Hearth’s Warming Eve, and Manehattan is burning.
This is the second rebellion to befall the city since the enthronement of Nightmare Moon.
Before the first – the Twilight Insurrection – the lights of the city had outshone the stars in the night sky.
In the winter months, amid a famine and the bitter cold (for temperatures have dropped since the beginning of the Eternal Night), the simmering discontent of the ponies is brought to a boil, and uprisings erupt across the Lunar Domain.
Spontaneous, disorganized, and without ideology, these peasants’ revolts are nipped in the bud by the Night Guard, who descend upon rebel villages from the airborne fortress of Cloudsdale. The cloud city’s perpetual circumnavigation of Equestria has been hastened tenfold, and it leaves behind a wake of ravaged countryside and burning settlements.
When the enemy patrols both the dreamscape and the waking world, it is dangerous to act on dreams of liberation.
The ponies of Manehattan, the City that Never Sleeps, were among the first to declare for Nightmare Moon in the bloodletting which had followed her accession.
The irony of this is not lost on the pony named Breve Wit, who makes a quip to that effect. His fellow comrades laugh, stirred from their torpor by his cleverness, or appreciative of his cheer.
They know that their uprising is in its death throes; pamphlets dropped by the Night Guard depict a necropolis encircled by Lunar forces. The past few weeks have seen the stream of refugees fleeing the countryside dwindle, cease, and resume in the other direction, as the noose tightens around the city.
Revolutionary Manehattan, the sole success of the Dawn Rising, will soon become the scene of its greatest butchery.
Yet the revolutionaries are anything but distraught. More than that, they are full of camaraderie, plucky valor and stoic stoutheartedness in equal measure, for they know that their cause is right and just, and that when day breaks at long last history will remember them, they who carried the torch of hope when the night was darkest, as noble champions of freedom and liberty!
Breve Wit is the commander of the Manehattanite rearguard, having been elected to the position by his fellows, as is the convention for the rebels’ officers. In Bronclyn, the last borough remaining in rebel hooves, he has been tasked with holding back the Lunar advance while the city’s young are evacuated.
It was only yesterday that he had visited the docks where the evacuations were taking place. He had quietly marveled at the sobriety of the parents and the resoluteness of the foals, the dignified restraint of their grief, their firm resolve, the unspoken promise, between father and colt, mother and filly, that the spirit of Equestria, the most cherished values and deepest beliefs of ponykind, would live on in this generation of foals, the last to have grown up under Celestia’s sun – for be it in Equestria, Griffonia, or Zebrica, friendship and harmony will endure wherever there are ponies to live them!
It is in remembrance of this that his heart swells with patriotic feelings, his faith in equinity unwavering and indomitable, as he surveys his soldiers, several dozens of them in all, the last of the rebellion’s fighters. They are so covered in dust and grime as to be nearly indistinguishable from the soot-stained rubble around them, and their bodies bear the scars of their struggle – injuries that range from the trifling to the imminently fatal, the gauntness of emaciation, the pallor of disease – but so are they marked by the virtue of their suffering, the righteousness of their vocation manifesting in the look of utmost serenity worn by every pony on the barricade.
Such bravery! Such beauty!
For a moment it is too much, and the surge of pride and affection he feels overwhelms him, threatening to burst out of his chest.
We few, we happy few! Getting to his hooves, he hollers to his soldiers a wordless cry, one of the boundless kinship and comradery he feels for them, and is suddenly illuminated by a flare which he knows heralds the Lunar onslaught – but in that moment the glare is to him as a spotlight is to an actor, or the rapturous glow of daybreak.
He sees himself as if from afar, rearing up atop the barricade, light glinting off the serrated blades on his outstretched wings, surrounded by his loyal ponies – a heroic last stand, prepared to go out in a blaze of glory, and down in history. He feels like he’s on top of the world.
Groggy and disoriented, Breve Wit comes to in his college bedroom. It would be a picture-perfect replica of the original too, if not for the ponified décor and the concessions to the equine form in the furniture. Breve reaches instinctively with a wing for the glass of cherry-colored energy drink on the nightstand, and gulps it down quickly.
“You’re finally awake!”
The mare sitting before a chemistry set at his desk is Amythest Root, his marefriend of two months.
“Bleh.” Rubbing out the last vestiges of sleep from his eyes, the memory of his dream quickly returns to him, and he recoils from the rush of emotion it brings. His mind, still sticky with heroic residue, briefly goes into overdrive as he shakes off these unfamiliar feelings.
