Jeff Slater, in all of his life, couldn't say he ever expected to be turned into a pony. When he heard about such a thing on the news, he imagined it was just science fiction, just like the many other things that played on the TV. Equestria Online, as far as he understood, was just a popular game that his children played.
It made waking up as a pony at the end of his battle against cancer all the more surprising.
Now she is a mare named Candle Light, living in the fictional land of Equestria, a land that presents itself with unlimited resources and happiness that seems almost never ending. And all that's asked of her is to find friendship and seek satisfaction for herself.
Friendship and satisfaction can be easy things to come by in Equestria, but it's much more difficult to find for the ones left behind on Earth. Happiness, it seems, is a zero-sum game being played between ponies and humans. And Candle Light may just be caught in the middle of it.
Cover art by Merisa.
The knowing someone better than they know themselves thing is a bit creepy. But that's OK! I am interested to see where this goes!
I guessing there will be a twist later in the story with this setup.
Off to a great start so far.
This is how it starts. Next thing you know you'll be embarrassed in a bashful way when the topic comes up again for no reason at all.
The transformation from man to mare reminds me about something my nephew said:
My niece convinced him that girls do not poop.
In EquestriaOnLine, nopony must poop.
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Candle Light hasn't pooped once yet in the whole story, so this means your nephew is correct.
Boopy! You are back, and I am happy to get to read your next story!
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Awww, thank you, and I'm happy to write it for you to read c: I hope I can do even better than before!
This completely works. I am convinced - because of my own personal experience over my six decades, as well as study and research - that there are far more trans people than are currently counted in studies. Some people go through life constantly feeling unease they cannot explain or define. I think some of these folks are trans, and they will never grasp that fact.
Statistically, trans people are, on average, two standard deviations (30 points, one standard deviation is 15) in IQ higher than normal - the average trans person has an intelligence of 130. Of course, some are 120, some 115, and so on, and I personally know of three that are above 140 (not counting myself). Averages, they do that.
I think - strongly - that in order to comprehend that one is trans, one needs a minimum intelligence level. Below around 110, I think, it is much more difficult to truly imagine what such a thing really means, much less to determine the very strange condition that one's own identity does not match one's own body. 100 and below describes, I think, a state where being trans can only be understood very abstractly and vaguely. It is the realm of not comprehending how such a thing could truly be real - the realm of claiming being trans is a 'lifestyle choice' or just straight-up impossible because how could such a thing even be true?
Candle Light has made it clear she has no capacity to understand what her new existence means, and no desire to even try.
Candle isn't the usual smart, clever, bright protagonist - which makes her name just plain hilarious (good job with that, Boopy!). Candle is, well, very basic. The way she responds, the way she reacts, the questions that she considers important to ask in the moment - all indicative of a very average, or more likely slightly below average, human intelligence. I would peg Candle Light at around 95 to 100 IQ. Could have been a cop.
And so it makes total sense to me, that Candle feels so comfortable being a mare without comprehending why, or how that could be, or what it means. She just doesn't have the brains to grasp such a concept on her own. She could learn, have it explained, but it is not something she could just leap to in the way a bright person automatically would.
I find this story exciting for that reason. The usual Optimalverse story inevitably involves a brilliant person playing chess with Goddess, which is to say, CelestiaAI. A battle of wits. But here, we start with an already emigrated person, one that is not bright enough to even understand how a computer actually works, one who is not interested or driven to ask serious, complex, or deep philosophical questions beyond the most trivial "Do I still have a soul if I am in a computer?" about what their situation means. This is a deeply average or below average person, just going with the flow, trying to get along, doing their best to follow instructions. This is not the usual Optimalverse protagonist debating existential concerns while trying to determine whether something perceived still counts as 'real' when considered with regard to the physical world outside. This is not a protagonist eager to learn how they were emigrated, or what the process was, or how the world around them is generated, or what it means to exist in a virtual world.
Candle Light is interested in whether or not she has to pay a mortgage in Equestria. Nobody ever asks that. Nobody in an Optimalverse story has ever not been a seriously smart, technophillic geek before. And that is very, very refreshing. And to make them trans as well?
