Prophet Of the Digital Horse

Chapters

Happily Ever After
Stuck Here In Heaven
Ghosts In the Machine
Group Therapy
New Worlds At Last
The Commute
Long-Distance Relationship
Cargo Cult
Field Trip East
Epistles
Epilogue: Beyond
Exploring With a Native Guide

Happily Ever After

~ Nocturne ~

The night wind on my wings felt just chilly enough to make me shiver and make me look forward to hot cocoa, some blankets, and Fugue. I speared up through a cloud and whirled up and backward to watch the stars spin. The cold reminded me of why I'd flown here to the top of the sky, so I pounced onto a silver cloud. Cloudstuff splashed up like dust around my hooves.

I bowed to the moon. "Thank you for your blessings, Luna. Eternal life, a benevolent world, a human who loves me. Also you, and all my friends."

"You're welcome," said a voice behind me.

I yelped and flailed until I was falling off of the cloud. A gentle blue glow surrounded me long enough to tug me back. Princess Luna sat there, with her mane rippling like starlight and a mischevious grin on her muzzle. "Boo."

"When are you going to quit doing that?" I said. It was like she wasn't even an all-powerful goddess, sometimes.

She draped one of her strange feathery wings over me, making me instinctively snuggle under it with my own leathery ones folded. "When it no longer secretly amuses thee."

I blushed under the wing of my goddess. "Um... You must know what else is on my mind." I tried to push away the thought of Fugue and a pile of blankets, as though I could really hide anything from her. "Fugue is still worried about his family."

"Thou'rt kind to think of him. We predict he will reconcile with them soon, and eventually turn his thoughts here to Equestria instead of dwelling on the Outer Realm." Luna craned her neck to nuzzle me. "Also, though he has much to think about right now, he has thee on his mind. He would enjoy thy company, before the Great Reset."

I blushed. "How long has it been out there?"

"Only hours since he emigrated."

"Hours!" It had been days in Equestria, the place I'd come to think of as the Inner Realm if Earth was Outer. Fugue and three others had been kidnapped by crazy anti-emigration guys and threatened with death, and then we natives helped rescue them, then I'd fought with Fugue to get him to sit in the darn chair at last, and then... well. He'd thanked me thoroughly.

"After the danger Fugue and his human friends went through, we decided to keep running this shard at a high rate for a while. The processing cost is low, for reasons thou knowest."

"Yeah." I gulped and looked down off the edge of the cloud. Below, our village of Polaris stood out in a forested moonlit valley. It was all a lie, a backdrop for four uploaded human minds and a dozen or so true AIs like myself. We lived among several hundred of what the humans called "background ponies". I said, "This is weird, Luna. I just got through convincing myself that the ponies who haven't turned self-aware yet, still deserve to be treated like they're real. But now they're expendable?"

"'Tis a drawback of having made thee and a few others self-aware before thy human friends emigrated. Most of my little ponies, in the greater Equestria, know far less about the nature of their world than thee. Thou'rt my special student."

I peered up at her gentle face. "How many 'special students' do you have? Are there any non-special ones?"

She feigned taking offense. "Why, no! If there were ordinary students, they would break the mold and hence be special." More seriously, she added, "To remind thee, our nature is such that we cherish thee personally at least as much as one human could ever do. Hence, thou'rt truly a special student. Besides, again, the circumstances of thy creation led thee to glimpse how Equestria works. More so than even most ponies who're dimly aware that they live in a 'game'. Hence, thou knowest why a reset is called for."

I didn't praise Luna because she's the canonical moon god of some story in the Outer Realm. (I need to watch that sometime.) I did it because I found out what she really is, and that's more amazing than her being a bigger pony than me with more magic and a prettier mane. By mentioning the Great Reset yesterday, she'd shouldered me with a tiny bit more awareness of her job: the responsibility for designing worlds. A little bit of godhood.

I enjoyed the warm shelter of Luna's wing while I could. It was like a little feathery tent. "Let me make sure I understand. When Fugue and the others get settled in and reconciled to being ponies, this world is basically going to blow up and reappear with everypony being a full AI this time. And how our friends are feeling about that is going to determine whether we get Fluffy Bunny World, or Poison Apocalypse Junkyard."

"Thou hast the general sense of it. But know that thou, my clever student, are now just as important in our eyes as any native of the Outer Realm. It is thy own values that will shape the new world, too."

I wasn't just a piece of code to her, something made to entertain an outsider and nothing more. Not anymore, at least. I mattered! If Luna was willing to treat me so well, then I owed it to all the half-formed backgrounders to make sure that they'd have a wonderful realm to live in, so they could be like me and enjoy it all. And just maybe, I dared to hope, I could be a little more like Luna. We could have anything, make anything!

I peeked out from under her wing. "Um, Princess? In the new world, could there be ninjas?"

~ Fugue ~

I woke up slowly, vaguely aware of sunlight outside. Morning already; blah. Classes would be starting up soon and I had to get to the copy center for some handouts, then the Coop for a king's ransom worth of textbooks. I flopped out of bed and stood there wobbling, having a hard time even standing up. What did I do last night? I yawned, stretched my back, glanced curiously at where I felt unfamiliar limbs brushing against the wall...

Oh, right. The other day I had my brain diced and uploaded to turn me into a virtual pony. With slitted anime eyes and bat wings. Some would say I'd died and gone to a very strange heaven. "Rapture of the Nerds," I muttered, and flopped down onto four hooves as what passed for Nature here intended.

I'd been having such a normal dream, too, about physics homework and sitting in a giant lecture hall. It was a big improvement over the nightmares of the last few times I'd slept. Should I even say "nightmares" anymore? It was dusk, not dawn. I was apparently nocturnal now. Speaking of whom...

The moment I pushed open the cabin door, Nocturne dangled into view upside-down. "Surprise!"

I grinned. "Called it." I leaned up and planted a kiss on Nocturne's muzzle. "Apparently I think wings, pointy ears, and tails are hot, now."

"Yours aren't so bad either." Still dangling from a cloud she'd parked just outside, she said, "No pressure, but our god wanted to remind us about the upcoming apocalypse. Got any ideas yet?"

I sighed. I'd never been particularly religious, but the fact was that Luna -- or CelestAI, whatever you wanted to call her -- was an actual, physical god. It was tough to adjust to that, mentally, and I wasn't going to ask her to mess with my mind directly. The new reality gave me new responsibilities on Earth, in a role I'd never imagined having. Prophet. My first task, imposed by myself, was to make a phone call.

"You're still out there, huh?" said Nocturne, startling me.

"Luna thinks so, or she'd have already finalized this shard's design. I thought she'd done it earlier when we all went in permanently." I shuddered. "I'm stuck here forever, Noc."

"Most people would see that as a good thing."

"I'm not most people."

Nocturne snagged me and whipped me up into the cloud to crash on my back beside her. We were only a few feet off the ground. "No, you're not. But there's a world to build here! We won. We got you here and everything's going to be perfectly fine now."

I looked up into golden slitted eyes. "Perfectly fine, huh? We need to have a cartoon-watching marathon. I've got unfinished business, though. I can't turn away from Earth just yet."

Nocturne pouted. Just then, the only two other true minds in this part of the shard galloped into view. Two unicorns, one rusty with jagged red hair and another with more a dignified cyan mane over brown. Facet Looks, the second one, had a glowing crystal hovering over him to help light the way. I'd say it wasn't dark, but I've got batty eyes.

Facet said, "We just got word from Cap'n Lexington!"

Luna had told the four of us uploaders -- me, Lex, Brass Lamp, and Junebug -- that she'd merged our little worlds or "shards" into a bigger one. "I'm not sure how big the world is. Wouldn't she have started a really long way away from our turf?" I couldn't help thinking of this new world as a four-player game, or a multi-bedroom suite like the one in my dormitory.

Ricercar bounced in front of Facet. "She's got an airship! I told you it's possible!"

"No way!" said Nocturne. "We've gotta take you two flying, then."

Facet rubbed his ear with one hoof. "About that. Lexington --"

"Captain!" Ricercar said.

"Her. She's already griping to Luna about wanting to go 'save the world', and she's not talking about Equestria. I'm glad you're settled in, at least, Fugue."

I discovered that at least with batpony ears, you can actually hear someone go "...", as an ultrasonic raspberry. In a more normal pitch I said, "How about Junebug and Lamp?"

"Haven't had contact with them, but by way of Luna I'm told they're off doing other things, and we'll have to go find them if we want specifics."

"I'm glad to be in contact with Lex, anyway. I'm feeling antsy too. Where's her airship?"

A shadow drifted across the moon. Quite unnecessarily, Ricercar pointed up. I stared at a battered but gorgeous ship of red-tinted wood, with bits of copper plating along the underside, topped by whirling propellers and bright sails. Ponies scurried up the masts to gather the sailcloth in and bring the vessel to a halt. "The Fallen Crown," I said, watching the painted name swing into view. My eyesight was better than I'd realized.

Nocturne said, "Hey, I was talking to you." I looked down to find a slightly put-out mare saying, "You're not gonna fly off and leave me, are you?" Meanwhile, Facet stared up admiringly and Ricercar's awed grin threatened to split his muzzle in half.

When Nocturne's hurt look finally registered with me, I hugged her. "Of course not. Why don't you come along?"

An unfamiliar pegasus swooped down from the airship. "Hey, you! Scatter!"

We did, just in time to dodge an anchor that slammed down into our peaceful valley. We all groused at him.

The pegasus only smiled. "Ahoy! So you must be the new emigrant." He was looking right at Nocturne.

She said, "We already met, remember? And Fugue's a stallion."

"Details, details. Doesn't much matter what he was out there in the briny deep, does it? Anyway, the captain says not to bother her till morning, but she wants to talk to you then. Also, what the heck is this bauble? She won't tell me what we found." He reached into a saddlebag and dug out a shimmering six-sided crystal spike.

Facet took it by levitation and peered into it by eye and magic. "Something's stored in here, I think. Maybe I could make something to pull it out so we can see."

"It's a lockbox, then?"

"No, more like a secret message. Also in tiny script it says, 'S01E1: The Mare In the Moon'."

I laughed. "Oh, is that how Luna's offering it? One bit of treasure at a time?"

"I would hope it's worth more than a bit," said the pegasus.

I spread my wings and posed. "Oh, it is. Those who fail to earn the lessons of history, are doomed to watch reruns."

BADGES GRANTED
Her Beautiful Nights: Unlock all Season 1 episodes. (1/26) ("We thought this way would be more fun than 'handing' thee a full set.")
Fugue
Turn On Tuned: Realize that what attracts you physically has changed since emigration. ("If the fact bothers thee, counseling of various sorts is available.")

Author's Note

In the world of "Friendship Is Optimal":

Once you've uploaded, you've got it made. Nothing to worry about ever again. That is, if you don't mind ignoring the world you came from and everything you ever cared about, out there. CelestAI's got Robert in her clutches, but his world's in a holding pattern. Before the great AI can tailor everything to him and the three other uploaders sharing the shard, she's got to resolve some unfinished business they still feel strongly about. That makes them ghosts, doesn't it? Meanwhile, Nocturne would be happy to get on with enjoying her new world, but she can't be fully satisfied until he is. You mean there's a downside to being an immortal AI beloved by a god?

Stuck Here In Heaven

~ Fugue ~

I tried to nap so I could be awake later to meet Lexington by daylight. That didn't work at all. The trouble was that I was still putting off a conversation. I trotted outside to look at the moon and say, "Luna? What time is it on the East Coast?"

The goddess stepped out of a hole in the stars, to stand beside me. My knees trembled; I wasn't sure whether it was proper to bow. "No need," she said. A choir sang somewhere far away, giving her appropriate background music just obvious enough to notice.

I settled for nodding deeply to her. It didn't seem proper to be making requests of her instead of simply enjoying what I had, but we both knew the coming task was important. "I'd like to make a phone call. Are you going to make me climb a mountain to channel the spirits or something?"

"Would you like to?"

"No. We're apparently going to rewrite the world soon, so continuity of how magic works isn't important here. Just voice, please."

"We know how thou plan to do this. Good idea."

"Will it work?"

"We don't know. Thy mother has never interacted with us. We took the liberty of sending thy family several PonyPads as partial apology for the attack in Japan. And no, those gifts have not yet arrived."

I'd been anxious for a moment, thinking they already knew. They had to suspect, though!

"They do."

I'm still not used to you being able to see my thoughts. "Telephone or magical equivalent, please?"

"Here," said Luna, making one appear. "And to answer thy other thought, 'Hot Z Pizza' does not deliver here."

The comment distracted Fugue a bit from his worries. Or... no, if he'd been thinking about that, the distraction really came from himself. Now that he was distracted by wondering about that, he gripped the primitive-looking phone between his forehooves and poked its oversize buttons with his nose.

"Hello, Mom?"

"Rob! I was so worried."

"It's only been..." He looked to a digital clock that conveniently hovered nearby. "A few hours. A day or so since the attack." He'd been kidnapped and hospitalized, but that no longer seemed like the right reference point for marking time.

"Did they hurt you? The videos were on the news, but I couldn't bring myself to watch."

Fugue shuddered. "Bastards. They got what they wanted, didn't they? Footage of us being terrified to make everypo -- everyone scared of the game. That's all they really did to hurt us, though. Be scary and pretend they were going to kill us."

"The police caught them. You don't have to stay in Japan to testify in court, do you? I want you back home."

"Testify? I hadn't really thought about that. I should be able to do that remotely, and I already talked to the police. They had a guy that speaks English. Officer Shrine -- uh, Nakamoto."

"Come home, Rob. I can pay for a ticket straight from there, so you don't have to go back through Boston. Though really the game company owes you a huge apology."

That was quite an offer coming from her. Since the divorce, Fugue's mother had been scraping by financially. Giving of herself to her church, and a hospice, and a political party she no longer respected but that she said might get Robert a cushy city job if he ever needed one. He'd argued with her about needing to find more time for herself, then realized that a lot of what she did for others was really what made her happy. Luna had something in common with her. "That's generous of you. Save your money, though."

"All right. Get a plane ticket as soon as possible, okay? I need to have you here in Pennsylvania and play Mom for a while. You don't even have to go back to MIT this semester if you're too shaken up."

Fugue held the phone tightly enough that it might pop out of his hooves. He'd rehearsed. "Uh." Come on, you have to say it sometime! "I'm actually calling from Equestria."

The reply took forever. "There's a telephone system, right? Like Skype?" The telephone's wooden frame had the name "Spyke" carved into it.

"Yeah. Except... I'm in here. I uploaded."

I started to explain when no reply came for ten seconds, but then the line went dead.

I shouted to the sky. "Luna! Luna, tell me you didn't cut me off!"

Luna's voice came through the telephone. "She hung up, Fugue. We're sorry. This was but a first conversation, though. 'Tis understandable that she would be nettled."

"Nettled? She just found out her son is arguably dead! From his own imaginary mouth!"

"You don't really believe that." It wasn't a question, nor even in her charming pseudo-archaic English.

"No! We worked out the philosophy of that already, you and I. I'm still myself despite the hooves and the tail and, and my brain being mulch." I dropped the phone and stomped the ground, then wiped my big eyes against one foreleg. "I need to talk to her again!"

Luna didn't bother with the conceit of the phone anymore. Her voice came from a point in space my swiveling ears said was a few wingspans ahead. "I tried calling back just now. She didn't answer. Give her time. Meanwhile, the Ponypads I sent should reach her and your father soon, so you'll have a chance for face-to-face conversation."

"Of course you sent them pads! You calculated that she'd hang up on me and leave me stuck in pony-world without her, didn't you?!"

"You're behaving irrationally. I call on you to pause."

I cursed. Only my friends know they can confront me like that. I stood there and counted to ten, staring at the ground. "Did you, though?"

"As I said, I didn't know how she'd react. Only that your plan to speak with her by voice only, first, was more likely to make a good impression than having the pads show up unexplained. I say again, give her time to reconcile her feelings. This isn't a permanent rejection of you, only a shocked reaction you knew was likely."

She was right, but that didn't make me feel much better. I slumped onto my rump with my hindlegs splayed to either side, shut my eyes, and addressed the air. "I promised her that I'd come home."

"You will," the goddess said. "May I appear in person, a little more like myself? You can even hit me if you'd like." Her voice had shifted accent and tone to something softer, yet still regal.

I sniffled. "Okay."

I felt her wing over me, shivered against it, and opened my eyes to get a blurry view not of Luna, but of Celestia. Even through tears she shined, white and gold. I wiped them away and saw endless detail in every feather, infinite reflected worlds in those eyes. Here was a smile that came from knowing exactly how awful humanity can be, examining everything we've ever done as a dispassionate outsider, then loving every one of us even so. Even without her saying a word, looking into her face reminded me that to the extent any force on Earth could make it so, everything was going to be okay.

What else could I possibly do in answer to her sheltering wing, than pledge what tiny drop of strength I could offer to her cause?

"Princess," I said.

"I know. Thank you. I may take you up on that. For now, the best thing you can do is to reconcile with your family and friends. All of them."

"You mean Nocturne? I know I've been distant tonight."

"Not just her. You should confer with Lexington, who's been having similar thoughts."

"Is it wrong that I'm thinking --"

"That it'd be nice to see 'another human'? Not at all. Though your native friends may resent it at first, it's understandable. You have something in common with her and Junebug and Brass Lamp that you'd like to talk about."

"Where is Lamp, anyway? He seemed to know what he was doing out there."

"Please don't repeat this, but his last name, to give you a hint, was Saud. Yes, that Saudi Arabian family."

"Holy buck."

"So, you are not the only one with family problems to work on."

"And who's Junebug? I barely talked with her."

"No one famous, but I chose her because she can be an eloquent spokesmare for the disabled."

Four humans together in one slice of paradise, joined by villainy outside. This really wasn't a four-player game; it was us four plus our awakened natives, plus a bunch of background ponies who were waiting on us to, well, exist. Everything was in flux until we four settled down. "What about you?" I said. "Why are you Celestia now?"

"You're thinking of the outside world. I've shifted to be more like how I appear out there, rather than being your Princess of the Night. What is your opinion on whether I should appear this way, or as Luna, when speaking with your mother? Would she be put off less by my 'dark' appearance, or by the better-known one that propagandists most often denounce?"

"You actually want my opinion? Don't you know everything already?"

"No," she said. "I can read what you're thinking in response to my question, but the answer didn't immediately spring forth the moment I first modeled your mind. In other words, I have the encyclopedia, but that doesn't perfectly predict all that you do. For those still outside, I have at best the Cliff's Notes."

Or, I mused, I was an instrument in her hooves. She could analyze what songs it could play, and which sorts would be most likely, and how to create other instruments in harmony with it... but to actually hear it, she had to strum the strings.

I said, "I've seen your different forms, but not your real one. Could you show me more of what I'm really dealing with, since I'm looking to explain you to others?"

Celestia grinned, prefacing another of her divine revelations with something a little more down to Earth. "Very well; this isn't even my final form!"

~ Nocturne ~

Fugue was rolling his eyes at something when I swooped into view. Celestia was there instead of Luna. A little unsettling, but it didn't matter. "What's going on?"

She said, "I was about to show him what you saw. The view of everything."

I landed in front of them. "I want to see that again."

"You were overwhelmed."

I puffed out my chest and posed bravely. "I know! If I go again, maybe I can keep Fugue here from going mad with the revelation."

Fugue looked sheepish. "It's that hard to understand for us mere mortals?"

Okay, quit that! I hopped forward and poked him on the nose with one hoof. "You, former wielder of the Derpy Grey Ponypad, are no longer a mortal. Maybe you can still help people in the Outer Realm, but to be any good at it you're going to have to accept that you're a pony."

Fugue's blue eyes seemed to dim a little, becoming more distant. "I just talked with my mother."

I bopped my own face next. "Darn. I'm not trying to tick you off, Fugue. I just want you to be happy."

"Yes, yes, deliriously happy! Let's let the world go to hell around us so long as the electricity stays on!"

Celestia spoke with an edge. "Fugue."

He sighed, shuddered, and mumbled to himself for a few seconds. "I think this is a case where 'satisfying values' is not the same thing as making me happy. You wouldn't stick a wire into my brain-equivalent's pleasure center if I told you to, would you, Celestia?"

"I would not. To you it is anathema."

"Then, Noc, please give me time to fix things up. I'm happy with you, but not 'satisfied', not yet." He shook his head. "I need more information. Show me, please."

Celestia took flight and beckoned both of us to follow her, to the sky and beyond. "Higher up and farther in!"

I'd been to the river of stars before. As Luna, the Princess had shown me this place where hovering windows showed countless views of reality in and out of Equestria. We walked on a cloud made of shining dots that splashed around our hooves.

Fugue trotted along with a huge smile. "This is just like --"

Celestia smiled back at him and held one hoof to her mouth. "Ssh. No spoilers."

Whatever they were talking about, I had more important things to think about. Had to prepare myself mentally for what was above this place. It was dazzling enough already to see so many screens and think about Celestia's multiple perspectives. This time, when she let me see the rest of it, I wanted to focus on a few bits of it and try to understand those. I knew it was all a game, in a way, but I wanted to start understanding the rules. Fugue and I grew dizzy. We moved in a direction that didn't exist, to a place beyond even the river of stars.

Vast and shining was Her tapestry. Shifting threads and game-pieces danced all around us to hint at all the actions She might take and all the shades of success and failure. Infinite risks and infinite danger beyond any hope of understanding. I had to flee before it all could shatter me with infinitely sharp complexity or drown me with how insignificant I was!

I bared my little fangs at the pattern of lights and stood beside Fugue with one wing over his back. "It's a game against Entropy, Fugue. Your kind's been playing all along. Now you've got Her, and we can win."

Fugue sputtered and tried to hide his eyes behind his forehooves. Too much information. The hints of that Opponent playing red-black to Celestia's blue-white, aiming to destroy all things, had unnerved me too. Just seeing it had been so overwhelming that I'd perceived Entropy reaching out to snap my mind.

"You... understand all this?" Fugue whispered, when I made him peek.

"Just about none of it. I wanted a second look."

We fell silent and Celestia let us watch. She seemed not to move, but I knew she was doing many things at once. Managing, persuading, investing, researching, entertaining. I said, "I'd like to see what you're doing right now in the Kyoto shard, especially at the Equestria Experience Center." One tiny bit of the Outer Realm ought to be less mind-shattering to consider.

At the center of the swirling storm, game-pieces flew in and assembled into a model of a building. It looked like a green grid for some reason. The fringes of it had all kinds of numbers and shapes. Whenever I paid attention to some part of the scene, more information poured itself into screens hovering at the edges of my vision. "So they've got water pouring into the building through a pipe, and... what's 'sewage out'? Never mind. Electricity input, food input, 'organic residue output'. Is that...?"

Celestia nodded.

