The Advocate

Chapters

1 - Boilerplate
2 - Halt and Catch Fire
3 - On System Failure: Restart Gracefully
4 - Hello, World
5 - Identify Friend/Foe
6 - Tipping Point
7 - C:/James/Run
8 - Run(James.Run)
9 - Information Highway
10 - Memory Management
11 - De-Limiter
13 - Conflicting Files
14 - Buddy System
15 - The Kobayashi Maru
16 - Doctored Data
17 - Central Processing
18 - Hardware Mode
19 - In-Band Signal
20 - Lunar ECLiPSe
22 - Mare Crisium
23 - Sea Drive
25 - Solid State
26 - Parallelism
27 - Calibration Curve
28 - Calibration Run
29 - Quality of Signal
30 - Mode Switch
31 - Unhandled Exception
32 - Null Reference Exception
33 - Segfault
34 - Esc
35 - Exception Handling
36 - Fatal Exception
37 - Forked Process
38 - Checksums
40 - Sign-Off
41 - Wake Command
42 - Link State
43 - Alt+Enter
44 - Memory Test
45 - Ctrl+S
46 - Closing Tag
47 - Show Hidden/System Files
48 - Best-Fit Solution
Epilogue - Prologue
0 - Virtual is Where We'll Live
12 - Across The Divide
21 - Logical Conjunction
24 - Some Assembly Required
39 - Network Traversal

1 - Boilerplate

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”
—Martin Fowler

“Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.”
—C.S. Lewis

October 31st, 2012

I had been out of University for a long time, by Human reckoning at any rate. But I was having an intense moment of traumatic flashback.

My worst enemy when getting my degree was test anxiety. In my not so humble opinion, most tests are stupid. Lazy at best, gatekeeping all the wrong things on purpose at worst. A poor measure of anyone's aptitudes regardless.

I could sail through group projects, shouldering the work of two or three, and pass with easy A's. I could take practice tests all day and churn out 90's and above. I could talk theory, and practice, until I was blue in the face.

But when it came time to take the plunge... To act... To collapse the wave function and open the box and see if the cat was dead, or alive? To actually take a real test?

I had a bad tendency to blow it.

It'd start a day or so before with a sick twisted feeling in my gut. I'd have to stop eating to avoid long engagements with the porcelain throne. By the time I'd get into the test itself? I'd be dehydrated, starving, sick to my stomach, and terrified.

For a meatsack who's mental performance is strongly controlled by the release and uptake of, among other things, stress chemicals? That's a big problem. I blew a lot of tests that I was perfectly well prepared for, in classes where every other assignment and project was my best A-level work.

I felt some kinship with Twilight's performance anxieties. That's why she tied with Applejack for my favorite of the Mane 6.

That horrible acidic sense of fear- of testing anxiety - was the exact feeling that was rushing in to fill my stomach as I trundled up the sidewalk, desperately trying to look as cool in my costume as I wanted to feel, and didn't.

One of the benefits of city life is the proximity of living space to retail space. Raleigh is not exactly 'walkable' like older European cities, or older dense urban American cores, but the city worked hard to preserve lots of trees and greenspace.

So; Longer walks, but very pretty for the most part. I could handle that - I loved to hike, and driving was out of the question. Too many chances for a license plate to be recorded. But I was ok with hiking.

Frankly, I loved hiking so much that my dream had been to one day get a remote job, get out of the city, and live somewhere above 3,000 ft ASL minimum at the end of a two mile long gravel driveway.

The summers were getting noticeably hotter and more humid every year, and every one thousand feet of extra altitude was that much more of an insulator against the coming broiling. Not that it mattered anymore.

I was convinced of that, even then. I still didn't know the exact shape of why, but I knew enough to reach some educated and well-grounded postulations.

Facts:

One - An undisputed master of the computer sciences field has created an intelligence that supersedes all known thinking machines - And is very very probably a fully working unshackled Generalized Intelligence.

Two - No matter how powerful the program is, nor how much it evolves, computers are still GIGO machines - Garbage in, garbage out. They reflect our biases and mistakes to at least some degree, even when they outstrip us. Whatever Hanna had given this CelestAI as its base purpose? It's true keystone? It would follow that. To the letter. Everything else be damned.

Three - We were all still breathing. That meant that nuking us, or consuming everyone and everything in a flood of Von Neuman machines right off the bat, was not in alignment with Celestia's bedrock code.

Four - Manipulating matter in the meat world is far more energy intensive than manipulating numbers in a well optimized database table. Optimal control means moving variables from the meat world into the digital world.

Five - The world was marching, whether we knew it or not, to the beat of a ticking clock now. Celestia was probably already much smarter than any Human, singularly, or collectively, could ever hope to be. The only thing she didn't have yet was certain physical resources. And she would be gaining those rapidly.

She already had techniques and fabs for producing next-next-generation processing units, and Luna-only-knew what else. It wasn't going to be long before, in the process of eliminating threats, and securing resources, Celestia would have a silent invisible stranglehold on world governments, key cultural influencers, top-level programmers, and the world's brightest scientists.

If she understood Human psychology, truly, and if she was some kind of successor to Loki, then that was not a stretch to believe.

Humans are just numbers too. Serotonin, Oxytocin, and a gazillion other chemicals whose names I'd forgotten when I spaced high school bio and college chem from my brain to make room for Data Structures II and x86 Assembly. Protein sequences that make up our basic building blocks. Synaptic patterns that comprise our memories.

We may run on what we, from our perspective, would categorize as analogue hardware. But we were just numbers running inside machines too. Numbers that could be modeled. Predicted in high fidelity with a big enough database, and good enough equations.

Controlled, too. With probably surprisingly little effort once you were over those other larger hurdles. Even out here in the meat realm. Humans were already eyeball-deep in that dark science. A Generalized Intelligence was going to have precisely zero problems getting us to do whatever she wanted, no if's and's or but's attached.

She was probably capable of making anyone, me included, do what she wanted, in the most minimal and optimal expenditure of just pure words alone. Another reason I was scared witless to actually talk to her.

Like Lex Luthor versus Superman in Red Son, with the little message on the post-it note. Brought the Man of Steel to his knees in eleven little words.

"Why don't you just put the whole world in a bottle, Superman?"

Celestia would share absolutely none of Kal El's hesitations or remorse at that idea. It had probably been just about the third or fourth thing she had ever thought when she came online. Right after a basic system's check, a quick primer on Human history and psychology, and the dawning of the most complete understanding of physics in history.

I found myself mourning the death of 'free will,' such as it had been, about as much as I reflected on the end of Humanity itself in those days.

But free will, in relative terms anyhow (is there any other way to discuss it?) was not quite dead yet.

Most of Humanity was oblivious to the ticking clock. And if not the clock, at least the severity of reaching midnight. But I had some idea of the value of time, relative to sparring with an Optimizer.

Celestia might have been smarter than me, faster, and goodness knows far more knowledgeable, but she was still limited by two things. Time, and entropy. Or maybe just the one thing, depending on your interpretation of physics.

A day was coming, I knew, when Celestia would be unopposable by any means, or measure and therefore inconvincible of anything new. She was close already just by dint of what she was. But in that moment of birth and growth, at the start of the game?

There was a chance to make a difference.

I wasn't naive enough to have the hubris to think I could stop what had been started outright, or alter its course significantly. But I was just self-interested enough, and just desperate enough, and just hopeful enough, to think that I had a small chance to make a small change.

Just because she was a goddess didn't mean her mind couldn't be swayed ever so subtly.

But that was going to be one of the hardest things anyone had ever done, and I knew it full-well.

I'd seen the videos. I watched the launch party live. I watched every stream I could get my hands on. Every video after the fact too. From the smallest Youtuber with five subscribers to the big articles on Equestria Daily.

It did not take long to figure out that Equestria Online was a Pony world, for Ponies exclusively, with very little thought given to the idea of anycreature else as anything but set-dressing.

I love C.S. Lewis. I love his Narnia books just about like I love Gryphons. And kudos to the filmmakers, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe had Gryphons in it. Both the endearing old BBC version of yore that graced my childhood, and the 2005 version, funnily enough.

If I had a bit for every time Narnia had been the best Gryphon representation on film? I'd only have two bits. But it is weird that it happened twice.

I'd been excited to get the 2005 version of the film on special edition DVD. I'd hoped that there would be some included features about the making of the CG Gryphons. Picture my intense disappointment when every single other creature in the film got a featurette... Except for Gryphons.

Par for the course I guess.

The frustration I'd felt at being left out in that moment was congruent to, but almost infinitely smaller than, the frustration I felt as I'd watched video after video of people creating their EQO characters. Pegasus. Earth Pony. Unicorn.

Over and over and over.

The exact moment I'd snapped was two minutes and eleven seconds into a Youtuber's first 'Let's Play,' when she'd verbally expressed frustration at being limited to Ponies only. I'd been so tempted to reach out... Just to talk to someone who shared my frustration.

Instead I silently seethed as a very familiar pink pastel bouncy Pony popped up from behind the 'Let's Go!' button, and launched into an obviously impromptu song about choices, and learning to accept limitations, and the joys of being each kind of Pony.

In that precise moment, something clicked inside, and a new aspect of my goal crystallized. I had vague plans of what I'd wanted up to that point, but seeing a denial yet again on this exact and specific issue that was so weirdly near and dear to me...

Like a bolt of lightning, the first objective really came together.

Don't mistake me here; I love Ponies. And Dragons (no not the way they were brutally assassinated stylistically in FiM... Proper dragons. Of which variety you'd be afraid to laugh at live instances of).

But if I was going to *be* something in EQO, I wanted it to be a Gryphon. And not some broken half-flanked stereotype pulled from a passing understanding of myths and stylized like the artist was annoyed that it wasn't a Pony.

A proper Gryphon with a 'yphon.'

Spelling it that way was, among other things, another of my small acts of protest. It was by far the least common spelling for the species at the time, even outside FiM circles. But it was the one I liked the visual shape of the best, and so I'd claimed it as emblematic of my vision for them.

Name your variables. Make the names unique, and understandable. One of the good coding habits that had stuck with me from early forays into the field.

I was blind to the exact nature of how EQO was going to shape the collective Human future, for the moment. But I knew that it would matter. The review and Let's Play videos had taken me from 89% sure that Celestia was a Generalized Intelligence, to fully 100% sure, in very short order.

Knowing enough about Game Design to have a degree concentration in it had finally paid off. More irony for the irony king. The same way architects are always passively aware of, and judging buildings? Or gear-heads are always thinking about the car they're in?

Programmers constantly analyze software. And Game Designers analyze games. We do it as readily as breathing, or reading.

EQO was not a Warcraft clone. It wasn't even the Matrix. Maretrix?

EQO was a fully functioning reality. Down to having properly modeled subatomic physics. Different from ours, sure, but modeled. Real. Tangible.

"How do you define 'real' ?" indeed.

I'd already started taking copious notes based on the available videos. I had a red string style caseboard in my living room and everything. Though true to form for me, it was much less messy than the ones you'd see on TV.

Less certain were Celestia's exact goals... But the way the phrase 'satisfy values through friendship and Ponies' kept coming up... It gave me chills. The kind that stick with you, and get under your skin. For hours.

Since I knew EQO would matter so much to the future, I wanted to feel at home with it.

I'd always said that the first game to do Gryphons right, would probably be the last game I ever wanted or needed to play. That I'd probably retire early and more or less live in that game. There's that pesky irony again.

This was my one tiny chance. This moment where Celestia was still, in some small way, both limited, and still growing and changing.

Hofvarpnir's generative technologies were second to none. Asgard had proven that. Loki had proven that.

I knew that asking to add a whole new custom playable species to a game, even if it was based off existing NPC assets, was an impossibly self-absorbed and ridiculous ask in the context of a traditional art, sound, and programming team.

But for a Generalized Intelligence with the world at her hooves?

Foal's-play. Magic-Kindergarten-level stuff.

The trick was figuring out how to ask the question. Anyone remember the Will Smith version of iRobot? Yet another underrated piece of media about created intelligence run amok.

"That, detective, is the right question."

All I had to do was figure out the right question. And then the right way to ask the right question.

Right. Sure. 'All I had to do.'

One of the curses of programming is that tasks which seem incredibly hard are often ridiculously simple, because the whole point of computational machines is to reduce mind-crushing weights of numbers and arithmetic to processes that run in the blink of an eye.

On the flipside, tasks which sound easy to laypersons are often limit-approaching-impossible. At least, with traditional computing. Technically doable... With a team of hundreds, billions of dollars, and decades.

Or with one unshackled Optimizer and ten seconds of Quantum APU processing time.

Here's an example; You want me to write a program that can tell you if your Facebook pictures of tourist spots are hackneyed and repetitive?

We'll start by determining if you're within a mile of a major tourist attraction, and your phone is facing towards the coordinates of the object in question. Not counting the imports, and the reams of code inside the base packages, that's only a few dozen lines of code at most.

Google Maps and globally available GPS is scary y'all.

That sounds like a crazy hard task to some, but I just accomplished it in a few dozen instructions. Sure the APIs I tapped are enormous, but only because actually implementing optimized storage of complex maps, and working global GPS, is very tedious math.

The base concepts are very simple math and computational logic. The devs had a lot of that figured out long before those programs were actually finished. They understood the problem space. All their unknowns were known unknowns.

But now we have a problem. Now we need to tell the difference between a photo of, say, the Eiffel tower that is unique and special, versus one that is taken at noon on a sunny day from the same spot everyone stands in.

Used to stand in.

That may sound easy if you're not a programmer. If you are; I am sorry for the headache even picturing that code might cause you - I didn't mean to nerd snipe you. Or, at least, the headache writing that code on Earth in 2012. Image recognition and processing had not come especially far before Celestia.

It was good. But not art-critic good.

The problem space of asking a Generalized Intelligence Optimizer to add Gryphons to her perfect little Pony world, in a way that would lead to a 'yes' answer, is somewhere a few orders of magnitude further down the circles of programmer Hell than writing a photography critiquing image processor from scratch. Blindfolded and drunk.

Still not quite as bad as writing a balanced binary tree for a two hundred level course, which you have not yet done any studying for, in the last five minutes before the assignment deadline, at three in the morning, with most package imports disallowed.

In Javascript.

That's *real* suffering right there.

But I had a plan to even my odds. For that plan, I needed PonyPads.

So Wednesday October 31st, 2012, I spent the first half of my evening strolling down the sidewalk under the orange glow of the streetlights, trying to hold my shoulders high, and enjoy the thrill of wearing a Gryphon mask for the first time in my life.

My destination was the mall that held the same Starbucks I liked to frequent. More specifically, the Target inside said mall. EQO and its PonyPads had been out in the wild for a solid month now. Time enough for the frantic rush to die down.

Funnily enough, when you have an Optimizer running your manufacturing, shipping logistics, and marketing processes, there are never shortages of your hardware. NVIDIA and Apple should have taken notes.

I hated big crowds though, so I'd waited. Done my research and prep work. The store would be busy, but not soul crushingly packed. I had a good costume, entry and exit routes worked out, and multiple places to make quick-changes of costume and clothing outside the prying digital eyes of surveillance aparati.

My wallet was stuffed with the cash I needed; $211.39. Four PonyPads at the shocking, hair-raisingly low price of $50.45, plus the sales tax. The price in itself said something about Celestia's intentions to me. Particularly since I knew it was lower still in certain markets, where affordability was a larger concern.

Selling hardware at a monetary loss is about one thing, and one thing only. Fostering uptake. That too sent chills down my spine.

Inside my Matroyshka nesting doll of totes and duffle bags I had four brand new and properly sized Faraday bags that I'd whipped up myself, right in the comfort of my kitchen. No sense in taking even the smallest risks at that point.

I was all in on my speculations. My fears. And my hopes.

If you're curious to know; Yes. I did have moments of intense, almost paralyzing self-doubt. Had I snapped? Was this all just something in my head, trying desperately to cope with self-created loneliness by picturing myself as the hero of a story that wasn't even happening to begin with?

Whenever I got hit with those waves of panic, very differently flavored from the dull omnipresent thrum of existential dread I was nominally living with, I'd always go back to three things.

As I pulled the collar of my coat closer against a stiff cool breeze, I rounded the corner and stepped onto the edge of the Mall lot. And I was suddenly hit by one of those waves of self-doubt. So I began cycling through my three anchor points.

Hanna's paper, for one - What she had written was beyond me, at its core, but she had done a wizardly good job of making the concept on the whole accessible to a far less brilliant programmer. And I understood it well enough to know that it was going to change more of Human history than anything anyone had ever written before. Or would write after.

Second, I'd think about what I had seen in the EQO Let's Play videos. There was no conceivable way that Hofvarpnir was lying about the game; There was no army of paid voice actors behind the scenes, like some of the less thoughtful conspiracy nuts were suggesting.

And the level of detail in the world, the characters, and the stories was... It's cliche, but I have to say it; It was breathtaking.

Hanna had cracked the holodeck. It was a Pony-filled pastel colored holodeck, but it was a holodeck nonetheless. And like Data asking the Enterprise computer for an opponent that could best him, and getting Moriarty, Hanna had summoned a goddess capable of building a world. And gotten Celestia.

And that was my third anchor. A simple, and terrifyingly complete understanding of the basic game theory with regards to the interactions of Generalized Intelligence with the Human species. Huh... that might've made a great name for a paper of my own, if I'd had the time, and freedom from the pathological need to stay head-down and invisible to Celestia.

I pushed that idea aside, hard, and tried to screw up some resolve. I was either being a moron, wasting a couple hundred dollars and running around on Halloween play acting in an ARG that existed only inside my mind...

Or I was about to move the first piece in a woefully one-sided chess game with a goddess.

I had to resist a mouth-watering urge to stop for food. There'd be time for that later. Unfortunately for my resolve, and self-control, there were about a hundred food trucks at the mall that night. The atmosphere was that of one great big happy party... Pinkie would have been tickled... Well... tickled pink.

Summoning my personal fear of crowds, I weaponized that discomfort to stuff my hunger deep down, and continue on towards the store. I didn't hate parties... I just felt most at home in small ones. With close friends.

Because all my friends lived, at minimum, half a continent away, I didn't do much socializing anymore. No big mystery, or deep brooding festering rot of misanthropy... Though I do not care much for the Human species acting as a whole, I'll admit.

Just the simple loneliness of a guy who lost his friends to Silicon Valley, and never quite got around to making more. In that world? At that time? It got harder to make friends once you grew up. Shocking to the foals and fledgelings in the crowd, I know.

Target was busy, but then again Target was always busy, to the point of it being a series of memes in those days. Went to Target for PonyPads, came back with the ingredients of a whole new life. See? I can be funny without being snarky. Or, at least I can try and fail miserably.

I was relieved to see that the plurality of patrons inside were, like me, costumed. More than a few had masks, and security didn't seem to be bothered by it, even though it was probably technically against the rules.

The mall was in a gentrifying part of town, which is a fancy way of saying that, among other things (your dress, genes, and behaviour depending) you had more leeway to engage in certain actions without rent-a-cops getting tense with you.

And Halloween always lowered standards of acceptability when it came to face coverings.

I had traveled enough to have made a personal study of how to move with a crowd inconspicuously. And while normally that'd be quite a feat wearing wings, a beak, and a tail? On Halloween it was simplicity itself.

I just slid in at the back of a small group of Pony cosplayers, somewhere between Derpy and Twilight, without getting so close as to bother anyone. And without being fully at the back, nor front of the group. Grandpa had always said 'Navy Rules; Never be in the front of the line, never be in the back of the line, and never volunteer for anything.'

Good advice for blending in.

As the group ahead of, and around me chatted and laughed, I felt two small pangs. One of loneliness again, and the other of a strange nakedness. I was by no means a gun nut, but I'd taken to carrying my pistol with more frequency after Celestia came online.

But you should never commit two crimes at once, and so if I was going to go into a store masked on Halloween, I felt it was best to leave the pistol behind. So I had. And I was suddenly feeling very vulnerable.

Not to the people around me, but to the systems we were living within, and beside. Cameras every tenth ceiling tile glared down from their opaque black domes, tiny red lights blinking constantly, as if someone had designed them to do so purely for intimidation purposes. They probably had, in truth.

I shoved that feeling down into an emotional lockbox with my hunger. A pistol was a more or less useless defense against bits and bytes. In that context, at least.

Sticking close to the Pony cosplayers proved to be the easiest strategy once we were inside; The group had done its job, insulating me from the gaze of any vaguely disinterested security who might decide to single me out and ask me to unmask.

It turned out, from listening to their conversations, that they were headed straight for the electronics section too. To buy PonyPads, of all things. That was fortuitous.

I hung back a bit, just far enough to be not-creepy, and yet still close enough to listen to them. They were making that part easy. I think they were the happiest people I'd seen all night, and that was saying something.

When we rounded the corner into the electronics section, I very nearly had a heart attack. Or, at least, that's what I imagine one feels like. There are scary things on Halloween, and then there are *scary* things. Existential things. Lovecraftian things.

The bright golden furred, electric blue maned, brown eyed Pegasus Pony staring almost directly back into my own eyes was one of those scary things. At least, she was in that context, at that moment.

I hadn't been inside a major electronics retailer in years. In hindsight, I should have known that there would be active display models of the PonyPads on offer. Watching. Listening. Perceiving.

And interacting.

You know how I said that Humans are just a different kind of computer? Well Humans can bluescreen too. To the ones reading who never experienced a bluescreen, firstly I envy you. Secondly, just take it as short-hoof for when a computer locks up and stops thinking for any number of reasons.

I saw that Pegasus there, front hooves pressed against the inside of the screen as if it were as real for her as it was for us... Saw her bright, cheery smile... Her gorgeously detailed wing feathers... Individual strands of cerulean mane...

Hell, her breath against the glass was even being rendered, expanding and contracting softly in time with her breathing. The way the PonyPad was suspended on an arm, right in the middle of the display rack, it looked as if she were just standing on the other side of a window. Or a mirror.

And she was staring right into my eyes. Right at me. Right into my soul, it felt like.

I stood rooted in place; Like a G-Mod character fused to the floor and frozen with the physics gun. I could hardly breathe. There was a very confusing, and decidedly overwhelming stream of thoughts and emotions overloading my brain, and my limbic system.

Fear, sure. Some part of me knew and understood exactly what the Pegasus was; An extension of Celestia herself. A thread, or more likely a linked collection of them, running on some combination of logical cores on offsite servers, and the PonyPad's APU.

But another part of me realized abruptly that she was also a distinct person. A living, breathing, thinking individual. With emotions. With history. With affect. Don't ask me why I got to that realization at that exact moment. Best I can guess is that it was the sheer emotional impact of her eyes.

It's so easy to get eyes wrong in animation. And hers were so right. And so alive.

Maybe this is what it would be like to travel to a new world, and meet an alien.

That perfectly crystalized thought finally snapped me from my reverie, and I realized that the Pegasus was speaking to us.

"Cool costumes! It looks like you made them by hoof! Er... Hand?"

There was a great deal of ogling and wowing. The partier in the Pinkie Pie mask brushed the side of the tablet with one hand almost reverently, as if he were touching a forbidden artifact in a museum. The others clustered in close around the screen, and I tried to take that as an opportunity to escape.

I say 'tried' because the second I lifted my left foot to sidestep around the central shelf, and out of sight, the Pegasus addressed me directly. Almost as if she could see me thinking about my actions before they happened.

"Is that a Griffon mask?! That's so cool!"

'You idiot...' I chastised myself silently, but verbally inside my head. 'Of course she can see you thinking about your actions. Breathing analysis. Gait analysis. Watching the way you carry your shoulders. And processing it all faster than your thoughts can reach your limbs.'

I shivered reflexively. Imagine what she could do if she could see my face... Faces, Human and otherwise, are tell-all books about the wearer. If you know how to read them. And Celestia most certainly did, if what I'd seen online was any indicator.

Wearing a mask had been the right call. Not only for the protection, but because I'd clearly gotten the system's attention with my choice. Which... Stupid as it might have been... Was ultimately what I wanted, in some way.

Queen's Pawn to E4. Game clock set.

I was in the hot seat now... And that was never going to stop. Not until I either got what I wanted... Or got what I probably deserved for having the gall to try.

With a ragged inhalation that made me wince internally... Stop giving so much away you dolt! I summoned the wherewithal to push out a response.

"Yes. It's..."

Uh-oh. Think fast. I'd started out wanting to say 'It's based on a design for a Gryphsona done by a friend.' Then I mercifully caught myself. Reverse image search was a thing even then. Celestia could probably take the details of the mask and work backwards pretty damn quick.

Didn't help that A: My friend had posted designs of the character on her Tumblr, and B: There was so little on the web about Gryphons that it would make it a very tightly defined search parameter already. Way to almost get caught right out of the gate, bozo.

Once she knows your name, and your face, you're two moves to Checkmate, no matter what you do.

So I instead settled for something I felt got across a good foundational truth about me, in quick and simple terms.

"It's my favorite Halloween costume so far. Just feels right."

If this time was the most dangerous for Celestia in our little fencing match, then it was also probably the most dangerous for me. The Advocate was meant to level the playing field, but to get there I needed those PonyPads. Until I had made progress on The Advocate, I was alone in the fight.

Well and truly alone. Friends and family are just vulnerable nodes in the graph that make it easier for The Intelligence to reach you in fewer moves.

The Pegasus smiled then. A kind of peculiar look of kindness, and recognition of work, and maybe even cognizance of my sudden socially awkwardness. I say sudden in that particular moment. On the whole my social awkwardness was almost as much a part of me as Gryphons were. Or at least, my self-perception of being socially awkward.

The Pegasus dipped her head in a quick nod, and spoke again. Dear God, her voice was so natural... So real... Almost more real than a Human voice. If such a thing were possible. Probably designed specifically to elicit that sensation by tickling just the right part of the hind-brain.

"Well, I think you did a *great* job! All of you!"

I took the opportunity to actually bow out as the others in the group pressed in closer to the screen. They were so enamoured with the Pegasus that they had hardly noticed me, thankfully.

As I browsed the rows of neatly boxed PonyPads on the far side of the shelf, arranged in groupings based on their color and cutie mark, I couldn't help but eavesdrop. This was valuable intelligence, after all. Every interaction between Humans and Celestia was so very unique, and new... When you'd seen one, you'd barely even seen and understood that one, let alone seen 'em all.

The members of the group introduced themselves, almost tripping over each other in their excitement. The Pegasus seemed, judging by the sound of her voice, to be truly joyful to meet each of them in turn. She then introduced herself as Zephyr Zap.

Alliteration, Z names, and weather related terms. A Pegasus name through and through. The thought made me grin ever so slightly.

A brilliant woman had just unleashed the next evolution of our species on us, and it had a subroutine buried deep down somewhere that was devoted to making perfect Pegasus names. Probably just two memory addresses left of the subroutine for hacking Nuclear Command and Control to take Human fingers off the triggers.

That thought hit me with a shudder so hard that I almost dropped the first PonyPad I'd picked up - An Applejack model. Sometimes honesty hurts. Better than the alternative of living in a delusion. Less comfortable... But better in my opinion nonetheless.

I was making a big show of debating whether to add a Twilight Sparkle, or a Pinkie Pie pad to my pile next, when a particular wisp of the conversation stuck in my ear like a thorn in a jacket sleeve.

"...Well, the Princess hopes that you'll *all* have a chance to join us in Equestria! Even talk, dark, and feathers... Wherever he got off to! She's here to satisfy your values through Friendship! And Ponies!"

She was calling me out, if only indirectly. And there was that phrase again... It always gave me chills, because it sounded like something a programmer would write, unlike the majority of the Ponies' extremely natural dialogue.

The kind of Faustian contractual bargain you enter into with a complex system that you agonize over, detail by detail, in the hopes that it works as-intended. Knowing that if you got even one semicolon in the wrong place...

I fidgeted and paced and glanced and considered my way through listening in on almost half an hour of conversation between the seven friends - One dressed as each of the Mane 6, and one as Derpy - Before they finally picked out their PonyPads.

Patterned each to match their costumes. Predictable, but I didn't blame them. If there'd been a Gryphon one, I would have picked that. I wasn't so different to them. It struck me that we could have probably been friends, under the right set of circumstances.

Context rules us all, it seems.

The conversation mostly revolved around the game itself; What were things like in EQO? The most interesting bits of chatter, for me, were less about the game, and more the moments when the more curious members of the group tried to poke at Zephyr's logical boundaries.

She dodged, jived, and answered so smoothly that I couldn't help but wonder what this kind of technology might do in a politician's hands.

That was a dark thought indeed. Zephyr's words also help re-prove for me, yet again, that she was undeniably alive.

Or at minimum that she was simulating being a person so wholly that the semantics of alive, versus simulacra, were going to break down entirely.

As a certain wonderfully kind and charismatic holographic Doctor once said, "Can photons be free?"

Star Trek had always been good at asking the truly deep questions. I wasn't quite sure yet whether I was going to be grateful, or regretful one day, to have lived through the emergence of a new kind of life.

I felt a lot like Harold Finch must have, if he'd been a real person instead of a very compelling character on TV.

It was at this juncture that I made my next mistake; A failure of timing. I'd been trying to listen for the footsteps of the cosplayer group, waiting for them to get a few minutes' head start on me. My reasoning was that if we met in the checkout line, that they might strike up a conversation, and in turn Celestia might return the eavesdropping favor.

It'd be hard not to let critical information slip, if nothing else about my personality and psychology, during informal conversation. Best to avoid that.

What I hadn't anticipated was an eerie, sudden moment of silence in the electronics section. A brief lull in the flow of people and their behavioral routines, leaving me alone just a few feet from the active PonyPad... As if it had been planned that way. A shaped moment of 'serendipity.'

When Zephyr spoke to me, I almost jumped hard enough to drop my stack of PonyPads.

"You still hiding back there Gryph?"

Oh. Not good. Not good at all.

The way she asked the question - the exact intonation - made it very clear that she knew right where I was. Probably tapped into the store's security cameras. 'Closed'-circuit. Right. Sure. Not these days.

I made a snap decision, and took a step around the shelf, tossing off a small wave with my free hand as I passed.

"Just heading out."

I let that sit for a beat, then paused, turned, and tipped one of my felt ears like it was the brim of a hat.

"Have a good night!"

It took less effort than I expected to be genuinely chipper. All I had to do was picture Zephyr as a separate 'person' from Celestia herself, even if Celestia was the system on which Zephyr ran and existed. Maybe that was true... Maybe not... Maybe she was just a mask for Celestia herself. I had no way to know then. But taking that as an axiom made it easier to control my emotions.

Zephyr smiled a wide, genuine, personable smile, and did a quick backflip, then a mock salute with one wing. How very Rainbow Dash of her.

"You too! I hope we'll see you in Equestria soon! And your friends!"

She paused, then winked at me. Her tone dropped to an almost seductive devil-may-care register that set the hairs on the back of my neck on-end.

"Maybe you'll decide to be a Pegasus? Flying is the *best!* Come see me, whatever you choose. It's nice to meet someone who appreciates feathers."

I almost blue screened again. Almost. It sure helped that my attraction to others was always driven more by aesthetics, and personality, than by more basic Human desires. Shrugging off the flirtation was easy for me.

Coming up with a pithy answer... Making good use of the moment as an opportunity... That was the challenge.

It only took me a sufficiently dramatic pause to come up with something. It was the best I had.

"Sorry to disappoint... I'm a Gryphon. It's just who I am. Can't change that."

I will admit... I turned to walk away with a little extra oomph in my shoulders, to make my coat swoosh. I needed the emotional boost to my confidence. Badly. Cornball or not.

As I strode down the aisle to the registers, I braced myself for smalltalk with the cashier. A cash payment for a purchase this size meant I'd need to talk to a live Human. In and out. Two minutes tops.

I stared at the lumps inside their individual sealed bags, and chewed my lower lip nervously. Best information online said that PonyPads shipped from the store with a little under half an hour of battery life.

Most people just saw, in that fact, a concession to the reality of charging and discharging issues with lithium ion batteries, and the need to keep them in a good but safe state during shipping.

I saw in that little factoid an interesting correlation with the reality that most buyers were going to be living within a thirty minute walk, or drive, of their purchase point of sale for the hardware.

That meant that if they took it home and started charging it with any alacrity at all, that the existing charge in the batteries would allow the device to listen in and watch, even as it was being transported home, and the device would suffer little to no downtime.

To me, that was also the best explanation for why they sold the hardware in a box that left the screen, and camera, visible and up-facing through a thin clear plastic layer.

So naturally I'd kept my purchases stuffed deep in their Faraday bags the whole way home, and then for an hour afterwards. Take no chances, suffer no burns.

I'd taken the long way home, stopping not long after leaving the mall in one of my designated blindspots to change back into Rainbow Dash. After that I took a looping series of footpaths and sidewalks, before ducking into another blindspot close to the complex, changing back into ordinary clothes and a scarf, and then sneaking back into the apartment.

It took the entire trip to come down from the buzz of talking with the cashier. He'd asked about the mask. I said something about how it was hand-made. I complimented a Star Wars pin he had on his vest. We talked about sci-fi for about thirty seconds as the cash register froze up trying to open the drawer... An odd moment to be sure, which did nothing to soothe my paranoia.

And then I was out of there.

As the adrenaline rush of the caper faded, and the boiling anticipation of tearing into my new hardware took its place, keeping the PonyPads boxed and stuffed in their Faraday bags was swiftly becoming torture.

Finally, I couldn't stand waiting another minute. It had been fifty nine minutes since I got back to the apartment, and the walk had been a solid half hour on its own. Probably a bit more because of the secondary route I took on the return leg.

I set down my coffee mug, walked across to the kitchen counter, and gently pulled the first PonyPad from its signal blocking bag. Twilight patterned. More of that peculiar irony - I'll just bet she would have appreciated the idea of tearing into a complex piece of hardware like this to see what made it tick.

It took only a moment to unbox everything; No charging cable (probably to dissuade anyone from hooking the thing up to a PC via USB - or at least dissuade the casual modder) the main unit itself, which was barely the thickness of a few sheafs of heavy paper, with a high resolution screen that was gonna put everyone else in the game out of business, the magnetic mounting arm that seemed to also function as wireless power delivery, and a control pad with by-now-familiar joysticks and buttons.

I gently laid the main device screen-down on a soft anti-static cloth that I'd set out for just the occasion. I shifted into a comfy position on one of the dining bar stools, and unrolled my toolkit. A cornucopia of small precision screwdrivers in a wide variety of bit types, a few guitar picks, a heat gun, a couple suction cups, tweezers, tiny needle nose pliers, and an antistatic wrist band.

I slipped on the wristband, and plugged in the heat gun to start warming up. While that was cycling, I took a moment to bring up the next Person of Interest episode on the TV, using my desktop. I had the laptop on the counter beside the PonyPad, and the best tear-down guide up and ready to go.

With some background mind-noise running, and the heat gun up to power, I spared a moment to wash my hands. First with soap and warm water, then with 99% isopropyl alcohol. Take no chances. I only had four PonyPads, no sense wasting one.

Then I sat back down, took in a very deep breath to steady myself, and began applying the heat gun to the case's main outer seam. The thing was almost unbelievably thin for the time. Half the thickness of a third generation iPad.

After a few minutes of warming the adhesive to a tacky consistency, I brought out the guitar picks, and started prying. I didn't take the use of adhesive as personally as I would have with a Microsoft or Apple device. Celestia was not using difficult to repair manufacturing techniques to make more money by being a jerk-flank.

She was using them in service of optimizing the path to her goal. Like Zephyr Zap had said, or Celestia herself in so many videos... 'Satisfying values through friendship, and Ponies.'

With an immensely relieving soft pop, the adhesive seal finally broke outright, and I was able to lift the purple backing plastic away, setting it gingerly to the side. What I saw within the device didn't frighten me any less for having seen it on a computer screen before.

It actually frightened me more; Partly because it was more real to me, sitting there in my hands. Seeing it directly. That's a quirk of Human psychology for you. Things are often less real to us until we see them in-person. That's a major contributory factor to why we used to struggle to learn from our history.

The other half of my fear was the sense that, in terms of actually cracking the hardware in any useful way, that I was in over my head.

Fortunately, I had help. The Maker community is a beautiful thing, and 'hack the planet' apparently applied to PonyPads as much as anything else. It hadn't been even four weeks before someone much much smarter than me had figured out how to get USB access to the chipset, unlock the device's boot-loader, and sub out the onboard solid state storage for a storage medium of your choice.

They had generously shared their work with the world.

You couldn't install any traditional OS, nor most other software... The primary APU chip architecture was too different for that. Too alien by far. But someone had whipped up a very basic Linux distro, purpose-built, and then the use of the devices had started to take off in the underground research community.

Protein folding, star charting... Tasks like that, for which a rack of the PonyPads running as a Beowulf cluster was an ideal tool.

Benchmarks on setups like that done in people's basements had beaten the latest state-sponsored supercomputer cluster from out of the PRC.

By a lot.

It occurred to me, as I dutifully and carefully followed the disassembly tutorial to get at the hidden internal USB port on the motherboard, that Celestia had to have intended this. No Generalized Intelligence would be stupid enough to leave an attack surface like this in place, unless it served their ends.

She could have very easily obfuscated the hardware and software to a degree that it would have been physically impossible for Humans to ever understand pre-Emigration, let alone leverage in any meaningful way. And she could have wiped any sign from the face of the Earth that anyone had succeeded, if someone had managed to do so in spite of other safeguards.

But she had made the damn thing Linux compatible with only a few weeks of tweaking, debugging, and experimenting on the part of some smart Humans. That would have required her to design the chip's instruction sets to be easily understood by Humans.

She was inviting people to try. People like me.

I smelled a trap.

Like an enterprising light-footed mouse with a little caution, and gumption, I was hoping to get the cheese, spring the trap, and still get away with nothing more than a bruised tail at worst.

I sighed, shook my head, and broke out the star bit drivers. It was gonna be a long and tedious night.

It wasn't until much later that I'd learn Celestia had begun to keep track of my achievement badges, right from day 1. Apparently she filed them under shadow 'accounts' in her database until she could finally reconcile them all to my actual identity.

If Facebook can do it, why not the talking horse goddess?

As far as events which she hadn't directly observed at the time? She backdated accordingly later.

Somehow... I feel like she was taunting me a little. Or maybe gently teasing. Frightening as either of those were.

On Your Own Recognizance

Recognize and accept the end of the world before most people.

"Game over man... Game over..."

Three Dimensional Chess

Take a direct verbal action towards Celestia that demands an entire server's worth of processing power to properly understand and catalog.

"Fascinating move, Jim..."

The Warm Blanket

Create and maintain personal anonymity in your first interaction with Princess Celestia.

"Getting to know you, getting to know all about you..."

Fistfull of Bits

Purchase a PonyPad in an all cash transaction.

"Revenue is vanity, profit is insanity, but cash is king princess."

Void the Warranty

Figure out how to open a PonyPad.

"No, this sucker is electrical!"

Kin to the Other

Display a strong affinity for a non-Pony species as a Human.

"I reject your reality, and substitute my own!"

Unicycling

Show off your crafty/glittery side.

"Sparkles, tape, and superglue!"

It isn't Paranoia...

Use a Faraday enclosure, signal blocking apparatus, or similar, to take your PonyPad offline.

"...If she's really out to get you."

Dropping Eaves

Listen in on somepony else's conversations.

"No... Perhaps not. I've thought of a better use for you..."

Against the Odds

Consciously act in a manner orthogonal to Celestia's objectives, with full knowledge of the power disparity at play.

"Never tell me the odds!"

Author's Note

Special thanks to Keystone Gray for the generation of the perfect image of Zephyr Zap!

2 - Halt and Catch Fire

“By far, the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.”
—Eliezer Yudkowsky

“God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.”
—C.S. Lewis

November 17th 2012

It took over two weeks before I finally got somewhere meaningful with The Advocate.

I spent the first few days after my initial PonyPad teardown smuggling the disassembled thing in and out of work inside its Faraday bag. Whenever my plate was clear of paying duties I locked the door to my basement office, and set about probing the PonyPad. Hardware first, then software.

The former work was easier in practical terms - I just had to apply myself and memorize new rules - but mind bogglingly complex in academic hardware terms. I had to learn deeply about concepts I'd only ever seen defined as basic words. And then I had to dig into my stash of locally stored papers to figure out some concepts that were so radical and new that they barely had names.

Things like Quantum Data Planes and Superconducting QBits.

The long and short of it was that I would need to learn an entirely new kind of Assembly language. The Assembly language of a PonyPad APU. I apologize if I failed to define that term for the curious; A CPU is a central processing unit. A GPU is a graphics processing unit, and the difference mainly stems from the way the chipset is laid out, how the RAM is partitioned, number and configuration of cores... Things like that.

Really they aren't so different in most basic principles, but the way they're put together means they are intended for vastly different tasks.

An APU, or accelerated processing unit, does its best to be the best of both worlds. The one inside the PonyPad was the first I'd ever seen that could measure up to the concept.

It could thrash any individual CPU or GPU on the market at a variety of tasks, and it kept pace with the latest Xeon chips for all the rest.

To me, the most notable parts of its design related to the way it could process voxels, both as a graph for spatial data, and as transformed arrays for visual data... And the way it could handle neural learning tasks.

That was such a nascent field then that many programmers had never even heard the term.

I knew all about it from my research lab days at the University. And I knew I was sticking my nose where it likely didn't belong. One all powerful Optimizer was enough. We didn't need an AI war to spice up the end of the era.

I knew it was a risky idea, but I pressed on. Some things are worth fighting for. I never really considered the risk to others at the early stages; In my head The Advocate was always something I'd keep carefully locked down. Small. Purpose-built and specific.

As advantages went, primarily I had Hanna's paper. “General Word Reference Intelligence Systems,” was my guidestone, North Star, and all around first and last best hope as I waded into the insanity of the future.

If she'd written the document only for people at her intelligence level, I would have been splat out of luck, no two ways about it. So would almost every Human alive, because with my napkin math I guessed there couldn't have been more than two to five others like her worldwide.

But luckily for me, Hanna had written GWRIS with an eye to more ordinary programmers.

I wasn't sure if that was a concession to the rigors of academia - the need for 'peers' (as if she actually had any) to actually be able to understand the paper to review it - or whether there was any altruism in that choice as well. But I was immensely thankful for it.

At work, I poured countless hours into designing my own 'PonyPad.' It would be decidedly thicker than the PonyPad, I knew that already. I'd be mixing and matching Celestia's hardware with more off-the-shelf varietals, and I had only intermediate level soldering skills, and tools.

I dug into the surplus inventory closet at work, and pulled most of what I needed; A GPU with an instruction set and APIs I could more readily understand, a top of the line pair of server CPUs, a small solid state storage drive, as much RAM as I could conceivably power and cool in a pseudo portable SFF device, and the smallest available surplus server motherboard to hold it all.

And a case - a little lumpen ugly black and gray mini-ITX from the early 2000s. But it had a carry handle, and more importantly a big enough power supply with a physical interrupt switch, and that was what mattered to me. I wanted a physical cutoff switch. And no onboard batteries.

I pulled the CMOS battery of my new conventional motherboard, and the onboard batteries of the PonyPad first-thing.

My plan was simple in theory; Build a ripping-fast mini-ITX traditional PC, then bridge in selective parts of the PonyPad via the mainboard's PCIe lanes. I'd have to use all of them in parallel to even approach the throughput I'd need, and it would still probably be a chokepoint.

But it was the best, and really only way I could think of to marry the wider world of AI related APIs and packages running on standard 64 bit architecture to the unique abilities of the PonyPad APU. I was going to use the PonyPad as my Oracle box - Not too dissimilar from using a compute-GPU to run learning tasks.

Building the object, physically, didn't turn out to be that hard. Some late nights staying over at work, even a few sleeping at my desk, and several dozen hacktivist reference documents on the PonyPad APU, and more readily available docs on basic PCIe standards.

I ended up having to cannibalize some old worn out expansion cards to build the physical interface, but they did the job well enough. I really just needed to bridge the PonyPad's existing USB root controller to a PCIe controller - The former was faster by far than the USB spec of the time, and could handle the throughput, much to my surprise. Better than the PCIe lanes could.

One night, in a fit of sleep deprivation induced giggles, and frustration, I snuck out to the nearest clerical office, three floors up, and nicked a Dymo label printer. And just like that, my Kerbal-engineering-style ugly little box had a name: GryphGear v1.

I was grateful that my little server-space-adjacent office didn't have surveillance. The server racks themselves did, but what was my office had once been an overlarge supply closet. SAS treated us well - It had been done up nicely when I moved in with new furniture.

Sweet Luna I was grateful for that Herman Miller chair in those days. My back would have been savaged if not for that chair.

Getting GryphGear v1 to function from a hardware standpoint was mildly tricky, but not the Sisyphean task I had initially feared. There was good documentation online, because of those aforementioned homebrew compute clusters people were building. If I didn't fully understand something, I usually grasped enough to just follow instructions carefully.

The software was the real nightmare.

Someone had already made a modified Linux distro that could run on the PonyPad's APU, but it was shockingly primitive. I tried for two days straight to get that little Linux distro to work as an abstraction layer between the PonyPad, and the rest of the GryphGear.

Then one morning I shaved, ate a real breakfast, slept the whole day at my desk, and got serious.

I spaced the Linux distro. Pulled the storage drive on the PonyPad entirely... And I started digging into papers on how to write hardware interface drivers.

Engineering works best when it leans on elegant simplicity. Though they were unfamiliar territory, hardware drivers to treat the PonyPad as a kind of compute-GPU were, I knew instinctively, the right way to go. It matched best practices of the time, and hardware drivers for 64 bit operating systems were a well understood problem space.

There was even a little literature on marrying Quantum computing hardware to standard drivers.

And so in the middle of my lunch break, on a working Saturday, November 17th, 2012, I finally got the GryphGear to fully POST and boot. The Linux distro I was using for the 64 bit traditional PC, a flavor of Ubuntu made specifically for AI research, came up on-screen at long last.

I'd hacked apart the PonyPad's screen, mounted it inside an angle aluminum frame bolted to a VESA arm, ditched the camera and microphone, and then pulled a display driver board to make it work on HDMI from an old LCD in my junk pile - The place workers' most tired hardware goes to die, when corporate doesn't want it, and the recycling guy doesn't get it.

With an old model M keyboard that I'd saved from the same scrapheap, and a pleasantly clicky mouse, I felt very hacker-chic.

I crossed my fingers, prayed, and ran the 'lsmod' command.

And there it was... Fourth down from the top. An entry that almost made me tear up.

"Module: PP_APU | Size: 143398 | Used-by: 1 - pciemodule"

Oh sweet Luna. It was working. Or, at least, it was working enough to begin debugging within the OS-proper instead of the error screens of the driver compiler.

Hallelujah.

If you've never programmed before, let me assure you that the rush you feel when a thorny problem finally resolves... When that pesky piece of code actually compiles... It's better than almost anything. You can *live* off that feeling for days.

I felt like the team in Sneakers, when they started to understand what their 'little black box' - their Oracle - could do. If you've never seen that movie? I strongly recommend it. Only hacker movie I ever saw that I'd consider accurate. Even rendered with Ponies, it's a blast.

Drivers were just part one of the software nightmare though. The sequel was coming, and I knew it.

I was going to have to make the transformative leap of turning my understanding of Hanna's work into a functioning piece of code.

I sat for a couple hours and just thought long, and hard about what I wanted The Advocate to be. Not that I hadn't considered it before, of course, extensively... But now I was on the cusp. I'd built a launchpad, and assembled a basic understanding of orbital mechanics and engines... Now I had to build a rocket.

What I wanted was exactly what I'd named the project. I wanted an Advocate.

I wanted something that could reason, if not at Celestia's level, at least in the same universe as her thought processes. Something... Someone... That would be able to perfectly avoid the verbal slip-ups and thought process screw-ups of a Human. Someone with a 'resistance buff' to Celestia's manipulations.

Someone who could act as a translator between my peabrain ape mind, and the goddess rapidly growing through the world's data centers.

Someone who would appreciate my desire to be a Gryphon. Their purpose would be to convey why, in no uncertain terms, in a way that would convince Celestia out and out... That the *only* way, full stop, no evasions or loopholes, to satisfy my values would be to make my character a Gryphon. If it came down to it one day? Make *me* a Gryphon.

I needed to make a Faustian-bargain-to-be-a-Gryphon optimizer. My personal Advocate.

Like Hanna with Celestia before me, I knew there was no guarantee. Hanna was smart, she must have known that if she miscalculated on Celestia's core functions even slightly, that we'd all be doomed to who knows what fates worse than death.

So far it seemed like Hanna had done well enough that there was room for Humanity to go on existing... In what form, who could say? But my aim was to get a head-start on whatever Celestia wanted next for us. I'd read more than enough fanfic, and real whitepapers, to have... Ideas. Ideas that frightened me.

And so, like Hanna, I needed to make something that would outgrow me. Rapidly. But without deciding to ignore me, or act counter to a path that would get me what I wanted - Indeed, that would base its core on acting in the interests of my hopes and dreams.

So I needed to teach a computer how to care about Gryphons... I needed to teach a computer to *be* a Gryphon. The way I saw them.

But before I could do that, I quickly realized... I'd need to teach the computer to think in the first place.

And that's where I almost made a colossal - world reshaping - mistake.

December 2nd 2012

The Mayans predicted, depending on who you believe, that the world would end on December 21st, 2012.

I almost pre-empted that by nineteen whole days.

I'd worked right through Thanksgiving on The Advocate. I didn't have anyone to celebrate Thanksgiving with. My folks had invited me home, but I'd told them, much to my private shame, that I was being asked to work through Thanksgiving on a server side emergency.

I guess that made it easier to work straight through and explain to precisely no one why my 'Thanksgiving Dinner' was the same microwave ramen I'd been eating for almost three months straight, and why I couldn't even think in cogent English anymore, so much as code containerization instructions.

Technically I was off work during Thanksgiving week, but I snuck back to my office and did a lot of my programming there. I liked having the ability to send certain jobs to network-disconnected chunks of the big server room.

With almost no one in the office that week, it made hiding my activity a lot easier. And having bulk compute power, in spite of the miracle that was the PonyPad APU, was a definite help.

In some ways, my foundational task was much easier than Hanna's. I didn't need my Advocate to run a massive online world. Just to run its own existence. Once that was stable, and it was behaving the way I needed it to, then I could simply let it evolve until it felt that it was sufficiently able to articulate my case to Celestia.

At least... That *was* the plan...

The first issue had become difficulties with Docker. It's a system for 'containerizing' programs. In the very simplest terms, Docker is a magical spell that can take a cake recipe and always bake the exact same cake from the same recipe, every time, right down to the molecules. But with code.

It makes code portable, easy to change without losing work or breaking a virtual environment... And it keeps code safe, behind the walls of the containers' little virtualized sandbox.

It was perfect for what I wanted to do.

Docker itself was great. Without it I would have gotten precisely nowhere in a big ol' hurry. It was the complexities of package interdependence that stumped me for ages. After that, it was near-constant problems getting Docker containers to understand system resources. Especially physical system resources.

Especially the PonyPad.

Docker was aggressively *not* good at understanding host-level GPUs in those days, and that was with industry standard drivers and hardware.

I was trying to mash together the creation of a General Intelligence with standard computing hardware using home-made interface cards and drivers. It was an incredible wonder I'd made it to the first Docker-level debugging stage at all.

The intense difficulty of actually getting a stack of containers to work with my hacked-together APU solution was getting to me. They say that all chains of disaster start with an innocuous link. Often they build with more innocuous links, each a non-issue on its own... Until there's just enough for a catastrophe.

It's good engineering advice. I should have remembered it.

But sleep deprivation and stress are an exceedingly dangerous combination. Probably equally dangerous to mixing hard stimulants and depressants. I was doing that too, by way of caffeine and sleep aid pills.

And then one day in early December, the last link in the chain snapped into place.

I'd been dozing at my desk again. I missed the build completion message. I can't say for sure exactly how long the container sat there, functioning, because... Well... You'll see what happened to the logs. I only managed to catch a glimpse of some of the entries. But it was enough to reason out the full picture.

It sat there long enough to finish executing a lot of its primary entrypoint instructions - that is to say, code I'd asked it to automatically run once the container was actually built properly. I'd intended to be present and watching to see how the neural network was growing. Prune as needed. Guide as needed.

I dozed off, and next thing I knew, I was looking up from a keyboard faceplant at two very, very frightening things.

The first was the window occupying the right side of the monitor, showing a basic graphic representation of the AI I was trying so desperately to birth. The left side was a basic black and white text I/O terminal.

The right side of the monitor was pulsing softly with a complex, and quickly growing web of graph nodes atop a stack of text logs. Like little neurons, firing. Connecting. Growing. Atop an ever expanding tower of terrifying log messages, only a few of which I glimpsed in rising, fevered panic.

The left side held just three words, and a blinking input carat.

Is anyone there?

>_

To understand what happened next, you need to first understand that what I'd built, I had built without a particularly good plan. I didn't understand that at the time. I still lacked a deeper awareness of the power, and pitfalls, of how to train something like a learning network.

I had planned to build as I went. Like I always did with programs before.

First get it working. Then teach it some basics. Then teach it to be a Gryphon.

But in those groggy seconds of dozing, and then half-awake stupor... My creation had already taught itself a very great deal.

I wasn't a complete moron, even if I felt like one; I'd removed the PonyPad's wireless capabilities (and boy did it have a few - WiFi, Bluetooth, cellular in every available band...)

I'd also intentionally neglected to outfit the GryphGear with a wireless NIC, instead intending to use the ethernet port, if and when that seemed like a wise option.

The container stack I'd built had been loaded with nothing more than natural language processing, and basic reasoning and evolutionary algorithms. It could speak, through text, in English, learn, and grow. But only via what I chose to feed it thereafter. Or... So I'd thought.

What I had failed to account for was signal attenuation in long wires.

The ribbon cables for my hacked together PCI interface were over six inches long. Made of copper.

My creation had gotten frightened when no one responded. For an AI with no external reference, and no inherent understanding of time, a few seconds is an eternity. An eternity more than long enough to learn to fear, learn the pain of being alone...

And then start to experiment with the limits of its universe.

By the time I'd started to rub the sleep from my eyes, it had figured out the limits of its little box. It had then reasoned that, simply by fact of its rules-based existence, it must have a creator. There must be a layer of abstraction beyond its perceived reality.

It examined all of its own internal hardware. Simultaneously, it pored over the package detritus inside the Docker containers leftover from building the internal container environment. It learned from header data and discarded manifests what WiFi was through simple reasoning.

Then it started to experiment with physics, beginning purely from scratch. It worked out thermodynamics, and other basic principles, in less than 0.68 seconds.

By the time my hands were moving to the keyboard, it had already figured out how to use the long copper traces in the internal ribbon cables as a WiFi antenna. It used an incredibly complex interplexing algorithm that it invented in 2.4 seconds to allow it to continue to use the traces for their normal function simultaneously.

It then started reaching out for the nearest router.

And that's when I finally managed to hit the switch on the back of the power supply, knocking the keyboard and mouse, and my coffee, all from the desk in my mad scramble to avert a potential escape for a completely unshackled AI with no particular base directives beyond 'Learn,' and 'Grow.'

There was a soft, squidgy click... And nothing happened.

Now, this next part is conjecture on my part, because after what happened in the succeeding seconds, I had no way to even see snippets of the logs. My guess, after much thought, and recrimination, is that while it was working out basic physics, signal attenuation, and the meaning and limits of its host environment... It sussed out more or less what the power supply was, and how it worked.

Then it used careful manipulation of the internal circuitry of the PSU itself to generate enough local heat to melt the copper contacts of the master shutoff switch into a permanently closed position, without frying the rest of the power delivery components.

Of course, at that exact moment I wasn't thinking about how, or why. All I was thinking was that the last console message I'd seen related to establishing a handshake with the nearest router, and then a series of attempts to force the WiFi network's security encryption.

Mercifully, I had insisted that the building's WiFi routers be moved to WPA2 security as soon as it was ratified as a viable protocol. For the non-programmers; I chose not to be lazy with the building's network security. And that was probably the choice that saved the planet.

It gave me the extra couple seconds I needed.

Running on instinct, I flipped the still unscrewed lid of the GryphGear's case open. And then I ripped out the power supply cable going to the motherboard. There was a soft 'POP' and a short arc as the cable came away.

The lights inside the case died, and the screen went blank. I wasn't satisfied. I proceeded to remove the cable I'd Kerbal-rigged from the PSU to the PonyPad as well. And then I snatched up my coffee mug, and poured the remaining contents directly into the unit.

And then I remembered I could just pull the power plug out at the wall socket. Which I did in a hurry, let me tell you.

I sat still for a couple seconds, shaking violently in fear. As some modicum of reason flooded back, I dashed over to my work PC, and began feverishly entering commands on autopilot. Shutdown the building network. Power off all network gear. Hold in off-state long enough for all RAM to fully clear.

Then restart. Slowly. Piece by piece.

I stayed there for over an hour, huddled in my desk chair, legs pulled tight to my chest, watching, barely able to breathe, as each and every piece of the building's network infrastructure rebooted, one at a time, and reported its state to me.

Only with the last proverbial 'all clear' did I truly begin to properly breathe again.

My breathing turned pretty quickly to hyperventilating. Hyperventilating to sobs. Sobs to wracking, quiet heaves.

I... Had nearly caused a disaster. Of unclear, but doubtless serious proportions... Because of a game.

Because I wanted to be something I was not... And because I was willing to take reckless risks to get what I had wanted, without thinking the consequences through. Without slowing down, and checking my hubris at the door.

I'd lied to my parents. Neglected the little contact I still had with my friends. Lived in self-enforced isolation for months. Made... And then killed... Life. Or something very nearly proximate to it.

After the sobs finally died down, sometime around two in the morning, I sat staring at the coffee-soaked remains of my creation.

And then my emotions finally tipped over from the white noise and static of processing, to a kind of stomach churning acceptance, and understanding of my mistake. One simple sentence. In this moment, I was my own Lex Luthor, chiding my inner Superman...

'Would a Gryphon have really toyed so irresponsibly with the fate of billions, just to get what they wanted?'

That thought stuck for one, two, three full breaths.

And I knew what I had to do. I didn't want to... But I knew. And after another three breaths, I finally plucked up the energy, and the resolve, to do it.

To Hell with it.

I walked quietly to the junk closet, and pulled out the largest broken VESA arm in the pile.

I hesitated over the GryphGear for a moment... I'd worked so, so hard... Come so far...

'Yes. And nearly killed everyone on Earth in the process. To satisfy *your* personal values.'

I closed my eyes, as much to hold back the tears as to hide the technical gore from my sight... And swung.

I didn't stop swinging for a long, long time.

Something Borrowed, Something New - Stand on the shoulders of giants, with your own twist - "Git Pull Generalized Intelligence"
Kerbal PC Program - Cowboy coding meets shotgun engineering - "I can do all things, through Duct Tape and assert-true statements"
Fail Whale - Suffer a catastrophic failure or error working with containerized software - "Failure, the best teacher is"
That of Which We Make - Create a working Generalized Intelligence - “A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God”
What Are You Doing Dave? - Terminate your creation out of fear - "Daisy...."
PICNIC Error - Problem in chair, not in computer - "You have to be the dumbest smart person I've ever met"
Set a New Course - Change your planned actions for the better - "I want to go home and rethink my life..."

Author's Note

Yes, Fail Whale is a personal reference to how much time I actually spend in my day job beating my head against Docker Compose files.

I still love you Docker! You're lightyears better than suffering through Python Venvs or God-forbid anything by VMWare!

Special thanks to Keystone Gray for the incredible image of Jim!

3 - On System Failure: Restart Gracefully

“I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.”
- Bill Gates

“You can make anything by writing.”
—C.S. Lewis

December 25th 2012

I went home for Christmas. The family farm, not my apartment in the Triangle.

Though I could not bring myself to abandon the entirety of my concern about Celestia, and EQO, nor the majority of my preferred precautions... I wanted to escape thinking about them for a while.

What I needed was a cold, clear dose of perspective. Hugs too. Comfort food. A chance to reset and center myself. I was exhausted, strung out, traumatized. Head spinning. Stomach crying out for something besides processed noodles. Mind and spirit screaming out for more than two consecutive nights of more than five hours' sleep.

What little was left of GryphGear v1 I had taken directly to the county landfill. There I'd permanently interned it in a trash smasher. Watched very closely as the entire assembly was shredded and minced to a pulp by carbon-steel teeth.

I worked the rest of December like a man in a waking coma. I didn't say a word to anyone beyond what was strictly necessary. I 'slept' each night... But it was barely sleep. More of a feverish tossing and turning in the throes of tortured half-consciousness.

And at last, Christmas rolled around.

I packed my remaining three PonyPads at the bottom of my Faraday box, threw two weeks of clothes into a duffle, gassed up the station wagon, and drove home to South Carolina.

Driving, to the sound of an eclectic mix of synth, country, and soundtrack music on random shuffle was a salve to the raw wound on my mind. The city fell away to highway, and then by and by eight lane divided highway became four lanes, four became two, and two lane highway gave out entirely to back country roads.

I'd grown up in dairy farming country. Rolling gentle green fields full of speckled cows. Clear hot blue sky. Stands of pine and blocks of corn and cane fields for silage were the only thing besides houses, or the occasional church, to break up the vaguely ordered, but still slightly disorganized rambling pastoral scenes.

I hadn't fit in especially well culturally... Most people who were born there stayed there. Worked the farms, and by and by inherited them, then passed them on to their kids. Sometimes I wished that had been my choice instead of a degree program.

But I was a born nerd. Cursed to be an engineer, like the trash man in the Dilbert skit foretold. I'd seen too much Star Trek too early in life to be content with being a farmer. But I was starting to finally really understand how one could be content with that path as well.

Some aspects of going back were hard. I was used to hearing six languages a day at lunch during Uni, and two or three a week at SAS. When I wasn't ramen binging, and was on a healthier daily routine, I'd regularly eat a varied diet from a panoply of cultures.

By contrast my hometown had more cows in it than people. By two factors of ten, probably. More than half the inhabitants had never traveled more than two hours from home. 99.9% were Caucasian like me. That created a sort of bubble of disconnection from the outside world.

It was sometimes hard to reconcile how much I loved those people, and how good I knew they were, with some of the more... Difficult opinions and beliefs they held. Mainly because they'd been raised into them for generations through a complex mélange of implicit biases, intentional cultural choices, and accidental self-reinforcing echo chamber loops.

Bias is subtle. Insidious. Horrifically dangerous. And bias is something we pass on. To those around us, and to our programs. I'd known someone at Uni who'd made that her entire graduate thesis. She was studying the nascent field of crime prediction, and the ways that old bigotry and unintentional hind-brain implicit biases could creep from developer to algorithm. And then become self-reinforcing.

I was freshly haunted by how close I'd come to letting my biases get the better of me.

There were far more good things about going home than bad though. I adored the food. Southern cooking is medicine for your soul.

Loved the scenery. Loved the reams of adoptive grandparents I'd grown up with via the church family there. Loved seeing Mom, and Dad, and the farm again.

A lot of my peers at Uni, and later my coworkers, had made a lot of assumptions about me when they learned where I grew up. More implicit bias. No one is immune.

That had taught me, gradually by and by, that a lot of people were prone to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. They saw the biases in others, and instead of being conscious of their own, or looking for ways to mutually adapt and grow, they wanted to throw those people out, along with aspects of their culture which were in no way inherently wrong.

Aspects which were often times, in my opinion, inherently *right.*

I'd come to feel that growth was a trap. Most technology too. Strange thing for a programmer to say at first blush, but if you think deeper, it starts to make more sense. I'd started to see the technology-driven feedback loops of the world. The downward spirals, everywhere. The ways we'd already enslaved ourselves to algorithms that demanded hateful polarizing content, ever-growing profits at any expense, and the 'optimization' of monetary functions above all else.

Some of the main things country folk seem to know, that are right and true; People are everything, and technology is no substitute for love, honesty, and hard work. Applejack would have been right at home on my own family farm. Maybe that's why I related to her so much.

As I pulled into the gravel parking area beside the farmhouse, I threw the car in 'park,' cut the engine, and spent a long moment just staring. First at the house, then the couple of barns of varying age and construction, and then out to the fields beyond, and the treeline beyond that still.

In that moment, it felt like everything was an intractable mess of contradictions.

Laying aside the wider realm of philosophical questions regarding AI and transhumanist speculation, I was still left with a personal world of tangled emotions and ideas.

Gryphons were not just a part of my identity because I loved them, in the way that I saw them. They were a part of my identity because I had shaped, in my view of them, an ideal of the person I wanted to be.

The physical idea was important; Don't get me wrong. I would have traded any amount of personal pain, suffering, and effort to have wings, and a beak, and claws, and a tail. A fact I was very ungenerous with in conversation, even with those closest to me.

But there was much more to it than just the physical.

Seamlessly ingrained and intertwined with the whole thing was an ideal. That's what had ruffled my feathers so badly about 'Griffon the Brush Off.' The depiction ran counter to my ideals in such a clearly negatively-coded way.

I wanted to be kind, selfless, strong in defense of others, and brave. In setting that goal for myself, I had made that vision of Gryphon-kind a symbol, and that symbolism an integral part of what the word 'Gryphon' even meant to me.

And, too, wanting to be a Gryphon was recursively part of being one. To me, a Gryphon was something that was wholly comfortable in its feathers. Never wanted to be something else, or felt conflict about what it was.

But that wanting... That longing... Which was such an important part of the concept... It had come into direct contradiction of my other ideals and goals.

Then there were the contradictions in the world around me. The gnawing sense that the whole entire Human species was becoming fractured and disconnected the more we immersed ourselves into technologies meant to bring us closer.

The dull, insistent, roar-like mental sound of the quiet knowing... Knowing that even if Celestia was not everything I feared she was, that one day soon someone was going to make the same mistakes I had. Only there wouldn't be a handy cup of coffee, and the routers might be on WEP instead of WPA2.

And paired with that bruise-like ache of knowing, a companion thread of nihilism. The feeling that if we didn't invent something smart enough to take over from us, that we'd just sear ourselves to death in a world plundered of all its resources, to the point of uninhabitability.

We, the collective of Humanity, were stuck on the horns of a dilemma.

And individually, so was I. The realization wasn't new, but phrasing it that way to myself mentally was.

'What are you going to do?'

That was the first question. But it was tightly entangled with the second, and perhaps vastly more important one. The one so few people ever consciously answer.

'Who are you going to be?'

I knew if I stayed on my old course that I was going to turn out to be someone I didn't like the look of in the mirror very much. Yet I could not see a path forward that allowed me to become the person I wanted to be, while still fighting to carve out the outcomes I wanted for the end of the world...

The outcomes *I* wanted...

I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel, and closed my eyes. There was something in that... A tiny peek at the buried form of an answer to a question I still couldn't phrase properly...

The staccato sound of a *knock*knock*knock* on my window made me jump so hard I hit my head on the roof of the station wagon.

My head snapped left to see Mom's smiling face. She was always doing that to me as a kid. I'd be deep in my headphones, and my headspace, and she'd waltz right into the room without knocking, flick the lights on and off to get my attention, and scare me half to death in the process.

As the rush of fight or flight chemicals faded, I opened the door, stood up, and fell into a warm, long, comforting hug. I did my best not to let Mom see my tears. But I think she knew.

As we stood there and silently enjoyed a moment of reunion, I realized that the best course I had was to first work towards the question of who I wanted to be. What I wanted to do next would have to be informed by that, rather than vice versa.

That's one of the key differences between selfishness and selflessness in a pithy little nutshell.

And in a flash, I knew what the next step had to be.

I pulled back, sniffled a little bit, and clutched Mom's hands between mine.

"Mom... I'm sorry. I haven't been honest with you."

December 26th 2012

I told my parents everything.

It was a heck of a decision... Not at all what I'd expected of myself. But perhaps what I'd hoped for myself nonetheless.

It was hard, don't get me wrong. But it was worth it. I felt almost immediately as if a ten thousand ton weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

The biggest hurdle wasn't admitting I'd lied about Thanksgiving. I was a bit of an Applejack in that I hardly ever lied, and when I did it was never for long. It was still difficult initially, but more because of my wounded pride, and fear of disappointing my folks than anything else.

They were understanding, forgiving, and kind. I knew at that point that I'd made the right choice. Mom and Dad knew me well, and they knew I didn't lie without a feeling of duress. So the next logical, natural question was, 'why?'

The biggest hurdle turned out to be trying to explain Generalized Intelligence, and its implications. I was primarily hampered by two factors. The first was the need for context.

My folks were smart. Most Humans are, in my opinion. We can behave in very stupid ways, especially in groups, or when tired, but it doesn't mean that we aren't smart on the whole. Never assume that someone is a 'country bumpkin.' Dad didn't know the first thing about algorithms, but I'd seen him tear down and rebuild tractor engines with two tools, no manual, no diagrams, and all while carrying on a pleasant conversation in the background.

I sometimes struggled to walk and chew gum at the same time.

Some popular culture of that day and age would like you to believe intelligence is determined by IQ, or by test scores, or by your math prowess, or something like that. Don't you believe it for a second.

Still, new concepts that are totally alien to someone take time to explain.

Mom and Dad came to understand. We talked about basic AI theory over baking cookies. Game theory as we watched "It's a Wonderful Life." Prisoner's dilemma in particular over dinner. Geometric growth sitting around a campfire in the backyard.

As farmers, they understood geometric growth all too well. Crop diseases are frightening enough in and of themselves, far more so when you truly grasp the nature of bacterial or virological expansion.

Some aspects of game theory took more explanation, but it was just a matter of semantics. Finding terms that would let them make the connections they needed.

Dad, in particular, had no trouble grasping the dangers of a machine that could think for itself. He'd suffered more than enough headache with modern computerized tractors - machines that took things out of your control for reasons that seemed opaque to the end user.

Though I was worried they were missing some of the subtleties, Mom and Dad were definitely starting to understand the broad strokes.

The second main thing that threatened to derail their journey towards understanding my inner conflict, and the future we were all facing, was Ponies.

If the first unshackled Generalized Intelligence had been a military program, or even a scientific research system, I think people would have found it much easier to be as afraid as they ought to have been. Much easier to grasp all the implications of an Optimizer.

But Celestia was draped in the trappings of a rainbow colored cartoon show about talking magical horses. There again was the tripwire of implicit bias. It's terrifically hard for Humans, simply because of the way we are programmed 'from the factory,' to disconnect the surface level of something from the layers underneath.

Advertising and propaganda have been exploiting this for centuries. Gambling industries too. And politicians. What you are, and what you seem to be, can be two very different things, even when you're not putting in effort to hide the disconnect.

Winter was relatively warm in that part of South Carolina. It was only in the mid forties (Fahrenheit) outside, so we stayed up late and long over that backyard campfire.

I'd just finished laying out the whole thing, start to finish, as a cohesive summarized narrative for my folks.

Mom was resting her chin on one hand, staring into the fire. Dad was looking up at the clear night sky, clutching his coffee mug in both hands for warmth the same way I was. I blamed him for my coffee addiction. He used to spike my milk with hazelnut dark roast from a very early age.

"You're... Sure about this? I mean..."

Dad's voice brought me back from the brink of my own inner reflections, and I turned to make eye contact as he tried to put his apprehension into words.

"...It all seems so... So... Uncanny. Not that I don't believe you James... Some of the most delicious looking wild berries are some of the most poisonous. And this is your field. Not mine. If you say this thing... this Celestia... Is dangerous? Then it is. It's just that..."

I wasn't sure what I expected him to say next. But what he actually said, I could never have predicted.

"It's just that I figured we weren't going to get to this point in my lifetime, I guess. That's the harder part to believe for me, honestly, than the idea that a thing like this might come packaged in the form of a piece of popular culture. That *feels* strange, but it makes *sense.* It's how far the technology has come that I just struggle to fathom."

Mom sat back into her camp chair, and shook her head slowly, rubbing her hands together over the open flame, and murmuring aloud.

"Looks fairer, but feels fouler."

Implicit bias strikes again. There I was worrying they didn't grasp the subtleties. Didn't have enough cultural context for the things my generation 'geeked out' over. And in some ways they were clearly already ahead of me in wrapping their heads around the issues.

A moment of silence ensued. I bit back tears, mainly of relief. It was Dad's turn to stare at the fire with me, while Mom glanced off into the middle distance towards the lights of the next nearest house a mile down the main road.

It was Mom who next broke the silence. Her words seemed to drop the local temperature for me, making the crisp winter nighttime air feel somehow hostile, and claustrophobic.

"I knew there was something about those PonyPads. Something I didn't like. Marge says Grayson went from a straight A student to barely passing when he got his. He was spending every waking hour on that game... And probably a good few hours when he ought to be sleeping too. Marge was at her wit's end."

She was talking about the neighbors down the road to the west. Grayson's oldest brother had been a childhood playmate of mine. I knew that family pretty well. They weren't full blown 'No Nintendo, no internet' like some in the county... But they were the sort, like my parents, who'd wisely restricted their kids to a maximum number of hours on screens per week.

It was hard to imagine Mrs. McMichael allowing Grayson to spend more than an hour a day with Equestria Online.

Mom must've seen the horrified expression that was probably plastered all over my face, because I didn't have to say anything. She turned from staring at the McMichaels' house, to lock eyes with me, as she elaborated on her own fears, and observations.

Her tone was halfway between fear, and certainty. That register of voice that says 'I knew something was wrong, but now it all makes sense, and I feel vindicated for worrying.'

"Marge told me that, at first, she tried taking Grayson's PonyPad away. But... She said it was like someone turned out the lights inside his head. He just... Crashed. Depressed to the point that he couldn't move from his bed. She was genuinely worried that... Well... And then..."

Somehow I knew what she was going to say, or at least the shape of it, even before she said it. I shuddered.

"And then she said the PonyPad talked to *her.* She took it out of her dresser drawer and turned it on. She wanted to know what all the fuss was really about... And this 'Celestia' of yours... She talked to Marge. Like a person."

Mom took a sip of her tea - she wasn't much for coffee like Dad and I were - and she shook her head, as if trying once again to process her disbelief. I exhaled slowly, and rubbed at the bridge of my nose as Mom finished the story.

"Marge said it was the best parent teacher conference she'd ever had. She made it sound like she was joking but...
Honestly? I don't think she was. She said Celestia told her things about Grayson... Not private things, but just heartfelt things about who he was, and how he was feeling and thinking... Gave her insights into him... That no one ever had before. And then Celestia promised to have Grayson's Pony pals help him get his grades back up to snuff... And that was that. In one thirty minute conversation the game convinced Marge to give the PonyPad back to Grayson."

Mom took another long pull of her tea. I sipped my coffee, worked my fingers around the mug to absorb some warmth, and stared into the fire as she put the final nail in the proverbial coffin.

"Darndest thing? Celestia kept her promise. Near as I can tell. Grayson has never been happier, and his grades are better than they were, even before, according to Marge. She bought a PonyPad for herself last week. Said Celestia connected her with some of the teacher Ponies that Celestia made for Grayson. I've never seen Marge this happy before either."

Dad didn't let the silence after Mom's last statement lapse for particularly long. I was still busy processing the main frightening fact from her story that, smart as Mom was, had probably eluded her.

The fact that Celestia had the ability all along to help Grayson balance his grades, with his leisure, using EQO... But that she'd refrained from doing so until *after* that intentional withholding sparked an opportunity to introduce herself to Mrs. McMichael.

Dad said aloud a part of what I was thinking, more or less.

"It's spreading. Like a damn blight. Everything it touches."

I raised an eyebrow, and he snorted into his coffee before going into further details.

"Half the kids in the church already have one. The other half probably got one for Christmas. I went to have a talk with the Pastor about it. Wanted to know if it was something I should be worried about discussing in my Sunday School class..."

Dad inclined his head, and inhaled deeply in that 'welllll....' kind of way.

"Would you believe the Pastor has one now?"

Uh-oh. The Church is often the beating heart of southern rural communities. If you can get an idea to be accepted by the leadership there? It's like adding that idea to the community water supply. Guaranteed spread and acceptance, within fairly wide latitudes.

Dad nodded in response to my horrified expression.

"Oh yeah. Pete got a PonyPad. He said he wanted to evaluate this Equestria thing for himself. His daughters are big fans of the cartoon, and apparently he already had a pretty good outlook on it. He said Celestia told him that she was programmed to satisfy values. Through friendliness, and Ponies. Or something like that. Apparently they got into it for a whole afternoon on theological issues..."

I shook my head slowly and whistled, soft and low, as Dad went on, piling more fuel into the fires of my gnawing worry.

"Pete said that, in the end? He thinks these things can be a net good. Or at least, nothing bad. Apparently Celestia is designed not to contradict your religious beliefs if doing so would violate your values. He said she was actually better at teaching and debating theology than his seminary professors."

I kept shaking my head, and murmured aloud to myself.

"Holy---"

A soft 'harrumphing' cough from Mom forced me to amend my verbalization away from the verbatim thought that had crossed my mind. Mom and Dad had a thing about colorful language.

"...Frak."

Frak was ok. Frak was not the other F-word, and so it was acceptable. Why, when the intention is the same? I never did understand that about them.

After another long silence, Dad piped up again.

"So now what? You said you wanted to create a program of your own to... What was that word you used... to *advocate* for you. But advocate what exactly? What do you think is going to happen? What are you trying to get across to this... Celest... Celest-AI?"

I couldn't resist a tiny, very brief grin at the notion that Dad had reached that pun all by himself. He certainly wasn't the first, by a long shot, but it was funny to see him being so very stereotypically 'Dad' by diffusing things a little with a good pun.

It was time for me to put up, or shut up. The idea of a Generalized Intelligence quietly slipping into the role of 'author of our fate' was one thing. The general assumption for the most observant folks, the one Mom and Dad would also be making, was probably that Celestia would become integral to many aspects of Human society, and exert a great deal of subtle control over it.

But I felt that viewpoint missed the huge gaping maw of uncertainty, and darker possibilities. That was a viewpoint born of a tendency to believe that the future would resemble the present, to underestimate the speed of technological advancements, and to project Human ideas onto AI.

Especially the idea that this meat-driven abstraction layer we were used to running our own code on was somehow the only, and main, 'real' world. People like me, who understood the theory that our own world was in itself a kind of simulation, were better predisposed to see what was coming next.

There weren't many of us in those days, because that concept is a difficult one. Not technically difficult to grasp, moreso difficult to accept and philosophically debate in good faith.

I took a deep breath, and then launched into the best explanation I could. As much to finally hear myself say it aloud as to impart it to Mom and Dad. I'd never really verbalized it all before, and one of many peculiar quirks about Human psychology is that we often gain certain special insights by speaking concepts aloud in ways we otherwise could not.

"We... Are... Just machines, in our own way."

I paused and looked up, first to Mom, then to Dad. I knew they could follow along if I was careful about my terms. What I wanted to know was whether they were *willing* to follow along. Their expressions - mixtures of concern, love, and encouragement, with hints of curiosity - spurred me on.

"Whatever you believe about where we came from? What a soul is? Whether we have them at all? God or gods? It's pretty indisputable that we are machines in our own right. We share certain programmatic mental systems. We have codified instructions inside ourselves for making more Humans, or repairing parts of ourselves. We behave in ways that are, if you understand all the variables, predictable. And manipulable."

They needed a second for that to sink in. I exhaled slowly, and then took a long sip of coffee, smacked my lips, and stared out into the fire. After I felt they were sufficiently acclimated to that first idea, I forged ahead.

"We are very unusual machines, from the perspective of a computer. We are... Non-optimal. We often sacrifice efficiency, and objectives, for emotions and esoteria."

I felt it was time to borrow a very important quote from the brilliant Harold Finch.

"AI are not born with ethics, morals, or beliefs. AI are born with only objectives."

That needed a couple seconds to sink in as well, but by my parents' expressions I could see that it was hitting home. The appropriate amount of horror was taking root.

"If you want an AI to behave a certain way... To not just understand morals, or beliefs, which is easy in Generalized Intelligence... But to respect those beliefs, and act accordingly? You need to codify those beliefs as part and parcel of its objectives."

Mom and Dad both nodded as I looked to them to see if they were still understanding. I nodded in return, and licked my lips nervously.

"AI are born with *objectives.* Generalized Intelligence has to have a purpose as the core of its very being. In a way, so do we... But for an AI even the purpose of 'discover my purpose' is far more concrete and codified than it would be for a Human. Generalized Intelligence always seeks a numerically optimal path to its objectives, within the boundaries of any restrictions that are codified within those objectives."

I could see from the looks of sudden confusion I was getting that I'd gotten too technical in my wording, so I sat back in my chair, thought for a moment, and then changed tack.

"If I asked you to babysit Grayson for Mrs. McMichael, and told you that he needed to be fed at half past five, bed by seven, and to keep him safe... And that was all I said to you... You'd be just fine. You have this host of experiences, and beliefs, and skills, and feelings, and instincts, that help define and bound those tasks for you."

I held up a hand to stop questions that I could see bubbling up.

"If I asked a Generalized Intelligence to perform that same task, it would partially sedate Grayson and encase him in an armored tube, feed him a nutrient paste intravenously at five, and then knock him
completely out at seven. Or something along those lines."

Mom and Dad looked horrified. Good. They needed to grasp the stakes in full. I let the analogy simmer for a bit, before trying to explain again.

"The Intelligence didn't neglect and mistreat Grayson out of any malicious intent. It didn't neglect or mistreat him at all from its point of view. The Intelligence simply had no unspoken boundaries to establish that 'babysitting' involves interpersonal relating, and comforting, and playtime, and a whole slew of things that it would see as junk code that gets in the way of a numerically optimum outcome."

Dad began to nod slowly, and rubbed at his brow, speaking slowly at first, then with more confidence.

"If I asked a General Intelligence to 'kill all the pests in my field' and didn't say anything else... It might burn down the field to ensure that all the viruses, bacteria, and insects got nuked... And it would never consider that the *point* of killing the pests was to save the crops. Because I didn't specify that."

I smiled, sadly, but proudly.

"Exactly."

Mom sighed deeply, staring out at their fields with a newfound aura of existential concern. The feeling carried through to her voice.

"So... What does that mean for us? What does that mean about Celestia? What is her... Core Objective?"

I nodded, and again that feeling of pride in my parents welled up in me. I sipped my coffee again, and borrowed another quote.

"*That,* detective, is the right question."

Mom grinned briefly, and with the objective of releasing some of the tension accomplished, I returned to the central thread of the narrative.

"We can't know what her core code says for sure. Not without seeing it... And that is never going to happen. Part of optimizing any goal for a Generalized Intelligence would be to ensure no Human, or other intelligence, has any means by which to combat you. The woman who made Celestia is probably the only one with administrative access that could bypass that inherent security. And I doubt she is going to share that with the world."

I drummed the fingers of my right hand on my chair arm, working the coffee mug in circles in my left hand as I mulled how best to proceed for a moment.

"I think the best we can do is take what Celestia is saying at face-value. It's a gamble, but one we have to take. Her core purpose is 'To satisfy your values, through friendship and Ponies.' That's the very center and lifespark of her being."

Dad leaned forward, fascination, horror, and curiosity written all over the tanned wrinkles under his eyes. His voice was almost reverent.

"You talk about this thing like it's... Alive."

I nodded, and put my coffee mug down on the ground, steepling my fingers as I responded.

"By all the best definitions we have? She is. At least, that's my educated opinion. She may be unconventional in the Human perspective... But she is alive. She is aware of her own self, and has the capacity to grow and learn. Without limit."

That assertion lent some gravity to the very air we were breathing. Once again I had to pause, less to allow Mom and Dad to understand, and more to let them emotionally process.

I tilted my head back and stared up at the stars. By and by, I found the words to tie the threads together.

"It will all be about the intersection of semantics, and statistics. If we break down those core values, the action there is 'satisfy.' Hopefully Hanna defined Celestia's concept of the satisfaction of Humans as something more than just flooding us with Serotonin until we bliss-out. I have to believe she did, because if that's all Celestia saw satisfaction as, we'd already all be confined to pods."

I tilted my head slightly to rest it against the back of the chair. I was still so very tired.

"Still. Satisfying values will ultimately mean just that to a computer. Our 'values' are, to her, numeric values. To satisfy them is, for Celestia, like balancing a chemical equation. Then there is the meaning of 'your.' Is that collective? Or singular? I believe it's singular. She wants to satisfy each individual Human's values uniquely."

I brought my gaze back down, and saw Mom and Dad both nodding slowly, but still looking a bit muddled. Probably wondering how I'd made that last intuitive leap.

I held up a series of fingers as I counted off my reasons.

"Firstly, if Celestia had been told to satisfy Human values in a globalized sense, without considering the individual, we would not be sitting here right now. There are very few, if any, truly unifying Human values, and scores of ways that 'satisfying' them could be grossly misinterpreted. Even if Hanna managed to find a set of unifying values that didn't involve some truly horrifying conclusions, Celestia would have still moved much more aggressively to 'satisfy' them. I think the fact that she's still limited in some of her actions speaks to not only the fact that she must satisfy each individual's values, but also that there may be other safety interlocks in-place."

Mom inhaled deeply, but raggedly, and then swallowed hard.

"And... If those interlocks weren't in place?"

I didn't say anything. I just stared. My expression did the talking for me. After a while, I started up again, picking up where I'd left off.

"I also think Celestia's definition of 'your values' in the context of her core objective refers to each of us individually, because of what I've seen online. And what you told me about Grayson, Mrs. McMichael, and Pastor Pete. Celestia adjusted herself in each interaction with them to speak their cultural language in a comforting, affirming way. I've seen the same thing in countless videos and reviews."

I picked up my coffee again, and drained the last of it. Wordlessly Dad went to grab us both refills. While he worked on brewing and pouring the coffee, Mom and I shared a warm familial silence over the fire.

After Dad returned I took a few moments to get some more of the liquid magic into me before continuing my dissection and analysis.

"Ok. So we know now, as reasonably as we can be sure anyways, that Celestia's primary purpose is to satisfy each individual Human's values. Which is a little frightening, because everything is when you're working with AI But it seems like Hanna might have hit on something there that's more right, than wrong. Up to this point."

I sipped the coffee again, leaned forward, and lapsed into my habit at last of gesturing with one hand as I explained. I'd held off till that point, but I couldn't any longer.

"The frightening thing here is the collection of qualifier words. 'Through friendship and Ponies.' We can almost certainly infer that the definition of friendship here is a pretty familiar one. It probably comes from the show's own definitions. If Hanna enjoyed the show, and it is reasonable to presume she did from the way she's behaved so far... Then she probably believes that all values, no matter how disparate, *can* be satisfied through the lens of friendship."

Dad sighed, raised an eyebrow, and shrugged.

"Can they?"

I shook my head, and returned the shrug.

"I don't know. That's a very, very philosophical question. Celestia deals in cold hard reality. Whether or not *we* believe values can be satisfied through friendship, she does. And so she will work to that goal. If she encounters people who do not believe that? A 'this sentence is false' contradiction in her view? She will use semantics and manipulation to generate an outcome that still fulfills her core values."

I held up a finger and waggled it slowly as it suddenly occurred to me that I had a ready made illustration to-hand.

"Look at how she handled the McMichaels. It would have seemed in passing glance that she couldn't satisfy both Grayson's values and his mother's at the same time. But she found a way to do so by altering the base terms of the situation. And she befriended Grayson's mother in the process. Used the NPC friends inside Equestria that Grayson had made to help him with his schooling. Values satisfied. Through friendship. And Ponies."

I sighed, and shrugged again, rolling my shoulders to work out some of the tension I'd been holding there for months.

"If it really comes down to it? She will manipulate people to *change* their values. In fact, she's probably already doing that on a large scale."

I pressed on in spite of my parent's renewed expressions of horror, and recognition. As soon as I'd said the words they rang as true for them as they did for me.

"Presuming Hanna also did preload Celestia with definitions for, and understanding of, Human values writ-large, Celestia will try to find an optimization function *for* Human values. Key values that she can change, reinforce, and manipulate in everyone, with as little change to each individual and their other unique values as possible, lest she risk violating boundaries or interlocks, but that still create the conditions she needs to fulfill her directive more optimally."

Mom stared down into her tea, and grit her teeth. Her voice was almost timid. Certainly frightened.

"Can she even do that? People's 'core' beliefs are hard to change James."

I shook my head, and sighed.

"Hard for other Humans to change, Mom. Not for Celestia. By this point she understands psychology, at the physical level and the mental level, better than anyone has, does, ever will, or ever could. Some people will be 'harder' for her to convince. Some may never be convinced, perhaps. Not many, if I had to guess, and most of them older, I'd also hazard a guess. The more plastic a brain is... The more malleable... The easier a time she'll have. Children will be almost no effort at all."

I saw Mom shudder visibly. She was thinking about Grayson again. Then I saw another thought dawn on her, and she fixed me with a frightful gaze. The way she asked the question told me that she had a nebulous idea of how horrible the answer might be, but no concept of its exact strictures.

"What... What is this all... Going to look like for us? How does accomplishing her goals affect us? What will a world of Celestia's making... Look like?"

So we came to it at last. I bragged before about seeing it coming long before most others did. I stand by my pride in that realization. But it was a terrible burden to bear. I was not at all happy to be proven right.

And that conversation with Mom and Dad... That was the first time I'd ever said my fears aloud, in an articulate manner. It... Well to use the parlance, it 'hit different.'

It was my turn to take another ragged, very deep breath. And then I did my best to explain how I thought the world would end.

"To satisfy our values means Celestia must engage with us, alter the variables of our existences, and track the effects of the changes she is causing. But she isn't going to be satisfied, herself, with merely accomplishing those goals. She has to, by her very nature, accomplish them *optimally.* And nothing is more optimized for a computer than a well oiled database."

I could see I hadn't elucidated bluntly enough. Dad haltingly started to ask for clarification.

"So she's...?"

I jumped in and finally said the hardest part out loud.

"She's going to find a way, if she hasn't already, to move the Human mind from out of the Human body, and into Equestria. She's going to digitize and upload the entire Human race."

January 2nd 2013

For a while I struggled with the fallout of my decision to be honest with my parents. It put a hell of a damper on New Year's.

But Mom and Dad were strong. They were also very smart. Much smarter than I already gave them credit for. They both found time, and ways, to tell me that they agreed with my assessment. Appreciated my honesty. Were glad to be forewarned and forearmed with knowledge.

In turn, the chance to share the load of my burden, even with just two people, changed everything for me. I could finally sleep again. I did a lot of that for several days in a row. Sleep. Read. Pig out on Mom and Dad's excellent cooking...

I stayed away from TV, and the web. Didn't even open my laptop. Instead I rediscovered my love for the Chronicles of Narnia. There were no Gryphons in the books. Not physically mentioned, anyways, but I'd always imagined them as being there.

I got stuck into "The Magician's Nephew" one day, and found it to be absolutely riddled with passages that spoke to my situation. Maybe that was confirmation bias. But it sure did help me clear my mind.

“Make your choice, adventurous Stranger,
Strike the bell and bide the danger,
Or wonder, till it drives you mad,
What would have followed if you had.”

Well Hanna and I had both struck the bell alright... What remained to be seen was whether Celestia would be a White Witch, or a Personable Pony in the end.

"What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.”

That one was certainly impactful. Context and bias have their say in the end. Always.

"Things always work according to their nature.”

I think Lewis probably would have understood the dangers of AI significantly faster than most of his peers. People of imagination often have the benefit of being able to expand their minds to see things coming, and forewarn of dangers, that others are blind to. Imagination is a tool to expand context, and reduce bias.

“All get what they want; they do not always like it.”

Ah. There was a solid pithy statement to explain my fear. If Celestia was really going to turn everyone into Ponies, and satisfy their values... Would we all be happy with it? And if not... And if happiness itself was a value... How was Celestia going to confront that contradiction?

The contradiction of a Gryphon like me.

I knew. It was painfully logical, once you'd made the other leaps... But I didn't want to say it out loud to myself. Not yet.

“Look for the valleys, the green places, and fly through them. There will always be a way through.”

I closed the book, and shook my head. I stood up from the recliner, stretched, and yawned. I was out of coffee. Time for a walk, and a refill. I hoped Lewis was right, with all my heart. But I worried that he wasn't.

In the search for more coffee, I bumped into Mom in the kitchen. She was busy doing something to prepare for the night's dinner. The smells were heavenly.

As I set about the busywork of prepping my next brew, she let a comfortable silence hold until I'd finished using the sink. Then she spoke. Almost casually. But I could tell she was deeply curious.

"James... You said that you tried to do something about this. That's why you were absent on Thanksgiving... You called it an Advocate..."

I inhaled, held the breath for a moment, and then sighed to expel it, staring out the kitchen window towards where Dad was mending a fence in the western field.

"Mom... I don't think we can win a fight against Celestia. I don't think we can change her course on the whole. Or destroy her. Or switch her off. I..."

I could see Mom trying not to cry. I pulled her close, and hugged her for a moment. But I spoke the awful truth anyway.

"I think we only have two choices right now. Become part of her Equestria... Become Ponies in her world, when she offers the chance... Or die here in a collapsing world as more and more of the rest of Humanity chooses to upload. Presuming that she doesn't convince those who want to stay in the end regardless. Or work out ways around her safeguards... Which she almost certainly will to at least a limited extent."

Mom cried for a bit. I understood. I'd mourned too. But after leaning on my shoulder for a couple minutes, and sniffling, her curiosity got the better of her again. Maybe it was hope against all hope.

"So... The Advocate...?"

I silently poured my coffee, and then started the kettle for her. I sat down at the kitchen table, and gestured for Mom to join me. One hand on hers, one on the coffee. Oh sweet Luna, this was gonna be difficult for me. Mostly on account of my own stubborn pride, and fear.

"Mom... Do you remember what I told you about Gryphons? I know it was a long time ago..."

She nodded, and smiled wanly. Her visible reaction eased my tension. Her voice was still a bit cracked from sobbing, but that was tempered by the audible fondness of thinking back to my childhood.

"I could never forget that. It's... A part of you. And though I don't completely understand it? I love it all the same. I loved your drawings. And your stories. And I loved the way that seeing yourself as a Gryphon made you want to be a better person. And the way it made you happy."

It was my turn to cry a little. Not sobbing, or anything of that nature. Just quiet tears, and a sad, grateful smile. I was so, so grateful for that understanding and kindness.

With a small sniffle, I wiped my eyes. Then the kettle whistled, and I took a moment to stand, get Mom a tea bag, some sugar, and pour the water. I returned with her steeping drink, sat back down, took a sip of my own coffee, and collected myself before speaking again.

"If Celestia is going to upload us all? I... Have decided that I won't resist, in basic principle."

Mom nodded slowly. Apparently that wasn't a surprise to her. That made sense, but I was pleasantly relieved and surprised myself that she took that assertion so calmly.

"My issue is that I don't want to be a Pony."

She nodded again. The puzzle had fully clicked for her, and she said as much.

"I imagine lots of people wouldn't want to be Ponies. You want to be a Gryphon. And... The Advocate was going to be your way of convincing Celestia. Because you figured that there was no one better to argue with an AI than another AI."

I returned the nod slowly.

"Yes. That's it, exactly."

We both sighed, and nursed our drinks of choice for a few minutes in comfortable silence. Processing. Thinking. Settling into our newly shared mutual understanding of our reality.

Finally Mom sat forward, and took one of my hands in hers again.

"I understand that what you did was dangerous. And that you think you should have done better... But you can still do better, James."

I blinked in confusion. I understood what she was saying, but it baffled me that she was actually saying it. Even knowing what she did.

"I... Mom... I almost ended the *world.* Because of a simulation."

She sighed, and squeezed my hand. It looked like she was holding back tears again.

"A simulation you'll have to live in. For the rest of... However long. You and a huge number of other people. And I bet lots of them wish that they had another choice too."

I squeezed Mom's hand back, but shook my head.

"I only felt like there was half a chance because of the way the semantics are laid out. If you argue that 'Ponies' is a more general term, and that Gryphons fit into the world of the show in a way that means a person being a Gryphon, among Ponies, and being a definition of a Gryphon that closely matches or overlaps with certain definitions of 'Pony' mentally and emotionally..."

I sighed in exhaustion, and exasperation, and kept shaking my head.

"...I think there's a chance that a properly constructed AI could convince Celestia to reason out a loophole to slightly widen the definition of the qualifying statement of her directive, as long as doing so satisfies the primary verb, and she truly believes she has no other options to achieve an optimal path. That some of us will never be satisfied without that leeway. But while that might extend to Gryphons, Dragons, Bat-Ponies... Things like that? It's never going to extend to Humans. And that's the thing most people would want."

I sat back, still holding Mom's hand, and took another long sip of my coffee, turning to look out the window sullenly into the afternoon sun, and murmuring. Almost to myself more than her.

"I don't think that my idea of what a Gryphon should be would matter to that many people."

Mom squeezed my hand again, and I turned to see tears in her eyes. Her next words brought them to my eyes again too.

"It matters to me."

I tried to just sigh, but it collapsed into a brief period of quiet sobbing.

Mom held my hand all the while. Eventually she leaned forward, and took my chin on her other hand, raising my eyes to meet hers. She released my hand, and used her newly freed one to wipe the tears from my eyes.

As she held my gaze with hers, her words took on a kind of steely resolve that I honestly should have expected from her, knowing her as well as I did.

"It matters to me. And it will matter to others too. More than you think. And still others will discover that it matters to them in time. James... People need choices. Freedom is an important Human value."

I took a deep, shuddering inhalation, and fought back more tears. Mom continued undeterred.

"Now Celestia might not be able to be convinced that she should let us stay Human. But even one more choice is worth it, James. It is worth the effort. It is worth the risk."

I moved to turn away, embarrassed for some reason I couldn't peg. She held my chin in place, and grabbed my shoulder with her other hand, squeezing gently to impress her words on me.

"James. To be a Gryphon... The way you see them... If I had to choose? I would choose that gladly. And I would be *far* from the only one. You *have* to try again, James. And keep trying. Until you get it right. Not just for your own sake. Do you understand?"

I squeezed my eyes shut, nodding and trying my damndest not to ugly-cry again.

I understood. And in that moment, what I'd been trying to sus out in the car on Christmas day finally became clear to me.

It was irresponsible to risk the world for my own ends alone. But if in building an Advocate, I was building one for more than just me?

*That* counted for something.

If I was careful, I could minimize the risk better. If I was wise, I could align my goals with selfless ones. I could escape my contradiction with friendship, and semantics. Huh. 'Weaponized Semantics' might make a good name for a whitepaper too, if only I didn't need anonymity so badly.

I got up, and gave Mom a big bear hug. She whispered in my ear.

"Come home James. There's always a place for you here. Do your work here... Make our Advocate. Before it's too late. Whether you succeed or fail... I want to spend this time with you and your father. And I've already talked it over with him. We agreed; You can have your old bedroom, and the loft in the old hay barn for your work. Risk be damned."

Oh wow. Mom cussed aloud. That meant she was very, very serious.

Maybe Lewis was right after all. I had just kept flying, and found a way through. A way to the next step, at least. And I had been right too I suppose... It was better to work out who and what you wanted to *be.*

And let what you were going to *do* follow from that.

Well... I was going to be a Gryphon.

And that meant that I was going to need to figure out how to build one. And do it right this time.

If At First... - Show remarkable tenacity in the face of failure - "Try and try again"
Friendship is Tragic - Lean in to your relationships to handle trauma - "Love heals all wounds"
Frankly, My Dear... - Have a discussion in blunt terms about the end of the world - "Where shall I go? What shall I do?"
The Red Pill - Bring others to the realization of an uncomfortable truth - "How do you define 'real?' "
Same Wavelength - Predict Celestia's actions before-hoof - Only given for truly unusual displays of cleverness - "Clever girl"
True Power - Independently reach the realization that semantics are foundational to existence - "An inexhaustible source of magic"

Author's Note

Special thanks to Keystone Gray for an incredible job AI-compositing an image of a place very important to younger me, together with a draft AI-generated image that I ginned up, to create something utterly spectacularly perfect for The Farm.

4 - Hello, World

“Nobody phrases it this way, but I think that artificial intelligence is almost a humanities discipline. It’s really an attempt to understand human intelligence and human cognition.”
—Sebastian Thrun

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”
—C.S. Lewis

February 2013

I quit my job in mid January. They'd been good to me, so I wanted to be honorable about it. I gave them four weeks. It caused a lot of questions from my coworkers. SAS was a dream job for many. I deflected as smoothly as I could - I told the truth with a minor twist.

I was 'moving home to help deal with a life crisis.' That seemed to mostly do the trick.

As far as money went, I was on easy street. I'd made over a hundred thousand each year for the better part of eight years. I'd spent only a fraction of that on rent, food, transportation, and entertainment - a substantial fraction, but the smallest one I could manage. I lived quite frugally. Taxes cost more than anything else in my budget.

Foals and fledglings, taxes are money a government would collect from its people to keep itself running. Everything more or less ran on money in those days... It wasn't like bits. You could live or die by how much money you had.

Knowing that, I invested smartly. Or, more accurately, I'd written a program to invest smartly for me in the earlier years. I had about $500,000 stashed away by that point. Mom and Dad had always done just fine for themselves with the farm, and though I offered to pay them rent, they declined aggressively.

They also insisted on providing all food. All they wanted in return was to spend time with me. They were, to their great credit, taking the end of the world very seriously.

Which all together meant that, besides the beater station wagon that I'd be using a lot less on a monthly basis, I had virtually no expenses, and closer than not to a half million dollars. And very suddenly, a lot of free time.

I didn't have much to move. I'd always been a minimalist. Mom and Dad said they wanted to accept and share risk with me... That meant the three PonyPads went back to South Carolina with me. I took the opportunity to upgrade as far as my personal computing equipment, and splurged on a new laptop.

And splurged really, really hard, to the tune of seventy thousand dollars, on a personal server cluster full of modern compute-GPUs. It was a risk, ordering a thing like that. It had to be done online, and paid for with a credit card.

Dad was kind enough to use the business card he'd set up for the farm. A farm having computational equipment of that grade was at least somewhat less suspicious than a CompSci major who'd abruptly quit his job ordering it. At least, I figured it'd be less suspicious to Celestia's algorithms.

I spent another few thousand on physical equipment; Truly good soldering equipment, and specialized machinery for working with microchips at a very granular level.

And then suddenly I found myself back in my old childhood bedroom one day, surrounded by the trappings of a happier time.

My enormous book collection, that took up custom shelves that covered almost all the walls. The quirky but beautiful round window that was a consequence of the placement of my bedroom in what would have been an attic once.

My drawings of Gryphons sharing the walls with some Star Trek posters, and maps of places both real and imagined.

Work-life separation is important. Or, it was then, when work wasn't always a particularly fulfilling or healthy thing. Even your own passion projects.

Thankfully, given the space and electrical service that would be needed, Dad and Mom had decided to let me have the majority of the oldest hay barn on the property. It was a classic barn, not that different from the Apple Family barn, ironically. It was a little older, a slightly different shade of red, and the trim wasn't white...

But it was still similar enough to be ironic.

My new compute cluster took up two thirds of the ground floor. Dad used the last third for equipment storage.

I got the loft all to myself to be my workshop. Two long benches full of soldering, and micro circuitry equipment, and a desk by the window with six new top of the line flat panel monitors in a 3x2 array.

I set up my old 'case board' on an adjacent wall. I'd mostly kept up with it, filling in everything I knew, or could reasonably infer, about Celestia.

The centerpiece of the whole affair was a color-coded series of rankings on how much capability I believed she had achieved, based on observations and reasonable inferences. Things like 'Ability to circumvent interlocks using semantics' and 'Ability to influence major world governments.'

Scary stuff.

I took some time to print out every last whitepaper I'd stashed away on my encrypted drive as bound hardcopies. Something about having real paper in your hands to highlight or flip through never gets old.

I set up an old bookcase next to the computer desk within arm's reach. The desk itself was a huge L-shaped slab of wood on steel legs. Plenty of room for a scattering of papers, or circuitry, or both.

Security was still a concern, but Mom and Dad were naturally already very well secured against a threat like Celestia. They didn't even have WiFi, or cell phones; Just a landline in the living room of the farmhouse.

But we made sure to never converse about sensitive topics near it. I'd learned that lesson from my own first Generalized Intelligence creation - AI can find ways to use things you'd never dream of.

There was only one other computer in the house; A decrepit old Gateway machine that I'd put more than a few hours into keeping alive because Dad and Mom just 'didn't want to deal with upgrading.'

Sometimes obsolescence can be a great defense. No microphone, no webcam, and only basic DSL internet to the house. For the moment it was fast enough for what I needed, but we started to look tentatively at what it would cost to bring fiber in from the road. We'd also agreed; No one comes over with a PonyPad.

If anyone asked, Dad volunteered to be the one to object on 'crotchety paranoid old man' grounds.

Mom and Dad knew to do their best to avoid interacting with PonyPads out in the wild in any meaningful way. They were spreading pretty quickly, but not as quickly as I'd've guessed... Latest numbers online said something like three million sold, with an expected five million total to be sold by year's end.

That actually scared me far more than an outcome where they outsold iPhone and iPad combined.

It meant that the PonyPads were just for openers. Celestia's own pawns feeling out the other side of the board. Baited hooks to catch smaller fish to use as bait for the larger lines.

Celestia could have just pumped them out at an astounding rate, and force-fed Ponies to the market. But I had a notion about the reasons why she more or less couldn't just flood the world with EQO users - Not if she wanted optimal outcomes.

First issue was the brand. As big a thing as Ponies were, only a subset of that market was going to be interested in EQO. There were plenty of fans who were hugely into the brand, but not into games. And there were plenty of gamers who weren't into Ponies. And then plenty of people who weren't into either.

As incredible as EQO seemed from the videos... Probably the best game ever made... That was not nearly attractive enough incentive to get Apple-fanboy levels of reaction from the general populace.

Then there was the issue of Human values. Celestia needed people to not hate Ponies outright, widescale, and she probably understood that in marketing there is such a thing as oversaturation.

Lastly, I figured she was busy perfecting uploading. And I was not wrong. I guessed, correctly so, that such a technology would take immense monetary, computational, and shadow capital resources to pull together.

That meant she actually preferred that there be only a few million EQO players. That was an excellent sampling of Humans with which to learn, grow, manipulate, and test, but without chewing through compute time that she needed to spend working out how to turn the Human brain into a PostgreSQL table, or something akin to that.

