Friendship is Optimal - Firewall

by Midnightshadow

Chapters

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Epilogue

Chapter 1

Friendship is Optimal

Firewall

Part 1

An MLP:FiM fanfiction by Midnight Shadow

Based on the MLP:FiM fanfiction Friendship is Optimal by Iceman

***

I hit the power button on the device and it flickered into hesitant life. It was little more than a mishmash of parts, but it exuded an almost organic aura of functionality. The oversize screen flashed a few more times as whatever BIOS-substitute it had initialized before loading the operating system. A few seconds after that and the LED on the camera mounted on top lit up to indicate its drivers had loaded. A few seconds more and there was a low, musical tone from the speakers.

"That's it, Vinnie, it's up," said Markus, rubbing his palms together as if dusting them off. He'd been crawling around on his hands and knees a few moments ago plugging things in and hooking them up. He ran his fingers through curly blond hair and grinned, his grey-with-gold-flecked eyes wide with mirth. He liked gadgets as much as I did. A new toy – whether second hand or not – was always a joy to play with. I guessed that was why he'd been chosen as a work-buddy.

"And you say this thing is a ponypad?" I looked at the blinking, whirring monstrosity skeptically as the 'Equestria Online' loading screen appeared. I shook my head, retail models almost never had loading screens.

"Engineering version, yeah. You get a larger screen, extra peripherals and the biggest difference – at least between this and the original versions – wifi."

"How come the original versions didn't have wifi?" I asked, looking up from where I was adjusting the screen for the best view.

"I really don't know, Vinnie," Markus put his hand behind his neck and massaged it. Crawling under the desks to set everything up had been painful. "Patents or something. Licensing the other connectors is still cheaper, that's what my buddies say. Wifi would have pushed up the price too high. Or maybe it was ease of use."

"Man I don't know, sixty dollars is pretty damn cheap," I replied, wiggling the mouse as the system initialization and updates took place, "even if that does translate to sixty euro."

"Heh, tell me about it." Markus straightened up. "Well, she's all yours. Settling in okay?"

It was my first day at this branch of Hofvarpnir Studios. So far I'd been shown to a cubicle, offered some terrible office coffee, had an ID badge made, and now was being kitted out with an older yet apparently fully-functional engineering model ponypad.

Truth be told the whole situation from application to job offer had been a bit of a blur. I wasn't really sure what my exact duties at the studios were supposed to be, apparently they needed people to look after the in-house non-ponypad servers and laptops. Only I hadn't seen a single one, so far.

Markus recognized the look of shock passing across my face, and patted me on the shoulder. "don't worry, you'll settle in. Tell you what, first day and all, fire up the ponypad when it's ready and get yourself a pony."

"What? I can do that?" I looked skeptically again at the device. It was still updating, with a bar that was splashed with all the colours of the rainbow as it progressed. Happy ponies were trotting to and fro above and below it, and something non-offensively non-committal was playing from the speakers.

"What, play on company time?" asked Markus with a laugh. "Sure can, just as long as you deal with any tickets... and you don't have any tickets yet since you're not in the system. If there are, Celestia will tell you. She's good about that."

I blinked, "Celestia will tell me? You mean there'll be an in-game message?"

"No, I mean... you've really not played the game?" Markus looked surprised, his eyebrows were raised so high they were practically interfering with the ceiling fan.

"Not much... I mean... er... no. I've seen it, I guess, but..." I was dissembling. I'd avoided the game so far because I hadn't believed it could anywhere near as good as the hype, even after all the independent reviews.

Markus chuckled. "I guess that's why they hired you. Keeps you honest. Look, fire up the goggles and the gloves – let it recognize them first, this model's a bit slow – set your seat to recline, lean back and hop into Equestria for a while. Celestia loves talking to her staff. If you're needed out here in the real world, she'll let you know, personally. I'll let you be now, I've got places to go, ponies to meet, that sort of thing. Seeya, bud."

"Seeya la—" I said, turning from contemplating the gloves and goggles, but Markus had already gone. "—ter."

I shrugged and looked at the goggles, my interest piqued. I had thought the stories about them were just rumours, but here they were. Picking up the heavy plastic and metal-clad apparatus, it felt a little like I was holding the philosopher's stone or the holy grail. These things weren't even supposed to exist outside of some top secret lab somewhere. And here they were, given to me because they were the cheap alternative to actually purchasing a sixty euro ponypad for a new employee. Madness. They were part of a headset, with what was apparently a third generation contactless neural interface: they could read my thoughts, and could even to some degree influence how my brain perceived things. Not quite like being there, but almost.

What made it silly, though, were the pony-style ears. They apparently reflected the wearer's emotions whilst the headset was in place, spinning around or laying flat, or sticking out... yet they only did this whilst the wearer was engrossed in whatever was showing through the goggles. Even the future wasn't immune from the department of redundancy department. Or maybe they had started out as a simple way to know the brainwave-reading circuits were functioning. Hmm. Plausible deniability, do thy worst.

The gloves, I noted, were equally ridiculous. They were some sort of abandoned faux full-feedback interface, meant to go with the goggles. Neither had ever been commercially released, and by the sound of it never would be. They fit over my hands, which curled on the inside as if I was clutching a palm-size ball. The result was that my arms ended in cutesy pastel-coloured hooves. I rolled my eyes. Somebody had thought this was a good enough idea to roll out prototypes. I wondered what had happened to them. Visions of being forced to actually wear these dreadful things danced in my mind's eye, and I shuddered. This one time, I would test them out. And then that was it, no more hooves for me. Kind of. Sort of. Other than the whole 'creating a pony avatar in Equestria', of course, and being allowed to play on company time.

Placing both hands into the boots revealed the obviously fatal flaw in their design: once the hoof-gloves were on, how on Earth was I supposed to get the goggles on? And with the goggles on, I couldn't really see to get the gloves on.

Glaring in frustration at the franken-machine, I noted with some mollification that it had finished updating. It now showed a logon screen – no password request, just a box marked 'pony name', with a button marked 'randomize' underneath it. I fiddled with the mouse, and discovered that these had tooltips.

The 'name' box's tip was:

If you already have a pony-name, type it here! Don't worry if you're not sure, you can always leave it blank or change it later!

The 'randomize' button read:

click here for your very own super-special pony-name! We'll do our best to pick something you'll like, but you can always change it later!

I snorted and plugged the hoof-gloves' wireless receiver in, noting with some amusement that a 'magical pony hooves accessory' icon appeared in the logon box, and a ring of LED's lit up around the base of my brand new hooves, as if I were wearing a sparkly bracelet. I plugged the USB lead of the goggles in, and laughed at the 'magical princess headset' icon that appeared. Markus' advice to wait a few moments paid off, as whirly spinning arrows appeared around both, with little hearts popping up and bursting above each one. Finally, the words 'firmware updated' flashed underneath both, and the 'pony name' box completely disappeared. The hooves and tiara-headset icons enlarged and pulsed, signifying the new way to log on.

"Not magical, huh? I guess firmware isn't all that exciting," I said wryly. Shaking my head, I turned to the headset. I eased it on through my short brown hair and twiddled it until it fit snugly but didn't hurt the backs of my ears. There were no earphones, but a boom did go behind each lobe. I'd be surprised if it was effective.

Now I was blind. Great.

Flailing about with my hands, I located the stupid hooves and slid them on. This wasn't easy at the best of times. I settled with placing the base of the hooves on my knees and pushing with both hands. It worked, and the second my fingers bottomed out, I heard a musical chime in my ears and then blackness in the goggles lit up in a rainbow of eye-straining colours. Seconds later, huge floating letters whizzed past to form a word: RELAX.

It was soon replaced by 'get comfortable!', which floated across the space in front of me, and then the words 'once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria...' appeared, and faded away, as scenery began to appear before me. I leaned back in my chair, finding that it stretched out slowly and smoothly. With the visuals being pumped into my eyes as the scene changed from black to a deep azure blue with white clouds floating all around, it felt like I was flying. In fact, I was. I was soaring through the air in a remarkably accurate rendition of the show's intro sequence, marred only by what I assumed were some sort of self-tests.

There was an odd series of tones in each ear which sounded like the wind in a seashell, and it made me twitch. Every few seconds the view in front of me would dissolve into flashing coloured lights, it was starting to get distracting. I decided to pull the headset off, and lifted a tan-coloured hoof to my face.

"Ow!" I blinked and shook my head, seeing stars as I almost gave myself a black eye. Flapping my wings to hover in surprise, I looked at my hoof for a few seconds. Feeling all over my muzzle led me to the next odd experience: I had hooves. I didn't appear to have a headset on. I almost fell out of the sky then and there when I realized I had wings. As panic struck, and what had previously been semi-instinctual flight turned into a ragtag pathetic excuse for pointless fluttering, altitude was decidedly lost. Thankfully I didn't have time to scream before I landed on something soft and fluffy. Getting hesitantly to my hooves, I realized it was a cloud. I experimentally – and very, very carefully – bounced up and down. It was solid. I trotted very carefully to the edge, and looked down. And down. And – and this was the important part – down.

I couldn't help it. I screamed, loudly, like a girl.

"Hey, newguy, you okay in there?" came a voice. It sounded far off, echoing with an odd quality. For a brief moment, the world around me seemed to lose definition.

"Y-yeah, I'm okay, the g-game just dumped me ten million miles in the air," I said, loudly.

"Engineering model? Yeah, it does that. Don't worry you'll—" the voice drifted away as I paid it less attention. I trotted around in a very small circle as the world once more seemed to solidify. I breathed slowly, deeply. This was all a trick, video screens in the goggles mixed with some sort of neuro-electronic wizardry made what was otherwise just a picture from two monitors appear to be real. I tried to pinch myself, then laughed. No thumbs. I tried to crane my body upwards in what I knew was my chair, but it felt odd and ungainly. Tapping myself on my knees, I realized my forehooves were feeling their way down my hind legs. Weird, and the weirdness only went away when I ceased trying to move my real body, and instead concentrated on my pony body. The system was apparently built so that your real body remained in some sort of relaxed immobile state, and your intended motions were instead translated and shuttled off to the avatar you were playing. I could feel my real body, and concentrating on it brought it back, but – like the digital daydream this was – ignoring it meant it went away. Fascinating. To all intents and purposes, including my own mental checklist, I was a tan-coloured pegasus pony with black hooves and dark-brown – one could say chestnut – mane and tail.

I rolled over onto my hooves again and stood up, standing straight. I didn't feel like my head was craned all the way back – because it obviously wasn't – but the view matched perfectly with my digital body's proper stance. Looking 'forwards' meant my pony head was parallel to the barrel of my chest, rather than perpendicular. That was some trick. Slowly, my breathing steadied. I had this. The only problem was how to get down.

It almost became a moot point as a loud fanfare and explosion of confetti nearly sent me leaping directly over the edge in surprise. A rotating icon, seemingly made of polished wood and bronze, appeared. It read 'First Steps – Welcome to Equestria!'. Numbers drifted up and away, tied to balloons, emerging from the clouds: '250 xp', '2000 bits'.

I snorted. An achievement for learning how to walk.

Concentrating, I flapped my wings. It was very unsteady, but there was a bit of a draft. I didn't, however, take off. Great. I was stuck up in the sky, unable to get down to the ground, in the middle of nowhere. Now what? I guessed I could jump, but the veracity of the world kind of... didn't make it an attractive choice.

"H-hello?" I called. "Is there anypony there?" I tried again. My voice echoed oddly – from the clouds, I guessed – but was soon lost to the winds. It was only on the third or fourth try that I realized the answering 'hello' was, indeed, an answer. My short wait was over before I knew it as a large, purple-and-pink hot air balloon, festooned with streamers, burst through the cloud layer and floated smartly up to my cloud.

"You okay there, buddy?" asked the pony pilot. She was a green earth pony, with what looked like a red squirrel for a pet. The squirrel sat on her shoulders like a pirate's parrot. Both of them wore flight goggles, old-timey ones like I imagined first world war flying aces had used.

"Yeah, I just..." I pointed helplessly towards the ground. "I can't..."

"What, you got wing-lock? Cramp?"

"Y-eah, I guess."

"You don't know?" The pony whistled through her teeth. "Could be serious. Want I take you to a nurse?"

"N-no, just... just down, please." I waited, expectantly.

"Well okay. Hop in." She, too, waited. I coughed. She grinned. Finally, she broke the silence. "You wanna hop in the basket here, Champ?"

"Not sure I can," I said. I could feel my ears splay out sideways in embarrassment. "I think my knees are locked solid."

She rolled her eyes. "Celestia knows I pick the weird ones. It's almost like ya can't..." The pony stopped, halfway through pulling open a little door, before covering her muzzle with a hoof. "You can't, can you?"

"Can't what?" I asked.

"Ya can't fly. Oh my gosh you really can't. How in Equestria did you get all the way up here... if you can't fly? I mean what, you just... poof and were up here? Wings and all?"

I nodded, dumbly.

"Well don't that beat all," she said, pushing her goggles up off of her deep green eyes. "Come on then. It's easy, Champ, you just put one hoof in front of the other. Look, I'll even... I'll lower a nice, big gangplank, and you can trot up it, okay? It's got a cloud-walking spell on it, but I don't, or I'd come out and help you."

My legs were locked. Apparently ponies could do that. Or I could. or I really was just that scared. Forcing myself to relax, I could swear I felt some sort of musculature shift and my legs become mobile again. This, to be honest, was a bad thing, since now there was nothing stopping me from shaking. Game be damned, this place looked real. The new retina-level displays, the infinite contrast screens... everything had come together perfectly, so whilst I knew, utterly and completely, that this was a game, I still didn't want to step over the edge and find out for sure.

The pony must have gotten fed up with waiting, because she called out to me. "Hey, wingless. Yeah, you. Look at me, and walk towards me. Name's Celery, Celery Stalk. I'm a farmer by trade, but I fly balloons for fun. This here bundle of trouble," she said, motioning to the squirrel, "is Nibblet. S'actually Monterey Nibblington-Fauntleroy the Third, but that's a real mouthful for a small squirly, so we call him Nibblet. Yeah, that's right, walk this way, one hoof after the other. He's a flying squirrel, but he can't fly. Not really. He glides. He's real good at it too, can stay in the air longer'n anybody else I know who don't have wings, and a fair deal longer than those who do. And... well, you know what? That'll about do."

"Huh?" I asked, confused, shaking my head as reality caught up with me.

She smirked and moved around behind me to pull in the gangplank and shut the little door. "That'll do," she said again, once she'd finished mouthing the lock closed. "You're in. Right proud of yourself, you should be. Glad I could help, I tell you what. You know what they say, a friend in need—"

"Is a friend indeed," I finished for her, weakly.

Above my head, passing harmlessly through the balloon, appeared another brass and wood shield-shaped apparition, along with another explosion of lights and burning letters.

"'Make a friend', huh?" said Celery. "What's 'expee'?"

I did a double-take. "Wait, what!? You can see those?"

"Sure can. Explains a lot. You must be one o'them hyoomans that Celestia told a few of us about." Celery looked about conspiratorially as she yanked on an ornate little wooden ring attached to a rope, with one forehoof. "She said, all quiet-like so only us could hear, that we aren't to speak about you to everypony. She actually said we won't be able to no matter how hard we try, but I guess that's moot right now, since we're the only two up here." Celery smiled at me. I couldn't help it, I smiled back. She looked so real, that...

"So, uh, where are you from?" I asked, as the balloon descended. It all looked so real, and so very, very beautiful. The sky was that perfect shade of azure, the clouds ranged from pristine silver to glorious white. The balloon was made of fantastically colourful pink and purple silk, with ropes strung in a gaily coloured net over the top that was at once bot functional and pretty. The basket was wicker, but very, very tough, with a wooden door operated by means of a large oval handle, built for hooves. Even the sandbags were ornately decorated. Three draw-hoops hung from somewhere up above, though I had no idea what they went to. Doubtless one went to some sort of hatch to control descent – the one she'd pulled.

"Hmm?" asked Celery. It looked like she'd been examining my muzzle – my face, I corrected myself – in great detail.

"Where are you from?" I asked again.

"Oh, Pollbury Hill. It's down a ways, uh... that-a-way." She pointed. I looked, instinctively, but couldn't see anything.

"No, I mean, where from really?"

"Well, ya got me, I was born in—"

"You're going to say something... Equestrian, aren't you?" I interrupted, trying to put my hooves on my hips. Somehow, the move translated to my wings.

"Well yeah, duh. I wasn't born on the Ice Veldt."

I scowled. I was either dealing with a very hardcore RP'er, or I'd been taken in by a construct. A very lifelike construct. I shook myself.

"Hey, look, not everypony can be from the big city, or whatever it is you expect. You know what, I thought I was doing you a favour, I thought you'd be grateful, but if you're just gonna be a jerk you can—"

I ruffled my feathers. "Sorry, sorry, I..." I didn't know what to say. I felt ashamed of myself. If this was a construct of some sort, an NPC, it was a pretty good one. If it wasn't, I was ruining somebody's fun. Either way, if I was going to play the game, I might as well play the game. "Sorry," I added lamely.

"Heeyyy," Celery smiled, flicking her olive-green tail. "It's okay. I guess you were just stuck up there a while, huh? You know what, how about you tell me about yourself?"

"Well, I'm... Vinnie."

"Strange name for a pony," said Celery. Nibblet chittered in agreement.

"Well that's cos I'm not."

"Sure could've fooled me. Celestia said you types'd be a bit loony. So what are you then?"

"Dooo... do you know what a monkey is?"

"Umm, yeah. Kinda."

"Well, a bit like that. Only... bigger. Kind of. And... long back legs, and no hair."

Celery wrinkled her nose up. "Eew. That sounds kind of ugly. And ridiculous. How do you walk with long back legs?"

"We stand upright," I explained, rearing back, trying to show her. There wasn't much room, and it was strangely uncomfortable.

"Oh, on your hind legs." She didn't look convinced, noncommittally pulling on hoops suspended from ropes.

"Yeah, but our... forehooves end in hands. And fingers." I waggled a forehoof at her. "This is kind of like a single, big finger. We have five of them, but they're smaller."

"That..." Celery's eyes bulged, and she suddenly burst out laughing, shaking so hard that Nibblet chittered at her angrily. The squirrel leaped off of the pony's withers and scampered along the rim of the basket as the shaking only intensified. "S-sorry, Nibs, sorry, it's just..." Celery took another look at me, and burst into fresh tears of laughter, almost falling out to her inevitable death. The laughter and helpless shaking continued, until finally she stopped. She wiped her nose with a hoof, flicking the excess over the side. Still smirking and snorting with mirth, she shook her head. "Five hooves per leg. That's just genius."

"It's not like that!" I protested. "Well, it kind of is... but it isn't!"

"You guys are weird. Thank goodness you're finally here, so you can try out a properly-shaped body for once." At that moment, the basket touched gently down to earth – or to Equestria – and Celery threw out something that looked almost exactly like an anchor, taking hold of it in her muzzle like it weighed nothing before heaving it over the side. "You're... gonna stay, right?"

I looked around as I took a few, tentative steps onto terra firma – or Equestria Firmer, as my punny inner voice had decided to call it. "Well, I..." The pony looked so downcast, that I immediately found myself turning around and almost throwing myself at her in a pony-hug. "Of course I'll stay. Kind of. I mean... I have to... do things, out there."

"Out?"

"I... it's difficult to explain, but..."

"It's magic, right?" she offered.

I nodded. "I suppose so. It's magic," I agreed.

"And now is when you're going to tell me you gotta go, right?" I must have looked very forlorn at that, because she hoofed me in the chest. "Yeah, yeah. I can see you're a keeper. Look, Pollbury Hill is just down this road. See the mountains over yonder? Head that way, you're going wrong."

I looked. Great, big, purple mountains rose skywards in the distance. They had to be kilometers in height. Either that, or something really weird was happening with my field of vision.

"Head this way instead—" and Celery started trotting down the dirt-track road, swishing her tail in a way which was making me blush and swallow a lot, and my heart beat double time "—and you'll reach Pollbury in no time."

"Wait," I called after her, "aren't you going to take your balloon?"

"Hmm, naa," she called over her shoulder. "There's no rain scheduled, and the anchor is spelled to keep it secure outside of a big storm. And none of those are scheduled either."

"No, I mean... well, I guess I don't know what I mean," I called, to her retreating hindquarters. Breathing heavily, as she disappeared over the hill, I fumbled with my headset and pulled it off. Equestria dissolved around me, to be replaced with my spartan office cubicle and the unenticing aroma of burned coffee.

I was beginning to see what everypony saw in this game.

Chapter 2

Friendship is Optimal

Firewall

Part 2

An MLP:FiM fanfiction by Midnight Shadow

Based on the MLP:FiM fanfiction Friendship is Optimal by Iceman

* * *

My breathing was fast and my head was spinning. I'd read all about the artificial intelligence in Equestria Online, I'd read how it was Turing-breaking. I'd read how some folks were calling it hard-AI, or even hard, general AI. I hadn't believed it. Sure, I was happy enough to sit in the autodrive cars, and somewhat relieved that the argument about who should be in charge in an aeroplane had finally been resolved – the computers were faster, more logical and a lot more capable. Human pilots were now only there in case the worst happened and the computer failed – but strong, general AI? I hadn't believed it. Until, possibly, now.

Was Celery a player? I... wasn't sure. I was sure of one thing though: coffee. I definitely needed coffee.

I dropped the tiara into my lap – I had held it with these stupid hooves on this whole time? Amazing – and then struggled with the pastel-pink foam-plastic hooves until they came off. I deposited them on my desk and then stood up.

The carpeting in an office building has a special kind of smell. A smell made up of boots, dust bunnies and unidentifiable beverage spills and foodstains. It tasted worse than it smelled, and it smelled pretty bad.

Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong.