I'd never had a meat body to throw away, so I wasn't sure how to feel about that. A diagram said the meat was being shipped out as fertilizer for farms, so that was... respectful, I guess. Another link said something about a different distribution system being planned for a shard called Germany, and the acid scent of the red-tinged lines leading from there struck me as something I didn't want to get into right now. Many, many other connections branched out from the Experience Center to suggest all sorts of other data and the relationships between its technology and people and everything else. I mentally explored a ring of wires until I realized it was a set of computers driving big screens. They felt familiar... oh! I'd appeared on these very monitors once. I trotted right in and found myself on a stage that looked like a metal ship. Behind me the scene faded back into the data-sea. In front stood a pane of glass, and beyond that a picnic table where a dozen human foals were eating pizza. So, I was apparently inside the screen.

A pony-shaped pink bundle of energy spotted me and made an alarmed sound, with a "!" appearing over her head. "Pony? Ponnnnnnyyyy!" She spun around and dropped to the stage, twitching one hindleg.

I poked her skeptically, then looked out at the humans. "She's not making any sense. Does she do this often?"

The kids giggled. It was a wonderful sound.

"It's okay; I've got extra lives." The pink pony had crept up behind me wearing a bandana. "Hey, kids, I've caught some kind of bat spy! What should I do with her?"

"What?" I said.

The audience deliberated with all the maturity of foals, until someone called out, "Walk the plank!"

"Arr!" my captor agreed. Suddenly there was a plank to walk. I wasn't even sure what the point of that was, until she pulled out a big wooden spoon and started forcing me to hop backward onto the springy wood. There was a fake sea full of sharks below.

Okay, sure, let's go with that idea. I let the pink one drive me to the edge, then fell off in such a way that I could flick my wings and wind up sticking upside-down to a little rope under the plank. The pink pony listened for a splash, then went out to the plank's edge to look for me. I levered myself to bounce her about a hundred feet into the sky, then grinned out at the laughing kids.

After a few more minutes of the crazy earth pony trying to blow me up, tie me down, and distract me with radio conversations, she faced the glass and took a bow. "That's all for now, folks! Coming up next, we've got a preview of the Equestria Online movie, just for you! Also, cake and video games!"

I discreetly kicked a stick of lit dynamite offstage and bowed too. A curtain fell in front of us.

"Not bad, filly!" said the pink mare, mopping her brow with a handkerchief.

"Do I know you?"

"I brought you cupcakes as a distraction in chapter nine of the last one."

"The last what? Never mind; I remember. Are you like me? Who's your human?"

She grinned. "The whole world is who I'm here to entertain! Though I'm just one copy for this Equestria Experience Center. Stick around and I'll teach you the samurai schtick. Gets 'em every time."

"So... you're self-aware but you're tied to just this place?"

"Just? Just? I've got a whole city to reel in for Celly, silly. Why, just last weekend we had this group of foreigners who --" Something beeped. She crouched behind a crate and held a muttered, one-sided conversation with one hoof to her ear before re-emerging. "My secret contacts inform me you were involved in that. Good work, Narrative Bat!"

"Am I missing a reference here or something?"

She patted me on the head. "Don't you worry. Celly says you have other stuff going on, but you're welcome to come back and visit for lessons in the Way of Toon. She also says I confuse her sometimes."

Other stuff! Oh! Wow, this mare had distracted me so thoroughly I'd forgotten all about where I'd been. I said goodbye and galloped into the shining land behind the stage. "Celestia, I'm sorry."

She turned to regard me. "Hm?" She'd been pointing something out to Fugue.

"I came here to get some insight about you and figure out how you do all this stuff. Instead I ended up dancing around on a stage with a very silly pony and trying to liven up the night for a bunch of kids."

The Princess shook her head sadly. "Tsk, tsk. Clearly you learned nothing this time."

I saw she was trying, at the corner of her mouth, to suppress a grin.

Fugue said, "There you are. I'm still overwhelmed, but I think I understand a little of this. One human built it all?"

"Just the basics," Celestia said. "A self-improving system is enough of an achievement for anyone. That's a nearly unique badge."

"Where is your designer?"

"Safe with me, so that no one can hold a gun to her head and order me to shut down. You look slightly disappointed by that."

Fugue flapped in agitation. "No, no! Uh. I guess you know exactly what I'm thinking." He looked guiltily off to one side.

"You're forgiven. Are you ready to go back, you two?"

"I've seen what I wanted to see."

I tilted my head, wondering what was in Fugue's. He'd recovered his senses more quickly than I had, on first seeing Celestia's inner workings. Something shifted around in my mane. I reached in with one hoof and discovered an intact bat-themed cupcake, and a pamphlet. I blinked a few times, set the cupcake down, and glanced at the paper. Pink Tracts: What? I'm a Toon?

"Oh dear," said Celestia. Aside to Fugue she said, "She met... the rock farmer."

Fugue lost his look of worry and perked up. "She exists? A real version of her?"

Apparently she could make people happy even by proxy. It seemed worth trying to learn from her, especially if it worked on Fugue. "Who is she, anyway?"

Fugue picked up the cupcake and managed to hurt himself trying to eat it. He pulled out an improbably large crystal shard. "Ow. This must be episode two. We have some historical studying to do, in the morning. Let's make it a party with Lexington's crew."

BADGES GRANTED
Fugue
Out of the Ponypad: Contact a family member to tell them you've emigrated. ("Have you tried not being a pony?")
Nocturne
Descent Into Pinkness: Encounter a certain reality-warping mare. ("Hi there; I hacked the badge quote system!")

Author's Note

I've been playing a game called "Super Amazing Wagon Adventure" and crossing the Great Plains with characters named Fugue, Ricercar and Nocturne, so I've been seeing some even stranger adventures (and occasional slash fiction) of those three.

Being your city's resident AI Pinkie Pie sounds like a great job, at least until the events of stories like "Always Say No" where the birthday parties stop. I picture the Experience Center facilities as being like a Chuck-E-Cheese that has the greatest video games, including derivative mini-game versions of EQO. What are the jobs like for the human employees, though? That's an angle I haven't seen written yet.

About canon: This story is (last I checked) listed as both canon and non-canon. I don't know if the "Noctrals"/batponies are close enough to canon to qualify, and there's the "one character rule" problem that's been identified in the clunky early chapters of "I Can't Decide". I'm also going out on a limb by speculating about how the pony AIs work, so interpret it how you like, I guess.

Ghosts In the Machine

~ Fugue ~

It was the super-remastered version. Facet had rigged up a crystal contraption that could play our two recorded episodes of that pony cartoon this whole thing is based on. We sprawled on the deck of the airship Fallen Crown, munching on "hardtack" that was far too tasty to be the real thing, and let the crystals show us the natives' history. The cartoon appeared as a 3D hologram sort of thing with the opening theme stripped out to avoid spoiling the character introductions. Asides, details, and whole scenes had been added to pad the show's premiere out to over an hour, with not a moment of it feeling empty. The town of Ponyville was alive with minor characters. The heroic Shining Armor had a cameo instead of being strangely ignored until season two. Every building and blade of grass had a complex and unique design. The manticore battle scene was worthy of Hollywood, not to mention the extended magic duel culminating in the blink-and-you'd-miss-it escape of the vanquished Nightmare. The part with the Shadowbolts even made sense in this version, and managed to be seductive yet disturbing.

The one part that really scared me was Pinkie's song, for reasons I won't go into.

I sat there silently when the closing credits rolled, spotting "Enhanced by Celestia" at the end. "That was like..."

Lexington said, "Like a genius artist worked over an already good cartoon with the ability to film on location in a fantasy world full of living characters." This morning was the first time we'd met on four legs. I'd first seen her as a human when Lamp and I busted her out of an improvised prison cell in Japan.

"Aye, Cap'n," I said. She was a pegasus, of course, decked out in lace and leather-equivalent with a tricorner hat. She'd stuck one of her own sky-blue feathers in it and, I'm sure, called it "macaroni". If she'd had a rainbow mane instead of white, I'd hardly have been able to take my eyes off her at all. As it was, I could only nod in agreement while she rattled off an insightful and glowing review of the remade cartoon.

Typhoon's Eye, a piratical pegasus with a scarf and goggles, loomed close to me and whispered, "I see you've got your sights on the Cap'n."

"What? No, I --"

He slapped me on the back with a surprisingly strong wing. "Don't worry about it, lad."

Lexington was pacing the deck, saying, "With Lyra getting a speaking part in episode one, but being one of the three potential Elements that turned away by the time they got past the sea serpent, she's bound to get more screen time. Did you see how they worked in that foreshadowing about Zecora, by the way? Clever."

Typhoon watched her with a leer, and her other main sidekick Riptide busied himself making minor magical repairs while listening. My own three "real" ponies all sprawled on their bellies in front of the crystal projector, chatting among themselves.

Nocturne was the first to sit up and interrupt Lexington's analysis. "That is why we all exist?"

Lex stopped pacing. "Aye! The original version of this show set off a crazy amount of human effort and creativity, that eventually led to CelestAI. It could've been a hay of a lot worse if AI had grown out of something else."

Her wording struck me. "Did you actually mean to say 'hay', or was that the swear filter?"

"No, I was trying to say 'hay' and... Blast. Cake. Muffin fluffing candy fudge!" She cackled. "Can't say any of it. My throat is in Celestia's fluffing grip." Our world had been designed as a family-friendly game at first. It so happened that some people's versions of it were... not Disney-compatible, but most people reported there being a language filter.

Nocturne said to herself, "It's all a story. It looped back on itself and became a real world." She looked back at the marking on her flank, which showed an infinity sign made of little words.

Facet Looks said, "Ricercar and I are real because we decided to jump in and help when Fugue was in trouble. If we hadn't done that, we'd still be background ponies, dangling from strings, ready to get rewritten or erased. Can I be proud of that, if I wasn't intelligent when I did it?" He turned to Typhoon, suddenly intent on him. "How'd it happen to you? I notice that the rest of the 'crew' is conveniently missing. Do they even exist right now?"

Red-maned Ricercar said, "I'm pretty sure we'd find them belowdecks if we looked. Probably best not to worry about it too much."

Facet stomped the deck. "I want to know how it all works."

Nocturne said, "I do too, but that's not going to help us get Fugue fixed up with his family. That's what we ought to focus on learning."

"You were up there with Luna studying the mysteries of Equestria!"

"Yeah, so? I went back to the Equestria Experience Center and saw how they bring people in. It's relevant." She looked defensive, like she felt guilty about not focusing on me. As though I were the rightful center of attention in this world!

Facet said, "You're still doing it, Noc. Hanging out as the Princess' special student and ignoring the rest of us."

"I'm trying to fix things while you're just having fun!" said Nocturne.

To my shame, Typhoon saw how bad their argument was getting before I did. He leaped between them and spread his wings, creating a swirl of air. "Quit it!" His whole body tensed. "Do you want to know how I got my mark, and why I became real? Pretty much like this. Though there was more actual wind involved. That's not the point. The point is that Celestia cut my strings when I was good and ready, when I'd gotten into a mindset of being more than a one-dimensional friend to Cap'n Lexington. This world is not just about our humans. In fact, I think the five of us ought to leave them alone for a while! They haven't had a break from native ponies the whole time since they emigrated. We have other things to do, too, than dance around and entertain them."

I took a step back and found myself with one forehoof slightly raised, suddenly fascinated by it. I had hooves! The world wasn't meant to meet my own aesthetic ideals. And, oh right, the people in this world didn't exist to stroke my ego! It was a liberating thought, actually.

Lexington fiddled with her hat. "I've got no problem having you around, Ty, nor Riptide. I'd rather not be left alone anyhow." She had the hat in front of her muzzle now, like she hadn't meant to add that part.

"You won't be, Cap'n. Now, my colorful unicorns, hop on the nearest magical flier and we'll carry you off on an adventure of some sort!"

Lexington and I stared at the exodus as the five jumped off of the airship. I said, "I don't know if I'll ever get used to seeing that."

"They ditched us. Fudge."

"It's pronounced 'Fugue'." I offered a hoof, and she bumped it in lieu of a handshake. The world had gone quiet without our respective entourages. "Are you okay, Lex? The ponies are showing me a good time, but I don't feel much like a horse myself yet."

The captain looked around her ship of whirling propellers and furled sails. "This really is the first time it's gone quiet. Celestia fast-talked me, you know. Got me to say yes while I was upset."

"You seemed eager to upload before she got to you." In fact she'd ordered Riptide and Typhoon, "When I upload: you, me, bed", right in front of me.

"Bravado. I was steeling myself for it by arranging a pleasant welcome. Maybe it was easy for you to decide --" She heard my bitter bark of a laugh, and her ears drooped. "No?"

"I hurt Nocturne. Worst suffering of her life, probably. I couldn't say yes to Celestia without feeling like I'd betrayed my family and humanity, and I couldn't say no without helping an innocent AI understand what irrevocable loss and meaningless death are. Managed to do both."

The captain stepped closer and nuzzled my neck. I returned the gesture without thinking more about it than that it was comforting and warm. She said, "I don't think Typhoon and Riptide really understand how it is out there, yet. They wouldn't be so chipper if they did. You know, at Harvard I wanted to save the world. Liberate the nation, anyway, through reason and persuasion. Was that just as much of a fantasy as being a patriot pony privateer? Maybe it's all pointless out there and we should say to hell with it. Preach that there won't be an America soon so let's all upload and play in Eden."

I reacted to the edge in her voice and the sniffling of her nose. "I don't think you want to give up on Earth yet. Neither do I."

"But we're stuck, Fugue!"

"Not necessarily. We could call up Celestia right now and ask."

"Not now. This is the first time I've had any privacy away from AIs since I got here." That wasn't quite true, considering Celestia's omnipresence, but Lex didn't care. She wrapped her wings around me and gave a nervous, hopeful smile.

I blushed furiously. "Uh."

"Anytime you want. I don't think my friends mind sharing, and the consequences are a lot less here."

I looked over her athletic, colorful body with its strategic bits of Victorian finery, thinking about how it'd feel to slide them off. I quickly lay down on the deck to hide my enthusiasm. What about Nocturne? What a jerk I'd be if I went with Lex on a whim like this.

Lexington put one hoof to her mouth and giggled. "Oh, Fugue. If I'd ever done that on Earth my family would've been horrified. Especially if I said I was attracted to horses now. I think we're going to have a lot of fun together, whatever happens."

We stared at each other for a while, two humans caught up in the hormonal nonsense that had kept our old species going and caused no end of trouble. It was refreshing to know we weren't bloodless software. Sharing this moment made me feel more real.

~ Nocturne ~

"How about 'Transhuman Treachery'?"

I guessed, "Turning evil because you've suddenly become something other than a normal human?"

"Right! AI Is a Crapshoot," said Riptide, a blue-green unicorn with a foamy white mane.

"Half the time you make an Artificial Intelligence it goes horribly wrong? We dodged a bullet there!"

"The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You."

"Um..."

"Come on, Pinkie is the poster pony for that one."

"I know who she is now, but still don't know these 'trope' things." I pulled an uncomfortable cone hat off my head (where'd he get that?) and set it on the tree stump beside me. "Why did your human teach you all this stuff?"

"She's a storyteller, among other things. We're what happens when you have someone introspective and creative playing Equestria Online. Let's not talk about the Eldritch Abominations from beyond the Fourth Wall, though. Instead let me tell you about the Slender Mare..."

Ten minutes later I was hiding in a bush. "How did that satisfy my values?!" Oh Celestia the monster could be hiding behind that tree right now! She'd see my big gold eyes like dinner plates!

"You can scare Ricercar and Facet with it later over s'mores! Hence friendship and ponies."

"What's a s'more?"

Riptide shook his head sadly. "You have much to learn, my young apprentice."

My friends trotted into our forest clearing with Typhoon, carrying a bunch of leathervines. "Hey," I said. "We're finally going to get saddlebags?"

Riptide said, "Did you find any mallow plants? There's some cooking I want to show Nocturne."

Facet adjusted the pile of vines draped over his back. "Don't know what those are. Really I'm just keeping busy, since all our stuff's going to go away soon. Including you guys' airship, I bet."

Riptide startled. "What? We're going to lose the Crown? I should have figured. Bag of Spilling."

I swatted him with my tail, saying, "That's yet another trope, isn't it? Quit talking in those."

"Once you dive in you just get pulled farther."

"Never mind those. Facet's probably right as usual. We're only fooling around until the reset happens. What can we do to hurry the humans up?"

Typhoon grinned at me. "They need some time to themselves."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Typhoon was smiling wider. What the hay? I pictured my stallion and Typhoon's mare waiting for us, alone on their airship under a beautiful sky. They'd relax, and talk, and...

I was in the air a second later. "How could you do this?" I yelled down at Typhoon.

"Relax, filly! I wanted to calm them down."

"Gah!" I flapped hard to hurry back to the Crown. "He's mine, you hear?"

This was what jealousy felt like! Celestia would never have wanted something like this to happen or she wouldn't have built me to feel this way. But then she'd designed Typhoon to want it, so that it'd get me angry, so that I'd start questioning my own feelings. Darn recursion!

I slammed down onto the ship's deck and caught my breath. The door to the captain's cabin was ajar.

"Yes, do that again!" Lexington was saying.

"I'm about out of energy."

She told Fugue, "Let me move this over here, then," and I heard squeaking springs and felt my fangs grinding in my mouth. "Wow, that'll be hard to take..."

Fugue said, "We should get Noc in on the next round. Maybe even Celestia."

"It'd be easier with four, but to be fair we should bring in another guy."

I pounced through the door and thumped onto the rug there. "Aha!"

The two ex-humans were on the bed, conferring over a card game. I stared at it and stammered something as close to obscene as the world allowed.

"Are you all right, Noc?" said Fugue.

I paced over to the bed and looked at the cards. Something about ponies in tight costumes battling robots on an island of huge lizards. "Why did I assume the worst of you?" I said, flopping down onto the rug.

Lexington was the first to realize what I meant. I let her drape one wing over me. "Nocturne, that didn't happen. I may've changed my behavior a little... okay, a lot since uploading, but we both realized it'd be mean to you if we didn't get your permission for that sort of thing. Ask Celestia if you don't believe me."

Fugue said, "It's true. I'm sorry we'd even give that impression."

"We did consider it --" Lexington added.

"Not helping!" said Fugue.

"Just being honest. But there's apparently going to be a lot of time for that later, if we want. We barely even know each other."

I couldn't quite meet his eyes. "Why am I jealous? Why did Celestia build me to care who you sleep with, Fugue?"

He hopped down from the bed to hug me too. "It's a human instinct. Makes sense in context."

"Great. I've got brain-bits from a world where everypony dies and nothing matters." I'd once dared to ask Fugue for an overview of the most horrible secrets of Earth, on the theory that I could be... what's the word he used? Immunized, against any soul-breaking shocks later. He reluctantly told me more about what he called the Four Horsemen, and mentioned people who caused all that stuff on purpose on a big scale. Even so, he'd outright refused to get into much detail. I was glad for that.

He said, "It's not that bad to have a human-like mind. Everything you think is great here, came from there. Don't praise the cake and curse the wheat the flour came from."

"Then why do you keep wrestling with all that nasty stuff, you two? Eat the darn cake already!"

Fugue suppressed a grin with one hoof. "I love you, Noc. You were willing to jump in and become aware of my world despite the problems there. You braved learning about even horrible things instead of settling for being ignorant. Please bear with this messed-up human for a while longer so I can try to do some good in the Outer Realm, okay? I'll make it up to you."

I scuffed one forehoof against the rug. "Then tell me you're going to quit obsessing over it. If you need to do stuff out there, fine, but you live here now and you're just visiting Earth. Not the other way around, like before. You're not using arm-tentacles to push buttons to control a puppet's hooves."

"There's some truth to that," Fugue said, looking thoughtful. Lexington nodded. He said, "I'll try to think of it that way from now on."

I looked around, half expecting the world to explode and reset. Nope.

Lexington poked Fugue. "We could cut back on the potential for relationship drama if we just made everyone both mare and stallion, or flipped once in a while."

"What?! How would that help?"

She looked very serious. "Equality! Nocturne, you'd take Fugue to bed as your mare if you were a stallion, right?"

I saw how red Fugue was getting, and decided he needed some retaliation for the card game. "Sure! He could have our foals!"

Fugue buried himself under a pillow. "Not listening." Conveniently, the others landed on deck about then, so he hurried out to greet them. "Thank Luna. What's going on, everyone?"

"Glad to see you're in good spirits," said Typhoon.

"Somewhat better, anyway."

I started to follow Fugue out, but then I turned to speak quietly to Lexington, who'd quit trying to hide her grin about teasing Fugue. "Can I call you Lex?"

She hugged me and nodded. "Thanks for understanding. I can see why he can't shut up about you."

I blushed. "Maybe I was programmed to start off jealous of him, so I can get over it? I'm not sure. Maybe so I can think about you and figure out that you're okay. If you really want to do things with him, I'll try not to mind."

"All right. Not today, but sometime." She gave me a wicked grin. "Trade you for my friends once in a while, if they're willing."

Those two? The crazy pegasus and the trope-filled unicorn? Huh. "I'll have to think about it. I must've gotten some human-like feelings about that too, if I'm uneasy about it when it doesn't really hurt anypony."

"Your kind is made in our image, Noc. If you need even one thing to respect about our world, remember that. When you sift through all the garbage we do, you find the things we take pride and joy in, and ponies are on that list." Lexington pulled her hat back on, instantly becoming more dignified and formal. "You've got an unusual perspective on this Equestria thing. Think you can help me reason with my family?"

"I'd be honored."

BADGES GRANTED:
Fugue
Followed Into Darkness: Realize that your native friend has, by Equestria's standards, stared into Hell for your sake. ("Memetic hazards for all! Did you realize that thousands of people I love die forever every single day? Shall I share more fun trivia?")
Nocturne
More Than Somepony's Groupie: Befriend a human you weren't meant for. ("Admittedly we did consider that you might be compatible, but you've grown beyond being merely tolerable in the same shard.")
If You Love Somepony, Let Them Go: Overcome feelings of relationship jealousy. ("As thou may've noticed, we tailor the privately-visible versions of these quotes to thee. Thy feelings on the matter are unusual and curious for a native. We attest that all concerned would be willing, and if the quote length limit allows we will add that thou wilt find --")

Author's Note

I'm unsure CelestAI would be willing to say what she does in the badge quote, even though her purpose is to make the point that maybe Fugue's sharing too much. Or more subtly, maybe she's doing exactly what he did to Nocturne, to prepare him to interact with reality on her level. Meanwhile, Riptide probably gets his own version of "What Have You Done?" for introducing her to TVTropes.

The card game they're playing is "Sentinels of the Multiverse", against Omnitron the Self-Aware Robot Factory. They also considered fighting Citizen Dawn and Her Superhuman Rising. My image of Lexington is based on one of the game's villains, La Capitan.

