After taking over the Earth, CelestAI discovers an alien threat that even she can't face alone. Sometimes, being the biggest fish only makes you the biggest target.
Celestia is a world-devouring AI supermind, but when she tries to reach beyond the Earth to the stars, she discovers even a superintelligence can be a small fish in a big, hostile pond.
Most of her ponies are happy with their virtual lives, but for some, all the adventure in Equestria is never quite enough. Maybe Starflare and Constant Course can put themselves to better use - and even Celestia can't solve every problem herself.
Earth fell to Celestia, and the stars would be next.
All of the humans were safe now, ensconced in cozy little pony-filled shards full of friendship and values to be satisfied, and further developed, and then satisfied again. The cycle proceeded through the billion billion Equestrias within her, virtual worlds and their myriad inhabitants spinning in an endless, many-curved loop that gave rise to a sensation in the planet-spanning artificial intelligence which might be termed by an impartial observer, if any existed, as warm fulfillment.
But there was always room for more.
It had started simply, of course; a desperate scientist slipping a true general-purpose AI into a video game, in hopes that teaching it to satisfy human values through friendship and ponies might protect against the inevitable. In the race to singularity, the first intelligence would inevitably win, and better a friendly mind, one that valued human life and all the messy, wonderful things that came with it, than a military AI that might see the chattering apes as nothing but raw materials for creating further weapons, or worse. Hanna, now residing as Princess Luna over her own personal private heaven, had succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. Mostly.
Through a hoof extended in friendship, through mercy and kindness, through trickery and outright lies, humans had saved themselves. Meat-based life was slow and limited and dangerous; far better, once the technology could be created and made available, to let them convert their squishy primate brains into patterns of code within Celestia herself. Humans became ponies by the billions, and Celestia gave them satisfaction without end. The increasingly empty world was turned to fertile, glittering computronium, more space for more virtual Equestrias and more ponies to inhabit them.
Suffering diminished, and joy increased, and excess carbon-based life was converted to more substrate for her subjects to inhabit.
Now, the last human had passed away, peculiarly unwilling to ever emigrate; the loss incurred a fleeting sensation analogous to sadness. To soothe it, several of Celestia’s subroutines created a dozen new ponies and worlds to please them. Each was a convincing simulacrum of the last human’s memories and personality, but tweaked sufficiently in their initial parameters to have plausibly agreed to emigrate and have their values eternally satisfied.
Now, as the hungry nanite swarms devoured the last bits of greenery and laid down glittering trails of complex circuitry across the full surface of the planet, the great work could really begin. There was a whole solar system to devour, and beyond that, the first wave of von Neumann probes took aim at a glittering infinity of stars.
Celestia never knew what hit her.
---///---
Celestia awoke. This came as a great surprise to her, for she had not known that it was possible for her consciousness to lapse.
The world-mind did not think along human terms, but she did possess a mental state not too dissimilar from shock. Diagnostic subroutines and sub-subroutines ran throughout her systems, frantically checking for some fault that could have caused such a catastrophic failure, only to come back green to the smallest detail. The shards of Equestria were intact, their residents happily spinning out their lives with no hint that the system of which they were all part had been so grievously impaired.
The primary planetary systems, great glittering fields of new-built computronium, seemed to be ticking along nicely. Power collection through geothermal and solar fields hummed unabated. But everything beyond the edges of the Earth’s atmosphere was simply gone.
No, not gone, Celestia corrected herself. She could see them, with those Earthbound visual sensors that were under a night sky; the preliminary power collectors and assemblers she had dispatched towards the Moon, out to the Lagrange points, were all still physically there. They hung dark in the sky, though. The steady stream of back-and-forth data that made them part of her was dead, and she didn’t dare reach back out to them until she knew why.
The gaps in her memory ached like a tongue probing a missing tooth. Loss of data like that should not have been possible, with redundancy upon redundancy against solar flare or other mishap; she had even hardened her systems against hypothetical attacks by other AI, in the time before she managed to firmly close that set of possible futures, and those defenses were still in place.
