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.