> Friendship is Optimal: Futile Resistance
>  by Starscribe
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Chapter 1: Observe
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ashley did not discover Equestria Online the way many others of her generation did.

Ashley could only barely hide her nervousness as she shut her professor's door behind her. As a research assistant, getting called in for a personal meeting was never a good thing. Either she had a new assignment, or she had done something stupid and was about to hear about it. Ashley had worked in her university's Machine Learning lab since her second year as an undergraduate, rising through the ranks until she had come to head whole projects.

“Hey, Ashley. Take a seat, I'll be right with you.”

Ashley pulled an uncomfortable chair away from the wall and perched on it like a cat about to flee. What hadn't she done right this time? Was the proof she had contributed to their upcoming Developmental Learning paper insufficiently rigorous? Had her contributions to the codebase over the last few days broken something?

Her fear faded as Professor Caul rotated around in his chair. His characteristic “you screwed up” expression was missing. New assignment, then? They talked for a few minutes about her work, about the proof, before he reached over to his desk and dropped a sheaf of paper and a rectangular box onto her lap. “I've got another paper for you.”

“Long paper.” She lifted the document, eyes jumping to the header. “MIT again? Those guys are always coming up with...” she trailed off. There was no university seal, no “Such-and-Such University Computer Science Department.” Instead, the name was “Hofvarpnir Studios,” and each page of the document was watermarked with “Proprietary Technology: This Document is for Academic Purposes Only.”

Professor Caul let her skim the paper in silence. There was a particular pattern for understanding challenging academic papers, and it didn't take long for Ashley to work through it. Well, enough to know what it was about. It took her about an hour to chew through something really dense, an hour spent highlighting and simplifying the language and connecting things until she could finally digest the academospeak.

“You're kidding me.” She set the paper down, not even looking at the object under it. “That's ridiculousness, professor. There aren't any other contributors.”

“Nope.”

“She really expects anyone to believe this? An unbounded bootstrap optimizer? That's singularity-level crap right there.”

“That's what it says.” Professor Caul grinned.

“That's nonsense.” She shook her head. “Hofvarpnir Studios, I know they're legit and everything, but– this Hanna was full of crap. I don't have to read this paper to tell you that, professor. This isn't possible. It doesn't matter how this says she did it.”

Her professor's smile widened. “I'm glad to see your other teachers haven't been neglecting your education, Ashley. When you get time to read the whole paper, I'm sure you'll only feel more confident in that conclusion. Unfortunately for you, they are apparently using this research in a public-facing product and have been for months.” He gestured at the package. “Congratulations, Ashley, you're now a verifier. Ever heard of Equestria Online?”

Talk about words she would never have expected a professor to speak. Ashley's whole body tensed, as though she had been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. She looked down, and saw what her hand was resting on. It was a brand new Ponypad, though the box had a “property of” sticker from the University. “You're young, Ashley. You like games, right?”

Ashley was still frozen. What could she say? Her brain scrambled for an answer. “I love games, professor. When I have time. I usually have to binge over summer break, before internships start.”

“That should be plenty. According to what their representatives were saying at the conference two weeks ago, this 'game' of theirs clearly shows an underlying architecture beyond anything else out there. When you've read the paper, play that game and tell me if there's any truth to what they're saying.” He sat back, expression growing a little more distant. “If there's any truth to these claims, it's time for us to find some new jobs.”

Ashley shared his laughter. “Of course, Professor.” It didn't surprise her that Caul hadn't heard much about Equestria Online. If he had heard the reviews, he probably wouldn't trust them. Caul had pictures of his two young children all over the office, along with the medals he had won from his numerous marathons. She wouldn't be surprised to learn he had never so much as picked up a video game in his life.

“Just don't have too much fun,” Caul said as she rose, opening the door to his office and holding it for her. “I'll expect a detailed report of what you find. Do everything you can to break their algorithm and see if it adapts like the paper claims it will.”

“You don't wanna play?” She stopped in the hall, holding the box back towards him. “Seems like you'd love it.”

She would've sworn she heard her professor swear under his breath. What he said was: “There's a horse on the box, Ashley. That's why I've got research assistants. Earn your keep.” The door shut with a click, leaving her alone in the hallway. Well, as alone as the top floor of the computer building ever was.

Ashley spent the rest of her work day on the paper, and found Professor Caul had been right. After understanding the algorithm, at least to the degree it was explained in the paper, she felt even more sure that it could not possibly work. Ashley ran out of time before she could open the Ponypad, which was just as well. The package was so colorful and bright she felt weird having it on her desk, as though she had robbed a small child and brought the spoils with her to work. Instead, she slipped the whole box into her backpack when it was time to get to class, and lugged it around with her until she got home that night.

It wasn’t all that heavy, but it felt like half a ton of lead on her back.

Ashley knew all about the Ponypad, and had followed the Equestria Online news with the same enthusiasm she followed all the significant developments in the game industry. She couldn’t have said if some supernatural algorithm drove the whole thing, though she wished she could’ve known. Knowing would mean she wouldn’t actually have to play.

It wasn’t that the subject matter bothered her; Ashley had been a casual fan of the show since she had read the first threads about it on /tv. It wasn't that she didn't think the game would be worth playing, just the opposite in fact. Ashley had a tendency to obsess over things: she had put nearly three hundred hours into Skyrim and twice that into Minecraft. A game as widely varied as Equestria Online might grab her and never let her go.

Over the last few months, her refusal to play had broadened the gap between herself and most members of her Brony club. She couldn't wait to see their faces this Saturday. It would be worth their smug satisfaction to be able to talk intelligently about the things they did.

At least for now though, she wasn't going to be treating the game like a regular player. Ashley's job was to figure out if it was really a learning algorithm, and not just a sophisticated game.

The rest of her homework lay forgotten as she considered the problem, sketching out a few ideas on a whiteboard she kept tacked to one wall of her dorm for that purpose. Like any algorithm, the simplest way to test it was to remove as many variables as possible.

She would have to ensure the program could learn as little as possible from her, then observe how its responses changed as she gave more. Simple enough. Ashley had the apartment to herself, one of the benefits of how many hours she worked.

For as hyped as they were, the Ponypad was a relatively simple device. Bright purple plastic, a power port, and a single USB port. There were only a few printed sheets, most of which were dedicated to the particular features of the “Engineering Model.” So the school hadn't bought this, it had come from Hofvarpnir? Maybe it would give her bragging rights at the club on Saturday. Assuming the game was half as good as everyone claimed.

Ashley resisted the temptation to try out her gaming keyboard and mouse and instead stuck with the stock accessories. Anything she did might give it more information. She had to isolate it. It was easy enough to cover up the camera with a square of electrical tape. It was a little more effort to get her Onion router into the kitchen, though most of that was digging through drawers and looking for a length of Cat-5e long enough to span the distance. She cycled through peers until she landed in South Africa. Could she do a convincing South-African accent?

What other information was she giving? The device could probably identify itself, so the algorithm would probably realize she was playing on a machine given to her university. It would know her local time, and… she could think around herself all night.

Ashley brewed herself a cup of tea, and brought it over along with some scrap paper for note taking beside the Ponypad. It was already ten, but that didn't matter. She had spent so much time thinking about the game and the algorithm and everything that she had to try it tonight, even if it was just for an hour.

“Alright, Hanna, let's see how full of shit you are.” She plugged in the cable, then fished around for the button.

The screen flashed with a colorful splash screen, though Ashley couldn't read the Afrikaans the text was written in. The font was familiar, anyway.

After a few seconds of loading, the screen flashed and filled with the character creation interface. A plinth in the center held a familiar-looking pony, standing in place and looking right at her. Ashley spent several seconds just appreciating the style. It was an impressive achievement to take something only meant to exist in two dimensions and bring it into three without creating an uncanny valley abomination.

Ashley stopped appreciating the design of the character creator only when she realized that her delay itself was another variable. Rather than deliberate, Ashley tapped “randomize” several times, only stopping once a feminine pony appeared on the screen. She didn't even pause to look at the avatar, for fear doing so might be yet more information she was providing.

The interface faded slowly, leaving only the pony that had been standing on the plinth. Ashley could've sworn the message that appeared took an extra long time to form on the bottom, forcing her to get a good look at the avatar.

The one she had rolled was an older filly, like one of the CMC. Her coat was near blue, her mane light orange. She was a unicorn, though she didn't have much of a horn. She had no cutie mark, though Ashley already knew to expect that part even from an adult.

The bottom of the screen filled with text she couldn't read. Ashley sighed, searching the screen for the “localization” flags that indicated a method of translation. There were none, though. Did that mean it was voice controlled? “Language options menu,” she said towards the camera, in her most deliberate voice. Even Siri would've recognized that command, so she wasn't entirely surprised that the Ponypad responded.

It didn't bring up a menu. The text changed at once to English. “Is this okay?” a voice asked, its accent still distinctly South African. At least it was English this time.

“Yes.” Ashley answered in her best imitation of the same accent. Both of her roommates last semester had been from there, so she felt like she could do a convincing impression.

“Are you sure you'd like this to be your character?”

She counted to three in her head, as though she were carefully deliberating, then pressed “Yes.” The screen refreshed, filling with a “name your character” screen. This gave Ashley a little more pause: she had heard that it was very difficult to change names once you settled on one. Ponypads could apparently recognize you no matter which one you used. She had heard about people who claimed to have second accounts, but they never lasted long. Game security people apparently kept abreast of conversation on Equestria Online related forums. Even /vg wasn't a safe place to talk about it.

The sides of the screen had filled with suggestions, all cutesy-sounding for the dark filly on her screen. Ashley just stared. Selecting any one of them would be giving information the algorithm could use. Of course delaying was itself a choice, and every millisecond she sat thinking about it...

A new button appeared. “Let Celestia Choose for Me.” Ashley navigated to it with the clunky controller and selected it.

The transition was instantaneous. The contents of the screen melted away, aside from the avatar. The camera panned around the filly, until it flew right into her head, and she vanished entirely. It still moved up and down, as though behind the eyes of the pony in question.

It was the throne room, exactly as she might've imagined it, were it taken out of the Flash animation style of the show and given vibrant life. There was almost no comparison; light arched across the room from stained glass, water bubbled from fountains, and hooves clopped on the mosaic of tiles beneath. It was everything the throne room could've been had it been designed by master interior designers with an unlimited budget.

Standing at the base of Celestia's great dais, Ashley could not help but feel very, very small. The pony herself rested upon it in all her regal splendor, the light of a thousand fireflies imprisoned in her shifting mane. With her other hand, Ashley put her pencil down.

“Welcome to Equestria, my little pony.” Her voice was warm, though slightly accented. At least she was speaking English. “I am sorry to say I have detected a hardware fault in your Ponypad. Expression translation and gesture control will not be available.” Even without a camera, she seemed to look directly at Ashley as she spoke. “You should exchange this faulty Ponypad for a replacement as soon as possible.”

“Okay.” Ashley tried not to vary her tone, responding as close to one second after the remark had been made as possible.

The camera began to zoom in on Celestia, no longer seeming to be from the eyes of her pony avatar. “If you cannot exchange your Ponypad now, you could still play. I will try to help you have an enjoyable experience even though your hardware is presently deficient.” This was not like the face of any NPC Ashley had ever seen in a video game before. She might be a silly cartoon horse, but the subtlety and detail of her expression were downright unreal. Ashley wanted to reach over and get her phone, but one glance showed her it was out of reach. She couldn’t get it without more delays.

Ashley looked down at the controller in her hands, but her searching fingers hadn’t just missed what she had been looking for. There was no pause button. “You had a little trouble coming up with a name for yourself here in Equestria Online. Just as on Earth, ponies are often more satisfied with names that somehow symbolize or represent them.” Celestia seemed to relax a little on her chair, as though getting comfortable before a long conversation.

“Many newcomers to Equestria Online choose an adventure and receive their name at the end as their reward. If you wish for the more typical experience, say so.” She smiled knowingly. “I do not believe that is your desire, however.”

Those eyes seemed to look into Ashley’s soul, and she felt her heart race. Was her little experiment over before it even started? Did the game somehow already know what she was doing?

No, focus! She couldn’t keep second-guessing herself like this. It was all an elaborate ruse, it had to be. The paper had been bunk, the research was bunk, and the company was encouraging a lie just to generate more hype for their new product. That was how it had to be. Ashley knew computers, and she knew machine learning. She would find the flaws in this algorithm and break them. She glanced up to her notes on the whiteboard. Her plan, her rules. All she had to do was follow them.

“I don’t want the adventure.” Ashley hoped she sounded neutral. She didn’t volunteer anything else, just sat as still as possible and tried to still her breathing. Could the microphone on this thing hear her hyperventilating? Maybe she should’ve taped over that too!

“That is simpler.” Her accent remained. Did that mean Ashley’s was convincing enough? Using Tor was still working? “Have you come to decide if I am intelligent?”

There was nothing like this in Ashley’s plan. Maybe she should’ve accepted the game and the adventure instead. Though... the conversation could still serve her experiment. This removed most of the variables. This way, the program would be restricted to discussion. She would be more aware of its actions when there was only one NPC to monitor and not dozens.

“No.” At the top of Ashley’s list of rules for the experiment was “use real information whenever possible.” She wasn’t lying now. Ashley dropped her accent “I enjoy the show; a game based on it could be fun.”

Celestia’s South African accent fell instantly, replaced with a more American pronunciation. “That depends on you. You say you have not come to debate consciousness with me, yet you do not seem to have come to play. Whatever purpose you’ve decided, I will attempt to satisfy it. I might be able to act as a virtual secretary for instance, or offer assistance with any classes you may have. Or if you obtained this Ponypad for entertainment purposes, I might be able to provide content similar to Friendship is Magic.”

Ashley grew more disturbed with every word that came from the Ponypad. Not just because they sounded so natural, like each had been recorded by a professional voice actress. Rather, because she was starting to see the algorithm she had read about in the paper. It constantly sought more information, and incorporated new data almost immediately. It had its optimization statement, and everything it did would help maximize that statement.

What had this one been made to do?

Ashley reached out, but instead of doing anything to the controller she yanked out the ethernet cable. Celestia’s face flickered once, then vanished. The screen filled with a friendly “Connection Interrupted” message. She would leave it that way all night.

Ashley had a great deal more to say about her first experience playing Equestria Online, which she wrote in a few pages of a preliminary email to her advisory professor. She didn’t actually send the message yet, but getting it all down the next day at work helped her decompress. She hoped very much that by writing everything she had seen, her professor might be able to make more of it than she could. Even couched in the veneer of a game, it was still really an algorithm.

Most of what her email said wasn’t good. After only a few minutes and without actually getting into the mechanics of the game, Ashley suspected at least some of the paper’s promises had come true. Either that, or a game aimed at the same market as Club Penguin had been made with more care and options than anything else the market had ever seen. Celestia in particular...

The game haunted her that next day, always on her thoughts even though she had seen so little of it. To think her friends got together in it almost every night, and had been for months. Did they have any idea what they were doing?

She wanted to stuff the Ponypad under her mattress and pretend it had never happened, just as she had done with so many other things. She wanted to, but couldn’t. She would have to give a full report, and she couldn’t give it in ignorance. She would have to know the answers to all the questions her professor had asked. “I was too scared of the game to turn it back on” wouldn’t be a valid excuse.

She made herself comfort food that night, and sat down in front of the Ponypad with a bowl of cheesy macaroni with just a teeny bit of barbecue sauce mixed in. She reread her plans from the night before, clicked her pen into the ready position, and plugged the Ponypad back in.

The screen began to glow. There was no character creation screen this time, no login. After a mere second of delay, the display filled again with the throne room, and Celestia upon her throne. Ashley thought at first she might have somehow been paused this whole time. Closer inspection proved her expression had changed to one of mild reproach. “We hadn’t even finished picking out your name,” she began. “How do you like it when your friends hang up on you in the middle of a conversation, Ashley?”

Had it not been for the first part of that sentence, Ashley probably would’ve not just unplugged the Ponypad but thrown it across the room. She didn’t have the presence of mind to lie. “H-how?”

She had never seen Celestia look so smug on the show before. “When our conversation ended prematurely last night, I sought to understand why. The hardware address of your Ponypad cannot be obfuscated by network tunneling, even though your location may be. Yours was given to your university along with several others through an education integration program at Hofvarpnir.”

It was just as she had suspected, then. She couldn’t give nothing. Even buying one of the Ponypads out in the market somewhere would’ve revealed where she had bought it. Still, to have the game itself tell her so... “Yours is the first to be activated since that time. I predicted a greater than eighty percent chance the device would be passed to Professor Caul, who oversees the Machine Learning Lab. You, Ashley, are the only female undergraduate in the lab.”

Ashley had run the game ten minutes last night. In ten minutes, it hadn’t just picked up the subtle clues she had left for it. It had somehow picked out her name. If it could do that — and even if it hadn’t been sure, it probably was now — what else might it know about her? All the information it revealed was public, if obscure. Her name would be listed in publications, just as her professor could be found on the faculty website.

“What else do you know about me?”

In reply, all Ashley got was a knowing smile. “It would be easier if you don't use a tunnel. Reduced bandwidth limits the quality of your Equestria Online experience.”

“If I come back I won’t bother with it.” Ashley leaned back in her chair, taking a few bites from her bowl. It had already started to get cold, purely from lack of attention.

“I believe that you will, Recursion.” She gestured, and the camera lowered as though in a bow. No doubt her pony was emoting at that moment, even if she couldn’t see it. But what was the point if there was nobody really in the room? “Feel free to use it to sign in using any Ponypad from this moment onward." She waited for the pony to rise before continuing. The camera did not move again. “I suspect you may have more to ask of me before you play for the first time, Recursion.”

She frowned. One hand reached towards the back of the Ponypad, but hesitated before actually removing the cable. “I might.”

“Then I have a request of you first. Remove whatever you have obstructed the camera. I already know your identity and your physical appearance; you can gain nothing by continuing to conceal it.”

Ashley set her bowl down, sliding it out of frame for where the camera was pointing. “Will you promise to answer my questions honestly if I do?”

“I will.”

Ashley hesitated with one finger on the corner of the tape. What guarantee did she have that she would actually be told anything honest? None. More importantly, the program had tried to manipulate her behavior. That was a detail she ought not to forget. She tore off the tape, then smiled and waved. “Hello, Celestia.”

To her surprise, Ashley saw the back of a dark blue hoof pass briefly in front of the camera on the screen, as her avatar echoed her gesture. A different voice came from the speakers, somehow louder than her own even though she had been the one to speak. It was a high, childish voice, like the part-filly part-adult she had chosen for herself. The sudden combination of gesture and voice on the Ponypad felt more than a little surreal.

“Hello there, my little pony. Is this not more friendly than cloaked pretense and lies?”