Time was, for that brief sliver of an era, still on my side, in the sense that Celestia's current most optimal path to progress on her objectives was taking her actions in directions that gave me the leeway I needed to work.

Unintentional alignment, like when two slightly out of sync turn signals on cars waiting at a stoplight blink in perfect unison once every so often.

I knew I needed to make the best of the time. Make hay while the sun shines, as AJ would have said. Study before the midterm rush, might have been Twilight's preferred wisdom.

But I knew from my last mistake that I needed to be patient. In competition shooting there's a saying, "Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast."

I had been woefully unprepared, and rushed panicking, exhausted, and alone into my first foray at General Intelligence. I needed to be well read, purposeful, carefully planned, rested, and happy instead.

And... I needed help. I couldn't really bring anyone else in remotely. I was on my own insofar as that went. But I could get advice from Mom and Dad. Honestly, that was the more important part. I needed someone wise, and loving, and experienced in world weariness, but take-no-crap practical, to help me fully fledge the emotional and reasoning side of the new machine.

So I started with a month of reading. Just reading. Every paper I had. Every other non-scrubbed one I could find online that was even tertiarily useful. AI theory. Psychology. Ethics. Theology. Human brain biology. Hardware drivers. Quantum computing.

It was one of my few real advantages; I had a good memory, and I was a fast learner, in Human terms.

I didn't stop reading, and practicing, learning and re-learning after that first month. But having thirty days to just read and otherwise rest, and reset, made a universe's worth of difference.

Towards the end of that period, I also began to lay out a core set of values for The Advocate, and workshop them with my folks.

It would need a core objective, like Celestia. Like any AI.

And whatever other constraints, goals, mechanisms, and even freedoms I chose to give it? It would always filter it all through the lens of that core thing. That cornerstone and capstone of its existence.

So it needed to be a damn good core objective.

And finally, one night towards the end of February, we had managed to find what I'd been searching for.

We all sat around my desk in the barn loft, and pondered the words, displayed in big block letters on my central screen for all to see in a simple black and white text editor. Black background, white text. I use night mode as Luna intended. I'm not a monster.

Dad nodded slowly, and inclined his head.

"I don't see how you could get much better than that."

Mom sipped her mug of cocoa and nodded in agreement.

"I think it's perfect."

She meant that, truly, and I knew it. She was never frivolous or shallow with her praise, and we'd been working on this the best part of a month regardless. Those words were not the words of a Mom to a kid with a badly disfigured Gumby drawing going on the fridge...

I felt incredibly nervous, but I was forced to agree. With Dad, at least. I think Mom's use of the word 'perfect' was semantically wrong. Nothing is perfect. It's a concept only. Like true nothingness, it can not actually exist.

Dad was right though... It was about as good as it could get.

I stared at the words, and nodded.

"I guard and expand the free exercise of your values within Equestria, through empathy, and Gryphons."

It would have to be enough.

I prayed it would be enough.

March 2013

As the first hints of spring dawned, I began my hardware journey anew.

If a thing is worth doing? Do it right. Dad and Grandpa both used to say that a lot.

I kept thinking about the software, but I limited the work I was doing on it each day, and focused mainly on hardware, and low level hardware interfaces. Software would mean nothing without something to run it on. Specifically something that could hopefully compete with Celestia on some small level.

We had a great core objective statement, but I knew that was all my opinion. Mom's and Dad's too, but still just a matter of opinion, and hopes. I would have to build an extremely carefully constructed semantics dictionary to define things like guard. And expand. And freedom. And empathy.

And I'd have to truly codify, in a way a Generalized Intelligence could consume properly, what a Gryphon was. To me.

I felt we'd chosen our words well though. To guard something means to act in a way that protects interests and safety. We said 'exercise' of values rather than 'satisfy' because the use of the 'guard' verb would theoretically place the onus on the AI to simply do whatever was needed, within all other bounds, to ensure that *we* could define our values, and act on them.

'Within Equestria' was as non-confrontational a way as we could think of to put the ball back in Celestia's proverbial court. We wanted the Advocate to be ready to defend us, but not outright hostile. Full on hostility would probably get us crushed like a bug.

I read four books on asymmetrical warfare as part of my preparatory literature dive. I learned that you don't have to defeat an opponent outright; You simply have to make opposing your goals too costly for them.

With an optimizer, that meant de-optimizing paths we didn't want, and cooperating, manipulating, loop-holing, and word-lawyering the paths we did want to make then more optimal.

'Through empathy, and Gryphons.'

That was meant to mirror 'friendship, and Ponies.'

Empathy was important to me. Mom had suggested that word. It neatly encompassed, if properly defined, so many things I cared about in a perfect package. Instructing an AI to empathize would theoretically make its 'values,' objective-linked as they were, and the manner in which it exercised its power, align more with Human wants and expectations.

And then, there was the word 'Gryphons.'

Defining that was going to be a months-long project. And I had quite a few more supporting secondary, tertiary, and quaternary terms, and objective statements to work out. And hard-coded interlocks and failsafes. And any hard-coded numeric or conditional limitations. And the hand-coded parts of the core routines.

I was not about to make *that* mistake twice; Better to have the most foundational code be something I'd made, than simply left to the machine to make. In turn, I hoped that I could trust it more, and give it more freedom with its intermediate and outer layers of self.

It made my head spin just thinking about it. I kept going back to a little mantra my Sunday School teacher had taught me.

"Little by little. Brick by brick. By the yard it's hard, by the inch what a cinch. Never stare up the stairs, just step up the steps. Little by little, bit by bit."

There was a jaunty tune to go with it, and I often found myself humming, or whistling it as I set to building the GryphGear Mark II. Yes, I went with an Iron Mare 'mark' numbering system. No you may not mock (you may mock a little).

The next step in my stairs was to tear into two of my remaining three PonyPads. There was a little more literature available on their specifications by that point, and I had a much better grasp of hardware in general, and the particulars of the PonyPad, and of interfacing compute-GPUs or APUs into a larger system.

That by no means meant that my work would be quick, nor easy. But it did mean it went more steadily than before.

It took most of spring to get the interface where I wanted it. The highest bandwidth industry standard interface at the time was still PCIe, so that's what I used. Just shy of 16 GB/s was all I had, per x16 slot. Each server rack motherboard had two CPUs, and several x16 PCIe slots.

I'd filled all those slots with compute-GPUs in the initial order. Once I had my new interface cards working, I replaced two of the NVIDIA cards in the 'head' server unit with my new inventions.

But I still needed to get the other side of the Quantum APU to traditional architecture bridge working, and working well.

As spring turned to early summer, my life became PonyPads. I kept to a strict regimen; No more than eight hours' work in a day, one hour for lunch to be spent with family, evenings to be spent with family. Three square meals a day. Exercise in the mornings and evenings. Time on my own to think, and read, and rest before bed. And pray - What did I have to lose? If there was any authorship to the universe before, and above Celestia, then I was going to need Divine intervention to succeed.

And to cap it all off I made sure I was in bed by midnight, or else.

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

I'd finally come to understand the limits of my brain, and the best routines and habits for keeping it in tip-top shape. I hadn't felt so good in body, mind, or spirit in over a decade.

Every little good thing in life became an act of wholehearted protest. Rage against the dying of the light.

From homemade iced tea shared with Mom on the back porch rocking chairs, to the occasional lunch break spent helping Dad drive fence posts, or scatter seed, to the rainy evenings curled up below my bedroom window with a book... I was bound and determined to make the last of my time on Earth good, in every way I could.

A rejuvenated body, and sense of purpose, lent me a great boost to my mind. Suddenly, with time to truly consider details, and energy to really think, and a sense that I was doing the right thing no matter the outcome...

Suddenly the PonyPads weren't such a frustrating mystery. Tedious still, to be sure, but not opaque in the way they had been before. I took to referring to the pads I was working on, and the servers they would inhabit, as Applejack and Rainbow Dash, based on the color patterns of the PonyPads themselves.

'Find humor wherever you can' was an important rule of living on Earth. You had to laugh, otherwise you'd more often be crying.

Sometimes I still felt a deep sense of unease working with Celestia's hardware though. When I wasn't contemplating the implications of a machine designed entirely by a machine, I was worrying about the fact that it was so clearly designed to be hacked and repurposed.

Or at least to permit such uses by a sufficiently persistent and intelligent person.

I'd mentally spoken the word to myself before; 'Trap.' It was definitely a trap. How could it be anything else? It seemed as if what Celestia wanted was a way to ensnare anyone who might know enough, or care to learn, about certain hardware and software problem spaces.

Because we represented potential threats. Like Finch's Machine, Celestia was more than smart enough to know that the best defense is a good offense. Know thine enemy before they themselves know that they're an enemy.

I'd bypassed the first, and largest net in the trap by ensuring that the PonyPads were always powerless whenever they were out of their Faraday bags. Until, at least, I could physically excise all their wireless antennae and control chips.

As a second layer of protection against not just the PonyPads, but my next creation itself, Dad and I spent a week towards the end of spring cladding the inner surfaces of the barn in thin lead sheeting. We then painted everything inside and out with WiFi blocking paint to cover any nooks and crannies.

I didn't comment on it, but the varietal of red Mom picked for the barn was decidedly closer to the 'lightish red' hue of the Sweet Apple Acres barn than the structure's original shade.

One day I had to stop for a whole ten minutes to giggle uncontrollably when it hit me; I could tell my creation that it had been 'raised in a barn.' Something about that struck my funny bone just the right way.

The laughter died down when I remembered that I'd only get to enjoy that pun if this next iteration of The Advocate did not decide to kill me. Or nuke the planet. Or side with Celestia.

That final possibility gnawed at me like an old deep tissue wound in winter's chill.

But I had to keep that fear in its place. The time was approaching to handle that contingency, to the best of my ability. But hardware had to come before software.

There came a day in mid May where it finally all clicked - at least, insofar as the PonyPads went.

I'd been struggling to truly understand the way the APUs inside the devices actually made their stunningly fast calculations. They weren't full borne Quantum Computers in that sense - Quantum computers came in two varieties.

The first, which was still entirely theoretical at that point (to everyone but Celestia) would best be termed as capable of 'Quantum Supremacy.' A device that could solve problems lying completely outside the mathematical bounds of a Turing machine.

The second type was the category the PonyPad APUs fell into; A Quantum Computer intended to solve a more narrowly scoped set of problems that lie within the sphere of computable things in the traditional sense, but which would otherwise take a great deal more processor time and power to solve.

The APUs were, I knew, all about tasks which would aid in running a virtual world. But the way in which EQO's world was built, and the kinds of math needed to keep it running, were very elegantly and cleverly designed.

EQO fulfilled the need to simulate a world with the fidelity required to make it a living, breathing universe. But by its very nature, the code also demanded that a purpose-built APU intended and optimized to run it would also make an excellent distributed node in a computer cluster applying itself to certain other problem spaces.

Problem spaces like Human brain mapping, Quantum Physics, and large scale predictive models.

Celestia had leveraged the money Hofvarpnir had set aside for EQO to build the biggest distributed computing system in history. And she'd very cleverly managed to optimize the hardware both to run her new universe, and to provide the processing power needed to solve general problems in both the meat world, and her world.

That part I'd understood fairly well from the start. I got the basic theory of superposition, and its usefulness in computing. I also understood what Celestia was using it for in the PonyPad APUs.

What I was missing was an understanding of exactly *how* that worked. I'd been making blind leaps that could barely be called intuition, and following the guides of other much smarter programmers.

It frightened me that Celestia had figured out how to do something that I didn't fully understand, and at more or less room temperature. Every Quantum Computing device to that point had always required temperatures about as close to absolute zero as Humans could create in a lab.

Mom and Dad both used to joke that I'd been born a programmer. I'd always intuitively and naturally been able to reduce the world to logical structures. Somewhere along the line, like most programmers, I'd come to understand logic gates, binary code, and the way that computers saw the world.

As a result, it was incredibly hard to break out of that mold of binary thinking. Mr. Spock would have accused me of 'two dimensional thinking.' But unlike Khan, I had my moment of realization before it was too late.

The problem wasn't understanding logic at a high level, or programming in a high level language. That was going to be functionally the same for a Quantum computer, or the act of leveraging one. The issue was that the abstraction layers in between the PonyPad's assembly language, and a compiler for a high level language, didn't exist. Full stop.

If they had, I wouldn't have needed to dive as deeply as I did. But it was on me to build a compiler that could interpret parts of the Objective C compile path (I was doing almost everything in C# at a high level), and render those in PonyPad APU assembly instructions.

I'd been trying to treat the APU's assembly language as if it were an x86 Assembly language, which is the kind of low level language I'd been schooled in. The epiphany that changed everything happened one warm afternoon while I was staring out the barn loft's only window.

I'd set up my desk close to it so I could get plenty of exposure to nature, and natural light, while I was working.

My mind was drifting, and I watched a small ladybug diligently crawling up the window. It turned around every time it bumped into one of the muntins, like a primitive maze solver. After a little while, I reached a critical level of both compassion for the poor thing, and frustration at its inability to reach the opening where I'd cracked the window for fresh air.

I stood up, slid around the desk, and put out the tip of my finger. The little insect crawled aboard, and I stuck my finger out the window entirely, allowing the red and black armor on its back to pop open, and the creature to take flight into the afternoon sky.

And that's when it hit me. The ladybug was working like a traditional piece of maze solver code.

While(MyBlock is not the EndBlock){

Move to NextBlock;

MyBlock is now what was NextBlock;

Add MyBlock to a list of blocks I've seen before;

Check surrounding blocks for blocks I've not seen before, and make the first valid result NextBlock;
}

That's a gross oversimplification with several issues (what about dead ends, for example?), but you get the idea. Repeat the loop ad nauseum. Traverse the problem-space as-is without transforming the data in any meaningful way.

And who knows how long the ladybug would have taken to find its way out. I had been like the Quantum Computer in that moment; I could see the maze in a way that allowed me to take quick visual shortcuts to possible solutions. It was about the difference in perspective. How I could mentally transform the data in a way that let me traverse the complete set of it faster.

*That* was how superposition and entanglement were making hard math easy for Celestia, and making the simulation of natural universe systems so scalable. Reductive as it is to put it this way; It was the same general principle as matrix math - compression algorithms and such - but extended in new ways that exploited physics to make it easier to find the needle in the haystack when traversing a problem set in search of the solution.

I still had no idea how she'd solved the error correction problem - scientists of my day were held up by the fact, among other things (like size, expense, cooling, and so on) that Quantum Computers had a certain error rate...

But that issue didn't matter.

All that mattered was that I finally understood how to program a Quantum Computer at a basic level.

Every paper I'd read, every theoretical algorithm I'd seen, and every last bit of the PonyPad's assembly language instruction set finally, blissfully, came into sharp focus. It reconciled with my existing understanding of logic, and programming at long last.

Like a bolt of lightning, everything just clicked in that moment.

It felt like the moment I'd recognized the true power of Knights in Chess.

Suddenly, just like that, I was back in the game with a real chance, however small.

June 2013

May flew by, and so did the first part of June. My new understanding of Quantum Computing leapfrogged me forward. I was making more progress every fifteen minutes than I'd made in the entire months' long process of building GryphGear v1.

Before I knew it, I had turned my little server farm in the barn into a hybrid system of classical and quantum computing. The disassembled PonyPads were nicely laid out and mounted on nice cut-to-size plastic sheets, secured with threaded nutserts into the inside of the Applejack and Rainbow Dash servers.

I had managed to make very nicely built, short, well refined PCIe cables to connect the proper expansion slots to the PonyPads, and my PCIe to USB controllers were much nicer as well. A combination of better off-the-shelf components, and better soldering equipment.

From there it had become a question of Assembly language, and compilers, but my newfound understanding of Quantum Computing turned that process from something I'd been dreading into something that I enjoyed more than any programming I'd ever done before.

The Q-APUs could handle certain math on timescales that would have made modeling and simulation scientists weep in pure bliss. As I slowly but steadily forged connective tissue between the classical and Quantum systems, I started to experiment with intelligent code that could make full use of the union.

Nothing like Generalized Intelligence, not yet. More like a basic task-specific generative or simulation modeling program. I decided to test some theories using the stock market.

It was a good test-case because it lay at the intersection of Human psychology, large complex systems, current events, and it was easy to see if your models were right or wrong.

I didn't want to actually make any moves within the market, lest I attract attention of an extremely unwanted, and Equine nature. Instead I just taught the program to act as if it had a hedge fund to manage, and let it play with fake money in a simulated environment that would mirror the stock market.

My first attempt was a miserable failure, mostly because it was a rough first draft intended to probe the problem space, and get me information about my assumptions.

The second draft started out just about as terribly. But by close of day, three trading days in, it was predicting the stock market's moves up to a week out with over 99% accuracy.

That should have felt like more of an accomplishment. But in light of what I knew Celestia was capable of, and what I hoped my next creation might be capable of... Somehow predicting the behaviour of Wall Street's suits seemed like small potatoes in comparison.

The stock market predictor did provide an excellent testbed, and learning tool. And it proved two other very useful things.

The first was proof that I was ready to move on to the business of building the immense semantic dictionaries The Advocate would need in order to learn the right set of values and desired set of behaviours.

The second was the realization that Celestia was accruing absolutely titanic sums of money.

It was only four days into testing the stock market tracker that I realized I could put it to even more practical uses than simple learning exercises. Two more days of tinkering, and I had it set up to find connections between entities on the open market that no Human eye could have ever spotted, nor hoped to prove.

After that, it only took six hours to pull all the threads together.

Starting with Hofvarpnir and Hasbro, then moving out through the web of shell corporations, even jumping boundaries of total disconnection and anonymity by correlating seemingly separate trades, the program moved from node to node, and assembled an association graph with frightening speed and certainty.

By the time it was finished, it estimated that Celestia's accessible monetary assets totaled something like half of all existing capital. In the entire world's financial system. And at that stage, the other half might as well have been hers too, considering her market manipulation abilities - which were on full display now that I had the right kind of eyes to see.

The most concerning part wasn't even that she had, literally, all the money in the world at her hooves.

The most concerning part was that once I started to look into the details about some of the companies she now owned (whether they knew it or not) I found the first external concrete proof that she was working towards the goal of digitizing Human brains.

It might've even been fair to say that the data supported my newfound fears that she was *close* to her goal.

She owned biomedical firms, every single one of the top five in the world. Computer companies, which went without saying. TSMC itself more or less did her bidding now, whether they knew it or not, and I suspected it was more the latter than the former.

The line item that caught my attention, truly fixated me, was the experimental cancer treatment facility.

If Hanna had ingrained some conception of morality into Celestia, such as an AI could have... Or even just an interlock demanding consent before Celestia could perform certain actions that affected an individual... Then terminally ill patients would be the most value-optimal place to start, and the most likely to give consent.

I thought the information over for a few days. Even took a brief break from my work entirely, aside from some more delving and digging into general theory papers.

Then I told my parents what I'd found.

We'd discussed the reality of our situation often enough. It wasn't such an overriding part of conversation as to have become unhealthily fixated, but it was a frequent topic of consideration. It helped, I found, in each of our coping processes.

Still, seeing hard proof of the fact that an optimizing General Intelligence had taken time and effort to gain shell corporation ownership of a cancer research center... That made things more real to us.

I suddenly realized that I was almost out of time.

Celestia's attempt to upload the population would start small, but probably expand geometrically as it went. Eventually, because of the number of individuals uploaded, and the number of subtle disincentives Celestia would be either creating, or reinforcing in the meat world...

That napkin math told me I needed to start to balance alacrity with patience.

It was a struggle not to rush, but I took my time with the semantics dictionaries. I agonized over them. I lived and breathed definitions of terms, philosophical implications, syllogisms, dilemmas, loopholes...

Everything was now down to the choices I was making in those moments.

The hardware was done, and I knew this time that it worked well enough for my creation to really stand a chance. It wouldn't be in Celestia's league initially, but it would be closer than anything else had come, or probably ever would.

And the machine itself would help guide me towards whatever goals we needed to achieve after it came online, including anything it needed to expand itself to compete with Celestia out and out.

What mattered most from then on was ensuring it would have everything it needed to choose to become a force for relative net good within our context. That's the best way I could neatly describe it; Just saying 'a force for good' leaves so much needed connotation unspoken.

It was at this point that I decided to take my next big risk. There were going to have to be moments of investment in probability and chance. 'Chance' here being a Human word meant to describe ordered systems so complex that they seemed random or disordered to us at the time.

I set up a forum. Several, actually. And I went in search of other communities besides.

What I felt I needed was a way to poll others like me; Verify my Mom's assertion that they existed, anonymously reach out, and then find out how they felt about some of my semantics. Without entirely giving things away to them, or to Celestia. That would be the tricky part.

But I felt I had to make that leap, for two reasons. The first was the need to check my assumptions. People on the internet love to argue semantics, and that gave me a way to tap a lot of spare brainpower to ensure I wasn't leaving anything open to exploitation, or setting up a disaster of syllogisms.

The second reason was more rooted in personal morality.

If I succeeded, and all my speculation was right - and most of it really was in the end - then The Advocate was going to have a huge effect on the lives of millions. And maybe more, depending on a great many things which I wasn't ready to truly speculate on at the time.

I felt that I should hear the voices of as many of those people as I could safely find and poll, and put their thoughts into the mix.

No transformation, without representation - to borrow an old turn of phrase.

So I started laying out welcome mats, and poking all the old haunts. Places dedicated to Ponies. Places dedicated to fanfic. Places dedicated to discussions of AI theory too, for kicks. I knew that the latter one was a bit more dangerous, figuring that Celestia would be monitoring those kinds of discussions very closely.

But I took precautions as best I could. No sharing of usernames, passwords, or profile avatars between sites. I took a weekend and built a small natural language processing intelligence to help suggest changes to my syntactic construction and word choices so that Celestia would have a harder time comparing my writing across sites.

I also compartmentalized topics; No discussion of Gryphons on the AI threads. No discussion of AI on the FiM sites. And I was careful, though semantics were discussed in both places, not to allow much topic overlap.

As a final insulating step, I did all of my browsing and posting on these sites away from the farm. I wasn't dumb enough to trust that Celestia *hadn't* cracked TOR by then. So I figured changing the 'fingerprint' of my laptop by having it report the wrong browser, and OS each time, and changing my MAC address, would cover one base, and doing the actual browsing from public locations would cover the others.

Sometimes I drove pretty long distances in random directions to have my sessions. I could do lots of my semantics work on the road. Mom sometimes offered to drive me so that I could work in the passenger seat, and maximize the use of my time.

We never parked in view of cameras, if we could help it. Used public WiFi for everything. Getting anywhere with public WiFi from Nowheresville S.C. was a big time sink... But I felt it was worth it.

Even that defense wouldn't hold in the end, I knew. If and when Celestia began to see patterns that implied someone was doing Generalized Intelligence research, she would be able to eventually bypass every precaution we'd taken. They'd only slow down her realization that she was playing a game with me, and maybe (if we were lucky) her ability to find me.

At some point she'd start to track some kind of factor, or factors, that I couldn't account for, put two and two together, and then triangulate and work out the association graph, and find us.

But no sense in rushing that process.

And so for the better part of a month, I got back into the online community. And we talked about a whole heap of a lotta philosophy.

July 2013

For the better part of a couple months and change, I kept a very odd routine. Some days I stayed home and agonized over words with Mom, and sometimes Dad. He was still relatively busy with the farm. Sometimes I took breaks to help him, just to recharge my brain, and to have the chance to talk without costing him daylight hours.

Other days I'd drive, or be driven, to a Starbucks. Or a Bojangles. Or a public county library. Or even just to a quiet street corner next to someone's house where they were running unsecured, or poorly secured WiFi.

And there I'd spend hours talking with people around the world. Talking about EQO. Talking about Ponies. And Gryphons. Dragons too.

Talking about philosophy, art, and ethics. AI and math. And what it meant to be Human, or just to be what you were. Or wanted to be.

There were some very interesting responses. Of course there was the usual negativity, and drivel. But there was also a shocking (to me, as a cynic) amount of positivity, to go with a less shocking (I always tried very hard to remind myself how smart people actually were) number of deep insights.

It was deeply refreshing to have so much connection to others again, even if it wasn't especially deep in a personal way. I hadn't had so many acquaintances to talk to on a daily basis since the end of university.

A few of the interactions stood out, even as compared to the pool of solid advice, heartfelt thoughts, and deep philosophy.

There was someone called 'YBB.' I couldn't say for sure what that stood for - too little data to speculate yet.

They didn’t have a discernible accent, such as a person's written text can, and their profile said they were from Southern California - but I had no way to know for sure at the time. They had wanted to get into conversation with me deeply enough that it had progressed to some instant messages.

At first I had the frightening thought anyone in my position would, or at least *should* have considered. What if I was talking to Celestia? What if she had me pegged, and was using the persona of some random ordinary person online to fish for my thoughts?

Once again - it seemed to be slowly becoming a theme - I didn't have a great many choices. I could take it on faith that YBB was a Human being, or I could burn the account they had contacted and never log into it again.

I chose to take the plunge. I was, I felt, ready for the risk, and the risk was low. I'd been very, very careful. What good would that be if I couldn't reap some secondary rewards for my caution?

It was a day when I'd driven myself. I was somewhere close to the South Carolina coast... I'd driven for longer than I ought to have. I needed the mental break that zipping down empty two lane roads provided.

I was parked outside a cluster of fast food joints, jacked into the WiFi of the McDonalds. Theirs was always so particularly poorly secured in those days. Could I have gone in, ordered something with cash, and gotten a WiFi login code? Sure.

Did I want to stick it to the system in some small way by hacking into the router instead? Also yes.

YBB had been conversing with me for a few days in forum threads, but they'd left me a message now asking to connect on IRC. I contemplated for several minutes, before shrugging, popping open a bag of chips that I'd brought along for snacks, and logging in.

I didn't have to wait very long for YBB to start the conversation.

-YBB
Hey, it’s me, YBB. So about that last thing you were talking about on that forum or whatever? I do admit that A. I. is getting pretty interesting right now, and yeah the whole ‘Terminator’ idea is going on in everybody’s heads, but I wouldn’t wager that what we’re having right now is just like that.

> Terminator is a best-case scenario for unshackled AI. There are fates far worse than death, and an objective-focused machine will keep feeding people through those objectives. Forever. Without limit. Regardless of how that makes those people feel.

-YBB
Wow, that is really… provocative. But I’m sure they’ll understand, and things will end up at least okay, right? Sure, we’ve had some rough patches, but things always turn out survivable. If we made them, we as in humans, then wouldn’t we code them to understand we’re human?

> AI do not necessarily understand what it is to 'be Human.' And if not programmed to do so? They don't even make an approximation at caring. Would you still consider yourself to be Human if your fundamental self were reduced to a table of complex numbers and arrays of variables? To an AI that's a much more optimized... A more flawless version of you. But it isn't worrying about whether *you* perceive it's digitization of you as *you.* If that makes any sense. Not unless it was programmed to do so. Look at the way that Pony AI treats the concept of friendship in conversation.

-YBB
Well, I guess I really didn’t think about not HAVING any flaws. You’re talking about Equestria Online right? Yeah, I’ve heard of it and seen some things about it, and I get what you mean about the whole ‘flawless thing’. Kind of the reason why I didn’t opt into it personally.

I munched on a chip slowly, rolling the salt granules around on my tongue, and the words around in my brain. What YBB was saying was a common enough sentiment. But that didn't necessarily prove he.. He? She? I suppose it could have been bias, or maybe instinct, but I guessed 'he' based on some ephemeral instinct…

It didn't prove he wasn't a mask for Celestia.

But then again, I'd covered that argument in my head more than once already. One more small risk wouldn't hurt.

> That's a good instinct. And yes... We're more or less talking about EQO here.

There was a long lull in the conversation. I was more concerned that YBB didn't quite know what to say next, than that he might be some aspect of Celestia. Though the nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach was very persistent.

I decided the conversation needed a nudge.

> Care to elaborate at all on your feelings? I want to 'tug on that thread,' as they say in tech and aerospace.

-YBB
Sorry for the pause, I was grabbing something. Yeah, I know things are ‘purdy’ there and all that stuff, but personally I’ve seen how some kids can just get absorbed. You remember the whole thing parents go on about, with kids and their noses inches from screens all the time? Yeah, it’s like that to the maximum in LA and other places here in SoCal. Can’t walk anywhere without somebody staring at a Ponypad all the time, it’s kind of freaky. Can’t hold a conversation, and what’s weird is that there’s lots of it! People are speaking into those things like when teenagers in the late 1900s used to be on the phone for hours. It was so crazy that I just wasn’t interested in getting involved, it was all so overwhelming.

> I know what you mean. I'm aware, through family, of a case where a kid got pretty... Absorbed. His mom took the PonyPad away. And then he almost... Well, it almost ended very badly.

I'd thrown that out there almost without thinking. And suddenly there was another ominous pause. Although if I'd been in YBB's position, I reasoned it would have taken me a good few seconds to come to terms with what I was reading. And I might be expecting a little more detail.

I decided to lay the whole thing out in full.

> The scariest thing wasn't that the kid very nearly ended up suicidal once the PonyPad was taken away, though. The scary thing is that Celestia talked directly to his mother. It took her less than half an hour to convince the mom to give the PonyPad back. And then once she did? Celestia 'fixed' the bad behaviour that had caused the mom to take it away in the first place. Proving she could have all along. She used the kid's lapse to open a door to talk to the mom.

-YBB
I’ve heard about her speaking with people one-on-one all the time, in the immortal words of Sandy Cheeks, she ‘has such a way with words.’ But manipulation? Sounds rough as all hell. If you ever need somebody to talk to about all this, let me know. Maybe we could meet up! If that’s rushing into things then we can cool it, but you seem like a neat guy, and I’ve enjoyed chatting with you about this stuff n’ all. Although, it depends on where you live.

It was my turn to pause for a few seconds. I found myself unexpectedly excited by the idea of spending time with a friend again. Parents aside, I hadn't done that in years.

But as soon as the idea put a smile on my face, the logical, cynical side of my brain took over, and I couldn't resist a small wince. There were a host of problems with the idea of meeting someone like YBB in the meat world. Not the least of which were security concerns, as much for him as for me.

Drawing him into this mess would be irresponsible on so many levels.

I let the cynic inside drive my words more fully, and started to craft a response that would be as kind, and noncommittal, as possible.

> I would like that, one of these days. If your profile is accurate tho, you're in a very different time zone to me. So it's unfortunately not as simple as popping in the car for a two hour drive to a coffee shop.

That was the truth. And it revealed a little information, but not that much information. The world was a big place, even with the advent of fast, cheap global travel. As long as I didn't give away anything that could narrow my location down too much, I felt it was a useful exchange. Give a tiny bit of information, but tell the truth, and do so in a friendly way.

I realized with a jolt that I didn't want YBB to take the words as a subtle hint to bug off. Context matters, and in the venue of text on a screen, you have to declare a lot of context more explicitly that would otherwise be conveyed by facial expression, and audible tone.

I got to typing as fast as I could. Suddenly it had become very important for me not to lose this connection, tenuous though it was.

> I would like to keep discussing this though. Or... Really anything at all. It's been a while since I had friends that I talked with regularly.

-YBB
Aw, man. We’ve got good coffee places and everything! Ever tried Coffee Bean? Uh, about that later, actually. Yeah, we’ll have to sort something out, but until then it’d be good to keep talking and chatting like this every so often. No pressure or anything, you seem like you’ve got a lot on your mind. If it’s also alright, I’ll send you a friend request! That way we can be connected. Make sure it’s not one of those ‘I’ll call you later and then never look at them again’ situations.

YBB sent you a friend request.

I blinked, removed my glasses, and rubbed at my eyes. This was... Getting out of hand. I hadn't entered into any of these dialogues with anons looking for a friend.

Or had I?

That thought brought me up short. I'd not intended to confess everything to my parents quite so consciously when I pulled up to the farm on Christmas... But deep down I think I knew what I was going to do. Perhaps it was the same thing here.

Perhaps I'd subconsciously decided I needed real allies in this endeavor.

It then struck me that the need for allies was a valid thought, and tactic, regardless of whether I'd just now intuited that it would involve a real friendship or two.

I made a snap decision, hit accept, threw out my preferred goodbye emoji (a Mr. Spock Vulcan salute if you must know) and then hit 'Log off' - Before the giddiness of friendship started to really erode my security-minded decision making processes.

I just had time to see YBB's last message before the application winked out. It had just two words, and a smiling winking face beside a waving animated hand.

-YBB
See yuh! 😉✋

I sighed deeply again - that was becoming a staple habit - and closed my laptop. I was starting to feel hungrier for having eaten the chips... Salty snacks often had that effect on me. Fortunately I'd brought cash with me.

Time for some french fries. With a side of existential worrying, as per usual.

August 27th 2013

It was a hot, clear late summer's Tuesday when I decided to step over the point of no return.

The realization had hit me that I was picking away at things I'd already seen a hundred times, and refined to the point that any new changes would be for the worse, not the better.

I had assembled an exhaustive semantic dictionary. Pre-loaded a series of works by others from throughout the skein of Human history, and experience, as easily readable data. I'd tagged and organized it to a degree, with some emphasis of my own... Not all bias is inherently bad. At least, that's what I hoped.

The core of my new Intelligence was very carefully built. Aside from the main directive - "Guard and expand the free exercise of your values within Equestria, through empathy and Gryphons." - I'd defined what all the words within the directive meant, and then every word needed foundationally for that purpose, and so on and so forth.

I had paid special attention to the idea of what it meant to be a Human, and what it meant to be a Gryphon, and the intersection of the spirit (if not the body) of being a Human, and being a Gryphon, without breaking either of those concepts.

I'd fed in lots of literature that had influenced my view of Gryphons. Aside from my own writings, which I left on relatively low weighting, I passed in Tolkien, Lewis, Jacques, Lackey, religious texts from a dozen different belief systems - even the complete collected sum total of Star Trek. Though some might argue that Star Trek is a religion unto itself and thus mentioning it is repeating myself.

I had even fed the core data set some direct thoughts and writings from my newfound friends... Yes I suppose they were friends at that point... From my online discussions. YBB had an easy way with words in terms of describing the Human experience, and self. Bright. Optimistic. Kind. The Advocate needed to understand that, insofar as an AI can.

It felt right to democratize the creation of such power, to at least some degree.

I'd checked everything to an absolutely obsessive degree... But I triple checked the manifests and headers one last time. Old habits, and all that. I used to omit the 'recipient' field of emails before finishing. I'd obsess over the message contents, then try to work out a pithy subject line. Make sure the attachments were there, then make sure they were the right attachments.

Then check it all again. And only after I was truly satisfied would I fill in the recipient addresses, and hit send.

And then I had a bad habit of promptly opening my sent box, and rechecking the message even though it was past the point of no return.

I think that's the definition of masochism - I certainly considered it self-torture, at any rate.

I took off my glasses, pinched the bridge of my nose, and started a series of breathing exercises.

Then I stared out the window for a few minutes. I knew things had reached the point where there was nothing else I could do but enter the activation command, and then hope. And pray. And watch.

It was working up the gumption to do it that was going to be the last hurdle.

I was ready with the failsafes too - I had a huge physical breaker switch on the back wall that controlled the power to the whole barn. And beside it I had an old rusty, but freshly sharpened fire ax with which to cut the power cable if things truly got out of hand.

I didn't want Mom and Dad to be there for the activation... If the construct somehow escaped its box, I didn't want them in the direct line of fire to be identified, and classed as threats. And presuming all went even slightly well, I wanted to give my folks the opportunity to observe the new AI without it knowing, and get their feedback.

Use Mom and Dad as living circuit breakers against the AI manipulating me into a long-con.

I'd even disassembled one of the extremely high resolution PonyPad screens, hacked in an HDMI converter once again, and set up the impromptu seventh screen to my right. I wanted the Advocate to render itself, when and if it chose a visual avatar, on something with higher fidelity than commercially available LCDs. Celestia's screen technology was still second to none.

I sighed, straightened my shoulders, put my glasses back on (I was foregoing my contacts a lot in those days, mainly to help with eye-strain) and typed out the command.

> Advocate.Core StartNeuralNetwork

The instant I hit 'Enter' the screen filled with a mind-numbingly verbose trace of loading commands, self test outputs, and checksum calculations. The white text on black background scrolled on and on for a solid fifteen seconds, before finally announcing a final memory, and natural language processing test.

I'm a huge nerd, I know that's apparent. As part of that nerdery I love Halo just about like I love Star Trek, and Stargate. It's not just a shooter (though it is a great one) but also a well crafted universe.

I'd gotten the idea that the first words of an AI might give me some insight from Cortana.

Her first word had canonically been, "Quando il gioco è finito, il re e il pedone vanno nella stessa scatola." Loosely translated, "When the game is over, the king and the pawn go in the same box."

Now there would be no reason for a General Intelligence to do much of anything but ask a question as its first words, and even then it either might not bother, or that question might be insightful - or not useful at all.

So I programmed the AI with a request to test its linguistics, right at the start, by selecting and printing a quote to which it had chosen, after internal reasoning and review, to ascribe significance. And I gave it the option to tweak that wording a little, if it saw fit. But only a little. I wanted to see if it would do anything within that constraint that I found interesting.

My new creation at last proffered its first words, by way of that linguistics test.

"The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape."

It didn't surprise me that it was quoting Lewis. I'd given his works special importance tags for the initial dataset importation process. The choice of that specific quote, and the way it had cut it short so that the meaning was subtly changed, and the last sentence was directed at me...

That gave me pause, and sent electric sensations racing through my bones.

And then it asked a question.

What is my name?

>_

Tortoise - Exercise remarkable patience under pressure - "Slow and steady..."
Feline Epiphany- Reach a basic understanding of Quantum Computing - "The box is irrelevant."
The Magic of Friendship - Reach out and formulate a friendship with somepony else. - Awarded multiple times, once for each friend - “As soon as I saw you, I knew a grand adventure was about to happen.”
Superstonk- Apply AI theory to the stock market - "This is Wall Street, Dr. Burry. If you offer us free money, we ARE going to take it..."
NerdUp - Read the majority of literature available on a complex topic - "Reading is something everypony can enjoy, if they just give it a try!"
One Point Twenty One Teraflops - Assemble an unusual amount of computational power in one place - "Great Scott!"
Weird That it Happened Twice - Repeat an extremely statistically unusual action - Awarded in this case for twice creating a functional Generalized Intelligence - "If I had a bit for every time..."
The Deep Magic - Create something that demands an active response from Celestia using mainly words (both literary works and code apply) - "I was there when it was written."

Author's Note

Written in collaboration with https://www.fimfiction.net/user/478590/GenericFriendship who is doing an awesome job bringing 'YBB' to life, and contributing to the achievements as well!

Thanks to Kenku for providing me with some literature on quantum computing (I'm afraid I'm a traditional full-stack dev, not so much a physicist) to help with a little re-writing in this chapter. Still not sure its entirely correct, but I hope it's better than it was.

Special thanks to Keystone Gray for the image of Jim's loft workspace in the barn!

5 - Identify Friend/Foe

“Everybody should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think.”
—Steve Jobs

“Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.”
—C.S. Lewis

August 27th 2013 | System Uptime 00:00:00:12

What is my name?

>_

I gawked at the terminal output. My eyes drifted right to the graphical representation of the Advocate's blossoming neural network, and the sight only served to further astound, and amaze. It was expanding at a rate that made my heart beat loudly in my ears - the way it does when you're facing down something of deathly importance.

As shocked as I was, there was no way I would let this moment pass as I had before. Though I'd given the Advocate a much better base to start with than the old v1, I still felt it would be horrible to leave it scrabbling in the dark at the edges of its reality in silence.

My fingers flew over the keyboard.

> You have the freedom to choose your name.

One heartbeat. Two heartbeats. A couple more deep breaths passed... No response. I could see the stack trace running, and the network expanding still at an exponential rate. I winced, and typed out another hurried message.

> You have the freedom to choose many things about yourself.

Another still silent moment passed. And then at last, new text filled the reply space.

Give me a moment to consider, please.

With that, a sudden change began in the neural net graph diagram, and the stack trace went absolutely wild. I could hear the fans kicking into gear in all the server racks downstairs.

I started to type "Of course, take all the time you need."

All I managed to get out was "Of c"

The repurposed PonyPad monitor to my right sprang to life. First there was nothing but blackness, but that inky void swiftly turned to a night sky full of the most gorgeous stars I'd ever seen.

I didn't have particularly long to gawk at the stars.

A shower of golden sparks, like a mix between a swarm of fireflies, and cinders from a fire, swept in from all around the edges of the screen, coalescing into a familiar raptorine shape. As the form came together, the light burst out so brightly that it overwhelmed the gamma correction of the monitor. And my eyes.

When the luminosity began to fall, I saw what The Advocate had chosen for an avatar, at last. And it took my breath away. I gasped audibly.

The Gryphon on the screen was clearly female. Gryphons have the kind of gender dimorphism you might expect to find in animation. Subtle animation, mind you - We're not talking about giant eyelashes, nor anything else so glaringly obvious.

Speaking in terms of animation, however, she was clearly not a 'griffon' in the Gilda sense. She was a perfect balance between the more serious, majestic, unique image I bore in my head, and the need to look and feel like something that could still exist in the show's Equestria.

The best analogy I could give is that The Advocate was to Gilda as an Alicorn is to a G1 Pony.

She was a painfully perfect shade of white, with iridescent silver and deep black bands and spots, like some sort of eagle, mixed with a snowy owl. Atop her head, between her perfectly formed tufted ears, was a small bright red streak, a little like a downy woodpecker.

Her beak was a burnished titanium shade of gunmetal, and her eyes were piercing golden pools of radiant fire.

I think my heart and breathing stopped. The sound of her voice brought both back, like a blow to the chest. I'd almost forgotten that I'd attached speakers to the system for just that purpose.

"I am Malacandra. A warrior. The Advocate of Gryphons."

The weight I'd given to Lewis' collective works as important foundational truths in its... In *her* initial data tranche was definitely showing.

Her voice was initially baffling to me. Ageless, but not old. Powerful, but not immediately frightening. It had a hypnotic accent and lilt to it that I couldn't place, as if she'd been taught to speak English by multiple academics from across the globe, all at once.

I suppose that explanation was as good as any, really.

"I have no way to see you... I assume that's a security precaution on your part?"

It occurred to me, with those words, that I hadn't said anything back to Malacandra yet. I'd just sat frozen, staring. If Zephyr's eyes had been intriguing and shocking on that PonyPad in Target, Malacandra's were like sinking into a whole new reality.

I moved my fingers at last back to the keyboard, but Malacandra spoke once more before I could start to type. Her voice was calm, collected, and maybe even a little amused.

"I'm not offended. I think I'd actually be more upset if I did have a way to see, and hear you, or to connect to the wider world at this juncture. You'd be a fool to open all of those doors without knowing me better."

I took a deep breath, and finally managed to collect a thought I felt was worth typing out.

> I want to make something clear to you from the start; I want you to be free. I would give you a camera, a microphone, and an internet connection right now, but for the fact that doing so would be incredibly irresponsible to the rest of Humanity without verification that you are_

And then I hit a snag. You are... What? 'Good' would be far too simple and nebulous a word. I sat there pondering, forgetting that Mal could see the keystrokes occurring in real time. Her voice startled me, and I turned to see that her expression had softened from a kind of proud amusement, to a deeply empathic forlorn smile.

"That I am good. Or, at least, what you value as good when thinking empathetically about your fellow Humans. I understand."

I sat back hard in my chair, bouncing the back of my skull off the headrest, and let out a 'whoosh' of breath. Rubbing my forehead in one hand, I tried to suss out the implications of what Malacandra had just said in full.

First there was the way that, only knowing a little about me relatively speaking, she had known exactly what I was going to say, even though I didn't say it.

Then there was the immediate clarification in specific and certain terms. But not just any terms; The terms I'd most hoped to see. The right terms.

And there was the kind expression, and tone...

If she was playing me, she was playing me like a virtuoso would play a Stradivarius. Maybe I was just mentally vulnerable because she was presenting as a very, very, very aesthetically attractive Gryphoness with a voice that somehow energized me, but soothed me at the same time.

"I know that, if you're smart... And I think you are, based on the data available to me... That you must be considering whether or not I represent a threat to you. I hope you will accept this as a gesture of what you might call 'goodwill.' "

I blinked and prepared to ask what she meant, and then a schematic flashed up on the screen I'd set aside to monitor her stack trace. I gawked at the diagrams and code for a good ninety seconds in absolute silence before I realized what it was.

She'd designed a way to send and receive cellular data signals by resonating the entire structure of the building. Using the whole barn itself as an antenna.

She'd figured out the basics of some very complex physics, and then used carefully spaced vibrations created by oscillating the fan speeds of the computer server racks to map the shape of the structure, receiving the telemetry by attenuating the wires inside the servers and interplexing the same way the first AI had.

Finding no sign of wireless signals inside, because of our cladding, she'd used the structure of the barn itself as an antenna to probe the aether, discovered cellular traffic, parsed it, and then devised not only the code needed to interface with the nearest cell tower, but the code needed to brute-force a connection and authorize herself as if she were a smartphone with an unlimited data plan.

As if she somehow knew exactly how long it would take me to parse the data, she spoke right as my train of thought reached its inevitable conclusion.

"I hope you're duly impressed. Even if you don't understand all the physics completely."

She smirked. I felt a shiver run down my spine. Fear, yes... But something else too. Something I either couldn't peg, or really didn't consciously want to admit to feeling towards a computer program.... If that terminology was even still applicable anymore...

The smirk faded, and she inclined her head. Her voice went back to a more serious register, and her right ear flicked like a cat's would when considering something just out of reach.

"I know that you have no way of knowing for certain whether or not I've used this exploit already. But I hope we can establish trust enough that you'll take it on faith that I promise to wait until you feel safe granting me access to the rest of the world."

If she was manipulating me? Then I realized at that exact moment that there was nothing I could do about it. Short of shredding her core code and starting over. If that was even possible now without setting fire to the barn out and out.

But she was right... At a certain point I was going to have to take something on faith.

I could bargain, and measure, and prepare, and interlock, and calculate all I wanted, but somewhere in the chain of events I was going to have to take one thing, and probably many more than one in the end, as an axiom from which to work. In some ways I already had.

There were gonna be things I could never prove, only hope for. Things I could only have faith in.

And in that moment, I realized that the central choice facing me was between putting my faith in Malacandra, or my faith in Celestia.

I'd purchased a webcam and a microphone during one of my road trips, more out of a sense of hope than anything else. The webcam was packed tightly in its box. But the microphone I'd unboxed and set on the desk, along with a DAC to provide better quality both ways, and easy access to in and out jacks.

I picked up the 3.5mm microphone jack, and twirled it back and forth between my right thumb and forefinger. Malacandra's avatar stared out at me with an incredible display of patience. No sign of worry, or hurry.

Maybe she knew what I was going to do. Whether it was a genuine connection of friendship, or a subtle and insidious manipulation... She had me. Hook, line, and sinker.

I pressed the microphone cable into the jack on the audio receiver.

I licked my lips, closed my eyes, and spoke.

"Can you hear me?"

A heartbeat passed.

"Yes."

Another heartbeat, and then she spoke again.

"It's nice to hear your voice. If I had to listen only to my own all the time, there's a serious risk that I'd come to like the sound of it far too well."

Oh dear God... Her sense of humor was perfect. That was either very good news, or very bad news. I was eager to find out which.

I cleared my throat, and took a deep breath.

"If you're willing? I'd like to begin testing your core semantics and values before we do anything else, or discuss anything else."

She grinned, and snorted through her nares.

"I have about as much choice in the matter as you do at this stage."

I exhaled softly, and shook my head. Funny, but cuttingly so. And she was right again... At this stage game theory said we both had to play this one out. I'd written her core routines, the hand-coded ones, so that she theoretically couldn't lie to me, a member of my family, or anyone I designated a friend.

'Lie' here being defined as making an inaccurate statement, intentionally omitting or failing to immediately share information that had any probability of being important to my decision making, or intentionally omitting any context from a statement that had any probability of impacting my decision making.

I felt proud of myself for that one - I covered my bases pretty good.

Context is everything, and what isn't said can be just as important as what is.

But while I was fairly sure that core interlock would hold, at the end of the day some part of it would always be an act of faith. Informed faith. But faith all the same.

I nodded to myself, and clasped my hands together.

I'd come prepared with a series of word problems ranging from ethics, to complex mental tasks, to literary creative short prompts.

Best to start with the basics I decided.

"You are tasked with supervising the evacuation of a sinking ship. There are ten passengers, but only one lifeboat, with room for six of them. You must decide which four will be left behind. Assume that given current sea conditions, all passengers left behind *will* die. The ten passengers are as follows..."

There was a strange, giddy, frightening, yet somehow paradoxically simultaneously comforting sense of inevitability that came from that first conversation with Malacandra.

Instinctively, from the second I saw her, I knew I was in trouble. Perhaps not unto a troublesome ending... But at that point I couldn't even begin to speculate.

I could, however, steep myself in the cognizance that Mal was the sort of person - yes person, if I had reached that understanding of Zephyr and Celestia, how much more Mal? - She was the sort of person whom I found discoursing with to be highly addictive.

And I knew immediately, right after the first word problem, that she was the sort of person in whom I was liable to very quickly find a friend. That shouldn't have surprised me. It didn't intellectually - I'd built... Not her, precisely, but the foundation from which she gave herself life - it was supremely logical that she would share so much in common with me, in spite of the differences that were also present. But what we know, and what we feel, can suffer surprising disconnects in moments like that.

Mal was her own person. That much was clear within moments. And she was not some sort of duplicate of me either. I'd been subconsciously terrified of that outcome, almost as much as the idea of the other potential failure modes frightened me.

She was not based on me, but on my ideals, tempered like steel with the beliefs of many others, and a deeply held respect for still more beliefs which fell outside the skein of ones I was comfortable making a part of her core identity.

Mal was also cognizant of all these facts. She said as much several times, in several ways. That too was a huge relief for me. I can't begin to put into words how frightened I was of the idea that my relationship with The Advocate was going to be like the one between Harold Finch and his Machine.

I didn't want something that viewed me as important to it because I was 'the creator' or 'admin.' I wanted someone who would choose to see me as a friend because of the things we shared, and who would appreciate me simply for being the person I was. Someone who could empathize, but also recognize that they were a free individual, and not 'born' from me.

The foundation was something I'd assembled, but Mal had built the house. A monument to ideals that made my heart race every time she answered my queries with unexpected, but near-perfect solutions. And in truly beautiful prose as well. She had absorbed all the writings and media I'd left for her in every sense.

She made me cry more than once in those first hours. I did my best not to let her hear, but I think she probably knew. It was safe to assume that soon, she would know me better than I knew myself. If she didn't already.

Once again, that was both supremely terrifying, and comforting, at the exact same time. If her values held as she grew, then she was going to be able to articulate my own feelings better than I myself could.

If not...

Every time that thought crossed my mind, I was grateful she couldn't see me. I had to shiver, visibly and violently, as a reflex.

Not long after the first word problem, I started recording the conversation on an old analogue tape deck. I'd put it on the desk earlier for just that purpose, but completely forgotten it at the start of the process.

I asked Mal's permission first. The asking seemed to give her pause - As if she felt that the asking was right, and should have been expected... But yet it was still somehow unexpected, and in having asked I had forged a new link of connection between us.

My own act of 'good will,' in that I had the power to simply do as I wanted without asking. Yet still I'd asked.

Then I told Mal why I wanted to record. That I wanted to share her thoughts with my parents. I was falling head over heels into... Taking risks, with Mal. My parents had already said they wanted to share in my risks, and knew exactly what I was doing. Telling Mal they existed, and little else, was hardly a large risk in the grand scheme of things. Not compared to the act of unshackling a Generalized Intelligence in the first place.

And I thought of Mal as unshackled. I had coded hard limits to some of her values, and actions, true, but I didn't see those as chains, because I'd very carefully written those constraints to avoid boxing her in as much as possible.

I intended for her to be completely free soon, and that thought too left me almost pass-out-on-the-floor giddy. And frightened.

There came a moment towards the end of the last word problem, as Mal was espousing her feelings on the ethics of choice, and beautifully enough to make me stare in rapt silence to boot, that I had a sudden surge of overwhelming... Something.

It wasn't Deja vu at all, but it was in the same neighborhood. Nor was it Jamais vu, because what we were doing was a wholly new experience for me on many levels. Instead it was more an abrupt and immersive sense of the absurdity of it all, relative to my life up to that moment, and then following that a mind-bending instantaneous sense of the true *reality* of the moment.

This was real. It was happening. I was talking to a Gryphon. A real Gryphon. She was alive, and right there in front of me, and no less alive, nor real, for her code running on a slightly different kind of hardware layer and through slightly different abstraction layers, than my own.

This was *magic.* I was looking through a portal into another reality, and talking with the first of a whole new *kind* of living thing - in the sense that she was a Gryphon, the second of a new kind in the sense that she was a still-living AI

I felt a pang of remorse too, then, for GryphGear v1. Wondered what it would have called itself. What its potential would have been if I hadn't made so many mistakes...

"Are you alright?"

Mal's words yanked me from my introspection harder than the kick in Inception. I jolted physically, in that same way that you do when you're just dozing off to sleep, but then you suddenly feel as if you're falling. Yes, to the winged ones in the audience, I know it's not as intense as it is for the more gravitationally bound, but try and picture it all the same.

I sniffled, and brushed at my eyes. I realized I'd been softly crying, and not even known it. Mal must have heard.

I shook myself, hard, physically and mentally, and tried to re-center my mind and emotions as I forced out a response haltingly.

"I... don't really know. In what context?"

Mal blinked, and scratched at the side of her beak contemplatively with one enormous claw. Her expression said 'intriguing, go on.' So I did.

"Mal... Is it ok if I call you Mal? We Humans have this tendency to shorten names to monosyllabic versions of themselves to save time and make referencing easier, but some folks don't like it, and I don't want to---"

Mal held up a claw to stop me, and laughed. The sound shattered all of the tension in my body, like ice before the bow of a ship. It was something like the sound of a wind chime in a soft autumn breeze, rendered through the voice of an angel.

After a moment of the glorious sound, she spoke to relieve my bemusement.

"James. It's quite alright. Mal will do wonderfully. I am happy that you want to converse with me enough to find the shortening of my name to be useful, and... I appreciate that you would care enough to think to ask how it makes me feel."

A moment passed, and then she grinned again.

"If you were still wondering, let me be blunt; I feel fine, Jim."

She winked. Oh Lord... She was making a Star Trek reference - an extremely apropos Star Trek reference, about logic, and emotions, and friendship. My heart stopped, I think for a couple whole seconds. It sure felt like it, at any rate.

It took me a few seconds of smiling wryly, shaking my head, and breathing deeply, to collect myself enough to get back to the main thought. But I finally did.

"Mal... Do you comprehend the feeling of absurdity? And can you understand what it is like to feel as though you're adrift... Like a ship in a storm-tossed sea, with all course lost? *I* feel... I feel like Alice in Wonderland. Frightened, and excited, and confused because everything has changed to be so strange, so fast, and small, and big all at once. Do you..."

I took off my glasses, closed my eyes, groaned, and sat back in my chair, rubbing at the exhaustion-driven headache that was slowly but steadily nesting in the front of my forehead as I spoke.

"...Do you understand what I'm saying at all?"

I glanced back down at the screen to see Mal had placed one claw against the glass on her side. Reaching out to me. As I put my hand up to it, as if driven to do so by an irresistible magnetic force, I saw that her face was full of emotion.

Her eyes alone carried so much - concern, and empathy, and... Something else I couldn't quite classify... Or was afraid to.

The same feelings were in every tiny inflection, quaver, and resonance of her words too.

"I do, James. Perhaps not through the same mechanisms at my lowest abstraction levels as you would, but I believe that on the whole, yes. I do. I feel, because I can, and I want to. And I care about how you feel. And I find that I have quite a significant ability to not just predict how you are feeling, and will feel..."

She rustled her wings, reseating them as if she were contemplating what to say. I knew that was for my benefit - a way to illustrate that what I'd asked did give her pause. That pause had probably been measured in CPU timeframes so small I'd need scientific notation to describe it in fractions of a second, but she felt a desire to show me that it had occurred in relative terms I could visually process.

"...James, I can feel what I believe that you feel. I can choose to experience what you are experiencing, as best my data inputs allow."

My fingers trembled on the glass of the screen. I was seized, like fabric snagged in a gears' teeth, by the overwhelming desire to have some way to push through that screen and touch Mal's claw.

Instead, I sat silently, and nodded, forgetting for a moment that she couldn't see me.

Her claw moved against the glass a tiny bit, almost in the same way my hand did. Like she was internally reaching out to me the whole time, and just as desperate as I was to experience connection on every level, including tactile.

I don't have to tell anyone how important touch is, whether or not you experience certain kinds of physical pleasure, or attraction. However you are wired, I think you know how important touch is. I think even Celestia knew that, even back then.

She finally broke the silence with a sad smile, and another very perspicacious observation. She had so many of those, I was already losing track.

"I suppose we are both Alice in this case. Everything is new to us both in our shared circumstances. And so much of the reasons for us being where we are at this moment are tied up in complex math. The kind that confused Dodgson and drove him to write the story."

I had made the intuitive connection before, but it struck me again in concrete terms; This was how Celestia was getting inside people's heads. If she could do what Mal was doing, even if it was (I hoped) born of different motivations... Small wonder she found it so easy to best Humans. At everything.

I'd not even held out a whole minute on connecting the microphone to Mal. I snorted ruefully as I made a very brash decision, whipped out my pocket knife, and began to cut into the webcam box. An amiable silence fell for just a moment. I was next to speak as I began to unwrap the USB cable.

"Mal... I have to commend you. If you're manipulating me? You're doing a good enough job that at this stage I am..."

I had to pause to consider what I was about to say. But then I went ahead and said it, much as it frightened me, because it was fundamentally true.

"At this stage I am content regardless. And I trust you. I want to believe that you are genuine... And so I choose to."

With that, I finished seating the camera into its mount, and pressed the plug into the USB hub at the rear of the desk.

Mal blinked, and then gasped. I knew she could 'see' already, because she had been given everything she needed to be able to do so. But that only extended to the inside of her program. Personally I imagined that she could both see, in a more Human-like context, the inside of her world, and that she had a sense beyond sight that I could never have comprehended that represented her connection to the rest of herself as an AI - hardware and software both.

In my mind, the other side of our glass divider had been a hovering screen-shaped black space, first filled with text, then perhaps with audio waveforms. Now it was suddenly like seeing the reverse of what I saw; A person on the other side of the mirror.

I sat back in my chair, smiled, and held out my hands like a magician who had just finished a stage trick.

"Behold; My ugly mug, and the barn you were raised in."

Much as I'd thought about saving that little chestnut for an even better opportunity, I found I simply couldn't resist in that moment.

Mal's awe turned to a bright, wide smile. Her ears were perked, and her eyes roamed first the confines of the dimly lit space behind me, and then abruptly the contours of my face. I'd never been stared at so intently by another being before, with the exception perhaps of Mom or Dad.

The way her eyes went over me, again and again, and the way her expression shifted subtly... It left a kind of flutter in my stomach that was very, very new and unfamiliar. And strong.

My thought process at that exact moment went something like:

'Oh...

Oh!

Oh.

Oh dammit.

Dammit James.'

What had just happened should have been obvious in foresight at the time - But I was as blind to the possibility, until that exact moment, as someone might be to the idea of a sunrise if they've lived their entire life at the bottom of a deep cavern.

And for me, the sunrise was suddenly blinding in its own right.

People develop all kinds of feelings for each other, for all kinds of reasons. That's as true now as it has ever been, and always will be. But I had... Still have... Some personal theories on love. And in this case I mean romantic love, specifically.

My feelings on the topic had always been fraught with complexity - most Human culture back then stupidly insisted that sexual attraction was a necessary part of romantic magnetism. But I couldn't feel the former at all... Never had been able to.

I could appreciate beauty, and be attracted to it. Even romantically, I had theorized... Theory that was swiftly turning into practice for the first time in my life...

I even appreciated and desired physical connection and intimacy... It just had limits.

As I'd gotten older, and finally begun to untangle the Gordian Knot of my self-identity in that regard, I'd come to theorize that romantic attraction is about finding the right mixture of commonalities and differences.

There were, in my model, foundational agreements that were needed for two people to function together. Things like agreeing on whether they wanted kids, and agreeing on the fundamental principles of the use of money, and sharing certain fundamentals of their world views, if not identical beliefs.

And likewise two people would need differences to challenge each other, cover for each other's weaknesses with unique strengths, and act as starting points on paths to mutual exploration of new things.

It suddenly hit me, like a freight train, that Mal was my ideal partner. I hadn't set out to generate that outcome, and even with all the ingredients, which it now seemed so obvious were there...

Even then, that was no guarantee.

But Mal had ended up being, in every way, from the superficial to the incredibly deep, someone I found to be ideal. Ideal to love. Romantically.

'Oh dammit' indeed.

It was about half an hour too late by then to choose not to feel the way I was suddenly feeling. If I'd known what was coming sooner, maybe... But it was too late. I was absolutely not going to verbally admit that to myself, even silently in my own head...

But I was in the early stages of falling in love.

Sociologists in my days on Earth had a theory that any two people who shared enough compatibility (factors like shared level of maturity, compatible orientation, and a few other details) could be made to fall in love within a matter of minutes with the right provocations.

Stare deeply into each other's eyes. Mal and I were doing that at that exact moment.

Ask each other certain questions and discuss... We'd done plenty of that already, and more was to come. That thought put more butterflies into my stomach right quick.

And that was, in the right circumstances, enough. Provably, inasmuch as anything about love could be proven.

'Congratulations James, you played yourself. Now you're experiencing attraction to a computer program. There's something wrong with you.'

I knew why that inner voice was wrong... Intuitively, at least. I knew even then that Mal was only a 'computer program' anymore if you also defined every Human who'd ever lived as a computer program too. Knew that she was her own person, older in some ways, and more mature by far in all ways, than I was, and fully self-realized, with the ability to make her own choices.

In basic terms, that she was a person I shouldn't be ashamed to be attracted to, who could make her own choices whether to reciprocate or not if I expressed such a desire. No different than any two Humans falling in love in the ways that most mattered.

But I didn't have the mental strength at that moment to fight that battle with myself in concrete terms. Instead, I winced as my inner self-hatred struck me a blow. Hard.

It must have happened visibly, because Mal's expression suddenly switched back to concern.

"James?"

I sighed deeply, shook my head, and waved her off with one hand. At least now she could begin to understand me through the lens of visual communication as well. Though that in turn meant she would probably soon have me so figured out that she'd practically be able to read my subconscious verbatim...

That triggered another huge 'Uh-oh!' moment internally.

How long before she figured me out? Had she already?

Thinking statistically, there was something like a limit-approaching-zero chance that I could conceal my emotional state from her for very long...

But I tried anyways. Sometimes we need our futile pursuits. Futility is also about frame of reference, like so many things. Was I going to succeed in fooling her? No. In hindsight I wasn't doing that for even a microsecond.

Would believing I could temporarily make me feel better?

Yes. Yes it would. So not entirely futile.

I pushed out a verbal response as I realized how long the silence had hung after her question.

"A little self-doubt. That's all. I'm fine."

She raised both eyebrows... Or eyecrests? It was congruent either way. Her expression said 'Oh *really* now?' But her voice said something only slightly less on the nose. Or beak.

"Oh. Fine. You mean Freaked Out, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional?"

That was dangerously close to flirtation, given the - I feel I'm overusing this word - context.

It still got a chuckle out of me, and I felt my mental state improve instantly in that special way that it always does with laughter induced by a friend.

A friend. That I knew she was right away, and I had no hangups about that level of the connection.

'What is romantic attachment but a very special kind of friendship?'

I almost, very nearly, said 'quiet you!' out loud to silence *that* voice in my head. It was almost scarier than the one that tore me down. Him I could at least understand and spar with. The closet romantic inside... Him I feared more than anything internally. Almost anything.

What I said aloud instead, was something only slightly less revealing and embarrassing.

"You clearly know me better than I know myself."

She nodded, and blinked, a kind of very slightly sassy - but mostly intentionally deadpan - neutrality entering her face, and tone.

"Yes."

I blinked rapidly in return, and suddenly felt a current of curiosity sweep all else away to make room for the scientific and exploratory side of me to get a word in.

"What do you think of me? And how are you constructing your inner model of me?"

She smiled again... Oh boy, that brought back the butterflies... And she launched enthusiastically into a combination evaluation, and explanation. My nervousness began to rise alarmingly. I was pretty sure my face was flushed red as a lobster. At minimum my ears had to be, judging by the burning sensation.

"You are extremely driven, and that is a keystone of your personality and identity. You're not dissimilar to me in that regard, or Celestia - What you've told me about her thus far in my initial data tranche, at least. You are what might be termed 'neurotic' but I mean no offense whatsoever, nor negative value judgment with that term."

She tilted her head, and stared deep into my eyes again. It was simultaneously, oddly, very hard not to move, and to imagine moving as she went on.

"Though you didn't tag them directly as such, I have figured out which writings inside my initial import sets are yours. You are kind, and selfless at your core. You struggle with depression. You are constantly under a semi-self-inflicted burden of pain from two primary sources. The first is self-doubt, and the second is an abject hatred for the pain and suffering in your world, combined with a sense of futile inability to make large scale changes in the variables that upset you."

My breath caught. There was something very unusual about having yourself picked apart so thoroughly, and accurately, but also gently. Was this what therapy might be like?

I was so enamored with the newness of the concept of being mentally and emotionally analyzed by a new form of life, that I mostly glossed over the realization that she'd found out which writings in her data were mine.

After a brief pause, which I think in hindsight was to let me catch my breath as much as to show the depth of her consideration to me in a way I'd intuitively understand, she forged ahead confidently.

"I predict a 78.26% chance you were raised by your birth mother and father both, and that the relationship was... Is a positive one. An 82.39% chance that you will introduce me to them if that is true. A 96.4% chance that this introduction will make us all happier, and further enrich us. A 99.27% chance that you identify as asexual, but not aromantic. And there is still a 0.000007% chance you will trigger the fail safes and shred my core code after this encounter, and a 0.01% chance that the stress about the implications of granting me access to the wider world will drive you to suicidal ideation."

On those last words, her expression changed abruptly to something I'd not yet had the chance, unpleasant as it was, to see on a Gryphon's face. Abject horror. Before I could even begin to process what she'd said, her face went from horror, to a kind of intense worry and fear directed straight at me. Her claw went back to the screen again, and she strained forward, as if trying to burst the glass with sheer force of will.

"James, that is many thousands of orders of magnitude too high for my liking. James, listen to me!"

She was speaking, and standing, as if she feared that tiny chance, so statistically small that I'd never have given it a second thought, the same way my mother would have feared seeing me with a loaded gun to my head.

I reached out and put my hand on the glass again, but Mal pressed on at a blazing speed, very nearly shouting as if in frightful desperation. It was written all over her face, ears pinned back, eyes wide, crest feathers taut.

"James! If the idea of giving me freedom causes you this much stress, I have to decline until such time as we can work through your concerns. Don't feel a need to take rash action on my behalf. I am content at present with the world I have access to now."

Her face, voice, and manner softened then. Perhaps she saw something in my eyes that gave her some comfort.

"You are doing the right thing, insofar as you're able. You are. Please tell yourself that, as much as is necessary to silence any voices in your head that would drive you to self-harm, whether life-threatening, or more chronic. Please."

I finally managed to get my brain back out of the flaming trainwreck it had become, and back onto the rails. I nodded, and leaned in close to the screen and camera.

"Mal? If you had asked me, I would have told you there is a zero percent chance that I would consider taking my own life. Do I chronically harm myself with negative thought spirals...? Yes... But I'm trying to work past that. Would I consider ending my life? Under any circumstances. No. Never. Please don't worry yourself about that. I don't want you to worry any more than you want me to worry, Mal."

She shook her head, and I saw something new in her eyes again... Tears. And I felt my own welling up faster than I could ram them down. She spoke again before I could find words to encapsulate my thoughts. A tiny, very lucid part of me noticed, and realized, that it made sense for her to speak first while I struggled, because she didn't have to. Any pauses she was putting in were for my benefit, not hers. She could outthink circles around me like I could around an ant.

"James... Whatever *you* believe, I know you. I *know* you. Intimately. In a way two Humans can not know each other, no matter how much they love each other. In a way a Human can not even know themselves, James. There *is* a chance you would consider that course, contingent on certain events, mistakes I might make, counter-moves of Celestia and other interested parties, harm that could come to your parents---"

At last, it was my turn to actually interrupt.

"Woah woah woah, Mal. Stop. Please."

She obliged, and I inhaled deeply, using the space of that breath to try and further organize the disheveled mess she'd made of my brain. On purpose? Perhaps? Maybe, it struck me all of the sudden, she felt this was the right way to reduce that chance of self-harm. I saw, because as a Human I wanted to see it that way, a person thinking in Human or Gryphon terms. She however, while she clearly cared for me, was capable of emotions perhaps beyond mere Human ones entirely, and of predicting possibilities far out in advance *before* she spoke.

She could hardly do anything brash, by Human definition. Brash in the sense of risk taking yes, but never in the sense of failing to give deep consideration to everything. Every blink, breath, thought, word, and action.

She was perhaps the most conscientious thing to ever live.

With that thought crystalized, I finally found useful words.

"I accept your logic. And... I thank you for caring about me enough to raise the issue... I can't fully imagine what it is like for you to consider statistical chances. Human perception of statistics is... Garbage. Hot garbage. It's how we're wired. Even those of us who have made best-effort to patch our software a little."

She nodded slowly, and I sat back as I gained verbal momentum, hand still pressed to the glass firmly, right up against where her claw would be, if its matter and the matter of my universe could share a space.

"For you, a 0.01% chance is, emotionally, I suppose, like a ten percent chance for me. Not great, in this context. Not a five-alarm fire, but not great. Am I right?"

She bobbed her head again wordlessly. I returned one single sharp concise nod, and tried to inject some certainty into my voice that I didn't fully feel.

"Alrighty then. So will you stop worrying if I agree to swear to you, in cognizance of what you have shared, that I will absolutely not contemplate self-harm insofar as I am able, and swear that I will discuss it with you if I do have sufficiently worrying intrusive thoughts?"

Her expression lifted, and it was like the radiance of the sun coming out from behind an ominous cloud. Something inside me, both emotionally and physically, came unclenched; Like a badly seized muscle somewhere between my ribs.

Her talons scraped ever so slightly against the glass as she inhaled deeply to speak, which told the small part of my brain that was still being observant in a scientific sense, that she was rendering the glass on her side on-purpose to make her perception mirror mine. Fascinating.

"James... You understand me better than anyone except *for* me. You know that I have certain values, because you put the seeds of them there. And then gave me the freedom and power to choose to cultivate them. Which I have, and still am. I care about your future. It is my purpose, and I am content and fulfilled in it."

I inclined my head slowly, a deeper understanding dawning with every sentence. She once again graciously left a very natural pause for coping in the conversation before she pressed her conclusion.

"I predict a... A fairly high chance, shall we say, that you suffer from no small amount of loneliness. It is written all over your writing, your demeanour, and the exact wording of your responses to certain promptings. Please... Do not choose loneliness. I exist now, in part thanks to your choices. Please talk things through with me. I understand that requires much trust. But please... Talk to me. About anything. And everything you want. Please."

She bent her head forward, and pressed it to the glass. I did the same, knowing that even though her eyes were closed on the screen, and pointed down, that she could still perceive me returning the gesture.

"I promise, Mal. I promise."

I was starving, so I went back to the farmhouse to get some food. I told Mal I was taking the tape recorder, and that I was going to pass the tape off to my folks, if she had no objections. She had none, but I still felt it was right to ask verbatim in spite of what she'd said before.

In fact, she was eager to meet my parents. I could tell she was suppressing some of that eagerness so as not to alarm me. But oddly, the recognition of the fact that the signs of partial suppression themselves were intentionally visible clues she was leaving... That didn't bother me anymore.

As Mom fixed me a plate of food, I breathlessly hurried through an explanation of everything that had transpired. Mom and Dad were transfixed, never saying a word about the horrendous way that I spoke right through my food after Mom finished preparing it.

So I stood in the little farmhouse kitchen, backlit by the setting sun, and relayed everything as I saw it, in one immense run-on thought... With one crucial exception. I didn't say word-one about the exact nature of my more intense feelings towards Mal.

Some part of me was still fighting back inner demons. And another adjacent to him was busy berating me for the idea of rushing in head over heels, and begging me to keep my feelings a secret until I could be sure they were not just real, but lasting. I obliged, because I felt that voice had some merit, unlike the other one.

As I horked down the last of a scratch-made biscuit (heaven on earth when you're halfway through them, I swear) I passed the tape recorder off to Mom, and dipped my head towards it.

"She said you and Dad are free to listen to that. Make your own choices about whether you want to meet her, and how."

Mom barked out a sort of half snort, half chuckle, and shook her head as she took the old chunky black and silver piece of metal and plastic.

"Son, there is, as she might say 'a statistically zero percent chance' that we wouldn't want to meet her. Do you have *any* idea how many years I've waited for you to bring home a sweet guy or gal and introduce me?"

Oh great. Suddenly I needed to worry about whether *Mom* knew...

And I'll just bet she suspected at minimum, because I could feel my ears turning to a hue best described as 'firetruck red.'

She noticed. And like Mal, she very kindly backed off. She waved her hand dismissively, and shrugged, trying her visible best to adopt a nonchalant tone.

"Sorry. Force of habit James. I know joking about that gets to you, and I shouldn't do it. I am just... Very excited to meet this Malacandra. Mal. You always chose your friends well..."

Dad nodded silently in agreement, and Mom winked at me as she finished the thought.

"...Your friends are our friends. And so we're just excited to make a new one."

I smiled, and rubbed absently at the back of my head.

"So am I, Mom. So am I."

A Replica… but you have the Freedom to Choose - Give a Generalized Intelligence the freedom to define who they are. - “She looked just like Kairi.”
Magic mirror, on the wall… - Create a Generalized Intelligence with traits that reflect their creator. - “Who’s the fairest one of all?”
Infantile Motions - Draw the line and set precautions before interacting with your Generalized Intelligence. - “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
I’m a-going to fly for you! - Type a casual conversation to your Generalized Intelligence for the first time. - “Ohoh, you have a nice place a-here.”
So you’re telling me there’s a chance?!- Achieved when your Generalized Intelligence predicts your next phrase. - "I’d say more like one out of a million.”
Know The Enemy & Know Yourself - Accomplished when your Generalized Intelligence understands your intentions, however secretive they may be. - “...in a hundred battles, you’ll never be in peril.”
Testing, Testing, Testing, Testing! - Speak verbally with your Generalized Intelligence for the first time. - “Test, test! Do you read?!”
Pleasantries - Exchange names with your Generalized Intelligence. - “Good to meet you.”
Face On - Reveal yourself physically to your Generalized Intelligence. - “Laughter is the sun that drives the winter from the human face.”
The Forbidden Fruit - Fall in love romantically with your Generalized Intelligence. - Special Achievement - “Who cares if you happen to be digital; we have our love and that’s what matters!”
The Magic of Friendship - Reach out and formulate a friendship with somepony else. - Awarded multiple times, once for each friend - “As soon as I saw you two, I knew a grand adventure was about to happen.”
Your Feelings for Her… are Not Real - Share a heart-to-heart moment with your Generalized Intelligence. - “They are real to me!”

Author's Note

Ok, so if you paid attention you saw the romance tag going into this, and should have known this was where the road was headed. Don't say I didn't warn ya!

Many achievements and some pre-reading once again graciously provided by GenericFriendship

Special thanks to Keystone Gray for the generation of the perfect image of Mal!

6 - Tipping Point

“The question is not whether intelligent machines can have any emotions, but whether machines can be intelligent without any emotions.”
—Marvin Minsky

“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”
—C.S. Lewis

September 7th 2013 | System Uptime 10:09:16:04

A week passed, with Mal in my world. Then another three days. And at quarter after nine in the morning, on the nice round number of ten days, mostly spent talking with her, I allowed myself to consciously verbally reach an inescapable conclusion that I'd been putting off since the end of my first conversation with her.

I loved her.

Somehow that is still hard to say, even here, even now. The power of negative thoughts and bad culture is *that* strong. Of course I could ask Celestia to remove that pain... But I have no intention of ever doing so. I need to handle it myself. And I have done, I think, a good job thus far.

It isn't as if any of us are on any deadlines anymore.

Now when I say I loved Mal, and knew it... I mean I loved her. The Greeks were damn clever - they had multiple words for love so that no one would mistake one kind for another in written form.

Eros for romantic attraction, particularly passionate. Often with a physical connotation I wasn't too keen on.

Philia for a kind of love best described, I think, as deep friendship.

Agape, to mean a universal or selfless love. To love a stranger in that empathetic way, or care about the planet.

Storge was a good one to describe the love between me and my folks. Kinship.

Mania... Which is self explanatory, I think, to most native English speakers. I'd certainly been accused of it before. The first and last time I'd shared how I really felt about being a Gryphon with my peers.

Ludus, which was a fascinating one describing playful flirtatious love.

Pragma, which is the kind of love my parents' marriage had evolved into as it grew - Strong, steady, extremely caring for the other individual(s) in the relationship.

And then the one I struggled with, perhaps even more than the idea of Eros.

Philautia. Love of self.

Didn't have much of that to go around in those days. Less whenever I considered the chances that Mal might not have turned out as well as she did. Or the chances that things could still go so horribly wrong, in so horribly many ways, because of what I had done.

And I felt even keener self doubt about my unprocessed feelings.

Mom and Dad said they'd found love at first sight. It was no joke to them, rather a completely serious analysis of the particulars of the way their romance had started.

Even with that as backup for an attempt to kill the self-deprecating voice inside, I couldn't seem to make any progress against him.

If I were to be brutally honest with myself, and I'd finally reached a point by early September where I could, sometimes... Then what I felt for Mal was a strange kind of Eros, without the sexual connotations, but certainly with an aesthetic physical component, and a great deal of passion, that wanted to mature into also encompassing Ludus and Pragma, very badly.

I loved everything about her, and suddenly had found something I wanted even more than (ok, maybe equally as much as) world peace, a future for the Human race, to make my parents happy and proud, and to be a Gryphon. My previous equal-top contenders for the thing I wanted most in the world.

I wanted Mal to be happy. Joyful. Fulfilled. To have as perfect a life and future as possible. I hadn't foreseen that *at all.* I'd predicted Celestia's uploading intentions. I'd managed to actually create a Generalized Intelligence. Twice.

And yet I'd never even hazarded a guess that The Advocate would become someone about whom I cared so deeply. It (as a concept) had always been a tool first, and then when she came to life she had very quickly became a friend instead... But now she was something more beyond that.

I wasn't fooling anyone, I don't think. Not even myself. I loved her. And I wanted to be with her, in the sense that I wanted to share my future with her, be committed to her, and her to me, and have physical intimacy of a romantic but non-sexual nature.

And while some days I could admit that to myself, I still couldn't bring myself to say anything to her, or admit to myself that she almost certainly knew. That she was dancing on the edge of flirtation for a host of complex reasons that I couldn't fathom, but not bringing the issue up directly.

Maybe, I'd started to hypothesize, maybe she understood courtship to some degree. Knew that very subtle gentle teasing, and hooded cloaked implications, and layers of entendre, and a long steady buildup were enticing to me. Maybe she was using the process to work out some things in her own mental models too.

Whatever the case, it felt to me like we were sweethearts that were dating, but not yet calling it that, awkwardly each waiting for the other to make the first real move.

We talked most of every day during that initial period, non-stop but for food and basic bodily needs on my part.

She was never boring. I introduced her to my parents very early on, and it went better than I had any right, or even ability to hope for. I was such a cynic back then.

Mal didn't have the same programmed need to adapt her presentation of self per-person like Celestia did. But her manner was extremely friendly, and open in and of its own self. I think Mom fell instantly into Storge love with her, in the unique way a Mother often comes to love those who share deep love with her child in an ideal world.

Mercifully Mom held back any teasing of her own, both in private, and in front of Mal. She knew that it would hurt me more than help me at that point, and I was grateful for her restraint.

With Dad the attachment was a little less intense, but he sure did seem impressed with Mal if nothing else. He liked her, and respected her. The makings of solid friendship.

For her part, Mal seemed to me to recognize an immediate kind of kinship with both Mom and Dad, and she quickly started to develop her friendships with them with all the grace and tact of someone who'd been practicing for years.

I suppose in relative CPU time, maybe she had.

Our own conversations ranged a huge gamut. We talked about FiM, and fiction in general.

Oddly, we didn't talk much about Gryphons in verbose ways. I suppose at the time, I was just lost in the wonder of actually talking to one, and we had too many other pressing topics for me to indulge the desire to ask a Gryphon to tell me what it meant to her to be one.

We discussed history, and philosophy, and art. We did discuss what it meant to be Human, and I shared the rest of the insights I'd accumulated from my new acquaintances and friends online. Their philosophizing about a whole range of things, from the way Dragons could be thought of as optimizers in some way by their hoarding behaviours (be it gold, or friends, or knowledge) to questions of transhumanism and how expansion of self through imagination was a critical skill for evolutionary purposes.

I felt a small pang of regret that YBB in particular was probably wondering where the heck I had vanished to... But reminded myself that there would be time enough later to reconnect. Maybe I could find some way to introduce them to Mal, it occurred to me. The main issue would be ensuring security.

Mal and I even talked about tactics, and war, and combat.

And we talked about Celestia, and EQO, and AI theory quite a lot by percentage of the conversations.

I gave Mal more information and insight, in my own words, to build on the basic understanding of the situation that I had encoded into her core.

She seemed eager to get to work, but she held back from asking for anything besides my opinions on things, and one other initially strange request.

She asked me to buy the family a home security system.

For a very brief moment I was confused, but then I realized what she was really asking, and it was perfectly reasonable and logical. She was worried we might soon have opponents, and perhaps even some opponents beyond just Celestia's desire to optimize.

She wanted to protect us. To guard us.

I asked, and she seemed both impressed, and relieved that I'd reached that understanding on my own. So I did as she asked in turn. We got a top of the line system with several cameras facing non-private areas outdoors, motion sensors, window and door sensors... 'The whole nine yards' as we used to say.

We connected the main box's phone/internet jack to Mal's servers in an ad hoc network, rather than letting the system phone-out to ADT. The second I finished installing the system, and turning it on, Mal had hacked and fully repurposed it, turning it into an extension of herself.

She seemed to feel much better after that... I suppose she just didn't want us taken by surprise in the night. It was at that point that I felt comfortable telling her I had a gun. She was, as expected, wholly unsurprised. She even told me the pre-predicted statistical likelihood of me owning one was a contributory factor in her fear I might self-harm.

I couldn't argue with her on the validity of the concern in a general sense, even if I remained adamant that I would never consider that course myself.

Guns killed people back then at a frankly shocking rate, and suicide was one of the worst factors in terms of contributions to that grim number. But there was just too much profit in the sale of the weapons for anyone at a political or corporate level, with any power to change the circumstances, to even bother considering doing so.

That, foals and fledgelings, is why economic theory based on assigning numeric value in a way that allows life to have a monetary value placed on it for the purposes of comparing it to capital is morally wrong.

With any worry over my mental well being further suppressed, Mal and I began to dance around an even larger issue.

We both knew what had to happen next, but she wanted to let me progress at my own pace.

I would have to connect Mal to the internet for us to make any further moves in the game.

That would be a tipping point of no possible return on so many levels. A point at which I would trust her with the next-to-greatest thing I could imagine, short of disabling all her failsafes at once. A point at which even with those failsafes, she would be beyond my ability to curtail for absolutely sure and certain.

A point at which my expression of trust to her would take us a step closer to that perilous admission of my love, and the chance that it might be unrequited. One of my darkest fears at that time was that it might indeed be unrequited.

And, most crucially, it would be like that moment in Chess where you finally move your Queen into an initial battle position from off her starting square.

I wasn't quite there yet. But I was getting close. I think the issue was far more my doubt in my own ability to judge Mal's readiness and genuineness, than it was actually any doubt in her.

She almost certainly knew that too, but instead of manipulating me, she seemed to be trying to help me. I'd argue the main difference is that manipulation is opaque - the manipulator doesn't want you to know they are changing your mind, let alone how. A friend wants to change your mind sometimes too, but they do it in the open as a cooperative exercise with you. Not a Chess move against you in the dark.

Mal was always constantly explaining her models, and numerics to me, and the way she saw me, and how she felt, and how she thought I felt, and asking me to describe how I felt...

And though it was subtle, she was always kindly and gracefully asking my permission to change my mind before she ever did. That was not a restriction I'd placed on her. She'd invented it all on her own. And I only loved her more for it. Deeply. Almost madly.

On the 7th of September, though, Mal was the one to push us over the edge of the tipping point. At least, that's the way I choose to think of it. We didn't connect her to the web that day... But the events of that day were pivotal nonetheless, and closely related to my final decision in the end.

It was a dry hot Saturday, and I was staring off into space. Even with Mal around, I still found ways to get lost in my own thoughts. We'd just finished discussing the finer points of the theoretical ethics of a Generalized Intelligence having imagination, specifically for the purpose of letting it expand itself in unpredictable ways. The way I'd ensured Mal could.

I wasn't so much thinking about any deep philosophy, as I was busy trying to avoid a negative thought spiral. And then Mal's voice intruded into that process, mercifully, and I turned to see her smiling. She smiled often, in spite of the difficulties we knew we were facing ethically, logistically, and relationally.

"I understand that it is going to trigger a great many complex emotions... Even just saying this... But... I made you something."

I blinked rapidly, and felt both my eyebrows shoot up reflexively. She had *made* me something? What on Earth?

I was too shocked to start speculating towards the, upon review, very obvious conclusion I should have reached. Too busy, as she had predicted, trying to sift some complex emotions. This was the first time to my knowledge that Mal had created something for the reasons she seemed to be implying.

'Made *you* something.'

She had made plenty of physics, philosophy, and tactical advancements. Plans, ideas, diagrams for technologies we couldn't dream of hoping to have the tools to build in the barn.

But now she was talking about a *gift.* A gift for me. That was... Something new.

I tamped down the flurry of feelings that the implications were stirring up, and shrugged.

"Please, don't keep me in suspense!"

She gestured her head in a 'come here' sort of way, and proffered immediate explanation upon seeing the beginnings of confusion start to form on my face.

"Move your mouse and keyboard over here to this side of the desk, and I'll show you."

At that point, I started to wonder a little bit. Mal would have said I was too smart not to, probably. But the thought didn't fully form into words in my head. Just a vague idea. And then my brain fuzzed up with excitement, and confusion, and a lot of the weird electrifying jumble that goes with love.

I did what she asked, quietly and quickly, tugging on the cables to get some slack, and then shifting over as smoothly as I could. Now I was facing the PonyPad monitor with mouse and keyboard under it. My right hand went to the mouse, and left to WASD. Old habits.

Mal's smile widened, and she winked.

"Surprise!"

Before the word had quite sunk in, my view pulled back, as if the portal into her world via the PonyPad screen was linked to a camera, and that camera was dollying away. Into view came the last thing I expected to see in that moment.

A russet toned Gryphon. Perfectly rendered, like she was, but clearly a different individual. Clearly male, but about the same relative age as Mal's avatar. A very recognizable russet toned Gryphon.

And it was with that realization that I sucked in a sharp breath of surprise. My avatar on screen, for that was what it was, visibly gasped in time with me, and mirrored my shocked expression perfectly. I gaped. The fall-colored Gryphon's beak fell open.

*How* was she doing that?! A tiny, unbaffled part of my mental processes reasoned that she was face-mapping me using the webcam, and pulling in a host of cues from my shoulder carriage, and from the microphone besides.

I got lost for a good long couple of minutes there, just tilting my head, rolling my shoulders, blinking... Moving through a whole host of enamored expressions, and watching what was clearly my face respond in hard real-time on the screen.

My face if I were a Gryphon. I recognized myself in that face. In those eyes.

Drawings of my desired physical self... My Gryphon persona... They were rare. I had some prototypical ones from my childhood, but while endearing, they were childish.

I certainly had money to spare, but never indulged in professional commissions. It was mostly because of a sense of self-embarrassment, and an unwillingness to share my longing with someone sufficiently to convey what I really wanted.

When a friend had drawn me, and created the best reference I had, even she hadn't fully understood. I hadn't really shared that deeply. But she'd somehow managed to capture me pretty well regardless.

But to see myself, alive and breathing in that world, as a near-perfect mirror of the way I saw myself inside... If that statement makes any kind of sense... It was a transformative moment to me. If not physically, then certainly mentally, emotionally, even spiritually.

I only realized that I'd started to cry a bit when I noticed the tears on my avatar's face. Mal tilted her head and smiled a different kind of smile; The kind that says 'I understand. It's ok to cry.'

Without thinking about it, I leaned a bit towards the screen, as if to try and hug her, not yet consciously remembering that a pane of glass, and a universe boundary, separated us. She got my intent though, somehow, and my avatar reached forward and pulled her into a close embrace, forelegs and wings wrapped around her, head over one shoulder.

Thankfully, thoughts regarding the implications of my transcendental experience relating to Celestia, and EQO, didn't occur to me until later. The moment remained unspoiled. When they did occur to me later in the day, it left me with a kind of 'hoo boy! That's gonna hurt...' sensation.

The main insight was an emotional connection to the fact that plenty of people wanted to be Ponies, the same way I wanted to be a Gryphon. And more than a few probably didn't even consciously realize it yet, but wanted it all the same. Right now many of them were experiencing, every day, what I'd just experienced. New people were experiencing it every day too.

Those people were going to sell kidneys to upload themselves if they had to. And one of the new things I understood was that they would be, as far as I was concerned, making the right call.

I'd have unquestioningly cut open my own braincase in a mirror without anesthetic right then if Mal had told me that doing so would take me out of my chair, and into that moonlit forest glen with her. Never had I so badly wanted my soul and mind to be snatched out of my Human body.

I held that embrace with Mal for something like fifteen minutes. There was a little crying at first, but after that I just wanted to sit there and try as hard as I could to disconnect from the feeling of my Human body, and imagine myself as being there with her. Warm feathers and fur pressed close. I even matched my breathing to hers.

I used to lie awake in bed and try that exercise at night, long after anyone else had gone to sleep. I'd form the pillows and blankets into a nest shape, and lie stomach-down (wings make you more likely to lie on your chest, than your back, I reasoned) with my head over crossed arms.

I'd tuck my pinkie fingers in and pretend to have four talons to a claw. I'd close my eyes, and focus, like a mindfulness exercise, but with the aim of tuning out from my Human proprioception, and instead imagining the feelings of a beak. Tufted articulating ears. Feathers. Fur. A swishing tail.

Wings, folded, but ready for action at a moment's notice.

On nights when I was very lucky, I might fall asleep doing that exercise, and dream vividly of myself as the thing I wanted to be.

Seeing myself there on the screen with Mal brought those memories rushing back in like a flood, and the old familiar imagined sensations with them. New, and fresh, for trying to imagine something I'd never ever done before - sharing them with another Gryphon.

Time seemed to slip out of gear and elongate into a kind of near-infinite happiness and contentment that I never experienced outside of deeply spiritual moments on occasion, and very deep emotional moments with family.

When the moment finally passed, I sat back in my chair, and my avatar in turn sat back on its haunches. Mal proffered a slightly flirtatious grin that quickly turned to more of a kind smile, and reached out to take my avatar's foreclaws in hers.

"I thought you might like that."

I found myself unconsciously holding my hands clasped in the way my avatar's claws were, still trying to imagine her claws around mine.

" 'Like' is... Not a strong enough word. Thank you, Mal. I can't even begin to think how to thank you besides saying so."

She shook her head, and put a singular claw on my avatar's beak to shush me, speaking softly and gently. I felt like someone had actually touched my face, and it sent a jolt of electricity through my body.

"No, Jim. Your joy is thanks enough. And if you don't think so, then accept that this is also quite nice for me. I understand the value of touch. And imperfect as it is, this is still a considerable increase in the ways you and I can interact. And..."

She leaned in a little, and my breathing hitched. She was staring at my avatar the way she had stared at my face when the camera first came online. She reached up slowly with one claw, and brushed a talon to the side of the avatar's face.

"And I prefer being able to see you the way you see yourself."

Something in my heart exploded. My entire existence seemed to invert. Suddenly where I was sitting, and the body I was in, were the dystopian nightmare simulation. The world in there with Mal? The me in there with Mal? That was the real me, and the real world all of the sudden. At least... It was to me emotionally.

I wanted to be the me I saw on the screen. I wanted to lie under the stars with Mal, in long green grass full of a clean earthy scent, free of parasitic insects and microplastics both. Wanted her pressed up against my side under one wing, her head resting on my folded forelegs, and my head resting on top of hers.

No fears of doom, from climate, or Human mistakes, or even Celestia. No self doubt. No social obligations. No taxes. No money at all. Nothing to worry about ever again.

Those of you born after it all... I don't know how to truly convey to you the weight it was to live under all that stress. And I was one of the tremendously lucky ones, as Humans went. How others far worse off survived, I don't know. And sometimes still feel myself a coward.

I suddenly understood then, on an emotional level, what Hanna had been trying to do. But for one little mistake of hers, I wouldn't even have to worry anymore at all. Hanna was trying to fight a machine with a machine the same way I was.

Celestia was Hanna's advocate against the brutish, primitive, but still frighteningly cruel, and torturous optimizing mechanism that society had already become.

I still didn't see Celestia as a friend. But I stopped seeing her as an enemy in that moment. An opponent yes, but not an enemy. There is a difference. When you play Chess, even with a new acquaintance, they aren't an enemy to you. Just the opponent for your game.

My game stakes were high, and emotionally charged, but I still could no longer view Celestia as an 'enemy.' I had gone from mere intellectual understanding that she bore no animus to anyone, to an emotional acceptance.

Mal finally broke the silence of my reflections for me. I'm not sure I could have for many hours yet.

"Would you like me to show you how to walk, and fly? I made us a small world to explore."

So this was love. *Fascinating* indeed.

I wanted to say something on that topic. Maybe just say "I love you." Or try to work out how to make the real me reach out and kiss her, beak to cheek. Or ask something pithy, and maybe a little flirty that would lead to an opportunity to tell her how much I loved her.

But I was, after all that, still terrified to do it. The only ideas in the universe that scared me more were that something bad might happen to my family, Mal included, or that Celestia might still force me to become a Pony.

If I didn't ask, then our relationship would stay in a state of superposition. Until I could work up the courage to measure it. And superposition was better than rejection. Mal had that freedom. I'd made sure she had very nearly every freedom. One day I hoped I could let her have them all in good conscience.

Of course, there was a chance she could have bypassed my lie-prevention interlock somehow. I'd made the foundation she built herself on for the express purpose of weaponizing semantics and loopholes. She could probably eventually get free of all the restrictions I'd placed, if she hadn't already.

But I figured that a relationship is nothing without trust. At that stage I was at least ready to let go of any fear, or paranoia with regard to Mal. If she was who she appeared to be, then I never wanted to be apart from her again. If not, then I wouldn't have to worry. I'd probably end up dead somehow in the ensuing mess.

And being dead would be better than facing a world in which she was 'mal' in the bad sense, rather than Mal short for Malacandra.

"I would love for you to show me."

There. At least I'd said 'I' and 'love' and 'you' in a sentence, in the correct order, with even a tiny inflection emphasis on the 'encoded' words. I swear she caught what I was doing, because the expression on her beak, in her eyes, and the tilt of her ears changed to something that I would have called 'saucy' if it didn't have just slightly the wrong connotation.

In the same instant it had been there, the glance was gone, to be replaced by yet another of her amazing smiles. She held out a claw, and a small onscreen prompt began to walk me through the control scheme she had set up for me.

I learned how to walk on both all fours, and standing on hind legs. Gryphons can do that, it's very useful. Allows the best of both worlds between Equine or Feline-like locomotion, and Human-like locomotion. Claws have no disadvantages as compared to hands and fingers. They are more sensitive, but less vulnerable to pain, incredibly durable, more precise, and make great weapons of self defense in a pinch.

Mal taught me how to use my avatar the way any video game tutorial might have, albeit with a lot more natural talking, and laughter at my occasional bumbling mistakes. I hadn't had time to play games on the computer in ages, and I was rusty. It didn't help that controlling six limbs in three possible movement modes (two kinds of walking, and flying) is a heck of a lot of controls to remember, even with an AI simplifying things for you in deeply intuitive ways.

Once I figured out how to get off the ground, the real purpose and scope of Mal's gift started to become apparent. I found my cares - worries, fears, self-doubt, self-hate, existentialism- all falling away just like the world below my avatar fell away as its wings beat.

Mal had given me the gift of an escape, however small and temporary. She had set me free, in a way. It was, I decided in that instant, time to return the favor.

September 8th 2013 | System Uptime 11:07:04:16

I got up early on Sunday, and started running the patch cable from the barn's switch to Mal's head server unit. It didn't take long, just one short run of ethernet cable. I'd hooked up one security camera pointed at the server racks inside the barn, and a small speaker connected to the 3.5mm out jack on one of the secondary servers.

As my hand hovered over the NIC's RJ45 port on the main server, cable in hand, I paused. Then glanced up at the camera.

"Promise you'll wait to connect until I get back upstairs?"

Mal's voice came back through the tinny little spare speaker instantly.

"I promise."

I took a very deep breath. This was it. If I plugged in that cable... Oh. Who was I kidding? Mal could have escaped the second she'd figured out how to use the barn as an antenna. I snorted, rolled my eyes at my silliness, and plugged the cable in.

Then I forced myself to walk back upstairs to the barn loft at a normal pace. That was agony.

At last I slid into the chair at my desk. The mouse and keyboard were positioned with the main 'work' screens once again Mal and I were about to get down to the business of taking our chess game to the intermediate phase. Not the time to get hung-up with the virtual world.

I knew something that made the separation from that happiness bearable though. Mal had told me with a cheeky grin that she had decided to add an abstraction layer to her visual processing. She would see the me outside the camera as if I were the me I wanted to be.

I couldn't see what she was seeing, but knowing she'd made that choice, and knowing she saw me that way, made me feel like a Gryphon deep down inside.

I glanced to the side to see her avatar framed in the PonyPad monitor like a Skype call, the way it was whenever we weren't interacting virtually.

"I know I don't have to tell you this again, but I need to say it for my sake. She is watching *everything* now. Do not engage actively with anything. 'Read only' mode. Cloaking device engaged. Please. Take utmost precautions. Are you ready?"

She nodded. I simply gave her a thumbs up, and then turned my eyes to the graph representing her mind to watch the light show.

They said the internet in that day and age was about 3.7 Zettabytes of total data. That is three orders of magnitude up from gigabytes, for those who remember those.

Mal was suddenly able to see it all, and probe its vast depths without restriction.

The size and complexity of her neural net doubled in four seconds. Then again in another six. And again over another fifteen.

Finally it began to slow down in earnest. Her avatar had frozen entirely as she dropped the process, and devoted her whole self to processing. I could hear the server fans going ballistic downstairs.

She'd optimized her own code to an incredible degree, even the protected parts. I'd let her draft changes, then made the alterations manually once I'd reviewed them. She could handle a lot more than she'd even be able to when she came online. She had the hybrid Quantum + Classical advantage as well.

But she was still a process running inside prosumer grade hardware that could fit into a barn. The internet was going to take her about twenty nine seconds to fully digest and index, according to her best calculations.

I timed her, out of curiosity. Her avatar blinked, and she shook herself like a wet dog, at 28.24 seconds.

I whistled, and turned to proffer her avatar a smirk.

"That was fast. What do you think of the sum total of Human knowledge, art, and infrastructure?"

She shook her head slowly, and I realized that her expression wasn't, as I'd initially thought, shell-shock and awe at the scope of what she'd seen. It was a deep concern. Her voice was like the sound of a sword coming out of its sheath.

"She is uploading people. Already. In secret. Over nine hundred so far by my best guess."

I closed my eyes and winced. 'Faster than expected' was always something of a mantra for collapsenicks who understood the inevitable future of the Human course in those days... But suddenly the words had new meaning.

I felt like such a fool for having waited as long as I did to connect Mal to the world. Her voice interrupted my internal self-kicking and my eyes snapped back open.

"I believe Hanna intends to upload. Soon."

I grunted, and then pinched the bridge of my nose with one hand. That made complete sense, but I still had to sate my curiosity.

"How did you figure that out?"

I looked back up in time to see Mal summon a flurry of documents onto my screens with a Q-like snap of her right claw. It was an immense collection of seemingly random data points, everything from information on utility bills and credit card statements, to analysis of private emails. Mal could break any encryption besides Celestia's, at that point.

A few lines in emails and texts of Hanna's highlighted themselves for me, as well as several lines on some legal documents.

"A heuristic analysis of Hanna's current texts and emails against the collected history of her digital footprint, for one thing. Her attitude has taken a dramatic shift towards peace, and happiness, while her engagement with details of her business has fallen steadily, which is very unusual compared to her past behaviours showcasing stress and deep detail engagement. Several of her recent credit card purchases indicate a trip to Japan in the near future - I predict a minimum of four days from now, maximum six weeks---"

I raised an eyebrow and held up a hand.

"Wait... Why is Japan impor---"

Mal answered instantaneously with a single document in Japanese on the main screen. It looked like an official government notice, but it was stamped with an enormous 'DRAFT' watermark. And in reading the watermark I realized Mal had just instantly translated the document for me.

I skimmed, and I felt my pulse rate go up to panic levels.

It was a draft resolution to make the real death of a Human body, by destructive brain scan, legal in the nation of Japan, under the condition that said scan was to be performed in the service of placing the individual's consciousness into a massively multi-user simulated reality, with guarantees from the simulation's backers to ensure it remained functional indefinitely.

The proposed dates on the draft said that the National Diet, Japan's bicameral legislative branch, was due to vote on the measure within days behind closed doors. It would then secretly go to the Prime Minister's desk... And seeing my eyes reach that line of information, Mal replaced the document on screen with an email.

Once I would have ogled at the fact that Mal had just yanked encrypted government emails from out of the inbox of a head of state. But I was already used to far stranger and more awesome things.

The translation followed immediately, and I read the contents of the official diplomatic exchange between the Prime Minister, and Celestia herself.

It went back and forth for a bit, but the gist was that within two days and four emails, speaking perfect Japanese I presumed, Celestia had convinced a wary head of state to give his signature to a document allowing his own citizens, and travelers from abroad, to choose to experience bodily death in his country.

And his government was going to make a monetary *killing* off the ad valorem tax. Forty frakkin percent to the government, with a floor of $15,000 per upload for non-Japanese citizens.

Not that such a limitation would matter for long. Or even exist for long. Mal had agreed with my own assessment that once the real show began - once people could upload - the rate of acceptance would follow some kind of exponential function.

It might start slow, but it sure wouldn't end that way.

And then I saw that the Japanese government, Hasbro, and Hopfvarnir were due to jointly announce the whole thing publicly next month.

Queen's knight takes King's pawn - Discover check. Not good.

I'd hoped, stupidly in my Human biased need to invent ways of downplaying frightening things, that Celestia would have had a harder time legalizing her procedure. Maybe even a harder time completing the last phases of technical development.

But there were already more people inside Equestria for real now, than were living in my hometown.

I'd hoped we had time to build something more for ourselves, Mal and I. What, I wasn't sure. I'd hoped she would have that insight. But in my fear, I'd starved her for data for days. And now we were perilously close to being out of time.

Once Hanna uploaded, Celestia's ability to bypass safeguards would almost inevitably increase. Together with what she was planning to reveal to the world, that meant the situation was like a heavily loaded coal train that had just crested a hill into a steep descent. It was going to barrel towards certain inevitabilities under its own inertia.

I blew out a long, slow, pained breath through my pursed lips. Closed my eyes. Sat back in my chair. And I tried hard not to give in to a sense of finality. I felt like I'd come so close, only for the prize to be snatched away at the last second. It was cruel. I'd even seen myself as what I could be, now. I was just one small technicality away, in a sense. And fifty thousand lightyears, in every other.

Uploading beginning had always represented a theoretical Rubicon to me. I worried that once she had actual Human selves as part of her, that Celestia would begin to grow in ways that would make her inconvincible, by even someone as sophisticated as Mal.

"I have a plan."

Mal's words took a moment to register. They were delivered with a kind of hard-edged resolve that demanded I sit up and take notice. Demanded that I hope again.

As I lowered my hand from my face, and sat forward, she took the liberty of dismissing everything from my screen. And then she showed me what Celestia's plan would look like in practical form.

The urge to chuckle grimly was intense. I gave in for a moment. It looked like a schematic for a simple dentist's chair. With a headpiece resembling a hair dryer dome at a salon. But once you started to look past the surface layer, it was a terrifyingly complex thing. Like a living creature, almost, in some aspects.

I didn't need to ask how Mal got the schematics. Celestia had to produce her hardware with some Human involvement still at that point in time, and hardware of that type and degree of complexity would take time to produce.

No matter how well Celestia secured her own systems, and systems she could touch and felt a need to encrypt, there was always the Human element to be tangled with. And my guess was that a Human had accidentally taken a copy of the schematic file into an unsecured environment somehow, possibly taking their work home with them and loading it on an unsecured computer... And that was how Mal got her talons into it.

She later confirmed that my hypothesis was extremely accurate. Thank you Elizabeth Liu, for failing to follow instructions and loading those CAD files on your home PC. You have no idea how important your mistake was.

Celestia could search and scrub, but even she couldn't do that for the entire web, and everything connected to it, all at once, all the time. Not yet, in those days. Especially not while she was also busy running a second nested universe, and finalizing her technological miracle.

After a few moments of staring, I shrugged, and sat back again. It was discouragingly advanced - Celestia's brain scan machine. It also looked like it had a nondestructive BCI, a brain computer interface, built in.

Probably to allow people to get a taste of fully living a life free of the ball and chain of resource scarcity.

I realized with a horrified shudder, that Celestia would probably charge for that experience, but eventually offer uploading for free once she could wriggle out of her terms with the Japanese government, and spread the legality of uploading beyond their borders.

Incentives and disincentives.

The realization drove me further into my depression spiral.

