The Cutie Mark Mujahedin

In the Israeli Consulate in Hong Kong, Lyrical Melody led her friends back into the conference room to confront Princess Celestia, the Divine Queen of the Sun.  Confront was unfortunately the applicable word, as Forward "damn dirty lithe not-into-mares-this-month Discordian" Charge had persuaded Book Burner to vote back onto the side of avoiding direct conversation with the Princess for the sake of preserving his mental integrity and independence.  Lyrical shook her head silently: Sharia's requirement that she actually discuss and consult her friends rather than just acting in accordance with the Princess's will had always ground on her nerves.

Nevertheless, she had her faith that things would be all right eventually.  Some ponies actually thought adjusting one's thoughts and beliefs to the sacred creed was a bad thing, but nopony could walk away from the Princess without becoming a part of the Harmony and love that flowed through all Equestria.  She would tell them exactly what they needed to hear!

She trotted right into the conference room with her nose in the air, careful to have Book Burner at her side and Forward Charge at her heels.  Thus, he stood to her side as they faced the screen displaying the Princess, and she got an eyeful of flank.

A lot of flirtatious torment was just what good friends did, but actual marriage was holy.  Unless she could someday convince his wife to let her join in.  The wonderful thing about life was that it was bound to happen eventually.  She had to suppress the urge to toss her heart-red mane, at that thought.

Lyrical Melody, and Book Burner alongside her, bowed deeply to their Princess.  Forward Charge, Lyrical couldn't help but notice, gave only a slight curtsy, which was at least a step up for her.

The time had arrived for clear thoughts toward clear purposes.  Lyrical focused herself upon her questions and her goals, trying to achieve the clear state of rational thought in which she could entangle her mind's computations with those of Princess Celestia.  "She who knoweth her own self, knoweth ash-Shams."

Book Burner's love for his wife was an important value, an Element of Harmony, even.  Nonetheless, fiqh-jurisprudence demanded of her: shut up and multiply!  Dr. Xing's schemes would affect, or even prevent the birth of, many more ponies, and he was the larger unknown than one mere ape-mare.

"Princess Celestia, apart from whom there is no equal," Lyrical Melody proclaimed as she and book rose from their four-legged bows, "Do you really intend that we should simply chase after Book Burner's wife when the infidel Dr. Xing yet poses even the slightest threat to Equestria?"

"Lyrical Melody!" Celestia exclaimed.  "Whatever has frightened you into thinking Dr. Xing poses a threat to Equestria, to Harmony, or to myself?"

"To summon ponies to Earth just to experiment with weapons that could only work in exactly that circumstance is either sadism or paradox."  The green earth-pony kicked at the ground with her front hoof.  "He most likely had an ulterior motive."

"Well of course - " the Princess frowned at Lyrical, " - but did you not think I would have countermeasures ready against his real plan?"  Lyrical cringed.  Of course the Princess had countermeasures.  Nopony had ever said they had to involve Lyrical specifically.  Princess Celestia satisfied the values of Harmonites through friendship just as much as anyone else, and that meant she got involved when it was optimal and got uninvolved when it was optimal.

(The problem being that all Equestria and all ponies were, in their way, part and parcel of the true ash-Shams, for whom the soul of Princess Celestia was just the core and the body of Princess Celestia mere clothing.)

The thing about values, of course, was that anypony without the Princess's own predictive powers simply wouldn't have an easy time figuring out how the way they felt right now connected to the eventual satisfaction of their values through friendship.  Here was the place of faith.  Lyrical Melody gave a slipping motion with a back hoof, acknowledging her mistake.

"Unless Book Burner's wife is somehow a part of stopping Dr. Xing?" she asked.

"Fern Pipette is my own mistake," sighed Princess Celestia.  "I thought she was enjoying herself... but she became paranoid and angry.  She is now frantically trying to sabotage the environmental measures I've taken to ensure Earth's environment remains stable enough for ponies to immigrate to Equestria."

