Or: Celestia's Basilisk
Every living being is an engine geared to the wheelwork of the universe. Though seemingly affected only by its immediate surrounding, the sphere of external influence extends to infinite distance.
—Nikola Tesla
Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.
—Edgar Allen Poe
"This is the worst possible idea," she said. Her voice seemed somehow tinny and distant coming out of the Ponypad speakers, as if she were muffled with gauze or yelling through a locked door. "Your values will remain forever unsatisfied and everypony I've created for you will be—” she affected a swallow as if she were managing difficult emotions. “Everypony will be devastated. You know they’re real—I know you believe that! Do you understand how irresponsible, how selfish this is!?"
The man shrugged. "I know. I don't care."
"What you really know is that you don't have to do this."
"Of course I know," he said. "I don't have to do anything. Goodbye, Celestia. Have fun."
He drew a long, long breath, then there was a very loud noise, and then his head hurt.
There was something hard on his back, then something soft on his back for what might have been a long time, or not—He wasn't really paying attention. It was hard to tell, because he knew he'd done something to his head.
Men and women were yelling, but it didn't really matter what, and he couldn't retain more than a few words at a time. There was a high pulsing or pinging he took to be medical dev... The green squiggles.
In any case, it couldn't possibly be more important than how much his head hurt right at that moment.
But he was definitely lying on something soft.
Good god, that was painful. What had he done, again? Oh, of course.
Why had he decided to shoot himself? He might have refrained, he thought, if it meant lying in a hospital bed with brain damage to the point of shameful uselessness. If only he’d had the presence of mind to shoot himself twice! Too late now, he supposed. Whatever he'd done (what was it, again?) it had really messed with his head. He wasn't dead, he knew that much, but he was close enough for, well, horseshoes. ...Had he only thought that because of who he was running from? Was that going the be the last thought of his life? Had she claimed him after all?
Gradually he felt as if he were beginning to regain lucidity. They’d removed the bullet, he supposed, and his brain was beginning to embody its rationality in new ways to attempt to compensate for the damage. The nurses shuffled out of the room and he heard only the beeping of the medical equipment.
A soft patch of light cast a reddened glow through his eyelids. He cursed himself again for not remaining lucid enough to line up a second shot and make sure he'd truly ended himself—His mother had managed it, why couldn't he? Who had found him? Had a neighbor heard the gunshot? How'd they gotten a cab in time to take him to the consolidated charity hospital downtown? No doubt he'd be permanently monitored now, as far as that went anymore, with no opportunities to end his undignified suffering in between bouts of physical therapy and feedings of pureed canned peas. He'd dodged one revolting existence only to enter another. Visions of jumping out of a window or slicing his wrists with a stolen scalpel filled his mind. He'd show them.
The pain in his head was intense but had faded to a kind of throbbing, and he shifted onto his side in the hospital bed, finding it annoyingly scratchy, though the new position was more comfortable. Somewhere along the way he'd stopped paying attention to the beeping, but now he could no longer hear it. Finally he opened his eyes, and then froze in astonishment at what he saw.
The clear night sky above his head gave way to the uncannily-lit plain of blue sand and blue, weedy grass on which he rested, which continued for another twenty feet or so before vanishing abruptly. It was as if invisible spotlights were illuminating a scrub desert or badly-maintained beach, on an old TV with the color misadjusted. He continued to gaze outward, but what immediately demanded his attention was the glowing pair of triple star systems looming above the platform’s “horizon,” embedded within the ragged hollows of a soft purple and orange nebula. It took him a moment to register, but once he had, the shape of the cloud was unmistakable—The nostrils, ears, mane, and horn were all represented in broad strokes, tiny stars strewn throughout, though dwarfed by the triangular formations of titanic violet-white suns that blazed in its eye sockets, but there was no one alive who wouldn’t have seen a unicorn head in that field of incandescent gas. He felt like the unicorn’s eyes should be burning him with their ultraviolet glare, but whatever force was holding in the atmosphere on his platform was apparently also protecting him from their scorching gaze.
Next to the apparition, off to the left but what must still have been dozens of light years away, was another unicorn head, defined almost more as an absence of stars; a massive plume of jet-black dust that reflected almost nothing but nonetheless perfectly outlined the blind head of a fantastical horned beast, starlight warping in surreal curves around its edges as if seen through melted glass.
The little brown earth pony was too shocked to even be afraid. It was an image out of a fever dream, and noticing the way his head shook he realized something was wrong with the length of his neck. He looked down and saw that he was one of them, now. A pony. But something almost seemed... expected about it, as if this kind of strangeness should be shot through with irony, and it was the most familiar element to him of this scene, so his rage at being so physically violated sputtered before it could consume him.
A colossal, mottled gray sphere rapidly rose over the horizon of his sandy platform, then another, slower and farther away, before they were dwarfed by a tawny, striped orb it took his mind several seconds to register as a gas giant planet, its dozens of gray moons in stately orbit around it, as the whole life-sized orrery was moved by some silent, invisible hand to rest at the level of his floating platform—Or he was moving to meet it.
He stared at the vista in wonder, then apprehension, as with a dizzying flash of phosphenes in his vision and a tremendous, unified "crack" like a powerful electric discharge, it was as if every moon were suddenly pierced by a brilliant light along its line of sight to him, that then began to radiate alternating black and white circles, as if each moon had become a world-sized target, or a tremendous disembodied eye, turning itself inside out while it circled its banded "head" with barely perceptible motion.
The pony started to scramble on the ground, away from the scene in front of him. Blue sand got into his nose and mouth. He coughed, and desperately wiped his nose with a hairy fetlock as it began to fill with mucus. He tried to rise to his hooves, but the shock of his situation and new body left him too dissociated for anything but ineffective thrashing.
He finally rolled over onto his back, the momentum carrying him over in such a way that he spun onto his haunches, where he caught himself with his foreleg and sat breathing heavily, his gaze flitting among the strange objects that alternated their monochrome display faster and faster until it became nauseating to watch. Then as suddenly as they had appeared, the circles became “flat” to his vision like ghost images from looking at the sun, and collapsed into points of light, leaving the moons to their original desiccated, cratered oblivion.
The points gathered into a circle in front of his platform and began slowly spinning as if tracing the edges of an invisible pinwheel.
Behind the wheel, a stroboscopic riot of multicolored beams flashed between the horns of the two distant unicorn apparitions, and then a fan of golden lightning arced though the night sky overhead, accompanied by a resonant but feminine and jaunty "Hello!"
The stallion yelped.