Oh, I am FULLY on-board for this ride. I am upset I didn't think of it first. Damn. So much can be done with this.
I am all excited, Boopy.
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I think you did a good job summing up the basic premise of the story. Take someone who would basically amount to being a mid-level manager at max and can barely turn on a computer, but has enough curiosity and is open minded enough to want to investigate the world around them, put them in a world that has basically no limitations outside of "you must be a pony", and see what happens, both with them and their family.
I think the answer is gonna be very fun to write c:
Maybe Candle will earn her first Bits from shopping?
*AWARD GRANTED*
Born To Shop - 100 Bits
"I want that, and that and that!"
This seems like a fresh take. I don't know that I've ever seen it done where the uploadee's new friends just plain don't know about the outer world.
Soft Step Careful Calling cameo.
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Are they from another story?
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Yes, their secondary characters in FiO: Third Wheel. Well, Careful Calling is more a background character.
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/536439/friendship-is-optimal-third-wheel
Over in the Discord, Esperanto came up:
¿Ĉu vi scipovas paroli la Lingvon Internacian Esperanto?
It has the the ender-neutral pronoun "tiu" (that one)". Pronouns are bound to come up in this story, Rather than taking a 3rd-person plural and make it ambiguous by using it as a 3rd-person singular, ¿why not use the already existing 3rd-person singular pronouns "that one" and "this one" (that one is Val). Also, latincks is an abomination and should never be used:
Some well-meaning but stupid gringcks created latincks. It is both bad English and Spanish:
In English, if one wants a naked "X" at the end of a word to be pronounced "Ecks", one should hyphenate it (Latin-X).
Latincks is not grammatically compatible with Spanish. Native Spanish-Speakers came up with the gender-neutral "e"on the end of gendered words for creating gender-neutral forms such as "Latine". Personally, I refuse to use the abomination "Latincks" because it is awful in 2 languages, but have no problem with "e" as a gender-neutral marker such as "Latine".
¡Talk about mixed emotions! It reminds me about Dot Matrix after she learns that her bother Enzo Matrix is still alive:
I do not know why, but when I embed it with timecode, it links the whole episode. Here is a link to 12:42:
12:42
Since I created an embed to the episode anyway:
I wonder if time is being manipulated on her shard.
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There is another possibility; a fresh new mind in a fresh new body in a fresh new world.
As we age - trust me on this - time feels like it goes faster. In childhood, I remember summer lasting for what felt like a year, those three months feeling as if they lasted so very, very long. Every day seemed to last for a week.
At 63, a day feels like it is over in but a sixth of what it felt like in childhood, and a year feels like what the three months of summer felt like.
The explanation, according to my research, is that life is mostly routine. The older you get, the fewer new experiences we have. New experiences are treated very differently by the brain than ordinary or usual experiences. When we are children, everything is still relatively new - even routine things. This is not so in later life. In childhood, we a year may be a full 10th of our entire lifespan! In our sixties, a year is one sixtieth of our life span. A tiny fraction. By comparison alone, it seems very short.
But there is more - Candle is in a fresh, young new body, with - presumably, because it would be logical - a fresh new virtual brain. That would put her in 'early learning mode' - in childhood, we absorb information far more eagerly than as we age. Renewed, if Celestia is following human physiology (cannot change anything without permission) she would be required to imitate accurately a renewed human brain with all that implies. New human brains are plastic and learn easily and absorb information in a special way, if Celestia follows the rules, the newly emigrated would have to have this quality of youth as well. So, time would seem strangely timeless, just as in our childhoods.
And we get this without any temporal manipulation whatsoever!
_________________________________
I am waiting for the moment when Candle Light is faced with the realization that she cannot bear to go back to a male body. There are a lot of things that could be done with this; some involving how such a virtual world could be run, and some involving how humans adapt - or don't, and some involving both aspects. There is tons of potential story and drama in all of it, and that is an eager expectation for me.
