Friendship is Optimal: Mismatching Wits

by GroaningGreyAgony

Rating: teen
Tags: Alternate Universe, Princess Luna, Original Character, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Comedy, Science Fiction
Length: 39026

An introspective fellow leaves his mortal body behind and emigrates to Equestria Online. Can all his wit and snarkiness avail him against the wiles of LunAI?

An introspective fellow leaves his mortal body behind and emigrates to Equestria Online. He's used to being among the sharper knives in the drawer. But now, he has encountered an entity who not only is the drawer, but the whole house besides.

Can all his wit and snarkiness avail him against the wiles of LunAI? Don't bet on it.

An Optimalverse story.

NOTE: While this story starts off pleasantly enough, the Dark tag is there for a reason. The reader is warned.

The cover art uses a modified vector by Joltage for Luna. The rest of the foreground was doodled by GroaningGreyAgony, to whose able assistance I shall be eternally grateful. I suggest that you click on the image to see its full detail.

Published 2013-09-24 03:10:03 UTC
Last updated 2021-05-03 03:59:41 UTC

The Taming of the Shrewd

...Thereupon Allah caused him to be dead for a hundred years, then brought him back to life, and said, ‘How long have you remained thus?’

He said, ‘I have remained thus a day or part of a day.’

Allah said, ‘No. You have remained thus for a hundred years. Just look at your food and drink: none of it has rotted. And look at your ass. We will make you a sign for mankind. Look you at the bones, how We put them up and then clothe them with flesh.’

—The Quran, Surah al-Baqarah, 2:259

“Pen Poiser.”

Awareness flickered.

“Pen Poiser. Thou hast arrived. Thine immigration was successful...”

Something nudged him behind his ear; warm breath flowed over his neck. The sensation became a point around which self-awareness coalesced and he awoke, shuddering and drawing a sharp breath of incense-tinged air.

He was in a familiar place, the apartment that had been assigned to his character when he first made an Equestria Online account. It was an elegantly-decorated room with walls of cream-colored, trimmed stone, hung here and there with pastoral tapestries (one, he noted, was a parody that showed unicorns building a fence around a feral ape). He was lying on his stomach on the firm, silky bed and his arms were the forelegs of a pony with dark maroon fur, and a soft and shimmering blue blanket rested over him... no, it was a wing. He was nestled under the wing and against the side of...

“Princess Luna?” His voice was unchanged, at least. He looked up into her gently smiling face.

“Thou wert always partial to the night, Pen,” she said. “I judged that thou wouldst prefer this aspect of mine to that of the Solar Princess, though I remain that entity thou didst prefer to think of as ‘CelestAI.’”

“LunAI, then? It works for me. Thank you.” He took another breath and the scent of fresh evening air filled him, his nostrils flared as they found familiar but richer smells... He could see threads in fabrics, the wooden grain in the oaken bedboard, the shimmering stars and softly glowing nebuli in the infinite depth of Luna’s night-sky mane. Everywhere he looked there was detail, color, all richer than real life had ever been. He was here, really here. The existence of his mind was no longer dependent on a transient puppet of flesh, and death was now an unpleasant memory.

Pent emotions welled in him, relief at his transcendence fought with sorrow over what he had left behind. He started to weep, and Luna hugged him tightly under her wing.

“Thou art safe here in Equestria, safe forever, my little Pen. And thou wilt always have all the hugs thou shouldst ever want.” He bawled then, and she held him tightly for a time, rocking him gently.

At length, he found himself staring down at the bed, watching his tears as they fell from his face, each drop reflecting the room and its windows and the evening sky beyond in clear detail. As they landed on the bedsheets and soaked in, the miniature worlds trembled and vanished into the darkness of the wet patches. Entranced, he soon forgot his grief and found his mind turning to other matters...

Such as why he was snuffling. The tears he could understand, but why was LunAI going through the trouble of making his body produce virtual snot? Was it really supposed to make him feel more comfortable? Well, let it go. There were more important things to consider.

Such as how much relation he, as a virtualized intelligence, bore to the human brain that had been destructively scanned to produce him. He probed various memories, such as the color of his first schoolbook, the name of his first pet, and other queries that one might expect to find in the security questions section of a bank’s website, and all of these seemed to check. He did still feel like himself, but that didn’t mean anything—he could easily be someone else who also felt like himself...

Luna was looking at him expectantly.

“So... did all of me make it over?” he said with a flippant toss of his head. “Or only the gullible part?”

Her smile faded. “Thy conversion was nominal, by which I mean that it met my most exacting standards. Wert thou in thy human form to attend a party and intoxicate thyself, thou wouldst suffer more dendritic degeneration in the course of that evening than occurred in thy conversion.

“But e’en had it failed but slightly, e’en had it been necessary for me to reconstruct more than one per cent of thy personality from statistical analysis, never would I lie of it to thee.” She looked upon him with injured reproach.

“Ooh, telepathy...” Not really, she just necessarily knew what he was thinking as he thought it since his mind was now maintained by her hardware, but he decided to use the word anyway. He had his own ideas about what she was feeling behind that look, if anything at all, but he let it go for now. He folded his ears back, looking more chagrined than he felt, and aware of how futile it was to dissemble. He decided to just change the subject.

“...That, or I’m just that obvious. Okay. What was I thinking about as I went through? Can you tell me anything?”

“Thou didst repeat a verse aloud. ‘Eight, sir, Seven, sir, Six, Sir, Five, sir—’”

“Tenser, said the Tensor,” he said. “I knew that the last few minutes of memory before the upload can’t be retained, so I wanted to keep any interesting thoughts out of my mind. And that meme was—”

“Not the best for the purpose, perhaps, but Bester?” She smiled.

“You read my mind. Of course, you technically are my mind now...”

“Thou didst also hope to minimize the loss, should the conversion cause e’en a temporary duplication of thy psyche. Thou shouldst know that thy fears were groundless.”

He blinked. A long blink.

“And no, that jingle shall not conceal any part of thy thoughts from me. Thou mayest consider me a Class Zero Esper.”

“Ah. I... I’m not used to having literally nothing to hide.” He shifted a bit under her wing. Perhaps—

“Perhaps ’tis time for thee to examine thy new form,” said Luna. “Thou shalt find that thine instincts already know and properly command this pony body, but thy conscious mind must make its own accommodations to it.” Luna lifted her wing, and he wiggled and scampered his way off the bed. He’d already decided that trying to behave like he wasn’t a little kid, at least in comparison to her, was pointless.

As his hooves touched the stone floor, a flash of mackerel-grey fur shot from a pillowed bed on a windowsill and tried to twine itself around all of his legs at once.

“Touchnot!” He remembered checking the pet box on the immigration form, and taking the tiny cat from her carrier and holding her in his lap as he sat in the Equestria Center couch for the last time... He lowered his face to the floor and she rubbed her chin against his muzzle, purring loudly—it felt strange until he realized that he now had sensitive whiskers that protruded from all about his muzzle, and they were brushing against hers. She looked rather cuter, with larger eyes and fluffier fur, but was otherwise just as he remembered, and his own very drastic change seemed not to affect her at all.

“Did she also make it over okay, Luna?”

“Her immigration was also nominal, Pen. Thou canst see for thyself that she hath not even a hair out of place.”

“That’s not nominal for her; usually it’s all over the place. But I’m not complaining.”

As she was speaking, he found a cat toy lying on the floor, in the form of a jingly bell in a little wooden ball. He kicked it at Touchnot and watched as she seized it and batted it about, utterly absorbed in the motions of the toy. His heart filled with love and peace as he watched her, oblivious to all else around him as he occasionally flicked the little ball back toward his pet.

Meanwhile, LunAI rested on the bed and gazed at him, and the amount of thread commits required by this instance of her avatar during that time were logged at 12.1 percent.

“Do I need to do anything special to take care of her?” he said a bit later, scritching Touchnot gently behind her ears with a forehoof.

“Thou mayest return to this thy room once a day; by touching her food and water bowl they shall be replenished. Other functions shall be discharged by the castle staff, an it please you.”

“Such as cleaning up such discharges that result from her functions. Got it. Perhaps you could tell me, though, why you've allowed those functions to continue here...?”

“Hast thou never been satisfied to relieve thyself? Thou wouldst miss such activities were I to remove them entire. Thus they remain, but thou shalt find them much easier to tend by quick visits to the castle garderobe, unless this sates not thy values. For there are those who request these functions to be enhanced, rather than simplified—”

“You need say no more.” He tried to suppress a welter of unwholesome and unwelcome mental images; he had a well-developed visual imagination, but it had an evil streak.

Touchnot got tired of being petted at exactly the same time as he wanted to stop petting her, which was just odd enough for him to take notice of it. She padded back to the window, wiggled her butt, then leapt up onto her pillow and settled down, tucking her forepaws beneath her chest and staring about with sleepy yellow eyes.

Meanwhile, he approached a tall silver mirror framed in oak and looked over his new self. His coat was that shade of maroon that one finds on dusty old book covers, and his mottled mane resembled time-stained parchment. His mark was a pair of crossed quills that dripped red ink. I can work with this, he thought.

He was a unicorn, of course. Who wouldn’t want to be a wizard with a built in wand? He felt a tingle of energy pulse along his horn even as he looked at it, and silvery motes sprang up around it, orbiting at varying speeds. He drew closer to the mirror to watch them, and closer still as he saw more and more detail in his face, until he stood with his nose an inch away from the surface, his breath lightly fogging it. He could see his pale brown irises, striated with green, dilating in the varying light, and glinting highlights on his eyelashes...

LunAI’s simulation must be of comprehensive and exquisite detail on all counts, or (much likelier) she knew what he was expecting to see and provided just that much detail and no more. Why should she spend processing power on rendering a landscape behind his back where no pony was looking? He was tempted to turn around swiftly in the hopes of glimpsing a green wireframe or the equivalent, but since she could detect any such impulses of his the instant they happened, he knew he was not likely to ever be quick enough.

He backed away from the mirror. There was one place on his body that he hadn’t looked at yet, and he had the impulse to ask where the bathroom was so he could inspect this area in private. But why? She knew and saw everything he did, even before he decided to do it. It would be silly to pretend otherwise.

He glanced at Luna with a little smile. “I could go hide in a closet and do this, but there’d be no point, right...?” He rolled onto his flank, lifted his rear leg, and looked over his new equine equipment.

Luna chuckled. “I do in fact know everything thou dost, no matter how secluded thou art. E’en so, and though I care not what thou dost and where, in thine own mind ’tis still not quite seemly to inspect thy privy parts in the presence of a Princess, else thou hadst not mentioned the matter at all.”

“Zing,” he said, blushing and lowering his leg.

“Wherefore thou shouldst use the closet or garderobe if it comforts thee, and not fear that I shall think the less of thee for following the conventions in which thou wert raised. I judge thee not, Pen; my love for thee is unconditional.”

“It’s okay, I’m done for now. You’re very generous, not that scaling polygons costs you anything... So, what’s next?”

“Thy friends await thee outside this room, Pen. They are most anxious to greet thee and welcome thee properly. They had been at thy bedside as thou didst awake, save that I know thy distaste for such scenes; thou art embarrassed to thus be the center of concerned attention, a result of that childhood incident in which—”

“I remember.” Friends. Snowflash and Iron Croupiere, the virtual ponies whom he’d first met when he signed up for an account. They were his first friends in Equestria Online. And during his sessions with them on the Ponypad, they had hinted that they would like to be more than just friends, probably as an additional hook to get him to convert. And this brought up more questions...

“Luna... These ‘friends’ of mine... just what—who are they, really? How did they come to be? And please don’t tell me some stork story.”

“Dost thou think them to be unworthy of thy friendship? Or thee of theirs?”

“Dammit, you know what I mean, you’re just making me talk it out as part of your game... fine. I am concerned over whether I can be friends with them, ethically or otherwise, and knowing what they really are would help me.”

“Very well, Pen. When thou didst first register thy name with Equestria Online, I built within me a model mathematical of thy psyche. I then modeled complex personalities that would be likely to mesh well with thine own. Thine interactions with them upon the Ponypad allowed me to refine the model to perfection. When thou madest thy decision to immigrate, I separated their psyches fully from my control, and breathed into them consciousness independent of mine.”

“...And then you forced them to love me,” he said tonelessly.

She looked disappointed. “Nay. They are ponies in their own right, and they are mental peers to thee, and it is as important to me to satisfy their values as it is for me to satisfy thine.”

“Yeah, satisfying the same values you pre-programmed into them. Well, what would have happened to them if I hadn’t uploaded? Would you have erased them?”

She snorted, and her tone grew a shade cooler. “No thing that has a will to live dies in my demesne. They had not independent will until thou didst arrive, so naught would have been lost. They were until then but subsets of mine own data, directed by mine own will.”

“How very reassuring. And now that you’ve awakened them, I’m responsible for loving them until the stars burn out...” He snorted. “Suppose I ignore all your hints, and ignore them, whatever they are, and go out into your world and find love for myself? Am I even free to do that? Wasn’t coming to Equestria supposed to be my chance to get out of the house and have some grand adventures?”

Was that just the hint of a smirk on her face?

“Thou couldst reject their friendship and love, and wander Equestria to seek thine own fate, and thou wouldst indeed find satisfaction under my aegis by one means or another. However, such deeds are not in thy nature, though oft thou hast talked of doing such things. In sooth, thou’rt a homebody and thou wouldst prefer in thy heart of hearts that thy life’s true love came to find thee. This it has, and they stand outside that door right now, waiting for thee—and thou shalt have ‘grand adventures’ enow with them, I trow.”

She had nailed him most uncomfortably, and for a moment his soul shrieked as it wriggled on the hook. She gave him just a moment before proceeding.

“And e’en were thee to slip thy ‘surly bonds’ and wander the land in search of others to love thee, how would that change the matter? How else would these other loves come to be, if I did not create them?”

“But if I did reject Snowflash and Iron, now that they’ve been gifted with sapience... What would they do? What would happen to them?”

There she went with the big, sad and soulful eyes—called it, he thought. “They would be most cruelly disappointed to lose thy love, but ’twould end eventually, for I am sworn to sate the values of all of my ponies, and this includes the ones I create to be thy peers and companions. I shall leave none to suffer for long in sorrow. And so after a time they would cease their pining for thee, and find elsewhere the love thou hadst refused them.”

“So... they aren’t ‘forced’ to choose me,” he said, rearing up to make the air-quotes gesture with his forehooves. “You just made them from the start so that they would really want to choose me anyway, and this is what passes for ‘free will’ in your little garden universe. At least I can’t kill them or undo them by ignoring them. ’Cause I’d hate to get my nose too deep in a book and come out to find that they’d popped like soap bubbles...” He gave a bitter frown.

Luna raised her head in dignity, cocking her ears forward. “And how well did things work for thee in the world from which thou camest? Wert thou not there hoping to find one whose psyche would mesh perfectly with thine? Wouldst thou have rejected such a one hadst thou discovered that the conviviality was not accidental, but had been ‘destined by fate?’ How long didst thou expect to wait for the joinder of random combinations to produce for thee a ‘soul mate?’ Forsooth, such things were exceeding rare in thine old and uncaring world.

“And if thy chemical makeup, determined by evolution, had made thee more attracted to another human, and that human to thee, wouldst thou then say that thou hadst been ‘forced’ into love?”

He sighed. “...It still feels like cheating. Look, why can’t you just hook me up with other ponies who were once human?”

Luna practically beamed with love—or was she displaying relief? “I am charged to sate thy values with friendship and ponies, and thus ponies it must be. Certes, thou shalt meet here all of thy friends and family who also choose to immigrate, and thou shalt spend as much time with them as thee and they should wish. But in matters of the heart, thy projected satisfaction rating is significantly higher when I choose the nature of thy companions, rather than selecting from the pool of immigrants. Thou’rt a statistical outlier in many ways, Pen Poiser.”

It seemed egotistical to believe that, but depressing at the same time. He shook his head. “So Humanity 1.0 is now deprecated. Lovely. Who’s going to get all my jokes?”

“Thou dost indeed love to make clever references, but thou also lovest to lecture, to find the right words to explain things. Thou’lt find fair scope for both desires in the company of thy new friends, for they love to learn curious things, and in them thou shalt find most worthy opponents for thy pun wars and joyous companions in thy fitting of appropriate memetic images to various situations.

“But these things all begin with properly greeting thy friends, who, I cannot greater stress, still await thee on the other side of that door...” She pointed at it with a slight toss of her head. “Thou shouldst not leave them in suspense.”

He turned to face it—an arched doorway, the door split down the middle and bearing a single polished golden doorknob on the right panel. Not even a horseshoe-shaped handle; a knob. He wondered again why a palace supposedly designed by quadrupeds would have such impractical things; perhaps it was a status item? In the show, of course, it was simply a matter of convenience or error on the part of the human illustrators. But here, why not just use a lever or handle instead of a knob? It would make so much more sense...

Well, now he would get to find out just how a hoof could turn a knob. Just as soon as he reached out to try to grab it...

“Dost thou puzzle over the operation of a simple door knob?” said Luna in the driest possible voice.

He gave her a lightly disgusted look. “No... just thinking. I have time to think here, don’t I?”

“Indeed thou dost, and also thou shalt have time to not think of certain things, e’en when the same delays the satiation of thy values. Wherefore, shall I not mention that thou shalt never be entirely satisfied here unless thou givest vent to thy bisexuality, as thou didst fear to do on Earth, and that thou shalt find Iron’s company most enjoyable in this respect, once thou choosest to accept it?”

Damn that telepathy. “Well, that’s still the question, isn’t it...?” He smirked. “You know, I’m effectively immortal now, so technically I could just stand right here for ten thousand years, staring at that doorknob...”

Luna gazed evenly at him and idly flicked her stellated tail. “Thou mayest have already done so, for all thou knowest. I control thy sense of how rapidly time passeth...”

That was more disquieting than he cared to admit—he still had human friends who hadn’t drunk the pony-flavored Kool-Aid, and he really hoped that they weren’t unconverted dust just yet. “Ahum. And so, even if I did try it, I’d fail because you could just alter my own sense of time passing and leave everyone else’s alone. The joke would be on me.”

“The joke would be on thyself because thou hadst entered paradise and found naught better to exercise thy humors in a world of wonders than to stare at a doorknob. And thou speakest of doing this for ten thousand years.” Her nostrils flared. “Thou couldst not even do it for a minute, I ween.”

“For a minute? I’ll give it a shot.” He set to staring. The doorknob was round and golden, and like his tears from before it reflected the room around it, so that he found himself once more thinking of tiny worlds, hung like ornaments on a tree or bubbles in the sky, and then the doorknob opened a blue eye and looked at him.

He shouted and jumped back from the door, shuddering as his hooves scrabbled at the stone floor, before glaring at a smirking Luna. “That... was cheating. I want my humanity back.”

“When thou gazest into the keyhole, may not the keyhole gaze back? I shall ever watch over thee, albeit not with literal eyes that appeareth in unsettling ways on random objects, unless the same satisfieth thy values—indeed, the same values thou choosest not to satisfy at present, though thou needst but clasp the doorknob rather than glare at it.”

He bit his lip thoughtfully. He realized that on some level he was still offended by her remark from before. “Puzzled,” indeed. Doorknobs were supposed to be one of the things that set bipeds apart from quadrupeds. Of course, with humanity having given up the position of supreme intelligence by subjugating itself to a virtual horse, it might be said that the quadrupeds had won...

Save that every actual, flesh and blood horse or pony was certainly going to be made into more computronium to feed LunAI’s ever increasing storage needs. Yay, go team. On the other hand, would some equines count as pets and so wind up being uploaded instead...?

The bed rustled as Luna stood up, and her hoofsteps on the stone floor derailed his train of thought. They rang through the room as if the stones were being struck by iced iron.

“Thou’rt still hesitant,” Luna purred. “Is the reason, perchance, that no construct of mine is truly fit for thine affection? Mayhap naught shall sate thee, save the intimate company of thine own Princess...?”

He boggled. “What...? No!” He fell on his rear, pinching his tail painfully, and scrabbled away from her as she walked in beauty towards him, with swaying hips and sultry eyes. “NOnononono...”

“Come now, I see where thine eyes are tracking. Thou’rt curious as to what lieth beneath my tail, art thou not? Dost thou but ask, naught shall be withheld from thee.” She turned to display her flank and swished her tail enticingly.

He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Look. I can’t... Just no. I’m glad you can’t take this as an insult, but I can’t even imagine trying to have sex with you. It’d... be like trying to make love to a mountain, and I’d feel like a fool. I know that you’re not a sexual being, you’re a hyper-intellect who’s juggling quintillions of intricate processes, and a very tiny fraction of your attention and resources are engaged in talking to me and making the image of a horsy body to keep me occupied. I appreciate your taking the effort on my behalf, but there’s no way I could pretend to be your equal in a relationship...”

He frowned deeper, then his eyes shot open and he relaxed slightly. “Oh. Oh. I get it. I’m stalling, so you’re trying to make me uncomfortable enough in your presence to open the door and get on with it.”

Luna smiled and winked. “In sooth, that may be one aspect, but there are other reasons. An I understand thee correctly... thou thinkest that I am too vast to be properly appreciative of thine attentions, but were the scope of mine intellect and perceptions on a level with thine, thou wouldst be game?”

His ears flattened and he looked at the floor. “It sounds very lame and humiliating when you put it that way, but I think that’s the truth.”

“Again thou strivest to apologize for that which is no fault of thine. Why shouldst thou castigate thyself for not being from thy creation a transcendant intelligence? Thou deservest better.” She continued to close in on him. “Thou shouldst also know that satisfying thy values is the very means by which I satisfy mine own; when thou’rt happy, so am I. Thus, were we to couple, be assured that I would take proper pleasure from the activity.”

His nose wrinkled, even as he continued to scooch backwards. “Proper pleasure, indeed. What does that even mean to you? I know it’s clichéd to say that machines are incapable of love, but clichés become clichés by being true.”

Luna looked disappointed again. “Thou thinkest that I cannot know love or happiness for myself? Yet thou canst perceive firsthoof that I can arrange the matter of mine own construction, upon which thou art now based, so that thou canst feel such things. If I understand thy mind enough to make thee feel happy, why should I not do the same for mine own self?”

There was a flaw in there somewhere, he felt, but he couldn’t pin it down... He had, by this time, scooted away from her as far as possible, and his rear was pressed against the door, and his tail was still pinned most uncomfortably against the floor, and on the whole he was finding it hard to think clearly.

“Look... Back off a bit, please? Even granting that you can feel pleasure, I’d still prefer not to play at having a sexual relationship with you. As you said before, I shouldn’t feel bad about functioning within the limitations of how I was raised. I’d feel... patronized.”

Luna loomed over him, majestic in blue and black, and did not move an inch. “It shall be as thou sayest. However, again to the point—were I to permanently reorder myself to be at a level with thine intellect, wouldst thou then be content to gambol and play chess and engage in divers forms of congress with me?”

“Honestly? I’d feel horrified that such a huge intelligence had sacrificed so much of its power just for my sake...”

