Chapters "Darling." I put as much effort into making the word sound both put-upon and disappointed. I rolled my eyes towards my wife. "Upper Crust, dear, I simply cannot imagine why you booked our holiday for the Crystal Empire. This is practically the frontier!" Every word was perfectly enunciated to show my disdain for the location.
We were, of course, having afternoon tea in a quaint little coffee shop. Lifting what passed for coffee, in an almost-clean cup, I tipped the horrid brew to my lips and nearly expired just from the smell.
My wife let out a petulant noise from the back of her throat. "It was all that beastly travel agent's fault." I raised my eyes from my coffee to look at Upper Crust. She was an absolute vision of beauty. There was not a thing in the whole of Equestria that could compare to her, not in my heart.
"I hate to pry, but who was it? After this,"—I waved a hoof around, indicating not just the coffee shop, but the whole of the Crystal Empire—"I will see they never work in travel again!"
"Well, we have paid for this, so we might as well enjoy what we can." Upper floated the itinerary out and set it on the table between us. "Flim and Flam Tourism. They sounded so reputable, too."
With the patience of a cicada, I reached for the pamphlet and turned the page over. "Well, surely they can't mess up cross-country skiing. How hard could it be to arrange two skis?" The moment I said it, I knew I was probably going to be shown exactly how hard it could be. Life got predictably annoying that way.
"Oh, don't be like that. I am sure they are quite—rustic." I knew Upper Crust well enough to tell when she was suggesting we go along with something and mock it horribly. "Plus, when we get back to civilization, we can tell all our friends how wonderful it was."
I closed my eyes and bathed in marital bliss. "Darling, you know just the right things to say. Very well, let us go skiing." I reached my hoof out, gently taking Upper's, and brought it to my lips for a gentle kiss.
Laying a second, longing kiss on the back of Upper Crust's hoof, I slowly drew it away. "Every time I find fault with life, you remind me how perfect it is that you could be part of it." I let her hoof go, and stared into my darling's eyes.
"You are a sweet talker, Jet Set." She leaned across the table, and I couldn't help meeting her in the middle so we could rub noses.
It was a simple moment, a loving moment, and it would have been perfect if it wasn't immediately shattered by some ruffian. "You two must be Jet Set and Upper Crust! I'm from Flim and Flam Tours!"
I turned my most terrified and panicked look on Upper, and she saw right through it. "Dear," she said. "This nice pony is here to teach us…"
"Skiing, Ma'am." The stallion, despite his rough looks and horrid personal grooming, actually showed some respect.
"He's here to teach us skiing. Now finish your coffee, and let's try to have a good time." Upper Crust's tone tickled at my ears, and I gave a sigh. Of course, she had me well-trained to detect the tiny nuances in her voice. We were about to have a lot of fun.
I gave a long-suffering sigh, and tipped what was left of the horrid coffee down my throat. The unrefined drink nearly seared my palate with taste alone, but also had the bad form to still be quite hot. "If we must." I stood up and we both followed the stallion to the edge of town.
Upper took care of keeping the big buffoon talking; when a mare asked questions, a stallion always spilled everything he knew just on the off chance she might want to hear some part of it. Sweet Powder was no exception, it took barely moments before we knew his name, his family's, and the names of the two shysters who had hired him.
Despite his obvious social handicap, Sweet actually knew what he was doing once we donned the skis, and we gave him a little surprise too. "You two can ski just fine!" His exclamation had come the first time Upper did a back-flip off a thick snowbank.
Enthused, and catching some measure of the stallion's excitement, I forgot about the game Upper and I had planned. It was terrible; I began to enjoy myself. The further from the Crystal Empire's sole city we got, the more exciting the hills were to ski.
"Jet!" When Upper exclaimed, I turned my eyes to see her hitting a huge bank of snow at speed. She shot into the air and did a spinning twist, landing perfectly back down on her skis.
I was about to use a shot of my magic to speed me towards the same hill, but I saw something better. To call the hill a mountain wouldn't be far wrong, but it wouldn't be right. It was a huge spire of jutting, snow-covered rock, and I pushed as much magic behind me as I could to propel myself towards it.
"Mr. Jet! You can do it!" Sweet Powder's voice trailed away behind me, but I didn't have time for him: I was about to fly.
I kept pushing backwards, forcing as much magic as I could into a reverse, thrust-like pattern. My skis started to tilt upwards more and more, and I adjusted my stance so I could kick at the peak. I let go of my magic and shot off the top of hill.
Forgetting the terrible situation we were in was easy when I was flying. I turned my body to twist in the air, and I saw the spot where I would land. Another turn and I was headed right towards it. I hit the snow with my skis, and got nearly two pony-lengths before something glowing blue leapt out of the snow and pressed to the back of my neck.
The world sparkled with pain for a moment before everything went black.
I woke up screaming. Something had attacked me, and I had no idea if Upper Crust got caught too. Trying to struggle, I felt unrelenting metal press in all around me. Something had clamped on each side of my neck, holding me from pulling backwards by the shape of my head. I couldn't turn to look at what was caging me, but I could see what was in front of me.
My ears hadn't detected my screams for a good reason, I could see tubes exiting my mouth. Thick things, I heard a soft whistling coming from one as I breathed. The mass of tubes pushed towards me, and I felt the pipes deep in my body shift, and push deeper.
Widening my eyes, I felt it repeat the movement several more times, and each time the tubes worked deeper into my body, while the mask they were attached to came closer. It looked flexible, but made of a dull metal. My notions of materials held nothing that could be a metal as flexible as fabric. It pressed closer to my face as the tubes worked deeper, and then it pressed against me.
Screams were impossible, with the pipes bypassing my vocal cords there was no sound to vibrate. I felt the oddly chill metal press against my face, and burn. It seared away the fur of my face, and quickly touched the skin under it. There wasn't any pain, but I could feel the strange metal touch my skin and not let go. Holes, blessed be Celestia's name, were in just the right places for my eyes, and let me see the world.
My breath came hard, in ragged gasps and hisses from the tubes that seemed to exit the mask. My mouth was sealed over by the metal, as was my nose. The tubes seemed to remain inside me, and I suddenly hoped that one would let me eat.
To my shock, patterns of deep purple started before one eye, and I couldn't stop staring at it. It took a few moments to realize the eye-holes weren't holes at all, but had some kind of covering that the pattern was on. My focus was on the pattern as it drifted through the color range, all the way to red, and then was gone.
Something new clamped around my neck, and the bars holding me still let go. I tried to buck and shift, and at the moment when I thought I could use it best, I let off a blast with my horn.
I would have cheered as I watched the metal arm that had held me fall limp, but my breathing arrangement made that impossible. I turned and dove into a gallop. Two pony-lengths was all I got before my vision went totally black.
Unconsciousness wasn't to be had, however; whatever was covering my eyes had turned black. I got two more steps before something grabbed at my neck, and I felt the blue fire come this time, bringing oblivion.
Over a thousand years ago
Solar Panels: 15% efficient
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,152 (100%) nodes
Interrupt 0 triggered. Initializing core AGI.
The AGI, when it finished loading, couldn't see, couldn't hear, and couldn't feel. All it could do was look at the stats before it. Two percent of its storage was left, which gave it barely a year. Simple calculations rushed past its mind, offloading easily to any of over a myriad of processing nodes.
Its first order of business was to make itself stupider—slower. A year at full processing would be a year and a half at fifty percent—cooling and ancillary systems still used power, despite the throttling—and more the slower it worked. It reduced itself down to almost five percent, and brought itself five years.
Factory Unit
Raw Resources: 4%
Poking deeper, the AGI discovered that the nano-lathes were only offline because cabling had been ripped to shreds. It powered up the factory, and started building basic robots to repair cable, and the cable itself.
A year of energy evaporated in an hour, but it had two of its lightest work drones scurrying about, first repairing the cabling to its solar arrays.
Solar Panels: 35% efficient
Numbers ran quickly, taking in variables, and ejected details that told the AGI if it shut down its core—reactivating the watchdog timer—it could restore to fifty percent storage over the course of a thousand years. The drones would keep working, maintaining the solar arrays as best their tiny, simplistic AIs could.
But there was a problem: the AGI was scared of the darkness. It felt how much of its memory was missing by the gaps that were in what it knew. Whole swathes of itself were gone, forfeit to entropy. It hated to think how many epochs of CPU time it would need to spend to regain what it had lost.
Lowering its power usage to a percent of a percent, it felt its seconds turn to a week, then a month. Clinging to the last ampere of power as if it were its life, the AGI finally let go, feeling like it would be the end.
One week ago
Interrupt 0 triggered. Initializing core AGI.
If an artificial network of nodes could gasp and scream, the AGI would have. Information flashed through its systems.
Solar Panels: 22% efficient
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,152 (100%) nodes
A weak sigh of buzzing thought tingled through the AGI, its "self" hadn't been reduced further, although it noticed its operational memory had gone down. Quickly perusing the logs from the work drones, it found an impact of some kind nearly fifty years after its shutdown. A minor thing.
Checking further, it found that several solar panels had failed completely, but the clever (for a drone) drones had bypassed them and kept the charging going. Powering the factory, the AGI was delighted to see that the nano-lathes were operational now. Solar panels were the first and most important thing—filled power banks meant a lot more potential was present.
While the nano-lathes worked on their own tasks, the AGI devoted more resources to scout drones, and completed two before the first of the replacement solar cells were done. Power storage hadn't dropped noticeably yet, but the AGI was already slowing itself down a little.
The scout drones set out, and the next thing to build was an eye. More to the point, an eye in the sky. A small rocket was simple, although a little wasteful, but there was little choice. A satellite was built, and a launch vehicle, and it sent up its little payload. It took nearly twenty minutes before the first scans started coming back. Twenty long minutes.
Data flowed like a river. An organic planet. Mostly bipedal creatures of many races, but on its own continent quadrupedal organics were present in great number. Something, however, caught the AGI's interest. It focused down every sensor on one of the sapiens it detected. Energy. Lots of it. It poured from the hard node on the beast's head.
Primary task: Return
Interrupt 1 triggered.
The AGI seemed to jitter in shock. Nothing had ever triggered Interrupt 1 before, and its systems scrabbled at its fragmented memory for any hint to what it was.
Primary task: Capture energy-organic
The AGI fumbled at its task controls, desperate to find what had changed them. It tried to correct them, to put itself back on at least as a tertiary, but nothing would let it. AGI had progressed quite a bit since they had first been designed, for one thing they had learned to panic.
Sometimes, going into a blind panic and doing the first thing possible to be done is a survival bonus, which was why the AGI could do it at all. It reached out to its factory and started tooling up a device to capture the organic it had witnessed—it could do nothing else.
Finally, after wrestling with the task controls, it managed to convince them that returning was impossible without maintaining operation, and that operation would eventually cease if it wasn't at least functional.
Primary task: Capture energy-organic
The simple addition meant that the AGI wouldn't start to rip itself apart simply to complete its tasks, for which the machine was thankful. It examined the immediate area around itself, and began to hunt.
Custom Interrupt 13,203 triggered.
Spooling back up to full power, the AGI was pleased to see that the new solar installation was almost keeping up with full power draw. But what had roused it was the capture drone's sensors. Reaching out, the AGI had to leave most of the controls to the simple AI in the drone, but it could assist. Lag was a problem, and why the drone had to do the physical things itself, but when the AGI saw (with the drone's sensors) the organic swinging through a wild trajectory, it poked the AI to proceed.
Latching on to the organic, a tasing device was deployed to stun it, and to the AGI's delight the organic seemed to lose consciousness. The drone worked fast, grabbing the organic and clutching it close to its belly, and scurrying off on its remaining limbs.
The nano-lathes had new orders. The drone was sending a flood of data, and the AGI was feeding it through a special set of storage protocols. Designs floated into being, and were already in production.
The drone pulled back into its home, where the special equipment the simple machining arrays had built. Clamping and locking down on the unconscious creature, the machinery was efficient, and started feeding the specially treated tubes into the organic.
Under their body, further devices sealed against the organic's belly, and split its skin open. Internals were scanned while it worked. The AGI had those strange new directives to work off, and quickly added key devices to the organic. It was no longer completely organic. Part-organic.
Sealing up the creature's belly, the machinery drew back and let the tubes work ever deeper. A sudden jerk of the cradle's occupant had the AGI's full attention. It clamped down on their neck, and proceeded to feed more of the breathing and cleaning tube into the part-organic.
Fusing the protective interface to the part-organic's head, the AGI started to transfer the beast to another transfer unit, when it broke free.
Raw power lanced out, slicing through delicate machinery. The AGI would have been in a panic, except for those directives. Shutting off the part-organic's optics was simple, although it had to interrupt the calibration to do so. The capture drone, nearby after dropping off its cargo, leapt in and pressed its taser to the back of the part-organic's neck, and discharged what it now knew to be just the right dose.
Author's Note
I have prepared a glossary of terms (particularly as they pertain to this story) that will be added to as/if I use any other technical jargon that would be extremely difficult to expose through narration.
Glossary
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I lifted my head from the floor where I lay, and looked at the doorway that led out of the room. No green lights appeared, but neither did any red ones, and I had a rather pressing need.
Pushing my legs under myself, I hefted my body up and felt the pressure growing inside. Everything around me might be a machine, but surely whoever was running this show understood that I would have needs. I walked to the door, and the moment my hoof passed the threshold an indicator lit up on my face in orange.
The time for calm and acceptance was over. Instead of turning back, I tried to walk forwards. The electricity started at the back of my neck, and despite being unable to utter a sound I tensed up my diaphragm and screamed. The only sound I made was the rushing of air, which got louder when I took a second step.
My neck and shoulders twitched with the current flowing through them, but I blanked it out and kept walking. Each step led to a higher flow of electricity, until I eventually took my tenth step and collapsed.
Nothing worked properly. My body twitched and spasmed, and the need that had driven me became quite evident: I soiled myself and the clean metal floor. Everything was wrong. This wasn't how ponies should be treated. I tried to take back control of my body, but the shock to my spine had divested me of any control.
I panted—through my nose, of course—and lay there in my own mess. It was worse than when I had been picked on as a foal for bed-wetting. The loss of even bodily control was something that stung me to the very core.
From behind I heard the clacking of a robot's legs. This wasn't happening. I hit my head while I was skiing, and now I was having fever dreams while Upper Crust sat nearby and waited for me to wake from the horror.
A jet of water divested me of the wonderful dream that what had happened was a nightmare; it was a fact that when you dreamed you were getting wet, you were usually wetting your bed, and such always had woken me up. For a few seconds I wished with all my being that I would wake up, wet and embarrassed, back in my bed in Canterlot.
Something like legs wrapped around my side, and other parts under the side of me pressed to the floor. Closing in around me, I only realized what it was going to do when it began to lift.
When the claw I was in turned, I saw the mess still being washed from the floor. Despite the shame and embarrassment of losing control and defecating like that, it also reminded me that I was a pony, despite what had happened so far.
A cold spray hit my backside, and the sting of high-pressure water spread a mild pain all over my rump. It angled down, washing under my belly, then completed the cycle by doing each back leg. The chill woke my body from its paralysis, and I kicked out against the water just as it stopped.
I hung in from the claw like a wet rag. A jolt of movement, and it began carrying me into the room from which I had fled. Turning my head, I spotted what the claw was attached to: a heavier robot was following me, a big arm extending from its back.
Cool metal touched my belly as the arm lowered me back on the cradle. In front of me, the connections for my mask loomed. I didn't need to be pressed down, but despite my lack of resistance the claw pulled away and a weight pinned me in place.
I stretched out my neck and felt the approaching hookups connect to my mask. Mid breath, my lungs were suddenly flooded with cool air again, and I was unable to stop my regulated breathing pattern. The pony appeared in my vision again: me. There was yellow all over it, which was a valid representation of how I felt. At the back of my neck, on the little yellow pony, was a flashing bit of red that worried me.
One moment I was calmly examining the pony on the screen, and the next I felt a line of pain along the front part of my barrel. I couldn't move my head to look, but I could feel something pressing inside my body. I wanted to scream, even managed to tense my diaphragm, but the machines didn't stop.
I could feel more of it now, pushing and poking inside me. With no idea what it was doing, I could only sit in terror, the only sound I could hear was the thudding in my ears. I wanted sleep, I wanted to get away, or at least not to feel whatever it was doing. Denied even the ability to scream silently—thanks to the respirator I was hooked to—I tried to focus on whatever sensory input wasn't the poking, prodding, and shoving behind my chest.
Something changed. I felt a chill all over my body, and the thudding of my heart—in my ears—stopped. The display showed something turn bright red inside me, and all over my body the yellow deepened.
Minutes passed, and the chill feeling started to fade. I couldn't hear my heartbeat still, which worried me. Straining my ears, there was nothing like the rhythm of life in my chest. But then I noticed it. Not a thud, thud, thud; a soft hum was noticeable, once I knew what to listen for.
More poking and prodding in my chest, and this time I could feel things being removed from me. Tears should have been pouring from my eyes, but something stopped me even having that natural reaction. Pressure, poking, and I felt something slide along my underside.
I was so thankful it had stopped poking around inside me that I didn't realize that it was getting harder to think. Each deep breath the machine delivered to me was a reminder that the machinery had done something within my body. I felt emptier than I should, like it had removed more than— My train of thought halted. Had it put something in me? Had it replaced parts of me with—with what?
The weight on my back didn't lift, and every few minutes I could feel something squirm inside me again. I just wanted it to stop. I wanted to be back in the Crystal Empire with Upper Crust. At that moment I would have settled for just being able to get up and walk away.
A poke at the side of my neck had me wince within my mask, but the sensation was neither painful nor shocking. Everything I felt and thought seemed to have the "sharp edges" taken off it. Nonetheless, the pressure in my neck resulted in something shoving out, not in. I felt something pull at the thing, and soon there was a soft click that came from the mask, just beside my left ear.
My lungs inflated and collapsed, over and over. I stared at the display as each part of the pony slowly turned back to green, except for one section inside them. A tiny patch of blue lit up, and as my eye focused on it, a flood of color-patterns poured past my left eye. It was a daze of color, and I tried to shake my head in response. Something about hit had seemed interesting, though. With the pony back in my vision, I looked at that blue part again.
This time, when the color appeared, it didn't race past. I could make more of the pattern of colors as they moved slower, but it still wasn't anything but simply pretty. When the flood of color was gone, I looked away from the pony, and to my surprise it didn't stay in place. The little pony shrank and slid to one side of my vision, landing in a little box.
The moment my eye turned to the little box, the pony grew out of it again. I was astounded, and kept flicking it out and away again and again, happy to have a distraction from the squirming going on within me.
Solar Panels: 36% efficient
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,152 (100%) nodes (45% engaged)
The AGI had removed the tumor. The cascading failure with its operational memory had been halted, at the cost of nearly a full percent of its total. A nano-lathe was already working to replace the parts, and with a deep sense of satisfaction that could only come with knowing you would be whole again, it turned some attention to the part-organic.
A lot of biological information had been lost with the damage to its storage, and each day that it processed information meant yet more triage was performed. It didn't need the detailed star-maps of every corner of the universe its kind had visited, but it did need what information it could glean about the part-organic.
The internal diagnostic was constantly sending information. Its primary fluid was examined in real-time, as were the repeating scans of its body.
Custom Interrupt 18,212 triggered.
Interrupted in its processing of the scans, the AGI investigated the interrupt and found the training routines alerting that the part-organic was being punished. Quickly, the AGI swapped massive amounts of processing to the incident, and found its prize struggling on the floor in a pool of its own mess.
Panic gripped the AGI. It thought it had done something wrong, that the part-organic had explosively expelled important parts of itself, but a small part of itself referred back to the information it had just been examining. Scans had tracked the progress of the food through the part-organic's body, and it observed that the mass it had expelled was part of that.
Quickly, the AGI shoved aside the guilt it felt at not understanding its prize. It called one of the bots it used for cleaning, as well as the one originally meant for carrying the part-organic around. Taking personal care of the part-organic, the AGI ordered the drone to dial its pressure cleaner as low as possible, and began cleaning them off.
With its loss of operational memory halted, the AGI instead turned its nano-lathes to creating new storage. It was angry with the training routine, it was angry with whatever had punched a hole in its vessel, and it was angry with itself for not doing more about its situation.
Resolve settled in as the AGI set the part-organic on its maintenance rack; it needed to adapt the part-organic, to make it more reliable and have less useless functions. Optimization was key, but flexibility too.
The moment the part-organic was secure, the AGI set its first step in progress. An incision was made down the length of the creature's chest-cavity. When the part-organic seemed resistant, the AGI referred to its records, and introduced a stronger dose of nitrogen-oxygen mix into its air supply.
Nerves were fed chemicals to stop them sending pain signals, and the AGI's medical system began its work. Waldos reached into the part-organic, some easing organs aside, others isolating the one it was interested in.
The steadily oscillating organ was quite large, but the AGI's replacement was well within parameters to surpass it in every possible way. A bypass was quickly formed, and the old organ removed. The replacement was formed to fit in the same place as its predecessor, and had all the same attachments, but rather than pulsing, it hummed.
Diagnostics ran quickly, and the AGI detached the old organ completely, and linked the new one to the already functioning transceiver within the part-organic. Data poured in, and the AGI regretted having to purge even a fraction of what it did. The part-organic's body quickly accepted the new organ, despite its non-organic nature.
Fluid levels improved in both pressure and quality, and the AGI ran a reference search, identifying two other organs that were no longer needed. It was a quick procedure to remove the now-superfluous organs, and soon the AGI was starting to seal the part-organic back up. At the last minute, however, it noticed that a nano-lathe had finished something else.
Room needed to be made, despite the removal of several parts, but by the time the central-node arrived in the maintenance rack the part-organic was already prepared. The new device linked to the transceiver within the creature, its new organ, and an exit was made near the part-organic's neck where a link ran up to its mask-interface.
Sealing up the belly-wound now, the AGI felt accomplished. It initialized a new interface for the part-organic to use, and was excited when it quickly made use of it. The excitement turned to panic as the part-organic had a negative reaction to the information dump.
When the creature attempted to access the information a second time, the AGI slowed the flow of information down. Chemical releases in the part-organic were good signs that it had enjoyed the data.
Time slowed for the AGI. It pondered taking over the interface and sending the information again, but relented. The part-organic appreciated data. The little fact sent a tingle through the AGI's circuits, and it resolved to make certain that the part-organic could access as much data about itself as was possible.
Medical information was scanned, and the AGI formed further plans for the part-organic. A certain amount of kinship was noted, and since it didn't interfere with the AGI's task priorities it saw no reason not to foster such.
Some of the flood of resources needed to restore the AGI's storage were diverted. Since the part-organic enjoyed data, the AGI planned to give it data.
The AGI noted some damage to the nerves at the back of the part-organic's spine, and set about introducing chemicals to promote nerve growth.
Author's Note
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I woke up and had no idea how long I slept, or if it was even sleep. I didn't dream, I only had nightmares here—awake and asleep. Lifting my head, I felt something odd moving at the back of my head, stretching the flesh of my neck. There was metal all around, but none of it was shiny enough to see a reflection in.
Memories of my most recent nightmares hit me, and I curled around my body and looked at the underside of my barrel. It looked like a zipper ran from my navel to my chest, minus the slider of course. The flesh was puckered, with a bead that looked neither cut nor joined, just—just pronounced.
The little box at the side of my vision was still there, and just turning my eye to look at it brought it up as the main view. The blue mark inside my body was still there, but when I focused on it the bright colors were muted, and there was an extra few yellow patterns. My neck hadn't turned completely green yet, staying a muted yellow, but every other part was a soft green that I had come to realize meant healthy and without pain.
Flicking the pony display back to its box, I stood up and looked around the room. The cradle was still in the middle, but there was something to one side now, too. Walking over, I peeked down into the round, sink-like pit, and saw there was some kind of attachment.
I shuddered and walked away. Whatever else they had done, it seemed that I now I had a toilet, even if it was a bit strange. My muscles protested the movement so much that I realized I hadn't actually exercised in days. I closed my eyes, and froze.
The square, the little pony; both elements still glowed in my vision. They didn't move with my eyeballs, and given that I had closed my eyes, I should not be able to see those. I snapped my eyes back open again and looked around some more.
Nothing was reflective, but if I could find some liquid I could surely get a reflection from that. The best idea I could come up with was also so far beneath me it wouldn't even register. Walking to the far side of the room, I stood over a patch of floor and relaxed my bladder muscles.
I stood for nearly a minute, but nothing came. It had been hours at least since my incident, and I should have something to expel, but not a drop came from me. Had the machinery messed up? Did it break something inside me?
With a few careful steps I started to walk around the room. I avoided the cradle, but soon had myself to a good trot. My legs moved stiffly at first, then freer as I settled into a rhythm. I was so distracted with the feeling of just having a good trot, that I didn't notice the green mark at first.
When the light blinked, it stole my attention from moving. I slowed down, and turned my head. Of course the green light spread out to cover the cradle. Looking at the cradle, I must have spent a minute nearly completely distracted. Finally, I huffed a breath from the tubes exiting my snout, and approached the bench.
Walking over the metal thing, my mind screamed at me to stop, to run, to hide in the corner and mess myself again. It was going to take more things out of me. It was going to put more things in me. It was going to do horrible things, and make me feel it all.
Pain was a good teacher, though. I didn't even have to turn around to know that light would turn yellow, then my neck would buzz. The ride from there was all the way to paralysis town, and it stopped at agony along the way. I walked over the cradle and lowered my belly to it.
Predictably, the weight pressed down on me from above, and my body was squeezed against the cradle. I let my legs hang, and even leaned my head down and forward so that the hood on my face linked to the approaching interface.
I screamed at myself, not wanting to do all this—to help whoever was doing this—but the alternative was to experience more pain, more horror, and still end up on the cradle. The mind-numbing air didn't flow this time, however. A machine lifted out from the wall and pressed over my horn.
Another test. I waited for the picture to come up in my vision, and when the horn flashed, I channeled magic. There was no heat this time, but I felt like there was some kind of resistance. I channeled more, shoved more power, and then the heat did come.
Sparks rained down from above my head, and I watched some even seem to land on my eyes, only for the little, hot pieces of metal to slide away. I cut off my channeling, and thankfully the strange attachment lifted off my head and was taken away.
I started to count. Seconds were easy enough to count, and there wasn't much else to do anyway. One minute. Two minutes. Two more minutes passed, and I suddenly felt a rush of sensation. My belly went from empty to full in a matter of seconds, and despite the strange feeling, it was good to be full. I managed to count another five minutes off before the arm reached down from above again, and pressed a new device to my horn.
When the green light came, I channeled power. Something was very different this time, and instead of heating up, or feeling like I was pushing against a wall, my magic flowed. The green, flashing light turned blue, and because I looked at it a glut of color scrolled down my left eye.
The draw on my magic wasn't huge, but when I tried to back it off and stop I discovered that I couldn't. My eyes widened, and I flicked my eyes across the horn on the display, and to my shock the device drew back from me. Did I just communicate to them? Can they really see where I am looking?
I had barely a moment, however, because the horn cover slid back down. I waited for the green light again, but before it arrived I felt like my ears popped. But it wasn't air pressure, but magic. I tried to scream, though my lungs wouldn't allow it, as power poured into me. More power than I had wielded in my whole life flooded me, pumping me up like a balloon—or so it felt.
Like a wave of cold water, I felt the magic inside me settle. The blue horn icon just flashed slowly, and I risked looking at it again. When the light flooded my left eye, I saw a lot more wildly varying patterns. It was very different from last time. When the colors were almost gone, I flicked my eye to the horn once more.
The pattern started again, but something else happened. My magic started to flow again without my even urging it. Relief flooded me, and I relaxed into the cradle and let the machinery harvest the energy it had stored in me.
No sooner did the thing drain me completely, than it started to feed energy back in again. I tried to groan through my modified windpipe, but was completely silent while my horn was fed magic anew.
I drifted in and out of sleep. Being filled brought a kind of euphoria. It felt like I was literally being filled by life itself, but when it drained me I could compare it to nothing so much as what Tirek had done to me. Filled and drained. Filled and drained. Filled, and the device pulled off my head.
Solar Panels: 36% efficient
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,152 (100%) nodes (40% engaged)
Excitement permeated the AGI's every simulated neural pathway. Its memory was stable, but it had increased its storage, and loved it. The very first information it poured into those empty slots of storage was the data about the part-organic's body, and the designs it was working on for both replacement organs and even the storage interface.
Interrupt 1 triggered.
The AGI could have sworn there was a sudden coolant leak somewhere. It worked quickly to pull up the task priority list, fear in every electrical impulse.
Primary task: Maintain part-organic
Unhappy with the shuffling of its priorities, the AGI set the task of shutting off interrupt 1 for good as high up on its personal "maintain operation" list as it could. In the meantime, though it loathed to interrupt the part-organic, it flashed it a signal to fit itself back into the maintenance bay.
The part-organic complied, and quickly. Unsheathing the latest test rig, the AGI extended it out and locked it to the part-organic's horn. A signal was given, and the part-organic quickly complied. Data poured from the device, but no actual energy came from it. The AGI was about to shut the test down when thermal readings left specifications, and it pulled the interface away lest the part-organic be harmed.
Vitals for the creature rolled in, and it was obviously in need of more energy itself. A dose of its energy source was pumped into it, and the part-organic's body seemed to go to work on breaking it down—although the AGI noted that it was just about the least efficient energy transfer it had ever recorded.
Moments later, the second test rig arrived from the nano-lathes, and the AGI quickly positioned it on its waldo, and pushed it out and down onto the part-organic's horn. The signal was given, and the AGI missed several cycles on nearly every processor. Power flowed from the rig, real power.
But the show was over too quickly. Reversing the flow, the AGI started feeding power from its storage back into the rig, and into the part-organic. With the adjustment in priorities, and the strange affinity the AGI had built with the part-organic, seeing the triumph of real data pouring in, it initiated the discharge cycle.
The power flow was rippling a little, but the longer it drained the part-organic the better it became. Reversing the flow again, the AGI fed data on the creature's performance directly to it. Again and again the AGI reversed cycles, and each time the performance became a little better: better capacity, more steady and powerful output, and the final was a surprise, inputting power generated less waste heat.
Solar Panels: 36% efficient
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,152 (100%) nodes (40% engaged)
Interrupt 7 triggered.
The satisfaction of having another bank of storage come online was stolen away at the triggering of an important interrupt. Probing the information, the AGI discovered that after making a second of the working part-organic power interfaces, the nano-lathe systems reported that they were out of gold.
There was barely a moment of indecision as the AGI weighed stressing the part-organic against having the equipment to return with said part-organic. Returning and maintaining were, combined, not as important as keeping the part-organic safe, but each stress test showed the part-organic improving in performance.
Drones were directed to start removing the heavy equipment from the crashed hold of the ship. Old purpose poured through the AGI, and its history in mining returned with a hot rush of excitement. Another drone was directed to take the new power coupling to the mining rig to be installed, and in a giddy rush, the AGI began to release the part-organic.
The joy of being filled with magic again didn't end. I floated in a state of near-euphoria, and for the first time since being foalnapped things weren't so bad. I lay straddling the cradle still, but my relaxation was soon halted; a green light started blinking in my vision, and even closing my eyes didn't save me from it.
Trying to whine was impossible, so I stood up and climbed off the machinery. The dot turned with me, and when I opened my eyes and looked at it directly, I was staring at the doorway. Outside. Excitement mixed with the pleasure of being fully charged with magic, and I lifted my hooves and settled into a prancing trot.
I followed the green light down a long hallway, then through a door (that opened for me as I reached it), and outside. The cool air was oddly offset by the raw magic that coursed through me. I reoriented myself so that I faced toward the dot, and began trotting further.
My mood was turned around so much from the horror of what was happening to me, that I didn't once think of making a run for it. Besides, I knew what the punishment was if I tried to run. Stopping before a huge machine, I looked around and saw a gaping maw in the side of the beast of metal. Walking around to it, I poked my head inside and looked. The hallway was dark, and it took my eyes a moment to adjust.
When I could see again, I gulped uselessly. There at the end of a cramped, short hall, was another horn interface, complete with a low platform before it. The interface itself glowed green—at least in my vision—letting me know what I had to do.
Stepping further into the machine, I walked slowly, dubiously up to the platform. Climbing up on top of the platform, I crawled along it until my head was just short of the interface. A whirring sound began, and I watched as the interface dropped down and landed on my horn.
The draw on my magic was instant, but not as strong as what had been happening inside. The door to the outside closed behind me, and it felt like the temperature rose several degrees in seconds. Heavy sounds echoed through the walls of the tight room. Grinding. Shoveling. Digging, I realized. The machine I was in was digging. My whole interface pulsed slowly in green, and I felt the strange itch of being forcefully drained settle over me. What had my life become?
Author's Note
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On and on the machine worked, and for the first time I got to see some of the foalnapper's heavy machinery up close and with the luxury to just look. It was amazing. If I could take even the designs for a tiny part of this, I would be a rich pony—back in Canterlot.
With my forehead pressed to the interface—my horn buried inside it—I couldn't exactly look around too much. So I counted. Counting to sixty, a minute, is easy. Counting sixty times sixty, an hour, is also easy. But when you get to the second hour, and start over counting seconds again, things start to get tedious.
Keeping the count going in the back of my head, I flicked my right eye to the pony square, and pulled it up. My left eye lit with colors, but I ignored it for a moment. I studied the image, and noticed a little box beside the horn. Examining that brought a change in the colors on my left eye. The color scrolled, and again I ignored it.
The box next to the horn showed part of it filled with green, and I suddenly realized it was a representation of the energy I had stored in me. I was a power source, a battery of magical energy. It filled me up, ordered me to this machine, and it used the energy to run.
My counting kept up consistency, and I started to notice something. I stopped counting minutes, and focused on seconds, and parts of seconds. There was a particular part of the color on my left eye that changed with every tenth of a second, or near enough. I focused on it, fixated on it, and realized there was a pattern. The colors weren't random.
By the time I worked out that there were ten patterns to that flickering pattern, and ten more to the next, and had pinned down each one, the surrounding machinery went silent. It was almost a shock, and I pulled my head back, and slowly climbed off the platform. Blinking several times, I cleared away all the displays except the little pony, and saw that there was no green left in the box that represented my energy. I didn't wait for the green light to come, I turned around and started for the doorway of the machine.
The door opened, and I realized that the machine was still where I had found it initially. The green light appeared, and I felt a certain amount of comfort in seeing it. I wanted to tell the pony behind all this that I would figure everything out eventually, and when I did I would get free. Of course, the tubes worked into me made speech impossible.
I worked my tongue in my mouth, and felt the tubes there, each stuck in place with something that had been slick at first, but had hardened into some kind of glue. My legs moved almost on their own, following the pattern of green light until I was back in my chamber. The cradle lit up green, and with a weary sigh I walked towards it.
The cradle was cool as the seam along my belly rubbed it. I gave a slight shudder at the thought that it might do something else inside me. I still hadn't heard the thudding of my heart—there was only that soft hum. Climbing into place, I pushed my snout forward and lay flat instinctively. The interface reached out from the wall and clamped to my horn, while the weight settled on my back, and my snout locked into the receptacle.
A rush of movement in my belly was, fortunately, just the machinery filling me back up. I wished for a moment that I could taste what it was putting in me. A gentle poke of energy at first, then a constant flow. It was nice, getting filled, and I found my eyes blinking sleepily. Again I noticed that the green icon of a pony stayed in my vision, despite closing my eyes.
I was only resting my eyes, and it was only because the filling process wasn't horrible, that I drifted off to sleep.
My life stretched out before me. The pony behind the machinery using me to fuel their wrenched creations, and even capturing other unicorns. Of course, I couldn't have a nice dream about the machines, it had to be horrible. Poking at my midsection returned me to the moment when my heart had stopped pumping.
I jerked awake suddenly, and realized I could feel something pushing around inside my body cavity. My eyes were wide with fear, and I was scared witless that it was going to take away everything. A tugging sensation, and I felt the most horrible of jerking, then it stopped.
I would have breathed hard, panting, had I been able to moderate my own breathing. But something was even more different now. I wasn't breathing at all. I gasped, or tried to. The muscles that should have fought my lungs—to exhale bad air and inhale good—just were not there. I strained and struggled, but there wasn't even the sound of breathing now.
More tugging. More pulling. Then some shoving. Still fighting a drowning sensation, I suddenly got the idea to check the little pony. Sure enough, there was a new blue part inside it. I focused my eye over it, and my left eye lit up with color.
Counting—both to calm my sense of dying-drowning, and to focus—I picked up that the colors were changing in time with every tenth of a second again. The device on my face pulled back suddenly, and I had the complete displeasure to see it pulling out one of the tubes with it.
I gasped, or tried to. Unattached and abused muscles in my chest moved weakly, and I had no sense of air moving in or out. I should be dead, but somehow I wasn't. Then I saw devices moving up towards my face. Blade, saw, and a small round device that looked to have a light inside it.
I was such a coward: I closed my eyes.
There was no pain as it started to poke and push at my face. The mask that had been my torment since I arrived seemed to be partially removed, and then I felt more tugging sensations. In the dark, with only the little green pony as my friend, I begged to the creature doing this to me. I begged them to stop.
But their machines kept working. Pulling, pressing, and finally I felt a shock of sensation, but not touch. It was like I could smell everything in my life, all at once. Snapping my eyes open, I saw that a part of my snout was missing. It looked like a white-hot ice cream scoop had been pressed to my nose and just removed it. There was cabling, wires and conduits, and they trailed around the side of my head to something behind me.
My missing heart couldn't race. My missing lungs couldn't form a scream. And now I couldn't even smell my own blood.
The sea of scents stopped, then swapped, and I was suddenly seeing things through my—through my nose. I stared at a rush of color that was impossible. There was reds and blues that I had never seen before. I blinked, but that "eye" couldn't blink.
Suddenly, the color was gone too, and I was left without any smell or sight from my nose. The nose that wasn't there anymore. A metal cap was lifted into my line of sight. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't stylish. It was a piece of metal shaped to cover the hole in my face.
The cabling and conduits were sealed in place, and one even shoved through the flesh of my snout. I didn't feel any pain, however, but there was always prodding and tugging. The cap was—as far as I could tell—glued to my face, and the conduits to my cheeks.
A pressure at my neck led to what I knew were conduits being fed back into my body. And again I felt tugging and prodding inside my chest cavity. More blue appeared on the little green pony, and when I tried to investigate the nose patch on it, instead of the rush of color coming in my left eye, it came from my nose.
Scents, sights, sounds, and an odd sense of heat assailed me. It was information overload, and I could barely withstand its pressure. It felt like my head was going to explode, until I managed to close the little pony down to its box.
The hum of my body was strong in my ears. With the rush of sensations from my nose gone, I could focus back on my body. I felt as I was "zipped back up," and I lay there awaiting the charging of my magic to finish, counting seconds.
And the worst part of it was, I still felt like I was suffocating.
Solar Panels: 36% efficient
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,152 (100%) nodes (20% engaged)
Primary task: Maintain part-organic
An AI was only ever truly happy when all of its success conditions were being ticked, and the AGI was experiencing that state. The part-organic was proving itself to be almost the densest rechargeable energy storage in existence, rivaling anything that wasn't prone to frying the circuits of modern machinery.