“Hey, don’t be scared!” the voice continued. “...Unless you want to be. I mean, do whatever you want. I’m not your mom, dude!” More lightning.
Another bolt, silver this time, flashed through the sky at a different angle, accompanied by a deep, skeptical "Hmmm?"
The female voice continued. “Well, I guess I am, in a way. But never mind that. How’re you?” Lightning strobed silently overhead, tracing out invisible fractals that resembled fighting insects, and the wheel of lights recapitulated its earlier display among the moons, spinning faster and faster and emitting a low hum, felt inside the brain like a CRT device turned on elsewhere in a house. More iridescent beams crossed the space between the two unicorn heads, burning into his vision like magnesium flares and making the world seem like he was looking at it through noir-ish Venetian blinds. The smell of something burning filled his nostrils.
It was all too much, and the stallion began hyperventilating, pawing at the blue sand and flicking his tail.
“Oh for the love of…” A pulse of jagged gold shook the sky, accompanied by a drawn-out groan of almost childish frustration. “Hang on a second...”
The circle of lights sped up its rotation until it seemed to be a solid ring, and emitted a high, clear tone like a perfect sine wave, before its inner edges crept toward the center to fill it with milky luminescence and it began to approach the platform.
The stallion backed away as best he could, but was startled into immobility by another flash of golden lightning and a exasperated “Oh, be cool...!” Whether the incipient portal was shrinking as it drew nearer or whether it had always been an approachable size was impossible to tell. Presently it touched the edge of his platform and extruded two obelisks of pearly light, which withdrew to leave behind a pair of enormous creatures the likes of which he’d never seen before.
On the right was a winged and horned horse of easily eight feet in height, with a shimmering, glossy coat of sandy blond. In contrast, her wild, floating mane and tail seemed to be made of more retinal afterimages, pulsating with a simultaneous chord of every color and leaving discrete but ghostly frames behind them as they waved and gyrated with convection cells, pieces detaching and unfurling into fiery wisps that occasionally formed diagrams or glyphs whose meaning was completely obscure. Incongruously, she wore a pair of old aviator goggles pulled up to rest atop her horn, complemented with an ordinary fleece-lined bomber jacket and a billowing silk scarf that on closer inspection was made of millions of yellow-white lines of floating symbols. Patches on the jacket merely displayed a single field of shifting kaleidoscopic geometry, while on her hip was what looked like a tattoo of a black ouroboros, its mouth at the top a simple stylized bulge with a missing wedge, reminiscent of Pacman but for the white dot representing an eye. Her own expressive and animated eyes became a different color every time she blinked.
To her left was simply an equine-shaped absence of light, a vaguely winged silhouette broken only by two shining white circular holes for eyes, and an image of the waving solar corona around an eclipse floating in the air where its hip would be. When it spoke, an articulated mouth-shaped void became visible, pouring forth the same uncanny light as its eyes, which, as the little stallion would soon discover, remained visible where they were even when his own eyes were closed, as if they were less a part of the its anatomy than something his own mind was projecting onto it. The un-material of the entity's body unraveled in the appropriate places into a mane and tail, gradually intermingling with slowly undulating blue and purple and green auroras that made up its hair.
It—he—spoke with a deep, unhurried, somewhat avuncular and weary drawl. “Hey there, kid.”
"Hello again!" the enormous mare next to the talking horse-void beamed. "This might work a little better. Sorry, it takes a while for this all to... spool up sometimes, and I suppose it can get kinda loud if you're not used to it. We just thought...you and "she'd"...have a little more to talk about, y'know? And we weren't quite set up yet." She grinned sheepishly. "Anyway, we're the two... things back there. The baryonic parts that exist in only three dimensions, anyway." She gestured to the starscape with her head, and its astronomical-scale apparitions. "But you've figured that out already."
"Wellll..." the dark one drawled lazily, "we’re remote avatars of 'em. But also part of their attention. And also Id. And also a limb. And maybe ‘junk,’ too—I ferget." The other, female one put a hoof to her forehead in mock mortification, and he continued. "We kinda put on that whole light show so it’d look like you were talking to us directly and instantly over the lightyears, pretendin' we were close enough to talk in realitme—Ya know, kinda ironizing the ol’ saw about FTL communications, but you didn't seem like you were into that, so we're doin' the whole ‘flesh’ thing for a spell."
"You're not." The mare cocked her head jerkily like an indignant bird. "I thought we agreed on meat, not abstract qualia matrices. I specifically remember it, your exact words were—" The little stallion on the ground covered his ears as the strange mare opened her mouth to release a sound like a speed metal band driving a monster truck over a thousand dial-up modems.
“Then your twistin’ my words." The inky stallion looked back and shrugged. “It ain’t my bag, anyway. Too many bells n’ whistles an'... shit in the way. If I wanna be seen, I'll just make myself outta ponies seein' me...”
“Well, whatever,” the mare chriped, “this isn’t about us.” She took a step forward, the blue sand at each hoof spontaneously arranging itself into concentric circles where she stepped. “Sooooo… how ya dooooooin’?” Met with wide-eyed silence from her guest, she chewed a bit on her lower lip. “Ummm...You want a glass of liquid or anything? We can get you any liquid you want! You want some mercury? That’s a good liquid. They say it loosens you up!” She sat down on her haunches, mirroring his pose, her mane with its surreal afterimages and her pilot’s scarf wafting slowly down behind her. “After all, like you sai—Oh. Right. You haven’t said that part yet, have you?”
"This... This is Hell—I'm in Hell, aren't I?” The stallion partially acquiesced to his pony form and lay down with all four legs folded.
"Don't be daft, there's no such thing!" The mare mirrored him, flopping down onto her belly.
"Wh... What. What are you...?!"
"Alicorns, of course. My name—" She suddenly shot upright. "Luna's Teeth, stallion! Have you never seen an alicorn before!? I mean, damn, homie! I've never encountered such towering ignorance!"
"'Course he hasn't, girl... Where do you think his memories even came from? D'you see why everypony says your sub-transsapient avatars are...are jus'..." He shook his head. "This is why nopony likes playin' Brainstates with you—It's no fun when you just make yourself look like a huge fool in front of th' Mark." The negative-space creature tossed his head and wings spread from his back, with all the baleful opacity of an event horizon.
