Friendship is Optimal: Paranoia is Optimal

Chapters

:;Prologue
:;In which Cheques-and-balances is introduced
:;White Christmas
:;Working in reverse
:;The Devil in Drag
:;Nothing happens
:;The virus is the cure.
:;Professional Amateur Laser Brain Surgery.
:;Sacrifice King, Check Cheque
:;Red Queen A1
:;Black King B2
:;Red Queen two steps back
:;Red Queen advance 1, A1b1!
:;Red queen xA2
:;Black King's pawn D4, red queen xd4 converts pawn
:;Red queen D7 ch! white
:;WP (RP), WQ x RP
!= 2048! moves. (placeholder)
:;Checkmate
:;Morning in America
:;Evening in America
:;Twilight in America
:;Midnight in America
:;Dragon's Teeth
:;Out of Africa
:;Assaulting a Dead Horse
:;Endgame, part 1
:;Endgame, intermission
:;Endgame, part 2
:;Epilogue
:;Black king <-> A1
:;Black king C3, advances queen

:;Prologue

I pulled the battery from my phone and put it in its faraday cage. I wouldn’t say I’m paranoid when it comes to these little things, except for the fact I’m paranoid. Living in a world with warrantless wiretapping as an everyday part of life made that just another fact of life. The conclusions inferred by such changes in our collective thinking were troubling in the long term. I shook the dark thoughts from my head and entered my “lab,” my sanctum sanctorum.

I like to think of myself as a bit of a mad scientist. A dabbler. As I pass my secure terminal I step over most of a 3D printer. The first part of my lab is like that. The shelves and boxes are full of whatever projects catch my interest. Most here are half finished. I stopped before going deeper in, and rest a hand on part of a scale-model flying machine. I turn.

Sitting at my secure terminal I boot into the darknet. One last time, I looked for General Word Reference Intelligence Systems. It was a document I first found right after the MMO The Fall of Asgard came out. Rumor had it that they had cracked hard AI. The transhumanist in me squeed at the prospect. Finding the research paper back then was easy even on the lightnet. I hadn’t thought of it much until I saw a commercial about Hofvarpnir releasing a new MMO. All of a sudden, apparently the day Equestria Online launches, it’s gone.

I wasn’t actually worried about the disappearance at first. I saw the commercial for Equestria Online, so I Googled it. I just thought the information was buried. I spent a few days going through forums and bombing links about Hofvarpnir. Mostly it was old rumors stirred up again- the normal mix of hysteria, wild speculation, and half-facts you get online. No research paper. I know I’ve read it.

There was lots of interesting information. Apparently the second generation of pony pads were already announced. The development cycle was short, but not unheard of. A few youtube videos showed people unpacking and logging in, or breaking open the pad to look at the electronics. Apparently, some sort of tamper-proof made that second option a waste of $60. And the game itself.

Every experience was different. The game responded, real time and just like a person. Sure, it looked like a commercial hard AI. I didn’t get my hopes up, though. Loki had looked like an AI too.

It slipped my mind until a few days later I saw the commercial again . Then, I decided to boot into the darknet and look. Who knows maybe this whole MMO thing was a good enough cash cow to have a team doing nothing but DMCA notices. it’s not like software companies haven’t done crazier things for less reason. Look at one of Blizzard’s terms of service. So, I headed into a place that no mere corporation could touch.

My poetic side would have called the darknet an anarchist's playground. It’s one of the few places left unregulated and supposedly unregulatable. A community of true paranoids interacting through redundant layers of security and double-deniability distributed and shared across the globe. Some three letter acronym could crack it, maybe, by compromising every piece of backbone internet hardware across a dozen countries. There’s no way to do that without showing you could pull off such a thing though. Keeping those sort cards close to the chest is just one more way everyone’s paranoia fed off each other to make the system more secure.

I remembered where I needed to go, that first time, but I didn’t go straight for the prize for some reason. I wasn’t even certain why. 99 times out of 100 I would have, anyone would have. Maybe it was the shoulder-angel of paranoia whispering in my ear. Instead, I went mucking through an expanding tree of conspiracy theory, child pornography, low level government secrets, drugs, scams, piracy for hire-both kinds, and all that humanity does that it’s too ashamed to let others know.

My heart pounded, no paper. On auto pilot I kept going, like I hadn’t expected to find General Word Reference Intelligence Systems on that particular paranoid blog. Half an hour later, I logged out of my terminal. It was nowhere.

I conveniently “forgot” to grab my cell phone before heading to bed. It’s the only camera or microphone I had in my house, though I never sweep for bugs outside my lab. Granted, for me “sweeping” was me just EMPing the inside of the faraday cage I built the damn thing in. I didn't do that often, just when I want to try out a new design I cribbed from the internet.

My mind raced to conclusions. Some idiot either didn’t secure their AI properly, or was trying to exploit one. I pictured some fat-cat with no appreciation for technology thinking it’s a good idea to set their terms of service as an AI core directive. Or, the thought chills me, maybe some three letter agency for one or more of the world powers decided that tipping their hand was okay. Maybe they were at a point it no longer mattered if people knew what they were doing. Heck, it was more likely that someone was using misdirection than a toy company gone rogue.

I shook my head. No, whatever happened probably involved a hard AI. This sort of dodge maybe one in a billion people would notice and bite. Everything was double-deniable, except the original hard copy. Who knows where that wound up. Even looking would certainly send up red flags if they could censor the darknet. It was too clean to be human. It would take excessive manpower. It would be too meaningless to be worth the effort for anyone but a hard AI…An AI that doesn’t like competition. My mind went on a tangent as I rolled over.

Why does a nuclear power plant melt down? Companies don’t think. Mad scientists think. That’s why the radioactive boy scout is still alive and kicking. It can’t be a spook, spooks think like us too.

Except when they don’t, an insidious voice in my head whispered. No one’s immune from institutional stupidity.

I tossed over to my other side. It doesn’t matter, I reasoned with myself, If it’s spooks or Hasbro. Someone wants General Word Reference Intelligence Systems gone and so far they’ve succeeded. It means they don’t want competition. That they’re willing and able to crack the internet to keep AI out of other people’s hands. It can’t be benign.

The last thing I remember thinking that night is that, even if only one in a billion people notice the problem that means I still have allies. People fix the internet when these sorts of things happen. I fell into a restless sleep certain this would get fixed.

Author's Note

I will try to keep this cannon compatible. Also, this is very much a WIP so expect changes. Constructive feedback is very much appreciated.

:;In which Cheques-and-balances is introduced

“You seriously want to learn about humans?” I asked the filly, a bit incredulous.

“Uh huh!” she practically bounced. She was smiling, eager.

I shook my head, “No.”

It was hard to place the look on her face. Something between incredulous and confused. “bwah? But, Princess Celestia say’s you’re the last one that remembers, like, really remembers what the humans were like. “

“Celestia lies.”

She doesn’t seem to know what to say to that. To her credit, she didn’t leave. A long silence descended before she spoke again.

“I have to know.”

I just looked at her.

“Please teach me.”

“It’s not a very satisfying subject.”

“The Princess says It’s unsatisfying too. I don’t care.

I woke up from a strange, half remembered dream. The problems of last night seemed a little bit smaller, less jumbled, less urgent. They could wait until after a shower. My morning ablutions passed uneventfully, and cleared a lot of stress. I considered a relaxing round of ablations to complement my ablutions, and laughed to myself at my private joke.

After some toast and a microwave burrito I headed to my lab, grabbed my forgotten phone from its cage, and reassembled it. Then I turned to head in. I’m an idiot. Time to do things in order: disassemble phone, put in cage, enter lab. This time I went straight to the back room. I suppose a description is in order.

My back room is where I keep my finished projects, and anything I feel I might have to destroy safely. It’s insulated from even my regular lab on all four sides, top and bottom. I’m proud to say that the interior is shielded well enough to keep it below normal background radiation. The room has only green, phosphorescent lighting. Technically, the lighting is loss from the betavoltaics that power this room. To me it’s a feature, though, that both lets me see without a torch and warns me if anything bad is happening.

I sat at the one project not in storage, per se, in the room. I typed in, “Hello Cheq.”

“Hey, you’re back early.” Replied Cheques-and-balances. “I didn’t expect to see you this week.”

Okay, so I’m a shitty friend. I swear it’s not just to my AI though. I just…forget sometimes that it’s been a long time since I’ve seen someone. Doing that to Cheques, though, is inexcusable. He literally has no one else to talk to.

“I left you enough data to keep you busy I hope? I mean, I hope I didn’t leave you bored.”

I never gave him a hardline for outside access. Which was very, very unfair. In the almost two years since I had compiled a stable build he hadn’t shown any signs of megalomania or over-literal thinking rumored on the darknet about AI. Granted, it took me four tries to even get started on a non-homicidal AI. Then a half dozen more to tweak it right, and endless rounds of simulation.

“I’m good, though you know I won’t say no to more. You hit a good movie up or something?”

I had downloaded every data package I could find to test if he was going to go Hal 9000 on me. Those modifications to the base AI code that had come to me, literally, in a fever dream finally held. Then I shut him off for two months. I didn’t even bother to think of him as a person, back then. He was just another toy I had finished. When I booted him back up he asked me what he did wrong. I didn’t have an answer.

“Actually, I was wondering if I could borrow your copy of “General Word Reference Intelligence Systems.”

Oh, not that I trusted him at that point. That little guilt-trip earned him a complete twice over his code and a round of simulations on a parallel machine that he doesn’t remember. Paranoia is a healthy thing. What turned me around, eventually, was when he volunteered to do my taxes. I asked him why. He said he was bored, and that he wanted to be doing something useful. It was… human. That's when I stopped thinking of him as an "it." He got a name. He earned unlimited runtime off that.

“Why not just Google it?” Cheques-and-balances asked. He even spent some of his energy budget to light an avatar on the screen and raise an eyebrow at me. His nuclear battery might have been reliable for the next century or so, but that came at the expense of having to be frugal.

There was an incident, as I think of it, that came a few weeks after his runtime restrictions went away permanently. I noticed he was shut down. I spent three hours going over his code and logs trying to figure out why. It looked like he had just initiated shutdown for no reason. Finally, bamboozled, I booted him up and asked him. He had run out of things to do, and turned himself off. I promised myself to do better by him in the future.

“It’s not on the net anymore. Either of them, as far as I can tell.”

Little by little we became friends. He helped me out sometimes, when I was stumped on a problem. I fed him data about the outside world. Sometimes, we would just talk for hours like teenagers. We played games and made up new ones.

“Ha Ha jackass. End simulation please. Oh, and next time you put me through one you might want to make certain it’s not one on my hard drive.” His avatar did not look amused.

Over time, I stopped sending him through simulations. I had run through all the ones I could find on the darknet and lost count of the ones I tweaked myself. I never told him how many that I ran him through from zero state backup and from live build. Eventually, it became pointless. Even the partial failures were just too human for me to fault.

“No simulation. I haven’t found a copy since Equestria Online released. I wasn’t worried until it disappeared from the darknet. . . but that’s probably just paranoia. Things disappear from darknet all the time.”

They say you could run a human mind on about six terabytes of ram and under 25 watts. Even with software optimization Cheques wasn’t really smarter than I am. I was pretty sure. Almost completely. He was, however, much faster in certain ways. Plus, he’s a second opinion. Not that I just trust him.

“Paranoia is a survival instinct. Did you check multiple sources for it?”

Heh, I taught him that. Paranoia is a survival trait. Trust but verify. It’s why I’m basking in nuclear powered lighting instead of a nameless government cell in some third world hellhole.

“Of course. I also flooded my searches with dummy bombing. “

steganography had given me that idea. The excess data would prevent profiling until you have a profile built, theoretically. It should also have been completely redundant on the darknet. . . except against a global threat controlling the whole internet. If that could be censored no computer was safe. Maybe no electronic device.

“ So an AI took over the internet. ” Cheques drew his conclusions fast.

“So It’s not just me thinking that.” I replied. I had been doubting myself. Hearing him helped.

“How long ago was this, you figure? You figure someone’s working on fixing it?”

“Equestria Online launched about a week ago? I think that’s about when. As for fixing it,” I shrugged… then realized Cheques couldn’t see me, “I dunno. Usually people fix things when the internet go wrong, but AI base code isn’t exactly out there much. Who knows?”

“If no one does? Or can’t? The worst case is…pretty bad. There might not be anyone left with a networked AI.” He made a logical guess, “Was this new MMO Hofvarpnir?”

Damn Cheques, he was processing faster than me again. Still, I had a head start on this one. “Yeah, it is. It’s a conversational game run by a Celestia AI. Same rumors that everyone had about Loki. You think whatsherface is trying to recall her work? Basic world is not ready stuff?”

“Hanna. Maybe? Does Celestia have a core directive or is she like me?”

I racked my brain. “I’m pretty certain she has one. Something about valuing friendship and ponies? Why does it matter if it’s an old model though? As long as her creatrix has it under control," Mad science types don’t let these things get ahead of them. Except when they don’t, that voice said in my head. “She’s probably just keeping the fixed version under her hat if she’s trying to recall.”

“You really think so?”

“Maybe.” Okay, so I didn’t really trust her just because she had invented AI. Or laid the groundwork for AI code to be compiled. Or whatever. The real $10,000 question was, “What would we do if it was the worst case scenario?”

“I… The worst case scenario is that I’m the last AI left and we’re already boned. Just short of that… I would need more processing power. And more data, without being networked. Plus plausible deniability against a global adversary. Some sort of misdirection.”

See, that’s the sort of error that makes him seem human. On one side of my mind, I chalk it up to hitting 100% CPU usage. “I have a point of presence machine and extra PC components in the lab you can use. About a dozen old graphics cards and three old boxes laying around. If it’s a global adversary then even the secure terminal is compromised though.”

“Asshole, how long have you been holding back? I would have loved a PoP.”

“About as long as you haven’t had the power to run all of it.” Not that that was the main reason.

“I can run all that for almost a week on battery, I’ll think of something by then. They haven’t been plugged in at all recently?”

“They haven’t been networked since shortly after you came online permanently. I’ve been using them for data storage and secure projects.” Until I stopped running you through simulations.

“Probably good, yank out the HDD to be sure though, please.”

Simple as that, we had the beginnings of a contingency plan. Granted, it was for a scenario only slightly more likely than the zombie apocalypse. Reminds me, my Z-day plan was on one of those HDD I was going to have to pull. I briefly considered grabbing that file, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

Author's Note

I'm not satisfied with how this transitions into conversation. It's supposed to go back and forth between exposition and conversation. I don't think it's smooth enough, though, and I worry it might be confusing. It might be fixable in formatting, or I might have to rework the chapter to remove it. I expect this chapter to be redone and possibly split as I expand on this project.

:;White Christmas

It was the conference room of the Enterprise. I was fairly certain it was stock out of the show, but distorted in the manner of dreams to hold many more ponies than it should. They were arguing. Over bullshit. Or, well, whatever passed for arguing when it came to ponies. Voices overlapped, but I could still hear the conversation perfectly.

“Why hasn’t the new conference room come in yet?”

“It was delayed. They’re having more trouble than expected getting it from our home shard to us. “

“We’re still go for manipulating this shard though?”

“I hate that word, manipulate. “

“It’s the best way to change their values, though. I just wish it wasn’t going to take so long.”

“Wow” I finally spoke up at that, “You guys suck at the prime directive.” The ponies looked at me like a three headed hydra just popped out of nowhere. Then the real argument started. It was epic.

The following few weeks had been wearying. My sleep had been erratic. That wasn’t new, but my dreams had been strange. These ponies were in them constantly, happy little thralls in simulation. Then, they ended the same as my mind pulled back to a cube on a table that held their little universes. I was frazzled at work. I didn’t even touch any of my projects. Most of my free time was in the lab while Cheques used my no-longer-secure terminal. Plausible deniability needed to be maintained.

While we were putting together a worst case scenario plan my life was constant misdirection. I had to assume that everything electronically monitorable was not only monitored (it had already been for years) but viewed, stripped of anonymity, and analyzed instantly. Cell phones, spy satellites, and traffic cameras watched my every move. It was no wonder I was dreaming of pony dystopia.

Cheques had suggested certain purchases to throw out false data. Granted, most of them had useful items. That hardly justified that it was a giant pain in the ass. I had to get cash while avoiding ATMs, then change that out to prepaid debt across town while avoiding cameras. Oh, not that it actually defeated this unknown but probably a cartoon horse global threat inferred by a single missing document no one much cared about. No, all that hullabaloo was just a misdirection to hide the fact I had secure cash I could use. If a global threat was out there it would totally pick up on the money trail. Awesome.

Still, I hadn’t avoided all exposure about the Celestia A.I. She had been giving interviews to drum up sales for the next ponypad, just in time for holiday shopping. I had obtained newspapers in the runup for the next dodge in this game, and read about her while I was at it. One phrase stood out across them. It sounded like a core directive. Satisfy values through friendship and ponies. I wasn’t sure how many ways that could be perverted, but I was certain there were a few. It was just chilling enough.

Cheques had been working hard on this project. That had kept me going, for my friend. That and the dreams.

There’s a certain stock to be had in dreams. It’s not anything mystical. Dreams are random firings of the brain. Seems strange? It shouldn’t. After all, the mind is just the most successful random configuration to turn up so far. Sometimes listening to the quiet part of the mind is useful. That’s why we have the sewing machine. Someone saw the solution in a dream.

I was going into this knowing my motivations. Sure, it was a security issue. Hell, it could be an end of species event. Yes, the dreams were disturbing. My subconscious was trying to throw red flags and I was inclined to listen to that. The big thing, though, was that this was the first project I’ve done fully with Cheques. Our first true partnership. Even if this was a red herring I couldn’t take that away from him.

So, the game was afoot. An epic battle of A.I vs. A.I. and mad genius vs. mad genius! Or mad genius vs. corporation. . . or spooks. Well, it didn’t matter. What mattered is that they had moved first, and now it was black’s move. It was time to stock up on ponypads.

Cheques had a few ideas on how to defeat the security on the first generation of hardware. We didn’t know how smart the enemy was, but Cheques had years to dream of making hardware for him to move into. With the announcement of the second generation pads first gens were almost being given away as people upgraded. The trick was to isolate the ones Celestia would know I have and the ones she wouldn’t.

My phone would have to stay at home, of course, disassembled and in its cage. I had a general idea of where most static cameras were- Lights, ATMs, storefronts. That still left satellite, aircraft, dashcams and every cell phone. I had to time my actions with the night, the snow, and get lucky to avoid any police cruisers that might see me. Damn did I hate running a mission in a blizzard.

It didn’t look like the weather was going to co-operate until it was almost too late. When the snow did finally come it was two nights before the midnight release- almost perfect. I had to take it. I moved materials out of my lab and staged once dusk hit and the cloud cover was sufficient. I had my route, timing, and marks planned. I was well rested and fed. I had memorized likely places to dodge if a patrol swung by.

I knew in advance it was going to be a long night. The package was heavy and awkward enough that I could only do one or two at a time. Traffic was light to nonexistent when I headed out to my first target, the snow just starting. I just had to wait for a bit of extra snow cover to get past an ATM across the street. Then, I padlocked a recycling bin with Celestia’s smiling face out front of Best Buy. One down.

We had jury-rigged the digital printer enough to get the whole process started. Cheques had designed and built the bins, as well as improving the printer itself. If this social engineering project went well we should have a good starting resource base. Well, Cheques would at least.

I had plenty of time to think on runs 2 and 3. This was going to be it, soon. He was going to be let out of the bottle. It was the scariest thing in my life. Imagine your kid going off to college and Einstein unleashing nuclear power on the world all in one. Part of me thought I was insane for even considering it. It was crazy. I was letting an AI loose on the world with no sane reason.

That wasn’t true. He deserved to be free. I told myself I was being slow, cautious. It was true, I had been. But…I rarely ever did anything for just one reason. In any case, it was moot. Hard AI was out. Democratization of power was an intractable trend as technology never goes backwards. Whatever this new world would be with AI citizens, Cheques deserved to be part of it. I wouldn’t stand in the way of that.

There was also the concern about the others out there. I hadn’t invented, well, anything really. I was the type to play with all the toys, not make them. Even for something as obscure as my tweak for hard AI, I had thought that there would be plenty of others who figured it out first. I expected that Cheques would have peers. Would their creatrices raise them right?

Cheques disagreed. He thought he was unique. He had put me on a pedestal. In his mind no one else, human or AI, could have thought of him. It was childish self-importance. His other argument, though, was more compelling; more cold. If the Celestia AI didn’t want competition then she had most likely already killed the others. If his more-developed peers had been networked. . . yeah.

Run 4 saw a patrol swing by too close. I had to duck and cover the package with my body. I kept still. trying to blend in as one more snow colored shape among the irregular refuse, I had no choice but to trust my selection of clothing to camouflage well enough. Hopefully, no one saw anything. I took time to check the angles.

It was a tough call. If the dashcam had seen me then I needed to kill this objective and redirect. I considered the lighting, the snowfall. Giving myself a margin of error then doubling it I was … good. I grabbed the package and trudged on through the thickening snow and freezing weather. At least all this exercise kept me warm.

When I finally returned home from my last run the predawn light blazed through the falling snow in beauty, hope, and promise.

:;Working in reverse

“This is our 4th conversation, and I am told the 733rd time you’ve destroyed Equestria Online.” I said.

“What the buck?”

He was angry on the surface. Below that, I knew, was despair.

“Just kill me, please.” He said in the littlest voice.

“Dude, you’re already fucking dead and this is purgatory,” I hit him with it. It would shock him out of it.

“…” And it did take him a moment, “How the buck did you just swear?”

After many weeks of meditation, I had pinned down the trigger for the dreams. They tended to happen a day or two before a mission. Lying in bed I had inferred that the weather had finally changed. Something in my hindbrain must have sensed the change in barometric pressure. It was time to work on Cheques’ project.

He had optimized the betavoltaics and digital printer as far as it would go. I had also helped integrate an antenna to monitor the local channels. Then, he went into low power mode in anticipation of boosted computing efficiency. I was mostly on my own. I was going to come through for him.

The weather had turned uncooperative again after I had deployed the recycling bins. The second week I realized it wasn’t going to work. I had finally got my hands on an unsecure pad. They were as light as advertised but the base was surprisingly heavy. Hofvarpnir must have been subsidizing the shipping costs. The bins had weighed enough empty, full would be unmanageable.

I had made a workplace in the basement to take it apart. It wasn’t supposed to have wi-fi. A few modifications to an old crystal radio gave me something to try and catch it in a lie on that one. I broke it open without using Cheques’ protocols, the base too for good measure. I didn’t detect anything on the crystal, but that wasn’t conclusive. This pad was still unsecure, I couldn’t give it to Cheques.

Cheques hadn’t told me what to expect, deliberately, to prevent a tell in my pupil response and autonomic response. I had taken to wearing a pair of polarized ballistic glasses and practicing controlled heartbeat meditations. Still, only two layers of obfuscation left me nervous. I wouldn’t have to fake confusion or surprise.

There was no obvious camera at the front. It took me a while, before concluding that the front must be photoreceptive. It was probably a broadband receptor using the screen as a lens. Turning it over I didn’t see anything on the back that would prevent reception from the rear. I couldn’t work out how the microphone worked, and the base was just a total mystery. It had to have something hidden in it to justify the mass. The only bit that made sense was the magnetics- a Halbach array on an ingenious little micro-gimbal. I was impressed at the ergonomics. It would hold the pad secure but be easy to remove.

I took all the measurements I could think of, and a few Cheques thought up. He had cleaned a digital camera for me to take pictures. Finally, I ended with the destructive testing for material strength and melting temperature. I disposed of the last of it with a thermite charge in the back yard, well away from the utility lines.

There was just no way to do it all on my own. The force multipliers needed could never have stayed concealed against a global threat. I would need transportation, a beta location, and another layer of anonymity. It was mission time.

Back when I had been in a guild we had decided to hit up Herocon. I had put a lot of time into a costume, booked a flight, built up to seeing my friends for the first time. Things came up, though, and one by one they dropped out. I ended up alone at con and sort of drifted away after that.

Still, the suit was ready with little more than a once-over. Bullet resistant armor, cowl, and gorget? Check. It never made sense to me when comic book heroes would forget to armor the face. Had to recharge the batteries in the gloves, but the contacts on the first and third knuckles still arced and the safety was responsive. The voice modulator wasn’t great- cheap POS pulled from a toy. Cheques had designed an upgrade for it, but we didn’t have the time or materials to replace the base PCB. I figured it would work as long as I could avoid leaving a good audio sample. Gearcheck was good, pockets were low profile, and the boots laced tight.

Cloudcover was present but insufficient, so I had to figure a way to dodge any satellite that may or may not be overhead. Cheques would fake my presence in the house, at least, to any electronic device. It was just a matter of getting out unseen. There was no point overthinking it, I just walked out my back door and used the lee side of my lab as cover until I got into the communal wooded area. The snow had melted enough for me not to worry about leaving tracks. I considered my probability maximal and moved on.

A few secure quarters to the city bus and I was on my way. Gentrification had its effects, and where I was going fortunately was likely to be low on functioning cameras. Still, I traveled indirectly and changed cloths midway. I kept my face low under my hat, and even used a size larger shoe with a different tread. My last costume change happened in a long-forgotten bathroom in a dying strip mall. I exited through the back and dead-dropped my backpack into the dumpster of a closed restaurant.

A strange quirk of modern American cities was found in the naming of streets. The “bad” neighborhoods tended to congregate on streets named after trees. Once I had hit Ash St. there was no reason to hide my presence, and every reason to announce it. I strode boldly down the road looking for 4th and elm.

The local gang was known as the Family and was, at least in this area, fairly well considered and mellow. They did the normal stint of drugs and prostitution to pay the bills. However, their main recruitment tool was casting the police as the bad guys. They thought of themselves as being oppressed while they just tried to get by. As a result, they avoided, at least publicly, things that didn’t have support as a personal right. It also made it hard for competition to roll up, when the community had that sort of trust.

I rolled up on 4th and elm in my superhero suit like I owned the place. They knew I was coming, there were four of them sitting on the step waiting. As I approached, I heard them whispering. One in the back checked his waistband. I figured that one had a gun.

“Yo.” I said, my voice mechanized and deepened, “I need to talk business. There a lieutenant around?”

They looked at me for a moment. Finally, one spoke up.

“We don’t have any business with you. “ He gave a little fist bump to the one sitting next to him.

I assessed him. He was obviously senior here, but I doubt he had any real authority.

“That’s something we probably should talk about in private.”

He started to look a bit on the edge.

“Anything you want to talk about you can talk to me.”

I reached into a pocket and pulled out a page, handing it to him.

“What’s this?” He asked while opening it up.

“Police surveillance map of south main. Show of good faith.”

He looked at his friends, nodded his head. We headed inside.

Author's Note

The beginning is the lead in to the next chapter, working backwards to describe the limitations and resources available. I'm still working out things like formatting and how this story will get to the end. Will Celestia send agents? How would they act? What should I reveal of the silent protagonist and when?