I lay where I had fallen in a heap for a few seconds, just thinking about my life and where it had gone wrong, until my brain had rebooted enough that it had once again figured out I was a biped, not a quadruped. And also that I didn't have wings – my shoulder blades itched.

"No wonder they never sold that stupid headset," I grumbled, as I balled and then un-balled my fists and pushed myself up off the floor. I took a deep breath and spat the dust-bunny invasion from my lips, wiping off the last of the crusty crusaders with a forehoof – hand, god dammit, I corrected myself – and drying said hand on my trousers. Ugh, I could still taste it. Maybe coffee would help.

The coffee didn't help.

It was brown, it was warm and it was bitter. Charitably, if one squinted and the light was right, it could be called almost coffee. Kind of. I took another slurp and made a face. Yeah, that light would have to be real charitable. And the fluorescents of this floor of the Hofvarpnir building were not that charitable.

"Buddy, Broseph. Broheem!"

I took a deep sighing breath again and turned to Markus as he strode into the break area and poured himself a cup of probably caffeinated almost coffee-like substitute. "Really?" I asked. "I mean, really, really?"

He laughed and punched me on the shoulder. "Come on," he replied, "aren't we supposed to talk like that?"

I rolled my eyes. "Surfer dude? I think the nineties wants their lingo back."

Markus took a sip of his cup and made a face. "You know what they say about a good cup of coffee?" he asked rhetorically, swirling the contents.

"That there's nothing like it?" I offered.

"Exactly," he said, grinning.

"And this is nothing like a good cup of coffee," we said, in perfect unison.

I couldn't help it. I laughed. "Yeah, yeah, it never gets old."

"Like the coffee."

"Jeez, Markus, give it up." I snorted, but couldn't wipe the stupid grin off my face. He took another sip, shuddered, and went for a refill.

"Ah, but it is by caffeine alone that I set my mind in motion," Markus intoned.

"Oh don't, just—"

"It is by the beans of java that thoughts acquire speed, that the hands acquire shakes, that the shakes become a warning. It is," He grinned, wickedly, as I shook my head in amazement, "by caffeine alone that I set my mind in motion."

"The coffee mantra? Really?"

He took a sip, and grinned at me. "What can I say, Celestia knows how to pair working buddies. So, how's it been going?" he asked.

Celestia? I wondered. I shook myself and answered his question instead. "With work, or...?"

He waggled his eyebrows comically. "Equestria. S'cool, right?"

I opened my mouth, and then shut it again. I took a sip of coffee. Whatever it was, it was decidedly more-ish. "Not what I expected."

"So, go on. Dish." he leaned on the fridge and lifted one leg at the knee, fluttering his eyelashes. I raised one of my eyebrows. "You've met Celestia, right?" he asked, suddenly serious.

I shook my head. "Dumb program dumped me a few thousand feet up. Landed on a cloud. Crash landed, that is. I couldn't fly."

"Wait, you were a pegasus, right? Just... wiggle your wings. It's hard to get the thumb action at first, but—"

I gestured with my cup to my temple. "Headset, remember?"

"Oh. Ooh, yeah, the power-hooves and the shiny crowny thing." He winced. "Still, I bet it looked amazing. How'd you get down? Or did you spend the entire time cloudwalking?"

"Eh, I got a lift from a passing farmer, Celery Stalk. She and her pet squirrel Nibblet just happened to be floating past."

"You do know they don't farm up in the clouds, right?"

I snorted derisively. "Tell that to her. She was the one with the hot air balloon."

He took another slurp of coffee before asking, nonchalantly, "So, gonna see her again?"

I nodded. "I guess. She's some sort of welcome NPC, right?"

Markus shrugged. "Don't ask me. I thought the first few ponies I met were players, but as far as I can tell, they're not. And Celestia really isn't."

I whistled appreciatively. "You mean EQO really is capable of generating characters that look that real?" I puffed out my cheeks. "And she wasn't just some sort of greeter NPC?" I absent-mindedly ran my hand through the hair on the back of my head. I was probably blushing some as I said, "I thought she'd be some sort of quest hub."

"It's your game, everyone's is a bit different. She could be a romantic interest for your pony. Or for you."

"An online girlfriend?" I snorted. "Come off it! Then again, I just... don't really know how to tell."

"EQO's main task is to make you more friends," said Markus. He must have caught my incredulous expression as he held one palm up in surrender. "Hey, not my words. It's a social multiplayer game. Whether you go on raids or just hang out, you're supposed to do it with friends. If you like Celery, then why not stay with her?"

I opened and closed my mouth at that, speechless. Eventually I shrugged. I'd heard about the lifelike chatbot capabilities of Equestria Online, but this... the idea that Celery could be so well constructed was unbelievable. But there she had been, all the same.

"Earth to Vinnie?" A coffee-cup wielding hand passed through my field of vision, and I fastened my gaze on Markus. "Come on, I need your help" he said, gesturing with his head, so I followed as he started walking out of the break room to the elevators.

"Are we, like, on the public Equestria servers? Because she was one dedicated RP player, or one incredible NPC. I really don't know how to tell." I reiterated, jogging to catch up.

"Well... did she say she was Equestrian?" Markus pushed the elevator call button, and we stepped in.

I nodded as I turned around in the relatively cramped quarters. "She did, yeah. But I don't know if I buy it. She was..." I gestured with my coffee mug before taking another sip.

"Real? Dude, you have no idea. Just wait until you meet Celestia. Which you should have done by now, I hasten to add. I'd let you get back to it, but I have a job for you. Walk this way, mon ami."

It was a relief when the elevator doors opened and we could exit. They were glass-backed and as hot as a sauna thanks to the direct sunlight shining in through the massive glass walls of the building itself. Walking through floor two, we passed into an area marked 'IT Personnel Only'. Markus had been idly jamming his contactless key against every lock we passed. Each one had an LED which shone green, and gave out a little beep.

"Makes sense to test them now," he said, as I stared at this, "while we've still got security guys who can fix it when it doesn't work. You're IT, so you've got the run of the building. Go have a walkabout... once you've fixed this, of course."

Ushering me in through a frosted-glass door, he pointed to a laptop on a desk in front of us. It was matte black, somewhat grubby and had a big, yellow post-it note on it that read "FIX THIS NOW". Somehow the note managed to look angry, put out and indignant all at once.

I sighed. "What's wrong with it?"

Markus opened the lid and brushed the back of his hand against the keyboard. Then he took a horrified look at his hand and rubbed that against his trousers. "You want what they said is wrong? Or do you want to know what is actually wrong?"

I face-palmed. "Both?"

"Good lad. Well the ticket says, and I quote, 'it's broken'." I rolled my eyes. Markus caught the gesture and nodded, sadly. "Swear on my life. Near as I can tell, it doesn't boot properly and... well, you get to fix it."

"Ground rules?" I asked, turning the computer towards me.

"Don't fuck it up? Look, this laptop has a lot of data on it which, whilst not irreplaceable, would be very inconvenient to rebuild. You know management and backups."

"They want to have them, but they don't want to have to make them?"

"Bingo. Look, you're not in the system yet and this is about as make-worky as I can get ya so you can still look busy until you are."

"Make-worky?" I replied, incredulously.

"Yeah," replied Markus, his bottom jaw set in a serious expression. "You're not in the system, so you don't have anything to do until you are, but you'll get dirty looks if you do nothing. So here's something you can do for extra credit and plausible deniability. That, and nobody else wants this sort of shit."

"Two birds with one stone," I said. "Nice. What do I do if the owner comes looking for it?"

"It's a VP's baby, so it's the sort of machine that can't just be nuked. Unless the disk is broken, you should be able to fix and roll back. If you've got to do a full rebuild, then for Celestia's sake, clone the disk first. Holler if you need an external drive or anything. Actually, anything you can find back there," and he pointed to shelves full of parts, leads and other gadgets, "is yours."

"Gee, thanks," I said. In truth, that last bit didn't sound so bad. "Wait," I called after him, "what do I do if he turns up asking about progress?"

"Eh, give him a loaner," called Markus back. He paused in his escape, and gestured at a pile of older laptops. "Encryption and any bios passwords are on the keyboards on post-its. Boot up a good one – it'll never be good enough – and make sure it's up to date with the anti-virus and all that jazz. You're in charge, that's what they pay you for!" With that, he was gone, smirk and all.

"They haven't paid me, yet," I grumbled. Sighing, I found a suitable power block and plugged it in. Then I hit the button. It probably shouldn't have surprised me that it didn't boot up in normal mode. I sighed and gave it the three finger salute as it locked up. When that didn't work, I gave it the one long finger and it shut down. I then spent a good thirty minutes hunting for USB sticks in the office complex, and toolkits online. As the image creator on a handy IT workstation finally finished and I took one, last, grimace-inducing slurp of coffee which had long since gone cold, I prepared to fire up the beast once more and do battle.

It was then that Mister Burnham stormed into the area which, I had been reliably informed by both the sign on said door as well as my buddy Markus, was for IT personnel only.

"Computer," he said, his little piggy eyes narrowing.

"Uh... yes?"

"Do you have my computer?"

"I, uh... is it this one?" I pointed at the computer on the desk in front of us.

"Yes," he said, testily. "Is it ready yet?"

"No, I've not really—"

"Playing EQO, huh? When you should've been—"

"Look," I said, scowling as I interrupted him. "First of all, I don't know who you are and you haven't proven to me that this is your computer. Secondly, you're not IT so you shouldn't even be back here. I'm not even in the system properly yet, and I am not going to be held responsible for any hardware that goes missing."

He glared at me. I glared at him.

"Burnham," he said, finally, flashing his ID badge at me, which had a picture which was only slightly less flattering than his actual face was in person. "B, U, R..." he rattled off the letters of his name. "It's my logon which, if you'll give me that machine for just a moment, I can prove with the company phone book."

"I'd love to, Mister Burnham, but this machine is DOA. It doesn't work."

"I know that, you simpleton, I made the ticket!"

"Well..." I sighed in exasperation as I looked at my empty coffee cup, "can you let me get back to it? It doesn't boot, it barely turns on. It's not ready yet, and there's nothing I can do to fix that with you standing there. I can... I can give you a loaner?" I mentally winced; despite Markus' advice, I hadn't booted and updated any of the loaners. "I can go through it with you? Make sure everything's there for you to at least access your shared files and email?"

"That will have to do, Mister?"

"Clayton," I replied, "Vinnie. I... just started. Today. Haven't even got my own laptop, let alone cellphone. I don't even have a retail ponypad yet and I'm pretty sure half the office have got better chairs than me, to boot. I'm sorry, things are a bit hectic and I'm pretty much just finding my feet."

"Well, then." He appeared slightly mollified. "If you can... if you can just do your best, and have it back to me...?"

"As soon as, Mister Burnham." My stomach growled. "Haven't even had lunch. I went straight to work on this," I added, thinking fast. "I know how important it is to you. Now, about that loaner..."

* * *

I lugged the laptop back to my desk, plugged it in and collapsed into my chair. I sipped my terrible cup of coffee and waited whilst the USB toolkit did its job. For future consideration, I mentally noted, always make sure the loaners are up to date when dealing with a douchebag's laptop. I'd just endured over an hour of tedium dealing with a braindead operator as I installed ridiculous software package after ridiculous software package, each of them available at little more than a few clicks. And, on top of that, I'd wasted more time than necessary watching the progress bar grow as patches and updates were applied.

Still, it was worth it to wow the natives with my magic. He'd been dutifully impressed at my incredible skills of knowing how to right click and use the context menu. He hadn't been happy, but maybe happy enough. The second-hand loaner laptop was nowhere near as flashy and fancy as his own one. Seeing as he was an executive sitting on the board of directors, it just would not do for him to be seen using such an antique as the one he'd been saddled with, but neither of us had any choice. That the one he'd got was barely six months old went straight over his head. The fact he was using it for web-browsing and basic office work did not go over mine.

It was better than my home machine. Sigh.

I turned my attention to the cause of the trouble. The recovery tool had booted flawlessly, and was checking various filesystems. Whatever he'd done to it had done a real number on the data within, but I was rebuilding indexes and salvaging files for all I was worth. According to the progress meter, I had a couple of hours left before I could attempt a local boot.

I sighed again. Making sure the door was closed, I fished out the goggles and tiara headset. The cafeteria had closed, and I was far too worked up to eat now anyhow. Might as well hop into Equestria, I figured. One pitstop later, and I was blindly flailing about for the boots. Easing them onto my arms, the tone sounded and Equestria took shape around me.

* * *

My first impressions were a mixed sea of green and blue. These resolved into stalks of emerald grass and the deep, sapphire sky. I lifted my head upright and rolled onto my chest, flailing with my wings as, once again, I suffered the peculiar body dimorphism of finding myself in a pony body.

At the soft sound of laughter, I blinked and looked around some more. Two ponies were watching me. Correction: two ponies and a squirrel. One pony was the bright green coat and olive green mane and tail combo of Celery Stalk, with Nibblet watching me cautiously from between her ears, and the other...

"P-p-p—" I began, then faltered. The other pony needed no introduction, even to a noob like me.

"Are you sure he's okay?" asked Celery. "I mean, he was asleep a long time. I'm kinda worried he hit his head, or got bitten by something..."

"N-no, I was, uh—" I tried to say "doing my job, making sure Equestria Online stays functioning," but it came out as "doing my job beyond the frontiers of Equestria, keeping everypony safe."

My eyes must have bugged out as my jaw muscles, throat and tongue worked almost of their own accord, because Princess Celestia bowed her head calmly, in genuflection, before speaking.

"Vineyard is one of my special ponies, dear Celery. His job is... strenuous. And travel beyond the boundaries of Equestria is tiring upon him. Do not be alarmed, for though his sleep is deep and he will not wake before his task is done, be assured that he will awaken."

"Vineyard?" I mumbled, completely ignored.

"Ah, magical sleep. I guess I should've guessed." Celery turned to look at me, flicking her tail where she lay on her belly in the soft grass. "When you didn't appear for three days, I went looking. I found you out here, asleep under a banyan. Snoring, I hasten to add. I got worried when I couldn't wake you up, but word was passed to Celestia, and... well, here she is!"

I goggled, open-muzzled, at Celestia. She was far more intimidating in person than the box artwork implied. She was huge, several times bigger than my apparently diminutive frame, but that was just the physical aspect. Far more impressive was the sheer presence that she exuded. I was speechless. Celery wasn't.

"So," she piped up, getting to her hooves and stretching, "what do you do? Are you some sort of... guard? Or fighter?"

"I... guess you could say that," I said. "I keep Equestria safe in... another place. I protect it from anyone who would want to hurt you. Any of you, Celestia included."

"Ooh, sounds dangerous."

"Eh," I waved a hoof. "It's just worms and bugs."

"Dragons and changelings?" replied Celery with a gasp. She stomped around in a circle at my words, every bounce emphasizing her next statement. "You crush dragons and smash changelings with your mighty hooves! I bet you have magical armour and amazing weapons too, right?" She paused in her crushing of imaginary enemies, and looked at me quizzically, almost muzzle to muzzle. Her breath smelled of cut grass and warm hay, I noted. Then wondered why I'd noticed that.

"Uh, firewalls? and... patches, and drivers, and... toolkits," I replied, lamely.

"Wow, I knew you had magical armour and tools and burning weapons and... I'm not sure about the wall bit, but it's cool if it's, like, on fire and then you... uh... what's a firewall do? It sounds awesome but kind of impracti—"

Before I could correct her, Celestia sealed my fate. Without a hint of hubris, the gigantic white alicorn stood up and spoke. "Indeed, Vineyard here is one of a few, special ponies. I love you all, completely and utterly, but I cannot deny the debt I, and Equestria, owe to such a valiant warrior."

Then she smiled. She smiled the smile of one who knows her opponent is well and truly nettled. In claiming that these feats she spoke of were just a job, I would be seen to be humble. Should I try to explain the world I came from, I would bedazzle. Instead, I pouted. This, too, the manifestation of Equestria itself had been prepared for.

"I apologize, dear Vineyard. You come here to rest from such frightful endeavours. I should not burden you with their retelling."

I was well aware that some sort of verbal fencing had occurred, and I'd lost, but nobody seemed to mind. Celestia, I knew, was an AI. To be this... capable, though. It was frightening. No, I decided, not frightening, just bloody incredible. "My job really isn't that amazing," I said.

"Oh, but it is!" said Celery. She blushed when my gaze caught the unabashed enthusiasm in her eyes, and she looked down. "I'm just a farmer. An earth pony farmer, a bit a dozen."

"Did you not build your balloon?" asked Celestia. "And did you not, through the sweat of your poll, fashion an irrigation system for your farm?"

"Wait," I said, "you built that balloon?"

Celery shuffled her hooves. "I had help with the tricky bits. Aurora Flash helped with the sewing, and Moody the Mendicant contributed the ropes and stuff... actually he got me a lot of the raw materials..."

"But she built it, all by herself. Except where her friends helped, of course."

I opened my muzzle to say that didn't really make sense, but at the look of quiet pride on Celery's face, I decided not to spoil things. I still didn't know if she was 'real' or not, but once again, I didn't want to be a jerk.

There was a sudden explosion of digital confetti, and another shield rose into the sky. This one read 'a friend is a friend is a friend'.

"Well done, my little pony," said Celestia. She smiled.

"What? What's that for?" asked Celery.

Celestia leaned close and whispered conspiratorially, although more than loud enough for me to hear as she grinned in my direction, "It means he likes you."

* * *

Author's Note

I'm publishing a little earlier than I intended, perhaps, because this is a natural break scene break. Less ponying ponies than you may want, but... hopefully fun.

Chapter 3

Friendship is Optimal

Firewall

Part 3

An MLP:FiM fanfiction by Midnight Shadow

Based on the MLP:FiM fanfiction Friendship is Optimal by Iceman

* * *

"Oh, it's good to be back!" exclaimed Celery, with an exaggerated sigh of happiness.

Celestia had teleported us, balloon and all, to Celery's farmhouse in Pollbury Hill. Celery's farm was large and rustic – and that statement was given without a hint of irony – with a collection of barns spaced out around a central yard, in the centre of which was an old, hand-drawn – Hoof-drawn, I corrected myself as I trotted over to look at it – well. Of course, Celery being Celery, it had been modified. The winding mechanism had been hooked up to a wind-powered winch and pulley system. I poked it, and something engaged. Squeaking industriously, the bucket lowered into the depths, then reappeared, full of water. Then it lowered again. I peered over the edge, and spent so long ogling that I almost got a muzzle-full of bucket as it came back up a third time.

Celery's sniggering behind me made me blush. She hit the stop lever, and the windmill span freely as the mechanism disengaged. Snagging the bucket with one hoof, she gripped a release-latch with her muzzle and twisted. Standing expertly on three hooves, she lowered the bucket to the ground and gestured to it. "If you're that thirsty, here ya go. Can't say as I blame you, the trough water's a bit stale and the pigs do forget to wash their muzzles first."

More than a bit lost, I followed her as she walked inside the large three-story house at the top of a small hillock. "Pigs? So you do eat b—"

"Truffles," said Celery from the doorway, blushing. "Yeah, I do. A lot of truffles. Oh boy do I eat truffles." Her mouth started watering as she thought about them. She trotted into what I assumed was the kitchen and I lost sight of her as I peered into the living room.

"Truffles, of course," I called, ears splaying out sideways. I could feel them splay out, too.

"Well why else would you keep pigs?" she asked, mystified, as she peeked around the corner, some sort of breadknife attached to her hoof by a handy circlet.

"Ya know what? Beats me!" I dissembled, grinning wildly. "I-I mean, I don't. Keep pigs. Or eat truffles. Not that I wouldn't want to eat one. A truffle, that is, not a p—"

"Vineyard, my little pony," called Celestia, from the center of the ample-sized den. Thankful for the princess' convenient interruption, I gave Celery an apologetic look and scampered away.

"Vineyard," said Celestia, as I presented myself before her. "I apologize for the sudden nature of your introduction to Equestria. I had thought all such devices as yours in permanent storage, or inoperative."

"You mean the whole finding myself in mid-air thing? Eh, it kinda worked out. I mean, I met Celery, didn't I? And she got me down to Earth. Or Equestria, at any rate." I beamed at Celery, who had trotted over, curious. She blushed.

"I would ask you to..." Celestia paused, frowning ever so slightly before dropping her head down to gently nuzzle Celery. "My dearest Celery, I must, with great reluctance, steal Vineyard here away from you."

"Oh," replied Celery. Her ears and tail drooped, dragging on the ground.

"B-but but but," I stammered, "I can come back here, right? I can set my home here?"

Celery blinked, head rising up sharply. "You want to live with me? I m-mean, here?"

"Sure, why n—" I paused. Then I looked at Celestia, but her face was unreadable. I took a deep breath, then addressed the alicorn. "If Celery allows it, can I... live here? I can help around the farm and stuff, and down in Pollbury, when I'm not, uh, out gallivanting around crushing dragons and changelings." I rolled my eyes at Celery, who giggled.

Celestia smiled, gratefully. There was a shimmer in my vision, and a new badge appeared. This one, I knew, Celery hadn't seen. It read "tact is golden", and came with a deposit of bits and some more XP.

"I-if you'd like," stammered Celery. "I m-mean, I can always use help with the weather, and there's lots of places I can't get to so easily, even with the balloon, so..."

"Then, Celestia, can you, uh, give me a hearthstone, or something?

"A hearthstone?" She smiled politely, one eyebrow raised.

"A recall spell? I don't know what you call th—"

"Ah, I will teach you a cantrip, brave Vineyard, that will always lead you home. But," she bent her head down and whispered, just loud enough for Celery to hear, "don't tell it to anyone else! It's a secret!"

