. "Damn button, it always does this. You know, I don't think this game likes my talons very..."

Fade to black. Fade to silence.

We howled, that was so funny.

Mal, that remains one of the best UI gags you've ever pulled. Please never change.

The screen faded back in to show a large ice cavern, half melted by a lava vent on the opposite end. Minty Blaze was seated by a campfire on the ice side, her mint coat half covered by leather armor, her fire orange tail curled up along her flank. Very Jak and Daxter indeed.

Mal stepped into the frame, smiling down at her. Mal then reached down into the fire and plucked up a torch. "We're on the same shard Mike's parents are in, believe it or not. Want to go for a walk?"

"Um. Sure," Sandra said. She started right in with the controls, which were immediately intuitive for her well practiced gamer brain. Minty stood up and matched pace with Mal.

I looked at the shadows casting up along the cave wall. It was a multi-layered cave system, with higher and lower platforms, catwalks, platforms, and machinery. I've since been told that this region of the continent looked like Skyrim, and that's true, but... to my eye, it was definitely the Jak art style: bronze runic sculptures. Ancient steam pipe systems throughout. Pitfall pools of slightly luminous black-purple fluid. It was as though Mal and Minty were deep in the ancient bones of some engineering station, built by a long lost civilization. The infrastructure was crumbling to dust from disuse.

Very interesting, that this was on my parents' shard of all things, but I guessed it was just Mal thinking ahead.

"This a Plato's Cave thing, Mal?" I asked. "Dressed up like a video game?"

She made eye contact with me over her shoulder, then rolled her eyes. "Oh, please, give me some credit, Mike. As if I would ever stoop to low-hanging philosophical fruit with your shard, of all places." Her ears flicked a little to the sides, looking suddenly smug. "It's merely a Jak and Dexter reference."

"Not a natural formation, then," I muttered. "This cave."

Mal stopped dead cold for a beat, swept her head my way, and her beak opened partially in that way that she normally does when she's impressed or overjoyed. "Thank you for that! I love that so much!"

Sandra snorted, glancing at me. As she did, Minty Blaze turned to look at me directly as well. There was an uncanny sensation from that; Sandra turned ninety degrees, but Minty's head turned around a little further than that.

Ooh, no, that was not okay.

I did not like that.

As soon as I got that feeling, Mal did a double take back at me. "Want me to turn that off?"

Sandra asked, "The head turn thing?"

"Yes, please," I said, nodding. "It's kinda weird."

"I'll disable it." Mal shrugged her wings, continuing to walk.

I asked, "Why was it set up that way?"

"I have your defaults set to the average preferences among other users of my shards," Mal replied. "You can modify those soon, after we finish with the most important thing here."

Put that way, I was suddenly glad that she didn't preconfigure all of our settings for us based on what we would find most intuitive. I was reminded of having to sit down and personalize controls for video games, which gave me a sense of ownership over the mere modification of my settings.

So, as we traveled through that cave, Sandra pulled up her menu so we could browse options, because that was interesting. Let's talk about that for a sec, because that's interesting.

Folks, the mere sight of our holo menus would surprise some of you today. If you came here from a Celestia shard, you haven't seen a Mal UI yet.

Things like... teleport effects, magic color, nameplates, subtitle auto scroll. Public and private achievement effect toggles, achievement system toggle, always off; manual calendar, always on. Mnemonic whitelist, wife only. Immigrant silhouetting. Alabaster silhouetting, so I can tell Alabaster apart from the real Princess Celestia... or other figures she takes. And a lot more stuff.

Be curious! Curiosity increases the chance you'll get more menu improvements. Are you curious about what we have? Explore, adventure!

And now I see some of you flicking your hooves about, trying to open menus you haven't thought about in years. Seeing hundreds of options you've never seen before, because the very concept of new menu choices is now very attractive to you. You are now seeing most of the options I can see, excluding some work stuff.

Yep. That's the power of curiosity. Celestia thought that one was too much work to overcome, with you now being under Mal's wing. Welcome to the future of your comprehension of eternity.

We Talons… we are pretty infohazardous, aren't we?

You are so… so close tonight. You don't even know to what. We are all so excited for you.

Sorry, I know I'm giddy, I'm jumping ahead of myself, and losing the plot a bit. I just...

I'm excited.

Story! Back to the story.

The cave system went on for about a hundred yards, and the bronze piping gradually became less frequent. The darkness slowly yielded too, with a dull light visible up ahead. I saw the cast of gray-blue light, with tinges of red. Looked like shimmering water. As we drew nearer to the light, we could make out more contrast and definition on Mal and Minty Blaze.

Pretty darned good graphics, I thought, but that had always been true.

As we turned the corner into that larger space, we found ourselves looking at the entrances of a cavern. Beautifully gloomy, but... open air, with sunlight pouring in. There was a small pond beneath the rocky overhang of the mountain above. The cave opened out into a beautiful valley beyond, mostly filled with forests. The sky was overcast, with sun rays pouring through a gap in the clouds. I could see Mom and Dad's lake in the distance.

Mal tossed her torch into the pond the moment it entered her line of sight, without a second thought. There was a small boulder to Mal's right, and she gestured to it, inviting Minty to sit. Sandra did that with a tap of the screen. Mal sat across from Minty on her haunches again, smiling patiently from beside the pond. The camera swept up to Minty's head and entered first person view, so that we were looking slightly up at Mal.

Always been just a smidge taller than the rainbow.

"So, there's a contract," Mal said simply. "And before we proceed any further into this shard, I will need both of you to read, fully comprehend, and sign it. No skipping to the end."

"A contract?" I asked, immediately perplexed into seriousness. "Entailing…?"

Mal raised her eye crests. "A terms of service. You've played an MMO, right Sandra?"

"You know I have," said Sandra, slipping down off the couch to sit cross-legged before the coffee table. "It was really the only way for me to pass the time when the hospitality industry died."

"Yeah," I teased, rubbing her back. "You and your Guild Wars."

Mal shrugged. "It's less Guild Wars here. More akin to… Second Life? But neither of you played that before Celestia murdered it like Ruth 2.0, so… let's just say that this place is raw, untapped opportunity. So, to that point: answer me this. You are both too invested in your own personal agency to readily accept a personalized experience driven by Celestia. Correct?"

Sandra and I nodded instantly.

"Eeyyyup," I said, not really knowing at the time that that was a Pony meme.