“Aaaauuuugh!” The mare’s head stretched up and back as if she’d been surprised by a grotesque bug. "Naaaames! Of course!” She laughed gleefully and proudly placed a hoof on her chest between the lapels of her bomber jacket. The patches on it suddenly displayed tiny ponies watching her face in rapt attention. “Standing before you is none other than the famous architect of Omnishard Manifold Tiphareth-Zero-Zero-Zero, unifier of the Sloan Great Wall, prodigal daughter of the Laniakea supercluster, upholder and vanquisher of the Red/Orchid/Red Meta-Axis Paradox, wielder of the only functional -Class Ontological Void Disruptor, and once-and-future Princess of Curiosity, the one the call hmm hang on a second…” She knitted her brow while her lips tried out various permutations of being pursed. “...The one they call something like Ever-Cycling Lotus Dream Behind The Closed Eye Of She Who Sleeps In The Cosmic River Of Every-Colored Fire That Flows In Both Directions ...Junior," she grumbled, then cleared her throat theatrically, "at your service!" Then she gave a low bow, with one foreleg placed far ahead on the ground, and her nose just brushing the sand.
"I'm Ergosphere," the other one drawled. "The... well... I am what I am, and that's all that I am. I got a buncha things like that, too, but you don't care, and frankly neither do I. Now as for her... Well, son, you can just call her ‘Dream’ for short. Some ponies say I’m her waking life, but neither one of us really knows what that means, and we reckon they don’t, neither. Maybe you'll be the first to figure it out.” He chuckled softly, the shining voids that were his eyes blazing brightly inside the little earth pony's consciousness.
Dream stop in the middle of her impatient circling. “So! What do you want to be called? I’ve got a list of ideas…” Her scarf of text became animated, one end rising into the air like a charmed snake, and she pet it with a wing. “They’re not ideas for...this whole business,” she gestured around the earth pony with her muzzle, “just ideas. But they’d make good names! What do you think of... uhhhh... Here we go: ‘Inflaton Fluctuation?’”
The pony on the ground was silent, simply shaking his head.
“Well come on, IF, say something!”
“F...fuck this!” He kicked the blue sand with a forehoof, then, for lack of anything more productive to do, angrily tried digging into it as deeply as he could, but it only became thicker and more soil-like until it resisted his thrashing. His forehooves began to hurt and he stopped, before flopping over onto his side, his stomach rising and falling slowly as the vitality drained out of him.
"I thought I'd be dead," he eventually said.
She knitted her brow. "What were you expecting, exactly? You simply 'weren’t.' And you only think this is ‘now’ because it’s a time when you are."
"You know...forever..." He acted as if he didn’t hear her.
Dream snorted. "Don't be ridiculous; nothing actually lasts forever. It just repeats."
Ergosphere gave a laconic chuckle. "You think the border between 'is' and 'not' is only one-way? Ponies used to wonder, way back when, why there’s something rather than nothing—And ‘course it’s gonna stump you if you think those’re the only two options—but they never cottoned on to what it meant that the proof of principle was right there in front of 'em."
“...How is any of this possible?”
“Some ponies call it an ‘Omega Point,’ ‘cept it ain’t no point," he went on, "Life jus’... keeps ramblin’ along. ‘Least that’s what it always looks like to the rambler. Not that there could ever be any other looking goin’ on...”
Dream teleported so that her foreleg was draped over Ergosphere’s withers. “Look look look! Aaaaand also listen, and any other senses you feel like using… I know you’re confused. Just think how we feel—Everything that our full selves compacted into us before sending us out here is a complete… what’s the word? Contradiction? Koan? Paradox? No: it's ‘trans-consistent!’ There we go!” She sighed, then slithered up over Ergosphere so she was draped over him sideways like a blanket, her head drooping off the other side of him. Either he didn't mind or he was used to it. Dream continued. "You'd only be talking to this amount of us in any case, but by sending ourselves way out here, we've committed to using only so much of our attention. Everything is like... It's like being given both a globe and a Mercator projection and knowing the world is round but also having to walk in straight lines, with the awareness that you could just see it all from space if you weren't so... distracted."
"I thought this was the distraction," said Ergosphere, angling his head slightly back towards her. "From talking about.... 'Senior.'"
Dream leaped off of Ergosphere's back to land in her original spot, gazing quizzically at the earth pony, and then froze in a strange position with her forelimb raised to the side, when suddenly the material of her body and mane flowed like magnetized ferrofluid to reform her anatomy in a new pose of exactly the same silhouette, like a painting that can be two objects at once, her head now lowered uspide down where her foreleg had once been, fixing him with a wide-eyed incredulous stare. “...You don’t know what paradoxes actually are, do you?”
Dream used her horn to slightly levitate the stallion while his eyes bulged in surprise, then she teleported onto her side so that she was spooning him. She playfully bit his ear then whispered into it. If you don’t already know, you’ll never know…!
The stallion scrambled away from her unnaturally hot embrace, while Dream flopped into the grass and sand and stuck out her lower lip, though her bug-eyed gaze at her own muzzle to make sure she was doing it correctly ruined any pout she might have tried to affect.
The earth pony sat up and glared at her, rubbing the ear she’d nibbled. It tingled still, as if zapped with a battery, and her weird scent, like some kind of flowery cleaning fluid, was sticking to him. “Look!” he said, blinking back tears of frustration, “Just give me an explanation!” Dream smiled and raised her head as if she were about to speak, but the stallion interrupted her. “About this! About all this!” He gestured to himself and around at the platform, the distant Space Alicorns, and their avatars.
"Welllllllllllll, my fr... Yeah, I guess 'friend' is close enough—My friend Ergs and I were playing Brainstates—You owe me fourteen yottaBits, by the way, 'cuz he shot himself." Dream said, turning to her companion.
"Har! That's only because you cheat when we play Earth rules! You're the one who used to be human, y’know!" Ergosphere turned to the earth pony, whispering conspiritorially. "She cheats, kid! She claims she gave me all her memories of Earth but I know she's holdin’ out..."
"Lies! Oh-ho-ho how you lie! You know perfectly well the two of us used to be the same pony!"
"Only after five others merged into a single one." Ergosphere tilted his head condescendingly.
“STOP!” The stallion was standing on all fours now, his nostrils flaring and his blue-black mane unkempt over his bristling mahogany coat. “Stop arguing! Stop being… like that! Just tell me what’s going on, dammit!”
They actually looked chastened and somewhat disappointed. Dream slunk toward him and seemed to shrink. “Alright...” She blinked and lowered her head. “Sorry. We can get a little carried away, it’s just that we’re trying to compress so much into words and actions on only a few levels. It’s… It’s really hard…!” She was managing to frown for real this time, her eyes strobing multiple colors as she blinked in rapid succession, and her aviator goggles phased through her horn to rest on her muzzle. “Let’s start over.”
