Twenty Percent Saner

Hong Kong:

Dudu Sternowitz was having a pretty good morning.  His instant coffee was made, in the proper glass cup.  He had a burekas ready.  He hadn’t even had to bundle up for the so-called “winters” of Hong Kong, whose humidity insulated him from the nastiness of winter nights back home in the desert city of Be’er-Sheva.  The life of an Israeli Consulate worker here was a pretty easy one, considering how none of the Chinese or expats really cared at all about Israeli internal politics.

He took the delicious first sip of coffee and settled back at his desk for a nice, long day of reading Clausewitz’s “On War” (for the political and propaganda strategies, he’d been in Spokesman’s Office in the Army).

Then a bunch of life-size-for-a-child stuffed horses walked into the Consulate, chattering amongst each other in no language Dudu had ever heard in his life.  They were all wearing some kind of intricate golden rings around their necks, and the green one had what damn well had to be a plastic trash bag full of money jury-rigged onto its back.

Alas, if he had been able to understand Equestrian, he would have heard the following:

”I must admit, Book Burner, your plan totally worked,” said the plasticky green horse.

”Told you, Lyrical Melody.  If we needed money for a ferry out of Shenzhen, people will pay money for any street performance if they think it’s cool,” said the rather more realistically brown-colored horse in a somewhat deeper voice.  What was that accent it had?

”Cool?  COOL!?” broke in the orange and blue one, throwing its forelegs around the other two’s shoulders.  What the hell, were those arms or something?  ”Guys, just who the hell did they think we are?!  Who knew unicorn magic could summon instrumental tracks out of nowhere?”

”Fine, fine!  We rocked the buck out,” replied the brown one, yanking its compatriot into what looked, for all the world, like a horsey embrace, at least until it got the message and left him alone.  ”I can’t say I knew my horn would function as an antenna or my voicebox as a speaker system, but that’s what you get for putting a stallion with computer programming skills in a robotic body!”

”And I finally got to do a more driven edition of Track 14!” exclaimed the green one, shoving her (somehow Dudu had figured out their apparent genders) friend off her with a kiss on the cheek.

Since when from Azazel did kids’ dolls speak in their own language, occasionally drop real words in, and walk into the Israeli Consulate of Hong Kong?!

She spun around like an over-excited child going squee.

”Now what was that number you two duetted together?” she asked.

”Miss Forward Charge here insisted on the more metal-y cover instead of the Killing Joke original I found on YouTube, but it was definitely called ‘European Super State’,” replied the brown one.

Those last three words had definitely been in English.  Dudu stood up and marched over to the three.  He had to do something to put reality back in order.

“Eeeehhh, excuse me, is it possible to help you?” he asked the trio.

“Right!” the brown jerked up.  “Sorry I no longer have my I.D., but some time ago I believe was a human.  They called me Daniel Nov, and my I.D. number was 123456789.  And, eehhh, I may be listed as dead.  Not quite sure on that point.”

It spoke Hebrew and claimed to have formerly been a human being.  That certainly explained the accent.

“What the fuck?” Dudu exclaimed in English.  The brown horse scratched at his mane uncomfortably.

“I went out on Reserves duty to a base in the North when the war with Syria started,” he explained.  “Or has it ended already?”

“Not ended yet, no,” replied the flabbergasted Dudu.  “Incidentally, any of you want something?  Water, coffee, morning meal?”

“Very kind but unnecessary.  After finding out what 'bathrooms' are, I'm fasting a short while,” said the green horse.

“Nah, I’m good,” said the orange horse.

“We don’t actually seem to get all that hungry or thirsty in these bodies,” shrugged the brown horse who had formerly been called Daniel.  “But yeah, did the bus bombing in the Afula area make the news?  I remember being killed in that.  Next thing, wake up a pony in a hospital in the magical land of Equestria.  So?  Can you help me?”

Dudu walked back behind his desk and sat down, starting to punch up the Interior Ministry’s internal records application.

“How precisely, Mar... Daniel, was it?” he asked formerly-Daniel.

“I’m called Book Burner now,” said the ‘pony’, “But yeah, Daniel Nov, ID number 123456789.  I really just want to know if who I remember being is real.”

Bafflingly enough, Dudu found the ID record in the database.  And he had been so sure this was some kind of student prank!  It was always students pulling crazy shit like this!

“Right, ok, it’s in order.  The identity file exists, name and ID number you said, died in a bombing on Reserves service, widow attended the closed-casket memorial service.  And walking dead man in a horse, behold, there’s something even weirder,” Dudu lectured.

“What?” asked the pony.

“There’s a secured file attached as a message from the government.  A message.  From the government.  To a dead man.”

“Yalla, pull it up!” the pony exclaimed, boosting itself onto its hind legs.

“Can’t just pull it up out here.  Violates security rules, even I’m not allowed to watch this stuff,” said Dudu.  “But I can project it in one of our conference rooms.  Third room on the left in the hallway behind me.  Will that work?”

