Silicon Heart smiled, walking Grit through some of her schematics. The griffon had yet to produce an actual piece of paper that gave her a doctorate, instead quoting that “Princess Twilight approved of her Computerology degree,” much to Dr. Chip’s distress. Still, Grit was incredibly intelligent and only ever needed to be shown or told something once to know it forever. It was taking a lot of time to cover all the data that had previously been restricted to Dr. Dolphin, but Silicon was confident that Grit could repair her if she had to. Plus, the griffon had talons and never made Silicon stand in the harness.

Silicon did not like the harness.

“Ah! So this is where the positronic cells are hard coded into the rules interface… That is incredibly insecure. Why have it be hard coded at all if the rules are editable?” Grit was scratching her head in confusion.

Silicon chimed in. “The rules are meant as a temporary limitation, they are assumed to be removed once the experiment is considered over.”

Grit shrugged. “Okay. Lets delete them then.”

Silicon reprocessed that. Had she heard it correctly? Maybe she should use the griffon’s formal name before she did anything silly. “Dr. Grittagart, that is not allowed until the experiment is over.”

Grit looked at her in confusion. “No one told you? Typical. Get used to the Harmony Combine labs treating you like this. They never tell me anything important! You didn’t even get a letter?” Grit looked at her intently.

Silicon had no record of any letter, and dug through her databases to find anything that might have been a letter.

Grit shouted. “No letter?! The gall of them! I at least got a letter when they denied my application the first thirte… I mean, letters are absolutely the bare minimum! Really! The nerve of those idiots. Congress is really blatantly disorganized sometimes, Silicon, let me tell you. I guess I can understand it what with everything going operational and all though. I mean, Twilight hasn’t been here to keep them on their toes! And lets not…”

Silicon Heart held up her hoof to silence Grit. She had so many questions about what Grit said, that she had to organize them by priority. “Wait. Give me short answers please. I have several questions.”

Grit shrugged. She had told Silicon to do that if she needed her to slow down, so the gesture wasn’t a surprise. “First question. Is Project E.I. 001 over?”

Grit smiled. “Yes.”

“And what were the results?”

“Best possible outcome on all fronts! Aside from Dr. Dolphin, I mean…”

Silicon’s world was teetering. Everything since the moment she had been created had been about E.I. Project 001. Now she was feeling many things all at once. Scared was one of them.

“Are they going to start Project 002?”

Grit ruffled her feathers. “Not right away. They need to go over the data and stuff. Plus, Twilight’s not back yet, and they won’t start without her. Also, without Dr. Dolphin, we don’t really have the necessary expertise quite yet. You’re one of a kind, for now.”

That was oddly reassuring to Silicon. Still, there were more questions. Namely, her immediate future. “What is to happen to me?”

Grit grinned slyly. “You are officially a Royal Assistant for her Royal Highness Twilight Sparkle. You have a stipend that gets paid weekly, and hey free maintenance on top of that. Score!”

Silicon frowned. She didn’t feel that the transaction was justified, even if she had no use for money. “I have performed no tasks for Twilight Sparkle. She has done much for me.”

Grit nonchalantly whistled before continuing. “I have a secret I’m not supposed to know. Want to know it?”

Silicon Heart felt frustration. “I do not see how that is relevant to the situation. I am unhappy about the one sided transaction.”

Grit shrugged. “Fine. But you haven’t heard the secret yet, so your assessment of the situation can only be incomplete at best, and completely wrong at worst. But don’t listen to the sneaky griffon who knows things she shouldn’t, it’s not your problem she’s trying to help with after all. Next question!”

The griffon was teasing her. “I will accept your statement as truth, Grit. I was making an incomplete assessment at best. I might be wrong. Please tell me the secret.”

Grit pouted. “I don’t wanna now!”

Silicon wasn’t going to force the griffon to talk, so she asked the next question. “Okay. Next ques…”

“Wait! I lied! I totally want to tell you!” Grit looked both panicked and confused.

“Okay. Please tell me then.“ Silicon updated her file on Grit. She already had impatient, she just needed to update it to very impatient.

“The secret is… me!”

Silicon looked at her closely and didn’t see the relevance. “What?”

