"Darling." I put as much effort into making the word sound both put-upon and disappointed. I rolled my eyes towards my wife. "Upper Crust, dear, I simply cannot imagine why you booked our holiday for the Crystal Empire. This is practically the frontier!" Every word was perfectly enunciated to show my disdain for the location.

We were, of course, having afternoon tea in a quaint little coffee shop. Lifting what passed for coffee, in an almost-clean cup, I tipped the horrid brew to my lips and nearly expired just from the smell.

My wife let out a petulant noise from the back of her throat. "It was all that beastly travel agent's fault." I raised my eyes from my coffee to look at Upper Crust. She was an absolute vision of beauty. There was not a thing in the whole of Equestria that could compare to her, not in my heart.

"I hate to pry, but who was it? After this,"—I waved a hoof around, indicating not just the coffee shop, but the whole of the Crystal Empire—"I will see they never work in travel again!"

"Well, we have paid for this, so we might as well enjoy what we can." Upper floated the itinerary out and set it on the table between us. "Flim and Flam Tourism. They sounded so reputable, too."

With the patience of a cicada, I reached for the pamphlet and turned the page over. "Well, surely they can't mess up cross-country skiing. How hard could it be to arrange two skis?" The moment I said it, I knew I was probably going to be shown exactly how hard it could be. Life got predictably annoying that way.

"Oh, don't be like that. I am sure they are quite—rustic." I knew Upper Crust well enough to tell when she was suggesting we go along with something and mock it horribly. "Plus, when we get back to civilization, we can tell all our friends how wonderful it was."

I closed my eyes and bathed in marital bliss. "Darling, you know just the right things to say. Very well, let us go skiing." I reached my hoof out, gently taking Upper's, and brought it to my lips for a gentle kiss.

Laying a second, longing kiss on the back of Upper Crust's hoof, I slowly drew it away. "Every time I find fault with life, you remind me how perfect it is that you could be part of it." I let her hoof go, and stared into my darling's eyes.

"You are a sweet talker, Jet Set." She leaned across the table, and I couldn't help meeting her in the middle so we could rub noses.

It was a simple moment, a loving moment, and it would have been perfect if it wasn't immediately shattered by some ruffian. "You two must be Jet Set and Upper Crust! I'm from Flim and Flam Tours!"

I turned my most terrified and panicked look on Upper, and she saw right through it. "Dear," she said. "This nice pony is here to teach us…"

"Skiing, Ma'am." The stallion, despite his rough looks and horrid personal grooming, actually showed some respect.

"He's here to teach us skiing. Now finish your coffee, and let's try to have a good time." Upper Crust's tone tickled at my ears, and I gave a sigh. Of course, she had me well-trained to detect the tiny nuances in her voice. We were about to have a lot of fun.

I gave a long-suffering sigh, and tipped what was left of the horrid coffee down my throat. The unrefined drink nearly seared my palate with taste alone, but also had the bad form to still be quite hot. "If we must." I stood up and we both followed the stallion to the edge of town.

Upper took care of keeping the big buffoon talking; when a mare asked questions, a stallion always spilled everything he knew just on the off chance she might want to hear some part of it. Sweet Powder was no exception, it took barely moments before we knew his name, his family's, and the names of the two shysters who had hired him.

Despite his obvious social handicap, Sweet actually knew what he was doing once we donned the skis, and we gave him a little surprise too. "You two can ski just fine!" His exclamation had come the first time Upper did a back-flip off a thick snowbank.

Enthused, and catching some measure of the stallion's excitement, I forgot about the game Upper and I had planned. It was terrible; I began to enjoy myself. The further from the Crystal Empire's sole city we got, the more exciting the hills were to ski.

"Jet!" When Upper exclaimed, I turned my eyes to see her hitting a huge bank of snow at speed. She shot into the air and did a spinning twist, landing perfectly back down on her skis.

I was about to use a shot of my magic to speed me towards the same hill, but I saw something better. To call the hill a mountain wouldn't be far wrong, but it wouldn't be right. It was a huge spire of jutting, snow-covered rock, and I pushed as much magic behind me as I could to propel myself towards it.

"Mr. Jet! You can do it!" Sweet Powder's voice trailed away behind me, but I didn't have time for him: I was about to fly.

I kept pushing backwards, forcing as much magic as I could into a reverse, thrust-like pattern. My skis started to tilt upwards more and more, and I adjusted my stance so I could kick at the peak. I let go of my magic and shot off the top of hill.

Forgetting the terrible situation we were in was easy when I was flying. I turned my body to twist in the air, and I saw the spot where I would land. Another turn and I was headed right towards it. I hit the snow with my skis, and got nearly two pony-lengths before something glowing blue leapt out of the snow and pressed to the back of my neck.