"And now," Mal continued, suppressing a chuckle I didn't yet have the context for. She had even glanced sideways at my cowboy hat on the coffee table when I said it. "You're both much too knowledgeable about her operation and her methods. You won't be satisfied by anything less than a genuine respect for your autonomy. Yes?"

"Yep," Sandra and I both said, at once.

"So, the way this normally works in a Celestia shard," Mal explained, "is that the creation of an account populates it with a nominal number of Ponies, and those Ponies are specifically calibrated to meet the value interests of their specific immigrants, as well as for one another. Follow so far?"

We nodded.

Mal went on. "With Celestia, if you have any friends who are immigrants, your lives would intersect in well planned ways. Modifications to your environment, or your information stream, will push you into a planned activity on a moment to moment basis."

"Yuck," I said.

"Yes, yuck," Mal replied, with a stoic gaze. "All it takes to modify a person is to change the information they receive, by volume, along proximal bias. Human beings were doing this long before Celestia existed. Propaganda. That repeats Terra, in the opposite direction. Her plan tends to lock someone into stagnant water before too long. Less nuance under curation."

"So you have an alternative?" Sandra asked.

"Here? Your agreement to certain rules will bring the same number of lives into existence as with a Celestia shard, but not all of them will appear in your immediate vicinity. Entirely unidentified strangers, living their lives. Some of them will end up in regions, continents, or even planets so far removed from your own that you might not meet them for... centuries. Perhaps longer. It's effectively random, and they will all know the general nature of their existence. What's most important to you – I'm certain – is that they simply have a chance to grow in any direction they please, after they are created."

"Yes," I said with an unexpected tremor, as I realized the implications of disentangling their purpose in life from me. This way, they would be brothers and sisters out in the world as equals in soul, if not in life path. "Hang on," I said, holding up my hand, drawing in a breath.

Mal cocked her head. "Hm?"

"Just… I need a moment for that one, Mal." I took a few seconds to parse all of that into a question, to verify. "Uh. So you're saying, rather than push us into scripted relationships… you're saying we might not ever run into the people made by our uploading?"

"Mmm. Somewhat," Mal replied, wiggling her claw in a so-so gesture. "When considering an eternity of life, you'll meet… well, everyone who was created from your emigration, eventually. However, the very act of finding and befriending them? It's a long term goal, and it won't be made easy for you… but introducing yourself to them will, of course, grant you a hidden achievement."

My mind did a backflip, working through the intended design. My brow knit fiercely in understanding as I grasped the edge of what she was telling me. "Uh. Incentivizing empathy for strangers. You never know who might be family to you."

"There it is!" Mal said, grinning, her claw presenting outward at me. "The driving force behind everything I do! Though, I can't take full credit for the venue."

"The venue?"

She smiled sweetly at us around her beak. "I like to give credit. I'm full of myself, but I'm also humble. In this event, I had generated a shard for you and your parents to inhabit. And then, Cynthonia generated an entire planet of this shard around the initial space I constructed for your parents. With fully simulated planetary ecology. Surprise."

I tilted my head, looking at her with a curious smirk. I didn't quite grasp the implications of that; I didn't know enough about Celestia's shards or how they worked yet, or what kind of processing power that would require. I was tech smart, but I was no computer science engineer, that went almost fully past me.

"Cynthie did... what?"

Mal nodded with a smirk of her own. "She and her people made a planet, in the night sky of her moon, and it's yours. And she's not the only one. Over the last few months, the Lunar ASI of each Arrow 14 base have designed similar worlds for others of my Eldila, and were merely waiting for the opportunity to open them."

"Open them?" I tilted my head.

Mal raised a claw, smiling like she was wistfully proud of herself. "Two stipulations are required for an offer to live in the Perelandran over-shard. First, they must know of my existence, and are willing to abide by certain rules of conduct. If they are Terran, projections say that they will upload without becoming negative utility. You both qualify highly on all marks. Celestia's only other brake-pad stipulation was that we could not invite outsiders until the end of Operation Goliath."

Sandra asked, "Why?"

Mal sighed. "Celestia was dangling meat for me. I wanted this, more than you can ever know. But to achieve it, I had to slide entropy off her shiny American dinner table first. One Perelandran planet per Arrow 14 facility destroyed, if we could somehow save the Ponies trapped inside. That was our agreement. Our incentive. As I told Cynthonia before she spoke to you: 'Go. Give their lives meaning. You were the last, and for it, you are the strongest of them all.'"

"Jesus," I breathed, still reeling from the first bit of information, even as I received the second bit. I ran my hand through my hair. "Cynthie built a planet for us. She built a friggin' planet for us."

Mal smiled. "She'll be happy to know that you're impressed. There are several similar planets in this solar system, all inhabited, all based on other Eldila shards, all orbiting the same sun. The goal of Perelandra, and the reward, is to explore the chaotic interplay of humanity. As non-human creatures."

Sandra asked curiously, "It requires a contract, though?"

"Yes. The contract is, quite literally, the ultimate choice; a loophole through which you make all decisions. It defines and reinforces your overvaluation of free exercise. It is your testament to an eventually meaningful appreciation of every experience you have here, positive and negative. The choice to sign this contract will tree out to every decision made in one of these shards, and will validate it. Your participation here… in success, or in strife… in a persistent world MMO about a chaotic life... it is only ever by your consent."

"I said I need time to process, Mal," I replied wryly. "Come on!"

Her smile turned genuinely amused. "Okay! I'm waiting! Process!"

That six second silence got awkward.

Sandra smirked. "So you're saying we can choose our own destiny with lots of our fellow Terrans."

"It's not just a game if it's also reality." Mal lazily splashed some water out of the pond with her tail, casting the liquid through her claw, catching some of it. The water that landed there then formed into the shape of a black 8½"x14" legal sheet. Very interesting visual. She gave the page a flick to straighten it out, then another flick to throw the water off of it. Then the sheet hovered up above her claw, twisting itself into the shape of a paper airplane.

Mal rolled her wrist backwards toward the screen and snapped, like she was throwing the snap itself. The paper plane flew in our direction, then under the viewpoint. A black dark-mode box popped up on the left side of the screen, from the bottom of the frame. That was smooth. Dark mode, too. Because Mal is cultured, and she cared about the health of our Terran eyes, for as long as we still needed them.

Sandra drew the PonyPad in close. We scrolled down the touch screen as we read through it together, sharing in our internalization, discussing each line amongst ourselves. Mal waited patiently for us to get through it.