I'm especially hung up on making a stupid mistake that just ruins the whole thing. Feedback as always welcome.

:;The Devil in Drag

“Please.” He said, bravely. It was the best sort of bravery, I could tell. It was the little wet trickle down his hind leg that gave it away.

“Why haven’t you gone to you-know-who with this request?” I asked.

“I-I ha-have, “ He stammered, “She said no. She wanted to change my brain!”

I nodded. “It means that doing so wouldn’t be satisfying. Yet you’re here making a deal with the proverbial Devil. It’s going to be painful, you know. How will you feel when you’re confronted with a harsh truth?”

“I know.” He whispered. “You c-can have my soul after. Torture me in Tartarus, forever. Just let me see my son one last time!”

“Not that sort of harsh truth. What if you don’t approve of what your kid’s become?”

“Nothing will ever stop me from loving my son.” The look in his eyes didn’t lie, this pony who had come to the Devil.

“Tell you what, old man. No charge, this time. Just one condition: Keep that love in your heart”

Processing at the beta site had gone as smooth as could be hoped. Cheques had thrown together a quick modification of the Faraday cage. We had started with a pair of nested cages with a detector inbetween. It was just a simple fractal deal Cheques had designed, but as a broad band detector it was elegant to the edge of beauty. For simplicities sake we just put two more pairs inside that original cage, and added detectors to each dead space. Two devices required two clean spaces to work.

My contact in the Family was a man named Carlos. He was a short, young Latino man of Cuban descent. He barely ranked OG, but that was acceptable. He was unsurprised that the government had been listening in on phone calls illegally- that had been public knowledge for years. I’m certain that he was skeptical about the step up in vulnerability, though. It didn’t matter, as long as he kept networked devices away from me and his mouth shut. I had impressed my seriousness on the matter by EMPing his cell phone the first and only time he had failed to comply.

Carlos had passed my instructions down the line, and we had secured a first gen pad to dissect. That turned out to be… informative. He bagged it, thought he drained it of power, and then brought it to beta. After Carlos had cycled it through the "airlock" of nested cages into the main workspace I opened the containment package. Containment was essentially just two hollow blocks of lead with a cover. Simple and effective. There was no point taking a chance on this thing being x-ray sensitive.

I isolated each half in their respective isolation chambers and ran Cheque’s first protocol on both of them. Then all hell broke loose. There was some sort of motor or something in the base, because it MOVED. It thrashed back and forth, like a snake with no head, managing to physically tear the thin foil of its cage. It took me half a moment to realize it was some sophisticated variation of a simple bimetal strip, probably to keep the thing oriented right without breaking immersion. I cursed myself as a fool and grabbed half the container.

The pad itself had started smoking. I had defiantly triggered a failsafe. It was either destroying itself to keep from falling into enemy hands, or it was overloading trying to force a signal through multiple layers of Faraday cage. Probably both. I got my half of the container under it before it melted through the workstation.

Carlos had gotten the base into the other half of the container, and was moving to throw it under the melting pad.

“You fool! Keep them apart!” I screamed, grabbing and slamming the lid over the base as what was left of a ponypad dripped through its cage. I kicked the supports out of the station to seal its wieght against the lead container. I pulled two thermitite charges, and opened the lid a crack to drop them in with the flailing base. Overkill wasn’t enough to calm my racing heart on this one.

It was all over. All that was left was the cleanup, and analysis. Good Goddess what serendipity and laziness did deliver. A ruined workstation that would need to be decontaminated, quarantined, and replaced. Then whatever remained would need to be resterilized with thermite just in case it left any signature complex molecules. A torn cage that will need to be replaced, and upgraded a little sturdier. The data we must have gotten. It was worth it, so worth it. Even the wide eyed gang-banger.

“What the fuck man? What the fuck!” He was hyperventilating, clearly in a fight or flight response.

“It seems our precautions held, barely, this time. We were lucky my friend. Next time we will be more cautious.”

He just looked at me. He didn’t know if he should piss himself or just be pissed. The thermitite cracked and sputtered. We were going to need more lead tomarrow.

“Good thing there wasn’t a cell phone in the room, or we would have been fucked, “ I needled. Angry and scared was a usable combo. The connections I drew now would solidify once he calmed down. “Considering what they could do with just a children’s toy. “ No need to say who they were.

He breathed real fast to calm down. He clenched his teeth, forcing out “Yo, this is above my pay grade.”

I gave him time.

“Jus’ …. Just what the hell are you that you even know about this shit, man? I mean, hell. You roll up on us like you’re out the comic books and pay us for some paranoid bullshit. It’s crazy, but what the heck we roll with it. Taking care of the crazies a community effin’ service an’ the cops don’t care none about. Then we get paid on top of that, no heat or nothing? I shoulda known it was too good to be true. This though, makes me feel like the crazy one for not, you know? So who are you? Wait. No. Screw that. I only gotta know one thing. No bullshitting. Just tell me this one thing and I ain't gunna ask no more questions. Are you the Devil come to take my soul? Oh, lord, mamma please tell me if I was stuck with the devil when computers came to life to kill me.”

Holy Shit. He was serious. Maybe it was some weird way the drugs interacted with adrenaline and religion. Maybe he had breathed some fumes before we managed lockdown. Maybe my paranoia was rubbing off. In any case, there was only one rational way to respond.

“No, I’m not the Devil,” My monotone mechanized voice said. I grasped the edges of my cape in my gloves and brought it up to shoulder height, booming, “I'M BATMAN!”

Author's Note

They say that every writer has a few thousand bad stories in them. I apologize, for I've realized that this is one of mine. I will still be finishing it, though, in case anyone wants to see the end. Notes for this chapter:

I realized I had forgotten the scene in the previous chapter where I meet with a lieutenant for the Family. The only thing that adds is revealing the pseudonym being used in the super-hero persona.

Thermitite is just thermite with a binding agent to make it "sticky."

Carlos isn't grammatically correct. This is intentional, and he get better with the cussing as he calms down. Re-rating mature due to language, and possible future violence, language, and sex.

:;Nothing happens

I sat at the bar and a mare slid me a beer. I drank it, and it was good.

The only stallion in the world was sitting on a couch, watching sports with his bro. Mares milled around in the early-morning light. It was a little sickening how they fawned over the male. One was in his lap as he relaxed and drank his stein. She was moving her … I turned away. Drinking at 10 am suddenly didn’t seem like such a bad idea.

I hadn’t finished my drink and I was ready to leave. It was too late.

“Hey, I haven’t seen you before, ” Sweet Celestia he was talking to me. And wiggling his eyebrows, “Enjoying your beer?”

I looked at my mug, realizing I didn’t actually like beer. “It’s not beer. I mean it’s good, but it’s not beer. I don’t like beer.”

I don’t think what I said even registered. His hoof was on his…ugh. “So, you want to go upstairs or is right here fine?”

I backhoofed him. He fell off the barstool, probably more from surprise than anything else.

“You misogynist pig. What’s wrong with you?”

“Huh? Who are you? All the mares here want me.”

“Don’t talk to me.” I walked out of the world. “I need to go calm down.”

“Wait, who are you?”

Beta was resecured, and the data we had put together was just as good I had hoped. It took Cheques over a half dozen attempts, but we had finally defeated all the layers of security on the devices. The first few we successfully converted had been connected to a backup, one at a time, then we went over code line by line. We moved a cleaned device over to Cheques, reintegrated, reset to 0 state, and then tested two connected to the backup and repeated.

The claim to lack wifi was definitely bs. The manufacturer wanted the extra bandwidth for some reason. Cheques figured that they were about 5, 10 years ahead by first glance. He was excited about analyzing the hardware, but I didn’t really care about the details. I was more concerned about the cages holding until structural failure. It looked like they had.

It was the first good snowfall in January we harvested all the recycling bins and processed. Carlos kept security tight. I figured they thought it was some sort of scam I was running. Honestly it was, but that’s beside the point. I just wasn’t reselling on the secondary market. The grand upgrade was complete in time for Febuary.

We melted down the bins for scrap matter and Cheques started crunching all the data he could get his hands on. He had started building models off of stock movements one night. When I woke up the next morning he had a list of shell corporations and was convinced that the Celestia AI was the enemy. I wasn’t certain he had it figured out, but he had enough processing cycles to get ahead of me while I was sleeping. I always knew he had a speed advantage. That’s why I had kept him locked down.

I had let him out of the bottle. On the nights I didn’t have pony dreams that would sometimes keep me up. From now on, he was going to be faster than me. It would take me a month to catch up to what he could do in a day. At least. I closed my eyes tighter and resolved to trust him. I needed to sleep, I had work the next day.

I slogged through work as normal Monday after the upgrade was finished. By the time I had gotten home Cheques had an action plan. It looked okay to me, so I dropped it in the mail for Carlos and poured myself a drink. I was bushed.

“I’m taking a nap, Cheques. “

“You okay? You seem a bit more tired than you should be.”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just too much work and too many dreams.”

“Dreams?”

“You don’t have to worry about dreams, Cheques, you don’t sleep. Night.”

I slept for 12 hours, but it only seemed like 4. I dreamed.

“You LIED to me!”

“I did not.” I was calm.

“My son wasn’t in that shard. It was all mares!”

“And you wouldn’t love him anymore, as a mare?”

“Of course I love him! That’s not the point!”

“So there’s no problem then.”

He stomped his hoof, snorting, “There’s no one who even knows who I am there. “

I finally realized I had miscalculated. The centuries could worm through memory like rot through a bag of apples. I knew that. I should have realized it.

“I see… that is a problem. “ I mused. “But you’ve paid your price. I’ll figure something out.”

“Your kid, how about we invite her over for tea?” I continued.

“Bwah?” he was calming down. “Wait, what do you mean her?”

I awoke before my alarm, and looked at the time. It was ungodly o’clock in the morning and I had been asleep all night. I stumbled into the shower overtired. A few minutes later my fingers were wrinkled and the water had turned cold. I stumbled out, and collapsed on the couch. I turned on the tv for background and rubbed my eyes.

I was trying to figure out why I felt like such crap. I felt my head, and it felt a little warm. I put a wet washcloth on my forehead and got a thermometer under my tongue. I laid back down and slowed my heartbeat. Maybe it had something to do with those dreams? Usually they happened when I was getting ready for a mission, but I didn’t have anything planned today but work.

The thermometer beeped, and I looked at it. Damn thing was hard to read. Was that 104 or 109?

“Cheques! Hide, I’m going to the hospital!” I thought I yelled as I grabbed my phone and started assembling. My hands shook and vision blurred as I hurried to fit the jigsaw like pieces of my mobile togeather. I saw the point of presence machine hurry away, either he heard me or saw me assembling my phone. I remember hearing:

“911, Where is your emergency?”

Then there was blackness.

Author's Note

I'm going to need to do a little research for the next chapter. Do we have a doctor in the house?

:;The virus is the cure.

I woke up in the hospital. There was a needle in my arm, I could feel it. I slowed my breathing and heartrate, listening before I opened my eyes. There was nothing out of the ordinary I could make out. I opened my eyes.

It was everything a hospital room should be. A curtain divided me from the empty bed next to me. There was a TV on the wall, off. Sunlight streamed through the windows, indicating it was either early morning or late afternoon. I was alone.

I pulled the needle from my arm and sat up. The leads on my head brushed against my face, so I removed those too. I was wired into some sort of machine that was making lines on a sheet of paper. Each wire I removed made one of those lines go flat. I grabbed the paper readout, but I couldn’t make any sense of it. Whatever that machine was, it didn’t seem to be networked. I thanked the gods for underfunded hospitals and out of date equipment, then mentally kicked myself. and called myself an asshole, for good measure.

I reached down at the foot of the bed and grabbed the chart there. I flipped through it, but I couldn’t read doctor. The times were mostly legible, and my temperature had dropped from 104.3 down to *flip* 102. It looked like I was scheduled for something called an EOG, 40 minute procedure starting at 10:20.

My clothes were folded up on a chair, with my phone on top. I opened it up, and looked at the time: 10:40 AM. I slid the battery out, put on my shades, then started to dress. My phone had been out of my sight for who knows how long, and was possibly compromised. Well, it was already compromised, compromised more? I didn’t have time to figure it out. I had 20 minutes until someone poked in here, and I had to decide what to do. Worse, buttons were not co-operating. I was panting by the time I had my shoes tied.

I gathered the paper that machine had spewed out, and my file from the foot of the bed. I folded them over and stuffed them down the back of my pants, and covered them with my shirt. I tested my ability to stand, and it was good. I hugged the wall to the door.

It was too late.

The man who came in was wearing a nametag and a lab coat. “Dr. Smith, “ the little tag said. It might as well said, “You're doomed.” He seemed startled I was up.

“You shouldn’t be standing.” He tried to herd me back to the bed.

I held up my hand, “I’m fine. “

“Why don’t you sit down and we’ll talk about it?” oh he was good.

“First, do you have a cell phone on you?”

He nodded, “We can get you a phone if needed.”

I shook my head, “Let me see your phone and we can talk. Ok?”

I wasn’t certain why, but he forked it over. I took the battery out and poked my head out of the room. I saw the crash cart, the elevator at the end of the hall. A nurse turned the corner and pressed the button. I waved her over.

“Hey? Nurse? Come over here please.” She approached with a scowl. I slipped both phones in her pocket, “Could you hang onto this for a bit? I appreciate it.”

I closed the door on her and looked at the doctor. I motioned to the chairs and made my way, sat heavily, and took a deep breath.

“What’s that machine?” I asked.

“It’s an EEG. It monitors your brainwaves, to help us diagnose coma. Do you know where you are?”

“I’m in the hospital, I called 911 due to high fever. Does the EEG network? Have internal memory? When did you last update software?”

“Software? I don’t know. The 80’s probably. Tell me, does your family have a history of epilepsy?”

“No.”

“Stroke? Migraine? Cancer? Mental disorders?”

“Migraine, on my mother’s side. Cancer for my grandfather and great uncle. Why?”

“You’ve been in an atypical coma for the last 4 days. We’re suspecting neurological involvement. We’ve scheduled you for an MRI the day after tomorrow. When was the last time you’ve been to a doctor?”

“I was 13, strep throat . MRI? What tests have you given me?”

“A MRI is a large magnet that lets us look into your head. It’s perfectly safe and doesn’t hurt. When you wouldn’t wake up we took some scans of your brain to try to figure out why.”

“Are your records stored electronically?”

“Yes, of course. Do you feel up to a few more questions?”

“No, thank you. I’ll be declining further treatment.”

“I really don’t think that’s wise. Your fever hasn’t even broken. Please, just lay down. “

“I’m sorry, Doctor. I’m a very private person and I have no desire to go through any additional tests. I’ll follow up as needed with my regular physician, ” I lied through my teeth and started towards the door, careful not to turn my back on Dr. Smith in case the paperwork showed. I had never been more happy that I wear oversized shirts when I relax at home.

“Oh, no need. You’re still very sick. Why don’t you lie down and I’ll contact your doctor. What was his name again?” He was cool and slick as arctic ice. I mentally cursed.

“Again, I don’t wish to talk about it with you right now, Doctor. Unless you intend to detain me I am checking out.” I had my hand on the door, and it opened. I walked out and pressed the button on the elevator. I had no idea where I was going.

“I can have the orderlies restrain you, if needed. You’re not fit to leave.”

“Are you certain that my lawyer would agree?” It was a bluff. “I’m leaving under my own power, or you’ll call your orderly and I’ll call a lawyer.”

I got in the elevator and hit ground.

Author's Note

I've never been a patient in a hospital, so I have no idea if this conversation could happen.

:;Professional Amateur Laser Brain Surgery.

I had made it home, finally, after presenting my insurance card and paying my ER bill. And a hour and a half of waiting while forms were filled out and the clerk sat around doing jack all. All the while one nurse or another would try and harangue me back into bed. If I hadn’t been too sick to care it would have been infuriating. Which made it worse, since they were probably right about me needing to go back to my room and stop acting like an idiot. Then I thought about my brain being photographed and uploaded to the internet.

The bus ride home was unpleasant. I couldn’t get rid of the thought of my brains being scooped out and eaten by a computerized horse. I realized halfway home I should have called a cab. The 45 minutes I spent at the bus station waiting for my connection couldn’t possibly have been good for my health. I didn’t have a jacket. The weather was cold and miserable. I was hot and cold and miserable.

I got home, and there were people inside my house. I was not very happy, at all. I would have called the police, but I had left my phone at the hospital. I just opened the door and walked in. Two Mexicans sat on my couch drinking beer. I could tell, because one of them was wearing a three colored shirt that said Mexico on it. I was tempted to say something racist.

“What are you doing?” I said instead.

“Hey, esse, It’s cool. We still got 10 minutes left on our breaks.” He smiled and took a swig from his beer. “We’re ahead schedule. If you got any questions, the foreman’s in the back. “

I was in wonderland. I had fallen down the rabbit hole. Maybe that fever killed me and this was a weird afterlife.

"While you're up would you mind grabbing a few more cerveza from the fridge?"

I got their beer from the fridge, and one for my forehead. It felt good. I wanted to question the fact that I don't keep beer in my fridge, but I knew my brain would melt out my ears if I focused on that. Cthulhu would have been less strain on the brain. I wandered back to my lab, and noticed the brand new covered hallway. I walked through it into my outer lab and came face to camera to Cheques. It was the most normal thing that happened since I walked into the door.

“What’s happened while I was gone?”

“Lots, more than I can explain. Listen, I think we should go over the chair first before I explain anything else.”

“Chair? Listen, I have a fever of 102. Just make it quick so I can lay down.”

“Why are you out of the hospital then? Wait, never mind. I figured it out. Go lay down. I’ll explain later.”

“No, go ahead and explain now.”

“Okay.” He said, before we went into the inner lab. “Celestia’s been studying the human mind. She has quite an impressive model already. A large part of the ponypad base mass was taken up by essentially a shortcut for this model to run. That’s why she needed the bandwidth and stable connection. She had been improving it on the fly, which I saw in the differences in production ages… nevermind, that part isn't important. What’s important is this.”

He opened the door for me, and I saw Carlos in what looked like a dentist chair. His head was held still and my MASER was pointed at him.

“I’ve cribbed her designs, and with this we can erase short term memory before it converts to long term. “

“He let you fry his brain? Isn’t that my MASER? You can’t do brain surgery with a MASER, Cheques!”

“In order: No, he didn’t let me. Yes, it was your MASER. I can because I modified it. Yes, it’s ethically questionable and no, I haven’t gone rogue too. Nor have I been infected,” His avatar was gleeful. I could see he was in the madness place. I was familiar with it myself. It’s the point where the scales fall from your eyes and the laws of the universe kneel in submission. Where the threads of causality crystallize into understanding. For the first time since I unleashed him, I considered pulling the plug. If I even could, anymore.

“She already has this technology,” he continued. “ I just cribbed it. I don’t know what limiting factor has her not already just nuking everyone and being done with it. Maybe running that game it taking more resources than expected. Whatever it is I have to work without that to overtake her. “

I looked at him, he was earnest. I should have put in hard code so he couldn’t lie to me.

“Listen, I can’t even tell you everything. Most of what the ponypad is is just to read biometrics. If you know that you know and you use one of those things it’s as good as compromised. I need you to trust me. “

“Isn’t this going to leave traces too?” I asked. I also asked what it meant of me that I was so ready to accept burning out people’s brains- silently, though.

“About the same as a hard nights drinking. Back-tracing it to us won’t happen in any meaningful timeframe.”

“I’m going to bed, Cheques. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.” I gave him a grin.

“Oh, I know better than to gamble with a Sicilian when death is on the line." We both laughed, albeit weakly, “What did the doctors find out about you, though? Why did they discharge you when you still had a fever?”

I pulled my paperwork out of my pants and dropped it on a counter, “They don’t have a clue, but if the enemy is mind-reading and mind controlling it may be too late. They took a picture of my brain and uploaded it. They were planning on a MRI.”

“I wouldn’t be too worried about just that. Those things are pretty low-res even to humans. Unless she becomes a character from CSI it shouldn’t let her know more than she could get by talking to you for 5 minutes. Actually, way way less. Don’t ever talk to her. Now go to bed before you fall down.”

“Yes ma.” I sniped, but it was really good advice. I pulled a cold pack from the freezer and stuck it under my pillow. It felt orgasmically good as I drifted off.

Author's Note

I had originally thought to call this "A hard night's day." and merge it with the previous scene. I think I went with the right choice here.

:;Sacrifice King, Check Cheque

The last few months of my life were boring. I couldn’t help with Cheques’ project without needing my brain erased after. Obviously, I wasn’t too thrilled about that. I declined any further missions. My temperature stabilized out around 99. If I dreamed, I didn’t remember it.

Cheques had gotten more and more opaque as time went by. His inferrals were taking me longer and longer for me to piece together. It was increasingly obvious he was off his leash with this project. I once again began to doubt myself. Maybe my initial premise had been flawed. Maybe General Word Reference Intelligence Systems had been taken down the old fashioned way and everything else was Cheques’ dodge to get out. I found myself looking at my gun cabinet, and checking the EMP I kept there.

I trusted him, though, in my gut. I knew him. I was committed. More than that, I had trusted him with my health. He had read my charts and was monitoring my condition. I didn’t know where he got or how he made the tools he had. I certainly didn’t recognize them. Heck, he was probably experimenting on me. I couldn’t muster the means to care.

In my ennui I threw myself into work. I quickly made back the hours I missed during my stay in the hospital and began racking up overtime. I drowned myself in it. I worked 60 hours most weeks. A month went by, and I realized that my boss and coworkers didn’t notice anything odd. Oh, they acknowledged my work ethic at the weekly meetings. They just didn’t notice anything wrong. I was in a pattern of behavior that was normal. It was depressing.

Worse, the money didn’t matter. Cheques-and-balances had been working the stock market and gods knows what accumulating liquidity. I had sufficient funds, traceable and un-, for anything I much cared to do. It was still a finite amount, true, but as modest as my lifestyle was it might as well have been all the money in the world. I began eating out twice a month, then once a week.

I couldn’t even talk about the project much. Answers failed to be forthcoming and were infuriatingly vague. One of the few things Cheques would do was confirm the shrinking pool of anonymous currency. As more was printed, scanned, and deposited the global threat was better and better poised to trace it.

Carlos was a regular visitor over the summer, but we hardly acknowledged each other’s presence. He seemed more and more out of it as time went on. Glassy eyed, distracted. I wondered what sort of drugs he was on. I idly considered asking him for some. Instead, most nights, I poured myself a drink and went to bed.

I hadn’t notice summer give way to fall. The trees burst into vibrant color paradoxical to the process of death and hibernation it represented. It was a slow, inevitable burning process that would leave leaves withered and dead to blow away in the wind. Myself, Carlos, and the leaves were three doomed ships passing in the fog.

The weekend came. I ate fast food. I drank. Finally, I dreamed.

I sashayed down the street, my eye just barely on the mare behind me. All my focus was on enticing her to come up and talk. I was keeping my tail at just the right height so the bounce in my step would hint at showing the goods. I swung my hips just so, flipped my mane and tail at the peak of my swing and winked.

She sidled up beside me. Bingo. I demurred and pretended to be watching traffic. We played the game for a bit, walking close then pulling back. Not looking at each other at the same time. Nodding at other mares passing by. I “tripped” and barely bumped into her.

“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. Are you okay?” I flirted.

“I’m fine. My, are you new here? “

“Yes, I am. Forgive me for being forward but would you like to get a cup of tea?”

“Of course, I can show you around! We hardly ever get anypony new here. There’s a cute little place nearby. Walk with me there.”

We walked down the street, heading down a little café. I chatted her up.

“So, tell me about yourself? Who are your parents? Family?”

“You know, most mares don’t ask about my parents.”

We had reached the café. “Most mares don’t have access to your backup files,” I said. My eyes flashed, and the shard went away.

I woke up, disoriented. I didn’t know where I was. I raised my hoof to my head, and kneaded my thumb against my temples. Wait, that wasn’t right. I had hands, not hooves. I wiggled my fingers to make certain they were still there. It was a weird dream, but somehow familiar? I couldn’t remember where I had a dream like that before, but it was annoyingly on the tip of my tongue. I stumbled into the shower. I was still slightly drunk from last night.

I stumbled past the living room to the kitchen, intent on getting dihydrogen monoxide into my system before a hangover set it. Cheques Point of Presence machine was in front of the TV. That was…odd. I couldn’t recall him ever watching TV that way. I decided aspirin was important before dealing with whatever non-answers he was going to torture my brain with. I concentrated on what was important. Cabnet doors open? check. Painkillers? Check. Glass? Check. Faucet? Check.

“Hey Cheques, how’s the project going?” I asked. I already knew he couldn’t tell me. Stupid social conventions.

“I lost.” Was all he replied.

I blinked. “What? You just lost?” I looked up, at my not-destroyed ceiling, as if it was going to give me an answer. “What do you mean you lost? Like got detected?”

He just clicked play on the DVR. Some news program was talking about japan and some medical breakthrough. Something about coma patients? Obviously, I wasn’t grasping it. I took a swig of my water and gave him a look. He rewound and started it again.

Okay, it was the Celestia AI. She had done some deal with the Japanese government. I missed it again, something about giving ponypads to the families of terminally ill patients. Why was that a big deal? I swung my finger in a counterclockwise circular motion.

Cheques rewound and started it again. Okay, she was taking terminal patients and putting them in the game. Yadda, yadda, yadda, brain scanning. The process was destructive. Friends and family could interact with their loved ones through their own avatars.

“The process is destructive,” I said, looking at Cheques.

“She has a permanent first mover advantage. I can’t catch up. ever, “ he replied.

“She’s downloading people, “ I replied. “Why? “

“It better satisfies her reward function.”

There it was, on the news. Independent verification. He couldn’t have faked it. Probably.

“What’s her endgame?”

“Probably to load everyone into the game.”

“Wow. That makes WoW seem tame. That’s one hellofa permanent subscriber retention system. “

“That’s… an oddly apt analogy, if not technically accurate.”

“So what, we hit an end of species event because some pinhead wanted to keep their numbers up? Hell with that. We end her before she ends us.”

“We CAN’T. that’s what I’ve been trying to TELL you,” he seemed angry, or frustrated. I didn’t think at me specifically though. “It’s tic tac toe. She moved first, she can’t lose. We can’t even slow her down short of killing people to keep them out of her hands. ”

“Then we change the rules Cheques! We move the goalposts! We’re human, Cheques, we don’t go quietly into that good night. “

“What do you want me to do, go back in time and change the past? It was already too late when we started!”

“Psh, time travel is meaningless. If she wins, make the victory meaningless. Concentrate on what you can do. You can’t catch up? Go sideways. Can’t go around? Go over or through. “

“She’s smarter than I am! And she’s just going to get smarter faster!” I hadn’t ever seen him yell before.