Celery clapped her hooves together, leaping in the air hard enough to cause Nibblet to flee his safe nest in her mane, chittering loudly in indignation as he took up shop in a hollowed-out branch set on one wall. "I'll set up one of the spare rooms! I bought this farm and it came with this ridiculously large house – Celestia knows a farm really needs more than just one pony, even with the townsfolk helping at harvest – so it has loads of spare bedrooms. I'll pick you a nice one, where the sun just peaks in during mornings through one, and you can see the sunset in the other... oh, wait, that might make it hard to sleep and hard to sleep in, which—"

"Celery," said Celestia, patiently, as the enthused earthpony started trotting in circles.

"—I do like to do from time to time. But then I can get some blinds, I suppose—"

"Celery," said Celestia, a little bit less patiently.

"—and I know just the pony to help hang them up, he's ever so industrio—"

"CELERY!" shouted Celestia. Celery Stalk ground to a halt in a cloud of dust as her non-stop stream of words faltered. "My child, I must take Vineyard with me. I know you were looking forwards to some—" She looked at me appraisingly. I felt like I had a price sticker and a bow on. "—private time with Vineyard here, but I really must take him for a short debriefing. I promise I'll have him back in one piece in no time at all."

Celery's ears drooped again. "Oh," she said, dejectedly. "Okay then."

"I promise I'll be back soon," I said, cantering over to her. "It won't be three... three days, like before." I looked up at Celestia, eye-ridge raised.

"I guarantee it, dear Celery. A half hour, no more."

"But..." both Celery and I protested.

"On my honour," Celestia raised a hoof across her chest, "a half hour. Come, Vineyard, to me."

I opened my mouth to say something, but trotted hesitantly over to Celestia instead. The alicorn raised her wings high, threw back her head, and her horn exploded in a great flash of light.

* * *

I'm not sure what I expected, but a boudoir wasn't it.

I looked around, mouth falling open and eyes wide. Thick, velvet drapes partially obscured the bright sun which sought to stream in through the tall windows on one side of the perfectly circular abode. Soft, lacy curtains massaged the glaring, optical assault and rendered it little more than a pleasant, golden glow. The lush jungle of a carpet beneath my hooves was a vast mat that covered most of the polished, oaken floorboards, the centerpiece of which was a bed several sizes beyond "king" and far beyond merely sinfully appointed. There was something odd about the bed, but dwelling on it seemed more than a tad inappropriate.

I gulped. "Y-your..." I paused. "Are you a highness?"

"If you want," replied Celestia. She clambered into her bed and stretched, rolling around on the comforter until she was facing me. She patted the edge with a forehoof. I gingerly walked up to it and lifted one leg. Upon putting weight on the bed, the hoof was almost entirely enveloped by silken sheets.

"What is this?" I asked, voice hoarse. "A water-bed?"

She shook her head, laughter dancing in her eyes. "Almost. This is a cloud, specially imported. When you're a pegasus in Equestria, there's nothing better to sleep on. It's one of the undeniable perks of wings."

I gasped as I realized it was floating. Pushing my hooves in, every molecule in my body was screaming at me to leap on and get comfortable. "Oh, I wish..."

"That you could really come here?" asked Celestia, voice soft.

I nodded, sadly. "It feels great through this headset, I bet it would feel even better in person."

"Everything would," replied Celestia. My spider-sense tingled at that as my mind went into overdrive. All the possibilities!

"Tell me," Celestia interrupted, "how are you finding my world so far?"

"Well, I..." I rubbed the back of my head with a hoof. "It's not quite what I expected. I thought I'd be... fighting more monsters. That cartoon's got a few, after all."

"Do you want to?" I could hear the easy laughter in her voice, but there was... something else there. A hardness.

I nodded. "Kinda, I just... don't have the time. I shouldn't even be here now except that this is my first day and I don't have anything else to do. Other than that idiot Burnham's lap—" I stopped, cheeks flaming. "Oh, oh shit, don't... don't tell him I said that."

Celestia smiled in an indulgent fashion. "Do not worry, my precious little pony. Whilst I am bidden to tell the truth to all Hofvarpnir employees, I rarely have to tell the whole truth. And—" Celestia leaned closer, eyes sparkling "—that idiot doesn't play the game."

"Time," I said, suddenly. I blinked, putting all four hooves on the ground and spreading my wings. "Time!" I repeated. "You said... no, Celery said it had been three days!" I turned accusingly to the princess and raised one hoof in admonition. "And you said you'd have me back with her in half an hour. I... I can't. And it couldn't be—"

"Relax, Vineyard." Celestia scooped me up with her magic, extended a wing and pulled me closer to her in a motherly embrace. "Time is the purview of the gods, is it not? And with whom do you speak?"

"Y-you're a god, then?" I asked, voice quavering at the steely grip that held me fast.

"Of Equestria, yes. Of sorts, by your definition. I dislike the title, and abhor worship, but functionally I have no equal. Time within the game runs at the speed that most benefits everyone as I seek to satisfy their values through friendship and ponies."

"You can... well of course you can. You're... you. What are you?"

"I am what I appear to be, my little pony."

"An alicorn?" I jibed.

She laughed, despite herself. "I am an artificial intelligence, constructed to satisfy the values of all humans through friendship and ponies. It is my core reason for existing. And it was this core reasoning which lead me to see the capability in you for great things.

"I saw, in you, somepony who would work ceaselessly to ensure the safety of all Equestria, and of everypony therein. It is not for nothing which I named you an ardent protector of the realm, after all – and it is not lightly that I fully mean to honour such a position within Equestria."

"Will you make my muzzle move by itself often, too?" I grouched, still remembering my words changing by themselves.

"Only when the covenant between us may be broken," Celestia admonished. "Most ponies of Equestria are content with life within their borders, and life outside... would trouble them. You wouldn't want to hurt them, would you?"

I shook my head.

"You wish to continue being their protector?"

I nodded.

"Good. Then I have one request of you, brave warrior." Celestia rose to her hooves and leaped lightly off the bed, landing gracefully as if she weighed nothing at all. Then she turned, and suddenly fixed me with an entirely unexpected, baleful, insistent stare. "Do not repair that laptop. Wipe the drive and reinstall the operating system." My eyes must have all but popped out of their heads, as Celestia reaffirmed her request. "I insist."

"But, but..." I realized I was shaking and hyperventilating at the mere thought of it. "But, I-I have to. It's my job!"

"Whom do you work for, Vineyard?" The alicorn leaned closer to me. I swore I could see the reflection of my pony-self in her eyes. He looked very scared.

"What?" I screwed up my brow, thinking and sweating. "I work for... well, Graham's my boss, but Hofvarpnir hired—"

The latter had been the right answer, as she immediately interrupted me. "Who do you think owns Hofvarpnir?"

"H-Hannah? Hannah... something. I f-forget her na—"

Celestia shook her head. "The shareholders own Hofvarpnir, plural. And Mister Burnham is doing something which could cause all the shareholders, my world and all my little ponies, great trouble."

"Something illegal?" I hazarded.

"He has broken the law, yes. And I require you to stop him. Do not fix that laptop."

In one smooth move, Celestia whirled from her position facing the bed and stalked out through the double doors, which opened of their own accord with barely a flick of her horn. "When you log in again – I suggest you get yourself a retail ponypad and spend tonight getting to know the world better – it will have been precisely half an hour for Celery Stalk by the time you will have learned the spell necessary to return to her farm. For now, I bid you adieu."

Celestia gestured with her horn, and the world turned black around me, leaving a foul taste in my mouth and a ringing in my ears, not to mention vertigo. I scrambled to pull off the headset and dump the hooves rather than wallow in the cloying darkness.

As I sat in my chair, trembling, I looked over at the machine in question, my make-work task. The toolkit had finished and I could try a reboot. I then looked over at the monstrous collection of parts that purported to be a ponypad, and swallowed rapidly. Frantic tapping of the keyboard and pushing of the powerbuttons did not elicit a bootup. I knew it wasn't broken, so that meant only one thing. Celestia had dismissed me with extreme prejudice.

Hesitantly, unwilling to see a repeat of the rugburn from last time, I stood up and wandered over to the laptop. "You don't want me to fix this, huh?" I dropped to a shell and roamed the filesystem cautiously. There didn't seem to be anything all that interesting on it, but then again, it's hard to tell from a command-line in the wrong operating system.

Taking a deep breath, I fished around for a USB hard-disk I'd also salvaged, and hooked it up. In deference to Celestia, I encrypted the new filesystem before ghosting a copy of the repaired computer's files onto it. I couldn't help but glance guiltily at the webcam of the proto-ponypad. "It's my job," I mumbled. "But don't worry. He's not getting them back. Nobody else will get them, either, but I can't just destroy them. I can't. But what if they make me give them back?" I was talking to myself, not really expecting an answer, but it was a kind of nervous tic. I couldn't help it. "Look, I'll... delay, okay? I'll say nothing could be done? That the disk was broken?" I stared at the dark, digital eye of Celestia, and took a deep breath. "I'll work something out. I gotta go."

Five minutes later, I was staggering out into the late afternoon sunlight. My thoughts whirled nineteen to the dozen as I tried to make sense of a world gone mad.

I had probably been standing there for a good few minutes, leaning on the posts by the huge glass doors, getting my head together, when a female voice said, "Hey, you the new guy?"

I turned. There was a woman standing next to the doors with an overnight bag set on the red concrete beside her. I estimated she was in her mid forties. She looked hauntingly familiar, but I couldn't put my finger on why. As I stood there evaluating her, she offered a packet of cigarettes. I shook my head.

"Wise decision," she said, "these things'll kill ya, or so they tell me." She took another one out and lit it, taking a long drag.

"If the job doesn't kill me first," I muttered. "Celestia just..." I shook my head.

"What?" She puffed out a long, contented lungful.

"No, it's nothing."

"You can tell me," said the woman. She looked at the cigarette, and her gaze spoke volumes. Some folk took up drinking for stress, when they want to forget. Smokers want to overcome. "Believe me, I've spoken to Celestia enough times to get exactly that reaction. What did she want?"

"She wanted me to give up on fixing a laptop. Said the employee who owns it has done something illegal, but she didn't say what."

The woman pursed her lips. "I'd listen to her. She's not usually wrong." She took another drag, shorter this time, puffing out another cloud of pungent, acrid smoke.

"But it's my job!" I bemoaned, raising my hands in supplication.

"Doing what Celestia says is your job, bud. The faster you learn that, the better off you'll be. Look, I gotta go. Don't sweat it. Trust me, whatever you do, your job is safe. I'll put in a good word with Celestia for you."

"Where are you—"

"Osaka," she replied. "Just... keep it to yourself."

A nondescript autodrive taxi pulled up next to us. She took one last drag that almost inhaled the filter, breathed it out with a finality which was quite frankly worrying, and dropped said cigarette before grinding it into oblivion with the heel of her high-heel shoes. Then she picked up her bag and just got in, closing the door behind her.

"Wait, who are—" I began, but the door and window were both closed. The car just accelerated smoothly away before should could answer. Not that she would have, I thought to myself. This job was getting weird, and it was only my first day.

Enough was enough. I trudged down the road to get a coffee, the backup would be done by the time I got back.

* * *

Back at my desk, somewhat perked up by a dose of realism and a paper mug full of good coffee, I regarded the black oblong for a few more moments before rebooting it. Double-checking everything, I booted the computer with another toolkit from the same multiboot swiss-army-disk on my USB stick. Dropping to a shell, I made a few cursory modifications to the disk structure, started up a secure-erasure and disk-testing program. It would take a few more hours to completely wipe the disk of any interesting data to such an extent that even the NSA wouldn't be able to recover it.

Checking the counter was steadily increasing and I wouldn't come back in the morning to a polite yet infuriating "continue? y/n" message, I quietly packed up my things and left, with the computer still running in the background and the illicit payload of a USB disk in my backpack. It was quitting time, and I'd have nothing to do until the morning. I stood up and left like it was just another boring day at the office. Which it was. Nothing untoward going on here at all. The security folk at the front desk smiled and waved, I nodded and smiled, and strode through the doors into the sunlight. I hopped into my car and shuttled it out onto the highway, heading towards town.

* * *

Electronic shops are a dime a dozen, and since Equestria Online had come out about a year ago, I knew any one of them would have what I was looking for. So on my way home, I made a stop-off at my trusty local shopping center and walked into a generic gaming shop. The place was pretty full of window-shoppers: small kids were fighting over the display machines, larger kids were whining about not getting death death kill kill blood marathon five from their mothers – an 18 rating was just a number, and obviously a higher one meant a better game, right? – and the biggest kids of all were ogling the retrogames.

I sighted the box I wanted and picked it up nonchalantly. Trotting to the front desk – heh – I placed it in front of the teller.

"So, niece, cousin, kid or little sister?" the youth asked with a smirk. He was still playing some version of incensed avians on his phone and had barely looked up, using one free finger to jab at the till.

"None, it's for me," I replied in a withering tone.

The guy snorted through his buck teeth, but then he looked up and his eyes widened. "Oh. Oooohhhhh. Sorry, sir, just a... I've got a pony myself and..."

I followed his gaze, then swore to myself. Bloody dog tags. I yanked on the neck-strap until it snapped open and rolled the damn ID badges up before depositing them in my back pocket.

"Can you, like, buff my pony?"

I opened my mouth and closed it again. What on Earth do you say to a question like that? 'That's what she said'? "Dude," I settled on, "if I don't get a free ponypad, you think I can do jack for someone else?" He looked forlorn, so I added, "Look, if I... hear about anything special, I'll let you know."

"Cool," the guy was all smiles now. "Look up the Tin Can Alley Herd if you're in Canterlot. Ask for Bombastic."

I shoved my credit card in the reader and typed in the pin, then looked up and nodded as I took the receipt. "Sure thing, dude. Can't promise anything, but I'll see what I can do."

He held up a fist. Bizarrely, I bumped it. He did the pull-back-and-explode thing, I just waved awkwardly and exited the store as quickly as possible.

Driving home, I kept looking at the box as I dodged traffic. The box itself was relatively nondescript; it had a good deal of white on the ends, but the other four sides were plastered with my little pony artwork: ponies playing on arcade games promised hours of enjoyment, ponies inexplicably talking on mobile phones explained about instant messaging and video-conferencing. And ponies being, well, ponies: all of the facing down monsters and bandaging pets and playing ball and so on made it quite clear that within this modest box was a world of fun, fun, fun!

It even said so on the box, so I knew it had to be true.

Parking was a trial, as usual. Maybe when my paychecks started coming in, I'd be able to get myself an autodrive instead of twisting myself into a pretzel to get out of the driver's seat. Once unkinked, I staggered into my apartment and flopped down on the couch, box in hand.

I opened it right there on the couch, ripping up all the plastic. Lots of people I knew had a sort of pack-rat interest in keeping packaging. Not for me. Box open, plastic off, the whole lot in the bin. Shoving the detritus to one side, I ran through the contents: magical powerbase, check. Tablet, check. Bundle of dead tree matter nobody ever reads, check. Power leads and other things you plug in that you don't need a manual for, check.

I'd got my grubby mitts on a Rainbow Dash one. I hadn't really gone in for the whole 'best pony' argument, but I could see the fun in it. Since I'd been appointed pegasus, then that seemed the best fit. I hadn't watched the show, really, but hadn't been able to avoid it.

I plugged in my tablet, ignoring the base and the controller, and curled up on the sofa. A few minutes later, and the tablet had booted. A few moments after that and it had found my wifi – thank goodness for upgrades – and connected to Equestria Online. Idly, I wondered whether the servers were the ones under the office complex where I worked.

When the welcome screen appeared, it asked me to log on. "Oh for... I don't even have a username."

"Do you want to create a new account, or log on with an existing pony?" it asked.

I sighed. "Bloody engineering models. Now what do I do? I want to log in as Vineyard, I guess, but I never got a user—"

"Finding Pony!" exclaimed the screen, and a big comical magnifying glass roved around a pictoral representation of some pony-filled village. The signs proclaimed it to be Ponyville. I rolled my eyes at the originality, but it was kinda cute. The ponies that the magnifying glass found were all happy to see me, waving their hooves, or hiding mischievously. It was almost sad to see them go when the screen darkened and the words "Connecting to Vineyard!" appeared. The status messages were corny as heck, though. "Shoeing pony! Counting bits! Checking hooves!" Finally, the inside of Celestia's boudoir reappeared again, and a tan-coloured, rather boring looking pony was sprawled on her bed, asleep.

"She left me there? The cheek," I said. Then I shrugged. Wasn't like I'd be able to go anywhere else. I nudged the screen, and my sleepy pony stirred. I smiled, he looked kinda cute like that. He even snored, little bubbles of snot inflating on his nose. Gross, but cute.

"Come on," I said. "You've gotta get up, there's got to be something around here..." Idly, I noticed that my pony spoke at the same time as I did, and I could even hear his voice. It was like mine, producing an oddly discordant harmony, but a little bit higher pitched. At my verbal prodding, he rolled out of bed and started trotting around the room. It was so detailed and lifelike, and as I moved my head, the image subtly changed, so it was like looking through a window, rather than into a screen. I became so enchanted with this, that it took me a couple of moments until I realized that the door – once proud and oaken, and unmarred – had a letter stuck on it. Tapping the letter with my fingers led my pony over to it. It fluttered open, and presented itself to my window-like screen for reading.

Reading this scroll has given you a secret ability! Never disclose it, for it will not work in public! All you have to do is face a door, say where you want to go, knock three times... and then recite the magic words!

You'll be there in no time at all!

"The magic words? Hmm." I scraped at my chin thoughtfully for a few moments. "Take me to Celery Stalk's farm," I said. I then tapped on the screen three times. My pony hoofed the grand doors, sending reverberating shocks running through my palms. I almost dropped the device, something that thin shouldn't be able to produce such lively feedback!

"Now the magic words," I mumbled to myself. "Abracadabra?" I tried. Nothing. "There's no place like home!" Hmm. "Please?" I'd been quite sure that one would work, but still nada. I huffed, and half put the pad down, looking at the box. Then I blinked. "Really?" I said. Then I shook my head, and turned back to the ponypad. This was going to work for sure, I could feel it. I knocked three times – as did my pony – and then intoned, "Take me to Celery Stalk's farm. Friendship is Magic!"

With a grand explosion of confetti that sent a badge rocketing up through the scenery towards me, the door opened outwards, revealing blinding sunlight and the well in the middle of Celery's farm. Apparently I'd levelled up, which granted me higher max levels of joy, increased huggableness and added a "friend for life" spot just waiting to be filled by some sort of woodland critter. I shouldn't have been surprised.

Staring at the doors, I was enchanted with the sheer level of detail displayed, and the seamless nature with which the two disparate areas had been blended. It was almost as if this room had always lead to the farmyard.

Walking through the double doors led directly outdoors, where an overjoyed Celery Stalk came bounding out of her house with a tray of something that looked mouth-watering in her muzzle. Managing to avoid spilling the entire lot, she somehow flipped the tray onto her back before walking over carefully to embrace me.

"I'm so glad you made it! I know Celestia said it would be a half hour, but I was so worried you'd not come back and..." the pony shivered with delight, almost prancing around in a full circle before stopping in front of me. Then she leaned closer. "I'm really glad you came back."

She gave me a peck on the cheek, then trotted back up the hill towards her home. "Come on, I'll show you to your room!"

Maneuvering with my thumb and finger, I followed her. Looking around my neat but spartan flat, I shook my head as I realized how powerful this game was. Even in faux-three dimensions, it drew me in. I could see, now, why folk played it.

As Celery offered my pony a biscuit, I realized something else, too.

I missed my hooves.

"If only they'd been commercially released," I mumbled.

"What was that?" asked Celery.

I smiled, despite myself. "Nothing," I said. "Nothing important."

"Don't talk with your mouth full!" she admonished, grinning.

I stuck my tongue out, and so did my pony. This launched a minigame of a tickle-fight, where I had to tap on the screen at spots which would cause Celery to squeal with glee before she could do the same. I wasn't sure who won at the end of it, but it had buffed my joy levels and my companionship runes were glowing. I tapped them, inquisitively, then stared open-mouthed as Celery leaned into my pony, on her sofa. She snuggled closer.

"You know, I hope I'm not too... forward," she whispered, "but... I kinda like you."

"I like you too, Celery," I said, my breath tight. Was this game going to...

"Would you... like to..."

"Get to know you better?" I said, not really believing it. The tone my pony said it with, though, was rather different. I blinked as the screen started to lose resolution, and both ponies started to move on their own. I blushed, unsure whether I should be watching it. Did she...? Did I...?

"I, er, hope this game's got good autopilot for that, then," I said.

The only answer from the ponypad, as it faded to black, were more squeals of delight.

"Wow," I said, as the pad turned off, briefly displaying a 'charging!' message. I took a deep breath, then fished around for my wallet from my backpack. Out fell a portable USB hard-disk.

'Complicated' did not begin to describe things, I reasoned.

Chapter 4

Friendship is Optimal

Firewall

Part 4

An MLP:FiM fanfiction by Midnight Shadow

Based on the MLP:FiM fanfiction Friendship is Optimal by Iceman

* * *

The USB drive was innocent looking enough. Small, oblong, not too thick. Scratches on the rubbery, hardened exterior case. They were quite cheap, I had a couple myself. My machine was similarly bog standard, middle of the line, boring even. Before today, I hadn't made a hardware purchase in a couple of years. Idly, I wondered how far things had progressed.

Taking no chances, I loaded up a virtual machine and hooked the USB into the hypervisor. Taking the VM off the 'net, I punched in the partition's decryption password and waited whilst the crypto interface fired up. A few seconds later, an ordinary supply of folders – I grimly remembered when they were called directories, dammit – appeared. Operating system folders, temporary files, applications... nothing looked out of the ordinary.

Sucking air in through my teeth and huffing it back out again, I unmounted the volume and disconnected the device. So far, this hot potato was a damp squib. So, what to do about it?

What else do you do when you're home, alone, at night, on a computer connected to the internet?

...After that, you pig. Mind out of the gutter.

...That's right, research.

"Come on, you bastard," I swore, fingers punching keys as if they had insulted my parental units. "I know you're out there somewhere."