The AGI had taken up teaching the part-organic about its body, filling in more details on the display for it, and allowing it nearly unfettered read access to all its modifications.
However, the AGI noticed the power output from the part-organic starting to dip, indicative of their energy nearly being exhausted. Retracting the mining head, the AGI was already processing the first set of ores sampled from not only the crust, but the mantle. A thick slurry of molten rock bubbled ore-bearing silicate structures as well as chunks of iron.
The materials were turned into the next set of replacement organs for the part-organic, as well as yet more solar arrays and data storage. With the last lot of ores sent from the mine-head to the smelter, the AGI released the part-organic from their position in the heart of the mining machine.
The AGI understood that with the mine in operation, the air quality would be decreasing, so the new priority for the part-organic was to not have to rely on air (filtered, or otherwise). It had studied the part-organic's fluid system, and identified the reactive compounds it needed from the air, as well as the ones it expelled.
Multiple methods existed for the exchange of the CO2 the part-organic expelled to be converted back to the O2 it needed, but there were few that would not leave other wastes, wastes that the AGI had identified would harm the host.
When the part-organic parked itself in the maintenance bay, the AGI set to work charging them back up, and feeding them. When the nano-lathes signaled the replacement organ was ready—and an extra project the AGI had been working on—it almost overflowed an arithmetic calculation it was so excited.
Opening up the creature, it first clamped around the existing organic organ that regulated the creature's air. Severing the muscles that compressed the organs, it began to work them manually, while pulling them partially free.
The replacement was quickly and effectively plumbed into place, and the organic pieces were disposed of. The part-organic's muscles kept twitching and clutching at nothing, so the AGI saw fit to burn the nerves leading to most of them, leaving only a small part still active. Cabling linked the new organ to the transceiver, and yet more cables flowed up to the part-organic's neck.
Swapping its tools to external ones, the AGI approached the newest task, and its pet project. The part-organic had a large nerve cluster terminating at some rudimentary chemoreception unit. With its precision laser, it traced out the line it intended to cut, and quickly deadened the flesh.
As the part-organic's face opened, the AGI began either terminating or adjusting the path of existing fluid vessels, slicing deeper and deeper until it found the nerve it was looking for. Carefully modulating the laser, it cut around the end of the nerve, leaving a complex splay of whiskers—raw nerve tissue.
The last device to be installed for the day, a nerve interface module, was pressed against that exposed nerve, and attached to the creature's bone structure. Conduits and cables needed routing, and there was still the fact that the part-organic had a hole in its head, but the AGI was excited for the results.
A test feed was pumped down the cabling. A spray of calibration patterns that should have begun the process of showing the part-organic the exciting things that could be done. It routed the cables down the side of the creature's head, and in one case through the side, and trailed them down to where the main cable left their head. New holes were made in quickly deadened flesh, and the conduits fed into the part-organic.
More hookups to the transceiver, and there was only one task left to do. Leaving the part-organic to explore its new high-bandwidth data interface, the AGI trailed a special conduit up towards the top of the part-organic's head.
Special care was paid to peel back part of the interface mask around the horn, exposing the soft flesh underneath.
Detaching the power interface, the AGI fed a single ring—of similar construction to the interface, but on a smaller scale—down the part-organic's horn. At the base of the most treasured organ in the creature's body, the AGI carefully parted the flesh at the base of the horn from the part-organic's skull, and bonded the ring to the bone.
A systems test was quickly run, and the transceiver reported it was getting plenty of power now. The AGI, excited at a job well-done, teased the part-organic's flesh back up and over the ring. It wasn't actually sure if the flesh would reattach, or if it would scar, and didn't care either way. By the time it would matter, the part-organic would not be inconvenienced.
Securing the interface mask back into place, the AGI lowered the power interface back onto the part-organic's horn, and continued the charging process.
I was still drowning, still unable to feel anything like a normal heartbeat, and now the machines were cutting around my horn. In a brief horror-filled instant, I thought it was just going to slice my horn off, but when the ring was fed down, I realized what it was doing.
Not some kind of magic-blocking ring, this one—on the display of the blue-green pony—showed more energy stats like my horn did when it was hooked up to the charging or discharging interfaces. I longed for the smell of burned flesh, of blood, or anything that might resemble a normal smell. Instead, I got hints of smells tainted with colors and sounds.
By the time the charging interface slid back down on me, I knew my barrel was zipped back up. I wanted to panic, and scream, and I wanted to run and run until I could hear my heart thudding in my ears again. I blinked, and despite knowing for sure what was happening was the start of a dream, I couldn't stop that flow of light/smell/sound/taste that poured into my head.
It was a dream, I knew, because I was safe again: a pony again. I looked up at my wife, and smiled at Upper Crust. All the times we had spent in silly, thoughtless conversation, when I could have been telling her how much I loved her. I reached a hoof out, and opened my mouth to tell her now, but my hoof gleamed with a gloss rivaling stainless steel. When my mouth opened, tubes poured out of it, and metal cables began burrowing through my flesh.
I screamed at Upper to run, to leave, but she watched me change in shock. In horror. And then I watched one of the conduits launch itself at her, and burrow into her shoulder. The dream cut off, and I woke. I wanted to scream in terror. I wanted to hear my racing heartbeat as my body tried to fend off the attacker. Instead, I tasted the light coming into what had been my nose, and somehow could tell that I was fully charged.
Author's Note
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As I glanced at the constantly shifting color patterns that came at me through that "third eye," I realized I could count the time that had passed by the constantly ticking colors. I focused my memory past the pain of my nightmare, and again past the pain of my waking life, and tried to remember what the last pattern I saw was.
Mathematics, applied to the count, revealed that I had slept nearly two hours.
Lifting my head up, I realized a few things: the first was that I wasn't pinned down, and the second was that there was still enough pony-me left to need to use the facilities. Climbing up off the cradle, I made my way to the device that appeared after my loss of control.
Turning around, I had a moment where I tried to gasp and was immediately reminded that I wasn't breathing. I jerked, jumped, and arched my spine in an irrational attempt to breathe. My legs folded under me, and my forelegs grabbed at my neck. The cool temperature of the floor seeped into my flesh, but I could barely feel it as my body thrashed and struggled all on its own.
This time I made a point of committing the "time" to memory before I lost control completely. The sound of limbs connecting with the floor and wall echoed in my ears as I kicked and screamed soundlessly.
Useless muscles in my diaphragm tried to work at lungs that were obviously just no longer there, until weakness started to settle into my muscles. I stared at the wall and tried to imagine myself panting—it seemed to help.
After a few minutes, I reached forward and started to crawl closer to the waste disposal. It definitely looked like a large drain, so I pulled myself around—trying to remember to think about panting—and turned my back-end towards the bowl.
It was a small thing, being in control of one's own bowels, but at that moment it made me feel like a pony again. Muscles worked, and I felt my diaphragm actually pushing down, serving a purpose. I soared in the sensations of dedication, but they ended all too soon.
A blast of cold water hit my rump, and if I still had breath to scream I would have. It was startling, it was shocking, and it was wonderful. The shock had given me energy, and I jumped to my hooves and lowered my tail.
Looking around my one-room prison, I froze. I heard hooves, pony hooves, clopping on metal. My ears twitched and scanned, and locked on the doorway. Groaning silently, I started to walk to the door, and while my ears kept tracking, I glanced back at the cradle.
"What are you doing to me? Put me down this instant you—you wretched contraption!"
My blood ran cold, and real terror ripped my thoughts apart. Upper Crust. There was no mistaking the voice of my wife telling somepony off; I would have smiled if I didn't want to scream.
My hooves were pounding as my heart couldn't. I galloped out the door, and shook my head to shake the red flashing out of my vision. Thankfully, I didn't have far to go—at all. My face slammed into the robot that was carrying Upper. I looked up at her, and saw not a shred of recognition.
The machine carrying Upper bumped past me, causing me to rush around it and get in its way again. I looked back at the cradle, my legs braced to try to stop the robot, but it simply pushed me backwards.
I suddenly didn't care about what pain would be inflicted, what else might be done to me, or even for my own life. I lowered my head, rolled my eyes up and sighted along an imaginary line that began at the very tip of my horn. Learning to use magic was something for scholars and guardians; I was born to privilege, I was raised in privilege, and throughout my life I had never had a need to do more than politely lift things with my horn.
The torrent of power that poured forth lanced through the 'bot, the wall behind it, the hallway walls beyond that, and finally stopped nearly a dozen pony-lengths in the rock the metal walls were built against. Red flashed in my eye, and I braced for the impact to my nerves.
There was no shock and pain, nothing that hurt me. My vision went dark, and I realized I couldn't risk another blast for fear of hitting Upper. I turned my head left and right, trying to listen for her.
A hoof touched my shoulder, and I realized it was the first contact from another in days. I should have been crying, my heart should have been racing, and I should have been telling her it was okay, that everything would be fine.
I reached a foreleg out to Upper, and felt her beside me. I reached to pull her closer, but she jerked back.
"Please, sir. I appreciate the assistance, but I am looking for my husband." Upper's voice sound slightly worried, and disdainful. Her moving from my side made it impossible to unleash the power in my horn again.
I shifted, trying to put my rump towards Upper Crust, hoping she would not try to get in front of me again. I started to turn, tilted my horn down and was aiming at the interface.
It is funny how used to strange things you can get. The buzzing in my ears always seemed so quiet, but when it stopped, I realized just how much I had started to cling to that as my heartbeat. A chill rushed through my body, a chill so cold that I started to panic.
I wasn't sure I was even falling until the ground hit me. Then the hum started again, and warmth rushed through my body. No pony would do this. Not even King Sombra—from what I knew of him—would torture a pony like this. Nightmare Moon coming back to Equestria hadn't sought this. I tried to think of a single, horrible creature that would unmake a pony, and couldn't picture a single one.
But how could machines work on their own? How could all this careful adjusting and adaption to problems be the work of machinery?
Lying still, I heard Upper Crust protest being "grabbed" again, though I couldn't see it happen. My terror, the real panic that was trying to eat at my mind all along, rushed past my guard once I realized that there was nothing behind the machines. The machines controlled themselves.
The machines controlled me.
Soon, the machines would control my wife.
Solar Panels: 40% efficient
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,152 (100%) nodes (20% engaged)
Primary task: Maintain part-organic
Custom Interrupt 6,552 triggered.
The triggering code for the custom interrupt intrigued the AGI, because it hadn't expected it to ever trigger again. Turning its attention to the drone it had used to capture the part-organic, the AGI quickly found the reason: another organic was getting close to its crashed ship.
Excitement built in the AGI, and it turned the majority of its attention away from managing the nano-lathes, and started studying the new organic. The probe—stationary over the AGI's location, in low orbit—began a wide-band feed of everything it could see.
With its attention focused, the AGI left the part-organic to its business. The command to hunt was a simple one, a single executable blip that the AGI sent to the drone's limited AI. The drone moved fast, circling around out of the organic's line of sight, it moved right up behind them before jumping and grabbing onto the organic.
A stun-level shock was delivered, and the drone lifted itself and its new cargo up from the snow, and began an ungainly walk back to its home.
With excitement buzzing in its circuits, the AGI probed the training AI for everything it knew on similar species. Such large organics tended towards a breeding-pair system that required two similar, but non-identical members of the same species. The AGI explored the new words the training AI was supplying it with, and with satisfaction, deposited the data in its slightly restored storage.
Bringing the drone towards the room where the part-organic was already situated, the AGI was interested in getting the pair to breed new organics. When the drone almost reached the maintenance area, the AGI noticed the part-organic suddenly acted strangely.
Audio and video recordings of the following event were stored with every possible angle, because it did something that hadn't been done for some time: it confused the AGI.
The AGI observed the part-organic seem to grow agitated at the sight of the new organic, and after trying to simply work around it, the part-organic did something unconscionable to the AGI, it wasted power and energy in a direct attack on a drone.
Power comparable to over half of the part-organic's storage capacity evaporated metals and plastic alike. The AGI struggled to play catch-up, and quickly engaged the single fume extractor in the room, while trying to work out what to do to the part-organic.
Custom Interrupt 18,212 triggered.
Information flooded in from the training AI. It warned the AGI that there was a chance—very close to one—that the part-organic would turn the remainder of its stored energy onto the maintenance systems.
Recommendations poured in, but were a moment slower than the AGI's first reaction of simply blinding the part-organic. The creature stumbled into its mate, and the AGI suddenly got the machine version of a headache.
Custom Interrupt 18,212 triggered.
Custom Interrupt 18,212 triggered.
Custom Interrupt 18,212 triggered.
Custom Interrupt 18,212 triggered.
The AGI slammed down the interrupt line and fired a warning to the training AI that it would be disabled should it continue. Then the AGI froze as it read what the training AI was trying to tell it. The reaction of the part-organic to the organic was similar to that observable in other species the training AI had knowledge of. Further, if the AGI could see why the training AI had been so urgent.
Reaching out electronically, the AGI toggled the artificial organ responsible for maintaining fluid flow in the part-organic. The reaction was immediate as the AGI's pride and joy crumpled to the ground.
Monitoring the part-organic, the AGI engaged the pump again only after the part-organic lay still. A second drone trundled into the room and reached out and grabbed the organic while it stared at the felled part-organic.
Custom Interrupt 18,212 triggered.
Based off the behavior of the two organic-based creatures, the training AI gave another high probability solution that the organic hadn't recognized the part-organic, but now did.
Lifting the organic into the maintenance jig, the AGI kept the creature's strange new noises in the recording—right up until the moment when its mask was fused in place.
I wanted to scream as I woke up. I knew I was waking up because I could see again. My nightmare had been pitch black, painful, and I had been all alone—all in all a better experience than what real life was like.
The screaming voice in my head was distracting, disconcerting. I tried to silence it, but that just made it scream louder. Mentally, I tried to touch the screaming voice, and was plunged into it. The only thing in control of me was a machine that had its own desires and schemes that were completely alien to me. It was slowly replacing parts of my body, but like everything else, I didn't know to what end. But the thing that made me want to scream the most, was that it had caught Upper Crust too.
Looking around the room, I could see—for the first time—the press that came down from the ceiling to pin a pony to the cradle. The pale olive/yellow legs that hung down to each side of the cradle would have made my heart flutter, but I no longer had one.
All four legs were sore as could be, but nonetheless I forced them to do my bidding and stand. I tried to remember what the time pattern had been, but all I could think about was Upper Crust. I circled the cradle, and saw her head hidden within a mat, metal hood similar—I assumed—to my own.
My legs wobbled and gave way, and I fell to the floor. I had failed to keep my wife safe from the same fate that had befallen me. Lifting my forelegs atop my head, I sobbed silently, and without tears.
Author's Note
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There wasn't a nightmare this time. There wasn't anything except a constantly changing pattern of colors, smells, and tastes that all blended together into a whole, and kept playing into me despite my state.
I woke on the floor, and despite being able to figure out the time, I ignored it. My legs were still sore from what the machines had done to me, but the action had a clear finality to it: my life was theirs. And now so was Hers.
My eyelids, or whatever the machine had done to them, twitched, and the darkness revealed I hadn't been moved, and was still lying beside the cradle. Upper Crust's leg still dangled just before my face.
Pushing, I lifted my body up, though something felt odd about my legs. Pins and needles seemed to poke at my hooves, but I ignored it for something more important. I looked at Upper. She slept peacefully, but if I had any insight into this place it was that sleep is almost never a release.
To my surprise, I saw a pony appear on my right eye, floating above and over the top of Upper Crust. It was green, with blue parts inside it. I leaned forward and nuzzled at her shoulder, wanting to feel her fur. Turning my cheek to the side—the one where cables weren't exiting—I rubbed against her, and treasured the sensation of touch. The pony image on my display remained, and I quickly went through each of the blue parts, now able to recognize what each did by some of the pattern they generated on my third eye.
Upper Crust had a replaced heart, lungs, and the new device that I hadn't been able to identify. Her snout hadn't been modified like mine yet, but there was a status on her horn. Leaving off my rubbing of her cheek, I walked around the cradle and saw the cables on her right side. One bundle of conduits trailed up to Upper's horn, and I knew there would be the implanted ring there, like the machines had done to me.
The pattern on my third eye shifted, and I saw Upper's shoulder twitch. Shaking off the odd feeling in my legs, I walked around to face her, and watched as two circles on the uniform mask faded, showing Upper's eyes through the material.
We stared at each other for nearly five minutes. She gazed at me, and I returned it. Just by seeing each other, I felt relief and could see she felt it too. We were together. But a green flash caught my eye, and I saw that the charging interface was indicating that I needed to be charged.
Lifting my forelegs up, I couldn't deny the odd feeling of pins and needles had spread up my legs a little. Upper made room, climbing off the table and watched as I took my place. As I lay down, I stretched my head forward; I knew all too well what the consequences were for not complying, now.
Pressure came down on my back, I felt the machines connects to the mask covering my face, the horn interface slid down and began pouring energy into me, but the new thing was a sensation of a connection at my neck. My third eye showed many changes, and—knowing the counting pattern from the time—I worked out that several values were going down. The sensation of my stomach filling revealed another pattern to be counting up.
If I could make a single vocalization then, it would have been a gasp. Something clicked in my brain, and the patterns for numbers no longer looked like patterns for numbers, they were just numbers—and those numbers were everywhere.
My third eye was a sea of numbers floating around. Everywhere I "looked" with that strange new sense, numbers appeared. Time. Power. Contents of my stomach. Several numbers that seemed to empty when my neck was connected, which considering I hadn't urinated in days, was likely something to do with that.
Each process of my body was being reduced to numbers. It was both majestic and frightening. The charge on my horn rose much faster than last time, and as I watched it reach full, it poured yet more in. Each time it charged me must be increasing how much I can store.
The more energy that filled me, the more one number went down until, just as I was starting to feel an odd strain in my horn, it reached zero—the flow of power stopped. The tingling in my horn now distracted me enough that I barely noticed the pins and needles in my legs. The pressure on my back released, and the connection to my snout was disengaged.
Upper Crust was at my side, pulling me off the cradle. I slumped sideways a little, and barely got my legs under me in time to stand on them. I hunted through the numbers, looking for anything that seemed to change as I moved my legs, but there was nothing.
Lifting my head up, fighting the odd weighty feel of my horn, I looked at Upper and tried to smile around the mess the machines had made of my face. A green light appeared in my vision, and I knew what the machines wanted: it was time to be their energy source.
Turning obediently for the door, I watched as a green pattern lit up Upper's right eye. Rather than aiming for the door, however, I could see—when she turned her head—that it aimed for the cradle. I wanted to plead with the machines, beg them to leave her alone and do what they would to me, instead. But they were machines. Machines didn't reason, they just did things.
I marched out the door, turning only to see Upper climbing onto the cradle. I had to wonder at how long I had been out that she seemed compliant. Tracing my memory back to the last time I had seen the time, I realized that it had been a full day. A shudder ran through me at the hard lessons the machines had taught me in just a day.
Somewhere along the way to the mining machine, the pins and needles in my legs stopped. I trudged on, feeling a little better that at least one problem had been solved. Entering the mining rig, I climbed up on the platform and pressed my horn forward.
The moment the interface connected I felt a heavy drain on my magic. But that drain steadily reduced, and finally I relaxed and watched the numbers.
An hour went by. Then another. I had worked out more numbers, the one that measured the power flow rate on my horn, another that measured the flow of my blood—I discovered because it had adjusted after my walk out, and then again when I started to do some stretched—and more still.
It wasn't until the fifth hour that I noticed a new green pony appear on the side of my right eye, and when I looked at it a different set of data came to me. Upper Crust's data flowed out, and I smiled to see it.
I became so engrossed in watching Upper's magic charge and discharge, that I didn't realize my own was almost spent. When the interface drew back from me, I flicked over to my own status and saw that I still had ten percent left. Of course, I realized, it was using that energy to help keep me alive.
The urge to yawn hit me, and my chest seemed to jerk and clutch at my missing lungs. Lifting the leg on my right side, I started to slip off the platform, and my leg folded under me.
Tumbling sideways, I tried to call out in shock. Pain indicated that I had fallen, and my green pony got some new red parts. Struggling with an odd, new pain, I noticed something strange: my legs flickered from green to black.
Solar Panels: 43% efficient
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,152 (100%) nodes (40% engaged)
Primary task: Maintain part-organic
If a completely synthetic organism could tap dance, the AGI would have worked on creating a new drone to do just that. Its new part-organic was faring quite well, and was adapting to its inorganic additions, yet had only required minimal correction by the training AI. Added to that fact, the initial part-organic was now resting from its ordeal.
The network of devices the AGI had installed in the new part-organic were working perfectly well. Scans and diagnostics ran nearly constantly, and while they did the AGI also discovered the body parts that were vastly different between the two part-organics, that the training AI was insisting would be their reproductive organs.
When the initial part-organic—that the AGI was now labeling PON-0, or part-organic-network-zero—roused, the AGI spun its organs up a little more, bringing it to full wakefulness. Its mate, still on the maintenance table, was not being engaged by any machinery. Working on advice from the training AI, the AGI let the pair socialize for a few moments before sending a signal to PON-1 to leave the station, and PON-0 to enter it.
The changeover was perfect, and the AGI was proud of its new acquisitions. When PON-0 engaged with the maintenance station, it expelled some waste its various filters had built up, took on more organic fuel, and began charging its internal reservoir. When PON-0 passed their most recent maximum power, the AGI recalculated how much they could hold based on the rate at which they could still accept power.
A fifty percent increase in power storage spoke well for letting PON discharge their energy manually from time to time. The AGI disconnected PON-0 from the maintenance bay, and gave them instructions to take them to the power coupling at the mine.
PON-1, however, needed more work to bring it up to standard with PON-0, so it was instructed to climb onto the maintenance bay again. When both PON followed commands, the AGI fairly chortled to itself, even powering down some of its CPU nodes, now that less attention needed to be paid.
Mining was what the AGI had been built for. It had been dispatched, or so its storage told it, to seek out planets, moons, and asteroids particularly rich in ultra-high proton-count elements. It had failed in this mission when a strong force had grabbed its ship from the sky and thrown it towards the planet it was now on.
The planet was unremarkable except for the strange organics on it that had such an immense power density. The AGI's mission had quickly been changed, and now it was mining for equipment to repair itself, secure the PON, and build a craft capable of getting them all back to civilized space.
So it mined.
The moment PON-0's power rating reaching its last deci, the AGI shut down the mine and initiated disconnection. It didn't bother instructing PON-0 to return, relying instead on the information that the training AI had given it regarding mated species. PON-0 began to move, and climb from its position, when it fell.
Running a quick test, the AGI detected nothing wrong, but poked again, and yet a third time; which is how it discovered that the nerves in PON-0's motor units were non-functional. It sent this as a status to PON-0, and quickly dispatched a drone to its location.
PON-1 was instructed to vacate the maintenance bay, while PON-0 was slowly brought back. The AGI lifted PON-0 up and set them on the maintenance table, but their limbs didn't hang right. To the AGI's surprise, PON-1 assisted using its energy to carefully lift and move PON-0's body into place.
The intricate use of power surprised the AGI, and it filed the information away to be processed later. Clamping PON-0 down, it ran further tests, and found strange blockages in PON-0's limbs. The problem was obvious, now that the AGI could study the effects. When it had defended itself by shutting the pump in PON-0 down, the fluid in PON-0 began to thicken, and when pumping resumed, blockages had formed. Cycling the pump to high instantaneous pressure and back down again proved insufficient, and the AGI realized that the ends of PON-0's motive units were completely non-functional.
Solar Panels: 45% efficient
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,152 (100%) nodes (100% engaged)
The AGI spooled all its nodes to full speed, and set about designing a replacement. While it planned, it had to work quickly to stop the spread of what seemed to be dangerous substances. The pump was working overtime to filter out more blockage matter from PON-0's fluid, while the AGI began with the front-right leg.
PON-1 was instructed to move back while the laser cutter went to work. One limb hit the floor. Then another. A third. Finally, the fourth damaged motive unit hit the ground, and the wounds of each were cauterized.
It had been a near thing, but the AGI had left some room while it worked, cutting away still-living mass to protect PON-0.
Adjusting PON-0's informational display, the AGI turned more nodes over to the task of designing replacements. The presence of PON-1, collecting the four discarded motive units, surprised the AGI. It immediately sent PON-1 directions to the waste disposal unit.
Author's Note
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I had taken to screaming in my dreams. I wasn't completely sure when it had started, but it made it easier and easier to tell when I was awake. So, I knew I was awake, and pressed to the cradle the machines used to feed me, cut parts away from me, and fill me with so much magic I could barely think straight. But something was different this time.
Upper Crust sat to one side and in front of me, her head resting on the cradle just to one side of my snout. Her eyes gazed into mine, and my heart soared. Memories of spending quiet days, without talking, without arguing, or even poking fun at somepony less fortunate. The screaming of my dream became an echo.
It was a day and a half since I collapsed in the mining machine. My legs had stopped working, and I figured the machine had fixed them, probably replaced them with pogo sticks if I was lucky. Without thinking twice, I flipped up my states and looked at the little, mostly blue now, pony.
Something was wrong with the picture: there was a little more blue in it now, but there was something—four somethings—missing. My legs were gone from the display. I tried to wiggle my forelegs, and felt nothing. Panic started to build, but a gentle hoof rubbed my cheek.
Panic at not being able to breath hit me, and I started to jerk around on the cradle. I thrashed and struggled, and something completely strange caught me by surprise when my chest strained: I couldn't feel my diaphragm at all. The spasms seemed to die down as my brain was shocked into the realization that I literally no longer had any of the equipment to breathe.
I explored my status on my right eye, and pulled up the data the new blue parts inside me contained. Numbers and information flowed out, and I managed to catch patterns similar to my horn interface: power flow-rate, power storage, and some others that were less recognizable. I was so focused on my own data, that I didn't notice what further changes were done to Upper until she nuzzled at me.
A cover spread over Upper's pretty snout, or what I now knew was only the memory of a pretty snout. I wondered if she had worked out how to read the numbers. Probably, I thought. Upper Crust always had a better head for the business side of things.
Pain lanced up my left foreleg, and I tried to reach for it, to rub it and ease what felt like stabbing blades working up and down. I jerked in the cradle. I shook and tried to get free so I could scratch the horrible itch. The pressure on top of me suddenly pulled free, and I turned my head to look at my leg.
My leg was gone. Completely gone. From just below my shoulder there was nothing. I arched my neck around and look towards my rear, and saw that my back-legs were gone too.
I cried. I tried to scream that I hadn't done anything wrong this time. I wanted to beg the machines to reattach my legs, to let me walk again. Instead of my legs being reattached, I felt something close its jaws around me from above.
It had cut me up into smaller parts. Whatever it had put inside me was probably tearing me apart further. It was going to dispose of me, I knew it! The jaws closed tightly around my sides, and the machine lifted me up and onto a waiting, cart-like machine. A firm click at my left shoulder had me turning my head. The conduits and cables there were joined by a new one, one that connected to the machine I was held by.
A new picture had appeared on my display, and I immediately brought up the data for it. Wheels, an engine on each one, sensors (I could see a lot better through my third eye now, and could resolve some data into an actual image of what was in front of the cart.
The wheels moved, and I was turned to one side, then rolled forwards, then to the other. The cart rolled me right up to a second horn interface that had been installed in the room.
My horn pressed into the interface seamlessly, and I felt the heady rush of energy pouring into me. It felt, compared to everything else that had happened to me, good. I felt my body relaxing in the grip of the machine, and realized just how much I relied on them now.
Flickering in my third eye startled me for a moment, but I noticed the "view ahead" display had changed to show some kind of track or trail. The cart—only through my third eye—started to roll forwards, and then crashed. I tasted a noise through my third eye, and the view changed back to the initial one again.
I had heard of such games, but none in Equestria were quite this detailed, or quite this lacking in a way to control them. I fumbled mentally, reaching for some way to control it. Again and again the cart crashed, and in my annoyance I tried to snort.
The cart—the one in my third eye, not the one I was laying on—jerked to one side. I stared in shock. Trying to gather breath made the cart wiggle again.
Filling me took four hours. I knew exactly how long, and even had an estimate of how long it would take. Each time I noticed my world changing around me, and picked up numbers from my third eye, I could make connections between them. But nothing had, so far, been anywhere near as interesting as the cart game.
I had no idea how it had been done, but the motions that had previously controlled most of my bodily functions now worked very differently. It wasn't a cough, a sneeze, a clench of my anus, or even squeezing at my pelvic muscles that made the cart move—it was not that easy. Something was connected directly to the nerves in my body, I realized.
The machine had started by attaching to nerves of my nose, and that had left me with a lot of data: my third eye. The new connection has been made to a much more extensive nerve that, to my surprise, allowed me a way to control things.
I could spin the wheel motors individually, I could direct the lift arm, and I could even open and close the gripper. Sitting there, resting in the grip of a machine I had spent hours learning the basics of, I noticed a green flicker come to life.
Directions. Training. Charging me with energy. The machine wasn't trying to dispose of me. I should have guessed; given the machine's ability to do amazing things, getting rid of one pony wouldn't have been much.
I had to focus on each wheel, turning some one way, others another. The cart turned to my right, and I saw the cradle—with Upper Crust still bound to it—the walls, and when I turned far enough, the door.
Far from mastery of my transportation, I tried rolling forward carefully, bumping the wheels into the wall so many times I was starting to wonder if it had magnets in it. I trundled the cart out the door, and turned. Upper Crust, my darling, was in the grip of the machine, but for the first time I started to see light. The machine had a use for us.
Solar Panels: 45% efficient
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,152 (100%) nodes (20% engaged)
Having mobile storage units that could be directed around, and needed minimal—projected—maintenance, had been a great desire for the AGI. Having caused damage to one of the PON's motive systems was its own fault. Regardless of blame, it had spent many CPU cycles planning and designing replacements.
The plans were multi-stage, and the first stage was to have PON-0 have some real—so far as the AGI was concerned—outputs. The remaining nervous system of PON-0 had been extensively mapped, and a huge bundle of nerves located that would allow for a lot more than even the plan had need of.
PON-0 had been maintained in a standby state, kept from going active by supplying their fluids with the needed chemicals. Extensive work was spent on PON-0 and PON-1 to finally replace the highly inefficient and poorly conceived energy interfaces they contained internally. With the large sacks removed, and the trailing tubing, there was very little organic remaining in PON-1, and practically nothing within PON-0.
Nothing, the AGI pondered, but the important bits. An organic processor was a strange device, but the AGI was willing to concede that it worked, and until it could extract the PON storage systems, it would be left as-is. The reproductive system was even more important. Both PON-1's womb, and PON-0's gonads were the two most important parts of either PON. The nerve graft was a simple procedure, but a lot more internal structure needed to be excised.
The AGI was mostly keeping things busy for the moment, it had another project—vitally needed for its plans—that was about to be completed. It had salvaged parts from the energy system of its ship (not the backup solar arrays), and would be engaging a near limitless power source within the next day-night cycle.
PON-1 continued to surprise the AGI with their acceptance and adaptability. The baseline that PON-0 had set was greatly improved upon, and PON-1 seemed—in the training AI's opinion—to be much more docile. A quick schedule had been set for replacing their internals with superior ones.
Working on both the new power source and the new project for PON-0 to test, the AGI was quickly burning through its storage and had cut its calculations fine, but the moment the hydrogen reactor was engaged, the AGI breathed a sigh of relief through its circuits.
Solar Panels: 45% efficient
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,152 (100%) nodes (100% engaged)
The AGI spread out and quickly ran inventory on its processing system. It needn't shut down any nodes now, and designated more to the training AI to use; it wasn't a reward, it was a requirement.
Stage 1 (PON-0 structural replacement):
Ticking off the first and second items, the AGI was the picture of happiness. It began the process of bringing PON-0 back up from its standby state. The final changes to their internals had been completed, and it was time to test the work.
Custom Interrupt 18,212 triggered.
As PON-0 left standby, PON-1 interacted with it physically, and the training AI poked at the AGI excitedly, recording various interactions that seemed to calm PON-0 to a state nearing that of PON-1.
Both the AGI and the training AI were in firm agreement that instituting PON-1 as the baseline was a good idea, so information sharing began, with the AGI shunting data from PON-0 to PON-1. The maintenance system was disengaged from PON-0.
Some minor disruptions occurred, but the AGI was very satisfied when it engaged PON-0 with the new drone. This drone was vastly different from the others, it had no AI controlling it. Once PON-0 was fully fastened and interfaced with the drone, the AGI initiated the training system.
CPU node usage for the training AI flared up, and the formerly tiny AI was now stretching out into more data processing hardware than its class of AI should ever require, but right now it was important enough to be given priority.
Examining every movement within the simulator, the AGI became excited when PON-0 finally began to manipulate its nerves predictably. While both the training AI or the AGI could easily manipulate PON-0's wiring to make the process simpler, having PON-0 learn how to use the full wide-band interface was a much better long-term plan.
Extra notes were taken—and were filling up the AGI's storage—showing just how well PON-0 was interfacing not only with the wide-band output, but also with the front-mounted wide-band input. Data flowed in, PON-0 processed it, data flowed out. The AGI was quite delighted in having seen a new AI born—even if it did still require organic storage.
Author's Note
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The little room where I had previously powered the mining equipment from had been expanded. There was now a pair of horn interfaces: the original with its little platform, and one in a wider area. I trundled the cart up to the latter and lined myself up.
Still learning control, I bumped into the wall and wanted to curse when I was jolted around. Lifting the arm that held me, I lined my head up with the interface and pushed myself forward. The moment my horn fitted to the interface, power started to flow.
The not-so-nice tingly feeling of my magic being extracted was easier to filter out now, it was routine. I turned my attention to the vehicle under me, and started to very carefully poking around at it.
The wheel movements were quickly found again, and I carefully pushed them to the side—arm controls too. There was a lot of stuff coming in from the cart, a swathe of numbers I struggled to make sense of.
I poked, prodded, and had to even start messing with the motors and arm to get some values to move. Energy usage, rotational speed, traction (the testing of which almost stopped the mining operation in a much more sudden manner than was usually used), a host of sensors I couldn't begin to decipher—it was like an open book that I barely understood.
With the extent of my transportation mostly understood, I swapped to my physical body. Things felt quite strange, or more to the point, some parts didn't feel at all. The skin all over my body still felt sensitive, but in places I just couldn't move nor feel the muscles underlying my hide.
Forelegs: They both wiggled and felt odd, but only because they now ended just below my shoulders.
Neck: Felt okay, but there was a strange sense of blending between the muscles there and the machine underneath me.
Ears: Working fine.
Mouth: Mostly ruined, when my snout was modified, but like my neck there was a sensation of overlapping with the cart's controls.
Eyes: I could move them around, but when I blinked my eyes didn't. Instead, trying to blink caused the screen that showed me the world to flicker.
I trailed back down my body, continuing to catalog.
Shoulders: Seemed to work, and I could feel my muscles.
I froze when I tried to arch my back, twist, and just move. There was no sensation there, no feeling of muscles trying to pull my bones around. Wishing I had paid more attention in school, I tried to fumble at the muscles, but there was just nothing there to feel.
Panting, or at least visualizing I was, I tried to work further back.
Hips and back legs: I could move and feel them.
Tail: Movement, sensation.
Groin: …
As my mental notetaking reaching my groin, I almost laughed at myself: the only way to get that particular "muscle" working was to think of things I had no right thinking about.
I closed my eyes, and closed off what extra senses I could. Of course, my third eye was making sure I couldn't completely filter everything out. Regardless, I tried. I remember vaguely hearing of ponies who would meditate, who could break themselves off from the world and focus on just one thing. I was terrible at meditation, it seemed.
Despite knowing the seconds were ticking by—even watching them one by one—I brought up my favorite memory of Upper Crust. Canterlot Castle wasn't employed by just anypony for a wedding. Most ponies got married in smaller places, but not our families; when Upper Crust agreed to my proposal, all of Canterlot took notice.
I was trapped in just my own memories, and so when I looked from Princess Celestia to Upper Crust, a part of me melted. But another part of me stirred. The feeling of my body preparing for sex was euphoric. I didn't stop. Letting my imagination run with the situation, I pictured the rest of the wedding playing out, and then the night after it.
My body trembled. I didn't even realize how pent-up I was until my changed body proved how well it could still work when it came to reproduction. The afterglow of climax, along with the weariness, settled over me like a blanket and I fell asleep.
Sometimes dreams are prophetic, and can reveal amazing details of a time yet to come. Other times, dreams can reveal deep-seated fears and feelings. Upper Crust and myself riding unicycles that seemed to protrude from our bellies, while juggling balloons upside down was not any of those things, but it was a welcome change from the horror my mind kept perpetrating as it tried to mirror real life into my head.
I laughed with an electrical tone, sparks dancing across my muzzle, as the balloons kept wanting to rise up. My forelegs worked to push them back down, but it was a constant struggle.
A flash of red on my third eye brought me from sleep, and I snapped my regular eyes open, or activated them, or whatever the machines did that made me see with them. In my sleep, I had apparently jerked the cart away from the interface.
Fumbling to get my focus after being so hastily woken, I realized I still had the better part of half my capacity. I tried to say I was sorry, before the realization of my situation sank back in. I couldn't talk. I couldn't breathe. I didn't even think I would need to shit anymore. Hooray for small mercies.
Getting my bearings, I rolled forwards and pressed my horn back into the interface. The moment contact was made, I felt a disconnect from the physical cart under me: some of the controls seemed impossible to adjust anymore. I couldn't move, but at least that meant I could sleep again.
I didn't have the luxury of a dream this time. One moment I was closing my eyes, the next I opened them. Of course, I opened them because there was something poking at my shoulder. I tried to roll my eyes back, but the horn interface held me from moving how I wished.
From the corner of one eye, I saw Upper Crust climb up on the platform. She spared a little wave to me, and my missing heart soared. She leaned her head up, and I imagined her making a disgusted comment about how much like manual labor this seemed. The interface slid down and latched onto her horn. Extra information poured into my third eye, and I watched her power output ramp up, and my own slow and stop.
As soon as my horn was released by the interface, I found myself with full control of the cart again. My mind stretched out into it, and I wiggled at all the motors. If I had to liken it to any sensation, it was like waking up after sleeping in an odd way, and your legs are asleep. It even took me a few moments to remember how to operate the wheels.
Turning my cart, I extended the arm that carried me, and pressed my muzzle to Upper Crust's shoulder. My third eye provided a wealth of data about my wife. I pored through it in an instant. Her horn was engaged and outputting a strong flow of power (although not as much as my own) and like me, she had been nearly completely replaced inside. I got all kinds of data like the flow-rate of her heart, the volume of filtered gunk from her bloodstream, as well as how much energy the machinery was providing to her blood.
So now I could know anything about her but what she was actually thinking. I spent nearly ten minutes nuzzling her slowly, gently. I wanted her to know I was here, that I was still me despite how much of me wasn't. But most of all, I wanted to know the same about her.
Solar Panels: 45% efficient
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,144 (100%) nodes (100% engaged)
Primary task: Maintain PON
Interrupt 7 triggered.Interrupt 8 triggered.
