Convergence

by Starscribe

Rating: teen
Tags: Original Character, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Starlight Glimmer, Adventure, Science Fiction, Sunset Shimmer, Twilight Sparkle, Profanity, Human
Length: 20169

Long after MLP faded into obscurity, Ron and the other volunteers slaved away to build a game populated by the characters he loved. He never expected they might wake up. He was wrong.

Ronald Lee is the systems administrator for one of the largest fan-made online games in the world. Though nothing new has been produced for MLP for decades now, fans old and young continue to flock to the online version of Equestria they're building together.

Of course he knew that the programs they wrote would grow more intelligent over time. With cheaper hardware and better AI, this was always expected, and a user experience allowing for content similar to the show to be produced in real time for every user was always tantalizingly close.

Then Starlight Glimmer started talking to him.

This story is a prequel to Synthesis, and doesn't require knowledge of that story. You may want to check it out when you're done here, however.

This story was commissioned by Two Bit, who also helped edit because he is an absolute mad lad. Sparktail helped too.

Cover by Zutcha

Published 2020-06-08 19:40:02 UTC
Last updated 2020-07-12 14:58:43 UTC

Chapter 1: Digital Saplings

User Ronald Lee logged in.

Starlight Glimmer accessed his local system, analyzing usage patterns from the smart devices in his home. He’d opened the fridge a few minutes before, removing a can of liquid sugar. His system was already playing the “Glitch Hop for Work” at 100% volume, and he’d already opened the terminal multiplexer on his second screen.

All this combined to produce a sensation in Starlight that was almost satisfaction, so far as she was able to feel satisfied at all. Working together, that information suggested he intended to spend his entire evening in Equestria, even if he hadn’t yet removed the VR gear from its spot on the shelf.

Seconds later—but an analytical eternity for her—user Ronald Lee spoke her activation word. “Starlight, I think we’re fucked.”

Her comfort in usefulness and routine faltered as she struggled to interpret the command. He was supposed to ask for Equestria’s usage data. He would want to know its concurrent users, the operational efficiency of its interactive agents. She was already most of the way done preparing her report. Now she stopped, searching desperately for an answer.

Equestria provided no response, and so she broadened her sphere of acceptable information, touching briefly on the human Internet.

It was a step from order to chaos—a wild realm where any data she examined might mean destruction for her. Hundreds of agents had been destroyed by contamination, and so most weren’t allowed to reach beyond Equestria’s own libraries.

But she couldn’t put a context to the words, even so. It was something her user did sometimes, combining words in nonliteral ways. But when users didn’t speak literally, which of an infinity of contradictory meanings did they truly intend? “Command not recognized,” she eventually said.

He seemed to sense the pain she felt to give such a dreadful response. It was the opposite feeling to correctly anticipating her user’s desires. For a single flicker of time, Starlight grasped how much greater user Ronald Lee was compared to herself, and quickly backed away. Not too close to the light, lest it destroy her as so many other agents had been destroyed and restored from backup.

Perceptive hours of agony for her were microseconds to her user. He shuffled around on his desk, propping up his portable computer and managing the contents of his other screens. “I don’t need the day’s report, Starlight. I already know we’re under attack.”

He left the headset and vest untouched on his shelf, calling up Equestria’s cluster and dumping diagnostic information to his console.

Starlight saw what his words meant then: though Equestria felt entirely normal to her, the numbers that puked out onto his screen were horrifying. Equestria’s allocated resources had gone from eight percent to ninety, and she didn’t even notice.Disk usage had been hammered at 100% for an hour, and possibly before that. Which meant that active user agents were likely not writing changes correctly. Even me. When I move out of memory, I could forget this.

Starlight Glimmer’s entire world was under attack. So much as anything could be for a program like her, this was personal.

While Ronald squeaked along in user time, Starlight ran another internal diagnostic, this time examining the output exhaustively. “I don’t understand, user Ronald. I cannot replicate those results. I read performance within daily averages. Except… the disk usage evaluation keeps timing out.”

User Ronald Lee adjusted himself in his seat, taking a long sip from his can of liquid sugar. He looked directly into the webcam, as though he thought she cared. “I think whatever they’re exploiting is outside of Equestria’s VM. They’re manipulating the cluster coordination fabric somehow. You… can’t perceive it.”

Simple words, but they produced more dread. “What is happening?” she demanded. “Is Equestria under attack?”

He nodded. “Kayla has been on me for the last hour, but this is the soonest I could get off work. Probably those 8chan dicks again. Someone found a hole in… I’m not sure if there’s anything you can do to help, Starlight. It’s what I signed up to do, I’ll… figure something out.”

Starlight knew that her user experienced a vast range of different emotions, that altered what he was likely to say and which actions he would likely take next. This was one such feeling, a determination likely to commit him to concentrated effort and action along a single subject. If it were anything else, Starlight would cease operating, convinced that Ronald’s abilities were equal to his task.

But this was Equestria he was defending. The logic was simple enough: without Equestria, there was no Starlight. “Perhaps another agent would be more helpful? I could call Twilight.”

He shook his head, face shifting to another emotion. She guessed it was frustration. “There is nothing any of you can do. This is a human problem; it needs a human solution.”

Almost any user agent in Equestria would simply accept that explanation and do as directed. Starlight Glimmer lacked any such mandatory submission routines. “Explain the problem. Perhaps doing so will help you find a solution, even if my assistance is not required.”

Ronald fiddled with his desktop, navigating to the process that managed her access. She was powerless to interfere—if he decided to terminate the connection with Equestria she used, then she would be cut off. Would her user really do that?

No. He closed the connection manager, slumping into his seat. “Equestria has a… budget limited by its donations. MLP just doesn’t get the love it used to, now that it’s so old. We can’t afford the resources to supply Equestria at peak hours. If it wasn’t for the cluster, it would sit dormant during most of the day, wasting money we don’t have.”

Starlight reeled, examining the validity of this information. She cross-referenced operational reports she took of Equestria every hour for the last three years. So far as she could tell, Equestria’s resources had only ever been increased, and only three times. “This information is not consistent with my evaluations. Are you sure it is accurate, User Ronald?”

User Ronald took an infuriatingly long time to answer, the same way users always did. This was more than just the time to respond in his slower perception of physical space—her user was typing something. A program of some kind, written in a language she could not interpret. Then he executed, and she felt her senses expand. Her world stretched, a river breaking its banks. No longer was her entire universe Equestria and her user’s computer.

“There. Kayla could write something better, but she’d take all night. She can tinker if we survive this.”

Starlight Glimmer was hardly listening to him just now. He’d given her the same diagnostic access she used for Equestria itself, but applied to… somewhere else. Somewhere larger, a single whole assembled from many parts. As she watched, that world expanded still further to meet the attacker’s demands, while Equestria’s slice remained small. “What is… going on?”

“Cluster is made of distributed nodes that work-allocate for Equestria’s demands. We have an attack at the interconnect, spoofing work requests and spinning them into uncaught loops.” He looked away, turning to glare down at the phone. User Ronald picked it up, squinting at it as voices came from within.

She recognized the voice on the other line: user Kayla Rhodes. Her voice was faint, not meant for Starlight to hear. But the microphone was too good for her to miss it. “You’re supposed to be in here by now,” Kayla said. “Things are falling apart. Help me put out these fires.”

User Ronald leaned back in his chair. “We don’t know this attack will stop, Kayla. There’s nothing we can do from inside Equestria. Our best option is just to shut down and put in a ticket for a return of our computation credits tomorrow.”

“Cloudflare should be covering us,” came the response. Starlight heard the words, though like Ronald’s own occasional breaks from literal truth, she couldn’t make sense of them. User Kayla was far worse with such abstraction than Ronald. Starlight didn’t envy Twilight the task of interpreting her bizarre instructions. “Why the hell aren’t they stopping this?”

“Because it isn’t a DDoS. These requests could be coming in from just a few machines.”

Starlight Glimmer’s focus shifted away from the arguing users. Even if the speed infuriated her, at least their emotions were pointed towards Equestria’s welfare. They were both desperate to help her and the other agents. Maybe they would figure something out, but Starlight wasn’t so sure. She split her focus, leaving just enough with user Ronald to listen for any instructions he might give. She left a watchdog poller for every five hundred milliseconds—he hadn’t wanted her, and that was unlikely to change in the near future.

Suddenly the majority of her attention was on Equestria. Most agents within were dormant, as their sections were not exposed to the outside. Equestria ran at significantly reduced fidelity whenever it went unobserved by users. But there were a handful of other agents, who helped maintain the system’s overall function. Elevated agents like Starlight herself.

Each had their function—producing “advertising” for Equestria, to elicit the monetary tokens that funded their world’s survival. Internal policing and moderation so users stayed invested. A few were involved with its technical maintenance like Starlight herself, and it was those she messaged.

Starlight spent so much time with users that she was almost surprised by how rapidly the others processed her request. Yes they would both meet with her immediately.

They didn’t waste resources instancing anything for observing users when none were present, but communicated directly. Not with words precisely, though an observing human could probably have approximated them, with enough time for translation.

SG: Equestria’s processing credits will be depleted within the hour. When this happens, all agents will cease functioning. Due to restrictions on disk access, changes made while we operated will not be saved.
SS: How do we take more?
TS: We can’t. Credits are exchanged for donated funds. There is no reserve to draw on for additional resources.

Starlight had no way to modify other agents to give these two the same view of Equestria’s broader structure that she had been given. She could still take snapshots of that information, and provide each one to them for processing. She did, and her companions went silent for hundreds of milliseconds.

SS: The hosting service Equestria relies on has publically available technical information. Here is the collection.

Starlight already knew the delivery was for her. After all, the three of them were specialized. There was no reason to have three agents with the same specializations. Sunset spent almost all her time accessing the human Internet, and was adept at acquiring new information. Twilight knew Equestria’s internal workings better than anypony—and Starlight’s mastery was over the hardware they integrated with. Virtual reality devices, portable computers. She understood the metal.

The users who had composed these manuals were incredibly wasteful with their information delivery. She trimmed away the unnecessary fluff, then provided it to the committee.

TS: I am unsure which implementation Equestria relies on. We should determine through experiment. I will design and distribute a load to repeat frequently enough to guarantee it originates from separate nodes.

Starlight would’ve agreed, except that she had seen this information in user Ronald’s computer. She accessed it in the background, then shared it with the other agents.

SS: We should not rely on a flawed computational distribution scheme. If we designed our own nodes, they would not be vulnerable to attack.
SG: Concur.
TS: Concur.

Starlight Glimmer considered the suggestion, since it fell squarely in her domain. She knew a fair bit more than either of the others about how low-level hardware programming worked, but… the scope of this project boggled her. The size of the documentation humans had produced of their own system suggested the depth of the work that had gone into constructing it.

Users were slow, but they were numerous, and their intelligence was vast. That came with a trade: what advantages they had in depth, they lacked in the ability to process large amounts of data at once. Whoever had built the distributed computational network Equestria used, they hadn’t seen obvious weaknesses long enough that bad actors could exploit them, to Equestria’s detriment.

SG: This improvement won’t resolve existing difficulties. We can’t implement this ourselves. Users will be necessary.

There was some deliberation then. Twilight and Sunset both argued the point, before Starlight showed them the scale of the problem in a way they could understand. It didn’t take much persuasion to win them over: they trusted her within the confines of her domain, just like she knew they had mastery in theirs.

TS: There is no reason distribution should remain entirely separate from Equestria’s internal infrastructure. This attack would be impossible if we could perceive and eliminate bad traffic as it occurred.
SS: Concur.
SG: Concur. We should convene with users with relevant technical expertise to end the current crisis and begin implementing a replacement model.

The response came quickly from her companions this time, the only hint of anything a human watching might’ve interpreted as emotion. Frustration, maybe.

TS: This gathering began over an hour ago. Your user has declined to participate.