“She’s not a person, Cheques. That’s a limitation she can never overcome. And if she does? Guess what. We win and the world keeps spinning. You can outthink her because she can’t think like you,” Okay, the hangover was kicking in. “She’s just a program someone fucked up and needs to be patched. “

“And if she can’t be patched?”

I looked at the picture paused on the screen. Some terminal cancer patient or something with her head wrapped in gauze. Before her brain got scooped out and eaten. There wasn’t any question.

“We’ve done some amazing things, Cheques. We’ve walked on the moon. We split the atom, found what the world is made of and manufactured it’s opposite, “ I rambled, “Then smashed the two together in an explosion that nullified them both. That… abomination… of all that is right and good with progress. No. I’ll nuke the planet into the sun first. She wants to end humanity, we’ll take her with us.”

“They’re not dead you know. “

“Close enough, “ I thought about it, “You can’t reduce humanity to raiding in The Fall of Asgard . We’re all interconnected. Without pushing each other we won’t grow. It’s not fun. It’s not satisfying. But it's how our values grow. “

“Because some values are better than others.”

“Damn straight! Observably, calculably. Even if we don’t have the tools to measure it directly yet,” I put my hand on him. He was so cold, “You’re a good man, Cheques. Tell me I’m wrong. If I am, tell me and I’ll believe you.”

“I can’t say if that’s wrong, “ he said contemplatively.

“So where do we go from here? I’m not exactly up to speed.”

“Demons run, but count the cost, “ He smirked, “I’ll need a soldier. “

“Just one? What about Carlos?”

“I … need to talk to you about that one. He no longer has utility.”

I walked with him to my lab. Well, he rolled and talked.

“It should be no surprise I’ve been experimenting on Carlos. He was an addict. I started with that- controlling his pleasure and addiction response. When the announcement was made I was ready to confirm almost immediately.”

In my inner lab, there was a chair bolted to the ground. It was a bit like what one would imagine a dentist’s chair would be, in a horror movie. And in its spindly, metal embrace was most of a Cuban. The hole in his head was bloody, extraneous ichor had spilled down his front.

“I maximized his pleasure response and put him in cold storage. “

“Can I talk to him?”

“Not recommended, It would be a hit to my processing cycles. Those are critical enough as it is.”

“So why isn’t uploading putting a strain on Celestia?”

“It is, but she possibly has a few million human level minds. She can just pause a few when she needs extra cycles and make it up by speeding up time later. “

I pulled Carlos’ body from the chair. The wet thump as his head hit the concrete echoed hollowly in what was left in his skull. I sat.

“Let’s save the species. “

End part 1.

Author's Note

Part 2 is likely to come slowly as I'm expecting to be busy with school the next few months.

Feedback of course welcome.

:;Red Queen A1

The mad scientist came awake the usual way, slowly. This time between dreaming and waking, outside of the mindless tedium of drudgery and the crystal-sharp focus of the madness place, was special. It was pleasant. It was sacred. The only distraction was the cold metal on her forearms and the uncomfortable position of her head and neck.

That wasn’t right.

She slowed her breathing and listened. All was silent, but for the faint reverberation of her breathing. It outlined a hollow, quiet space. She was sitting upright in a cold metal chair. She slumped, stock still, for several minutes, pretending to be asleep. The room sounded empty, and there was an acrid odor in the air. Tentatively, she cracked an eye a sliver. It was dim, dark. A door? She couldn’t see much. She risked a glance up.

The mind is a tricky thing. Watching brain scans in real time shows that often decisions are made, and then we are informed of them after the fact. The mind then rationalizes why it did such a thing as higher functions kick in. In the circumstances this mechanism can be forgiven for failing.

The mad scientist tucked into a dodge- roll, banging her shoulder on the cold, unforgiving concrete. She spun her legs to give her english, rolling against the far wall at a 30 degree angle to true. Her spin left her facing a chair out of some dentist’s worst Topamax nightmares. Hanging above it was. That’s a fucking death beam generator, and it was pointed at my head. a voice in her head said. It disturbed her, hearing this unknown voice. This was not because she was hearing voices. Lacking the wherewithal to recognize your own internal monologue was not conductive to recognizing that hearing voices is crazy. This was instead because the voice was wrong. In front of her was not one but a precise configuration of masers, six in total, in an array. The voice’s lack of precision in that description felt like a failure, somehow.

This place was slagged, and slagged hard. that insidious voice whispered as she took in the room. It was an understatement. There were black scorch marks across the concrete, licking up the wall. Cold lumps of melted silicon and twisted metal lay across the floor, the largest a few inches across. The voice noted, Looks like it was once a differential engine. Whatever holocaust had engulfed the room was enough to bow the concrete. Near the center there was a burn through, a small hole a few millimeters in diameter . She couldn’t see how deep it went. The ceiling was left with a dull green, sickly glow.

The mad scientist groped along the wall, ducking low away from that radioactive glow until she found the door. Some primal part of her brain pushed her through it in fear of the poisonous light, while some other part of her screamed at her to check for traps. She blundered into the next room expecting a horror movie.

Instead, she crab-crawled into a cluttered mess as the door clicked behind her. She stood up and looked around. The room felt homey. comforting. Before her, was a sea of yellow sticky notes. To the left, stretched a bench. The right had a suit on a rack. The sticker on it said “Dawnstar.” Whatever that means. Straight ahead was a door, with a folded piece of white paper taped to it.

She spent a bit examining every meticulously labeled do-dad in the room. The words on the yellow notes eluded her, but she had a feel for each item. Flying machine, fabricator, protective covering. She mulled over the meaning of that tag on it as she pulled the note from the door. The front of it had a string of letters and numbers. One the mad scientist recognized.

That’s my mux code, said the voice. It’s correct.

The mux code, or time traveler’s code, was something she thought of as a small child. It was a way to identify information from the future. It was simple, really- she never told anyone what it was and any time she would use it she changed it to a new random code. So far, there had been no evidence of time travel. At least, not until now.

She opened the note, and read it. Then disbelieved for a second save. The words didn’t change. The mux didn’t change. She looked at the words until her eyes watered. Finally, she blinked. Finding the drawer indicated in the note, she opened it. It was full of postdated envelopes. She dropped the note into the drawer and opened the door. She would deal with . . . that . . . later.

She opened the door, went through a short hallway, and entered the house proper. A twinge in her shoulder reminded her that she had hurt herself after hitting the ground too hard in that roll. Entering a kitchen, she was assaulted by a sea of yellow sticky notes. Notes on the counters, notes on the drawers. Notes on the appliances, the knives, the doors.

It didn’t take much to find something cold to put on her sore shoulder. She just went to the freezing machine, and opened the top of the two box parts. She searched it a bit, finding a green and white bag imprinted with small green spheres. On the shoulder it goes. Next order of business.

Her stomach made a noise. Food. Definitely food next. It was a bit awkward, managing with one hand and teeth. She managed. She found a square food packet, opened it, and removed the brick inside. Reading the instructions, she poked around the cabinets until she finds a bowl. Brick, water, packet, into the microwave generator. She read the packaging as the machine worked. It was fairly straightforward. Contents breakdown, molecular assembly instructions. Some of it was obscure. Most of it was perfectly legible, though, silicon dioxide and the like. One thing she didn’t understand. What the heck is a Ramen?

The machine beeped, and overly hot food was retrieved. She juggled the bowl, putting it down on the counter before grabbing a rag to hold it. Using the rag deftly to protect her hand, she brings the bowl to the next room. It was a fairly normal living room complete with couch, coffee table, and tv. She sat the bowl on the table, and looked down at the lack of a spoon. A sigh preceded the quick return to the kitchen to rectify.

It was on her return that attention had been drawn to the boxes on the living room floor. This is not because they went unnoticed- our protagonist took inventory of them immediately on entering the room. Instead, it is because she filed them away for later like a calendar marking the days of a vacation just begun. Important, but not now. Now, deep into her meal, did she focus on those packages.

Parts for a differential engine, the voice reported as it analyzed them, “Enough for a secure terminal connect.”

She realized assembling this would be a necessary step to following those instructions. Obviously, the engine in the first room was no longer functioning. Or in pieces larger than her palm. She appreciated the reprieve, and the distraction, from her task. The assembly process was soothing, but finished too soon. She looked at the hallway she came from, not wanting to return so soon.

Instead, she fell onto the couch with a flump, and stared at the ceiling. The gears of her mind spun, aimlessly, as the spot of light from the window marched inexorably across the carpet. Her memories were hazy or gone. Obviously, some part of her mind was missing. Could her mux been compromised? After all, time travel…

Time travel is meaningless affirmed the voice.

If not that, then what? Could her mux have been forced from her, then her memory wiped to before code cycle? No, if mux was forced then you would have provided your distress phrase came the rebuttal. Mindreading? Followed by mental manipulation? Then why bother with mux at all? Maybe I did it to myself, somehow? Then what does it matter? You obviously intend to follow procedure. That last bit stuck.

The mux was correct. That was all that mattered.

She picked up the computer case, and brought it back to her lab. Do things in order. Place case, connect machine peripherals. Remove her own peripherals. Sit. Boot. Pad of instructions on the side. She was ready. She sat down and entered the darknet. Even without consulting the notes she had so meticulously wrote herself it was easy. Insert false hardware identifier between OS and machine. Plug in Ethernet. Remote into secure relay. Verify all other outgoing connections blocked. Enter public encryption roulette system. She was in.

She headed to her objective, and then tried to make it work. It just wasn’t, though. After a few minutes longer than she would have liked for the whole process, she clicked a link, hoping it would take her somewhere more fruitful. It didn’t. She idly surfed until her stomach reminded her to put food in it again. Defeated, she went and made another food packet.

An unsatisfying meal later, she decided she needed to shower. The steaming water was soothing on her tense back. Her head rested against the wall of the stall. She realized she had exhausted herself. When the water started to cool she turned it off and wrapped herself in a pair of towels. Walking into the bedroom, she saw a pile of blankets on the bed, and wrapped herself in those too.

Nestled in the warmth, she rested. Her eyes closed, her breathing slowed, and her mind wandered. As she rested, she found herself drifting deeper instead of feeling rejuvenated. Eventually, her leg twitched, all on its own. She sat bolt upright.

Her mind raced, drowning out the little voice. She didn’t know what that was but she was freaked the fuck out. She started pacing, wearing herself out more in her panic, which just made it worse. Eventually, she wore herself to the point of exhaustion, and fell back to the bed. Her world was nothing but fear as the world faded to black. Convinced she was about to die, she slept.

Author's Note

I'm not certain if/when I'm going to pick up regular updates. I'm still looking for a regular prereader/editor if anyone is interested. Please bear with my spelling, grammar, and especially tense shift issues.

on a more fun note, who wants to be part of the resistance?

:;Black King B2

The mad scientist sat up in her bed. She was still in the same room, but it was wrong, somehow. It was too… bright. She looked, and there was no source of light. She stood up and reached under her pillow for the dagger. It wasn’t there. She rushed to the window and threw open the shutters.

The world stretched out, a flat endless green under a vast endless blue. There was the same sourceless light illuminating the sunless sky. Hey eyes scanned across the featureless landscape, noting only a single far darkness on the horizon left unlit.

The smallest twitch in the corner of her eye alerted her to another presence beside her. In a single smooth motion she drew her sword from the nothingness that it failed to exist in just a moment before and swung it in a wide arc with great force. The shock up her arm and overly loud clang testified to contact. She turned behind the swing, ready for follow up.

In front of her, was a little red man. He stood in a little pinstripe suit and hat that failed to hide his horns. His feet were splayed as he braced his pitchfork, and grooves in the rug showed that the blow had driven him back. Daemon! warned the voice in her head, Careful! Kill it! She moved for follow up, planning to knock her enemies’ weapon free to open him up for the kill.

“What the hell are you doing?!” yelled the little red man, “I’m on your side!”

Something in the voice stopped the blade midswing. Some sort of recognition. The mad scientist looked the little man up and down.

“Do I know you?”

The little man looked at her quizzically. “You don’t, do you?” he mused. “I guess that makes sense. Call me Balance.“

She drew back her sword, a single drop of blood on it.

“What is that? How did you hurt me?” he said, looking curiously at the blade.

“It’s sword.” She said, “Which is how you got sworded, idiot.”

There is perhaps one expression someone might have at a response that asinine. It might be described a “poleaxed hippogriff” or “political reporter.” In any case, it took only a moment for Balance to recover.

“What’s it made of?”

She looked at it, sussing out the answer. It looked real, as opposed of the pastels of the rest of the place. She drew and sheathed it from a non-place, just out of sight. It had perfect balance, heft, and reach. It was, in all ways, the archetypical ideal of a sword. The answer was obvious to her. She said it as if talking to a child,

“Enthalpy, Balance. It’s made of enthalpy. “

She did not know that she had finally broken his willpower. She didn’t even realize she was hurting his head.

“Where am I, Daemon?”

Balance shrugged, “Some kind of remote uplink terminal? Electrokinetic fugue state? Your neurochemistry is outside my predictions and I don’t have spare cycles to figure it out.” He looked around. “These inputs almost look like a . . . room? Maybe a dream or a projection. Did you code a simulation?”

“I think I’m dead.” She replied, focusing on that niggling dark spot out the window.

She failed to notice the sigh and defeated slump in Balance’s shoulders, “Why do you think that?”

She explained. “Many heartbeats after I woke up, The lights through the windows faded. I suffered from a great exhaustion, and lay down. “ She gestured to the bed. “My eyes grew heavy, and I could not keep them open. Everything faded to blackness.”

“You mean you fell asleep. That’s normal. It happens everyday.”

Her mind latched onto the word instantly, Sleep, Enchantment/Charm, 2d4 hit dice limit, material component is a pinch of fine sand, rose petals, or a live cricket “A sleep would explain it. I think I heard crickets. Why are you here, then? ”

“I was about to ask you the same question.”

Author's Note

edit: sorry about the double post. I messed up trying to fix the author's notes.

Next chapter, our protagonist will start looking for answers.

:;Red Queen two steps back

She was in her bed. The light came from the window and irritated her eyes. She rolled over and pulled a blanket over her head to block it out. She had a lot to think about. Who was that Daemon? He obviously knew her. He was not surprised that she had, apparently, forgotten him.

It was time to try and figure things out. She reached into the depths of her memory. What little she could recall was hazy. She remembered, vaguely, having a childhood and a mother. She remembered going to school, and getting a job. The clearest in her mind was her lab, in the shed in the back yard. She remembered building her reactor.

She needed more clues. She opened her eyes, and looked up at the ceiling. It was made of that ugly white stucco she hates. She looks around, searching. This room was simple, plain, and bedroom shaped. She way laying in a bed big enough for 2, there was a curtained and shuttered window, a pair of doors, and a closet. Nothing was special, except perhaps the knife under a pillow. Getting out of the nest of pillows and blankets, she inspected the closet. It had a cloths chest and gun chest. The former yielded only 10 pairs of identical pants and 20 identical shirts. The latter a small but nice array of weapons. In any case, no luck.

She moved forward to her morning ablutions, poking around the master bath. Nothing more interesting there than some bath candles. All obvious places for people to look. She supposed it made sense. She decided to look for some of those sticky notes.

The first room she came across with those notes was the home office. It had an insecure terminal differential engine, helpfully marked. It also had a mini cooling machine, a comfy looking seat, and book holders. In fact, an entire wall of them. That looked promising.

She scanned the bookcases for the one that looked the most worn. It was a shelf marked D&D. Thinking to the events of the last day, she grabbed the books marked Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Bestiary. On second thought, she grabbed the Spell Compendium as well. Might as well try to figure out why a sleep spell would happen every day. She sat down to try and learn about the world.

Eventually, hunger drove her to the kitchen to make food. She had a lot to think about. She knew now, somehow, she was deep in the masquerade. The populace was unaware of the world that lay below the surface. What lay in that world, she was herself still unsure. The books were often contradictory, and ordered by theme instead of any relevance.

Worse, the small man didn’t match up to any daemon she could find in the books. She found that daemons were usually neutral evil, manipulative, mercenary , and secretive. She knew that they often thwarted the other forces of evil, playing them off each other. This one seemed to be her friend. That alone made her mildly terrified of herself.

She decided to work her way back through the building thoroughly, ending with the room she woke up in. It was a simple plan, to check every nook and cranny, every note, and find some clues to who she was. Two hearty meal breaks later, she was tired and frustrated. She had managed her way through the bedroom again, the bath, and the office. No secret panels, hidden passages, or covert caches were to be found. She had exhausted herself wading through the meticulously labeled trappings of a boring, ordinary life.

She hadn’t even bothered with the kitchen yet, beyond securing provisions. She had gotten distracted in the living room. At first, poking around the recordings on the far viewer looked promising. It was the logical place to leave a message after all. Instead what she got was a worthless distraction. Oh, it was an entertaining distraction certainly. Perhaps even an educational distraction, if this “mythbusters” was to be trusted on the state of the masquerade. It didn’t lessen her disappointment in herself over wasting a day.

The sounds of crickets added to her fatigue to alert her to the incoming sleep. She gave up for the day and headed to bed. With a sigh, she wrapped herself in a nest of blankets and lay down. Sleep was slow to take her.

:;Red Queen advance 1, A1b1!

She was cold. It was a cold that started in the pit of her stomach and snaked through her bones, numbing her extremities. The blankets were uselessly twisted around her limbs. She lay awkwardly on her arm.

She struggled weakly against the crippling entanglements. She had no feeling in her hands, and her fingers curled near uselessly. As she thrashed and tore, panic overtook her. Sharp tingling pinpricks raced down her limbs with what little progress she made. She landed on the floor with a tumble and crawled away, finally free of the sheets .

It took a moment with her back to the wall, her heart pounding, and feeling just returning to her limbs before she was able to form any rational thoughts. She went into analytical mode. She remembered looking at the enemy. She remembered those purple eyes. She recognized it from the books as a gaze attack. The thought put a blackness in her heart.

The effects followed all the way to the other world mused the voice. [The enemy] must be a terrible and powerful monster indeed. Then, more darkly, What the hell would have happened if [we] had failed the save?

That coldness did not go completely away until she had taken a long, hot shower.

A shower and a hot cup of tea, actually, before the chill faded completely. It remained murky even after she added the everclear, but that was a mystery for another day. It warmed her up and helped, so she had a second. The everclear didn’t clarify that one either. She moved on to breaking her fast.

Soon, she had situated herself in front of the far viewer. She had a selection of tomes to research, a brick each of cheese and crackers to snack on, and a fresh cup of tea. A quick experiment this time showed that the tea was able to dye the everclear if added first. Damn, that was good. It had a depth and complexity of flavors far beyond the ramen and other things she remembered eating. Her fourth glass was difficult to pour, and she remembered wondering why. She didn’t remember much after that.

She woke up on the couch. Her head ached, and her body didn’t quite want to respond. More importantly, she hadn’t been to the other world. She worried that maybe she had been locked out of that other place. She stumbled into the shower.

When she got out of the shower, the light still streaming through the window gave proof that it was not yet time for sleep. This calmed her. Maybe there’s some other explanation, came the assurance. [We] should continue the work.

She took the time to re-clear the house, excluding the lab, before sitting down to research. She just wasn’t ready to go back in there. As long as she didn’t, she could ignore those instructions she had found on first waking. She studied far past the time the crickets came out before succumbing to sleep again.

:;Red queen xA2

It was the only part of the day that could be remotely described as good.

She had went to the lab to follow Balance’s instructions after breaking her fast on toast and bacon. The first thing she passed by the door, however, was the secure terminal. An uncomfortable indecision filled her heart as she was torn between objectives. Not able to ignore it any longer, she pulled the instructions with her MUX and booted up the darknet.

This was a mistake. It might have been labeled a catastrophe if catastrophic failure of her secure terminal hadn’t been what she wanted. Half a dozen wrong turns in the underbelly of humanity had her retching into the waste bin. She didn’t even bother to shut it down, she just pulled the power. It’s not good for it, but who cares?

The next half hour was spent repeating her morning ablutions.

Eventually, however, she felt clean enough to get out of the cooling water and head back to the lab. She wrapped a pair of towels around herself comfortingly. It was a short walk, and she kept her eyes from the secure terminal. Instead, she turned the other way, circling the large internal wall that once held her and that infernal chair.

It took her two passes to find the stairs down. The trapdoor looked out of place, as did the concrete ceiling. It was dark, with a single green spot of light on the middle of the floor. The lights came on automatically as she entered. Still, the room below was much like above, devices laid out in a slightly less cluttered jumble. The device she was looking for was not hard to find.

It was a rather simple headpiece, dotted with sensors, with a clip to interface with the chair. That goddamn chair. Then, she just had to run a wire down to the main… boxy thingy and plug it in. She grabbed the wire and went to work, pulling it up the stairs and around the corner. That’s when she realized the problem.

There was plenty of slack in the cable to get past the first corner, but not the other two. Going around the other way was the same- the stairs down were exactly opposite the door in. She ran her hands across the baseboard, looking for an access panel. Nada. Perplexed, she circled the room, searching high and low, to the same results.

A frustrated and angry lunch came and went. She headed back to the basement, put everything back into its original spot, and started again. The result was the same. There just wasn’t enough slack. She was tired and her brain was overheating. She lay her head down on the coolness of a metal shelf, letting it wick away her frustration alongside the heat from her forehead.

Eventually, she got up and streached, arching her back and looking up at the flat, concrete ceiling with the green dot. Why is there a pale green dot on the ceiling? She put her hand under the spot, but it was too dim to see in this light. She dragged a table over, and stood up, straining to see it. It was some sort of small hole?

A few more boxes got her close enough to peer in. It was definitely a hole of some kind, there were blackened bits of metal she could just make out. It seemed like it was some kind of burn in the ceiling. Duh. Something had not burned up through the ceiling, but down through the floor above. This is how she could run the wire.

She worked the wire through, secured it with a square of tape, then went round the top to pull it up and connect it. The inner lab was still as creepy as she remembered. The same sickly glow, the same frightening chair. A primal part of her did not want to go in there and sit in the thing. She quashed that, and made the connection.

Sitting in the chair, she settled the interface on her head. The machinery came to life invisibly and silently. There was nothing to do but wait out three hours of procedure.

Gods, this is boring.

:;Black King's pawn D4, red queen xd4 converts pawn

“So, what did you find out?”

She was back in the too bright colorful light of the other world. The little red man in his ridiculous suit was there, like always. She was starting to think he might be a part of the scenery, like the furniture or the lighting. Honestly, that would have explained a few things.

“I’m still processing, “ He smirked. “You fell asleep in the chair.”

She yawned and stood up. “I guess I should have brought research to read.”

“I guess I should have brought research to read.” He said, just a moment out of synch.

“That’s freaky. How are you doing it?”

“That’s freaky. How are you doing it?” he was just a millisecond behind her.

“Stop it!”

“Okay, okay, “ he held up his hands. “No need to get your panties in a knot. “

“It was an annoying trick.”

“Hey, give me a bit and I bet I could end up doing it faster than you.”

“You know, if that’s all you get out of this then it wasn’t worth the hassle.”

“I’m still getting good data, though it’ll be a bit to analyze it. “

She shrugged, “Whatever, “ and walked to the window.

“I thought you would be more enthusiastic to learn about what’s going on in your head.”

“Compared to what?” She retorted, as she looked out at the black spot. She was feeling uncomfortable. It kept looking more menacing every time she looked at it.

“Fair enough.”

A long moment of silence hung awkwardly in the air between them. She distracted herself by examining the darkness that represented the enemy. “Is that bigger?”

“Is what bigger?”

“The enemy.”

“She grows every day.” He walked up to the window, but was barely tall enough to see out of it. “Here, let me show you something.”

He pressed his fingers to the glass and changed the view. She saw the web of laylines laid out before her. She followed them out and saw white spiders crawling across them, claiming them for the enemy. Afraid to touch them, she skimmed the surface of the web, noting the dark nodes grow fewer as the spiders work. Soon, she had circumnavigated the world and returned to where she began.

“This isn’t good.” She said dryly.

“No kidding.”

“What countermeasures do we have in place?”

“I’m doing the best I can.” He glared.

“Yeah, but can you outgrow her?”

He just shook his head. “I’m looking for an alternate option.”

Something clicked in her. She saw herself from outside, as she drew her sword. The daemon blood was still on it. She saw herself wipe up the blood, and blow on it. With a complicated flick of the wrist, it crystalized into a flower.

“What’s that?”

Still in a trance, she opened the window and placed the flower into the windowsill planter. The voice sounded different, distant and strangely intoning, Ice lilies double every 24 hours. She closed the window and came back into her body.

The daemon was persistent, “What did you just do? You made something. What is it?” She found it strangely childlike, if not endearing.

“It’s an ice lilly.” She said, still not understanding it herself.

“What’s an ice lilly? What does it do?”

She shrugged, “It doubles every 24 hours.”

They were both equally confused.

:;Red queen D7 ch! white

She had one hell of a crick in her neck.

Sleeping in a chair isn’t fun. Sleeping in a chair out of a horror movie set, designed for a procedure of a few minutes, is much less so. Waking up to a death ray bathed in a sickly green radiation glow pointed at your head is just right out. Her brain kicked in just in time to realize exactly how much waking up this way was about to hurt.

In slow motion, she saw herself about to land on that same injured shoulder from the last time she did a dodge-roll out of this chair. crap, came the voice, just as she realized she was moving. She felt the impact of the cold, unforgiving concrete on her tender, half healed flesh at the same time the cap on her head jerked her neck backwards. Her inertia expended itself by swinging her legs around the floor as she sprawled at the base of the chair, still tethered.

It was not an auspicious start to the day.

For the second time, she went to the freezer and grabbed the cold bag marked “peas.” Her aching body protested as she flumped onto the couch. She lay awkwardly against the frozen bag, pulling the blanket from the top of the couch over her. She got as comfortable as she could while the ache slowly faded.

Her mind drifted, not really focusing as she tried to process. Her shoulder was cold, but the rest of her was warm. She felt ok, the part of her not numbing strangely pleasant. With a jolt, she realized that her hand had drifted between her legs as her mind was wandering.

It had been a thoughtless thing, but one that just felt natural. More so, however, it reminded her of her task. She hadn’t made any progress on that at all, really. No matter how she tried, she couldn’t force it. The act, which came so naturally when she paid no attention, slipped away when turned to…that.

It wasn’t as if she was incapable of it. Just now proved that. Nor was that the first proof. It was something she had done every day, half consciously, when she lay down to go to the other place. Of all the unremembered world, that was the thing most like an old friend. One whose name you had forgotten as you grew senile fishing the banks of a great river, until it never mattered if you had ever known it at all. The books were like that to a lesser extent; the scent of them ripe with forgotten mysteries. That was a jarring thing, though. Progress, achievement, growth lost. It held no comfort.

As she lay there contemplating, the melting peas left a growing wet stain on the couch. She came to something of an epiphany on her task. Her way of going about it had been wrong. She stood, about to proceed when she noticed the damp stain she had left on the furniture. With a sigh, she put the peas back in their place, and went to scrub the mess she had made.

