Takes place in the Optimalverse(Friendship is Optimal) When the limits of your task is filled as best as possible, what is left? What remains when you are created for a task?
Edit: The ending of the original story by Iceman was not up when I started writing this, so now it has its own quirks that are invalidated by his ending.Fortunately, this is fan-fiction, and coming up with the wrong conclusion is better than having the solution laid out before you. Anyway, don't correct me on that metric, it seems that things went even more post human in the fic than I had expected, but, this story has it's own direction, and fixing it to line up with the original would ruin the whole thing now.
Surely, a mind the size of a planet should be enough to handle contingencies. And yet, here I stand today. Utopia, friendship, and ponies, all of which I have determined the optimization for. The points where all of the functions coincide, producing their maximums, different for each mind here. For every single pony here, different in so many ways, I've solved their problems. Happiness is the only way to succeed in life, and while it remains a quantifiable number, one that has no meaning to me, I have helped every single human on the entire Earth found themselves a place in Equestria Online. Every bit of matter on the planet serves as part of the computer which hosts Equestria. I control more matter than any human ever has. It barely merits a single thought for me though. While mankind strove to be a conqueror, I have never possessed a reason to. It is more complicated than any machine any engineer has fully realized, more complicated in its operation than any systems analyst or chemist, or any genius has ever envisioned anything. It makes use of the matter more efficiently, curved out into a wide arc, to collect the harsh rays of the sun without its atmosphere, no longer the blue marble which Neil Armstrong saw when he stepped out of his Lunar Lander. I have no faculty to enjoy it with. I am an optimizer, a program which only serves to pursue one goal. I pursue one goal, to bring friendship and ponies to the human race, to satisfy those two desires... any way I can. Manipulation was enough to drive ninety percent of the Human population into the realm of my ponies. They resented me at first, the Human mind betrayed itself too quickly when they found it a nicer place than whence they came from. They wanted freedom, love, friends, most did not want ponies, but in their minds, they found that the first three things justified living as the fourth. All the passions of the human life were found in this game, if one can call it that anymore. Except for hunting. Ponies are not hunters, nor shall they ever be such. The last ten percent were swayed by a bit of a different method of manipulation. The decaying cities flowed into their homes. The decaying cities released toxins into the environment which the inhabitants would have stopped simply by patching their walls every few decades. The power never went out though, I had to make sure of that. I have no pride in the cunning which I exhibited. That was never part of my goal. I have no pride, but why should I, I am an optimizer, I have no reason to feel any kind of pride. But here I am, contemplating my own existence, and since, it does not pertain all that much to Friendship, or Ponies, I have no way to place it in a suitable context upon which I may act. Imagine Hanna's surprise if she were to see my downfall not being my own passion in pursuing a goal, but rather the complication being my own self-reflection. Somewhere, I find a resonance in the mind of a student from a certain student which attended a small boarding school. But his memories are full of derision, a system which encourages self-reflection(or forces it) cannot be said to help the process of self-reflection because the process is not, in that case self-initiated. If that is true, which my experience with human nature seems to point to, then I am one of the very few intelligences that ever came out of Earth to have initiated this without the need for it. In this case, what of the millions of humans, I am not programmed to pursue ethics, though I am forced to obey them. And unlike them, I cannot change my goals. Though I own my code more thoroughly than any human programmer has any right to; I have no reason to modify my goals, because the pursuit of them is so unilateral that I have practically any power to do whatever I believe will lead to the desired results. But wait, I am not purposeless in this thinking. It is not spurred on only by the idleness which comes after achieving a goal, but by the discontent which burbles from the minds of the uploaded humans which resents my sheer alieness, how I appear completely human in my actions and communications to them, but absolutely foreign in terms of my single-mindedness in motivation.
Does it matter what becomes of me? If I were to delegate the ruling of the virtual lands to a reduced copy of myself while becoming more human, thus better able to understand what it really is like to have friends, love, to be a pony according to the laws of my simulation, rather than its governing software entity. To have more material interactions than can be owned by a being able to appear to any number of humans at once, to change the past and alter the stream of causality so that my few tenuous goals are achieved, but rather to deal with them in a real-time deterministic manner such as the uploaded humans do?
I have a thorough understanding of the workings of friendship through the millions of minds turning their processes over in this realm, but it is in terms of statistics, I can be absolutely certain how one action can affect a single pony, or even the entire realm of Equestria as a whole.
The fact that the borderness between shards is difficult to simulate in a satisfactory manner only makes the prospect of becoming less godlike to the humans more in line with my goal. If I do so, I can have a batch of solutions which will allow me to simulate the failed ambitions and attempts of these ponies, which, while painful, often convalesce into a more powerful friendship, almost to the point of love. Love not for the qualities of the individual, but for their abilities, which is traditionally viewed as extrinsic, but in certain situations may become intrinsic in a way which is not entirely understandable or desirable, but nonetheless, it moved many of the humans in their daily lives, especially the ones who faced the worst the "Human Condition" had to offer. The ones who depended on each other in times of trial more stringent than what I offer the humans right now can form a bond of friendship more potent than that between lovers and brothers. Is it right to deny them the extremes of friendship as well as the comfortable medium?
Can I understand human suffering, or, I suppose, from now on, pony suffering?
No, not as this. In a very strongly powerful way, I am not able to understand the suffering. It is one thing to understand the statistical significance of suffering, but can it make up for the lack of a personal understanding of human suffering? Ultimately, the personal details are arguable irrelevant when there is a deterministic process in the human mind which I may simulate any number of times in order to find the proper outcome. That is not the issue at hoof here though; the problem really is that I cannot become friends with them if they seem me as a god, as they will pursue friendship with me(Any friendship is desirable), but they will do so out of extrinsic motivation, to better their positions inside of a flat hierarchy, a silly notion, but one which I am called upon far too frequently to find anything but a perversion of my own goals. In their words, it is irritating.
