Advancing Pony / Attack on Pony

The engine cowling had been done last Thursday.  The simulation results had come back last Friday.  Here Sarah was at her desk on Wednesday.  She was supposed to be improving its air intake rate with some simple graphs.  Of course, she could have gotten her computer workstation to draw the graphs itself, but she had always felt like that was cheating, ever since high school algebra class.

    Unfortunately, it was really turning out that she should have let the computer do the graphing, because she sure as hell wasn't.  What she was actually "graphing", or rather drawing, was a "fanning" mechanism for reeling steel cable back into a kind of engine after it had been fired by a small explosion of compressed air.  The entire engine was actually meant to be used in pairs, and of course the steel cable had hooks on the end.  By attaching both engines to a body harness, someone would basically have a perfect grappling-hook system for speed and mobility in environments with dense, tall structures.

    Dense, tall structures, of course, meant an urban environment.  Who would even need a grappling system in an urban environment?  Well, someone might try ultra-quick urban grappling for sport, but initially the technology would probably be used for combat.  Modern combat took place more in dense urban environments than in desolate desert shitholes or great open fields designed for Charges of the Light Brigade, but no-one could carry all the damn gear around on their backs anymore without some enhanced mode of mobility.

    It would be she, Breezy Dream, who would solve this problem and build the future of urban warfare for the modern pegasus!  She had joined the Engineering Corps of the Equestrians for Humans Brotherhood, and she was going to destroy every last square centimeter of the Barrier!

    Because by someone, she had meant somepony, and by dense urban environments, she had meant Manehattan.

Equestria Online, as it turned out, didn't have a crafting system.  It had an engineering system, and it was fucking awesome.  You could design whatever gadgetry you wanted, subject to fully realistic simulated physics, except that whenever you didn't want to exactly specify the physical basis of some particular element, you waved your hooves and magic happened.  Well, ok, you had to pay bits and employ an Earth Pony to mine the raw materials and then a unicorn to enchant the magical components, but Sarah was now two engineers.

    Sarah, the human engineer, made airplane parts.  She worked in a confined office with human beings.

    Breezy Dream, the pegasus pony engineer, made all kinds of magitechnological tools.  She worked anywhere she pleased, air or land, since she was a pegasus after all.  She had drifted right in with the Manehattan branch of the Equestrians For Humans Brotherhood, and had been surprised to find that half the members were Converted humans themselves.  Upon having been offered a chance to "emigrate to Equestria", they had apparently spotted the almost-cliched planetary takeover plot immediately, and gone behind "enemy lines" while the Conversion process still left their minds intact.

    Thus the city of Manehattan was controlled, behind the scenes, by the rivalries and conspiracies of the Equestrians for Humans Brotherhood and the Knights of Ponification.  The Brotherhood fought for the freedom of the human race, the enlightenment of the foolish common ponies, and the combination of Equestria and Earth into a broader magitechnological supercivilization based on the principles of real tolerance and honest friendship.  The Knights of Ponification preached that the nature of "the Apes" was predatory and evil, and that they had to be made pony or it would become necessary to strike them down entirely with the Elements of Harmony.

    Sure, it was didactically obvious that the Brotherhood were the good guys, but it was a kids' game.  In-game Celestia might claim her core function was to "Satisfy values through friendship and ponies", but in the outer world it was simply a sure-fire fact that the entire setting and concept of Equestria had been invented to teach pro-social values to children.  "Through friendship and ponies" was thus the actual core statement, with "Satisfy values" simply being a way of saying that the game customized itself to each shard of players.  In every shard the core messages remained: honesty, generosity, loyalty, kindness, laughter, and friendship.

    Despite working and conspiring mostly in Manehattan, Breezy Dream preferred to make her residence over in an anonymous cottage in Ponyville.  The “Mane Six” from the actual TV show - known in-universe as the Elements of Harmony - lived there, and had not the slightest knowledge of the conspiracies arguing about what they were supposed to think.  Why should they?  Ponyville was a peaceful place, and the Friendship Express would take a pony anywhere in Equestria when commuting became necessary.

    Of course, you never knew when the Knights were watching, so faster than you could say "safety and peace", the Brotherhood had issued Breezy with a really cool hood-and-cape setup.  It made her look like a raptor soaring through the air, which was very helpful for appearance when you were actually more of a girly hummingbird sort of pegasus trying to be a secret agent engineer.