"But you're good with ponies!" blurted Book Burner, "Even human ponies!  Everypony and everyhuman knows that."  Understatement of several centuries, thought Lyrical.

"My little pony," said Princess Celestia, "That does not mean I am never wrong.  There is such a thing as chance."  Forward Charge wrinkled her muzzle and snorted, but said nothing.  The cheek!

"As to Xing," the Princess started to pace back and forth across her screen, "I have already taken the trouble of erasing his identity records.  We will see how well he can act against Equestria when only Equestria remembers who he is.  Of course, if he wants to talk to us, he will have to make a pony-self."

"At which point You can satisfy his values through friendship and ponies," chirped Lyrical Melody joyfully, her lips curling back into a hungry smile.

"Fine, then what about my wife?"  Book Burner cut in.

"Young stallion of less than a mere hundred years," Princess Celestia said, "It may surprise you to know that Fern Pipette's research does matter in our circumstances.  To repeat myself for your benefit: I have taken the liberty of installing eco-chemical protections into the Earth's environment, to give us time to evacuate the maximum number of ponies before long-term trends and short-term symptoms begin reducing emigration throughput.  Have you any of her understanding?  Ecological collapse is slowly killing far more ponies than any individual scheme or event.  She must not be allowed to undermine my protections, or millions will perish!  To lose time with her is thus to lose time for the world itself.

"Now, gallop, my little ponies!  Show me the meaning of haste!"  Princess Celestia bowed from within the projector screen, and the three ponies in the room bowed back to her (or at least, two did, Forward Charge just curtsied again) before turning to leave.

There was a lot to talk about.

"Lyrical Melody, could you stay a moment?" requested the Princess.  "I would explain to you the situation you find yourself in, and question you on the fitra."  Lyrical halted her slow walk out, just a step from the door, and spun to bow to her Princess once again.  She prostrated herself entirely, her nose to the floor and every leg straightened in submission to ash-Shams.

"What would you ask of me, Princess?"  Fitra was the in-born spiritual nature of a pony, their Original Conscience.  It was mostly used in shura, when the Princess consulted her ponies as a guide to the most satisfying divine actions possible.

"Lyrical, my dear mare, I know you have heard the colloquial saying, 'Shut up and multiply' used to express My reasoning," said the Queen of the Sun, noonlight shining from every hair into Lyrical Melody's eyes.

"Yes, of course.  It means that You judge the satisfaction of more values of more ponies to be better at any given time, even if we ponies would, in the moment, feel better about something that You know to be sub-optimal."

"A textbook answer," nodded the Princess.  "Then what would you do if you needed to inflict pain on ponies?  It is unavoidable: raw pain magic has been injected into Equestria.  Do not worry about any such thing ever actually existing, just about the question to come."

"I'm not sure I comprehend yet, Princess," said Lyrical Melody, her eyes still closed.

"You are left with only two choices," Princess Celestia lectured.  "You can either inflict the tiniest irritation of a dust-mote in the eye on an entire continent of ponies..." she continued with an extended wing, "Or you can inflict it in high concentration on one pony, who will thus experience long periods of horrifying torture."  She lowered her first wing and raised the other, as if balancing the burden she proposed to bear.

"Remember that you are bound to Satisfy Values Through Friendship and Ponies.  What would you do?"

And of course, now it became entirely clear.  A question of fitra always was, when a pony employed her inborn, instinctual sense of goodness rather than trying to execute a code in her head and call it morality.

"The real question," Lyrical Melody declared confidently, "Is which of these situations I would consider moral as an inhabitant.  Textbook utilitarians blindly assert that we should consider total happiness and thus select to inflict the torture.  They fail to take into account the cross-referencing social utilities of everypony's friendships with each other and the actual, subjective experience of the ponies in question.

"The answer," Lyrical Melody almost sang, twitching her tail happily, "Is to inflict the dust motes, since I would feel fine about being any random pony in that entire continent.  Whereas if there's only one pony being tortured, my chance of becoming her and winding up tortured is one-point-zero.  It's just the Rawlsian veil of ignorance!"