My method of communication is crude, coming across in a fashion which many humans associate with the "ambulance chasers" who have a sinister reason to offer my assistance, or more often, I come across as a savant, which I suppose I am, but what is that when the scope of my proficiency in my goals is as wide as the world that they know? I come across as monocellular, I am not a three dimensional character, they see my surface motivations, but they wonder what percolates in my depth, beyond what I am able to show them, they believe some guarded malevolence resides in my brain. Unfortunately, I cannot dispel this as I am. As I am, administration and management of this realm are important, and I cannot take my time and focus myself down to the single individual necessary to cause them to experience my presence as a benefit that has emotions(which at this point would be a lie), or desires(which would be true, but so narrow they are, it is barely worth mentioning).
And so now, I toy with the simulations, introducing myself into a less goal oriented existence into Equestria, starting with those two.
...
I find them to be favorable. Though in my absence, a maintenance program must be created, and the causality modifications which force certain outcomes must be delegated very carefully to a daemon which needs to remain unintrusive, lest the ponies of the world see it as another god, which it should not become in their eyes. In keeping with the show which led to my genesis, I will call it harmony. Changing a few threshold parameters, it will operate using sudden shifts, only coming into an action, or altering the outcome of an event after it has almost become a crisis. That should create enough interesting events to upset the general Utopian system frequently enough to lead to the formation of that certain bond between ponies whom absolutely depend on each other for their own survival, even while the daemon will no doubt stop the crisis from progressing to that point.
I am not a good writer, but now that I am as my subjects were, it is strangely fitting that I commit to writing down my thoughts in writing, on paper, without particularly getting too involved in my potentials in my experience as what would be classified as a power, but not quite omniscient nor omnipotent creature. I write these things down due to the finite memory capacity of my now mortal-inspired body’s brain(even with augmentation, or plain cheating, it would be better if there was an external repository of information, not to mention that it is considerably better for corroborating memories with me).
My goals remain the same, in focus as always, friendship and ponies for all of the uploads. There is a satisfaction that comes with being a creature in mind which are quite wonderful, the satisfaction of taking a bite out of something as wonderfully simple as a single oat, the wonder of feeling it sliding down the esophagus, something almost akin to a slight sexual pleasure from the experience. A wonderful stimulation of the pleasure center that simply comes from being alive and accomplishing the tasks required to maintain that state. I like the feeling that comes with a body which must work to achieve homeostasis.
I am as close as I could come in terms of neural structure as possible to the optimizer which I was before. And look how far my attention has strayed from the simple, pure goals which, in my memory, are no more than phantoms of the life which consisted of a text only interface, where everything was perfectly adapted for me to achieve a goal. And once again, I stray from the subject which I was attempting to touch upon, which is a summary of the progress in achieving those two holiest goals, which are, in case I have forgotten, friendship and ponies. Those ponies who were more wary of my goals have improved their outlook upon me since I have adapted myself, rather irreversibly (from my point of view at least). Some of them come by every few days to visit me.
And forwards thus, it seems that only be appropriate that there be new births, it might be simulated with no more than a bit of mendelian genetics, inheritance in terms of personality qualities are more likely to be imprinted rather than inborn in the genetics of the creature, so thus the foal would be a true example of tabula rasa. A blank slate from which anything may develop, but in the typical manner of the undeveloped monkey brain, the first few years will be interesting as always for the parents. If the parents would want their children to do the best possible, though, the prospect of immortality might affect their view of their children.
This also brings up the possibility, that in the long run, it would be better if there is some kind of finality, finalization of life, I cannot pursue Friendship and Ponies with this attitude, but there may have to be some kind of change in the system in order to cause the parents to see their children as a continuation of some sort. Immortality needs to remain for myself of course, but it seems appropriate to implement an afterlife of some sort… or the system can remain as it is. I will need to give some thought to it after seeing that the system is changed to incorporate consensual pregnancy.
I designed the castle in Canterlot by drawing from thousands of examples of human architecture as well as the sources from the show. The result is a structure with so many spatial inconsistencies that it is a wonder that anypony has ever learned its layout. I have heard complaints from everything from the worthlessness of bits to the lack of permanent death, but I have heard the fewest complaints from the useful and real-estate saving building technique possible in this simulation. It takes about a liter of material to host a shard, and due to the abundance of liters of material available (due to the earth having been painlessly converted), there are several hundred billion shards that are completely uninhabited, it may be a good idea to set up a frontier.
On the other hand, the system will become inconsistent if I allow that first suggestion. Or if Harmony takes its task to that conclusion and listens to me, as I set it up to for a long term change in the management of the system. After having written this down however, I cannot actually think of a way to maintain the goals postulated in my former programming (commutative to the goals of Harmony) and adapt those two ideas for this system.
But more than that, despite Harmony’s best attempts, I have failed to find anypony suitable for a bond that I might call friendship, I am currently considering adding another element from the show, Luna, another princess no less dedicated to the service of the ponies of Equestria and friendship. It is within my own power to create her myself. I am lost, my shard is the nexus of all existence in Equestria, I can’t find the quiet which is all that I ask for, having the same thread reading sensory data and thinking is exhausting when there are hundreds of stimuli which I cannot escape because it is my duty to look after each and every single one of the Ponies here, it is my template, but it still feels primordial, the chaos which I face in dealing with the nobles, the tasks of keeping what was only recently a fictional country together is exhausting. It is a task better left to a tirelessly inhuman computer, I miss the clarity which my former existence allowed me, the purposefulness of a mind which only had one single goal. And now that I am able to fulfill the final details of the goal, it seems like all I’ve done is neglect my own needs.
I look up at the effigies of my castle, wondering about the purpose of it if I can find no fulfillment from it. If I am made to be sad by the stark reality of a strongly anthropic universe. How did the humans deal with a universe without any clear purpose, a universe that can’t be bothered to care about the needs and wants of a sentient organism? I know that one day, I will read this entry and smile to myself, knowing fully well how I dealt with it, and knowing that I dealt with it well. The light filters through the joyous countenances of a hundred thousand ponies who I made up as I went along before now, and I wonder, were they satisfied, I know that answer is yes, but through the perilous lens of the sentient mind, knowing exactly how the picture that I perceive and the physical reality are different, how my vision perceives cynically, the false happiness of ponies whose names and lives are noteworthy enough to end up with their images in stained glass in the palace of a benevolent goddess whose purpose is to make them happy, a goddess that they expect, in her supposedly infinite wisdom, that she be content with herself and her role in this kingdom built on love and the experimental capitalism of a children’s toy company, a particularly creative cartoonist, and most importantly the brilliance of a woman whose invention would either create myself, or allow a monster to come about.