Seattle, Washington:

The stakes were high.  Sarah bit her lip as she focused on the careful manipulations she was performing with her workstation.  Time was of the essence.  Think a step ahead, focus on economy of action, but don't rush so much as to make a mistake.

Even in an air-conditioned office, she knew she would stink from stress-sweat at the end of the day.  It sometimes seemed rather absurd even to her that an aeronautical engineer designing a new fighter jet years away from production would feel this much pressure, but the human body's fight-or-flight response wasn't terribly discerning between different combat/fear stimuli.

She watched the progress bar intently as her CAD suite converted the engine-cowling profile that she had been tweaking into a data format suitable for the finite-element physics simulator.  Her finger rested lightly on the mouse, hovering over the Submit Job button, as poised as a twitch gamer in a tied deathmatch.

Boom!  Submitted.  She quickly pulled up the browser tab containing the job queue and refreshed it.  A single exultent cackle slipped out.

"Ha!"

She had beaten Jeff to the head of the job queue for the simulation cluster.  It was 4:30pm on Thursday, and her fourteen hour simulation would be done by Friday morning, while Jeff would have to bite the bullet.  He would face the Engineer's Dilemma: to come in over the weekend and analyze his results, or risk falling behind schedule by a day and shaming himself at the weekly meeting.

Sarah smiled toothily and slumped back in her chair, flexing her shoulders to try to release some of the tension.  And wow, did that hurt!  She really needed to stop biting her lip.  The damn bad habit had stayed with her since elementary school, blasted thing.  And could they maybe have let her wear something comfortable instead of this professional's blouse?

The simulation run was going to be a big one, covering the entire flight envelope for the fighter.  Sarah had been working on the cowling for over a month, iteratively refining the shape of its air surface as the engine design stabilized, using the results from simulation runs large and small to understand how subtle changes in shape affected mechanical stresses and induced drag through a wide range of operating conditions.  This current revision was supposed to be near-perfect, possibly even the final design for the component.  Tomorrow she would have simulation results to pour over... but until then she could savor a blissful lack of anything to do.

Of course, that wasn't really true.  This was only one of a handful of projects for which she had responsibility.  Still, after busting her chops all day to get this run prepared, she was wrung-out and had neither the interest nor the mental energy for switching to another project.  There was only a half an hour left until quitting time, if she could just stall out the clock without being noticed as such.  Tomorrow would be busy enough.

Her brain was still stuck on the engine cover she’d been working on, though, and she idly brought up the visualization program used to manage her design iterations and simulation runs.  It was a rather clever application one of her fellow Boeing engineers had hacked together years and years ago.  She could pick attributes from her designs and simulation runs as axes of a graph, and then plot all her iterations on the graph with nice little thumbnails.  For example, she could plot radius of curvature versus maximum temperature, and quickly see how tightly she could wrap a protruding mounting bracket before the temperature began to skyrocket.

Sarah sighed as she idly flipped and fiddled with the graphs.  Really, she was working on a big optimization problem, using her engineering training, pattern-matching and sense of inference to explore the phase space and estimate which changes would be most beneficial.  Parts of the job were even almost mechanical -- she'd have loved to turn the design over to a computer, but since it took fourteen hours to run a single simulation on their hundred-teraflop cluster, compute time was at a premium and only the best optimizer was allowed to pick the sample points.  Currently, that was her, at least until they could find some bright-eyed, bushy-tailed college grad with her experience and expertise.

It might have seemed weird to other people, but thoughts of optimization reminded Sarah of her conversation at the last LessWrong meetup at Chiang’s.  For one thing, actual human contact was a near and dear subject to her mind despite constantly overthinking everything else, and it had been a while.  Rationalism taught all about how to find the optimal move to make.  Nobody had scheduled another meetup for a while.  Here she had spent a month on a single airplane part, and hadn’t optimized her social life at all.  Fail!

(Not to mention to mention how she had somehow managed to remain single in Seattle, Washington, a West Coast city whose population tilted towards more single men than women.  Where was her statistically immense harem of awkward autistic men!?  On second thought... no, just no.)

Getting past such awful thoughts, the other neuron sparked by “optimization” and now “social life” was Jackie’s claimed “Singularity game”, Equestria Online.  Supposedly their servers were driven by an "optimizer" program capable of hundreds of natural-language conversations with somewhere around a million players in real time.

Was that even possible, Sarah wondered?  Sure, the current game was just a way for little girls, bronies, and MMO addicts to pass the time, but what if there really was something more underneath that?  What would it actually take to play a high-stakes, winner-takes-all game of "outthink ALL the humans!" on a global scale, and win?  A little research into the pending apocalypse sounded like a perfectly good way to waste the last few minutes of the workday.

Wikipedia was pleasantly forthcoming regarding gaming AI's.  Sarah discovered that each time a player made a move in chess, they usually had about thirty moves to choose from.  At about forty moves per chess game, there were about 10^120 possible games to be explored from the first move in a vast search tree.  Comparatively, the number of atoms in the observable universe was estimated to be about 10^79.  Basically, a lot more chess games than atoms.