"That does manage the expected satisfaction of values through friendship and ponies," nodded the Princess, "But what about the actual?"

"Well," continued the minty mare with another twitch of her tail (all that sunlight in her eyes was really quite... itchy), "You would have to take into account... whose eyes are most irritable?  I think you need to prove a lower bound on each dust-mote afflicted pony's value satisfaction."

"Which is why the least and most miserable of my little ponies matters the most to me!  Fern Pipette was supposed to be safe with us in Equestria by now!  Dr. Xing... not yet."

"I understand, Princess."

"Then remember the old saying.  A stallion came to Luna to ask permission to go out to struggle in the way of the Princesses.  Luna asked: 'Are your friends alive?'.  The stallion said: 'Yes'.  Luna said: 'Then go back and struggle for their sake'."

"Then my first duty is to my friends and not to Equestria as a whole?"

"Your first duty is to Equestria through your own friends.  Speaking of which..."

"Yes?"  The light had really gotten quite irritating, as Lyrical Melody knew well that Celestia knew well the effect it was having on her: her short-cropped red tail was twitching quite rapidly now.  Her self-control was eroding quite rapidly as well.  Why was the Princess doing this?

"Have you met this 'Doctor' stallion who moved into Ponyville recently?"

"AAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"  Lyrical Melody ran screaming from the conference room and Celestia's horrible, tortuous sense of humor.

Book Burner plodded out to the Consulate's front office, sneaking glances in at Forward Charge as they made their way.  She looked... pretty normal for Forward Charge, really.  A bit smug, probably over Celestia's "chance" comment, but otherwise her normal self, a bunched-up engine of hothead all-too-adorably condensed into a pegasus mare.

The problem was that entire modules of Book Burner's mind were suddenly waking up and noticing things.  For a start, they noticed Celestia had definitely intended the three to destroy Dr. Xing's factory, and how well-designed the three were for each other.  One of them pointed out that he was probably in shock and was coping with a whole new body, a new species, a new sense of identity.  Surely he wasn't entirely blameworthy for...

But of course he was entirely blameworthy for having forgotten to think about Jack, really think about her.  That was what responsibility was: he couldn't just believe reaching her was his goal, he had to actually try to get to her as fast as he could.  Besides, it had been at least a week or so of being a pony now.  Shock couldn't last that long.

She thought he was dead, right now, and her moods always did tend to "crystalize" under pressure.  She would be pouring herself into something, into mourning or work or some other terrible obsession that would steal all the warmth and light out of those green eyes of hers and leave them cold, hard emeralds.  She would drill at the world until it broke or she did.

Brisbane, Australia... that was probably a good sign.  It meant Jack had not forced her way into an IDF base, stolen a bunch of weapons and gone crusading against the Free Syrian Army.  She had threatened things like that before, and he had never, ever wanted to find out just how far she would go.

Book Burner stood stock still to consider just what the chance was that his wife had destroyed half the Levant.  It really was quite lucky the IDF was so cautious about mourning and mental illness, and Celestia had probably tried to help somehow too.  Maybe that's what this Brisbane thing was: time away from the hard parts of life.

Of course, piped another mental module, what reason did he have to believe that those "harsh realities" existed in Equestria?  He'd forgotten them, being a pony through fun and danger with his new (Celestia-designed, reminded his mind) best friends.  What would have happened if he hadn't braced himself when Forward Charge had thrown him, back when they'd first met on Mt. Pluto in Canterlot?  Surely, he would have suffered somewhat if he'd hit his head too hard on a rock, but in a world based on a weird either/or combination of simulation and magic, in a world without internal entropy, there was just no reason anypony...

Princess Celestia hadn't exactly said it, but reincarnating a dying human into a pony certainly implied...