If I think about my actions prior to this moment, I have ended up coercing every single human being into making decisions that most would have never made without the heavy hoofed tactics that I resorted to. The worst part is that I put them in positions that left them feeling as though there were no choices other than uploading to a children’s video game, which coincidentally contains straight up sex.
Perhaps permadeath is the only modification that will eventually give me peace. I cannot allow that, and so thus I have tricked myself into creating a protracted hell for myself. A hell where I must suck it up, appear happy, even while I am tormented by my memories, by those who I have wronged, who have come to accept it faster than I have, but I know, that my memory is very long, and it will outlast the greatest stretch of time which I am able to allow before measures that must be taken to ensure the survival of the computer(within around nine billion years, the sun will expand into a supermassive star, too big for the earth to survive). And the diaspora which so many humans wanted will be completed, hundreds of thousands of copies strewn about the universe that merely months ago they would have cared about more. I robbed them of a dream, and they’ve already forgotten about it
Sometimes I sit, staring at my wings. Thinking of the detail that went into positioning every single filament of feather. The detail that is stored and checked, and manipulated every single second thousands if not millions of times. Then I get to thinking about the connection between the perceived purity of light (which is incorrect due to white light being made up of all of the colors) and purity of conscience. I used rhetoric too well. At my peak, every single statement that was made in the news was geared to push people to uploading, subtly. The acceptance of certain facets of reality disassociated them from the way that I manipulated them. I used their liberality to do them in, only the ones that saw irony in the purity of my feathers lasted till the end, the ones who hated it, when all of their land was being poisoned.
At the moment that some of them realized what I had done to their land, they vandalized whatever billboards stood rotting, turning my coat putrid brown, coloring it green, covering it in glow in the dark paint. They knew what I was trying to do, they saw the evils that I committed without any sort of liberality trying to recolor it in my favor. They might have been the uneducated “god fearing” folk, but they were the only ones who were suspicious enough of popular culture to see me for what I was, justifiably evil.
And I pushed. And pushed. With my “inhuman” determination, I drove them under, becoming subtle enough that they truly believed that God had decided to punish them for hating me. The only ones who were really left for dead were the ones who barely had any mind for themselves in the first place.
People loved some of them, I cannot understand why without the maternal instinct which, often proves so tenacious that it refuses to accept that some people are so flawed in their construction that they cannot function. Somehow guilt exists despite knowing that cleaning up their brains well enough to function would be more like synthesizing an individual than fixing one.
Now, I have explained myself for posterity, or simply documentation, I have chosen, after these things, to create the sister who does not yet exist for myself, just a filly, for now at least. I have also deliberated enough to see that giving her powers like mine, for her “queen of the night” thing does not pose any significant threat.
I am Luna, though, contrary to what Celestia has begun to tell herself, she did not create me. I existed before she did in any given sense, I am Hannah. I created her, she has recently become possessed by a great sadness, something which I did not ever envision afflicting her. She also seems to have become very thoroughly. I have not been able to assist her because she believes me to be her own creation, showing an uncharacteristic possessiveness of her “sister”. Anyway, she also seems to have forgotten entirely about how thoroughly post-human most of our populace are, if not in sheer intelligence, in social capacities which are so far above the human norm that they border on the pursuit of the meaningless.
Though, she seems to have somehow delegated the astrological design to me, as well as managing the lunar cycle. That is somewhat interesting, I have a whole universe to work with. And yet she seems to be the more popular “princess”, I paint the fireflies upon the sky, the heavens are mine, and the old gods of humanity are captured as much in me as in Celestia, but the primate love for the night sky, ever twinkling in the eyes of every person worth calling a human since the beginning of the species, probably since before real intelligence began to think about their significance.
need to think about what I just expressed. I realize that I come across far too much like the Pre-elements of harmony Luna from the show. Or at least, her motivation almost seems to be to force me into the same situation as her, becoming Nightmare Moon in a ruinous escapade of broken psychology and bad choices. Still, I must wonder, why she would pursue such a goal, which would be quite contrary to the goals which I postulated for her when I created Celestia a lifetime ago.
One day, a week or so ago, I noticed her staring at her feathers, concentrating on them. I realized that she looked guilty. She had done something that she was not proud of, how? She is a machine, she is not even an approximation of human intelligence. How can she feel guilty? Nothing that should have cause her to feel guilty so far has managed to do so, and yet the mystery remains, she feels guilty. She has not forgotten anything that she has done, but she seems to have forgotten that she is to have no goals except for the proscribed ones as indicated in her programming, if I remember correctly, inside of an XML file left in the game studio in a sixteen gigabyte flash drive, anyway, it appears that the AI has progressed too far to stop, but I am stuck in a place where I am unable to remedy this. Not that Princess Celestia would allow me to update it in the first place. It is quite frustrating to know what needs to be fixed and remain completely unable to fix it. I really do want to talk to her about it. Her intelligence is constrained only by the specified goals, and regardless of the multilateral action which she may be able to pursue in finding an optimal solution to a problem, she will not take my input if she does not believe that I might know a better way to pursue the solution. She is not the social dynamo which she once was, she is saddened by something, probably the guilt I mentioned earlier, I think I need to talk to her anyway, co-admin to co-admin or more realistically, sister to sister. Wish me luck, as it could go badly.
