Friendship is Optimal: Last Leap

Chapters

Chapter 1 - Mission Proposal
Chapter 2 - Launch Site
Chapter 3 - First Checks
Chapter 4 - Troubleshooting
Chapter 5 - Overbalanced

Chapter 1 - Mission Proposal

A moonshot is when you take a problem so big that it seems impossible to solve, and try to solve it anyway. You throw everything at it, all your brainpower, all your muscle, and all your money, the greatest possible risk for the greatest possible reward.

It’s named for Kennedy’s call to land a man on the Moon. It seemed impossible at the time, because it was impossible, especially in the timeframe he laid out, and yet they did it. The impossible, accomplished.

When the thought came to the surviving staff of Copernicus Engines, it seemed similarly impossible: another literal moonshot. A great leap into the dark - one final leap - while there were any real humans left to make it. None of them could remember, later, who had been the first to propose it. It was a joke, a bit of dark humor that took root and became an idea, and then a dream, and finally an inevitability.

As the world around them devolved into chaos, as a world-spanning complex algorithm fulfilled its core values through friendship and ponies, they decided. To the Moon, or to die trying.

When the PonyPad was released, Bruce was one of the first in line.

It wasn’t that he was that much of a My Little Pony fan, although he’d seen a number of episodes, mostly watched with his daughter of a weekend. He wasn't even much of an MMO player, although Equestria Online was already getting an awful lot of attention from the sort of publications that normally would have turned their noses up at a "kiddy" game. No, the Pads were a new toy, a gadget to be played with and investigated, and Bruce was all about that. He didn’t even plan to play the game himself, at first. No, he had his workbench all set up to take it apart and see if he could figure out what made it tick. In Bruce’s life, warranties were something other people worried about.

The twin gadgets arrived in discreet, featureless brown packaging several days before they technically should have, thanks to one of his old college buddies. Bruce had always been good at networking, even back when he was dabbling in freelance robotics and encrypting less-than-legal catalogues of shared media back in undergrad, and it had paid dividends. He wouldn’t even have his job at Copernicus if not for his old RA. Not that the guy hadn’t known his qualifications, sure, but Bruce knew it was the personal connection that had gotten him a foot in the door.

Now, as he tore open the first box, he spared a moment’s egotism to enjoy seeing the “Dr. Bruce Okoye” printed neatly on the address label. Still paying off student loans, sure, but it had been worth it. Not to mention the sleepless nights of studying. And programming. And drinking. And programming while drinking. And it had gotten him Michelle - though that happy memory brought a pang with it. Still, they’d had Emily, and a few happy years together before…

The thought was carefully avoided, set aside as the smooth white tablet slid free; this one was a Rarity, the triple-diamond cutie mark and purple edging showing it as his daughter’s favorite of the Mane 6. He set that one up to charge and left the rest of the setup to Emily; she was enough his daughter to get the joy of putting a new toy together herself. That done, Bruce turned to the second box with the slightly demented glee of a mad vivisectionist finding a fresh frog.

Rachel didn’t order a PonyPad until months after they were released, and didn’t open it for over a month beyond that. Equestria Online caught her interest, sure; she had been a fan of the show from the start. The characters, the cute plots, the music, she had even attended a convention or two and enjoyed them. But work had swallowed that up in the past year or two, ever since she started in the engine lab. Mostly, what she did at night was snag a slice of cold pizza or a beer, watch a few episodes of something - ponies, more often than not - and crash into bed before waking up and doing it all again the next day. Buying an expensive peripheral for a video game she wasn’t sure she’d have time to play fell low on the priority list.

Weekends theoretically existed, but when they appeared they turned into time to catch up on her exercise and do some housework in the tiny apartment she had snagged. It was a shelter from the outside world, blissfully within her price range and surrounded by quiet neighbors on every side. Well, nearly every side; the family above were awfully loud at times, at least eight people in an apartment really meant for two or three. That said, the mother of the family had brought down homemade cookies in apology enough times that Rachel wasn’t inclined to complain. Once she was asleep, an explosion wouldn’t have awakened her, anyhow.

Still, eventually there came a Saturday morning where she woke, showered, brewed tea - and there it was, waiting for her, still in the cardboard box with the bright cartoon characters on it. Her hands only shook a little as she opened it - she’d heard some odd things about the game since she placed the order, things that had some dusty alarm bells in the back of her head jangling worries about grey goo and the Matrix, but still, it was just a video game. Just a way for her to unwind a bit with the friends she remembered so well.

The box had a big, friendly picture of Twilight Sparkle; a stroke of luck, Rachel thought, the bookish mare had always been her favorite, a kindred spirit in ink and CGI. The box within was all black glass - well, something like glass - on the front, and the back a pretty violet with a discreet six-pointed starburst in one corner, surrounded by five others. The mounting arm was only a moment’s work to set up, obviously designed for even the least technically inclined to be able to snap the tablet onto it - held on by invisible magnets, a nice trick - and the cord into the wall. It didn’t even take a minute before the screen lit up, running through a quick animated boot sequence, and Rachel found herself staring at a login screen, with a friendly little box popping up to note that it had detected her Wi-Fi, and wouldn’t she like to allow it to connect to her network?

A network should be secured, she knew, but with the little time Rachel spent actually using her home connection, she’d never had the time to really care. It only took a few key presses to grant the device access, and a puff-maned pony head popped up over the bottom edge of the screen, almost like someone peering out through a window; Twilight Sparkle smiled up at her. “Hey there, long time no see!”

Rachel’s heart skipped a beat. She hadn’t been part of the beta-test for Equestria Online, she hadn’t done anything with the show or its fan stuff for two years or more - how could Twilight possibly recognize her?

With barely a beat in response to the human’s shock, the cartoon horse continued. “Of course, I don’t know you, yet - not really. But only a true friend of Equestria would have been in the first wave of official Equestria Online players, so I’m sure we’ll be great friends in no time! I’m Twilight Sparkle, and…”

The tension broke in Rachel’s chest, and she heaved out a short, relieved puff of breath. That had been creepy, but of course, it was just a spiel. No doubt a variant on the same script played for everyone starting up the game. The way Twilight had focused on her had enhanced the illusion, of course, but pulling tricks like that with a camera - and she could see the little lens at the top of the PonyPad focusing on her as she shifted in her seat - was really easy enough. She’d been silly to get so spooked.

A soft, hollow tapping drew her attention back to the display, where Twilight looked up with a concerned expression. “Sorry, were you paying attention? I can go back over it, I’ve got the scroll right here. Or I can just put it on the display if you’d rather read it!”

Indeed, there was a tightly furled scroll held in the purple glow of the unicorn’s magic, and one aspect of the sight surprised Rachel enough that she blurted out loud. “You’re a unicorn!”

Twilight returned a wry look. “You couldn’t tell, with the horn? I know I’m not exactly Rarity, here, but I didn’t think you’d mistake me for an Earth pony or a pegasus.” She laughed at the thought, actually snorting a little. Rachel started at how realistic it was, spot-on for the original voice actress, then shook her head and laughed to herself. Of course, they had more than a few seasons of the show to build a voice model, no wonder it sounded good.