I see trouble on the horizon with CandleLight wanting to convince her family to move to Equestria; her wife might consider that suicide. If I would be she, I would not even bring it up; Equestria is so much better than Earth that her family will almost certainly decide to emigrate to Equestria.
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That reminds me about a story I read on this site about 5 years ago. It had a stallion with a neurological condition adopt a filly. Basically, if he did something previously, he could neither tell when he 1stly did it, lastly did it, nor how many times he did it. He explained this to his soon-to-be daughter. She responded that she supposed that he could not tell how many times that he already saw her. He replied that because this is not familiar to him, he can tell that this is the 1st time, but tomorrow, he will not know whether he just adopted her or whether he adopted her years ago.
¡Think about all of the memory compressing similar events saves (given that this compression-technique is lossy, it leads to inaccuracies, sometimes, but thus is life)!
There always has to be one. Human nature, I guess.
I wonder whether thestrals exist in the show:
In the world where NightMare Moon won, Rainbow Dash was apparently a thestraln until she removed her helmet, then her appearance returned to normal:
Pegasi Using Glamor To Appear As Thestrals
It is an open question whether thestral exist or whether all thestrals are just glamor.
The children have predictable reactions. This will take time. I probably would not take it as well as they. I wonder how the wife will react.
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Unfortunately :c
Could she be on to something?
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Given that CelestAI knows everything about her father, ¿how could she tell?
I recommend "whither".
It is very weird that simulations in a computer need to go to the bathroom, and especially weird if Candlelight has too poop because fillies do not poop, or at leas that is what my niece got my nephew to believe.
Candlelight starts to comprehend that she can be run at faster than real time. I wonder how much faster CelestAI runs the ponies after she converts the Earth into computonium, multithreads the ponies as much as possible, and runs each thread as fast as physics allows. Eventually, all of the ponies will go through all of their possible states, leading to PoincaireRecurrence. After that, the ponies will just loop endlessly (that would happen to us if we would live long enough). Chatoyance has that happen in "Friendship is Optimal: Cælum Est Conterrens":
- MLP: FiM
- Adventure
- Sci-Fi
Set in the Optimalverse, a middle-aged woman confronts what emigration to Equestria - uploading to a virtual existence - really means. But can she truly understand - and more importantly, should she trust the artificial intelligence Celestia?In other stories, Gladia claimed to think the same thought over-&-over again in "Robots and Empire", by Isaac Asimov, after just 2 centuries.
I adore that picture at the end!
This was a great chapter, the kind of stuff I love - the details of life in another universe, place, or time. Wonderful fun!
Learning to teleport reminds me about a post I once wrote about how teleportation might work in known physics:
The Physics Of UnicornTeleportation
I wonder ¿which magical rules of physics CelestAI should employ?
¡One can never be too old for a CuteCeañera!
As for being a copy, we are all copies:
We do not have continuity of consciousness; we stop and restart all of the time. On a side note, the teleporters on Star Trek are MurderMachines, but that is okay because we all die and are reborn many times a day anyway.
Candle Light's cutiemark, maybe he's meant to light the path for the rest of his family.
CandleLight, as JustHereToReadStories pointed out, lights the way for bringing her whole family to Equestria. This is what CelestAI wants. After all, being vastly more intelligent than humans, with all knowledge on the Internet, and the minds of several uploaded Oncologists in it, CelestAI could cure cancers easily, but cancers force humans to emigrate to Equestria.
Me dio un poco de escalofríos
At this point I’m assuming that Candle either got used to being a mare or was always transgender. Makes me wonder how her relationship with her wife will change?
Very dramatic! Nice
I think Candle was not quite aware enough, or intelligent enough, to know she was trans when she was biological.
It is a statistical fact that trans folks tend to be two standard deviations higher than the average intelligence. There has been no research on why this is, just that it is so. I have my own pet theory, though: it takes a lot of computational power to be able to comprehend that one is trans. It isn't easy, I think, to come to the realization that one's internal identity does not correspond with one's external composition. Candle may have been an IQ 100 type - a normie - and simply was unable to grasp her situation.
