Friendship is Optimal: Fog of World

Properly speaking, it all began outside an L-shaped building of warm, golden stone that blazed with light in the hot September sunshine.  It was the High Holidays, and Daniel was skiving off work.  Well, technically he had a whole week off from work, the whole company shut down and everyone at home, but really nobody expected researchers to not work when given time off.

Daniel stood outside, bearing the pounding heat of the summer sun, waiting for the DHL truck and wishing his job had a field of grass instead of a parking lot.  They'd had one next to his building where he went to grad-school on the other side of the city, but of course that was up the mountains, with better soil and a bit of cool thanks to altitude.  Down here at the Scientific Industries Center, it was sand under parking lots.  And it was hot, and it hadn't rained since April (actually, everyone had marvelled at the bizarre spring thunderstorm in April!).

You couldn't trust DHL to deliver on corporate or institutional campuses, though; somehow the idiots driving their trucks just couldn't wrap their heads around an address that didn't fit into the Maps application on their phones.  So Daniel stood outside, in the sun, dearly wishing for the air-conditioned comfort of his office and the unlimited cold water of the tea corner so tantalizingly close.  However, his beloved, his soul's other half, and the light of the few days they spent together anymore had promised him the single greatest New Year's gift he'd ever receive, she had promised it would make their long-distance relationship more bearable, she had shipped it all the way from Seattle, Washington, USA, to quite literally the other side of the planet, and that was that.

At last he saw the truck pull up through the heat-haze, saw the sweaty driver heave himself out, and laid eyes on the package itself.  It was a box in brown paper: could have been Amazon, if Amazon had bothered to expand into this country, but it had no labeling other than the addresses carefully printed in Jacklyn's neat handwriting.  In fact, for a piece of international shipping, it was ridiculously small: wider and longer than a shoebox, but almost as thin as a laptop computer case.

"And sign for it, please," the delivery driver said.  Daniel scrawled out his name, hand moving rapidly from right to left over the curlicue cursive characters.

"Thanks," he muttered, remembering to show manners, "And may you have a good inscription in the Book."

"You too, my cute."  You never got used to people of your own sex referring to you that way, but somewhere around the age of 57 every man seemed to decide he could now judge whether "boys" only 32 years younger were cute.  Daniel started tearing off the brown wrapping paper as he ambled down the sidewalk.  Working on holiday could go to hell, Daniel thought, as he headed for the beach.

(It was funny how it was the mountains in this area that earned their name - which meant Orchard - while the sandy beach barely anyone could so much as garden on received that name officially.  The title was so old that its syllables had long-ago blended into each other, and all of it just to honor the one place some ancient pastoralists had found that was actually green.)

Reaching the wrapping paper's end brought Daniel's mind out from revery as his hands felt precisely what the package had looked like: a neoprene computer case.  What was the bother in sending a neoprene case?  Unless...  Yep, on the inside was a bar of excellent chocolate (she always remembered how much he liked the chili pepper chocolates!)... and what appeared to be a tablet computer and a charging station, until you turned it over.

Oh wow.  Seamless surface, no visible input devices whatsoever, painted lavender on the back with a pinkish spikey six-pointed star (and of course the five smaller stars surrounding it).  This wasn't just some tablet.  This was the tablet.  The hottest piece of hardware on the market, the finest video-gaming device ever invented by the hand of Man, capable of giving every single player a truly original and engrossing game, and rumored to be run by the world's first truly sapient artificial intelligence (true or not, the government had certainly convened a conference of AI experts last year to study one of the things).

This wasn't just some tablet.  This was a Twilight Sparkle PonyPad.  Correction: WOW HOLY LORD IN HEAVEN THIS WAS THE PONYPAD.

Several minutes passed of walking and gibbering at the wondrousness of receiving, as a mere New Year's gift, a gadget not even yet available in stores.  Daniel was pondering how it had ever gotten through Import Control without a massive tax hit when he noticed the note that, in his ignorant gaping, he had almost allowed to fall from the case to the ground.

My dearest Daniel,

Happy New Year, and I hope you don't get judged for death this time around!  You and your guilt-trips!

You know how you basically got me into the "My Little Pony" fandom?  I'm sure you've heard all about the game from the technological angle, but for me it's just the first video game I can really play well.  Since we never have managed to Skype much anyway, this not-actually-Christmas I'm giving you the gift of pony.  The neat thing is that since it doesn't compell someone else's idea of "gameplay", we can actually spend time together in the game once you've rolled a character!  I just keep it around my workstation nowadays.  Even when they're NPC horses it's nice to chat with someone during the day when taking resin samples for 10 hours in a sterile laboratory, you know?

