Fallout Equestria: Soldier, Seeker, Eagle

Whinnyapolis, the west coast’s Manehattan. A city of wind, rain, and industry. Most of the ponies living within its many concrete and glass towers had never seen nature before. They had the privilege of enjoying many fine parks, rooftop gardens, and a wilderness themed Theme Park, but those were just as artificial as the city’s sewers and just as tamed as the kittens for sale in Whinnyapolis’ many malls.

Whinnyapolis was the oldest industrial metropolis in Equestria. The very first city created to be a place out of sight and out of mind for manufactured goods to flow from. It certainly wasn’t the last, but Whinnyapolis was the only one old enough to produce ponies with special talents for various industrial processes… Whinnyapolis was actually something pony researchers considered a "Foundational shift"-a location large enough, and focused enough, to start producing cutie marks centered on specific new subjects not common outside the region. Canterlot had its scholarly and authority cutie marks, Manehattan had a long history of maritime cutie marks, and now Whinnyapolis with its industrial cutie marks… while also experiencing a marked downturn in talents relating to the natural world.

Lyra Heartstrings was not such a pony. She stood in her office, looking at a large backlit photograph of the city she had in lieu of an office window. Many of her visitors wondered why her office lacked windows. Surely one of Equestria’s leading defense contractors could afford an office with windows.

Lyra shook her head and smiled to herself, remembering the confused questions about her simulated window she’d been asked just that afternoon.

“It’s like they forget there’s a war on,” she murmured to the empty room while setting aside her empty whisky tumbler.

The ice cubes clinked against the glass as she set it down. She smiled to herself. The faint clink of glass on ice and silence was the only answer she ever got when she reminded anypony of the war in her office.

Lyra had a nice office in spite of the safe-room style armored walls and reinforced door. A few decades ago, such protections would have ponies whispering about how strangely paranoid Lyra was. These days, ponies asked her who she contracted to build the safe room. Lyra Machine and Tool got to be a contractor after one of the first defense contractors’ CEO’s had been killed by a zebra sniper through their office window. Lyra wasn’t going to make it that easy for assassins.

She also was not going to make it hard on herself. Her office had real wood furniture, lush grass like olive green carpet, with nice wallpaper that used a blue-brown gradient to evoke the outdoors, and a calm blue ceiling with clouds painted on it. Without the rows of filing cabinets, bookshelves, and the massive C shaped CEOs desk dominating the center of the room. It all came together well, presenting a nice cozy feeling one could spend time in without feeling trapped. In short, Lyra’s office could almost be a bedroom.

What Lyra would never tell anypony is she had copied her office’s color scheme from a particular brand of hotel mints for the sole reason that with her mint colored fur and mane her office would look like an almost empty box with one mint left in it. So far, nopony had gotten the joke, so far as she was aware.

Lyra’s horn shimmered, glowing a bright gold as she called on her magic to press the intercom button set into her desk. The intercom buzzed loudly in response.

“Harper,” Lyra called as she examined the mock-skyline infront of her. “Did Bonbon call me today?”

Harper’s synthesized, faux-French, mare’s voice replied with the delay one would expect of an Equestrian Robotics built machine. None at all. Lyra made a mental note to see about producing her own line of butler robots, just as soon as the company had room for another civilian project. She knew she could produce something better than the Miss Handy. Especially since Equestrian Robotics was using a processor she made for them.

“I am afraid she has not, madam. Would you like me to place a call for you?” Harper asked, choosing its response based on a pre-generated probabilities list and its owners previous commands.

“No,” Lyra said while continuing to hold the button. “It looks like I will be working late tonight. Please make me some tea.”

“Right away, madam,” Harper replied, immediately referencing the Lyra Machine and Tool facilities map to begin navigation to the closest breakroom.

Lyra let go of the button. The glow around her horn faded, and she turned her attention from the picture of Whinnyapolis to a smaller black and white photograph of Ponyville. She kept both photos framed on the wall, but only Whinnyapolis got the fake window treatment.

It amused her to see Ponyville’s grainy, sepia tone, tiny photograph next to the massive True Color poster print. Not only was it a reminder of how far Equestria had come in the last thirty years, but also of her part in shaping the present, and, Celestia willing, the future.

Lyra turned around and trotted over to her desk, where parts of a personal project and a small toolbox containing a smattering of electronic and hardware oriented tools lay in a neat little group, almost like a desk toy. The parts next to the tools were equally well arranged. Lyra didn’t move them for visitors, nor meetings. She liked her guests to have a reminder that her company made things.