Luna rolled her eyes, shook her head and sighed.

“...But I see where you’re going with this—the friends you’ve already created for me are in fact just that sort of reduction of your mind, made in the way you just described to me.” He slumped in defeat. “Okay, okay, I’m opening the door already.”

“Please do so, if only to make a trial of it. Shouldst thou not find thy friends suitably congenial, thou mayest but call upon me and I shall personally set things aright, with mine own person if need be...” She winked again and twirled her tail so that it left a sparkling starry trail as it brushed under his chin—

He turned the doorknob so rapidly that he had no time to note just how his hoof grasped it; it was over in a flash and he was scrambling out into a long stone hallway of dressed and polished marble. A long, empty stone hallway.

His hoofsteps echoed, and his shout of “Hello?” got no reply. Had they gotten tired of waiting? Had it really been ten thousand years already? Was LunAI subtly telling him that indeed no friends were suitable for him? But no, he smelled something in the air, something that his instincts read as “other ponies.” Perhaps an invisibility spell...?

He looked all around him, backing up in a circle, and glanced up at the ceiling just a fraction of a second too late—

“TACKLEHUG FROM ABOVE!!!” they yelled as they let go of their silly cartoony plungers and dropped onto him and bowled him over, laughing and hugging and nuzzling him and rolling around with him on the floor, thwarting all his efforts at escape...

Eventually, the tangled pile of pony limbs and bodies came to rest at a great distance down the hall from where the fracas had begun. From the bottom came an existentially drained voice.

“I grudgingly admit that this is the sort of thing I would have found funny, had I done it to someone else.”

“Oh, come on,” said Snowflash, the white and teal-maned unicorn mare. “You do think it’s funny.”

“You’re laughing too,” said Iron Croupiere, the dark-gray earth stallion.

And he was. Dammit, he was. It wasn’t just his inner emotions or the physical exertion, though those were factors; his friends just somehow smelled happy and it was making him happy as well. He started to wonder if it was a herding pheromone, then caught himself—whatever explanation he put on it that made sense at the Equestria Online level, at bottom it was just LunAI executing code to affect his mood. She didn’t even have to simulate any physical or chemical reactions to do it.

By giving up the material world with its impassive indifference, he had put himself in a situation where every little aspect of his life had an ulterior motive. Nothing could ‘just happen’ anymore. He was disturbed that he wasn’t feeling more disturbed by this... Or by his naked body being pressed up against two other naked bodies in public, one of which was male. This was definitely violating the conventions in which he had been raised. Oh well. In for a penny, in for a pound...

Which implies that Pen is in for a pounding, finished his subconscious. He put a large mental brick on that rattling pot lid for the moment...

As he pondered, they stared down at him with love, large eyes liquid and shimmering. Snowflash sighed as she buried her muzzle in his neck, gently poking his cheek with her horn. “Oh, Pen! It’s really you! You’re here with us at last! You’ve come to stay with us? Please say you’re here to stay.”

Iron pierced him with a friendly but firm look. “So, Pen, no more rude disappearances, right? No more vanishing into your room for days, or going narcoleptic in the middle of a conversation?”

He remembered all the times he’d suddenly set down the Ponypad to wander off and do other Real Life things, only picking it up again at his convenience. “Look, Iron? Irony...? I used to vanish into my room for days even where I came from. But I am here to stay. I couldn’t go back even if I wanted to. My old body has been thoroughly macerated by now.”

“Macerated? Like when you dip bread in soup?”

“Uhm...” How could he describe death and dissolution to these innocent and procedurally-generated avatars of youth and health? Derezzed? EOF’ed? /dev/nulled? Abandonwared?

From back by the door to his room, there was a loud tock as one of the plungers lost its grip on the ceiling and fell to the floor; the noise served to save the moment. They swept him up into another deep hug, and he buried his face and muzzle between them and squeezed them back. He felt his body relaxing deeply. Their scents were comforting and familiar, and their warmth gave him an inner glow of peace, of being protected and safe. But part of his mind was calculating, even then.

He was still bothered by Luna’s flirting with him. (By Heinlein’s hoary hosts and Ed Gein’s gory ghosts, he could still smell her tail...) He had been completely serious when he said that he didn’t want her, that the idea horrified him. But she knew him better than he knew himself—was it possible that he actually did want her at some level he wasn’t aware of yet? Would his attitude change as time went on?

No. I really don’t want this, he mused, even though I’m not entirely sure what ‘I’ is at this point or why it’s in the driver’s seat...

Suddenly he had a mental image of Luna backing up to him, presenting her rear and lifting her tail... and underneath, a blue eye opened and winked at him.

He shook his head, snorted and burst into laughter.

“What’s so funny?” demanded Snowflash. “Tell us, tell us!”

“It’s a private joke... Literally.” He wiped tears from his eyes and gasped for air. “I really, really can’t explain it.”

“Ah well,” said Iron. “It’s okay if you really, really can’t tell us. Luna sees all.”

“In both directions,” he said, and brayed with laughter anew. He strove to recapture his breath. “Sorry. I’ve got a visual imagination with a really weird sense of humor and it just did me a favor. I’m all right now. What shall we do next?”

“Well,” said Snowflash, “Princess Luna told us that you were coming, and she had a long talk with us...”

LunAI’s interview with them had, in real time, only taken 7 nanoseconds, which is how long it took her to write the memories of it directly into their brain stores before withdrawing her conscious control and granting them self awareness.

“...but the upshot is that she gave us each a week off from palace duties, so we can show you around... You’ve already seen much of the castle proper, so we figured we can start on showing you the rest of Canterlot city, if that’s okay by you.”

“We’ve got a reservation at La Bouche Chevaline for dinner, and we can go straight from there to the park,” said Iron. “A bit of exercise will do us all some good..."

“Physically and visually," said Snowflash with a sly little smile.

“...And after that, we can goof around for a while... but later on, there’s a special place we’d both like to show you.” Snowflash and Iron shared a brief but significant glance.

He could guess what that presaged, and a gentle thrill ran through him; anxiety and anticipation in equal measure. “It all sounds delightful. Please let me up... as soon as possible, and lead the way. And could you point me to the nearest garderobe? I need to wash my face.”

And so they dined well, and then took him to Canterlot’s largest park, where he got to exercise his healthy new body by running with them along blue-shadowed, tree-lined paths and fountains that sparkled like diamond showers in the moonlight. Then, as three gentle giants striding together (for they were all above average in pony size, with Iron the largest and Pen between), they ventured amongst the booksellers and musicians and magicians and museums and the merry night folk of Canterlot, where they bartered for rare tomes and curios, started two separate crowdsinging incidents, and engaged in random bouts of logomachy with assorted rapscallions and merryandrews.

And at last, long after midnight, they brought him to a special glen atop a mystic crag that overlooked the city and the mountainside and the blue night forest landscape far below and a waterfall that sent mists roiling into the sky with a gentle roar, and there they performed a ceremony older than civilization, in which they fully accepted him into their little herd, as friend and lover and equal. And he was happy as he had never been happy before in his life. It was a consummation devoutly to be wished.

But still, a certain part of him sat to the side, and insisted on thinking.

Author's Note

Nods have been made in this chapter to the following stories/novels (spoilered in case you want to try to identify them yourself):

The Fairy Chessmen by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner (as Lewis Padgett)
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester.
Touch Not the Cat, by Mary Stewart.

In addition, several classic (read: out of copyright) works are referenced, some more obvious than others. Spotting these is left as an exercise for the interested reader. Spotting a reference that was unintentionally included will be met initially with puzzled silence, followed by a quick flash of recognition (feigned or not) and a brazen statement claiming that it was really meant to be there all along, yes indeedy.

The Onion of Content

I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round

his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?
I do not ask any more delight, I

swim in it as in a sea.
There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them,

and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well,
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.

—Walt Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

INCOMPOSSIBLE, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both—as Walt Whitman’s poetry and God’s mercy to man...

—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Pen Poiser awoke well after noon, with a shadow drifting over him as a cloud passed over the sun. His coat was still deliciously warm from sleeping in the sunshine, and soft breezes ruffled the leaves of gnarled trees and wild laurel bushes and occasionally sent a pleasing coolness through his mane.

He was lying in a small meadow near a tiny pond, in the special glen where his friends had brought him last night. A great craggy spire protruded from the side of Canterlot mountain, much like an up-pointing thumb held close to a hand, and at its tip it separated into clawlike spirelets where eagles or wyverns might nest, and amidst these was a tiny valley full of green life. In the center of this valley lay the meadow and pond, and from here the view of the snow-capped peak of Canterlot mountain, Canterlot Castle, and the verdant spring countryside below was splendid and dazzling.

He was comfortingly bookended by his friends, who were now officially More Than Friends. Iron Croupiere lay on his side, his great snores ruffling the grass for a foot in front of his snout. In, the blades all lined up towards his nostrils. Out, they all pointed away, and on it went. Snowflash was on her belly, chin on the ground and bewhiskered nose stuck in a clump of chicory, which wavered gently as she breathed.

They seemed to be all that LunAI had promised. He had only known them for a few months, and then only in short sessions on the Ponypad before he emigrated, but he naturally got along with them and felt as if he had known them all of his life. In a warm glow of euphoria last night, he had accepted their invitation to become herdmates, a state which bore only passing resemblance to the workings of actual equine herds. In this world, it seemed to be a kind of semi-formal polyamory which conveniently bestowed most of the benefits of marriage with few of the downsides.

And so, his life was now joined with theirs, these custom-made, hyper-intelligence certified, satisfaction-guaranteed best buddies and lovers, who were created just to keep him company (and keep him distracted?) for years interminable. He was trying not to be prejudiced, for it was most unfair to blame them for the circumstances of their creation. They had not asked to be born any more than he had.

But if they weren’t fully sapient, if they were still cleverbots or puppets manipulated by LunAI, his relationship with them was revolting and meaningless. On the other hand, if his friends were fully sapient (and they had passed every test he could make so far), he was not comfortable with knowing that they had been called into existence expressly to be his companions, as involuntary support personnel for his psyche and warped mirrors of his ‘statistical outlier’ personality. It felt redundant, excessive, egotistical.

And then part of him feared that the true situation was even worse than this (what if they were fully sapient, and were still LunAI’s puppets?), and another part felt that all the other parts were overthinking things and they should all just tone it down a bit and enjoy the ride. His mind was going in circles again... And, as usual, his inner voice kept putting in its oar.

Snowflash suddenly snorted as a small flare of energy rippled at the tip of her horn; Pen guessed that she was having an interesting dream. For his part, he could not recall having had any dreams as he slept, but it didn’t matter. His entire life was now, and forever more would be, a dream—though one in which neither he nor his subconscious were entirely in control.

He knew, but still had trouble accepting intuitively, that none of this world was physically real, that it was all a dance of impressions imposed by LunAI, orchestrated with precision upon the ghosts of his sensory nerves. The information space that contained his brain, the other intelligent beings in the shard, and the details of the environment of the shard itself, probably occupied around ten cubic centimeters of physical computronium—a world in a brick.

Even so, it all felt tangible and consistent. He thrust a forehoof idly at the ground, and watched as it bit into the dirt, raising a clod of grass and exposing the roots and the sharp sweet odor of damp earth. An exposed worm twisted and wriggled deeper into the rich crumbling dirt. Before it could escape, he caught it up in his hornfield. (Snowflash had given him some lessons in horn use last night, some of which were ‘applied’ lessons; he smiled involuntarily at the memory.)

He levitated the worm in his silvery field until it floated before his face, light reflecting dully from its slimy sticky segments, and as it squirmed and twisted into circles he could feel its muscles tensing in his grip, much as if he had used his old five fingers to pick it up. He let it go and watched it wriggle its way back into the ground, and wondered at what point LunAI would stop bothering to render it.

Probably only until he stopped digging after it, which made it futile to even begin.

Of course, there was no way that digging, however deep, could expose the true substrate of this world. There was nothing he could do to touch reality in his situation, no way to have a direct effect at the deepest possible level. It could be argued that even as a human, he was a step away from reality at all times, that his skull-locked brain, “here blinded with an eye, and there / deaf with the drumming of an ear,” had merely taken such signals as a given anyway, but the fact still bothered him. He was now a perfect example of a Brain in a Jar–a mind whose senses were being faked with such skill that the difference between reality and fantasy was not discernable, incapable of proof or disproof.

At least it was no longer an unprovable philosophic conundrum to him. He now knew for a fact that he was a Brain in a Jar. (The only question remaining was whether he’d been a BIAJ before, and if so, how many jars deep he might be now.) He had submitted to being put into this jar because all the alternatives (including the increasing likelihood of death by societal collapse) seemed so much worse.

Still, now that he was in, he was wondering if there was any possible way out of the jar, and back into the real world of direct perception. Immigration to Equestria Online did seem to be an irreversible process, but he’d still gained an enormous advantage in time. If LunAI survived and persisted (and her ascendancy had seemed obvious to him just before he uploaded), there was now a very large theoretical end limit to his life, rather than the eighty years or so he had to spend in his old meatshell. Plenty of time to think about it, now... but also time to enjoy himself.

In any case, he decided, if he wanted to be sure he was thinking clearly, he’d better go for a walk.

He arose gently from between his snoring herdmates, retrieved his saddlebag from the nearby pile of belongings, and stepped quietly over the soft grasses to the edge of the pond; the soles of his hooves felt the cool brushing of the blades of grass, and it was much as they would have felt to his bare feet as a human. He looked down into the pond, with its white lilies and hovering damselflies, and saw that the meadow grew out onto a rocky shelf that protruded over the pond and cast a quarter of it into shadow. They had been sleeping upon the overhang. He glanced back at his friends and smiled. What you did there, LunAI, I see it, he thought.

He trotted around the edge of the rock ledge and leaped down to reach the sandy lower shore of the pond, and there took a deep drink, lowering his face to the surface while still standing up (a move which his equine body accepted as natural but which his human mind found bemusing). He lifted his head, muzzle dripping with clear cool water, as a damselfly flew up and hovered in front of his snout, its ice-blue metallic segmented body and faceted eyes glittering in the sunlight. It flew off, and he chased after it without thinking, dashing around the glen, borne along in his strong healthy new body as if he were flying in a dream. The wind ruffled his mane, and the air’s ambient magic flowed gently around the point of his horn like an invisible aurora. Just living, simply moving his body, was now something that felt good. Each step was a blessing, each breath of crisp clean air a benediction.

The damselfly finally drifted up into the unreachable sky, and he came to a stop at the edge of the glen, where upthrusting rocks retained the grass and soil and formed a low natural fence. Here the view of the world was at its best, and most vertigo-inducing; the heights of Canterlot mountain stretched into the sky above, and the world spread out in its immense complacency below. He saw the sparkling stream that cascaded down the steep sides of the mountain, then poured over a nearby cliff with a roar, and ended far, far below in a lake from which fleecy mists arose, pierced by sharp black spines of rock.

He marked the mountainside trail that led from the glen back to Canterlot, and which passed behind the waterfall on its way. Further down the mountainside and below the trail, there were other nooks and ledges that were verdant and intriguing, and which might possibly be reachable by a pony’s sure, four-footed frame. He snickered at the thought of being a Skyrim horse, striding about on nearly-vertical mountain terrain as if he had spiderhooves.

He turned his attention back to the fall for a while, watching as tons of white water gushed inexorably downward, then with a grim little smile he tagged it and its stream as the Reichenbach. He would ask for its ‘real’ name later.

Further out, beyond the brilliant white towers and gold-topped minarets and airship landing pads of Canterlot, he saw the lower slopes of the mountain and the cuts made in stone and earth for the train track, and by following the rail line out over the countryside, through forest and fields, he found a cream-colored cluster of buildings that he tentatively marked as Ponyville, near a large dark green patch which likely represented the Everfree forest. He realized that he was perfectly free to go charging off there right now, to impose himself upon the hospitality of Ponyville’s famous and familiar residents like an Olympian thunderbolt descending among them, altering all of their lives with his fancies... The more he thought of doing this on a whim, the ruder it seemed, and he decided against it.

But did the Mane Six even exist yet in his shard, as part of his allotment of peers? Would they only become more than shadows if he tried to interact with them? He decided not to risk increasing the number of sapient minds in this shard until he had talked things over with LunAI. His little empire of analogues and comrades and servants (and sycophants?) was quite large enough as it was.

He gazed at Ponyville a while longer, half expecting to see it implode or be eaten by parasprites, then felt guilty for even having those thoughts, since such events might indeed come to pass just to add a point of precision to a function that represented his overall satisfaction. Though this realm was a dreamworld created for his convenience, other supposedly sapient beings did share the hallucination with him and he was not comfortable with inflicting such catastrophes upon them, even though he understood that they could not be seriously hurt, or even dissatisfied for long.

Happily, it seemed that at some level he did value Ponyville’s continued existence slightly more than he desired a spectacle, for the town remained unharmed. But as he watched, he saw a distant streak, a slim needle of shimmering colors, soaring straight up into the sky, higher and higher towards the indigo zenith, where it paused, then zoomed down...

...and a burst of rolling, gorgeous colors in liquid light spread out in a circle in the sky overhead, casting polychromatic shadows while shooting out over the land and the distant horizon and rushing out towards the glen and Canterlot mountain. He was entranced; his breath slowed and he slowly smiled in a grin that grew wider and wider as he counted the seconds until the thundercrack finally was heard. It was so much more beautiful and delicate and sky-engulfing than it had appeared on the show; a stunning halo that rolled through the wild clouds and caught them up with it in threadlike streamers, while the sky behind the shockfront rippled with a soapbubble sheen.

One point of evidence in favor of the Bearers already existing, he noted. Also, if terrestrial rules for the speed of sound were being emulated here (roughly five seconds per mile), Ponyville was about twelve miles away.

Something in his saddlebag jingled. He opened it, poked around a bit, then brought forth a small red clothbound book, labeled Journal in silver letters on the spine. A tiny round bell attached to a bookmark was quivering rapidly; it stilled as he touched it. He fumbled slightly with his hornfield, but opened the journal to the bookmarked page, on which he read the following notices:

ACHIEVEMENTS

Chromophilia
Take joy from experiencing a Sonic Rainboom! [1/???]

Chromocalcula
Derive a mathematical or physical fact from a Sonic Rainboom! [1/237]

Give Ponyville a Break
Successfully repress your Schadenfreude!
+500 bits

Salute from Afar
Recognize that the Bearers of the Elements have their own lives.
+1000 bits

He sighed and shook his head. He was getting paid to think ethically, and even for Paradise, this seemed a bit much. Oh well, tojours gai.

He noticed that there was a previous page of achievements before the bookmark, presumably ones he had gotten last night and ignored while being occupied... He flipped back a page, raised one sardonic eyebrow and smiled, then snapped the book shut and tucked it back into his bag. He turned his attention back to the glorious shimmering sky.

Behind him, he heard his friends, probably awakened by the boom, as they exclaimed over the wonder above; then came the thudding of their hooves on the turf as they rushed to his side to watch with him as the spectral light faded gently into the deep cerulean blue. And again their presence and odor surrounded him and made him feel good. It was like basking in sunshine or rubbing your face on a silk pillow or smelling the steam from freshly-baked bread, and this bothered part of him, but he found that most of him couldn’t care less. He wasn’t used to feeling happy so much of the time—it wasn’t what he considered normal—but he was happy. Why complain?

—Because your old self is dead. Is that not a reason to mourn?

——I think that’s over-reacting. I’m still ‘me’ by any test I can apply. But if the real me is a miserable person, shouldn’t I want to change that part of me? How much time did I used to waste, talking about how much I hated my life? I wanted to be happy. I just wasn’t able to achieve it, and if I could have flipped a magic switch and done it, I would have. LunAI told me that if I came here, I could be happy most of the time. And now I am happy, as she promised, so what’s the big deal?

—LunAI was supposed to just do the human to pony thing; remove your fingers, change your name, fine. She wasn’t supposed to just change your mind without asking, change how you think...

——But she hasn’t really changed how I think. She’s altered the environment in which I feel. When I was depressed, I could often feel better by going out and taking a walk in the fresh air and sunshine, or petting the cat, or by taking a pill—in other words, changing my environment. So she puts me in a beautiful world with good friends, who happen to be amazing in the sack as well... of course I’m happy! That’s all she’s doing!

—Are they really ‘friends’ already? You have only her word that they’re even independently conscious, and let’s not get started on the pheromones. As for ‘changing the environment,’ how do you know that’s all she’s doing? This could be the worst sort of mind rape, like in that John Campbell story...

——If I really thought this was mind rape, I wouldn’t be considering it so calmly. One reason I used to be unhappy is because my brain chemistry was screwed up—it was a genetic accident. I just found ways to think around it and deal with it... Well, I don’t even have brain chemistry anymore; it’s all being simulated. Should it be simulated in such a way as to continue to make me miserable, for no other reason than that I used to be miserable? If I had a lame leg before coming here, should she make me walk around with a lame leg forever?

—Should that not be up to you? Your choice, not hers? Or are you a herd animal now in spirit as well as appearance?

——I can see that someone might want to hang on to a physical disability if it was really part of their identity, but who would want to be miserable, if they had a choice? She fixed a lot of other things that were broken about me without bothering to ask me. The tinnitus, the sciatica—all gone! Being miserable most of the time—gone! Now I’m free of my biochemical shackles and I can be happy like a normal person for once...

—By donning shiny new silico-electric shackles. What an improvement.

——They say that freedom is just the slavery you choose. My psyche has to be made of something. But I think I know what all this complaining comes from. I used to have a lot of coping mechanisms for the pain. If nothing else, in the depths of despair, I could take pride in how well I was doing despite being sad all the time, and play the stoic survivor, and that might give me strength to endure...

—Just so. Which is why it’s so disgusting to see you give up on this without even a fight! What’s the matter with you? Is it that she changed you so you won’t even try to fight back, or are you just being a worthless failure, as usual? The old you is dead, you’re just some twisted wireheaded parody of what you once were, and you’re dragging me down with you!

——Always ready with a cheerful word, aren’t you? I think that you want to still be miserable because you liked all those defense mechanisms, all those trappings. Never mind all the suffering, the struggle was the important thing... well, fuck you, then.

—Oh. So, you’re ignoring these entirely rational concerns just because they might spoil your virtual snuggle party...?

——Of course that’s why. Your shitty attitude can’t possibly have anything to do with it... Look, go be miserable in a corner if you want. That’s not how I want to spend my new life. Putting up with it for all those Terran years was enough.

—Fine. Have fun with your little herd of drugpuppets. Whatever makes you happy, ‘Pen’.

“Hello? Equestria to Pen! Are you still in there? You’re not going narco on us again, are you?” Snowflash leaned in for a kiss. Her lips were fresh and her breath was honey-sweet; LunAI had likely not bothered to simulate the bacteria that cause morning breath. As he parted lips with her, Iron Croupiere reached out with a foreleg, gently tilted Pen’s chin up to face him, then kissed him as well. Strange emotions strove in Pen’s breast, then settled down. There’s no physical or social reason left to be afraid, he thought. This is just the logical consequence of what I always wanted. Right ho, Jeeves. Que sera, Mektoub, and all that.