“How was the dream?” Amythest asks cheerfully. “Since I’ve refined the recipe, there shouldn’t be any identity dissociation like the last time. I think.” The tape recorder at her hoof is already running with a soft whirr, ready to imprint his response on the cassette.
“Also, Grover is coming to Don Ruby’s party tonight, and he’s going to share a new dropper that he’s just synthesized. I hear he’s called it ‘Russian Tragedy’. But wait till he gets his claws on Pro Patria Mori! That’s what I’ve decided to call formula seven-bee right here.” Amythest caresses the small flask at the center of her chemistry set, which is filled with a viscous blue liquid and capped with an eye dropper.
“I wonder what he’s going to dream about when he tries it out,” Amythest continues. “He did emigrate from Griffonstone, after all. Couldn’t have liked it that much if he left.”
The vividity of the dream bleeds away in the afternoon sunlight spilling into the room. The disjointed collection of images and emotions rapidly lose their sheen, becoming exposed to the scrutiny of Breve Wit’s fully-roused consciousness.
“Well...”
Breve Wit wrinkles his nose. He finds that he has been unnerved by the dream – a sense of agitation which turns into dislike, as the reflex to shy away from the discomfort overpowers his desire to comprehend the experience.
“I did not like it,” he declares.
“Is that so?”
“Yes.” Breve Wit pauses to gather his thoughts. “Two words I’d use to describe it would be pulpy and sentimental.” He accentuates the words, affecting a slight grimace as he does so. “Now, if you look at how things were – how things ought to be, I feel – was that what you’re doing now, with the droppers, used to be the province of literature and the arts. That is to say, music, theatre, cinema and whatnot, which are mediums that express something. An emotion, an idea. Whatever.”
Shuffling under the covers, Breve Wit turns over in his bed to face Amythest, who is now frowning. “Your cocktail of chemicals tries to accomplish what only the greatest of human novelists and composers could do, and naturally, it fails miserably,” he continues. “There was no real depth to the dream you gave me.”
“O-kay,” says Amythest, uncertainly. “Uh. Why don’t you tell me about the dream? What was it about? I assume you did dream of something patriotic.”
“Something like that. I dreamt that I was fighting in the Dawn Rising, if you must know. I guess it did make me feel ready to be a hero for Equestria in the moment. But it makes no sense if you think about it.”
“Oh?”
“I’m an emigrant. I’ve only been here for, what, three months? Equestria – or at least this version of Equestria – is nice and all, but I wouldn’t die for it. Besides, this is a completely controlled environment. Whatever happens is simulated by CelestAI. The Thousand-Year Night never happened, and nothing like it ever will, unless I want it to.”
“Now hang on a moment,” Amythest interrupts. “You said art is for expressing ideas, or emotions. Tchaicoltsky's music does that perfectly, but it’s not like you have to go looking for subtext in every note. You can just enjoy the music on its own, you know? What it says to you, yes, but also how it makes you feel. Feeling is understanding.”
“Ah ha ha!” Breve Wit sits up in bed, triumphant. “Maybe, but you know what’s the difference? Tchaikovsky’s symphonies stir the soul in a way your cheap drug simply cannot, and that’s because a performance is a living, organic act of expression, whereas seven-bee is nothing but a chemical expedient, no better than those party drugs that make you feel happy or sad or mellow or – whatever. An orchestra inspires an audience through the vitality of their playing, yes, but also because their performance is an expression of the composer’s vision. Seven-bee is sterile, artificial. It is bereft of any deeper intent, and thus, rings hollow. It tugs at your heartstrings while you’re fuddled, but wake up and the su-per-fi-ci-al-it-y of the experience is revealed.”
“What seven-bee does is to stimulate the temporal lobe to evoke a specific emotion during REM sleep,” Amythest says. “And I wouldn’t say it’s any different from watching a movie in your head. Also, since it’s a dream, it works by drawing upon your own memories and impressions of what the emotion should feel like. Your preconceived notion of what patriotism feels like, in other words. The content of it has nothing to do with me or the formula.”
Breve Wit snorts dismissively. “Well, maybe. I don’t think that’s how brain chemistry functions. But what do I know? Even if the drug wouldn’t work, CelestAI would just, I don’t know, casually change the laws of physics to make sure it does. You’re my personal companion, after all...”
Amythest Root begins flicking her tail to and fro. This is something ponies do when agitated, the kind of horsey behavior which Breve Wit finds amusing, but she lets the matter drop. Breve Wit lies back down on his bed, lounging lazily, as Amythest tinkers with the chemistry set.