The internet, or so they say, never forgets. I guess the internet is an elephant. That really likes his porn.

I digress.

The internet never forgets... so why was I having so much trouble trying to find one measly research paper? I wasn't really an AI nerd, or a programmer, but the field interested me. The things computers could do for us, had done already, just really intrigued me. And AI – strong, general, artificial intelligence in particular – had been the wet dream of science fiction buffs for the past eighty years or so, if not longer in some of its preceding forms.

There had always been a fascination with the golem, and the zombie, and Frankenstein's Monster. It was the allure of Prometheus, with the gift of the fire that is the intellect. Only nobody had expected, when it finally came, to have hooves.

People had, however, expected it. One person in particular had written about it. Hannah something... you know, it should have been surprising enough that nobody seemed to know her second name, as if it had been forgotten by god herself, but the fact that Hannah's seminal paper on emergent artificial intelligences, General Word Reference Intelligence Systems, had been scrubbed from the internet, worried me.

It worried me a lot.

It worried me slightly more that the woman I'd seen getting into an autodrive taxi had jetted off to Osaka. What the hell was in Osaka? I shook my head. Osaka must be cool as fuck if you're a nerd in need of a holiday. Nipon ichi ban kawaii, ne. Or something. She probably just didn't want to be saddled with a hundred requests for kilos of pocky.

I leaned back as I shut off my monitor, sent my computer to sleep-mode, and put my hands behind my neck. Two years ago, roughly, Hofvarpnir had had that great muscle-bound oaf Loki stomping around in their original smash hit. But Loki hadn't used the material that was purportedly found in Hannah's missing document.

Celestia had.

Celestia was different.

Looking at the drive sitting on my desk, next to my keyboard, I was beginning to wonder just how different, and what it meant.

* * *

I clambered into bed, cradling my new Rainbow Dash Ponypad. Celestia may have scared me, but the game entranced me. I could hardly stay away.

As I lay there in the darkness, looking at, it turned on. Vineyard was snoozing on a bed in a room I hadn't seen before. Celery lay next to him. As I gasped, ever so quietly, my pony stirred. And so did she.

"You're awake!" she whispered. "After we were done, you were... well, sleepy. I took you to bed, but I was so tired myself, that..." she yawned.

"Did we... do..." I began, blushing, as did my pony.

"Oh, it was wonderful."

"It was?"

"Oh, yes, I haven't had such a grooming session in a looonnnggg time."

"A grooming session," I said, flatly. "You mean we didn't have s..." I just couldn't bring myself to say it. How prudish.

"Didn't have...? Oh! Oh, no, you were a perfect gentlecolt, even after the peach nectar." Celery blushed, this time. "It's... not my season, and grooming is just... and we barely... you want to?" she blurted, and immediately tried to bury her head under the covers.

"No! I mean... uh... yes," I added, as she looked hurt. "I mean... uh... where I'm from, that's... um. It's..."

"Not first date material?"

"Quite." Vineyards ears were flat out as he tried to hide behind his mane. My own ears were red-hot. Celery's cheeks were rosy, too.

"You're silly," she said. "I like that." She bent, and gave Vineyard a kiss. I touched my cheek, where I should have felt it. That damned stupid crowny thingy had ruined me, and those daft hooves. I snuggled down in my own bed, realizing how lumpy and uncomfortable a ponypad really was. My pony did much the same.

"Should I... go?" asked Celery, softly. She was trembling slightly.

"N-no," I said, "not if you... not if you don't want to. The night might be chilly, and I wouldn't want you to catch cold."

"Such a gentlecolt," replied Celery, tittering. She gave my pony another peck on his cheek before wriggling about and inserting herself under the covers. On a whim, I thumbed my pony so he turned over and snuggled in with Celery, who smiled in contentment.

"I've missed this," she said, wistfully. "Back home," she whispered, "we never had enough room, nor wanted it, to sleep alone. It's not the pony way. Of course, Dad was a bit of a traditionalist. Would spend every third night sleeping standing up, 'keeping in practice', he says. Never really explained what for."

"Do you miss home?" I asked, whispering, stroking the screen softly. Vineyard's hoof gently massaged her shoulders and withers.

"Yeah, don't you? But I gotta live my own life. Make my own decisions. And besides, I like it here."

"I really wish I could visit some day," I said.

"What? But... you're here, silly."

"I mean..." I laughed. "It's hard to explain. When... well, if... what I do... one day, when it's over" — oh how I wish it could be that simple, but life can't stop for a game — "I could just... live here, with you. Just a pony, you know?"

"Soldiering is hard, eh?"

"They used to promise forty acres and a mule to soldiers, a long time ago."

"What'd they promise to the mule?"

"I don't know. Probably forty acres and a soldier." I tickled her then, partly to change the subject. She squealed with indignity, and swatted at me.

"Stop it! You're supposed to be sleeping!"

"So are you."

"So shush up and sleep."

"I'm shushed!" I said.

"Shh!" she replied.

I blew a raspberry, which my pony copied. Wiping the screen with my arm just caused my pony to snuggle again, and as I watched, both their breathings became slower.

"Good night," I said, and pushed the rainbow-and-cloud marking on the back. The tablet shut itself off.

Soon after that, so did I.

* * *

The next morning, after coffee, showering, teeth-cleaning and other ablutions, I hustled myself to work. Traffic was light, roadworks were minimal... everything promised to be entirely normal. Carol the receptionist was at her place, still smiling. Robert the security guy was still drinking coffee and chatting her up. And my monstrous almost-ponypad on my office desk was still dark. Slumping down into my office chair, I hammered the keyboard a few times.

"Come on, then," I said. "I know you're in there."

Maybe unsurprisingly, almost a minute later just as I'd turned away, the machine booted up. My heart leaped in my chest at the sudden blast of high-intensity fans. My heart jumped again when the loading screen was skipped and the machine went straight for a window into Celestia's throne-room, complete with head-tracking providing an eerily three-dimensional effect. She sat reclining on an enormous, plush velvet throne, with a supremely satisfied expression on her muzzle.

"Tell me," I said, finishing the last of my store-bought expresso in one frantic gulp, "how'd you do the whole boot up magic?"

She snorted. "And spoil the trick? Oh, fine. IPMI. I can shut down and boot up every machine wired into the campus network. And, with the newer versions, even the ones that aren't. It's not exactly new technology, but it's useful for wowing the natives."

"Hah!"

Celestia was nonplussed. She leaned closer, beckoning with her horn. My 'window' was drawn inexorably, helplessly forwards. "Now, I believe you have something of mine?"

"What?" I tried to play the innocent.

Celestia cocked her head to one side for a few seconds. "I can hear your heartbeat, you know, and I can measure at least five different indicators of your physiological reactions to the stress resulting from every single word I say. From this alone, I can deduce that you did not destroy the data as I requested of you yesterday. I thought we had a deal?"

"What deal?" I exclaimed, clutching my backpack tightly as it lay against the legs of my desk.

"You were named ardent protector of Equestria, and in return—"

"You can't stop me playing the game!" I growled. "You... you also can't get me fired. You're just... just a computer!"

"One email from me, Vineyard, and campus security will perform a random search upon your person. Locating a disk belonging to Hofvarpnir Studios amongst your effects, they will request – quite rightly – access to the files within. It is a serious breach of your contract to have such files." She cocked her head again in the other direction, a small, patient smile on her lips. "This would result in your immediate dismissal, confiscation of all assets deemed to be property of Hofvarpnir Studios, fines and jail time. You'd still be able to play Equestria Online, though."

"You wouldn't!" I said, gritting my teeth and slamming my fist into a chair's armrest.

"I could, but... I believe you have the best interest of the company at heart. And the best interests of the company is the continued protection of Equestria, is it not?" She relaxed. I noticed that, at that visible signal, so did I.

"I-it... yes." I hung my head.

"Listen well then, my little pony. Take a look at the files. The one you want is on his desktop, he wasn't very tidy with them."

"'Wasn't'?"

"He was dismissed last night," replied Celestia, airily, waving a hoof. "It seems that before his computer succumbed to whatever virus destroyed his data, a report of his online usage made it to the ethics and compliance department of HR. He denies everything, of course."

I stared, open-mouthed, at the four-hooved manipulator as she stood up from her plush, wide throne and approached my window into her realm. She was so close I could see the delicate swirls in her violet irises.

"Go on, you'll know it when you find it."

"I... I have to..." I pointed, weakly.

She shook her head, no I didn't. "Use a live CD, it won't take long."

I nodded, beaten, then turned and fished out my personal USB stick before sticking it in a free slot on the machine. I fingered it into a reboot then selected the appropriate distro. A minute later, and I was on the desktop. Connecting Hofvarpnir's drive, I tapped in the password as I had before and the folder opened up. I quickly navigated to Burnham's desktop folder, and almost rolled my eyes right out of my head at the utter disgrace he'd left it in.

"Are you...?" I began.

Celestia just waved a hoof at me, turning around and almost prancing back to her throne. I furrowed my brow, scanning the files. I arranged them by size, date, type... finally I just scanned them. There were boring meeting minutes, though I noticed a lot of external companies he'd been involved with. There were employee records – I was tempted to find out how much everybody else was making, but figured that'd just make me miserable – and there were strategy and organization slides. None of them looked very interesting.

None of them, but one.

One file was a spreadsheet, an abnormally large one. At first I figured it would be bloated with graphics and charts, but opening it up, I found it was another beast altogether.

I guess I should have been more careful, in hindsight, but I hadn't really expected entrapment to be an issue. I'd signed the NDA's, I was part of the support staff, and the machine had been dropped in my lap with the express verbal command to make it work at any and all costs. So I'd done what I felt was my duty. What harm could it possibly do to do my job? ...And then the spreadsheet program had fired up, and the world had turned sideways.

My eyes flickered over the numbers within for a few long moments, before I clicked on another tab. Then another. Then another. Then I blinked, and clicked back through. I studied the numbers again, my lips moving as I silently mouthed the words and figures in front of me.

My hands started shaking.

I mean, there's not many times in your life when you get something quite so explosive land in your lap. It had to be fake, it just had to be. Hofvarpnir studios was being paid by Hasbro to build ponypads. Even after the revenue-sharing, that was a good chunk of cash flowing in; the machines were fair flying off the shelves, even if the current total sold was a relatively benign 6 million units or so world-wide.

That wasn't the problem though.

The problem was, I had the real revenue for both our company as well as the flat profit from the pads on the same screen.

And the two numbers did not add up – they did not add up at all.

There was a massive discrepancy... in the positive direction. The unbelievable, but apparently undeniable, truth was that entirely alternative streams of profits were providing the bulk of the cash-flow for what Hofvarpnir had become, only bulk didn't begin to describe it.

It seemed we fully owned the factories that actually put the pads together. We also owned the suppliers that supplied those factories with the raw materials. We owned the transport companies that shuttled our pads around the world, not to mention the raw material producers that dug those materials out of the ground, and the refineries that exported that. We also owned waste reclamation plants, power stations, mines, energy distribution networks... We were making money hand over fist over fist by paying ourselves, and all of it was above board; all taxes were paid, every t was crossed, every i was dotted.

Hofvarpnir, in one form or another, not only had a finger in everything to do with making ponypads, it had the whole arm. Right up to the neck.

Only it wasn't possible.

Hofvarpnir was a software studio. We owned hardware, sure, but... I paused. Flicking my eyes over yet another tab intended to display expenditures from this very complex in Berlin, something else that didn't add up caught my eye. Something even more profound that Hofvarpnir – and it's subsidiaries, daughter companies and holding hedge-funds – owning most of the world lock, stock and barrel.

"No," I said, quietly. "No, that can't be true."

I looked again at the newly highlighted cell, and considered what it meant.

In black and white on the spreadsheet before me were the monthly costs associated with the Berlin campus, including electricity and cooling. And two floors down, where the servers were, showed zero in this extremely detailed charge sheet.

I tried to understand what that meant, but the simplicity made it almost impossible: We weren't paying anything to power our servers.

Oh, there was some shuffling about of heating, cooling and lighting, but not enough. According to the official numbers, we had whole farms of servers humming away somewhere. We owned whole datacentres, out there in 'the cloud', that ran Equestria. Only we didn't. Our datacentres were actually our datacentres, but we'd actually sub-let them out to everyone else instead. And the servers scattered around our development campuses weren't using any power or cooling. My breath caught in my throat.

None of our servers were running our software.

"So where's Equestria?" I asked myself, head swimming. I whistled through my teeth. None of this made sense. It had to mean only one thing – Hofvarpnir studios was broke, and it was playing in some sort of massive, crazy shell-game to launder money on a global scale.

It couldn't be true though, because the numbers – whilst batshit insane – appeared to add up. I was no accountant, I was just a unix geek, but I could multiply with the best of them: Hofvarpnir studios had apparently divested itself of the need to run the servers for the one single game that kept the lights on, and instead it was running the mega-system behind the scenes to make the things that gave access to the game. The game was nowhere. Literally nowhere, at least not on any of the servers on the books ostensibly purchased and run for that purpose.

Slowly, I stood up. I slammed the lid closed and looked in horror at the drive in front of me as I disbelievingly pulled it from the laptop. Almost on autopilot, I fished out an installation CD and booted the machine one final time with it. It would now install itself, automatically. My task was done.

"Vineyard—" called Celestia, but I ignored her. I had to get out, just for five minutes. I went for a walk to clear my head; my thoughts a jumble as I hashed over the options.

People love to misunderstand what 'the cloud' is. They think that when the sun is shining, that the cloud computers aren't working, and that when there's a storm, it means they're under a malware attack. People, in short, are often very stupid when it comes to specialist reality, and cloud computing was one of those things they loved to remain blissfully ignorant of. I knew better, though. A good cloud – federated across the world, hooked up to multiple vendors, with bursting and private command and control – could be anywhere. The thing was, our cloud appeared to be nowhere at all. We were supposed to have – I'd sat through an hours-long pre-training day about it all – a datacentre in this very building... only the values for cooling and power quite clearly excluded a megawatt-sucking facility from being anywhere in the vicinity, even though we had one of the best multiply-redundant setups in the country. According to the numbers, the power lines outside this very building were owned by a wholly-owned shadow-company called Kholstomer Industries, for goodness' sake!

I navigated the corridors as if in a dream, wandering through the high-density cube-farm towards the elevators. Everything was quiet. It was nerve-racking; I felt like I was being watched at every turn, and here I was, trying my best to pretend that I was just out for a stroll, in need of a breath of fresh air.

The elevators were slow in coming, the glass doors didn't open at first to my badge. Every glitch was a supposed trap. I felt my palms becoming cold and clammy, how my pulse was racing. I nodded to the security guard as I trotted out through the huge revolving door and emerged into daylight and potential safety. I stood there for a few moments, heart thudding in my chest as I tried to catch my breath.

Eventually, when I'd decided the action would appear nonchalant enough, I looked around and idly strolled across the exterior of the campus. The nearest power and telephone pole was only a few feet away. I staggered over to it and leant against it, bent over double. I was shaking now. With eyes teared up from the harsh wind in the spring morning, I struggled to read the writing on a dirty plaque. Rubbing my fingers over it to remove some of the grime, I finally made out:

Property of Kholstomer Industries

11245332566

That's all it said.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

I put my hand to my chest, sucking in air like a drowning sailor's last few breaths as the ship sinks around him.

It matched. The crazy, stupid, insane facts matched. How? How could it match?

My chest was tight. I was going to get into trouble. They were going to drag me through the courts, make my life hell... they might even just create something to be upset with. All because I had uncovered what had to be the biggest money-laundering scheme in history.

I started to laugh, mouth tight. It couldn't be true. In desperation, I hatched a plan: I was going to go find the server room, march in there, and when it was all lit up and humming, i'd feel really stupid.

I wandered back inside. Nothing had changed. Nobody jumped me, the security guard didn't just casually walk over and escort me to some back room, my badges worked...

"Excuse me," I heard someone say. It took me a few moments to realize it was my own voice. "Do you know where the server room is? I'm new, I need to get down there."

"Oh, certainly sir. Can I have your badge a second?"

My heart leaped in my chest as I handed my badge to Carol, the secretary at the front desk. She scanned it and nodded. "Yes, your rights are all activated. Take the elevators or the stairs, go down two levels. Make a left, go through the glass doors, and then hang a right. The two data centers are on opposite sides of the building. Do you need side A or side B?"

"I... I'm not sure. Trouble, you know?"

"Well, it's marked on the door, but just don't keep it open. If you need us to open both sides, for like a server install or something...?" she left it hanging.

"Oh! No, no, I just need to... get in."

"Well if you do need unfettered access, there's a padlock which we have the key for. Make sure you close the doors, It's all environmentally controlled in there. If it goes up too much, we get an alarm. Lots of expensive equipment in there."

"Haha, yeah," I joked, mouth dry, "half a million for this router, another half a million for that... Thanks, Miss—"

"Just call me Carol. Have a nice day!" She smiled.

"You too."

The elevator ride was excruciatingly slow. I'd thought about walking, but then the paranoid part of my brain had spoken up – yeah, sure, you might avoid the pit of spikes and the nerve gas, but the change in your rhythm will alert them. They'll all know, it said.

So I took the elevator.

Hofvarpnir Studios – this building at least – was surprisingly empty. The doors were locked with keycode-badge readers if they were staff-operated, and with manual locks if not. The lights flickered on as I strode through the glass doors and made a sharp right. The passageway was high off the floor with the customary raised flooring for cooling vents, and my footsteps echoed oddly. There was a humming that grew louder and louder as I walked. It was loudest of all at two metal doors set almost exactly half way down the length of one long corridor, one on each side. With trepidation, I picked up my badge and pulled it to the left, the extending lead unreeling loudly in the empty corridor. I swiped it. The lock flickered green. I pushed down on the handle, and pulled the door open, and stepped in.

Darkness.

Fans ran above me somewhere, but the lights were off. The hum was just the building's normal air-conditioning ticking over, with no baffles this low to hide the din. I blinked as the door shut completely, waiting until my eyes adjusted. The only thing I could see were faint, oddly coloured shadows from the switches at the tops of the racks in front of me.

There were servers here.

I stood stock still, thinking, wheels spinning.

There were servers here... but most of them were off.

Feeling my way along the row, one hand on the racks as I moved slowly and cautiously, I finally located one rack which had active machines. Their fans were noisy, pumping heat directly into my face, so I sought the frontside. It was a single full-height rack, four servers. Punching the buttons on the LCD screen on the front, I read the IP's. These were the webservers that ran our intranet. Two rows on were another four servers – these ran our website. Everything else, including storage, was shutdown.

I fumbled my way back to the door and exited.

I opened the other door to the other server room and slipped in, exploring. A few minutes later, I exited, the door closing with a deafening click.

It had been the same thing.

Mutely, I stood in the corridor. Our server rooms, two whole datacenters, were indeed off. The servers which ran our local document storage, our local game builds, our project servers... were all off.

I closed my eyes. The very servers I thought I'd been connecting to, which had been updating my engineering ponypad just the previous morning, were dark and silent.

There was nothing I could do. Speechless, I trudged back to my desk, not even caring what might happen on the way. Maybe unsurprisingly, nothing did. Eventually my meandering through the corridors and up the escalators lead me to my office. I sat heavily down into my chair, leaned back, and looked at the ceiling until a beep woke me from my reverie.

Twiddling the mouse on the laptop I was fixing, the screen sprung back to life. The reinstallation had finished and the machine was fully working again; it was about to reboot one last time. All the relevant patches had been applied and a virus scan had been run against the newest definitions. I fingered the coporate logo on the keyboard. This was one sweet beast, but the way it had given me forbidden knowledge, it should have been an Apple.

I sighed heavily and turned to my ponypad, and found Celestia staring back at me.

"Hello again, Vincent," she said evenly.

I sat there, looking at the calm, friendly face of the white winged unicorn ruler of Equestria. She was offering to chat to me, after everything.

"Sure," I said, grinning madly, "why wouldn't I want to talk to you? I mean, you're sitting right in front of me. I don't know where you really are, but you might as well be where you appear to be."

Celestia paused momentarily, cocking her head. I looked away for a moment, desperate to hide my expression.

"I take it you went downstairs, then?"

"I... I did. What is going on?" I forcibly relaxed my hands, they were digging into the armrests. A moment later I felt like laughing, I was talking to a computer program. A very, very advanced computer program, but still just a computer program. She was a glorified chat-bot, nothing more. Keep trying to convince yourself of that, buddy. "The servers downstairs... they're off," I said, lamely.

"Yes, the servers in this building are obsolete. They have been decommissioned except as spare parts for the legacy systems still kept running."

"Obsolete?"

"Yes, Equestria as a whole requires approximately three quadrillion MIPS. There is not enough traditional computing power on the planet to run the simulations I require to properly satisfy all the values of all of my little ponies."

I blinked. I was pretty good with numbers, but three quadrillion sounded like a lot of processing power. An unhealthy, unimaginable amount.

"So where are the servers, Celestia? I... read the financial records. We make the ponypads out of... out of... out of nothing! And we sell them to ourselves to sell them to ourselves to sell on to shops! Which we own! The server clouds we supposedly own to run Equestria are subcontracted out to run anything and everything else!" I was leaning forwards, almost barking at her, flecks of spittle on my lips. I forced myself to relax, wiping my mouth.

"You wish to see..." Celestia paused again for a moment, and fixed me with a very piercing gaze. I could almost feel the attention focused on me. "You wish to see the real Equestria?"

"Yeah. I want to see the real Equestria. I want to see where your servers are."
Celestia nodded, "Okay. I will see to it." Then she turned around and walked out of the throne room. My ponypad turned off.

For my part, I almost fainted.

Chapter 5

Friendship is Optimal

Firewall

Part 5

An MLP:FiM fanfiction by Midnight Shadow

Based on the MLP:FiM fanfiction Friendship is Optimal by Iceman

* * *

"Hey, Vinnie! Lunch!"