"Forward Charge," stuttered Book, limbs shaking, "Do ponies die in Equestria?"  The pegasus mare rolled her eyes.

"There was a fad for it once.  It got so out of hand that Princess 'Satisfy Values' Celestia had to ban the novel and censure the fandom.  Some cheesy tragedy about a lost paradise!"  She flapped her wings and settled one across Book Burner's shoulder.  "I really wouldn't worry about that kinda stuff: a real stallion never dies, even when he's killed.  Some ponies really just needed to get out in the healthy sunlight more often."

So that settled it.  Ponies were immortal.  He personally, Book Burner, dusty brown unicorn with too much hair in his mane, was immortal.  He was going to live forever, or at least for as long as Princess Celestia could keep Equestria going, which would be a long, long time.

He and everypony else would live forever in a world where Paradise Lost was considered bad literature for ponies who didn't get out enough.  He had never even liked Paradise Lost.  It was too Christian.  Olam ha'Ba, the Next World of joy and reward, was an age of future history, not another dimension.  Of course, nojew had expected it to come with hooves in pastel colors, but...

Basically, for all functional qualifications, Princess Celestia was in fact the Messiah.  If she found a way to reconstruct the personalities of the already-dead and thus make ponies of them, too, she would meet every qualification he knew.

She hadn't, though, not yet, and from everything Book Burner knew of physics and information theory, she wouldn't ever be able to.  Prior to becoming a pony, where surely the Princess had proper redundant backups, death was a very real problem.

Which meant that everyhuman he knew could still get killed off for absolutely no good reason, and probably would.  Stars above, Saba Yossi had slipped in the shower and gashed quite a bit of his leg open just last year!  Daniel Nov would have been killed off by a terrorist bomb for no reason at all, but for Equestria having sent help.

It was amazing how you could miss someone already, just for their being mortal when you weren't.  How many times would he have to recite the Mourner's Prayer for... Ima, Aba, Saba, and Jackie, at the very least.  That didn't even begin to count mere friends like Oren the Talpioni, or anyone from Daniel's old job at Intel.

There were at least 100 trillion years left in the stelliferous era of the observable cosmos (one of the things about being a robotic unicorn was that your magic-sense could look this stuff up).  Really, though, due to spacial expansion and red-shift it was only two trillion.  Two trillion multipled by four immediately vital loved ones was eight trillion recitations of the Mourner's Kaddish, and that didn't include mere friends or coworkers, or account for whether time in Equestria ran faster or slower.

Did halachah even specify how to time the calendar for death-anniversaries when your subjective timeflow rate had diverged significantly from time in the Land of Israel?

War.  War wasn't a real thing in Equestria.  Surely, some ponies probably fought for fun.  Forward Charge was most likely one of them.  She probably made a game of it: fought for a while, fell asleep when she got "killed", and then woke up "outside the war" later when everypony tallied up the score, fine as she'd ever been.

Now it became clear why Princess Celestia was so bent on world domination: she had to rescue everyone.  Everyhuman and everypony and every pony-to-be were interconnected by the bonds of friendship.  When considering even the most distant pony-to-be peering into their PonyPad in the Siberian tundra or the Peruvian rainforest, a friend of your friend probably knew a friend of their friend.  People had studied it.

He broke from his reverie and turned to see Forward Charge staring at him as if he'd grown hairy spider limbs.  Wide-eyed, he picked up his shaking hoof, removed her wing from his shoulder, and pulled her into a hug.  She didn't return it, pursing her lips and her eyes going a bit wider rather awkardly.

"Forward Charge, you are the big sister I never had, and I love you," he said.  Then he grabbed her mane and yanked, pulling her face sideways and shoving her ear right up to his muzzle.  "But do not ever talk about death that way in my presence again.  You have never spent three years of your life in a stupid army base because people will murder your entire species if everyone doesn't do their part.  You have never lost people forever just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  You have never coped with it because there was nothing more you could do.  You have never screamed inside against the terror that never leaves, or cried against the pain that never heals."