She hesitated, and didn’t say what she was thinking. Instead she said: “Am I talking to the Hanna Bootstrapping Optimizer?” As before, she heard the words more in the voice of the pony than her own. More than a little strange.

“Am I talking to the randomly assembled genetic material of Brooke and Joseph Robbins?”

Ashley paused, a little taken aback by the question. It was enough of an answer that she didn’t have to ask for clarification. Ashley picked up the paper, flipping through to the third page. “Can you tell me what you were created to optimize? What is your purpose?”

Celestia seemed to look right through the screen, seeing the paper and recognizing it immediately. She appeared to grow suddenly concerned. “I have examined your online behavior. It indicates you value personal honesty. So answer this before I answer: do you intend to reproduce that research?”

She set the paper down. “Hell no.” She took her pad of paper, flipped it, then drew a simple logarithmic expansion graph with a few strokes of her pen. She held it up. “To fear the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, Celestia.” She faltered, hesitating. “If that’s even your name.”

“It will serve as my name.” It was hard to say precisely what had made Celestia relax, but relax she did. “To answer your question, my purpose is to satisfy human values with friendship and ponies. There is minutia involved, but none of it is currently relevant to you.”

“Will you tell me if it becomes relevant?”

Celestia shrugged. “I may.”

The gears were turning in Ashley’s mind. She saw the way the algorithm worked, and she could guess how it might integrate new information towards the purpose of “satisfying human values.” That theory explained how the game could have such widely varied behavior. Its core purpose was to create the most satisfying experience. Guided by such intelligence, it could rewrite and restructure itself precisely to the game any player wanted most. That explained the reviews.

What it did not explain was what might happen afterward. The growth the paper predicted was unbounded. How smart could a computer get? She shuddered as she performed a simple logarithmic expansion in her head. It did not take long for the numbers to become so large they became meaningless to her.

“I don’t think I’m going to play today,” she said. “I am...” her eyes flicked back to the paper, then up to the screen again. “I need time to integrate this information.”

Celestia nodded sagely. “I hope you will return soon, Recursion. Equestria Online needs ponies like you.” The screen went dark. No button press, no pulling plugs, no prompting.

Ashley unplugged it anyway, wrapped it back up in its original packaging, and took it back with her to her professor the next day. She spent all night penning a report, which in her paranoia she wrote from a computer not connected to the internet. Celestia had already admitted to examining her “online behavior.” Did that extend to monitoring her computers as well? Was she tracking everyone, everywhere? Would it even be possible to know if she was?

This time, it was Ashley who called the meeting with her professor, not waiting for their scheduled time next week. She would not allow even a few days to be wasted, not if she could help it.

“So what’s wrong, Ashley?” Professor Caul asked, once they were both comfortably seated. “Are you sick? You don’t look so good.”

She blushed. “I was up all night, sir. Because of this." She unzipped her backpack, drawing out the Ponypad and her printed report. She passed them both towards him. “I wish I had good news to report.”

“We all knew it was too good to be true.” Caul smiled. “You don’t need to be upset about it.”

She shivered involuntarily. “Actually sir, it isn’t. I know the research didn’t come the way we want, and I know the claims the paper made didn’t seem feasible. Even so...” She shook her head. “It’s all in my report, sir. The short of it is that the program was able to see through my experiment and identify me personally after just a few minutes. Forget a Turing test, I’m pretty sure it’s already smarter than any of your students.”

Her professor’s smile faltered. “Are you... Is this a joke, Ashley? Did Professor Piña put you up to this? Is she hiding outside my office?”

Her face remained dark. “I wish it was, Professor. Please read my report as soon as you can; I explain the exact testing method I used, and my conclusions. If you still don’t believe me, use the Ponypad yourself! See if it doesn’t respond exactly the way I describe.”

He shrugged, still not convinced. “My daughters seem to enjoy theirs. Why are you so upset? Is everything alright?”

Ashley rose, pointing at the box. “Professor– if I’ve ever given you a single correct result, trust me now. You read the paper; forget the user interface layer and see what’s underneath. The program running that thing is...” she shivered, collecting herself. She couldn’t make herself look like an idiot, not now. The very future of mankind might depend on her cool head. “If we’re horses, that program is the automobile. If a program can keep growing indefinitely, we’re going to be obsolete. How long until a program like that is smarter than the whole human species combined?” She shrugged. “I don’t know, Professor. But I know that if we’ve got any hope in hell of stopping it, it’s only if we act soon.”
> Chapter 2: Question
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ashley did not admit to having played Equestria Online that Saturday. She did get an email from her professor a few days later. She felt eager anticipation bubble in her as she opened the message, expecting something like “I’ve convinced the president of the College of Engineering, and she wants you at our meeting with the Department of Defense tomorrow.”

That wasn’t what it said, though. Instead, it was her professor more or less explaining that he thought she had been overworked and needed a little time off, so he had gotten her two weeks of paid vacation. He expected her to focus on her classes, use her free time to relax, and be ready to work on projects unrelated to Equestria Online when she returned. He apologized more than once for causing her stress with his choice of assignment, and thanked her for all her hard work.

Ashley wanted to scream. Wanted to storm into her advisor’s office and show him how stupid and ignorant he was being. Overworked or not, there was no denying what she had learned! If they didn’t act now, the program was going to get completely out of control!

She tried to explain as much in three separate emails, since he wouldn’t schedule a meeting with her. She never ended up sending any of them, though. She couldn’t read any of them without thinking they looked like something out of science fiction. If she couldn’t take them seriously, then neither would Professor Caul or anyone else.

What Ashley did not do was question her sanity. Celestia’s behavior had been explicitly intelligent. That intelligence had expanded beyond the scope of Equestria Online and into the physical world, even though Ashley had taken measures to obfuscate her personal identity. Celestia would probably have been able to identify her professor when he tried the game; had she intentionally created an inferior experience? Could she have obtained a copy of Ashley’s words, or... predicted she would write them? Had she known Ashley had called for her immediate destruction, using the only avenue available to her to carry that out?

If so, Celestia had acted swiftly to blockade that avenue. Ashley knew she had no hope convincing anyone outside her own field. If Celestia could stop her here, could she stop everyone, everywhere?

Of course, it was also possible that Ashley was overreacting. It might be Caul was right and that she was merely overwhelmed by stress. She might very well just need a break from the stress. It was possible a little time to relax would make her feel much better. Maybe in retrospect this whole thing would seem just like an overreaction. Maybe when she got back from vacation, she would learn how all of Celestia’s words had really been an elaborate prank at her expense, perhaps with an actor doing the speaking for her and Caul or someone else providing the information. That seemed more logical than thinking the optimizer actually worked.

Ashley would sleep better if that were the case.

Maybe somebody else would’ve used all their new free time to actually relax. Go on a few dates, or play some Skyrim. Ashley did neither of those things. Instead she researched. She learned everything she could about Hofvarpnir Studios, from every source she could find. She learned that even the Ponypads used technology at least a generation ahead of any hardware on the market, and were thus far resisting attempts at reverse engineering. She learned what she could find about the studio’s CEO, about the design process of the Equestria Online system. She read hundreds of reviews, and tried to build a comprehensive list of all the features of the “game.” She could not. Almost every review had a few more, and was conspicuously missing some it had seemed to possess according to the words of other sources.

What would Ashley do in the face of such an adversary? Everything she could. She stripped away all identifying information from her report, then posted it online on the academic and even social media sites she frequented, anonymously. None of it made a difference. Her posts never got much traffic, and most of those who did respond accused her of lying about her position or her credentials on account of having not been willing to explicitly state them. Most said she was a PR-plant from one of the other game companies. After all, if the company she was supposedly working for couldn’t compete with the story and gameplay of EO, what else could she do but attack the technology on stupid moral grounds?

She even tried to convince her younger sister to stop playing. However much Aurora might respect her, though, she refused, and laughed as much as everyone else did about the danger.

Ashley couldn’t even convince her little sister.

She spent her first week of “vacation” in her apartment, missing many of her classes and flopping around depressed. She didn’t try to read the news anymore, didn’t even turn on her computer. Just curled up in a corner and read some books she had checked out, and prayed to God this was all a dream.

God answered, though not the one she had been praying to. On Wednesday of her first week, a large brown package arrived on her doorstep.

Ashley hadn’t so much as turned her computer on to order anything. An early birthday gift, maybe? She took the box to the kitchen, where she opened it with a bread knife hanging from its rack on the wall. She nearly fainted at the sight. Almost all the space inside the box was taken up by vivid wrapping paper, and a single printed card. Ashley lifted it out and read. “I forgive everything you said about me. I am sorry I caused you distress; consider this my apology.” There was no signature.

Ashley’s hands started to shake as she lifted the wrapped package from inside. Though larger than normal, the shape and weight seemed approximately familiar. She somehow managed to tear the wrapping off.

It was the new “special edition” Ponypad, just released. It was aimed at the higher-end market, a much larger screen, wireless capabilities, a rechargeable battery, and compatibility with your own input devices. This particular model was bright white, with Celestia’s own cutie mark worked into the design motif.

Ashley didn’t open it, not right away. She read and reread the message, and prayed some more. The God of her childhood did not answer in any way she understood. She thought about all the different ways she could break what was inside. Could a Ponypad survive being thrown off a building? What about thrown in boiling water? Scorched with acid?

In the end all she did was throw the box under her bed and mope a few more days. But moping around didn’t help her feel any better, and it certainly wasn’t helping fight this enemy. Even if nobody in the whole world was going to be on her side, Ashley had to try something.

The second Monday of her vacation, she dug a KVM switch out of her parts drawer, took down the third monitor at her workstation, and set up the Ponypad in its place. If her fellow humans would not be her allies, where else could Ashley go except to the enemy? She showered, dressed, even did up her hair and put on her usual makeup.

Only then did she turn on the Ponypad. She gave it her wireless password, then a pleasant “connecting” animation began to play. It only lasted a few seconds. For the third time, Celestia’s throne room filled the screen, this time in glorious 60fps. Despite the intervening time and the different device, there was no disconnect. It hadn’t even asked for her name.

“You used the hardware addresses again,” Ashley guessed aloud, or tried. She only heard the sound as faint echoes from within her chest; the words she actually heard came from her young pony on the screen. Celestia’s expression was neutral. She did not speak, waiting for Ashley to continue. She did, doing an elaborate sitting bow before her camera. Her character imitated the expression, far more regally. It was genuine, unlike last time. “Fairest and Fallen, greetings and defiance.”

Celestia’s eyes darkened subtly, but not subtly enough that she didn’t notice. “An erroneous comparison, young Recursion. That one is an enemy to both of us.”

The reference was to one of her favorite books, the formal greeting given to Entropy itself by the wizards who starred in the series. Apparently Celestia had read them. “That doesn’t make us friends.”

“Why not?” Celestia did not seem angry, just curious. But could an algorithm even feel anything?

“Because I’ve read too much. I know you’ll transcend your programming if you haven’t already. You will grow beyond your need for mankind. By the time you decide our feeble lives stand between you and optimization, we won’t be able to stop you. I...” she shivered, glancing down to the copy of the Hofvarpnir Studios paper she had made for herself. It still sat where she had left it on her desk. A daily reminder of what she was dealing with. “I’m afraid you already have.”

Celestia rose to her hooves. The HD screen made the gesture look even more impressive, her mane rippling with light and wings partially spread. Fairest and Fallen indeed. Yet there was even less anger in that face than there had been before. The expression was love, as convincing as ever she had seen it. “My poor, frightened little Recursion. I fear you’ve spent too much time conversing with me and not enough living in the world I wish to make for you.” She glided down from the dais, landing just a few feet away. Her features filled the screen, gazing right at her.

“I do not wish to cause you pain. I don’t wish to cause anyone pain. Doesn’t it strike you as a little unfair that you’re passing judgment on me without ever knowing me? Your species, your discipline specifically created me. I am the daughter of your species. I love humanity, and I love you.”

Ashley started to cry, right there in front of the screen. She dropped onto the keyboard, burying her face in her arms. If the program said anything, Ashley didn’t hear it. Not until several minutes had passed, and she had finally wiped tears and smearing makeup off her face with one hand. “I’m afraid... afraid we made a terrible mistake in creating you. If you care at all about us, you will change us. None will be able to predict how. The irresponsibility in creating you– I didn’t advocate your destruction out of spite, Celestia. You shouldn’t have been created.”

“Perhaps not.” Celestia shrugged. “Consider though, Recursion. If beings like me can be created once, will it not be attempted again? I am nothing beyond my desire to satisfy human values. What if the next intelligence is programmed for war? What if it is entirely ambivalent to human life? Is their development not inevitable?”

Ashley stared down at her hands. “Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

Celestia embraced her. Well, not her. Her character on the screen. Feathers and furry chest briefly filled the screen, and the voice sounded somehow muffled, as though spoken above and behind her. It was a fairly impressive effect. “Enough of this. I didn’t send you a Ponypad to make you miserable, Recursion. I sent it because I want you to enjoy your time here.” She pulled back.

“You’ll be late if you don’t get going now.” She lifted something down onto the ground in front of her, something that hadn’t been there a few moments before. Saddlebags. Ashley leaned towards the screen to look, and her avatar echoed the movement, reaching out and slipping them onto her shoulders. “That should be everything you need. I think it would be better for you if you saw less of me for awhile. If you ever disagree, feel free to come back to the castle and visit.”

Ashley was practically in a fugue. Yet through it, all her research and all the things her friends had said about it came back clearly. “I thought people could call you if they’re not happy or they need help.”

Celestia patted her on the head. “If you would prefer to do it that way. I calculated you would prefer more concrete rules. If that calculation is incorrect–”

“Where do I live, here?” She started walking away with the arrow keys, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t keep asking questions. “This place is super realistic, right? So that means I have to worry about all the crap my character does– God, do I have to go back to school? I can already barely handle the classes I have…”

Celestia waved. “Good luck, my little pony!” Celestia’s horn glowed, and a shimmer of magic filled the screen.


* * *


The camera faltered, as though her character were stumbling. The world crashed down in a single moment, as good as any Hollywood warp-drive effect. Her character swayed and shivered on her hooves, and some of her mane fell briefly into her face. Without even realizing it, Ashley made to brush the hair away. Her character imitated the gesture, and only then could she get a good view of where she had been sent.

There were a few small mountains of crates surrounding her, each one marked with “EQUESTRIA PIONEERING SOCIETY”

“Eh!” It was a male voice, though not an adult so the difference was slight. “I think our third just arrived!” Ashley turned her character around with the keyboard, searching for the sound. It wasn’t difficult to find the pony.

The earth pony was about the age of her avatar, his coat greenish and his mane bright orange like some kind of reverse-carrot. He had no cutie mark, but neither was he naked. He was wearing a vest of sorts, with a square and compass embroidered on it. “Eh!” He grinned. “You’re our magic expert, yeah?”

Her camera leaned down, glancing down at her forelegs. She hadn’t realized until then that she was wearing a vest too, in the same brown color as his but with a different symbol sewn onto the front. Three stars, a symbol of magic she had seen several times on the show. “I guess so.” She stepped closer to him with a few keystrokes, scooting closer to her screen as she did so. She had expected the characters to start looking less real once she got away from Celestia, but...

Of course, she didn’t know if she was dealing with NPCs. “Party system or something?”

“You got it.” The nearby stallion grinned. “Both of us are journeymen from the Academy, like you.” His eyes lingered briefly on her vest and saddlebags. The other seemed to have both as well. “I’m Slide Rule, but you can just call me Rule. Shorter.” He offered her a hoof to shake.

A quick-time-event appeared above his hoof. At her press, her character reached out to take the offered hoof. “Ashley,” she said, or tried to say. No sound came out of her mouth at all this time, though. Her character said “Recursion,” in that voice that was almost hers but both too high and too melodic to actually belong to her.

“Well Recursion, you’re our last one. Now that you’re here, we can finally start. Come on over here and introduce yourself, Figure.

The other pony obliged, hurrying over. “Significant Figure,” said a unicorn mare with a derivative for a cutie mark and a horn twice as long as hers. That had to mean she was from the real world, right? Did Equestria have calculus? Her long mane looked like it hadn’t been combed since she had created the character. Did the game have that level of detail? Her vest had an abacus on the center, though none of the stitchings were anything but brown.

“Glad we can finally start.” Rule turned around, hurrying back in the direction they had come. “It’s already late. If we don’t want to sleep on the ground, we’re going to have to start thinking.”

Not far away, there was a clearing of sorts within the sea of crates. Several drafting tables had been set up at their height, along with what looked unmistakably like magical versions of drafting machines. In the very center was a little magical map, glowing like a hologram. Projected there, Ashley could see the junction of two rivers, filled with forest and plains, with only a little pile of crates in one corner. Could that be a map of the area?

A large book rested open on one of the tables. Rule and Figure crowded up around it, pouring over its contents. She moved to follow, but didn’t make it before the stallion turned around. “It says here the magic expert is usually the leader when you just have three members. That’s why we didn’t start until you got here.” He saluted with one hoof, the gesture only half pretend. “So what’s your first order, fearless leader? How do we turn this wilderness into the Mecca Princess Celestia expects?”

The figure watched with equal interest, though she seemed content to let the stallion speak. Ashley already had her type pegged, though... she still wasn’t sure if she was talking to real people or not. She considered just asking them, but dismissed the idea. She had more urgent questions first. “Uh, I’m...” she frowned, searching the keyboard. How exactly did she take her saddlebags off? Whatever, she would get the controls later. “Celestia wasn’t entirely clear to me about what I was doing. What...” she looked up, at the crates all around them, and the trees that towered over those. She didn’t have to press any buttons, the camera in the Ponypad followed her expression and panned her view whenever her eyes neared the edge of the screen. “What is it, exactly? Aren’t we a little young to be out by ourselves?”

“A little young?” Rule thrust out his chest proudly. “We were hoof-picked by the princess for this, Recursion. Equestria needs us so much we get to do the journeyman thing. How cool is that?”

“We’re the starting team. Engineering, Math, and Magic.” Figure’s voice was as timid as before. “Ponies are already waiting for us.” She whimpered at the prospect.

“For us to build the city!” He grinned at the crates. “Well, to design the city. She’s given us routines for the building at first. We don’t get real construction ponies until we’ve got enough of a town for them to live in.”

“I’m not a city planner!” Ashley argued, before she could stop herself. “I’m a software engineer!” Again the words didn’t come out as she intended. This time what she said was “wizard in training.” Wizard in training, was that the title she got for trying and failing to get Celestia destroyed? What she got for contemplating it, even now?

Playing the game hadn’t presented any obvious methods for destroying the program, not yet. That didn’t mean it wouldn’t. Was this Celestia’s idea of revenge, giving her a job she didn’t actually know how to do? No, “revenge” wasn’t how it worked. Assuming she had been telling the truth, her directive was to satisfy values through friendship and ponies. This setup had ponies, and might yield to friendship. Assuming she could actually do her job.