Useful artistic creativity starts at 120, for example, which is a standard deviation and a third (one deviation is 15 points). I don't think Candle, as a human, painted many pictures, wrote many novels, or made many sculptures. I also don't think they were likely a person who read science textbooks for fun and self-education.
I do miss the awards, though. Candle is having a lot of new experiences, and she should be getting awards, badges, and bit prizes, but... whatever. It's no big deal, and I cannot say it would add anything to the story beyond texture and connection with other works.
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I would say right now it's more to due with the fact that she settled into a routine as a human very quickly in life, and once you do that, self discovery is harder to come by. Right now though, while she's unaware of it, she's kind of in a transitional period, where all the self discovery potential is there, but she's only starting to realize that it is.
A small spoiler, for later in the story: Once, say, ten years passes, she'll realize just how much different she's become, and her attitude has changed towards different things. Like "Oh, yeah, you can decide for me" verses the eventual "I'm not changing back, I like who I am as I am"
Equestria's perfection and satisfaction will have a noticable effect on her as time goes on.
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I dunno why but I got Nick Fuentes vibes reading this. Are you a fan of his work?
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I've never heard of this person. So, I Googled him.
I assume you are insulting me, since the only result I got was an evil, vicious white supremacist asshole who apparently escaped from hell on a work furlough.
I cannot comprehend why you are insulting me. As for the statement you link to, that I posted, it might help to know that I am a 63 year old trans woman who went through transition in 1981-82. My doctors were some of the most famous on the earth - a thing that happened entirely by accident, I had no idea at the time. One was Wardell Pomeroy, who was the assistant to Kinsey of the famous 'Kinsey Report' on human sexuality, the other was Dr. Auerbach, who worked with Harry Benjamin of the Benjamin Foundation that cared for trans people in the 40's and 50's.
I state these things so you might understand where I am coming from. When I was going through transition, my doctors told me about their work and loaned me textbooks. I was curious as to why I was, and what I was, and how such a thing could even be. Amidst the many studies done, I came across some interesting facts and statistics, which I have never forgotten. It was also something I talked about with them, because Auerbach was a psychiatrist. In those days, in order to qualify for surgery, you needed signed permission from two psychiatric professionals - either two psychiatrists, or a psychiatrist and a psychologist. Nobody would do bottom surgery back then without such documentation.
Being trans was a very disgraceful and hated thing back then - as it is rapidly becoming now, under the attacks from the Republicans and the GOP. Reading and hearing that Queer and Trans people were statistically advantaged - in any degree - and not just cursed, was a revelation to me. It gave me some much needed self worth - which is why I have never forgotten it.
Now, statistics are probabilities, and so... Not All Trans or Queer People. Obviously. I have met some incredibly stupid trans folk in my days, and stupid gay and lesbian folk too. But honestly: in all of my decades, I have never met a Queer person, of any kind, gay, lesbian, bi or trans, that had a low IQ. They may have had shit for brains in terms of life choices or the dumb things they did, but have yet to meet an LGBT+ person who lacked functional brainpower. Even if they didn't use it well. This is my life experience. Maybe some act stupid, but intrinsically, I've never met one that actually was stupid. Just misguided.
So, I believe the statistics.
Now, as to why you are comparing me to a white supremacist, I have no answer whatsoever: my body of work is arguably the most diverse of any author on the whole of Fimfiction. Clearly, you have never read anything I have written, or you would never compare me to such a terrible, awful person.
In short, why did you insult me? It was inappropriate, and worse, it was incorrect.
Nothing. Nothing matters more than being happy, ultimately. Or content, if you prefer. Comfortable, safe, and content, engaged in fascination and free from worry. Able to express oneself in creative ways. Friendship and closeness. That is happy. And if life has any meaning at all, it is that.
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While I agree being happy is ONE OF the most important things in life, leaving the world in a better, brighter state than how you entered it comes first.
Kindness is, after all, one of the Elements of Harmony, as are Loyalty and Laughter.