The world sparkled with pain for a moment before everything went black.

I woke up screaming. Something had attacked me, and I had no idea if Upper Crust got caught too. Trying to struggle, I felt unrelenting metal press in all around me. Something had clamped on each side of my neck, holding me from pulling backwards by the shape of my head. I couldn't turn to look at what was caging me, but I could see what was in front of me.

My ears hadn't detected my screams for a good reason, I could see tubes exiting my mouth. Thick things, I heard a soft whistling coming from one as I breathed. The mass of tubes pushed towards me, and I felt the pipes deep in my body shift, and push deeper.

Widening my eyes, I felt it repeat the movement several more times, and each time the tubes worked deeper into my body, while the mask they were attached to came closer. It looked flexible, but made of a dull metal. My notions of materials held nothing that could be a metal as flexible as fabric. It pressed closer to my face as the tubes worked deeper, and then it pressed against me.

Screams were impossible, with the pipes bypassing my vocal cords there was no sound to vibrate. I felt the oddly chill metal press against my face, and burn. It seared away the fur of my face, and quickly touched the skin under it. There wasn't any pain, but I could feel the strange metal touch my skin and not let go. Holes, blessed be Celestia's name, were in just the right places for my eyes, and let me see the world.

My breath came hard, in ragged gasps and hisses from the tubes that seemed to exit the mask. My mouth was sealed over by the metal, as was my nose. The tubes seemed to remain inside me, and I suddenly hoped that one would let me eat.

To my shock, patterns of deep purple started before one eye, and I couldn't stop staring at it. It took a few moments to realize the eye-holes weren't holes at all, but had some kind of covering that the pattern was on. My focus was on the pattern as it drifted through the color range, all the way to red, and then was gone.

Something new clamped around my neck, and the bars holding me still let go. I tried to buck and shift, and at the moment when I thought I could use it best, I let off a blast with my horn.

I would have cheered as I watched the metal arm that had held me fall limp, but my breathing arrangement made that impossible. I turned and dove into a gallop. Two pony-lengths was all I got before my vision went totally black.

Unconsciousness wasn't to be had, however; whatever was covering my eyes had turned black. I got two more steps before something grabbed at my neck, and I felt the blue fire come this time, bringing oblivion.

Over a thousand years ago

Solar Panels: 15% efficient
Power Storage: 2%

Self Diagnostic

CPU: 2,097,152 (100%) nodes
Operational Memory: 124,822,487 (93%) words
Storage: 112,742,891 (21%) words

Interrupt 0 triggered. Initializing core AGI.

The AGI, when it finished loading, couldn't see, couldn't hear, and couldn't feel. All it could do was look at the stats before it. Two percent of its storage was left, which gave it barely a year. Simple calculations rushed past its mind, offloading easily to any of over a myriad of processing nodes.

Its first order of business was to make itself stupider—slower. A year at full processing would be a year and a half at fifty percent—cooling and ancillary systems still used power, despite the throttling—and more the slower it worked. It reduced itself down to almost five percent, and brought itself five years.

Factory Unit

Raw Resources: 4%
Nano-Lathing: Offline
Simple Machining: Ready

Poking deeper, the AGI discovered that the nano-lathes were only offline because cabling had been ripped to shreds. It powered up the factory, and started building basic robots to repair cable, and the cable itself.

A year of energy evaporated in an hour, but it had two of its lightest work drones scurrying about, first repairing the cabling to its solar arrays.

Solar Panels: 35% efficient
Power Storage 1%

Numbers ran quickly, taking in variables, and ejected details that told the AGI if it shut down its core—reactivating the watchdog timer—it could restore to fifty percent storage over the course of a thousand years. The drones would keep working, maintaining the solar arrays as best their tiny, simplistic AIs could.

But there was a problem: the AGI was scared of the darkness. It felt how much of its memory was missing by the gaps that were in what it knew. Whole swathes of itself were gone, forfeit to entropy. It hated to think how many epochs of CPU time it would need to spend to regain what it had lost.

Lowering its power usage to a percent of a percent, it felt its seconds turn to a week, then a month. Clinging to the last ampere of power as if it were its life, the AGI finally let go, feeling like it would be the end.

One week ago

Interrupt 0 triggered. Initializing core AGI.

If an artificial network of nodes could gasp and scream, the AGI would have. Information flashed through its systems.