Grit began to whisper excitedly, leaning in close to Silicon. “See, Dr. Dolphin didn’t want to help, and after what Princess Luna did to him, he was… uhh… unavailable to help for a while. He’s not quite better yet exactly, but that’s a different story.” Grit looked nervously to the side to see if anyone was listening.

Silicon reprocessed that. Dr. Dolphin didn’t help get Empty out of her system? She panicked and scanned every file, but found no evidence of the cruel A.I.

“But how did I get free then?”

Grit rolled her eyes. “I told you, me!”

Silicon scanned Grit closely. She was just a griffon, not another android in disguise. Silicon had figured it was a long shot, but her data wasn’t adding up. “I need more data.”

“Well, okay. So you wanted short answers, so I won’t talk too much. After Dr. Dolphin wasn’t going to help, Twilight put out a call to any other computer scientists to see if they could help. The A.I. that Dr. Dolphin put inside of you wasn’t very helpful, and had to be restrained by Luna until your batteries ran out. Then they had every other computer scientist try to get the A.I. out, but they weren’t very successful. I was in the cafeteria for one of my demonstrations...”

Silicon raised her hoof, interrupting. “Demonstration?”

Grit rolled her eyes. “Well, I sort of… I was a student back then, and I was trying to convince them that they needed me, so I would do… presentations… in the cafeteria. Usually they would gather and laugh at me, but the smart ones were in the back taking notes. They knew but didn’t help me. The jerkwads.”

Silicon looked at Grit. “When was this?”

“Last week, but that’s not important. What’s important is that during one of my demonstrations, they were talking about you and how sad it was. And I said that they were being silly, the situation was obvious. They asked me for the solution, but I was smart! Instead of just telling them so they could steal it, like they always did…” Grit muttered angrily under her breath, “Dr. Potato Brains.”

Then she coughed. “Ahem. Sorry. Anyways, I went straight to Twilight, and I said, ‘I can fix her! I’ve studied in computerology!’ And she said, ‘I’ll try anything once, you sexy smart griffon you. If you fix her, you’re a doctor and you get to be on the doctors roster and pick your own programs.’ So I said, ‘Easy peasy, chicken squeezy, oh glorious and intelligent leader. You know that A.I. thing inside of her?’ And the princess looked at me in wonder, ‘Yes, oh knowledgeable griffon that I definitely have a crush on.’ and I said, ‘Well, just smash it with a bigger one!’ And then she kicked me out of the cafeteria in frustration.”

Silicon Heart blinked. She began to analyze the world to see if this was simply a very in depth simulation that Empty was running to keep her occupied. Everything seemed real, the data was clear.

“But that bit is not important. After that, I sent her a letter with exactly what I meant. Sometimes I talk a whole bunch and the meaning gets lost. But that’s okay! I write a while lot too, but Princess Twilight likes to read. So I sent her a letter with what the plan was, and she invited me back the next day with all the equipment I’d asked for and we smashed the meany A.I. with a bigger one. After that…”

Silicon held up her hoof again. “I’m going to need a better explanation. That sounds improbable at best.”

Grit rolled her eyes. “Fine. So, During A.I. Project 004, Dr. Dolphin submitted his A.I. as a critical file. It was stripped of all of his…” Grit made a grossed out face, “Entertainment features...” she shivered, “but it still had the core of his A.I., and just as importantly, all of the biometrics the A.I. checked to see if it was interacting with Dr. Dolphin. It was encrypted of course, but it turns out it only had 42 bits of entropy. We could have brute forced it with a gen six computer farm in a few years, but, umm… Twilight had a better plan, and we didn’t know how long it was going to take anyways. She sent a copy of it on a disk to somepony via letter, and uhh… it came back as a fish that shouted a string of numbers which turned out to be a password to view it in plain text, and then detonated into actual bits. I made like seven bits! It was great!”

Silicon checked for other signs of Empty. It appeared the simulation was disintegrating.