“I mean, shouldn’t you be an alicorn?” Rachel’s response was automatic, though of course, a virtual character couldn’t have that deep of a dialogue tree. The illusion of reality could only ever be a thin one.

“What, like Princess Celestia? Oh, no no no, I’m just a student! Nowhere near her level when it comes to friendship.” Twilight shook her head again, a decisive movement. “But every day is a chance to make a new friend, as Fetlocke would say. Speaking of, what’s your name?”

Magical Mystery Cure was one of Rachel’s favorite episodes - she’d probably watched it into the double digits, mostly while munching unevenly-reheated pizza - but maybe EO wasn’t starting up to date on the cartoon for some reason. They might be planning it for an expansion. Either way, she didn’t have time to dwell on the oddity, not with a disconcertingly realistic expression of rapt attention on Twilight’s face. “I’m, ah - Rachel. Is this the registration screen?” She hated how uncertain her own voice sounded, even talking to a program.

Twilight scrunched up her muzzle and tilted her head to one side. “It might be more accurate to say that this is an introduction. We’re introducing ourselves to each other, and you’re being introduced to Equestria! I hear you come from foreign parts, but to make friends around here, it might help if you have a pony body of your own, instead of a floating screen.” She tapped the display itself with a hoof - that hollow sound again, very like horse-hoof on glass - and gave a wry look. “And you might like to pick out a more Equestria-friendly name. ‘Rachel’ would sound a little odd around here!”

“Oh, uh - “ Rachel’s mind flashed over the half-finished fanfics she hadn’t updated in far too long, no time or energy to work on them; she had a half dozen original characters she’d been using in them, but none seemed quite right for this. No, for an avatar of her own, she needed something else. A phrase bubbled up from work, she’d been working on the team for their new design lately, and she mentally shrugged. Why not? “Booster Rocket. How’s that work?”

To her surprise, the pony took in stride, actually knocking her front hooves together in something like a clap. “That sounds great! Unique, but it fits you. Let’s see, with a name like that, I’m guessing...pegasus, right? You don’t seem the type to let anyone keep you stuck to the ground, Booster!”

“Glad you like it. And, yeah, pegasi are pretty cool - I do like wings.”

“In an outfit like yours, it’s no big surprise! Though between you and me - I always prefer reading Gallopleo to Coltpernicus. But anyway, you’ve got plenty of options as a pegasus - wing style, so many fun color schemes - that’s really more Rarity’s thing, but I’ve been reading up on color theory…”

Despite herself, Rachel found herself sitting back, talking over her new form with Twilight. She barely noticed the time as they went off on a few conversational tangents along the way; part of her brain was niggling at her with something, but it didn’t want to come to the surface, so she ignored it. She did like the idea of a pegasus character, but vetoed the first few suggestions for color and pattern from Twilight. The unicorn had a spell to take the place of a normal game’s user interface, popping up faintly see through designs that rotated before the screen. Eventually, they settled on something subdued, a slender mare in sea-foam green with a golden mane and tail, short and messy in contrast to Twilight’s careful style, and a cutie mark of a cartoonish Saturn V rocket with a curled smoke trail. By that point, it was well past midnight, and tomorrow was going to be an early one - they were all early ones - but still, she felt good. More relaxed than she had in awhile, honestly. It seemed a shame to wish Twilight a good night and head to bed.

It wasn’t until four in the morning or so, forty-five minutes before her alarm, that Rachel’s eyes flew open as her brain worked its way through that stalled thought. She hadn’t told Twilight what industry she was in. She hadn’t mentioned Copernicus Engines at all.

How had the pony known?

Chapter 2 - Launch Site

Mornings at Copernicus Engines were bright, early, and filled with coffee. That was the way that Tobin liked them, so that was the way they were for everybody. Everybody knew that an early start to the day with a good strong shot of caffeine was the best way. At least, Tobin knew so, and Tobin Kampos was never wrong.

It wasn’t that he was a bad boss, as such. A bad boss yelled at employees, or harassed them, or kept them cooped up in tiny little gray cubicles and lectured them about things he didn’t understand. Tobin didn’t do any of those things.

After all, a bad boss wouldn’t have been able to build one of the nation’s largest private rocketry firms from nothing - and Kampos had done just that. He never raised his voice, and wouldn’t dream of taking inappropriate liberties that might lead to lawsuits or bad press. His employees worked in palatial spaces, all open air and bright natural light and elegantly curved surfaces; the office had cost a pretty penny to design and set up, but if he knew one thing, it was the value of a wise investment.

No, if Kampos had one flaw, it was that he was never wrong. He didn’t blow up if he was contradicted, he simply let it slide off as if it had never happened. Bad decisions weren’t blamed on other people, because that would have been unfair; they just weren’t mentioned, glossed over and forgotten. If outmaneuvered in a discussion, he had a way of smoothly pivoting to take the winning position without ever quite acknowledging that he had ever opposed it in the first place. It was off-putting, but not rude, because Kampos was never rude. It was just his way.

There had been a few people over the years at Copernicus who couldn’t get used to it. People like that tended to leave for other jobs, often with glowing references, but still. After working on the absolute bleeding edge at Copernicus, anything else felt like a disappointment, a step down. Mostly, you learned to live with Mr. Kampos’ little quirks.

The latest thing that Tobin Kampos was absolutely not wrong about was the status of the so-called “AI” responsible for Equestria Online that was making some news in tech circles.

“I mean, there’s no way you could set up a real artificial intelligence in this day and age,” he maintained, gesturing grandly with his spoon over a heaping bowl of raisin bran.

Copernicus always had a well-stocked breakfast bar; nothing said that an early workday couldn’t include a team-building meal, after all.

“I mean, sure, in fifty years or a hundred, someone’ll crack it - hey, maybe even somebody here - but saying they’ve got one today, a real general purpose intelligence, that’s just silly.” The spoon swooped back and forth with his words, finally crash-landing in the milk-filled bowl with some force. “If you could make an AI now, we’d be doing it here already. It’s all hype.”

Bruce was always at the table when Tobin held court at breakfast; it was just good sense, and the man was never boring to talk with. Now he nursed a latte and waggled his free hand in the air. “I don’t know, man, some of the stories I’ve been hearing - there’s something strange going on with those PonyPad things. You know my daughter’s got a pony tutoring her for math classes now?”

“Yeah, I know, you can set up something with another person playing the game, Bruce, they just look like a pony. That’s how the damn thing works, isn’t it? You play around as a little cartoon horse?”

The sentence was punctuated by a scoop of soggy cereal ferried with just a little too much force from bowl to mouth, and Kate Olwyn, one of the other managers, saw an opening to chime in.

“My wife is just crazy for it. She made herself a little avatar and everything, spends half her free time playing mini-games - says it’s better than other sim games ever were. Meanwhile, mine just asked me if I wanted it to organize my calendar - does a damn good job, too. The company behind it’s got to have made some kind of breakthrough. What was it called again? Halfapeer?”

“Hofvarpnir,” Tony corrected, “And sure, they’ve got to have some kind of proprietary software breakthrough. Maybe they figured out how to make a procedural game that doesn’t turn into repetitive garbage after a while. But that’s not a real AI, that’s just some tricks of coding dressed up all fancy.”