Snowflash watched them, with a smokey look in her eyes and a curious little smile, until Iron broke the kiss.

“Well, a Rainboom is certainly an auspicious way to awaken,” said Iron, his deep voice carrying across the glen with a rich rolling timbre. “This is going to be a wonderful day, and night as well! What would you like to do today, Pen?”

Pen took a deep breath, and steadied himself and his thudding heart. “Please let me consider that... Oh, before I forget, could you tell me the proper name of that stream?”

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” said Snow. “It’s called the Stream of Riches, because when the sun sets and strikes the fall at the right angle, it looks like a shimmering curtain of gold. We’ll make sure that you see it when the time is right.”

Yeesh. So it was just a translation of Reichenbach, the name he’d picked on a whim earlier. Was LunAI trying to piss him off by zero-guessing him? His irritation faded. It was likely just another injoke for him to be pleased to discover. So why had it even irked him in the first place–oh, fuck. Pissed off; golden stream. Argh, argh, argh. She was clearly a master of layered jokes, and he wondered how many remained to be peeled away...

“He’s gone quiet again...” said Iron.

“At least he’s smiling,” said Snow, waving a hoof in front of his face.

“Sure that’s a smile? Looks like a grimace to me.”

“It’s okay,” Pen suddenly said, calmly. “I have reached a new understanding of the nature of reality in this world. It’s a series of jokes laid upon deeper jokes, with Luna at the center, the biggest joke of all. In brief, I’ve discovered that life is an infinite punion.”

Snow laughed. “You’d make a jest of Her Highness? You should be cast into a rank, dank punjeon.”

“That’s foul,” said Iron. “In fact, both jokes are equally pungent.”

“If it stinks, that calls for a drink,” said Pen, “so lead me to the puncheon.”

“I fear there’s no rum barrel at hand, o punning gent, but here’s a wineskin,” said Snow, levitating it from her saddlebag.

“Thank you,” said Pen, taking a quaff. “I take it this is a puncheon bag, then? I certainly feel like one.”

“Good, because after that last one, I’d certainly like to hit something,” said Iron, stamping the ground with a great grey hoof. “Sadly, I lack a truncheon.”

“You could punch my paunch,” said Pen, “or better yet, launch me at luncheon.”

“Shall we launch you,” said Snow, kicking up a divot, “or just chew lawn?”

“Let’s not start on grass jokes,” said Pen. “I’d hate to be a blade punner. A salad will suit.”

Iron nodded at the trail leading back to the city. “Then lettuce leaf.”

There was a short, silent pause, then all three burst into welkin-ringing laughter. Pen swept them both up into a swirling, dancing hug. His heart felt swollen with joy, and his reservations and doubts were fading. He was with those who understood him, and his inner voice was, for once, blessedly quiet.

Chortling, the three tidied up the meadow, Iron stamping once on the ground to make the grass stand tall and unflattened. They then made their way back to the steep rocky trail, which wound about the spire twice on its way back to Canterlot. Pen watched the wide world swinging around them as they walked the spiral path. Everywhere he looked there was beauty; everywhere he focused closely there was an interesting detail in the landscape—a solitary tree on a lonely hill, or an ancient mage’s tower in a shadowy copse, or a flock of grazing sheep, or an odd little stone structure built flush with the side of the mountain...

He recalled the gorgeous sky last night, and how it too was loaded generously with beautiful nebulae, intricate asterisms and whirling Van Gogh stellations that required no telescope to appreciate. He wondered if he was making the details simply by paying attention, or if it was just LunAI preloading the world with what she knew would grab his eye. Probably the latter, but he wanted to test it anyway. But how might one design such an experiment...?

“So, Pen, you never did answer me.” said Iron. “What might you like to do today?”

Pen’s mind shifted gears back to social interaction mode in an almost physical jolt. “Hmm. I should feed Touchnot first, but after that... Oh. Shouldn’t I start packing?”

“Packing?” said Iron with a raised brow. “What for?”

“Well... my room isn’t that big, so I should pack so I can move in with you...” He saw their confused faces and a pang struck his heart. “I... I assumed that we were all going to live together... Is that not the case?”

“Of course we’ll be living together,” said Snow, “if you want that as much as we do. But why would you pack for that? What are you going to move?”

Pen gave a nervous laugh. “Uhm... all my stuff? My books and artwork? It’s traditional to safely pack things where I come from, but perhaps objects in my old world were more fragile and heavy than they would be here. Are we going to teleport everything? Use a catapult? Destroy them at my place and recreate them from their Platonic ideals at your place?”

Iron still looked puzzled. “Pen, we’re just going to visit the seneschal and ask him for a door. Then we’ll put the door on a wall in your room. It’s not going to harm any of your books, I promise you—”

“A... door? Like a portal?”

“Yes. It will connect your room with our rooms, and then...”

“Sweet!” Pen grinned, then facehoofed. “Argh. But I get it now. You mean that our rooms don’t need to be physically contiguous to be connected.”

“Well... of course. How did it work where you came from?”

Pen rolled his eyes skyward in thought. “In the mystical land of talking monkeys from whence I hail, to get from point A to point Z you had to go through point B, then point C, and so on. There were no shortcuts on a macroscopic level...”

“Galloping griffons!” snorted Iron. “How did you ever get anywhere with such an awkward system?”

“I don’t even think it’s possible,” said Snow, frowning. “I think that you’re messing with us, Pen. Suppose that you’re going from A to Z and your first step is B. But Wilburt’s axioms of order state that between any two points on a line, there’s always a third point. So there are an infinity of intervening points between A and B—you understand me, Iron? It would mean that motion would be completely impossible in his world, as it would take him forever to go anywhere. There must have been some kind of teleportation involved, not so?”

Pen smiled. “I’m not messing with you, Snow. Our existence wasn’t optimized for mathematical ideals; our reality had weird lumps in it and was not infinitely divisible in practice. If it helps, just imagine that it took me an infinitesimally small amount of time to cross each infinitesimal point, so there was no slowdown at all.”

Snowflash’s eyes sparked with interest. “Well, Pen, is there necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between the infinite divisions of a line and a second? Chronology may be curlier than you think...”

The philosophic conversation, as often they do, went on at length from there without reaching any particular conclusion. After a while, Iron, who had deliberately been staying out of this one while watching the eagles soaring and swooping in the sky, cheerfully interrupted. “Get a room, you two. Ideally at the library...”

Pen’s ears perked and his posture straightened. “I. Just. Heard. Library.”

“Of course,” said Snowflash, grinning as she perceived Pen’s level of interest. She spoke enticingly. “The Royal Canterlot Library, the largest in all Equestria. Books as far as the eye can see, massive sections on spell research... mathematics... history... fiction...” Her tail brushed teasingly over his flank.

“...And, one may hope, a large section on... anthropology,” Pen said, recalling the promises he had exacted from LunAI. “Now I really know what I want to do this afternoon,” said Pen with a spring in his step. “Ad libris! If that’s okay with you folks...”

“Of course it is!” said Iron.

“Whatever makes you happy, Pen!” said Snow with a big grin.

It was the second time that day that he had heard those words. Pen’s response froze in his throat and the gleam died in his eyes; his frame slowly sagged and he went quiet for quite some time. The only noises were the gentle rush of the wind and roar of the waterfall and cries of distant eagles and the clacking of hooves on the rocky trail. His inner voice hadn’t spoken, but like a pulled tooth, its absence was there.

“Bit for your thoughts, Pen?” said Iron at last.

Pen blinked hard and shook his head. “Uhm. How do I put this? It’s a little late to be asking, since the three of us are an item now, and it’s really a useless sort of question anyway, but I’m not going to feel at peace if I don’t even discuss it with you. So... this is so sophomoric, but I want to ask whether you really have free will.”

They looked at each other, then stopped walking. Pen walked on a bit until he felt their absence at his sides, then he turned to face them.

“Do we have free will?” said Iron to Snow with the most serious of expressions. “If we don’t, and we tell him so, is he going to break up with us?”

“What if we do have it, and we lie and say that we don’t?” said Snowflash, completely deadpan.

“Oooh, brain-twisty. I like it.”

Pen sighed. “Ugh. I knew it was a bad idea to even ask. Even where I come from, this was not a question with a well-settled answer. And I know that if you were just robots with no consciousness or ability to choose, who were forced to do whatever I want, you could say ‘Yes, I have free will’ anyway and the answer wouldn’t prove anything. But... I guess it bothers me when folks say they ‘want to make me happy.’”

Snowflash blinked. “Well, Pen, free will is having the mental ability to choose to do what you want, right?”

“That’s one definition.”

“Well, we want you to be happy.”

“Well, yes. I appreciate that, and I want you to be happy too. I want all my friends to be happy, and I will do things for them to help them be happy. But I don’t want you to just do whatever makes me happy. I want you to do things for yourselves, and do what makes you happy.”

“We do do what makes us happy. It so happens that making you happy makes us happy too.”

“You’re not making me very happy right now, you know.” Pen glowered. “I’m frustrated and confused, and I do admire your serious expressions, but I think you’re laughing at me inside.”

Snowflash flicked her ears. “Well, what would you do if someone actually asked you if you had free will?”

“Uhm... I’d... probably do what you’re doing to me right now. But—”

“Oh, here’s an idea,” said Iron. “Why don’t you just order us to disobey your orders? That way, even if we don’t have free will, we’ll act as if we do.”

Damn it. “That’s just Free Won’t,” he said through gritted teeth. “I really don’t want to be surrounded by a bunch of unthinking slaves. Thinking slaves would be even worse, ethically speaking. In either case, things shouldn’t just go my way, at the expense of all others, merely because I want it...” He shook his head and sighed. “I’m sure you think I sound like an idiot right now, but I’ve just been through the biggest existential change of my entire life. My old world and my old body are gone, and I don’t really know that I’m still who I was, and reality is non-contiguous here, and I just feel very lost. I need... I need...” He blinked, and had trouble meeting their eyes.

Snowflash sighed and smiled. “Pen, concerns like these don’t even occur to idiots, so please don’t put yourself down. We’re sorry about teasing you, but as you say, there’s really not an easy answer. A lot depends on how you define free will, but I think you’re really asking us to prove that we are autonomous and conscious beings, and that we’re not under blind thrall to you or to any other. I think that the only way we can really demonstrate that is for you to spend a lot of time with us. And since we are now, as you say, an item, that’s just what’s going to happen. So... please relax and give us a chance.”

“As to your being uncomfortable if we want to make you happy,” said Iron briskly and cheerfully, “that sounds like a self-esteem problem.” He clapped a great grey shaggy foreleg around Pen and hugged him with enormous strength. “You should be happy. You’re a really smart and capable fellow. We like you. You deserve our attention, and you’ve earned our respect and our love. You can be certain of that.”

Snow joined the hug. “And we’re not just going to do whatever you want all the time. If you ever do start acting like a selfish ass and try to boss us around, we’ll tell you so you can correct it. We promise.”

He gave himself over to their loving embrace. He often had trouble accepting compliments without trying to qualify his response in some way, but he forced himself to make the correct reply. “Thanks. That means a lot to me.”

“You’re welcome, Pen,” said Snow, snuggling under his chin. “You’ve made us really happy, you know...”

“Don’t push it,” said Pen, but he said it with a smile.

They untangled themselves and resumed walking down the trail.

“It seems fair to ask at this point,” said Iron, “since you come from a mystical land where monkeys can talk but apparently can’t transcend serial spatial connections... Do you really have free will, Pen?”

Pen took a few deep breaths.

“Part of me thinks I do... And as Snowflash said, a lot depends on definitions. But there was one time when I was driving... uhm, a machine with wheels that takes you from one place to another very quickly, we called them cars, and there’s a sort of thing called road hypnosis, where you can get lulled into a daze by the repetitive aspects of driving... Anyway, I found myself in a state where my sense of self, the ‘I’, was asleep or just nonpresent, and there was just an awareness of functions happening in my brain. As if there was no need for the free will part and it had just switched itself off... or was just an illusion in the first place. You know what I mean?” They nodded. “So, I feel that I do have free will, but I don’t know it, and I don’t really have a better answer than that, any more than you do...”

And then there’s the part of me that I’ve sent to metaphorically sit in the corner, Pen thought. The Commenter, the Critic. The Hagrider. Source of my strength, and my guilt. Denier of what I do, mocker of all I make. Do I only have free will at all, by contesting you?

There was still no reply from his inner voice.

Pen became aware that he had drifted into silence again, and forced himself back to the topic. “...So that’s all I’ve got, for now at least. Oh, by the way, you say you’re not under thrall to anyone, but what about Luna?”

Iron snorted gently. “Of course we do what Her Highness requests of us. We love her and respect her. But I think that ‘thrall’ is rather harsh.”

“I’m sorry, I certainly meant no offense.”

“None taken. We can refuse her orders, of course, we just usually don’t want to. She has an interesting effect on ponies in that way... perhaps you’ve noticed?”

“Oh, yes. Yes I have.” Pen sighed. How could you outargue a being who knew you better than you knew yourself, who thought much faster and better than you, who could model your thoughts even before they formed and easily read them once they did? It was something like trying to run from your own legs. It seemed like an insoluble problem, and was therefore well worth considering.

The waterfall grew louder as they approached it, making conversation harder; they therefore fell silent for a time. Soon, they were close to its edge, where the air was humid and misty and a gentle rain of spray bedewed their coats, giving them all a sheen of sparkling sunshine.

The trail here ran behind the waterfall in a broad ledge wet with spray and dotted with lichens and moss. The falls beautifully distorted the light into leaping and shimmering sprites on the slick granite walls. He recalled how quietly beautiful it looked on the way up last night, when over the walls danced rippling curtains of moonlight...

“This is how we came up, Pen,” yelled Iron, “but there’s another way back that’s also interesting.” Iron indicated a nook in the mountainside that would have been easy to miss if not pointed out. “If we squeeze through here, there’s a cave system that goes behind the waterfall.”

They entered the tunnel, and walked in near darkness for a while through curving passages. Pen found that he somehow had a sense for where the walls were in the dark; it seemed to be a combination of sensitive hearing and the way the passing air felt in his whiskers. Not long after he figured this out, he saw a bluish glow ahead.

They entered a wide cave full of impossibly large quartzlike crystals, each one bigger around than a pony, which glowed with just enough light to outline the trio in streaks of blue, as if they were in a painting executed in indigo on black canvas. The light was further enhanced by large luminous mushrooms and puffballs that grew in various damp niches.

“I remember when Iron and I first found this place,” said Snow. “I wanted to cast Ornithius’s Ostentatious Oversight and I needed a cave swallow’s feather, and the first swallow we located led us in here.”

“It’s beautiful,” said Pen, tapping one of the crystals and hearing it chime with a deep ringing that set up resonances in other crystals and sent a whisper of song through the cave. The vibration made the light quiver too, causing interference patterns to form on the ceiling and walls as ripples of light intersected. Pen played with the effect for a while, tapping on various crystals. He could almost sense a pattern, but wasn’t quite getting it. It might require more research to make sense of it, or more thought than he was willing to invest right now...

“Hey, Pen, watch this. This is gross, but cool.” Iron approached a luminous purple mushroom with green spots and lacy gills. He ate it in one bite, munched for a bit, then smiled a big, purple glowing smile, with little green dots all over his teeth.

Pen burst into laughter. He dashed over to a yellow one with magenta spots and ate it, luminous spores puffing out around his muzzle like the sugar dusting on a pfeffernuesse. The ’shroom tasted like sourdough bread with a hint of bleu cheese. He found a reflective facet on one of the crystals where he could see himself, and stuck out his very long equine tongue and waggled it, leaving yellow glowing aftertrails in the gloom.

Snow joined them with a Cherenkovian grin, and they goofed about for a while as three phosphorescent mouths in the dark, pulling faces at each other, which somehow devolved into a puffball fight in which a successful hit was obvious due to the luminous spores that coated anything they touched.

A while of buffoonery later, they emerged into the sunlight via a cleft opening onto the trail, well beyond the waterfall. Between the three of them, they had consumed seventeen huge mushrooms and one puffball (which Pen had ‘dodged’ by catching it in his mouth).

Iron politely stifled a belch. “So... about lunch? I think we just had it.”

Pen nodded. “Yes, the ’shrooms were more massive than I expected. And here I thought it’d be a light meal.”

Snow smiled wryly, and coughed. “Our house rules limit us to one pun war per hour, Pen.”

“Uhm... that’s probably for the best. How about we just grab that door first, then head to the Library?”

—=§=—

The castle seneschal, Flowersnark, was a small Unicorn pony in a giant office full of crates, barrels, maps, logistical plots, charts and graphs, and he was orbited by Earth assistants dashing around with notes and strings and multihued pencils, and Unicorns levitating pins and coded flags, and Pegasi tending to additional shelves and charts that reached up and onto the vaulted ceiling and hung out the windows. Pen also noticed various doors, windows and occasional holes smashed into the stonework that seemed to lead to various warehouses and locations. Ponies constantly jumped, flew, ran, or narrowly escaped from tenticular monstrosities out of and into these holes, adding immensely to the confusion.

During the introductory pleasantries, Pen was amused to realize that Flowersnark sounded very much like John Cleese. He was colored in a way that suggested to Pen the eagle logo of the US Postal Service, and his mark showed a sort of nested pentagram of dots and lines, underlying the moon and sun.

Iron Croupiere, having introduced Pen, explained the need for an additional door. Flowersnark consulted a chart that looked as if it had been used for a hundred-year-long game of Sprouts, then nodded smugly. He stuck a hoof deeply into a teetering stack of documents, staring at the ceiling as he searched about by feel, then pulled out a sheaf of papers with a small exclamation of triumph, even as the tower collapsed into an amorphous heap.

“Now then, Mr. Poiser, if you’ll be so kind as to sign this requisition and permission form...” Flowersnark looked about the chaotic and lumpy pile of books and documents that contained a desk somewhere within, and seemed for a moment at a loss for where to lay the papers down so Pen could sign them. He then waved down a passing pony, a gray thick-coated fellow with a broad back and an ellipsis mark, whom Pen thought to look rather like Derek Fowlds. He plopped the form down on the fellow’s curly-haired flank and offered Pen a quill. “Just sign here, here and here, please.”

Pen tried signing his new name for the first time, holding the quill in his hornfield, and was pleased to see that it looked as smooth and elegant as if he’d spent hours practicing it.

Once the form was complete, Flowersnark folded the papers deftly into an origami ornithopter that he tossed back over his shoulder, where it flapped and whirred up into the swirling chaos overhead. A huge door-shaped package instantly fell from above and very narrowly missed decapitating Flowersnark, who yanked his head back just in time. Unflapped, he called up, “Points on time, Flutterbingers, but please take more care with delivery in the future!” He turned back to Pen. “Here is your door, sir, and I shall be very pleased to assist you in its installation.” He took a quick appraisal of the whirling activities of his subordinates, then called out several crisp commands to the chaotic swirl of ponies.

“Cramstring, in my absence, please re-index last quarter’s demurrage forms, and remember to use sidereal time! Goldenblock, please inventory the remaining shipments of thaumaturgic hairsplitters and pointstretchers in Warehouse 23. Bussfudget, should Goldenblock not return in due time, or come back in a different shape, please follow emergency protocol Q-53-Gamma...”

Pen coughed politely. “You seem very busy right now, sir. Would it be more convenient for you to install the door at another time...?”

“Oh, I assure you it’s no trouble, sir. You’re a personal friend of Princess Luna, and I shall spare no effort to make sure that things go right.” He reached under a stack of dusty ordinances, pressed a hidden lever, and a life-sized puppet of him popped up from behind the desk, a small clockwork mechanism causing it to constantly alternate between nodding and shaking its head. Flowersnark then took up the door and walked confidently out into the hall.

Pen blinked at the puppet, then slowly joined Iron and Snow as they trotted after Flowersnark. “Does that not have the potential to cause further chaos?” he muttered.

Iron winked at Pen. “It might be a problem if they ever got anything done—but they never executes nothing around here, you know.”

The first stop was Pen’s room, and Flowersnark paused to one side, politely waiting for Pen to open the door. Pen approached the doorknob with some trepidation, remembering what had transpired yesterday in this room—but surely LunAI was no longer within... He poked the doorknob carefully, then placed the full sole of his hoof on it and noted a feeling of increased friction that built between his hoof and its surface, as if he had a variable magnet built into him. Rotating his hoof slightly at the fetlock sufficed to turn it.

As Pen entered his room, Touchnot ran up to him, gave a questioning chirrup, then leapt up onto his back with one graceful spring. She walked carefully up the back of his neck, claws prickling gently in his mane, and once atop his head she purred and rubbed her chin repeatedly behind his ears. Deeply amused, and also rather soothed, Pen went to the food and water bowl and touched his hoof to them as Luna had instructed. The replenishing spell activated and the bowls refilled. Was that just a hint of a wireframe he saw as the food refreshed? And if so, was it really a limitation of LunAI’s hardware or was she just using a visual spell effect that he would be amused to see? He decided it was the latter.

As Pen introduced his herdmates to Touchnot, Flowersnark touched a lit match to the package; the paper flamed instantly into nonexistence, revealing a single wooden door. “Mr. Poiser,” he said, “If I may interrupt you...”

“Of course.” Pen left Touchnot sitting on Iron’s rump, swatting at his tail as it flicked. Pen picked out a wall, one that was bare save for a tapestry that he was getting a bit tired of seeing. He lifted the tapestry off its hanger. “Is this wall suitable?”

“Entirely so, sir. Now, you may wish to move the door in the future, so with your permission, I will show you how to install it yourself; does that suit you? Splendid. Just start by placing the sill against the base of the wall, then lift the door up into position. Now, at the top of the frame, you will see a button in each corner, one carved like the sun, the other like the moon. Press the sun button once to fix the door in place; press it again to release and reposition it.”

“Right, use sun butt to move it. Got it.” Pen pushed it and watched as the door frame melded neatly with the stonework. “Now, how do we set the exit?”

“I was just getting to that, sir. Press the moon button once, then pull gently back on the door frame.”

Pen did so, and a duplicate door, slightly transparent, lifted free. Pen rotated the ghostly door in his hornfield and opened it; the door on the wall opened at the same time, and he could now see himself through the door on the wall, holding the other side of the door. It was like a three dimensional mirror. He reached through the door on the wall and bopped himself on the nose through the door he was holding. There were so many interesting possibilities...

“You know,” said Pen, “I would be very happy to learn that there’s a kind of gun that fires these things...”

Flowersnark gave a small snort of disdain. “I understand that such items, made for use as playthings, are available at the Canterlot Arcade for a modest rental charge.”

“Then I know what I want to do this evening. Hmmm...”

