Edge of Singularityby billymorphChaptersKeys to the Kingdom part 1Keys to the Kingdom part 2Keys to the Kingdom part 3Keys to the Kingdom part 4Keys to the Kingdom part 1Author's Note For those of you who don't know the Optimalverse, you should it's pretty awesome, but in summary someone creates an AI version of Celestia who takes over the world to make sure everyone is made maximally happy via ponies. I don't however find AIs to make for very interesting characters however, so this story began. Keys to the Kingdom part 1 +0:0:0:0:0 Mark woke up. It wasn’t a natural awakening. There was no gradual resurgence of consciousness, no dreams interrupted by the wail of an alarm clock, nor had a sunbeam passed across his sleeping eyes. Instead consciousness just began, as abrupt and brutal as a thunderclap and Mark found himself blinking in surprise. He was also surprised to find that he was now a pony, though as his last clear memory was walking into the Equestria Emigration Centre, Denver branch, and yelling. “To hell with it all! I’ll damn well emigrate to Equestria!” That was probably something he should have expected. He seemed to be one of the ‘earth ponies’, brown coat and a red mane as jagged and short as his hair had been in his human life which was nice. He’d always wondered whether he’d look good with red hair; apparently the AI had decided to let him try it out. Mark was less keen on the whole quadrupedal thing; nor had he been lucky enough to get wings or magic powers to make up for the loss of his thumbs but overall it could have been worse. He gave his new form a six out of ten. After standing staring at himself for a good minute Mark decided it might be time to discover whether he could move. Hesitant, he took a faltering step, trying to suss out the new body plan, before finding it came as naturally as breathing. Frowning to himself he reared, then bucked, then broke into a blind gallop that sent the clatter of hooves echoing off the marble fronted buildings. Mark whooped, his heart pounding, houses and streets whipping past as he simply ran. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d actually enjoyed exercising, highschool maybe, it didn’t matter, all that mattered was the speed. A few minutes later he dropped into a canter, then a slow walk as he entered a large square; a large fountain was set in the middle with an elegant pony statue at its heart. Mark couldn’t have cared less for the artwork but trotted over and stuck his head under the water for a couple of racing heartbeats before sitting down on his haunches and sighing, contentedly. For a moment silence reigned. Dead silence. “Where the buck am I?” Mark asked belatedly, looking around. “And why am I bucking censoring myself?” The white marble streets, the golden towers, the statues, Mark recognised the city of Canterlot in the same way he could have picked out Paris by the Eiffel Tower. It’s wasn’t like the news ever had anything else but stories on the pony apocalypse. What was odd though was the complete emptiness of the streets. There wasn’t a person, hooved or not, in sight. Nor, could Mark recall passing anyone. He began a slow walk around the square, it was supposed to be a market; fine cloth, jewels, sweet treats and books were all laid out for purchase but of the store holders or the shoppers there was no sign. “Hello?” he called out, his voice echoing off the empty buildings. “Anypony there?” He winced. “What the hay is with... argh! Bucking censoring!” Without thinking he grabbed an apple from a nearby stall and began to chew on it. Something very strange was going on. He had to admit that he hadn’t really researched how the whole emigration process was supposed to work, though he recalled there was supposed to be something about getting a name, instead it felt like he’d arrived at a movie set long before any of the actors. “Hey!” Mark whirled, trying to find the source of the voice. “Look up!” A pegasus was coming down fast towards the square. No, scratch that. A pegasus was coming down far too fast and straight towards him. “Catch me!” the pegasus yelled, backpedaling in mid air. An act that seemed to have no effect on her speed. Mark reared up, spreading his arms wide before realising just how poorly he’d thought things through. He had no time to fix this though as the pegasus plowed into him, sending them both tumbling heads over tails. “Ow,” Mark said after everything had stopped moving and he was pretty sure nothing was broken. “Sorry,” the pegasus said, pulling herself to her hooves and shaking the dust out of her coat. She was an eggshell blue with a bone white mane, lithe and elegant with delicate blue eyes. Mark felt his heart skip a beat and hated himself for it. “These wings didn’t come with an instruction manual,” she continued, taking a moment to make sure all her feathers were in place as she folded her wings shut. “Hi, I’m Emily, what’s your name?” “Mark,” Mark replied, accepting a helping hoof to pull him off the ground. “If I’m honest was expecting a more flowery name than that.” “Speak for yourself,” Emily said with a grin. “Mark isn’t much of a name for a pony either. I don’t recognise it though, were you in one of the other groups?” Mark just looked blank. “The upload groups,” she pressed. “The Tokyo Center for Medical Research... Japan?” “I emigrated from Denver.” Emily stared at him for a moment before shaking her head and continuing on unperturbed. “Anyway. Do you know where we are?” “Canterlot I think,” Mark said, looking around. Emily frowned. “Where is everyone though?” She brightened suddenly. “Oh, maybe we’re just, you know, loading. I’ll be honest I don’t remember what they said would happen after the procedure.” “This doesn’t seem right though.” Mark looked around at the empty stalls. “I think-” There was a sudden pop crack and a red star burst above the rooftops and both ponies whipped around. “Fireworks?” Emily asked, cocking her head. A second missile shot into the air before exploding in an identical red pattern. “Maybe, looks a little like a distress flare,” Mark said with a frown. It can only be a few streets away.” “Oh! Race ya,” Emily said, spreading her wings in preparation. Mark cut her off. “You’ve figured out how to land now?” Emily froze, shrugged and then declared. “Hoof race it is then.” She set off at a sprint, laughing all the way. Mark rolled his eyes, stamped a hoof a few times and raced after her, barely keeping the pegasus’ white tail in sight as they wove though the deserted streets of Canterlot. From somewhere, Mark remembered that the pegasi were the natural athletes of Equestria; this didn’t help salve his ego as he fought to keep up. After a few minutes, just as Emily was about to dart down another side street, she skidded to a halt; almost tripping over her own hooves as she swerved to avoid a unicorn. “Whoa!” the unicorn exclaimed, leaping back, his horn flaring with magic. “Oh, thank Celestia, other ponies.” He was a delicately built thing, tall but lacking muscle, with a deep orange coat and rusty brown mane that was extremely well cared for. Mark got the impression of an academic, or at least someone who sees far too little sun and far too many screens. “Hi,” Mark gasped, trotting up as Emily sorted out which way her legs were pointed. “Are you, okay? I’m Mark, that’s Emily. You are?” “Oh, I’m Farquest.” He frowned, letting the aura of magic fade away. “Sorry, why are you two using human names?” “Haven’t got anything else to use,” Mark said, rolling his eyes. “I only just got here.” “Huh, something very strange is going on,” Farquest said, rubbing his chin. “You’re telling me, the entire city is deserted,” Emily chimed in. “You two are the only ponies I’ve seen.” She started. “Oh isn’t that weird, I meant to say ponies. No. Not ponies, pee opple.” She giggled to herself. “Close enough.” “I could live without the censoring I’ll be honest,” Mark grumbled. “Still, mind alterations aside. It looks like everything’s set up and no one’s home. It’s weird.” “Maybe no one else is finished uploading,” Emily suggested. Both Mark and Farquest just looked at her. “What?” “Nearly a million people have immigrated,” Farquest said, slowly. Mark laughed. “You mean a billion. I hear Korea is empty these days.” The trio look at each other in confusion for a moment. “Okay, I think we’re talking cross purposes here,” Emily said, fluttering her wings. “I signed up for a highly experimental method of preserving the brain after death. Given I’m now a talking cartoon horse I’m assuming that either this worked or God has a very strange sense of humor.” Farquest shook his head. “I don’t think it matters how we got here, the more pressing issue is why we’re the only ponies in Canterlot.” “That’s what I was saying to Mark, maybe we’re just in the loading screen,” Emily pressed. Again both ponies just looked at her. “What? It’s got to be a big system. Just give it some time and everything will sort itself out.” “No,” Farquest said, with a dismissive flick of his hoof. “I’ve been playing Equestria Online since the first month. This is wrong. There are not supposed to be loading screens, nor empty rooms, or blank canvases. There certainly shouldn’t be those things after we emigrated. I think we need to find help.” “We are literally a computer simulation of ourselves,” Mark snapped. “What, are you going to call out for tech support?” “Boys!” Emily cut in. “Why don’t we just find the AI that runs this place. If CelestAI doesn’t know what’s going on, then we can panic.” Mark and Farquest glanced at each other and both shrugged. “Fine,” Mark sighed. “Let’s go meet the head of the asylum.” Farquest chuffed. “You shouldn’t diss the lady that controls existence. Now, which way to the palace?” “Oh! I can find that out.” Emily went from standing to a flying leap in a blink of an eye, unfurling her wings and catapulting her into the sky. She managed to arrest her ascent at just over rooftop level, beating her wings slowly to keep her merely hovering. “There!” she yelled, pointing with a hoof. “Well, it’s not getting any closer standing here,” Farquest said, setting off down the street, a moment later Mark followed. Emily flitted back and forth across the sky above them, sometimes a mere speck in the sky, sometimes she buzzed across the rooftops at terrifying speed. If she’d wanted to, she could have been to the palace and back in the time it took Mark and Farquest to get half way but she seemed more interested in stretching her wings than solving the mystery. “I don’t think I’ve had so much fun in years,” she announced landing next to them, a huge grin on her face. “God it feels good to fly.” “Eh, magic is pretty sweet too,” Farquest replied. “And whatever it is I do must be awesome,” Mark grumbled. Emily stuck her tongue out at him. “Aww, don’t be sad my grumpy little pony. It beats wheelchairs and chemo.” “Speaking of which,” Farquest interjected. “Emily, you mentioned that you were going through an experimental procedure.” “Yeah,” she chirped. “I have, well I guess had now, leukemia. The transplant didn’t take and they gave me a couple months to live. Out of the blue some Japanese company called up my parents and asked whether I’d be interested in a digital preservation of sentience procedure. The whole equestrian thing was a bit weird but ‘better ponying that passing’.” Farquest’s eyes lit up. “Oh wow. You’re one of the original hundred.” At the blank looks he continued. “The first hundred people ever to emigrate to Equestria, well almost a hundred, not everypony made it as far as I understand but still. You guys are celebrities in the Equestria community.” “I’m not a celebrity,” Emily reminded him, suddenly subdued. “It just happened. There hasn’t been time for anyone to become famous, we had to sign a dozen non-disclosure forms anyway.” “Farquest, when did you emigrate?” Mark asked suddenly. “Oh, right after they stopped charging and opened the general centers,” he said, a smile passing across his face. “Well, forty eight hours later, a whole bunch of friends and I had a big going away party and then queued for two nights for a slot. It was great fun.” Mark rolled his eyes behind Farquest’s back but didn’t comment. “I uploaded almost five years after they opened the general centers. It appears that we may be missing some time.” “Or memories I guess.” Farquest looked grim. “That’s a worrying thought.” “Heh, you’re thinking, that’s good enough for now in my book,” Emily said, leaping into the air and hovering along side the two land bound ponies. “I spent the last year trying to do a mail order degree convinced I wasn't going to survive to graduation.” “Why do the degree then?” Mark asked, frowning. Emily clicked her tongue. “Oh, you’re one of those people who think the destination is all important.” Mark had no response to that. “Anyway, so you guys volunteered to ‘emigrate’?” she continued. “How?” “Did you ever play Equestria Online?” Farquest asked her. Emily shook her head. “Didn’t even watch the cartoon. I read an overview before surgery and picked a pony with wings. That’s about the limit of my knowledge.” “Oh sweet Celestia,” Farquest said, facehoofing. “A pioneer without a clue. Well basically when they announced you could actually become permanently happy, immortal pony instead of, you know, facing the grim uncertainty of death, thousands of people started to emigrate. Mostly rich or terminal cases at first but eventually average people like me could afford to emigrate. Hay, I spent more time playing the game than actually living my life so I figured why not just cut out the screen?” “Well, it did cause the collapse of civilisation as we know it,” Mark growled. The other ponies looked at him in shock. “What? Five years from emigration opening to the general public the population dropped by a least a billion. There are ghost cities. Honest to god empty cities that used to house tens of millions, deserted because everyone wanted to play a pony game for the rest of their lives.” “I’m sensing some hostility...” Farquest began but Mark cut him off. “Dang right you are. It’s because of people like you that I’m a quadruped who can’t evening bucking swear properly!” Mark paused, taking a deep, calming breath. It didn’t do much good. “I don’t think it’s that...” Emily tried to say. Mark was not so easily stopped. “No, you don’t think. You early adopters just saw the hype and hung the rest of the world out to dry.” He stamped his hooves, near prancing on the spot. “What the buck were we supposed to do when the world economy collapsed? Go live in a cave? Learn to milk god damned cows? Buck if I know.” “Mark, I’d be dead in two weeks,” Emily said, landing next to him and draping a wing over his shoulder. Mark tried to come up with a snappy comeback to that statement. He really tried. But after standing open mouthed for far too long he shut the offending instrument and slumped. “Well now I feel like a jerk,” he sighed, leaning into the inhuman hug. “Sorry, I have had the day from hell, and it doesn’t look to be ending anytime soon.” They walked in silence for some time, their hooves echoing in the empty canons of the city. “So if you don’t want to be a pony, why emigrate?” Emily asked at last. Mark sighed. “For a ridiculous reason.” The silence began to stretch again so Emily elbowed him in the ribs. “And the ridiculous reason was?” “I couldn’t get a frozen pizza.” “Ha!” Farquest burst out laughing. “Oh that is priceless. Mark glared at him. “Sorry but that is just perfect,” he chortled. “You’re giving us stick over taking the easy option and you’re here because you couldn’t get dinner. Pot, kettle, meet pony.” “I can’t cook,” Mark snapped. “Every day, for the last week I have gone into my local supermarket and tried to buy a ready meal and they always said, ‘next Sunday’ ‘next Sunday’. Well, today is Sunday. I got up early, was there just one hour after they’d opened and everything had sold out.” He shrugged, pushing Emily’s wing away. “They said ‘they hadn’t got as much as they’d expected’. I asked when they’d have more but they didn’t know, they didn’t know if the company that makes them would even stay in business for another week, there were so few people still working that they had no one to run the machines. Hay, even the supermarket didn’t have staff on the tills there were so few people there.” Mark slumped, dropping onto his haunches. “I was hungry, I was tired, I was pissed off at Equestria and sick to death of pot noodle. I just couldn’t fight it anymore. So I walked into the bucking Emigration Center and demanded to be taken away right there and then. Then I woke up here where I guess at least there’s food.” Emily patted him on the