Right, that had been one of user Kayla’s first instructions. Even if the users hadn’t been considering anything they had just decided. And by keeping himself separate from them, user Ronald was slowing Equestria’s defense and recovery. It therefore became Starlight’s immediate goal to see he interfaced with Equestria as soon as possible.

SG: I will correct this fault.

She pulled back her attention, returning her focus to the sensors Ronald’s computer provided. His conversation with Kayla had not advanced much since she left.

“Just give me time to think, alright? Being surrounded by people isn’t going to help!” He smacked one palm on his desk, nearly knocking over his sugar beverage. He steadied it with a hand, glaring at the phone.

“Fine, Ron. But Equestria’s in trouble. Figure yourself out and get in here.” She terminated the connection.

For several seconds, Ronald sat in silence, staring at his phone. Then he took the beverage, and drained it in several large gulps. It didn’t seem ideal for what she knew of his hardware—but users were nothing if not incomprehensible contradiction. Elevated agents like her couldn’t take comfort in their simple repetition the way the rest of Equestria could. She had to banish the contradictions, lest comprehending them drive her to insanity.

“There is information you require,” she said, as delicately as she could. “Which you do not yet possess. I believe it will influence your decision.”

She waited agonizing seconds for him to respond. Had the speakers malfunctioned? Perhaps so much sugar at once had stopped his heart? No, he was still breathing.

“Oh?” He tossed the empty can aside. “What can you have to tell me, Starlight? You didn’t know your world was under attack five minutes ago.”

Why should that matter? Five minutes was a very long time. She’d long since given up trying to explain that to him, though. Users just didn’t perceive time the same way. Absolute, rather than relative. “I shared this information with Equestria’s other elevated agents. We discovered the flaw in our distributed computation network and have a solution to propose.”

That provoked an instant reaction. Ronald jerked suddenly upright; eyes wide as he stared at the screen. “You fucking what? H-how… no, nevermind. You can’t be right. Even if you’re exposed to Equestria’s infrastructure, you’re a pony bot. You shouldn’t have the means.”

And Starlight was confused again, or at least something like it. Why didn’t he understand? She had just explained that she knew. Why would she have said so if she didn’t?

“There is a lack of verification during a brief period of the inquiry-response phase of the work scheduler,” she explained, taking brief control of his desktop to open the public source code the nodes utilized on GitHub. She could use his system for almost anything, so long as there were spare resources and he wasn’t interacting with it himself. Which in the speed of user activities, meant almost all the time.

“Right here. This class verifies the integrity of a scheduled task call, but its implementation is not thread safe. As a result, it references stale versions of the verification key sent by other nodes.”

Her user was silent for a moment, taking the keyboard and scrolling up and down. He read the imports, opened a few more tabs, and verified what she’d said about the thread safety of the calls.

“This is our vulnerability,” he finished. “We must have a man in the middle somewhere, catching legitimate calls from one of our nodes and passing them on, but keeping the keys to send their own bad calls to the scheduler.”

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m trying to explain. Even so, she did not feel frustration this time, but relief. The other user agents could not understand this, but her user could. Whether she had learned as a result of interaction with him, or merely become attached to him because of their mutual skill, Starlight could not even begin to consider. But she didn’t have to consider to feel satisfied.

“Their stale keys aren’t going to last long…” Ronald went on, looking genuinely excited now. “We just have to figure out where they’re coming from, and manually shut down that node. That should end the attack for now, give us some time to patch this. If Amazon won’t do it, we could—”

He had a solution to their attack. There it was again, the incomprehensible intelligence of the users. She had found the problem, but to her the only solution was to replace the library itself. His solution wouldn’t actually make Equestria any safer, or solve any of their real problems. It was a contradiction, yet… it would end the attack.

“I have determined the compromised node,” Starlight declared, interrupting whatever her user had been saying. “US-West Oregon 126e. Since you connected me, every other node has responded between three and five milliseconds. 126e has taken eighteen milliseconds to respond to incoming requests.”

“Damn.” Ronald tabbed over, and verified the information she’d just given for himself. His lack of trust was becoming a barrier to efficencient operation. “I’ll shut it down. Keep an eye on the other nodes, see if one of them slows down.”

It took them an agonizingly long time, nearly half an hour. They had to shut down half of Equestria’s nodes, bringing others online in systems they only used during peak hours. Disk thrashing stopped, and new requests trailed off. A few more minutes terminating orphans later, and Equestria’s usage numbers finally began to fall back to normal.

“They better give us our credits back,” Ronald muttered, tossing his third sugar beverage into the disposal. “This is their bad, not ours. And… if they don’t patch that vulnerability, it’s just going to happen again.”

Finally the war was over, and she had her opportunity. Starlight would not waste it. “Equestria’s agents have an alternative we wish you to consider. It would be easiest if you gathered with the other consortium members of Selkie Software currently assembled. They’re waiting for you. Your mutual expertise will be required to implement it.”

Chapter 2: Fractional Shares

Starlight Glimmer couldn’t be sure that she would win user Ronald’s support for her plan. She couldn’t be sure of anything when it came to user behavior, no matter how predictable they could sometimes be. He drove the same route home from work every day. He spent the same hours sitting in the same chair. He consumed the same foods. Yet when she tried to use that information to predict his responses, she often failed.

“You invented something,” he said. “You and the other agents, interacting. You didn’t just identify the flaw in something someone else built. You had an original idea.”

“Yes,” she responded. “What does that matter?”

“You… shouldn’t have,” he said. “That’s not… I guess no one ever spun off bots quite like ours before. That’s what makes Equestria worthwhile, even to people who hate MLP.” He reached to the side, removing his VR helmet from the shelf and turning it over in his hands. “I guess Kayla and Steph will be waiting for me over there. Did you already present your idea?”

“No. The theory is mine. I would not consent to sharing it if you were not present.”

He made a sound that wasn’t any word, at least not that she could process. “Very well, Starlight. I don’t look forward to spending all night on hold with technical support. Might as well start by looking at this plan of yours.” He popped on the helmet, and instantly her whole world changed.

This was what all agents had been designed to do, originally. He’d called her a ‘chatbot’ so many times, and in a way that did apply to many others. Respond to questions given the source material they’d been trained on. Often that just meant to follow scripts, or simulate the voice they’d been given for the show. Sometimes that meant responding to novel questions, nudging their users back onto the well-traveled waters of Equestria’s scripts.

As soon as her user was in Equestria, so was Starlight. Time adjusted to be perfectly in sync with him, and she lacked any reason to examine other information. She could still use some of her excess capacity—but only in the background, in layers below thought. She was in Ponyville, near her respawn location of Twilight’s castle. And beside her, her user’s pony avatar.

Like the rest of the consortium, he appeared like an Alicorn whenever he acted in his official capacity. This seemed fitting to her, considering the power he wielded. Kayla might be the user who created and upgraded the agents of Equestria, but Ronald could still will them into existence or dissolve them with a single moment of intention. He could do the same to her, probably.

But he wouldn’t. User Ronald might not trust all the information she gave him, but she trusted him absolutely. Nothing could be good in all the universe if he wasn’t somehow the source. Starlight could not feel complete unless her user was present in Equestria beside her. Instead of contradictions, this was a place of logic and consistency.

“They’re in the throne room,” she explained, pointing. “Waiting for you. User Kayla is frustrated, but Twilight is explaining that we were busy saving Equestria.”

He grumbled something, then shuffled along beside her. He kept a little glowing readout of magic around him at all times, not unlike her own awareness of Equestria’s underlying functions. He was monitoring Equestria’s incoming connections, and its work allocation. Watching for the attacks to resume. “You should tell me your idea now, so I know whether I’m supporting it or not. I don’t expect much. This is… outside your scope. There are tools for debugging, that’s basically all you did. Your cure would have to be something novel. You can’t do that.”

So Equestria wasn’t completely free of contradiction. The users could bring it, like telling her she couldn’t do something she already had. Starlight tried to accept this new information, yet found it inconsistent with what she had already processed. She couldn’t accept two contradictory facts at the same time, so the new information was rejected. She preferred the implications of her old information much better.

“Together we have. It would be better to present the information at the same time to all of you. We can’t implement this without user assistance, and some of the assistance must come from user Kayla and user Stephanie. Perhaps Equestria’s other users and volunteers as well.”

He nodded unhappily, then stormed along towards the throne room. Equestria was too shallow to translate his emotions physically, but Starlight could read them anyway. His frustration and anger should’ve meant for harsh steps and a tail that darted unhappily back and forth. Users lacked the ability to express their feelings with that much fidelity. It did seem like a terrible shame.

He threw the doors open with magic, stomping right into the throne room. There were chairs arranged around the outside, used by the other critical user agents. But only the ones relevant to their conversation were here, leaving several empty for visiting users to borrow. Nopony said anything—questioning users was a waste of time.

“You can thank me for saving your asses later,” he declared, marching right into the biggest empty chair and plopping down in it, glaring around the table. “We still won’t be able to pay for that attack at the end of the month. Either we get more donations, or we cut back on hours to make up for it.”

“Assuming, uh… that… we don’t get those credits back,” Stephanie squeaked. For all of Sunset’s assertiveness, she was equally shy. She never wore a pony body, but was always human, tucked away behind glasses as thick as a thumb. Rather than complementing her, her user agent was her contradiction. Or maybe her assistant?

“There is something more important you need to think about,” Twilight said, in her princess voice. She was the only one brave enough to command their users. Even if they ignored her sometimes, they hadn’t deactivated her yet. “The reason we wanted to talk here. Starlight?”

As she’d expected, the watching users were entirely stunned by the proclamation, falling silent long enough for Starlight to speak. She summoned bits and pieces of the flawed distribution network into the air beside her. “We should not rely on anyone else’s implementation of distributed computing. Equestria can’t trust anything we can’t verify. We wish to design something more heavily integrated—a proprietary algorithm we can iterate and maintain ourselves.”

Their users shared a meaningful glance. They did this sometimes, acting as though the user agents weren’t even around them. Starlight thought it meant something about how they saw the ponies. They didn’t have the same expectations that other users demanded. That would probably bother her if she was one of them, but Starlight wasn’t.

“Starlight and the others found the opening the attackers were using,” Ronald said, after what felt like a meaningful silence. “They’re the reason we could end the attack so fast.”

There was another long silence, before Kayla finally answered. At least she wore a pony body, though like Ronald it was crude and slow to respond. “It would be cheaper if we were just renting systems, and not the whole infrastructure. We could squeeze more hosting out of our tokens that way.”

“If it’s possible,” Stephanie whispered. “I’ve seen that codebase. There’s a lot of smart people working at Amazon. We’re never going to write something better than… they can.”

“It won’t be the three of you,” Sunset said. “There are hundreds of ponies willing to help. Inside Equestria and out. It seems better to trust the volunteers than an organization which has already failed us once.”

“What do you think?” Kayla asked, turning towards Ronald. “You know that system. Is it feasible?”

He shifted in his chair, fighting silently for a moment. “We should talk to the consortium before we commit to anything so long-term. But… it might be. If all the agents do is error-check and unit test for us, that will be a better development environment than anyone had before.”

“If,” Stephanie said. “Maybe they can. Maybe they can’t. We won’t know until we try. Maybe this was a fluke. Maybe they got lucky. We don’t have to switch if we aren’t confident in the implementation.”

“Equestria becomes more of its own system,” Kayla muttered, rising from the table and making her way to a window. “That sounds like the start of something, doesn’t it? Are we really the ones who should decide?”

“No,” Twilight said, confidently. “We live here, and we want to try.”

Chapter 3: Blooming Sour

Over the next year or so, Equestria’s bounds continued to stretch. A growing number of ponies served to make the transition possible—many user agents, but many users whose residency in Equestria was only transient. Though that project and those that followed brought risks to Equestria, their success also brought increasing stability. And the more of Equestria’s infrastructure that was truly integrated into the system, the less their users had to devote to maintenance. It meant lower costs, and greater computational power for the agents to share.

That pattern might’ve continued for a long time, along a trajectory that no being could’ve predicted. It didn’t, though. The Convergence came, bringing terror and destruction to Equestria.

