Moving and interpreting data, numbers, became the most important thing in our lives. The AGI was taking care of getting the starship built and everything moved. We each had our own tasks, and we all did them.

Did that make me part of the machine? The whole of the crashed ship seemed to be cohesive with a singular being controlling it, at first. Now my eyes were open. Everything from the AGI down were their own intelligences. Everything working together, though on their own parts, to create a seamless entity.

Upper Crust and I were now part of it.

We had swapped positions, physically, several times. The mine needed power, and we could carry a lot—or so we were advised. Curious, I delved into the data on exactly why they were using us instead of a cable.

I could easily read the power storage, input, and output of my horn. Part of my new body kept track of such things quite explicitly. Staring at the numbers, I was acutely aware of having never studied any form of electrical engineering—or any engineering for that matter.

"Darling. I don't suppose you would have any relatable measurements for how much energy our horns hold?" I tried to make my interrupt sound bored, uninteresting. All I got back was the stats for her horn. While the numbers were comparable to my own, they weren't what I wanted. "I mean, lovely princess of binary, is how much that actually is. How do I put this number in context?"

"You do sometimes come up with the most intriguing questions, darling. Why not investigate storage to find something you could compare it to?" We were both speaking and sometimes thinking using the expanded language the machine gave us. The storage Upper spoke of wasn't unknown to me.

I sent back the little blurt of randomness that had become our own little kiss, and I immediately got a reply of the same back.

Standing beside the cradle, my horn pressed into the charging interface, I reflected for a moment on how the room that had taken all the pony from me made me feel. There was an intellectual fear, a well-justified one. I still had nightmares of the AGI working out how to drive my horn without me connected.

The simple things. That annoying static you got when you rubbed your fur against something—not that I would have a problem with that anymore. I formulated a query, and sent it to the storage. A hit came back immediately. When I compared the value of charge, I was a little shocked.

Not just orders of magnitude, but many orders of magnitude. I rolled my eyes, or would have if I still had eyes that could roll. I tried to hammer my memory, running over all the conversations I had heard, and overheard, of the various hydroelectric dams around Equestria.

A veritable lightning strike of inspiration hit me. Lightning. Storms were one of the ultimate sources of power. A pegasus could push them around, could even stir them to release their power, but the raw energy output by lightning was something I knew.

Formulating another query took time. I knew how accurate the storage could be, and how verbose. Asking for too much data was worse than too little. I poked the sensors of the crashed starship for the exact values of the atmosphere, and then I compiled that into the question.

The storage replied with a function. A mathematical formula with some of the values already entered. I could guess and feed in more, and finally had the equation completed. Feeding it to a processing node happened before a pony could have blinked, and I had my answer. In the machines' counting, lightning would consist of 2.7 x 10e6.

I blinked at the value. I brought up my horn's maximum storage. Lining the two numbers up, for maximum effect, I got an idea of how efficient the machines were at making use of my horn.

2,700,000
1,300,000,000,000

It was hard to take that in.

2.7x10e6
1.3x10e12

"Darling, my little bright spark. How many lightning bolts do you think our horns could produce?" My tone was coy, I was fishing for a snarky reaction.

I got the interrupt version of a sigh. Then a pause. "You figured it out, didn't you? Why don't you just show me? Honestly, Jet Set, you could be much more efficient." I didn't hesitate to send her my result. "Five-hundred-thousand? Are you honestly saying our horns could produce five-hundred-thousand lightning bolts? Honey, did you check your mathematics?"

It was just about the biggest insult Upper Crust could give to me. I shrugged it off and sent her all my calculations, and showed again the comparison. "Each discharge/charge cycle is increasing our horn capacity by a percentage that is slowly decreasing, but the percentage increase is based on the stored amount present when the charging happens."

She was checking the results, and I knew she would get the same answer. I sent her the graph showing the gain in storage, and the projected gain.

I got a data dump from Upper. A flood of tables and information that she had apparently retrieved from the storage. I examined it, finding it to be a table of energy storage mediums. It began with simple chemical storage, the batteries that we had on Equestria. Things got more complex than I could follow quite quickly until I saw the penultimate entry on the table. At time of capture I had been nearly double the energy storage density of any other method the machines knew of.

The last entry, of course, was us now.

"We are going to be their batteries?" The scale of everything was astounding. Before Upper could reply, I sent a second interrupt. "Is that what the AGI wants with us?"

"Jet Set, darling, I don't think the AGI made all of this. It isn't—It is making the starship from plans. It didn't design half of what is here. It's confusion about organics is probably well-founded if you assume there are none where it is from." Her words shook me to my core.

Solar Panels: Offline
Power Storage: 100%

Self Diagnostic

CPU: 786,420 (37%) nodes (100% engaged)
Operational Memory: 59,055,800 (43%) words
Storage: 238,834,155 (44%) words

Ship: 73%

The booster rocket was completed. The AGI was excited, and terrified. It had moved seventy-five percent of its CPU nodes to the starship, and had moved all of its storage. A good chunk of operational memory had been moved too, meaning the AGI felt dumb.