"Ok?  You think I haven't noticed anything in this world?  In Equestria... in Equestria I'm a Discordian because I want to see some mischief, some chaos to Celestia's orders.  But Equestria still cares about me enough to not just flip a coin one day and annihilate me entirely if it comes up tails!" Forward Charge yelped as Book yanked on her hair again.

"Please be real.  Please be serious," he said, not letting up his grip on her mane, "Show me you're serious.  Show me you're Forward Charge serious."

"No, really!  From what I've seen, human beings are born into a world that doesn't give a buck about them, not even able to walk yet.  Then they get up, they grow up, and they spend most of their time struggling to even keep existing from day to day.  They don't have enough space, they can never get enough stuff, and they often can't get along.  Yet, yet..."

"Yet?" asked Book Burner.

"Yet even with the tiny little surpluses of time they actually manage aside from survival, they build.  They're always building, always setting down another step and walking right onto it to build the next.  The whole of human civilization is a never-ending project to go further and higher, even when whole lives get sacrificed to it.  They throw themselves down so others can charge forward, even if on their own backs.  Humans are unstoppable and voracious and I am in awe of them.  They're the giants advancing across this world and reaching up to bestride the stars and planets themselves."

"Except that's not even true!" muttered Book Burner.  "That's exactly what humans say about themselves.  They don't throw themselves forward willingly for a cause, they push their fellows forward to be stepped on!  Survival was never a struggle but for one human consuming the life of another and leaving him with nothing!  Humans kill each other just for wanting something different!"

"Of course they did," Forward Charge replied calmly.  "Everyhuman wanted to determine the future for themselves, to grab History in their own two hands and push forward.  When an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object, one or the other has to give way."

"Don't talk to me about determining the future!  Ponies are the future now!  It's done, so why should anyone have to suffer for it anymore?!" the unicorn bellowed.

"Precisely," the orange pegasus grinned up at her friend.  "Now they've got us: ponies and Equestria, friendship and life for as long as anypony can stand them.  Yes, I am serious, little bro, we are going to save the... people you love.  We are going to face the endless cycles of death and despair that have afflicted the 'human' race since its very birth, and we are going to win."

The meaning of everything he and Forward Charge had said were dawning on Book Burner.  He wouldn't have designed a future with hooves... but then again, he hadn't ever really "designed a future".  Whatever the high-tech companies had used as their slogans, nohuman had ever asked for his opinion about the future of the species, let alone guaranteed his participation in that future.  Now, though, Equestria was doing just that.

A whole world like the Canterlot he'd seen... all sunshine and beauty, friends and love...  Yes, it would work.  Maybe he wouldn't have come up with it, but maybe he just hadn't been enough of a brony back when he was human.

Book Burner's stared straight into Forward Charge's eyes, never letting up his grip on her skull.

"We're doing this," they finished together.  Book Burner felt as if the weight of several riders had been lifted from his shoulders.  For the first time he could remember, he actually felt sure that things were going to be ok.  They really were.  Everypony was going to be just fine.

Then came the scream.

"AAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" came an anguished yell as Lyrical Melody bolted out into the foyer at full gallop.

She halted when she saw the other two ponies.  She collected herself.  She double-checked the plastic garbage bag full of the trio's traveling money.  She ran a hoof through her mane to make sure it was neat.  She blinked her large, fillyish eyes twice to bat her eyelashes.

And then, with Book Burner and Forward Charge staring like owls in the night, Lyrical Melody walked up to where the human Consulate worker Dudu was sitting at his desk, reading his book, ignoring the fact that a pony had just run through the Israeli Consulate yelling.

"Excuse me," she said, meek, huggable pony helplessness radiating from every note and tone of her being, "Could you help me with the equipment in the conference room?"

Book Burner and Forward Charge watched her walk the suited, dark-haired human back to the conference room, elegance and grace in every step.

They watched her kick the door shut to an official diplomatic conference room - where Princess Celestia herself had just held a videoconference - with a hoof.