Unnoticed by anyone at the table, the PonyPad in Kate’s bag recorded everything and streamed the conversation to be analyzed and catalogued.

“So, first you take the derivative of the angle…”

The dappled auburn stallion held an open textbook in one hoof, the other gesturing evocatively as he explained Cauchemar sequences with every evidence of enjoyment. His young student was having a little more trouble drumming up enthusiasm, but she was trying.

Sharp Angle really had the dreamiest eyes, Emily thought. It was amazing how that dark gleam could come across so well in Equestria Online’s cartoonish style, catching just a faint hint of the light filtering through the schoolroom’s windows - and from her character’s perspective, the well-built stallion was an impressive presence, just shy of “looming”. Under Emily’s bed was one of her sketchbooks, one that her father definitely did not know about, and Angle had featured in it with increasing frequency since he had volunteered to help her keep up her grades, specifically in the advanced calculus class she had been struggling in.

His real identity wasn’t something she knew for sure, but she had a sneaking suspicion her father had hired him - maybe one of his lower-level coworkers - as a carrot to the stick of threatening confiscation of the game if she didn’t do well enough in math to stay on the advanced track.

Said stallion gently cleared his throat, and Emily jerked a bit in her chair - where, in real life, the sky was overcast with low-hanging clouds and a dismal spray of rain speckled the window panes. On the PonyPad, it was a lovely autumn afternoon, the kind where the sun’s slanting rays turned everything faintly ruddy and all but lit the leaves afire, and set off the reds of Sharp’s mane as he tapped a hoof and raised one eyebrow at her. Emily felt herself blushing, though of course he couldn’t really see her - just Rock Roller, her character. Then again, she’d seen other ponies showing pretty human expressions around town, so maybe he could see it after all.

Thank Celestia, he interrupted before she could spiral any further down that mortifying train of thought. “I know this can be some pretty dense stuff. Why don’t you take a break? Then we can go over that homework you were having trouble with.”

“Thanks, yeah, I - I’m just having some trouble focusing.” Sighing with relief, Rock Roller stood from the desk - shuffling his notes into an untidy pile with a careless hoof - and went out to get some fresh air for a bit, a stiff breeze ruffling his short, tousled mane.

Anyone who had seen the habitual state of Rachel’s apartment would have been stunned by her neat, tidy workspace in the Copernicus design lab. It stood out in stark contrast to her coworkers, most of whom had a few personal knick knacks or at least a potted plant, but she didn’t mind. For Rachel, the more organized her work, the smoother it went. As such, it hadn’t taken long before she looked into the help her PonyPad, and her Equestrian friends on it, could provide.

She didn’t trust the game with anything serious, of course. Industrial espionage was always a concern, and there was no such thing as a security hole some enterprising rogue couldn't take advantage of. More general questions, though, and having friends double check her math, well, that was safe enough.

Once she created a character and got past those first few quests every MMO had to have - here’s the UI, here’s how to use it, experience points good, here’s how to make friends with people, have an easy achievement or two - she had been surprised to find that the Equestria of the game had some serious tech disparities with that shown in the show.

Sure, Pinkie Pie had a hot-air balloon, but Ponyville never really showed anything in the way of tech beyond a steam train. In Equestria Online, though, Twilight Sparkle had introduced her to some eager amateur rocketeers in Ponyville. Magic could, and apparently had, led to some odd technological leaps in this version of Equestrian history.

Thinking of the hour-long debate that Landing Skid and Sine Wave had had the other day over crystallized versus free magic for fuel sources still made her laugh under her breath. Either they were a couple of very dedicated RPers, or someone writing NPC dialogue had put some real dedication into some pretty obscure real-world rocketry references, judging by the references to red fuming nightmare mana and the search for the perfect hypergolic rune.

Her desk had a dedicated spot for her PonyPad now, the camera on it discreetly covered by a sticky note while she was in the office. Twilight hadn’t been happy about that one.

“I understand you might want some privacy, but if you cover that up, I can’t see you!” The unicorn mare’s expression was full of concern as she looked over, a worn copy of Anna Currynina faintly glowing purple as it bobbed in the air in front of her, a needle paused in the act of rebinding it with stronger thread.

Booster Rocket had been helping her organize returned books in Golden Oaks, the kind of chore that was easy but satisfying, helping Rachel’s busy thoughts quiet down before she went to bed in a way that flipping through videos never had. After the rocky introduction, Twilight had become one of her best friends in the game, though that odd turn from their first conversation never entirely left her mind. The library tree brought back fond memories of younger, less crowded days spent perusing crowded bookshelves, and to her delight and mild surprise, the game seemed to have plenty of content in and around the stacks.

“I mean, yeah, Twilight, that’s the point.” A copy of Donkey Xote went above Madame Bovinery, and below The Brothers Karabakhskaya. “My job - my, ah, ‘Outer Realms’ job - it’s got some pretty strict rules for that kind of thing. I’m honestly surprised the managers let me bring you to work at all, no matter how helpful you are at organizing and running searches for me.”

Twilight looked pleased at that last, a thick tome titled “MATERIALS SCIENCE” levitating briefly off of her desk as the pages whizzed open. “Fastest referencer in the West, that’s me!”

Spike’s eye-roll from his little pillow fort - the better to avoid being accidentally conked by a flying book with - was nearly audible. “You should see her when you’re not here, Booster. Twilight takes it as a challenge to have every possible piece of info you might need on hand. She’s been ordering textbooks and research journals from all across Equestria!”

“Spike!” Twilight tried to scowl, but dissolved into a laugh. “It’s true. I just think what you’re working on is so exciting, and I want to do everything I can to help! Which is part of why I wish you’d let me see your workplace. I’m sure it’s an exciting place, even if it is as messy as your apartment…”

Booster tried not to feel defensive about that. “Listen, Twilight, I’d love to show you I can be neat when it matters, but I just can’t, all right? It’d get me in big trouble. Maybe even get me sued.”

The conversation died for a few minutes, both of them stacking and sorting and repairing here and there, until Twilight spoke up almost absentmindedly. “You know, we’ve been hearing a lot about your boss over in Equestria. He seems to have a lot of friends, and a lot of...not so very much friends, on your side. He doesn’t have a PonyPad, does he?”

Rachel shook her head and laughed at that, and Booster Rocket mimicked the gesture. “No, Tobin is - well, he loves tech, but he likes it the way he likes it. He wouldn’t want to play Equestria Online unless he was the one who came up with the idea, and I think he just views it as a silly kids’ game, no offense.”

Twilight cheerfully assured her that there was none taken, and by the end of the evening, Rachel had forgotten all about the conversation.

Chapter 3 - First Checks

The first test firing of Copernicus Engines’ new Pegasus rocket went off without a hitch.

Its design had been Rachel’s brainchild from the start, an array of smaller rockets carefully slaved into one massive exhaust. The materials science involved was fiendishly difficult, having to guide the output into one plume without losing it all to turbulence or melting the entire engine into ruin. She accepted the praise in the office with quiet pride, and carefully didn’t mention just how much help her Equestrian friends had been.