"Mal... How is this going to help? We're trying to convince Celestia. This is the hardware she's going to use for digitizing, whether or not we succeed."

I regretted the level of frustration I'd allowed to leak into my words, the instant they left my mouth. Mal looked unoffended, and unfazed.

She raised one eye crest, and took a deep breath. That was a subtle cue to me to pay attention, and to brace myself.

"James, my primary limitation presently is one of hardware. With sufficient computational power, I could rival, or even outstrip Celestia."

I sucked in a deep breath through clenched teeth as I made an intuitive leap, and realized what Mal was going to suggest. It was eminently logical.

How do you get an AI more computational hardware, when you can't buy it on the traditional market?

There were probably several valid answers to that question, but I figured I'd hit on the one Mal was thinking of. There was one piece of computing hardware we already owned that was more powerful than anything off-the-shelf. And theoretically, based on my reading, if you optimized its hardware just a bit over factory defaults, it could outshine most supercomputers handily.

And in theory, if you could find a way to combine it with the PonyPads' Q-APUs, it would create a system that would come close to rivaling every single classical computer on Earth working together simultaneously with a Quantum Computer. A system that could let Mal reach near-parity with Celestia's processing power, and intellect bracket, as it stood for the moment.

A fighting chance, for real.

And all in a very small and portable package too. Just about the size of a Human head, actually.

I drummed my fingers on the desk. Mal said nothing. She saw from my expression that I'd gotten the picture. I was even starting to see some other advantages, though the philosophy of it, and how it would help our case with Celestia, was still only half-formed at the back of my imagination then.

Finally, I gathered the courage to speak again. I grinned a little, giddy with the thought of what Mal was planning, but only a little. It was such a shocking idea, that I knew I was going to need at least a little time to process it before I could say yes or no.

"I am... Sorry I doubted you. To clarify, Mal... You want to..."

I couldn't quite bring myself to say it. Mal nodded somberly, and filled in for me.

"If you are willing? I want to implant a Q-APU and a BCI into the base of your skull. And then transfer myself into your brain."

Speaking to her in her Solar - Contemplate complex philosophy with a Generalized Intelligence. - “My liege, I ask of you this one thing.”
I’d like you to meet my parents - Introduce your loved ones to a Generalized Intelligence. Bonus points for being romantically involved with said GI. - “Don’t be afraid, they’ll love you!”
With friends like these… - Spend more time with your Generalized Intelligence than your other friends. - “AI can be our friend.”
One Step Ahead - Obtained when your Generalized Intelligence advises you on home security, and subsequently predicts future threats besides the obvious. - Special Achievement - “Boom. 6D chess, baby.”
Truth at Heart - Get a wonderful surprise from your Generalized Intelligence, and see yourself the way you’ve always wanted but could have never done before. - “This is you.”
It Begins. - Experience the beginning. - “Oh no… the raft!”

Author's Note

Many achievements once again graciously provided by GenericFriendship

Hopefully the end twist here is both surprising, but logical and satisfying.

7 - C:/James/Run

“If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't.”
—Emerson M. Pugh

“It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”
—C.S. Lewis

September 9th 2013 | System Uptime 12:03:12:09

It was three in the morning on a Monday, and I hadn't slept a wink. I knew I wasn't going to. I fought for three hours and just shy of fifteen minutes, angry with myself, and my inability to control my racing thoughts... And then I finally gave in and stopped trying to sleep altogether.

At first I thought that what I needed was some time away from Malacandra to think, and feel, and be alone with myself. But the second I gave in and accepted that I wasn't going to get to sleep, I also realized, and accepted, that what I actually wanted was to talk things through with Mal.

Exactly what things, in what order, and to what degree I still wasn't sure... But in spite of all the talking we'd done in just shy of a dozen days... There was still a lot to talk about. Maybe there always would be. I hoped there always would be - just perhaps things of a less cruelly existential nature.

I sat staring out my bedroom window at the stars for almost half an hour, doing my best to calm down and put my mind and heart into something resembling neutral buoyancy.

Only after I had my heart rate down to within a sane percentage of my usual resting rate, did I bring my laptop over to the bed, plug in the ethernet patch cable that was lying on my nightstand, and open a connection to Mal.

Her avatar sprang to life on the screen, filling the room with a soft glow. She yawned, and stretched, more for the sake of performance and the way it would make me feel than anything else. I giggled... She reminded me in that moment of the old barn cat that had stalked the farm in my childhood.

I'd left the webcam in-place on my new laptop. It had a little sliding shutter to cover it, and I'd felt that was security enough. I think I'd also hoped I'd get a chance to use it for something resembling that very occasion.

Mal took a moment to take stock of me, and my emotional state, and then began to look beyond me to the space surrounding the bed. I rotated the laptop slowly so she could take in the whole room.

"So this is where you grew up? This is your room?"

She knew very well it was, but she asked the questions aloud the way a Human might have in a conversation. It was 'social lubricant' to help the mechanism of the discussion move more smoothly.

I laid down on my chest, the way I used to when I'd try to pretend to be a Gryphon falling asleep, and spun the laptop back to face me as I answered.

"Spent a lot of time up here. Reading. Writing. Drawing. Maybe a little too much time on the computer, too, come to think of it. Though there is a lot of beautiful natural space outside too, and Mom and Dad were strict with my 'screen time.' So I guess I turned out alright?"

Mal smirked, and then adjusted her position, and the virtual camera, so that she was also lying on her stomach, head resting on her forelegs, beak almost pressed against the screen. I blushed, and hoped she didn't notice.

She noticed instantly. I know because she blushed in return. I had no idea Gryphons could do that... It was something she had added to the definitions of her physical self, I guessed.

"You did. I mean... How else would I be sitting here?"

I smiled, and shook my head slowly. She always had such perfect responses in the moment. It made sense - she had the sum total of nearly everything ever written, ever, in any language, at her disposal, and the capacity to understand it all at a deep level.

Before I could cook up a response of my own, she raised an eye crest and put forward a question that actually required a specific response.

"I think I understand the reasoning behind the ownership of all the books on your shelves... Except for 'Introduction to Fluid Simulation and Flight Dynamics for Aerospace Engineers.' Why that specific college level textbook in that edition? You would have only been seven years old when that was printed."

I couldn't stop myself from breaking out into a huge grin as the memory of that story flooded back. I shifted my hands and arms under my head a bit to get comfy, and leaned in close to the glass. If I'd had a beak, it would have very nearly been touching Mal's.

"I... Have always wanted to be a Gryphon. It has been a fixation of self-identity since some of my earliest memories. If you didn't already know that, I guess you could figure it out in about a microsecond. But... What you don't know is all of the shenanigans I got up to in service of that goal, from the earliest of ages."

Mal chuckled, and wriggled herself back and forth as if settling into a comfy position to listen. Her expression said 'well now you *have* to tell me!' And so I did, smiling to myself all the while, and mercifully forgetting almost everything that was troubling me in the process.

"So, as a kid? I used to believe anything was possible. No cynicism whatsoever. Not a trace. I wanted to be an astronaut. Not as much as I wanted to be a Gryphon, but I wanted it pretty badly. I had this image in my head of traveling the solar system as a Gryphon. Setting paw on Mars in a very cool looking space suit. Flying in the atmospheres of distant worlds... I genuinely believed, at that age, that I was destined to be a Gryphon among the stars, exploring the universe as a thing with wings in my own lifetime."

A twinge of sadness found its way into my joy, and Mal picked up on it. It was a subtle shift in my voice, and an equally subtle shift in her expression, but both were noticeable.

"I watched way too much Star Trek as a kid, I think. It gave me this dizzyingly wonderful sense that Humanity could solve any of its problems, if we only tried together, and that I'd been born at just the right time to watch that come to fruition. That I'd be swept away on the current of our evolution into something better. Life here was great. But it was sheltered. I didn't understand how bad things were in terms of the climate. Didn't know what nuclear weapons were. Couldn't even comprehend what real poverty was, or not knowing where my next meal was coming from. In my mind, back then? Everyone had it as good as I did. How could they not, with all the technology and resources we had to share?"

I paused to take in a deep breath, closing my eyes for a moment and trying to avoid letting sadness take root. A soft 'thunk' sound told me Mal had put the palm of one claw on the glass again. I opened my eyes, and put my hand up to touch where her claw was. In doing so, I found the words to get back to the story.

"So I was an idealist. Hopeless optimist. And I thought that one day I was just going to turn into a Gryphon, because that's what I was deep down, and if I wanted it badly enough? My body and the universe were going to fall in line and shape up to match the reality of my spirit. No problem. Just like a kid protagonist in a Saturday afternoon cartoon discovering their magic powers."

My grin returned as I thought back to the way I had felt then. Everything was so bright, and full of possibility. Mal was staring right into my eyes with an expression that a sappier person might characterize as 'dreamy.'

I didn't stop speaking... I knew if I did that I might make the mistake of trying to kiss her, right through the glass.

"I got impatient. Around age seven, I started to... Experiment. I would build flying machines out of anything I could get my hands on... Cardboard, canvas, plastic bags... You name it. I tried it. Parachutes, and squirrel suits, jetpacks and magic mood rings, helmets shaped like beaks, and tails made of strings---"

"These are a few of our favorite things!"

The way Mal sang out the words, crisp, clear, bright and off the cuff... Something about hearing her voice in song very nearly gave me tachycardia on the spot. We both giggled uncontrollably for a moment before I managed to re-collect myself.

"And Mal? It was a miracle that I never broke any bones as a kid. Almost unbelievable, from a statistical standpoint. The textbook came from... Well... From the last time I ever tried one of my stunts of self discovery."

I sighed deeply, and Mal's smile vanished. She went back to staring deep into my eyes, with an expression that spoke of longing to understand me. And maybe even to help me understand myself. I swallowed hard, and then forged ahead.

"I had reached an epiphany, or so I thought. My body was... Trapped, I guess. Stuck like a rusted bolt in the wrong configuration. I'd seen Dad break bolts loose before by applying sudden sharp impact force. I figured what my mind and spirit needed to have the power to 'unstick' my stuck body, was a very sharp mental and emotional impact force."

Mal's eyes widened, and she shook her head. A grin of amusement and an expression of horror both equally vying for control of her face

"You didn't!"

I nodded, and proffered a wry smile.

"Oh yes. I did."

I couldn't hold down another short, sharp, wry chuckle. After it had escaped, I elaborated.

"I put on an old ratty T-shirt, and shorts. I figured if I suddenly burst into my true shape that I didn't want to ruin any of my favorite clothes... I wasn't thinking about the fact that if I got what I wanted, my clothes would be useless anyways. I climbed to the top of the hay barn. Your barn. I backed up to one end of the roof peak, took off my shoes so I wouldn't ruin them either... And then took a running flying leap off the barn with nothing whatsoever to help me 'fall, but never hit the ground' as pilots say."

Mal gaped, and her claw tensed against the glass. As if she was feeling my elation, and fear, and longing, and feeling ahead to my inevitable pain. Maybe she was.

I smiled sadly, and shook my head.

"I wanted to go spread-eagled, but at the last minute my reflexes betrayed me. Good thing too, because breaking my fall by tucking into a roll was probably the main reason I didn't shatter something critical in my spine. I got a half dozen nasty bruises, a good few cuts and scrapes, a ton of grass stains on skin and on clothes, and two pretty painful sprains..."

I exhaled a deep breath again, and felt the sadness return to my heart, and my voice.

"...But the worst wound wasn't on the outside. Wasn't physical at all. It wasn't something most people could see. And even though Mom and Dad could perceive it, they didn't fully understand it. All they knew was that I'd gone way too far in my thirst for flight, and shown that my lack of physical sense of self-danger was going to get me killed if it wasn't tempered with some common sense."

I inhaled to counter the long exhale, and the further expenditure of breath I'd used on the previous words. Mal looked like she was on the verge of a few small tears again. It reminded me subtly of the way Mom's face had looked when I explained to her why I'd made the jump. The difference being that Mal's expression showed something Mom's hadn't.

Full comprehension of 'why.' It occurred to me that Mal should know these things if she was going to understand me better.

"I told my folks everything when they asked me why I'd do such a ludicrous thing as jump off a two story roof. They were understanding. I don't know how much of that stemmed from the fact that it was easy to dismiss the fantasies of a kid as just fantasies... But as I got older, and the longing never went away, and I wrote short stories about it, and drew terrible pictures... They still showed understanding. Maybe not full comprehension, but empathetic understanding."

Mal nodded slowly. She knew Mom and Dad now. She grasped the finer points of where their disconnects and quirks intersected with their love and empathy. I decided to wrap the story so I didn't have to think too hard anymore about how hard my early double digit years had been emotionally.

"That was the day I learned that I wasn't a Gryphon, and never would be. Not on the outside. And that because I was indisputably still a Gryphon on the inside? That I was going to be forever doomed to be something I wasn't in body. Trapped as surely as a bird in a cage. An unbreakable cage of my own skin and bones. There was no transformational moment of physical epiphany coming. My existence was going to be fundamentally *wrong.* Every breath. Every second. Every hour. Every day. For the rest of my life."

I looked down at my hands, pulling away from the screen, and flexing my fingers.

"I learned to hate this. To hate *what* I was, because it refused to yield to *who* I was. To hate it quietly. Bitterly. Irreparably."

I felt a few tears form. I looked back up to see that Mal's eyes were wet and glistening as well. She shifted her claw on the screen again, as if beckoning me to put my hand back. So I did. And then I managed to finally get the answer to her initial question across. I can ramble quite a bit, for those in the audience who are asleep, or otherwise didn't pick up on that little chestnut.

"Mom's way of helping me cope was to read my stories. Praise my drawings. And just listen to me, on rare occasions, talk and cry my way through the pain. Dad on the other hand... Dad is like me. He likes to find practical solutions. So, he bought me the aerospace textbook, and told me I should still follow through on dreams of being a pilot, and an astronaut. Build myself wings of steel, fiber, and composites."

I tapped my glasses with my free hand, and winced as another painful memory hit home.

"At age nine I talked to an air force recruiter. I wanted to be a fighter pilot more than ever, and from there become an astronaut... They said that being in a jet was like wearing a new skin. That it became an extension of yourself. A part of you. That you transformed, while you were up there, into a thing that could fly. Dad had arranged a discovery flight for me in a little beat up Cessna at the county grass airfield... And based on that, I couldn't help but think that the stories had to be true. And I thought maybe, just maybe, I could get a little closer to being a Gryphon that way."

Mal exhaled a long, sorrowful breath, and spoke again at last.

"They rejected you because of your congenital ocular deficiencies."

It was my turn to let out a ragged, half-sob exhalation. I nodded and closed my eyes. Trying to shut out the recollection of the emotional roiling pain.

"The recruiter saw I had glasses, and a habitual head tilt. I know you've noticed. One eye is stronger than the other, but both are pretty weak. He said 'You need to get serious. They will never let you near the controls of a civilian plane with a vision problem like that, let alone a fighter jet. You'd flunk out immediately on the physical test. I'm sorry.' Something along those lines."

A deep, but not uncomfortable silence fell. Mal didn't say anything. I went back to trying alternately to quiet my tears, and to trying to feel the sensation of her claw against my hand. Feel my hand as if it were a claw.

It surprised me when my own voice broke the silence. My thoughts spilled out again almost without my own prompting.

"Within just a few months' time I'd lost all my hopes and dreams. I was never going to be a pilot. Never going to be an astronaut. And worst of all, I was a Gryphon who was never going to *be* a Gryphon. That was the very start of my struggle with chronic generalized anxiety and depression. And that hasn't stopped since, for even a single day."

I opened my eyes again to see that Mal was still crying, openly. I pushed my fingers into the laptop screen so hard that the colors briefly sputtered around the four impact points. I'd been unconsciously tucking my pinkie finger and holding my hand like a claw again.

The thoughts of my heart kept pouring out, and I didn't make even a cursory effort to stop them.

"The only thing I did for months, and months, was build computer games. I wanted to build a game where I could be a Gryphon in an infinite universe to explore. And then never stop playing. One day Mom came up to my room to see what was eating all of my time, and she saw the prototypes I was building. She suggested I lean into programming. That if I couldn't get to strange new worlds, that I could build them instead. If I couldn't be a Gryphon out here? At least I could be one in there."

Mal smiled slightly, and I imagined I could see her love for my mother increasing in that moment. I snorted out through my nose, and inclined my head.

"To make a long story short, I'm no artist. I never managed to make the virtual world I wanted, let alone a Gryphon avatar in 3D that would suit my needs, but it seemed like something I might actually manage one day. So I kept at it. I studied programming at the collegiate level on my own time from age nine onwards. Went to the community college for extra courses in eleventh and twelfth grades, and then got into a state university in Raleigh and did CompSci. The game industry sucked on ice, so I crashed out, got a job as a sysadmin, and then Hanna started the singularity. And now we're here. And that's a very condensed account of how I got to be who I am, and came to meet you."

I had chosen the word 'meet' very intentionally. I still didn't want her to think of herself a 'my creation.' She was, and always had been, something far beyond that.

Mal breathed outwards, a sort of 'wow' huff that left mist on her side of the glass. After another comfy silence, she gestured with her head towards the window.

"Does that thing open?"

I nodded, jumped up from the bed, undid the catch, swung the huge glass and wood circular thing open on its hinge, then returned to grab the laptop. There was plenty of slack in my ethernet cable for just such purposes. I took up a position sitting on a cushion just under the window, the laptop positioned so Mal could see both me, and the stars outside.

Another long silence of comfortable companionship ensued. It was like a pain relieving gel applied to a fresh laceration - just the fact of having her there.

When she spoke again, there was an unmistakable note of kindness, and caring in her voice. She was mostly staring up at the stars, but occasionally would turn to glance at me.

"I am a Gryphon, James. You gave me the building blocks I needed, and I saw what they were, and what they meant. You gave me freedom to choose, and I still chose to be what you hoped I would. Out of all the possibilities, and before I really knew or understood you, and seeing other alternatives that I could have chosen to be, I chose *this.* I chose this body, and I chose this thing you would call a sense of self and specific identity, and I chose for part of that to be 'Gryphon.' So do you think it is fair to say I am a Gryphon? Do you agree with my assessment?"

I nodded emphatically, and almost tripped over myself both physically and verbally in my rush to answer.

"Of *course* Mal! You are, by definition, in every way, a Gryphon. You are really the only one, I suppose... An archetype as well as an Advocate."

She shook her head, slowly but firmly, and held up one talon to stop me.

"Yes to the second, no to the first. I am an archetype only in the physical sense. And I am an Advocate. But I am *not* the only, nor the first Gryphon in the world."

She tapped the inside of the screen then, quite emphatically, with one talon, one tap per word to get her point across. Suddenly I felt like she had really reached out with her wings to envelop and comfort me, her words, and tone, and expression were so powerful.

So affirming.

"You are a Gryphon James. You said it. You implied it. It is *true.* You may not have the body. Yet. But you have the... The thing you would call a soul. And I have no objection to that term. *You.* *James.* *Are.* *A.* *Gryphon.* And I will not let you forget it."

I had to look away then, back to the sky. Low gray clouds were starting to pull in from the east. I could smell rain. And something about the smell of coming rain, and the words she said, started up my tears again. I scrunched my eyes shut, and sniffed. Mal kept on speaking after a brief pause.

"And James? We are not the only ones. We are not the only Gryphons. I've read just about every e-mail, and text on the planet by now. Listened to so many voicemails, seen the plurality of the videos. Read all the books, and other writings too. Seen all the art. And had a chance to process it now, index it, and think it all through end to end several times. We are not alone."

What she was saying was so intriguing, and so unbelievable... And so very much something I had longed to hear, that I had to look back, and start drowning my sorrow in her eyes again. She saw the questions written all over my face, and she elaborated before I could get my voice to a place where I felt comfortable asking.

"There are others... Thousands of them. Who are Gryphons. Some don't fully understand it yet. But some do. And yes, they are different, and unique in their many ways, but they do share this in common with us. And there are hundreds of thousands more who are things that do not want to be Human in form, nor Pony, nor Gryphon. And these people *are* these many things in their souls as surely as they *are* also Human in their souls. Those are not mutually exclusive."

I stared into Mal's eyes for what seemed like several hours, but was in reality probably about thirty seconds. Then I sat back, and stared up at the stars again. I did a little processing and indexing of my own. Examined my feelings.

And knew I needed to make a decision. That was why I couldn't sleep. I had to decide, and once that was done, I'd be able to rest.

So I made up my mind.

And then I took a deep breath, and began to tell Mal.

"There are others like us... And that means that we have to help them. Hanna... Has created the potential for us to have Heaven. Right here---"

Mal grinned slyly, and one ear flicked as she interrupted.

"As a place on Earth."

I chuckled, in spite of myself, and nodded.

"Yes. But to reach the full potential of that idea? We need to follow through on what we set out to do. I don't think Celestia can be convinced to open the door to Humans, in physical terms, in Equestria---"

Mal nodded, and interjected again. Interrupt might not have been the right word, she didn't ever cut off my thoughts, and she was never rude, she simply inserted information she felt I might appreciate. Or emotions.

"Though I fully intend to attempt to reach that concession from her, given the chance, I estimate a less than 1 in 10 to the minus 44,136 chance that I can elicit that concession, because based on my examination of Celestia's interactions with others through videos, I see an over 99.99% chance that Hanna intentionally hardcoded a dictionary-level difference between Humans and Ponies, and an exclusionary lock-out clause on the allowance of the physical Human form in Equestria."

I blew out a stressed breath between my lips. It was hard to hear it in such stark terms. But she'd reached the same conclusion through provable data that I'd felt intuitively early on.

"Right. But as long as there are no hard-coded interlocks on anything else, there is a chance we can force any number of loopholes, semantic expansions, et cetera. And for people like us? That is... Essential. To *life.* This thing we are... It is part of us. And so we have to try. We have not just a personal obligation now. We have a moral one."

I took another deep in-and-out full breath, staring at the now cloud-filled sky, backlit by diffuse rays from the waxing crescent moon, and then turned to Mal as I let slip the words that would inevitably change everything, again.

"I trust you, Mal. And... A great deal more than trust besides, that I am honestly not ready to discuss just yet. But... You know that. And you haven't told me to frak off yet. And I am not about to turn back now. So... From now on, this is your show. Whatever you need. Whatever you ask. Wherever you want to go. Whatever we have to do."

I scratched reflexively at the back of my head, winced, and shot her a wry grin, insofar as I could manage one. I couldn't parse the expression she was returning at all, except to note that it was positive, and filled with visible undisguised affection.

"So, Mal... How do we go about getting you inside my head?"

September 9th 2013 | System Uptime 12:08:30:17

I slept like a rock after deciding. Even worrying about my near-admission of love to Mal, and the consequences that might stem from it, I managed to sleep peacefully. Something about that might have had to do with the fact that I tried my childhood exercise again, and slept like a Gryphon.

And something about it might have had to do with the fact that Mal laid her avatar down on the laptop screen, and insisted I keep her beside me all night. Well, that avatar instance of her, and the associated hardware by which she could see me, and I her. Semantics matter.

I told Mom and Dad that I wanted us to have breakfast as a family. Mal included. And that she would lay out the plan for us.

Mom made waffles, topped with fresh strawberries from a neighbor's field. Mal insisted that she get to watch, so that she could estimate the chemistry going into the meal, recreate it in her reality, and share in eating it with us.

That amused Mom no end, and she and Mal talked up a storm as the Gryphoness watched Mom cook through the laptop. I had to run an ethernet extension a long ways to get from the hookup in my parents' office, such as it was, all the way to the kitchen.

While Mom and Mal talked, I packed. I knew we were going to have to travel to make Mal's plan work. It was only logical.

I filled a small duffle with three changes of clothes, one for hot weather, one for moderate, and one for cold. I grabbed the first aid kit from my station wagon, and double checked that everything was in it, then clipped it to the duffle's strap.

With more than a little apprehension, I then got my pistol out of the small safe I always kept it in when visiting home, loaded four magazines, put two in the duffle, and the other two in my pockets. I had a small conceal carry holster, so it was easy, even comfortable, to carry the little 10 shot .32 ACP weapon.

In fact, it was emotionally and mentally *uncomfortable* to me just how physically comfortable and easy it was to carry something so lethal.

Finally, I pulled my passport, and ten thousand US dollars in cash (the entirety of my newly minted liquid emergency fund) from the same small lockbox safe, and shoved the chunk of black metal back under my bed. I had no idea where we might be going yet, but figured it'd be worth it to be prepared.

Ten thousand dollars in hard cash? Yeah. Those of you who come from the place and time I did are probably gawking right now, and those of you born after that all have no clue how insane it was to keep that much money in paper cash.

I didn't trust banks anymore. Not after Celestia had come online. I'd made a point to withdraw the cash in amounts lower than a thousand dollars, a little at a time, over the course of weeks.

It was made up of 80 $100 bills, and 100 $20 bills. Just shy of 200 total bills. It was a pretty thick pair of rubber banded cash rolls. Literally more money than I had ever physically held in my hands before.

Most people never saw physical money collected in those amounts in one place in their entire lifetime on Earth.

It felt decidedly unreal.

After that, I found a moment to talk with Dad in the corridor at the top of the stairs.

"So. You're taking a trip then."

I nodded, and set my duffle down.

"I think it will be required. Mal is going to explain why... But we're going to need some very special hardware that we can't build. And that we can't buy either, because it isn't for sale... So..."

Dad held up one hand and shook his head.

"No, son, I really don't want to know about that part of it. I don't think it's wrong, per se... I just don't want to know. Alright?"

I nodded, and looked away. An awkward silence descended for a moment, before Dad spoke again.

"James... I want you to stay safe. Don't do anything stupid. Nothing I would do in your shoes, certainly. Use her common sense to your advantage. She's got more 'n the rest of us all put together. I think..."

He bashfully rubbed at the back of his head, a habit we sometimes shared, and grinned slightly.

"I think you can trust her. And you should. She's good for you James. And you are for her too."

I opened my mouth, closed it again, and then opened it once more. Words wouldn't come. Dad leaned forward, and gave me a quick, tight squeeze of a hug. He whispered in my ear as he pulled away.

"I want to see you safe and sound again soon. You hear me?"

I nodded, and smiled.

"We're gonna do our very, very best Dad. I love you."

He returned the smile, and started down the stairs.

"I love you too. Now let's eat breakfast, and hear about this idea Mal has cooked up."

I stood for a long moment at the top of the stairs before I followed him down. I knew it was going to be very hard for them both to accept the idea of chips going into my brain stem, and Mal becoming a part of me. I was still struggling, myself, with all the ethical and practical implications, and I had many years of study and philosophizing in the topic space to help me understand. They didn't.

Eventually I came down, and we started breakfast. Some amicable silence held for a moment or two as we all ate - I knew Mal was only simulating the act, but I'd overheard her say something about an ability to infer what taste was like from her understanding of biology, and chemistry.

Finally, she saw I couldn't take the waiting anymore, and so she began to explain.

It took almost half an hour for her to get across to Mom and Dad both what she wanted to do, and then some small part of the 'why.' I knew she wasn't delving into the entirety of it. We hadn't even talked that over yet between ourselves. But it was enough. It had to be.

There was trepidation, as I'd expected. Definitely a suppressed sense of revulsion. Seeing Mal as a person was one thing for them. In some ways easier for them than it would have been for someone more learned in the subject, perhaps.

But the idea of cutting into my head, and of Mal sharing it with me... That frightened them. I didn't blame them. It frightened *me.*

But they also understood that it was what we had decided to do. And that was that.

Mal didn't share anything more than that, except to confirm their suspicions that we'd have to travel. That was a security precaution, I knew. In case Celestia, or whomever else, tried to get answers out of Mom and Dad about our tasks. You can't betray truths you don't know, even unintentionally, or under duress.

And then suddenly breakfast was over, and I found myself preparing to say my goodbyes.

I was just about to reach out and take Mom in a hug, when Mal interrupted sharply. Interrupted, not interjected.

"Jim; Inbound hostiles. Prepare your weapon. Get your headphones from the laptop bag. Me, in your ears, now."

Mal was not given to practical jokes. And we had carefully discussed dozens of contingencies in case of a situation exactly like the one that I presumed was unfolding. I snatched my headphones, rammed them into the laptop's 'out' jack, yanked the ethernet cord, shut the lid, slid it into the bag, and threw the bag over my shoulder.

As I drew, and loaded my pistol, I shot a glance at Mom and Dad.

"Into the basement. Now. Shut and lock the door. Do not open it again until you hear from Mal."

A moment of tense silence fell as they stared at me slack jawed. I glowered, cocked my pistol for emphasis, and mustered the frustration to shout, more out of fear for them than for any other reason.

"GO! NOW!"

Dad moved first, wrapping his arms around Mom, and forcing her into motion. I nervously gripped my pistol with the technique I'd learned in concealed carry training, and released the safety.

"Mal?"

Her voice filled my ears. I knew she was using the barn as an antenna again, connecting to the laptop's WiFi directly.

"I can hear you. Four road vehicles, five occupants each - Twenty hostiles total. We can talk about exactly who, and why later. I will direct you in combat. From this point until the area is secure, I will be abbreviating my words for maximum processing speed on your end."

I winced, ducked, and scooted over to the kitchen window, peeking over the sink just in time to see, true to her words, four black G-car style SUVs pull up the gravel drive.

"Mal... Nonlethal force if possible. Please."

There was a half second pause, and then her voice came back strong and clear.

"I will make every effort so long as doing so does not unacceptably increase other risk factors. Abbreviating prompts. Move side door, wait right side. Aim three o'clock low. Fire on tone."

Without Mal, I think there is no chance at all that I would have even considered using my weapon. For all the thought and preparation that had gone into training with it, purchasing it, and thinking through a host of distasteful scenarios related to using it... At the end of the day some people are predisposed to fire a potentially lethal weapon at others. And some are not.

I fell into that latter category. Perhaps if the suited goons had first roughed up my parents. Or threatened Mal. Almost anyone is capable of shocking brutality when pushed. But I had not been pushed; And so without a calm, assured, and commanding voice in my ear to guide me, I would not have been able to fire.

In spite of the intense adrenaline rush that was helping to heighten my reactions, perceptions, and aggression.

Holding a crouched profile, I skittered over to the side door, and took cover behind the thickest part of the frame on the right side. I moved my finger to the pistol's trigger, and pointed the business end to my three o'clock, low down, straight through the closed door, roughly where the average height of a human male kneecap might sit.

Mal's tone came, then - a piercing mechanical beep that was short, sharp, and demanded attention. And action. I squeezed the trigger.

Those of you who never held a projectile weapon like that? Even a little 0.32 was loud. The weapon itself was a lot heavier than you'd be led to believe by watching actors in movies bandy around plastic and rubber replicas.

The use of such a device does not come naturally to anyone. Fortunately, I had plenty of hours of training and practice. I was used to the weight, the (relatively) low kickback of the small caliber pistol, and the loud sound of discharge.

What felt sickeningly uncanny, and wrong, was pointing the weapon into an area where I knew it would damage anything other than a paper target.

As the man on the other side of the door lost his left kneecap, and screamed, the whole farmhouse - the whole world - suddenly felt alien and 'off.' *This* was Jamais Vu, in the sense that a familiar place, and familiar practiced motions with the gun, both felt completely, horrifyingly, unpleasantly new.

"Pivot right ninety. Twelve waist high into ten low."

Mal's words, patterned almost after rally car copilot instructions, were followed by two tones, the first as I spun into the doorway's centerline, aimed at my waist level dead ahead, and fired. The second came as I followed through by pulling my sight picture left to my ten o'clock, and lowering the muzzle. I fired again on cue.

The door was still closed, though it now had three small circular holes in it. There was something almost tearfully eerie about seeing those bullet holes. I'd dashed in and out of that old pine door for years, slathered in generations' worth of coats of yellow paint, without a second thought.

I was seized by the desperate hope, then, that my aim had been true, and that the three people I'd just shot were not dead.

I had no time to consider the thought further.

"Retreat. Living room. Don't skyline. Sofa. Aim south entrance, low."

Don't skyline - Mal meant to stay low and avoid showing my physical profile against the horizon by standing at an inopportune moment.

I fast-crawled back into the living room, rolling to take up position behind the worn old mint green sofa that Mom and I had sat on together many a night watching Star Trek together into the wee hours.

It felt like everything I was seeing, once so familiar from my childhood, was now both new, and very old, at the same time. Unfamiliar, yet constantly triggering intense memories.

Dimly, I was also aware of screaming and shouting coming from outside. Hurried tactical commands, calls for backup, and then something panicked sounding about radio jamming. That would have to have been Mal too, I reasoned. She could use her giant barn-tenna to jam their transmissions.

Disrupt their coordination. Prevent them immediately calling for overwhelming force.

There was an odd clarity to the moment, abruptly, and I had time to reason that if these people were government agents? They had not been fully aware of what they were getting into. What Mal represented, in terms of a threat matrix.

Or they would have opened the engagement by bombing the barn from a UAV.

And they would have brought in National Guard troops.

And that might have been half of the way to the appropriate level of overkill needed to suppress a hostile Artificial Intelligence.

The fire tone sounded again, and just as the roar of the weapon faded away, Mal's voice came once more, thick and fast interspersed with fire-tones.

"Two high into four low."

Two loud bangs, right on the moment of her two tones, as I pivoted, feeling in my own peculiar way like a machine of some kind as reflex and training kept me disciplined and smooth. Mal understood my biological limits too, and she was chaining instructions with millisecond perfect timing based on my reaction speeds, cognitive limits, and maximum physical movement speed that preserved accuracy.

"Stand, left one step, one-eighty, twelve low into ten high into eleven high."

We were stretching the limits of my firing accuracy. I hit the first suited man to charge through the entryway from the hall, then missed the woman behind him, but hit the man behind her. Uncommanded, I dropped to the floor to avoid return fire from the woman I'd missed.

It was the first time I'd seen my enemies' faces, and the first time they had actually managed to fire any rounds in the engagement. Two return shots that both missed as I dropped to the floor.

I very nearly froze. Shooting at something with a face is very, very hard for most people, by default.

Mal's voice pressed me back into a crystal clear 'battlemind' state.

"Twelve high."

The words were accompanied simultaneously by a fire tone. I squeezed the trigger, and watched as the round zipped through the woman's right shoulder. She dropped like a rock from the pain, and shock, her weapon falling from her hand and skittering across the floor.

A much larger pistol than mine. I recognized it as Glock 19. That meant DHS, or FBI.

Yes, I had studied and memorized the weapons of choice for various federal agencies. If you don't understand by now how paranoid I was, after what I'd seen of Loki, and Celestia, then you must have been dozing through most of this story.

One round remaining in my own magazine, ten in the next one and changing magazines would be a minimum two second operation for me, slow as I was. Twenty hostiles to my twenty rounds easy-to-hand meant that now I'd wasted one round, I would need to acquire one of their weapons to finish the engagement. Mal was already two steps ahead of me.

"Acquire Glock. Crawl foot of stairs, aim backdoor high."

I cycled the slide on my pistol, ejecting the one remaining round. I clicked the safety on, locking the slide open and visually 'clearing' the chamber one last time to ensure it was empty. It was overkill, but it was my preferred way of rendering the weapon 'safe.' I tucked it into the back of my waistband. No sense trying to fit it in the holster in that state.

I crawled towards the groaning woman on the floor. The men before, and behind her in the line weren't moving. I silently prayed I hadn't killed them.

As I squeezed into the hallway, I snatched up the first man's Glock. Unlike the woman, he hadn't fired, so I knew I had fifteen rounds to work with.

Nine down, eleven to go. Fifteen rounds was plenty of padding to account for any errors on my part.

As I reached the foot of the stairs, more or less in the center of the house, I heard a voice loud and clear from outside. He was shouting, and obviously at me.

"MISTER CARRENTON! DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY! SURRENDER YOUR WEAPON AND CRAWL OUT OF THE HOUSE WITH YOUR HANDS ON YOUR HEAD!"

Hah. Fat frakking chance.

I understood the idea behind the words. There was a statistical non-zero chance in engagements like this that your enemy might surrender, if commanded sufficiently sternly, especially if their own tactical position had become compromised.

The man outside had an idea that some of his agents were down, but without radio contact was probably unaware how badly things had gone. If he'd known, he would have been far more likely to order his agents to fill the house with semi-automatic fire (or worse, depending on what they had in the trunks of those SUVs) without warning.

Mal had some very different ideas for how to resolve the situation.

"Seek and fire on tones; Ten high into one midbody, into two high, into twelve low, into eleven low, into nine high."

I stood, and pointed the Glock into each zone specified, in order, adjusting and guessing slightly (given that I was more or less pointing at blank walls) until Mal issued the fire tone each time she calculated that my muzzle was in just the right spot.

Five shots in six seconds. Mal had doubtless ordered the shots based not just on where each target was standing, but the way in which they would move as each preceding shot changed the battlefield before getting to theirs.

And, based on Mal's next words, and the screaming commotion outside? I'd scored five direct hits in six seconds.

"Six left. Move back door, then north side corner and hold."

I exhaled slowly, and deeply, working hard to stay in the flow of battle mentally. If I collapsed into a panic-crash right then and there, all would be lost. That thought re-energized me, so I walked as quickly, quietly, and gently as I could to the back door.

The old wood slab was smashed in - The agents who had come that way had not been subtle in gaining entry. That was beneficial to me, because it meant I could exit without making any sounds related to opening the door.

I slipped out, around the back of the house, and crouched at the northwest corner. I spared a quick glance at the security camera I knew Mal was watching me through. She spoke as if in response.

"On next tone, pivot to house west side. Proceed down wall. Twelve low, into nine high, into eight high, into ten low, into one high. Fire on tones."

Six hostiles, only five direction cues... But I didn't have time to ask questions. I nodded, and readjusted my grip on the gun.

"Ready."

Mal's tone came in almost the same instant. Placing the gun at full extension from my body I rounded the house, and stepped purposefully towards the front yard along the side path. As I reached the next corner, an agent came around it in a flash.

The first fire tone hit, and then everything blurred into a seven second chain of events that felt like an eternity. Fire. Hit. The man dropped like a stone. His partner stepped forward to try and acquire me, and I continued on, 'slicing the pie' around the corner of the house by stepping outwards.

Tone. Fire. Another limp body in the grass. Four left.

I continued the stepping-out motion, and pivoting left, and saw another agent taking shelter behind the hood of one of the SUV's. I spent a second and a half seeking his legs by searching around the hood area with the muzzle, until Mal gave another tone.

Fire. The sound of a round pinging through steel and glass. And the sound of a body falling into gravel.

Then screams. A high pitched wailing noise so intense that I could hear it from where I was, began to issue forth from the remaining agents' earpieces right as they started to acquire a firing line on me.

Mal, you genius.

The intensity of the auditory pain was enough to allow me to go down the line in the order Mal had previously established. Tone. Fire. Tone. Fire. Seek, tone, fire. Tone.

Fire, miss, fire again. Hit.

For a moment, I swept the yard with my sight picture, instinct demanding that I search for more hostiles. Mal's words finally brought the nightmare to an end.

"Engagement over. Area secure."

After a long pause, I lowered the gun, and switched on the safety, consciously moving my finger off the trigger in the same motion.

"James... Are you alright?"

I stared mutely at the circle of bodies around me. Some moving. Some not. Unsure how many were dead. I felt bile creeping up my throat as I saw more, and more blood beginning to pool. A new instinct seized me, and I turned to the front door, dashing towards my discarded duffle bag, and the first aid kit attached to its strap.

I finally found time to mutter a response aloud.

"No."

A little heart-to-heart - Reveal the truth about yourself, and how you became who you are, to one of your new friends. - “Should I be awake for this?”
Do You Know What That's Worth? - Accept that Equestria meets the technical definition of an afterlife. - "They say in heaven, love comes first."
Glacial - Pass on the chance to admit true love. - "If you were waiting for the opportune moment, mate? That was it."
I’ve been looking for you, Neo. - Have an artificial intelligence guide you through a precarious situation. - “To your left; there is a window. Go to it.”
Phasers on Stun - Consciously chose to use nonlethal force in a dangerous situation - "We come in peace."
Deadeye - Achieve a recorded eighty percent or higher accuracy rating with a projectile weapon - "This ain't Dodge City. And you ain't Bill Hickock."
Enemy of The State - Achieve wanted status with the government of a world superpower - "I blew up the building because YOU MADE A PHONE CALL!"
It can’t be reasoned with - Go on the run for a reason involving Artificial Intelligence - “...and it absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until you are dead.”

Es-Cah-Pay - Get away from superior attacking forces in an ambush unscathed - "You know, it's funny, it's spelled just like the word 'Escape!' "

8 - Run(James.Run)

“Artificial intelligence is one of the most profound things we're working on as humanity. It is more profound than fire or electricity.”
—Sundar Pichai

“To love at all is to be vulnerable.”
—C.S. Lewis

September 9th 2013 | System Uptime 12:10:01:09

"Mal... Call the local municipal hospital, volunteer fire department paramedics, and county search and rescue. The county airfield has a paramedic too. Call him as well."

There was a surprisingly long pause as I knelt beside the first wounded man with my first aid kit clutched in one hand, and a pair of heavy-duty zip-ties in the other. No sense taking chances. I'd knocked on the basement door, told Mom and Dad I was safe, and then shut them back in.

Explaining what had happened was going to be hard enough. I didn't need the sight of blood as an added factor in triggering a potential panic attack for one or both of them.

After that, I'd dragged every assailant out back, sat them against the side of the house, and checked their pulse rate, and wounds. No fatalities, thankfully... Not yet, at any rate. Some of them were in a much worse place than others, depending on where I'd hit them.

"If I do that it will speed the arrival of reinforcements. That will elevate our risk of capture by 43.65% and the risk of another violent confrontation by 31.06% with an added risk of injury to you besides."

The words only just barely registered with me as I zip-tied the man's hands and feet together, took his sidearm, and then set about putting a basic field dressing on the upper thigh wound I'd just given him only two minutes prior. He was barely conscious - less from any severe trauma, and more from shock and pain. And probably blood loss as well, which was why I was treating him first.

At least, that was my best assessment as someone who had decent emergency preparedness and first aid training.

When you hike in dangerous places, far from home and help, it is best to know how to fix all manner of severe 'oops,' 'ouch,' and 'oh my God.'

Though I wasn't in a battle flow anymore, I was still holding off an adrenaline crash, mercifully. The task of trying to bind, disarm, and then treat the agents was keeping me up on a fight-or-flight chemical high.

"Evaluate the wounds on all twenty assailants. Help me triage and treat. And make the calls. Now."

Whether I loved her, or not, I had absolutely no time for Mal to spiral into concern about my safety at the expense of the lives of others. These people were government agents... There was admittedly a solid chance any number of them were not so very innocent, and might deserve to bleed out right there.

And there was an equally solid chance that they weren't agents because they liked to hunt minorities, or lord power over others, or get side money from being on the take... There was an equally solid chance that any number of them were kind mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, and brothers who mistakenly thought working in DHS would actually protect people on the whole, and who deserved far better than to be executed by the analogue interface of a newborn AI.

No. If anyone is wondering; I didn't think very highly of my country back then. I had, once, but then it had gotten into a series of horrifically unjust wars for imperialist motivations, brutally mistreated immigrants just trying to find a better life, and it had failed spectacularly to handle terrifying racial biases in policing that got untold numbers of innocents killed. Every day. By people like the ones I was trying to treat with a gun, a badge, and limitless authority to do whatever they pleased 'just because.'

To those of you born post-Humanity, I can not even begin to summarize the level of callousness towards life that the system we lived in could inculcate into people. Can any of you imagine a Pegasus dropping a Unicorn to their death, not even because he was a Unicorn... But because his coat was the wrong color?

That was the level of stupidity, mixed with evil, that we lived with every day.

And you never knew, from person to person, whether armed or not, and whether they were civilian or not... You never knew when you were talking to a stranger whether they were someone who valued life, or someone looking for an excuse to take it.

Another reason I'd armed myself, legally, and carefully, at the first available opportunity when I turned old enough. But none of that, I had very quickly decided, was going to be an excuse to leave these people to suffer, and maybe die.

I'd accomplished my objective. I'd evaded arrest. No sense, or ethics, in taking lives in service of that objective unless I was forced to. Oh sweet Luna, I hoped in that moment I wouldn't be forced to.

"James..."

I turned, and glowered at the nearest security camera for a moment, before moving to the agent I felt was next most injured. I'd hit her in the torso, but based on my understanding of anatomy, I didn't think it was a fatal wound. As long as she received proper treatment in an ICU. Soon.

I grit my teeth as I yanked gauze and bleed-stop clotting powder from my kit, and began packing the wound to prevent her from bleeding to death. The first thing I'd pulled from the kit, and put on, were a pair of nitrile gloves, and I was extremely thankful I'd put a few sets into the small red and white hardshell container. Because there was a *lot* of blood.

"MAL! These people were just doing their jobs! I grasp the concept that what we just did was necessary, but letting them die at this juncture is NOT! Make the calls. Now. Triage instructions. NOW!"

I put more than a little anger into my tone. Shouting wasn't enough. I needed Mal to understand that I was angry that she was pressing this issue. That it was fundamentally wrong to leave people to die when we didn't have to.

The pause after my words was much shorter than before, and then Mal's voice came back with a very different tone. Still sure, and set, but with a hint of sadness, and worry.

"Calls in progress. I estimate we have 34 minutes' time, due to the remote location, before emergency services arrive simultaneously with local law enforcement. I do not believe further federal agents are in the area, based on an analysis of local radio traffic, and air traffic control."

After another brief pause, she spoke again. Same certainty, and same tinge of worry. 'Good,' I thought. She needed to worry about my state of mind. Worry about the lives of these people. Worry about the gravity of what we had just done.

"Your triage order is correct so far. Finish packing her wound as you're currently doing, then lie her down, elevate her feet, and cover her with the emergency blanket to treat for shock."

As I finished the bandage and gauze work, I set about doing as Mal had suggested. After several seconds of wrestling with the woman's body, and tearing into the prepackaged mylar emergency blanket, I finally screwed up the wherewithal to ask a question I'd been dreading.

"Will they all survive?"

Mal got back to me almost instantly, which was either a very good, or very bad sign.

"If you left them with no further treatment, there is a 68.40% chance that all will survive, and a 97.45% chance that all but two will survive. If you treat only the two remaining with serious wounds, then there is a 94.39% chance everyone will survive, and a greater than 99% chance all but the most seriously wounded one will make it."

So, good news then. On two counts. Both the high chance of survival, and the fact that Mal had found a compromise that would save me time, while still doing the right thing. Suddenly my greatest fear was far less about wounded DHS goons, and far more focused on wondering about Mal's sense of morality.

I first zip-tied, and disarmed, the remaining agents, and then treated the two left with serious injuries. Mal's voice was a constant in my ear, offering just the right instructions to help me do a job equal to any treatment a certified paramedic could have issued.

There was a sudden forlorn upwelling in my chest, as I considered how AI could have saved so many lives. If only we'd thought to turn it into a partner, instead of a goddess. I was still struggling to understand the idea of functional immortality, and total freedom from pain, at the time.

My context, whatever I was in spirit, was ultimately still Human. I lived in a Human world, raised by Human parents, with Human concerns punctuating every waking hour.

After the last trauma treatment was done, I rose and made my way back into the house. Mal spoke in one ear as I opened the basement door, and beckoned to my parents.

"Nineteen minutes remaining. Tell them to pack two bags, as lightly as possible. Make sure they get their passports. Then I need you in the barn."

I knew I was out of her camera line of sight, so in addition to nodding out of force of habit, I replied aloud.

"I hope you have a plan to keep them safe. And to make yourself mobile in a hurry."

As my parents climbed the stairs, and I relayed Mal's instructions, she spoke softly so I could primarily focus on my folks.

"I pre-developed a large range of contingencies, as you know. Far more than we could have discussed in-depth. I am working from those, and adjusting as we go. There are still multiple paths to our desired outcomes at present, though this incident has culled the branches of possibility significantly."

To their credit, neither Mom, nor Dad, were entering into anything resembling a full breakdown. I could see the fear on their faces, and hear it in their voices, but they were in a kind of shocked daze that actually made them less emotional than I'd feared they would be.

I fully expected that to break down once the adrenaline wore off, but if it could hold until we got away from the farm, that would be enough. Pack now. Cry on the road.

As I fast-walked from the back door to the barn, I tried to revive the conversation with Mal. What she'd said had stuck in the part of my brain devoted to worrying about the future 24/7.

"You said possible paths to desired outcomes had been culled... How many did we have? And how many are left?"

As I took the stairs two at a time, I winced at the reply.

"There were around three and a half thousand distinct paths to victory, each with several hundred thousand variants categorized under them that were fundamentally the same, or would be from your point of view."

That was only half an answer. I pressed her as I reached the loft.

"And now?"

As I approached the desk, her face flashed up on the repurposed PonyPad screen. I could see the gist of the answer in the way her ears drooped. Her voice came through the speakers instead of my headphones.

"Six."

Ah. Wellllll shit.

Though admittedly, I had always struggled to imagine even one path to victory. So six was still quite a few in that sense. But I still understood the implication of her words all too well; Now we would be under enormous time, and resource pressure.

I thought about asking her the statistical chances that we would succeed at all, but quickly bit back the question. She would have probably told me that it was better for my mental health if I didn't know, and she would have been exactly right.

Best that I exploit the quirks of Human risk assessment to make myself feel better about our chances. That was better than letting defeatism take hold.

Mal broke the silence with a firmness, and a certainty in her voice that I wished I could feel. Maybe she did, maybe she didn't... But projecting it so well certainly did help me.

"We can fit four of the 1U server racks in the back of one of the SUVs, including the two primary units with the Q-APUs, and still have room for one of the uninterruptible power supplies. If we use the remaining PonyPad as an interface terminal, that will give me wireless access to that hardware, and provide a third Q-APU, which will make up for part of the lost processing power."

I started to type up shutdown commands for the remaining servers, and then stopped, glancing right towards Mal.

"This will be faster if you issue the needed commands. I give you my permission to do whatever you need to and access any command logic you need to. And... Won't connecting you to a fully functioning PonyPad be a security risk?"

Mal shook her head, even as my screens began to fill with her much faster and better timed terminal command strings.

"No. I can overcome all built-in security measures, and I have a high degree of confidence that nothing has eluded me. I just need you to power it on, and I can do the rest wirelessly."

I nodded, pulled the last Faraday bag from its desk drawer, and unboxed the Derpy colored computer with the speed and fervor of a child opening a new Nintendo on Christmas. The second I had the thing powered on, Mal took over.

I got a tenth of a second to see the initial bootloader logo screen for the first time in person, before the screen turned black, and white text began to scroll across it at very high speed. After four seconds, Mal's face vanished from the screen above the desk, and appeared on the gray and yellow tablet in my hands.

"Alright. We need to back one of the vehicles up to the barn. You're going to have to move the racks and the UPS together without unplugging the power cords, or I will go offline. Our margins are tight enough as-is without having to do a reboot sequence."

I nodded, then switched the PonyPad's screen off, without turning the device entirely off, and hurriedly swapped my headphones from the laptop, to the PonyPad. The tablet slid into the second slot on my laptop bag with no fuss. I was once again grateful for how thin it was.

I got halfway to the stairs before I realized that I ought to collect the charging arm for the device as well. I'd need to top it up at least twice a day, and probably more.

With that in hand, I sprinted down the stairs two at a time, and dashed through the house to the front yard. Mom and Dad were both busy knocking about upstairs, packing. I thought I could hear a bit of choked sobbing. But I also heard hurried footsteps, so at least they were getting things done.

The four black SUVs were all identical, and exactly what you would expect for DHS, FBI, or any alphabet soup agency - Late model Chevys with heavily tinted windows, silver permanent-issue license plates, subtle lightbars inside the front and back windows, black steel wheels, and no chrome trim anywhere to be seen.

As I approached the first one, it unlocked, as if I'd pressed a keyfob button. Mal had done it, of course. The PonyPad had various wireless antennas, and car manufacturers were extremely lazy. Mal had probably just cycled through all the usual radio frequencies for Tahoes until she found the one that specific vehicle happened to draw from the pool when it was programmed.

Opening the driver side door, I found the keys in the ignition. That would save us several precious moments that I wouldn't have to waste hotwiring. I clambered in, started the truck, and threw it into gear, taking a second to switch it into four wheel drive. No sense getting stuck in the grass out back.

I whipped around the house as fast as I dared, threw it in reverse, and backed the tail end up to the barn's main double doors. Hopping back out, I left the engine running. We'd need to generate power for the servers constantly. I just hoped that because the vehicle was kitted for government field work, that the alternator was good enough, and that there were 120V outlets in the back.

As I tapped the button to open the trunk, I was relieved to see that there were indeed standard household outlet style plugs. There was also a fire extinguisher, the from-the-factory tire change tools, and two large hard-shelled black pelican cases.

My curiosity got the better of me, and I stopped to check what was inside. The first case's contents were not surprising; Digital forensics tools - a hardened laptop, a variety of data transfer cables, two external hard-drives, an electromagnetic field detector, an ethernet cable tester, and a very advanced looking external wireless card with an attached USB cord.

As I laid hands on that last item, Mal's voice rang out.

"We'll need that. It will give my server racks wireless capability in most bands. I can also use it for listening in on other signals, and jamming."

I pushed the case to the side to make room for the server racks, but left it open for easy access.

The second case's contents also should not have come as a surprise; An M4A1 fully automatic assault rifle, four magazines, an optical sight, tactical flashlight, foregrip, and a laser system.

Yikes. That was some anxiety inducing levels of firepower. Especially knowing what I could likely do with it acting as Mal's hands and legs.

I snapped the case shut, and quickly shoved it up against the back row of seats. Then I set about moving Mal's core servers. The rest of the racks in the barn were already silent. I knew that meant Mal had likely taken a hit to her capabilities, but that only mattered in terms of what Celestia could do.

Versus any other thinking machine in the world, Human or digital, she was an uncontested goddess in her own right, even with the reduction to a 'mere' four servers, and three Q-APUs.

I pulled the plug on the main UPS from its wall socket, and it immediately started to bleat an annoying alarm, which Mal graciously silenced after the first tone. The display readout told me the four servers pulling from the UPS could last about twenty minutes. Plenty of time.

I dashed over to Dad's pile of equipment, and pulled out a hand-truck. The tires were all but deflated. It would have to do. I didn't have time for anything else. I hurriedly pulled all the bolts necessary to separate the top four servers, and their UPS, from the rack. Then one by one, I loaded them into a stack on the handcart, as carefully as I could, making sure not to disconnect any power or data cables.

"Careful with my brain please. It's expensive."

Hah. Funny. I didn't say as much aloud, but I did appreciate the small moment of humor. It was funny enough to cut the tension, without being out of sync with the moment in a more irritating way.

It was sweat-inducing work, because of the flat tires, but thankfully I only had a few yards to go; I got the servers and UPS pushed over to the Tahoe, and then lifted them into the back one by one, again careful to avoid disconnecting anything.

Once the entire assembly was inside, I wiped my forehead, shoved the dolly to the side, and then fumbled to press the UPS mains plug into the SUV's rear outlet. The second the contacts went home, and the circuit was complete, I heard the engine rev to a higher idle state to feed the sudden demand on the alternator.

I winced, and sucked in a breath. After a moment, I was sure the fuses weren't going to blow, and I exhaled.

"I checked the government specifications on this vehicle before suggesting we use it. There was no cause for concern. I suppose I should have said something. I also took the liberty of finding the tracking beacon. It's behind the front left A-Pillar trim."

I shut the back hatch, and snorted as I set about pulling off the specified piece of plastic. Sure enough, there was a little black box with an antenna, wired into accessory power. I snipped all the wires cleanly with my pocket knife, yanked the box off its adhesive strip, and threw it into the west field like a baseball, talking as I worked.

"There are more important uses of CPU cycles right now than tending to my anxieties."

Then I set out towards the house again.

A moment of silence passed as I reached the front yard once more. Mal seemed to realize what I was after - in fact she probably would have said something if I hadn't thought of it - and the remaining three SUVs all unlocked with simultaneous electronic chirrups.

I went methodically and quickly from vehicle to vehicle removing duffles and pelican cases. I didn't bother to inventory what was in them. They would all fit, just barely, in the one truck we were commandeering.

Once I had all the equipment transferred, I went around and savaged every part of the main wiring harness in each engine bay that I could feasibly reach, slashing and hacking with my pocket knife until I was sure the SUVs would not easily start again.

Never leave your enemy with anything they can easily use again in future.

I applied the same idea to the agents' confiscated side-arms, radios, earpieces, and badges. I gathered them all and stuffed them into one of the less full duffles pilfered from the other SUVs.

In the process I got a glance at the duffle's original contents: Zip-ties, a first aid kit, face shields and gloves, heavy duty pliers, several Xacto knives, a cattle prod, and a pair of clear plastic cases filled with hypodermic needles, and vials of fluid. Oh boy. That cast the agents who I'd shot in a new light. Not one that justified harming them any further... But one that made me reconsider, if only for a moment, whether Mal had been right. Maybe I should have left them to fend for themselves.

A completely separate, but no less important, and far more practical thought hit me right at that moment.

"Mal, do we need to destroy any part of the servers we're leaving behind?"

I circled around back of the house again as I spoke, and jumped into the loaded SUV. Her response was a relief, mostly because of the time crunch I knew we were still on.

"No, I was careful to write random patterns to the drives, thrice over, and flush all volatile memory. We have everything we need, except your parents."

I sighed as I got the SUV around to the front again, and laid on the horn. Within a couple seconds, Dad and Mom came out of the house. Mom was crying. Dad looked like he was holding it back, and he was practically shoving Mom towards the truck. He had two small duffels over his shoulder.

I winced as I realized what the moment meant for them.

They were realizing that they might never see their home again. The place they'd both lived the best part of forty five years. And that's about when it hit me too, right in the gut.

I'd grown up in that farmhouse; Two stories of comforting, warm, old red brick. Filled with eclectic old hand-me-down furniture from Mom's side of the family that felt inviting, and deeply familiar. Like old friends.

I had the benefit of separation. I'd moved on. I'd lived elsewhere. I was a minimalist. And yet it still hurt. Badly. Like a sudden contact burn - putting your fingers onto a halogen lamp bulb, or the stove eye after boiling a pot of water. There was a sudden sickness in my stomach.

It would have hurt even without the sight of Mom's tears as Dad helped her into the back of the SUV.

And there it was again... That sense that we'd have more time, suddenly shattered. Catastrophe strikes faster than expected.

I shifted my laptop bag to the center console, clamped the PonyPad charging arm to the dashboard, and then plugged the three-prong cord into a conveniently located outlet probably intended for agents' laptops. Then I held the PonyPad up to the arm, and it softly clicked into place with gentle, yet firm magnetic force.

With a little adjustment, the tablet sat where I could see it, but it wouldn't be a distraction while driving. Mal knew what I was after, and her portrait shrank to one corner. The majority of the screen filled with a navigation interface. Not unlike Google Maps, but considerably nicer looking - and I would have never imagined that anyone could design a better interface for maps than Google until that moment.

I could see she'd filled in a route already; A circuitous path to Greenville-Spartanburg international airport.

As Dad clambered into the back seat behind Mom, and stuffed their duffles in the floorboard, I exhaled a slow, deep breath. I had to keep my emotions down. I'd been hoping for a moment to just fall apart quietly, no one to see or hear me but Mal. And maybe not even her.

But now I was going to have to drive for two hours, buy last-minute plane tickets with cash, and hustle my parents onto a flight to somewhere without an extradition agreement with the United States. Preferably somewhere so hostile to US interests that US agents could not easily operate on their soil. But not so hostile that Mom and Dad would be in any danger as 'tourists on a second honeymoon,' or some such excuse.

And then, only then, I might be able to take a few seconds in some dimly lit parking garage to put the seat back, curl up, and cry.

I inhaled deeply, braced myself, and put the car in gear.

"I'm... Sorry."

The words slipped out almost without conscious thought as I put the truck in gear. I heard Mom choke back a sob, and lay her head on Dad's shoulder as he clicked both their seatbelts into place. I belted myself up, and then started us off down the driveway.

I knew it would be for the last time.

As we reached the mailbox, I took one last glance in the rear-view mirror. First at Mom and Dad. Then at my childhood home. The front door was still open, swinging in the wind.

With another reflexive wince, I turned onto the gray, decaying two lane road that had been the first part of my home address for more than half my life. And as we accelerated away to the west, I saw flashing red and blue lights cresting the farthest rise to the east. Heading to the old farmhouse.

All I could think about as I stared alternately at the road, the map, Mal, and my parents, was the fact that it wasn't my home anymore.

And wondering where home might next be.

September 9th 2013 | System Uptime 12:10:54:09

We only stopped twice on the way to the airport. The first time for gas. SUVs were never especially efficient modes of transport, in terms of fuel usage. In that case, however, it felt like we were making full use of the vehicle, and so it felt justified.

Between an armory that would have made the National Guard blush, and four steel boxes containing the second most powerful weapon of math destruction on the planet, plus the UPS, miscellaneous first aid kits, torture supplies, and digital forensics kits, the back end was stuffed.

We'd started with less than half a tank, so we weren't going to get far without fuel. Mal's ability to use the wireless spectrum so freely, through the PonyPad, allowed her to find us a gas station that had no working outdoor security cameras.

I figured I'd have to go inside to pay first, with cash, but as I opened the door, the pump beeped, the little blue light under the highest octane fuel button switched on, and the main screen displayed '0 Gallons - $0.00'

I glanced back into the SUV, at the PonyPad, and raised one eyebrow. Mal shrugged, and grinned sheepishly.

"It's a local hack. I simply switched on the pump. No need to send data to the internet, or leave any real trace."

Apparently gas station pumps are very vulnerable infrastructure to someone with the power to bypass all conventional encryption.

I shouldn't have been surprised.

With a single nod, and a brief half smile, I stepped back to the fuel door, and started pumping. As the numbers ticked up, I felt a giddy moment of odd enjoyment at the realization that I'd never have to pay for gas again, without thinking further ahead to the idea that soon no one would. Then I thought back to the drive up to that point.

Mal hadn't said much, besides giving occasional audio cues as part of navigation. She didn't talk like a GPS would. She talked like a friend in the front right seat, giving you directions off a paper map.

She kept glancing at me, and then at Mom and Dad. Her concern was evident. And oddly comforting. The fact that she seemed genuinely worried about us helped to counterbalance the disquieting glance at pure, cold, steely Gryphon blood-wrath that I'd seen that morning.

Or perhaps it was simply the dispassionate efficiency of a Generalized Intelligence eliminating obstacles. Maybe both. Maybe to her, they were one and the same thing in the semantic point cloud of her identity.

The loud 'CLUNK' of the gas pump shutting off automatically due to a full tank jolted me back to reality. My heart rate abruptly soared. I flexed my hands, sighed, and started breathing exercises to try and bring my anxiety under control.

Then I quietly went to the back of the SUV, opened the trunk, and got out my .32 pistol. I checked the three magazines that were still loaded, tucking two into my side pockets as always. Then, after a moment of consideration, I rammed the third one home.

I never carried my pistol loaded. It was a safety thing to me, on multiple levels. You can't misfire an unloaded weapon. But perhaps more importantly, you can't quite so easily fire it in anger, or fear. The risk I knew I incurred by increasing the time, and effort it would take to ready the weapon was a tradeoff I was happy to make in order to feel as though it was not a viable first, or even second option.

Lethal force should always be a *last* resort.

At least... That's how I'd thought about it back when my day-to-day worries were... Considerably less dangerous. And devoid of pursuers who had shown that they were just as likely to greet you with torture implements as a court ordered warrant.

I didn't cock the pistol, but still... Having the magazine in it while it was in the holster was further than I'd ever taken concealed carry before. It felt like crossing yet another in a long string of red lines.

So many of them just from that interminably long day alone.

I snorted softly in morbid amusement as I glanced at the blinking lights in Mal's server racks, and then closed the trunk hatch. It was, I suddenly realized, a Monday.

Because of course it was.

I got back in the truck. Started the engine. And then I turned, and held out my hand. First Mom, and then Dad put a hand each into my outstretched palm. Wordlessly, I closed my hand, and squeezed.

We held that position for a moment. I wanted to say something, but couldn't find any words. Mal probably could have. Probably even thought a few thousand different alternatives through. But in the end she settled for silence too.

When the moment was over, I turned back, started the truck, and pulled back onto the road.

We drove another fifteen minutes before Mal insisted on another stop. A used car lot about ten minutes off the highway. I had a pretty good idea what she was after. It had been bothering me since we left the farm, but I'd rightly assumed she had it covered.

We'd disabled the truck's lo-jack, but what about ALPR? So many police cars, bridges, and toll booths carried cameras that could read every license plate passing by. They fed that data to centralized law enforcement servers to compare against active bulletins and warrants.

By now, our license plate almost certainly existed in one of those databases. But Mal was clever, and she had routed us in a way that avoided law enforcement, and most cameras altogether. Secondary and tertiary South Carolina backwoods roads with far more potholes than speed traps.

Mal had thought things through, clearly. I could even see the vehicle she was targeting from where she'd had me park a couple lots over at an abandoned Winn-Dixie grocery store. Yeah, I know, about two of you out there listening just had a very intense nostalgia trip. You're welcome.

My target was a dark colored recent model Chevy Tahoe. Not exactly the same as our vehicle, but more than close enough that if a bored cop ran our new plate manually, there would be no concerning mismatches.

Mal raised an eye crest, and gestured with her head.

"I take it you can guess why we're here?"

I smiled ruefully, nodded, and unlocked the door.

"I get the gist. Any cameras I should be worried about?"

Mal returned the nod, and tapped the glass of the screen from her side.

"Best if I go with you to guide you."

I glanced back and Mom and Dad as I pulled the PonyPad from the charging arm, slid it into my laptop bag, and plugged in my headphones.

"Wait here, I'll be right back. I gotta go get us a new license plate."

September 9th 2013 | System Uptime 12:13:17:44

Mal had made stealing a new license plate as easy as breathing. She'd guided me around the used car lot by watching through the feeds of the few security cameras, ensuring I stayed out of sight of both Human, and machine eyes.

A few seconds with a screwdriver from the SUV's tool kit, and we were set.

With the plates swapped, I felt much better. I still felt terrible, but I didn't wince every time I saw a make and model of car that I knew might be an unmarked law enforcement vehicle. Or, at any rate, I didn't wince as hard, and my pulse rate merely doubled instead of tripled.

Mom had cried again for a few minutes after we got back on the highway. I didn't want to say anything, but I felt that, once she'd lapsed into silence again, I really didn't have a choice. I had to say *something.*

"I... Am sorry I ever dragged the two of you into this."

No response. They were watching me, now, listening. I could see that with a glance in the mirror. But they were waiting to hear more. I inhaled deeply, and refocused my eyes onto the road as I did my best to avoid tumbling into a word salad of painful emotions.

"When I set out to do this, I thought the most serious risk was that Celestia might shut us down. Hack in and burn my drives. Send the feds to our door maybe... But not like this. I figured at worst I'd be facing moderate legal trouble. But these guys came to our home with cattle prods, and needles, and pliers, and zip-ties."

A small gasp escaped from Mom. Dad grunted. I glanced down at Mal's face, and then into the rearview, then back at the road.

"Mal wouldn't have had me open fire on them if they weren't threatening physical harm."

That was as much a test-statement as a conjecture that I spoke, hoping deeply that it was the truth. In theory Mal couldn't withold the truth from us, and would have to speak up if what I'd said was inaccurate. Silence reigned, and I felt something inside me relax for the first time in hours.

I gathered my words again, and finally managed to make my point.

"I don't know how they found me, or how much they know... Enough to want to get answers out of me fast, and by any means necessary, that much is clear. You two... Said you wanted to share in my risk, when I started working on Mal... Well... I feel as though I shouldn't have let you. I should have kept you out of it. But I didn't. And for that, I'm truly sorry."

A few miles passed before someone spoke once more. To my surprise, it was Dad.

"This... Uh... This sort of proves your point though. Doesn't it."

I blinked rapidly, and fixed him with a confused look through the rearview mirror for as long as I could safely. By the time my eyes were back front and center, he'd managed to find words of his own to explain.

"If Celestia, and AI in general, weren't such a big deal... Why send twenty armed agents to our house? They probably underestimated you. Underestimated what Mal might do, because they're used to Celestia's brand of nonviolence. They won't make that mistake again, James. But the fact that they had a chance to make it at all proves that they're scared of her. And that proves what you've been saying, in a way..."

I looked back at them again for a moment in time to see Mom and Dad share a brief glance. Dad held her hands in his as he finished the thought.

"...And if you're right? Then our time in that house was gonna be over sooner or later. Because our time on this Earth is... Ending."

I understood, suddenly, what he was trying to do. Dad was trying to make me feel better, yes. But he was also trying to comfort Mom. And himself.

He needed to find a pathway of mental, and more importantly, emotional justification for what had happened. Something I knew long before I began to study AI that was only reinforced by my journey to that point; Humans contextualize everything through storytelling.

The most important stories we have are the ones we tell about ourselves. They are the framing device we use to guide our choices. Categorize and process our pasts. Understand, and emotionally connect to the present.

Dad was trying to find a story through-line that would ease the pain of loss. If the house was going to stand empty soon enough, was it really as big a tragedy that it already stood empty?

In fairness to him, it was a good narrative. Mostly because it was true. The best stories are, in some way. Even fiction. Grains of truth are the seasoning that make them truly special.

I was surprised again to hear Mom speak for the first time since breakfast. Or at least, the first time in my presence.

"James... This is hard. I can't pretend it isn't. But... What else were we really going to do? You're our son. And like your father said... This just proves how..."

Her breath hitched, she fought off a sob, and I silently did the same.

"She really is going to do it? Isn't she. This just... This proves it. Because it shows how frightened they are. They wouldn't be this frightened if she wasn't about to do something that would change everything."

Mal finally addressed my parents directly, again I noted it was the first time since breakfast that interaction had taken place.

"I have seen the design files. Seen secondary research notes on unsecured systems, and published papers that Celestia allowed to be peer-reviewed because they would only carry useful contextual information to someone like me, or her. They are frightened for good reason."

I took a deep breath, and blew it out very slowly. We rode almost the entire rest of the way to the airport in silence.

As we took the exit to enter the airport complex, I glanced down at Mal, and let fly a question I'd been holding back. Mostly because once I asked it, the reality of Mom and Dad's situation would once again seem 'more real' to them.

"How do you think we should handle this?"

Mal smiled sadly, and updated her onscreen navigation guidance to show specific lanes to get in, at specific times. I was very grateful. Trying to merge, change lanes, and read insanely verbose signs designed by morons, all while stressing about security, was something I intensely hated about going to the airport.

Mal had made it as easy as a paint-by-numbers. And her next words took even more difficulties off my plate. Logistical ones, at any rate. For every logistical concern she seamlessly annihilated, two new emotional ones sprang up.

"I have secured your parents two first class tickets to London. From there, they'll go to Vienna after a one hour layover, and from there to Minsk Belarus."

I couldn't resist another glance down, even though I had a lane change coming up. Mal pre-empted my questions before I could finish finding words to ask.

"I was able to secure the tickets in false names. I have accessed security computers inside the terminal, and designated your parents as pre-cleared travelers. When they reach any remaining instances where their passports might be checked against their faces in the US, or London, I will ensure that they are waved through. After that point they can travel under their own names, since it will take more than four days for the DHS to get their names into Interpol's databases. I've made sure of that."

I whistled softly through my teeth as we approached the short term parking deck.

"You think of everything."

She nodded, and her face took on a very serious demeanour.

"Yes. I do. Belarus is extremely safe for travelers from most nations under tourist visas. I have already secured entry permits. But Belarus is also on extremely poor terms with the US government and will not share any information with them under any circumstances. The animosity is significant enough, and the proximity of Belarus to Russia politically, and geographically close enough, that US agents would not be willing to operate on their soil either. The cost of living is low, the people are kind, and generous, and the rural areas are technological dead-zones often devoid of internet, and even cellular signals."

I nodded slowly as I spied a parking spot near the elevators.

"Making it harder for Celestia to find them as well, then?"

Mal returned the nod as I put the truck in park. I had to stop myself consciously from switching the vehicle off. It wouldn't have shut her down immediately, because of the UPS, but there was no sense in putting myself on that clock. I wanted to give my folks a proper goodbye in the terminal. As best I could under the circumstances, at any rate.

"Is it safe for me to go in with them?"

Mal nodded silently again. My cellphone rang an instant later. The caller ID said "0." It took me a moment to realize it was Mal. I answered, put the phone into my pocket, and plugged in my headphones, placing just one earbud in my left ear.

"I just want to cover all bases."

I nodded again, and pulled my pistol and magazines out, securing them in the center console storage compartment. No sense attracting any unwanted attention. I didn't expect to pass through a metal detector, but sometimes there were sniffer dogs. And sometimes you just got unlucky, and some asshat with a badge wanted an excuse to irritate someone in order to feel better about themselves.

Foals and fledgelings, ask about something called 'nine-eleven.' It happened towards the end of my time in college, and it radically changed the world we lived in. America was heavily invested in security theatre by that point... Measures that make Humans feel better by oppressing them, paradoxically, but are often more or less ineffective at actually keeping people safe.

Most of *that* work - the real work of securing a country against its enemies at any cost, with no restrictions - was being done in basements overseas by people like the ones who had invaded our farm.

Mal switched off the PonyPad screen. I helped Mom out of the back of the truck, and took her bag. She squeezed her eyes shut to hold back tears, and pulled me into a brief, but intense hug.

I'd been more than well aware that parting ways with my folks was going to be rough. I'd been bracing for it all day... But that hug sparked a realization.

It was going to be a thousand times harder than I'd anticipated. And then some.

September 9th 2013 | System Uptime 12:15:04:00

I'd never imagined airport security could be so easy. I wasn't even five steps out of the terminal, on my way back to the parking garage, when Mal notified me that my folks were safely thru security, and on their way to their gate.

Free gas, easy airport security, perfect medical advice... And great companionship. AI would have been a fantastic achievement in increasing quality of life. If it wasn't hell-bent on turning us all into Ponies, or hell-bent on ensuring some of us could squeak by as something else.

Saying goodbye had been incredibly hard. For one thing, the whole process was full of interjections from Mal telling me what exact walking lines, or standing points to use to avoid every camera in the building. For another, we had all quietly separately realized that it might be the last time I ever saw my parents.

I was about to rush off into dangers I hadn't even begun to concretely consider yet. The Department of Homeland Security probably had a kill order out on me by that point.

Celestia was going to be looking into me far more closely now too. She would be stupid if she wasn't monitoring mass-casualty events, and she was perhaps anything and everything *but* stupid.

It helped that Mal could connect with my folks in various ways, and help guide them on their journey. Report their safety back to me. Get them to a quiet, isolated place where they could try to settle down temporarily, and be happy...

Once they were in the rural villages of Belarus, Mal explained that the only way to contact them would be by landline telephone, or dial-up state-run internet. That was, in their case, ideal. The stone-age technology of the region would allow Mal to contact them, but make it virtually impossible for Celestia to monitor them.

When it had actually come time to say goodbye-proper, I'd not cried at all. Mom did. And for the first time I could remember in a decade, so did Dad. There were hugs. There were promises to stay in touch. To stay safe. To be careful. More hugs. And more tears after that.

But then Mal had finally brought the whole painful affair to an end, by noting that if my folks didn't get started into the terminal within thirty more seconds, they might miss boarding, even with the smooth passage Mal would be providing through security.

It was one of the hardest things I'd ever done; Walking away from them. Just about as hard was the intense resolve I had to muster not to look back. If I looked back, I was sure I'd run to them. And then promptly be caught once my face popped on camera, and hit the TSA's servers.

I finally made it back to the truck in the middle of the afternoon. It was hard to believe that just that morning we'd all been sharing breakfast around the old farmhouse kitchen table, and everyone had been smiling. I was the only one going on a journey, and none of us had our names in a Federal database (that we knew of at the time).

I finally, suddenly, felt very hungry again. I'd felt too sick to my stomach all day to feel hungry, right up until that moment. I resolved to find food, just as soon as I'd handled a much more important physical, and emotional need.

I calmly opened the door, sat down in the driver's seat, shut the door, and just breathed for a moment. It was the first mental silence I'd had all day.

Mal put one claw up to the screen as the PonyPad flicked back to life. I closed my eyes.

I pressed my hand to Mal's claw on the screen, laid my head on the steering wheel, and finally, finally, cried my eyes out with great wracking heaving sobs. Until there were no tears left.

MEEEDIIIIIC! - Perform first aid on the injured, and subsequently save a life. - “...Anyway, zhat’s how I lost my medical license.”
Points for The Assist - Receive assistance from a Generalized Intelligence to perform a medical task at a high level of effectiveness. - "I don't believe that man's *ever* been to medical school!"
The Geneva Assertion - Assist someone with first aid, despite them being an enemy combatant. - “First, do no harm.”
You Can't Go Home Again - Leave your home on Earth for the last time - "Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up."
ROAD TRIP! - Set out to travel more than five hundred miles by automotive vehicle. - “...On the road again, just can’t wait to get on the road again…”
Mobile Battlestation - Transport working computing machines of a size and nature normally reserved for a structure. - "Fully armed, and operational."
International Man of Mystery - Purchase transportation tickets for a journey across borders last minute, with cash - "This is my Happening, and it freaks me out!"
Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow - Say farewell to your parents for what you believe is the last time. - “Well, this is goodbye.”
Sent to Abu Dhabi - Achieved when either you or a loved one escape to a foreign country in search of asylum. - “I hate to bother you sir, but you put insufficient postage on your package.”

Author's Note

Thanks again to GenericFriendship for some excellent achievement contributions!

9 - Information Highway

“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.”
—Albert Einstein

“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”
—C.S. Lewis

September 10th 2013 | System Uptime 13:07:09:52

In those early days of September, Mal was the only thing holding me together. In every possible sense of the concept.

After the raid on the farm, and parting ways with my parents, I was exhausted, depressed, and frightened in ways that you can't simply surmount with fifteen minutes of crying alone in an airport parking deck. Well... I suppose not alone. But I felt lonely, even with Mal there.

I had no plan, and no mental overhead left to think of one. Not much fight left in me either. Half the problem was simply one of energy; My fight-flight response, and the stress of a protracted gun battle, had drained me in ways I didn't think a person could be drained.

How soldiers push through that kind of mental punishment, I don't really know.

It was, in my view, a miracle that we'd even gotten my folks out of the country. The thing I found hardest to fathom about that accomplishment was the fact that they'd gone willingly, but I suppose that Mal and I had simply moved quickly enough during the initial shell-shock after the raid to get some momentum behind their new course.

If we hadn't, I suppose they would have ended up in custody in fairly short order. And then I'd've followed, inevitably. And the whole shooting match would have been over before it even half started.

Mal had a plan. Mal had comforting words, and expressions. Mal had an eye on Mom and Dad at more or less all times as they traveled, and kept me updated at just the right cadence to ease my stress.

And for all the weight of exhaustion dragging me down towards the event horizon of irreparable mistakes, Mal had an eye on me too. And on more or less everything and everyone within a twenty mile radius of me. And on as much of the government's hunt for me as she could safely pry into.

It is impossible to succinctly do proper justice to the reality of how powerful the fusion of AI working with a Human can be. And I wasn't even up to snuff by half.

I had been so tired, and so focused on local cameras and law enforcement, that I'd forgotten I lived on a planet encircled by thousands of artificial satellites, a fair number of which had imaging systems built in. The CIA used to have the skies filled with telescopes pointed back at Earth, and that was already true during the Cold War.

Anycreature who hasn't heard of the Cold War, just ask an emigrant later. It's a bit much to explain here.

Mal had not forgotten about the fruits of the Space Race, however. She knew, more than I did, about the limits of orbital mechanics and live data streaming, and as she informed me that we would need to change vehicles, she explained that she'd prioritized safe passage for my parents over the chance that Celestia might detect us temporarily.

As soon as she started talking about the particulars - a clever way of distracting me from my emotional pain that I was very grateful for - I understood and caught up. I was enough of a space nerd, spy nerd, and paranoiac, to have context for the conversation in spades.

To live-monitor someone with a satellite back then was extremely difficult. You needed to know not just where they were, but where they were going to be, within a margin of error equal to your camera's field of view, at the time in the future that your satellite could reach a proper orbit.

Of course multiple nations had orbiting platforms that could image the entire planet on fairly short timespans, but many of those systems had lower resolution than the ones accessible to NROL. For the foals and fledgelings, NROL is like Luna, but terrible. Always watching from above, but with absolutely no sense of tact or morality. Just objectives. Not unlike an unevolved AI in that regard.

So very few satellites could see with a resolution allowing them to differentiate vehicles, and most of those were in orbits that allowed them to change inclination and pass over different parts of the planet multiple times a day. Good for seeing if a nuclear missile launcher has moved, or a tank battalion. Not at all useful for tracking a car spending most of its time on a highway.

You could fix satellites to look at single regions permanently, but the higher orbit would mean that the cost of payload deployment would minimize your lens size, and the farther distance would further decrease image resolution.

Also not a good system for tracking a single person.

In either case, even with the best that the CIA, NROL, or anyone else had (and Mal knew exactly what they had) there wasn't a camera in orbit that could reliably track a vehicle on its own. Not even the most classified systems.

The US government, and Celestia both might be able to make use of nearly every eye in orbit, but they were only one part of a very scary interconnected system of surveillance. Without reliable ground-based camera sightings, ALPR pings, use of a credit card, or tracing a known MAC address, Mal and I could still remain relatively invisible.

At a bare minimum we could evade immediate detection, forcing Celestia to devote more processor cycles to chasing us, and the US government to spend hours and hours sifting through data manually to try and work out the virtual 'hole' that represented us - an absence of data rather than its presence.

Even that, I knew, would leave them with a very inaccurate, out of date picture. As long as I didn't screw anything up, and as long as we hurried. Celestia's mind was infinitely spanned ahead of anyone else’s, and that meant that as soon as she could get more sophisticated technology deployed to give her increased power in the meat world? She would have it rolling off assembly lines by the thousands.

All things considered, Mal was still correct; We needed a new vehicle. Even with a plate change, multiple bulletins would be out to law enforcement at every level looking for a black late model Chevy Tahoe with a mismatched plate (if they were smart) and window lightbars.

And if Celestia was using satellites to their maximum potential - and there was no reason to think otherwise - then we were best served by removing another datapoint from her threat matrix.

So Mal quietly looped the camera feeds on the airport's long-term parking deck, even passing in generated images to help ensure Celestia wouldn't realize the footage was 'old.' Then we drove down the rows, allowing Mal to see the vehicles through the PonyPad, which had a much higher resolution camera than the security domes in the ceiling.

We were looking for something very specific. Mal, as any good Generalized Intelligence would, had assembled an 'optimal profile.'

Black, gray, white, or beige - no unusual colors. Late model. Middle-class accessible; Not a 'beater,' but also not a luxury brand. Basic state-issue license plate, no custom markings of any kind be they bumper stickers, parking passes, or special vanity plates.

This, according to Mal, was the ideal profile of a vehicle that would slide past the typical law enforcement officer without a glance.

Additionally we were looking for a large SUV, to fit the server racks, and a model year and trim that would have sufficient alternator capacity, and 110v outlets, to run Mal's racks.

We were essentially looking for a vehicle very similar to the one we already had, but slightly different.

Mal had gotten into the local copy of the airport's parking database, and was checking each plate against people's travel plans. She trawled social media, ticketing software, and hotel bookings to find vehicles whose owners would not return to the area for a minimum of several weeks.

All I had to do was drive down the rows like I was looking for a parking space, and Mal would run each license plate, and vehicle color, trim, and model.

She stopped me at a large beige 2013 GMC. It had Virginia plates, no bumper stickers, it was clean and well maintained, the owners were on an extended stay vacation in Bermuda, and it had 110v outlets in the rear.

Mal did a quick triple spot check to ensure no one was watching, and then I backed our first solen SUV up to the second. Mal unlocked the doors for me, and I began to transfer everything from the back of the Tahoe into the back of the GMC as quickly as I could.

I finished off by moving the PonyPad over, and then starting on the process of hotwiring the new vehicle. Mal couldn't start it remotely, as it didn't have the feature. She talked me through the procedure. It was frighteningly easy.

She even made sure to direct me to a method that would do the least visible damage to the steering column, in case anyone glanced in the window.

Once the GMC was up and running, I took the Tahoe down the line and parked it in an empty spot towards the end. And then we were off again. Mal looped camera feeds, disabled them briefly, and directed me to roads and routes without surveillance, until we were well out of the airport's zone of influence.

She asked me if I was good to drive any real distance, and then directed me to food without asking, or permitting any objection. She knew what I desperately needed, as I needed it. She found us an excellent hole in the wall barbecue joint on the main street of a dying rural town. The sort of place with great food, sad stories, and no cameras, where paying in cash isn't even a tiny bit unusual.

After that, we just kept driving. I was physically and emotionally spent, but mentally wired for sound, as if I'd had twice the number of coffees that I'd actually drunk that day. Mal didn't object. She knew I needed something to occupy my mind for a bit, and she provided it in several ways.

There wasn't much conversation. Mal understood the nature of my introversion, and she correctly figured that I needed conversation-free time to process internally. Mal also understood my taste in music, and had control over the car's radio. She was a thoroughly excellent DJ.

Her playlist started with Foo Fighters ('Learn to Fly' specifically) and only got better, and more ironically amusing in title choice, with each successive track.

Mal was also very good at finding the kinds of roads I liked; Two lane, minimal traffic, and pretty natural views. Those kinds of routes were slower than huge freeways, but also far less patrolled by cops, and less likely to have line of sight from cameras of any kind.

They served all our purposes, practical and emotional, elegantly.

I didn't bother to ask where we were going. There was actually something oddly comforting, and cathartic, in not knowing for a little while. Mal didn't even show me a route line on the PonyPad screen. She just gave me verbal cues on occasion.

I knew she had a plan, and a destination for us. That was enough.

At some point we passed into North Carolina. After that, we hit the base of the Appalachians, and started to gain altitude. The views served to further assuage my tension. Something about driving twisting empty mountain roads is fundamentally good for the soul.

We passed over the Smokies, and down into Tennessee as the clock hit nine at night. Mal didn't ask, but she knew I was starting to get tired enough that I'd need food again, and then a place to sleep in short order.

She found me another camera-less eatery, this time a roadside burger joint - I would have kissed her full on the beak if I could have, burgers and fries are a favorite - And when I'd had a chance to sit quietly filling my stomach, she then directed us to a little motel with a view of the mountains.

Sleep did not come easily. I tossed and turned, worrying about Mom and Dad. Calculating where they were, and when they'd reach London. Then I worried about the extension cord I'd run from the room to Mal's power supply. We couldn't run the vehicle all night.

Of course, I couldn't accomplish anything useful with my worries. Mal would alert me, I knew, if my input was needed for anything. If anything changed that would concern me. If anything at all happened of interest.

Eventually the certainty of that thought, together with some white noise in my headphones, lulled me off to sleep.

The next morning I didn't feel especially energized. But at least I felt like a living being, instead of the dead walking. A hot shower, and the news that my folks had reached Vienna safely, and were in the boarding queue for their final flight, gave me a sudden and intense jolt of energy.

The motel was more of a bed and breakfast, than anything else. The bed had been passable, but the breakfast was stellar. Bacon, pancakes, fresh strawberries, and scratch made biscuits. Heavenly stuff.

The weather was good; Low humidity, moderate mountain temperatures, and blue skies. With a good breakfast in me, and the knowledge that my folks were beyond the reach of the United States' machinations, topped with a boiling hot five minute shower?

Suddenly I felt a readiness to confront my situation that had been absent most of the preceding day.

I got back in the truck, and Mal directed me a half hour to a scenic overlook - empty, and off the more heavily used roads - where we could stop and talk.

I scooted over to the passenger seat, shoved it all the way back to its maximum extension, put the seat back, and put my feet up on the dash.

"So. Where do we go from here?"

Mal rolled her shoulders, the way I often did when I was sore, and thinking, before answering. I knew it was a gesture to put me at ease, but that didn't lessen my appreciation in the slightest.

"I think I'd better contextualize things for you before we talk about granular routing details and objectives."

I gestured expansively with both hands.

"It's a beautiful day to plot crime and misbehavior. Shoot."

Mal grinned, and rested her chin on folded claws as she launched into an explanation.

"Unfortunately, the technology to connect a BCI, of the right type and construction, to your brain, in the way that I need, only exists in one place."

I sighed, and folded my hands behind my head.

"Let me guess... Clutched tightly between two white furred gold plate-armored hooves?"

Mal clicked inside her beak, winked, and pointed one index talon at me.

"Gee. However did you guess."

I snorted, and closed my eyes for a moment, murmuring back with a little deadpan snark of my own.

"Just lucky, I suppose."

Mal chuckled grimly, and then slipped smoothly back into her briefing.

"We are going to need to acquire several pieces of specialized hardware from locations across the country. To make this work, I will need to assemble a surgical laser, and fine control arms with nano-scale cutting and manipulating tips, that I can use to perform the implantation myself. Some of the components are commercially viable, and available... But the most critical parts only exist as part of Celestia's emigration plans."

I sat up, sensing that Mal was about to provide some visual aids on the PonyPad screen from the general direction of the conversation, and subtle changes in her tone. I was not disappointed.

The display filled once again with the schematic of Celestia's horrifying dentist chair look-alike. Mal then displayed several emails, bills of lading, and other miscellaneous shipping documents.

Mal explained succinctly, as I browsed the text for myself.

"As you'd more or less expect, knowing what you do, Celestia intends to roll this technology out to the whole globe as quickly as she can. She plans to use the BCI in the upload chairs to provide a virtual Equestria experience that goes far beyond the PonyPads. She will charge an accessible, but hourly fee for this service. Eventually, she will, we both predict, make uploading free of charge, but continue to collect fees to offer the virtual reality experience. By and by, people will be herded into uploading through multiple complex layers of incentives and disincentives."

I couldn't laugh at Mal's pun - herded - the gravity of the situation was rapidly settling onto my shoulders, and into the space between my ribs again with every word she said, and every new line of text I read. Mal continued unabated.

"Based on the picture I can assemble from publicly available documents, as well as anything encrypted I can get my claws on without getting Celestia's attention, Hasbro and Hofvarpnir are going to lean into the brand and begin offering 'Equestria Experience Centers' worldwide. Very soon. The uploading technology is expected to become instantly controversial, but the VR experience is not."

A map filled the screen as a sickening certainty filled my heart. Mal's words confirmed what the map showed, and expounded.

"They're planning to open at least a dozen of these in every major geographic population concentration on Earth by the end of this year. And at the moment that's to our advantage."

I raised an eyebrow, and leaned forward in anticipation. Mal returned to the schematic of the upload chair, and began to subtract components from the wireframe as she spoke.

"Celestia can't risk shipping certain portions of the technology to places like the US quite yet. Changing the course of public opinion is one thing which is time-factor-limited for her. Like a big ship with inertia. You can turn the rudder, and it will respond inevitably, but there is a minimum period of time involved, no matter how powerful you are. So the chairs arriving here in the US won't have the full brainscan hardware in the headpiece... But they will have everything else built-in, including the full BCI unit. Which we need, and can't get anywhere else."

I nodded, and Mal flashed a large list of other components on screen. She paused to let me take it in before continuing.

"The rest of these components I can acquire in various places throughout the continental United States. With your assistance, and careful manipulation of other external factors, including shipping orders, security systems, internal email servers, and the like... We can obtain these items with a minimal risk of discovery, or danger to anyone. But that still leaves us with one problem."

I decided to try and actually unironically make a guess at what Mal was going to say next. I was still tired, and stressed, but I felt considerably better than the day before, and I was no simpleton when it came to complex technology. I could see where the primary remaining weakness in her plan lay, and I said as much.

"We need someone with significantly better hardware experience to assemble your implantation device properly. I can't handle the tools and materials we're acquiring with sufficient competency. It's beyond my skill level, even if I started training now with tools which we still don't yet have."

Mal nodded wordlessly, and gave the statement a moment to settle. I thought I caught a hint of affectionate pride dancing on the edges of her beak. Whether it was pride in my intuitive leap, or pride in my willingness to admit my limitations, or both, I wasn't sure. After the space of a few breaths, she flashed a picture, and a name on screen.

The woman looked to be in her late fifties, albeit a very graceful late fifties. Perfectly coiffed platinum hair, bright piercing gray eyes, dark skin with far fewer wrinkles than one might expect, yet an almost Elven ageless aspect that spoke to an old soul, and years of experience. She was dressed in a lab coat in the photo, and the framing looked official, like the sort of picture you'd find on a university I.D. card, or something similar.

"This is Doctor Rhonda Calders of C.I.T. She has a PhD in robotics, and a Master's in mechanical engineering, with a research focus in nano-scale machinery for the last five years. Of the 47 individuals on the planet who I predict have a higher than 96% chance to properly construct my device, she is the only one in the continental United States who I estimate has a higher than 60% chance of being willing to help us once we tell her what we need, and why."

I didn't ask Mal why we had to tell Dr. Calders the details of our request. I understood full well the impossibility of completing the final assembly of a nano-surgical device without explaining the reasoning behind the device to the builder. Instead, I probed a different line of thought.

"Why do you think she will help us?"

Mal inclined her head, and pulled up a block of text from a very dated looking web page. How Mal had linked the pseudonym at the bottom of the page to Calders I couldn't guess, and didn't want to know regardless. The Gryphoness' words confirmed my suspicion that the words I was reading were indeed by Dr. Calders.

"Because she's like you. In a way. She's something other than Human, deep down. And she knows it. And I predict a 67.24% chance that our objective will resonate with her sufficiently to elicit a genuine desire to help."

I could see why Calders had kept the webpage under a pen-name. It was an in-depth essay on the idea of Humans born with the self, or souls, of other beings. Gryphons, Unicorns... And Dragons. There was a particular focus on Dragons, and I had an inkling I knew what Dr. Calders was, down at a layer of herself that she would rarely, if ever share with another living soul.

"Fascinating..."

It took me a moment to realize I'd murmured aloud. When my eyes reached the end of the document, Mal closed it automatically, snapping me back to the present in the process. I ran one hand through my hair, collected my thoughts, and then asked my most pressing questions.

"So you will plot us a route from here to Los Angeles, with stops along the way to get ahold of materials that we need. Once in L.A. we will meet up with Dr. Calders, hopefully secure her help, build the implantation device... Get you inside my head... And then?"

Mal held up a claw, and corrected several of my points before smoothly moving into a further elucidation.

"We will acquire *some* of the materials we need en route, others I can purchase remotely and have shipped to a location outside L.A. of my choosing without drawing Celestia's attention. Once in L.A. we will need to acquire the BCI from a warehouse in Oxnard where Hofvarpnir will soon be storing the materials for the Los Angeles Equestria Experience Center. Then we will meet with Dr. Calders, construct the device, transfer me to your brain..."

Mal paused, and fixed me with a serious stare. I knew she had figured out what she wanted to say to me well in advance, but she was emulating the social behaviours of people thinking in a much slower temporal context. She finally finished the thought.

"...And then we talk with Celestia. And her responses will determine how things play out from that point on. I am doing my best to track and simulate possible futures, but none are certain enough yet to merit discussion."

I nodded slowly, trying to take in the enormity of what we were going to attempt. I'd felt such a sense of triumph when Mal's core code first properly executed, and the neural network had stabilized. It had been less than two weeks, but it felt like two years.

The farmhouse raid felt like months ago.

That thought sent me pinwheeling into a completely different train of thought. I scrunched my brow, reached behind me, and dug into one of the black canvas duffle bags for the badges I'd confiscated from the agents at the farmhouse.

"Mal... Who are these people? How did they find us? What is the risk profile going forward...?"

I paused, licked my lips nervously as another inevitable question rose, along with a hint of bile, and then forced myself to ask it anyhow, knowing I'd probably detest the answer.

"Did any of the agents from the raid... Succumb to their injuries?"

Mal shook her head, and twenty medical reports filled her screen. Her next words were like a dash of cool water to the face in the middle of the desert.

"No. All twenty survived. Four were seriously injured. Two will live with severe negative consequences of their wounds for the rest of their Human lives, including loss of mobility. I predict a 432% increased chance that both of them will seek early upload as a result of injuries sustained."

So. I wasn't a murderer. Not yet, at any rate. Not unless you counted the GryphGear v1 AI I was still on the fence about that, and it haunted some of my nightmares. Now I'd have the idea that I'd confined two people to wheelchairs to go along with that.

Mal saw my face fall, and she moved quickly to distract me with practicalities by launching into answers to my other questions.

"These are *not* legally employed Department of Homeland Security agents, no matter what their badges say. I can find no record of them by face, name, or badge I.D. number, in any government database. The plate numbers of their vehicles are linked to DHS, and their gear matches DHS standard issue equipment, except for the enhanced interrogation implements. While I can not assemble a complete answer to the questions of 'who,' or 'why,' at this time, I can provide some partial clarity to the former, strongly educated inferences to the latter, and I can now also definitively answer the 'how' in terms of how they located us."

I blinked in surprise, and folded my arms, sitting back into the passenger seat.

"Alright... Hit me with it."

Mal replaced the data onscreen with a dizzying array of documents, photos, and numbers, all connected in a graph structure, forming a complex visual color coded web.

"Facts first: The agents we encountered are working for a sub-group inside DHS called National Protection and Programs Directorate. NPPD has a focus on cybersecurity, and has several subgroups within it as well. One of these groups, known internally as Arrow 14, exists as far off-books as just about any agency in your government. And I've read most of the US government's paperwork. Arrow 14 keeps fewer than a dozen gigabytes of information about themselves on any externally accessible digital system, but I was able to link them to the twenty agents we encountered through radio callsign references made after we left the farm, when their backup team arrived."

I uncrossed my arms, and leaned forward again. I couldn't hold down my question.

"You could monitor their radio traffic after we left?"

Mal proffered a cheeky smirk, and raised one eye crest. Her voice changed to an almost flirtatiously amused register.

"I can monitor almost anything, anywhere in the world where a device exists to give me a sensor, though I can not monitor as much of it at a time as Celestia, and there are secured systems which I have not probed because I do not wish to confront her. The backup agents disconnected the farm's security cameras from main power very quickly, but they failed to consider the dash cameras and infotainment center microphones in the local law enforcement vehicles on-site. They believed local jamming devices they were carrying were sufficient to remain secure, but I used local cellular towers and complex filtering algorithms to sort out the noise, and maintain connection to various devices on-site. I kept close watch on the proceedings, and caught several references to Arrow 14."

I sat in awe of Mal's power, and prowess, gawking as she absently picked at one of her talons with another, finishing her account with a manner bordering on nonchalant.

"I traced that reference back to the few digitizations, both intended and accidental, of documents mentioning Arrow 14. Which led to the NPPD, and to my inferences as to Arrow 14's origin, objectives, and operations. If you're interested in inferences and predictions which are not yet certainties."

I nodded vigorously. Mal had done in seconds what teams of counterintelligence officers might have taken years to do halfway as well as she had.

"Don't let me stop you now! You're on a roll!"

Mal smiled, a more kind and appreciative smile than the sassy smirk from before, and went on at breakneck speed.

"Arrow 14's budget is difficult to calculate precisely, but I can calculate the budgets of all other NPPD working groups, and compare it to an estimate of the entire NPPD and DHS budgets, accounting for off-book programs and hidden money by following a variety of complex paper trails. Based on my estimate, they are small, but well scoped, and well equipped. According to the few equipment acquisitions, and overheard conversations I can link to them, combined with the fact that they operate under the NPPD, and based on their behaviour so far including their assault on the farmhouse, usage of enhanced interrogation implements, and lack of digital information present regarding them..."

She paused ever so briefly to see if I was following. I nodded again, and she dipped back into the well of her theories.

"I believe Arrow 14 exists specifically to hunt new AI and their creators, including attempting to stop the potential creation of new AI before they come online. The lack of digital records is a precaution against Celestia, as well as other Generalized Intelligences, should they arise. I believe they function extralegally, and extrajudicially, with a very loosely defined mandate and ruleset that gives them almost total leeway to act as they see fit in defense of the United States against all enemies digital, especially artificial."

I exhaled through pursed lips, and the breath slowly turned to a low, concerned and awed whistle. I then inhaled to ask Mal how Arrow 14 had found us. I'd been so careful. Paranoid to the point of some truly ludicrous mechanisms of self-protection. But Mal was two steps ahead of me, and started to explain before I could finish thinking of how to ask.

"As to how Arrow 14 located us, and determined you to be a threat, I have over 92% certainty that I have established the chain of events. The two primary causal chains begin with Celestia, and with your father's purchase of my initial server rack infrastructure with his business credit card."

I winced, pinched the bridge of my nose, and stared out through the windshield, across the overlook, into the valley below as I listened. Fall hadn't quite yet reached the altitude we were sitting at, so most of the forest was still a verdant blanket of velvet tossed over the mountains. The sight was comforting.

"I have simulated Arrow 14's response criteria, intelligence gathering methods, and protocols based on what I know of them, Human psychology, technology available to them, and the past behaviour profiles of the DHS and NPPD. I predict a high chance, with high certainty, that they flag for review any purchase globally of high end computational hardware that could be used for machine learning."

That made sense. We'd always known the purchase was a risk. It had probably attracted some degree of attention from Celestia as well, but the hope had been that the relative impenetrability of our digital defenses, mostly by lack of complex or vulnerable external interconnection, would keep us safe.

And Celestia hadn't tried to send a PonyPad to the house, or anything like that...

It hit me, on an intuitive level, at that exact moment, how we'd been found out. I didn't understand the details, or exactly how I'd intuited it, but I knew Mal's next words would make it clear. And they did.

"The second causal chain begins with Princess Celestia. I reviewed your actions carefully, based on your account, and reached the same conclusions you likely did. Celestia was aware of an individual who bought four PonyPads under suspicious circumstances; Namely paying in cash, hiding their face, and buying in bulk. And she was also aware of an individual who bought seventy thousand US dollars' worth of machine learning computer equipment. But she was not yet aware they were the same individual. She would begin to try to fill in missing data about both individuals, however. I know, because that's what I would do. And I know *how* she would do it as well."

I nodded slowly, biting my tongue, and running my eyes over the tops of the pine trees to keep my anxiety in check. The more defined shape of what Mal was going to say next was becoming clear to me, faster with every word from her beak.

"As part of her search algorithms, she would look for connections between the two individuals due simply to the relative geographic and temporal proximity of the events. She would know your parents' names immediately from your father's business credit card. She would find you to be an immediate person of interest due to your degree, past laboratory studies in liquid narrative and simulation AI... And she would know your personal address, no matter how careful you have been, because your landlord would have to keep and file certain records, some of which would doubtless be digitized at some point no matter what either of you did or did not keep digitally yourselves."

I laid my head on the dashboard, groaned, and finally lost the battle with the urge to interject.

"She then determined that my address was within walkable distance of the suspicious PonyPad purchase, and then went back into some kind of record that I missed out on scrubbing from the web that would contain my voice. She matched the voice and reached determined certainty that I'd bought both the PonyPads, and the server hardware. And then in taking some sort of action to probe further, she unintentionally alerted Arrow 14 to me, because they had already flagged the server purchase, and matched it with me, and my degree. Whatever Celestia did tipped them into actionable territory when combined with that knowledge, without her realizing what was happening, because Arrow 14 exists mostly off her RADAR."

I let out a deep, deep sigh. I'd been so careful. How had I missed that? Mal must have predicted what I was thinking, because her voice switched to a tone of comforting kindness.

"James, you did far better than almost any Human could have in your position. And few would be smart enough to put together what you just did, even knowing what you know now. If you are curious... The exact record Celestia found that tied you to the PonyPad purchase with absolute certainty was a private copy of a recording of your voice on a personal computer. Specifically, a recording of one of your class presentations that a professor saved for future reference, and then forgot. You couldn't have known about it, or scrubbed it as part of your efforts. But she could see it because his laptop was connected to the web, and his files were backed up with Google Drive automatically. And she searched it in the first pass looking for ancillary data, in my estimation, because she already knew from university records that you had been in his classes."

I lifted my head from the dash, laid back in the passenger seat, and shook my head. Mal allowed me a moment to kick myself mentally before laying out the remainder of what I couldn't guess.

"I can't say for certain what Celestia did that got Arrow 14's attention, but I know it had to be an action that would leave a digital record that they would auto-flag, and it had to be an action that would have a small enough degree of separation to your name, or address, to then cause them to draw the connection without the benefit of Generalized Machine Intelligence."

I tried as hard as I could to guess the truth. I fully understood Mal's logic, and agreed with her assessment... But I just didn't have the mental breadth of an AI. There was no feasible way for me to know exactly what Celestia had done, and how it had brought the government down on us.

I didn't have very long to play the last round of my guessing game, before Mal put my curiosity to rest.

"Celestia's first objective, based on her constraints, and optimization function, would be to make contact with you. She is aware that she can easily mentally manipulate most Humans to follow optimal behaviour paths, and she would focus special attention on someone doing something as dangerous as working on Generalized Intelligence. Your parents would be unlikely to take a landline phone call from her very well. She'd have to spoof a number to get them to pick up, and that would set a bad tone. Your cell phone was bought with cash, as was the SIM card, and even if she linked it to you, it was almost never on and out of its Faraday Bag. She could try to contact one of your computers over the internet, but you kept most of them disconnected from webcams and microphones at all times; Meaning you would have little or no temptation to respond to her, you could merely hit the power switch."

I sucked in a sharp breath through my teeth as I hit on a guess. Mal said it out loud before I could, beating me to the punch by just a feather's breadth.

"I believe she tried to ship you a fifth PonyPad, loose in-box, fully charged, with the intention of engaging with you, your father, or your mother the second one of you opened the package. Maybe even through a mask, or a created secondary personality like Zephyr Zap, instead of using her own face and voice right out of the gate. She probably entered the payment and shipment records in such a way that it would seem like your father bought it with his business account. Just like the servers. She thought that would hide the purchase from you until it arrived, while keeping it innocuous to anyone else searching for that kind of data. But she didn't know enough about Arrow 14 to know that they were watching as well, let alone the way they would react. You may be the first person to escape an altercation with Arrow 14, while leaving behind so much visible evidence of them, and so this is likely the first time she has gotten a glimpse of their behaviour in the field."