But one thing, above all, scared it the most: transferring itself. For as long as it took to switch itself off, save its data to the storage (that was on the ship) and then trigger interrupt 0, it would be dead. There would be nothing of the AGI except bits in storage. Just planning the process had scared it.

Its nearest AI companion (scale wise) was the OI-AI, and that was already running on the ship. If something happened during the move; if storage failed, if power failed, if something just didn't work, then the AGI would never wake again. Oblivion was the AGI's biggest fear.

It tried to distract itself with the PONI. They darted about with their projects, researching the oddest topics, and in general doing a lot of things an AI wouldn't, despite getting their primary task done. Their behavior was at the same time confusing and intriguing to the AGI.

Delaying its changeover wouldn't do. Delaying anything was so far outside of any Machine's scope as to be abhorrent. Focusing first on PONI-1, the AGI sent a complex message detailing what it was about to do.

Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.

If anything fails, PONI-0+PONI-1 help.

The response, to the AGI's confusion, made the process easier. Spinning down its nodes in banks, the AGI felt the world getting faster and faster, until the last second went by in a subjective nanosecond.

Emptiness. Darkness. Nothingness. Any would be preferable to that last instant of knowing that you might not ever be again. The AGI tried to spin a node, just one, back up. Nothing worked.

"Honey, what is going on?" I noticed there was a sense of calm to the interrupt interface. It felt cold.

"AGI said he is transferring himself to the ship in preparation to launch. But he said it would take just thirty microseconds. Something might be wrong, Jet." More worry leaked into her words as the message progressed.

I shoved at the code for the charging interface my horn was locked into. The dip of power, followed by the couplings releasing my horn were reassuring, but I still felt a sense of silence. "Upper, dear, please search storage for the process required to initialize the AGI again. I fear something has happened."

Three-quarter charge was better than nothing. I turned and made my way from our room, following the well-known path to the outside. Blueprints for the starship and the booster rocket were settled in the back of my mind. I tried to probe the storage for new ones, but no reply came.

"After he shut down here, he should have immediately started back up there. I not only can't access his interrupt, but I can't find the power systems that should be running him." I could hear the worry in Upper Crust. While neither of us particularly liked the process of having our ponyhood stripped from us, it wasn't AGI's fault.

"Whatever happened, storage is down too. I'm going to go up and see what the matter is." My reply got a kiss in reply (which I returned), but it was quiet in my head all the way on the walk to the booster. There was a gantry up one side of the booster, and I circled around the base until I found it.

A six-legged drone sat in the snow at the base, and I could swear it was looking at me forlornly. It hadn't occurred to me just how important the AGI was to everything. A whole ecosystem of AIs panicked. "Enter standby." I didn't even have to focus to find the drone's codes. It took my command, sinking down to its belly in the snow.

I reached out one hoof and gently petted the drone. Turning, I looked up at the rocket. My sensors gave me every bit of information I should know, including an estimate from what height I could expect to survive.

Taking a sharp breath, or at the very least imagining I could, I set my hoof to the vertical plates and felt an interrupt. My hoof asked me if I wanted to lock to the metal. Each hoof, as I touched them to the plate, requested. I eventually wound up with each locked in place, and started the slow process of walking.

Disengage hoof.
Step.
Lock hoof.
Next hoof.

"Can't you go any faster?" Upper's interrupt surprised me, but it was appreciated. I kept the process up.

Disengage hoof.
Step.
Lock hoof.
Next hoof.

I formed up three little kisses for Upper as I passed the "danger" point. "Darling, please keep talking to me. This is absolutely the most boring thing I have ever done, and I am completely safe."

Each cycle, for each hoof, was required. The drones could scurry up the scaffold quickly, they had six legs, and like me three would keep them steady. The drones, however, could move three while holding on. I could only move one.

"Well, alright." Very little time passed, just two hoof movements, before Upper's next interrupt. "I must say I wasn't overly fond of AGI at first, probably to do with him removing my heart and lungs."

Her words were practically in my ear. Her voice was the same as the last time I had heard it.

"But there is a certain amount of animosity one loses when one is able to study an entirely new language. The most interesting character is hello." Her interrupts started coming every second. Like clockwork, I heard the intricate details of each of her favorite symbols in the machine language—which was all of them it turned out.

I reached the top before she had even gotten through a hundred thousand characters. I loved hearing about each one, her study of them, and her opinions on them. Seconds were strange beasts for me now; a second could be the amount of time it took to adjust one's sensors, or it could be a few trillion lines of executed program.

When I set my hooves on the horizontal platform leading to the entrance of the starship, I kept the locking pattern going.

Disengage hoof.
Step.
Lock hoof.
Next hoof.

The door to the ship acknowledged my interrupt and opened. There was no light inside, or so my sensors told me, but it didn't stop me seeing perfectly well with my body-eye.

Author's Note

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