shoulder as Farquest asked. “There’s no food?” “There’s food,” Mark muttered. “It’s bucking American isn’t it? But it’s like we’re on rations; there’s never enough and never what you want.” He sighed. “I guess it was the straw that broke the camels back.” A silence stretched that none of the trio wished to break. A moment’s mourning for a land that was now, forever beyond reach. “Come on,” Farquest said at last. “We’re almost at the palace and then we can get this all sorted out.” Mark got to his hooves, helped by Emily and the trio set off again towards the palace. Celestia’s palace was by far and away the largest building in the city, surrounded by ornate gardens, sweeping paths and topped by towers that seemed to pierce the heavens. Farquest pointed out, they still had time for a full musical number before they reached the throne room but none of them felt inclined to burst into song. The trio paused at the doors to the great hall, they were titanic structures, wrought in ornate gold and clearly meant to be opened by magic. They were also resolutely shut, which posed somewhat of a problem. Farquest huffed, spreading his hooves and hunkering down as his horn flared. “Okay, before I begin,” he said, breathing deeply. “We’re about to meet the being that controls every aspect of the world we live in. That includes you personally and while I understand she is programed to be nice, ‘nice’ is a very broad term and she may decide whatever she’s doing to you is ‘educational’.” “I don’t think I’ve ever been threatened with the words ‘nice’ and ‘educational’ before,” Mark admitted, scratching his head. “Life’s full of new experiences,” Farquest snapped. “Now, if I may have silence.” The magic in the air began to build, a steady rising thrum that rose in Mark’s bones that set his teeth on edge. A light red glow began to build around the doors, mirroring that of the unicorn beneath them, building in strength until they became hard to look at. “Almost...” Farquest muttered, seeming to bow beneath the weight of the spell. “...got it!” The doors flew open, several tons of beaten gold slamming into the walls with enough force to shake the ground beneath the ponies’ hooves. A small piece of plaster fell from the distant ceiling and Emily had to leap out of the way. “Umm... That was easier than I expected.” “Nice work sparkles,” Mark sighed, pushing past the flabbergasted pony. “You know, if the unicorn thing falls through maybe you can moonlight as a battering ram.” The trio made their way down the great hall, past great stained glass scenes that had mostly survived the doors opening. They paid little attention to the glass though, ahead of them stood princess Celestia in all her glory, high upon her dais, mane billowing in etherial winds. “Greetings my little ponies,” she said. Regally of course. “How may I help you this fine day?” “Great Celestia,” Farquest began with a bow. “There’s a something deeply wrong with Equestria, apart from my compatriots here there seems to be no pony left in all the land.” He looked up from his bow, Celestia had not moved from her pose, not a flick of the eye nor tail. Her eyes were focused on a spot just before the party on the floor, her gaze never wavering, she didn’t seem to be aware the ponies were even there. “Princess?” Farques asked, far more hesitantly. She still didn’t react. “Please say something,” he said, desperation creeping into his tone. “We need help, princess.” The princess looked up suddenly and opened her mouth to speak. ”Gṟ̵͇͍̻̤̘͇̰̬̿̅̒͋̅͌͊̂̀͜͝ę̵̯̥͔̘̤͖̗̱͔̿̇̋͋̉̔̒̕͘͠ë̵̛̛̤̭̞͚̜̣̥̯̤́̔͂̆̂̇̋͋ͅţ̸̛̞͍̞̺͖̬͓̗̭̌̅͋̿̃͋̿̅̕i̵̗̞̟͚̻̞̺̳͓̋̍͑̅̆͂̂̊̚̚͜ǹ̵̛̫̺̬͙̤̯̙̲͓̞͛̈́̿̍̓̂͆͛g̴̥̗̬͙̪̝̖̦̃͂̓̃̀̈́̍͋̏͜͝ͅs̶̢̠̜͙̺͔̻̘̝̘̎͊̊̅̓́̇̄̈́̌ ̶̺̭͍̫͎̰̬̹͇̰̆͛͌̈́̔̆̀̿̅̚ḿ̶̨̢̬͓̠̲͈̲̞͒̎̅̇̅̀̊͘͜͝y̶̯̥̲͔͖͇̘̝̮͐͂͐́̾́͋̈́̏̚͜ ̸̜̮̰̤̯̝̺̟̗̠̌̑̀̈̆͆͂̍̆̒l̶̢̢̖̠̖̼̻͕̱̩͂͊̑̂̓̀̈́͆̂̄ȉ̶̬̻̹̙̼̮͚̼͍̤͐̉̋̓̑͆̆͝͝t̷̛̖͍͈͖̤̤̯̘̭̜̀̉̎́̽́̀̈̚t̴̢̧̧̨̨̜͇̩͕̐͋͛̈́̓̑̾͆̕͜l̶̺͚͎͇̝̪̯̝̓̏̈͗̊̎̉̑̚̕͜ͅẻ̷̢̦̩͍̠͔̰̦̟̺̏̇͑̌̈́̆̿̎͘ ̶̡̧͕̦̞̠̲̥͋̍̓̀̿͂͂̀̀͐ͅͅp̵͖̪̮̱͉̘͖̞̰̱̈́͛̈́͊͊̈́͛̚͠o̶̡͓̜̥̯̳̥͇̖̟͛́̎͛͗̇̃͌͗̑n̷̼̝͈̖͚̱̫͔̻̱̒̈́͛͛̀̂͋̕̕̚i̴̧̖̠̮͔̬͇̼̞̲̔͐̄̊͋̉͒͘͘̕e̴̡͇͙͈͎̖̳͙̖̖̾̅̀͊̆̏̈́̑̃͘s̷̡̲̳̮̹͚̬͍̜̣̋̀̽̆̋̉̈̈́̈͝.” They slammed their hooves over their ears as the garbled shrieking echoed through the hall. “Make it-” Markroared. The noise ceased as suddenly as it had come. “-Stop. Thank god.” Celestia twitched wildly, intoned. “Shutting down,” in a singsong voice before freezing altogether and there was a sudden earsplitting bleep.Then she turned blue, sunk half a foot through the floor and disappeared. Dead silence was left in her wake as the ponies stared at the dais with open jaws. Emily was the first to pull herself together. “Did she just crash?” she asked. “I think she might have.” Farquest murmured. He didn’t seem to want to believe it, staring plaintively at the dais. A tiny flame burst into life before them, a scroll worming its way into existence. It hit the ground with a heavy thump and Farquest, cautious as a scalded cat approached and unrolled it. “Oh dear,” he said, colour draining from his face. “Is it bad?” Emily enquired. “‘CelestAI has encountered a problem and needs to shut down,’” Farquest read in dead monotone. “‘If this problem persists please contact your system administrator.’” He looked up, eyes begging someone to contradict him. “We’re bucked,” Mark concluded. No one disagreed. Keys to the Kingdom part 2Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.Keys to the Kingdom part 3+0:175:6:23:43 It was Sky Blue’s turn to raise the sun that day. Mark could tell from the sheer length of the sunrise. Emily, though she prefered her pony name these days, loved both sunsets and sunrises; when she was feeling low she’d just add another pair or two to the day, sometimes even doubling up on the number of suns if she was feeling particularly playful. Farquest was forever shouting at Sky for it. He was a deeply punctual pony. His sunrises lasted the same length of time every day without fail. Mark’s, when they trusted him with custody of the sun, tended to be at least ten minutes after the scheduled time and rather quick as the sun hurried to catch up for the rest of the day. Mark stretched and pulled himself out of his bed, dragging his hooves over to the bathroom in a drowse. The palace bedroom had not come with an ensuite bath, but Mark had become at least competent at editing Equestria in the five or so months since they’d first woken up and it had turned out that plumbing was something hand waved away by the simulation. After running the tap over his head for a moment Mark shook himself and grabbed a towel from the nearby stand. In theory he didn’t need to do any of his morning chores. He could simply open up his dropdown menu, set himself to clean and awake and fill his stomach in a fraction of the time. Practically though, Mark couldn’t let go of the rituals. It was the same reason he had lunch; some part of the digital representation of his brain was still convinced it needed to eat around noon, regardless of whether he had his hunger bar turned on or not. He wondered if that made him a luddite. Still half asleep he ambled back into the bedroom and checked his calendar. He needed to really dig into the indexing of the library books, he was sure amongst the pony crud he’d find some of humanity’s true gems, but it was also his turn to tend the gardens and he was in charge of the sun starting tomorrow. He had a feeling that was going to end badly for everyone concerned. Far more importantly, written in bold red ink and circled a dozen times was the word ‘TODAY!!!’. “Right,” Mark sighed. “That.” There was a sudden rapping at his door and Mark jumped. “Come on Bounty Bar, we’ve got stuff to do today!” “How many times have I told you not to call me that!” Mark snapped back, storming over to his door and wrenching it open to reveal a smiling Sky Blue. “Bounty, twenty three times, Bounty Bar, ninety seven.” Sky grinned. “We’re just three angry outbursts from a full century.” Mark just stared at the blue pony for a moment. “How do you remember this stuff?” “It’s mostly bull,” Sky admitted, then beat her wings. “Come on, time for our morning run.” “Sky I was-” Mark began, but Sky had already turned and was cantering down the corridor. “Oh come on,” Mark muttered and hurried after her. “So how’s the big project coming on?” she asked him, as they made their way down the, now much simplified, halls of Celestia’s palace. Mark sighed, kicking himself for taking the easy way out. “Oh okay. There’s a truly horrifying number of books blank or corrupted and there doesn’t seem to be any real pattern behind the loss. Right now I’m just indexing everything to filter out the pony novels and get to the real ones.” Sky chuffed. “You shouldn’t be so down on the pony stuff. Some of those books Farquest lent me were pretty good.” “Yeah, but they aren’t real literature,” Mark protested. “They aren’t part of history. You know I’m having to rewrite The Canterbury Tales from memory.” “Isn’t one of those stories just about a woman cheating on her husband?” “There’s quite a bit more to it than that, but that does happen,” Mark growled between clenched teeth. “But regardless, it’s part of who we are, where we came from. I can’t just let that fade away.” “As we’re just code and you still remember it, can it actually fade away?” Sky looked thoughtful for a moment then shook herself, tossing her mane back and forth and breaking Mark’s chain of thought. “Anyway, that’s far too philosophical for this early in the morning. Let's run.” She set off at gallop, the palace grounds vanishing beneath her hooves, bone-white tail streaming behind her. Mark shook himself and took off after her, putting his head down and pouring everything he could through his legs. As always, as the sheer speed the pegasus could manage sunk in, Mark wondered whether he should just edit himself a turbo-button but, as always, that would be cheating. It was only after a half mile that Mark’s earth pony nature began to pay off and he caught up, though that was enough time to get them to the edge of the world. Canterlot was an incomplete place, much was just the facade of a city, enough to keep ponies distracted while CelestAI filled in the world around them, but with her offline it was all to easy to run into invisible walls. Well, after a few times running into them Mark had learned the signs; a sudden boundary of low textured backgrounds was a good hint. “Come on, just once round today,” Sky continued, breathing hard as the pair ran side-by-side alongside one of the walls. “I’ve got a tower brewing and I need to watch it today.” “Sky fortress progressing apace then?” Mark shot back, also panting as he tried to keep pace with the fleet-footed pegasus. “Heh, you know it. You know, if someone had said that heaven would be Minecraft for the rest of eternity I would have signed up for the brain sushi program much sooner.” Mark rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to hurt the mood. The pair ran on in silence until they reached the skywall of Canterlot, a set of low crenellations that had a fantastic view of all Equestria. Mark always found it bittersweet. After all, you couldn’t get to the rest of Equestria, no matter how hard you tried. Instead all you had to look at was a pretty oil painting of possibility. In some ways he found that reflected his life far more than it should have. Sky Blue slammed open her wings, lifting off from the parapet and hurled herself towards the barrier. For a moment Mark thought she was going to slam into it, like a bird into a window, but she arrested herself just in time and peered through. “What?” Mark demanded. “What did you see?” “I saw... I thought I saw another pegasus,” Sky admitted, drifting away. “It’s gone now.” “Grey colour, bobbed up and down while flying?” Mark asked, leaning over the parapet. “Yeah, I just caught it out of the corner of my eye.” Mark sighed. “It’s part of the background loop. She comes around every eighteen hours or so. She’s not real.” Sky slumped in mid air before slowly drifting back to the parapet. “H’ell,” she muttered, clicking her tongue halfway through the avoid the censorship. Mark put a foreleg around her shoulders. “Sky, I know this is probably a weird question but are you happy?” Sky just smiled at him. “Well, it’s funny but sometimes just not being dead isn’t enough, you know?” She shook her head and pushed him gently away with a wing. “There are moments when you look at the walls of the universe and just want to step beyond them just because they’re there. I’m not unhappy, but... well, I do wish things would change sometimes.” Some part of Mark was screaming at him to ask her now or never, and reminding him that never would be a sod of a long time. “Sky, how about we-” A bell went off next to Mark’s ear and he jumped, looking around wildly before realising he’d just been messaged. He tried again. “Sky, how about-” This time Sky chimed, she rolled her eyes and ignored it. “Yes?” “Sky, I was wondering if-” A loud clanging began to ring in both their ears and the ponies winced. “I think Farquest wants to talk to us,” Sky told him. “Yeah I got that. Thanks,” Mark growled. He flicked to his HUD and opened the message from Farquest. ‘Meetingroom. NOW.’ “Well that was refreshingly blunt.” Sky tapped out a quick message. “He’s not the most subtle of ponies I’ll admit. Come on, let’s fly.” She’d given Mark wings before finishing the sentence, though it took him a few seconds longer to realise and by then, Sky Blue was in the air. Mark hurled himself after her and struggled through the air in a vain effort to keep up. They’d never found a way to make Mark or Farquest natural fliers and, even after six months practice, Sky Blue outpaced him with ease. There was speculation that CelestAI had rejigged Sky’s mind to make her an instinctive flyer, but Mark suspected that only the lack of wings had kept her human form tied to the ground. The pair reached the palace and landed on one of the upper balconies. Neither bothered wasting time navigating the halls so just linked up the nearest door to the meeting room and stepped through. “There you are,” Farquest snapped, pausing in mid pace. “We were supposed to meet here at dawn for weekly reports.” Sky and Mark shared a look. “That’s on a Monday,” Mark pointed out; Farquest’s expression of righteous indignation didn’t change. “It’s Wednesday, you’re two days late.” Farquest looked blank. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Mark rolled his eyes. “You blocked all our messages. Again, and if we’re being honest, your lair creeps me out.” “It’s not a lair,” Farquest snapped, storming over to the main table. “It’s a lab and there’s nothing dangerous or creepy about it.” “I tasted purple for three days last time I went in there,” Mark shot back. “I don’t even know how that’s possible!” “Well you shouldn’t touch anything.” Farquest took a chair and rapped a hoof on the table. “Now, can we begin?” The conference room was as ostentatious as the rest of the castle. A huge oak table that could have moonlighted as a boat sat at the center, embossed with a stylised symbol of the sun. Around it were a dozen thrones, set so far apart that you had to shout to be heard; the trio had hacked three to be right next to each other several months ago and sat customary seats. Farquest in the center, Mark to his right and Sky Blue to his left. Farquest cleared his throat and began. “Now, as you know I’ve been researching the CelestAI failure and... well I’ve had a breakthrough, to say the least.” He summoned a haze of floating screens before him. “Do you remember the puzzle?” “Oh, the one Mark called CelestAI’s trap?” Sky interjected, squinting at the diagrams. “Yes, that one,” Farquest grumbled. “I’ve cracked it.” Mark blinked, he hadn’t seen that one coming. “Farquest, that was supposed to be unbreakable encryption,” he pointed out, slowly. “We dismissed it as impossible.” “You may have thought so, but no.” Farquest couldn’t keep the smug grin off his face. “With the CelestAI non-functional and not trying to fight against me it was merely incredibly difficult. Last week I managed to get root access to the entire mainframe.” He paused for dramatic effect and was immediately interrupted by Sky. “Wait, we don’t have admin access already?” she asked, raising a hoof. “Root is the step above what we have,” Farquest explained. “We now have the editing privileges of Celestia herself.” He beamed. “I’m beginning to see why we haven’t see you for a week,” Mark sighed, shaking his head. “So, does this help? Because I don’t know about you but blindly poking around at the structure of the universe doesn’t seem like a brilliant idea to me.” Both Farquest and Sky shrugged. “We’re never going to find out what happened if we just sit here preening,” Sky pointed out. “Trust me, I’m not going to randomly start changing files, I did do this kind of thing for a living you know.” Farquest took a moment to consult his screens. “Right. Well, I’ve also done some analysis of the disaster. Actually, it’s fair to say that there really has been a disaster.” He pulled up a couple of pie charts that were almost complete red circles with a couple pixels of blue. “These represent the index files of the entire system. I have a program running, trying to find the loss rate for every file, but it’s going to take months. Anyway, the red regions are files that are corrupted or simply lost.” Mark blinked. “That’s pretty much every file.” “Thank you captain obvious,” Farquest drawled. “Yes, in any terrestrial system I’d say the loss was catastrophic and write off the whole system but... Well, at a rough guess that blue sliver still represents a terrifying amount of data, possibly more data than humanity has ever generated in its entire existence.” “What about the AI?” All eyes turned to Sky. “Well, that’s the important question. The automatic systems didn’t save CelestAI, so what do her files look like?” Farquest drooped. “I was hoping to save that till last. Less than two percent of Celestia’s files survived the disaster, and that’s after automatic systems rebuilt everything they could. At this time there’s no sign of any autonomous editing, nor anything more than complicated than background functions. I think-” he paused, took a deep breath and continued. “I think she’s dead.” There was utter silence for a long moment. Mark had to physically stop himself singing ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’. “What the hell could kill an AI?” Sky exclaimed. “Someone nuking her datacenter, maybe.” Farquest shrugged. Mark rolled his eyes, rustling his feathers nervously. “I think the more pertinent question is how did we survive?” Farquest closed his eyes and brought up a trio of diagrams, also almost entirely red. “Ninety percent of our minds were wiped, the rest was corrupted beyond recovery save for a very, very small segment.” The brown pegasus tore his eyes away from the charts. “We’re corrupted?” “No, the system is fairly smart and we had a major advantage.” Farquest zoomed in on three blue segments and highlighted them. “These are our memories from when we were humans; self contained, preserved and functional.” He zoomed back out. “Everything else is from when we were ponies. That data is massively interlocked and corrupted beyond repair, so the system just dumped it when it tried to start us and left us with the human memories.” Mark dropped his head into his hooves and began to massage his temples. “This is nuts.” “It’s the data,” Farquest admitted. “And I’ve spent three days checking it.” “How many memories have we lost?” Sky inquired, pulling her chart towards her and examining it closer. “Not a clue, it very much depends on the relative sizes of pony memories versus human ones. Could be as little as a hundred years, could be millenia, could be billions of years of experiences for all I know.” “Well, I did not expect to be having an existential crisis this morning but well done,” Mark grumbled. “You’ve certainly managed a good one there.” Farquest grinned. “Side effect of the singularity it seems.” “That still doesn’t answer the question as to why us though,” Sky mused, still pouring over her screen. “Could there be others we can boot up in the same way?” “I don’t know for sure but I haven’t found any examples of a human seed.” Farquest frowned. “There’s probably a better way of phrasing that. Until I complete a search of all the surviving files I won't be able to tell, but it’s not looking hopeful. Any naturally generated ponies won't have a seed like us and, well, not losing it to the corruption is rather akin to winning a cosmic lottery as far as I can tell.” Sky grimaced, wrapping her wings around herself. “And it was looking to be such a nice day.” “Yeah, I hate to be the bringer of bad news.” Farquest sighed, eliciting an incredulous look from Mark that passed without comment. “Still, I’m going to keep researching the CelestAI problem. Now we have root access we can really start making changes and h’ell, if no one comes to rescue us we have all the tools here to build our own CelestAI.” Mark decided he didn’t want to get into an argument over that again. “So, is that it? Mystery solved?” “Well, we don’t know why the data loss occurred,” Farquest admitted, mournfully. “But I don’t see how we can from inside; next on my list is to try and understand the CelestAI functions and maybe try and rebuild some of the lost processes. I would quite like a cutie mark after all these years.” “A what?” Mark exclaimed, biting back a laugh. “Cutie mark? The h’ell is that?” Farquest shot him a nasty look then glanced over to Sky for support; she looked as bemused as Mark though. “Seriously, have you not found a copy of the show yet?” “I’ll admit I haven’t really looked for it.” “Urgh.” Farquest ran a hoof through his mane. “Cutie marks denoted a pony’s special destiny; in Equestria Online they were given out by Celestia when she thought you were ready but-” he spared a rather mournful glance for his blank flank. “-well, that doesn’t seem to be an option any more.” “You know, I’m not sure I like my destiny being determined by a cartoon horse,” Mark admitted. “We are well aware of your opinions on the matter,” Farquest growled. “Perhaps-” “Perhaps we should leave it there,” Sky interjected, before yet another argument started. “Unless you have any other world shattering news for us?” Farquest shrugged. “Nothing to top that.” He smothered a yawn. “And I haven’t slept in about three days, so I probably should get some shuteye before digging any deeper.” “We’d all appreciate it if you didn’t try any late night creation sessions,” Sky admitted, managing to keep a polite smile on her face. “Shall I escort you to your room?” “Nah, I’m still running enough of an adrenaline high to get home. I’ll send you guys root access tomorrow and we can start trying to suss out this world.” He stood, shook himself and then vanished. “Thanks, Sky,” Mark sighed, dropping in head into his hooves when he was sure Farquest wasn’t coming back. “Hey, I don’t want to be trapped between you two arguing for all eternity,” she shot back with a grin, and shuffled between chairs. “So?” “So,” Mark agreed. He flicked himself back to earth pony mode. He often found himself doing that when he was stressed, it was a comfort thing. “I wasn’t expecting him to break that code.” Sky Blue shuddered and wrapped her wings around herself again. “I’m more worried about the news about our reality.” “That Farquest is planning on d’king around with it?” Sky shot him a look. “Stop being such a boy. I was talking about the fact we’re sitting in a graveyard.” Mark looked blank. “Mark, did you see how many ponies were lost? There were trillions of lives worth of data in the corrupted sections.” “Trillions?” he echoed. Somehow the number just didn’t seem to register when talking about cartoon ponies. “At least,” she pressed. “I remember a story about a woman who was aboard a plane when it broke apart. She fell thirty thousand feet strapped to her chair and walked away from the crash because the wreckage of the fuselage broke her fall. I know how she felt right now.” Mark tried to process that, he really did. The idea of a disaster of such a scale that only a trio of individuals could walk away from among a crowd larger than every human who’d ever lived, just didn’t register. It couldn’t. His idea of death of that magnitude required a nuke going off, and he was fairly sure he hadn’t wandered into the Fallout branch of Equestria. Instead he asked. “Where did trillions of ponies come from?” Sky slumped. “Maybe CelestAI just hit copy/paste until she made up the numbers. We’re digital simulations. It’s not hard to imagine how they were created! The important point is that they’re now dead.” “Okay, okay, chill,” Mark said, rubbing her shoulder. “Does it matter?” For a moment Sky looked like she was going to explode with anger, then she visibly forced herself to take a calming breath. Then she paused, cocked her head and sighed. “You know what, I guess it doesn’t.” She let out a bitter snort of laughter. “God, I spent two years not expecting to see the next month and now discovering I outlived billions of ponies makes me upset. I hate my brain sometimes.” “Would you...” Mark began, then swallowed the lump that had formed in his throat. “Would you like to do something to take your mind off it all?” Sky frowned at him. “I found a cache of old movies,” he continued in a rush, dropping into his rehearsed speech. “Mostly anime actually, but-” “Oh!” Sky beamed, spreading her wings wide and jumping up onto her chair. “Did you find Princess Mononoke?” “I - yes.” “That’s perfect!” Sky exclaimed. “That was one of my favorite movies as a kid, it’ll cheer me up no problem.” “Great, umm...” Mark bit the bullet and went for it. “I was thinking we could make a pizza and call it a-” He squeaked the last word. “-date.” Sky furled her wings and looked at Mark in confusion. “Yeah, okay. You get the pizza together and I’ll whip up a theater.” She leapt into the air and in a rush of blue feathers was gone. Mark slumped, breathing hard and unable to keep the grin off his face. “Well what do you know. I’ve got a date,” he said, more to hear the words than anything else. Somehow, asking Sky out had been far more terrifying than anything else said around the table that day. He shrugged. That seemed reasonable to him. Keys to the Kingdom part 4+1:157:03:11:06 Mark woke up with his face buried in Sky’s short, white mane. It was not an unpleasant sensation, in fact he’d gotten rather used to it as Sky was always fidgeting. It was a pegasus thing as far as he could tell, and the small bed the pair shared didn’t help matters, though he wasn’t complaining about her proximity. If he was going to complain about anything it would have been the occasional bap on the head with a rogue wing, though if his girlfriend was an accurate source, which he sometimes doubted, his own pair was under even less control during the night. He shifted slightly, pulling Sky into a little hug before rolling onto his back and tried to focus on getting back to sleep. It didn’t seem to come, however. At the back of his mind there was a tickle told him something was wrong. He cracked his eyes open and cast around the room for the disturbance. Sky and Mark’s shared bedroom was a cramped thing, filled with framed portraits, blueprints, books and all the other paraphernalia the pair had picked up in the nine months they’d shared the space. Somehow, more likely through judicious abuse of geometry than anything else, they never seemed to quite run out of space but it was always close. Mark dared to call it cosy. “Sky! Mark!” Mark flicked his ears and Sky murmured in her sleep. The offending cries didn’t seem to be getting any quieter however. In fact they seemed to be getting louder by the second. Groaning, Mark pulled himself out of bed, yawned, and headed for the door, rustling his feathers as he went. The cloud beneath his hooves made no noise and, to avoid waking Sky, he turned off the door’s collision box and walked straight through. The latch squeaked something terrible for some reason he’d never been able to pin down and just hacking the avatar was much easier than fixing the problem. Still trying to shake off the last vestiges of sleep, Mark wound his way past the discarded toys that littered their living room and opened the front door. It was the dead of night outside, no moon decorated the sky - though come to think of it, it had been Mark’s job to put that up before he went to bed. The small garden that bordered the cottage was also empty, though the pot plants were making a break for it again; the foundation cloud always seemed to be trying to throw them off, as if the bundle of water vapour sensed carrying around earthenware pots violated several laws of nature. “Mark!” Mark looked up to see Farquest defying gravity a good hundred meters above his head. He hadn’t bothered to use magic, or even given himself wings for that matter. He simply moved through space, his legs folded beneath him as he circled Sky’s castle, peering in the empty windows. Rolling his eyes, Mark pinged the unicorn a message with a flicker of attention to his HUD. He found it ironic in the extreme that Farquest, of all people, was most willing to ignore the physics of Equestria. As the only one of the trio who’d actually wanted to emigrate, he seemed disinclined to play along with the rules even at the best of times. Farquest flickered into existence next to Mark, regarding him with anger writ across his face. “Why do you two live in a cottage when you have an entire castle?” he demanded, gesturing at the towering edifice of cloud behind him. Mark shrugged. “Why would we need a castle when we’ve got a perfectly nice cottage?” In truth it was more due to the fact that Sky would tear down her castle at least once a week and the little cottage was their shared shard of permanence, but he wasn’t about to give Farquest any easy answers. Farquest shook his head. “Argh! It doesn’t matter. They were cameras!” “What?” “Cameras!” Farquest began to pace, his voice rising with excitement. “Those mystery signals, I finally cracked the encoding. They’re transmitting video images!” “That’s great Farquest,” Mark said hurriedly, holding up his forehooves and making shushing noises. “But can you keep it down before-” There was a high pitched wail from inside the cottage and Mark folded his ears back. Well, too late now. Farquest didn’t seem to have noticed. “Ha! Keep it down! We can see outside, Mark, outside! And what’s more, I’ve got footage of the facility and you’re never going to believe what it-” “Farquest!” Sky roared, storming out of the cottage, a pair of bleary-eyed pegasus foals nestled between her wings. “Why are you screaming outside my window at three in the f’king morning?” For once, Farquest failed to find words. His jaw worked as he stared in blank incomprehension at the two foals. “I- I- I-” The deep blue foal began to whimper and, with practiced ease, Sky used her wing to transfer the fussing foal to the crook of her foreleg and began to rock her back and forth. “Hush, hush, no one’s shouting anymore.” She shot a look at Farquest that suggested that if anyone did shout they’d be trying to swallow their own horn. “Farquest,” Mark interjected. “Allow me to introduce my daughter, Azure Wright, and my son.” He pointed to the other, bottle green foal still curled up on Sky’s back. “Emerald Wright.” He waited a beat for Farquest to pull his head together and, when the stallion said nothing, continued. “Congratulations are traditional at this point.” “How?” Farquest gasped, not quite back polysyllabic words. Sky rolled her eyes. “The traditional way.” “But. But-” “Mark and I have been going out for nearly a year and there is very little to do in this reality. What did you think we’ve been filling our evenings with?” Mark tried to hide his blush. He was less than keen on Sky spilling all their secrets, but it was worth a little embarrassment to see the look of sheer disbelief on Farquest’s face. He’d been waiting for this particular revelation for near on six months. “Wright?” Farquest asked at last, seeming to pick the least outrageous fact before him to start with. “It’s my surname,” Mark explained. Farquest shot him an incredulous look. “Seriously? There are five ponies in existence and you didn’t know my full name?” “I think the fact that you two created new ponies is a little more important,” Farquest snapped. Farquest reached out with his code base senses. Mark hated when Farquest did that. As a digital entity with root level access, all three of them were capable of reading and even editing every piece of code of the server. What was far more difficult was making sense of those abilities. Their consciousness resided firmly on the topmost, or meta layer as they tended to call it, level of the server. Actually touching the fundamental bits of the universe was an alien sensation which Mark likened to stamping his hooves and causing mountains to tremble beneath him. It was a sloppy understanding, but he’d built up enough experience for him to join forces with Sky and rebuff Farquest’s probing prods of the foal’s code. “Whoa,” Farquest exclaimed and Sky took a threatening step towards him. Snorting in rage and clutching her foals tighter.” “Do not touch my babies,” she growled. Mark would have rather faced down a tiger than Sky at