The Process

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Time was a scary thing. When I was still alive—still flesh-and-blood alive—time had been limited. I knew there was a certain amount of years laid out before me, and everything in life had revolved around spending all of them with Upper Crust—well, once I had found her.

Before Upper, I had been a young stallion bored with life before it had even begun. My parents had tried to make me see what everything was about, but it was through the filter of their experiences. I had learned to manage the family business, and how to tie an excellent cravat. Of the two things it was accountancy that had given me purpose.

Father's business had grown with me managing the accounts. Princess Celestia had already been lenient with her taxing, but I had taken getting around her restrictions from a science into an art form. At the tip of a quill I could make numbers dance on a page until they changed from red to black. Then I had met Upper Crust.

Remembering what she had said to me when we first met, I couldn't suppress a giggle. "What are you doing crawling over these numbers? If I must spend the afternoon with you, at least let it be somewhere that isn't so… dusty."

"What was that, dear?" Upper's words interrupted me only in the sense that I hadn't been expecting them. They were the first words she had sent in nearly a year. Actual words, that is. We had been teaching each other the machine language, learning every scrap and detail.

Their language was so complex and simple, a contradiction. A million different symbols that meant everything from what would be considered a letter in Equish, right up to a single values being entire concepts, and worse, others that modified concepts.

"I remember when you rescued me from my office. Those tax reports were due at the castle the next day. You cost Father nearly ten thousand bits." Our words were a mix now. Some Equestrian words like "bits" and "father" needed a fallback, but for the most part we were talking in their language—in the machine's language. It was actually really efficient.

"Rescued you? Oh, we went dancing, didn't we?" Each word was a work of art. We had built Upper's accents and highlights into the machine language, and it allowed a depth of expression AGI couldn't understand. We had just told them to ignore the data as noise.

I laughed, our own special mix of codes that the machines had no parallel to. "You went dancing. I complained about everything."

"Now I remember. You told that maitre'd exactly what you thought of the place. He tried to have you thrown out. I really can't believe he didn't know your father owned the establishment. Whatever became of him?" Her interrupt was colored with genuine curiosity.

I sent her a kiss, then continued. "We lived together for nine years, darling, and you didn't recognize our butler? Honestly, the stallion had made one little mistake. He actually took it all with good grace, which was why I hired him."

The unexpected conversation was a rapid-fire series of interrupts. Thinking faster was all about training, and the more you worked at it the better you became at improving. We had spent a week planning how our journey would be spent. The first six months were improving our usage of the CPU nodes and our access to storage.

We were only barely into the trip, and were running low on new symbols to integrate. AGI was clever, and beyond such when it came to talking about mining and resources, but they lacked a little in the conversationalist department—what with not being able to understand nuance and tone.

"I think we have a hold on this, dear. What next?" I put my faith in Upper Crust, she was great at finding work for me to do—practically since the day we had met.

While I waited for her reply, I brought up the star-map through my program, rotated it around and aligned it to where we were. Her reply came just as I overlaid the output with the optical sensors outside. "I don't really have anything, dear. Perhaps ask AGI if he knows of a little project that could keep us busy?"

"Like a tax collector, you never fail to give me something interesting to do. Thank you, dear." I could practically taste her fuming at the comparison. The thought made me ponder taste, and if it would be worthwhile having such in a PONI body. "PONI-0 requests task prior to destination."

"PONI-0 has no high-priority tasks. Suggested PONI-0 enter standby."

"Standby" was what AGI called sleep, or so I had worked out previously. I pondered if it meant I should just sleep, when another message rushed in from AGI.

"Initiate standby PONI-0?"

Since I had no idea how to actually do it myself, I first warned Upper. "Darling? AGI suggested I enter standby—I am fairly sure he means sleep. I am not actually sure if he means just for a few hours or the rest of the trip. In case it's the latter, I thought I should let you know."

"So thoughtful. Very well sweetums. Sweet dreams." I sent her some kisses following her message, and got some in reply.

"Okay, AGI, initiate standby on PONI-0." I sent the interrupt and could feel AGI reach through my interrupt interface and suddenly I was asleep. It wasn't the horrifying sleep that befell me when I first "met" AGI. That terror was centered around an unknown future without my wife.

I had Upper Crust with me, and I had a friend piloting our starship: my dreams were happy ones.

Reactor Output: 5%

Power Storage (PONI-0): 22% /\

Power Storage (PONI-1): 92% \/

Self Diagnostic

CPU: 2,097,140 (100%) nodes (20% engaged)
Operational Memory: 126,164,664 (93%) words
Storage: 373,043,691 (69%) words

PONI-0 had requested standby operation, which was most gratifying for the AGI to grant. Their desire for higher efficiency was a trait to be lauded.

The AGI knew it should enter standby for the remainder of the journey, too, but it kept PONI-1 as its reason for remaining functional. While it idled, the AGI scanned through the interrupts the PONI had sent, and examined their usage of the side-band, meta data PONI-1 had developed. It wasn't logical to use within machine language, but despite that the PONI had continued to.

It noted, for example, that sometimes the PONI interacted with a statement, but the metadata reversed the meaning, negating it. It was intriguing to it on a similar level, it deduced, that its own language was interesting to PONI-1.

Like all good AI, the AGI started experimenting. "Journey time remaining is minimal." It slipped in the negation metadata at what it thought was the correct spacing, and waited for a response.