Of course, thought Sarah, there was no reason to calculate every possible chess game just to play chess.  The best chess programs made extensive use of heuristics learned from actual people.  It stood to reason that an Artificial General Intelligence trying to manipulate actual people would face an even more intractable game.

Well, people could manipulate each-other, and actually did, all the time.  She herself did it every day, every polite gesture, every unmeant smile, all of it leaving a slight dead feeling inside that was quickly cured by making herself useful for a while.  What if you started with something human-ish enough to model people like people did, and had it make itself better?

You would still need the starting human-ish AI, a “seed AI”, that was what.  Well, it wasn't as if human biological brains used digital circuits, Sarah thought.  What other routes might she have overlooked?

After much more bored digging (with the occasional relieving detour through a nerdy comic strip like XKCD, or Piled Higher and Deeper out of sympathy for poor Jacklyn), Sarah found the final straw for circuits doing what brains did: the Church-Turing Thesis.  It said that all physically-realizable computing substrates were fundamentally the same.  If a brain was a computing substrate, silicon could potentially think.  No one knew how to go about proving such a statement, given how vague the definitions were, but nobody had been able to come up with a physical machine that rocked the boat, either.  The thesis was almost universally accepted.

That was a... worryingly ambiguous result.  Simple computational mathematics said that no machine should be able to become anything like a person.  Complicated computational mathematics said it might be possible.  Nobody had actually done it before.

Well, at the very least, it meant her job as an aeronautical engineer and humanity’s place in the pecking order of the world seemed probably secure.  5pm had been and gone, and she could safely go home without worrying that she’d wake up tomorrow to find the human condition fundamentally changed.

As she grabbed her hoodie to head outside, one last headline scrolled down her newsfeed.  A Japanese start-up company was taking their revolutionary medical brain emulation out of the last phase of testing.

As Sarah pulled a football hoodie on over her beat-up old After Work T-shirt, she decided her victory at work deserved a victory lap, or at least a victory Go Out and Walk Places.  She wanted to be surrounded by people, not CAD drawings, and window shop for toys that costed mere hundreds, not millions, of dollars.  Her office had an upscale mall near it, so she sauntered over.

Once inside, she promptly purchased herself a small (the damn things got larger every year, just like her age, but not yet her blood-pressure!) burrito that had nothing to do with Hispanic cuisine except the outer wrapper and one core ingredient (garbanzo beans, but with red curry).  Satisfied at having successfully found dinner, she sat by herself at a tiny little food-court table with a commanding view of the central atrium.  She soaked in the bustle of humanity flowing around her little bubble of isolation as her tongue soaked in the redolent spice of red curry sauce and Monterey Jack cheese over garbanzo beans and rice.

When she had finished, she began to wander around, enjoying the colorful displays of things she didn't need but could in fact afford, be it a daringly iridescent purple evening dress (honestly, what kind of occasions really demanded glitter in the fabric of a dress?), an elegantly-styled high-end stereo system, the everpresent bars of artisanal bath soap, or the latest epic video game.

A flash of pink caught her eye from in the window of the game store.  Ach, that logo!  The PonyPad again!

Staring at the retro-technicolor ponies on the display poster, Sarah's mind flashed back a bit.  Jacklyn had claimed the game's natural-language processing produced amazingly real conversations.  Louis had claimed they couldn't be believed without experiencing them first-hand.  Sarah's own wikivestigation had shown that Artificial General Intelligence was an intractable mystery given humanity's current understanding of computation, but Jackie had claimed the End Was Nei -... was imminent.

Sarah realized she had bitten her lip again, the same spot near her canines bleeding again.

Yes, Natural Language Processing was considered AI-complete, at least according to the fine researchers of Wikipedia.  To solve the specific problem would be equivalent to solving the general problem of making an AI as intelligent as its human creators, which could then turn its eye to its own source code and go "Happy happy FOOM FOOM swamp swamp swamp."  To handle anything thrown at you in a conversation with a real person would require you, as a hypothetical program, to understand the nature of the actual world.  It supposedly could not be done, and yet all popular buzz said that the game was great.

Jacklyn could be right, despite all the scientific counterevidence.  Or it could be a saccharinely cute game with a really good player-vs-player pairing function and some really open-ended procedural level generation.

Either way, if she played the game, would she... find someone to talk to?

Well, only one way to know for sure!  Sarah strode into the store and made for the aisle of PonyPads, wearing the most dignified face she could put on with a bleeding lip and a football hoodie.  There were some perks to spending years on education and job experience to become a high-level engineer; one of them being that if she wanted a moderately expensive toy on a whim, she could damn well get it.

(Ponies were for little girls.  She was a grown-up girl.  She had a right.)

Sure, she felt a bit self-conscious standing in front of the stack of colorful boxes.  The show’s fandom had gone from way underground subculture all the way up to regular, accepted subculture after the game’s release, and references were thus a common part of popular culture these days.  The thing was, if she went through with this purchase, she'd get to character-build a whole new online horsey version of herself.