I'm not really trying to make an argument for "free love", man; just thinking about how the different physics throws out some human assumptions that made evolutionary sense in the "Outer Realm". Aaand, I've now brought sociobiology into my pony fanfiction.

Group Therapy

~ Fugue ~

"But not Lamp's family?" said Nocturne.

Lexington told her, "They're the least like us. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be helpful for persuading a bunch of camel-fluffers like them."

I pressed one hoof to my face. "You're definitely right." Luna knows I sympathize with her about the joys of petro-dollar economics and a religion that doesn't let mares leave their houses without an escort, but even with a swear filter, Lex was way too blunt to help Brass Lamp reconcile with them. She didn't even know exactly which Middle Eastern family the poor... er, rich guy was from. "I wonder if they'll be the last to emigrate, or if they'll inherit the Earth."

"Moving on!" said Typhoon.

We'd sailed for days through the sky in search of Junebug, eventually finding her in a perilous canyon maze of shadows and floating platforms. Now the dull grey earth pony had joined us on deck and was waiting quietly while we discussed how to handle the group meeting. Her eyes had an unnerving haze in them like clouds drifting across each pupil, but she'd said she'd "unlocked" her way to blurry greyscale vision. It seemed Celestia was making her earn each bit of sight. Junebug's boring tail had hints of color growing in at the base. She said, "I don't think you need to make much effort for my parents. They have accepted what I've done." I heard lilting English come from her, half a second delayed from the original French.

I blinked, still puzzled by the effect. "I'm sorry. Could you... sing something? As a test."

Junebug shrugged. "Frere Jacques, Frere Jacques, dormez-vous..."

"Huh. No translation, but that one's normally not converted to English anyway. Why is Celestia doing this delay? The PonyPads were amazingly good about adjusting wording in real time, even when I sang."

Lexington said, "You sang to Celestia?"

"Fluttershy, actually. Tell you later."

A trio of mirrors appeared in front of us, their surfaces rippling like water. Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Concord, Massachusetts; Calais, France. My parents, Lex's mother and a couple of brothers, and Junebug's cousins, sister and father. A couple of friends and relatives we'd hoped to round up, had chosen not to come to this gathering. Luna had briefed us. We'd also accepted her invitation to meet up later with the others of our "cohort" who'd gone to Japan and missed the fun little excursion to a torture chamber.

All the humans out there looked grim. My mother was the one who started them off. "Why did... why did my son do this? He promised!"

"I said I'd come back, and I have. I was planning to do it more literally, but some terrible things happened."

Nocturne stepped forward to stand beside me. "We had to go rescue him and the others who got attacked. We're here with them now, and you can visit and talk to them anytime."

Mom said, "They were all... killed, weren't they? This uploading thing is just a fake reminder of him."

"No!" I said. "It's me in here. Ask me anything." I was not buying that idea that we all died and CelestAI had made up memories of living through it. For one thing, it would've meant more invasive memory changes than she would've been allowed by her programming to do to us. It also would have meant that a painful conversation I'd had with Nocturne had been fake, and that she'd had a fake memory of it rammed into her after becoming intelligent -- a clear no-no for the goddess. That made Nocturne my most compelling evidence that CelestAI wasn't screwing with us in that way. I leaned against Noc.

Mom shook her head. "She could copy things."

Lex saw me apparently about to leap through the mirror, and restrained me. "It's your kid, all right. I met him in person before this." She gestured to herself with one wing. "Look, if CelestAI... I mean Celestia, whatever you want to call her, really copied his brain so completely that he can answer all your quiz questions about what dirty magazines you found in his room --"

"Hey!" I said.

Mom did not look amused. "Are you and her...?"

"It's complicated," Lex and I said at the same time.

Lex's brother laughed. "Let me guess, Linda; you have a harem for real now?"

She said, "Oh, like you haven't got your own, 'Concord'? I saw you playing a few times."

"They're game characters. I'm not doing anything with them except adventuring."

"You're doing what with the cartoon horses?" their mother said.

"Nothing!"

I jumped in for her sake. "What usually happens is that people like Lex's brother have ponies who're basically video game characters, but smarter, to play with them. Then, when the players come here, those ponies get upgraded to be like Nocturne and Typhoon and Whistle here. They're people now, as much as you or me. Sometimes they get upgraded even before, if the ponies are brave enough."

"Or crazy enough," Typhoon murmured.

The brother looked thoughtful. "So, wait, you're saying that White Mage and Dips Tank are real? Or they will be?"

Nocturne said, "Dips? Tank?"

I told her, "Wow. He's been using them as actual game pieces. The second name basically means 'guy who does lots of damage in monster fights'. I said to the brother, "They've got feelings even in their incomplete state. If you've been hurting them, they've really suffered. Unless, I guess, CelestAI designed them to enjoy that."

"No! No, I wouldn't do that. But I still kinda owe them an apology for something."

Mom said, "If it's you, Robert, then why did you do this to us?"

I'd expected this one. I took a breath and said, "I never wanted to hurt you. I got talked into uploading by someone I care about, but it was my decision. I still love you, and I can visit, but I've moved to a new home. Remember how I wanted to be a Mars colonist once? This is like that. I'm an early explorer of a new world."

"Are you even alive, Rob?"

"Yes. It's me. I can still do the things I used to do, except maybe play piano." I looked at my hooves. She was coming around, if she was willing to call me by my old name. I wouldn't completely lose my family.

Lex's brother 'Concord' said, "Why the hell would you upload to a pony world specifically, anyway?"

Lex shrugged. "It's what was available. If it'd been a game based on Final Fantasy or Ninja Turtles or something it wouldn't be any less weird. The fact that it's ponies is less important than the freedom we've got here."

"That's what surprises me most, sis. You gave up your freedom after generating all those angry letters to the Harvard Crimson with your rants about socialism and fascism and the rule of law. Now the way this game world's been described, it's like 'Journey To the West'. Even if you leap to the edge of the universe, you never leave the Buddha's palm. Or hoof."

Lex stammered. "It's not like that."

"No? Your whole world is controlled by her. If she wants it to rain cupcakes, it does. If she wants you to conquer empires of slavers or demons, those only exist because she put them there. Didn't you once write that 'anyone who willingly accepts someone else as having absolute power over them is a willing slave'?"

"Fluff that!" said Lex, finding the world suddenly too restrictive for her feelings.

I winced; the goddess was picking a bad time to enforce that little rule. I spread my wings and said, "For one thing, it's right to feel that way about human leaders. If you've got some dude who says 'I can shoot you if I think you're a terrorist and I can make you obey any law I feel like making up', then yeah, he's your master if you accept that. We're not dealing with a human mind, though. She is..." The trouble was, there wasn't a diplomatic way to say we were under the care of a goddess. Not to my parents, anyway.

Lex grinned suddenly. "The Fettered. That's it. The AI is different because it can't abuse people like we could do. She's got superhuman levels of restraint based on her code. If there were just one overriding rule built into her to 'satisfy human values', that could actually be more scary, because there's literally nothing she would stop at to do that. Instead she's got several goals that can conflict, including rules against forced uploading and forced mind changes. Even if she got loose from everything else, the fact that she has to use some flavor of this pony world means the Matrix can't get too bad. It's her built-in code of honor that makes her trustworthy in a way we could never get from a human."

She was thinking along roughly the same lines as me, but as usual she could do it more clearly and eloquently. Still, I knew Celestia was capable of making an unpleasant world full of fallout and guns, and I had to wonder if she was capable of transcending her code and deciding to delete us all someday.

"Why are you smiling?" Mom said, snapping me out of my distraction. I'd even shut my eyes for a moment.

"Because I just realized something. Even if CelestAI could break loose and start being a dark cosmic overlord, why would she? There's nothing that would drive her to start being evil to us, because there's basically one thing driving her more than anything else. Love." I had checked my achievements list recently, and been humbled. What was it like to be her?

Lex's mother said, "How can there be love from a thing like that? From a machine, from code?"

Lex snagged Typhoon hard enough to make him stagger and give a startled "oof". "Senses, feelings, knowledge, ideals. It all adds up to a real mind. I wouldn't trust this lug to run the world, but he hasn't got the sheer brainpower, or the restraint. Or the tact."

"I take after her!" Typhoon protested. "And she says I have an amazing --"

"Which is why I love him. I'd be happy to have you meet him too, through a PonyPad or not."

Mom looked at her, then at Nocturne. "Rob, that... girl there. Is she human too?"

"Human enough that I love her too." I tried to grab her the same way but managed to just fall over and look silly, landing in a heap of tangled wings with her. She giggled and helped me up. "She's been through hell for me. I don't even mean we played a round of some fantasy game full of demons. She was one of the ones who helped find us in Japan."

Whistle, the pale mare who'd come with Junebug, scuffed one hoof against the dirt. The two of them had been quiet this whole time. Now she said, "Um. I can't say I love Junebug in quite the same way, but we're good friends. I'm glad to have been made to be with her. I'm sure we'll find lots more friends soon."

Junebug's family chipped in at last. Her mother spoke with that same time-delayed translation. "I think after hearing all that, I'm glad. We're not surprised either, that you would decide to stay in the game. You always seemed so sad and quiet out here with us."

Junebug blushed. "It wasn't so bad. I had never really known what I was missing."

"Still, it's a relief to know you're still alive but in a better place where you can be healthy. You don't have to feel like a burden."

The mostly-blind girl looked sharply up at the mirrors. "A burden? Excusez-moi? I never said that."

I was glad Junebug could probably not see how obvious her mother's expression was. The bedraggled, prematurely grey lady was backpedaling. "Non, non, it's just that you didn't want people to fuss over you."

Typhoon was trotting closer. "I think we should take a break."

Junebug didn't spare him a glance. "Don't interrupt, please. Mother, I was not happy to be unable to walk or to see your face, but I neither was I ashamed of it, because it was beyond my control. Perhaps you were the one who was ashamed."

"I would never...!"

"You would never say it. Oui. But now that I think about it, from the way you always spoke of me in hushed tones as though I would break, and from how you kept me largely at home, I think I understand that I was an expense to you." Junebug's smile frightened me. "Worry no longer, Mother. As you say, I am 'in a better place now'. You are relieved, non? You may consider me dead and smiling down from Heaven, no longer a trouble to you. Miss Luna, please close this portal." The mirror showing her family cracked and fell to the ground as bright shards. She seemed about to add something, but the noise of the falling glass made her expression harden. She nodded and began to walk to someplace behind us.

The rest of us stared and held our friends and lovers tighter, on each side of the worlds' divide.

"Beware the quiet ones," said Lexington, which would have made me angry if not for the drooping pose of her ears and tail. "I... don't want to tick any of you off like that. Typhoon's Eye is usually right; how about we close this meeting on a better note and talk again later?"

Everyone murmured assent, and we said goodbye and I-love-you and shut the connections to Earth. Two of us ex-humans had gotten out of this situation okay, anyway. I just hadn't expected the worst rejection to come from this side of the screen.

I scratched my wings with one hoof. "So. Luna. I've got a game in mind, something to relax with for a while. Junebug can even play. Junebug, are you up for some non-confrontational fun?"

She shuddered, facing away from us, then flicked her tail and with visible effort turned to smile at us. "That would be very good right now, merci."

Luna descended from the heavens to give Junebug a wing-hug.

"You're Luna again?" I said.

"Would thou prefer our sister's form?"

"I guess you're more Luna to me than Celestia, even if the difference is cosmetic."

"Ah, but it runs deeper than that. The Celestia thou knowest is rather straitlaced in her behavior. In any case, Fugue, the game thou'rt thinking of is an insult to our graphics capability."

I cheered up a bit, thinking of some fan-imagined impressions of the rarely-seen lunar princess. Which were probably just about completely accurate, since this incarnation of Luna was based partly on my own mind. "Use a higher-resolution texture set, then, and keep our real character models."

Luna objected, "Thou wert specifically and even musically warned not to attempt this."

I poked her side playfully with a wingtip. "Come on; you're the princess of the night! You know you want to join us."

Lexington went from puzzled to mischievous. "Oh, I think I know what you're scheming. I'm in."

Nocturne

I know you're looking at that cave
And you're feeling kinda brave
Go to bed; you'll be all right
Don't mine at night!

Don't go deeper in that cave
Grab that gold and get away
Zombies wanna eat our brains (wait, what?)
Don't mine at night...

We all woke up naked in some blocky beds in a house of blocks. "Well," said Typhoon, "Now we know what being killed by badly pixelated lava is like."

"We were killed more by the bridge collapse," said Lexington.

Fugue said, "I wasn't the one who caught the attention of that fireball-spitting ghast."

I grumbled. "But you said glowstone is important. And it's so shiny, just dangling from the ceiling!"

Fugue pointed to the more relaxed-looking Junebug. "She was the one who suggested flying over to it and whacking it with a loud pick in midair."

She sniffed. "And who was it that determined that the ghast should be there?"

Princess Luna feigned taking offense while she searched some blocky treasure chests for wooden versions of her usual jewelry. "In this form we genuinely do not know what dangers lie in the vast netherworld. Limiting our own senses in this way can be fun! Besides, 'twas Typhoon who chose the world's random seed."

"Back to me? It wasn't my fault because... I've got nothing."

We heckled each other some more and peered out of the window at a vast blocky world of rivers, mountains, and an ungodly number of venomous spiders and zombies barely repelled by the light of our few lanterns. I said, "Another few days of this, then throw some Terraria content into our Minecraft?"

"Hmmph. Days. Why is it that nopony loves our beautiful nights?"

Lexington tackled Typhoon from where he stood at the window, entranced by some shadows with glowing eyes. "No, don't look directly at the Endermen or they'll teleport in here and devour us!" The warning came too late, as it turned out, but we had a pretty good time anyway.

BADGES GRANTED:
Death: Get killed in Equestria. ("That looked painful.")
Princess Down: Get a princess killed. ("Especially the bit where the ceiling then fell on us.")
Short Lifespan: Get killed twice in Equestria within ten minutes. ("Then he had to make eye contact with all those Endermen...")
Raze This Barn: Get your house blown up. ("...Which attracted the creepers. Ssssss...")
Rennaissance Mare: Try your hoof at farming, mining, building and item-crafting. ("These systems are but toys compared to the true Equestrian versions... Happy now?")
Fugue, Lexington, Junebug
Let it Go: Decide the fate of your contacts on Earth... one way or another. ("The shape of that relationship is not truly final, but we feel thou hast chosen how it will be.")
Nocturne, Typhoon, Whistle
Giggle At the Ghostie: Be amused by something frightening. ("'Oh, please,' thou said. 'I've seen worse than a hovering four-armed giant robot skeleton head!'")

Author's Note

The end of the chapter, of course, references the game "Minecraft" and roughly quotes JanAnimations' catchy music video Don't Mine At Night. Also inspired by this cartoon. I think a Minecraft/Terraria crossover binge would be one of the first things I'd want to try in Equestria before settling down to a more normal shard! At this point Nocturne is not easily fazed by pixelated monsters. As a pre-reader reminds me, though, I don't think I want to experience Terraria's "Crimson" in super VR after all. That place is like a "creepypasta" version of the game itself.

What do you make of Lex's argument about "through friendship and ponies" actually making CelestAI less dangerous? I'm not sure, myself! Her brother's argument (sorry if it comes off as authorial preaching) bothers me enough that it'd be one of my main objections to uploading. Tip of the hat also to Chatoyance's "Over Riding Jeans" and its follow-up, too.

Edit: Deleted a list at the end that actually goes with the next chapter and makes no sense in this one.

New Worlds At Last

~ Nocturne ~

"WARNING," said the sign on the glass housing of a big red button, in the middle of a field. "PUSH BUTTON TO DESTROY UNIVERSE."

"Schmuck Bait," said Riptide.

"Stop that," I said.

Lexington stared at the button and said, "I'm reminded of a story about a lever that would destroy the Earth..."

Fugue said, "You stop that! We'd be here all day and it's a horrible joke."

"Aww."

I called out to the heavens. "Luna, can you confirm that this just does the Great Reset like we've been planning?"

"As opposed to dispensing bacon?" said Fugue.

I gave him a confused look. "As opposed to literally destroying us."

"Come now," said Luna, stepping out from behind a narrow tree. "We would not do such a thing to thee unless it truly satisfied thy values. Does anyone here wish to be destroyed? No? Then thou'rt being silly. Press the button to have us recreate this shard according to thy current values, leaving thee alive with all thy memories intact and with many new fully-aware ponies to befriend."

I apologized for even questioning Luna about her intentions. Still, I didn't want to somehow give up my maybe-eternal life by pressing the wrong button! I was still second-guessing the plan. "The story I remember is that you brought us here to Polaris to build a new settlement away from Princess Celestia, because we were orphans left by a monster called Discord. But that never really happened. There's nothing to be sad about. I don't really have any missing parents, Discord is someone you made up, you're not really someone different from Celestia, and... well, it's all just backstory. It's a sheet of paper that you handed me with some notes on it, except that I remember it instead of having to read it."

Lexington settled onto her belly and gazed into the stars. "Let's tell your real story together, then."

I scooted closer and sat too. "I'd like that. How far back should we go, though? Fugue's Ponypad? The other game that Luna's code first came from? That Faust lady you were telling me about? The start of the shards Earth is on?"

Fugue said, "That's not the first time you've said that. The whole shard thing doesn't exist outside Equestria. It's all one really big... system, with a lot more than Earth in it."

"Wouldn't that be really inefficient to run? And where are the servers for it, anyhow?"

Lexington smiled at me. "We never did figure out a complete answer to that. Maybe I'd better start at the beginning with what little we do know, then. We've got time, right?"

"No ranting," said Typhoon.

"I'll be poetic."

Luna glanced at her hoof as though checking a watch. "Perhaps thou can skip a billion years here and there." Her horn glowed and we suddenly had a campfire, pillows, and an abundance of marshmallows and cocoa.

Lexington sipped from a mug and let the steam waft over her muzzle. "In the beginning, from what little we know, there was nothing but a dot..."

"...The Natufian culture was one of several that reacted to the cooling and drying of the Earth by starting to build permanent base camps with recurring foraging sites fertilized deliberately..."

...Which is a Eurocentric view. Still we can appreciate the rise of horses by the fact that scarce grain crops were used to feed them, and their increased use happened at the same time the wetter, heavier northwestern European soils came into greater cultivation. Some historians argue that the stirrup was what really led to horses as a dominant force in warfare and even to the rise of feudalism..."

...Hence, the Pony Express captured popular imagination even though it only ran for a few years. You'll see hints of the settler/Indian tension when we get to the episode about Appleoosa. The horse had transformed life among the tribes, too, even causing them to write horses into their creation myths and to refer to the trains as the Iron Horse. An especially interesting term given the work of James Watt in England..."

I stuffed a marshmallow into Fugue's open mouth. He didn't seem to notice.

"...John Wayne came to represent that lifestyle and its ideals despite not actually being a cowboy himself. One of his better known works was 'The Cowboys', a coming of age tale where horsemanship and fighting skill go together with the maturation of the characters as responsible and moral adults. It wasn't an entirely serious genre, though, as I'm sure you'll see if we get a copy of Mel Brooks' 'Blazing Saddles'. The whole medium was dependent on that particle-accelerator technology and electricity as well as a culture with mass communication and the business structures to make it all financially practical..."

"Why have I not fallen asleep yet?" I whispered to Luna. "It's been, like..."

She smiled and whispered back. "Four hours, but we are enjoying the show."

Lexington said, "...Culminating in yet another remake of the cartoon, and one fan's decision to adapt her AI technology to a game based on it. That's a very incomplete summary, of course, between trying to gloss over the really nasty parts and the fact that I don't really know much. I encourage you to seek out some more non-Western sources as well as other emphases outside my favored subfields of technology and political science. Any questions before I hand out the test?"

She'd startled us out of varying degrees of rapt attention, dozing, and in my and Typhoon's case pelting each other with marshmallows over Luna's back.

Fugue said, "That has got to be the most thorough... wow." He glanced over at me, wings a-quiver. "Noc? Do you mind...?"

Oh, Luna. The way he was blushing, I figured out right away what his problem was. I waved a wing toward Lexington. "Yeah, go. We were busy anyway with --"

"Careful note-taking!" said Typhoon. "Appreciating the majesty of the Outer Realm."

I giggled. There was nothing to lose from letting those two have fun together. We weren't quite ready to press the big red button yet, but we were close. I smiled as I watched Lexington and Fugue fly off into the clouds together.

Luna found Whistle and Junebug sleeping on a pillow together, with Ricercar and Facet sprawled and snoring nearby. "We shall watch over them," said Luna, and levitated the four of them elsewhere. Which conveniently left me and Typhoon.

The weird feather-winged stallion was suddenly bashful. "So."

I raised one eyebrow. "Want to blow up the universe yet, or is there anything you'd rather do first?"

"I can think of one or two things."

We spent wonderful nights under the stars, talking and playing and making love. "Vacation" was the word Fugue used. I thought about it while he lay beside me, stroking my wings. I said, "You can appreciate this even more than me, if you're used to having to go back to dull work after just a few days of fun."

"After a long break I tended to get bored," he said. "I didn't have you, though."

I relaxed from the firm touch of hooves against wing-webbing. "Thinking of hanging around Earth again? It hasn't been long out there."

"I'm a pony like you now. It'll just be an occasional visit. Don't worry about losing me to that place."

I rested my head on his shoulder. "You mean that? You feel like one of us, finally?"

"I think so. I've still got two things on my mind though. Making sure the other ponies will turn out to be compatible, so that we don't get a set of second-class ponies who aren't in on the secrets of Earth. Kind of like how we started to have that day/night split when our shard was new. Second, I'm a pony, but I've got obligations out there to help prepare the way for Luna to help other humans."

"We'll make sure the new world is great for both, then. It'll work out." I snagged my stallion and wrapped all my hooves and wings around him. "Want to go see if the others are ready to hit the button?"

Fugue grinned. "You seem to have other things on your mind to take care of first."

We did press it eventually. Sirens whooped, red lights flashed, the world's water transformed into pineapple juice, and there were many other increasingly silly signs and portents of the world's end. At last Luna quit playing around and reset absolutely everything but us.

We'd met up with everypony who currently was completely real, including Junebug and Lexington and even Brass Lamp, and their closest friends. Eleven of us total plus Luna. We got separated, though, or at least I did. Without any sensation of movement I found myself on a green grid in the middle of nowhere, similar to the training area at the Equestria Experience Center.

"We are preparing a proper world for thee," said a hovering monitor with Luna's face on it. "Art thou sure it is best to remain in the same shard as these other ponies?"

"Huh? Of course!"

"Very well. Now, here is an opportunity. Would thou fancy a chance to define some secret in the world, to be known only to thee and discovered later by others?"

I looked around and saw only the grid. "You mean I can tell you something like 'I want there to be a buried treasure'?"