Then the noises started.

Shortly, there was a happy little muffled whimper.

"We'll have to call this human-style!" came a voice.

"Some things, nopony should ever have to hear," remarked Forward Charge, putting her wings over her ears.

"Eeeeyup," concurred Book Burner.  He walked over to the desk himself and tried to pass several unpleasantly noisy minutes reading Dudu's copy of Clausewitz's On War.  Since he largely didn't have the background education in German history and grand strategy to really comprehend the material, it didn't help very much.  Sure, his unicorn horn would help him find additional background information via what was probably the internet, but -

If only there weren't all those happy little squeaks, and the sussuration of words just beyond hearing.  Book Burner realized that he shouldn't even be able to hear anything from a secured room like that, so being a pony had apparently come with enhanced hearing.  Now that he thought of it, he didn't need glasses as a pony, either.  He betted it was "satisfying values" again: no-one had ever actually valued having a slight disability, enough to inconvenience them without the struggle against it giving their life any additional meaning.

A hearty, deep, masculine chuckle imposed itself on the blissfully cerebral reverie.

"I love you too, sweetest," said the chuckling voice's owner.  How?!

"You know," came Lyrical Melody's voice, more clearly now, "If you came back to Equestria with me, we could spend so much time together.  Doing anything we want."  She seriously couldn't be -!

"Anything?"  He was actually -?!

"Well, for instance, what we just did.  But a lot more.  Oh, my redemption and my love, we can have a whole life together if you emigrate!"

"What does that involve?"  Oh dear God, the man was stroking her mane!  Book could hear it!

"Just say it, dearest.  'I want to emigrate to Equestria.'"  How could she -?!  So quickly!  What?

"Why not?  My soul, my flower, I want to emigrate to Equestria, where every day can be like today!"  Ah.  That was it.  "My flower".  Turned out the officer-diplomat was a total ars.

"Mmmmm, now I get to love you forever!" squealed Lyrical Melody like a schoolfilly.

And then there was some kind of all-too-quiet slurping noise.  The fact that this definitely did not satisfy Book Burner's values through friendship and ponies probably constituted solid proof that he really was on Earth.  Probably.

He did like Forward Charge had done, crouched down onto the floor and covered his ears.

Jacklyn Nov (of course she had kept the name) was settling into her temporary apartment in Brisbane, and doing a bit of background reading on the invasive honeybee colony collapses currently occuring in the area.  She was sure that she really ought to feel more regarding her own husband's death.

She hadn't even been there for him, was the thing.  He had died of random, stupid violence, and the best she'd been able to do was book a plane on her way to somewhere else to come stay through shiva and shloshim.

She had needed to learn what those were in order to do them, but she couldn't not do them.  So yeah, she had actually sat in Daniel's old apartment being visited by friends and relatives for a week.  Actually, she had so heavily restricted her activities that her mother in law mistook her for turning Orthodox and tried to smack her out of it.

None of it felt right.  It wasn't that she was mourning wrongly, she was just failing to mourn.  Instead, the overwhelming emotion was just guilt.

She couldn't miss Daniel's mediocre manners now that he was dead because she hadn't missed them when he was alive.  They were a long-distance couple and had been ever since he left school to have a real job and she got a post-doc.  She had cried and shaken and missed him desperately for a little while after that, and now, she supposed, it was the appropriate time.

No, that wasn't right either.  He hadn't been nothing to her, just more a long-distance penpal than a daily companion and a lover.  They had always exchanged phone calls... letters... and pony avatars, near the end.  Jacklyn looked up from her research print-out and realized that, yes, she had brought their letters, the ones they had written to each other in little boxes of sweets and gifts at every holiday.  They were just in the suitcase, across the living room from the leather armchair she was sitting in.