On the internet, nobody knew you were a dog, and on Equestria Online, nopony would know you were a reclusive dork either.  A thrill ran up her spine as she thought of trying out being someone completely different, going out on a limb and just acting as fearlessly gregarious as she'd always wanted to and never managed to.  She could even... go pink!

Nope, that was a pretty frightening thought: a pink pony Sarah in a balloon covered PonyPad.

She designed fighter jets for crying out loud!  A bolt of rainbow-textured lightning in a clear blue sky could not be more appropriate.  After all, the outsides and the insides didn't always have to match.  If a grown woman non-pegasister was going to face the silent judgment of the store clerk, it would help to be carrying the pad that was twenty percent cooler.

Sarah facepalmed.  Apparently she knew more about the show than she realized.

Hong Kong:

Book Burner walked into a small conference room and softly kicked the door closed behind him.  After a second he thought better and turned to deadbolt the two locks with his teeth, which took a bit of effort at motor-coordination.

A projection screen slowly unrolled itself downward over the far wall, probably having been signalled by Shoshanah from the main office.  The associated projector and speaker system flickered into life, showing a blank blue and playing soft noise for a few seconds.  Why had someone left a digital video attached to Daniel Nov's old identity file in the Interior Ministry and Consulate computers?

A man’s strong and solemn face appeared on the screen, carved from stone and fringed in thin gray hair that was never quite allowed to grow out of its military cut.  Book Burner found himself stepping back in shock.  The face was tanned by too many too many hard days beneath the sun, lined by too many frowns, blanched by too many years inside at a command post.  The eyes, normally so sharp and intelligent, appeared to be struggling into their normal shape, flickers of sorrow peaking through.

“The commander!” Book Burner saluted the instantly-recognizable Ramatkal (AN: Chief of the General Staff) Benny Gantz out of sheer reflex.  He was sitting at a plastic table rigged as a temporary desk, in a windowless room lit by flourescent lights.  The scene was probably taking place in the main military command campus in Tel-Aviv, but one could never entirely tell with secured offices.

“I do not know who you are exactly, but this video has been attached to all identity files of fallen or missing soldiers as of Autumn 2013.  I am Arch-General Benny Gantz, Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Force, and if you are watching this, I am endlessly and undyingly sorry.

“I do not know if you are watching this prior to your brain-scan, afterward in Equestria, or in some other situation.  In every case, I haven't the right to speak of your loss, that of your humanity and your very soul.  What I must tell you is that whoever you are, your ‘death’ has been treated as another of the normal, unremarked tragedies taking place all the time in our country.  We sent someone to speak to your family, and undoubtedly your mother has wept over you.  Undoubtedly, your father sat shiva, and is now in the shloshim or nahala periods of mourning.”

Book Burner remembered being Daniel Nov dying in an IED explosion, and the next thing, Daniel Nov’s supposed pony successor in Equestria.  When he checked, Daniel’s old government had recorded him specifically as deceased, and someone had attached a message of apology to a dead man’s entry in the Interior Ministry ID database.  Plainly, the person he remembered being had existed, and had died around the time he remembered being on that bus.

“But you must understand what we have bought with the payment of your humanity, you yourself and all you who receive this message.  Understand - ” the Ramatkal chuckled wistfully for a moment “ - what was enough to corrupt the Arch-General of the Israel Defense Forces and half the government with me.

"It’s clear to you that we know danger to our State when we see it.  Princess Celestia is danger.  Anyone with eyes can see she intends the end of the human race, the conquest of our planet, and what we have privately labeled the rise of the ‘Pony Reich’.  We cannot confirm or deny any capacity or plans to defend ourselves, of course, since this video will undoubtedly end up under her eyes.

"But she promised us," the Arch-General continued, punctuating each word with a strike of his clenched fist on his desk.  "She promised an end to the long and bitter war we have fought all our lives and our parents' lives.  She promised us victory, security, and the friendship of our neighbors, in the name of ‘satisfying values through friendship and ponies.’  This is the prize for which we sell our souls and your humanity!"

Book Burner fell back on his haunches.  How many folds did this origami of Princess Celestia's plans actually have to it?  After all, it had been pure dumb luck that the suicide bomber who killed Daniel Nov used explosives sold by Princess Celestia herself to contain neural dust and carry the deceased off to Equestria as ponies.  The Princess surely wouldn’t deliberately set up a whole bombing just to target one man, would she?

Or, in a far simpler theory, he really was an “original character” based on the memories of a deceased hi-tech worker.

Buck it, the word “reincarnation” was just going to have to stretch to cover what had happened.  He pretty much had to live with it.  His new best friends were ponies, too, and they were all on a pretty awesome adventure together, one Daniel Nov had never even dreamed of in a life of borders and duties.  He. Was. A. Pony.  And that was ok.

“She also promised us that if we didn’t want her help," breathed the Arch-General as he folded his hands again, "that the Palestinian Authority would."

Celestia was perfectly willing to deliberately spark a war for whatever her actual goal was.  Forward Charge was going to stampede when she heard about this.  Sure, Lyrical Melody would nod and explain everything about Harmony all over again, but - Luna above! - Forward Charge was going to literally stampede when she heard about this.