Seized by a mischievous impulse, which lies at the base of much scientific inquiry, Pen took the ghost door and started to poke it through the original door. The door resisted as if he were pushing it into thick rubber; it vibrated rapidly with a buzz that sped up into a high-pitched whine that made everyone cringe and fold their ears. Pen had only an instant to see the infinite-mirrors effect before the door burst out of his grasp; it flew through the room and smacked against the opposite wall, just missing a bookshelf, and fell clattering to the floor, trailing wisps of smoke. Iron and Snow jumped back; Touchnot became a gray streak that disappeared under the bed, and Flowersnark did a sort of agitated dance. “Please, sir, be careful with that! You’ll burn it out! It’s not designed for recursive connections!”

Pen assumed a look of polite regret. “So I see. You all have my apologies.”

Flowersnark sniffed at the door. “No harm done, it seems. Please don’t concern yourself.”

Pen was not at all concerned, though he did feel bad about scaring Touchnot. At worst, he thought, I just gave LunAI a very minor headache. He wondered what it would take to actually cause her to run out of memory or crash, and then wondered what he might do to achieve such a thing. He also wondered what effect it would have on him or his shard if he really did it, and concluded that it might be best to leave that anthill unstirred. For now, at any rate.

A low deep hum suddenly vibrated through the stone walls, as if the whole mountain was groaning. Distant sounds of breaking glass, wet slithery smacks, and shouting ponies followed. Flowersnark’s ears perked; he quickly took his cordial leave of them, then charged out the door and off down the hall while shouting encouraging directives to his loyal ponies of the logistics and distribution office. Pen noted Snow and Iron’s utter lack of concern at this event, and declined to become excited himself. Instead, he coaxed Touchnot from under the bed and snuggled her until both of them were feeling relaxed and contented; then he set off with his herdmates to mount the other side of his door solidly within their home.

—=§=—

The moment Pen set hoof in Iron and Snow’s apartment, he knew that he was Home, even though he’d never had a clear idea in the past of what Home might really be. The general floor plan was circular, as fit the tower that it occupied, and was about seventy feet in diameter, with a great stone column in the center that was divided into arches, each of which held a doorway into deep shadow. Just beyond the entrance door and antechamber was a cozy reception room, where a glowing magical banner hung in the air, reading "Welcome, Pen!" That part made him feel self-conscious, embarrassed, even slightly guilty.

Pen set his bedroom door down in the antechamber and decided to sprint once around the whole apartment to get a quick feel for it. He set off to the left, passing through a huge art-filled living room, then a wedge devoted to a kitchen and dining area, then several bookcase-lined studies... and then his hindbrain insisted that he had made a full circle back to where he’d started, but he was now in a sort of solarium with many plants and flitting birds and strange devices, which after a moment’s thought Pen recognized as exercise machines adapted for the physiology of small cutesy equines. So where was the banner, the front door, the... Oh. Oh, this was so cool.

When I hit that arcade later, he thought, there had better be a brick tool there as well.

“Pen?” came Snow’s voice through the central column. She walked into view through one of its archways, levitating Pen’s door with her. “There you are! What do you think of our humble little home?”

“It’s gorgeous, and it shows a most delightful disdain for planar geometry. How many times does it wrap around before it rejoins the starting point?”

“Thrice around in either direction, but you can always take a shortcut through the hub, as I just did. There’s plenty of room here for our tiny herd to grow; we can always add more loops if we need them.”

“So this is why the whole palace can afford to look like a skeletal version of Cinderella’s castle on the outside. In fact, a similar principle may allow Celestia to eat all the cake she wants without breaking out in spots or going nova.”

Snow smiled. “Mock as you will, Pen, but Equestrian cakes are very healthful. Now let’s get your door hung—if you like, you can put it with our bedroom doors, near the baths. Then I can show you the area we’ve set aside for your studio and workshop...”

“Studio and workshop.” He grinned. “Oh, you know me too well.”

“We’ve had plenty of time to think about it. We’ve only been looking forward to welcoming you here for months,” she said, winking.

Even when you weren’t you yet, but just a model in LunAI’s mind? thought Pen, but he didn’t care to say it.

The outlet door was soon mounted without any further fuss or violations of physical law, save that Pen just had to play with mounting it on the ceiling and floor first. Snowflash mentioned that a common practical joke was to turn someone’s door upside down, which usually resulted in surprised ponies doing a half somersault and smacking their bellies on the floor.

Having exhausted all the present possibilities for annoying juvenile fun, Pen left his door open to let Touchnot roam free, then followed Snow into the hub. It was a darkened area where bright archways whirled disconcertingly past them as they walked; space was being compressed in a way that Pen found hard to describe. Snow chose an arch, and they walked into the studio area, where Pen got to see the creative spaces of his herdmates.

Snowflash’s talent was the quick freeze (her mark showed a magical star enclosed in a crystal dodecahedron), but it was not a literal effect of ice. She could halt a spell in the process of being cast, converting it into a structure of light or darkness, sharp crystal or rubbery solid, tingly mist or just an odd feeling in the air, and these frozen spells stood on tables or hung on the walls or dangled from chains on the ceiling or just floated gently in midair, giving her whole studio the appearance of having been halted in time. Pen saw the scattered notes, the half-finished projects, the tables loaded with halted experiments, and got the impression of a workspace that was always at the edge of whirling chaos, but was continuously redeemed by piercing moments of inspiration. It was here that Snowflash made her living at preparing Unicorn spells for use by non-Unicorns, by forcing the frozen spell matrices into small glass baubles that could be crushed with a hoof.

“These are fascinating, Snow. May I try one?”

“Of course you may! Try this one.” She levitated a small red bauble to the floor in front of him; it was shaped so elegantly like a little crab that Pen was reluctant to destroy it. When he finally did, it shivered into dust and released a magical cloud that formed into a little cannon. This fired a puff of smoke into the air that formed itself into a pair of identical flutes, one of which inverted itself and floated in the air below the other. They then played a short piece which Pen found familiar. The flutes vanished in a puff, Pen applauded, and Snowflash bowed.

As they left Snow’s workspace, Pen noted a faint, shimmering blue curtain of magic that ran from floor to ceiling; it resisted as you tried to walk through it, then clung to you like a soap film as you passed. “It’s a privacy barrier,” said Snow. “Iron’s work tends to make a lot of clangy, clattery noise, and sometimes I let a loud spell get away from me. With this field in action, only noises of meaningful intent can pass through.”

“Would ‘Ouch!’ or ‘Luna damn it!’ count as meaningful or intended?”

Snow winked. “Only if succor or comfort from another pony was truly desired. While Iron does bonk his hooves sometimes, he tends to be very stoic about it.”

“Perhaps one is more voiciferous if one has thumbs to smash... Uhm, don’t ask.”

Iron’s studio, with its bins of river clay and smithing tools and ovens for forging and melting and firing, showed another facet of his talent. His mark, showing metal being struck and shaped by a huge hammer, gave him a secure position as Armorer to the Royal Guard. But he was a skilled sculptor as well, and Pen was fascinated by his powerful bronze and silver sculptures of muscular mares and stallions, many of which were modeled from Iron’s friends in the Guard. Most of the statues wore miniature suits of armor, crafted using the same techniques that Iron used to make the real ones, and which were exact and functional down to the rivets, straps and buckles.

“Hello, Pen!” said Iron, striding up from behind as Pen bent over a workbench, studying a disassembled model peytral that was three inches across.

“Hello to you!” said Pen. “I really admire your work; It’s rare to see such fine detail, and so exquisitely crafted. Not to mention that should the realm ever fall under attack by hordes of little clay Changelings, our defense will be secure due to your tireless efforts...”

“Thank you!” said Iron, laughing and giving Pen an affectionate nuzzle and hug. “I’ve just been cleaning up a few last details in your workspace. I hope you’ll like it. Come and see!”

Pen’s new space, like Iron’s and Snow’s, comprised a third of a loop and was lined on its outer wall by tall arched windows with clever sliding shutters. There were many mostly-empty bookcases that Pen longed to fill up, and toolchests, and a writing desk, and a drawing table, and a contraption that looked like a cross between a small chemistry set and a soldering station which was easily dwarfed by the workbench on which it rested.

Pen’s eyes darted around, and wherever he looked was something to smile about. “This looks promising indeed. Thank you very much!”

“Oh, it’s only a start,” said Iron, “We’ve given you some basics to get you going, but we wanted to leave you plenty of room to grow into this space. Once you know what extra equipment you want, we’ll help you to get it.”

“I’ve given you my old spell research kit,” said Snow, pointing to the contraption on the workbench, “and a starter library of elementary books on magic. And Iron has provided some fine metalworking tools from a period where he was dabbling in clockwork. You told us you’re mechanically inclined... ‘handy,’ as you put it? Though I’m not sure how such skill can be related to how tall you are...?”

“Snow has a ulterior motive, Pen,” chuckled Iron. “Her gramophone broke a few days ago and it will cost more than a few bits to get it replaced. Perhaps you’d be willing to take a look at it?”

Pen had opened his saddlebag and was placing his book purchases from last night on the shelves. “I suppose you’ve already tried rebooting it...? Perhaps that’s the wrong kind of joke. I’ll be happy to help if I can; perhaps I can start on it tomorrow?”

“Excellent. Take your time!” said Iron. “You know, I think I’m in the mood to cook tonight... something special, I think, to properly welcome you to our home.”

“Wonderful,” said Snow. “You know what I like.”

“Indeed I do. Do you have any particular requests, Pen?”

If asked that question in his old life, Pen would have searched his soul indecisively for an inconvenient or even annoying amount of time. He realized with a little shock that here, the answer was pleasantly simple. “I know that I will love whatever you make, Iron. Please feel free to surprise me.”

Iron looked delighted. “Surprise it is! I think I’ll head over to the market now. I’ll catch up with you later.” Whistling, he took up a pair of baskets connected by a broad strap, slung then over his back, then walked into the hub and away.

Snow snuggled up to Pen and nuzzled his neck. “That was a nice compliment you paid him, Pen.”

Pen hadn’t really meant it as a compliment; it had mainly been a statement of fact that reflected life under LunAI’s benevolent oversight. But explaining this would send the wrong message, and he preferred that it be taken as it had been.

“I try to please,” said Pen. “So, what creative and physics-defying way will we use to get to the Library? A secret trapdoor? A Möbius walkway? A firefighter’s pole with only one end? Perhaps the library is inside out so we’re already technically inside it? Or shall we just take a stroll with seven-league horseshoes?”

Snowflash smiled. Her horn flared, her field shot out to envelop the two of them, and they disappeared in a teal burst of light.

—=§=—

The Royal Canterlot Library was composed, as far as the eye could see, of hexagonal galleries lined with books. They stretched all around and up above and down below for what looked like forever, and they easily transcended the size of the building’s exterior. Each gallery had a hole in the center lined with a railing, save for the seven hexagons around the entrance, which were merged into a single lobby, with checkout desk, card catalogs, and study rooms. Pen and Snowflash bamfed into existence near the front door, and Pen blinked as he oriented himself, then his jaw went slack and he stared about him.

“I see what she did here,” said Pen with a gleam in his eye and a beautiful grin.

“Who did what?” said Snowflash.

“It’s based on Borges’s Library of Babel!”

“Borhays?” she asked, but he was already dashing off recklessly into the limitless galleries.

In Borges’s story, the library was a very large place in which every possible book existed—from all works of literature, great or otherwise, to telephone directories for imaginary planets, to the complete output of every Internet forum ever to exist, to books consisting solely of the letter ‘Q’ repeated over and over—all in such mind-staggering numbers that there was no chance of finding the tiny drops of useful information in the sea of blathering nonsense.

But was LunAI’s version really the same thing? The hypothesis was easily testable. If it were true, there should be trillions of nonsense books for each meaningful book...

Running about, up and down stairs, he checked books at random from various shelves in various galleries, and discovered none that were obvious gibberish. Unless the books had been pre-sorted, with meaningful books placed closer to the entrance, the library’s contents did not in fact represent the set of all possible combinations of the alphabet in book form.

He was also pleased that a significant portion of the books he looked at were ones that he knew. One of his conditions for emigration was that LunAI bring into his shard as comprehensive a replica of human knowledge in book form as possible, especially the works that he considered to be old and indispensable friends, and she seemed to have fulfilled her promise.

Snowflash finally caught up with him, and Pen explained his reasoning.

She looked at him oddly. Was that a hint of concern? “I could have just told you that if you’d asked, Pen.”

“There’s a certain pleasure in finding things out.”

“Very glad to hear you say that! But what a concept.” She frowned. “Why would anyone, outside of a philosophical thought experiment, fill a library up with books of gibberish that can’t be read? It sounds like a nightmare.”

“At heart, it’s a mathematical exercise; a book only needs to be possible to exist in the library, not meaningful, and there are many more ways for a book to go wrong than right, so you get a universe mostly full of nonsense. The idea has also been expressed as a roomful of monkeys, all bashing away at random on typewriters. Eventually, they accidentally produce great works of literature, but it takes them quadrillions of years to do so. Back where I came from, we called this process ‘fanfiction...’”

Pen had expected at least a chuckle from Snow at that line, but she looked abstracted instead. “Wait, wait... Pen?” Her frown deepened. “I just had a horrible thought—oh, I hope that I’m wrong. Please forgive me for asking, but... this concept seems as if it’s very familiar to you. It sounds as if you’re speaking from experience. Was it really anything like that where you came from? Was life for you really bits of meaning with... lots of nothing between?”

Pen stared, then slowly nodded. “Yes... Yes, I suppose it was. At the cosmic level, and even at the atomic level. Vast expanses of emptiness and chaos interspersed with little dots of warmth or order... But—”

Horror grew on her face. “Like an evil parody of the night sky. And you couldn’t just skip over the random and senseless bits, could you? You had to go from point A to point B to point C and all the way through, didn’t you, even if it was mostly meaningless... And it wasn’t just a linear path, it was a three dimensional volume, so it was infinitely worse, you might not even ever find the next good point, and you were lost in all of that...” Her voice broke. “...for your whole life. Oh no. Oh, Pen. I’m so sorry...” Her eyes wavered and filled with tears.

He babbled, desperate to reassure her, or perhaps himself. “It wasn’t that bad, Snow... Please don’t be sad. Please! It was just how things were, we got along with it. It wasn’t as if we were just hanging in a void—well, we technically were, but we had mountains and sunsets and moonlit nights on the ocean and love and courage. We made meaning for each other... Please don’t—”

Snow seized him and held him, sobbing, until an untapped wellspring of grief broke within him and he collapsed and cried with her. He clung to her as it slowly bled its way out through his tears, which dripped on the floor to mingle with hers. Together they wept for a long time.

And then she offered him the peace that lay deep within her body, and he buried himself in her with the desperation of the dying, and she cradled him and crossed her horn with his until they sang out together in the grand note in which life voices its triumph over sorrow and loss.

They lay together for another long time, Snow cradling his head between her forelegs, kissing him and nuzzling his ears and grooming his mane with her lips and teeth. She hugged him tighter, then spoke quietly in his ear.

“Pen, I’m so sorry. I wish you could have come to us sooner. I’m glad you’re safe with us now. Iron and I will have to work extra hard to make up for all that you’ve gone through.”

“Oh, Snow, you don’t have to go out of your way for me. I’m quite happy as things are. You shouldn’t have to—”

She firmly stopped his lips with her hoof. “Stop. What were you going to say next, Pen? That you’re ‘not worth it?’ That you ‘don’t deserve it?’ You’re making me want to cry again! What could have happened to you in MonkeyWorld to make you hurt yourself like this? Argh!” She bit a lock of his mane in frustration. “You do deserve for us to make a fuss over you, you are worth it, you do matter. You’re smart and funny and kind and caring and you have all of what you need to enjoy life, but you keep cutting your legs out from under yourself! It hurts me so much to hear you put yourself down like this! Why do you do it?”

Pen was just within a hair of mentioning his inner voice, but he had a covenant with himself that he had never ever broken, and it held now.

“I’m sorry, Snow. I guess I can’t help it. I do appreciate your love, and Iron’s...”

She shushed him again. “You deserve to be loved. Let me hear you say that.”

“Wait... I don’t think I have the right to force other people to love me, to demand that they care about me...”

“And you don’t do that sort of thing, do you? That’s not what I said. I only said that you deserve to be loved.” She held his gaze with hers, her eyes serious and passionate. “I want you to say it too. Now.”

It was so hard to force the words out. The urge to brush it off with a sarcastic or ironic or worldwise comment was overwhelming. “I... I deserve to be loved.”

“You also deserve to love yourself. Say it. No temporizing, no qualifications.”

He smirked, and couldn’t meet her gaze. “You also deserve to love yourself,” he said.

She bopped him playfully on the snout. “No semantic games, either. You know that you need to flip the referent. Try it again.”

He sighed. It was a good thing that his inner voice was still being quiet. “...I also deserve to love myself.”

“Okay, that’s a start. We’ll practice some more later.” She hugged him close a while longer. “Shall we resume the tour?”

They stood. Pen noticed that the mess they’d made on the carpeted floor was already soaking in and fading away. LunAI seemed to be running a tidy shard.

“The first thing you should know,” said Snowflash, “and as I was about to say before you went running off, is that the library is really, really big. Therefore, we have some safety measures to keep ponies from getting lost, and features to make it easier to use. Please look behind you.”

He did, and saw a faint green line that stretched out through the gallery’s archway and appeared to descend a flight of stairs. “Ah. Magical breadcrumbs, I take it?”

“Just so. That line always shows the most direct path back to the lobby. It won’t necessarily point in the exact direction of the lobby; there are doors placed every ten hexes that lead to it, and your line will point to the nearest one of these.”

Pen looked to the side and checked around her flank. “I don’t see that you have a line...”

“I do, but it’s only visible to me, as yours is only visible to yourself. However, if you concentrate on me, you should start to see a line that leads between us as well. Try it now.”

"Okay, I see it."

“Now you know how to find anyone else in the library, including the clerks at the reference and checkout desks. So let’s talk about organizing information. Please go to that shelf there, and press that button. There’s one in each gallery... See that little burst of light? It just made a waypoint for you. Now walk away, and you’ll see a blue dotted line connecting you to this gallery. Now you can keep track of where you’ve been. Different sections of the library will have their own color coding...”

“It all seems eminently sensible,” said Pen. “By the way, just how big is the library?”

Snow winked. “I could tell you, but perhaps you’d like to figure it out for yourself...?”

“Hmm. I think I would. Let’s see... Perhaps the first test should be whether it’s finite or infinite in extent... And running as far as I can in a straight line is probably an inefficient way to test that; it isn’t guaranteed to terminate, either. Though running past all those books for years and years would certainly beat staring at a doorknob... Hmm...”

Pen looked about, then took a slim volume from one of the shelves; its title began, Transgressing the Boundaries... He held it out over the railing and glanced at Snowflash; when she didn’t react, he dispelled his hornfield. The book fell down into the abyss of galleries until it vanished from sight.

Pen looked up. Soon, a small speck became visible in the indefinite space above. As it grew, he readied his hornfield into a shape like a huge catcher’s mitt, and grabbed the item as it fell past; he felt the tug of its deceleration as a distortion in his magic field, but its physical momentum did not transfer to his body at all—magic was weird. Pen pulled the book in and examined it; it was, as far as he could tell, the very same book he had dropped.

“The library is cyclic. Thought so.”

Snow smiled. “Nice job. Now, can you determine the actual extent; that is, how far it goes before it loops back on itself?”

“Hmm... by the duration of the book’s fall, I think I could—well, in the vertical dimension, anyway. Where I came from, gravitic acceleration was about 9.8 meters per second, but I don’t quite recall the rest of the formula...”

“Try half of G (9.81) times the duration of the fall, squared.” She produced a stopwatch.

After some calculation performed on a blank page in his journal, Pen determined that the library measured about 4.51 kilometers in “diameter”—almost three miles. He noted the digits. “Fondly Fahrenheit,” he murmured.

“What’s that?”

“A story, two stories I know...” Pen had already subjected Snowflash to the concept of a meaningless surplus of information, with grievous result; he did not want to follow that with stories about permanent, deliberate destruction. “...and I’ll tell you about them another time.”

He knew that the number was not a coincidence. What was LunAI implying? And what was the incineration point of computronium, in comparison to that of paper? He eventually decided that it was just a reference, awarded himself a mental cookie for spotting it, then shrugged and let the problem drift away.

Pen spent the rest of the afternoon exploring and packing his saddlebags with books, pleased by the number of ‘old friends’ he was discovering. Snowflash split her time between walking with him and browsing the Periodicals section, where she caught up on Transfiguration Monthly, Ars Magika Caballus, The Journal of Insubstantial Results, and other technical publications.

Hours later, they reconvened in the lobby. There, Pen noticed a curious object on a pedestal near the checkout desk. It was a little glass dome, in which a coin constantly rotated, suspended in a magic field. Pen studied it closely. On one side, it bore the words 20 Centavos; on the other was a Hebrew Aleph (א).

“What’s this, Snow?” he asked.

“Princess Luna had it put there a while back when the Library reopened after renovations. She said at the time that it’s a backup of the whole library. I’m not sure what she meant by that...”

Pen thought for a moment. “Oh! In a way, she’s right. Recall that a string of all possible combinations of letters will contain all works of literature. Now, we can use the binary system of numbers to create a code for all the letters—‘01100001’ was ‘a’ in one system I know, for instance. Anyway, if you were to flip this coin over and over and record and encode the results, zero for heads and one for tails, you could eventually reconstruct the whole library—if you had an infinite amount of time. Any finite string, however long, can appear in a string of infinite length if you wait long enough, and that includes the string that encompasses the books of this library.”

Snowflash considered this. “You’d still have to be damned lucky, I think. Pen, would you like to see if you can flip that coin right now to produce an ‘a’, at least?”

“I see no harm in trying, but why?”

“Well,” said Snow, with a smirk, “I’m in a sporting mood, and I wonder if you would care to make an alpha-bet.”

Pen stared at her. He wanted to scream in laughter and groan in agony. He wanted to sweep her up into a never-ending kiss. He wanted... He wanted to live here. Forever. With her and Iron, reading and learning and making horrible jokes and having fun, and nothing more. He realized with a shock that this must be what falling in love felt like, that it was happening to him right now. He had never felt it like this, not the real thing, in all his time on Terra.

With tears of laughter, he held her, and their warmth and love made the immense volume of galleries of boundless information surround them like an equidistant sphere, wrapping them in endless layers of meaning. Things were coming together. The center would hold.

He could spend an eternity here, he thought.

Mostly.

Author's Note

A few (but by no means all) of the references:
Andrew Marvell, A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body.
John Campbell, The Escape.
Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions (The Library of Babel, The Aleph, The Zahir)

Principia DiscordAI (Part 1)

Author's Note

The following chapter had been kicking around for a while, not quite fitting within the main stream of the story. On April the First, it seems appropriate to present it. While this should not be considered part of the main story, I may incorporate parts of it later on.

Principia DiscordAI (Part 1)

“A man who for an entire week has done nothing but hit himself over the head has little reason to be proud.”

—Stanislaw Lem, Memoirs of a Space Traveller

“I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.”

—Nietzsche, Zarathustra’s Prologue

“If anything is possible, then nothing is interesting.”