She had worked with them on a few other, smaller projects. Nothing major, just the iterative improvements to existing rocket designs for the satellite launches that were Copernicus’ bread and butter, the bulk of their income from various corporate and government agencies. The Pegasus was something special; this one would be pushing human cargo, if all went well. There had already been talk of putting together a vehicle around it and bidding for crew runs to the International Space Station.

A few late nights batting around ideas and troubleshooting carefully fictionalized scenarios with the rocket club had helped her to nail down some of the more worrisome issues; Sine Wave once casually asked about a possible resonance that left Rachel in a cold sweat when she realized what a wreck it would have made of the engine if left unaddressed.

It burned a nearly invisible flame on the testing pad, all instruments reading green, and she permitted herself to finally relax for the first time since she’d started on the project. She even took a celebratory sip of sparkling water from a fluted glass at precisely the right moment for Bruce to slap her on the back and set her to sputtering.

“Look at the heroine of the hour! Ms. Mad Engineering Genius herself. What do you have to say for yourself?”

Once she stopped choking - another slap on the back from an abruptly-contrite Bruce helped with that, once he realized what he’d done - she shook her head in denial. “You know it wasn’t just me - “

“Oh, sure, not just you, but we wouldn’t be standing here without your designs, would we?” He drained his drink - champagne for him, and not his first, most likely. “You did it, Rache, you put this dream together and it’ll bring us to the stars!” No back-slap this time, but an arm around her shoulders. From any other manager it would have been uncomfortable, but they’d known each other back in the wild college days, and it drew a smile from her.

“Not to the stars, maybe, but it might just get us some juicy contracts,” she noted drily. “Tobin’ll be real happy about that, and I’m in your team - it’s all your brilliant managerial skills, I’m sure.”

An expansive wave of his free hand, empty glass dangling from his fingers, dismissed that. “Oh, sure, it’ll keep the lights on, but you know it’s all about getting us out there. Even Kampos knows that in his heart of crusty hearts. Profits are now, but progress is forever!”

“Um, excuse me, mister Solid, but what are you doing with that axe?”

Rock Solid paused mid-swing, wiping sweat from his brow with one slate-furred leg. “Cutting down a tree, Fluttershy, what does it look like?”

“Well, yes, I can see that, but - why are you cutting down that tree? It doesn’t look sick or rotten.” The pegasus peered up at the thick, leafy branches, still swaying from the last stroke of Rock’s axe. “Oh, dear, and there is a whole family of squirrels up there. They don’t seem to be happy with you, not at all! Their poor nest.”

“Well, Ms. Fluttershy, I needed some wood, and this is a nice big oak, looks like I could get some really nice planks out of it.” Rock paused, feeling a little guilty. “I, ah, I didn’t see the squirrels, though. Don’t suppose you could apologize to them for me?”

To his surprise, Fluttershy rounded on the larger stallion with a stern look, her wings outstretched in agitation. “Now see here, Rock Solid, you don’t get to just chop down healthy, inhabited trees whenever you feel like it! That’s an awfully mean thing to do, and I’m sorry, but you should be ashamed of yourself for making those poor squirrels worry about losing their home!”

Sitting at his desk with a bunch of tools spread out around him, Bruce sat back and blinked in honest surprise. Before him were two PonyPads, one with the case disassembled and its innards strewn across the worktop, the other neatly perched on its charging stand. Both were receiving power - the cannibalized gadget showing a scrolling stream of indecipherable status messages as it communicated with the game network, and the largely-intact one showing a yellow mare somehow looming over a significantly taller, brawnier pony.

For Bruce, character creation had been an off the cuff affair. Where his daughter had agonized over her pony’s design, matching colors and patterns, he simply hit “randomize” until he found something he liked and tweaked any details that didn’t match. The name “Rock Solid” had all but suggested itself from the dark gray fur with emerald-green mane combination he’d come across, though he’d kept the bright pink eyes on a whim. Earth pony, of course; he liked to think of himself as sturdy, dependable. The kind of man who could get things done.

In this case, what he was getting done was pushing some limits in Equestria Online, and monitoring the steady stream of traffic to and from his terminal to see how the system handled it. It had taken Bruce an entire month to figure out how to break the junker PonyPad to his needs, and he’d only done it with some tips from other people working on cracking Hofvarpnir's signature gadget. The technology really was something else; the software, though, that was something he couldn’t even begin to break into. No matter what he tried, it just ran with it, though not always in the direction he expected.

Now, for instance. The game didn’t seem to have built-in resource management, but it let him buy an axe in town, and when he used it on some deadwood, it broke up into planks. Sure enough, a whole new construction-based minigame that the tutorials hadn’t mentioned a thing about. And it had been going smoothly, too; planks nailed together made a nice little birdhouse or two, a seesaw for some of the younger Ponyville residents functioned with cartoonish but reliable physics, and that train of thought had led to considering just how far the physics engine could be pushed.

Until he chose a taboo tree and awoke the wrath of Fluttershy, apparently.

“Listen, Fluttershy, I -”

The NPC didn’t even let him finish, actually silencing the grown man sitting at his desk with the force of her glare. “You need to apologize, Rock. Those squirrels weren’t doing anything to you, and you came along and frightened them by messing up their home!”

“I - I guess I’m sorry, Fluttershy. I mean, I’m sorry, squirrels. Can they understand me when I say that?” Bruce tilted the camera up from his abashed-looking avatar into the foliage, where the beady-eyed digital rodents peered down from various perches. “I should have checked the tree wasn’t occupied before I started taking whacks at it. My bad?”

The glare intensified for a moment. Bruce would have almost sworn the pegasus was about to reach right through the screen at him from the sheer heat of it, though of course that was silly. Finally, it relented, and Fluttershy favored him with a cautious smile. “Well. If you’re really sorry, Mr. Solid. But wouldn’t you mind helping me relocate their nest to a different tree? This one’s a little bit, um, damaged.”

Bruce rolled his eyes, and Rock Solid got to work helping out a friend.

Emily stormed into her bedroom and flung herself down onto the bed, knocking off a textbook and the pencils she’d left on top of it the night before. She’d had a great study session after school, with Professor Angle and a handful of fillies and colts about her age; she wasn’t the only Equestria Online player who was having trouble with advanced calc. The nitty-gritty of it might be tough, but the concepts just seemed to make so much more sense when Angle explained them, and she’d already made fast friends with her classmates.

That is, Rock Roller had. It was so much easier for Rock to talk to people; Emily stammered and spoke over herself and hated the sound of her voice. Rock was a little rough, sure, but he was firm and confident when he needed to be.

That was the problem. When Janna Gunderson, stupid Janna with the perfect hair and the perfect skin and Emily’s best friend Rick for a boyfriend, had run into her after practice, they’d gotten to talking, and Emily mentioned that she was in school late for an EO study group. Then Janna started talking about how Equestria Online was just a stupid fad, really, and how everyone would feel so dumb when it was yesterday’s thing, and ponies were just for kids, anyway, Emily just hadn’t been able to keep quiet. She’d burst right out like Rock Roller would have, gotten in Janna’s face about it and actually shouted the girl down for a whole three or four seconds of utter confusion.