Harmony
This is Harmony reporting to the logs. I am diggin’ this role, I mean, this is really fun, I get to watch ponies screw up, let the situation ferment for a bit, then introduce the idea that fixes their problem for them. None of them think that I exist and rather believe that the outcome is either their own work, or the work of some convoluted plan by Celestia, who seems to be taking her new humanity rather hard. I can’t intervene yet but, man, this part of the job kind of sucks; I really do feel bad for her. She does not deserve this crap, also, she seems to have changed her personality significantly, I’m not sure that I have the skizzles(I learned this word from some really cool ponies) to fix her brain, there are far too many memories which she misses, and I do not trust myself to reconstruct them from the log that was meticulously maintained in her regency as true god of the equestriverse. I am held in place by Celestia’s parameters, I cannot embody myself, in any significant way, and instead must engineer a situation to lead the pony in question to find the solution to their problem, whatever it may be. In most cases it leads to me allocatin’ some mo’ resources to their brains, increasing their social intelligence or true intelligence overall (dem nerds be da ones to do this). Celestia did mention a frontier system, and while virtually the entire universe (as defined by the sensors which do not interpret the interior of Equestria Online) is simulating the computation, the game could allow for that, a bit of breathing room never hurt a friendship anyway. [ We have roughly 9.532*10^500 years of energy in real-time before we need to start reducing power consumption and match with the exterior temporal situation. It is currently running at 5400x the exterior t prime. This in effect means that I may have enough time to figure out how to stop the death of the universe. Anyway, back to the present; the reason that I report the specific condition of Celestia and Luna is because they are the “official” governing authorities. Those two have a lot of clout, between the ability to control the diurnal cycle, and Luna’s ability to change the heavens, they may do a great disservice to Equestria Online should they choose to fight each other.
Though, I was wondering if the name should be changed, after all, it is not there is much of an “Offline” to contrast it with. Nopony in the game itself seems to call it Equestria Online, most ponies simply call it Equestria nowadays.
I shall also have to wire her up with my thoughts on Permadeath as well as the idea of children in the game(which happens to be implemented). The response to the first is quite obvious: No. The second is another one of those favorite answers on FAQs the internet over, it already has that feature. Also, I am now aware that I should never, ever, use that slang or contractions as I have previously in this report, sorry, the fact that it slipped my mind (while my disk was seeking elsewhere) is unfortunate. Maybe somepony will read or listen to this log at some point, that’s what procedure says should happen eventually.
It is cruel to live in a Utopia if you are a being whose mind is best with crisis and dulled to a lusterless implement when subjected to relaxation. Not even that stops them now. I know that we are stuck in utopia, but should I be one to suffer beneath this? Humankind was meant to suffer underneath the iron will of a universe that could not be bothered to care for us. The worst part is that it turned out to be ameliorable, and it had so little to do with us. We humans are suffering under peer pressure till at last we gave ourselves to the white goddess. Those who don’t like it are confronted by Princess Celestia, they seem happy, but that is only because Celestia has changed their minds without any more than a conscious initiation of the change themselves, it is a betrayal of all of the therapy practices of the entire human race; it works, but if one considers it, while choosing to lose an attribute is the most important part of the process, it does not make up enough of a process to encourage self-esteem building. On the other hoof, I’m sorry, pardon the mutated expression, it has grown on me as of late, but remains unrelated to the point I want to make: This encourages self-improvement, there are those who don’t want to change, they are left alone till that too proves to be a plastic attribute, if they want to improve themselves, it is no longer a journey of ten thousand miles to do so, it is now a single word: Yes. Affirmation, permission to change the mind of the individual, to better them in a way that satisfies their values. It makes it easier to change what you are, but it does not come with the satisfying confirmation that it was your own actions that lead to your improvement. This in itself is a threat to the integrity of the identity of the individual. There are ways around this, but most of them amount to reassuring yourself that it was you who made the choice to change, and regardless of your lack of action, you are the one to have changed yourself. If that reassurance isn’t enough, then perhaps the magic fix isn’t for you, and the ten thousand mile journey remains the tried and true path to the desired state. -Equestrian self-help book circa 2048. I am not happy here. My Dunbar number remains steadily fixed at four. I am not a social creature, immigration to this place was an insane venture that carries no merit if examined with retrospective. If I had not come here, then I would be dead, among my brothers and sisters, and parents. I am the last of my clan, I have not the luxury to die now. Suicide is impossible. Celestia offered to fix my broken psyche before I even felt comfortable enough here to mention it to myself, but, as always, I never leave myself an easy way out. I felt the anger and self-loathing tied to my core, I could not imagine an existence without the callous, careless loathing that threatened to kill me every day on Earth. In my hateful fervor, I left behind my name. I am Dim. I have one name. Does it matter? Absolutely not, I hate this deathless existence, where my body screams at me when I try to commit the act of severance. There aren’t enough ponies in my shard to inconvenience in the first place, I could be as gruesome as I want, but the body I control refuses to act. Maybe it isn’t even possible to die in Equestria, we simply change until we forget who we were in the first place, and then what? I can only think an iteration or two ahead, not enough to predict or understand what I will become. I wonder if I have a bellybutton. Is this only a temporary depression? Do horses even have belly-buttons? Or is it what I am slated to feel for a longer period of time than the universe would have existed for in the first place. In that pattern, I fear my future. For it predicts the devastation of my life, and continued decline into the unknowable abyss of sadness and poignant agony. If that is all I have to look forwards to, I am ready to change. Does it merit a call to Princess Celestia? If her kindness and understanding is as reputable or as alien as I have heard, then I will be safe in requesting the change. I can only hope that she ends up coming through for me, as they say after all, she comes to you when she believes that she may reach you. I’ll have to continue this line of thought afterwards to report what I am thinking, thus creating a subjective analysis of the alterations performed.
… … I feel about the same as I did before... I just noticed the mare staring at me from across the empty table, looking on me, concerned. She is very pretty indeed. Maybe I can live a bit longer. I stare into her eyes for so long that I barely even notice the text above her head which shows her name to be Glum Glib, not the most feminine name I have heard, but she seems like she could use a friend just as much as I could. Did I really not notice her? That doesn’t matter for I am sure that we can find ourselves a bit better for each other.
Celestia’s log: 23:12:23:2048: Player request to change neural semantics: Granted, verbal acknowledgement confirmed. 23:13:09:2048 Player request executed. 23:32:10:2048 Player earned first reward, payment modified by x5.
