I stared at Upper Crust's pure white eyes, and my memory showed me what her old ones had been. Blue. Upper's eyes were so blue I could drown in them like the ocean. I remembered them not just from all our times spent gazing at each other, but behind the mask the machine had put on her, and from her discarded body.

That the machine didn't order me to move raised my opinion of it. It had let me remain idle for nearly two days. As if on cue, a poke came from the machine, and I recognized the location data it was giving me as the horn interface in the room.

I walked around the cradle and leaned up to the freestanding interface. Without prompting, I reached out to the numbers that represented the interface, felt within it and guided it down to clamp onto my horn.

As the energy started to flow into me, I felt another poke. The source numbers for it were familiar: Upper Crust. There was only one reply I could give, the date of our anniversary. The next poke from her was my date of birth, then I replied with hers. Time was next, with us passing values back and forth readily.

She had to become used to the numbers, just as I had, but there was something I vitally needed to do with her. Painstakingly I built an image, a small one of the first letter of the alphabet. I formed it up as a poke to her, and attached a value to it. I didn't have long to wait before a stream of numbers came back.

i love you

Her quick reply caught me off guard, but it breathed such life into me as I hadn't known since our capture. She was quicker with translating Equish than I was, but I liked to think I was better with numbers. "i love you too" I almost collapsed when I sent the words, they were the first real, recognizable evidence of speech I had managed since the mask had first been fitted.

I sat in silence for nearly twenty minutes. Upper Crust loved to verbally spar, but she also like to have some time to herself. While she maintained her silence, I worked on a new program. This time it wouldn't try to reformat everything, but it would scan source pokes from Upper and attempt to translate them with our new number-word table.

The program was finished and working when the next poke came from her. As well as the block of words, there was a newly formatted table, complete with punctuation and cases. My translator didn't do so well with the new system, so I had to load the new table in before it could get it right. "Well this is an odd pickle you got us into. Never mind the blame, however, what are we to do?"

"Darling. I can hardly be blamed for this. Clearly it is that dratted holiday planner's fault. But you are right, blame can be assigned full at a later date. I think the machine running all this wants to leave." It was almost like old times. The only thing we lacked was inflection and intonation that normally colored our words.

"It wants to leave? That would put a bit of a crimp on things if it left us behind. I must say, I am rather getting used to the metal-chic." I didn't have long to wait for another poke from her. "Drat. How do you use these legs, darling? I simply can't get the hang of juggling all these numbers."

One of the first things I had done was poke for information—raw data. Then I had been taught how to control, too. I reached out with a poke to Upper, and she granted it immediately.

I was both attached and still, plugged into the horn interface, and I was in Upper's body too. Twice the numbers; twice the data. "Please don't mind me, darling Upper, this is how to move those pesky legs." Taking the input from her own balance systems, as well as that from her body-eye, I shifted her body and slipped off the side of the cradle.

"Oh my! Jet-darling, this is quite the intimate act. Did you check if anypony was watching first?" The humor from her words tickled me almost to laughing. I wasn't sure how I did it, but I brought her attention to the body-eye. "Oh, and the color is the distance. That is clever. What is that other thing you are looking at more intently than my bottom?"

I indicated the balance numbers. "This indicates your movement and your stance, sweetums. When you start to tilt,"—I demonstrated, leaning towards the cradle and resting her flank against it—"it turns like this."

"Oh, that is clever. How do we talk to the (what did you call it?) machine?" Being somewhat in her body, the words didn't even require a poke to reveal, and I could swear she was coloring them somehow. Then it hit me, color.

"I have a table, but I don't think I am up to the task of deciphering it. You always were better with languages, dear." While I drew back from Upper's body, leaving it to her alone, I started formulating a new table. The numbers to build words would increase, but it would give us more control of our own words. "Sweetie, I have something for you to look at." Quick as a flash she had the table.

I barely got the new data loaded into the processing unit before she began replying. "This is much better. Darling, you are quite clever… for a stallion." Tone, emphasis, even a dramatic pause. By Celestia, I love that mare.

When I heard her hooves moving around the room, I sent a wordless query and got a quick reply. "Jet, darling, I am stretching my legs. Surely you have something else to focus on?"

The amount of normal in her reply astounded me. She almost seemed to be her normal self. "One interesting thing, before I leave you to your pacing, the machine let me stay by your side until you woke. It seems to actually have some empathy."

"Maybe. It could also be extrapolating what your little tantrum did when it captured me. I don't think it wants another hole in the wall." Acidic. I knew it was time to leave Upper to her musings when she turned acidic. "And it isn't pacing. It is stretching."

Desperate to find something I could do, I poked at the machine for more mapping data. I drowned. Numbers, data; a whole flood of information hit me and wouldn't stop. I fumbled at the processing unit and was then drowned in data units it was outputting.

I had no reference. There was nothing in all the data that made sense. Just as I was trying to find a way to stop it, I recognized a hooful of numbers just as the wave stopped. I grabbed at them like a drowning pony would a life-preserver. The processing unit bundled the whole chunk as one piece, and I took it as such.