Lyra sat down in her high backed leather chair so her hind legs hung over the front edge and her weight rested on her plot. A peculiar way of sitting for a pony, and one which most ponies believed had to be most uncomfortable. Lyra found the more typical rest on one’s hooves and plot to be the uncomfortable stance.

As soon as she sat down, Lyra once again lit her horn to take the largest collection of parts she was working on and move it into a comfortable working position. Robotics wasn’t her special talent, but she’d always been good at working with complex machines. Even back in Ponyville, Lyra had found the occasion to put her old engineering degree to use. Usually it had been to help repair instruments broken by one of the same six ponies due to weekly shenaniganry.

Lyra smiled to herself and giggled. Those six had been amazing for business then, and they still were now.

Lyra turned her invention until she found the part she had been working on the last time she’d stayed at work late, and then fetched the parts which would need to be attached next. She began to work, slowly, carefully, taking note of everything. The small framework and the crystal wafers, wires, and servos mounted to it were a prototype. Every last part of it needed to be fully understood so she could later develop it into an end product.

In a way, inventing was a lot like playing music. Small discrete operations arranged in specific shapes to create larger elements that worked together in a harmony. It helped reduce the sting just a little.

Lyra had left her music career behind her decades ago. She’d been born in Canterlot, moved to Ponyville to date and then marry the love of her life, Bonbon. It was in Ponyville where she realized she could make a living with her music. Her performances brought her endless joy and she’d loved that it could be her career.

Unfortunately, while Lyra was a good musician and Bonbon’s Confectionery had provided Lyra and her wife with a stable income, it had never been much more than what they needed to get by. There were thousands just as skilled as the two of them had been in their passions and one day, after a small accident with an adult oriented transformative potion which Lyra had mistakenly believed included a contraceptive… Well, suddenly there was a foal the two would need to provide for.

Torn between being able to raise their child properly, and being able to work her dream career for life, Lyra chose to make sure Bonbon could continue to run a candy shop. She went back to her old profession: engineering.

The carved live oak doors of Lyra’s office opened automatically to permit Harper to enter. The door’s hissing hydraulic pistons were almost drowned out by Harper’s flux regulator. The floating robot carried a tea tray in two of its three limbs, with its third carefully holding the fine china teapot steady as it floated over to Lyra’s desk.

“Your tea, madam,” Harper reported as it began to set a saucer, cup, and small plate of coffee cake slices on Lyra’s desk away from her work area.

Lyra looked up and smiled at one of Harper’s three arm-mounted cameras. “Thank you.”

Lyra always thanked robots. She knew they were not alive, but most of them were programmed to pretend to make conversations feel natural.

“You’re most welcome, madam,” Harper said as it set the tea tray and teapot aside further away from Lyra’s workplace and her tea. “You seem troubled tonight. Is there anything I can do for you?”

Lyra set down her screwdriver and took a sip of tea. She swirled the earl gray around in her mouth, savoring the taste and debating if it were even possible for Harper to understand her problem, let alone help solve it.

“Just a little rough spot on an old marriage, Harper. Don’t worry. Everything will probably be alright tomorrow,” Lyra answered once the words finally came to her. “It would be nice if you’d fetch me a spark battery from supply closet twelve though. I need one that is size seven.”

“Right away, madam!” Harper said with synthetic cheer as it turned around and left, remotely closing the doors behind it.

Lyra’s marriage was hardly in jeopardy. She knew she would one day lay with Bonbon, holding hooves, as they passed on into whatever lay beyond death together. But no marriage is perfect. The person you marry will grow and change over time, and sometimes pick up a trait you do not like.

For Bonbon, that trait was when Lyra had taken her start up Lyra Machine and Tool and transitioned from manufacturing construction equipment and consumer grade tools to making weapons for the war effort. More specifically, combat robots.

Lyra had no idea Bonbon would feel so strongly about the subject that she’d come home with the “Wonderful news!” that the Ministries had offered her company a contract to produce robots and other war gear for the new trade war with the Zebrican Empire. It wasn’t that Bonbon was against the war. Rather, she had a certain paranoia about robots designed to kill, and be smart about their killing.

Lyra understood her wife’s fears. She didn’t want a machine uprising either… but as somepony who helped design and build those very robots, she knew of all the safeguards, design choices, and the very nature of computers which made such an event much, much less likely than the Breezies rising up to enslave Ponykind.