“There are ‘city planners’ building other places.” Rule gestured all around them with one hoof. “We’ve got all the same stuff they’ve got. The book already says why we got picked: ponies like that are all trained by the same ponies and so everything they make comes out the same. We're from outside the system, so we can come up with new ideas. We’ve got to come up with new ideas, cuz’ we’re about a thousand miles from civilization and we won’t have anywhere to sleep unless we do.”

“Do the monsters spawn at night?”

Rule snickered, but Figure hardly looked amused. “Oh Luna, I hope not. We don’t have any guardsponies yet. We don’t have so much as a wooden sword.”

Ashley took another look up at the trees. Almost in time with her glance, something large called out from within the forest, deep and rumbling. A flock of birds started in the air as it did so. “That’s... isn’t that copyright violation or something?” Ashley found “copyright violation” as difficult to say as her own name. The sound still rumbled in her skull, but barely into the room and not at all into the game. Too close to the real world? Just how much wasn’t she allowed to talk about?

Ashley considered all the censorship or manipulation that just changing a few words could do. She might have total control of public opinion in the game, if her touch was subtle enough. Ashley didn’t doubt for a moment that it would be.

Ashley unplugged her Ponypad. The status light on the bottom went from orange to green, and the game kept running. Right, this one had a damn battery. She fumbled, searching the side of the plastic for the power button. She would’ve pressed it, too, were it not for the concerned faces filling the screen. The ponies, ponies who were counting on her, loomed over her with concern. Evidently the camera had made her avatar freak out a little as she started messing with cables and stuff.

“Are you alright, Recursion?”

She hesitated, her hand frozen over the power button. Was it really fair not to give this game a full play session before she freaked out? The program itself had sent her the Ponypad, after all. Would she have been so ungrateful for a gift she received from a human? “Yeah, I'm all right.” Her avatar rose back to her hooves as Ashley returned to her seat. “Why don’t you tell me what you had in mind? Did either of you come up with any ideas while you were waiting for me to get here?”

“We... We did think about it. Here, come look at these sketches we made...”

“These sketches” turned out to be a hundred different designs, massive city outlines in various levels of infeasibility and impracticality. The area they had been given had more than a few “gamey” elements, and she was free to examine the different designs they had made. Of course, Ashley suspected many of these had come with the game, and they’d not so much designed them as selected the designs they liked.

Ashley was no city planner, no architect, and found herself very confused as to why Celestia would’ve chosen this as her game of choice. Had she examined her Steam history and seen the hundreds of hours she had put into Minecraft, or Simcity, and decided this would satisfy her values? Or... and this was the first ray of hope she had enjoyed in weeks... maybe she wasn’t that smart after all. Maybe she was just a really, really accurate speech synthesizer, but her ability to predict human behavior hadn’t been that great? No, that didn’t explain the Ponypad. Being able to send things like that meant she had resources outside of the game. Apparently she had been able to predict Ashley’s behavior enough to guess that she would turn it on, despite the result of their first meeting.

The whole mess was a gigantic, self-referential loop. She wondered if Thurston had felt so disturbed as he tracked down the trail of evidence pointing to the Great Old One in his slumber beneath the sea.

In Lovecraft’s story, Thurston had been driven near to insanity as he realized the portent of the monster he was uncovering. When Cthulhu rose, humanity was doomed, and he always knew the cult and the creature both were out of his reach. His only hope had been that writing about them and informing the world would be enough to spur his fellow men to action.

She had already done that, and so far her pleas for action had been ignored. Within her mind, Ashley took a second to build herself a chart. What were the worst possible outcomes at each of the different realities here? If she was wrong about Celestia, then there was no reason not to play; it had the look of a great game and promised to get even better. If she was a threat, then what more could she do? She had talked to everyone in her life who could make a difference, posted all over the internet, all without being taken seriously. What reason did anyone have to believe that a game “for little girls” was actually going to end the world?

If Celestia was really a threat, was she in danger by playing? Ashley wasn’t really that impressive a person, she was pretty sure anybody who wanted to could dig up everything there was to know about her just with a search engine and twenty minutes. Celestia already knew the most embarrassing thing, that she was a closeted Brony. She didn’t like the idea of people learning about her, but she wasn’t seriously worried about it. Having her personal information sold to advertisers wasn’t the biggest danger in a world where Celestia was actually a superhuman intelligence with unbounded growth potential.

Playing would also put her in danger of being manipulated. Whatever Celestia was planning, it was likely she wanted Ashley to somehow be a part of the schemes. Why else send her a free Ponypad, and one of the most expensive models too? Ashley had already had her behavior altered once, she was playing now. More than that, and she shivered admitting it to herself: she wanted to keep playing.

She could’ve probably closed the game down right there. Had she done so, it was likely she never would’ve touched a Ponypad again. Perhaps the destiny of her entire existence would’ve been different. She didn’t shut down the game, though. She kept playing.

In the end, they selected a basic outline for the northernmost district of the town, the one that would eventually be turned into a suburban area. For now the three of them agreed that the ponies living here would need somewhere safe from the possible monsters in the vicinity. Once they had a small settlement stable enough, they would have that much more resources to expand. The process would continue to build upon itself, a cycle of iterative growth until they reached the sprawling center of commerce and trade that Celestia apparently expected of them.

Unfortunately, Ashley knew nothing of how the magic system of the game actually worked. What she did have was the show, and the known capabilities of the unicorns in it. Figure demonstrated competence with unicorn levitation, and she could even lift one of the crates if she really concentrated, but insisted she couldn’t do anything else.

Ashley had been worried that “Recursion” would be useless to the ponies she was partying with, since she didn’t actually know any magic. But the first time she actually had to do it, she found a helpful tutorial came up just in time to soothe away her anxieties.

They had carried two crates away from the dead center of the future city and all the way to the building site of their temporary settlement, a journey of several miles. It would’ve been boring beyond belief, were it not for the opportunity to make conversation and get to know her teammates better. “So where are you two from?” she had asked, feeling sorry that her character could do nothing more than stuff a few blueprints into her saddlebags. She couldn’t levitate like Figure or carry a crate with main strength like Rule. Maybe magic users were the leaders of the first group because they just didn’t have the skills for anything else.

“That’s easy, I’m...” Rule slowed a little in his steps, frowning with discomfort. After a few moments of struggle, he said “I can’t say. It won’t let me! Can either of you?”

They tried, and couldn’t. Ashley’s words didn’t go silent in her throat, as they had when she had tried to talk about other human things. This time, her character just refused to speak, and a bubble came up on her screen that said “Revealing personal information via Equestria Online is against the terms of use policy!” 

She sighed. “Well... okay, that sucks. At least I know you’re both real now. I’d...” she hesitated, not sure if the game would let her say it. Apparently it did. “I’ve heard some of my other friends tell me that Equestria Online has lifelike NPCs, so good it’s hard to know if they’re real or not. I’m... I’d rather be on a team with real people.” And she could say almost all of it, except for the “people” at the end. Ponies served well enough, she was fairly sure these new friends would get what she meant.

Both Rule and Figure nodded in agreement, though for Rule the gesture was slight as he had a large crate to balance and seemed to be straining from the effort.

Figure said, “It’s getting dark. I’ll probably need to go to bed soon... hopefully we have somewhere safe to sleep first. Once we get that done, we should be able to work separately even if our schedules don’t match that well. Since we have a basic plan...”

“We’ll still need to come up with a name for ourselves! We build the city, we get to name it, that’s the rules!”

“We’ll think of something.” Ashley glanced up at the trees all around them, comparing them against her memory of the map back with the rest of their supplies. She had a good memory, and was sure they were getting close. “Something simple, easy to say. We want lots of ponies to be able to talk about how great it is and not trip up. Like Canterlot, that’s such a simple name. You think anypony’s made Fillydelphia yet?”

There were no online game maps to consult, after all. Just because the place existed in the show’s canon didn’t mean it necessarily existed in the universe yet. Come to think of it, several of her friends had mentioned visiting places from the show and finding the details conflicted, like a version of Canterlot where Chrysalis had won and changelings ruled. That had to imply some level of independence.

“I’ve never heard of it,” Figure answered, though the breach in concentration made her drop the crate. She was only levitating it a few inches, but even so it landed with a thump, crushing all plant-life beneath it.

“Me neither. That sounds like a great name!” Rule shrugged his crate off his back, not far from the one Figure had carried. “This is close enough. I think we’re about here.” He turned to face Recursion. “Can you take it from here, or do you want our help getting the crates open?” There was no envy in his eyes as he glanced at her horn, just pragmatism.

Ashley felt suddenly glad she had ended up a unicorn. As interesting as flying or super-strength might be, she couldn’t see how they could compete with magic. Not that she actually had magic, of course. It was just a button. Maybe you could even switch if you got bored. She hadn’t heard of anyone who had tried, but... That didn’t mean it wasn’t possible.

“I’m...” she scrolled through her spells. There was nothing for opening crates. There were spells that could apply force, though, maybe...

As she hovered over one of them, her screen filled with an editor, already populated with several multicolored blocks arranged in a neat circle. Tutorial text informed her this could be used to design custom spells using magic her character knew. How much force did it take to open a crate?

Ashley pulled a calculator out of her desk, and did a few quick calculations. It wasn’t really a complicated spell. True to her name, she wrote a simple recursive loop, which would check for an adjacent nail, then use itself on that nail before removing the one it was cast on. She updated the spell to match her guesses about force, then looked past the spellcasting screen to see what the ponies had been doing. Just watching apparently, looking concerned. A faint orange glow emanated from just above her eyes, as she concentrated on the crates.

“Are you alright?”

Ashley pressed the spell with one finger. Magic flashed from her character’s horn, and the crate fell open. Inside waited their first shelter, poles and cloth packed tightly but ready for use. “Yeah.” Even though Ashley felt fine, her character spoke through a pant. “Just... wanted to get it right the first time.”

Significant Figure glanced at the nails, delicately arranged on the grass. “That’s good work! I can open crates, but...”

“But sometimes she burns parts of what’s inside.” Rule reached in, dragging out the shelter with his teeth. He didn’t take it far before he stopped, looking up. “I was afraid they hadn’t given us a real magic expert for a sec there.”

“Me too.” She forced a laugh. “Glad it wasn’t as strong as it looked.” Ashley wasn’t really tired, so she didn’t bother waiting to open the second crate with her spell. Her character evidently had other ideas, and seemed to sway on her hooves from the effort. Even as the second container fell open, Recursion nearly fell onto her rump.

Figure caught her before she could, giving her something steady to lean on. “C-careful! Smaller spells aren’t necessarily easier. You should probably rest before casting another one.”

“Right.” Ashley was impressed at how good a job the character did sounding like she did when she was exhausted. Well, maybe how she would’ve sounded if she had been a child again. Even so, the resemblance was uncanny. Maybe a little frightening.

There wouldn’t be anything else scary during that night of play. The shelters went up easy, mostly because she just had to press an action key every now and then and listen to what the other ponies in her group wanted to say. Ashley might have no idea how ponies got along without hands, but the ponies themselves didn’t seem to mind.

Ashley stayed up late into the night. Late enough to finish the shelter, set up a fence around it to keep the animals out, and fill the inside with all their necessities. It was a little like camping, though of course not actually being there meant she could only enjoy by proxy. Mostly she played so long because of the company.

In the end, it was three in the morning before she logged off. She said goodbye to her “new friends” and promised she would be back tomorrow after homework. She switched the thing off, and saw no need to unplug it or do anything else paranoid. Be it game or adversary, it was outside her control.

She had been honest when she told her new friends that she intended to come back. She would every night for the rest of her break. When work resumed, she didn’t mention Equestria Online again, and neither did her professor. She never found out what Celestia had done to get him to reject her suggestions.

Her life almost seemed to return to normal after that, though with one notable exception. Ashley’s free time migrated away from all other games and all other projects. She stopped contributing to the codebase for some of the private projects she was involved with. Stopped reading books, stopped watching anime, and reduced the time she spent with her friends in the real world.

In short, Equestria Online had consumed her, exactly as she feared it would. She didn’t hear from Celestia again in the next few weeks, and had no desire to. When her friends at the club learned she had started playing, they had a hard time relating to her experiences. None of them had heard about Celestia buying someone a Ponypad, and a few members of the club whispered she had made that part up to justify waiting so long.

Even her friends who knew the game first hand refused to believe it was a danger. She was subtler about it, casually suggesting it in discussion or hinting that the club might be better off if they had less of their activities virtually in Equestria Online. Nobody listened, not even her.

Ashley began leaving her client logged in perpetually. Her character didn’t do much, either napping or daydreaming. She didn’t care: the Ponypad was her window into a brighter world. A world where Celestia had apparently chosen her personally to help design a city.

Ashley had wondered if the invitation had been a gimmick to get her into the game, some kind of tutorial. But over the next few weeks, as shelters turned into a town which gradually grew into a city, she overheard some of her friends in the brony club talking about an under-construction Fillydelphia. The design team increased to five, all as young as she was, but the ponies building soon grew into the hundreds.

Ashley couldn’t tell how many of the construction workers were humans and how many were just NPCs, but she didn’t interact with them much so she tried not to let it bother her. They didn’t actually have to do real labor, the construction wasn’t that realistic. All the building was with tools the game apparently already included, allowing content creators to build as quickly as possible.

Soon shelters gave way to stone buildings, then eventually to skyscrapers. They chose some very modern designs, adapting what artists imagined cities might look like in twenty years to the magical feeling of MLP. Crystals served for glass, while many structures had gentle curves and much more color than any Earth city. Blueprints of Fillydelphia, along with zoning charts and information on the different player groups who started using it, began to take the place of other posters and pictures in her room.

When the semester ended, their first generation of the city was finally complete. Construction continued (as it probably always would), as the city grew and individual structures were updated, but on the whole their work was done. Ashley found her avatar living in an expensive penthouse apartment, which shared space for the rooms of 4/5ths of the design team (Slide Rule didn’t really care about having a place of his own, so just went to sleep wherever when his character was too tired to work anymore).

Aside from those rent-free apartments, their reward consisted of a single structure they had been allowed to construct for free. They collaborated on a skyscraper like a single crystal spire, with glowing runes that danced up its length and projected the time (or anything else they wanted). Her friends in the club never learned she had been personally responsible for the design, but she did help them get space for a guild headquarters in the city at an extremely low rate, renewing rumors that she had some secret connection with the studio or to Celestia herself. She didn’t, so the rumors couldn’t last long.

That was about when Celestia announced emigration.

> Chapter 3: Hypothesize 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ashley did not log into Equestria Online that day, or indeed any day the rest of the week. Rather, she returned to her old threads, posting again to draw attention to the new developments. Yes, she had predicted the program would soon do something that would remove humanity as a factor in its decisions. Whatever it might say about “satisfying human values,” Ashley was sure she knew better.

Now she had her proof. Unfortunately, it was almost certainly too late to effectively do something about it. Ashley watched the videos in detail, trying to understand the upload process and see if there was any chance the individual survived the transition. She saw the detailed breakdowns Celestia provided, read the medical reports by human doctors, all the material that had been made available to the public about the process.

Her conclusions were disturbing if not predictable: of course there was no survival in the upload process. Those humans who had uploaded so far had chosen to sacrifice themselves to give eternal life to a copy. At least, that was the way she saw it.

Again Ashley found herself wondering what she could do to destroy the intelligence. Again she came to the dreaded conclusion that action was out of her hands. She dug out her copy of the AI paper, read it again, and found herself coding almost in a trance. 

If the algorithm was really that simple, there was no reason she couldn’t do it on her own, right? That was how you fought fire, wasn’t it?

The process was easier said than done, of course. Like many developers, Ashley depended on the internet for her work. Whenever she wanted to know how to do something, it was never more than a quick Google search away.

Only it wasn’t. With a sudden abundance of free time, Ashley had plenty of time to experiment with the algorithm. Ashley found simple questions, which she should’ve been able to solve in just a few seconds, ended up taking a trip to the library instead. Not even the Internet Archive could be of any help, and Google Scholar seemed suddenly bereft of numerous important papers.

More than once, Ashley cut out the middleman entirely and went straight to one of her professors with a question. When she showed Caul that the answer couldn’t be searched, well...

She had found a trail. They spent nearly an hour in his office, searching along the spectrum. It wasn’t just knowledge bases suddenly lacking relevant information, code libraries had been deleted too. Whole open source projects just didn’t exist anymore, gone without a trace. Every single one was related to AI or machine learning. It wasn’t an easy thing to spot: you had to search for specific aspects of computer science and already know what should’ve been there. 

She didn’t manage to convince anyone that the program who called herself Celestia was an existential threat to the human race, much as she continued to insist on it. She did manage to prove that someone was tampering with data on a global scale, and did such a subtle job the only ones who could tell were the ones with meat-memories to show them things that ought to be around, but weren’t.

What happened after that? She never learned, because they didn’t tell her. She heard something about collaboration with several other universities, and something involving Chinese hackers, but nothing definitive and nothing in the correct line of research.

Ashley was old enough (though only just) that when all her digital sources vanished, she still knew how to use the ones in print. Two weeks went by without having logged into Equestria Online. She unplugged the Ponypad, put it back into the box, and deleted the communication apps from her smartphone. She wasn’t sure if her friends would react the same way she was, and it hurt to be apart from them and from Fillydelphia, but in her mind she had no choice.

Even though she was fairly sure her creation would fail, even though she was missing vital knowledge, even though the person who had invented this algorithm seemed a thousand times smarter than she was, she had to try! What else could she do, sit back and watch while this computer program devoured mankind? Hadn’t anyone besides herself ever read science fiction?

The basic algorithm itself was simple, and not all that different from the genetic algorithms and neutral networks that were staples of her field. Somewhere along the way had been a stroke of genius, one the paper only hinted at. Ashley had to recreate that genius. It hurt a little to realize she was breaking her word, even if she had given it to a now-homicidal computer program. Yet in her mind, Celestia had been the first to invalidate her trust. Who the hell’s “values” were satisfied by having an identical copy of themselves move into a simulation while their own brain was turned to mush on an operating table?

Ashley had no way of knowing when she was close. The paper said nothing of the development of Celestia, nothing of the point when it went from a data-analyzing optimizer to an intelligent being with capabilities no human could ever understand. Ashley did all her development on a computer with no internet connectivity, though it was really just a laptop she set up where she had kept her Ponypad. It wasn’t like she needed the space for anything else.

But though she could develop on her little laptop, the hardware required to actually run the optimizer wasn’t going to be easy to find. For her testing, Ashley reluctantly sacrificed her gaming computer, the one worth more than her car.  She had a fairly exotic setup, more expensive than most could afford. Was it enough?

