Her eyes were beautiful. My vision was filled with the perfect blue of Upper Crust's eyes. I wanted to remember them, remember how wonderful they were, because I knew what would come for my wife. The machines didn't need ponies, they needed only a few parts of us.

To say Upper's eyes were all that I could see would be a lie, but they did fill my direct vision. I could see the nearness of the wall behind me, the floor under my hooves and rump, and I could even see the contours of Upper's masked face. But still that wasn't everything.

The machines had given me a third eye initially, and I could see the pattern they had used now. I was allowed to get used to the information, they had trained me how to operate the interface of the mask, all with the end result of me needing those skills to exist.

While I sat and watched Upper's magic being charged with energy, I explored more of my new self. Numbers poured into me, and I could make a lot of sense of them. Legs, tail, organs, and my sense senses were all fed to me as numbers. Numbers were everything, and they were how I interacted back with my body.

A pony body was all instinct. I imagined foals learning the same way as I was, trying to mentally poke something, then working out the reaction. I had staggered across the room to look into Upper's eyes using just the vision at my disposal, but as I looked, as I tested, I found a lot more.

Just as Upper Crust's horn interface disconnected, I found something very different. It was a device inside me that seemed to buzz with activity. There were numbers pouring in and out of it, and to test what it was I poked my own numbers at it.

The numbers froze, stopped, and a sense of excitement filled me. Poking more, I started off by shoving zero into the device. Immediately a one came back. I pushed a two, and a three came back. I paused for a moment. I looked at Upper as she sat up on the cradle. A pattern of numbers came from the device.

I ignored the numbers for the moment, and climbed up on the cradle—or tried to. My body was strong for its weight, but a sense of balance was what I lacked. Falling sideways, I felt several of thing inside me start spitting numbers out excitedly. It wasn't junk information, nothing the machine had fed me was. In the moments as I tumbled over I raced through the values again, and realized they were the angle I was tilting at.

Upper had moved while I was distracted "playing" with my numbers. She crouched down before me and nuzzled against the metal cheek of my new head. The touch stole my focus, and for just a moment I moved naturally and rubbed my cheek back.

The number from earlier tickled at my memory, and I poked it back in at the first device I had been prodding. A small trickle of numbers started coming from the device, and to my utter surprise I realized it would be a third eye, but not mine. The habits I had built came back, and I searched the data looking for familiar things. Horn status. Time. Organs. Legs. Womb.

Realization struck, this was the design for Upper Crust's new body. Focusing all my attention, I took the stream of numbers, keeping them intact, and fed it back into the device with Upper's number at the start.

Upper jerked against me, and her eyes stared into mine. I started poking my own values into the data. A flood of zeros, with a single set of numbers that stood out in the sea of nothing: the date of our anniversary.

I saw the data indicate Upper was getting directional information. I reached one foreleg up and gently curled it around Upper's withers and gave her as light a squeeze as I could. I relied entirely upon touch sensors telling me how far her body moved, and how her fur felt, so as not to hurt her.

We hugged for five minutes and twenty-six seconds. My thoughts raced, and I reached out again with that device and poked another black field of zeros, and again I put our anniversary date in it. She nodded to me, and the simple acknowledgment was all I could desire.

In the moment of pure bliss I lost track and miscounted. Numbers flew past, and with a silent laugh that echoed through my head, I reached back into the ocean of digits. Upper Crust was gone already, following her instructions, but I could remember the nod, her eyes, and her body-language when she recognized the numbers I had sent.

While I sat there, exploring the numbers further, I realized I could still bring up Upper's data. Tuning in to her third eye was less strain than I would have thought. Not only was it a small amount of numbers compared to what my own senses were now giving me, it was something I was used to understanding.

Watching her energy output rise, and her own reserves start to tick down, I suddenly turned my attention to my own. While I watched, my energy was going down at a slow—minuscule—rate. Lifting a hoof up, I watched as the amount increased while I moved, and then lowered again when I stopped.