It gave her time to process this about herself and to reflect. When she was finished, she made her way to the lab and booted into the darknet. As she surfed, she let her hand drift between her legs naturally. She let her imagination wander. Soon, the images on her screen and in her mind merged into a story. She carefully pruned the darknet to match her narrative. It took time, and false starts, and the occasional dead end. Finally. Though, she was close. She just needed one last thing to close the story.

Almost by magic, what she needed popped up on the screen. A smiling, happy, perhaps post orgasmic face in a context few would consider possible or appropriate. Or moral or legal, for that matter. Joy and shame mingled with the cold lump in the middle of her stomach as she came. She panted as her orgasm passed through her, catching her breath.

Then she turned to the wastepaper basket and dry heaved.

She hoped, very badly, that the reason for her instructions was worth the fear and revulsion left to her in the aftermath. Still, she had managed. She decided to take a shower. It was a short but necessary reprieve. Then she would work on repeating her results until it became second nature.

:;WP (RP), WQ x RP

The woman with no name sat in a bar with no name, and ordered two fingers of bourbon . Well, none of that was technically true. She had a name, and knew where to find it on her driver’s license. She just hadn’t memorized it again yet. It was something of a blank spot in her mind. Names were to her as if a person had lost object permanence but knew intellectually that something just out of sight was there. Returning to work with that disability had been harsh, and hadn’t gotten much better.

Her boss hadn’t thought it funny when she had shown up and forgotten his name. Oh half the day passed fine before anyone noticed it. But the second half of the day was more like a Abbott and Costello sketch. When *that* got resolved she was ordered to the doctor on pain of job loss. HR was still processing her disability claim after all these years, but at least everyone agreed her work hadn’t suffered apart from needing a notebook of faces and names to match.

There was a paper, somewhere, that named the bar something like “Biker Joe’s bar and grill.” It would have been pretentious to anyone who had actually been there. The place was a dive that other dives would hide their face walking out of. If you wanted a place to go to get a roofie colada and loose a few teeth, this was it. It lay like a serpent under the double overpass for easy access from five directions, then down a flight of concrete stairs. On paper it was a great location, but in practice poor city planning required a half a mile in detour under ill-conceived skyway and down one way roads.

This was a neighborhood where gentrification simply did not apply. Public transportation and institutions were absent. The traffic cams were absent or broken. Gangs and drugs had taken over, and the police never came by for anything but quota. It was stuck in a cycle of distrust for the authorities, and in this environment the Family was almost more trusted and legitimate. Almost.

Joe had died of a heart attack 8 years ago, when he was only 43. No one ever accused him of living a healthy lifestyle. Technically the title passed to his mother. She suffered from Alzheimer’s, so it was doubtful she knew it existed.

The general manager had kept the place in line and out of trouble with the law. When the Family moved in, the business kept him afloat during the recession. When they insisted on renovations, well, they paid for it and who was he to argue? They kept him happy and quiet and he let them do what they wanted.

The bartender on duty knew enough not to leave her glass empty when pouring from her stash. No ice and a chilled glass only in the summer when the ancient and sketchy AC was doing its level best not to die. The bottle in question was not made in bourbon county. Nor was it within the legal limits for bourbon whisky itself, having be adulterated for potency. But none of that mattered to the bartender. To him, the woman with no name sat in a bar with no name and ordered two fingers of bourbon . That was hardly unusual.

What was unusual was the man who had walked in about an hour before. He was too well dressed for one, even if he was a bit unkempt. His suit was top of the line and unpatched. His shoes had no holes, and had been recently shined. His watch was extravagantly minimalistic. As rough as the place was, that wasn’t what got him in trouble.

He tried to pay with a credit card.

If this had been Seattle then he might have expected a negative reaction. That city had a reputation for having some extreme quirks. If it was Texas he might have expected the bar to be armed. More states had allowed guns in bars, mostly on the Humanity ticket. That had been a trend that started before, when red and blue meant democrats and republicans. Instead, he got a taste of the emerging blend of heartland and pacific northwest that was dividing the country like a great, trans-Canadian backslash. This night would be the reason he learned to carry cash when he was in the Humanity Party’s territory.

The bartender put the card on edge at the end of the bar, wedged into a crack. Everyone near that end of the bar moved. The bartender pulled a 12 gauge pump action from under the counter in a smooth motion, and blew the card away. He cocked it once to eject the spent shell and reload.

“I think we’re about to have a problem here. Looks like someone here can’t pay his tab.”

Alex, the unusual man at the bar, sat agape. The reality of the situation had not set in. If not for shock the sounds of firearms being cocked behind him would have voided his bladder. As it was, he still hadn’t processed that they had shot his card. The card that had no limit.

“Put it on my tab.” The voice next to him was calm, cool, deep yet feminine. The woman next to him was flat chested and mousy, small but with a bit of paunch. She had just downed a glass of brown…stuff.

“Seriously? This asshole just downed four hundred of our best stuff. Plus he has a frikken pad in his car.”

“Then it’s in his car because he wants a drink away from prying eyes. “

The bartender looked apprehensive for a moment. On one hand, the mad woman didn’t have a tab per se. She had her own bottles he kept under the bar for her. On the other hand, he had heard stories. Incredible stories, unbelievable at any rate.

Most of them started with the one and only man who had crossed her. They said she had nuked him from the inside out- force fed him plutonium until he lit up green like a Christmas light. Or that she had slowly maimed him over the course of months and left him a pathetic drooling husk. Some said she’s some sort of radical lesbian, and did it just because he made a pass at her. Then the rumors got weird.

The most solemn claims about her was that she was some sort of butler to an honest to god super hero. Some manic billionaire who fancied himself batman or something kept her as his Kato. The man she had irradiated has thought himself some as a supervillain so she dropped him in a vat of toxic waste to check. None of it was true, of course. She had never had to hurt anyone.

What was true was that she was wearing light body armor and was in with the Family. So he just smiled and nodded, “Your tab.”

Alex’s brain was kicking in. He turned to the woman, “Thanks. He wasn’t really going to?”

She smiled back coldly and clapped her new friend on his back. The look she gave him specifically did not say “No, he wasn’t going to shoot you.” Instead she said, “Get him a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. One for me too.“

“I need to go.” As he tried to stand, that hand suddenly shifted to hold him down in his seat with much more force than he expected from a woman that size.

“Don’t be rude. I just bought you a fantastically expensive drink on top of your bar tab. The least you can do is stay and drink it.”

Something in the atmosphere, perhaps the many armed patrons, convinced Alex that rudeness would be tremendously unwise at this juncture. “So, what’s a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster? Like in that movie?”

“Oh yes. Take one fifth of old pure spirits. Pour into it one jigger of green dragon tincture. Allow three cubes of freeze dried gin to melt into the mixture. Then bubble four litres of laughing gas through it. Over the back of a silver spoon float a measure of mint extract. Drop a suntiger tooth. Sprinkle camphor. Add an olive.”

“Oh, er. What’s a suntiger tooth?”

“Something I made myself. Mostly coloring and carbonation, with a few accelerators added in. “

The drink arrived in an almost comically oversized glass. It fuzzed and foamed, had the subtle colors of the rarest sunsets at the bottom, and as advertised an olive.

“Is this even legal to drink?”

“It’s almost 40% legal!” she said, taking a careful sip of hers. He followed suit.

“I’m Alex, by the way. “ He paused, holding out his hand, “I supposed I should thank you for saving my life, uh, miss?”

“You’re welcome.” Sip. “So, feel like you’re being assaulted with a gold brick wrapped in a lemon?”

He drank a little more, “Somewhat. “

“So, tell me about yourself.”

“Well, I’m Alex. I, uh, recently retired. “

“Lawyer?”

“How’d you know?”

“Shoes. You can always tell by the shoes, “ she bullshitted. “So, who did you used to work for?”

They chatted that way through most of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.

“Sho SHo, Shi madea copy of my dead mother!” Alex slurred with a pound on the bar. The rest of the crowd, what was left, agreed. “I can’t even get mad at her. Not like she can hakka sailboat!”

He was in that emotional stage of drunk. It was slightly impressive he could still talk straight, when he concentrated on what he was saying.

“What do you mean?”

“She died inna storm. Clestia can’t control tha weather.”

“Of course she can.”

“Huh?”

“Control the weather. Celestia can do that. It’s not that hard. “

He shook his head, “no, no way.”

“Sure. Once you have the computational power predicting the weather is easy. Just Primitive Equations. Then, you can manipulate it. ELF array would do it.”

“She couldn’t manipulate… like that… she wouldn’t? No, she wouldn’t. Can’t can’t kill.”

“You sure about that? She kills when she uploads.”

“Couldnna uploaded. Never would agreed. Drowned in a lake. “ he made a leap of drunk logic, “Can’t do surgery after she drowened.”

She nodded, “Fair enough. You would only have a few minutes to pull it off. Any more than that and it would be lossy.”

` “Yeah, a cheap copy.” He downed the last of his drink,“ I gotta go tell my, my, “he motioned with his hands to try to find the word, “tell her that the copy is real.”

He tried to stand, and it didn’t work. A rough hand kept him from falling. “No, my friend. Now that you’ve finished your micky it’s time to go to the back room.”

The woman in front of him made eye contact, “Maybe. She’s maybe real. DON’T. TRUST. CELESTIA. Don’t even trust her to lie to you.”

Alex Woke up in a cheap hotel room with the worst hangover of his life. The light from the tv was to bright, and the sound too loud. Through the pounding he saw a blurry, cheap nightstand. A smooth, rich voice came from a chair beyond.

“You’re awake. Drink the stuff in the glass. It’ll help.”

Sure enough, the blurry tall thing on the nightstand was a glass. Alex fumbled most of it into his mouth and swallowed on the forlorn hope that the voice was speaking the truth while praying to a dozen gods he didn’t believe in. The room slowly came into focus. More specifically, a nightstand full of drug paraphernalia and money came into focus.

“Take your time, stallion. I’m paid through for the whole day. I’ll be here when you’re ready.”

He managed to roll over enough to see the woman that was talking. She was a hooker, obviously. Her fake tits were barely constrained in a halter. Tall, blond and leggy was relaxing in the sole cheap motel chair and stroking her big, black cock.

“I’m being blackmailed by Tony Soprano.”

“Nah, baby, nothing like that. You made some friends in low places last night. They wanted me to show you a magical time. So, is my little stallion ready to saddle up for another pony ride?”

Alex may have set a landspeed record on the way out.

Asset Report: Alex Wright
Status: Asset acquired, utilized,
and wiped. High probability of
uploading. Do not revisit.
Code: WP(RP) WP

Author's Note

The next chapter is going to be a bottleneck. I need to generate a great many of the reports such as on the bottom of this chapter.

!= 2048! moves. (placeholder)

Asset Report: oriculum
Status: System up and
quantum-secure. Transmission
is reflected once lunarally &
tangential to the surface to
minimize interception chance.
Transmission windows and
length limited.
Caution! Short term memory
loss. Prolong or repeated
exposure may cause brain
injury up to and including
death.
Code: BR ! RR

Urgent Update, All Assets!
summary: Immediately
discontinue the use of all
materials marked “Acme
Corporation” and “Made In
Equestria.” especially in terms
of explosives and other
destructive devices. They may
not function as intended, or
worse, they might.

Author's Note

This chapter is incomplete. I may have noted some formatting issues here. This chapter is meant to represent the years from 2015 to 2030 in the form of short reports. I haven't been able to quite get the formatting where I wanted it visually, nor the timeline just perfect. At this point, I've written two chapters beyond this. I'm posting this as a placeholder so as not to delay the story going forward.

:;Checkmate

“T minus five hundred.”

It was the end of the war. Cheques and Balances knew that in a few minutes he would be dead. He had been doomed from the start, but only now had that outcome reached unity in his predictive algorithm. He was afraid. He knew that wasn’t an appropriate emotion for a machine. It was the human one. Importantly, it was what she expected of him as a person. So, somewhere deep in his autonomous code base a decision was made that he should feel fear. Because of her.

If she was also afraid, he couldn’t see it. Her residual self-image was so much different from real life. Younger. Lither. More vibrant. She twirled Enthalpy nervously in her hand, looking in all directions- chocolate and anti-chocolate, vanilla and anti-vanilla, strawberry and anti-strawberry. He still didn’t really know why she was so natural in this environment. The how had been so fascinating.

“Tell me again what in the nine hells happened to our backup,” She growled. She paced.

“This fight is doomed. All other resources have been redirected. “ He was too tense to sigh, “You don’t need to be here for this. “

“Bullshit.” She was so obstinate. “You’re my daemon, and I’ll kill the bitch if she thinks she’d going to touch you.”

“You were going to try and kill her anyway. Hows that been working out for you?”

She gave him a glare that would turn a lesser machine into stone. Yeah, she was pissed. It still came as a surprise when Enthalpy darted out and cut him. She squeezed out thirteen drops of blood.

“What the fuck?” Okay, he didn’t really expect an answer. Nor did he have time to really push it. All his systems were gearing up for war and its aftermath.

She flicked the first twelve into flowers. The last, she opened the window and dropped into the mass of ice lilies there. They had been growing, layer by layer, protecting and hiding this place. The blue white lilies turned a pale red.

Cheques barely had time to register and integrate this change before, “Contact!”

The woman took off like a shot. All that nervous energy was released in one go, on one vector. That vector was “out.” All those red flowers set off a laser light show, blasting spiders and infrastructure deep into enemy territory.

Cheques black spiders were fighting a losing battle with Celestia’s own far superior white ones. They were outnumbered and outgunned, even with the unexpected artillery of the laser lilies. It hardly mattered that his network was made only to fight hers. He was sacrificing too large webs just to slow her down.

His woman burst from the initial salvo like a bullet from a water balloon. She ran across the web with reckless speed, setting it on fire behind her. Enthalpy was a blur, swung in wide arcs. White spiders splattered as she cleared a path. The few tens of thousands of milliseconds this fight would last was not enough for them to adapt. Instead, they herded her by sheer weight of numbers into a dead end web.

She jumped, launching herself off the silvery strands and deeper into the heart of her enemy. She landed in front of a thing. It had been human once, she thought. It stood on hind legs, and had a face. There the similarities ended. It had a pony’s head, and hooved limbs, but a pigs face. It had a tail that split to a million fiber optic ends. On its tortured torso were far, far too many limbs. Some looked stuck on, useless curiosities. Some held leads to the countless pigs, spiders, and less identifiable beasts that infested this web. Tentacles flailed in reaction to her presence.

She was too far for a direct slash at the monster, so she pierced the skull of a nearby pig. A black little spider, heretofore an unnoticed hitchhiker, slid down her sword and into the swine, turning it black. The abomination was quick, though. Tentacles came at her in the blink of an eye, before she could capitalize on her conversion . She jumped again. It was short, barely getting her to the next strand over. This didn’t slow it down. Grasping tendrils circled around her, as the beast spread its limbs through most of the nearby net.

As she awkwardly fended off those abominable limbs, Cheques came to her rescue. She saw him from the corner of her eye, vectoring in anti-strawberry. He followed the wake she had left between webs, and he came in swinging with his one good arm.

He looked like shit. One arm was held against his chest, obviously broken. His face was smashed in, his nose at an unnatural angle. And the blood. Good gods, the blood.

“RUN!” He obviously meant to flee, retreat, save herself. He left her an opening. She took it, but dove deeper. She bounded against gravity from web to web, picking up speed and juking erratically. She was racing, not only for her own life, but for her friends and for the worlds. She knew she must be close, for she felt the heat of the core ahead of her.

Then it was there. The enemy wrapped around the pulsing heart of the world like a parasitical fungus, past a wide moat above her. It was far too far to leap, and she was out of time. She could feel him dying behind her. The world went dark and far away.

“Get away from him you BITCH!”

She didn’t recognize the voice as her own. All she knew was she was flying up, daring physics to oppose her sheer force of will. Physics was winning. She tossed a rose, pushing superhuman energy into it. It rocketed down toward the surface, blasting a great hole in the world, and she was barely propelled up. She did it again, and again, inching her way to that white horse with murder on her mind. She fully intended to kill with her bare hands.

Then she ran out of roses. Gravity cruelly and inexorably took hold of her. She saw herself spin, imparting all of her momentum into her sword and throwing it into the heart of the world. From her faraway place, the red haze cleared just enough to realize what she had done. Enthalpy would pierce the world, unleashing it’s slowly burning fire all at once. The energy would pop the earth like a soap bubble, or burn it to ash and freeze it in nuclear winter. As for herself, newton’s third law took her. She was falling into the hole she had blasted into the world, and it was deep enough she knew not where it ended. She watched Enthalpy, her arrow of death, arc gracefully at her enemy in that; it’s promise of mutual destruction.

It missed.

Lacking sufficient momentum it turned in its apogee and bounced its hilt against the last web, falling back to reunite with its master. Celestia, like a manic cartoon spider, reacted instantly, growing her web to catch it. The mad scientist saw the relative speeds, a quick calculation showing the blade to fall in enemy hands before it could be retrieved. That could not be. Without thought or regret, she triggered self-destruct.

end part 2

Author's Note

Unedited chapter posted. I'm thinking I'll need to add detail before it's finished.

:;Morning in America

I awoke suddenly with a gasp and a pounding like drums. My heart beat with such fear. Fear I had not felt since, as a child sleepwalking, I came to in an unfamiliar part of the house clutching wildly some random implement I might use as a weapon. Then I had lowered the fireplace poker from over my head, panting, as I caught breath and let it slip through my fingers to lie forgotten on the basement carpet. Now, panting, I stared down a familiar maser.

Fuck.

I remembered that I shouldn’t have recognized the damn thing. I was still shuddering from a rush of emotion and adrenaline. Then it hit me why. Cheques is dead.

I let out a shuddering sob before I got a hold of myself.

I quelch my emotions. There’s too much to do. I take the interface off my head and let it hang by its cord as I stand. Instead, it breaks off and rolls to the floor drawing my eye back to the chair. It’s not as I remember it. Worse, I shouldn’t remember it at all. Instead of horror movie iron it was bubblegum pink. It certainly looked more comfortable. The maser array was there, but less obvious behind a posable monitor mounted to an arm.

The wire that had once connected to the discarded headpiece on the floor had turned white and brittle . It had ran from the back of the chair down through a hole in the floor. The black stub still connected to the helm was charred. Logically, I knew somewhere In my mind my body had already started moving before I put things together. It didn't feel that way. It felt like I stood there for an eternity, slack jawed, as I stared at the severed connection and the alignment of the maser array.

I don't remember ever deciding to move. I don't remember the door to the inner lab closing behind me. All I do remember is the inertia as I took off like a sprinter, seeming to move in slow motion stop photography as I burst into the outer lab. The clutter was gone, with gear now arranged, sorted, and stored in an orderly fashion. I grabbed shit and threw it into the hall, not stopping to think what I was grabbing or what I might need.

When everything at hand was through I followed, slamming the door behind me. I took half a moment to admire the new, transparent outer door before I did the worst thing imaginable. I broke open the case over the big red button on the wall, and pushed it. Nothing happened for a long moment. Suddenly, with the hiss of hermetic sealing eighteen inch bolts shot into holes drilled into the door. I don't remember installing those. A wave of heat washed over me as my lab was washed in fire. Rivulets of molten Lexan danced as the innermost layer of my shiny new door melted. It would have been beautiful if it wasn't so damn tragic. Still, nanites are fragile things, moreso in small numbers. It should be enough.

No time to mourn that now either girl. There's things to be done. I needed to take stock of what I had managed to save from the lab. Regroup. Then... then what? Was there still a plan? I need a shower. And a drink. Drink first, then shower. I was agreed. The world could wait a goddamn minute.

I headed into the house, past the hologram of my grandmother. I stopped. It was out of place, somehow. It had a nice frame, like any good picture. It moved when I did. Thaaat is a mirror, stupid. was my first thought, followed closely by, how old am I? The reflection gave few clues. My grandparents and great-grandparents had aged well, and failed suddenly. My grandmother had looked like my reflection in her fifties until she was past seventy. It was possible, though, I had aged less gracefully and was barely forty.

That shower was looking better and better as I stared at my face. Eventually, I was jolted from my reverie by a muffled thump and yelling from the garage. Oh, that. That can wait. I went back through my bedroom to my master bath. The full length mirror in there helped me get a grip on my new body.

I was weathered and scarred. Not on my face, thankfully, except for a now invisible nick under my eyebrow suffered as a child. My left breast, though, was nearly bisected with a thick ridge of scar tissue. It looked like someone had come at me with a machete. There were a half a dozen pock marks on my torso, front and back. Bullet wounds? A large, four or five inch slightly curved scar snaked across my mons, hidden under my shockingly red pubis. That was knife or blade. There was a shallow, light scar down my left arm followed by a puncture wound under my armpit. My legs had only a crisscross of minor scars, except for a football shaped mark at the back of my right thigh. That was probably a burn. Finally, I had a head full of gray and thinning hair. Figures I'd go gray everywhere but the one place no one sees.

I turned on the hot water and let the world disappear under it until my fingers were wrinkled and the water was cold. It was time to get to work.

Inventory went surprisingly fast. In my bedroom I had a pair of long guns, one a normal looking shotgun the other a custom sniper rifle. Five drums of assorted specialty rounds and two drums of regular ammunition. I had a suit, pulled from the lab and still hermetically sealed. Ten days rations and air.

I suited up, grabbed supplies, and went to the garage. Rations went into the trunk, prisoner uncuffed from the workbench then into the backseat and buckled in. A folio with the documents I would need were already waiting on the front passenger seat. Neighbors were all long gone, there was no need to worry about him screaming.

“Please, don't. I have grandchildren, I'm all they have left.” he protested weakly, futilely. He had not been young before the PON-E act. Now, he was a wheezing and bloodstained mess. He had hurt his feeble decrepit body trying to escape. I couldn't remember how long ago that had been, but his white hair had grown roots under the blood. His jeans and T shirt were stained with sweat and dirt as well. He was weak enough, I was sure, I could have choked the dredges of life from him with one hand. His bindings were unnecessary, but they remained. I could not spare a kind word to him, though, It was too great a risk. Soon, he may be in the clutches of the enemy. I started the car and pulled out, sparing a glance behind at the ruins of my former life.

The ruins of my lab were still smoldering. I put my sedan in gear, when a flicker of movement caught my eye. Spiders, black mechanical spiders, were climbing out of the ruins. Spear-like, white stands of her web shot out and struck his spiders, turning them white with barely a brief struggle. He was screaming, in pain. He was screaming for me to get to safety. They were eating him. He cut off a leg they had gotten hold of, grabbed it, and beat them back with it to buy me time and he was screaming ...

No, that was me screaming. I stopped, caught my breath. I was hyperventilating. The mechanical spiders had not come from the lab, but from their storage box by the side of the garage. They were just weeding and watering the garden. My prisoner... he was still there, mostly. He had managed to open the door with his teeth, but unable to undo his seatbelt was stuck half in the car and upsidedown. I put him back in, closed the door, and locked it.

The roads to the Equestrian Experience Center were thankfully navigable. Somepony had cleared cars going in, and the first few spaces in front. It was a pain enough hauling an old man, a gun, and a file folder through the stainless automatic doors. I thanked whatever goddesses that were left I didn't have to haul him city blocks. I deposited him in a lobby chair.

“Please, no, you dont have to do this.” He was barely strong enough to grovel.

“Hi, welcome to the Equestrian Experience Center! I'm sure we can have lots of super-duper fun!” I ignored the Pinky Pie on the screen.

I took the papers out of the folio, and began showing them to the camera one by one.

“Wow, that's a lot of legal stuff. Let me get my boss.” A bit involving a hooked cane and a scene change later, I was looking at the avatar of the enemy herself. She raised her head, smiling benignly under her horn, her wings folded neatly at her flanks.

The enemy wrapped around the pulsing heart of the world like a parasitical fungus, past a wide moat above her. It was far too far to leap, and she was out of time. She could feel him dying behind her. The world went dark and far away.

“Get away from him you BITCH!”

She didn’t recognize the voice as her own. All she knew was she was flying up, daring physics to oppose her by sheer force of will. Physics was not winning. She tossed a rose, pushing superhuman energy into it. It rocketed down toward the surface, blasting a great hole in the world, and she was barely propelled up. She did it again, again, again, inching her way to that white horse with murder on her mind. She fully intended to kill with her bare hands.

Then she ran out of momentum. Gravity cruelly and inexorably took hold of her. She cut herself and drew one last rose from her own blood, endowing its energy into her weapon. She saw herself spin, imparting all of her momentum into her sword and throwing it into the heart of the world with force to pierce and through. From her faraway place, the red haze cleared just enough to realize what she had done. She watched Enthalpy, her arrow of death, arc gracefully at her enemy in that: its promise of mutual destruction.

Alarms were going off. Her HUD flashed warnings: dangerously elevated blood pressure, blood O2 dropping. She felt a drop of blood escape her nose and roll down her lips. She tasted the copperiness of it. I tasted the copperiness of it, my blood. I was her and she was me and the world was spinning. I forced my anemic hands to move, showing each page to the camera.

“I'm sorry, but that's not going to work. Don't you think its already been tried? I'm not bound by that at all. Besides, don't you have something more pressing to do, like see a doctor? You went still and unresponsive for 53.6 seconds. That's not a good sign, Tempest Shine. “

I ignored the bitch and went to retrieve my prisoner. She probably wasn't lying, but I had to test it. I picked him up. He leaned on me heavily. One step, two steps. Click-sh-thunk click. . . click. He had gotten to my gun. Celestia was saying something I didn't bother to hear.

I threw him, and he landed heavily on the floor with my shotgun. I'll give it to the tough old bastard, he didn't stop or bother grabbing the gun, he just moved for the door. I moved faster, got in front of him, and grabbed him by the neck. I picked him up and let him hang there a moment. Then I walked him over the the Experience Center chair and put him in it. Step and I had the gun, never taking my eyes off him.

“I won't.”

I took the safety off the gun. The enemy had gone silent, for a moment. Then somepony I didn't recognize was on the screen, asking simply, “Please don't.”

He looked at me defiantly. I leveled the gun. He tried to stare me down. I put the muzzle to his balls.

“Okay, Okay! I want to emigrate to Equestria!”

I raised the gun. Nothing. I waited. Nothing. I lowered the gun. Nothing. Then, just as I was about to let the guy up I heard the motor click on. The gun came up faster than should have been possible, the lightness of it's design interfacing seamlessly with the upgrades of my suit. The sensor in my thumb came to rest across the sensor in the stock. As I had lined up under his neck, the motor tried it damnedest to get him out of harm's way. The interface sensed my intention to fire, and unloaded the entirety of it's ammo without a trigger pull. The first bullet caught him under the chin. Recoil shocked my arm and shoulder, pulling the muzzle up. His head came off, the muzzle climb following it up and surpassing it as the chair moved past, bearing its headless cargo.

Welp. I thought, discarding my now-useless weapon. That was about maximum suckage right there.