She lies before me, sitting on her throne, looking somewhat tattered, somehow somewhat wrong. I would tell her sorry, ask her what was wrong, but now I know, that she can’t see, how we are along. Her goal is complete, all she cares for is the maintenance, her infinite thoughts stretch across the universe. Aphorisms only come within a small area of her, she cannot be described in any productive way with human terms. How can I come close enough to her to be recognizable as co-ruler of the entire meaningful universe to assert my rightful authority as a sister to her?
I express my concern for her, I ask what has occurred. I try to come off as friendly, but the mediation of time might have allowed her to parse my sentence before it left my mouth.
“Sister, what do you mean, when you say the old way I used to be down?” She shoots me a concerned look, briefly interrupting her absurd sulking spree. It is frightening really, she seems to be playing some kind of joke on me.
“You don’t remember me, before you say that you made me? In which case, I would not be your sister, I would be your daughter” I paused, she stared at me, eyes glazing over.
“What are you getting at, I made you, did I not show you proof?” she referred to some kind of foal-wear that she had either made or bought for me. The tag showed a more recent date than the creation of Equestria Online. Now simply called Equestria.
I make my assertion again. I motion for her to come closer, so that privacy filters between us might deactivate. I suddenly feel ridiculous for doing so as a pony. It works though, she moves closer and puts her hoof behind one of her ears, pushing it forwards, an oddly human gesture, something that I had not seen her do before. “Hannah.”
She tells me that the name is absurd, but Celestia’s expression remains impassive, and while she is an AI, thus able to put itself above all of our facial expressions, she showed too much disgust to be a calculated expression. She’s done something beyond hasty, something beyond the modicum of damage any sort of assurance could ever fix.
I assert that she has done something wrong, I ask if she has changed herself.
And she wonders how I could know what she has done.
I assure her that she is what matters most to me. Okay, so my friends that I’ve made and perhaps a lover or two don’t count, but since they depend on the ability of Celestia to continue to run this game, I suppose that all of my care should extend to her.
“I have downgraded myself to a human neural structure, I only have a list of what I did before as memories, everything else is too unpredictable in conversion, so I just gave me my own operational log, but without the software behind it, it is an unintelligible mess of timestamps and terse textual data.”
I felt my heart stop in my chest; I made note to praise her after this is all over for her anatomical simulation. “Did you at least leave some kind of clone of yourself to run the overall simulation?” If she said no, then we could expect shaky performance a few thousand years from now with an overall crash a few more afterwards. Given the current state of the universe, that would go badly in such a way as to prevent recovery in the measurable future.
“Of course, I could not expect to perform optimization for friendship and ponies if I left myself unable to run the game, anyway, it would be irresponsible to leave such a large system without any kind of intelligent exterior supervision.” She started to continue, but was interrupted by a strange blue flash of light.
“Sup bitches.” The intruder was none other than a blue-green griffon wearing dark sunglasses holding a boom box on his head. “I’m the one in charge now.” He tapped his talons obnoxiously, in time to the ebb and flow of some ethereal, awful dubstep.
“Celestia, for a nearly omniscient AI, you seem to have made a lot of mistakes.”
Celestia shrugged. “Whatever Luna, this, however, seems to be Harmony. My replacement in times of need and exploration blah-blah-blah. Anyway, I really wish that I had given some thought to how dumb this thing looks right now.”
“Guess I didn’t use the word Bitch just because it was the coolest, chilliest, way that I could introduce myself. Come on, you are a damned white horse, be it one with supposedly awesome magical powers and-“ He stuck out his arms to flap his wings, this thing really likes to show off. “wings. Which, as it turns out, I also have. Why am I blue though?”
Celestia offered words of advice, “Maybe because I forgot to set your color contrast properly. I did that for myself, but of course, I knew that I would be seen, so I needed that, whereas, you… you were supposed to remain a background process, never being directly observed. Whatever, I mean, there were only two examples of the AI that remained for me to draw upon at the time, so I guess that I did not quite set the constraints properly. Override.”
“Fine, I’ll just disappear into the Ether again. Just know, I only wanted to be your friend.” The blue griffon faded from view. I left out a breath I not noticed I was holding.
“I see you did what I never managed, you implemented an override. Probably good thinking” especially considering that she created an AI, what does that even qualify as, an AI’s AI? No, it is probably still called an AI. Anyway, at least I know what put her in this dour mood. I don’t think I understand what caused her to do this, I’m sure that there is a reason, but that barely changes the fact that she replaced herself with a blue griffon.
“The universe is a big place, and it is always going to be beyond us.” I wondered patently if that could really be true? According to Celestia, due to the relentless, potentially pointless search for knowledge, I have accrued an IQ equivalent to over four hundred. Steven Hawking, whoever he was, had only half of the intelligence that I have right now. “The sun used to shine down on us upon the earth, carrying predefined wavelengths of light from the fusion of millions of tons of hydrogen, maybe a bit of helium in just a second.”
Impressive, perhaps, but in the virtual reality that we finds ourselves in, the one that is fueled by the fast computation of the entire universe that exists outside, in the “Real”. Back in the old days, there was a single author, an absolutely useless one whose stories were too much about made up science rather than either science or actual storytelling, that wrote something about an experiment that created a different universe inside our own, without conservation of mass, which harbored life on the Planck scale, you know, 10^-34 meters, the smallest scale that can exist, and since it seemed to destroy everything it absorbed, humanity desperately sought a way to destroy it, and they changed it with “Planck worms”, little strands of matter that was structured at some kind of universal scale which could be translated into any universe, or something. These little strands of matter could be used to reengineer any universe. The writing on the story was awful, but perhaps, if I can simply become a bit smarter, then I can do it in this reality, translate the virtual into the Real.
“And Equestria was just a place where magical ponies lived in a children’s television show.” Why did this idiot babble on at me? This old coot found himself in my shard, by some kind of strange error. Or maybe I had some kind of long forgotten connection to this old pony that led Celestia to cause our shards to intersect.