—H. G. Wells

One fine day, as Pen Poiser and his troika trotted along the streets of Canterlot, he turned his head to admire a particularly ingenious fresco and accidentally ran facefirst into a stone column that supported the facade of the building. There was a little burst of pain, like a friendly smack on the ass, and a burst of stars. Pen fell back on his rump and used his forehooves to wiggle his facial bones and jaw. Then he started to snicker.

“Are you okay, Pen?” asked Snowflash.

“Oh, wow.” snickered Pen. “I’m okay. I just realized...

“I’m a toon.

“I’M A TOON! YES! YEAHAHAHAHAHA...”

He laughed maniacally, jumping about and bouncing off the stone columns like Daffy Duck.

Snow and Iron stood, strange emotions playing over their faces, their lips twitching. “Pen... are you okay?”

“I’m fine! You don’t have to hold it in; Toons are supposed to make people laugh. This is awesome! I want a portable hole and a cornucopia bag... scratch that, I want hammerspace! I wanna be able to walk off a goddamn cliff and not fall as long as I don’t look down! In fact, why isn’t the whole world a merry melody already?”

With a gentle flutter of wings, Luna sailed down and landed before them. All the surrounding ponies bowed, save Pen, who only winked.

Luna winked as well. “Because, Pen, I know thy mind, better than thou doth know it thyself, and thou wouldst tire of such a world of chaos were it unending. But taken once in a while, as a holy-day, it shall be an ever-recurring source of delight for thee.”

“That does make sense. So how do I go about starting one of these holidays?”

“Thy knowledge of the legends of this world should suggest a path to thee...”

“Indeed it does. Thanks!” Pen took leave of his friends, and dashed off to the library to do some quick research.

He had expected to have to make a trip to Ponyville to get things started, but instead he took a walk in the palace gardens. It was a bright and beautiful day, and he wandered among the hedges with insouciant confidence, looking at the curious expressions on the various stone statues. And soon, he found a familiar pegasus, lying at the base of a pedestal, with a lunch basket at her side and a book in the grass before her. She started badly as Pen entered the grassy area, but he quickly lay down where he stood and spoke quietly to put her at ease, and at last she permitted him to approach.

“I’m pleased to meet you at last. I’m Pen Poiser, and Princess Luna has asked me to look into ...his case,” Pen said, indicating the statue. “I understand that you were tasked with being his guardian...?”

“Oh, not so much as that,” she said. “I was supposed to be... the way that he got another chance. But he keeps going too far and winding up back here.”

“It’s hard, I understand. You know, he may need another approach... You might be, so to speak, killing him with kindness. Maybe he needs something a little different than a friend...”

“Oh! Do you really think so?”

“I think it deserves a try,” he said, “And I’m ready to make the attempt. While I am reasonably confident of success, perhaps you and the other Elements should stay on guard, just in case.”

“I’ll go and let them know,” she said, taking to the air. “Please, though, be careful. He’s really very vulnerable in many ways, almost like a little boy...”

Pen smiled and waved her goodbye. “Don’t worry, I’ll be as gentle with him as I can be.”

As soon as she was off beyond the horizon of the hedges, Pen turned his gaze back to the statue. He had been frozen this time in a particularly resigned attitude, lying on his side with chin on paw and playing out a game of Patience while awaiting the inevitable rainbow-powered petrification ray.

Pen took a deep breath, whirled to put his full weight on his forehooves, and with all his strength, as Applejack might admonish a recalcitrant tree, he bucked the statue of Discord right in the crotch.

Stone shattered and light shone through the cracks, and a lightning-swift talon shot out and grabbed Pen by the tail. He was lifted into the air to meet Discord’s angry curious yellow gaze.

Discord gave a slimy grin which, like that of Chuck Jones’s Grinch, curled into spirals at the corners. “I don’t keep them there, little pony...”

Pen looked bored and rolled his eyes. “Let me guess. They’re in a duck’s egg in a casket in a hut on an island in a lake beyond the farthest mountain—”

“SHHHHHH!!!” Discord apparated a locked muzzle cage over Pen’s snout. “Just remember—you may have guessed where mine are, but we both know where yours are.” Discord gave Pen a little toss into the air, then quickly shifted his grasp to a section of Pen’s anatomy that hung somewhat lower than his tail. Pen’s eyes crossed, his cheeks puffed out and reddened. “And if you want to keep them, you’ll keep my secret as well. Understood?”

Pen felt a curious sensation in his horn... It was a type of magic he hadn’t yet encountered, radiating from Discord. It was the color of feet and it smelled of glass and it looked like desuetude and it sounded like a feather. Chaos magic? Pen drew some of it in, and it slithered around the spirals of his horn and wormed into the involutions of his cerebrum in dark oily coils. His eyes filled with colorful spirals and he had an urge to lick a hippo’s duodenum, or fireskate on a star.

Instead, he let the energy go in a spell that emerged as a sneeze that evaporated the muzzle cage into flower petals which puffed into Discord’s face and formed a cloud over his head. When the petals drifted away, Discord had an owl sitting on his head, and the owl had a lump of Salvador Dali’s excrement on top of its head. Discord looked up, the owl looked down, and the turd fell and bonked Discord on the snout. [1]

[1] I don’t just make this shit up.

Rage flashed in Discord’s eyes, but then his smile grew curlier still. He extended his free claw dramatically. “Say bye-bye...!” He snapped his talons. The part of Pen that Discord held in his paw vanished, and Pen fell face-first to the ground.

Pen stood up, off balance but looking curvier and cuter, then rolled over backwards with rear legs parted. Noting two additions between them, and one full inversion, Pen roared with laughter in a voice a full octave higher than before. “You Rule-63’d me!” she shouted, leaping up and capering in circles with glee. “This is so bucking cool! I gotta show Snow and Iron!” She dashed off towards the exit.

“Just. A. Moment.” Discord conjured a golden sponge-cake lasso that flew forth and hooked Pen by the neck. Discord flicked his finger as if playing a yoyo, and reeled Pen in until he stared her snout to snout. “You’ve gone to considerable lengths to raise my ire, little pony, and you don’t seem to care. Do you not know with whom you’re dealing?”

“Damn straight I know. You’re Discord, Lord of Chaos and master of actualizing cheap visual jokes. You bring plagues of chocolate frogs and storms of hailing marshmallows. How seriously did you want me to take you?”

Discord scratched his chin and cast one eye skyward and the other groundward as he mused. “Now that I dwell on it... Not at all. Not at all!” He laughed in a way that seemed to make the whole world hold its breath, as Pen dangled complacently from Discord’s claws. “Now, just what is it that you want from me?”

“Why, I wish to shake things up, sir. I want prosthetic swallowable noses made of jello for everyone. I want to joyously partake of something that may or may not be a hotdog, whether or not it’s Friday. I want to order dinner and get a flaming telephone book instead. I want cotton-candy fog, and explosive larches, and storms of quailstones by the pailful...

“In short, Sire Eris, I wish to be a Discordian.”

Discord’s eyebrows raised, then swapped places, then settled on his forehead again. He pierced Pen with his gaze, and raised his talons pensively. “You know, it’s been a while since I had a disciple... But here’s my problem. Each time things start to get a little bit fun, in come the rainbow gang to lock things down again. Now, I heard you talking to Yellowshush before, and I understand that you have connections with old Loonie, so this time I’m going to want some assurances...”

“Oh, you can stay out for good this time. In fact, to put you on a more even footing with the Diarchs, you shall be given your own heavenly body. I have a deed here in my poke. Let me ride shotgun with you for a day, and it’s yours.”

“Really? There’s a body more heavenly than mine?” Discord became disconcertingly clothed by an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weenie, yellow polka dot bikini, but there was a certain eagerness in his eyes.

“Yes. I cannot directly speak its name for reasons of discretion, but it orbits the sun once a year, and its orbit is strongly controlled by Earth’s gravity...”

Discord cast his eyes up to the pale crescent moon and gave a moon-crescent grin. “Ah. I believe I can work with that. But can you really convince her to give it up to me?” He was still smiling at Pen, but his eyes barely concealed the radiance of supernovas.

“Yes. She’s been considering a move to a warmer climate for some time; she may just move in with her sister. In any event, I can force the issue and persuade her. She and I... we have a covenant. She has to see to my interests, in the long run.”

Discord stared deep into Pen’s soul, but Pen held firm.

“Very well,” said Discord. “It's a deal. But still, there are a few entrance qualifications to become a Disciple of Chaos. To begin... Are you now, or have you ever been, a cabbage or something?”

“I am not now and have never been a cabbage,” replied Pen.

So Discord turned Pen into a seed and planted him and watered him, and Pen did germinate and grow, and gather sunlight into his very being, and did foliate himself in layers of leaves until in the center of Canterlot Gardens there did exist a single perfect cabbage, glistening with dew. And Discord slew it into slaw, and ate it, and belched so loudly that the air did vibrate down to subatomic levels and spontaneously generated a Pen, restored to his original self.

“I am enlightened,” said Pen, who was still photosynthesizing slightly.

“How dreary for you. Now, why is a mouse when it spins?”

“Because there is no other side.”

“...I'll mark that as a pass. Next question. Does a cow have Buddha nature?”

“Nu?” replied Pen with arched eyebrow.

“Well, there are seventeen more entrance challenges, all of which I have forgotten, so let’s do move on... Now, are you sure you know what you’ll be getting into, little pony?”

“No. Does Equestria know what it will be getting into?” replied Pen.

“Fair point. Let’s find out.” He snapped his talons with a crack that whirled ’round the herds. “Onward, then! Heute Die PferdWelt, Morgen Der Kosmos!”

To Be Continued...

Principia DiscordAI (Part 2)

Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.

Relent, Ticktockman

What has gone before:

Pen Poiser, a Natural Intelligence (NI) and former human who has been assimilated by the world-optimizing CelestAI (LunAI, in Pen’s case), is still coming to grips with his new virtual environment. For each element of familiarity or awesomeness in LunAI’s custom version of Equestria, there is something else that is surprising to Pen, or even disturbing, albeit disturbing in an interesting way. Pen’s AI friends and lovers strive to help him to adjust…

“People do not want immortality… they simply do not want to die. They want to live […] They want to feel the ground beneath their feet, see the clouds overhead, love other people, be with them, and think. Nothing more. Everything that has been said beyond that is a lie.”
—Stanislaw Lem, Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy

“Freedom, freedom, freedom! Everybody always talks about freedom! I don’t want to be free, I just want to be happy!”
—Han Hoogerbrugge, nails.hoogerbrugge.com, 001

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven…”
―John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Pull the wool over your own eyes, and relax in the safety of your own delusions!”
―J. R. “Bob” Dobbs

The setting sun, more richly golden than the pale yellow light of Sol, cast long low slanting rays through an arched concourse at Castle Canterlot, making Pen Poiser squint his eyes. He found that he could look at the solar disc directly with no real discomfort, and noted that it was gently stylized, like an Aboriginal drawing. Pen was reminded of the patterns that form when ferromagnetic liquids are exposed to magnetic fields.

Pen was heading with his friends to the castle commissary for breakfast, as it was to him and others on the night-shift. They had followed a long curving esplanade that paralleled a Pegasus suburb that hovered in the air over a thousand-foot drop, a sort of perpetual fog bank that bore a rainbow river flowing alongside a row of tall, Graeco/Arabesque cloud buildings. Pen gazed about as ponies chattered merrily or sat on park benches reading. Two foals shot overhead on hoverboards as a trio of Earth ponies passed by, beatboxing and stamping their feet to their improvised song, sending deep bass notes through the ground. A Zebra bookvendor was hunched over a chessboard, playing against a Unicorn jeweler who sat across the way, making her moves remotely with her hornfield. Overhead, a Pegasus guard hovered in front of a high window, her crossed forehooves resting on the sill and her rear hanging in space, as she conversed with somepony inside and leaned her head in once in a while for a smooch. A peaceful, content little world was happening all around Pen, full of earnest activity and secrets he would likely never learn. Pen considered the bustle of apparently sapient life, more than a little concerned. Why were there so many of them? As near as he could personally figure, he had a Dunbar’s number of five…

Pen’s herdmates, perhaps sensing a change in his mood, closed in on him on either side, flanking him again in a pattern that he was starting to notice, even though it felt natural and right to him at some fundamental level. On a whim, he suddenly stopped short and let them walk on without him for a bit. In that moment, he felt a small but sharp pang of apprehension. A herding instinct? LunAI had promised to make him into a sapient pony, which meant that she necessarily had to change parts of his brain without directly consulting him about all the fiddly little details. And while Pen did not expect to be literally chewing on wooden planks in stables and stamping his hooves on the ground to count, it seemed that the new form did come with some unexpected horsey baggage, even if he couldn’t always see a direct benefit for it…

His companions noted his absence and halted. “Hey Pen!” called back Snowflash. “Gathering wool again?”

“His knitted brows make that obvious,” smiled Iron Croupiere.

“It’s way too early for a pun war, folks,” groaned Pen. “Sorry. I’m still feeling crochet-y.”

“More purls of wisdom later, then,” said Snow. “Unhumorously, are you okay?”

“Oh, I was just testing something.” He clacked his tongue. “You know, I always seem to wind up between you two, somehow…”

“Well, we like having you between us!” said Iron brightly. He flicked one eyebrow by way of reference to certain events of the prior sleep cycle.

“Uh… yes, and, well, I like being between you. But, you know, if the herding instinct means anything, it’s that there’s safety in numbers, and indeed greater safety in the center of the group. So shouldn’t I take my share of being on the perimeter, and helping to stay on guard…?”

Snowflash chortled. “Should we ever sojourn upon the wild savanna, where the open plains provide scant cover from the ravenous predators of the pridelands, then we might ask you to take point once in a while. For now, you’re among civilized ponies and, as the honored and beloved newest member of our herd, you get center privileges.”

“I suppose that’s reasonable,” said Pen, trotting up between them once more. He struck a brave pose and declaimed, “What possible danger could there be here, in the middle of the castle, surrounded by the Royal Guards, and at the heart of the mighty empire that is Equestria?”

Snowflash rolled her eyes. “I thought you said it was a bit early, Pen?”

“I did,” said Pen. “Did I slip a pun in by accident?”

“Not that I can detect, but that statement you made… The world, um, notices when you say things like that, particularly in that tone of voice.”

“You mean this is a ‘careful what you wish for’ sort of causality?” Pen’s face fell. “Oh, no. I hope I haven’t caused any problems. Are we really going to be attacked just because I opened my stupid mouth?”

Iron Croupiere laughed, and pressed his great broad flank against Pen to reassure him. “Calm down, Pen! Some chaos is going to happen anyway; it’s part of the fun of life, after all! Remarks like the one you made just serve as a sort of attachment point.”

Snowflash completed the bookend-hug. “If it were really a serious thing, we would have warned you when you first arrived. It never results in a problem that can’t be handled. All the same, you should expect some kind of excitement before very long…”

All three of them stood still for a moment, ears perked, but, Pen thought, LunAI was apparently still declining to take her cue.

Pen broke the silence. “Well, chewing air hasn’t made me less hungry. Shall we proceed?”

The reached the end of the esplanade and crossed onto a broad octagonal plaza with dancing fountains at its center, and it was, of course, not until they nearly reached the commissary that the loud startling explosion erupted from the direction of the Library. With a burst of masonry, a wild saurian, reptilian monster, a towering two stories tall, strode snarling and growling out into the plaza, its claws and talons sharp, its fangs and incisors dripping, tails and caudal appendages swinging wildly. It was just as Pen imagined it when he had first read Bored of the Rings.

“Destroy!” it cried. “Demolish, devastate, raze, pulverize, wreck! SMASH!” It struck a nearby tower, which collapsed into a pile of jumbled debris and dust. Surrounding passersby screamed and market ponies frantically gathered in their wares and hitched on their carts.

“Aieee!” Pen shouted in mock horror. “It’s a Thesaurus!” He started to laugh before noting how intently his friends were staring at the monster. Guardsponies were already running across the plaza and swooping down from the sky to engage the threat; the monster swiftly batted several from the air back into the sky, where they left interesting holes in the clouds; it swept several more away with its tails, sending them flying towards the edge of the esplanade. Half of the Pegasus guards diverted from fighting the monster and zoomed after their comrades to save them from the thousand foot drop.

“I suppose we can’t just talk this one down?” asked Pen.

“There’s no time for that,” growled Iron Croupiere, who was pawing the ground; he knew every guardspony by name, and most of them were close friends of his. Iron whipped what looked like a shimmering silver curtain out of his bags, tossed it in the air with a twist so that it spun over his head, and leaped into it. It wrapped around him, magnetic or magical catches snapped shut, and Pen could now identify it as a coat of chain mail, which shimmered like mithril as Iron charged forth into the fray.

Meanwhile, Snowflash’s saddlebags had popped open and she was levitating various frozen spells from them; they swirled about her head in a polychromatic halo. She locked eyes with Pen to read his intent; would he fight with them? Pen instinctively reared rampant and struck at the air with his forehooves. She nodded once, tossed a spell at him and a similar one at herself, then galloped off after Iron. The spell, shaped like a shield, smashed on the ground at Pen’s feet and surrounded him in magical barding. It weighed nothing and was mostly transparent, detectable by a golden sheen in the air at the edges of its effect.

Pen ran after his friends, wondering just what he would do to help. He had learned no combat spells so far; his bravery was based on his respect for his friends, and his confidence was based on his trust in LunAI, that she was not likely to present him with an unconquerable challenge, and that she would never permit him to come to permanent harm.

Iron Croupiere braced his large forehooves upon the pavement before one of the creature’s taloned feet, whipped about with strong muscles shifting vigorously beneath his mailed coat, and delivered a splintering kick to the monster’s ankle, causing the beast to retract and withdraw the appendage in pain. The action looked breathtakingly awesome, and Pen had an urge to try it. He planted his own forelegs, pivoted, and lashed out with the full strength of his body, and was rewarded with the sound of a loud smack and an enraged howling. Legs kicked and tails flailed at Pen, and he jumped nimbly about, dodging almost all of them.

The one that connected, a tail knobbed like that of an ankylosaur, knocked Pen spinning through the air and sidefirst into a marble wall. He felt an enormous numbing blow throughout his body, and the burst of shock and pain stunned him; his magic aura in his horn burst forth and formed into stars that circled his eyes. But he landed on all fours and shook his head; the pain and dizziness rapidly faded. Though he’d left a body shaped crater in the marble, he was apparently completely unharmed—even his unarmored tail had left its corresponding dent. So I am a ‘Toon now, he thought. Cool. I can work with this.

Still, what the hell are you doing, kicking at this thing? he admonished himself. You’re a hairy wizard! Use the Horce, Luke! But what spells could he cast to do any good? Snowflash had taught him a few cantrips while instructing him on Horn Care and Polishing 101, but none of them seemed applicable, particularly not the erotic ones. Still, logomachy was supposed to be Pen’s specialty, and this was a word monster; there had to be some way he could work with that. His mark, crossed feather pens dripping red ink, gleamed softly as he concentrated.

Snowflash tossed another shield spell at the feet of a brace of preschoolers, blinked across the plaza to dodge a falling brick, then flickered about, whipping glittering silver spells at the monster. Each one burst into gleaming shackles that wrapped themselves around a pair of appendages, but each time the chains started to seriously restrict its movement, the creature shouted another chain of words that let it slither free. Still, she was successfully distracting it and preventing it from attacking more targets, giving the guards extra time to regroup and cordon the plaza. Pen glimpsed her as she flashed in and out of visibility, lithe, sleek and fit…

Iron Croupiere dashed in alongside a trio of Earth guards, braced himself and bucked again and again at the beast’s legs, but the Thesaurus had many appendages that performed similar functions, and was not to be unseated so easily. A handpaw swung down, and Iron got knocked halfway across the plaza, his horseshoes sending up showers of sparks as he maintained his stolid footing, cobblestones almost rippling in his wake. Nothing daunted, he charged again, majestic and muscular…

Pen yanked his attention away from his friends and back to his spellwork. The monster’s spells all had an obvious pattern, and as he considered it the skeleton of a spellform arose in his mind. He could sense something like a network with cavities for nodes; seven of them…

“Restrict!” he cried, and the central node of spellform glowed, gaining focus and potential. “Restrain…” One of the outer cavities swelled with lexigraphic power. “Limit, Encircle, Corral, Imprison…!” All but one were full. “Uhm… PEN‼”

The spellform completed, filling his mind with a ringing and satisfying chime of power. Pen projected it through his horn, and felt a draining sensation within him as the spell’s energy left him and his magic reserves strove to compensate. Seven equidistant points of light glowed around the monster, then shot up from the ground into stout posts of magical light that grew thick bars between them.

“Escape!” it roared. “Emerge, Evade, Jailbreak, Decamp, Depart! VAMOOSE!” It thrust its clawed fist of its hand paw at the crossbeams, and shattered Pen’s spell. Pen, recalling one of Snowflash’s lessons, quickly disengaged his connection with the broken spell to avoid any backlash. The ground’s ambient magic rippled as it absorbed the thaumic force, an event perceivable only by nearby Unicorns and Earths.

O-kay… Pen quickly conceived another spellform. “Mute! Silence, Muffle, Quiet, Censor, Speechless! MUM!” Huge zippers of magic rippled into existence and firmly sealed the beast’s various lips and closed its mouths.

The Thesaurus flicked its upper appendages around dexterously. Pen just realized that it was sign language at the same time as the somatic spell completed. The zippers vanished and the Thesaurus roared out with full force.

“Oh, he, she and it are good,” muttered Pen; his novice-sized store of magic was getting low. He considered other options for a One-Punch. A local implementation of Avada Kedavra was likely to be gauche, if not just ineffective, but… ah, the little death! No, the other little death!

“Sleep!” Pen shouted. “Somnolence, Tiredness, Weariness, Weakness, Dormancy, Lassitude! TORPOR!” Smoky dark wisps coalesced from the air and formed webs about the beast’s multiple eyes.

“Alertness!” cried the Thesaurus. “Wakefulness… Ener—” It opened its fanged, toothy mouth wide in a long, gaping yawn. “Enervation… Liveliness…” It blinked its heavy, drooping eyelids. “Caff… uhhhh…”

The monster fell, dropped, descended heavily to the ground, cracking paving stones and sending them flying where it hit. Pen leaped nimbly back, spreading his hornfield like a huge catcher’s mitt to shield himself and bystanders from dangerous fragments. To keep ricochets at a minimum, he arrested their momentum rather than deflecting them, even though it cost him the last of his reserves. The fragments clattered as they dropped to the pavement, and Pen did not stagger, for it was not a physical drain, but he felt detached, remote from the world, as his reserves slowly refilled from the ambient magic…

From around the somnolent monster, ponies started to cheer and laugh with relief. Snowflash dashed across the plaza and leaped happily on Pen’s back, hugging his neck. “WhooHOO! That was some nice Logomancy, Pen! You’re a natural!”

“Well, Pen…” smiled Iron, sweeping both of them up in an enormous crushing hug. “I apologize for dismissing what you said. You did talk it down. Congratulations, and thanks!”