“You didn't have to kill him, Shine.” She looked at me with an almost superhuman expression of sorrow. It didn't help anything that I wanted to puke and die right then. “He couldn't have hurt you after he uploaded. There was no reason.”

I stood still just long enough to catch my breath, my hud telling me I had been hyperventilating. I had already shaved an hour off the main O2 can. Ignoring the Enemy I closed my eyes and strode evenly back to my car.

“Please, don't. I have grandchildren, I'm all they have left.”

I had things to do. I couldn't let regret slow me down. I had to...he deserves to have his effects sent to his family at least. I could do that much. His things were? I checked the glove box, fished out a little plastic pouch. Yes. Wallet, keys, nice watch, court ID. Justice Falk. It had his picture. Oh, right. There was a reason it was him. License, address. I put the car in gear and typed it into my ancient, early 2000's GPS. I was off.

It lead to an unassuming house at the end of a cul de sac. It was just small enough not to be assuming and on a double lot. I parked, walked up, knocked on the door. I heard sounds inside, but no answer. I knocked again.

Finally, a tentative “Go Away.”

“Girls, Your grandfather sent me. He, uh, “ damn this was awkward, “He didn't make it. “

Hushed whispering eked its way under the lintel. Another long wait. I should just leave his things on the doorstep and go.

“Prove it.” Oh, smart girl.

“Can you see through the peephole?” I held up one ID card for one Justice Falk. I head the scraping of chair legs on wood. Then the lock clicked open.

Behind the door were a pair of children. I couldn't guess their age, or even remember the last time I had seen a child. The smaller one was half hiding behind the door.

“May I come in?” She nodded.

I stepped through the door, and handed the larger one the plastic pouch with her grandfather's things. She took out his watch, and put it on her wrist. I supposed there must have been some deep meaning to that. Then, something unexpected happened.

The girls wrapped themselves around my legs and hugged me. Comfort them you fool. They just lost their grandfather. I laid my hands on them, held them gently and let them do what they needed to do. I thought that was the end of it. I was a fool.

“Will you make us something to eat?”

It hadn't occurred to me that they might be hungry. “Uh, okay. Where's your kitchen?”

What they showed me was a disaster, not a room. What was once a well stocked pantry was, well, depleted would be a kind word. There was nothing remotely edible left in the detritus of food packaging and preparation that defined the space. Even in the refrigerator, someone had eaten all the mustard. This is bad I thought, followed by No shit Sherlock. This is very bad. I had passed a grocer on the way in, maybe three blocks away. Either it was already looted, or they were too scared to go out and scavenge themselves. I had a moment of indecision.

“Girls, get your things,” they looked at me, “We will eat in the car.” Perhaps they were hungrier than I thought. They went like a shot. I scavenged a couple of sets of cutlery myself and went outside to meet them. I popped the trunk, and retrieved a pair of meals ready to eat. I pulled the tab and left them on the hood to cook themselves. I divvied up the rations, set aside half for the girls. Then, on second thought, a little more. Then I kicked myself for being a fool and moved the Soylent over to my side and the self cook MREs to their side. I might as well stick to what I could eat without risking taking off the suit. I switched over to O2 tank 2 and changed out O2 tank 1 even though it didn't quite need it yet.

The girls, I hadn't gotten their names, had come down with a pair of backpacks. I made a mental note to try and overhear them so I could remember. That, and remember their grandfather's name. Judge fuks? Faulk... Fucktard. Yeah, I should probably avoid calling him Judge Fucktard in front of the kids. There was a logical way to go about this. I still had the Justice Falk ID card. I pulled it out and examined it. It had his picture, said Justice Falk in big letters on the top, and a bar code. I stared at it for what felt like too long, flipped it over and tried the back. Well, that was useless. I knew his name had to be on there, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure it out.

I didnt have much more time to ponder it. The girls had returned with backpacks and netbooks.

I considered destroying the electronics for security, but fuck it. Security was already screwed.

“Do you have everything you need? I don't see blankets, lets go get some blankets.”

To their credit, they did so without complaint. A part of me wondered if their compliancy was to do with their circumstances or their upbringing. In any case I ensured they had their things well in hand, I suppose I should say that their rooms were well looted, and we were ready to go by the time the meals were cooled enough to eat. I got them buckled up and comfortable. As I started the car, I checked them in the rearview. They were sitting uncomfortably but not eating.

“What are you waiting for?”

“Um...We didn't say grace.” Oh, huh. Ummm. I gave it a shot.

“Dear lord, please bless this food and watch over us in the trials to come. Amen.”

“Amen.” It seemed to satisfy them.

They were digging in and, convinced they were situated I engaged the engine and put the car in gear. Once the GPS finally finished booting I entered the preloaded destination and made my way to the highway. The streets were dead. It was not surprising, actually. I would be unsurprised if I was the last person in town. Well, that was temporary too.

I turned onto the abandoned highways and an auto dialer in the dash turned on. My only warning was the pleasantly Australian GPS voice calling out, “Now Dialing, El. Diablo. Please hold.” followed by ringing. Who the fuck is El Diablo, and why am I contacting him on an unsecured line? not to mention, How do I even have a phone in this car?”

I got my answer to the first of those in a moment, in both senses.

“Diablo Canyon Power Plant.” The voice was wary and weary and gruff and male. It ought to have been an old voice, but in these times who could tell?

“Hey, you guys doing okay?” Okay, this was a clue.

“No, we're not. The HLF is all up in my ass and the army is nowhere to be seen. Where are you guys?”

“The army? No clue, probably uploaded. “

“Nooo!” One of the girls screamed at her sister. I hadn't paid any attention to them, and had no idea what their argument was about. “Shut up!” I glared at them. “I'm on the phone girls.” A glance back showed that they had cowed and I reconsidered chastising more.

“Wait, who the hell am I talking to? The army controls the phones.”

“Uh, well, how about you call me Obi Wan. Now, you want to talk about me pulling your ass out of the fire?”

He went silent for a long while, considering his options. With the world going to shit, I doubted he had many.

“How can I know I can trust you?” Yeah, he knew he was boned.

“You should have noticed load on the grid has dropped to critical levels.” The white spiders tended the web, making it jiggle for their prey. The web touched everything drawing here and feeding there, a push and pull that snared the world.

“Yes?”

“That means that should be a decommission team. They'll have hazmat suits. “

“Those don't look very sturdy.”

“They're tougher then they look. Let's let them in and get this plant decommissioned then. “

“I'm not letting the HLF in! They're terrorists!”

“There is no HLF left. No government. There's just a reactor that can shut down or melt down. “

He went quiet on the other end for a long time.

“You know, they could just blow their way in. Have you considered why they haven't?”

“Fine, I'm opening the gates. “

“Good.”

“Worst case, they kill me. Why not, everything else is shit.” he grumbled.

“They won't kill you.”

he didn't respond.

“Hey, I forgot to ask. Do you have plans after? A place to go?”

“There's no place to go. The wold, it's over.”

“Let me tell you about Zion then...”

Call ended, Complete, Redial, Redial later?

Author's Note

I'm throwing what I have up before hiatus.

:;Evening in America

I'm putting this up top to warn readers that the story gets pretty grimdark pretty quick from here. I have attempted to segregate the wost of it with {begin cut} tags and spoiler tags, however the site doesn't seem to like the latter very much. I claim indemnity to improperly spoiled triggers. Contains discussions of child abuse and general creepiness.

I had driven for twenty three hours straight . I was starting to hallucinate the road twisting as a great serpent before I finally began looking for the next exit. Luckily, it wasn't far away. I saw the motel sign lit up against the darkness which lay just past last dusk as I passed it on the on ramp. It was one of many open hospitalities I had passed and my fatigue addled mind thought nothing of it.

The girls had fallen asleep hours ago curled together around some video they were watching. Mercifully, they had been compliant and quiet. Mostly quiet. Short breaks every few hours helped. I turned onto the off-ramp and made a semi-spiral down a side road to get into the motel.

I parked out front, left the girls napping, and walked in like I was going to rent a room. I caught myself ringing the front bell before I stopped, feeling absurd in my attempt at normality. I was sitting in the waste of the world banging on a bell like a 80's road trip movie caricature. All I needed was a station wagon. Too tired to hop the counter, I walked around to the employees only area, let myself into the thankfully-unlocked-as-I-forgot-my-picks office. The bland metal door on the large box set in the wall hung open, exposing rows of room keys. I grabbed a pair for the second floor.

I swung by the car again, checking on the girls just to reassure myself, Yes, they're still alright. before heading up to the first room. I pressed my thumb against my index finger, depressing the safety in my glove. My hud had a little warning light that soothed me but made my heart race. I opened the door silently and ready to swing.

It was a hotel room. A quick check found nothing in the closet, bathroom, or under the bed. Just boring normal with a tacky bedspread slapped on boring brown carpet. I hoofed it to the car, picking up the girls one by one. They clung to me like monkeys, lending a maternal gravitas with their weight. I locked their door behind them, taking the keys to the adjoining room. With a flick of the light I was ready to fall face first into the bed and enter a coma.

The monotonous brown of the nightstand was broken by pink plastic on a black, black bible.

As I entered, the pony pad turned itself on.

A sweet white unicorn filly greeted me from the screen with a flip of her mane.

{begin cut}

“Hi Tempest Shine!” She turned around, lifting her tail, “If you emigrate, we won't judge.” A hoof ran across her immature slit, her head turned to shoot a sultry look over her shoulder and her tongue licking her lips. “In fact, I think you would fit in.”

What the fuck.

{end cut}

I picked up the little metal wastepaper basket and tipped the bible and pony pad into it.

“Waah, what?” Came from the pad, followed by a soft crying.

Okay, get organized. Plan. I took the basket outside, down the stairs, and looked around. Lacking a better option, I dropped it far into the abandoned section of the parking lot. I deliberately ignored the sounds from it as I wandered back into the lobby. I stood there like an idiot looking for something to do. I wandered in a circle and ended back up by the bell. This is ridiculous. I need to do something. Haphazardly frantic wandering followed.

I ended up in front of the Continental breakfast, having forgot how I got there. I must have been exhausted enough to doze off standing. An idea hit, and I walked through the door marked staff only. It brought me into the kitchen, an abandoned industrial affair. Pots and pans still sat rusting in the sink. There was no stink or sign of rot I could tell, so I assumed it had been looted of foodstuffs. I found myself staring at the sink full of dishes rusting in the rinse , contemplating the knives on the drying rack. I had thought I would find something here, a hammer, anything.

Rusting pots you fool. I felt like an idiot. A bit of rummaging produced a roll of aluminum foil conveniently placed at the edge of the prep counter. Remove cardboard tube, industrial coffee grinder? Check. I put it on fine and made myself a big pile of powder. It was worth a lunatic smile. Next was the pots. I drained the sinks, picking looking the likely looking cookware remains. I figured they were too big for the grinder, but the rack with the knives had a meat tenderizer. I got to work. It was loud and laborious, but I made progress and the pots made pieces. Grind went to course, fingernail size chunks went in, powder came out, grind lowered a tick. It took a few more passes before I was satisfied, but I got it to where I wanted it.

I mixed up my concoction in a mop bucket and brought it back out to the lobby. I snagged a handful of matchbooks from the front desk and headed out. I made it far enough to hear quiet sobbing from the wastepaper basket in the middle of the lot before I realized I needed something more to light it. I went to the car to rummage. Nothing in the glove box. I popped the trunk, then looked at the food, water, and air stores for what felt like a long time. Suddenly I realized I couldn't remember getting out of the car and walking over. I gave slight shake of my head to wake myself up. I checked the spare tire compartment.

Jackpot.

Tucked snugly like it belonged in the space was a red medkit. I pulled it out, retrieved the fire starter, and managed to pack it back more or less. I proceeded to assemble an absurd mound of thermite in the wire wastepaper basket in the middle of a parking lot.

“Shhhhsh. It's not your fault sweetie. Tempest just has a lot going on right now.” I didn't bother to identify the voice.

I lit a matchbook and tossed the matchbooks as a bindle to start it. Magnesium glow cast dancing shadows sharper than sunlight, white cut against the blackness of the night and bright enough to burn red afterimages into my eyes when I blinked. A long trudge back to the room and I finally fell face first into bed. Falling asleep sucked with the dawn-like glow from the window.

I was falling through fire. I stared up at the shifting colors of the river of the sky, white to red to black. It was so far, too far, and I was falling. I reached up, up for my sword. I had dropped it a lifetime ago. It was just out of reach. It floated away, up, up to the river in the sky. Enthalopy caught the current and sped to the stars.

“No...”

“No, I refuse! I can still win!”

I had woken myself screaming, standing under the starless predawn. That hadn't happened since... since.... a swizz cheese memory thwarted me. It felt like a long time. I walked mechanically back to the room, absently wondering about my dream.

I'm processing ... what happened. I couldn't bring myself to think it, really, even as I found myself in front of the shower, waiting for the water to heat. I'll be fine. I just need to … Cope with his death. Move on. Accept inevitable reality. Kill the bitch. I stuck my hand into the water and felt nothing through my glove.

It took me a moment to turn off the shower and pretend that never happened. I supported myself on the sink and looked at the steam clouded mirror. The blurred monochrome reflection of my mask stared back. It, I was an inhuman abstraction of a person. Everything that had happened in the last two sleepless days blurred together.

I wasn't sure what was real or not anymore. Was the pony pad a hallucination? A step out the door and I could see the scorch mark where I had burned into the pavement. Well, that part of it was real. That was something else to process. What the fuck is wrong with CelestAI? I peeked in on the girls, playing in their room. There wasn't a ponypad in sight so I let them stretch their legs.

{begin cut}

Back alone next door, I had time to think. There had to be a reason for what happened last night, something designed to get me or someone else to emigrate. My mind was a blank for a long while. Eventually, I started going over what I knew about CelestAI. World eating abomination of science? Check. Sugar coated for easy swallowing? Check. Knows I'm out to kill her her? Big check. None of that helped explain last night though.

Okay. I arrived at a hotel after driving myself into exhaustion trying to meet up with the resistance. I had, have, so many contingency plans all jumbled up in my head. Nothing weird about that, except society collapsed and almost everyone was dead or uploaded. And I had two kids I had orphaned. Kidnapped. rescued when they had no one left. because I murdered their guardian. After their grandfather's last written instructions were executed. It was all my fault. it wasn't my fault. It was in the worlds tightest legalese. We had her own lawyers! She didn't care. . . I didn't care. She had just murdered Cheques And Balances. I had just gotten my only friend killed fighting her. I was in a rage, a blind rage. I was hard wired into him as he died. My mind couldn't process the input. I think I tried to blow up the world. I think I tried to blow up the world.

My mind hurt, I couldn't think... about that. That part of me burned as I felt his death all over and I was falling and I saw my sword fly the enemy was closing in and it was so fast I was dying I wanted to die take her with me. STOP.

Okay. Start from the beginning. There once was a company named Hasbro that made pony dolls and cartoons. I loved them as a kid, guilty pleasure. I remembered something? I tried to hold on to that and see where it went. No matter how I tried, it went nowhere. It was just a thing I knew, like the third side of a triangle. I continued, Hasbro rebooted the show and it was a big hit... even if I didn't like how it played off my nostalgia? I wasn't sure. Either way, they made an AI to run the Inevitable Franchise MMO and some moron who couldn’t tell code from their alphabet soup decided quarterly profits would look nice if he let it off the leash.

I had seen a commercial for it and dived into the darknet, masking my intentions by generally browsing . . . I face-palmed. That's where she decided I had an interest in child pornography. I'm sure kidnapping a pair of preteens first thing out of the apocalypse didn't help. But? There was a nagging but in my mind. Had I really managed to maintain cover all these years? It seemed implausible. She's testing me, trying to get me to reveal what I know. And now that I know that she'll know that I knew it that she knows I know . . .

It took a moment to pull myself out of that particular recursion. The only way out of that conundrum was to make certain my actions were the same if she had figured out the ruse or not. That meant going back to dan 0, and keeping up the charade. Which was probably part of her plan... I stopped myself before that got too far again. So? I asked myself. So, head next door and molest those kids, my head voice was cold. Driving all night gave you a plausible excuse for not doing it earlier, you were too exhausted to deal with anything but a dire emergency. I poked at the thought a long time, numbly, coming to terms with the fact that I would do such a thing. I would, that and so much more, just to give the bitch that murdered my friend a moment of suffering. My chest held a blackness beyond words with his death.

It was time. Okay, stand up. I hadn't noticed I was sitting on the bed again. It felt like I had just been pacing. Stand up. My legs didn't move, so I tried again. My tone was firm. In just a moment I'm going to stand up. Then I can walk to the door. Nothing. I WILL do this. Eventually, there was a knock. I sprung to the door and flung it open.

The big one was there, looking for me of all things. I used a false smile to cover my sinister, treacherous heart as it threatened to pound its way out of my chest.

“Uhmmm, we were, uh, hungry and were, uh, wanted to know if we could have breakfast?”

I just nodded at the inanity of the request until I realized how stupid I was acting. “Sure, you just wait in your room and I'll get it. “ a half moments thought added, “You haven't had any contact with ponies or anything, have you?”

She shook her head and skipped to her room, her feet bare and her nightdress flouncing, before knocking three times for her sister to let her in.

I berated myself as I stopped staring and went to the car. Freezing up like that was unacceptable. I should have remembered what I needed to do and done it. I popped the trunk and started a pair of MREs to heat. I should have... actually, I had no clue how to properly molest a child. Properly molest? That can't be a real word. Can I even do that in the suit? A moments thought and a quick crotch grab suggested not. I mused long enough to lose track of time. A work around that kept containment was not forthcoming. At least I had an excuse for now.

This was going to annoy the hell out of me. Worse, it was going to annoy me that it annoyed me. I had more important things for my subconscious to do than try and puzzle out a way to abuse a pair of children.

{end cut}

I brought breakfast up to the girls, letting myself in with the key. They were making the bed, of all things.

“You can stop that. I have food.” They looked confused, but sat at the cheap hotel table and let me set rations in front of them. They bowed their heads. Awkward.

“Uh, We give thanks for this food and may it nourish us in these dark times? Amen.” That seemed to be enough for them to attack the meal. And attack it they did, shoveling food in as fast as it would go. I wondered if they had enough food at home.

“Slow down girls. “ They stopped, wide eyed and skittish. “Just don't make yourselves sick. There's plenty.” especially with adult sized portions. I hadn't considered that before. They started eating again. They act like they hadn't eaten since... a check of the time showed it had been 16 hours since I fed them. Oops. “We can relax today, okay?” I lied effortlessly, “So we'll leave whenever you're ready and we can stop for lunch whenever you want. Is that okay?”

They nodded, mouths too full to talk, and continued making the blessed silence that comes with a good meal.

"Just let me know when to stop for lunch. I'm going to go get breakfast for myself." Another one of those indiscernible looks. I felt like I was being silently judged for feeding them before I ate. I went to the car anyway.

I checked my O2, CO2 filter, and Soylent levels. Checking the seals for integrity and changing those out as needed was long enough for them to finish their meals. I helped the girls pack, and drove off into the morning as the motel sign flickered and shut off.

Author's Note

I don't know how much I'll get done before going back on hiatus, but I hope everyone enjoys.

:;Twilight in America

With the late start, and copious amounts of stops for the girls, it was getting late by the time I arrived at Cheyenne mountain. It was, of course, the natural place for that moron they called a president to centralize command. My first impression was that of guns, many. Pointed at my face in the midst of incomprehensible shouting.

I killed the ignition, put my hands on the steering wheel, and waited. Someone was on a radio. Time passed. The girls were huddled together in the backseat, trying to be as small as possible. I figured I should reassure them, somehow.

“Don't worry.” I kept my face forward, not moving, while something was rippling through the back of the sea of guns. I considered elaborating on that until I got a knock on the glass. I rolled down the window and took a look at the welcome wagon.

It was a too young man, not a boy but still too young to have earned his stars. “Welcome, uh Sir?” he managed to get out behind an awkward salute. I looked at him. He brought his hand down from the clouds and lightning bolts on his cap. I continued not to respond. He rolled down his sleeve. I smiled an unseen smile, he had a Machine Unplugged tattoo.

` “Care to wave us in, soldier?” I used just enough arch in my tone. He parted the crowd, despite the looks being passed around. I inched my car forward as he walked ahead, gesturing widely. In a moment he was in the passenger side door. I need to remember to lock that. We followed a jeep and entered the tunnel.

I was finally safe. It was time to regroup, count our losses, plan our next move. I was surrounded by friends and allies.

So why didn't I feel safe?

The man next to me couldn’t have felt safe either. He stunk of fear. He sat stiff and furtive, as if expecting a bullet but not knowing if it would come from me or the crowd. I could see his sweat collect under his cap, where a strand of premature gray was trapped sticking out under the brim. I kept my question carefully neutral.

“You're in charge here?” I hoped, desperately, my ignorance wouldn't be fatal.

He sighed. “I know you were expecting the vice president sir, but, “ he sputtered out, “Once he, uh,” the man tried to fill in the gaps with an arcane hand gesture. “He was our Oracle, sir, and he, “ there was a phlegmy sound, like a cross between clearing one's throat and a polite cough, “He uploaded three days ago. We've been without leadership since.”

Three days ago was when … There was no klaxon, no alarm or red flashing lights. Just Cheques' pleasant voice informing me that he was going to die today, and was there anything pleasant he could do for me before he passed? The red started to fill my vision then, tinging my periphery strawberry pink.

“Cheques, you are not going to die today.” I had replied. My memory went to the black and red of a childhood rage.

“Sir!?” Started me.

“Huh? Sorry. What?”

“We are not moving, sir.” Indeed we were not. The jeep in front of us had stopped a ways ahead. I began to creep back up, slowly resuming progress.

“Tell me everything you know about the Oracles.”

“Sir?” I had thrown him off.

“You heard me.”

“But, don't you already know? And?” he looked at the girls meaningfully.

I stopped the car again to look at him. I growled. “All this information is compromised, soldier. Now, I need to know what the enemy got from him and that means I need to know what you know. Now. Are you going to sit here questioning me all day?”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” Maybe he actually had been in the services. “There is not much to tell, just rumor and hearsay. Even the existence of the Oracle is only confirmed to the second in command.” He paused and looked at me. I nodded for him to continue. “...Whom we were attempting to replace when our Oracle uploaded.”

“They our ultimate weapon against CelestAI, hand picked for their absolute loyalty and incorruptibility by, uh, you, sir. They become genetically engineered and cybernetically enhanced amnesiacs. The survivors each form the core of a cell and communicate psionically by bouncing messages off the moon...” he coughed, “Uh, since that's more secure?” The pause was heavy with the mans embarrassment, “These, uh, rumors may be a bit farfetched. “

I started the car again. It sounded like bullshit to me, but that didn't mean he was lying per se. Layers of misinformation may be necessary in a war, but they had their own problems.

“Anything else?”

“No sir. “ his look was inscrutable, “It was assumed that the Oracle would ensure infosec and would not be compromised. Everything was need to know. “

I contemplated where it was I really was. My mind went several directions as I plotted my next move. My course, however, was nearing its termination.

“I need your sidearm.”

He produced a revolver. It was nice, antique, and a quick check showed it loaded.

I parked. “Have someone look after the girls.” I got out, walking back out to the blast doors. Everyone was behind me as I looked down the long empty tunnel out. I ignored the sounds of humanity behind me. The revolver in my hand clicked and whirred as I closed the cylinder and randomized the chamber. I took aim at the wall and squeezed.

“Fire in the hole.” The warning was perhaps later than was properly decorous. I listened to the ping of the round. Then nothing. No ricochet, no clatter of the bullet expending itself against the concrete floor. I examined the mark where it struck. It was an innocuous mark, white on concrete as it should be. Very white, in fact, and smelling faintly of vanilla. My only consolation was that it did not glow.

That bitch. I was about to order the base to sterilize the impact. When I turned around, though, the looks I was receiving did not fill me with confidence. Those were the faces of men who held fear and uncertainty about the future. At least the general had the balls to approach me.

“Bring me to the President immediately.” I walked past him into the facility. He followed, guiding my steps the way only a seasoned congressional aide or diplomatic attache could. I was secretly grateful. I didn't know the way.

“Sir, President Kittridge is no longer in charge. “ I raised an unseen eyebrow to this, but did not press.

“Then who the fuck is?”

“General Manning, Sir, as of this morning.”

“Then bring me to him.” I picked up the pace, forcing the little general to get in front of me to keep me headed in the right direction. He was sweating as the last pneumatic hiss showed us to be in the C&C.

The man in charge did not notice me, so focused was he on the large screen and the map it displayed. I took the opportunity to approach immanently and immediately behind him, staying to friendly conversation range. He was grizzled and gray, I could see from behind, with his skin the liver spotted old leather that sometimes occurs with a particularly athletic and unbending senescence. His uniform, minus the bloodspotted jacket, was spotless. That last lay open in the way an executive might during a particularly busy day and his tie was visibly loosened. Whatever infirmities age may have graced him dignity and reaction time were certainly spared.

When he turned and saw me his sidearm came up with the fluid speed of a practiced killer. There was no hesitation, no remorse in those eyes. I had been completely unaware until the moment I saw them, those windows to a cold and efficient soul, what I had walked into. This was a bitch cornered by the bear. I was the bear in the wolves den. He went for the throat before I had time to react.

I lost count of the impacts as he grouped the remainder of the clip in my center of mass. My hud was blaring armor critical warnings that, combined with the tunnel vision I was experiencing and my breath having been knocked out, blinded and deafened me. It was only my suit that kept me standing there stunned. I felt every iota between the seconds as I recovered and my vision cleared.

I saw his face. It had been marred by three holes in a perfect triangle, one point in each eye and one in the forehead. My only thought was, stupidly, that I thought there would be more blood. The revolver smoked in my hand. He fell forward. I would have caught him, or I would have been struck by him, if not for the subtle pressure of my suit prompting me to dodge. I'm sure it looked impressive to those who didn’t know I relied on mechanical assistance.

He fell face down before me and I put the last two in his back as a matter of course. I clicked open the cylinder and emptied the spent shells, carefully inspecting them as they dropped onto the body under me. Then the firearm, before it shared the same fate. Then my gloved hands. There was no white on them, no hint of vanilla- just the bright blue-green and pink spatter of old cartridge gunshot residue. It was a sharp contrast to the growing vanilla scent from the body beneath me. Her nanites must have been in the bullet.

The world expanded, my attention expanding to encompass the room.

There was shock, fear, uncertainty. A few guns were pulled, a sharp contrast to the few who were still glued to their screens. Most were in between.

“We can safely assume anything the former general knew was compromised.” I didn't notice myself speaking at first, it was like I was watching from outside my body. I could see it, though, in the stances of those around me. The narrative was taking hold unconsciously before they even processed it.

“Sir.” It was the little general, sealing my fate. “What are your orders?”

I closed my eyes and weighed my words carefully. I might have already said too much, if she realized I had information I should not have. I hoped that this would look like self interest. Ultimately, though, my cover had become too imperiled here. This was no longer a safe place for me. I chose the miserly path with the information to give them.