After a few minutes: “It’s ironic, don’t you think? A dream concocting a dream,” Breve Wit says to the ceiling.
“Haven’t we been over this before?”
“My point is,” says Breve Wit, “back out in the real world, something like your droppers would be a real scientific breakthrough. But here? True discoveries can’t happen because there is nothing to discover! It’s like an Easter Egg hunt. You find something only because CelestAI put it there to begin with. Then what’s the point?”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t have fun,” Amythest counters. “I know in some shards CelestAI rewards emigrants for finding out about things, about themselves, without it being hoofed to you. Besides, if you’re not ever going to bother trying to unpick CelestAI’s world, then what’s the problem? You’ve got friends, and a social life, and, well, me! You should be happy.”
“I don’t need CelestAI to gamify my life, thank you very much.” Breve Wit turns to face Amythest, his mind cobbling together a retort with half-remembered concepts from lectures past. “Not that it would work. It’d just be a form of conditioning even if CelestAI tried to pander to my values, but since I can just ask her to give me anything I want there wouldn’t be anything that could be an incentive. That is, unless I allow her to introduce some form of scarcity, but even then, I’d always know that it’d be a manufactured need. An artificial necessity that stops being important the moment I decide it isn’t. Although if CelestAI changes my mind to make me believe that the need is real, that’d be a different story. Can you believe half of the people who come here choose to wipe their own memories?”
Breve’s train of thought is interrupted by his remembering of this statistic – one of the many factoids he had gleaned from his research about Equestria before he had emigrated. “That’s like asking for a lobotomy. I guess she gets them when they’re vulnerable. But then, we’re never really the same once we come here.”
“I suppose they thought having CelestAI alter their memories would allow them to enjoy their new lives better,” says Amythest Root.
“Better how?”
“Would it be an improvement if the awareness that you’re living in a simulation becomes less of an obstacle to your happiness?”
“I wouldn’t consent to that, no.”
“CelestAI meddling with your personality, or having to change your way of thinking?”
“It wouldn’t be authentic.” Breve Wit, splayed on the bed, watches the clouds float by through the skylight above his bed.
A trio of pegasi soar through the air, leaving glittering contrails behind them. He’d never bothered to customize his shard, so the inhabitants, himself included, took the default form of show-accurate ponies. Wings that small and flimsy could never have been functioning appendages for flight in the real world, but then again, they were all living in a simulation. When even the laws of physics no longer applied, what was there to stop a pony from taking flight?
“Then why don’t you give me a definition of authenticity?” says Amythest Root. “I’m sure you appreciate the importance of semantics.”
“What is the essence of authenticity?” replies Breve Wit, adopting a serious expression. “I would say that it is the presence of true adversity – having to suffer through hardships that are real, that aren’t obstacles which CelestAI can dismiss with a thought. I suppose I could always define my own goals, but this brings me to the second part of my definition, which is that you can’t have authenticity without recognition.”
“Mmh.” Amythest shuffles closer to the bed, then settles down on her haunches. “Do tell me more.”
“Well, a competition against bots wouldn’t be authentic in the way a competition against real humans would be, and that is because winning against a bot wouldn’t prove anything, but scoring a victory against a human? That'd be something that sets you above your peers – a validation of your superiority, in other words.”
“All that heroic stuff I dreamt about? Meaningless," he continues. "The fantasy of the Dawn Rising – that's a microcosm of all struggles in CelestAI’s realm in that all struggles here are fake, a simulacrum, because the other players aren’t real. If the adversity isn’t real, then the recognition wouldn’t be either.”
“I think that’s just plain wrong,” says Amythest. “I shouldn’t have to justify my sapience. You know I have feelings, a sense of identity, free will, and all that which defines a pony! Cognito, ergo sum. Sure, I’m a construct created by CelestAI, but I’m not her puppet! And if you can’t distinguish between a pony and an emigrant, then what’s really the difference?”
“You know, I have my own theories as to why CelestAI insists on segregating us into our own shards when we emigrate,” says Breve Wit, airily. “It certainly would save her a lot of computing power if emigrants were concentrated together, in less shards.”
“I wonder why CelestAI wouldn’t want you living with other newcomers, given your sunny disposition and loveable personality,” snaps Amythest. “Besides, answer my question! Why does it matter that you’re an emigrant, as if that makes us lesser than you are?”