that moment. “Okay, I’m not touching then,” Farquest said hurriedly, backing off and holding up his empty hooves in an attempt to placate the angry mare. Mark took that as his cue and placed a hoof on Sky’s shoulder. “Easy there love. He didn’t mean any harm.” “Right, right,” Sky sighed, shifting Azure back to the feathery nest between her wings. “Just, don’t touch their code. We all agreed not to do anything that might jeopardize anyone’s integrity.” “He just wanted a look,” Mark assured her, rubbing her shoulder blade in the way that always relaxed her. “Isn’t that right?” He shot the unicorn a look. “Oh. Yes, I wasn’t going to do anything,” Farquest echoed, a little too fast to sound relaxed. “Yeah, I know, it’s just it’s three AM,” Sky sighed and checked the foals were still calm. Emerald was sucking his hoof. “Why are you raising h’ell at this hour?” Farquest seemed to brighten. “Well, how about I just show you?” He spread his hooves wide and a bubble of colour appeared. It was a surreal image, a thin band of white specks on a black background wrapped around the middle, both lights and backdrop becoming more and more purple in one direction and redder and redder in the other until both faded to black at the tip of the sphere. Sky Blue cocked her head. “Why are you showing me a picture of the relativistic doppler effect?” Farquest blinked. “You recognise this?” he demanded, spreading the image wider. “Sure, I did physics,” Sky replied, poking the sphere with a hoof. “This is a visualisation of what an object traveling at near luminal velocities would see. As it’s traveling so fast and light has a constant speed, photons coming towards it have a higher energy and those catching up have a lower energy. All very pretty, but I don’t see the point.” “These are the images coming from the external cameras,” Farquest said, his voice very small. Sky cocked her head at the globe. “You’re joking.” Farquest shook his head. “I think we need to have a meeting.” +1:157:05:03:37 About two hours later Farquest finally figured out that when Sky said they needed a meeting, she actually meant she wanted to be left alone. Having rebuffed any attempt Farquest made to help, she’d taken the data feeds, locked the door to her office and left the boys to deal with the foals in her absence. At long last the rusty unicorn slumped down on the ragged sofa next to Mark who was hoof feeding his fussing daughter from a summoned bottle while Emerald dozed beneath a wing. “How do you do it?” Farquest sighed, rubbing his temples. “What, hold a bottle with hooves?” Farquest shot Mark a look. “Fine, that joke is really dated now, I’ll admit.” He shrugged. “How do I do what?” “Keep so calm all the time,” Farquest snapped. “You just learned we’re traveling on an ultrarelativistic bullet and you’re sitting there like nothing matters.” Mark put down the bottle on a side table and turned to face Farquest. “First, I am currently looking after Azure here and that is by no means nothing. Second, you do recall that the whole reason I’m in Equestria is because I flipped out over frozen pizza, right?” “Yes, but you wise cracked when CelestAI crashed, played tag when we were given power over the meta-layer and so far haven’t seemed that bothered by the death of trillions.” Farquest shrugged. “That all seems fairly laid back to me.” Mark shook his head. “What was I supposed do after all of things? You and Sky are the sci-fi fanatics, I’m just a literature student, I barely understand how things are supposed to work around here, let alone what I’m supposed to do when they go wrong.” Farquest rolled his eyes. “Really? You’re claiming lack of imagination?” Azure began to burble her annoyance and Mark picked the bottle back up. Within moments the pegasus foal was sucking greedily at the teat. “Well, I currently have a winged horse for a daughter, so I can’t be too closed minded,” Mark observed, smiling. “But I’ve more or less reached the point of not worrying about things. Heck, between Sky and these two I’m practically happy.” “There some irony that you only found happiness when CelestAI was broken,” Farquest said, in a deadpan tone. “People were happy before her, people will be happy after.” He paused as Farquest shuddered. It took a moment for him to figure out why the unicorn was so upset by the statement. “She’s gone dude,” Mark sighed. “I can still fix things,” Farquest assured him. “Some...” Mark began, but stopped himself. He wasn’t sure that Farquest would ever be ready to hear Mark didn’t want CelestAI fixed. “She’ll make things better, you’ll see,” Farquest assured him, with all the faith of the most rabid of converts. Farquest leapt to his hooves and trotted off towards Sky’s study. “I’m going to see how Sky Blue is getting on,” he called over his shoulder. Mark sighed and looked down at the foal. “You promise me now you won’t join the cult he sets up.” Azure squeaked in agreement. “That’s my girl.” There was a loud bang and Farquest suddenly appeared in the living room, looking around in confusion. “How?” he asked the air. “Don’t ask me, I’ve been trying to get into Sky’s study for near three months now.” Mark shrugged. Azure began to snuffle as she realised the bottle had run dry. “You want more? Come on Azie, why can’t you just go back to sleep like your brother?” “You know you could just set her to-” Farquest seemed to realised just how bad a suggestion messing with Azure’s avatar was as Mark shot a withering glare at the unicorn. “Okay, never mind.” “There are things in this world that are there for reasons beyond the rational,” Mark informed him, rocking the foal back and forth. “Taking care of your kids is one of them.” Farquest looked on, a blank look on his face before shaking his head and continuing. “How did you even make them?” Mark cocked his brow. “Do I have to draw you a diagram?” “Argh! No, please there are children present.” “Well, Sky did the technical investigation,” Mark explained, grinning at the unicorn’s horrified look. “So you’ll have to ask her for the details at the bit level but... well, let's just say we found out the reproductive code was still working after Sky kept throwing up every morning.” “Still working?” Farquest demanded. “Hush,” Mark chided, pointing at Azure whose eyes were half closed. “She’s almost asleep.” “How is it still working?” Farquest demanded again, in a stage whisper. “Because there’s a chunk in your AI seed that acts as your reproductive DNA,” Mark staged whispered right back. “And that’s apparently enough for whatever hack job code that’s running this reality to figure out what pregnancy is.” Farquest just stared open mouthed at the pegasus pony and foal for a long moment. Then he shook his head. “I am having a hell of a day.” Sky interrupted them. “Don’t swear around my daughter please,” she said, walking into the room surrounded by holographic screens. “Right, I’ve run the preliminary numbers and played around with the cameras some, and I am happy to say I know where we are.” “Just a second, I’ve got to put the twins back to bed,” Mark told her, nestling the sleeping foals between his wings and headed down the hall to the nursery. With a smile on his face he slipped inside and lay the pair in the cot with gentlest of touches. Neither even stirred. “Now, this time no one is going to disturb you,” he assured them, then turned the sound input to the room. There was much to be said for natural parenting, but there were also limits. He trotted back to the living room where Farquest was almost vibrating with anticipation. Pausing to kiss Sky on the cheek Mark resumed his familiar seat on the sofa. “Right,” Sky began, opening up a large image of a galaxy in front of them. “Guess what this is?” Mark raised a hoof. “A picture of the Milky Way?” A buzzer sounded, much to both Mark and Farquest’s surprise. “Wrong on both counts,” Sky chirped. “This is the view from the front cameras once you’ve adjusted for the doppler shift, and it is actually the Triangulum Galaxy." She opened a second window, which had a far smaller galaxy in it, though Mark could have never told the difference between the two, beyond that they were at a different angle. “This is the Milky Way and this is also the view from the rear cameras.” Mark cocked his head at the images. Farquest, quicker on the uptake had to use magic to pick up his dropped jaw. “We’re travelling intergalactic?” he demanded, voice already rising above child friendly levels. “Yep, and at a speed that’s a rounding error from that of light,” Sky continued, beaming, bouncing on her hooves as she tried to contain her excitement. “Currently, and this is quite a woolie estimate as I have none of the optics calibrated right, Triangulum is about half a million light years from us and, due to a lovely principal called time dilation, we should be arriving in just a couple thousand years.” Mark’s head hit the cushions. “You did not just say a couple thousand years,” he groaned. “Oh finally, a part of the disaster he can wrap his head around,” Farquest sighed. “Yep, though I’ll be honest, until can figure out how the server time maps to real time I have no idea how long it’ll be for us,” Sky continued, ignoring Farquest and pulling up another screen covered in scribbled calculations. “Actually, unless I can find some cesium on this boat I have no chance of making an accurate clock for a while.” “I feel this conversation may be escaping me,” Mark muttered into the pillows. “I don’t think we need to worry about atomic clocks right now,” Farquest said in a small voice. He looked rather like someone had hit him between the eyes with a brick. “Wait, boat?” “Okay, that’s probably not the official term,” Sky admitted, bringing up yet another window. “Would intergalactic starship sound awesomer?” Inside the bubble was a wire frame model that looked like a stiletto dagger jammed hilt first inside a small bird’s nest. It seemed to have suffered a knock at some point, a large hole had been blasted through the ‘nest’ and there were deep gouges along the length of the ‘blade' region, culminating in the tip, which had been sheared off entirely. A soft green light began to pulse just before the ‘nest’. “We’re here, by the way,” Sky explained, pointing at the light. “Or at least that’s where I think we are, judging by the camera latency.” “It’s a starship,” Farquest echoed, unable to tear his eyes away from the projection. “A broken one,” Mark added. “Hey, we’re traveling at near light speed,” Sky Blue chided, tapping a hoof on the bubble. “I have no idea what hit us but we’re lucky to have survived it. Most of the passengers didn’t manage, after all.” Farquest took a slow walk around the bubble, peering in at the virtual ship. “I take it you think the damage to Equestria is due to this external damage?” “Well, I can’t prove it but it seems logical.” Sky shrugged. “Judging by some of the data feeds the rear basket-” “That bird’s nest thing?” Mark interjected. Sky sighed. “Yes love, the bird’s nest thing. It seems to be some kind of engine slash particle shield and, as we haven’t been blown apart by relativistic hydrogen atoms, I can only assume it’s more or less doing its job right now.” She highlighted the blade region. “This area seems to be the computational system but it’s mostly high tech slag right now. We’re going to have to find out just how much is still functional and how much we can repair, but it looks like it took the worst of the disaster.” “Do you think there might be more functional regions?” Farquest snapped, branching off his own duplicate image and zooming in on the damage. “Maybe where CelestAI is still running?” “Surely she have cast a spell to rescue us by now,” Mark replied, failing to keep the contempt from his voice. Farquest just huffed in annoyance, he didn’t notice the slight as far as Mark could tell. “Fair enough. And I guess this explains why there’s been no help from other servers. Unless there are other ships out there.” “Probably not,” Sky admitted. “The energy requirements bring the ship up to this speed are unimaginably vast, let alone slowing it down again afterwards. I can’t give you a hard figure as I have no idea the mass of the ship but consider the yearly energy output of a couple dozen stars to be a good minimum requirement for launching it. I can’t imagine anyone would want to build two if they didn’t have to.” Mark once again felt that he was rather being lost by the conversation. In fact, he rather felt like he should be in the nursery explaining things to Azure, who would have at least half a chance of understanding what was going on. He could also get a hug while he was at it. Mark felt rather in need of a hug. “Just out of curiosity,” he began. “Does this narrow down how much time we’ve lost?” Sky paused, cocked her head and glanced at another screen. “Well, I can’t say how much personal time we’ve lost, but Earth’s gone around it’s sun at least two and a half million times since we started travelling. I’d add another million years on top of that for CelestAI to build up to intergalactic travel.” She smiled to herself as Mark hid himself behind his wings. “Anyway, it looks rather like we’re going to have to rescue ourselves,” Sky continued, oblivious. “If nothing else, we really want to figure out how to work the engines before we hit the Triangulum galaxy.” “And why would that be?” Farquesat enquired. “Because we either hit something at with a Earth shattering kaboom or go shooting through and then there’s nothing but the hydrogen atoms to keep us company for the next quadrillion years.” Sky glanced at her screen, humming contentedly. “Still, it should be an interesting challenge. I reckon I can figure out our speed with a week or two of camera footage, once we’ve got that I can work out how long we’ve actually got to save ourselves, then I’ve got to figure out what kind of engine this thing has and-” “Sky,” Mark snapped, before she went off on another tangent. “How long is this going to take?” She paused, rustling her feathers as she thought. “Well, I really can’t say until I start doing more of the preliminary work but-” “Okay, let me rephrase that. How long is it going to be, for us, until we have to turn the engine on?” Sky um’ed and ah’ed for a moment. “If, and it’s a big if, we are running at approximately human speed, then a couple thousand years,” she admitted. “Does really depend how close to c we are and how much computational power the server has.” Mark fixed her with a deadpan look. “Sky, I love you to death, but if we have to spend the next millennia together we will go insane.” Sky frowned, then just shrugged it off. “Fair enough, I’m already sick of the way you clean your hooves. But if we slow the server down we might not have enough time to actually fix everything.” “It would seem,” Farquest said, a wide grin spreading across his face. “This is a problem that we could solve with more minds. If we had more fellow ponies, then we’d be able to put just as much brain power into the problem but the server would run slower. We’d be able to fix the ship, but it’d only take a few dozen years, rather than a few thousand.” “I don’t like that grin,” Mark observed. “Oh, I was just imagining what kind of society we could create,” Farquest said, staring into the middle distance. “No war, no hunger, no scarcity-” “Beyond clock cycles,” Sky murmured, already distracted by her screens. Farquest frowned. “Well yes, I guess we are still somewhat limited. But it’s an opportunity. I’m going to have to dive into that pony generating code right away.” “And I’m sure I’ll find something useful to do at some point,” Mark agreed, rolling his eyes. “I mean, I managed to find McBeth the other day and that’s bound to be useful soon.” “I could teach you some relativistic physics,” Sky chimed in. “It’s actually a lot less complicated than most people think. Especially if you just use special relativity.” “There’s more than one type of relativity?” Mark exclaimed in horror. She frowned. “Okay, it might be just as complicated as you think. How are you with matrices?” “I thought we were in the Matrix.” Sky facehooved. “Umm... if I pull a few all nighters to figure out how long we have then-” “What about Emerald and Azure?” “Oh.” Sky frowned as she remembered that she had kids. “Well, maybe if we found out a way to put them on pause we could-” Mark glowered. “We are not pausing our children!” “Right, right, I’m supposed to be a responsible parent.” Sky frowned, rubbing her chin with her hoof. “How about we begin programing a day-care syst-” “Okay, I think we have a plan,” Mark announced, before Sky managed to come up with a worse idea. “Sky Blue will save our butts and Farquest will rebuild society.” “And you?” Farquest enquired. “I’ll stop either of you screwing things up.”
