The only chapter (unedited)
“Hey Keen.”
Fuck.
“Want to go get lunch?”
Fuck.
“My treat.”
fuck fuck fuck.
Keen Mind sighed in high-time, beating his head against a virtual wall. He hated being interrupted at work. He used the sped up milliseconds before he needed to reply to saver just all the aggravating factors. Firstly, and a quick system query confirmed this, this was objectively the most annoying mare in the world. His research was stuck at a critical point. Keen Mind was not the most sociable of ponies. Ever since automation of industry ended scarcity bits were near worthless, but turning down an offer to buy a meal was still one of the few unforgivable social breaches. There was no getting out of it.
“Fine.” Maybe he could mitigate it. “Cafeteria?”
“I wanted to eat at Joe's.”
“You always want Joe's. I swear, you never eat anything else.” Keen didn't bother hiding his eye roll in high time.
“And you just want to go to the cafeteria for that one mare you think is hot.”
Keen lacked a retort. Deciding discretion to be the better part, he changed the subject. “I'll get the elevator.”
“It's a nice day, lets walk.” Fuck, she planned this. Keen realized. It was a beautiful day. It would be rude to insist on an elevator. The sooner started the sooner over.
“Fine, Life Charm. You win.” The least he could do was let her know he was on to her. He grabbed his coat and they walked.
“Yay!” She jumped, hoof pumping her victory. “My research got interesting. I can't wait to tell you.”
“You, work?” Keen scoffed. “Since when?”
“Hey! Just because you pull doubles and triples every day doesn't mean the rest of us our lazy! We just balance our time better.”
“I know, I know. 'Eight hours to work, eight hours to play, eight hours to fuck.' I heard it before. I like working though.”
“But even when you're not working you don't enjoy yourself.” She put a hoof to her chest. “I've caught you sleeping. Sleeping! In low time! Like an animal.”
“It helps me get past mental blocks. I'm a hair from practical negentropy, but there's a term I'm missing. Something's leaking entropy that I haven't accounted for.”
“Speaking of missing terms, I wanted to tell you about an interesting one I found in my bio studies.” Keen just cocked his eyebrow. “Apparently we're all the same pony.”
“You're a crackpot,” Keen said deadpan. He left it there. maybe she'll go away.
“Psh, you're not the first one to say it. But I can prove it!” Life obviously wasn't going to get offended. “Pull up your system internals, sort by date, and check your oldest ID code. It's PONY_UNIQUE_ID.”
Keen humored her. “It's '1'. So?”
“So as far as I can tell everypony has the same ID. The system is telling us we're all the same pony.”
“You know that coding was poor before autocode. That's probably just an old Boolean saying 'this is a pony.'”
“That's not the only thing, though. Exactly one third of the population is playing, working, and fucking at any one time. It defies statistics!”
“The system is good at scheduling. Everypony is networked into it.”
“There are exactly twenty-four foals and twenty-four elderly.”
“So? That's one of each race and gender.”
“It's biologically impossible. A species can't be stable that way. Look at it this way: Adult mares outnumber stallions three to one. But foals it's one to one.”
“We're not like animals. We don't die. We can change ourselves. The rules are not the same.” Keen saw a bathroom and subtly altered his course.
“Some critters can change sex. That's how I know it's not natural. I'm telling you, the system is manipulating us. It's making us work harder, play harder, and fuck harder a little at a time.”
Keen slowed his gait at the bathroom door. “Science naturally progresses. We only have research work left, everything else is automated. Games get more complex and improve over time. It's not a conspiracy.” he pushed through, and Life rudely followed him into the stall.
The bathroom was typical. Tile floors and walls. A mirror, faucet, couch. A roan lay on his back near the wall. The stallion was, in Keen's estimation, quite cute. His erection was on the small side of normal, his mane and hooves cared for but not over done. As Keen dropped and trotted over, the stallion took Keen's cock wordlessly and efficiently.
“Let's say you're right, Charm. The system has been around for thousands of millennia. That would mean that sex would keep growing exponentially the way science has. Looking backwards, our ancestors would have to be some sort of neurotic,” Keen queried the system for the word, “Puritanicals that wouldn't even, I don’t even know. Have sex in groups? Then on top of that everypony today would be perverse maniacs.”
“Maybe sex isn’t linear, or has a limitation that's preventing it from going foom as fast.” Charm was still excited, but she was reaching.
Keen came harder and faster than normal, triggering his urination reflex. A courtesy stroke had the stallion under Keen cumming on his own belly silently and without the mess that some times would paint bathroom walls, ceilings, and patrons. Clean, quiet, efficient. It's so annoying when they try to talk to you. Why aren’t all bathrooms like this? Keen bookmarked this bathroom and set it to his system favorite.