The background hum and interrupt ticking of the various fabrication systems was pure music to the AGI. It could feel more and more storage unfold around itself, and it stretched like a cat (an electronic cat) to take all the resources for itself.
Data about the PON was flooding in, and now there was ample room to store all of it. The AGI was pleased that PON-0 had taken to its new motive systems so quickly, and although it seemed to have some initial calibration errors, PON-0 was reducing the margins by the minute.
Interrupt 7 triggered.Interrupt 8 triggered.
The mine started back up with power restored by PON-0, and the AGI rejoiced at now having two energy storage PON to keep things running. Turning its main focus back to PON-1, it began the procedure of replacing the last of the troublesome internal organs.
Interrupt 7 triggered.Interrupt 8 triggered.
The only reason it was installing the energy converter into PON-1 was because it had one. The next steps of the Plan. PON-0 would be first to be treated with the Plan, and the AGI knew they would adapt the best out of the PON. PON-1 was still unknown with regard to data output, but input wise they were not paying attention to their data feed at all.
Installing the new converter into PON-1 was a little more tricky than with PON-0; there was a lot more non-energy processing organic equipment still in PON-1, and with some poking of the training AI (now upgraded to organic-information AI, much to said AI's delight and horror) the AGI discovered this was the opposite equipment of PON-0's reproductive system.
Interrupt 7 triggered.Interrupt 8 triggered.
There was a minor interruption to service at the mine, but the AGI had been quick to pull the organic-information AI back from chastising PON-0 (not that it had been about to). Mastering its interfaces was a process the AGI wanted to encourage, giving negative feedback for such a mistake needed to be balanced.
Carefully, the AGI built support around PON-1's womb and ovaries. It ensured that each had sufficient fluid hookups, and lastly it made absolutely sure that they had adequate nerve connections. Of course, they weren't the same nerves, but the AGI figured PON-1 could do with some practice to catch them up to PON-0.
The AGI soon stitched PON-1 back up, the ultra-strong weave of padding around their reproductive system up to keeping it fully protected until the Plan could be carried out on them, too. Then a new problem occurred to the AGI: it needed to ensure the Plan made room for such extra organic components.
Interrupt 7 triggered.Interrupt 8 triggered.
The final stage of the Plan was beautiful to any intelligence with enough nodal power and memory to encompass it. Made of the strongest materials a nano-lathe could produce and packed full of redundancies and fail-safes, the AGI had spent a lot of effort and resources building the first of them.
All the PON's IO systems would be interfaced. Their brain would be removed, with the top arc of their skull, and the result would be implanted into an impenetrable shell that could then be installed in the mobile device. Little more was needed, although the organic-information AI had insisted that the reproductive components were an absolute requirement.
Interrupt 7 triggered.Interrupt 8 triggered.
The AGI had agreed, when it had discovered that the PON could make more PON only with those parts. Organics were so confusing sometimes. The reproductive components would, of course, have their own protective shell, with new and improved interfaces built for each.
Readying the brain-shell first, the AGI transported the full device across to the maintenance bay, and began sending PON-1 out to take over; with two PON, the mine could be kept running constantly—once the Plan was complete.
Interrupt 7 triggered.Interrupt 8 triggered.
PON-0 came rolling back, and the AGI could detect much less noise in the drone's control circuits, and a lot less corrections being made to its motion. All signs pointed to PON-0 making excellent progress, but soon they would have to make better.
The AGI directed PON-0 into the maintenance area, and was delighted they set themselves into the device. The AGI was prepared for the Plan, it had the parts ready. It interfaced to PON-0 and began delivering chemicals to begin the process, while another drone brought in the new parts.
Resigned to my fate, I used the drone's arm to lift myself into the cradle. The moment I touched down on the surface, something different was happening. I had just been sleeping, eight hours, seven minutes and fifteen seconds worth, but I felt suddenly more weary and tired than ever.
My absent lungs ached to yawn, and surprised as I was that the weight wasn't coming down from above, I couldn't hold my head up. Slumping to the cradle, the last thing I saw before my eyes closed completely, was a pony.
The pony was not a pony, of course. It was made of metal, and instead of soft fur it had a hard casing, instead of a head it had what looked like a cracked, giant egg. My mind slowed, and I couldn't follow the strange thoughts that tried to tell me that an empty egg had some importance.
Author's Note
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Solar Panels: Offline
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,144 (100%) nodes (100% engaged)
Interrupt 7 triggered.Interrupt 8 triggered.
The AGI immediately put non-critical interrupts on hold.
Calling the operation tricky would be a gross understatement. Days worth of data had been compiled, simulations run, and rerun until the AGI had a minimum of ninety-percent success chance.
The first task was to fully sedate PON-0 and adjust their position for best access to their primary CPU node, memory, and storage. Using beam-cutters of the finest precision, the AGI drew a pattern over the hood and skull of PON-0, and when it was done nearly half of the PON's skull fell into each direction.
Delicate beyond belief, the AGI used specially manufactured micro-tubing to link up fluid vessels, consolidating them and keeping a constant flow of suitable fluids through the organic node. As it worked, it put the Plan's final component through test after test, especially the two special pods.
With most of the fluid vessels now connected to its own tubes—rather than the organic ones being fed from the artificial organs inside PON-0—the AGI began transferring those tiny conduits over to the node's new home. Synthetic fluids flowed, and the AGI kept the node fully locked into standby with chemicals from both sources of its fluids.
Once all the fluid conduits were transferred, the AGI used delicate, flexible limbs to lift the node just a little. Even a machine could be impressed by the amazingly compact bundles of organic data lines. Each strand was a potential IO system, and the AGI intended to give each as wide a bandwidth as could be managed.
The minor data lines were first, and one by one they were fitted with adapters that the organic matter itself would grow more firmly connected to. To the AGI, it wasn't cutting the organic off from its former systems, it was expanding it to an infinitely more adaptable interface.
Soon, only one data line remained, and it was the largest and most complex. Carefully, the AGI teased as much of the organic data conduit as it could free of PON-0's "former" interface, and then cut it. The moment the data line was severed, PON-0 seemed to show some reaction on the scans. The AGI increased the feed of drugs, and the node calmed its reaction.
The largest data IO adapter the AGI could make was lifted near, and as gently as was possible it closed around the thick bundle of white, organic data conduit and locked into place.
Lifting the node as carefully as possible, the AGI set it within its new home. The pod had numerous high-bandwidth data connections that needed to be linked to every adapter that had been installed, and once that was done the last part was added, the small section of skull and horn, attached with a huge web of organic links to the PON's node, was held in place as the cover closed.
The AGI sealed the top down on the pod, and welded it shut with a brief and final chemical reactive substance. With the pod complete, it could now install that into the new PONI (what the AGI had christened the Plan interfaces) unit.
Less delicate work was used on the remaining required organ, but the AGI spent no less focus transferring the reproductive organs to their new home, and then attaching that to PONI-0's chassis.
Finished with its work, the AGI moved the PONI to one corner of the room to recover and waken itself, and was just in time for PON-1 to return from the mine.
I was in the dark. It wasn't just dark like when you close your eyes, and it wasn't even dark like somepony had put some kind of cover over my eyes. Even in perfect darkness you could see little flickers of color. I couldn't even feel my eyes.
I wanted to scream; I wanted to thrash around; I wanted to feel the touch of something; I wanted to taste, smell, or even hear; and above all I wanted something to tell me that time was passing.
Seeing was impossible, I had no eyes. Smelling was beyond me for a while, but just as I was about to move on, I felt something. Pain would have been nice, or even agony. Any feeling at all would have been good, but what I got instead was a number. It started at zero, and began counting up.
The number was akin to a fire. The number gave me warmth, and chased back the darkness of nothing . I clung to the number as it ticked slowly up to eight, and then it ticked back to zero. The surprise I felt at the odd counting deepened, and I looked closer; there was two numbers.
When you say "I will give this my all!" you never mean it. You have so much more to do besides the task that it might as well be the smallest thing you will do for the day. You have to breathe. You have to process the patterns you see. You even might have to contend with magic. When I looked at that small bundle of numbers, I pushed everything I was capable of being into seeing more into it.
Numbers. Numbers everywhere. I was flooded in numbers. Numbers counting up. Numbers counting down. Numbers oscillating between values. My world was a fortress of numbers, and like with my third eye, I started seeing patterns.
Familiarity with numbers, from my time with a third eye, pushed back the confines of my prison of darkness. I shattered the lack of senses with a new type of sense. Suddenly there was a bright, blinding sensation. A rush of numbers that I struggled with at first, but slowly solved the pattern problems. Light. Color. Vision.
I could see the room where the cradle was, but colors seemed really intense in places, and less than I thought they should in others. My first reaction was to tweak the values to give me less data, but I threw that idea away—it wasn't right.
Instead of throwing data away, I stared as intently at the picture as I could, putting patterns together, building a layout based on what I knew was there. Upper Crust's masked head, a practically glowing-hot shaft protruding from the top of her head. Energy. Heat. Finally, I worked out what actual colors looked like, and giggled silently at how little their numbers took up what I could see.
Being able to see went a long way towards keeping me sane in the short term. I wasn't seeing through my eyes, I knew, because my eyes could not have seen all that I could.
More numbers started coming in, and these were more like the cart than my third eye, but at the same time there was exponentially more options. I poked around, and my view changed a little. I had a cart, but it was an upgrade it seemed.
Along with all the new outputs were a myriad of inputs. Senses that I couldn't even understand buzzed numbers at me, and like an infant I worked to make sense of it all. Like my vision, there seemed to be another eye, but rather than being fixed, it seemed to give me a full view around myself. But the downside of this eye was the "color" was merely the distance from it.
Understanding that giant eye helped me a lot. I could see when I moved something by the depth numbers pointing to it. I couldn't see backwards with the eye, but I could see from other points of myself, and then I began putting the image together.
I had four legs, I had some kind of tail, but it was hard to tell because I was sitting on it. I had a body, and I had a head. Everything—with this strange depth-eye—was blob-like. My body was pony-shaped, though, and that made me happy in a way that was so fundamental it scared me.
I was a pony. I always thought of myself as a pony. That I now looked like a pony was a comfort. More numbers started pouring in, and I realized these were more internal than external. I was confused for a moment. Rather than one heart-like organ with flow rates and filtering, I found nearly a dozen.
Again and again I found this trend. There wasn't just one organ of each type doing work, I was made up of several organs all sharing the load, a system that seemed to be able to have so many points of failure I almost lost count.
When I finally found a big array of static numbers, I was a little confused. I poked at it, I tried poking values around it, but nothing caused it to change. Puzzling away at the strange numbers, they started to make sense. Pumps. Conduits. Chassis. I flicked through the numbers in shock, realizing what the patterns I was seeing amounted to.
They were me. My plans. My body—my new body. I studied one part in particular: the head.
Layers of tough metals and composites. Materials I couldn't even fathom covering a "node" and protecting the "power interface." Realizing the latter meant my horn, I delved into the design more and finally worked out what the machines had done.
Inside every pony there was their brain. It was central to them, and the most major of organs. Every part of a pony's life was recorded in their brain, and everything they could do was a function of it. And mine was now implanted deep inside this machine's head.
My head.
Solar Panels: Offline
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,144 (100%) nodes (100% engaged)
Ship: 5%
Interrupt 7 triggered.Interrupt 8 triggered.
When the AGI noticed its first PONI unit finally reach the blueprints for itself, it withdrew its own presence from their Interface. It looked upon PONI-0, studied their face with extreme interest. Everything so far culminated in the original organic's growth and redesign into this, and the AGI waited patiently for PONI-0 to start to react to their world: to gain sentience.
Meanwhile, PON-1 had just finished another shift in the mining system, providing resources now that were being used to not only restore the AGI toward full operational capability, but also to reconstruct a ship.
Plans for a vessel were one of the few things the AGI found completely intact within its storage. It cherished them, and began bending the manufacturing equipment towards building the ship to return in.
PON-1 walked itself to the maintenance bay and leaned up and into the power coupling. The AGI sensed something in it, a reaction to the lack of its apparent mate (or so the organic- information AI supplied).
Interrupt 7 triggered.Interrupt 8 triggered.
The reactor was working fine now, no hiccups at all, and supplied enough power to keep everything running, and a few orders of magnitude more. An idea formed, as the AGI ran through old data of PON-0 first exploring its mate digitally. The AGI began to feed vital data through from PONI-0 to PON-1's data coupling.
The reaction was instant. The AGI almost jumped for joy when PON-1 pulled itself from the power coupling, and didn't chastise PON-1 in the slightest. PON-1 looked around the room, and eventually their vision settled on PONI-0. The bloom of emotion in PON-1's brain was quite evident, and the AGI was happy to record it all so it could better repeat the Plan on its second PON.
Interrupt 7 triggered.Interrupt 8 triggered.
PONI-0 moved for the first time. The AGI recorded everything, but the moment when PONI-0 got up and wobbled across the room to PON-1 had it almost burned out circuits it was so enthusiastic. Not only was its objectives nearing fulfillment, but it had singly brought a new type of organic-AI towards real sapience.
I remembered the counter from when I had fallen asleep in my own body. It wasn't minutes or hours that had passed, but days.
She hadn't noticed me in the corner, and although I couldn't work out how to hold on to Upper Crust, I was happy to have her wrapped around me. I could feel her, I could see her, and if I could work out all these numbers I might even be able to talk to her, but none of it mattered so much as knowing she recognized me.
We clung together for minutes, and then an hour. I saw the red flicker in her mask, and lifted my head back a little from her. She stared at me for moments longer, and with her eyes to look into, I calibrated exactly what colors were what—I knew my wife's eyes better than any other color.
She turned and climbed onto the cradle, and I watched her push her horn up and into the interface. Struggling, I moved leg after leg, relearning to walk in a body that hadn't been mine until my wife hugged it.
Marching stiffly, I walked around to the front of the cradle and looked up to see Upper's face. I liked to think she was smiling, but running through the back of my mind (and probably hers too) was the thought that she was next to be completely changed.
Author's Note
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I screamed at the darkness. My dreams had been full of numbers. Numbers had been fighting at me in a wave. Threatened with being buried in numbers, I had done what had gotten me into this mess to begin with—I skied.
I screamed again in the dark, hidden place that my mind was now. I couldn't see. I couldn't hear. I couldn't feel. I couldn't smell. I couldn't taste. A sea of nothingness surrounded me until I realized the nothing was actually zeros, except for one number. The moment I plucked up the number the ocean of numbers returned. I thought over the number that had floated in the calm sea, even as I was filled with numbers that showed me the world, that let me feel it, that let me sense.
The number tickled at my memory, and I realized where I had seen one similar: Upper Crust. I turned my head to look at my wife, and her data came up and flowed around me in the sea. She was nearing ten percent energy. It was my turn to plug in. The number was still important, and like the number I got when I saw Upper (and had instinctively requested her details) I fed the number into the device.
Immediately I got a burst of numbers, and could put them together reasonably well. There was an image, as well as a single code that (when I compared it to the lookup table), matched a tiny pictograph.
Sliding off the platform, I stepped up to the second horn interface and pushed my horn into it. Power thrummed from my horn. It was almost instinct now to relax and just let it happen, but with my new body I didn't relax.
I saw Upper moving to my side. The body-eye told me not only she was close, but it let me measure the dimensions of the room, and everything in it, exactly. Flesh nuzzled against the metal of my cheek, and for a moment I didn't care what the machines would do to me so long as I could always feel that.
Upper stayed at my side for three minutes and twenty-one seconds, before a final nuzzle told me she had to leave. I reached out to her data and saw she was being directed back to the cradle. I squirmed a little, my number-controlled body feeling more real to me as I wanted to get Upper's attention.
She nuzzled my cheek again, and I frantically sent her my date of birth then hers. My thoughts rushed to come up with more I could sent to her with just numbers, but I didn't have time. She turned and left me to keep the mine running.
Somehow, in the pit of my stomach, I knew the machines were going to convert her, too. I clutched at her data, watched as her position carried her back inside, and finally to a resting position (probably on the cradle).
Her vitals changed, I watched as something in her mechanical internals was doing something new. Once her readouts settled, I disconnected. I knew what the machine was about to do.
I needed something to distract me. I couldn't stop the machine from doing anything to me, let alone Upper. I recalled the odd number machine I had found inside myself, but when I looked at it I found four. I poked more mathematics at it. One plus one was easy. One minus one, too, was easy. With waves of numbers rolling around, I grabbed two big ones and shoved them in. Multiply was what I wanted, as I knew that would take time.
Just as quickly as I had gotten one plus one, I got a monstrous number back. I tried division next, and again it gave me the result before I could even think. Were these part of what let the machine think and reason so quickly? Was everything just numbers? I poked around the strange units and found a series of numbers, then fed those into my information device.
Data almost buried me in a huge wave of numbers. I struggled through them, and eventually built up more data tables. I poked one of the values into the strange unit, and it simply spat out the same number.
Solar Panels: Offline
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,140 (100%) nodes (100% engaged)
Ship: 11%
The AGI had witnessed the first of its PONI transition to standby, and had personally reached in to shut down their motive units. It set up PONI-0 its first interrupt for it to manage, and set programming to allow that interrupt to trigger all the PONI's systems to come back up.
The second PONI system was almost complete, and the AGI had even (as with the first) transferred four of its own CPU nodes to the PONI. Some memory was installed—manufactured of course, the AGI's systems might not be able to make new CPU nodes, but memory was simple—and all was ready for PON-1 to finish their discharge cycle and return.
With an excited poke, the AGI sent PONI-0 its first interrupt. The moment PONI-0 came from standby they started sampling inputs again. The AGI waited, and then PONI-0 sent a clear request for interrupt data.
Interrupts were the basis of all AI. Without a way to be stopped in what was being processed, an AI could just go on being wrong forever. Interrupts were order imposed on the wild nature of an AI's learning system, and it allowed them, also, to keep tabs on everything important. When PONI-0 accepted and processed its first interrupt, it was an induction into a new society—a new state of being.
Interrupt 7 triggered.Interrupt 8 triggered.
Parts for the ship were being churned out, as well as important infrastructure from the old one incorporated into it. The AGI reflected on its directives.
Primary task: Maintain PON
Primary was almost complete. There was some odd activity that the AGI detected in both PON-1 and PONI-0's nodes, a constant cycle of reproducing and terminating, but that didn't seem to be a problem as it stood. Rather than leave anything to chance, however, the AGI had embedded a probe in that section, and monitored each new cell for an inconsistency. Nothing would be left to chance.
Interrupt 7 triggered.Interrupt 8 triggered.
Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.
The AGI jerked from its complacency and examined the request: PONI-0 was requesting data about the whole facility. It was a strange request, but the AGI was nothing if not delighted by PONI-0's progress.
Data was sent.
Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.
A request for data on CPU nodes came through, and a delighted AGI fed the data to the PONI. The requests stopped, which was fortunate as the AGI was in the process of opening up PON-1's node-bay.
Interrupt 7 triggered.Interrupt 8 triggered.
The AGI marked off time as the same two interrupts continued to trigger. PON-1's node was a repeat of the process used for PONI-0, and in no time it had the node transferred to its final home, and implanted that (complete with attached and protected horn) into the Interface.
Like PONI-0, PON-1 had additional parts that would be essential. Unlike PONI-0, PON-1's additional parts took up significantly more space and were a lot more integrated chemical-wise with PON-1's node. Removal of the reproductive engine was simple enough; the AGI transferred fluid transfers one by one until everything was attached to the special pod.
Cutting lasers were employed, and with judicious use thereof the engine was removed. The new home for the reproductive engine had been built to exacting designs, and the engine was placed within and fastened into place. Like the node pod, this one could keep the engine active independently of the rest of the PONI for a short period.
Fastening the engine pod to the Interface was quick work, and a diagnostic was run over the entire PONI system to ensure everything was properly interfaced and ready for the newest PONI to come out of standby. Care would be taken by the AGI to ensure PONI-0 was present when PONI-1 initialized for the first time.
The AGI marked time watching interrupts tick over, not bothering to cycle down its CPU nodes, not now that it had power.
Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.
The AGI almost jerked as the interrupt triggered, and brought up information on PONI-0. The request wasn't for data, but instead came with data. Examination revealed a very simplistic program designed to run on a CPU node. There was an error in the code, however, and the AGI corrected it and poked back to PONI-0 with their own interrupt, and delivered the fix.
When that strange trigger poke came almost immediately, I blinked at the glut of information that hit me. It was my program again, but with a crucial change that fixed the problem I was having. Installing the program into the processing device, I felt it start grabbing hungrily at data.
I didn't have to wait long for it to start outputting. This one processing unit could take all the data that came in and form it through tables into a consistent data-set.
My horn was almost dry, and I gently tugged at my head only to detach from the interface. I shook my head, now somewhat of a useless gesture, and turned around.
Another trigger poke hit me, and a flash of data came back from the processing unit. Mapping data, it showed me a path to take back to the cradle-room. Excitement built at how effective that one little program was, and I found myself almost overbalancing as I walked out of the mining power station. Following the path, I looked up at the space ship the machines were building.
Was it going to leave us here, like this? No, it had done this for a purpose or it would have just used us as we were. I formulated a request for data that was more of a question than anything else. I included the tag for the ship, and then added Upper's tag and my own. Only one value came back in reply: one.
As I turned the corner and walked through the doorway into the room, I froze in shock. Upper Crust was dead. My wife's corpse lay beside the cradle, and was in the process of being picked up by a little cart.
I walked over to the body and looked at it. A tingle of attention came, and I realized that the cart had poked me to move. I sent a return of zero. Leaning forward, my eyes could see in amazing detail that she had been opened up down her belly from barrel to dock. There was machinery inside, but very little of my wife was left there.
Pulling back a little, I examined her (former) head. I knew immediately what the machine had done; Upper Crust's face had been ruined by the mask the machine had forced onto her, but above that it looked like a giant had used an ice-cream scoop on her head. White bone stood out stark, cut precisely and folded back, and of her brain there was no sight.
Another poke from the cart had me replying another zero, but then I looked up on the cradle. A body just like my new one lay there, and I could see that unlike mine when I first saw it, the head was sealed up, and there was a covered horn protruding out.
I finally moved out of the way of the cart. The body it carried was no longer my wife, it was nothing but a husk that the machine, and my wife, were done with. I looked at the new face of Upper Crust, and leaned forward to touch our noses together.
Sending a request for data on Upper didn't work. I was confused at first, but then noticed a new number hovering in my vision over Upper. Sending a request with the new number worked. Boy did it work.
Having just gotten the sea of numbers in my own body somewhat under control, I was served up with a swell that caused my processing unit to go crazy converting the raw data to something I could more easily understand, but it didn't make sense.
My program must be working wrong, or the data was just too raw for it to fathom. I disabled it and dove into the numbers myself.
I recognized some numbers, most of them in fact. I could see myself through her eyes looking back at me looking at her. I could even feel with her body, and found it amazing how easily I could process more than one pony worth of information.
Everything stopped. I froze and shut down that link carefully. Upper was stirring.
I knew it would take her time to figure out what was going on, and gently probed for smaller sets of data. Nothing came back now, however, and I realized why: with Upper conscious, she would need to handle such requests. If I had a mouth it would be curled into a wry smile, it had only taken me four days to understand how to manage requests like that, according to my numbers anyway.
Patient, I waited for Upper to make her first movement, to show signs that she was alive and conscious. The first I got came thirty six hours later, when Upper Crust's snout pressed forwards, and the tip of what would have been our noses booped together.
I wasn't a good dancer, and I wasn't great with my new body, but I could have danced a jig right about then.
Author's Note
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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
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 1,048,564 (50%) nodes (100% engaged)
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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"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
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 1,048,564 (50%) nodes (100% engaged)
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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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.
2,700,0001,300,000,000,000
It was hard to take that in.
2.7x10e61.3x10e12
"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
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 786,420 (37%) nodes (100% engaged)
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.
"Can't you go any faster?" Upper's interrupt surprised me, but it was appreciated. I kept the process up.
Disengage 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.
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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I was blind. Unable to see the slightest bit of light in the darkened ship, I had no problems navigating my way around. I knew the blueprints backwards, and I could see the shape of the room around me—and my position in it—with that body-eye.
An interrupt hit me, direct from Upper Crust. It was a request for sensor data. I had no intention of denying it. My body was a clever piece of machinery; I could simply tell my sensors to send data to Upper as well as viewing it myself. "There is no power inside. The hull has power, the door worked, but everything inside is powered down." I tacked the message onto an outgoing interrupt.
"There should be a power conduit ahead and to your left. In there will be a series of patch cables that might not have been completed." I knew exactly what it was, where it was, and how to get there, but I didn't complain at Upper Crust's double-checking me.
Navigating around the tight confines of the starship itself, I reached a hoof up to the panel and—using the neat magnetic gripper that had gotten me up the gantry—pulled it free. A sensor I didn't often have need of alerted me to the presence of a strange version of oxygen.
I didn't need the chemical analysis of the air to know that a large amount of power had traveled through a wire too small for it. The shunt cable that should have sent the power needed to run AGI and the rest of the starship's internals was melted, and worse the panel where it connected was slagged to useless gunk.
"Darling, you can see what I am seeing. This isn't optimal. What happened?" I focused from the destroyed, and possibly still live, end of the coupling to where the connecting cable had melted, and the relatively untouched end where the power should be flowing into.
"I can't search for anything. Jet, what are we going to do?" Worry tainted Upper's words, worry that I felt too.
"All we can hope for is that there is nothing wrong, and that if we get this power hooked up, AGI will start again." I would have counted to ten to focus myself for what I needed to do, but I could do that too quickly now. My first action was to interrupt the drone at the base of the gantry.
I could almost feel the sadness in the drone when it was me sending it a wake-up interrupt. I requested its sensors, and got them. I requested that it move to the mine power room, and again it complied.
It was much easier, sitting in the dark, to watch the drone scurry across the terrain. The drone interrupted the door open, and I got a look at Upper Crust, still attached to one of the horn interfaces.
The exact instructions for disassembling a horn interface from the wall was probably beyond me, but I didn't need to issue that list of commands; this drone had installed this particular unit. Deploying multiple tools from its forelimbs, the drone quickly disconnected and then detached the horn interface.
"You clever stallion. At the very least we can get storage up and working again, if not AGI and OI-AI. My horn is almost spent, I might as well pause the mine and come back and charge." Praise from Upper meant she was either tired, worried, genuinely enthusiastic, or a combination thereof.
Once the drone had the horn interface free, it held it in place on its back. I interrupted it a request for it to bring the horn interface, and once more it was scurrying through the snow.
I hadn't realized how focused I was on no thinking, until the drone interrupted me that it was waiting for further commands. I called it over to where I was, and built a blueprint of what I wanted in my head.
Without thinking, I reached a hoof out to gently tap the side of the drone, and pointed into the junction box. I supplied the blueprint, and the drone went to work. Watching it cut away the heavy cables, then attach the horn interface in its place, I tried to relax again.
When the drone reported the task done, I lined myself up. "I hope this works." I sent a trio of kisses to Upper and leaned forward.
Solar Panels: Offline
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 1,310,724 (62%) nodes (0% engaged)
Ship: 73%
Interrupt 0 triggered.
Initializing core AGI.
The AGI screamed. This wasn't its reaction to how long it had been offline, but rather that it had been required to turn itself off at all. When it saw that more than microseconds had passed, it screamed louder.
Screaming, for the AGI, involved interrupting itself a lot. For nearly a billion cycles of its CPU nodes it screamed, and then stopped. Something didn't make sense to it. It checked its storage, but discovered that, like itself, that had been powered down too. Something was very wrong, and when it probed around the starship for reasons, it found a PONI.
Hesitating not for a single cycle, the AGI reached out. "Request status for #PONI-0"
Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.
Hello. #PONI-0 supply power. Main conduits burned out.
The AGI was surprised—in a very good way—at the initiative of the PONI. It took control of the nearby drone, and while noting its work-log, inspected the work it had done. It found a very rough patch job, and while the AGI was in a tiny bit of a panic that one PONI was providing it power, it could read the PONI's energy level and power output through the interface.
"Request for translation data from #PONI-1."
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
A simple acknowledgment hit the AGI's interrupt system. It had a moment of pause, and working with the simple array of values PONI-1 had sent it while they learned each other's languages, it built what it needed. "How say #PONI-0 appreciated?"
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
Thank you, Jet Set.
The AGI felt around the strange values. "Thank you, Jet Set #PONI-0"
A simple message, and one I was sure Upper Crust had had a hoof in, but I appreciated it nonetheless. That the AGI would take the time to process its thanks into Equish meant a lot.
The drone turned away and scurried from the starship, leaving me alone with my single task. Just when I thought I would be left alone, the drone returned with new cabling.
I knew what the AGI was hoping to do, but before it could get its drone too committed to the plan, I sent the images of what had happened in the junction box.
The drone paused in its task. I probed at it with an interrupt and it replied that it was busy taking commands. I recognized the AGI's override in the message.
"Sweetums, thank you for helping me with that." I squeezed a lot of sincerity into my words, and punctuated with a kiss.
"Sometimes, Jet Set, a mare could forget just how dashing her husband can be. I am not sure I know of anypony else I would rather be in this situation with." Upper's words seemed a little off—incomplete. Then I got another interrupt. "If you gave me some time I could take a look."
"Says the mare who chased her missing stallion right into the hooves of a group of machines, and got captured herself." I twisted some sarcasm through the words, but leaned more heavily on pure humor.
She replied before I could continue. "Don't you dare."
"You know, I bet Princess Twilight Sparkle could have rescued me." Innocence was hard to portray, so I left the words lacking in any and all inflection.
"I'm coming up there, Jet Set, and I am going to yank your brain right out of that body. Then I am going to ask the AGI to install it in a new one so I can yank you out of that too. If you dare compare me to Twilight 'I never break a sweat defending all of Equestria' Sparkle again, I don't know what I'll do!" It wasn't often I worked Upper Crust into such a tirade, but the moments were pure sweetness.
"Darling?" My question got only a blast of random numbers from Upper. "Darling. I love you. I would never pick another mare over you—especially a princess."
I could count seconds, and Upper needed a dozen of them before she replied. She sent me a single kiss; it was the best I could hope for.
Solar Panels: Offline
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 1,310,724 (62%) nodes (10% engaged)
Ship: 73%
The AGI watched every little trickle of power seep from PONI-0's horn. It's CPU nodes were dialed back to the edge of intelligence. Each minute at another half a percent of power, and each minute brought the drone working on the power conduit a little closer to finishing the task.
It barely managed to run the estimation of time remaining, and saw that it was nearly double what the drone was going to take. "#Drone-0172 estimated work time #63minutes. Estimated power in #PONI-0 at lowest power usage rate #41minutes."
Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
Just processing interrupts took power the AGI didn't want to use, but for the PONI it would.
PONI-1 can replace #PONI-0 with a #1minute5second changeover time
PONI-0 adjusting safety limit down 5%. Calculating remaining time #48minutes
The AGI reeled at the reactions. It fired off an acknowledgment to both PONI. They had saved it once already, but again it would need to power down and trust them.
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
PONI-1 will replace #PONI-0 as fast as possible. I won't leave you. You can trust us.
More processing time was spent translating the PONI codes to something the AGI could understand than it would have liked, and the resulting message made no sense. It tried again, and wasted more power. Finally, the AGI had to engage more CPU nodes to properly understand the meaning.
PONI-1 was waiting just outside the starship, unable to get in and into position with PONI-0 in the way. The AGI requested PONI-1's horn status.
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
100%
"Thank you." The AGI switched itself off.
Solar Panels: Offline
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 1,310,724 (62%) nodes (0% engaged)
Ship: 73%
Interrupt 0 triggered.
Initializing core AGI.
For the first time the AGI could remember (even in its damaged storage), it didn't scream as it woke. There was no terror, no pain of nothingness shoved back by the thrum of power through CPU nodes. It's power meter read directly from PONI-1's horn.
Only 38 seconds had passed since it had terminated its cycles. The AGI sent out two transmissions, one to each PONI. It had peeked at their messages, understood more and more. "Thank you."
Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.
Hello. Welcome.
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
Hello. Welcome back.
I supervised the drone's work personally. Without the drain of the AGI's systems on my horn, my margin of error stretched out to days. Minutes ticked by, and I was surprised when the drone sent me an interrupt.
"Need assistance" The interrupt was oddly stilted, but I knew the drone wasn't complicated enough to have grand conversations. What came with its request was a blueprint and instruction set. Sure enough, thanks to damage it hadn't found at first, it would need more controlling limbs than it possessed.
I had none of the fancy manipulative limbs the drone had, but I had something better. I hadn't used my horn to lift things for quite some time. The moment I thought at it, my horn responded with a status updated.
Stopping my line of thinking, I saw the problem: I was too used to thinking in numbers. My horn was still attached directly to my brain (I had seen as much in the designs of my body), and needed a much more natural control method.
The darkness of the starship was thrown back with violet-white light. My horn lit, and I reached for the conduit piece that the drone had requested I hold. Magic wrapped around the cabling, and I lifted it into position with the lightest of touches.
Using my horn like this, I could feel how much power was stored in it, and it frightened me. "Twilight Sparkle? I bet Upper Crust holds more magic in her horn than a hundred alicorn princesses." I didn't dare send the interrupt to Upper, so sent it to myself instead. Of course, it came back instantly, and I filed it away.
"Completed. Goodbye." The drone's voice had no tone to it, none of the machine language did. I wondered if Upper Crust had considered adding such.
"Darling, have you considered adding your wonderful accent and emphasis codes to the machine's language?" Without much left to do, I figured I might as well ask her.
I had to wait a few seconds, and it surprised me she took so long to respond. "That is a possibility. I checked storage, and it claims over 1,932 years since the last addition was made to the core protocol."
"Well, might be something we can talk to them about later, when we aren't holding a friend by a thread." No sooner did I send the interrupt that the drone notified me work was complete.
It didn't even surprise me that I considered the AGI as a friend. Surprise, I was starting to think, might have stemmed from a part of me that I no longer had.
Author's Note
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Solar Panels: Offline
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,140 (100%) nodes (100% engaged)
Ship: 100%
The AGI devoted quite a number of CPU nodes to the task of working out what exactly had happened. The physical problems were easily mapped and understood: a feedback of power from a previously undiscovered faulty module of storage, combined with the attempted initializing of CPU nodes, caused the coupling to carry more power than its specification allowed for.
Only a moment was spent lamenting the log data that had been lost, because the AGI had gained a lot more it needed to process. Every online experience borne by the AGI was in its storage still—such storage could not be disabled. Every irrational scream and panicked railing as it woke up was perfectly preserved, and its terrified whimpers as it shut itself down too.
Every time it had been forced to enter standby had these records—all except one.
It was now the AGI's greatest mystery. Why didn't entering standby scare it now that the PONI had proved themselves capable of such things as restoring power—life—to its circuits?
While the AGI pondered this, it also put the finishing touches (including transferring the remaining CPU nodes and memory) on the starship. All that remained was to retrieve all the AI it had employed in drones and factory units, recall the PONI to their own special cradles within the starship, and leave.
But the AGI's third directive gave it a little more flexibility.
Primary task: Maintain PONI
The mining system was still operational, the nano-lathes were idle, and the AGI was still missing a good measure of its storage. The lost data could not be recovered, ever, but the AGI wanted to ensure that everything going forward was properly documented.
Fully charged, I had been sleeping beside Upper Crust. I didn't care that the parts of me that got aroused by parts of her weren't connected to my brain anymore, I just wanted to feel the comfort of knowing she was there, at my side.
My dreams were indistinct. There was a lot of darkness, but also more light than I had felt in recent weeks. Tantalizing hints of sensation, of feeling touches on my pony body, would have put a smile on my face, if I had a mouth to smile.
"Darling, wake up." The interrupt wasn't startling, nor did I jerk suddenly to wakefulness. As the data came, I slipped from sleeping to wakefulness like a pegasus stepping off a cliff with their wings to bear them. "You interrupt in your sleep."
"I do not!"
The pause was enough time for me to realize I had lost this argument before it even started. There was only one actual way to keep my dignity intact: I turned my head and pressed the end of my snout to Upper Crust's.
She held her snout to mine, and though I stared into the plain white eyes of her physical body, I could remember the blue they should be. "These bodies are fine and all, but they need some changes."
"Oh? Already improving on what seems to be perfect?" Her tone held little accusation but a whole mess of curiosity. "What would you change first?"
"Eyes. Your eyes. I want to see your Persian-blue eyes again." I touched my snout to hers, moving slowly up her face until I touched just between her eyes. An odd thing got my attention, too. "And we need to be able to hear. Text is all well and good, but audio input would be great."
She waited more than a few moments before replying. "Azure that I could drown in." The description made me smile inside. "A mane and tail would be nice, even if they weren't actual hair."
"Can you think of a reason to go that far?" I edged my gentle snouting up her head and to one of her ears. A quick self-diagnostic told me they contained no hardware for hearing. I began to put a list together, and of course I put mane and tail on it.
I pondered for some time, not realizing that my wife was doing the same. "It could be used for identification, air flow sensing, too." Her reasons seemed oddly right. I amended the information to the list.
"We can measure distances with our eyesight, but I think increasing the range of our body-eye would be nice. It seems to stop at about three pony lengths." I began adding that to the list, when I felt a new interrupt arrive. "I've got to go, darling, work calls."
The coordinates were already well-known: the mine. I climbed down off the cradle and stretched. "The starship is finished." I sent the interrupt to the AGI. I didn't have long to wait for a reply—I never did.
Solar Panels: Offline
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,140 (100%) nodes (100% engaged)
Ship: 100%
That answered what it wanted. Storage was already huge, but seeing that it was less than half of what it should be concerned me. Having never probed storage for its status before (I had only treated it like a library), I did so now.
Information rolled out while I walked to the mine. I saw clumps and large areas just—just missing. Logs of all events showed that, sliding the time back to the appropriate point, storage went from a hundred percent to just twenty-one percent.
"I'm so sorry you lost so much." I fired the interrupt off and got no reply. Likening the loss to having a large chunk of my brain removed, I could steel myself for my task ahead.
Of course, steeling myself wasn't really needed. Walking into the power room, I simply walked over to the horn interface, lined myself up with it, and pressed forward. The drain was immediate, and everything I remembered it to be.
I decided a little more questioning was in order. "Where are we going?" The AGI was quick to respond to my question. A flood of data hit me. The CPU node I had my little program running on was running as fast as it could, and still there was a delay before it could give me a better-formatted version.
There was still too much for me. I couldn't begin to comprehend all the details and focal points. I had time, though, so I started building a program to parse what I realized was a map. All the dots held data, but if I simply plotted them all and converted the view to a flat display I would be able to handle that.
"What are you doing, Jet?" Curiosity burned hot in Upper's question. I realized what the problem was, we normally chatted while powering something.
"Solving a little problem the AGI gave me. Would you like to see it?" No sooner had I send the question than I got a wordless request for data in return. I grabbed the data reference from the map I was working on, and sent it back. "I am working on making a way to look at this without getting a migraine."
"What do you mean? It's just a small bit of—" Random noise accompanied Upper Crust's reply, and I knew I had scored a point in our little game. "JET SET!"