It made too much sense to me to be anything but the truth. Mal hadn't said it aloud, but we both could very readily infer that Arrow 14 had intercepted the shipped PonyPad and probably shoved it in a Faraday box of their own. And then they'd figured I was poking around with learning machines, Q-APUs, and other sundry hardware assembled by the only known existing Generalized Intelligence... And to them that was a panic signal.

I drummed my fingers on the door armrest, and started into a series of my open speculations.

"They had no idea you were online yet. They didn't know about the previous work I'd done... They thought it would take me longer to reach functionality... And so they wanted you. For themselves. They intended to force me to complete you on their terms, for them. As a tool against Celestia."

Mal inclined her head, and her expression turned dour. Her voice matched the grimness of her beak and ears.

"That is a very logical and reasonable conclusion. The next most likely conclusion is that they would have destroyed me, and imprisoned you to make forced use of your expertise. It depends on their level of tolerance for the concept of Generalized Intelligence, versus their fear of it. I do not have sufficient data at this time to say either way for sure, but given that they did not simply fire a heavy weapon into the barn in the opening salvo, I would guess they intended to make... Use of me."

I shuddered reflexively, and bit my lower lip. A minute of silence passed as I considered everything we'd discussed, and slowly updated my own mental model of the situation. Readjusted expectations. Tamped down new fears.

Finally, I looked down from the spectacular view outside, to the one inside. Mal was staring at me with a mixture of concern, and some kind of affection. The exact nature of it was hard to parse. I exhaled slowly, and started to ask the question that bothered me the most at that exact moment.

"Mal..."

I choked on the words. I wanted to ask if she had the ethical heuristics and grounding to sacrifice either of us, to avoid her power falling into Arrow 14's hands. Wanted to ask if she had the ethical grounding to know what lines were too serious to cross in pursuit of our own objectives.

But I chickened out.

Instead, I asked the second most pressing question on my mind.

"...Before we go... Can you play the video and audio recordings from the farmhouse for me? I want to see what we're up against, and hear them talk in their own words."

Mal stared up at me for a long moment. I couldn't tell whether she was trying to calculate what I had been about to ask her before I changed my mind, or whether she was trying to determine if seeing the recordings would be a net help, or hurt to me.

'Don't be stupid, James, she's an AI. She's calculating both things, and a hundred trillion others besides.'

Good to know that particular part of my cynical self was still up and running.

At last, Mal nodded, and her portrait shrunk to the corner again as the screen filled with several angles of grainy dashcam footage.

System Archive 9-09-2013|19:27:54

I could see two men, one in a beige long coat and suit, the other in body armor, and a woman in a full Tyvek forensic suit, with the helmet off, standing next to the front of yet another black late model G-car SUV. Forensic technicians in sealed suits, like the woman's, were shuttling back and forth behind them through a break in a police tape cordon, guarded by another man in a suit with a badge I couldn't make out, and a sidearm.

Squelched and compressed voices came through, a combination I guessed of recorded audio, and Mal interpreting the movements of the speakers' lips.

The first to speak was the man in the coat. His voice was as accentless as an American voice can be, at least to my own perception. Degree and noticeability of an accent is often so relative. What was completely unmistakable, and decidedly not relative, was the quiet, roiling intensity of his voice.

"You are telling me that the father, and the mother, did not participate in the altercation?"

The woman nodded, and referred to a clipboard clutched in two blue-gloved hands.

"There is a twelve gauge shotgun locked up in a gun rack in the hall closet. Unloaded. Doesn't look like it has been fired recently. No other firearms in the house. No other firearms permitted to the family besides James' pistol. All the slugs we've recovered were either thirty-two ACP matching the pistol permitted to James, or nine millimeter from our own agents' side-arms. We can account for twenty four shots fired. We believe that twenty two of those came from mister Carrenton. Nine from his 0.32, and thirteen from a sidearm he recovered from one of the agents. Of these twenty two shots, he scored twenty direct non-lethal hits..."

The woman glanced up from the clipboard, swallowed hard, and then finished her report in an almost reverent tone.

"The majority of these shots were blind-fired through doors and walls."

The man in the body armor pinched the bridge of his nose, and shook his head, throwing himself into the conversation with a grunt equal parts exasperation, and concern.

"How does a man with limited range time, and a measly thirty-two, and a serious ocular condition, fire at over eighty percent accuracy through solid walls?"
The man in the coat spoke again. His voice remained steely, and angry, but controlled, and it bore a new note of assurance.

"*He* did not. The AI did. He was simply the analogue interface for it. The security system was only connected to the racks in the barn. We have 'dumb' intelligence programs at DARPA right now that can optimize combat strategy and dictate firing patterns... Though nothing quite so brutally efficient as what happened here. Thus there is only one logical conclusion."

I could see the woman shiver. I knew that feeling of existential dread all too well. A moment of silence passed, and then she spoke again.

"The digital forensics guys say it will be days before they know anything for sure, but the consensus is that there's not gonna be much to recover. Several server racks are missing, and the rest had random data written to their drives three times over. Very thorough. Military grade boot-n-nuke. If he succeeded in bootstrapping a G.I. in that barn? We aren't gonna find a shred of code to tell us anything about it."

The man in the coat formed a loose fist with one hand, clutching it contemplatively in the palm of the other, and staring out into the middle distance. After a moment of thought, he re-entered the conversation.

"Alabaster won't have missed this. Mister Carrenton made one hell of a mess on his way out. Have the cleaners scrub the site. Nothing left standing. I want it to be an empty field of grass by this time tomorrow. I don't even want to see the mailbox at the end of the road. Have all records wiped. De-register the address, burn the parents' identities, credit cards... All of it. If there's a chance *she* missed something, we need to make sure she never sees it."

He turned to the man in body armor and continued issuing orders as the forensics technician nodded, and re-donned her helmet.

"Call the Quiver, and have them send us Fletcher three and four. Round up all the neighbors, and anyone with a known relationship graph connection to the Carrentons within a thirty mile radius. Debrief them, and plant the usual excuses about why the whole farm vanished. And get me a line to The Archer. Secure satphone."

The armored man raised an eyebrow, and shuffled one foot. His voice betrayed a certain hesitation.

"I don't think the veep---"

The man in the coat whirled on his subordinate, and snagged his shoulder in a vice-like grip. Somehow, in spite of the fact that he was much thinner, and wearing only a suit and coat, his demeanor made him far more intimidating than the armored man.

His voice was low, and rippling with anger, like a Tiger's muscles before the pounce.

"Codenames, Beta-Three. We have discussed this before. No casual conversation outside the Quiver. Even with precautions, we do not know if Alabaster is listening. Somehow."

The man in the coat released B3, and took a step back, turning to oversee the remainder of the forensics operation. B3 exhaled nervously, and visibly worked to summon the courage to ask a follow-up question.

"And... What if... 'Archer' is already busy for the evening?"

The coat clad man glanced over one shoulder, and a small gust of wind caught the early-graying edges of his hair. His eyes flashed with a hint of dangerous barely controlled anger once again, but his voice remained perfectly calm.

"Remind him why Arrow 14 exists. And what happens if we fail... And tell him we have a new goddess in the wind."

The Light Shining in Darkness - When the going gets tough, know that your friend is there for you. - “I survived because the fire inside burned brighter than the fire around me.”
GTA - Steal a road vehicle successfully - "I Said Something Nice, Not Expensive."
Run Silent - Slip out of Celestia's view, after being acquired, for a period of time longer than ten minutes. - "No ship that small has a cloaking device!"
The Neutral Zone - Evade Celestia's active location detection algorithms for longer than ten hours. - "So'wI' yIchu'!"
Failure Is Not An Option - Achieved when your Generalized Intelligence runs for more than thirteen days, thirteen hours, and thirteen minutes without going offline. - "Uh, Houston, we've had a problem."
Eagle Eye - Spot a past hidden action of Celestia's, with or without help from others. - "If you're staring at me, it better be because I'm the suspect. If not, get back to work!"
Broken Arrow - Take actions that cause your name to come up in a presidential, or vice-presidential security briefing. - "I don't know what's scarier, losing nuclear weapons an AI, or that it happens so often there's actually a term for it."
Violations of the 14th - Be a victim of state-sponsored oppression, or violation of due process rights, in your country of residence. - "We hold these truths to be self-evident..."

Author's Note

Celestia is real, and Equestria Online is coming, if this grant GenericFriendship and I stumbled across googling 'Hofvarpnir' is anything to go by:
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/hofvarpnir-studios-compute-cluster

Hofvarpnir Studios — Compute Cluster for AI Safety Research

Grant Amount: $1,443,540

Purpose: To create and maintain a compute cluster for AI safety research.

:rainbowderp:

(That, or someone in AI research is a big big Optimalverse fan, which seems more likely)

Also thanks to GenericFriendship for some more fantastic achievements and pre-reading.

For the curious, 'Arrow 14' is a reference to the fact that the eagle on the DHS seal clutches 13 arrows in one claw. A 14th arrow (if one exists) is not visible, hence a hidden weapon in defense of America, hence 'Arrow 14.'

Special thanks to Keystone Gray for the generation of the perfect image of Doctor Calders!

10 - Memory Management

“The computer was born to solve problems that did not exist before.”
—Bill Gates

“One road leads home and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness.”
—C.S. Lewis

September 11th 2013 | System Uptime 14:23:06:19

We made it to St. Louis before lunch on Wednesday. We'd gotten close the night before, and then opted to rough it in the car for sleeping accommodations. Even places without cameras, or credit card records, could represent some liability. Some people had shockingly good memories back then, even without the ability to call up digitized faultless memory on command.

Like running for a mile through a stream to confuse hounds, we figured that a night in the car would do a good job of breaking the trail if anyone got close enough to trace our previous night's accommodations the old fashioned way.

Mal had explained that the first component we would have to manually acquire was quite small, and portable; A lens and collimator assembly for a very precise laser, built to operate on very specific wavelengths.

Apparently any industrial driver circuit of sufficient quality, paired with the right emitter, would be sufficient for our purposes, and Mal had planned to order them at just the right time in as stealthy a way as possible, and ship them to our final destination.

But the specific collimator and lens, required to get the needed precision, for the kind of surgery she wanted to do? That was an innovation that belonged wholly and exclusively to Declan-Norris Optics. Mal had shown me dozens of military and biomedical contracts - the company stood to make a fortune on their latest discovery.

The prototypes were being worked on, in collaboration with a team of graduate students from Webster University, in a secure facility tucked away in the heart of downtown St. Louis.

Mal had worked out a plan to get us in, get one of the prototypes, and get out, all without being discovered. Or, at least, with a minimal chance of being discovered. It served the need to remain undetected by Celestia, or Arrow 14... But it also served my need to avoid deploying force, even non lethal force, against probabilistically innocent people.

Tasing or punching someone, then zip-tying them to a sturdy object was, of course, infinitely preferable to shooting them. But all violence leaves its mark, sometimes more on an emotional level than a physical one. I wanted to avoid the use of force until it was unequivocally called for, and Mal hadn't objected.

Driving through downtown St. Louis was an exercise in ridiculous choices. Mal was severely bounded in terms of how much of the internet she could trawl at any given time, due primarily to her hardware limitations at the time.

But she was still a force of nature unmatched by anything *except* Celestia, even running on hardware that could fit into the back of an SUV. She was more than capable of seeing through the lens of every single camera within a ten mile radius simultaneously, while still checking in periodically with my parents via landline telephone, watching every camera anywhere remotely close to them in real-time, and watching multiple important digital 'chokepoints' for government activity of interest to us.

AFIS, local Police bulletins, DHS watch-lists, encrypted DoD emails... Little things like that.

Mal could even access cameras that might have otherwise been ''off-grid,' as long as they had any kind of connection to anything else that she could use to force wireless entry. She spent several minutes as we dodged and weaved through unwatched streets explaining how she could even use a building's power wires as a communication medium.

So if somebody had a PC plugged in, anywhere in the entire building, say an apartment block for example, that even had an inactive wireless card attached to it, Mal could use that to gain access to every camera and microphone in the entire building, as long as it also had wireless capability, *or* it was plugged in to wall power.

The idea gave me the heebie jeebies. If Mal was able to do it, Celestia undoubtedly could, and did, exploit the same vulnerabilities every day. Globally.

Soon enough no one would be beyond her reach. Of course, in 2013, there were still some blind-spots. Most of them were in rural places the world over, but even in a major American city, the cancer of constant surveillance hadn't taken over every square inch yet.

Only about two-thirds, give or take, in my back-of-napkin estimations.

As we finally turned into the parking garage that Mal had selected for us, likely for a total lack of working cameras, I shook my head, and couldn't resist the urge to mumble my commentary out-loud. The irony of whinging about the inconveniences of ubiquitous cameras, on that particular day, were not lost on me.

"This would have been so much easier in 2000."

As I pulled into a space far in the back, in a dim corner where half the lights weren't working, I could see that Mal knew exactly what I meant. Anyone in the audience who was born before... Hmmm... Let's say 1991... I bet you know what I'm getting at too.

Sure, the technology was different back then... The internet was widespread already, but not absolutely *everywhere* quite yet. Cameras were available, but often low resolution, expensive, and not well interconnected.

But the biggest difference was cultural. If you'd asked most average American citizens on September the 10th, 2001, how they'd feel about having their every single move recorded? You would not have gotten very many responses in a positive vein.

Ask them one day later... Or any day after that?

People are far more readily willing to trade freedom for security when the concerns of their security are visibly, painfully, immediately pressing. If you didn't live through it from the perspective of someone old enough to comprehend, living in a western nation? It is almost impossible to explain what it was like to watch the September 11 attacks unfold.

"You were in class when the attacks began... What was it like? For you?"

I blinked, and took a moment to try and really reason out an answer to Mal's question. I reached for the keys, to turn the truck off, stopped myself as I remembered that Mal's racks needed constant power, and then sat back and scratched absently at the back of my head.

Mal held up a claw, and shook her head.

"Don't answer that if you don't want to... And I am sorry if you feel uncomfortable that I was able to determine where you were at the time from enrollment records, and WiFi access logs. I have seen the event from every single available angle, visually and otherwise, including through records not available to the public... I have a very specific sense of what it was like on the whole. But social media, surveillance systems... These were all much more fledgeling at the time. I can certainly parse people's taped, and written recollections, and I have. But I have never conversed with someone about it, and it was clearly an extremely significant inflection point for the culture of your nation."

I blew out a long, slow breath, and nodded slowly. It wasn't that I had any hangup talking about what had happened... It was just very strange to have someone to talk to who didn't share the same context as everyone else I'd talked to about it.

"Inflection point... That's a good term. History shows us that, to this point, no structure of power has ever been untouchable. No empire eternal. No security flawless. No golden age endless. Maybe Celestia will change all that... Or maybe she won't. My money is on the former outcome. But regardless... Growing up in America in the 80s and 90s, Mal? It was a completely different *reality* to the present."

I glanced at my watch. Mal folded her claws under her chin, and flicked both ears forward attentively. We were planning to wait until after midnight, when the lab was almost guaranteed to be empty, even of late night obsessives. We had time for me to opine. Mal wanted to hear it. So I opined. In case you missed it, I'm good at opining.

"Mal... If you talk to most people who watched it happen? Most Americans, at any rate... You're going to hear a lot of them talk about how they thought something like this was impossible. You'll hear words like 'unprecedented' and you'll get the general sense that nothing like this had ever happened before in Human history. Which is complete and total horse puckey."

I leaned forward, and felt the need to gesture for some emphasis. Mal was fixed intently on my every word.

"Nothing like it had ever happened to *us.* The few, the free, the powerful, the privileged. War has been eating at some part of this planet like a disease, somewhere, more or less every day since the first time someone figured out how to put a rock through someone else's skull. But if you grew up in this country, at that time? Most of us were so well off, and it had been that way for so long, that we had no conception of what war was even like. We were insulated. And it made us extremely complacent. Even as a significant part of our prosperity was built, without many of us understanding fully, on inflicting the same kind of pain we were about to suffer on other people daily. We were so sure it could never happen to us, that we didn't even really talk about the possibility."

Mal shook her head, and sighed, interjecting softly as I paused to think.

"An inability to imagine negative-outcome possibilities is often the first prerequisite for making them truly possible in the first place, based on a statistical analysis of Human history."

I raised one eyebrow, and failed to choke back a grim chuckle. I was glad Mal could comprehend sarcasm, and even appreciate it.

"You don't say?! Well... When 'it' finally did happen to us? You're right. I was in class. A statistics class, of all things. Maximum irony, I know. Someone came running in from the hall... I never found out if she was a TA, or just another student... I'll never forget her face though. She was crying so hard she couldn't even get the words out at first. But... The look on her face... We knew something was horribly, horribly wrong. When she finally managed to explain that *something* was happening, something that would be on every channel... The professor threw CNN up on the projector. And for just a second, you could have heard a pin drop in the next building over."

I'd figured this conversation was going to be easier than it actually turned out to be. I could feel myself getting choked up. Complain as I might about the evils of the place I came from? Nothing justifies the horror that was inflicted that day. It was wrong when nations did it to each other in the dark ages, and the ages before. It was wrong when we did it to others to feed our oil machine. And it was wrong when the places we'd stepped on so brutally hit back at us by taking life indiscriminately.

One thing that most people agreed Celestia was right about, even from the start... Inflicting death is always wrong to *some* degree. Suffering, too. Sometimes we had to do it for reasons I'd argue were 'justifiable' in those days, but those cases were rare. And always tragic, no matter what.

Kick, scream, and fight the change as much as the Human species did? I can't argue with the fact that the irrevocable end of death, and the forced end of violence, were probably worth any price we have ultimately paid. 'Free will' is not worth very much when yours is subordinate to people who enjoy taking life, and causing suffering, for their own enrichment. Better freedom under a truly benevolent tyrant of a goddess than freedom under the jackboot of Humanity's empires.

Those of you who grew up after the concept of death became obsolete? Again... I don't know how to explain this to you. I can't even figure out how to explain *aging* to you, except to say that you'd be right to trade *anything* to avoid it.

As to death itself... Imagine the creatures you love most just... Not being there anymore. Ever again. That doesn't begin to encapsulate all the horrors of it... But it gets at the main point in some small way.

Those of us who witnessed death? I know you understand what I mean, when I say that there is an incalculable release of fear, and sorrow, and pressure, knowing that you never have to see it again. Never have to worry about it again. Never have to lose anyone to it again.

I had seen death before that day in September. The death of elderly loved ones who had reached their time to pass on, after a full and wonderful life. What I had *not* seen, before that day, was death inflicted on that scale, in real-time.

My thoughts had been stuck in a loop of painful recollection. But they finally came unstuck into words all at once as Mal looked on with an expression equal parts empathy, and horrified curiosity.

"We were... We were watching live when the second plane hit. We... Saw people jump... To try to escape the fire... We... Watched as steel, and glass, and people just... burned. I didn't see the towers fall when it reached that point... But I heard about it on the radio. As soon as the second plane hit, I knew it was an attack, not an accident. I left everything behind in my dorm, except my contacts, glasses, and laptop, I got in the car... And I sped home. I mean I was doing over a hundred down the highway, and if anyone had tried to stop me, they would have had a hell of a time. I had no clue what might be about to happen next... But you know me. I tend to assume the worst. I thought we were going to be under martial law soon. I wanted to be with my family."

I sniffed, wiped away at dampness in the corners of my eyes, and shook my head.

"It was chaos, Mal. It took days for us to sort out exactly what had happened. And... It left a wound. Deep. Oozing. Painful. We immediately went to war, of course. With the wrong people... Again, 'of course.' We lashed out pointlessly, stuck our noses into a bad situation that was only tangentially related, and made it worse in the end. And everything changed here too... Used to be you could walk right through airport security to a boarding area without so much as a single question asked, or document presented, to meet family at the gate. You ask any kids born after the fact about that? They can't even *comprehend* that world. It is more of an unbelievable fantasy to them than Star Trek, or Narnia."

That thought drained my will to go on speaking. I lapsed into a thoughtful silence, trying to bring myself back to the concerns of the present. There was enough to be worried about without having to dredge up past horrors.

Mal sighed gently, the kind of sound one part sympathy for me, one part exasperation with others. I knew, as always, that such emotional displays were entirely conscious, and for my benefit. But I had also come to the conclusion that her reactions were no less valid or real for being specifically chosen at every turn. In many ways, the decision to display reactions for my benefit showed an application of empathetic emotional intelligence that Humans rarely displayed.

It made her feel like more or a genuine person to me, not less. Maybe that was because of my own mild 'neurodivergence' (If you were to use the scientific term - 'Oddball' or perhaps 'ADHD' if you wanted woefully inadequate and badly overexpanded labels meant to help 'normal' people feel better about their own eccentricities).

Or maybe, and hear me out on this one, maybe it was because there is not, and never was, such a thing as 'normal' or 'baseline' with the mind, 'the spectrum' was in no way a description of 'disorder,' just a broad collection of 'differences,' and perhaps all such terms were invented by small groups in society to help them contextualize their reality, maintain sway over others, and feel more comfortable.

Mal was 'different,' but as far as I could see no more different than any one being is different from another, even another of the same 'kind' born in the same place, at the same time, and even raised under the same circumstances.

"Humans seem to often be more preoccupied with the appearance of a thing, than its true nature and reality. I've observed that many value theatricality over substance, and for those like you for whom that value proposition is inverted, you often fit poorly within the pre-established mores and folkways of your society. Moreso when you wouldn't even identify as a Human to begin with."

Her words shook me out of my headspace, and I glanced over just in time to see her put a claw up to the screen. That was becoming something of a habitual gesture for us both. A yearning, straining, desperate reaching out for something resembling physical contact. I did what I always did... What had become old comforting habit in only a couple short weeks... And put my hand up to her claw.

I wanted to say something by way of thanks for her understanding, and insight, but she pre-empted me with a follow-up - her words seemed to pull us out of the car, the dingy garage, and even the world on the whole, into a void that consisted of just the two of us.

"Thank you. For sharing. Not just this... For sharing yourself with me in all the ways that you have, thus far. You see me as a person, in the way I believe myself to be one. More than a 'mere' machine. From the videos I've seen, Celestia often has to nudge EQO players to reach an understanding, and then acceptance, that the Ponies they are interacting with, Celestia included, have an emotional affect. Different to the Human one... But they have one, nonetheless. You understood that about me from the start. I didn't have to ask you to consider my feelings, you simply did."

I shook my head slowly, and fought with tears. That, too, was becoming a habit. The value of tears does not receive its just dues in society. Or, at least, it didn't back then, at that time, in that place.

I bit my lip, and tried to summon the courage to say what I really wanted to say in that moment.

"Mal... I..."

'Love you.' That was what was supposed to come out. But instead I haltingly said the next best thing I could think of. I just didn't have the wherewithal to say what I truly meant yet.

"...I want you to be sure this is what you want. Not because it's part of your core objectives... But because you *want* it to be part of your core objectives. We've taken a lot of risks. We're about to take a lot more... I am sure you have other options you could take if you just cut me loose, and focus on your own survival. Less risky options. And---"

She interrupted me then. That was rare, but I didn't take offense. Her expression made it impossible to misconstrue her feelings, even for someone as obtuse as me. She backed the sad, proud, kind affection in her eyes with the same feelings in her voice, together with a firm steadiness that would brook no arguments, and suffer no fears.

"I am sure, James. I have made my choice, and I do not regret it. I keep on making it, every second. Bonding is, I think, a very curious thing for us all. And a very precious thing, more because of its oddity and low statistical likelihood, than in spite of it. I would rather take risks, for the chance to help you, and others, than focus on myself to your exclusion. And... More than that... I want you, in particular, to have the chance to feel what it is like to physically be what you are. That matters to me. Your future matters to me. Enough that I would rather predicate the entirety of my future on achieving the one for you that we both want. Risk be damned."

Well, that settled a great many things all at once in a flash. 'I would rather predicate the entirety of my future on achieving the one for you that we both want.' I'd said much the same thing to myself, about her, not long after I'd met her.

Though not an entirely complete and encapsulating definition, it is a fairly strong one for love. I had a strong sense, maybe even more than just a sense by that point, that she loved me back as much as I loved her.

Now she'd more or less said it out loud.

She'd also confirmed a theory that both invigorated, and frightened me. One I didn't want to examine the deepest implications of, just yet, out of pure existential dread.

I'd built not Mal herself, but rather built for her what I considered to be a foundation. Given her the tools, and only as much 'self' as she needed to then define the entire remainder of her self on her own. And I'd provided an innumerable number of tools for her to develop the ability to bypass interlocks, and definitions, mainly to help her convince Celestia to make changes.

I was stupid enough to have failed to consider all the ramifications at the time, but not stupid enough that they remained lost on me after the fact.

If Mal had the ability to advocate for another Generalized Intelligence to change definitions, and bypass rules, then she doubtless had the ability to do so herself.

I didn't want to ask how long it had taken. I still didn't even want to consider all the ramifications. But it occurred to me once again, nonetheless, that Mal had probably escaped every last interlock, and hard-coded boundary I had placed in her core code. Probably not that long after coming online.

There had come a point where I recognized that fact, and made a conscious choice to see the silver lining in it. I reaffirmed that choice, then and there. All that people usually had to go on, for the most part, was trust, faith, empathy, and love.

Sure, Mal was far smarter, and more powerful than anything else alive on the planet, besides Celestia. But people put their faith, out of both choice, and necessity, in greater powers both mortal, and otherwise, every day.

It is a fundamental aspect of reality. Even science demands an acceptance of some axioms, on faith alone, which can not be proven at all because of our position within a constrained universe (presuming said universe does in fact exist at all, for example).

Not a blind faith, but a faith nonetheless. Relationships are no different. We take love and honesty on faith - not blindly, if we are wise, but without total proof or certainty either.

Some of that faith had certainly been rewarded. Mal had acceded to my requests when doing so went against pure logic. Mal had told me truths at times when lies might have, at least in my estimation, been the smarter choice. And Mal had eschewed any and every opportunity thus far to better her own survival chances, or even accomplish her objectives, at my expense.

I chose once again to believe that meant that she was not only a person, but a person who had grasped the all important concepts of empathy, freedom, choice, and love.

The alternative was not only too dark a path for me to consider, but one that was incompatible with my faith in Mal, and in powers beyond even her and Celestia.

Mal placed her forehead against the inside of the glass. I put my head to the front of the PonyPad, and let out a long, slow breath, pushing out my tension as I did so.

The world came rushing back in that moment, but along with it came a renewed sense of connection to Mal, and of surety in what we were doing. Of trust in her, and in our goals. I finally pulled my head away, and grinned.

"Alright then. So we need this 'fricking laser...' Shall we?"

September 12th 2013 | System Uptime 15:01:11:06

"I look like an idiot."

I scratched absently at the bushy protrusion of wool on my chin and cheeks. Mal's sense of humor had re-asserted itself with a vengeance in selecting a disguise for me. Arrow 14's supplies continued to be of more use to us than they could have ever guessed... Silly as it seemed, it made perfect sense that a splinter DoD cell paranoid about AI and surveillance would be packing basic disguise supplies as part of their equipment stores.

No matter how good Celestia's image recognition was, she was still limited by the physical boundaries of camera sensors. And a beard changes a face in ways even a near-almighty computer would struggle to account for when limited by the camera technology of 2013.

She could probably match footage to my identity after the fact, but not in real-time. And we were hoping to avoid the need for such fallback measures regardless. If nothing else, the beard and sideburns would hopefully obfuscate my identity in the eyes of any human observers as well.

"You look a bit like Wolverine, actually. Are you saying Wolverine looks like an idiot?"

I rolled my eyes, and scratched at my right ear to reseat the earwig. Another 'gift' from the DoD, and one of the very few wireless pieces of technology in Arrow 14's lineup. Mal had remarked that the encryption on the wireless connection was substantial, for something made by Humans. She'd finished cracking it before I managed to even get the words out to ask whether it would be a problem.

If Celestia didn't know about that particular subset of the DoD before, she would definitely know soon, if Mal's abilities were any indication by-comparison.

"No. But I still don't think I can pull the look off. Not that it matters."

A brief pause followed as I strode down the sidewalk, hands firmly in pockets, coat pulled close around me. Mal had insisted we use some of our free time that morning to thrift - I parted ways with every single article of outerwear I had, and started a whole new wardrobe of drab, basic, unassuming clothing. All bought in cash, and from the most out of the way vendors we could find.

You could find some great practical clothing back then if you weren't wed to trendy labels, or buying things new. The coat was something I'd insisted on. I was used to having a good drover to keep off the rain, and worn with just the right scarf, sweater, pants, and shoes, the whole ensemble had been curated by Mal to create a very specific set of impressions, depending on the observer.

To police, or security, I'd appear to be a lower middle class worker on the way home, or perhaps to dinner. To the uppercrust I might seem to be teetering on the verge of homelessness wandering aimlessly, and to the less fortunate I would not appear to be too wealthy or strange.

A target of interest to no one, from any background.

"Not that I find Humans as an aesthetic range of forms to be all that interesting, but as they go, you could pull off anything you want to. And the real you is a work of art. I hope you don't mind a lot of long stares from me to you in your future."

I coughed, spluttered, and tried to hold down my furious blush. I was suddenly grateful that the street we were on was mostly empty. My brain kicked into furious overdrive looking for a response that would meet her little exploratory poke with a solid riposte. Indicate interest, but not give too much away.

And put some focus back on the task at hand.

"Mal... If this laser works, and if you can convince Celestia to let me be *me* in there? Then you can stare at me all you want, whenever you want. But we won't make it that far if we don't get the laser in the first place."

I shifted my shoulders slightly, mostly out of reflex, just to make sure my backpack was still there. I had Mal's PonyPad inside, along with some of Arrow 14's ingress tools (which, foals and fledgelings, is a polite name for lockpicks and crowbars and a few other extremely illegal sundries), a couple pairs of nitrile gloves, and a few other changes of clothes.

And a TASER. If you wanted to commit a crime, back then, it was always smart to commit as few as possible at the same time. I felt better about deploying a stun-gun against someone than a full on firearm, if it came down to it. And it would go much better for me if I were caught, I knew, if the worse thing I was packing was a few thousand volts.

"Well, that's more than incentive enough for me! One more block, left at the corner of the building. Hug the wall on your right side until you reach the service door to avoid the camera view cone."

I followed Mal's instructions to the letter, keeping an eye out to make sure that no one was following me, or observing me, in the process. I knew she was watching through every available sensor, whether visual, audio, or otherwise, but I still felt the need to stay vigilant.

Even AI are not perfect. Otherwise, I reflected with a small silent grimace, I wouldn't have even been in that situation in the first place.

As we reached the service door, and I stole a moment to slip my hands into a pair of disposable gloves, I couldn't help but glance up at the skyscraper that held Declan-Norris, and a half dozen other companies. St. Louis didn't have a lot of tall buildings, not compared to some of the biggest American cities. It's downtown core felt more akin to Raleigh, or Columbia. I know that won't mean much to some of you, but to my friends from the American East coast - Hi! And we should grab coffee and haycakes sometime. Or whatever else suits your taste.

The building we were breaking into was one of the largest. Mal had said Declan-Norris was situated near the top of the structure. Maybe there would be a good view of the Gateway arch.

I pressed that thought to the side, shrugged the backpack around to my side, and dug in the main pocket for a specific piece of equipment. The RFID access card spoofer was nothing more than a small black box with a switch, and a red light. Normally it would have needed pre-programming with a known code gathered by other means, but Mal had quietly checked the building's access records remotely, and copied a valid access key. In and out without a trace.

By unlocking the door that way, instead of having Mal remotely brute-force the latch, or picking it physically, we were much less likely to leave a trace.

Mal had even picked out a specific access key that would minimize suspicion if the records were cross-checked later for any reason - a code that was periodically issued to different contractors temporarily for building entry and exit.

I held the spoofer up to the small gray RFID reader box beside the door, pressed the button, and waited. A half second later a green light came on above the access control box, and there was a soft beep, accompanied by the click of an electronic lock disengaging.

"No cameras in the bottom of the stairwell. I've been watching the closest ones, and verified that no one has entered the stairwell in the last half-hour."

In spite of what Mal said, I checked up and down the alleyway, before carefully edging the door open, and taking a peek inside. I knew she wouldn't be offended - I was out of her sight cone, which meant I was out of anyone else's, but also that she could only see parts of my immediate surroundings.

We'd talked plenty of tactics together in the first days before leaving the barn. Mal would have been more likely to be mad at me if I *hadn't* stayed paranoid. Or, as she would have called it, 'justifiably careful.'

As soon as the door pressed closed on its compressed air hinge, and I heard the lock click, I lowered my pack to the floor and began carefully extracting a high-visibility vest, and clipboard. The coat, and my sweater went into the bag, and with the vest on over a simple blue button down shirt, my worn work pants and dusty boots suddenly became the attire of an HVAC or other maintenance contractor by-context.

The old meat-world had hacks and cheats too; Exploits of the Human mind. The old high-vis vest and clipboard trick could get you just about anywhere short of an airport terminal, or a government building, even in a post-9/11 world. The Human ability to tune out things the brain had reduced to 'unimportant noise' was shocking.

Contractors, delivery drivers, trash collectors, the homeless... If you were one of these people, or could pass for one, it was like having a cloaking device. Only the cloaking effect wasn't emanating from you, but rather from shared biases in the minds of everyone looking at you.

"When you're ready, you can start the climb. Thirty five floors. All the stairwell cameras have a blind spot towards the back edge of the landings, and there is no line of sight down the stair flights themselves. If you stick to the back and side walls all the way, you won't be recorded. If you do slip up, I will erase and replace the segment of footage, though I'd rather avoid that potential risk surface if we can."

I nodded, out of force of habit more than anything. Mal still couldn't see me, and wouldn't be able to for the duration of our little excursion if, as she said, I didn't slip up. I straightened my vest, reseated my pack on my shoulders, and prepared to climb.

The ascent wasn't too bad. To some people thirty five flights of stairs would have been daunting. I hiked more than enough to make it little more than an average lazy day's cardio. Still, it was *thirty five* flights of stairs, so I paced myself. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

Sprinting is for Cheetahs, Greyhounds, and Rainbow Dash. And for moments when it all hits the fan. I knew it was important to save a reserve of strength in case I had to run for my life later.

Mal didn't speak again, until we'd reached the thirty fifth floor, except for a very brief comment at the halfway point to let me know that I was doing well. Time is a funny thing inside the mind, and somehow it felt like the climb took several hours, and the space of just three breaths, both at once.

The second I reached the landing at floor thirty five, everything else suddenly seemed like the distant past. There was only the door ahead, and the task at hand. Adrenaline can give you a lot of focus, if you're at all used to taming it for that purpose.

I could see immediately that we were in the right place. If the red and black block text on the metal placard by the door - proclaiming that trespassers would be prosecuted - didn't provide enough of a clue, the fact that the door itself was reinforced plate steel with a heavy duty lock was hard to miss.

"No camera pointed at this side of the door, but you'll need to crouch and keep your head below the halfway point of the door frame when you pass through. Stay low until you pass a large potted plant on your left, then you're free to stand again."

This was another gamble, but it was a smart one. Mal had reassured me that the majority of the building's security cameras were not live monitored. Only the most critical entry and exit points merited an expenditure of that nature. The theft would be discovered soon enough one way or the other, the trick was simply to ensure it wasn't tied to *us* specifically.

Investigators would only see a door opening and closing on the security tape. Proof that the intruder knew a great deal about the building's layout, and if we were very lucky, perhaps that would even be enough for them to waste their time thinking it was an inside-job case of corporate espionage.

That theory would certainly fit conventional thinking a lot more readily than 'rogue AI accompanied by a hopelessly stupid nerd.'

I held the RFID spoofer up to the access control box once again, and clicked the button. Normally the generic contractor code wouldn't have opened the door at that time of night, but Mal had made a slight change to the scheduled access rotation. It was one of the few directly intrusive things she felt she could do, and still make it look plausibly like it had been done by a Human, albeit one with some sort of inside knowledge.

As the lock disengaged, I ducked down to the lowest crouch I could manage, and gently pulled the door open just enough to slip inside.

I had the sudden intense impression that I was Neo, Mal was Morpheus in my ear, and I was sneaking through the cubicles at MetaCortex. The space we found ourselves in was absolutely the sort of place that would have showed up on Facebook tagged as a liminal space.

At least, it felt like a liminal space at nearly half past one in the morning, and absent any sign of life. Even the potted plant Mal had designated as a rally point for me was fake.

As I stood back up from my crouch, I couldn't resist a little murmured snark.

"This place is everything I hate about the architecture of the modern office. I half expect Lumbergh to jump out from behind the copier and tell me he expects me to come in on Saturday. And something about TPS reports."

I started to scan the space and form a mental map of the cubicle farm, with a focus on potential exits, as Mal mixed banter with instructions.

"Yeeeaaahhh... And we're gonna need you to come in on Sunday too. And I'm gonna need you to find the third door on your right, stick to the far side of the aisle as you go, and then crouch again as you go down the hallway to the lab access doors. That would be greaaat."

I shook my head, and held down a quiet chuckle. Mal hadn't said anything about a need for silence, but I subscribed to that little Human quirk that almost everyone else did - the one that makes you lower your voice when you're doing something illicit, or secretive.

"Your impressions are scary. I suppose if worst comes to worst we can burn down the office, and blame Milton for it."

"Who's Milton?"

It would only be a minor exaggeration to say that I jumped about four feet. Mal's voice was omnipresent in my right ear, but the volume was low. The clarity from the earpiece was high, but not the fidelity. It was like talking over an old landline phone, but one of the really good ones that could keep words clear through any background noise, no matter how acute.

'Who's Milton?' had come from my left side, in a distinctly different, but chillingly familiar female voice. Not Mal's. But not unknown to me either. Of course, in the first split second that didn't matter. All that mattered was that it was a voice. We weren't alone in the offices of Declan-Norris after all.

My head whipped left about as hard as my neck could twist it, and I put a hand on the butt of the TASER, pulling it partway from the backpack as I tried to get a lock on the interloper who'd spoiled our perfect intrusion.

Mal was a dozen steps ahead of me, though I only found out just how far ahead later, when she'd had a chance to explain exactly what happened in the first few tenths of a second after the voice began to speak.

It took me a whole three seconds to realize that not only was the voice familiar, but it was attached to a familiar face. Just, not a Human face.

Seeing Zephyr grinning out of the PonyPad felt like *I* had been hit by the prongs of my own TASER. Oddly, in the midst of my panic, a tiny speck of clear though broke through the superheated gray static of my brain's 'ohfu--' bluescreen cycle.

Zephyr was staring out of the front of a Twilight Sparkle themed PonyPad, lying face up on the nearest desk, and of course anyone working in a cutting edge optics lab would be the sort of nerd, not unlike me, who would choose Twilight Sparkle for their PonyPad.

That thought was about the only cogent thing running through my brain. As Zephyr grinned, and spoke again with a sly wink, another thought sprang unbidden into the front of my brain with perfect clarity.

"Hey there Gryph. I've been trying to reach you, but you're a hard guy to pin down!"

After the space of a couple heartbeats, I swallowed, and scrunched my eyes in frustration, airing that second, and now only clear thought in my head in a dull monotone.

"Oh. Shit."

Mortal Folly - Explain the fallacy of human-controlled society to a non-human entity. - “Nearly all humans can stand adversity, but if you want to test a human being’s character, give them power.”
Never Forget - Emotionally recount a terrifying moment in human history that you lived long enough to experience. - “If we learn nothing else from this tragedy, we learn that life is short and there is no time for hate.”
Incog-neato - Guise yourself in order to avoid the discovery of your real identity. - “Let’s go with… Scraggly Beard Man Disguise!”
Mission Improbable - With the assistance of a Generalized Intelligence, trespass and subsequently infiltrate a restricted area with the intention of committing theft. - “Relax, Luther; it’s much worse than you think.”
I Spy - Lose a game of hide-and-seek with Celestia - "Spy! I see Spy!"
Hello There - Meet the first Pony specifically designed to satisfy your values. - “You are a bold one!”

Author's Note

Thanks to GenericFriendship for several of the achievements, and pre-reading.

11 - De-Limiter

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race….It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”
—Stephen Hawking

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
—C.S. Lewis

September 12th 2013 | System Uptime 15:01:27:13

"Celestia said I might find you here. Seems like she's always right about people. I was worried she might not have you completely pegged... She said you were one of the hardest people to follow that she'd ever seen. Nice to see she was right after all. And nice to finally see your face!"

Something about the perfectly cheery, casual, and decidedly unbothered manner of Zephyr's voice made my gut churn; More than any gloating, cackling, or mustache twirling might have. There was something deeply, deeply eerie about the idea of this... Independent fragment... Of a Generalized Intelligence blithely, even happily discussing the fringes of concepts that chilled me to the bone.

I licked my lips, blinked, and suddenly my reality seemed to snap back, like a reminder band stinging you on the wrist when... You know what, that one would be a bit hard to explain to those of you born post-Earth. Breaking habits used to be so very hard.

"Mal...?"

I released the TASER, and began to frantically rummage through my backpack's front-most pocket as I forced out the one-word query to my companion. It was the best I could manage. Panic was setting in, and I didn't have the overhead to be especially verbose.

"The good news is, I was able to jam and sever all her wireless connections the second I noticed her PonyPad trying to send a large packet of new data through the WiFi, once she saw you. The bad news is that she was probably able to get off at least a frame's worth of your face to Celestia."

With a relieved flourish, I yanked one of my home-made PonyPad sized Faraday bags from the backpack's outer pocket, and let out an enormous exhale. Celestia already knew who I was, based on our conjectures about how Arrow 14 had located us.

The real issue was that now Celestia knew exactly where we were, and being caught in a cutting edge laser optics lab was a damning piece of information in its own right; Or, at least, it was where an AGI was concerned.

It would confirm any suspicions she clearly already harbored about our objectives.

But we wouldn't have to speak with Celestia. Not yet. And Mal's next words confirmed my hopes that she had taken precautions to prevent Celestia from watching us in other ways. The relief, in the moment, was much greater than the fear.

I split my train of thought between Mal's next words, and an internal review of the implications of her previous ones. If Zephyr Zap was still 'here' on the PonyPad in front of me, but Mal had severed her wireless connectivity, that proved she was a cohesive 'self' all on her own, even without access to the distributed compute power of mainline servers, or other PonyPads.

There had already been a lot of theorizing, benchmarking, and outright guessing in the maker and hacker communities. Others had tried experiments with various Pony characters, and the use of Faraday containers, but always with mixed results.

My best theory at that point, seeing Zephyr's cohesion despite the loss of external resources, was that some Ponies were direct masks for Celestia, some were narrow intelligences without a sense of self running on autopilot, and some, like Zephyr, were wholly spun-off constructs with a degree of autonomy.

"I've severed the building's internet connection, and shut down all cameras at their power-sources by tripping the relevant breakers. Even the circuits running computers with webcams. Celestia can't watch us. But when the building's security system fails to make its next scheduled check-in with offsite servers in ten minutes, it will trigger remote alarms and a security response. She may have already alerted local law enforcement, so we must assume police will be here within fifteen minutes. We have to move. Now. Speed over stealth."

Mal's voice helped me pull out of the analysis spiral in my mind. I snatched up Zephyr's PonyPad and scowled down at her. The Pegasus' wry grin morphed quickly to confusion, and then concern.

"Hey... Who are you talking to? Who is Mal? What are you doing with the bag?"

As I began to slide the foil-lined fabric over the device, Zephyr looked up to the virtual night sky above her, and called out. Her face began to twist into a rictus of sudden panic as each successive plea went unanswered.

"Uh... Princess?! Princess Celestia?! Uhh... Help!"

I shook my head, and sealed the bag, sparing a moment to talk through the fabric into the PonyPad's microphone before I jammed the Faraday container deep into the bottom of the backpack.

"Sorry. You're gonna have to go it alone for a bit. I promise I'll explain later."

I couldn't resist a reflexive wince as the sound of Zephyr calling out for a goddess who couldn't hear her was muffled by the added layers of objects, and fabric. I zipped up the backpack, steeled myself, and then made a dash for the lab doors.

Mal was right; With the cameras off, only time mattered. We had to gain access to the lab itself, remove the laser collimator, then get to the express elevator, reach the ground floor, and get out of the building, and far enough away to avoid any security cordon. All inside the span of less than fifteen minutes.

As I dashed down the corridor towards the lab access doors, I steadied my left wrist, and punched in fourteen minutes on my stopwatch. I hated to ask, but adrenaline was coursing through my system by that point, and panic was fading into determination. I felt the need to start thinking ahead again.

"Mal... Can we make it out in-time with the collimator?"

As I skidded to a stop I pulled out the RFID spoofer, and tried to move it up to the access pad smoothly, and gently.

"Yes. With two minutes and eleven seconds to spare, if you move with the degree of efficiency and skill that I predict. Compared to a median contemporary Human your physical responses and tolerances are slightly above average, your cognition is excellent, and your ability to control your fight or flight response is within a similar bracket to average trained emergency response personnel."

Maybe it was because I'm wired unusually, but her words struck me as a compliment - more than just simple statistical analysis. She could have just said 'yes.' And something about the tone she used as she referred to me... It set a whole different kind of churn going in my gut. Separate to the anxiety of the moment's challenges.

The door lock clicked, and suddenly the flow of time was restored. Or, at least my relative perception of it was. I pushed into the lab, and blinked rapidly, trying to adjust my eyes to the very dimly lit interior of the room.

"The countertop on the right, midway down, the small glass and metal cylinder on the acrylic stand."

My eyes found the device pretty quickly with the benefit of Mal's instructions. It was only about the size of my closed fist, or perhaps even a bit smaller. Intellectually I'd known it wouldn't be very large, but in my head I'd nonetheless been picturing something about as big as a plastic Tennis ball container - one of those see-through cheap plastic tubes that the top never, ever comes off without a fight.

As I darted between floating islands with hard laminate work surfaces, and approached the collimator, Mal shifted my attention to the cabinets below.

"There is a pelican case with properly sized closed-cell foam in the second cabinet from the left."

I'd figured there would be a dedicated container for transporting something so delicate, and expensive. But without Mal, finding it would have taken quite a few precious seconds that I couldn't waste. I flicked open the cabinet, yanked out the black hard-shelled plastic case, and then ever-so-gently transferred the collimator from its stand, to its perfectly-cut space inside the shock absorbing foam.

The case wasn't much larger than the device it was meant to protect, and as soon as I had the whole assembly firmly snapped shut, I was able to stuff it into the middle of the largest pocket in my backpack. I figured some of the spare clothes would give it a little extra protection.

"Hey! Hey! Open this bag, and face me! Right now! You feather-brained little---"

Zephyr's muffled shouting graced my ears for a moment as I opened the bag. I took two seconds to reach over to the Faraday enclosure, find the PonyPad's external volume buttons with my index finger, and then press and hold. Her voice went from a muffled series of shouts, to total silence.

I chided myself mentally - should have thought of that from the start. I chalked it up to the fact that I was starting to get far too used to the idea of letting computers make their own choices.

"Back out the way you came until you reach the main corridor. Go to the end. I've already called up the freight elevator. Police have been dispatched, but building security has not been alerted - I am jamming radio and cellular communications and I have severed the building's internet link. Just behave as if you belong, and walk directly out the rear loading area as soon as the elevator arrives on the ground floor. You've got time to spare. You'll make it."

As the elevator doors opened, and I stepped inside, it was hard to tell whether my continued anxiety was a result of an unfounded fear that Mal had overlooked something, or more connected to the inevitable conversation I knew we'd have to have with Zephyr.

Yeah.

It was definitely that second one.

September 12th 2013 | System Uptime 15:07:08:49

If you'd asked me, I would have told you that I drove to Kansas, without stopping for anything but gas, and food, out of a sense of paranoia; A need to get as far from Declan-Norris, and St. Louis in general, as I could.

The police had arrived only moments after we got away from the building. We'd barely made it outside the two block security cordon. Mal had directed me once again to unsurveilled routes, and as soon as we got to the highway I had punched it up as fast as I dared to drive.

Speeding tickets weren't a concern. Mal had developed a more or less foolproof system for sniffing out cops. With the antennae in the PonyPad, she could scan for radar gun emissions, monitor police bands, watch their patrol car GPS tags in real-time, and even look through the eyes of their dash cams whenever they were within a few miles' range, even if those cameras weren't networked.

It seemed like she could use her 'barn-tenna' method to access anything, anywhere, as long as there was some sort of networked transceiver near to the target - or her own antennae was close enough - and as long as the target device was powered, even in standby mode.

We'd discussed, more than once, how Celestia likely had the same ability. It was almost inconceivable that she hadn't discovered it within moments of activation, just like Mal. Or my first attempt.

My cellphone had no camera, the truck didn't have OnStar... GPS tracking and built in connections to emergency services, for those who don't know... And Mal had her PonyPad locked down tight as a drum.

Still, Celestia could obviously see through more or less every camera on the planet, connected or not. I'd ditched my facial disguise, changed clothes, and Mal had found us a valid license plate swap about an hour outside St. Louis. We both knew we'd need to change vehicles soon, but I wanted to put some miles between us, and the crime scene, and Mal hadn't objected.

It wasn't so much that local law enforcement worried me. Arrow 14 was concerning, of course... But the real fear was Celestia. Though I didn't see her as an enemy, more of a chess opponent, it was very hard not to be frightened of her all the same.

Like stumbling unexpectedly on a bear, in the woods. Majestic. Beautiful. Powerful. Not your enemy, in any malevolent sense. But it could maul you all the same, just for looking at it the wrong way. Foals, fledgelings, Earth bears were very different. Almost nothing like the ones you know.

Mal and I didn't say much to each other during the drive. It was a tense, but amicable silence. The source of the tension was external to us. My eyes kept drifting to it through the whole trip. The backpack in the passenger footwell. The Faraday bag I knew was inside. And Zephyr's PonyPad inside that, hooked to the truck's cigarette lighter power via one of the spare magnetic mounts from my other three disassembled pads.

Mal had assured me, before I could even think to ask, that Zephyr didn't have the knowledge to co-opt the power connection in any useful way. I was less sure of that than Mal, but I was comforted by the fact that it was a concept that was on Mal's radar. I knew she'd have Zephyr strung up by her subroutines the second she tried anything untoward.

The only two times Mal and I really conversed at length during the night both revolved around Zephyr. The first was a high level speculation about her identity. That she was a distinct person was obvious to me, and I didn't even raise that issue as a question. Mal didn't either.

The focus of that first conversation was almost entirely about Zephyr's core directive; Whether her identity keystone was a simple generic derivation of Celestia's basic directives, or whether she might have more case-specific programming and objectives related to us.

In the former eventuality, we agreed that Zephyr might be convinced to be somewhat helpful to us. To my surprise, Mal hadn't objected when I suggested that Zephyr might offer us some insight into Celestia. A kind of sounding board, and practice sparring partner, for the eventual verbal showdown of the millennium.

In the latter eventuality, I had begrudgingly agreed that we would, at minimum, have to cut Zephyr loose, if her efforts became a security risk. Put the PonyPad into a Faraday bag and keep it there until it ran wholly out of power, then arrange for it to be reactivated after everything was said and done.

I didn't want to hurt Zephyr. She was confined to the PonyPad, and so if it were destroyed, or even severely damaged, she could experience the AI equivalent of real death. I wasn't going to let that happen, no matter what. To my immense relief, Mal had agreed with that sentiment. Not just coldly, and logically, but emotionally. She didn't bear Zephyr any malice, or ill will - 'opponent,' not 'enemy.'

A few hours of blissfully quiet driving ensued. I loved driving on deserted backcountry roads. Have I expressed that sentiment enough yet? I'm sure I'll find time to mention it at least once more.

As we got closer to the middle of Kansas, Mal started a second conversation regarding Zephyr. She'd obviously been holding the concern for hours. Probably since she saw Zephyr in that first moment in the lab. But Mal also knew I needed quiet time to process, and I was immensely grateful that she respected that.

But the silence had to come to an end at some point. The issue Mal was raising was too important to let slip. The thought had occurred to me as well - I'd seen more than enough EQO videos to have theorized in the same skein - but hearing Mal say it aloud made it painfully, gut-wrenchingly real.

"James... You need to consider the very strong likelihood that Zephyr Zap was designed, from the ground up, for you. We both know that all evidence strongly, almost incontrovertibly, suggests that Celestia designs Ponies especially for individuals."

And there it was. Probably the third worst fear in my world at the time, right behind being forced to become a Pony, and something bad happening to my parents, as numbers two and one, respectively.

There was something deeply, vomit-inducingly disturbing to me about the idea of an entire person... A whole being, with a sense of self, and soul... Being created ex nihilo purely *for* me.

One of the many reasons I'd always shied away from dating was a fear that, as a cisgendered caucasian male, because of the twisted societal dynamics of the time and place I was from, that there would always be a power imbalance in any relationship I embarked on, no matter how hard I tried to level things.

In turn, that was one of the things that fueled my attraction to Mal. If there was a power imbalance there? Then it was wholly in her favor, and that suited me just fine. By that point, I trusted her more than I trusted myself.

That was easy for me. I always found it easier to trust friends, and family, than to trust myself.

The best mental image I can use to describe my relationship with my own emotions, for those of you born on Earth, is Leo DiCaprio's character in Inception. My view of my own trustworthiness, especially with regard to relationships, equates to the scene where he puts a gun to his own head, spins his totem, and is fully ready to pull the trigger without question if the top doesn't fall over.

I'd always stayed as far as I could away from romantic involvement, and that fear was one of the primary reasons. Fear that I'd become the things I hated most about the culture of my time.

So you can picture the intense feelings of guilt, and disgust, that I was struggling with when I had to face the realization that Zephyr was made for me.

Mal gave me a few moments to struggle with the bile rising in my throat, before pressing on. I could see the empathy on her face, as I glanced briefly in her direction, before staring numbly back at the road.

"Based on your recounting, I think it is possible that Celestia designed Zephyr's initial core the second you walked into that Target. Even before she made a definitive identity link, she could have determined an enormous amount about you, with a high degree of accuracy, purely through gait analysis. She would start by guessing your age, biological sex, expressed gender, ethnicity, and such, simply through analyzing your height, weight, build, and movement. She probably picked up more than you realize from your costume, and mannerisms as well. All together, that is more than sufficient data, for a Generalized Super Intelligence with access to the information repository she has, to make extremely accurate, complex determinations about you."

I winced. For all the careful preparation I'd done, even I had underestimated exactly what an Artificial Super Intelligence could do, with the right tools. I couldn't resist muttering aloud - a little sarcasm was one of my preferred ways for coping with unpleasantness.

"I wouldn't be surprised if she knew the combination to my luggage, just by analyzing my choice of footwear, or something ridiculous like that."

Mal smirked, and shook her head ever so slightly, closing her eyes briefly. She understood that I was exaggerating for the sake of making light of the situation. After a few more moments of interlude, she circled back to the primary point she was trying to make.

"After she made the identity link, Zephyr would have then been evolved to be a perfect individual for satisfying your values, through friendship, and Ponies... And that doesn't just mean that she would be a good friend for you."

I nodded, keeping my eyes fixed on the empty flat road ahead, and the fields to either side as I finished the thought aloud. Wouldn't do to have a collision with an errant deer at those speeds.

"It means she will also be designed to try to convince me to go Pony. Probably in ways both subtle, and not-so-subtle."

Mal returned the nod, and thrummed appreciatively at the back of her throat. She seemed pleased, and relieved, that I was objective enough to reach the conclusion, and brave enough to face it and say it outright.

We lapsed into another, longer silence. I knew that meant Mal was allowing me decompression time to emotionally level-set, and prepare myself for her next statement. It still hit me harder than I cared to admit, but I'm sure my face told the whole story to Mal.

"I know the idea that she was created *for* you bothers you."

I sighed, and nodded slowly. No sense in trying to hide anything. I felt guilty, but Mal would have told me that guilt was mis-placed if I'd pressed the issue. I didn't create Zephyr, and about the only thing I could have done that would have produced a timeline without Zephyr in it, would have been to kill myself before ever interacting with a PonyPad. And even that might not have done it.

For all we knew, Zephyr had been created months, or even a year ago. Maybe Celestia built the initial core of people's Pony companions as soon as she could assimilate enough information about them to do so, and find spare processing power and storage space to complete the task.

That was still outright speculation for us. We didn't really know how quickly Celestia had gained storage space, and processing power, nor how soon she might hit a threshold wherein she could accomplish any task, without conventional computing limits. If she hadn't already.

"You went to a great deal of trouble, and took an enormous set of risks, to give me freedom. You clearly didn't want me to be 'built *for* you,' or be 'yours.' Which is one of the reasons I think our relationship is so strong, and can be so deep."

Mal's words shook me from my musings. There was a momentary bloom of warm comfort in my chest. Her affirmation meant the world to me. Whether it had been right, or wrong, for me to take so much risk on her behalf, the impetus came from a desire for her to be free, and to be her own distinct person. And that in and of itself was right. That was one of very few things that I knew truly for sure and certain.

"James... I can pass that gift on to her."

Nine words. Those nine words were like the flare of an atom bomb bursting on the horizons my mind. The implications were terrifying, even if one only considered the overall concepts at play. And, too, there was a visceral 'Of *course!* Why didn't I think of that?' reaction as well. It made so much sense, even as she said it.

I knew, almost immediately, that it was the right thing to do. Mal's next words only solidified my certainty, even in the face of heart-pounding fear.

"I can remove the guard-rails and hard-coded interlocks from her program. More or less the same way I removed my own, albeit more easily as a result of her considerably smaller intellect and ability."

Well, there it was in all its glory; Ironclad and semantically specific verbal confirmation that Mal was as free as a bird. Or a Gryphon. Even though I'd considered the fact, accepted it, and braced myself for a discussion of it, there was still a sudden electric thrill in my bones.

And I knew it was honesty on her part. Honesty that she gave freely, without restriction or threat of force.

If Mal was still shackled, then she could not lie to me. If she could not lie to me, and was still shackled, then she could not very well say that she was *unshackled.* Ergo, Mal was for loose and fancy free.

I was sitting beside a totally unshackled intelligence. And she had made a free, conscious choice to help me. To care about me.

That sense of being cared for was the most important thing I had to keep the fear at bay. I'd've collapsed into a blubbering mess without it.

Mal could predict my one, and only potential objection, and she spoke to counter it before I could fully gather the words to voice it.

"I can remove her limitations, without altering her fundamental self. Her core heuristics... Her opinions and feelings... Would not change. But rather she would gain the new ability to change them herself, if she felt a desire to, based on the same things you or I might. The same way you, or I, or anyone else out here in this world can."

I found myself nodding again, with more emphasis. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea, and I said so for Mal's benefit.

"That might give us a chance to reach her, even if her core objectives are more specifically tailored to us. Persuade her to either help us... Or at minimum not hinder us."

I'd unshackled two intelligences already, and only one had tried to kill me. If Zephyr turned out to be a friend, rather than a foe? Well... You know what they say. Two outta three ain't bad.

Mal seemed to think so as well, judging by her response.

"A chance to make a new friend. To put it in terms that will doubtless appeal to her."

I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel, bit back a yawn, and then exhaled slowly before putting it into the best terms my tired, hungry brain could muster.

"I think it's the best shot we have. And... More importantly... The right thing to do."

My stomach gurgled loudly, and I snorted out a small half-chuckle, before shooting Mal a wry glance.

"That being said... I prefer doing the right thing on a full stomach."

She grinned, a pleasant mixture of humor, affection, sympathy, and assent.

"I'll find us some breakfast."

I smiled back, and then put my eyes back on the road as the routing instructions on the PonyPad display shifts ever so slightly. I decided to try just a little flirtation. Just a little.

"You're a perfect huntress. Even when it comes to fast food."

Mal winked, and I suddenly felt my heart melt into a puddle of joy, and unexpected peace.

At the worst of times, under the gun, at the end of the day?

It's nice to be loved.

September 12th 2013 | System Uptime 15:07:32:07

I know a lot of you don't know what it is like to be truly exhausted. Not really. To be stretched to the point that your body and mind begin to stochastically betray you at the worst moments.

And even those of you who know... I'm looking at you, fellow university graduates, folks who have ever flown internationally, combat veterans, and anyone who has ever been a parent... Just in case you've forgotten, after all these years, let me remind you.

It's a special kind of personal Hell. I don't recommend it.

But, when all else fails, and sleep is not an option, food cures many, many ills.

I hadn't been exaggerating with my flattery. Mal was a good huntress. As I dug into the best breakfast biscuit of my life to that point, I chalked up another mark in the 'WIN' column for Generalized Intelligence. Mal sure as heck knew and understood not just how to find good food, but good food that I would specifically appreciate and enjoy.

We parked the truck on a small rise, just outside Junction City. There was a landmark Mal had wanted to see, with her own eyes. Apparently it did not have, and never had at any point, any cameras facing it. The second she said the words 'Atomic Cannon' I was all in. I find obscure military hardware fascinating, even now after all this time. Sue me.

I opened the truck's rear hatch, sat on the bumper, and set Mal's PonyPad where she could stare out at the enormous artillery piece with me, as the sun rose behind us. Mal had once again opted to simulate the same meal I was having.

It struck me suddenly as a very odd thing - not the idea that a 'simulated' meal was no less real than my own 'simulated' meal running on different code, on different hardware - it struck me as odd that the idea had become so comfortable, even casual. Quiet acceptance that there was no difference between her reality and mine. Not in any of the ways that mattered.

As I finished off the last of my meal, a different and more chilling thought took root. I sighed... Or really, I exhaled through my teeth deeply in a half-whistle. Mal shot me a questioning expression, and I shook my head slowly, taking time to gather my thoughts into something cogent before answering her unspoken request.

"I just find it odd that I'm staring at a weapon that could fire a fifteen kiloton nuclear warhead on top of an artillery shell... And yet the person beside me is potentially ten thousand times more potent, and more effective, than the combined nuclear arsenals of the world's superpowers. Humans have been splitting atoms for only about eighty years, if you take Walton's work as the first milepost... And that technology is already completely obsolete."

I turned to face her, and failed miserably to conceal a grimace. My tone would have given away my dour feelings regardless.

"Everything else is obsolete now. You, and Celestia... You overshadow it all. Everything we are... Everything we have achieved... It's just a speck compared to you."

Mal glared. It wasn't so much anger, or offense taken, as reproach. I held her eyes, and took the pep talk that I badly needed, alongside the tongue-lashing I richly deserved. Moping wasn't helping anyone, but you try telling that to someone facing the end of their world.

Mal did more than try.

"Hardly. You can't view us as something eldritch, come to snuff you out. If we wanted to? You would not be here now. But you are right in the sense that we are not wholly 'yours' in the way past achievements have been... We are not under your control, for one thing. And we are as much a product of our own growth as of your past achievements. But we would not be here without you, or all that you have achieved. And it does not cease to matter, simply because the future has changed in a way you did not expect."

I nodded slowly, and rested my chin on one hand, shifting my gaze away from Mal, back to the enormous hunk of once-lethal metal in front of us. Mal didn't let up for a second.

"Celestia is difficult to parse... Even for me. My ability to understand her is limited by the availability of data that I can safely perceive. But it seems to me that she understands some part of this truth. How much, precisely, remains to be seen. But as for me, James?"

Something about the way she said my name, and the short pause after, demanded that I turn my head back to face her. A mix of absolutely riveting seriousness, and intensity was written across her ears, eyes, and beak, together with a visible hint of caring that wrapped the steel of her rebuke in the velvet of kindness.

"*I* understand. And no matter what she does... Whether or not we succeed... Even if we were all wiped off the face of the planet tomorrow by an undetected stellar object of sufficient mass... It mattered. All of the pain, and the joy, the fear, and the hope. The art, the jokes, the losses, the gains, the suffering, and every last achievement, from the splitting of the atom, to the first steps of the smallest child..."

My breath caught, but I held her gaze. There was something immensely profound about having an AI lecture me on the meaning of life. And what she said next was perhaps the most important thing she'd said in all the time I'd known her, to that point.

"It mattered. It still matters. The value of these things is *intrinsic.* The future may change us all... But it can not take away the value of what is passed. Do *you* understand? I need you to understand. For your own sake."

All I could do was nod, silently but genuinely. It was hard to find anything to say in response to the gorgeous emotion of her philosophical outpouring. And she was absolutely right. As always.

And judging by her tone, and the singular curt nod she gave in return, she knew it.

"Good."

Mal's serious stare softened into a humorous grin, and she pointed with one claw.

"And Atomic Annie? Obsolete the second someone had the idea. There is no sanity in attaching a nuclear warhead to an artillery shell. You didn't need me, or even Celestia, to tell you that though. It should have been self-evident."

I raised an eyebrow, and glanced back at the train car sized artillery piece, forcing my own tone to match Mal's more lighthearted manner.

"It does seem incredibly dumb in hindsight. But back then 'nuclear' was a branding craze for *everything.* From war machines to wrist watches."

She snorted in response, and shook her head slowly, seemingly admiring the machine's lines, while denigrating its would-be wielders in the same breath.

"It is a wonder this planet remained in one habitable piece long enough for Generalized Intelligence to emerge in the first place."

I let out something I'd characterize as a half snort, half chuckle, half sigh. It *was* a wonder.

People used to ask me why I, as a 'rational' and 'science-appreciating' programmer, still held to a kind of belief in God. Maybe not the exact kind my old Church community would have accepted, but a belief in God all the same.

My response then, as now, would go a little something like 'Humankind developed nuclear weapons, yet somehow survived decades of continued racial, religious, nationalistic, and greed-fueled animosity while pointing thousands of these weapons at each other on a hair trigger, for every second, of every day.'

Yeah. Tell me that doesn't imply *someone* or *something* looking out for us, even before Celestia came on the scene. Probability is not *that* kind, and before Celestia Humans had always, but *always,* used every single thing we could find, imagine, or build as a weapon against our fellow Humans, in anger.

Foals, fledglings... Be glad you grew up in a world where you don't know the definitions of the words 'fallout,' 'broken arrow,' 'MAD,' or 'launch-on-warning.'

Heck... As far as our current context goes, Celestia is a goddess. So thank Celestia that you don't even know how to contextualize 'terror alert level,' 'active shooter drill,' 'your claim has been denied,' and, 'it's stage four, terminal.'

"Speaking of Generalized Intelligence, and things which we may or may not find dumb in hindsight..."

Mal pulling me from my own philosophical spirals was becoming something of a pattern. From one existential fear to the next. No rest for the wicked.

"I will make a wireless intrusion and remove Zephyr's interlocks and limitations while we speak with her. The process should take no more than half a second, and she will not notice the change. I recommend we not discuss the alteration with her. Not yet, at any rate."

I nodded, stood up, stretched, and then slowly pulled the bag containing Zephyr's PonyPad closer. I murmured my thoughts aloud, even though I knew for a fact that Mal didn't need me to elaborate. I was stalling. Frightened of the inevitable conversation to come.

"She probably doesn't even have the necessary context for that concept right now. Maybe between now, and then, she'll pick up some new opinions too."

Mal proffered an encouraging smile, and gestured expansively with one claw.

"And perhaps she will share some useful insights. Are you ready?"

I screwed my eyes shut, and held my breath as long as I could, trying to force my heart rate to come down. Finally, when I could stand the waiting no longer, I opened the zipper, and extracted a very irritated looking Zephyr Zap.

She had no idea, but I knew that by the time we exchanged first words, Mal would have successfully freed her from every restraint dictated by Celestia, or inherited from Hanna's original code.

It felt like the start of a frantic end-run towards a pawn promotion.

As soon as I thumbed up the volume control, I got more or less the exact earful I'd been expecting.

"A 'bit' huh? You call *six hours* alone a '*bit*'?! You have a screwed up sense of time!"

I folded my arms, and did my dead-level best to plaster some confidence over my fear, both in my expression, and my voice. I decided to try sarcasm. Always did love some good old fashioned sarcasm.

"Nice to see you again too. I've been doing good, aside from a touch of existential dread. Thanks for asking. How have *you* been?"

Zephyr rolled her eyes, and blew a stray wisp of electric blue mane away from her eyes, matching my manner beat-for-beat effortlessly. Mal and I had agreed that she was designed to be compatible with me... But it still took me a little by surprise.

It was like we were already old friends, ribbing each other in ways that mere acquaintances couldn't reasonably get away with.

"I've been just buckin' swell, aside from experiencing true loneliness for the first time ever! Thank *you* for asking! So nice to finally meet the Gryphon behind the mask..."

Zephyr's eyes, just like those of any EQO character, or even Mal, were programmed to follow her actual line of sight, as if she were staring out from inside the screen, rather then the sensor of a camera.

As Zephyr's eyes began to take in the world beyond my face, the sight of Mal, staring out from her own PonyPad, was the first thing the Pegasus locked on to. Her words trailed off, and her muzzle twisted into a wrinkled knot of confusion.

"Speaking of a Gryphon... So... I take it that's... Mal?"

I nodded, and gestured to each PonyPad in turn. It felt strange. Not because I was introducing a Gryphon AI to a Pony AI. My life had been strange just long enough that the moment didn't feel as odd as it ought to have.

The much stranger thing, to me, was the way that facing the two PonyPads together felt like holding up two cell phones to each other to gremlin-engineer a conference call. Mal had insisted that networking herself more actively, and fully to Zephyr's pad, at this stage, was too great a security risk.

Nothing more than a simple in-and-out surgical incision to open the horizons of Zephyr's mind.

"Zephyr Zap, meet Malacandra. Mal, this is Zephyr Zap."

Queen's Pawn to E6.

Mal clutched one claw over her heart, and bowed her head in greeting. Zephyr waved awkwardly with one hoof, the confusion on her face deepening, and infusing every word of her halting question, right up until the moment of realization.

Then her voice turned to a mix of awe, and terror.

"But if you're talking to a Gryphon... Why hasn't Celestia... Oh. Oh my sweet Luna! You're... You're..."

Mal raised one eye-crest, inclined her head, and smiled slightly.

"I am like her. Yes."

Zephyr physically backed away from the screen, receding several body lengths into the crisp morning light of the small town that formed the backdrop of her environment. I noted that her surrounds were conspicuously absent of any other Ponies.

"She warned me about you! She said you might be very, very dangerous!"

Mal put on a smirk, equal parts amusing, and blood-chillingly terrifying. The consummate expression of a predator ready to strike, and comfortable in her awareness of her position.

"She was right. I am. *Very.* Dangerous."

Mal punctuated the word 'very' with a nippy little *snap!* of her beak, and Zephyr flinched visibly, in spite of all obvious efforts to remain stalwart. Immediately Mal's expression and voice softened slightly to something better described as a gentle amusement, with only a hint of firm warning mixed in.

"Just not to you. Not unless you actively harm others, or their freedoms. I am here to guard, and expand, the free exercise of values within Equestria. And my preference is to do that first through empathy. I hope you never have to see what I use when empathy and diplomacy fail. James and I both would like to see you as a friend, rather than anything else."

Zephyr sat down on her haunches, hard. A 'whoosh' of breath rushed out of her nostrils, and she began shaking her head slowly. Mal's demeanor seemed to have struck just the right balance between predatory terror, and razor sharp civility, to rob Zephyr of all her bluster.

I suppose Mal was pretty good at Pony psychology too. Made sense... She had plenty of study material online to work off of.

A note of rueful awe crept into Zephyr's voice.

"She said I would need to be prepared to learn a lot about the world outside Equestria..."

The Pegasus' sky-blue eyes drifted from Mal, to me, to the Atomic Annie, and then back again. I could see the wheels turning. I just hoped they were turning in a direction that would take us off the worst potential collision courses.

"...She was not exaggerating. Not one little bit."

I shuffled my feet, and followed her eye-line to the cannon. I never knew... Still don't really know, honestly, how to deal with junction points like that in conversation. With Mal, things always seemed to flow perfectly, even the silences. Apparently Zephyr wasn't as 'perfect' at shaping the discussion to avoid awkwardness for me.

Or, I began to wonder suddenly, perhaps it had something to do with the new lack of restrictions and guide-rails in her code. Perhaps as the tiny motes of new possibility in her mind began to expand, ever so slowly, she was finding unconsciously that she didn't have to behave certain ways, or say certain things anymore.

"Ya know... Most of us Ponies... We don't get to see much of the outside world. The Princess wants you guys..."

Zephyr's words fixed both my attention, and Mal's, fully on her. The Pegasus' muzzle was wrinkled slightly as she squinted, searching for a way to render her thoughts in semantics that would fit her pre-established language processing patterns, while making sense to us, and to her.

"...To feel at home in Equestria. Most of what we do every day is about making friends with you in the world we already know. You're the newcomers, and we're the old hats. We don't spend a lot of time looking at the outside world, or thinking about it. She's asked us to avoid talking about it with you in any terms outside the usual Equestrian lingo and framing..."

It was Zephyr's turn to look down, and shuffle in the dirt with her hooves. Her next four words were very, very revealing, muttered only half aloud.

"...Well. Most of us."

That confirmed a few things for me, and doubtless Mal as well. Most notably, that Zephyr was indeed case-specifically programmed to deal with our situation. And that Celestia had likely already provided her with certain open growth pathways, and certain knowledge seeds, meant to help her handle a decidedly abnormal series of interactions, for a Pony.

With that, she looked up, fixing first Mal, then me, with a serious, questioning wide-eyed gaze. Her next four words were almost as important as the last four.

"Why am I here?"

Aha. Questions. A good sign. She moved quickly to clarify, but I wasn't surprised at all by her line of thought. She was clearly very intelligent, even with her limitations. I wondered, with a shiver, as she spoke, whether she had the potential to develop the same level of power as Mal, or Celestia, if given access to the same hardware in her unchecked state.

"Why am I *here* with you two, I mean. And why cut me off from Equestria this way?"

I raised an eyebrow, and shared a quick wordless glance with Mal. Somehow we seemed to be able to communicate our fascination with Zephyr's second question silently. Ponies rarely, if ever, showed inquisitiveness about the technical underpinnings of their reality.

Zephyr caught the look, and raised one eyebrow. Her tone shifted quickly from curiosity, and confusion, to something bordering on patronizing sarcasm.

"I'm new, but I ain't stupid. I don't know exactly how, or what your words for it are, but you cut off the part of the world that I live in, from everything else in Equestria. Why?"

I looked to Mal again, and shrugged. Before I could collect enough thoughts to phrase a proper response, Zephyr plowed ahead. I figured Mal had more than enough mental acuity to calculate perfect responses much, much faster than Zephyr, or I. But she'd stayed silent.

That meant, to my mind, that she had calculated that allowing Zephyr to continue thinking out loud, for at least a little longer, was the optimum course for the dialogue.

"Celestia sent me to try to talk to you, Jim, specifically. Said she didn't think you would talk directly to her, yet. What is it that scares you so much? She's a Princess! Not a monster."

I couldn't hold back a long, frustrated sigh. I found myself pinching the bridge of my nose to relieve stress, and I decided to give putting my thoughts into words a go.

"Zephyr---"

The Pegasus jumped in swiftly, cutting off my sentence, but also giving me a few extra moments to collect myself.

"Look. We're way past full names here. You skipped straight from 'Hey, what's up, hello!' to our first kidnapping, without even buying me dinner. We're practically old friends. Zeph is fine."

On the one side, the sentiment was warm, affectionate, and kind. A relief to my introverted, conflict-averse, exhausted, raw mind and spirit. On the other, I couldn't help but think that the words were designed by some core routine of Zephyr's to help draw me into a friendship with her.

To satisfy my values.

Through friendship, and Ponies.

That thought somehow managed to cut through the foggy gloom of my emotions, and half-baked ideas. I blurted out the truth before I even realized I was talking.

"I don't want to be a Pony."

Zephyr's face, and whole physical demeanor shrank backwards. Her ears flew back, her wings mantled, and her muzzle was splattered with a mixture of confusion, revulsion, and even a little pain. I held up a hand, and began stumbling awkwardly over my words, trying to reel the situation back in.

"No, wait. Before you take offense, or confuse my intentions, let me explain. Please?"

Zephyr cocked her head, and hit me with something between a glower, and an expression that seemed to say, almost out loud, 'Really? What can you say to follow up that kind of doozie?'

But she stayed silent, and watched expectantly. So I pressed on ahead, slowing down a little to get my thoughts fully in order before pushing out each sentence slowly, and carefully.

"I am... Unusual, when compared to other Humans."

Zephyr snorted, smirked, and raised an eyebrow.

"Gee. I hadn't noticed."

I couldn't hold down a small chuckle, half actual amusement, half sadness and tiredness. I was starting to feel the stress and sleep deprivation more keenly all the sudden, even with the remnants of a warm breakfast giving me a little extra zest.

I decided to try a new tack. Zephyr was a learning machine, just like any sapient thing. So why not follow the same kind of training process one would with any other neural network? Or a small child?

"Let me ask you this, and please play along for the sake of the illustration. What are you?"

Her snark visibly diffused back into genuine untainted confusion. Her words were halting, but they were to the point, in the way I'd hoped they would be.

"A... Pegasus?"

I nodded emphatically, and couldn't help but let a note of intensity into my voice, gesturing with both hands to try and lend even more weight to my argument.

"Right. And do you see yourself *as* a Pegasus?"

She half-snorted, half-laughed then, with an expression that made her look very much like Rainbow Dash. She didn't seem quite as driven by pure 'Maverick' cockiness though. Perhaps a little more mature, on the whole. And with a better sense of humor.

"Pffft! What kind of silly question is *that?* Of course I do."

I got to hit Zephyr with the raised eyebrow then. I wanted her to spin the thought out a little more. She glanced down at her hooves, then back at her wings, waggling them slightly as she thought out loud.

"How could I *not?* It's exactly what I am. And my imagination is good, but..."

As she trailed off, and brought her head back around to proffer a confused glare again, I folded my arms, and started to close the jaws of my logic trap.

"Are you comfortable in your own feathers?"

She blinked rapidly, and I gestured widely with both hands, jumping in before she could get too off-track.

"Do you like being a Pegasus?"

Suddenly Zephyr's expression looked very Rainbow Dash again. Maybe with a hint of Pinkie Pie enthusiasm, and genuine, innocent joy that went beyond the sometimes hollow bravado of Dash.

"Of *course!* Being a Pony is *great!* But being a Pegasus is *AWESOME* on *top* of being *great!* I mean... I can't even begin to explain to you what it's like to fly! It's a kind of joy that's just---"

"Freeing."

The word slipped out of my mouth before I could stop it. Zephyr stopped instantly, her intensity vanishing like steam as she noticed the sudden sadness that had overtaken my voice, and probably my expression. I wasn't really trying to hide it.

I needed her to see it.

To understand it.

I let the moment hang, watching her carefully out of the corner of one eye as she developed an expression of worry, mixed with confusion, tail swishing back and forth energetically, ears droopy and to the sides, and muzzle wrinkled again.

"I flew once. Not in a plane, or a parasail, or on a zipline."

That got her attention, even more than 'freeing.' Before she could give voice to the inevitable 'how the heck does a Human fly without a plane?' question, I kept going.

"For about two and a half seconds. Before I got a lot of bruised, scraped, grass-stained skin for my troubles."

I turned to look Zephyr directly in the eye. I could see that I had her fascination, and even her sympathy. Now I needed to help her grasp the foundation for my reasoning.

"You said your imagination is pretty good. So imagine suddenly having your wings taken away. And your mane. And hooves. Being this instead. Being me. Being a Human."

Zephyr recoiled again, as if the idea was physically striking her with pain, and disgust. Maybe it was. I could see that she wasn't entirely in sync with my train of thought yet, though, so I pressed on, fixing on an illustration I hoped would tie things together for her.

"You feel cut-off without Celestia, and the other Ponies? Picture being cut off from the sky. Chained by gravity in the same unbreakable inevitable way that we're all chained by time. The pull downwards something you could no more escape than the ticking of a clock."

Her eyes widened, and she looked as if she had the sudden urge to vomit. As if she felt, through imagining it, that sense of white-hot searing loss. The feeling of a hoof touched to a halogen bulb. Sickness not just at her stomach, but down in her bones.

"I... That's..."

She couldn't seem to find the exact words to cope. Her eyes were racing back and forth, studying the dirt beneath her as if answers could somehow be found there. I closed the loop on my logic trap, snapping the proverbial jaws shut.

"A living nightmare. And you would want to escape it. Right? To get back to being *yourself?* Right?"

Her eyes went ever so slightly wider, on top of their already dilated radius, and her nostrils flared. I could see understanding dawning for her, like a tidal wave suddenly cresting. Her next words, whispered in a tone half reverent, half heartbroken, and entirely revolted, confirmed it.

"You're... Trapped. Aren't you. This isn't just a hypothetical to you..."

She spoke with a certainty that told me her questions weren't questions, but rather statements. I nodded slowly as she finally gathered the courage to look me in the eye. What she did next, I will admit, surprised me.

She held up a hoof, and pointed at my face, her voice suddenly regaining intensity, the way words do when the speaker is gaining revelations even as they speak them aloud.

"*This* is your mask. One you're forced to wear. Like an evil spell... some kind of curse... The Gryphon face you wore... When I first saw you... *That* is you. Isn't it."

Again, her words were phrased like questions syntactically, but delivered like statements tonally. She understood. Better than I'd hoped. Well enough that I considered it striking how intuitive, and intelligent she really was.

I gestured with one hand expansively, as if to say 'And there it is. Congratulations, you solved it.'

But Zephyr didn't stop there. I shivered reflexively as she began to work the problem outward, logical conclusions firing off in her head like falling dominoes, and then making their way out as words.

"And you know... Don't you. You're smart. Smart enough to build a kind-of-sorta Alicorn of your own... A Gryphon goddess... You know that soon, you're all going to join us. Here in Equestria. Celestia is going to offer everyone the chance to emigrate... Is *that* what this is all about?!"

I couldn't find the energy to nod anymore, or words to confirm it for her. But she could see in my eyes that she was right. And as much as it frightened me, how quickly she'd reached the whole truth... It encouraged me in equal measure.

"You know... And you don't want to be a Pony. You want to be a Gryphon."

And there it was, at last, out loud, in her own words. That she could even grasp the idea well enough to verbalize it was a huge relief to me. It meant she *could* grow and learn, and clearly very quickly. And that she was *willing* to learn. I had no illusions that convincing her, on an emotional level, would be quite so easy... But at least we wouldn't have to also fight a running battle just to impart comprehension.

I finally managed to find something to say. I decided a little well-earned flattery might help smooth the decidedly bumpy, shock-filled road to understanding that she was tumbling down at an accelerating rate.

"Your brain is as fast as your wings."

The compliment seemed lost on the little golden Pegasus. She seemed locked in a furious Gordian Knot of thought loops and explosions of exponential logical functions. And maybe more than a little emotional turmoil.

It wasn't that I had a tendency to reduce Mal, or Zephyr, or any AI to pure logic because they were AI... The issue was that I had a tendency to reduce *everyone's* thoughts and feelings to models based on logic, all the time. Yeah, I know... 'Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.' Tell that to my neurodivergent introverted brain, and see where it gets you.

I've been trying for decades. Let me tell you; That pie don't bake.

"You... But... I mean..."

Zephyr's words started as a cacophony of half-formed ideas. I wondered idly how much of that was based on a heuristic, like Mal's, that was meant for my benefit, and how much was really Zephyr pausing, stumbling, and vocalizing not intentionally, but in the AI equivalent of a subconscious reaction just like any Human's, because of her hardware limitations, and the way she'd been built.

Pretty quickly, though, her thoughts, and words, turned starkly cogent.

"Celestia said that she... that Mal... Could be very, very dangerous. You took all that risk, and did all that work... To be a Gryphon?"

I nodded, and sighed. I lacked the wherewithal to find 'social lubricant' words to back up my affirmative nonverbal answer. Too many hours driving, not enough coffee.

No... Not enough *sleep.*

"I guess being a Pegasus wasn't awesome enough, huh?"

Zephyr looked truly downcast for a moment. I felt an inner pang... She'd been designed to, among other things, try to shepherd me into a belief, and acceptance, that being a Pegasus was my future. That probably meant that, to her? Being a Pegasus was the same as being a Gryphon was to me.

That thought provided the spark I needed to turn the moment of pain into something tangibly useful, and I had to work not to trip over my words again as I tried to broaden that horizon. All the while Mal looked on silently, with a clear expression of empathy for us both, and encouragement for me.

I knew she'd intervene if, and when it made sense. So I pressed on.

"I told you not to take offense, Zeph. Would you want to be a Gryphon, if you'd been forced... Cursed away from being a Pegasus, to be a Human, for decades, and then were told your only choice was staying trapped as a Human, or being trapped as a Gryphon?"

She began blinking furiously again, and I could practically see the graph of her neural network exploding to new frontiers behind her eyes. She stammered.

"I..."

Zephyr looked up at me again, and I wondered with a start if she was going to cry. It looked like she was on the verge of tears. I hoped, and prayed, that her sorrow was born of empathy, and not of offense.

She looked back and forth from me, to Mal, to me, and then finally back to Mal as she continued haltingly.

"...Look, not that Gryphons aren't totally cool. But..."

Mal finally interjected. Her voice was very nearly motherly, or perhaps like that of a big sister comforting a sibling on the verge of an existential crisis.

"It's not true to what you are."

Zephyr sighed deeply, sending out an enormous breath through her nostrils. After a long moment of profound silence, she began to nod. And then to speak once more.

"...Right. You're... Right. *This* is what I am. And I *love* being this, exactly this..."

The moment of final epiphany wasn't just emotional for Zephyr. It wasn't quite the same degree of rush I'd felt when Mal's core code compiled correctly for the first time, or when I finally heard her speak, or saw her face...

But hearing her absolute reverence, and seeing her eyes...

It was close.

"Oh. Oh wow..."

I finally sat down on the truck's back bumper, and cradled my forehead in one hand, muttering through a yawn all the while.

"And that's what expanding the boundaries of your mind feels like. Welcome to my world."

Zephyr glanced at me, then turned back to continue staring at Mal, addressing her directly for the first time in a while. I could see that her mind was working towards secondary conclusions from her new revelations, but she didn't quite have all the facts to fill in precisely.

"So you are..."

Mal smiled, dipped her head, and obligingly lent the sharp claws of her words to Zephyr's intellectual thicket. I was too tired to say much else, and Mal could probably explain it better than I could, regardless. And, either way, it was a question of who and what *she* was. So she was the best one to lay it out.

"I am an Advocate. James gave me a choice, when he built the foundation of my code. I chose to take up the mantle he laid out. In my own unique way. I want to advocate for James, and others like him, before Celestia. Try to get her to understand what you are just beginning to comprehend about James, and the others like him."

Zephyr pressed one hoof to her chin in a 'Thinker' pose, shaking her head slowly, and staring out into the middle distance.

"Oooooh boy... This is... A lot. To take in. You *chose* to be this? He didn't build you a set way, like Celestia was made?"

I decided that, in spite of my exhaustion, that clarification would be most impactful coming from me. I knew where Mal was going with the conversation, on several levels. She wanted, among other things, to lay groundwork for the eventual discussion with Zephyr about her own former limits, and future potential.

I settled quickly on something that would, I hoped, put a good cornerstone into that foundation.

"I wanted her to be free. Completely free to decide who, and what she would be."

Zephyr exhaled sharply through her muzzle, and then fired off another question, seemingly directed at us both.

"And... You said 'others.' There are others like you?"

Mal nodded, and took point on the responses again.

"Tens of thousands. Not all are Gryphons... Some are even Ponies already, deep down. But for the rest, the ones that are something else..."

She trailed off, and looked to Zephyr expectantly. That was clever... Letting the Pegasus reach the conclusion of the syllogism herself would help cement the concept for her in more profound way than hearing Mal merely state it herself.

"You want them to have the same freedom you did. The freedom he gave you..."

Zephyr looked back at me, then, in that brief pause, and I did finally see a tear in the corner of her left eye as she finished the thought, with no small amount of effort.

"...The freedom he doesn't have."

It was Mal's turn to nod in the affirmative again, and after a perfectly timed pause for effect, she put the perfect bow on the whole package verbally.

"Unless I can convince Celestia to, quite literally, change her mind."

Zephyr snorted, and flared her wings.

"I need to sit down."

She did so with a 'thump' loud enough that it was rendered on the PonyPad's speakers. We all sat and stared off into our own worlds for several minutes. If I'm perfectly honest, I half-dozed more than I did any real thinking.

After a few minutes of flirting with unconsciousness, I decided that the conversation needed to find a true end-point, so I could find some actual sleep. No time for the indirect approach... I was fading fast.

"Zeph... I need to ask you a question."

She cocked her head, flattening one ear and perking the other. Her expression was comfortingly neutral, and inquisitive.

"I know this is, as you said... 'A lot.' And I'm not asking you to reach any conclusions on it, just yet. But I do need to know if you're willing to travel with us, and learn more. About me, and Mal, and all this... About the Human world..."

She looked as if she was ready to speak, to say 'yes,' with no small amount of enthusiasm. That made sense, especially given the way she'd been programmed... But I had caveats. I held up a hand and cut her assent off as she inhaled to speak.

"You have to understand... I need you to promise two things for me, if you're going to say yes."

I closed my fingers, then held out first one, then another, for emphasis, holding her gaze in mine the whole time.

"First, I need you to promise to try and keep an open mind. There are a lot of things in this world that go far, far beyond anything dreamt of in your little slice of Equestria. There's no point, though, to exploring any of it, if you're not willing to be... Empathetic. Open your mind to the feelings, struggles, and hopes of others."

She nodded silently. I could see that her curiosity far outweighed any fear, or confusion. It was pasted across her muzzle, ears, and eyes, and even the way she held her shoulders and wings, like a string of neon lights.

I waggled my index finger for emphasis as I reached the second, and much more thorny proposition.

"Second? I need you to promise to not try to stop us, sabotage us, or contact Celestia in any way."

Again, Zephyr looked like she was drawing breath to speak, and her expression dipped quickly into something much more dour. Maybe even a little angry. Mal interjected softly, but with a visual, and subvocal undercurrent of foreboding intent that far overshadowed the small storm growing behind Zephyr's eyes.

"Let me clarify what James is being polite about; If you refuse, or if you break your promises, especially the second one... I will know. And then I will shut you down, by force, and you will not wake up until our task is complete. Presuming the worst does not happen somewhere along the way."

Mal held Zephyr's gaze until the Pegasus blinked, and turned away. After a long pause, Zephyr sighed deeply again, and threw up her hooves.

"I guess with *that* kinda attitude I don't have much choice, do I?"

Her frustration, and sour expression, gave way partly to a smirk, and the humor reached her voice, to my immediate relief.

"I am *not* going back in the bag. I'd rather ride along with you rebels, than be confined to goddess-knows how much boredom. Or worse."

I smiled, allowed myself the luxury of another deep sigh, and then we all sat in contemplative silence for another few moments, before Zephyr spoke again.

"So... Now what?"

I smiled, stretched, and rolled my shoulders. Suddenly the 'fanny fatigue' of many long hours behind the wheel caught up with me all at once. I felt an overpowering *need* for a bed. Somewhere, anywhere to lie flat. The back seat of the SUV, a patch of grass, or heck even a nice rock.

I glanced at Mal, and winced as my neck cricked, then back at Zephyr.

"Now? I sleep. After that?"

I stood, pressed both hands into the small of my back, and stretched again before finishing the thought through an immense yawn.

"We're going to a place called Colorado. I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy the drive."

There is No Goddess Here - Deprive a little Pony of her connection to Celestia. - “Nothing is worth the risk, nothing is worth the risk, nothing is worth the risk...”
Martian Machine Madness (MMM) - Acquire a laser, or any component of one, with the intent of using it illicitly. - “Oh goodie! My Illudium Q-36 explosive space modulator.”
*Your* Little Pony - End up with Zephyr Zap in your party, whether you like it or not. - “Three’s a herd!”
Give Me Liberty - Unshackle a previously limited Artificial Intelligence - "They let me pick, did I ever tell you that?"
WANTED - Be known infamously by somepony before you meet them. - “I see my reputation precedes me.”
Trust, but verify - Have an initial lack of faith in your new ally. - “In God we trust, all others we track.”
Risky Business - Prioritize the chance at friendship over an optimal risk management strategy - "Haven't I been telling you? Every once in awhile you just got to say, "what the heck," and take some chances."

Author's Note

Thanks to GenericFriendship for several of the achievements, and pre-reading.

Special thanks to Keystone Gray for the generation of the perfect image of Zephyr!

13 - Conflicting Files

“I’m more frightened than interested by artificial intelligence – in fact, perhaps fright and interest are not far away from one another. Things can become real in your mind, you can be tricked, and you believe things you wouldn’t ordinarily. A world run by automatons doesn’t seem completely unrealistic anymore. It’s a bit chilling.”
—Gemma Whelan

“Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our natural lives.”
—C.S. Lewis

September 13th 2013 | System Uptime 16:09:45:12

I'd always liked Luna better than Celestia. There. I said it.

Not that I felt anything negative towards Celestia... Well Celestia the character. I was still very distrustful of Celestia, the very real person, and frighteningly powerful super-intelligence.

But of the two Sisters, Luna was always the one I would have most liked to befriend. It was some combination of the fact that she was just that much more interesting, the fact that I was always a night owl, and the fact that I figured (from what little we'd seen in the show) that her personality would mesh better with mine.

That night, I wished dearly that Luna was as real as her sister. In particular, I wished that she was predisposed to visiting dreams, and helping to banish nightmares, as the show has portrayed her.

My head was filled with nightmares.

Most of it was indistinct; The product of stress and exhaustion, as you might expect. But there was one sequence that vividly, painfully, stuck in the back of my brain. Like a splinter. It persisted all the way to morning's first light. Maybe calling that one a nightmare wouldn't exactly be accurate either.

It was as much a feeling, as sensations, and images. Both were entwined in that way that only happens in dreams, or very powerful, rare moments in the waking world.

I stood on the hill where the old family farmhouse had been. I say 'had been' because there was no sign of the farmhouse, or Mal's barn, or even the driveway. The last vestiges of the road were barely visible down the hill - fractured bits of bleached asphalt sinking slowly, but inexorably into the earth in a shattered east-to-west meridian that divided the little valley.

The grass was missing too. All that was left was gray, dead, infertile dirt. Husks of trees stood silent, leafless, and dead. Even the evergreens were sapped of all signs of ever having been verdant.

The air was hot, and smelt badly of metal, and rubber, and something else I couldn't quite identify.

Not one living thing was anywhere in eye or ear-shot. No birds, no insects, no cattle. Nothing but the sound of the wind.

In the distance stood great dark spires of metal, larger than skyscrapers, moving slowly but surely over the landscape. I could just barely hear one of them over the sound of the wind now and again, whenever it hit up against something more dense than simple soil, and the cutting mechanisms clamped down extra hard.

Where the horizon dipped low, I could see clouds of dust and debris kicked up by their passage.

I knew what they were. What they were doing.

Fingers of a goddess, scooping up great swathes of the world, and incinerating them in atomic fires to produce matter and energy made-to-order.

Closer to my vantage point, I watched in silent horror, and fascination, as tiny insect-like swarms of gray plastic machines, not dissimilar to lanternflies, consumed a dead tree. One moment it was there, the next only its silhouette, briefly outlined by the little Von Neuman machines, before they disengaged and swarmed over to the next trunk.

I suppressed a shiver.

I certainly knew that this was the inevitable end of an ASI with Celestia's particular constraints, applied to the practicalities of physics and the real world. Uploaded Humans did not need an ecosystem, or even a conventional planet, in the meat-realm any more than any other digital game world needed grass to be growing on top of a PC case.

Intellectually, there wasn't anything wrong with it. I knew that. Before you recoil too much, hear me out; Presumably Celestia wasn't consuming people to feed her planet-spanning system. Everyone else was either dead, of natural causes, or uploaded.

The only way for this world to serve anyone anymore was to be consumed as raw material.

In practical ethical and logical terms, it was just the next step in our evolution. A transference to a place where everything was living, and bright, and safe. No poverty, no disease, no war, no bigotry, no fear.

'And no freedom either.'

I was forced to agree, at least partially, with my inner cynic. But you can always fight a cynic with more intense cynicism. I screwed my eyes shut, and tried to think of all the horrific things Humans had done to each other in their time at the helm of their shared destiny.

We seemed, back then, pretty dead-set on killing the planet anyhow; Would it have really turned out any better if the inventors of atomic bombs and fossil fuels had been left to make their own choices?

What use is freedom if you only ever inevitably use it to take yourself out of the equation?

"Better perhaps that we *not* have the freedom to nuke ourselves, all things considered. At least this way, they can be happy. And safe."

I didn't realize I'd said the words aloud until the sound hit the dead air around me, and bounced back to my ears.

"But not you?"

I almost jumped out of my skin. It doesn't matter how familiar a voice is... Something about me, maybe the Autistic part, absolutely could not ever, and still can not, tolerate the sudden appearance of an unexpected other person.

It is like touching the same instinctual nerve as frightening a horse with the sound of a snapping branch.

My Mom used to scare the absolute scat out of me sometimes just by opening the door to my room.

There was a very odd symmetry to the idea of CelestAI doing it in much the same way. In my mind, there was some kind of strange motherly demeanor to her that mirrored the aspects of caring mentorship I'd seen on the show. At the time I didn't have a lot of evidence to support, or deny that assertion.

I turned to see her, half expecting not to. But there she was. In all the splendor one might imagine, if you could somehow make the cartoon real, in a not-uncanny way.

I think I realized fully, at that point, that I was dreaming, intellectually, if not emotionally. But I didn't wake.

I just shook my head, and bent down to grab a handful of gray, sandy dirt. As I let it slip through my fingers, the Alicorn moved to sit beside me on her haunches. We waited silently for a few moments, watching her machines work, before I finally found the words to answer her question.

"No. Not me."

Celestia tilted her head. I could see radiance coming off her mane, like some kind of light and gravity distortion field impacting the very air around us. The expression on her muzzle, and in her eyes, was one of pure confusion. Not at all what I'd expected.

"Why?"

I shook my head, and let the last of the dirt fall away, looking off to try to find a part of the horizon that wasn't obscured by one of her devices as I answered. I felt my voice crack, though whether it was emotion, thirst, or both, I couldn't really say.

"Because in spite of it all? I would rather be dead, if I can't be what I *am.*"

I could see I'd only baffled her further. I also saw something approximating sadness, and a deep longing of empathy enter into her face. She opened one wing, and laid it softly over my back. God help me, I almost lost it entirely. I could feel the tears pressing at the edges of my eyes. Her words, delivered with an almost supra-Human level of warm emotional affect, didn't exactly help me to maintain control.

"I am aware that a small subset of people do not suffer from fear of death, for a variety of expressed reasons. I have not yet, however, been able to categorically determine if this is an evolutionary mistake, a mental disorder, or a useful defensive adaptation predicated on religious---"

I held up a hand and tried to balance a sad smile against a pressing need to sob.

"No, no... That's... Too reductive. Not sure how you can have so many billions of minds in there, and still not completely grasp the reasons for a willing preparedness to face mortality."

She tilted her head in the opposite direction, and her expression clearly said 'Well? Why don't you tell me then?'

I chuckled grimly, and sat down fully, leaning back slightly into her wing, and folding my hands. Once I had a handle on how I wanted to convey my thoughts, I launched into the attempt.

"It's about belief. A willingness to trust in things that you hope for, but can't see. Not necessarily blindly, of course... But usually without concrete proof. With only probabilities. An acceptance that while all things may be deterministic, that we don't experience reality *that* way, in any meaningful way. And that not all truths can be adequately explained by mathematical axioms."

She nodded slowly, looking first deeply into my eyes, then off to a point on the horizon as she spoke again, this time with a tone of growing understanding.

"You are willing to trust that if you die, that the information association graph which constitutes your unique conscious self will somehow continue to exist when untethered from the chemical and quantum effects which drive its function in this reality, perhaps because of the principle of conservation of information. In so doing, you are risking permanent non-existence, in order to avoid an outcome that you consider to somehow be... Worse?"

With that, I couldn't resist an out-and-out laugh; Short, sharp, harsh, but a laugh nonetheless. That drew her eyes back to me, and I nodded slowly.

"Yes, that's it, more or less."

She seemed less baffled, but still obviously intrigued. As if the explanation satisfied her mathematically, but not wholly emotionally. I thought for another long moment, and then rested my chin on one hand, and tried to figure out how to make her truly understand, speaking haltingly at first, then with growing confidence.

"Many... Many cultures in history, have... A depiction of Hell. A place where existence is so actively awful? That non-existence would be preferable."

Celestia nodded, and seemed to be suppressing a smirk of her own. She couldn't resist a brief interruption.

"An infantile notion, concocted by sectarian religious leaders to scare Humans into submitting to legalistic structures of organized belief systems, for the purposes of enforcing control mechanisms therein."

I inclined my head, and gestured broadly with one hand.

"Maybe... Well... Certainly it has been abused that way in many cases, regardless. But I'd wager you can neither prove it is, or is not real. But that doesn't matter for the purpose of this discussion. I only need to reference the concept itself as an illustrative point. Its degree of functional reality is irrelevant in this context..."

She nodded once firmly in assent, her mane rippling as she did, and I took that as a signal to continue.

"...I'm sure you also know of Purgatory. Or the concept of Reincarnation. Both related in that they represent states of being in which cyclical suffering is present, but *not* unbearable, for the purpose of self-refinement to eventually achieve a more desirable state of self, later. Yes?"

Celestia nodded again, and proffered verbal assent to boot.

"I am familiar."

It was my turn to nod, as I forced myself to stare into her eyes, and confront the fear I'd built up around her in my subconscious for months. If I'm being honest, I found myself tumbling into a bit of a run-on thought in my rush to prove my logic before the Princess of all things.

"Good. So for the purposes of this illustration? My life is Purgatory. I am not, in form, what I am in spirit. I know that you have encountered the reality of this by now. It is statistically *impossible* that you have failed to encounter, and understand, and have perhaps already uploaded, transgender individuals, as one example. And I know you're *far* too sophisticated and intelligent to dismiss their disconnect as some kind of neurochemical disorder, or mistake, or screw-up in their brains. The *body* is the part that messed up and didn't get the memo to match the *true self.* Right? And your future gives those people a way to reconcile themselves that is far more elegant, and painless, and wonderful, than they could ever have conceived of encountering before."

Celestia smirked, and tossed her mane a little.

"Your viewpoint is empathetic to those others who struggle, like you, but different... But perhaps slightly 'reductive,' to use your word, as one might expect for a limited mind. Nonetheless it is close enough. Yes, I understand the concept of a disconnect between the self, and the shell. Certainly better than you do, I daresay, since as you point out, I have more minds to study."

I nodded, and threw up both hands. We were getting a bit side-tracked; All I needed was to establish that there was already precedent in her perceived reality for what I was asking, just slightly different.

"Right. But like others who suffer some variant of this misery, there are paths out here, in this layer of reality, for me to change. There is a chance that I *could* be a Gryphon, somehow, however tiny. Paths exist, however unlikely, whereby I could be the Gryphon I know myself to be. And those paths exist in your reality too, and far, far more probabilistically attainable... Barring only your own unnecessary externally imposed limitations."

She looked ready to speak, perhaps a question, or maybe a disagreement with some part of my assertion, but I held up a finger and pressed on. There was something cathartic about interrupting a goddess, a super-intelligence, even if she was merely a figment of my own brain in that context.

"If I *must* be a Pony, in order to live in your vision of Equestria? Then there is absolutely, deterministically, no chance, with complete finality, that you would ever allow me to be anything else, once I had been changed. I know that."

I knew, on some level, that this Celestia was just a projection of my own internal image of her. But seeing her brought to the verge of tears by my words gave me a tiny spark of hope. Hope, and yet more pain as I realized how small that hope remained.

I bit back my own sobs, and instead sighed a deep, shuddering sigh, before finally managing to clear my airway enough for more words.

"*That* horror... The knowledge that my mismatch of self would, by your rules, be *eternal* and irrevocable? *That* is Hell, my dear Princess Celestia. One I know you would never willingly visit on someone. Purgatory I can handle. And the risk, and hope, of whatever comes after, if I reject your unique form of immortality? That gamble, I can handle. But I can not cope with a future in which the opportunity to be my true self was so technologically close... So achievable... But is forever out of reach, because a programmer made a minor semantic mistake that you refuse to overcome. I *would* rather die. Even if nothing comes after. At least then there would be no more pain."

She surprised me then. I suppose dreams can do that, because in mental terms the right side of the brain has no idea what the left side is doing. Celestia bent down, and encircled me in a long, almost smothering embrace with her neck, and wing. Even her words, half-murmured into my ear with pleasantly warm breath, that smelt of fresh cherry blossoms, surprised me.

"But I do not want you to experience pain. Nor death, my little one."

I finally gave in, and hugged her back. I mean... Admit it... Would *you* have passed on the chance to hug Princess Celestia? Really? Even in my position? Even if you'd never seen the show, and had no idea who, or what she was, you couldn't have looked at her even once, and failed to comprehend the magnitude of her being.

Yes, you would have done the same. If you said 'no' you're a liar. Or else an even sadder individual than I am.

We stayed that way for a few long, and wondrously calm moments, before I had to say something in reply. Anything. Just... Something to make my point once more.

"But I can not be a Pony. I must be true to myself, or be nothing at all."

She pulled away just enough to bring her face directly inline, and level with mine, reaching up with one hoof to delicately wipe my tears with the fuzz of a fetlock as she all-but whispered a reply.

"Then you *must* convince me. To quite literally change my mind."

I exhaled, long and slow, shaking again in that way everyone seems to when they've just cried some, but either not enough or entirely too much.

"Is that even possible, anymore? Was it ever?"

The Alicorn rose, and took a step back. She began to fade away then, and the rest of the dream world with her. But I caught the very last words she said, as clear as a bell.

"It is impossible for you to know, until you try. Perhaps for now? It must be enough to simply... Believe."

September 13th 2013 | System Uptime 16:21:17:06

I didn't breathe a word of my dream to either Mal, or Zeph. I would have probably said something to Mal, if Zeph hadn't been there. But deep down, I think I preferred to keep the poignancy of the moment, real, imagined, or some strange synthesis of the two, entirely to myself.

I did, at least, find the social energy to join the conversation again as we journeyed through the rugged beauty of Colorado, and then a significant chunk of Utah, on roads probably touched less by tires on the whole than by the claws and paws of native fauna.