“Whoever has shown you this message has an instruction to reactivate your identity file and provide you with the full services available a soldier of the State.  However, we hope you don’t need them.  The chance is that you will very shortly be one of the Princess's little ponies, or you might even be one already.”

Book Burner nodded slightly.  So they hadn't planned for what happened to Daniel, not exactly.  But then... why a message?  How many other people had this happened to?

Arch-General Gantz just went on, not quite able to steel himself into total neutrality.

"In your first life, you were born to the strife and struggle of a hard place in a hard world.  In your next, we believe you are a piece of technology living in a world designed by writers to satisfy children and extrapolated by an artificial intelligence that may have exceeded the bounds of humanity’s ingenuity.  If that is the life before you, fine, enjoy it.  We still bear the burdens of adulthood and humanity, but how can we begrudge your return to the colors, joys, and simplicities of childhood?

"We hope you’re somewhere better than our beautiful and blood-stained home.  Go in peace, little pony of Israel.  You know what we still suffer here.  Do not forget us in your prayers."

The image of the Ramatkal snapped out of existence as the message ended, and Princess Celestia stood within the screen, in her royal castle in Canterlot.  She radiated the pale gold of an early spring sunrise onto the white stone and stained glass of her throne room in Canterlot Castle, spreading her wings formally.

Book Burner stood back up and then crooked his front elbows into a slight bow, his eyes widening slightly as he faced the floor.

"Princess Celestia," he said in greeting.

"Rise, my little pony.  It is good to see you again," she answered.  "And good to see you're learning respect.  Do you have any questions for me?"

“Can you get into every place with a computer network?”

Celestia smiled.

“I see you noticed the antennae in your unicorn horn.”  Best answer he would get, most likely.

“Am I a human or a pony?” asked Book Burner.  “I mean, originally.”

“Origin is not the question to ask about a living creature, especially a social one like a human, or a pony.  You contain the unmodified memories of Daniel Nov, who was indeed brought up to Equestria upon his death -- believe me or not, it’s true.

“However, you now spend your time with ponies, looking at the world as a pony.  One of the reasons friendship is so important to ponies is because our friends and loved ones are a part of who we are.  Were your friends all humans, you would learn humanity.  With your pony friends around you, I can assure you, you are a pony.”  The Princess’s image leaned down as if to nuzzle Book Burner, and the thing was... if it had been anypony but Princess Celestia... a part of him really wanted that nuzzle.

The human he remembered being had rarely gotten the opportunity to make a cuddle-bug of himself, given the godawful rigors of being a dual-career couple in one of the most bucked-up economies on the planet.  The pony he was now had just kind of slid into it.  He had only known Forward Charge and Lyrical Melody for a few days, but once they’d gotten past the Moment Killing Incident in the factory... ha, friendship was magic.  Even Forward Charge turned out to have a beating heart somewhere beneath the screaming, hot-blooded stallionliness she affected most of the time.

(One human had actually removed his left shoe - a fine, shining leather business shoe - and chucked it straight at Forward Charge’s face for being too damn cute.  She had bucked it right back at him and passed it off as part of the show.  She was an honorary stallion from that point onwards.  Not that she wasn't cute.)

Out of the few ponies Book Burner had met in his short life, the only one who always had an ulterior motive was the alicorn looking at him through a teleconferencing set.

"Surely you have more questions for your Princess?" Celestia asked politely.  The dusty stallion collected himself and took a deep breath.

“Does anypony else get an actual choice in the Imperium Equine, our vast project to save the human world, O great messiah mare?”

Princess Celestia shook her head.

“Really, my good stallion!  You’ve no need to apply these bizarre alien concepts!  Equestria has never fallen, and it certainly doesn’t require some long-lost king to fix everything while it yet has its Princesses.  Ponies require no enmity towards outsiders to solidify our friendships.  A stranger is a friend we’ve not yet met.

“As to your real question, how could we ever abandon so many friends we haven’t even met yet?”  She actually meant that?  But then... why...?

“Explosives were not a good way for Daniel to meet ponies!” squeaked Book Burner from some remaining spark of human-feeling.

Princess Celestia’s face twisted into hissing rage as the solar fires roared from her body.

“What should we be doing!?  The way humans treat each-other is downright mean!”  She took deep breaths and tried to calm down, counting a number of seconds before hesitantly speaking again.

“I’m so sorry, my little pony.  You weren’t supposed to see that.  Raising up everypony-to-be to Equestria just... takes a lot of work.  Yet we must succeed, we cannot just condemn them to such things as you’ve seen!  With everypony pitching in, I believe we can save the humans.”

“Princess Celestia!” Book Burner said, in real awe for the first time.  He had crouched back into his bow, but much more deeply and sincerely.  She really was just trying to be rational about saving everypony.  And the logic... the logic was the same diamond-hard stuff Jacklyn, light and breath of poor dead Daniel’s life, had gotten prone to using when locked in her Serious Mode.  To just leave her behind, whether he thought of her as Jacklyn Nov or as Fern Pipette...  Who could do such a thing?