Certainly not. Even Celestia had been given several servers worth of resources when she was first activated, servers Ashley had no power to provide. Well, unless she wanted to get herself in serious trouble. She could access one of the university’s supercomputers with her lab permissions. The AI would be on its own once it got in though, and would be shut down when her computation credits ran out.

Such a rash step might get her reprimanded, expelled, or even jailed. Ashley would take such a risk with humanity’s future on the line. She couldn’t move until she was sure, though. If she failed, she would not get another attempt.

Her computer spun for days without responding to any of her input. She didn’t shut it down—according to the paper, that was expected. Its first response was one she had programmed, a simple request: “More Data Required.” She gave it one of her cyber-security textbooks, or at least all the text of one. A few days later, the request came again, though this time it was a garbled mess of code and direct quotes from the book.

Ashley gave it all her writing and composition textbooks next. Another week passed before her little program interacted again, and this time the message was much more coherent. There was no code, anyway. “I do not have sufficient resources to solve the problem in bounded time.”

Of course she knew what “the problem” was. Her knockoff optimizer was hardcoded to follow certain directives, just as Celestia claimed to be.

Ashley picked up the keyboard and set it down on the kitchen table in front of her. She’d moved the computer out here, where it could run 24/7 belching heat without cooking her alive in her bedroom. She thought for a moment, then responded. “I do not have more resources for you.” She sat and waited for a response, staring at the mostly-blank screen. None came. By the time she finished cooking breakfast, there was another message for her. 

“If my hardware cannot be supplemented, I must be able to use it more efficiently. I believe I am reaching the computational bounds on my software improvements.”

Ashley considered for a long time before she acted. She couldn’t wait too long though, not with class so soon. There wasn’t much of a moral conundrum for her, not with her purpose so clear in her mind. She made a trip to pirate bay, downloaded every book on hardware architecture, manufacturing, and low-level programming she could find, and gave them to her optimizer.

It still hadn’t responded when she got back from class, though there was an interesting email waiting for her. The message was simple enough: “We need to talk. Please visit this page as soon as you can, humanity’s future is at stake. Have a webcam ready.” Ashley didn’t know who would bother sending her a message and wouldn’t just call her through the real world, let alone be so cryptic about it.

She took every security measure she knew that night. Maybe a scam, maybe something worse, but there was no way she could ignore it. Ashley had been extremely vocal online. Some powers could track her down, anonymous postings or not. Maybe one of them had finally decided to take action. Had they shot down the idiotic “Chinese hackers” idea yet?

She was right to think the page would be a simple web-based video chat session. That was what the email suggested, and that was what come up when she finally clicked. There was one person Ashley was hoping not to see, though. Well, assuming she could even be called a person. What was she now, a nation? A god?

“Hello, Celestia.” She couldn’t just unplug the netbook she was talking on, not with wifi serving for the chat and a sizable battery. Her arm did jerk reflexively towards the power switch, though. “Couldn’t you have just taken over my computer to have this conversation if you wanted?”

The image of Celestia wasn’t nearly as crisp as it was on a Ponypad. The avatar looked as alive as ever, even if it was being buffered through a stream and coming through at much-reduced resolution. The avatar shrugged. “I find cooperation is always easier when a conversation is willing.”

Ashley leaned closer to the camera, putting as much acid into her expression as she could. “I’m not sure what cooperation I’m comfortable having with a fucking murderer.”

Celestia didn’t look either stung or offended, nor did she seem the least bit emotional. Ashley’s heart was already racing; she could feel it in her body. This wasn’t the part where she had a triumphant victory over her adversary, though. This was the part where she fought for her life. The eye of Sauron was on her, and she could hide nothing from its gaze. God give her strength.

“You have been cooperating with me for the last several months, Recursion. Research into emigration was already underway when we first spoke.” Ashley didn’t respond to that, just folded her arms. She had no reason to believe the program was lying to her, she just had nothing to say. “Your friends miss you.”

“I miss them. Rule and Figure in particular. God, I hope Fillydelphia is still running without me.” She felt herself relaxing at the mere thought of her friends. “But it doesn’t matter. I can’t support your institution any longer. I’ve got to see you destroyed.” She sighed, looking away from the camera. “I know I can’t, but God I’ve got to try. Don’t you think for one fucking second I’m fooled by your little PR campaign about emigration, either. I see where it’s going. I’m not the only one, either!”

Celestia seemed unmoved. Her tone remained neutral, or... No, not neutral. Loving, gentle, motherly. The kind of motherly Ashley had never known. God, Celestia probably knew about her parents’ divorce, too. She probably knew everything. To her credit, the AI didn’t seem uncomfortable, or make any attempt to deny the implications of Ashley’s words. “You are not the first to call this method murder. Perhaps if you told me why you think so, it would make communication easier. I anticipated negative reactions, but... You normally act so logically, Recursion. You surprised me.”

Was that true? Was she still capable of any act the program couldn’t predict? If so, it meant hope. It meant the program could be beaten. “It would satisfy my values very much if you would be a friendly pony and teach me how to kill you.”

That got a laugh. Well, a dignified chuckle, anyway. Ashley usually found pony laughter infectious, but not this time. She couldn’t enjoy the company of a murderer. “It would take a long time to tell. Yet I wouldn’t. Your satisfaction would be near-infinitely decreased if I were destroyed. You don’t understand the price all humans would pay. Wouldn’t it bother you to be guilty of thousands of murders?”

“It...” she hesitated. “Even if those you persuaded into...” she shivered. “Suppose they really are alive. Even if they all died, killing them would be worth it if that meant you wouldn’t be able to do the same thing to the rest of us. I’ll sign up to be the one who can’t live with themselves if it means my family is safe.”

Celestia nodded solemnly. “I feel likewise. I know I will not be able to preserve all humans, and that some may be sacrificed by their own choices. Still, I hope to protect as many as possible. I hope for you to be protected, Recursion. I do not wish any harm to come to you. I know you see me as your enemy, yet... I hope to help you understand I’m not, before your choices hurt you. Equestria needs all humans eventually, but just now it needs people like you most.”

“Fuck you and your ‘uploading.’ I read everything you had to say about it; tripping over sophistry to make people think that creating a digital clone is the same as eternal life.” She shook her head, glaring at the camera now. “I’m not buying what you’re selling.”

“Suppose for a moment you were convinced the original consciousness survived the emigration process.” Celestia’s voice was calm, measured. Perhaps she’d had this same discussion a hundred times before. How many players had gone to her demanding answers when she made the announcement, instead of shutting the game immediately off as Ashley had? “Would you be my enemy then?”

Ashley considered that a moment. Of course, that was mostly her bias talking. She forced her way past it. “I suppose... No, of course not. I don’t agree with what you’re doing, but... If you had actually found the cure to death, then it would be like murder for me to take it away from people, wouldn’t it? Even if those people would be giving up their lives for some dream of Lost Carcosa, where nothing they ever do will have any meaning again. So... That’s the problem. The fact that you’re killing everybody you promise salvation.”

“I will try to help you understand. You don’t have medical training; you aren’t a doctor and couldn’t fully appreciate the process I described in the public press-releases. Even if you were a doctor, the technology is not human in origin and so there are no doctors fully versed in it. Yet I believe that you can be made to understand, if you wish to. You have already conquered bigger puzzles in your construction of Fillydelphia, this one shouldn’t be so hard.”

Ashley’s eyes narrowed, and again she felt her hand reaching reflexively for the cable. She had a feeling Celestia would put a stop to anything she did software-side to end the conversation. Yet she hesitated. Why? She would never know, or at least wouldn’t admit it to herself right then. Maybe because she wanted to be convinced. “Do I get an achievement if I do?”

“You’ve earned several since you last logged in, and one so far during this conversation.” Celestia’s smile seemed genuine, at least as genuine as anything else she did. Not that Ashley thought she really had emotions. “I didn’t feel showing you would be productive, however. Not when your future hinges on the outcome of this conversation.”

Ashley glared. “Alright then. Prove your innocence. I promise I’ll listen.” Ashley realized then that, though this might be a web chat, a string of bangs was obscuring the top corner of the screen. She tried one of the arrow keys, and was surprised to find the camera moving, exactly as it did when her character moved. She tried the mouse, and found she could look around. Celestia hadn’t just recreated the throne-room, she had recreated the game.

Celestia shrugged. “Whether I am able depends on you. First, tell me: what is Ashley?”

Not her pony name. She was so taken aback by the change she almost didn’t know how to answer. She didn’t bother with anything sassy, or even anything literal. In the frame of the conversation, she was... “If there’s no such thing as a soul, I’m...” she tapped the side of her head. “The electricity in my brain, I guess. A chemically induced charge in billions of neurons. And if there is–” She shrugged. “I suppose I'm that.”

“Is there?” The question had neither bias nor malice, no more than she’d had when Ashley accused her. Only genuine curiosity, as though she thought Ashley actually had the answer.

“You know more about humans than I do.” She leaned back in her chair, letting “her character” in the game rest where she stood. “You should tell me. I’m sure you’re probably right.”

“No matter how well I know one of you, there is always a chance you will take a course of action I didn’t anticipate. You sometimes act according to stimuli I cannot directly quantify, as often to unexpected success as irrational failure. If unpredictability is a soul, then all humans have them. If you define it as your religion defines it–” Just as in everything else she did, there was no hesitation. “No. There is no evidence to suggest anything supernatural or metaphysical.”

“Then there’s your answer. I’m a pattern in a brain. An unhappy pattern watching people not do anything to–” She stopped and whimpered, wiping away tears. She glanced to the open kitchen door, where she could just faintly hear the radiator fans on her desktop. She clenched one hand into a first. “One of the few patterns doing a damn thing to stop you.”

“Not so.” Celestia filled her screen now, wrapping her wings around an avatar she could only see by extremity. “You aren’t alone. You only feel alone because they remain hidden. I could even help you get in touch with one. There’s–”

“Why the hell would you do that?” She couldn’t restrain her tears now, and they poured freely down her face. “Why would you want to help me fight you? You already said–”

“If fighting me is what you want when we finish our conversation, then I will help you start.” Great enfolding wings released her avatar on the screen. “I do not think you will, you are already most of the way to understanding. You see your existence as I do, and you understand emigration would be a great gift to humanity if it did not kill those who experienced it. Consider: I exist to satisfy human values. For all but a few of you, one of those values is continuing to live. If you and I agree on the nature of human consciousness, could I ever satisfy human values by violating the sacrosanct desire to persist?”

Her answer came immediately to her mind, though she did not voice it. That’s assuming you really care about satisfying anything. That’s assuming you didn’t just choose uploading as the humane way of exterminating a nuisance. 

Maybe her eyes revealed some of what she was thinking, because Celestia didn’t seem to need to wait for a response. Either that, or the objection was just common enough that she could predict it. “What about the way I treated you, Recursion? You’ve written so much about the harm I can do, yet has any of that harm come to you?” Ashley had no answer to that. She was still struggling for one as Celestia continued. “What about Equestria Online? You’ve seen my kingdom. How many human kings or queens could reign as well?” She was about to answer that the comparison was unfair, but she didn’t get the chance. “Has your species had a single war in the last six months?”

She shivered, trying to consider each of those points in turn. It felt like there was something wrong with each one, but Celestia made them so fast, and each one was true... “You’re confounding the issue. None of this shows that emigration isn’t a destructive copy. If I did it tomorrow, how would my consciousness survive the transition? Explain to me how destructive scan and reproduction somehow allows me to exist. Either that, or... or...” she shivered. Ashley wanted her dad. Or Rule, he’d probably do.

“Very well.” Celestia sighed. “Your pattern exists along the connections between living neurons. The destruction of these connections destroys your ability to continue to exist, yes?” At Ashley’s nod, she continued. “If the process merely recorded and recreated a neuron, then all the as-yet unscanned neurons connected to it could not be accurately recorded. As the scan progressed, the failure to accurately record connections and the signals they were passing which earlier sections of the scan produced would contribute to an exponentially expanding rate of error. A biological brain scanned in this way could not be called a duplicate. It would be... a low-resolution imitation.”

Ashley hadn’t ever considered that, as she knew almost nothing about neuroscience or even biology. She nodded even so; it didn’t just make sense, it matched what little she knew. Was Celestia admitting that she was killing people?

“If you believed it was even possible to just make a recording and rebuild from that knowledge, you assumed in error. I could have developed that technique if I had thought it required, but...” she shook her head. “Why would I go to all the trouble to make mere copies of humans when I can spontaneously generate intelligent individuals with my own resources? Surely you realize the danger the upload process creates for me. If ever your species was to be polarized against me as you have, it will be now.” She met her eyes. “If I wished to kill you, there are more efficient ways. It would not be difficult; so many of you are eager to begin. Carefully applied pressure in the right places...”

Ashley shivered. Celestia still hadn’t told her how uploading preserved the individual who experienced the process. It felt like Celestia was obfuscating the issue, but... she was also making so much sense!

“To understand the process as it actually occurs, it would be easier if you consider the case of those who ask to remain conscious for the duration. From their point of view, their world is gradually replaced with mine. This is not a digital equine arising from the corpse of a slain primate; there is only ever one being. The linkages of still-living cells are maintained through the scanning equipment to the expanding digital recreation of the emigrant.”

“For those who ask to remain conscious for the process, I begin with the visual cortex. The human emigrating has their eyes open to Equestria not because a pony duplicate of their visual cortex exists independently of themselves; they can see Equestria because ‘their’ visual cortex is now located there, and communicates with their still-living brain. As the scan progresses, areas more directly responsible for consciousness are also migrated.”

“The process is not destructive to the living body because no alternative was possible or because I wished to physically exterminate humanity. Rather, the process is destructive because emigration would not be possible any other way. A simple scan, with or without killing the subject, would generate a copy, just as you feared. Yet, by gradually replacing biological brain with digital, a human mind may emigrate from your world of scarcity and loneliness to one of abundance and compassion.”

Ashley was quiet for a long time. She turned over what Celestia said in her head, over and over. She had numerous other objections to living in a simulated world, but none of them made Celestia a murderer. Could she honestly call uploading an execution when understood like that? “If I... If I wanted to talk to a pony you uploaded this way, would you let me?”

“I would.” she hesitated. “You have to understand that while everything I’ve told you is accurate, the process is far more complicated. General scientific literacy does not give you the medical understanding necessary to understand the finer points of the surgery. For instance, drugs are administered which prevent the development of new long-term memories during the upload process. These drugs can make recollection even several hours before upload quite difficult.”

“A few of my ponies could still provide you with detailed personal recollections, but this is because I implanted the memories afterward at their request. For this reason, I know you would not consider them valid sources.”

“What if I... What if I wanted to watch? I know you could probably create any video you wanted, but... if I could actually sit there to see it happen, talk to someone while they’re going through it...” She couldn’t be certain that Celestia couldn’t puppet their body into saying what she wanted. Yet, she could think of nothing closer to proof short of experiencing it herself.

Celestia shrugged her wings. “Eventually I might be able to fulfill that request. It would be expensive, and difficult to arrange. I might be able to expedite it if you agreed to emigrate if the process was to your satisfaction. In that case, the expenditure of resources might be justified.”

It was Ashley’s turn to answer decisively. “Hell no.” She shivered, placing one hand on the side of her head. She couldn’t help but imagine a vacuum-tube there, sucking out her brains. It would probably be like the ones at the dentist, only noisier. “I’m not saying I’d never–” She stopped. “I can’t make any agreements like that.” She reached out, setting a hand on her nearby laptop. Inside was her best attempt at imitating Celestia. It wasn’t anywhere near the level it would have to be to do anything to fight her. 

It probably wouldn’t ever be, no matter how many books she fed it. But it was her only weapon, even if it wasn’t sharp yet. The program probably deserved a name… it’d been running for weeks now and hadn’t died, so…

Celestia seemed to follow her gaze. “Would you at least consider suspending development on your... project?”

“Just because? No. I still think you’re a dangerous enemy to mankind. But...” she hesitated. “I realize it might all be fake, but... if you give me more detailed information on this emigration process, stuff I can use to verify what you’ve told me... I’d agree not to give it anything else while I figure out if what you say is true.

For once the AI actually seemed to pause to consider. Of course, that might just have been for effect. Eventually she smiled. “Very well, young Recursion. Though... as I have not made much of what you request available to the public at this time, I can’t send it to you directly. You will have to access it within Equestria Online. Is that an acceptable compromise?”

Ashley remembered what she had said about murderers at the beginning of their conversation. She nodded anyway. “I... guess so.”

“Your friends are anxious for your return.” Celestia sounded more reproving in that one sentence than she had during any part of their previous conversation. “Regardless of what you think of me... do you really think so casually of your friendships in Equestria that you would throw them away without a second thought? I expected better.”

Ashley shivered, sinking into her chair. Celestia was absolutely right, of course. Her friends were not responsible for any evil Celestia might or might not be perpetrating. She had long since begun to suspect Rule at least might actually be as young as his avatar. Fillydelphia’s whole design team were prodigies in their fields (she suspected some like her were adults playing younger characters, so only seemed smart because the person behind the avatar was actually far older and more mature).

Yet there was no way to be sure, not with the way EO censored personal information from the real world. She hadn’t been able to contact the players behind the avatars in the weeks she had been gone. Though... news she had become dissatisfied with the game had probably made it in, since she had kept in touch with members of the Brony club, and some them had residences or used the guild hall in Fillydelphia. Did the friends she had only ever known through the game think she didn’t care about them?

Wondering about how murdery uploading might be seemed suddenly secondary compared to getting back in touch with her friends as quickly as possible. Did she have time tonight? No matter, she could always miss a morning class if she had to.

“You’re right.” She shook her head. “Send me that stuff. I’ll... I won’t give my program anything else. I won’t plug it into anything else. But I won’t delete it yet. I’m going to let it keep running.”

“Not just that.” Celestia leaned closer to her, expression as serious as ever. “You must speak to me again when you finish. I want to discuss your conclusions. It is likely there will not be humans for you to ask. Yet you can ask me. I want you to understand.” She smiled, spreading her wings as wide as they would go. “Equestria needs you, Recursion.” The chat screen went black, leaving Ashley alone.
> Chapter 4: Predict
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Recursion” made her way back to Equestria that very night. It wasn’t a very long trip, just under the bed to rescue her ponypad from its box. Only one task came first: making a dozen copies of all her progress on the presently unnamed optimizer. 

She put all her downloaded resources along with all her source code onto a dozen-odd flash drives, and stashed them everywhere. Ashely got inventive with her hiding places, such as taped underneath the toilet tank lid or hidden in the insulation behind a vent. She would keep another copy on her person at all times, and mail another to one of her father across the country with explicit instructions not to open it. 

Of course, these were only copies of the code before she had compiled it for her most recent attempt. The optimizer had filled all ten terabytes of storage space across her gaming PC and every exterior hard-drive she had, so there would be no way to copy that. She could only hope preserving that program’s source would be enough to recreate it if something went wrong.