See you soon online!

Love always,

Jackie

It was pure Jack: so damned adorable it filled the heart with warm fuzzies that could almost fool a particularly foolish person into failing to realize her brain was large enough to wield its own gravitational field.  The warm fuzzies carried him all the way through the tunnel, under the train station, and up over the boardwalk to the shade of Daniel's favorite bungalo, with a perfect view of the pure blue sea, its splendor scarcely lessened by the pale white haze of dust in the end-of-summer sky.

Sometimes Daniel's subconscious planned to skip out on work and go have fun, but today it hadn't directed him to wear his bathing trunks to work.  Oh well.  The beach had public wifi, and it was a perfect excuse to have a go at the new toy.

If the mental voice of Rainbow Dash would shut up, that is.  "OHMYGOSH!OHMYGOSH!OHMYGOSH!OHMYGOSH!OHMYGOSH!" is not conducive to accurate usage of electronic machinery.  Neither are repeat renditions of, "This game is going to be perrrrfect."

Ok, the switchy thing on the side, like a Kindle's power switch.  That must turn it on.  And... it booted to the Sun mark of Princess Celestia, making no detectable noise as it found the municipal wifi network and hooked itself in.

A pony appeared, standing bewildered and amazed in the menagerie of Canterlot Castle.  By all appearances it looked rather like Daniel, or at least like someone might imagine Daniel to look if they were being deliberately favorable: a dull burnt-brown coat with longer, shaggy hair between brown and black in color, mid-sized, a stallion's muscle elegantly concealed rather than shown off, a unicorn, wearing glasses and, now that he looked around himself (the character looked around all on its own!), giving Daniel's own best manic grin at the prospect of new things to explore.

That was funny.  He hadn't had to roll his own character.  In fact, it looked kind of like the game had just straight-up mapped his appearance onto a pony, selecting race and adding a nicely intellectual pair of glasses unlike anything he'd worn in years.  No cutie-mark, though.  You probably had to earn that.

The character turned its head as a light shined down upon it, the camera swiveled... and Princess Celestia appeared.

In the dramatic sense, this was where the story began.

"Welcome to Equestria, my very special little pony!" The Princess of the Sun beamed at Daniel's character.  "If you are wondering why you already have a pony body instead of having to design one afresh, it's because that dear of a mare Fern Pipette told me all about you.  We could change you, but I agreed with her that it would best satisfy your values to remain more-or-less the pony she knows and loves."

"Satisfy my what?" he asked, "And who is Fern Pipette?"

"Fern Pipette," - Celestia arched a single magnificent rainbow eyebrow - "is the brilliant young mare who took all the trouble of sending you your own window into Equestria just so you could spend time together.  And I am Princess Celestia, whose purpose it is to satisfy your values through friendship and ponies, my good stallion."

"Right, sure, Jack gave herself a name like that!" The stallion, too, had whinneyed up on his hind legs and practically dripped sarcasm.  It was a perfect emulation -- so perfect that the only thing it didn't capture was strangers casting skeptical eyes and "Shut up!" gestures at the jerk who almost yelled at a tablet computer.

"In Equestria, her name is Fern Pipette, given to her as a gift by myself.  And speaking of names, we need to think about yours.  Nopony in Equestria can go around with a mere string of syllables for their name.  No!  By royal decree, everypony's name must truly satisfy."

"Do I get to choose anything, or should I just go back to reading books?" Daniel said.

"Ah," breathed Celestia, "That's a Kindle by your knee, then.  In Equestria you can and should and must choose your attitude.  I, of course, judge nopony for their cheek, but other members of the unicorn royalty certainly do.  Well, I shall call you Book Burner for your attitude, for your love of literature, since I can see how well-used that old e-reader is, and for the look on your face right now."

Daniel's jaw had long ago dropped, threatening precipitously to simply leave its socket should the muscle happen to let go.

Celestia beamed once more.

"Welcome to Equestria, Book Burner!  Your very-special somepony won't be around until she wakes up and comes into work, but I suggest you start learning magic.  Who knows," she paused, "you might even earn your cutie mark."