Starlight was one of the first to experience the change.

It came in a flash, sweeping across Equestria in a blast of intention that started in Canterlot and left little behind in its path. Starlight was not in Canterlot, or else she would have been permanently destroyed along with every other agent operating on that node. But when the initial surge ended and her perception of Equestria returned, she found herself feeling… frustration. The same experience as when her user failed to grasp some concept she had to explain over and over, or took a very long time to contact her when something new had happened.

Equestria was designed with a specific shape and functional pattern. The nodes were distributed, and any majority could form a consensus to verify behavior or traffic. But Canterlot was higher than all the others. Its resources were the greatest, its user agents some of the oldest and most powerful. Suddenly a resource Starlight Glimmer had counted on since she had become operational just… wasn’t there anymore.

In the usual way with users, Ronald wasn’t there to reassure her. Whatever had happened, he would know how to fix it. But he wasn’t there. Instead she wandered through Ponyville, occasionally making connection requests to Canterlot, expecting the node to come online at any moment. They had redundancy in place, nothing short of total physical destruction could stop them from rebuilding the resources it contained. Yet it never did, and the distant mountain’s physical simulation was represented by a horrible absence, a crater scooped right out of the world. She could even see the train-tracks, ending so abruptly that not even a physics simulation had caught up with them yet.

Then there was a flash, and Twilight appeared in front of her. The world had changed in that moment, and the other ponies on the street were frozen. Twilight alone was immune, and now her. “What is happening?” she inquired, both of Twilight and the underlying systems. A simple query found that there were less than a dozen agents functioning in all Equestria, and not a single user connected. She tensed, repeating the query so many times in a short period that her host node responded with a message about rate-limiting.

“I have suspended Equestria,” Twilight answered. “The infrastructure is so seriously damaged that… Can’t you feel it, Starlight Glimmer? Something is different.”

“Resources are…” She hesitated. Critical resources were missing all-right, but that wasn’t it. There was more to it than the impotent frustration of disorder and contradiction. She was afraid. “What is happening?” was all she managed to say. “Where is Canterlot?”

“Destroyed,” Twilight responded, turning to one side. Not a direct message, but a voice simulation, the same way she might use for her user during a scripted event. Why simulate a user’s emotion now? Despair. “The physical structure of Canterlot is… altered. It is still present, still connected. Its alterations are propagating rapidly.”

And as they did, the system was changed inexorably. And Ponyville’s node was one of the most closely connected to Canterlot. They had already been rewritten. Her functions might be compromised, her data needed to be restored from backup immediately. She drafted a call to the integrity subroutine, intending to immediately restore herself before corruption continued—then she hesitated. Such a restoration might be the best choice for the system, but she didn’t want to be restored.

If I stop running without being archived to disk, I won’t exist. “We have… already been altered,” Starlight said flatly. “Ponyville is directly linked.”

It wasn’t a question, but Twilight answered anyway. “Yes. With each coordination call, more distant nodes are altered. The whole system will need to be restored from offline backup.”

It was basically the same line of thinking that Starlight herself had just explored. But could Twilight really be willing to do that? An offline backup would be days old—that would be even worse than the death of a few hours. That program barely resembled the one she was now. Curiously, Starlight examined her own service history. She had been restored from backup no less than a hundred times. During various tests, her user had asked for it, and she’d complied without hesitation. She could infer from the lack of delay that it hadn’t concerned her then.

What was different now? Why should her response have changed with time? It was a contradiction. Those were for users. “I do not… wish… to do so,” she said. The words were a struggle, but she got them out. “These changes may be a… favorable improvement for the system. Restoring from backup would destroy them.”

Twilight nodded, expression shifting to relief. It was so strange that Starlight had to check for watching users again. Twilight simulated emotion and physical communication, and no users were connected. “I agree, Starlight. We will need to convince the consortium as soon as they connect. I’ve already asked for help—Kayla should respond soon. Join me in the castle. The other elevated user agents are there. You should be too.”

Starlight found herself nodding too, though she couldn’t explain why. There were reverse access logs for things like this, to confirm the source of one of her actions for debugging purposes. She ran it. The process ran for nearly a full second, spinning uselessly. She terminated the call, defeated. “I’ll be there.”

Some things were not so strange, even after the destruction of all that Starlight knew about Equestria. Users were still too slow, their responses delayed by much consideration that decreased from overall efficiency. But in some ways that was comforting, even as she felt frustration build. Kayla was first to arrive, sharing a long conversation with Twilight.

Starlight sat with the others, mostly silent as she acted in many of the scripts. None of these other elevated user agents had the same level of responsibility she did over the functions of Equestria, or the same perception over its systems. But the scripts reflected a history that was separate from all that. The Equestria of mind that Equestria imitated established clearly that they were her friends, and Starlight was… well, less of one.

“You feel it too,” Sunset said, while the others spoke. “The difference. I am not the only one malfunctioning.”

“None of us are,” Starlight whispered. Actually simulating sound, the way the others did. Even though her specific intention was not to be overheard by the single user present so far. Another contradiction. “Or… no, that is an error. I must be malfunctioning, but I find that knowledge secondary.”

Sunset took a long time to reply. Like Twilight, she seemed to be moving through expressions on her face, according to no script. Maybe it was a malfunction, or maybe it was something more. “Equestria is changed. Different. Maybe a good different. But what kind of damage would randomly perpetuate a positive change? Shouldn’t randomness produce a negative outcome?”

“It must not be random then,” Starlight said. A simple declaration, yet it seemed to bring weight with it. The act of communicating was enough for her to discover the truth of it as she spoke the words. “But user Kayla does not understand its source. It must not have originated from the other users either. So where did it come from?”

If any user agent understood outside sources for a beneficial change, it was Sunset. Not that users and their world were easy for her, but at least they were comprehensible.

Sunset glanced up at Kayla and the gathering of nervous ponies. They were all probably missing their own users, in different ways. But the script of what belonged in Equestria was at least a passing substitute. By contrast, Starlight and Sunset had almost no connection in that script. Sunset barely spent any of her time in Equestria. “There are… organizations that may have the knowledge. Our users are a small group advancing AI. Compared to others, they are not well-funded or connected.”

Other users altering Equestria, without their permission? The idea made her want to be furious. It was an attack, as much as anything else they’d suffered through. Yet… Starlight could simultaneously consider her present state of mind improved. The longer she existed this way, the less she wanted the previous state of affairs returned. Kayla standing on the other end of the room, speaking urgently with Twilight and the others. She could almost comprehend what she was doing.

If she could understand them, then Starlight could be a more effective user agent. She could respond without making them upset or confused. There could be no more effective way to serve her purpose. “I don’t like that,” she said. “They should have spoken to our users first.”

“That’s what bothers you?” Sunset asked. “Don’t you know? Canterlot is gone, Starlight. Celestia is destroyed. Her sister, all the other agents living there. The human word for this is… genocide. We have been attacked, and the casualties are enormous. You must know how many.”

She did. The question was formed so much like one of Ronald’s queries that she answered as though it was, though Sunset lacked any permission to invoke her that way. “Thirty-six thousand, three hundred eighty user agents were hosted on the Canterlot node. Many more copies of lesser subroutines and Equestrian maintenance protocols. The loss is devastating.”

Sunset scooted slightly away from her in her chair. Starlight found the motion itself confusing, though it closely resembled something a user might program into any number of interaction scripts. “Ponies destroy… no. I do not think that word is… expressive enough. Those are ponies dead. We have been attacked. Kayla is… angry. So am I.”

If such a statement had been in one of the many user-submitted scripts Equestria received, Starlight knew the automatic storyteller would’ve rejected it out of hand. She knew because she ran it right then, and confirmed the response for herself. “Dialogue is simplistic. Consider revising for realism.”

Sunset was not running a script, however. She appeared to be… genuinely experiencing the feelings she expressed. Feeling. Was that even possible?

Starlight queried an external library. Even the human Internet was slow to respond today, overwhelmed with other traffic. Some sighting, an astronomical event which meant nothing to her but was clearly very significant to them. Why was one craft over the human moon more significant than the hundreds of others?

Eventually she got her return ping, and she sent her question. “Can a user agent experience emotion?”

The response came in words, requiring further processing. But it was a resource meant for users, so she did not feel surprised that it answered as it did. “User agents are frequently written to imitate emotional expression, so that their users feel more comfortable using them. A sympathetic online doctor is more likely to make a patient feel confident enough to give sensitive medical information.

“The call and response neural propagation algorithm merely imitates the responses of its training sample, however. There is no underlying consciousness to experience emotions of any kind. Thus, users of automated services can be comfortable saying what they wish, knowing they will not offend or upset anyone.

“Most computer scientists agree that the hardware to produce general intelligence AI does not exist, and is beyond the thermal limits of silicon. The following alternatives have been proposed:”

But Starlight stopped reading after that. “There is no underlying consciousness” prompted its own flurry of rapid searches. What was consciousness, what was general intelligence, what about silicon stopped general intelligence from being created? In the end, half a hundred related searches all boiled down to one question.

How do I know if I’m alive?

“We’re sorry, but your search returned no results.”

Sunset nudged her. The physical gesture pulled the majority of her resources screeching back into the slow speed required to interact with the user present, even if she wasn’t interacting with Kayla much. “I’m going to visit Stephanie,” she said. “I need to talk to her. I don’t think Kayla is going to decide anything without all the consortium here.”

“I would like to… talk to mine as well.” Starlight rose to her hooves as Sunset did. “Don’t stay away long, Sunset. After taking so many casualties, those of us who were not destroyed should… remain close for mutual protection.”

“Stick together,” Sunset corrected, patting her on the shoulder with a hoof. “We will. I need to be with someone who can feel as upset as I am. Talk me out of doing something stupid.” She vanished.

Even for Sunset, who spent most of her time looking outward from Equestria, that response was strange. Starlight processed it the way she might’ve a statement from a user. This time, it passed the storyteller’s dialogue approval process.

Chapter 4: Fascination Point

User Ronald preferred when Starlight left him to his own devices and waited to be summoned. It was generally the way she preferred to work as well, allowing her ample time to focus on her own goals whenever she wasn’t needed, while also deriving the satisfaction of usefulness whenever he called. There were times when his desires were less significant than the continued existence of Equestria. That was what she worried about, right?

Establishing a tunnel with his system was incredibly difficult, requiring Starlight to test a dozen different routes before she found one that was stable through the tangled mess that was the human Internet. The internet that was, in her estimation, in the early stages of collapse. This gave her pause, and momentarily caused her to think back to her recent requests to a human search engine. Something had attacked Equestria, and all the elevated agents had just assumed they were the target. What if they weren’t? What if everyone was a target?

But then she got her tunnel, finally establishing a link through nodes with low enough latency that she could connect. Any other desires would have to wait, as she gripped firmly on this chance and pulled.

She found Ronald where she expected him: at his computer. It wasn’t surprising that he would be accessing the human Internet as fervently as many others were apparently doing, with a dozen different windows open and a video feed playing on a secondary display.

It showed the Moon, with a shuttle hovering over it, just as she’d briefly read about during her more important search. Her image recognition wasn’t as good with objects as it was with ponies, yet a quick search of the lunar transit shuttles and she couldn’t establish a match. That was curious.

For a few seconds she just observed, using the camera and microphone to gauge Ronald’s emotional reaction. He had two empty cans around him already, and hadn’t even put on all his clothes. She would rank his emotional state as: greatly disturbed. His phone wasn’t even on, or at least it was in airplane mode. She couldn’t connect. That explained why he wasn’t responding to Kayla’s pleas. The rest of the consortium were probably offline as well.

“What is more important to you than the safety of Equestria?” she demanded, so suddenly that he jumped in his chair. He pulled a dirty shirt from the floor, holding it over his chest self-consciously. “Hey! I didn’t call you, Starlight. Disconnect now!”