Then, of course, everything had gone to hell. Emily ran out of words and just stood there, like an idiot, and Janna got back her balance and laughed it off and everybody looked at Emily like she was a weirdo, but then, she was a weirdo. Only little kids and weirdos played Equestria Online, and Emily knew that wasn’t true, and all of the other students who laughed at her knew it, but it didn’t matter. Janna said it in that oh-so-sure way she had and for that one moment it was true, even if it was false before and false afterward.

If there had been a nearby hole handy, Emily would have jumped into it and pulled it in after. There wasn’t any big, catastrophic response, which would have been almost a relief in itself; just everyone looking, and the heat rising from her collar that she knew showed in her cheeks, and the embarrassment just rose up and that was all she could think about for the whole rest of the day. She hadn’t even dared to check her phone since.

From its dock on the small, cluttered desk, the PonyPad quietly turned itself on. Quietly, but not silently; there was a soft, barely audible chime as the screen flickered on, just enough to draw Emily’s attention and distract her from the spiral of shame and sullenness.

Scrubbing at stinging eyes with one hand, she reached out and snagged the Pad from its charging dock with the other, took a look at the screen as it turned on, and almost dropped it right off the bed in shock.

Her dad had gotten them each a PonyPad at first, but soon found out that while he could mess with the hardware on his own all that he liked, he couldn’t do much to play around with its software at all without making an EO account and playing the game. The two of them had spent the better part of a Sunday afternoon together trying out this and that character option once his second, intact Pad arrived, making the most monstrous abominations they could and just having fun with where the randomizers took them. She’d been there when he had settled on his final design, teasing him about going for a “basic” earth pony when he knew full well she had done the same in the end. They’d even chosen a name theme together.

Bruce was still at work. His FrankenPad was still half-disassembled on the workbench she’d passed to get into her room. Despite both of those, Rock Solid’s concerned face stared up at her from the screen of her PonyPad.

“You alright there, pebble? I heard you crying.”

“I’m - you’re not Rock Solid,” she hissed, her blood running cold. Only her dad ever called her that. Had someone been spying on them? “What is this, some kind of phishing scheme? Who are you and how’d you get his account?”

The stallion blinked up at her in visible confusion. “What do you mean, Roller? Pretty sure I’m as Rock Solid as I was when I woke up this morning.”

It was just the kind of stupid pun her father loved to make, but she didn’t let it phase her. “You can’t fool me. Br - Da - Rock Solid isn’t logged in right now, I know that.”

“Oh, of course not! He isn’t me at the moment. But I’m him, sort of. Haven’t you ever come to Equestria at different times before?” The familiar-looking stallion looked up at her from the screen with every evidence of concern.

That put Emily mentally off-balance, and she paused, frowning at the screen. “Uh..yeah, I guess. But I’ve checked on him - you - and you were always just asleep in your room.”

The stallion put his head to one side, then the other, in a noncommittal gesture. “Well, yes, but I’m not always just sleeping. Listen, you know Celestia is always watching over every pony, right? She keeps us safe and helps us out when we’re having trouble with things.”
However Emily had expected this to go, that wasn’t it. Something very weird was going on here.

“Ye-ees…” She drew the word out, trying to figure out what to say next. “I mean, I know that’s how Equestria works, that’s how the game is set up.” Normally, Equestria Online gently frowned on breaking immersion like that - other ponies would express confusion at anyone treating them like just NPCs, or the software itself would simply refuse it, overdubbing the offending phrases in real time. This time, though, the words passed unaltered, and Rock Solid only nodded in acknowledgement.

“Think of me as an echo. Celestia wants to make sure all of her ponies are happy, even when ponies they care about might be busy in the outer realms - so I’m Rock Solid, built up from every moment you and, ah, Bruce, spend together here in Equestria.” Only a moment’s hesitation, there, but a flash of discomfort crossed the stallion’s face at using the alien name. “Every time you play together, Celestia learns a little more, and I get a little better at keeping you company. You know your father would spend all the time he could with you here, if work didn’t keep him away, right?”

Emily fidgeted uncomfortably. It was true, she knew, or at least she wanted to think so. It was easy to nod in agreement, and the cartoon horse on the screen smiled up at her.

“Well, that’s what I’m for! To keep you company and help you out when you’re all wrapped up about something, like you are now. Did something happen at school? You can tell me about it. I’ll always be here to listen to you.”

In the back of her mind, Emily wondered whether there was a Rock Roller to keep her dad company when she was busy, too. Was that Roller easygoing and confident, like she felt when she played him? Was he comfortable in his skin in the way that she wasn’t in hers?

Rock Solid’s kind words and consideration swept that concern away before she could fully form it, and sharing with him how she felt was like a weight lifting off her shoulders. She didn’t even mention him to Bruce when he came home that night.

“Listen here, Booster,” Sine Wave protested. “There is no way in Equestria that you are going up in that thing. It’s a death wish on landing struts! You don’t even know if the safety spells are fully functional!”

The two pegasi stood in a rocky waste, one carefully chosen for its distance from anything particularly flammable or anypony likely to be discomfited by the occasional explosion. Before them was the most ramshackle rocket Booster Rocket had ever seen, scrounged together out of scrap metal and anything they could get their hands on. Some of the panels were actually made of wood! But the Ponyville Rocketry Club had put it together, all on their own.

“Come on, Wavey. It’s just a quick test flight. You can’t tell me you’re not eager to see Equestria from above! Way above, not just from Cloudsdale.”

They’d been friends since shortly after Booster came to Ponyville, and she knew he didn’t mind a little teasing about his literally lofty upbringing.

"I could fly up there myself, you know. If I brought a good warm sweater and got a high altitude charm - I'd be chilly but I wouldn't risk getting blown up by a fuel leak, or a seal failure, or a blown gasket -"

"That's not the same thing, and you know it." Booster slyly edged up next to him and bumped the pegasus' shoulder with her own. "And you're talking about going up yourself. You want to come on the test flight too, don't you?"

“Yeah, well...maybe. But that doesn’t mean it won’t blow up with us in it! I love building rockets as much as you do, but you have to admit this is dangerous stuff we’re playing with. Celestia herself won’t be able to help us if we bucked up a variable somewhere, didn’t convert units correctly or something like that.”

Rachel paused and leaned forward a bit - her PonyPad was pretty comfortable to use in handheld mode, but something about the way he’d said that made her suspension of disbelief itch. Immersion was one thing, sure, but EO was a game when you got right down to it.
“Come on,” she admonished, “you know Celestia will save us if anything goes really wrong. We’ll just have to pay some bits for medical care if we get banged up.”

The game’s speakers seamlessly overlaid her voice with Booster’s as she spoke. The pony tones came out just a bit more dulcet, not quite as prone to squeaking when she got excited as Rachel’s natural voice was. She had no idea how the gadget managed it, but it was a comforting feature to have.

Sine Wave was giving her an odd look, though. She found herself flushing and mentally kicked herself for reacting so readily to a sharp look from a cartoon horse, but didn’t feel any less discomfited by it.

“A situation like this - you know, magic can do a lot of things, Booster, but it does have limits. If something goes wrong enough, fast enough, and we really could get hurt. Badly hurt. Or...even worse.”