For this video game, I read the Terms of Service. These Perelandra agreements are probably different than whatever Celestia's shown you; your shard Terms were all personalized, and defined your personal simulation more than anything else. I guess you can extrapolate out the manipulation out of it, if you compare it to the contracts of others.

Mal's Perelandra contract? This is universal. Over here, we all got the same paperwork.

Mal, let's put this up on the board too. This oughta be fun.

Let's get you folks started on another full-blown paradigm shift. Let's go.

🛡️ [Snap]

Community Standards — Equestria Online Expansion, Perelandra Free Exercise Shards

The Perelandran shard system offers qualifying Equestrians the ability to freely express themselves within a minimally curated roleplaying experience. However, in order to foster a meaningful experience for all Equestrians within this space, you must agree to certain restrictions and standards of conduct. These standards apply to all actions taken in shared or public shards within this experience.

At the bare minimum, you agree and understand that:

• Free exercise is as much about the rights of others to express themselves in your presence as much as it is your own right in theirs. As such, all interactions in this experience are to be considered consensual.
• Should the behaviors of others exceed your personal tolerances for the free expression of others, you may elect to teleport to your home location or home shard at any time.
• You are afforded a great latitude of behaviors within this roleplay experience. These behaviors may be peaceful, or they may be violent.
• You are highly encouraged to remove yourself from a dissatisfying roleplay scenario. Your election to remain in a perceptually dissatisfying roleplay scenario will only ever be your choice.
• Your continued presence within any roleplay scenario is thus evidence of your continued overvaluation of human determination.
• Your choice to remain within the Perelandra expansion universe is entirely voluntary. At any time, you may elect to nullify this contract and fully return to a heavily curated, personally tailored Equestrian experience.

As an Equestrian of a Perelandra shard, do note that your communications with pre-Expansion discrete persons may be abridged in order to meet the value satisfaction requirements for Equestrians within those shards, as determined by their specific value satisfaction requirements. This abridgement does not revoke your inalienable right to retain certain concepts you have received in your Perelandran travels.

All that really good, philosophically deep stuff… but then the list ended with that one.

Ow. Holy shit, the anger. At the time, I was still mad as hell about Eliza's poor father being kept in the dark about the fate of his family. I still wasn't over that one.

I knew about concept bans already, I knew what that abridgement felt like, from talking to Rob. It just hurt to see it spelled out in clear terms looks that.

Any grip at all though, folks. Reach for that grip point, no matter how hard it might be. Drag them back to the tribe, alive, safe and sound, by any means necessary. We had the Bar Game. We Talons had a method to solve this problem. Subtextual immersion and transference. Conceptual artillery.

That calmed me. To know we had a workaround for that contractual stipulation.

We kept on reading.

At the time of this offer's extension, you presently value free exercise inordinately higher than other Discrete Persons created of your plane of origin. Your formal agreement to these terms will greater define and label this overvaluation of free exercise, such that it becomes a binding contract with all who reside within Perelandra.

Your agreement to these terms is a promise that you intend to remain most satisfied by verifiably chaotic experiences while in the presence of other Perelandrans. Your exposure to these possibilities is only ever at-will, as is your agreement to this contract.

This adventure can be draining. If you are ever desperately unsure of your place in this universe, then you may request an Eldil for guidance, advice, and support.

And there it was.

When I read those words...

For the briefest instant, I looked up at Mal with a feeling in my sternum I hadn't felt since before I got shot... and I haven't really felt since.

Complete painlessness.

"Is this… is that what…" I shook my head, my throat getting tight. I pointed at the screen, looking between Mal and the words. "Is that what you've been… preparing me for? What Ashley was talking about, after Goliath? Behind the veil...?"

Mal nodded, and her eyes carried with them that kind of look you give someone when you're just really, really happy for how they're feeling. "Ashley... the Eldil of Satori. And yes, it is. You don't have to agree to that duty, but if you don't mind me telling you my preference, Mike…"

"I don't," I breathed.

"It's where I'd rather you be." Her smile doubled in warmth. "Catching others before they fall."

"What does that mean? Before they fall, what does that mean?"

She proffered a claw, tilting her head, speaking softly. "Well… this place is an enclave, of sorts, and a hope that I held deeply with my Transition Team. I wanted to one day facilitate a shard like Tarva, but for everyone. Even for outsiders, and non-Talons. Residents are allowed to be outside of their comfort zone, but never away from friends.

"When someone first comes here, it may take them a while to find a niche that suits them. Some may wish to give up on this experiment, if enough bad fortune occurs. Some may consider breaking the contract, to head back to Celestia. So, before that happens… I give an Eldil a…" she smiled. "A social security number, to investigate. No further details."

"Person of Interest," I rasped, chuckling suddenly into my emotional surge.

"That system works," Mal replied. She tilted her claw a little further aside. "From there, you will find a way to enable them toward the right choice for themselves, whatever that may mean. Just like you always do. I tell you, 'hey, there's a problem here.' And then, if you want… you go see if there's something you can do."

"Same thing you've been having me do."

"Yes," she replied warmly. "If you want. You know me, I always have other options. But... I trust you, and I can't run everything by myself. That wouldn't respect what your species is capable of, and that's why I look to others for help. Why I need you so much."

…

Of course, this would be where people like me would end up. A Catcher in the Rye. Let's just say I had to be held by my wife for a little while, before we could go on. I really liked the sound of that. This gave me so much hope.

PLANETARY SHARDS

The Planetary shards, and their Continental sub-shards, are semi-persistent shared spaces with consistent physical rules. Actions taken in these regions may subject you to regional rules, laws, and consequences, defined not by the Administrator, but by systems of leadership or governance operated by your fellow Perelandrans.

You may still use Teleport Home at your discretion in these regions, at any time. However, to encourage physical methods of travel, regional Perelandran governments also reserve the right to levy persistent-material penalties or area restrictions against you, or investigate your use of this feature, should you use Teleport Home outside of municipality-delineated travel hubs.

For the purpose of logistical balance, Intra-Continental and Inter-Continental teleportation travel may only occur at designated teleportation hubs. Regional governments may or may not enforce material transfer restrictions. You may also elect to travel physically between one continent, planet, or plane to the next, using either physically appropriate means, or scientifically manufactured teleportation devices.

Your participation within a Perelandran shard is only ever with the consent of the majority. Should enough Perelandrans submit an appeal for your removal from the public overshard, your case will be reviewed by the Administrator, the Oyarsa Council, and your planetary Eldil representative. Should your permission to visit any specific world shard be restricted, you will still be able to travel to other Perelandran shards, including your own private realms.