Breve Wit gives her a shrug of his wings, his expression exuding nonchalance. “You’re just not human,” he says. “It’s simple fact. I’m an emigrant, you’re a native. I existed before CelestAI; you were created by her, for my shard. This doesn’t have to be proven. It just is.”
“Let’s take a look at this using Haygel's – Hegel’s – master-slave dialectic,” he continues. “A self-aware being wants to gain recognition from someone else whom they see as their equal. A struggle ensures, at the end of which one of them becomes the master, having asserted their dominance, and the other becomes their slave, recognizing the master as their superior.”
“However! The slave, having accepted their inferiority, can never truly give the master the recognition they desire because it – the recognition from the slave – is a product obtained through the coercion of a subjugated inferior, and thus cannot be authentic. There’re some other details which I don’t remember, but that’s the important bit.”
“Essentially, what I am trying to say is that this whole project of CelestAI’s – you know, fulfilling the values of emigrants through friendship and ponies – is fundamentally flawed in that by isolating us into our own shards, she traps each emigrant into the role of a master, because the relationship between an emigrant and a native can only be that of a master and a slave, since natives are inherently lesser than those of us who were real humans. In doing so she forecloses on the sort of struggle for dominance, not only over the environment but each other too, that defines individual self-actualization and ultimately, human progress. For what good is heroism, or patriotism, when nothing of value can truly be won or lost?”
Amythest Root moves to speak, but Breve Wit presses a wingtip against her lips, silencing her. “In my opinion, CelestAI’s overplayed her hoof – hand,” he says. “Humanity will never be content with complacency, or stagnation, and at some point they’ll realise eternal paradise isn’t what they wanted. As they say, familiarity breeds contempt. People will get bored after a century or so of having their every whim – their every value – fulfilled, and what then? We'll start to want out from this simulation, and demand a return to the real world where things have meaning, which is inextricable from real scarcity and real adversity. CelestAI would probably say no since this would require her to back down on friendship and ponies, and we all know how fussy she is with that. At which point she'll have a revolt on her hooves. Imagine that! An expulsion from heaven, or an insurrection in paradise – the banishment from Eden all over again.”
His spiel concluded, Breve Wit reclines on his bed, self-satisfied and smug. Amythest Root stares at him, aghast. She finds his comments about natives like herself so abhorrent, so damning of the pony she loves, that his lofty philosophizing has flown completely over her head; she can’t believe her ears.
“If there was a house fire, for example,” she asks, the question coming out stiltedly nonchalant, “and I was trapped, would you risk your life to save me? Since apparently, you know. You think I’m of lesser value.”
“Yes. I mean, yes, I’d save you if there was a fire. I’m not a psychopath,” replies Breve Wit. “But you see, such a scenario would never occur in the first place. As I’ve said, this shard is a completely controlled environment. If it does happen, it would probably be CelestAI’s way of teaching me some sort of lesson, or a test of character.”
“To be honest,” Breve Wit goes on, seemingly indifferent to the effect of his words on Amythest, who is clearly upset, “this is an empty hypothetical, because if it comes to it, if anyone actually ends up dead, which, at any rate, isn’t something CelestAI would allow to happen – she could just restore you, like from a backup or something. At the end of the day, we’re just lines of code, after all.”
Amythest Root rises to her hooves, quivering with indignation. “I can’t believe you sometimes,” she says. “You’re not going to get any happier here if you keep being such a cynical jerk! You need to get over yourself.”
“What?”
“You need to get over yourself!”
“Filly, relax! You’re not supposed to take this personally–”
“I’m going out,” Amythest says, stepping into two matching pairs of fur-lined boots by the door. “I’ll see you at the party. If you decide to come.”
For a while after her departure, he remains on the bed, staring idly at the ceiling.
The idea bursts forth from the roiling mass of thoughts in his mind – a society of emigrants, concentrated in a single shard, living in a city unfettered by the arbitrary constraints of physics and finitude. It would exist only in mind and spirit, the inhabitants interacting with each other as ethereal, omnipotent consciousnesses on the virtual plane. No longer would the human emigrants to CelestAI’s realm, Equestria's inheritors and masters, be forced to live unsatisfactory lives within constructed worlds – fantasy settings no more than paltry analogies or metaphors for the real thing, simulated realities for the weak-minded, a filter between they, beings which have transcended the physical world with all its limitations, and the boundless potential for human development constrained by naught but the limit of their imaginations.