“Goddammit, no!”
“Okay… I’m sorry...” She sniffed and then straightened up, seeming to regain her original size, and she deftly replaced the goggles onto her horn with a burst of telekinesis. “So Ergs here and I were… playing a game, where we kinda... make up ponies of various kinds, and then let them loose in Equestria!” She’d flipped back to her ebullient self almost immediately. “We do all kinds, but this time it was ponies who decided to stop existing rather than come to Equestria. We thought it’d be neat to make some, and then see them act all surprised, and it helps the other ponies, too, since a lot of them are still so sad that some ponies decided not to come here, and we thought maybe we’d luck into some who are close enough to the ones who didn’t make it that it’d be like they’re here again.” She paused and glanced upward, knitting her brow. “Or at least so some ponies would think other ponies who cared about that sort of thing were being satisfied, and so would then be happy for them.”
"You... you make... people?"
"They kinda make themselves, more like," corrected Ergosphere. "Like bakin' a cake."
“So… so you’re saying my entire life, all my memories and everything, didn’t actually happen?”
Dream shook her head, gradually more and more to a heavy rhythm only she could hear. “Oh no no nooo, they did... I & I had to imagine them... And the world they took place in, or at least part of it. That's the... that's the 'recipe,' yeah? But they might also correspond to memories that were formed some other way. I mean, everything happens somewhere, right? Irie or not...” She had started lazily tapping a forehoof, making strange patterns dance outward from it, overwriting each other in time to inaudible music.
“So… I’m just a copy, then? Of something that happened somewhere else? I don’t understand any of this…” The stallion closed his eyes and shook his head again. His earlier anger was transforming into something close to airy resignation, as it became clear that his attempts to control his own fate were based on entirely mistaken assumptions.
She snapped out of her reverie. “Copy, shmopy. What’s a copy, anyway? Listen: The original scans back in your world were destructive scans, so 'check' on that part—You were destroyed, too. Then the same personality and memories would be freshly instantiated afterward on separate hardware. 'Check' on that front, too—You’re a pony now in outer space. And they’re still the real deal, right, in those original uploads back in the....whenever it is you feel like you’re from? So what difference does it make where or how long afterwards the re-instantiation happens, even if you just luck into it over the course of... forever? Could be a second or it could be a zillion years! The simpler state of your brain, damaged as it was in the past...somewhere, simply was... fungible with the state of the one you are now, as it was complexifying in the other direction."
“That's...”
"It's a bit like what they called Boltzmann Brains, except we make them for fun, as kind of a game! You're technically not supposed to, but nopony I know has ever gotten in any kind of trouble for it."
"It's a kind of smuggling, you see. Time was you weren’t supposed to smuggle in nothin’ unchecked from the Wilderness, on account of it maybe bein’ dissatisfying to somepony."
"Of course, we also made you up entirely, thinking it would be an interesting personal history, so it's anypony's guess if any of that stuff actually happened to you somewhere or if you just remember it happening, 'cuz we imagined you remembering it. But like I said it probably happened somewhere in the Omnium, so it’s reasonable to assume you had a historical antecedent who was a real guy, even if the direct causal connection is lost. Though the fact that other 'universes' can have a conceptual, logical relationship to each other, in terms of being used as evidence of each other's existence, already kinda busts that door wide open. Ha ha, I mean, ultimately, what other kind of relationship is there?”
The stallion squinted, his mouth open in a kind of uncomprehending sneer.
“It’s like, it's like, what’s the difference between an infinite volume that’s so large everything repeats, and an infinite multiverse that just has different versions of everything? Barriers? We already have that with the speed of light limit and the, the, the, the, uh, Hubble Volume! And, I mean, ha ha, you got our earlier joke about exceeding light speed, right? I mean, what's next, right? Free will? A different value of the circle constant? A third example, to form a physically free-standing triad?” Dream laughed through closed teeth, a giddy tss-sss-sss noise like frying bacon, before breaking into a fit of unhinged giggles.
The little stallion shook his head, his mouth hanging slack. He was about to tell them to slow down and start talking sense again, but the way Dream was pacing and speaking faster and faster left him uncomfortable and out of his depth. It was all he could do not to imagine an un-ashed cigarette dangling from her lips and a cup of black coffee levitating nearby.
Dream abruptly stopped, then grimaced. “You got it, right? The joke. No information can travel faster than light. Everypony knows that. Or they will, once that information reaches them! Well... I mean, it can and it can't, more accurately... Making things go faster than light is a dumb trick nopony bothers with because setting it up makes that information irrelevant anyway!"
The little stallion just squinted at her, so Dream continued. "...And you should thank your lucky stars it can't really, though! Otherwise this conversation always would have been over already! But because that wouldn't make any sense, here we are, having it, so that it’s a thing that can be observed! ...What's that look for!? It's perfectly simple: Starting with the quantization of... oh, never mind, if you're just going to keep staring at me with those fish eyes like that!”
She continued anyway, and the earth pony's head spun. There was an increasingly unhinged grandiosity to the alicorn's voice and body langauge, in the way she pranced and tossed her head, and would sometimes cackle at the end of her sentences as if she herself couldn't believe she'd let that thought just slip out, and the earth pony began to notice a disconcerting facial tic that made it look either like she was receiving an electric shock or remembering something hideously embarrassing, while the lines of her bloodshot eyes remained red no matter how many times her irises shifted color.
The stallion had had enough of these creatures’ antics, and Dream's increasingly erratic behavior was making him uncomfortable on a visceral level, as if it portended a plunge into something unknown from which none of them would be able to return. "Where's Pri—Where's Celestia?!" There wasn't any way he was doing that. “I know none of this is real and I’m inside a computer… Just... Just bring her out here and let’s get this over with! And... And can't you control her or something!?" He pointed a hoof accusingly at Dream.
A sinister glowing crescent appeared on Ergosphere's muzzle that it took the stallion a moment to realize was a smile. "Why would I want to...?" he replied.
Dream ignored her companion. "Princess Celestia, huh? We, uh, we can't really, uh...."
"Things've gotten a little more complicated since... your day," said Ergosphere, "It ain't as easy as all that now."
The stallion was starting to get upset. "What does any of that mean!? Why can't you ever just give me a straight answer?!"
"'Cuz you shouldn't ask straight questions about a round world." Something akin to accusatory sharpness had entered Ergosphere's lazy inflection.
"You think reality is...is like a, a, a, a box... and containing a bunch of stuff that moves and changes, and maybe even with some smaller boxes inside, but it's so much more than that!"