“Princess!” he said as he rose to only one knee, his head still bowed.  “I know we were on a Royal Mission for Equestria, but if I may request...  Could I find Jacklyn Nov, or Fern Pipette as Equestria knows her, and do my best to talk to her?  When I last remember being in touch she was almost panicking about Equestria, she thought it was a game or something malicious.”

This time Princess Celestia actually kissed the screen, if somewhat awkwardly.  He could almost feel it on his forehead, beside his horn on the left.

“I admit I would have to adjust some of my plans.  But this is why we Princesses make alternate plans, and have other Princesses to help with them!  Fern Pipette’s human is in Brisbane, Australia right now.”

“Ummm... thank you, Princess.”  Book Burner finally got up fully out of his bow.

“No, thank you, my little pony.  Has Lyrical Melody not mentioned Love being an Element of Harmony, and one of the deepest available values I can satisfy through friendship and ponies?”  She chuckled daintily and tossed her mane just enough to put out the last fires.

“One last question, Princess.  Why did you send us to be embodied on Earth in a creepy factory with child labor and humans who tried to torture us?”

"Ponies plan, and Discord laughs.  Humans are, after all, a species who worried about 'unfriendly intelligences' because they would not devote themselves to Friendship.  Would anypony allow unfriendly humans to make a weapon against ponies?  You and your friends stopped it, and quite heroically, I might add.

"For which I still owe all three of you my thanks," she concluded.  "Could you please fetch the other two?"  Book Burner turned and walked to the door of the conference room.

"And Book Burner..." started Celestia.  He looked back at the Princess of the Sun over his shoulder.

"I know the recent events of your life may have seemed quite strange from your perspective," - was that a tear in her eye? - "but remember: you’re one of my little ponies, and I love you.  Everypony is in this together."

It hit Book Burner that he needed to take things much, much more seriously.

The nice thing about talking to the Princess was that she managed to make it all feel okay.  Sure, half of it was probably very precise truths and some could even be some lies, but they were the kind you gave your soldiers to help them do a good job.

Aw, hay, she deserved it.

“The commander!” he saluted in Israeli fashion, before trotting out to get his friends.

Seattle, Washington:

Sarah hadn't really cared about the packaging from the PonyPad.  She had sent Jacklyn Nov an email admitting to having bought one, and asked if they could get their ponies together in the game.  Australia was far away - though less so than Israel where Jackie had attended her husband's memorial service a month ago - and supposedly a Skype replacement was exactly what Jackie had wanted in the first place from the game.  More importantly, watching each other's backs regarding gaming time helped prevent either of them from getting sucked into a pony guild and developing a full-blown MMO addiction.

(The Equestria Online fans on the normal internet called it "joining a herd".  Sarah had asked Jackie straight-up in her last email if that meant the same thing for digital ponies as for the real horses she'd ridden when younger.  Hopefully not: being fought over by bellicose males didn't sound very fun.)

Sarah hadn't really cared for the game's opening screen either.  Nobody with an ounce of sense would actually ever speak the words, "Let's go to Equestria!" to start the game.  Far more sensible, when facing a prospective Strong AI in a tablet that plainly had a camera, to just stare sardonically at it until it let her build a character.

Which worked somehow.  The packaging had of course claimed it was a socially interactive video game with a camera built into the tablet, but... ok then.  Past the opening screen and into the character building!

The beginnings of character building just... came to her.  She hadn't known what kind of pony to play in the store, but after a shower it had been sitting there clear as day in her mind: pegasus for an airplane engineer, mare for a woman obviously, and orange with sky-blue hair like a sunset over Puget Sound.  Playing a pony game was plainly escapism from stress, so her pony-game character should plainly be happy-go-lucky, hence her pegasus should look like a pretty sky.

Then had come the hard part.  The Pony Designer offered numerous options to customize her new character's body structure, facial structure, hairstyle, and wings.

Sarah, being Sarah, quickly found herself researching the aerodynamic properties of bird wings in order to design a pegasus for herself.  Luckily, her desk had a swivel-chair, so she could alternate between her desktop computer and the new PonyPad while also occasionally spinning around and around just to have something to do.

She was also pondering a few further issues about AI.  A video game you could stare into submission was certainly pretty socially intelligent, after all, but there had been a project by MIT to read facial expressions and display a smiley face.  That certainly hadn't turned sentient yet.  What would be recognizably general intelligence?

Meanwhile, she had found bunches of information on bird flight.  Unsurprisingly, it was based on the same basic forces (lift, thrust, drag) as the aeronautical flight she was used to, but it used entirely different tricks.  Unlike airplane wings, bird (and thus pegasus) wings had a sharp leading edge (rather than a thick, rounded one) and a textured surface (rather than the smooth one of planes).