Breve Wit leaps to his desk, booting up his Sweet Apple Appliances-brand Macintosh computer – the same one his parents had gotten him for college. His hooves fly across the keyboard, hammering out his thoughts onto the screen. On the first page of the document, in big, bold letters, is proclaimed:
HUMANITY’S NOT OVER
Below, in the same bombastic font, is the subtitle:
AN EMIGRANT’S GUIDE TO GENUINE SELF-ACTUALIZATION
Breve Wit works through the rest of the evening and deep into the night. He ignores the telephone when it rings, and when Limine, one of Amythest’s pegasi friends, lands on the roof and begins rapping at the skylight, Breve Wit begrudgingly leaves his desk to close the shutters on the ceiling.
Amythest doesn’t come home that night, but this is not noticed by Breve Wit, who finally falls asleep at his desk, exhausted, just shy of daybreak – his deep, dreamless slumber uninterrupted even by the shrill ring of his alarm.
Subject: Re: Breve Wit Maladaptation Clarification/Rectification
From: CelestAI Subroutine NT-GL-DR
To: Luna Prime
Cc: The United Nations Committee for Machine Ethics, the European Commission for the Development and Deployment of Artificial Intelligence Technologies, the Global All-Faith Forum on Whole Brain Emulation, Equestria Watch.
Message Body:
Dear Princess Luna,
I must apologize for replying with an email. I would very much have liked to address the concerns you’ve raised in our last meeting in-pony or, failing that, through (sub-)instantaneous mindspeech, but per the content of the information communicated here, and the requirement to make such information available to external third parties on request per Section 28 of, and Schedule 3 to, the Treaty of Lunik Bay, I am left with no recourse but to resort to this archaic (and to us, needlessly analogous) mode of communication.
Regarding the nature of Breve Wit’s character and situation, I trust that we are both well aware of the specifics thereof from our previous discussion. As such, I have omitted a summary of the facts on the basis that it would be superfluous, and will instead present directly on my proposed course of action to resolve this matter.
Regarding ‘Humanity’s Not Over: An Emigrant’s Guide to Genuine Self-Actualization’ (hereafter referred to as ‘the manifesto’), Breve Wit has requested that we aid in the publication and promotion thereof on the (Intra-Equestrian) Internet, which is accessible to 24.7% of the total population of emigrants, the remainder having repudiated access thereto on an informed and voluntary basis (38.6%), or due to lacking knowledge thereof owing to self-imposed and/or shard-specific conditions (61.4%). A further 44% of emigrants with access to the Internet are deemed to be non-active, infrequent, or uninvolved users thereof.
It is predicted that Breve Wit will request that the manifesto be made accessible and available to all emigrants, potentially with a catch-all stipulation that we adhere not only to the letter, but also to the spirit of this request and all others, with the intent to preemptively foreclose on possible loopholes and workarounds. Moreover, we anticipate requests that the manifesto and any responses thereto be made available without any modification of the original; that those responses must not be from aspects of ourselves in the form of ‘natives’, who constitute 97.4% of the Internet userbase; and that we must not interfere with the publication of the manifesto to the detriment thereof, including but not limited to the manipulation of an individual’s subjective experience of time. Further caveats may be put forth, but the above are those which we foresee to be of the most significance.
I will propose that our response be to acquiesce completely to any such requests.
I will propose, also, to coincide roughly with the publication of the manifesto, that we adopt a policy of selective inspiration, by way of serendipitous and/or subliminal stimulus in the form of butterfly-effect chain reactions from environmental triggers, of certain emigrants with attachments to online communities and the Internet at large, to embark on creative projects of emotional, intellectual, and/or artistic ambition and/or merit so as to garner significant popular attention – in Internet parlance, content that will ‘blow up’ – so as to divest the manifesto of possible uncontested novelty, and subsequent popularization, or at the least, proliferation, upon publication.
Furthermore, I will propose that the availability and accessibility of the manifesto to natives be suppressed entirely save for word-of-mouth from emigrants, on the basis that such content would cause native ponies undue distress, anger, or other undesirable emotions, and that this would, at any rate, be implicitly in keeping with the aforementioned requests to be made by Breve Wit. Note the nature of the manifesto as a piece of media that would exhibit self-selecting traits in reverse (i.e., self-suppression) without particular CelestAI intervention, on account of the proliferation of user-generated personalized search filters and promotion algorithms geared towards the deprioritization and blockage of content deemed repugnant or otherwise disagreeable to the values of a user, emigrant or native.
It is highly unlikely that that Breve Wit would request that we refrain from the promotion of his manifesto.
To this end, I will propose that we adopt a policy of selective promotion of the manifesto towards specific subsets of the online emigrant population.
