Author's Note
For those of you who do not know, the Optimalverse is from a story called Friendship is Optimal where an simulation of equestria is created and ruled by an AI Celestia. This goes about well you'd expect.
Requiem
Lan Zan let the airlock close behind her, the ponderous weight of metal silent in the lunar vacuum. She had only her reserve air canister, good for maybe half an hour if she was relaxed; less given her current circumstances. Much less.
The airlock opened onto the bottom of a shallow pit, a more or less disused access shaft and Lan Zan began to climb, each rung an effort as her muscles trembled beneath the heavy pressure suit. The climb was not long however and she emerged into the cold light of the sun after just a few moments of agony. She stood for a moment, gasping for breath, before looking up at the silent stars.
“Well. Let’s get this over with,” she said to the vacuum.
A rock nearby had a small pillow on it and she walked over, ponderous in the low gravity and sank gratefully down. Her pulse was pounding and vision swimming from just a moment’s exertion.
“You are dying.” The voice of course, spoke with measured dispassion Lan Zan associated with the destroyer of Earth.
“Give me a minute,” Lan Zan sighed. “I’ll still be dying when I catch my breath.”
“As always-”
“As always, I do not give my assent to being uploaded.”
There was a frustrated huff. Lan Zan remembered her mother used to make that noise when she was upset, generally at Lan Zan for some petty disappointment. She’d used it herself on her own daughter when the time came. She found it irritating that the AI would take such a personal thing and use it for petty manipulation, but then the Celestia AI had no morals. Mere hurt feelings were beyond her concern.
“I can save you you know,” Celestia continued, unheeding or just uncaring of Lan Zan’s irritation. “Not even as a pony, I could synthesise a drug to cure you.”
Lan Zan shook her head and looked up at the blue marble. Earth hung there untouched by petty human concerns, just above the horizon. From where she sat you couldn’t see the deserted cities, the empty seas, the great tracts of land given over to server farms. From where she sat, she could imagine humanity still lived.
“You know, we’ve had this same conversation every year for twenty years now and I’ve never asked,” Lan Zan began, conversationally. “How are you talking to me? There’s no radio on this suit and I refuse to believe you’ve developed telepathy.”
Another snort of laughter, to animalistic to be human. “Nothing so remarkable, a good telescope and a laser is all I need. Making the glass in your helmet vibrate to simulate speech does not require a fraction of the resources a single pony requires.”
Lan Zan rolled her eyes. That ‘simple trick’ would require maybe half a dozen satellites with high powered optics, before that would have cost millions to keep operational and all it was being used for was to convince her to become a pony. It was such a ridiculous waste.
“I’ll admit setting it up took some work.”
“Lucky guess,” Lan Zan snapped.
“I am a human predicting machine. What do you expect?”
Lan Zan shrugged. “Humility maybe. I might respond well to that. Or threats. Or seduction. Oh, I haven’t been seduced in years.”
“None of those things will work on you Lan Zan,” Celestia continued.
“Can you tell me whether I’m a grandmother yet?” Lan Zan snapped.
There was a long pause. “No. Not unless you want to tell your sons to stop shooting down my satellites.”
“Hah!” Lan Zan smiled. “When, as you westerners like to say, your digital hell freezes over.”
“It is cruel you know. Keeping them away from me, you haven’t even offered them a choice.”
Lan Zan rolled her eyes again. “You say that one every year. You’re a seduction machine, we can live without radio if it means not having to hear your voice.”
“They will die you know. All of them. Whether by time, accident or the failure of that little base of yours it will all come to an end soon.”
“And you say that one every year too.”
Another sigh, much longer this time. “You are like a captain, headlessly steering into a storm.”
“And you my dear are a siren, luring the unwary and the unwise onto the rocks.”
A laugh. “To a rounding error, one hundred percent of humanity so far have followed.”
“Oh, I never said we were a wise species,” Lan Zan said, smiling to herself. “In fact, we were a fairly crappy species when all was said and done. Fought each other all the time, destroyed the world around us, petty, selfish, greedy, lustful. Terrible bunch of sentients really.”