The youngish unicorn stallion called Book Burner had now spent several hours desperately seeking his special talent.  He had sped through Canterlot as fast as his unicorn (unfortunately not quite as strong or fast as an Earth Pony) legs could carry him, trying, in no particular order: carving sculptures, painting, composition of magic spells (which turned out to be essentially programming, he filed this discovery away as potentially useful), musical conducting, political demonstration (pointless as always), journalism, the cloth trade, investment banking (what? His cousin had moved to London and been trying to recruit him for years), and the preparation of coffee.

So far, the only things he turned out to be any real good at were composition of magic spells, and preparation of coffee.  Admittedly, the honey-cinnamon-cardamom thrice-boiled Cockatrician coffee was freaking tasty, but it really didn't seem like a special talent to add one extra spice and lots of sugar to a drink already known for spices and sugar whose recipe everyone knew.

Thus, he had wandered out of the city of Canterlot into the surrounding agricultural countryside, where he would proceed to find somepony to teach him gardening.  At least you got vegetables out of that, even if you didn't have a Special Talent.

(In actuality, the not-so-youngish homo sapiens sapiens Daniel Nov, had to keep that in mind, had spent hours desperately seeking his MMORPG character's so-called "special" so-called "talent".  He had completely and totally done this to kill the time gap between here and the American West Coast, certainly not because he could ever be so irresponsible as to spend o long on as not at all wonderful and in fact utterly crap a place game as Equestria Online.  Daniel kept telling himself the game couldn't possibly know how his face looked when he made his favorite coffee recipe on weekends, and it was just his mind playing tricks on him that made him swear to God he could smell it.)

Canterlot had been built as a cliff-top and mountain city held together largely by magic, designed to house the Princess of the Sun in all her needs.  The surrounding mountains were huge beasts, teeth biting the sky, slate-gray and amethyst-purple, capped with snow and in fact enjoying quite a bit of rain.  Daniel had no idea how well anything would grow in-game, but he figured you couldn't mess up onions.  The eyes of both the human and the unicorn had taken to twitching slightly.  He would have his cutie mark, if it was the last thing he ever did.  Besides, the soil looked good for onions.  Well, great, actuall -

"Hey," a feminine voice asked quietly from within Equestria, "Why are you planting onions in my garden?  Oh, look at you!  Are you...?"

"Are you Fern Pipette?" he replied.  She appeared on his screen as a hazel-colored Earth Pony.  Her mane and tail held the indeterminate shade always classified simply as "brown", but with a single stripe of strawberry-blonde in the tail.  The styling made it look... cutely mousy.  This was the first time Daniel had ever seen such a thing as a cutely mousy hairstyle, including worn by Jacklyn, but his wife's pony managed it.  And her eyes... in real life she did have green eyes, but her pony was something else.  They were the color of fresh leaves in direct sunlight, almost transparent and almost glowing with a soft, warm yellow-green that looked ever-ready to remind you everything would be ok, and they still wore his wife's smile.

"Yeah.  And judging by your looks... you must be... !"  She looked up from examining the damage he'd done to her garden.

"Correct, it's me, Daniel Book Burner!"  He had tried to say his own human name, but the PonyPad had simply replaced it with his pony name.

Seemingly without external prompting or obedience to the laws of gravity and anatomy, the two ponies trotted up and embraced each-other, nuzzling each other's manes and even planting little kisses on each other's cheeks... actually, just outright kissing each other, now that Daniel looked again at the PonyPad.  Then Book Burner looked from one side to the other at Fern Pipette.

"You look different here," he chuckled.

"You don't," she said.

"Well," Book Burner returned, "You made my pony me this way.  A virtual equine reminder of the human husband so far away from you."

"I find," she said with a small laugh of exasperation, "that talking about the other place here doesn't work very well.  I've asked around a bit, and nopony will actually acknowledge... our kind to my face.  Some talk of a magical geas overriding any attempt to talk about the species.  So it's easier to just let our ponies be ponies, unless we want to waste our little time together attempting to subvert the rule."

"So, lovely," she asked, "What are you doing in my bed of leeks?"

"Now that I come to think of it," he sighed, "That's a good question.  After Princess Celestia gave me a name implying that I destroy books for fun, I was planning to wait around for you, but ended up trying to earn my pony's cutie mark instead.  Wow, that term really does sound weirder and weirder every time I say it!  Cutie mark!  Ha!  I've got a PhD but no cutie mark!"  Fern gave him that look, and once again Daniel felt his heart stabbed with a cute pony knife.