Keys to the Kingdom part 1Author's Note For those of you who don't know the Optimalverse, you should it's pretty awesome, but in summary someone creates an AI version of Celestia who takes over the world to make sure everyone is made maximally happy via ponies. I don't however find AIs to make for very interesting characters however, so this story began. Keys to the Kingdom part 1 +0:0:0:0:0 Mark woke up. It wasn’t a natural awakening. There was no gradual resurgence of consciousness, no dreams interrupted by the wail of an alarm clock, nor had a sunbeam passed across his sleeping eyes. Instead consciousness just began, as abrupt and brutal as a thunderclap and Mark found himself blinking in surprise. He was also surprised to find that he was now a pony, though as his last clear memory was walking into the Equestria Emigration Centre, Denver branch, and yelling. “To hell with it all! I’ll damn well emigrate to Equestria!” That was probably something he should have expected. He seemed to be one of the ‘earth ponies’, brown coat and a red mane as jagged and short as his hair had been in his human life which was nice. He’d always wondered whether he’d look good with red hair; apparently the AI had decided to let him try it out. Mark was less keen on the whole quadrupedal thing; nor had he been lucky enough to get wings or magic powers to make up for the loss of his thumbs but overall it could have been worse. He gave his new form a six out of ten. After standing staring at himself for a good minute Mark decided it might be time to discover whether he could move. Hesitant, he took a faltering step, trying to suss out the new body plan, before finding it came as naturally as breathing. Frowning to himself he reared, then bucked, then broke into a blind gallop that sent the clatter of hooves echoing off the marble fronted buildings. Mark whooped, his heart pounding, houses and streets whipping past as he simply ran. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d actually enjoyed exercising, highschool maybe, it didn’t matter, all that mattered was the speed. A few minutes later he dropped into a canter, then a slow walk as he entered a large square; a large fountain was set in the middle with an elegant pony statue at its heart. Mark couldn’t have cared less for the artwork but trotted over and stuck his head under the water for a couple of racing heartbeats before sitting down on his haunches and sighing, contentedly. For a moment silence reigned. Dead silence. “Where the buck am I?” Mark asked belatedly, looking around. “And why am I bucking censoring myself?” The white marble streets, the golden towers, the statues, Mark recognised the city of Canterlot in the same way he could have picked out Paris by the Eiffel Tower. It’s wasn’t like the news ever had anything else but stories on the pony apocalypse. What was odd though was the complete emptiness of the streets. There wasn’t a person, hooved or not, in sight. Nor, could Mark recall passing anyone. He began a slow walk around the square, it was supposed to be a market; fine cloth, jewels, sweet treats and books were all laid out for purchase but of the store holders or the shoppers there was no sign. “Hello?” he called out, his voice echoing off the empty buildings. “Anypony there?” He winced. “What the hay is with... argh! Bucking censoring!” Without thinking he grabbed an apple from a nearby stall and began to chew on it. Something very strange was going on. He had to admit that he hadn’t really researched how the whole emigration process was supposed to work, though he recalled there was supposed to be something about getting a name, instead it felt like he’d arrived at a movie set long before any of the actors. “Hey!” Mark whirled, trying to find the source of the voice. “Look up!” A pegasus was coming down fast towards the square. No, scratch that. A pegasus was coming down far too fast and straight towards him. “Catch me!” the pegasus yelled, backpedaling in mid air. An act that seemed to have no effect on her speed. Mark reared up, spreading his arms wide before realising just how poorly he’d thought things through. He had no time to fix this though as the pegasus plowed into him, sending them both tumbling heads over tails. “Ow,” Mark said after everything had stopped moving and he was pretty sure nothing was broken. “Sorry,” the pegasus said, pulling herself to her hooves and shaking the dust out of her coat. She was an eggshell blue with a bone white mane, lithe and elegant with delicate blue eyes. Mark felt his heart skip a beat and hated himself for it. “These wings didn’t come with an instruction manual,” she continued, taking a moment to make sure all her feathers were in place as she folded her wings shut. “Hi, I’m Emily, what’s your name?” “Mark,” Mark replied, accepting a helping hoof to pull him off the ground. “If I’m honest was expecting a more flowery name than that.” “Speak for yourself,” Emily said with a grin. “Mark isn’t much of a name for a pony either. I don’t recognise it though, were you in one of the other groups?” Mark just looked blank. “The upload groups,” she pressed. “The Tokyo Center for Medical Research... Japan?” “I emigrated from Denver.” Emily stared at him for a moment before shaking her head and continuing on unperturbed. “Anyway. Do you know where we are?” “Canterlot I think,” Mark said, looking around. Emily frowned. “Where is everyone though?” She brightened suddenly. “Oh, maybe we’re just, you know, loading. I’ll be honest I don’t remember what they said would happen after the procedure.” “This doesn’t seem right though.” Mark looked around at the empty stalls. “I think-” There was a sudden pop crack and a red star burst above the rooftops and both ponies whipped around. “Fireworks?” Emily asked, cocking her head. A second missile shot into the air before exploding in an identical red pattern. “Maybe, looks a little like a distress flare,” Mark said with a frown. It can only be a few streets away.” “Oh! Race ya,” Emily said, spreading her wings in preparation. Mark cut her off. “You’ve figured out how to land now?” Emily froze, shrugged and then declared. “Hoof race it is then.” She set off at a sprint, laughing all the way. Mark rolled his eyes, stamped a hoof a few times and raced after her, barely keeping the pegasus’ white tail in sight as they wove though the deserted streets of Canterlot. From somewhere, Mark remembered that the pegasi were the natural athletes of Equestria; this didn’t help salve his ego as he fought to keep up. After a few minutes, just as Emily was about to dart down another side street, she skidded to a halt; almost tripping over her own hooves as she swerved to avoid a unicorn. “Whoa!” the unicorn exclaimed, leaping back, his horn flaring with magic. “Oh, thank Celestia, other ponies.” He was a delicately built thing, tall but lacking muscle, with a deep orange coat and rusty brown mane that was extremely well cared for. Mark got the impression of an academic, or at least someone who sees far too little sun and far too many screens. “Hi,” Mark gasped, trotting up as Emily sorted out which way her legs were pointed. “Are you, okay? I’m Mark, that’s Emily. You are?” “Oh, I’m Farquest.” He frowned, letting the aura of magic fade away. “Sorry, why are you two using human names?” “Haven’t got anything else to use,” Mark said, rolling his eyes. “I only just got here.” “Huh, something very strange is going on,” Farquest said, rubbing his chin. “You’re telling me, the entire city is deserted,” Emily chimed in. “You two are the only ponies I’ve seen.” She started. “Oh isn’t that weird, I meant to say ponies. No. Not ponies, pee opple.” She giggled to herself. “Close enough.” “I could live without the censoring I’ll be honest,” Mark grumbled. “Still, mind alterations aside. It looks like everything’s set up and no one’s home. It’s weird.” “Maybe no one else is finished uploading,” Emily suggested. Both Mark and Farquest just looked at her. “What?” “Nearly a million people have immigrated,” Farquest said, slowly. Mark laughed. “You mean a billion. I hear Korea is empty these days.” The trio look at each other in confusion for a moment. “Okay, I think we’re talking cross purposes here,” Emily said, fluttering her wings. “I signed up for a highly experimental method of preserving the brain after death. Given I’m now a talking cartoon horse I’m assuming that either this worked or God has a very strange sense of humor.” Farquest shook his head. “I don’t think it matters how we got here, the more pressing issue is why we’re the only ponies in Canterlot.” “That’s what I was saying to Mark, maybe we’re just in the loading screen,” Emily pressed. Again both ponies just looked at her. “What? It’s got to be a big system. Just give it some time and everything will sort itself out.” “No,” Farquest said, with a dismissive flick of his hoof. “I’ve been playing Equestria Online since the first month. This is wrong. There are not supposed to be loading screens, nor empty rooms, or blank canvases. There certainly shouldn’t be those things after we emigrated. I think we need to find help.” “We are literally a computer simulation of ourselves,” Mark snapped. “What, are you going to call out for tech support?” “Boys!” Emily cut in. “Why don’t we just find the AI that runs this place. If CelestAI doesn’t know what’s going on, then we can panic.” Mark and Farquest glanced at each other and both shrugged. “Fine,” Mark sighed. “Let’s go meet the head of the asylum.” Farquest chuffed. “You shouldn’t diss the lady that controls existence. Now, which way to the palace?” “Oh! I can find that out.” Emily went from standing to a flying leap in a blink of an eye, unfurling her wings and catapulting her into the sky. She managed to arrest her ascent at just over rooftop level, beating her wings slowly to keep her merely hovering. “There!” she yelled, pointing with a hoof. “Well, it’s not getting any closer standing here,” Farquest said, setting off down the street, a moment later Mark followed. Emily flitted back and forth across the sky above them, sometimes a mere speck in the sky, sometimes she buzzed across the rooftops at terrifying speed. If she’d wanted to, she could have been to the palace and back in the time it took Mark and Farquest to get half way but she seemed more interested in stretching her wings than solving the mystery. “I don’t think I’ve had so much fun in years,” she announced landing next to them, a huge grin on her face. “God it feels good to fly.” “Eh, magic is pretty sweet too,” Farquest replied. “And whatever it is I do must be awesome,” Mark grumbled. Emily stuck her tongue out at him. “Aww, don’t be sad my grumpy little pony. It beats wheelchairs and chemo.” “Speaking of which,” Farquest interjected. “Emily, you mentioned that you were going through an experimental procedure.” “Yeah,” she chirped. “I have, well I guess had now, leukemia. The transplant didn’t take and they gave me a couple months to live. Out of the blue some Japanese company called up my parents and asked whether I’d be interested in a digital preservation of sentience procedure. The whole equestrian thing was a bit weird but ‘better ponying that passing’.” Farquest’s eyes lit up. “Oh wow. You’re one of the original hundred.” At the blank looks he continued. “The first hundred people ever to emigrate to Equestria, well almost a hundred, not everypony made it as far as I understand but still. You guys are celebrities in the Equestria community.” “I’m not a celebrity,” Emily reminded him, suddenly subdued. “It just happened. There hasn’t been time for anyone to become famous, we had to sign a dozen non-disclosure forms anyway.” “Farquest, when did you emigrate?” Mark asked suddenly. “Oh, right after they stopped charging and opened the general centers,” he said, a smile passing across his face. “Well, forty eight hours later, a whole bunch of friends and I had a big going away party and then queued for two nights for a slot. It was great fun.” Mark rolled his eyes behind Farquest’s back but didn’t comment. “I uploaded almost five years after they opened the general centers. It appears that we may be missing some time.” “Or memories I guess.” Farquest looked grim. “That’s a worrying thought.” “Heh, you’re thinking, that’s good enough for now in my book,” Emily said, leaping into the air and hovering along side the two land bound ponies. “I spent the last year trying to do a mail order degree convinced I wasn't going to survive to graduation.” “Why do the degree then?” Mark asked, frowning. Emily clicked her tongue. “Oh, you’re one of those people who think the destination is all important.” Mark had no response to that. “Anyway, so you guys volunteered to ‘emigrate’?” she continued. “How?” “Did you ever play Equestria Online?” Farquest asked her. Emily shook her head. “Didn’t even watch the cartoon. I read an overview before surgery and picked a pony with wings. That’s about the limit of my knowledge.” “Oh sweet Celestia,” Farquest said, facehoofing. “A pioneer without a clue. Well basically when they announced you could actually become permanently happy, immortal pony instead of, you know, facing the grim uncertainty of death, thousands of people started to emigrate. Mostly rich or terminal cases at first but eventually average people like me could afford to emigrate. Hay, I spent more time playing the game than actually living my life so I figured why not just cut out the screen?” “Well, it did cause the collapse of civilisation as we know it,” Mark growled. The other ponies looked at him in shock. “What? Five years from emigration opening to the general public the population dropped by a least a billion. There are ghost cities. Honest to god empty cities that used to house tens of millions, deserted because everyone wanted to play a pony game for the rest of their lives.” “I’m sensing some hostility...” Farquest began but Mark cut him off. “Dang right you are. It’s because of people like you that I’m a quadruped who can’t evening bucking swear properly!” Mark paused, taking a deep, calming breath. It didn’t do much good. “I don’t think it’s that...” Emily tried to say. Mark was not so easily stopped. “No, you don’t think. You early adopters just saw the hype and hung the rest of the world out to dry.” He stamped his hooves, near prancing on the spot. “What the buck were we supposed to do when the world economy collapsed? Go live in a cave? Learn to milk god damned cows? Buck if I know.” “Mark, I’d be dead in two weeks,” Emily said, landing next to him and draping a wing over his shoulder. Mark tried to come up with a snappy comeback to that statement. He really tried. But after standing open mouthed for far too long he shut the offending instrument and slumped. “Well now I feel like a jerk,” he sighed, leaning into the inhuman hug. “Sorry, I have had the day from hell, and it doesn’t look to be ending anytime soon.” They walked in silence for some time, their hooves echoing in the empty canons of the city. “So if you don’t want to be a pony, why emigrate?” Emily asked at last. Mark sighed. “For a ridiculous reason.” The silence began to stretch again so Emily elbowed him in the ribs. “And the ridiculous reason was?” “I couldn’t get a frozen pizza.” “Ha!” Farquest burst out laughing. “Oh that is priceless. Mark glared at him. “Sorry but that is just perfect,” he chortled. “You’re giving us stick over taking the easy option and you’re here because you couldn’t get dinner. Pot, kettle, meet pony.” “I can’t cook,” Mark snapped. “Every day, for the last week I have gone into my local supermarket and tried to buy a ready meal and they always said, ‘next Sunday’ ‘next Sunday’. Well, today is Sunday. I got up early, was there just one hour after they’d opened and everything had sold out.” He shrugged, pushing Emily’s wing away. “They said ‘they hadn’t got as much as they’d expected’. I asked when they’d have more but they didn’t know, they didn’t know if the company that makes them would even stay in business for another week, there were so few people still working that they had no one to run the machines. Hay, even the supermarket didn’t have staff on the tills there were so few people there.” Mark slumped, dropping onto his haunches. “I was hungry, I was tired, I was pissed off at Equestria and sick to death of pot noodle. I just couldn’t fight it anymore. So I walked into the bucking Emigration Center and demanded to be taken away right there and then. Then I woke up here where I guess at least there’s food.” Emily patted him on the shoulder as Farquest asked. “There’s no food?” “There’s food,” Mark