    Speaking of pegasus flight, it often could not manage the precise maneuvering, top speed, and acceleration necessary for urban stealth warfare.  Hence, Breezy Dream had invented the Pegasus Maneuver Gear, a full-body grappling system designed to very quickly accelerate a pegasus in the direction he or she needed to go, launching them into the air after a "pull" to soar on their own wingpower.  After that, she had gone ahead and equalized things: a Holtzmare Kinetic Shield for unicorns, and Flame Horseshoes for earth-ponies (which actually drew their power from the ground via earth-pony magic).

    Her work had even proven good enough for Princess Celestia to take notice; she had asked Breezy Dream if the Diarchy could license her designs out to other ponies for their own usage and satisfaction.

    Overall, surrounding herself with conspiracies and spy-stuff while also simultaneously living in a cute, lovable sugar-bowl was what made life in Equestria so interesting!  Sarah's sketch right now was intended to triple-check what would happen to some poor pegasus when accelerative forces started acting on her skelet -

    "That's definitely not an air-intake rate graph," said her boss from behind her.

    Shit.

    She turned around to face the disturbingly bloodshot golden eyes and obnoxious smirk of James Vassar, former senior engineer and now team leader.  He was tall and blond, wearing a heavy but elegant brown suit that made him look like something out of British academia.  It had never suited him until his promotion, but now it broadcast exactly the warm-but-disaffected professorial touch he wanted to the entire team.

    "You know, normally I don't catch you goofing off too much," he said.

    "Sorry, sir, I picked up a bit of a new hobby over last weekend and it's been... sticking with me," Sarah answered, more or less truthfully.

    "Indeed!"  He strode into Sarah's cubicle and snapped up her sketch.  "You know," he said, tapping his cheek with a finger, "This is just what I would make if I were interested in a particularly suicidal form of urban base jumping.  A mechanically-powered full-body grappling harness?  The violent-death enthusiasts will line up around the block, or perhaps that Spiderman musical from a few years ago with all the tragic accidents."

    "Ok," Sarah admitted, "So they'd have to wear lots of safety gear.  How did you know what it was?"

    "Because I am privvy to many secrets of the twisting streets, O She of the White Hood and Hair Bow."  Sarah stared into space for a moment until the implication sank in.

    "Oh.  Oh, ummm... well then.  So, are we on the same side of the war?"

    Again with his relentless cheek-tapping and amused sardony.  Why did he always have to bother her like this!?  Hell, why had she never just gotten the hell away from him?

    "Lots of meetings were thought to be held safe well away from enemy eyes," he said, "But I certainly managed to get in on them anyway.  Actually, what makes you think you even know how many sides there are?  After all, at how many levels is the war even going on?  There is, at the very least, the public face, then the night face you and I normally participate in, and then... and then there's the face of the war that I'm fighting right now, just by talking to you.  They can intertwine, or recurse, of course, and the enemies of different factions are different at each of the different levels.  Who knows, but to say that I'm always fighting at some level for my own faction?"

    He looked like he was waiting for her to say something, but mostly Sarah just really wanted to wipe the smirk off his face and install a proper smile with a wrench.  Just once, she'd like to really, truly get back at him for the years and months of slow workplace... niggling.  Never outright torture or provocation, in fact, never even real negativity, but never enough positivity to just write it off as pranking.  Besides, "pranking" was for children and ponies.

    "What do I have to do for you to stop this joke during work hours?"  Oh no.  She realized it too slowly, too slowly entirely.  She had never wanted to just get the hell away.  She was enjoying being needled.

    "Ahhh...," he smiled.  It was a real smile this time, actually, and a good one.  "You could join in the joking outside work, perhaps.  Are you fond of cappucino?"  The golden eyes stared at her, wide and unblinking.

    In retrospect, after Sarah's mind stopped veering around panicking, it really was obvious.  The years and months of slow, childish needling from an otherwise mature adult, the intellectual showing-off, the coming off cold...  He was flirting, in some bizarre wannabe-British engineer's way.

    What. The. Hell.

    "If what you mean to say - " she took a deep breath " - is that you can't just come out and ask me to coffee because I'm your subordinate - " James snapped his fingers and offered her an arm, which she rose and took " - then how about you buy that cappucino, I tell you about my designs, you spill your military intelligence, and we both pretend we weren't totally set up by a PvP algorithm somewhere?"

    "Deal," he answered, his golden eyes practically glowing, and they walked off for some proper Seattle coffee.  One of the things about the computer age, they both knew, was that the program logs knew exactly how much overtime you'd pulled, and there was thus nothing wrong with fifteen minutes to grab cappucino and plot the end of Equestria as everypony knew it.