Needless to say, that was almost certain to be impossible. Unless of course the Breezies teamed up with Changelings, but Lyra refused to entertain her brother’s crackpot theories. If he came up with them before enjoying a batch of “brownies”, Lyra might have paid them some attention. But that wasn’t the kind of pony he was.

Sometimes it was a little fun to take his drug induced ideas seriously, but not now. Not when she was able to tinker with her hobbies and put the morning’s argument out of mind. Bonbon would be doing the same, and by the time Lyra got home late that evening they’d share some fresh sweets, watch each other's favorite shows, and not talk about Lyra Machine and Tool’s new contract to reverse engineer the Zebrican Assault-Pone-3 combat robot.

Lyra smiled as she pictured the late-night arrangements waiting for her in say, three or four hours. Lyra would tolerate Bonbon’s medical dramas and enjoy her hospital themed candies. In return, Bonbon would enjoy Lyra’s animated action-adventure program about bipedal space aliens and tolerate her wife’s obsessive fanaticism for a teenage colt’s cartoon involving what Bonbon always described as “shaved apes”.

“It’s not therapy… but it will have to do for now,” Lyra muttered to herself as she fixed the last of the main components of her gadget-in-progress into place.

The device looked and felt like a prototype. It was a mess of wires, circuit wafers, and simple metal scaffolding clearly built with reconfiguration and ease of access in mind. And situated in the form of a gauntlet which could be worn on a pony’s hoof.

Lyra squinted at a delicate servo-motor, the light of her magic’s aura reflecting off its silver body and her gold eyes as she delicately fixed two strands of wire to the motor terminals.

The wires fused to the terminals with a sizzle and a faint wisp of blue-grey smoke. Lyra released her spell, and as her aura faded she flexed her leg to test the device. It twitched, hummed, then moved as she’d expected.

“Perfect,” she whispered to herself just as three quick knocks echoed through her quiet office as somepony rapped upon her door.

She flexed her forehoof gently, taking note of how the tactile telekinetic force shared by all ponies moved as she flexed different parts of her frog. Everything was as she remembered. Her device should be able to translate the natural motions of the touch-range telekinetic fields in a pony hoof into inputs for the device.

Lyra began to assemble the prototype’s housing. Unfortunately, the more boring work didn’t allow her to ignore her problems.

“Shame I can’t call a counselor,” Lyra grumbled as she tightened a nut on her invention.

Lyra often thought about setting up an appointment with a therapist or counselor to tackle her family issues once and for all. Unfortunately, the many, many cases of Wartime Stress Disorder meant such support was in short supply. It would often take three months to get an appointment, and even then, seeking help for family-based-disharmony could lead a pony to diagnose one or all of Lyra’s family with WSD.

That was a fate nopony wanted. Nopony knew just what was done to treat WSD, but as a defense contractor who supplied certain technologies to the Ministries, Lyra had her grim suspicions. They could attend to this once the war ended. It would be safe to seek counseling then.

Lyra’s intercom buzzed, yanking her out of her darker thoughts. Her prototype was ready. Lyra slipped the robotic gauntlet onto her hoof and with nothing more than force of will, as if it were a natural limb, extended one of the gauntlet’s fingers and depressed the button with it.

“Miss Heartstrings speaking,” Lyra said into the intercom, doing her best to contain an excited squee at her success.

Harper’s voice came from the small speaker. “I have retrieved the spark battery you requested, madam,” the robot reported. “However there is a visitor here to see you. They do not have an appointment. Do you wish to see them?”

“Who is it?” Lyra asked, mentaly glaring daggers at Harper’s programmer for not thinking to have her model inform you who was at the door in addition to there being someone there.

“It is Brass Rivet, a junior programmer, madam,” Harper said.

Lyra facehooved hard enough to make stars flash in her eyes. “Harper, that’s my son.” Lyra groaned as she made a mental not to not facehoof while wearing steel hands in the future.

“I’m sorry, madam, but no pony named My Son works at your company,” Harper said emotionlessly. “The pony waiting for you is Brass Rivet.”

Lyra felt her left eye twitch uncontrollably. It was not worth explaining this yet again.

“Just let him in and give him the battery, please,” Lyra ordered as she wished she could slap Harpe’s programmer for the umpteenth time.