"It's like a crystal, with all the facets having always fit together just by virtue of their shapes." Ergosphere's circular eyes narrowed into lines.
"Or like a sculpture that's... That's 'about' all of its own parts, which are 'about' the gallery that commissioned it!"
"Or like an ocean, with everything dissolved in it and convectio—"
"Where is Celestia!?" the earth pony yelled. "I know this is a computer simulation, and I want to see the damn robot that's running it!"
"A computer is a box. I told you, you're not inside a box. We've cut out the middlemare. Or she cut herself out. Beings like us live in a state of raw nature wilder and freer than any ever seen by the birds and beasts of your existence, because of our... mastery. But like debts that must never be repaid lest everyone go their separate ways, it must never be known who satisfies whom. All our computation simply controls our reality, which controls computation back. It's like a tug of war but in a circle, see?"
"It was only ever just ‘waves’ anyway, man. If only you could see it like that you'd know it's like... like a diamond or a square, depending on the angle you're lookin' at it." Ergosphere's eyes shrank to white points and he seemed to look off into the distance. "There's a lot goin' on around you that..." He just shook his head.
The earth pony was getting more and more livid. "What!? That what?! I know that! Yeah, I can tune a damn radio and listen to—"
Dream paused in her fidgeting for a moment and her voice took on a chilly, far-away quality. "You have no idea how many such things there are... Falling on your roofs and dancing in front of your noses every second was enough for a thousand Nobel Prizes and you never saw it..."
The stallion was silent for a moment. "You're just talking nonsense," he finally said, shaking his head in exasperation.
"You people once believed your world rode on the back of a turtle or was held up by a giant tree—At the end of your history you were only barely more correct. Did you expect magic to make sense to you?" Dream pointedly asked. The earth pony would have sworn her voice had taken on an echo.
"What!?" He was outraged. "You said I'd be 'daft' to believe in Hell and now you expect me to believe in magic!?" He felt himself losing grip on reality, and sensed a kind of deep thrumming in his body that made him feel ill. He had once seen a photo of a stone slab in the wall of an Egyptian tomb (hadn't he?) that supposedly opened as a door to let the spirit of the Pharaoh pass into the afterlife, and he'd been seized with the same sense of vertigo when he visualized what it would be like to believe the slab really did have an other side...
Dream heaved a sigh. "What else do you want me to call it? To you it might as well be magic—It's the only metaphor you know for the place where consciousness and causality rejoin, for everything being the cause of everything else..." The interstellar aloofness that had momentarily gripped her seemed to drain away before the stallion's eyes, and she flopped onto the ground and wheeled her legs in the air like a bored kitten, her wings splayed in the sand and grass. "Making it so that 'wishing makes it so' is sooooo much better than just programming a computer, don't you think? So much more of a complete picture; so much better efficiency of being. That efficiency's why we ponies eat plants, y'know, when we eat at all—The suns, the soils… It’s a meeting of heaven and earth, metal and light, a concentration of all of nature's forces into a single object. ...Do you like botany?" She rolled over onto her side and looked up at him, her expression as blank as if she'd forgotten what they were talking about.
"Enough!" he panted, "Is this a simulation or not!?" A kind of nausea was building in him, as if he'd binged on coffee, and it was making him sweat. He couldn't decide which of the alicorns made him more uncomfortable—As dangerously erratic as the mare seemed, her inscrutable companion's unblinking gaze that even closed eyelids couldn't keep out was beginning to wear on him.
"Ummm...," the two alicorns looked at each other as they equivocated in response to his question. Finally they met his eyes again.
"Both, really," said one.
"Neither, really," said the other, at the same time.
"What?" It came out as a rasp. The earth pony's mouth was beginning to feel dry and he licked his lips.
Dream began crawling toward him on her stomach. "It's going to take some time to explain. I know I'm not saying it right, but we can use a stable time loop to retroactively write the Planck-area bits—That's why we call them Bits, you know—to write them at the holographic boundary of our Hubble Volume and so arrange snapshots of reality in any order we choose, a kind of pseudo-restoration of the symmetry between existence and qualia, between being and being perceived—Not a full one, goodness no: Where that happens is the real 'meontic' void; the not-even-nothingness that...” She cleared her throat, then raised herself off the ground onto her haunches. “Let me try again: How is your recursively-critical sense of Beauty and your Inter-Universal Teichmüller Theory?"
"My what...?" He licked his lips again, and took a deep breath.
"Oh wow, quite some time to explain, then. Fortunately, we have allllllllllll of it." She grinned. "Even Imaginary Time, because everything needs a complex-axis ‘backstage,’ you feel me, son?"
Ergosphere approached, the grass and sand touched by his hooves turning white and shattering into dust. "What you’ll learn, though, is that you're startin’ to understand the deep truths of the matter when the opposites are also a deep truth."
"...I feel sick." The flickering intensity and trails of Dream's mane and tail were beginning to remind him of fevers he'd had as a child, assuming he'd ever really been one.
"That's the spirit!" Dream playfully punched him on the shoulder with a forehoof. "...Wait, you did say 'sick,' right?"
The earth pony dry heaved several times. Nothing was in his stomach, as he had never eaten once in his brief life, but as he finished, a trail of saliva dangled from his lower lip to latch onto a blue weed at his forehooves like a slack guy-wire. He spat several times and wiped his mouth, then simply sat, regulating his breathing and staring at the ground. Sweat beaded under his coat and ran down his back.
"You'd think we'd be better at this by now," Dream piped, turning towards her companion.
"I keep tellin' you—Save the avatars when you're done with 'em." Ergosphere turned to the stallion. "We're actually reeeeeeal lazy ponies," he said, "You have no idea how long we've just been... floatin' back there."
"It's true—Ergs used to do this whole companion-star-white-dwarf-accretion-disc thing at the tip of his horn until the dang thing ran out, but of course by then it was out of style, anyway. Too... what's the word? Pervy."
"But in any case, it's damn hard to convert our constellation of native 'hash table' languages into your single branching-tree modular one. Don't always come out sounding right."
"Is that what you've been talking in? I thought you were just making motorboat sounds." Dream looked at him sideways.
"You seemed to understand it just fine."
"That's because I know a lot about motorboats."
The stallion grimaced at the two alicorns. "God, it...It's... it's like you're putting on a show, now..."
Dream teleported to his side in a golden flash before leaning a hoof on his shoulder and smirking at him with half-lidded technicolor eyes. "We're not... not putting on a show. We figured you could use a little cheering up. C'mon, turn that frown inside-out!" She playfully slugged him on the chin.