It was a strange feeling to see my life ticking away. My horn held my magic, it held my power, and it was all that this machine I had become needed. The feed of data got my attention, and I changed the position of the anniversary date on it.

Not everything came from energy.

But I did need more. Balancing, I watched the numbers indicating my position as I stood up, and climbed onto the cradle. It was safer to crawl my way to the end and offer my head to the machine. Like a promise kept, the machine lowered the horn interface to my head, and it engaged with me.

Solar Panels: Offline
Power Storage: 100%

Self Diagnostic

CPU: 2,097,144 (100%) nodes (100% engaged)
Operational Memory: 92,610,232 (69%) words
Storage: 222,056,939 (41%) words

Ship: 8%

Watching PONI-0 learn to move, to converse—to control itself—was exciting to the AGI. There had been a moment when it had been monitoring PONI-0 for telemetry, and the PONI cleared the data and sent back null.

The two had sent numbers back and forth, and the AGI was prepared to begin attempting more high-level information when PONI-0 had turned to PON-1.

Custom Interrupt 18,212 triggered.

Without doubting the message was important, the AGI probed the organic-information AI for its reason to interrupt. The odds that the PONI was interested in its mate were so high the AGI had to parse the calculation off to a heavy-duty number-crunching node just to find out how many significant figures were involved.

The AGI sent a single chunk of data to PONI-0 that contained the data-address of PON-1.

Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.

The number came back, and the AGI had the delight of routing PON-1's data feed through PONI-0.

Data burst between the two, and the AGI watched as PONI-0 touched and modified the flow. It was a significant amount of processing required to do, which surprised the AGI more, but PONI-0 took the number stream, edited it, and wrote it back to the output buffer without using any of the additional data-handling and processing units installed within it. The AGI knew PONI-0 wasn't cheating, because the units in question hadn't been activated yet.

Custom Interrupt 18,212 triggered.

The AGI didn't need to see what the organic-information AI was sending. There was all kinds of calculations, but the AGI could tell by the interaction between PONI-0 and PON-1 that they were communicating in the physical manner it had learned they preferred.

Making a decision, the AGI recorded requirements for the PONI and PON to be given time to themselves. The reasoning was simple: so far the PONI and PON had operated at peak efficiency and without negative feedback only when given such moments. Surrendering a few time periods to enhance future efficiency was a clear-cut case of optimization. All AI loved optimization.

PON-1 ignored the signal to return to its work to within a few time periods of it escalating, and the AGI was acutely aware that PON-1 likely knew the timing too. It made a further note that all activity requests should be made prior to the time they were scheduled to be started.

When PONI-0 climbed itself up onto the maintenance platform, the AGI was more than pleased to lower the power coupling and initiate transfer of energy.

Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.

The request for PON-1's feed came again, and again the AGI granted it, amending an auto-approval on that interrupt line for any requests towards PON-1's datasets.

Interrupt 7 triggered.
Interrupt 8 triggered.

Resources flowed again, and again the manufacturers processed material from the mine into parts needed for PON-1's PONI system, the AGI's storage, and the ship to return in.

Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.

For a moment the AGI reflected that its interrupt systems were being worked overtime, then it examined the data anomaly coming from PONI-0's data feed. It was the null value again. The AGI immediately replied with the value one.

When the AGI checked PONI-0's output again, it displayed two. The AGI replied with four, and got sixteen back. Language. The AGI hurriedly sent a flood of data. It was a lookup table it hoped the PONI could understand.

Thinking more on PONI-0's state of idleness while it charged, the AGI enabled the first of eight processing nodes built into the PONI. Telemetry detected the node being probed immediately, and immediately it began to send back nonsense.

Reaching past PONI-0's control, the AGI demonstrated by setting the nod to do a simple summing operation.