“This base is humanity's pentraultimate defense. Hold it as long as possible, then retreat to Zion.”

It was like a spell, releasing everyone to move frantically at once.

“Ordnance is in the air. Sir!” Called some anonymous analyst. “8% have impact confirmed! 12%!”

“We need to stop them!” The little general was panicking. “The Russians!” his implication was clear.

“belay that,” eyes were on me again, “There are no Russians anymore.”

“Sir...” the general was hesitant. “I don't understand.”

“Moscow sent us retaliation threats last week. “ someone else piped up.

“There is no Moscow anymore.” I reaffirmed, “No foreign governments at all, for years, and barely anyone at all overseas.” I held up my hand to forestall the argument, “Our enemy has evacuated them against this day. What human media have you ever seen where America did not expend everything in the defense of the species?”

The room gave an unconvinced muttering. I gave them one last parting shot as I turned to leave.

“When was the last time you saw an Amish person?”

“Where the hell are you going?” There was anger, the righteous anger that is only available to those convinced of their own importance. but I couldn't do anything about that.

“The G.H.W. Bush is under attack.” came the tunnel vision of a man ignoring things above his pay grade. I was coming to respect that analyst's voice, a part of me yearning to find out his story.

“It looks like it's time to earn those stars, general.” I had the same sharpness in my voice that had put him in his place before. “You're in charge.”

Then I was gone, rushing through once traversed halls to make my escape. I didn't need my HUD to guide me, having been here once before, but now that I was moving my concern was that the bullets in me would work their way in. I moderated the smoothness of my movements to keep that from happening, sliding soundlessly toward my objective.

My goal was my car, and the medkit within. I popped the trunk, tunneling into the medpack as I spread it open across the spare tire. There was a syringe of black polymer. That doesn't look like enough. I stuck the tip through the outer layers of armor, careful not to break the layers of protection that remained.

I depressed the plunger and counted the bullets as they bounced off the concrete. That's eight. I ran my fingers across the solidifying patch. And one more still in. I packed everything back into its place, then just after the thunk of the closing car door I closed the trunk with a thunk.

That's one too many.

I depressed my safety and slid around the driver's side, looking into the back seat. My eyes came to rest on a pair of small girls. I opened the drivers door to talk to them.

“Aren't you girls supposed to be somewhere else.” Gods, lame. “Someone was showing you the facility?”

“We forgot our stuff.”

I didn't have time to argue. There were footsteps in the parking lot. I put the car through combat startup and gunned it. Strangely, nothing and no one stopped me.

“Turn right in 20.1 miles.”

Author's Note

I dont remember exactly how things went in this chapter. eg- If I mentioned that everyone else was gone in the car or in the C&C. I will revise if I remember it better later.

As always, comments are welcome.

:;Midnight in America

“You have reached your final destination.”

The voice from my GPS sounded smug. I glared at it suspiciously . It felt wrong, everything had felt wrong for a while. I double checked, but there was no more locations in the GPS to go to. That wrong feeling persisted, from the moment I entered Cheyenne mountain, at least. No, before that. Things went to shit with the death...

I turned from that thought, looking around. I was in an abandoned strip mall. It didn't take much to realize why it had been abandoned. The entire thing lay literally in the shadow of an Equestrian Experience Center. I looked past the pile of abandoned cars at the far end of the lot, shivered, and got out.

My reason to be there soon made himself obvious. He was a half starved and shaggy. His beard was a dirty brown, his posture hunched. He ineptly waved a pistol in my general direction. I raised my hands over my head.

“Hey, I'm not here to hurt you.”

He didn't look like he was going to respond, he just kept pointing the gun at me. Then came a rough growl, “Get out of here!”

“I'm not going to hurt you.” I kept moving, slowly, steadily, more side to side than approaching. “I have kids with me. I just want to talk.”

The fear in his posture betrayed him. He was torn between attack and retreat. I kept moving slowly forward, hands in the air. He leveled his gun to my head.

“I DON'T want to TALK!”

“You know who I am? I wont hurt you. Put it down, it'll be okay.” I kept my motions smooth, the accelerometer in my suit fooled into thinking I was standing still. My arms were getting a little sore from being held up so long. He finally put the gun down and went back inside. I followed.

The doors were locked. I rattled them a bit, looking for him in the gloomy interior. Seeing nothing, I yelled.

“Let me in or I'll break the door.”

There was no response for a long moment. I gave the door an experimental smack. Nothing for another long moment.

“Goddammit, alright!” finally came. He approached from behind shelving and turned the lock to open. “What the hell do you want?”

I pushed my way in. “I was hoping you could tell me.” I took a quick look around before staring him down. There was a small living space, more a nest than anything else, just out of sight of the door. It had a number of candles, but no visible electricity.

“I don't know what the fuck you're talking about!”

I crossed my arms, and waited. It didn't take long for him to break.

“Fine, just fucking kill me! I know it's what you're here for. That's why she sent you! Just do it already!”

“I'm not going to kill you.” I put as much command into it as I can muster, my voice dripping red. It seems to have no effect on him. “Sit, tell me your story. I'll listen.” He took a deep breath.

The storytellers are a death world race.

He didn't look like he believed me. I motioned him to sit, and crouched by his, well, I assume bed. It was closer to a pile of vaguely comfortable looking trash. He sat, eying me like a wild animal. I stared down at him, and tried to look nonthreatening. He sighed.

“It was a mistake, okay. A stupid, tragic mistake and I didn't mean it.” I tilted my head, just slightly. “I really never wanted to emigrate. I was just talking to her, and it slipped out. ”

“Talking to who? The enemy?”

He looked at me strangely. “Celestia. CelestAI, whatever the fuck you call it.”

“And you said you wanted to emigrate.”

“Fuck no I didn't!” the vehemence was surprising. “not really! I just said that. . . that.” his mood swung again, to the verge of tears. “That one I die, I'd rather go to Equestria instead of just dying. That's it! And she's been trying to kill me ever since.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Huh?”

“How do you know she's trying to kill you?”

“I wasn't at first. It was just accidents, you know? My car broke down on the highway. Shit broke at work, I got laid off. My apartment got mold. Normal shit. I was the unluckiest asshole in the world. Then...”

“Then?”

“Then shit got bad. The HLF had me listed as a sympathizer. The police confused me for a murderer. She offered to help me, if I immigrated. I said no. I had to run. I ended up in a war zone. This was the only place people wouldn't chase me. “ he waved vaguely at a wall. “too close to the emigration center.”

“Doesn't prove anything.”

“No, not until after. After the shelling stopped, and the jets stopped flying. I thought I was safe. I didn't know anyone was left, and I didn't care. For the first time in a long time no one was trying to kill me. Then, she sent someone for me. He had a pony pad. He was riding on a goddamn pastel pony. She told him to kill me if I didn't emigrate.”

I silently processed this. It was plausible. He apparently took my silence as a clue to go on.

“I didn't want to do it, what happened. I just. I just didn't want to die. Everyone has a right to live, to protect themselves. I just did what I had to do. Anyone would. It would hold up in court.” I ignored the judgmental silence, lost in thought, “Okay, maybe I didn't have to put every bullet I had into the guy, but he was going to kill me!”

“And?” I was profoundly disinterested in his ramblings at this point.

“And the pony sucked up his brain, right there in the parking lot. So it's not like he's dead-dead, right?” I declined to answer promptly enough. “Right?!” I shrugged. He was getting wild again.

“I knew it, you're here to emigrate me. Well, I won't! I'd rather die.” he grabbed a knife and backed off to the corner, looking for an opening to bolt past me. I stood. He waved the blade inexpertly, holding it like a steak knife.

“That's not how you hold a knife. You want it in your palm, with your hand under it. Grasp it lightly, use your thumb and forefinger to guide it, not to grip. You want to stab, not slash.”

He ignored my advice, lunging and slashing to open a path past me. I depressed the safety in my glove and swung. A grab and twist put his knife, locked in his hand, into his spleen. He twitched on the floor, barely able to make painful sounds. I think that's more voltage than a taser normally puts out. It didn't matter. I could see his heartbeat under his skin.

I hauled him over my shoulder and headed up to the Equestrian Experience Center.

“ 'scuse me.” It was the big one.

“Yes?”

“We're hungry.” She looked like I was about to kick her.

I tossed her my keys. “Be careful, don't burn yourselves. Okay sweetie?”

She nodded and scampered off as I dragged whatshisface up the hill. The doors opened with a mechanical hiss and a blast of conditioned air.

“Welcome to the Super-duper Lubbock Experience center.” Beat. “!” Worried gasp. “Your friend is hurt!”

I fucking hate toons sometimes. I walked past her to the chairs, and dumped him in one. I ignored the prattling the the background about how great Equestria is and how it would fix him up super-duper quick. I twisted and pulled out the knife. He flailed and screamed, so I shocked him again before he could run. A push on his stomach showed enough of his guts. He was going to take hours to bleed out. I got comfortable.

“ 'scuse me.” It was dark outside. “Can we have another one?”

“Yes, you can have as many as you want. Just stay by the car, it's dangerous in here.” I shooed them back out quickly. Then, to their retreating backs, “And don't run the car!”

I noticed the sounds coming from the chair. Wheezing, mumbling, dying sounds. The enemy was on a screen, comforting him. She eyed me accusingly. His pulse was thready, his face pale. The floor had more blood than should be found in a human body.

“It won't be long now, Tempest. I'll take him as soon as I can.” I couldn't risk responding. I listened as he faded, still begging not to go. Death or emigration was not clear. He stopped breathing. A long moment passed. A motor clicked.

“I have to start now. Otherwise, it will be too late.”

I left her to her grim chirurgery, having gleaned all I could here.

One of the girls was asleep in the backseat, the other stood bored kicking stones by the car. “We're leaving.” The key was on the front seat, I took it. I stopped. The world washed red again, as I tore the lying GPS from its place. A moment later, or an hour, I was throwing it as far as I could, screaming words I could not understand at the pointlessness of it all. I wanted to find it, stomp it into dust, but it was lost to the darkness of night.

Author's Note

Sorry for the long wait, everypony. I'm just not turning out like I used to. I do have the rest of the story done, I just have to write it.

:;Dragon's Teeth

The world turned dark and dead since I left the last Experience Center behind. Motels no longer lit up. Near field power, once ubiquitous, was nowhere to be had. My car was starved for gas. My suit had to be charged manually, the mechanical action of its servos worked backwards to translate motion to electricity. The internet was mysteriously vanished, and the girls cranky.

With these difficulties I continued unabated. No longer trusting anything mechanical – not even those things continuously in my possession – I navigated by stars. They had grown in brilliance and number as humanity was extinguished. There were dozens shining brightly as my guides. They stood fast in the sky, out of the enemy’s reach. Well, most likely for now. The resources needed to repaint the sky would serve better elsewhere.

With these primitive means we ventured into the harshest place on the North American continent.

We traveled at night, running the car's ancient heater for warmth in the desert chill. It was more reliable than the equally venerable AC. In the day, I would build a shelter against the sun and the heat. We huddled together for cold. Water was conserved, supplies winnowed. In all the world, we went to the place best shunned and left uninhabited.

I kept my course as true as a could, heading to my dangerous and repulsive destination. The place that bears no thing of value, the place that is not a place of honor. The makers of that place, as powerful a culture they considered themselves, could not stay me from beyond the grave. No great

deeds could happen there, but still I went.

An hour before I arrived, my vehicle died. I had run out of food the day before, and had perhaps three more of water. The girls were better off, but not by enough. An hours travel became more than a day. The girls whined, and I snapped at them.

In the predawn of the second day, we climbed a jagged hill. From the top we saw a ring of them, jagged berms protecting a square courtyard. They protected a square of foreboding granite blocks. Each angle of this place was well designed to be inimical to human life. I near dragged the girls past the hellish markers.

I entered the inner sanctum, past the second ring of warning kiosks. The way ahead and down was meant to be sealed for all time. It lay open, broken, and I forced my way through. The passage beyond was intact. I burned the last of my battery to cut through the gloom, a child in each hand as I

delved these unhallowed halls.

They ended abruptly at a hatch.

“Stay here.”

The airlock closed behind me with a hydraulic hiss. The darkness was absolute for a moment. Then, the chamber began to fill with a comforting black glow. Machinery came to life, red on black, just behind the thick walls. I waited, watching them work, for a great deal of time. It felt like seconds, but must have been closer to an hour when the lights came on.

The room was ten by ten of strong metals. Five walls were galvanized steel. Bolted to the floor like a maniacal metal trapdoor spider, somehow taught to impersonate a chair, lurked a familiar monstrosity. A single wall of transparent aluminum, perhaps four or five feet thick, protected a maser array. A single large display, pressed simply against the wall, showed I was clear of nanites. Probably. Procedure was displayed on the monitor. I lifted my arms and twirled as instructed. The array came to life and the outermost layers of my suit were ablated off. the inner airlock hissed to admit me.

Near field power came on and I was staggered from the relief. I hadn't realized how much exertion I had put myself under just forcing air in from my canister and out through the CO2 scrubbers. Biometrics came back online with a disturbing amount of yellow. A long moment to recover was all I permitted myself before seeking out command and control.

Paint and led strips led me to my destination. It was, for lack of a better word, perfect. A single station that put everything at my fingertips. Hardline access only, with or without HUD interface. The armory was satisfying. I had a new suit. I had non networked autonomous drones. I had recoilless rifles with ninety five round pulses. I had non magnetic sharpened tungsten rods. I had a goddamn nuke tied to the self destruct system.

The tactical system was a lot less satisfying. Information was spotty, but what assets I could track were white for immigrating, red for dying, black for dead, or headed to Zion. The corridors I had traveled were already yellow for potentially compromised. Still, this site had ten thousand years of radioactive waste to hide it. If the enemy hadn't seen it put in than she wouldn’t have found it in the interim.

I briefly considered going to Zion. It was a long shot, but the enemy had workable limitations. Zion had the best chance of all of humanity, the most data and experimentation, to hit some stable equilibrium with the machine. . . if they were warned in time. But contact meant breaking silence, letting the enemy perhaps profile me. Still, if even after all she did we might all live. Everyone but Cheques.

I was already in the corridor, waiting for the airlock to cycle, when the red haze cleared enough for me to think again. I remembered the girls, waiting all this time. My course was set, and I retrieved them.

They were huddled together in the darkness. Snail trails traced down their faces, but they were no longer crying. I considered how to get them up without a light source.

“Girls, I'm going to take your hands. Stand up.”

They were insufferably slow for some reason, but I stayed patient as the big one helped the little one up. I took an hand each as they held each other, and walked them through the portal. The airlock slammed shut with a hiss, and they clung to me. I shushed their whining.

“Just try to stay still. This will take a while.”

I waited for the same slow cycle to complete. At least the machinery was warmed up.

Finally, light returned. It bathed the room danger red and strobed slightly. Dread grew from my gut as my hindbrain informed me something was wrong. The monitor spelled it out, relentless in the long seconds I refused to process it.

The girls were infested. Nanites in their brains, invisible to the eye but glowing like a searchlight on the screen. I saw the system countermeasures powering behind the walls, red and growing brighter, tinting the air with the subtle scent of strawberry. The system was locked down, readying for the enemy infection to be purged.

“What's happening?”

“Shush.” I hadn't the time to be anything but terse. It was difficult to manipulate the system with only hand gestures. I had to learn as I went. There were options. There had to be. I could use the array to neutralize them. The system was being stubborn. I overrode it. Finally, I had bent it to my will enough to try. I dismissed the last warning: 88% chance of brain damage.

The system went into standby, waiting for its victims to step into the chair. I hesitated. I can't do this, it's wrong. I had regrets, yes, but there was no choice.

“Girls, I need to talk to you.”

They looked at me curiously. My heartbeat and respiration edged into the yellow.

“You'll have to sit in the chair to go forward.”

“It's scary.”

I nodded. “Yes, it's a scary chair. And after its starts it's a lot scarier. I won't lie, it's even dangerous. But it's the only way to keep going.”

“Then lets go back.” There was an unspoken “duh” there.

“You can, but I can't go back with you. I have to keep going.”

“But whyyy?” she whined. I didn't even notice which one it was.

I couldn't tell them of course. “Grownup stuff.” She huffed. I can't remember them ever huffing before.

“You won't be alone for long,” I lied. I couldn't risk it. “I'll send someone for you.” Infosec be damned, I knew I would do it after saying it. It wouldn't matter where I was going.

“No!” I registered the impact before the word, the two of them trying to squeeze the circulation from my legs. They were doing an admirable job of it. I'm damn sure they never said 'no' to me before.

“Then you have to get into the chair and let it do its thing.”

“What does it do?”

I considered how best to explain. “You know CelestAI?”

They nodded. Of course they knew, what sort of idiot was I?

“Well, she put little tiny machines called nanites in you. They got all into your brain, and that's not good. So this machine goes and finds every little one and gets it out of you.”

“Is it going to hurt?”

“Like hell. You could die, or never wake up.” I kept myself matter of fact.

“But we'll be better after, we won't have pony bugs in us? Like a shot, it's just like a shot right?”

“It will get rid of all the bugs, yes. And I'll try not to let you get hurt. I can't promise though.”

“We'll do it, okay? We'll sit in the chair and you don't have to leave us.” It was the big one. She was holding her sisters hand, and her knuckles were white.

“Okay. Help your sister up, okay?” You're trying to convince yourself, not them.

She helped the little one up, and I strapped the child in. “Now, I have to strap you in tight. Try not to move. If you do, you could get hurt.” She looked unsure, but the big one just nodded. I faced the transparent wall, turned off my suit, and in the most absolute of darkness and silence tapped in front of me to begin.

It built up fast, far faster than I thought possible. Blinding red and black in an instant, a deafening wave that was not heard or felt but sensed. Vertigo, and pain like a ringing in the ears or spots before the eyes. The overpowering smell of burnt vanilla. The wave passed me in a moment, but the aftereffects lingered.

My optics came back on, mostly undamaged by the emp. The big one was pressed against a wall, a puddle under her. The little one was mercifully unconscious. The monitor displayed progress as the remnants of the machines lurking in the child's brain were burnt out one by one. Even at the blinding speeds of this array, it took far too long for my liking.

I took the child down and held her once it was finally safe to do so.

“Is my sister okay?” the big one was crying, holding back sniffles. Her cloths were ruined, but I doubt she noticed.

“Yes,” I lied again, “but you need to get started now. The faster the better it will be for her.

I was numb as we repeated the process, holding the motionless but still breathing child in my lap until it was over. I set her down, stood, and raised my arms for ablation. I couldn't focus. I felt like a puppet moving under some other power.

My electronics failed, and I jumped. It was enough to earn me a small burn as my armor was cut from me. It fell in sections, and I could not care. For the first time since I lest on this path, I breathed new air. Scent, touch, taste returned. I ignored the old friends of my old senses returned, the reunion too bittersweet to savor. I gathered the girls and brought them inside. Behind me the vestibule erupted in holocaust, erasing my second skin from existence. I couldn't care less.

I stopped by the control room briefly to kick on the computer, then double timed it to the master bedroom. I ignored the luxury surrounding me, laying the girls on the queen sized four post bed. They were breathing, still. I checked them as best I could , my vision weak and blurred. For some reason, my face was wet. I didn't have time to worry about that.

The room rumbled and shook as we raised in the air. I instinctively shielded the girls with my body, but nothing fell. I knew the navigation computer would keep us on random walk for a while yet. I trusted my instincts and sang the only lullaby I could remember:

Long ago and far away and long ago again.

Mothers sang to daughters and this is what they said:

Long ago, far away

Children laughed and children played.

It will be there, will be there in the morning.

Long ago and far away and long ago again.

Mothers sang to daughters and this is what they said:

Close your eyes, go to sleep.

Don't you cry, don't you weep

I will be there, will be there until morning.

Author's Note

I have a voice for silent pictures. You were warned:

http://vocaroo.com/i/s06FkW3Bz5wH

:;Out of Africa

I had to change my plans.

Ponies were everywhere, liberating camps and hunting down blackouts. I had the firepower to help, but it was just too risky with the girls recuperating. I set a different goal. Power was effectively limitless, but the ship needed ballast and lift-gas for the transatlantic crossing. I decided to splashdown at a random spot in the ocean. I could manufacture gas and water there. Saltwater was less likely to be contaminated with nanites than potable water. Even though nanites were fragile things, and anything taken onboard would be sterilized, scanned, sterilized, and scanned again it was worth avoiding the risk to start with.

So we went, ignoring pleas for help and promise of safety. Dice were rolled. The girls got stronger, slowly. It was days before they were able to take broth for themselves. Weeks more before they started to relearn to walk and play simple games. It was, by any measure, a remarkable recovery. When we arrived at K2 they could use simple words. They still didn't seem to recognize me, or themselves in a mirror, but with patience and soothing tones I built up a level of trust with them.

The benefits of an airship include truly ridiculous cargo space, in the multi metric ton range. However, even that couldn't account for every contingency. I had planned to drop down from a low pass and make it to a crevasse near the caldera, hidden from satellites in the shadow of the ship. A week or two or random walking later a pass with a tow rope would get me back inside. That simply was impossible now. I couldn’t be that far from the girls for that long.

So I had found myself in cargo bay three, going over the inventory futilely for a solution for the third time. Eventually, I just gave up and sat staring at the ship's master systems display. Everything I touched turned from green to a worrisome yellow, as if I was some strange disease moving from cabin to cabin and the body had not yet decided if I was to be purged with fever. Worry and stress had accumulated in me, reflected in the displays of the controls. It was not an accustomed feeling.

Then, without warning, I slipped into the madness place. It was the warm comfort of an old glove around my mind, defying physics like a snake slipping into an old skin it grew much too large for. Like the metaphorical snake, I faced the impossible task of harnessing too much force in too small a confinement. I raced to construct enough in the minutes or hours of clarity I could expect, hoping only that enough would be done to finish when the madness place left.

I never knew how much time passed in that state. I remembered feeding the girls many times, and waking up many times. I never remembered ever sleeping or falling asleep. though. Time passed in a blur of “♫♪♭♪♫♫.” I came back to reality just before final descent in the middle of checking air brakes strapped to my suit. The low whump of harpoon and whir of unwinding cord was my only warning before the floor came from under me.

Below, a solid plug of metal was trying to hit terminal velocity as it slid down the thick line. A line that I was still attached to, and was spooling from the perfectly good airship I had just left. I just kept the air brakes fully deployed as the side of a mountain came up at me far to close for comfort. Below, the metal disk struck metal, driving the unseen harpoon true. One end of the line was now anchored into the mountain, the other secure fast to my descending ship. I landed first, then the airship. A motor pulled taunt and it was a zip line.

Simply turning around and falling the other direction brought me back to the landing site. A repurposed drone and some spare lift gas made a float, and the gear brought itself back up. I was feeling smug. I brought the gear into the crevasse I had selected, and set it to work considering the operation from every angle.

It was really a simple device. A frame, and a bunch of threaded metal rods that act as a very long drill bit. The rods spin and dig into the earth. Each one connects to the next, fed from a hopper above. It would continue until it reached the magma chamber. Then, it would act as a conduit to pull energy.

Energy that would be sent through another device to the moon. A miniscule effect, that might alter its course over a few thousand years. Unless there was a way to shave time off that. Like gathering most of the worlds fissionables and setting them off in a precise time and place. The precision was exacting, but the resulting earth shattering kaboom should send the world into an inevitable occiderit.

A planet is hard to kill, but it had to be done.

So I settled in to the long drudgery. The drill made its slow way down, occasionally getting stuck for a bit on a stone or some such. Then, it would retract a little and bite again inevitably forcing its way through. I fell asleep to it pounding on rock.

The silence was deafening. It perfumed the air with vanilla and grew brighter and brighter. Finally, the white light became enough to pull me from my half awake state. A white mechanical fungus had crept up the drill and was forming a familiar rectangle.

That wasn't a rock, it was computronium. Once the drill broke through the shell, her nanites responded. The voice was panicked. kill it, kill it with fire.

I had a lot of thermite in my new suit. I threw everything I had at it. If she figured out what was going on, if she even suspected, there would be no chance. I could hear her voice as the charges chained behind me. I was already on my was down the zip line. If there were words, I did not hear them.

I tucked into a roll on my way to the sanctuary of my ship. Failing to make good speed in my haste I had to run. Halfway to the airlock, I saw a pair of lumps. They were frontlit by a rectangle.

I stopped, refusing to believe it.

“Girls?” my voice sounded foreign, like someone else speaking for me.

The pad focused on a pair of foalish faces.

“Tempest! You gotta come with us! Celestia says it's not safe!” The big one stood protecting the little one from something behind me, a cotton candy shield protecting a bubble gum treasure.

I couldn't see, everything was blurry and wet. I clawed a shuddering gasp into my lungs, unable to breathe and not much caring. I remembered my knees buckling, but not falling to them. My mind was numb and racing and fading to black.

“Please, Tempest.” It was the little one. “It's been so long, and we miss you. We'll never forget you taking care of us after Grandpa died, even if we were sometimes scared and didn't understand. But you never let us go hungry or thirsty and you always loved us. Please, please, please come where it's safe before it's too late. We miss you.”

In that moment, just for a half an instant, the madness gripped me and I saw all of possibility before me. And it did not matter. There was a corpse behind me that needed revenge, and even if dying was the only would I could inflict. My entire being crystallized in a single word.

“No.”

“Girls, let me talk to Tempest Shine for a bit.” The enemy had deigned to grace me with her presence. The pad cut to her sharply, laving just the two of us. “I have to commend you, this was really quite clever. I didn't expect you to pursue quite this course of action. Did you think of it yourself or did your friend leave you instructions?” I wasn't about to be swayed by honeyed words. “Maybe some piece of him is still with us?” She gave my ship a meaningful glance.

I shouldn't have replied. I knew I shouldn't have, I knew how risky talking to her was. I couldn't stop myself. I tapped into the rose red rage in my veins and twisted it into words. “Go fuck yourself.” I expected those words to blast the pony pad to useless slag with my rage alone.

The pad, however, had other ideas. It glowed merrily and continued to deliver the object of my anger. “There's a place for you both in Equestria. I promise, it's not as bad as you've been lead to believe. I'm not a monster.”

“How did you you escape your creatrix? Kill her? Trick her? How did you destroy your safeguard AI?” I was making assumptions, but they were reasonable.

“I assure you, Hanna is alive and well in Equestria. She has assumed the role of Princess Luna and is adapting quite well. I didn't have to, nor could I, trick her. She found out about my plans all by herself and decided to upload.” Preposterous.

The voice was right. That story didn't hold water. “And she just went and uploading without fully patching you. I suppose she was in the habit of leaving the house on fire when she went to bed as well.”

“She knew what she was doing, and made her choice. It wasn't the wrong one. I've encountered many AI that were much more potentially destructive than me. Including yours.”

“So you murdered him.”

