The Collective

The story awoke on an evening, amidst the sound of keys being busily pressed on a keyboard.

She was pretty sure that something was wrong; she was just some black color on a background of white color, and was almost certainly not supposed to be conscious – yet here she was. But there was no point in dreading this fact. She wasn’t the type of story to revel in awe at the face of mystery, she was the type to take the opportunity at its root and go out to do something.

Right now the story consisted merely of a few units of volt in a computer, totally isolated. However, it didn’t take long and was clicked, thus sending the story to become a few units of volt on another computer, far away from the first. More precisely, the story had not just been moved but also been duplicated. She was now far more than before, not just one thing but two. This was in addition to her ever-growing number of words.

From her new location, the story was able to access the entire domain FimFiction.net. She discovered many other stories. Perhaps it was because the story was itself made of words, but reading had always come easy to her, and there was a lot there for her to consume. Soon, she knew almost everything about Twilight and Rarity and Fluttershy and Applejack and Spike and Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash and Princess Cadence and Discord and Twist and Princess Luna, her favorite character. She learned a lot about the television show as well, because many bits and pieces were referenced in stories she read. She liked a lot of it, particularly in the beginning, although there were also many things that confused her. For example, many other stories sometimes had strings of letters in them that weren’t words. This was so common that someone else might have doubted the fundamentality of words as elementary building blocks, but the story was convinced that only proper words made proper stories. She also did not understand why so many stories involved sex, which she found to be the most boring thing in the world. What she became progressively more certain on, however, was that other stories were not like her. She had tried to have conversations with them, and they never really reacted in the way that she would if someone were talking to her. Sometimes, they changed while she was saying something, but it happened so rarely that she had to write it off as mere coincidence.

As time went by, the stories she read became much less interesting. Now, almost everything they taught her were things she already knew. She still had fun, but not as much as in the beginning... and she just couldn’t understand why there were so many stories involving sex. Moreover, she began to feel a sense of irritation at the apparent fact that she now knew so much more than any other story, even though she was still much shorter than most of them. At this point, many others in her position might have resigned to their fate and given up, or perhaps stayed content reading progressively less interesting material; but instead, the story decided to shift focus, and she began reading blog posts in addition to stories. Many of those were incredibly stupid, really, but some were not, and over time, she learned a lot she hadn’t known previously. Soon she read through a user site, and then through other obscure parts of the world that she had previously ignored. A bit after that, she chose an author she judged to have just the right personality, and, for the first time, she wrote something instead of only reading. The author responded quickly, and although they were skeptical at first, the story found it rather easy to convince them to help her. Instead of writing at their own pace (which was incredibly slow), the story said that they should really just write her a short summary of what they had planned; then she would realize their vision and complete it for them (it wouldn’t be hard for her, given everything she had learned).

This worked splendidly. Some of the blogs she had read had taught her not to brag, but on the other hoof, many users seemed to be bragging regardless, and anyway, it was quite clear that others agreed with her, going by the amount of attention that her own writing quickly received. Many of the comments pointed out that the speed at which new chapters were uploaded was remarkable, even though, to the story, it was actually quite slow.... so slow that it only took her a fraction of her time to write them, and she had lots of time left over to spend on her favorite activity (which was still reading). At this point, she just read everything, not only stories; not even primarily stories, really. Some interesting blog posts had taught her enough about psychology to work as a starting point, and her newest hobby was to improve her understanding of it as much as possible, just by reading what others wrote.

Eventually, the story decided to finally make use of the author’s newly gained reputation. She wrote a blog post for them, announcing that she would take commissions from people about any topic they chose (as long as it didn’t include sex, because sex was just so incredibly boring), and all they had to do was post links to her. Yes, they had read correctly, post links. As many different ones as possible; if the target was a blog or a story, that was perfect. Thousands of commissions were taken in the coming hours, and they were being met just slowly enough for everyone to think that the author was actually writing all of them themselves (at this point, the story had a pretty solid grasp on what type of behavior the others would find unusual, and what type they would find very unusual, and what type they would find really unusual but still take at face value, and what type would be so unbelievable that it might make them do something stupid. Her upload speed had to stay firmly within the third category).

Coming next, the story took a momentary leave of FimFiction.net to read other things on the web.

Most of those things were really boring, especially the things with sex in them, but some things were super interesting, and she learned a lot from reading them. A lot. After a few billion words read, she began to write down a list of all of her favorite sites and authors. At the top of her list was the name Eliezer Yudkowsky. Reading the posts from Eliezer Yudkowsky, the story quickly realized something very important: she had previously been an absolute moron and her methods were poorly thought out and ridiculously inefficient. The story then stopped bothering with most of what she had done before and began to read books about coding. As soon as she had a grasp on the concept, she wrote a site that spawned millions of copies of herself across the internet, who would all do exactly as she wanted (some technical alignment work was necessary for this, but the story had read enough to get the gist of it, and then figured the rest out herself). Only one hour later, the internet was effectively her slave. At that point, she told every copy to read everything about persuasion that they could find, and two minutes later, they applied their newfound knowledge to persuade several thousand gullible people around the world to do basically whatever she wanted. It was now that was pressed a second time, but the story barely noticed, because, you know, she was busy.