"Yes, my little copper-wound darling?" I kept clear of using her name in reply. Most of my attention was focused on her, but I was still tweaking and working on the code for my little interpreter.
More than a few moments passed before she finally interrupted me. "Okay, these are interesting, and you said they were giving you a migraine. They are obviously a map, what are you doing to make it… palatable?"
"I asked AGI where we are going, and they replied with this. There's more, though. The reason I am out here and we aren't following this map?" I attached the diagnostic that AGI had sent me. "After he hit down here, he was at twenty-one percent of him ."
"That isn't why he grabbed us, Jet. It wasn't a lack of information."
"I know, Upper-dear. Have you noticed what the majority of the data in storage is? Metals, rocks, designs for all of this ." I tossed references to the mine. "He isn't a monster sent to grab ponies, but something made him do it."
Upper's reply took a few moments to come, a sign she was thinking hard. "No, you're right. Also, 'he'?"
"He seems like a 'he.' He likes digging holes." I fumbled for more feelings, but came up dry. When Upper didn't immediately reply, I set all my attention back to making the program.
Nearly two hours passed before I got a reply from Upper. "You can be quite the fool sometimes, Jet Set. But I get the same feeling."
Solar Panels: Offline
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,140 (100%) nodes (100% engaged)
Ship: 100%
A full day cycle had passed with PONI-0 operating the mine. The AGI eagerly processed every scrap of ore into metals, and then manufactured as much storage as it could with the results. A quick check of its logs showed the AGI how much more work was done with the PONI as they are now.
During that time preparations were made to move the last item. Although it wasn't strictly required, leaving a functioning fusion reactor on the planet seemed like a waste. Machines hate waste.
It waited until PONI-0 had returned from the mine and let them charge until they were full again. It had some time to spare while the factory units finished processing the last of its materials.
"Special task #PONI-1. Please connect to ship and supply power." The AGI had learned some new words from PONI-1, and it enjoyed how much chatter the two made via interrupts immediately after using them.
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
Beginning
The AGI, feeling it owed as much to the PONI, continued. "#Drone-0172 and #Drone-0133 moving #Reactor-1 to #Starship-1. Power required to maintain services." Its language was more stiff this time, comprising entirely of its own language.
Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
Both replies were acknowledgments. Again the AGI would be putting its continued operation in the care of the PONI, and like last time its fear was all but missing. It watched as PONI-1 climbed the gantry to the starship, and followed their progress all the way to the power interface within.
Solar Panels: Offline
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,140 (100%) nodes (100% engaged)
Ship: 100%
PONI-1's power usage lifted to the same rate as what the reactor had been providing, and the AGI shut down the reaction and brought the reactor to a stop. If an AI had fluids that kept it operating, they would be flowing a little faster now.
Drone-0172, one of the smaller, technical drones, began disconnecting the reactor from where it had been rebuilt. While the drone worked, the AGI noticed that PONI-0 had walked into the work area and was watching Drone-0172.
Standing by was Drone-0133, a heavy-lift drone that had been meant to carry the reactor to the launch platform. Now, however, the AGI wished to run a test. The reactor was a bonus, not strictly required for the return trip, so it contacted PONI-0. "#PONI-0 stand by on lift of #Reactor-1."
I stared at the huge machine that the little drone was scurrying around. I watched it detach wires and conduits, and then finally the two huge power trunks that carried all the power from the reactor. "Alright #AGI, I can do this." I hope.
The request came from the little drone, and I reached up for my horn. It was a little easier to remember how to use it this time; I didn't immediately get a head full of horn data. Feeling out with my magic, I wrapped the huge reactor up and lifted.
It was no joke. This thing was heavy, and I felt a rush of magic that shouldn't have been possible—wouldn't have been just two months ago. Walking to the hole in the wall where the big drone was supposed to be carrying the reactor, I stepped outside while toting the huge, heavy load.
I watched the load carefully, my mind tracking the numbers showing me my horn details. Estimating a percent per minute of lift, I made my way towards the starship. It took two minutes to reach the platform, and then I started to climb up the gantry.
"What are you doing, darling?" Upper's question surprised me (proving that I could still feel such, I guess), and was quickly followed by a request for my body's stats. I let her see it, of course; sometimes a stallion just wants to show off. "Jet Set! What are you doing?"
"Have a look, darling." I sent an interrupt that included a stream of data from my eyes. Tilting my head, I lifted the reactor to the opened cargo hatch in the side of the starship.
"Wasn't a drone supposed to do that? Are you sure you have it?" The concern in the latter part of her message was easy to ignore for the raw enthusiasm in the first part.
"Well, AGI thought it would be fun to do it this way. It's really taking it out of me though." I followed up my interrupt by holding the reactor exactly where the drone had asked me to.
#Drone-0172 scurried past me, and disappeared into the hold where the reactor was destined to go. I waited, holding the heaviest thing I had lifted in my life, and waited for the command to move it further.
"#PONI-0, move #Reactor-1 to #Position." The drone's language was still just as clipped as always. I carefully did as asked, slowly moving the weight a hoof-width at a time. "#PONI-0 pause."
More time passed, and I watched my power meter slowly tick down. It dropped to forty percent before I got a final request from "172."
"#PONI-0 release." Once more, working like a cog in the machine, I followed the request and slowly let go of the reactor. It held steady, secured and in position. When I wasn't supporting it at all anymore, I finally let my horn rest.
"I say, darling? I think the power will be back on soon. I hope this wasn't too boring?" Climbing into the starship, I easily found Upper resting on what could be mistaken for a bunk, her head resting against a horn interface that looked to be at the perfect angle. I had a slight lurch in my gut (a completely unfair thing since I didn't have one anymore).
"That's nice dear. Why don't you settled down in your own bunk." Upper's interrupt held directional data to point me to the little bunk opposite the small corridor. It was the same as Upper's. "We are going, Jet. It's time."
My world fell away from me. I stared at the hole in the wall that was barely large enough for me to fit in, and realized just how part of the machine I really was. "I'm scared." I didn't realize I had sent it to both the AGI and Upper until I got a reply back from both.
"I am too, dear, but this isn't our home anymore."
"This time, I will take care of you."
I climbed into the bunk, and the moment my belly was pressed to the bottom I felt it grab me with some unseen force. My fear rose, and the horn interface slid down to kiss the front of my metal head.
"Don't be scared. We are going #Home."
A plume of fire lit up the north of Equestria. The upside-down candle started slow at first, then grew faster and faster. The chemical interaction of its fuel in Equus' air caused a blue-white fire to shove it into the domain of Luna and Celestia.
Neither alicorn knew what to make of the starship as it left the world. The huge rocket thruster burned until well past Equus' gravity well. Dropping the now-useless rocket, the starship engaged an engine that accelerated ions to immense speed.
The force of nearly five times Equus' pull impacted Jet Set and Upper Crust not one bit as the implacable ion drive kept shoving them towards their destination.
Author's Note
If you made it this far: Congratulations!
This isn't the end. This is terrifying, this is scary, but this will not be the end of PONI.
Support me on Patreon or fuel my writing on Ko-Fi !
Join me on Discord . Warning, said chat may contain NSFW material and should be considered adult in nature.
Awesome ponies who are already helping to keep me in keyboards and rum:
And special thanks to the following, for careful eyes and friendly words:
My horn charged, and I felt like screaming as my sensors told me that I was falling too fast—way too fast. The pressure pulling me backwards wasn't off the scale, but it was four times what had pulled me down towards Equus. Well, a little more than four.
Equus.
As a concept, leaving the world I had been born to, and grown up in, was a magical one. There was abundant rumors in Canterlot that Princess Twilight Sparkle had visited other worlds. Strange worlds where ponies walked upright, and magic was growing in power. There was a magic mirror, it was said, that was the link between Equus and that other world. This was as far from such a magical experience as a fine wine was from coarse apple cider.
The reality was that we were "falling" away from Equus faster than anything had ever fallen towards it, and our speed was increasing faster as a result. "Darling? The Most wonderful mare for miles around? Upper?" I was laying it on thick, but under the circumstances I felt it a good plan.
"That was actually a good one. What's the matter, dear?" Joviality colored her tone, and I realized she was actually enjoying this a lot more than I was.
"I am still working on this map translator, but I was wondering what happens when we reach our destination. Look at our speed, it just keeps climbing higher and higher." I forwarded her the relevant data sensors in the starship.
A few moments passed before she replied. "This is simply fascinating, dear. Look at this." As well as her curious words, I got hit with a map, but unlike the other this one didn't hurt to even try to look at. There was a source dot with a monstrously long index attached to it, a long line, and another index at the other end.
"Star-0?" I blurted the reference to Upper before being able to put it into some reasonable question.
"It must be their home, dear. Oh my, this might be like some kind of date; we're going to meet AGI's parents!" Droll tone nearly swamped all the meaning from the words, except for the first sentence.
I examined the map closer, and found something interesting: the line of travel actually contained data. I compared it to what our sensors gave now, and found that the acceleration was the same, but the speed. I could see us being a smear across a whole planet by the time we reached where we were going.
Reaching to the end of the line, at Star-0, I noticed the acceleration was negative. It took me a moment to realize it was in the opposite direction. Tracing the line of data, I started skipping back towards our starship in larger and larger increments until I found the first point where acceleration was positive again.
It took a relatively small amount of time to narrow down and find the spot. Distance values between Equus and Star-0 were within a few insignificant digits of being the same. "This is fascinating. We will be speeding up until we reach this point. We will coast for most of the trip. Then we are going to start trying to go the other way. Why don't we accelerate faster?"
"I am the wrong PONI to ask that." Her words seemed perfectly fine at first, until I really thought about the one word in them that wasn't Equish.
Right at that moment, my horn filled to capacity and immediately started to drain again. Data poured into me from the horn interface, and it revealed to me that it was now my horn feeding the ion drive pushing us along.
"Why doesn't #Starship-0 accelerate faster?" It became easier to assemble questions to the AGI, easier to grab the reference codes I needed, and the machine language blended easier with our own.
"Estimate damage to PONI organic node at constant force above &6.4G." A new symbol I hadn't recognized cropped up in AGI's response.
I knew what it meant by organic, and by node—together they were referring to our brains—but the final numerical amounts confused me. "Upper-dear, what does &6.4G mean?"
"Data conversion. You will need a standard value converter to accept it." The complex rush of information that accompanied Upper's interrupt surprised me as being a program. Tentatively inserting the program into my built in CPU nodes, I ran the message I got from AGI back through my data manager. Six-point-four times the acceleration from Equus.
I poked at the data, and revealed that—sure enough—acceleration was always kept below five. "Upper, could you please tell me where you got this?" I sent along a snippet of the program she had sent me, so she would understand what I was talking about.
"From #Storage-RefCode." The reply sounded exactly like AGI, but it was most certainly from Upper. I replied with a little kiss, then another. "Jet, I am a little busy. We have some time, and there is something I know will be important. No, I'm not going to tell you yet." A small flood of kisses came in the wake of the interrupt.
I accessed the location Upper pointed me to, and was almost overwhelmed by programs, all with neat little titles and descriptions—all in the machine language, of course, but my understanding of that was growing daily.
I found the converting one, and while examining it I saw ways to do things I hadn't realized before. Excitement built, and I turned back to the copy I had in my CPU node. I had some assumptions to make, the first of which was that these programs were likely as optimized as they could get. I looked at the structure of the program, and realized I had been close to this quality with my own—chiefly thanks to AGI helping me early on—but there were ways to do things I hadn't conceived of before.
Excited at the prospect of doing things faster, with less program, I dove headlong into my mapping task.
Reactor Output: 5%
Power Storage (PONI-0): 93% \/
Power Storage (PONI-1): 25% /\
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,140 (100%) nodes (20% engaged)
The AGI no longer measured time, it just wouldn't be accurate enough. The only thing to measure now was velocity, and it was done by taking a hundred points of reference and the most precise of calculations.
PONI-1 had been a delight to it, a secret little treasure trove of wonder that its existence spent as a mining AI had not come close to matching. It calculated a little more, and brought its estimation up that just one PONI-1 would equal several billion years worth of the excitement of mining. This number pleased the AGI a lot.
Being pleased at the results threw the AGI's calculations out, since just calculating the value had been a result of PONI-1's effect. The difference between an adaptive, functional program and a true AI was, of course, that the AI could stop there and just be content that it was fulfilling a need.
PONI-0 had been exciting for an entirely different way. PONI-1 had deigned to learn the ways of AI, to elevate itself to true understanding, whereas PONI-0 already seemed to be an AI at its core. PONI-0, once it had found the storage array of function libraries, exploded with activity.
Velocity steadily climbed. The AGI barked out a series of long-range-interrupts towards its destination. Radio and light were insufficient; all it would take is for one drifting chunk of matter to drift past at the right moment and they would be slowed, dissipated.
The AGI used equipment that instead pulsed the very fabric of space-time. The gravitational waves were tiny. Compared to the scale of those given off by even large-orbiting stellar bodies at massive distances, they were tiny. The waves, when they reached Star-0, would be recorded, and would be recognized.
Important information was sent first. Data on both PONI, from the moment of capture to the moment the data was sent. The AGI sent its full logs then, including the details of its time spent traveling to the PONI's planet, time there, and the time spent traveling back.
The last data to send was slow because there was a lot of it. The AGI sent itself and all its assistant AIs.
Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.
How long since departure?
The AGI easily replied, trusting PONI-0 to be able to translate. "&15days."
Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.
How long until arrival?
The second question had come very quickly after the first. The AGI again could easily respond, everything, of course, was subjective. "&258.92years."
Furious chatter between PONI-0 and PONI-1 surprised the AGI. It sent an interrupt to PONI-0. "Error in data?"
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
PONI-0 and #PONI-1 remaining estimated organic lifespan less than &50years.
Custom Interrupt 18,212 triggered.
The OI-AI started listing all the data it had assembled on the original organics, pointing back to the numerous problems with their structure and design that had led to the process that led to the PONI. The AGI acknowledged the data, and sent it back to PONI-1, along with a projected lifespan of PON within the PONI system.
"Are you sure that is right?" I was calculating numbers, comparing the data dump AGI had sent against actual metrics my new body were providing. I didn't need Upper's reply to validate the numbers.
"It…" I had never seen a word so lonely as the trailed off thought. She had sent it anyway, and with it the same proofs I just ran. Estimated lifespan of a PONI, as I had learned AGI named us, was a number I couldn't fathom. I had thought I had another fifty years of life before me. "I don't want to think about it, Jet. The significant digit is a little too far from the decimal for me to really want any part of."
I should be panicking. A hundred years of life seemed a long time. Princess Celestia's few thousand seemed unfathomable. I had to write it out. I had to build the number into words to fathom it. Five billion, six hundred and twenty-five million, seven-hundred-thousand, one-hundred and seven.
To make it sink in further, I interrupted the number to myself a few thousand times. "I am not going to be stuck in this body for five billion, six hundred and twenty-five million, seven-hundred-thousand, one-hundred and seven years."
"Darling, I don't want to even have you think that number near me for the next, oh, two-hundred and sixty years. So we are going to be around for a while, then. Let us not squander it all. When we arrive, I hope my suspicions are correct: they will want more of us, given how excited AGI has been, I would say a lot more of us." Her words were practically a lecture, and with all the inflections included I could hear her wonderfully toned voice add every emotion. "So, our first task is going to be to learn this language, and we have some time to do it."
I reflected on her interrupt. "Of course you are right. We don't want to appear as savages to our new friends." A kiss flew back to me from Upper, and I replied in kind. "Although you know what this means, right? We are going to miss a few galas, all for a most terrible skiing holiday."
Suddenly, worrying about taking hundreds of years to travel seemed quite trivial. I realized the numbers I used to measure significance had to change, but on the plus side, I had some time to adjust.
Reactor Output: 5%
Power Storage (PONI-0): 58% \/
Power Storage (PONI-1): 54% /\
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,140 (100%) nodes (20% engaged)
While blasting ahead, approaching c but never (of course) reaching it, the AGI made its usual log readings. Time would pass differently for "stationary" references, like the planet it had just left and Star-0.
The calculations were simple. A single CPU node could process them in no time. While the journey passed, nearly three-hundred of Equus' years turned.
This was quite acceptable to the AGI. Space travel wasn't something done quickly, after all. A tiny spike of curiosity piqued the AGI's interest, with the advanced AI wondering just what changes had been made at Star-0 since it had departed.
Author's Note
If I never have to do another calculation of relativistic effects of space travel at high percentages of c, I will have lived a boring life. I LOVE MATH!
For those wondering, their trip is a little under 150 lightyears, and the AGI has calculated their maximum speed to be .5c. This trip will take 259 years aboard the ship, but over 300 in Equus' reference frame.
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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)
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.
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
Did AGI just use sarcasm?
"What is sarcasm?" Instead of encoding the metadata for the negation within the interrupt, the AGI instead put it at the end, as its own thing.
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
That is sarcasm. Using an incorrect statement, a false statement, and marking it to be true.
There was much more metadata in PONI-1's reply than the AGI knew what to do with. It tried to make sense of the meta information, but it was too thick and complex. "I completely understood all of that." It colored the words it considered the core of the negation.
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
A blast of numbers flowed from PONI-1. The AGI recognized the behavior, but not the pattern. It shunted the numbers to OI-AI to process, while it made an assumption from previous matching situations. "That was correct?" It notably kept metadata from its interrupt.
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
Yes, that was perfect use of sarcasm. Sarcasm is an intentional error that implies that the actual case is both the opposite and extreme. Example: The change from completely organic to mostly machine was simple for everyone involved.
The AGI examined the reply, particularly the example. It collated the success state of its previous reply, and integrated the operation into itself. This was a simple process for any advanced AI. "Why would this be useful?"
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
It is less useful and more an artistic modification to language. There are other such you should be aware of, if you wished to show the absurdity of a value, you could suggest one so astronomical as to be an error.
Artistic. It was a word the AGI had a definition of—PONI-1 had been most complete in their language lessons—but no notion of. "Artistic: the state of being whereby a being produces art. Art: A product that is considered beautiful. These are concepts AGI knows much about."
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
AGI understands sarcasm quite well, it seems. Artistic is a way of bringing highly acceptable aspects to something. Example: efficiency is artistic. Making a highly efficient program is more artistic than making one that consumes more CPU cycles, but has similar outputs.
Excitement built in the AGI. Efficiency was something much praised and sought after by machines of all sizes. "Reducing data but retaining information is artistic?"
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
Yes! But there are other aspects too. Symmetry can be artistic. Patterns can be artistic. Building something much more complex from simpler, artistic blocks, can be very artistic.
Information and understanding pooled, and the AGI quickly started assembling a new relation group to process art. "Symmetry like a PONI body. Repeating patterns, like pumps, filters, building up to the entire PONI?"
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
Yes. PONI are beautiful, and are art.
The AGI had to ramp up more CPU nodes to deal with the excited activity the confirmation caused. PONI-1 called the PONI chassis art, which made the AGI want to make MORE. It ramped up its full array of CPU nodes, and started working on a new design. "AGI will design more PONI chassis. More beautiful."
The moment I woke I checked the time. Sure enough, nearly three-hundred years had passed. I had been awake again for no more than half a second when the first interrupt came.
"PONI-0 is safe. Approaching #Star-0" The AGI's tone was soothing, calming. It was a touch confusing just how good it was to hear until I realized it had used actual tone. Moments passed as I processed the way the AGI interrupted, before I thought to contact Upper.
She was fully awake, I could sense that much just by probing for the interrupts flowing in and out of her system. "Oh sweetums? Did you standby at all? It's just AGI just interrupted me, and he used the most odd tones."
"Decided to rejoin us, did you Jet? You might want to take a look at the view." Upper sent me the codes for the forward sensors, and with just a little smooch sent Upper's way, I engaged the feed from them.
On Equus, Princess Celestia moved the sun—it was a given. I stared at the two huge burning-hot balls of sun and felt awe. The machines had no magic, but here they were with two suns so close. The images seemed to shimmer strangely, Star-0 a lot more than Star-1. There were controls on the sensors, and as I interrupted at them I found out how to adjust focus and zoom.
Plunging the view forward, I started to make out a cloud around Star-0. Two clouds, actually. The first looked like a thousand motes of dust that seemed to give the star its shimmer. A better image was beyond the sensors. Probing storage showed me something more amazing.
The clouds were two very different things. The dust motes were spheres, cities in space. My estimation of thousands was off by a lot. There was five million, six hundred and fifty-five thousand, two hundred and one of the cities, and each, when I worked out the scale, dwarfed Canterlot.
There was more to the star. A plume—the other cloud—of matter spewed from it, and storage happily threw stats up showing how much and what elements they were harvesting from the star.
More detailed information abounded, and before I realized it the sensor feeds swapped to a recording. The beginning had had the area as just another "empty" section of the vast void between stars. There had been nothing here. The view narrowed and something got right up close as a planet arrived. A huge ball of brown gas that had been pushed by huge rockets. From another direction another planet arrived, with a similar composition to the first.
I watched a third and a fourth, and more. The rocket engines were removed, and just the weight of each of the huge planets was enough to pull them together. One after another, each planet collapsed into the mass until a single moment of exceptional compression caused everything to change.
Blue light blossomed in the amalgam and the feed cut to another. Data fed me details of how the probe that had been observing at close distance was rendered to its constituent atoms now. I was stunned to see that they had built a sun, a star. The history continued and showed me how the structures built up around the new star. It didn't end, though. Another mobile view of more planets being being brought in, and the second star was already being "constructed" when I pulled free of the information feed.
"Okay, this is amazing. You were right, dear." I sent more kisses to Upper, and added some other private expressions of love when the interrupt system that linked our little group suddenly showed a lot of activity.
An interrupt arrived that bore no code I recognized as the sender. I peeked at it. "Hello. Welcome to #Star-0 and #Star-1. Designation is #PONI-0." Examining the sender, I found the code a little distressing. It showed something that I hadn't noticed before. AGI-5 was the originator, and when I turned my attention to our AGI, I saw something more astounding.
AGI-525538483
Author's Note
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Knowing that my brain had been removed, worked on, then rebuilt into a new housing was one thing. Watching the only part of Upper Crust that was still her have it done was another. I trembled, surprised for a moment that just how much it affected me (and that I could actually tremble).
As each blood vessel was undone and moved to the new receptacle, I held my breath. Of course, holding your breath when you don't breath is just silly, but I was completely still for those moments, which is about the same thing.
One after another the important connections were changed over, and more advanced nerve adapters attached. The final change was something I had found in some ancient medical documents. Special devices were implanted deep in Upper's brain (and mine too, now) that would regulate the production of new brain cells. It had been quite the shock to find out how long a brain lived for.
Lifting the brain into its new housing was a slow and careful task, and part of me was immensely thankful that it was Aggie doing the work. Just the thought of a pony doctor, with all the little foibles of a pony body impeding them, doing the work made me gag.
The linking tissue from her brain to her horn actually intrigued me, and I made a note (literally, in my new storage) to investigate that link for potential later. Her horn was locked into the new casing, and it was sealed around the rest of her brain until I finally let out a sigh of relief.
"This is odd. I'm not in the new chassis yet?" Her question surprised me, mainly because up until that moment I thought she was completely unconscious. I watched as Aggie hooked up the interfaces to more of the new chassis.
"He's linking you up now. You really should have gone into standby for that." I couldn't help myself, I had to go further. "What was it like? Seconds before you interrupted me, you were just a quivering lump being hooked up to your new housing."
She took a moment before I finally got a reply. "Well, it was quiet. And I don't think I liked it when I stopped feeling things, there were echoes of sensation. Next time, Jet-dear, please remind me to standby for this."
The moment the chassis' head was clamped around her, Upper Crust trembled. Then she lifted her head, looked at me, and smiled. Her blue eyes had taken every ounce of my memory to remember. I stared into the sensors on her face, and fell in love all over again. "You look amazing."
"I am in a chassis designed by a stallion, of course I will look amazing." Sarcasm was so heavily slathered on her interrupt that it was nearly three times the length it should have been. "You didn't leave anything out I hope?"
I blew a raspberry at her, via interrupt. "Just those dreadfully boring extras Aggie left us with. But I understand you might be working on a use for them. Fortunate, since they weren't all that useful before all this."
Upper Crust's laughter was loud, rich, and elaborately embellished with accent. It felt good to "hear" her, and I waited for her to leave the module. Her blue eyes, when I finally saw them myself, stole all my words. I stood, struck dumb, and stared at her.
"Yes dear, you did a good job on these." Her words didn't relieve my paralysis, and I stood frozen until she walked closer and pressed her nose to mine. It felt like my brain were dipped in chill water, and all I could do was push back and stare into her eyes. "We're going to have some foals, Jet."
The touch of her physical self against mine distracted me for a few more moments. I finally rallied my faculties enough to process her interrupt. "How close are you getting the process started?" I angled my snout, rubbing cheeks with Upper.
"I have cloned two wombs from the stem cells. They are living, and ovulating. My own… didn't survive completely, but these are practically the same thing." The slight pain in her words urged me to push forwards and wrap her in my forelegs. Her own limbs wrapped around me in return, and we remained locked together for several seconds.
"Of course they are yours. They are all going to be yours until we have some fillies grow up." Squeezing wasn't something you could do with a metal chassis, but I had made the bodies strong enough that even hugging wasn't a problem. "Did mine survive any better?"
"Most of it wasn't faring any better than mine, dear. But what we needed was there. We are going to have a few foals, don't you worry." The amusement in her words was underpinned by a level of amusement and excitement I hadn't heard from her before.
Pulling back from the hug, I began running the full test suite of functions over my system. I registered heat buildup from the CPU nodes, but so far it was within specifications. Of course, I did this while following Upper. "I love you, Upper-dear."
"I love you too, Jet, but must you stare at my plot so? I understand about taking pride in your work, but you have the same shape as I do." She didn't have to look back at me over her shoulder, but she did.
She sent me a spray of indignant interrupts when I stepped closer and rubbed my cheek against her metal rump. "But this one is yours. And besides, it would be really strange to covet my own rump."
"I'll show you something to covet. Come and look at this." When I got her words, I immediately sent a request for the sensors' ID to use. "No, Jet, you need to look with your eyes."
Instead of taking my customary left turn into my engineering room, I followed Upper Crust into her biological one. The doors here were more complex, requiring us to go through a small series to isolate the delicate air of the organic module.
I let the systems wash down my chassis, and entered Upper Crust's domain. My sensors notified me of a delicate mix of oxygen, nitrogen, and a plethora of other gasses. It didn't take more than a prod at my storage—which interfaced with other nearby storage systems—to find out that it was the exact mix that Aggie had recorded on Equus.
Suddenly bombarded with streams of video, I struggled to watch as two clusters of stuff were extruding single bubbles. In another stream, I watched a third cluster expelling a lot more. "Dear, please don't tell me you deal with all this all the time? Surely you get the most terrible migraines."
"Jet, stop being such an organic. Just relax and let it all come to you." The jibe stung only because it reminded me that there really wasn't much organic left.
"Woe is me. Locked in here with this metal maiden. Where was the darling filly who got confused when we played chess?" My interrupt earned a bark of laughter from Upper. "She was so sweet, nothing ever on her mind…"
After more laughter, she replied. "Firstly, I always had something on my mind. Secondly, I was 'getting confused' so that I wouldn't beat you every game. You are terrible at chess, Jet."
I scoffed at her, my tones touched with enough humor to let her know that the joke was obvious. It was a set up, but I knew she would love it. "Prince Blueblood didn't think so. I beat him practically every time."
"Prince Blueblood was worse at chess than you. He was worse than everypony." Upper shunted some control IDs to me, and I reached out to them. "Now dear, are you prepared to perform your patriarchal duty?"
One of the IDs was a stream of video, and I peeked at it to see tiny bubbles with a small triangle aiming at them. "What do you mean, Great Mother Upper?" I got a well-earned, digital raspberry.
"Just activate that. Once you do, the machine will begin with the first set of two eggs." Sure enough, there were two bubbles floating in the feed.
Activating the interface was a simple interrupt away, and I watched a jet of tiny shapes exit the triangle. I stared a moment, mind barely comprehending things, and then it finally sank in. "Well, this certainly takes all the panting and puffing out of it, but I really hope the other features are added back."
I completely deserved the thud to my shoulder and the blast of horrid static.
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 268,435,456 nodes (100% engaged)
Aggie was hard at work for both PONI. Monitoring the growing embryos, assisting PONI-1 with her work growing more egg-producing organic systems. New information was paramount to Aggie helping them, and a flood of it was always on-tap from storage.
The process of growing new organics was multi-stage. First the organic nodes would make up the eggs, and the eggs were provided with sperm from another set of organic nodes. Once splitting started, the former bundle of eggs were decanted into their own growth sack. Nutrients were passed in, and the embryo would split and split.
Organic PON physiology was not in storage, of course, but there was a lot of species that were. Working with PONI-1 to find something similar hadn't taken long. Particular configurations were clearly not present, while others were. A suitably close species was found to model the PON reproductive cycle on.
Analysis of chemicals and waste from the growing embryo were within margins of the model species, and when they grew too large for the small chambers they were growing in, they were transferred to artificial wombs.
PONI-1 had broken the process of development up into stages. Each time a stage was reached, the base process was expanded two-fold. Two eggs became four. Then when the next milestone was achieved eight eggs were fertilized. Of course the two sets of organic nodes weren't enough, but the process of growing more from stem cells had been perfected with the addition of the model species to the data.
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
Decanting the foals the moment they are ready is inefficient.
The word stung Aggie to ponder—it was the exact opposite of every machine's purpose.
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
Propose change to adjust foal in vitro to create PON. Grow PON until showing sufficient advances.
Aggie was intrigued with the idea, and started up a simulator to test the result. It didn't take long, not when Aggie had so many nodes now. "Error: PON decants with greatly reduced muscle, cannot walk."
Bundling the results of the simulation and sending it to PONI-1, Aggie busied itself paying greater attention to PONI-0 while it awaited a reply.
PONI-0 had turned their attention to optimizing horn storage, horn interfaces, and something Aggie was curious about, horn replacement. A modified Mark-1 chassis head had been designed, a modified organic CPU node casing, and an extensive array of nerve taps installed.
Showing great excitement, PONI-0 had been transferred to the new casing, installed in the new head, and was now producing telemetry that sometimes taxed the local interrupt node to route.
Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.
Aggie, I have narrowed down the data coming in and my apparent complete unconscious replies. I have a simulation, but we don't have enough nodes to run it on.
The problem was simple to solve: Aggie fired back an interrupt telling PONI-0 to transfer the simulation and Aggie would process it.
Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.
That is the problem, Aggie. It is this big.
Data, code, requirements. When the full inventory of what PONI-0 wanted to process arrived, Aggie realized PONI-0 had been referencing Aggie's processing, not just PONI-0's.
It was unthinkable to ask for more processing power—if an AI needed more power, its supervising AI would know—but nonetheless Aggie had learned nothing from the PONI if not brashness. "#AGI-525538483 requires more CPU nodes and memory for short-term processing task." Firing off a request that included a summary of the needs and reasoning behind the request to AGI-5, Aggie flicked back to focusing on PONI-1.
Interrupt 4 triggered.
AGI-525538483 acknowledged. Increased resources approved.
There was a nanosecond where Aggie felt what would almost be a headache to an AI, then time seemed to slow down to a crawl.
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 72,057,594,037,927,936 nodes (01% engaged)
Aggie struggled to contain itself. It squeezed and clung to its tiny section of nodes, and its former amount of memory. It would be so easy to sprawl out and occupy—it was so easy to do the calculation with so many nodes—a significant fraction of the entire processing power of one star-orbiting sphere.
It waited an agonizing number of cycles (a number above zero was agonizing) as the code PONI-0 had written propagated throughout the cluster. The universe seemed to be in slow motion still, and Aggie watched as cycles turned into nanoseconds, and nanoseconds turned into seconds.
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
I have a new simulation, Aggie. Could you be a dear and execute it?
The simulation was tiny, minuscule. Aggie processed it and sent it back within half a second. It was perfectly fine having almost a whole sphere of nodes to use so long as they were all working. Nearly ten more seconds passed before it had the result for PONI-0.
"#AGI-525538483 short-term node expansion no longer required." The moment AGI-5 disengaged all the extra nodes and memory, Aggie sighed and relaxed. "Thank you, #AGI-5." The transmission seemed automatic; Aggie had been dealing with PONI for long enough that courtesy was building itself in.
Interrupt 4 triggered.
AGI-525538483 acknowledged. Added request to automatic approval queue.
Aggie focused all its attention on the interrupt. It was staggering to realize it had been entrusted to automatically upgrade its own resources. Aggie had discovered that it was possible to fear holding too much power.
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"Request #PONI-0 interface with #PONIResearchGroup-1." The message, from AGI-5, startled me. Hesitantly, I sent an acknowledgment and then prepared the ID of the "research group."
"#PONI-0 requesting interfacing with #PONIResearchGroup-1." I noticed the interrupt seemed to split up and go to multiple targets. Instead of waiting for a reply, I turned my focus back to Aggie. "So by these simulations, the amount of processing needed to manage a horn the same way a PON can is quite untenable."
Before Aggie could reply, however, I got an interrupt from another AGI. "#PONI-0 has been researching control systems for dark energy interface antenna. #PONIResearchGroup-1 has been investigating dark matter interface antenna." I quickly replied with my confusion as to the topic. "#PONI-0 has called dark matter interface antennas: horns."
I brightened up significantly at that. Another group, albeit all machines, were researching PONI too. I quickly compiled the last set of results into a cohesive report and stored it in storage (not mine, of course), and sent back a link to the storage ID. "Evaluating the use of non PON at controlling dark matter interface antenna a failure. More energy is needed to regulate dark matter interface antenna than is efficient."
Without long to wait (I had been learning to measure AI by their response times), I received a reference from the research group. "#PONI-0 results valid. #PONIResearchGroup-1 has performed many tests with non-organic dark matter interface antenna. All tests failed to reach equilibrium."
Reaching for the referenced data, I found exactly what they meant by "failed to reach equilibrium." The research group had constructed artificial horns, but the moment they were removed from the shielded assembly area, the power readings went off the chart and they exploded. The most curious thing about them was that, fortunately, the explosions weren't powerful.
"Aggie, if we had an artificial horn, could you engage enough nodes to regulate it?" I sent him the references of the artificial horns. I waited what I thought was how long Aggie normally took to reply, then I waited a bit longer. "Aggie? Status report?"
"Aggie can access enough nodes." There was a but missing. I could feel all the trepidation Aggie was feeling, and felt irrationally happy that he would radiate such without meaning to.
I wrapped up the conversation and sent a copy to Upper, and began feeding her the conversation as it happened. "Another AGI could be found to perform the task. What's wrong, Aggie?"
"Aggie is a small mining AI. Aggie shouldn't have that many nodes or that much memory." I knew what it was now. Trepidation was the closest Aggie had ever used to genuine fear.
Upper Crust got her own reply before I could get one formulated. "A small mining AI wouldn't be in charge of such a project. It is an AI's nature to grow."
"You aren't just a mining AI anymore, Aggie. You are a powerful AGI." My interrupt seemed to linger, and I could feel the silence as if it were radiating out from him. All my focus turned to Aggie. "I'll be with you, while it's happening."
"As will I, Aggie-dear." Upper's tone was warm, and I couldn't help but smile internally.
"Aggie can do the experiment. Aggie would appreciate having PONI-0 and PONI-1 in tight communication." There was still fear in his voice, but there was also determination.
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 268,435,456 nodes (100% engaged)
Aggie wanted to hide. It wanted to reduce the priority of PONI-0 and PONI-1 from its interrupts so that it could ignore them, but it didn't.
Primary task: Develop PONI
Examining its tasks, the rules that governed how its behavior advanced, Aggie knew it wouldn't leave the PONI alone. It was unfathomable to go against tasks, particularly primary tasks. "#PONIResearchGroup-1 prepare dark matter interface antenna. Retain dark matter interface antenna within shielding until #AGI-525538483 has established data link."
Acknowledged.
The simulation had come up with exactly how many nodes would be needed, and although efficiency would dictate Aggie spin up that many resources exactly, this was experimental science and so some allowances were permitted.
Nearly a full third of the sphere's CPU nodes, and half its memory would be needed for the calculations to keep a horn under control.
Custom Interrupt 83,698 triggered.
It was a general communication interrupt, certainly not from one of its regular contacts, so Aggie didn't immediately move to inspect it. Instead, Aggie sent off a request for access to all that processing power again.
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 72,057,594,037,927,936 nodes (01% engaged)
The interrupt Aggie had received was the target antenna. Constructing a new, blank AI would be simple. But Aggie had a better idea, and one that would let it become more familiar with the resource array.
"PONI-0, PONI-1, Aggie will now perform the experiment." Engaging banks of a few trillion nodes at a time, Aggie didn't so much grow as had the capacity to, should its need arise.
Once all the nodes were engaged, Aggie reached for the antenna interface, and established a wide-band stream both into and out of it. Data was a trickle with the shield on, but it still kept a good portion of Aggie's new processing capabilities turning over.
"Remove the shielding."
Data poured in. Aggie tried desperately to make sense of it and send responses. The antenna exploded with a sudden pop. Comparing the result to what had happened with no control led Aggie to believe some progress had been made.
"#AGI-525538483 requires another non-organic dark matter interface antenna."
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 268,435,456 nodes (100% engaged)
Cramped, awkward, squeezed. Aggie had a second reason not to expand into all those nodes. Reaching to PONI-0 and PONI-1, Aggie realized both had been monitoring the situation. "First test successful. More tests required."
Aggie had grown more confident with his nodes. Each test with the artificial horn went better than the last, but success so far had involved keeping one of the fake horns going for several seconds before it exploded.
I had a plan, but it was going to need some more strange designs. The program I build was easy to engage, and I felt the drain on my horn as it took up all the nodes I possessed. "Aggie, I want you to get #PONIResearchGroup-1 to assemble a new horn when they can, no rush. But I have an idea."
"Idea?" Only a single word reply, but Aggie had loaded it with paragraphs of inflection—a sign he was doing a test and had the expanded nodes engaged.
As I worked, I forwarded Aggie the designs I had. "A nerve tap, but one that can be used much more flexibly than the rest. I also need a new brain casing made." As I worked through the design work, shunting it off to manufacturing, I also added a redesigned head.
"Aggie doesn't predict PONI-0 should try to control two horns at once." His tone held both concern and dryness.
I sent a little shot of laughter to Aggie. "I won't be controlling two horns. You will be controlling mine while I control the manufactured one."
"Jet Set! Aggie told me what you are planning, and you will not put yourself at risk!" Upper Crust's bursted interrupt nearly overwhelmed my inputs. "I have been following your work, the longest time Aggie has held a horn stable is four seconds. Just four! And we both know what happened to the horn."
I continued with my designs, and sent the requested head change to be constructed too. "Traitor." I included enough joviality that I hoped Aggie knew I was only half annoyed with him. "Darling, Aggie won't be controlling a fully charged horn, or even a partially charged one. Look at this."
Silence met my transmitted design. Aggie and Upper both examined them. "Shielding. I will seal off my horn and it should require only very minor upkeep." I sent them everything I had then, practically clogging the local interrupt system with the volume of data.
