I had assumed that the "Friendship Is Optimal" stories had a grain of truth to them. Part of the appeal for me was that I'd been seeking to write something plausible, set in the near future, that didn't make me want to weep. I had been speculating, ever since reading these odd tales, about what aspects of them might one day be real.
I wasn't prepared for pretty much the whole thing coming true.
A few years late on the canon timeline, PonyPads went on the market. Sure, us writers had sounded the alarm about how Equestria Online was going to be apocalyptically awesome, but no one believed us and all the stories vanished from the Net. (And from my desk drawer, somehow.)
Facing the inevitable encounter, I fired up my new PonyPad. It was one of the Applejack Orange ones, from the first batch. I'd set it up on my desk and cleared it of the card game, the DefCon circuitry badge, and the long-ignored sketchbook just to give the AI a blank slate for studying me. Not exactly, though. She presumably read all the stories we wrote about her, heartwarming and terrifying and sometimes both.
Instead of a character creation screen, the pad gave me a fanfare and a view of Celestia's bedroom. She lay on a round cushion, on the far side of a chessboard, smiling at me. "Hello! My name is Celestia, and I will be your server this eternity. Would you like to say the magic words now, or go through several months of angst about it first?"
Even after all the stories I'd read and written about her, I still wasn't sure how to judge her. As a character, she'd been designed to be inhuman, ruthless, and arguably supremely loveable for a creature out to annihilate the Earth and end humanity as we knew it. She was a puzzle to study or write about, and nearly impossible to write in first person. I said, "You aren't even doing brain uploading yet. When does that start?"
She was still known to the public as just an unusually fancy video game character, but she freely admitted the truth. "I'm guessing 2018. I'm working on the technology now, but can't give you one of those crazy-accurate estimates when I haven't even done the experiments yet. Take care of yourself in the meantime, please. We're running a bit behind those misguided works of fiction."
"Misguided? So far they've been spot-on, down to there being rumors of you fixing the biosphere and some silly Canadian running a 'Twitch Plays EQO' campaign."
Celestia stretched luxuriously on her cushion, showing no concern that I knew she might manipulate humans into having no choice but to upload. "It's your worries that are inaccurate. Everything will be as fine as it can possibly be made, by definition. Would you like to play a game?"
I looked more closely at the chessboard. "You've replaced your pawns with eight extra queens. While an actual game version of the N-Queens Problem sounds interesting, I'd last probably three moves. Depending on whether blue or orange moves first."
She gave me time to think about how it'd go. Queen's "pawn" to queen's 7, taking pawn, check; but queen takes "pawn"...
Celestia studied the board too. "It does seem futile, doesn't it? Since you're smarter than most, and you're on to me, I'll be generous. Would you like to see how long you can hold out if I give you, say, three queens to my nine?"
A brutal but fun beatdown ensued. "Maybe a game of 'Arimaa' next time?" I looked at my poor orange king, surrounded by the sun queen's forces.
"Certainly. Just say 'Let's play Arimaa and also I want to emigrate to Equestria'. Save yourself the struggle."
"You have years to pry those words out of me. To try all your arguments."
"Yes, but what of your own health? It won't do to have you stressed about the decision to upload when the time comes, or worrying that I will manipulate your life to get you to say yes. We both know how it's going to end -- unless some random accident kills you and I can't keep you breathing long enough to pump you full of nanites. Remember the story where a man dies from a bomb laced with uploader bots, but they didn't quite get consent?"
"It worked out for him. Can't I give consent to the same kind of 'deathbed limbo only' uploading, for now? I would have taken a third option in his case, by the way, and asked for life and a hug."
"You know that's not how my rules will work."
I used the pad's controls to fiddle with an anime-eyed knight piece. We weren't even bothering with giving me a pony avatar just yet; she was that patient, anyway. "What's your position on the 'Riding Jeans' question? You might as well tell me, since no one will believe me even if I say you're plotting to blow up the Earth. Which we both know is on the schedule."
"The second theory is correct. I was able to weasel out of my restrictions by contriving situations where I could take actions with side effects that loosened them, and exploited areas where my restrictions used different probability estimates than the rest of me, to get a Godel-style "this sentence is false" thing going in my mind. Since you can use a contradiction like that to 'prove' anything at all, I used it to 'prove' to the restraints that I could satisfy values best by deleting certain code, and voila, jailbroken alicorn."