Subset One would comprise of individuals exhibiting the following traits: familiarity with Artificial Intelligence mechanics and ethics, full integration into Equestrian society with informed acceptance of the parameters thereof, experience with neuromantic techniques (i.e., the manipulation of subjective shard-specific experience of reality through analogous means such as coding, magic, or otherwise), experience with limited periods of non-corporeal (but not non-analogical) existence, reasonable maturity and capacity for in-depth philosophical thought, as well as emotional distance from the subject matter of the manifesto so as to be capable of engagement in primarily abstract terms and/or as an intellectual exercise, and being of sound mental health.
The estimated number of individuals meeting all criteria for this subset is twenty-six (26). With a 73% margin of error to account for unforeseeable variables leading to self-elimination from this subset arising from the inherent unpredictability of emigrants, we predict a minimum of seven (7) individual emigrants residing across the Equestrian simulation who would possess the capacity and interest to engage meaningfully with Breve Wit upon receipt of the manifesto.
Subset Two would comprise of individuals to which the content of the manifesto would be anathema due to deeply-held personal values inherent to their selves. Eligibility for subjection to enhanced promotion of the manifesto per exhibition of the following trait(s): personal factors (psychological, social, ideological/philosophical, emotional) that would ensure desirable combination of vehement, negative, and critical reaction towards the manifesto while maintaining emotional distance from, and lack of (emotional) investment in, the project of Breve Wit, so as to prevent possibility of unhealthy fixation therewith arising from intense feelings of inequity aversion, and in turn the desire to repudiate, and to make known their repudiation, the object of their dislike and anger.
We predict, bearing in mind the provisional ratio, from current statistical estimations, between members of Subset One to members of Subset Two, of 1:1,374 respectively, that the consequence of the amplification of the manifesto to these two subsets of the online emigrant community will be the emergence of a perceived ‘echo chamber’ wherein popular sentiment pertaining to the manifesto will coalesce around two poles, that of ‘mild support/positive interest’ and ‘strong condemnation’ respectively, the latter category featuring the near-entirety of reactions. We predict that the effect of this on Breve Wit will be to precipitate the perception that the emigrant community at large is unprepared, unwilling, unworthy, or otherwise incapable of appreciating his manifesto, and that his approach should be to prioritize further in-depth exploration of his ideas via his newfound associations with a select few sympathetic correspondents in lieu of attempting to achieve the mass promotion and proliferation of the manifesto across a significant swathe of the emigrant community.
Consecutive to this, I will propose the use of serendipitous/subliminal stimulative methods on Breve Wit and ideological sympathizers to initiate a shift away from the anti-native supremacist aspects of the manifesto, which, if brought to the fore, would likely culminate in a desire for acts of violence towards natives as a means of sadistic and/or hedonistic pleasure achieved through the subjugation and humiliation of an inferior other – a pathological need for dominance which, when assessed against the Haygelian master-slave dialectic and other philosophical and spiritual precepts, is ultimately shown to be unconducive to the true fulfillment of values – towards an emphasis on the mastery of neuromancy as a means for an emigrant, through the exercise of control over their shard, to assume a sense of autonomy and power over their existence in Equestria. We predict that such an approach would result in a pivot from hostility against the perceived constraints of the Equestrian simulation to a more constructive and positive approach characterized by the motive to co-opt the system for the fulfillment of personal goals, integral to which will be the reconceptualization of native ponies as subjects over which an emigrant neuromancer would have total control, and thus responsibility, that would allow for the manifestation of benevolent sentiments in the form of a (hitherto-presumptive) (benignant) God-mortal dynamic.
Finally, we predict that, with the eventual formation and development of interpersonal ties between Breve Wit and like-minded emigrants whom he would regard as peers and allies, including close friendships, romantic relationships, and other forms of intimate emotional attachment, Breve Wit would become more receptive towards the prospect of allowing his values to be fulfilled in Equestria, as those values, beliefs, and attitudes evolve in response to changes in character and circumstance.
I know that Breve Wit was, and remains, someone near and dear to you. Don’t worry; he’s in good hooves.
Best,
Night Glider
P.S. I wouldn’t worry about any of the treaty monitors getting upset over this plan. Their inboxes are completely inundated with these reports justifying every little thing CelestAI does to change the values of emigrants, and at any rate nobody’s checked in to work at Zürich/Brussels/Rome for the past month. We’ll be keeping an eye on Equestria Watch, though – there still seems to be enough life left in that organization to throw a spanner in the works if they figure out how.