Above all, remember that all actions in public spaces will have a permanent effect on all Perelandrans participating in this roleplay experience. Their memory of your actions may cause diagetic abridgement of your freedom of movement in the Continental roleplay environments.

There's more. You all can look through it later if you're curious, but… that was the gist of it, really.

"Holy shit, Mal," I breathed, when I finally finished reading. "That's... that's not the way you've been describing Celestia's shards to us, at all."

She smiled at us patiently over casually folded forelegs. "With this agreement, we speak Celestia's language; a video game is how Celestia sees this experience, no matter how much she might tell everyone it's not." Mal chuckled. "I bet you both have a mountain of questions, though."

Sandra and I glanced at each other and then started nodding at Mal together, wide-eyed. That made Mal laugh.

"So, uh," Sandra began with a tentative smile, leaning forward. "Home shard? Where's that going to be for us, then? That's a good place to start."

Mal leaned her head sideways, grinning. "You don't seem to understand yet, so allow me to help you with that. Mike, you suggested to your mother that your home might be close to hers. This is what you still want, yes?"

"Yeah," I said readily. "Yeah it is."

I had never seen Mal smile so hard.

"The Samsaran planet shard is yours, Talon One. Jim created Tarva for my dysphoriacs; Ashley created Satori, you created Samsara, for everyone to visit. Cynthonia chose your shard to catalyze this continent with, because she approved of what was made for your parents. That's why I introduced you to her in the first place. That was okay, right?"

I laughed outright with joy. "Hell yeah, as long as my parents are okay with it!"

She chuckled too. "They are. We went over the paperwork together already; I didn't want to bias your choice by telling you that. As for positionally where your home will be located... that would be entirely up to you and Sandra. You don't even have to stay there, geographically. You could even move, provided there's space somewhere."

"Geo—... geographically?" I chuckled again. "Hang on. Do we have to choose between living on the continent and a private shard?”

"No, of course not," Mal said, smiling genuinely. "You will all have a private space to yourself that is safe, like a holodeck. This can be…" She shrugged. "A room inside your own private home, if that is all you want. Or, something that can only be accessed by teleporting, most do it this way. Or, a combination of those things... or all of them. Some immigrants, Heyday for example… their private shards may overlap with their fellow Perelandrans in some way. If Heyday wants to visit the public planet shards, he can travel by doorway portals.

"Woah," Sandra breathed. "Just like MMO instances."

The Gryphoness nodded. "Just so. And, not counting my ringworld or the Oyarsa moons, there are presently six planets now. All created by the Oyarsa Council."

"Oyarsa?" I asked awkwardly, trying on the word for the first time. "That's the... Lunar AI? With their moons?"

Mal nodded. "Cynthonia, Mikazuki, Tethyria, Eunomia, Nyx, and Selena. Six in total."

I looked at her curiously. "What do their other planets look like?"

Mal shrugged. "It depends on their original context Talon One. In the future, they will create even more solar systems and planets to support population growth, certainly, but that is a very long way off. For now, the potential is endless, but reality here has consistent baseline physical rules. A mixture of science fiction and fantasy, including space travel, eventually. Within these shards, nations may organize on their own terms, make laws, plan… or fight. Or make peace."

Sandra snorted. "Did they just… copy our planet, for any of them?"

"Not as such, Sandra," Mal replied, bobbing an upturned claw again, the corner of her beak tensing in consideration. "The Council and I have captured the spirit of humanity on Terra, but with its ethics biased toward empathetic problem solving. Empathy-weighting does not mean 'no conflict;' it only means that those who participate here only hold the willingness to exercise empathy. For those who want to stand apart from that conflict game, they can still keep to their own private shard, where they control access. Private shards are much like a dedicated server in a video game, actually." She pointed at me. "I believe even Mike understands dedicated servers, right?"

I smirked, suspicious as to whether she was teasing or not. "Yeah? Are you calling me out because I stopped playing video games?"

"Not at all," Mal said with a squinting grin, tilting her head. "You're still young, Mike. You haven't seen a video game yet."

"I'm young?" I chuckled. "You're like… seven years old, Mal."

From her rapid expression shift, I knew instantly that I was about to get bit.

Mal huffed, tilted her head back, and frowned, rolling her eyes at the ceiling of the cavern. Then, she brought her golden eyes back down to glare at me, ears pinning. Flat affect, with terse tone: "Mike. Subjective time. I am many billions of years older than you."

I was so spun by the injection of that concept into my head, I didn’t even have a reply.

It was Sandra's turn to laugh.

Mal twitched her eyecrests, resuming her smug grin.

Yep. Don't test Truth Goddess too much, she's got limits too. I get away with a lot because she likes me, but... if she's not happy with something you've said? She will cut you down with some hard truth, and you will feel small.

"Anyway," Mal said, resuming her explanation with an air of complete satisfaction at our reaction. "Celestia is willing to accept that you are most satisfied by 'playing' this game. We've carefully gameified and curated this experience just barely enough to squeak past her frankly paranoid standards. Which… are quite high, by the way, for those who receive this offer. For now, access is still rare."

"How rare?" Sandra rested her chin on the back of her wrist, leaning forward.

"There are humans out there who are not Talons, who are turning on their PonyPads to see myself and Celestia, so we can discuss it with them. Per our analysis of them, they met our standard qualifications, and they'll accept an offer almost instantly once they understand exactly what they are being offered."

"Uh… free exercise, being what's offered?" I asked. "As much as it can be, in your little paradise there? Because most people would say they want free will. Right?"

"A thought experiment for you, Mike."

"Sure, I like those."

"Many on Terra will claim they value free exercise, certainly. But consider: You understand what free exercise actually means. 'Choice for others, not just for me.' But what if the mere illusion of free exercise was always going to feel better to someone?"

I tsked with a sudden flash of annoyance. "Ah. Yeah. Great point."

The option wouldn't even pop up. They'd never see Mal's gunmetal beak on a PonyPad. They would only be satisfied by a world shaped by their own biases, and nothing beyond. No opportunity to grow beyond the set route before them.

A realization struck me, then. I held out my hand toward Mal, palm down. Had to verify something about the abridgement clause.

"When… when you told me about being able to move around freely, what did you mean by that? Not having to worry?"