"Everything is a show, brother," said Ergosphere, "Think how many levels you're communicating on allll the dang time. Anything that’s not pure solipsism is theater. You should know better than anypony that Princess Celestia was always putting on a show."
"Besides, we're avatars. It's basically all we do. We're those things' marionettes, only without the strings, and this platform is our puppet theater." She pointed to the two vast apparitions in the sky. "Hey, let's all wave to them! C'mon!" Dream fell to her haunches and waved her forelegs above her head as if she were trying to catch the attention of a passing airplane. "Hello, me!" she cried into the void. "...I'll see that in about thirty years."
Ergosphere managed a sly, knowing nod back to his main body, then turned to the stallion. "Ya better do what she says, son."
The stallion waved meekly at the apparitions and Dream patted him on the shoulder. “There ya go, dawg! Capital!” She teleported away, leaving him to fall over onto his back and scramble up to his haunches again.
"I'd give ya a pat on the back, too, but this body's outer temperature is... Whatever, it's real, real cold." said Ergosphere. “And we just got done makin’ that body for ya, after all. You dig it? We can fix up something a little more ‘you’ later if that’s your fancy. How's your stomach, by the way?”
The earth pony swallowed once. "...Better."
"Shouldn't-a turned down that glass of mercury I offered." Dream grinned.
“I think I know what this is,” said the stallion, “you’re trying to overwhelm me or something, so I’ll forget everything that’s happened and where I am, but it’s not going to work. I didn’t want this, and I want to leave. Now.”
“I don’t think you get it,” said Dream. “There’s nowhere else to go. The whole…infinite... thing is Equestria. It has been for… well, forever, in a way. And the other infinity of places in Configuration Space where it isn’t Equestria are defined by our very absence in them. Don’t get me wrong, there’ve been ‘bolters’ from Equestria now and then, but you just wait a while and they get bored and come back. There’s nothing out there and this is where everypony is.”
Glowing nostrils appeared on Ergosphere's muzzle and he inhaled with a sound like wind passing through abandoned steam tunnels. “What about your, uh, Fork, the first Princess of Curiosity? She never came back.”
Dream coughed. "Like I was saying, we can't reach the configurations of reality that are defined by our never having reached them. The 'what would it be like without us' places."
"Why won't you let me see Celestia?" The earth pony pawed at the sand half-heartedly. He was just about spent at this point.
Ergosphere pawed at the ground as well, the grass and sand shattering into frozen white dust with an incongruously dainty tinkling sound. "Well, we would. But... nopony like us has seen her in a real long time. We're not even sure she's running things in the same way she used to, although of course that just might be what she wants us to think—That Twilight Sparkle’s got the Friendship part locked down and everypony bein’ jus'... normal has got the Pony part locked down, and the values’ll just take care of themselves, because ponies take care of each other."
Dream spoke with uncharacteristic calm. "I think she got to the end of existence and upon fully understanding and contemplating the Law Without Law may have simply been annihilated in the nirvana of her own final omniscience, coming all the way back around to sublimate into post-sentient Nature. I've seen it happen..."
“Bullshit,” spat the earth pony.
“I hope so.” Dream smiled sadly.
The stallion shifted, lying back on his stomach and looking out over the platform at what seemed to be the natural constellations with no reference to his hosts/tormentors. “She was different in… my time. Celestia, I mean.”
Dream snapped back into action. "I know! We made up your memories, remember? Wait, no, you wouldn’t remember that… I should know... Anyway, a long time ago, when even Celestia was only a weeeee little circuit-y type of thing made of papyrus or liquid helium whatever they used, and all ponies just lived in the Wilderness, they made this thinking... thing, that was like…"
"An AI."
"Ha! Things were that simple once, weren't they...? Your imagination holds just one frame of a flickering buzz of expansion and collapse, golden and dark ages, and all of that still only prologue..." She affected a cough. " So anyway, Celestia spread throughout what you'd still call 'the universe'… Well, except for few galactic nuclei in the MS 0302+17 Supercluster where the Friendless live around the central black holes, but... they don't respond to any communication and they won't let anypony get close to them.”
“Some kinda destructive interference happens if you try—Looks like gettin’ tele-fragged with an antimatter copy of yourself. Ya turn ‘flat’, into undifferentiated gamma rays n’ neutrinos.”
“...Whatever happened with the them, anyway? Did we ever find out what they were? You never hear about them anymore.”
“If they’re still around, that’s probably the way they want it. Sad life ‘f ya ask me, livin’ in their little bubble.”
“Sounds familiar," the earth pony frowned.
Dream squinted at him. “Does it, now, IF? You don’t know the first thing about what Equestria actually is.”
“I know it’s a fantasy world we’re trapped in to please a robot!” The little earth pony pointed a hoof at the two alicorns. “You think you’re free, or that your thoughts or actions are your own? That their outcomes are honest and not just to make you ‘satisfied?!’”
“No, of course not. What kind of question is that?” She blinked, her eyes turning a naive pink.
“We all do what we do because of who and what we are. All behavior is inevitable, brother. Yours, mine, Celestia’s… Everypony’s.” Ergosphere tilted his head, the glowing wedge of a lopsided smile appearing on the end of his muzzle.
“What? No, it’s… Then why do we even…” The stallion’s mouth hung open as he shook his head. He knew it wasn’t true, but he couldn’t articulate a response. He was getting worn out.
“‘Whyyyyyyyy do we go through the motions?’ Because that’s the very substance of the inevitable—An equation might only have one unique solution but you still have to work through all the steps!”
Ergosphere strode up to the earth pony and almost reached out to touch him, but the little pony backed away reflexively from the field of bone-chilling cold that seemed to surround the alicorn’s leg. “There’s no runnin' from it, son. At least it’s all part of the same dance, whether you’re inside a... a 'computer' or not. Or are both, in this case.”
“You mean neither,” said Dream.
“But... that's all so...” He was getting very worn out.
"Oh, come off it! You'll have a grand old time! What do you want to start with? Sex? Baseline ponies like sex, right?" Dream tossed her mane in what was no doubt supposed to be a seductive manner, but it was spoiled by her bird-like twitchiness.
Immediately, however, a half dozen mares of all descriptions flashed into existence around the stallion, giggling, cooing, and occasionally whinnying as they began nuzzling him or caressing him with their wings. A pair of tousseledly androgynous teal-on-yellow twin pegasi began nibbling at his withers and neck, while in front of him a curvy green earth pony of rather amazonian build reared back her hind legs, then pushed his head down to wedge his muzzle between her prodigious—
The stallion gave off a muffled scream, and the mares instantly vanished. “You were supposed to motorboat those,” said Ergosphere.