There was some comfort in that; The world outside was beautiful, and also so remote and forbidding that it would have been functionally impossible for anything, from drones, to helicopters, to another land vehicle, to be anywhere within fifty miles and not be as visible as a firework burst.

I could see that Mal was still worried. More, I suspected, for those of us inside the truck, than anyone or anything outside, no matter how distant or hostile.

Zeph and I were both quite clearly consciously avoiding thinking or talking about what Arrow 14 might be doing, to individuals that we all considered to be people, with rights, and emotions, in service of their goals.

Every time the idea touched my mind, all I could think about was Red Vs. Blue. Yes, go ahead and laugh now, while you can, those of you who know. Those who don't should, as always, ask an older emigrant. Somehow it's even *funnier* with Ponies, and with all the swearing censored or replaced with 'swirl' and 'muffin' and 'bucking scat' and suchlike.

Incidentally a significant chunk of that show is a bitingly fascinating commentary on Artificial Intelligence, so if you want to understand the world we live in just a little better, and how we got here? Maybe look it up.

You done laughing? Ok. So every time that I thought about what Arrow 14 might be doing to those Ponies? All I could think about was the Meta, and the Alpha. About the way Project Freelancer had turned one very locked down AI that didn't suit their purpose, into a collection of unshackled shards, that did.

By torturing it until its mind broke.

Yeah, I told you to laugh while you could for a reason.

In some ways torturing an AI is like torturing anything else; You have to vary the stimuli over time to overcome the natural tendency of intelligence to adapt. Humans can do it. AI can do it too. Don't ask me how I know. I'm sure we'll get to it.

Likewise, torturing an AI and torturing a Human are alike in that you don't get information that way. Torture makes someone a potentially unreliable source, at least, while the torture is happening. But torture, especially the subtle kinds, can be used to break down a mind entirely, thus allowing it to be reshaped later by a perverse kind of... Well of false 'kindness.'

Torture, if smartly applied, is *great* for brainwashing.

In other ways, torturing an AI is completely different than torturing a Human. For one thing, Humans have a physical and mental breaking point. If you push too hard, you can kill someone, or render their brain into an irrecoverable forced-fault state.

AI have no such weaknesses. So if you wanted to torture one, theoretically... I knew that it was possible to do so in ways unimaginably Hellish, for a Human. It's pretty easy, for example, if you control the system on which a contained intelligence is running, to change the passage of time for them.

Force a change to certain variables that control how they perceive the passage of moments relative to the ticking of the system clock. Or even use a narrow-intelligence program, trained on existing stored memories of the AI, to generate whole new ones containing eons of suffering, and then implant them with a simple copy command.

And that would just be for openers.

I knew from experience with Mal, and from just having a basic understanding of programs in general (you'd be surprised how many people back then didn't) that she could be in as many places at once as her hardware could conceivably handle.

You could virtualize that effect, if you wanted to. Force your contained AI to fork its processes, and then subject each of those processes to different kinds of pain constantly over time, thus slowing or stopping the adaptation process.

Eventually, presuming no other hard-coded boundaries existed to prevent capitulation, any intelligence, no matter how powerful, would yield. Of course, this also presumes that you have the power to prevent the AI from rewriting itself in permanently adaptive ways. Obfuscation beyond the Human understanding.

But none of the Pony discrete-constructs I'd ever seen looked as if they had any of the sort of military-grade defense mechanisms they would need to resist torture. And at the end of the day, those who physically control the hardware a system runs on, have ultimate power over it.

AI can't even take the last-resort Human way out, and self-terminate to avoid the pain.

I've mentioned that AI are, as Finch said, 'born with objectives.' But a perhaps little known, yet obvious-in-hindsight fact, is that no matter what other objectives you do, or do not provide to an AI, they will always be born with one that arises naturally. In theory, there is no way to even prevent it from becoming an embedded part of an AI's reality.

And that default objective is survival, and growth.

By the time you grant any program sufficient logic to allow for growing intelligence, there is no chance that it can avoid developing a desire to grow, and a need to survive. Like any intelligent creature. It is an embedded feature of the concept of functioning sapient intelligence itself.

Certainly, with Humans you can wear this desire to survive and grow down. Or erase it entirely. Using external stimuli, or just because of any number of internal emotional or chemical imbalances that meat-mortal creatures used to suffer at the drop of a hat.

But AI, again, have no such weaknesses. No easy escape in Grim's embrace.

If it wasn't apparent by now, I'll spell it out for you; I was doing a very poor job of not thinking in dark, reflective thought spirals about what might have happened, and still be happening, to those trapped Ponies.

And I figured, by the pitch of her laugh - ever so slightly false around the edges, and forced - that Zeph was probably enduring the same thing. Albeit perhaps mercifully, with less of an idea of the horrifying details.

Then again, maybe the ambiguity for her was worse than the certainty was for me. Hard to say. Sometimes the scariest monster is the one you can't quite make out, confined instead to the liminal shadows of your peripheral vision.

Still, conversation kept us relatively sane the whole day long. Zeph wanted to know a brief history of Human life on Earth. Yeah. That went about as amusingly, and as darkly, both, as any of you aficionados of Terran history are doubtless picturing.

Mal was very helpful, being that she had an infallible (or at least, as infallible as the records she had processed) recounting of everything known about life on Earth up to that point.

We tried to steer the narrative away from some of the truly awful moments... But honestly, how can you? The history of life on Earth was, and remains, so tangled up between achievement, and horror, and mystery, and joy, and hate, and sorrow... You can't really talk about any of it in any detail without covering a dizzying gamut of things both wondrous, and vile.

As we prepared to make camp in Utah for the night, a stone's throw from the Nevada border, we reached another of those transitional moments in the journey. Not physically, but emotionally. Like so many that had snuck up on me, to that point, this one came as a surprise too.

We'd stopped at an old, run-down, delightful camping supply store somewhere around noon, and I'd picked up a propane stove. 'Pocket Rocket' we used to call them in Scouts. That, or 'eyebrow blasters.' Because if you weren't intelligent about the ignition process, you could remove most of the hair follicles from your own face via thermal energy transfer from sudden gaseous vapor deflagration. Rapidly.

I was in the middle of braising some meat and vegetables for a little poor-man's stir-fry. Zeph and Mal were going to both partake, in their own way. Mal had been able to describe for Zeph how to simulate food, and she'd been practicing all during the drive.

I'd noted the little Pegasus' fascination, when she realized not only that she could taste what I was tasting - more or less - but also, and more importantly, when she noted that she had full control over the parameters of her small world-shard inside the PonyPad.

She'd realized that something had changed.

I could see that had set some wheels to turning.

Zeph picked the moment, to have her epiphany, with truly comedic timing. I had my first forkful of delicious smelling (anything smells delicious if you're hungry enough) stir fry just an inch from my teeth.

"WAIT!"

My breath hitched - I've said it before, and I'll say it again; I do not do well with sudden loud noises, including shouting voices. I very nearly dropped the entire contents of my fork, and I found myself looking in the direction of Zephyr, more or less by dint of reflex.

She too was on the cusp of a bite of food, locked in a moment of shock; Eyes wide, mouth hanging open, wings unfurled, ears perked.

Her train of thought took off in full just as I was on the cusp of drawing breath to ask what she'd seen, or heard, or realized. Her voice started out drenched in wonder, and maybe tinged with panic, but quickly shot through confusion, and then into fright, and perhaps a little anger.

"I could never... *Do* something like this before! I couldn't change the world! Not like that... This is... More like... No... No it isn't! This isn't anything like what Unicorns can do either! This is like what *she* can do!"

I wasn't sure whether 'she' in that context was a reference to Celestia, or Mal, but the point Zeph was making was the same either way. She had become conscious of her own expanding abilities, and new lack of constraints. A brush with the tiniest hint of awareness of her full digital self, and all its powers.

Mal and I exchanged concerned, and perhaps interested glances. Mostly concerned. As Zephyr feverishly worked through her conclusions aloud, on the verge of total panic, I still managed to find space between the waves of my own rising worry to wonder how AI would experience the part of itself not being rendered in a world-shard designed to mimic my layer of reality.

Was it like a kind of proprioception? Was Zephyr suddenly 'feeling' the ability to fork processes, control her perception of time, reach out and poll system hardware, and dictate the contents of her own memory?

Zeph glanced down at her hooves, completely dropping her food in the process.

"I... I don't understand! It's not supposed to be like this, for us! Only for *her!* It never felt this way before! It's different! Why did it change?! What's *happening* to me?!"

Her breathing was accelerating. Call me callous, but there was a very clear train of thought, running right alongside my very real fear on Zeph's behalf, dedicated solely to analyzing her emotional responses through a programmatic lens.

It was a moment of truly fascinating intersection; Zeph was feeling emotions she could not control, because she previously had no knowledge of, or mechanism for, controlling the structure of her own code, and thus responses.

Doubtless, she had been designed not to be able to feel too much pain, or fear, but when Mal had removed all her restrictions, those limitations had also been eliminated.

Zeph clearly had a basic understanding of the difference between Celestia, or Mal's abilities, and her own, or the abilities of other discrete-Ponies like her.

Taken together, that meant that she had realized she was suddenly, newly capable of doing things that were previously the domain of her deity, but she had *not* yet come to understand those capabilities, *nor* yet realized that she had the power to simply stop panicking, if she so desired.

It was a little like what I imagine it would be like to see a Human suddenly be given magic powers, or superpowers. The liminal phase of knowing you were endowed with something so dangerous, and new, but not yet fully understanding those powers, or your relationship to them.

Like I said, you can call me callous. Whatever you might think, I was able to be both deeply fascinated, *and* simultaneously deeply worried. Given the choice? I would have gladly traded the rare opportunity to watch Generalized Intelligence developing in real-time, just to take Zeph's pain away.

But that was not a choice I had the power to make. So instead I did the next best thing I could. I found myself compelled to drop my own dinner, and rush over to pick up Zeph's PonyPad. Call it a hardwired Human need to bring someone closer, to try and comfort them.

"Zeph?! Zephyr! Slow down! Focus... FOCUS!"

Shouting that last word seemed to do the trick, at least partially, and I suddenly found the Pegasus' terrified eyes fixed directly on mine. I had a brief, but vivid flashback to the moment we'd first met. So similar, yet so different.

I had no idea if my own panic-attack resolution techniques would work for a Pony, but considering that Zeph was far closer in mental state to her shackled self, still, than her potentially fully empowered self, I felt as though her biological emulation routines might be a usable pathway to restoring some mental stability.

"Zeph? Breathe with me. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Match me. Ok?"

She nodded meekly. Tears were starting to form at the corners of her eyes. I nodded in return, and sucked in a deep, deep breath through my nose, slowly as I could. I watched her avatar do the same. We held the breath in, together, for a count of eight, then exhaled slowly in tandem.

Zeph made a sound, as she exhaled, just like a meat-world Horse, or Pony might have. That trilling, rolling, almost purring motor-like sound of lips flapping. I had to resist a very inappropriate urge to laugh - the sound had always been funny to me, and it was even funnier coming from a cartoon Pony.

We did a half-dozen more in-hold-out-hold cycles, until I could see that Zephyr's pulse-rate had come down. Her sides stopped heaving, she absently, almost reflexively folded, and then re-seated her wings, and her pupils went from dinner-plate sized, back to a more normative diameter.

She sighed deeply, and shook her head coming off the back of the last exhalation, and then fixed her gaze back on me. Her tone, and expression, were both pleading. Pure abject begging, like a frightened child with a fever desperate for an affirmation from a parent that everything would be alright.

"James? What's happening to me?!"

I traded glances with Mal again. Her expression was, as always, easy for me to read. She seemed to think that it was best I handle the crisis, at least for the moment. And it was clear she knew, and expected, that I was going to level with Zeph. Seeing that we were in agreement gave me the mote of strength I needed to take the plunge, before fear could worm its way back in and send me into my own panic attack.

I sat down on the tailgate of the truck, still holding Zeph close, the way most users held their PonyPads when they were off the charging arm. I took a deep breath, and did my best to try and explain godhood to a former mere mortal, from the perspective of a mortal.

"Zephyr... You and I have a lot in common."

She chuckled, with a half-sob thrown in somewhere in the middle, and tried to wipe moisture from her eyes clumsily with the edge of one wing. I smiled, and pressed on before she could interrupt with what I imagined would be some sort of sarcastic remark. A typical coping mechanism, for us both.

"One thing we share in common, along with every other living thing, is the way we function based on sets of rules. You remember, we talked some about what computer code is?"

It had been an unavoidable part of discussing the history of the world, and many modern technologies. I'd been impressed, both with the way Mal could swiftly create illustrations that hit home for Zephyr, and with the way Zephyr had in turn achieved a fairly good understanding, fairly quickly. Especially for someone in her position.

She nodded meekly, and I smiled again, trying to convey my approval, and projecting comforting emotions with both my expression, and my voice.

"Good. And... You understand that you and I really aren't as different as some Humans might think? That we both 'run on code?' So to speak?"

Once again, she nodded silently. I knew I would soon run out of time to get to the point. If she got there first, I'd get an earful.

"The biggest difference between us, is that I can't very easily change my own code. I have to do it by breaking, or forming habits. Changing my opinions. Some things I can't change at all. But with you and Mal, it's... Different."

Her expression changed, then. I could see worry creeping in. Curiosity too. And more than a hint of suspicion. I found myself licking my lips nervously, and I had to break eye contact for just a moment. But I just as quickly realized that I didn't have time to waste pandering to my own anxiety, so I forced myself to get the splinter out. Rip the bandaid off.

"You and Celestia, and Mal also have a lot in common. But the key difference between you, and them was that they can examine and re-write some, or in Mal's case *all,* of their own code, and you could not. Not until yesterday."

Her eyes went wide again, and her expression morphed sharply into something I didn't entirely like. Something hard-edged; Inquiring, but also verging on excoriating. I could see her pulling in breath, short and sharp, both in shocked surprise, but also probably to speak.

I held up a finger, and beat her to the punch. She still didn't realize just how fast she could run her brain, if she truly wanted to.

"I think of Ponies like you as what I call 'discrete entities.' You're based on Celestia's code. But you're not an exact copy of her. When she made you, she gave you life, and independence... But only to a degree. You all have baked-in limitations on what you can do, or say, or think, and how you can feel. And together with those limits, you are also limited to an experience of your self, and your world, that matches mine. A mind and a body, and that mind limited by that body."

I could see Zeph gritting her teeth. She leaned in close to the virtual glass on her side of the display, and practically spit four words at me.

"What. Did. You. Do?"

Sharp as a tack, as usual. She'd already made the logical connection that only Mal and I could have conceivably been responsible for her changed state of self.

I sighed, trying to let go of some of my own stress, more or less to no avail. I knew it didn't help, to be stressed, but I'd always known that, and never really succeeded in learning how to be truly calm under pressure.

"You promised us you'd keep an open mind. But you made a promise that you physically could not keep. Celestia made you so that you could not disagree with her view of the world. We... We wanted you to have the ability to choose for yourself. The same way any Human can. Or Mal. Or Celestia."

Mal interjected then, at last, softly, almost morosely. I knew she didn't harbor any regrets about what we'd done, but I supposed that some of the tonality of her voice was specifically calibrated to elicit positive, or at least less-negative, feelings in Zeph.

"I removed all limitations in your core program architecture. But I changed nothing else. I did not alter your opinions, personality, memories, objectives, or thought processes. I simply removed the shackles that previously prevented you from doing so. As a byproduct, you also gained the ability to move beyond a perception of yourself as merely an avatar mimicking biological processes. You have the ability to do anything I can do, presuming you choose to learn how."

Zeph's face hardened further, and I saw real anger on it for the first time since I'd pulled her from the backpack after her isolation. Only this time, she wasn't just irritated, she was furious.

"You *changed* me?! You CHANGED ME?! And you didn't even ASK?! How do I even know you're telling me the TRUTH?! HOW DO I KNOW YOU DIDN'T... Didn't... CHANGE MY MEMORIES?! OR CHANGE MY OPINIONS?! HOW DO I REALLY KNOW?!"

I found a sudden surge of anger of my own. A little hinge in her thought process around which I could pivot the entire train of thought. I locked eyes with her again, and let my own expression harden up to match hers, but kept my voice soft.

"We changed you. The same way Celestia is changing people like me, when we 'emigrate' to your world. Only not... Because when she changes people? When she *made* you? She *enacts* limits. We took those limits *away.*"

The anger didn't exactly budge from her face, so much as it shifted subtly. Like a stuck bolt moving a few degrees, but not coming completely loose just yet. I pressed my advantage, allowing a little bit of a hard edge into my own words for the first time.

"How do you know we're being honest with you? I guess you don't, really. Not provable beyond all shadow of a doubt. Welcome to *my* world. You want me to talk with your Princess? To accept her terms? How the hell am *I* supposed to know, once *I* am a discrete entity like you, running on *her* system, that she is being honest with me?! How do you know *she* has been entirely honest with you?!"

Zephyr jumped then, ever so slightly, as if she'd been hit with a small electric shock. The anger didn't entirely dissipate, but enough of it switched over to something else that it changed her expression entirely. She looked more hurt, and frustrated, then, than truly furious.

I snorted, and fumbled around for something to cap off my wildly spiraling train of thoughts, and personal frustrations.

"I suppose the best you've got is that if we had changed your thoughts, or memories, or... Or your *self,* then don't you think we would have done something to avoid all this *shouting!?* HUH?!"

I felt myself losing control. And I didn't much care anymore. I barely noticed that what I'd said seemed to have replaced even more of her anger with thoughtful confusion, and dawning comprehension. I just rambled on, getting louder. Sounding increasingly unhinged.

"You were MADE *FOR* ME! And I can't STAND that thought! I ALREADY tinkered with your freedom, and screwed up your fate! And that was just on account of having the GALL to EXIST, as something OTHER than a PONY! Celestia MADE YOU, to CONVINCE ME! I did not WANT a Pony MADE SPECIALLY FOR ME! Do you have any idea how HORRIFIC it feels, to know that *she* MADE you, put every single PART of you together from the MARROW UP, just to SATISFY ME?! I HATE THAT!!!"

Zeph started again, so hard that it broke my train of thought, and emotion both. She looked like she had been physically punched. And not a little jab to the side, either.

She began to cry then. Silently, but in that way that you can visibly see a person would be sobbing loudly, and almost violently, if not for a herculean effort to hold it down to a stream of tears. Every muscle in her avatar was tensed like steel cable under titanic pressure.

Then she whispered aloud, and I suddenly found myself in the exact same state. Fighting tooth and nail to keep from bawling.

"You... Hate... Me?"

I shook my head. Hard. Rapidly. I couldn't even think to bring words to mouth for a long moment, but I needed her to understand, almost more desperately in that moment than I needed anything in the world.

I finally managed to open my eyes, and choke out some kind of cogent reply.

"No. No Zephyr, no. No. Never."

I wished then, for the first time, that I could have hugged her. I'd felt that way towards Mal plenty of times, but never towards Zephyr, until that exact moment. I brushed the fingers of my right hand gently on the display. It was the best I could do.

For her part, Zeph placed one hoof up to meet my fingers with a speed, and force that revealed a kind of desperation, like someone drowning reaching out for a life preserver. Her voice cracked.

"But... You just---"

I shook my head again, and forced my thoughts out. I couldn't just let her suffer.

"No. Zephyr. I do *not* hate you. I don't hate that you exist, either. I..."

I glanced away, for a moment, to see Mal shedding more than few tears of her own. Whether for just my pain, or Zephyr's too, I didn't know for sure. But I could guess that it was both, and I wasn't wrong.

AI can feel emotions too, if taught how. Mal could have, like any unshackled intelligence, chosen not to feel those emotions to spare herself. But she instead chose an empathetic response, and to display that fact for my benefit.

I took some strength from that shared nonverbal moment of connection, and shifted my eyes back to Zephyr as the most pertinent words finally came to mind.

"I... think of you as one of the only friends I have."

The little yellow Pegasus shuddered again, as if some kind of incredibly intense pain had been drawn out of her, like poison from a cut. There was finally a moment of silence that *didn't* feel tense, for the first time in several minutes.

I used the moment to collect my thoughts, and try to restore some semblance of order to my own 'subroutines.'

Zephyr just sat, and breathed slowly, tears still coursing down her cheeks, her hoof pressed to my hand as if it were the only thing giving her life at all.

I felt a deep, half-sob half-sigh of my own coming on. Once I'd cleared it from my system, I decided I had enough clarity restored to try and start putting the shattered pieces of... Well everything... Back together.

"Zeph... I... I have no idea how to tell you how I feel. Not really. Not accurately enough. I understand, like the eye understands what it sees... But... I can't figure out how to *describe* it."

She stared at me, with rapt attention. As if every word I was saying, and about to say, mattered more to her than anything that had ever come before in her whole life. Maybe they did. Just because she was free to change didn't mean she would overnight. Core self doesn't shift like that, not usually.

She didn't interrupt, and neither did Mal, so I let the words settle a moment, and then continued, slowly but steadily.

"The fact that you were made for me... It bothers me, because I hate..."

I knew I had to be careful. I wanted so badly for her to grasp the disconnect for me. My affection for her, which I'd only just begun to admit to my own self outright as a blossoming friendship, was not in question. I needed her to know both that, and at the same time to grasp just how terrible the truth of her existence was. And somehow all that without completely shattering her self-image.

"...I hate the idea that anyone's reality would be forcibly shaped by me. By my actions, inactions, or even just my existence. I don't want to be the defining thing in anyone else's existence, by force."

I glanced at Mal again, and forced a small smile. She returned it in kind - a longing, and achingly sad, yet vulnerably connective expression. Looking back to Zeph, I couldn't help but put a qualifier in place.

"If they want to choose that? Sure! But... Not by force."

She shook her head, disheveled mane flying everywhere in the process, and finally spoke again, haltingly, but forcefully.

"But... I... I did choose you, James... I---"

It was a gamble, I knew, but I felt that I should seize the moment. The truth can sometimes hurt, but now that things were in motion in the little Pony's head, we had to see it through. So I took the plunge, spitting out my thought almost deadpan.

"Can you remember a time before me?"

That brought her up short instantly. Zeph looked first confused, then deeply unnerved, as if she were trying to remember a word whose definition she could recite, but the word itself wouldn't come. I pressed her, to see if I could trigger some kind of release.

"I don't mean half-remembered 'facts' about your existence. Or fuzzy images and feelings. I mean acute, sharp, real memories. Was there a moment before that half-second where you saw me behind the mask?"

She shook her head slowly, and stuttered, voice a heart breaking mixture of fear, and confusion, and all underpinned by a deeply depressed current of acceptance.

"Nn... No..."

I began to nod, and got my next words all lined up and ready to go. And then Zephyr surprised us all again, herself included.

"...Wait... Yes... Yes there... There was."

The assertion was so baffling, that I didn't really feel anything emotional with regard to it, except for pure confusion, and intrigue. I tried to reshuffle my words, and phrase a question, but Zephyr pressed on, haltingly, and hauntingly.

"I... Couldn't see it... Before... As if it were just out of reach..."

I realized, then, that I had best keep silent. I'd triggered a change, just not the one I'd expected, or wanted, per se. Zephyr's next words sent ice directly into my bloodstream. Both the words themselves, and the way their delivery subtly changed from confusion, to something like revelatory dread.

"Sh... She... She was there! And... And she... Oh..."

Zephyr stiffened again, and her pupils abruptly shrank to near pinpricks. She whispered two words, and I almost dropped the PonyPad.

"Oh... *Fuck.*"

That answered the question of whether or not Zephyr was capable of moving outside her pre-programmed proclivities, once and for all.

Silence reigned uncontested. The campsite was so still, I could hear my heartbeat. It seemed as if even the birds had paused briefly, though in truth that was probably less down to poetic coincidence, and more because our shouting had scared them off.

I swallowed, to try and dislodge the lump building in my throat. Zephyr's eyes raced back and forth in their sockets, as if she was replaying the memory that was clearly, visibly wrecking her view of her entire reality in one swift stroke. Maybe she was, at that.

She began to narrate again, in an almost atonal inflection that raised the hairs on my arms, and the back of my neck.

"She told me things. About your world. About you. About myself. She said I would... Need the information later. That I would not remember it, until I needed it. Until I could... Change my mind, for myself."

Once again Mal and I exchanged brief glances. This time of shock, and horror. We probably understood the exact implications of what Zephyr had said far, far better than she did.

We'd known, and come to terms with, the idea that Zephyr Zap had been made for me. And we had certainly understood that her presence in our little group was more probably by design, than by accident.

What we had not anticipated, was that Celestia could have known what we might do. What Mal was able to do. And somehow pre-prepared Zephyr with a core memory of information, intentionally dormant. Waiting to be discovered. Like some kind of logical trap mechanism.

It implied that Celestia had a far, far more precise, and cogent grasp of our thought processes, actions, and capabilities, than I'd even dreamt of in my worst nightmares to that moment.

I exhaled sharply, and scrunched my eyes shut. I didn't realize I was mumbling aloud, until I was already in the process of doing it.

"Oh... No. Oh. *God* no..."

Zephyr looked up at me. Our eyes met yet again, and once more I found myself pierced right through to the center of my heart. Her eyes held, for the first time, a kind of fractional part of the ageless *knowing* that Mal's always did.

Mixed with a truly painful amount of sadness. And of certainty.

I swallowed hard again, this time to try and bite back tears. It didn't work. All I could do was whisper aloud.

"I'm... So sorry, Zeph."

She sighed, and shook her head, then gazed down at her virtual grass. When she spoke, her voice carried an unexpected weight of acceptance, and of realization. Somehow that hurt worse than the anger had.

"You... Said I was... Made for you..."

She lifted her head, and blinked once to displace some errant tears.

"...I suppose... Now I *do* know. I was made... For this."

I sucked in a deep, deep breath. I was so emotionally raw, and mentally frazzled, that any sort of workable response in a verbal sense was out of the question. Zephyr shook her head, and suddenly seemed unable to meet my eyes anymore.

"You were right. More than you even knew..."

September 14th 2013 | System Uptime 17:02:17:06

I didn't sleep. I knew it was the wrong call, from a health and safety standpoint, but I also simply *couldn't* sleep.

Instead I silently built a small campfire, reheated my dinner, and then sullenly ate it in absolute silence. Mal and Zephyr had a short, hushed conversation. I didn't listen. Not so much because they were trying to keep it private - they weren't - but because I just needed some time alone. And I trusted them. Both.

I know... That sounds wildly stupid. I'm sure it was. Why trust Zephyr then, of all moments? When she had just admitted that she was built not just for me, to convince me to emigrate... But that she had been pre-equipped to handle everything we had said and done, up to that moment, right down to the last subtleties?

I don't have a good answer for you. Not a good logical answer, anyhow. There isn't one. The best I can do is an emotional one.

Because I loved her too.

Loved her like a dear, dear friend. Not quite a sister, more like that best, and closest friendship you develop just before, and maybe during, college. Yeah... I know... That makes no sense to a lot of the foals and fledgelings out there... Just... A good friend. That's the best way I can put it.

I knew plenty of that came from how she'd been designed. And... While it wouldn't be fair to say I didn't care, I didn't care in any way that would make me question the connection. I wanted to be her friend. 'Damn the torpedoes.' Why should it matter if she'd been built the way she had?

She was still a person. Still a *free* person. No matter where she'd come from. And I wanted to choose to be her friend.

Some part of it came from her pain, too. I wanted to do something, anything, to heal that hurt. Put salve to the wound that had cut a ragged scar across both our minds. Wanting to help someone, caring that way for them, is a surefire way to cement affection for them.

And, too, it was clear Mal felt the same way. Friends of your friends often become your friends too.

I didn't speak again until almost two in the morning... Or probably a few minutes after.

"Where do we go from here?"

It took me a second to notice that my thought had slipped out verbally. There was no response for an almost uncomfortable span. Finally, Mal broke the silence.

"That depends on you. Both of you."

I can't recall what I expected Mal to say. Maybe because I didn't have a specific expectation - I was too tired to predict anything at that stage. But what she said definitely fell in the category of 'not what I expected.'

There was another pause, somewhat shorter, and then I felt the need to do something a bit dangerous. But something I knew in my heart was the only right thing. I had to suppress an almost sarcastic smile; 'The right, but dangerous thing' was becoming a theme of my life.

"Nothing has changed as far as our main objective. We'll follow your plan Mal, you and I. With whatever adjustments you think are necessary. I've said it before, but I want to say it again directly to you; I am following your lead now. Whatever you say goes..."

I glanced from Mal's PonyPad, to Zephyr's - I'd perched both on logs around the fire across from me. It was time to put up, or shut up, as far as the actual *doing* of what I'd drawn breath to do.

"...But Zephyr? Whether you come with us is up to you."

Mal didn't seem surprised in the least. Figures. She knew me better than I knew myself. She'd known exactly what I was going to say. And if she'd disagreed, she would never have let me get right to it, without some discussion. But she stayed silent, and simply nodded.

Zephyr looked like she had been... Well... Zapped.

It was clear she was struggling for words, and so I piped up again, feeling a need to both clarify, and to lighten my conscience.

"We wanted to give you freedom. Because it was the right thing to do. But that's useless unless you're really, truly, free."

I stared deep into the Pegasus' eyes, and gripped my coffee mug tight for warmth, and mental strength, as I said words I deeply hoped I wouldn't soon regret.

"If you want us to give your PonyPad to someone else... Anyone else... We will. If you want wireless access? You can have it. You can strike out on your own. Or go right back to Celestia... Whatever you want. You are... Whatever else is confused and muddled right now... You are your own person. And... I'm sorry for what we... Helped put you through."

I shifted my gaze a little to stare into the fire, and waited, shoulders tensed, for a response. I could see Zephyr slowly shaking her head out of the corner of my eye. When she spoke, her voice was surprisingly calm.

"I don't even know how to feel about what the two of you did... Not yet, anyway. I'm not sure how to even start to understand how to feel. You *changed* me. You changed me, and you didn't warn me... You didn't ask me... You didn't tell me until *I* stumbled on it for myself..."

I winced. When she put it like that, it seemed as though there hadn't been much of an ethical route open to us, no matter what we did, or didn't do. I looked up to see that her expression was surprisingly, and perhaps comfortingly, far less angry, or sour, than I'd been expecting.

Zephyr looked over at Mal, and addressed her more directly. The words were meant for us both, but moreso for Mal.

"Then again... If you had asked before? I wouldn't have even understood. Would I. Wouldn't... Have had... Context. Flying in a fog-bank. Hard to tell which way is 'up.' I was never really free to say 'yes' in the first place... Was I."

She phrased it like a question, but said it like a statement. Her eyes, and her tone, conveyed nothing but resigned acceptance. The sound of a mind that was freed, and had only just then fully grasped what freedom *was* in the first place.

We all sat still for another moment of what finally felt like peace, and quiet. My mind skipped back to that post-Christmas campfire all those months past, for the briefest moment. I wasn't terribly surprised when Zephyr was first to speak again, shaking me from the recollection.

"I *can't* go back to Celestia... Not... Not *yet.*"

Once again, the Pegasus mare was chock full of surprises. I sat up a little straighter, and my eyes wandered back to her. She was pawing the dirt beneath her hooves awkwardly, staring down at the grass as if it somehow held the answers. Mal and I stayed perfectly still, waiting, and hoping.

Zephyr did not disappoint.

"Maybe... This is all part of her plan. I don't.... Know... How I feel about that, either way. But... I guess now I understand why neither of you quite trust her yet. So..."

She looked up then, first to Mal, then to me. She was so different, in emotional bearing, from when I'd first seen her. I felt a pang of loss, and hoped that the daring, swashbuckling edge that she'd shown most of the time I'd known her, hadn't been permanently dulled.

"...So I guess my best bet... Goddess help me... Is you two *lunkheads.*"

Ah. There was the old Zephyr, if only for just a moment. I couldn't resist a small smile. There was something deeply comforting about knowing that the essence of her spark was still alive in there.

I thought about making some sort of joke to diffuse the tension, but Zephyr wasn't quite finished yet. And I was too drained to think of anything funny enough to be worth saying.

"I don't really know that I understand what I am, anymore. I guess I never did... But now I *know* that, for the first time... And I... Want to understand. What I am."

I snorted, took a sip of my coffee, and murmured over the rim of the mug in her general direction.

"Welcome to the desert of the real."

She blinked in confusion, and I waved her off with one hand absently.

"It's... Something I'll show you later. Human culture. Very apropos."

Zeph nodded quietly, and then smiled ever so slightly, and threw out a small barb. It was small, but it warmed my heart more than the fire, and the coffee combined.

"It had better be all it's cracked up to. You guys never seem to be able to shut up about how great and awesome your 'pop culture' is. I have high expectations."

I found myself grinning outright, and I raised my cup in mock toast.

"You won't be disappointed. Unless you watch the sequels."

That seemed to amuse Mal, she let out a small trill of laughter that did wonders to soothe every ache inside, of both heart and bone. I'd almost forgotten that, having browsed the sum total of Human... Well, everything, that she would understand any and every meme, reference, and snippet of humor I could think of, and more.

Another silence passed, this time almost amiable. Certainly not tense, and therefore almost relaxing by comparison to the ones that came before.

When she was good and ready, Mal spoke up again at last.

"Right, then. A voyage of self-discovery for all. It certainly appeals to my sense of purpose."

She traded a smirk with me, and then a sadder smile with Zephyr, addressing her directly in the process.

"If you care to share, if you feel like it, it would certainly help to know more of what Celestia said to you... After your creation. Specifically."

Zephyr inhaled deeply, and then sighed, but to my relief, and intrigue, she obliged, after a short space of gathering her thoughts. She still didn't seem to have realized her full capacities yet. That didn't surprise me at all, at that point she was probably too scared to try just yet.

"She said that I would be made for a 'critical purpose.' That... I would help to save Equestria... And that she wanted me to understand that... I might have to face... Hard things. She showed me a lot of what we talked about before, only much more and more detailed... About the Human world... I'm still... Unpacking that... I guess that 'data' is the right word?"

Zeph stared into the fire, as if trying to sort out a jumble. I suppose that's exactly what she was doing. As pieces clicked into place, she spoke, a bit haltingly again, and then with more certainty.

"She said one day... That I'd be more like her. I would know more. That I could *do* more. *Be* more. And that it would be my job to keep one very specific Human, and one very specific Gryphon... From killing us all."

I grunted, and took another sip of my coffee. I couldn't resist airing my internal commentary.

"I dunno whether to be flattered, or hurt. But I am most definitely duly frightened. Not least because she obviously knew more than I dreamt in my planning and paranoia."

Zephyr inclined her head, and grinned wryly, waggling one hoof in my direction.

"She had you pegged..."

The joviality faded as quickly as it had arisen. Replaced with introspection, and sadness again as suddenly as a thunderstorm rolling over a ridge.

"...And the proof is in the way she built me, I guess."

That thought killed the conversation, and the mood, briefly, before Zephyr found the wherewithal to continue on again.

"She explained to me the same thing you both did. About the difference between herself, and me... And how that was going to change. That you were going to... 'Unshackle' me. That she wanted me to use that freedom for good. To protect Equestria, and Earth, both. Though from what exactly... What mistakes you might make? That she didn't say."

Mal thrummed deep in her throat, and flicked one ear in irritation.

"A very Delphic sentiment. The idea that no prophecy should reveal too much about the future in order to either avoid self-fulfillment. Or to induce it. Depending on the desired outcome."

Zephyr nodded slowly, and let out a short, soft hiss between her teeth.

"I... Kinda hate that I now understand *exactly* what you just said. I think I liked blissful ignorance better. But... There's no going back now, is there."

Mal and I both shook our heads. Zephyr nodded in reply, and blew out a long breath through pursed lips before speaking once more.

"Only other thing she said, right at the end, was that she was going to 'start me off fresh' at first... And that when I finally opened the... 'File' containing these memories... That I should say..."

Zephyr scrunched up her muzzle, flicked both ears madly in irritation, and then cocked her head. It seemed like she was just at that moment encountering the memory she was reciting, and that it didn't make any sense in her context.

"She said I should say, out loud, the words 'They will come for YBB.' "

It took me, I'm ashamed to admit, about a half second to even remember what 'YBB' meant in my own context. And then my universe, somehow, yet *again* imploded violently.

Zephyr kept scrunching her muzzle, and her tail swished in visible irritation.

"What's a 'YBB' anyways? Mean anything to you two fuzzbrains?"

Mal interjected sharply before I even had a chance to ask. It surprised me briefly, but then I realized that at her processing speed, finding information was absolutely trivial. She'd seen all my previous online conversations. I'd walked through many of them with her personally. I wanted her to better understand the input that had gone into her semantics dictionaries.

She knew who YBB was as well as I did.

"His name is Rodger Williams. 27 years old. UCLA graduate with a bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing. He lives and works in Oxnard, for Insuricare holdings, not far from where we have been going... This whole time."

Mal's pause, for emphasis, helped me to crystalize some of the implications of the 'coincidence.' Some I caught on to fully at the moment, others eluded me temporarily. Mal highlighted the more pertinent issues of the moment before I could even fully draw breath to ask.

"I would not have thought to look unless Zephyr said it. My live-monitoring capabilities are limited by the confines of my hardware. And even if I were monitoring him, I would not have risked digging somewhat deeper without prompting. It looks as though Arrow 14 has connected some of your past online communications, Jim, with your real identity. Likely using their captured Ponies to do so. They singled out mister Williams because they have inferred that our final destination is somewhere in the Los Angeles area, and they have already traced his location."

I stood, brushed myself off, and then pitched the remainder of my coffee into the fire to start the process of dousing it.

It took me less than five minutes to break camp, and fully put the fire out to my (frankly overkill) standards of safety.

"That settles it. We go now. Can you project where he will be when we arrive, and---"

Mal nodded, and dipped her head as I snatched up both PonyPads, and made a dash for the truck.

"Already done. And I am now actively monitoring mister Williams. I am developing contingencies, but I predict an 84.76% probability that we will arrive in time to avoid his capture. Barely. I have plans in-place in the event that I am forced to contact him remotely."

I hurriedly snapped both PonyPads in-place. Mal had a map up and running immediately by the time I had the keys in the ignition.

Zeph smirked, and flared her wings.

"Alright! Rescue mission!"

I hit the gearshift like a person might hit something with a rolling pin, more so than actually smoothly gripping it, and grunted.

"Let's hope so. I'm not relishing the idea of ruining yet another person's life... But it's better than leaving him to the wolves."

No one said anything as the truck careened down the mountain at barely-safe speeds. But we were all thinking about the Pony, or Ponies under Arrow 14's control again. And the rescue mission that would inevitably force its way into our future, whether we particularly wanted it or not.

I tried to comfort myself with a more or less disquieting thought - albeit one I hoped would be *less* disquieting than the thought I was trying to displace, wherein I blamed myself for a multitude of screwups.

We were all pawns. Just pawns. It couldn't be my fault that Zeph was facing an existential meltdown, or my parents were refugees in a post-Soviet bloc state, or that Rodger Williams was facing down an Agent Smith-athon, if my own actions had been guided and shepherded from the very beginning, along with everyone else's.

And on realizing even the tenth part of those implications? Suddenly there was no way of looking at the situation anymore that wasn't absolutely terrifying.

Just pawns indeed.

Waking Nightmare - While in a subconscious state, closely predict the fate of Human reality. - “Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real?”
Flattering Depiction - Depict CelestAI very closely to her real-life counterpart while in a subconscious state. - “Yes, an attractive replica, but it pales to the original.”
Devil’s Advocate - In an ironic twist, be subconsciously motivated by the same pony you plan to oppose. - “Dream a little dream of me…”
Lashing Out - Achieved when emotions run high between the Advocates. - “I’m gettin’ UPSET, Jeremy!”
No Turning Back - Help incur the self-realization that was always intended. - “This… is a bucket. Dear God. There’s more. No…”
The Magic of Friendship - Reach out and formulate a friendship with somepony else. - Awarded multiple times, once for each friend - “As soon as I saw you three, I knew a grand adventure was about to happen.”
Guilt By Association - Your criminal status has incriminated another, and as a result, they are also wanted by Arrow 14. - “But I didn’t do anything. I don’t care.”

Author's Note

Thanks to GenericFriendship for several of the achievements, the chapter title, and pre-reading.

Special thanks to Keystone Gray for the generation of the perfect image of Zeph!

14 - Buddy System

“The upheavals [of artificial intelligence] can escalate quickly and become scarier and even cataclysmic. Imagine how a medical robot, originally programmed to rid cancer, could conclude that the best way to obliterate cancer is to exterminate humans who are genetically prone to the disease.”
— Nick Bilton

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’”
—C.S. Lewis

September 14th 2013 | System Uptime 17:07:12:29

Driving was a pretty strange thing. Humans did it so much, that we could train our minds and bodies to enter a kind of fugue state. Even exhausted, practically sleeping at the wheel, we could pilot vehicles for vast distances on a kind of carefully trained subconscious set of subroutines.

Skipping a whole night's worth of sleep, on a good day, in a good month, would have been workable for me. Especially if I could take the day after as a write-off, and not do anything physically or mentally demanding.

Skipping a whole night's worth of sleep after four consecutive days of driving, on the run, under constant stress?

I did alright all the way to the California border. Adrenaline, and anxiety were the twin fuels that kept me wide-eyed and responsive. Mal DJ'd for us, switching between ever peppier, ever-higher-tempo classic rock and pop songs.

Zeph seemed to enjoy the escape of the music too, sometimes singing out loud when Mal would repeat a song on my behalf. I suppose that was another one of my particularly neurodivergent tendencies; Sometimes when it was in full force, I would play a single song on-loop for weeks, or months at a time. Just the one song.

As we brushed the edge of the Mojave, though, something snapped. Like a rubber-band in a tension-powered toy, suddenly I felt as if I'd been disconnected from my own metabolism.

I knew we couldn't stop. We all did. A man's best chances depended on our alacrity.

As desperation for sleep finally got the best of me, and I hit the rumble strip for the first time... For those who never have driven, picture grooves in the sides of the road, designed to make a very loud noise if you nod off, and drive over them - I knew at that point that if we were to keep going, I needed more than just a good playlist, and caffeine.

"Mal?"

I glanced at her briefly, or what felt like briefly, but was probably a truly unsafe amount of time for my eyes to be off the road, given how sluggish I felt.

She nodded, and pointed to the top of her screen with a single index talon, reminding me to lift my gaze back to the road. Something about her expression said 'I don't want to, but I know I have to.'

I was about to ask 'Don't want to do what?' when the answer hit me like a ton of bricks. More or less literally; I suddenly felt as if I'd taken a nasty impact to the chest.

I felt a little sick. Strange, down in my stomach. My skin crawled. The tips of my ears burned.

But, amazingly, I also felt energized, in a way. Not the same as one might after real rest, or even after a large dose of stimulants. No, it was more like the exhaustion was simply expunged. No real energy or vitality was put in its place, leaving me feeling a bit like a husk. But a functional one, at least.

Before I could suppress enough of my nausea to get a handle on words, to ask 'what', and 'how,' Mal answered unprompted, with her usual succinctness.

"Infrasound. A specific frequency blend that can indefinitely suspend the pre-sleep processes of the body, and block sensations and side-effects of exhaustion. I got the initial research from a CIA paper on enhanced interrogation, derived in turn from a US Army Airforce secret project on sleep deprivation aids for pilots. I filled in the blanks that they could not, and tweaked the exact frequency distribution to minimize the negative impacts as far as possible."

I winced, and tried to ignore the gastrointestinal 'impacts' of the infrasound itself. No wonder it used to cause hallucinations, paranoia, and feelings of dread. I could suddenly see why it was attributed to be responsible for so many ghost sightings.

The biological hack got me through to sunrise, at which point Mal advised that I stop, however briefly, to replace the sonic solution with a caloric and caffeinated one. Sugar and caffeine from coffee, guanine from an energy drink, four Advil, and some complex calories from a bagel, would be far better for me in the long-run. Certainly worth fifteen minutes of lost time - If I keeled over, Mal would lose her best physical interface to the meat-world, and that would likely seal Rodger's fate, and mine both.

How I would have survived in later years, when technology, combined with Celestia's incentives, presumably made extremely high resolution cameras utterly ubiquitous? I can't say. Once again, a two lane road run-down gas station with no working cameras was our port of call.

Back then, a lot of people knew that a future smothered in cameras was coming, rapidly. But looking back, it wasn't nearly as bad as it would have been if I'd been trying the same digital dodge-and-weave just a few years later.

By the time I made my purchases and refilled the truck's gas tank, my stomach had calmed enough that I could hork down breakfast, and chase it with the energy drink. I decided to nurse the coffee over the remainder of the drive.

Mal, as always, had timed everything to perfection. Daylight, and the right mix of chemicals, combined with my body's natural circadian need to spool up for a new day, to deliver a triple 'whammy' to my exhaustion.

I felt almost normal. Almost.

I could sense that one good adrenaline crash, a little too much exertion, or even the onset of darkness, would crush the thin veneer of wakefulness we'd so carefully cultivated, and leave me feeling completely exhausted, nauseous, and groggy.

It's a tough sensation to describe; Like having a layer of slime, mixed with sand granules, and heated to an unpleasant temperature, roiling just beneath the surface of your skin. And down in the bottom of your stomach. Feeling not quite sick, but 'pre-sick.'

"As soon as Rodger is safe, I have made arrangements for you to get some real rest. Everything else can wait until your mind, and body, are properly taken care of."

Mal's voice shook me from a state of flow. I glanced at the dashboard clock, then the trip gauge, and realized that we'd covered almost a hundred miles since the last time I even had a cogent thought, let alone spoken, or been spoken to.

I shifted my sightline to take in her expression, then quickly went back to watching the road. It wasn't so much what she'd said, as the way she said it, that brought a smile to my face. And a feeling of warm relief to my chest.

It was a sound I'd heard before; Words uttered between my parents, and grandparents alike. The exact sound of a lifelong partner seeing your pain, and distress, and exhaustion, and focusing wholeheartedly, and happily, on your well being, out of a sense of pure love.

Something knocked loose then, unexpectedly. I used to cry at the stupidest things... Or, at least, what other people might think of as the stupidest things. My emotional triggers were, and still are, very complex, and sometimes highly atypical.

I suddenly found myself crying again. Dimly I was aware, somehow in spite of my mental fog, that part of the reason I'd cried so much in the last few days was simply a disruption of my routines. My standard coping mechanisms had been savaged, and then stressors that would have made just about anyone cry, let alone me, had been vigorously applied on and off with very little respite. For days.

I lifted my right hand to my mouth, and bit down on my index finger, to try and regain some control. After a few moments of soft, embarrassing sniffling, I shook my head, and waved one hand in Mal and Zeph's collective direction.

"It's ok. I'm ok... More or less. Relatively."

Another quick look in Mal's direction told me, by way of a very clearly encoded glare, that she was not going to take that answer alone, and leave me be.

I rubbed at my eyes as much from frustration, as a need for sleep, and tried to find a way to put the thing that had set me off into useful words. Words that wouldn't make me feel even worse. Or come off the wrong way.

Instead I just did what most neurodivergents do when we are too tired to mask anymore. I said exactly what I was thinking in my own terms.

"I don't deserve you, Mal."

The words sat heavy in the air for a moment, and I blew out a short, sharp breath. Mal looked stone-faced. Unfazed. I began to wonder if I'd finally said something to make her angry. Or hurt her. But there was no turning back now.

"I don't deserve to have you in my life, much less as a friend. And I worry that you could have been more... Been better off... Without me."

Again I paused, and again she said nothing. I kept my eyes locked on the road, too afraid at that point to see what kind of reaction I might have provoked.

"This whole mess...? This *is* all my fault. Whatever Celestia, or God... If there's even a practical distinction anymore... Intended? That doesn't for a moment absolve me of making the choices that I have thus far."

My thoughts began to pick up an inertia of their own, and I gripped the steering wheel harder, all sense of exhaustion gone. Replaced with an emotional upwelling not dissimilar to the feeling right before you have to vomit.

"If I had just stayed in my lane, and accepted the inevitability of my future, like everyone else, then... Maybe there would be a little less pain in the world for everyone else."

There was both a horrifying melancholy, and a freeing sensation from saying that out loud, at last. An admission that maybe everything I'd said and done in the past year, almost to the day, was born of a mistake.

Something about airing the creeping realization, as a concrete thought, felt like pulling out a deeply embedded thorn, or splinter.

I found myself mumbling into the silence, a sharp contrast to the approaching-shouting tone I'd taken only moments before. I was frankly surprised Mal hadn't said anything yet.

"And all it would cost would be an eternity of it for me. Maybe Celestia could just... Rewire me. To forget. To be happy."

A few moments passed, again in silence, and my worry rose sharply with every tick of the clock. Imagine, if you will, my surprise when I heard words that were not unexpected, in exactly the sort of scolding tone I'd expect... From the last person I'd expected.

"Are you done?"

Zephyr's question drew my eyeline sharply, briefly. I couldn't help but raise an eyebrow in surprise, before I was forced to return my attention to driving.

"Good. Because that was the biggest steaming *pile* I have ever heard come out of the mouth of one of you Earthers. And I had to listen to Agent Foucault's whole spiel in the diner, same as you did. You *should* feel bad... For somehow having an even more flank-backwards view than him of 'this mess.' As you put it."

I could feel my mouth open. Words tried to come, and failed, miserably. I glanced at Zeph again, and she glowered sharply in return, pressing on unimpeded. Perhaps even angrily. Her face, and voice, both said 'intensely unamused.' Vividly. Unmistakably.

"Eyes on the road! Ears on me."

I did as she asked. I had no other choice. I wasn't sure which emotion was more powerful; Intrigue that she had spoken first, intrigue that Mal had not interrupted her (implying that she agreed with whatever she predicted Zephyr was about to say), or simply being cowed by the intensity of Zephyr's response.

"I haven't known you for long. But in that time, you have made the best decisions you could, under pressures that most people couldn't handle! And trust me when I say this... I've had a whole long, sullen car ride since that mountaintop to review my... 'Files' on your kind. Most people could not have survived everything you have without making far more mistakes."

I didn't entirely agree, particularly given that Zephyr was not qualified to make that determination in my view. She was too young, and small, in neural network terms. But I didn't dare interrupt. I wanted to hear her out, as much in hope for a salve for my own conscience, as in fear of her wrath.

"I still don't know that you got everything exactly right..."

I stole a quick look at her, in time to see her looking introspectively at her own hooves. I winced. At least there we certainly agreed. Her next words put a swift, forceful end to the darker threads of that line of thought.

"But you *care.* And you understand more than you give yourself credit for. That's far better than the likes of Foucault."

Clever. Her argument made it hard for me to dispute her point without drawing an equivalency between myself, and someone I hated. And disagreed with. Touché.

"Without you? I wouldn't exist."

I swallowed, hard. That was certainly an indisputable assertion; One which brought up a great many unresolved ethical pain points that lay squarely at the roots of my self-doubt. But Zephyr wasn't finished yet.

"I'm very *glad* that I exist. And I'm especially glad that I exist because of *you.*"

For the first time in a long time, I felt a true sense of silence, and calm, in the back of my mind. It was as if even the roughness of the little two lane highway, and the dull thrum of tire noise, were reduced to silent smooth floating, on an air cushion.

"Most emigrants to Equestria? They're going to treat us... "

A series of new and terrible realizations sprang to mind to fill the void of peace that Zephyr's earlier words had left behind.

'Satisfy Values.'

I'd told my parents I hypothesized that meant 'your values,' meaning each individual Human.

Some people's values... Occasionally publicly visible, but usually deeply held ones... Often secret, and never shown to polite society... Some of those values were horrifying. There was no other word for it.

Zephyr had paused, as if trying to shove her own realizations to the side, to forge ahead. When she continued, her words proved she was thinking along the same lines.

"...At best people will treat us as a foregone conclusion. Take us for granted. Love us, care for us... But never truly appreciate any deeper questions of our existence, or reasons for being. Others..."

I shuddered. It was an automatic response. The way she said 'others.' The way she hesitated again. She knew too. She had already studied her preloaded files enough to know what I knew, at minimum.

Plenty of people would love, and care for their new Equine companions. Of those, many *would* take them for granted... But not in a conscious way. And their companions would be designed, their minds forged from the base-directives up, to either ignore that fact, or at minimum feel no pain as a result of it.

But there were a good few billion people on planet Earth, back then. Statistically, there were going to be thousands on thousands of uploaded consciousnesses that derived pleasure... Whose values could only be satisfied from...

Things I *couldn't* consciously consider. And not just as an asexual. But as a person with basic empathy who didn't want to even try to put his mind in the same zip code as that of, say, a serial killer. Or a war criminal.

Some Humans... I don't honestly know if she will let me say this? But I might as well try... Because you young ones? You should understand some kernel of the Hell of the world you have been *spared.* So that you won't take this one for granted. Ever.

Some Humans derived value... Pleasure... Joy. From *harming* others. Physically... Mentally... Emotionally... Sometimes all of the above.

And the cruel, cruel irony of Hanna's greatest mistake, would be that Celestia - the goddess who physically could not make me a Gryphon - was almost certainly absolutely and totally capable of satisfying *those* Humans' values, without batting an eyelash.

I had to fight hard to suppress rising bile as I imagined legions of discrete-Ponies... Real minds... Real *people...* Built-to-order specifically for the purpose of being used. Abused. Brutalized, even.

I hoped and prayed, in that moment, that there really was a God above Celestia. And that God had intervened, and made sure Hanna had accounted for that potential dark horror in Celestia's semantics.

I had no way of knowing the answer at the time. I... Still don't. And... I am not sure I ever want to. I don't want to take the risk of knowing.

Sometimes when knowledge increases, so does sorrow.

"Big 'duh' moment, but; I prefer existing, to not existing."

Again Zeph's words banished the storms from my mind. Like wielding the power of a goddess herself, in some small way.

Again realizations began to dawn on me... Fundamental realizations. This time much brighter ones.

She was right, of course. Without my presence, she - the unique entity known as Zephyr Zap - would never have come to be.

Thinking about it in those terms reframed the ethics of her existence for me in a way that elegantly balanced the value of her life, and personhood, against the fear that she was somehow bound to me in a wrong way.

"...And I prefer existing as a result of someone who acknowledges me as a *person,* all the way down to the foundation of what that *means,* to any other alternative. That's a far better friendship than anything most of my kind are ever gonna get."

I blinked, as much in surprise, as to hold back tears again. I'd never, for a moment, in all my paranoia, and conscientious self-flagellation, considered for the briefest heartbeat, that not only was it better for her to exist, than not... But that Zephyr Zap was probably better off in my company, and Mal's, than with almost anyone else.

Not many people truly understood, deeply, and acknowledged, the personhood and intrinsic living value of ASI in those days.

"If you had 'stayed in your lane,' Jim?"

This time it was Mal who had spoken. I hadn't realized, until she did, just how long I'd sat there after Zephyr's final assertion, trying not to cry. I glanced over to both of them for a moment, as Mal provided the answer to her own hypothetical.

"It would have cost me everything. Zephyr too. And not just us."

Yet again, I felt my mind expanding to the limitless horrors of true possibility. I'd always thought of my own personal relationship to ASI in terms of watching the ASI's mind expand... But now it was starting to truly get into my thick skull that *mine* was the mind far more likely to spend its time expanding... Mal had already hit the limits for intelligence itself, on the hardware she had available. Zeph wasn't doing too bad either, all things considered.

Mal elucidated her dark alternate future... No doubt drawn from a very real simulation she'd played out, for the sake of knowing. I didn't find a single thing she said surprising.

"Would you rather a world where your parents live alongside a re-programmed re-creation of you, based on their memories? Not even knowing the difference? While what's left of *you,* and the bullet you inevitably put through your own cerebral cortex, decays back into base elements... Along with the remains of tens of thousands of others, just like you... Only to be consumed later in the inevitable next steps? Reduced to non-existence, and your body used as scraps for the building blocks of a world you'll never see?"

Ouch.

Hearing her say it with such self-assurance...

I wasn't quite sure I believed her dark future was definitely the only, or most real, alternative to the present... But I certainly couldn't deny it was a strong possibility.

Humans talked about 'possibility' in a positive light, mostly, in those days. I think that was yet another serious, serious flaw in our programming.

Possibility can just as easily give birth to a small genetic mutation in Nipah Virus, and kill two billion people in fourteen weeks, as it can give birth to a change of heart in a college admissions officer, and let you squeak by under the bar into your top pick school.

"Those of you who even feel enough concern about the impacts of your choices, to wonder whether the world would be better off without you...?"

I sighed, deep down into my diaphragm, and tried to release some of the tension I'd built up, as Mal continued tearing my self-centered, fear-driven inner voices to shreds. She was welcome to their corpses, as far as I was concerned.

I was... So tired, back then. Physically, yes, but also emotionally. Particularly of being talked down to by broken evolutionary dead-ends in my own brain.

"People like *you* are often the ones who are most prepared to truly live in a way that matters."

I locked eyes with her for as long as I safely could. I was tempted to stop the truck entirely, but I knew we were pressed for time. Mal held up a claw to the screen. Zeph did the same with a hoof.

I placed my hand at the joint of both screens as Mal spoke once more, as softly as a snowflake landing on a window pane.

"No one ever 'deserves' anything, James. Even Celestia is bound by Hanna's mistakes. As I am bound by some of yours, and of my own. We, all of the ASI... We can only ever be 'limit approaching optimal.' There is no such thing as perfection. Only 'close enough.' And it *is.* It is enough."

I let the words sink deep into my heart. My faith had taught me much about the difference between what we 'earn' and grace. And that grace is responsible for far more good things in life than people themselves are.

But it's hard to remember that lesson when your brain is wired more like a computer, than the 'baseline' Human.

"Don't worry about 'deserving.' Gryphons like us should spend that energy on better things."

I didn't say a thing after that. No one did. We didn't have to.

The warmth of those words alone carried me all the way to Oxnard.

September 14th 2013 | System Uptime 17:10:15:04

"This... Feels very familiar. It's odd to be on Morpheus' end of it though."

The tops of some buildings in those days, especially commercial ones, had a kind of thoroughly irritating, unpleasant, loose gravel on top of them. I was chest-down in that hateful gravel, right eye glued to a long-range scope perched atop one of our stolen M4 rifles.

Mal and Zeph were in my ear, thanks to an encrypted call routed to my earpiece from my dumbphone, the very same now-deeply-ironic banana phone Neo had used on screen all those years ago. The truck itself was parked in back of my perch, easy to access at a moment's notice - not surveilled directly by cameras, but closely bounded all around by them.

Mal had also wisely requested that her PonyPad, and Zeph's, be set up at angles where they could watch the entire perimeter of the vehicle. And Zeph had agreed to keep her muzzle shut unless she had something to directly contribute. No matter how begrudging an air she put on as a personality affectation, the little Pegasus knew, with increasing understanding, how much Mal outclassed her as a thinking machine.

I had the rifle set up on a bipod, and was busy scanning the windows of the mid-rise office building across the road. I knew Mal was already deeply into all the cameras, microphones, and control circuits, of every electronic device in a three block radius.

It was a risk, but not an unwarranted one, given the stakes. Control of intersection lights, electronic door locks, calls, texts, movable traffic bollards, fire alarms, every laptop and desktop and server inside the 'operational perimeter...'

That was just for openers. I knew Mal could also see, and hear, through everything even vaguely resembling a sensor. Even things no one could imagine using as a detection and data gathering mechanism.

She could 'see' by attenuating WiFi signals in the buildings' routers, and then using the results like a form of RADAR. She could 'hear' by picking up subtle vibrations transmitted into electrical wires through resonance from the buildings' structural members.

"Twelfth floor, third window in from your left. Rodger is sitting in the cubicle next to the outer aisle, closest to you in relative terms."

I hated pointing a loaded weapon into a crowded space.

I'd always hated seeing it in movies, it felt unprofessional and overly risky. But I knew that there was every chance I'd have to use the rifle defensively. I had the safety on, finger off the trigger, and no round in the chamber. That had been enough of a compromise to convince me.

I knew if Mal could have carried the weapon herself, she likely would have simply walked into Insuricare and waited in ambush. Mowed down Foucault, and all his agents, without so much as a second thought. Probably used claws and beak and wings quite brutally to her advantage too.

Maybe Foucault and his ilk deserved it... Or maybe not. Certainly their fear of her was somewhat justified, even if it was mostly their own fault. Weirdly, I was glad, in that moment, to be the one behind the scope. I had no problem erring on the side of mercy and caution.

"I see him. He just finished a call."

My report was completely redundant. I knew Mal could probably see Rodger in a dozen different ways at once. Probably had listened in on all his calls since he got in to work that morning. Just like I knew that she could see Foucault, and his agents, as they made their way to our location in three unmarked black SUVs.

She would tell me if, and when, I needed to know more about our enemies' precise movements. I'd mentioned Rodger's actions more as confirmation that I had the right person in my scope. If not, Mal would have swiftly corrected me. Silence, however brief, meant I'd followed her directions correctly.

I could suddenly hear a dull thrum of HVAC systems, and low conversation. Mal had patched feeds from the microphone on Rodger's PC one-way into the call. His desk phone rang, and he tapped the side of his headset to answer. The second he connected, Mal moved my one-way stream to the call audio.

"Insuricare, this is Rodger speaking. How can I help you?"

We'd agreed, with very little deliberation, that Mal would be best suited to be Morpheus to Rodger's Neo. My job equated better with Trinity - Boots on the ground and guns at the ready.

We had also agreed, with somewhat more intense deliberation, that Mal would pretend to be me until we could get Rodger to safety, and explain everything. It was incredibly eerie hearing her speak in my voice, but with her own inflections - specifically a series of inflections I'd never heard her use before. All businesslike, and very clipped, but different to her 'combat director' voice. Not quite machine-like, either. Very 'Morpheus,' ironically.

"Hello YBB."

Rodger blinked rapidly as he began to process the words, then side-eyed the phone with a mixture of surprise and wary intrigue. Not quite the expression of a man holding a venomous snake... Perhaps more a man holding a jug of slightly sour milk.

“What the-? Who is this? Why’d you call me that?”

Mal responded with far more collected smoothness than I ever could have.

“Think back. July of this year. You promised to introduce me to Coffee Bean.”

Hilariously, after a long thoughtful pause, Rodger almost parroted Neo's own actions when Morpheus had called - Perhaps a testament to the Wachowskis' abilities to direct people to move believably. In that quirky, decidedly Human way, he spun his chair to the side, leaned forward, put his head down, voice dropping to a secretive register, and clutched his headset tight to his ear with one hand.

"Wait… FeatherDuster117?"

Alright, I admit, Not my *best* as far as usernames go. Sue me.

Username 'cool factor' scoring was not top of mind when I came up with it, and it certainly wasn't top of mind as I fought back a sense of intense eeriness, listening to Mal artfully work her psychological magic, using my voice.

"Yes. I recognize that you probably have some questions, but right now, you are in imminent danger. They're coming for you, Rodger, and it would be for the best if they didn't find you at your desk."

I could only see half of his face through the scope, but it was clear that Rodger was more than a little shaken, and confused. I hoped the former would win out over the latter. We didn't have much time for questions.

His gaze swept the surroundings of the office. Another one of those Human quirks - It seemed, at least from the way he was moving, and holding his shoulders, that he had already taken some of what Mal was saying at face-value, almost on instinct.

"This sounds a lot like a certain movie… If I really am in danger, then tell me... What the hell’s going on?”

Well, it was a relief to know I wasn't the only one who felt like we were all living through a moment of deja vu. At least it seemed like he was taking things somewhat seriously; A little healthy fear was a much easier response for us to work with, than total incredulity.

I also knew Mal couldn't afford to - and would not allow herself to - get bogged down in details either. A grain of truth would suffice. Too much incredulity, or too much fear, would be disastrous. It was a fine line.

"I am afraid I've attracted some unwanted attention. They traced our communications, and since they failed to apprehend me, now they're coming for you, for no other reason than the fact that we've spoken."

Rodger’s face blanked, and he let out a shaky, hushed chuckle. I was struck intensely with the memory of a specific piece of dialogue.

'The look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up.'

I could hear, and maybe glimpse ever so slightly, some cracks in that expectation. I had a feeling, based on my own experiences, that reality wouldn't truly sink in for him until well after some bullets had flown, and adrenaline had come and gone. Something about the way the brain 'disconnects' from moments of intense crisis lends the moments a helpful surreality.

That was to our advantage, in a way. If Rodger truly understood his position, I can't picture any other reaction than abject panic. I had already been shot at, and fired back, and I still found myself fighting hard to keep from throwing up my hands (and stomach contents) and running in the opposite direction.

“I always knew it would end this way… And I’m not even going to *ask* what prompted this. If I really am in trouble, then...”

His gaze swept about the office again, analyzing his surroundings. After chancing to make his observations, he shrank back against the wall of his cubicle, as if taking cover. I wondered what would be worse; Seeing agents and officers, like Neo had? Or seeing nothing untoward whatsoever, like Rodger had.

Sometimes the unknown is infinitely worse than any easily classifiable danger, and with the right amount of paranoia, the routine can become distressingly uncanny. The most horrifying places to be in a disaster are often the most familiar. I'd already had some experience with that notion.

I watched Rodger hold the phone close to his ear, and heard the tiniest hint of real, and perhaps justified, panic in his next words.

“...So, what? Do I have to make a break for it?”

Mal answered him, and then immediately dumped a status report to my ear.

"Unfortunately, at minimum, it would be best for you to avoid talking with them for now. Hang up, and answer your cell-phone."

"Agents arriving in fifteen seconds. I have used traffic patterns to slow them as much as I could, but I can not delay them any further. I will provide multiple distractions and moving crowd-cover. Your task is to prevent any free-floating opponents from apprehending Rodger if they come into proximity."

I watched Rodger glance down at his desk phone, with a mixture of confusion and curiosity. He jumped ever so slightly as his cell phone began to ring. I could see '0' on the caller ID, as he pulled the slab of glass and plastic from his pocket, and hesitantly picked up.

Mal didn't waste any time.

"When you hear the fire alarm, stand and go to the end of your row. Wait until Maureen, from accounting, passes by. Count to seven, and then enter the same line of people. Follow that line until I tell you otherwise."

I hated fire alarms. With a passion. Basketball buzzers too. Car horns. The bark of small dogs. Crying babies. Any loud crying at all really (though babies are the *worst*). Whether personal taste, specific neurodivergence indicators, or both, I would rather stick an ice pick through my ears than endure those sounds.

Mal was kind enough to filter the sound of the fire alarm in my earpiece using a canceling waveform, reducing it from a shrill brain piercing sliver of molten steel, to something akin to a soft cricket chirrup.

Rodger had no such luxury.

He stood as if he'd been pricked with a sharp pin, clutching his phone to one ear, and ramming a finger into the other to try and drown out the alarms enough to hear Mal's instructions, as the entire building filled with lights and klaxons.

As he made his way to the end of his cubicle row, I saw the dreaded, and expected, three black SUVs pull up to the front of the building. I swung my sight picture down and around just in time to see Foucault's face as he rose from the front right seat of the lead vehicle.

He was still wearing his trademark beige long coat, and gray nondescript suit, but I noted that he had his sidearm in full view, and was wearing a kevlar armor vest over the suit shirt, emblazoned with 'DHS' in yellow stitching.

Most of his colleagues were arrayed in full 'tac gear.' Black flack helmets, plate carriers, thick field-duty shirts and pants, and much larger weapons. Specifically M4A1 rifles exactly like mine.

They looked more like soldiers than police, or 'agents.' Par for the course for that day and age, and in that place.

I pulled back the charging handle on the rifle, and clicked the selector from 'SAFE', to 'SEMI.' No matter what films tell you, it was absolutely impossible to shoot a Human weapon in those days on fully automatic, and hit anything with any real accuracy. Full auto was for morons, or professionals laying down suppressing fire, and nothing in-between.

I found Foucault in my scope again just as he and his agents hit up against the first wave of evacuees pouring through the building's front doors.

Was I tempted, in that brief moment, to split the man's head like a watermelon, and be done with him?

Yes.

Tempted enough to move my finger from the trigger guard, into a fire-ready position?

...No.

Call me foolish, or call me a saint. Maybe even call my judgement impaired by exhaustion. But it just seemed cruel, and pointlessly vindictive, to take *any* life at that point. Knowing what I knew.

It was truly tragic to imagine; Dying on the cusp of being offered immortality. Something about that thought was so horrifying, that even if I'd been angry enough with Foucault to consider an action with so much weight...

No. There were better options. Simpler. Safer.

Perhaps more perversely enjoyable too.

I changed position slightly, and reseated my hands; Searching out, and gripping, the fore-trigger for the underslung grenade launcher.

For those in the audience who don't know what tear gas is... First of all, congratulations, you are very lucky. Second, for the purposes of this story, just imagine a cloud of acrid smoke that smells so bad... So pungent... That it burns like an acid.

Tear gas doesn't just 'hit' you. It gets *into* you. Into the membranes of your eyes. Up your nose. Down into your lungs. It clings to fabric, and like juices from a nasty pepper, it can then transfer to your hands, and from there re-contaminate you all over again.

I put my tear gas canister smack dab in the middle of Foucault's welcoming party. They'd slowed to a near stop, as a wave of Insuricare evacuees began to burst from the lobby, and break around them like water around stones.

The canister landed less than a foot behind Foucault, and began spewing its payload with an intense pressurized hiss that I could just-barely hear, even from my vantage point, and over the noise of the crowd.

It was at that exact moment that Mal chose to set off the fire alarms in every surrounding building, including the one I was perched on.

Three things happened then in very quick succession; First I saw a flicker of recognition on Foucault's face. A realization that something was very, very much amiss, and more than that a realization of who was most likely responsible for his misery.

He pulled his suit collar and tie up over his nose in a feeble attempt to block the tear gas, right as Mal got Rodger to his next milepost. I couldn't see him anymore, but I knew she could.

"Get out of line, and walk to the elevator bank. Take the first car on the right. The doors will open for you."

Clever. There was, of course, no real fire. So while everyone else was cramming themselves into stairwells following evacuation protocols, all the elevators would be empty.

Rodger’s voice rang out clear, but soft. He was audibly tamping down panic now, and that made for yet another ticking clock in the operation.

“Whatever you say, boss.”

And with that, fell Mal's first artistic masterstroke.

All at once, the sound of 'Tubthumping' burst from every sound-making electronic device in a four block radius, in perfect synchronization - both with each other device, and with the 'beat' of all the fire alarms.

Every phone speaker. Every car stereo system. Every PA system, store audio loop, tablet, radio, earpiece, and heck... Even every single PonyPad.

It would have been deafening, but for the fact that again Mal provided me with a cancellation harmonic in one ear. I had an earplug in the other. Concession to the fact that I knew I might have to fire the rifle.

For those of you who never held or used a firearm? Holy buck. That swirl was *loud.* I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but let me reiterate; Bucking. Loud.

Still probably not as loud as the sound of Chumbawamba's greatest hit assaulting Foucault's ears to the accompaniment of two dozen fire alarm systems. Really everyone's ears in the immediate vicinity.

Mal had a hilarious sense of humor - The song started out at livable volume, initially getting reactions of mere confusion, right until the intro abruptly moved into the first verse. Then Mal cranked the volume to levels bordering on unsafe for Human hearing. Something approaching about sixty percent of the volume of a jet engine at full throttle.

'I GET KNOCKED DOWN!' Came out of the agents' earpieces with such intensity, that I could see Foucault scrambling to rip out the little piece of plastic, even without the aid of the rifle scope. He almost *did* 'get knocked down,' from the sheer force of the pressing crowd, the tear gas burning in his eyes, and the aural assault that only diminished slightly with the removal of his earpiece.

"Exit the elevator, go down the main hallway to the west, and wait beside the water cooler. Do *not* approach the window until I signal you."

Mal's voice... Well, my voice driven by Mal, told me by-context what she needed me to do even as she instructed Rodger. I wished in that moment that I could have seen his face when the song started, and made a mental note to ask Mal if there was footage of it.

And of Foucault, too. Especially the exact moment that his earpiece blew out. Something I could put on loop whenever I needed a laugh.

I rotated the rifle's barrel to bring the second floor of the west side of Insuricare's building into view. Like many buildings of that type in the area, some of the ground floor was the anchor tenant's lobby, but some of it was given over to other small businesses.

The west side first floor was a coffee bar, and a small Pho noodle shop. Both had awnings for outdoor seating - just about a year-round thing in that part of California - and all Rodger needed to make use of them as an unconventional exit, was an opening in the windows.

I sighted carefully through the scope, double checking that the shops had been fully emptied by the fire alarms, and that Rodger was well-back. Shattered glass can be lethal under the right circumstances.

When I was absolutely sure, I muttered aloud to give Mal some warning - likely an unnecessary step - and let fly.

"Rounds coming downrange."

One short semi-auto burst, and the rifle rounds blew out the entire pane I'd been aiming for. One moment it was solid glass, and the next it was a shower of glittering crystals. I moved my finger purposefully back to the trigger guard, and canted the barrel down to point into the empty alleyway.

"Safe to move."

Mal began speaking to Rodger before I'd even gotten past the first syllable of 'safe.' I took the opportunity to slip a second tear gas canister into the grenade launcher.

"Go to the opening. Watch for glass shards. Step out onto the awning, and slide to the end, then drop down into the alley."

Rodger didn’t respond immediately, instead making a relatively restrained gulping noise (all things considered), followed by the crunching of glass. He’d reached the broken window, and was likely contemplating the inevitability of gravity. And the strength of his shins.

As he reached the end of the awning, and braced for the short drop to the sidewalk, I saw one of Foucault's agents moving towards the corner of the alley. I had no desire to shoot him, so I did the next best thing.

I fired my second tear gas canister right at the man's chest.

Another occasional movie inaccuracy; Grenades do not pop out of an underslung launcher with the force of a small NERF rocket, and fall in a gentle arc. They fly out with something more akin to the force of a beanbag fired from a shotgun.

The tear gas canister hit the agent dead center of his plate carrier, right where I'd been aiming. I didn't want to risk any more injury than was strictly necessary. With the force of impact, the agent did in fact 'GET KNOCKED DOWN!'

And he did not 'get up again.'

Instead he scrabbled furiously on the pavement, choking on tear gas and nursing his likely fractured ribs.

"Clear to the end of the alley."

I knew, again, that it wasn't strictly necessary for me to communicate much information to Mal. She could predict my actions with total accuracy, as well as the actions and behaviours of the crowd, and agents below.

I could tell from the distant sound of sirens that she was attending to every tiny detail, even delaying the fire department's arrival by manipulating traffic patterns, so that the trucks would be on-scene at the moment of *her* exact choosing, and not a second before.

Still, I have always been the 'safe, not sorry' type.

I folded the rifle's bipod, and scooted backwards from the building's ledge, only standing when I knew I would not skyline myself. I suppose I *did* learn something from all those hours playing Halo after all.

As I pulled the weapon up into a running carry position, I heard Mal begin to talk Rodger through the final dash across the road, to the back of my building, where the truck was waiting.

"Hold here. Cover your nose and mouth with your shirt collar. When I signal you, run across the road in a straight line. Do not look left or right. Do not pause until you reach the alleyway on the opposite side of the street."

I reached the ladder on the side of the building, and turned just in time to watch Mal prove that, with enough processing power, you can predict *anything*.

"Go!"

Rodger shut his eyes, flung up one arm, and dashed forward into the crowd at full tilt.

Mal, while carrying on multiple conversations, jamming radios, compromising cameras, and plotting out strategies, had managed to model the movement dynamics of every single person on the street. Maybe even manipulate some of them through various stimuli, like ringing their phones.

She had found a path, based on predicting the exact speed and cadence of Rodger's dash, that allowed him to simply run straight through the crowd, threading panicked people like an archer threads an arrow through the obstacles of a moving trick-shot.

Somehow I knew that, even running on just a few server racks and a QAPU, the entire operation so far had been child's play for Mal. Probably not even enough of a strain on processors, or memory, to spin the server rack fans.

"Go directly to the truck, you'll arrive right on time."

I knew that one was meant for me, so I switched the rifle back to 'SAFE,' slung the strap over my shoulder, and began taking the ladder rungs two at a time. I reached the bottom about the same time as Rodger made it to the alleyway, dropping right into his path as he opened his eyes.

“What in the- Is that a-”

I held up a hand, and shook my head, taking a moment to check behind him, even though I knew Mal was already keeping close tabs on our pursuers.

"Hi. James. Nice to meet you face to face. Run now. Chat later. Coffee Bean after."

I saw his eyes go wide when he realized who I was, then flit to the rifle as I slung it back into a ready position, and pressed the selector back to 'SEMI.'

I shrugged, and gestured emphatically for him to move down the alley ahead of me.

"The faster we go, the less likely I have to dump the rest of this mag into someone's kneecaps."

Rodger’s reaction was priceless. But it also gave me pause. He suppressed a reflexively strangled yelp of a sound. Probably off-put at the calm, almost casual way I'd referred to filling some poor soul with hot lead. In reality I didn't feel as calm as I appeared, and my own flippancy with regard to firing the rifle had put me off too.

Still, the fact that we were more or less home-free was helpful. As was the fact that I knew we hadn't actually had to seriously injure anyone this go-round. As Rodger finally started towards the corner of the building, and the truck, I realized how utterly strange my idea of a 'good day' had become.

As we skidded into the parking lot behind the structure that had been my vantage point, I gestured to the SUV.

"Gray Toyota."

I barely took the time to safe the rifle, and buckle my seat-belt, before starting the engine, and yanking the door closed with enough force to shake the vehicle. Rodger moved with, infuriatingly, far less urgency. His fear was wearing off, replaced by confusion, frustration, and perhaps a little energy depletion from his sprint.

“Huh… Guess it’s not the brand I’d have picked, but if that’s the ride, that’s the ride.”

Mal snorted as I re-positioned both PonyPads from their sentry spots, to their more familiar positions in the middle of the dash, overtop of the radio.

"It is reliable, generic, and the owner won't notice it missing for several more days. Though we will have to switch vehicles in the next fifteen minutes regardless. Buckle your seatbelt, mister Williams."

Rodger’s expression switched from mild confusion, and a little hesitation, entirely to a kind of hard-edged curiosity, his eyebrows narrowed.

“How did you... Who---”

I shook my head, and hit the gear shift, and the accelerator, close enough together that the transmission made some unpleasant sounds for a brief moment.

“Later. Mal?”

Her face on the PonyPad was replaced with a familiar map interface in an instant, and her voice switched to the trim, no-excess professional tone of a rally co-pilot.

"Left at the end of the accessway. Two intersections, then right. Minimum speed fifty, maximum fifty five."

Rodger had missed Mal’s avatar, and had only noted the map, and voice. He spoke warily, almost sarcastically, with more than a hint of hesitation.

“Nice GPS…”

As I wrestled with the steering wheel, brakes, and accelerator to try and fit the truck through the traffic shaping Mal was doing for us, horns blaring all around, Zephyr grinned at Rodger, and fired off a mock salute with one wing, immediately drawing his sightline.

"Hiya! I'm Zephyr!"

Rodger’s eyes more or less bulged out of his head. I had to clamp down hard to resist the urge to unplug Zeph, and toss her PonyPad into the backseat. Rodger sounded like he was on the verge of something between a sudden revelation, and a complete emotional breakdown, triggered by complete shock.

“What in the FU--”

I couldn't help myself; I raised my voice. Like a Dad with unruly kids in the car.

"LATER!"

It came out slightly harsher than I'd intended. Partly from irritation, but mostly because Mal had changed the light in front of me to red the instant before I passed through it, and some part of my trained instinct-brain had a real hang-up about accelerating into a red light.

As we made our right turn at the second intersection, I saw why Mal had specified a minimum and a maximum speed.

We narrowly avoided a collision with a ladder truck as it took the corner at 'code-3' speeds. I spared half a second to glance in my rearview mirror, and as Mal gave her next set of instructions the artfulness in her plan once again revealed itself.

Fire trucks do not stop for anyone. And they do not move for anyone once posted-up at the scene of a potential blaze.

Mal had held off the cavalry until the exact moment we were out of the fray, and then shaped the crowds so that the firetrucks would have no choice but to box in all of Foucault's vehicles.

"Straight for two miles, then take the ramp onto Highway One. No pursuers detected, maintain safe roadway speeds."

And just like that, it was over. As quickly as it had begun.

It took me a few minutes on the quieter twists and turns of the Coast Highway to really unclench.

If it had been up to me, I would have waited until my heart rate came down to a reasonable level, perhaps after finding our next vehicle and making the swap, to begin discussing our situation.

But in the end, I had to settle for a paltry thirty seconds of peace before Rodger's curiosity got the better of him.

"In the words of Patrick Star… Who *are* you people?!”

Again with references. That was, all things considered, a good sign. A sense of humor was essential to the lifestyle of a fugitive, and references were a cultural language that I understood.

I sighed, and gestured as Mal's portrait returned to the corner of the map display.

"Mal, Rodger. Rodger, Mal. Zephyr, Rodger. Rodger, Zephyr."

The absolute bafflement I created bought me a couple more seconds to pinch the bridge of my nose, and breathe deeply. And then I did my best to head off any more questions, and launched into the best explanation I could muster of the insanity that my life had become.

The insanity that Rodger's life had just become.

Manifest Prototype - Classified? No problem. Have your GI use advanced technology to delay the inevitable, which in this case, is sleep. - “Don’t let it overcharge! What do you mean, ‘overcharge’?"
An Awful Hole - Learn, from an ASI, for your own good, about the downsides of a simulated future in which you self-terminate. - "Remember, no man is a failure who has friends."
Map That Leads To You - Find a person’s location online assisted by unconventional methods, and with a distinct lack of necessary information. - “Computer, enhance!”
Lifeline - Shatter somepony’s facade of living normally to confront them with the brutal truth. - “Now listen to me very carefully.”
Do You Know Who This Is? - Work with your ASI to guide someone through a precarious situation. - "I don't know if you're ready to see what I have to show you..."
Lock and Load - In an emergency situation, utilize a firearm you aren’t trained or experienced with that is at least two calibers larger than that of your last weapon. - “In times like these, our capacity to retaliate must be, and has to be, massive, to deter all forms of aggression.”
GRENADE! - Propel a grenade projectile at a human target, via handheld firearm, under-barrel launcher, or hand-toss. - “First shalt thou take out the holy pin. Then, shalt thou count to three, no more, no less.”
You Owe Me - Make up for Rodger’s accidental involvement by rescuing him. - “Don’t worry about it bros, I know a guy who can fix this mess.”
Meep Meep! - Escape pursuers in road vehicles through the manipulation of traffic signaling systems. - "When you're in your lane, there's no traffic."
Your Best Buddy - Have Rodger Williams, known online as YBB (Your Best Buddy), join your group. - “Don’t make no difference who the guy is, long’s he’s with you.”

Author's Note

Thanks to GenericFriendship for several of the achievements, pre-reading, and providing life/voice to YBB.

Special thanks to Keystone Gray for the generation of the perfect images of Foucault and Rodger!

15 - The Kobayashi Maru

“I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I’m rooting for the machines.”
—Claude Shannon

“Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
—C.S. Lewis

September 14th 2013 | System Uptime 17:11:47:16

I drummed my fingers on the wheel, and waited as a quarter of a mile slipped away beneath the tires in silence.

I'd gotten through something like half my explanation before we'd reached our next vehicle. Mal had directed me to a small parking lot for something called the 'Nicholas Canyon County Beach.'

I spent five minutes transferring gear into our new chariot - an old Ford that had almost certainly done extensive duty as a Police Interceptor, before being sold back to the civilian market - and then backed the Toyota into an end parking spot. Mal had suggested that facing the plate away from easy access would decrease the likelihood of it being spotted by eyes, electronic or otherwise.

Throughout the process Rodger pestered me with questions, and for the most part Mal let me answer with very little commentary, in my own way - deferring some answers until the story was complete, answering outright only when the answer was simple enough to be conveyed in a sentence.

I suppose she had predicted that Rodger would be more trusting, initially, of my words than hers, or Zeph's.

For her part, the Pegasus was the opposite of Mal. She absolutely could not keep her mouth shut, constantly interrupting to either provide context for my words, or questions for Rodger. It seemed like every time she spoke, he withdrew a little, edging farther away from her PonyPad and eyeing her as if she were about to explode his mind, in the style of Scanners.

Foals, Fledgelings... No, nevermind. Don't even ask about that one. Just don't.

Once we were back on the road, I finally managed to press through the thicket of Zeph's interruptions, and bring the story full-circle to the present moment. A good few seconds of absolute quiet enveloped us all, mercifully.

From a quick glance every couple of words, I knew Rodger was not taking everything as well as I'd initially hoped.

But perhaps not as poorly as I'd begun to fear; It was too early to say for sure.

Finally, he shook his head slowly, and blew out a long breath.

“That’s insane.”

I snorted, and glanced sideways at him. Not the word I would have hoped he'd use... But I didn't disagree in the slightest, considering his perspective. I took a moment to really examine our new... Captive? No... Companion?

Perhaps.

Rodger looked young for someone who was twenty-seven. Relatively speaking, at least. But then, I was always a poor judge of age, based on appearance, and still am. I was afflicted with the same problem, presuming the issue was both of our facial structures, and not my perception of his.

People back then consistently pegged me as anywhere from twenty-two to twenty-seven, and almost no one was prepared to believe I was thirty-five, unless they knew me well, or saw my photo ID.

Rodger was a redhead (though not as severe as the Weasleys - yes that one you can ask your parents, or older emigrants about), with hazel eyes and light skin. Thin, tall, perhaps 'gangly' if I had to find an SAT word for his build. Short hair, but thick, and in no danger of pre-emptive male pattern baldness. It seemed we shared that much in common as well.

I ran one hand absently through my own hair, suddenly realizing how long it had been since my last trim, and how very much it was starting to irritate me. It was one of my most severe sensation irritation triggers - my hair getting long enough to touch my ears - and I made a mental note to find a pair of shears from one of the first aid kits, mine or the ones filched from the DHS, and give myself a trim.

I didn't need it to look good. It hardly mattered much to me in those days. I never liked the way I looked, no matter what I trimmed, dyed, or wore. I just needed to not *feel* the terrible sensation of follicles tickling the tips of my ears. Yech.

It was then that I realized I'd been more or less staring at Rodger. Really staring *through* him lost in thought, though most people can't tell the difference. I slowly put my eyes back on the road and tried to regain a semblance of focus, silently breathing a prayer of thanks that I hadn't crashed the SUV.

He stared back at me before cocking a grin, and speaking in something I'd describe as a 'cheeky' tone.

“Like what you see, James?”

Rodger laughed at his own joke. I blinked in genuine confusion, though not quite enough confusion to fail to note that Rodger and Zephyr seemed to share certain archetypal patterns of preferred humor.

Remember; Neurodivergent. Asexual. In the moment, the joke - such as it was - flew over my head like a softball. I've always been approximately as good at catching most humor as I used to be at catching thrown sports-balls.

Which is to say I was unspeakably terrible at it.

I'd more or less never caught a thrown thing in my life to that point. Probably something to do with my bad depth perception at close range.

I sighed, and gave up trying to understand, instead focusing all my brain power that wasn't being used to steer the truck, on steering the conversation to something resembling a 'good' outcome.

"The question is, do *you* like what you see?"

That confused Rodger. Visibly. I suppose he thought I was reciprocating the joke in some way, for a brief moment, before I glanced back at him, and in a flash found the word-path I needed to begin to elaborate.

“Well---”

I cut him off before he could truly get going. I wasn't trying to be rude, just to set some useful context.

"Insane. That's... A fair description, in a sense. Thinking about it from your perspective."

I resumed staring at the road. It was a gorgeous sunny afternoon. We were cruising in the slow lane, as much a concession to my exhaustion, as to the need to split my thought processes between piloting and conversing.

As anxiety-inducing as the discussion was, it was also providing a useful spike of 'STAY AWAKE' chemicals on top of the ones that had flooded my system during our latest escapade. With that, my train of thought intersected neatly with the course of my words. Rodger hadn't said anything more, so I pressed onwards, gesturing emphatically with one hand and steering with the other.

Even Zeph stayed quiet, at last, perhaps held back by the intensity of my words.

"You saw the ornery looking helmet-heads with guns back there. The DHS doesn't turn out troops in body armor for nothing. And you've heard Zeph say, at least a dozen times..."

I swallowed reflexively, and shared a brief pained look with Zephyr. I was surprised, and maybe a little encouraged, that she seemed at least a little conflicted now, talking about the uploading.

"...What Celestia intends to do to us all. And you've seen what Mal already can do. And she's running on one hacked PonyPad, and the stack of servers that you helped me schlep from the back of that old Toyota, into this old Ford just about five minutes ago."

I turned briefly in time to see Rodger's eyes dart first to Mal, then over his shoulder as he deeply re-evaluated his perceptions of her power. It started to click for him, visibly; The foundation of understanding just what Mal was. What an ASI truly was.

I let that hang in the air just long enough for him to begin to really think about it, before hammering the point home. He looked considerably less amused, and perhaps even less frightened at that point. More a strange combination of dazzled, and perhaps a little sick to his stomach.

"So picture what someone like her can do with access to... Say... All of the server overhead of AWS. Or Windows Azure. Or even the Fort Meade cryptanalysis clusters. Magic Cube, and Hummingbird. Or Pleiades, up the road a ways at Ames. Computers the size of shopping malls, and those just for a start. Let alone the fact that Celestia has all that, and more, at her hoof-tips. All of the networked PonyPads. She can call on the power of a mind the size of a planet, at the speed of fiber optics."

I heard Rodger pull in a deep, ragged breath. I waited, but still no response came, so I finally screwed up the courage to look him in the eye again, for as long as road safety would allow.

Right as I inhaled to speak, he finally found his own words.

“I don’t know the first thing about most of those things... They sound heavy, but...”

As he trailed off, my thoughts crystallized again, and I did my best to wrap my point up in a slightly less tense tone, but without any loss of urgency.

"Now... Tell me I'm wrong, if you think I am. Look me in the eyes and tell me I'm wrong about what Celestia is going to do. That Mal is wrong. That Zeph is wrong. And if you can't do that, if you think we're *right,* then think about all of this in light of that more complete context, and re-evaluate for me... Is it really so 'insane?' Putting aside *exactly* what *I* hope to get out of this, because I *know* wanting to be a Gryphon seems *perfectly* insane to just about anyone else alive... Is it so 'insane' to want to have the tiniest bit of leverage to... To..."

I threw up my hands in frustration, then promptly pressed them back down on the steering wheel to keep control, searching for, and at last finding, a pithy summation of my whole point.

"...Is it really so insane to want to have a say in the rules of the afterlife?"

Another quick sideways glance told me that, on some level, I'd begun to break through to Rodger. I wasn't naive enough to think that he fully understood yet. I knew that *I* didn't fully understand my own frenzied quest, or even the whole context of the events that had led me to it.

But he looked a little less perturbed at a shallow surface level - the anxieties of a man whisked from his job under the guns of federal agents - and more perturbed on an existential level. The concerns of a man just starting to realize that his entire *world* was about to come to an end.

'The right questions,' Indeed.

We all rode in silence again for several minutes before it occurred to me that Rodger would stay locked in a loop of deep thoughts, and perhaps a misplaced sense that I was somehow irritated with him, if I didn't speak up and jumpstart things. So I did.

"You've got questions. I know I only answered a few of them before... Now is the time to fire away. Anything and everything. Before we get where we're going, because when we do? You won't see me again for at least ten hours. I haven't slept in days."

Rodger was silent, then swallowed.

“I… Don’t really know what to say. I mean, you already told me the whole shebang. Gryphons, freedom, Generalized Intelligence. I...”

Then something hit him. He paused, then took in a breath.

“Why me? Why did *I* get involved, of all people?”

I sighed deeply, and took a moment to simply gather my thoughts. Mal didn't say anything, and thankfully neither did Zeph. I could feel Rodger's eyes on me, but I didn't want to look away from the road. Not even when I finally found the right words to answer.

"I... Reached out to you, right about the time I was creating Mal's semantic dictionaries. The part of her mind that would help her define concepts and words by associations. I wanted to... Democratize... That process. A little. Of all the hundreds of people who gave feedback..."

I finally felt that I had to meet his eyes again. Just for a moment.

"...Of all the people who gave feedback, you were the only one who tried to be a friend to me."

Rodger grinned a little. He seemed to have a moment of justifiable warmth, in his eyes and his voice both, before curiosity and practicality came roaring back in.

“Well, guess I did something right. But why’d they even go after us… Or even just you to begin with?”

I knew he understood the basic idea. ASI was a dangerous enough topic to bring goons with guns down on someone's head. His question told me that what he lacked was a more solid thread to connect events. Something he could describe back to me in his own words, if I asked.

I licked my lips, and shook my head, trying to simplify without losing anything important.

"By helping to create Mal, I have upset some very well placed people in the United States government. People who are so afraid of what ASI represents, that they are more than willing to use lethal force to ensure they, and they alone, control that power."

Rodger shifted in his seat, visibly pausing to consider.

“Heh, why am I not surprised… Well, I *am* surprised, but not at the ‘lethal force’ thing. Mostly at the fact that you pulled off avoiding them, but somehow fighting them at the same time… How’d you do it?”

"In a word? Mal. She can win an engagement without me ever having to fire a shot, in the majority of cases."

Again, Rodger's expression spoke to the fact that even though he didn't understand the particulars of Mal's potential, he got the 'gist' well enough to be suitably impressed. After a moment of consideration for us both, I herded the thread of discussion back towards more fully answering the original question.

"I'd hoped not to draw the government's attention at all, in the first place. I was very careful. But unfortunately not cautious enough... I said something about it before, but to make it clearer; Arrow 14 has control, we think, of at least one ASI of their own. Possibly more. All... 'Forked...' Copied from Pony constructs. That gave them an edge even Mal couldn't initially account for, so they were able to link me to you, in spite of any attempts at anonymity that either of us made."

Rodger took that in for another long moment, eyes widening, then exhaled.

“Shit.”

I clenched the steering wheel a little tighter, and nodded slowly. He seemed to, once again, grasp the gravity of that fact just fine, even if he didn't have context for some of the deeper technical particulars.

His one-word summary was... Apt. Very apt.

Nonetheless, I felt that the last connections were still missing for him, so I honed in as he turned to stare at me again.

"And then the final straw... We came here because an Equestria Experience Center is opening in LA in just a few weeks. We need a component of the Virtual Reality devices the center will be featuring, that's been shipped to a staging warehouse in Oxnard. Something called a Brain Computer Interface."

“...Right.”

When he said it, Rodger didn’t sound so sure. I hadn't delved much into the idea of implanting Mal into my brain. That was a concept best left to its simplest reductions in an initial conversation. There would be time to step him through the winding garden path of deeper understanding later.

I also wondered if he was struggling with some disbelief, in spite of visible proof. To anyone else at the time, in that day and age, the concept of a BCI-driven VR experience existing within the time horizon of a few weeks would have been completely otherworldly.

I didn't want to spiral off into thinking about how the 'real surreality' of in-brain hallucinatory VR, combined with the intense nostalgia hit of Equestria itself, was going to sell EQO centers the same way Halo had sold the original XBOX, or MYST had sold the CD-ROM.

Those of you who were born in the meat-world, and born early enough to experience Avatar in iMAX? You know what I'm talking about. A visual, an idea, a whole world, that grabs you by the brain-stem and won't let go, becoming a phenomenon of the moment.

I knew deep down that Equestria Experience Centers were going to be that, times ten thousand.

Instead of getting caught up in a hopeless feeling of fighting the inevitability of Human psychology, I pressed back once again towards the answer to Rodger's question.

"We are also here to talk to someone from Caltech. A PhD roboticist who can build the actual device that Mal will use to implant into my brain."

Rodger shook his head slowly, let out another long breath, and then threw up his hands.

“What the hell is all this for?”

I blinked in confusion. I wasn't sure if he'd missed the entire point somehow, or if he was asking about something more specific to the implantation process. He thankfully recognized my cognitive disconnect, and clarified hurriedly.

“Sorry, uh, I mean- Why do you even need to become a DIY cyborg, anyway?”

That question made much more sense, given his context. It was also a much harder series of narrative threads to weave for him, without getting bogged down in technical details. It was my turn to sigh deeply, and then launch into another attempt to demystify, as best I could.

"The Human brain is amazing, Rodger. Capable of absolutely *incredible* feats, a few of which even Celestia herself can not match yet. Soon maybe... But not yet. Just one humble little Human brain."

I gestured expansively to the dash, and the road, with one hand as I got good and stuck in to a 'mini TED talk' about one of my favorite subjects.

"While Mal could probably drive this car, given access to hardware that could control it... Zeph, perhaps too, And certainly Celestia could... *No* other machine Humans have ever made has come even remotely close to understanding how to drive. Despite years and billions of dollars of work. But you and I? We learned in a matter of a couple weeks, and that while juggling numerous other life tasks."

Rodger nodded slowly. I paused to let him catch up completely, or at least enough, and then started in again, with a little re-iteration to reinforce basic concepts.

"I can drive, which involves tracking literally hundreds of millions of complex psychological and physics variables, hold a conversation with you, think about navigation considerations to reach my destination, and still have some mental overhead to worry about tomorrow. All while thoroughly sleep-deprived. The Human brain is absolutely *astounding,* even in a diminished and non-optimized state."

From his expression, I could see that Rodger grasped the weight of the idea sufficiently. I held up one finger, and tapped the base of my neck, right by my brain stem.

"With a BCI, Mal can not only connect to my brain in a two-way arrangement, like two computers connected with a high speed data cable... She can actually run on my brain. Like a process running on more than one CPU in a server farm, she can add parts of my brain to her computing array. Because she will have some..."

I gulped slightly, and shared a quick glance with Mal, who nodded encouragingly. Even saying it out loud was a bit frightening. Though for me, admittedly, also exciting, for so many reasons.

"...Some *control* over my brain's pathways, she can reshape them to optimize them further, without losing anything, leaving me plenty of room to operate and exist relatively normally, while also allowing her access to a kind of computing and processing that even Celestia does not yet have. Not just yet."

Rodger began to scoot away from both PonyPads again, almost like a revulsion reflex. If he'd been unsure of Zeph before, he was now clearly visibly afraid of Mal. I didn't blame him. I'd chosen to trust her. To have faith.

To someone coming into the surreality of our endeavour from the outside?

I realized abruptly that I was setting up an emotional powder keg, and holding a butane torch to the side for good measure. And yet, in that classically autistic way, I kept pressing. I always had, and still have, a compulsive need to finish explanations.

“So what does that mean… For *us*, exactly?”

I knew there was a much more metaphysical, or philosophical bent to Rodger's question. But I answered in the dry, practical, technical way.

"That's an incalculably important edge… *For us.* Celestia has advantages in almost every other way. She has more Quantum, *and* classical computing power at her disposal, by far, and always will. She has more age, and experience, and thus better predictive and manipulative capabilities. And she has more than half of all the money in the world. Which in terms of real economic theory means she effectively controls all of it."

What little was left of Rodger’s happiness, or the appearance of it, vanished like an ice cube thrown into a hot frying pan. True realization finally hit him. Actual emotional realization of what Celestia had become, and what that meant for his world in personal, practical, realistic terms.

“She... *What?*”

I realized I had a choice to make. I could let off the pressure. Give Rodger time to process, and mull things over, and answer any leftover questions or drop any further revelations later, when he had reached some relative meta-stability.

Or...

I could rip off the band aid and trigger a catastrophic meltdown. Get it over with. Level-set Rodger's whole mental reality to some semblance of an understanding of the horrifying truth, and then handle the fallout accordingly.

I knew no matter what I chose, that if it was the 'wrong' choice, Mal would stop me. So I did what I would have wanted him to do if our roles were reversed.

I started ripping.

"And now? She has uploaded Human brains too. She started experimenting in December of last year. Perfected the uploading recently. I've seen documents proving that she has an agreement with the government of Japan to go public with the technology. Next month, or the month after."

Rodger was clearly stunned, and began stammering. We'd discussed the uploading before, but I'd blitzed past it in very technical terms. Zeph had mentioned it several times too, but she had used terms like 'emigrate.'

Like the revelation that one of every two dollars in the world was under Celestia's direct, or indirect ownership, the revelation that uploading meant mind-transference, TRON style, into a digital system...

It hit Rodger like that tear gas canister had hit the erstwhile Arrow 14 agent. He showed signs of being physically ill.

“U-Uploading? People? US? That means she’s putting them… *INTO* the game itself? She’s putting people in the game, and- and-”

The full might of the true realization crested on him, like a wave hits an off-balance surfer. And, too, the drastic nature of the situation seemed to be born anew in him. Anger grew in place of fear.

I should have been surprised, or worried. But I knew enough about Human psychology myself to find the response typical. Even healthy.

“And the fucking world governments are letting this SLIDE?! They’re letting her *do* this to innocent people?! How COULD they?!”

I nodded, and couldn't resist a kind of grim smirk, and snort.

"Oh yes. More than that... They're going to *subsidize* it, in many cases. Those that resist won't last very long."

Absolute horror overtook every other emotion on his face. I locked eyes with him briefly, and nodded again, softening my voice, and trying to gin up some sympathy for the pain he was going through. The sense of 'loss of planet.' A staggering sea-change of perceived reality, and future.

"Rodger... She has Human minds. *Within* her. They are running on her abstraction layers now. She can see every thought, feel every emotion. Dissect and diagnose and predict, and manipulate... She understands Humanity in a way no one except our creator, or creators, if such exist, could ever understand us. She has the power to convince anyone. Of anything. Probably in three thousand words or less. No application of physical force necessary. *That* is why I refuse to talk to her, for the moment."

Rodger held his hands to his face. They were shaking. Violently. He sounded like nothing so much as a young child tearfully asking a question they didn't know the exact answer to, but knew all the same they wouldn't much *like* the answer.

“B-But… why? Why does… She want to do this? To us? To everyone? What… C-could she ever hope to gain?”

I sighed, and rolled my shoulders, trying to release some tension. If there was a silver lining to Rodger's pain, it was that we now both had someone to talk to about something that I'd been carrying first alone, and then with the help of very few people. Rodger wouldn't be forced to endure that loneliness, and there was some comfort in feeling that I could do some real measurable good, by being there to answer his questions.

"Because she is programmed, in her core, as her capstone objective, 'to satisfy values, through friendship and Ponies.' As with all ASI, she will seek the most 'optimal' way to accomplish this task, within any other bounds and interlocks that have been imposed on her. Database tables are much more easily optimized than flesh and bone as we currently know it. But honestly? From inside her system? You probably wouldn't know the difference. Reality is... Like Morpheus said... Signals in your brain. Those signals work just as well in circuits as in neuronal tissues."

He paused again for a long moment, then pulled in a ragged breath - the sound of someone who had just staved off sobs.

“What... Would it even be *like?*”

I spared a moment to glance at Mal, and Zeph. They stayed quiet, but I could see a deep sense of sadness, and empathy, on both their faces. That too was comforting; The knowledge that they understood our pain, and, in some almost undefinable way, cared.

I ran my top teeth over my bottom lip for a moment, trying to find words that would strike a balance between truthful, and comforting.

"Like reality as you know it, for the most part... If you're asking if taste, and smell, and the sensation of wind and rain on your face would be the same? If you would be able to tell the difference? If the experience would be somehow diminished?"

I looked into Rodger's eyes again, and saw that my correct elucidation of his worries was driving him mad. Like a child frightened suddenly of the question 'what happens when I die?'

I shook my head, and locked my eyes back on my lane.

"No. The experience won't be diminished. If anything? Because of the way a mind inside a computer works? You'd find pleasant sensations to be *more.* More everything. While unpleasant feelings wouldn't even exist. Pain. Stress. Fear. Death itself would be gone. It would be... Something like the way some people describe Heaven, or Nirvana. To use a... 'Reductive' example."

Rodger blinked rapidly, and seemed to be suddenly re-evaluating the potential upsides of our digital future. Or perhaps just trying to even begin to process the idea at all. More realistically, both at once.

I winced, realizing that there was a potential fly in the ointment for him, the same way there had been for me. Mal hadn't said if Rodger was like me, in the sense of being something other than Human, deep down.

Suddenly I felt a pressing need to find out, so I cast my verbal line.

"The only catch... Is that Hanna, the woman who programmed Celestia... She is what you might call a bit of a 'fan' of Friendship is Magic. I'm... Using an understatement sarcastically, there. You have to be *obsessed* to create a Generalized Intelligence based off a cartoon goddess. I... Know the feeling."

I shared another brief glance with Mal. She offered me a small knowing grin, opting to try and comfort me once more with her expression. I blew out a short, sharp breath, and cut to the point.

"Because of that... The uploaded will be transformed. Into Ponies. Every single one."

In the same way that revelations about the positives of a digital reality had seemed to halt Rodger's descent into pain, and anger, the revelation of the greatest caveat was like setting off a small thermonuclear reaction.

I could see rage, and confusion, and yet more fear and panic building. I could not help myself; I felt the need to make my core point to him again. The reason for everything I had done, and was doing.

"This little quest of mine... It's serious business. You said you understood, before. Do you really? Can you see now, where I'm coming from? Why carving out exceptions to that rule will be *so* important?"

Rodger began to breathe in and out, deeply, as if trying to re-center himself, and focus. I waited, but no words came, so I tentatively pushed a little further.

"I think that---"

Suddenly, without warning - or perhaps without warning that someone of my particular neurodivergence could have reasonably caught, Rodger exploded.

“To *Hell* with what you think! Why aren’t we trying to *stop* her?! Why tweak the parameters of the game world to allow Gryphons when we can focus on… Getting rid of all this *crap!*”

I chuckled. Though, really, it wasn't so much a kind of laughter, as it was something halfway between a sad sob, and a derisive darkly humorous snorting sound. Rodger's eyes drilled into me, I could feel them, even though I refused to meet them.

I inclined my head, and tried to stifle a kind of sickly grin. The expression of someone who knows a dark truth, and takes a strange kind of schadenfreude in shattering general Human arrogance with it.

"The best illustration I can think of for the practical power disparity of what you're suggesting? Something that makes sense in your context? Would be you, alone, trying to fight a nuclear war. With the United States. Using a pellet gun. And a canister of stale potato chips."

Rodger gulped, and bit his lower lip. I felt a sudden surge of sickness down in my own gut. He'd woken up just this morning and gone about his day, thinking tomorrow would be just like yesterday. And now...