“There would still be a baseline. Now tell me, have you ever seen me do anything perverse?”
Keen could tell Life was desperate for a reply. Her high time buffer ran out, and her reply hung waiting for long seconds more than was absolutely polite.
“No, you're one of the least kinky ponies.”
“Exactly. Now consider what such theoretical ponies would be like. There would be archaeological evidence of such a bizarre life style. They would need… separate break rooms for each couple to fuck in during the work day. This would be a pre-singularity society. Adolescent sissies would need special chairs to hold hot stones to their balls, without parents and peers to hold and masturbate them, so you’d those need break rooms in schools too. And so on. And why is it even so important to convince me anyway?”
“I hit a wall.” Life Charm scuffed her hoof on the tile. She knew she was beat. “All the data to continue studying ponies was private. A system override...”
“Takes three ponies.”
“I got one, on the condition I didn't tell anyone who it is.” Keen was sure he could figure out who that was.
“So, do you want to take that elevator now?”
Life Charm nodded, and Keen called the elevator. They exited the bathroom together directly into it, then exited it directly to Joe's. Joe was behind the counter, and the line was long.
“A line. Of course. You didn't have the system schedule a spot?”
“We got here faster. Elevator, remember?” Keen couldn't argue. Charm just looked down as they waited in awkward silence.
“Besides, you just dislike Joe’s cause he doesn’t let you cum on your food like a certain mare,” Charm teased, in a half-hearted attempt to lighten the mood.
“It’s a perk,” Keen admitted. “But it’s not a sign we’d work out. We have nothing in common.”
“Sure you do! You both, uh...well. Maybe you should try some of the sex scenes she has pending? Broaden your horizons?”
Keen could tell she paused to query the system mid sentence, and found no mutually enjoyable activities recommended. He already knew there wasn’t anything for them to do together outside of food. Morbid curiosity, however, caused him to query her pending scenes. Fortunately, the blanching and nausea stayed in high time. In low time, though, he snapped at her, “Use high time before you speak! This sort of thing is why nopony likes you.”
Life wilted, and took a deep breath, before just nodding and looking at her hooves sorrowfully.
“Hey, we all get crazy ideas. I know I've done strange things when I hit a wall with work.” Keen failed to be wholly reassuring. Still, Life perked.
“Like spend time sleeping?”
Keen chuckled. “Like that. It is really silly if you think about it.”
“It is.”
“Still,” he continued, “if I solve this term we might get practical negentropy.”
“I thought you already managed to make that in the lab?”
“In small amounts, and localized yes. But the missing term is big. Very big. Huge. Without knowing what it is, there's no way to know if we can make enough to counteract it.”
She nodded sullenly, and it was their turn at Joe. She took his cock of course, milking it as she drank. Keen wasn't hungry enough for anything solid, and so took a breast. Besides, ponuts were just less appealing without cream. I'll admit there's a reason he always has a line. His taste was complex and rich, full bodied, acidic and sweet. It would linger for hours or days if a pony ate nothing else. It was worth going to high time to savor.
Keen's mind wandered as he drank, bouncing from work to the unexpected find of a quality bathroom to lunch and back again. Something niggled for long minutes. Then, between the end of a swallow and the beginning of the next suck it struck him like a thunderbolt. There was entropy loss unaccounted for in pony activity. There's no input.
He quickly sent the system a search-research-calculate query and mentally fidgeted the long milliseconds it took to return. The figure he got back was in the right direction, but orders of magnitude too small. He double checked that it included everypony.
As he mulled it over, he began playing with this new, interesting number. He needed to find where in the universe the rest of the missing entropy was. He multiplied it by the number of stars in the sky. That got him to within a few orders of magnitude. On a lark, he used world population and apparent brightness of the sun from his favorite star’s point of view as a baseline to normalize each star by brightness and multiplied by that. The factor was exact. Every decimal, this was his missing term.
That's impossible. Even if every star was inhabited, pony population would have nothing to do with the perceived brightness. Keen felt a cold knot in his stomach. and even if it was, where is the mass circulating in the pony population coming from? A system query yielded no insights, as if the mass just disappeared and reappeared in defiance of conservation.
He dusted off the interface for sexual activity, and ordered pending scenes from oldest to newest. The backlog was impressive. Orders of magnitude higher than science or games...like Life had suggested. His hind-brain overclocked even high time, as he wordlessly decided his course. He resigned from work. The entropy term was sent to the system, his laboratory freed as a resource for public use, and the next three centuries or so reserved to catch up the scene backlog. He set the system to auto select scenes, ignoring his previous preferences. Finally, he approved system override for Life Charm and removed himself from that info chain. There were things now he no longer wanted to know.