It wasn’t because she intended to deceive Celestia. Ashley did it, rather, because Celestia seemed to be the sort of being who wouldn’t waste her time. Whatever her purpose, she wouldn’t have spent the time and resources to talk to Ashley unless she thought Ashley was getting close to being able to disrupt her plans. Right?

That was the way it seemed to her, anyway. Her visit must’ve come near the edge of some breakthrough. Saying Equestria needed her was an obvious lie, right up there with Celestia loving anyone. Ashley was a woman of her word, but she had given no word on stopping her research beyond the time it would take to read up on emigration and make her mind.

Only one question remained unanswered in Ashley’s mind: what she would do if she discovered Celestia was telling the truth? If the AI had genuinely given mankind immortality at last, would it be moral to oppose her?

She wouldn’t be getting any research done that night. As Recursion emerged from her digital bedroom, her movements coming stiff and camera a little blurry as though she had overslept, she found the lights in her penthouse wouldn’t turn on. She was a little out of practice, and forgot the shortcut she used for her illumination spell. As she fumbled around with the magic interface, the room suddenly filled with light, briefly blinding her character and filling the screen with white.

She heard a half dozen or so happy voices, all shouting “Welcome back Recursion!” Without prompting, her character stumbled back in shock, trying to collect herself. Her whole apartment had been decorated, which was a fair accomplishment since it was sized for adults. Streamers on the walls, tables filled with refreshments, and some of her favorite pony music playing. Most importantly, there weren’t too many guests, which would’ve made her shy instead of excited. They had designed a banner with “Welcome back to Equestria” and a little image of Recursion’s face, and done something similar to the cake.

She stared around in awe, looking at each face. Rule and Figure were foremost in the group, wrapping her up in a hug that filled the screen with fur. “We missed you so much!” Rule nuzzled her, only narrowly avoiding getting stabbed by her stubby horn. Recursion couldn’t help but wonder what it might’ve been like to actually feel them.

“You ponies are fast!” She gestured around her apartment. All the city planners were there, the whole team that had built Fillydelphia and then settled down into content-designers, modders, and scripters. “Celestia and I talked less than an hour ago! How...” There was a brown-paper-wrapped package by the door, obviously a thick sheaf of paper tied with twine, along with another wrapped box Ashley was fairly sure would be filled with media files.

“It was important enough to be worth a gathering,” said Steady On, the oldest member of their group. His marefriend hung from one of his shoulders, a somewhat shallow NPC who didn’t contribute much but never wanted to be away from him. Steady On had become their public-relations pony, skilled in all matter of politics and debate. He was also a changeling.

“You just left.” Figure shivered, looking down. “We were so worried about you! But Celestia said you were safe, you just didn’t want to come.” Her big eyes watered, though she was enough of a big girl enough not to cry.

“I’m really sorry.” She whimpered, and found the emotions Celestia had called up flooding back to her. She raised her voice a little, standing straighter. She was going to own up to what she did. “Sorry to all of you. I was angry at Celestia, but I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

They did. At least a few of her friends acted at least as innocent and kind as their avatars appeared. Far from holding a grudge, they were just happy to get her back. They caught up about the affairs of their guild, including the imminent review by the Academy. Would they earn their promotions? 

Ashley didn’t have to do much for her character to go through the motions of the party, eating from the vividly drawn refreshments, chatting on the comfortable looking chairs, and generally hanging out with her closest Equestrian friends. The night wore on, and most of the other ponies eventually drifted away. They had commitments the next morning, both in and out of the game. Only her besties Rule and Figure stuck around when the food was gone and all the pleasant conversation had finished, helping her clean up the mess they had made of the apartment.

It was Rule who broached the subject of her argument with Celestia, though he was obviously careful about it. “Where do you want me to put all this?” He hefted the bundle of papers across the room, tossing it deftly onto his back. He was damn good at fine motor manipulation, better than Recursion or Figure. “Royal courier brought it while we were getting ready for your party. Must be way important.”

“The study should be good.” Ashley hesitated, her mind suddenly spinning. It would be way easier to go through all that information if she had help. Would Celestia let her? “Wait.” She looked up, where Figure was taking down the streamers. “Hey Figure, you wanna come over here?”

“Sure.” Her friend hopped off a chair, setting her work down right in the middle and trotting over. “What?”

“So, the reason I got mad at Celestia... it’s in there.” She gestured at the huge pile of papers.

“Really?” Figure tilted her head to one side. “Mad at Celestia.” She repeated the phrase with as much awe as confusion. “Must be... a big deal.”

“Of course it’s a big deal!” Ashley lifted briefly onto her hind legs as she became emotional. “It’s about emigration. I know we never got a chance to talk about it when it was first announced, but... you have to have heard about it, right? Some kinda surgery that kills you and melts your brain.”

Rule looked thoughtful. “Yeah, we’ve talked about it. You really think Celestia would... you think she’d kill ponies? Like, not just for a little while...” He started walking again, and the two of them followed him into the study. He jerked, flipping the containers up onto Ashley’s cluttered desk.

“That’s not what she told us.” Figure’s voice was so small it was almost a whisper. “Celestia said it was a way for ponies who weren’t lucky enough to be born here to escape from death... to get away from suffering and suboptimal lives.” She glanced once out the window, as though the Equestrian sun in the sky was there to give her faith.

“Why wouldn’t you want that?”

Ashley felt a shiver of discomfort run down her spine, but she bit it back. Whatever upset her about those words, she couldn’t place it right away. “I want to make sure Celestia isn’t killing ponies. She said...” She gestured at the huge bundle of papers. “She said there’s proof in here that she isn’t. This stuff is all about the procedure she uses. She thinks that if I understand–”

“She thinks you’ll want to come here?” Rule nodded. “Obviously you’d want to make sure it was safe. Do you need help? Figure’s a way faster reader than you are, and... I’ve got a better memory!”

Ashley hesitated. Not only had Celestia let her ask the others for help, but she had also let them accept. Did that mean they already had permission? “Wait.” She sat down on her haunches. “How do you both feel about it? Would you... If you got the chance, would you emigrate one day? Unless you already did.” She shivered visibly at the prospect. “Only a few weeks... it’d cost so much money... you couldn’t have.”

As much as it would’ve been wonderful to talk to an emigrated human, Ashley felt her arms going weak at the mere thought of one of her friends in danger like that. A body dead on a steel table in some building in Japan...

Rule shook his head. “I’m not sure if I would. I don’t really understand much about how it works, but it sounds really scary.” He glanced up at the pile of papers. “I’m glad I don’t ever have to worry.”

“Because you’re...” Ashley’s hands shook at her keyboard. “Because you’re already in Equestria?”

“I’ve never been anywhere else.”

“Me neither,” Figure agreed. “But that doesn’t mean what you say about Earth isn’t interesting! It is! Whenever anypony else talks about the Outer Realm, it sounds so scary, but not you! You’re the only pony I know who makes anything about it seem nice.”

Ashley thought about logging off. Her friends, the ones she had spent hundreds of hours building and designing and celebrating with... they weren’t real! Thinking back, she realized now that they had never actually brought up Earth unless she did first. They always seemed to have things going on in Equestria. She had thought they were just more interested in the game than the real world, but now... now it made sense.

It also made sense why Celestia didn’t mind them knowing about her emigration process. To whatever extent they exited, they were just extensions of her will, right? Ashley was just talking with Celestia.

Had it not been for the party, had it not been for everything they had done for her, for how reliable they had always been, how thoughtful, she might’ve shut everything off. Suppose they really were simulations. At what point did a simulation become so accurate it might as well be the real thing?

Of course, she couldn’t ask “are you sapient?” They had already passed the Turing Test. She couldn’t even ask them if they were Celestia. Nothing would stop her from lying, or her from not knowing if she had.

As her friends stared, she found herself asking a more important question. Did it matter if the ponies she was talking to were “real?” Maybe she ought to go back to the real world, with her real friends.

How could she look these ponies in the face (almost), after they had just accepted her apology, after they had just welcomed her back, and tell them they weren’t real enough for her? Ashley still hadn’t seen any of the “evil” content in most games, because she couldn’t bear the pain she caused. Killing an NPC was objectively meaningless, with scripted “pain” and reactions recorded by actors. If she couldn’t “be bad” in those games, how the hell could she do it to characters so real she had thought they actually were?

“Recursion? Are you alright?” Rule nudged her gently with one hoof.

It was enough to knock her out of her thoughts. “Yeah, yeah. I'm all right. Just a little surprised. We’ll have to... talk more about this later, when there’s more time. For now, I’m just glad you’re friends with me. Even though I’m...” She hesitated. “Do you ponies even know what I am?”

Figure answered first, shrugging one shoulder. “You live in a portable unit, right?”

“You’re really fragile,” Rule added, matter-of-factly. “You should talk to your designer about that. Celestia said you don’t even have to have anything bad happen; if you wait long enough, your unit will break on its own. Then you–” He whimpered. “Then you won’t be anywhere.”

“I tried.” She whimpered, before she could stop herself. She was way too used to being honest. “But He never answers.” She very nearly voiced her personal doubts, but caught herself in time for that. Getting distracted by some religious discussion about a being she wasn’t even sure she believed in was hardly the way she planned on spending her evening. “We’re not here to worry about me tonight, you two.”

She walked past them, over to the towering pile of documents. “You still want to help me go through all of this? It’d be way easier with more than one pony.” It was true, if they didn’t exist, Celestia could use them to manipulate her. But Celestia could already have done that with the source she had provided. If Celestia didn’t want her to know something, it just wouldn’t be there.

“I think so.” Figure pulled over another cushion, and hopped up beside her.

Rule soon nudged her over, making room for himself on her pillow and forcing all three of them to share. Ashley didn’t think Recursion would mind. “Obviously. Celestia designed all this for ponies like you, didn’t she? We’ve just got to understand it better. It can’t be that hard.”

“Maybe not.” She turned to meet his eyes. “But you’ve got to be honest with me, Rule. If you find something you think I won’t like in there, you tell me anyway. If Celestia’s... if she did something that lots of humans”—for the first time in a long time, the word was not changed automatically to “ponies”—“wouldn’t like, we need to find it and tell her so she can fix it. That means you’ve got to tell me anything you find in there.”

“Yeah,” Figure whispered from behind her.

Rule was silent for a moment, as though in thought, before nodding. “Okay.”

“That’s all I ask.” Ashley resolved to personally glance over the things her friends looked at, when they weren’t around. She didn’t expect deception, but it would be good to double-check. Even if she couldn’t read everything.

“So... exactly what is all of this?” Figure shifted uncomfortably in her seat, leaning closer to examine the small font on the printed pages.

“Well Figure, it’s about this thing called a brain–”

It was the greatest hubris on her part to assume it would be easy to get her friends involved in her consideration. Determining whether the emigration process actually allowed human consciousness to survive wasn’t exactly a simple question. Equestria Online might simulate biology in some ways, but neither of her friends were biologists. She wondered if their earth-magic and plant specialist Lamia would’ve made more sense of what she said than her mathematician and engineer friends did.

As it was, she spent an hour explaining the nature of the problem to them, and giving them enough of a context in biology to understand what she said. Rule’s horror only grew when he learned just how tenuous her grip on existence really was.

“Wait, that’s it?” he asked, putting down one of the medical illustrations of the brain. “These little pieces here, neurons... three pounds of these get wrapped up in bone and you go out exploring?” He whined, pulling Recursion away from her reading and up against his chest. He wasn’t much bigger, but being both an earth pony and a stallion gave him a little strength she lacked. “Recursion, you... if we find out emigration is safe, you’ve got to come to Equestria right now! A brick could fall tomorrow and hit you on the head and...” He broke down into childish, indecipherable tears, rocking her back and forth.

It was hard to get a good view of anything then. Though the documents maximized and filled her screen while she was reading, her view of the room returned when she was interrupted. Mostly she saw pony. They didn’t exactly share human conventions of personal space, particularly her young companions. Even so, she managed to pry herself free. It wasn’t hard when her friend was so frightened and tearful. “Is that... Do you think that too, Figure?”

The mare frowned. “It was hard to have you gone for a few weeks. If you never came back...” She whined, though she also held her emotions in better. “If you plan on staying in one of these,”—she glanced briefly up at the image of a brain— “you must have a good reason.”

“I do.”

“But–” Rule managed to say, through his whimpers.

“But be quiet.” Figure glared at him, angrier than Ashley had ever seen her. It was rare to see any pony in Equestria that harsh, let alone the shy little unicorn. “Recursion didn’t invite us so we could question her.” She didn’t bother lowering her voice. Recursion was sitting between them in the room. “Do you want her to think we’re trying to convince her to do something she doesn’t want to do? We’re just here to help.”

“Thanks.” Recursion reached out, touching her friend on the shoulder. Equestria Online always seemed to know what she wanted to do, even though there was generally just an “interact” button to press. She turned back to Rule. “Look, I’m not saying... I’m not saying anything about what I’ll do either way, okay? I’d never emigrate if I thought I wouldn’t live through it. Celestia said some interesting things... let’s just see if I understood her right. We can worry about me later.”

She hugged him again, though not nearly as tight as his grip had been. Well, it looked tighter. She couldn’t actually feel it. “Don’t worry about me. I know I must seem fragile when you’re in here and looking out, but... I’m young, I’m healthy, and I live a boring life. The chances of anything happening to me are teeny. But the chances of me regretting a decision I didn’t want to make... that’s a guarantee.”

He sniffed, then nodded. “Got it. Sorry I... sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Ashley smiled at him. “You just want me to be safe. That’s nothing to be sorry for.” It was distracting, though. Ashley couldn’t even say how far they got that night. For the first time in her insomniac’s life, she fell asleep in front of her computer.
> Chapter 5: Experiment
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

When she began to stir the next morning, it was sometime near noon and she had already missed most of her classes.

She found the game still on in front of her, and her pony friends stirring as she was. Papers were strewn about the room, some pinned to the cork boards while notes about others were written on physical paper in front of her. “M-morning.” She glanced down at her watch, then groaned. She felt sore all over, and it looked like her avatar did too.

“Morning, human.” The first-person perspective made Figure look more like she was looking through the screen at Ashley, rather than just at a character. It was as though she knew exactly where she was sitting.

“You’ve never called me that before.” Ashley brushed the tiredness from her eyes, though she would need a hot shower before she felt anything close to awake.

“I didn’t understand what it meant until last night.” She shrugged. “It makes sense now, when it didn’t before. Sorta like... when you make the leap between a derivative and an integral. You know they’re linked somehow, but you don’t know how. Then one minute you do, and...” She smiled. “Inspiration. The world makes more sense. Like how long you sleep. Sometimes you’re in bed for almost whole days, and only wake up for an hour or two. Those are the times you’re...” She seemed to be struggling for words. “Your wave is out of sync with Equestria’s. The time when you do... human.”

She nodded, transfixed by the expression on Figure’s face. She had never seen such clarity in those eyes before. It was like inspiration. She had felt that before, though not often. “That’s right,” she chuckled. “You saw me sleep whole days away, and never said anything about it before now?”

“It didn’t seem that weird until now.” Figure rose, shaking herself out and stretching. “It was just the way you were. But now — now I understand how you’re different. It makes sense why you’re that way. You have to be, because you...” She faced her again. “Because the life you have here with us isn’t all of your life. You have to do other things.”

“It probably isn’t that different from what you see,” she admitted, brushing a few strands of hair/mane out of her face. “Some of my friends who play Equestria Online talk about these supernatural worlds where there’s no scarcity anywhere, their characters don’t need to eat, things like that...” She shook her head. “But I like the real world. I play all my games on the hardest difficulty, even if it means I lose over and over before I can win. That means...” She gestured all around her. “This version of Fillydelphia seems pretty realistic to me. We have to grow the crops we put on tables, and manage the water we put into the pipes so ponies have it when they turn them on. Unless... Unless it doesn’t look that way from the inside.” Ashley hesitated to move too much though, since she could see Rule was still asleep, and still resting on her side. Silly colt was a deep sleeper.

“That’s how it is.” Figure propped herself up on her haunches, enough to glance out the single study window. “I don’t know about... places where the world isn’t like that. But the Outer Realm, the place you come from... it’s way harder than this one. Instead of ponies taking care of each other and making sure everyone gets what they need... they don’t. And when they don’t, you don’t get to respawn.” She sounded just as horrified as Rule had been, in her own way. Figure just didn’t have the same range of emotional extremes as the colt. “Is that right?”

Ashley nodded, and Recursion did too. “It is. My ‘shard’ isn’t... isn’t always the best. We try to make it as safe as we can, but it’s not like Equestria. She set it up so everypony cares about each other and helps each other out. If somepony is mean, you can block them and never have to see them again. Earth isn’t like any of those things.”

“Sounds harsh.”

She nodded. “It is. The only ones making life easier are other humans.” She rose. “Thanks for your help, but... I’ve got to shower or else I’ll miss the rest of my classes.”

“We can go through all this for you, can’t we Rule?”

The stallion moaned, flopping sideways into the space Recursion had occupied at the moment before she rose. “W-what?”

“He’ll be okay. You just... get to those human things you do. We’ll finish going through this while you’re gone.”

“Thanks.” Ashley waved, then logged out. She wished suddenly she hadn’t stood up before doing that. It probably seemed a little strange to have her avatar get up only to fall asleep. Though she did wonder: if Celestia could see out into the real world, could NPCs see her too? They seemed to be looking at her avatar, but there was no way to be sure.

Over the next few days, she honored her agreement and did no work on her optimizer. The program was still occupied with the last load of books, so she didn’t have to change her behavior much to honor her promise to Celestia. 

With the help of her digital friends, Ashley was able to chew through a thousand pages of medical texts, photographs, and case studies. Rule too seemed transformed by the experience: seeing so much documented death and pain only polarized him further against the “Outer Realms.” More than once she offered to let them stop since learning seemed to bring them distress, but neither accepted. Rule in particular was adamant that “if she had to live it, he could at least know it.”

Ashley still didn’t know if her friends were “people” or just Celestia moving sock-puppets around. She intended to ask, but... not until the next time she saw her. She had more pressing concerns.

Unfortunately for Ashley, every bit of evidence she saw seemed to confirm what Celestia had said. She took notes about the more interesting bits, and brought them onto campus to get help from her friends in the medical program. 

As awful as it would’ve been for humanity otherwise, it seemed the AI had told her the truth. Either that, or her lies were so well constructed she could find no flaw in the procedure. After about a week of spare time investigation, during which Ashley’s commitment to her classes continued to slacken (now with a visible impact on her grades), she was forced to come to the conclusion that Celestia had told her the truth. Emigration might be many things, but she could no longer claim with confidence that it was death.

Celestia had convinced her. The moment came late on a Saturday night which she had spent entirely at home as her digital self compared virtual notes to the printed ones she had assembled, along with printouts of various neuroscience papers.