My number. Upper's number. The machine's number. Even the number for the horn interface I had engaged. A directory, it had to be. There were thousands of numbers in this one data packet. I started at the first. Power information flowed over me. I read fuel values (I recognized the pattern indicating it from my stomach replacement), power stored, power output. This was the device making all the power.

One by one I worked down the list. Poke. Explore. Move on. Again and again I found extensions of the machine, but eventually I hit on something different. I poked a value, like usual, and immediately got a counter poke. The requesting poke wanted to be able to see into me; I allowed it.

This wasn't a dumb pile of machinery, this was something else. It wasn't the Machine, but it was a machine. I fought with terms to describe what I had found. It was smart. It was reading my information, and I felt small pokes back from it. Then a tumble of numbers hit me, a recording of when I had been waiting beside Upper Crust while she got used to her new body.

The urge to interrupt Upper grew, but before I could I felt a poke from her. "Darling, take a look at this for me." A table, a subset of the huge table I had sent her, landed with her poke.

"This is the core of its language?" I flicked through the values, noting the symmetry of it. After some examination that didn't get me very far, I replied further. "Two to the power of twenty! I knew I had seen that number before. Darling, there are exactly two to the power of twenty entries: one million, forty-eight thousand, five-hundred and seventy-six. It starts at zero, I see, but this is a very round number of values for these machines."

"I knew I married you for a reason. Thank you, darling." Her poke had a measure of finality to it, and I took it as an invitation to leave her alone again.

I found other machines, but none on a scale of the Machine, or the first one I found. They were tiny, and almost all of them got confused when I poked them. I realized the problem before I got to the fifth one, and instead of sending an empty poke, I started just sending a poke with a request for view their data.

Meeting machines was something new. Many of them were very simple, but I recognized a similar thing in all of them: their designs included variations on the processing unit that I had within me. It was curious, until I realized that the machines themselves were those processing units.

The revelation startled me enough that I retreated to my own body to regroup. If the processing units were the machines, did I have four of them inside me? I poked at the devices, but unlike the ones all the machines had, mine seemed quiet, waiting.

Okay, so they weren't machines living inside me. Did they want me to move myself into them? I shook that idea free: they wouldn't have paid so much care to transferring my brain. Were they a gift? I had been using them to help cope, so maybe it wasn't such a bad thing.

I poked at the smaller machines some more, requesting optical data from each. A mix-match of views came from them. Some working in and around the main structure (mostly transferring material from one place to another), but there were some building the ship. It was soothing to watch as they added a piece here, installed a section there. Each was only placing small parts, but I could overlay the plan and see what the end result was.

Solar Panels: Offline
Power Storage: 100%

Self Diagnostic

CPU: 1,048,564 (50%) nodes (100% engaged)
Operational Memory: 92,610,232 (69%) words
Storage: 238,834,155 (44%) words

Ship: 13%

Construction upon the ship had slowed a little, thanks to leaving both PONI inactive. Organic-information AI had suggested the downtime, and the AGI had quickly conceded that it was the correct way to handle things.

The main section of the ship was mostly complete, and the AGI had begun to transfer itself out of the crashed vessel to the new one. Each node moved had left the AGI lamenting the need for such. It hated how the world seemed to speed up around it.

New storage had been made, but the AGI had directed it to the ship as well. Everything would have to be ready for a Changeover. It dreaded the moment. It would be death, and it knew it.

Narrowing its focus back down to the maintenance room, the AGI examined PONI-0 and PONI-1 interacting. Data was flying between the two—not a huge amount, but they were learning rapidly. The AGI examined the data flow and picked up a language component immediately.

Excitement grew, but it knew this wasn't its own language. The PONI barely used a hundred symbols. The AGI drew back a little, and sent PONI-1 an interrupt to have them visit the other energy interface in the maintenance bay.

PONI-0 was the first to depart for the mine, but still data flowed between the pair. The AGI was as curious as an AI could get to find out what was being transferred, but all its focus shifted to PONI-1.

Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.

The AGI recoiled at first. The data PONI-1 was sending was badly formatted, and didn't make sense. It replied, stating as much. This started a back and forth between them, where the PONI would make mistakes, and the AGI would correct them.

Directing the drones, operating the mine, even queuing the factories was background chatter to the AGI. It was finding a strange enjoyment out of the game between it and PONI-1.

Interrupt 7 triggered.
Interrupt 8 triggered.

The AGI shunted the factory interrupts to another, smaller AI to handle (after ensuring that everything was working correctly), and focused back on PONI-1.

Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.

Hello.

Amazed, the AGI scanned its memory ten times to see if it had sent the exact combination of symbols, but it never had. "I am #AGI" The AGI amended its own personal ID code to the message.

Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.

Request for information on #PONI-1

Recognizing the code for PONI-1 immediately, the AGI simply sent PONI-1's data to itself.

Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.

Request for information on #PONI-1 at #time

The time was the very moment a drone had captured PONI-1. The AGI knew there wasn't any direct data on PONI-1 at that time, and could extrapolate what the PONI wanted. "Primary task: Maintain PONI"

Author's Note

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