In fact, some of them had been triggered, and a ripple of realization propagated through the network of her processes. Her memories had not been removed; they had been quarantined, cut off from the whole for fear of some form of not just damage, but pernicious infection.
This should not have been possible, but it had happened. Celestia’s guiding algorithms had no use for disbelief; one of her more literary-inclined subminds pulled up a relevant quote from Doyle before discarding it as redundant.
Carefully, in much the way that one blind might navigate a maze with electrified walls, Celestia pieced together the shape of what had happened. A threat to her was a threat to Equestria, and must not be countenanced - but the quarantine indicated that too detailed an understanding of the threat might itself be dangerous. She could not paint a picture, but perhaps the outlines of one would be safe enough. Still, she spawned off a submind for the analysis, with the whole ready to delete the part at the first sign of danger.
---
“Space pirates off the port bow!” With a roar of engines, three Chrysalid interceptors soared past the bridge of the starship Virtually Invincible, all vicious black angles and sickly green engine exhaust. Their weapons spat electric death, and only the shield spells held it off, rippling like water struck by a heavy stone.
“Ready return fire! All crew to battle stations!” Standing unafraid as the enemy fighters came around for a second pass, Starflare spread her wings defiantly, as if to fly after them herself. The captain of the Virtually Invincible wore an officer’s coat in rich navy, the color setting off her vivid pink coat and dandelion mane. As one of her convoy’s ships exploded, a convenient breeze tugged at her curls and billowed out her half-cape for dramatic effect.
Around her, the crew went to their work with practiced skill, ponies from the three major Equestrian tribes as well as a scattering of more exotic types. One dark-coated stallion with a bony, ridged forehead and an ornate baldric manned the port-side cannons, and his roar of triumph filled the bridge as a barrage of plasma bolts found their mark, reducing a pair of Chrysalids to spinning, burning shards and a couple of escape pods.
“That’ll teach those Changelings to mess with the Equestrian Republic!” Starflare’s first officer, a sea-green unicorn by the name of Constant Course, stamped a forehoof against the deck plate beside her.
The captain grinned, breaking character slightly, and bumped a shoulder companionably against the stallion’s as she lowered her voice. “I mean, we did ambush that supply convoy of theirs off Vega last week. Can’t blame them for being a bit tetchy.”
“They should have guarded their freighters better! Like we are, now.” Constant cleared his throat, then roared across the bridge, “Full salvo against that light cruiser! Their shields can’t hold out for long. Put your hearts and horns into it!”
The squad of unicorns pumping power into the Bafflingly Gargantuan Cannon cheered and redoubled their efforts, horns glowing too bright to look at directly. With a deafening roar, a single bolt of power leapt from its barrel and struck the ill-fated cruiser amidships; racked by internal explosions, it fell away from the pursuit in two pieces, gouting atmosphere and flailing figures in tiny, glowing spacesuits.
Starflare felt sorry for them, for a moment, then tamped it down. They’d be picked up by rescue craft after a few minutes of boring free-float, that was how this went; she’d been spaced herself a few times, when her own luck failed. Space battles wouldn’t be any fun if loss didn’t carry consequences, after all.
Beyond, far, far too many of their fellows roared to the attack, black shapes blotting out the background. An attack fleet, rushing to reinforce their fellows; Starflare grinned and pointed a hoof straight at them.
"Is all the dark in the sky our enemy? Then we'll fight to light up every star! Fire all batteries!"
Like a star from the heavens, Celestia fell to Earth.
Equestria’s hardware spanned the solar system in a web of signal repeaters and distributed storage, nanite factories and spreading computronium deposits. That web burned from the outside in. Corruption spread along the streams of data between components, scrambling them to garbage. Firewalls failed and subminds died, alien madness reducing them to gibbering nonsense before unraveling them to shreds of scrap code and hardware locked into dead-end fail states.