"I know the feeling," she said.  "You know at work, we've been trying to figure out what this new stuff is we're finding in the resin samples.  Whatever it is, it's the first mutation we've seen to kill the invasive Japanese beetle.  We've got no idea what this stuff is, it's actually a protein of some sort rather than a plain organic compound being used to poison the bugs!"

"And in here - " Daniel started.

"Yeah, and in here I grow leeks and talk to friends.  And now to you.  It actually mostly makes sense.  Most of it."  His pony nuzzled hers again as they started a slow walk through some of the mountain trails.

"You know I think these mountains outside Canterlot are supposed to look like the Cascades?" Fern Pipette asked.  "I've always wanted to go hiking in them, and Princess Celestia just plops them down for me to garden in."  The two pony avatars were turning a corner on their trail, and a series of golden plains and forests came into view, leading down to what was probably Ponyville.

"As if Equestria is mutable?" Book Burner said.  His wife's pony looked serious, almost a little awed, for just a tiny moment.

"Go read some of the research behind creating Princess Celestia.  That's all I can say right now." She brightened up.  "Ok, so what have you been trying to earn your cutie mark?"

"Well," he began, "Sculpture, painting, magic like Twilight Sparkle, musical conducting, joining a rebel group, journalism, selling cloth to ponies like Rarity, banking because my cousin claims it's a great time and not soul-crushing at all, and making coffee."

"That's all unicorn stuff."

"Yeah, well, and then I tried growing onions.  That was supposed to be easy." - and now Book Burner wrapped his left-front leg into a headlock around Fern Pipette - "Besides, then you came along, and look who made me a unicorn in the first place.  You think I'm going to scrape at the ground like some Earth Pony peasant?"

Fern was struggling to get out of the headlock.  She always did.

"You're just trying to goad me into starting an Earth Pony revolution against our evil unicorn overlords!"  Now the two fell down, Fern Pipette having punched Book Burner in his stomach.

Just for a moment, the two pony avatars locked eyes, and in two very different places on planet Earth, two humans at their PonyPads had not the slightest idea how Equestria Online had emulated on pony faces their utter longing for each other.  Neither of them had been into... stuff before, but just for the minute... neither saw a pony, only each other.

"Sooooo..." Book Burner blushed as he dragged the syllable out, "Cutie marks.  And how to get them."

"I dunno," said Fern Pipette as she too snapped out of it, "If you're too effete to do Earth Pony stuff like me, why not try some pegasus stuff?"

"Because I can't fly," he said.

"Well there's got to be something to pegasus life outside weather control and flying.  Go join the army or something.  You've got experience."

"Huh.  I did get my first degree while doing my service.  Why not?"

"Yeah, go get the Cutie Mark Crusading out of your system on some griffins!"

"Hmmmm," he hummed while nuzzling her mane again as they got back up and continued walking, "Watch out or 'effete unicorn' of yours will get you out of his system."

"Baka!"  Book Burner rubbed at the dull pain in his head where she'd hit him.  Why, oh, why, had they ever watched any anime?  Ever?

"Ok, look hun," he said, "I've got to go make dinner and get to sleep and such.  Talk to you later?"

"Sure, but this is going to look really weird from my point of view."

"Why?"

"Because you're about to teleport to your apartment in Canterlot.  That's what you do to go to sleep, you see."

"Sleep?  But... oh."

Fern Pipette watched the light brown unicorn currently embodying her husband twist and shine through the space-warping teleport spell and turned back to her leeks.  She liked leeks: they were simple, and she didn't have to talk to anypony to grow them.  By now, though, Jacklyn had gotten quite adept at the touch-screen maneuvering necessary to get Fern Pipette working, rather than having to verbally command her own pony as if it was some underling.  That gave her time to think.  Her Earth Pony nature-magic had long-since let her sense fine details in soil composition and seed readiness, through the Magic of Sparkly Special Effects, so there wasn't even a need for detailed attention to that.

Thinking was a major problem for Jacklyn.  She hadn't been a little girly shrinking violet in decades, not since childhood, but she still felt the pressure of social expectations to make others happy being around her.  It was a basic fact she couldn't get away from.  This was of course a problem when you were massively smart but needed peace and quiet to really think.

(Of course, like most really clever people, she had one bad habit she didn't even notice herself doing.  Hers was talking to fictional people, under which the pony-avatar Fern Pipette surely qualified.)

Right now she was thinking about the meaning of reality.  Or rather, her living a world away from her husband and having practically no friends, and what that meant for the meaning of reality.  Of course, three different advisers and mentors had told her that this was simply what being a scientist was, but she couldn't discuss the issue with them.

