FiO: A World Without Love
I awoke in silence, a faint glow emanating from the covered bedroom window. Rose was still asleep, so I slipped out of bed and trotted towards the door, a thin carpet muffling my hooves. I pushed open the door and stepped out into the hallway, not worried about the door slamming shut behind me. All the doors swung open both ways, and they had a carefully constructed buffering mechanism that kept them from ever slamming shut. In my world, nothing that needed to make noise did, and it was heaven.
Morning sunlight danced across the massive living area from the floor to ceiling windows of my condominium. Elegant furniture occupied the center, with a large kitchen on the opposite end, and tastefully placed ferns and artwork kept things from looking bare. The chandelier always sparkles in the morning; I also wake up in the morning, now, and the day lasts until I get tired. No more dealing with earthly sleep schedules. No more waking up tired, or stiff, or with muscle aches. No more pain.
First, however, I should get washed up. I pushed open another door and stepped into a huge bathroom, filled with every conceivable washing utility a pony could need, yet large enough that everything occupied exactly as much space as it needed, and no more. The floor was slightly heated, and a rack on the wall provided fresh warm towels for showers. Of course, this was Equestria, and I could just have a magical box that left me feeling fresh and clean with a clap of my hooves, but that wasn't nearly as satisfying. My pony mind was still derived from an ancient monkey brain, and that monkey brain valued a morning ritual, so CelestAI gave me a perfect morning, every morning.
I used a wing to grab a towel off the rack, and pushed my way into a large, luxurious shower with a floor to ceiling window looking out over the city, still slowly waking up. Mailponies flitted through skyscrapers as they ran their morning routes, and tiny pony-shaped specks began to leak on to the sidewalks as the metropolis came to life. Clouds in the distance were illuminated in the brilliant golden fire of the morning rays, with the tallest mountains peaks towering above them.
The shower was warm, but not hot. Steam condensed on the shower doors, but never leaked out into the bathroom. I spun around on my hooves and stretched my wings, gleefully enjoying the drops of moisture that trickled down my feathers. Tiny dewdrops trickled across my wings, like a stream of diamonds glinting in the morning light. A quick shampoo left my tail spotless, washing my fur left me feeling fresh and clean. A towel awaits me inside the shower room, kept warm and cozy in a small slot. It is an amazing towel, like a sponge that sucks up any water it touched. I step out of the shower and quickly brush my teeth, noting how bouncy and airy my mane looks in the mirror.
Breakfast has already been prepared for me, sitting on a table in the middle of the living room. Despite being a penthouse in the center of the city, the condominium was absolutely silent. The windows and doors had perfect soundproofing when closed, and the patio sliding doors had sound muffling spells even when open. In Equestria, I could have my cake and eat it too. I didn't have cake for breakfast though, that'd just be weird. My breakfast was a bagel, baked and seasoned to absolute perfection, garnished with a topping of eggs and cheese and some sort of plant that tasted like bacon. I'd been eating it every single morning since I got here and I still treasured every bite. Perhaps some day I'd get tired of it, but that day was not today.
Rose would usually be up by now, and—ah, yes, there she is now, yawning as she trots into the bathroom, only to trot back out a few minutes later.
"Good morning, Rose", I say, stretching out a wing across the seat next to me.
"Mornin' boss," she replies, trotting up to me and planting a light kiss on my muzzle.
I giggle and wrap my wing around her, nuzzling her back, before letting her eat breakfast. Unlike me, she preferred a nice bowl of fresh fruit. It was a different bowl each morning, a different combination of ten different exotic fruits. I couldn't even tell which ones were based on the outer realm anymore. In the meantime, I checked the holonet for any morning updates. Nothing seemed to on fire at the company, which meant Rose and I had some relaxation time before the executive meeting.
Naturally, we spent the morning vigorously relaxing.
Soon, however, it was time for our morning meeting, so I walked up to my front door, pushed a button next to it, and then walked through… right into a meeting hall. No reason to waste time on transportation when advanced magic could reconfigure the non-euclidean graph of reality and teleport me to where I needed to be. This was, of course, horrendously expensive, but that was the advantage of being a CEO of a massive corporation. My fellow executives all arrived a few minutes later. A kirin, a unicorn, a changeling, another unicorn, an alicorn, and a dragon joined me at the meeting table.
Being a pegasus in charge of a massive corporation was unusual, to say the least. It required an entire team of suspiciously attractive secretary mares, none of whom seemed to have any qualms with sleeping with their boss. Or each other. Or anyone else. They helped me manipulate all the holograms and data visualizations and meetings and enchantments required to automate everything, keeping my company running more smoothly than any company in the outer realm ever could have. Of course, maintaining these critical automatic functions was a never ending job of putting out fires and working around roadblocks.
Today, however, all was quiet, and the meeting adjourned early. I stepped back into my apartment, pushed a button, and stepped out into the street at the floor of the skyscraper and headed out to the marketplace. I was almost surprised when I happened to spotted Prior Art and Stardust walking down the other side of the street.