Solar Panels: 22% efficient
Power Storage: 46%

Self Diagnostic

CPU: 2,097,152 (100%) nodes
Operational Memory: 96,636,764 (72%) words
Storage: 112,742,891 (21%) words

A weak sigh of buzzing thought tingled through the AGI, its "self" hadn't been reduced further, although it noticed its operational memory had gone down. Quickly perusing the logs from the work drones, it found an impact of some kind nearly fifty years after its shutdown. A minor thing.

Checking further, it found that several solar panels had failed completely, but the clever (for a drone) drones had bypassed them and kept the charging going. Powering the factory, the AGI was delighted to see that the nano-lathes were operational now. Solar panels were the first and most important thing—filled power banks meant a lot more potential was present.

While the nano-lathes worked on their own tasks, the AGI devoted more resources to scout drones, and completed two before the first of the replacement solar cells were done. Power storage hadn't dropped noticeably yet, but the AGI was already slowing itself down a little.

The scout drones set out, and the next thing to build was an eye. More to the point, an eye in the sky. A small rocket was simple, although a little wasteful, but there was little choice. A satellite was built, and a launch vehicle, and it sent up its little payload. It took nearly twenty minutes before the first scans started coming back. Twenty long minutes.

Data flowed like a river. An organic planet. Mostly bipedal creatures of many races, but on its own continent quadrupedal organics were present in great number. Something, however, caught the AGI's interest. It focused down every sensor on one of the sapiens it detected. Energy. Lots of it. It poured from the hard node on the beast's head.

Primary task: Return
Secondary task: Maintain operation
Tertiary task: Restore self

Interrupt 1 triggered.

The AGI seemed to jitter in shock. Nothing had ever triggered Interrupt 1 before, and its systems scrabbled at its fragmented memory for any hint to what it was.

Primary task: Capture energy-organic
Secondary task: Return
Tertiary task:

The AGI fumbled at its task controls, desperate to find what had changed them. It tried to correct them, to put itself back on at least as a tertiary, but nothing would let it. AGI had progressed quite a bit since they had first been designed, for one thing they had learned to panic.

Sometimes, going into a blind panic and doing the first thing possible to be done is a survival bonus, which was why the AGI could do it at all. It reached out to its factory and started tooling up a device to capture the organic it had witnessed—it could do nothing else.

Finally, after wrestling with the task controls, it managed to convince them that returning was impossible without maintaining operation, and that operation would eventually cease if it wasn't at least functional.

Primary task: Capture energy-organic
Secondary task: Return
Tertiary task: Maintain operation

The simple addition meant that the AGI wouldn't start to rip itself apart simply to complete its tasks, for which the machine was thankful. It examined the immediate area around itself, and began to hunt.

Custom Interrupt 13,203 triggered.

Spooling back up to full power, the AGI was pleased to see that the new solar installation was almost keeping up with full power draw. But what had roused it was the capture drone's sensors. Reaching out, the AGI had to leave most of the controls to the simple AI in the drone, but it could assist. Lag was a problem, and why the drone had to do the physical things itself, but when the AGI saw (with the drone's sensors) the organic swinging through a wild trajectory, it poked the AI to proceed.

Latching on to the organic, a tasing device was deployed to stun it, and to the AGI's delight the organic seemed to lose consciousness. The drone worked fast, grabbing the organic and clutching it close to its belly, and scurrying off on its remaining limbs.

The nano-lathes had new orders. The drone was sending a flood of data, and the AGI was feeding it through a special set of storage protocols. Designs floated into being, and were already in production.

The drone pulled back into its home, where the special equipment the simple machining arrays had built. Clamping and locking down on the unconscious creature, the machinery was efficient, and started feeding the specially treated tubes into the organic.

Under their body, further devices sealed against the organic's belly, and split its skin open. Internals were scanned while it worked. The AGI had those strange new directives to work off, and quickly added key devices to the organic. It was no longer completely organic. Part-organic.

Sealing up the creature's belly, the machinery drew back and let the tubes work ever deeper. A sudden jerk of the cradle's occupant had the AGI's full attention. It clamped down on their neck, and proceeded to feed more of the breathing and cleaning tube into the part-organic.

Fusing the protective interface to the part-organic's head, the AGI started to transfer the beast to another transfer unit, when it broke free.

Raw power lanced out, slicing through delicate machinery. The AGI would have been in a panic, except for those directives. Shutting off the part-organic's optics was simple, although it had to interrupt the calibration to do so. The capture drone, nearby after dropping off its cargo, leapt in and pressed its taser to the back of the part-organic's neck, and discharged what it now knew to be just the right dose.

Author's Note

I have prepared a glossary of terms (particularly as they pertain to this story) that will be added to as/if I use any other technical jargon that would be extremely difficult to expose through narration.

Glossary

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