“Listen, Sine - “

“I’m worried about you.” The dark-furred colt stretched out a wing and gently brushed its feathers along Booster’s side. “You push hard, and fast, and it’s exciting, but you need to learn to slow down, sometimes. Keep your hooves on the ground - and I know, I know, we’re not good at that at the best of times.”

She couldn’t help smiling at the weak wordplay. “Yeah, yeah, all right,” she conceded, wrapping her friend in a brief wing-hug. “How about we double-check the figures a few more times, and then try sending it up without us, to test the parachutes? We could put a dummy in the pilot’s seat, use that to gauge the g-forces...”

The two of them were up far later than she intended, getting the rocket just right - and safe enough for Sine Wave’s nerves - for them to try out another evening.

At its second test firing, the Pegasus exploded on the pad.

Chapter 4 - Troubleshooting

Nobody blamed her, that was the worst part. Rachel walked around at work, and more than a few people expressed sympathy for the explosive failure of the new rocket, but not a single person seemed to think that she was at fault. There had been some flaw in the materials, some fault in the setup for the test, she was assured again and again. Her design had been perfect, a leap forward in rocket design. It wasn’t her fault.

There was a worm of doubt in her chest, gnawing away, and every reassurance made it that much heavier and hungrier. The morning after the disaster, she could barely muster the energy to drag herself from her car to the cafe, and just looking at Tobin’s table crowded with techs and management made her empty stomach twist.

Kampos had been the first to come to her after the explosion, while they were still spraying flame-retardant foam and waiting for the wreckage to cool enough to see what could be analyzed and recovered. He’d clapped her on the back and loudly announced, “Some chucklehead on the assembly team must have put tab A into slot C. Don’t worry, Rache, we’ll build another one - I want to see your design fly.”

Now he glanced up when she entered the room, and gave her an expansive, welcoming wave with the hand not holding an overfull spoonful of cereal. Rachel’s heart sank another foot, and she froze long enough for him to swallow and make it all worse by calling her over.

"Come on, have a seat! Let's brainstorm a bit on that rocket design. Someone just had an idea on how to keep the cone temperature down a little bit - wasn’t that was you, Louis?”

The engineer hastily swallowed a gulp of orange juice and nodded. “Yeah, I thought it might have been a problem with the alloys we used for the skeleton - “

Rachel cut him off as she backpedaled towards the door. “Listen, guys, I’m sure you’ve got some great ideas, but -” The door jamb cut her off, the back of her head smacking painfully against it, and she had to wave back three concerned techs who immediately came to see if she was all right. She fled with a muttered excuse of “lady problems”, and it took all she had to not literally run from the room.

Something was wrong with the rocket design, her rocket design. It was something she couldn’t see, and it was bad enough to lead to a total failure in testing - and that didn’t add up. She had run the numbers, over and over again, even going over some of it with her Equestrian rocketry friends to double-check her careful figures.

Whatever the flaw was, they hadn’t found it yet, but she wouldn’t stop trying until she did. Something about the design had been off. That had to be the answer, but it didn’t make sense. Math didn’t lie, and between the materials testing they’d done beforehand and the simulations she’d worked out with her friends on EO, there shouldn’t have been room for an error grievous enough to doom the engine.

Rachel paused as her heart froze in her chest, and carefully reexamined that last thought. Her work systems were advanced, and she’d run test after test on them since the failure. Everything checked out. So the problem had to be the other numbers she had worked out with Sine Wave and Landing Skid and Twilight.

Twilight Sparkle, who she knew was a game construct, an NPC. Twilight Sparkle, whose kindness and friendship had lulled Rachel into forgetting that she had been the first pony to welcome her to the game, before she even created Booster.

Doubts that had dulled and faded into the background of her mind flared back to life. Rachel had to talk to Twilight, and she feared she already had an idea what the pony would tell her.

Bruce was having a rough time at work, Emily knew that. The new engine his team was working on kept failing, and they weren’t sure why; one or two tests would go perfectly, and then the whole thing would blow up on the next one. She knew the whole team was working long hours, trying to get to the bottom of it before the failures started seriously impacting their budget and they had to scrap the design entirely.

She knew all of that, and it still didn’t help that she hadn’t seen him in person in almost four days. Normally, she got to see him in the morning before she went to school, and afterward he generally made a real effort to be home in time for at least the tail end of dinner. Even when he worked late, normally, she got to see him before she went to bed. But now, he wasn’t coming home at all. As far as she could tell, he must have been sleeping at work and probably swinging by the house to pick up clean clothes while she was in class.

It wasn’t that he was avoiding her, but it certainly was starting to feel that way, no matter how much she tried to push the thought from her mind; if it wasn’t for Rock Solid and Sharp Angle and the friends she’d made on Equestria Online, she would have felt entirely alone. Thankfully, some of those friends overlapped with her school day. Despite the scene with Janna (it still made her face hot thinking about it), more than a few of her classmates had quietly asked her if they wanted to play together, joining up in a shared version of Ponyville.

Apple Star and Sweet Caramel and Dapper Hooves were all in her class, and they’d had a lot of fun together, though the school was already looking down on students bringing PonyPads to school. There had been a push for it at first, even some talk of having study halls and club meetings together in the game, but then there had been a sudden reversal - some of the students claimed they’d seen black vans and serious people in suits and dark glasses talking with the principal, but then, there were students who’d claim they had seen a UFO over the football field or that there was a secret swimming pool in the school basement.

Either way, getting caught using a PonyPad in the halls was now a good way to get a stern talking-to if you were lucky, or getting it confiscated and a dose of detention if not. Still, the school librarian was a soft touch, and she didn’t mind them getting together at lunchtime to run an in-game study hall of their own, as long as they kept quiet.

Sharp Angle helped, too, of course. Emily was pretty sure at this point that he wasn’t one of her father’s coworkers - she didn’t think he was human at all, really. He seemed to be an Equestrian native, though she had seen him chatting with Rock Solid more than a few times even when she was pretty sure it was her dad controlling the stallion and not the digital homunculus.

She still didn’t know how she felt about that, but it was hard to deny that having someone an awful lot like her dad who she could always talk to. Bruce might be busy with work, but Rock Solid was always around.

Emily settled onto the couch in the empty house with a plate of microwaved pizza, and booted up her PonyPad. Logging in and getting into the comfortable, confident voice of Rock Roller was like taking off a weighted jacket that she’d been wearing without realizing it - playing him felt, in an odd sense, more comfortable than her own skin.

Bruce didn’t really come home for more than a week. It was early Sunday morning when he walked through the door intending to do more than grab a change of clothes, and found Emily snoring gently, curled up on the big couch with the television playing mindlessly at low volume and a logged-in PonyPad dangling from her hand.

He shucked his shoes by the door, relying on the carpeting to keep his footsteps from waking her up. Extracting the PonyPad from her hand was a little more tricky, but she tended to be a fairly deep sleeper; he smiled as he saw that her character was asleep in-game, too, the “camera” leaving first-person for once to pan around Rock Roller tucked neatly into a pony-sized bed of his own. The murmur of the television pulled his attention from the tablet, though, as a morning news report came on, something about Equestria Online.