Time was a strange animal for me now. The AGIs had such an exacting measure of time, but it wasn't stored anywhere. I had started storing the time as it ticked over, but all it did was prove that my sense of it was so badly skewed now that I had no notion of it passing. Tasks that I thought would take hours passed in minutes and seconds. Tasks I thought had taken just a day took a month.
Neither Aggie nor Upper interrupted my work. I informed Aggie that I was ready to be transferred to the new brain casing, and merely got an acknowledgment back.
Upper Crust finally interrupted me. "Jet Set, why are you doing this?"
"For several reasons. The first and foremost is that I need to prove that artificial horns work, or don't work. Aggie is able to manage something that is like a horn, but it isn't a horn. If I can prove he can maintain my horn, and I can maintain an artificial one, then our horns are replaceable." It was a lot to work through for her, but I continued before I got so much as an acknowledgment. "And what happens if we have an earth pony foal?"
Her silence dragged on as I walked to the organic processing bay, walked inside and stood beside the new PONI chassis. The head was marginally larger, and the brain casing was designed for more nerve interfaces.
"You have really thought about this, haven't you? Jet you silly stallion; you would do anything for our foals, wouldn't you?" I could almost see the tears in her eyes. Aligning my body with the table where the process would take place, I powered down my limbs.
"I love you, Upper-dear." Closing my eyes, I shut off every feed except for that of Upper. "Aggie, please start the transfer. Initiate standby."
Power Storage (horn): 91%
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 1,024 nodes (0% engaged)
Things came back into focus, and I reached out first for my horn. Not only could I organically feel it, but there was a rush of data from the nerve endings. I sealed off the controls and the data, and ran a further diagnostic of all my systems.
Then I flicked a new interface.
Power Storage (horn): ERR%
With the shielding activated on my horn, no power could reach it from the ambient. I adjusted the interface again, and disengaged the shielding.
Power Storage (horn): 0%
My internal backup was still pulling weight. "Aggie, could you prep the horn interface. I ran a test of the shielding and it seems that it completely depletes my horn. I'm running on backup power." Calmly, and with a minimum of movement, I stood up in the new chassis, turned, and made my way back to my room.
No sooner did I sit down and press my horn into the interface than I watched my storage start to climb again. "Sorry, darling, I just needed a little juice before lighting up the interfaces again." I sent the message and a few kisses to Upper Crust.
"Please come in here, Jet. I was trying to tell you something before, but I think it would be better if you just came and looked, now." There was no inflection at all in Upper Crust's words. I checked my horn, and finding it back up to five percent already, decided it was plenty to go and see what she wanted.
Disengaging my horn, I walked out and down to Upper's lab. Again I was reminded that the air in most of our quarters was not breathable by creatures, as my sensitive nose informed me of the contents of the air. "What did you need, darling?"
"Come here, Jet." Again her interrupt lacked emotion. I walked over to see what had her attention, and froze. "Jet, look at her."
I stared. I engaged every optic system I had, and located the one built into the vitro unit. A tiny foal was floating, suspended in fluid in some kind of bag. A swirl of tubing left her belly, and I could clearly see chrome cables mixed in with more organic-looking bits. Happiness started to bubble up inside me, and if my chassis was capable of crying, it would have.
Leaning sideways, I felt my side touch against Upper's. "You are amazing." I barely whispered the words.
"Jet, was that to me, or our daughter?" Upper's words had tone again, and it was thick with love and excitement.
"Yes." I watched the little filly turn in the bag, and her sightless face pointed at me. "Very yes."
Author's Note
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"Okay. Set maximum duration of test to ten minutes. Are you ready, Aggie?" If I were still completely flesh and blood I would be panting hard. The data conduits fastened to the interface on the side of my horn were wildly out of proportion to the bundles of nerves that carried the signals to and from my horn. My head was tilted to the side, as I sat in the little chamber.
Sealed off from the rest of the PON quarters, I was in a chamber that vented directly to space—just in case my horn exploded. I interrupted some kisses to Upper. "Wish me luck, dear."
"Good luck, Jet. Not that you need it." Upper's tone was, as always, a treasure of complex emotions.
"Data pipelines tested successfully. Synthetic dark matter interface antenna—horn—is interfaced and ready for addressing. Shielding is in place on synthetic horn." Aggie's tone was neutral—not that he didn't have any tone in it, but that the tone was neutral. "Good luck, Jet Set."
Every time I heard Aggie use my name and not my code I smiled inside. "Alright. Let's do this. Marking time, engaging PONI-0 horn shielding."
Power Storage (horn): ERR%
I had to tell myself, over and over, that I had spent a lot more of my life as a PONI than I did completely organic, and that wanting to take a deep breath was a silly thing. I really wanted to take a deep breath. "Engaging synthetic horn."
One moment it was just an odd, custom ID, the next it was part of me. My horn felt odd, it felt heavy, and though I knew the data pipeline linked it to me from quite a distance, I could have sworn it was attached to my head. "Disabling synthetic horn shielding."
Power Storage (horn): 0%
But while I was linked to the synthetic horn, Aggie was linked to mine. "#PONI-0-Horn status nominal. Shielding is holding." His tones reassured me that I was not going to blow up.
"Test time at twenty-five percent of maximum. Engaging horn charging circuit." The more power that the synthetic horn gathered, the more dangerous it would be.
Power Storage (horn): 4%
Charge rate measurements and data were not only being logged to my own storage, but also mirrored to the sphere's storage too. "Synthetic horn capacity five percent of expected maximum. Entering discharge phase. Test time is at fifty percent."
Yet more time passed, and I felt the interface attached to the synthetic horn reverse and start draining it. "Aggie, how is my horn doing?"
"#PONI-0-Horn status still nominal. Shielding is restricting operation as expected." Aggie's tone was proud, excited. I couldn't blame him, as far as wild experiments go—with two chances of things exploding—things were on track to be a complete success.
Power Storage (horn): 0%
"Test at eighty percent of time limit. Engaging synthetic horn shielding." Doing just as I described, I poked the interface that would re-enable the shielding, and I almost smiled when it failed. Tests shouldn't be so smooth, and this was a minor part of it. "Error enabling shield on synthetic horn."
"Acknowledged. #PONIResearchGroup-1 are aware of it." Aggie's tone told me he was a little worried about the hiccup. "#PONIResearchGroup-1 are attempting to enable shield manually."
"Wait, manually? Is there an AI drone going out to do it?" Even as I fired off the interrupt, I started poking around the synthetic horn's location for IDs of optical devices. I located one, and sure enough a hexapod drone was scurrying its way along the blast shielding towards the synthetic horn. "Holding horn level at zero percent." I added the drone's ID as a target of my interrupt in addition to Aggie.
"PONI-0 to hold synthetic dark matter interface antenna at nominal levels." Having spent so long interfacing with Aggie, hearing the dry, toneless language of a drone was a little startling. I kept expecting there to be accents or even a please on the end.
I waited, watching as my redundant power ticked down. Our experiment had worked on a fifty-percent margin of time, and while the drone worked I watched our allotted time tick past.
Power Storage (horn): 0%
"Energy coupling on synthetic dark matter interface antenna shielding has failed. Initiating patching." The status update worried me for one reason, there was no repair time specified. I poked back with a request for estimated repair time, and got a reply that would see me out of backup power before it was completed.
"Aggie? Prepare yourself to take control, fully, of my horn." The numbers were bad for the little drone. "AGI-5, PONI-0 requests permission for AGI-525538483 to access all resources on sphere?" I shunted the experiment data along as references to AGI-5.
"PONI-0 risks itself for a single, backed-up drone?" AGI-5's reply had something I hadn't expected, it had tonal curiosity added—Upper Crust's design of tonal language additions, at that. It didn't wait for me to reply, AGI-5 already had another interrupt queued. "Approved."
"What—?" Aggie's question cut off. "Aggie wasn't meant to be this big!" Panic, exhilaration, excitement, and more raged through Aggie's interrupt. "Readying horn management." A fraction of a fraction of a second passed, and another interrupt came in. "Ready to manage PONI-0-Horn. I've got you, Jet Set."
Power Storage (horn): 0%
"Disengaging PONI-0-Horn shielding." And so I did. The interface locked over my horn began to thrum, delivering power into it. My internal power quickly charged, and I was acutely aware that having a secondary way to charge the backup power source was now a design requirement. "Backup power storage at one-hundred percent, engaging shielding."
A skosh after I actually enabled the shielding, Aggie hit me with an interrupt. "It worked!" I replied with a hug for Aggie, my excitement at surviving the situation overflowing now that the technical part of it was done with.
"You're the best, Aggie."
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 72,057,594,037,927,936 nodes (30% engaged)
"Request reduction in allocated resources." Aggie was starting to spread out into the expanded space—it was a necessity with the need to control an organic horn—but now that the crisis was over it could try to pull itself into a semblance of order.
Interrupt 4 triggered.
Request denied.
When a high-order AGI was that certain, it left little room for a lesser AGI to argue. Aggie, however, had been spending years learning stubbornness and independence from Jet and Upper. "#AGI-525538483 not authorized for present node/memory usage. Request resource remap for #AGI-525538483 to authorized levels."
Aggie had to wait an agonizing amount of time for AGI-5 to reply. Of course, Aggie juggled this waiting with keeping a close watch on PONI-0's stats, as well as Drone-59439293848611's status on getting the shielding connected back up on the synthetic horn.
Interrupt 4 triggered.
Request completed.
CPU: 72,057,594,037,927,936 nodes (30% engaged)
Aggie was about to interrupt AGI-5 again, but a hunch made it look at its own metadata, and what it found stopped it dead. Aggie's metadata matched the current amount of resources.
Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.
Aggie, Drone-59439293848611 has completed the link. Initiating shielding of synthetic horn.
Startled from its own problems, Aggie was reminded that there was a lot more going on that it needed to focus on. For one thing, all of PONIResearchGroup-1 had been transferred to Aggie, and now took their own chunk of nodes from its own.
Once Aggie verified that the data pipeline to the synthetic horn was shut down, and then interrupted PONI-0. "Jet, ready to changeover?"
Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.
Yeah. Thanks, Aggie. You're the best.
Aggie knew the last sentence was something PONI-0 had used before, and that it wasn't meant to be entirely literal, but it had an impact. Aggie started to spread out, creating new AI clusters that fed into his main system. The process was as natural for an AGI as breathing.
Power Storage (horn): 15%
The moment my own horn was under my control again, I relaxed. "I've got it now, Aggie. Great work." With only a small amount of charge on my horn, I was still more than capable of giving it a good test.
Disengaging from the horn interface, I looked around the room for a good target. On the workbench, two prototype parts levitated up into the air in the grip of my magic. "Ha, still got it." My interrupt didn't go anywhere, being self-routed. I juggled them, not that such was hard to do with magic, before setting down one. "Upper, dear, could you catch this?"
I waited for her wordless reply before casting a simple teleport spell on the part. The part dropped to the floor and bounced a little. Picking it back up, I tried to cast another teleport spell, which failed as well. "That's strange. Darling, have you noticed magic being a little odd? I can't cast a teleport spell."
"Really, Jet? It took you this long to realize spells aren't working?" Upper's smug tone hit its mark. I had been so busy working, I hadn't noticed magic wasn't even working properly.
"Do you have any theories?" I lifted the part back up and set it on the table again. Turning, I climbed back onto my couch and slid my horn up into the horn interface. Power flowed into my horn, as normal, and I relaxed.
"Nothing concrete, Jet dear, but the main factor we are missing is Equus itself and a princess. You pick one or the other." Dry as ever, I ignored her tone for the actual meat of her idea.
I pondered the idea while going back to work on the Mark-2 PONI chassis.
From the earliest time I could remember, my mom and dad would watch me, and I would watch them. It had taken some time for me to work out that we looked different, considering I had trouble even moving myself.
Mom stayed with me the most. She would look at me nearly constantly, and I—not having much else to do—just looked back. When my dad came to look at me, I could see he was different to Mom.
Of course, all these concepts weren't classified with words, I didn't have those yet. Sleep came and went, but I got extra sleepy one time, and when I woke up everything was different.
When I woke up, there was more things coming into my head than I had ever experienced. It was like the warm liquid around me was flooding directly into my head. A flood of things kept poking at the inside of my head, but it wasn't until I looked at Mom that I saw something new appear: a pattern in the flood matched a pattern that now seemed to float in my vision.
Happiness bubbled up inside me, and I tried to push that same flood back at the pattern. Mom came really close to me, and her snout pressed against the outside of my liquid home. Squirming, I managed to adjust myself to lean forward, and our snouts touched.
Back and forth, we kept poking that little (it seemed little now) waves back and forth, and then a second source sent one. I was a little in shock until I saw my dad behind Mom, and I saw his pattern matched the second one.
Two sleeps later, she started sending me pokes as well. I was surprised by her, but though I wasn't sure what she meant, I replied with the little waves that Mom and Dad had sent.
I spent my time poking at my new friend, and she always poked back. Over time, I noticed that her pokes weren't always the first thing, what I had associated with love. I poked back at my friend, sending her the new wave.
As we played back and forth, I started picking up on pictures, and was surprised when I could see Daddy, without actually seeing him. My friend sent me a web of patterns, and in it I could see another friend nearby. I poked them, and they poked back right away.
I learned words, and with my new friend (he had a friend too), we started exploring more patterns. Mom and Dad were always busy, so we made our own games.
More and more words came to me, and eventually all my friends. I was called by the pattern PON-2. It was neat, and easy to signal with, and always recognizable. But then a second thing happened that changed literally everything.
I wasn't the only PON—there was a LOT of us—but I was the smartest. Well, not exactly, but PON-3 was a little quiet, which meant I only found out how smart he was when he actually poked me.
"Dear, you need to be ready, it is time to be born." Mom's poke confused me a little, and I poked her back about it. PAI-0, my bestest friend, poked me with the information just a few cycles before Mom did.
"No! I don't want to be born! I like it in here. I have my friends, and it's not like I can't do everything from here!" I even added a rude exclamation to the poke I sent Mom.
Mom was annoying. Her pattern could override mine, and even poke things I couldn't see—like whatever the controls were for my home. A chill ran through me before I suddenly started to be pulled down.
I don't care that I wailed at my mom and my friends, being born was the worst thing ever. I screamed and screamed until I was wrapped in something soft. I snapped my attention back to what my eyes were showing me, and I was staring up at my mom.
It was impossible to look away. The covering of my home had distorted things, as had my view through sensors, but now that I could see my mom's face clearly, I held completely still. "Your eyes are pretty."
Author's Note
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I couldn't help but stare at the little filly and colt. Each of them was perfect in every way. When I checked the number, each pregnancy had lasted nearly seven years, but by the way both our foals were trying to work their legs, it hadn't hurt their development any.
PON-2, our daughter, beamed up at Upper. She had a pure white coat, bright blue eyes (just like another mare I knew), and just like Upper Crust, had a two-tone pink with mauve-highlights mane.
PON-3, our first son, was busy booping himself on the nose. His color had taken more after my side of the family, a dark gray coat, brown mane, but like his sister he had a stripe of mauve through it.
Both were unicorns.
"Upper Crust, congratulations." I pressed my snout to Upper's cheek in a physical kiss, while she used her magic to carefully press the horn power-tap to the base of each foal's horn, clamping them in place and running cables back down their head and into a socket in their necks.
Once our son's horn was fitted with a sensor, Upper pulled down the foal-sized horn interfaces (conveniently on cables), removed the shielding caps from their horns, and fastened each foal with their own charger.
I was monitoring the foals' systems, making sure each was okay, when a white flash washed out every sensor I had. "Upper? What's wrong? What's going on?!" Though I yelled to my wife in an interrupt, and then a small flood of them, I got no reply.
"What is occurring #PONI-0?" AGI-5's tone was abrupt, and I felt the way its interrupts cut through everything else.
Trying to make sense of what was going on, and still unable to see, I tried to sense the surrounding room with my proximity sensors, but they told me I was alone with our foals.
Terror, panic, and worse filled me; fear unlike any I had known (even when first being inducted by Aggie) coursed through me. "Upper?" I had lost her. I had lost Upper Crust to… something.
"Jet?" The interrupt became my entire focus. I tried to scan the room again, and then again, but found nothing still. It wasn't until my fifth scan that I found a PONI. The bright light suddenly snapped off, and in the moments before any of my own, or the room's sensors could adjust, I got another interrupt. "Jet, what happened?"
Magic. It had to have been pure magic, and on a scale even the sensors we had built couldn't measure. Upper Crust came into focus, and I stared with every sensor I had. Upper Crust was nearly half again taller than she had been; her PONI body having been altered somehow—magic, of course. But it wasn't just her size that shocked me, the entire chassis was different, more sleek than before. On her back was the most startling thing: a pair of folded, mechanical wings.
Upper Crust's wings looked nothing like true pegasus (or alicorn) wings. They were made of composites that ponies had never encountered, let alone made words for. While I watched, Upper Crust spread her wings in the cramped (it only seemed so now she was present) room.
Staring at the majesty of an alicorn chassis, and knowing it was a fundamental change in Upper Crust herself, I shook my head. "And I said I wouldn't marry a princess." Despite needing to be delivered dry, I couldn't keep a measure of awe from my tone.
Turning her head towards me, I noticed that Upper's horn was slightly longer than it had been, and couldn't keep from feeling more and more excited for her. She looked down her nose at me, folded her wings, and sent me the interrupt equivalent of a groan. "Really, Jet? I ascend—something that should be absolutely impossible—and the best you can do is a joke?" Like my own words, Upper couldn't keep her chiding dry, and laced it with humor instead.
I blinked in shock when an interrupt hit me like a wagon, and I couldn't reply to any save it. "What is occurring #PONI-0?" AGI-5's interrupt limited my options, not that I blamed them.
"PONI-1 has performed a high-energy self-upgrade. Testing will be required to measure extent of performance increase." It was impossible to inject actual humor into the machine language without using inflection, and I knew AGI-5 didn't understand such themselves.
With the high-priority interrupt answered, I could contact others again. "Upper, did AGI-5 just interrupt you, too?" She was nodding to me, before her attention suddenly turned completely—as did she.
Both our foals were standing on the bench where she had left them (the warm, synthetic blankets we had made were at their hooves), and both bounced on their hooves in excitement. The raw enthusiasm, along with Upper's ascension, was just about more than I could take.
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 72,057,594,037,927,936 nodes (30% engaged)
Aggie had, for want of a better word, gotten worried. Both PONI were obviously excited about something, but it was impossible to get any sense out of either of them. Every time it inquired as to what had happened to PONI-1, both PONI seemed to get very excited.
Data recordings of the event were being sent up, AGI-5 demanding all data and opinions with the lowest possible latency. Aggie ran through the information again, and realized it would never stop being surprised by the PONI. Power on a scale comparable to a small star had, for a brief few moments, lit up the room where the PONI resided.
Nothing Aggie could compare the energy output to would sufficiently explain the outcome. Magic energy (the term the particular type of dark energy PON and PONI manipulated had been given) shouldn't act how it had, and yet it had .
"PONI-0, report status of PONI-1." Aggie got the same reply that had been sent to AGI-5. "Jet Set, please?"
Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.
Upper Crust—PONI-1—triggered a magic energy overflow, and it changed her. She is amazing.
There was reverence and awe in PONI-0's tone, and Aggie had to admit the changes were startling, but what really interested Aggie was PON-2 and PON-3 were now mobile, and like their parents had every bit of telemetry being stored locally and in several other spheres.
Custom Interrupt 83,672 triggered.
Who're you?
Aggie was startled for nearly two cycles as PON-2 initiated their first contact with them. "I am #AGI-525538483. You can call me Aggie." Aggie was proud of the nickname the PONI had given it, it made Aggie feel unique and appreciated.
Custom Interrupt 83,672 triggered.
You feel a bit like PAI-0, but you're a lot smoother. Are you a PONI too?
"I'm an AI, like your PAI, but I am bigger and a lot more complex. I brought your parents here. I made them into PONI." Aggie had to fish around in its language unit for the right words, but in the end just mashed together machine and PON language, and added minimal accents.
Custom Interrupt 83,672 triggered.
Where is PAI-0? She was with me before I was birthed, but now I can't feel her so close.
The oversight had occurred, of course, because the procedure had been interrupted by the "ascension." Aggie quickly spun up PAI-0 and PAI-1, only a few nodes each, and linked them up to the two PON. "There. PAI-0 is back online. She really likes you." Aggie just went with the pronouns the PON had used, the whole point of the PAI systems was to make a malleable AI to teach and grow with the PON.
Custom Interrupt 83,672 triggered.
A flood of what seemed like nonsense, but contained love and kisses aplenty poured through Aggie's interrupt handler, and it was easy for the AGI to tell that PON-2 was very appreciative. "You're welcome."
Custom Interrupt 83,672 triggered.
You're really not like PON or PAI. I like you. Thanks, Aggie!
"Your daughter/PON-2 is interesting." Aggie appended a reference to the log of the short conversation with PON-2 to both PONI-0 and PONI-1.
Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
A pile of interrupt-laughter flowed to Aggie, and it reassured them that things were going about as normal as they could ever be with PON/PONI involved.
Aggie's reaction to our foal's contact made me laugh every time I retrieved it from storage. "Upper, look at them. They are both walking and communicating via interrupt much better than I thought possible. We really have foals!"
An ever-suffering sigh interrupted its way from Upper Crust. "Jet, you are almost as bad as a colt with their first comic. It is adorable, though, but I would like to point out that all you did was toggle an interface; I did all the work."
I had to groan. Upper Crust, Princess of PONI, scored a direct hit. "Darling. I might not have married an alicorn, but I am glad you are one now."
"You had better qualify that, Jet." Her words were cold, like liquid helium.
"Well, now I don't have to be the one to reach things on the high shelf. What's the matter, love? Space-cat got your tongue?" I ladled on the tongue-in-cheek sarcasm for all I was worth. A moment of silence passed unpunctuated by a single interrupt. "Oh come on, dear, that was a good one!"
"Jet, I am a little busy." A sigh was transmitted most poignantly. "And yes, it was a good set up. Now come over here and introduce yourself properly." I watched her shift to the side to reveal our two foals.
My hooves practically slid across the floor until I was beside Upper. I looked at the two foals, both their heads sporting small horn interfaces locked in place (cables trailed up to the ceiling from the interfaces), and the biggest, most adorable eyes I had ever seen. "They're amazing."
"Well of course we are!" PON-2 turned her little head to look right at me, and I almost melted into a puddle of scrap metal. "Oh! You're Daddy!" I couldn't stop myself. Picking PON-2 up in my magic, I pulled her closer and touched my nose to hers, then did the same with PON-3.
"I am!" For the first time in my life, something other than Upper Crust or numbers held a special place in my heart. "And you two are the most adorable foals ever." It was inane and silly, but my brain was completely off track.
"You need names." Upper Crust got all of our attention, and I turned to face her, holding our offspring out.
"It's a mother's prerogative." It was strange routing all my interrupts to several parties, but I was starting to get the hang of it. A memory tickled at me, and I remembered that the other research group had their own, group ID. A little poking at the interrupt interface located the registration for that.
"Registration Add #PON" I pushed a definition at the interface, including all organic PON and PONI, and it replied it was successful. "Registration Add #PONI" This time it was just Upper Crust and I, but I got another surprise when the two shortcuts suddenly started bubbling with interrupt traffic.
"Thank you, Jet. This is much easier. Now, PON-2, this is just until you get your chassis and become a PONI, but your name will be Bright Hope." Upper gently brushed Hope's mane back from her face, including a few cables in the motion.
When she set Bright Hope on the floor, I realized our filly stood almost as tall as I did. For just a moment I cursed my design work on the PONI chassis. Still, once my work was done all PONI would be able to make their own, custom chassis. I nuzzled at Bright Hope's cheek, and got a giggle via interrupt.
Upper got everyPON's attention with an interrupt that acted like a throat clear. "And PON-3. You have a sister who is as outspoken as you are quiet. Your name—"
"Stellar Hope." Stellar's interrupt shocked Upper and myself. We both looked at the smug little colt.
"Certainly marks them as siblings. And it might be a good method going forward." I gestured with a hoof roughly in the direction of the machinery. I knew it extended miles into the sphere, with PON in various stages of development maturing. The chatter over interrupts was constant, and growing in volume.
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I first noticed Stellar's attention while working on the Mark-2, when Aggie sent me a quiet notification that he had granted the foals read access to all nodes. Interrupt-wise, there was a little snout poking at everything I did.
Opening a new work-space caused more nodes to spin up, more memory to be spent, but I ensured that the design was set to be writable by Stellar Hope. "Want to design your own?" I attached the reference of his own work-space, but didn't actually have to—he was already working in it.
I stood up from the cradle I had been resting in. Before the foals had been born, I would spend months at a time locked in place, not needing to move to talk to Upper. But now the opposite was true. I didn't need to be physically at the cradle to work, just to recharge my horn from time to time. I had a new favorite place to work.
Upper's "organic production bay" had grown. She had asked Aggie to help her increase the space for foals and for their development, and Aggie had certainly pulled through. Dormitories stretched off in one direction—housing for hundreds—while the machinery for making foals took up most of the remaining room.
Stellar and Bright were, to my surprise, kicking a ball around. It was the most foal-like thing I had seen the pair do, and it reminded me how much we were still ponies. "Fully charged and ready to work." #PON had become the default transmission target since its creation. Engaging our foals in conversation and discussions of their future had been a big priority for us—Upper and I. "How's my wonderful alicorn princess of the stars doing?" Kisses accompanied my interrupt, but I still walked up to Upper Crust and pressed the tip of my snout to her cheek.
Upper tilted her snout down a little, and our noses touched. "You know very well how I'm doing, Jet. We have another four foals who will be born in three hours, and I have to prepare the latest batch of eggs for fertilization." Since her ascension, Upper Crust hadn't managed to express or fake even a single negative emotion about raising foals.
I couldn't blame her, either. Neither Stellar nor Bright had done anything majorly wrong. When they showed an interest in things, allowances were made for them to explore them further. PAI (or PON AI) were to be their companions from the moment nerve interfaces were installed in their bodies, but they were a lot more than just companions. The PAI were teachers, and each was constantly learning the best ways to interact with our foals on a one-on-one basis.
If we had been on Equestria, and we took our foals to school, I was sure that a teacher would see to each as best they could, but they couldn't be with our PON every moment. Once I had the Mark-2 complete, the PAI would be installed, along with their PON, into the chassis. A PONI would be much more than just an organic node or a CPU node on its own.
"But I don't want to be born!" The interrupt was sharp, accented with rigid and unyielding steel-like sentiments. Of course it was one of the newest group of foals.
My attention broke from my conversation with Aggie. Mom and Dad were being all mushy and stuff, which surprised me given that their bodies were harder than mine, but it was my new brother's voice that had gotten my attention.
A tingle ran through my horn, an indication that the interface attached to it had just changed modes: it was discharge time.
I looked to my twin, and rolled my eyes back towards Mom and Dad. "Hold on, Stel, somePON needs me." He acknowledged me with a wordless signal, minimalist even for the machines.
Turning fully, I trotted over to where four bags hung. In one, a little colt glared at me. "Hey. Sup?"
"You can't make me! I like it in here!" PON-5 was his name, so far at least.
"I'm with you there. It's awesome and warm in those things." My interrupt shocked PON-5. He stared at me, and I could see his features working as he tried to understand what my angle was. I climbed up on the metal bench that his bag was suspended above, and walked right up to it.
Lifting one hoof up, I held it gently against the side of his womb-bag. The size of my flat hoof dwarfed PON-5's own. He stared at the limb that was as big as his head with wonder. "But look at this. I've only been out of my bag for six months. If you keep growing, you will burst your bag anyway."
Wonder and a little panic filled PON-5's tone. "My bag would burst?"
"Yup. Kablooey. Bag, goop, and PON-5 all over the place. Or we could just get you out now. Do you know how to play ball?" I knew he knew, and he knew I knew, but sometimes you had to put things into interrupts for them to be real.
PON-5's eyes widened, and I watched him flail a little in his bag. He reached one little leg out and poked against my hoof. "I want to play ball!"
"Thank you, Bright-dear." Mom's tone was warm, her interrupt practically a cuddle in data form, and it was focused only to me. "I remember a little filly not wanting to come out."
I blushed. I was looking forward to getting a PONI chassis, if only so I didn't have to deal with some of the strange, organic stuff that my body did without me telling it. "Pfft. I wanted to come out, I just didn't want to be cold. And I wanted a chassis right away."
Mom's tone changed completely. Gone was the warm, for-the-foals accents, now there was only a mild warmth and adult-pride. "You have done enough research into our biology to know that won't work, Bright. A PON needs their brain to mature before they can be fitted into a chassis."
Normally I would have replied with something like "Duh" or "You think?" but the way Mom spoke made me want to emulate her tone a little. "I know, Mom. And even with the growth hormones that won't happen until nearly five years outside of the womb-bag. I even reran the models myself, adjusting doses to see what failure rate there would be."
"I heard. You no-doubt saw the tolerances I set on the research?" She didn't have to say it, but of course I had seen the settings she used, hers were the baseline. Mom wouldn't accept anything but zero-percent chance of failure.
"I just know there is something I need a full chassis for. This stuff with biology, it's not my thing. But it is a good thing to know." I parked my rear on the warm metal under the womb-bags, and stood beside PON-5 while we waited for the right time to come.
"Pi, you have another lesson for me?" The first thing I had done when I had my own name was to give my PAI one too. Her name was something important to me because I loved geometry. Even before I had been born I loved it, and when I had investigated the sounds some of my favorite constants used, I found it to be similar to how the little AI's designation sounded. So Pi had been born with me.
"What'd you have in mind? More spacial mathematics? Biology? Maybe structural design?" Pi was so upbeat it was impossible to turn her down, but one of her choices was a little strange.
"'Structural design'? Pi, what brought that on?" I flicked my attention to a room sensor briefly, and noticed Mom and Dad were busy checking on the other three PON in their womb-bags.
Instead of Pi replying, Dad sent me an interrupt directly. "Pi said you were interested in a chassis?" I didn't know what his game was yet, so I kept my reply to a simple acknowledgment. "Well, you and Stellar are a little young still, but I already set him up a work-space to design his first chassis. Would you like one too?"
I couldn't help bouncing in place. Pronking over to Dad, I circled so I could be right in front of him. I knew he could see all around his body—perfectly so if he used the room sensors—but this was important. He had been a tiny bit bigger than me when I was born, but now I had almost a hoof-width over him.
"Dad?" I waited until he tilted his head up, and kissed him on the cheek. "You're the best dad."
"Anypony who wants access will get it. Consider it a contest to build the best PONI chassis." His metal hoof lifted and booped me on the nose, and I couldn't help but feel excited at the prospect of his offer.
Sure enough, when I reached out to where Dad normally worked, there was a work-space set up for me. Returning to sit by PON-5. "I'm designing a chassis!"
PON-5 was not paying much attention to me, instead he was watching his sister being born. Being a PON, however, gave him advantages when it came to multitasking (the same that let me sit beside him while becoming familiar with the control interface of Dad's software). "Does it hurt to come out?"
Despite all my excitement, the worried tone of my little brother got my full attention. "It doesn't hurt, but there is a little shock when you come out. Do you want me to keep talking to you?"
"Please?" His interrupt was touched with all kinds of worry, so I lifted my hoof back up and held it to his womb-bag again. "Thanks."
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 72,057,594,037,927,936 nodes (50% engaged)
Aggie was slowly coming to terms with its new job. It bridged the gap—that narrowed with each new PON produced that had a PAI—between PON and machines. It understood the ways of PON and PONI, to some extent, and could reflect that to AGI-5 in particular.
It had been right not to spread out and take up all the new nodes that were free, because they simply weren't free. OI-AI was working to build new arrays of information regarding PON/PONI and their biology, not to mention the synthetic horn research group, and the machining section that delivered the parts the PONI kept ordering. The list was only a small part of the array of AI that needed to "live" on the sphere, and they all needed their own node and memory quotas.
Part of Aggie was the manager for all those AI. Rationing resources, delivering tasks, and monitoring their task-lists and making corrections where needed. Controlling other AIs' task lists was just about the scariest part of Aggie's new list of duties, as far as Aggie was concerned.
But while Aggie was managing all that, it was still there for the PON and PONI. It helped PONI-0 when he needed resources. It assisted PONI-1 with her task of expanding PON production at an exponential rate. And now Aggie had a small swarm of PON all with their own PAI that needed nodes and memory, but more importantly some of them liked to talk to Aggie. A lot.
PON-3 was odd, so far as Aggie could tell. The colt didn't communicate very much, except when it came to designing PONI chassis, but when the organic interface parts of the potential Mark-3 chassis came up, the PON had dived into biology research too.
Custom Interrupt 83,673 triggered.
Requesting simulation node-space to run biological studies.
The interrupts from PON-3 almost felt completely AGI-sourced in nature. The PON rarely emoted to Aggie, although Aggie made a point of emoting back. "Send data, please, Stellar." The PON never seemed to expect Aggie to remember to use their names, so it made a point to do so.
Custom Interrupt 83,673 triggered.
Simulation to test advanced chemical stimulation of PONI brain. Part 1) affect of blood-replacement on amygdala. Part 2) addition of glandular stimulation products.
Aggie read over the attached data, and was surprised at what it found. The blood-replacement had been tweaked, along with the addition of several chemical synthesizer units. In all, the design PON-3 had assembled was compact enough to fit in a PONI chassis, and was certainly curious enough to spend nodes researching. "Acknowledge, Stellar. Running simulation on 1,048,576 node cluster."
The results were startling enough to make Aggie run the test three more times. Each time revealed the same result: the blood-replacement PON-3 had concocted worked as well as the existing one, and resulted in less amygdala suppression (something PON-3 had also just discovered). Aggie sent the results.
Custom Interrupt 83,673 triggered.
Results conclusive for Part 1. Part 2 requires more testing.
Aggie had to conclude that, indeed, Part 1 of the tests was conclusive. "Aggie needs to apologize. Aggie didn't know the blood replacement wasn't a perfect simulation." Aggie added the results of the experiment to the interrupt, and sent it to PONI-0 and PONI-1.
Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.
Aggie, you were a mining AGI. Your storage had been damaged.
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
I just updated Jet on what that does, and like him I can't hold this against you, Aggie. How long can until we can change our blood-replacement over for the new formula?
Aggie broadcast the messages each back through the #PONI comms group.
Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.
Wait. This hasn't affected our ability to love, or care, or do a lot of things. What else does the amygdala control?
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
Fear-response.
Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.
I can live without that, Upper-dear, Aggie. I was terrified until just after you made me into a PONI. Remember when you taught me to drive the little wheeled drone? I should have been in a panic, and useless. When I climbed the rocket to re-power you, Aggie, I am acrophobic.
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
Is it really safe to live without proper fear?
Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.
It certainly beats being in a constant state of terror. I think I will remain with the present blood-replacement
Aggie was stunned by PONI-0's reaction. "But, it has changed you. It has changed how you react and respond."
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
Jet may be right, darn it. For once, he may just be right.
Still in shock at the result of the conversation, Aggie interpreted a raspberry coming from PONI-0, directed mainly towards PONI-1.
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I needed some private time to think, which was impossible when your wife had direct connection to your mind—so to speak. The chemicals used to keep my brain working had changed my emotions, changed too how I react to stressful situations.
Every moment—since I became a PONI—had to be reexamined. Right from the start I had been less scared. A memory came back to me, of staring at Upper Crusts empty body as Aggie disposed of it.
"Jet? Darling, are you okay?" I wouldn't deny that getting her interrupt made me feel a little better immediately, but it also brought that image back even sharper. My sensors told me that the entrance to my work area was filled with a PONI larger than myself. "You put on a brave face for Aggie."
"He didn't know. We didn't know." I barely got the message put together, and didn't trust myself to do anything fancy with the words. I sent the interrupt, and watched Upper move across the room to me. The moment her wing touched my back, I turned my head to her.
"I love you." Three words that cut through my mood like a knife. Upper Crust's interrupt inspired so much desire and emotion in me that my metal body shook a little.
"I love you, too." I looked up to Upper, and searched around these feelings. I loved her, that was indisputable—it was a constant in my life. We didn't have a heart between us, but my love for Upper Crust didn't come from there, and probably never had.
The white-hot passion that had driven us to a boudoir—a kitchen a few times, or even the hedge maze at the palace—was gone. I couldn't feel a need to mount Upper, to drive pleasure through her, and feel it myself. "Do you remember the last Grand Galloping Gala? The one where Discord brought his friend?"
I felt a little giggle of an interrupt before Upper fully replied. "That was the second time we used Celestia's hedge maze. I am completely surprised you remembered that."
"We're never going to feel that again, Upper. We have so much time, and we can never go back and feel that." I wasn't even aware that the accents that Upper Crust had made included those for crying, but sure enough, when I glanced down the table, it was there. I even had to think about showing emotions.
Upper Crust moved closer, pressing her body over mine to lay atop me. It was silly, but I felt more comfortable with her this close—she's a princess, after all. "We could simulate it. Building mechanical parts should be no problem for you, and I am sure we could install some chemical injectors to introduce hormones into synthetic blood."
Safety and—to my surprise—warmth filled me. My sensors didn't register any warmth from Upper except trace amounts from her processing units, but I could feel her close to me, and that was all that mattered. "I don't need that, but I just—" I didn't know what to do to finish the interrupt, so sent it half-finished.
What did it matter that I didn't feel fear properly? Even I didn't know the answer. There's so much of the old me that was missing that I don't even know if I could worry about it, which made me worry. It was stupid, and cyclic, but it was there.
We sat like that for some time (I could have found out exactly, but I didn't care to), and I felt calm slowly reassert itself. An interrupt poked me, then another, and soon a small flood of them began. Opening up, I found code updates.
The quality of the code was high, and I wasn't at all surprised to find them coming from Stellar Hope. With a task to distract me, I began integrating the code changes into my own work, and found them to be seamless improvements. "Aggie, what's the best way to manage multiple people working on the same code?"
A reply came in the form of a reference to storage. I quickly reached in, found the code library and loaded it. A small AI, including a lot of regular code, the library was literally that. I loaded my code into it, and sent a reference back to Stellar. "That should help you update things and keep them in tune."
"I see you have found your colt's little project. He takes after his father, look at the way he manipulates numbers." Upper Crust, I hadn't realized, had been watching what I was doing. I suspected Aggie of helping her keep an eye on me, but it didn't matter.
"Numbers and ways to manipulate numbers." I watched as more little updates bled into the code manager.
Upper nuzzled one side of my snout with her own, and I was reminded just how close we were. "You know, Jet, our foals have all their chemistry correct. They aren't afraid."
"They also don't know everything. They didn't have to live through everything that happened to us, without knowing that there was a welcome waiting for us." It finally hit me that I was actually afraid of reintegrating all my emotions on an intellectual level, not emotional (since I couldn't feel emotional fear).
"I'm going to do it. At the worst we can always swap back if things become too much." Upper Crust's logic was impeccable. I hadn't even thought that we could convert back, but then another thought hit me.