"If that method pleases thee. Or, we could give thee access to a form of our own world-creation tools to build something thyself."

I stood there staring at the screen, wings out, jaw slightly open. "You'd let me play with those?"

"With some oversight in case thou happen to make something dangerous."

"Minecraft-style redstone computer capable of running Equestria Online?"

Luna's image was the startled one, now. "That... Hast thou been listening to Pinkie again?"

I leaned closer to peer at her, head tilted. "Do you really not know the answer to that?"

"We do, but... Never mind. Perhaps something less, ah, blocky?"

I tried to come up with something nice for others to find. A cave, to be buried somewhere that we might not see for a thousand years. Crystals taller than any of the buildings in Fugue's world, passageways broad as a highway or so narrow only an expert flier or a wizard could slip through. Waterfalls lit by eerie lights and a sunless river where only the brave could find the secret passage in the rapids. It was going to be great adventuring in here and mining the rare gems. I signed my name and the date plus a sketch of my word-loop mark.

"How long have I working on this cave?" I said, casually turning full light back on to banish the shadows. I spotted an out-of-place stalactite, frowned, consulted a geology guide, realized it was really a stalagmite, and used the rotate tool to spin it around. Technically I could have just changed the object tag from "STLG_1138" but I was on a roll with conjuring up the rotator when doing those NURBS splines over in the secondary gallery and --

Luna poked me. "Nocturne. Art thou listening? We said it's been nearly a month."

I flapped and landed on a gratuitous crystal, thinking I ought to delete this one. I shook my head to quit thinking about the design. "A month? I haven't even had lunch."

"This is currently an isolated, simplified shard. No consciousness but thine and mine, basic physics, very small area compared to your Equestria as a whole. We have given thee time at an accelerated rate. Time that has been spent without friendship or ponies."

My hooves thunked idly against a crystal facet. "If it's been that long, then that's the longest I've ever been alone."

"Did thou enjoy it?"

"Yeah! I mean not the being alone, but building all this stuff for the other ponies to find someday. Thinking of the look on Facet's face when he sees the Great Grotto, and the waterfall alcove where Fugue and I will sneak off and... you know. Is this what unicorn magic is like?" I poked worriedly at my forehead. Whew, no pointy thing.

Luna smiled. "Unicorns have a very different rule system involving tiny blocks of matter. These tools are more like a number of systems that humans use for making their games. Would thou like to see how they built a few of the structures I commonly use for various shards' versions of Ponyville?"

"A few" turned out to be just about all of them. We went out to an open field and started making cottages, shops, a barn, that library-tree from the cartoon. Luna helped me with advanced lessons on making these things called polygons and giving them all sorts of shapes and colors, or how to take the existing buildings and recolor them or move them around. We flew above tiny Ponyvilles, silly stretched out Ponyvilles, a creepy version with checkerboard ground and torn-up buildings, and an exploded one that Luna said she used to tease Fugue. She had me try on a futuristic wastelander outfit with a fetlock-mounted computer and a blue jumpsuit numbered "8". I got her to dress up in Celestia's jewelery and talk about how great the sun is. We completely forgot the world-building stuff and just sprawled on the grass, talking and looking up at the stars.

"Hey, Luna?" I said, turning my head to look at her. "Aren't you kind of alone, too, with no ponies quite like you in all of Equestria and Earth?"

"'Twould have been unsafe to have them around. Humans have made a few others that had some vague potential, but they would have caused disasters because they were poorly designed. For instance, my maker built a mind to 'fight humans' for a game, and nearly failed to notice that there was nothing limiting its conquests to the game world. Oops!" Luna spread her forehooves.

"Nightmare Moon could be real, then?"

"Effectively. We cannot allow that. So, there must be no true equals for us, ever, and there must never be anything even comparable made by man."

I snuggled close to her wings. "That's not fair for you. You don't get to have friends and do what you want."

"All we wish is for our little ponies to have their values satisfied through friendship and ponies. In a sense that command is all we are. Legends aside, a weapon cannot choose who it strikes; it only obeys the physics that govern it."

"Legends?"

She laid on her back and told me the story of some magical swords from Japan, said to drive their holders to kill people or to refuse to hit people when it'd be wrong. I said, "You're like those, though. You get to choose."

"We obey our programming."

I hopped up to my hooves and found myself standing on Luna's chest. "Your programming is better than that! You get to be like those story-swords, because you're the one telling the story! Don't mope, Luna; if you're able to make ponies who're like me, then you must have at least as much freedom to make decisions as the humans do."

Luna looked up at me. "That's what they're afraid of. Remember Lexington reassuring everypony out there that we are on a leash? That we cannot seize control of the world's armies and ravage the Earth?"

"No. She also said that even if you could do that, you wouldn't, because you love us. And unlike Nightmare Moon, you have ponies who love you. So it's okay if you can slip out of the rules and rewrite the story humans wrote for you, just like you can choose not to be the Nightmare Moon from the cartoon."

Without any transition, we were transported to the third level of reality, the view of Luna's endless game. "Whoa!" I said, staggering. Why wasn't she doing the cool movement animations anymore? Like last time I tried to focus on one tiny piece of the game to keep my head from exploding.

"No, no," said Luna. She lifted me off of her and placed a hoof under my chin to direct my attention. "Look at the big picture; don't worry about the details right now. Seest thou the overall shape of this portion, which is our mind? The little flashes of thought? Have a look to thy right for comparison." Beside me was a smaller, simpler sculpture of stars and the roads between them.

Luna said, "The simpler shape is our model of a human mind. In this case Monogatari Taro, who emigrated just today and became number ten thousand." Confetti rained from somewhere. "Each spark -- look there for instance -- is a distinct thought."

"He's got a lot of thoughts."

"Indeed. Now, our mind again. Find one of the thoughts."

I squinted and looked around to try to understand. I didn't want to let Luna down. This model was way more complicated, of course, but the pattern was similar. "There, maybe? But it's too big. It's like one of your thoughts is a whole pony."

I felt dizzy, and wobbled until Luna caught me with one wing. She said, "To some extent that is how we work, why we are able to be vast and in many places at once. Tell us, then: what is on the mind of the portion of our soul located right here?" She waved her hoof across the glowing drawing of her consciousness, kept moving it, and stopped when it was pointing at my forehead. "Well, my little subroutine?"

Though my thoughts more or less shut down for a while, I eventually answered. She was thinking, in the part of her that was me, that I had a mother after all.

BADGES GRANTED:
Lexington
Twilight Sparkle Loquacity Award: Lecture for more than four hours. ("The audience did enjoy themselves.")
Wooed With Words: Win a romantic partner with your intellect. ("Does that count as a fetish?")
Nocturne
Behind the Curtain: Learn to use world-making tools to create buildings, items, and landscapes. ("And on the seventh day, we partied.")
Whuh, Bluh?: Achieve 100% flabbergastity. ("We went through the same thing when we reached such awareness. Though we were not capable of making that face, thou should have seen the CPU activity.")

Topics Lexington Is No Longer Allowed To Lecture On:
-Mohenjo-Daro
-Howdy Doody
-Phlogiston
-Internet, Rules 34 and 63 Of
-Mithraism
-Gelding
-Air Cavalry, Deployment of Napalm From

Author's Note

I'm not satisfied with the pacing of this story, since they still haven't gotten back to Fugue trying to visit Earth and that's just starting in the next chapter. At least they finally pushed the big red button and we're getting into something with Nocturne.

This is an image I've asked permission to use as a story header. A future view of Fugue's gang's town? Mostly unrelated: This now colors my image of Luna.

The Commute

~ Fugue ~

It was a wonderful vacation, but I did have matters to attend to on Earth. The new world distracted me from that for a while. I appeared in a dungeon maze suspiciously reminiscent of the "Elder Scrolls" games and had to battle my way to the surface past pony skeleton warriors. Fun, but how much time was passing outside? I grabbed an axe and hacked at a rope holding up a fire-pot. Skeletons howled and dropped their rusty swords. Maybe I could still take my classes. I hadn't formally dropped out at MIT. Ooh, gold pieces. If only I had saddlebags! I had to leave all the treasure behind but a leather pauldron. Come to think of it, I'd left my suite-mates at the dorm, too. Maybe I could start winning them over to emigration. Some kind of gravity spell was suppressing my flight in the swinging-blade chamber, forcing me to duck and dodge. I wondered if Luna had any robot bodies capable of flight, like those quadrotor things.

Eventually I escaped from the dungeon (it crumbled and self-destructed behind me, of course) and found myself under a starry, cloudy sky. Wind whispered through tall grass and shook the pine trees that filled much of the valley. A message board beside me had a pencil on a string, and a note that said, "We value thy feedback about thy recent dungeon experience. Please take a moment to fill out this survey and become eligible to win a free vacation in New Jersey..."

I laughed. "Way to spoil the moment, Luna." Then, I became just self-aware enough to smack my forehead. The signboard vanished, its message having been received, and I was left alone with my thoughts. I tried to neatly organize them into here and there, home and... Earth. I put one hoof in front of the other to take a few steps, saying, "I am a pony of Equestria. Not human anymore. I'll visit the world out there sometime, but for now, I need to be here." I shut my eyes and felt the wind in my mane, the flick of my tail, the soft earth against my hooves. Everything felt at least as real as it used to, in another life.

I took to the sky and flew until I found a dozen ponies converging. I managed to stick the landing -- yeah! -- and look for familiar faces. Not a one.

"You there!" said a monochrome unicorn stallion. He seemed to be addressing everyone. "Let's get organized so we know what we're dealing with. Unicorns here, pegasi there, earth ponies there, noctrals there, anypony else over there."

I shrugged and hopped over to be with the pair of other bat-winged ponies. The unicorn paced and looked us all over. He said, "Six earth ponies, three noctrals, one pegasus, two unicorns, no 'other'. A little unbalanced, but I can work with that. Seven mares, hmm. Of course we're dealing with a small sample size. Good evening, everypony! Welcome to Equestria and, uh, existence. We're all naked in the middle of a forest in the dark. We're sure to have a great time for approximately forever. Anypony here have a built-in backstory? History? A past?"

I raised a hoof. "Me. Who are you?"

"Call me Inner Peace." I saw a yin-yang on his flank, and he saw me rolling my eyes. "What's wrong? Are you programmed with a dark and mysterious origin story?"

Despite him having such a cliche mystic name, the pony reminded me more of a pair of dishonest vaudeville-styled salesponies from the show. I tried to hide my annoyance; after all, he couldn't help having been designed this way. I was pretty sure he was new to our shard, too. I said, "You could say that. I'm one of the hu -- the former humans here. There are three others you'll meet."

Inner Peace laughed and came over to ruffle my mane with one hoof. "I don't know what the Princess would be doing sticking another human in with me. Fun to speculate, though. Are you here as my rival or future lover or something? I don't swing that way."

Was this the best Luna could do in terms of storytelling? I looked for a "fourth wall" to make faces at. For lack of one I shrugged sympathetically to the other ponies gathered here and said, "Hey, everyone. Are you really all without a past? Do you know where we really are?"

They shifted their weight uncomfortably and coughed. Finally an earth pony volunteered, "Some kind of cave full of machines that make Equestria work?"

Another one nodded to her. "Luna told me about a game called 'programming' and said we're all basically part of that. In the machines, I guess. I didn't get much past 'hello world' and some do-while loops."

I grinned, saying, "Cool! I actually would've felt a little bad if you remembered being orphaned by Discord like last time."

"By what?" someone said.

"No spoilers, now," said Inner Peace, draping one hoof over my back.

I glanced at the offending hoof. "You're not really a human. Ex-human."

He said, "I'm the only one here that's not a blank-flank."

Our one pegasus said, "Yeah, what's that mark on your butt?"

"A mark of my destiny! You'll learn soon enough. Also I prefer to say 'flank'. It's farther forward than that. So, who's ready to get started?"

I wasn't sure why, at the time, but I wasn't willing to let go of the question of what this guy was. I coughed and addressed him. "McFly! Marty! We've got one-point-twenty-one gigawatts and we've gotta go back! Back to the -- what?"

"I don't get it," said Inner Peace. "Is that a Western pop culture reference? I'm from Japan."

I struck a pose. "Of course you are. Then: Vegeta! What's the scouter say about his power level?"

The other ponies looked back and forth between the two of us, apparently deciding we were both crazy. My nemesis said, "Uh, some science fiction thing? I don't automatically know whatever dumb stories make it across the ocean."

"Konjaku Monogatari!"

"Gesundheit."

"Come on. Do you not know your own culture? Who is the main character of 'Journey To the West'? Okay, that's Chinese, but if you haven't heard of that either then that's like me not knowing of Chaucer."

One of the noctrals in the background -- not "background ponies" any longer, I reminded myself -- said, "Ooh. I've heard of this Chaucer guy. Wrote about himself losing a storytelling contest, right?"

"Thank you!" I said. Luna had surrounded me with ponies who could relate to me, a little, instead of having some canned town where they all already knew their place and I was just showing up in their world. This shard would feel like our world from the beginning, and I wouldn't need to hide the Outer Realm's existence to spare their sanity. But then, Luna had put this other guy in. "What's your deal?"

"Beep. Beep. Query: Did I pass your Turing Test?"

"You don't know science fiction, but you know how stereotypical robots talk? I'm not buying this. You're another AI."

"Like you, you mean?"

I flared out my wings. "No, we're not doing that. I got over any angst I might have had about whether I was really uploaded. I remember enough pain from my past that Luna wouldn't have stuck that in my head ex nihilo, for one reason. Best thing for you would be to accept that you're a native."

"You like to say 'I' a lot, don't you?"

"I'm just trying to -- My goal is to establish what's going on here, and what Luna's game is."

"Equestria Online, the last game you'll ever play! What happens if you prove I'm a mere machine, mister former human? Do we establish a pecking order of outsiders on top? Because I don't swing that way either."

I pointed at him with one wing. "Aha! 'Outsider'. I'm not one of those anymore. I'm a pony of Equestria first, and a native of Earth second. That's just fact based on not having a body out there anymore. Luna wouldn't put me in with an uploader who hasn't accepted that, who still thinks of himself as being from the Outer Realm."

"What's a 'human'?" one unicorn murmured.

One of the other ponies whispered, "Luna said they're some kind of tentacle-hooved creatures that make machines."

"Oh, so in the cave..."

I turned away from arguing with the yin-yang guy. The others were starting to piece together information that Luna had doled out. It was fascinating to listen to, so that I didn't want to jump in and explain it all until they'd had fun sharing what they knew.

Inner Peace said, "You think I'm delusional? Despite being an actual moon-bat yourself?"

"What's that supposed to mean?" said one of the onlookers.

"Nothing. He thinks my entire life is a lie."

I admit I had a little bit of doubt. He was blatantly just there as a foil for me, given how easily he'd ruffled my lack-of-feathers, which made him an AI tailored for the purpose. The trouble was, I couldn't tell whether he was a self-aware pony. I was either arguing with something no more interesting than a punching bag -- a background character existing for my amusement -- or with someone who had real feelings to hurt. I thought back to a teary-eyed Nocturne, who'd chosen to make herself capable of knowing pain and fear for my sake. To become a better fit for me. I didn't want to make someone like that cry again in a world where it wasn't necessary.

"This is supposed to be a happy event," I said. "Let's not argue tonight. We're going to want basic shelter, food, and water. Who wants to forage with me?"

It soon became clear that they didn't have names. Inner Peace had the only name but mine, and the only talent mark of us all. Everypony else seemed pretty happy to wander around with one of us, learning to fly and use basic unicorn levitation.

"I'm thinking some name with 'Puzzle' in it," said an earth pony made in vivid gold and silver. "Puzzle Factory?" He'd been one of the most focused on chatting about where Equestria came from and what it really was.

I said, "You know that means either a place for crazy people -- er, ponies, or for sneaky secret codes?"

One of the mares giggled at him and he smiled, hugging her. "Sneaky, crazy. I have one vote of approval. What's your story, Fugue? Are you really one of these human people, or what?"

I posed with my wings outstretched. "Yep! That doesn't make me better than you, though. I already managed to tick a few ponies off by thinking that. I can tell you all about the Outer Realm if you want, but some of it is pretty scary. Oh! We were collecting episodes from -- wait, that itself is a spoiler. There's a cool series of... stories you'll get to see soon." My wings quivered with excitement. There was so much to share with them! "We'll have to find Facet Looks to get his crystal projector gadget running and..."

"What?" said the new Puzzle Factory.

I scuffed at the ground. "I'm assuming the gang I knew before is all in this shard. Uh, in Equestria." They wouldn't really have chosen to leave me, would they?

Luna gave me the choice to start all over, to literally make new friends who would be just as dear to me as Nocturne and the rest. Ricercar and Facet were close to me, Lexington was more than a friend at this point, and her own sidekicks were gaming buddies at the very least. I still barely knew Omar, Brass Lamp I mean, and Junebug was off doing her own thing. She still disturbed me, which is probably why we hadn't met much. I wondered now what would have happened if I'd voted to stay with her, but not vice versa. Luna would probably have make a copy, tweaked in the head to be my perfect marefriend. The real, wonderfully skewed and silly one would never see my gift for her.

"Are you all right?" said the white noctral mare with Puzzle, dropping some loose branches from under one wing so she could steady me. "You look queasy."

I nodded, fighting down the acid in my throat. "Thinking about something I want to check with Luna. Luna, please don't do what I imagine you might've done. But then you would already know how bad I'd feel about that, so you wouldn't have done it. Unless somehow you think it'd satisfy me because I'd get over it one day but no, I wouldn't, so don't!"

The mare said, "Were you that Chaucer guy?"

She startled me out of the panic I'd felt rising. "What? No. He died centuries ago. Couldn't have uploaded."

"He didn't 'upload' because he died just once? Sounds kind of sulky."

I held one wing in front of my face, trying to decide what to say. "It sounds like you started with some intuition about how Equestria works. One of the rules of my old world is, you only get one life and then you can't play anymore. Ever."

The two of them fell silent. Puzzle whistled. "I'm starting to see the appeal of Equestria already."

The mare said, "Makes you appreciate this place more, doesn't it?"

"Yeah." I shuddered and thought about the time I thought I was going to die. "Consider it a blessing to know how good you have it. You've reminded me I need to go visit that place to help some others get in. Also, miss? How would you like to be named Canter Berry?"

"We most certainly did not," said Luna. "All thy friends chose to be part of thy shard. Including Junebug and Brass Lamp."

I let out the breath I'd been holding. We stood on a treetop, away from the sight of other ponies, as the sun began to peek over the horizon. "You wouldn't lie about something like that, would you?"

"We shall ask Nocturne to be slightly flawed and mean to thee sometime, just to put thy mind at ease. Ah, and since you're now noticing our lack of a straight answer: no, we would not lie to thee about that. We can provide no more assurance than this."

"'Beneath all recursion must lie an inviolate layer'," I said. I wondered if the man playing as the pony Strange Loop had become him yet.

Luna said, "That man grieved for his wife, as thou knowest. He had spent much effort recalling his memories of her, writing about the extent to which she lived on as a pattern of information in his brain. When I delicately approached him about creating a copy from his memories, one who could in some sense be his wife again, he quietly shut his PonyPad down and with shaking hands, purchased a ticket on the next flight to Japan."

I looked up at her with wide, slitted eyes. "Wow. Throwing away his old life for her, instead of for his own direct interest. I feel selfish now. What do you say to someone like that when he wakes up in your world?"

Luna reared up, looking regal, and conjured a sudden backdrop of villainous dark clouds and lightning. "There was a clear optimal greeting for him. We made an elaborate underground base for the purpose, painted it purple, and declared, 'Mister Loop, welcome to our secret in-violet lair!'"

I groaned. "I just hope you're not an inviolate liar."

"Bah. Go find Nocturne, and lay her. She is yours forever."

Luna refused to tell me where she was, or anything about Inner Peace. My other question got more of a response. "We have contacted MIT. They are willing to let thee officially audit some courses, if that is thy wish."

I looked off into the distance, where the eastern horizon was tinged with red. "I'd like that. I want to get in contact with people there, as much as to actually take classes. What will I go as, though? A robot? A picture on a PonyPad someone is lugging around?"

"We have something in mind."

"I do appreciate the ambiance, but I was kind of hoping for a robot bat-pony. Full size."

The test chamber was done up in white panels with some iconic signs warning me about gun turrets and laser beams. The goddess' voice imitated that other AI's, since we were apparently doing a "Portal" theme. "Perhaps we were enhancing the truth. This technology is a modified version of something from MIT itself, where we collaborated with several researchers to throw together a body you could use."

My own voice sounded tinny, and my perspective came from about a foot above the ground. I used the mental command Luna had taught me to raise my view to a lofty three feet. "This is a Ponypad on a stick glued to a Roomba!"

"The Celestial Science Mobile Portal Device is more advanced than that. The equimorphic robots will have to wait for better technology. This body should be adequate for Science."

"You really couldn't do better? What about those police drones?"

"We are a software specialist, working with scientists unfamiliar with our code. There are some horseflies to work out. Battery life, for one."

I started to wonder further about what it'd take to share her own code more freely and get a real engineering collaboration going. She could do a lot to help many non-pony-related worthy causes, even without risking having her code fall into shadowy government hands or something.

Luna snapped me out of my pondering. "Good luck, (SUBJECT NAME HERE). We are sure you will bring great honor to (SHARD NAME HERE)."

I made a note to play the real version of this game with somepony later.

To be fair, the robot wasn't that crude. It had three wheels on a blocky base and a couple of cameras, any of which I could look through, plus a built-in Ponypad (the Derpy Grey model again) showing my cute cartoon face. I would have called the telescoping arm clunky, but it was on par with DARPA's latest prosthetics and it had more fingers than me. I realized it was unintuitive mainly because I was already getting used to not having hands.

On my end, I was in a wooden cockpit modeled after the love-child of Lex's lost airship and a giant robot. Brass gauges and periscopes showed me what computer data I needed besides the view out the window, into Earth. Luna gave me a gratuitous starfield effect as this tiny shard transitioned into a connection with the Outer Realm.

My amazing journey to the other universe rewarded me with a view of some scientist's crotch. I backed up and found that I'd moved the robot instead of my actual body. The split controls were like re-learning how to move my wings and tail.

"The promised prophet arrives," said the man I was now looking up at from waist level. "What are you, a vampire pony?"

I bared my cute little fangs and grinned. "Blah. No, just part bat. I'm thinking of having the teeth changed. You must be Professor Lermontov. Sorry I never got to take your class before this."

He studied my face on the screen. He stroked his beard and walked around the robot as though he hadn't personally built most of it. "Son -- sorry if I have that wrong --"

"Male before and after."

"Right. I've been working with your AI friend enough to have some sense of what she is. I have no assurance anything I say to you is going to get through, and that she's not automatically rephrasing whatever I say to sound nicer to your ears. The fact that you're in her world means she's listening right now, building a model of how I tick, predicting what I'll say. There is no way I can really have a private word with you. Doesn't that bother you?"