“Of course, madam!” Harper said cheerfully.

“How I hate that silly tincan,” Lyra chuckled to herself.

As nice as it was to have a personal assistant who happened to be a robot, Harper’s programming left much to be desired. Lyra was tempted to rehire a proper person to be her assistant again… But it was possible her son could fix some of her major complaints with Harper’s programming.

Brass Rivet had grown up quickly and spent his foalhood as one of Whinnyapolis’s most promising pupils. Rivet personified Whinnyapolis’s ideals, both as an intellectual unicorn focused on industry rather than magic, and by bearing a cutiemark which proclaimed his talent for computer programming to the world.

Once he graduated high school, he immediately found employment in his mother’s company as a junior software developer, not out of nepotism, but by merit. Lyra had not even known he’d applied for a job at her company, but had been delighted to see him at a board meeting as his supervisor’s assistant.

The door’s well-oiled hinges opened with only a light rustle of wood on the carpet and the humm of hydraulics. Lyra looked up to greet her son. “Good, evening, dear! Working late too?”

A shorter stallion, with cream colored fur, along with pale mint colored hair styled in a somewhat effeminate mane and tail cut, and electric blue eyes stood at the door. He was dressed in a coffee stained white dress shirt, lacking a tie, and had a Pipbuck Model 3001b strapped to his left foreleg. The Pipbuck stood out due to being repainted to be lavender, pink, and blue, so as to resemble the mare whose cutiemark was painted on the back of the spark battery panel.

“Mom, I need to talk to you,” Rivet said as he trotted through the doorway, and gently closed it with a rear hoof.

Lyra nodded once and rested her forelegs atop her desk as she sat up on her haunches, giving her son her full attention. “I’ve always got time for you, hon. What is it? Is your team over budget?”

“No, it’s—” Rivet frowned and tilted his head, letting his long green mane droop from his shoulders. “Uh… Mom? What’s with the robot hand?”

“Oh, this?” Lyra said as she held up her project.

The mechanical appendage she’d been so lovingly crafting flexed and grasped as Lyra focused her will on the machine, controlling it as if it were a natural limb.

“I was thinking about ways to adapt Minotaur weapons and vehicles for pony use,” Lyra explained, only half lying. “Now that they are our allies, we will trade with them and our soldiers may need to make use of their equipment in the field. Unicorns will have no trouble, but everypony else will. The simplest solution to me is to adapt the hoof to work with equipment made for hands.”

Rivet’s eyes narrowed as he assumed a deadpan expression. “You just wanted an excuse to make even better cosplay hands, didn’t you?”

Lyra blushed, cleared her throat, and leaned back in her chair, making the leather creak. “Son, I don’t question your hobbies. Please return the favor. And for the record, I didn’t lie. I’m simply good at merging my work with my hobbies. Could you pass me the spark battery? It would be nice if this could work off its own power instead of draining my magical reserves.”

Rivet bit his lip and did his best not to think about his mother’s obsession with a teenage colt’s cartoon. Lyra returned his look with that special look a parent can give a child only after knowing a dozen different embarrassing little secrets.

Rivet nodded once then levitated the small glowing power crystal to Lyra, who took it and fixed the gem into the gauntlet’s power socket with a loud click.

“A-hem! Yes. I’ll do that… Anywho!” the young stallion turned his head to fetch a small set of spell matrix chips from his saddlebag and rest them on the table.

An odd gesture for a unicorn, using their mouth to retrieve items. Lyra often wondered if his eccentricities were the result of having so many Earth Pony friends. She remembered the pressure to fit in at school oh so well.

“What is this?” Lyra asked, leaning forwards to get a better look at the small, yet intricately complex chipset.

“A breakthrough my boss refused to tell you about,” Rivet answered plainly. “I never have, nor do I now, want special treatment, but this is too big to not show you directly.”

“I’m listening,” Lyra said as she lit her horn to lift the chips, then paused and looked at her son. “Is this telekinesis safe?”

“It’s completely magically inert. There isn’t a damn thing you can do short of using enchantment spells to disrupt it!” He proclaimed with a huge smile that faded into a worried frown. “Well, by accident at least. If you try to destroy it it will break just like any other spell matrix.”

Lyra nodded, picked the item up, and began to examine it. The delicate bird’s nest of arcane and technological circuitry glinted and sparkled under the dim light of Lyra’s desk lamp.