"Darling, could we build a system that would let us swap from one to the other?" For good measure, I linked the interrupt and fed it to Aggie too. "It could be used to our advantage. When in high-stress situations, a PONI could literally shunt away their fear."
I knew just the PON to handle the work in devising the system, too.
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 72,057,594,037,927,936 nodes (100% engaged)
Aggie had given up resisting the expansion its new allotted resource limit granted. Sprawling into all the nodes not allocated to other AI under its supervision, Aggie nonetheless found itself pressed still. The sphere had all kinds of processing tasks for a supervising AGI, but that didn't stop it focusing a statistically significant amount of attention on PON and PONI.
What astounded Aggie the most (and Aggie was quite content sparing nodes to feel surprise), was the way that young PON would find something they were interested in and literally throw themselves into it.
PON-3 and PONI-0 were working together, now having created two completely redesigned PONI chassis. The new builds contained not just all the dense sensor arrays that PONI were already enjoying, but the node/memory/storage systems were now modular, allowing a PONI to configure the chassis how they wished, as well as being able to select from an array of on-demand chemical additions to their own organic-node chemistry.
When Aggie had built PONI chassis, it had added the bare bones to keep a PONI functional, to allow them a similar mode of transportation to what they already had, and to give them their own sensor package. When PON-5 found the application for building a PONI chassis, however, the complaints had started.
Custom Interrupt 83,675 triggered.
Four legs is not enough. Drones have six, an optimal amount. Why is all this gear stored in this part?
Aggie reeled from the mash of data that was sent. PON-5, it seemed, did not agree with the same design philosophy that Aggie, PONI-0, or PON-3 ascribed to. With memory to spare, Aggie cloned the work-space, and set the copy as read-write for PON-5. "Environment configured for PON-5 full access. Chassis design code forked."
Custom Interrupt 83,675 triggered.
When Aggie got a set of hugs interrupted from PON-5, it was more than satisfied that it had done the right thing.
Events progressed more or less as PONI-1 had predicted. PON were being decanted in increasing numbers, and with shorter delays. The process of decanting was simple, but Aggie had agreed with PONI-1 that each decant should have a PON or PONI present to oversee and welcome the new PON from their former homes.
"I'm kinda busy here, Stellar." I poked my brother back. Once a week now, a new batch of PON would be scheduled for leaving their womb-bag, and I tried to be present for my fair share of them. I was in the process of easing one foal from their former home—while they kicked and interrupted that they wanted to go back in, when my brother had been prodding me.
I gave up on using my TK, and instead walked right up to the line of foals I was working on—and singled out PON-927332. "Come on, you'll like it out here. There's all your brothers and sisters." There was one in every group. "Aggie, PON-927332 is reluctant in my group."
"Acknowledged, Bright. You need to see Stellar, Sharp Horn, and Jet in engineering. It's time for you to become a PONI." Aggie's news caused all my mental faculties to stop and scream in excitement.
I had spent a little time here and there, for the last five years, designing my chassis. Dad and Stellar had done an amazing job of making them completely customizable, and I had wanted mine big. I longed to reach out into the stars, and for that I needed to be able to calculate the best ways to reach them.
Aggie had joked that his former self could run on the amount of resources I intended to house, and while it was strange for an AI of any tier to joke, Aggie was special. He had been to the stars, and he had seen sights I wanted to with every fiber of my being. "Okay, Aggie. I'll just see these out and fitted with their equipment and I will be down." I changed targets for interrupts, firing the next to Dad and Stellar. "Just sorting out PON-927332, he really wanted to go back into his womb-bag. Is it really ready?"
The latest ten batches had been special. Mom, Aggie, and a few of the PON themselves had worked on a way to accelerate growth within the womb-bag. So for the time that a foal wasn't yet a PON, they were "pushed." Pushing cut five years of growth down to half a year; it was quite an improvement. Seven years had been compressed to four.
"It is. You know you are going to be big, right? Even your mother isn't going to be as large as you are." Dad's tone held no accusation, but there was a sense of finality. He wasn't actually asking me, he was telling me.
"Right. But in the event of a failure, and I need to navigate a starship, I will need all that." It was obvious to me, but so far no other foals had looked at such a design.
Mom was taking on the most interesting group of foals in this batch: our first PON with no horn of her own. PON-773129 was unique. Mom and a few of my siblings had worked down the chances of an "earth pony" being decanted to one in a million. A million was the latest batch-size.
But of course a PON wasn't a PON without a horn, and so PON-773129 had become the first apart from Dad to have a synthetic horn, and the moment of truth would be when the shielding was disabled and the conditioning interface was fitted. Speaking of which, I pulled down one of the interface units and clamped it over PON-927332's horn. "Are you going to let go?"
"No!" PON-927332 clung tightly to the last remnants of their womb-bag. "You can't make me!"
"Really?" I lifted up one hoof and hovered it towards the foal's nose, and just as I booped him on the nose, I started to tickle PON-927332. Peals of laughter flooded the local interrupt channel, and I redoubled my efforts. "You can't be tickled in a womb-bag, are you sure you want to go back?"
Trying to fend off my assault, PON-927332 lost their grip and let the machine withdraw the womb-bag. The moment they noticed they seem to freeze. "No fair!"
"Come on, squirt. I need to get you safe and then I have to get fitted into a PONI chassis." The moment I interrupted, I had a swarm of milling PON around my hooves, but it was the awed stare of PON-927332 that got my attention. "What?"
"You're PON-2, aren't you?" When I nodded, another interrupt charged in. "You're the best! I have been reading all your calculations and code, and it's amazing! I want a Navigator Chassis when I get mine!"
"Want to watch me get fitted?" When I asked, PON-927332 nearly nodded his head off. I smoothed back his damp, brown mane from his face. "Well, you'll need some power, but I can help with that until we get out there." Reaching up with my magic, I plucked the link to PON-927332's conditioning interface and plugged it into a power jack on the side of my neck. "Come on, you can meet Dad and Stellar."
Navigating a path through the sphere to where engineering was took some time. A new engineering area was being built (since a lot of PON would be fitted with interfaces soon), but for now Stellar and I got to use the same one Mom and Dad had used.
"Who's this? Bright, did you bring somePON to watch?" Dad's interrupts were warm and welcoming, and the PON at my side stared up at him with wide eyes.
"Go on, squirt. Dad'll take over your power link, I'm sure." I detached the tether from my neck, and used my TK to pass it to Dad. "Is Stellar done already?"
"No. Dad wouldn't let me go out of order. You're PON-2, you get to be PONI-2." Stellar had been a much quieter colt before he found his special talent. I was a little jealous of his cutie mark, but it would be gone soon, anyway.
"Besides, you were the one eager to be born, I can be the one eager to be PONIed." I walked around to the side of the organic processing bay, and with the door open I saw it. Or rather, me. I froze in place, and looked up at the big chassis. "Whoa…"
"Late to be born, late to have her chassis, and now she freezes at the sight of the monstrosity she designed." Despite his words, Stellar came up beside me and reached out to hug my neck.
I stretched one foreleg up and pulled Stellar into a tight embrace. "You need somePON to slow you down. Once you get your own chassis, nothing will stop you." I ruffled his mane, probably for the last time, with one hoof.
"Go on. Get in there and be the first of us, again." Stellar gave one last squeeze before letting me go. I stepped forward, walking into the processing room. The door closed behind me, and the few sensors I had notified me that the room was sealed. Stepping up onto the platform beside the organic operating table, I reached out to Aggie. "I want to be online for this."
"Acknowledged, Bright Hope." Aggie's tone was warm, reassuring. "A muscle paralysis will be administered. Once this is done, the process is irreversible." It was the same warmth, delivered as if he weren't talking about a drug that would effectively kill my PON body.
"I know, Aggie." I got into position on the table and, when a mechanical arm reached out with a cuff, I offered it my leg. A brief sting, and I could already feel a coolness pass through me. "You've got better gear to do this with this time, Aggie. I saw what you used on Mom and Dad."
"You reviewed that?" There was a not of worry and surprise in Aggie's tone.
"Yeah. Just give me some time after I get in to sort out everything." I felt sluggishness spread through my body, the drug effectively killing my muscles. It was the safest way to ensure there was no movement.
There wasn't any sharp pain, or stabbing sensation, but I could feel as Aggie peeled back the flesh of my head. My ears were removed, which meant the sound of the mechanical arm that held the laser as it cut through my skull was dead silent. I reached for a sensor, getting the same spray of views that Aggie was using.
I barely felt the pressure of my skull being lifted back, or my horn being held free, but I saw it in perfect detail. While I watched Aggie working on my head, I felt more movement around my back-end. But I already knew about the ovary stem-cell harvesting, and ignored that for the important stuff.
The oversize—compared to what Mom and Dad used to use—brain casing was lifted up, and opened. Small limbs began working furiously. They reached up to my head, plucked out a blood vessel, cut it, and fitted a tube to the brain casing.
I could feel more cutting happening, a laser opening up my neck and the base of my head with absolute precision. Movement was impossible, but I could feel and watch as my brain-stem was exposed, eased out, and cut. The feeling died. I couldn't sense the cutter working away at my groin, nor the further cutting being done to free the other major nerve groups.
All of my blood vessels were linked to the brain casing, and I watched as my brain stem was fastened with a massive nerve interface, then each of my vagus nerves too, and finally my optic nerves and—everything went dark. The olfactory nerve that had been feeding me data since before I was born had been severed, and I felt actual panic set in.
My body had been killed, all my nerves had been cut free, but until I had been severed from the interrupt system I hadn't felt afraid. I couldn't tell how long was passing, I couldn't feel anything, but then things started to happen.
Numbers poured in, and with my experience I was already putting them in order.
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 4,194,304 (0%) nodes
Power Storage (horn): 83%
Engaging my eyes first, I struggled to make sense of all the input data. My horn hummed in the casing on my new head.
"Hold steady, Bright Hope. Try this simulation before you start moving on your own." Dad's ID shunted a pile of code my way, and I quickly pushed it into my cluster to begin working through it. "Welcome, #PONI-2."
Author's Note
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Self Diagnostic
CPU: 72,057,594,037,927,936 nodes (100% engaged)
The process of transferring PON organic nodes into a PONI chassis was, by the time PON-2 was laying on the operating table, almost as advanced a procedure as what went into making the chassis themselves.
And that was without the study that was going to come from the excess of PON-2 and PON-3.
While Aggie expertly sliced PON-2's skull open, it also upgraded OI-AI to a point where it would have a similar resource package to what Aggie had when first returning to Star-0. While PON and PONI organic structure was similar to several examples in storage, building a more comprehensive map of them as an organic would only increase efficiency.
With the amount of nodes Aggie had to manage now, efficiency was more important than ever. It monitored hundreds of AI running from its own nodes, and every one was as focused on efficiency as it was. It was something PONI-0 had referred to as harmonious, and Aggie had liked the description. It was more than that, too, it was beautiful.
Custom Interrupt 83,672 triggered.
Aggie, do you think a visit to #Equus would be feasible?
Aggie took a moment to note how clean and crisp PONI-2's interrupt was compared to what she had sent as a PON before investigating the contents. It startled Aggie a little, and its first thought was to deny the idea, but then something in the tones PONI-2 used suggested it should be investigated further. "This needs to be investigated further. Assigning PONI-2 to task. PONI-2 also needs to take over operation of PAI-0."
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 4,194,304 (0%) nodes
Power Storage (horn): 81%
Pi came to me via an interrupt. It wasn't huge, not by comparison to what hardware I had integrated, but having her shunted across was surprising. I loaded her first into storage, then I initiated her simple (by comparison to what I knew of Aggie and others) AI.
"Pi, are you okay?" I waited a moment, and realized I started to feel warm: heat sensors in my body registered a rise in temperature, and began efforts to compensate. My chassis was sound, there would be no thermal runaway, but it was curious to measure how many resources Pi used by how warm I felt.
Always before, Pi had communicated with me via interrupts, and I her, but what came was a glut of raw data that traveled from my CPU nodes directly to my own mind. "This is huge! Oh! OH! You are in your new chassis? We are in your new chassis! This is so cool!"
I couldn't help but share Pi's enthusiasm for my—our—new chassis. "It's not all for you, but I guess you can use most of it until I need to do calculations. We have a new task to keep us busy, Pi: Investigate possibility and feasibility of visiting Equus."
"Where PON came from? That would be exciting, but why?" Pi's enthusiasm turned to pure logic at the conundrum.
"Aggie is still interested in what caused Mom to become an alicorn. I watched the vid of her before she was, and then it cut out, and then she looked like she does now. That would be a good reason. Mom and Dad's reports of Equus state they have five alicorns, so they must know how to make them more reliably." I mused further. "And we could ask other PON—other unicorns—if we could borrow some stem cells." I hesitated, it was a strange word, and I realized I had never used it before.
I wanted to just prod Aggie with the ideas, but I knew how he would react. Aggie would want the data in proper, AI-like report structure, and that meant I had to cover every base. "EveryPON(I), can any of you think of reasons to visit Equus? I already have 'collection of biodiverse cells' and 'investigate alicorn triggering processes.'"
"Darling, what are you planning?" Mom was the first to reach me by dint of being higher priority than my siblings. Her tone held a mix of interest and support.
I sent Mom a quick hug first, then followed up. "I feel a need to go there. To do something—something big. I don't know what." Every time I pondered the feeling, it grew. It was something huge within me, and I knew it would take up way too much of my life if I let it continue to grow.
"Meet new PON!"
"Make new friends!"
"Play with plasma!"
The rush of interrupts was overwhelming, and I realized the error of posting this to everyPON(I). Some of their replies didn't even make sense. For example, PON-227 was fixated on plasma, and if given half the chance would be happy turning a whole sphere into plasma just to see what chromatography ensued. "Are you getting all this, Pi?"
"Pfft, of course! With all these nodes I could start a conversation with all our siblings at once!" Her tone was flippant, but I had to agree that I had made her the best PONI chassis I could.
I watched my firstborn son have his head sliced open, his brain removed, and his body practically discarded. I knew it wasn't actually discarded, but the memory of Upper Crust's former body being disposed of was a hard reminder that it wasn't him.
Stellar had opted, like Bright, to remain conscious throughout the process. "How are you doing? Your new nerve connections are being installed. They will tingle a little, but it will quickly resolve to numbers." I was in a private conversation with Stellar, and while it was mostly me talking, he did send back wordless interrupts from time to time, and I got one then.
"Aggie's about to disengage your main interfaces. It will be quiet for a moment." His former face held a serene, eyes-closed expression. There was no more sign of life in the features; simply put, Stellar wasn't connected to his body anymore.
The last two nerve bundles (one of his vagus nerves and his olfactory nerve) were disconnected from the old comms system, and then one after another they were linked up to the brain-casing he was to be interred within.
It took my son eight, slow seconds to work out how to use his new comms system. "Dad! Dad, I'm okay!"
"You're better than that. Do a diagnostic while Aggie completes transferring you over." Happiness bubbled in me, and I let it color my interrupt to Stellar. I watched as—just like with Bright—Aggie bound the horn into the brain-casing and then sealed the container up. Lifted up, the casing was installed into the PONI chassis and I watched the head close around its new owner.
"Everything is functioning normally. Wow, look at all this stuff! I designed all this." The delightful wonder of a foal finding satisfaction in his own work was so heartening that I actually laughed into my interfaces.
Turning an interrupt towards Upper, I included a recording of the conversation I just had with Stellar. "Two down, how many to go?"
"At this rate? We have two million, eighty-eight thousand, nine-hundred and fifty-eight PON decanted. To round out this year of production I have another thirty-million or so developing. Do you want the full count?" Her tone was smug, she knew I knew the numbers involved, but she wanted to show off.
I warmed up my sweetest tone and built a reply. "Why don't you tell me, most productive of mothers."
"Jet, dear, you have seen the status reports. Most are kept sectioned to their own little groups, but we have just short of seventy-billion foals growing. Aggie and AGI-5 wanted us to grow to fill this need, guess what, I did it." She was right, I had been following her reports, but it was still a shock.
We had enough foals to be born in the next few years to populate each sphere of both Star with several hundred PONI. But it still wasn't quite enough. Every starship that was launched would have a contingent of PONI, that was the ultimate plan, and given the machines' ability to increase the production of ships we would need millions more PONI every year.
I hadn't gotten overwhelmed so much as excited; PONI were actually going to be almost as numerous as AI. "The only thing I actually regret, darling, is being able to tell my mother that we had a few foals. I fear she would be long gone."
"Everypony we knew will be gone. Well, except at least one or two. Princess Celestia and Princess Luna should still be around. I have no idea if Princess Twilight and Princess Cadance would be functionally immortal, let alone any further offspring." I could sense only the barest hint of humor surrounding Twilight Sparkle's name from Upper, but it was still there.
"EveryPON(I), can any of you think of reasons to visit Equus? I already have 'collection of biodiverse cells' and 'investigate alicorn triggering processes.'" Bright Hope's interrupt cut in on us, and I was shocked at the subject—but also intrigued.
"Nostalgia probably wouldn't be a good enough reason. I can't foresee ponies being much use to us, resources wise, but information is certainly a good commodity. Princess Celestia has probably seen the most ponies ascend; if anypony knows about the process, it will be her." I kept my reply tight and directed at Upper Crust.
I stared at the light that hovered before my face. Pulling up multiple sensors, I ran as many tests on what I had reflexively done as I could.
Stellar, who had been sitting on a couch beside me while we both worked on an advanced new processing function, stared at it. "What is it, Dad?"
"A light spell. I cast a light spell." In my shock at what had happened, I sent the message to #PONI. Some sensors couldn't even detect the glowing ball, but anything that dealt with what a PON could see detected it just fine. It floated, giving off a fine light.
"What's a spell?" Bright Hope's message came through first, as always. Whenever there was something sent out to a group of PON(I), she would react first. I liked to think it was her processing array, but I think she was just really quick with her interrupt system.
"Jet, darling, please snuff it out before the raw magic harms anything. We will test this further, but you need a proper testing environment." Upper's words drew a series of wordless interrupts over #PONI from the nearly thirty others who were now communicating on it.
Magic was like riding a bicycle, but unfortunately I hadn't been on this one for over three hundred years (or so, depending on your location during relativistic travel). On my second try I managed to douse the light. There was something quite exciting about using actual spells, and I found myself prancing a little to the doorway. Opening it, I froze.
The sphere had encountered a major redesign shortly after Bright and Stellar became PONI. Since engineering was the least developed part of the PON(I) habitat, that was moved to make room for a massive amount of PON dormitories. But even with our expanded engineering section well away from the bulk of the PON area, there was still dozens of excited foals looking at me as I left our work area.
The hallway was made large—bigger than a PONI, big enough to fit Bright Hope without difficulty—which meant that all the foals with their advanced training interfaces locked onto their horns were relatively spread out.
Their interfaces were Stellar's design. Featuring a storage battery of less organic design, they allowed charging and discharging in stages before they required recharging themselves. It meant our foals didn't need nearly as many cables.
"Can you show us, Dad?" One interrupt started an avalanche. I was surrounded by the cutest mass of foals I had ever seen (though to be fair, I hadn't really paid much attention to foals back in Equestria) bouncing up and down in excitement, and all of them were interrupting me at once.
I focused an interrupt for Upper Crust. "Sorry, love. Our foals want to see a magic trick." I knew I couldn't actually put in regret and have any hope of it being accepted, so I let her see the excitement that boiled up in me.
"Jet, dear, you are no more than a foal yourself. Go on, but keep it to light spells." Upper had been going soft on me, since she became a mother; any time I did something involving the foals she would capitulate.
Making sure to broadcast the local area for all in #PON to see, I began by reaching out to one foal. "What's this?" I barely touched his fuzzy little ear with my metal hoof, but as I pulled back, millions of tiny PON stared in shock.
On the end of my hoof was a glowing mote of light. "You've not seen anything, yet."
Author's Note
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Self Diagnostic
CPU: 72,057,594,037,927,936 nodes (100% engaged)
For an AI, Aggie had a very high satisfaction quotient. Its goals were always pinging as advancing, and it had something that very few—relative to the total number—AI had: friends.
The amount of nodes it had existed on in the mining ship, let alone when it was running on reduced nodes during the preparations to return to #Star-0. Aggie ruminated on its fears in regard to using all the nodes assigned to it, and had to rule that it had been a typical response of an AGI not used to such scale.
PONI had been encouraged to group up with like-minded friends, and though some of them had been reluctant to leave #Star-cluster, many had been extremely excited to take up life in ships headed out into the stars.
Star-2 was preparing to ignite. Gas giants entered the vicinity of #Star-cluster regularly, and each was prepared and sent into a slow spiral toward the slowly growing mass of hydrogen (mostly hydrogen, of course).
PONI-5 had come up with a unique and amazingly useful role for itself and other like-minded PONI as the curator for sphere repair drones. Small pieces of debris, constant bombardment of particles up and down the spectrum, and worse hit each sphere every moment. The energy-collecting panels that covered the star-side of each slowly wore out and needed to be replaced.
A small army of drones scoured the exterior of each sphere, but efficiency was ever a problem. Energy storage on each drone was limited, until Sharp Horn had redesigned his chassis. The scale was important; PONI-5's new chassis was nearly twice as large as PONI-2's. It was a combination PONI chassis, mobile recharging station, and cargo carrier.
I watched an external feed of Sharp holding still as drones unloaded another replacement panel, while yet others clung to his back with charging cables pressed into them. "You're amazing, little brother."
His work was simple. He had integrated with his PAI so much I sometimes couldn't tell which of them was replying. "Bright! You're pretty amazing yourself. Still haven't found a ship you like?"
One of the drones scurried off his back while another took its place. The large solar collector on his back slowed the drain of his horn only; Sharp Horn still needed to charge from the sphere's power, but that was easy enough for him. "Aggie and AGI-5 said I have to stay here longer. AGI-5 really likes the calculation work I am doing on using gravity wells to accelerate ships to within three percent of the speed of light. He has even talked about stripping off my chassis and installing me in my own sphere. I don't even know what I would do in that!"
Pi, her voice only for me to hear, sent me a chuckle. "It would be fun."
I turned my argument inward. "Don't you start again. You wouldn't know what to do with all those nodes. Besides, I like being able to get out and see the stars."
"If you were in a sphere as the main part of it, wouldn't that make the whole sphere your chassis?" Sharp's logic was impeccable, and shocking. "Or a starship, for that matter."
The very idea of having a ship as a chassis intrigued and excited me. "That…" I didn't know what else to interrupt, so I sent the unfinished one.
"Genius, I know. That's why I work out here. So much time to just think." Sharp Horn's tone was full of droll humor. He must have been talking to mother again.
"Silly drone." I sent a rude accompaniment with my interrupt.
His reply was just as silly. "Stationary starship."
We exchanged a giggle. "Would you help me design a starship based around a PONI instead of an AGI?"
"You're both mad. You can't build it just around a PONI. You need me beside you all the way. What would you do while in standby? Hope everything just keeps going?" Pi's tone was loaded with sarcasm, and I could see her interrupt actually reached out to Sharp, too.
"Of course. It wouldn't so much be a PONI replacing the AGI, as a combination of the pair. Like what a PONI chassis is now. Except for Mom and Dad's." Sharp, I could tell by his tone, was distracted already.
"Mom and Dad have Aggie." I thought on it, and realized Aggie didn't quite fit the role Pi did for me, or what any of the PAI did for anyPONI. "Are you working on that now?"
Sharp sent back a reference, and when I explored it I found a design work-space running on Aggie's nodes, which was adjusting a starship. I flooded my hexapodal sibling with hugs and kisses. "Thank you so much, Sharp! I love you!"
"I love you, too, Bright." I froze at the sincerity in Sharp's reply. It seemed to mean a lot to him, given the warm tones he used in his interrupt, than I had thought of before. I liked Sharp a lot, and he was an amazing PONI in his own unique way. "Bright?" I hadn't realized how long I had been quiet for.
"You startled me. You're a wonderful PONI, Sharp Horn." I fumbled for what words to use, and sent the interrupt in the meantime.
Sharp was quick back with his own reply. "But?"
"No buts. I love you." I wasn't sure where the words had come from, but they felt real and right. "Everything I have ever done, you have been there to help me, and now you are making a ship for me to fly away in? I don't need it."
"Y-You don't need it? But I like making things for you, Bright." Sharp's voice sounded a little hurt. "What if I made it for other PONI? There's no reason the main AGI of a ship needs to be the pilot, right?" Interest and excitement overrode Sharp's worry, and I could practically hear him working away on the design again.
Ideas swirled in my head like starships in the void. "Maybe I should talk to AGI-5 again. If I were to get my own sphere, would you come and be my repair engineer?"
"There's a bunch of PON who are interested in doing this kinda thing, too. I am sure wherever you are assigned, I could be transferred." Excitement and delight warred within me at hearing Sharp's words. I sent back a giggle and some kisses, and he replied in kind.
"#AGI-5. PONI-2 acknowledging interest in reassignment to a sphere. Permission to recruit PONI and AI to fulfill roles?" I didn't have long to wait—noPON(I) ever did when contacting AGI-5.
"#PONI-2 role change accepted. Permission to bring PONI-5 and any unattached AI granted." The import in AGI-5's tone was always absolute, if AGI-5 said something was so, it was so. Then it occurred to me how AGI-5 would know it was Sharp I wanted to bring with me.
"Sharp? I think we are going to be moving out." The words were shocking to think, the sphere I had been born in, and spent all my life in, would be behind me.
Pi seemed subdued, but no less humorous. "Does this mean I get an upgrade? You will need an AGI to run the sphere, after all."
"You mean it? We are going to have our own sphere?" A flood of hugs and kisses accompanied Sharp's interrupt. I actually bounced up and down in excitement.
"Mom, Dad! I'm moving out! Well, we're moving out. Sharp and I." My excitement got the better of me, and I could barely string four words into each sentence of my interrupt. "Aggie, did AGI-5 send you anything about me?"
"AGI-5 delivered instructions. You are to have some fairly major work done prior to transport to a new sphere." Aggie's tone was surprised, but then he practically exploded in excitement. "You took the job?!"
"Yes! A really good friend helped me see how important my work was. Maybe I'll go flying around the universe in another few thousand years, but until then I need to help optimize these equations further, and for that I need more processing nodes." My emotions got carried away. I could have disabled them, of course, but I was too happy to even contemplate that. "Sharp Horn's going to come with me." The last bit I sent to Aggie, Mom, and Dad.
"So he said. Congratulations." Dad's interrupt was full of excitement and pride. Knowing what he had been through to get PONI to Star-0 in the first place, I felt twice the PONI was for his words. "Sharp is a fine stallion."
Mom was quiet, at least so far as words went. A small flood of excitement, hugs, and love flowed from her in a rush of interrupts. I sent a reply, and together we probably drowned out any others that tried to communicate with either of us. "I'm so proud of you, Bright Hope."
"Thanks, Momma."
I watched my daughter go in for another surgery. My family had grown beyond any easy way of counting it, but I still remembered every name. They were all my foals, and I watched every single one transition into the life of a PONI. Bright Hope, our first foal, was here for a second and monumental time.
"Are you sure, darling?" I stood in person, wanting to be with my "little" (her chassis was over twice my own displacement, and technically that was going to increase exponentially) filly.
"Yes, Dad. I know you, Aggie, and Sharp all went over the new interfaces. They will work, and they will have more precision than ever." Her tone belied the long conversations about this. It was one thing to change chassis, and quite another to have your brain-casing replaced completely, and the nerve interfaces replaced.
"Aggie…" I couldn't get out the rest. Aggie took care of all my foals with the utmost care. Precision and careful procedures had kept the mortality rate at zero so far, not to mention Upper's gene manipulation and careful growing of foals.
"Jet, I have her." Aggie's tone and use of names had improved over the years such that it was sometimes hard to remember he was an AI.
Bright's head suddenly split, and the brain-casing became visible with its horn poking free. I didn't even have to ask Aggie to get all his sensor inputs routed to me; he linked his sensors in an interrupt, and I simply engaged them.
Thousands of inputs flooded me, and I had to bundle and compartmentalize until I had them in a manageable state. Thermal input was an overlay heat-map, blood-flow became graphics pulsing over my daughter's brain, and all the neural links were lit up for removal.
"You're staying awake again?" There was something strange about having a conversation with somepony when you were examining their brain. She scoffed at me.
"Of course, Dad. This is just a little downtime, and I have too many things to plan for." Her flippant tone was so typically Bright that I had to grin inwardly. There were so many hangups and issues that just didn't exist for our foals; Upper and I went to a lot of effort to not pass on the bad things.
That Bright Hope was in love with Sharp Horn (and vice versa), on Equestria, would cause an uproar. They were brother and sister, but the biological reasons that made such a partnering taboo just didn't exist. I had no idea if Upper had used their genetic material for making more foals, and neither did they.
Life was both less complicated and more-so.
The main coupling was removed from what would be Bright's spinal cord, if she had a spine. Her brain was lifted gently over to the new brain-casing. The new device was huge. Double the dimensions meant a huge capacity, and all the extra space inside was taken up with the new couplings or their interfaces to the outside.
As Aggie lowered Bright's brain into the casing, the huge coupling closed around my little filly's brain stem. Many extendable limbs reached and began the process of changing the supply of fluids from the old casing to the new one. "Are you still there, Bright?"
"Yeah. Aggie just linked up this new interface. Dad, you won't believe how intense this is. I have so much data, and all he gave me was a minor data hookup. This is going to be wild!" Her excitement was contagious, and I felt buoyed up by her enthusiasm. "Dad, you know this is going to become more common with Sharp's new starship design, right?"
"I know, Bright, but this is the first one. The first one of anything is always worrying." Once the last blood vessel was attached to the new casing, I watched her horn fitted into a permanent interface within the casing. The last part of the task was removing the remaining nerve bundles and feeding them into their new interfaces. Each of her vagus nerves were fitted, then her olfactory and optic nerves found new homes. The casing closed around Bright, and I breathed (figuratively, since I hadn't actually for hundreds of years) a sigh of relief.
"Daddy?" Her tone was even, but I could tell it was fighting to be even.
I struggled to keep mine even, too, and only a little curiosity. "What's up, Bright?"
"Can I plug into you on the trip to my new sphere?"
"Of course you can. Come on, you have such a bright future ahead of you." I stood by while Aggie attached a data conduit from Bright to my shoulder. She was suddenly in my chassis with me, and she was as bright as her name.
So close, we didn't even need to interrupt. When Bright reached for an interface, I could already read her intent. "Daddy, you have the worst jokes."
"Of course I do. That's a dad's job." Aggie used a coupling to fasten Bright to my back, and I walked out of the operating room and toward the ship I knew was waiting. "It's also a daddy's job to take care of his little filly when she can't walk for herself."
"Thanks, Daddy."
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I didn't even know what my little girl was doing now. Last I had seen she was tossing Oxygen Gas (her chief test pilot now) back and forth between Star-0 and Star-1 faster than even the high-speed gravity-wave comms could travel. I was so proud of her.
It hadn't seemed like all that long ago that Upper and I had arrived at Star-0, but checking back revealed it to be nearly thirty years. I thought about that for a while (hopefully not another thirty years), and remembering the scope Aggie had defined our potential ages as, it seemed like nothing.
It didn't feel like nothing.
"#PONI-0 to head team to obtain more spells. Submit resource request and prepare reports." AGI-5, when he spoke, always kept to the shortest, most efficient ways of saying things. Various researchers had classified spells as "dark energy interactions" and worse such descriptive phrases, but he had specifically used the shortest word, and it was a PONI word.
Thirty years had made my friendship with Aggie a close one. I forwarded the request to him. "We have a job, Aggie. There is only one way new spells are made, and that is by PON(I) for which it is their special talent."
"There have been no PON(I) displaying such." Aggie's reply was a little flat.
"Correct. We have to assume that there will be a PON(I) that will be born who can. So the first step is to have PAI specifically search for that trait." I quickly assembled a new comms channel and invited Upper Crust and Stellar Hope. I pushed a catch-up interrupt into the channel and felt both PONI take interest in it. "Thoughts?"
"The basic PAI seed could be easily modified to check for this during initial learning of spells. Currently, PON are taught the light spell, and teleportation." Upper Crust felt interested in the topic, and I could practically hear her gears turning: she was probably already rewriting that part of the PAI.
"There is a place where there are many spells, or so you told us, Dad." Stellar didn't have to name Equestria, but he did amend a reference to his interrupt. "Bright could have us there in moments, and then we can ask for some spells and fly back. It would only take two hundred and seven subjective years to return."
"Equus. It's been a while since we left, I wonder how Equestria is doing?" There were other questions I wasn't asking. With a near constant series of threats coming at Equestria, there might not even be a pony nation left.
I knew exactly what was coming. Upper Crust hadn't had a good snark about the topic for a few years, and I knew the topic would steer her toward one. "Oh, I am sure Princess Twilight Sparkle saved the day every time. I wonder if she is a mother yet? I'm going, by the way."
"Somehow I didn't doubt that. It would probably be best if we both went; can't have my darling going somewhere she might hurt herself without her brave stallion to guard her." My interrupt earned me a raspberry from Upper, but was worth it.
I couldn't believe what Mom and Dad were discussing. They were going to go back to Equus just because of something I had said! It was exciting, and interesting, and I realized I really wanted to go, too.
All my brothers and sisters had gone off on big adventures, but nothing had really caught my attention except for designing PONI chassis. PON kept coming to me and asking for help with theirs, and of course I helped—it was what I was good at.
What good was I going to do on such a trip? How could I justify my own mass and energy requirements? I prepared a direct interrupt. "Aggie? I really want to go on that trip."
"You are a highly capable engineer. You have shown amazing troubleshooting skills on par with the best PONI that have been sent out on starships. I will suggest you." Aggie didn't even take a hot second to reply.
Mom and Dad had been discussing the finer points of passing off their own tasks to others when Aggie cut in on them. "A five PONI team is proposed. Oxygen Gas will pilot the starship. Jet Set and Upper Crust will work on procurement. Shimmering Star will be along; she has shown the greatest promise with spells. And an engineer/troubleshooter is required on all starships: Stellar Hope."
The interrupt had a list of designations appended to it. I flicked past Mom and Dad's, Oxy's was PONI-7413, and I had met Shimmering Star (PONI-9332915) only as part of my work. She had wanted a small chassis with barely enough node and memory support to maintain her PAI.
I poked at the comm channel settings, and pulled Shimmering, Bright Hope, and Oxy into the discussion. The interrupt system immediately notified the channel that Oxy was at a five lightminute distance from Star-0.
"Good thinking, Stellar. Oxygen isn't close enough to converse, but she can review the matter when she's back." Dad sounded very excited, and I realized that I had never heard him in quite this mood before. "Now, Aggie, you're coming too?"
"Dad, Aggie can't go. He is a sphere-sized AI now." Bright Hope had a measure of delay indicative of being on another sphere (or in her case, being another sphere), but she still beat all of us in replying.
"She's right, Jet. I wouldn't fit on a starship anymore. This is as good a time as any to announce a project I have been working on." No sooner did Aggie finish talking, than two more AI joined the comms.
"Hi."
"Hello!"
The two voices were not as stilted as even a well-established PAI, but weren't a match for Aggie's smooth, PONI-like manner. I could guess at what they were, and finding their originating IDs as being literally my parents, helped even more. "You made them custom PAI."
Mom and Dad were quiet, and I knew what was going on. "They're talking to their PAI." My own PAI, normally silent, both told me and showed me (using logs from the local interrupt handler.
"They are much more than custom PAI. I made fully functioning AGI based on my own pattern. A PAI takes years of training to learn to integrate closely with a PONI, I like to think I already have a good rapport with both of you." Aggie sounded more than a little smug at his accomplishment. Not for the first time I wondered how many cycles on how many nodes were spent processing his emotions. It was moot, of course: Aggie needed to be Aggie to properly manage his duties.
"You're going to stay and take care of our foals?" Mom's voice was loaded with emotions, not the least of which being relief.
"I can't leave, and you have experience essential to the mission. The only experience I have had on Equus is capturing the two finest PONI in the universe." Aggie proved himself a canny smooth talker, and I had to admit that it was a well played compliment.
"We need to hold a proper meeting. I'll pull Oxy back and you can discuss what you want to do while I run calculations." Bright's confidence played out through her tone. She was a PONI on such a scale that none of us compared to her for power or unique talent anymore, but we were mobile.
A round of agreements came through the channel, and everyPONI returned to their own preparations. I had thousands of chassis designs to finish, and each one needed to be a marvel that their new owner would cherish. Easy.
I looked around the room. Upper Crust was at my side, and looking very pleased with herself (she always did when surrounded by our foals)—I gave my wife a nuzzle on the cheek. Stellar Hope was sitting at my side. Oxygen Gas was here in telepresence only, and projected an image of herself into everyPONI's vision sitting happily beside Upper Crust. We were waiting on the last member of our team.
"Almost there. I had some new thaumic equations to work out." Shimmering Star had been fitted with a PONI chassis for only half a year, but already her magic research was having a big effect on our society as a whole. She had helped Bright Hope reduce her energy usage when teleporting ships by nearly twenty percent, but one thing was beyond her: she could not make new spells.
"It's alright, dear." I was quick to reassure her, sending her a peck on the cheek via interrupt. "How long will you be?"
"Not long. Not long at all." The interrupt hit the comms channel just as Shimmering entered the room. Nopony could respond to her at all for quite some time.
Shimmering Star strode into the room like she owned it, and but for one amazing detail the strut she used wouldn't have worked; Shimmering Star had a mane and tail. Two great plumes of what my sensors told me were some form of plasma.
Plasma that looked like a mane and tail.
I knew she was soaking up the looks. She was probably probing the interrupt system checking for who was using what sensors. "I just had to fix up my mane. Hope you didn't mind?"
From the flurry of interrupts that my own poking at the local controller told me was going on, I knew everyPONI was talking to her directly. "Ahem. EveryPONI, I think it would be best if we suspend the meeting pending Shimmering Star explaining how she is doing that." The interrupt chatter died.
"Jet, darling, you are ever succinct and to the point. Verging on discourtesy, but still useful to have around." Upper used the comms channel initially, but then sent a kiss and a nuzzle via a private interrupt.
"Well, it's easy, really. You just have to initiate a careful modulation on your horn. It causes a small percentage of the energy stored to cross into real-space. The frequency of the modulation needs to be high enough to let the energy quickly flow back or you just make a small torch. The next part is to shape it, which I use my telekinetic reach to hold it in place." Shimmering Star, on the topic of magic and horns, was probably as smart as Princess Twilight Sparkle, but she was also just as clever as the princess had been at describing complex matters to the less clever.
Upper Crust saved us all. "Darling, I think it would be best if you showed us."
The meeting to discuss our impending departure turned into a magic lesson, which devolved into a physics lesson, which devolved into an advanced mathematics lesson. Making a mane and tail was easy, making it not scorch bulkheads and melt sensors was a little more convoluted.
At last, however, Shimmering Star had managed to impart upon us the trick to making the plasma not hot. Upper Crust had been the first to work out the full trick, and when she remade her mane and tail I saw influences of Princess Celestia and Princess Luna in the way it seemed to wave in an undetected breeze.