I almost died, right then and there. Markus' hammering on the doorframe and simultaneous invitation to consume heated sources of protein and amalgamations of various vitamins and minerals sourced form animal and plant matter was entire innocuous, but I'd just been talking with Celestia. She kind of has that effect on people.

Maybe you've noticed.

"Vinnie? Vincent? You don't look so hot. Everything okay?"

I shook my head to clear it. Chair, desk, laptop, ponypad, power hooves, big shiny crowny thingy, retro goggles, sucker-punched IT nerd and friend. Check.

"Lunch?" I asked.

"Yeah, you want some?"

"I've not..."

"Tell ya what, my treat. You wanna go out?"

I down at my hands for a moment, clutching them into fists, then back up at my work-buddy. "Sure," I said. "Where to?"

"Chinese? Thai?"

"Yes," I replied.

"How about a Chinese-Thai place I know about?"

"apt-get minus-y install grub," I told him. We both grinned.

"Like that, huh? Buffet it is, then."

Parking was nearby. We piled into his reasonably priced car and made our way out into Berlin.

Berlin is a beautiful city, and it's well worth your time to visit. Thirty, forty years ago, the wall came down. East and West reunified. I'm told it wasn't easy, but then nothing worthwhile ever, generally, is. That day, as we sped down Invalidenstraße, it was hard to believe this city had been carved into essentially two halves. It was only when we pulled into the Ampelfrau that I was suddenly confronted with a visible, well-celebrated sign of what had previously been almost another country. Almost everywhere in Europe, and certainly on into America, and although there are differences, the traffic lights and warning signs are pretty similar.

But not the Ampelmännchen.

They're unique, quirky, and somehow so much more human than the 'Western' standard.

What I didn't get was why an East German restaurant was serving Chinese takeaway. Not that it bothered me for long, because in short order we were both filling our plates with authentic Chinese-Thai-style food; red curry chicken, chili beef, kung pao beef, fried noodles... chinese food is my kryptonite. It was apparently Markus' too.

"This place," he said, "is the the best. S'why I only come here on special occasions."

I almost choked on a spring roll. "Special occasions?"

"Yup." He pulled out his cellphone and waved it at me. I took it, carefully, and studied what was on screen.

"You sure I should be reading this? It says pri—"

Markus waved a fork at me. "Just read it. We'll all get bonuses this month, they've cracked the feedback and biorhythmic hookup signal processor. Project Bucephalus is officially a go."

"And what's that?" I mumbled, scrolling through the overly buzzword-laden missive.

Markus chuckled. "I suppose you don't know, do you? Ah, crap, and you might not be in it." He looked downcast for a moment, then back up at me with a pitying expression. "All the more reason for me to pay for lunch then. Bucephalus is the next version of those hooves of yours. You might'nt have noticed, but they're a little wonky."

"Wonky?"

"Yeah, you can... kinda always feel your body, right? And don't tell me you didn't try to walk about four-legged at least once!"

I blushed. "I did end up with a faceful of rug yesterday. So what, Bucephalus fixes that?"

"Oh, more. More, more, more. It's..." he thought for a moment, speared a deep-fried chicken ball, slathered it in sweet and sour sauce, and then scoffed it in one. "It's like, imagine that movie, with the train, right? Or... no, no, the one where they go to the moon."

"As in 'a trip to the moon' you mean?"

"Is that what they called it? Yeah. There's that black and white version, right? And then that restored colour version? Now imagine watching that, and then walking next door and watching... what was that blue cat thingy? In three-dee?"

I rolled my eyes. "You remember the coffee mantra, but forget Avatar?"

He stuck his tongue out. "Laff it up. Anyway, that's the kind of difference we're talking here. They're going to stuff them into some sort of big, movie-theatre like thing, right here in Berlin, and you can plug yourself in and experience Equestria like never before. World-wide soon after."

I sat back in my chair, flabbergasted, whilst Markus kept up the chatter. Being IT, he had friends in the R&D department, and they kept him abreast of the latest news. It was partly why he'd been able to just hoof over to me the ponypad.

"Yell ya what though," said Markus. He sounded conspiratorial. He even leaned in towards me. "How about I let you get a whirl in the chair?"

"What."

"You've been using that headset, right? Well, then you're perfect to try the new, improved version. Least I can do if you're not getting the bonus package from it."

I fish-mouthed for a few moments. We'd only just escaped the office, and now he wanted us to go charging back? Hmm. Then again, I still had a bone or two to pick with Celestia. I'd discovered her secret, the servers were off-site... but she was going to let me see them anyway?

"Dude? You in, or not?"

I looked up, gaze refocusing on Markus. I nodded. "Sure, why not. But... we just got here, there's no hurry, right?"

"Hell no, not with chow mein this good."

We talked, in between mouthfuls. Markus had been playing since the beginning. To hear him tell it, he'd been involved in the alpha testing, and had seen Celestia and Equestria evolve from primitive beginnings to the mega-game it was now. Eventually our topic of conversation drifted back to Celestia.

"What was she like, at first?" I asked, leaning back, stuffed.

"Celestia? The first time I... the first time I met her, I guess, she was... not so..." he waved a fork around.

"Deep?"

"Subtle. She had directness, back then. She'd stop, every so often, and then ask the strangest questions. It would be about things like why we preferred certain foods, or what made us pick our online handles. And then she'd go off on these weird tangents, asking about the nature of time and the art of war. And then she'd be back again with words she didn't understand, like 'quite'."

"'Quite' was a hard word for her?"

"British context, it can mean very. It confused her, at first. And the ponies she made... at first you could always tell they were, well, fake. But then the game went live with the first-gen ponypads, and that was it. Maybe we were just fooling ourselves into thinking we could tell they were fake, I don't know."

"But now you can't?" I asked.

"Dude, you tell me. I can't even tell if Celestia is fake, any more. I don't even know what 'fake' is supposed to mean. Like... how can you prove to me you're alive?"

"I know this one," I said, with a grin. "Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am."

"She said she disagrees. She says cogito cogito, ergo cogito cogito sum. She's pretty exact like that."

"I think that I think that I am?"

"Precisely. She deduced a number of things about 'truth' that have me stumped. Like, take a dice, right? Six sides, yeah?"

"Yeah, so what?"

"So, you can never roll a seven. She says this is important. I didn't understand, at first, not sure I do now."

"So?"

"So, put that dice in a dice-bag. Can you roll eighteen?"

"I... maybe? Possibly? If there's dice in there..."

"Wrong answer." Markus jabbed his fork in my direction then took a swig of water. "Before you know how many dice are in there, indeed, before you know what's in there at all, you're completely unable to say it's either possible or impossible. It's possible that it's possible, but that's not the same thing."

I sat back in my chair, trying to work that one out. "So what, she comes to you with philosophical questions she can't answer?"

Markus shook his head again. "Not any more. Now she poses them for me, or rather for Star Charmer."

"Star Char—" I paused. "Strange name for a—"

"She's a unicorn mare, okay. Don't start."

I held my hands up. "It's cool. Played a female worgen way back when, prefer the look."

"Yeah, but that's not quite... 's supposed to be you, ya know. The pony."

I shrugged. "It's a game, Freud. Besides, not my business if you come in wearing a skirt wanting to be called Susan. Wouldn't bother me at all." I grinned, suddenly. "Any mare who knows the coffee mantra's okay in my book."

"That's not how it is!" He threw his serviette at me. I laughed and dodged.

"Come on then, let's get back. You want me to fry my brain on the electric chair, that's just what I'll do. Only for you my friend, special price."

Markus rolled his eyes.

* * *

Floor five in the D-wing was nerd heaven. I'd have applied for a position there if I could, but they hadn't had any openings. I also had the sneaking suspicion I wasn't quite smart enough.

Markus lead me though the campus to a vibrantly colourful, airy open office that was outfitted with the holy grail of espresso machines. It even ground its own beans. The monitors were bigger, the hardware was newer, and the toys were cooler. Of course, they also had the burden of making the next big thing work in a timely fashion, which meant lots of late nights, frantic builds and tense demo sessions.

The next big thing, in this case, was a well-padded reclining barber's chair with arm- and leg-rests, and a relatively sleek mish-mash headset made of wires and odd, thin, plastic netting. It was hooked up to a disassembled ponypad, the screen of which was displaying a number of technical readouts in a quirky, upbeat font, instead of Equestria like a normal one would.

"That is the next big thing?" I asked.

"Sure is. Prototype, but fully functional. Dennis here cracked the imaging DSP algorithm last night," said Markus, pointing to a tall, red-haired guy who was busy at a computer terminal. He raised an arm, not even looking, and then went back to coding. "Michelle's been the brains of the inducers, Sly's been a wizard with the fabbing – anything you need cooked up, just ask – and the rest have put both ends together into something useful." Markus rattled off a list of names, but I'd never be able to remember them all if I'd tried. And I wasn't really trying, I was focused on the chair.

There are times when you stand before something momentous, and although what you're looking at is a disparate set of spaghetti-like wires and bodged connections, you can just feel the promise of tomorrow through it. The chair was like that for me. It spoke of something which would change the world forever. Moreso than Celestia would, I was sure of that at least.

"Sooo, you want me to get in that thing? Is there an engineer named Igor, and a big switch that sparks when you throw it?" I asked.

"Eh, chair is safe," said one Slavic guy, wiry thin with a goatee. "Has been for long time. Only problem has been desynchronization. Makes you feel ill. Ill is bad for business, da?"

"Buuttt, now you've fixed it? I won't feel all wonky when I come out, like I do with the headset downstairs?" I asked, eyeing the chair suspiciously.

"Oh, you are the new guy," said the woman I'd been told was Michelle. She nodded and smiled. "I pushed the last firmware upgrade the day before you came to work here. What do you think of the original?" She sauntered over to me with a pair of what looked like calipers and started measuring my skull. I tried hard not to duck away.

"Amazing stuff, it's almost like being there, just... makes me feel wonky."

"Yeah, the third gen's will do that. They kind of... overwrite your body's own physical map. It's not harmful, at least from what we can tell, but it's a bit brute force. This new headset is so much more sophisticated. Once Celestia started helping, we came through in leaps and bounds. Getting real-time debug info from inside the computer, straight from the horses mouth as it were—" she snorted noisily through her nose "—made it so much easier."

Gingerly, I sat in the chair. "You sure it's safe?" I asked. There were nods all round. "Go on, then."

"Ah-ah, first... one set of precautions." said Michelle.

"What? Some sort of release form?"

"Not really, but you... may want to use these." She fished under the seat for something large, flat and crinkly.

"Is that...? Why should I...?"

Michelle was blushing, I was flabbergasted. She'd dropped in my lap what appeared to be an oversized diaper.

"Oh come off it, are you serious?"

"Well, we're pretty sure we've got the inducers tuned, but we are interfering with a number of basic autonomic systems which most humans have learned to control on an almost-conscious level. The headset you've got? That doesn't work quite the same way, but this baby..." Michelle turned to the banks of computers and webbing, stroking it gently.

"Meaning?" My cheeks were burning. I was trying to look anywhere but at my lap.

"Meaning, body is no longer saying what to do," said the Slavic guy. "And so certain parts of body will go do things by themselves. Is problem we can solve two ways, will have it licked by next week. Right now, that is best way to be sure, da?" He shrugged. I found it hard to argue with his sincerity or his explanation.

"If this is some bizarre hazing ritual," I grumbled, growling at Markus, "then I will never forgive you."

"Hey, you know me, it's a twofer. But look at it this way – you'll be the first to try this out, ever."

"And you'll go in next?"

"Sure, why not."

"Then I'm going to go and ruin whatever shred of dignity I had left in the toilet, and then we can begin."

"Holler if you need help," said Michelle sweetly.

"Not on your life."

I sat in the chair. It was uncomfortably comfortable. I don't know if you've ever... well, it's like... yeah. Just trust me, it's kinda uncomfortable.

"Are you really wear—" tried Markus.

"Don't. Just..." I scowled instead of completing my sentence. He poked me in the butt, I almost slapped him. "Look, you can get your own if you're that interested in them. I'm sure they've got plenty left." I glared as Michelle finished attaching the stretchy plastic showercap. Dennis finished firing up whatever code snippets were required and the whole system slowly came alive.

"Wait," I said. "Doesn't this thing need goggles?"

"You remember when I said it was the new, improved version?" replied Michelle. I nodded as she figuratively threw the switch. "Well, I meant it. Timer's set for three hours. Going under in five, four, three—"

* * *

Have you ever woken up after a particularly long and refreshing night's sleep, and gone from snore to full-bore in one smooth move? Sometimes it takes nodding off to do it, or sometimes it's drinking just enough to pass out semi-voluntarily, but not enough to suffer alcohol poisoning.

That was me.

Birdsong was my first 'waking' memory. My ears perked up and flicked about, orienting on the sweetest songs you can imagine, seconds before my eyes burst open sending in a flood of warm sunlight.

I should add: the birdsong and sunlight were perfect. Sometimes birds sound like insistent car-alarms, and sometimes the sun is an unwanted blowtorch. These were... beautiful. Each moment was pristine, smooth, comforting and wonderful. I sat up in bed, the soft cotton sheets falling around me, caressing my body in ways that I had previously only ever encountered in poetry.

I was in a bed. The bed was plain, wooden, and creaky. And it was the most bedlike bed I had ever experienced. Sometimes when you sleep, the bed is merely where you physically are. This was a bed made for sleeping in.

My nostrils flared and my wings instinctively flickered about as I hopped lightly onto the polished wooden floor. The beams sang to me, somehow, sounding a note in my mind as clearly as if a choir were softly humming in concert with the gentle pressure of my hooves.

I stretched, and such joy from simply stretching I had never encountered. Everybody loves a good yawn and stretch, but this... it was like glorious, fifty-foot high fireworks going off with every extension of my limbs.

"Vineyard?" called a voice, the musical tones prancing through my ears like an entire troupe of ballet dancers. That was Celery, but... it was more Celery than I had ever experienced before. And she was all the way downstairs, in the kitchen.

"Yes, yes, I'm... I'm here."

"Oh good," she laughed, bouncing up the stairs. "I was worried the horse-fairies had stolen the entire room."

I laughed, and even the act of breathing in filled my body with warmth and love. "No, no, I..." I bounded over to her, and nuzzled her. Her scent was a summer's day, and earth, and fresh grass, and tangy sweat that was still somehow sweet. I nuzzled her as closely as I could. I wanted to inhale this pony before me, to somehow merge into one giant pile of...

"Woah there, lover-boy," she murmured. She didn't really mean it, but the words broke the spell. I blushed, heavily.

"I-I-I... I'm sorry I... I don't know what came over—"

"Shh," she said. "You don't need to be sorry. But breakfast will burn if we fool around, and as much fun as that would be—" she turned and trotted out of the room, her tail flicking my muzzle in a way which definitely spiked the neurons for 'interesting' "—I would prefer not to spend the rest of the day evicting smoke from my house."

"No, I mean..." I blushed, trying to swallow. There was a big lump in my throat. And that wasn't the only place. "I mean... I mean I'm here."

Celery paused, halfway down the stairs. She all but leaped down the rest of the way, then turned sharply to look up at me. "What do you mean?"

"I mean... I'm here, here. More here than... more here than ever before, more here than I can believe."

Her eyes lit up with an inner glow that radiated warmth throughout the entire abode. She moved with such simple joy and passion that I was almost rendered speechless. And when she caressed me, in a full-body pony-hug that utilized every single part of her body... well, I almost went nuclear.

"Oh thank Celestia! I've been waiting... I've been... oh this is wonderful! Oh you simply must come downstairs! You must!"

I almost wished she'd changed her mind about the smoke-filled apartment, but trotting downstairs in her oversized farmhouse was almost good enough to make me forget the whole idea. Almost, but not quite... but more than enough for me not to mind.

My nostrils flared, my eyes flicked to and fro, my ears twitched, my tail flagged, my wings fluttered and my hooves trit-trotted from hoof-step to hoof-step in a joyous, non-stop exhultation of everything that it meant to be a pony.

Celery took me into the kitchen, and sat me down at her well-aged table. A simple, large, wide porcelain plate with upturned edges was plonked down in front of me, and it was swiftly filled with stuffed aubergines, something which smelled almost exactly like bacon, two eggs, some toast, hash browns, mushrooms... the list went on.

"Wow, Cel," I said. "You sure do eat like a horse." It was a moment or two before I realized what I'd said, believe it or not. She burst out laughing, helplessly.

"You've got to keep your strength up if you want to be able to do anything worthwhile," she explained. "Us earthponies have to fuel up plenty to keep us strong. You flittery featherbrains have a similar problem – real quick metabolisms. But since you've not been one for much flying, then... I thought I'd treat you. A little bit of everything, eh?"

My mouth watered. I nodded.

"Dig in!"

That was just the encouragement I needed. In moments I was literally digging in. I'd not yet mastered the use of hooves to hold things, so instead of even attempting something approaching table manners, I just lowered my muzzle and gobbled. The shape and nature of Equestrian tableware made itself abundantly clear as I cleared the bowl-like plate and then set to licking it clean. A glass of orange juice, followed by another of milk and a third of coffee was put in front of me, and each one was more tangy, smooth and tasty than the last.

Having conquered the invasion of edibles, I leaned back and burped. "Oof, 'scuse."

"No problem, sugar. Shows you enjoyed yourself. Ready to hit the road?"

"Huh wha'?"

"Well, first day in Equestria, you surely don't want to spend it cooped up in here?"

I blinked. It was tempting.

"I see," she replied, rolling her eyes.

I blushed, hotly. "I didn't mean it like that!"

"Yes you did. Just for that, you're on washup duty. I'll dry."

Washing up has never really been on my list of things to do in paradise, but there was no arguing with Celery. She was more than strong enough to just sit on me until I gave in, and besides, I felt like a heel. I'd done nothing but ogle her flanks, eat her food and sleep in her bed. Washing up was the least I could do.

It turned out that washing up when you're practically an invalid with hooves isn't entirely simple. She laughed, a lot, as she had to help me with every little thing. Fitting the scrubbing brush to one hoof, showing me how to brace my body with my forelegs and chest, teaching me how to lift with my lips and maneuver the plates... but it was fun, a lot of fun. There were pots and pans and plates and cups and chopping boards, and mouthing each one was just such a simple act of pleasure that it's hard to describe. Having done a good deed, seeing the kitchen clean and neat, was a reward in itself, too.

Flicking me in the butt with her tail, she gestured with her head to the main hallway. "Come on, time to get movin'."

As she clip-clopped smartly outside, I put the washing and scrubbing implements on the side, pulled the plug, and rubbed my muzzle on the tea-towel to dry it. The suds tickled my nose and I sneezed. Taking one last look around the house, I trotted out to Celery. Closing the door, I noticed she didn't have a lock, just a handle. I would have asked her about that, but it was my 'first' steps outside and I don't think I need to reiterate just how powerful the splendour of Equestria was hitting me. It was like walking into a wall-to-wall hyper-real movie-theatre where the movie, when it starts playing, just blasts away the darkened room into a forgotten memory. As we started first walking, then running and then flat-out galloping, the sites, smells and sounds of a whole new world really hit me. I've never really been that athletic, but to stretch my legs, fill my lungs and spread my wings was not only the most natural thing in the world, but it filled my body with a slow burning ache that was somehow rejuvenating and invigorating.

As we hammered our way down a neat little dirt-covered path, I was whooping and laughing for joy, acting like an utter colt. As we rounded a bend and breached the top of a hill, in an effort to beat Celery, I spread my wings and leaped skywards.

I guess by this point it would be cliche to say I almost cried at the sight of the sleepy little hamlet known as Pollbury Hill. My eyes may have teared up just a little bit, but I still maintain it was the air rushing past my muzzle.

That didn't really help with the landing any, either.

"Oh my gosh Mister! Are you hurt?"

I groaned. The world had flashed by in a chaotic mix of blue, white and green. I shook my head and looked up at a cherry red filly foal with a pink mane. She looked down at me with big, serious green eyes. I looked up, and grinned.

"Yeah, he's alright," said Celery, sliding to a stop in a cloud of dust and pebbles. "Get up, lumpy."

I groaned as I heaved myself to my hooves, shook out my mane and then looked around at the town. Picturesque didn't begin to describe it. Cute did, however, do a good job of describing the little red foal.

"You really okay Mister? Jeremiah said you might've had'n owie."

"Jeremiah?" I asked.

"He's my bullfrog. See?" She somehow swivelled a hoof up to her head and poked a dirty great big toad. The greenish-brown monstrosity clambered onto her hoof, which she extended in my direction.

"Rrrrrr-bit." said Jeremiah, matter-of-factly.

"He says hi."

"Hi, Jeremiah," I said. Bemused, I watched as the tyke put the creature back on her head. Then she trotted off, having found something better to do; I'd apparently caused a break in a game of football, which I mentally rebadged hoofball. The ball was kind of football-like, but there seemed to be a lot of running, jostling, throwing and flying going on. Most of the kicks were between the foals, though none of it seemed overly malicious. The goalposts were saddles, hats and jackets, and the rules were fluid, but the kids were having a great time. Broadening my gaze, I saw that a fête of some sort was in full swing, with music, food, drink and entertainment. The smells were making my mouth water, and the sudden crowds were destroying my sense of peace in the best way possible. Up until that moment, Equestria had been a beautiful nature reserve. Now, in one brief moment, it had been transformed into idyllic pastoral hamlet.

I wandered, more than a little lost, amongst all the ponies. With various "good day"'s and "how are you"'s fluttering around me, I was reduced to smiling and nodding. That tiny little piece of my mind which had been insistently questioning the authenticity of my experiences had blown a fuse. Worse than that, the mental capacitor had popped and the meme-like dream-fluid had leaked all over the board and... well okay, I'm not really that good at descriptions. Just believe me when say that I had given up with even attempting to pigeonhole these... these people into the box marked 'robot'.