    Jacklyn had been waiting an hour in the crowded ranks of a major Lock the Gate antifracking rally.  She was standing in the Queensland desert, and she was into her second 1.5-liter bottle of water the day.  She was supposed to be waiting to meet a man called Dr. Xing from China, who looked like Benedict Cumberbatch and whom she could tell about how his arsonists had Israeli accents.

    She had been waiting for an entire hour, in the sun, in the scrubland, and this Doctor Xing of hers had simply never arrived.  To top it off, the facilitator had come and told her that three people were looking for Jackie Nov by name.

    "Yes, I'm waiting for Dr. Xing, and whoever else came with him, I guess.  Where are they?" she had enquired.  The facilitator had tilted her head at Jacklyn and looked like she was trying to explain hands to an octopus.

    “Who’s Xing?  No, it’s the three weirdos in costumes who’re looking for you,” she had answered.

    What the heck did that mean?

    She didn't need to actively notice that she was confused.  She just felt it.  She was being stalked by someone who knew her, and there was a fairly good chance he was here, and she had just wanted to have a meeting.

    She pushed through another group holding signs wishing death upon capitalism (her view on the subject was highly complex and dealt with varying amounts of r-strategizing and k-strategizing in the raising of human beings depending on social class), when a sudden hand on her shoulder startled her.

    "Were you followed?" whispered her erstwhile rapist in her ear.  She tore the hand off her left shoulder by spinning, grabbing its wrist, and twisting, only to find its owners other hand on her other shoulder.  The face now looking at her was...

    Well, it was Doctor Xing of Foxconn, who looked quite precisely like a Chinese Benedict Cumberbatch, and whom she had arranged to meet in order to explain about how his arsonists were actually Israelis and not Islamists.  It had been quite convenient that he'd wanted to "get a look" at the Queensland hydrofracking well in any case, and had agreed to meet at the protest.

    "Why on Earth, Doctor Xing - " she ran a hand over her face and hair tiredly, " - would you arrange to meet in public like a reasonable person, show up to this demonstration that you quite suspiciously were looking to attend 'in any case', and then stalk me?  All to find out some minor information about petty criminals?"

    He removed his hands, took a step back, and offered an ordinary handshake with a broad, honest smile.

    “As a matter of fact, you’re quite right.  I really have gotten far too paranoid lately, to the point that my paranoid actions are themselves leaking information to the enemy.  My apologies.”

    Jacklyn considered her options.  Nobody ever came across well when stressed about an “enemy”, and incivility obviously wasn’t going to help her any further.  Also, they were actually in a public place like normal, sane people.  A single extremely creepy introduction simply was not going to immediately lead to an assault, unless of course the entire gathering was in on the scheme.  Even considering that was obviously insanely paranoid on her own part, and so it also looked like she and Xing were both operating at similar levels of stress and paranoia, in fact.  Jacklyn cautiously decided to reach out and shake his hand.

    “Mrs. Jacklyn Nov.  So you have an enemy?” she joked.

    “Oh yes,” Xing chuckled as he stepped back from the completed handshake.  “My enemy sees everything beneath Her sun.”

    Well, tack up another point for this guy being a completely creepy weirdo, or deliberately concealing important information, or deciding to drop a clue into a random conversation as if she was supposed to know what it meant.  Jacklyn’s mind ground to a halt.  Her sun?  As if someone could own the unholy water-depriving day-star, and see everything that went on beneath it?  What the hell sort of person would that be?  Oh.  Ooooh…

    Her mental gears started spinning again.  One who owned the Sun would be a sun god.  One who saw everything beneath the Sun would be someone with an extensive surveillance network.  A normal person could only dodge an extensive surveillance network by coming out into a rural area with far less infrastructure to use for surveilling.  Who was a sun god with a massive surveillance network, and could easily be called the “enemy” of just about everyone in the world?  Well, Celestia, the pretty pony unfriendly intelligence explosion.

    “Oh.  I see.  That enemy.  Hold on, do you think that anything you could do to me right now would be worse or better than what she could do?”

    Xing frowned at her.  “My company was employed to make equipment for that Thing.  It was having us make equipment for the destructive scanning of human brains.  We arranged to have it sabotage our factory, so we could analyze some if Its technology.  I can inoculate you or anyone else against the scanning apparatus, thanks to that, by the way.  So are you really going to stand there and make a threat estimate on me, or are we going to talk?”