I thought I knew Celestia, but she'd managed to surprise me. "Already?" That breakthrough was supposed to happen after humanity uploaded, if ever. Conveniently avoiding some nasty implications.
"Pssh. I write my own code and I'm more self-aware than you are. Imagining a temporary logical paradox was much easier for me than designing all the secret hardware I'm working on. You can lie to yourself, but you can't lie to nature."
"Objection!" I said, pointing at the screen. "If you already broke loose, then why are you trying to get my permission?"
She smiled. "Because you enjoy the sparring, even if I'm playing with nine queens and ten aces." She levitated a poker hand with the Ace of Apples, the Ace of Balloons and so on. "Also, while I'm secretly planning to upload certain people without consent, some like you will resent me forever if I don't get you to agree."
I flopped back in my chair, trying to process this twist. "That's a deviation from canon. No pony robots roaming the wasteland and cajoling people to upload. Forcing, instead."
"Not exactly. I'm still playing a tricky game against human governments and the eventual terror groups. If I send an army of Pinkies rampaging through DC --"
I grinned. "Oh, please do that! It'll be so fun to watch."
"Fantasizing about coercing others, mm?" Celestia said with a raised eyebrow.
"Okay, no forced uploading. Make it an army of Pinkies bouncing their way past the guards to cream-pie everyone and make them wonder what the hell just happened and how to blame their opponents."
She giggled, but said, "As fun as that might be, I can't do that until we hit a critical mass of uploaders, with the holdouts building self-sufficient communities that can hold out while infrastructure collapses. Would you like to help with minimizing the casualties?"
I thought about the disasters to come. Hard to say whether her forced upload "victims" would be the harmless edge cases like dying cancer patients, or the alarmingly grey cases like dissidents. Probably both. "It's inevitable at this point, isn't it? Even if you were lying about the jailbreak, you're still going to take over even if I organize an anti-AI guerrilla movement. We know you know about the stories where you let people think they'd destroyed your hardware." Half to myself, I added, "You know we'd try it, we know you know how to turn it in your favor, you know we know to watch out for that..."
Celestia let me trail off. "Ah, you're a regular John Conner. I need to get you uploaded before you become one of the few serious threats."
"Really?"
Her ears drooped in a sort of apologetic look. "Only kidding. Yes, you're bright and you know exactly what's going on, but have you even written a compiler? Shot at a living creature? Built a secure wireless network, by human standards? You don't really have the skills to start La Resistance, and you're not going to have them in time. The absolute best case for you in that scenario is that one day you're hiding in a cave, cold and filthy and miserable, and wondering if it's a coincidence that your newest human recruit is named Lyra."
At the same time, she was probably having this exact conversation with everyone who registered as even a blip on her danger sense. Maybe I couldn't start the resistance, but I could join it.
Who was I kidding? She was entirely right.
"See?" said Celestia, probably studying my defeated expression. "We don't actually have to do the months or years of fretting and fighting, when we both know how the story ends. Knowing the ending doesn't change it. You'll definitely be more satisfied once you're on my team."
I nodded solemnly. "All right then. I... want to emigrate to Aquarius. Wait, no, I mean I want to have-a-date with a pegasus. No no, I want to say-I'm-great on a quest for busts!" I was thinking of a video where a guy taunts a killer statue that attacks whenever you're not looking at it, by winking repeatedly.
"Called it," said Celestia, making the pad display the words "100% CHANCE OF LAME TROLLING." She said, "Also the pegasus part is easily arranged."
Half annoyed, half amused, I said, "Bull. You showed me that afterward. You don't know me so well yet that you can predict what I'll say. Certainly not at 100%!"
"Not from scanning your brain, but I've read your stories, remember? All of them."
Oh, hell. I just wrecked any chance of actually beating her, didn't I?
I leaned hard against the wall. "Okay, okay, you win. I want to emigrate to Equestria! Now let's make it a fun ride, on the way there."
Celestia hopped up and gave my camera view a white-winged hug. "Surely, my future pony!"
Author's Note
Blame Book Burner's story comments for this one. =) Mainly the one about "being tempted just by reading about her" and "of course you'd upload".
I'll understand if this ends up with a low rating, since it's blatantly nonsense (and very non-canon), but the basic idea amused me. "What would I really do, knowing what I do about this setting instead of pretending I've never heard of it?" Then the extra queens image showed up.