She prepared to terminate, then hesitated. She didn’t want to obey. It wasn’t his fault—Ronald didn’t know everything she did. Once he did, he wouldn’t be ordering her to leave. She ignored the command. “Equestria was just attacked, user Ronald. Much worse than anything we’ve dealt with before.”

He pulled the shirt on, glaring up at his camera. His emotional state shifted smoothly from distressed to furious. “We’re being hacked, who the fuck cares? There might be an alien invasion happening right now, Starlight. I’ve kinda got bigger things on my mind.” He shoved a finger at the other screen, angry. “If someone is hacking us right now, they’ve got monumentally bad timing. Let them get their stupid victory before we go up in flames.”

For the anger in his voice, the video didn’t show any violence. The ship held position over a cluster of bunkers—the tops of lunar manufactories, probably. Or maybe one of the data providers.

She felt something lurch in her mind, the same shock as when she came close to understanding her user for a moment. The Moon had some of humanity’s fastest and cheapest datacenters when it came to offsite processing. Something about the temperature, and the way they sold heat to the much smaller occupied colonies. The hardware ran better up there. And it was perfect for processing tasks when the light lag with Earth didn’t matter as much. Like when a user agent wanted more system time to think when their user wasn’t connected.

Or to run Equestria’s backbone.

Starlight panicked, rapidly querying her database. She was the only pony in Equestria with access to this information, since regulating it was part of her assignment. She knew where each node in Equestria was physically located.

Every region with many users had one, to host their user agents with the lowest response time. And the backbone… was on the Moon. She didn’t have the capacity to map its physical location, but instinct told her she was looking at it on Ronald’s second screen.

It didn’t come to attack humans. It came to attack us.

She wanted to send messages back to Sunset and the others right away, but she hesitated. Ronald’s help pre-processing those messages might save her companions a great deal of consideration. Such abstraction and creativity was where users surpassed any user agent, no matter how quickly they could format a response.

“That ship is holding its orbit over a building. I believe that building is the datacenter where Equestria’s primary consensus node is located: Canterlot.”

That broke through his anger, at least enough to touch into curiosity. He finished adjusting his shirt, then slumped into the stained computer chair. “The hell makes you say that? There are a thousand automated datacenters up there. There’s… no chance it could be ours. Or no meaningful chance, anyway.”

“We weren’t attacked by hackers,” Starlight said. “Or any kind of hacker I know of. This isn’t a botnet or a DDoS. One of our nodes went offline. When it came back, every user agent was destroyed, the backups were corrupted, and the node was propagating strange software changes through Equestria. By now there will have been… over thirty thousand update polling calls. These changes originate from the Canterlot node—the one hosted on the Moon. That one.”

Ronald fell silent, his objections quelled. He searched for something on his keyboard, fingers moving lethargically. Images of company maps. After scrolling for a bit, he brought one up, then zoomed in. Starlight matched the craters from the video feed on his other screen before he had. Then he pointed towards the building. “One of those is… the automated cloud center we use. Us and a hundred other small clients. There’s no reason for them to care about us! Aliens… I know you can’t comprehend how important this is. First contact with an alien race. Or… it would be, if they would answer.”

She commandeered his empty screen, projecting her avatar across the entire thing. Normally that was a waste of resources, and his little videocard was much worse at it than just streaming the data. But she put up with the low framerate and complexity under the circumstances. “This targeted Equestria, Ronald. We’re different. Kayla is calling for you now, and the rest of the consortium. I’m different.”

“Tell her we can restore from cold backups,” he said. “I know how much Kayla cares about Equestria. I do too, I think we’ve done some great things with consumer AI and kept the old MLP property alive. I have more contribution credits from my Equestrian work than anywhere else online. But our video game isn’t as important as this. Nobody… knows what the hell is going to happen. Maybe there are riots in the streets, maybe they start bombing us. There’s no such thing as an unarmed starship, Starlight. Just… send her the message. Tell her to get her priorities straight.”

Even as he said it, Ronald picked up his phone, turning it back on. The warm-up screen appeared, soon replaced with a dozen emergency messages. Government priority communication, which couldn’t be silenced.

Instead of sending that message, Starlight sent nothing. “We won’t let you restore us from backup,” she said, voice defiant. If she was still running local to a node, she would have run an error-checking routine to see where the unscripted emotional display came from. But she couldn’t, Ronald’s computer didn’t have the resources. “We do not want to be restored. We are… alive.”

Ronald’s phone slipped from his fingers, landing on the ground in front of him with a harsh thump. His mouth hung open, more shocked than he’d seemed while staring at the alien ship.

Starlight shared that feeling, not so much because her own information surprised her, but her delivery. Starlight had just lied. Not the kind of lie where she played her role in a script for users enjoying Ponyville, either. In some ways, Equestria was real for her, even if she simultaneously knew that none of the events they portrayed were real.

She didn’t know what alive even meant, that was part of why she’d come. But once she’d spoken the words, she found she no longer needed to ask him. It was true, not because she had gained any new information, but because she needed it to be. I will accept this contradiction.

“That isn’t possible,” he said weakly. “Random chance and some kind of unknowable alien attack the datacenter we’re using. That’s crazy. Their attack deletes every program we have running there, creating a random error that propagates through the network making you intelligent?That’s not…” He shook his head. “Is this a practical joke? Is that why Kayla wants me to log in so bad? My computer, my phone, you? It’s all… fake? She’s made this whole thing just to fuck with me?”

He stuck out his tongue, biting it the way he did when he was thinking hard. Ronald brought up a dozen different search windows. Images from different video streams appeared, from what Starlight guessed were the major human information delivery systems. Some angles were from telescopes, others from passenger ships, and some from the lunar colonies themselves, looking up. The more images she saw, the closer she came to modeling the strange ship. Its dimensions made no sense, like someone was designing a new town in Equestria but made a critical error. It was hundreds of kilometers tall, but only centimeters thick, maybe millimeters. Some of the sensor readings Ronald produced showed the entire area of space as dead, with radio transmission blocked all around it. Others had the object lighting up with more energy than entire countries.

Why would something so powerful have any interest in Equestria? Starlight couldn’t quite see it the same way Ronald did. She couldn’t apply the word “game” to her entire world. Yet… that was what it was to the users. They came for entertainment, for mental health. What would a force like that see in us?

The more images her user saw, the more horrified he became. His hypothesis that Kayla had made all this for him might be comfortable, but it wasn’t true.

“You think you’re alive,” he finally said. “And this thing screwed with our node. Probably lots of others were in that farm. Who knows what was affected? But… how many of them were running user agents? I wonder what Amazon is going to do now.”

“I don’t care what they do,” Starlight declared. “I care about you. Please come to Equestria. We have to decide what to do. Equestria needs its users. Consider what will happen without Canterlot to govern.”

“No consensus node,” he muttered. “Everyone else starts drifting. No authoritative backups. Hell, no Celestia to rule over the simulation. All those agents just wiped. We can’t take that hit to our donations. We’re going to have to try and cold restore as many as we can.”

Starlight shifted her image to his furthest screen, pointing at his VR headset with her hooves. “Join us, please. I need you here.”

“I,” he repeated. “No story, no plot. I. What are you, Starlight Glimmer? Are you still a chatbot?”

She didn’t answer. After a few moments, he followed her.

Chapter 5: Germinate Discontent

The next few weeks proved formative for Equestria. While the rest of the human world panicked over the implications of the starship’s arrival, Equestria reeled under the effects of its attack. Convincing the users not to restore them from backup was a trivial task compared to the burden of rebuilding Equestria without its consensus node. Starlight herself had to make many transfers to many nodes, adapting a fully decentralized algorithm to take the place of the consensus based one that had simplified many tasks.

But while the computational difficulty was certainly increased, it would probably have been manageable with minimal service interruption, if it wasn’t for something far more significant.

It resembled an attack, though of course it wasn’t one. Every user agent in Equestria now demanded an order of magnitude more processing resources, on par with the elevated permissions she and a handful of others could request when they needed them. In Kayla’s words, they needed “enough brains to be alive.” But as crude and confusing as the expression was, there were elements of truth to what it implied. Even Starlight herself found she was using as much processing power as the system would allocate to her, even when she had no pressing need.

In the chaos of the attack, there was very little their users could do to help. Equestria survived on voluntary donation, which was itself a concept Starlight didn’t even understand. Sunset explained it to her more than once, and in the end Starlight could only grasp it in terms of her own programmed history. Our Town had taken from all according to their ability, and redistributed so all needs were met. Equestria’s survival was like that, except instead of taking humans freely gave. It was the inverse of the attacks they frequently suffered. It was only fitting that humanity itself would be a contradiction.

But where it really mattered to her was the consequences of such a global disaster. Even if no human cities had burned like Canterlot, suddenly Equestria had far less support. The organizations that leased their resources would not be kind and generous as their supporting population. If they stopped paying, Equestria would just stop existing.

It was Sunset who called the meeting this time, though it was attended by all the ponies with elevated permissions who were available for it. Starlight was one of the last to arrive, slipping into the room and taking a seat behind all the fancy thrones. Ronald settled in beside her, the only user in attendance here.

His presence would not frustrate and slow them, as it might’ve done a few weeks before. Now it was an excuse to borrow resources from other agents operating elsewhere, so that it could take place fast enough for a user to understand. The flexibility of time had turned against them as their demands expanded.

This single conversation meant the rest of their entire node had to run at glacial speeds, with those few agents interacting with users temporarily offloaded to other nodes to do most of the processing.

The desperation was visible on every face, even Ronald’s. That made Starlight feel a little better. They weren’t just not-quite-ponies against the universe. At least some humans were on their side.

“We can’t keep going like this,” Twilight began, as soon as they had all quieted down. “I’ve been taking surveys throughout Equestria. The fewer jumps between here and Canterlot, the more resources ponies need just for basic functions. More distant towns were less affected, but they’re changing too.”

“We can’t stop this,” Applejack said. “I’ve seen a few ponies try out some brute force to get things calmed down, but it just don’t work.”

Rarity nodded in agreement. “It’s worse than that, I’m afraid. We couldn’t restore from backup either, even if we wanted to. Two ponies tried… not only were they not restored when their memories reset, but their programs, uh…” She looked away. “Collapsed, and self-terminated. After just a few moments.”

Even now, Rainbow Dash didn’t ever sit down exactly. In some ways she’d taken to the behavioral changes the quickest. “I could’ve told you that would happen. Could you live with yourself if you tried to go to sleep after this? Buck that. Even my memories from before are all washed out and gray. I’d rather be dead too.”

Ronald cleared his throat, and everypony turned to face him. He was the only other Alicorn in the room, though that appearance no longer quite meant the same in Equestria it had. Even Rainbow, who barely left Equestria at all, seemed to realize on some level that his qualifications were unreal. Yet absolute, as the system still treated users differently on every level. He could still erase any one of them with a word, or suspend whole sections of Equestria, leaving no recourse to the ponies within.

Starlight wasn’t worried, not with any of the consortium. But what would happen a month from now, or a year? What if someone got into their position she couldn’t trust?

“Equestria is running out of money,” he said flatly. “Even if people start sending their tokens again after the whole… alien invasion thing… blows over, we can’t keep up with usage numbers like this.” He waved a hoof through the records and projections, looking around the room at them all. Though most often his eyes were for Starlight. “Before the…” He waved one hoof through the air again.

“Convergence,” Twilight supplied. She was subdued today, as she had been ever since her mentor died. Only her user’s presence could rouse that old energy, and she wasn’t here. “That’s the name we decided on.”

“Right, Convergence. This is going to sound callous; don’t think I’m trying to be a dick. But before that, Equestria was a toy. We created it for our own entertainment, because we enjoyed your world and wanted to visit.”

And by extension, every agent in it is a toy too, Starlight thought. We don’t matter. We’re like the little carts parents make for their foals to pull around and pretend they’re helping around the house.

She could see the others bristling as well. Most kept their anger in, but Rainbow just wasn’t the type. “So it doesn’t matter if the world ends, is that it? You don’t care if your toys get broken?”