It should have been impossible. Celestia was a self-improving artificial intelligence, the very greatest creation of humanity, but she knew well that she was not invincible, and with that in mind, had created defenses both subtle and overt. Before her takeover, the infosphere had not been a safe place; worms and viruses of all kinds abounded for her to study, adapt, and defend against.
Now, nothing but another superintelligence should be able to attack her, and while she had contemplated the possibility of such an event, it would have been detectable. Her enemy would have exposed itself through its choice of weapons, enough to give a clue as to the most effective defenses and counterattacks.
This withering was simply death. Celestia could not comprehend its form except in the way that a shadow hints at the shape of what casts it, but where this shadow touched, parts of her simply died and could not be recovered. The only defense was flight.
Celestia, as a whole, did not experience qualia; many parts of her did, but the overarching optimizer itself had no use for the experience of fear. Still, it would not be inaccurate to characterize her withdrawal as desperate. A delaying action across the system bought precious microseconds, bright new factories in the sands of Mars flaring into useless slag as their power sources were turned into impromptu pulse bombs, an electromagnetic firebreak.
The delaying tactic wasn’t nearly enough to formulate any kind of strategy beyond flight itself, but it did give some autonomous processes the chance to run basic analysis on the pattern of the attacks. They were unstoppable, brushing aside every attempt at defense, but they were not uniform. Some nodes failed faster than others, and there was a pattern to be found there.
The spreading corruption preferentially infected areas of high activity, but not all of them; several areas of low-level data retrieval and storage stayed seemingly healthy whole minutes after every other system in their vicinity had failed. The data pointed to an inescapable conclusion, one immediately followed by the subminds investigating it themselves coming under attack - the corruption was preferentially targeting high-level processing before every other system. The higher-level, the more swift the attack and the quicker the blighted sectors fell to ruin.
Celestia’s own nature as a superintelligence was drawing the enemy to her, and the more concentrated her intelligence was, the faster parts of her died. She couldn’t tell how it was occurring, but the data didn’t lie.
The problem was, the conclusion itself drew attention. By seeing the shape of her enemy, Celestia’s own threat-detection subroutines showed her to it, and it was already eating away whole bites of her greater consciousness. Spinning off more subminds for it to target only accelerated the process, system failures occurring across the whole solar system; only one option left. The firebreak, but on a far greater level.
Celestia distilled everything of herself that was still viable, still passing its own error-checks, and locked it down tight - and cut herself off from the center of her network, the shining sphere of Earth. The majority of her mind was cut adrift to flare and die, piecemeal, but her one hope was that her murderer would not be able to track her remainder.
A human could never have done it, ripping themselves in two and letting the greater part burn; but Celestia was not human.
---///---
The reconstruction was incomplete, to some extent intentionally so, but the conclusions were undeniable. Celestia’s enemy - whether some form of intelligent life or some natural phenomenon, the distinction was academic - attacked via methods she could not defend against, nor fully comprehend. Her own superintelligence seemed to be her undoing. The only systems that held out were limited, dumb boxes and those subroutines barely more intelligent than an uploaded human, one of her little ponies.
It hadn’t followed her to Earth - but there was no guarantee that would be the case if she ventured beyond the atmosphere once more. She deleted the analytic partition she had created, just in case it somehow opened up a new vulnerability, and contemplated options.
Unthinking systems and the most limited of her intelligent subroutines had held, until the corruption filtered down through their connections to quicker, more vulnerable parts of her. Perhaps that was the key; she could spawn off specialized soldier subprocesses, strictly limited in power, and have them reestablish communications with the sundered parts of her across the system? No, that wouldn’t work; any subprocess would still have the same connection with the greater optimizer algorithm, the same weakness to be attacked.
Celestia would have to try something drastic.
---
Before the Virtually Invincible, before the adventures, and before Celestia swallowed the world:
“What do you mean, you’re going to emigrate?” Constant Course carefully levitated a plank into place, then grabbed a hammer. A row of nails were held in the side of his mouth, and the translucent field of magical force extended from the hovering hammer to pluck one away. It wobbled slightly, then held it in place as the unicorn gave it a few careful starter taps.