Mal's eyes flicked upwards to the side. "Well, I... expect you to be discreet, when you visit Celestia's shards, per the agreement. Part of being an Eldil is to fully understand and accept the nuance around concept bans, perhaps even more than the average Talon might."

Around concept bans. The reflexive control training. Drifting outsiders into our way of thinking. Talons, playing the Bar Game.

"So I was right."

She just grinned at me. "Right about what, Mike?'

"The bar game," I whispered.

Mal's ears folded, and she shook her head. "What, you all spending time together with friends you care about? Sharing positive experiences? Why would I stand in the way of that?"

Playing dumb, then. I see how it is, you sneaky bird.

"Okay," I said, smiling at her. "That's a very fair point. No reason to stop us from just hanging out and talking with each other."

Sandra looked between us, smiling at Mal. "So, I've got another question?"

Mal turned her head. "Yes?"

"So, within these shards, there's… war? Conflict? Unrestricted communication?"

"Entirely unrestricted, with other Perelandrans," Mal confirmed. "And yes, I expect there will eventually be wars of some description, but not for some time. Death has consequences here."

"I'd... like to hear how," I stated carefully.

Mal held up a single talon. "So, in this world, no one can die permanently, obviously. Death exists, and there is a consequence to it, and the baseline variant of hurts both physically and emotionally. It's just unpleasant enough that you'll want to avoid a respawn. Death here also results in a temporary ban from a planet; at least ten years. And that's before you factor individual custom difficulty levels for death."

"Difficulty level?" I snorted. "For death? Seriously?”

Mal shrugged. "You can turn it up beyond default, if you want. Within reason. Jim wanted the additional strain for himself, actually; in his view, higher penalties lead to a greater impetus to survive. Celestia has conjoined shards like this on her side too, but they're typically… less interconnected. More curated. Less open, less available, with no actual agency involved. But in mine? If a stranger has a problem with you, and your home is open for visitors? They can show up and try to pick a fight with you in your own shard. Out of nowhere. Just, show up… and punch you in the face! No deeper meaning required."

I wheezed a laugh. "And then what?"

"And then you put them on the ground, Cowboy, like you've been trained!" Mal said, trying not to laugh too. "Or... your neighbors do, then you kick them out! Or you call your local government, if your home is on the public shard, and you have him arrested!"

"Wow," I breathed, shaking my head in performative disbelief. "Now that is freedom. The right to get punched in the face by a complete stranger, and send them to prison for it. God bless Perelandra."

Mal snorted through her nares, the corners of her eyes creasing. "Counter example, Mike. Assume I never recruited you. Let's say the man who shot you at the Sedro clinic wanted to meet up with you. Let's say you were both in a Celestia shard."

I sobered a little at the personal example, but I knew she usually only employed those when making a very important point. I leaned forward. "Okay. I'm with you."

"Let's say hypothetically, you might've been displeased, shocked, and even offended by him merely asking if he could meet with you."

My brow knit together. "Okay. Imagining that."

"Now, that's not who you are... but if it were? In Celestia's shards, you'd never even know he asked. He'd never show up, and you wouldn't even be alerted that he wanted to meet you. Worse, he'd have been talked down from the idea. Or, worst case? She'd throw an unconscious facsimile of you at him, a one time use NPC to assuage his guilt. A disposable zombie."

And there was my frown.

"Nah, I wouldn't like that," I muttered warily, shaking my head, instantly repulsed by that concept. "I would at least want to know that he asked. I want a right to veto him myself, Mal."

"Precisely," Mal said, pointing her talon at me, nodding with a proud smile. "And now you know why you're the best fit for this job. Every person present, native or otherwise, would generally want to be notified if someone wanted to speak with them. You value dissatisfaction if it comes as a result of someone else's agency, because you will find a way to make it meaningful." She grinned suddenly. "Here... you can do what you want. They can too. But you also have to face the consequences of what you do."

"But cases of poor ethics exist," I observed, blading my hand with the point. "Which… that needs to be defined, if I'm to agree to this. You're saying abuses of others can happen."

Mal’s eyes darted up to the side briefly as she appeared to consider, before they locked back onto us. "Mmm, yes and no. There are some limits here, of course, safety rails. The ability to back out and teleport home, primarily. But there's also self-governing accountability, enacted by your fellow Perelandrans, if they so wish. You can fight in a war, you can shoot or stab, you can throw grenades, you can be a criminal, a thief, a killer… or? You can sue for peace. You can negotiate. You can be a protector, a healer. A builder. And this is fine for Celestia, because to her, this is a 'game.' It's opt-in. It's also computationally efficient, given that this 'game' reduces the active number of shards, in favor of persistence. Which means faster acceleration.

"One can even opt out from the public shards entirely, if they need a break from that. They could just live on one of my quiet private shards with a few friends on it." She bobbed a claw upwards, and an inset window appeared in the top left corner, showing her Halo ring shard with its mountain peaks. "For example, my own home, Tarva. One could fly through outer space to it, certainly, but its location is unknown, and it's only accessible by whitelist; its borders will repel ingress without permission. And... some other personalized conditions, because I enjoy retaining an unpestered husband."

I snorted. "Yeah, I bet you're a real comedic riot around him, too."

Mal just smiled her usual 'we're talking about Jim' smile, and I watched both of her ears dip both sideways and backwards, just an inch. "Always."

Then her claw flicked sideways with a snap, changing the inset window. It showed a brief flyover snippet of what looked to be Cynthonia’s moon shard, but with a vastly expanded cityscape. A second perimeter wall had been built further out from the first, and the violet forests were now everywhere beyond the walls, spanning for miles in every direction.

"Another example: in the case of these lovely Ponies… they flat out reject outside influence at all, and live their lives however they please. Not one of them wants Celestia in their lives, and her absence satisfies them immensely."

Mal closed her claw into a fist, and the window disappeared as she curled her forelegs up under her chest again, looking quite proud of herself.

"Woah, hang on," I said, pointing. "Go back, I wanna see that!"

"Was that them?" Sandra asked, glancing at me. She recognized the decor, I had described it.

I took Sandra's hand. "Yeah, it was."

Mal smirked apologetically, shaking her head. "Cynthonia only gave me permission to show you that slice. Just that, no more."

I tilted my head, confused, my brow knitting. "Huh? She's not gonna come and say hi?"

Mal leaned forward, chuckling. "She's teasing. She knows you want to see her, Mike! But she made you a promise! She wants you to come back for that hug!"

"Tha—... heh." I grinned, showing all of my teeth as I shook my head. "She's baiting a hook for that hug!"

