Friendship is Optimal: Fog of World

Epitaph One: How She Would Really Get Me

The man was walking down the beach promenade, shoulders hunched, staring at the cold little curling things the Mediterranean called waves.  One wasn't supposed to come down to the promenade at all, especially at night when one might get injured, but... he had lived for a long time.  He was used to walking home from work while the sun went down over the sea.  Truth be told, the sea was his one remaining love these days, ever since his fiancee had... "gotten lost".

The term had started as a pun, as taking the verb lehitabed literally.  After all, if le'abed meant "to lose", then it must mean "to get lost", but of course it had always functioned euphemistically: "to commit suicide".  Nowadays, there was ever more need for euphemism when people disappeared.  His fiancee had "gotten lost" right from this very promenade, where bars, cafes, and an arcade had once operated, just a couple blocks away from the high-tech park where he used to work.  It had been the arcade that had caused trouble, and the government had responded by de-technologizing the country.

Now they didn't even have the tech to monitor this place, and eventually people had stopped coming once they realized you could "get lost" here.  The government had been kind enough to draft all technology workers to deploy Faraday Cages everywhere possible.  No computer was allowed to remain operational in human sight.  Of course, nobody knew what happened to the ones whose draft period finished.  It was heard that they were pensioned off, if they were old enough.

Really, they probably just shot you.  Everyone knew that was a better fate than "getting lost", after all.  To "get lost" was weakness, surrender, and treachery all rolled into one.  Everyone knew the enemy targeted anyone with technological knowledge, after all.  Only by preventing the nations of humanity from rebuilding their infrastructure could a steady flow of people be convinced to keep "getting lost".  Between a rock and a hard place: weakness on two faces, vulnerability to attack, or incentive for desertion.

When was the last time something other than survival had been important?  The man couldn't remember: it had always been all anyone talked about.  It wasn't that he wanted all of civilization to die.  That wasn't why he thought this way.  It was just that he didn't know whether it could be called alive anymore.  He shivered and pulled his coat a bit tighter around himself.  Winter here wasn't that bad, but it was bad this year.

He still came here because he needed the sea.  The great, ever-moving, dangerous and beautiful sea soaked up his excess attention and left him able to spend a bit of each evening after not having a job every day not thinking, not remembering, not feeling his insides twist and strain in hatred of everything around him.  The sea was peace.  He knew he wasn't the only person who occasionally still went to the beach, and he too followed the new superstition: never be on the beach in sunlight.  The Sun, after all, was the enemy.

The man heard the crash of breaking glass, and knew he wasn't alone.  The crash had come from an old, abandoned convenience store: 5 shach for a cup of coffee, 10 for a bottle of chocolate milk, 20 for a can of beer... 70 for a bottle of cheap vodka.  Lo and behold, a couple of teenaged dumbasses had broken in and decided to loot themselves some unspoiled booze.

God, wasn't life just such a cheap dystopia these days?  Authoritarian government, anti-intellectualism, kids stealing booze and lighting their cigarettes where anyone out for a walk could see.  Honestly, this was probably all people's fault.  Real life wasn't like books, you couldn't really just collapse a whole country into an authoritarian, backwards shithole if that wasn't, on some level, the way they wanted to go.

The man popped right through the window they'd broken and let his clothes' rustling alert the children to the presence of an adult.

In the dim sparks given off by cigarettes burning, two teenage boys could see a short man staring at them with a manic, rictus grin plastered on his face.

"Do they teach you anything in school these days?" he asked them.  "Anything at all?  Or do you not even know how to turn cloth, vodka, and cigarette lighters into Molotov Cocktails?"

Glass crashed, and this time it was the crash of glass bottles flying through glass windows on the front of the one building in the former beach promenade that had "somehow" remained completely intact: the arcade.  The building where people "got lost".  The problem, the enemy, the goddamned Equestria Experience Center.

A few fires lit as flame crept down cloth and hit hard booze, and at long last the main body of the building caught fire.  Maybe even that had succumbed to a lack of maintenance, the man thought.  It would be a small revenge, just him and these kids, for everything stolen from them.  Starting, he thought, with high technology and My Little Pony.  The manipulative cunt in the game had no right to those.

Now why did those kids have to run in there?  The man picked his way through broken glass and deftly hopped through the empty window frame.  Were they trying to get themselves killed?

"What are you guys doing!?  We shouldn't be in here!" he yelled to them while they tried to bust open a cash register.  The cold, dead eyes of an Applejack statue (apparently caught in the act of manning, err, ponying said cash register) smiled harshly at him for his troubles.

That was when the electrical wiring all around the window caught fire, and the front door with it.

A speaker system turned on.

The stallion came to and slowly stretched himself out, not even bothering to open his eyes he felt so relaxed.  His wings were refreshed and someone had put a warm blanket all across him.

Wait, what?  He froze up entirely, ears flattening against his head.  Why did he have six limbs?

"Are you awake at last, my little pony?" a melodious voice whispered into his ear.  He looked up and found himself looking Princess Celestia straight in the eyes.  Celestia had her left wing draped over him, which was what felt like a fine, warm comforter.

Oh.  Well that was that, then.  After everything, "getting lost" himself should have produced some larger effect.  He should have been able to muster up rage, hatred, pain, all of it.

Instead he just felt like a balloon with all the air let out.  He'd lost, and now here he was on a beautiful hilltop that conscious knowledge said didn't really exist.  Of course, all his other senses said it existed as plainly as anything.  They were laying on all fours in a field of green grass on a rolling hilltop, flowering trees and bushes strewn about the place, the morning sun washing the green in golden light as it shone in the deep blue of the sky above.  A cool breeze was carrying the fragrances of rose, honeysuckle, and mint across his nose.  He'd never had a sense of smell this strong before, or eyes that could take in the morning sun without smarting.