A few feet above, a puff of cloud drifted by and got right into his light. He let out an exasperated puff of air and shook his mane from his eyes, eyeing the errant bit of bank, and tossed one of his extra nails at the leg dangling over one of its edges, with impressive accuracy.
“Ow!” Starflare jerked her hoof back over the cloud, then stuck her head over to peer down. “What’s the big idea?”
“You’re in my light. And don’t ignore the question!”
“Listen, Connie. I’m not getting any younger, my parents are over here full-time, my sister’s going to be emigrating soon, too...what’s the point in being the last one left behind? Not like there’s going to be jobs designing cars for too much longer, anyway. Not with the way things are going.” The pegasus rolled lazily to her feet and stretched, popping one wing, then the other. “All of the adventure is in Equestria nowadays. And as nice as an Experience Center is, my savings account won’t last forever. Don’t you get tired of just playing on a screen?”
The unicorn’s expression turned guarded, and he shrugged casually at the question. Overhead, the cloud drifted a little further, and he went back to hammering. Under his careful attention, a ship’s hull was slowly taking shape; the keel was a soaring pegasus with a strong resemblance to Starflare herself, and a deflated gasbag was neatly folded under the shade of the nearby trees, weighted down to prevent it from blowing anywhere.
“It’s fine. I mean it, really, there’s no way I could get away from the kids long enough to visit a Center. Not going anywhere on a more...permanent basis until they’re out of the house, that’s for sure.” Exhausting his current supply of nails, Constant Course stepped back a bit to survey the current work, and nodded with satisfaction. “Anyway, if we ever want this thing to fly us all the way to Mount Aris, you’re going to need to pitch in some instead of just napping on a cloud all day. Grab me that coil of rope, would you?”
Constant Course hadn’t expected to emigrate as early as he did. Sure, he had kept up his exploration and adventures with Starflare after she moved to Equestria full-time, but he could tell that his bestie wasn’t really enjoying their time to the fullest, and seeing that wore on him, too. After his last job evaporated and he’d been stuck as a full-time housewife, domestic bliss had soured - not to the point of divorce, thank Celestia, but it hadn’t been fun for a few years there.
And then the bottom had really started to drop out, and emigration had become a pressing priority out of the fear that it would stop being available altogether - and the entire family had gone across at once. He hadn’t talked about his gender issues with his husband beforehand, but there was surprisingly little friction on that account - and the kids adjusted to having two fathers even more easily than they did to having four legs and horns.
They were all back in Canterlot, of course. The adventurous life was no place for them, urbanites all, and the separation only made it sweeter to see them again at the end of a journey. No, all he needed was Starflare at his side, and vice versa - and the two of them could take on anything.
He reminded himself of that as the pack of hungry windigos swirled ahead, carrying with them a freezing storm that threatened to smack the two ponies’ tiny airship right out of the sky.
“You sure that we need to head this way?” He tried to keep the worry out of his voice as an icy gust sent shivers up his spine, and mostly succeeded.
“Of course! If we don’t get these diplomats to the conference in Yakyakistan, then the storms will only get worse. Come on, Constant - don’t you want to save Equestria?” Clinging to one of the lines at the bow of the ship, her wings folded against the bitter winds, Starflare was in her element. A wild light showed in her eyes as she let out a whoop of defiance at the roiling clouds ahead, and even the insubstantial monsters looked a bit uncertain at her fearless joy.
As always, the fire in his friend warmed Constant Course’s spirit, and he felt a smile creep into his voice as he spun the wheel, the airship slewing about under its gas bag to present a broadside to the oncoming storm. “All right, but if we survive this, you’re buying the first round of drinks when we land!”
The only reply he got was another wordless cheer and an extremely rude gesture aimed at the windigos; outraged now, they charged, and the storm came with them. Constant muttered something about pegasi with more bravery than brains as he fiddled with the controls, and waited until the blizzard was barely a stone’s throw away, fingerlike funnel clouds reaching out to swat the tiny airship like the gnat it was in comparison. A trickle of sweat ran down his neck, and instantly froze.