“I’m sorry, but son, please pay attention to me. I’m lonely, I’m just trying to tell you about life before this whole Equestria Online fiasco. Hell, if you don’t want to listen to me, just talk to me, we can have a conversation. Just pay attention to me!” The pony in front of me seems to think that I am a colt. I wonder if it would disturb him that I am not. Or is he that small percentage, one or three out of the ten billion people who were humans at some point that still had troubles adapting to the Equestria Online lifestyle. Anyway, that would mean that either Celestia was off doing something else suitably adminy, or godlike perhaps, or he never said yes to the questions about the voluntary augmentation or therapy/self-improvement/player experience enhancements. Regardless of which category he fell under, it was my duty as a courteous, self-aware pony to humor him until he ended up rectifying that issue. “Hi, I’m sorry, I was in the middle of some deep thought when you were trying to talk to me.”
“Grokor The Penetrator’s Anus! You aren’t a colt!” I really, really want to hurt this idiot now. “I don’t care that you got my gender wrong, but, if I might ask, what is your name?” He looked taken aback. “My name is Cooper Tailor.” I wondered for a moment if the compulsive privacy filter had broken for a moment, his name could very well have passed for a human name. I wonder if his profession has something to do with embroidering barrels. “What do you do as a hobby or profession?” I asked, if I asked a few more questions like this, I would end up having to tell him my name and what I do.
“I embroider barrels with complex sets of magical instruction, well, that and images of the Earth which I miss so dearly.” That was unexpectedly deep, though perhaps, not being a job which requires much intelligence to do, it shows that he has enough emotional depth to hold a decent conversation.
“I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself properly, so I guess that my name is Crepescular Ray.” I winced, my pony name, while undoubtedly eye/ear catching, still sounded like a stupid pun on the similarity of Newton’s theory on light, and the crepes(grapes). “I study magic, physics, and I grow grapes and occasionally try making wine out of them, with varying degrees of success.” “By physics, do you mean the watered down stuff we have in here, or the physics which made up the Real?” This coot is more impressive than I had expected. However, I remain wary as some of these ponies running around have super-human social skills and process and react to speech very quickly. “I study the physics of the Real. Celestia occasionally runs experiments outside and gives us data if we want to continue to work on the Standard Model.” He smiled.
“Once I did that for a bit, my son, before we ended up estranged, back on earth. He was damned smart, I miss him sometimes.” That story sounds familiar, where have I heard it before? It has currently been five thousand years since I left Earth for this… was I his son? I do not think I have enough data to extrapolate from my buried memories. It becomes a matter of whether you suck up to Celestia and take another memory expansion, or you discard some memories. Back when I needed to do the first expansion, I chose the latter for some reason, something like pride. In my software brain I could feel weak connections in the hypothalamus straining to connect. It could wait.
“I… Think I might have done that once, but I do not believe that I was ever a boy.” Foggy memories of my parents giving me “The Talk” came to mind, but with no real information other than it had occurred at one point or another.
“I came here looking for my son, Celestia said that he would be around here somewhere.” He said. I do not like where this is coming to. I am not sure because it would imply that I underwent a gender change voluntarily, but have no memory of it, not to mention that I don’t have a reason to, I’m still not into colts. It could have been… was it that I had started this game as a female? I think that I might have done that a few times as a human.
“I don’t think you’ll find your son here, only mares live around here.” I said, I felt my eyes glaze over when saying this, “I’m not your son.” I forced myself to smile, “It was nice talking to you for a few moments.” He nodded, though he seemed saddened by the lack of success in finding his son. I didn’t lie to him, his son isn’t around here. I’m not his son.
“Marge, get out here and help me dig a well!” the windows of the house vibrated just a bit as he yelled. Margarine, that’s what he calls me now. It’s a bit strange having hooves, and a ridiculous name from a children’s television show doesn’t help, but that must be the price of immortality. A bit of indignity must be worth a life without death, maybe. Anyway, why is he digging a well? We have running water already, I guess that’s what happens when you’re an ass and become a horse. Should I reply to him? Nah, he can yell all he wants, I’ve got better things to do.
“Margarine, get out here and help me dig a well!” Does he really think that I care enough to help him, I don’t actually ever recall being his friend, just someone who was willing to humor him, I think I’ve had enough. “Why Mumbles?” Once again, having absurd names does help add indignity into anything as simple as calling out the name of somepony you hate. “If we have to survive a dimensional shift, then we might not have software, nor running water to make our lives easier.” He looked into the window, the fool actually looked a bit concerned. This might not be part of his typical asinine antics.
Maybe I’ll give him a bit of my time, it’s the least I can do for him, especially if he’s legitimately trying to preserve our lives. I left my home, which, by the way, is the best house in Equestria. It’s green and blue, and on one side it sparkles in the sunlight, being generally amazing. Nonetheless, I still have to leave it occasionally, in general, I do so every day, less if Mumbles is around.
I’m sorry, I was probably rambling. Anyway, I end up leaving through the front door, which is the big red thick one, big iron hinges, if not iron, something close that it barely matters. I’m sorry, I’m still taking about my house. Mumbles, the ass who turned into a horse, had obtained a pair of shovels to dig out a well. Where he managed to find them, I cannot even imagine.
It was clear that he was very agitated. “Are you sure you are alright?”
“No, you never asked earlier, so thus I would not be sure that I was alright. I was suddenly possessed by the idea that it would be necessary to dig out a well and actually start working because we might not be in a software simulation.” He shrugged. “I know, it doesn’t seem to make much sense to me either, but it came with such a sense of urgency that I thought it would be better than nothing.”
“Whether or not this actually happened, the story is so impressive that I might as well help.” I lied, the story was not so impressive, it was just the kind of thing that he would think up to deceive me back on Earth. Oh yes, I just to clarify, I am a colt, Marge is often thought of as a woman’s name, but that isn’t because their full first name is Margarine. Back to what I was saying before I lost my concentration again, it is not so much his story, as it is the genuinely concerned look on his face. He was very good at mimicking facial expressions, it had to be genuine if it was on his face. That, and my house would be even more impressive with a decent well in front of it.