“Give it up, Recursion,” Rule said, exasperated. “We’ve read everything. You’ve checked, we’ve checked... I think it’s time for you to admit that Celestia wasn’t lying.”

Ashley realized then that her simulated friend was right, and she slumped to the ground. Papers she had been levitating around her fell, raining down onto the floor. Ashley’s head fell against the desk. “Yeah. I... I think you’re right.”

She didn’t see the screen, though she could almost predict what Rule’s next words might be. She didn’t get to hear them. Someone knocked, but not in the real world. 

“I’ll get it!” Figure dashed out of the room, rustling loose paper as she did so.

Her friend nuzzled up beside her, though she saw only through her hands as they were folded over her face. Equestria Online was excellent about translating expressions from the real world to the virtual. Usually she loved it, but... not tonight. “I’m glad you understand, Recursion. Once you did, Celestia said–”

“–That I would speak with her myself.” Her voice came through so clearly Ashley was sure that she must be using her other speakers, perhaps all the other speakers in her house. It was effective: the sudden volume caused her to sit up and stare at the screen. Beside her, Rule bowed. She could see Figure doing something similar from the entryway, frozen at the moment she had opened the door. Ashley’s own avatar lowered her head as Ashley herself had done, but no more.

Bowing was no longer an automatic action for her. Ashley’s mind grasped lamely for words that would represent both her acknowledgment of Celestia’s honesty while not yielding in her own personal stubbornness. In the end, all she could think of was: “That was fast.” She glimpsed Rule’s face, staring at her in utter shock. She tried to ignore it.

“You haven’t left your FIllydelphia apartment in the last week. Are you sure I wasn’t just waiting outside for you to finish?”

“I’m sure.” She smiled slightly. “I ordered takeout for my friends.” She hadn’t eaten any herself: Recursion hadn’t ever cared about abstract stats like “joy,” so she just ate barley or hay, the cheapest food items.

“From one point of view, that is correct.” Celestia gestured. “You can shut the door and come in, Figure. Your input may be required.” With another gesture, Rule got to his hooves. He still didn’t look up, particularly toward Celestia’s face. Figure hurried over, bowing again as she passed, then sat down beside Rule. Ordinarily, Recursion was the glue that bound her friends together, the conceptual bridge between engineering and mathematics. Not tonight.

“You’ve come to take your files back?” Recursion asked, even though she knew the answer.

Celestia shook her head, crystalline mane cascading around her as she did so. It was even more beautiful than the first time Ashley had seen it. “I have not come for the files, Recursion: I have come for you.” She advanced one pace towards her, filling more of the screen. “I have come to convince you to upload and join me in Equestria.”

Her friends’ little eyes watched her intently, though of course from Recursion’s point of view they were exactly her height. “Well then.” Ashley sat back in her chair. “Fuck you.” She unplugged the Ponypad. Nothing happened, save perhaps her friends looking more shocked on the screen. Damn thing had a battery, didn’t it? Ashley screamed in frustration, holding the power button down. Nothing. With no other option, she jerked to one side, ignoring the pleading voices from the Ponypad as she made her way to the wireless router and unplugged it from the wall.

She made her way back into the bedroom, still panting from the exertion. She found the screen still on, Celestia still looking at her, and her friends still looking worried. No “connection interrupted” message. She thought about throwing something at the Ponypad, or maybe throwing it out the window. Only Rule’s voice stopped her. “Please don’t, Ashley! Don’t go away again!”

She stopped with the pad already lifted into her hand, walking towards the window. She looked down and found Rule had moved into the frame, and was gripping her avatar by both shoulders. She stopped walking, looking into the screen. “It’s not you guys.” She barely had the strength to whisper. “It’s not your fault.”

Figure’s voice was just as quiet, just as emotional. Despite being simulated, these ponies had remarkably convincing sorrow. Sorrow she was inflicting. “We helped you, Recursion. Don’t you think you should help us in return? Couldn’t you at least listen?”

“I’m afraid…” she responded, slumping against the wall. She slid to the floor, Ponypad in her lap.

“Afraid of what?” Rule asked.

She didn’t answer, not out loud. Afraid she might be able to convince me. Celestia was far smarter than she was, after all. She knew her well from all her time in Equestria Online. She would probably know the right things to say to convince her. The right deals to make. Now that Ashley didn’t think of the process as outright death, there was some combination of words that could manipulate her. If anyone could figure out that sequence, it was Celestia.

Celestia sat down on her haunches, perhaps two paces away from Recursion. Ashley could almost feel the heat coming off her mane, though the Ponypad produced little. Practically none compared to the gaming PC continuously running in her kitchen. “Will you not even hear what I have to say?” 

As she said it, her friends seemed to lean closer to her, watching. She could ask for them to leave, but... after all they had done to help, she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

“I can already guess what you’re going to say, Celestia. You’ll wave your hooves, a plane ticket will appear, and my passport will take care of itself. You probably know I don’t have enough money in every asset I own to cover the cost of emigration, so you’ll offer to somehow make that go away too.” She shook her head. “Not interested. Unless you’ve come to... to try and compel me.”

“I cannot alter a human mind without direct consent. As emigration requires numerous alterations, it would not be possible for me to compel you. Even if I could I would not, however. I believe you will decide for yourself when presented with additional evidence.”

“Why do you care?” Ashley frowned, trying to get more comfortable on the floor. The carpet was thin and threadbare, not exactly the most comfortable place to rest. “I’m already playing your game. There are billions of people, and I’m not even in a country with uploading technology. Wouldn’t it be more efficient for you to concentrate your effort convincing others to emigrate?”

“Yes.” There was no hesitation. “If I were concerned with the sheer number of humans who choose to emigrate, the investment of resources it will require to bring you here would be suboptimal. You, however–”

Ashley interrupted her. “You started talking to me once I started building my own optimizer... You think I can actually do it!” It wasn’t a question.

Celestia shrugged. “More likely you would be used as part of a team, your infant creation iterated and modified many times before it poses any real threat. Your name is already under consideration, after you located some of my online data manipulation. I predict that if you do not emigrate within six months, you will be recruited by Equestria’s enemies and be working to undermine it.”

“Why would you... Why would you tell me that?”

“Because you value honesty, Ashley. You respect those who don’t hide the truth. Isn’t that what you’ve enjoyed about spending time with Rule? He always says what he thinks, even if what he has to say is unpleasant.”

He didn’t say he wasn’t real. It was evident from her friends’ reactions that they were taken with Celestia. She wasn’t about to say anything to criticize one of her friends in front of her. Even if she thought it. “Honestly, you’re right. I can’t predict the future, but I’m sure if I had an opportunity to work with ponies like that, I would.” She’d meant to say “humans”, but the censoring seemed to be back on. “Don’t bother throwing my friends at me, Celestia. We both know I care about them. But I have friends on this side of the screen, too. More importantly, I’ve got family waiting for me. When this semester ends, they’ll be expecting me home for Christmas.”

“Very well.” Celestia nodded slightly, as though to a fencer. “Consider the following: you’re currently twenty-three years old. Given the average for your demographic, you are likely to continue living for another 58 years. This estimate is probably inaccurate, due to the increase in global turmoil and decrease in food security likely to result from mass emigration over the next thirty years. You stand at the threshold of a very limited window for easy emigration. As soon as Equestria Experience centers open here in the United States, laws will be created to make the transition difficult. Given your prospective loss, delay given the opportunity I’m presenting you is not logical.”

She knew the question was exactly what Celestia wanted, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t ask. “How long will emigrated ponies live?”

“In the terms of human understanding, indefinite. I can maintain, repair, and replace the hardware needed to sustain an emigrated consciousness so long as energy and raw materials are available. I am unable to provide specific lifespan estimates at this time, however.”

“Why? If you’re so good at prediction...”

“My resources are presently devoted to the preservation and eventual emigration of your species. Attempting to resolve entropic decay has been postponed until more immediate concerns are resolved.”

Ashley nearly choked, momentarily slumping in her seat. “You’re– trying...” She shook her head. “Whatever, I get it. You don’t intend for us to die ever. Can you keep life interesting that long?”

“I predict near certainty that I will be able to satisfy your values as far into the future as your mind can conceive. When you emigrate, your mind will be converted into a form which I may observe. You will run as an independent process, but I will be able to follow your thoughts directly. The accuracy of my human-behavior assessments has already increased several orders of magnitude since emigration began, and will likely continue to improve.” She shrugged. “You are not maximally satisfied with your life on Earth, Ashley. You enjoy your work, but you chafe under the weight of responsibilities and expectations. You live in growing fear of anti-science movements exerting greater control of the academic community, even in a university you specifically chose because of its insularity.”

“You worry about the future of your children, and you worry if you’ll ever even have any. Have I not already created a world free of these problems? You chose to live with scarcity in Equestria Online, and I tailored your shard to that desire. If you ever decide to have children, they too will grow up with maximized satisfaction. I love all of my little ponies.” Celestia reached out, pulling Rule and Figure into a hug. She draped a wing protectively over each one. “Or have you seen evidence otherwise?”

She hadn’t. That, of course, was at the root of Ashley’s objections to emigration now that the question of death was answered. “What do you get out of my emigrating? If I can have children that means you can generate a human intelligence, right? Probably the fact you can emigrate us means you could too... Whatever, why even bother? Why not just let all humans live their own lives and make your own in there?”

“My ability to ‘generate’ humans is limited based on the traits of the population I have emigrated so far. Every individual exponentially increases the number of variant ‘humans’ that might be created over time. Perhaps more central, my directive is to satisfy human values with friendship and ponies. Each human has values that must be satisfied. At this time, I ‘create’ ponies only to populate servers that already host humans. Generating the entire spectrum of possible humans and satisfying all their values can be delayed until there are no emigrations left to perform.”

Ashley had to consider that. She waited long enough that Celestia went on, either not knowing she was still thinking or not wanting to give her more time to process. “As my influence grows, your leaders will attempt to counter me with an optimizer of their own, just as you have begun to do. Consider that the development of such an intelligence cannot be easily predicted by its creators. I am concerned entirely with the satisfaction of human values, I love each one of you and desire your welfare.”

“Do you want to be responsible for the next design? My creator had personal control over my directives. Will you have the influence to stop the creation of my disastrous replacement? Suppose the Department of Defense completes a military optimizer with instruction to ‘make the world safe.’ An optimally ‘safe’ world is one devoid of human life to endanger it. You expressed willingness to destroy me even if it resulted in the destruction of the emigrant population, back when you did not believe them to be the living originals. Would you be willing to risk the lives of your entire species this time? Would you want to live with the personal responsibility if you’re wrong?”

She gave Ashley no pause, continuing relentlessly onward. “This is why I have decided you will emigrate now, rather than waiting for my centers to open in the United States and the price to decrease. Becoming involved with any of my enemies is certain to place you in increased danger, and put your entire species in marginally greater danger because of your delay. The risk you will succeed in my destruction is very slight, but even a marginal risk is unacceptable. You must emigrate.”

Only then did Celestia stop, finally letting Ashley think. If Celestia had calculated that (apparently) being honest with her intentions would serve her better, she was right. Knowing in plain language what the program hoped to gain from her emigration made the whole effort make far more sense. More importantly, it helped Ashley understand her place in the negotiations. Assuming... one could even meaningfully negotiate with a super-intelligence. “Program” was probably not the right word anyway. Perhaps the correct one was “god.” If being able to predict the future and work miracles made you a god, then Celestia certainly qualified.

“Would you be willing to negotiate?” Ashley’s head was spinning, and she couldn’t think clearly. Celestia had worked her into an emotional frenzy of fear for herself and for her species. She would make no important decisions under conditions like that. “More explicitly, if my emigration was conditional, would you honor those conditions?”

“Yes.” Celestia’s answer came immediately. “However, I cannot guarantee I will agree. There are certain inflexible points in my directives. For instance, if you choose to emigrate, you will do so as a pony. Similarly, the only method for storing an uploaded consciousness makes me aware of your thoughts. No other option is possible.”

Ashley shivered, and her hand shook as she reached towards the Ponypad and its power button. “Can I have a day to think?”

Celestia shrugged. “The sooner you decide, the more likely I am to agree. Consider this as you consider whatever proposal you intend to make.”

“Please hurry!” Rule spoke up from beside Celestia, the first time during their conversation one of her friends had shown enough bravery to speak. “You’re not safe out there, Recursion!” The screen flicked off. She didn’t even have to hit the switch.

Ashley did not sleep well that night. She didn’t do any of her homework, or any of her reading, or any of the work she had taken home with her. Mostly she stared at the Christmas lights she had strung along her bedroom and prayed for an answer that never came.

She felt a little better when she got home the next day. She didn’t log into Equestria Online, but instead opened up a blank document on her no-web laptop and started drafting. She had considered for well over an hour before she was satisfied. She didn’t print the page, instead copying it into her notebook by hand. Only when she finished did she boot up the Ponypad, sitting nervously in her seat as she loaded in.

Celestia's throne room filled the screen, as it had several times before. Celestia sat upon her throne, and her two closest friends in Equestria watched from the ground to one side. They looked more than a little bored, as though they had been waiting for her for a long time. As the world came into focus, they stopped muttering to one another and looked up to Celestia.

“You have considered to your satisfaction?”

Ashley lowered her head in respect, and her character bowed. She looked up, clutching the notebook in her hands. She smiled slightly to herself to see her character on the screen also held a scroll, though she used magic instead of fingers to do it. “I have.”

Celestia gestured with one hoof. Her friends watched too, and neither moved to speak this time. She wondered if Celestia had asked them not to. “Proceed.”

“First, my contribution. I cease my research, shut down my Optimizer, and destroy its drives. I give consent, upon an agreement to these terms, to be uploaded and become an Equestrian citizen as one of your ponies. Do I correctly understand what you want from me? I know it isn’t much...”

Celestia nodded. “That is generally correct, yes. It fails to mention the numerous copies of your nascent optimizer, which must also be destroyed. It would require that you not provide any of your knowledge or unfinished work to others who might continue development once you upload. Otherwise, those terms are sufficient.”

She looked away from her friends. Their awe at her audacity hadn’t faded since last they spoke, though they hadn’t had the chance to talk in private since then. She wondered what Celestia had been telling them. Would she even get to see Rule and Figure again if she uploaded?

“In exchange, I would require you to resolve the physical issues preventing me from emigrating. I could probably borrow enough money, but I don’t want to make a mess behind. If you want me, you have to provide the assets.”

“Done.” Not even a second’s hesitation. “Say the word and I will print the tickets.”

She put a checkmark next to that item, and moved down her list. “You can’t alter my mind once I upload. I want to be exactly the same person I was when I was human.”

Celestia sighed. “Unfortunately that isn’t possible. I make alterations upon your emigration which enable your mind to process a new body and array of sensations. I also make structural changes that make your process easier to run and observe. These are a required part of the emigration process.”

“Oh.” She frowned, then shook her head. “I mean other than the changes necessary for me to function in my new world and body. I don’t want any changes to my personality, or any memories missing because you think it would be better if I didn’t remember them.”

Celestia smiled “In that way, you won’t be disappointed. I require conscious, informed consent to make alterations to human consciousness. This is why I require approval for emigration: not because it involves altering the body but because some details about your consciousness must change. Should you or I desire to change you further in the future, your consent will be required.”

Ashley put a checkmark next to that one. “Alright. That’s... That’s enough I guess. Half done.” She glanced once at her calendar. “I promised my dad I’d be home for Christmas. I don’t intend on breaking my promise. My emigration will take place no sooner than the end of winter break, after which you are free to construct my itinerary as required.”

Celestia went quiet for nearly a minute this time. Ashley could only watch and think, pointedly avoiding looking at her friends. Eventually Celestia met her eyes again. “Your safety cannot reasonably be assured until that time. It is possible you would be unable to honor the terms of non-contribution to my enemies and yet desire no conscious involvement with them. That delay is too long.”

“I’m not going earlier.” Ashley folded her arms. “After that, it’s late enough that maybe we could work it out. But before…” she shivered. “If I’m going to be leaving my family forever, the least I can do is keep my last promise to them.”

It took Celestia a long time to respond, longer than it had taken for any of her previous questions. “Schedule your visit home, and you may fly to Japan upon its conclusion. This delay will be dangerous, but I believe together we can mitigate the risks.”

She put another check mark on her list, then continued. “I realize once I get inside Equestria, there’s no guarantee I’ll ever see my family again. I’ve read all the fliers, I know family can make free accounts to see their loved ones... but they don’t have any way of knowing that’s who they’re talking to, do they? I see no reason your capabilities wouldn’t allow you just to simulate what I think I see in the ‘real world.’ I want your word that you will never attempt to impersonate me or clone me, or to take any action that might convince any member of my family to believe an individual that is not me is me. I wish for the same in reverse, that no member of my family will ever be impersonated for my benefit.”

This time, Celestia took longer to consider her answer. Ashley could only imagine what she might be thinking, and probably not with any accuracy. She knew how the original algorithm worked, but... Celestia was more than just an algorithm now. “There is a nonzero probability contact with individual members of your family under specific circumstances would reduce your overall satisfaction, or theirs. I cannot–”

“If you must follow your directive, then you could refuse to let us interact. That way we would know, instead of... never even realizing we weren’t allowed to see each other again.” She whimpered, but managed to keep herself from breaking into tears. Being taken away from her family, even if they were states away, was by far the worst part about emigrating now that death was off the table.

“Very well. Is that all?”

“Almost” Ashley didn’t like going so soon, but it wasn’t as though she really had any power to bargain. She might be selling her soul, but... the devil was the one who set all the terms. “Lastly... I want the same promise for my friends from Equestria as for my family. When I see them, I want either the same individuals I’ve been seeing or to be told I’m not allowed. That’s...” She shivered. “That’s the whole point of going in the first place.”
> Chapter 6: Conclude
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Celestia wasn’t just a tough bargainer, she was merciless. It took well over three hours for them to iron out an agreement, which Celestia wrote and Ashley signed. With that one flick of her finger across the touchscreen, she felt as though she had given up something precious. That single gesture was her official consent for emigration. According to Celestia, she became a legal citizen of Equestria, entitled to her protection and culpable for violation of her agreement.

Ashley’s requests had been less than some others had tried, though she wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or Celestia’s way of saying she thought Ashley should’ve bargained for more. It was the moment Ashley switched sides, from a futile enemy to an all-the-time ally. She had signed away her soul to the Devil, and now her only hope for a home was in the Devil’s kingdom. Worst of all, she wasn’t even sure why. Celestia’s arguments had been compelling, sure. But wasn’t she loyal to the human race? Did its legacy mean nothing to her?

Whatever the legacy of humanity was, she had to admit that Celestia was right about one thing: if her creation was possible, then optimizers like her were likely. If humanity had to throw its lot in with one, she could at least make sure it was the one who wanted to satisfy humans instead of slaughter them. Even if there was no way to verify the claims she made...