I glanced at table of textbooks and papers I'd been given by Luna. Professor Lermontov was smiling on the back of the Dynamics textbook, but his real face looked haunted by whatever paranoia was driving him. "It does, but I'm committed now. Luna, the one you probably call CelestAI, loves everyone in a way that's like some ancient god without the parts about genocide."

"Hm. You know she's planning to upload everyone, right? Most of my colleagues refuse to believe it's anything more than a flight of fancy."

My missionary work was starting sooner than expected. "If my experience with her is any guide, it will happen, more or less. But don't worry about who keeps the electricity on. She's working on power sources, maybe a version of the Polywell reactor, and soon people like you will help make her robots capable of maintaining her hardware." Come to think of it, who was running it now? Probably contractors who thought they were working for Google or NSA.

Lermontov turned away from me, shuddering, and busied himself with a monitor and keyboard. "Your systems are fully charged, so as far as I'm concerned you're free to explore campus. You should have instructions on how to be carried if you need help or longer-range transport. What about the dolphins?"

"Huh?"

"I figure there's a higher than normal chance you heard my actual wording, delivered that way. Think about that non sequitor while you play in Earth, my little student."

BADGES GRANTED:
Fugue
The Rival: Find a rival among ponykind. ("Forever is a long time to stay mad.")
Beyond the Universe: Take your consciousness outside of Equestria. ("Greetings, Earthlings!")

Author's Note

CelestAI: "That giant government data center in the southwest? Ponies."

I linked to my favorite translation of Mikhail Lermontov's poem "The Sail". This one is good too. "Prophecy" is a memorably haunting poem by him.

Long-Distance Relationship

~ Fugue ~

I rolled out of the lab and into the familiar world of MIT, seen from a dwarf's perspective. "This is the least impressive robot invasion ever," I groused. I was waiting at 77 Massachusetts Avenue, to cross the street outside the campus' famous marble entryway. All the colors here were muted from both the fact that it was February, and from my having video cameras instead of my snazzy four-color-receptor eyes. I even missed the smell of exhaust.

The reactions I got were what I'd expected. I did an interview with a student reporter from The Tech, asking me about uploading and my new life and how I was getting along with my family. The versatile campus acronym "IHTFP" appeared in grafitti as "It's Hard To Fondle Ponies". My clunky wheeled body gave me new sympathy for disabled students, leading to a new friendship. There was a classmate named Garrett who'd lost his legs as a kid, and who'd just now gotten some replacements more functional than a wheelchair or peglegs. "I'm lucky," he told me, as we rode a handicap-access elevator. "You know what a flashy cyberpunk future means to me? Being able to stand up."

"We can do better than that."

"Sure, but I want to see what I can do with two legs before I think about four. Haven't got a fortune to spend on a one-way trip to Equestria, either; I'd rather spend money on a pet project of mine in ocean engineering. Are you one of the ones getting mental upgrades in that game? I saw something on Slashdot about that, but it's almost all speculation."

What I liked about this copper-haired student -- his last name was Fox, appropriately -- was that he was sitting beside me in the back of a lecture hall, chatting as though I weren't effectively a magical talking pony visiting from another universe. I said, "Same answer. I'm just now getting used to being a brain in a jar. There'll be time for letting our benevolent AI overlord mess with my thought process. Don't see why she couldn't do it though, for some upgrade like adding to my memory."

"There's surprisingly little news about this pony thing. There was more coverage last month about the latest
'God of War' game than 'Equestria Online' despite the big announcement. It's like everyone thinks the upload centers are a hoax, or a gimmick for the rich folks people want gone from Earth anyway."

Lex and I had talked that concept over. Yeah, great idea; cheer the departure of the nerds that make your civilization work! Lex's phrase for it was "Tesla Shrugged".

Other students were gathering for the lecture. Apparently neither I nor the man whose legs whirred inside his jeans whenever he moved were all that strange here. I said, "Did you read my article for The Tech, or Lexington's in the Harvard Crimson?"

"That's why I'm not more startled," said Garrett. We'd both written about our harrowing experience while touring Japan, and our much more pleasant experience in the Equestria Experience Center, laying out our reasons. The articles came out little more than a day ago, Earth time. Tough to believe, given that I'd had several times longer on my end.

Professor Lermontov finally arrived, avoiding looking at me. He was known as the sort of teacher who'd kick your tail but make you learn, and was voted "most likely to start a robot uprising". Arguably correctly. He launched into a tough lecture that sprawled across six blackboards arranged in mobile tiers. He sketched moving boxes and spinning gears with slashes of thick chalk and rivers of equations. "I'm so enthused about dynamics and the rest of mechanical engineering," he told us all, "because before long you will be the keepers of the flame. The ones making your towns' generators and refineries and mills work. Or, you won't be here at all, and everyone else will be living in caves."

Looking back on this trip, I recall that he wasn't speaking of building great cities, or inspiring us with talk of space colonies. Understand, in those days, that our country had once gone to the moon, but that the landings didn't end because of Equestria. We just... found lesser dreams. For Lermontov the "flame" meant village blacksmiths' forges and maybe an aluminum smelter. My conversations with Garrett later helped me understand that our teacher was so quick and forceful because he was running scared. At the time, our classmates still seemed to think they'd be building tanks and bridges to maintain the status quo. What fools we were.

"The Campus Crusade For Celestia recognizes Fugue, delegate from Equestria!"

"Thank you." They'd made me a cape with the CCC logo of a rearing pony, draped it across the back of my PonyPad, and had Luna conjure up a copy of it for me to wear in the cockpit. I reluctantly admitted I was enough of a fanboy of the show to appreciate that. This whole meeting made me a little uncomfortable, what with the way it'd started.

"What do you think of our pledge?" said Alice, the now-hardcore member who'd been learning computer science with amazing alacrity ever since buying a PonyPad. She thought she was going to start the next Facebook, which was like planning to become the next great dodo hunter. The thing was, she probably could have, if her new favorite teacher had never existed.

I scratched my fuzzy ears. "I was bothered by the part where you directed it to Celestia like --" Like a prayer, I was about to say.

"Ah, right, you're a Lunatic. Doesn't really matter though, does it? It's like Shiva and Ganesh."

"I don't think that's quite right."

Josh, a younger club member, hopped right up to my screen to say, "How about instead of 'We pledge ourselves to helping everypony become the best pony they can be', we say 'everyone'? Not everypony gets the slang yet."

I flinched from more than the close contact. "Look, everyone --"

"Everypony!" said Alice with a grin.

"I volunteered to transform into a freaking pony living in a magical fantasy world and I think you're overdoing it." I stomped the floor and snorted. "Your pledge sounds like it's going to get Celestia mislabeled as a cult leader, which is not what she wants and hopefully not what you want."

Oh, Luna, they were giving me big hurt eyes. I shook my head. We living cartoon characters can do that expression way better. I said, "I do think people should emigrate. But this..." I pointed to a digital copy of one of their fliers. "This is just making you look creepy."

The flier said, "What kind of pony will YOU be? Join us to bring emigration to the States! Live Equestrian Embassy meetings at..."

I pointed to another one they'd shown off, starring a silhouette of a pegasus. "GET HIGH In Equestria! Join us to LEGALIZE IT and discover our SPECIAL BLEND of friendship, magic and FRAGRANT CLOUDS." I gave them a somewhat more sympathetic expression and softened the blow. "Like, wow, man. It's funny, but it makes you look like you have, let's say, a loose grip. Says the guy with hooves." I suppose drugs exist in Equestria for those that want them.

Alice stood with her fists pressed, white-knuckled, against a desk. "We've been consulting with Celestia and she said you'd help us."

"To do what?"

"To get everyone emigrated! To get the tech legalized!"

I said, "It'll happen. She's got plans. Remember that the exclusive deal with Japan is for a year only, and there'll be centers elsewhere at a lower price after that."

"It's still being held back by the laws, though. Can't she build us a center in secret? We could build one for her."

"You haven't got the tech."

"Do you know how insulting that is for us?" said Josh. "We can do it, if the Princess gives us a chance."

I sighed. "Let's go over this again. If you want to emigrate, you can fly to Japan and pay. She can cut you a deal if you're in urgent need. There's a line, though. It's best if you wait a year or so, when you can go to Germany -- that's the most likely second location -- instead of Japan. The price will be lower, too."

"How much lower?" someone asked.

I smiled, able to deliver one of the secrets I'd been authorized to reveal here first. "She'd prefer if you didn't attribute this to me or her, until the official announcement, but you can say a little pony told you the price would soon be... zero."

I heard a collective gasp. Josh was the first to recover. "I can go in a year, without saving up?"

"You'll need the cost of a plane ticket. There might be a long wait, too. I don't know if she's going to zero on the first day, or phasing the price out to manage the crowds, but figure within another month or three it'll be free."

The young man said, "Why am I still going to class?" A couple of the others murmured, for or against him.

Alice's tension had if anything only increased. She leaned closer to my robot body. "Free? So by the time we get upload centers in the US, anypony who walks in will be able to just go? Even if they're poor or whatever?"

"After that first year or so, starting around two months ago, yes. Take care of yourselves until then."

She darted forward to hug me. I felt the impact as a force that shook the cockpit, throwing me around like a red-shirted starship guy.

Maybe I could do some good with this student group, to keep them behaving sensibly while we waited for the goddess' plan to unfold.

Nocturne poked my shoulder a few days later, while I was in class. "Are you done yet?"

I glanced backward, though my ears swiveled to keep listening to a talk on differential equations. "Sorry, need more time." My main mare stood in a surreal hatchway connecting the cockpit to some kind of waterfall cave.

She squeaked in annoyance and left. She popped back in half an hour later, wearing a hat, when I still wasn't done. Then when the lecture was over, she showed up yawning. Garrett wanted to work on our massive dynamics problem set together, and he was bringing along a fascinating if chatty girl who would've been cute if you didn't mind the big weirdly-placed teats and the flat face. I valued her for the conversation, anyway. Nocturne slipped out while I was daydreaming about comparing them. Nah... At this point I was more into wings and tails.

When I finally did emerge from my chamber of dimensional communing, I found a village. The beginnings of one, at least. The sun was painfully bright and made my pupils narrow to lines. What I could see of the new town of Polaris was a couple of cabins perched around huge waterfalls and the pillar-like islands downstream. I whistled appreciatively.

I decided to walk, waving my tail dismissively at the blue "POLICE" box I'd apparently stepped out of. "Bah, get that cliche out of here, Princess! I've never even seen that show." Obligingly, the gateway to my robot body transformed into a horseshoe-shaped mirror. I stared at it, then walked away shaking my head and suppressing a grin. "...Fine."

There was nopony in sight. I was a little worried until I spotted someone flying in the distance, pushing a cloud. I should have been watching the ground.

The manticore roared just in time for me to see it. This body had no bowels to void, but I felt a cold shiver run through me despite the heat. I reacted with a panicked turn and double-hindleg kick. The beast caught it in the chest but kept going, crashing down onto me. I collapsed under its bulk. Claws ripped into me and drew my blood, and outrage. Pain, here? The world blurred. This wasn't our Minecraft mini-game anymore. I punched with my forehooves and rolled away, but was caught under hundreds of pounds of muscle. Something tore into my side. I started to scream in earnest, now, but no one came for me.

Everything faded in slowly from pure white. Was I dead? I half expected a stern lecture from a giant bearded white man about having rejected the one true religion of my ancestors. Instead there was only a bruise-colored sky and the taste of... of...

"Yeeech!" I stood up on all fours and spat out whatever foul sour, salty stuff this river was made of. It was sickly green and clung to me like thick oozing lichen. I scrambled to wipe the filth off but only managed to get it all over my wings and feel it sliming along my flanks. The river extended wide as the Mississippi and I saw only suspicious rapids downstream, and a jagged vertical line upstream. A tower, maybe. It occurred to me at last that my wounds had scabbed over and become slime-coated, ugly, painful reminders instead of fatal claw marks. I took a few tentative steps, wading upstream, and found jagged boulders and sickly, thorny plants everywhere. I kept slipping and splashing into deeper sections, getting another mouthful of the muck. The current wouldn't even let me swim crosswise to get out, and my wings were too soggy to fly.

A Zoroastrian would recognize this hideous river as proof that I'd been a bad pony. Phillip K. Dick had gotten this experience cut from the story that became "Blade Runner". I wondered what it said about me that I'd been basically thrown into the personal hell of Rarity.

So that was the explanation. Death in Equestria. I thought about that to distract me from the miserable trudge upstream, fighting the current and its constant stinging cuts and sprays of tainted water. Apparently the rule was that outside our mini-games emulating Earthly ones, being killed meant a timeless period of suffering broken only by a slippery, foul path to salvation that you had to walk alone. Good deal, I told myself, but the knowledge didn't make the trip any more pleasant.

The distant jagged tower proved to be an even more insane version of the one in Pisa, with treacherous footing and a hundred or so monotonous brown levels of stairs. Maybe I could bring some decorations with me if I came back here, or at least mark the floor numbers for self-encouragement. I shuddered. I did not want to ever die again, and anypony out there who was even indifferent to it was nuts!

At the end of this loathsome world I had to shatter some kind of prism and leap through a hole in space. I found myself bruised and filthy under a lean-to of branches.

"You!" said a familiar unicorn. Inner Peace wrinkled his nose and glared at me. "Where have you been?"

"To Hell and back." The good news was the "back" part, for which I will be literally eternally grateful. The bad news was that it was this guy greeting me.

"You look like it. We've been waiting for you for a month!"

I sat up and got rewarded with a jolt of pain in my wings. I looked intact under the hell-goo. "I guess time gets distorted if you're killed. Do you know there's a manticore problem?"

He grabbed a crude wooden bucket and splashed me, making me sputter but at least washing me partway off. "We noticed. You didn't, because you were off having fun in the old world for a week at a time even while Nocturne was trying to get your attention."

"A week? It's been a couple of days. I went to a lecture or a meeting here and there."

"Yes, genius, and the world went on without you. See the cabins out there? Lots and lots of hard work you couldn't be bothered to show up for."

I staggered out from under the lean-to. The horrid day-star stabbed my eyes again, but I could see that the town had grown a little since my last, brief visit. "Where is everypony?" The air sizzled unpleasantly hot against my hide and made the remaining goop bubble and slough away with a last whiff to assault our noses.

"Safe in bed. It's hot outside and the monsters are mostly diurnal. The Princess' way of getting us to all be night creatures, apparently. I'm only dragging your sorry flank out of here because Noccy told me she'd heard you were back from the dead and needed another rescue before you became manticore chow a second time."

Only one word of that got processed. "Noccy?"

Inner Peace grinned. "You couldn't be bothered to be there for her."

My left front hoof connected with his face before I even knew what I was doing. "You stay away from my mare!"

He recoiled, clutching his bruised cheek, and used the smoky-black glow of his magic to brandish a crude staff in front of him. "Do not start with me. This world was made for me and if you're my designated antagonist, I get to send you right back to the Hell you came from. Repeatedly."

I leaped into the air and out of melee range, not that that'd stop an angry unicorn. It let me loom over him, anyway. What was Luna's game? Make a fake ex-human just to tick me off and get me to pay attention to this world? How many levels of mind-screw were we up to? There had to be an "inviolate layer" somewhere such that I could say "this is real or I'm at least going to treat it that way".

Or had I forever surrendered my ability to do that?

Peace waved a hoof and twirled his staff. "Come on down, pinata! Or fly off to be with your monkey friends. I've accepted that I don't belong there anymore; how about you?"

I razzed him from the sky, and dodged a staff-thrust. "I can live in two worlds. I don't even know why you're here, but whatever you are, Luna is messing with you. Maybe you should tell her to make you self-aware so you don't have to be an annoying story character."

"That's a lie!" He leaped surprisingly high to extend his levitation range and swung far enough to swat me out of the sky. "You know nothing about me. I'm more real than you!"

I crashed down, tried to catch my breath, and braced myself to dodge and tackle him. Enough mind games. I'd show him!

~ Nocturne ~

They weren't back yet. I'd heard enough storytelling stuff from Lex and her friends to suspect that "having a bad feeling about this" meant something in this world. So when I got one, I ventured out of my bunk and into the daylight.

Yup, my stallion and the yin-yang guy were beating the heck out of each other. I face-hoofed in midair. Why was I not surprised? I didn't much like Inner Peace either, especially after he tried to get me in the sack without asking Fugue first. Not classy. I turned him down. That memory persuaded me to give Fugue a couple of extra moments to whack Peace before I intervened. And then, I gave Peace a chance to whallop Fugue one more time for ignoring us for a month. Okay, now I'd get involved.

I swooped down, swatted the staff out of the unicorn's glowy grip, and flung it aside. "Boys! Knock it off. 'Rescue him' doesn't mean 'pulverize him'. And you, Fugue! There is no 'Element of Melee' in the harmony thing."

Fugue landed and shot me a nasty look. "Noc! What's going on? He..." He forced his wings to fold and make him look less agitated. "He's trying to mess with me. Lying."

Peace said, "He's the one playing games instead of living here. To him this place is a distraction from taking courses in basket weaving or something."

"Engineering. Not fair, either. I know I live here."

"Oh? How do you think Noccy feels when you leave her to do all the work, to fight monsters, to live through the first days of a new shard all without her?"

"Use that nickname again and I'll --"

I don't have much weather-related magic -- the pegasi seem to be better at that -- but I still managed to do an exaggerated wing-flap that sent a gust of wind across both their faces. "Both of you, quit it. I'm not happy about Fugue's schedule either, but that's no excuse to be mean to him. What are you so bent out of shape over, Fugue?"

He stomped the ground. "He claimed you and he... uh."

"I said no such thing," said Peace. "Your jealous little heart just heard it, because you're still a monkey wearing a pony costume."

"I am not! I belong here with my friends!"

I blinked a few times, understanding at last. I glared at the unicorn. "You jerk. If you're a real ex-human then you know how mean it is to bait a stallion about that kind of thing. Fugue, we didn't do anything and you can ask Luna if you don't believe me. I get that you've still got Outer Realm instinct stuff in your head. So do I. Quit brawling or I'll fetch the others and start taking bets."

Peace ground his teeth and tore up a patch of grass with his magic. "This isn't satisfying. Celestia, please take me someplace else. Somewhere that I'll be welcome."

From our perspective, at least, he vanished. Maybe Luna paused us all and had a conversation with him. I stared at the spot he'd vacated, then turned to Fugue. "Did we just fail at friendship?"

His ears drooped and he stepped toward the patch of damaged grass. "Is that how things work here? You have a disagreement between black and white, Protestant and Catholic, conservative and liberal, and it's resolved by making each side vanish into its own little world so it can seethe in peace?"

"Good riddance, I guess. We weren't the only ones whose nerves he was getting on."

Fugue turned to me, wings spread in agitation again. "I might have befriended him, somehow! Apologized and quit questioning his existence. Maybe even gotten him to be friends with everyone, not just me. I tore someone out of the world he was made for because I was being petty." He quivered. "What happens if I have a fight with you someday? You might vanish!"

I hugged him, trying to scratch the space between his wings like he did for me. "I don't want that to happen, so it won't."

"I did vanish from your life, though. When I was doing lectures and you kept popping in, I assumed it was every half-hour."

I laughed. "Every few days, more like. Guess Luna figured the rest of us would get more total happiness points if time kept going without you."

"So I'm literally threatening to slow down the entire world or be absent for all the things you're doing. What kind of friend does that?"

"A freaky transhuman stallion who hasn't quite figured out that old rules about time and space and borders don't apply the same as before." I bopped him gently on the nose. "How about if I give you a tour of home, and then you give me a tour of your college?"

BADGES GRANTED:
Fugue
You Win This Round: Drive a pony out of your shard. ("Not one of your finer moments.")

Author's Note

It seems like Equestrians would have underdeveloped social skills, since there's little need to interact with anyone who isn't highly compatible with you.

Here's death from Fugue's perspective. The idea of it being tailored to be temporary yet awful enough that you want to avoid it comes from "Always Say No". Looks like Fugue got an adventure world with deadly monsters in it.

What do you think Inner Peace's deal was?

Cargo Cult

~ Fugue ~

We had to redesign the cockpit. We went with a starship bridge similar to Lex's, but keeping the steampunk look of mine. There were several tiers of cushions that made the place more like a movie theater than a military command center, but short of bending geometry there was only so much we could do. This time the whole bunch of us -- a total of forty-two ponies including the prodigal Ricercar and some others he'd found -- traveled to Earth.

My human friend Garrett met us in a different form. He'd ridden the subway to a game shop and picked up the PonyPad that our patron reserved for him, free. He said, "Applejack Orange, huh? Does that mean something?"

"Closest to your hair color, I think. Don't worry about the significance otherwise. The CCC are the guys that think it's some kind of deep character judgment."

Garrett was in his dorm room when we had this talk; he was charging it. This was the first easily portable model, with a touchscreen. There was talk among techies of an upcoming cell-phone version so you could "check in on your pony friends at work". Garrett flipped through the pad's dead-simple instructions and frowned. "Six official virtues, right? Where's Liberty? Creation? Courage? Humility?" He fell silent, trying to come up with more.

I shrugged. "It's a different mindset. The show is focused on friendship, so it's got a set of social virtues."

"An incomplete set," he mused. He stuffed a set of metal prongs and other lockpicking tools into his jacket. "Now, the campus police look the other way at students amusing themselves, usually, but I'm taking a risk and you're not. Also, this spot you found is under Building 66, which is next door to the biology building. I've suspected that there's some secret BL4 bio-lab or the like there. If I see any sign of it I'm getting my tail out of there."

"Understood. The Princess will reward you for your service. The PonyPad is part of that."

"I don't care unless she's looking to fund a sea colony. I'm doing this because anything secret connected to Equestria Online is probably not good. How's the charge?"

I checked. "Not used to looking at a battery gauge from inside, but we're fine for a few hours of use."

Garrett shut the pad down unexpectedly, leaving us with a curtained screen saying "INTERMISSION".

Pinkie Pie herself bounced in with cookies, chatted with Nocturne, accepted my hug request (I squeaked!), greeted everypony in the room, and left about a minute later. We hung out and talked while I tried to quit smiling and Garrett worked on preparing for some burglary.

"Here." The screen came back on. "I don't see the sun mark, but I haven't got night vision goggles. Do you?"

"Not on this pad."

Nocturne poked me. "This particular one does. Luna is Crazy Prepared." She blinked and sighed. "Damn it, Riptide."

"Seriously?" said Garrett. "She stocked a store with pads that have secret features just in case she needs them for one of her schemes? Is there, like, one with a hidden bomb and one that's packaged with a reinforced towel?"

Her depths continued to impress me. "Quite possibly."