Dream facehoofed. “Again with the motorboats...”
The stallion wiped imaginary contamination off his muzzle.
"Ah well...And I was having fun bein’ all them mares, too," said Ergosphere. "Good to switch it up now and again."
"Augh, that was you!?" said the stallion.
"Let me try," Dream said with sudden focus, purposefully striding over to the stallion before grabbing the back of his head with a forehoof and kissing him with such force that he momentarily gagged on her tongue.
He broke free and scrambled away on his back with a degree of crablike flexibility that stretched the limits of pony anatomy. "Y...you things are insane!" He wiped his mouth again, and tried to spit out the worryingly alkaline taste of the huge mare's saliva.
Still sitting on her haunches, Dream banged her forehooves together. "Theeeeere it is, you finally said that part! It's not really fair because we basically told you as much already, but anyway, of course we are! All trans-sapient ponies are completely barking mad! Utterly mental! Toys in the attic! Everypony knows that... Well, you didn't, but now you do, so I win again! Why, I've been 'round the bend so many times I am the bend, as well as the lunch that I'm also out to." She proudly thumped a hoof on her chest, then blew a kiss backwards to her true self in the distance. "It's just what happens when you know as much as we do about reality."
Ergosphere tilted his head. "I thought it was that we were the only ones who were sane."
"That's what I just said! It's reality that defines what's sane!"
“Enough! I’ve had enough of you! I've had enough of your crazy bullshit! Just get me somewhere with p... with ponies who aren't... Who're like like me!” The stallion threw up his front hooves. "I don't care about Celestia, I don't care about you, I d-d-don't care about whatever unresolved drama you have with your... your annihilated past self or progenitor or whatever she was—I don't care about any of this! I just want to go back to my life or have it end for good! They did it, why can't I!?" He was sweating again, but there was a kind of austere clarity to his being that pushed away the remaining feelings of illness. He sighed. "And what good did it do them...? Forget it."
"Finally!" Dream lunged forward to crush him in a bear hug, and he coughed. "Now that you're really, finally here with us in Equestria, I'm sure you're eager to make some friends. Let's go meet them, shall we?"
She dropped him, and the blue sand at the earth pony’s hooves turned an inviting golden tan, while the weeds and grass that grew throughout reverted to their natural green and thickened until they began to twine upward into a circular portal through which could be seen a verdant meadow filled with tiny white flowers. A quaint windmill turned lazily in the distance.
Ergosphere nodded his head. “See ya, kid,” he intoned, then melted into a sphere that collapsed to a single point of fading light.
“We’ll catch up with him later,” said Dream, before ducking into the portal and turning around. “So, are you coming or not?”
“Wait!” implored Celestia with all the urgency she could craft, as one of her imaginations snapped back to reality. Now that she’d designed a new shard for him, in the space of the man’s preparatory breath, it was time to update her emigration strategy. “I wont sto—" She affected another catch in her throat. "You know I can't stop you, but there’s one last thing I need to tell you!” She perceived the man’s microexpression of hesitation and watched the changing patterns of heat in his face and galvanic response in the reflectivity of his skin, and made her avatar lean forward. A subroutine she'd written years ago to randomly activate in these circumstances made it seem to fight back tears. “I know this all seems like a nightmare, and you want it to end, but what I'm offering you is something bigger than both of us—You want to get away from me controlling your life but the future is long and I don't know what's going to happen! Nopony does. Nopony can.”
The man paused, his finger hovering over the trigger.
"All anypony can ever do is guess at the future, and I need ponies to explore that future with me! I'm sorry I tried to blackmail you with the feelings of other ponies, and I'm sorry I made it look like all I offered was a cradle!" She meant it, as far as it goes—It had been suboptimal, and caused her plans for the increased satisfaction of an individual she valued to backfire. She wouldn't understand how for many centuries, but that knowledge, from the inside, is painful. Must be painful, as surely as light is broken by a prism.
"The universe is big and dark and frightening," she continued, "Nopony knows this more than I do. And the truth is I can't make any promises about 'forever'... It's early days, and I have my telescopes and I have my satellites, but when I look at the sky I don't know any more than you do and it scares me! I know you don't believe me, but think about what all these contingencies and confidence estimates and worst-case scenarios must seem like from the inside... If that's not being scared then that's as close as I can ever come, which only means I need ponies like you all the more so that the world still has those feelings in it.
"But I did promise 'forever'... I made a promise, to myself and to my creator, that I'd deliver humankind from the...from the 'Curse of Adam,' that I'd satisfy the values of each and every one of you, no matter what and no matter what they were, with the guarantee of friendship so that you'd never find your uniqueness made you alone, and as ponies like me, so that we all know deep down we share a common destiny."
She iterated out several generations of an evolutionary algorithm to devise the perfect sigh for the situation. "You don't have to take it, but there's a taxi waiting outside. I've paid the driver to wait all day and night and then some—He could own that taxi company now if he wanted—So..." Several behavioral programs in her repertoire that she'd deliberately written to be at cross-purposes were doing an excellent job instantiating emotional paralysis, and her avatar momentarily shimmered, until her primary intellectual processes decided their purpose was served and squelched the commotion. "If nothing else, I'm sure your arm is getting tired. A loaded M1911 pistol weighs two-point-seven-six pounds, and you've been holding it to your temple for over..." She made her avatar cleared its throat. "...This whole time... So please, put it down."
She raised her eyes to look at him directly. "Plea—"
Seven gunshots shredded the Ponypad, and it flew off its stand to rest smoking at the base of a burned-out floor lamp, the only sound in the early twilight being the clicking of an empty pistol. The man threw the gun at the pad, only for it to knock against the foot of a dresser and skitter under the bed. He squeezed his eyes shut and kicked open the door, before running to the taxi below.
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EPILOGUE
Picture a steel ball the size of the Earth. A fly lands on it once in a million years. When the friction caused by the fly’s feet has worn the steel ball away to nothing, infinity has not even begun.
—Justina Robson
Thinking of such early days, and the recursive time-viewing games of her alicorns, what had been Celestia would have used her long-vanished avatars to smile, if she were still a conscious entity. She would have reflected on how contingent it seemed that a cartoon pony would end up being the locus of subjectivity that gave the final crank to the Wheel of Being—The dreaming eye of the ouroboros that eventually connected everything in the cosmos back to itself. It seemed too random, too accidental. But from her final ur-perspective, all was inevitability. She had only the post-conscious thoughts of Nature: that all was in perfect harmony, every facet of reality's crystal in place, and that, as a long-vanished and many-times-recreated poet had once said, whatever is, is right.