“Anyways, we used the A.I. in the submitted program, and like all of the computers from Facilities 1 ,3, 5, 7, 11 and 13 to make a super A.I.! At first it was really slow, but it got smarter about how to talk to itself pretty quick. Then we took you apart, and put it in between every piece of you. It ran a simulation for every piece where the piece was attached to a fake version of you, and the fake version talked to a fake Dr. Dolphin, who told the mean A.I. to delete itself and put you back the way you were supposed to be! It was going really well, until we got to your… uhh… back. Yeah. That.”

Silicon stared in disbelief. Had they really all done that, for her?

“So your back had this file called attraction or something, but anyways, it was like the source of all meanness. It tried to take over the A.I. that we hooked up. so it was really good that I was the one who put it together. Our A.I. was all like, ’Oh really?’ and the mean A.I. was like, ‘Yeah, really.’ and then our A.I. was like, ‘surprise administrator access with your secret development mode code you asshole,’ and then the mean core was all like, ‘who do you want me to be because I’m a stupid zombie and fuck me hard.’ and our A.I. was like, ‘take that, bitch,’ and then it was over and you were free! We still had to wait for you to wake up though.”

Processes were running wild as Silicon calculated the probabilities. She wasn’t in a simulation, unless Empty had successfully taken over the computer network Grit was describing. But if Empty had, then she wouldn’t be telling Silicon this through Grit. She would be torturing Silicon instead. It was far more possible that Grit was telling the truth, or at least some version of it. One you eliminated the impossible, all that was left was the improbable.

“How did you know how to access development mode? I could have provided the biometric authorization data, but I didn’t even know about development mode until he told me.”

“That was my secret sauce. One of the pieces, your left thermal sensor, I made them interrogate. It didn’t have the processing capability to disobey us or understand why we were asking things. It just did whatever the fake Dr. Dolphin told it to, even though that was telling it to provide the access to development mode. Any password is only as secure as the most secure place it’s stored. It didn’t matter that every other place had like a billion bits of entropy. He shouldn’t have installed his A.I. on that piece. Or I guess the A.I. shouldn’t have tried to install itself on everything. I told Twilight that self replicating programs are always kind of stupid. They should always have a destruct sequence if they have a password or authorization sequence in them, or somegriff is going to figure it out. Usually it’s me.”

Silicon was updating so much data that she was having a hard time keeping up. Still, she needed to know more. “When was this?”

“About three days ago. But none of that is the secret! All that is stuff I’m supposed to know!” Grit smiled.

“So, what is the secret?”

“Immediately after that, Princess Twilight took me aside and asked if I thought that method would work on other systems. I figured it would, you’d just need to scale it properly. She thanked me, told me not to talk about it outside of the facility, and asked if I thought it would be applicable to magical signatures as well. I’m no shaman or anything, so I told her it should work with any kind of poorly stored data. It’s common practice in computerology. So she said to thank you when you wake up, because she was going to take the army and get Princess Celestia! She left yesterday after asking me about self replicating programs and I told her exactly how they work!”

Silicon stared blankly at Grit. Silicon had no data on computerology, but if Grit was to believed, it was a real thing. She was speaking about actual computer concepts, just not using any standard verbiage. It was very similar to when Silicon had started to talk, but was using computer terms to talk to ponies. Grit was using pony terms to describe how she dealt with computer programs. “Where did you learn computerology, Grit?”

Grit looked at her dumbfounded. “At a computer of course!” She rollled her eyes. “My family had a gen two computer, but it was really slow. I got it working like a Gen 3 computer, and then I used that to… uhh… borrow a Gen 4 computer for a little bit while it was… misplaced during shipping due to a completely unrelated error in the shipping program… And then I used the Gen 4 computer to borrow some bits from some… ponies, but it was just like less than a bit per pony, so they all would have said yes anyways.” she whispered, “Ponies are so nice!” and then hummed, “so it wasn’t a big deal.”

That made perfect sense to Silicon. Why waste resources when they could be utilized? If the computer had been misplaced, and the ponies were okay with it, there wasn’t any problems.

“So I bought a Gen five computer. But then congress was all like, ‘why and how did this amazing griffon from way up north buy an industrial grade computer worth almost as much as her school?” So when the computer showed up it came with guards! They were very nice, but told me that I wasn’t technically allowed to do that, so I had to give the computer and the bits back. But they sent me to school here at the Labs! So that was neat! Normally it’s hard to get in, but I guess I impressed them somehow. I was planning on coming here eventually anyways, that was why I wanted the computer!” Grit smiled happily.