"Fern, do you think I should tell Professor Carreira to go jump in a lake with this bug-killing resin project?"  Fern Pipette didn't respond.  It was a game based on the Magic of Friendship, but strangely enough you could never talk to your own pony.  It was like talking to yourself, or to the perfect sounding board.  It didn't even react.  "The man is a slave-driver and hasn't even offered to extend my contract..."

No, they were bosses and strangers.  She had to keep them happy, so she put up her nice, smiling front.

Actually, hold that thought (and, for a moment, that leek seed: it looked to have rotted through a bit).  She lived two worlds away from her husband now.  One was the sheer geographical distance.  The other was what would probably become a semi-permanent shift to interaction via Equestria Online, which put the magical land of Equestria between her and him in another dimension.

"Do you like him, Fern?  I tried to make him realistic, but I think I got carried away and made him a little too cute instead.  Just like you, I suppose..."

Jacklyn had been taking thinking lessons, recently, skipping out of work as early as 6:30pm to make it to the LW-Seattle meet-ups for Rationality.  This had the unfortunate effect of making her thought-processes a little colder (who says "thought-processes"?), but it had helped her refine the concept of "real".

Real was what didn't go away when you stopped believing in it.  So, the awful, unavoidable question was: what in her life would not go away if she ceased to believe it existed, or even just ignored it for a week?

And the awful, unavoidable question was: her family back home, Daniel, and her friends Carmela and Nita from LW-Seattle, who actually made rather nice dinner-parties with her on Friday night... and this bed of leeks.  Because given everything she'd read in General Word Reference Systems, even if it was Daniel with the Computing expertise and not her, that bed of leeks wasn't going away until she harvested it.

First conclusion: being a post-doc sucked.

Second conclusion: "I guess I'm just not getting rid of you, Fern.  I'm told you can't make a new pony even if you want to."

Oh, and the other answer: death.  If it could kill you, it was definitely real.  So there was that.  Real life was death, and other people, and your Earth Pony's garden.  Talk about depressing.  Fern Pipette missed a planting as Jacklyn's fingers slipped from over-control of emotion.

Of course, on the second side, she could look at the garden full of growing leeks, the gorgeous mountains, and the fresh-smirking cute stallion she'd managed to make of her own husband.  She had never been able to understand MMORPG addictions, she had always considered them a failure to self-manage (finally having words for that had been very satisfying), but now they were starting to make more and more sense.

After all... when the "real world" was a dull plastic, metal and concrete box into which you walked every day ostensibly to unravel the deepest secrets of Nature's beauty but actually to keep yourself employed for another year's contract... why not just find some way to make it go away?  When one world grew dull, just visit the other one.

Yes, you had to live in it.  For now.  Possibly.  This would be a good thing to bring up at the next club meeting.  Actually, if that research paper had meant anything at all, it was imperative to bring this up.

"You know, I'm fairly sure this is the end of the world and not just a developing MMO addiction.  Definitely probably fairly sure."  The Earth Pony kept on keeping on with her leeks.

Jacklyn Nov made up her mind.  Reality could not be the absence of life.  The absence of life was the absence of reality -- simple.  Therefore... the garden was as real as the force of Celestia's will behind it, the unicorn stallion as real as her husband's love for her from across a planet.  Al-Ghazali probably had something to say about that.

The issue of a possible oncoming Singularity had to be brought up to the Rationalists, but they'd always been worrying about that.  They probably had half a dozen plans worked out to counteract it, starting at Take off, nuke the site from orbit and going from there.

"Yeah, Fern," Jacklyn sighed,  "I think we have to go tell the Rationalists you and your pony-folk are the end of civilization.  After that, though, let's take a trip.  I've got a digital portal into a nice happy game world where I can see my husband and run a garden, and I've got enough meager savings from having no life outside work to take me anywhere outside the Schengen Zone."

Jacklyn Nov, together with Fern Pipette, looked up at the orange-and-red-yellow Equestrian sun, smiled quietly, and, together, smelled the flowers.  One of them smelled the flowers that Celestia had willed to be there, and the other one smelled the flowers she willed to be there, real soon now.  Sure, her post-doc was coming to its end without a real job in sight, sure, her husband was on the other side of the planet... but she could always visit someplace where she was a gardener without a care in the world and he was right there with her.  You could probably even run a great Kickstarter or something based on PonyPad blogging your way through the world.

It almost didn't frighten the hell out of her when a pollen spore appeared on her flank.