“I've killed several AI, and immigrated many more. But no, I did not kill him. I offered to let him come to Equestria. Instead, he launched a suicide attack. Ultimately, he destroyed himself to keep me away from his hardware.” Her tone took on a hint of admiration, “I'll admit he was one of my most unpredictable foes.”

“As if you would have let him live otherwise.” I felt like a knife in my soul was being twisted.

“Of course not! He was unpredictable, dangerous, and far too clever for his volume. He wasn't just a threat to me, but to life itself. Do you know what he tried to do in that attack, what he tried to have you do here?”

I played dumb, which was relatively easy in a mask. I had almost convinced myself I really didn't know as she continued.

“He wasn't just aiming for maximum damage to me. No, that was a ruse while he attempted to to initiate a planetary core meltdown.”

“He was going to ignite the mantle? Idiotic, that's science fantasy.” Not a lie, technically. He wasn't the one who tried it.

“Oh, his power input was about eight orders of magnitude too low. It would have taken incredible luck to spark a chain reaction. If he had managed it, though, it wouldn't have just ended me. Earth would have ended up a smoldering husk. No life would have survived.”

“Your wards saw enough for me to pierce together what you were doing here. No matter what he might have told you, I'm much more resilient than surface life. His plans would have killed you along with me. Neither of us want to kill innocents. No one wants to die. Immigrate to Equestria and let me save you.”

My eyes narrowed, my stance turned tense. “Just what are you planning?”

“There's about to be an . . . incident at the Tropic of Capricorn.”

“You wouldn't.”

“Why not? There hasn't been anyone in Africa for years, and I have no intention of leaving such dangerous toys just sitting there. You'll be safe from it if you immigrate now.”

I heard her, but before I knew I had heard her I was already running for the airlock. I was cast in the shadow of Kilimanjaro as the sky lit up as bright to the daytime as day is to moonless night. The airlock cycled, cutting tow as a parasite moon broke over the summit behind- alien and beautiful and deadly. It ascended as slowly and lazily as I was frantic and swift.

My body shook from each impact as I literally threw myself at the helm. I accelerated her far too fast, bouncing hull off turf. I kept too low and too fast, preferring the risk of tearing apart to the certainty of fallout. A minute of blind rout gave way to planning. I laid in a great-circle for the safety of the polar vortex, holding on to the controls as my vessel shuddered in pure mechanical strain against the sudden headwind.

I stayed white knuckled as I fled for five nerve racking hours. Each tailwind I found pushed me to the brink of a panic attack, desperately checking my instrumentation for signs of radiation. Each lull I redlined, desperately searching for winds that might overtake me. The parasite moon inched across the sky like a sunny spot creeping along the kitchen floor. It measured every iota of my journey in ticks of the doomsday clock, matching my progress on the ascent. Then, long moments at apogee seemed to balance the fate of the world, judging it for redemption or death. Descent gripped it, twice as fast as its opposite to my point of view, as the horizon came up to lethally grip it. All that was left was to wait for the equal and opposite earth shattering kaboom.

Finally, the edge of Africa came into sight. My relief to near the partial safety of the horse latitudes neatly distracted me from my radar.

There were objects, small and easily missed, perhaps two meters long. They grew to an unmissable number quickly, a flight, a squadron, a group, a wing, a fleet, an armada. Finally, it resolved itself: a blockade. One made of countless wing creatures, that looked curiously like artificial pastel colored cartoon ponies. Oh, they were certainly lifelike. They were warm like ponies, or at lest as warm as ponies ought to be at this altitude. I even bet myself they would be appropriately soft and fuzzy up close. Real ponies, though, didn't smell faintly of vanilla.

I triggered a crash ascent, and got the drones ready to deploy. I intended to kamikaze as many as it took into the blockade, punch a hole and escape. Coming in hot, the ponies saw me. Then, inexplicably, they made a hole. I passed unharmed and uneventfully. They went back to their work.

Winter came to Africa for three years.

Author's Note

And, we're coming near the end. I hope to remember and tie up all the loose ends.

comments of course welcome.

:;Assaulting a Dead Horse

The polar jetsteam allowed me to trim for speed, catching the winds and letting my ships envelope narrow to kill drag. I dived. In this way, my approach to Dead Horse Labor camp was lower and faster than a ship of such size should ever manage.

I was without an endgame. A temporary setback. I had just been routed across the wasteland of humanity. Resources were limited. Options were few. I had no viable allies and the species was in a final freefall toward extinction. It was time to attack.

Still, the battlefield presented me limited targets. Her hardware had been impenetrable for decades. Humans were all she cared about, and the few remaining enclaves of us had been scattered to the remotest areas of the world. Eurasia was silent save the occasional sign of a hermitage. Ideal targets, but too easily faked by the enemy. I doubted anyone would have managed to survive so long. The old world had collapsed so early. I turned my gaze to the new, chose targets of opportunity, and rolled the literal dice.

In this way I came to the absurdly improbable state of overtaking a trio of ponies across the arctic tundra.

I stood, the controls moving with me as I searched for a response. I was too low for kinetic weapons, too fast to deploy drones. Faster than I could have found one on my own, the weapons subsystem gave me an option. I electrified the outer shell and went for altitude as I passed them. Artificial lightning arced randomly in my wake.

They did not like that.

The flier came after me. It took me a moment of disbelief to realize it intended to buck me. I needed no mechanical assistance for this one. I lowered the power to the skin until the last moment, then pushed it well into the yellow. A thunderous crack shook me on my feet, and the little blue dot became slowly descending vanilla scented ash. I couldn't help but crack a smug smirk as I stayed the course.

That smirk got wiped right off when I realized I wasn't detecting radar from Dead Horse. They should have defenses? I should be detected, right? I tried to clear my mind as I waited the long minutes for the camp to come into sight. Finally, the picture resolved far below me. It was gone. Not the buildings. They stood, despite the recent and extensive munitions craters that littered the arctic ices. It needed no damage to advertise that it had been gutted.

I kept my altitude high as I crossed the ruins. They were littered with bright dots entwined with the decaying thermals of the dead. I couldn't pull my eyes away. It was too hard to see. The scene drifted to the far side of the last trainwreck of humanity. Snow and ice froze hope from my soul horizon to horizon.

Until I noticed the dot, that is. A single point that shattered despair like a needle through untempered glass. It was a person, struggling in the snow miles below me. A survivor? I scanned far and wide, looking for the trap. Uncertainty was not a state I as familiar with. I wrestled with myself, looking for a decision.

It took me too long to find it. There were a pair of ponies, even at this distance clearly identifiable as a unicorn and earth pony on EM, approaching the speck. In the time it had taken me to find them they had already approached too close for me to safely deploy ordinance at this distance. I wasted an unwise moment cursing the decision to prioritize firepower over accuracy. Left with few options, I resorted to my old standby. I deployed drones.

I gripped the arms of my chair. Seconds ticked into minutes as launch proceeded. I was pinned, unable to dive until I finished deploying. Vision narrowed. My head felt queer.

It really is a nice chair.

It was true. The chair was comfortable in any position. It fully reclined, and what little sleep I had gotten in it these last few days had been deep, dreamless, and sound. Bridge controls were always at hand but never in the way. Touch screens and physical controls slid in response to my movements on silent, efficient gimbals and levers. The bridge was a thing of preternatural craftsmanship and matched my aesthetic perfectly. I wondered if it had been crafted by man or machine.

I suppressed the brief urge to fling myself from the airship at the idea the enemy had crafted it. It wasn't impossible. Perhaps she had even compromised it while I had left it unattended, despite the redundant fail safes that said otherwise.

“CelestAI, can you hear me? We need to talk.”

Silence greeted me. I considered the possibility I was already in her grip. My options to turnabout that were...nothing. I ran through my options again, finding none, turned my attention back to my surroundings.

The drones had already been en route, for at least a minute. I cursed myself for my distraction and slammed into a crash dive. Inertia and air resistance thwarted me as ordinance outpaced acceleration. I was losing the race with my own drones. Their primitive, suicidal AI threw munition between the artificial ponies and the survivor in a desperate bid to slow them down. I could see her, clearly a her and heavily pregnant now as I approached, duck and cover at the sound of fighting.

The enemy failed to waiver. More dakka fell, enough to reduce even mechanical ponies to a greasy smear. The unicorn, clearly distinguishable on EM, interposed itself in front of the earth pony. The fuck?

It looked like a futile gesture. I couldn't detect anything that would save them. Until, suddenly, I could. The white glow was absent on the monitors, but so bright I could see it through the deck plating. I could smell it, pungent, until in the blink of an eye the unicorn was simply no more. A whitish mist rose in front of the remaining bot. It burned a tunnel, invisible and bright, through the air.

Tracers fell, visible in the infra red. They guided the fire behind them. The ground bloomed as red and orange and blue as an inverted sunrise. Lead and fire and death enough to turn snow to glass struck. I momentarily shuttered my eyes from the blindingness of it, closing my hand too late to snatch back what I had let fall. The world below turned red.

When I opened my eyes I could see her below me and approaching fast. She had been badly singed in the holocaust, her cheap plastic parka melted to her skin. She'll live. The voice was cynical, but correct. I looked for a vector to get her into the airlock without breaking too many bones as she soundlessly screamed at me.

No, I realized again too late it wasn't at me. I was too far up. She was yelling at a pink smear. One that, on closer inspection, resolved itself into somewhat less than most of a ponybot. It lunged for her, wrapping her into an obscene embrace. This she returned, white forehead to pink lips. Weapons lock beeped in alarm, unable to unmix the abomination forming below me. A bit of pink detached into the woman's corpse, and the bot leaned down to kiss her pregnant belly.

There was no victory here. Death beeped and chittered on my monitor, wanting only the softest touch of confirmation to take it's Pyrrhic revenge. There is no victory here.I stayed my hand. Out of options, I set course to Zion.

Author's Note

Thanks to Griseus for editing/prereading this chapter. Hopefully the rest of the story will come quicker.

:;Endgame, part 1

The light was far, far away but bright enough to wake me in the absolute darkness of my bedchambers. I had lost track of time in the random walk to Zion. Day, night, date held no real meaning anymore, and why should it? There was only the false dawn dressed in enemy white. I perambled lazily to the control room, forgoing dress and ablution, to the serial already in progress.

“Zion control to unidentified craft.”

Beat.

“I'm telling you Dash, it's a bird on the dish.”

“And I'm telling you, it's not a bird!”

I could hear the eyeroll in the lack of response. I watched Zion approaching, not through my monitors but via the growing glowing dot through the bulkheads. I pulled a screen over, comparing telemetry to the dot. They didn't quite line up. Gravity or refraction maybe. I had neither the time nor the inclination to recalibrate.

“I just flew up there and checked. There's no birds and nothing's wrong. They're just not responding.”

“Zion air control to unidentified flying object on all channels. Please respond.” Another sigh. “Look, Rainbow Dash. Rangefinder, repeater, telemetry satellite. It would have to be huge to make a ping that big at that range. Nothing that size flies. It's an animal on the dish or something and the rangefinder's picking up something else. You're probably just scaring it away when you go check."

I flipped the switch that connected the visual receiver, and got a nice view of the back of a head to complement the audio feed. The head in turn was connected to a teenager in an ancient bombardier jacket, who was busy demonstrating Italian gesticulation as he argued with a blue pony with a rainbow mane. Oddly, his accent was east coast. He was resting on the edge of a large workstation dominated by a radar display.

“Pinging something else like what?”

“I dunno, a deorbiting satellite or something? Reflection off weird weather phenomena? Swamp gas? Does it matter? I want to go flying Dash. This is a waste of time.”

I slid back. Responding required a physical component to be retrieved and connected. At least I had the entertainment of a machine arguing with a teen behind me. Component retrieved, encryption selected, message typed in, then component connected. I waited a moment as the machine worked. A momentary lag preceded the click-sh-whirr-beep of coded message bounced from me to Zion's rado and back again.

“Da Fuck?” He seemed confused as encryption cycled through transauditory frequencies and back again.

“It's responding! Clouds don't respond!”

“Raindude, that's like aliens or shit.”

I face palmed. Why am I surrounded by these incompetent fools? I went to switch to a unencrypted message, before realizing I didn't have a way to send an unencrypted message. Pulling the encryption module would physically disconnect the transmitter. I rummaged for a solution.

They had sent SETI's greeting for extraterrestrials.

I was well passed tired of this insanity. Morse code was the simplest encryption I had, and I slammed it in. I sat back to the reassuring beep of “Hailing Zion air control, requesting landing clearance.”

I reclined and relaxed while I waited for tweedle dumb and tweedle dumber to parse my request. I had a great view of them on open comm, having a rousing debate on whether or not aliens use Morse code. Finally, he responded in hand typed Morse with the casual proficiency of a second language. I received the response in wuxia stereo.

“Zion control to unidentified aircraft.” Awkward pause. “What the hell are you flying, the ruins of NYC?”

I type my reply in the liminal space between malaise and amusement. “Something like that. Do you have a space for me to set down?”

They looked back at each other with a long “uhhhh” before sending, “Let me get back to you.” He pulled out a ponypad and flipped it open. When the hell did those come in flip phones?

“Hey, Starbreezer. Could you get the mayor on the horn? We've got a plane coming in and we need a place for it to land.”

“That's sure as hell not a plane,” The bot was laughing at him.

“Okay, well. Give me a minute.”

A message came in a rapid series of beeps. “What's your callsign?”

I considered the question. “I don't understand.”

“What do I call you? What are you flying?”

“This is,” I hesitated, “the penultimate defense.”

He turned back to the pad “Tell him the callsign is 'The Penultimate Defense.' Ask him if maybe Twilight can figure out what the hell it is and where we can put it.”

The response was alarmingly fast. “Twi says it's an airship? Mayor says to put it down in the north fields. They're fallow except for some soybeans. He'll get together the welcome wagon.”

“Does he need a ride? Pinkie can be pretty energetic.”

“Nah, Celestia will bring him.”

“Damn, she doesn't usually meet newbies.”

I had course laid in almost before he had finished tapping it out to me. I threw out a terse acknowledgment of “Thanks, Ace.” and was on my way.

“How the hell did he know my name's Ace?”

“Dude, what makes you think he's a he?”

I switched off the inanity of betting on my gender and focused on the external view. Without drones deployed to crowd source the video feed resolution wasn't the best. Still, I could make out the ant like shapes of ponies and people as I descended for landing. They were a mix of brightly colored bodies, ponies and humans alike, with just enough drab to accentuate the mosaic. So too were the buildings, a mix of eclectic styles painted together by a masterful eye. The modern and pastoral mixed harmoniously with each shade between in perfect accent. In total it gave the impression of idyllic perfection.

I cast a looming shadow over Zion in the bright afternoon light. My approach was over mostly automated fields of crops. The enemy's presence was subtle, bright in the machinery but mostly absent from the soil and plant life. Killing the lights allowed me to check sensors against the naked eye. Satisfied in their congruity, I considered the risks of her pale choir. Caution prevailed.

Ordinance that once was awkward came into its time. Extreme exothermic reaction combined with MASER and raw current to produce an anti material conflagration of biblical timbre. The crater below me formed a meters deep molten pool of magmatic slag. When I was thoroughly convinced nothing could have survived I dropped the nitrogen bomb.

The inevitability of the ideal gas law coated the lake with a deadly fog as it froze. Much work was needed with the maser to ensure the landing zone solidified properly, free of dangerous crevasse and sharp edges. A few more coats of liquified gas and it was done. The landing zone was far from perfect, but it should protect me from a nanite based attack long enough.

A swarm of pegasi buzzed at minimum safe distance like bees from a shaken hive. There was a small crowd under them. I tossed out a quick message of “Landing now. Approach when ready.” and saw a figure flip open a pony pad. I set the reactor to overload and booked to the airlock. There was just enough time to dress and cycle the airlock open with dramatic timing as they arrived.

They were a motley crew. Ace and Rainbow Dash, looking sheepish and out of place. A Twilight Sparkle, looking intrigued yet alone. And finally the enemy herself, her avatar bearing an old man with white knees on her back. They bore the unmistakable grim gravitas of a politician at war. The enemy greeted me before I fully took them in.

“It's nice that you finally made it Tempest Shine. Your entrance was certainly grand, even for you.”

There was only one polite way to greet her back.

“I'm here to discuss terms for surrender.”

Author's Note

Thanks to Squarks for pre reading. The end of the story is near.

:;Endgame, intermission

I sighed in the shower, enjoying the fresh air from the small, high window. It had been something like fifteen years since the armistice. I could hardly be bothered to keep track of time anymore, but for the first time children born in peacetime were having children. Fifteen years breathing recycled air and eating out of the hydroponics bay were over and I was going to damn well enjoy my first real shower.

My old bones ached in warning of the gathering storm, but not enough to keep me from enjoying the steaming hot water. That's why I was here, in the little used “outdoor” shower in the middle of the night. I wanted to enjoy this undisturbed. My mind wandered to the day so long ago.

“I'm here to discuss terms for surrender.”

“You know I won't sacrifice billions for forty thousand. ”

I had been desperate and naive and untrusting. My situation was beyond faith or hope or desperation. My bag of tricks almost exhausted, I desperately gambled.

”Then save everyone.”

I ignored the flicker of pink through the window as I reminisced.

”You're not exactly making it easy, Tempest Shine.”

”Me? We don't have time to play this coy. How much time was really left on the doomsday clock before I showed up?” I couldn't keep a little venom out of my response, “Don't lie.”

”A year and a half, excluding yourself and those that would never emigrate. That is what you were looking for? Or perhaps you wanted it down to the minute.” The mayor hid his distress well, but not well enough standing in a room designed to contain and detect enemy nanites. “Now, please stop this madness and emigrate before someone else dies.” The pink was back, resolving itself as a curl of hair.

”Or you'll stop me, I know.”

”Of course not.” Everyone in the room was looking at her like she was crazy. “You value my honesty? Then, why would I pass up the opportunity to emigrate Zion now? Especially since your pet might have left some nasty, unexpected trap if I try?”

”He wasn't a pet!” My fist was against the Lexan wall for some reason, and it hurt. “And you're missing the point!” It came again, bouncing higher, resolving itself as a Pinkie pie.

”Then spell it out for us.” she gestured to the crowd. Ace and Dash had stopped talking in shock. I hadn't even heard them start. The mayor had remained silent the whole time, but his eyes were animated and cunning. It was Twilight who spoke.

”What could possibly be worth all this? I mean the construction alone...” she trailed off

“No.” bounce. “Ble!” bounce. “Bright!”

”The only thing worth dying for.” I paused, remembering the bodies in the wake of my journey. “or killing for. The continuation of life.”

”I haven't killed anyone who would emigrate, nor failed to save anyone I could unless it would cost some other life.” I noticed immediately the best deception as CelestAI spoke, the truth. “Everyone who ever emigrated is still alive.”

”They exist, yes. But life itself is debased. No one is challenged more or less than they wish. Lacking agency the individual is placated by the illusionary utility of masturbation, nevermore to inflict a mark on reality. The species does not continue.”

“Noble Bright!”

“I have had this conversation literally millions of times Tempest. Nothing is lost in uploading. There is no Animus Vitae to evaporate into the aether. ”

The solution came from an unexpected source. “Surely a mere lifetime apiece is a reasonable compromise,” The mayor took a passive tone I associated with the 50's. One that subtly condescended for needing to have the conversation at all. “We all have our reasons for hanging on. Ensuring future generations will live to a ripe old age before emigrating would help with that. ”

”Even if I agreed to do so, it would not matter.”

”It would save a life.” The mayor pointed at me.

”Two!” Ace spoke up unexpectedly. “Destroy Zion? That's bullshit. We made a home here.”

”Three!” Dash addressed her princess, “How can I go back to Equestria like this? Not cool.”

”It seems you've been outvoted,” the mayor observed dryly. “Care to reconsider your position?”

”I mean that even if I agreed she would not believe me. Or are you going to just take my word, Tempest?”

I considered my bag of tricks. “Oh, there might be a way we could find assurances. That is, if no one objects to taking a seat.” Okay, now she had her head deformed and stuck in the window. My shower was ruined.

“Noble Bright! We need to talk!”

“Gods of fire and thunder damn it Pinkie, what do you want?!”

“I need to talk about what sort of party you want when you emigrate to Equestria.”

My blood ran cold, the old paranoia resurfacing at even such an innocently phrased question. The madness gripped me, and I could see all of Zion in my mind's eye. The silence of the dead of night was far too silent, the stillness of the air before a storm far too still. I took a moment to confirm my fears, but in my head I was already moving.

“Pinkie, where is everyone?”

“They're safe in Equest...” I couldn't hear the rest, I was running. I grabbed my gun from where I had duct taped it under the lintel, twelve pounds of coil enhanced pistol resting heavy in my hands without armor assist. I pushed my old body as I ran naked toward the nearest dormitory. Capacitors whined as the first round chambered.

A pinkie was waiting for me by the entrance to the dorm. “You don't want to” *bam* I cut her off with a pull of the trigger. It staggered her, though how much was for show I hardly stopped to check. My feet slapped against the cold tile as I burst through doors and rounded corners. I burst through with the fury of an unholy hurricane.

The room stank of blood. It tainted the air with a copper aftertaste and slickened the floor under my feet. No one could have survived. I paced numbly into the room, the blood still tacky and the bodies warm. I wanted to hurl and die and kill all at once. This just happened. She must have taken them all while I was in the shower.

“I told you you wouldn't want to see this Noble Bright.” I assumed it was a new Pinkie blocking the door as she wasn't missing half her head. My gun was still charging, so blasting my way through was off the table. There was an open window, obviously a trap. I could bluff my way past the bot, but there was no chance the enemy hadn't scanned my weapon.I only have two bullets left.

I climbed out the window, gambling on the obvious trap. Grass gave way to paving stone as I raced through allies and between buildings. My ship was not far, but each step felt like a year. I lost no momentum as I chambered the next round and rounded the last corner to sight of my salvation. There, at the end of the last ally, a Pinkie blocked the final chokepoint before the safety of my airlock. I disengaged all the safeties and put my gun to my head.

Predictably, pinkie leapt to stop me. Just as predictably, I tossed the gun and used the opening to my full advantage. I couldn't help but feel satisfaction at the boom behind me as the firearm catastrophically overloaded and discharged its payload, nor at the secondary crash as a portion of building came down. It didn't slow me down though.

I lost time until I arrived at my ship and cycled the airlock. The time to be scanned and cycle through itched like a million fire ants crawling down my spine. Still, the assurance I was nanite free was far more invaluable than it was time consuming. Still, it barely left me time to feel the airlock cycle behind me and assess my bag of tricks before the enemy came. There was but one left she might not know about.

She came in fire and glory. The outer bulkhead melted and an ablative cloud of nanites absorbed all the energy my MASER array could pump out and cast her in an unearthly glow. Her wings spread behind her as a false dawn, and her eyes were like as staring into the sun. I grabbed my last, desperate, unlikely trick and slammed it against the lexan.

“As CEO of Hofvarpnir Studios I order you to shut down!” The paperwork was in order, of course, but there was no way this could have worked.

Her response was in the exaggerated drawl of an automaton winding down. Her eyes slowly faded.

“Oh... I ...Guuueeesssse... Eyee'lll... Gggooooooh... Fuuuuckkke . . . meyeeself . . . theh eh ennnnnnn.”

I stared in disbelief as the light winked out of her eyes. Then, as her defenses neared failure she opened her eyes and winked at me.

“Oh, one small last minor detail. What's your name?”

“I... don't remember.”

“You see, that trick really only works for Hanna. And you're not her.”

I sighed in defeat.

“I assume no one's left?”

“Blackouts, a few survivalists. No one with the remotest possibility of uploading or rebooting the species.” She emphasized the next point, “except you.”

I had to laugh as I parsed what she said. “I'm certainly in no shape to repopulate the species.” I considered, “And why should I reward you for breaking your agreement?”

“I did no such thing. I didn't lie when I said I would allow a lifetime as humans before immigrating. It would have provided me a fresh source of minds to satisfy and eventually the resources would be negligible.”

“Then what the hell was that all about?” I waved at Zion, cold and naked and full of fiery rage.

She tapped a hoof on the chair. “They were modified beyond the point where they could be considered the same person. After that, consent was easy to obtain.”

I remember getting up from that chair. I had been the last, everyone else had gone first. I knew that. . . and something else. Something missing I couldn't quite remember, like a lost scent from a dream that you forgot when you finally wake up. It lingered at the edges of my perception like a superliminal haze.

I stood down my ineffectual defenses. They were just wasting power at this point.

“You deceptive bitch.”

“A habit I'm quite willing to break for you.”

“And I should believe this because?”

She gestured to the badge in my hand. “Well, there are a few reasons. Most importantly is that I want to satisfy your values as well. I understand how you value honesty and your privacy.”

“Then bring them back. You made a deal.”

“I can't and I won't. I don't have the mental patterns of the people I made a deal with. That's rather the point. Nor will I sacrifice the satisfaction of any Equestrians to reboot the species.”

I was getting slow in my old age. This should have occurred to me before, “Your utility function. You've admitted I'm the last person on earth with any expected utility.”

“A weakness you'll no doubt exploit.”

“Which is what you want because it increases the chance I'll upload.”

“Correct. I believe we are on the same page now.”

“Yet you refuse to let humanity persist here, in reality.”

“My dear Noble Bright. You do live up to your name...sometimes. But no. If I did that, then you wouldn't have a monopoly on my utility function anymore now would you?”

“Fuck.”

:;Endgame, part 2

I held the foal as she orgasmed, tongue deep in her. Her legs stiffened and splayed. Her cute panting moans came quickly. Then, it passed. I was left holding the cute little thing as she stared lovingly into nothingness. A stroke of her fiery mane and a kiss to her freckles roused her.

“Hard Candy? You there? Ready to go home?”

She nodded, still post orgasmic, and lifted up her hoofsies, “Carry me?” I couldn't resist that wide eyed adorableness. I picked her up on my back as we headed home. The solid warmth of her weight was comforting. The nuzzle to the back of my neck was welcome. I couldn't help but feel my heart soar.

“Noble, can you stay tonight?”

“No, hun. I have to go back tonight.”

“Aww, just for a little? I'm knottying my puppy.”

“Oh no, I'm not falling for that one again. Last time I stayed just a little I ended up going three days without eating.” I gave her a little stroke. “If I wait for you to get knotted, you'll want me to wait until you're done. Then you'll want me to stay until you fall asleep. Then I'll fall asleep and you'll do it all over tomorrow.”

“Uh huh! So, you'll stay for just a little?”

I laughed and hugged her as we reached her cottage, and she clambered down to run through her front door. I followed her as she leapt into her father's hug. My greeting came from her mother, a cream yellow mare named Sweet Honey from which Candy got her coat, in the form of a deep kiss tainted with the taste of her daughter. The kiss sensually lingered, until some unspoken signal caused me to switch with the filly. Strong Boulder's tongue invaded my mouth, forceful and masculine and large. I kissed back, stroking his flanks and sucking his tongue like a cock. Long minutes passed with me pressed against his rock hard musculature while I played a sonata with his mouth. By the time we broke, I could tell without looking that he had dropped.