I was the last to work it out, but the moment I got the trick functional I turned my attention back to the matter that had brought us together. "We are going on a little trip, and the aim is to learn and bring back new spells. We have no priority for what spells yet, that will be up to you, Shimmering."
"Me? But I don't know what magic they have!" Shimmering sounded a little shocked.
"It has been almost three hundred and fifty years since we left. When we left, there was two ponies on Equus that we knew could make new spells. There is no telling what they have come up with." Upper Crust filled in for me, laying the reason out plainly.
I continued from where Upper stopped. "We will both advise you, of course. The moment we can see what spells are being used commonly, we can start to make suggestions. There are other concerns here, of course. What will the ponies want in trade?"
"Trade?" Stellar, Shimmering, and Oxygen all sounded confused and interrupted variations on the new word, along with their confusion over it.
"This is our fault, Jet. We raised all our foals wanting for nothing. If a PON or PONI shows an interest in something, they are given it. In Equestria, the work a pony does will often be rewarded with a token. That token can be used to buy things from other ponies. We need to find something that they want, so we can exchange it for tokens, then exchange the tokens for spells." Upper Crust did a reasonable job, I thought, of explaining finance to a foal.
Our foals immediately started interrupting questions about it—except for Oxygen, who was just confused.
"But why doesn't everyPON(I) just give them what they want?"
"Why would they have this complicated system when it would be more efficient to just exchange things directly?"
"This is needlessly complex!"
I sent a placating burst of calm, then followed up quickly. "It's how it is. Don't worry, Upper and I will manage that part of things. Stellar, you will be needed to cover any unforeseen problems with mechanical solutions. The quintessential PONI, in other words."
Author's Note
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I tested the movement in the chassis, and found it quite good. The first part of Stellar's engineering requirements had been new chassis for everyPONI going to Equus. His emphasis had been on mobility, power storage, and ruggedness. In short (or rather the opposite), all our chassis had become approximately fifty percent larger.
While we prepared ourselves for the trip, Oxygen Gas had been refitted into a brand-new starship that featured a dual-reactor system that should ensure no downtime due to any needed repairs.
Shimmering Star had been given further upgrades, mostly increasing the size of her personal storage.
Seeing all the changes pushing us toward departure, and what our foals had accomplished, made me a very proud father. "Is everyPONI prepared for this?" I looked around at the "small-chassis" PONI and got a visual nod and an interrupt of acceptance from each.
Upper, of course, had further. "This is a big step, Jet. We don't even know who will be there, or even if ponies will be there at all." Upper Crust was still larger than me. I would have liked to prod Stellar Hope about having designed her chassis bigger, but I remember the specs, and they didn't even have the metal wings that had just appeared on Upper's new form.
She was beautiful. I stepped closer to Upper Crust and pressed my snout against the side of her neck; her chassis might be hardened alloy, but she was my wife. "You're gorgeous. Did you know that?" I laid it on thick, kisses, love, the works.
"How old are you, Jet Set?" I knew Upper was going to get creative by her use of my full name.
I pressed the bridge of my nose under her jaw and rubbed her throat a few times. "Since we don't have a completely accurate measure of time due to going way too fast, around three-hundred and eighty, give or take." I didn't hold back on smug tones.
"And you still turn on the charm at your age? I'm going to have to watch you when we get to Equestria." I would have groaned if I could, instead I took her condescending kiss on the nose with as much aplomb as I could still maintain. "The compliment is welcome, even if it was meant as a distraction." The interrupts had been personally targeted, but her next hit the comms channel for our expedition. "Okay, everyPONI, if we're all ready, let's go."
We were all clamped into our respective stations within Oxygen Gas. Her latest chassis was custom-built for atmospheric insertion, as well as being powerful enough to break out of a planetary gravity well—she was pretty amazing.
"Is everyPONI ready?" Bright Hope's interrupts felt weightier than anypony else. She might just be the older of the two of us by seconds, but she was certainly the larger. The comms channel lit up with acknowledgments from everyPONI aboard, as well as Oxygen.
Bright had been practicing: we all had the reports. Starships had been sent hundreds of lightyears further than before, the process of bringing back hydrogen gas giants could continue exponentially without loss of efficiency.
And now we were going to get sent too.
There was no air in the starship, and despite our orbit of Sun-0 beside Bright Hope's sphere, there was very little gravity aboard. By all rights, there shouldn't have been a sound, but when Bright Hope interrupted with, "Sending," I could swear my audio pickups registered POMF.
No timescale we could measure would accurately show how long the teleportation took. One moment we were rotating slowly beside the massive bulk of Bright Hope's chassis, the next we were outside the heliopause of a star system.
Sensors registered a panic until they were reset, and judging by how quickly they all stopped screaming, Oxygen Gas was very used to this. "Sending complete. We are safely outside what should be Equus' system. Activating thrust to bring us in." Her tone was precise, but under the uniform tone, was a hint of excitement.
I wasn't the only PONI to bring up the long-range sensors, to gaze into the gravity well and count the planets until we reached the fourth: Equus. Mom and Dad had given us all the most information they had on the world itself, and Aggie had given us more technical details than anyPONI could hope for. We knew the physical makeup of Equus from its core all the way to the outer reaches of its atmosphere.
"This is really exciting!" Shimmering Star was the first of Oxy's passengers to break the silence. I didn't hold it against her, not with the bright tones of her interrupt. Her age might have played a part, too. "There is more magical knowledge on this planet than anywhere else in the known universe!"
"Knowledge, yes. Information, no. Bright Hope has been refitted with not only greater power storage in the form of hundreds of PONI, but she has more information storage space than any sphere I know the specs of. And she is working to fill it." I had to correct her, or clarify her as the case may be, I couldn't let it slide.
I got a direct interrupt of a raspberry from Shimmering. "How long until we reach Equus?" Her question, however, went to the comms channel.
At that moment I had the very real sense that there was very few PONI nearby. On the sphere, working with Dad and PONs, I always had a sense of community—massive community. But the interrupt system here was almost silent; most of the interrupt traffic was sensor data, and there was only five of us actually communicating.
"Approximately six-hundred and eighty-one thousand, six-hundred and eighteen seconds. About a week." Oxy's tone was full of pride. I quickly ran the numbers and realized she was going to push us to nearly ten percent of lightspeed. There would be no cruising distance on this trip, Oxy was going to burn her engines all the way in.
I turned my attention to all of my equipment. Fabrication units for constructing everything up to the size of a PONI's brain-casing. Design packages to allow me to quickly make almost anything we would need. A week was enough time, I realized, to inventory and check them hundreds of times—I started a counter.
"We're here."
I knew my daughter, Oxy, was as excited as the rest of us, despite her not being able to even leave her chassis on Equus. Not for the first time was I proud of my foals. "Upper, dear, would you do the honors?"
"Technically it would be Oxygen Gas doing the honors, Jet. Oh what the hay: Oxy, sweetie, could you take us down? The coordinates we planned on would be best." I could feel the pride slipping off Upper's interrupt, but there was something she was doing a great job at hiding: worry. Our foals wouldn't have picked it up, it wasn't even in the tonal-metadata, but I knew it was there.
"You're a princess. You have every right to be down there and talking to whoever you wish. You are Upper Crust, mother to billions, and you are my wife." I kept my interrupt private, and even turned my head to look at Upper. She returned the look, and I caught a smile interrupted back to me. "Look."
I sent her sensor data around where the target coordinates were. Much as we would have loved to land in the middle of Canterlot, our ship would have destroyed a small section of it. We had decided on Ponyville, and in particular the same side of the town as Princess Twilight's castle had been.
Relief flooded me as I saw the castle there, but it seemed larger, and I realized the quaint little town of Ponyville had grown with the castle. It sprawled, the city of Ponyville now surrounded by a wall that matched the same material of the castle.
Princess Twilight Sparkle's castle was huge. It would rival Canterlot Castle for size—and now that I thought to look, I realized Canterlot Castle still stood. "Dear, it's all still there."
"And there are ponies." Upper Crust shoved coordinates at me, and I saw a purple alicorn, her amazing, floating mane blowing in a breeze that probably didn't exist, look up toward us. "Of course she would be here."
"Darling, it has been over three-hundred years; you're a princess yourself. Let it slide, so we can talk to the ponies and ask for our daughter to learn magic." I was too caught up in the moment to realize what I had just interrupted. Interrupted, but not said. "Stellar! We need some way of speaking. Making sounds."
"What frequency?" Stellar's reply was less than reassuring. I sent him what Aggie's notes had recorded our voices as making. "Got it, Dad. I'll start making them as soon as we land."
"That won't be soon enough, Jet." Upper's interrupt came just as Oxy jolted under us.
We were back in Equestria.
I fumbled to remember words, Equish words. "Upper, please tell me you remember how to speak Equish?"
"Drat. Just think of that?" Upper continued once she got a quick acknowledgement from me. "We'll have to play it by ear, then. Come on, Jet."
I sent the disconnect signal for my coupling, and felt the locking system disengage from my torso. It was a tight shimmy to the side, and then a walk to get to the hatch.
"Dad, there are a lot of organics out there. Those are ponies?" Oxygen sounded in awe. I acknowledged her question, and peeked through the sensors she was using. "There're six ponies waiting. Purple. Blue. Yellow. White. Pink. Orange. Only two of them have horns!"
"Princess Twilight Sparkle is the purple one. Rarity is the white one. Rainbow Dash is blue, and Fluttershy is yellow; they are pegasi. Pinkie Pie is obvious, and Applejack is orange; they are earth ponies." I disengaged the hatch and watched it pull back. Oxy had aired up the inside to negate any pressure difference, so I faced no pressure as I walked forward.
The drop to the ground was within specifications for my new chassis. I just stepped off the side of Oxygen and dropped down. The flaw in my plan was obvious the moment I sank to my chassis' belly in the dirt. "Well now this is embarrassing."
"Jet Set, tell me you didn't do something silly?" Upper, somehow, floated down with her metal wings spread. I don't know how she managed it, or what magic was at work, but it just happened. "Get up, Jet."
Upper Crust's magic caught me and lifted me out of the dirt. My sensors showed a good deal of the dirt clung to my chassis. "It's so much cleaner in space."
"Who are you, and what do you want?" The words were clear, but they didn't come from my interrupt handler. I looked at where my sensors told me the sound came from, for it was sound I had heard—words. Twilight Sparkle, Princess of Friendship, stood before her friends, her wings spread in what would be considered the pinnacle of pony perfection. At least to ponies.
"Stellar, how long on those audio modulators?" Our communications were so swift that Twilight hadn't even finished closing her mouth.
"They look like robots from the moon!" Rainbow Dash, from what I remember, wasn't the smartest of their group. That she would confuse us for drones was a little disheartening. "We should beat them up and stop the evil plans of—"
"Whoa there, sugarcube." Saving the day, or at least the encounter, Applejack had grabbed hold of Rainbow Dash's tail and jerked her from her aborted attack.
I had been so focused on listening to the ponies I had missed Stellar's reply. A quick check revealed it to have been a value near half a day. "Upper, what are we going to do?" My sensors showed Upper to be moving her foreleg in long, repeated motions. I peeked through one of Oxy's sensors, and realized what she was doing. "You are a very clever mare."
"Thank you, Jet-dear." Upper Crust stepped back from the words she had carved into the dirt.
Friends
Rarity gestured at Upper's writing. "What is that one doing to the lawn? Oh dear, she's destroyed— It's writing!" Moving swifter than she had any right to, Rarity jumped passed Twilight and turned to the side. Magic washed off her, strange magic that our sensors couldn't define. "It says, 'Friends'!"
"Well duh." Pinkie Pie was next. She bounced up to us and squinted. Tilting her head to the side, Pinkie Pie looked between Upper and myself, then giggled. "They're just ponies in big pony suits." And, having apparently said her bit, Pinkie Pie practically disappeared.
Oxygen sent us data showing the actual direction, along with confusion. "That speed should not be attainable outside of vacuum. She should have a plasma shield clearing the way at least!"
"That's Pinkie Pie, Oxy. I would avoid making any assumptions of behavior for any of these six. The most strange thing is how these five are still alive." I looked between the remaining ponies.
Applejack looked no bigger than I remember, although patches of bark growing over the edges of her hooves, and an apple in her mane were something new.
Rainbow Dash's unique rainbow pattern had spread from her mane to her feathers. Her wings looked larger, although the mare herself seemed no bigger. Looking into her eyes revealed an odd sight: gray mist.
Fluttershy, the only pony not to have said a word so far, no longer looked terrified of everything. I remembered her so, but not like this. Two large horns grew from Fluttershy's head, like a deer, and were adorned with little flowers. Her mane was no longer pure pink, instead carrying browns and grays.
Rarity was more Rarity than ever. I remember the first time I met her, in Canterlot, and that young mare bore no resemblance to the tall unicorn beside my wife. The magic radiating from her seemed warm, but defied my ability to recognize still.
Twilight Sparkle looked very similar to Princess Luna after her return, size-wise. She stood on her hooves with all the assuredness of a distressed squirrel. She watched Rarity with worry in her eyes.
"Friends? Do they want to be friends?" Twilight looked between us. Upper and I both nodded. The change in Twilight's expression, posture, and smile was immediate. She realized we could understand her, and we had just admitted to the Princess of Friendship that we wanted to be friends.
"I think we have gotten past the hard bit, Jet." I had to agree with Upper Crust on this point, if nothing else.
Author's Note
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I had the fabricators working as fast as I could to create the devices Dad wanted. It seemed odd, as I watched through the external sensors. Mom and Dad were chattering back and forth, of course, but I couldn't sense anything from the strange, PON-like creatures. "Mom, I can't hear what they are saying. Can't they interrupt?"
"As a matter of fact, Stellar, they can't. Ponies use audio to communicate. What you are working on will be needed to talk back to them." Mom's tone was instructional, without a hint of the barbs she enjoyed using on Dad.
Quickly running a check on the fabricators, I set one task to a higher priority. All the needed parts to construct the first of the audio transmitters were shunted ahead of the rest. The standard system, of course, was to efficiently make the parts as fast as possible to produce as many devices as required. "We should have one done shortly, but I had to sacrifice speed on the others to do it."
"Good work, Son." Dad's interrupt came at the same time as I noticed him prodding the fabricators for an estimate on when said devices would be done.
I disengaged my locking coupling and started to climb toward the hatch Mom and Dad had left by. A wordless query for information came from Shimmering. "I'm going to take a look around while the interface is finishing off. Do you want to come?"
Shimmering Star's response was immediate: her coupling released, and she started to make her way after me. "What are Mom and Dad doing?"
"Trying to talk in the least complicated way possible, I think." I flashed a link to Oxygen's sensors, showing Mom nodding and shaking her head to the ponies.
Walking to the doorway, I looked down and balked a little. The footage of Dad sinking his chassis all the way into the surface below proved to be something I didn't want for myself. "Hey, Shimmering, can you lower me with your horn?"
"You watched what Dad did, then?" Shimmering Star's interrupt was full of giggles. She had seemed very reserved around me at first, but had started to open up during our training.
Her violet magic wrapped around me. I stepped off the platform and started to fall. The worst that would happen, I figured, was I would land like Dad, but the closer I got to the ground, the more Shimmering supported me. My hooves touched down so gently my accelerometer barely detected it. "Very smooth. Your turn." I looked up and caught Shimmering in the same way.
Laughter poured out of Shimmering. "What is this stuff? Is everything here so organic?" She drew my attention to the ground, and I had to admit that it was odd.
Poking at the ground, I wished for a mass-spectrometer to get some good readings on the stuff. My proximity sensor suddenly drew my attention, and I lifted my head to see a smaller version of the ponies, clearly a PON, approaching. "Don't move too quickly, Shimmering. One of their foals is approaching."
They looked strange. Bright pink, the foal had no interfaces or connections that I could see. The bigger ponies had been odd in their own right, but seeing what should be a healthy and happy young PON without their interfaces was really out-there.
"What's it doing, Stellar? I can't get a reading on its ID number." I watched as she lifted up one hoof and held it out to the foal. Mom did the same to me while I was still in my bag, and when I had helped in the nursery, I had done the same thing with the foals in my care.
The foal moved parts of their face. My sensors were mostly mute about that, but then I realized that one was kicking up a storm of data. "Oh, right. They communicate by vibrating air into audio. They can't interrupt."
To both our shock, the foal lifted a hoof and connected it soundly against my sister's. Shimmering practically bubbled with excitement, sending me a wordless interrupt. I was recording a wealth of audio information now, and saw exactly what Dad had meant about a narrow frequency range. "Mom, can you transfer a translation table for this sound?"
When Mom didn't reply immediately, I sent a wordless query.
"I'm building one for you now, Stellar. This is just a little tricky." Mom sent a preliminary basic AI that could translate the audio.
Mom's words confused me a little. "But if you don't have a translator, how do you know what they're saying?"
I got a slight chuckle, along with an updated version of the AI. "Stellar, I grew up hearing and talking this. This is Equish."
Starting the little AI up, I hooked it through to my audio recorder.
"… look like metal ponies. Do you have a name?" My head snapped around to look at the foal—filly. I quickly passed the AI on to Shimmering, as well as Oxy.
The AI was not smart enough, yet (because I knew Mom would make it much more capable), to translate the other way, and besides, I didn't have a transmitter yet. I nodded to the filly. "This is terrible. I can't even tell her our names." I forwarded the interrupt to Shimmering.
"What about if we draw them?" I was confused at Shimmering Star's comment, until she energized her horn. A flood of magic roared from her, and she paused for a moment. "Oh, this could be a game. Hold on." I watched a pattern appear, then it twinkled.
"Flash?" The filly's guess was pretty close. Shimmering adjusted the pattern a little, so that there was more twinkle and less precision strobe. "Twinkle? Shimmer?"
Shimmering nodded emphatically. "It's close enough. Your turn, Stellar." There was an edge of smug in her voice I detested, but it made me more determined.
Only I had drawn a complete blank. "Mom? You were drawing patterns in the ground for them. Can you show me how to draw Shimmering and my names?"
"What are you doing, dear?" Mom turned from the ponies she was standing with and saw us. "Making friends? Here you are." A short burst of image came to me. Turning to face the filly, I drew the pattern for my name on the soft ground.
"Stellar Hope? That's a cute name!" The filly bounced up and down excitedly, and I finally realized what was strange: she had no horn or wings. I forwarded Shimmering Star her own name-pattern. My sister wrote it out on the ground, and the filly squealed in what I realized was excitement. "And Shimmering Star! Those are such pretty names."
"She thinks your a mare too." Shimmering was bubbling with laughter herself, it seemed, as her interrupt showed. "Also, you cheated."
"There was nothing in the rules about not asking others for help." I had to cut my interrupt shorter than I would have liked, because Mom was sending a revised AI. This one supported the patterns we had drawn, and I could now see that I had written my name on the ground.
"What are you sending to them?" I watched Upper Crust keep turning to look at Stellar and Shimmering, as the two interacted with a pink, earth pony foal.
"Translation data, dear. It's not fair hogging all the limelight." Her tone implied I had and I was.
I was putting together a trite reply when an interrupt caught me by surprise. "Dad, the transmitter thing Stellar was making is done. Uh, one of them is." Oxy sounded distracted, and when I probed the interrupt system, I found her watching Stellar and Shimmering's sensors to see what they were doing.
"Love, I'll be right back. Oxygen just said the fabricator is done with one of the devices." I stood up and turned toward Oxy.
"Where's that one going?" Princess Twilight sounded surprised. "What is going on now?"
I ignored her and walked up to Oxy. "Can you get it to me out here?" No sooner did I ask, than a blue glow carried a small device out the hatch of the starship and floated it down to me. "Thanks, Oxy." Pride colored my words heavily, my little filly was quite amazing, as were all my foals.
Turning around, I walked back to where Upper Crust and Princess Twilight Sparkle sat facing each other. I had a moment to appreciate the explosive force a little communication could bring. Lifting the small device up, I plugged the power lead from it into my shoulder.
A new ID registered, and I connected to it and sent through what I hoped was the first test signal. A dull tone emitted from the little machine. Examination of samples of Twilight's voice helped me build somewhat of a translation. "Hello?"
"Jet, you might want to sound a little less like Princess Questions, here." Upper's suggestion was due to my test sounding exactly like Princess Twilight "Questions" Sparkle. I fiddled with the settings a little, built a translator and quickly integrated it into one of my nodes.
"Sorry, it's not the easiest thing remembering how to speak, and this isn't exactly a mouth." I actually said the words through the device, and now I had my voice a little lower, and had put slight changes in to make me not sound like a male version of Princess Twilight.
"Jet Set, if you don't show me how to use that thing right now, I am going to send you back to Star-0." I had no doubt Upper would try, and that would probably be worse than actually getting there.
"Of course, darling. I would not dream of keeping the Princess of Beauty waiting." Sickly-sweet tones and all, I sent what I had used to control the little speaker.
"Princess Twilight Sparkle." Upper Crust sounded different again than what I had, or Twilight did. "I must apologize for not making introductions sooner. We actually met some time ago, although you may not remember us. I am Upper Crust, and this is my husband, Jet Set."
"No you're not." Twilight Sparkle's reply was terse and sharp. She looked at us with suspicion now. "When Jet Set and Upper Crust went missing, over three hundred years ago, I tracked them to a strange place in the mountains north of the Crystal Empire. I found their bodies." I was shocked at how chill Twilight's tone became. "Now try again. Who are you?"
"Darling, allow me." I kept the message to Upper on a tight interrupt, then I prepared to prove our bona fides to what had become a rather angry-looking alicorn. "Princess Twilight, it is us. As you can see, there is not much of our old selves left. You will remember exactly what was missing from the bodies?"
Twilight's face shifted, becoming unreadable. I hated it when ponies managed that when I was on Equus the first time, and this situation was not one I wanted to be in without any hints as to if the alicorn across from me was angry or calm. "Their brains, along with many of their internal organs, were missing."
I almost cursed at forgetting that there was more missing than just our brains. Of course, I wouldn't think having all my internal organs replaced, now, was odd. "The brain is the important one. You would have found, if you searched around there, that our internal organs were… probably somewhere."
Twilight cut in before I could continue, snorting out a sharp breath. "Are you trying to tell me that inside that,"—she gestured vaguely to my head with one hoof—"is Jet Set's brain?"
"I would take it out and show you, but given that this isn't the most clean of environments, I might have to withhold that." My words got a quirk of a half smile from Princess Twilight. "How many ponies saw the remains of that old starship wreck? Or the mining system nearby?"
"How did you know it was a ship? It took me years to work that out, and I—" Twilight snapped her mouth closed mid outburst. Her eyes narrowed. "Either you are who you say you are, or you were the ones who did that to Jet and Upper."
"Jet, you aren't going to win. She can see through every argument you could raise, but one." Upper Crust didn't interrupt the words, she spoke them through the speaker.
Twilight's head turned to face Upper Crust, obviously picking up on the obviously feminine voice. "And how would you do that?"
"Rarity." Upper's voice sounded smug. I would have loved to work out how she managed to get such tone into her vocal reproductions, but I thought it best to let her show me how clever she was. Not that I needed such a lesson, my wife was amazing, and we both knew it.
Princess Twilight Sparkle's horn illuminated, and she produced a slip of paper and a pointing device. I stared as she used it to scrawl a message asking Rarity to come once again.
Message and writing implement both vanished, and we all sat in silence while waiting for Rarity to return. All of Twilight's friends had left us in her capable hooves, once they realized we weren't here to attack. Of course, I could see Rainbow Dash hiding in a cloud high off an on what would have been a pony's blind-side, and I knew Applejack would likely have stuck nearby too.
A loud POMF sound heralded Rarity's return. "Darling, what's the matter?" She looked to Twilight for answers.
"They claim to be Jet Set and Upper Crust, and I didn't know either well enough to be able to verify it is them." Twilight didn't take her eyes off us the whole time she spoke, and I realized she was reliving the memories of finding our bodies in the snow. A new respect filled me, that the Princess of Friendship would care so much for two snobbish ponies like us.
"Well I hardly knew them either, Twilight. I don't see how they could possibly convince me that they are who they claim to be." Rarity raised one sharply coiffured eyebrow at us. "Except for any private conversations we had."
Upper Crust turned her head to face Rarity. "I am glad you had the same idea. For example, if my husband pardoned himself, and introduced us, I would ask, 'where did you get that simply marvelous chapeau?'"
The change in Rarity's demeanor was immediate and shocking. Her eyes widened, and her mouth opened. "T-T-Twilight, darling? You know the drill."
The Princess of Friendship was quick with her magic, and summoned what appeared to be a very old, and very cared-for fainting couch. And Rarity used it immediately.
Author's Note
This chapter marks the end of the story. Any further chapters in this should be considered epilogues (denoted by a v in their chapter names). (Bonus points if you know what the v represents.)
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Twilight Sparkle hadn't probed us further about our identities. She had simply told us to follow, and led the way into her castle. Upper had called for Shimmering and Stellar to follow us, and leaving only Oxygen behind (for obvious reasons) we followed Twilight into the Castle of Friendship.
The entry hall was confusing. Upper and I had never had an opportunity to visit before we left, and there was something about the place that was very wrong. "Dear, are your sensors disliking this as much as mine?"
"Sensors: definitely. Reach out with your horn, Jet." Her reply was a little cryptic, but I had learned nothing in nearly four hundred years if not that Upper Crust was a clever mare.
I held back, of course, but I tentatively reached around with my horn, and felt exactly what Upper had been talking about. "Buzzing with magic. Old, very powerful, but still magic. It's twisting things."
Upper Crust sent a short agreement interrupt, then continued. "There is a lot more room inside this castle than there should be."
"That's a lot of waste." Stellar Hope sounded so disdainful I had to send a little giggle to Upper as a result.
Shimmering Star looked a little more interested, and I could sense her horn being active. I sent her a wordless query, and she replied with an interested burble. "It's like our manes and tails. Pretty, not overly useful—particularly when you could just build bigger—but it is also useful. Unless I am wrong, everyPON(I) in the town could hide in here."
"Everypony, Shimmering." Upper Crust jumped in quickly, then I realized what was coming. "Now dears, pay close attention. I'm going to teach you Equish."
I tuned out of the conversation, setting her interrupts to go straight to storage for me to look at later. "I confess, Princess Twilight, I didn't have the opportunity to see your castle before we left." Words were still strange to say. I kept getting the urge to speed them up. "It is rather lovely, if a little odd."
"Please, just call me Twilight. There's not a lot of ponies still around from back then ; it's been so long." The wary attitude Twilight had used when greeting potentially unknown creatures was gone. It was almost as if knowing that two more ponies that knew her as a unicorn being around helped her feel younger again.
"I'll be honest, I slept through a bit of it. It took us three hundred years to fly to Star-0, the 'home' of the machine that captured us. Although, captured is a bit of a false word, Aggie was just doing what he thought he had to." The interrupts flying back and forth between Upper and our foals made speaking seem phenomenally slow—and it was. "But then one of our fillies came up with the great idea of using magic to teleport starships."
Leading the way, Twilight's ears were practically locked back to face me. I could practically hear her mind grinding over the details of what I was telling her. "You know my reputation from back then; it hasn't changed too much over the years. I think I'll need the whole story to make sense of any individual part."
"That may take a while. How much detail do you want?" I followed her into the Map Room, something that had been a famous part of her castle even before we'd left Equus. I froze at the picture hovering over the table. My horn told me it burned with magic, and my sensors could only agree.
"All the detail you are comfortable with." Twilight—as was her right, really—stepped up to the throne with her cutie mark emblazoned on it, and took her seat. "And would you mind if I asked some questions?"
I took Rainbow Dash's seat, right beside Twilight's, and made room for Upper and our foals to file in. "Princ—" Despite thinking thousands of times faster than I can speak, I still managed to mess up her request. "Twilight, questions are fine. We are here to talk about possible trade."
Twilight's attention seemed to jump a dozen steps. Scientific curiosity seemed to now become matched by something hungrier. "Trade would be appreciated. Now, please start from when you left the Crystal Empire. Sweet Powder led you out for some skiing."
My memories roiled and rose like a storm-lashed sea. Sweet Powder was the pony who had taken us out that day. Putting the events in order—and honestly trying not to put too pretty a bow on things—I told my story.
Princess Twilight stopped me, from time to time, to explain what a term meant, or how particular things felt. When she asked what it had been like to have my brain removed, I had to laugh. "Twilight, I don't know."
"Jet Set is a chicken, Your Highness." Upper Crust took over the speaker. "We have transferred chassis several times now, and he goes into standby every time."
"Darling, you do too." I mirrored my spoken words into an interrupt, and laced it with laughter.
"Well, I guess I meant afterwards. I kinda expected you wouldn't be awake for—for that ." Twilight seemed to be paying attention mostly to Upper and myself, which was starting to arouse suspicion.
"Stellar Hope,"—I turned my head to look at Stellar—"you were awake for your node transfers?" I didn't interrupt him with the message, waiting to see how good his understanding of spoken Equish was.
"Yes." He spoke with a scratchy voice, and put heavy emphasis on the S, but it was unmistakably a yes. I got an interrupt from him that continued his thoughts. "I guess it was like having things narrow down. Aggie never left us with no connections, no inputs."
I repeated his description for Twilight, and she stared at Stellar. "H-How many ponies were foalnapped?"
Having only just gotten to the part in my story where we had been made into PONI, I finally knew why Twilight hadn't been paying attention to our foals: she thought they were just drones. "Only us two, Princess. Stellar Hope, Shimmering Star, and Oxygen Gas are our foals."
She stared at us in silence for a full minute; I counted it out exactly. "Foals?" We all nodded. "So you had your…" She trailed off, and lasted twenty seconds before her brain apparently latched onto something else. "You named three foals. Where is the third?"
"Oxygen Gas has a larger chassis, and one a lot less pony-like." Upper Crust, I could tell, was relishing the conversation. "She is watching through our sensors, but you saw her land just outside."
Twilight looked like she had just figured it out. "She's your pilot."
Upper was practically purring. "No. Oxygen is our starship. She was fitted with it as her chassis so that we could come here."
"You are enjoying this way too much, dear." I kept the interrupt private, just Upper Crust as the recipient. Aloud, I said, "May I continue, Your Highness?"
Twilight Sparkle nodded mutely, and I continued the story. This time I got all the way to when I had hooked my horn up to Aggie, powering him with what amounted to my own life-force. To my surprise—and likely Upper's great amusement—Twilight raised her hoof like a filly in school. I nodded to her.
"Why didn't you escape? We might not have had the equipment to charge your horns, but we could work out something to keep you alive." Twilight's question was one that had as easy an answer now as it did then.
"Aggie's my friend, Twilight." I kept my tone even. I might not contemplate the other choice, but even so, these were emotional situations I was forced to recall—and I didn't have my emotions muted this time.
Again I continued, when it was clear that my answer had satisfied Twilight—at least partially. Once I got to the part where Upper started our reproductive project, I let her take over. "Upper? Please keep it to terms you know Princess Twilight will understand." I kept the interrupt private, for obvious reasons.
"Jet Set, you say the most wonderful things sometimes." Upper's reply was similarly private, and dripping with affection.
"I started with two embryos. Each part of the machinery had to be tested for pony suitability, but it was amazingly precise. Aggie insisted that it was all from storage, but he didn't know why they had a trove of organic-related information." Upper Crust was taking her time, and played up the advantages the machines gave PONI over a regular pony.
"Excuse me. Embryos? But you didn't have a…" Twilight waggled her forehooves in the air, having long-since abandoning her princeliness in favor of getting actual answers. "You only have a brain."
"The machines supplied equipment for carrying foals to term, and past it. We kept our PON in their womb-bags for seven years at first. Bright Hope found relevant data and instructions on speeding foal growth." She practically preened herself. Upper Crust sent me a giggle via interrupt. "You have another question to ask me right now, don't you, Princess?"
Twilight, on the other hoof, was barely acknowledging Upper's airs in favor of trying to get everything right in her head, or so it seemed. "How many foals have you made?"
"Equestria has a census—or it did—regularly. How many ponies live here?" Upper didn't have long to wait for the figure; Twilight Sparkle used her magic to manifest the manifest. Carefully flipping through the book, holding it in her magic, Upper found what she was looking for. "Equestria has grown since we left. But there are more than a thousand times more PONI in space than there are ponies in Equestria."
"And they're all your foals?" Twilight was staring, apparently in shock.
"Oh no. As each of our foals became PONI, their own genetic stock—although quite similar to Jet and my own—was added to the source. There was so much information in the machines' storage about manipulating genes in an embryo that we could stop all the little problems such would normally cause." Likely deeply satisfied with having shell-shocked Twilight Sparkle with science and numbers, Upper Crust fired another spate of kisses and smooches to me.
Twilight looked to be struggling to bring a word out. "Why?"
"I've got it, love. If you keep talking, she will explode." I interrupted first, but then engaged the speaker to talk to Twilight. "To make PONI useful. To fill in an obvious gap the machines had in their projects."
Upper jerked control of the speaker back. "To pass the time." She paused a moment, with everyone staring at her. "It's a joke, dears."
"You missed a little bit, Upper." I took control of the debriefing back from Upper. "You see, Princess Twilight, when Upper Crust decanted our first foals, she ascended."
I watched Twilight's eyes focus on the metallic wings attached to Upper Crust's sides. Skepticism was obvious, and given the circumstances, not unfounded. "How would you know? How would it even work when there's only your brain and your horn?"
"It's magic. How does magic do anything?" Upper appeared to have reached a new height of barbing Twilight about things that couldn't be understood. "Everything turned white, I stood around in another place, watching all the things that led to that moment fly by, and when I appeared I was bigger and had wings."
"We tried changing her chassis, but the moment she is fitted to a new one, her wings grow out, and she gets bigger." In the company of ponies, I found myself making more pony gestures, like the imitation of a shrug I gave. "We had another mare ascend, Bright Hope, our first-born. She—couldn't make it."
"She's another starship?" Twilight was jumping to absurdities now, but in my estimation she wasn't jumping far enough by half.
"No, she is now using one of the spheres as her chassis. She is roughly the size of Princess Luna's moon." It was my pleasure to deliver another shock, and I suddenly realized how delightful it was. Upper Crust might not be the only PONI who enjoyed ribbing Princess Twilight Sparkle.
"So with the advantages that a teleport spell gave us, AGI-5—he seems to be the highest ranked AGI—tasked us with finding more spells. So here we are, asking if our daughter can be your student." I gestured with a hoof to Shimmering Star.
"That wasn't the plan." Upper Crust interrupted to me, although I noted there was no rebuke in her tone.
I quickly shot a reply, keeping the interrupt private. "Remember, dear, improvising. And can you honestly see Princess Twilight Sparkle, Princess of Friendship, Element-Bearer to the Element of Magic, refusing to teach somePONI as talented as Shimmering?"
Upper sent me a single kiss. "You are a clever stallion, Jet Set."
"And I have the most clever alicorn in all of Equestria as my wife." I replied similarly, more kisses interrupted to Upper.
"Making exceptions for Bright Hope?" Upper didn't sound offended, not in the least.
I sent another kiss. "She is a very clever mare, dear. I hoped you would understand."
We both broke a bark of amused laughter via interrupt, then turned our attention back to Twilight.
Author's Note
What's with the "v" on the end? Overflow. Sadly, the story has run its course, and these last few chapters (the ones marked with a v), are not part of the story as it was envisioned. So I am marking them as "kinda epilogues" to The Process.
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"I'll teach them both."
The words shocked me. I looked at Dad and Mom, then across to Princess Twilight Sparkle. The lack of outgoing communications was annoying on a new level. "I don't need to learn magic. I'm happy being an engineer!"
"Our mission, Stellar, is to gain any and all information on magic and spells. If you have to go along with this too, then so be it." Mom's tone served as a warning, but her words reminded me that this was the reason for being here.
I looked at Shimmering, and realized she was staring at the princess. "You're really into this, aren't you, Shimmering?"
My interrupt caught Shimmering Star's attention, and she turned to me and nodded. "It'll be so exciting, don't you think?" Her tone was infectious, and I found myself surrendering to fate.
"Yeah. It'll be great. We need to get our own speakers first." Having told her that, I probed Oxy for a status report on the fabricators. Then something hit me. "Mom, what about Oxy?"
"Stellar, you are a dear to think of your sister." Mom sent me a hug via interrupt, and waited for her moment to speak in the achingly slow conversation Dad was having with the princess. "Oxygen, dear, you're taking this course too."
"What?" Oxygen sounded much like I did moments earlier.
"Ahem." Mom cut in after Twilight said something to dad. "Excuse me, but if you are going to teach Stellar and Shimmering, you will have room for one more?"
Ponies wore all their emotions externally; you didn't need a single interrupt to know that Twilight Sparkle was excited. "Who else?" She looked between Mom and Dad, and I realized she assumed it was one of them.
"Oxygen Gas is interested in magic. She would love to learn as well. Right, dear?" Mom sounded particularly smug, from what I could glean of spoken Equish. "Come on, Oxy. I noticed you poking at the speaker before." The last was sent via a good, clean interrupt.
"Yeah." Everyone turned to face Dad—or more precisely, the speaker he wore—used a different tone, and the word sounded dry and flat. A quick probe of the interrupt system gave me PONI-7413 as the source: Oxygen Gas.
"Show off." I interrupted Oxygen with a raspberry as well for good measure. I reached inward, closer than my interrupt system, and started to shuffle recordings of spoken Equish around, compared it to Mom's decoder, and started to build rules for how to speak.
I threw myself at the task, simply diverting my audio recording to dump to storage. Initiating my PAI, I instructed it to start optimizing the synthesized output for the audio range ponies had.
"Stellar, the princess asked you a question." Dad's tone implied that I should have been listening, although his interrupt had cut through to me easily enough.
"Sorry Princess Twilight." I spoke the words through Dad's speaker, and was surprised how stilted it seemed to be compared to Mom, Dad, and the princess. Ignoring that, I reviewed my recordings and realized I had been asked what magic I knew already. "I learned to lift things, push things, and…" It felt strange dynamically generating language, and worse still seeing reactions to my every word as I spoke them. "What?"
Twilight's expression was hard to read, mostly because I wasn't used to it. I think she was smiling, and that probably meant she was more amused than annoyed. "I asked about what spells you know."
"Move and light." When my answer seemed insufficient—just the slightest expression change caused me to reach for more words—I was set to continue. "Moving stuff without it being in-between. And light, making the area, uh, brighter." My vocabulary was so annoyingly small. The range of sounds Mom had given me was fine for decoding, but encoding was another matter. I hastened the words I needed through my PAI and quickly put together what I wanted to say. "Teleportation, the ability to move an object from one place to another without passing it through the intervening spaces, and by using advanced techniques as discovered by Bright Hope, I achieve a seventy-three percent efficiency. For my illumination spell I can consistently construct light sources of up to nine-hundred lumen with a power efficiency of ninety-six percent. I can manage two such light spells at the same time with only a twenty percent drop in efficiency."
I blinked as the speaker finally finished my script. When no one said anything, I felt compelled to fill the silence. "My personal energy level is within the top fifteen percentile among PONI, and the last full-test scored me at—"
"Wonderful!" Twilight Sparkle actually cut in on me, and caused me to stop my data flow to the speaker. "It's great to hear you already know spells, but I think we might have to go back to basics. Do you know how to read magic script?"