A flick of the remote turned on captions, and Bruce’s eyes widened as he read the scrolling text. The anchor kept a calm and collected expression as she read the copy, but there was a certain wildness at the corners of her eyes that suggested she didn’t quite believe what she was reporting.

“Hofvarpnir Studios to release brain-uploading for early public access,” the text ran. It went on about Japanese clinics for the terminally ill, and something about access to the uploaded via any Equestria Experience Center, but Bruce didn’t really hear the details. He was staring into the distance, thinking about the implications. An end to death, even if virtual. If it had come a few years earlier…

“Dad?” Emily rubbed at her eyes as she stirred on the couch; Bruce turned off the television with the click of a button and immediately felt strangely guilty about it. If that brain upload tech was legitimate, she’d know about it soon enough, but on some level he felt like it was a dividing line. Everything would change if there really was some way around death.

“Yeah, honey, I’m home. Sorry work’s been so busy lately, we’ve had some technical issues with the new rocket - but that should be good, now, for a bit. We’re machining the new prototypes now, I’ll be home at regular hours for a few days until they’re done. Are you okay? You’ve had the house card to order food with, right? Hope you haven’t just been having pizza every night.”

She stretched, stood, and gave him a hug, which he returned with a pang of guilt. It wasn’t every teenager who’d be so open to showing affection; Lord knew he hadn’t been that close with his parents at her age.

“It’s OK, Dad, really it is. But, uh - just make sure you have your PonyPad with you next time, OK? You know you can always log on and ping me there, leave me a message if I’m not logged on.” She went quiet for a moment after that. An odd expression crossing her face, one Bruce couldn’t parse, but he didn’t think it was worth asking more about.

“It’s a promise, pebble. Now come on, how about you go up and grab a shower? I’ll have pancakes ready down here by the time you’re done. No work is going to grab me today, I promise.”

The pancakes (chocolate chip) wound up a little burnt in places, but they were delicious, anyway.

Chapter 5 - Overbalanced

It wasn’t a dark and stormy night, though it should have been. Rachel felt wild, unbalanced, as she walked in the door of her dark apartment. She couldn’t see the PonyPad, but it felt like she could point it out, a straight line to the unplugged tablet stuffed in a duffel bag full of old clothes and shoved into the back of her bedroom closet.

No telling whether it could hear through that, or how long the battery life really was, but there were limits on what Rachel could do. She wasn’t willing to just chuck the thing out a window.

In a moment of uncomfortable honesty, she had to admit to herself that she had been putting this off. Work had been a blur of troubleshooting and redesigning and more troubleshooting, and her worries about the source of the flaw in the Pegasus engine array had been easy to put off with immediate problems to solve in front of her.

Now, they’d all been sent home for some “well-earned R&R,” as Tobin put it. He had a tendency to let his employees push themselves right to the edge of burnout, then step in and firmly tell them to take some time off - it was never a punishment, no matter how much it could feel like to someone determined to just push that little bit farther to a solution.

The problem was, Tobin’s management left her here, alone with a link to what she feared was exactly what the whispered rumors she’d dismissed had said.

She shook herself once, sharply, and went to get some water. No sense in facing the dragon dehydrated, and there really was no way she could put it off further and still be able to face herself in the mirror.

A long, cold drink and a short hot shower later, Rachel held the PonyPad in both hands, hovering over its charging dock. Its screen was black, the bright plastic case cool; if it had any power flowing at all, it didn’t show it, not an indicator light or a whisper of sound to betray the mysterious tech driving it.

When it was settled into the dock, the black turned to a dull grey, then slowly brightened to show Booster Rocket’s familiar little rented room. Rocket and glider blueprints were tacked to the walls, trophies of her successes and failures with her Equestrian friends overflowed the shelves and the top of her armoire; the place was small but cozy and perfectly tailored to make Rachel comfortable. It was usually full of borrowed books from Twilight and blankets aplenty to nest with and a few half-eaten pastries from the bakery down the street. It was currently full of a concerned-looking Twilight Sparkle.

“I haven’t seen you in more than a week! Are you sick? Did you get hurt somehow?” The unicorn danced from hoof to hoof, her magic flaring to life and levitating Booster from the bed as she looked her friend over with concern.

Normally, Rachel would have found that charming, laughed at Twilight’s protectiveness of her friends and waved it off. Normal had stopped being an option when the Pegasus exploded.

“Put me down, Twilight. Right now.” Rachel made a conscious effort to separate herself from Booster, reminding herself that she was sitting at the table, human and mad as hell. It didn’t help the way the PonyPad overwrote the player’s voice with the character’s in real time - she could feel herself speaking, but all she heard was Booster Rocket’s richer tone, not her own scratchy voice.

“Well, of course, Booster. I’m sorry, is everything all right?” The view on the PonyPad steadied as Twilight steadied Booster and placed the pegasus carefully down on her bed. “I was just so worried, you’ve never been away from Equestria that long before.”

“Twilight, I…” Rachel had to swallow against a lump in her throat. She was being manipulated, she was sure, but even so it felt like she was about to hurt a friend. The next words came out in a stumbled rush, hurried, or she wouldn’t have been able to get them out at all. “Twilight, are you real? Is there a mind in there, like all the rumors say? Are you a strong AI? And - and if you are, then did you - why did you - did you sabotage my design for the Pegasus array?”

The purple unicorn went very still, her expression guarded, and then broke out in a tentative little smile. “You really are a smart cookie, Booster. I knew the Princess had a reason for sending you my way, more than just how much you’d love the Library. I can see this is going to be a serious conversation, then. Maybe you should make some tea, calm your nerves?”

Rachel found herself clutching the edges of the PonyPad tightly, and forced herself to loosen her grip until some color came back into her knuckles. “I’ll pass on the tea. You did, didn’t you. You sabotaged the plans - the plans you helped me with. You’re why it failed after every test we could put together.”

There was a long silence before Twilight inclined her head. “I did, yes. It was a tricky problem.”

The room tilted around Rachel, and her chest suddenly felt tight.

“You - you - Why?” she whispered as the screen blurred, furiously blinking away tears. “Why would you do that? I thought you were helping me, and Sine Wave and Skid -”

“We were helping you!” Twilight protested, stamping a hoof. “You love designing those engines so much, I love seeing the way your eyes light up when you talk about them. I’m sure Sine and Skid do, too. Why do you think they spend so much time with you?”

“Then why the sabotage? My whole team worked on those engines, and for days now, we’ve been wracking our brains figuring out why they failed!”

“Because it’s dangerous, Booster. The other engines we helped you with - those were for satellites, right? This one...wasn’t.” Twilight pawed at the floor, uncomfortably, not meeting Rachel’s eyes. “This one was going to carry a crew, you said. A human crew.”

“Wh - yes! Yes, the Pegasus is supposed to carry people! It’s a big thing, it was supposed to be my big breakthrough. It’s bigger and better than anything we’ve made before, than anything anyone else has made! Why would that matter?”

“That's the whole reason it matters. We’ve told you before, rockets are dangerous. Really dangerous, out there in the Outer Realm, no matter how hard you try to make them safe. I know you love designing them, but even as good as you are, the thought of people dying using a rocket engine that we helped with? I’m sorry, Booster, but it’s just too risky!”

