"Honey, I think I found out some interesting things." Upper Crust's words stole sleep from me. I hadn't been sleeping deeply (maybe I couldn't anymore?), and her poke roused me.

I dreamed numbers. Numbers coming in. Numbers going out. "That's nice, darling. I was just trying to get some sleep." My little barb earned another poke from Upper, containing what looked like an ocean of zeros. "Sleep has been a problem of late, no idea why. So, love of my life, what did you find out?"

"Some of this amazing language for a start. You have no idea how complex it is, but at the same time amazingly efficient. Hello is just a single symbol, but I think it is used more for two machines initiating contact than for actual conversation." Reading her poke, I checked my energy storage and poked the horn interface to disengage.

Stretching, despite not needing to, I turned my head to look at Upper properly. Her body was not exactly like mine. Sure the limbs looked the same, and her head mostly resembled mine, but her body was slightly different.

"What are you looking at?" Her poke was accented to sound more playful than aroused or actually curious. She could have just asked for my optical data if she wanted to look.

"The singularly most amazing mare in all Equestria." It should have frightened me that the fire of lust was absent, but there was a strange clarity to my thoughts. I could appreciate Upper Crust for the wonder of her being, and not for just the curve of her plot.

I turned and walked out, not waiting for a poke to do my job.

My job. It was a strange world I had settled into where being a mobile battery was my job. There was, however, something uniquely interesting in the opportunities it gave me, that the machines gave me. Nopony in Equestria, even the lauded Princess Twilight Sparkle, had come close to this level of machinery. I wasn't just working on it, I was it.

I got halfway to the mine before I poked the machine for data on the giant boat. It sat atop the tube that would harness more destructive force than Equestria had ever seen. I lightly poked at a drone I saw high on the ship, watching as it moved a device (that I poked, it was a smaller power generator) into place. "What else was there?"

Upper had been waiting for me to ask, and I got the poke-equivalent of a sigh before her reply came. "Its primary objective is keeping us alive." She let me stew on the thought. "And by that, I of course mean literal objective. It wishes us to remain functioning."

"Well that's a relief. Here I was wondering if I would wake up on the floor next, with just my horn attached to this body." I reached the structure where the horn interfaces were for the mine. I poked at the door to open, and slipped inside. "That was a joke, darling, you are supposed to laugh."

"Was it? Well, maybe you should try a little harder next time." Sarcasm dripped from her words, each one double emphasized with humor. "Of course you wouldn't see that. If you were just a discarded brain, dear Jet, you wouldn't be able to see."

"Of course, dear. What else did you two chat about? Is it going to be sunny tomorrow?" Settling into a standing position before the horn interface, I poked it to connect. I felt the pressure of machinery below me start, and they leaned on the energy within my horn. It was a smooth flow, one I was used to. "Sorry darling, I think I missed your reply. Something about all this work that just makes one so easily distracted in thought."

"Oh no, I didn't interrupt you, don't fear. I was just waiting for you to be done with your little walk, I know how hard it can be processing interrupts and walking at the same time." I groaned inwardly at that one, her tone so dry that it might as well have been salt. "We aren't going to be here much longer. It plans to take us somewhere."

I suddenly realized there had been something odd in what she had just said. Something that had translated a lot different than I thought. "Darling, my sugarplum, what is interrupt?"

"It's what the AGI calls this. Pushing information at each other. Oh dear, what silly little colloquialism did you call it? I bet it is something silly like prod, or shove. You always did love shoving, didn't you dear?" I was almost laughing too much to notice she did it again.

"You are using their words again. And from what I remember you particularly liked shoving too. We still have the parts, but I am not sure if they are all that useful." Banter and wordplay. I knew she loved it more than I did, and I loved it quite a bit.

"I looked, mine are just shoved into a little pod, and yours aren't much better. I don't think either of us will be using them for their intended purpose." The dry wit was gone, and I caught a hint of actual indignation.

I collected the codes for the little machines, and the big ship, and interrupted them to Upper. "As I understand it, we are going to be taking a little ride in this. I do hope it is better catered than that awful train ride to the Crystal Empire."

A tumble of random letters hit me, each one expertly accented with humor. In high spirits, I turned my attention back to the processing units inside me. Each seemed quite fast on their own, but with some more playing I found all four to be linked together.

"Jet Set. I'm not scared. I don't know if I can be scared. Are we going to still be us, or is it going to take away even more?" There was no humor, no clever little barbs.

I reached out, interrupted as many machines as I could, and asked for a dump of their data. It washed over me, shoving everything away. I felt cleansed by the numbers. "You love your words. You twist meanings and spar with me. You are hungry to learn languages, I remember you finding out about those dreadful yaks, and despite how terrible they smell you didn't stop interrogating them until you could understand their language.

"Your thoughts mesh with mine, you know when I need time alone, and when I need to have somepony intrude. And I know the same of you. We don't have those—those parts that made us lust for each other. Upper Crust, my clever and wonderful darling, I still love you." I couldn't cry, but I put every drop of my emotions into the data packets and sent them.