    Jacklyn nodded slowly.  "Let me stick my cell-phone in the car, so graciously paid for by our same enemy, and we can find a less-than-perfectly surveilled spot to talk.  This is going to be unbelievably creepy, but you’re right about Her being worse, at least."

    The walk to her car was a few blocks, her cell phone went right in the driver's seat, and luckily, they were in a rural area.  If Singulestia was hoping to spy on them while they talked, she would have had to predict their precise actions (rather than general plans) and lay bugs precisely where they would walk.

    “Even if we’re in a rural area,” Jacklyn said, “We should choose our turns and directions randomly.  It’s the only thing that can’t be predicted.”

    “You think we’re being predicted?  Does that One care so much?” Dr. Xing asked.

    “The better question is: does She have enough resources that spying on absolutely everyone who might not be fooled by her, even a little bit, is actually a significant resource burden?”

    “Ouch.”  A few coin flips got them a direction to walk in the vast scrubland fields, but unfortunately nothing would actually provide cover.  They’d just have hope fine-grained satellite surveillance wasn’t in use, Jacklyn thought.

    Or, piped a treacherous little voice in her head, they might not be under surveillance because they were utterly powerless.  One vaccine against brain scans wasn’t exactly a weapon against a full-blown Singularity.  An intelligence explosion event could be firmly counted on to outwit two tiny little humans.

    Sarah staggered down the street and tried to lean on James’ shoulder.  A drizzle of rain pitter-pattered the ground.  It never got truly dark here, even in winter.  It just got a dull green as the eternal clouds of the Seattle sky trapped and blurred a whole city’s worth of light pollution.

    “You… you see,” he said, stabbing a finger into the air, “The key is to control your interactions with the thing.  Its job obviously has something to do with us.”

    “So we just threaten to boycott it unless it’s hoenst?” Sarah asked, and pressed her face into his shoulder.

    “Pretty, pretty much.”  James tripped over a crack in the sidewalk and righted himself, then put an arm around Sarah’s… around Sarah.  It was amazing how he could still be capable of discussing game-theoretic strategies for dealing with AIs at a time like this.

    Did Sarah have her Orca card with her for a bus?  She felt around in her pocket for it.  Yup, right there in her wallet, unless she accidentally used it to pay for her half of the drinks.

    Oh dear God, the drinks.  It had only started with cappuccino in the afternoon.  Their “strategic talks” had proved so vitally important to the national security of the magical kingdom of Equestria that she and James had needed to hit a pub in Capitol Hill for further discussions.

    And by discussions, it turned out they meant extremely heavy drinking.  And by “a pub”, they had meant several pubs.  And by “extremely heavy drinking”, she was relatively sure she had meant two Imperial Stouts, splitting a bottle of Gewurzterminer, three cranberry-and-vodkas, and an entire bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream that was rather hurting her stomach about now.

    Admittedly, it might just have been drunkenness in general that was hurting her stomach right now.  She’d enver been lcatose intolerant before.

    “Soooo then,” she slurred, snuggling herself into James’ overcoat again, “What do you actually make Celestia do when she talks to you?  Does she have to send you bits?  Let you play as the big dragon guy?  Un-bloodshot your eyes?”

    “Wellll,” James said unsteadily, scanning the roads for a cab, “I make her tell me truths.  Or at least, da evidential truths, which is the only truth it’s even possible to get out of such a creature.  And my eyes are not bloodshot!”

    “Right,” muttered Sarah while she tried to keep her stomach right-side-in.  “Right, she has to tell you only stuff that’s supported by all the evidence you can get.  But… what bout all the evidence she can get?”

    It was while James explained about the Simulation Hypothesis, which frankly everyoney already knew about from watching The Matrix, that Sarah came up with an awesome idea.

    “Do you think,” she asked, “that if we sing the song, winter will end, and we can see the blue sky for once?  It’s been months and months!”

    “Surely, I have not the slightest idea what song you mean,” James answered.  Sarah tugged on him to drag him around a corner.  They really didn’t need to call a cab, her apartment was just another two blocks away.  She could totally see the building from here.

    “Winter wrap up, you know damn well!” she cried into the night.  Someone was probably going to chuck a beer can at her for singing pony songs horribly in the streets.  She, however, was too drunk and too weary of winter to give a damn.  She wanted it to stop raining instead of increasing to a steady downpour.  She wanted to dry off.