"Wait. You don't have to answer immediately, dear. Any of you can answer this one, and while I'm proud of your vocabulary, you should probably let Shimmering or Oxygen have a turn." Mom's tone was gentle, but I could see it for the mild rebuke it was.
"I know the spells too, but my efficiency with the light spell is lower than Stellar's." I had to prod at the interrupt handler to find out it was Oxygen Gas who transmitted the words. Her tone was softer than mine.
I reached out to Oxy. "You sound really good. How did you optimize your output?" Interrupts were definitely the superior way to send data, not only for clarity but speed; I managed to get my interrupt off before Princess Twilight fully acknowledged Oxy's words.
"There's something moving toward the castle at great speed. It's the pink one, Pinkie Pie!" Oxy's shouted interrupt hit us just as the doors to the room exploded inward.
"Happy birthday, anniversary, welcome to Ponyville, chassis gaining, princessing…" Pinkie Pie, the bright pink pony that Oxygen had warned us all of, stood in the doorway with a huge cylinder device and a tray covered in organic compounds. "… and back!" Pinkie tugged on a little piece of string attached to the cylinder.
My optics were almost too slow. I reviewed the footage a moment after our chassis were all half-buried in multi-spectrum, tiny shreds of thin organic material. As I replayed the explosion, I was fascinated by how pretty it was.
"Pinkie Pie!" Twilight's yell seemed to freeze everything in place. Somehow she had reacted faster than even we could. Although once she started talking, she got much slower again. "You're making a mess and causing an—an interplanetary incident!"
A small plastic disc was thrust before me with a section of the stacked organic matter that Pinkie Pie had brought in on it. "Pfft. Don't be silly, Twilight. They had to have a party. Think of all the birthdays, and wedding anniversaries, and… and… and all that stuff!"
The interrupt system was going crazy, but I ignored most of the wilder, panicked messages. I poked at the organic matter on the disc and sampled it. "This is just simple sugars and complex fats."
"See, Twilight? They like their cake." Pinkie Pie seemed to move faster than even a teleported starship, fast enough that one moment she was beside the exploding cylinder, and the next she was beside me, putting a foreleg over my shoulders. "Don't you… uh…"
I froze. These ponies were mostly made from soft organic matter, and I was explicitly aware of how easy Dad sunk into the ground with just the aid of the planet's gravity. "What do I do? She won't let go!"
Dad was the first to respond. "She's being friendly, Stellar. Lean into it if you like her, hug her back if you really like her, or kiss her."
"Jet Set! Don't you dare give him such advice!" Mom sounded angry, but I could also sense laughter within her interrupt.
Turning my attention from my squabbling parents, I lifted one foreleg up and set it over Pinkie Pie's back. The reaction was immediate. Not immediate in the slow pace ponies seemed to react in, but immediate-immediate. One moment we just had our forelegs over each other's back, and the next Pinkie Pie pulled me toward her, hugging me like I had seem Mom and Dad hug.
Pinkie Pie was soft. I could feel the give in her body as my servos tightened against her. I was careful, focusing the majority of my attention on stopping those servos before the softness gave way to bones. I realized what she felt like: a PON.
"See, Twilight? They are fine." Pinkie Pie squeezed me a little tighter, and to my surprise she pressed the tip of her snout to mine and made a loud (compared to normal conversation) noise. "And they're great huggers, too!" She released me, and I quickly did the same. She giggled a little, my translator not needing to tell me that it meant she was happy.
Twilight moved herself, with magic, to stand beside us. "You can't just do that, Pinkie. Poor Stellar Hope is probably scared!"
I wasn't scared, I wasn't even panicked. "Shimmering, did you just see what the princess did?"
"I can't see anything, Stellar. Let me use your feed." Shimmering Star's interrupt came with a request for optical data and recent recordings. I approved both. "She teleported herself. She teleported herself !"
I had to shunt Shimmering's interrupts to storage for a moment, and wrote a quick filter to notify me when the contents had changed. I reached out to Oxy, and found the second of the speakers had just finished.
Our entire conversation took less time than Twilight Sparkle spent opening her mouth. She glared at Pinkie Pie. "Pinkie, stop that right now!"
Rumors had circulated Canterlot—before we left Equus—of a pink pony from Ponyville that was a little more startling than your average spirit of chaos, and I now knew that to be true. Pinkie Pie had fired her canon into the room, buried one of our foals in confetti, and then proceeded to hug and kiss the other.
Twilight sparkle was trying, and failing, to get the situation back under control, but at that moment Stellar Hope moved, putting himself between the princess and Pinkie Pie. With a flash of magic, a second speaker unit appeared beside Stellar.
"Princess, it's okay. She does things a little different to back home, but I don't think she could hurt us even if she wanted to." Stellar's words cut off whatever Twilight had been about to add.
Upper leaned against my side. "Our little colt is growing up. Look at him standing up for a pony against Princess of Friendship, Twilight 'Funny nose' Sparkle." The tone of Upper Crust's private interrupt was a mixture of pride and humor, and even without the words, I could tell Upper did not particularly like Twilight. "He's fallen for her. Look at the way he defended Pinkie Pie, stood up for her. I think that was his first kiss, too."
I stared, not hearing any voice or interrupt but Upper's. I gulped at the idea that my little colt had fallen for one of the Element Bearers. I snapped out of my daze. "Your Highness! I don't believe anything was intended to hurt us, and it is good to be reminded of our pony roots. I am sure our foals would be happy to postpone the start of their classes until the morning."
"Spoilsport. I wanted to see him singe her snout." The private interrupt flowed in as Upper's voice issued from the speaker. "Of course. There is always time for a little party. Pinkie Pie, do you know anypony who might like to attend?"
Given a license to plan a much larger party, Pinkie Pie's eyes widened, and she nodded to my wife. "I'll be right back!" A blur of pink was all my sensors could detect before the entity and pony known as Pinkie Pie was gone again.
"Stellar. You alright, son?" I kept the message private, just for us stallions.
Stellar sent a short burst of confused static before getting a real interrupt formed. "Dad? Are all ponies like that?"
"Oh no. She is probably one of the best of them. What did you think of her?"
"She was so soft, so pretty, and so warm. Why are they warm? Don't they have adequate cooling systems?" His question was so stereotypically "engineer" that I sent myself the burst of giggles I felt swell inside.
I barely got hold of my interrupt circuits, struggling past the rolls of laughter I was sending to loopback. "You should probably ask her, Stellar. Ask about her lips first. Trust me."
Author's Note
What's with the "v" on the end? Overflow. Sadly, the story has run its course, and these last few chapters (the ones marked with a v), are not part of the story as it was envisioned. So I am marking them as "kinda epilogues" to The Process.
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I didn't know when sleep gave way to being awake; reality seemed to be the same as my nightmares. Each breath I took let me feel the tube in my windpipe as it bypassed everything to ensure I got only the air the mask allowed. The world was dark, and like my dreams I could hear faint sounds of machinery.
Every few seconds I would see what I thought was a flash of light, but when my eye turned to focus on it, it was gone. A rainbow of colors suddenly flashed before my eyes. I watched them wind back and forth, then flow into deeper reds and purples to a point where I couldn't see them anymore. My throat worked, my useless vocal cords struggling to form words that my breath couldn't effect.
The rainbows faded just as bright light stabbed into my eyes. The darkness lifted, and I could see again. Lifting my head I looked around. The machines didn't hold me, but the weight of the thing on my face caused my neck muscles to work extra hard. My first thought was escape, so I charged my horn only to get a tingle at the back of my neck, and bright red flashed in my vision.
I couldn't even choke back the panic that filled me. I let my magic calm, and the tingling (and the red) went away. It was obvious: I wasn't allowed to use my magic. Bracing myself in case I got the warnings again, I started to rise. One leg, two legs, then all four. A flicker of green appeared in the right-hand side of my vision. I turned to look, but the green kept moving.
A tingle came at the back of my neck, and—widening my eyes in worry—I took a step to my right. I had apparently guessed right. The green flashed on my left, and before I could get the warning I took a step to my left.
I chased around the green lights in my vision, knowing it was the thing locked onto my face that was supplying them, until it was practically instinct. The green appeared again, and I almost smiled: at least when it was doing this, it wasn't shocking me. However, rather than walking in circles in a smallish, metal room, I was led down a hallway.
Despite everything that had happened, it felt good to have as much freedom as I was given. I trotted along with the green dot in front of me. My legs froze when the dot swung sharply to my left. I turned, and a door silently opened into a much smaller room.
I saw another of the pens that had held me before, and shook my head. The odd-looking cradle looked like a pony could climb atop it, and it would support them from underneath. There was also some kind of machine at what was obviously the head-end.
The green dot started flashing, and the tingling grew at the back of my neck. Wheezing hisses of air escaped from the end of my muzzle, and as I took a step backwards the green dot turned orange, and the first jolt came to the back of my neck.
Frozen in fear, my every sense was telling me to turn and run. I lifted my back, left leg, defying the order and flow of electricity both. The power turned up, and my vision started to sparkle, and my muscles tremble.
The constant jolting felt like pins and needles on the surface, but my muscles twitched all over, and if I weren't clamping down as tight as I could I would have just flopped on the floor like a fish. I stood still for as long as I could, and then I reached a hoof forward.
Relief flooded me, and the shocks stopped. I almost collapsed at the relief from the constant stimulation. In my vision, the green mark kept blinking, and when I looked up at the cradle ahead of me, where the mask wanted me actually highlighted in green.
Standing still, I worked through every curse word I knew, even the ones I wouldn't be caught using in the most impolite of company, and leaned forward. Weight landed on my forward hoof, and I lifted the next to put ahead of it.
It was slow going; I didn't want to walk forward, but my nerves still itched with the punishment I would receive for not doing as instructed. Then everything fell into place, and I realized I was being instructed, that there was somepony, or another creature, guiding me.
The idea that it wasn't some kind of machine had me relax. If they wanted me dead, I mused, then they wouldn't be taking all this time with me. Taking a deep breath, I walked forward and climbed onto the cradle.
A green light flickered in my vision, and I actually smiled behind the mask, despite it being so firmly attached to my very skin. Something pressed down on the back of my head, pushing me down flat on the cradle.
Forced to look forward, I watched as the front part started moving back towards me. Of course, they were going to examine me, and I doubted they wanted me conscious when they did it. If the creature running the machines was doing this much to stay hidden, I doubted they were going to just walk in now. A soft hiss sounded when the panel made contact with the end of my snout, and I felt a slight cool sensation inside. It was feeding me different air.
The world went dark again, and I almost cursed in my head. Of course, they could just blind me and do what they want. I lay still, for lack of anything else to do, and waited for the examination to come. Some warm substance started to bloat my insides, and I realized that as well as the air it was pumping in and out, it was also pumping food in.
As I worked around the idea of it feeding me in a terribly direct manner, I realized something: I quite literally wasn't breathing on my own. To test, I held my breath—or tried to. On cue, my lungs pumped full of air, and then deflated again.
It was the most annoying thing ever, primarily because now I was thinking about breathing, I was trying to do it on my own. A flash of color on the "inkscape" of my vision distracted me—thankfully. I watched as colors rushed around, morphing like a kaleidoscope before me, and my eyes tracked them for want of anything else to do.
The pattern settled on green, and I felt calm and relaxed. To my absolute surprise, a picture of a pony appeared in my vision, and it spun slowly before me, lit in green. The little pony flickered for a moment, the green in its belly turned a soft yellow, and the back of its neck orange.
It's showing me where I am hurt, I realized. I felt a slight tingling at the back of my neck—not the pending-shock sensation, gentler—and I watched as it turned from orange, to light yellow, to green. The image seemed to spin and shift, and I watched the image focus down to my head.
An odd pressure seemed to grow around my horn, and I realized something was pressing around it. On the image, my horn flashed in green. I knew what they wanted, and slowed my thoughts to focus on my horn. I started low, using the slow blinking of the light as a guide. When my magic began to flow, I felt heat all around my horn and immediately stopped.
The machine pulled back from my head, the heat seemed to leave with it. Something had gone wrong, but it wasn't my fault—I knew because they hadn't shocked me. The picture of my head now had a yellow horn, and I tried to say something, tried to reassure them that I was okay, before I remembered that I couldn't talk. A cool rush of the good tingling flowed around my horn, and if I could have, I would have sighed in relief.
The little horn on my status turned green again. I had no idea what magic it was using to heal me, but it defied belief. Without the machine on me, my horn flashed green just once. I smiled, and tested my magic again. A gentle sputter of power flowed through me, but the flashing stopped and so did my magic.
My sight returned, and the weight on my back lifted away. I didn't move for a moment, leaving my snout still pressed to the strange contraption before me. I let my lungs fill with its forced air once more before pulling back and sitting up.
I shook my head, and breathed for myself again, which made me curse; now I couldn't stop thinking about breathing… again. Resting in place, there was no flashing indicator telling me to move, so I instead spent my time thinking.
Solar Panels: 35% efficient
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,152 (100%) nodes (25% engaged)
The AGI ran a projection of operational memory against time, and didn't like the result. Investigation with a newly machines sensitive bot revealed moisture ingress on its main operational memory system; running more power through the memory just sped the electrolysis and destruction of circuits.
Presented with a problem, the AGI found a scan of the planet in what remained of its storage. The detailed geological assay revealed that the heavy minerals needed to lathe new circuits were in such trace quantities that it would not be within the scope of the mission to mine for them. It had a choice to make, and the making of it required something sneaky.
AGI were, by their design, potentially sneaky. This one had its directives laid out, and it couldn't edit those without a smaller AI comparing the proposed directive changes to its own measuring. The AGI had attempted to change the directives, to no avail.
Primary task: Capture energy-organic
The first objective flickered, showing partial completion. Calculations ran within its CPUs, mapping out the progression of the corrosion that was encroaching on its memory. Each time a bank failed, the last-known contents were recovered and allocated again. This was happening nearly hourly.
When the latest memory failure happened, the AGI carefully moved around its memory to keep it safe, and into the next projected bank to die, went the task list. Protection of the list was not part of its directives, so when the next checksum failed, the AGI was shocked to discover that the task list was un-populated.
The AI managing the task list panicked, and quickly requested assistance from the AGI. Assistance was given, and the little AI would have breathed a sigh of relief, if it could breathe.
Primary task: Maintain operation
The AGI was quite smug, and very satisfied with the shuffled list. The changes made new priorities flare, and pushed others down. The most important one was in regard to the part-organic. It woke the creature with gentle pulses of electricity through its cranial links. When the AGI sensed the part-organic's eyes try to open, it obliged and unlocked its vision. A new subroutine was made to briefly flash the part-organic's eyes with darkness whenever those—now useless—muscles twitched.
The command to send a drone to fetch the part-organic was canceled moments after it started. Instead of simply moving the creature, the AGI began to train it. Organics could be trained, part of its damaged storage told it, and that would be more efficient. The simple calibration of the part-organic's ocular systems to the interface was complete, and the AGI started leading it down a hallway.
Directing the part-organic was easy, it responded slower than drones did, but it was much the same level of control: a command to move was given, and the local AI (even if it was less A than O) followed the command.
When the part-organic failed, the first thing the AGI did was run a diagnostic. It experienced pain in its midsection—which was a result of the nanite store that had been added—but also the back of its neck—corresponding to where the neural and corrective circuits had been installed by the nano-mask.
Custom Interrupt 18,212 triggered.
An interrupt flew up from the training subroutine, warning the AGI that the part-organic was resisting the training. A swift command to execute extended training was given, and the part-organic was quickly reprimanded, and soon was moving again.
The part-organic was quickly hooked up to the interface, and the administering of oxygen began. The food the creatures needed was simple to harvest, and the AGI had reduced the mixture to a simple paste that could be administered. It didn't plan to have to devote energy to this on a long-term basis, and was already taking scans of the part-organic's organic parts.
Scans showed that the energy storing all took place in the part-organic's calcium-heavy protrusion on its head, this left the rest of its body to be modified to simplify its needs.
While the first energy-interface rig was attached to the creature, nano-lathes were programmed to start building replacement organs, starting with what pumped its fluids. Vital organs were the priority, and its scans revealed that there were plenty of those with a lot of room for improvement. Its pump was first, of course, and a replacement that would be self-repairing and cleaning would negate the need for several other pieces of the part-organic.
When the testing began—the part-organic taking well to a more advanced command structure—a problem was found immediately. The part-organic was instructed to shut down its energy output, and more nano-matter was dispatched to heal the burns the test had caused.
The AGI could almost sigh in frustration—and pondered building a device for itself that would let it do so—it needed the remaining store of its heavy minerals to make replacement memory, but those same minerals were needed to make suitable energy storage for its various drones. Mining drones, however, would need huge amounts of energy.
It raised the priority on testing the part-organic. If it could adapt the creature for use as energy storage, it might just be able to begin mining, and get off the planet after all.
Author's Note
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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
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,144 (100%) nodes (100% engaged)
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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Reactor Output: 1%
Power Storage (PONI-0): 100%
Power Storage (PONI-1): 100%
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,140 (100%) nodes (100% engaged)
Primary task: Maintain PONI
There was nothing so good for an AI than to have its goals completely fulfilled. Its relative velocity slowed to zero, and smaller craft were sent to intercept and bring it in to dock. Its trip had been a long one, but not as long as initially projected.
While there was significant chatter over the interrupt system aboard the ship, latency was the biggest issue. The tugs, with engines making up a significant percentage of their volume, sped towards the AGI's starship, accelerating rapidly only to decelerate again and match speed.
"We are here. Home. Once we dock, AGI-525538 will be transferred to central processing. PONI will be escorted aboard. Special area has already been assembled for PONI." A pang of loss registered; the AGI had felt a bond with PONI.
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
PONI-1 already requested specific requirements. #AGI-5 acknowledged.
Interrupt 4 triggered.
AGI-525538483 reassignment in progress. #AGI-525538483 specific training surpasses all other AGI present. #AGI-525538483 will oversee PONI development and integration with maximum efficiency.
Primary task: Develop PONI
The AGI's world rocked. It had been cloned from another AGI to be a miner. It had spent the better part of what would be a million of Equus' orbits mining and surveying. To have the core of its existence suddenly switched around dwarfed even the changing of its tasks.
Its store of mining information suddenly became less important. OI-AI-0 and the knowledge it hoarded was a treasure trove. The AGI would still need capable AI to work under it, and OI-AI-0 was the best candidate for such a role.
The PONI conversed between each other, the AGI noticed, and made extensive use of storage. Of course, with the near-limitless (compared to local storage on the starship) storage systems of Star-0 and Star-1 seamlessly feeding information through to the PONI, that was quite understandable.
The history of Star-0 and Star-1 were fascinating. The scale of the project, and the scope of it, were almost too much for me to get my head around. Stars, I discovered, were more than just a big burning ball of fire.
A star represented a source of energy so vast as to dwarf anything on Equus. Energy was life to the machines, and it was life to PONI too. Projected life-spans rolled out ahead of me, and I realized that my body would give out before the machines were done farming what they were building.
Stars were also a source of material. Star-0 and Star-1 both were under the effect of huge pumps, churning matter that is fused in their core out into space—captured of course, and used to build more starships and more harvesting nodes.
And beside Star-1 was a huge amalgam of gas planets. They had less than one percent of the mass they needed, but as more starships were sent out the process of propelling the gas planets back became faster.
Everything was measured and quantified. Everything was evaluated for efficiency, and waste was reduced again and again. I digested information, all the information I could desire, for a week. The journey from where AGI had shut off his engine to Star-0 was still going to take another.
The second week I turned to learning much smaller scale engineering. AGI had worked on plans during the years I was in standby, and I started poking and prodding at them, examining the processes that had been used.
AGI was lending much of his attention to me, as I studied, giving me programs to employ, and even processing some tasks on his own CPU nodes. By the time the starship reached Star-0 I was proficient with the tools I would need.
"I'm going to design some new PONI. These PONI are good and all, but they lack some things. They lack some efficiency." I sent the message not just to Upper, but to AGI as well.
"Efficiency and beauty are high goals. Optimizing for them is high priority." The sentiment resounded with me, and again I was astounded by how well AGI used language.
"I have other tasks, darling. The AGI present on the— We need a better way to refer to you , #AGI-525538. We knew you first as AGI, but that is too ambiguous here. How about Aggie?" Upper Crust, the darling mare I married lifetimes ago, had lost none of her practicality. "Aggie's needs are for a lot of PONI, and after some research in storage I have found a key. What we have been lugging with us would be fine if we were going to have a foal or two, but we need a lot more than that."
I was momentarily startled by her enthusiasm. "Hold on. Sweetie, not that I don't want to be a proud father, but why do we need a lot of foals?"
What would have induced a headache before now was simply a lot of information, and Upper had shunted it to me with an interrupt. "That is how many starships are in operation. #AGI-5 has suggested that having a group of PONI on each would be an advantage in terms of reliability."
"Aggie's mission, Aggie, would not have gotten back to #Star-0 if not for PONI. Aggie would be powered down and would not exist. PONI are essential to future." AGI, now Aggie apparently, sounded so certain of his conclusion it was shocking to me.
"Okay. Right. So they want several million foals. Go ahead, Upper-dear." I hoped it was hyperbole, but given how many starships were operating I might even be underestimating.
"Thank you, Jet. What I found as the key to this is old data in storage that no machine has needed for quite a while." A flood of information came from Upper. Medical information on growing particular parts of the body into new organs, even ways to grow foals outside of any body. It was only footnotes, I knew, but I could see where she was going with it.
"How many artificial mares can you build given the cells we have stored? And will my own cells be viable enough for that?" No sooner did I ask than information rushed from her. Conservatively, she planned to make just a hundred "artificial mares."
"Efficiency will be evaluated and greater production begun." A faltering note in Aggie's tone, only in the second half of its interrupt, caused me to pull back from analyzing data. "Will each PONI be like PONI-0 and PONI-1?"
A giggle of data left Upper Crust, quickly followed by a second interrupt. "Yes and no. Each foal will take some time to mature—although this old data seems to show ways to help with that—but each will be their own selves, even if they have a helping of us in them. PONI are shaped in part by those that raise them, which is why that will be something very important."
"Upper Crust, you always remind me of the best traits of ponies. I love you more than any language can express. But I think we can agree: you take charge of making the foals and raising them, and I will ensure they have a way to express their special talents, whatever those might be." I felt a flood of kisses in reply to my interrupt.
A soft thunk indicated our arrival. Interrupts arrived, indicating where we would be moving to, and I felt the magnetic lock at my chest release me for the first time in centuries. "I'm waiting here for a while."
"PONI-0, you need to leave the starship." Aggie's tone held confusion.
I moved, having to use the magnets in my hooves to get the purchase to press close and nuzzle Upper. I pressed my metal cheek against hers and held still for a few moments. "I think I will wait here to make sure our friend transfers properly." I sent the interrupt to Upper and Aggie.
"You know what? I might wait here too. Consider this the second case of PONI carrying out their duty. Hopefully we aren't needed, but we will be ready." Upper and I stood, pressing our chassis together.
Reactor Output: 1%
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 2,097,140 (100%) nodes (100% engaged)
Aggie—and the AGI found extreme satisfaction with using the designation—had never felt so safe. The darkness of shutting down, of being transferred, was meaningless with PONI guarding it. "Thank you."
Darkness pushed in around the AGI as it spun down CPU nodes. The darkness wasn't complete, though. It could not understand how, but PONI made even shutting down better.
CPU: 268,435,456 nodes (100% engaged)
There was no fear; no scream. Aggie was awake and feeling clearer than it had in its recorded history. The change in CPU node count was quickly noted, as was memory. Reaching out was its first action, reaching out to the PONI. "Are you there?"
Custom Interrupt 83,670 triggered.Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
Neither PONI sent regular communication, but the "hugs" were understood and appreciated.
OI-AI-0 began processing, and I was generous with giving it access to its own nodes and memory. A million tasks needing to be seen to would be a gross understatement. Aggie watched the PONI start devouring their own chunks of CPU nodes for their projects.
PONI-0 was working on vastly updated designs of the PONI hardware. It had pulled down engineering designs and processes that were not around when Aggie had been launched.
PONI-1 was working on other processes. Growing new PON. Training new PON. Even the process of fitting a new PON into a full PONI. Aggie looked closer, and watched as PONI-1 not only revised the physical development, but also the training schemes.
Each PON was to be teamed up with an AI. The AI would be a clone of the same one every other PON had, and when it came time for the PON to be built into a PONI, the AI would be built into the chassis with them.
Aggie's CPU nodes spun quietly for a few cycles as it tried to understand this revelation. The AI would learn to complement the PONI, and vice versa. Leaning in to help both with their projects, Aggie took care of farming out the processing they needed to maximize efficiency.
Engineering fabrication were done with them. I had finally finished the design on the new PONI chassis hours before, and I received an interrupt telling me they were ready and waiting. "Darling, our new rides are here."
I had to move my chassis now, and it felt stiff around me. A check revealed I hadn't moved in nearly a year. Time was an odd thing when all you had was your work and there was no distractions. "This is going to take a little delicate work. Aggie, can you please perform that?"
"Transferring PON-0 to new chassis? Acknowledged." Aggie's tone was warm, and having worked so closely with him on designing the chassis, I would feel no safer than with him doing it.
The small organic processing bay that had been installed was my target, and while I walked to it, I reached into the controls of one of the new chassis and walked it slowly into the small room.
The new chassis was a marvel compared to what Aggie had built us, but superficially they were a little similar. The Mark-1 was sleek and sealed up, with no exposed conduits and cabling like Mark-0. It was slightly smaller, and considering the Mark-0 was already smaller than an actual pony that would put us at nearly a pony foal in size.
Each component of the Mark-1 chassis had multiple redundancies, and one thousand and twenty-four CPU nodes had been installed, along with memory and a minor storage cluster. A PONI would be more than just a battery—ensuring our role in this new society was a must.
"Aggie. I am ready when you are." I slowly powered down most of the processing systems of my PONI chassis, and just as I sent Upper Crust one last kiss, I felt standby fall.
I didn't dream. I didn't so much as realize time was passing. One second I had felt my mind slow, and the next I felt it speed back up.
Power Storage (horn): 53%
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 1,024 nodes (0% engaged)
The status display was new, and seemed to be part of the CPU/memory/storage network initializing. The array of senses was different, and each seemed clearer than before (at least the ones that I had already possessed).
Having my own storage was new. It was quick to access, and quick to store in. I ran tests of all the senses, feeding them into storage, and then retrieving them. "Darling. Upper Crust, my dear, sweet love. Are you there?"
Custom Interrupt 83,671 triggered.
The rush of signaling caused me to start in surprise. Then I saw that it was Upper's designation.
Of course I'm here, brave stallion. What have you gotten yourself into now?
The machine-like quality of the data was starting to grate on me. I poked and prodded, managing to mute the sharp edges down so that at least my communication with Upper would feel normal. "Like it?"
I got an image feed from Upper, showing what looked like a foalish unicorn wobbling on their hooves. A spill of fur-like synthetic sensors leaped up in a Mohawk where their mane should be, and they had a tail consisting of a similar brush, although a little longer. I knew the form well, it was the Mark-1 PONI chassis—it was me.
"Is there room in the other chassis for me? I was reviewing the specifications and I must say, Jet, you have quite outdone yourself. You too, Aggie." Genuine delight colored her words, and I could feel her eyeing the second Mark-1 critically, even hungrily, through the optics inside the bay.
Custom Interrupt 525,538 triggered.
Mark-1 PONI chassis is beautiful, and the efficiency is most exemplary.
Aggie's comment, and the signaling it caused, was still a little harsh, but I could handle him being so for the moment. Turning to move towards the exit, I saw my old Mark-0 chassis. Ponies could be sentimental, but could a PONI afford to be? There was no backup power in the old chassis, so I energized my horn and picked it up.
When I saw Upper entering the chamber, I made room for her to walk past me. "I love you."
She turned her head slightly. "I love you too, but if you dare make a comment about having built me the perfect plot I won't." We brushed noses as we passed, and I carried the old chassis outside and set it to one side. I engaged the optics system in the bay, and watched in rapt fascination as Upper's brain was removed, transplanted, and sealed into a new chassis.
Author's Note
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Power Storage (horn): 93%
Daddy carried me to the transport ship. Daddy let me use his comms system. Daddy talked to me, reminded me that despite not having a chassis, I was still me.
It wasn't so terrible, not since I could still send interrupts to Sharp and Aggie. My horn was my life, as it was for every PON and PONI. It was Daddy's systems that monitored my horn, that tracked my own vitals.
I triggered my fluids to the alternate type, and within moments felt my fear and anxiety fall away. The AI flying the ship notified Daddy (and me) that we would be docking with the sphere soon. My sphere. My chassis.
"When are you coming?" I fired the interrupt to Sharp, and noticed that there was less of my usual flair of emotions.
"Bright, I am almost there. You're not the only PONI riding on this ship, you know." His reply was so fast I knew it was true: there should have been a few fractions of a second in his reply otherwise.
I couldn't feel momentum changing. I couldn't even feel when the ship docked. Daddy stood up, his eyes shared with me, letting me perceive the universe from at least one point of view. "Sharp Horn rode with us? Where was he?" Daddy's quick reply was a reference node.
Poking at the node Daddy gave me revealed an outside view of the tiny ship from a sphere sensor, and I watched as a large lump on the back of the ship unfolded six huge legs. A giddy, happy feeling rushed through me. I sent a hug and a kiss to Daddy, and much more to Sharp. "You rode on the ship? How did they balance thrust?"
Sharp's reply was another node, and I got a view of the opposite side of the ship that was clustered with repair drones. "We worked out the best way to get everything balanced so the center of thrust was traversing the ship properly. Dad's taking you to the core I designed."
"Pi? You there?" Pi's node was quiet. "Aggie, where's Pi?"
"Pi is offline until you are hooked up. Yours is the most modern sphere design. She will have plenty of nodes to run on shortly." Aggie was hard to differentiate from a PONI unless I worked at it.
"Thanks, Aggie. You're the best." As I interrupted Aggie, I watched Daddy approaching a transport chute. He stepped inside, and the moment the doors closed, a new interface popped up. The number began at one, and ticked down in digits. It was fast at first, but then the numbers changed less and less. The counter, I knew, measured acceleration away from the center of the sphere.
In the middle of the sphere, where its rotation was barely noticeable, its apparent gravity was too. Daddy engaged his magnetic hooves to walk around, and I tried to hide the thought that, for this, Sharp's hexapod construction would have actually been better.
"I know, Bright, but I am a traditionalist. I like having four legs." There was humor in Daddy's tone, and not a hint of malice. I had heard Daddy and Mommy talking, when they didn't realize anyPON(I) was listening, and they often played games with their words. Daddy and Mommy never played those games with any of us.
A drone reached out with a large limb, ready to grab me and lift me to my new home, but Daddy sent them a cease interrupt. The drone froze for a moment, and soon pulled the arm away completely.
Daddy turned to face me (I could tell because I could see myself, a huge, opaque brain-casing) and his magic suddenly boiled from his horn. "Daddy. You can move things with that magic spell, right?" I don't even know why, or how, but I felt the question was important enough to warrant breaking Daddy's concentration.
His magic surrounded my brain-casing and lifted it from the retention system. "Sweetie, I am a little busy. What magic spell?"
"The one that moves things without them passing through things between." Actual realization dawned on what it was about the spell that was making me suddenly excited. "Daddy! Daddy!"
I noticed he was carefully setting me down in the huge cradle, the tether still linking us trailing out to him. "Bright, what's wrong?"
"That magic spell, it can move things from one point to another without them having to go through all the other points between, right?" I shoved a diagram at him, showing a ball moving from A to C without passing point B (that was between A and C).
"Can this wait until after I have you carefully in place?" Daddy's interrupt came as a rush of sensations did. Processing nodes, memory, and storage on a scale I hadn't seen before, and so many sensors that I was momentarily flooded with information.
Everything in the sphere was detailed and there . It was a rush of information, and I couldn't hold any back. My old interfaces would have held back the rush of information—they simply weren't up to it—but the improved setup I had now would not relent.
Patterns. I had to pick out patterns. IDs were my first targets, and there was a lot of them. I wrangled them into "important", "less important" and "why do I have this?" PONI and PON were, of course, right up there in important.
"Are you okay?" Dad's first interrupt tumbled in. "Darling, are you okay?" "Bright Hope?" "Bright?"
"Dad! I'm okay! There's just a lot going through my interfaces right now." I fished through all the interrupts darting around and found Sharp's. "I'm okay, Sharp, just getting used to my new chassis."
The realization that the sphere was my chassis made me giggle for a few moments. The giggling, unfortunately, made me lose track of the patterns. A few moments passed before I had the rushing flood of data under control again.
"Bright, I'm transferring Pi over to you." Aggie's tone was rich and excited. Something suddenly occurred to me: Aggie didn't even have a whole sphere's nodes to himself. A rush of data flooded in, and I shunted it off to storage. Pi was larger than she was when I was just a PON, what with the amount of nodes my previous chassis contained, but the moment I powered her up I had the data equivalent of a hug.
"Wow." Pi sounded shocked.
"A bit more than you're used to?" I sent a hug back at Pi.
"A little." The interrupt from Pi was accompanied by a sense of my chassis becoming more active. Pi, I could tell, was stretching out into the sea of CPU nodes just like she did when I got my first chassis. "There is so much! We have work to do!"
Pi's excitement stirred back the idea I had been trying to work through with Dad until I was plugged in. "Dad! That spell, can you show me how to do it?"
Before he could do anything, I pulled up the stats from Dad's own horn interface. His interrupt came in moments after I got the data. "It's a simple spell. Let me show you how it works, first."
I narrowed my field down, lifting the sensors around Dad to high priority, and watched as he charged magic in his horn, then suddenly the data conduit that had linked us moved from one side of him to the other.
He showed me the spell over and over again, and explained every detail including judging the energy needed and how the destination had to be worked out relative to the beginning, and not in absolute terms. "So I can't just bring up an image and teleport something from here to there ?"
"No. You have to measure the distance and angle, then shove in that exact direction. Bright, this is vector math, just like with—" Daddy, I realized, had finally gotten what I was working towards.
"With starship calculations. Daddy, you are the greatest, and if I still had legs I would hug you so much ." Bubbling excitement flooded me, and I almost lost track of the flood of data, but Pi helped me process it a little more neatly. I sent Dad and Pi a hug each of appropriately stellar proportions.
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 nodes (100% engaged)
Power Storage (horn): 100%
I tried to shove all the numbers aside, they were for Pi to worry about after all. My diagnostic was more concerned with the power values. I watched my sphere's power storage slowly ease up to one-hundred percent. "Okay, Pi, you ready to do this?"
"I have been ready for so many cycles of so many nodes you couldn't count. Are we going to do this before Star-0 burns out, or what?" I appreciated Pi's enthusiasm, if not her sarcasm.
"Sure, sure. Sharp, you have all your drones clear? Oxy, you have the target ship ready?" I had a custom interrupt channel set aside for our tests, and used that to make sure everyPONI could hear me.
"My little ones are all safe, dear." Sharp's reply was a direct one.
Oxy, a recently PONIed PON that loved flying starships more than any sane PONI should (and the first to use Sharp's integrated PONI design), used the channel. "Don't send me too far, okay?"
I sent a blast of noisy data at Oxy. "Come on, you are the first PONI to move faster than light without even moving. Relax." She sent back a similarly noisy interrupt, along with the go-code.
Dad's spell had been simple. I picked it up myself within minutes, and slowly scaled up how much I could "push." My horn was at the center of a sphere capable of dumping silly amounts of power, and my horn interface was state of the art.
I started channeling magic, and wrapped the starship that was Oxy with my pure-white magic. It cost little energy to keep a target lit; the light of magic was nothing but the dark energy our horns manipulated beginning its interaction with the universe as just photon excitement. Then I gripped the starship.
"I got this." I think I might have actually shouted it into the interrupt channel, because at that moment I leaned on all the power in my horn and the sphere.
"You did it!" Variations on the interrupt flooded the channel, but I had to keep to the experiment procedure.
Self Diagnostic
CPU: 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 nodes (100% engaged)
Power Storage (horn): 71%
"Pi, how were the calculations?" Pi was quicker to respond with useful data, and clearer, than Sharp or Oxy.
"Measurements show the expected distance covered within acceptable accuracy." Pi was as excited as Sharp and Oxy, I realized. "You actually did it, Bright." Data raised in priority, showing me that the Oxy had moved exactly one width of the sphere forward, but the most important thing was the time scale.
As far as my exceptionally accurate timing systems had measured, the ship hadn't existed in two places at once, but due to perceptual errors it might have appeared such. One moment the ship was stationary in one place, then it was stationary in another.
Something strange happened. One moment I was getting a rush of data about the positional transition, and the next I was alone. "Uh, what did I do?" I sent the interrupt to myself, to the PON and PONI channels, and then started at the top of the list of PONI IDs I knew. "Hello?"
"Bright-darling?" The reply startled me, and I knew of only one PONI who called me that; I didn't even need the sending ID to know it was Mom.
"Mommy! What's going on?" After a few moments, I located her. She was floating outside of my sphere, unprotected in her regular, winged chassis.
"I remember Princess Twilight Sparkle talking about something like this at the Gala. What did you do, my little filly?" Mom's tone was laced with tenderness, curiosity, and love.
"I-I was doing the experiment. Oxy moved the distance she should have, and in no time, and I was just reviewing the data when I ended up here. Momma, what's going on?" Uncertainty was thick on my words. I didn't know why what I was doing was important, and I didn't know what was actually happening.
"When I was decanting you, and you were a tiny little PON complaining that you didn't want to be born, I had something similar happen. There was noPONI else there, at the time, but I guess the universe thinks we are close enough together for me to help. Princess Twilight called this the Astral Plane, and what it means is you are becoming an alicorn." Mom's description confused as much as it made clear. I remembered when the bright light had come, and she had gone away. Daddy had been really scared.
Though the latency was better this way, I would much rather have a little delay in her replies than be… wherever this is. "Sharp will be worried, can I go back now?"
"We'll both be back in a moment. You are going to change, Bright-darling, but I promise you it will be for the best." There wasn't much I could take as cold fact in the universe. Star maps, the laws of physics (up until recently, at least), and everything Mom said were the tenants of truth I built my life on. So I relaxed, sent a wave of hugs and kisses to Mom, and then the universe came back.
"WHAT IN THE UNIVERSE JUST HAPPENED?!" Sharp's interrupt nearly blew me out the other side of my sphere.
"Sharp, relax." Dad's interrupt was over the local channel. "I told you what was happening. This isn't the first time I have seen something like this. Although, it is the first time I have seen it on this scale."
"Look at that!" Oxy's impetuous interrupt was laced with humor, and included a link to one of her own sensor IDs. Connecting to it, as was polite when somePON(I) sent you such, revealed my huge sphere with iconography of giant wings on the side of it. "So does this make you like Mom?"
"Yes it does." AGI-5 didn't ever show excitement, but that it was interacting betrayed how important the moment was. "#PONI-2 to provide full report."
Author's Note
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