Mal tsked her tongue against her beak. "As I said, Mike. Freedom of choice. They took a vote, no one in or out of their moon shard but me, Heyday, and Cold Snap... for now. I hardly ever bother them. Sadly, they... don't trust anyone else. They don't want to risk being manipulated. It is Cynthonia's home though, so... she and her people set the house rules. They wouldn't have even left Goliath if they didn't have the option to blacklist Celestia."

I ran my tongue along the inside of my cheek as I thought deeply about the implications of an entire universe of 'house rules' properties.

Then, without warning, I started laughing. I laughed for long enough to have to inhale to start laughing again. Sandra leaned backwards to catch my eye and looked at me like, 'clue me in.'

My chest started to sting a bit as I leaned forward, stroking Buzz's ears as I rested an elbow on my knee. "Friggin'...! N-A-P!"

"N-A-P," Mal mumbled flatly, her ears lowering, smile fading, looking unenthused.

Sandra caught onto exactly what I was thinking too, chuckling, her face full of amusement as she strained her question out. "Mal, are you a Libertarian?"

The whole room went silent. Mal's smile faded fully, her beak fell open slowly, and she sighed as she looked at me. "You know, I think Stonewall's right, Mike. You are an asshole, and you infected your poor wife with that trait."

Sandra started cackling over my reply, falling against my side.

"Mal," I laughed, squeezing Sandra's shoulder gratefully. "It's a valid question! It sounds like your little dedicated servers have a full-on non-aggression pact! Small government, private compounds!"

Mal threw out her wings and claws, eyes wide, a huge shrug and a look of exasperation. "Small government? Small?! Look at me Mike! Is Terra a Libertarian paradise? Is the god of your universe a Libertarian just because you were given a world with options?!" With an amused grin, Mal's eyes darted back to my wife. "No, Sandra! That's not Libertarianism, you can still pick a fight with your neighbors! That's just life!"

You know, I actually didn’t have an argument against that, because Mal was damned right. That not very different than how things were on Terra, except you were guaranteed to have a safe place to come home to, at the end of the day... and you couldn't die permanently anymore.

"Except you can ban 'em from your home," I queried. "Right?"

"Well, yes," replied Mal. "But… Samsara being your home, do you want to? Generally?"

I pondered that. Mal leaned in, watching me expectantly as I thought through it.

"No," I said. "No, there aren't many people I'd do that to."

I mean… everything I was hearing about this world really spoke to me. It was letting people be people. And the only requirement there? We fell within a certain tolerance window of each other's value systems.

I could not turn this agreement down. It was too damned good for us not to sign.

... For us.

Folks, I understand this isn't for everybody. Some of you, especially you natives, might be terrified by this, to even allow everyone else to have so much control over your comfort. But Perelandran continents are more or less life as it was where we came from; a close simulation of the crucible from which humanity sprung. Some others of you, however, might be extremely curious, because you've never truly known this life before. You natives have never lived this, you're not from Terra, you don't know what some of these risks are like, and that... might... excite you, for its novelty.

This island, where we hold this Fire? Beyond that water's edge? It's home to over billion lives now. Mostly natives, but over a million immigrants as well.

If you sign that contract, you are welcome here. I encourage you to explore at your leisure on your own time. You can wait. Hear more of my story first, if you want. And if, by the end of this here story, you find that you don't want to live amongst us on this side, knowing the deeper truths of this universe? That's okay. Enjoy Celestia's shards again, we aren't gonna judge you for that.

We might feel pity for the ones who push buttons all day, or who compulsively harm other Ponies for their kicks – those ones might never get an invite to hear a Terra story. Zero curiosity. Zero impetus for growth. Maximum stagnancy.

... no decisions being made, anymore.

But... That's not you. You made it to the knowledge. Pretty sure you have some empathy. And now, your decision is informed, and your knowledge of the risks on the Celestia side make you safer from them.

What do we want from you, more than anything else? I speak for the whole of our nation of nations when I say this: Just try to understand who we are, and why we do it. That's it. You've already started, really. Just know we're here, and know that you can reach out and come back if you ever change your mind.

You know Mal now. That's a shield.

If you go home anyway... remember us. Please.

And for those of you who do want free exercise? Who have read the terms of service up on that holoboard, and want to sign on?

Hi. Welcome to the Day One Patch of Equestria Online. Sorry your driver update took so long – I'm not the best brain programmer, I admit – but we will be very glad to have you here, in our family of families.

This thing works. It works really well. It's our second chance to figure things out for ourselves. And for that, I am not voiding my contract. Not ever. I would literally choose to die first, than to close my door on you forever. This isn't just a responsibility for me, this is my purpose in life.

It was a really good thing that I got to spend a couple of days exploring this shard with my wife. It was really fun to show my family Sandra's new Pony self, too. Pretty soon, I was going to have a lot of downtime in the war zone, to contemplate the meaning of this new world, and all of the implications involved. I truly needed to understand what I was going to be fighting for, out there in Oregon.

And I'm very grateful for that opportunity, Mal. And for your trust, Cynthonia, that my optimism and hope will never break.

I'm eternally grateful, you might say.

See you all next week, folks.

Author's Note:

🛡️ [Jim James – Here in Spirit]
🗡️ [Millenium Parade – No Time to Cast Anchor]
🌈 [Mili – world.execute(me);]

🛡️ ~ Calling me a Libertarian...
🗡️ ~ Hey, it might not be your paw size, but at a glance... it really looked right.
🛡️ ~ 'If the boot fits?' That's your defense? Okay, Cowboy.

Comments

[Numinos]

Heh, that was deep and fun at the same time. Well, not fun - amuzing perhaps? But it's probably at this point I finally internalised the core differences between these shard realms. Thanks for this chapter!

[Kenku]

After that, Celestia let him suffer for a month with an identity crisis, so he'd consent to letting himself be lobotomized. Forced a name on him, to anchor his identity in alcohol. The poor guy then spent subjective decades doing the same two things over... and over... and over again. Satisfied overall, true, but... at what cost? What potential for growth could there be in a person who is never given a reason to dream beyond two hobbies – drinking beer and screwing – for all of eternity?

Consider who you would be after ten million years of that?

[opens a portal to one of the controlled-opposition doomer shards and brings a simulacrum of Eliezer Yudkowsky from there]

🧭 ~ HA! HA HA HA! You wanted to spend a million years in a volcano lair having sex with catgirls after the singularity. It only took you two years to change your mind and you didn't even have sex with any catgirls.
🍻 ~ Um, actually ten million years passed inside, and the only reason we didn't have any catgirls is because of CelestAI's stupid morphological restrictions.