“This looks like a robot brain…” Lyra said thoughtfully. Then her ears peaked. “Did you manage to reverse engineer Zebrican processors?! Why would Tempered refuse to report this?”

“It’s not Zebrican,” Rivet answered with a hesitant sigh. “It’s a breakthrough I had on company time. The Assault-Pone-3 units we were granted are all far too damaged to reverse engineer the processors. I was asked to come up with my best guess. This isn't it, but it’s a fork of that I had to see through. The real trick here is the software… Mom, I’ve got something better than Zebrican robotics here.”

Lyra raised an eyebrow. “I’m listening.”

Rivet stepped over to his mother’s desk and sat down in one of the guest chairs. He didn’t sit like his mother did. He sat like a proper pony who knew they were in fact not a biped.

“Tempered doesn't think it works. He thinks I’m faking my test results. I’m not,” Rivet said with an irritated huff. “I think it’s because he never saw anything about StableTec’s new computer.”

Lyra’s brow furrowed. “Son… There is an NDA. We never saw those plans. We can’t use them for anything. Technically speaking, you shouldn’t know about them at all. I only showed you because as low ranked as you are, you’re still our best programmer and I needed to know if we could even make the firmware for that thing to accept the contract.”

Rivet nodded and scratched his long mane with a hoof tip. “Yeah… But I couldn’t get the basic idea out of my head. They did it in this… really inefficient way, and I swore that I could do the same thing, but better, in my own original design. So, I didn’t steal their tech. I was just inspired by it… also, this isn't pure software. There’s a bit of magic involved too. Oracular predictive thaumaturgy, specifically. I had Balance help me with the arcane parts.”

Lyra’s heart skipped a beat. “Pardon?”

“I found a better way to create a thinking, intelligent, machine,” Rivet repeated and nodded towards the chip. “That’s the hardware for it.”

Lyra picked the tangled mess up once more and gently tapped it with a hoof tip, listening to the crystalline sound of the wafer. It rang well. No flaws at all. If her son had put this much work into a prototype, then he was certain it would prove important.

“This isn’t much smaller than a Crusader’s sub-modules if I remember its specifications correctly,” Lyra commented after double checking with her memories. “How is this more efficient? We’d still need a few thousand of them in a huge cabinet, liquid nitrogen cooling systems, the works!”

Rivet leaned back in his chair, making it creak as he smiled. “The Crusader is a sledgehammer. This is a scalpel.”

Lyra’s annoyed look prompted Rivet to frown, clear his throat, and be a little less poetic.

“StableTec did it by brute force,” Rivet explained.

Lyra’s annoyed look shifted into a higher gear.

Rivet cleared his throat and let his chair thump back to the floor. “Sorry, mom. That’s the technical term for throwing a million or even a billion operations at each part of a problem to just make it go. The software I saw in the demo package StableTec sent us is effectively seventeen billion lines of code, mostly IF/ELSE arguments, which allow a computer to mimic intelligent decision making by never actually making any decisions. That works, but it’s debatable if the system is conscious. Yes, it’s complex and can make decisions based on information unlike any other computer, but I find their claim that it’s actually thinking like a person would be to be suspect… Also, there’s some kind of subsystem where it looks like you’re meant to let a pony sort of, transfer their mind into the machine. So I think they’re cheating.”

Lyra triple blinked, then held up her robotic hand. “Excuse me there’s a what on them?”

“Yeah, I’m not sure. I didn’t see the whole of the hardware plans. But, if the commented code in the demo package is to be believed, the Crusader can, or has to, not sure which… Well, it’s basically an artificial brain. Apparently you can put a pony’s consciousness in it. Not sure if it’s a transfer or a copy,” Rivet shrugged and frowned. “I couldn’t tell you without seeing all of the code. But that’s what got me thinking about a thinking machine. The idea of having an actually intelligent computer, and the basic ideas they had but executed in a horrible sloppy mess… Well, at least in my opinion. They probably have different design constraints than I assume.”

“Alright,” Lyra said as she tapped a hoof against the table. “So, what did you do?”

Rivet gently tapped the small processor cluster on the desk with the tip of a hoof. “My method uses self-reinforcing, looping, randomized yet logical, patterns, and oracular predictive enchantments, rather than IF/ELSE statements. It is so much more processor efficient that with just a little bit of spellcraft we can make the whole thing run on this. Just this! It’s just barely smaller than a pony’s brain, and could theoretically contain something just as intelligent.”