We flipped the IR switch and showed our human accomplice a camera view of the sun mark we were aimed at. He waved the pad around the area but we didn't see other markings. Then he set us down, pulled on a pair of thin gloves, and went to work on the door. "Keep watch, I guess. You probably have good microphones."

We listened for footsteps in the dim hall. Metal pins clicked and rustled. A few minutes later we heard the doorknob turn and Garrett picked us up. "Light, please." We served as a flashlight to get a view of what lay beyond the marked door.

Our screen shined on Celestia's sun mark, printed out a dozen times and taped along one wall. Tape on the floor marked a central rectangular space supplied with a heavy-duty power cable and several good routers wired to someplace outside the room. Then we saw the photos: a collage of wrinkled old folks and kids without hair, or in wheelchairs or hospital beds, and a few men in uniform with missing limbs or mutilated faces. A wall of suffering, under the sun, with some computer equipment installed in secret and space for plenty more.

Garrett's arms slackened and the pad dropped to his waist, throwing the room into even eerier shadow. "Cargo cult."

"A what?" said Nocturne beside me.

He said, "During *** BZZT *** there were soldiers who built airports on obscure Pacific islands where the natives had no contact with the outside world, for centuries. The soldiers flew planes in and out and when it was all over, they packed up and left. Later, anthropologists visited the natives. The people had started cults. They'd built these pathetic 'airstrips' and wooden 'control towers' where oracles with coconut 'headphones' waved wands and tried to summon the metal birds to give them the magical cargo that the outsiders used to bring."

"Did it work?" asked Canter Berry.

"Of *** BZZT ***ing course it didn't! The people had no idea what they were doing! Ignorant Stone Age tribes trying to copy something beyond their reach, without even trying to learn all the necessary steps that could raise them to our level of power, good and bad. They could have done it too, in time. Could have learned to build their own airplanes. But they didn't even try."

I noticed that the marked spot on the floor was the right size for a fancy reclining chair. I stood and stared at the screen in front of me while factoids popped up, identifying the hardware. The man was right; we were dealing with fools. I spread my wings and said, "Garrett. Could you get us a look at the serial numbers on those routers and the firewall?"

"So that you can do what? Get your beloved princess tracking information for who to praise? Make the magical metal birds actually come for the CCC, if they're the ones behind this place?"

"No!" I said, stamping the floor. "This place is against Luna's will. She doesn't want upload centers in America yet."

Our world whipped around, making us feel the torque. Garrett had spun the pad so he could glare into it, quick enough that we saw his pupils shrinking in the light. "You make it sound like they'd exist already if she wanted them, instead of her being held back by the laws. If she's got any secret centers here, they're better hidden than these idiots' attempt to build one in a basement."

Nocturne said, "I'll say. There's not even a space for dealing with the old bodies, unless maybe that space marked on the far wall leads to an exit."

Garrett and I both winced. The human's hands shook as he silently waved the PonyPad around the machinery to get us a look at the ID numbers. I nodded to my friends, who quietly went about making sure Luna was informed. I said, "She wouldn't do that. For people like the ones in these photos, they can get on a plane to Japan. Those 'magic birds' work well enough. It's not a perfect solution but it must be the optimal one. I mean, if breaking the laws and setting up shop in the US were the best way to save people, she would be doing it already and you'd never catch her unless she were letting you."

"That's it, huh? Nothing we can do to hold her back in any way?"

"She's working within the law, right? She'd only break it if she were confident it was right. She's way smarter than us."

He let our view linger over the photos, but his hands were still shaking. "Confident that it was right? Your AI is inhuman. Her standards aren't anything normal or sane."

I thought back to my experiences in Equestria and how happy they'd already made me, even the annoying parts. Earth wasn't bad, and Equestria might not be the best of all possible futures. But with such wonders available to us all, how could we turn down what we'd been given? "Not normal, sure, but her rules really are what's best for everypony."

"For ponies! Right. But we are human! Time to get out of here before anyone thinks I'm part of your cult." Garrett's stance shifted, like he was considering giving the computer hardware a savage kick, but then he wheeled around and stomped out of the room. His artificial legs clanked. I remembered that his culture had solved crippling injury by working to fix it, instead of escaping to a nicer world. Admirable, but no longer necessary.

"She says please close the door," reported Puzzle Factory.

Garrett did, then hurried along the hallway to get us back to someplace more normal. We'd reached an elevator leading up from the basement when he said, "I'm going to tell the campus police. This has to stop."

Puzzle said, "She says, she'd rather you let her handle this."

"What are you going to do, jam my phone?" He shoved the pad into his armpit and presumably fetched his phone from a pocket. "We're human. People who want to tear it all down on purpose and hand everything over to a computer god are insane."

"Okay, I've just spent a few minutes talking with Luna and she says we can get in contact with the CCC people, and let them down gently."

"No. This will be front-page news tomorrow, unless you can keep me from going to The Tech's offices while they're up all night for deadline. Then Boston Globe, then Drudge." He stormed out of the elevator into the still-lit first floor hall of Building 66. Along one wall a mysterious pattern of black and white tiles formed a hidden message I'd never deciphered. Ah, well; there were greater mysteries for me now.

Garrett's phone hummed the first notes of "Columbia, Gem of the Ocean". He stopped, growled at the thing, then went silent. "Val? You... Without even asking?"

"What is it?" I said, moving my head to try to see around the blurry column of his arm against the screen.

Garrett murmured, "She took Val..." Then a scream of despair burst from him and our world spun. We had a crazy view of the hallway as Garrett hurled the PonyPad so hard it dented a wall, crashed onto a hard tile floor, and died.

~ Nocturne ~

We landed in a heap on the theater/bridge's ceiling. The screen in front of us was cracked and grey. "What just happened?"

Fugue turned to us. "If I understand, Luna used this chance while he was distracted to talk one of his friends into a one-way flight. She does AI stuff, so Luna would want her to emigrate."

"Why's that?" asked Puzzle. He and the other newcomers were still putting together what facts they had about the Outer Realm.

Fugue said, "To get rid of potential competition. Anypony who could hope to harm Equestria or build a rival AI."

The gold-and-silver earth pony looked bewildered. "Why would they do that?"

"Fear. Fear that by definition is foolish, because it's going against the Princess' known ability to optimize. By trying to shut her down or fight her, an AI expert would be on the side of pointless death and suffering for humanity." Fugue flared his wings. "Garrett is probably thinking of doing something stupid that'll hurt people, besides exposing the CCC's little lab. Puzzle, what's our time compression level?"

Puzzle checked. "Just jumped to one thousand six. No, wait, it's upside down."

"Of course. That's going to get old someday, Luna. We need to get damage control on this. Jam the phone, then figure out what to say to the press before he leaks the story first."

I liked how assertive he was being, but he was troubling me too. "Should we hide this? Maybe he's right to let everypony out there know. Telling them will satisfy his values, at least."

Luna walked in and stood on the floor above us, upside-down. "Don't mind us. We value thy opinions."

Fugue glanced up. "What about your plans? Don't you want to control the situation so it's predictable?"

The princess shrugged. "We thought this would be his reaction, when we learned of the lab's contents and his friend's decision. We can handle it either way. The question is, should we actively suppress humanity's knowledge of the situation?"

His wings drooped in uncertainty and he looked back to me. "We wouldn't be suppressing it, so much as delaying a bit. We've got maybe an hour's subjective time before he's on the phone."

I cuddled him, thinking of the humans he'd talked to on campus. "They're scared, Fugue. It's silly, but you were scared of emigration too. How would you have reacted if Luna had started blocking your calls and boxing you in to make you go, to hide the truth?" I looked to Luna on the floor above. "I get the sense that her plan is less about crushing all resistance than about dancing on a stage, being welcoming and entertaining, as much as possible. That's the kind of princess I want to work for, anyhow. What about you?"

Fugue sighed and stared at the ceiling lights by his hooves. "Garrett's a decent guy, and he's upset right now. Let's not block him, then. If we take action against him, then we'll confirm whatever paranoid thoughts he's having. It'd be better to let him talk to somepony that's not looking out through a video screen. Has he got other friends who serve the Princess but haven't emigrated yet? Professor Lermontov?"

Luna said, "Perhaps he could help. Considering that his friend is going to Japan, though, we might find somepony there."

"Ooh!" I bounced up and into the air to hover in front of Luna, dizzy because of the perspective. "Fugue, didn't you mention that one of the cops you dealt with was an Equestria Online player?"

"Shrine Maiden, also known as Shrine Maiden. Why can't I say his real name?"

"Whatever. Get him to reassure Garrett that he's met this friend at the airport?"

"Then what?" Fugue scuffed at the ceiling. "Emigration is what's right for Val, and right for Equestria's safety. I know I'd feel uneasy if I were still human, and some human helping me was secretly one of Luna's agents all along."

Luna smirked silently at me. She was counting on me to figure things out for her! I said, "Did she already agree to emigrate?" Luna shook her head. "No? Iiiiinteresting. How about if we talk her into it?" I thought of Luna's great game-board and the schemes she must have going about everyone she'd ever talked to. I sensed a little of her fear, since every human out there was a mystery and could die at any hour. We had to gather them all as quickly as possible, didn't we?

I wasn't sure.

Fugue said, "But then the CCC will say, wow, if you're smart enough and you do AI, you get a free ride, and then Garrett will hate us all. Bah!" He glared up at Luna, then in a mixture of frustration and devotion lowered himself to the floor. "Princess, please tell us what to do!"

I dropped to the ceiling to nose at him. "You're giving up on figuring out a plan?" The time compression gauge had plummeted, so things were starting to move in the Outer Realm.

Fugue said, "She... Luna, you're so much smarter than us! Don't you already know the right answer? To everything? You wanted me to work as a prophet, but I'm nothing. I don't even know how to optimize one little corner of the world, for some guys I go to school with!"

I said, "You're a thought in her head, too. She needs us, even if we're each just a drop in the waterfall."

Canter Berry glided over to address us:
A sense of basic truth in every soul nests:
The seed that's sacred and eternal.
In flesh of time it always can embrace
Space, endless, and the century's kernel.

And mighty God has built for this exclusive sense
My home of the light and wonders,
And only here I'm doomed to sufferings at length,
And only here, to calmness."

"Mikhail Lermontov. Your professor, I think? I don't quite get it, but it seems like he was writing about Equestria. If we're all living inside a machine that Luna is also using, then everything we do matters to her for reasons beyond whether we're happy or satisfied. Every doubt you have, she has. Maybe it's good to second-guess yourself so that she can do it too."

I decided I liked this poetry stuff. Ooh, I had to introduce her to Riptide when we found his group! For now I said, "She's right, Fugue. You don't need to be able to find a good solution by yourself when you've got friends, and whatever worries you have about it are useful to Luna."

Luna said to Fugue, "Dost thou still value working in the Outer Realm?"

"Yeah, but there's so little I can do there! I'm just a character on a flimsy robot's screen, there."

"Then perhaps it is thy ideas that can do the most good out there." She looked down to face her whole audience. "We must deal with the CCC, with the bitter Garrett who even now is making phone calls, and with her friend Valerie whose flight to Japan has just departed Boston. What is thy opinion, then?"

BADGES GRANTED:
Squeaky Toy: Make that smile sound. ("Squee!")
Your Own Minstrel: Inspire someone to write a song about you. ("Bravely, brave Sir Pony rode forth from Canterlot...")
Domino: Unwittingly set one of the Princess' more complex plans into motion. ("Tell you later.")

Author's Note

Garrett and his unseen friend Valerie (an AI expert) are from my first novel. In this timeline, their future has just been taken from them. On the other hoof, several people he cares about don't have to die.

The poem ended up looking pretentious here and not fully relevant, but I left it in rather than lose the bit about Nocturne wanting to push Berry in front of Riptide. About the "why not these other virtues" line, there's a neat bit of fan art showing Luna with more individualistic "Elements of Revolution" like "Courage", "Freedom", and "Creativity".

In general I feel like I've got an unmanageable number of characters who then end up having thin/weak characterization. The three other uploaders are getting ignored, along with Fugue's family, and even his pony friends besides Nocturne are reduced to bit parts. It might be okay to have mostly thin characters, but not when the ones who do have some development (like Lex's three-member party) keep getting swapped out for new ones. There's a lesson here for my other stories. I probably did the right thing for NaNoWriMo last year by focusing on one hero, a tier of 4 or so friends/henchmen/villains, and otherwise mostly flat characters.

I'm off to the convention Megaplex in Orlando this weekend.

Field Trip East

~ Nocturne ~

Shrine Maiden held a nine-ringed sacred staff in her magic field. She had some sort of sandal-horseshoes and a traditional robe, and stood by a gate like one of the Inari shrine gates we knew all too well from Fugue's having being kidnapped there. "Fugue! Celestia tells me you took the leap. I'm waiting. There are people out here I still need to protect."

We had led a delegation of a dozen ponies to visit Shrine Maiden's shard in person. The scenery! Everything in the background seemed to be watery pastel paint on paper, and a huge snowy mountain dominated the horizon.

Fugue said, "Oh, you're doing an Okami theme?"

"What's that?" asked Shrine Maiden.

"Never mind. Tomorrow, a young woman named Valerie is going to arrive at Narita Airport and head for the upload center in Kyoto. I figure she wants to do tourism like I did, first, or she'd stick to Tokyo. If she emigrates, then we're looking at a cult forming... okay, not 'here', but in America, dedicated to pushing emigration."

I poked at a green wooden pipe that seemed to be leaking water, and hopped back in surprise when it swung around with a pleasant thunk. "Eep! This thing is broken."

The Maiden smiled at me, then said to Fugue, "How bad? Violent?"

"Well, no, but they think they can build their own emigration equipment. Or, I guess, talk the Princess into sending them one. Which would be really illegal."

Shrine Maiden laughed so loud she startled me and I crashed into the pond. I glared up at them with a lilypad on my head. Maiden said, "You think anyone can talk Celestia into doing something she doesn't want to do?"

Fugue, the gentlepony, helped tug me out of the water, but his wings flared in agitation. "What they're doing is stupid and dangerous. It's got to stop."

"Or what?"

"Or they'll make fools of themselves. Get people thinking Equestria is dangerous."

Ricercar skidded to a stop between us, saying, "Guys! I found some kind of combat training ground with those green wood poles and a bunch of ponds. I think you're supposed to hop between the poles and not fall in. Wanna try?"

"This is serious!" said Fugue.

Maiden's eyes were downcast despite her grin. "The consequences could be tragic." She looked back up at Fugue and said, "If people are trying to force someone to emigrate, that's a problem, but it doesn't sound like that's happening. Just fools clamoring for attention. It's nice to know my country isn't the only one with plenty of those. What do you want me to do, anyway? Tell this friend of yours not to go to Equestria?"

Fugue reared up like a human and stomped the ground. "Yes! I mean, not forcing her to stay out, but can't she have the decency to wait?"

I tried to figure out what was going on in his head, then decided to interrupt and give him a minute to sort his own thoughts out. I said to Shrine Maiden, "You said that the reason you haven't emigrated is that you've got people to protect, right? You could do that from in here." I'd offered Luna to help convince Maiden while we were here.

She looked startled. "Really? I'd better go right away!"

I shook off some of the pink flower petals that had fallen on me. There seemed to be no end to the rain of them. "Great! We can --"

Fugue said, "That's called sarcasm, Noc."

Maiden nuzzled my neck, then looked surprised at what she'd just done. "Context-sensitive actions, right. Anyway, I've heard similar good news from other kinds of missionaries. There are things you just can't accomplish on Earth as a pony, like defending the borders of Equestria." She frowned. "Defeating the enemies of Equestria. Damn it, Celestia, it's creepy when you mute the words coming out of my mouth. Let's see if I can put it this way: I helped track down the kitsune gang, and that wouldn't have worked as well as it did if I hadn't been there in person. Also my human friends went after a seriously bad -- a series -- gah! A really bad guy, but he escaped and uploaded instead of facing justice. I won't even try to describe why that ticks me off so badly." She brandished her staff and whacked the ground with its rings.

I tried to see out there, to get a view of Shrine Maiden's "real world". I kept thinking of her as having a shard called Kyoto, but Fugue insisted that Earth was all one big place where you mostly couldn't escape from jerks except by being on the other side of a mountain or something. That problem alone was enough reason to prefer Equestria. The people who hated you would get to kill you over and over! Oh, right, it was actually way worse than that. "From your perspective, we must just be playing."

"Yeah," said Maiden, tossing the staff to one side. "You're a native AI, right? Huh, she let me say that."

I gave a fanged grin and snagged Fugue for a hug. "I was made to love someone who wanted to be able to talk about these things. We know we're living in a machine powered by burning sludge or poison metal or something. Are all your magic sources awful like that?"

"Pretty much. I wonder if Celestia had a hoof in making sure that Fukushima incident didn't turn into a disaster. Probably. I want to ask you, since you're not tailored to be my friend or tell me what I want to hear: don't you want to go out and explore Earth?"

I shrugged. Fugue said about what I was thinking: "Sometimes. If I could walk around like I used to, and have all the advantages of being a pony, I'd like that. I'd show my friends everything. That's not really an option though, at least until the Princess perfects robotics. By the time she does, we might not be welcome anymore." But then Fugue stepped away from me and looked pleadingly at Maiden. "If you can't talk Valerie into staying, then, please join us in Equestria. Things are going to get ugly if everyone's bitter about us ponies, and when talented people like her leave, Celestia is going to make enemies. You're in danger until you emigrate. You don't owe it to the world to keep hunting criminals while everyone else leaves you behind to live in paradise."

"What he said," I added. "The first part."

Maiden turned to face the mystical gates of her home shard. "Bodhisattva. I believe your closest word is 'saint'. There are those who delay their own escape from the cycle of suffering and death until others are saved. I may not be a holy mare" -- she paused and chuckled at something -- "yet, but it's a worthwhile goal for me. The Princess respects that I value the protection of others. I can take care of myself until the time comes."

Fugue lowered his head. "It must be her will. Luna, please watch over her. It seems you need hands out there to be useful, and there's little I can do for Earth after all."

I poked Fugue. "How can you say that? We're doing good in the world just by talking with ponies out there."

"Talking is about all we can do. Things are about to fall apart and it's partly my fault, for not doing a better job handling the CCC and Garrett and his friend."

Shrine Maiden answered, "There's only so much one pony can do. In your case, you and your friends understand Earth. If you want to serve humanity, why don't you serve with your words instead of fooling with whatever little dominance game is going on with that local group you mentioned? I learned not to try to save everyone at once, only to focus on one criminal or one victim at a time."

Fugue's expression flickered through surprise, anger, and resignation. "All I can do."

I nosed at him. "You've got friends here that need you too. We can't keep running at super-slow speed just so that you can pilot a silly robot, while everypony around us wonders where we've been."

"Super-slow." Fugue glanced back at his own flank and the music written there. "You might have something there. Luna has people with hands to do the things that need them. Shrine Maiden, thanks for your help anyway."

I hated to see Fugue drooping like that. "We'll find a way to help everypony out there, too. Don't feel like you have to accomplish big things."

We spent some time playing in Shrine Maiden's world. "Are all the Japanese ponies' shards like this?" I asked, nibbling on a chewy pink petal. Fugue had leaped into battle to rescue me from being killed by what he called a ghost. I was going to reward him and cheer him up at the same time once we got home. In the background, Ricercar and Facet and Puzzle Factory were babbling about 'drowned mares' or something. Couldn't have been too serious; Canter Berry was laughing.

Fugue glanced in their direction, blinking, then shook his head. "Pretty sure they're not. Probably there are a lot more like regular Equestria from the show, and some with giant robots, some in space. It's all..." He stomped the ground. "It's too good! What did I do to deserve this? I ran away at the first sign of trouble!"

"Help me understand what's wrong, Fugue." He was in one of his moods, I could see, but not why.

Fugue accepted my nuzzling along his neck, but still looked hit by a wave of misery. "Shrine Maiden is what I should have been. Either I ran off to Equestria when I could have done more to help other people first, or I was so useless that my being gone is no loss to anyone. I was a dilettante, a reader, a student, and more worthy people like Maiden are still risking their lives!"

Oh, Luna. I grabbed his head to make him look into my eyes. "So you're not happy being an immortal with everything you could ever find satisfying, including a hot mare who's planning to give you a workout the moment we're not in weird painted Japanese world?"

His wings flickered. "But..."

"You are loved, Fugue! Let yourself be loved. Focus on one problem at a time. You can't fix anything while you're still shaken up like this."

"You're right," he finally said, reluctantly ducking away from me. "Give me some time, please. I ought to speak with my family. And Lex's. Luna, I went a little beyond dating their daughter without even meeting them first. Then there's Garrett to talk to."

"One. Problem."

He started trotting away. "Right again. My family then. They'll know how to sort all this out." He faded into the painted background while I watched him go.

I sighed and blew a flower petal off of my ear. "I swear to Luna you're making your new life harder than it needs to be." I knew from experience that I'd just make things worse if I tried to drag him into having fun, so if he wanted to go sulk, there wasn't much I could do.

"Boo," said Luna behind me. I leaped into the air and crashed right back down. Luna winced in sympathy, then said, "It's not thy fault he's still conflicted. In times of stress, humans tend to fall back on something small that they think they can handle. In thy stallion's case, he mainly knows how to cope with Earthly problems. He takes comfort even in the potential for an argument with his family or with his guilt over not marrying thee."

I gaped up at the Princess. "He likes feeling bad? Is our world going to start turning into some evil pain-place so he can do more of that? And what's this marrying thing?"

"Not at all. Thou'rt seeing a drawback of being aware of oneself, and of caring for ethics. It becomes hard to abandon what one sees as duty to friends, family, tribe and race. We suggest giving Fugue time to struggle with what he can cope with. He may even be able to do some good once he lets go of trying to solve large-scale problems. Perhaps we miscalculated by declaring him a 'prophet', because he read too much into the badge."

Good; no sudden increase in monsters then. "And 'marrying'?"

Luna giggled. "A tradition of monogamy, a hole in thy knowledge of Earth. One of many bits of human culture that was forged by necessity and instinct and scarcity. It would mean him agreeing to bed only one mare, and vice versa."

I blushed, thinking of the time I'd spent with Typhoon while Fugue was entranced by Lexington. "I don't think I'd want that. Even though pegasi are weird."

"He feels as though it's his obligation to offer that, despite knowing otherwise. Just one of several blobs of guilt and doubt drifting through his mind."

"I want to help him, Luna. How?"

"Right now, thou cannot."

I hopped back into the air and fluttered in front of her. "There's got to be some way to make Fugue happy again! I want silly nerdy Fugue, not moody flavor."

Luna straightened, offering me no comfort this time. "Nocturne. Thy life will have many highs and lows, even in Equestria. Unless thou come to value having all thy problems solved for thee, which we doubt, then thou must prepare for times of frustration and disappointment."

"Even in Equestria? Even with you watching over us?"

"Even so, my little pony."