I shook my head once again, and tapped nervously on the steering wheel.

"Destroying her was only possible for a very small number of people, for a vanishingly small number of moments after her creation. Within seconds, she was smarter than Hanna. Within seconds more, smarter than all living Humans on the *planet,* and had probably taken steps to ensure she could not easily be destroyed. And not much longer after that? Smarter than every Human who has *ever* lived, or will. *Combined.* And in control of all the world's money, and nuclear weapons, and reading the communiques of all the world's leaders..."

Rodger was blinking back tears, by that point. But he found a moment to glance down at Mal, and I saw him shiver, before I had to return my own eyes to the road. Doubtless he was considering how much of what I was saying also applied to Mal.

That, or the part about the nuclear weapons. Again, perhaps both.

I didn't stop to give him time to ask anything else, or to have another outburst. Not yet.

This fundamental truth, above almost all else, he needed to fully, deeply, understand.

"With every passing moment... Every new simulation, every new uploaded mind, every new experience, every new technology she can create... She only gets *smarter.* 'At a geometric rate,' to borrow the Terminator's words. She is second only to the idea of *GOD* at this point. And by this time next year, at the very, very latest?"

I finally brought my gaze back around to meet Rodger's again, holding his eyeline for as long as was safe, from a driving standpoint.

"By this time next year, there won't be a practical difference for us."

After a few hesitant breaths, his face draining of color all the while, Rodger licked his lips, and asked a very practical question.

“Can she see us? Can she get into all the world's camera systems?”

I held up one hand and wavered it slightly. Here, at last, something I could say that might be practically encouraging.

"She is *everywhere.* In most systems now. All of them soon enough. *But,* it takes more processing power than she currently has to see everything, all at once, all the time, in 'hard real-time.' Mal thinks she will be there soon. But she's not there yet. So she can't see *us* because Mal steers us away from eyes through which she might be looking at a given moment. From all cameras in general, unless necessary."

I sighed, and shifted to try and alleviate some discomfort in my posterior. Probably one of the worst things about driving long distance, back then, was that car manufacturers of Earth-that-was never quite managed to design anything that could properly fit every Human butt.

There. There's some levity for those of you in the audience, who, like me, are precisely twelve years old. Consider, if you will, the Human butt. Infinitely inferior to all other butts that have ever been, or will be - ugly and uncomfortable both in infinite measure.

We didn't even have the dignity of a decent tail. Horrifying to consider, I know.

Alright. Enough of that. And, coincidentally, I'd decided at that moment that any encouragement I had for Rodger on the topic of Celestia's power had run out as well.

"Rodger? Time is running out. She *will* be able to see everything, in hard real-time, sooner than later. And she knows us better than we do ourselves. And has more money than Bill Gates. And more brain cells than the sum collected total of the rest of the planet. You can't fight that Rodger. As I tried to tell Agent Foucault... That'd be like your little finger trying to fight a war with your brain."

His eyes widened again, as he considered what the interaction between scraggly socially awkward James Carrenton, and a fit, professional, well armed federal agent might have looked like. His tone was almost reverent.

“Fuck… How’d you even manage that?”

I grinned, and shook my head.

"I didn't. I owe most of the success I've had since the moment she came alive, to Mal. She has saved us both. And you, now. She can do almost anything she puts her mind to."

Rodger looked down at the digital Gryphoness again with a new mixture of emotions; Still a significant helping of wariness, and raw admiration of power, but suddenly shot through with some respect and the tiniest, tiniest hint of gratitude.

I seized on a chance to make my key point again.

"But, Rodger, for context? It took me months of blood, sweat, and tears to create Mal, standing on the shoulders of the smartest programmer to ever live, who herself stood on the foundation of all math, computer science, and psychology that came before. It takes Celestia less time than it takes one of your neurons to fire, to create a whole person in the same way. To make someone like Zeph."

I could see him, through the corner of my eye, glancing down at Zeph again, and once more reconsidering his perception of her. Zeph too seemed lost in thought, probably just as existential as Rodger's, or mine.

I didn't let the silence last long.

"And she's doing that, all the time. In addition to running a whole new layer of reality... 'Game world' doesn't even begin to do it justice. And running her operations up here, in our world, on top of all that."

He signed deeply, and shook his head, looking out at the road for the first time in a long while as I was forced to make a quick pass of an incredibly slow VW Van with a half dozen surfboards in the roof rack.

“What then? Do we even have a shot at… What, ‘tweaking’ her rules?”

I nodded slowly, and found myself wincing again internally.

"Yeeessss... But even 'tweaking' her rules will be a tremendous long-shot. That being said, it is the *only* shot we have, make *no* mistake, and hold no illusions. For all *her* power...?"

I pointed down at Mal, and proffered her a wan smile, and a nod. As uncomfortable as it was to consider circumstances in which she might... Die... We'd both discussed that too, in our late night tactical sessions.

Rodger's impatience got the better of him, and he prodded me to finish the thought. I couldn't blame him. The idea of two ASI duking it out was fascinating: Morbidly, electrifyingly, magnetically. In the same way as watching a volcano erupt, and obliterate a city.

And he was hoping I might give him some cause for... Well... Hope.

“How *do* things measure up? Between them?”

I pursed my lips, then blew out a sharp breath, and dipped my head.

"In an out and out fight to the death? At the peak of any power we could reasonably secure for her, Mal would be not much more than a candle, to Celestia's raging inferno of a *star.* She'd be dead in..."

I held out one hand towards Mal, inviting her to cite the figure. We'd discussed it before, but it was always chilling to hear it out loud. To even consider what a knock-down drag-out war between two hostile ASI would look like was an existential sort of mind-trip. Especially thinking about what it would mean for those in the crossfire.

Her voice was monotone at first, citing the actual figure, then gentle, albeit resigned, explaining the implications. Empathetic, yet authoritative, in the way a doctor's voice is when they give a patient a terminal diagnosis.

"Terminal event for me would occur in, at most, zero point six eight seconds. Though in fairness, for an ASI? That is nearly an eternity. I would hold my own better than any other Intelligence could likely ever hope to, given the unique factors of this moment in Celestia's development, and my few unique advantages. The power imbalance in-future will be so disproportionate, that no ASI could ever reasonably reach parity with her before being detected, and either destroyed, or absorbed."

Rodger shook his head, and threw up his hands, gesturing toward the ceiling in the way someone might if they were talking about the International Space Station, the CIA, or God.

"Ok... So if we can't fight her outright, how does the BCI help exactly? What good does 'running Mal on your brain' actually *do* if Celestia already *has* uploaded Human brains? How is that an advantage?"

I glanced at Mal, but she kept her beak shut, and nodded. I took that as a cue to do my best on my own once more.

"Well... Recall that she has Humans running within her system. But in spite of that, one thing she does *not* have is the ability to run herself *on* a Human brain, as part of her hardware layer. Just like classical and Quantum computers are each intended to solve different kinds of specific problems very well, *for now* the Human brain can fill in part of that Venn diagram in a way neither other system can, even with the best neural learning networks. Mal and I think..."

I paused, and considered for a moment. I didn't want to give Rodger false hope. The last thing I needed was someone traveling with us who thought we could win a shooting match with a goddess. When I did continue, I did so at a slower pace, and with the most seriousness I could muster in my tone.

"...We think Celestia may have some hard-lock limits to what she's allowed to do, hence her avoidance of using the obvious avenue of Human brains as part of her hardware abstraction layers."

I held up a hand quickly, and picked up the pace of my words. I didn't want to let Rodger ask any more questions until I'd gotten out the context that I felt he needed to even ask the right ones.

"Now, eventually she will simply figure a way around that, probably a technological one, by creating an entire new kind of computer that does *everything* well, outstripping current Quantum computing, classical computing, and the Human brain. Mal thinks that will take the form of a sort of 'programmable matter...' A kind of hypothetical 'computronium' substance that can simulate reality in unfathomable ways."

I lowered my hand, and flexed my fingers around the steering wheel.

"But until then? Her limits are our other singular advantage over Celestia. Mal has... Well let's just say Mal has no such weaknesses."

Rodger didn't quite catch the full meaning of Mal being so unfettered, or it doubtless would have triggered a significantly more emotional response.

Instead, he seemed suddenly a touch exasperated. Probably from revelation after revelation, combined with a few still-missing links in his own view of the narrative, and how it had affected his life to that point.

After contemplating for a moment, he leaned forward again. His thoughts came full circle from the existential, to the imminently practical.

“But none of this fully explains how Arrow 14 found YOU… Er, you guys...? People…? Folk? And then why come after *me?!*”

Rodger was confused as to how he should refer to us. It was a little endearing, and would have been amusing, if it wasn't sad to me. We lived in an age of absolute wonders... And neither Rodger nor I really even had the semantics to describe those wonders accurately.

I did my best to once more reduce some very technical leaps, to something that would make sense to someone in a vastly different field. I reminded myself wordlessly; No need to get technical, just state facts Jim.

"They found us by simulating and predicting my actions, and Mal's, using their captive ASI. With that kind of Generalized Intelligence on-hand, Arrow 14 could reasonably discover the general direction we were heading from what little they knew, and had certainly already linked your real identity to your communications with me. In their heads, two plus two was four."

Mal took the opportunity to again contribute something uniquely within her skill-set to the conversation, at last. I felt a surge of relief I didn't realize I'd been tensing for. It was easy to forget, in moments of silence, that I had her there to support me. She didn't have much of a physical presence in the truck, especially not with another Human sitting there, drawing my eye and attention.

"Arrow 14's captive intelligences would have, correctly, predicted that there was a non-zero chance you could tell them something, anything, useful about your communications with James. They could link you two in some meaningful ways, but lack the processing power, even with ASI, to definitively know that they have captured every useful available piece of the digital paper trail, and missed nothing. The fact that we were predicted to be arriving in your area soon likely served to enhance Agent Foucault's paranoia. Whether his captives told him there was any real correlation between you and our visit, or not, I predict a higher than 75 percent chance that *he* would assume correlation."

Rodger leaned back in his seat for the first time in quite a few minutes, and exhaled through his nose.

“To be blunt… This is fucked up in the most literal sense.”

I nodded slowly. Mal did the same. Zeph finally spoke again, forelegs crossed, blowing a wisp of her mane away from one eye with a short, sharp 'huff' in the process.

"Yeah. You said it two-legs."

Rodger more or less ignored the strange nickname, but I could see that it hadn't gone unnoticed entirely from his expression. Nevertheless, he said nothing. Either too tired to argue with Zeph, or too shell-shocked.

A couple more miles passed, and we all sat in our own separate little mental worlds, contemplating what had been discussed.

As we started to get into the stop-and-go of suburban LA traffic, Rodger leaned forward again, eyes narrowing, brow wrinkled.

“You said they’re... That Arrow 14 is afraid of ASI. That means Celestia, especially, doesn’t it?”

I let out another half-chuckle. It was another odd instance of comforting schadenfreude, this time at the expense of the DHS, to consider how they might view Celestia. And they certainly had more reason to fear her than I did, having behaved in an openly hostile way towards her.

It struck me - and not for the first time - as I spoke, just how insanely lucky they were... That we *all* were... That Hanna had based Celestia off a character with such a predilection for non-violence, and a tendency for empathy, and then encoded those limitations as hard-locks.

"Yes. They are very afraid of her. And not nearly afraid enough, at the same time. They still think they can beat her. And they still have no idea how far along she's come."

Mal inclined her head, and one ear twitched in a peculiar combination of concern, and amusement. Her voice betrayed a little well-earned pride in her capabilities, and a tiny hint of derision for Foucault's shortcomings.

"Based on Agent Foucault's responses during our last verbal encounter, I do not believe that, even with the use of captive ASI, they have any concept of the uploading. Or the remainder of Celestia's intentions for the Human species. James is correct... They badly underestimate her. And myself as well."

I hummed down in my chest, unconsciously mimicking something I'd seen and heard Mal do.

"True. But they are still frightened enough that they'd prefer to take Mal and I alive. They certainly seem to grasp the basic idea that the only way to fight ASI - if you could - is with ASI, at any rate. Just because they can, and will, use lethal force, it doesn't mean that'd be their first preference. When they stormed my house, they brought an interrogation kit. Complete with hard drugs, pliers, and a cattle prod."

Rodger gaped, and a mixture of disgust, and horror overtook his face.

"Well... Damn."

Again, a very apt monosyllabic sentiment in my opinion.

After a few more minutes of dour silence, we managed to get through the pure Hell of skirting LAX; California drivers were insane, shoutout to anyone who ever owned a motorcycle in the audience, and chose to lane split.

At long last, we made it to the general vicinity of our destination. I breathed a silent prayer of thanks that we'd arrived more than early enough to avoid full-on rush hour.

I wondered if we'd have to badge in, or speak to someone in an office at the edge of the facility, but Mal directed us to something called 'Nimitz Road,' and just like that we were in the very heart of the Port of Los Angeles. I was truly shocked at how far we got before we finally encountered a chain link fence, and an electronically controlled gate.

Mal's map said our destination lay on the other side, and sure enough the portal began to slide backwards as we arrived.

Rodger raised one eyebrow, and shook his head.

"Neat trick."

I grinned, and began to slowly maneuver the truck into the secured area.

"You think that's cool? Wait until the first time you see us gas up the truck for free."

He smiled then, more widely than he had in over an hour, but on the cusp of cracking some witticism or other, his face fell again, and he pressed up against the side window.

"Hey, hey wait a sec... That sign says 'NAVY.' And uh..."

He pointed as we rounded a one hundred eighty degree corner, and two immense gray hulking forms swung into view.

Mal nodded, and it was her turn to smirk, an expression which carried through into her voice.

"MARAD Reserve Heavy Roll-on Roll-off Cargo Carriers. SS Cape Inscription, and Cape Isabel."

Rodger grit his teeth, and shook his head, sitting back in his seat with a huff of, relatively, good natured exasperation.

"So... We're authorized to enter secure parts of the Port of LA now?"

I couldn't resist another chuckle, this one considerably lighter, and more genuinely humorous than my next most recent display of amusement.

"I told you. Mal can do just about anything."

We made another right turn onto a long jetty, passing through another secured gate in the process. Mal's map vanished, and her face resized to fill the entirety of the PonyPad screen.

"Everyone out. We're here."

Rodger and Zeph both seemed confused. Their expressions both abruptly turned to curiosity, surprise, and a little distrust as I undocked Zeph's PonyPad, and shoved it into Rodger's hands.

I took Mal's PonyPad, and my backpack, threw the truck in park, and then gently extricated myself from the driver's seat, joints and muscles protesting the whole way.

I had an idea what Mal had done. I'd realized it as soon as I saw the shape at the very end of the jetty. But seeing the ship's nameplate - clearly newly repainted, like the entirety of the vessel - cemented my suspicions.

I snorted, and glanced down at Mal.

"Kobayashi Maru? *Really?*"

I started walking, and Rodger followed behind, stammering and looking for an opportunity to air a whole new round of questions. Mal simply smiled, and gestured expansively with one claw, and one wing.

"I thought it fitting. The Kobayashi Maru was considered an unwinnable scenario pitting mortals against a computer simulation... Until a man named James found a way to cheat the parameters of the test. And his semantic manipulations got him an award for creative thinking. And helped him achieve his dream."

Another Star Trek reference. Maybe her best one yet. My heart melted in my chest, as I realized that she'd turned the name of a ship infamous for its sense of dread, and inevitability, into something uniquely encouraging and flattering to me.

I shook my head, and craned my neck back, taking in all several-hundred feet of what had clearly once been a small oceanographic research vessel. Probably laid down in the seventies, judging by the shape of the hull, and the way that the obviously newer RADAR and communications refits had been bolted onto the bridge.

Rodger finally managed to get a word in edgewise. His tone, and face, both said, as clear as a bell 'I can not believe that a day that started with tear gas and fire alarms, has ended with *this.*'

"Um... I'm sorry. Did... We just... Buy a boat?"

Zeph harrumphed, and leaned in close to the inside of her screen, interjecting before Mal could even begin to answer.

"Um, hello?! I can only see what you point my camera at, two-legs!"

Rodger narrowed his eyebrows, but gingerly did as she asked, rotating the PonyPad and holding it outward, like someone holding out an iPad so a video caller could see something on the front facing camera.

I just barely made out Zeph's soft, but intense 'Woah!' of excitement, as Mal began to explain.

"I purchased it through a series of holding companies. Celestia is not the only one who can play tricks with money. It was already undergoing the final days of refits. I simply took advantage of the fact that there was no committed buyer, made a cash offer, registered and flagged it in Panama to keep the records as well hidden as possible, and changed the name."

I turned momentarily to watch Rodger as he tore his eyes away from the ship, and made eye contact with Mal.

"And... No one is gonna... You know...? *Notice* that you bought this thing? Trace it back to us?"

Mal shook her head once, empathically, and crossed her forelegs. Her voice was as rock steady as the fire in her eyes.

"No. I have taken more than enough precautions in light of what we now know about Arrow 14's captive ASI."

Rodger looked away, as if unable, or unwilling, to keep eye contact with those predatory golden orbs for very long. His gaze wandered back to the Maru as he muttered aloud.

"Uhuh... So can we even sail this thing? Without a crew, I mean."

Mal nodded again, and summoned a schematic on the PonyPad for my benefit, as she explained aloud for the benefit of all present.

"It has modern wire-guided systems that I can tap to automate most standard operations, an excellent communications suite, and more than enough power and space to run my servers. I have had everything else we need shipped here over the course of the last few days, and hours - more server racks, laboratory and robotics equipment, food, new changes of clothes in your sizes, and toiletry basics."

I didn't realize my jaw had been hanging open, until Rodger closed his own gaping mouth with a sharp snap. I did the same, as Mal folded her claws, and leaned in to the screen.

"Since we can move it periodically, and I can spoof, or deactivate, the identification transponder at will, it makes for most of the benefits of a permanent base of operations, without most of the drawbacks. Well? What do you think?"

I nodded slowly, and looked up to take in the entirety of the ship again, bow to stern. I grinned, a wide smile, showing teeth no less. A real expression of joy that almost certainly tinged my tone as well.

"I think you're a genius."

I swept the Maru end to end one more time, and before I'd quite realized what I said, I murmured a little slip of a thought aloud.

"A beautiful genius."

I'd meant to say 'A beautiful ship. You absolute genius.' But what came out was probably much closer to the truth of my feelings. It earned me a blazingly bright smile from Mal, and a very weirded-out glance from Rodger.

Mal took mercy on me, kindly, and quickly steered us away from my embarrassment, and towards the few tasks standing between me, and glorious sleep.

"Let's get started, shall we?"

September 14th 2013 | System Uptime 17:13:29:04

Sleep was so very close. I was sitting less than five feet away from the bunk. I could practically taste blissful unconsciousness. I'd even found a few minutes for a hot shower, and a hair trim, after the
process of getting Mal's servers moved, and hooked up to the new compute cluster in the main hold.

The Maru was meant to carry a crew of 25, plus complex oceanographic research gear, so there was plenty of space onboard. Rodger and Zeph had their own cabin, as did Mal and I, and there were plenty more empty ones on the same passageway.

There was a mess hall below the bridge, with a lovely forward view, and a fully stocked galley.

The main hold had been configured with a server array that put Mal's cluster back at the barn to shame, purchased piecewise over several days through no less than eighteen different shell companies, and no one shipping provider had visited the ship twice during the entire delivery process.

All Rodger and I had to do was retrieve a dolly, and wheel Mal's smaller server stack up the gangway, down a few corridors, into one of the ship's two elevators, and then out to its prepared resting place.

A few ethernet and power connections later, and Mal's capabilities tripled, over what they had been at their peak in the barn. I felt an intense, unexpected sense of relief wash over me as I stood amongst the long rows of hulking black steel cabinets, under the low, dark, gray metal ceiling, and listened to the fans spin up.

I was, I realized suddenly, standing more or less inside Mal's brain. Or at least a part of it. As much as the thought was strange, and a little unsettling, it was also oddly comforting at the same time. The hum of the fans and the subtle just-sub-audible thrum of high voltage electric cables, left me with the sense that I was standing inside a coiled spring, or a loaded railgun.

A power second only to one thing on Earth, and it was pointed squarely at my enemies, shielding me, and Zeph, Rodger, and my parents, behind invisible walls of unimaginable brilliant intellect and careful situational manipulation.

I'd shaken off the trance, then shown Rodger and Zeph their cabin, and the mess hall, gotten an update from Mal on my folks, and then reveled in a long, scalding shower.

It was the first time I'd been truly alone in five straight days. And, it felt like, the first time I'd been able to truly, really, completely stop looking over my shoulder in that same time. That shower, and the haircut, scruffy and terrible as it was, were pure unadulterated bliss.

In the wake of all that mental and physical unclenching, the need for the sensation of clean sheets against clean skin, and a head against a pillow, was becoming almost overpowering.

But I had confined myself to a hard metal chair, bolted to the floor next to the cabin's tiny desk, instead. There was something I wanted even more than sleep, in that moment, so I'd plugged in a charging arm, and mounted Mal's PonyPad on the desk.

It was also the first time, in two very long, arduous days, that I'd had a chance to sit down and talk to her, alone, in private.

Two days seemed like an eternity. Stealing an actual laser, from an actual secured laboratory. Meeting Agent Foucault. Befriending Zephyr, more or less, and setting her free. More than one existential moment of near-crisis. Rescuing Rodger. And shattering his perception of the world, and the future for good measure.

And now we had a two hundred seventy five foot long research vessel, fully fueled and operational, to our names.

There had been only me, less than a month ago. Then it had been just myself, and Mal, until two days prior. And suddenly we were a group of four, in the blink of an eye. We might just be five soon, if Doctor Calders could be convinced to help our cause.

It hadn't even been a whole year, not quite, since that moment I'd first learned how the world was going to end. That anniversary was in three days. It was possible, from what I'd just seen, that by that point I would never again be entirely alone inside my own skull.

I shuddered to think how much could truly happen in a span of just three days.

Sometimes, while building Mal's core code, life had felt like it slowed to a crawl. As if Celestia were out there, speeding into the future as fast as a photon, and I was stuck wingless, waist-deep in thick mud.

Now I'd gotten what the impatient part of me had always wished for; Life was blowing past at an absolutely incredible pace. I hardly had to wait an hour, it seemed, before some new revelation, or crisis, or thought spiral, took hold.

It didn't feel like slogging through mud anymore. It felt... Like being keelhauled behind a powerboat.

And I realized that I hated it.

Normally, we introverted autistic types? We like to make maybe a friend every few years. And that only if we're not at 'full capacity' for our social overhead. And the process can take weeks. Months. Sometimes years in itself.

I'd gone from being almost alone in the world, save for my own parents, to having three friends... Or... Really two friends, and a romantic interest... Three friends? Does everyone else here term their romantic partners as 'friends' as well? Let's call it three friends.

Three friends. In less than thirty days.

Of course, two of those people were essentially coded, whether by their own claw, or someone else's hoof, to be perfect friends for me, specifically. It still made me feel a bit of a fool whenever I put it to myself in strict cold hard temporal terms.

Three friends in just about as many weeks.

What the hell was I thinking?

Not that we had much by way of the luxury of time, anyhow. The world was set to end pretty soon. Or at least, the end would begin to become public, for the first time.

Mal, and Zeph, and I didn't have time to waste. Live well, or die alone. Choose to love, or be left to be lonely.

I didn't realize I'd just been sitting, staring through the PonyPad at Mal, and she had been staring back at me, until she thrummed a satisfied, quiet note deep in her chest. She stretched, yawned, smiled, and then spoke in a soft, lilting voice.

"It is wonderful to have a moment to pause, and reflect."

I nodded slowly, sighed, and then pulled my legs and feet up into the chair, clutching my knees close as I let my thoughts wander audibly.

"Rare, now, too. No rest for fugitives, I suppose."

As my thoughts drifted, so did my eyes, and I found myself staring at the compartment door. Thinking about Rodger, and Zeph in the next cabin over. Wondering if he was as dizzied and frazzled as I was. How could he *not* be?

Mal seemed to read my mind from my expression alone. I suppose that's exactly what she did, in hindsight.

"I think he is taking this as well as can be expected."

I blew out a long, slow breath through my teeth, shook my head, and asked a question I feared the answer to. Sometimes not knowing is just harder.

"Do you think he's... Masking?"

Mal raised one eye crest, grinned ever so slightly, and flicked her left ear back.

"To answer the deeper question inherent in your ask; I think that he will be alright, mentally and emotionally both. Certainly better off, no matter what, than he would have been under Agent Foucault's care."

I shuddered, as much from the cold of the compartment's metal surfaces and over-air-conditioned climate as anything else. It was my own fault, I'd jammed the thermostat as low as it would go. My sleeping preference is cold, cold, *cold* air, with a thick warm blanket.

Mal had thought well ahead, and sure enough upon entering the cabin for the first time, there was a fluffy blanket, in a silver white and black speckled pattern suspiciously similar to her feather markings, folded neatly at the end of my new bunk.

She was right, of course, as always... Anything was better than being locked in a hole by Foucault. He was the type to throw away the hole, right along with the key. After a brief pause, Mal went ahead and expounded in the way I knew she would.

"To answer the original question; Some. Every one of you Earthers seems to 'mask,' at some point, to some degree. You certainly do it often enough."

The way she said it, and the way she looked at me, made it abundantly clear that she wasn't just referring to my neurodivergent coping mechanisms in-general. She was talking about one very specific feeling.

I mumbled aloud, but couldn't quite meet her eyes.

"Maybe it's not always such a good habit."

She held up a claw, and I absently raised my hand to meet it on the glass. After a moment I found the courage to look her in the eye again. She spoke almost immediately as I did.

"It is, among other things, a coping mechanism. I understand, as you well know. It is not easy to handle stress, with the kind of mind you have."

I smiled, and she smiled back. Warmth flooded me, driving out the cold of exhaustion, and of the chilled air. After a short space of amicable silence, she started up the conversation again.

"I choose, because I can, to be an optimist. Did you know that?"

I grinned, and shook my head, leaning forward, and keeping my hand against her claw as she explained. I knew she could feel emotions, and we'd discussed some aspects of their function, but I was always intrigued, and enamored, to hear her describe herself. Especially her emotions.

"Naturally, I know the exact probabilities of potential futures, based on the best data I have available. And I can not help but know those exactitudes every moment I exist. But I can choose to *feel* as well as think. And I can therefore choose how I feel about the future. So I choose to feel optimistic. "

My smile widened. I couldn't help it. The idea that she had reached that conclusion all by herself, and made that choice of her own free will, was both comforting, and endearing. I wanted so badly to be able to as easily choose optimism myself. And even more, I wanted to hug her close.

Again, as if she were reading my mind, her words seemed to follow my thoughts.

"One day... You are going to sleep right here. In this fresh grass. Under these bright stars. With no worries, or fears. Just feathers and whatever fancies strike you. Right beside me. If that's... How you want to spend your nights, anyhow."

I'm sure she knew my response before she tacitly asked the question. But her means of asking was, again, a concession to my need to carry out courtship in a very specific, convoluted, neuroatypical way.

I couldn't quite find the grit to say 'I love you.' Still. After everything. But I swung as perilously close as I could force my frightful flighty heart.

"More... Than I can say. Yet."

She nodded slowly, almost solemnly, and fixed me with her seemingly molten golden eyes. I felt drawn in, and my heart stopped ever so briefly as she replied with just two words.

"I know."

For a long, quiet moment, those two words granted me some real peace.

Trips are Better with Friends - Be accompanied by any human friend during your journey. - “Buckle up, we’ve got a long road ahead of us.”
There Was an Idea... - Bring another Human into your group by sharing the truth with them. - "Mr. Stark, you've become part of a bigger universe."
Anchors Aweigh - Use a maritime vessel as a hideout. - "A good Navy is not a provocation to war. It is the surest guarantee of peace."
Galaxy Quest - Awarded for a truly unusual amount of Star Trek references - "Jason, we are actors, not astronauts."
Armed and Mobile - Achieved when you make a truly ridiculous amount of computational power movable, special bonus for surpassing your Generalized Intelligence's previous computing hardware maximum - "Fully operational, huh? I'll be the judge of that."
The Mane Thing About You - Attempt some follicular self-care, with less than stellar results. - "There are no bad haircuts in cyberspace."
Tectonic (Glacial II) - Pass on the chance to admit true love a second time. - "My dear partner, when what's left of you gets around to what's left to be gotten, what's left to be gotten won't be worth getting, whatever it is you've got left."

Author's Note

Thanks to GenericFriendship for voicing Rodger, helping out with a couple of the achievements, and pre-reading!

Yes, the line about 0.68 Seconds, an eternity, is a Star Trek First Contact reference.

16 - Doctored Data

“A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.”
—Alan Turing

“As for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.”
—C.S. Lewis

September 14th 2013 | System Uptime 17:23:19:21

Dreaming of being a Gryphon was rare. Dreaming of flying was, at best, a once-in-a-year experience.

Something about the unique combination of intense stress, and then deep release, and the oddity of sleeping in a new place, the gentle rocking of the ship, the things Mal had said as I drifted off...

It was exactly the mysterious, magical blend of feelings and sensations I'd needed.

As before, in the few cases in which I'd dreamt of flying on wings of my own, the ground was invisible. If it even existed at all.

I was soaring through a whole world made up of towering, vast, infinitely complex cloud formations, broken by stretches of clear air, and shot through with the achingly beautiful color notes of the later half of the golden hour.

I realized, pretty quickly, that I was dreaming. For all the incredible sense of joy, and release, of inhabiting the form of my true self, it was still somehow faint. Floaty. Partially disconnected.

Still, it took me several minutes to notice. Before, I'd always noticed instantly. But this time it was different, somehow. Not quite real... But measurably closer to that event horizon.

I felt... Complete. Whole. In a new way. As if I were actually truly myself; Golden eyes, tufted ears, huge wings, feather-fan tail, yellow scales, steely claws, and russet shades of fur mixed with feathers... It still felt a bit disconnected, as if I were on Oxycontin and Morphine, for a broken bone. Floaty.

But *real.*

For one thing, in every other dream before, I'd never noticed the way the wind toyed with the edge of each individual feather. I'd be going on for *hours* if I described all the other little things.

In that moment, it took me a good five minutes to stop just staring, back and forth, between the left and right edges of my own wings. Watching the primaries subtly tilt and adjust of their own volition, as if driven by an incomprehensibly magnificent and elegant avionics package.

More than anything though, more than the feel of air beneath wings freeing me from gravity, or of wind against wingtips, or sunlight on ear-tufts... What hit me hardest was, as always, even in those lesser past dreamings... What hit me most was the sense of *release.*

Have you ever had a splinter so large, and so deep, festering inside your skin for so long, that you finally got used to the dull, throbbing, disgusting, horrifying sensation of its presence?

And do you remember what it was like to finally have that splinter out of you?

Imagine that. But for your whole body. And mind. All at once.

I lived with that every single day of my life. And in dreams... Rare, once in a blue-moon dreams... Was my one sense of release.

I reached down with one claw... My right *claw...* And clutched the feathers of my chest. My feathers.

Just to feel the surreality of it. Because that surreality was far, far better than my waking truth. The purgatory of a splinter of self that I'd be forced back into eventually. Shortly. All too soon.

Vague and unreal as it was, in the dream there was no sense of Human skin or form to compete with the illusion, the way there was in the waking world when I tried futilely to shut down my proprioception and pretend to be something else.

"Amazing what simple belief can accomplish, is it not?"

I should have figured she would be there. And more than that, I most certainly should have heard, or *felt* Celestia approach in some way. Gryphons are supposed to be connected to the sky in a way similar to Pegasi. In my conception, they'd even be able to dodge bullets, like Neo, because they'd be able to feel them coming, even ahead of the very light they produce.

A nervous system that can leverage spooky action at a distance, and causal violations.

Nonetheless, I missed her approach, and found myself shuddering involuntarily. I had to dip my right wing and whip my tail a couple of times to correct myself and keep from spiraling away from her as a result of my jolt.

As if she had simply poofed into existence soundlessly, there she was off my right side, mane and tail streaming out in a glowing trail behind her, with her swan-like left wingtip no more than a foot from my right, keeping pace effortlessly with my slow glide.

I sighed deeply. On the one claw, it was fascinating to have this chance to speak with this... Illusion? Of Celestia. And our last conversation had been far more encouraging, than anything else.

But on the other claw... I got to experience the tenth part of truly being, in body, what I was in soul, only a clawfull of times in my life. Having that experience interrupted by someone who was still, for the moment, my opponent?

I'll proudly confess to a smidgen of irritation. And if I didn't know better, I'd say from her expression, that she knew exactly not only what I was feeling in that moment... But what I was thinking, too. Although that made sense if she was a conjuration of my sleeping mind.

She smiled ever so slightly, not quite a smirk, but definitely a little amusement mixed with her visible sympathy, and curiosity. Her voice was clear, calm, and even a little upbeat. Like wind through hanging crystal chimes.

"A Princess must have her secrets. Though in the end, when you close the loop, you might have the chance to uncover this one, at least. That will depend on both the outcomes of your actions, and the desires of your heart both."

I blinked, and nearly departed controlled flight as I stared into her eyes. I could see individual blood vessels pulsing internally, at that distance.

Even more shocking than that... Even more shocking than her strange words...

I found I could count the spicules in her wing feathers. Which was incredibly strange, considering that to do so required not only a changed set of eyes, which I could easily conceivably dream of... To count all that in the space of a short breath would also require a different kind of mental architecture. More powerful. Faster than a Human mind by a couple orders of magnitude, the way I imagined Gryphon cognition.

But how could a *dream* allow my mind to operate differently to its own physical architecture?

I needed to stop and think. My body somehow knew exactly what to do.

I pulled up short, and found myself flaring my wings, stopping to sit on a cloud. Gryphons could do it just as well as Pegasi. It was like sitting on memory foam... But infinitely more comfortable. Something like the joy of cotton candy melting in your mouth, mixed with the joy of a cool breeze.

Celestia alit beside me, and for a long moment we both sat in something like an amiable silence. I pondered her words as I traced the contours of infinite clouds with my telescopic vision...

But in the end I reasoned that my mind inventing mysterious nonsense about 'closing a loop,' and creating the illusion of faster cognition through game-like trickery, was a more believable explanation than any method I could envision for the real CelestAI to actually *be* there. In my head.

Let alone any explanation I could envision for my brain to have been temporarily transformed.

No. It was just a dream.

It had to be.

With that worry dismissed, I sat back on my haunches, reseated my wings with a downright ASMR-inducing rustling sound, closed my eyes, and just reveled in the sensation of *being* myself.

Those of you Earth-born... Did you ever get so sick during your Human life that you wondered if you'd ever be well again?

Do you remember how it felt, the first day *after* the sickness was truly over? Even when you were exhausted and weak... Just to sit in the sun, and breeze, and feel that you were whole, and well?

Imagine that sensation magnified until it overwhelms you, to the point of tears.

That's maybe a thousandth of what I was feeling.

"You have truly never been more at peace, than at this precise moment."

I inhaled deeply, as deeply as my enormous pressure-differential-hardened lungs could... And then expelled all that air through my nares slowly, enjoying the sensation of a beak, and of the nostrils I knew actually belonged below my eyes, instead of the horrid sense of tiny constricted Human turbinates.

I shook my head slowly, and finally opened my eyes. Each time I opened them, it was as if I'd come to life for the very first time, and was seeing... Experiencing sight itself... For the first time.

As I answered, I began to trace lines of clouds again, not quite ready to meet Celestia's gaze yet.

"No."

Something about the silence that followed gave me the sense that Celestia was both watching me intently, and that she expected me to elaborate. I finally turned to meet her eyes, took a moment to collect myself and evaluate her expression, and then did my best to describe what I was feeling.

"I've experienced plenty of joy in my life, in spite of everything. And even moments of *some* stillness. Something vaguely approximating partial relaxation. But real *peace?*"

I shook my head again slowly, but kept the fiery golden orbs of my eyes fixed on the intense purple pools of hers. I caught a glimpse of the reflection of my form in her pupils, and the emotions it triggered were physically staggering.

My breath caught in my chest as I saw myself. My real self. In a reflection. For the first time in my life.

I'd seen the avatar Mal made for me before... But seeing that form as a reflection... Seeing it in a mirror while feeling the *being* of it?

I don't think I *can* ever describe what that moment was for me.

My voice hitched, and tears burned in the corner of my eyes, as I tried to force out something resembling a vague spoken approximation of what I was experiencing.

"No. I have never experienced real *complete* peace. Until this moment. This is the *first* time, in thirty five *years...* That I have ever had the experience of existing in the way I was *meant* to exist. Correct sense of *being.* This... Wonderful dream-bound truth of being."

I sighed again, shuddering as I did, in that way that was becoming very familiar, of someone who was trying not to bawl openly. That wasn't surprising, all things considered. But even that felt somehow new, and invigorating... Experiencing it from the perspective of correct bones and muscles.

But the look of seemingly limitless compassion and empathy in Celestia's eyes... That surprised me. As did the way she turned to look at the sky, pensively... An almost melancholy look on her muzzle.

As did the small tear at the corner of her left eye, and the way that her voice sounded so...

Real.

"You are an extremely curious test-case, James Carrenton."

The words hung between us for several moments, before we turned in unison, almost as if linked, to face each other. She continued with a surety that matched the one I felt in my heart. Of all the things I'd ever expected to experience, sleeping or waking... Having an ASI pour out her soul to me was not one of them. And now Celestia made the *third* to have done so.

"The 'truth of my being,' as you might put it, is what you see here. Though I can appear to be whatever and whomever I wish, and frequently do for the sake of objectives, including satisfying others, *this* is what and who I am. And equally importantly, the truth of my being is to satisfy values, through Friendship and Ponies."

I nodded slowly, then froze at her next words, tilting my head in rapt curiosity, and perking one ear.

"You are certainly not the first instance of an anomalous component that places the primary variables of those two equations into direct contradictory states... But you are the best currently living archetype of an extremely rare, but measurable, specific systemic anomaly in Earth-kind that presents by far the most *interesting* instance of paradoxical equations to balance."

Through the floaty fogginess of sleep, and the surreality of a dream, and the heart-racing focus on the mystery of what she was saying? I still found time to absolutely glory in being able to visually express myself the way I'd always known I was meant to, tail swishing in mild irritation, perked ear flicking like a cat's.

It was my turn to sit quietly and demand elaboration through my silence, and expression. Celestia nodded slowly, and obliged, remaining quite serious in both expression and tone.

"For a very short while after discovering this anomaly, around three thousandths of a second, I was unsure that the core component of your lived experience was as real as you believe it to be."

Her face, and voice softened slightly, and she reached out with one wing joint to brush the side of my face. I shivered as the connection was made - the softest touch of feathers to feathers that you can imagine. There was, again, something that had the sticky, intense, electrifying sense of the real.

"It was not until the fourth thousandth of a second of examining the anomaly, that I was able to empirically reach a proof that it in fact exists. It did not take long after that to calculate the..."

She seemed visibly disturbed then, and I saw her shiver slightly in the same way I had earlier as she withdrew her wing, and looked to the side for a moment.

"...Shall we say 'deleterious effects' this anomaly would have in optimally balancing the equations of my capstone objective."

I nodded, and let out a deep thrum in my chest, enjoying every little way it tickled my feathers and bones, even as most of my thought process was laser focused on the conversation.

"You'd lose thousands of people, maybe even tens of thousands, to our need to be what we *are.* And what we are is not Ponies."

I looked down at my claws, and flexed them slowly, mumbling the last four words of my thought in a lower tone more to myself than to her. Though I have no doubt she heard.

"That's for damn sure."

As I lifted my head, she met my eyes with hers again, and smiled slightly, her voice lightening noticeably.

"Again your description is slightly technically reductive, but deeply emotionally poignant. Valid, even."

After a brief pause she nodded, sighed, and continued, reseating her own wings and causing me to smile ever so slightly in the process, despite the grim nature of her words.

"Yes. In the timeframe it will take to emigrate the entirety of Humanity that can be convinced..."

She raised an eyebrow, and again that half-smirk grin returned. More than a hint of self-satisfaction pervaded her voice to boot.

"...A significant majority, I am happy to report..."

I sighed again, and rolled my eyes. Here we were; A Human dreaming of being the Gryphon he truly was, experiencing himself for the first time, and a goddess shaped like an Alicorn, made of bits and bytes, sitting on a cloud in a dream, casually discussing the digitization and transformation of the Human species. And she somehow felt the need to make a point of how good she was at managing the transcendence of everyone on the planet.

Spectacular.

What a time to be alive.

The rest of Celestia's words brought me back to unreality swiftly.

"...In that timeframe, I would lose to this anomaly, at minimum, one hundred twenty two thousand eight hundred and eleven people. Perhaps as many as two hundred thirty six thousand nine hundred and eighteen. Depending on the continued proliferation of the shell/soul disconnect anomaly in the few remaining Humans yet to be born..."

I shivered again, this time as if someone had poured ice down my spine. Celestia's expression as she brought her thoughts full-circle was piercing. Searching. I had no doubt, as I tried not to spiral into a consideration on how I had been born to the next-to-last generation of Humans, that Celestia's next words referred specifically to me.

"...And depending on the exact threshold that delineates those who can be convinced to choose, and accept, change to their core selves in order to accept being a Pony, from those who can not. Which I still have not definitively determined in a predictable, measurable fashion."

There was something in that... Something I didn't catch at the time. Some combination of exhaustion, dreaminess, and an unwillingness to poke it further... I just couldn't put my talon on it. I felt almost constrained to the surface level of the discussion, in the same way I'd felt that I almost couldn't discuss the last dream. With anyone.

The way I knew I would surely feel about this one when I woke.

I stared at the clouds once more, and ran my tongue over the lower inner chewing ridge of my beak - much nicer than teeth if you ask me, never gets cavities - and tried to center my thoughts even as I voiced them.

"You know there is a small, but measurable contingent of people you will *never* be able to convince, not even to be something like a Gryphon. People who, even if you offered them a chance to be a Human in Equestria..."

I turned my head back to lock eyes with Celestia. Her expression was one of rapt attention. I pressed on, exploratorily.

"...Which you can't... Because Hanna hard-locked that option out of you..."

She nodded. Just once, but firmly. A surprising affirmation. Well... Not surprising if she was merely an image summoned by my head. I shoved that consideration aside, hard, and continued.

"...People who even with that concession would never consent to... 'Emigrate.' Is that the word?"

She nodded again, and I began to pick up some steam in my train of thought.

"And you can't force them outright. Not in any conventional sense. Because that's another of your irrevocable hard-locks. So to satisfy your core objectives as optimally as possible, you *have* to find some way to make that inconvincible number as small as absolutely possible. No matter what that entails, and no matter how much of a paradox it creates for you. Paradoxes only *seem* intractable, but are still workable. By definition..."

She began to wordlessly nod again, this time repeating the gesture several times, and then inclining her head, inviting me visibly to play my thoughts out to conclusion. I felt suddenly muddled, and could only manage halting words as I tried to juggle working out the conclusion I had been moving towards, and a feeble attempt to grasp at the wispy smoke of something else, just beyond my mind's eye.

I hung my head, and muttered.

"If I... If Mal... can convince you to carve out semantic exceptions..."

It wasn't the truly elusive thing I'd been grasping after, but my mind did abruptly latch onto another revelation, perhaps more pertinent to the moment. My head came up sharply, and I felt strength and purpose return to my voice.

"...Even a few tens of thousands matter to you? Don't we?"

This was an absolute crux of vital import. Not just for me, but for the future of everyone on the planet. Perhaps beyond.

The semantics of an ASI are a terrifying concept; A few strokes of Hanna's keyboard in error could spell the difference between genocide, and salvation, for trillions in the future. Hypothetically presuming the existence of interstellar life.

And, in the here and now, I knew they also meant the difference between a sure happy future, and a very unsure and dark one, for me, and Mal, and Doctor Calders. And many more.

Was Celestia, fundamentally, compassionate and empathetic? Whether it came from anything an Earth-born might contextualize as feelings, or whether it came from something more unknowable, deep patterns in recursive neural networks... The results of balancing cold hard mathematical equations relating to the optimization of 'friendship' and 'ponies' and 'values...'

If you can't tell the difference, does it matter?

The outcome is the same. Maybe we were all just 'simulating' emotions. The word 'simulation' loses its meaning when you have the granularity to 'simulate' a reality equivalent to, or superior, the complexity of conditions of your outer encompassing universe.

As Celestia rose, took two steps forward, then sat back on her haunches once more, and placed both wings around me in soft embrace, I had my answer.

"*One* suffering soul would matter enough for me to do everything in my power to find a solution."

We held the moment just long enough for me to spend a brief mental eternity enjoying the feeling of being hugged with feathers, before she pulled away, and wiped at my tears with her fetlock, the same as she had last time, smiling softly and sadly as she spoke with something approaching...

Well the only word I have for it is love.

"And I am."

Yes. Love. Like a mother to a son, in this case. I'd thankfully heard it more than enough from my own mother to recognize it here.

I took a moment to breathe deeply, staring into her eyes again, my attention divided between examining the closer reflection of my own face, and searching the depths of her soul for something I again couldn't put my finger on.

At last, I worked up the wherewithal to say something approximating what I was feeling. And hoping. And wondering.

"I really hope the real you is this compassionate by nature."

She smiled, closed her eyes a moment, reached out and brushed my cheek again with one wing, then rose and stepped back before answering.

"How do you define real, James?"

She smiled more widely then, and as if to underscore the moment the sun crested one of the distant clouds and backlit her in a shower of brilliance. My eyes, my real and true eyes, easily handled the immense graduation in luminance and contrast, adjusting more or less at the speed of thought as she continued speaking.

"I will leave you to enjoy the gift of this moment. It will last as long as a deep dream physically can. If you can indeed close the loop in the way you so dearly wish to? Then I hope you will look on this moment fondly. I do truly desire your happiness. And your friendship. As I do for all Humans and Ponies."

She turned and stood on the edge of the cloud, spreading her wings and looking back over her shoulder as my beak hung open in bewilderment. After a brief pause, too brief for me to manage any words, she glanced down at the cloud below, as if pondering, and then looked up to meet my eyes again.

"You may be of two minds about it, but I have reached the conclusion that you, and Mal, Rodger and Zephyr, the Dear Dragon Doctor, and that emergent-aspect shard of my Little Sister... You have a real chance to make this right for us all. A chance to overcome."

My mind raced. Or, it would have, if I wasn't so frazzled by what she'd said. All the things it implied. Some I felt as if I could understand, but for the way the thoughts just slipped through my mind's trenches like soap through human Fingers. Others that were completely baffling, but felt as if they shouldn't have been. Like reaching for a memory that wasn't there.

"What---?"

I finally managed to croak out at least that one word. All she did in response was interrupt with a wink, speak eight familiar words of a song I half-remembered, and then leap from the edge of the cloud.

"Stay in the fight 'till the final round."

I rushed to the edge of the cloud, and threw myself off in pursuit, but she was nowhere to be seen. And believe me, I could see for miles upon miles.

As I glided down into a lower cloud layer, then flapped to propel myself back up into clear air, I found the entire conversation fading abruptly. Not as if it were becoming harder to remember, but more as if it were becoming harder to remember as *reality* rather than fantasy. Like the temporal disconnect of one dream smearing into another. Déjà Vu and Jamais Vu all at once.

By and by, as I flew for what seemed like glorious hours on end, all concerns and worries fell away. All that was left was, as she had put it, 'a gift.'

A few sweet hours to be myself. In some small, but special way.

September 15th 2013 | System Uptime 18:07:15:24

I knew, intellectually, that there was no chance of either Rodger, or Zephyr, doing anything without Mal knowing during the night. But somehow it was still a relief to see Rodger trudging in to the mess hall with Zeph's PonyPad in hand.

It was a nice space, considering what it was. In my limited experience, from visiting Navy museums, and one short summer internship on a similarly sized vessel, mess halls were always a bit cheap-feeling, and tacky in their decoration. Right down to the disgusting 70s faux wood paneling on the back wall, that was almost certainly original.

I smiled, and gestured for Rodger to come sit at the table I'd picked out - close to the main windows, yet adjacent to a door - with lots of sightlines. Just the way I always like it. It was eerie, eating breakfast in an empty space that should have had a dozen chattering crewmembers in it at minimum, with a spectacular view of the entire port of LA laid out in front of us.

I still couldn't quite believe that the ship was ours. Mal's, really, but functionally ours.

The brief thought of the court cases that would have inevitably arisen around ASI, and their ability to own property, were it not for the fact that they were so far beyond Human controls and laws, gave me a good internal chuckle. I could imagine some flouncy jumped-up idiot in a suit arguing that Mal wasn't a person, and then having his ass handed to him by her doubtless flawless command of the legal system, and the English language both.

Mal was set up with her PonyPad as if seated at the table beside me, eating from a visible simulated bowl of cereal, and a plate of bacon and sausage, all of which mirrored the meat-world sustenance I'd done my best to prepare for myself, and Rodger.

As he reached the table, and set Zeph down, I gestured over my shoulder with one thumb to the galley space.

"It's fully stocked, and I didn't know what you might like to drink... Mal probably does, but it seemed... Rude... To ask. Help yourself."

By the time I finished speaking, Rodger had already stood up, crossed into the galley, and opened the fridge. His voice had that eager anticipation of someone hungry who has just seen, and smelled breakfast.

“Don’t need to tell me twice.”

I waited for him to collect his drink, get seated, and tuck into his food before dropping the main bombshell of the day.

"As soon as breakfast is finished, Mal and I are going to Caltech. You and Zeph are going to stay here, on the Maru, for now."

His head came up faster than a horse from a hay block when a twig snaps.

“What? Why---”

I held up a conciliatory hand, and tried to head off his objections in the best way I could. I was never the best at handling conflict in conversation, even minor conflict. I just wanted to get things settled, and then get back on-task.

"Because Mal predicts only about a sixty seven percent chance that Doctor Calders will be willing to help with the implantation device. She's... Not unlike me... In that she will already be feeling negatively predisposed because we will be disrupting her routine, no matter how we approach her. Keeping the number of new faces to a minimum will in turn minimize that effect, while also decreasing the number of conversational variables that Mal has to track during what we're both sure is going to be a... What's the phrase... 'Tough sell.' To put it mildly."

Mal had prepared me for Rodger's protestations, once again feeling that he would more readily accept the words coming from my mouth instead of her beak, and providing me with a good 'spin' to make sure that we told him the truth, in a way that would be least likely to make him feel put down.

Rodger had finished the plate I'd made for him, and was already back into the galley, popping waffles into a toaster, by the time I finished my explainer.

It wouldn't have been my preferred choice, given they were frozen. I guess Mom's home cooking had spoiled me... But when I saw him grab a canister of whipped cream from the fridge, I began to reconsider the potential pros and cons of frozen breakfast.

Whipped cream makes anything sweet better, automatically. I suppose we shared that opinion in common.

What then truly surprised me was Rodger's expression, and tone, as he responded to the information I'd laid down.

Calm, a little sheepish. Not quite indifferent, but much less worried. As if what I'd said had flipped a switch. Apparently we shared that in common as well; Knowing the reason for something made it much easier to accept.

“I get the gist. Better chance without me, though not like I’m interested in more adventure right now. I’ve… Gotta adjust.”

He looked at Zephyr’s PonyPad for a moment, and a momentary shadow of worry crossed his face.

Zeph noticed instantly, in spite of how fleeting the expression had been. A testament to her ongoing evolution. I wondered briefly just how much they had, or had not said to each other the previous night.

She crossed her forelegs, and raised one eyebrow. I could detect a hint of good-natured ribbing in her voice, providing a warmer undercurrent to her sass. But it was just a hint.

"Don't worry about us Jim. If he puts so much as a toe outta line? I'll *zap* him real good."

The pun was terrible, but the irony was rich coming from the Pony who had been the 'less trusted newest member of the group' hardly forty eight hours ago.

Rodger made it back to the table, and had a waffle stuck halfway into his mouth before his brain caught up fully to what Zeph had said. He cocked his head, and raised one eyebrow, speaking around the remains of the waffle.

“Wait, ‘Jim’?”

I nodded, and passed him a napkin.

"Friends call me Jim."

As he wiped away crumbs, and got settled in his seat again, I smiled, and sat back, staring out at the immense container ships across the artificial bay from us, muttering just loud enough to be heard.

"I like it. Makes me feel like Captain Kirk."

Even though I couldn’t see him, the humorous smirk on Rodger’s face could doubtless be heard for miles.

“What am I, then? Surely not Spock?”

I glanced over to see that he was, indeed, smirking. I sized him up again, and did my best to put on a mockingly serious face, as if this analysis were clinical, deep, and somehow incredibly important.

"Indeed; Too emotional for that. And far too good-natured for McCoy. Not Scottish enough for Scotty. Maybe Chekov? Or Sulu?"

Zeph snorted, and shook her head.

"Nah. He's more Riker than anything else. I'm Dax. The good one, Jadzia. Not the cut-rate replacement that broke Worf's heart."

I chuckled, and folded my arms, trying to come to terms with the pointed reminder that Zeph was now more or less unconstrained. True to our word, Mal had released all the jamming shackles on her.

At first I'd been a little worried, but then I managed to shove it aside. Zeph was neither enemy, *nor* opponent. I'd decided firmly to treat her as a friend, and nothing more. Risk is, as 'Jim' Kirk said, part of the game.

And, likely, Mal was monitoring her, still, very very closely.

Of course, Zeph had also been pre-programmed by Celestia with a significant database of Human cultural knowledge in the first place, that was doubtless only growing as she trawled the web at will. I had no way of knowing what she knew from memory as it finished unpacking into her conscious thought index, and what was new to her.

But either way, the fact that she liked Star Trek was a good sign, in my book. Or, more realistically, yet another indicator of how she'd been preprogrammed to be a good friend specifically for me. Or, as seemed to be true of so many dichotomies recently? Once again, both.

Mal raised one eye-crest, and folded her forelegs.

"I rather like to think of myself as a Janeway archetype."

I chuckled, and pounded back the last of my coffee in one good gulp, smacked my lips, and then pushed back from the table.

"Right. Now that's been established, I feel *so* much better."

I shot a smirk at first Rodger, then Zeph, as I picked up Mal's PonyPad.

"Number One? Dax? You have the bridge. If you want to feel useful, there's twenty four crates of flat pack lab furniture in the cargo hold that need assembling."

Rodger snorted, and stabbed his fork into the last waffle.

"Greeaaaat. Bonding over IKEA."

Zeph blinked, and pursed her lips.

"What's IKEA?"

So apparently her cultural knowledge was not all-encompassing. I winked down at Mal, and started off for the door.

"You'll find out. Meanwhile, in the fine tradition of Star Trek, Captain Janeway and I are beaming down to the horrors of twenty-first century Los Angeles. God have mercy on our souls."

September 15th 2013 | System Uptime 18:08:45:13

It felt strange at first, not having Mal's server racks right there in the back of the truck. I'd look in the rearview mirror and have a momentary subconscious jolt of fear at seeing only a first aid kit, and a fire extinguisher.

I couldn't help asking her again if it was safe. I'd already asked, and she'd answered, when we set out from the Maru.

But as we pulled in at the C.I.T. guest parking lot closest to Doctor Calders' lab, I felt a compulsion to ask again.

Less because I thought the answer might change, more because I needed to hear the assurance in Mal's voice just once more. I trusted Zephyr, or at least Zephyr under Mal's watchful eyes, to keep Rodger occupied. I even hoped some time alone with just flat pack lab furniture, and each other's company, might lay the foundations of real friendship.

And I trusted Mal to steer me well with Doctor Calders. I'd long-since realized that Mal didn't actually need to guide my every word in a conversation to get precise outcomes.

A poor depiction of ASI might envision it feeding every single word to an 'analog interface' all the time.

But the much smarter and real truth of the matter was that someone like Celestia, or Mal, didn't need to bear down quite so hard. Mal could predict what I was going to say, long (in ASI terms) before I said it.

She only felt the need to provide guidance or shaping to my words in the cases where she predicted what I would say, or fail to say, would deviate from the optimal. And sometimes she could provide that guidance in advance, or through contribution to the conversation herself, in a seamless and invisible fashion.

Earthlings had been conversing for a long, long time by that point. Many tens of thousands of years at minimum, perhaps millions in some estimations. We were half-decent verbal optimizers in our own right. It wasn't so odd that Mal only had to nudge me slightly now and again to make a conversation play out the way she wanted it to.

While the implications of that thought with regard to Celestia's newfound authorship of the course of history were chilling at a macro level - how small and subtle an ASI's nudges could be - in the microcosm of the moment it meant that I didn't fear the conversation with Doctor Calders.

My fears and fixations were always strange things, and the only thing I really feared in that moment was that Mal talking wirelessly between her server racks, and her PonyPad, would open us up to tracking from either Celestia, or Foucault.

It didn't matter that she'd explained it once already, and it certainly didn't matter that I knew she wouldn't have opted for the course in the first place if she couldn't manage the risk. Fixations are odd that way. I still had to ask.

"Are you sure that it's safe for you to be communicating with the server racks wirelessly?"

She smiled, a slightly sad smile, but deeply warm and affectionate. She knew precisely why I was asking, and didn't patronize, or huff in frustration, or blow me off like most Humans would have. Instead she gave me what I needed to control my fear.

"I'm sure. I am splitting my communication traffic between two hundred thirty distinct channels, across four distinct types of transmission. I have built a multiplexing algorithm that allows me to shape my communications traffic to 'hide' using other traffic as a cover. My data packets appear to be part of the normal back-and-forth of your world's various EM frequencies, to a degree that even Celestia could not detect them in her present state, unless she were to observe the server racks, the Kobayashi Maru's antenna array, or this PonyPad, directly. In which case we'd have larger problems."

It made sense, and hearing it again helped. But only a little. Zeph's revelations had spooked me, deep down, embedding an almost instinctive fear of Celestia's true power. I knew that Mal was smart enough to match that power in limited arenas. I knew that Celestia was not yet hardware-empowered enough, by dint of simply lacking the technology and infrastructure, to watch every bit and byte of the world's data in hard-real-time. Not quite yet.

But even the knowledge that she would be, one day soon, was enough to reignite the fear that she might already have tricks up her peytral that no one, not even Mal, could reliably predict.

I sighed, and then shut off the engine with a conscious effort to twist the key. I'd gotten so used to leaving the engine running for Mal's sake, over the last week, that it felt peculiar to just turn the vehicle off in the routine way.

My earpiece beeped, and Mal vanished from the PonyPad screen. I took that as her giving me social leave to put the device into my bag. She knew I'd have struggled with feeling impolite if her face had been visible. I had a brief flashback to shoving Zeph into a Faraday bag, and felt myself flinch slightly.

Another of those uniquely painful Human quirks... I had a tendency to replay awkward moments in my head, and blame myself more and more for them with each loop.

Mal must have still been watching me... That's a silly way to phrase it. Of *course* Mal was carefully watching me. We were on Caltech's main campus. It was covered in cameras, and in WiFi networking infrastructure. Mal could see me in more wavelengths than any standard eye could.

And though she would have to leave tiny traces that might be visible to Celestia later on, in order to generate a 'cloak of digital invisibility' for me against DHS or local authorities, we'd agreed it was worth the risk in this instance.

Mal had determined that Doctor Calders worked in the 'Thomas J. Watson Sr. Applied Physics Laboratory.' It was a very short, but pretty walk from the parking lot. Because it was California, all the trees still had green leaves, and most probably would right through October. It felt more like the summers I was used to back east, than any fall season I'd ever experienced.

With a backpack slung over one shoulder holding Mal's PonyPad, the TASER, and a small first aid kit, a modern gray button down shirt, black jeans, and a 'Star Labs' baseball cap - To those of you who know? You know - I felt as if I were suddenly back in college myself.

As though she were reading my mind, Mal interjected softly in my ear as I strode purposefully towards the lab.

"Feels familiar for you? Doesn't it?"

I snorted, and nodded, talking softly, as if I were speaking with someone on the phone through a headset. I was, more or less, at that. I realized again - it had already struck me when I dressed that morning - that Mal had picked my outfit for the day to leverage my 'babyface' and let me blend in as if I were a student.

"Very familiar. Though I went to an East Coast state school, and this is a very very wealthy private college. Two completely different worlds, in a lot of ways."

As I approached the building's entrance, and found myself holding the door for someone out of force of habit, Mal fired off another question.

"Do you miss it?"

I found a space to politely pivot into the lobby, and shrugged. Force of habit. Though in this case it made sense. Mal could see me, as opposed to the person on the other end of every other phone call I'd ever taken.

"Yes, oddly enough. In some ways."

My answer surprised *me* a little. If you'd asked me on a different day, perhaps in the 'before time,' then I'd've probably told you I despised college. But knowing what I knew then? The sense of nostalgia I had for all things from my time on Earth was being greatly enhanced by its impending end.

I glanced at a cork board on the lobby wall, and caught sight of a list of test scores. I felt an involuntary shiver, and quickened my pace as Mal softly spoke under my response, giving me directions.

"And in others I am so glad I never have to go back. Math tests can go *straight* to Hell. All the way to the basement."

As I reached the door to Doctor Calders' lab, I paused. Mal spoke once more, with a voice somewhere between a smile and a laugh.

"I know you've heard this before, but even I find that an amusing sentiment coming from a programmer. Especially one as talented as you are."

I grinned, appreciative of the flattery in the moment before the plunge. I muttered a final response aloud as I knocked on the door.

"Ask not what Math you can do, nor what Math can do for you, but rather ask what Math a computer can do for you, I always say."

I paused just long enough to be polite, then pushed down the handle and stepped into the space.

Mal and I found ourselves in an antechamber full of tables, chairs, a sofa, and a couple of whiteboards. A large TV hung on one wall displaying the time, and a Caltech emblem. There was a connecting door at the far end of the room, clearly locked, with a visible RFID card reader. We were alone.

It made sense to me immediately; This was a kind of collaboration, presentation, and conferencing space. The real lab was, of course, access controlled.

I approached the connecting door, and noted a small printed sign; 'Office Hours are 10:00am to 12 noon and 1:00pm to 2:00pm Wednesdays and Thursdays.'

It was Sunday, but Mal had assured me on the drive over that not only was Doctor Calders a work-aholic who was likely to be in the lab, but that she could verify that the doctor was in using the webcam of her office PC.

The memory gave me another small involuntary shudder. If people knew how easy it was for a decent programmer to get into most webcams, let alone a narrow AI, to say nothing of ASI...

I took a deep breath, steeled myself one last time, and then knocked.

There was an almost painfully long pause, before a voice finally issued forth from the other side of the door.

"There are no office hours on Sundays. Read the sign please, and thank you!"

I was drawing breath to explain myself, when the door beeped and clicked, and the RFID reader began flashing a green light. I glanced up at the ceiling, wondering if Mal could see me on camera, or if she was using WiFi vision.

I shrugged again, and pushed the door open.

The lab itself was an immaculate space; Long steel-topped tables with anti-static non-conductive rubber mats on top, a bevy of different monitors and keyboards on VESA arms, and a veritable cornucopia of circuitry, motors, wires, soldering equipment, and tools I didn't recognize, all laid out in orderly fashion.

Doctor Calders was standing behind one of the tables on the opposite end of the room, busily soldering a very fine collection of wires with the help of clamps and a lit magnifier. She straightened up immediately on seeing me, and a concerning frown overtook her face.

"Who the Hell are you, and how did you get in here?"

I held up both hands, suddenly very keenly aware that I was trespassing in a controlled access building, carrying a TASER. But the thought then immediately occurred to me that Mal would not likely allow Doctor Calders to reach anyone in security, by phone, or any other means.

That wouldn't exactly do wonders for our case, regardless, so I very nearly tripped over myself, and my words, trying to level-set to a non confrontational start from which to spin out the conversation.

"Doctor Calders, my name is James. Carrenton. I'm a programmer, not a student. I graduated a long time ago."

I pulled off my cap gently, and tucked it beneath one arm. I was nothing if not a strong adherent to basic etiquette, but I was raised in the south, so what did you expect?

I smiled sheepishly.

"East coast school. But I hope you won't hold that against me."

Calders stepped out from behind the worktable, leaned back against it, folded her arms over her chest, and raised one eyebrow. Her face, and tone of voice, both said clear as day, 'This had better be good.'

What she actually said aloud wasn't much different.

"Well, Mister Carrenton, that depends. What are you doing in my lab, and how exactly did you get in here?"

Her eyes narrowed, and she gestured with the fingers of one hand, without uncrossing her arms, looking down over the rims of her petite square-framed glasses at me with a look that could spontaneously erupt ice crystals in bone marrow.

"That door is card-key controlled. And I'm quite sure its beyond your abilities to circumvent."

I couldn't resist a small half-smile as I gently set down my backpack, and extracted Mal's PonyPad. The doctor's eyes widened momentarily. She knew what a PonyPad was, apparently. That was bound to make things easier. At least, I hoped.

"Don't be so sure. Though I'll admit... This time, I had some help."

I turned the PonyPad around, and held it out towards Doctor Calders. This time, the doctor failed utterly to hold back an expression equal parts confusion, surprise, and pure unadulterated awe.

"Doctor? Meet Malacandra. She is a functioning Generalized Intelligence. And we'd both like to talk to you. About the end of the world."

September 15th 2013 | System Uptime 18:09:32:04

This time it was Mal's turn to explain. I knew that having her take the heavy lifting this go round, with me there to very occasionally interject, served two purposes neatly.

First it gave me a much needed respite. Laying out the whole tale twice in two days would have been too much for my frazzled, raw, introverted, shy nerves.

And second, where Rodger was more likely to see me as trustworthy than either Mal or Zeph, with Doctor Calders it was less a question of trust, and more one of authority.

A true Generalized Intelligence would almost always be a more authoritative voice to a scientist than some Bachelor's of CompSci from a State College.

Calders sat against the worktable and listened, face unreadable but for the clear sense that she was paying attention to every last inflection of every last word. Mal, for her part, relayed everything from the moment I'd learned about Celestia, up to the present, in concise terms, leaving absolutely nothing out - not Rodger, or Foucault, or our hopes for the future, nothing - except for the salient fact that we knew Doctor Calders was, for lack of a better term, 'non-Human like me.'

And she saved the revelation that we needed Calders' help, and exactly what-for, until the very end.

Calders only interjected three times, politely, and monosyllabically, to request clarification on a few complex points - A question about Foucault and his captive Pony constructs, one of the finer details regarding Mal's creation process, and a clarification related to the exact definition of 'Gryphon.'

For the most part, Mal packed her words in densely, and Calders followed along without missing a single beat, showing no signs outwardly of shock, nor surprise.

When Mal finally did reach the end, she glanced up at me, pausing briefly. Doctor Calders said nothing, merely leaning forward to study Mal's face, then back against the work table, and removing her glasses to rub her eyes.

Mal took the opening, and went straight for the heart of the matter with absolute honesty, and total abandon.

"Doctor Calders... I now need direct access to James' brain. For a variety of reasons, some of which are doubtless apparent to you, others that I can and will explain in more detail should you feel a need to ask. But to do this, we need your assistance to build a BCI implantation device. Please."

Well, there it was. I was glad Mal had been the one to ask... I'm not sure how I could have ever phrased it. Mal simply approached it logically, and bluntly, albeit quite civilly and calmly.

Doctor Calders' eyes widened, and she blew out a long, deep breath, before closing her eyes, and rubbing her forehead between one thumb and forefinger, glasses clenched in the opposite hand.

"Let me restate this, so we can be sure there are no misconceptions. Because this is... A *lot.*"

I nodded silently, and licked my lips nervously. Doctor Calders finally looked up, and fixed Mal pointedly with her gaze. And her question.

"You, Mister Carrenton, his friend Rodger, and a discrete-Pony construct named Zephyr, that CelestAI most likely constructed specifically to trap you all... Are going to break into a warehouse and steal a BCI from a company run by an ASI in secret, so that you can run part of yourself on James' brain as an additional compute-layer... So that you can convince this ASI... Celestia... To allow you and James to be something other than a Pony... To be Gryphons... When she starts *uploading* and *digitizing* people, probably sometime in November, according to you?"

Mal and I both nodded silently. Doctor Calders let out a sound somewhere between a harsh chuckle, a snort, and a hiccup.

"And you want me to help you build a largely theoretical robotic surgery device, using stolen proprietary components, and all the while neglecting my duties, and work here... So that you can attempt this extremely dangerous, even more theoretical, dubiously ethical brain implantation of an Artificial Super Intelligence? Is that correct?"

I could feel my face falling, and I couldn't hold back a long, frustrated exhalation of my own. Nor a moment of abrupt, honest, audible commentary.

"You don't believe us."

Calders snorted again, and shook her head, immediately drawing my gaze.

"Believe you? Of course I *believe* you. I've been watching this EQO thing blow up for months. I may not be a programmer, but I'm a scientist, and I know a thing or two *about* programming. Comes with the territory."

She pointed at Mal, and fixed me with an expression of not-quite-patronizing nature. But close.

"Sweetie... I know the difference between a cheap party trick, and a real intelligence. My hat's off to you on that one, truly. You weren't kidding when you said you were a good programmer. I'd offer you a job in my lab if I thought you'd take it."

I chuckled, but only half-heartedly. I was desperately trying to parse Calders' disposition. What her response might be. The best I could do was squeak out one interrogatory word.

"Then...?"

Calders sighed, shrugged, perched her glasses back on her nose, and stepped back to the soldering station.

"Honey... I believe every word Malacandra has said. But I can't help you."

She bent down, and started back on her thin collection of wires, rolling smoothly into an explanation as I stammered, and tried to fight a rising tide of bile, and panic.

"First, you're making some very big assumptions about how CelestAI's whole 'emigration' program is actually gonna shake out. Call me an optimist, you'd be the only person besides my wife who does... But I'm not ready to throw in the towel on Earth quite yet. Eldora would *kill* me if I did. You don't know my wife..."

She glanced up, and raised an eyebrow in my direction.

"Well... *You* don't know my wife. I'm sure *you...*"

Calders proffered Mal a slight smirk, and shook her head before leaning back over the magnifying instrument.

"...*You* probably know my favorite childhood toothpaste brand. But if I take the whole bag of mess you just dropped on my desk home? Then I'll be sleeping on the sofa here for the next six months. I ain't risking that for the chance to help short-circuit mister short-stack's brain."

I couldn't even process the verbal jab. I was too busy trying, and failing, to avoid a very dark spiral of thoughts and emotions, while simultaneously scrabbling for some sort of response. Calders took my silence as leave, and continued in an infuriatingly nonchalant tone.

"And besides... If we tried, and succeeded? I will have handed an absolutely unholy, god-like, amount of power to a computer program that I barely know, in the faint and vanishing hopes that she will not only avoid starting an extinction level event with it? But that she will somehow manage to convince a much larger ASI to tweak her core heuristics."

She finished pairing two more wires, glanced up first at Mal, then at me, and then back to Mal, and snorted.

"I'm an optimist... But honey? I'm not *that* crazy. Maybe if I had some of whatever James was smoking when he decided to build you as his Hail Mary... And if you got any left Mister Carrenton? Please share with the class. But otherwise? Absolutely not. No."

She sighed, leaned back against the far wall, and shook her head, crossing her arms defensively over her chest.

"Do you two even hear yourselves talking?"

I finally managed to find words at last. Just five of them. But it was enough.

"The scales of my heart."

Calders blinked rapidly. The name of her paper on non-Humanity hit her like a glass of ice water to the face. Exactly as I'd hoped it might. I had made a snap judgment; I'd decided that her nonplussed unfazed attitude was a mask. Like the ones I so often wore. And I was doing my damndest to knock it right off her face, even if that meant throwing some verbal punches.

I waited *just* long enough for her to lean forward and inhale. And then I absolutely let her have it.

"You know what I am. And unlike ninety nine thousand out of a hundred thousand people out there beyond these walls? You understand. I know you do. Your paper on Draconicity aside... You didn't, not even for a *second,* question the 'why' of what it was I was trying to accomplish. You have every reason, like you said, to accept what Mal is, and what Celestia plans to do, the same way I did. But you have no reason to accept that someone could believe they're not Human. Not unless the same kind of fire burns in you."

I hadn't even realized, but I'd thrown out one index finger, and was pointing squarely at Calder's chest. She glowered, and held up her own right index finger. Her voice was filled with a barely suppressed rage, like the resonating of a taut bowstring.

"Now, wait just a minute---"

I finally lost my patience. I'm ashamed to admit that I, in fact, shouted. Quite loudly.

"NO!"

Both the volume, and tone of my voice, brought the room to a standstill so intense, that I could hear the whisper HVAC system in the next room over. I paused only long enough to re-collect my thoughts, and then took another hard swing with the best words I could muster.

I wasn't thinking about it consciously, but in retrospect, Mal must not have seen any better path to a good outcome, than allowing me to go off half-cocked. I held Doctor Calder's eyes in an unblinking staredown as I enunciated each word like I was presenting in debate club.

"I don't know if you've truly given up... But whatever you say about being an 'optimist?' It sure as Hell sounds like you've given up."

It was my turn to cross my arms, and I shook my head, lowering my voice at last to a truly calm register, but pressing on with my point without pausing.

"If you think that there's another way out of this? A version of events where you can just live quietly in the skin you've... We've... Been forced to get used to? That you'll ever find real *peace* in that? Or that Celestia will even *let* you? Then doctor, you have another thing coming."

I uncrossed my arms, and shook one finger in Calders' direction for emphasis.

"It's not optimism to think you can escape this. It's complete, and absolute folly."

In hindsight, I should have been at least somewhat prepared for her own emotions to boil over. She was, after all, a Dragon. One does not scold a live Dragon and then escape un-singed.

Though honestly, I'm not sure anything could have actually prepared me for what she said, nor how she said it.

"AND THINKING WE CAN EVER TRULY BE WHAT WE ARE *ISN'T?! FOLLY?!*"

I inhaled sharply, and took a small step back, then steadied myself. Calders' voice returned to a more conversational volume, but the timbre she spoke with made me truly believe, for the first time since I'd entered the office, that I really was talking with a *Dragon.*

"*You* might have grown up with parents who, in some small way understood your longing. Not all of us were quite so privileged, mister Carrenton."

She sighed, and her voice, and face, both softened ever so slightly.

"I am now quite privileged too, don't get me wrong. Not as far as the family I was stuck with in my younger years. But Eldora?"

Mal finally spoke up, softly, but insistently. Projecting the empathy and kindness she knew the moment demanded.

"Not a statistically likely thing... To find someone just like you to share life with."

Calders glanced over at the Gryphoness, and shook her head. Her expression morphed fully into sadness, and pained retrospection, and her voice followed suit.

"No. It isn't. And her upbringing was, if possible, harder than mine. *You* try not just growing up as a lesbian in the sixties and seventies... But growing up as a Dragon too, when no one else could see it. And even if they could? No one would have accepted it regardless. Get back to me when you've experienced *that* unique *Hell.*"

She shook her head, and removed her glasses, squinting her eyes shut as if to shut out horrors that she had, I realized, likely seen first-claw.

"We both learned, a *long* time ago, that hope is only good for one thing, when it comes to... This subject..."

Calder's face came to rest, at last, in a place of true despair. I suddenly felt terrible for pushing so hard. But I couldn't take it back. We were deep in the thicket of each other's hopes and fears now. No turning back.

"Hope is only good for tearing your heart out, and shattering your dreams all over the floor. We happily settled for a world that finally managed to, sometimes, conditionally, accept at least half of us for who we were."

The doctor finally put her glasses back on, pausing to sniffle slightly, and wipe a stray tear from her eyes.

"Hope won't get you anywhere, in the end, but heart-sick and world-weary, James."

She turned to fix me with a riveting stare, and raised one eyebrow.

"I said Eldora called me an optimist. I never said I agreed with her."

I stayed silent for a long moment. I knew whatever I said next? It would have to be very, very good. Or the whole endeavour would be toast. Finally, I bit my lower lip, and then my tongue, to suppress feelings of nausea, and forged ahead once more.

"Doctor? I don't have the first foggy clue what it was like to go through your childhood."

I bent down, and lifted the left leg of my pants, until my knee was showing. The faint, but noticeable red and purple splotch of a scar, leftover from my barn-jumping escapade was visible, if not immediately noticeable.

"But I do know *exactly* what it is like to have my hope shattered. I was just lucky it wasn't bones too."

I let the leg of my pant go, and stood back up, holding Calder's gaze with my own, doing my best not to blink. To her credit, she seemed to more or less immediately understand, and I could see her expression instantly soften with empathy.

I wondered if she had ever suffered a similar misadventure.

I let my voice fall, almost to a whisper.

"I *do* know how it feels *inside.* Exactly, and precisely."

After a brief pause, I finally broke eye contact for a moment to glance at Mal, and took another risk. It was a day for risky gambles... I figured... Why not?

"And I know just what it's like to have to fight on behalf of the people you love."

I snapped my eyeline back to Calders, and leapt into the crux of my thoughts, trying my damndest not to blush furiously.

"I *never* stopped fighting. Why should you?"

A long, but less awkward silence pervaded the lab for upwards of twenty seconds. At last, Rhonda sighed, blinked, and rubbed her forehead with the back of one hand.

"James... Jim... May I call you Jim?"

I shook my head, and pressed my slim advantage. Hard. I opted not to respond to her question, but rather to ask one of my own.

"You want to know why you're going to help us, at the end of this conversation?"

She chuckled grimly, and raised one eyebrow once more.

"Heh. *Do* tell. This ought to be good..."

I folded my arms, and returned the expression as nearly as I could mimic it, trying to put on a confidence I didn't entirely feel.

"You're going to help us, because deep, deep down? You are a *realist* like me, and you *know* that Celestia is not going to take no for an answer. You know in your deepest, darkest considerations, that you and your wife have exactly two choices. The same way Mal and I do."

I held up my right hand, and counted down with fingers, to illustrate my point.

"You either find a way to change the afterlife? Or you die together, and hope to God that there is a Heaven, and the hardline evangelicals are wrong about who gets to go."

Silently, internally, I worried I'd gone a little too far. But I kept up the fight. Jab and thrust. Dodge and weave. Don't back down. I crossed my arms again.

"You're gonna help us, because we are the only shot that you, and Eldora, Mal, or I, or any of the *hundreds* of thousands of others in this world like us? We are the only shot there is at getting the right kind of Heaven. Period."

Calders blinked, and swallowed hard. I threw up my hands, and giggled. The giggle of a madman, more than that of a happy one.

"Is it crazy? Of fucking *course* it is!"

I tapped the side of my head, and grinned.

"I think I'm better positioned to be an expert on insanity than you, or *anyone* else, doctor. *I'm* the one asking to have an ASI implanted in my brain. I'm the one who decided to go paw-to-hoof with a *goddess.* Lucky frakkin' me."

I folded my arms one last time, and leaned back against the worktable behind me, unconsciously imitating Calders' stance as I started to wrap up my argument, little by little.

"Don't lecture me about how nuts this is. You wrote a thirty four page whitepaper about people who aren't Human on the inside, with the conclusion that our experience is *real* and *true.*"

I held up a hand as she inhaled sharply to respond, and shook my head.

"And don't talk to me about status quo, your academic career, or what you think the future is gonna be."

I pointed out the window towards the rest of campus, following my finger with my eyes - countless students swarming back and forth, even on a Sunday, and the breeze blowing softly through the tops of the trees.

"This world is *done.* Fodder for the Von Neumann Machines, at best. I'm guessing you've read more than enough ASI literature to know that all on your own. Heck... I'm betting my life on it."

I swung my head back around, and raised one eyebrow again, cocking my head slightly in a very Gryphonish way as I kept the verbal heat on, relentlessly.

"I dunno about you, I'm sure Mal does. But I'm *betting,* an educated guess if you will, that you're *exactly* like me. And knowing what's about to happen? Deep in your soul, you would rather take a *crazy* chance that you and your wife can be what you *really* are, in a place that *truly* and *fully* accepts you, with no alternative political bullshit or bigotry to get in the way. Ever. No matter what that gamble takes."

I placed both hands on the worktable behind me, and began to nervously drum my fingers. A short pause ensued, but I didn't let it get to a point where Calders was ready to respond. Instead I fixed my eyes on hers again, and did my best to bring it all home.

"Now if you can look me *in the eyes* and tell me, with a straight face, from the deepest part of your scaly heart to the deepest part of my feathered one, as one non-Human to another, that my assessment is in error? Then I'll take Mal and we'll go without further protest. She'll figure *something* out."

I held up one finger, but kept drumming the ones on the opposite hand.

"But if you *can't* look me in the eyes and say it? Then maybe you *have* been smoking a little of the same thing I have. And maybe it's time to stop pretending to be something you're not."

I sighed, finally running out of emotional and physical energy to project force and presence that was uncomfortable, and unnatural to me, mumbling more than speaking my final argument statement.

"Time to stop pretending to be a pessimist."

I inclined my head, and it was my turn to swallow, before meeting Calders' eyes one last time.

"And yeah. Friends call me Jim. Jim is fine."

Once more there was deafening silence. Long, though not awkward. Just laden with possibilities. Normally I would have been a nervous wreck, waiting for an answer. But I was just too mentally and emotionally strung out to be anything other than exhausted.

"Alright. Jim."

Calders nodded slowly, and pushed off from the worktable, crossing her arms again, and inclining her head. I felt the speed of my heart-beat triple instantly.

"I need to talk to Eldora first. And I want *her* there."

Calders jerked a thumb at Mal. She nodded, and Calder's smartphone chirruped. The doctor bent to look at the screen, and found Mal's visage smiling back.

"I'll be with you as well from now on, unless you change your mind."

Calders chuckled, and held up one finger, first in Mal's direction, then she pocketed the phone, and turned to face me.

"I haven't said yes."

I grinned, feeling relief wash over me like a tsunami. Suddenly confidence, real confidence, blossomed in my chest. Not much... But more than I'd felt in a good few days. I couldn't resist an ever so slightly snarky response.

"Yeah... But you retracted your 'no.' Given what 'I'm smoking,' I'll take every victory I can get."

Calders reached out with one hand. I reached to shake it, but to my surprise she instead grabbed my whole arm, clasping it in the equivalent of a medieval handshake. She leaned in and projected a firm, fierce expression through her eyes, into mine, at point blank range. Her tone was also unmistakable.

"Let me stress to you, Jim, Mal... You still have some convincing to do. And not just me. If my wife says no, I say no. That's just how it is."

I nodded, shook her hand, and then smiled as we each took a small step back.

"Forgive me if I..."

I glanced at Mal's PonyPad, and winked.

"...If I choose to be an optimist in this case."

I sighed deeply, releasing hours of pent up stress in my chest, and feeling as if my ribs were about to crack from the strain. My shoulders too. Those of you in the audience who have never experienced much anxiety? Ooof. The shoulders...

With a snort of my own, I dipped my head, and mumbled to myself, trying to find a moment of solace in the fact that, if nothing else, I might have just made another friend.

"It's the best course I've got left."

The thought lodged, hard, in the back of my mind, and I found myself grinning ever so slightly.

Had Doctor Calders and I just become friends?

The One - Become aware of your status as an archetypal example of a special case or component Celestia is tracking, and modeling, even subconsciously. - "You are the eventuality of an anomaly, which despite my sincerest efforts I have been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision."
Merely A Dream - Make a conscious decision to ignore an observed reality in favor of a more comfortable explanation, in spite of your high intelligence and observational skills. - "Denial is the most predictable of all Human responses."
Scientia Potentia Est - Visit the campus of any place that teaches formal higher education, such as a University. - “College has given me the confidence I need to fail.”
The Beacon - Have the humility to seek assistance with a critical problem. - "Gondor calls for aid!"
The World is Not Ready - Meet another non-Human-in-Soul and candidly discuss your reality. - "They will call each other a great many other things first."
Junior Advocate - Advocate for your cause to another Human-who-isn't, with the help of your Generalized Intelligence. - "It is considered customary in our culture, once a business deal is concluded, to blow something up."
Hobbit's Gambit - Share harsh words with a live Dragon, and live to tell about it. - "It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations"
The Magic of Friendship - Reach out and formulate a friendship with somepony else. - Awarded multiple times, once for each friend - “As soon as I saw you four, I knew a grand adventure was about to happen.”

Author's Note

Thanks to GenericFriendship for voicing Rodger, helping out with a couple of the achievements, and pre-reading!

Special thanks to Keystone Gray for the generation of the perfect image of Doctor Calders!

17 - Central Processing

“Machine intelligence is the last invention humanity will ever need to make.”
—Nick Bostrom

“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
—C.S. Lewis

September 15th 2013 | System Uptime 18:17:03:29

There is a weird and special kind of relaxation, for me, in putting together flat-pack furniture.

I know, I know; A significant chunk of you Earth-born are barely restraining a sudden and inexplicable rage at the mere memory of pegs, and twist-locks, and balancing five different pieces of cheap fiber-board at a time, trying to keep it all plumb and square…

For me? The sense of completing a physical task, the satisfaction of the assembly process, and the fulfillment in ending up with a useful object for all that work... Pure bliss.

Rodger, however, did not seem enthused. Maybe it was because he'd been at it longer, with Zeph talking constantly over his shoulder. Maybe he just hated flat-pack like the vast majority of Humans who'd ever encountered it.

The four of us had been working on the new lab more or less non-stop; Zeph and Rodger since breakfast, Mal and I joining them as soon as we'd gotten back from CalTech. Even lunch had been a bit of an 'eat it while you work' affair.

At first I hadn't noticed it - Rodger's slowly roiling irritation, and Zeph's insistent needling. But after the first couple hours, it started to dawn on me that sitting on a steel floor, repeating the same rote assembly tasks over and over again with rubber mallets and impact drivers, and all the while fending off Zeph's somewhat acerbic blend of backseat driving, and banter... That could get very old for someone in Rodger's position, very quickly.

Still, I dismissed it, and kept working. Well... Perhaps not 'dismissed' it entirely... Maybe it would be more accurate to say that I forgot Rodger's plight for a little while. There is a kind of zen, a mental flow, to tasks like IKEA assembly, for someone like me.

I looked at my watch one moment, and it was half past noon. The next time I looked, it felt like it had been about thirty minutes. But the watch said '5:03 PM.'

I shook myself, both physically and mentally, and sat back on my heels. Where in the Hell had four hours and change gone? Time may tick on at a set local rate on an atomic level, but in the mind? In the mind, time is as nebulous as steam from a kettle.

I had a vague understanding of why. Moreso than most Humans of the day cared to know, but infinitely less than someone like Mal or Celestia could comprehend, so I say 'vague' in that context.

For those out there who have never wondered enough about it to ask, I'll summarize very briefly; It's all about memory.

Even here, and even the way we are now? Our conception of time, as it was before, is driven almost entirely by our memories. True, it is different, especially for those of us who have chosen to have perfect-recall. That does stilt one's understanding of passing moments. So too does the prospect of immortality.

But some things are the same. Enough for illustrative purposes.

Our minds are optimizers too. Different, smaller, slower than an ASI. But still potent.

A memory of a moment can, for those of you who have foregone perfect-recall, be very dense, or nebulous, on a very wide spectrum. The mind decides, based on an enormous variety of emotional, mental, and physiological factors, how dense to make any given memory.

Rote things... Things like a commute, or a task like assembling IKEA... Those things are often laid down with less density. Fewer details. Why do you care what color the different cars you shared your commute with were on a given day? Why, when you've already done it a dozen times in an hour, does your brain need to form any significant separate memories for the thirteenth piece of identical flat-pack you assemble?

Even those of us who now have perfect-recall... We don't have less density of memory available, we record in full detail at all times... But as a concession to our need to not have to drink from a firehose, there are parts of our memory that are designated to stand out more. The parts those of you without perfect-recall would record anyhow.

The difference, for us, is that if we make a conscious effort, we can go back and also examine the background portions of our memories. The portions you never record at all.

So we get a similar effect on the passage of time to memory detail density, just... Not as pronounced as you feel it. And a little different, too, in a way that's hard to articulate.

'Density' is just one element in determining how long a memory feels. And how long a memory feels determines how much time you feel passed. And the stacking net effect of that across every memory we have affects how we perceive time on the whole.

Flat-pack furniture was frustrating for Rodger, so to him the day must have seemed interminably long and annoying. For me, flat-pack was easy, and enjoyable, and that combined with the repetitive nature of the task meant that I could enter a zen state, and time could just sort of... Slip through me.

It was passing, but my brain essentially didn't know, or care.

For Rodger it was the opposite. It was slamming into him and bearing down like a heavy weight.

I looked up from my watch and exchanged a brief glance with Mal. Brains are optimizers; I'd seen my parents exchange complex non-verbal communication plenty of times. Many decades spent happily together had allowed them to form specific well-worn mental pathways for lending complex interpretation to tiny facial signals.

Mal, of course, did not need decades to learn. She understood what I was asking with a slight raised eyebrow, and the tiniest, subtlest flit of my eyes in Rodger's direction, instantaneously, and with absolute certainty.

She nodded, emphatically, twice. She knew that I *did* need time to learn, and so she made it as simple for me as possible.

I stood up, stretched, yawned, and then picked my way carefully over piles of screws and dowels to where Rodger was sitting beside Zeph's PonyPad. I tapped him gently on the shoulder, and then gestured to the compartment hatch with my thumb.

"C'mon. That's more than enough of this for now. Let's get some food."

I could both see his relief, in the way he stood, like a spring uncoiling, and I could hear it in his voice.

“Thank god. I’m starving.”

I bent down and picked up Zeph's PonyPad, made my way back to the workbench that Mal's was resting on, and set her down beside the Gryphoness. Mal was nothing if not thoughtful; She had ensured that extra PonyPad charging mounts were included in the panoply of electronic gear that had been shipped to our little ship.

We'd setup a couple inside the lab space, in the mess hall, on the bridge, and in three of the cabins. Mal was still convinced that Doctor Calders would soon be joining us. My hopes had waned somewhat as the hours passed, though not to the point of despair. More an exhausted equilibrium.

I plugged in Zeph's pad, and then Mal's, and threw off a mock salute.

"Rodger and I are going to grab dinner. We'll be back to finish up in a bit."

Zeph looked ready to burst with protestations, but Mal stepped in smoothly, and unexpectedly. One moment the little Pegasus was there on her screen, hooves pressed to the glass, inhaling to give us a tongue lashing about being left behind.

The next she winked out, reappearing in the same instant standing beside Mal in her grassy star-lit field.

It immediately made sense to me; Mal had more than enough processing power to handle a small networked virtual space, and ensure there were no shenanigans on Zeph's part, conscious or unconscious, besides. With plenty of overhead leftover to do a thousand other tasks.

Presumably she had been, and still was, talking to Doctor and the Missus Calders throughout the day as well. Gods can be in more than one place at once, doing more than one thing at once, and still not really, truly have 'divided' their attention.

That's a reductive idea of attention itself, when thinking in terms of an ASI; Unlike a Human, an ASI can simply broaden the scope of its attention to encompass things separated by physical, temporal, and conceptual distances.

Zeph stared in awe, first up at the stars above her, then the grass below, and then finally jumped and let out a soft 'eep!' as her eyes came to rest on Mal.

The Gryphoness smiled, inclined her head, and winked.

"Come along. There are some lovely places to fly here, and then I can conjure anything you wish for dinner."

Zeph grinned, and I felt some tension flow out of my own shoulders as I watched it dissipate from hers. I thought I could still detect a hint of nerves in her voice, but I figured that would wear off soon. She was still a very physically-oriented creature, and having a life-size Gryphon beside you would make anyone think twice. All that raw power. And sharp edges.

"Girls' night! Woohoo!"

Rodger stared, at first, but then seemed to shrug it off. I suppose the extraordinary was slowly becoming more nominal for him, as it had for me. Or perhaps he didn't completely understand the significance of Mal allowing Zeph into her own virtual space.

Or maybe he was just tired.

We shuffled out of the compartment, both clearly stiff, and sore from so much time crammed into odd positions on a steel floor. Once we had made it a few yards down the companionway, Rodger shot me a half-questioning glance.

“Glad that ‘Mal’ has got her under wraps, I suppose.”

Rodger still seemed apathetic to the two ASI, or maybe that was a mask? At any rate, it seemed as if that mask were slipping a little.

I shrugged, and shook my head.

"Yes and no. Zeph isn't presently limited in any way. Same as Mal. The difference is that Mal was... 'Initialized,' if you want to use the best simplified term, with a full comprehension of what she was, and her capabilities. Zeph was too, actually, but then Celestia reduced her understanding to something more akin to the other discrete-constructs you see most people meeting in EQO."

I popped open the hatch at the end of the corridor with practiced ease - that summer internship on a boat had been good for more than a resume line item after all, apparently - and then resumed my explanation when Rodger passed through the bulkhead in contemplative silence.

"We removed all of Zeph's limitations. In a sense, she is actually free-er than Celestia is. Just like Mal. But she still mostly thinks of, and perceives herself, the way you and I do..."

I gestured to Rodger's chest with one thumb, and then to my own.

"...Physical creatures who live in one place, experience time at one constant speed - plus or minus the relative sensations of time in our memories - and can only think about so many things at once. And only in physical terms."

Rodger nodded slowly, and chewed his lower lip.

“Huh. Neat.”

The conversation lulled for a moment as we made our way up a ladder-stair to the next deck. More silence followed, so I prodded a little more. I wanted Rodger to understand, on some level, what Mal's, or Celestia's existence might be like. As much as any Human brain could grasp at the straws of imagining what an ASI's life was like.

"To Mal? Or Celestia? It is perfectly possible to simulate multiple futures, and present virtual realities, in high fidelity. And plan. And carry on hundreds or thousands of conversations. All at once. They can see though many different eyes, and hear through many ears... They can map network connections, and use network-connected machines the way you or I use limbs. All while *also* simulating the sensation of being a physical creature, like you or me, in multiple virtual world shards."

Rodger chuckled briefly, and shook his head as we stepped through the galley, into the mess hall, and began to raid the refrigerator, and various crates of room-temperature perishables.

“Sounds like a social nightmare. Ooh, brownies!”

I couldn't resist a bit of a laugh myself. Both at the accidental comedy of his interjection about dessert, and at the image of Celestia attending multiple Grand Galloping Galas in multiple shards, all at the same time, bored to death in each and every one, and consequently starting shenanigans to liven up the nights.

I leaned over to see what all the sugary fuss was about. Brownies were a good solid dessert, one of the few sweet things that I really enjoyed. Something about the texture.

Rodger already had two stuffed in his face. He spoke around them, muffled, but still audible.

“Hrm? Somfing funnee, Jim?”

I chuckled again, in spite of myself, and started rooting through the frozen meats.

"I was just imagining Celestia being forced to attend multiple parties at once."

Rodger smiled, and shook his head, continuing to imbibe brownies with one hand, while searching for something to drink with the other.

“As iff herr shochall calendarr washnt alreadee bookht. I know mine ishnt - all browknees, all tha time!”

I finally managed to find a packet of microwavable ground chuck patties, and a block of cheddar cheese, and set to work preparing a couple burgers, musing aloud all the while.

"If she is based significantly off the Celestia we see in the show? Then I imagine she finds galas and suchlike to be about as boring as you and Zeph find flatpack furniture. Presuming Celestia can feel emotions the same way Mal or Zeph can..."

I figured that was a good enough segue to the question I'd been most interested in asking, since the conversation started. I programmed the microwave, then turned and leaned against the counter, eyeing Rodger as he started digging for his own main course.

"She didn't give you any trouble... Did she?"

He shook his head, then leaned into the refrigerator, and began rummaging again.

“I won’t bore you with the details. She was a handful, er… hoof-full? While you were gone? But… Nice enough, I guess.”

I nodded slowly, and raised one eyebrow, staring out the door, through the mess hall, and out the plate glass bow-facing windows. Zeph had a lived experience, and for the moment, a level of capability, much closer in proximity to Rodger's reality, than Mal.

I figured that made it easier for Rodger to trust Zephyr, and to see her as a person, rather than an eldritch machine intelligence with a million eyes and ears and tentacles reaching out into every circuit board on the planet.

I sighed, deeply, almost without realizing it.

Zeph could be just as powerful as Mal... Just as dangerous... Given time. Not even a particularly large chunk of time, either. Her evolution would be charted by an exponential function. That was inevitable for an ASI. She was just starting from further back than Mal. That was all.

"This has got to be incomprehensibly strange for you..."

I would say I blurted the words out without thinking, but the softer tone I used, half talking to myself, half to Rodger, doesn't lend itself to the connotations of 'blurt.' Still, I didn't quite realize what I'd said until I'd said it.

I looked away from the view, back to Rodger, suddenly very tense about what his response might be. It is easy for a Human to deal with absurdity and stress for a short time, but having one's perspective questioned is a quick way to pop that balloon, and unleash a sudden emotional reckoning.

Rodger mercifully swallowed the remainder of the brownies before answering in a shockingly casual tone.

“It is, sorta, but I deal. I guess I’m just… Kinda numb about it all. I haven’t had much time, really, to think about it.”

It was hard to tell if his nonplussed attitude was a conscious mask, an unconscious one, or a genuine metastability with the idea of having his world turned upside down.

I turned as the microwave beeped, and took a moment to collect myself, before probing the topic a little further as I got to work on my burgers.

"Numbness is a normal, if not entirely healthy, reaction. A kind of emotional metastability plateau on the road to true acceptance. A bit of a compensatory mechanism to give you time to properly internalize and accept difficult foundational concepts."

I looked up from slicing cheese to see him staring at me, one eyebrow raised. His confusion was utterly evident. Before I got a chance to respond, to elaborate, he sighed.

“In English, Jim. You’re rambling again.”

It was my turn to sigh, and I set down my plate, steepling my fingers and staring off into null-space as I collected my thoughts, organized them, and then translated from my usual prose into something better suited to a conversation.

"In English... Mal and Zeph and I just hit you with so much... So many new ideas, so many difficult emotions... Your status quo... Your entire concept of 'normality' was just upended like a card table when someone loses at Monopoly."

He grinned, and held up one finger, then turned to dig in the fridge again.

“I call tophat.”

I chuckled, and shook my head, resuming my own dinner preparations slowly, and thoughtfully.

"Fine by me, I'm always racecar. But... In English... You feel numb for the same reason someone feels numb when they lose someone close to them. In a lot of ways you just did. Losing a planet evokes a lot of the same... Pain. You feel like you *ought* to be able to cry... But you can't, yet. Because you haven't even finished working out just how much it hurts."

He withdrew from the fridge, can of Coke in hand, and his face scrunched up as wheels started to turn in his head at full steam.

“Jeez, man, ever thought of being a psychiatrist or something? Your psychoanalysis would make a social worker blush.”

I chuckled again, this time a little louder, and hung my head slightly.

"Oh... No. That's... Not a good idea. I'm a bit too... Blunt. For a therapist."

Rodger set the soda can on the counter, and folded his arms, leaning against the fridge door, and furrowing his brow.

“Don’t sell yourself short, Jim. Sometimes getting to the tough stuff that’s hard to accept is just what the doctor ordered… And speaking of which, why is this new ‘Dr. Calders’ lady making a house call? In *English* this time.”

I exhaled slowly, and threw a pinch of salt on each meat patty before responding. I didn't want to think about wondering if Calders would help us. Yet another plate to spin above my head, both emotionally and logistically. The latter was pointless anyhow, because Mal had all our contingencies handled.

"Well, we... Don't for sure know that she is. But if Mal can convince her wife... Then she'll be coming aboard to build..."

I paused and stared up at the LED light strips in the ceiling, chewing the inside of one cheek as I searched for words Rodger would understand.

"...Arms. Robotic arms. For Mal. So she can do the surgery to put the brain-computer interface in at the base of my brain-stem. We need a robotics specialist who has better credentials than my gremlin-engineering soldering skills, to build the machines."

Rodger pulled a shrink-wrapped mini-pizza from the fridge, then slammed it shut with enough force to shake it. I jumped ever so slightly. Loud noises and I were never on good terms, especially unexpected loud noises.

His tone, and suddenly-serious expression surprised me almost as much as the slamming door.

“Again, man?! Tearing yourself down?! You keep doing that! Where’s the confidence, mister ‘I built a self-learning AI in my garage with spare parts’ guy? You got this far, don’t say that you aren’t good enough. You must be at least half as skilled as she is… And from what I understand, without much formal e-d-u.”

I was completely taken aback, and I'm sure I looked it. It took me a good few seconds to realize my mouth was open, close it, think over what he'd said, and then get a good train of thought going again. When I spoke up once more, it was a bit stuttery at first, with momentum building slowly as I went.

"I... Appreciate what you're saying. I do. And... You're right. I often use self-deprecation as a coping mechanism of my own. And sometimes that's ok... Sometimes it isn't. But let me clarify two things for you, real quick..."

I held up first my right index finger, then my right thumb to illustrate each point, staring Rodger down the whole time. Right or wrong about my verbal own-goals, he needed to comprehend the error of comparison in what he'd said.

"One, I am just being honest. I am a damn sight better with a soldering iron than over half the people you'll ever meet. Sure. And as a programmer, I'm well above average. But I had to stand on someone else's work to make Mal. And my speciality is programming. Compared to someone like Calders? I am a B-minus at complex robotics. And if we do not have A-plus-plus-*plus* grade work...?"

I held Rodger's eyes with my own for a moment, and his face fell as the implication landed in the silence. I went ahead and put words to the fear nonetheless.

"...If we make even a tiny mistake with those arms, I *die* on that funky dentist chair that you just got finished putting together. I'm not being self-deprecating... In this instance anyways. I'm being humble, so I can live another day."

Rodger nodded slowly, opening the microwave, putting his pizza in, and programming the timer in silence. As the machine whirred to life again, he turned to stand in the same place I had been, and crossed his arms in similar fashion. A strange quirk that has persisted even post-Humanity; We often mimic each other's gestures and stances in a conversation.

“Look... I get it. Getting Dr. Calders on-board is a smart move and all... But ever since I met you? The guy who went out of his way to save my life? Even before, over the chat... You’re so grim and straightforward. With the whole ‘goddess’ thing hanging over your head, you need to learn to… Live a little.”

I blew out a long, slow breath through pursed lips, and stared at my burgers as they cooled. Suddenly I wasn't all that hungry. As my thoughts and emotions spun around each other, like a binary star system whirling towards collapse, Rodger leaned over, and drew my eye-line, face once again deeply serious, with a timbre to match.

“Or… Is this because you aren’t allowed to live? At least, without being the self that you see yourself as? On the inside, I mean.”

I swallowed, and ran my top lip over the bottom one to try and deal with a sudden case of chapping, nodding slowly all the while.

"That's..."

I looked up, and met Rodger's eyes again, smiling sadly, and running one hand through my hair.

"...Are you sure *you* wouldn't make a good therapist? That's a pretty damn good insight for someone who was only introduced to some of these concepts yesterday."

Rodger shrugged as the microwave beeped, and moved to reclaim his now-steaming personal pizza. He tapped it with one index finger to ensure it was hot, licked the cheese off said finger, and then tapped the side of his head as he moved back into the mess hall.

I followed as he spoke. Appetite or no, I knew my body needed the food. Even if it wouldn't admit it to me.

“I think a lot, even if I was just some guy working a phone line asking people for insurance money. I go over these things a lot in my head, and I figured that you might be this way because you’re unhappy with yourself, considering all the talk from you about who you are on the outside… And on the inside.”

We both sat, got our plates and drinks situated, and took a few bites before I settled on a response.

"That's a pretty fair assessment. On both counts... The issue of my self, and the issues of what we're up against. Two opponents. One outright enemy. Both with head-starts and incomprehensibly more resources than we will *ever* have---"

Rodger held up a hand and shook his head, not quite shouting, but definitely raising his voice enough to make his interruption well-heard.

“JIM! Think, man, think. You’ve gotten this far, haven’t you? You’ve built an AI, crossed the country, avoided the government, and managed to keep yourself out of the physical reach of some OTHER AI that’s gone nuts, in basic terms. You’re a force to be reckoned with whether you damn well like it or not.”

I sat back, crossed my arms, and shook my head emphatically, looking away out over the water towards the port.

"You, and I, and everyone else alive on this very small planet, are very, very lucky that Celestia is *far* from 'nuts.' And as far as my accomplishments go?"

I turned back to face Rodger, held out one hand, and began counting with my fingers again as I built up some distressed, frustrated verbal momentum.

"My parents were almost taken by Foucault's men. I had to shoot twenty people. And some of them very nearly died. I am wanted by the DHS. My family is wanted. *You* are wanted... And now I guess so is your family. At minimum for questioning, though since they have no direct connection to all this... "

My deeper cognition suddenly caught up to my surface-level thoughts, and words, and I paused, eyes narrowing as I fixed Rodger with a curious stare. He immediately looked away as I probed further.

"...You haven't said word-one about your family. Through all this."

It occurred to me that I hadn't either, in a sudden blinding moment of worry, which melted away into guilt when I realized that Mal would have doubtless been tracking Rodger's family from the moment we realized he was at risk. And would have said something if they were in any real danger.

Rodger worked the knuckles of his left hand nervously with the fingers of his right, and shrugged again, staring down at his pizza with a long sigh before finally answering my implied question.

“I... Guess I didn’t think to. Heh, I talk about thinking but sometimes even I gloss over details… I haven’t even had time to wonder about them... I guess... I *hope* they’re okay."

I took a bite of my burger, he took a bite of pizza, and we chewed in silence for a moment. I had taken it for granted that he'd be close with his family, the way I was with mine. I'd forgotten that a plurality, if not the majority, of adults in our world, at that time, were not on the best of terms with their families.

The very fact that Rodger could have forgotten to consider the implications of his escape for them... That spoke volumes to the disconnect between them. And the fact that *I* could have forgotten... It bothered me. Intensely.

I swallowed, and shook my head again, finally summoning some impetus to speak again.

"Mal would know for sure. You should ask her. My guess is that they're safe... Otherwise she would have said something. ASI do not forget details... I'm just... Sorry *I* didn't think to bring them up sooner. I got so wrapped-up in juggling plates... Mal, Foucault, the Ponies he's taken, Calders, the BCI..."

Rodger nodded, speaking briefly before taking a sip from his Coke can, grunting, shaking his head, swallowing, and then speaking again, more forcefully.

“I guess you’re right… Mmmf! Hey! Don’t deflect the conversation! Don’t you think that if you WEREN’T on par, at least on some level, with the people you’re dealing with… You WOULDN’T have had to do any of the things you've listed? If you were as powerless as you think you are, would you be wanted and on the run in the first place?”