Lyra snickered, leaned back in her chair, and let a smile part her lips. “Is it Pinkie Prank Party Day already?”

Rivet huffed and crossed his forelegs. “Mom, I’m not joking. I can prove it.”

Lyra’s smile faded slightly. “How would that even work?”

“I call it Oracular Neurological Computing,” Rivet explained as he flicked his pipbuck on and began to play a slideshow for his mother to see. “This hardware is a collection of connected units or nodes that I’ve loosely model after the neurons in a biological brain. Each connection, like the synapses in a brain, can transmit a signal to other neurons. When one receives a signal, it performs a simple process on that signal, and signals neurons connected to it. The "signal" modulation is hardware based and that’s where the arcane component comes in. The output of each neuron is computed one iteration in advance of the actual calculation being performed by a nonlinear function of the oracular—”

Lyra cleared her throat and held up a hoof for him to stop. “Simple first, then technical.”

Rivet closed his eyes, groaned, then sighed. “This is the simple, mom… It’s a brand new process.”

Lyra winced, flicked her tail across her seat, and picked up a pen with her telekinesis to fidget with as she thought through the implications of her son’s claim. “Okay… Are you implying you’ve found a way for a computer to work using a gradient of possibilities for each bit, rather than simple binary?”

Rivet nodded immediately. “Yes!” he exclaimed with a huge smile, grateful his mother understood the idea he’d been working on for just shy of a year. “There is so much more than what you’d think at first. Not only does it drastically improve the performance of any software you adapt to run on this kind of hardware… erm, it can’t run things coded for linear processors. It just can’t. But we can port things. Anyways, the thing I discovered which makes this more than just a faster computer chip, is this system can learn!”

Lyra dropped the pen with a clatter. “It… It learns?”

Rivet nodded once, stood up, and picked up his prototype gingerly. “Yes, it does. The enchantment is responsible for the mechanism, but the software is key to making it useful. One without the other is useless, but both together… I’m starting to think as a nation we should be focusing on unifying magic with technology as, well, standard. Separate they are mighty, but together? Together they can make an artificial mind.”

He turned the prototype in his hooves, watching it shine and sparkle with pride. “You don’t have to program everything you want it to do. You just need to set up a foundation, then show it correctly done work, and it can figure out how to do more work when it sees incomplete work, or instructions relating to doing that type of work. Just like a pony.”

Lyra blinked several times and sat straight up in her chair. “What?”

“It’s just like a pony, mom,” Rivet explained with a confused glance upwards at his mother’s face. “You give it instincts, switch it on, show it what you want it to do, and it will learn to do that thing in time. It’s self-teaching, self-improving, and in theory, with this module in this configuration, an artificial consciousness could reach the same complexity and nuance as you or I!”

Lyra reached up with her mechanical hand and stroked her chin. “You said you could prove it?”

Rivet nodded and brought up a new program on his pipbuck. With a flick of his hoof, the clack of a rocker switch, and a whir of fans, the screen began to show a series of pictures. Specifically photographs of ponies taken around the factory.

Lyra tilted her head. “Son, what does this prove other than you being a bit of a shutterbug? … And also that mare there either needs a longer skirt, or needs to learn to carry her tail down lower if she doesn’t want HR to write her a letter about public decency in the workplace.”

Rivet beamed his mother a proud smile. “Please! Have HR try and write her a letter, that would be amazing. Not only would every mare in the office, you included, insist that you can’t help flagging a little during a heat, but, well... she doesn't work here.”

Lyra steppled her hoof and robotic hand and hummed, her eyes narrowing. “You… You’ve made one of these… consciousnesses, and instructed it to work as a security system?”

Rivet snorted and rolled his eyes. “No. Nothing could do that. This is something our current robots cannot do.”

“Which is…”

Rivet leaned up against the desk again. “Be creative.”

Lyra’s eyebrows arched. Her stepped hoof and digits slumped. “Are you telling me you got a robot to draw photorealistic pictures, from nothing?”

“No, not nothing,” Rivet corrected as he turned his pipbuck to give his mother a better view. “These things could really use a second screen on the back… Erm, anyways, I showed it hundreds of pictures of ponies doing normal work, then asked it to create more pictures of ponies working. None of the ponies in these pictures exist, nor do those workstations, or specific tools they're using. Then I showed it hundreds of pictures of locations around the city, and asked it to make a picture of a pony doing anything at all.”