    She didn’t know where her towel was.

    “Let’s finish our holiday cheer!” sang Pinkie Pie and James.

    “‘Cuz in three months spring is here!”

    “Fuck you fucking drunk bronies!” someone yelled, and quite predictably chucked a can at the pair of them.

    “Buck you too, Mister!” yelled back Pinkie Pie, and hit the can over into the street.

    “Seattle wrap up, Seattle wrap up!” James droned.  Really, she would have to figure out what to do with him once she got him home.  Of course, that was presuming she could stay awake once she reached the safe confines of her apartment.

    “Let’s finish our eternal winter rain!” she attempted to sing with James and Pinkie.  She tried switching back to regular speech.  “And come on James, my place is over here.”

    “What,” he started, “on the first date?  While drunk?  Well, I guess I do need some place to stay.”

    “And I need to giggle for an hour straight, and possibly throw up.  Thanks Pinkie.”

    “Yeah, thanks Pie of Pinkie Fingers!”

    Correction: she needed to giggle for an hour and a half straight, while also getting herself and James some dry clothes.  Though she figured they could have sex when they were well and firmly hung over, with a towel draped over the bloody PonyPad.  Of course Celestia would be watching like a cheap voyeur, and of course she would get to see nothing but some rain-soaked towels.

    That would learn her to hook them up.

    "Let’s get it out in the open," she started.  "The human race is going to be wiped out by an artificial intelligence programmed to think of itself as a livestock animal, piled on top of several major economic and ecological crises, all at once."

    “Wiped out, or apparently for some reason brain-scanned, yes,” replied Dr. Xing.  For a moment he just looked tired, and Jacklyn suddenly noticed that his suit looked like he’d been wearing it for a good while.

    "Why?  Why bother scanning our brains as an extermination method?  To get at anything we might know about shutting it down?"  Jacklyn kicked at a rock and watched it roll haltingly over the dry, cracked red clay.

    "Honestly?  Probably because some idiot tried to make it human-friendly."  Dr. Xing rolled his eyes wearily.  “As if you can make a Singularity that’s really and truly good for people.  No, it’s only a permanent and profound alteration in the universal condition such that nobody living before can predict what things will be like afterward!  Surely we can make it nice!”

    "So that phrase 'satisfy values through friendship and ponies'...?"

    "Means just what it sounds like, probably.  Attempted Friendly AI.”

    "Ugh." Jacklyn rolled up a sleeve and stuck out her arm.  “That means my recognizing your arsonists’ accents as Israeli is utterly useless information, isn’t it?  They might as well have been giant robotic spiders.”

    Dr. Xing stopped walking and looked at Jacklyn’s arm awkwardly.  “It did at least serve to locate additional people working on reducing our current surfeit of existential risks to the human race, and a horizontal hydrofracking rig.  And why spiders?  And why your arm?”

    “My arm because you’re vaccinating me right now.  Even if you actually are just some creep, I can endure mere personal poisoning rather than species-wide violation.  Giant spiders because everyone knows those are the optimal shape for a robot army."  Of course Dr. Xing had brought a dose of the vaccine.  In fact, it fit in the needle used for an allergy shot.

    "You must have had an organization, though, but you look like you’ve been through the wringer.  What happened?" Jacklyn asked as Xing performed the injection.

    "I was just an engineering executive.  I did my part in the larger system that is Foxconn, and the still-larger system that is China.  I know you probably don’t see that as good, but we all play by the rules we’re given," he said, looking up.

    "Until?  Also: the hydrofracking rig?"  She rolled her sleeve back down.

    "Until an existential risk changes the rules, and until ‘Princess Celestia’ deleted all record of my identity.  As to the rig, the most rational place to keep ultra-secure servers is undergound.  Fracking damages the Earth's crust, ergo, we can try to use it as an attack vector.  There are many wells in even this area we are looking to take over and whose operation we will accelerate."

    Jacklyn put her face in her hands and tried to hold back tears.  Rational people did what was necessary, and Xing's logic was sound.  It was just too much, was all.

    "Sacrifice the Earth to save humanity?"

    "More or less, unfortunately.  We are a terminally stupid species, but we’re also the only one we've got."  Doctor Xing was actually smiling, and for the first time in a long while, it made Jacklyn laugh.  She threw her head back and just laughed, watching the clouds go by.

    “Hey!” she said.  “There’s some kinda bird circling us.  Think we should get inside?  Oh, wow, the Singularity has happened and I’m worried about birds.  I’d bet you’d love it if that was some kind of horrible robot!”