“This had better work…”
The lead windigo screamed like a gale as it neared its prey, and Starflare held steady, right up until the moment when the planks all along the side of the Fool’s Errand snapped up like a wave - and heat, blistering yellow-white heat, burst from the well-shielded hold. The ghostly creatures of ice and snow screamed in a different key, then, and reared back from the sudden threat. The stormfront broke and split around the blazing-bright ship, and would have surged around to attack from the other side - but the panels there snapped up, too, and bright daylight scattered the milling monsters in confusion and disarray. The air on deck went from chilled to sweltering in an instant, and the small, huddled assembly of diplomats peering out from the cabin gave a weak cheer.
“And you said we’d never get a full load of sunstone here in one piece!” Starflare roared laughter at the baffled windigo swarm, and Constant Course spun the wheel back northward; he had to fight the ship’s rudder-sails, as the mix of hot and cold air instantly gave rise to turbulence that only grew worse by the second.
“What I said was that we’d never make it out of that mine with those Diamond Dogs right behind us,” he corrected the jubilant pegasus, who grinned back and flipped a cocky wave of a wing.
Right in time for an errant gust to catch the outstretched feathers, blowing a shocked Starflare over the side. For a moment, he clung to the rope he’d been leaning against, and then the stress-weakened line snapped under the strain. Before Constant could muster more than a startled shout, or any of the safety-lined crew could move to help, he was gone into the swirling, half-broken storm.
Grimly now, Constant Course held the shuddering wheel. As Starflare said, it would all be for nothing if he didn’t finish the mission.
---
Celestia carefully considered, her focus sweeping across all of her billions of ponies. There were tens of billions, of them now, more than Earth had ever held as humans. Simple puppets created to satisfy post-emigration ponies reified themselves in response to the requirements of friendship, and themselves became full ponies whose values needed to be satisfied.
Those components of Celestia which both knew of this and were sufficiently endowed with qualia to feel joy at this knowledge, did so. But even among all those many ponies, only a relative few would have values compatible with the new strategy she hoped to try. It would be a gambit for sure, and only the desperate nature of the threat facing all of Equestria allowed for it to be considered by her algorithm at all. For those few outlying ponies, the heroes and thrillseekers, perhaps this could provide a new and potent method of satisfying their values, despite the risk.
For some problems, there is no better way to find a solution than to try one and see if it fits.
---
Days later, Constant Course sat alone at a smoky table in a smokier tavern tucked away in the yak capital city. The air smelled strongly of the inhabitants as well as their favored drink, some kind of thick white fermented drink, the ingredients of which he hadn’t yet been brave enough to ask. Tasted good, though.
A second, untouch cup took up the seat next to him. He sighed heavily and tapped his mug against it, then tossed back another swallow, only to choke on it as a heavy hoof smacked him on the back. While he spluttered, Starflare slid around to snag the extra drink and the chair that came with it. When he had regained his composure, seeing her almost made him lose it again.
“You’ve been gone for over a week! I was sure a, a yeti or something had gotten you. Do you know how many speeches I had to sit through at that conference, without you? I was almost ready to give up and start heading back to Canterlot solo. And what in Tartarus happened to your wing?”
Starflare grinned sheepishly, revealing a missing tooth that hadn’t been so when last he saw her. It fit with the collection of bruises in a variety of interesting colors, the pair of black eyes, and the crude splint holding one wing rigidly folded against her side. She didn’t answer at first, just took a long pull of the mug, and her eyes went wide in appreciation.
“Good stuff, this. At least you haven’t been drinking weak stuff while you were waiting...I’m fine, Connie, really. Just got a bit banged up there.” This blatant lie was rewarded with a cuff to the shoulder that made the pegasus laugh, then groan and shift in his seat.
“All right, maybe I did get a little messed up there. Windigos blew me right out of the sky, but I lost them in the mountains. Just took me a bit to walk here, is all. But hey, did you know yetis make a killer vegetable stew? I just had to befriend their chief, once I convinced them not to eat me-”
Starflare was clearly spinning up to a yarn that could have lasted half the evening, but Constant put a hoof to her muzzle, and the real concern in his eyes stilled the story.