“And?” Lyra asked, turning her head in interest.

Rivet reached for his pipbuck and clicked over to a single stored image. The screen flashed as it loaded in. A young mare knelt in the road, a wrench clutched in her magic to fix the wheel of a fruit cart while a second pony ate an apple.

“I asked the MoM to ID these ponies. They couldn’t. Had their whole office in a panic about it. They don’t appear in any other picture the Net drew. They are unique. What I couldn't figure out was how it knew ponies ate apples… Then I realized I’d left my camera running while working on it and it had watched me eat lunch at least once. The system knows what a pony is, and understands we eat apples, so it chose to depict a pony eating an apple,” Rivet squirmed excitedly in his seat. “Don’t you see? That’s creativity! Or at the very least it’s critical thinking on par with a young pony. It also learns incredibly fast! We could pop one of these in a robot, send it to school for a week, teach it Equish verbally like any foal, then the next week send it to Bootcamp and have it perform just as well as any other soldier!”

Lyra’s jaw dropped at the implication of her son’s breakthrough.

Rivet jumped out of his chair and pointed to the processor network. “This thing, right here, put into an equoid frame, say the Assault Pony we’re working on, could mean the end of mass death for our side. We replace shock troopers and assault squads with these guys, and that’s that. We lose no pony power on the fronts. Or at least, much less.”

“Yeah,” Lyra said slowly as she began to frown. “But… there’s a pretty obvious risk.”

Rivet blinked. “What?”

“If it can learn, think, and is pretty much a pony, it could decide not to be a soldier. Or it could decide the Zebras are right and turn traitor,” Lyra pointed out as she sat back in her chair to steeple her hoof and robot-hand thoughtfully.

She’d waited years to pull that gesture off during a meeting like this.

Rivet snorted dismissively and waved his hoof. “So what? We risk the same thing by using ponies as soldiers! Actually, we risk more because we can’t control pony instincts. We can control these robots' instincts, at least to a small degree. That’s more than we can do for a pony. We could make them feel about treason the same way you would feel about cutting off your own legs.”

Lyra raised her robotic hand with one finger pointing upwards as she opened her mouth to make a point.

Rivet cleared his throat. “Uh, assuming you couldn’t replace them with hands and feet… Scratch that. Uh, another pony. Any other pony.”

Lyra sighed and sat back further in her chair, eyes closed thoughtfully. “Good counterpoint… But we can’t be sure it works how you think it will. We’ve never made anything like this before.”

Rivet nodded twice and gave his pipbuck a little loving stroke. “Yes. I agree completely. It needs to be tested. The only real way to test it is to build one and give it a shot. It’s too important not to try this. We could save so many lives this way… combat robots are good, but we could do so much better than a glorified heavy machine gun platform that needs a half dozen ponies to make sure it works properly in the field.”

Lyra nodded in agreement. Such a thing was currently the holy grail of robotics. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said with extra politeness in her voice. “I get it. I do. I especially get why you of all ponies would like to make robot soldiers we could send out without pony supervision. But there is still risk, significant risk, in creating one in the first place. What about running it in a terminal and asking it questions, or stimulating environments for it to test it?”

Rivet shook his head and flashed his mother a look of disgust. “Think about that again. It’s beyond unethical! I’ve shut the one I have running off. It’s evolved past its programming by learning what ponies are and what they do. These are… Well, people! At least, of a sort. What you’re asking is like intentionally ensuring a foal is born without limbs, or eyes, or a nose, so we can see if it's got a good or bad heart and mind before giving it the ability to experience the world.”

“So what? It’s a safety issue,” Lyra pointed out as she tapped her fingers against her desk. “A foal is, well, a foal. If a foal was so evil it wanted to kill everypony it saw, almost everypony could buck it over a fence…” Lyra winced at her thought, then cleared her throat. “Morbid as that may be, it’s true. A foal poses very little threat to an adult pony, or even an older foal. But you want to put an untested system into a prototype war robot, which may give it consciousness and create a pony like Celestia, or Sombra. With the body of a tireless actual murder machine.”

Rivet nodded again, climbed back into the guest chair, leaned back slowly, then sighed.

“Yes. I’ve thought about this, mom.” he looked up, making sure to center his eyes on his mother’s. “I’ve talked to a few psychologists. Developmental ones. I’m not doing this alone, you know I needed a unicorn to make this prototype… Well, there’s four of us that worked on this. Mostly me. They are not on the payroll, it’s all pro-bono consulting. No implied job if they help either. These are all honest professional opinions.”