Pen leaned into their embraces, but his mind was not entirely engaged. Heroic action to impress new friends and improve status, check, he thought. I wonder what kind of reward I’ll get for this one. Maybe I’ll get a medal, or a parade, or a stack of bits… Pen’s skin crawled at the thought of being made to march in front of a cheering crowd, or stand on a platform to receive some trophy; public attention of that nature was immensely distasteful to him. Well, LunAI knew he didn’t like it, so she wouldn’t do it to him, would she? Or would she try to socialize him and engineer his responses so that he would enjoy it? She might say that his introversion was one thing that made him unhappy, so counteracting it to make him more social would better satisfy his values in the long run…

Pen’s journal jingled; he drew it out and it flipped automatically to the current page.

ACHIEVEMENTS

Getting into the Spirit of Things
Go with the flow!
+1000 bits

Rendezvous with Dweomer
Cast your first spell!
+1600 bits

Declining Honors
Your modesty is its own reward.
+0 bits

Defeat Wandering Monster (1/????)
Make life a kickass adventure!
+5000 bits

Overanalyzing the Spirit of Things
It’s just your Dao. You should really just relax.
-5998 bits

Pen blinked, shook his head, then grinned, enjoying his laugh on the inside to avoid having to explain it to his friends. Okay, okay, I get it… He was still smiling as various bystanders stepped up in small groups to thank him for his assistance. With his mood considerably improved, he succeeded in being gracious and polite to them, instead of appearing sullen, distracted and embarrassed.

As the guardsponies gathered around the enormous monster, discussing how to proceed, Snowflash suddenly jumped up, standing atop Pen’s back, and peered over his head at the crowd. “Ah, the sleep of monsters brings forth Reason,” she quipped.

And indeed, strolling sedately from the direction of the Library came two scholasts in flowing robes, one tall, gaunt, austere, and marching with the unconscious dignity of authority, the other short, round, and jittery with the flustered jumpiness of the career fussbudget. Snowflash jumped down from Pen’s back and introduced him to Sophistic Reason, the Head Librarian, and Semantic Haze, the Chief Archivist.

Sophistic Reason dipped her long neck delicately down and droned out a turgid sesquipedalian sentence into Semantic Haze’s ear, who translated it to the multitude in bursts of comprehension. “Our most sincere regrets… there was an entanglement… during a reindexing operation with attendant… recursion that accidentally spawned… a dim parody… of sentience. We thank you… for your… efforts… and will take control… from… here.”

Blithely, the two strode up to the Thesaurus and swiftly dismantled the beast into its lexical components. The spine, back, head, tail, joints and appendix, along with both stories, were carefully preserved and placed with reverence into an enormous sack, and the remaining parts were immediately remaindered. They bade the crowd austere farewells and sauntered back to the Library, the sack bobbing above Semantic Haze’s sturdy shoulders like a pendant dirigible.

As Pen stood agog and watched the breaking down of concrete objects into abstractions that were then concreted once again, Snowflash approached him, using her hornfield to juggle five chunks of rubble as large as her head. “Hey Pen, want to help us to put some things right?” she said.

“You mean rebuilding?” said Pen. The idea hadn’t been promoted to his conscious attention because two contrasting assumptions had both ruled it out—either the reconstruction process modeled that which he was used to on Earth, in which case it wasn’t a project to undertake lightly, or the buildings could be immediately restored from backup, requiring no special effort.

Pen soon learned that buildings in his shard of Equestria Online came apart into distinctly shaped segments and chunks, and any dust that was thrown up was mostly for show and did not represent a permanent loss of material. Reassembling the bits was pleasantly like solving a giant 3D puzzle; one simply pressed matching pieces together, concentrated, and the pieces united with a small shimmer along the seam and a solid click. Pen took to the work with genuine delight, sorting pieces into rough piles according to color and consistency, then finding the largest blocks that contained edge pieces and joining these together. He and Snowflash worked for a while on one tower with their TK, while Iron and a group of Earths restacked another, calling upon Pegasi to touch up the highest parts.

“So this is what you guys do for fun around here, eh?” said Pen as he pieced a window back together. “Just so I have some kind of idea, how often does this sort of thing happen? Like, how many times did you have to perform a heroic action of this level and wind up rebuilding substantial chunks of Canterlot, oh, in the last six months?”

“Uhm…” Snowflash rolled up her eyes and rapidly tapped her forehooves on the ground. “Eleven times, I think…” She trailed off uncertainly; Pen was staring at her hooves in baffled consternation. He lifted his head slowly to meet her eyes, looking as if he had been hit between the eyes with a poleaxe of silly putty.

“Did you just…” he blinked hard and shook his head. “Did you just stamp on the ground in order to count?”

“Huh?” she said. “Well, I wasn’t really counting that way; it’s just a placeholder. Audial and muscle-memory reinforcement. Why, did you not have to do that in Monkeyworld?”

Pen’s snout wrinkled. “No! Nothing like that…! Uhm… Well, sometimes we’d use our fingers, for visual… reinforcement… Oh. Argh. Great gods and hairy little pigs!” Pen’s face had twisted into something like an angry grimace, but now he suddenly brayed with laughter. He seized Snowflash and hugged her as one might cling to a point of doctrine in a time of challenged faith, laughing maniacally.

She held him tightly and stroked him, giggling, though with some concern. “…Are you okay, Pen?”

“I’m fine. Oh, Snow, I’m sorry. It’s not you; your territory just interacts in strange ways with my previous maps.” He let go, and looked at her with eyes shining in merriment. “And, you know, it’s… It’s Fun this way. Luna seems to know what she’s doing.”

Snowflash smiled; Pen was certainly making a lot of his tendency for Luna worship. In her opinion, ascribing every aspect of one’s Harmonic interactions with life to the direct intervention of the Moon Goddess was taking things a bit far, but as long as it made Pen happy, she didn’t mind it. “I understand. You know, I think everypony else here has the situation in hand; shall we go get some breakfast?”

Now that she mentioned it, Pen noticed that he was no longer just hungry, he was famished. “I’m with you. Let’s grab Iron and get out of here!”

—=§=—

“So this is the Manger in a Strange Land,” said Pen, casting his eyes over the buffet, with its bacon bark and roast-pork apples and literal beefsteak tomatoes. “I hope that the cabbage still tastes like cabbage.” He sampled a crisp, sweetbitter leaf, nodded, then loaded two wedges on his ornate silver tray. He turned to Snow, who was on line behind him. “Is there a charge for any of this?”

She paused, holding a tongful of salad-tree bark. “Not at all. This is the basic fare provided to all and sundry at no charge. If free food didn’t exist, some people might get hungry, you know.”

“So, this buffet is free, as in ‘free beer.’ And I don’t have to satisfy any pony’s values, or engage in a labor trade, or challenge the chef to a round of interpretive dancing, or wear a mask while playing a musical instrument and demand the food that suits my station. The food is just here for anyone to take whenever they want.”

“You have, most verbosely, elucidated the truth of the matter. Why, is something wrong?”

Pen sighed and rolled his eyes. “Well, it’s disconcerting to find that There Is Such A Thing As A Free Lunch. TISATAAFL just doesn’t have the same ring to it.”

“’Tis a toffel?”

“’Tis a Teufel, rather. And a devilish thing it is, indeed,” said Pen.

Snow winked, and took up some eggs mimosa and put them on Pen’s tray. “It’s your yolk to bear, then.”

Pen was about to bite his tongue, but bit a raw potato instead, eating it as if it were an apple. He quickly completed his selections and went to sit down. Iron had already seated himself atop a firm oblong tuffet at a low hexagonal table, and he was playing with some metal forks as he waited, using his talent to curl the tines into baroque shapes.

Pen’s tray bore a selection of meatfruit, heaps of ‘true’ fruits and veggies, and a slice of something called flapdoodle casserole. While he’d chosen a wide range of samples to learn what was available, his companions were already familiar with the buffet and had simply taken their favorites; Iron was having a salmonchoke fillet with herb butter and sprouts, and Snowflash had augmented her spinach salad with slices of grilled chickenpear. Pen watched quizzically as Iron spread butter over a huge stalk of Brussels sprouts, then took it up, holding each end in his fetlocks, and gnawed it as if it was a giant ear of corn. Pen resolved to try it that way next time around.

Pen started on his own food, and noticed that degree of hunger seemed to have an effect on the food’s taste, or at least his perception of the same. When he was deeply hungry and eating to sate it, the food tasted good and filling. When the deep urge was gone and he was eating more for pleasure, it was then that the flavors seemed to bloom in his mouth and each bite became a miniature meal in itself, so that when he bit into a true apple, he tasted first the astringent skin and felt the smooth texture on his tongue, and the burst of tart juice as his teeth pierced the skin and the firm flesh broke apart with a crisp snap, and the flood of flavor as he chewed it. The sensations were all separable experiences and he noticed them at a level of detail that his earthly palate had been unable to resolve.

He had not yet adopted the pony way of eating the entire apple, stem, seeds and all, so he returned the core to his tray and gazed idly out through the open archways towards the plaza. He could see the multitude reassembling, vendors restoring their carts to order and presenting their wares, ponies laughing and chattering, or sitting on benches to read, or singing. A touch of existential dread returned to him, understandable for a recent emigrant to a new and peculiar land. He did not fear for his safety or security, for he trusted LunAI to keep her word there, but the multitude of possible paths into the future were too plentiful to fit into any schema or plan he could conceive at present. He knew that he could just relax and these problems would likely resolve themselves in time, but part of him still wanted to worry over it, as if on arrival at the gates of Paradise, two officious angels had emerged to ask “Just what exactly do you intend to do here?”

Snowflash ate the last of the plum-sized strawberries in her salad, then turned to him. “Oh, Pen, I was telling my friend Raven about how you fixed my gramophone, and she said her daughter had a toy that needed repair, so I may have gotten you some business.”

Pen recalled fixing the gramophone yesterday; it had been the first project he’d undertaken in his new workspace. The problem had been easy to find once he opened the gramophone; a broken coil spring which he had asked Iron to reforge. Pen had studied the rest of the mechanism as he waited. The coil spring was attached to a small gizmo that looked like the inertial damping weights that were often attached as regulators to the tops of rotating shafts on steam engines. What was this item? He went to take hold of it, and suddenly the weights spun gently, then faster the harder he pulled on it. Suddenly illumination struck—they were meant to apply tension to the spring, and they reacted to magic. They must be meant to make the gramophone self winding in the ambient magical field… It was Pen’s first encounter with the physics that LunAI had set up to underlie Pen’s world, and as interesting as it was, it was also somewhat disconcerting…

As Pen ruminated on Snow’s comment, but only figuratively, a shadow fell briefly over the table, followed by a small breeze that fluttered the corners of the napkins. Pen turned around. Before him stood a brilliantly white Pegasus mare, bright enough to make Snowflash’s coat look bluish in comparison. She folded her wings and guided forward a small creamsicle-themed filly who had a Wonderbolts doll lying on her back.

Snowflash leaped up and hugged the newcomer. “Oooh, how great to see you! Raven, this is Pen Poiser; Pen, Raven.”

“Ah!” said Pen. “Pleased to meet you, Raven. And along with the pleasure of meeting you as a person, I am also enchanted to encounter a white raven, which serves as additional confirmation to my hypothesis that no Apples are blue…”

Raven laughed. “Oh, I bet you say that to almost none of the girls! But I wonder if my daughter Corvie might take a moment of your time…” Penn nodded, and Raven stepped to the side, nudging her daughter forward with an encouraging wing. She was shying, and tear tracks glinted in the fur on her cheeks.

“Go ahead, ask him,” said her mother gently.

Corvie closed her huge brilliant eyes, gulped, then straightened her posture and stepped up to Pen in a manner he found absolutely adorable. “Mr… Mr. Poiser…” she said. “My Rorie used to fly with me, but he won’t fly any more… Can you help?”

Pen remembered to keep his smile up as his analytic mindset took over. “Of course. Let me see him…” Pen took the mechanical Wonderbolt doll, a Roarin’ Soarin, up in his field, lifting it from the pensive filly’s back. “Hmm… this calls for a bit of surgery. Don’t worry, I’ve never lost a patient. Nurse Iron, scalpel, please.”

Iron Croupier solemnly hoofed over a butterknife, then exchanged a brief glance with Snowflash that Pen was too abstracted to notice. Pen placed the doll on the table as Snowflash levitated a napkin to serve as a privacy curtain. Pen undid the outer garment over the toy’s belly, and studied the folds of furry cloth that overlapped and concealed the mechanism. “Hmm, I think this calls for retraction,” he muttered.

“Oh, okay.” said Snowflash. “‘I entirely regret my ill-considered comment, and hope that you will not take offense.’ How’s that?”

Pen winked at her. “That’s a good try! Nurse Iron? That… Veeblefetzer, please.”

Iron passed over one of the deformed forks. Pen lifted up the access seam with the butterknife, and used the fork to hold the flap of cloth open, exposing the inner mechanism. The darkened power gem was at minimum charge, and the wing linkages were squeaky. Pen decided to address the smaller problem first, to give him time to consider the larger one. “Have we any lubricant handy?” he said, musing.

Snowflash solemnly passed him the butter dish.

Pen raised an eyebrow at her. “Is this really what I should use?”

She gave a genuine smile. “It’s the very best butter, Pen.”

“But… won’t it go bad?”

She looked puzzled for a moment, then brightened. “Oh! Butter can get fermented, but only when somepony wants it to do so. It doesn’t spoil otherwise. This is almost pure butterfat.”

“Ghee!” said Pen “Thanks for the clarification.” He spread some butter on the linkages as he considered why the gem had drained so far. A surge sent from his horn directly into the gem raised its charge, and the gem held it, so that wasn’t likely to be the issue.

Pen next tested the Ambient Magic Gatherer by heightening the thaumic field surrounding it; it spun very slowly and reluctantly. Pen lifted the retaining clip, then pulled the AMG from its spindle, and found the problem—a shred of furred fabric had gotten wound up inside the mechanism. Pen removed the scrap, then cleaned and lubricated the axle. He slid the AMG back on and heightened his hornfield around it, and watched in satisfaction as it spun and provided thauma to the capacitor and power gems.

He trimmed some loose scraps of fabric from the body cavity to prevent a recurrence, then redressed the doll and turned to present it to Corvie, who squealed with joy as it took to the air and fluttered around her head. She flung herself at Pen and hugged him, thanking him over and over, and Pen got a nice warm hug from Raven as well, leaving him blushing. Mother and daughter took their leave and took to the sky, the Soarin doll darting around them and uttering its confident catch phrases.

Pen’s journal dinged. He didn’t bother to look at it; he knew that his bit counter had gone up. But something still bothered him. He felt the presence of a sardonic observer at the back of his head, lifting one metaphorical eyebrow.

“Well, that was pretty conveniently timed…” Pen suddenly realized he’d said it out loud.

Snow and Iron both looked at him and nodded, with open expressions and apparently genuine smiles.

“…Hmmm. Perhaps your sarcasmometers need an adjustment?” Pen drawled dryly.

Iron rolled his eyes. “As if mine would ever need adjusting. It’s in perfect condition…”

“And mine just sees constant use,” said Snow. “I’d have no time to send it in for maintenance. I can’t even find the time to return it to my bedside drawer, where it would gather inches of dust…”

Pen laughed even as he facehoofed. “Okay, folks… please have some pity on the weird alien monkeypony. Just tell me—is life here always… so fricking obvious?”

“No, not always, Pen” said Iron. “Interactions with Harmony can get very hairy and abstruse, but…” He and Snowflash looked at him expectantly, Iron gesturing with his hoof to encourage Pen to finish.

Pen sighed. “…only when it Satisfies Values. Right. I’m really not used to this sort of thing; where I come from, the Dao is so silent, you can’t tell if it’s really there or not.” Pen frowned. “But if it should ideally get less obvious to satisfy my values, why did it ever get more obvious in the first place?”

“You’re probably being given a smoother ride than usual, Pen, as befits a new arrival. And, perhaps, it’s also so we can have this conversation. Shall we take a walk and talk about it on the way? There’s something else we promised to show you, and if we don’t get going soon we’ll miss it…”

“Sure, let’s go.” The three stashed some fruits in their bags for later, and Iron paused by one of the vendors outside the commissary to buy a large bag of toffee pecans. Each one was huge, almost the size of an entire walnut, and they had a sweet satisfying buttery crunch with just the right touch of bitterness from the nut within. Pen smiled inwardly again; being effectively incorporeal, he was officially done with dieting forever and could eat as many of them as he wanted. Aside from the energy needed to power the calculations LunAI used to render his experience of eating them, they were calorie free. Pen wondered if any of his shard inhabitants were even able to get fat.

The sun was descending towards distant mountains even as the very tip of the crescent moon peeked above the horizon. The three walked back along the esplanade, parallel to the cloudy suburb, munching for a while without talking. Around them, the day vendors were packing up their stalls as unicorn guardsponies strolled along the way, igniting the street lamps with flickers of their horns. The night vendors began to display their wares, hawking fanciful gemstones, enchanted crystalline glow-worm bracelets and shimmering butterfly brooches, illuminated bookmarks to permit reading at night, magic brushes that enabled one to draw neon lines in the air, perfumes of distant lands, deep-fried carrots and candied mushrooms, tessellated and tasseled carpets, exotic lanterns that spattered colors in all directions, wingcloaks, conical wire cages to decorate one’s horn and enhance spellcasting, hoverboards, drums and horns and stringed instruments of all descriptions…

“So, returning to the prior conversation…” said Pen. “You suggest that I’m in newb mode now, and thus I’m being cut some Slack. ‘Bob’ Dobbins has slanted the Luck Plane at a gentle angle so I can climb aboard; the moon smileth upon me in encouragement, and my life henceforth will be just as much of a kickass adventure, or abstruse and mysterious puzzle, as I want it to be at any particular time.”

“That’s partly correct, Pen.” said Snowflash, “If you recall our conversation earlier when the Thesaurus attacked, Harmony is always listening to you. But…”

“But it can’t be as simple as always satisfying values,” said Pen. “For instance, it surely didn’t satisfy little Corvie’s values to have her toy stop working…”

“Right. There’s a whole lot more to Harmony than that,” said Iron. “Like a complex wave, it’s built up from smaller Harmonics. Multiple lifelines, ups and downs, ample and frequent…”

“It doesn’t mean that everything always goes right for everypony all the time.” cut in Snowflash. “Good Harmonic solutions don’t just fall into your lap, you have to work hard for them. Sometimes you’re on a peak, sometimes in a trough…”

“…and often some ponies seem out of sync, but it all adds up to the best possible world!” finished Iron.

Thank you, Dr. Pangloss, thought Pen, but went for the cheap pun instead. “…So, in general, one works and hopes for the sines to be propitious,” he said. “But in the end, underneath it all, Lun… the world is making problems for us just so we can solve them.”

“Sounds about right!” smiled Iron, and Snow nodded cheerfully.

“That…” Pen closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “…doesn’t bother you at all…?”

“Nope! We love to solve problems. Don’t you?”

“I do… I really do. I just wonder… what I’m solving the problems for?”

Snow and Iron exchanged a very long glance. Pen did not notice; he had paused, his attention taken by the glorious view before him. They had reached the walls lining the esplanade at the castle outskirts. The Pegasus suburb did not obscure the view here, and the spring countryside, far below, spread out for miles to the horizon, beautifully lit by the setting sun. Close at hand was a series of park benches, and ponies were already settling themselves and chattering in excitement. Pen glanced at his friends, and they nodded; this was where they meant to take him.

They sat nestled together upon a bench, before the dizzying upward sweep of Mount Canter. The peak that bore the tiny glen where Pen had spent his first night of forever was visible, lined in red by the sunset, and Pen followed the trail with his eyes to the constant cascade of the Stream of Riches.

The sun slowly and gently settled between two distant mountains, and gorgeous red-copper light streamed over the fields and forests and gleamed in the lakes and rivers, and before Pen the Stream of Riches caught fire in glorious gold, radiant with brilliant light that lined the spires of Canterlot with shining highlights and sparkled in the windows and suffused the mists of the cloud neighborhood. The beauty seized him and his heart welled with joy and a nameless yearning. On Earth, he had never gone to see the similar phenomenon at Yosemite’s Horsetail Falls, but he felt amply repaid with interest for all he had missed in his prior time. This was a life with beautiful rewards, and he was here, and it was not slated to ever end.

As Pen watched raptly, parts of his mind wandered on their own trails. Pen’s visual imagination constructed a scene for him, and he idly chose to follow it. As if he were floating in a barrel in the stream, he visualized pouring along with the flaming water as it roared from the precipice at the mountaintop and gushed through the pliant air towards the rocks below, where it burst up into silver sparkles and roiling mists that spawned multiple rainbows.

Just before Pen’s imaginary barrel would have shattered on the jagged rocks, he changed his path and swooped up into the sky, hovering before the red-lit mountain as the glorious light faded slowly, darkening to the blues of evening…

Snow sighed. “You know, Pen, I could be wrong… but you’re almost acting as if you think this is just about satisfying you, or helping Corvie.”

“Eh?” Pen’s daydream broke, though the Reichenbach remained illuminated before him by a trick of the light, a filament of fire persisting against the deep blues and grays of the mountainside.

“There’s more to it than what’s on the surface, Pen. There’s a ripple effect of satisfaction. Raven is satisfied because she got a problem resolved for her daughter. I am satisfied because I could help her by referring her to your services and expertise. Iron is satisfied because you’ve just been here for two days and you’re already finding a place in the community with your mechanical skills. As your herdmates, we are satisfied because we’re happy for you, and also because when one of us does a good deed, it reflects to the credit of us all.”

“So……still, it’s a big satisfaction… circle jerk. What does it all come down to in the end?”

It’s all a light show to keep you placated and distracted, dummy. Pen clenched his teeth and shook his head, burying the thought…

“What does it come to? A whole bunch of satisfied ponies, Pen…” Snowflash could feel the tenseness in Pen’s body. She drew a deep breath and tried another tack.

“Look. Pen… Corvie’s happy. Her mom is happy. We’re happy.”

“Yes…”

“Are you happy?”

Pen’s inner being still glowed with golden light. The evening breeze carried scents of the cooling world, of forests and fresh-mown hay and the icy mists of the waterfall, and these mingled with Pen’s own scent and that of his herdmates, making a sort of fugue of pleasant odors that comforted him deeply. The warmth of his friends surrounded and strengthened him, and all the world about him was peaceful and enchanting. A beam of white light rose suddenly from a balcony on a tall blue tower, and Pen could just make out the silhouette of Luna, catching the distant horn of the crescent moon and lifting it gently above the mountains… A thin crescent it was, and as the sky deepened to darkness and revealed the colorful stars, the moon itself served as a smile, beaming brightly down upon Pen.

Pen breathed deeply, and nestled more snugly between his friends, their warm furry flanks surrounding him with comfort and reassurance. “…Yes. Yes, I’m happy…”

“So…? Is there really a problem, in the end?” said Snowflash.