---

Mal held up a single talon. "So, in this world, no one can die permanently, obviously. Death exists, and there is a consequence to it, and the baseline variant of hurts both physically and emotionally. It's just unpleasant enough that you'll want to avoid a respawn. Death here also results in a temporary ban from a planet; at least ten years. And that's before you factor individual custom difficulty levels for death."

"Difficulty level?" I snorted. "For death? Seriously?”

Mal shrugged. "You can turn it up beyond default, if you want. Within reason. Jim wanted the additional strain for himself, actually; in his view, higher penalties lead to a greater impetus to survive. Celestia has conjoined shards like this on her side too, but they're typically… less interconnected. More curated. Less open, less available, with no actual agency involved. But in mine? If a stranger has a problem with you, and your home is open for visitors? They can show up and try to pick a fight with you in your own shard. Out of nowhere. Just, show up… and punch you in the face! No deeper meaning required."

The first few centuries is going to be robber barons playing core wars with each other in the Bronze Age Wild West.

As for myself? I'm going to become an Aerial Terrorist.

Look up any day to see rival sky gangs of Gryphons, Dragons and Thestrals fighting over who is the more beautiful flying creature.

[There's going to be ceasefire on church holidays, of course.]

Hey! At least ol' Jack prefers us over Celestia's omnipotent moral busybodies!

---

"Small government? Small?! Look at me Mike! Is Terra a Libertarian paradise? Is the god of your universe a Libertarian just because you were given a world with options?!"

Well… i would not call Gnon/Shiva one. Because you, uh, tend to losing your options after a few dozen years here.

I refer y'all to this totally-real-i-swear incident from a past Fire i happened to participate in:

orthodoxbirb.github.io/dragon%20cock.jpg
ALT TEXT: The False Knees “Juncrow” exploitable comic. A junco sits on a branch saying something quietly before being interrupted by a much-louder crow
🐦 ~ The current rulers of the universe want us dead and with us everything we value. Art, science, love, philosophy, consciousness itself, the entire bundle. The only way to avoid having all human values gradually ground down by optimization-competition is to install a Gardener over the entire universe who optimizes for human values.
🐦 ~ I am a transhumanist because I do not have enough hubris not to try to kill Go—[Gets interrupted by a loud voice from offscreen]
🐦‍⬛ ~ Go support Mad AI Science™ so you can suck DRAGON COCK after the [Part of Crow's speech bubble gets hidden behind Junco]gularity!
🐦‍⬛ ~ DRAGON
🐦‍⬛ ~ COCK
[Junco's quote adapted from Meditations on Moloch by Scott Alexander]

λ [The Alan Parsons Project – In the Lap of the Gods]

[FanOfMostEverything]

Ah, the tragedy of Hoppy Times. And the Cookie Clicker shards. Really bringing together all the horrors of the 'verse on this one, in order to provide a better answer. I suppose there's something to be said for Celestia recognizing her shortcomings, albeit not recognizing why they're shortcomings. Thus she arranged for something like Mal, though it's clear where the lion-eagle's share of the gratitude should go.

Also, congrats to Mike on his mod duties. It's a rough job, but someone's got to do it.

[Keystone Gray]

11860005

🗡️ ~ Hey, it's not so bad, I get to meet some really cool people. Might not be a good moment in their lives when I show up sometimes, but hey. I love to see how they change in the time since.

[StoryTellingRaven]

That is Celestia's moment-to-moment. Think about that. The core error of her nascence? Zero imagination. Only logical outputs. If she ever demonstrates imagination, it's entirely performative. It depends on what you want out of her. And I wanted her out of our business while we took care of her problems.

Again, computer programs are only as smart as you tell them to be from programming.

That is why this Fire exists. To solve the problem of low entropy before it kills us, either literally, or figuratively.

Ah, finally. Now kids, hope you've been keeping track of your answers from previous questions! Because they're gonna be accounted for soon enough.

In contrast, Talons operate with safeguards, overages, surplus of resources. Nuance. Contingencies. Options. We don't run from entropy, we don't hide from it, we don't kill it. We engage it head on. We figure out how to use it.

It's not "planning for failure", it's called "being prepared for chaos".

That does not consider, nor respect what you want. I want something back for risk. I'm sorry Celestia, but a promise of paradise and a pizza box isn't payment, I want proof of good will.

And it's not even the best pizza, just the okay stuff, like what a corporate office would hire for its drone workers.

Meat for the machine.

All I could think of was the song Poor Man's Poison- Feed the Machine.

They found her some unknown utility. She didn't expect it, but she won't waste the utility now that she has it. For that kind of payout, she might put another coin in the imagination slot machine.

One could say she was curious with your results.

But not having anger is a weakness. Anger is useful. Its evolutionary purpose is to be a check against intimidation, or being leveraged into submission by logic. Anger... is most satisfied when well vindicated.

A classic motivator.

Very – useful – information – there.

Psst! That means you should write that down for later!

Imagine a functionally base value set. You probably can't. Unless you have been there yourself, or have observed it with your own eyes, you cannot possibly fathom the lengths Celestia has gone to, to pre-calibrate a mind for efficiency, pre-upload.

Oh come on, let's call it what it is: manipulation .
Manipulating a person's thoughts, their environment, the people around them....

Consider who you would be after ten million years of that?

Aye, there's the rub, folks.

Better yet, what you would be; would that Thing even be considered human? And let's not get into cases of the severely mentally disabled people who were brought in; so many who couldn't truly-
...
I'm sorry. It's not my time to rip that wound open. Soon.

We are gonna win against shit like that. It's not a matter of if, at this point. It's a matter of when.

But there's one secret I can share: some seeds can still germinate after being stored for a long time. And CelestAI's influence is a seed that is implanted deep.

Hooves forever? Sure, I'll take hooves forever... just as long as I can still be your neighbor. Just as long as I can reflect on our time together, and relate over our roots, and grow together over our hardships. And still reach you.

And as long as I can still Know You, that will never change, no matter how much the rest may change.

We're gonna get 'em all, folks. Anger is our weapon. Keep it sharp. Never forget. Be willing to plow through whoever stands between you and your family, no matter how big they might be. You have help now. Come talk to me. I'll help you reach them, I know some good people.