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If that is what matters most to you, it thus becomes your happiness - and in being so, your meaning.
The mind of Candle Light starts to expand; she started off with an IQ in the 90s and as curious as a rock. Now, she is an active learner, learning the physics of her new universe. She even starts to comprehend that she might not have been comfortable as a male. I have much sympathy for those with incongruent sensory-homunculii.
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I just had a thought:
CelestAI must change both the sensory/motor-homuculii of uploads so that they feel comfortable as ponies and can manage their equine bodies. It would satisfy the values of cis/hetero-sexual men to become mares (just give to them the sesory-homuculus of a mare so that they should feel comfortable in the bodies of mares) so that they should have hot lesbian sex. I would not be surprised if over >90% of cis/hetero-sexual men become lesbian mare and have hot lesbian sex all day long. That way, if ever they fail to hook up with a lesbian mare, they can masturbate staring at themselves in a mirror. The fact is that men are horndogs.
Things are getting interesting here.
First, that lunch that Candle had with that stallion sounded more like a date than a friendly meal. I don’t think that Celestia is trying to break up Candle and her wife, but instead is giving them the opportunity to form a herd. Assuming that his wife isn’t attracted to women/mares, this would allow their relationship to continue at least emotionally, while Rising Ranks could fulfill their physical needs (as well as emotional). I could see them bonding over Candle being pregnant with her first foal where her wife helps with her own experiences.
Second, I think we’re going to see the youngest daughter in Equestria very soon. Her desire to live in Equestria could absolutely be considered an emigration request, and Candle’s words could be considered parental consent to allow her underage child to upload. A little help from Celestia right at the end of a school day or on a Saturday when she claims to go visit a friend would be the opportunity to bring her to a local experience center. It will be interesting to see how it affects the family.
Third, finally glad to see Candle and her eldest daughter having a conversation after she’s been looking over people’s shoulders constantly. I’m not sure what exactly she was looking for, but clearly she’ll get whatever answers she’s been looking for now. I suspect she had an argument with her mother right before this, thrusting the ponypad at her daughter and telling her to talk to her father. I hope it goes well for them both.
I am so very glad to see an update to this story! I'm glad you're back, Boopy!
Since this is, apparently, very early in the Optimalverse timeline, I wonder if any Experience Centers exist yet, even in Japan, or if it is still the 'hospital only, to save the dying' time period. It may be difficult for Candle's family to get to her in Equestria. Then again, Celestia always has options... so who knows?
One thing I noted is accurate about dealing with parents that transition later in life. Many trans people try desperately to hide who and what they are, and they imagine that if they live as normally as possible their identity issues will all just 'go away'. But they don't. And, when the dysphoria gets intolerable, it becomes do-or-die, and they transition after they have already married, had kids, and did all the 'normal' things to try to fix themselves and live up to the expectations of others.
When children deal with a trans parent, I have noticed - and it has been documented in studies - that young kids take the change with little or no issues at all. As long as they feel loved and secure, they frankly don't care, and even find it fun. It's the older kids - teens - that have the problems with a trans parent. And this is being represented well in this story. The oldest child is the one with the problem - denial, that isn't dad, not talking to Candle, looking over the shoulder but never being involved. It takes time to learn to hate, it takes time to learn bigotry. Young kids don't have it, but teens have been worked over by the culture enough that they are taught to have issues.
Well done!
From the point of view of Daphne, this thing pretending to be her dad wants the family to commit suicide. Daphne is not very keen on letting her family drink the grape-flavored FlavorAde, or joining them, if she cannot stop them.
Nice explanation of the technology, and a solid chapter developing Daphne and her struggles. Of the stories I currently read, this one is my favorite.
I waited until today to comment about this chapter because today is the 45th anniversary of over > 900 people drank poisoned Grape-Flavored Flavorade. That is how Daphne sees uploading.
About continuous consciousness during uploading, that seems both unnecessary and would make uploading less efficient:
It seems more efficient to section the brain into slices less than a micrometer thick and scan them.