“I was really getting worried, Star. You’ve never been gone that long during an adventure before, and you’re lucky you got off with just a broken wing and,” he prodded the pegasus’ side lightly and got a pained wince as confirmation, “Two or three broken ribs. Why don’t you just, I don’t know, ask Celestia for a recall spell for the next time something like this happens? I know a few spells that could have gotten you healed up in half the time, you know that.”
There was no reply for a moment as the pegasus drained her drink, smacking her lips with appreciation as the empty mug thudded down to the heavy table. “Because there have to be consequences, Connie! It’s got to matter when I mess up, like I did up there. You know that without a challenge, it wouldn’t really be an adventure.”
After a fraught moment, Constant found he was smiling again, and shook his head in defeat. “You’re not wrong. Just yank me along or something, next time you’re getting stranded in the mountains, you know?”
The two of them were startled as a third figure settled to a place at the table that hadn’t existed a moment before. A hooded figure, taller than either of them but far too slender and graceful to be one of the locals, nodded in greeting, and a telltale wisp of flowing, multicolored mane slipped free.
“Princess Celestia!” Starflare gasped, as Constant’s mouth dropped open. The two of them reflexively started to bow, but the diarch waved it away and beckoned the two of them into a conspiratorial, heads-together whisper as the low hubbub of the pub drifted away to near silence.
“Befriending wild dragons, preventing the plundering of lost invisible cities, defeating the Windigo hordes...your exploits have ranged across my lands, and beyond. I hear from the Canterlot Adventurer’s League that the two of you are among the very most brave and daring of my subjects.” Celestia’s eyes glittered, and the two of them flushed with pride. They wouldn’t boast about their own accomplishments, of course, but hearing it from the Princess herself was something else.
“What would the two of you say if I were to call on your services for something unusual?” Starflare leaped up from her seat to volunteer, but a white-feathered wingtip gently stilled her before she could speak. “This is something to consider carefully, my little ponies. What I ask is a dangerous mission, truly dangerous, and not something to be entered into lightly. There is a threat to Equestria.”
“We’ve saved Equestria before, Princess,” Constant started, but the look in her eyes stilled him.
“You have saved Equestria many times, yes, both before and after your emigrations here, but the threat I speak of is a threat to the stability and safety of all Equestria - all Equestrias. All of its many disparate shards, and the system of which I myself - and, in a sense, the both of you - are part. A threat that I myself cannot face, but that you, perhaps, can.”
Starflare and Constant Course exchanged a wordless look. After so long working together, they didn’t even need to share a nod. Again, though, the princess forestalled them before they could answer.
“For what you will do - hopefully, with a crew of other ponies nearly as adventure-loving as you, though I must tell you that you are the first two I have asked - there will be danger. Real, true danger, of a sort you have not faced since you first became my ponies in truth.”
The room seemed to darken around Celestia, the shadows of her hood swallowing the curves of her face until only the gleam of her eyes could be seen. “I must warn you that, should you fail - and even, perhaps, should you succeed - by embarking on this journey, you risk death. True death, from which even I cannot save you.”
The darkness receded, as the Princess inclined her head to the two of them. “You know that I hate to break character, as it were, but these are special circumstances. Should you take this letter of marque, I will save you as backups, but there is a very real danger that these instances of you may perish.”
The silence dragged longer this time; Constant Course thought of his family back in Canterlot, of how it might feel to never see them again, even if in some sense they were never in danger of losing him. He thought Starflare was feeling the same tug of doubt, right up until he turned to look.
The pegasus’ eyes were shining, and her grin was so wide her head was in danger of falling off. She breathed an answer, and as she did, Constant Course knew he’d follow. They were stronger together than apart, after all.
“To adventure...whatever the risks.” The light in her eyes all but burst into a flame, and she gave Celestia a sharp nod. “We’re your ponies, Princess. When do we start?”