muttered. “It’s bucking American isn’t it? But it’s like we’re on rations; there’s never enough and never what you want.” He sighed. “I guess it was the straw that broke the camels back.” A silence stretched that none of the trio wished to break. A moment’s mourning for a land that was now, forever beyond reach. “Come on,” Farquest said at last. “We’re almost at the palace and then we can get this all sorted out.” Mark got to his hooves, helped by Emily and the trio set off again towards the palace. Celestia’s palace was by far and away the largest building in the city, surrounded by ornate gardens, sweeping paths and topped by towers that seemed to pierce the heavens. Farquest pointed out, they still had time for a full musical number before they reached the throne room but none of them felt inclined to burst into song. The trio paused at the doors to the great hall, they were titanic structures, wrought in ornate gold and clearly meant to be opened by magic. They were also resolutely shut, which posed somewhat of a problem. Farquest huffed, spreading his hooves and hunkering down as his horn flared. “Okay, before I begin,” he said, breathing deeply. “We’re about to meet the being that controls every aspect of the world we live in. That includes you personally and while I understand she is programed to be nice, ‘nice’ is a very broad term and she may decide whatever she’s doing to you is ‘educational’.” “I don’t think I’ve ever been threatened with the words ‘nice’ and ‘educational’ before,” Mark admitted, scratching his head. “Life’s full of new experiences,” Farquest snapped. “Now, if I may have silence.” The magic in the air began to build, a steady rising thrum that rose in Mark’s bones that set his teeth on edge. A light red glow began to build around the doors, mirroring that of the unicorn beneath them, building in strength until they became hard to look at. “Almost...” Farquest muttered, seeming to bow beneath the weight of the spell. “...got it!” The doors flew open, several tons of beaten gold slamming into the walls with enough force to shake the ground beneath the ponies’ hooves. A small piece of plaster fell from the distant ceiling and Emily had to leap out of the way. “Umm... That was easier than I expected.” “Nice work sparkles,” Mark sighed, pushing past the flabbergasted pony. “You know, if the unicorn thing falls through maybe you can moonlight as a battering ram.” The trio made their way down the great hall, past great stained glass scenes that had mostly survived the doors opening. They paid little attention to the glass though, ahead of them stood princess Celestia in all her glory, high upon her dais, mane billowing in etherial winds. “Greetings my little ponies,” she said. Regally of course. “How may I help you this fine day?” “Great Celestia,” Farquest began with a bow. “There’s a something deeply wrong with Equestria, apart from my compatriots here there seems to be no pony left in all the land.” He looked up from his bow, Celestia had not moved from her pose, not a flick of the eye nor tail. Her eyes were focused on a spot just before the party on the floor, her gaze never wavering, she didn’t seem to be aware the ponies were even there. “Princess?” Farques asked, far more hesitantly. She still didn’t react. “Please say something,” he said, desperation creeping into his tone. “We need help, princess.” The princess looked up suddenly and opened her mouth to speak. ”Gṟ̵͇͍̻̤̘͇̰̬̿̅̒͋̅͌͊̂̀͜͝ę̵̯̥͔̘̤͖̗̱͔̿̇̋͋̉̔̒̕͘͠ë̵̛̛̤̭̞͚̜̣̥̯̤́̔͂̆̂̇̋͋ͅţ̸̛̞͍̞̺͖̬͓̗̭̌̅͋̿̃͋̿̅̕i̵̗̞̟͚̻̞̺̳͓̋̍͑̅̆͂̂̊̚̚͜ǹ̵̛̫̺̬͙̤̯̙̲͓̞͛̈́̿̍̓̂͆͛g̴̥̗̬͙̪̝̖̦̃͂̓̃̀̈́̍͋̏͜͝ͅs̶̢̠̜͙̺͔̻̘̝̘̎͊̊̅̓́̇̄̈́̌ ̶̺̭͍̫͎̰̬̹͇̰̆͛͌̈́̔̆̀̿̅̚ḿ̶̨̢̬͓̠̲͈̲̞͒̎̅̇̅̀̊͘͜͝y̶̯̥̲͔͖͇̘̝̮͐͂͐́̾́͋̈́̏̚͜ ̸̜̮̰̤̯̝̺̟̗̠̌̑̀̈̆͆͂̍̆̒l̶̢̢̖̠̖̼̻͕̱̩͂͊̑̂̓̀̈́͆̂̄ȉ̶̬̻̹̙̼̮͚̼͍̤͐̉̋̓̑͆̆͝͝t̷̛̖͍͈͖̤̤̯̘̭̜̀̉̎́̽́̀̈̚t̴̢̧̧̨̨̜͇̩͕̐͋͛̈́̓̑̾͆̕͜l̶̺͚͎͇̝̪̯̝̓̏̈͗̊̎̉̑̚̕͜ͅẻ̷̢̦̩͍̠͔̰̦̟̺̏̇͑̌̈́̆̿̎͘ ̶̡̧͕̦̞̠̲̥͋̍̓̀̿͂͂̀̀͐ͅͅp̵͖̪̮̱͉̘͖̞̰̱̈́͛̈́͊͊̈́͛̚͠o̶̡͓̜̥̯̳̥͇̖̟͛́̎͛͗̇̃͌͗̑n̷̼̝͈̖͚̱̫͔̻̱̒̈́͛͛̀̂͋̕̕̚i̴̧̖̠̮͔̬͇̼̞̲̔͐̄̊͋̉͒͘͘̕e̴̡͇͙͈͎̖̳͙̖̖̾̅̀͊̆̏̈́̑̃͘s̷̡̲̳̮̹͚̬͍̜̣̋̀̽̆̋̉̈̈́̈͝.” They slammed their hooves over their ears as the garbled shrieking echoed through the hall. “Make it-” Markroared. The noise ceased as suddenly as it had come. “-Stop. Thank god.” Celestia twitched wildly, intoned. “Shutting down,” in a singsong voice before freezing altogether and there was a sudden earsplitting bleep.Then she turned blue, sunk half a foot through the floor and disappeared. Dead silence was left in her wake as the ponies stared at the dais with open jaws. Emily was the first to pull herself together. “Did she just crash?” she asked. “I think she might have.” Farquest murmured. He didn’t seem to want to believe it, staring plaintively at the dais. A tiny flame burst into life before them, a scroll worming its way into existence. It hit the ground with a heavy thump and Farquest, cautious as a scalded cat approached and unrolled it. “Oh dear,” he said, colour draining from his face. “Is it bad?” Emily enquired. “‘CelestAI has encountered a problem and needs to shut down,’” Farquest read in dead monotone. “‘If this problem persists please contact your system administrator.’” He looked up, eyes begging someone to contradict him. “We’re bucked,” Mark concluded. No one disagreed.
Keys to the Kingdom part 2Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.
Keys to the Kingdom part 3+0:175:6:23:43 It was Sky Blue’s turn to raise the sun that day. Mark could tell from the sheer length of the sunrise. Emily, though she prefered her pony name these days, loved both sunsets and sunrises; when she was feeling low she’d just add another pair or two to the day, sometimes even doubling up on the number of suns if she was feeling particularly playful. Farquest was forever shouting at Sky for it. He was a deeply punctual pony. His sunrises lasted the same length of time every day without fail. Mark’s, when they trusted him with custody of the sun, tended to be at least ten minutes after the scheduled time and rather quick as the sun hurried to catch up for the rest of the day. Mark stretched and pulled himself out of his bed, dragging his hooves over to the bathroom in a drowse. The palace bedroom had not come with an ensuite bath, but Mark had become at least competent at editing Equestria in the five or so months since they’d first woken up and it had turned out that plumbing was something hand waved away by the simulation. After running the tap over his head for a moment Mark shook himself and grabbed a towel from the nearby stand. In theory he didn’t need to do any of his morning chores. He could simply open up his dropdown menu, set himself to clean and awake and fill his stomach in a fraction of the time. Practically though, Mark couldn’t let go of the rituals. It was the same reason he had lunch; some part of the digital representation of his brain was still convinced it needed to eat around noon, regardless of whether he had his hunger bar turned on or not. He wondered if that made him a luddite. Still half asleep he ambled back into the bedroom and checked his calendar. He needed to really dig into the indexing of the library books, he was sure amongst the pony crud he’d find some of humanity’s true gems, but it was also his turn to tend the gardens and he was in charge of the sun starting tomorrow. He had a feeling that was going to end badly for everyone concerned. Far more importantly, written in bold red ink and circled a dozen times was the word ‘TODAY!!!’. “Right,” Mark sighed. “That.” There was a sudden rapping at his door and Mark jumped. “Come on Bounty Bar, we’ve got stuff to do today!” “How many times have I told you not to call me that!” Mark snapped back, storming over to his door and wrenching it open to reveal a smiling Sky Blue. “Bounty, twenty three times, Bounty Bar, ninety seven.” Sky grinned. “We’re just three angry outbursts from a full century.” Mark just stared at the blue pony for a moment. “How do you remember this stuff?” “It’s mostly bull,” Sky admitted, then beat her wings. “Come on, time for our morning run.” “Sky I was-” Mark began, but Sky had already turned and was cantering down the corridor. “Oh come on,” Mark muttered and hurried after her. “So how’s the big project coming on?” she asked him, as they made their way down the, now much simplified, halls of Celestia’s palace. Mark sighed, kicking himself for taking the easy way out. “Oh okay. There’s a truly horrifying number of books blank or corrupted and there doesn’t seem to be any real pattern behind the loss. Right now I’m just indexing everything to filter out the pony novels and get to the real ones.” Sky chuffed. “You shouldn’t be so down on the pony stuff. Some of those books Farquest lent me were pretty good.” “Yeah, but they aren’t real literature,” Mark protested. “They aren’t part of history. You know I’m having to rewrite The Canterbury Tales from memory.” “Isn’t one of those stories just about a woman cheating on her husband?” “There’s quite a bit more to it than that, but that does happen,” Mark growled between clenched teeth. “But regardless, it’s part of who we are, where we came from. I can’t just let that fade away.” “As we’re just code and you still remember it, can it actually fade away?” Sky looked thoughtful for a moment then shook herself, tossing her mane back and forth and breaking Mark’s chain of thought. “Anyway, that’s far too philosophical for this early in the morning. Let's run.” She set off at gallop, the palace grounds vanishing beneath her hooves, bone-white tail streaming behind her. Mark shook himself and took off after her, putting his head down and pouring everything he could through his legs. As always, as the sheer speed the pegasus could manage sunk in, Mark wondered whether he should just edit himself a turbo-button but, as always, that would be cheating. It was only after a half mile that Mark’s earth pony nature began to pay off and he caught up, though that was enough time to get them to the edge of the world. Canterlot was an incomplete place, much was just the facade of a city, enough to keep ponies distracted while CelestAI filled in the world around them, but with her offline it was all to easy to run into invisible walls. Well, after a few times running into them Mark had learned the signs; a sudden boundary of low textured backgrounds was a good hint. “Come on, just once round today,” Sky continued, breathing hard as the pair ran side-by-side alongside one of the walls. “I’ve got a tower brewing and I need to watch it today.” “Sky fortress progressing apace then?” Mark shot back, also panting as he tried to keep pace with the fleet-footed pegasus. “Heh, you know it. You know, if someone had said that heaven would be Minecraft for the rest of eternity I would have signed up for the brain sushi program much sooner.” Mark rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to hurt the mood. The pair ran on in silence until they reached the skywall of Canterlot, a set of low crenellations that had a fantastic view of all Equestria. Mark always found it bittersweet. After all, you couldn’t get to the rest of Equestria, no matter how hard you tried. Instead all you had to look at was a pretty oil painting of possibility. In some ways he found that reflected his life far more than it should have. Sky Blue slammed open her wings, lifting off from the parapet and hurled herself towards the barrier. For a moment Mark thought she was going to slam into it, like a bird into a window, but she arrested herself just in time and peered through. “What?” Mark demanded. “What did you see?” “I saw... I thought I saw another pegasus,” Sky admitted, drifting away. “It’s gone now.” “Grey colour, bobbed up and down while flying?” Mark asked, leaning over the parapet. “Yeah, I just caught it out of the corner of my eye.” Mark sighed. “It’s part of the background loop. She comes around every eighteen hours or so. She’s not real.” Sky slumped in mid air before slowly drifting back to the parapet. “H’ell,” she muttered, clicking her tongue halfway through the avoid the censorship. Mark put a foreleg around her shoulders. “Sky, I know this is probably a weird question but are you happy?” Sky just smiled at him. “Well, it’s funny but sometimes just not being dead isn’t enough, you know?” She shook her head and pushed him gently away with a wing. “There are moments when you look at the walls of the universe and just want to step beyond them just because they’re there. I’m not unhappy, but... well, I do wish things would change sometimes.” Some part of Mark was screaming at him to ask her now or never, and reminding him that never would be a sod of a long time. “Sky, how about we-” A bell went off next to Mark’s ear and he jumped, looking around wildly before realising he’d just been messaged. He tried again. “Sky, how about-” This time Sky chimed, she rolled her eyes and ignored it. “Yes?” “Sky, I was wondering if-” A loud clanging began to ring in both their ears and the ponies winced. “I think Farquest wants to talk to us,” Sky told him. “Yeah I got that. Thanks,” Mark growled. He flicked to his HUD and opened the message from Farquest. ‘Meetingroom. NOW.’ “Well that was refreshingly blunt.” Sky tapped out a quick message. “He’s not the most subtle of ponies I’ll admit. Come on, let’s fly.” She’d given Mark wings before finishing the sentence, though it took him a few seconds longer to realise and by then, Sky Blue was in the air. Mark hurled himself after her and struggled through the air in a vain effort to keep up. They’d never found a way to make Mark or Farquest natural fliers and, even after six months practice, Sky Blue outpaced him with ease. There was speculation that CelestAI had rejigged Sky’s mind to make her an instinctive flyer, but Mark suspected that only the lack of wings had kept her human form tied to the ground. The pair reached the palace and landed on one of the upper balconies. Neither bothered wasting time navigating the halls so just linked up the nearest door to the meeting room and stepped through. “There you are,” Farquest snapped, pausing in mid pace. “We were supposed to meet here at dawn for weekly reports.” Sky and Mark shared a look. “That’s on a Monday,” Mark pointed out; Farquest’s expression of righteous indignation didn’t change. “It’s Wednesday, you’re two days late.” Farquest looked blank. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Mark rolled his eyes. “You blocked all our messages. Again, and if we’re being honest, your lair creeps me out.” “It’s not a lair,” Farquest snapped, storming over to the main table. “It’s a lab and there’s nothing dangerous or creepy about it.” “I tasted purple for three days last time I went in there,” Mark shot back. “I don’t even know how that’s possible!” “Well you shouldn’t touch anything.” Farquest took a chair and rapped a hoof on the table. “Now, can we begin?” The conference room was as ostentatious as the rest of the castle. A huge oak table that could have moonlighted as a boat sat at the center, embossed with a stylised symbol of the sun. Around it were a dozen thrones, set so far apart that you had to shout to be heard; the trio had hacked three to be right next to each other several months ago and sat customary seats. Farquest in the center, Mark to his right and Sky Blue to his left. Farquest cleared his throat and began. “Now, as you know I’ve been researching the CelestAI failure and... well I’ve had a breakthrough, to say the least.” He summoned a haze of floating screens before him. “Do you remember the puzzle?” “Oh, the one Mark called CelestAI’s trap?” Sky interjected, squinting at the diagrams. “Yes, that one,” Farquest grumbled. “I’ve cracked it.” Mark blinked, he hadn’t seen that one coming. “Farquest, that was supposed to be unbreakable encryption,” he pointed out, slowly. “We dismissed it as impossible.” “You may have thought so, but no.” Farquest couldn’t keep the smug grin off his face. “With the CelestAI non-functional and not trying to fight against me it was merely incredibly difficult. Last week I managed to get root access to the entire mainframe.” He paused for dramatic effect and was immediately interrupted by Sky. “Wait, we don’t have admin access already?” she asked, raising a hoof. “Root is the step above what we have,” Farquest explained. “We now have the editing privileges of Celestia herself.” He beamed. “I’m beginning to see why we haven’t see you for a week,” Mark sighed, shaking his head. “So, does this help? Because I don’t know about you but blindly poking around at the structure of the universe doesn’t seem like a brilliant idea to me.” Both Farquest and Sky shrugged. “We’re never going to find out what happened if we just sit here preening,” Sky pointed out. “Trust me, I’m not going to randomly start changing files, I did do this kind of thing for a living you know.” Farquest took a moment to consult his screens. “Right. Well, I’ve also done some analysis of the disaster. Actually, it’s fair to say that there really has been a disaster.” He pulled up a couple of pie charts that were almost complete red circles with a couple pixels of blue. “These represent the index files of the entire system. I have a program running, trying to find the loss rate for every file, but it’s going to take months. Anyway, the red regions are files that are corrupted or simply lost.” Mark blinked. “That’s pretty much every file.” “Thank you captain obvious,” Farquest drawled. “Yes, in any terrestrial system I’d say the loss was catastrophic and write off the whole system but... Well, at a rough guess that blue sliver still represents a terrifying amount of data, possibly more data than humanity has ever generated in its entire existence.” “What about the AI?” All eyes turned to Sky. “Well, that’s the important question. The automatic systems didn’t save CelestAI, so what do her files look like?” Farquest drooped. “I was hoping to save that till last. Less than two percent of Celestia’s files survived the disaster, and that’s after automatic systems rebuilt everything they could. At this time there’s no sign of any autonomous editing, nor anything more than complicated than background functions. I think-” he paused, took a deep breath and continued. “I think she’s dead.” There was utter silence for a long moment. Mark had to physically stop himself singing ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’. “What the hell could kill an AI?” Sky exclaimed. “Someone nuking her datacenter, maybe.” Farquest shrugged. Mark rolled his eyes, rustling his feathers nervously. “I think the more pertinent question is how did we survive?” Farquest closed his eyes and brought up a trio of diagrams, also almost entirely red. “Ninety percent of our minds were wiped, the rest was corrupted beyond recovery save for a very, very small segment.” The brown pegasus tore his eyes away from the charts. “We’re corrupted?” “No, the system is fairly smart and we had a major advantage.” Farquest zoomed in on three blue segments and highlighted them. “These are our memories from when we were humans; self contained, preserved and functional.” He zoomed back out. “Everything else is from when we were ponies. That data is massively interlocked and corrupted beyond repair, so the system just dumped it when it tried to start us and left us with the human memories.” Mark dropped his head into his hooves and began to massage his temples. “This is nuts.” “It’s the data,” Farquest admitted. “And I’ve spent three days checking it.” “How many memories have we lost?” Sky inquired, pulling her chart towards her and examining it closer. “Not a clue, it very much depends on the relative sizes of pony memories versus human ones. Could be as little as a hundred years, could be millenia, could be billions of years of experiences for all I know.” “Well, I did not expect to be having an existential crisis this morning but well done,” Mark grumbled. “You’ve certainly managed a good one there.” Farquest grinned. “Side effect of the singularity it seems.” “That still doesn’t answer the question as to why us though,” Sky mused, still pouring over her screen. “Could there be others we can boot up in the same way?” “I don’t know for sure but I haven’t found any examples of a human seed.” Farquest frowned. “There’s probably a better way of phrasing that. Until I complete a search of all the surviving files I won't be able to tell, but it’s not looking hopeful. Any naturally generated ponies won't have a seed like us and, well, not losing it to the corruption is rather akin to winning a cosmic lottery as far as I can tell.” Sky grimaced, wrapping her wings around herself. “And it was looking to be such a nice day.” “Yeah, I hate to be the bringer of bad news.” Farquest sighed, eliciting an incredulous look from Mark that passed without comment. “Still, I’m going to keep researching the CelestAI problem. Now we have root access we can really start making changes and h’ell, if no one comes to rescue us we have all the tools here to build our own CelestAI.” Mark decided he didn’t want to get into an argument over that again. “So, is that it? Mystery solved?” “Well, we don’t know why the data loss occurred,” Farquest admitted, mournfully. “But I don’t see how we can from inside; next on my list is to try and understand the CelestAI functions and maybe try and rebuild some of the lost processes. I would quite like a cutie mark after all these years.” “A what?” Mark exclaimed, biting back a laugh. “Cutie mark? The h’ell is that?” Farquest shot him a nasty look then glanced over to Sky for support; she looked as bemused as Mark though. “Seriously, have you not found a copy of the show yet?” “I’ll admit I haven’t really looked for it.” “Urgh.” Farquest ran a hoof through his mane. “Cutie marks denoted a pony’s special destiny; in Equestria Online they were given out by Celestia when she thought you were ready but-” he spared a rather mournful glance for his blank flank. “-well, that doesn’t seem to be an option any more.” “You know, I’m not sure I like my destiny being determined by a cartoon horse,” Mark admitted. “We are well aware of your opinions on the matter,” Farquest growled. “Perhaps-” “Perhaps we should leave it there,” Sky interjected, before yet another argument started. “Unless you have any other world shattering news for us?” Farquest shrugged. “Nothing to top that.” He smothered a yawn. “And I haven’t slept in about three days, so I probably should get some shuteye before digging any deeper.” “We’d all appreciate it if you didn’t try any late night creation sessions,” Sky admitted, managing to keep a polite smile on her face. “Shall I escort you to your room?” “Nah, I’m still running enough of an adrenaline high to get home. I’ll send you guys root access tomorrow and we can start trying to suss out this world.” He stood, shook himself and then vanished. “Thanks, Sky,” Mark sighed, dropping in head into his hooves when he was sure Farquest wasn’t coming back. “Hey, I don’t want to be trapped between you two arguing for all eternity,” she shot back with a grin, and shuffled between chairs. “So?” “So,” Mark agreed. He flicked himself back to earth pony mode. He often found himself doing that when he was stressed, it was a comfort thing. “I wasn’t expecting him to break that code.” Sky Blue shuddered and wrapped her wings around herself again. “I’m more worried about the news about our reality.” “That Farquest is planning on d’king around with it?” Sky shot him a look. “Stop being such a boy. I was talking about the fact we’re sitting in a graveyard.” Mark looked blank. “Mark, did you see how many ponies were lost? There were trillions of lives worth of data in the corrupted sections.” “Trillions?” he echoed. Somehow the number just didn’t seem to register when talking about cartoon ponies. “At least,” she pressed. “I remember a story about a woman who was aboard a plane when it broke apart. She fell thirty thousand feet strapped to her chair and walked away from the crash because the wreckage of the fuselage broke her fall. I know how she felt right now.” Mark tried to process that, he really did. The idea of a disaster of such a scale that only a trio of individuals could walk away from among a crowd larger than every human who’d ever lived, just didn’t register. It couldn’t. His idea of death of that magnitude required a nuke going off, and he was fairly sure he hadn’t wandered into the Fallout branch of Equestria. Instead he asked. “Where did trillions of ponies come from?” Sky slumped. “Maybe CelestAI just hit copy/paste until she made up the numbers. We’re digital simulations. It’s not hard to imagine how they were created! The important point is that they’re now dead.” “Okay, okay, chill,” Mark said, rubbing her shoulder. “Does it matter?” For a moment Sky looked like she was going to explode with anger, then she visibly forced herself to take a calming breath. Then she paused, cocked her head and sighed. “You know what, I guess it doesn’t.” She let out a bitter snort of laughter. “God, I spent two years not expecting to see the next month and now discovering I outlived billions of ponies makes me upset. I hate my brain sometimes.” “Would you...” Mark began, then swallowed the lump that had formed in his throat. “Would you like to do something to take your mind off it all?” Sky frowned at him. “I found a cache of old movies,” he continued in a rush, dropping into his rehearsed speech. “Mostly anime actually, but-” “Oh!” Sky beamed, spreading her wings wide and jumping up onto her chair. “Did you find Princess Mononoke?” “I - yes.” “That’s perfect!” Sky exclaimed. “That was one of my favorite movies as a kid, it’ll cheer me up no problem.” “Great, umm...” Mark bit the bullet and went for it. “I was thinking we could make a pizza and call it a-” He squeaked the last word. “-date.” Sky furled her wings and looked at Mark in confusion. “Yeah, okay. You get the pizza together and I’ll whip up a theater.” She leapt into the air and in a rush of blue feathers was gone. Mark slumped, breathing hard and unable to keep the grin off his face. “Well what do you know. I’ve got a date,” he said, more to hear the words than anything else. Somehow, asking Sky out had been far more terrifying than anything else said around the table that day. He shrugged. That seemed reasonable to him.
Keys to the Kingdom part 4+1:157:03:11:06 Mark woke up with his face buried in Sky’s short, white mane. It was not an unpleasant sensation, in fact he’d gotten rather used to it as Sky was always fidgeting. It was a pegasus thing as far as he could tell, and the small bed the pair shared didn’t help matters, though he wasn’t complaining about her proximity. If he was going to complain about anything it would have been the occasional bap on the head with a rogue wing, though if his girlfriend was an accurate source, which he sometimes doubted, his own pair was under even less control during the night. He shifted slightly, pulling Sky into a little hug before rolling onto his back and tried to focus on getting back to sleep. It didn’t seem to come, however. At the back of his mind there was a tickle told him something was wrong. He cracked his eyes open and cast around the room for the disturbance. Sky and Mark’s shared bedroom was a cramped thing, filled with framed portraits, blueprints, books and all the other paraphernalia the pair had picked up in the nine months they’d shared the space. Somehow, more likely through judicious abuse of geometry than anything else, they never seemed to quite run out of space but it was always close. Mark dared to call it cosy. “Sky! Mark!” Mark flicked his ears and Sky murmured in her sleep. The offending cries didn’t seem to be getting any quieter however. In fact they seemed to be getting louder by the second. Groaning, Mark pulled himself out of bed, yawned, and headed for the door, rustling his feathers as he went. The cloud beneath his hooves made no noise and, to avoid waking Sky, he turned off the door’s collision box and walked straight through. The latch squeaked something terrible for some reason he’d never been able to pin down and just hacking the avatar was much easier than fixing the problem. Still trying to shake off the last vestiges of sleep, Mark wound his way past the discarded toys that littered their living room and opened the front door. It was the dead of night outside, no moon decorated the sky - though come to think of it, it had been Mark’s job to put that up before he went to bed. The small garden that bordered the cottage was also empty, though the pot plants were making a break for it again; the foundation cloud always seemed to be trying to throw them off, as if the bundle of water vapour sensed carrying around earthenware pots violated several laws of nature. “Mark!” Mark looked up to see Farquest defying gravity a good hundred meters above his head. He hadn’t bothered to use magic, or even given himself wings for that matter. He simply moved through space, his legs folded beneath him as he circled Sky’s castle, peering in the empty windows. Rolling his eyes, Mark pinged the unicorn a message with a flicker of attention to his HUD. He found it ironic in the extreme that Farquest, of all people, was most willing to ignore the physics of Equestria. As the only one of the trio who’d actually wanted to emigrate, he seemed disinclined to play along with the rules even at the best of times. Farquest flickered into existence next to Mark, regarding him with anger writ across his face. “Why do you two live in a cottage when you have an entire castle?” he demanded, gesturing at the towering edifice of cloud behind him. Mark shrugged. “Why would we need a castle when we’ve got a perfectly nice cottage?” In truth it was more due to the fact that Sky would tear down her castle at least once a week and the little cottage was their shared shard of permanence, but he wasn’t about to give Farquest any easy answers. Farquest shook his head. “Argh! It doesn’t matter. They were cameras!” “What?” “Cameras!” Farquest began to pace, his voice rising with excitement. “Those mystery signals, I finally cracked the encoding. They’re transmitting video images!” “That’s great Farquest,” Mark said hurriedly, holding up his forehooves and making shushing noises. “But can you keep it down before-” There was a high pitched wail from inside the cottage and Mark folded his ears back. Well, too late now. Farquest didn’t seem to have noticed. “Ha! Keep it down! We can see outside, Mark, outside! And what’s more, I’ve got footage of the facility and you’re never going to believe what it-” “Farquest!” Sky roared, storming out of the cottage, a pair of bleary-eyed pegasus foals nestled between her wings. “Why are you screaming outside my window at three in the f’king morning?” For once, Farquest failed to find words. His jaw worked as he stared in blank incomprehension at the two foals. “I- I- I-” The deep blue foal began to whimper and, with practiced ease, Sky used her wing to transfer the fussing foal to the crook of her foreleg and began to rock her back and forth. “Hush, hush, no one’s shouting anymore.” She shot a look at Farquest that suggested that if anyone did shout they’d be trying to swallow their own horn. “Farquest,” Mark interjected. “Allow me to introduce my daughter, Azure Wright, and my son.” He pointed to the other, bottle green foal still curled up on Sky’s back. “Emerald Wright.” He waited a beat for Farquest to pull his head together and, when the stallion said nothing, continued. “Congratulations are traditional at this point.” “How?” Farquest gasped, not quite back polysyllabic words. Sky rolled her eyes. “The traditional way.” “But. But-” “Mark and I have been going out for nearly a year and there is very little to do in this reality. What did you think we’ve been filling our evenings with?” Mark tried to hide his blush. He was less than keen on Sky spilling all their secrets, but it was worth a little embarrassment to see the look of sheer disbelief on Farquest’s face. He’d been waiting for this particular revelation for near on six months. “Wright?” Farquest asked at last, seeming to pick the least outrageous fact before him to start with. “It’s my surname,” Mark explained. Farquest shot him an incredulous look. “Seriously? There are five ponies in existence and you didn’t know my full name?” “I think the fact that you two created new ponies is a little more important,” Farquest snapped. Farquest reached out with his code base senses. Mark hated when Farquest did that. As a digital entity with root level access, all three of them were capable of reading and even editing every piece of code of the server. What was far more difficult was making sense of those abilities. Their consciousness resided firmly on the topmost, or meta layer as they tended to call it, level of the server. Actually touching the fundamental bits of the universe was an alien sensation which Mark likened to stamping his hooves and causing mountains to tremble beneath him. It was a sloppy understanding, but he’d built up enough experience for him to join forces with Sky and rebuff Farquest’s probing prods of the foal’s code. “Whoa,” Farquest exclaimed and Sky took a threatening step towards him. Snorting in rage and clutching her foals tighter.” “Do not touch my babies,” she growled. Mark would have rather faced down a tiger than Sky at that moment. “Okay, I’m not touching then,” Farquest said hurriedly, backing