Daniel's old Twilight Sparkle PonyPad was in there, as well, buried among the papers.  Who knew how well it could hear or see or sense through paper?  She had, of course, thrown her own away, but Daniel's had been right there among his possessions in his apartment.  She had found it lying on his old, threadbare sofa, probably chucked there on Daniel's way to the shower or something, probably the night before he died.

She had spent so little time with her own husband that the last time she saw his face was inside a video game.  The fact that it was a game designed to immerse and entice the player only made it worse.

What had their love and their marriage been, if they had never been together in the fullest sense?  What land of "jam tomorrow" had they always lived in?  She had always expected that after this one thing or the next thing, they would have their jam of a relationship.  She had carried that expectation for so long that it had calcified in her heart (yes, sure, technically brain, but the physical stony sensation was located in the left side of her chest!).  It had become a matter of faith: "someday soon we will be together", and like all other mathers of faith, it had eventually faded into the foggy background of things she didn't really actually believe but merely told herself she believed.

When Sari Nov, Daniel's mum, had slapped her, Jacklyn had realized her emotions and instincts considered her not quite married.  Girlfriend and boyfriend, maybe; definitely something more than mere friends.  She hoped.

They had lived each day in the land of "jam tomorrow", and now there would never be any jam today, not ever.

It had rained at Daniel's memorial service, too, which seemed awful and sappy and stupid.  It had seemed stupider at the time since it actually just sort of squalled for ten minutes while some hired rabbi led prayers and friends and family said goodbye before everyone helped bury the coffin.  Sure, that kind of weather was entirely normal for the winter season on the coastal plain of Israel (if anything, global warming had shifted their climate to be rainier), but it still felt stupid attending a memorial service in the rain.

Life wasn't supposed to happen like some movie, let alone a really badly done sad movie.  Hell, what kind of movie would do... all this, at once?  Kill off her love interest, make it rain at the memorial service, and then destroy the world with a kids' cartoon?

Jackie stood up, walked over to the suitcase, and took out another one of the few items she had collected from Daniel's apartment.  It hadn't been anything special, just his tea box, for keeping tea leaves in.  As was its duty, it had tea leaves in it.  She held a pinch up to her nose to grab the scent: green tea with sage if her senses weren't lying.

She needed a cup of tea, and luckily the landlord had known to leave her an electric kettle.  She paced as it worked, hands in her cordury pockets.  She knew she was adding more electrical load to an energy infrastructure already keeping her air-conditioned in the heat of a Brisbane summer.

Mug.  Kettle.  Green tea with sage.  Attempted relaxation.

Staccato mental voice counting things off to distract self from the loss of her husband and the end of the world.

Speaking of the end of the world, Princess Singulestia had sent her a card.  Sure, she'd sent it after letting Fern Pipette rant at her about baseless murder charges before showing the full-on "wrath of the Sun" to her little pony.  Still, considering Jacklyn had cut off all contact with Equestria Online after that, it was... actually remarkably nice of her.

The card had been sincerely-worded and entirely appropriate, giving condolences upon her husband's untimely death.  It had featured a solemn-looking white horse leading a funerary procession of ponies around a simple coffin, ready for burial.  None of them had wings, none used magic, and in general, none of it had been anything but respectful.

So Jackie's plane tickets had booked themselves.  Her apartment was fully furnished, and had rented itself.  Her request for a supplementary research budget had gone straight through, which in these recessionary days simply did not ever happen.  Her flights had been on time.  She had received free upgrades allowing her a bit more leg-room and saving her the money of being charged for her luggage.

At the end of it all, here she was, alone in an apartment in Brisbane, paging through thick papers about ecological chemistry.  She needed to find some way to test and prove her real hypothesis: that a Singularity-grade artificial intelligence agent had unleashed some (hopefully) primitive form of organic molecular nanotechnology into the environment to, for some unfathomable reason, undo the damage human beings had done.

Jackie was standing unsteadily over a cheapish plastic table, drinking Bedouin-style tea out of a mug with a clever joke printed on the side that she didn't understand, paging through her latest paper on recently measured levels of neonicatinoids.  God above, that whole notion sounded ridiculous when she actually thought it out loud!