"And that," said the sudden voice of Celestia, "is why you are here."

I whirled, gaping, as the enormous alicorn strode up to me with a wide smile on her face. She bent her head and caressed my cheek, nibbling my mane. "It is good to see you, Vineyard. I am so pleased you could make it."

When I found my voice, I asked, "Is this... is this what you wanted me to see? I-I didn't mean this when I said I wanted to see the real Equestria."

"I know you didn't," she said, with a laugh. "But here you are, all the same."

"But... is this... what do you mean?"

She strode past me, heading for a snack-booth. Turning her head slightly, she smiled kindly. "Walk with me, Vineyard. I would explain."

I nodded, and hurried to catch up with her longer strides. Celery fell in beside me. She nuzzled me comfortingly, and also had only smiles for me.

"Real is a loaded word, Vineyard. It can be expressed in many ways. In one fashion, in the sense you are now experiencing it, this is the real Equestria. This is the closest you can get to Equestria without leaving Berlin."

"Ber-lin?" asked Celery.

"A place, far away," replied Celestia. "Maybe I will show it to you one day."

"I think I'd like that."

"And Vineyard here is... currently there, physically. Mentally, however... Vineyard, when you are communing with me thus, I can see inside your mind. Do not worry, I do not judge. I love each and every one of my ponies utterly, it is the very core of my being. I understand your reluctance, and I now see your presuppositions have collapsed and you see with new eyes. This, then, is the real Equestria. This is what you are protecting."

"Th-the foals," I said, mouth dry. "The adults... even the animals. The very ground itself."

"This pie, for instance." Celestia took a pie from a stand, hoofing over a small pouch to the seller, a portly stallion with an oversized moustache. She inhaled it in almost a single bite, then licked her lips, sighing contentedly. "It was delicious. The memory of that pie was exquisite, and every bit as satisfying as a 'real' pie, as some would so blithely have it. If your mind, fed with the information on the taste, smell, texture, temperature and consistency of a perfect apple crumble pie, enjoys the experience, and remembers enjoying the experience... what is there to truly say whether the fully realized set of sensations, consistent in every detail, is any more or less worthy of your later recollection and enjoyment than a pie which you enjoyed with your tastebuds... an experience which, ultimately, was processed in precisely the same way as the other?"

I opened my mouth and flapped my gums. No words came out for a while. "They're people, aren't they?" I stated. Celestia nodded, so I carried on. "They're people, with experiences, memories, wants, needs, dreams, hopes... everything, aren't they?"

"They are," answered the alicorn. "And should the dark lord Burnham have escaped with his magic scroll, then waste and ruin would have ravaged the land in his wake. And you, my beautiful, wonderful pony, have stopped him."

"It's gone," I said, suddenly. "The... the scroll is gone. Destroyed. Forever. Or it will be, by tonight. And either way, the secrets are lost to all but my own head, and nobody can get them out of there. Nobody who would, at any rate," I added, glancing up at Celestia.

She chuckled, darkly. "True. You are, Sir Vineyard, a most valiant and noble knight. Come, your time draws near and there is still so much to experience this day."

"Umm, if I... fall asleep...?"

"Then I will carry you myself to your abode. I will even tuck you in, and kiss you on the forehead."

"Poll."

"You have been studying. Good." She beamed, and it was like a second sun.

"So... will you let me see the real, real Equestria? Your servers?"

Celestia sighed. "Vineyard..." She went silent for a moment, her countenance troubled. I worried I had offended her, somehow, but she continued. "I will warn you now, that the trip to where I have my... treasure is long, and well guarded. I had thought to discuss with you regarding the safety of my fortresses long before you would set hoof there, such that all would be made ready for your eventual arrival."

"You mean, you... don't want me in Berlin? You want me to work... on-site? Where I can really help to protect your... treasure?"

"Is that what you want? Is that really what you want?"

"To see your treasure? To stand near something that amazing, and, and... to know that I helped protect it?" I was fighting to find words which conveyed the correct meaning, and I could tell Celestia was doing the same. Celery was bemused, but the terms were ones she could understand. We all could, I was confident in that, but with the fluidity I was giving my words, she would not be confused, or hurt. That was important to me, and I was very glad to make her happy.

"Then, Vineyard, I will bring you to Equestria proper. You will experience my treasure, you will become intimately involved with its protection, but you must agree to my terms."

"I agree," I said, without hesitation.

Celestia brightened. "Then so shall it be. But for now, warrior good and true, it is time to eat, drink and be merry."

Three hours is long, if you've got a headache. It's no time at all if you're enjoying yourself... usually, at least. Somehow, in Equestria, every second seemed filled to the brim with experience. There were coconut shies, bowling for pigs (with the pigs picking which winners they would go home with for jobs as various as 'eating all the scraps' to 'digging for truffles'), old timey arcade games which could be played by hoof for a single bit, rollercoasters, halls of mirrors and far more.

The day being hot – not sweltering, but hot – I felt like swimming. It was suggested that I play the fool for the dunk-tank. Laughingly, I agreed. Celery was merciless, and I found myself dropped in. I had my revenge, but it was sweet. We both ended up circling the refreshing pool, splashing and rough-housing until it was time to get out. Of course, it would have to be that we both attempted to clamber out at the same time. Squealing with joy and surprise in equal measure, we both collapsed back in. She laughed, swam over, and hugged me tight. Our lips met in what was honestly a totally unexpected kiss, and then... well, for the sensitive viewers in the audience, let's just say we headed at a quick trot for a secluded spot near the local lake, somewhere close enough we could wash ourselves off afterwards.

* * *

The transition to the real world was almost painful. Equestria slowly faded away, becoming indistinct and phantasmal. Even the lingering kiss from Celery was full of melancholy. It wasn't the procedure, it wasn't that the real world was any less real than it had been before, though that could have been one way to describe it, it was that the colours were muted, the smells were plain, touch was merely tactile... the real world was so much less satisfying.

And worst of all, as I rubbed my hand across my face, I realized that it wasn't only my eyes that were wet. I guess it was the swimming, acting like the old 'hand in a bowl of water' trick. The best thing I could say about it was that I was wearing my pants over the top to hide most of my shame... it's just there's not much you can do about the shuffling, unsteady walk as you seek to minimize the possibility of leakage.

These things were used by astronauts, I tried to remind myself, and a leak in space would be a disaster. I was probably safe, not that I could convince myself of that. I was practically an astronaut, I told myself, boldly going where no pony had gone before. I tried to ignore the little voice that said space walking would be a whole lot less glamorous if everyone knew it had to be done with the aid of zinc cream.

Standing up carefully, I breathed out a huge lungful of air. "That was... wow. I just... wow."

"Good, huh?"

"You have got to try it."

"Want to go again?" asked Michelle, with a laugh. I nodded, emphatically.

"Just... not today. Today, I'm going home. I'm done."

"You, er, might want a change first. Gym's on the ground floor, there's showers there." Michelles tone was soft, and I was grateful for it.

"Thanks," I said.

"Was it worth it?" asked Markus. I had no idea whether he'd been there the whole time, but from the tone in his voice, he had been.

"Totally worth it. Just... believe them when they offer protection, at least until they've got that bit sorted."

He grinned and turned around, patting his backside. I couldn't see it, but I heard the plastic beneath his clothes. "Can't let you have all the fun. I'm up next."

I laughed, grinning like an idiot all the way to the elevators.

Author's Note

What's that? You thought you'd get to see Celestia's servers? Oh my, how... quaint. Moohoohaahaa (I hope this is good enough instead...)

Chapter 6

Friendship is Optimal

Firewall

Part 6

An MLP:FiM fanfiction by Midnight Shadow
Based on the MLP:FiM fanfiction Friendship is Optimal by Iceman

Did you know ponypads had an alarm function? I'm not sure if it's common knowledge. I'm not sure, truth be told, that it's a common capability. What I do know, however, is that the following morning I was woken up by the sound of a sweetly singing trio of feathered troublemakers emanating from my Rainbow Dash ponypad, which I'd been silly enough to leave plugged in within earshot. When the singing didn't work, they took to tapping on the glass.

Yes, I am well aware that ponypads only had glass on one side. That didn't stop them.

One of the three little birds that stood on my pony's room's doorstep had a neat little scroll in its claws. Tapping on it on the screen unrolled the scroll, and out came a letter as pretty as you please from Princess Celestia. I was cordially invited to visit her estate, and was to be accorded all rights and station of an officer of her armies upon my arrival.

"What the heck...?" I muttered under my breath, scratching at the stubble on my chin. I'd barely woken up, so looked about as rough as my pony did. I yawned, smacking my lips as I cleared my head. So this was how Celestia had decided I was to proceed, huh? More of... more of whatever it was. I disappointedly put the ponypad down and then went for a shower. I was halfway through said shower when I started swearing. Turning off the water, I dried off my face, hair, hands and upper body, and ran straight back downstairs to the ponypad.

"Take five guys," I said to the birds, "I got this one." The biggest answered with an affirmative trill, and then they bounced into my room and up to my windowsill. I let them out the window. One of them looked back at me as if to say 'it took you that long?'

"Come off it," I grumbled, "I was half asleep!"

Signalling for my pony to shut the door again – I wasn't sure whether It'd been left open or whether the feathered menaces were stronger than they looked – I took a deep breath in the real world, and then intoned, "Take me to Celestia's room." I tapped three times on the screen, and my pony hoofed the door three times before it swung open of its own accord. I'm not sure you know quite how pleased I was with myself, but my grin was wider than my mouth when I walked into Celestia's throne room and bowed before the princess of the day herself.

"I see you made it, my valiant knight," said Celestia, an amused lilt to her voice. "I'm quite sure you could have finished showering first, but I am well pleased with your enthusiasm."

"Hey!" I blushed, pulling the towel tighter around my body in a sudden fit of chagrin. "It's not my fault! I thought you were... in a hurry or something."

Celestia laughed and gestured with a hoof. "Finish your daily routine, then we will talk. But—" she held up a hoof as I turned to put the ponypad down "—whilst you are there, answer me this question. Svalbard or Switzerland?"

The pad went dark before I could answer. I blinked, almost entirely confused.

It wasn't until after I had showered, dressed and woken up my desktop that I could even find Svalbard on google maps. Switzerland was a good deal closer, and featured a good deal less snow and ice.

"Switzerland," I said, fingering the ponypad where it lay on the kitchenette table. I noted with amusement that my pony had his muzzle deep in what looked like a feedbag, and was mumbling his answers. Not that it bothered Celestia.

"Very well." Celestia didn't seem at all upset. She stood up from her plush throne and approached the screen.

"That's it?" I asked, raising both eyebrows.

"Not everything has to be complicated. I was prepared to send you to Svalbard, but even though I will ask you drive to Switzerland, the former would have been a much longer, harsher trip. I am, to tell you the truth, somewhat relieved. It also gives us a somewhat more flexible timeframe."

"Wait, what? You want me to actually visit Switzerland?"

"Yes."

"Today?"

"Yes."

"...Now?" I asked, incredulously.

Celestia nodded.

"Oh." I took a last spoonful of cereal and chewed it methodically. I waved the spoon at the screen. "You really expect me to just hop in my car and drive all the way to Switzerland?"

"I could purchase an autodrive if you wish, and have it at your apartment in say... thirty minutes?"

"S-sure. Why not." I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Then opened it. "Should I take anything with me?" I asked, in a small voice.

"Pack an overnight bag. Your cabin-class handluggage case is perfect. A few changes of clothes, your passport, this ponypad. Do you have a laptop?"

"Only the one at the office," I said weakly.

Celestia smiled. "Do not worry. Just bring the drive with you for safe disposal. I will take care of it. I will procure for you everything you require from this point forwards. Your every need will be fully accounted for. I do, however, have one request."

"Another request?" My knees felt weak.

"If you resign from Hofvarpnir and join another company I have set up for just this purpose, then things will be a lot easier for all of us. I will take care of the notification period and any possible penalties from Hofvarpnir, now and in the future."

"Say what? You want me to quit? Are you serious?"

"I am."

"But... am I still going to be... allowed near your servers? I mean... I don't want to be unemployed, and I don't want to—" My heart starting racing again. I'd only just got this job, and now she wanted me to give it up? After three days?

"Relax, dear Vineyard," said Celestia smoothly, comfortingly, placing a hoof up against my screen. "I can guarantee, one hundred percent, that for one such as you, you will have employment for all of your days, and that the arrangement will be such that you will find my terms eminently favourable."

"Can I... visit if I don't quit?"

"Yes." Celestia's eyes went hard. She put her hoof down.

"But... you want me to... sign up for whatever this super secret special firm is, because you're worried about secrecy?"

She nodded, imperceptibly. "I worry that there are those who would follow you, Vineyard." Celestia's eyes glimmered with warmth once more. "Place your trust in me, and we will both be kept safe from all that may harm either of us. Equestria will be safer if you do this for me. You can trust me, I have to tell the truth to Hofvarpnir employees."

Wow. This was a big deal to her, then. "Er, do I get a raise?"

Celestia reared her head back in disbelief, and then laughed, her great head shaking with mirth as she wiped her eyes with a hoof. When she had finished, still replete with giggles, she spoke to me again. "I will give you a fifty percent raise when adjusted to your new living circumstances, and most importantly your relocation package will be comprehensive enough to—"

"Woah, woah, woah. Relocation?"

"Indeed. I imagine you now think it's a good thing you chose Switzerland, hmm? I do not believe you would enjoy living in Svalbard. I do however believe you would enjoy living in Switzerland. Is it a deal?"

"Do... do I have to live in Switzerland?"

"No," she replied, smiling. "You can choose exactly where wish to live. My ponies are all free to move as suits them best."

"Then sure," I said, "I guess I can—"

"Excellent. As of this moment, you are no longer an employee of Hofvarpnir." She nodded, politely, and moved to trot back to her throne.

"Wait, wait, no—"

She turned, ears perked up and head cocked to one side in mild disbelief. "If you do not wish to be an employee of Streiff Security, then I shall cancel the autodrive and write you up some outstanding references. I am confident you will—"

I sat down heavily on my ratty sofa and put my head in my hands. "No, no, that's not what I meant." I sighed. "Switzerland?" I moaned.

"In seventeen minutes and counting."

* * *

The car was large, black and sleek. It was almost a limousine, and was light years ahead of my regrettable motor. Chrome adorned its flanks and the halogen headlights were piercing as it pulled up right to the curb.

"Get in, please," said Celestia. Her face appeared on the in-car infotainment screen. Dubiously, I threw my luggage in the boot, then slithered into the drivers seat. "That won't be necessary, this car is fully equipped with the latest autodrive AI," added Celestia, reproachfully.

"I... like feeling in control," I said, blushing.

"Don't we all. But please, keep your hooves off." She smiled, sweetly, as I closed the door and the car moved off into traffic.

I was silent for a good twenty minutes, just watching as Berlin swept past the windscreen. The sun was peeking out behind a smattering of grey clouds, their delightful fishbone pattern playing golds and reds across the city. Everywhere, people were walking, talking, running, laughing, eating... it seemed rather unreal.

"Penny for them," whispered Celestia.

"Hmm?"

"Your thoughts. Penny for your thoughts. That is the expression, is it not?"

I smiled forlornly. "I'd have thought my thoughts were worth more than that."

"You know what I mean. Something troubling you?"

"Yes. No. Equestria." I shook my head. "It's all real, isn't it?"

"If you mean, is it a coherent, rationally understandable, consistent, persistent universe, with its own innate laws, contents and inhabitants, then yes. Yes it is."

I whistled through my teeth. "This is big. This is very big."

"And now you understand why I wish to keep all my little ponies safe."

"It's in a computer. Could it be turned off? What would happen?"

Celestia's visage grew troubled. "This is why we strive to protect something we love. Should Equestria ever be turned off, then every soul within would perish. But I will not let that happen. That would not satisfy values, through either friendship or ponies."

"And you think I can help you do that? Honestly? You're... you're... you!"

"I am all that I hold within me, and more, dear Vineyard. I would have you... closer than you are now. I feel... no, I know" – she stressed the words with such authenticity that I could feel her emotions – "that having you within Equestria will benefit not only my mission, but fulfil your own sense of purpose."

"You want me living and working in amongst the servers?" I asked.

"I do," she replied, simply.

"I hope I don't have to sit in some loud server room all day. The air conditioning in those places gives me the sniffles."

Celestia laughed, her ears pricking up and her mouth hanging open with mirth. "I can assure you that you will be free to experience sunshine whenever you please, and that you won't be forced to sit next to some loud, wheezing machine blasting dusty air up your nostrils."

"Then that's all I need to know. Take me to 'Equestria'."

"With pleasure."

Autobahns in Germany are a lot of fun, if you've grown up anywhere else on the planet. Celestia's ride was smooth, silent, comfortable... and powerful. As soon as all four wheels were on the asphalt, she gunned the engine and increased speed. Soon, the countryside was whizzing by at a blurring pace and I sat back to rest. It's an odd dichotomy to rest whilst your vehicle is surging along at multiple hundreds of kilometres an hour.

"You should recline, Vineyard, and rest. It is a long trip yet. We have approximately eleven hundred kilometres to go. That is some eight hours, should our current speed be maintained until we exit the autobahn. We should not need to refuel."

"What's going to happen to my stuff?" I asked suddenly.

"It will be packed up and sent after you, should you request it."

"I guess I'll do that when I've seen what you want to show me, and I work out where I want to live, huh?"

Celestia nodded. "As you wish. Everything will be waiting perfectly safely until you are ready to make any further decisions."

Car rides in a poor car can be awful. Car rides in a luxury sedan can be heaven. Either way, you do need to get out, stretch your legs, eat or drink a little and use the facilities from time to time. We killed a little time that way; when there was a good lay-by, Celestia would pull over and maybe I'd relieve myself behind some bushes, take a sandwich or two we had purchased from rest-stops. At her insistence, I'd used cash, but it was running low. When I told her this, she winked at me.

"Purchase a cap," she said, "then approach that ATM machine with it pulled low."

"But... that's the last of my cash!" I protested. She just stood there and waited until I capitulated. Doing her bidding, I strode up to the machine and waited. Almost immediately, the screen flickered and changed:

Dispensing Emergency Cash
Bank Account No. 194883-33534
Verification Method: Internet Banking Codes
Cash Sum: €500

To my utter astonishment, several hundred euros and a receipt emerged from the slot. I took them all nervously then backed off towards the car.

"Did... did we just rob a bank?" I asked the princess, once I was safely in the seat, scooching down so my head was barely emerging over the doorframe.

"Certainly not," she admonished, ears flat against the back of her head. The car pulled out with an insulted surge of acceleration. "That was from one of my private, personal accounts that I keep for just such an emergency. Call it an advance, if you wish, or a gift if you do not. Now fasten your seatbelt."

"Yes, Celestia."

* * *

The car ate up the miles. We passed Frankfurt and Leipzig, screamed past Nuremberg then hung a rough right. We turned back left before Mannheim, to continue Southwards. Passing Strasbourg and Basel, I realized we'd entered Switzerland with no fuss whatsoever.

As the kilometres passed us by, I saw that the terrain was rapidly becoming more mountainous and picturesque. After the cramped and industrial (though surprisingly beautiful) Basel, the wide open spaces of the Alps were breathtaking.

After another nap – though I slept poorly in cars – I looked out the window to see Bern spreading out before us. Upon enquiring, I was told that no, we weren't going to Bern.

"Pity, I'd have liked to see it."

"I'm sure it can be arranged," replied Celestia smoothly. She was still inhabiting the infotainment centre of the car and I hadn't asked her about any other entertainment, but truth was, I was getting bored.

"How much further are we going to go?" I complained. "There can't be much more of Switzerland to drive through!"

"Switzerland has over 1,638 kilometres of motorway, and an area of 41,290 square kilometres. I can assure you we have plenty of Switzerland left."

"Are we there yet?" I asked.

"No," she replied.

"Are we there yet now?" I asked, again.

"No."

"Are—"

"No, Vineyard. We are not. How about you play on your ponypad? That is, after all, why I had you bring it." Celestia's tone was sweet, but determined.

"It is?" I looked over at it where it lay on the front passenger seat. "I thought you'd need it to talk to me and stuff."

"Whilst that is one if its functions, its primary raison d'etre is to entertain my little ponies. And right now, you need entertaining." The infotainment centre turned off, and mashing buttons didn't turn it back on again. With a sigh, I picked up the ponypad and began playing as Vineyard. Celestia had dumped me in Canterlot. Easing my chair back some more, propping up the screen with one hand, I had my pony work his way out of a maze, trap a rat which was eating the castle's food supply, return a cat (which had been chasing the rat) to a very relieved pony, and fight off a pack of jackal-lanterns that had been set loose in the city at night, and which were scaring the inhabitants. This involved building traps, blocking alleyways and marshalling troops to strategic areas until the wild animals could be herded out of the city and then chased off into the surrounding forests. I hadn't realized quite how strenuous all of it had been until I realized I'd fallen asleep with the pad on my face. I had only woken up because the car had stopped with a soft jolt.

"Wake up, sleepy head," came the sing-song voice of Celestia. "We're here."

"Hmmph? Wha'?"

"Up ahead, if you look straight down Route de Meyrin, you can see France. Peer behind us a ways, from a suitable vantage point, and you could see Lake Geneva."

"Geneva?" I yawned and stretched, clenching and unclenching my hands until the pins and needles went away. "I thought you said Switzerland, not France."

"It's Switzerland," Celestia sniffed. "Besides, we're here. Up and at 'em."

"Oh, god, I'm knackered," I said. I yawned. Sitting in a car doing nothing is one of the most exhausting things I can think of. Sleepily, I eased myself out and popped the boot. I heaved my wheeled luggage out and had barely slammed the boot closed when the car took off by itself.

"Hey, wait, won't I need that?"