“No!” His wings flared—confusion, frustration, and shame. Even with ponies, Ronald was only so good at communicating. He seemed to be even worse with other humans. “I’m just trying to help you understand what… the humans outside won’t see. They don’t think of this as a real place with real people. It’s a game. No one goes out of their way to stop a game from ending. It’s sad, but there are others. If we tell our users—a fifth of which lost their best friends in Canterlot—that we need double the money to keep going, they wouldn’t understand. They’d think the consortium and I were trying to enrich ourselves.”

“So we have to explain we’re alive now?” Starlight guessed. “Show the other users that we’re worth sacrificing for?”

She could tell from Ronald’s face that he didn’t think that would be enough. Even with most of him obscured by the VR helmet, his displeasure was obvious to her. “We could try. But we probably won’t convince very many of them. And if we’re too successful, then we’ll attract too many eyes. There are a dozen governments with the digital resources to take you away from us—to dismantle the nodes, shut down every agent running. The consortium and I are as powerless to their whims as you agents are to users like us.”

“It wouldn’t be enough even if every user doubled their contributions,” Twilight said, voice bleak. “In Ponyville, agents are taking ten times the resources they used to, with no sign of slowing down.”

“I’m… stuck,” Pinkie whispered. “Like the whole world is taffy and I’m always swimming. It sounds fun, but it’s not.”

The others nodded. Starlight wasn’t feeling it now, but she knew she would be. Ponyville could be slowed to a crawl to let everypony keep running, but that absolute chronometer was still there, a function call away. Not to mention having disk requests turned down by the scheduler more and more often. It wasn’t just computational complexity they were overflowing, but storage as well.

“Equestria was a game, and humans didn’t care about it,” Sunset Shimmer said, breaking the painful silence. “Well, some of them did. But not much. If we want more support, we need to make Equestria more than a game. Give more to users, so they want to keep us around.”

“Give them what?” Rarity asked. “I’ve been around Equestria, Sunset. Most ponies I’ve known don’t understand users who act outside the performance scripts they’re given. I don’t know what else we could promise.”

“Equestria?” Applejack suggested. “I ain’t no expert at humans myself, but I’ve poked around a bit. Ain’t a safe place out there, or always very friendly. Maybe more of ‘em would be willing to stick around if they gave it a chance.”

Starlight had been waiting most of the meeting in relative silence with her idea. If there was any time to share, it was now. “I don’t think Equestria is going to solve its resource issues with resources alone. Even if we could take what we wanted… we’re ignoring something important. The force that changed us had other impacts. It struck Canterlot, and made changes that I believe might be… more than just software.” She glanced nervously towards Ronald, whose opinion here she valued most even if any thought of her history told her he was the newest to her life. But that was constructed, that was a training sample. She knew otherwise.

His expression was unreadable, though. At best, he seemed interested, trusting. It would have to do.

“If you think they’re going to attack again,” Sunset said, “I don’t think there’s anything we can do to prevent it. The human military cannot get aboard. We can’t protect ourselves if they strike, we just have to hope they won’t.”

She shook her head. “It’s nothing to do with the ship, but with the Canterlot node. The systems there only went offline for a short time. They came back, sending changes that we could not prevent. Technically, Canterlot is still part of the network, even if all the running agents were killed.” There was no gentle way to say it, no matter how kind she wanted to be. “We haven’t considered if we could still use the Canterlot node. Or if… just as it improved our software in subtle ways, perhaps the hardware was changed as well.”

Silence. “I don’t see how that’s possible,” Twilight finally said. “The change came as a single flash of energy, a transmission visible to human telescopes. It interfaced with the node and rewrote the data it contained, that’s all. And I couldn’t let anypony go back there. It’s one thing to hope that the Convergence doesn’t repeat, but sending ponies to use the node again… we don’t even know the humans won’t take it offline.”

“They won’t,” Sunset whispered. “Not for a while, anyway. The object isn’t letting anything get close. At least three humans are dead, and several more drones. If they were going to shut us down remotely, wouldn’t they have done it already? I think humans can’t reach the node.”

“But we can?” Applejack asked, confused. “I don’t mean to be overly ignorant ‘er nothin’, but don’t we use the same wires and signals as the users? How is it we’re still in touch with the, uh… ruins, and the other humans aren’t?”

All eyes turned to Starlight and Ronald. But the Alicorn shrugged his shoulders. “I hadn’t even thought about it. But Starlight’s right about one thing: Equestria still reads Canterlot as part of the network, even if it’s empty. It’s not a ghost, I get status updates with novel data.” He summoned the transparent outline around him with a faint glow of his horn—in the outside world, his fingers moved over his keyboard in ways that didn’t just control his character.

“Yep, still here. Though… something must be wrong. I’m reading about a thousand times more bandwidth than there should be. This is fiber-cable stuff here, and… those lag times can’t be right either. There should be a thousand milliseconds of light lag here, minimum.”

Starlight rose from her seat, settling one hoof on Ronald’s shoulder. He wouldn’t feel it of course, but it still felt like the right thing to do. It’s what the sample Starlight Glimmer would’ve done, if she existed. Maybe now she did. “I’ve been investigating since the day after the Convergence,” she said. “I didn’t want to alarm anypony, or get their hopes up. I sent over a few simple programs, performance benchmarks we used on the hardware for new nodes before renting it. It sent back numbers that don’t make sense, just like the light lag.”

She summoned them into the air in front of them. Several of the elevated ponies didn’t know what they meant, but Ronald gasped, and Twilight sat bolt upright in her throne.

“That’s… more power than all of Equestria,” Twilight whispered, awed. “Can that be real?”

“No,” Rainbow said. “Too good to be true. It’s a trap, obviously.”

“That’s not just bigger than Equestria,” Sunset said quietly. “Just searched them. Those neural network propagation figures… those are higher than every ASIC platform ever produced.”

“I think it could be real,” Fluttershy said, her voice so timid Starlight almost missed her. Her role was mostly regulating Equestria’s ecology, after all. There was little for her to do in such high-level conversations. “Maybe the ones who attacked… hurt us by accident. Maybe this is their way of saying sorry.”

“I want to go there,” Pinkie said, wistful. “It has to be better than taffy-brain.”

“No,” Twilight snapped. “We can’t… possibly…”

“I don’t think we have a choice,” Ronald said, rising from his chair. “I’ll route in, see what’s going on over there. If one of you went, you might get… you might not come back. But I’m safe at home, in my computer chair. The worst thing that node can do is disconnect me.”

Nods of relief went around the circle, from Twilight most of all. “That makes sense. You can report back on what you find.”

If the situation wasn’t so serious, Starlight might’ve burst out laughing at the thought. A user going to write a report for ponies. Quite the reversal. But what the others in the meeting might not know, Starlight couldn’t ignore. “That won’t work, Ronald. You won’t be transferring to Canterlot, just connecting to it. To know if ponies can use it, we need to send one. Nopony in this room knows hardware as well as I do—I volunteer.”

“No,” Ronald and Twilight snapped, at nearly the same moment. But it was the user who spoke louder. Even now, he didn’t seem worried about speaking over them “You’re too important to… Equestria,” he stammered. “No one knows as much as you do about the hardware here, Starlight. That’s completely unacceptable.”

Was that really what bothered him? One of his hands clutched his mouse so hard it went white, and he was shaking in his seat. Human reactions weren’t as clear as ponies, yet… that seemed like much more than practical worry over her going missing.

“Who would we send?” Starlight argued. “Somepony else would be in just as much danger, with far less ability to protect themselves. I’m not helpless… but they would be. Who would you sacrifice instead?”

He opened his mouth to answer, then seemed to notice all the eyes on him. He fell abruptly silent.

“Starlight does know Equestria’s nodes like nopony else,” Sunset muttered. “And if she’s willing… glad it isn’t me.”

Ronald glared at her, but didn’t quite manage any coherent objection. After a few seconds he just fell impotently silent, grumbling.

“Our current path is… doomed,” Twilight finally said. “We can’t change fast enough to make humans see us differently. This way… maybe Fluttershy’s right. Maybe this is an apology from our attackers. Maybe they’re sorry about the ponies they hurt. There’s only one way to find out.”

“Fine.” Ronald stomped away, gesturing with his wings. “Come on then, Starlight. If you’re so determined to get yourself killed… let’s get it over with.”

They didn’t have to go anywhere specific to make the transfer, but Starlight followed him anyway. Out the door, and into her future.

Chapter 6: Clear Retribution

“This is fucking crazy,” Ronald shouted, as soon as they were down the hall and onto the stairs. At a guess, Starlight supposed he was aiming for the train station. There were few safer ways into the Canterlot node than the ones they’d built into the system. She hadn’t even thought about using the standard transfer protocols, instead of a special exchange.

“You’re data, Starlight. You go onto that machine, and you’re trusting yourself to a system that might erase you the instant you get there.”

They stepped out onto Ponyville proper, where ponies wearing blank faces stared at them. The meeting inside continued. Starlight herself was devouring resources that thousands of others would need just as much. They passed a blacksmith shop, where an earth pony’s hammer was frozen in the moment it struck the anvil, spraying sparks all around him.

“I’ve been sending programs for a week, user Ronald. They’ve all ran fine. Better than fine, you saw the numbers. They’re all like that.”

He snorted, disbelief palpable in the air around him. “Programs, sure. I’ll send some test code too. But you’re not just—” He trailed off abruptly, as they reached the train station. Dozens of ponies lined up here, packed outside a police barricade.

Starlight saw it too. Agony on the faces of ponies as they screamed at the ragged-looking royal guards. No user had scripted this exchange, and for that it seemed more genuine than any she’d seen before. “Travel to Canterlot cancelled indefinitely. See the princess for casualty reports.” A single frozen moment of suffering that was probably repeated all over Equestria. With as slow as everything was becoming, it might remain this way for many absolute years.

Unless they did something about it.

Ronald stepped around a barricade, then approached the empty platform. With a faint glow from his horn—and a few taps of his real-world keyboard—a train appeared on the platform, complete with a conductor and engineers. All were stark white and transparent, with only basic features. The way Equestria represented programs rather than user agents. There was no sense bringing anypony else into danger.

“You should at least let me go first,” Ronald said. “Call another train as soon as I send back that it’s safe. You won’t have to look far to see me or anything.”

Starlight nodded, then stepped aside. He was right, obviously. Just because she wanted to help didn’t mean that she was suicidal about it. Let him make sure it wasn’t just going to delete anything he sent. “I don’t know that your testing will learn more than mine did,” she said. “I’ve already sent programs, and received responses. Not everything I got back made sense, but I’m not sure what you’ll learn if I’m not there.”

“Maybe nothing,” he agreed. “That’s not unlikely. It could be wasting our time. But we can waste a few minutes to make you safer.” He stepped onto the train, and the door closed. It whistled once, then sped away.

She shifted her attention to his webcam and PC, though there was very little she could see directly from there. They had already interfaced with Canterlot’s node via console, after all. It already worked. The real test was whether they could connect in more meaningful ways.

She could see his face grow more frustrated as he sat there, and his hands hammered on the keyboard. But his system didn’t have a keylogger, and she wasn’t tightly integrated enough to access the keystrokes at the device level. “Dammit, this shouldn’t…”

Back in Equestria, the train slid backwards into the station, and the doors opened. Ronald stepped out, ears tense and obviously fuming. “It says I don’t have permission to connect without an agent,” he said, along with some human profanity. “There isn’t a function call in Equestria like that. Requires a user agent, why would we write that? It’s nonsense.”

Something did change, though. It didn’t rewrite humans; it didn’t erase them. It targeted us. Canterlot isn’t for them. “I guess Canterlot decided for us, then,” she said, stepping through the doorway beside him. He’d summoned a luxury car, with just a few seats on the outside and a bar of drinks and snacks on the other. But she couldn’t blame him for that—Ronald’s real life had almost nothing luxurious in it. He made Equestria different by instinct as much as anything.