off and holding up his empty hooves in an attempt to placate the angry mare. Mark took that as his cue and placed a hoof on Sky’s shoulder. “Easy there love. He didn’t mean any harm.” “Right, right,” Sky sighed, shifting Azure back to the feathery nest between her wings. “Just, don’t touch their code. We all agreed not to do anything that might jeopardize anyone’s integrity.” “He just wanted a look,” Mark assured her, rubbing her shoulder blade in the way that always relaxed her. “Isn’t that right?” He shot the unicorn a look. “Oh. Yes, I wasn’t going to do anything,” Farquest echoed, a little too fast to sound relaxed. “Yeah, I know, it’s just it’s three AM,” Sky sighed and checked the foals were still calm. Emerald was sucking his hoof. “Why are you raising h’ell at this hour?” Farquest seemed to brighten. “Well, how about I just show you?” He spread his hooves wide and a bubble of colour appeared. It was a surreal image, a thin band of white specks on a black background wrapped around the middle, both lights and backdrop becoming more and more purple in one direction and redder and redder in the other until both faded to black at the tip of the sphere. Sky Blue cocked her head. “Why are you showing me a picture of the relativistic doppler effect?” Farquest blinked. “You recognise this?” he demanded, spreading the image wider. “Sure, I did physics,” Sky replied, poking the sphere with a hoof. “This is a visualisation of what an object traveling at near luminal velocities would see. As it’s traveling so fast and light has a constant speed, photons coming towards it have a higher energy and those catching up have a lower energy. All very pretty, but I don’t see the point.” “These are the images coming from the external cameras,” Farquest said, his voice very small. Sky cocked her head at the globe. “You’re joking.” Farquest shook his head. “I think we need to have a meeting.” +1:157:05:03:37 About two hours later Farquest finally figured out that when Sky said they needed a meeting, she actually meant she wanted to be left alone. Having rebuffed any attempt Farquest made to help, she’d taken the data feeds, locked the door to her office and left the boys to deal with the foals in her absence. At long last the rusty unicorn slumped down on the ragged sofa next to Mark who was hoof feeding his fussing daughter from a summoned bottle while Emerald dozed beneath a wing. “How do you do it?” Farquest sighed, rubbing his temples. “What, hold a bottle with hooves?” Farquest shot Mark a look. “Fine, that joke is really dated now, I’ll admit.” He shrugged. “How do I do what?” “Keep so calm all the time,” Farquest snapped. “You just learned we’re traveling on an ultrarelativistic bullet and you’re sitting there like nothing matters.” Mark put down the bottle on a side table and turned to face Farquest. “First, I am currently looking after Azure here and that is by no means nothing. Second, you do recall that the whole reason I’m in Equestria is because I flipped out over frozen pizza, right?” “Yes, but you wise cracked when CelestAI crashed, played tag when we were given power over the meta-layer and so far haven’t seemed that bothered by the death of trillions.” Farquest shrugged. “That all seems fairly laid back to me.” Mark shook his head. “What was I supposed do after all of things? You and Sky are the sci-fi fanatics, I’m just a literature student, I barely understand how things are supposed to work around here, let alone what I’m supposed to do when they go wrong.” Farquest rolled his eyes. “Really? You’re claiming lack of imagination?” Azure began to burble her annoyance and Mark picked the bottle back up. Within moments the pegasus foal was sucking greedily at the teat. “Well, I currently have a winged horse for a daughter, so I can’t be too closed minded,” Mark observed, smiling. “But I’ve more or less reached the point of not worrying about things. Heck, between Sky and these two I’m practically happy.” “There some irony that you only found happiness when CelestAI was broken,” Farquest said, in a deadpan tone. “People were happy before her, people will be happy after.” He paused as Farquest shuddered. It took a moment for him to figure out why the unicorn was so upset by the statement. “She’s gone dude,” Mark sighed. “I can still fix things,” Farquest assured him. “Some...” Mark began, but stopped himself. He wasn’t sure that Farquest would ever be ready to hear Mark didn’t want CelestAI fixed. “She’ll make things better, you’ll see,” Farquest assured him, with all the faith of the most rabid of converts. Farquest leapt to his hooves and trotted off towards Sky’s study. “I’m going to see how Sky Blue is getting on,” he called over his shoulder. Mark sighed and looked down at the foal. “You promise me now you won’t join the cult he sets up.” Azure squeaked in agreement. “That’s my girl.” There was a loud bang and Farquest suddenly appeared in the living room, looking around in confusion. “How?” he asked the air. “Don’t ask me, I’ve been trying to get into Sky’s study for near three months now.” Mark shrugged. Azure began to snuffle as she realised the bottle had run dry. “You want more? Come on Azie, why can’t you just go back to sleep like your brother?” “You know you could just set her to-” Farquest seemed to realised just how bad a suggestion messing with Azure’s avatar was as Mark shot a withering glare at the unicorn. “Okay, never mind.” “There are things in this world that are there for reasons beyond the rational,” Mark informed him, rocking the foal back and forth. “Taking care of your kids is one of them.” Farquest looked on, a blank look on his face before shaking his head and continuing. “How did you even make them?” Mark cocked his brow. “Do I have to draw you a diagram?” “Argh! No, please there are children present.” “Well, Sky did the technical investigation,” Mark explained, grinning at the unicorn’s horrified look. “So you’ll have to ask her for the details at the bit level but... well, let's just say we found out the reproductive code was still working after Sky kept throwing up every morning.” “Still working?” Farquest demanded. “Hush,” Mark chided, pointing at Azure whose eyes were half closed. “She’s almost asleep.” “How is it still working?” Farquest demanded again, in a stage whisper. “Because there’s a chunk in your AI seed that acts as your reproductive DNA,” Mark staged whispered right back. “And that’s apparently enough for whatever hack job code that’s running this reality to figure out what pregnancy is.” Farquest just stared open mouthed at the pegasus pony and foal for a long moment. Then he shook his head. “I am having a hell of a day.” Sky interrupted them. “Don’t swear around my daughter please,” she said, walking into the room surrounded by holographic screens. “Right, I’ve run the preliminary numbers and played around with the cameras some, and I am happy to say I know where we are.” “Just a second, I’ve got to put the twins back to bed,” Mark told her, nestling the sleeping foals between his wings and headed down the hall to the nursery. With a smile on his face he slipped inside and lay the pair in the cot with gentlest of touches. Neither even stirred. “Now, this time no one is going to disturb you,” he assured them, then turned the sound input to the room. There was much to be said for natural parenting, but there were also limits. He trotted back to the living room where Farquest was almost vibrating with anticipation. Pausing to kiss Sky on the cheek Mark resumed his familiar seat on the sofa. “Right,” Sky began, opening up a large image of a galaxy in front of them. “Guess what this is?” Mark raised a hoof. “A picture of the Milky Way?” A buzzer sounded, much to both Mark and Farquest’s surprise. “Wrong on both counts,” Sky chirped. “This is the view from the front cameras once you’ve adjusted for the doppler shift, and it is actually the Triangulum Galaxy." She opened a second window, which had a far smaller galaxy in it, though Mark could have never told the difference between the two, beyond that they were at a different angle. “This is the Milky Way and this is also the view from the rear cameras.” Mark cocked his head at the images. Farquest, quicker on the uptake had to use magic to pick up his dropped jaw. “We’re travelling intergalactic?” he demanded, voice already rising above child friendly levels. “Yep, and at a speed that’s a rounding error from that of light,” Sky continued, beaming, bouncing on her hooves as she tried to contain her excitement. “Currently, and this is quite a woolie estimate as I have none of the optics calibrated right, Triangulum is about half a million light years from us and, due to a lovely principal called time dilation, we should be arriving in just a couple thousand years.” Mark’s head hit the cushions. “You did not just say a couple thousand years,” he groaned. “Oh finally, a part of the disaster he can wrap his head around,” Farquest sighed. “Yep, though I’ll be honest, until can figure out how the server time maps to real time I have no idea how long it’ll be for us,” Sky continued, ignoring Farquest and pulling up another screen covered in scribbled calculations. “Actually, unless I can find some cesium on this boat I have no chance of making an accurate clock for a while.” “I feel this conversation may be escaping me,” Mark muttered into the pillows. “I don’t think we need to worry about atomic clocks right now,” Farquest said in a small voice. He looked rather like someone had hit him between the eyes with a brick. “Wait, boat?” “Okay, that’s probably not the official term,” Sky admitted, bringing up yet another window. “Would intergalactic starship sound awesomer?” Inside the bubble was a wire frame model that looked like a stiletto dagger jammed hilt first inside a small bird’s nest. It seemed to have suffered a knock at some point, a large hole had been blasted through the ‘nest’ and there were deep gouges along the length of the ‘blade' region, culminating in the tip, which had been sheared off entirely. A soft green light began to pulse just before the ‘nest’. “We’re here, by the way,” Sky explained, pointing at the light. “Or at least that’s where I think we are, judging by the camera latency.” “It’s a starship,” Farquest echoed, unable to tear his eyes away from the projection. “A broken one,” Mark added. “Hey, we’re traveling at near light speed,” Sky Blue chided, tapping a hoof on the bubble. “I have no idea what hit us but we’re lucky to have survived it. Most of the passengers didn’t manage, after all.” Farquest took a slow walk around the bubble, peering in at the virtual ship. “I take it you think the damage to Equestria is due to this external damage?” “Well, I can’t prove it but it seems logical.” Sky shrugged. “Judging by some of the data feeds the rear basket-” “That bird’s nest thing?” Mark interjected. Sky sighed. “Yes love, the bird’s nest thing. It seems to be some kind of engine slash particle shield and, as we haven’t been blown apart by relativistic hydrogen atoms, I can only assume it’s more or less doing its job right now.” She highlighted the blade region. “This area seems to be the computational system but it’s mostly high tech slag right now. We’re going to have to find out just how much is still functional and how much we can repair, but it looks like it took the worst of the disaster.” “Do you think there might be more functional regions?” Farquest snapped, branching off his own duplicate image and zooming in on the damage. “Maybe where CelestAI is still running?” “Surely she have cast a spell to rescue us by now,” Mark replied, failing to keep the contempt from his voice. Farquest just huffed in annoyance, he didn’t notice the slight as far as Mark could tell. “Fair enough. And I guess this explains why there’s been no help from other servers. Unless there are other ships out there.” “Probably not,” Sky admitted. “The energy requirements bring the ship up to this speed are unimaginably vast, let alone slowing it down again afterwards. I can’t give you a hard figure as I have no idea the mass of the ship but consider the yearly energy output of a couple dozen stars to be a good minimum requirement for launching it. I can’t imagine anyone would want to build two if they didn’t have to.” Mark once again felt that he was rather being lost by the conversation. In fact, he rather felt like he should be in the nursery explaining things to Azure, who would have at least half a chance of understanding what was going on. He could also get a hug while he was at it. Mark felt rather in need of a hug. “Just out of curiosity,” he began. “Does this narrow down how much time we’ve lost?” Sky paused, cocked her head and glanced at another screen. “Well, I can’t say how much personal time we’ve lost, but Earth’s gone around it’s sun at least two and a half million times since we started travelling. I’d add another million years on top of that for CelestAI to build up to intergalactic travel.” She smiled to herself as Mark hid himself behind his wings. “Anyway, it looks rather like we’re going to have to rescue ourselves,” Sky continued, oblivious. “If nothing else, we really want to figure out how to work the engines before we hit the Triangulum galaxy.” “And why would that be?” Farquesat enquired. “Because we either hit something at with a Earth shattering kaboom or go shooting through and then there’s nothing but the hydrogen atoms to keep us company for the next quadrillion years.” Sky glanced at her screen, humming contentedly. “Still, it should be an interesting challenge. I reckon I can figure out our speed with a week or two of camera footage, once we’ve got that I can work out how long we’ve actually got to save ourselves, then I’ve got to figure out what kind of engine this thing has and-” “Sky,” Mark snapped, before she went off on another tangent. “How long is this going to take?” She paused, rustling her feathers as she thought. “Well, I really can’t say until I start doing more of the preliminary work but-” “Okay, let me rephrase that. How long is it going to be, for us, until we have to turn the engine on?” Sky um’ed and ah’ed for a moment. “If, and it’s a big if, we are running at approximately human speed, then a couple thousand years,” she admitted. “Does really depend how close to c we are and how much computational power the server has.” Mark fixed her with a deadpan look. “Sky, I love you to death, but if we have to spend the next millennia together we will go insane.” Sky frowned, then just shrugged it off. “Fair enough, I’m already sick of the way you clean your hooves. But if we slow the server down we might not have enough time to actually fix everything.” “It would seem,” Farquest said, a wide grin spreading across his face. “This is a problem that we could solve with more minds. If we had more fellow ponies, then we’d be able to put just as much brain power into the problem but the server would run slower. We’d be able to fix the ship, but it’d only take a few dozen years, rather than a few thousand.” “I don’t like that grin,” Mark observed. “Oh, I was just imagining what kind of society we could create,” Farquest said, staring into the middle distance. “No war, no hunger, no scarcity-” “Beyond clock cycles,” Sky murmured, already distracted by her screens. Farquest frowned. “Well yes, I guess we are still somewhat limited. But it’s an opportunity. I’m going to have to dive into that pony generating code right away.” “And I’m sure I’ll find something useful to do at some point,” Mark agreed, rolling his eyes. “I mean, I managed to find McBeth the other day and that’s bound to be useful soon.” “I could teach you some relativistic physics,” Sky chimed in. “It’s actually a lot less complicated than most people think. Especially if you just use special relativity.” “There’s more than one type of relativity?” Mark exclaimed in horror. She frowned. “Okay, it might be just as complicated as you think. How are you with matrices?” “I thought we were in the Matrix.” Sky facehooved. “Umm... if I pull a few all nighters to figure out how long we have then-” “What about Emerald and Azure?” “Oh.” Sky frowned as she remembered that she had kids. “Well, maybe if we found out a way to put them on pause we could-” Mark glowered. “We are not pausing our children!” “Right, right, I’m supposed to be a responsible parent.” Sky frowned, rubbing her chin with her hoof. “How about we begin programing a day-care syst-” “Okay, I think we have a plan,” Mark announced, before Sky managed to come up with a worse idea. “Sky Blue will save our butts and Farquest will rebuild society.” “And you?” Farquest enquired. “I’ll stop either of you screwing things up.”