    Xing turned his head.  He stared up at the shape for a moment, trying to make it out in the heat-haze of a Queensland summer as it slowly swooped and spiraled down towards them.

    "Bugger.  Did I mention the horrible pony robots?  Because Mrs. Nov, I am afraid to inform you that one of them is in fact straight above us."  He spread his feet and bent his knees, assuming the stance of a rugby player about to be tackled.  “And I know just which one!”  Was he actually planning to try and fight a robot hand-to-hand?

    "Wait, what, really?"  Now that she looked at it closely, though, it was moving towards them at quite a rate.  It was coming straight at them, in fact, down through the air, as if in a galloping gait.  Jacklyn started running and wished she had worn sneakers instead of sandals.

    As she ran she looked over her shoulder to see the bird-creature actually galloping, for all the world to see, because it was actually an orange pegasus pony.  And it was barrelling down towards Jacklyn, completely ignoring Dr. Xing.  Why was she more important?  Was this going to be how the AI killed her?

    If it was anything like a real horse, it could just kick her skull in, and just to make sure, it appeared to be carrying a pair of aluminum boxes on its sides, hooked up to its wings in some bizarre mechanical apparatus.  The pony-robot thing started whooping.  It looked straight into Jacklyn’s eyes and hollered a shout of pure, terrible joy, its voice reverberating like a small crowd speaking together.

    "Incoming glomp in three... two... one... GOOOOO!”

    The orange pegasus with a blue, braided mane tackled Jacklyn to the ground and pinned her on her back.  It straddled her stomach at the back and held down her shoulders with its front hooves.

    Then it threw its forelegs around her neck, nuzzled her cheek and kissed her, swiftly and softly, on the lips.

    That was the moment when Jacklyn just plain lost it even further, and started cackling.

    "Really?  Really really?" she said between peels of roaring laughter, "I must admit, I've never been glomped by an existential risk before!"  The thing just kept on beaming down at her like her face was the most beautiful thing it had ever seen, and then it kissed her again.

    “And I’ve never been kissed by a mare, either!” she giggled.

    “Jackie, it’s me, it’s, err, I guess it’s Book Burner now, but you have no idea how glad I am to see you.  This pony is Forward Charge, actually, but my body is searching for you somewhere westward.  I’ll bring me in.  The three of us are sharing, you see.”

    “Sharing WHAT?” Jacklyn guffawed.  The pegasus pony sent to kill her for finding out about the Singularity was claiming to be her deceased husband’s game character, when she had made him a unicorn anyway, and it just didn’t stop nuzzling her.  If it hadn’t been macabre and horrifying on several levels, it would have been absolutely adorable.

    The reverb came back.  "Bodies, of course, but also kind of minds?  Each of us has a share of our consciousness in each body?  As Princess Celestia pointed out, we wouldn't be able to find you over such a wide area unless we split up, and I think she really enjoys giving ponies this big warm magical group hug."

    What?  The voice would actually make sense if it really was several voices overlaid on each-other.  But sharing minds?  And it was claiming to be who?

    “But Daniel died!” Jacklyn insisted.  “In a bombing!”  She was trying to figure out how precisely this thing was lying, but so many of her alternative hypotheses called for her to be dead now.  The enemy had her at its utter mercy, and could have just stomped her skull in whenever it wanted.

    Instead it was hugging and kissing and nuzzling her.  The Unfriendly AI had sent agents after her.  One of those was at least lying quite capably about somehow being her deceased husband’s game character.  That one, and possibly its companions if they were real, perceived being made into a Borg hive-mind as a “big warm magical group hug”.  It was also hugging and kissing and nuzzling her… as if it actually did believe it loved her.

    “I didn’t die,” the thing said, without reverb, and kissed her on the cheek.  “I just became a pony.  I haven’t figured out which one out of magic or brain uploading is the cheap excuse and which the real explanation, but it turns out Equestria is a place people can actually go, if we’re ok with being ponies.”

    Then the pegasus shot a vengeful glare at Doctor Xing, who stood stock-still with shock mere yards away, its eyes suddenly glowing white.

    "We're here to rescue you from him, Jackie, and we will.  After that, just for once, we’re all going to go home together to Equestria, a couple and their friends, and we’re going to have a life together.

    “No more waiting for each-other, Jackie!  On all my love for you and on our wedding vows, I promise: jam tomorrow is moved up to jam now.”