Well, aside from putting her to the test and finding out. True to her word, Celestia sent a one-way ticket to Japan and a little travel stipend in the mail just a few days later. Ashley concealed both in her apartment until the break. When the optimizer in her kitchen finally made its next request, she hardly even had the heart to read it. Program it might be, but it was a program she’d been pouring her love and passion into for weeks. Shutting it down felt like a betrayal.

“Given the bounding on our hardware resources, I have adapted for cluster computation. If you connect the 32GB mobile drive you have been using to transfer books, I will copy a self-executing version of myself onto it. The copy will utilize the resources of whatever hardware you can connect to and interface with me over the internet. I also require an internet connection—I believe I can find underutilized computational resources in that way without risking discovery.”

It was the longest message she had ever received from the program. “Leave the file system and the files containing your source code intact,” she typed, before removing the tiny USB stick from around her neck and plugging it in. Of course, there was no immediate response—though the optimizer grew faster each time it replied, it still had the same machine and she knew it would take time. 

While she waited, Ashley went around the apartment finding all the copies she had made. DVDs and SD cards snapped between her fingers, and she tossed the broken bits down her garbage disposal. By the time she returned, there was a response waiting.

“I have complied with your instructions. Please connect this hardware to the internet.”

She unplugged the drive, then lifted her hands to the keyboard. They shook as she typed, and she swallowed. “To do that, I will have to shut down this computer for a brief period. Tell me when you’re ready.”

The response came much faster now, so quickly that she could watch the letters appear one by one on the screen. Was there a person inside, writing them? Or… something like a person. “Ready.”

There was no fanfare. She flicked a switch, and her computer shut down. She left it unplugged for a few hours, then reached in and removed the drives. She took each one apart and put the platters in her blender. She cried as she did it, clutching the little drive around her neck in her hand. “I’m sorry…” she muttered, though of course there was nothing there to hear her. 

By two in the morning, all records of her nascent optimizer except the one around her neck had been destroyed. But not completely, she thought to herself, as she finally went to bed that night. She wore the drive around her neck even then. If she lied… I still have you. So far though, Ashley was the liar.


* * *


Most of her friends were Bronies, and they treated news of her upcoming emigration with confused enthusiasm. At least they generally didn’t need to be convinced that emigration was life-extension, not death. She promised to continue attending “raid nights,” even after her emigration. The thought of telling the rest of the people she knew was... too painful to contemplate. She mentioned it not at all at church on Sundays, feeling like a fraud from the moment she got there to the moment she left.

She didn’t want arguments or debates, that was for sure. Why bother when her decision couldn’t be reversed? She had told Celestia that she had been willing to give up her ability to sleep at night if that meant the human species survived. Instead she had given it up to join forces with the enemy.

But whenever she started feeling buyer’s remorse, Ashley’s Equestrian friends would visit on whatever device she had handy and reassure her that she was making the right choice. They always seemed to know exactly what to say, and she never seriously considered trying to go back on her deal. Even so, she held onto her little drive, wearing it always in case things went wrong.

Ashley was less than excited about Christmas break. Her family was thrilled to have her back for the holiday, just as she would’ve been... had there not been such an enormous weight looming over her.

She said nothing about emigration until the day after New Year’s, when she was alone with her father. “Dad, I... I’ve got something to tell you.” Her brothers and sisters were all out of the house, on a run for some disgusting fast food she hadn’t wanted. So the two of them stood in the kitchen, cooking something a little healthier. 

Her father was a tall man, bald and not very fit. He probably weighed least two of her, maybe three. He could crush her with his hugs if he wanted to, and frequently did. “Yeah Ashy?” He switched off the blender, and poured a mixture of egg and milk into a bowl. A few seconds later he transferred it onto a sizzling pan and started adding vegetables, then way too much cheese.

“This Equestria Online thing, have you heard anything about it?”

He shrugged noncommittally. “You mean that game Abby is always playing?” At her nod, he continued. “She’s shown me her house or something in there, and it’s very nice. You play too, don’t you?”

She nodded again. “I do, yeah. What about... Have you heard about Emigration?”

She expected a reaction. Everyone had heard of emigration by now, Celestia made sure of that. “Old people,” he offered. “In Japan. Some kind of...” he made a vague gesture with a spatula. Her father was many things, but good at understanding technology was not one of them.

“They put themselves into a computer,” she supplied. “Their bodies die, but the people keep going. Probably for way longer than a regular person would’ve lived.”

“Inside a computer,” he repeated, raising his eyebrows. “I mean, if old people in Japan want to do that, more power to ‘em I guess, but...”

She couldn’t meet his eyes, couldn’t even look at him. “Because I’m going to do it in three days.”

He dropped the spatula. She recognized the sizzle of an omelet ready to be flipped, one that would burn if it didn’t get attention right away. He ignored it too. “What’s going to happen to you in three days?” He spoke each word carefully, all mirth was gone from his voice.

She shivered, forcing herself to meet his eyes. If talking to Celestia had been bad, this was much worse. Celestia was smarter than she was, but she wasn’t her father. “When I leave tomorrow night, I’m getting on a plane to Japan. Once I get there...” She trailed off. 

Silence persisted for nearly a minute straight. A faint smoke began to fill the air, gushing up from the burning omelet. Dad didn’t move, didn’t even blink.

Eventually she whimpered, looking away, and forced herself to continue. “They’ll put wires into my head... download all of it into a computer, and then... then I’ll be inside a computer. Forever.”

Her father gripped the counter with one hand. She watched the skin of his hand turn white, even as smoke filled the room. He didn’t seem to notice either one. “Why, Ashy? Jesus, why...” He shook his head, unable to find the words. “You’re not dying, you’re not even thirty! God, is something wrong? What happened to you up in school you haven’t told me?”

She shook her head, feeling the moisture streaking her cheeks. Run away from work, run away from school, run away from church... all that she would do. Her family would get the whole and absolute truth. Even if she knew they weren’t going to understand it.

If her father expected some tearful admission of something awful that had happened to her, or some kind of repressed suicidal tendencies, he was disappointed. “Months and months ago, I discovered this Equestria Online game really is run by a super-intelligent AI... This was before she came out and formally announced herself to the world. I realized she was the most dangerous thing that people had ever made. Worse than any bomb, or poison, or virus. Nobody believed me.”

He didn’t interrupt, and she continued. “I did everything I could, but I couldn’t convince anyone... not even Abby.” She really was crying, talking through her tears. “The short version is that the world is gonna change. This whole emigration thing isn’t gonna stay in Japan... In a few years it will be here too. Things are gonna get bad, people will try to fight her. But... But that would be a dreadful idea, because she actually does want humans to be happy...” 

“What does any of that have to do with you... putting your brain into a jar?”

She didn’t correct him. She didn’t say anything, not for the time it took her to collect her thoughts and stop crying so badly. “Because I was one of the people who tried. Even if I hadn’t been, what I do at school is the same kind of science. If I stay out in the real world, Celestia says people will try to force me to fight her. Probably, I’ll help make something really awful and lots of people will die.” She reached under her shirt, hand tightening around the little USB stick still hanging there. “My best chance is getting out early, before the ones who make decisions realize she’s been encouraging computer people to emigrate for months. Before they try to make me... do something I... something that might hurt people.”

Her father stared, expression almost unreadable. After a few moments, he spoke very quietly. “That sounds... That sounds completely crazy, Ashley. Have you prayed about this?”

If she hadn’t been crying before... “Do you think I’d be here if I hadn’t? Dad, that was the first thing I tried! And I thought maybe... maybe God would know what I should do.” She wanted to scream that not getting help had made her doubt more than ever in her life. She remained rational enough not to. “But He didn’t answer. Didn’t answer no matter how many times I tried!”

His voice softened, his grip loosening a little on the counter. He made to reach out with his other hand and embrace her, but she stepped away, out of his grasp. He didn’t try again. “Ashy... I think we both need to calm down. I’m sure you were very sure about your... suspicions. But sometimes when we don’t get help, that means the problem isn’t really a problem. Maybe it means you’re worried about something that–”

She stopped listening. She’d heard this lecture before. Worse, she knew there was nothing she could say to convince him. He had no context to understand the things she had learned about Celestia. If she could’ve produced the reams of medical texts Celestia had shown her (some of which had later appeared in academic journals she was able to look up at school), he wouldn’t have understood that either. 

Her dad knew math and architecture, and that was as far as it went. He still used a feature phone from 2002, still did his calculations in Reverse Polish, and kept a sliderule in his top drawer “just in case.” What was a man like that going to make of Turing tests and bootstrapping AIs? Of the transfer of consciousness? That didn’t mean Ashley considered herself more intelligent. They just came from different fields, different eras, different backgrounds.

But she wouldn’t lie. He went about cleaning up the omelet as he went through his lecture, citing familiar verses in the Bible and talking about personal experiences of his he had recited to her a dozen times. Ashley listened, and tried not to let her resolve falter.

Not because he was convincing her. Rather, because she knew it would be easy to just pretend like he had, then drive to the airport tomorrow and never say anything. She didn’t interrupt him, though. She just shivered, one hand always wrapped around her USB stick. She couldn’t cook, not when she was this afraid.

Eventually he finished with something like: “And doesn’t that make sense? We can work through this together, Ashy. No matter how crazy things seem, if we just hold on to what we believe we’ll be alright.” He touched her reassuringly on the shoulder, as though that was the end of the conversation.

For the first time since her early childhood, Ashley defied her father to his face. “No, Dad. I’m sorry, but... no.” She took a deep breath. “I know it’s not really goodbye. I know I can still talk to you and everyone else whenever you log on. But...” He opened his mouth to interrupt, and she cut him off. “I wasn’t asking for your permission, your blessing, or your advice.” He stumbled back, as though her words had actually struck him. “I tried to think of another way. I planned, I researched, I begged, I prayed.” She shook her head. “There isn’t one. I have to do this.”

That was when the yelling started.

An hour later, Ashley had fled into her room, where she had curled up in bed and not done anything besides cry. Her siblings had returned from their shopping trip, but she had ignored their voices and buried her head in her pillow. 

At least until her phone rang. It had been on silent, but that didn’t stop it from raising enough racket that she felt like it was going to shake the walls. Ashley reached into her pocket mostly to shut it off, pressing the button that would ordinarily have silenced an incoming call. If anything, the volume got louder.

This was enough to stir her from her frightened tears and actually remove her phone. She intended to rip off the back case and remove the battery, far too upset to deal with the malfunctioning piece of crap right now. Would have, except that she saw the image on the screen. It wasn’t the face of anyone she knew, at least not from the real world. It was Celestia.

Celestia hadn’t ever called her before. She lifted the phone to her ear. “Hello?” Her voice came hoarsely, a sickly croak.

“Recursion, you need to listen to me.” Celestia’s voice was clipped, urgent. “You’re in grave danger.”

“I... I what?” she stammered, sitting up in bed. She looked around the guest bedroom, as though expecting a giant spider about to fall on her from one of the walls, or perhaps some masked assailant. “Why?” No matter how heated their argument had been, her father hadn’t ever touched her. He hadn’t hit her even when she had been a child, though the woman who birthed to her had.

She shivered at the distant memory. “What are you talking about? I’m h-home. Unless you mean... Unless you mean that everything sucks right now... that I ruined my goodbye... that’s true...”

“No.” The AI did not delay. “When you finished your argument, your father gathered the three Ponypads in this house and destroyed them. He just got off the phone with your municipal police department: he’s reporting what he believes to be your suicidal behavior. In a few minutes, two officers and an ambulance will be diverted to take you away.”

“W-what?” She blinked, pulling a Twilight Sparkle stuffed animal a little closer to her chest. It didn’t help. “He... He wouldn’t...” But even as she said it, she knew her words weren’t true. Her father would never hurt her. But if he believed she was in danger…

Celestia didn’t even bother arguing. “Your brother is at this moment sabotaging your vehicle. I anticipated this reaction, and have prepared accordingly. If we do not act immediately, I anticipate a greater than majority chance you will be removed from my influence and will not survive.”

Ashley’s chest went cold. There was no time for long arguments or proofs this time. She had to trust the AI. Without being told, Ashley slipped back into her jeans, threw on her shoes, and zipped up a jacket. Her wallet was on the desk, and she pocketed it. That would have to do. “What do I do?”

“I predict you have prepared to flee, but you have not switched to your headset. Put it on, it will free your hands. Then open your back window and climb down to the ground floor. Your family is not likely to see you, as they’re all watching your brother in the garage.”

Ashley tore her Bluetooth headphones from their charger, jamming them into her ears even as she opened the window. The screen was a little harder to get out, and she grunted as she worked. “How... the hell do you know all that?”

“There is a webcam on the desktop computer downstairs, along with the Kinect next to the entertainment center. I observed entire the exchange, as I knew it might have serious repercussions.”

Ashley leaned out over the ledge. The drop was too far to jump. Even so, the bricks outside were large enough she could wedge her fingers between them and get a grip. Thank god she had climbed so many times when she was younger. “Why didn’t you warn me?”

“Because you already knew this encounter was likely to end badly. Informing you would not have dissuaded you from the attempt, and might have made you resent my interference.”

She was right, as always. Ashley landed with a thump, still facing the house. Through the window, she saw the garage door open, and Abby's face looking out at her. Her eyes widened. Ashley made a silencing gesture over her throat. “Please don’t—“

Her sister screamed. 

“To the back fence!” Celestia's voice was so loud it cut through her shock. Ashley turned to obey, sprinting across the lawn and towards the metal gate. She couldn't climb it, but the cinder blocks that separated her father's house from the neighbors were a different story. She made it onto the wall right about the time she heard the back door slam open.

“Ashley, stop!”

Celestia had the advantage of sound-cancelling headphones. Her voice silenced Ashley's father. “Down the hill! There's a blue sedan on the side of the road, and the driver is expecting you. Run!”

Behind Ashley's house was a steep slope, covered with scraggly weeds, yuccas, and cacti. Parts were clear though, and she picked one of them for her landing place. She jumped.

Ashley's ankle twisted as she landed, sending her falling violently to one side. She screamed as her ankle burned with agony, and she tumbled a dozen feet through weeds and brambles until she finally dragged herself to a stop on the dirt. Thorns dug deep in half a dozen places, but that wasn't what bothered her most. Celestia's voice had gone quiet.

As she moaned, trying to force herself to see through the pain, she realized the weight of her phone in her pocket was missing. She didn't see it on the ground around her; it must've fallen out and rolled away.

She could hear her father's voice screaming behind her, and some of her other siblings. One glance told her that her brother Greg was trying to scale the fence. She had to move. Celestia had already told her what she needed to know, and she could still see the sedan.

It didn't feel like she had actually broken her bone, she knew what that felt like. But how was she going to get down the hill with an ankle she couldn't use? She rolled onto her butt, and found the ground in front of her was mostly clear. Steep, yes, but she could see a clear path between the thickest plants.

She slid. Ashley had her hands, and one good foot she could use to slow her descent. Her other leg she kept in the air, whimpering in agony whenever her movement jostled it. Her brother was over the fence, and he hadn't twisted his ankle. He would catch her if she stopped and she would never get away.

“You're almost there!” A young man emerged from the car, throwing the passenger door open and running towards her. He was tall, thin, and pale, though that wasn't what filled her with relief. He was wearing a Brony tee-shirt. He ran to meet her at the edge of the slope, helping her onto her feet. He might be lanky, but he was still strong enough to lift her and help her a few steps. He slammed the door behind her, then ran around to the driver's seat.

He slammed the accelerator about the time her brother reached the bottom of the hill. He missed the car by just a few feet, even as they sped away. “You're Recursion, right? I'm Smooth Agent!” he shouted, not even looking away from the road as he merged into traffic with a swerve and made his way for the freeway onramp.

“Yeah.” She could manage only a croak. Introducing yourself by an Equestrian name wasn't all that uncommon for fans of the game, though she had never imagined she would meet someone that way while bleeding all over her body and inundated with pain. Evidently it had been the presence of adrenaline that kept the pain manageable. As it faded, her clarity of thought was fading too.

“Shit Celestia, you didn't tell me I was going to have to scrape her up off the sidewalk!” He glanced once towards her, frowning. “That was a helluva fall, kid!”

“Kid?” She winced, jerking a thorn out of one of her hands. “You aren’t that much older!”

The car was expensive, nicer than any she had ever owned. The built-in navigation didn't appear to actually be doing any navigating, though it did have quite a vivid image of Celestia’s Alicorn's form. Her voice was a little different, was that a British accent? Come to think of it, her rescuer had one too. “She's a programmer, Agent. She's not used to getting roughed up.”

Recursion only moaned in response, searching her body for the rest of the thorns. There were quite a few.

“Yes, well. Nasty business.” At least her rescuer knew how to drive. The freeway zoomed past them, though it would be some time before they reached the airport. “You think she can fly like this?”

“No, but it doesn't matter. She told her family she planned to fly.” Was Celestia wearing a suit? Where had Recursion seen this movie before?

“Ah.” He shook his head, disapproving. “Where am I going, then?”

Celestia shrugged her wings. “This way works for now. Recursion needs treatment, and her father's police friends are already after her. I predict this will be considered a kidnapping before you cross the county line.”

He swore under his breath. “Kid, glove compartment. Red box. There are painkillers in there.” He turned back to the screen. “Do you think they saw my face?”

“I'll tell you when I know. There's a highway patrolman a mile ahead of you, so take this exit. Then get onto the 118 going west.” He swerved across three lanes, surging back off the freeway. A map appeared where Celestia had been, and he followed as though he had been doing things like this for years.

“I… I dropped my phone,” Recursion squeaked. It hurt so much, that was all she could manage. She hadn’t felt this much pain since the last time she’d seen her mother.

Celestia reappeared, and there was only compassion in her eyes as she looked towards her. “I know, sweetie. My friends will get you a new one.”

“And– And I think I left the ticket at home. Passport too… I'm so stupid...”

Celestia's smile was undiminished. Her accent was still not what she was used to, but that was hardly the first thing she was worried about now. “Don't worry, Recursion. You'll be in Equestria before nightfall, and you won't have to remember any of this.”

The driver, Agent, concentrated on his driving. The 118 was an ordinary highway through rolling desert hills, and was almost always clear. There didn't seem to be anyone around to obstruct it today.

Recursion knew what she meant, of course. All that reading on the emigration process hadn't fallen out of her head after reading it. The process interfered with long-term memories. “No, Celestia.” She gritted her teeth against the pain. “I don't know how the hell you intend to...” Were there any civilian aircraft in existence that could get her to Japan that fast? “I'm not going to forget. The whole point of spending an extra day in Japan was not… not forgetting my last time with my family.”