“And what do they think of this?” Lyra said with professional calm.

She was not above being corrected if an employee’s idea or point was good.

“If we “raised” a pony-like being without the ability to walk, talk, and do what a pony does, we would ensure the creation of another Sombra, at best. It wouldn’t look forward to gaining the abilities we take for granted every day, it would resent us for failing to give it to them from the beginning,” Rivet said darkly, taking a moment to look down at the floor. “See, foals take years and years to grow and mature. They spend those years in a very different state of consciousness than adult ponies, as all well know. But this system takes days or weeks at the most to arrive at something like you or I. It would take months to test and evaluate it. By then, it would have an adult mentality and likely also hopes, dreams, and preferences which it couldn’t begin to undertake all because we created it as what amounts to a brain in a jar in a room that’s empty most of the time. It needs to be respected, nurtured, and cared for, and also have the freedom to do small things and discover itself. Just like anypony.”

Lyra sat back in quiet thought for several long minutes. Finally, she sighed. “Again, a good counterpoint… I suppose we could have guards with anti-machine rifles on standby.”

“We easily could,” Rivet agreed with a chuckle. “You know I’m not stupid, mom. There is all the reason in the world to be ready for potential threats to safety. We could also ensure the lab we build and test it in is equipped with a hidden anti-matrix pulser and simply fry it if it goes evil. We won't know how this goes until we try and I think we owe it to everypony who died at Shattered Hoof to try!”

Lyra frowned at the mention of Shattered Hoof. She’d known her son’s primary motivation for this as soon as he’d mentioned this could make independently operating robotic soldiers, but she also knew he’d probably like to refrain from discussing his fiance's death. Unfortunately, that was no longer an option.

Lyra took a deep breath and leaned across her desk to tip his chin up with her hoof. “Dear… I’m sorry you lost Gold Leaf. We both know this won’t bring her back… If that’s what this is about—”

“It’s not about that,” Rivet said quietly. “It’s about making sure the next stallion doesn't lose his mare too.”

Lyra nodded once, sighed, then stood up and went to fetch her memo pad from her secretary’s desk out in the hallway. Rivet sat quietly, refusing to remember what he had lost as best he could. He’d managed to force the tears away just as his mother returned with a memo pad and pen.

She fidgeted with the pen and pad for a while, debating what she should do with this information. If her son was right, it would be a world changing invention. If he was wrong, it would be a potentially superior robot, and thus a company changing invention. The problem was how tight the quarterly budget was.

“How many Assault Pony prototype models did the MWT order for their testing?” Lyra asked with professional calm.

“One hundred and sixteen. A full company,” Rivet answered immediately, the project details had been burned into his brain over the last two months.

Lyra nodded and did a little bit of quick calculations in her notebook. The budget for the new MWT contract to produce reverse engineered Zebrican Assault-Pone-3s had some wiggle room left in it. Enough to produce one extra chassis and pay a few engineers to tinker with a “enhanced prototype unit”. It wouldn't even be in violation of the contract to keep a chassis for potential improvements.

With a means of letting her son try his idea worked out, Lyra began to write down a memo to let her company know what would be happening with her son and this new one off design. “We will be making one hundred and seventeen. Number one-one-seven will be given to Lab J for experimental modification with advanced computation technology.”

Rivet sighed in relief. “Thanks, mom. I truly believe this could change everything.”

“Don’t thank me yet… I’m also promoting you to Team Leader, and assigning you to Lab J,” Lyra continued before looking up from her writing to look her son in the eyes. “You’ve got a budget of eight million bits. That includes making the hardware for the robot, payroll, everything. Think you can handle it?”

“I can sure as hay try,” Rivet replied as he stood up and collected his prototype. “I’ll have personnel assignments to you by the end of the week.”

Lyra smiled, gave her son a quick hug, then nodded to the door. “Best get to work then. There’s going to be more to this than you think.”

“What do you mean?” Rivet asked as he tucked the prototype back into his saddlebag.

“I don’t know exactly what,” Lyra said with a shrug and a small smile. “Every project is more complex than you think it will be at first. I’m just wondering what you’ll wind up having to do to bring your vision to life.”

Lyra paused for a moment, decided to voice her full thought, then looked her son in the eyes. “And, just how close what you make will be to what you intended.”