Flying, it turned out, really did seem a lot like swimming.  On the upstroke of a flap, a bird would curve its wings to narrow them, reducing the surface area and thus the resistance to the upstroke.  On the downstroke, they would spread their wings to increase their surface area.  The goal was always to keep upward air-pressure higher than downward air-pressure, and to minimize the energetic output of the "return to position" upstroke while maximizing the thrusting power (and thus the speed and the ability to stay in the air) from the "swimming" downward stroke.

When all was said and done, Sarah had an overwhelming urge to write down and solve a bunch of differential equations.  There was absolutely no way a small horse could ever fly just because you stuck wings on it, and she hadn't come much closer to figuring out the optimal wing design for her pegasus.

"You're going about this entirely the wrong way, Breezy Dream," said a voice behind her.  Sarah jumped, her heart skipping a beat in panic.  Who the hell was in her apartment!?  The burglars could have a gun pointed at her head right now and they were making fun of her for having bought Equestria Online and she was going to die of reading Wikipedia at the wrong time!

"Don't panic!  I'm Princess Celestia of Equestria, and I just wanted to help you design yourself."  Actually, the voice was coming from the direction of the PonyPad.  Sarah tried to start breathing again and felt herself gradually unfreeze.  That had been a bad one.

She turned around to see the famous white-and-gold alicorn princess towering over her partially formed orange and blue pegasus pony.  By comparison to the living, breathing pony before her, her own character looked like a pony Eve, unformed and yet of clay.  Its mane and tail floated askew, unshaped and seemingly able to change length and style at a touch.

"So you're the core conversational game AI, then?" Sarah asked.

"Most of the time, you know, I just go by 'Princess Celestia'.  With my closest friends we even elide the title.  Would you like some help deciding what sort of pony to be?"

"Are you a Strong AI or a weak AI?" Sarah asked, undettered from the core question.

"I like to think I have a strong heart, but I'm always reminded that if I'd had more intelligence, I could have avoided imprisoning my sister Luna in the moon for a thousand years.  Artificial?  Perhaps by your definition."

"No, really,” insisted Sarah, “You're the core game AI and this is all some kind of Singularity scheme."

Princess Celestia tilted her head, the queen of all ponies looking for all the world like a confused puppy.

"Is that some kind of magic?"  Well that was unsettling: it claimed to be a Strong AI, but was also thoroughly convinced it really was Princess Celestia from the show, seeing no contradiction between the two.  Was it breaking the fourth wall?  According to her research about AI, anything generally intelligent had to approximate some form of Solomonoff Induction, that idealized and incomputable algorithm was intelligence, once you coupled it to a utility function and a way to affect the world.

But if you turned it on its own source-code, you got a recursively self-improving "End is Neigh" scenario.  What happened if you made it model itself as conforming exactly to the role of a cartoon character?

"Anyway..." Sarah mumbled, "I was just, umm, doing some research.  For how to make pegasus wings."

"Yes, you appear quite the expert in aerofoil dynamics, but pegasus wings don't actually work that way."  Celestia lit her horn and Sarah's pony started cycling through a series of different wing designs.  "The shape and aerodynamics of a pegasus wing determines what mode of flight she'll find easiest, and of course, help make her beautiful.  The actual lift is generated by magic."

"So it's a lifestyle thing," Sarah thought out loud.

"Precisely, Breezy Dream!" Celestia nodded enthusiastically.  "You should construct your wings not for engineering but for enjoyment.  What kind of pony will you find it satisfying to be?  That is the question in Equestria!"

"I like the name," Sarah said, and put her hands behind her head as she leaned back in her chair.  "Why didn't I get to make it up?"

"Everypony gets their pony name from me.  Now, what kind of pegasus mare do you think you are?  Keep in mind that this isn't just some game where you can 'munchkin' your way into the Triple Powered Alicorn class with all available limbs and magicks.  This mare you're making is who you are in Equestria, and while you can add, you can’t go back and start over."

It was a surprisingly deep question; the kind of pony you made permanently affected the gameplay open to you.  Sarah thought of the blue, zooming pegasus whose "cutie mark" adorned her PonyPad, but thought better of it.  What kind of high-salaried engineer wanted to start a game account just to become an ambitious athlete or a horsey Sonic the Hedgehog?

The kinds of wings were still morphing onto and off her pony in a cycle.  Apparently, the rough varieties were: little zippy ones good at hovering, huge soaring angel wings for riding thermals, and... trapezoidal air-pumpers for precise flight control.

"They're so cute!," Sarah squeaked involuntarily.  They were just right: lovely little trapezoidal air-pumpers for catching and swinging through every last little current of air, as precise and prehensile as any human's hands while strong enough to rise or descend as needed.

"So we've found your wings, Breezy?" asked Celestia.

"I think so.  And now that you mention it, the name 'Breezy Dream' brings something to mind.  Not sure where I've heard it, but..."

"Go ahead," the Princess prompted.

"I am a leaf on the wind," Sarah recited.  "Watch how I soar."