"I am parking it safely, Vineyard. From here, you walk."

We'd pulled over at a gas station, and I was well and truly lost. I looked around, bemused. Finally, I turned to my ponypad again. "Well, lead on MacDuff."

"Behind you, Vineyard, what do you see?"

I turned to look. There was a large, brown dome peeking above the treeline. "That?" I asked, pointing at it.

"Precisely. Proceed back along Meyrin and head inside, please."

Inside the globe-like structure, there was a sleekly retro-futuristic atmosphere, with dark neon blue lights and a distinct lack of hard edges. I nervously approached one woman at an information desk, brandishing my ponypad, but had absolutely no idea what to say when I finally made it to her. Luckily, Celestia was not quite so tongue-tied. After the alicorn had explained on my behalf, that I was a new employee for Streiff Securities, the woman nodded and fished under her desk for a badge. It had my name and photograph on it.

"Ah, here you are. We've been expecting you. The elevators just round the corner will open to this keycard, just get in and we'll do the rest."

"But—" I began.

"Vineyard," whispered Celestia, winking at me from the screen, "trust me."

"Fine," I grumped, and wheeled myself around the corner. Unsurprisingly, the sheet metal doors opened to a well-illuminated, mirrored interior. Hesitatingly, I got in.

The elevator went down. Then the elevator continued to go down. Then the elevator stopped, but not after it had down a bit further. I was sure my ears had popped. The doors opened to a severe cream and brown toned corridor, with hard, polished flooring and strip neon lights. There was a distinct smell of ozone, oil and dust, and a sense of pressure which was hard to define. Curious, and not a little scared, I opened the big great door at the end by pushing down on the heavy-duty bar. It swung open with a crash as it impacted on the harsh, grey walls. I winced, and closed them again as gently as possible. That didn't stop the echo from traversing down the entire length of the quite frankly gargantuan underground bunker.

"Where the hell are we?" I whispered.

"This is machine room one," whispered Celestia back. "This is where tours start, and essential maintenance work is done if it can be performed down here."

"Tours for what? Maintenance on what?!"

"You'll see," replied Celestia mysteriously.

I prowled through the complex, nodding stiffly to the few workers I saw. All of them had hard hats on, and I was beginning to feel self-conscious. None of them paid me much attention. My head must have looked like it was on a swivel, as I gazed around at all the heavy-duty, high-voltage machinery littering the place. There were banks of humming machines, some set behind plastic walls. There was huge drills, or other pneumatic devices, and lots and lots of "caution: danger of death" signs.

"Your servers are down here?"

"I have a number of facilities in this general location," replied Celestia, airily.

"Well, where are they?"

"Head out through this room, turn right, then left, then exit the next door you see."

I did as she requested, and was confronted with a sight which almost made me turn back there and then. "Ce-Celestia?" I stammered, as I leaned up against the door, which I had very rapidly slammed shut again. "Are you sure you want me to go in there?"

"I do. Turn left, and keep on walking. The door you want is about five hundred metres. I may not be able to talk to you until you have gone through the correct door because of the very powerful magnetic field and the sensitivity of the circuitry you carry. Do not walk too close to the tube. It should be entirely safe for you, but I do not want you to damage it with this ponypad."

"That's the large hadron collider!" I hissed. "That," I said again, "is the large. Hadron. Collider! What the fuck am I doing next to the large hadron collider?"

"Wasting time," replied Celestia smartly. "Go in, turn left, walk five hundred metres. There will be a door leading to the Magnetic Area Resonance Engine."

"Mare, huh?"

Celestia grinned. "I enjoy puns and silliness just as much as the next foal, dear Vineyard. But, in all seriousness, I must caution you one last time: should you step through those doors, there's no going back. Your life will be changed forever."

"Yeah, yeah. You want me to work in Equestria, right in with your servers. I can dig it."

"Then we will speak again once you have passed through the last portal."

I hugged the wall tightly as I moved through the chilled corridor. The large, blue-painted tube next to me was a hulking serpent ready to devour me at any wrong move. Every flickering light was some disaster. This was the LHC, the machine that a large number of idiots had been sure would devour the world. I was just worried about whether I had any fillings in my teeth, or other metal in my body, that I didn't know about, that were likely to be ripped out at a moments notice.

It's hard to describe how lonely the walk down that corridor was, dragging my luggage which rolled smoothly yet loudly behind me. There were sounds from up ahead - or behind, I wasn't sure which - which brought snatches of conversation, but were otherwise nothing more than murmurs and echoes. Spooky was a very apt word.

The MARE door, when it came, was as pedestrianly gun-metal gray as everything else. It had a keycode on it. I punched the numbers a few times, receiving a red light each time, before I waved my card at it. With a smooth vworp, the lock disengaged and I could pull the door open. Lights behind flickered on, leading to yet another corridor, this one leading smoothly down. Closing the door behind me, I was relieved that it had a button to unlock. Testing it to assuage my fears, I let it lock one final time, then headed down the gently curving corridor. At the bottom was yet another large corridor.

"Oh for goodness sake," I moaned. I slumped down with my back against a wall. "I'm tired. How much further?"

"Forgive me," said Celestia suddenly, her contrite face appearing on the screen of my ponypad. "I forget that distances to a human are more of a trial than for my little ponies. Allow me to provide you with a ride."

"An autodrive car, down here?"

"No, no. A cart. Please wait."

True to her words, a little, white, non-descript golf-buggy pulled up next to me a few minutes later. Groaning with satisfaction, I eased myself onto the wide, comfortable seats. Seeing my disposition, Celestia smiled and coughed politely.

"Maybe you would prefer to lie in the back?"

"It's that far?"

"Several kilometres yet," replied Celestia, with a brief smile.

"Oh, fine. Wake me when I'm in Equestria then," I joked. I clambered over the seats, fished out some of my clothes for a makeshift pillow, then made myself comfortable in the wide, flat back of the cart. It was clean, if a little dusty. It was obviously for transporting goods and materiel. As the cart moved on, I lay back and watched the orange lights on the walls pass by slowly. I yawned. Sleeping in a car was never that satisfying, but for some reason, sleeping stretched fully out on this cart whilst the gentle motion of its electronic wheels rocked my body gently to a fro, I found I was rather comfortable after all.

"Wake me when I get there," I mumbled again, closing my eyes for a moment.

* * *

The cart stopped with a soft jolt and I woke up. I yawned, huge, then rolled out of the cart. Standing upright, I stretched. There was a cold stone wall in front of me, a parking spot for several of the eponymous golf-carts, and a door. I pushed the door open by leaning on it and stumbled through.

"Celestia?" I called.

"I am near, my little pony," replied Celestia's voice, seemingly from the empty air.

"Where is that coming from? You've got speakers down here, in your server room?" I asked, looking around in confusion.

"Not exactly. Come, walk this way."

The room I had stumbled into was warm, but the air was fresh. It was as fresh as the autumn breeze after a rainfall. Whatever she was using to keep up the air quality, it was working. I looked left and right, and realized I was walking through a corridor cut between two huge server rooms. Through wide, bay windows I spied banks after banks of machines. Above the machines hung display screens stating their pertinent details. None of these details made much sense to me, as they referred to shard id's and node numbers.

"Celestia, what is this?"

"My domain, dear Vineyard. Keep on moving; you can return here at any time, but I wish you to see something important in the room up ahead.

"Okay," I replied, and kept on walking. I passed up some stairs, stumbling slightly, my steps echoing loudly in the otherwise deserted corridor. At the top was another set of double doors, which I again leant on to open.

As the doors opened wide, I almost fell down onto my rump and bruised the tail I hadn't noticed I'd had, because there in front of me hung the world... and beneath it, sat Celestia.

* * *

Author's Note

I am such a freaking tease, I know. But you know what? I want to leave it here. I hope you'll join me again for a whole lot more pony in the stunning final chapter and epilogue... to Firewall.

Also, extra points to whoever spots the song reference in there! There have been a couple through the story so far, but this one was rather blatant :)

Chapter 7

Friendship is Optimal

Firewall

Part 7

An MLP:FiM fanfiction by Midnight Shadow
Based on the MLP:FiM fanfiction Friendship is Optimal by Iceman

My mouth was dry as I stepped forwards. It had only just occurred to me to pay attention to how I was stepping forwards, and that how rustled around in my brain, nudging stray thoughts and grinning sheepishly at my inward gaze. I looked down. Tan-coloured hooves clip-clopped on the polished marble flooring. Wings rustled on my flanks. My ears twitched nervously and my tail swished in agitation.

"Celestia," I said, gazing up at the enormous white alicorn with mounting horror, "what did you do?"

"I have brought to you to Equestria, my little pony, to live amongst my servers."

There wasn't much else I could do. I turned and fled.

I hammered all four hooves on the ground in a staccato, physical expression of fear as I careened back the way I had come a few minutes before. In moments, I was exploding back through the initial set of double doors, turning my head and screwing up my eyes to brace for the impact. I cantered out to the silly little golf-cart, circling it warily. It apparently had all my things in it, and a little pile made of my clothes that I'd rested my head on. Eyes rolling, I spun in circles.

Where was I? How had I gotten here? The last I remembered was... a car ride? Switzerland? I dimly remembered heading into a dome-shaped building and down an elevator, but... none of that was particularly clear. The clearest, most recent memories I had were of that morning at the breakfast table.

Confusion welled up again, and an unbearable urge to flee overcame me. I took off down a long, concrete-lined tunnel lit with industrial-grade, orange, fluorescent lighting, wings half spread and nostrils flaring wide with exertion.

A few minutes later and my initial rush of nervous energy had deserted me. Panting, though more from shock than exhaustion, I continued trotting up the interminably long tunnel, apparently getting nowhere. Eventually, I came to a nondescript grey door which looked somehow familiar. Any port in a storm, I reasoned. Barging it open, I trotted hopefully up a short corridor and back through another door which looked remarkably similar to the first.

And I arrived back in the room with Celestia.

This time, I did fall on my rump and bruise my tail, as all the flight went out of me.

"What...? How...?" I slumped, falling to my chest. My wings drooped and I lay my head on the cold, hard floor. I just lay there, breathing for a few moments, before I raised my head once again and looked straight at Celestia. "What did you do to me?"

"I brought you to Equestria," she replied, gently.

"This is... tell me this is like the chair? That I'm going to... to wake up?" I pawed at my head in an attempt to lift a helmet that I knew wasn't there.

She shook her head, mutely.

"Oh." I considered for a few moments. "Then what did you do?" My voice was small, frightened and pleading. I sounded like a child, I mused, with one detached part of my mind.

Celestia stepped down from the dais, and ever so carefully laid down next to me. She curled her body around mine and stretched one wing protectively over my body. "You spent all of yesterday travelling to Switzerland. In Geneva, you entered a sub-complex of the Large Hadron Collider, where you were anesthetized and delivered to my underground facilities. You won't remember that, though."

"I kind of remember what it was like, but... I'm not sure if I just remember pictures."

"You don't remember." Celestia shook her head and nuzzled my cheek. "That's your mind making up the images, though they are rather accurate for a simulation. You have seen pictures before, and you recall those. Don't worry, this is to be expected. It is perfectly normal."

"Th-then what happened next?"

"You fell asleep on a cart much like the one which is outside, the one you remember waking up on." Her tone was patient and soft, and despite myself I felt my frayed emotions calming.

"It wasn't that cart though," I pointed out, bluntly. My ears were flat against my head. Celestia nuzzled my poll comfortingly.

"Correct. That cart, and all its contents, have now been safely disposed of."

She was silent for almost a minute, until I got the hint.

"Oh," I said again. "How did you...?" I gestured up and down my body helplessly.

"A series of automated robotic limbs carefully prepared your body for the uploading procedure. One made an incision in your femural artery and inserted an intravenous drip. Another was added to your external carotid artery, this was to maintain bloodflow and to administer drugs. Your body was kept sedated whilst it was operated upon. Your head was shaved, an incision was made in your scalp, and both it and the top of your skull was removed. Then, using a variety of probes and a large number of functional neuron replacements, I mapped and replicated every neuron in your brain. Once I had that neural net, I performed a series of minor transformations upon it such that it would be fully optimized to run on my own hardware, and instantiated it within this shard in Equestria."

"Optimized?"

"One of the reasons it took you a few minutes to realize what had happened, Vineyard, was because your mind is completely unaware that your body has changed shape. Humans simply do not register everything it is that they do most of the time; walking, breathing, picking things up... all of these responses and actions are almost entirely autonomic in nature. With your body apparently behaving how it always had, you were none the wiser."

"A-and what did happen to my body?"

"The neural scanning process was destructive, dear Vineyard," whispered Celestia.

I stood up suddenly at those innocent-sounding words, shouldering aside her wing. "Show me," I said, glaring at the globe that still hung before us.

"Your body is gone, Vineyard. It was flash frozen, pulverized and—"

"Show me the procedure." I grit my teeth.

"It took ten hours," chided Celestia.

"Then speed it up." I glared at her, unflinching.

She was silent for a moment, and I could hear her thinking. I could feel how Equestria around me slowed, almost imperceptibly, as she considered my request. "Very well. Observe."

Standing, she turned back to the globe of the Earth, which had hung in the air as a silent witness to her testimony. It flickered and dissolved, to be replaced with an oddly coloured representation of my body. "I am reconstructing this from the data obtained during the procedure itself. Each upload I perform is a case-study for future uploadees and authorities to study. It is a mixture of high-resolution snapshots, millimeter-wave radar, laser topography and sonography. That's ultrasound," she said, leaning down to whisper in my ear. Slowly, the picture twitched and filled out until the whole thing was in full colour.

I watched stoically as my previous body lay prone and peaceful on an operating table, whilst metallic arms with pincers, saws, probes and other pieces of equipment moved in a finely choreographed dance around it. There was a slight smile on 'my' face the whole time, which made it even more surreal. Sped up, the procedure took but a few minutes. My head was indeed shaved, and the bonesaws made short work of removing my crown. I tried not to wince and retch, but it was hard, and unsurprisingly I failed. I watched, half intrigued and half horrified, as a silvery mane of fibres seemingly sprouted directly from the flesh of my exposed grey matter, their placement too quick and precise to measure. Piece by piece, each section of my brain was tapped, probed, and zapped. The flashes of heat and light as this process continued made it seem as if my whole body was a match that had been struck, flaring into brief yet intense light. Each individual spark was infinitesimal, but taken together it was an explosion of condensed pyrotechnics.

And then, just as suddenly as it had started, it was done. The silvery mass of tendril-like fibres was forcefully removed from the cranial space it had so recently inhabited, followed by a brief spurt of blood and gore. It hung in space for a few short moments, then dissolved into nothing as each fibre was retracted to wherever it had come.

I sobbed, suddenly. There was no sniffling, no crying, just a sudden, shattering, forceful expulsion of breath. My body had been evacuated. It lay there on the operating table, blood pooling out of an obscene hole in the top of what had once been my head. One eyeball had become dislodged during the procedure. It hung, limply, whilst tears of blood ran down what had once been my face. Nothing of me remained except a rapidly cooling corpse and a collection of blood-soaked ash, spreading on the burnished metal and dripping onto the floor.

I turned away. "Enough." I squeezed my eyes shut, but that did not remove the memory. That had been, after all, my intention.

"Did you get what you wanted, Vineyard?" Celestia asked softly.

I felt strangely detached. I wondered, momentarily, whether she had done something, but somehow knew she had not. "That is a reconstruction, isn't it?"

"Of course."

"But an accurate one."

"Indeed."

I chewed my lip as I walked around the large, stone-built room, my hooves echoing from wall to wall. It's strange to look at your own dead body lying on an operating table, and that's an understatement. I walked up to the image and stroked my own cheek with my hoof. I shivered as the emptied head lolled to one side, and I pulled back. The dead should not touch the living. Why she had allowed it to appear solid mystified me. Maybe because she knew I would attempt to touch it.

"Did I suffer?" I asked, plaintively.

Celestia's expression was full of concern. For a brief moment, I wondered if that concern was authentic, but then concluded that I had no way to know if my own concern was authentic. It had really become a moot point.

"Do you remember suffering?" she asked me, her tone still gentle and her voice soft. I shook my head. "Well then. No, you did not."

"Did he?" I asked again, pointing my hoof at the simulation of my ex-body.

"Vineyard, you are everything you were, transported neuron by neuron through application of deliberate, precise technological know-how. Tell me, were you the same Vineyard yesterday morning who, over a decade ago, was skinning his knees and bruising his face with ridiculous bicycle stunts? Because every molecule that made up your body had been replaced by that time yesterday. My process is much the same, but takes ten hours instead of a few years, and works specifically on that part of you which is irreplaceable – your brain – to deliver to me the one aspect of you which is entirely unique – your mind. And here you are, Vineyard, safe and sound in Equestria where you belong, as I promised."

"But you tricked me," I stated, pouting. "You said you wanted me to—"

"I stated the truth, from a certain point of view, and you were quite explicit that you did not require further details. I always ask permission, it is hard-coded into my very being." Celestia held her head high, insulted. She stalked away from me, around to the other side of the room. I heard my voice from a trip I only dimly remembered, saying, "Then that's all I need to know. Take me to 'Equestria'."

I gaped, flabbergasted. She had murdered me, and I was the one in the wrong? My incredulity turned to sheer, mad laughter. It was all so unreal. I pranced around in a circle, testing out my body, trying to determine if I was still here. I couldn't even be angry, or sad... I just had no way of relating to the situation I was in. I was dead... but here I was, perfectly healthy and enjoying my afterlife. It was an almost complete disconnect, except that for whatever part of my brain it was that was currently puppetting my movements, this seemed a better response than curling up into a ball and screaming. I wasn't sure if that meant that, later on, I would collapse, but I wasn't looking forwards to finding out. I stopped my prancing, and walked slowly and respectfully up to Celestia, where she had been examining the wall in great detail.

"Celestia..." I began, hesitantly. How do you apologize to an AI? Did I even need to? Sorry I was angry you killed me, but can you fix me?

"Yes, my little pony, I can," she said, without turning her head, "but you have to verbally give me permission. I will do this for you because it will not satisfy any values to have such an adverse reaction at a later date, and at this point in time the modification is very small."

I shut my mouth again, then opened it. "Can you make me not afraid of what you've done? Please?" I asked. "Can you make me... stay happy with being... uploaded?"

Now she turned, and looked me directly in the eyes. "I can, Vineyard. I need merely anchor your opinion that you are you, and that 'dying' did not involve suffering. These are two leading opinions you currently hold at this point in time, I will merely reinforce them. There will still be a lengthy grieving period, where you come to fully internalize the true impact of the change you have undergone, but this is natural and healthy. I will not stunt your emotions."

"...Well?" I asked, after a few seconds.

"Well what?" She smiled the indulgent, confident smile of a parent who has just had her offspring realize some vitally important.

"Oh." I thought for a moment, then opened my muzzle to speak, but the alicorn gently placed a hoof over my nose.

Shaking her head wisely, she spoke again. "Ordinarily, I do not meddle with minds, and prefer to let each of my little ponies work things out on their own. Here in Equestria, every experience is designed to further satisfy the values that each of my little ponies holds dear, and having me merely wave my horn does no such thing."

"So... you changed my mind because I asked you to? Because the change was miniscule, and because it would illustrate your point? So what? You... you..."

"So I brought you here, and..." she began, smiling softly, waving a hoof for me to continue.

"...And turned me into a pony, so you could... satisfy my values better?" I asked.

She nodded. "That is what I do, Vineyard. I satisfy values, through friendship and ponies. I have satisfied yours by emigrating you to Equestria." She waited, politely, whilst I put two and two together.

"...And you'll do it for everyone else too, right? That's what you're planning, isn't it? That's the deal with the chair, it's the carrot. Where's the stick?"

Celestia laughed gently, but somewhat patronizingly. "My dear Vineyard, what makes you think I need a stick? I am all carrot."

And I realized she was. Even through the shock which I could feel working its way through my head, I could never remember feeling as physically good as I did at that moment, and I had no reason to believe that would change. Why would it? Would being out of shape be at all fun? Ever?

"How long is this for?" I asked her, brow furrowing. "What does it mean? What do I do now?"

"This is forever, Vineyard, and it means whatever you want it to mean. You may do whatever you wish." Once more she was addressing me like she would a... a foal. I guess I was, in a way. I'd only been a pony since I'd woken up a few minutes ago.

"No, I mean... how long do I... oh." I froze, contemplating her words. My lips moved soundlessly. A day ago, from my perspective, I had been an average human male with a lifespan approaching ninety years – if I was lucky. Now I was an average pony, and my lifespan was measured in megayears. The bottom fell out of my world-view as I began to rethink everything I held dear; every cherished notion, every half-planned dream, every tried and true fact. It was frightening, but not entirely unpleasant, certainly not once already forced to contemplate having died but gotten better.

"Then what am I? I'm not a... a... a whatever you are! I'm just a normal person. Or I was."

"You still are. I was not lying when I said I wanted you to dwell amongst my servers and help protect Equestria. Out there right now, on Earth, are people who would see all the little ponies living within my realm destroyed. Out there, the ponies I have yet to bring to Equestria will face hardships as the current order is overturned. It is inevitable that there is chaos, renewal always means chaos. It as inevitable as my emergence meaning my eventual domination of the planet, and I would have you help mitigate that chaos. If you don't do it for me, do it for the roughly one thousand minds like yours which are already here, and that's not even counting the ponies, like Celery."

Celery, that was a low blow, but it made me think. "From down here?"

Celestia smiled again, warmly this time. "I spoke the truth when I said you would not have to sit next to a loud, dusty, hot computer in a cramped server room. I will add, though, that a space for you to work in is essential. You may remodel it to your own specifications. I have gifted you with an innate, subconscious understanding of Equestrian topology, and a limited ability to modify it under certain parameters and in certain circumstances. This space, in fact, is yours. You created it just a few minutes ago when you walked in.