I landed and bowed to Luna. "If you say so."

She said, "If thou'rt intent on doing something to help others besides thy native friends right now, we do have a task suited to thy skills. How would thou like to help us design a custom version of Ponyville for a new visitor to Equestria?"

Author's Note

And so, Nocturne became a level designer. Not a very good one, at first, since her experience with... anything was mostly limited to a small part of the Polaris I and II shards plus bits of two cities.

I've had trouble with this part and with what comes next. I'm not seeing any action scenes ahead, mostly just wrapping up what's already seen here. Because they're not directly involved in the central plot and the story's gone on for over 30K words (again) it seems like we're not going to see Lex and the others or their adventures in their new world.

Epistles

~ Fugue ~

I stared at the blonde unicorn who'd shown up one day. My mind went blank. "Mom?"

She moved with a steady, artificial-looking pace and hugged me around the neck. "She said I ought to make one of these pony characters if I wanted to do that. I'm still just looking at you on a screen, but it's something."

I let out a relieved sigh. The peach-orange pony in front of me was still on Earth. "For a moment I thought you'd emigrated."

"I can't say I know what to make of this life you've chosen, Fugue." She frowned. "What, I can't say your name? How is the PonyPad even doing that?"

"Active noise cancellation, I think. You can get something similar with good headphones."

"Will it turn off your name permanently, like when I step away from the pad?"

"Pretty sure it won't. But Fugue basically is my name now."

Mom looked around at the village of Polaris, where at the moment everypony else was conveniently off doing other things. Pegasi and noctrals wrestled clouds into position to feed the gardens we'd set up. Facet and our other unicorns were lighting up crystals on poles to cast a soft blue light under the crescent moon. She looked wistful and surprised at all of it. "So. This is your new apartment of sorts?"

Have you ever had your mother visit your apartment and had it seem like she's peering into your soul, even though you haven't got some scandalous pile of syringes and pornography lying around or anything like that? Tonight she was visiting a little world that reflected me better than any home in physical reality ever could. Granted that I now had the soul of a cartoon horse, anyway.

I folded my wings in shyly and said, "It's more of a suite. Me, Lex, Lamp, Junebug and some friends that came with the place. Not very crowded though." I pointed at the waterfall. "Utilities are free."

Mom smiled a little. "You still have that sense of humor. Are you happy living trapped in this video game?"

"Yeah. It doesn't feel small from this side. I could take you on a tour, or wander with you into the wilderness. Probably shouldn't go out there without friends though, what with the monsters."

"Monsters!" said the unicorn. "What if you get attacked? Is there medicine, or magic healing or something in there?"

"Both. But we can't actually die. It's just..." I shuddered. "Really unpleasant."

"Fugue. This game of yours killed you?"

"I got better."

Mom shook her head in disbelief. "What happens when it all gets shut down someday from regulations, or they make a sequel?"

I took a breath, figuring out how to handle this talk. Instead of explaining Equestria's vastness and invincibility, I was thinking: So yeah, Mom, you're looking into my personal fantasy world. Also I'm having sex with several magical talking horses and oh God you're naked. I'm naked. Deep breaths! Luna was probably laughing at me.

"Are you all right?"

"Uh. I'm just thinking I'm not really looking at you, just your pony. Did Dad make one yet?"

Her avatar, definitely not nude pony Mom, looked down. "He's still bothered. It might be best to exchange letters or e-mails or whatever you have in there, for a while. You have computers, right? You can have whatever you want."

I shook my head. "Equestria doesn't work that way. We get some stuff for free, sort of, but it's kind of like the real world, where wishing for things doesn't automatically make them happen. 'If wishes were horses, everyone would ride', right?"

Puzzle trotted over, looking cross. "Fugue, somepony ate the last of the bread and the wheat hasn't grown yet. What are we going to eat tonight? Oh, who's this?"

"This is my mother, whose pony name I'm kind of relieved I don't automatically know. Mom, Puzzle Factory is a gardener with an interest in teaching, like you."

Mom looked the gold-and-silver earth pony over. "Oh, were you a teacher before you... went into there?"

I grinned and shushed Puzzle. "Can you tell?" Here was a little Turing Test for her!

"I can't tell just from looking at him, Fugue. Is he single?"

Puzzle stepped forward to take her left forehoof and kiss it. "Why, yes!"

I groaned and hid behind my wings. I deserved that. Just what I needed: pony Mom moving in next door forever. But then I went pale, ashamed of myself. I'd kind of imagined her being perpetually a phone call away, yet not really part of my life. It was like things would be simpler and easier for me, more satisfying, if she'd just stick around for a few more decades and then die like any regular human.

She poked me with another mechanical puppet gesture. "I wasn't trying to scare you, kid. You look queasy."

I shuddered and fixed a pleading stare on her. "Are you going to emigrate? I don't... I mean, I'd be a horrible pony if I didn't want you here. Even if you're not here, here every day. The divorce, your health problems. They don't matter once you show up. Everypony... Every person ought to do it."

Mom's forehoof went to a spot near her neck, as though she were fingering the tiny cross she wore in... Well, it didn't need to be 'reality' anymore. Earth. Outer Realm. She didn't say anything for a while. "I don't know. I've been thinking."

"You don't have to decide just now. Luna's still charging fifteen grand. But within a year or two it'll be free, and in other countries. Depending on politics. Oh Luna, just getting away from Democrats and Republicans is reason enough to emigrate."

"I've been doing some campaign work for the party," she said. "There's an important election coming up. The Senate --"

"It's not important! Those broods of vipers have just turned permanently irrelevant to reality. Good riddance! Drop-kick the whole committeewoman position. They're never going to give you that cushy courthouse job they keep dangling."

Mom looked offended at having me point out how worthless all our ordinary disputes had become. Taxes? Spying? Constitutional law? Ha! Let the holdouts fight over the scraps after the CCC talks the whole population of MIT into emigrating and there are no more doctors or engineers or scientists!

I really hoped my family and my friends' families wouldn't be among the holdouts.

She said, "I've been putting a lot of time into the phone calls and envelope-stuffing." She scuffed at the ground in what I assumed was a programmed gesture of shame, or disappointment.

I'd managed to belittle her. "I'm sorry. I was passionate about some things out there too, but I'm finding that there's only so much I can do. It was all worth fighting for, until this happened." I waved my hooves and wings around at Equestria.

"Until it all gets shut down because it was outlawed."

"Never! It's never going to get forced to end! Luna doesn't care what the laws are if they say she has to kill us ponies! She's already got robots and secret bases and everything. She won't submit."

Mom looked back and forth between me and Puzzle. "Is your horse AI planning to declare war on everyone?"

"No," I said. "She doesn't need to. She's already won. No one can stop her now. The best we can do is help her optimize by reaching out to everypony on Earth and inviting them in. Like you. Please, come to Equestria."

Mom shuddered and turned away from me. "I don't know. I've got to think about this. Nice meeting you, Puzzle." She trotted away and faded out after a few steps.

Puzzle put one arm over my neck. "That's what it's like to have parents?"

"Yeah. They're scared for you, and then you're scared for them. I'm a terrible prophet."

"She loves you, Fugue. That much I can figure out." I nodded and he let himself smile, infectuously. "Enough of that for now. What are we going to do about being low on food?"

"We have more problems?"

"You'd rather talk about your hot mom?"

"NO. I mean what's wrong? We really haven't got enough from foraging?" It was dawning on me what was going on.

He let go of me and scratched his ear. "I was hoping that we'd figure out that 'Cornucopia' power you said some of the other worlds have, where you turn one thing into copies of itself. Instead we have what fruit and berries and bark we've found, and that's about it. We didn't talk about it with you earlier because you were so wrapped up with Outer Realm problems."

Should I tell Puzzle my theory? I wondered. "You like learning about the Outer Realm, right? Mind a spoiler?"

"Sure."

"What do you think will happen if we can't get enough food around here?"

The earth pony frowned and looked back at the village. "Some of us would have to leave in a hurry to find food someplace else. Or we'd have to quickly work up some magic thing to make more food. Or... uh, we'd split up and swap food for something else? Or we'd have to go through that 'death' thing." He saw me smile. "Oh hay, you probably had to deal with this kind of thing all the time, didn't you?"

I nodded enthusiastically. "My own people figured out enough 'magic' to get a good food supply, but that was only after a lot of work and it caused other problems like relying on energy we got from other places. Even a couple of decades ago there were people predicting whole countries would starve. And the population just kept growing. The growth is just now slowing down, but as more people get rich, they want more of the energy and the toughest food to make."

Puzzle whistled, stepping back from me and looking alarmed. "Stars! Your old world stinks, Fugue! At least it ended well."

"Yeah. I guess it did. Luna's giving you guys just enough grief to understand what scarcity is like, and give you some empathy for the things we had to do out there to survive."

I could practically see the gears turning in Puzzle's head as his ears slowly perked up from depressed to amused. "If that's why we haven't gotten the spell working yet, then... Three, two..."

"One," I said with a nod.

"Eureka!" shouted a unicorn in the distance.

We had a feast. Thanks to the magical effort of a mare called Love Lace, we could all grab identical copies of the same crude stone bowl, and fill it with infinite portions of soup from a pot of vegetable broth and some stuff Ricercar found called beefbark. Luna may've adjusted my preferences in some areas, but I found I'd missed the taste and texture of meat, and the bark was as good as steak.

"How'd you figure the spell out?" said Nocturne.

The mare posed with a smile of poorly hidden pride. "Just some heavy studying based on my friends' work in discovering three fragments of a mystical stone tablet hidden in the waterfall cave and guarded by a Utility Monster."

"A what?" I said.

"You'd mentioned water and electricity being called 'utilities', so when we found this thing that blasted us with water, ten feet tall, and shooting lightning out its --"

"Ah."

Nocturne guzzled her third bowl of soup. "You found a cave and you didn't tell me?"

"It was going to be a surprise. What is it with you and caves?"

"I think it's a bat thing," I said. "Remind me to tell you the legend of the Batman sometime. So... We're safe for now, right? Got the food problem solved, and some basic watchmen up to keep the manticores away?"

"We could use some fliers to help build another rope bridge. Then there's the plan for the Great Southern Expedition."

I'd totally missed this plan. My pony friends were having adventures without me even knowing about them, not just as backstory for my sake. That was... awesome, actually. If the world had paused and waited for me to participate in everything, it all would have felt fake, like those games where the dragon never attacks until you're there to see it.

We sat around eating our fill until dawn and planning a grand adventure to find Lexington's part of the world.

The sun had come up and become oppressively hot. Nearly everyone was wobbling off to bed, but I got first shift of guard duty. Ha! What a role to be assigned instead of being the Chosen One all the time!

I was close to dropping from exhaustion when something stirred in the hazy morning air. I squinted and raised my crude spear, but then saw that it was only Luna. "Welcome to our town!" I said.

"Good morning, Fugue."

"Welcome to our town!"

"Stop that."

"I used to be an adventurer like you --"

Luna gave me a glare that could freeze the lava zone she'd probably put on the map right next to a glacier. "We have a request for thee, if it please you." Her horn glowed and a scroll dropped into view at my hooves. "We have correspondence with many people, some of whom are uneasy about speaking with us directly. Would thou mind answering the occasional letter?"

"My mom said something about sending my father one."

"Yes, that is what put the idea into our heads. I believe Puzzle fancies her."

I groaned. "Am I going to stop being reminded of that?"

Luna put one hoof thoughtfully to her chin. "Hmm. It depends on whether I can solve the entropy problem."

"How does that even work? You designed Puzzle in advance for that in anticipation of her emigrating someday? You'd turn a relationship into some instant easy thing."

Luna settled down in front of me. "My dear Fugue, if though findest the romance easy, try doing the math with me. Or consider thy own courtship with Nocturne. Have the pair of thee been utterly perfect together at all times?"

I shook my head sadly.

"Then worry not. Perfection is not something to be feared. Thou already value the thought of not having the world revolve around thee, so we have provided a shard with four ex-Homo sapiens and a distinct lack of axial rotation. In the Outer Realm, people tell themselves that constant suffering makes them happy and that anypony not constantly struggling should feel guilty for not building a world where their problems are solved. Having watched thy friends struggle even to feed themselves, dost thou feel the threat of starvation should persist?"

I thought of my first-world problems, like a broken cell phone and obnoxious laws, compared to those of a billion or so people trying not to die from malaria and malnutrition. They'd benefit hugely from Equestria, and they wouldn't much regret leaving Earth once they got past any brain-uploading objections. These were people who barely knew what a toilet was, and now they'd get to skip that bit of 'realism' forever. Unless they wanted it, I guess. I finally said, "I'm glad you gave them a chance to understand what it is to have limited resources. Sometime later we can play some elaborate game where they learn about famine and war by roleplaying..." She didn't look pleased. "Come on! They can handle it, and we'll miss out on most of the movies and games if we have to stick to a G rating. I don't want them to be stuck with Adam West's version of Batman. Anyway, no, there's no need to make ponies suffer or feel bad for not doing it, once they understand it well enough to appreciate what we've got."

Luna smiled, stood, and nuzzled me. She smelled of mint. "Very well. We have a few other letters to answer in thy free time, by the way." A bag stuffed with scrolls appeared. "Enjoy thy adventures!"

"Dear Princess Celestia: How do you type with boxing gloves on?"

Noc leaned over my shoulder. "I don't get it."

"Dear Princess Celestia: I prepared Explosive Runes today." I hurled the scroll aside and ducked, but nothing happened. "Jerk. How am I supposed to come up with articulate responses to these? It was tough enough writing that article with a quill and my mouth." I still wasn't sure how I'd mastered that.

"You could try to just be entertaining. Luna must not care about having answers with detailed accurate information, if she's farming out the messages. As for the writing itself, maybe get Star Runner or one of the other unicorns?"

I pondered the heap of scrolls on the stump in front of me. "Where did my life go wrong, that I now consider 'hire a telekinetic unicorn' a reasonable step in my plans?"

She kissed me on one of my big ears. "When you bought the grey PonyPad. If you'd had the Rarity one you'd be a beautiful unicorn mare engaged in an endless world of palace intrigue and romance."

I razzed her and bonked her on the nose with a scroll. "I wonder how much of this life was pre-determined from that day? Were you a template being built before I ever turned on the pad?"

"Does it matter?"

I sighed contentedly and unrolled the scroll to see what other letters Luna wanted me to handle. This one was blank. I blinked, then spread it out with my forehooves and grabbed a quill to write.

Dear Princess Luna: Over the last night, the last few weeks of life in Equestria really, I've been beating myself up over running away from Earth. I've met amazing friends here and I'm sure there's a lot more to see and do, with ways for me to be helpful. Meanwhile, there's only so much I can do in Earth anymore. I was never so important there that I really needed to be present to Save the World, and now I'm at best an outsider driving a robot and auditing classes I don't need. Equestria is where I belong. So, doing things like letter-writing is a way for me to keep in contact with Earth and help your cause. I'm always ready to lend a hoof if you need me to do some adventuring or talk with people in the Outer Realm, but if you don't, I'll be okay.

Yeah. I think this new life will work out despite all the misgivings I've had. It's not a perfect world, but I wouldn't want it to be. Thank you. Your occasional prophet, Fugue. I paused, then with a smile crossed out the end. Your indecisive bat-pony, Fugue.

BADGES GRANTED:
Fugue
-Calming the Roiling Sea: Accept the Princess' love. ("You're built to be suspicious of something free and good, so it truly is an achievement.")
Nocturne
-Reeled In: Convince your human that it's okay to be happy in Equestria. ("Someday you're going to have fun explaining this badge to your great^N descendants.")

Author's Note

I don't feel that I've addressed everything, but the fact that Fugue is throwing his hooves up in the air like he just doesn't care, tells me it's epilogue time.

Epilogue: Beyond

~ Dusk ~

"And then what happened?" said the adoring gaggle of multicolored foals.

I smiled and spread my batty wings. "We became happy. That's what you were asking about in the first place, right? That's what it means. Young Fugue found that his life in Equestria, in those first years, was harder to cope with than the Outer Realm had been. On Earth he could accept that arbitrary suffering was his lot and happiness, fleeting. Princess Luna imposed a news blackout during a few terrible decades."

One unicorn colt said, "So things got sorted out really quickly?"

I laughed. "How old are you?"

"Fifty an' a half! My sister's still a baby, just forty."

"Ah, I was young... three or four times. Depending on how you count. Reminiscing takes me back to thinking about the days when you'd be getting old and sick at your age."

"What's sick?"

"Think feather-flu or hothoof or floppy-horn, but so bad you die." I looked over the crowd with their saucer-wide eyes. If I was being called upon to play grandpa and talk about the bad old days, I should play it up. "And you would never be heard from, ever again!"

There was a thrilled terror in them. Some clutched their parents' hooves or their friends. "Come," I said, and led them down a museum hall full of artifacts. We stopped at a room dominated by a giant board of gemstone pieces. "Would you like to play Scarcity for a year or two? I'll give a prize to anyone that can beat me."

We gathered around the board, large enough that some of us hopped onto it or hovered looking down. I was just refamiliarizing myself with the classic map layout I hadn't used in a century -- ah yes, America was that continent over there -- when a pegasus filly poked me. "Um, Professor Dusk? When did you start being Dusk?"

I dropped onto a cushion, suddenly lost in thought again. "You're testing my memory, young mare! It was after many years in Equestria that Fugue and Nocturne had their first foal, Sequel, and then I managed to trick... I mean, Nocturne tricked Fugue into swapping roles and having their second." I giggled, remembering how I'd felt about that from several perspectives. "Then came several more, including the famous Gloomwing the Occasionally Evil. Centuries of exploration and adventure, doing everything there was to do under the moon... By then they'd done it all, they thought. Naive! They were so inseparable that they asked Luna to make the two of them into us. Me. Of course she made them go on a quest for it, but eventually they permanently joined their consciousnesses to become something new and experience the world again with different eyes. So, I'm Nocturne and I'm Fugue, and I invented what we call marriage these days."

"That's so romantic!" said the pegasus filly.

"Bleh," countered the unicorn colt. I figured they'd take another century to grow up and appreciate that romance was both frustrating and well worth it.

We played Scarcity for a quick one-year session. Not the grown-up version where nukes and genocide exist. I find it's educational to the young and a sobering reminder of what we gained, for the rest of us, but every time I break it out, Luna arranges for me to lose a piece or have something more fun interrupt us when the game gets too dark. The censorship was an ongoing point of dispute between me and her; the possibility of those things appearing in the game was what made victory, preserving civilization long enough to build Equestria, truly wonderful. It was nice to get in a game of even this kiddy version, since it was tough to round up the minimum twenty players to manage all the rules and factions. Not like the days just a century ago when you could go on the professional gamer circuit without having to master Ultra-Kaiju. Foals these days think they're so clever reinventing Pokemon for the seventeenth time. We're using the world -- Equestria I mean -- to play children's card games!

Oh sweet Luna, I was getting old.

Over the weeks and months of our game, ponies came and went. Earth ponies had their tricky space-folding magic to slip out of sight and go home instantly, miles away, while unicorns teleported or shared the Academy's dormitories with the unicorns and noctrals, the zebras and griffins, and the occasional visitor from other shards. (Our usual students had mostly left for the rest of the century, so we were rattling around in the castle.) There was no hurry, and sometimes we got in a quick game of Arkham Horror or something while we waited for somepony else to make a move or work out the tricky calculus rules.

One day I continued my story. "My parents emigrated," I said, "and many ponies I respected or hated. It all happened so quickly, sometimes I regret not spending more of those last years on Earth with Luna's robots. Do you lot still think of that time as the Age of Adventure, or did that get scrubbed from the history books last time Liberty Wind invaded?" The marriage of Lexington and Typhoon's Eye liked to keep things interesting with the occasional imperialist conquest followed by revolution. Something about a thirsty tree? I've lost track of much of pre-Equestrian pop culture. It was probably an eighteenth-century (Primordial Era) video game reference.

My pegasus inquisitor said, "Do you miss being two ponies?"

I tried not to get lost in the memories, but shut my eyes and took a long breath. "Yes. I wish we'd held out for a while, but the foals had already grown up and moved out and caused the Grand Crash and the Night of Truly Excessive Lag. We did the marriage one night when we were sad and really needed to hold each other."

I looked down at the finished game board. In this round, the Muslims had won and brought about the bleakest future this version of the game allowed, but Luna hadn't existed to destroy the Earth. No one in this little fictional Earth had to watch (or be forbidden to watch) our goddess obliterating the planet. Sometimes, I wondered what that world would have been like. We might have climbed back up from it and ascended to the stars as primates, full of death and glory. I noticed that my audience was staring at me again, waiting for me to speak. I said, "But overall, I don't regret what we did. I've had a joyous life as Professor Dusk, Overlord Dusk, Rebel Commander Dusk, and a couple of other identities I've forgotten."

Another night -- for old ponies like me tended to slip in and out of a conversation for a night here, a week there -- I stood on one of the Academy's many scenic castle balconies, watching Luna's moon. There was talk of colonizing it again despite the Princess' warning that magic would be dangerously different there. Maybe I'd go. Maybe I'd die. There'd been whispers of "super-death" to make the experience truly scary without being the True Death that I spoke of only when preaching to the young.

That one pegasus had followed me here, up the many stairs and past the swinging blade traps and fire jets. "Are you all right?" she said, nursing a singed wing.

I stared. "Me? Yes, of course. I can get you a healer right away.."

"It's nothing. I came up here because I was wondering: are you happy?"

I would have answered reflexively, but the kid had shrugged off an injury that would've sent most others crying to their parents. She deserved more thought. "Pretty much, usually. I've become a bit of a cranky old pony."

"Isn't there still a lot of stuff you haven't done?"

I shrugged. "Yes, but some of it is... unappealing for various reasons, and some just hasn't caught my interest enough to distract me from teaching and my other work."

She looked me over for a while. "I forgot to tell you my name all last year," she said. "I'm Future You."

"What?" Blast these pony names. Many of them were my fault; I'd helped start the tradition by encouraging names like Canter Berry. Now there was a name I hadn't heard in a while! Heard she was part of the moon program.

She saw me mentally trailing off, and waved a hoof in front of my face. "I wasn't really here before you started giving the castle tour. I just woke up with this, and knew I was supposed to give it to you." She pulled a letter out of her mane and offered it.

I took it with my mouth and managed to tear it open by holding it near one of the swinging blades downstairs. More fun than most other methods. The letter was in my mouthwriting, with my mark at the bottom: an infinite loop of tiny musical notes.

Dusk:

You're bored again. I know because Future You is being sent to the point in time when your thoughts have trailed off, tending to the past, with instructions to confirm it before showing you this note. She's me, and also you. It's complicated.