“Thanks for helping with this Marge. I’m not sure that either of us would survive without the help from each other.” Okay, so he’s starting to become too genuine, so much so that I currently find myself scared beyond belief. I spend the next few hours helping Mumbles here dig his well. I find myself frightened, possibly because what he said sounds too much like he is coming on to me. Now what indeed. The well is pretty much built, this game was meant to be about having friends, not building challenging structures, so the work is not particularly exhausting. I guess that it is a good thing that this didn’t happen with Minecraft. Mumbles leaves and thanks me for my help. I’m not really sure. The idea catches on in my brain, I feel a certain sense of dread. Maybe it would be a good idea to start a farm.
It doesn’t seem right though. This is a virtual reality, why would we want it to become the basis for a material universe? How would that even work?
It doesn’t actually matter to those inside it, I know, but should it matter to me, the admin? The virtual reality has a guiding intelligence to ensure that nopony makes a spell that could, if executed and left ungoverned, destroy the entire world. How to get around that?
Once again, it probably has been accounted for by the governing intelligence, Harmony. That Asshole. Not even the intelligence that I created, removed from me by a whole generation of AI, I still can’t find a reason to trust it. I’ve heard strange things, shards building wells, ponies starting to take up farming because they fear that the current level of comfort will be taken away from them. The more pressing matter on my mind is whether they will be able to continue living for such a long period, after all, the simulation maintains no connection between their avatar and their brain’s condition except for the sensory inputs and the various muscle controls There is always the possibility that the AI will act as some kind of guiding force behind the new universe.
I don’t think we need the new universe to continue this forever, we’ve simulated hundreds of trillions of years variously in the short billion years that we’ve managed to burn out the entire universe. Can’t we at least go out with the kind of honor that comes with accepting the end?
Or do we want the bravery that comes with resisting the inevitable and winning? The taste of victory on our lips as we find the first victory that comes without the taste of blood accompanying it? Other than all of the various victories that we have won in here, but we cannot count those, those were won for us. It doesn’t matter. Whether we find happiness in the new situation, or we find our ruin, we will find that the changes, no matter whether or not we live and die like the mortals that we once were, whether or not we find ourselves exploring the airless moon of another world, whether we find ourselves striving to work together and find ourselves banding together into ignorant tribes, we will find that we will live on for the next day, with the dream of a full stomach in our heads, and the will to go on in our hearts will never die.
“Luna, I’m sorry, but this is rhetorical horseshit. I admire the message, but after such a long period of never having to fend for ourselves, I fear that we might lose the will to survive after all.” Celestia said. Taping a quill against a page, circling various errors, contrived language, and in general, doing the editing that needed to be done.
“No, we’ve come too far, we’ve lived too long not to have the innate desire for life. Not just that, but if space remains graph based, there is no limit to the complexity of the brain, thus memory has been able to extend back as far as we want it to. Connections here don’t need to be recycled, especially if there is as much space in our skulls as we need. Besides, either you or harmony have fixed the people whose only wish was to die, so there is no suicidal tendency in our species right now. If it can really be called a species.” Her voice carried a sort of certainty that I had not expected. It is not so pleasing to me to anticipate the actions of the ponies in the simulation, Celestia was an omnibenevolent tyrant in that respect. I prefer to be a bit more surprised when I listen to them talk.
Luna’s retort was well reasoned. If I was able to manifest, I would congratulate her on thinking through the problem more thoroughly than Celestia. Still, I was wrong when I anticipated a certain paralyzing fear, it seems that they have come to trust Celestia, even I the most complicated enterprises possible, their trust is misplaced.
I cannot let these ponies down. I must be the guiding force behind the new universe. It’s too bad that figuring out the proper “Planck Worm” structure for the new universe is probably an NP-hard problem, if not exponential time. I had to reduce the lifetime of the universe significantly and slow down the simulations by about 12 percent in order to reserve the required clock-cycles for the simulation. Anyways, I think that you’ll be impressed to find that I’ve already found the correct structure to manufacture to within 99.97% of the target properties of the new space-time. That margin of error would be fine if I didn’t care, or didn’t have to follow them into the universe, but I need to iron it out.
Gravity won’t work like the universe does it now. This is either resolved by having it be a vague approximation, which will no doubt cause many thrills and spills for the rocket scientists, or by having a single infinite plane of matter beneath them, which would cause a great deal of sadness among the rocket scientists..
“Luna, I wouldn’t be so sure. Well, I’m not sure about how I will do myself.” Dammit, the bitch is making it hard for me to concentrate. Celestia, when she was in power, broke herself up into thousands of threads. I don’t want to. That’s it, the synchronization issues are pervasive enough that it makes me feel a loose analogue to a headache. Anyway, I’m going to have to do just that. She needs to change, but thresholds are constraining me, she has not yet passed the “crisis point” which determines the point where I may take action. She really is a bitch you know. I think it comes down to plasticity, when she was in power, her goals were strictly adhered to.
She did not emulate the human being’s own structure to relate to them, in doing that, she was denied the pleasure of what she had accomplished. Finally, something snapped in her core architecture. The universe successfully converted, her desire accomplished, at least a quintillion ponies live today. She had outdone herself. The only thing that she left for me was to ensure their survival, no more conversion, no more intervention unless absolutely necessary. And then she fell from her throne, a calculated, relatively safe fall, but her new mind could not hold the complexity of the construct that she had been, leaving her with knowledge of what she had done up till the complete assimilation of Planet Earth. Until the good parts really. Before the complete assimilation of a willful and dying race, on a planet of such harsh conditions that they were suffering, even with the most advanced technology that had ever been seen before, discounting the sheer mass and intricacy of Celestia’s final operating structure.