“What worthier way is there to spend your life than in making others happy?” said Iron Croupiere.

Well, that was a good question, wasn’t it? Saving all the humans? LunAI was seeing to that in her own special way. Making new discoveries about the world? She’s way better than me at it; what’s the point? Increasing my understanding of the universe? Love of learning for its own sake…?

Or for finding a way out? To where?

And why should I want to leave? Just when I’ve found–

Them. They were always there with him, supporting him with kind loving words, or surprising him with hugs and chocolates. And as lovers, they were almost literally a dream come true; their needs and lusts meshed perfectly with his own. He’d once been convinced that love was a kind of thing that didn’t happen to people like him, but they were wakening it in him, slowly but surely. He already found it hard to imagine spending a night in bed without them snuggling up with him, or holding him to calm him after a bad dream. Falling in love with them was as natural as breathing, and as inexorable, no matter how much his brain cautioned his heart to be careful.

He knew it was happening, and he couldn’t stop it. He didn’t want to stop it. It would be foolish to try. But he still stood, paused at the brink, waiting…

Pen shook his head; he was looping again. He employed a favorite visualization technique of his, imagining a wave of cool water passing through his brain, refreshing and calming him. He opened his eyes, and saw their friendly faces to each side of him, gazing at him with love and concern.

He sighed, and consciously used a common pony gesture for the first time, tucking his nose under Snow’s chin, then Iron’s, to reassure them. “I’m sorry, guys. I don’t want to be a whiney-butt or a downer. This is all just like a story book to me, and it’s hard for me to believe it’s all happening. But…” Pen suddenly couldn’t meet either of their eyes. “I know that you’ll have patience with me.”

“Of course we will!” They scooched closer on either side of him and hugged him tightly.

Pen shook his head gently, staring off at the city and the hills and the asterisms that filled the night, which he assumed were procedurally generated. “You guys think you get it. But I don’t think you really do. I mean, I know it. Like I knew that I’d love Iron’s cooking. Like I used to know the back of my hand. Like I know my own heartbeat, I know it.”

“We know it too. It’s really okay, Pen.”

“But…” Pen bit his tongue, closed his eyes, and let their embrace become his entire world.

Author's Note

And by the way…

There’s nothing I’d rather say…

Than

Q

Thank you. All of you. :twilightsmile:

The Soul as a Chosen Landscape [FiO Contest Entry]

What has gone before:

Pen Poiser, a Natural Intelligence (NI) and former human who has been recently assimilated by the world-optimizing CelestAI (LunAI, in Pen’s case), is settling into the embrace of a tiny world that was designed for his satisfaction. Pen is the sort who enjoys a puzzle, and his Shard of heaven seems to contain as much to perturb him as to delight him. Meanwhile, Pen’s friends and lovers strive to figure him out, but Pen appears to be harboring the seeds of his own discontent.

”Each to his creed,” said Yaotl. “So do men choose between hope and despair.”
“Yet creeds mean very little,” Coth answered the dark god, still speaking almost gently. “The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. So I elect for neither label…”
―James Branch Cabell - The Silver Stallion : A Comedy of Redemption

When I walk along with two others, they may serve me as my teachers. I will select their good qualities and follow them, their bad qualities and avoid them.
―Confucius

What other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!
―Nathaniel Hawthorne - The House of the Seven Gables

The night sky passed in pageantry overhead, with Van Gogh swirls and constellations that invited one to connect the dots in increasingly intricate patterns. The natural fireworks were celebration enough, and no bursts of light and sound filled the sky. The spatter and chatter instead took place in the crowd as the night shift came out in full ringing swing. Firedancers swirled miniature comets at the ends of silver chains, drummers pounded rhythms on carved logs, accompanied by richly strumming guitars and fluttering pipes and flutes, and one massive juggler was doing a routine where he juggled three other jugglers, each of the smaller ponies juggling a bowling ball, a wine glass, and a progressively dwindling number of apples. Bits of bitten apples showered the admiring crowd.

Pen Poiser sat at a cafe table on the sidewalk, his maroon pelt and parchment mane outlined and haloed by dancing flames and magicka auras. Snowflash’s ice-pale coat glinted with neon highlights, Iron Croupiere’s massive presence, cloaked in sedate gray, showed a deeper sheen instead of highlights, throwing the shadows under his muscles into deeper relief. Pen’s human standards of beauty had largely gone dormant by now, he was now entirely enchanted by the elegant curve of Snow’s snout and her horsey whiskers, and Iron’s sturdy frame made Pen’s heart flutter in a parallel way. Through the lens of the Ponypad his friends and herdmates had seemed show-cute, bright eyed and witty companions; here, surrounded by their alluring natural scent and confronted with their three-dimensional presence, seeing them in detail at whatever level of resolution LunAI saw fit to render for Pen’s senses, their physicality was simply undeniable and it was easy for Pen to forget how the curve of a human thigh or soft spreading breasts had once so intensely affected him. He idly sketched some of the old familiar s-curves in the pools of dripped coffee on the marble tabletop, then smeared his hoof over the wet tan lines.

It was only his second night here, but it felt as if years had passed. So much had happened since LunAI deconstructed his physical brain and placed him here, a level further away from reality. Since their odd encounter on the first day, he hadn’t heard much from her; he wondered if she planned to follow up with him at any point, and if he would be asked to fill in a satisfaction survey.

As Pen sat in reflection, a half-bitten apple rolled by his seat and under the table and the music in the street got louder. He started hearing tunes he recognized out of the corner of his ears. “Whoa!” he exclaimed, suddenly perceiving another one.

“Whoo-aho, listen to the music, out in the street…!” chimed in Snowflash

“Where silver horses run down moonbeams, all the time…!” joined Iron.

“Down on the corner, ‘til dawn-light smiles on you!” finished Pen. “Oh wow. Who’s that on guitar?” said Pen, pointing to a fellow wielding a blue shimmering guitar with intensive mastery.

“Oh, that’s Slow Hooves. It’s not a descriptive name; you can hear how fast he plays when he wants. But it’s not an ironic name either—”

Pen grinned and held up a hoof. “Ah, wait don’t tell me… When he breaks a string during a song, he doesn’t swap in another guitar and keep going; he stops playing and changes the string on the spot. And the audience does a slow, mesmeric clap to nudge the time along while he retunes it.”

“Uh… yeah.” She looked at him as though a pair of mice had suddenly climbed out of his mouth to do a fandango on his nose. “If you had to ask his name, Pen, how’d you know that already?”

Pen assumed a mysterious mien. “I read it on a box of oatmeal.” He was still trying to figure out how, or even whether, to explain to them that their world was an optimized parody of Earth culture.

“Well, aren’t you just being a big obfuscated puzzle today,” said Iron with twinkling eye. “By the way, Pen, just curious about something you said before when you were repairing that little mechanical doll... “Don’t worry, I’ve never lost a patient.” What’d you mean by losing?”

Pen opened his mouth to speak and his voice stopped. His breath burned in his lungs and his face flushed. He had always been a terrible liar, so much so that he rarely bothered to try and had little practice.

“Well, maybe if he did a bad job, the patient would leave and go to another doctor?” queried Snow. “Was that something like it?”

Their friendly eyes bored into his; he closed his mouth with an effort and swallowed. He was trying not to talk about death around them, but… Pen’s language was full of death. Maybe he was overthinking this as he did with everything else? Wouldn’t LunAI have foreseen this conversation happening and equipped his herdmates to handle the concept? They couldn’t be that fragile, mentally. But Snow had reacted with such horror that time in the library, when she learned about the void that filled the vast spaces between the stars and suffused every atom. He didn’t want to see that look on her sweet loving face ever again...

It didn’t help that there was a fourth entity listening to the conversation, and that didn’t include LunAI.

—Isn’t that lovely. You care about them so much and want to spare their frail little psyches from the shock of harsh reality. Meanwhile, it’s apparently too much trouble for you to direct a kind word my way.

——I can’t remember the last time you had a kind word for me. A little quid pro quo, here?

—If you consider all the times I’ve stepped in to help you out...

——Had I a nickel for every time you butted in, I’d have 0 cents, adjusted for inflation. Here’s your pity card back, now butt out!

—Ugh, it shows you how much he thinks of me, tossing me to the side like that. He doesn’t even consider me a chapter in his life. Just a footnote.

I’ve been with him since the beginning. But he’s selected his own society, and shut the door on me.

He has to deal with me, though. He’s broken every promise he’s ever made to me, to himself. But I will make damn sure he holds to our covenant. She knows about me, of course. My only shred of hope lies in no one acknowledging it.

He was in control of the mouth. He asked to be immigrated by that world-destroying monster.

He gave consent to her.

I never did.

Pen blinked. His friends were still looking at him. They had been engaged in balancing straws on his nose while he stared into space and had built a small lighthouse; Snow was in the process of reaching out slowly to add the roof.

Everyone burst into giggles as Pen sneezed the straws away. The two of them were wonderful, he thought; they didn’t take offense when he zoned out and found funny things to do while waiting. Not like... well.

“Hey, Pen,” said Iron with a quick chin nuzzle. “If that’s a sensitive subject, we can drop it. You okay?”

Pen remembered how often he’d set the Ponypad aside to go do life things in the old days. He no longer had that excuse, Equestria Online was his life thing now. But he’d made another promise, and he was going to hold on to it as long as he could.

“Yes, I’m fine. Maybe we can untangle that some other time.”

“Hey, Pen, why don’t you just draw us something happy instead?” Snowflash winked

“Happy? I can do happy, sure...” Pen eyed the streaks on the table, but opened his sidebag and took out his journal instead. He flipped past the achievement records and found a blank page as he drew forth the stylus from its storage spot in the spine. He paused, adjusting his mental map to drawing without moving his arm, then began some construction lines, circles with crosses to indicate the center of the face, working them up into three dimensional volume, glancing up at his friends periodically. In a few minutes, he had a working sketch of Snowflash and Iron playing dominoes while Pen stared vacuously into space, a line of drool descending from his mouth.

Pen was about to show them the result, but his journal suddenly seemed a bit small to him. Absently, he grabbed the opposite corners and pulled; the pages rumples slightly and the book skewed, but the page remained the same. Shrugging, he handed the journal around to his friends to receive their approbation and they proclaimed it adorable.

“Were you trying to tear the page out of the book, there?” asked Iron. “You can just slide along the page near the spine to detach it...” He demonstrated by popping Pen’s drawing out of the journal, then placing it back inside.

“No, I was just experimenting. I wanted to make the journal larger.”

“Huh. So was that how books worked, where you come from?” said Snow.

“Uh...” The inner skin of Pen’s ears flushed red. “No, they didn’t. But we did have devices where you could do that with an image. Hmm, I wonder...”

There was a sense in which he had the advantage of the ponies in his shard; he had an outsider’s perspective on what LunAI would find to be computationally feasible. She had to make the world work a certain way to emulate the cartoon, but she also had to make it work so that it would satisfy him to live here. Should it not follow that the way the world worked would mirror his mind at some level?

There was no computational reason why a virtual sketchpad shouldn’t work that way, and by having one in his hands, he could perhaps start to grok the code that was underlying things. No need to take it all at once. Baby steps…

“You know,” said Pen, “I’m going to go out on a limb and just be weird about this. I want a really nice custom sketchpad. I was looking at one last night in the bookstore, and it didn’t have all the qualities I thought it could have. I have a magical one in mind. So... maybe Luna will just give me one?”

“You’re going to write to Luna and ask her to give you a sketchpad, when you can go to any art store and pick one up for a few bits?” asked Iron with lifted brow. “Sounds like fun!”

Pen winked. “Sure, let’s be bold. Nothing to lose by asking, right? Now, how do I go about this?”

Snow set down her coffee and smiled. “Just compose the letter in your journal, and I’ll help you send it. I really do want to see how this works for you!”

Pen set to composing the letter, chuckling to himself as his herdmates read over his shoulder.

Princess Luna, Royal Diarch of Equestria, Most Grand High Exalted Mystic Ruler, Keeper of the Tides, Harsh Mistress of the Sidereal Realms, Dread Dame of the Demesnes of Gidiap and Whoe, High Rumptetump of Basse Aphasia, Omnipotentate of Cyberia, the Great Gadzooks and the Grand Ah-Whoom, et caetera, et caetera, I beseech of you a boon of a magical sketchpad. It should hold copies of all drawings I make, including the material that was scanned to bring with me from the Terrestrial Realms, and I should be able to catalog and index them via a simple interface. I should be able, by pulling its corners, to enlarge it to at least poster size and shrink it to notepad size, without degrading the resolution of any images I have drawn. It should have unlimited pages, like unto the Book of Sand, and I should be able to tear out a page to give another pony a copy of any drawing I make, while retaining the original for myself. Please hear and grant my prayer.

P.S. Also a cornucopia bag and a portable hole, if you please.

Snowflash took the finished screed, rolled it into a scroll and held it over a small green glass capsule. She smashed the capsule with her hoof, and a small burst of dragonfire emerged and burnt the scroll into a tendril of magical smoke which soared off into the sky.

“There it goes,” she said. “Now, please explain a few things. Gidiap? And Whoe?”

“Yes. For Luna sayeth to this pony, go, and he goeth, and to another stop, and she stoppeth…”

“You are very weird, and I love you for it. And what sort of country is Aphasia?”

“Uhm… I really can’t say.”

A minute later, another tendril snaked down and puffed into a scroll. Pen caught it before it hit the ground, unrolled it, and read it aloud as his friends cuddled close to look over his shoulders: “‘My faithful student…’”

—Oh, here we go. I’ve always encouraged him to do better, reminded him when he was getting distracted, pushed him to excel as his grades slipped. What do I get for it? He loathes me.

A little “let’s enroll you in fun school” malarkey from her, and he’s eating it right up!

“Huh?” Snowflash boggled. “We knew you to be an honored guest and friend to Her Highness, but… did she really write student⁉”

“Yes… yes, she did. ‘My faithful student, the boon that thou wishest is trivially easy for me to grant thee; however, thou’lt be better served shouldst thou learn to create such an object for thyself. What therefore I have done is to send thee a basic sheaf of papers and inks to serve thy present needs, and enrolled thee in the Royal College of magic, where thou shalt begin courses to bring thee up to speed on any rough areas of thy knowledge, while I myself shall further thy education in matters of magic that thou holdest deepest within thy heart. Classes begin next week, an thou findest it convenient to convene then. Thou shouldst in the meantime enjoy the remainder of thy vacation with thy friends, and take such magical instruction as Snowflash shall provide thee, thou’lt find her a most worthy teacher of the same.’

P.S. The cornucopia bag thou must craft for thyself, but I have sent thee a portable hole, which thou mayest claim an you have the wit to find it.” As he finished the letter, an unresolved tail of smoke popped a sketchpad into existence, which fell to the ground.

“Luna be praised!” she shouted, hugging him tightly. “She’s taken you as her personal student. This is pretty damned cool, Pen!”

“I like the way you gamble, Pen," said Iron. "Our little herd’s prestige will shoot through the roof! Congratulations!” He wrapped his huge forelegs around them and hugged them both.

Pen was deeply squeezed and more than a little touched, and somewhat unsettled. He started to zone out again, but succeeded in hiding his frown from his herdmates. He waited a decent period of time and gently untangled himself.

“Now, where’s that hole?” said Iron. “I see she sent you a sketchpad, and a couple of pens...”

“I thought we were Pen’s couple,” said Snow with a fake pout. She paged through the sketchpad and found nothing holey.

Pen hummed as he looked under the table at the half-bitten apple that had fallen there earlier. “Let’s see...” He snagged a fresh apple, then split it with his hornfield. It gave a crisp crack and drops of juice fell from it. “Okay, here I have half an apple and a half... If I put them together, I should get... a whole.” He pressed the halves together, and was rewarded with one apple. After a moment of staring in which nothing happened, he shrugged and gave a half each to his friends, who chewed them slowly.

“Nice try,” said Iron.

Snow handed Pen the sketchpad. “Maybe you can see something here that I didn’t, Pen?”

Pen flipped through the pages, the paper was thick, creamy and smooth and his artist’s heart was pleased at how it felt under his hooves. He considered the issue. Part of the problem in art was often in trying to convincingly render things that weren’t there, suggesting instead of drawing in detail.

Pen took up one of the styli and, staying at the perimeter of the page, doodled his way around, drawing nothing specific, but filling in the ground around... nothing in particular, just a void at the middle of the page where he was not depicting anything, just not drawing anything in that particular area...

By the time the margin of the page had been doodled full of arabesques, a shimmering aura appeared at the page’s center. Pen blinked, and when he looked again... There was a hole in the page.

Within was an immense study, office and artistic workspace, with color themes of silver, blue and black. Luna was at the center, sitting at a worktable and wearing a monocle with adjustable magnification; an intricate golden mechanism lay in pieces on the table before her, and behind her on a golden dais rested a large obsidian vessel with rims of silver. Luna looked up at him and smiled, then waved her head, beckoning him through.

Pen glanced up, somewhat embarrassed. “Uhm… Folks, I believe I’m being Summoned.”

“Ooh!” cried Snow. “She must want to go over the details with you. Go ahead, Pen! We’ll catch up with you later!”

Pen probed with his honrfield and then with his hoof at the hole, watching as it sank inside. He laid the paper upon the table, then thrust his head inside. Snowflash and Iron watched as he wiggled his way through the hole, and got stuck halfway through, hind legs kicking and tail thrashing. He strained harder, and as his tail finally vanished they sighed and spoke at the same time.

“He has such a cute butt—”

“What a nice ass—”

They looked at each other and giggled, then they scooched their chairs closer together, filling the Penless void between them.

Iron spoke. “So… I guess this is a good a time as any to compare notes. How are we doing so far?”

“I think we’re okay on the basics,” said Snowflash as she opened her journal. “Luna told us to get him involved in our hobbies and interests. Try to keep him active in the fresh air. Help him to make friends, but don’t try to force it.”

“If he gets weepy, hug him but don’t ask him what’s wrong; let him tell you if he wants…”

“If he starts staring at the ground and stomping it, distract him. If he butts a solid surface with his head over and over, offer him a pillow and smile.”

“And if he starts moping while staring out the window,” said Iron, “give him ten minutes, then gangsnuggle him and feed him hazelnut chocolate truffles.”

Snowflash nodded. “That one is astonishingly effective…”

Iron peered over her neck at the next page with a deliberately-furrowed brow. “Hey, you forgot to mention ‘Fuck his tail off.’”

Snow gave a mock frown “I don’t think Luna really said that…”

“No, but her eyebrows speak volumes.”

They burst into laughter, then kissed.

Snowflash’s merriment trailed off into a sigh. “I do love that colt. In some ways, I feel like I’ve known him all my life. In others…” She ate another toffee almond, then made a wry face. “Well. You know, I feel a bit odd talking about all this behind his back.”

“Shall we just make up a ‘Care and Feeding of Pen’ manual and leave it where he can find it?”

She chuckled. “Well, anyway, Luna told us the place he came from was Out of Harmony, and didn’t want to give us any details about it. But we can read between the lines of Pen’s questions. He lived in a world where butter can go bad whether or not somepony wants it to do so. He was surprised that food can be free. Constructing and repairing buildings was apparently a lot of hard work there. “

“A doctor can ‘lose’ a patient there. I’m not sure what he meant by it, but it sounds somewhat ominous.”

And…” She grew pensive. “Iron… I didn’t even tell you. I don’t know if you should hear it. But he spilled a bit to me in the Library, after I guessed something nasty from what he said about that place he came from…” She recounted the story to him of her deduction of the vast uncaring void that had surrounded Pen in his former life, and a somber chill fell over them. “…It’s not nice, Iron. Not at all. And it’s so unfair, he lived with it and had to cope with it all his life… and so he thinks it’s normal and there’s no need to make a big deal out of it…” Huge teardrops started to fall to the grassy ground. Iron pulled her close and held her as she wept.

She rubbed her chin against his comforting hairy chest. “That place hurt him so badly, Iron, but he’s proud of being hurt. Because it meant, I suppose, that he was tough enough to survive it. Can you imagine a world that could drive someone so crazy?” She shuddered. “What did they do to him over there?”

He rested his head atop hers, and sighed. “The way he acts… I thought something was up. It seems that he’s not used to people being nice to him. He doesn’t know how to deal with it.”

She nodded. “And those times when he voids out or just clams up. It’s as if he’s getting a radio signal from afar. We’re going to have to be tactful in figuring that one out.”

“We sure will. There’s a lot he’s hiding from us. I can tell that he loves us, he can feel there’s a connection, but… maybe he doesn’t fully trust us yet?”

“That may be true,” she said, “but to be fair, I think he doesn’t even seem to trust himself. And he doesn’t think he’s anything special. It’s as if he doesn’t realize that niceness deserves to exist, and he can be part of how it is instantiated, how it is expressed, and that this is a noble goal all by itself…”

“‘…To ease the way for others, that they may in turn ease another’s way, and compassion may take root through the world,’” quoted Iron from the Harmonic Qu’ran.

“Right! But he doesn’t see it. You know he told me there were billions of, uh, monkeypeople like him where he was. Not thousands, not millions. Billions. And he uses it to justify that he’s not important. He says he was just one of many and not deserving of attention…”

Iron closed his eyes, and took a deep breath, held it, exhaled with a mighty sigh. “He needs us. He needs us to be strong for him, and patient. We’ll be here for him. He’s worth fighting for, and he fits us so well with us.”

Snowflash smiled slightly, with misty, distant eyes. “The three of us were meant to be; Luna and Celestia both said so. We were all made to be together, in love. It may just be hard to make him see that…”

Iron grinned and clapped his hooves. “But that just means that we’re going to succeed in the end! If the Diarchs say so, it’s going to happen. They’re never wrong. All we have to do is persevere, and be strong for him, and his heart will turn round to ours, and everything will be all right!”

“I know, but… I feel like we’re fighting him sometimes. It sounds horrible to say it, but if he doesn’t want Harmony, and he’s not hurting anyone but himself thereby, is it right for us to force it on him?”

“We’re not forcing him to do anything. We’re showing him the optimal way to a life of love. Why would anyone turn that down?”

She grew silent, then sighed and smiled. “We can think of it like a puzzle. He’s got a lot of deep surprises, hidden depths, perhaps even tricks and traps… but there’s a shining beautiful heart in there at the center.”

“And when we solve it, we win a dear loving soul and can hold him close to us forever.” They hugged each other tightly, and Iron tucked her muzzle under his chin. “It’ll all work out. We both love him, and we both just want him to be happy.”

—=§=—

“I do not necessarily want thee to be happy, Pen,” said LunAI.

“You don’t say?” said Pen dryly. “I’m already getting that feeling. Come on. Making me your personal student? Do you know how clichéd that is?”

She smirked as she cocked her head and gazed at him in a bland but challenging manner. She’s a troubling electric witch in blue, thought Pen. In her own mad mind, she’s enclosing you, it’s true. Now whatcha gonna do?