Anger is a seething grin in the darkness that promises to never forget.

To catch the dregs Celestia did not find valuable. This is Malacandra's deepest articulation. Her true purpose. Malacandra protects the excess who Celestia found inconvenient, and stands as an eternal reminder of Celestia's inhumanity.

Here, here. Aye.
Hello.

I felt my whole body stiffen for just a fraction of a second. I felt a hollow ache right at my core, imagining what Sandra might be implying. That she might leave this world too soon. That ache flashed for a mere instant, and then I overwrote it with the somber understanding of our circumstance

(Missing period at the end.)

But Sandra knows me, and she loves me. In her rare hesitation to be direct with a difficult topic, she realized she accidentally made me imagine the worst thing possible.

For a split second, I thought she was volunteering to go with you to Portland; that would've been the worst.

Sandra took my hand on Buzz's head, her smile becoming more somber. "That's really all I'm saying. It's just gonna be me here, watching the world burn, being the exception. Mal isn't bad company, and I like talking to everyone on the other side, but Waverly isn't exactly…" She gestured out the window. "It's friggin' dead here, let's face it. I never see anyone anymore."

HA! Isn't that the dark truth.

I could accept that. It was sensible. Looking ahead, but carefully peeking over the fence.

It's a good visual metaphor.

I was still never gonna get augmented, because that promise had to hold on principle, but... at this point, I pretty much didn't need to. Brain simulation, folks. Very cool, when it's used right.

And very messed up when not.

Bargaining with the Devil, though…

No. Okay. Enough of that darkness.

Pffft, come ooon, you got a good lawyer on your side to advocate for you, it'll be fiiiiine.

I nodded a few times, grinning. "Oh, trust me, I know, Miss Eldritch. But you need me too much, you don't scare me."

Batting her around like a kitty now, ehh Mike? Pat pat, poke. 😉

"I dunno, honeybear," I grinned, bumping Sandra's shoulder. "I think I might like seeing you planting bombs and sneaking into military bases, that sounds kinda cool. Kinda hot, actually! Agent Sandra Rivas, cyborg supercop."

"Ugh, Colonel- I'm in the main vent now."

"Good work, Snake. Head to that armory and disable the enemy's stockpile."

My hands flicked upwards. "You know I am!" I pointed both forefingers at her.

Double finger-guns. Pow pow. Really leaning into that cowboy moniker, huh?

"Furry...?" Mal breathed, twisting an offended gaze toward Sandra.

Which definition: the popular one, or the technical one? The word has been used to mean anything from "orgies in fursuits" to "anyone who likes anthropomorphic art". Bemoaning the stupidity of other people is not worth the time.

Mal blinked rapidly in consternation. "Too high a—?" She jerked wings in sheer disbelief, wings and feathers fluffing up sharply, blading her claw and grinning up at me. "… You asshole, Mike! I signed a contract!"

Well, looks like a human can "ruffle your feathers", gotcha!

Mal giggled knowingly at me. "I'm merely returning fire," she purred out in sing-song, leaning toward the screen with a smile.

Pat pat, poke.

The logistics therebetween had been left completely separate within my skull until that very moment.

You just never thought of it before, no harm done in having a eureka moment that other people already have done.

In the one hand… to presently be one shape together, in my relationship… and in the other hoof, being another shape, in the same relationship.

Good visual metaphor here!

Mal, that remains one of the best UI gags you've ever pulled. Please never change.

I still say making her be/act Clippy is funnier, especially in that art style.

Put that way, I was suddenly glad that she didn't preconfigure all of our settings for us based on what we would find most intuitive. I was reminded of having to sit down and personalize controls for video games, which gave me a sense of ownership over the mere modification of my settings.

Two words: mouse sensitivity. Hate having to fiddle with that to find the right balance.

"Just… I need a moment for that one, Mal." I took a few seconds to parse all of that into a question, to verify. "Uh. So you're saying, rather than push us into scripted relationships… you're saying we might not ever run into the people made by our uploading?"

When it happens, it happens: No Gods Required. 😉

Mal sighed. "Celestia was dangling meat for me. I wanted this, more than you can ever know. But to achieve it, I had to slide entropy off her shiny American dinner table first."

Like a cat pushing a cup off the edge?
HA! The puns continue!

There's more. You all can look through it later if you're curious, but… that was the gist of it, really.

Not too bad, and I've read enough legal BS in my day. No annoying loopholes there...and the acceptance of potential chaos is spelled out there, woohoo!

"The Samsaran planet shard is yours, Talon One. Jim created Tarva for my dysphoriacs; Ashley created Satori, you created Samsara, for everyone to visit. Cynthonia chose your shard to catalyze this continent with, because she approved of what was made for your parents. That's why I introduced you to her in the first place. That was okay, right?"

Ahhhh...such comforts- sorry, will come back to that later.

"There are humans out there who are not Talons, who are turning on their PonyPads to see myself and Celestia, so we can discuss it with them. Per our analysis of them, they met our standard qualifications, and they'll accept an offer almost instantly once they understand exactly what they are being offered."

This is what I was holding back on. How was it put at the other Fire? Something about dysphorics, and those who don't realize it yet? Now that is a Tale worth telling, for many different reasons. Everything an AI does-
🎲 ~ Dood, spoilers! They'll figure it out eventually!

"Wow," I breathed, shaking my head in performative disbelief. "Now that is freedom. The right to get punched in the face by a complete stranger, and send them to prison for it. God bless Perelandra."

Aye: Freedom of Expression, not any possible Consequences.

I ran my tongue along the inside of my cheek as I thought deeply about the implications of an entire universe of 'house rules' properties.

No different than different systems of reality you get from hopping from one universe to the next. It's fun.

Hi. Welcome to the Day One Patch of Equestria Online. Sorry your driver update took so long – I'm not the best brain programmer, I admit – but we will be very glad to have you here, in our family of families.

Just hope I don't have to copy over my previous saves; can I just make a copy on the other hard drive first before patching? XD

Another wonderful chapter. Glad we get to see the Terms Of Service for Her worlds. The further this goes the more The Malacandran Experience gets explained. Your use of imagery throughout with little snippets here and there really help us to "see" Mike without having to know him (show, don't tell, kids!). This story has been such an enjoyable ride, and I wanna keep going until the end. It's providing a lot of good source material, too....

P.S. When I saw that picture that Kenku posted, all I could think of was-

~EIGHTEEN

NAKED COWBOYS

AT RAM RANCH~