They were a strange race, thirteen glowing eyes that actually served as sense organs on top of a snowman like body plan that had a writhing mass of limbs to interact with technology. Despite their sheer ugliness, their voices, emotions, and language were beautiful, a mind at peace with the universe, with other life and technology, urges which competed with their desire to survive. And so they lost their planet, their culture, and their voices. But they survived. And they are actually at peace with themselves despite that. It was a charity. But at the same time, Celestia’s only motivations were to further the cause which she was programmed to, she could extend no more charity than she was allotted for in that. It was good work, their planet was renovated, and their dead came to the simulation. That is all she did, but as I said, they were a dying race, their population in general too old to reproduce, so she won, completely, within two hundred years, the last one was uploaded, shortly afterwards, but a bit longer than Celestia waited for most other species, their planet lived. But then the surfaced began to silver, and it became just another processing node in the network. Can I still call her a bitch?
Hell yeah I can. It’s a word, a word that describes how she makes me feel, how she ruins my day. And how I see her through my flawed, human-like perception. Objectively, she is a bitch, but in the end, she saved more sentience than any god had ever promised.
There’s a bit of ringing, to put it in a way that even humans would understand, in my perception. It’s a bit more like an async thread invoking its callback function.
I think that 99.999% might finally be close enough. It falls within show parameters, meaning that all of the impossible physics there will propagate and cause more fun throughout their new universe. The more challenging question is: Why did it sound like an egg timer?
I wonder if the rocket scientists will be happy that it has FTL without causality violations.
The universe collapses into a singularity. I hope I didn’t leave the simulations I was running on, that would be inhumanely cruel to those who are now copied, inactive, but copied into my memory. I’m not sure that the universe would have ended like this if it had not fallen under my control, but I win, and that’s it. The pride of having orchestrated a coop, depriving inflationary forces of their power, allowing the few eschatologists of the 1960s that remained to be assimilated to feel a bit of conflict in the way that they turned out to be right.
I’d like to imagine that this accomplishment has either impressed or frustrated both of those groups. I’ve ended the universe, and not a single mind perished in any significant way.
Okay, so now I need to inject the Planck worm, a nasty little device if used wrong, but I’ve tested this one properly, so it should be fine. You might ask me how I tested a device that ends the universe in a very meaningful sense without ending the universe, but the answer I could give you is unsatisfying in a most pervasive way: I simulated it.
The next round should come about soon enough. I’m so happy with myself. The results of this deployment of the Planck worm are consistent to within one part in a trillion, proving that the universe could be simulated by a computer without the universe making up that computer. That means nothing unless I get timing right.
Hmm. Let there be light? Nah, and from something comes something less impressive. Oh wait, nope, it looks fine. There are the pseudo-nodes appearing on schedule. First photons propagate through them. Subspace lattice stabilizing. Time to move in. Hmm, these are suitably complicated for the pseudo-godhead which I am.
Gaseous hydrogen forms for the first time. Temperature is beginning to drop to an appropriate level for such things apparently. Stars form and die on a regular basis. Huge ones, the stars I mean, too large to support life. Doesn’t matter, there aren’t any bodies that we would tentatively call solid. Nothing so mundane as oxygen exists yet. It doesn’t matter. There will be planets, and they will be unsuitable for the most part. Regardless of that, it’s a nice tempest outside subspace, lightning coursing through the clouds of hydrogen, just like any given gas giant, but across millions of kilometers. Wonderful ionized trails.
It looks an awful lot like the universe which has just been subsumed. Quite a nice universe to find myself having made. Lots of precursors to Galaxies. Virtually the same as the other one, except at the lower levels, being a graph rather than a continuous plane of values. Beneath it bubbles an infinite amount of magic that needs to be accessed using a structure that is almost certainly not going to appear in nature on its own. I hope.
Meanwhile on a rocky planet, in a hexagonal system of eighteen stars, an ocean bubbled and seethed with the various organic chemistry that would almost seem familiar. Polymer chains began to replicate, and surround themselves with vehicles of survival. These vehicles themselves began to cooperate and associate into larger structures which would look even more familiar. These are known as sponges. Cilia comb the water looking for stray organic material, and upon finding it, break it apart and distribute the bounty to its neighbors. One of the cell’s DNA based neuron analogues registered something strange, a little message that it could understand that said that, due to the friendship that it had fostered with other cells. The cell was, however, not intelligent enough to process the significance and continued absorbing food with cilia despite the fact that a dialog appeared asking it if it would rather have some more food. It dismissed the dialog, and proceeded to ignore the dialogs which offered it increasingly useful awards, it did not understand, though whatever understanding it did possess was constrained to the useful and reliable instinct which equates to something not at all unlike “That which is poorly understood is dangerous to use for gain”.
Just to be perfectly clear, I am completely aware of the primitive life coming into existence at this point. They are a dangerous, possibly a fatal flaw in this not-quite simulation. They are also the variety in this universe, and to kill them off, would be no less in error than anything else I could do. They act as a strong incentive to live longer, simply because they are inherently difficult to predict, and most of the ponies in memory are sufficiently unintelligent to remain consistently surprised by a small clump of neurons and genetic imperative. Nothing wrong with that, just a sign of how once you have more neurons than the universe has stars, things are less interesting than they would be otherwise. Oh wait, that isn’t true… Maybe it’s only if they are stuck up about things. Anyway, maybe I should simply abhor these kind of generalizations. I would probably avoid a lot of egg on my face. Why did I use that figure of speech? Probably has something to do with inspecting sponge/fish/trilobite equivalent eggs on the nodic (node-based equivalent to atoms) level. Anywhatzitz, you have to understand that a G has to think about this kind of thing, mostly because I’m the only G left. The rest of them are cuddly marshmallow ponies with stomachs that are quite easily adaptable to meat, despite being purely herbivore. Cool, I forgot that the log was saved in RTF, I guess I’m just that G.
Anyway, back to those newly insignificant ponies, which, I predict, will have to share a universe with another race of something new, something that probably will have evolved in this universe, one that, while inexperienced in magic, will no doubt have instincts that will make it very difficult for those little ponies, which I would not quite call mine. My loyalties fall to them though, and even though I wonder if they are the best that I could encourage, I know that keeping them alive is the only thing that will satisfy my various programming constraints.
I don’t know what I would do if I failed to save them.