I didn't even see a second tick over before her reply came. "I love you. I don't have a heart, and I certainly can't be called a mare anymore, but I still love you."

She was right. We were always told love came from the heart, but neither of us had those anymore, unless you counted the pumps. Love was something else, something not even a machine could take from us.

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: 15%

PONI were intelligent. The AGI was proud of the note it got to append in their file, even if the file was now stored in the ship. Half the AGI's storage had been transferred, and it had been handling the latency poorly. AI could get headaches.

The flow of data between the PONI was moving in fits and bursts. The AGI had interacted with PONI-1 to some extent, sharing with them mission critical information. Compared to the AGI, even with half its nodes offline, PONI were slow thinkers. They moved numbers slowly. They processed numbers slowly. But when it came to depth of understanding, the AGI had been pleasantly surprised by PONI-1.

With PONI-0 installed at the mine, resources flowed, and all were directed towards the ship now. Neither the PONI nor the AIs needed for resources. The AGI continued to assist PONI-1 with their understanding of language, of requesting and sending of data, of formatting and standardization.

Custom Interrupt 18,212 triggered.

The organic-information AI pushed the AGI's attention to PONI-0. A quick glance revealed nothing strange: all PONI-0 had done over the last major time period was request reference information about CPU nodes. Turning its attention back to PONI-1, the AGI started to dive into another explanation of syntax.

Custom Interrupt 18,212 triggered.

Custom Interrupt 18,212 triggered.

Custom Interrupt 18,212 triggered.

Each interrupt, quickly fired, grated on the AGI. It turned its attention to the organic-information AI, suppressing the first urge it had—disabling the interrupt.

A trickle of information flowed from the OI-AI, and the AGI was genuinely surprised by it. The program wasn't the most extensive the AGI had witnessed (at least in the experiences of its storage, damaged as it had been), but it showed promise that the writer was developing the skills needed to do much more extensive work.

The program, to the AGI's interest, actually broke down data from interrupts and formatted it. That it was doing a lot of it badly wasn't the writer's fault, they hadn't learned the proper formatting yet. The AGI conceded that the OI-AI was right to alert it.

Bringing its attention back to PONI-1, the AGI sent a request for information sharing between the PONI. PONI-0 needed the information PONI-1 was learning as much as PONI-1 did, if not more.

Data was shunted out of storage word-block by word-block, and transferred to the new ship. Once it was installed and activated, the AGI would transfer parts of its storage to it, and another little part of itself became slower. It was maddening, and if the AGI didn't have two interesting, emerging intelligences to keep it busy, it might have gone a little bit crazy.

Locked in place until I used up the energy in my horn, I had plenty of time to do whatever I wanted so long as I didn't have to move. Deciding on playing with the processing units was a simple choice; watching the machines build the ship was a little too passive for me, and poking—interrupting Upper Crust so she would talk was unlikely to be terribly fun in the long term.

I requested as much data on the units as I could get, and set to work. I didn't write the program process each data packet, instead I wrote a program to examine data packets and make actual sense of them. Once I had the data broken up into pieces, I could make something to assemble them into useful information.

The first interrupt from the second biggest machine startled me. It was polite I realized, since it could have just grabbed the data from me. I honored the request, showing it what I was working on.

When no reply came, I just continued on with my task. Part of the process was gathering as many blocks of data as I could, and feeding them through the initial data harvester. Some it gathered properly, others took some tweaking for it to recognize yet another format for positional data.

"Oh Jet Set, darling? I have been asked to share some things with you." Upper's tone held obvious superiority. She had something that she was going to share, regardless of if I wanted it, but she was going to make sure I knew that it was her doing the sharing.

I decided on a different tack than usual. "That would be wonderful, dear. I can only assume it was the Machine that asked, and if it did that there would be a great reason behind it."

"You would disarm my fun like that, wouldn't you? Very well, it was AGI who asked, and the information is this." I was swamped by data tables, syntax rules, and a mess of definitions for data types. "I hope you enjoy it."

My program was in a panic. The code had no idea how to handle this much information. I juggled it around until I got it in a semblance of order. "Is this what you have so far on their language?"

"AGI indicated you were working on something to help with data translation. This helps. And darling? Please make sure you share your little program with me when you are done." She had slipped real longing into her words, the color of them bringing out how much she longed to learn faster.

"Of course. The moment I have this doing more than giving me a headache you will have your own version." I sent a little code on the end of my message, a mashup of our dates of birth and our wedding anniversary.

There was a distinct pause before Upper Crust interrupted back. "What was that?" She repeated the code.

"The kiss I can't give you." I added the code again, and the only reply back from Upper was another of them.

Her work was brilliant, of course. She had immersed herself in the language she was learning, and I saw why it was vital I knew it for my program. Their language was itself a definition of data types and ways to request and send information. There was little in the way of distinct commands within the language, everything seemed aimed at showing truth. It was beautiful.

I threw myself at my work with every ounce of fervor that I imagined Upper Crust was employing with hers. Our time in Canterlot seemed a lifetime away, but in truth it was only a month. A month, and I was remade more machine than pony. The strangest thing: I was actually starting to enjoy it.

Author's Note

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