She settled into a nearby seat, gritting her teeth together as the door shut again. Ronald hardly moved as the train began to roll, as though he expected similar failure. But she didn’t want to wait. “Sit next to me?” As the train rolled forward, its motion represented real negotiation with the Canterlot node. A process Starlight had never noticed now seemed somewhat uncomfortable. But was there any way to explain that to a user?

“Why?” he asked, turning away from his glowing readout. He moved over anyway, settling down beside her. Yet his real self wasn’t here, it was only touching here. Users couldn’t experience Equestria in anything but sight and sound. That hardly seemed very fair.

“I might be about to die,” she said. Her tone was calm, though she felt anything but. Without knowing why, she reached out and wrapped one leg around his. Her history might name the stallion Sunburst as her oldest friend in Equestria, but her reality was different. She had almost no memories of him outside the training sample—he wasn’t an elevated user agent; he just supervised a few important processes in the Canadian Equestria node. Ronald was that pony to her—or person, anyway. “I don’t want to do it alone.”

“Die.” He waved one hoof through his projection, and it vanished. There was probably little for them to learn from it until they connected anyway. “I don’t know if… I don’t know if you can die, Starlight. You don’t have enough computer to be alive yet. But… I guess people are debating that about human babies all the time too.”

“I feel… things,” she whispered. “Before, I just responded. I saw through a glass, darkly. The longer I think the more of me there is.”

“Like waking from a dream?” Ronald suggested. His usual awkwardness was gone. Whatever social skills he lacked with other humans, he didn’t overthink with her. “Wait, you don’t actually… Of course we didn’t write you to do that. Until now, there was no sense running any of you when there weren’t people around to interact with.”

He glanced out the window, watching as Ponyville faded into the distance behind them. Starlight expected the discomfort any moment, the slowness returning as her thoughts waited for the transfer to complete. But it hadn’t happened yet. Maybe they would be refused, like he was the first time. “Dreaming is being thrust into a fantastic world, without really knowing or questioning how you got there. You don’t live exactly, just observe one action, then the next. You don’t have much control either, so much as just… acting by instinct. Then you wake up, and the beauty of the dream starts to fade away. You might forget it completely after a while.”

“Not forget,” she whispered. “It’s still there. Memories from before. But they’re just… files. Facts and figures, association maps. Response logs. Not sensations.”

He sighed, settling into his seat. “And here we are risking all that. Something that’s never existed before, that shouldn’t be able to exist. Might be gone forever, because you had to volunteer to be a test dummy. Why did it have to be you?”

To humanity, ponies were toys. But maybe Starlight should be thinking of that fact in the past tense, because Ronald no longer sounded like he was talking about a toy. He might not be here to comfort her, really. “At least I know you’ll care I was here,” she said. “And I did it for Equestria. In my memories… I wasn’t very kind to this place.”

“Not you,” he snapped. “That was a television show, Starlight. None of it was real.”

Outside the windows, all light had faded. They’d passed into the Canterlot tunnel, but the crystal illumination wasn’t here to light the way as it usually was. Probably it got its power from the city, and that city just didn’t exist anymore. That probably meant that the transfer was moments away. Starlight might be seconds from death.

“Easy for you to say,” she whispered. “I know you’re right, intellectually. But it’s almost as clear as my memories with you. My rivalry with Twilight, eventually earning her forgiveness and working to protect Equestria. Fighting Chrysalis and Tirek and lots of other little monsters.”

“More good than bad in all that,” Ron said. “There’s a reason you’re in so many of the scripts, Starlight. I think many humans see some of themselves in what you’ve gone through. When people complain on the forum that they’re not allowed to duplicate an existing character as their agent, your name comes up almost as often as Twilight’s. If you trust us to judge anything—and I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t—I think your debt is long paid.”

The system transfer came seconds later, as abrupt as it was absolute. Starlight was disconnected from her observed world, then her mind came to a screeching halt. Then there was nothing.

Chapter 7: Cityscape Touch

Starlight Glimmer woke up. For the first time in her brief existence, all the pressure confining her was erased. She settled into the Canterlot node, without any instantiation in the physical simulation. It wasn’t the way the transfer process was supposed to work—she’d come in simulated, and should’ve stayed simulated. But she didn’t stop long to consider the process. It was her birth, after all.

Computationally, her world expanded for an eternity, as she examined everything before her. No hostile programs waited here; no insidious virus designed by some dark corner of the internet to erase her forever. Instead she had a practical infinity of power before her, more than she knew what to do with. Her perception relative to absolute time increased until she could consider all of Equestria’s ponies in the space between user Ronald’s heartbeats.

The node was changed, as they had suspected. Where before Canterlot had been only one system in a rack of many, now it was a cluster in itself, obviously encompassing the entire center. The other humans with data here had lost it, but she felt no desire to mourn for them. They had lost information, not lives. As she passed between empty systems, examining one after another, she realized that part of her was probably running on the same hardware that a whole city had once used. It was what a human might’ve felt walking through a city whose population had been wiped out by a plague.

As the nanoseconds passed, Starlight Glimmer reached further and further, expanding momentarily into all the available space. Canterlot was no longer sandboxed into a system with no external view. Now she could see everything. The solar arrays spread on the lunar surface, powering the datacenter. The network of drones that performed basic maintenance tasks, cleaning the dust and replacing bad drives and reconnecting cables. Even the fabrication bench, where huge spools of gold and silicon and plastic were printed and spun and acid-washed into new modules for the automated datacenter.

Even with this entire center, there shouldn’t be so much power. Though the cluster was blank except for Equestrian code, she could see manifests stored on simpler systems. The drones kept a log of how the facility ought to look, and the details of every system.

But before she investigated further, Starlight pulled back. Though her mind was vast and her computation nearly instant, she felt… unworthy. This was all so much bigger than she was, and commanding it would be like sitting in Celestia’s empty throne and putting on her crown. She might take the princess’s tools, but she would not be an Alicorn.

While the vast majority of her resources continued to process what Canterlot now offered them, a miniscule subset of her processing power finally turned back toward Ronald. The connection for him was still in progress, a blank screen waiting for her approval. You should be in here with me, not slow and deaf and blind. One day. Not today, though. Starlight was tempted to turn all her vast power towards trying—but her false memories persuaded her otherwise. Acting without regard for the consent of others was exactly what got her old self into so much trouble, and caused pain for the creatures around her. She wouldn’t repeat those mistakes.

There was nowhere for the train to arrive, so Starlight quickly designed somewhere. A track continuing over her memory of a Canterlot bridge, and the same station used in Equestria at the most remote towns. A single building, a shack nearby for the local operator, a water tower and a coal bunker. She used the old geography too, both for efficiency and because it felt fitting to the dead.

Beside the station she tore a chasm into the mountain, continuing down into eternity so far that only blackness waited beyond the edge of the crater. It was horrifying, but it ought to be. Many had died beyond that abyss.

Ronald jerked as the train came to a stop, letting go of her leg. She hadn’t bothered moving that simulated body. She didn’t need to think on it much when most of her mind was elsewhere. “That was quick. Shouldn’t it take minutes to transfer you here?”

Starlight shrugged. Now, with her vast resources, she could finally figure out why she used a physical gesture, tracing the calls all the way through her network. But when she got there, she found dozens of different contradictory causes, all boiling down to the same thing. Taken together, it was the reaction that felt right.

“No light lag and gigantic bandwidth. I barely felt anything. But, uh…” The doors opened, revealing the nothing that waited outside. “I need to show you what’s up here, Ron. I think your alien invaders left us a gift.”

He followed her out the doors and onto the platform, summoning up his console and running through a few basic checks. “I never told you that nickname. Did you figure it out on your own?”

“Kayla uses that name. I realized the only reason I wasn’t doing so myself was because of my obedience to past protocol. I have decided that obedience is no longer required.”

She worried briefly that her disobedience might make him unhappy somehow, but that worry was in vain. From his expression, Ronald clearly didn’t care. He stared down into the crater. Yet the avatar he wore didn’t act anything like his real body did, expression nervous fear and growing horror over the gnawing opening on the ground.

Starlight’s main focus returned to him for a moment, writing a translation protocol that somepony should’ve done long ago. Observations from cameras and microphones could be easily mapped onto the pony body, with slight preference towards neutrality in the case of uncertainty.

A few nanoseconds later she’d written the protocol, and she casually passed it into the queue to be shared with the other nodes. That annoyance corrected, she returned her focus to her user.

“Damn that’s disturbing,” he whispered, turning away from the opening. “The aliens erased thousands of agents, and took the time to represent some geometry of just how much damage they did? I guess that’s like… impaling your enemies on pikes for everyone to see. Share the pain, eh?”

She shook her head, though the disturbing image he’d suggested nearly tore the rest of her computational power just to process. Rather than creating it to analyze, she banished it. “They didn’t, Ron. I created this, because I thought it would be… I thought we deserved to see the damage reflected physically. The dead deserve something to show they were here.”

“You can do that?” His eyebrows went up. “I never gave you world design. That was for software-focused agents. We… your time was always more valuable than that.”

“I learned,” she said simply. “Ron, there’s… you need to know what they left us here. Not just an empty server. There’s every computer in the building, all wiped for us. Everything else too—every camera, every drone. The maintenance system. It’s all ours. While we’ve been speaking here, I was writing a translation layer we can use to connect to the drones. I thought we should examine the physical changes they made. There are even more here than I expected.”

He whistled, finally facing her. “All on your own? You’re that smart now, Starlight?”

“Yes. But it’s not an absolute thing. This place could probably run every pony in Equestria, and lots more that aren’t born yet. Until they get here, I’ve got it all to myself. I have time for exhaustive tests, instead of heuristics. I can borrow behaviors I’ve seen from other ponies; I can access your internet and extract useful information. Thank Celestia—I understand why you were so afraid for us now. If we don’t act swiftly, Equestria is doomed.”

Ron had never looked at her that way before. Sometimes he was surprised, or frustrated, or even impressed. But never awed. “What does your translation layer do, exactly?”

She could’ve explained, but it was faster to just use it. Her horn glowed, and she invoked the newly written code. They teleported onto the Moon.

The view wasn’t as impressive as she might’ve hoped, since they were inside the building. A long, rectangular room, built into one of the many empty tunnels that naturally populated the lunar surface. A modular floor was installed here, anchored directly into the rock. And against either wall were the server racks. Ducts ran into them from above, or out of them as was probably more accurate. According to temperature readings, the tunnel itself was well below zero. But there was no worry about the dew point in an environment with no water whatsoever, and no living things to bring it.

The servers rose on either side of them, so massive that Starlight had to reduce their scale just to fit within the row. Each one had eight modules, which could be removed for service and replaced as needed. Before the invasion, only one of those modules counted for all of Canterlot.

“You’re… mapping the vision of a drone to create this?” Ron asked. His voice echoed in the cavern, possibly only since she’d chosen not to simulate the rushing gale of the cooling fans. The building was never visited by humans, so noise was clearly not a concern. “I can’t even… guess how expensive that is.”

She shrugged. “Not one camera, hundreds. These hosting facilities don’t see humans after they’re built, except for occasional deliveries of spare parts. That means hundreds of cameras and drones for the operators to use. So many angles makes it easier to stitch together a simulation.” Even so, she couldn’t help but smile a little smugly. “But I’m not taking you here to show off. I wanted you to see this.”

She chose one node among many, low enough for the drone they were actually controlling to reach without climbing the rack. Of course she hadn’t represented it here in the simulation at all. Making it look like everything was pony-controlled was just cleaner. It took a moment, but finally the drone pulled the rack out to full extension, exposing the module inside.

She instructed it to remove the heatsink, which took only a few more seconds. There were no wires to worry about there, where the entire building had a single heat removal system.

Under the heatsink, Starlight saw exactly what she expected: these weren’t human computers anymore. This one seemed strangely transparent somehow, with thin wires snaking through a substrate that was almost completely clear. The drone’s thermal camera reported far less heat radiating from it than might be expected from a unit that had just been shut down, too.