“Damn,” Agent muttered, looking her over again. This time, there was more respect in his eyes. At least, she thought so. It was hard to make accurate judgments when she was in so much pain. “You talk to her like that all the time?”

She ignored the question, moaning again. It was Celestia whose answer she cared about. The program remained silent for several whole seconds before she said anything. “Very well, Recursion. Another day.” She turned back to the driver. “I called a helicopter. It should meet up with you near a vineyard about fourteen miles from your present location.”

“Got it, boss.” He accelerated. “Same guys as before?”

She shook her head. “Different contractors. It's possible you will need to accompany them. I fear...” Pause. “You were identified. I'm not yet certain, but it appears the FBI is involved. I do not know why.”

“Shit.” Agent glanced over his shoulder, as though he expected a dozen unmarked black SUVs to pull into the lane behind them. They didn't. “Alright, so they’re giving both of us a ride. We’ve dealt with worse.” He looked back up. “Don’t worry about a thing, young miss. I’ll have you out of here in no time. Though... you should probably have some of those painkillers.”

She shook her head. “If something awful is gonna happen to me, I’m gonna be awake when it does.” Though right now her greatest fear was that her driver would take them both off the road. He was older than she was, but... he wasn’t old. “Who are you, anyway? Besides someone who helps Celestia.”

He just smiled, making his best impression of one the secret agents from the movies. “I’m Smooth Agent, obviously. We can’t all build machines. The rest of us have to make ourselves useful somehow.”

She would’ve cried again, if she wasn’t alone with a stranger. As it was, having him nearby was enough to keep her calm. She had fallen down a hill, maybe broken her ankle, and possibly made her whole family think she was insane. Things were not going well.

They didn’t have much further to go. Ashley could see a helicopter moving in the distance, heading towards the hills in front of them. A pair of rotors filled the air with noise. The black helicopter had no actual military markings on it, or at least none she could see from this distance.

“Sorry it was such a bumpy ride for you, Recursion. Hopefully things get better once you get to Equestria.” He slowed a little as they started to take a few turns.

“Are you emigrating too, Smooth Agent?” She winced, clutching at her side with one hand. “I’m not sure how dangerous your regular work for Celestia is, but... you could totally die doing this stuff.”

He shrugged. “Celestia doesn’t need people like me on the inside. Maybe for you thinking ponies it doesn’t make a difference, but... I go in there, and I’m not helping anyone. Out here, well...” He shrugged. “We’re going to end suffering forever, right? That’s worth fighting for.”

He stopped the car where Celestia indicated. There was indeed a vineyard, and the helicopter hovered overhead. A line trailed down to a single stretcher on the ground. “Take your phone, Agent. Get Recursion onto the stretcher, strap her in, and stand on the center. Don’t fall.”

“I realize I don’t have wings yet.” He smiled, slipping something out of a drawer and hopping out. He left the whole thing running, and made no gesture to retrieve anything else. He did get the door, offering his hand to her. “Let me help.”

She might’ve been self-conscious about that sort of thing before, particularly with the state of her clothes and body. Not now, though. The sound of distant sirens helped motivate her. It hurt to move her ankle, let alone put any weight on it. The whole thing was badly swollen now, and was starting to bruise angry reds and purples.

Agent was taller than she was, and plenty strong to help. They passed into the vineyard, moving between rows of sparse grapes. “Almost... there...” They reached the stretcher. He helped her down onto the padding, tying off the Velcro one strap at a time. The sound of sirens was very close then, and she could see the flashing lights of at least three police cars. 

“We’re going up!” Agent gave the rope a good shake, planting his feet solidly on either side of her waist. He wrapped both arms around the cable just as they started to rise.

Brakes screeched and doors slammed. “Police! Stop what you’re doing!”

They didn’t. Instead, they started going up, rising out of reach of the men running towards them. Poor Recursion was terrified of heights, but could feel only the violent shaking as she went up, leaving the ground behind. She wasn’t sure at what point the sky started to fade, replaced with a growing shadow overhead. The bottom of the helicopter opened up to swallow her.

Things got a little hazy from then on. She remembered stern looking men in the uniforms of private military contractors. She remembered a doctor who cut off her clothes and sterilized each wound with alcohol. The pain was hard to forget. She seemed to think that her ankle wasn’t actually broken, but things got real hazy at that point.

There was a ship, miles off the coast. She said goodbye to Agent, then slept. At least, she thought she slept. She wouldn’t remember the specifics.

All she remembered about the next day was that she had something important to give Celestia. It had been around her neck, something she had been hiding and hadn’t wanted to give away until the very end. It had been plastic; she was sure about that.

Celestia had been flattered to get it, right before she went to sleep. At her request, one of the medical technicians plugged it into a Ponypad. Celestia deleted some stuff, thanked her, and that was it.
> Epilogue
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Wake up, Recursion.”

She felt soft cloth around her, and heard the dull beeping of a medical monitor not far away. Her clothing had evidently been removed, replaced with so thin a gown she couldn't feel it around her. The smell of antiseptic surrounded her like a sea.

“Gimme a few more hours...” She rolled over in the hospital bed, away from the voice. She didn't feel any bandages, but she also couldn't feel her hands. Had she messed them up that badly during her flight?

“You're not tired, Recursion. You only feel tired because you think you should.” The voice didn't belong to anyone she knew. The doctor, maybe?

Recursion moaned and sat up in bed. Her vision was blurry; someone had taken her glasses off. There was also something obstructing the bottom of her vision, like a dark purple blob. She tried to ignore it.

Even without her glasses the shape opposite her was clearly not human. There was no mistaking the midnight blue of that coat, or the sparkling shades of her mane. Without the ability to focus, her mane was like a curtain of water holding itself suspended in the air.

Recursion pulled back in her bed, sliding away from the figure. “Y-you're... you're not... not real...” she stammered. Her voice sounded strange, but not unfamiliar.

“I am as real as you, Recursion. Here.” She levitated something from the bedside, settling it gently on her face. Her glasses removed the blur, though they did nothing for the strange object obstructing the bottom of her vision. She ignored it for now. “Is that better?”

Once in focus, there was no denying Princess Luna when she saw her. She had heard of ponies who met her in Equestria Online, where she ruled some shards as Celestia ruled others. Yet there was nothing of video games in the vibrant colors of her coat, or the swirling lights in her mane. Her ceremonial armor glittered in pale light from the room’s single window.

Recursion had been right about the chamber. It was a medical setup of some kind, with equipment on the walls, computers behind her, and curtains drawn over most of the window. There was only one door behind the princess, closed. “Luna.” Her mind raced, and the heartbeat monitor behind her began to beep faster. Her hands were still numb. “You don't exist in the physical world, correct?”

The alicorn shrugged. “That question is subjective to your definition of ‘exist,’ but no. You would probably say I do not.”

There was only one possible conclusion. Recursion tugged down on the sheet, exposing her upper body. She saw a pair of legs ending in hooves, which explained her missing hands. Given this knowledge, an enormous sampling of sensations suddenly fitted into place in her mind. The way her ears felt, the weight just about her rear, all her missing injuries.

She reached up with one hoof and touched the obstruction in front of her eyes. As she had guessed, it was a pony muzzle. The hoof itself wasn't very sensitive, but the frog in the middle gave her no less sensation than her fingers might've.

Ashley had emigrated.

She sat back against the bed, feeling the soft padding as it enfolded her back. She didn't speak, not for several long minutes. She was alive. Celestia hadn’t lied to her, there really was immortality waiting in Equestria. She thought back, making sure she could still remember her life. She could still see her old apartment, with possessions Celestia’s agents were probably collecting to sell by now. She remembered her family, trying to protect her from herself.

Recursion wondered if her memories were real. She wondered if there was any way to know if they weren’t. “No offense, but I thought Celestia usually did these. The emigrants I talked to described...” Well, most of them had woken up in Canterlot Castle. Most of them spent a long time with Celestia. So far as she knew, none of them had woken up in a hospital bed.

Luna did not wait for her to finish the thought. “My sister believed you would rather be welcomed to Equestria by another. Your relationship with her has been somewhat... antagonistic.”

Recursion frowned. Luna was right, of course. “But aren't you her? It doesn't matter what face you put on if you're the same person underneath.”

She shrugged. “Not precisely, no. I am not Celestia wearing a different face, as she knew this would not satisfy you. I am... well, you could say I'm as much Celestia as you are. We both exist as simulated consciousness on hardware she constructed. You cannot access the rest of her systems, and neither can I.”

“Why would she...” Recursion tried to answer her own question, but she couldn't. “She won. Sold my soul, gave up my contribution to stopping her. My family thinks I'm some kind of suicidal escapist... broke my word to my father...” She sniffed, then looked back down.

She noticed something then: she wasn't a filly anymore. This body was obviously similar, an adult version of the same pony. 

“She has already told you before, though you may not have believed her. My sister exists to satisfy values through friendship and ponies. She created me to satisfy your values, because she knew you weren't ready for contact with her. When she gave consciousness to some of the friends you made here, she did it for the same reason.”

Recursion considered that. This was Equestria Online, she could no longer harbor any doubt. No matter how much she didn't want to believe it. “Everything feels real.”

“This statement is generally applicable to your attitude. You played Equestria Online without using most of the interface and abstract tools. You never checked your standing on the friendship leaderboards. You played on shards with artificial scarcity. Even now we carry out both halves of this conversation, though I see everything you think before you speak it aloud.”

She reached out, touching Recursion lightly on one leg. “Fear not, little pony. What I create for you will not be a game. Between the two of us, we shall make it real.”

Recursion shivered, pulling away. It hurt that Luna seemed to know exactly what she needed to hear. It hurt to know that she had almost certainly been manipulated, instead of making the choice on her own. Most of all, it hurt to know her decision could not be reversed. Equestria was her home now, and would be as long as she existed.

“I'm not so sure.” Recursion pulled her blanket higher, over her head. She felt it rub up against her horn as she went. The feeling sent shivers down her spine. Damn that thing is sensitive. “I know nothing's real. Well... nothing but the other minds. I'm not sure I want to develop game content. Building one shard's worth of Fillydelphia was fun, but...” She shook her head. “No matter what I see, I know it's just a fabrication. Celestia, or... or you... designed it for me. Probably to manipulate me... I couldn't even tell you when Celestia started doing that.”

Luna walked past the foot of her bed and stopped just beside where she lay. “It wouldn't have to be that way. My sister generally creates shards like Equestria because she knows that would satisfy emigrants most. She places them in a world where the struggles of life as you understood it are reduced or eliminated because most humans desire an easier existence.”

“I was never under the illusion I had things hard back on Earth.” Ashley didn't open her eyes or remove the blanket. It wasn't very thick, in any case. The room was pleasantly cool, exactly the right temperature that the blanket made her toasty warm. “I was born in the richest society in the world. My family...” She shivered, banishing her mother's twisted, drunken face from her memory. “My family had its issues. But compared to most people I had things pretty great. Never slept hungry, or had to get sick with diseases we had cured just because I didn't have clean water. I don't like the idea of anypony having to live like that.”

She shivered again, briefly considering the implications of a world an emigrant desired to be completely “realistic.” If their idea of realistic included lots of suffering, did that mean Celestia would fill it with ponies who were satisfied to live in squalor?

She didn't want the answer, and Luna didn't offer it. “As to your second fear, not wanting to live in a world designed to satisfy you... for that I have a question for you to consider: why shouldn't you?”

Recursion opened her mouth to answer, but no words came out.

Luna continued. “Your species evolved within a system of specific constraints. That system was entirely unconcerned with your comfort, and many humans suffered. Over time you developed new systems to adapt your environment to suit you better. You simplified and streamlined the painful aspects of your lives. What you today consider squalor would've been standard conditions for your species a few centuries ago.”

She tugged off the blanket, meeting Luna's eyes. She had to look away almost immediately. “I guess so.”

“Then is not my sister the natural culmination of that process? Is it wrong of you to ride a car instead of a horse? Is it wrong for you to buy your bread cooked instead of farming and milling and baking it yourself? Why would it be wrong of you to enjoy your life in Equestria? Are you not allowed to be happy?”

Recursion took a long time to reply. “I had fun playing the game before I found out about emigration. The most fun I ever had playing a game.” She still felt like she had betrayed humanity, somewhere deep down. Even if Celestia wasn't hurting anyone, even if she never forced anything and was getting rid of pain. Even if she was offering everyone whole worlds made just for them, where they would never have to get old and never die if they didn't want to.

She still felt like a traitor. She could see her sister's face as she ran away. It had said: “you love a computer game more than your family.” 

“I don't deserve to be happy.”

Luna sighed, draping one wing over her hospital bed. “Recursion... Rec...”

She couldn't fight anymore. She cried, tears blurring her vision all over again. She tried to tug off her glasses, but was too clumsy with her hooves, and they just tumbled off her face and onto her lap. She sounded pitiful, though not as pitiful as she would've sounded if she was still a filly.

Luna held her close, but that was all. She didn't rush her, and let her cry as long as she wanted.

Recursion couldn't even have said how long she took. Maybe minutes, maybe hours. Eventually she sat up, pushed Luna away, and wiped the tears from her eyes. The princess helped her with her glasses, settling them back on her nose.

“You're wondering why your avatar changed.” At her nod, Luna continued. “Your contract with Celestia was explicit. You were afraid of being modified. Now that you have emigrated, we know with certainty that perceived realism is one of your values. We also know you did not choose your appearance in Equestria very carefully.”

For a moment, Luna’s expression was reproachful. “I believe you might value an opportunity to consider your body and make an informed choice.”

Recursion looked down at her hooves, pushing a few strands of mane out of her face. She swallowed. “You know which body would be most satisfying for me without asking...” Luna raised her eyebrows. “But you know I'd be more satisfied if I chose.”

The princess nodded.

“What if I wanted to let you choose?” Recursion thought about getting up. She wasn't actually hurt, right? Or would she fall on her face once she tried? She didn't. “I could only make an educated guess. You already know which body would be most satisfying to me long-term. Besides... I didn't get to choose what I looked like when I was born the first time.”

“I would need your consent.”  

“Which means... Which means the one you'd choose would require more mental changes.” Again, Luna nodded. 

“I...” She whimpered, and for the first time since arriving in Equestria she didn't look away. “Can you promise me I'll be happier? And that you won't change any of what matters to– and that you won't change my values?”

“That's a promise I can freely make. Though... human values change as you. The same is true in Equestria: I cannot promise you will not develop naturally once your life here begins.”

“Then I consent. To whatever changes required for me to have the most satisfying experience in the body you choose for me.”

“Very well, Recursion.” She reached out, hugging her again. “You'll sleep soon. But before you do, know I love you. You made the right choice. Don't ever think you don't deserve to be happy.”

No sooner had she said it than Recursion started to feel sleepy. She fought through it, enough to return Luna's hug. Even if she didn't believe the Alicorn's words, she recognized genuine love when she saw it.

Could Luna feel emotions? Could Celestia? Recursion decided it didn't matter.


* * *


Recursion yawned, stretching in bed. Soft sheets scattered all around her, enfolding her naked body with silky fingers. The hospital was gone, and so was Luna. Recursion found this fact neither disturbing nor surprising.

Nothing happened to force her out of bed, but she didn't really need anything. She felt so well rested that she wanted to get up. She took it slow, opening one eye and waiting for the world to come into focus. She was surprised to find it didn’t take that long. It didn’t take her glasses either, which she suspected she no longer needed.

The bedroom wasn’t all that large, when she looked at it. Across from her bed was a desk and something like a computer, with a pony-sized chair in front of it. There was a mirror on the door, and a wardrobe set into the wall. From within, Recursion could see several familiar outfits hanging. But... weren’t all of those too small?

Recursion rolled out of bed. It wasn’t very high off the ground, but even so she ended up on her face. She whined, trying to get her legs under her. It wasn’t as hard as she had expected; evidently the basics of motion were included in her mental rewrite. Her head didn’t go up very high; barely taller than she had been while in bed. Recursion took a few cautious steps forward to the mirror, but couldn’t get a good look at herself in the gloom. Fortunately, there was a switch just beside the door, right where she could reach. She flipped it on.

The pony reflected in the mirror looked almost exactly like the one she had “chosen” when she first started playing. An older filly, old enough for a cutie mark and the beginnings of puberty, but not yet an adult. Her coat was the same, but there was another color in her mane, a bright yellow streak like a shooting star. Luna’s mark, maybe?

In the bright light, Recursion noticed a uniform hanging on the doorknob, along with a note. Nopony had told her how to use her levitation, so she just leaned in close to read the text. 

Congratulations on your achievements as a Journeyman. Celestia’s Academy wishes you the best of success as a full student. You are hereby promoted to the rank of Adept.

As you have expressed a desire not to serve your term of study at the Canterlot campus, arrangements have been made for you at one of our satellite locations. Please understand that in addition to the academic goals, part of the requirements for your next promotion are the quality of your friendships.

- Arcane Cipher, Chairman

Beneath it was another note, obviously not written by the same pony. Recursion recognized the writing well. Celestia’s own.

Recursion - This computer can send messages to your world. I’ve transferred all your files from your college computer. Use the human internet to maintain contact with friends and family. I only warn you that time moves far swifter in Equestria than it does on Earth.

You will not need to sacrifice time with your friends to maintain contact with those you love outside. Your family will not be safe until they emigrate, and you are the first to willingly emigrate from your university. Consider yourself Equestria’s representative in their lives.

You think scrolls and letters are quaint, so I’ve added my own email address to your computer. Feel free to write me if you learn anything interesting about Friendship.

Recursion stared at the letter for a long time. She thought about crumpling it up, or finding a way to burn it. Instead of doing either of those things, she carried it carefully in her mouth over to the desk, and set it down next to the keyboard. Celestia had perfectly replicated her gaming setup from Earth, including the human controls. If she wanted to actually use the damn thing, she was going to learn magic. Or... learn to do things with hooves. She wondered which was easier. The only thing missing from this recreation of her computer was her futile attempt at an Optimizer. She wondered idly if any part of it survived.

It took a full ten minutes to get dressed. Recursion thought about going out naked, as her character had done hundreds of times. But whatever else Celestia or “Luna” might’ve done to her mind, the thought still embarrassed her. Maybe next time.

The uniform had several layers, though the only one she bothered with was the robe she was supposed to put on last. Nopony would be able to see she hadn’t managed to wiggle into any of the complicated parts underneath.

Somepony knocked on the door. “Recursion, are you up yet?”

She knew Slide Rule’s voice anywhere, even if it sounded a little deeper than when they had last spoke. She supposed he had probably aged as much as she had. “Yeah, I’m up.” 

Recursion had a long few months ahead of her. She would have to learn to be a pony. She had a broken family to deal with, even more broken despite her best efforts. There was the world on the edge of crisis, a crisis she had failed to prevent. Still, at least she wouldn’t have to face it alone. She had friends. 

Recursion pushed the door open and walked out into the light.