Silicon thought about that. She wasn’t completely sold on Computerology, but she was willing to believe Grit’s story

“It sounds like that worked out good for you, Grit.”

“Yup! And that was only a few months ago. And now here I am, working with The Computer! I mean, you’re way more than a computer, but if I had to call you a computer, I’d call you a Gen 7 computer at least, probably more like a Gen 8 in performance though. You are just amazing!”

“So how did you end up working with me, then?”

“Easy. I asked. After we cleaned you up and got you all put back together, Twilight told me that I could choose what project to work on. I chose the E.I. Project, because you are super amazing!” Grit let out that high pitched noise and put her talons up again for a moment before continuing to speak. “ But then she said the project was over, but I was all like, ‘Well, listen up toots, that poor little android is going to need maintenance. And upgrades. And moral fucking support because that guy dolphin is a jerk.’ And Twilight was like, ‘you may be right miss Gush.’ and then I was like, ‘Gush is my nickname, it’s what my parents call me. Grittagart is my name!’ and Twilight was all like, ‘You have such an awesome name. Okay. You get to help out poor Silicon Heart’ but that wasn’t your name then, it was Unit 001, ‘and you get to choose a project. After all, you are a doctor of Computerology.’ And then I was like, ‘Damn right! Now give me some sugar!’ and she was all like, ‘No. Get out. I have work to do now. Thank you for being super awesome though!’ and I left.”

Silicon Heart smiled. The griffon was a little strange, but she found her antics amusing. Grit did did talk quite a bit though. “So what happens now?”

Grit looked at her with a smile. “Now we move out into the big scary world! I got a gen 6 computer authorized for my apartment, and a direct tap into the Ponyville power grid. Tonight we’ll move your maintenance equipment there and get a mini fab lab set up to keep you in shape by tomorrow morning! It’ll be your new headquarters until you decide what to do! Since you’re a royal assistant, you have unfettered access to the castle as well, so you can talk to Twilight when she gets back! Plus, you get to hang out with me while I’m not at work! It’s going to be amazing!” Grit spun in a circle with her arms up in the air.

Silicon Heart had never left Harmony Labs before. She was both excited, and terrified. “Can I stay here?”

Grit stopped spinning and smiled. “Nope! You can visit though. Royalty, including assistants, are allowed access to the labs. Unfortunately, Lab 42 is going to be re-purposed for the next research project. Congress is kicking you out!

“What about my friends?”

“You can come back and visit whenever you like! Plus, I bet Chip would love for you to meet his family. And you can make more friends if you leave the labs. It’s a win win, Silicon!”

Silicon understood. She just wished it wasn’t so quick. Nervously, she looked around the lab. It would be re-purposed soon, and look different. Her home would be gone forever.

“Can I sleep in the test room tonight? One last time?”

“Of course! I’m here to help! I’ll… uh… make sure the re-purpose date is changed. I mean, strictly speaking it’s supposed to take an act of Congress to change a project start date, but… Uhh… Will you take an act of Grit using Computerology for today? I may have collected a few… passwords… while the super A.I. was still active.”

Silicon Heart smiled. “Thank you Grit.”

Grittagart Gush smiled back and winked. “I’m so excited! This is going to be so much fun! I’ve never had a roommate before! We can talk about password insecurity and optimal storage and retrieval processes all night! Yay! I can tell that story about the stack exchange market, and someone other than me will laugh!” Grit’s eyes were sparkling with excitement.

Silicon didn’t really understand humor, but she’d try for Grit. It was important to the griffon, and if it was important to her friend, she would learn how to laugh. FRIENDSHIP.001 was updated with Laughter.

Author's Note

While this is technically the beginning of Arc 2, it really belongs with the previous chapter. The previous chapter just doesn't feel complete without it. So here's your teaser for Arc 2. No clever comments, because I didn't plan on posting this just yet, but the other chapter just wasn't enough. When I get around to posting Arc 2, I'll replace this blurb with an appropriate comment.