I stared blindly at the wall. What the machine was showing me—and I could sense its intrusion into "me" quite clearly—was that I had some sort of adding machine built into me. No, it was more than just an adding machine, it was a fast adding machine.

The bulk of new numbers were complex, and hard to track. Half were steadily incrementing values, but the other was all kinds of odd things. I stared at them blankly, trying to understand what the data could be.

It was a puzzle, and though I was not particularly good at the strange word puzzles that Upper seemed to breeze through, number puzzles had been my guilty secret. I pored over the data, and finally realized it was a table. A table of values and—and things associated with them.

A single value came from the device inside me, and I looked it up on the table and sent the reply. I returned the favor, and got a reply with the corresponding value.

Passing values back and forth was exciting at first, but this was hardly real communication. I still had no clue what each value was, but I hoped the machine replying to me—smart as it seemed to actually be—would help with that.

I felt a strange tingle, and realized my horn was nearing capacity. It was sobering to realize that the only directly connected part of my old body felt strange now. It wasn't numbers like everything else, not until I looked at my data and noticed that the input power rate was decreasing.

Reaching out to Upper, I put her code in and immediately got her data back. Something about it triggered something in my memory. I focused my attention down, and sent the code again. A readout of appropriate table values came back just before the data flowed to me.

They "looked" like an image, like what my body saw with its depth-eye. Each one was a neatly drawn character of an alphabet I realized I wouldn't have a hope of knowing. I groaned inwardly; Upper Crust would be so much better at this than I am.

Remembering what I was doing, I checked Upper's horn, and with a little shock realized it still had over eighty-percent capacity left. Pride swelled within me at the thought that Upper had surpassed me in storage capacity.

I was fully charged, I had a body that could probably survive being slammed between the moon and the sun, and I was completely bored. The ongoing game the machine was playing in my head was interesting, but it hardly used all my focus. Dropping off the cradle, I walked to the doorway and outside.

No warning flashes. No stopping my heart—hearts: plural now. I gave a mental sigh and watched all my numbers as I walked down the hall towards the exit for the mining area.

Outside, I felt my numbers expanding infinity as they failed to find a reasonable limit. There were no walls, no ceiling, and nothing to impeded my perfect vision.

The world looked fantastic and new. The frosted over trees looked like they were dealing with the chill weather, but as I turned around I became fascinated by something new. A huge edifice towered over the facility.

Walking, watching my sensors to keep balanced, I got closer to what looked like a giant pillar stretching up to the sky. Mechanical robot things scurried up and over it in places, assembling parts and building it out. I walked around the base of it, and measured the shape as at least eighteen pony-lengths across, and an uncountable amount tall.

At the thought of "uncountable," I got an idea. I walked to the base of the structure and looked directly upwards. Values poured through my sight, but I reached for the right one. It was one hundred and fifteen point three-five-one-six-seven-two— I shook my head, mentally trying to cut off the feed of values. It was really big.

While I looked at it, a set of digits fed to me, and submitting my request yielded a huge block of data. Dazed a little at so much information—so many numbers—I made my slow way to the mine power room.

The data was more plans, but whereas the ones for my new body had been intricate, these were equally so, but massive. Ponies had never built anything this involved before. I picked small parts, tiny sections of what I soon realized was a flying machine.

Reaching the power station for the mine, I activated the door and walked inside. Upper Class twitched on her platform, but she trusted the machine not to let anything nasty in to hurt her. Flicking to her stream, I sent my date of birth this time.

The machine was nothing like what ponies made. Pony flying machines used balloons of heated gasses, heated by magic usually, that floated slowly through the sky. This machine, from what I understood of the part I inspected, would leave a plume of white-hot flame in its wake.

The information on how it flew had been mixed in with the plan. Calculations for motion and acceleration seemed embedded in my memory. It all made perfect sense, but I wasn't sure how. Ignoring the worry, I climbed up on the bench beside Upper Crust and nuzzled into her side.

Author's Note

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