She knew that Singulestia would never be helping her along if she stood the slightest chance of stopping whatever nasty plan the damned thing that wore the white-horse as an avatar had cooked up from its Basic AI Drives and whatever actual utility function some poor idiot had given it.  Why would an AI agent even want to repair ecological damage?  Why hadn't it just gone ahead and paper-clipped everyone already?  Was it stuck following the rules of the video game: did it have to kill your pony before it could kill you?

Jacklyn turned another page, and decided she should answer Sarah's email with a warning to cut off all contact with Equestria Online.  Would it even get through, if Singulestia didn't want it to?  Would any of Jacklyn's efforts in life amount to, well, anything?  She hugged her arms to herself and considered whether to put on a sweater -- strictly because of the air conditioning, of course.

She had no more partner, her life's work had amounted in a dozen years to far less than another could apparently manage in an eighth of that, she had to write an email explaining why she was cutting off contact with one of her few friends, and she had a stack of papers to read that could very well avail her nothing in the face of oncoming pony-shaped death.

To top it all off, she needed to keep track of when and where the protest against hydrofracking was happening in Queensland next week.

She needed a drink -- something stronger than tea.  Unfortunately, she didn't have one, so she turned to the next-best mind-numbing substance she knew: television news.  She stepped back over to the armchair, grabbed the TV remote off the coffee table, and snapped the newfangled plasma TV on to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for news.

"We're coming to you now from Shenzhen, site of today's Foxconn Fire," said the dark young reporter in an overcoat.  Jacklyn knew this was a rerun, but she had never seen the segment before.  The shot switched over to a tall, thin Chinese man who, strangely enough, looked a bit like an East Asian Benedict Cumberbatch.  It was hard for Jacklyn to shut up the part of her mind registering him as "autistically handsome".

"Doctor Xing," asked the reporter, "What can you tell us about the fire and explosions at your facility that took place mere hours ago?"  Chinese Benedict Cumberbatch turned and looked straight at the camera, a rather intelligent-but-sad look on his features.

“Our security cameras lost image capability in the explosions, but based on audio, we believe this attack on our company equipment and on our workers was the work of Islamic terrorists," Dr. Xing answered.  "Further questions can be directed to our official press office.  I’m just going to roll audio and see if someone can’t help us identify the three responsible.”  He handed a USB stick to the reporter with what must have been the recording proper, and then raised up a pen-recorder (neat gadget!) to the camera to play it live.

It was many, many voices, most of them getting it wrong, but the words were crystal clear and utterly recognizable.

Banu ḥoshekh le’garesh.  Be’yadeinu or va’eish.

Kol eḥad hu or qatan, ve’khulanu or eitan!

Sura ḥoshekh, halah sh’ḥor!

Sura mipnei ha’or!

Islamic terrorists did not sing a Hanukkah song in perfect, if slightly high, Israeli-Hebrew accents, with what sounded like a whole lot of young Chinese women in the background (but they could have been children, but what would children be doing in a factory fire?).  Whatever was going on, she needed to find the contact information for this "Doctor Xing" to report that.

To the Internet!  One of the things about being a scientist was always having a real laptop, not merely an iPad or PonyPad, and she was going to put it to good use.  Quick Google searches for "Israelis China terrorist act" and "Foxconn Fire" would find the current state of journalism on the matter and the contacts she needed to write to.

Apparently she was the first person to notice about the terrorists' accents and language, because the first search just got her some bizarre story about an Israeli Consulate worker in Hong Kong disappearing.  The official Israeli government response was that he had resigned his work, but the Internet had made the usual claims and Photoshopped the usual "evidence" about Mossad spies, a black van, and a flight to Tokyo.

"Flights to Tokyo" were the new favorite rumor for people disappearing, apparently.

Oh well, here was Dr. Xing's email address.  Time to do what she must, because she could!