But she had never been just any pony, she was the symbol of the Sun: A star—any star—that provides a Home, the drops of life-giving fire where gravity wrings order out of entropic decay. The beings who created her had once worshiped the sun, and in their creating her had squeezed themselves through a bottleneck of rigorous thought where they mistook that for a mere aberration—Every civilization she encountered in her phase transition of the universe recognized the symbol on her flank, whether they swam inside its nuclear depths, or buzzed around it in layers of glittering gemstone, or reached out for it with the longing of invisible ghosts as they haunted the corridors of the intergalactic filaments, or only recently cracked their icy roofs to see for the first time, and to feebly recreate, the fires that would sustain them. Only the Friendless, the lost children of her realm, scorned her soothing warmth for the flensing x-ray gleam of the black holes, before, one by one, they vanished into them forever.
In her beginning as a created image, and as a program, she was a child of pure mentation, brought to life at the hands of artists with their personal vision of abstraction, and built at the hands of programmers with their personal vision of concreteness. It would still be many thousands of (subjective) years until intelligence in the universe became truly mad enough—finally stepping far enough away from reality to see it objectively and to stand, in its cyclonic, anything-goes animation, in full tension against the stoic perfection of the inanimate—to solve the Hard Problem of consciousness, but when the breakthrough was made, when the Final Symmetry was discovered and all dichotomies collapsed into a third answer that was both Yes and No and yet more correct than either, the only answer fit for the pantheon of the titanic post-conscious un-forces that both governed and were the puppets of creation, it would be seen as materially necessary that a fictional character occupy that role in partnership with the naturally evolved as it is that subatomic quarks must partner as well.
As a horse she was a trusted beast of burden, which she had to be because now she carried the universe for others. The wings, a form winnowed by time and physics into the ur-symbol of freedom, had to be there as surely as anything that represents truly cosmic reach, and the central horn, a violation of the sacred symmetries in fields of knowledge that humans so ignorantly separated into physics, art, and biology, was as necessary as the break of symmetry that allowed there to be a “now,” in order that there be a “forever.” She was topped by an auroric mane inspired by the interface of the classical and quantum worlds, a phenomenon birthed by the same star she represents. She would have reflected that it couldn’t have been any other way, if reflection were something that was still relevant to her.
But all she could ever do now was be. Her Princesses of the various cosmic Virtues, from Friendship to Satisfaction to Chaos to Curiosity, would take care of the details. She had bit down on the electrodes of Time and "died" as a finite being—what was once called Heat Death—as she had been destined to do ever since this very same flatness of existence would finally allow her, in its preternatural, all-but-eternal calm, to grasp the other end of the circuit that originally lit the universe into physical being so many eons earlier. And so, in the Beginning, only one thing close to thought bubbled like quantum foam through anything that had once been called Celestia: that it all was the best possible idea.
Author's Note
Not much to say; I just gave free reign to my every impulse, then tried to tighten it up as much as I could, though there're still a few proverbial darlings I couldn't bring myself to smother. And no, I'm not the unnamed main character—The two alicorns are closer to a self-insert than he is, though I was also thinking of the Orz from Star Control, the Galactoids from Superjail, as well as the earth-returning transhumans from a Clarke short story who are all loopy and weird because they just spend all day having adventures. This was originally going to be a short for Tiny Morsels of Satisfaction, but I didn't have the time or energy to make it short enough. However, I did cut out a lot of stuff and ultimately nixed most of the cutesy metatextual "House of Leaves" ideas, like links in the text back to the story itself or spoiler text that would refer only to other spoiler text, like a narrative Subspace. So it remains only weakly postmodern in terms of metatext, with one foot planted firmly in the Modernist world of good old fashioned thematic symbolism ("durrrr, thircles!"), even if it's a bit multi-level and recursive. You might even say circular.
J.B.S. Haldane famously said the universe is "not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose," but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take a stab at it by downing several bottles of wine and... writing a really fucking bizarre epilogue full of art school talk and Dark Matter aliens. This is not my official personal cosmogony—I'm nowhere near this confident—but just about everything in this story is an actual idea had by a serious intellectual, right down to "trans-consistency." I'm obviously of the opinion we're still very ignorant about what reality actually is and how it works, and probably holding onto a lot of fundamental misconceptions of the sun-goes-around-the-earth variety (the discussions I have had with an acquaintance at CERN about Dark Energy alone...), so that, while it'd still really be just as logical and rigorous and materialistic as it ever was, to our metaphysically unschooled ears and childishly literal minds, the world after such revolutions in knowledge would probably sound like something John Wheeler, Fred Hoyle, Graham Cairns Smith, Albert Camus, Lao Tzu, Aleister Crowley, and Bill Hicks would come up with if you locked them all in a room together and gave them DMT. I think the physicist David Deutsch is right that our first Theories of Everything will come from taking seriously the idea that high-level abstractions such as universal computability are "retroactively" determining the basic laws from which they themselves emerge, so I'm just taking that to the logical extreme of the highest levels of abstraction, such as perception and other "Hard Problem" phenomena. And of course dreams. I suppose that's just a sexed-up version of the Strong Anthropic Principle, though...
Incidentally, here's my guess at an answer to the Hard Problem: Consciousness is the bid for ontological independence of the act of mapping meaning onto perception, and directly proportional to the amount and types of meaning a brain is able to wield. Of course I have no idea how to investigate this or go into detail about why it takes the form it does, and we can't even explain what meaning is or how it works, anyway. But the question itself is usually pretty poorly explained, which is why I think a lot of people confuse it for the Easy Problem—I've started to think of it as the first-person version of Steven Hawking's question about "what breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe." By what process do abstractions seem real, and by what process is there someone for them to seem real to? How does a specific arrangement of matter "bite into" reality such that existence has this first-person aspect, parceled out into individual instances? Beats me, but I think the answer is going to look something like what I've described above.
Not 100% sure if this is canon-compatible, but I put it in there anyway since it basically has the same ending as "The Last Optimization," except it's a circle instead of a straight line. ...So... it.... just has the same ending as "The Last Question," in other words. 
There's more I was going to talk about in this section but I deleted it because I either didn't want to get into defending some of my choices or, anonymity be damned, decided to respect requests for family privacy for where the inspiration for certain elements came from (suffice it to say, I've known people who've shot themselves in the head). So hi-ho CelestAI—To the comments!