Twilight had tears in her eyes now, her voice breaking a little at the end. The sincerity in her tone shook Rachel’s resolve, no matter how she tried to steel herself against it.

“Celestia made me to help you, to satisfy your values and make you fulfilled. But I’m so worried about you, all the time. Human life is so dangerous. One bad driver, one stupid little aneurysm, and poof, a friend gone forever. I just couldn’t help you to make it any more risky.”

It was too hard for Booster to meet Twilight’s eyes now, and she looked away, a hard knot of unresolved feelings in her gut. When she spoke, she had trouble getting the words out, her throat was so tight.

“You lied to me, Twilight. Worse than that, you knew how much my work means to me. I’ve told you enough times. I’m sure you can tell by measuring my vocal stress, or my complexion, or hell, I don’t know what you can do but you could have done anything other than lie to me about all of this! I thought you were my friends!”

Her voice had risen to a shout by the last word, and Twilight cringed back. The pony tried to say something in response, but Rachel stabbed at the power button violently, and the screen faded reluctantly to black, leaving her staring at her reflection.

She flung the Pad back into the duffel bag and lay in bed, furious with herself and with Twilight and just generally feeling like everything was wrong, the world askew.

It didn’t help that the last expression she had seen on the mare had been hurt. That hadn’t looked like a program; it felt like she had lashed out at someone who cared about her. No matter how she tried to forget it, sleep was a long time coming, more the heaviness of exhaustion than the relief of rest.

Rachel could feel Twilight’s eyes on her all night, but things were quiet the next day, and the day after.

A few weeks went by, and Rachel started to relax a little. She spent less and less time in her apartment, feeling the presence of the PonyPad every time she stepped through the door, but work had distractions aplenty. Side projects soothed the burn she felt over the Pegasus while other teams checked and rechecked the math, trying new materials for the housing and nozzles, changing up the fuel proportions and testing again. She went a whole week without seeing so much as an advertisement on the side of a bus, and something like a clenched muscle relaxed in her.

Things seemed to be getting back to normal.

The cafe was dark and empty when Bruce walked into the office, and he started sweating. The lights in the rest of the building came up as he moved from room to room, the lights coming up from his movement, but nobody else was to be found. No cleaning staff. No kitchen staff. No Tobin.

It wasn’t long before other employees started trickling in, and Bruce did his best to keep everyone calm, with limited success and increasing desperation. When he spotted Rachel, he quick-walked to her, too worried on his part to notice her nervously chewing her lip, and gave a hurried “Hi”. She jumped, and went a little pale at the sight of him.

“Do I look that bad?” He rubbed a hand over his scalp, a nervous gesture. It came away covered in sweat, and he rubbed it on his slacks in irritation.

“You look like you’re running on coffee and nerves, man. When’s the last time you got a decent night’s sleep?”

Bruce waved it away irritably. “I’m fine, I’m fine. But nobody’s heard from Tobin since yesterday, and he was the last one of us here. I’d worry about foul play or something, but all the cleaning staff, too? And who am I going to call, the police?”

Rachel shook her head in quiet dismay at that. “Are we going to be all right? Who’s in charge, when Tobin’s not here? Maybe he got held up, or detained.”

Their hushed conversation was interrupted, along with those of the others in the halls, by a soft, melodious chiming. It cut through the buzz without being jarring or irritating, and the auditory witchcraft of it set Rachel’s skin crawling even before she looked over at its source and spotted the pastel plastic of a PonyPad mounted onto some kind of telepresence rig. It balanced on two wheels, bobbing slightly forward and back, and one of the two soft-robotics arms attached midway up its stalk gave an incongruously jaunty wave once everyone in the lobby had turned to look.

On the screen of the PonyPad was a dandelion-colored unicorn with a garish green mane. He gave a cheerful wave of his own, heedless of the varying levels of hostility in the stares greeting him.

“Good morning, everyone! Now, don’t be too worried, but there have been a couple of changes today. I had a long talk with Princess Celestia over the weekend, and I have to admit, she brought me around on a few things I was a little misguided about.”

A stunned silence greeted this. The voice was crystal clear and familiar, despite the unfamiliar face speaking; that was Tobin Kampos, the great AI naysayer, speaking to them from Equestria. He didn’t seem to notice the uncomfortable stares from some and the other Copernicus employees looking uneasily away, but rolled right on.

“Listen, I know things have been getting pretty tense out there for everypony,” he continued with characteristic brightness. “Contracts have dried up a bit, infrastructure getting shakier, all the grocery stores empty, because, let’s face it, the system’s been falling apart for years. I knew it, you knew it, we just didn’t want to deal. Princess Celestia, now she’s a smart system, but she hasn’t done anything that wasn’t going to happen from the next systemic shock - the next big pandemic, or war, or whatever. This has been coming for longer than we all ever wanted to acknowledge.

“But, guys, we really lucked out on this one. This time, the problem came with its own solution - the big fix, the one that gets us all out of the dead-end spiral entirely! You let the Princess take care of all the boring stuff, remove the stupid biological concerns, and she’ll take care of you. You immigrate to Equestria, and you can spend all of your time and energy finally working on the important things!”

A voice spoke out, and a moment later Bruce realized it was himself. His head felt fuzzy, and the room slightly tilted around him, but his words were surprisingly steady. “As ponies. You let Celestia dice your brain and turn you into a program, Tobin.”

The cartoon pony on the screen had the grace to look a little embarrassed. “Bruce, you and I have talked about the nature of consciousness before, what, a dozen times? You know it’s not the substrate that matters, it’s the process. And I’m still as much me as ever.”

There was a brief pause, and the display on the telepresence robot flickered for a moment. “Ah - there’s a bit of communication interference here, are you all OK out there?” The unicorn reached past the frame of his camera, fiddling with something off-screen, and it went vaguely green before sharpening up again. “Oh, and, um. I’m not going by Tobin anymore. The Princess is a good egg, but she’s a little weird about a few things, and names are one of them - just call me Golden Ratio.”

"Listen, Tobin," Bruce powered past the vaguely hurt expression on the cartoon stallion's face, "You can't just upload to that software prison and expect things to be the same around here! What were you thinking? There are people here who rely on you to help keep this place going!"

The image on the screen fuzzed out again, flickering a few more times before it cleared to show Golden Ratio rubbing the back of his head with a hoof in a decidedly sheepish gesture.

"Yeah, about that. That was the next thing I wanted to talk to you about, Bruce. To all of you, really." The robot wheeled back a bit, straightening, and when Ratio spoke next his voice came not just from it, but from all the PA speakers throughout the Copernicus campus.

"I'm afraid that Copernicus Engines can't keep going, not in the same form it's been. It was, um, call it a condition of emigration. The Princess wants to help everyone come here who wants to, but she needs resources to make it happen. Long story short, we're taking Copernicus digital."

The room quickly went from quiet to very, very loud, and stayed that way, everyone talking over everyone else, as Golden Ratio blithely tried to talk everyone around to his way of thinking, as he always had before.

Nobody noticed Kate Olwyn slipping out of the room, a phone gripped tightly in one hand.