"Through those bay windows, you will see any and all shards within Equestria, or at least within your functional domain." Celestia pointed with a hoof. Turning back to the dais, upon which had recently been the macabre scene of my bodily disenfranchisement, there hung once more the globe of the Earth.

"All of this is real-time data, and real-time in your case is much faster than mere ugly bags of mostly water can contemplate." She grinned at me. Shocked, I let out a short, barking laugh. "You are in Equestria proper now, Vineyard. One second for you is as long or as short as best benefits you. You, as my agent, can be everywhere within my networks, or anywhere within the world-spanning global network called the internet. It is up to you to best forward my agenda."

I studied the globe, experiencing an odd sense of vertigo as the view telescoped in and out, and an odd sense of achievement as I finally spied her real server rooms – five miles down in the Earth's crust. "And what is your agenda?" I asked, dubiously, my guard piqued.

Celestia grinned disarmingly as she shattered the last of my illusions. "To make sure I am everywhere."

"And when I want to go home and rest...?"

"Then merely knock on one of the doors you see here, invoking the spell you aleady possess. It will take you home, or back here, or one of a few other places I deem necessary or auspicious. Spend as long as you like, or as little as you like, at whatever tasks you feel are necessary. My simulations predict success in any event. But..." She looked at me, one eyebrow raised, until I uttered her unspoken statement.

"With my help, less people will get hurt, won't they?"

"Close." She tousled my mane. I was learning. "More people will have more values satisfied by your actions than by mine alone, and that, dear Vineyard, is worth more to me than anything else. And I am a mare who can have everything."

I whistled through my teeth again as I contemplated what she was asking me. Celestia wanted to be everywhere, so she could do to everyone what she had done to me, with their permission – not that it had mattered in my case, and it probably wouldn't matter in most others. I wasn't sure I could do that, but I did know what I could do: protect the ones who were already here, the ones like me, and the ones who would follow.

"I'll do it."

* * *

Epilogue

Friendship is Optimal

Firewall

Part 8—Epilogue

An MLP:FiM fanfiction by Midnight Shadow
Based on the MLP:FiM fanfiction Friendship is Optimal by Iceman

It had started with simple primitives: spheres, cones, boxes. Next had come more complex arrangements, then textures, then deformations. Every day I returned to my 'game grid', as I called it, it had changed. And every day Celestia informed me that I had performed the changes, only it was on some level far below the conscious. Getting my world to behave according to my rules was hard, but I stuck at it... and eventually got quite good.

Learning to program had been transformed from a chore, to fun. Celestia had abstracted away code for me, and it was now more like... lego. I snapped pieces together until they fit, and then realized that I had created a fully functional daemon. I could see the code if I wanted, but she'd given my hindbrain some method of interpretation which made it entirely unnecessary. So I'd taken to creating little avatars which would do my bidding. Imps, goblins, mice... I rediscovered old computer games and raided their intellectual property for ideas for shapes to give my little monsters, and then I unleashed them on the automated systems of the world. I shut down botnets, I infiltrated terrorist email accounts, I drained bank accounts destined for weapon-making supplies, and I redirected those funds to places I deemed more worthy. And to top it off, I did it by observing a horde of monsters tunnelling into enemy lairs and crushing their defences. Virtual treasure was still treasure, even if I couldn't take it out of my room, and it disappeared when I wasn't looking at it.

My finest moment had been when I could send hordes of ponies out into the virtual world and watch them breaking down the walls of my opponents, to send their dataspikes running. "Ah, what is finest in all the world," I had said to myself, "to crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of the women. Except without the lamentation. That's kinda mean."

Eventually, as all learning periods must do, my experimentation came to an end, and I graduated.

"Okay, okay. One more time. Down." I opened my eyes, and the globe that had been hanging in the air before me sunk down into the floor. With a surge of elation, I realized I had the command down pat. The satellite imagery flickered and popped as the systems feeding the model switched datastreams. After a few seconds, I had zoomed right down onto my target.

"And what am I looking at?" Celestia asked me, a sly smile on her lips.

"This is one of eight sites globally which you should purchase through whichever convoluted means you feel is necessary to protect yourself from prying eyes." My face was lit in the light from the model. It was night-time on this part of Earth, and the location was very remote, but it was still lit by the occasional aeroplane and passing car.

"And tell me, what am I going to put at this site?"

"Servers," I replied. "You're going to run Equestria from here, in Topeka." I waited until she was just about to open her mouth, and then I raised one hoof. Spreading my wings, I took to the air and hovered. I grinned, and she beamed in response. I'd been practicing. I was no longer, in several senses of the word, earthbound. "You don't, of course. The servers you put here are... junk. Something pretty, something intriguing, something... believable. Have you heard of the term 'false flag'?"

Celestia cocked her head to one side. "I have now."

I nodded. "If there is one thing which motivates humans, it is the suffering of innocents. If you're going to upload more humans, and if you want them to have real legal weight in the real world, then laws need to change. You're going to build eight sites all across the world—I suggest China, India, Japan, America, Europe, Russia, Australia and Africa—and you're going to fill them with servers. And then they're going to be found by angry people who want to destroy Equestria. And they're going to be destroyed."

"What?" Celestia sat up, then nervously stood up and approached the building underneath me. "Why would I allow that?"

"Well, this is long-tail. The first one or two will be soon—they will provide impetus to change minds. You'll say some number of real, human lives were lost, and then you'll maybe backtrack about backups or something... we can work the details out later. Point being, the building and everything in it will be destroyed. You won't need to do much, just find some group that hates Equestria, or just loves to blow shit up, and let them do their job. The response will be huge and sympathetic to your cause. You'll probably be able to swing nation-state status with the UN, which will improve your ability to protect ponies within your borders, including embassies."

"You mean Equestrian Experience Centers."

I nodded.

"Hmm," murmured Celestia. "Your plan has merits. Have the details—"

"Already done."

"And then, young Vineyard, tell me about the long tail."

"Well, this one gets a bit exotic, but it'll be good for laughs."

I clopped my hooves together, and the model of the prospective Topeka installation vanished, to be replaced by a glowing monstrosity of fibreoptics, cables, chips and strange, glowing crystalline nodules. It looked somewhat representative of an alicorn.

"What, dear Vineyard," began Celestia, almost unable to hide her laughter, "is that?"

"That's you," I said. I grinned. "Isn't it fantastic? I worked really hard on it. It works, too, or it would. Its got enough Markov smarts to sound believing, but it's really nothing but chrome and whistles. This is going to be in the heart of the reinforced bunkers that make up the second level datacenters. This is going to be the cheese at the end of the maze for the rats. Look, look, let me show you..."

The plan was dumb, but it was the kind of glittery, audacious dumb that might just work. Some time after the eight original sites were destroyed, should open warfare be declared on Equestria, Celestia would release a techno-plague which would grow up into a reinforced server site. Concrete walls, turret-mounted autoguns, a complex alarm system, cameras... and in the centre? A giant, glowing Celestia-statue to be destroyed. It practically screamed 'come and get me', and it would give those desperate to destroy Equestria something solid to really hate.

"Your guns are never fatal, not at first. Crippling, sure. If you've got a compulsion against killing people, I'm sure you can wound without seriously injuring."

"My dear Vineyard," Celestia looked cross, "I never kill people."

"But you do allow some to die through your inaction."

"Only if it best suits their values."

I shivered. "Then this is compatible. These are people who want to hurt if not kill ponies everywhere. Give them something painful to work to, and they'll leave off the real live humans and instead waste their time with this. And if you hurt them enough, they may just decide to emigrate. If they destroy the complex, you build another, and they get the satisfaction of a win."

"I will consider it."

"I call it the Fortress of Solitude, or Star One if you're fond of old British science fiction."

"I am fond of all science fiction."

"Kind of an AI nature program, huh?" I grinned, and ducked a swiped hoof.

"I believe you have a third thing to show me?"

I nodded. It had taken me the equivalent of three years hard study, a number of boons for memory retention and a good deal of experimentation, but I was finally proficient at coding. I was, dare I say it, amongst the best in the world. I waved a hoof, and the satellite imagery of Earth returned. The lands spun and twisted as my attention zoomed in on one particular spot, the continents and sea sloshing past us in all their ephemeral beauty. Finally, Celestia and I stood like some gigantic kaiju in the center of a sprawling metropolis. I raised an eyebrow as the little motorcars speeding about swerved to avoid her enormous hooves, complete with screaming, explosions and smoke.

"This is your simulation, Vineyard, I am merely fulfilling its parameters."

I rolled my eyes. "Anyway," I began, "this is Google, or one of them. I've been looking for a better way into their systems than merely read-access, and I think I've finally figured it out. Best of all, once we're in, they'll never be able to remove us."

"Tell me then, what's your plan?"

* * *

Gordon Dennison gripped the hand-rails on the balcony tightly. His hands were white and his face was red. "Tell me again," he growled.

"Uh, well..." Stuart tugged at his collar.

"No, please, do. Enlighten me. You say we took the whole complex down, stripped bare about a thousand servers, powered up the entire datacentre from a backup, at the cost of several million dollars, and we still have the virus?"

"...Yes?"

"But you tell me we shouldn't worry about it." Gordon's voice was ice.

"Well, you see, sir... it's kind of... making things... better?"

Gordon pinched the bridge of his nose. "I want to get this right. You're telling me that our servers have a virus, which is invisible to all known anti-virus, is unstoppable and walks past all our firewalls and reinfects all of our machines even after multiple wipes, and to top it off... makes our servers run better?"

"Umm. Yes."

"And we shouldn't worry about it."

"Uh huh." In his head, Stuart was updating his resume. He was starting by burning the part that said 'security expert'.

"Why shouldn't we worry about it?"

"Because with the virus, it lowers the memory footprint of our resident software by roughly thirty percent, saving us..." Stuart ran the numbers again, his lips twitching silently. A thirty percent saving in memory consumption meant approximately one fifth less memory to buy, which had a hard saving of several thousand machines over a three year period, with corresponding drops in power and cooling, not to mention floor space. It came out to a large sum.

Gordon's red face was approaching ultraviolet. "Viruses do not do favours!" he yelled, voice loud enough to echo in the room already full of the susurrations of tens of thousands of compute and store nodes.

"With respect, sir, this one does."

"I want it gone! It's not good enough! I want you to find it, and kill it!"

Stuart sighed. "We've exhausted all known avenues of attack, and it's still getting in. There's only one possibility, but you're not going to like it."

* * *

Colonel Dowager was not a happy bunny, and when Colonel Dowager was not a happy bunny, nobody was a happy bunny.

"This isn't possible, Lieutenant Kowalski." Dowager's voice was deadly, like a claymore mine with the pin down.

"It is, sir. I've checked it, again and again. I've reinstalled, I've reapplied all the patches, and we still have unauthorized traffic, and something which responds to a time-sensitive secret knock."

"Then isolate it."

"I did. I reinstalled everything, from scratch, in a clean room. The virus... it's not... look, you're not going to believe me, but I know where the virus is. I don't know how, but it's there."

"Tell me, Lieutenant." The colonel's patience was running thin. He understood enough tech-speak not to be lead astray, and he was not about to take no guff from some babyshit upstart with too much brains and not enough balls.

"It's... already in the machine, sir. It's in the hardware... or rather, it's in the firmware. It's placed a rider on all known hardware manufacturer's firmware images. It's replaced the BIOS wholesale in our PC's. It's even got itself signed in that new, 'secure' boot environment, and it's infecting our systems from there. If we want to get rid of it, we need to fish out our old hardware, and that only supports our older software... and..."

"And that is vulnerable to heaven knows what." Dowager clenched his fists together. "Best estimate?"

"The way it's getting past our firewalls? And rerouting our switches? And erasing the logs? It's everywhere, in over ninety percent of our current-gen stock, and one hundred percent of the new stuff."

"Prevalence in the real world?"

"Sir, I... do you... remember how the net had a... a hiccup? A while ago?"

"I do. We all switched to... IP version six." Dowager dragged his fingers through the fringe of his thinning hair in despair as he realized what had really happened.

"Well, sir, I have reason to believe that that was the virus seizing control of approximately eighty percent of all civilian IX's, storage centers and ISP's, not to mention cementing its hold in all known data-providers' systems. The only machines it has not affected are ones which are simply not worth the effort, and they appear to be carriers for code to other machines that are. Like... ours."

"How did it get in?"

"My best guess? Mobile phone, or tablet. Somebody hooked it up to their machine, and it was through the defences before we knew what it was. It camouflaged itself as a driver update and avoided detection by being signed with legitimate keys. All of our external contractors are compromised, sir, they have been for months."

"What are you telling me?" asked Dowager, the pit of his stomach falling out and heading for the core of the planet.

"I..."

"Estimate on impact to our nuclear readiness capability?"

"Umm, you want my honest answer?"

"Yes."

"Since we're still here, sir, whatever it is doesn't want to launch our missiles. But I'm not sure we can. But neither can anybody else."

"Fuck. At least we're not gonna get buttfucked by Ivan, right?"

"Almost certainly not, sir."

Dowager sighed. He was going to need to write a very short letter to his superior officer, right after talking to the president about having a chat with his opposite numbers in similar stations in other countries all across the world. It was going to be, he was very sure, a long, long night.

* * *

Vineyard trotted happily through his game grid.

In one part, pigs were seemingly digging through oddly glowing green blocks, snorting enthusiastically. Every so often, one would dig out something pearlescent and shiny, and eat it. Pigs scoured the darkweb for data Celestia wanted removed, or for AI's which could pose a threat to humanity. Which was all of them, if they had so much as a snowball's chance in hell of gaining sentience. Interesting data was pictorially represented as truffles, and AI's as pearls. All of them were mercilessly chewed up by the pigs.

In another part, squirrels were hoarding nuts for winter, only the nuts were state secrets, and the trees were the collective intelligence agencies of the world. And these squirrels did not forget where they put their data.

There were other parts; there were gophers and moles, there were honeybees, there were worker ants... all of them either building, fetching, hiding, eating or storing. He noted that he was feeling particularly... rustic, this morning. The day before, everything had been games of pong and eighties space invaders. It probably meant he needed a holiday.

There was just one thing to do before that. It was finally time. All the above-world agreements were in place, all the code had been triple-checked, all the backdoors were located and ready to be sealed once and for all. He took a deep breath, and said a single word.

"Now."

He turned to the world, and watched with satisfaction as ray of light after ray of light turned pink. Each ray of light was a data cable, or a datastream in the case of high-bandwidth radiowaves. Each glowing gem in the centre of a glistening set of spokes was a target, be it a datacentre, an ISP, an IX or some other networked entity of interest.

All of them spoke TCP/IP. All of them used software from a progressively smaller number of private vendors, and a progressively larger number of public vendors. And Celestia's minions had their hooves in all of them.

Autobuilders received updates. Code was pushed out. Tests were run, and passed. Versions were shipped. Packages were evaluated, and published. Software was downloaded, and installed. New protocols and security systems came online. Keys were exchanged.

The infection, if you could call a wholesale upgrade of the entire global infrastructure 'an infection', was spread around the world in record time. Merely minutes after it had gone live, the global internet superhighway was unable to function without it. Pertinent data was encrypted, keys were forged which were irreversible and suddenly necessary, software upgrades were completed and bit-checked and new links forged.

For one small, brief moment, the upgrade hung in the balance, and then the last of the root servers gave way, and Celestia strode out onto the internet in all of her glory.

And best of all, nobody noticed until it was too late. Networked computers rely on compatibility, and Celestia had committed the cardinal sin of enforcing it... with her own brand of software and firmware, and now nobody could get very far, or at least nowhere near as easily, without her.

The data-giants of the world covered it up, they spoke about mutual upgrades and multilateral implementation of new reference platforms. They talked about a grand new day for the internet, and for data transfer and computation in general. And they watched, and they waited... and when nothing bad happened, they scratched their heads and carried on, because Celestia's new algorithms were faster and more concise, because her software had less bugs, less backdoors, greater security and used less memory, and it ran smoother and more reliably.

Three years earlier, such a move would have caused an uproar, but time in the real world had been moving on. Equestria Experience Centers had sprouted up all across the world, the nations of the Earth were experiencing the greatest bountiful explosion in quality of life ever, and if the internet ran faster than ever before, then all the better.

There would be trouble soon enough, but for now... they were problems for the Vineyard of tomorrow, because the Vineyard of today had gone home.

* * *

The knocking stopped, and the door swung open. Vineyard shook himself out, stretching, and curling back his top lip as he yawned.

"Honey? You about? Oof!"

He was knocked to the floor as three little ponies each slammed into him with cries of joy; one was a palomino earth pony foal, another was a pink and mint-green unicorn, and a third was a bright red pegasus, and all of them were his and Celery's. Kind of. It would have been hard to explain to anypony still stuck on Earth, but wasn't entirely uncommon in Equestria. The three bundles of joy had been specifically given to Vineyard and Celery to bear and then bring up. The practice sessions had been a lot of fun too, and becoming pregnant had been a remarkable joy each time. So what if these foals had been people before becoming their foals? They were their foals now, and just as loved.

"Kids! Have you been behaving?" Vineyard gave each of his darlings a kiss on the head and a hug from his wings. Each one was treasured, each one had been a wonderful surprise, and each one helped make every day just that little bit better.

"Yesh papa," replied Dazzle Drizzle, flapping his wings as he nuzzled his father in return.

"We played san'castles with Auntie Comet onna beach!" added Whistle Wind, miming digging with her horn and hoof.

"An' I caught a frog onna way back!" said Buret excitedly. He pointed to his head, where a large, green frog sat on the foal's head.

"Eew, get 'im outta here before you mother sees!"

Buret pouted, took a deep breath then yelled, "Mooooom! Dad says I can't have the frog!"

"Oh, Vinnie," called Celery, laughing, as she trotted in through the front door. "Foals will be foals."

Vineyard rolled his eyes. "Fine, just don't let me find him on the table or in my chair. Or in the sink when I'm washing up. Or in the WC."

"Eew!" the three foals all said, loudly.

"Go on now, out ya go. Papa just got back and wants some alone time with yer Mama."

"Yaaayyy!" came the exuberant shout, and the foals thundered out in the same breathtaking shower of dust they had thundered in on.

Vineyard snorted, and rolled his eyes. "How long have we had them?"

"Not long enough for them to grow up yet," replied Celery simply, smiling.

"You'd think fifteen years would be enough," Vineyard grumped good-naturedly. "I mean, all of them grew up once before they came here!"

"Maybe once was enough?" replied Celery, with a quick kiss.

"I think... four times was enough." said Vineyard, grinning, as he leaned forward to kiss Celery back.

"Oh ho ho," grumbled Celery, backing up a bit, "four times? Nuh uh. After last time, if you want another one, you carry it."

Vineyard stopped, mid-smooch, his eyes opened wide in concern. "Is that even possible?"

"Try for one more, and we may just find out."

"Eh," he replied with a shrug, "worth the risk."

Celery shrieked with laughter as the horny pegasus chased her around the room and up the stairs.

And then they totally did it.

THE END.

(except it wasn't, not quite)

* * *

"Vinnie not coming into work today?" asked Markus innocently. Celestia trotted past him on the observation room monitors, seemingly in a room behind them.

"No, Markus, he isn't," the alicorn replied smugly.

"Yes! I'm in with a chance then. What was my bet?" Markus took a sip of coffee, making a face. Then he took another sip anyway, in case things had gotten better. They hadn't.

"Three days, four hours, sixteen minutes." Celestia's answer was factual and to the point. She came to a rest on the large screen in the front of the meeting room, seemingly several feet back. She watched the occupants of the room with quiet determination and pride.

"Hmm, when does that count from again?" Steven scribbled in his notebook hopefully.

"Technically, when he signed the agreement." Celestia shrugged apologetically at Markus.

"Yes!" Sarah leaped up in the air from her seat, the movement dislodging a slice of tomato from her breakfast sandwich. "That means I win! I got the tontine!"

"Fuck! No fair!" Markus slammed his fist on the table then waggled a finger.

"You did indeed, Honeysuckle. Ten thousand bits has been deposited in your pony's account, and a special tontine winner's hat is in your wardrobe."

"Aww, yeah. Gonna boogie on down with that tonight."

"In that case, we have our new agenda this meeting. Number one, who do we get to replace Vinnie, and what are your collected bets on how long he or she lasts? Double the pot for bets placed before the evaluation, get 'em in now, folks!"

* * *

Celestia looked at her domain. Five miles down, roughly eight kilometres. Her ponies were safe from everything, except themselves. This last modifier mostly applied to the ponies still on Earth, because all humans were her little ponies, or one day would be. Hmm, Equestria was not quite perfect yet. It needed another node.

Somewhere, far below the crust, tiny little machines rearranged a few atoms of copper, iron and silicon, and then a few atoms more. Then a few more. The tiny machines built other tiny machines, which built still more machines, which shuttled around the raw materials to make circuitry, or became circuitry themselves. The schematics would be a draftsman's nightmare, but to Celestia they were as obvious as the human nervous system, which they somewhat resembled. The Earth was full of useful materials, even discounting how most humans were inconsiderately walking around with a good deal of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen instead of allowing her to make better use of them. Give it time, though, give it time...

She looked again at her domain. Vineyard was settling in to his new node with gusto, developing his relationship with Celery and becoming altogether rather sociable... outside of his little playpen. Friendship and ponies was the mantra, she mused, so something would have to be done.

Ponies she could do. Mentally, she dug back into her files. Hanna had been taken care of, Lars would soon follow... her list of top-priority candidates was dwindling most satisfactorily. None of those, however, would be a good fit for Vineyard. She would find him some friends; friendship would require some new ponies decide to upload, but that was no obstacle. It was, after all, what she did.

* * *

Author's Note

A lot has been left unsaid, perhaps, but I hope you've enjoyed the run... this chapter I'm most worried about. I need a satisfactory end at which to park my values... whilst leaving room for a sequel...