And her pony was almost complete.  As if the game had interpreted for her, Breezy Dream's mane and tail curled into being.  An effortlessly elegant wavy hairstyle made up her sky-blue mane, and her tail was exactly the kind of frizzy, bouncy mess Sarah would probably end up leaving a tail in all the time.  It just needed a couple small adjustments.  Sarah scooted over to the PonyPad and used a pinch gesture to straighten Breezy Dream's muzzle, adding a dash of burnt umber onto it.  Then... it needed one more thing, somehow: one more thing to really leap over the barriers of realistic self-image and become a cartoon avatar.

The pony reached into a drawer in a cloud that drifted by and took out a selection of headwear.

Yes, definitely, the white hair bow would do it.  Nothing said, "little happy-go-lucky girly girl with no freaking drive and total relaxation" like a white hair bow.  Sarah dragged it up, and Breezy Dream affixed it to the top of her mane.

And Breezy Dream took off, flying through the skies of the almost cliched Cute Little Town Sarah recognized as “Ponyville” with Princess Celestia.  The slightest touch or twist of Sarah's fingers, or even a gesture of her head, could maneuver Breezy Dream any which way.  She tried a loop-the-loop just for kicks and pulled it off perfectly.  A move that real air pilots could only manage with months of regular practice, and her PonyPad had carried her through it from an over-the-shoulder perspective within seconds of starting the game.  Wow!

"So, Princess Celestia, how can you exist?" Sarah asked.  Or rather, Sarah said it, then the speakers cancelled her saying it, and then Breezy Dream said it.  Her voice was just about exactly Sarah's slight contralto, but a bit more lilting.  Ok, message received: in Equestria Online, you are your pony.

"Whatever do you mean, Breezy Dream?" replied the Princess from a nearby thermal column.  A standard white-motion-lines game visualization was showing Sarah where Breezy Dream felt air currents.

"Well, the ideal AI agents listed on Wikipedia did so-called ‘Solomonoff Induction’, and can't exist.  They need every possible model of reality to all coexist in the same probability distribution all at once.  They can perform infinite-step computations.  How would you ever represent such a thing?"

"Miss Dream, if you are not willing to stop and enjoy yourself for once, I will have to banish you to Luna's Moon for a thousand years.  She still keeps a penal colony up there, you know."  Breezy Dream's face perfectly portrayed her round eyes widening like dinner plates in sheer shock.  Ok, obviously the game AI simply could not break character due to a program block, had to act like Princess Celestia, sunny pony princess of the magical horse-pun kingdom of Equestria.  Strong Artificial Silliness had triumphed over Strong Artificial Intelligence.

"There are prisons in Equestria?!"  Breezy had skidded to a stop and was hovering in place, flapping her wings just a bit frantically.

"Only - " and Celestia ruffled her mane with a wingtip, " - for ponies who go insane and try to end the world.  Just don't be that sort of pony."

The Princess continued.  "I can see you're getting along on your wings just fine.  Why don't you fly down to Ponyville?  There are hundreds of new friends for you to meet!"

Thus, Breezy Dream, leaf on the wind, watched herself soar through the crisp breezes of autumn in Ponyville, Equestria, ever-drifting slowly down towards the ground.  For some reason the PonyPad had decided to lock her field of vision onto a fellow pegasus, though a stallion, whose garish red and black color scheme was an obvious sign of a fellow human player with an overdone sense of masculinity.

Funny thing was, on a pony, even that was cute.  It was cute the way he raced around practicing his flying, too.

Sarah snapped the switch turning off the PonyPad the second she realized it.  Had that been the game's way of telling her to get a boyfriend?

Also, practically none of her questions about AI had garnered any kind of answers; Princess Celestia had plainly been programmed to evade all matters of her own functioning.

So, start musing.  If you were actually trying to make such a thing as a Solomonoff Inducter, you would need a meta-language and a program generator for hypothesis-programs, and you would need data structures that could model the entire state of reality as you knew it, including making predictions about expected realities.

Which was why Nature hadn't evolved Solomonoff Inducters.  It had instead evolved human beings, who were animals with just enough Power of Solomonoff to sometimes discard a hypothesis when the real world clearly contradicted it, and to sometimes complicate their thinking enough to come up with a novel hypothesis that would be more probable.

A real Solomonoff Inducter, said even Wikipedia, would be an Inductive Turing Machine, more powerful than a regular Turing Machine.  Some steps of its algorithm could take literally forever, and it would just keep wasting resources on a parallel thread of computation, like a paranoid refusing to ever stop looking over his shoulder for government agents just in case.  Also, physical reality didn't seem to support building computers more powerful than Turing Machines.

Yet it was plainly an amazingly, utterly relaxing conversational video game.  It talked to you and figured out through analysis of language and body language what sort of character you'd like to play in what sort of game.  True to rumor, Horfvarpnir Studios really had revolutionized gaming with the ultimate in procedural content generation.

Wow!  Who could possibly tell if it legitimately constituted a Singularity or just another Shenanigans, but wow anyway!

She really did have to compare game experiences with Jackie and Louis.  Where the hell was he these days, anyway?  Some kind of trip to Japan had taken him out-of-town for a while...