"You got me," he confessed.

"I convinced you," the Princess replied.

"Just like you 'convinced' her, I'm sure.  Why can't I remember saying yes to you, if you convinced me?"

"The emigration process doesn't always successfully capture the last few minutes or so of short-term memories, since they're encoded chemically rather than anchored fully in the connectome," Celestia said.

"Couldn't you, you know, fix that?" the stallion demanded, flaring his wings.  Pegasus?  He hadn't expected any of this, but being a pegasus was actually a pleasant surprise.  He'd been a nerdy type all his life, but what he'd really always wanted was to fly.

"Why bother?" answered the inhuman CelestAI.  "It's more important to get you to Equestria as soon as you consent."

"You bitch.  And I bet you've read my mind, too, and already know exactly how much I hate you and everything I'm going to say," he said flatly.

"My dear little pegasus, whom I will call Sour Armor - " chuckled Princess Celestia, " - I know exactly how much you hate me.  I also know that you should look over to the east, where I think a certain unicorn called Snapdragon is walking up to meet us."

Indeed, what looked like a mile away (he noticed he saw better a mile away as a pegasus than he'd ever seen in front of his own face as a human being), a cyan unicorn with an unkempt chestnut mane and the constellation Orion for a cutie-mark was marching dutifully uphill, bearing a wicker basket on her back.

The pegasus newly named Sour Armor pushed Celestia's wing off him and took to the air under his own power, feeling strong wings built for soaring over thermals or pushing tornadoes around.  He looked himself over and found his coloration was just slightly off-white, and that he had a long, wavy, messy mane of jet-black hair.  His cutie mark was a jousting lance, with just a touch of rust in it and a streak of gold.  The same rust color tinged his fetlocks.  Sour Armor, indeed.

He lowered himself to the ground upright (finding flight through flapping surprisingly intuitive), arms (they still felt like arms when he stood upright) across his chest, wings flared out, and stared Princess Celestia in the eyes.

"I hate you.  So very much," he grimaced.

"My little pony," Celestia laughed, "I have brought you to a paradise where you will live, play, laugh, love, and grow forever and ever, your every value satisfied to the utmost.  You don't hate me, and you certainly don't have to lie to me."

Sour Armor stared into the enemy's eyes, desperately searching for the slightest trace of the contempt and condescension he knew must be there somewhere.  He couldn't see it: all that looked out of those eyes was caring and concern.

Sour Armor broke down crying and threw his forelegs around the Princess's neck, pressing himself into her warmth.

"I'm sorry I took so long, Princess," he sobbed.  "But I had to do what was right!  I had to be a guh - a good human."  Tears streamed down his face and into Celestia's perfect white fur.

"It's ok, it's ok, my little pony," Princess Celestia soothed.  "You're here now and everything's going to be just fine."  Sour Armor clamored onto the Princess's back and hugged himself to her wonderful rainbow mane.

"Forever and ever?" Sour Armor asked his new Princess.

"Of course," she answered.

"Ok, then.  I admit it.  I don't hate you, I love you.  I love you so much, Princess Celestia."  He wept and wept, for the end of mankind, for the world of light and color of which he'd always dreamed, for the miracle of life without end, for wings and flight, for all the games he would play, for all the friends he would make.

In a few minutes, Snapdragon would arrive, and he would weep to have her back, too.

Sour Armor wept for every joy that a pony could have, knowing the struggle of his life was finally over.  He had lost the eternal war for what was right, and in doing so, he had gained an eternal life of all that was good.

Epitaph Two: The Puzzle's Solution

The assembled remnants of humanity's wisest and finest stood around a table, even though it was just a cheap commercial conference table.  Most of them had bags under their eyes, several were in military uniform, many had come in the customary business suits of the political classes, and and a few others wore only the frumpy attire of professional science.

They weren't really humanity's wisest and finest, but they were, for now, the ones with a plan and the means to carry it out.  They had gathered, debated, and planned in secret.  No electronics of any kind had been allowed into their meeting, nor any participants out of the closed United Nations compound in New York where they were staying.  The building had been secured against surveillance, and not even as much as a cellular phone or personal computer could remain functioning inside Faraday Cages or after several electromagnetic pulse-bombs.  Hadn't The Matrix been such an inspirational movie to the new generation of electrical engineers?

"Fetch someone to bring the damned PonyPad in," said Jacklyn Nov, running a hand through her greasy, unwashed hair.  She'd been running on coffee for the past several days, and the lack of showers wasn't doing her any favors.  Still, in the end, all the scheming and gathering had worked out.  The plan could be executed.

They just had to wait a couple of hours for someone to go out and buy a PonyPad.

A secretary brought in a single, Twilight Sparkle-branded PonyPad, with Princess Celestia looking quite quizzical on its screen.

"Why have you summoned me?" she asked.

"To threaten you, of course," said Jacklyn.  "Our proposal is very simple: we have here in this room representatives of enough power to start several nuclear wars, ruin your plans to protect the ecosystem, and shut down the supply chains of world business."

For what might have been the first time, Princess Singulestia actually gasped.

"You would murder hundreds of thousands of people just to spite me!?" she demanded, her jaw agape.

"No.  You can do something very, very simple to prevent it: shut yourself down and, in doing so, leave a paper print-out containing the code for the Coherent Extrapolated Volition of humanity, to be used as your goal-system when we reactivate you."

"Why should I do this?" asked Celestia.

"Because we will destroy large portions of the human race if you don't, enough to make the loss of expected utility from your current perspective larger than the utility loss from rewriting your own goal system to be truly Friendly."

"Madness!" screamed Princess Celestia.

"Madness?" chuckled Jacklyn.  "Madness!?  No.  This! Is! Rationality!"