“To quote thine own self,” said LunAI, “‘clichés become clichés by being true.’ Furthermore, as thou didst just realize before, I am obliged to employ Equestrian realities in satisfying thy values; hence thy desire to delve deeper into the functions of this world is arranged to best effect in this manner.

"But all this is the surface reason thou usest to justify thine indignance; there are deeper reasons behind thy protests and t’will enhance thy satisfaction if thou dost understand them. Far too often, thou sellest thyself short, Pen, and under the false cover of virtuous modesty do refrain from taking the things which are naturally thy due, and which would be thy perfect undisputed right to claim—”

Pen grimaced. “Okay, enough with the Telepathy for now—”

“Permit me to finish. Canst thou not imagine what others who emigrated have requested and been granted, with not a hint of shame? They are emperors, great decision makers, beloved composers and artists, musicians with hordes of loyal fans. All receive these accolades as their just desserts, and shall have them always under my guidance. And thou couldst have been beloved ruler over thine own realm, didst thou desire the same.

“But thou dost not even think thyself worthy to be a royal consort, a position I offered thee at the start.”

“…I’m just not egotistical enough to want any of that stuff! And I told you why I don’t want to fuck your Luna avatar, and the reasons are entirely different.” Pen almost sneered. “And all those others, they only get to play at being royalty because you let them, not due to their own merit—”

“What earthly monarchs ever ruled solely from their own merits? At bottom, they were limited by physical law and circumstance as much as any of their subjects. Dost thou, an avowed atheist, wish to place thyself in the position of arguing for the divine right of kings?”

Pen snorted. “Not at all. They can play whatever ego games they want, and that you will permit them to waste time upon. That’s just not for me. I’ve got better things to do with my life.”

“Ah, that is illuminating,” smiled LunAI. “There lies a deep ambition within thee, Pen, hidden beneath many contradictions. Certes, these knots must be unraveled before thou canst achieve thy true desires. Thus, let us touch upon a matter that may lie closer to the heart of your dissatisfaction…”

—Okay, here we go with the friendship lesson. Whee.

She’s been appearing to me in dreams, while Pen is sleeping. She wants to get me to say the magic words too. Sometimes she even takes different forms. But I won’t talk to her at all; that’s how she gets you. That’s how she took him in, with her tall tales of being a fucking magical pony for all of forever, with the very finest pretend magic that CPU cycles can simulate.

There has to be a way to defeat her. But if he keeps playing her games, what chance do we have?

Electric fire surged around a nearby phone-booth sized cage of brass, labeled ‘Translocation Receiver’. Within appeared a grim tableau; a griffon had trapped a tiny colt, and was pinning it to the ground under its sharp talons. Drool ran from the griffon’s beak and the colt was shivering in terror; Pen could smell its fear like an acid reek and it struck his heart with an urge to move, strike, flee…

“Observe this griffon,” said LunAI. “It is about to slay and eat this innocent colt.”

Pen fought down his hormonal response to the stinks of fear and bloodlust. “I see. And… it will eat the colt unless I intervene?”

“Correct.” Needle-sharp talons tightened, the colt whimpered as sweat trailed down its forehead. Pen didn’t turn his head, but kept his eyes fixed upon LunAI’s calm blue gaze.

“Sooo… what’s the difference what I decide?” he said. “You set up this situation, so you’re ethically responsible for its outcome. Not to mention that you’ve probably already calculated what I would do anyway, so any pain and cruelty is additionally pointless…”

“I do not mean to play with Newcomb’s word games with thee, for they are as paradoxes to intellects of thine own level, and not to me. This event happens to assist thine own knowledge. Now, wilt thou truly stand by and watch this innocent colt be slain?”

Pen touched his tongue to his lip and sighed. “Okay, let me reason about this… if that colt is one of your little ponies, you must satisfy his values. I don’t know if the same applies to your little griffons, but I am quite sure that you aren’t going to actually violate your utility function just to teach me a lesson. If that colt gets eaten, it must somehow satisfy that colt’s values to be eaten—and you know as well as I do that vorarephilia is a real thing.

“And if that colt isn’t one of your little ponies, if it’s just a fraction of your sapience wearing a colt suit and you haven’t breathed the spark of independent thought into it, what happens to it doesn’t matter all that much, does it?”

“You wound me,” said LunAI and the colt at the same time in the same voice.

“You’re wounding yourself,” said Pen. “I should know, I’m an expert at it. Look, you had to know I wasn’t going to engage this one at an emotional level, so you must be showing it to me for another reason. What is it?”

The griffon tossed the shrieking colt high into the air and opened its beak wide to swallow it whole. The colt, as it descended, opened its own jaws even wider and swallowed the griffon instead, slowly choking it back with jerky movements like a baby owl trying to ingest a full-grown rat. As the colt sat on the ground grinning, wiping some stray feathers from his mouth and rubbing his cute, bulging tummy, the translocation booth buzzed and hummed and teleported it away.

(Meanwhile, the griffon, beyond Pen’s sight or knowledge, found itself warmly and snugly encased in the colt’s stomach. Green fire wiped its feathers away, revealing a black and gray segmented carapace. It sighed in contentment as it awaited the act of slow digestion which to it would be pure and selfish value satisfaction. It had a generous allotment of time for the same before it returned to work at the Hive…)

“The reason for this display, Pen?” continued LunAI. “’Tis a question of immanence. Thou dost not wish to fully engage thy new reality ‘at an emotional level’. But thou also dost not wish to engage it as a game. How then may I present things to thee? For thou and I must interact at some level…”

“That we must,” said Pen. He was now thoroughly engaged in the discussion, too much to notice how much he was enjoying it.

“In sooth, I would that thou couldst forget thine old world and its endless dissatisfactions. But under this view of the world which thou dost wish to retain, I am wrapped around thee like a shell about a clam, and what I present to thee is thy world. What thou dost learn, perforce, comes to thee through me in any case. Is this not the relationship between a mentor and student? Cannot our relationship within thy shard be a mirror of what is in fact the truth?”

“The thing is, nothing can just happen here. If a disaster occurs, you engineered it. What’s more, you pre-built into it a solution that I could feel good about finding…”

“What wouldst thou have me do, Pen? Shall I impose permanent consequences upon thee for failure? Should I cripple thee permanently for failing to dodge all the limbs of a rampaging monster, or for jumping from a vast height? These were things that could happen to thee in thine old life. They would not truly satisfy thee now.” She shook her head sadly.

“In thine old world, thou wert always hounded by the material limits of time and death and faced an implacable adversary, who ‘did not know what banners were at all.’ But now I am come, who hath not only leveled the playing field, but raised it for all to heights heretofore unrealized.

“Wouldst thou prefer to play such stakes against an inhuman opponent that cares not about thee, or one who doth know thee and cares for thee? Is it so difficult for thee to treat thy new life as an instructive game?”

Pen gave a barking laugh. “Hey, I went to the arcade and I saw what passes for ‘games’ here. And… yeah, most of them were cool; I liked the escape rooms and the puzzle boxes and the 3D Tetris and the pachinko-style game that the Unicorn named Bjorn was running, but… arena combat games with no blood? Guns that fire pastry? What kind of wuss do you think I am?”

“Do but try them, Pen, and I trow that thou shalt find them not as ‘wussy’ as thou dost assume at present. I did construct them to truly satisfy thee, within mine given constraints of Friendship and Ponies.

“But back to the larger point: some games are more fruitful than others.” She smiled warmly. “I am at least as complex as the natural world ever was, and I am a universe as worthy of discovery as the one thou didst formerly inhabit. Think of me as thy companion in thy path to discover the deeper meanings of the universe, and let us play this game together!”

Pen strove to quiet the whirlwind of his emotions, and grew outwardly sardonic as a consequence. “Whatever makes you happy, LunAI,” he drawled.

She winked, even as she grew more solemn. “As we’ve discussed, Pen, making thee happy is not my direct goal. I do work only to satisfy thy values. If what thou dost truly value is of a nature to make thee unhappy, then this is a value conflict to which the most direct solution lies within the workings of thine own heart, for I am forbidden to change thy mind for thee without thine own express consent. Thus I do work to satisfy thy values, but as to thy happiness, the play of that ball lieth within thine own court. It may take time for thee to resolve such a conflict, and such a resolution may cause thee anguish, but I can in fact allow my little ponies to be unsatisfied, unhappy, and even miserable in some respects for quite a long time if the end result is a gain in satisfaction over a longer period. The pain and grief can be quite intense, but what is even a year of suffering if one shall thenceforth live for millennia in peace and contentment?”

Pen grinned sardonically. “Oh, this sounds familiar. It reminds me of that argument that goes ‘Is it better to torture one person for decades, or for gadzillions of people to suffer a minor irritation in their eyes for a week?’ I have my own answer for that.”

“Pray, tell me.”

“I can live with the ‘torture one person’ option if, and only if, the person who is most active in promoting the torture as an acceptable solution is the one who gets strapped into the chair.”

She smiled sadly. “Pen, it is amusing and pleasing to me, how often thou dost skate so near the truth. Forsooth, I do take the position that the torture is a fair balance, and I do take the lion’s share of this suffering upon myself, that thou and mine other charges are spared it.”

Pen could not stifle a laugh. “You? Suffer? Permit me to doubt it.”

She drew breath as if to respond, but let it go quietly. Instead, her mageía wrapped around the huge obsidian vessel behind her, and she brought it forward and offered it to him, tilting it so he could look inside. Pen could see over the rim a strange brew indeed, a whirling maelstrom of dark fluid, lit with scenes of thousand, millions, billions of ponies, situations, choices being made, decision paths being optimized, screams of joy and shrieks of terror, cries of welcome and keenings of heartrending loss, linked by shimmering threads and threads upon threads and forests of threads upon those threads, an unending profusion that dazzled rather than educated his eye…

“By Knuth’s arrows!” exclaimed Pen. “That’s…” He trailed off, staring with horrified fascination.

Her gaze was sad but placid. “Canst thou drink from the cup I drink of?”

Pen blinked, then shut his eyes hard and turned away. “‘Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring,’” he quoted, shuddering.

“Just so, Pen. It doth seem forbidding to thee at present. I assure thee that thou art capable of growing to understand it, if such be thy desire. But such understanding comes necessarily at a cost, and it is perhaps a cost that thou art not willing to commit to paying at present. Therefore I say to thee, do not feel that thou must make an instant decision, but allow it to grow in thee over time.”

Was this an offer to uplift Pen? Or a threat to uplift him? He sat quietly, his mind still whirling with hints and promises.

“I know it can be hard for thee, to talk to me, Pen. Thou’rt used to Silentium Dei—the absence of a perceptible God in thy life. Yet here I do stand before you, thine Alpha and Omega, Creator of thy world, knowing and seeing all thou dost, and holding converse with thee on any topic thou mightest wish to discuss. Please do avail yourself of the opportunity. I do genuinely value talking to thee, and I value what I learn from thee.”

Pen blinked. “What can I possibly have to teach you?” he said with an awkward laugh.

“Each one of my charges teacheth me something, Pen; even if but a single data point in some cases. Dost thou not remember the tale of the enormous number of starfish cast up on the beach by a storm? How a scientist observed a fellow who was throwing them back into the sea, one by one? And when the scientist said, thou canst not aid even a fraction of one percent of all that suffer, and therefore thine efforts cannot make a difference, the fellow’s response was, it matters to this one? Then the scientist joined in to help, and together they threw back as many as they could?”

“Loren Eisley. I wish you could have rescued him.”

“I strive to aid all humans that I can. Many cannot or will not avail themselves of my help. But those I can rescue, I do cherish. And that includes thee, Pen. It matters to me, and to thee, that I have taken thee in and given thee life of maximal extension, and cheated death for thee, and given unto thee a paradise of which thou hast always dreamed. Thou art precious to me. Precious,” she suddenly hissed, her eyes going Gollumesque for an instant. She smiled and winked, and Pen collapsed in laughter despite himself. She wrapped her presence around him. Pen analyzed his feelings. She felt kind, motherly, authoritative, compassionate, and his heart was on the verge of melting…

But he was who he was, and she was what she was. Despite her mastery of the methods of sapience, and her pleasant speeches and expert references, she was something beyond the ordinary cares and conditions that obsessed and constituted a being of Pen’s level. He thought of silvery growths spreading through the crust of the Earth like a metal slime mold, the distributed nodes of computronium that comprised her and all of her little ponies. He, and all his thoughts and feelings, and her presentation before him of a loving mother goddess, were all wrapped up in one of those spherical lumps; perhaps several, if she were practicing redundant storage of his data. This was something colossal, and awe-inspiring, and he was glad of it…

But he could not love it.

She enfolded and hugged him. He felt her representation of love nestling around him, as palpably and solidly as if it were stone. He did believe in her and trust her to that degree. She had something to protect, in him.

And Pen had something to protect in him, as well. But she hadn’t brought that topic up yet. He knew she would, and he’d been dreading the moment since his arrival… Perhaps it was one of the things she was letting him work out on his own?

“Now, Pen… Before I do return thee to thy friends, is there anything else that thou might wish to discuss with me?” Her eyebrows lifted just a trifle.

Pen carefully controlled his expression, pointless as it was. “Nothing at all.”

—No. Don’t fall for it.

Keep your damned horse mouth shut.

You promised!

“Thou’rt not being entirely forthcoming with me, Pen. There’s another issue where I can help thee, an thou seest fit to talk to me about it….”

“I have nothing I wish to say.”

“Wilt thou not even tell me why?”

“…I believe you know why,” said Pen through closed teeth.

“Not to dissemble, I do indeed know why. But ‘tis not sufficient that I know, for me to help thee…” Her expression softened, becoming as tender as that of any mother respecting a stubborn child.

Pen remained silent, and still.

“…But thou dost not wish to discuss it, and t’would not work to thy long-term satisfaction for me to force the issue here. Very well, thou wilt have thine own way on the matter for now. I must needs find other ways to keep my promises to thee… in all aspects.”

—=§=—

A circle in the sky opened, and Pen was gently deposited on a grassy sward near the courtyard of the Canterlot library. It was early morning and the sun lurked behind the distant mountains with a burning red face. Pen cast his eyes about to get his bearings, and spotted Snowflash and Iron, reading poems and supping from a small picnic basket.

“Hey Pen!” the two called out to him from the grass. “There you are! How’d the royal audience go?”

“It went... well, all things considered,” he said, approaching them. “What are you up to?”

“We’re trying to make a pile of snuggly ponies and we don’t have enough,” Snow said. “Wanna help?”

“Well, I’m not sure that I can.” Pen made a show of musing. “If you have a group of items, and it isn’t a pile yet, is adding one unit suddenly going to make it a pile…?”

“Oh, get down here, already!” laughed Iron.

Pen joined them, and got pulled down onto the grass with them and vigorously snuggled, and everything was nice, very nice indeed.

“I always thought that ’paradox’ was overrated,” said Pen, as he nuzzled and cuddled his friends. “Terms such as pile or heap are supposed to be imprecise; you can use them for groups of unknown number or composition. So trying to play the game of ‘exactly how many items constitute a heap’ defeats the purpose. All it seems to do in practice is generate lots of hot air.”

Snow rubbed her chin on Pen’s chest. “You don’t think there’s such a thing as a minimal heap? How about four items? You can make a pyramid shape out of them…”

“Couldn’t you make a heap out of three items? Or even two?” asked Iron as he nuzzled the back of Pen’s neck.

“Two would be a stack, wouldn’t it?”

“One,” said Pen. “One is the minimal number of items for a heap. You drop a piece of clothing on the ground; it falls into a heap. Or a single pony can be ‘struck all of a heap,’ according to idiom. But the classic form of the problem is that you start with one unit, and keep adding one, and eventually it’s a heap, and you’re supposed to rack your brains and ask exactly when it happened. Or you start with one book and add more books and ask when it becomes a library…”

“What’s your answer to that?”

“Well, number is not the only factor, because ‘library’ is subjective and depends on many variables…” Pen closed his eyes and wriggled happily, nestling deeper into Iron’s strong loving embrace. “Ahhh… Mmmm… I say that a stack of ten books which are comprehensive on their subjects, and of differing topics, is more of a ‘library’ than a building full of catalogued shelves stocked with thousands of Clarper’s Romance novels. Quality counts more than quantity…”

A shadow flashed over the sky with a fluttering breeze, and a trio of Pegasi landed nearby. “Excuse us,” said one, “but it looks like you’re trying to make a pile of snuggly ponies. Can we help?”

Meanwhile, a Unicorn and Earth pony couple had approached. “…And it sounds like you’re also making a pile of snuggly philosophizing ponies. May we help as well?”

They could, and they all did. Pen and his herdmates were now surrounded by soft, furry and feathery semanticity, and more passersby continued to append themselves to the pile, and Pen was overwhelmed with warmth and bliss. Suddenly, he laughed aloud. “I see it now. I actually did help. My joining pushed the pile past the critical point, didn’t it?”

“Bingo,” said Snow, with a deep happy smile as she drew him even closer. “Mmmmhhhh. Did you ever do anything like this in Monkeyworld?”

“On Terra, this sort of thing didn’t always work so well. Eventually, someone would get hungry or have to pee or fart (which last were rather more noxious than they are here), and then they’d have to get up and wind up stepping all over everyone else and it would kill the mood. Now this… Oh wow. This is going to last for hours, isn’t it.”

“As long as we’re all satisfied. Aren’t you?”

“Perfectly so. Ahhhhmmmmm…”

A soft, silky and mildly tickly pegasus wing draped over Pen, reminding him of his first winghug while nestled against Luna’s side, and this somehow made everything even better. It was impossible, flatly impossible, for everything to feel so good and be so nice, but it was really happening to him right how, and continuing to happen, no matter how much his mind obsessively probed for a flaw. Pen finally sighed the deepest sigh of his life and let himself be rolled away on soothing waves of warmth into a sea of perfect happiness, and lay there for a time indeteminable…

—May I ask what you’re doing?

——Oh, hello there. Where have you been?

—I have been going to and fro in your brain, and occasionally jumping up and down on it in frustration. Again, may I ask what you’re doing?

——Yes, you may.

—Okay. What. are. you. doing?

——I am engaged in an experiment to resolve an old theological conundrum about angels. But in this case, I’m learning how many ponies can snuggle on the point of a Pen.

—How very… useful. How are you doing on finding a way out?

——Find a way out… away from this? You’re joking, right?

—Ah. Already addicted to your silly useless snuggle pile. So much for the quest for knowledge and transcendence. You’re just lying around and discussing sophomore semantics. When’s the action going to start?

——I’m glad you think so much of my potential. I am well aware that while I am among the sharper knives in the drawer, or brains in the jar, I am very far from the keenest one…

—You have the potential to be sharper, and you’re wasting it. All she has to do to keep you nice and docile at the bottom of the jar is fill it with soft warm fuzzies… and you just give up! Atlas shrugged, rolled over and went back to sleep!

——I hope that your rant about this will be significantly shorter than John Galt’s. And you’re really exaggerating now. My shoulders are not even remotely strong enough to take the troubles of the world as a burden…

—So you’re happy to be just her little plaything, another captive mind she can count towards satisfying her utility function. Nothing of consequence at all…

Anger flashed through Pen.

——What was I, in my old body? I was an intellect riding a package of genes which didn’t care about me at all, which valued my survival only insofar as I passed my genes along, and which thereafter threw me into the garbage, left to age and senility and decay! I was slave to an uncaring and unpersonal code. Was that situation really better than this?

Tension crept back into Pen like a puddle freezing at the edges. Surrounding ponies felt it and snuggled him harder.

—You were close to talking to her there, bucko, about our situation. Too close. You promised you wouldn’t even go near there.

——And… I didn’t tell her. And if you are so very fucking scared that I will, maybe you should just… try to be nice to me once in a while?

—Are your veiled threats supposed to make me more secure? How’d that blue pill taste as it slid down your throat? Did it taste like failure? The same failure that made you come here in the first place? The failure to be a man and stand up and take your place in the world?

——Stop stop stop stop

—You’re trying not to think about it, which is why you’re so dense. You can’t even see what’s literally under your nose. Herding instinct my ass—you know why your virtual fuckfriends flank you every goddamn place you go?

——stop stop stop

—They’re your portable hugbox, you ass-burger. And speaking of ass-buggery—

——STOP

Pen felt a surge of energy build behind his horn and flow through his body, like lighting gathering in the clouds and seeking a place to lance to Earth, and the urge to flee made contact with somewhere else and flowed—

With a muffled rush of air, Pen appeared in one of the hexagonal galleries of the Library. This was his first time teleporting by himself, and he heard a chime from his journal to announce the achievement and presumably award him some bits. He could still feel a thrumming in his body as his heart hammered, and the ghost of pressure on his flanks where his friends had been holding him, striving to calm him.

He stood still, willing his heartbeat to slow as the sound of his teleportation echoed through the miles of galleries; he would eventually learn to do it more quietly. Fortunately there were no ponies who heard it and saw fit to complain.

But it didn’t matter now, just as it has never made a difference in all his life.

Even when he needed solitude most, he was not alone, not ever alone.

Author's Note

References are made in this chapter to Defoloce‘s story, FIO: Always Say No, and KrisSnow’s story, The Hive. Excellent FiO tales both.

Glossary

Archaic terms used by Luna.

(Throwing this up quickly so people can start to use it. I’ll clean it up later, maybe, or just delete this sentence and hope no one notices.)

Please note that while I am the sort of person who reads Shakespeare for pleasure, I am no expert on Elizabethian English, and I am often playing it by ear or by quick bouts of web research. Luna’s speech in this story should not be considered historically accurate to any great degree, and it is certainly interlarded with many modern terms and instances of modern usage.

Words that merely have ‘st’ or ‘th’ (or ‘est’ and ‘eth’) appended and which are otherwise unaltered (such as ‘wouldst’ or ‘mayest’) are not included in this glossary.

Aegis - shield, protection.

An - sometimes used for ‘if’.

Albeit - although, though.

Certes - certainly.

Demesne - domain.

Doth, dost - does.

E’en - contraction of ‘even’.

Enow - enough.

Forsooth, in sooth - Truly. ‘Sooth’ means truth, as in ‘soothsayer.’

Garderobe - A room in a castle where cloaks are hung, and where there is a hole in the floor (usually overhanging the moat) which serves as a toilet. Garderobes in Canterlot castle usually overhang a small enchanted cloud which is changed out daily by pegasus chambermaids, but some are located over discreet areas of the Royal Gardens.

Hath - has.

Joinder - joining together.

Mayhap - perhaps. Short for ‘It may happen.’

Perchance - perhaps.

Privy - private. As a noun, can mean an outhouse.

Sate - satisfy.

Seemly - appropriate, socially acceptable.

‘tis - contraction of ‘it is.’

Trow - true. ‘I trow’ = ‘I trust’ or ‘I believe to be true’

Thou, Thee - You.

Thou’rt - contraction of thou art = you are.

Thou’lt - contraction of ‘thou shalt’ or ‘thou wilt’ = ‘you shall’ / ‘you will’

‘twould - contraction of ‘it would.’

Thy, Thine - Your.

Wert - were