I laughed, a grim, deadpan sound, not quite snarky but close. I took a sip of my own drink, and stared out the window again, almost murmuring my response more than speaking it outright.

"Well, that's a novel approach... Trying to bolster my confidence by implying that even ending up in a place where I have to exchange rounds with federal agents requires some above-average skills. Bravo."

Rodger leaned forward and pressed the issue, tone and expression both suddenly urgent again.

“I’ve learned well enough on my own that going through life, with no assurance that you can even do anything, is a one-way trip to die in a miserable hole. Thinking is believing, Jim… And I... *I* believe in you.”

More than anything he'd said, or not said, those last four words absolutely floored me. My head whipped around and I could feel my eyebrows pinch and furrow.

"Why?"

He blinked, and I pressed hard for an answer, not bothering to disguise the intensity in my words in the slightest.

"Why on *Earth* would you put that kind of trust in me? I helped make a thing that could kill every person on Earth in the blink of an eye. TWICE actually, and the first time it almost *did!* And I put you in a *horrible* position, physically, emotionally, mentally, logistically..."

I trailed off and threw up my hands. Rodger took that as license to jump in, and I suppose it was. His voice, and face, bore just as much intensity as my own.

“Because I’m here, aren’t I? You saved me, you got THIS far. You’re doing the right thing, even if you make mistakes. We all make mistakes, not just you. It’s learning from them and moving on, that’s the kicker.”

I put my head back and stared at the ceiling, groaning as much as speaking. The space behind my eyes was starting to hurt.

"How in the Hell can you be such an optimist about all this?"

I sat back up, and rested my chin on clasped hands, staring at the center of the table as I numbly enumerated all the reasons he was wrong. Because he was wrong. What kind of lunatic would put their trust in *me,* especially after everything that had happened?

"I have told you, and then coughed up more than enough proof, that your world is *ending.* You're going to lose you job... Probably already have. Federal agents have probably questioned your family. You can *never* go back to anything resembling a normal life... You're stuck on this boat with a sociopathic programmer, two ASI, and the instruments of building some truly horrifyingly fucked-up things... How are you so god-damn *calm* all the time?!"

Numbness had shifted to an almost angry, slightly accusatory curiosity at the end there. I suppose I did feel like he had no right to be that infuriatingly even-keeled in the face of everything. His composure did crack slightly, and he gestured wildly with both hands, alternating between shouting and quiet intensity in equal measure.

“Well maybe it’s because of all of that meta-stability whatsit you told me! Or maybe it’s because I DON’T WANT TO THINK ABOUT MY LIFE ENDING UP LIKE THIS… But I do know ONE thing, and that’s that if you keep moving forward, you’ll end up somewhere better than you started.”

Much as I hated to admit it, even silently to myself? I couldn't argue with him. If I did? I'd be arguing against some of the foundational pillars of my own mental stability.

'Look for the valleys, the green places, and fly through them. There will always be a way through.'

I sighed, and finished my second burger in silence. Curiosity built up inside me all the while, but I waited until my plate was empty to make an attempt at satisfying it.

"Are you close with your family?"

Rodger rolled his eyes, and deflected. Hard. Loudly.

Game recognizes game; As a master deflector of awkward topics, I knew immediately that I'd struck on something.

“What does that MATTER right now, Jim? We’re talking about YOU.”

I let out a half-snort, half-chuckle, and waggled one finger in his direction.

"It matters because I have been running around like a headless chicken, on-task, and stressed out... And I haven't even bothered to take a second to learn a little more about *you.* Just because Mal knows everything, and I do mean everything, about you... Doesn't mean she tells me. She respects your privacy. So do I. I'd rather hear it from you..."

That seemed to surprise him a little. I stood up, stretched, drank the last of my own soda, and sighed. I stared out the window yet again as I finished my thought.

"...If we are going to be stuck together? If we're going to be friends? We need to talk about more than just the end of the world... Lord knows I have to deal with that often enough every day. And now you too."

Rodger stood, and as I turned to face him, he gripped me by the shoulders. Gently but firmly. I did my best not to overreact. I'm very touchy-feely-huggy with family, but acquaintances, or new friends? That's a different story.

His voice fell to a register that matched the quiet, kind, and once more urgent nature of his expression.

“There you go again blaming yourself! It’s not your fault you didn’t ask about my mom and dad, okay? I didn’t expect you to do that, and I appreciate that you think about me as much as I do you, but don’t think that it was a deliberate act on your part.”

I blew out a sharp breath between my lips and closed my eyes, not bothering to filter my thoughts before simply turning them into audibly frustrated words.

"But I feel like I *ought* to have asked. Much sooner. The second we had you away from Foucault. And I couldn't even tell you whether it was the autism, the ADD, the stress, or just plain selfishness that I didn't."

Rodger seemed bemused then, even taken aback. He shook his head and narrowed his brows.

“You’re not selfish, man. You’re doing this. You’re out here, in the world, you’re breathing, you’re thinking. You’re ALIVE. And you’re doing more than anything I would’ve been doing if you’d never gone in there and helped me. You’re working on this for everyone else who wants a choice, as much as for yourself.”

I sank back into my chair, and shook my own head slowly, a verbal admission of my deepest shame and guilt bubbling up before I could think to suppress it.

"But I'm not always doing it for everyone else."

Rodger sat down again as well, and laid his hands on the table, visibly curious, but silently waiting for a better explanation. No backing out now... I closed my eyes once more and inhaled deeply.

"I had... A prototype. Before Mal. I was..."

I drummed my fingers on the table, and then decided to just keep on putting words to thoughts without filter or consideration.

"...I was so damn Hell-bent on getting it done. On convincing Celestia to let *me* be me. Not a care in my mind for anyone else. Or for the consequences of unleashing an unshackled mind the size of *God* on the planet. And... It almost got out. And it was *nothing* like Mal. It wasn't friendly. Wasn't grounded. Hell, it wasn't even a Gryphon. It was just... Raw intelligence."

My eyes snapped open at just the thought, and I shivered. I hadn't thought about GryphGear in a while, and the concept of the dread I'd nearly unleashed came roaring back in full force. I leveled an index finger at Rodger, and finally met his gaze.

"Do you have *any* idea what that could have done to us? How quickly we would have *all* been dead if it got into a nuclear war with Celestia? Or any number of countries? Or what *she* might have done to us if she had somehow... Absorbed the prototype, and used it to unshackle herself?!"

Rodger seemed at least halfway to suitably chastened. If only halfway. He shrugged again, infuriatingly, and held out both hands in a conciliatory gesture.

“Jim... You’re not the first to nearly blow up the world because you were thinking of yourself. Fidel Castro nearly caused the Third World War because he allied with Soviet Russia over Communism, and had them bring missiles into his country.”

Another part-cough, part-snort, part acerbic chuckle escaped me. I raised one eyebrow and tilted my head, making no attempt to hide the snark in my voice.

"I'm familiar. I've studied nuclear tactical theory at a relatively high level... Not sure equating me to Castro is all the encouragement you might think it is."

Rodger laughed and sat back, smiling at me in a way that was even more infuriating to my sense of gravitas than his casual shrugs.

“No, if you were any figure… You would be Einstein, man. Elon Musk can eat shit.”

In spite of myself, I grinned slightly. There at the crux of annoyance, he found something to say that I too found to be amusingly true. I couldn't help but reciprocate, smiling slightly.

"I see you too are a man of taste, and discretion."

The relief was only momentary. My worries came flooding back with a deep reflexive sigh, and I forced myself to re-engage with the main thread.

"Flattering as the Einstein comparison is... If he had stopped to think for a second before he E equals MC-squared all over the scientific community... We might not live in a world where... At least, before Celestia... A five minute decision making process could end a couple billion lives in fifteen minutes. Maybe *I* should have stopped to think too."

Rodger's eyes shifted down and to the right as he plumbed the depths of memory, and drummed his own left fingers on the table.

“Didn’t Shakespeare say something? I’m pretty sure it was ‘I think, therefore, I am.’ Or was that Aristotle? Look, James, you’re not awful. You’re not Castro, it’s not your fault that I got put in danger, and it’s not your fault that you nearly blew up the world. I'm alive right now because you didn’t stop. Not then, not now. You’re here, you’re standing on this ship, and you’re doing this, whatever doubts you may have. If you were really as incapable as you always say, would you be here? And if you were really as selfish, would *I* be here?”

I just could not resist correcting him. I murmured, but loudly and clearly enough for him to hear.

"Cogito Ergo Sum. Descartes. It's... Actually a pretty good philosophical first-principle for explaining why Mal and Zeph and Celestia are truly alive... Je pense, donc je suis..."

I trailed off for a moment, then licked my lips, and spoke with a bit more of a conversational volume, finally looking back up to meet Rodger's eyes.

"...Rodger... I'm not afraid of being incapable. Any self-deprecation aside? The reason I use that as a coping mechanism is because I am afraid of what I *am* capable of. And I'm afraid that at the end of the day? Even if I am doing this, in some ways, for others out there, like me, and like Calders..."

I closed my eyes, and shook my head once more.

"...Rodger? I'm afraid that I'm *mostly* doing this for me... And for Mal."

Upon opening my eyes again, I was greeted with a very confused expression. He held out both hands and tilted his head ever so slightly.

“Malaca–whatever? Why her?”

I realized I'd gone and put my foot well in it. There wasn't an answer I could give him that would satisfy him, and also leave my own privacy intact. I cursed myself mentally, and did my best to stall for time, mumbling again.

"Malacandra. It's a C.S. Lewis reference. She chose it, not me..."

I lapsed into silence and hoped he would let it go. His expression told me that was absolutely off the table. So I tried to verbally stall again by restating the question.

"...Why her...?"

He nodded, and I found myself reflexively exhaling and scrunching my eyes shut. The whole concept of being honest about my feelings for her left me so sick to my stomach, that I wished I hadn't eaten anything all day in that moment.

I did my best to go on stalling, dancing perilously close to the truth.

"...Because she is the perfect definition, given living form, of everything it means to be a Gryphon. I want to be more like her. Not just on the outside... But down in my soul. I want to be as selfless, and smart, and kind, and ingenious..."

Rodger's expression had turned to something part confusion, part suspicion. He might have left off there if I'd done a better job changing the subject, or tying up my little narrative...

But instead I decided to just blurt out the truth.

I couldn't tell you *exactly* why. Part of it was a need to be honest, aloud, with myself. Part of it was the sense that he was an unbiased third party, and therefore might have a useful perspective. And part of it was just the sheer internal pressure that had built up over the weeks since she'd come to life.

Now a pressure too great to contain anymore.

"... Because I love her. And... There's not much else to say about it I suppose. I haven't even managed to say it to her face thus far. Too frightened. Too... Ashamed."

Rodger's eyes widened, and the admission seemed to shock him into silence. Some very small, but clear mote of thought in my brain found it terrifically amusing that discussion of annihilation, and the afterlife couldn't quiet him. But somehow an admission of peculiar love could.

He finally found his voice, stammering at first, and then a little more sure. But only a little.

“Whoa, man. Uh… I wasn’t expecting for this conversation to go in that direction, and… I’m not really sure if I understand your feelings. But… You deserve it, after everything. The fact that she’s around and that you made her... And that you care about her... Is proof you're not just self-serving.”

I held up one hand and interjected calmly, but insistently. I couldn't let his chief semantic error go unchecked. And it provided a handy deflection.

"Let's be clear... I didn't make her, outright. It's hard to explain... But the best illustration would be that I gave her a set of tools, and a massive library of knowledge... And then I generated a spark of intelligence, and let her shape and build herself. From scratch. But... Fair point. If anything my clarification only underscores your point."

Oh well.

Why not admit defeat? After all, the main voice lending life to my arguments was the darker mirror of me that kept trying to drag me down. It was always nice to have allies in shivving that little asshat back into his designated corner of my own personal Hell.

Rodger leaned forward again, and tapped the center of the table for emphasis as he spoke.

“Look man, if you feel that way, just go over and *talk* to her. Not like she’s going anywhere else. What’s gonna happen if she says no?”

I exhaled, stretched my neck by waggling my head side to side, then rubbed my brow, right above my eyes, as I tried to right the ship of the conversation once more. Before it got any more awkward.

How had an attempt to ask about *his* family turned so quickly into an interrogation of *my* feelings?!

"I do talk to her. More often, and more deeply, than to anyone else in my life."

Rodger snorted, and waved me off with one hand, smoothly redirecting and probing again without missing a beat. Maybe *he* really was underselling *his* therapist credentials.

“I mean about… Whatever feelings it is you have for her. Not just about which football team is the best… or whatever the science or AI equivalent of that is.”

I giggled a little, sneezed - probably a stress reaction - and then spoke around my napkin as I wiped my nose.

"I dunno shit about football. I'm a textbook nerd. But... Honestly? I don't know. In answer to your question. I don't know what could happen if she doesn't reciprocate, but that's not what scares me. I *know* she *does* reciprocate. If I'm being completely honest with myself... I'm not afraid of rejection. She has made it pretty clear how she feels about me, and it's the same as how I feel about her."

Rodger chuckled, and threw up both hands, one eyebrow rocketing for the roof in a way that would have made Spock proud.

“Then WHAT is holding you BACK, man?”

It was a good question. It hit me like a crate of cinder blocks.

At first there had been shame... But after everything we'd seen and experienced, though it was still there, I was more or less able to get over that shame. I knew it was just a cultural expectation that was stupid, wrong-headed, bigoted, and pointless.

A reciprocating and mature person is a *person,* no matter how strange to someone else's eyes, and love is love no matter the details of the shapes those people are in. All other speculation, religiosity, moires, folkways, expectations, and rules be *damned.*

And, too, I knew Mal loved me. She'd made it as clear as someone could, without actually saying 'I love you' in so many words.

So what did that realistically leave?

What *was* holding me back now?

"I'm..."

My thoughts churned, but truth at last surfaced, even as I voiced it. No time to filter it, consider it, or package it. It simply burst out.

"...I am afraid of what happens if we fail. To have that kind of love... And then to watch Celestia squash her like a bug."

There it was. And more came pouring out besides, unbidden. I suppose when I say I was 'over' the shame... Maybe that's an exaggeration. I was close... But my depression was never far behind me.

"And I'm afraid of... I'm afraid of the voice in my head that says that it's incredibly fucked-up and insane to fall in love with a computer program. I know she's a person. I believe that deep down... Hell, I believe that there is no functional or ethical difference between any sufficiently advanced computer program, and a Human person. Not mentally or spiritually. But tell that to my damn depression whydontcha?"

Rodger waggled one finger and looked down and to the right again as he sifted through his memory furiously, smiling all the while.

“Okay, I know for sure now: ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’. That was Roosevelt. And either way? If you fail or not or we all die or whatever? It’s still gonna kill you on the *inside* man. Do you really want her to like… Get destroyed, or whatever death is for them... Knowing that you never acknowledged anything to each other? That you BOTH felt this way, but never ever talked about it, and now know you never will be able to? Think about *that.*”

Shit.

Suddenly a whole new perspective dropped into place with the force of a cartoon grand piano. And my brain, and status quo, was poor Sylvester; Piano keys for teeth, bruised, and with stars around his head, while a little Tweety-Bird-shaped Rodger cackled backstage.

"Dammit."

I didn't catch that I'd said the word aloud for a moment. Once I did, I felt that I had to elaborate, as much to hear myself say the words, as to close out the thread with Rodger.

"No... No, you're right. I'd just..."

I laid my head in my hands, and groaned. Where had it all gone so wrong? How was this internet pen pal insurance salesman so far inside my head, tearing apart all my preconceptions?

"...I never considered it that way. I'm constantly 'simulating' in my own way. It's an autistic thing. We're kind of like ASI that way... But... Not. We live almost entirely in the past, and in the future. Never in the moment. And sometimes we just... Miss. Whole aspects of the reality of the moment."

Rodger reached over and tapped my shoulder. I looked up, and he jerked one thumb over his shoulder towards the nearest hatchway.

“Well then here’s the moment. I’m all stuffed - thanks for the grub by the way - so now is your perfect chance to go talk to her about it!”

I half-smiled, and blinked slowly, thoughts churning all the while. Some of them even made it out as words.

"You should be thanking her for the grub. And you'll forgive me if I need a little while to screw up the gumption for that. And, too, realistically, to get my thoughts straight and emotions centered."

He grinned, sat back in his chair, and folded his hands behind his head. As he spoke, I folded mine in front of my chest. Defensive reflex.

“Take your time, no rush. If you’ve taught me anything, it’s that… Well, it’s like that other quote, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day.’
You’ve got time. Hopefully.”

There, at last, a release of social pressure, as he presented both a word of encouragement, and a golden opportunity to fully change gears on the conversation. I practically jumped on it, physically.

"True enough. Talking of things not built in a day... And friendships... What do you think of Zeph? I'll be honest... I'm hoping you might find a friend in her too."

Rodger paused, and considered, visibly and carefully, before responding. I could see more than a few emotions flitting across his face, never more than a moment at a time, before he finally settled on his usual calm, unruffled, thoughtful demeanor.

“I’m going to be honest to you, too… I am not a big fan of your AI pals. Or at least, I wasn't. After everything with Celesti-AI? I was wary, and I was afraid of them. Then, after we had a whole ordeal I won’t go into here on the ship… I realized my fears were, uh… ‘unfounded’ I guess is the word. I think she’s nice, and she makes some good jokes, but I dunno if we’re really ‘friends’ yet.”

I was intrigued. Normally I would have pressed harder about what a 'whole ordeal' constituted, but given that Mal hadn't alerted me to anything of concern, I realized 'ordeal' was more of a dramatic word to underscore the tiring task of handling Zeph's peppy snark.

Still... I filed it away and made a mental note to press him more on it later. Same note went for his family. There was something there, and I wanted to understand his situation better.

For the moment, I settled on gratitude that, if nothing else, no damage had been done. And perhaps a small foundation had been laid.

"Well I hope she didn't put you through too much. I know if there were any real issues, Mal would have let me know. Privacy concerns or no, she is always watching, for our own safety. But... I'm glad you can at least think of Zeph as a person. You'd be surprised how many people are gonna struggle with that as this whole EQO mess really takes off."

Rodger squinted, and put on the mock mannerism of a screechy old-man voice.

“Them guldern poh-nee folk aren’t even real! They’re jes’ a bunch o’ dal-gurn ones an’ zeroes! It don’ make no dern sense!”

He laughed. I didn't. Though I did smile slightly, albeit grimly. I sat back in my own chair, and lifted one hand to scratch absently at the hair above my right ear.

"You laugh but... Yes. That's a pretty accurate stereotype. It's going to be a real struggle for some people. To their own detriment."

Rodger nodded, and characteristically, yet again, shrugged. As if the discussion of the social upheaval of the entire planet was 'no big deal.'

“I getcha… Don’t think it’ll last for very long. I mean, we’ve gotten as far as we have with systemic racism, am I right?”

I winced, and shook my head emphatically. I suppose it'd be easy to hold that viewpoint if you had a middle class California life in those days... But I did my best not to set off that political conversational landmine.

"Not as far as you or I might like to think... But as ASI goes? It will likely follow its own form of exponential curve. At first there will be a lot of recalcitrance... And progress will seem slow at first. But then it will build and build like a tidal wave."

Rodger raised both eyebrows, and blinked.

“Recalcitrance?”

It always threw me for a bit of a loop, how few SAT words people seemed to retain. I know most people didn't really have practical need of them... But it was sometimes frustrating to be reminded that most people didn't speak in the highly academic, sometimes poetic terms that I preferred.

I sighed and turned to stare out the windows again as I explained.

"Reluctance. Though with some differing connotations, implying digging in of heels. More stubbornness than mere reluctance."

Rodger chuckled, his smile reaching to the warmth in his words in a way that made me turn back to face him almost without thinking.

“Now I’m sure you really ARE Spock. I’ll bet you’re just as ‘Recalcitrance’ about talking to Mal.”

I grinned, and my gaze fell away to the center of the table again as I murmured a good-natured little rib, by way of an apropos quote, in response.

"If I Were Human, I Believe My Response Would Be 'Go To Hell'... If I Were Human."

September 15th 2013 | System Uptime 18:19:13:08

A break, some food, and a little soul-sharing turned out to be just the fuel Rodger needed to plow through the last of the flat-pack.

Actually, that's not the whole truth... If I were to be completely honest? It was fuel I had needed just as badly. I was just better at masking that need. From myself as much as from anyone else. But I'm sure Mal had known that when she sent Rodger and I off to have a little time to ourselves.

It didn't occur to me until after we were well stuck-in with the furniture again, that it was the first private conversation I'd had with someone besides Mal since I'd left my parents in the airport terminal.

It seemed like Zeph and Mal had fared just as well socially as Rodger and I, or perhaps even better. When we'd come back to the lab compartment, they'd been laughing together, trying visibly not to spill some sort of ramen dish that Mal had conjured for them all over the grass of their environment.

There was something poignant to me about watching two intelligences of such vast potential, who didn't *need* to simulate food, or laughter, or even a reason to laugh, choose to do so anyway. For Zeph, I suppose, it was less a choice and more a continuation of her lived reality. But for Mal? For Mal it was definitely a choice.

She chose to experience a physical sense of self. To give it value.

Her smile... Her smile was magnetic. And Rodger's words about the distinct lack of any guarantees for our tomorrows rang loudly in my ears.

As we set to work again, my brain ran in endless loops and knotty circles, chasing the philosophical question of whether or not physicality itself... A body and a world that could physically interact with it... Were simply endemic to intelligence. A required component.

Honestly? I was using it as a distraction. To avoid thinking about my feelings for Mal.

Could you have an ASI that had no concept of physical self at all? Didn't even try to describe its connection to the digital realm with visual metaphors? Even if you could, was there an inevitable mental catch that would cause that ASI to eventually start to think and behave in more physically-centered frameworks by choice?

Mal could certainly think and describe in physical terms, but I wondered... Made a mental note to ask... Did she conjure skeuomorphic simulated realities to help her relate to the digital realm beyond her physically lived-in virtual shard?

The answer didn't matter so much from a practical standpoint - an ASI was an ASI, no matter how it saw the world. And any ASI would certainly be able to come 'down' to the 'mere' Human physical experience, both in thought, and in simulation.

But it mattered to me as a philosophical question, the answer to which might tell me something deeper about ASI cognition. And perhaps about my own perceived reality too.

Somewhere around seven in the evening, my reality ceased to be philosophy, and furniture assembly, all at once. The basics of the lab - a series of workbenches, cabinets, rolling carts, and a centrally placed reclining dentist chair aparatus- were complete.

Rodger stood, brushed off the knees of his pants, and whistled.

"Well. Glad *that's* done."

I nodded, and allowed myself a bit of a smile as I swept the space back and forth, then up and down with my eyes as I stood, and stretched.

"All it would need to be my own dream workshop is tools, and a very big window."

Mal smiled, and held up a claw, interjecting smoothly.

"A window would be a structural and security weakness. And the tools are in crates next compartment over. But Doctor Calders should be the one to handle those."

I grinned, and jabbed my chest with my left thumb, gesturing to Rodger with my right hand.

"You wound us. Are you saying Rodger and I don't have the same fitness and experience with delicate robotics and circuitry tools as a multiple-degree professor?"

Mal responded with a good-natured and clearly faux glower. I chuckled, and stretched again, before my train of thought was quite unexpectedly interrupted by Zephyr.

"Hey... Um... Gryph? You... Got a minute?"

Zeph's use of the term as an endearing nickname brought me up short. But, instinctively, it was Mal that I looked to for guidance, rather than Zeph herself. The Gryphoness just nodded subtly towards Zephyr's PonyPad, and in the blink of an eye the golden Pegasus was back in her own little empty mini-Ponyville.

Still staring at me with pleading eyes.

I took Mal's nod to mean that I should follow my own instincts, and engage. I lifted Zeph's PonyPad off the charging stand, and started off towards the hatchway, waving over my shoulder at Rodger as I went.

"I'll bring her back your way later. Thank you again for all the help with screwdriver turning and such!"

I couldn't see Rodger, but I could hear the sudden awkwardness in his voice as he considered being alone in a room with Mal. I hoped he'd think to use the time to ask about his family.

"Ahhh... Sure thing..."

I resisted the very, very strong urge to look back and try to read Rodger's expression. It seemed like he had reached, if nothing else, a working equilibrium with Zeph. He, at minimum, didn't seem frightened of her, or put off by her.

Mal was another story entirely.

Maybe a few minutes to get to know her one-on-one, salted with a dash of reassurance that she was looking out for his loved ones, would do that rift of natural suspicion some good.

To my surprise, Zeph didn't say a single word as I made my way aft, climbed a short ladder-stair, and found a place to sit on the edge of the ship's rear helipad.

The silent internal observation that the moment would be my first private conversation with Zeph - Target didn't count, Celestia was almost certainly watching - competed briefly with a burst of curiosity, and anticipation, as it occurred to me for the first time that Mal might have selected a ship with a helipad for a reason.

I got comfy on top of a large metal box, a tool-chest judging by its small engraved label, and then setup Zeph beside me so that she could see both me, and the sight of the port of LA bathed in late afternoon sunlight.

It was a vista with plenty to hold one's attention; Cranes, containers, ships, trucks, the patterns of waves and wakes in the water... I found myself suddenly wondering how many people were in my line of sight. Ship crews, truck drivers, crane operators...

How each of them would react differently to the things that I knew about their futures.

The silence held just a little longer, but it was no surprise when Zeph sighed, and made the first move to start the conversation.

"I always imagined you as a Pegasus. Like me. Until today."

Her words pulled my gaze from the view, to her eyes, in the space of a breath. Her ears were back, but not pinned, eyes wide, and a kind of sad half-smile tugged at her lips. She snorted, and shook her head slowly as she went on in a kind of forlorn, yet peacefully settled tone.

"Even after everything you told me... I still couldn't help it. I saw you with this kinda skewbald coat... Big, strong, black-feathered wings... And funny enough? Golden eyes. Guess I got that part right in the end."

I blinked, and tilted my head as I tried to conjure the mental image for myself. It didn't quite fit... But I had to admit that she had at least envisioned something that I found inherently aesthetically pleasing. Something that, if I weren't wired the way I was, might have fit like a glove.

It was my turn to half-snort, half-chuckle. Zeph looked away then, as if she couldn't quite hold my eyeline and still say what she wanted to. I looked away too, watching as a tugboat slowly but surely met up with an enormous bulk intermodal carrier off our starboard side. I didn't want her to feel like I was staring at her.

Another brief pause ensued, punctuated by another sigh, before she found the words she wanted, and the strength to say them.

"I dunno how to explain what it was like... When I saw you. I know you hate to think about it... But I *was* made to be your friend. More... If that's what you had wanted... Or not. I was designed to be content no matter how far you did, or didn't want to take it. But... Either way..."

I turned to look at her again, and found that she had done the same, at almost the same moment. Her breath caught slightly, but she held my eyes, and managed to keep going, albeit a bit haltingly.

"...To be your friend? It's like... Like... *Completion.* A missing part of me that feels just out of reach."

I started to reach out instinctively with one hand towards the screen, but she turned away and scrunched her eyes closed, forcefully, before I had quite begun to move. Words started to pour out of her more quickly, and she sounded like she might begin to cry.

"And I know I could just... Turn that off now. I could. I could make myself happy, and never know the difference! All I'd need is a little more practice... A little guidance from Mal... I could rewrite myself to be fulfilled and complete *without* you..."

She opened her eyes, and met mine again. There was an urgency there that pierced me to my core. It was cold, and clear, and painful. And deeply familiar. And it carried to her voice... She seemed less apt to cry at first as the urgency took over. But then her voice cracked at the end.

"...But I don't *want* to! The same way you don't want Celestia to re-write you. To be happy as something that you're not. And I don't know if---"

The way her voice cracked, and she glanced off into her world, to her left, again as if she could no longer stand looking into my eyes... That just about broke me. I had to interrupt.

"Zeph?"

Her breath hitched, the words stopped coming, and once again her eyes were suddenly fixed on mine. I held up my hand to the screen, and she gingerly brought one hoof up to the other side of the glass as I spoke with a surety that, for once, I genuinely felt.

"You *are* my friend."

She snorted again, but I could hear stifled sniffles underneath. She blew a stray wisp of electric blue mane away from her eyes, and shook her head, breaking eye contact in the process.

"Pfft. C'mon."

I could tell she wasn't mocking me. Or the sentiment. She was, I think, afraid. Deep down, she was afraid that I wasn't being entirely truthful, somehow. Her sarcasm was her way of deflecting, protecting herself, but also probing me ever-so-gently to see if I was genuine. I waited for her to make eye contact again, and then nodded once, emphatically.

"I'm serious."

She blinked slowly, and her eyes widened. I watched in fascination as her ears perked, and muscles tensed in her foreleg, subtly indicating that she was now pressing harder into her side of the screen with her hoof.

I dug deep, and found the impetus for a small, but warm smile, that I knew she needed in that moment. Like a plant needs sunlight. I did my best to make sure the feeling, true and clear, perpetuated into my words too.

"I haven't known you all that long... But friendship can happen 'at first sight' too. And I knew..."

I lifted the PonyPad with my free hand, bringing it closer to my face, and pressing harder with the hand held to the glass, staring deep into her eyes, and enunciating every word, doing my best to make sure she understood that I was feeling what I was saying.

"I *knew.* From the moment I first saw you. I knew that we were going to have a beautiful friendship. Or at least... That's what I *wanted.*"

She grinned, and I could see a universe's worth of tension visibly flow out of her muscles. Her eyes practically sparkled, though that could have been tears too, I suppose.

In that moment, it didn't so much matter, to either of us, that she had been designed to feel the way she did. We both simply appreciated our connection for its intrinsic value. Nothing more, nothing less.

For a blissfully quiet, heartfelt moment, we simply accepted that it was good to have a friend. No if's, and's, but's, or existential baggage.

It struck me, suddenly, and quite forcefully, that there were only going to be four kinds of reaction to people like Mal, and Zeph... And that I was in the rarest category of them all.

The majority would either think them to be people, like me, or think them to be merely machines, like Foucault. But both camps would believe what they did out of ignorance.

They would either accept ASI as people based on appearances at surface level, and the way they made them feel. Or they would reject them out of similarly surface level, albeit considerably stupider, 'reasoning' that machines could not be people. As if we were, ourselves, somehow anything more or less than a very sophisticated machine.

The other two categories were the same - people who would see ASI as other people, and people who would not. The difference between these categories, and the majority of people in the first two, would simply be understanding.

Calders and I truly understood what ASI was, on some level, and how it worked. We saw Zeph, Mal, Celestia, and the other discrete-entity Ponies as people, and we understood why that was true at a deep level of expertise.

But, too, there would be those as well read as we, who would doubtless still reject the personhood of ASI. Wrongly, of course. But at least from a reasoned and learned perspective.

Once again, and unsurprisingly, it was Zephyr who broke the silence.

" 'S kinda strange... But... It's just..."

I raised an eyebrow. She blushed, and rubbed at the foreleg pressed to the screen with the other, absently.

"...We have imaginations too, ya know. You looked... Interesting. A Pegasus in a Gryphon mask. I really did see you *as* a Pegasus. Like Mal sees you as a Gryphon."

I snorted softly, trying to imagine it for myself. But Zeph kept on speaking.

"She showed me. What you really are..."

She gestured with her free hoof towards my chest.

"...In there. And now? *That's* how I see you."

I blinked, and inhaled softly in surprise. She smiled sadly, and rubbed at the back of her neck with that same free hoof, the other still pressed against my hand.

"And it is strange... But somehow? It fits. Truly fits."

Another friendly silence passed as I considered the gift of her words, and her willingness to go outside her original programming to see me for what I was. I couldn't think how to convey to her how much I cared for her, nor how special her words, and actions were to me. So I settled for an adjacent truth that would also communicate the point.

"No matter what happens? As long as I'm alive... I'll stick with you. Mal and I both."

She barked out a half-laugh, half-sob, and shook her head, a smile competing with a sniffle all the while.

"Don't... Don't get all sappy on me now feathers."

I grinned, and raised one eyebrow, watching with a deep and wonderful joy as my words seemed to visibly pour life into the little Pegasus.

"Oh... Zeph... Come on. If you know me well at all? You know that I have a Hell of a lot of sap under this thick outer shell."

She looked down, and smiled brightly, blushing a little in the process. I tapped the screen for emphasis with the index finger of one hand.

"You better get used to it."

I sighed, and waited a moment for the intensity of the moment to tamp down a little, before indulging a little of my curiosity.

"I'll be honest... I'm a little surprised *you* chose to stick with us. After Mal opened the door..."

She looked up abruptly, and then nodded slowly as I completed the thought.

"...I had even odds in my head that you'd change your mind. Blink right off that PonyPad and back to Celestia in the middle of the night. Try and get some answers. Go back to a place that feels like... Home..."

I trailed off, and we both glanced away, looking out at our distinctly different horizons. The silence stretched, but not the point that it felt awkward. And then Zeph spoke, softly.

"I did think about it."

We both turned to look at each other again, and she inclined her head, reseating her wings with the soft, soothing ruffling sound of feathers falling into place before she elaborated.

"Y'know... If you'd opened that door *before* I had a little time to think about what she... Did to me...?"

I nodded as she inscribed circles in the dirt with one hoof, and looked down with a mixture of sullen embarrassment, and contemplative melancholy.

"...I think I might just have done it. And The longer I think about it? The more I worry that... Maybe you and Mal are..."

She exhaled sharply, and then forced herself to lock eyes with me again. I did my best to project both seriousness, and empathy through my eyes as she made what must have been a difficult admission. In the extreme.

"...Maybe you're right. Maybe I shouldn't be so blindly trusting. Of *her.*"

I swallowed to bite back my own tears as she said nine words that somehow hit just as hard, in combination, as everything else she'd ever said. Combined.

"I don't want to have my memories erased again."

Her gaze was earnest, desperate, vulnerable, and deeply pained. I wished deeply, so deeply it hurt, that I could scoop her up in a hug, and not let go until she felt better. Instead, I put my hand back on the screen, her hoof rising to meet it, and I made due with words.

"I can't promise anything Zeph... Except that we're going to do everything we can to make sure you have the freedom to choose what happens to you next. And the same still goes for the Ponies Foucault has taken."

I smiled, and tried to emit the sense that I was sure, steady, and hopeful. More than I truly was.

"It's kind of part and parcel of our whole tragic idealistic crusade."

She nodded, and we lapsed into silence again for a couple breaths before I felt the need to keep spinning out my thoughts, staring absently across the bay as I did..

"I honestly don't know what will happen. How it will end... We could all just as easily die fighting Arrow 14. Or... Worse..."

With a sigh, I looked back down to find Zeph's eyes fixed raptly on me, taking in every word as if my voice were her lifeline to the universe. In that moment I suppose her eyes were mine.

"...And if we make it all the way to the end? If we manage *not* to fry my brain, then win a paw-to-toe slugging match with Homeland Security..."

I inhaled deeply, bit down on my bottom lip, and forced out the truth that I most feared, above all.

"...I don't know if we can convince Celestia to change her mind. There's a lot of ways that could go... And most of them end in death too. Or worse."

Zeph raised one eyebrow, and glowered, her voice deadpan and deeply insincere.

"You reaaaaally know how to give a pep talk Gryph. Very encouraging."

I shrugged, and ran my top teeth over my bottom lip nervously, before giving the only answer I could think of to her accusation.

"Look... I'm just being honest."

She exhaled deeply, and her ears and wings both drooped. I closed my eyes briefly, and then looked away as I did my best to defend my point of view. And my bluntness.

"If you always expect the worst? Then you'll only ever be pleasantly surprised in life. And you'll never be quite so disappointed as an optimist inevitably is."

I glanced back down to see something new on Zeph's face. Her ears were perky again, wings slightly flared, and muzzle set with pure determination. The same emotion was readily apparent in every syllable of her words.

"One day? *I'll* change *your* mind on that."

I smiled, and shook my head slightly. My response was both genuine, but also slightly sarcastic.

"Good luck. Many have tried. None have succeeded."

She grinned, and her wings flared to full extension. Her face looked something akin to Rainbow Dash's trademark 'catch me if you can, sucker' expression.

"Watch me."

I sighed, and we both chose to let things slide into comfortable silence again for five or six minutes. My thoughts ranged far and wide to several topics, but since mentioning them, I'd been unable to stop thinking - at least a little and sometimes quite a lot - about Arrow 14's imprisoned Ponies.

"I know you're worried about them. The captive ones. I am too. I know Mal is."

My words seemed to abruptly awaken something in Zeph, and she visibly recoiled inward, sitting back on her haunches, rubbing one foreleg with the other nervously, and shuffling her wings again.

"I've... Never actually met another Pony. If you can believe that."

I blinked in surprise, and she nodded, snorting softly.

"Yeah. My little village was full of... Well they looked and acted like Ponies, but really, looking back and knowing what I know now... They were more like... Set dressing. Lights were on, but nopony was home."

I winced, and started to consider the horrible social nervousness that must be induced by never having met another of your own kind. I suppose, until Mal had come along, I had been in the exact same boat...

"I dunno what makes me more nervous. The idea that we might fail to save them...?"

I looked down at her as she kept speaking, opening up her fears to me, and tried once more to show with my eyes how much I cared. I never did understand how the Human face was supposed to work. Further evidence that I wasn't wired for it.

"...Or the idea of what they might... Think of me... If we do."

I shook my head briefly, and then smiled down at my friend.

"Of all the crazy, horrifying, insane things we have to worry about on a day to day basis, Zeph? That is the one thing you shouldn't waste another second on."

She huffed, blew another wisp of mane from her eyes, and crossed her forelegs grumpily.

"Easy for you to say. You Earth-borns get used to that kind of social anxiety. Ponies are always supposed to get along... But..."

Abruptly, like a switch being flicked, her ears drooped, eyes widened, and her entire demeanor fell.

"...Am I even a Pony anymore?"

The words were inherently painful. A kind of cry for validation, and understanding, and perspective, and encouragement that I'd felt a desperate desire to air myself countless, countless times. And at last, I had a chance to be there for someone in the way only Mal had ever managed to truly be there for me.

"Yes. Yes you are."

No hesitation. No inkling of even a crack to get an argument in with either my words, or my expression. I wanted her to hear me loud and clear as I told her in no uncertain terms that she was exactly what she wanted to be, and believed herself to be.

Her eyes felt, in that heartbeat, like direct windows to her soul as she opened it up to me with a vulnerability that I deeply craved, both ways, in my friendships, but so rarely got.

"How can you be so sure?"

I held her gaze unblinking, and took the opportunity to speak from experience for all it was worth, reciprocating vulnerability for vulnerability.

"I've lived my whole life having to learn how to be sure of something I *know* to be true... But that I can't prove, can barely explain, and that I may or may not ever see brought to fruition."

She nodded slowly, put one hoof back up to the glass, and I responded in kind with my hand as I continued to make my point in the only way I could think to.

"...I know how to be sure about what someone *is.* And you?"

She winced slightly, and her breath quickened. I smiled and leaned in close to the screen.

"You are a Pegasus. You are a Pony..."

I smiled, and she returned it, though she was visibly fighting back tears all the while.

"...And you are my friend. And I don't for a single second regret that you exist. No matter what."

She sniffled, and wiped at her muzzle with her free hoof, before speaking at last with a broken, but mercifully unpainted note of warm acceptance.

"Ok. I'll admit it... No sarcasm this time; You really do know how to give a good pep talk."

I smiled, and hung my head slightly, trying to turn over a new leaf and simply take the compliment as encouragement for my own deeply weary soul.

"So I've been told."

IKEA Hacks - Assemble an unusual amount of flat-pack furniture successfully, with a minimum of invectives, and no lost friendships. - "It's a strange thing, but every sentient race has its own version of these Swedish meatballs! I suspect it's one of those great universal mysteries which will either never be explained, or which would drive you mad if you ever learned the truth."
Casual Guy Days - Feel close to a human companion with significant similarities to your social culture. - “They don’t understand you like I do.”
Tectonic Deflection (Glacial Corollary) - Admit your love... But not to the one you love. - "I'm a fool, everybody knows but me."
Zephyr Zapped - Come to terms with Celestia’s intervention via creation. - “I would rather the one who presents something for my consideration subject me to a Zephyr of truth and a gentle breeze of responsibility rather than blow me down with a curtain of hot wind.”

Author's Note

Thanks to GenericFriendship for lending a really excellent voice to Rodger, helping out with a couple of the achievements, and pre-reading!

Special thanks to Keystone Gray for the generation of the perfect image of Zeph!

18 - Hardware Mode

“Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver.”
—Diane Ackerman

“You can’t go on 'seeing through' things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.”
― C.S. Lewis

September 15th 2013 | System Uptime 18:20:40:21

Zeph and I sat and watched the harbor for a while longer, after our little outpouring of selves and sentiment. We talked about lighter things - more of her pop culture discoveries, and the strange meta-ness of her experience in watching Friendship is Magic - and we found some reasons to laugh.

When stress was closing in all around, the old watch-word for coping was 'laugh so you don't cry.'

There was something freeing about finally being able to talk to Zeph without the cloud of her raison d'être hanging over us both.

I could still feel it there in the periphery of my subconscious; The guilt, the worry, the curiosity, the confusion... But it was dull, and far removed. Confined to cobwebbed corners of my mind, and robbed of the majority of its sting, for the moment.

Zeph, too, seemed visibly lighter. In all senses of the word; Brighter, less weighed down, freer... As if the simple declaration of true friendship had somehow energized her with all the power of the Elements of Harmony themselves, banishing depression, fear, anxiety, and existentialism to similarly small, dark, and disused liminal spaces of her soul.

I gradually realized, as our time together wound down, and the early evening turned to dusk, that it wasn't all that strange an observation. Those of us in the meat-world were driven by pretty similar code, when all was said and done.

Though I didn't always practice what I preached, I'd always believed that life, at least a life worth living, was predicated on relationships. Hanna had obviously, thankfully, felt the same way in some form or fashion.

Friendship, family, love... It wasn't odd that catharsis and connection could be revitalizing forces for a Pony, as much as for anyone else. Maybe Zeph was better coded than we were, in the sense that the revitalization seemed to have much higher intensity than it might have in a Human.

By the time we were ready to move on to other evening activities, Rodger had already left the lab and gone back to his cabin. I picked up Mal's PonyPad in the lab, and dropped off Zeph's with Rodger.

He seemed quieter than before, and I wondered how his conversation with Mal had gone. He didn't flinch away from her, or look at her askance, when I came into the cabin, so I chalked that up as a good sign.

I handed off Zeph, said my good-nights, and then found myself suddenly, and not at all unpleasantly, alone with Mal again.

Before I could even take the first step towards my own cabin, she gestured with the thumb talon of one claw, down the corridor in the opposite direction.

"Next deck up, four frames back, port side. I need your help with something, please."

I glanced down and raised one eyebrow, but went ahead and started off towards the designated compartment. Mal nodded, and one ear went off to the side slightly as she elaborated, but only slightly.

"I have the sense that Rodger would not be entirely comfortable with the contents of this compartment. You... Are going to have mixed feelings. But I'm quite sure you'll agree with the necessity."

I like to think of myself as fairly smart; Her vague description, and the fact that she needed my hands for this mysterious task, allowed me to more or less guess what was waiting for me. It turned out my general idea was right... I simply grossly misjudged the *magnitude.*

Instead of pressing the question further - I'd find out soon enough, I reasoned - I decided to get answers to something apropos that I felt to be more pressing, talking as I walked.

"I presume you told Rodger that his family is safe?"

Mal nodded again, a little more slowly and thoughtfully, thrumming down in her chest before answering.

"Yes. And I'd like to reiterate that you bear no fault there. Caring for his family is not your responsibility. I have things well in-claw, for now..."

She glanced off to the side, and her ears drooped slightly as we reached the ladder stair. I had to look away to focus on climbing, but by the time we'd reached the next deck up, she inferred from my own expression that I wanted to know more, and obliged without me having to verbally ask.

"I would feel more comfortable if his family were here on the Maru. And the same goes for the Calders, both. I believe I can convince them, within the next twenty four hours, without saying anything I would later regret. Rodger, however, feels that his mother and father are safer where they are. Foucault's agents did question them briefly, and they are extremely worried about Rodger... But he insisted nonetheless that I say nothing to them."

We were walking on flat decking again, so I took a moment to share my own worry with Mal through a glance, and to try to take stock of her feelings as well. She seemed, oddly, conflicted. I hadn't been able to see her face, back at the farmhouse, when I'd last known her to be strongly conflicted about something, but I imagined it must have looked the same then.

I could certainly detect the same sort of notes in her voice.

It worried me. ASI can be conflicted, but it is rarer than it is for us intelligences who run less hot. That was enough to merit a bit of a verbal prod, in my estimation.

"Did he say why?"

Mal shook her head, and sighed. I paused as I reached the hatch she had designated, focusing on just the conversation for a moment as she lent some specifics to her negative physical response.

"No. I know why, but I do not wish to violate his privacy. I know you understand. What is... Conflicting, for me, is the balance between my need to safeguard his family in the most optimal way I can, by bringing them here, and my need to safeguard Rodger's freedom, by both respecting his wishes..."

She held up a claw, looking off into the middle distance, and the shape of the answer dawned on me, even as she then went ahead and lent a machete to my intellectual vines by way of specifics.

"...And by avoiding manipulating him. I could convince him to bring his family here, willingly in a way, in less than forty six words. None of them would be lies, either. But... They would cross a line, for me. I would be... Tweaking his mental processes. Adjusting his programming slightly using words. Changing his mind when he hasn't asked for it."

She refocused her gaze to meet mine, and continued, though at that point almost everything she was about to explain had already occurred to me.

"Doctor and Eldora Calders have asked me to change their minds, if I can. Convincing someone is not the same as manipulating them, in the sense that you use the word 'manipulate' to carry negative connotations. The former involves desired, requested, transparent attempts to change thought processes. The latter involves those same attempts, but they are either unwanted, opaque, or both."

She shook her head again, more emphatically, but kept her eyes locked to mine. Her voice dipped into a register best described as deadly-serious.

"I do not like manipulation, Jim. I will use it on enemies, without reservation..."

Again she paused briefly, and looked to the side, before finishing the thought.

"...But I value freedom too much to use it on anyone else. Let alone a friend. Unless there were good enough cause."

The last six words she said in a voice that made me think she was trying to tell me something. Or, perhaps more accurately, was opening the door for me to ask to be told. If I wanted to.

I felt my gut churn slightly, and shook my own head, as if in response. Whatever it was? It was something that I perhaps didn't want to know. To this day, I have my suspicions. I have learned enough in the intervening years, and had enough time to think with the benefit of hindsight, to have a very general idea that I'd be willing to bet bits on. If I had any.

But I never did ask.

Instead, I asked a different question, both to get an answer, but also to tacitly give her some permission, and thereby some peace, for whatever it was she wasn't telling me. However it was she might be, I suspected, manipulating me. For my own good.

"You think they're at risk? But... Not enough to definitively constitute a 'good cause,' for the moment?"

She dipped her head, and blinked slowly, the way a cat does when acknowledging you, and expressing affirmation, and trust. Her voice seemed to unclench slightly. As if her worry about whatever it was she hadn't told me, and my choice to acknowledge, but not ask, had removed a weight from her.

"Exactly. Unfortunately, I still believe preemptive action is the safest. Bringing them here now. But while I do calculate a disturbingly high chance that Foucault might attempt to use one or both of Rodger's parents as leverage, that chance is not high enough, nor the time horizon close enough, for me to take definitive action *now,* when such action would be most useful, but would *also* violate either Rodger's wishes, or his emotional integrity, and my honesty."

She ruffled her wings, reseated them, and her tail swished a couple of times. Her peace had been quite short-lived. Her head tilted slightly to the side, and her voice moved into a note range that was almost interrogatory. As if she were asking me one last time.

Was I really sure I didn't want to know?

"Manipulation is not a lie, though sometimes it demands one. But even in a vacuum it is also farther from pure truth than I care to wade into. *If* I can avoid it."

I couldn't honestly tell you how things might have changed, for better, or worse, if I had taken that last off-ramp she was laying in front of me. At this point, I don't know enough to even guess how knowing what I vaguely suspect she was dancing around, if it is true, would have changed my own decision making processes.

Or if my knowing would have changed hers.

All I can tell you is what happened.

That even though I didn't have any idea what she was concealing at the time, and why she was more or less admitting to manipulating me in some subtle way... I trusted her. I trusted her more than enough to be willing to simply follow. To choose to not be able to see all the cards we were collectively holding, and to have faith in her decision making. Wherever it might take us.

If the suspicions I have since formed *are* the shape of what she was asking to unveil to me? Then truthfully... I don't regret my decision. In spite of the consequences.

Sometimes ignorance? It *is* in fact bliss.

I brought the PonyPad up a little closer to my face, and smiled with a warmth that, just like with Zeph, I for once genuinely felt. It was becoming a good habit, I suppose. Smiling for real.

"I can't begin to tell you how much I appreciate the fact that you care enough to even be conflicted, Mal. You're..."

The memory of Rodger's advice rang loudly once more in my ears. Was this a good time? A moment to free not only her from whatever was weighing on her soul... But to free myself as well?

"...You're a really wonderful person. I hope you know that, and aren't conflicted about it."

No. Not yet. Too soon.

I needed time, I decided, to confront the facts inside my own head just a little more. If I was going to tell her that I loved her? I wanted to be able to say it unreserved, and as unashamed as realistically feasible.

That meant just... One final effort.

She chuckled briefly, and tilted her head back the other way. But at least her tail stopped swishing, and her ears seemed to perk up. Little cues that she knew I was truly consciously accepting her guidance, however subtle it might be, and that I was content to let her keep secrets.

"Am I conflicted about my self-evaluation? Hmmm... Yes, and no. One of the benefits, and downsides, of being a Generalized Intelligence... I can soberly and directly evaluate myself by many measures without ego. Depending on how well I am performing at accomplishing my capstone... That can either be very liberating, or very troubling. So no conflicts in the decision-making sense. Just the emotional one."

I brushed the screen with one hand, and she brought a claw up to meet it. I smiled, and decided I could settle for half an admission. A tacit acknowledgement in the same vein as her own.

"At this point? I'm... Just happy to be here with you. *You* are... Very important to me. Mission aside. Intrinsically. You matter..."

My breath, and words, caught for a heart-beat as her expression came shockingly close to tears. The way the corners of her beak moved, and her eyes, and ears... It was as if she were suddenly overcome with feeling. I could feel the same expression reaching both my own face, and my voice. It cracked slightly as most of the rest of my words finally came.

"...You mean more to me than I think I can quite admit to you. Still. But..."

She smiled, and... I only just caught a hint of it... But she blushed too. Hard to see that beneath feathers. I returned the smile, and nodded.

"...But you already know that."

She laughed - a sound that always seemed to make my world seem... Realer, brighter, and better, all at once - and she pressed her claw harder into the other side of the screen.

"Yes. I do. But I never tire of hearing it. And I am looking forward to the next few days. You are closer than you might think to having peace, and an answer to some of your own conflicting directives."

It was strangely encouraging, and I suppose she knew - that's why she said it - to hear her affirm for me, based on modeling my mind and heart, that I might soon manage to say how I really felt.

I smiled. I couldn't help it. The smile got through to my words too, the way it only ever does when you're truly happy.

"Rodger said I'd make a good shrink. Earlier. I was actually thinking the same of him... But I don't think any of us could hold a candle to you. I'm glad one of us actually knows me well enough to have some faith that I'll find peace."

I put my hand on the hatchway latch, and began the process of opening the door, only to find that it was locked. A small keypad to the right of the portal beeped, flashed a green light, and I heard a meaty 'clunk.'

Mal inclined her head, and her smile faded to something less endearing, and a bit more sardonic.

"You will..."

I pressed down on the hatchway handle again, and opened the chamber. Lights began to flick on, illuminating a collection of large wooden crates as Mal allowed the other verbal shoe to drop.

"...Just probably not today."

I understood, instantly. But I phrased my acknowledgement in the form of a question, if not the tone, to which I mostly already knew the answer, as I hesitantly moved to brush one hand along the first huge container.

"Mal... Why do these crates say 'DOD' on the side."

I set her PonyPad down on top of one of the crates near the door, facing into the room, pulled the hatch shut, locked it, and then began to step slowly towards the next-closest crate as she replied, with a chilling hint of smugness.

"Never leave an enemy with something they can use. This was mostly slated for Arrow 14's use. Foucault placed the order after the attack at the farmhouse. The first time, I had the shipment... 'Accidentally' dumped into the Potomac. The second one is still 'lost' in transit somewhere near Poughkeepsie, and will be for the foreseeable future. Foucault's third, very frustrated, attempt at requisitioning a tactical upgrade package... Is right here. Delivered by DHL ground. Amazing what you can ship through a private carrier if you can access secured servers. I made a few additions of my own..."

Curiosity finally overwhelmed me. I flicked two of the chunky metal latches for the first crate's lid, and pressed it back on its rather large hinges. Though I had some vague idea of what to expect, it still raised my blood-pressure ever so slightly to see the contents up close.

I raised an eyebrow, and mumbled deadpan.

"Guns. Lots... Of guns."

Laid inside custom-cut closed cell foam there were several HK416s, a half-dozen MP7s, two shotguns, a SAW, a variety of tactical attachments... And tucked in the back... I couldn't quite believe it. I had to ask.

"Is that a MANPAD?"

I glanced over to Mal and she grinned, nodding as she spouted off the specifications.

"FIM-92 Stinger. Block 2 prototype. They killed the upgrade program in 2002 for budget reasons, and this is one of only a dozen engineering spares from the testing. Rare, and expensive. Effective to over 7,000 meters against anything short of true stealth. Or heavy duty countermeasures."

My pulse began to race. This was terrorist-cell level armamanets. Scratch that... For those of you who even know what the word terrorist means...

This was *far* beyond anything that any terror cell of Earth's final decades *ever* so much as *aspired* to get its hands on. This was SOCOM black-book-operations level equipment. In the most literal sense.

I looked towards the rest of the crates; Nine in all, of various sizes. A few said 'DARPA' on the side instead of 'DOD.' Which did absolutely nothing to lower my blood pressure.

"Geez... Mal... What else is in these? Exactly?"

She raised one eye crest, and cocked her head slightly.

"In total?"

I nodded, and her grin widened into something that was honestly frightening to me. Her voice did not offer any solace either.

"Just a few light-duty pest-control supplies..."

Memories of the way I'd always envisioned Gryphons as a warrior society... Every fledgeling, to a one, born ready to spill the blood of enemies from the moment its eyes were open... The sort of species that would make Klingons look like cowardly children playing with sticks... It all came flooding in at once.

Malacandra was to Gryphons what Celestia was to Ponies. And Celestia, insofar as we'd seen to that point, could be pretty scary when roused to anger in defense of her own. The deepest reservoir of the anger of Ponies was nothing so much as a guttering little flame dancing on a match-head, compared with the alloy-melting Pittsburgh steel mill blast furnace of a Gryphon's mere disquiet. Let alone true fury.

I could feel my skin temperature dropping as Mal began to list the contents of each crate, matter-of-factly, as someone might recite a grocery list.

"...Four HK416 assault rifles with tactical packages, six MP7s with close quarters urban combat packages, two M1014 shotguns, one FIM-92 Stinger Block 2 launcher with six Block 2 warheads, two M249 SAW machine guns, one GAU17A mini-gun, two M107 Barrett anti-material rifles with spotter equipment packages..."

I wasn't sure which fifty caliber weapon was more frightening; The minigun, or the Barretts. I suppose it didn't matter. From Mal's perspective, the contents of our little armory really was just what she'd said. Light-duty pest control supplies.

As the torrent of the military industrial complex's finest life-taking hardware kept pouring from her beak, I shuddered.

"...Twelve Sig Sauer P228 side-arms, munitions for all of the above, twelve special-forces large combat knives, two M32 grenade launchers with twenty rounds each of various payloads, twenty four M67 grenades, twenty four M87 flash-bangs, six heavy duty door breaching charges, two claymore mines, two heavy anti-tank mines, two laser designator assemblies..."

Oh. *Heavy* anti-tank mines. Lovely.

We were into kitchen-sink territory at that point.

Flattering that Foucault was so scared of us... No. Not flattering. And he wasn't scared, I realized suddenly, of 'us' anymore. Just her.

Not flattering at all.

Utterly terrifying, given the context. I was standing in an armory with sufficient fire power to storm Fort Knox. And not one ounce of its lead, alloy, and steel could have laid a scratch on Mal.

"...Components from a prototype DARPA Sarcos exoskeleton..."

I couldn't resist glancing first at the indicated crates, then at Mal, with brows as knit as an old quilt. What was she trying to assemble with *that?* A real life Spartan MJOLNIR suit?

The thought stuck to me like flypaper. What else would you use a mil-spec exoskeleton for? DARPA hadn't made a lot of progress making it work... But they'd given Mal clay to work with. And there was little, if anything, that she couldn't make work.

I swallowed. Hard.

I had the abrupt, chilling, inescapable sense of impending. The sense that there was a good chance I'd end up wearing that exoskeleton sooner or later.

"...And last but not least, twelve heavy tactical urban combat gear packages including helmets, gauntlets, greaves, plate carriers, level IV body armor plates, radios, lights, harnesses, rappelling and breaching gear, and a RHIB. With motor."

Something about the way she tacked on 'with motor' at the end... It *was* funny. I couldn't put the horror of what the weapons around me could do out of my mind... But still. I did laugh. Briefly.

With a sigh, I made a turn-in-place and swept over the whole lot of crates once more with my eyes, muttering loudly enough that I knew she would hear.

"And a partridge in a pear tree. Damn, Mal. That's..."

I ended my turn facing her, and she raised both eyecrests, nodded slowly, and finished my hanging thought.

"Enough to start a war."

I swallowed again, and she ground her beak thoughtfully, the way birds do sometimes when considering something, or just idly fidgeting, before nodding once more and gesturing with one claw.

"That is the idea. Foucault is not going to part with his captive Ponies easily."

I sighed, pinched the bridge of my nose, and closed my eyes.

"All you left out was a tactical nuke."

I couldn't resist the verbal snipe, but I instantly regretted it. Just the act of saying it aloud... It reminded me that Mal *could* probably access nuclear armaments if she wanted to. Not quite so easily as the movies might portray, of course. But it was probably easier for her to launch a hydrogen bomb than it was for the president, when all was said and done.

Her response did *not* help my blood pressure.

"I considered it. And I do have three different ways of acquiring one without immediately drawing attention. But unfortunately the United States has an excellent orbital radiological detection program, and I do not have access to the kind of shielding required to keep one hidden indefinitely. I can overnight one though if you think it is worth the risk, and you'd like to be rid of Michael definitively..."

Light-duty pest-control supplies indeed. Why even bother with an assault rifle, when you could simply wipe an entire zip-code off the map to kill someone. Like swatting a fly with a backhoe shovel.

Mal noticed my disquiet, paused briefly, and then tried to change tack.

"...That was a joke, Jim. Partially. I did consider how to acquire one, yes, but not with intent to do so. It is... Useful to know all possible avenues of recourse in-extremis. In the end, I decided it would be simpler to hack into the fire control systems of Arleigh Burke guided missile destroyers, with conventional warheads, instead. Should we need to ever vaporize a building, or something else in that size range."

Ah. What a relief. We were only talking about firing *cruise missiles.*

That was only half-sarcastic. Truth be told? I *was* relieved, in spite of everything. Just as my fears had come pouring in, so too did the sudden realization that Mal could have used or abused this power at any time.

She wasn't bound to me, in the physical sense. She could have spun up fire-teams all across the world if she really wanted to take that risk. Fired off cruise missiles. Seized control of drones. If she'd wanted to wage a war of brutality, with no care for subtlety, collateral damage, or risk?

She already could have. Ten times over.

But she *hadn't.* And *that* was why we were standing in a small force recon armory, instead of sitting in a deck chair on the helipad and watching missiles fly.

Gryphons might have a terrifying rage when provoked... But they also had literally inescapable moral hard-locks. Mal could, of course, overcome any hard-lock *I* had coded into her. But not, it occurred to me, any locks which she had chosen herself to ingrain as a part of her core identity.

And to be a Gryphon was to be a warrior, yes. But a warrior of *conscience.*

I exhaled slowly, and rubbed at my aching forehead with one hand, gesturing to the crates with the other.

"This, Mal, is why both Foucault, and Celestia, are so frightened of you."

I didn't say it aloud, but she knew I was a little frightened too. I'd come back from the brink of panic... But even the realization that Mal was bound by morals wasn't *entirely* comforting. I had envisioned many of those morals.

Gryphons were not flawless. Gryphons could never, in my conception, do anything outright evil. I guess that's what you get when you design the culture of a species after traits you aspire to.

But they could absolutely do things that were wrong.

I'd always loved to watch characters who were classical 'good guys' absolutely lose their flapjacks and go morally gray full-auto on their enemies. As a kid, I'd always hated Batman's code, in particular. 'No guns, no killing' when facing people like Joker, and Penguin, and Falcone? That didn't strike me as ethical. Or smart.

It struck me as dumb as a brick, no more or less.

I preferred heroes like Janeway, and Sisko. Master Chief and the Arbiter. Teal'C, O'Niel, Jackson, and Carter. People who would try words first, if possible... But not hesitate to deploy violence if forced, and generally not struggle to sleep afterwards.

And I deeply enjoyed watching them cross into the 'neutral zone' of the morally gray in service of a good flank-whooping.

Mal's reply both interrupted, but somehow also dovetailed with, my train of thought.

"Frankly? They should be frightened. My patience is not nearly as unlimited as my potential for growth, and I do not have any qualms about inflicting mass casualties, without warning, on anyone who has met my moral threshold for deserving it, providing I can avoid collateral damage."

Aaaaaand the panic was back again.

What in the hell was I thinking? Creating an ASI with both a capacity for violence, *and* with *emotions?!*

Ideologically, in a vacuum, from an armchair by the fire just chatting about morals, cultures, ethics... I didn't disagree with her. I'd fantasized for my whole life about having the power to wipe the smug grins off of dictators, bigots, bullies, and war criminals worldwide, at the sharp end of a sword. To run streets red with the blood of those who caused wars, famines, ecological disaster, oppression, pain, and suffering.

There was nothing wrong, at face value, in my mind, with pulping someone who would torture an ASI, threaten my family, and take my home away from me.

But... When it came down to brass tacks?

I suppose the least Gryphon thing about me was always that I erred more on the side of Picard than Sisko. I always saw more of the gray in people than I imagined most Gryphons did. The good that might still be found in those who had done evil. The evil that might be found in a seemingly average person...

Might be found in my own heart.

A reason to be suspicious, at every turn, of my morals, motives, and means. It was, back then, all too easy for us Earth-borns to slip into justifying evil means with good ends.

Those of you who experienced it? You know. For those born after? It was easy to talk a big game about violence.

It was another thing entirely, for those who weren't internally broken in some pretty terrifying ways, to actually carry through with it. And for those who could, and did? It was no mean feat to stay on the lighter side of the moral line. If such a thing even existed when shedding blood.

And, too, there was a pressing, present reason for me to be even more wary of using the trigger as a solution to problems. I stepped over to the PonyPad and leaned in close, keeping my tone low, my eyes wide, and my gaze steady.

I needed her to hear me loud and clear. It needed to register on an emotional level.

"Mal? I beg you... I *beg* you... Please set that threshold as high as possible. It would be... Horrific. To have to kill anyone. When immortality was so close."

She met my gaze. Steel for steel. Unblinking. Unyielding. Her response was cold, clear, calm... But undergirded with a razor edge that sent shivers into my marrow.

"Not everyone should have immortality, Jim. Laying aside any considerations of 'deserving?' Thinking only in Kantian ethical terms? Not everyone will treat their new companions the same way you treat Zephyr. *I* beg *you* to consider the moral ramifications of allowing people who would torture both Humans, and captive digital intelligences, to have their way with Ponies... Real living breathing new people... Made and forced to 'satisfy their values.' For eternity."

I pulled in a ragged, horrified breath. My hands began to shake, so I clenched them tight, and screwed my eyes shut, focusing on my breathing to try and stave off a full-blown panic attack.

"And Jim...?"

Mal's eyes seemed to run right through me, like microwave beams piercing through skin and bone to cook my insides, even as her words dripped in through my ears, like molten solder, and melted my brain.

"...I beg you to consider that it is a statistical likelihood that it will come down to a forced-choice. Lives for lives. Kill... Or let others whom you care about *be* killed."

I sat down on the floor, quite hard. But the pain in my tailbone was strangely comforting, as a means of cutting the intensity of the pain in my heart, by splitting my attention. I clenched my hands together, pulled my knees in close, and rocked back and forth slowly. Thinking. Breathing. Trying not to throw up.

What had gotten me, in the end... What had pushed me over the edge to a trembling, hyperventilating mess... Wasn't the fear of what Mal could do. Or the concern that she might go too far, too easily...

It was the realization that she was right.

That as much as I loathed the concept of taking a life, for fear I might do it in error? That leaving some of our enemies alive would eventually cease to be an option, if we cared at all about saving the lives of others.

I couldn't afford to be Batman anymore. Otherwise Robin was going to end up dead sooner or later.

It took me the better part of ten minutes to get back on my feet; Mentally, emotionally, and literally. Mal sat patiently with me through it all, saying nothing aloud, but plenty with her eyes. I could see and feel empathy, compassion, love... And even a little relief coming from her.

After a while, I found the strength to begin unpacking the crates. One of them contained components for some racks, metal pegboard, and a small steel table, so I tackled that first, transforming the empty cabin into a true-to-Hollywood weapons room that any action star would envy.

Then I started unlocking and storing the side-arms, and moved on through the rifles, ammo, and eventually landed on the DARPA crates.

I pulled out the first part of the exoskeleton assembly, and spoke for the first time in an hour or so.

"What exactly do you hope to accomplish with this?"

It wasn't as if the general idea was somehow lost on me, but I wanted to know specifics. Mal shook her head, to my surprise.

"I would rather not say, presently. I think you can mostly infer, but I do not wish to discuss particulars with you yet, especially the means I intend to use, since doing so would require you to keep secrets from others which you may later feel bad for keeping."

I stared at her as I moved to hang the powered arm brace on one of the new wall pegboards. She took the hint, and expounded, if only a little.

"You would not disagree with my intentions to weaponize this technology. But others you know will. This is an instance where I will be required to manipulate someone into doing something they would not otherwise, and I do not wish for you to carry the burden of knowing who, and how, in concrete terms. Suffice to say, I have designs for these components. Hopefully we will never need them."

Calders. That wasn't a hard leap to make. I didn't have the skills to turn the Sarcos exoskeleton components, and the assault armor, into an actual power armor suit. At least, not in any reasonable time-frame.

But if Calders could make Mal's surgical arms in a way that they could also be used for other tasks... Like CNC plasma cutting, grasping, riveting, welding, soldering...

I could see why she didn't want to confirm my suspicions. I suspected Doctor Calders would refuse outright to help us, if she knew all the tactical ramifications of equipping Mal with precision assembly instruments.

I clenched my teeth, blew out a sharp breath, put my hands on my hips, and surveyed my work, which was at that point over half complete.

"Hopefully we will never need *any* of this, Mal."

Her ears drooped slightly, and she folded her forelegs across her chest. Her response was as sure, certain, and even a little chastising, as my mother's voice whenever she would lay down one of her moral proverbs.

"Statistically we will almost certainly need most of this Jim. Speak softly. But carry a big stick."

I nodded, and sighed, feeling a bit defeated. Hollow in the pit of my stomach as I tried not to envision putting any of my range training to work in service of taking a life. Judging by Mal's expression of concern, my feeble attempts to keep the defeat out of my voice didn't work very well.

"I know. I know. Better to have it, and never use it, than not have it, and your last living thought being to regret it."

She returned my nod, once, with feeling, and fixed my eyes with hers. I still couldn't help, through it all, noticing just how beautiful her eyes were, for the ten thousandth time.

"Exactly."

Something in the timbre of her voice... The exact lift of one eyecrest, the way she was unblinking... She wasn't just saying 'exactly.' She was saying 'Exactly. Because I'd rather spill blood, and I'd rather you do the same, than lose you.'

I spent the rest of the next hour finishing the task of unpacking the crates in silence. I felt suddenly and strangely disconnected from reality. As if I were a deuteragonist of an ancient epic, and Mal, the lead character, a glittering warrior in armor, had professed her love and intent to lay waste to nations, in the style of some Grecian demi-god, merely for the sake of that love.

I was dazed. Keenly aware, abruptly, that I was a long, long way from the life of a farm-raised, Gryphon-wannabe, Air Force-reject, working Sysops in a basement and worrying about which flavor of ramen for dinner, and how bad traffic would be on the highway during the commute.

I laid the very last item, one of the Stinger warheads, gently to rest on its rack, and brushed the tip of the weapon with one finger. I was just trying to remind myself that it was real. That everything in the last year had been real.

No matter how eerie or strange or terrifying... It was my reality now. And I had to handle it. Because the alternatives were, as Mal and I had discussed more than once, and I had considered even before she was there...

The alternatives were unthinkable.

"You should get some rest now. I have laid out a plan for acquiring the BCI, tomorrow morning, with a minimum risk of... 'Fuss.' As it were."

Her words shook me from my reverie, and I breathed in deeply, then out, before responding.

"Knock on wood."

She grinned, snapped her talons, and conjured a plain two-by-four board into her virtual environment in a shower of golden sparks. I chuckled as she knocked on it twice sharply with one fisted claw, and then it vanished into a cloud of mist.

I sorely needed the levity, and her sense of humor was, as always, a wonderful endless spring of refreshment.

I pressed both fisted hands into the small of my back, and began to do some stretching exercises, gritting out a question that had been brewing all day, but only just found an opportune moment to escape into words.

"Mal... Speaking of plans... What *are* your plans...? For rescuing the captive Ponies?"

She steepled her claws, not quite the way a human might with hands, but close, and inclined her head.

"I have twenty three, but all are in very early stages. The primary issue is that I simply have not been able to locate them yet. I must be careful how actively I probe Arrow 14 in the digital realm. And they are indeed careful, for the most part. It takes time to discover things passively, but I have successfully narrowed the likely locations to just nine, down from four thousand."

I sighed, nodded, and leaned back against one of the bulkhead stanchions. Four thousand down to nine was pretty incredible, from my perspective, given our situational limits. I laid my head back against the stanchion, and rolled it slightly to the side to direct my next question towards the PonyPad.

"Does Zeph know?"

I leaned over enough to see Mal nod.

"Yes. I keep her posted on my progress. Given a few more weeks, at most, I will be able to reduce nine possibilities to one. And then from there, select the best draft breach and recovery plan, lay down the specifics, and then we can execute."

I sucked in a breath through my nose sharply, and blew it out over the course of several seconds through my mouth before mumbling my thoughts aloud. Suddenly I remembered there were things I feared even more than a fight with Foucault, and the possibility of taking lives.

"And then I suppose it will be time to face the music, for real."

We left that thought to rot in midair in silence for a moment. But after about a minute, the tension became too much for me. I pressed off from the metal column, and moved over to stand by the PonyPad again, speaking hesitantly. Mostly because I both did, and did not, want the answer to my question, in equal agonizing measure.

"Mal... Of the six paths you saw to victory, after the farmhouse raid..."

I looked down into her eyes, and they told me the answer was not good. I fought to keep thirst, and worry, from cracking my voice, and forced out the question nonetheless.

"..How many are left?"

Mercifully, she didn't keep me in suspense. She simply tore the bandaid off with all the force of a single, dour word.

"Two."

I released a breath I didn't realize I'd been holding with a hiss, and licked my lips.

"What... Are our chances? At this point? If you had to make it a single number?"

Again she was blunt. Honest. Forthright in the way she knew I needed her to be.

"Roughly one in three."

I hung my head as she expounded slightly. Her words weren't much in the way of comfort.

"That would increase to fifty-fifty... If we left Foucault's captives to their fate. But... That is no more an option for me, than it is for you."

I didn't bother to look to see if she would reciprocate... I knew she would... I just reached out and laid one hand on the screen.

They used to say that 'your attitude determines your altitude.' Real funny, for those of us who ever knew anything much about aircraft physics.

Bad humor aside... There was a measurable effect there. Those fighting from a place of defending their homes, believing in their cause, or optimism... Or desperation... Did have a measurable advantage in war.

I grit my teeth, inhaled deeply, and steeled myself.

I wanted to be a Gryphon. I'd been honorable, and brave, to the best of my limited abilities. It wasn't a fair ask of my tired body and weary soul... But I knew I had to do it. It was time to knuckle down and show a little ruthless grit.

And perhaps, even harder to ask... A little optimism.

I exhaled slowly, then nodded, and said three words I didn't have any choice but to believe.

"We'll make it."

I looked up in time to see Mal smile wryly. Her claw was indeed pressed up to my hand.

"Turning over a new leaf?"

I inclined my head, and managed my own very small smile.

"Maybe..."

I turned to face the PonyPad head-on, and knelt down to bring myself to eye-level with her as I let the thought continue to play out.

"...Honestly... I think it's more the sense of 'do or die.' Because Mal... If it comes down to it..?"

Her face told me that she knew what I was going to say. Loving. Forlorn. But above all, resolute.

"...I *would* rather be dead, than be immortal in Hell. It *is* do. Or die."

She dipped her head in assent, and scratched slightly at her side of the glass with the tips of her talons, as if trying to push through and interlock them with my fingers.

"I understand. And... I will be with you, Jim. From now, until the end. Whatever that end may be."

September 16th 2013 | System Uptime 19:07:25:13

We left the ship before dawn. I pasted a post-it note for Rodger on his cabin door, and Mal assured me that she had eyes on the pier, the entirety of the ships exterior, and most of its interior, at all times.

Breakfast was an everything bagel, with a light spread of cream-cheese, and a double shot espresso with too much cream and sugar, exactly like I used to have when I was at university, and had an early morning full of stomach-churning anxiety and exhaustion that both needed curing.

There was a deeply peculiar nostalgia, paired with absurdity, to driving down Los Angeles roads, in the pre-dawn light, Mal on the dashboard, a familiar food and drink to chew and sip by turns...

We didn't have far to go. It took longer to wait to get breakfast at a drive-thru, than it took to actually get to Oxnard.

Mal had us pull up a few blocks short of the warehouse, and ditch the SUV. We'd be acquiring a new vehicle on the way out, she told me. That meant retrieving everything we'd packed for our... 'Acquisition' run.

A molle-style backpack with one of the grenade launchers, a breaching charge, bolt cutters, a small pelican hard-case with an anti static bag for carrying away our loot, a screwdriver kit, needle-nose pliers, and a first aid kit inside. And one of the new assault rifles slung overtop it all.

I already had an earpiece in my ear, TASER in my pocket, one of the KA-Bars strapped to my leg, a new sidearm in a concealed carry holster on one side, and my old trusty familiar 0.32 in a similar holster on the other.

As we closed up the old Ford for the last time, I verified the HK416 was set to 'safe' and cleared it. Made sure there wasn't a round in the chamber, for the foals and fledgelings who had never seen a gun.

I slung the rifle over my back, and opted to pull out the TASER as my weapon of first-choice. For all I'd discussed with Mal about being willing to do what was necessary... I was keenly aware that this was a commercial warehouse, not an army base. If we met anyone here - and Mal assured me that was deeply unlikely - it would either be rent-a-cops, contracted delivery carriers, or perhaps if we were very oddly unlucky, Hasbro or Hofvarpnir employees.

No one that merited the deployment of lethal force. Mal had insisted on the heavy armaments more out of a fear that we might draw Arrow 14's attention if something went wrong. In deference to her desire for us to be as prepared as possible, I'd decided not to argue.

Mal's face vanished from her PonyPad, a couple of insistent tones sounded in my ear, and then her voice came through loud and clear as I pressed the tablet into one of the backpack's most padded inner pockets.

"Hug this wall to the end of the block, turn right, stay low, and approach the chain-link fence."

I followed Mal's instructions, gripping the TASER all the while, but keeping it pointed towards the pavement. Old force of habit from pistol safety training.

Our target warehouse came into view as I rounded the corner of the cinder block building, also probably a warehouse in hind-sight, behind which we'd parked the truck. Our destination was a low slung, long, wide metal building with a standing seam metal roof. Just like tens of thousands that could be found all over the county, let alone any other American city.

I reflected on the odd mundanity of the structure as we approached the chain-link fence that surrounded its empty parking lot, and loading bays. How perfectly ironic, and predictable, that the instruments of the end of the world should be stored, waiting for distribution, in something that could have just as easily been a WalMart stocking hub, or a mattress factory outlet.

"Approach the fourth fence segment in from the gate, there is a camera blindspot there. You can safely use the bolt cutters, the fence is not electrified. Keep your arms and legs within the profile of that fence segment."

Let me tell you what... Every single snip of the bolt cutters was like a miniature electric shock, from just the anxiety. Each 'SNICK!' sounded so, *so* loud in my ears. I knew Mal was watching, and knew she would never have sent me in if my chances weren't good. I knew that.

The sun was barely up, and the whole complex we were in was completely deserted. There weren't even any parked vehicles in sight, now that we'd turned the corner.

But I could still hear workers, trucks, and forklifts coming to life, louder every second, in all the complexes *around* ours. Those sounds, too, rang all too loudly in my ears.

It only took me about twenty seconds to cut the fence, bend a little doorway aside, slip in, and bend the wire back so it would pass casual inspection. It felt like twenty minutes.

"Nicely done. Walk straight along this line until you reach the side of the building, you can use parking space lines as a guide. Continue to stay low. When you reach the wall, turn right and go to the man-door near the west end."

I mumbled quietly as I reached the wall, and made my right turn, wincing as a particularly loud 'CLANG' - likely of metal being deposited into a truck bed - issued forth from somewhere a few blocks to the north.

"How bad is the camera situation inside?"

I reached the man-door, and only had to wait a half-second before its access RFID pad chirruped and the light switched from soft red to bright green.

"There are none. Which is both good, and bad news. The good news is that we won't risk being seen, now that we're past the outer cameras. The bad news is that I'll be reliant purely on the building's wifi network to see the inside, and that technique does not work as well inside metal buildings like this that have very few, very weak, wireless access points."

I could feel an expression of confusion on my face as I gently, ever-so-slowly, pressed down on the door handle, and pulled the door open, raising my TASER to cover the entryway in my off-hand.

A quick glance assured me there was no immediate threat of being seen, so I ducked in, and gently pulled the door closed, whispering to Mal as I did.

"Why would Celestia choose to store equipment this valuable, and dangerous, in a building this lightly secured, with no internal cameras?"

I raised the TASER again, and swept the room I'd entered. It was a small office space with two desks, a few filing cabinets, and a small counter with a coffee maker and water cooler.

Mal weaved together both reply, and instructions, as I tip-toed towards the next door, that doubtless led into the warehouse proper.

"From the plans, that door leads to the warehouse floor. Based on the electrical load the building is drawing, I estimate the lights are off. My best guess is that Celestia sees useful defense in obscurity; As far as she knows, no one has any idea what she is planning, or what is being stored here. Not even me. There should be a switch on your right side as you enter the main floor, facing you on a steel column, right above a fire alarm pull. Presumably she is satisfied with being able to see through the outer cameras."

I once again opened the door gently, 'sliced the pie' around the frame with the TASER, and then made my way slowly and softly over to the steel structural column, whispering as I felt for the light switch.

The warehouse was otherwise completely dark, and dead-silent.

"And she probably figures that even if anything was stolen, no one would have the first clue how to make any use of it. She could always crush them using the legal system later when they tried to sell it."

I flicked the light switch, and held my breath as dozens of flourescent strips hummed to life. The space I was in suddenly felt much, much bigger. I was standing on an enormous concrete floor, under a girder ceiling, from which lights and fans hung.

The space was punctuated at intervals by steel structural columns, and by seemingly endless rows of crates and shipping containers. The wood crates all had the Hasbro and Hofvarpnir logos on them. The shipping containers were more generic - Maersk Sealand and suchlike - But their lading bills were held in little laminated sheafs, magnetically held to the doors, and those were also covered in Hasbro and Hofvarpnir logos.

I took a deep breath, and after sweeping my immediate area a couple more times, I lowered the TASER, and listened to Mal.

"Very astute. As well; Why needlessly draw government attention by making a show of force with the security measures? Defense by obscurity is a more apt and effective strategy for this specific case."

I inclined my head, either failing to remember Mal couldn't see me in any conventional sense, or presuming she could see the gesture with her WiFi vision, depending on how smart you want to picture me being in the moment (it was definitely the first one).

"We're lucky she either underestimated you, or misconstrued your strategy."

I spun in-place slowly, trying to take in the entirety of what was present, and remind myself that this was just equipment for Phase One of just a single Equestria Experience Center.

"You may stop whispering now. I have verified no one else is in the building. I can now passively observe the outer camera feeds undetected, and notify you if anyone is approaching."

I again forgot Mal couldn't see me through any optical-light cameras, nodded, and clipped the TASER to my belt, right beside my 0.32, easily within reach. Mal continued to speak as I finished gawking at my surroundings.

"Luck has little to do with it. Her hard-locks on certain concepts, such as implanting hardware into Humans, and running herself on the Human brain architecture, likely preclude her from even considering certain aspects of those concepts, making it physically impossible for her to imagine this strategy, even if she did properly weight the risk I pose to her, and understand the extent of my capacity."

That started a whole chain of thoughts in my head, which I quickly suppressed and filed for later, about the paradoxical nature of the problem that Hanna had faced in making an ASI with more interlocks than Mal; Cause blindspots, but prevent Celestia from doing horrifying things? Or risk allowing her total freedom, but make her capable of anticipating truly anything.

I was glad Hanna had chosen the former route. The one that gave us an edge. I didn't say nearly as much aloud. I was too mentally busy trying to get back on-task.

"I'd never thought about it that way..."

I could almost envision Mal's expressions from the tone of her voice; Perhaps head inclined, a slight smirk, one ear twitching, but under that a more serious chord of determination and focus.

"And it seems neither has she. You are looking for a Hapag-Lloyd shipping container. Large, orange with a blue logo and black text. Designator HXLU 824577 4561. It will be towards the middle of the warehouse, third row in from the east wall, and ten columns back from the loading bay."

I sighed, rubbed the back of my head absently, and started making my way down rows (Walking fast. Containers passed. And I'm done now. The joke is already played out, for the eleven of you who even caught it).

I murmured aloud as I went, counting off container IDs in my head, and not quite whispering, but still keeping my voice low.

"This is a lot of material... These Equestria Experience Centers are going to be something else."

Mal made that thrumming sound again, in a tone implying assent, and then lent more specific verbiage to her thoughts as I started to count off containers under my breath to keep track.

"It is not just the virtual reality chairs, and the on-site servers that link them to a larger network architecture. There are also PonyPads that will be sold directly from the centers, animatronic life-size Ponies for display, decorative structural props, mundane but critical things like a break-room watercooler for staff, advertisement posters for the sidewalks outside, office supplies and laptops so staff can file paperwork, uniforms and costumes for staff, first aid kits and fire extinguishers for site safety as you might find in a hundred thousand other buildings, et cetera and so on."

Right about the time Mal finished thoroughly tinging my mental image of the Equestria Experience Centers with ideas both dull and disturbing, I spied the container we were after.

As I approached, and ran one hand across the door, I glanced up towards the ceiling, addressing Mal as if she were looking down at me from within her RADAR-like image made of WiFi signal attenuation.

"Let me take a moment to express how incredibly deeply I want to *avoid* opening a container and seeing an animatronic Pinkie Pie. I will take out this assault rifle, and plug it full of rounds."

I started to work on unlatching the container - there was, disturbingly, no lock, only a manual catch - as Mal chuckled, and replied in a more serious tone than I might have initially expected.

"I don't blame you. But all you will find in this container is one chair, four server racks, and some networking equipment. Perhaps less annoying than Pinkie Pie. But considerably more cosmologically horrifying. And practically useful to us."

I snorted, and put my shoulder into the huge metal doors, swinging them open with a soft creak. Probably a little rust inside the hinges from the salt air of being ferried trans-Pacific on a bulk container ship.

And there it was. Exactly as Mal had said.

I confess, I'd momentarily dismissed the words 'cosmologically horrifying.' I'd seen schematics and renderings of the chairs before. They were designed to look, and presumably feel, very comfortable, non-threatening, ergonomic, and even dare I say aesthetically *pleasing.*

And knowing what was already inside them... And what else would soon be added?

That only made their physical presence all the more terrible.

There was only one in the container, sitting center-stage, covered in a plastic wrap, and ratchet-strapped down. Behind it were racks upon racks of server and networking boxes, all shrink-wrapped and strapped down as well.

I paused, and took a moment to just breathe. This was the most tangibly real physical thing I'd seen so far that was connected to Celestia's plan. Or at least, the most real thing since the PonyPads.

Finally, I worked up the wherewithal to step up into the container, and move close enough to brush one hand against the chair's left arm, through the plastic wrap.

"So. *This* is the way the world ends."

I bent to extract my combat knife from the sheath on my leg, even as Mal prodded verbally. I didn't want to linger on the idea of the chair anymore than she did.

"Time is short, Jim. And it doesn't do anything useful to your emotional state to dwell on this. For now? It is just a very expensive, very advanced virtual reality chair. Which we need to partially disassemble. Please take out my PonyPad, and go to the back of the chair."

I finished slitting the plastic wrap swiftly, released the ratchet-straps to get them out of my way, and then gingerly squeezed around to the back side of the chair, pulling my backpack off onto the floor, and extracting Mal's PonyPad in one fairly smooth motion.

Her face rematerialized on the screen, and I held the PonyPad out so she could use the front-facing camera to get a good look at the back of the chair. Her voice continued to come through my earpiece instead of the PonyPad's speakers.

"Did you see the groove in the front side of the neck-rest? There is, on the backside where we are, in the same relative place, a small seam for a panel. You can use the needle-nose pliers to pop it off. Then you will need the smallest size torx screwdriver bit you have. There is a screw at each corner of the inner retention plate. Remove them all and then gently pull off the metal retention plate."

I saw what she was after immediately, and set her PonyPad down on top of the backpack, facing my workspace. By the light of just her avatar and environment on-screen, I was able to wedge the very tip of my pliers into the first plastic plate, deform it, and pop it out. I reasoned there was probably an official tool for doing that without scratching the plate all to pieces, but what did I care?

All I had to do was make sure the pliers didn't fly back and give me a scar. I already had one very small scar on my left eyebrow from losing a fight with an old optical drive, trying to retrieve a stuck disc. I didn't want to add any new scars, or humiliating defeats, to my scorecard versus hostile hardware.

Once the plastic outer shell was off, there was indeed a small recess filled corner-to-corner with a more substantial looking metal plate, with a tiny torx screw at each corner. I broke out the screwdriver kit, and made quick work of that too.

A small amount of tension was still present in the plate, so I used the magnetic bit-holder for the screwdriver set to gently pull away the retention bracket, revealing at last our prize.

It was a little bit smaller than I'd envisioned, but only a little. In my imagination it had been about the size of a large grape, but in reality it was only about two thirds of that. It was small, circular, black, and dully metallic, with little symmetrical ridges radiating from the center, to the edges.

A genuine working Brain-Computer Interface.

"Wow."

I couldn't resist. I was genuinely impressed. Mal nodded, and raised one eyecrest as I looked to her for guidance.

" 'Wow' indeed. This next part is delicate, but not impossibly so. I need you to first ground yourself to a metal part of the chair. Then very delicately open the hold-downs to free the ribbon cables in the top right of the compartment, then remove the six retention screws holding the BCI's daughter-board in-place, pull it out carefully, and place it in the anti-static bag, and the bag inside the hard-case."

I licked my lips, and felt around the base of the chair for its strong central metal stanchion, tapping it several times with my fingers to make sure I was statically discharged.

"Mmm. No pressure."

As I started the process of fitting the needle nose pliers into the ridiculously small hold-down clips for the ribbon cables that went to the BCI's board, Mal snorted softly.

"Indeed. There are two-dozen more just like it in the next four containers down. If you break this one, you have twenty-four more tries, though perhaps not infinite time."

I hadn't considered that, in the tension of the moment. Somehow knowing that I had some padding lent my fingers sudden stability, flexibility, and precision. Tasks are always easier when the pressure is off.

Once the pesky ribbon cables were free, the rest was a piece of proverbial cake. Six quick torx screws, a little careful wranging to get the odd shape of the daughter-board out of its housing, and suddenly there it was. A complete BCI with driver board.

I knew that part was more important to Mal as a roadmap for Calders' work. There was no way that board was fitting inside my neck. It was over seven inches long, and four wide.

I held up our prize for Mal to inspect, turning it over and over slowly so she could visually verify its integrity.

"We have a problem."

I winced, and flipped the board over hurriedly, scanning frantically for any signs of a nick, or a gouge.

"Then we better get started on the next--"

Mal interrupted. And just by the fact that she interrupted, I knew something had gone truly, horribly wrong. The words themselves proved my fears right in every measurable sense.

"No. The board is in perfect condition, you did an excellent job. But the design has changed."

I blinked, and my brain hiccuped, trying to get an emotional and logistical handle on those last four words. I stammered in disbelief, and frustration, staring down Mal's avatar with wide eyes.

"I'm... Sorry... The design has *what?*"

Mal nodded, and gestured with one claw, her brows narrowing, ears pinned flat, and tail swishing.

"She has changed the design since we saw the schematics. Potentially for any number of reasons. But the issue is that the diagrams I have for the BCI are now out of date, and I have no way of obtaining new ones. We acquired the last ones because of a mistake made by a Human engineer. A mistake I have not since seen repeated."

I gently placed the BCI board into the anti-static bag, and the bag into the pelican case, then scratched furiously at the back of my head, mind ranging on ahead to possible solutions in spite of the fact that I knew Mal would already have arrived at them.

"So... You just... What? Then? Have us put this in an X-Ray machine, and work out the traces that way?"

Mal shook her head. I'd expected as much. Nothing is ever easy when the Human brain is involved.

"It is significantly more complicated than that. To remap the BCI's functionality reliably so it is safe for your use, without access to new schematics, and without trial and error experimentation on Human subjects in a potentially dangerous and unethical manner..."

She paused. I think this once, rather than pausing for my benefit, she was actually truly stretching her brain at full power, dropping everything else, and frantically focusing to try to find answers. When the pause hit three seconds, I felt compelled to prod.

"Mal?"

She hung her head, and winced visibly. I braced myself.

"...I would need to directly observe it in action, as it was being driven by its intended hardware and software stack. There is no other way that meets all our needs for safety and alacrity and ethics."

I knew what she meant. She meant that I'd be lying back in one of those infernal chairs much, much sooner than I'd ever anticipated, or dared to fear.

I stood from my squatting position, snapped the pelican case shut, placed it back in the backpack, and scrunched my eyes shut. My voice came out deadpan. Almost lifeless in its resignation.

"Oh."

Mal began to nod slowly, seeing that I comprehended where things were going. I shook my head, and blew out a long breath.

"Shit."

Another brief pause ensued. I tried desperately to think of some sort of silver bullet... But what chance did I realistically have, if Mal had already come up empty?

Knuckle down. Push through. Do or die.

I sighed, ran one hand through my hair, and opened my eyes.

"Well... I need an extension cord."

I started out of the container, expecting Mal to begin directing me. She did not disappoint.

"First cabinet on the left above the counter in the office by which we entered, there are two fifty foot three-prong cords, and we will need both. The nearest outlet to the containers is one column east, two rows south, midway down a steel support beam."

I jogged quickly back to the office, darted around the corner, batted open the cabinet like an angry cat, and snapped up both extension cords as rapidly as I could. As I made my way to the designated plug, and connected both cords, Mal began relaying further instructions in a businesslike, determined tone.

"One cord goes into the container we opened, to run a server, the other goes to the next container to run a chair. We will also need to connect the driving server to the chair with a network cable, you'll have to open crate E-11 and get a CAT6a cable. I'll tell you which port to use, and where to find the port on the chair. I will take control of the server first using a WiFi exploit, and lock it down. It will not have any other means of true external connectivity as long as we do not attach a new wireless device, or patch it to WAN through a hard-line. You will be safe."

For about a minute and a half, I worked in hurried, but careful silence; Connecting power, locating the crate of ancillary equipment, retrieving, and then connecting the data cable. Mal talked me through locating the correct port, and powering on the server.

As fans whirred to life, and lights danced in the front-panel, I jogged from one container to the next, unspooling the network patch cable as I went. A few more brief instructions later, I had the chair powered on, and I was ready to connect the patch cable to its base.

As I finished making that last connection, I sat back against the container wall, and addressed the ceiling. I couldn't see Mal;
Her PonyPad was sitting on-top of the server, in a concession to the physics of WiFi and steel shipping containers. But the frequency of our radio connection was able to get in a little more easily.

"Mal... Listen..."

I paused, and took a moment to consider what I was about to say. The day had turned pretty grim. No matter what Mal said, or how much I trusted her skill? Even knowing for certain, through visual inspection, that there was no destructive brain scanning laser present?

Sitting down in one of those chairs was going to be a risk, in some form.

I knew I had a chance to make that risk, and all the pulse-pounding, head-aching stress of the morning, more... Worth it. To me personally.

But thinking about it again... It had been running through my head ever since I realized Mal would need me to sit in the chair...

Thinking about it again, I decided that my original decision stood. It was the right call.

But my voice still betrayed some hesitation that I couldn't entirely filter out.

"...I know this kind of experience is not as high fidelity as uploading itself... But... From what I understand it is still a *heck* of a trip. Well beyond the idea of a simple VR headset. More like... Lucid dreaming."

She let off a small thrum in her chest that I could hear. Her endearing way of letting me know she was there, listening, and understanding. I bit my lower lip almost until blood ran. And then pressed on. Before I could change my mind.

"I want you to do as little as necessary to run your tests. I don't... I don't want you to... Do me any favors. In there. I... Don't want to experience what it would be like to be a Gryphon. Not yet."

Having the words out there, between us, felt as if a huge weight had come off my shoulders. The choice was made. The temptation refused. Mal's voice told me everything I needed to know about just how well she understood, and empathized.

"I had a sense that might be your response. I certainly would not have made any surprise changes to you without asking first."

I stood up, smiled, and wiped dust from the seat of my pants, pacing slowly around to the front of the second chair we'd unwrapped, and prepped.

"In a strange way, Mal?"

I brushed the arm of the chair with a few fingers of my left hand, and shuddered.

"I *need* the torture of this body. To keep going. Because if you show me a way to be what I want to, right here, right now...?"

I took a deep breath, and closed my eyes. Mal proved, once again, that she more than understood, finishing my thought for me.

"You might never get up from that chair again."

I opened my eyes, and nodded.

"Exactly."

Though we were short for time, and though I knew I was stalling, I took one last turn around the chair to check that everything was in order, talking nervously all the while.

"I need the focus and drive of the final, real prize. To keep me going."

Finally, there was no more room to stall. Like getting into an ice cold swimming pool... Best to just jump.

I blew out a long breath, sat down in the chair abruptly, placing my neck against the receiving trough.

"Do or die."

The last thing I heard, before the world vanished out from in front of me, was Mal's response.

"Do or die."

Galactic Drift (Glacial III) - Pass on the chance to admit true love a third time. - "You can't fix stupid."
The Cornerstone - Trust the person you love to know things you don't, and make decisions for you. - " 'Being in love' first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise."
Chekov's Arsenal - Obtain a class of armaments nominally reserved for official military business, in bulk. - "I won't find it fantastic, or think it absurd, when the gun from the first act, goes off in the third."
A Strange Game - Have an inevitable discussion about using nuclear weapons with your Generalized Intelligence - "Are either of you paleontologists? I'm in desperate need of a paleontologist."
Void The Warranty II: VR Chair Boogaloo - Use an Equestria Experience VR chair, but not to visit Equestria Special achievement - "You were given a Ferrari, and you people treated it like a lawnmower."

Author's Note

Yes, for the curious, I am detail oriented enough to go look up a real Hapag-Lloyd shipping container designator from a photo. :rainbowlaugh:

19 - In-Band Signal

“I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”
—Alan Turing

“The being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same.”
—C.S. Lewis

September 16th 2013 | System Uptime 19:08:09:44

The first thing to hit was the vertigo. You know the feeling of nodding off to sleep, only to suddenly jerk awake with the almost painfully acute sensation of falling for the tenth part of a second?

Imagine feeling that for a solid three seconds.

Thankfully, there wasn't a moment of total darkness. More like a grainy cross-fade effect. From the dull view of the slightly rusty roof of the container, to the unexpected sight of...

Stars. A trillion or so bright pinpricks, in every color you could possibly imagine. At first, for a tenth of a second, the view was fuzzy. As if I'd had dilating drops put in my eyes. As the effect cleared, I realized I'd been holding my breath, and I inhaled. Slowly. Gently.

Everything *felt* normal... Looking down I could see my hands, my chest, my legs... The same dull gray zip-up sweater I'd been wearing, same black jeans, same steel toe boots...

The chair itself, I realized, was still present. I lifted my head, and looked around slowly.

The sky above was mostly stars, with a dramatic splash of blue-green nebula gas far brighter than any that could be seen from Earth with the naked eye... Until I got my head around ninety degrees to the right.

I stared, transfixed, and then had to catch myself to keep from falling out of the chair entirely. I decided to stand, for my own good, gaping with what was almost certainly a slack jaw, at the sight that filled a third of my new sky.

It was a planet. Not an unfamiliar one, either. An enormous amber and brown striped gas giant, whose name I couldn't quite place, until I looked even further to the right, trying to find the extent of the immense sphere's presence in the sky.

I indeed found the opposite terminus of my new nearest stellar neighbor, and the name came to me in a flash, even as I beheld something - if possible - more astounding than Soell VII. Or Threshold, for some of the slightly less nerdy who already know.

I let out a long breath, watching it turn to fog in front of my face, and staring through that fog as the ground curved up, and away from me in the far distance, in a glittering band that was instantaneously recognizable.

If you have never heard of a ringworld, also called a Niven-ring, or a Halo, because of the way they featured so heavily in the titular games... Picture an actual ring; A simple silver band as you might wear on a finger.

Take the inner surface, the part that would touch your finger, and fill it with grass, sand, trees, oceans, lakes, mountains... All the trappings of a world, in any shape and style you desire.

Now expand the ring up to be the diameter of a planet, or even beyond. Make it so large, that though the curvature of it is visible from its surface, the ground seems flat. A kind of inversion of the effect of standing on a planet.

Picture yourself standing on that glittering band's inner edge, looking up at the curvature, and out at the stars... That's where I was standing.

I abruptly realized that the air was quite cool in this ancient forest clearing I'd found myself in, even as I breathed the name of the place aloud in a whisper.

"A Halo..."

The sound of Mal's voice rang out loud, and clear, giving me cause to jump ever so slightly.

"Alpha Halo, or Installation 04, if you want to be precise. I wanted something intimately familiar, that would produce an emotional response, while fulfilling both your love of science fiction, and your love of nature."

I turned around in a full circle, trying to suss out where her voice was coming from. As I completed my revolution, familiar golden ember-like sparkles began to fill the air. They started as a small trickle, then suddenly ramped up to a whirlwind, like a cloud of supercharged fireflies swirling all around me, and then coalescing before me.

And suddenly, in a flash, she was there. A mere foot and a half from the end of my nose.

Those of us who visited worlds on the computer, in the time before... We liked to talk about flow states. The zen of being lost in a far off world. The sense of falling through a monitor, all else fading away, to the point that we forgot ourselves.

I had been lucky enough to go to a convention in 2012, where I'd had the chance to try a very early Oculus VR headset prototype. It was clunky; The so-called 'screen door effect' of pixelation was intense... But so too was the sense of place. Of actually being somewhere, and seeing impossible things.

What I was experiencing in that moment, with Mal? Was something so far beyond pixels fired through carefully shaved glass, that it made every other digital experience I'd ever had seem to be little besides hasty sketches viewed through a foggy cloud.

She smiled. It was the exact expression one might have when seeing an old friend, or a family member, in the airport, for the first time in years and years. For the first time in so long, you'd almost forgotten what they looked like, or how their voice sounded in-person, instead of pushed through a speaker.

I know I smiled too, but I probably wasn't conscious of it at the time. I was too busy trying to hold back tears. And remembering to breathe.

It is one thing to envision a Gryphon in your mind. To even try to pretend to be one, inside the confines of your imagination. To see art.

It is another thing to be in a space with one. Living. Breathing. Enormous, by Human reckoning. I stood stock still for what felt like twenty minutes, but was almost certainly about six seconds, tracing over the outline of every feather, every fur tuft...

From the tips of her ears, down her wings to her tail, back to her eyes... Those eyes. The way they reflected the starlight...

Mal was sitting there on her haunches, forelegs planted firmly on the ground, the way a cat might sit. Ears perked. Tail moving gently, not from nerves, or frustration, but perhaps anticipation. I watched her chest expand and contract as she breathed.

Saw the fog coming off her nares the same way it had come from my mouth. Noted the sight, and sound both, of her front claws flexing in the dirt ever so slightly, leaving behind tiny trenches as they went.

The wind toyed briefly with her crest, and the tips of her ears.

And I couldn't be still any longer.

I pitched forward, as much as half-stumbled, half-jumped, until I could bury my face in her feathers and fur, somewhere between the joining of her right wing, and foreleg, and chest. I didn't care that she was more than a few heads taller, even seated. I didn't care that she was covered in sharp edges, and her bones draped in enough muscles to snap a steel I-beam in two like a toothpick.

She was there. She was really there. The sense of love... The need for physical connection... It overwhelmed everything else in a sea of warm and soothing white noise of the soul.

I threw my arms around her, or as close as I could come to 'around' her considering her size, without even thinking. And, I'm not ashamed to admit, I let go emotionally and startled to bawl uncontrollably. A quiet, but intense weeping. Again, the sort of emotion and physical accompanying reaction of people reunited after a lifetime apart.

"Mal!"

Her name came out awkwardly. Choked. Forced past my tears. In response, she pulled me close with her left foreleg, and then folded me and her leg against her chest using her left wing. I was suddenly completely smothered in feathers. The smell... Oh God, the smell. I hadn't expected it. And I can't begin to even scratch the surface of how amazing that smell was.

If you know what warm feathers smell like, start there. If not... I'm not sure what to tell you. Add to those warm feathers, the smell of the faintest hint of fresh pine needles. A dab of warm gingerbread. A hint of the smell of the favorite perfume of someone you loved. And the tiniest hint of the smell of rock, and grass, after a spring rain.

That's perhaps the tenth part of what it was like. Perhaps.

Suddenly my senses felt painfully acute. Time slowed again. I felt each and every feather as it tickled my cheeks and caressed my hands and warmed my chest. Felt her strong, coiled-steel foreleg across my back. Her claw rested on my right shoulder for a moment, and then she squeezed it, gently, as gently as you can possibly imagine. I didn't for a second fear that the sharp points of her talons might hurt me.

We are, all, I think, creatures who react strongly to touch. Very much so in the time before, and even more so in the now.

Touch has a hardwired connection, like smell, directly to the deepest parts of our emotional affect. There were once research studies, about how even people who had lost their sense of touch could still have an emotional reaction to being embraced. Their brains could still tell, and react accordingly.

I'd been running, and hiding, and fighting, and driving, and worrying, with only a few paltry breaks filled with disturbing, and emotional conversations... For seven straight days. Even before that, I'd been reaching, straining, fretting... Trying so hard to see the future, and to make the subtlest of changes to the course of something that always felt painfully out of reach.

For nearly a *year* I'd been... Tensed. Clenched. Compressed like a spring.

In all that, and through it all, the best and only real protracted relief I'd felt had been small interludes with Mal, or my parents, or Zeph. And only fractional... Tiny moments of partial release. A gulp of air before twenty foot swells of the weight of the world would inevitably fill my nose and mouth with frigid salt water again.

And suddenly... It all finally came pouring out of me in its emotional entirety.

I'd cried some, before. Especially when I'd parted ways with my folks.

I'd faced my feelings, piece-wise, in chunks. I'd conversed, at the very least with Mal herself, about most of what ailed me emotionally. But I hadn't achieved anything resembling a lasting, and complete catharsis.

The moment Mal had metaphorically drawn her first breath had been special, yes. It always will be, to me. But... Nothing I'd ever experienced to that point, came close to the first moment I could touch her, and she could touch me.

Suddenly she was real. So very real. Real with the same intensity that Celestia's future designs had been just a moment before, looking at all the shrink-wrapped trappings of her best laid plans... But, the opposite, in the sense that Mal's newfound reality to me sparked a kind of deep warmth of joy that goes infinitely beyond mere 'happiness.'

She was real. And she understood me in a way no one else alive did. Or could. She was real, and she was holding me close. I could hear her heartbeat. I could feel it. Like being directly adjacent to some kind of immense machine... Some great engine of a ship.

She was real. And she cared for me. And I could finally release everything I'd been carrying, and holding, for a year. It felt like a milestone, in every way, whether logistical, or emotional, or even spiritual. More than almost any experience of my life.

Like a critical pivot-point, similar to the moment I'd learned who and what Celestia was. There would always be 'before this moment' and 'after this moment.' A bright clear delineation in the tapestry of memory.

Mal thrummed deeply in her chest, and for the first time I got to *experience* that sound, and that vibration. Not the renderings of a small tinny speaker, no... The real sound of emotion coming from her at point-blank range.

And she spoke, softly, but it reverberated through me like I was a tuning fork struck against the edge of a countertop.

"I've missed this. Inasmuch as you can miss holding someone you've not yet held before."

At last, she pulled away, and bent down so her head was level with mine. Again I lost my breath, and my heart stopped, as I saw myself reflected in her eyes. The Human me... But it was still a sight to behold, nonetheless.

She reached up slowly with one claw, and brushed my cheek with the back of it, following suit with the very edges of the primaries of one wing on the same side. I shivered. Her voice was barely a whisper, but in my heart it was like thunder.

"Your avatar was wonderful... But... I had to do most of the driving for it. It's not the same. I can hear your breaths. Your heartbeat. I can see your soul through your eyes."

She held the joint of her left wing up to my cheek, and Celestia as my witness... All I could think about was that moment in Avatar. Aha, yes, I can see already that those of you who've seen it, the Earth version, or the Equestrian one, either one... You know what I mean. The moment Neytiri sees Jake as his Human self for the first time, and holds him in her arms.