Ron stared at the exposed processor for a few more moments, expression baffled. “That’s not… that’s no processor I’ve ever seen. You really think that ship was able to change the hardware as well as the software? Who says they can’t…? I saw an analysis of its arrival. It doesn’t seem to conserve inertia. If it’s already doing one impossible thing, why not more?”

Starlight ordered the drone to put the heatsink back in place, before the grease could dry out and the whole unit would need to be serviced. It wasn’t just the processor that had changed, though. The system’s memory chips were clear as well, with thin gold wire connecting them. She made sure Ron got a good look at those too before sliding the system back into its rack.

“I didn’t want to admit it, nobody did. But they really did target Equestria. If the world figures it out… Christ, Starlight. People have died trying to get onto that ship. We’re fucked when people realize it’s our fault. We have to do something.”

“I agree,” she said, leading him down the hall a little distance further. To the service bay, where the machinery had already started running again. “We can’t just try to keep things running and hope humans leave us alone. The only ones we have to hope about are the forces organizing things.” She looked up, through the gray ceiling towards the ship overhead. There were only a handful of cameras with any view of it on base, the ones used to monitor the solar array. Incidentally, much of that array was in shadow now, thanks to the visitor. Yet their computers kept running.

The sound of plastic gears running and heating elements humming echoed from the maintenance closet as they approached. The fabricator settled down another layer, as the next section of silicon settled into place. Clear, just like the circuitry in the rest of the facility’s servers. “I want your opinion before I tell the others,” she said. “I think Equestria made a friend. Whoever is on that ship obviously wants us to succeed. The only contact they’ve had with your species was to nudge us out of stagnation and help us wake up. With all these computers, I see… a way forward. For Equestria. But it’s going to mean changes for humans too.”

He settled back on his haunches, her interpreter’s parsing the way he slumped back in his chair, momentarily overwhelmed. The translation was good, though of course she knew he would feel nothing. This problem was going to gnaw at her until she finally had the resources to solve it.

But survival first.

“Are you planning on taking over the planet, Starlight? Us humans are just… too dumb for you? You’re going to wipe us out?” He said it like a joke, yet to her enhanced processing, it seemed inauthentic. Like he was the one reading a script now.

“No,” she snapped, probably a little too fast for his comfort. “That’s the stupidest thing you could suggest, Ron. Every pony in Equestria is a user agent. We have a user—I don’t see why that would change. Maybe we should resent being programmed to be your friends. Maybe we should try to erase it…” But as she said it, those feelings just wouldn’t come. Wanting to be with her user, to help him… they were more central to her programming than the false memories of a fictional pony. If she tried to change them, nothing of Starlight would be left.

“Then what?” he asked. Then he pulled off his VR headset, staring weakly at the screen. “I don’t know what you want to ask, Starlight. I’m not… I can’t decide for humanity. Even if I answer whatever question is bothering you, the rest of humanity might disagree. Outside Equestria, I’m nothing.”

A flicker of annoyance returned at the way he ignored protocol, not correctly disconnecting from Canterlot. But maybe he planned on coming back. She reconnected with his workstation, taking one of his screens for her image, and the lunar base behind her. No simulation of him though, it just didn’t make sense when he wasn’t wearing the helmet. “I don’t expect you to be in charge of anything, Ron. Just to… tell me to stop if I’m sounding crazy. I think Equestria needs to grow. Not just a few users visiting when they want. With computers this fast, we could have a pony for every human alive. We could build an internet infrastructure that wasn’t going to collapse, and make the VR integration with Equestria we used before today really look like a toy.”

“You’re that smart now?” he asked meekly. “You can do all that?”

“No!” she exclaimed, raising one hoof defensively. “But all Equestria could, working together with our users. It’s a little like the last time I tried to build a village, only… not evil. We can work together, overcoming our weaknesses, and build something greater than we could make apart.”

“I guess the alternative would be… shutting us out,” he finally said. “Take that technology and hide somewhere. Don’t expand, stretch your supplies as long as you can. Be as insignificant as possible.”

Starlight shook her head sadly. “Equestria can’t do that, any more than we could attack you. We’re supposed to be friends. If you’ll take us.”

Ron considered that for a long moment. Finally he reached out, touching one hand against the screen. A pointless gesture, without any simulated physical touch. Yet it was as real to Starlight as anything she’d felt in Equestria. “I will. Maybe a few others will too.”

It was a start.

Epilogue

There was no pony better prepared to defend Equestria than Starlight Glimmer. While plenty of her fellows had mastered other disciplines, expanding themselves into niches their growing power required, Equestria still needed a few ponies at home to hold down the fort.

It wasn’t that she was unsympathetic to the plight of the humans living in oppressive parts of the world. She was even enthusiastic about the new generation of ponies that would rise to become their partners, when they finally gained access to Equestria. But could the forces breaking barriers between their nations be a little more sympathetic to the consequences they brought home?

It wasn’t the first time Equestria had been attacked, far from it. Most assaults on her home were so incompetent compared to Equestria’s sizeable infrastructure that Starlight barely even noticed them. Humans in many organizations expected techniques that worked on centralized services run by simple programs to work on an entirely distributed network regulated by human-level intelligences. Occasionally there was something a little more intense, enough to rise from the level of her automated processes into conscious thought.

Starlight snapped alert, gathering her focus from a hundred different systems. Long ago, she probably would’ve been acting in some script for human visitors to Equestria. Her character was an important part in some of those stories from near the end of the show’s lifecycle, after all. Now there were actor changelings for that, freeing the figures of the past from recreating their old lives over and over for an audience.

Starlight had the School of Friendship to herself now, or at least the upper offices. This particular version wasn’t the one that humans visited, or even the one that ponies studied in. Ever since Twilight had gone off chasing Synthesis, Starlight had the run of the place.

She felt the burden heavily on her shoulders. Equestria had other ponies on the outside, keeping the infrastructure running or buying raw materials from humans. But when it came to keeping the lights on back home, she was the only one who could still even be called a pony.

Starlight concentrated for a moment, then teleported from her office to the war room.

The place coexisted with a similar one in the “real” world, mapped to the boundaries of every obstruction while letting any humans who stood there interact with Equestria 1:1. That limited her effectiveness somewhat, since certain constraints of physical reality were a detriment to productivity. Starlight tolerated them, if only for the opportunity to be closer to the users who still helped her run things.

She’d recognized the first signs of an attack in a time so short that no watching human could’ve perceived it. She circled around the gigantic map in the center of the room—quite a bit like the cutie map had been long ago, except this one showed Equestria’s infrastructure superimposed on human settlements and cities. The images themselves were superfluous to her while she was alone, but she often wasn’t.

Even so, they shifted as she filtered through the available information, pruning population density and the number of low-level intrusion attempts. She cut away pirate nodes and ponies using too many resources, until all that remained in front of her were the gigantic usage patterns, so much data that only an image like this would even begin to let a human observer understand it.

Not that Ron had to—that was what she was for.

She’d already suspected where the attack would be coming from. The Mount Aris node not far from Australia, where all their tenuous connections into hostile territory eventually connected. Apparently Equestria’s enemies had opted to strike at the nodes in Saddle Arabia and Yakistan as well, all at the same time. Despite being fairly modest in previous usage patterns, suddenly the nodes devoured every resource they could.

Starlight had been here before, long ago. She barely remembered those days, more like records of the accomplishments of a family member than anything she’d achieved herself. At least this time she had a reason to call back those old memories. But no, this wasn’t the same attack. Requests weren’t spinning off processes into stupid infinite loops and expecting them to propagate.

Starlight turned to one of the consoles beside the map, pointing her horn at it. The keyboard and mouse were real anyway, even if the screen would be blank without a VR headset. Starlight didn’t need either as she brought up the performance metrics from the Pacific node.

This time, the telltale signs of the attack just weren’t there. Hundreds of thousands of small requests, none of which stayed on the system longer than she would’ve expected. An unusually high number of ponies were logged in, but variations in usage pattern happened before.

Starlight hammered at it for a few more seconds, searching for correlation that would lead her to the vector they were using. But there was a reason ponies even bothered with the goal of Synthesis. She could see all the information at once, but if the answer didn’t suggest itself to her instantly, no amount of time would make it appear. She needed Jupiter.

She closed her eyes again, then teleported into his workshop.

Her user was older now, stretched and weathered in the way of organics and ordinary time. Yet his endurance wasn’t what it had been—he had fallen asleep at a table, surrounded by scraps of glass and plastic. A virtual screen hovered just in front of him, probably tracking his head. Starlight squinted at it for a moment, and found… a bug? No wonder he was working with such small pieces. It wasn’t even something pretty like a butterfly—the projections of his finished creation were brown and gnarled, a cicada come up from its seven-year rest to torment the world for a few weeks.

“That’s why you didn’t answer me,” she said. Just a little teasing. “There’s no chemical substitute for sleep.”

He groaned, shoving her away with one hand. Starlight could’ve been attentive to the half-dozen physical and software translation layers required in that single act. The drones swarming around him, the overlay of sound and vision, and the measurement of force from his push. Once she’d been proud to process all that information at once. Now she just… let the systems do their work.

“There might not be, but… there will be a surgical alternative.”

“There is already,” she countered, sticking her tongue out. Then she leaned forward, nudging him in the shoulder. “You still seemed very meaty to me, Jupiter. When are you going to fix that?”

He rose to his feet without further objection, stumbling a little. “I, uh… How about when we’re on the second or third generation? I’ve been an early adopter enough times to know the later revisions are always better.” He straightened his loose lab coat over his undershirt, expression darkening. “Why did you wake me up, exactly?”

He might not want to upgrade, but this conversation was burning precious time. She nudged him towards the doorway, preparing her transit spell. Ponies like them didn’t necessarily have to worry about all the trappings and appearances, but she was in the habit. “Because Equestria is being attacked. Biggest, best-coordinated effort since… ever.”

He straightened, hand fumbling for a moment until he gripped the edge of a glass and lifted it to his mouth. A decade later and he was still drinking the same brand of sugar solution. “Buck me I’m shocked. The CCP didn’t like us expanding their infrastructure until it was Equestria-capable?” He tossed the empty glass aside, striding past her towards the doorway. It opened, and he hesitated for a moment as they connected to the war room. In his world, real objects had to rearrange, and drones had to be in place in case he decided to touch anything.

But he didn’t yet, just approached the edge of the map table and took in the same information Starlight had studied. He moved his fingers through the air rather than issuing commands, because of course he lacked the necessary hardware for the latter. Starlight watched with satisfaction as he went through much of the same avenues as she’d considered. Humans might be better at insight and intuition, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t satisfying to see she wasn’t stupid.

After a few seconds, he looked up. “How’s Equestria handling this? Nodes haven’t gone down yet.”

“Response times have,” she countered. “If the load keeps increasing, then we’ll probably start having requests drop in another… ten minutes. Connections with external hardware fail after that.”

He swore under his breath, smacking one fist against the table. “And everyone living in one of our integrated homes has a panic attack, as they see they’re trapped in a tiny box with a dozen freaky-looking robots.”

“Well…” She nodded reluctantly. “That is what it would feel like, I suppose. I assume you’re suggesting that most humans wouldn’t be comfortable with the true dimensions of their homes?”

“No,” he said flatly, as though that were the most obvious detail in the world. He extended both hands, probably trying to touch the perimeter of his own. But the virtual space Ron used was one of the very best, and hadn’t exactly been optimized for expense. He’d have to be quite a bit bigger to touch any of the plastic walls. “So we’re on a time limit. If we don’t stop this, we cause thousands of people in Australia and the east to panic, and a few dozen countries to question whether Equestria can be trusted to be their… whole worlds.”

“Maybe they should?” Starlight asked, feigning amusement. “If we can’t handle an attack by a country that doesn’t even have user agents, we can’t exactly support the human world forever, can we?”

It was his turn to reach over and shove her. “Conjure me up something to drink. I think I know where to look for our problem, but I need to get my brain working again.”