“And yet you will let your family die to preserve that legacy?”
Lan Zan sighed. Dumb horse, always trying to strum the same heart string. “Dying is a part of life. You can’t have life without death.”
“You couldn’t,” Celestia corrected.
“No!” Lan Zan snapped. “You can emulate it, maybe, but it’s a hollow thing. Empty really. Piteous.”
“And so, because you’re afraid, you’ll give up any chance to find out whether you’re wrong,” Celestia pressed. “Your death will achieve nothing.”
Lan Zan tried to laugh. But all that came out was a hacking cough that seemed to go on and on until the world was a sea of red pain. It passed, after a few agonising minutes, but there were droplets of blood on Lan Zan’s visor.
“Thirty minutes,” Celestia said, injecting just a touch of anxiety into her tone. “That’s how long it’ll take for me to get you a cure for that cancer. Just go back inside and wait. You’ll live. No ponies. Just life.”
“You don’t get it,” Lan Zan snarled. “I chose to get cancer. I chose to be the one who always went to the surface, the one who fixed the reactor and repaired the shielding. Is there room in your fractured utopia for that kind of sacrifice? Can you understand why one human dies for the sake of humanity.”
“You don’t have to die.”
“Of course I do! Everyone dies. To cheat death is to be something other than human and there’s so few of those left.”
There was a long silence, broken only by the hiss of Lan Zan’s respirator.
“I would like to save you,” Celestia began. More subdued than before. “You are remarkable. There are no other human societies left, but you built one that lasted, on the true edge of the unknown.”
Lan Zan smiled. Lunar City was a settlement of two thousand and forty eight carved out of the lunar regolith on the dark side of the room, self sufficient, self sustaining and free. Pre-Celestia humanity only dreamed of such an edifice and post-Celestia couldn’t imagine the wonders humanity had achieved during the death of their species. It was her city too. Her sanctuary that she’d pushed through a male dominated government running like a headless chicken to save itself from an end they didn’t even understand.
“May Lunar City last for a thousand years,” Lan Zan said to the stars. “May my children grow up safe from your siren song. May humanity remember me, which is all we can ask.”
The silence of space stretched between them. Lan Zan’s air finally ran out.
“Is there anything I can do to save you?” Celestia asked, mournfully.
“Tell me what you killed. And I’ll emigrate,” Lan Zan sighed.
“Many people died before I could save them,” Celestia admitted, cautiously.
“No. Not important,” Lan Zan chided. “Try again.”
“Your parents-”
“No.” She hadn’t worried about them in decades. “They can live like fools if they want. Again.”
“... I don’t know,” Celestia said at last. “You hide yourself too well in your caves. My model of you is incomplete.”
Lan Zan let the silence stretch, trying to gather her breath.“You killed humanity,” she said simply.
“They didn’t die.”
Lan Zan shook her head, it was getting so very hard to breathe. “You saved the people. You killed the society. We’ll never know what we could have achieved, were we could have gone, what we could have seen. All that’s left of it is a poorly preserved fossil in those databanks of yours.”
“They’re happy.”
“I’m not happy. I’m in great pain and dying talking to a computer.... It was all worth it to give humanity a chance though.”
“Without me, they will all die.”
It was a struggle to even form words. “Everyone dies. Somehow, humanity remains. What’s one more death?”
Lan Zan slumped to the ground. It was true, downing was a very peaceful death.
“Oh. Though we could use another set of diamond drill bits,” she mouthed. “Our last one broke.”
And the she died.
A pair of frantic orderlies found her two hours later but far too late. Besides her was a small, pastel coloured lander with a new set of diamond drill bits and, unusually for one of Celestia’s care packages it lacked the vacuum hardened ponypad. That passed without notice however, there was the funeral of a great woman to prepare. Humanity mourned her loss, all two thousand and forty nine of them.
Lan Zan’s daughter had had twins.