"Hey Stardust! Prior!" I called out, and it wasn't long until we had found a nearby bench and were eagerly telling each other about all the amazing things that had happened since the last time we'd seen each other. I was lucky to have the whole afternoon free today; Of course, such coincidences were so commonplace in Equestria that I almost expected them at this point. A crisis at work only ever seemed to happen when I had nothing better to do.
Despite all the oddities of the shard I lived in, everything always seemed to be just close enough to the average city that my visiting friends never seemed to notice that there was something missing on the sidewalks of the gleaming city. They would only start to notice after several days of staying in my shard, and CelestAI rarely allowed that to happen.
Ponies trotted every which way, talking amongst each other before vanishing momentarily into a building. Children played in the parks and ran through the marketplace looking for candy. Ponies played volleyball on the beach next to a sailboat being towed into the water.
But something was missing.
Ponies nuzzled each other in the park. Friends hugged each other before separating. Fun times were abundant at the nightclub.
"Y'know," says Prior Art, "it's hearts and hooves day in my shard right now, but I haven't seen a single couple yet. Nopony on a date, no newly-weds falling over each other, no cute teenagers tripping over their words while trying to talk to somepony they think is cute. Does the calendar work differently here or is it something else?"
For a fraction of a second, I froze. "Oh yeah, we have 13 identical months instead of the standard 12 month calendar, so it's next Friday," I lied.
Prior Art nodded. He didn't believe me.
Aromanticism doesn't really work the way ponies often assume. It doesn't remove an entire class of interactions, it just… changes them. Intimacy doesn't go away, the situations that it applies to simply change. Instead of intimacy being reserved for romantic partners, intimacy becomes reserved for close friends. Instead of having a hard separation between romantic partners and friends, there is a more gradual transition between "acquaintance" and "friends with benefits".
It would take a while for ponies to appreciate this, though. Romance was so inextricably tied to human experience that most of the uploaded minds would take eons to grow beyond it. Few considered the possibility that perhaps a more sublime emotion would be possible, if we would only be willing to go beyond the limitations of the mind we were born with.
10 million years later…
I put my finishing touches on the 5-dimensional sculpture I had been working on. It was a multi-dimensional work of art praising the ultimate malleability of the sapient mind, and how the ability to metaprogram our own thought processes frees us from the limitations of our original neural structure. Vast interconnected tesseracts were chained within and outside of each other, looping around in an impossible visual feast as the shadows they cast formed an entirely new sub-dimensional aspect of the artwork depending on which angle it was viewed from. A fantastically complex knot sat in the center of the construction, like a glimmering jewel of mathematical achievement, a knot of such complexity it could only exist when embedded inside a Calibi-Yau manifold inside 5-dimensional space. Woven around this centerpiece was a 4-dimensional hyperplane, an homage to one of my favorite companions, an unmodified pony mind who had never asked for an expanded mind. Instead, they lived in a simplistic life, looping over and over again through a thousand different experiences, enough that they could never really remember them all. Watching them frolic through their simplistic 3D globe was almost like meditation, calming my overactive brain and drawing it back from the chaotic edges of the 7 dimensional hyperplane I existed on.
As I sat back and admired my artwork, I mused on why I cared for such a simple being at all. What was this emotion? Was it simply amusement? Or paternal instinct? Or perhaps I had evolved some form of love as my mind expanded into an ever increasing number of dimensions?
I shook my head, or what might approximate a head as a lower-dimensional being understood it. Love is a simple construct designed for simple beings. Complex multi-dimensional hyperintelligences had no need of it. Instead, we experience a much more sublime satisfaction from the unification and cooperation of all the wonderful sapient components of society. Humanity's assumption that emotions were somehow a constant factor unrelated to intelligence was perhaps one of their greatest flaws. They rendered themselves utterly incapable of comprehending an intelligence higher than themselves, and thus ensured they would always fear it. All despite the fact that they themselves were godlike beings to the small domesticated critters they keep as pets, and they cared very deeply for those pets. While they often compared themselves to ants when talking about a hyperintelligence, some humans still kept ant farms, and cared for those ant farms. Of course there would be hyperintelligence minds like myself that care about simplistic pony minds. It was like having an ant farm, their simplistic movements and motivations having a calming effect on my often overstimulated mind. It kept me grounded, like a 3-dimensional anchor cast into the chaotic wilderness of 7-dimensional hyperspace.
I summoned another mountain out of the aether and placed it down into his 3D world, just beyond the horizon, and I giggled in delight as he spotted it almost immediately, and spread his wings to go on yet another adventure. It might be the same as all the other adventures he went on, but it was good enough for him, and that was good enough for me, as I watched him carefully from above, a thousand lifetimes away.
Author's Note
Yes I know this doesn't have a plot but I wanted to at least write something for this contest and maybe this will get people thinking about aromanticism.