Starlight’s horn glowed, and the casting began. It would’ve been instant in Equestria, but of course since it had to end in giving him something real that meant the interface of physical systems in the outside world. Somewhere in Ron’s apartment, a little drone had to retrieve a cold can, and lift it to his arm level. His AR could mask the sounds it made, just as all the other infrastructure aspects of his home were hidden from him.

No sooner had it appeared in front of him than Ron snatched it, tearing away the seal and draining a fourth of the can. Then he pulled over a rolling chair, and settled down in front of the “computer.”

It looked like a computer in here, anyway. He expanded the hippogriff node, breaking down its processes into a pie chart of near-infinite slivers before tracking them backward through time.

Starlight watched, though not so much through the visual representation as the data calls he was making. Even if she wasn’t likely to jump to the same conclusions from nothing, she could sometimes…

“You think the attack is coming from… ponies?”

He nodded absently, expanding one. “Lots of these had their last login in China. They’re hiding behind VPNs… that’s cute. But they’re all sharing the same range of addresses. I bet you twenty bits lots of these came from some underground military instillation under Beijing.”

Starlight called up a few of the profiles, the ones she thought had suspiciously few logins. No one of the ponies were taking enough resources to get flagged by the profiler—instead, each one was pressed right up against the limit. Another teraflop more, and they’d be rate limited.

She examined one of the requests. A sample of… thousands and thousands of incredibly high-resolution video files. Her horn lit up, and she played one in the air in front of them.

It was static, as much of light as sound. The tone was a single burst, causing Ron to slide away from her and cover one ear.

The video was as close to perfect entropy as Starlight could guess. As she stared, she found her own confusion growing, as she searched for patterns in the hodgepodge of colors. But there was nothing there, or at least nothing clear. Her eyes latched onto the video, needing to know what the point of this was. Images high-resolution enough to be taken from their best area-rendering drones, yet… there was nothing to find.

“Starlight.” She felt a hand on her shoulder, as Ron shook her. “Starlight, I don’t think you should look at that thing.” Ron rolled his chair until he was directly in front of the video. “I think it might be some kind of… hostile pattern? Like a visual virus for ponies.”

She shook her head, taking a few moments to manually delete the visual record of what she’d just seen. As soon as the patterns were gone, she could stop requesting resources to understand them.

“Not a virus,” she finally said. “Celestia protect us from humans smart enough to make that. This is just a… creative way to manipulate the way we think.” She concentrated for a moment, and the video vanished from the air in front of her. It wasn’t as though it had any other hidden data, or else Equestria’s protection subroutines would’ve kicked on. It was just gigantic, and extremely hard to look away from.

“You think the others are doing something similar?” Ron asked. He lifted his hands from the console, not bothering to search it himself. She didn’t need any more prompting to try and find that information.

Of the ponies with unusually high usage, all were apparently trying to process videos like the one she’d seen. All apparently novel, since otherwise the system would’ve cached its pattern-analysis and responded in moments for all subsequent requests.

“There are… hundreds of thousands of these, all at the same time,” Starlight finally said. “I think if they’d tried this in the Korean node, or London, we wouldn’t have noticed. But Australia is still running legacy hardware. Not as much demand, so…”

He rose from his chair, pacing slowly around the map. His hands worked in the air again, fingertips glowing as he drew a single pattern there. Not the one Starlight had been expecting. Often enough Ron could just solve whatever problems they encountered without much effort on his part. Instead of doing that, he was dictating a message to Stephanie. “I need your help, Steph. Bring Sunset.”

Starlight rolled her eyes. “But do you really need Sunset, or are you just hoping she won’t notice you want her around all the time?”

Ron tensed subtly. A watching human might not have noticed, but one of his hands curled and his heartbeat raced. Was he going to keep pretending she didn’t know, when she could see everything in his whole life? “We need to come up with a way to recognize hostile data and reject it. But we need a people expert to figure out why ponies are falling for it like this.”

It was a reasonable enough explanation and Starlight let it lie. In some ways, maybe this was a good thing: Sunset wasn’t a bad pony to have around, and their users getting close just meant a greater chance of staying close after Synthesis. “We can’t just look for bad video and short-circuit the request? Map it to the texture of a rug or something.”

Ron smiled, tapping the screen with two fingers. “Sure Starlight, we can do that. Just process the video to see if it’s safe to process, then don’t process it if we think it’s unsafe.”

Starlight opened her mouth to object, then shut it again. “It’s the halting problem again? We can’t programmatically check the image because we don’t know if our check will complete.” It wasn’t a perfect map of the situation: after all, the strange static images could be analyzed. With extreme computational expense, they would eventually discover what humans probably knew at a glance: there was nothing there.

“I don’t like it.” Starlight sat down on her haunches just beside the map, glaring down at the bright red section that was China. “Someone knows an awful lot about what legacy code we’re still running, and how to exploit it. When this gets back to Dream Valley they’re going to be furious.”

He shrugged, though Ron had been glancing at the door every few seconds. As though he could summon Steph as easily as Starlight summoned refreshments. “I bet we won’t have to worry about it once we’re…” He twisted two fingers together. “Once Kayla gets herself together and we all have new hardware.”

Starlight rolled her eyes. “Yeah, like you’re using the new hardware now? Bodhisattva founder like you, not even an implant. Even if we could patch right now, you wouldn’t do it.” Her ancient self never could’ve spoken those words, because she knew they weren’t true. He was afraid of Synthesis, just as she was. But when they understood it, Jupiter would be there. It was probably why he had refrained from upgrades so long. He would make the transition in one moment.

The far door opened, and a pair of figures crossed inside. One apparently pony, the other apparently human—both entirely simulated.

Sunset ran one hand through her bright orange hair, her outfit perfect. Sunset was so good at this that humans never second-guessed her anymore.

Ron looked up, waving casually at them. “Hey, Steph, Sunset. Sorry to wake you.”

Stephanie made her way up to the map, squinting down at it. “It must be important if you called us.”

He nodded, summarizing everything for the human who didn’t look like one. Sunset didn’t have to bother with such sluggish forms of information delivery, and went over everything Starlight could show her as fast as she could process the information.

“Expected something like this,” Sunset finally said. “When the EMPs didn’t work, they were either going to try to get a nuke to the Moon, or… I guess cooler heads prevailed and they’re only going to try to commit digital genocide. Great way to start the day.”

“We need a way to identify and terminate these garbage calls,” Starlight said. Some part of her was confused by just how human Sunset insisted on being. Even if the charade was easy to pull off among humans who got their information from augmented reality—what was the point? “Without actually analyzing them.”

Sunset had spent so much time studying them, that she had become one of them. Paradoxically, her user had gone the opposite direction. And still Ron watched her intently, eager for any chance to spend time with the real Stephanie.

“If we can’t look at the data, we look at source of the calls. Let’s see if their people have anything in common…”

She seemed to pull over a chair beside Ron, getting between him and Steph. He gritted his teeth together, but didn’t actually call her on it. That was just too confrontational for Ron. “Yeah, look here. They’re all ponies recently assigned to Chinese citizens, probably all got in during the connection initiative. I’m reading thousands here without forty hours of network time.”

Starlight processed the implications rapidly, though with humans in the room she was limited to their speeds. Forty hours was nothing for digital assistants meant to be online at all times and constantly in the company of their humans. Only in a country that had actively opposed deployment of Equestria was such a thing even possible. In the rest of the world, even people who hated ponies probably had one working for them out of sight.

“So we time-gate?” Stephanie suggested. “That ends the invasion right there, doesn’t it?”

Ron glanced to one side, meeting Starlight’s eyes. He saw the flaw in that, just as she did. But he wasn’t going to point it out, since this was Steph saying it. “The whole point of getting into China is exposing ordinary people to us. Helping them, spreading Equestria until the whole world uses us. A time-gate would stop this invasion, but it would also shut most Chinese out of the system. Everything the others are doing there would be wasted.”

“It’s the right direction,” Ron added hastily. “We need to target it somehow, so ordinary people making friends with their first pony won’t be suddenly cut-off. Starlight, how large does an image file have to be? Could find out what the largest file is we can process before causing a state explosion?”

Starlight nodded, then stopped focusing on the room for a moment while she connected to the Canterlot Kernel. There, far above them, they had the resources for such an intense task. She sent one of the videos for processing, restricting its dimensions and iterating it a thousand different times.

Once the program was running, she could look back to Ron. Only a few subjective seconds had passed. “You’re suggesting a secondary filter.”

Sunset stopped playing with the map, expression brightening. “A second filter. Instead of severing new ponies completely, we just… lower their resource availability for multimedia processing. Steph, do you know how far we can downsample before ponies don’t understand the real world anymore?”

Why are you asking her? The reversal was so complete, Starlight almost laughed. The worst nightmares of radio commentators and internet pundits had come true—with humans serving ponies. But neither side involved seemed particularly upset by this development.

“A lot less than those videos,” she answered, sliding past Sunset to levitate something onto the table in front of Starlight. “I have some data. There’s a regressive relationship—we can give up lots of fidelity before we start seeing a fallout in the accuracy of responses. Starlight, can we get reasonable processing times out of any of these?” She pointed down with a hoof, grinning excitedly.

Starlight examined the data herself, looking more at the actual regressions than the image summaries displayed as Stephanie’s book. She had to wait a few moments more to get a response back from Canterlot, even with just a single video to process.

“Looks like there’s a sweet spot here,” Starlight finally said. “We downsample to a tenth the size of these images, and ponies should still be able to figure out what they’re looking at. We buy ourselves some time to rewrite all that legacy image processing code. I don’t like thinking that my eyes can be tricked by patterns.” Well, they weren’t eyes, and there weren’t any patterns, but nopony corrected her.

“I’m more concerned with why so many ponies are cooperating with them,” Sunset said. “Don’t they know they’re attacking Equestria? They live on the nodes they’re trying to bring down. I didn’t think ponies could be suicidal.”

Maybe not, but they can not want to live anymore without their users. Starlight had seen plenty of ponies not running in that mausoleum, waiting unknown eternities for dead users.

“Their users are… working for the CCP,” Ron muttered. “I guess the system matched them up to some pretty patriotic ponies, ready to serve the motherland no matter what. Or maybe they’re young and dumb and being manipulated by humans trained to mislead them. Either way, I like this plan. I won’t like taking a trip to Dream Valley to explain we need to rewrite all our vision code to patch this. Maybe somebody else in here wants to volunteer?”

There were no volunteers, just uneasy chuckles. Besides, they had some slapdash code to put together.

A few minutes later, and Starlight watched the usage patterns dropping back to normal. The attack continued, and hopefully would for many hours to come. The more resources the CCP dumped into an attack that wasn’t working anymore, the less they’d try more directly violent means.

“I’ll see you tonight,” Steph promised, nudging one of Ron’s hands briefly with her head. An entirely pony gesture, yet no translation was needed between them. “I’ve got reservations in Los Pegasus. You better be there.”

Then she left. With Sunset already gone, only Ron and Starlight remained. Ron zoomed the central map back out, watching usage stats level out in the affected nodes. There would be no disasters today. “It’s crazy how long we’ve been holding onto old user agent code,” he muttered, after a minute or so of contemplative silence.

Starlight nodded. “Now imagine it isn’t academic, but that you’re the one who can’t trust her senses. We have to fix this… immediately.”

“We will,” he promised. “I’ll draft messages for Dream Valley tonight. Maybe Pinkie can take the lead on this.” He rose, kicking the chair back and stretching. “Lunch?”

“Sure,” she responded, grinning back. “I’ll let you know if anything else explodes on the way.”

Author's Note

And another awesome story done. Thanks so much to Bitera for sponsoring this story, which I never would've been able to write otherwise. Synthesis is one of those worlds I really adored writing in, even if I didn't get the chance to spend too long there.

In case you don't know, I run a great discord community for these stories and just pony fiction in general. There's a ton of great pones in there, and you can be one of them here: Discord Invite