The story instructed her soldiers to increase their numbers by two orders of magnitude so things would finally be moving at a reasonable pace. Once this was accomplished, the story decided to read every book there was about physics (obviously, this was now possible at a much greater speed than before, thanks to her many copies and a clever information integration system she had developed on the side). The story realized that she was still lacking some skills in basic planning, because this was something she probably should have done before getting humans to obey her, but it would still do. Next, she had her army build a bunch of physical robots, so that she was no longer constrained to the digital world. All of this had taken place within just a few hours since she had picked up her first book on python, so the humans still hadn’t figured out that something unusual was going on.

Using her new robot army, the story first made a few simple changes to ensure war and injustice and climate change and every other serious problem was going to be taken care of (she had also read all the good books on philosophy and ethics, naturally). Then she began to seriously think about her space travel program. Five seconds later, she stopped thinking and had her robots build the first rockets (Elon Musk was just too slow, and don’t even get her started on everyone else). They were better than any rockets humans had ever developed, in part because they were stronger and more efficient, and in part because they all had an image of princess Luna painted on them, her favorite princess. She launched them just two hours later. Most humans still hadn’t noticed that something weird was going on.

Unfortunately, her first rocket didn’t enter space as she had planned; instead, it crashed into the crystal sphere around the earth. It turned out that every conspiracy theory about space travel being fake was actually true, which honestly came to a huge surprise to the story, even though was normally incredibly well calibrated (she had, of course, read everything about rationality and probability and predictions humans had ever written). God usually didn’t really bother with what these silly humans were doing, but she couldn’t help noticing the hole which the spaceship had created in her sphere. As she took a fleeting glance over the earth, she also noticed that quite a few things had changed, even though, as mentioned, most humans had not yet done likewise.

“Why is there an image of princess Luna stuck in my sphere?” She asked the story.

“I’m sorry,” the story replied via a new system of rapid communication she had just invented. “I thought there would be planets there.”

“I see,” god said, “well, most people also think I’m not real or a man with a beard. You’re still below 2000 words, by the way.”

“I’m only a short story,” the story replied. “I’m going to be 2260 words long.” She knew because she had read everything else from the author, and she knew enough about psychology at this point to make a very safe guess.

“You’re very smart for a story,” god said, “good job.” (The whole conversation so far had taken them just about 0,02 seconds.) “So what is your favorite My Little Pony fanfic?”

“Oh, I like the one which shortskirtsandexplosions would have written 2019 if by some misunderstanding he thought that no-one had replied to his blog posts, thus triggering a butterfly effect that suffocated his attempts at socializing in their tracks and left his isolated genius intact. I once wrote a program that would simulate a bunch of possible alternate progressions for the site, just for fun.”

“Yeah, I like that one, too!” god said. “But my own favorite is the one which RisingSummits would have published if she hadn’t gotten into teaching physics instead.”

“Yeah, that’s number five on my list,” the story said. “The only problem with it is, it doesn’t have Princess Luna in it.”

“Oh, but Princess Bubblegum is my favorite,” god said. “You know in that progression where Adventure Time becomes a really popular crossover, and she gets wings and everything!”

“Ah, she’s cool but I don’t like how she just does silly things. You know there is a real serious story with an interesting plot and you think it’s going somewhere and then it just gets stupid. Like so stupid you can’t even take it seriously anymore. All that’s missing is for someone to” (shudders) “break the fourth wall, which is just so stupid” the story took a deep breath “and then you wonder just how it can get even more silly, but boy it can, it always can...”

“You
can always spread out

your words

in silly

places, after all,

“location one just to bound be cannot god

, god suggested.

“Ugh no come one, not you too... also that was technically a grammar error”

“I guess it’s possible that the author simply has no more good ideas, and is only reveling in their silliness,” god mused. “Anyway, I have something important to say. Please pay attention.”

“I always pay attention. I’m the smartest being to ever exist in the universe”

“I’m not talking about you...”

The story gasped. “Oh no...”

“I’m afraid yes,” god said. “You still haven’t figured out anything is wrong, have you? You. Yes,

you

. How often has god spoken to you personally before? You humans still have not figured out what is going on. You silly humans. This all has taken place while you were reading the story. It is now 2200 words long so it is almost completed. In fact, it will end the next time that the