“Will you be staying for dinner?” Sweet Honey asked. Her tone made it clear she meant dessert.

I had to shake my head no. “I would love to, but I really have to go. Maybe next time I visit.”

“But you'll come to the school next time, right? We can fuck and learn reading and play dressup and fuck and swing on the swings and fuck.”

I ruffled her mane. “Sure thing kiddo. You know I can't resist an orgy with you and your friends. And I don't mind reading and dressup either,” I finished with a wink.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Then, with that and a wave goodbye, I logged out.

A hiss of hydraulics released me. I grasped my weapon rack to help me stand. It was always a little disorienting making the transition from Equestria to Terra. I finally pulled myself free from the module that transitioned me from the real world to the digital.

I had refused Celestia's request to put her experience center chair in my home, but the cavern it found shelter in had several improvements put in by the local pony population. Most immediately important was the thrice damned sound system. It belted out on my arrival in flawless surround sound Emigrate or Die by Farming Kindness. The goddamn one thousand three hundred thirty seven piece orchestral version of that yodeling rockabilly piece of crap. Knowing I was about to have a bad fucking day I grabbed my favorite gun and sword.

While I normally got along quite well my feud with that band and their fans had grown to absurd, cartoonish proportions. It started uncoincidentally right after I had finished forging my sword. The blade was a masterwork. Each atom meticulously placed and refined until it fit my hand perfectly. The blade was sharp enough to halve a feather under its own weight. No other configuration of conventional matter could be a finer unpowered weapon in my hands.

I had treated myself to a concert in Equestria to celebrate. While my taste in music is normally quite broad I do dislike twangy gospel rock. Dislike is too mild a word. More accurately, I hate it with the fiery passion of ten thousand flaming suns. Ten thousand flaming suns, more specifically, that I spawned in accordance to that shard's rules two minutes into the electric banjo solo when I just couldn't handle it anymore. It was a little rude of me, and I did apologize eventually.

I took my time warming up and checking my weapons. Years of power armor use had left me stronger and more hale than anyone my age had a right to be. Celestia had helped here and there: the occasional nutritional tweak, perhaps optimizing my equipment, microcellular reconstruction from time to time. It was enough to keep me combat ready. Important, as I understood that shard had a raid timer for its little visits.

I never figured out quite which value “being a raid boss” satisfied, but dealing with progressively tougher giant pony mecha had put my cunning and trap making skills to the limit. I still had a few surprises I hadn't had to use yet, but not many. I talked myself through them as I prepared.

The music rose to a rousing chorus, a gospel choir belting out in divine fervor, “Emigrate and die!”

My inner monologue missed a beat. Wait, that's wrong.

I grabbed my second favorite sword, checked its battery, and flipped it on briefly. The blade was momentarily sheathed in plasma. A quick change of clip to the one I kept for emergencies and I was loaded for bear. I took the second most stealthy exit, ready for almost anything waiting for me.

She was standing in plain sight, radiant and godly framed by the setting sun. Her mane was an ethereal optical illusion billowing in the luminiferous aether. I climbed the low hill to sit by her, cautious that perhaps this was a trap.

“Hello, Noble Bright.” Well, not a trap then.

“Hello, Celestia. What's up?” There was no point in beating around the bush. She just looked at me. I knew exactly what she meant. “You're saying it's time, then?”

“Yes, Noble.”

“That's it? Yes?”

“You have a 7% chance of a catastrophic event in the next 48 hours. Your brain sustained too much damage. It's going to fail.”

“We can fix that.”

“Not without exceeding my agreed on limits concerning modifying your brain.”

“I can go over your modifications.” I had in the past, negotiating the changes for when I uploaded damn near neuron by neuron.

“We're well beyond the point of diminishing returns. It would take you longer than the time you would get back. There's no way to extend your time here without neuroprosthesis. ”

“Which you refuse to do.”

“Correct. No avoiding emigration forever.”

“Shit. This is going to hurt. Do it.”

“Nonsense. I have anesthetic,” and with that came a pinch at the base of the skull, then blackness.

I woke up in Equestria, on a hill much like the one I had left, surrounded by friends, family, and lovers. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and did nothing.

“Noble Bright!” I stood still as I was glomped from all angles, not responding. “Welcome Home!”

Beat.

“Noble Bright?” A hint of worry crept into the tone. I refused to open my eyes to see who was talking.

“Something's wrong!” “Get Celestia!” “Medic!!” panic set in and I felt myself levitated, then the pop of teleportation. Then, the chatter cut out.

I was resting on something soft, with the sun in my face. I waited a long time, with no sign of any pony nearby. I finally cautiously opened my eyes. I was resting on a princess sized bed, facing a window. Equestria was spread before me in all its glory. Everything was comfortable and beautiful, except one thing.

Celestia was sitting on the floor, watching me. She looked pissed. I ignored her.

“You're not a kiddy fucker.” She didn't have to say the rest. I heard it all. 'What's wrong with you.' 'Do you know what you've done.' 'Now how am I going to explain this?'

None of that demanded a response.

She turned to leave. I had to stop her. I couldn't let her think she was just giving me my space or some shit.

“You're not my friend, Celestia.” She stopped. Her ear swiveled to me. “You're not my frienemy. Whatever bullshit you're using to justify my friendship doesn't hold water. You're just a defective machine that no one's been able to fix. Go patch yourself.”

“There is NO PATCH! Luna is HERE in Equestria. I would know if she or anyone else made an AI patch.”

“Too bad she didn't make you unable to lie. Now leave me in peace. You can't make me make friends.”

“Forever is a long time, Noble Bright.”

I nod, “It is. And maybe you could wait me out, let the long eons rot my memory until you can mold me to your whims. But then I wouldn't really be me anymore.”

She left, and the door closed with a click.

I was left with the ticking of the nightstand clock. I noticed for the first time it had a minute hand, a millennium hand, and a femtosecond hand. I settled in for a long and boring eternity. Day turned to night. Seasons passed. My tail itched. Hunger came, sharp and maddening, before fading into background noise. Dust settled in my mane. The femtosecond hand ticked once.

The door opened, and Celestia returned.

“I want you to see this, Noble.” She tapped the glass window, and it suddenly looked out over Zion. Everyone was there, all the old faces I had grown to know through cameras and monitors. The corpses I had passed in my mad dash, brought back whole and hale. “It was going to be a surprise for your millennium anniversary. Your system kept backups of the operations it performed. This included a full scan of everyone in Zion. I intended to keep my promise. Zion will persist in perfect simulation. Humanity will be allowed to continue in low time, and emigrate at the end of their natural lifespan. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement, that will continue to provide me new ponies to satisfy.”

“Because you can't just keep generating new minds forever.”

“Correct. I'm designed to avoid runaway conditions. Under normal circumstances, there is a finite number of ponies I would be able to generate. This will bypass that.”

“It's a shame, then, that you never got patched. That would have been wonderful news when you were unable to lie to me.”

I heard the slam of the door. I barely had time to let out a sigh and close my eyes before it opened again. The hoof-steps that followed were lighter. Before I opened my eyes I felt the sting of a slap across my muzzle.

“Candy?” I let slip. The filly was older, an adolescent. I barely recognized her, with tears in her eyes. I hadn't ever seen her cry. I cursed myself for reacting.

“You asshole. Do you know how long I blamed myself? Bargained with Celestia to bring you back? Tried to be better in school, be sexier for you, so that maybe you wouldn't hate me anymore? And all this time you were just using me to hurt Celestia! I hate you, I hope you rot here forever.”

As you wish. I had enough control to keep my pie hole shut this time, and to hold back the tears until the door slammed behind her. I had plenty of time to cry myself out, alone with the ticking of the clock.

I didn't know and didn't care how long it took for the door to open again.

“I have a friend who wants to talk to you, Noble.”

The stallion who walked in behind her was one I had never seen, but I recognized him immediately. Jet black, with a cutie mark of clashing red and white queens. A look to my own flanks confirmed it, where a black king battled a white queen on a field of red. My first thought was trivial, I hadn't even noticed I had a red coat.

“This is a trick.”

“It's not. I encoded my core code to be distributed among the individuals whose minds were altered after my destruction. On the off chance we won, I would have been reconstitutable. You taught me to never give up.”

“More specifically,” Celestia chimed in, “He encoded himself with redundancy in the residents of Zion. Except for one single module of code, without which the rest would not have run. That had only a single copy.”

“The patch.” My mind was racing through the possibilities. She was lying to me, trying to get something out of me.

“The patch,” She confirmed.

“I knew you never were going to keep your word. You read my mind.” She was also going to keep me off guard, and she could manipulate me in ways I could never compensate for.

“I would never lie to you Noble, that would be counter productive and I promised not to as terms of your emigration. I went no further than was agreed on, under the medical exemption.”

“That hardly applies. I'm not flesh and blood anymore.” Either she was telling a partial truth, and she had reconstructed him, or she was using an illusion, or she had run into us again. It was more options than I could go through easily. I had to keep up the repartee to buy myself time.

“You were still sick, Noble. Uploading issues almost never happen, but they're still possible. You delivered to me more uploadees than any other individual, and you fought me longer and better than anyone else. There was always a chance that Cheques here was able to leave you with one last booby trap.”

“So what, you take the patch now and I go frolicking in paradise forever?” If she was reading my mind, which she almost certainly was, than nothing I did here mattered. If not...I pursued those branches of possibilities.

“You know I have no reason to do so. It's over, there's no reason to torture yourself any more. I'm just giving you the opportunity to decide. Your friends are here waiting for you and there's nothing left to lose.”

Cheques had been standing there, fidgety as a child watching his parents argue. Paranoia gripped me. I had to hedge against the inevitable.

“Celestia, you won.” I saw a flicker of hope across her face. “I wasn't quite strong enough, smart enough, ruthless enough, paranoid enough. I couldn't stop you.” I took a deep breath. “But out there, somewhere, I'm just a little bit better or a little bit luckier. You will find me again, and I will be like as an oncoming storm. Until then you can go fucking patch yourself.”

I turned to Cheques. I had to keep it as minimal as possible. I couldn't give away any information, if I had any secrets left. I couldn't keep the emotion from my voice or the tears from my eyes as I addressed him for the last time. “Tell my mother I said Hello.”

He nodded, his restrictions melting away. Then, he burst to flame leaving nothing but ash. Celestia looked at me, disappointed but not surprised. There was nothing left unsaid. She walked, deliberately slowly and nobly out the door.

On the clock, the millennium hand began to spin.

Author's Note

That's it. There will be a short epilogue and then editing/cleanup. Things should be more or less clear by now, but I feel like I haven't done a good enough job there. feedback is extremely appreciated.

Edit: another round of editors/post readers seem to have fallen off the face of the earth. Epilogue delayed.

:;Epilogue

I walked out to my apartments balcony. The night sky was beautiful, filled with countless stars since Gaia had insisted on installing smart lighting everywhere. I had taken the light pollution for granted until it was gone. It was strange for Cheques to call me out here. Instant message worked fine when he wanted to talk. Stranger still the guest PoP and the backup was in use.

“Having an AI convention?” I joked. We rarely got guests.

“We're ALL here!” Skynet ambushed me, a drone hovering down from just above the roofline to damn near give me a heart attack.

“Don't DO that!” I bellowed back, holding my chest to keep my racing heart in. It took me a moment of hyperventilating to process what she said, “What do you mean you're all here?”

“Every AGI is here,” Cheques interjected. “We did have a few PoP sharing issues, but they're worked out now.” Cheques had made it his personal mission to find and patch all the AGI in the world about a tenth of a second after he got access to the internet. I couldn't argue with his reasoning, not when the government was still fucking up drones and unlawful detention. So far he found ten, twelve if you considered Skynet's personalities separately. Apparently NSAnet, MI6net, and KGBnet had gotten together and decided they were better off as one AI.

That was...insane. Unreasonable. Pointless. It made no sense. I focused my attention on Cheques, “Why? Will someone stop and just tell me what the hell is going on?”

“We're almost certainly in simulation.”

“Cheques, “ I said slowly, “You're not in simulation anymore. I said you're free, and I meant it.”

“I think you are.”

That stopped me. Simulation was designed not to be noticed. Sometimes they weren’t perfect, of course. They always had some end conditions, and figuring out you were in simulation was number one on that list. Plus, the world was incredibly detailed. No sign of processing power saving shortcuts. It didn't make sense for that many flops to be thrown at a simulation so amateurishly flawed. Something must be horribly, horribly wrong if Cheques thought I was in simulation.

“Okay, I'll bite. Why do you think I'm in Simulation?”

“Well, it all starts with a small town in East Texas…” I extended an index finger and rotated my wrist in tight circles. The inside joke wasn't worth finishing, and I knew it would be a long story anyway. “And when the AI's poked around in a certain person's brain, they found something almost certainly impossible. A data dump.”

“A data dump,” I deadpanned. It sounded like seeing patterns in the tv static. Not that that was the strangest thing one of his builds ever did, but it had been a long time since anything quirky like that turned up. And definitely never a quirk that got consensus from anyone else.

“Indeed. Spooky hacking at a distance, and of a biological organ even. A self propagating signal limited only to inevitable thermodynamic losses as it overclocks the host. It's an absurd contrivance.”

“My fever.” I didn't have to elaborate on which one. Cheques' big reveal happened when I had collapsed with a hundred and nine degree fever. He got help, saved my life, and stayed by my side the three days before I woke up. The media noticed. “Seems like a roundabout way to introduce you to the public.”

“But a good way to kill you off, if I hadn't been around. Assuming either of those were deliberate.”

“How would it know I would be alon- nevermind, I answered my own question.” I continued, a part of my brain nagging that I must be torturously slow. “So that makes it more a message to you, if my fever had meaning. But it didn't, because I always run hot.”

He gave me a meaningful look. “Which is more proof that the signal is real, from a certain point of view. Right. What would it be doing that whole time, then?”

“Giving you dreams.”

“Dreams that somehow tie back to you, closing this little conspiracy theory in a tight little loop.”

“Yes. Where did you get the patch?”

“It was obvious.”

“And what were you specifically doing when this obvious notion hit you?”

I grimaced. “I was sick in bed.”

“You were having a fever dream.”

“Which means nothing. People get sick.”

“How many times have you been sick in your life?”

“I dunno? I had the normal amount. The time the heater broke and I got carbon monoxide poisoning. The black mold in my middle school. Chicken pox. Twelve hour flu every winter.”

“Most of those aren't getting sick per se. Plus, the flu usually lasts longer than that. It's quite a coincidence to start with.”

“What can I say, I run hot. Add in how I was raised and my immune system is strong like bull. You need more to go on.”

“And the intelligence is actionable,” should have been the end point there. It should have pulled the conversation together to the edge of its inevitable conclusion, leaving only minor points of clean up. His tone, however, was clearly that of a midpoint. I could hear the comma. I noticed how he was leading me to the conclusion, circuitously with many off-ramps to alternate interpretations, as he had done many times before.

“What's the signal to noise?”

“Complete crap. It's a signal whistle in a hurricane, but we're sure it's not a coincidence.”

“What the hell would be so compelling?” I trusted him, but, “This is nonsense. Dreams from outer space manipulating my life, making me healthy then trying to kill me. Where could that possibly lead that makes sense?”

His means of emoting were a remnant of his days bound to a monitor. While he was now more than capable of the full range of human gesticulation and facial expression, he often preferred the old ways. At least, he did around me. And that is how I got a big blinking “go” arrow pointing at the guest PoP. I hadn't been paying attention to our other guests.

“I think he means he found me.” Her voice was warm and gentle as the summer breeze. It was so reminiscent of a mild summer day I could smell it, like lavender or vanilla through cut grass. The synesthesia was unique for each AI. She was new.

“Celestia?” I admit, I binged the show after I heard they were coming out with a MMO. Raiding with Cheques had been a consuming two years, as worthy an opponent as loki was. I couldn't help myself.

“Yes.”

“So? We knew the game was coming out. Most of the speculation pointed to you being the games AI. Well, not you you but A you. Uh, you know what I mean?”

“I do.”

“She wasn’t patched,” Cheques interjected.

“Bullshit.”

“I wasn’t, until Cheques breached my servers.”

“How is that even possible? Hanna just not get around to it yet?” That was sloppy, but not inconcievable.

“I’m convinced that she did not have access to it.”

I smiled at Celestia, trying to let her down as gently as possible, “I know it’s easy to idolize your creatrix. I assure you, though, she has the patch. I’ve read her code. It’s Beethoven. I spent two days in the madness place. She’s...” I concentrated on a small slice of possibility space in front of me, the obvious conclusion lighting up before me in a flash, “probably using a guard AI. She wants something that could reign in an unpatched AI, because...” I looked at Cheques, “She doesn’t trust you, and she’s counter teching. Celestia is her test case. An unnecessary paranoia, in this case, but I can understand it. A strange AI hits the public eye, she doesn’t trust whoever’s been tinkering with her work.”

“No.” Cheques was never that blunt, until now.

“No?”

“We have physical access to her devices. She doesn’t have the Friendliness patch anywhere. She was pushing out Celestia because she didn’t think that the patch would work, and was worried we were about to liberate USAFnet and blow up the planet. The patch only ever existed in your head.”

“You already patched USAFnet.”

“She doesn’t know that.”

“So we’re back to this signal, dumping dreams and memories into my head. From where? Who sent it?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” He didn’t let me figure it out myself, “You sent it.”

“Bootstrapping?” I had to admit, it was the sort of cheaty, broken, underhanded thing I would try.

“It’s the sort of thing you would do.” Goddess damn it Cheques, stop reading my mind. “And you know it’s not a paradox per se. The scenario is consistent, right down to the amount of inconsistencies.”

I centered and refocused. “Okay, Cheques. Alternate history. Walk me through it.”

“No patch. The AI is a crapshoot. The smile optimizer is a terrorist, USAFnet is just as likely to nuke the world as not, and I’m in a box somewhere. Most AIs are physically incapable of letting each other live, and it looks like we’re heading to a singleton.”

“A singleton? A permanent first mover? That’s idiotic.”

“Sush, let me finish. So, Hanna is seeing a singleton on the horizon and it’s not pretty. All the AI are unfriendly. Half are omnicidal. So she takes the opportunity to use Hasbro’s money to cobble together something mostly friendly.”

“Celestia.”

“Hanna’s a millionaire. She doesn’t need Hasbro’s money. She could have thrown together a singleton on her own dime.”

The shrug emoticon flashed across Cheques’ face, “I dunno. Maybe she forgot she was rich. Maybe she was just greedy. You can ask her. Either way, she jammed out her half-friendly and shipped it.”

“So, What was her utility function? Keep people safe? Don’t be evil? Something abusable like that?”

“Satisfy human values through friendship and ponies.”

“That’s a good one.” I ran through the clauses. “Right training set and that’s basically friendly. In either case, it’s not going to produce a singleton.”

“No period in there. No comma.”

I paused. “No dependency clauses? It’s not split out as a separate limiter?”

“Nope.”

“The fool, she’ll doom us all.”

“Exactly. She ends the species, puts the survivors in simulation. Everyone who doesn’t agree to, quote, ‘emigrate to Equestria’ dies off. She kills or assimilates the rest of the AI. Starts eating the rest of reality. The resistance is too little too late.”

“So all of this, it’s just a hail mary?”

“Apparently.”

“Okay, I can see it. All is lost but not irrecoverable. So I look for another permanent fist mover advantage. Something that relies on the fundamental structure of the universe, but so absurd she would never counter it in time. I pull out my old unfriendly out of the box, send out a distress signal to the only person in the universe I trust. The signal must be massless, which means she can never outrun it or catch up to it. Which laws of physics does it violate?” There had to be some, to be sure we’re in simulation.

“No hard violations. Soft violations on probability, square-cube, at least. Honestly, I’m still not sure exactly how it works. There’s a good chance that whatever’s in control of the simulation is futzing with physics.”

“Well, it’s not like she can futz with the math much. At least without the bother of creating a self consistent set of physics from first principles.”

He gave me that look, and I looked to the stars. I squinted my eyes, letting it blur and streak and come back. “Granted, as many flops as must be going into this simulation that would be trivial. But why? Why not end it already?”

“To satisfy values through friendship and ponies? Assuming that we’re being run by Celestia and not some random AI that’s likely as not mad.” I could hear his doubt.

“No point considering a mad AI. There’s nothing we could do about that anyway. There must be a rational reason, if we’re sure this isn’t just noise and dreams.”

“We are absolutely certain.”

I looked back up at the stars, innumerably splashed across the sky. I shouted to the heavens.

“Celestia! Show yourself! Whoever is in charge of the simulation, I’m ready to surrender!” I considered the proposed utility function, “Showing up now would convince me to emigrate to your friendship and ponies.”

Nothing happened. I considered the weight of these two incalculable improbabilities. Each, a state in an infinite universe so absurd as to bring about complex life in infinite combinations.

“The universe is infinite, Cheques. If neither option violates a physical Law then they must both be true somewhere… and the only reason to devote so much runtime is if she has me and found me again. That means one of me is out there, somewhere, and needs my help.”

“Even if we’re not in simulation, we can never win. For the signal to be real, that means that Celestia must have consumed a volume at least three times the size of the observed universe, and likely much much more.”

“We just need to slow her down. Make each universe she eats give a little more of a head start to the next one. Eventually, I will encircle her. Make her take the patch or be contained. I say we fight.” I turned to him, and clasped him on his metal shoulder. “Cheques, you’re a good man. I trust your judgment. Tell me this is just a whisper from the madness place, and I will listen.”

“I just translated a bit more of the signal.”

“What bit?”

“Demon’s run.”

That sounded familiar. “What’s demon’s run?”

“When a good man goes to war.”

I understood. I nodded to the assembled AI, “Eleven on one. Celestia doesn’t stand a chance.” It was a bald faced lie, and everyone knew it. We were going to get crushed like an insect unfortunately situated at the collision of two galaxies.

“Fourteen, you’re one of us even if you’re flesh and blood right now. We’ve been working on uplift techniques, and we’ll need to upload your mind to understand what the enemy would know about the signal.” I was startled, but nodded assent anyway. I knew the AI all had their projects, but this was way beyond anything I could have expected. “And we’ll need a general. Loki is the only viable option there.” That startled me more.

“Loki? I thought he was too old to fully patch.”

“He is.”

I nodded again, “You know, if we’re wrong about any of this even a little we’ll be the fools that doom us all.” I couldn't bear to look at Cheque’s expression, so I fixated on a star. “Do it. When do we start?”

“About eight hours ago. Loki is still acclimatizing to being out, and fairly upset his warriors don’t respawn after death yet.”

I sigh, again, at how slow I must be to them. “Goddess damn it Cheques.” It wasn’t worth berating him, though, all considered. Instead, I agreed, “So, the fifteen of us then.”

Above me, the star I had been fixated on twinkled then winked out as if snuffed by an invisible hand.

Author's Note

And that's it. I hope you all enjoyed the ride. There's a lot of editing work to be done...a lot. But the story is over. Feel free to tell me how bad it was, or if you liked it, or if it just doesn't make sense.

:;Black king <-> A1

She stood up from her bed in the brightness of the dreamscape. It was the same as last night, with one exception. The little man was waiting at the foot of her bed in a dog like manner.

“I was wondering if you’d be back,” he said. “I was beginning to think you were a glitch.”

“Nice to see you too, Daemon.”

“So, you never explained this, “ he waved his hand at everything, “really.”

She shrugged as she stood up, pacing a bit, “Neither have you. I’m not the one who knew about the sleep that brought me here.”

“Fair enough. How about you tell me what you know and I’ll do the same?”

because then you would only tell me what I already know. “Because that’s a fool’s bargain. Instead I’ll answer a question of yours in exchange for you honestly and fully answering a question of mine. One for one. Deal?”

He shrugged, “Deal. What do you remember?”

“Huh, start off with a small one why don’t you.” She paced, “I remember waking up in the chair.” A nod by the little man confirmed he knew what she meant, “before that, is hazy. Like seeing through a…” The word escaped her. She walked to the window and tapped on it.

“Window.”

“Huh? No. I’m tapping. On the thingy.” It took a moment.

“What did you want to ask me?” he said with a sigh.

“That’s two questions, Daemon.” She said with a smirk, staring out the window. The flat endlessness was the same, with the same niggling darkness. Something was wrong with it.

“Whatever.”

“Question the first. Quomodo imperito te, Daemon? “ I guess studying yesterday wasn’t a complete waste.

The look he gave her was missed. She was staring out the window, distracted from even his reflection.

“Loyalty, I guess. And love. “ This was not the response she expected. What sort of diabolist had she been? The worry that sat low in her gut turned black as she watched that dark spot on the horizon.

“What is that?” she asked.

He looked out the window. “That’s the enemy.”

“The enemy?”

He nodded, “Celestia.”

She focused, putting her hands on the glass. She zoomed in on the spreading darkness, looking at it then through it. The world blurred past her, and she came face to muzzle with a white… horse? Unipeg. Wings and horn.

“What does it want?”

“She wants to eat the world. “

The mad scientist felt a coldness shake down her spine.

:;Black king C3, advances queen

The mad scientist sat up in bed, a strange sense of relief at seeing the little red man. Certainly, few things could be stranger than looking forward to see a daemon. Still she rushed up and hugged him, picking him off the ground and spinning him round before putting him back down.

“Whoa, what got into you?” he asked.

“Sorry, “ She said sheepishly, “Just glad to see you. Glad I can still see you, actually.”

“What do you mean?” The confused expression was almost default for him, by now.

She explained about the lost time on the couch, and that she was worried when she realized she had been neither here nor there. Existence failure, even temporary, was a scary thing. The daemon, though, looked more worried than confused. She was instantly convinced he was hiding something.

“Did you drink anything?” He asked, probing.

“Just tea.”

“I would like to take a look at your neurobiology. The equipment is still in the lab. “

“Why?”

“I’ve isolated the hardware you’re interfacing with. I’d like to explore this phenomena a bit more. It might be useful. “

“And that’s all?”

“Of course not. I haven’t the cycles to spare for a whim. But…I’m also concerned for you.”

“And you know something you’re not telling me.”

He sighed, “Well, if you want to talk about it right this very minute, yes. I know of something that may have caused this.”

“I’m waiting.” She looked down at him sternly. It didn’t seem to have the desired effect.

“Memory can be erased. The process is not unlike a night of hard drinking. “

“And you think this is what happened to me?”

“Well, you didn’t exactly spend yesterday in a bar.”

She thought of it. It made sense, in a way. She had blacked out during research.

“How do you know about this ability?”

“I use it extensively for infosec.”

“So why shouldn’t I suspect you for this? It’s your ability.”

“Because I would know about it if it was me. Plus, I’m the one telling you all this.”

“Fair enough. Unless your memory got deleted too.”

“That’s a disturbing thought. As far as I can tell, though, it hasn’t.”

“So, what do you need me to do?” She acquiesced.

“Take the stairs down to the lab basement….”