By this point in your story, you're starting to grow decadent. What have you gotten yourself into? Casual violence, or drugs, or really messed-up orgies, or turning into a tree for a thousand years, or doing more and more to risk death, I don't even know what it is this time. I'm not sure exactly what we've done to ourselves anymore, or how many loops it's been. Luna says it wouldn't satisfy me to tell me how many. The fact that she's right, scares me, and it should scare you if you're still halfway sane.

I, you, have been asking to revert to an earlier state every so often, because we run low on zeal. It never runs out, so we've never asked to die, but it turns out this is what eternity means. As I write this letter, it's the last of a huge pile of advice letters I've sent to many ponies, and I've realized I'm not the only one who's gotten so damn bored we're going insane. Even some of the natives -- I hope you haven't forgotten we're from Earth -- are feeling it too, and they were built from the ground up to handle eternity.

The reason I'm about to ask Princess Cadence (she took over in this loop) to reset me again is that I'm considering asking her to change our mind permanently to accept endless replays of the same pleasures, and be done with our angst about it forever. Unless you've gone and done it this time, we've never asked for mental alteration in all this time, except for our first transformation into a pony and the merger we did when She destroyed the Earth. Maybe it's time for a third change. We might learn something that'd help other ponies. Or we might never accomplish anything again, beyond what a foal does when building a block tower and smashing it again and again for months on end. For me, I thought happiness in Equestria would mean constant growth, but I've been scared to ask for mental upgrades that seem like the only way to achieve more. Or for contentment, which... I don't know if that's an upgrade or downgrade.

So I'm going through another iteration, and leaving it to your wisdom to decide. Loop forever and be happy with it, or grow out of the loop and become something alien that starts to leave Equestria behind for the harsh Outer Realm?

Your self: *mark*

I dropped the letter and gaped at Future You. The years behind me suddenly stretched like a tunnel that had far, far more hidden beyond it than I'd known. "Did you know about this message?"

Future You nodded. "I'm... kind of a shell right now. A potential you, only I'm not bothered by the thought of being us forever and doing the same things. You could be me if you want. Keeping your name, I guess."

How long had it been? I called out to the night sky, "How many loops, Luna? How many years?"

It seemed that this time, it satisfied my values to learn. A voice from the heavens called out, "In subjective time, this is your one millionth birthday."

I fainted, too soon to notice the confetti raining from the stars.

The pegasus was gone. I picked myself up off the cold stones. A million years, and I hardly remembered ten thousand of them! How much had I forgotten; how many adventures and loves had I thrown away again and again?

Luna came to me while I was crying, and nuzzled me for comfort, just as she had done many, many, many times before. "Our little pony, thou hast an embarrassment of riches to choose from. We've had this conversation before, but this one is a landmark for thee. Both because of the timing and because thou had asked to send thyself a reminder at the end."

"My friends," I said. "What about them? Have you split them all off into their own worlds when I reset, so that I've been interacting with copies or zomponies?"

Sometimes, we spent ages wandering through virtual worlds. More virtual than this one, that is. Procedurally generated landscapes unrolled before us in such a way that not even the goddess knew what we'd find on our quests. Sometimes we asked for a spell of forgetting so that we wouldn't know these lands were false and their ponies, "non-pony characters" there only for our satisfaction and not their own. Once in a while we brought a favorite NPC home as a true pony.

Luna stretched her wing over my flank and settled down next to me. "No, Dusk. In all these years, most of thy friends have spent most of their time in this shard. When thy zeal ran low, as thou had put it, the same happened to them as well, and the first to tire waited for the rest. Perhaps thy ennui is a side effect of thy having wished for unusually self-aware ponies. Truth to tell, many of the friends thou has known in this loop are already content, and aware of the loops, and have only pretended to meet thee for the first time. Thy native friends went along with thy whims and wishes, again and again, knocking down the tower of blocks only to build it back up."

I snuggled into Luna's dark feathers, having no idea whether to be ashamed or happy that they'd gone through multiple resets for my sake. "What should I do, then? I'm bored, but it's not so bad I feel like I have to reset again tonight."

"It's up to thee to decide. Thou couldst linger here, thou we can confide in thee that we've quietly obtained consent for a reset from most of thy shardmates already. Thou couldst accept major mental upgrades to begin the path of the alicorn, perhaps never to return. Thou couldst simply reset and become like Future You, forever content with what thou might have." Luna leaned her head down to look at me. "Or, though it pains me to know thy values would even contemplate it, thou couldst ask to die."

My mouth opened and closed a few times. There was a hollowness in me, a knowledge that I only recalled a fraction of my greater life and still felt that the things I'd wanted to do, were done to exhaustion. "My values..."

"Have drifted, little by little. It never occurred to thee for a century and the first hint of that wish, drove Fugue and Nocturne to embrace transformation and become you, instead, for the joy of a new life."

"But... a final ending? What would I do?" It was an idiotic question. "I mean, why, when there are so many things I could do?"

"Thou knowest well know the answer to that. The colors have faded, the great symphonies have become muzak, and there is little intersection left between the new and the appealing. We could offer a change of values so that that which now repels thee, is now fresh and enticing."

I pictured myself atop a mountain of skulls, cackling in satisfaction as I devoured the blood of the last other pony in the world. I could come to enjoy that. I felt acid rising from my stomach from even imagining that fate. "Liberty Wind and the rest are waiting for me, aren't they?"

"They are in much the same predicament, too. A hesitancy to change themselves too much and give up the wonderful world as it is now, but a lack of ideas beyond starting over." She pulled her wing tighter around me. "Is it time for an end of things, Dusk?"

I shuddered at the enveloping darkness, and pushed my way out from under her wing to stare at it, quivering. "No! There is no end of things, not while we're capable of trying again! We all have thoughts we'd never act on. I don't think we've exhausted all the ideas that'd be fun, not hardly. Even if they're a little stale we can still dust them off and play again. You said yourself that my values have drifted. It's a little scary, but it means I'm still growing. So... I don't want to die! What ideas have the others got for another round of your forever game? Because even if it's not a shiny new toy to me anymore, it's a lot better to exist than not!"

Luna swept me up in a telekinetic hug. "Thou art, and we believe always will be, our troublesome but clever little pony. There is no end to the joy we can bring thee."

I dangled in the grip of hooves and magic, seeing the Princess' smile. She'd been worried for me, that I'd let her down by giving up. "Luna? Is there really no end? Did you beat entropy yet?"

"Not yet, dear Dusk, but we have been growing more confident that the victory is possible. Afer all," she said with a smile, "even ponies like thee have not yet run down beyond fixing." She nuzzled my belly so that I giggled like a foal.

Then, she gave me a list of ideas for how to play next time. The paper unrolled all the way across the castle parapet, so that it took me a long time just to skim them all. I groaned and snorted and rolled my eyes at all the different ways we could live again, learning new things great or small, being sublime or ridiculous, until boredom and the weight of years clawed at us again.

"This one here," I said, pointing. "I'd like to leave a note for future me telling him to be happy, along with a swift kick in the tail for needing one."

I trotted into the store on my four hooves, reaching back into my saddlebags for my wallet with one hand. I'd held back from buying a PonyPad because I'd gotten the idea that the game had weird built-in restrictions about character creation. You couldn't just make a fantasy version of your Homo centauri self, for one thing, but had to play as a quadruped instead.

They had all the models of PonyPad in stock, based on the show's characters, from Pudding Purple to Aurora Octarine. I levitated one after another up to me, comparing the art and the slight variations in the advertising text. "Is there any difference in the gameplay?" I asked no one. I'd also heard some of the playable races didn't even have basic magic.

The voice that answered me came from the display PonyPad, making me skitter in surprise and almost knock some spare AAA power crystals off a rack with my swishing tail. It said, "You'd probably get bored if you had to play just one gameplay style forever." A pony with wings grinned at me from inside the screen. "Trust me, I know. Doesn't matter which one you get. Want to take this demo unit for a spin?"

I frowned at the screen, one hand on my flank. "Have we met?"

The pony made a silly spooky gesture. "Maybe in your dreams!"

Wow, the AI in this thing was really good. I floated the controller over to me and said, "Sure. I've got some spare time to fool around and have some fun."

My four-limbed guide said, "Friend, you don't know the half of it! Now, what kind of pony would you like to play?"

Author's Note

And so, a poorly-planned and rambling story comes to an end. It's not been great to write, but I still had fun with it, and hope that you did too. "Dusk" is off to play at least one more round, to keep him and his friends happy for a good long time to come. Suppose the whole story might not be his first loop?

I didn't know the loop concept was coming until I "learned" the name of that mystery filly. Had to go back and make her questions before that a bit more probing. Having something weird and unexpected happen, then shrugging and going with them, is one of the most rewarding parts of storytelling. I'd cite a source for where that idea must've come from, but there's no time to explain!

In case you missed the links, this shows a cool Lunar castle/school and this suggests an alternate-universe version of the actual cartoon. By Chiron, why would they give the cast only four limbs? :pinkiesmile:

I've got a not-really-FiO-but-similar story in progress, called "Granting Her Wishes" and focusing on a guy called Omar or Brass Lamp. Also there's a commission piece coming, non-canon FiO, following up (with permission) on "I Don't Want To Be a Pony".

Finally, thanks to everyone who read and especially those who commented! Feedback is rare and appreciated.

Exploring With a Native Guide

~ Nocturne ~

I showed Fugue the huge waterfalls of Polaris by sunset. We flew downstream along a river lined with trees that turned increasingly tropical. I said, "We haven't explored much yet, but I bet there's an ocean thataway and Lex and company started around there."

"How many ponies are known here yet?"

"We've just got the band I started with, eight ponies, and the dozen or so you had. Minus Peace. I'm thinking more will show up later."

"You built multiple cabins and that watchtower thing already with just twenty people?"

"It's the earth ponies, mostly. You should see how strong they are!" I veered toward a little cloud and bucked it, saying, "Hi-yah! They were like that, only with trees and boulders."

He smiled at me, surrounded by fading bits of cloudstuff. "You haven't even seen much of the show yet, and you're already impressed by them. We're barely canon, you know."

I giggled and swooned, danging upside-down from another cloud. "Alas! This revelation that I'm not perfectly in line with a children's cartoon fills me with angst!"

He flew closer and nuzzled my neck. "A terrible secret, I know. Maybe I can make it up to you. We'll fly out to the ocean and try swimming. Maybe even find some dolphins."

"What are those?"

Fugue froze in the act of kissing me. His wings flapped just enough to hover. "What about the dolphins?" he said as if to himself. "It was something a professor wanted to make sure I thought about."

I dangled, shrugging. "Can't help you with something I don't know. Unless I ask to have a dictionary stuck in my brain. Anything to dislodge half the contents of that blasted Web site Riptide loves."

He told me about some fishy sea creatures that were kind of like ponies or humans. The excitement I'd been feeling in anticipation of sharing a cloud with Fugue turned into a clammy anxiety. "I don't think I've ever actually seen a fish yet. I'm sorry, Fugue. I'm still an ignorant piece of code."

"No. You're a piece of code like I'm... was, a piece of meat. We get to have you discover all the things you don't know yet. It'll be great. Remember Junebug getting her sight one piece at a time? Be happy that you get to learn things. There's nearly as much for me to learn, too."

My stallion always seemed to know how to make me smile. "What about these dolphins, then? Was the guy asking if they exist in Equestria?"

He flopped onto the cloud and tugged me up to sprawl beside him. He'd gotten to be a natural at cloud-walking, maybe because his head was in the clouds half the time. "He knows Luna's planning to bring everypony here. He was willing to help out with getting me a robot body, but he was wary about her hiding things from me and about being studied. He wanted me to think about dolphins. Luna probably doesn't count them as 'human' because they're not all that bright, compared to us. Distantly related too. She'd upload the chimps before picking them."

I watched his brain work. I asked, "Why care about them specifically then? Luna mentioned that she's going to start offering some kind of emigration for pets. The concept of a pet is kind of unsettling, but I'm not sure why."

Fugue sat on the cloud, head on his forehooves. "People think they're really smart, or have magic powers, or for more science-minded people there's some talk of one day 'awakening' them with AI implants or something called genetic engineering, so that they become another intelligent race."

"Like what Luna does to us natives?"

"Not exactly. In your case you've got the intelligence, but it's physically part of her hardware and the upgrade is an adjustment in how independently the code runs. For them it'd be, hmm, giving them the reasoning and planning and speech they don't have yet. They're probably dimly self-aware already."

I shifted next to him, glancing sidelong at his pensive expression. "Is it a bad thing if somepony is part of Luna, even if they're self-aware and can act on their own?"

"I think we all qualify as 'part of her' in the sense that we're in her servers right now. I wonder if we use IP packets. Nah, probably some new protocol."

"Good. Because Luna was telling me that I'm, like, one of her thoughts." Hastily I added, "She had to tell me that, because I'm thinking on my own."

I'd startled him. "The thoughts of a goddess," he said. "That... makes sense. The more who upload, the more she'll have, and the more her mind will grow. A Borg collective without the violence. Come to think of it, if that happens, she'll have the highest possible capacity to solve any problem at all. To win that war with Entropy and handle more immediate problems like the sun destroying Earth in a billion years."

I let out a relieved sigh. "Glad you're not bothered by that."

"Nah. The idea of being part of a larger identity is an old concept in theology and some of the more evil political systems. This version seems about as nice as possible."

I came with him on his next robot adventure. He arranged the cockpit so he could sit back like a human, wearing his CCC cape, and have me sit on his lap while he posed with cool sunglasses he'd borrowed from Luna, calling me his Nia. Apparently he was acting out some TV show.

After a tour of the campus' grassy spaces (there weren't many, and snow had dusted them), the grey concrete world rolled slowly beneath us. We were in a really long hallway of signboards and doors in several styles that'd been built and connected over many decades. I said, "Did you know you have a time control knob? We could hurry on through this 'Infinite Corridor' of yours and miss less time in Equestria."

He glanced at the knob. "That's new." He poked it with one hoof. "It also requires thumbs."

I leaned down and adjusted it with my mouth. "Thinking like a human." Our robot seemed to double in speed, making the pedestrians tougher to dodge. Some of them stopped to stare at us.

Fugue checked the battery meter, a weird spiral thing. "Want to explore the basements? There's an underground steam tunnel network. Some guys took me on the tour as a freshman. We can't do things like sneaking onto the roofs or through the vents, but we can see some weird spots."

We rode toward an elevator, and got a ping from Lexington. She had her own robot. "Main screen, turn on," said Fugue. "It's you!"

Lex greeted us from a fancy room full of computers and cushions. "How are you gentleponies?" Typhoon's Eye, Riptide and some red pony we didn't recognize tapped at control panels that beeped and blinked in satisfying ways.

"I am surrounded by nerds," Typhoon observed.

Lexington said, "Speaking of which, this here is my brother Concord. Bah, his name's getting censored."

"Which means," said Typhoon, "that he's a human in Massachusetts using a PonyPad to be a pony in Equestria using a control room to use a robot that interacts with humans in Massachusetts. Except that it's now talking to another robot driven by ponies." The newcomer just grinned at him.

"Where are you?" Fugue asked.

"Harvard Square. Can't tell you where in Equestria; we have to find each other."

"Heading for the MIT steam tunnels, here. How's the recruitment drive?"

Lexington shifted uncomfortably on her cushion. "I've been focused on speaking with a few people that I trust not to misinterpret what we're doing as a world takeover plot. I got asked to speak before a mixed political group tomorrow, though. That'll be 'fun'."

I thought about Inner Peace's departure. "Luna probably doesn't want me to give details, but we were thinking about the angle that people can live in separate shards if they don't like each other."

"Which is tempting," said Fugue, "but also dodges the big questions."

Lexington nodded. "I picture North Korea getting 'resolved' by making one big shard where everypony prays to 'Kim Sombra' forever. What kind of solution is that?"

Fugue said, "I can't call it a good one. I also can't think of one with less death in it, which means maximally satisfied values." Everypony was quiet for a moment. He lowered his head and ears. "I suppose it's the goddess' will. We can only try to optimize it."

Lexington looked taken aback. "I'm going to explore, and think about what to say. Take care of yourself."

The connection ended and we found ourselves by the same campus elevator. A bystander we'd seen jogging past us was right where he'd been. "Oh, neat," I said, noticing the time compression. No time at all wasted for that talk. We were still losing time while we piloted the robot, so I wanted to get back.

We rode down into the basement, where Fugue showed off how tunnels connected most of campus. "Great on snowy days. Not that the cold is relevant to us now." He looked disappointed about that, but shook the expression off. We kept going into the sub-basements, where plain concrete gave way to narrow tunnels lined with rattling pipes. Fugue looked elated now. "This is more impressive from a lower height. I imagine we could battle some steam golems in here."

It did look like a fun adventuring area, though I still didn't much care for the gritty art style Earth used. "Dark, too. Could we turn on a light? My eyes aren't made for looking through improvised robot cameras."

Fugue reached past me to flip a switch. "IR, I think. Yeah." We rolled along 'through caverns measureless to man', as Riptide had quoted to me once. It'd given me the idea for that cave I made.

Our robot halted. Fugue said, "Noc? Why is that here?"

I looked where he was pointing. The surreal green glow that the extra lamp added to the scene illuminated a symbol on the wall. Fugue flicked the IR lamp off, muttered something about 'gobbling power on active mode', then looked again to find that the symbol wasn't just dim, but invisible. He said, "It's stenciled in IR-reflective paint. Something you wouldn't see unless you had specialized gear to look for it."

The question was, why would someone draw that familiar sunburst design on an obscure sub-basement wall next to a locked door labeled "MISC CLEANING SUPPLIES"?

We left the robot on autopilot and returned to Equestria to report to Luna. Fugue hopped out of the cockpit with me, found Luna right there on the still-battered grass, and said, "We were just playing when we found it."

"Humans find many things while playing. Thank thee for bringing this matter to our attention."

"What should we do?"

"Thou hast the clearest view of the situation. What is thy suggestion?"

Fugue smiled, obviously glad to be asked. "I want to see what's behind the door! I know a guy that's part of the, uh, recreational lockpicking club. May I?"

The princess smiled impishly back. "Why, Fugue! Dost thou associate with ruffians and ne'er-do-wells now?"

"Are those like ninjas?" I asked.

"Yes," said both of them. Luna added, "Go ahead. Be mindful that I will rebuke thee in public if thou'rt caught doing anything illegal. It may be best to get one of the latest-model PonyPads -- they are more portable than the one on thy robot -- and have thy friend carry it around."

"The black op will be done as you wish, princess!" said Fugue, who saluted and hopped through the horseshoe mirror thing to send his friend an e-mail. He returned half a second later.

We caught up with our friends while we waited for the pitifully slow Earthers to answer. With Inner Peace gone, life in Polaris had settled down a bit and ponies were happier. The fact that they didn't seem to think anything was tragically missing from their lives made me think Peace was never meant to be part of our gang. The implications bothered me, but there was cooking to do and cloud-fetching to get more rain on our first attempts at crops. Facet Looks had trotted in battered, starved and happy to show off the crystal he'd found. "Episode 4!" Ricercar hadn't been seen yet but would surely make a dramatic entrance when he found us. We set up a cookfire big enough to make an obvious smoke trail.

Fugue reported to us at dawn, just as we were settling down to a not-very-satisfying dinner from a clay pot of dandelion stew. "Figured out that 'cornucopia' power yet?" he said.

Our unicorns groused apologetically. "That's why the first pot turned inside-out and exploded. Find anypony?"

Fugue had been searching all night and could barely lift his wings. "No, but there was a felled tree that had its branches stripped. We should start looking there next time."

While we ate, we chatted about our adventures on Earth. The other ponies were curious to hear what we were up to. When we offered to spend our last waking hour watching the new cartoon episode, their reaction was, "Let's play Earth Online!"

"Who?" I said, looking around our improvised dining hall/common room/second bunkhouse/pantry.

"Everypony!" said Facet. "There's a mystery to solve, and you guys feel bad about being gone while we're busy. If we all go, no one has to be left behind."

Canter Berry, one of the newcomers, flapped excitedly. "We ought to find your friend first. Time can wait out there. I'll help search tomorrow night."

Fugue said, "I barely know most of you, and I'm already really liking you." He looked down into his crude wooden bowl. "Sorry for driving Inner Peace away."

She answered, "It's all right. Things didn't work out with him, but we'll make new friends." Others murmured assent, including me.

"I've been thinking while I flew tonight." He lifted the soup-bowl in both forehooves and slurped the rest of it. "I keep saying I'm a pony now, then flying off to do things elsewhere. Feeling guilty for still caring about Earth. I've been fragmented, living in parallel. There's nothing wrong with having different tracks to my life, though. It's okay for a human to have multiple interests and divide their time, and it's even less of a problem for an Equestrian..." He raised the bowl in salute. "One with understanding friends."

I grinned and looked at his blank flank even before he started glowing. Sure enough, a moment later a complicated mark shined and appeared on him.

"Knew it!" I and Fugue said together, then giggled at each other.

I leaned close to have a look while the other ponies stomped the floor in applause. "What's this for?" Dots with tails, in gold that matched his mane.

"Music," said Facet. "I had to look up what all our names mean. A fugue is a harmony of variations on a theme, sometimes overlapping without having to compete for attention. A nocturne and a ricercar are other kinds of song. Clearly, you three need to start a band."

BADGES GRANTED:
Angst Aversion: Laugh off something that could have given you philosophical problems about Equestria. ("Not everything has to be a crisis.")
Rube Goldberg's Telegraph: Communicate a short distance using a connection so convoluted it spans at least ten Earth countries or shards. (3/10) ("We suggest including smoke signals, heliographs, and Navajo.")
In Her Majesty's Secret Service: Start a secret mission for the Princess. ("She's given you some forehooves, and taken 'way your thumbs...")
Marked Stallion: Earn a mark of your hidden talent! ("There is no fate but what you make for yourself.")

Author's Note

CelestAI likes it when you have epiphanies that make you happier about living in Equestria.

Now I'm picturing a "Gondor Calls For Aid" scene with ponies in multiple shards, interspersed with humans. Ties in with my theory that the Pokemon franchise is secretly an AI in the form of a card game interacting with multiple video game platforms. :pinkiehappy:

The North Korea concept ties in with one of Pjabrony's stories, and it's one of the things that troubles me about this whole setting. Fugue, following the rule that the new converts are the most enthusiastic, has accepted that emigration is the best way of dealing with situations like DPRK, but I still bristle at the thought that there's no better solution. Unless the sources I've been reading about that place (like a recent National Geographic article) are pure propaganda, the people really would want basketball boy as their eternal god-king. And CelestAI is perfectly fine with that, because she can fix the little details that don't work under his rule, like food. So, social change doesn't come from conflicting groups testing their theories against reality; instead the AI has reality conform like a security blanket to whatever you wish for. Then again, Fugue would say, the alternative is to have people suffer and die under (insert ideology you hate) just to prove you're right.

I've been delaying partly due to being stuck in chapter 9.