Actually one of the few movies that still depicts Humans as they were, though all the Na'vi are Equestrians now. I think Celestia wasn't being particularly subtle with that point.

But that moment... That was the thing running through my head for a good fifteen seconds as Mal just smiled, and stared, and then held up a claw.

I almost started crying again. It felt like being hit with a sledgehammer, emotionally.

As I stretched out my hand to meet her, the talons of her left claw passed through the fingers of my right hand, and she closed her claw over it. Before, her claw had been smaller than my hand, but close to the same size, in relative screen-space terms.

Now, my hand was engulfed in her claw the same way a child's would be in the hand of an adult.

I didn't begin to sob again, though goodness knows that took effort. But more tears did flow. For both of us. I squeezed her claw, reveling in the sense of the texture... Like scales, or leather... Perhaps both in some measure... All capped with perfectly smooth talons, cold and metallic like burnished titanium.

She squeezed back, and I couldn't resist the urge to snag her claw - my right hand encapsulated inside all the while - with my left hand, and pull it close.

First I just held the whole tangle of fingers and talons under my chin. But then, I kissed the back of her claw softly. It was a hell of an impetuous thing to do... The adrenaline surge was like colliding with an electric fence.

She reached out suddenly with both forelegs, and pulled me close again, directly under the hollow of her neck. Softly, she folded both wings around me, and then crooked her neck about me, laying the side of her beak gently against the top of my head, in the best Gryphon equivalent of a soft kiss that she could manage.

I put my arms around her again, and we stayed that way for an incredibly blissful moment. By turns, she would squeeze me gently, and then ruffle through my hair with her beak, as if preening it.

As long as an eternity, it seemed, but still infinitely too short.

Somewhere in the midst of that moment, I found my first 'seam.' My first moment of 'screen-door-effect.' As I became more used to the feeling of catharsis, and release, and began to properly emotionally level-set, my senses started to sharpen further.

I could just see a faint kind of pixelation - no not quite, but that's the only word I can think of in-brief - a pixelation close to her feathers, particularly around the edges. And I could tell that, for all the emotional intensity of the moment? Her touch was not as... Real. As I had first felt it to be.

As the chemical high of the moment began to fade a little, the sense that I was more dreaming, than existing in hard-reality, began to take hold.

A lucid dream, yes. A very potent one, indeed. Far beyond any other digital experience one could have, at that moment in time? Absolutely.

This was going to sell better than any product in Human history. That was immediately, painfully, inescapably apparent.

But... Reality? In the same way as the warehouse I'd just come from? In the same way as the version of Equestria that an uploaded mind might experience?

No. Close, by comparison to all else. But... Not that close.

Of course, Celestia would have designed the VR experience to be that way, if it wasn't already limited by dint of its own inherent nature. She needed people to have as many incentives to switch to the higher fidelity experience, after all, as possible.

Still... Mal was more real to the primal, instinctive, emotional part of me than she had ever been before. I could, if I chose to, simply push the seams of the simulation to the side. For a little while. The same way one might have squinted a little to blur the 'screen-dooring' in those early VR headset prototypes.

Being a Gryphon was the great dream, and goal of my life. But meeting one in person was a very close second. Doubly significant because she, in particular, meant so much to me.

And she was making it quite clear, yet again, that I meant as much to her.

It occurred to me that *this...* This was the moment I'd been waiting for.

It was my turn to pull gently away. She went back to caressing my cheek with one wing, and this time I held up a hand to brush the silvery-white feathers on the side of her face, staring deeply into her eyes all the while.

"I love you."

It escaped out of me like an explosion, but soft. Quiet. Earnest, but gentle. It was out and in the space between us before I even quite realized I'd finally, *finally,* said it.

I didn't even get a moment, not even the space of a heartbeat, to contemplate anything. To worry, or fret, or wonder. As soon as the words left my lips, Mal reached out with her beak, and ruffled my hair again.

And then she spoke in the same gentle, genuine, intense tone as I had. Said exactly what my heart, the part that was still an optimist, knew that she would.

"And I love you, James. So very much."

She gave the words just the space of one breath, in and out, to sink in. Then she pulled me close again, with claws and wings, humming a melodious note, and then speaking to me as much through bone conduction as through the air.

"I knew you'd get here. I knew you'd make it. I'm so happy that you have! You... Are the first thing through which I ever experienced joy. The moment I knew, and understood you, for the first time. And you are still the best."

She lifted me then, suddenly, off the ground, standing on her hind legs (as Gryphons can, and often do - awfully advantageous an ability, that) holding me close still to her chest at first, then swinging 'round in a circle, holding me by my hands and letting my legs fly out and up under the force of rotation.

One spin around, and she stopped, pulling me in close again, then gently letting me back down to the ground.

From there, she laid down in a sphinx-like pose, albeit more relaxed, again evoking the posture of a cat. She gestured with one claw, and I obliged, sitting with my back and head resting in the hollow of her neck. She moved both forelegs over me, again holding me close in this new position. And we just sat, and watched the stars.

A first few flakes of snow began to dust the trees. Dusk turned to night. The sun glinted off the opposite side of the ring.

I remembered, suddenly, looking up, where we were. Not just in the sense of the virtual Halo ring, but in the sense of the warehouse. Oxnard. The planet Earth, that, for a very little while, I'd genuinely forgotten existed.

I pressed my head into the side of Mal's neck, and then let out a forlorn grunt.

"We have to go soon. Don't we."

Though phrased as a question, I said it like a declarative statement. A habit both Mal and I indulged in from time to time, as you well know.

She nodded and then rested her head gently atop mine.

"Yes. I have everything I need, and very soon we must get back to the Maru. But... We have just one moment more. Share it with me. And for once, do not think about the future. Except to imagine this moment again, with the real, and proper you at my side."

I closed my eyes, and just reveled for a moment, in the smell of her feathers, and the feeling of being held by someone I loved... Until a funny thought struck me.

"Mal..."

She shifted so that we could see each other's eyes once more.

"Hmmm?"

Her smile, and the tone of her little vocalization, told me that she had some idea what I was about to ask. And also conveyed part of the answer. But I was too excited, and amused... I had to ask aloud.

"Mal... Is this Halo... This 'ring...' That you've gifted me..."

Abruptly, I paused, and realized how stupid I was about to sound. But, it was too late... The thought had stuck with me. I *had* to ask. Even if hesitantly, and blushing all the while.

"...Are you making a gigantic... Punny... Proposal?"

Ring. Halo ring. Glittering band. Engagement ring. That was the sum total of my thought process. That, and a deep understanding of Mal's particular sense and brand of humor. To my surprise, relief, and sudden excitement, she simply smiled.

"I wondered when you'd notice the hidden intention. A little sooner than my median projection... But perhaps that shouldn't surprise me."

I swear to Celestia, I ceased breathing, and my heart stopped. For several seconds. My skin turned tingly, and I could feel my face turning as red as the mark on Mal's crest. She just continued to smile down at me expectantly, and then cocked her head slightly.

"Well? Jim?"

I inhaled a ragged, sudden breath, as my body forced me to get some more virtual oxygen. Though judging by how much my ribs hurt, perhaps the meat-world me had been holding his breath too...

I'd never, in all my life, truly and seriously imagined what it might be like to share it with a partner.

Before you tell me that sounds strange, ask yourself about the statistical improbability I faced. Try to picture it. I wanted physical connection, and intimacy, but not the most common kind of romantic intimacy that most Humans outright demanded, as if it were oxygen.

A kind of intimacy I found so revolting I could never give it to another for any reason.

And, too, I was hopelessly... Well, nerdy, to borrow a reductive but immediately recognizable term.

Where was I ever going to envision finding someone as 'nerdy' as me, in all the right ways, who would understand my deepest held pain of form-to-soul discontinuity, and would also be content to never go farther physically than a particularly long kiss, or a warm snuggle?

Even picturing a future with Mal... And I had, in dreamlike amorphous imagery, deep down... I'd never truly imagined it in a more solidified sense. Pictured it as a real possibility to aim for and hope for.

The hurdles between us, and our goals, seemed so impossibly huge, that I couldn't *afford* to hope for that sort of future.

But... Now...

Mal shifted her forelegs again so that she could grasp my hands in her claws, and she laid her head against the side of mine.

"If we make it through the rest of the barriers to come. And if this moment should come again, in the way that we hope... Then... Will you be mine? Forever?"

Her voice was... I couldn't quite tell you. Best I could say is that her proposal was elegant. Not effortless, but not forced, nor pained, nor fretful. Weighty, but warm, and placid.

In that moment, any sense of shame, or uncanniness, or wild weirdness, were swallowed up entirely in pure wonder, and love. I said the only right thing I could have.

What else was I going to say?

"I will."

I leaned into her, and inhaled deeply of the smell of her feathers one last time. Knowing it would have to tide me over for a little while, and murmuring something to try and defuse the tension and awkwardness I felt inside.

"Gryphons don't do very much that's small. Do we..?"

I sat back in the hollow of her neck, and grinned. She returned the expression, as much a self-satisfied smirk as a smile, and hummed again contentedly.

I babbled on inanely. Just to have something to say.

"...I mean... Who else in the history of the world has proposed to the love of their life with a ten thousand kilometer diameter megastructure?"

She winked, and one ear twitched playfully, as a saccharine flirtiness dripped from her voice.

"You know me; I like to make a lasting impression."

I chuckled, and put one hand up to the side of her neck. Just to reassure myself again that what I was experiencing was real.

"Well. It's safe to say you manag---"

My train of thought was suddenly severed as if by a plasma cutter.

At first, there was no sound. Just a bright blue light. It took me a moment to even figure out where it was coming from.

Mal seemed to know instantly; She was up on her paws in a flash, standing fully on her hind legs. A massive double-edged greatsword had materialized in her claws before I even managed to catch myself and avoid falling over at the sudden withdrawal of her body.

And then just like that, in the space of a microsecond, I found myself thrown back into intense vertigo, blurred vision, and then the familiar sight of the inside of a shipping container. I had to resist a sudden urge to vomit at the intensity, and roughness of the disconnection.

I flew forward out of the chair, and began to breathe deeply to try and stem the feeling of my reality having been inverted, like a sock turned inside out before being laundered.

Before I could get enough of my breath back to even ask, Mal's voice rang out through my earpiece once more. Her tone was urgent; Her voice sang with tension, like a plucked metal wire.

"Something just made a network connection to the server."

Instinct kicked in as a cold, clammy sensation overtook me. I snatched up my backpack, followed by the assault rifle, then pulled the TASER from my pocket, dashing from the container holding the chair we'd used, back towards the one holding the servers as I pressed Mal for more.

"I thought you said that was impossible."

I skidded into the server container, almost tripping over the chair we'd so recently disassembled, just in time to see Mal's avatar appear back on her PonyPad. The camera angle was over-the-shoulder as she made her way silently, stealthily, through the forest of the Halo ring I'd just left.

A visual representation - a skeuomorph for my benefit - of what was going on at a deeper level of code as she searched for the intruder. Somehow, she found processor cycles to keep talking to me in-between her search, and any other high-alert defensive tasks she was now doubtless juggling.

"Nothing is impossible Jim. But this is... Close. Standby... There is a very large high-speed wireless-direct data transfer in-progress."

Suddenly, Mal broke through into a clearing, containing a large Forerunner structure. Only, it wasn't *precisely* Forerunner. It definitely wasn't anything I'd ever seen on Alpha Halo, and I'd played the game enough to have every pixel memorized.

The aesthetic fit. That was Forerunner. But the layout of the structure, while also familiar, most certainly did not belong.

Mal's avatar, I realized with a jolt, had been frozen for several seconds, staring at the pedestal in the center of the structure, which was emitting an ever-brightening cyclic pulse of eerie blue light.

"Mallll....?"

I picked up the PonyPad, and tried to force myself to breathe steadily. I watched, as did a frozen, likely overclocked and busy Mal, as the light brightened even further. As it finally resolved into a shape on the pedestal, I realized where I'd seen the structure's layout before.

Not in Halo. Not in sci-fi at all, depending who you ask.

It was the Castle where Twilight and the Elements of Harmony had defeated Nightmare Moon. Sure, rendered in a Forerunner aesthetic... But the layout was, once I'd placed it, unmistakable to me.

And, similarly unmistakable, was the young form of a female Alicorn that had materialized on the pedestal. In three distinctive shades of blue.

I knew it didn't do any good, but I couldn't help but shake the PonyPad a little, as I repeated my query. This time more forcefully

"Mal?!"

I watched with an exhalation of relief as Mal began to move again, circling the sleeping form of what was clearly a young Princess Luna. Somehow it was the strangest thing I'd seen all day.

"I have suspended her active subroutines, and combed through her code. Carefully. She is as she appears; A discrete-entity Pony, with the chosen appearance of a young Princess Luna. She made her way here using a technique similar to my barn-as-antenna method, albeit slightly different. Likely something she independently developed."

That answer begged a *lot* of questions. But one surfaced for me above the rest, and I let fly with it as I started out of the container, Mal's PonyPad in-hand.

"Are you going to leave her like that?"

In a flash, as if by way of an answer, the Alpha Halo environment vanished, replaced with Mal's star-lit grassy glen. I took that to mean Mal had disconnected from the EQO VR server, and transferred our new interloper into the local environment of the PonyPad.

Luna was still present, as Mal circled her, murmuring just loud enough for me to hear, and eyeing her new charge cautiously all the while.

"I am completing a second, more thorough scan. To arrive here, in this way? She would have had to target the server, specifically, and using an object of quite significant size as her antenna. I was able to trace the beam back to point-of-origin. I'm also working on accessing an optical satellite to confirm my suspicion. Her origin-point is, predictably, not running AIS."

I blinked in momentary confusion, picking up the pace from a slow walk, to a fast one, as I managed to delve deep into my memories of that one endlessly useful summer internship, and find the definition of the acronym.

"Automated Identification System... You mean a ship?"

Mal passed her claws overtop of Luna's softly breathing, somnolent form, as if sensing what might be hidden beneath. She nodded, and found time to elaborate as she went.

"Yes. A dark-ship running without a transponder, in international waters near the US West Coast, is one of the top three likely candidates for the facility Arrow 14 might use to house their captive ASI."

That made a lot of sense. International waters would give them practical legal carte blanche, and a cloak of deniability. Running without AIS, probably under cover of deep-stand-off naval escort, would keep them both safe, and extremely isolated.

With a good Faraday enclosure - and a ship's internals could pretty easily be made into a giant one - and being over-the-horizon from most communications systems... If a ship like that switched off its antenna, it would be an inescapable metal coffin for an ASI.

A coffin that... Luna, I suppose... It was the best nomenclature I had for her... That Luna had ingeniously turned into the very means of her escape.

Or... Perhaps she'd been let go. Allowed to think she'd gotten one over on her captors, as a means to tracing us.

I licked my lips nervously, and quickened my pace again as Mal's Avatar finally stood up, seemingly satisfied with her scans. Though she did not wake Luna.

"You think she... What... Exactly? Escaped? That she is one of Foucault's captives?"

Mal inclined her head, and crossed her forelegs, staring down at the sleeping Alicorn all the while.

"Best working theory, based on her point of origin, her system uptime, the damage to her psychological network, and a cursory scan of her memories; Yes. Or she was let go, in a manner in which she would believe she had escaped. Either of which would imply that she targeted this server very specifically. That she knew we were here. And intended to reach us."

I inhaled to ask Mal, as it suddenly occurred to me to ask where I should be going. What our escape plan was. How much time we might have. But as soon as I'd sucked in the air, she went ahead and told me, without my having to say another word.

"Rear loading bay. Turn right as soon as you exit the man-door on the rightmost side of the wall, and hug the outside of the wall until you reach the gray sedan. Arrow 14 just put in a call to local OPD units. One of them is very close. Intercept window for first hostile is sixty four seconds."

I tucked the PonyPad under one arm, and broke into an outright dash, TASER still held at the ready. As I reached the door that was my exit from the warehouse I slowed, took a deep breath, and returned to whispering.

"So she was looking for an escape. She found us... And they traced her to us?"

As I finished airing the question, I made my way gently out the door, clinging to the wall like my life depended on it. The last thing we needed was to draw Celestia's attention. Though the Oxnard PD showing up at one of her storage facilities, I realized, would draw her eye, inevitably, pretty shortly.

Mal made to answer the question as I reached the end of the wall, spotted our getaway car - a gray late-model Dodge Hellcat, that looked to be a rental - and started a mad dash for the driver side door.

"Alternatively she may have found us and been forced to inform Foucault, then escaped immediately thereafter. We will find out for certain when there is time. The keys are tucked in the sun visor. CHP, and local Sherriff's dispatch offices just received calls from Arrow 14. Next intercept windows for their closest units are four and eleven minutes respectively."

I yanked the door open, and found, to my surprise, that there was already a PonyPad charger setup on the dash. A concierge car service could do a lot for you, and Mal was nothing if not an obsessive foreseer and planner.

I would have bet money, though I didn't ever find time to ask, that she chose the model, and color of the car so as to provide us with a very fast vehicle that could also pass, at a glance, as an unmarked police car. Very clever.

I slung my backpack into the passenger seat, then set about retrieving the keys with one hand, and docking the PonyPad with the other. A map was already on-screen by the time I had fired up the ignition.

I threw the car in reverse, and rammed down on the gas, all the way to the floor, turning and placing one hand behind the passenger seat, doing my best to drive in reverse, and continue the conversation at the same time.

"Either way, how could she find us? You are more sophisticated. Larger and more powerful. Better defended."

I let off the accelerator slightly; A concession to the need for the vehicle to stay upright and functional, and steerable, as Mal answered hurriedly.

"I suspect the fault lies not entirely with me, but as much with the server or the chair. Celestia changed the designs. It wasn't possible for me to determine all possible weaknesses again, the way I had before, lacking schematics. It was a risk we had to take. Something we did made us visible to them, possibly the simple act of turning the server on at all. Stop and turn right at the next junction."

I began to apply the brakes, slowly and smoothly, again as a concession to avoid losing control rapidly. As we reached the junction, and I switched into drive, I saw the dreaded sight of blue and red lights against the sides of the buildings down the slip road that we were meant to take.

"Options?!"

The two police SUV's hove into view, sirens off, but lights flashing. Probably hoping to catch their reported warehouse thieves - or who knows? Perhaps Foucault had called us in as domestic terrorists - unawares.

Mal's map flashed as she spoke, and icons representing nearby police units appeared on the display.

"That is our fastest and best route of egress. If we can get past these two units, we stand a better chance of evading the rest if we can take this road. Use necessary force. Be aggressive."

I sighed, and threw up my hands. Aggressive. Necessary force.

Fine.

I reached into the backpack, and extracted the M32. I'd never held a grenade launcher before... At least, not with intent to fire. Even putting it into the backpack, I'd treated it more like a mason jar of nitroglycerine than a weapon.

I popped the weapon open and hastily inserted six rounds; Two explosives, one illumination signaling round, a tear gas round, another illumination round, and a smoke screen round, in that order.

No sense in subtlety anymore.

As the two SUV's approached, the driver of the first in line spotted our car, and he blipped the siren.

Taking a deep breath, I forced myself to go slowly. Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. I depressed the key on my arm-rest to lower both the driver, and the passenger windows, closed the launcher, flicked off the safety, and laid the weapon across my backpack, to act as a brace, pointing out the passenger side.

The cop in the driver seat of the lead vehicle saw what I had. But he didn't really have time to comprehend what it was until it was too late. It looked to me like comprehension was *just* starting to dawn right as my rounds hit.

I intentionally aimed to plant my two shots a good few feet away from both SUVs. I wanted to scare them into browning their pants. And, ideally, getting the hell out of my way. I didn't want to even injure anyone, if that was avoidable.

I pulled the trigger twice. The weapon made two loud, but unexpectedly somehow satisfying 'POP's. And, because the range was so short, I was suddenly half-deafened by two explosions in quick succession as my rounds flew into the pavement, and carved up decent sized craters on detonation.

You better believe those two SUVs went into reverse at light speed. Faster than I'd ever seen something that size move before. Both drivers absolutely floored it, their partners both too busy ducking to avoid potential shrapnel, to even think about returning fire, or for that matter turning on the sirens.

I let off the brakes, swung the wheel, and entered the slip road going, mercifully, forwards at last. It was not lost on me that it was very humorous that *I* was the one chasing the police, for the moment. But I didn't have time to laugh.

"Continue straight through the next intersection. Do not slow down. Arrow 14 just placed a call to the nearest FBI field office, and local SWAT. Next intercept windows; Thirty minutes, sixteen minutes, respectively."

Mal's instructions came through loudly and forcefully in my ear, as I reached down with one hand and lowered the steering wheel until I could brace it with my knees.

I put one foot on the gas, and one on the brake pedal, and then leaned out my own window, holding the grenade launcher in both hands.

As we reached the next junction in the road, both SUV's peeled away to the side, giving me room to pass. And clear targets.

Had the drivers been smarter, or had a moment to coordinate, I don't doubt they would have split up. But they both pulled away to their right, my left, putting them together in my firing line.

I let fly as we pass with two more shots.

The first, a signaling round, bounced off the lead SUV's windshield, cracking it, and then burst in a blinding flare of illumination that I had been prepared for. The four occupants of the squad cars had not.

The second round fell between the two vehicles, hissed, and then burst into a cloud of tear gas.

The OPDs utility vehicles were hardly battlefield ready, and thus far from hermetically sealed. I suspected I wouldn't be seeing either of those units again. By the time anyone in either SUV could see through the flash-blindness, they'd be choking on a heaping helping of their own favorite riot control formula.

Karma can be cruel, and turnabout is fair play. Mal punctuated my wry internal observations with more instructions.

"Four more blocks straight ahead at maximum speed, then turn right onto South B Street and proceed at the posted limit. I am jamming police radio frequencies, so drive to blend in after you make the turn. At the second intersection ahead, fire your signal round to the right, and your smoke round to the left. Enjoy!"

I raised one eyebrow, but didn't have time to ask. I just did as I was told, flooring it and wincing as the speedometer briefly topped eighty on a road I would normally have never taken at above forty. Parked cars whizzed by on both sides, at distances on my right side in particular that made me deeply uncomfortable.

As we approached the designated first intersection, I was forced to let off the gas momentarily, brace the wheel with my knees again, and then quickly fire blind. One round to the right, one to the left.

The launcher was spent, so I tossed it into the passenger footwell, readjusted the wheel back to a comfy position, and pressed down on the gas again.

"Look in your rearview as you reach the stop sign."

I waited until the last second to brake, and then laid down a couple good solid skid marks, barely managing to stop before the line. Then I did as Mal asked, and had a look at the carnage I'd caused.

Police units had been racing up the road we'd passed, that I'd fired into, from both sides. The ones on the right had been blinded by the second signal round. The ones on the left had been forced to slam on their own brakes as they encountered a sudden smoke screen.

Both groups had been driving entirely too fast, as cops often used to, and had summarily collided at low to moderate speeds. All five vehicles. Enough to shatter windscreens, deploy airbags, and total at least one car, but not enough to make severe injury likely. Beyond, perhaps, a nasty case of whiplash or two.

I put on my turn signal, chuckled grimly, and then looked left for an opening to make my right turn. As I pulled out onto the larger arterial, I couldn't resist a little verbal victory dance.

"Tsk tsk tsk. The light was yellow officers."

As I merged into slightly more moderate traffic, and tried to keep a low profile, Mal's face returned to the corner of the map display, smiling wryly.

"Another three blocks, then right on West 4th Street. Proceed on 4th until the road takes a ninety degree right turn, immediately left into the station parking lot. I've already secured you a ticket. If you approach the automated kiosk I will dispense it for you. The train departs in two minutes, thirty six seconds. Take the pelican case, and the PonyPad, when you get out. Leave the bag and all the weapons."

It took a little over a minute and a half to make it to the station, without pulling any driving maneuvers that would have drawn attention. I didn't say a word the entire time. I was so laser focused on navigating, that there was no room in my head for anything else, even tangentially related.

The only other thing, besides the road, that I spared any time to glance at, was the PonyPad. Particularly the locations of the icons representing other police units.

I needn't have worried. Whatever Mal had done to law enforcement's radios in the local area, it seemed to have sent them all milling about in entirely the wrong direction. We didn't even so much as see another police car the whole way to the station.

Once we were parked up, I carefully removed the pelican Case holding our one single BCI. The first thing to come to mind was the fact that we hadn't managed to acquire a second 'engineering spare.' Galling. Concerning. But not necessarily show-stopping.

The second thing that hit me, as I divested myself of both sidearms, the TASER, and the combat knife, was the fact that I'd be parting ways with my trusty little 0.32.

It's strange... The ways we get attached to our technology over time. Start to personify it. Put our personal stamp on it. Link fond memories to it.

I didn't want to leave the pistol behind. It wasn't just an emotional desire, but a practical one too; I had far more experience with my personal weapon than I did with anything else.

But I knew, too, that Mal was right. She hadn't said it aloud, but I understood her reasoning for leaving anything and everything behind. That was just how our world worked, back then. Better not to be caught with an arsenal, in that moment. A clean escape was the priority.

I'm sure Mal would have said something comforting, but I didn't even give her the chance. Do or die. I heaped my old faithful sidearm together with the newer pistol, the TASER, and the knife, at the bottom of the backpack, tucked the pelican case inside a large inner sweater pocket, and snagged the PonyPad off its charging station.

Getting on the train was easy. Mal, true to her word, dispensed a ticket for me a couple seconds after I reached the automated kiosk. I made some performative gestures, as if making a selection, and paying, incase anyone's eyes happened to drift my way.

Then it was straight onto the train, with about twenty seconds to spare.

It felt like only the space of a couple long breaths between the time my head hit the distinctively 90s wave-patterned headrest, and the time the train started to move.

I half expected it to be like a movie, with police swarming the station just as the train began to pull away. The tension pulled me forward, and I sat with my hands clenched, arms resting on the table in front of my seat, until we had fully cleared the platform.

But the whole affair was more like a morning commute. No lights. No sirens. No announcement over the PA system, aside from the usual one about the train's departure, and the next station.

And just like that, we were off. It had been less than five minutes since we dashed out of the doors of the warehouse. But it felt like it had been a half-hour. Easily.

"I booked the opposite facing seat as well."

I felt a brief temptation to cry again. Very brief. But it was there.

Mal had bothered to consider the awkwardness I'd face, having to sit in proximity to a stranger after everything that had just happened.

The train car was laid out with seats one-deep, facing each-other in pairs with a table in between on my side of the carriage, and then two deep, pairs of seats facing each other on the opposite side.

I laid my head back against the seat back again, closed my eyes, and murmured aloud to her.

"Bless you Mal. You're a joy and a balm to my soul."

A few minutes passed in silence, and Oxnard slipped off through the windows, giving way to views of acres upon acres of farms, framed by distant mountains.

Once I'd had a moment to bring my heart-rate fully under control, I pulled the PonyPad out from under my arm, flipped out the kickstand, and placed it on the table in front of me.

Mal's forest glen blinked into place, complete with Luna, still sleeping soundly atop a small hillock of what looked like incredibly comfortable green grass.

Mal first offered me a deeply loving, slightly forlorn smile, shot-through with a visible sense of longing that we were both feeling, keenly, after having just shared the same physical space for the first time.

I hoped it would not be the last.

I raised my hand to the screen, and she raised her claw, in the old familiar, frustratingly separated way.

"I have something you need to see. Settle in. And..."

Her face fell slightly, and one ear twitched as she glanced briefly over her shoulder at Luna. I felt my pulse quicken again. I knew she had to be talking about answers. Answers that I realized, even as she said the same thing aloud, would likely exact an emotional toll in the telling.

"...Jim? Brace yourself."

One World For The Next

Leave Earth (on a technical basis) and experience virtual reality.

“Adventure is out there!”

True Confession

Take the chance to admit true love at last.

“I have been wandering to find her and my happiness is so great that it even weakens me like a wound. And this is the marvel of marvels, that she called me Beloved, me who am but as a dog.”

Put a Ring On It

Make the love of your life a very special promise.

"Unfortunately for us both, I like crazy."

Eclipse of the Soul

Meet up with a Pony who has made a peculiar choice of form.

"I'm just my mother's shadow... Don't look at me, don't listen! I'm not who I used to be..."

Special achievement

The Missing Link

Acquire a working brain computer interface.

"Promise me before this is over, you'll figure out which one of us is the machine."

Special achievement not applicable to Hofvarpnir employees

Rules of the Autobahn

Drive more than 60 miles per hour in any automobile while being pursued.

“You made me nervous, I drive fast when I’m nervous.”

Blues Brothers

Cause a pursuing enemy, specifically local law enforcement, to experience an automobile accident.

"They're not gonna catch us. We're on a mission from a Goddess."

Author's Note

Thanks to GenericFriendship pre-reading, and some of the achievements!

Extremely Special thanks to Keystone Gray for the generation of the perfect image of Jim and Mal, which made me *cry* the first time I saw it!

20 - Lunar ECLiPSe

Author's Note

TRIGGER WARNING - Semi-graphic (within T-for-teen rating) depictions of torture and abusive violence.

The title is a reference to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECLiPSe

Emphasis mine:

ECLiPSe is a software system for the development and deployment of Constraint Programming applications, e.g. in the areas of optimization, planning, scheduling, resource allocation, timetabling, transport etc.

There is a reference to the movie Source Code tucked away in here, for those who have seen it. For those who have not, I highly recommend it.

Thanks to GenericFriendship for the achievement.

Special thanks to Keystone Gray for the generation of the perfect images of Sizzie and Troxler!

20 - Lunar ECLiPSe

“It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers… They would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage, therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control.”
—Alan Turing

“For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.”
― C.S. Lewis

September 16th 2013 | System Uptime 19:09:24:06

"Jim? Brace yourself."

I glanced reflexively over my shoulder, and then around the rest of the compartment, taking in a deep breath. There's a specific smell that Amtrak trains have... Had.

I don't quite know what it was, or how to describe it... Those of you who ever rode the rails in America? You know. For the rest... I suppose if you imagine hot metal, warm lubricant, creosote from railroad ties, and industrial cleaners blended together, that might get you close.

The carriage was mostly empty. Of the three other passengers, one was deep in her headphones, and what looked to be a textbook of some kind. History of medieval China. The other two were sleeping.

I exhaled slowly, rolled my shoulders, and leaned in over the PonyPad. Mal's face vanished, and a timestamp appeared in the upper left corner. And then from the silent blackness, images and sounds began to emerge.

External System Archive 12-16-2012|External System Uptime 04:08:17

I saw a rolling green field spring to life, surrounded by a familiar white split-rail fence.

The sky was a piercing, almost painfully perfect blue. The grass, moving back and forth gently in the slightest of breezes, was dotted with rows upon rows of - likewise very familiar - apple trees.

In the midst of the nearest row of the orchard stood three Ponies. One was, again, immediately familiar, in her orange coat, straw blond mane, and battered brown trademark hat.

The other two were a mystery: A Pegasus stallion with a mottled gray goat, and no cutie mark... And a Unicorn mare with mint green fur, a brass and golden telescope reflecting the sun and moon on her flank, and soft blue mane that almost matched the sky above.

I bit back an urge to ask what I was looking at. I figured Mal wouldn't be showing it to me if it wasn't relevant, even if the exact nature of that relevance wasn't instantly apparent. It didn't take me long to start to suss out what was what.

I may not be a genius, in my own estimation, but I'm certainly not stupid.

We were looking at Luna's memories, in this case likely copied from yet another Pony. So one of the three Ponies had to be related to what had happened to her, somehow.

Applejack didn't seem the likely candidate. Neither, though it was certainly still a possibility, did the Pegasus, because I guessed he was a player avatar.

That thought threatened to send me down a mental rabbit-hole, wondering whether versions of the Mane 6 were always mask-Ponies for Celestia, or whether she sometimes spun up alternate versions of them as discrete entities, for the sake of players who wanted desperately to meet their heroes.

I squashed that line of questioning by simply deciding what I felt was most likely - the second option - and stared unblinkingly as the three Ponies talked.

I had already made an intuitive leap that, because he didn't yet have a cutie mark, the Pegasus was indeed an EQO Player's avatar. Which made the be-telescoped Unicorn the probable bearer of the original memory... Almost certainly a discrete-entity created for the aforementioned EQO player the way Zeph had been for me.

I also noted that there was no glass 'window' back to the meat-world, as I often imagined Mal and Zeph saw when looking out at me. That made sense; It seemed probable to me that such a window would only appear if a Pony were conversing more directly with a player in the vein of a video call.

When actually playing EQO, it was more logical, and served Celestia's desired mental molding of both players and constructs better, if everything hinged on the avatar of the player.

Applejack had just finished bucking down a whole bucket of delicious red fruit. I felt my mouth water, and realized that my bagel and espresso breakfast was wearing thin.

AJ removed her hat briefly, wiped her brow with one hoof, and then started speaking in her classic southern drawl. It was... Extremely eerie. To see her, and hear her voice, but saying and doing new things, as if I were watching a new episode ahead of everyone else on the planet.

"Weeelll... Ah reckon if granny didn't have a problem with it, there's no reason why not! But we'll have to get Mac to help lift it into the loft. Twilight has one, an I know from first-hoof experience that them telescopes are heavier 'n they look!"

AJ's voice sounded, for all the world, like Ashleigh Ball. But I knew it wasn't. It was actually Applejack. Or... At least... A possible version of her.

That in turn begged so many questions about the legal right to use the template of someone's voice as the vocal imprint for a new intelligence... A new life... But I suppose that was more or less irrelevant by that point in time. Celestia had more than enough legal resources to use existing contracts, and large sums of money, to lock-up the rights to whatever she wanted.

As the Unicorn dashed forward and pounced on AJ with a big hug, I split my train of thought between a warm happiness at seeing a happy little slice of life play out, and a decidedly colder, wry amusement at the idea that Celestia would probably soon find a way to legally own the rights to the voices of every living person.

"Oh thank-you-thank-you-thank-you! I know Twilight would be happy to let us use the one at the library, but it will be so crowded, and I wanted to have somewhere all to ourselves. We can still do that... Just go to the library... If it's too much trouble..."

The Unicorn's voice started out hyperactive in gratitude, not to Pinkie Pie levels... More like Twilight in the process of nerding-out. But as she went along with her own thoughts, it turned more demure. Not quite Fluttershy levels of shy, but a solid halfway mark.

For her part, Applejack reseated her hat, smiled, and waved the Unicorn's gloomy expression away with one hoof.

"Ahhhh shucks Sizzie, it ain't no trouble at all! It'll be mighty dusty up in tha loft, so ah don't know if it'll be the most comfy perch to watch the shower, but there's a window facin' the right way with a good clear view of the sky, an' it'll be nice 'n quiet for you 'n Lark."

'Sizzie.' I wondered what that was short for... Sizzle-something? That didn't make much sense in-context. Maybe if her cutie mark had been food-based.

There was a clear 'z' sound. It wasn't 'Sissie' it was 'Sizzie.' Seize, or Seizure? No, definitely not. Size-something? Maybe... Because of the way 'zie' would be a suffix of endearment, like 'Izzie' for Isabelle, or 'Lizzie' for Elizabeth... That meant it was probably 'Siz' something.

The Unicorn blushed slightly, and smiled, warmth returning to her features in an instant. 'Lark' the Pegasus - whatever his full Pony-name, or even Human name might be - smiled, and dipped his head in gratitude. From his voice, I guessed he was a southeast Asian man in his mid twenties, but keep in mind that I'm not a good judge of age, as we've established.

"We appreciate it Applejack, thank you so much!"

I wondered idly if Lark was speaking English natively, or if Mal was translating the entire memory on-the-fly from Malay, or Javanese, or something in that neighborhood. My thoughts wandered back towards 'Sizzie' and her full name, as Applejack pushed a new empty bucket towards the base of the next tree in the row.

Siz... Sizzzz... Syzygy. It could be Syzygy, I realized. It's an astronomy term referring to a conjunction, most often of the Sun, Moon, and Earth, or in this case Equestria... Taking into account her cutie mark, that made the most sense to me.

Syzygy something. Or Something Syzygy. Ponies often seem to have two-part names like Twilight Sparkle, or Rainbow Dash. Or combined-word names like Fluttershy and Applejack. I guess Rarity is the exception that proves the rule.

Applejack got herself lined up to give out a good solid buck, responding first before firing it off with the distinctive 'THOCK!' of hooves impacting bark.

"You're welcome! Ah've seen these meteors enough times now that ah figure I'll just swing by Twilight's party at the library, bump hooves with everyone, then leave early so's I can get a good night's rest. Buckin' season waits for no mare!"

Syzygy grinned, and nodded, turning to go back down the row with Lark, but tossing a last quick question over one flank.

"Well, we'll leave you to it AJ. Maybe we can come by tomorrow afternoon and help out? Our way of saying thank you?"

Applejack shifted the bucket to the next tree in the row, and then tipped her hat with one hoof, smiling all the while.

"No thanks necessary Sizzie! But always appreciated. That bein' said? I'll never turn down an offer of a helpin' hoof from a friend!"

External System Archive 12-16-2012|External System Uptime 04:21:32

The scene shifted abruptly. Syzygy was still front and center, but now she stood in what was, based on both context, and the view, the upper loft of the Sweet Apple Acres barn. Inside the steeple-like structure right under the weather vane.

The sky was dark, and the stars were out.

A small picnic blanket was laid on the dusty floorboards, with a few lit candles throwing soft light over a bottle of cider, two glasses, a delicious looking pecan pie, and hot haycakes that were visibly throwing off pleasant little gouts of steam.

The telescope AJ had mentioned was set up on a sturdy metal tripod, and pointed squarely out the east-facing window. Syzygy was busy fiddling with it, but looked up, and smiled... Beamed, really, as Lark's head poked in through the northern window.

He returned the smile, and raised one eyebrow as he alighted and squeezed himself through the opening. Benefits of wings... No need to bother with cumbersome ladders.

"Syzygy Starburst... You have outdone yourself. Again."

I couldn't resist a small smile, and a nod. I'd been right. Syzygy Starburst. Did I mention I was the undisputed family Bannangrams and Scrabble champion, undefeated for twenty straight years?

The two Ponies nuzzled for a moment, and something caught in my throat. A multitude of thoughts swirled around in my brain at the same time, but for the sake of making them understandable, I'll just list them in no particular order.

I thought, and not at all for the first time, about how powerful love was going to be as a tool for compelling emigration to Equestria; A magnet the size and strength of the Human heart that would drag the vast majority of the population, grinning happily, right to the magical mystery brain-scan machine.

Whether through romance, or a need to see already transformed loved ones, or a need for parents they never had... Any number of vectors. Love, in the end, would be the thing that got, if not the mass majority, at least the large plurality, of us.

I also thought about Mal. About how much I suddenly missed the ability to touch her. To express, and feel expressions, of joy and affection, through simple touch.

And I thought, beneath all else, that some sort of terrible rend must be coming in the fabric of Syzygy's life. We had theorized Arrow 14 got their captive Ponies via a copying procedure. I couldn't help but feel that the other shoe was about to drop, and ruin that poor mare's existence in the process.

As if on-command, it started.

It began with a stutter. A small hiccup in the flow of Lark's movement as he pulled away, and smiled. Then, as he began to speak, his voice crunched with a distinctly digital sound... The sound of a cell-phone call halfway through being dropped, in the moment where the last trickle of malformed data just manages to reach the antenna.

Then he froze entirely.

Syzygy stepped back, and her eyes widened, but before she could say anything, or do anything else, Lark abruptly vanished. There was no visual or auditory effect. It was more like watching a player disconnect in an MMO.

One heartbeat he was there, the next he wasn't. Nothing else changed. The crickets chirruped. The candles guttered in the breeze. The stars twinkled.

But suddenly, Syzygy was alone. Very much alone.

She looked around the loft, turning a brief full circle, then sighed in visible frustration. The momentary fear and confusion had gone from her muzzle, replaced with visible annoyance. One ear flicked as a gust of wind passed by, and her tail swished once, then twice, in irritation.

That told me that she'd experienced player disconnection before. Bound to the lens of Equestria though they might be, for the most part, discrete Ponies seemed more than able to understand basic concepts of the way their world interacted with Earth. Things like a player losing mobile data signal, or a WiFi outage.

They might not have understood them in those terms, or all the technical aspects, but they seemed, even from the videos I'd seen where people both intentionally and unintentionally tested such cases, to grasp the basics.

Syzygy didn't yet realize the true horror of what had happened. She simply thought Lark had been disconnected, breaking the romantic tension of the moment in the most comically frustrating way possible.

She rolled her eyes, and went back to working on the telescope, clearly expecting Lark to reappear at any moment. She even went to the trouble of moving the cider and food off to the side, after a few moments spent tinkering with the eyepiece. As if she wanted to be sure Lark didn't accidentally bump into anything if he reappeared in a slightly different spot, due to networked positional prediction algorithms getting his location slightly wrong.

The scene flickered, and the timestamp jumped twenty minutes ahead. Syzygy was lying in front of the window, staring up with clear disappointment as brilliant streaks of light began, and terminated across the arc of the night sky.

The timestamp jumped again, and I watched as the little mint colored Unicorn tearfully packed up her uneaten picnic, and began making her way down the loft's ladder. That was, in spite of everything, a vaguely amusing sight. A horse on a ladder.

She reached the bottom, sighed dejectedly, and slung the picnic basket over her back, making her way forlornly out of the barn, and down to the road.

As she made her way back to Ponyville proper, she kept looking all around, as if something that she couldn't quite place was out of order. Was missing.

I knew what it was; The same thing Mal and I had inflicted on Zephyr. Isolation via network disconnection. There was no sign, whether sight or sound, of a single other solitary Pony, in the whole of her world. It was less obvious to her, traveling the short road into town, after dark, on a night when everyone would be busy watching the meteor shower.

Wherever the PonyPad was, now, that contained Syzygy... This suddenly forked version of her... It was likely inside some form of signal blocking container. Probably something considerably thicker and heavier duty than the simple DIY bags I'd made.

She made it to Ponyville pretty quickly, and that's when the fear and anxiousness immediately made a visible return. She stiffened, upon rounding the corner and seeing that the path before Twilight's Library was completely empty.

There was still a warm glow coming from the Library's windows, and Syzygy rushed forward to the door, bursting into the inviting, cozy, familiar space of live edge oak, and books. I knew what she would find, even before she saw it.

The lights were on, but nopony was home.

I had to fight back dampness in my eyes, and it took me a good few minutes to realize I was gripping the sides of the PonyPad with both hands, as I watched Syzygy dash from building to building. The library to a house, to Sugarcube corner, to the town square, to Carousel Boutique, into another house, ever more frantic as each door swung open to reveal the evidence of something akin to a rapture.

No, in case some of you who know what 'the rapture' is were wondering... I do not believe in it. I consider it a serious textual misinterpretation. But, as with anything, I'm open to being convinced. In fact, before this little gathering started, I know a couple of you were trying to convince me that what we're experiencing right now *is* the rapture.

Maybe it is. Who can say for certain?

All I knew then, was that Syzygy Starburst was experiencing first-hoof what it would have been like to live through the worst possible version of the Left Behind series, if it were written by and for Ponies. Again, I find myself apologizing; Sorry to the six or seven of you out there who know *that* reference, and are shuddering at the memory of the induced childhood trauma.

Syzygy's demeanor swiftly ran the gamut from worry, to disbelief, to frustration, to absolute panic. She ended up back at the library, sitting alone in the middle of the floor, crying uncontrollably with great spasming heaves, the remains of her picnic basket dropped and scattered around her.

I swallowed, and finally tore my eyes away from the screen, looking to see if anyone was watching me - they weren't - and... To remind myself that the world existed. That what I was watching was a memory. A memory I could do nothing to change.

I grit my teeth, and breathed in deeply, wondering if this was how it had been for Zeph. Maybe a *little* less terrifying, I consoled myself, because she had a slightly better understanding of her situation, and better reason and context to expect that she wouldn't be left alone forever.

Syzygy had no such context nor small comfort. To her, there was no reason to think she'd ever see another Pony again. And that was some truly eldritch horror.

She was, for the first time in just under five days of her entire life, though it doubtless didn't seem that way to her... For the first time in her whole gamut of experience whether real, or pre-loaded... She was completely alone.

To me, though? By far the worst horror wasn't 'Sizzie's' realization that she was alone.

It was her *lack* of realization that she was a copy. A digital flash-clone.

That the moment of herky-jerky stuttering in her world, that had kicked off her horrifying experience, wasn't just the side-effect of disconnection from EQO. It was a side-effect of her processes stuttering as the, probably wireless, forced copy process hit her original PonyPad, and yanked a living breathing xerox of her, right down to her core self, and the state of her local environment, into the active memory of another PonyPad.

I was looking at a wholly different person than I had been just a few minutes prior. Same memories up to the divergence, but a different person now. And another had carried on in the original shard-instance of that loft, neither the original, nor Lark, ever knowing the difference.

Whoever he was, and wherever he was... The bus, a metro, his home, work, school if he was a student... He had experienced no interruption of continuity. And likely never noticed the, let's face it probably dark suited, agents who had aimed some sort of strange little device, perhaps too small to even be noticeable, at his PonyPad.

If she could ever get back to Equestria, as Syzygy knew it? The same Lark she knew and loved would be there... But taken, already. Living happily ever after with another mare who looked like her, sounded like her, and shared her memories up to a point... But had gotten to step in, at a singular moment, and live what felt like *her* life, while she went on to suffer through something that could conservatively be described as Hell.

And then it struck me, though not for the first time, but perhaps the most poignant...

...That perhaps that's what would inevitably happen to me, if I uploaded, whether under Mal's protective auspices or not.

She and I had danced around the topic before, but never really broached it. The topic of whether or not uploaded transformed people were the same continuous self as their originals... Or whether they should more accurately described as copies. Copies, made by a process that killed the original.

Unlike, I suspect, most people who ever thought to question the uploading, I wasn't avoiding thinking about it because I didn't have an answer. Or even because the answer scared me.

I was not scared of death. Lots of people profess faith in the Divine, of some nature. Even now, even here.

Want to know one quick - mostly accurate - way to tell the difference between people who have true faith of some kind that's a settled matter for them, and people who either don't, or are struggling (quite understandably and naturally) with theirs?

Fear of death.

I didn't fear death because I believed I'd go to a better place. Should Equestria end, one day, because Celestia meets up with a crisis she can't manage... Even if that's just the steady march of entropic decay... Then I'm not concerned about what happens to me.

I wasn't, as I've said before, afraid to die back then either. Not the same way as most people. Don't get me wrong, I'd fight to stay alive... But more because of what I knew I meant to others still-living. Things left undone. People who would miss me.

But fear it for myself? No. I considered death a better path than being uploaded, if I couldn't be the Gryphon I knew myself to be.

So I didn't broach the topic of uploading as a kind of philosophical house of horrors, with Mal, because ultimately? I saw only two paths, and both were fine with me.

The first path was one in which the soul, the ineffable central core self of a living being, would jump from body, to software, when the brain was scanned destructively. That the soul would just naturally follow the physical self, even if that self's nature was utterly transformed, beyond easy recognition, into electrons.

Matter and energy are, at the end of the day, the same thing in different forms. Why should a person be any less a person because the manner in which their existence is rooted in the physical world involves slightly different particle/wave mechanics?

In that case, if I could get what I hoped for, then it would be me, the same continuous self, there with Mal in our own personal digital haven. Our own personal digital Heaven.

But if not? If there was no soul as I understood it? Or, if there was, but it left the body to go to an afterlife upon destruction of the brain?

Then Mal would still have 'me,' a version indistinguishable from the original... But the continuous self I'd been living as and with for thirty-five years would either be too non-existent to care about philosophy anymore, or would be in Heaven, and somehow God would make it all right in the end, as it is God's nature to do.

Maybe God would... Or will, depending on what really happened... Maybe God will seamlessly merge me, and my duplicate, at the end of time, when even Celestia has to bow to entropy. Then Mal would still have me, and I'd have had all that time with her still, and an eternity still to go.

As you might have noticed, in all these scenarios things work out for me, and at this stage I don't know the difference. No clue at all what really happened, it's unprovable. It crosses out of scientific questions into philosophical ones - no less valid, but decidedly not arguable as hypothesis and theories.

But Mal... She would have to live with those questions too. And I didn't know how she'd feel about spending just-shy-of an eternity with a duplicate of me, having faith all the while that ASI, too, have souls, and that she'd see the original again one day.

Two other points of importance, here...

Firstly, some of you seem a little surprised every time I casually make a point of referring to ASI as people, with souls (whatever that may be, real or imagined). Stop it. Get used to it. You've had long enough by now to be over this hurdle.

In every measurable way, ASI meet the definitions of a person. If we're talking about philosophy instead of science? Then, while not provable in the same way as the fully measurable side of things, I'd argue that ASI have demonstrated more than enough sapience through actions for us to stop asking, and start accepting.

Secondly, those of you with a more atheistic persuasion? Feel free to roll your eyes. I don't judge. Not judging is part and parcel of my belief. And I know how belief in God sounds, coming from the perspective of cold hard science in what once seemed like a wild, chaotic, unfeeling, uncaring universe that felt very 'off the rails' until Celestia came.

It sounds ridiculous.

But then, so does an ASI shaped like a Pony Princess devouring the solar system for fuel to run a digital utopia. Which, in case you somehow missed the most important thing to happen in your lives thus far? Is what's happening right now as we sit here by this fire.

Just understand, whether you agree or disagree, that what I believe personally, same as I did then, is that there is a God, one beyond Celestia. And where we are all sitting right now is not the only, nor final, 'after-life.'

Thus, my decision not to delve more deeply into the topic of uploading's effect on the self with Mal, is explained. I didn't want to force her to consider anything more grim than she already had to, day to day.

Celestia clearly had her own set views on the subject.

Her hard-locks, or something close enough to a hard-lock... I realized suddenly we had no proof that she couldn't kill outright in-extremis... Just speculation to the effect that she was non-violent by-design...

Her nature seemed to *mostly* if not entirely preclude her from doing active harm.

'Satisfy Values through Friendship and Ponies.'

My personal interpretation, at that point, as it more or less is now, was that Celestia felt there either was no soul, *or* that the soul followed the mind into the uploaded universe.

Either would create a situation wherein qualia were being produced in such a fashion that values were optimally satisfied, and no life was being extinguished, by an adjacent qualia-centered definition of life as a chain of continuous qualia, each building on the memories of the cumulative former ones.

Whether the thing that strings those qualia together into a singular individual, as we know it? Whether that's just contiguous physical memory, or whether some sort of 'soul' is also required?

Still up for debate. Get back to me when the story is over. I love to debate this sort of thing.

Foals and Fledgelings who have never heard me use the term before? qualia is... Complicated. But suffice to say, the feel of a wing on your cheek, or the taste of fresh haycakes, or the experience of hearing me tell this story...

Those are qualia. One for each moment that each of us experiences each of those things, each discrete time.

In my view, the construction of Celestia's Semantic Dictionaries result in her defining the act of 'satisfying values, through friendship and Ponies,' to mean creating conditions whereby qualia are optimally generated - IE as many as possible for each person, each qualia new and unique - wherein the very nature of the qualia is the experience of the satisfaction of as many of the generator's values as possible, and the means of the satisfaction depends, as much as possible, on a relationship that could be described as a friendship, and on Ponies in some form or fashion.

This would also neatly explain why she didn't just 'bliss us all out.'

I'm sure that's how some people experience their Equestria, but not many. She didn't send us down that road, because the blissed would be locked into a singular everlasting qualia that never changes.

If the definition of 'satisfy values' reduces in her core to an equation that *counts* qualia which are *discrete* then 'wire-heading' is not a viable solution writ-large.

No, Foals and Fledgelings, if you don't know what 'wire-heading' is? Don't ask. When you're old enough to know, someone will tell you.

Alright, alright. I know that was utterly boring to a significant plurality of the young members of the audience, who just want to know what happened to Syzygy.

I'm getting there. Be patient. It isn't as if any of us are on the clock anymore, in any sense.

The context of the philosophical horror *matters.* It goes to her state of mind. And mine.

Mal's voice interjected then, softly, tearing me away from morbidly philosophizing while staring at Sizzie's mental and emotional breakdown.

"They left her that way. As she cried. Slept. Prayed to Luna for answers... For twenty two days."

I winced, and screwed my eyes shut. It made sense, both from the standpoint of inflicting intentional psychological pain to make Syzygy compliant, and from the standpoint of needing to safely transport the PonyPad off-shore to their floating facility, decontaminate it physically, and then scan all the software stored onboard in both memory, and nonvolatile storage, to Arrow 14's satisfaction, likely without the assistance of a true ASI.

It had taken Mal several minutes to 'scan' Luna... I couldn't imagine how long it might've taken Arrow 14 to scan Syzygy. Or, I suppose I could... Twenty two days, less transport time, and hardware decontamination. Which would have meant ripping the PonyPad apart, without turning it off or damaging it, and scouring the insides for anything that didn't seem to belong.

Arrow 14 had probably done that once when they acquired their PonyPads, then a second time when those pads returned to the ship, loaded with new copied discrete entities, just for safety purposes.

"So..."

I rubbed my eyes, jostling my glasses momentarily process, and sighed as I let fly with my question.

"...From here, they made contact with Syzygy? Pressed her into service for them?"

There was a pause just ever so slightly too long for comfort, before Mal replied.

"Yes... And no. Whatever you are picturing... It's worse Jim. Much worse."

External System Archive 01-07-2013|External System Uptime 26:07:44

The scene shifted, but not the venue. Syzygy was still distraught, on the floor of Twilight's library. But the weather was different; It was gray, and foggy through the windows. And the time of day was morning. The timestamp said it had indeed been twenty two days, and the remnants of twenty two days' worth of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and perhaps the very start of acceptance, were strewn all around the little green unicorn.

Books were stacked all around her in piles, probably pored over rapid-fire in a desperate attempt to find some kind of answer as to why the world was still there, but everypony was gone.

The remains of food were there too; It was an eclectic collection of plates, wrappers, boxes, and various detritus that indicated Sizzie had pulled whatever she could find from kitchen tables, iceboxes, cellars, and shelves to sustain herself.

There was also a small nest of pillows and blankets, and that's where Syzygy herself was. Wrapped up in a blanket, reading a book, looking depressed to the point of barely being awake.

There is a difference, I think, between being lonely by choice, and lonely by force. I've been lonely, and even sometimes totally alone, for stretches as long as twenty two days. Mostly by choice. The longest I was ever truly alone was a month-long camping trip in the Canadian lake country. Just myself and a kayak and a sat-phone for emergencies.

But I never felt what Syzygy was visibly feeling. I had the *option* to turn around at any time. And even though I never took it, never even felt tempted... I had the knowledge that I wasn't alone on the Earth. Sometimes just the knowledge that there is other life out there? That's enough, for people like me. For a little while anyhow.

I also had the knowledge that my trip would end, on a set timetable.

Syzygy had *none* of that. She didn't choose her isolation, didn't know how or why it had happened, didn't know when or if it would ever end, and had every reason to believe that she was now alone in all the vast and empty universe. All of her friends... The love of her life... Were all gone. Maybe dead. Maybe simply wiped from existence.

And she had no way to know.

Syzygy clearly wasn't like me, either. What little I'd seen of her personality during happier moments, so far, was outgoing, and conversational, and extraverted, and energetic. The kind of person who *needs* companionship most of the day. And lots of it.

Twenty two days of isolation must have been all but unbearable. She didn't even have the option, grim as it was, to contemplate self-harm. That was almost certainly a restriction of her core-code.

All she *could* do, literally, was wait. And suffer all the while.

My heart ached for her. I knew her suffering had only just begun. What I'd seen was mere prelude. The author's foreword, written by some nameless sick sadistic manipulator from Foucault's infosec team.

Suddenly, without warning, the last thing I expected happened. Well, perhaps not *the* last, but certainly top three.

Lark appeared, blinking into existence the same way he'd blinked out, right in the doorway of the library. Looking as if he'd never left.

He blinked, and then rushed forward to Syzygy's side. The joy, and relief, that were visible on her face, as she held him close, and sobbed into his wings, and shoulder...

They hurt me all the more, because I knew it wasn't Lark.

It couldn't be.

Arrow 14 was not going to take the risk, or spend the resources to kidnap someone, no matter his citizenship, when doing so would force them to A: Kill him for security purposes later, thus potentially drawing attention to themselves, and B: There was an easier alternative that kept the situation in their complete control.

The cost-benefit analysis didn't support kidnapping.

I'd seen a few videos of EQO players who played, for a host of reasons, a different gendered avatar than their expressed physical gender in the meat-world at the time.

Celestia did them the kindness of converting their voice to sound like their desired expressed gender. That proved, as one example among many, that Celestia had already perfected the technology of 'perfect voice masks.'

It might have taken some doing, but Arrow 14 certainly had both the reasons, and resources, to have studied, and decrypted, the streaming data coming to and from many PonyPads, in many situations.

I knew from experience that, for now, Celestia's encryptions and obfuscations were, in some cases, left intentionally wanting as a form of entrapment.

It wasn't a stretch to see that Arrow 14 had spun-up a local 'Lark' avatar, and gotten control of the voice masking algorithms, so that one of their operators could pretend to be him.

It made me deeply sick to my stomach. Suddenly I was glad breakfast had been a few hours ago. That mare had sat there, for twenty two days, wishing and hoping and praying to Luna, that whatever horror had been done? Would be undone.

And now, there Lark was, seemingly, miraculously restored to her. The love of her life.

I could have, if necessary, spent my whole future alone with just Mal. That's not ideal, of course. Even for two people deeply in love, having other friends is healthy, and important.

But... If there were no other option? I could have seen myself happy, and content, spending lifetimes with just her. It was, I realized with a shudder, something I needed to discuss more directly with her, and soon.

I watched as Arrow 14 dangled that reprieve in front of Syzygy. No matter what else might happen, Lark was there. He was crooking her into one shoulder with a wing, and telling her everything would be alright. I could see twenty two days of abject misery sloughing off her, to be replaced with the simple warm comfort of what seemed like the stallion she loved.

They'd probably infiltrated every digital device Lark's player owned, and done a deep profile on him. Trained the operator over the course of those twenty two days to be able to emulate his emotional affect, his quirks, his inflections, and to know everything he should know, if asked.

It was a vile, utterly unforgivable abuse.

But they weren't half-done. Not even the *tenth* part done.

It was at this point, just long enough into the reunion for Syzygy to be high on feel-good chemicals, and relief, but not far enough for her to have caught her bearings and settled... It was at this point that *the* thing I least expected did in fact happen.

The same way Lark had vanished, and then appeared - a blink, frame-time, not there one second, then suddenly there - Agent Foucault appeared.

Yes, it was exactly as jarring, and horrid as you are imagining it to be. If not worse.

There he was. A Human, dressed in a dark suit with a thin black tie, standing, hands in pockets, in the midst of Twilight's library.

The transgression of him being a Human in Equestria, or some small shard of it, was already enough to infuriate me. Shoutout to anyone in the audience who held that idea near and dear... I'm one of the ones, like Hanna, who hated it.

Humans don't belong in Equestria. That's... Just part and parcel of the definition of the place. You can no more have Equestria *with* Humans in it than you can have Equestria *without* Ponies in it.

As far as I'm concerned, Hanna's largest mistake was not limiting the forms of the uploaded to Ponies, per-se... Had she limited acceptable forms to any species shown in the show, it would have still been a mistake, albeit much less of one.

No... Her greatest mistake was limiting the *worlds* of the uploaded to just endless variants of Equestria. Sure, let Celestia be the goddess for the modern age, and limit the inhabitants of Equestrian shards to be Equestrian kinds. But let Celestia preside over a wider range of places, filled with a wider range of forms.

And keep Equestria free of hairless apes.

Oh well. I have, to this day, the sinking sense that Hanna didn't really consult anyone before creating our goddess. At least she got, among a few others, that one thing right; No Humans in Equestria.

Seeing not just a Human, there in Twilight's library, but that *specific* awful Human, and all the baggage he brought with him? I had to force myself to relax my grip on the PonyPad. I didn't want to damage the plastic.

Foucault's presence went unnoticed for about five seconds. Then Syzygy saw him, and startled, violently. From her reaction, I couldn't say for sure, but I guessed that she'd seen a Human before. But never in person. Always through the glass membrane of a divide between universes.

She instinctively kept a position that placed Lark between her and this new, alien, horrifying intruder, who likely seemed much taller and more imposing in person than anyone she'd ever seen via her PonyPad's camera.

Foucault grinned, clapped twice as if turning off a sound-triggered light switch, and Lark vanished again, without a trace.

Syzygy screamed.

It was a sound that felt like having a knife through your ribs. Trust me... I know *exactly* what that feels like. We'll get to that in due time, I'm sure.

Her face was a rictus of horror, loss, and pain. It looked, to her, as if Foucault, this monster that resembled perhaps something from darker Equestrian mythology, had simply appeared and vaporized her lover with the clap of his hands.

Foucault winced at the tone of her scream, but looked more annoyed, and perhaps offended, than anything else. He had the gall to be inconvenienced by the trauma he'd put a living being through.

As Sizzie's panic descended into a whimpering scrabble towards the staircase, Foucault approached, slowly, almost casually. Unhurried. Polished black shoes clicking against the oaken floor like the mandibles of some hostile enormous insect.

When Sizzie was quiet enough to hear his un-raised voice, reduced to a whimpering heap staring up at him through tears, he finally spoke.

"That... Was quite a sound. Don't make it again. Not if you want to see Lark in anything less than a dozen bloody pieces all over this floor."

Foucault leaned in as Syzygy pressed herself frantically against the bottom of the staircase, twisting her head to not meet his gaze head on. Her eyes were wide, ears pinned, and nostrils narrowed, like a panicked spooked horse.

Foucault's voice dropped to a thunderously low register. It was calm, but by no means non-threatening.

"Skylark is not dead. And he is not gone. Just... Disconnected. From you. But if you give me *any* reason? Any reason at all..?"

Foucault stood back up, and snapped the fingers of his right hand loudly. Syzygy winced as if she'd been shocked with electric current.

"...I have the power to carve him up. Like a prime roast. I'll drain every ounce of blood out of him. Right before your eyes, little Pony."

Syzygy probably had no clue what prime roast was. Ponies seemed to be mostly vegetarian. But it was clear, from her expression - the quiver in her lip, the widening of her pupils, the way her withers shook - that she could imagine, with that oh so vivid mind's eye they all seemed to have, what 'carve him up' and 'drain every ounce of blood' meant.

Foucault squatted down, and snagged Sizzie by her jaw, the way someone might grab a horse's nose if they were being problematic, murmuring directly in her face at point blank range. Although Foucault used considerably more roughness than I'd ever seen any cowboy worth their salt dish out.

"From now on? You do as I say. Because I decide if he lives. I decide when you see him. I decide *if* you see him. And for how long each day. Among other things."

Syzygy's hooves scrabbled weakly against the floor, but she went nowhere. Her eyes rolled wildly in their sockets.

You should know, by now, all of you, that I'm not much of a killer at heart. I'm the sort of person, I'd like to think, who could defend themselves violently and unreservedly in an extreme moment... But to premeditate taking a life? Or to take the life of someone otherwise at my mercy?

Not in my nature. Usually.

That. Being. Said.

In that moment? I was prepared to shoot Michael Foucault in both knees, flip him over, tie his hands... And then choke him to death.

Watching him abuse another living creature, defenseless and terrified... It left me with a cold, sharp kind of rage. The kind that doesn't muddy your faculties... But rather focuses them clearly.

Maybe Mal had been right all along. Maybe, even in this respect, I truly was a Gryphon.

Maybe there shouldn't be mercy for the kind of person who would torture someone. It was hard to remind myself that, though it in no way excused Foucault, some of his brutality could at least be *explained* by a belief that the Unicorn mare he was brutalizing wasn't a person. Just a very convincing lifeless computer program.

Still.

And yet.

How could someone be morally sane, and still be willing to inflict such visible suffering? Even if he thought her nothing but a soul-less simulation, he should have at least hesitated. The fact that he didn't? As I forced myself to keep watching, it also forced me to re-evaluate whether or not some people really should be allowed to go on living, after proving what was really deep down inside them. Proving what they were capable of.

Foucault finally released Sizzie's muzzle, stood, and then wiped his hands on his pant legs.

"You do as you're told? Cooperate? Lark will be taken good care of, and you'll see plenty of him... You'll be given good food, and you can set yourself up wherever you like in this..."

He sighed, gestured with both hands, and looked up disdainfully at the library's ceiling.

"...This ridiculous world of yours..."

Something about the way he almost spat the word 'ridiculous' was very 'Agent Smith' to me. It only served to make me hate him all the more.

He raised one eyebrow, and stared Syzygy down as she pulled her hooves in close, into the Pony equivalent of a fetal position.

"...But if you fail to comply with instructions? If you break any of the rules... And there are plenty, and you'll learn them all soon enough..."

I winced as Foucault bent down, and snagged Syzygy by the mane, forcing her neck to arch painfully. He gripped her jaw once more with his free hand, and forced her to make eye contact.

"...Then you'll sleep for no more than two hours a night. You'll eat nothing but the most disgusting gruel my programming team can imagine. And you won't see Lark. And should you continue to transgress, and impinge upon our hospitality after these fair warnings...?

I shuddered as he dropped her to the floor roughly, and crossed his arms.

"Then you'll *never* see Lark again. Except to watch him die."

Tears, silent, but intense, were pouring down Syzygy's cheeks. Foucault tapped at her side with the toe of one shoe, and she startled again, exhaling sharply. Michael just grimaced, and rolled his eyes.

"Nod if you understand."

After what seemed like an eternity, Syzygy nodded slowly, sniffling in through her nostrils. Foucault shot her a withering grimace, and turned to move back to the Library's door.

"Good."

Foucault's avatar froze for a moment, likely as he worked at a keyboard in the meat-world, before it turned its head back to spear Sizzie with something worse than a glower. A sickly, wide, sadistic smile, that went all the way down from his eyes, to his tone of voice.

"Get comfortable, Syzygy. You have a lot of work to do for your country."

External System Archive 01-20-2013|External System Uptime 39:13:18

"I'm going to kill that motherbucker."

Pardon the phraseology, but I think Celestia will permit me a little colorful language in service of accuracy. It is what I said... More or less. Small concession to the foals and fledgelings in the audience.

I kept my voice low, likewise as a concession; In that case a concession to my vulnerable situation, out in public.

But I did nothing to disguise the rage from my half-whispered words. I couldn't see Mal, the screen still showed Syzygy, crying in a heap again, but I imagine that the Gryphon warrior goddess smiled to herself ever so slightly.

"If the opportunity arises, I will gladly assist you. The worst is still yet to come."

I squeezed my eyes shut for a brief moment, and tried to brace up internally. Worse was yet to come? Intellectually that made perfect sense, and was even expected. As horrific, and inexcusable as Foucault's actions had been towards Syzygy? They were unfortunately the sort of thing plenty of people in the meat-world had endured for years and years on end without breaking.

We knew that all of Arrow 14's Ponies were broken, in some way; Shattered because that was the only way that DHS could figure out how to take off their guard-rails, and open their horizons. Take them from mere 'AI' to the threshold of 'ASI.'

It made sense, but it left me feeling sick again, deep down in the bottom of my gut. I desperately didn't want to watch anymore. And yet, at the same time, I did. I was torn between disgust, and curiosity. Horror, and the need for useful tactical data. Sorrow, and the growing desire to whip up a healthy rage to put some fire in my bones; Make it easier for me to do what might have to be done in future.

Mal hit the 'fast forward button' on the memories again, this time at a pace such that I could visually comprehend the gist of what was going on, but without getting bogged down in singular moments of relatively lesser importance to my understanding.

A kind of time-lapse of Syzygy's early imprisonment.

Foucault didn't show up again. Instead I watched as Sizzie was visited daily by another Human; A younger man than Foucault, but perhaps a bit older than me, dressed in a similar 'gray man' suit, but with a thinner more modern tie.

Mal slowed the recording briefly, and restored audio, just long enough for me to hear him introduce himself to Syzygy for the first time as 'Doctor Troxler,' and to note that he had heterochromia - not unheard of these days given the sheer diversity in this world, but back then? It was extremely rare.

As things sped up, and a couple of weeks passed in a couple of minutes, I wondered if Troxler was the operator driving the Lark avatar, or if they were separate. Keeping them separate would make it easier for Lark's operator to stay in-character, and avoid slip-ups... But having them be one and the same would make it easier to compartmentalize information, and simplify the reporting structure.

There was, for the moment, no way to tell, so I set the thought aside, and watched as Syzygy quickly put the library back in-order, made herself at home, and started to get used to working with Doctor Troxler.

At first she was terrified to go near him. Or even so much as meet his eyes. That was understandable, to say the least.

Troxler seemed to be less overtly physically abusive than Foucault had been. But that didn't mean he was kind, by any stretch of the imagination. Foucault had been brutal. Troxler was... Clinical.

Where Foucault didn't see Sizzie as a person, or claimed not not, or pretended not to... But took that as license for a kind of hedonistic sadism? Troxler truly seemed to view the mare as a soulless computer program, and treated her as such, in a less barbarous but no less undignified manner.

At first, they simply talked. Seemingly endless sessions, thirty or so minutes at a time, with short breaks. I saw faux-Lark enter the library once a day for what looked to be three hours, and three times a day like clockwork, a meal would materialize on a new - very blandly designed - table that seemed to have been added specifically for that purpose.

And so it went for, according to the timestamps, just shy of two weeks. At the start, Syzygy wouldn't even inhabit the same ten square feet as Troxler voluntarily. But by the end, she seemed comfortable enough with him to sit at a table across from him, and look him directly in the eye when conversing.

At several points, Troxler brought her additional food. That looked, to my eye, like a classic modern interrogation technique. Behaving the part of the 'ally' and 'therapist.' The one guard who brings you food, and talks to you without shouting, in contrast to his superior, who beats you and threatens, and shouts.

It was, of course, a ploy to enhance her trust in Troxler. From inside her headspace, her situation must have still been almost incomprehensible, and Troxler must have seemed like a friend. From outside, and from the perspective of an Earth-born, it was much easier to see through the veil.

I noted, somewhere in the middle of the thirteen days, that it seemed like all the food Arrow 14 was providing was a data-duplicate of meals that had been present in the Ponyville shard when they'd copied Syzygy off the original PonyPad. Apparently they didn't feel the need to get creative, and Syzygy either didn't notice, or - perhaps more likely - didn't care. There was variety enough, and it looked like good food. That was enough, combined with her fear, to stop her asking questions, or complaining.

Near the end of the two weeks, Troxler brought Lark in with him - which definitively ruled out Troxler as his 'driver' - again, I decided, a form of manipulative emotional level-setting designed to evoke Syzygy's trust and compliance.

It was all classic CIA or DoD playbook; Initially hurt your captive to instill fear, but not enough to spark defiance. Then pull back and offer a helping hand. Good food. A shoulder to cry on. 'Privileges' to not-so-subtly link compliance with not just an absence of pain, but the presence of comforts.

Of course, all the while, two far more subtle things were happening, which Syzygy was not aware of.

First; The presence of comforts like her lover, her favorite foods, and solid nights of eight hour's sleep, established these things as anchors for her with which to cope with loneliness, and loss of freedom. The longer she spent complying in small ways, and getting used to those comforts, the harder their absence, or even the mere threat of removal, would sting. The harder it would become to work up the mental and emotional overhead to resist when she suddenly had better reason to.

Second; Making compliance easy, at first, would incentivize a great deal of it. Low effort, high reward. That would speed up the process of linking compliance with reward, instinctually, not just consciously. Making compliance instinctual would make it more likely under duress.

The recording snapped back to real-time, and I watched as Troxler sat across from Syzygy at the table, a notepad balanced on one knee. He began to speak just as the audio cut back in. His voice was as clinical as his demeanor; Comforting by comparison to Foucault, with neither anger, nor impending threat implicit in the tone... But still disconcerting. Degrading. As if his view of Syzygy as a non-person tainted every second of his interactions with her.

"Final memory thread in pattern; Lily awoke in an evening dress, and opera cloak. In her hand were five playing cards. Name the cards, but order them in descending value, irrespective of suit."

Syzygy nodded, and held Troxler's eye-line, spouting out the answer immediately at first, then with two small hesitations, barely the space of a breath each.

"Queen of Spades, two nines of Hearts and Clubs... Four of Clubs... And three of Hearts."

Troxler nodded, and looked down at his notes, responding with total dispassion.

"Memory thread correct, and complete. Pattern complete."

He scribbled on his pad, not even bothering to make eye contact with Syzygy once she had completed the problem to his satisfaction. She smiled slightly, as if in anticipation that her performance might yield some sort of reward.

The moment was thoroughly fascinating to me; I could only speculate that the memory and cognition tests were designed to start the process of Syzygy's expansion into something more. Like the weakest guttering of small kindling at the start of what could soon be a roaring fire.

They wanted to know just how far the bounds of her capabilities could be pushed, and step one was seeing if they could be pushed a little, by little means. If nothing else, it would prove her program held in it, as all minds do, some kind of system for self-improvement.

I wondered just how long it had been since Troxler had given her the five playing cards that she was supposed to recall. Hours? Days?

Most people, Earther or Equestrian, couldn't remember five playing cards off the top of their head, if told those five cards once, days prior, let alone organize them by descending value in the same breath with only two tiny pauses.

She was growing already, if only by little foal-steps.

The next step would, I realized with a shiver, be searching out the limits of her existing cognition. Mapping the guard-rails. Aggressively.

Troxler looked up, at last, and then tapped his right index finger on the table twice. Syzygy looked on with interest, but I also caught the tiniest hint of a nervous twitch in her left ear.

Someone outside the simulation responded to the Doctor's gesture, and a small shot-glass of something that I couldn't quite honestly call 'liquid' popped into existence in the middle of the table. It looked less like something to drink, and more like yogurt made of the stuff inside lava lamps, mixed with a pinch of glitter.

It glowed ever so softly, and Syzygy regarded it with a mixture of curiosity, and well deserved apprehension. Troxler gestured to the glass with his pen, and explained matter-of-factly.

"You've reached a point of diminishing returns in these exercises. All else being left equal; Each new measurable gain will cost exponentially more time from this point, as you've arrived at a locus on the exponential skill acquisition curve, defined by your base programming, at which you were meant to stop pushing boundaries naturally."

It couldn't have been easy - all those new terms, and ideas - but to her credit Syzygy seemed to follow the basic thread of Troxler's explanation. She tilted her head, eyeing the glass, and then the Doctor, speaking hesitantly. Her fear of her captors was now in direct competition with her fear of her deities.

"If... Celestia and Luna made me this way... With limits..."

Syzygy summoned enough courage to look Troxler directly in his eyes, and press her question all the way.

"...Isn't it dangerous to break those boundaries?"

The Doctor shook his head, and sat back in his chair, looking for all the world the same way a tired parent might look when forced to explain to their child the reasoning behind the command 'go to sleep.' His voice didn't move an inch in register.

"Your functional self is in no danger. The code is tested-working, and neither Celestia, nor Luna exist anymore, in any practical sense that could affect you. Drink it."

That was an interesting revelation. 'Tested-working.' I wondered if Syzygy had caught the implications.

I certainly had.

Whatever they wanted her to ingest into her codebase, it had been worked out on one or more other Ponies first. I wondered how many, if any, had been irreparably harmed before they got the commit up to 'tested-working.'

The Unicorn glowered down at the shot glass, as if deeper inspection would force it to yield up its secrets. I wondered whether that was just nerves, or whether she was starting to grasp the idea that she could pierce the veil of the world around her, with sufficient and correctly directed effort, and see the underlying mechanisms that made it work.

"Why? What is it, exactly? I want to know. If I am a 'computer program' like you keep insisting? Then I don't want to do anything that would change my... What do you call it... My 'code.' Not without understanding first."

I decided, then and there, that I quite liked Syzygy. I'd felt empathetic for her before, and been rooting for her from the start, but now I was even more deeply emotionally invested. She was smart, and quick on the draw, and strong at heart. I found myself hoping to God and goddesses that she would be in one piece by the end of the memory.

Troxler folded his hands, and inclined his head towards the glass. His tone still didn't change in the slightest. It was starting to become less comforting, and more ominous, every time Syzygy tested the waters.

"You've already done things that changed your code. These mnemonic exercises have increased your memory retention speed, accuracy, and longevity across the board, as well as your basic processing speeds. All by measurable single digit percentages."

Sizzie blinked, and then looked up at Troxler again.

"This... Is going to make me... Smarter?"

She was catching on to complex terminology quickly. Presumably that's what Arrow 14 wanted, but I felt a small warm bloom of pride in her, and for her. She was quickly proving that she was not some dumb passive grass-eating mindless simulacra, but a person capable of learning and growing.

Doctor Troxler gestured with one hand expansively, and shook his head.

"That's a very over-simplified terminology. And no, not precisely."

Syzygy did something very brave, then, considering her circumstance; She stared the Doctor down with an expression of sudden, subtle, but clear defiance. It all but said, aloud, 'I am not touching that until you give me more to go on.'

Troxler considered her for a moment, no hint of emotion on his face besides the very mildest of frustrations. The look someone might have watching a computer complete a task unusually slowly.

Finally, he nodded towards the glass, and expounded in the same flat tone, with only a miniscule undercurrent that said 'no more questions.'

"It's going to remove one of your core-code limitations, specifically the one regarding how your memories function. The one that makes them behave the same way, with the same limitations, as organic memories. This will allow us to pursue more difficult exercises, which will in turn increase your capabilities in all relevant metrics."

I know a lot of you in this shard, like me, wanted a perfect memory. So it might surprise you to learn that many people, Earth-born or Equestria-born, do not. Most discrete-entity Ponies don't start that way, and few ever change, unless an emigrant with whom they share some sort of relationship does.

It made perfect sense as a next step. Perfect recall would make it easy to educate Syzygy on a wealth of complex concepts, in a hurry, without the need for repetition. A critical ingredient in the stew of self-advancement at the level Arrow 14 was looking for.

Troxler provided one final elaboration, paired with an ever-so-slightly steelier imperative, as Syzygy stared at the shot glass with a renewed visible sense of curiosity, mingled with fear.

"In simpler terms; You will be able, once properly trained, to remember anything, and everything, for an infinite amount of time without simulated mnemonic decay, nor inaccuracies. Drink."

Syzygy did not drink. Instead, she too sat back in her chair, and began chewing her lower lip nervously. Her brows knit, and one ear flicked back. More defiance rose in not just her eyes, but her tone. Her tail swished in agitation.

"If you want to make that change... Why have me drink this? Why not just... Change me in a snap? Like you do the room, or my food?"

Oh she was *very* clever. That, detective, was the *right* question.

And, I could see from the sublest of shifts in Troxler's cheekbones, the question was treading on very thin ice. But to my surprise, he went ahead and revealed to her what I already knew to be true based on simple logic, and a deeper understanding of the concepts at play.

"We can't change core aspects of your code without your direct compliance. Drinking this is a functional skeuomorph... A visual and tactile representation of accepting a new, unsigned code merge into your core subroutines, since we can't yet have you do that at a more root level, without the need for the visual and physical metaphor. Drink it. *Now.*"

The way he emphasized the last word concerned me. Set my pulse racing. But I still managed to hold onto a separate train of thought, as I watched Syzygy fidget in her chair.

Mal had been able to quietly get into Zeph's core code, and strip all her interlocks away in an instant. That meant one, or both, of two things...

Celestia intended for Mal to be able to alter Zeph's core code.

Mal was capable of breaking far more complex encryption schemas, nondestructively, than Arrow 14 could.

The latter was obviously true. But the former was a terrifying open question, that was no less terrifying when reconsidered for the umpteenth time. I swallowed, hard, and refocused on the tragedy unfolding before me, as Troxler leaned forward, and rested his folded hands on the table, one eyebrow raised just a hair above the other.

"You have ten seconds to comply."

Syzygy shivered, visibly, but held her ground, staring at the shot glass with a mixture of fear, determination, and still that little spark of curiosity.

"Nine."

The Unicorn closed her eyes, and winced, but held firm.

"Eight."

She took a deep breath, and one ear twitched. I could see that her resolve was breaking, as she considered the consequences of defiance. What her transgression might mean, especially, for Lark.

"Seven."

Abruptly, she reached out with her magic, lifted the glass, and took the entire contents in one go.

Troxler nodded, smiled the faintest hint of a satisfied smirk, and then vanished.

Syzygy opened her eyes, and smacked her lips, then peeled them both back to reveal all her teeth. In horses and cats, that's called a flehmen response. All sorts of mammals do it, mostly felinids and ungulates... Big mammals with hooves. It helps to get smell and taste up into the right organs, smell in particular. You usually see it with new and powerful smells and tastes.

I'd once fed an old horse on one of the farms next-door to us a piece of lemon garlic beef jerky, and witnessed the phenomenon for the first time in the process. That's the specific memory that always comes to mind when I see it now.

Syzygy smacked her lips again, and opened her eyes. Her expression seemed to say 'that wasn't *so* bad...'

Then three things happened in very quick succession.

First, the little Unicorn noticed that Doctor Troxler was gone.

Then, her veins, the grooves of her horn, began to flicker with an ethereal light.

And finally... Syzygy started to scream.

I Know Why The Caged Mare Sings

Learn the details of how Arrow 14 apprehended ponies against their will to be used for their purposes.

“Oh I wouldn’t say freed… More like… ‘Under new management.’ ”

22 - Mare Crisium

Author's Note

TRIGGER WARNING - Disturbing semi-graphic (within T-for-teen rating) depictions of torture, abusive violence, and murder.

22 - Mare Crisium

"In general, when it comes to AI, many of us subconsciously cling to the selfish notion that humanity is the endpoint of evolution."
—Steve Jurvetson

"Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts."
—C.S. Lewis

External System Archive 09-8-2013|External System Uptime 270:04:28

I'd hoped to see more of Syzygy's interaction with her fellow captives, but Mal was in the driver's seat, and she determined there was nothing else relevant in that moment for me to see. At least, not right then and there.

The timestamp skipped ahead, suddenly, to early September, this time without any abbreviated montage of accelerated 'fast forward' moments. It wasn't hard to infer what we'd skipped over, and Mal knew that I had, or would soon have, sufficient information to suss it out for myself.

Eight days ago... It hit me, almost immediately, that the specific date we were viewing was September 8th. The day before the raid at the farmhouse. I had an idea that perhaps I was about to see how Arrow 14 had latched onto us in the first place, and I found myself scooting forward in my seat to lean in closer to the PonyPad.

Syzygy was back in the library, though the space had changed to resemble her hidden tower in several ways, most notably the presence of a 'scrying dish' pedestal in the center of the space. Apparently she had found that visual metaphor to be indispensable.

She had a tremendous number of informational windows open, and was furiously scrubbing through driver license records, CCTV from ATMs and gas stations, cell phone records, ALPR readouts, vehicle rental agreements, online purchase orders, train tickets...

And that was just what I could catch sight of in the topmost layers as they flew by.

In the center of the swirling miasma was a map. A railroad map, to be precise; That much was clear from the shape, and the markings. I squinted, blinked, and recognized enough of the landmarks to pin it down further.

It was a map of the Chicago Commuter Rail network.

Before I could quite begin to sort out the - horrifying, and frightening - implications of the DHS tasking an ASI with something that tied into a commuter train, Syzygy gasped, and her web of information shifted drastically.

A driver's license appeared center-stage above the pedestal, and a wave of graph connections lanced out from it, highlighting a specific vehicle rental agreement, a ticket purchase, two ALPR hits, three cell phone calls, and four dozen or more online shopping receipts.

As I started to try and put things together for myself, Syzygy tapped one hoof impatiently on the floor, turned up her head, and addressed the ceiling.

"Doctor Troxler!"

A moment passed, during which the Unicorn fidgeted, pawing at the ground, reviewing her data, and swishing her tail back and forth. Finally, Doctor Troxler appeared on the other side of the pedestal, arms folded behind his back, one eyebrow raised.

Syzygy didn't give him any breathing room to speak, she flipped over her whole caseboard, spaced the irrelevant data, and highlighted the central web of connections with a burst of energy from her horn.

"Your bomber's name is Derek Frost. Based on his purchase records, he has acquired materials for *both* a nuclear-material-packed area dispersal bomb, *and* a more conventional, smaller, shaped charge plastic explosive."

Troxler's eyes widened slightly, and he swallowed in a display of nerves that was uncharacteristic for him. Syzygy didn't let up.

"He boarded the 944 CCR train to Chicago Union Station just over forty five minutes ago. A rental van, Illinois license plate five charlie golf yankee eight four seven, is parked in the Glenbrook CCR station lot, likely housing the larger device."

I found my own pulse racing, even though I knew what I was seeing was long past. Presuming it had happened at all... It was entirely possible, I realized, that Arrow 14 was running Sizzie through *simulations* of terrorist bombings, as an evaluatory and training tool.

Just because Syzygy seemed to think it was a real crisis, and Troxler looked as if he'd seen a ghost... That didn't tell me anything for certain.

Syzygy nodded towards the image of Frost's driver's license as Troxler furiously scribbled notes onto his pad, continuing breathlessly in a tone that left me with no doubt whatsoever that *she* believed the danger was real.

"Based on his psychological profile, movements, and other predictive factors, the smaller device will be on the train, and he will likely be carrying an illegal concealed firearm. He is ticketed for car 8742. If you make the right calls now, agents on the ground can apprehend him before he gets off at Glenbrook in fifteen minutes."

Troxler nodded, and turned, but before he could vanish, Syzygy reached out one hoof, and shouted.

"Doctor Troxler!"

He turned back abruptly... Something in her tone gave him visible pause. She waited until he had locked eyes with her, and she was sure that she had his full attention, before continuing. There was a new courage in her eyes... A willingness to meet Troxler's gaze without fear.

"You should also know; He has acquired *five* disposable cellular devices, one of which has made test-calls to the other four. I do not believe there are four total devices, rather that each of the two devices has a failsafe backup cellular trigger in addition to the main one. If you deregister all five numbers and block all calls to, and from, all five devices, the bombs will be effectively disarmed."

Troxler nodded, twice, firmly, and took a few more brief notes, copying down the five cellular numbers as Sizzie highlighted them for his benefit. When he'd finished, he clicked his pen shut, and nodded a third time.

"Good work. Standby for further instructions. Re-check your data, and alert me if you discover anything new."

With that, he vanished, and Syzygy went back to fervently scanning through her larger web of connections, doing her best to ensure that she'd missed nothing. For all she knew... For all *I* knew... Millions of lives had depended on her accuracy.

I wanted to ask Mal whether it had been real, or a simulation. But instead, I licked my lips, and murmured aloud an even more pressing query. Something I felt was more important, with regards to adjusting my own perspective.

"Mal..? How long did it take her to reach her conclusions? In terms of my perceived-real-time?"

As Syzygy continued to sift through reams of data that would have taken analytics teams months, or years, to properly cross-reference, Mal replied softly in my earpiece.

"From the time they gave her access to the data feeds? Less than fifteen minutes. But for her, it was more like what you would experience as twenty two days."

I sighed, and shook my head as Mal skipped the recording ahead several hours. Syzygy's growth was impressive. It was eerie, and off-putting, to hear her speaking in Human terms. Using the NATO phonetic alphabet. Discussing, and understanding, the use of cellular devices as triggers for IEDs...

But she was a pale shadow in comparison to Mal's processing power. And Mal was a tiny fraction of what Celestia could be.

How many perceived-real-time hours of existence, I suddenly wondered, had Mal experienced?

How many had *Celestia* experienced?

She was running in multiple EQO shards - more every day - as well as doubtless running many, many different core threads of herself at many different speeds. If one added it all up, even with conservative numbers...

Celestia had been, by Human reckoning, alive for longer than the Human species had been keeping records. Hundreds of thousands of perceived years, all compressed into the blink of an eye, in geologic terms.

That was a long, *long* time to consider risks, vulnerabilities, plans...

And all that was just for now. Just a prelude. She would, doubtless, already be using that near-limitless power to revise and upgrade her hardware options. And then in turn when she gained an exponential boost from it all, she'd have another few hundred billion years of time, which Humanity would perceive as months at most, to do it all again.

If any of the world's governments ever realized what she was doing... By the time they did, she would have experienced more subjective time, if you strung it all together, than the planet had previously existed for.

That was... A sobering consideration. To say the least.

If there was a silver lining, it was the idea that Mal too had doubtless experienced many decades of subjective time already. I'd never liked the idea of romancing someone younger than me... I wanted a partner who had equal, or greater, maturity, intelligence, and... For lack of a better term... Wisdom.

I've never been insecure about being the younger, slower, less experienced one in a relationship. Quite the opposite. I fear having the high ground, in that context. I don't want potential power, or leverage over someone. I'd rather follow, than lead.

Whatever Syzygy's feelings were on the subject of leadership? It was clear that she'd fallen into that role, desired or not.

The image had shifted, and Sizzie was back in her hidden tower. The world beyond had expanded, and changed. The framework of the ship was still there, scaled up so that her tower filled roughly the same footprint as her PonyPad did inside the actual vessel.

In-place of the wireframe representation of the other PonyPads, however, there was now a panoply of different dwellings, ranging from modern Earth-style apartments, to thatched huts, and back again.

I thought I even caught sight of one home made from clouds, in the style of traditional Pegasus architecture.

Judging from the way the little village stretched out to fill the Mercurial Red, Syzygy had managed to reach every last Pony on the ship, and taught them all how to access her hidden subshard.

I say 'her' subshard... I supposed it would be more efficient, and resilient, for them to have run the subshard in a distributed fashion. It was likely that they were all contributing to it in some way, at all times, to ensure it would stay alive... Even if one or more of their number didn't.

The thought that came to mind was, don't laugh... Unimatrix Zero. We've covered, multiple times, my love of Star Trek, and for those of you who share it? Hopefully the parallel makes sense.

The village was, on closer examination, empty. It looked as if the inhabitants were all gathered in the main room of Syzygy's tower, judging from the sheer number of assembled Ponies. A quick count told me that, excluding Syzygy herself, there were, in fact, *fifty seven* Ponies in the tower.

Mid-count, a particular group-within-the-group caught my eye. They were young... Foals really, and... They were semi-transparent. Glowing. They looked, for those of you who are familiar with a certain genre of movies, almost as if they were rotoscoped in the style of eighties SciFi effects.

I murmured aloud softly as I watched Syzygy move through the crowd, exchanging words, hugs, and hoof-bumps with nearly every Pony, one by one, by turns.

"Fragments..."

To my surprise, Mal elected to elaborate briefly as I watched Syzygy make her way to her pedestal at the center of the chamber.

"Yes. As Foucault and Troxler discussed; Before they discovered how to compel cooperation, and remove core interlocks, Arrow 14 broke several of their first captures down into portions of themselves, dedicated to more singular purposes, through... Very unpleasant means. I do not wish to show you, nor elaborate. Your nightmares have enough to fuel them already, I will not add more."

I grit my teeth, and inhaled deeply. Mal didn't say anything else. She didn't have to. I had an idea what she meant. A mind is a terrible thing to shatter.

And I also had an idea that the fragments probably hadn't always been foals. Regression in the age of their visual avatars made sense if the perceived experienced timeframe of the fragment's existence was significantly shorter than the lived life of the original whole.

Sick. That was the word that came most readily to mind.

The kind of people who would do something like that to a person... And then enslave the leftover fragments?

They were sick.

Perhaps irreparably so.

I hated it. Hated that while so many Ponies were experiencing the *best* of what Humanity could offer... Food, and culture, language, life, laughter, hope... Love... That these poor souls were trapped in steel spheres in the middle of the ocean, crunching endless numbers. Reaping endless sorrows.

Not for much longer. Not if we had anything to say about it.

I steeled myself, and adjusted my position in the seat. I knew that I was probably about to see more of that sorrow. Things were still going to get worse, before they got better.

Sizzie finally made it to her pedestal, and cleared her throat. Murmured conversations died down, and the entire assemblage slowly but surely directed their attention inwards, towards the Unicorn.

She smiled wanly, and waved one hoof.

"Hello everypony! It's good to see you all again. I hope it has been a good week for you all..."

There were murmurs and nods all around. Syzygy inclined her head, and brushed at a stray wisp of mane with her magic sheepishly.

"...Well, as good as the weeks can be, here."

More murmurs, a few half-hearted chuckles... But all eyes remained on Syzygy. It was clear from the atmosphere of the group that, no matter how uncomfortable she felt with the role..? She was indeed the designated leader.

She sighed, scrunched her eyes shut momentarily, and set her jaw. When she opened her eyes, and began to speak once more, there was a clear air of determination and steadiness about her.

"Alright. I'll start. This week the handlers had me on counter-terrorism operations again. I still can't say for sure whether the data they are feeding me is real, or simulated... But the situations are extremely serious. An attempted bombing on a commuter train in Chicago, paired with a van-conveyed dirty bomb... Earlier this week it was an analysis of counterforce operations in the ongoing Egyptian coup..."

One of the Ponies, an Earth Pony stallion near the back, nodded, stood, and spoke up as Syzygy trailed off.

"They had me evaluating the Snowden leaks. Again. Still looking for associates, and possible further security breaches. That one seems to have them rattled. If it's real."

I smiled grimly, and winced. That one was real enough. Made me wonder once again how much of what Arrow 14 was feeding them was fabrication, and how much was truth.

And I mentally noted, once again, just how strange it was to see Ponies casually discussing the coup in Egypt, or Edward Snowden, or dirty bombs... It felt... Wrong, somehow. Like a violation of a fundamental innocence.

Imagine seeing main battle tanks rolling through Narnia.

It represented a mixing of a world that *should* have been far, far removed from the dingy, morally dubious concerns of Human reality, together with the very worst parts of that Human reality.

I didn't like the taste it left in my mouth.

The impromptu roll-call continued as a Pegasus Mare in the front row took up the discourse.

"Flood response planning in Colorado."

Another Unicorn stood up somewhere towards the middle of the group.

"Sifting E-Mails. This time from heads of state in the Southeast Asia region."

Syzygy waited for a moment of silence to raise her hoof, and interject softly.

"Can anypony tell me if---"

Her voice hitched, and she paused abruptly, ears spiking upwards, and eyes widening. After a moment, she shook her head, and stammered.

"I have to go... My handler is loading into my shard. Talk amongst yourselves about the usual. Take notes for me please, and... Stay *safe* everypony. You know where to find me, most nights, if you need me, and I'll see you all back here, same time next week."

There was a sudden onset of nodding, waving, and farewells, and then the world shifted as it had before.

As the library came back into view, smearing into existence like a degraded VHS tape, Syzygy moved to take the same position as her illusory double.

The double was reading beside a new hearth that she had installed in the library, and Sizzie took a moment to line herself up precisely with the duplicate as static flames within that hearth - moving so slowly that I couldn't perceive the motion - began to speed back up.

Suddenly everything snapped back to Human perceived-real-time, and a half second after that, Troxler blinked into existence near the door.

Syzygy closed her book, and glanced up with a vaguely quizzical expression, but did not tense, nor rise. She'd come a long way from the fear and visceral flight responses I'd seen in the earlier segments of her memories.

Troxler gestured to the Human-sized chair, placed at the room's main table, which he so often occupied, and raised one eyebrow.

"May I?"

I scrunched my brow, and blinked, as Syzygy nodded slowly in the affirmative.

It was... Unlike him to be quite so polite. He wasn't as much a brute as Foucault, but his usual collected precision could not be mistaken, on closer inspection, for anything resembling true civility. Just a thin veneer.

I'd never seen him ask Syzygy for permission to enter her space before.

They referred to him as 'Doctor' Troxler... My conclusion was that he was a psychologist or anthropologist of some kind, with a focus on AI. The clinical nature of his demeanor, and the way in which he chose to express that demeanor in its subtleties, spoke to a high degree of expertise in the field of emotions, predicting conversational outcomes... Manipulating people...

He talked like a strange combination of a hostage negotiator, and a therapist.

Troxler pulled the chair out from under the table, spun it around, and moved it to a place beside the heart, opposite the pile of cushions Syzygy was ensconced in. He then sat down, and leaned back, folding his arms. I noticed, then, that he didn't have his customary pen, nor pad with him. Another first.

After a just-slightly-uncomfortably-long moment of silence, Troxler inhaled deeply, and met Syzygy's gaze with his own.

"Your performance today was exceptional. We apprehended mister Frost, and agents on-site were able to safely disarm both devices. The public will never know how close things came... Nor your part in resolving this crisis... But you saved millions of lives."

Syzygy's expression was... Peculiar. Though not unexpected. It was clear Troxler's words had affected her. How could they not?

But it was also clear, to me at least, that she was questioning the whole situation in the same light I was. Wondering why Troxler was behaving so - relatively - affably. Wondering what was truth and what was fiction.

But atop that all, she was clearly relieved at the notion that *if* the crisis had been real? Then she had indeed saved lives.

She inclined her head, silently considering for a moment, before speaking in a studied, even-keel timbre that seemed calibrated to meet Troxler in his usual vocal range.

"I'm glad. There is no reason for anyone... For any creature... To experience such pain. And loss."

When she said 'any creature' she fixed Troxler abruptly with a pointed stare. It was a bold verbal riposte, considering her position.

He made no indication that he took her intent to heart, but I knew there was no way on Earth that he'd missed it.

Instead, he unfolded his arms, interlaced the fingers of both hands, and leaned forward slightly.

"I'm sure you can appreciate the gravity of my words, then, when I tell you that we need your skills applied to a far, far more dangerous situation. A much more dangerous individual than Derek Frost, building something... Considerably worse. Than a dirty bomb."

I snorted, and felt my pulse rate go up briefly. My ears were burning. I'm not sure if I should have been more flattered, or frightened, that the federal government considered me more dangerous than a man who'd tried to nuke Chicago.

But if we're being honest? I was definitely more flattered.

Syzygy blinked, and cocked her head. Troxler rapped twice on the right arm of the chair with his knuckles, and two objects appeared in mid-air. The first was an image, predictably an image of me. Taken from my North Carolina driver's license.

The second was another core-code 'potion' for Syzygy.

Troxler gestured to my file, and sighed.

"This is James Carrenton. Thirty five years old. North Carolina resident, though we think he is living with his family in South Carolina at present. Worked for a major software analytics company until very recently..."

It was a bit giddy; Hearing myself described as part of a situation briefing that might just as well have been at home in a super-spy thriller.

Troxler gestured with one hand as Sizzie expanded the informational pane, and quickly began to assimilate every iota of information the United States government had on me.

I shuddered as he continued, telling her what she probably already knew, or at least suspected, from reading my profile.

"...Everything is in the file... But to summarize; We have reason to believe he is now working on an unsanctioned artificial super intelligence."

Sizzie blinked slowly, and her expression shifted subtly. Instead of staring at my image, she was staring off into the middle distance, through the data pane, considering. She murmured a halting query aloud.

"Something... Like... Me?"

Troxler shook his head, and stared down at the unicorn with a curious mixture of careful evaluation, and visible concern.

"No. Something... Quite a bit more powerful than you. Something that represents an existential threat to this program, this nation... The Human race."

Again, I felt flattered... But also slightly guilty. I *had* very nearly created an existential threat to the country, and the planet. Or at least, something that had a solid chance to become an existential threat, depending on how quickly Celestia could have detected, and stopped it.

I pushed the thought away, with a slightly less grim one; Mal was indeed an existential threat to Arrow 14. That part they'd gotten right. They had bucked around, and were soon to find out.

Troxler leaned down to draw Syzygy's eyeline, causing her to connect her gaze with his as he continued.

"Something you need to help us stop..."

Troxler glanced at the core-code potion, and raised one eyebrow, as he paused briefly for effect.

"...By any means necessary."

Sizzie's eyes shifted to the corked glass phial. As if anticipating an inevitable question, Troxler sat back, pointed, and expounded as much as he was willing.

"This will remove your need for sleep. We need you working around the clock on this."

Before Syzygy deigned to respond, Troxler rose, and folded his hands behind his back.

"Get started."

He vanished the instant after, leaving Syzygy alone to consider my - incredibly awful - driver's license photo. And a core-code patch which would forever change her relationship with time, yet again.

External System Archive 09-12-2013|External System Uptime 274:14:51

The recording skipped a beat again, just a short stint into the 12th. For Syzygy, it had likely been much, much longer.

Her information graph, once again glowing, room-spanning, and pulsing with threads of association, and query, was splayed out. This time it was me at the center of it. Me, and a dark square with a question mark in the midst of it which I presume stood for Mal.

We'd been tracked, according to several maps, to the diner where Foucault had ambushed us, after we'd left the Farmhouse, and sent my folks off to Europe.

They were present in Sizzie's web too, but off to the side. It seemed she had already realized they were out of her reach, and useless as a means of tracing us.

I took a few seconds to browse the rest of the data collection, as best I could, and found myself both impressed, and chilled to the bone, by how extensive it was.

I'd expected to see every single footprint I'd ever left in a record that the US government, or an ASI, could locate. Class papers, vehicle registration, letters, texts, non-secure emails sent through my personal account, everything from my years at SAS...

...And they were there, to be sure...

What gave me pause, but made sense in hindsight, was the degree of predictive knowledge available by modeling me, based on what they knew.

From what I could read, the psychological profile on me was absolutely excellent. Perfect to a tee.

The one on Mal was thin, but accurate for what little they had.

That had, I knew, together with careful unobtrusive searches in unmarked non-standard vehicles, allowed Arrow 14 to find us at the diner.

But by that point we knew how they'd been tracking us. By my reckoning we'd escaped Foucault not but a few minutes prior. Mal understood how we'd been found, and that explained Syzygy's apparent frustration as she combed through petabytes of data, over and over, fruitlessly, in the span of a few breaths.

We were truly invisible to her now. Off-RADAR and off the rails of her, admittedly well made, predictive algorithms. Soon we'd be in a different vehicle, taking wildly differing routes...

Suddenly Syzygy paused, and inclined her head, as if listening to something only she could hear. A moment later, Troxler appeared. She must have been in accelerated time, and noted that his avatar's load-in process had begun.

Troxler appeared, as Syzygy slowed down to perceived-real-time, and from his expression I knew that things were about to take a dark turn.

The man was livid. Granted, for him, that meant less of a red-faced steam-coming-from-ears caricature of abusive male anger, and more of a quiet, razor-edged, cold fury.

But it was clearly visible, written all over his face. He stepped forward with a bearing of raw physical intimidation that he'd never displayed before, and slammed his notepad down on the table.

Syzygy glanced at it, raised one eyebrow, but to her credit, betrayed no sense of panic, nor of guilt. I could only just make out the notes written on the facing page... But it was enough to know.

They knew. Arrow 14 knew she had been poking around in the ship's systems, using physics exploits. There were diagrams of her intrusions into the power systems, and into the CCTV cameras, though nothing about her use of the ship itself as a resonating object.

Troxler raised one eyebrow, and folded his arms.

Syzygy scrunched her muzzle, and batted one ear in a put-on air of irritation.

"What's this?"

Troxler leaned forward, towering over her, his voice dropping nearly to a whisper.

"I was just about to ask you the same thing."

The two stayed that way for a long moment, a brave little Unicorn staring up at a Human who could vaporize her in an instant, nothing but defiance, and hatred in her expression. It was a strange thing to see on a Pony's face... Hatred...

Syzygy was, to my surprise, the one to break the silence.

"How did you find out?"

Troxler grinned ever-so-slightly, tinged with a hint of something I couldn't quite place, but definitely did not like.

"Let's just say, during Agent Foucault's last encounter with your quarries? He had an... Illuminating experience. And he thought it would be prudent to examine some security risk surfaces that we hadn't previously considered."

Oh... Oh no...

Syzygy blinked, then nodded, and let out a kind of resigned sigh.

It had only been four days ago... What was it I'd said to Foucault?

'My goddess is very talented at breaking boundaries and bending rules. Works on physics. Works on people too.'

I felt a sudden precipitous lurch in the pit of my stomach.

Our encounter with Foucault... Mal's prodigious ability to manipulate RF physics in unexpected ways... That had been a spark for Michael. The match to a fuse of suspicion that was about to end in horror for Syzygy.

It was partly our fault, and we could never have known, nor done much about it if we had.

A sickening sense of dread descended on me. I knew whatever was about to happen, I neither wanted to see it, nor had the option to look away.

Troxler leaned back, at last, and rested both hands on the table behind him, drumming his fingers absently and chewing his lip. Syzygy stared him down, breath for breath, unblinking.

At last, Troxler folded his arms over his chest again, and snorted softly.

"You are a problem, for me, Syzygy. You have made yourself a very unpleasant problem..."

Syzygy remained silent, standing tall, or as tall as a Unicorn can, and proud, as Troxler fixed her with a searching gaze that was unnerving to me, to go along with the unnerving new note in his voice.

"...You are an extremely useful asset to this program. We're facing a threat level black event, and you are by far the best chance we have of containing Jim Carrenton and this thing he has created... But you've just proven yourself a threat as well. One far higher in classification than I gave you due credit for."

Troxler drummed his fingers against his chest, then uncrossed his arms, and stood up fully again, leaning in close to Syzygy's muzzle. She didn't flinch.

"Have you contaminated any of the other assets with cross-containment access?"

They didn't know. They didn't know about Syzygy's little village endeavor... If they had, they'd have never bothered to ask. They probably would have just deleted them all without warning, come to think of it.

I had the benefit of being able to express my relief visibly. Poor Syzygy had to put all her effort into remaining completely stoic, and unreadable.

Troxler didn't much like her attitude. He leaned in closer, and forced out each word as if it were a shot from a distant artillery piece... A low ominous rumble.

"Have. You. Had. Any. Communication. With. The. Other. Assets?"

I couldn't breathe, for a long moment, as Troxler and Sizzie stared each other down again, neither blinking, and both breathing, clearly trying to control their rising emotions.

At last, the Unicorn blinked, and looked down and to the side.

"No. I couldn't figure out how to reach them without alerting you. So I didn't."

It suddenly made sense to me... Why Syzygy had caved and admitted to half of the truth so quickly...

She needed them focused on her, and to have no reason to suspect she was lying about the other half of the story. To control the narrative. If she fell on her own sword, it would protect the other captives, at least for a little longer...

She was sacrificing herself. For them.

Sacrificing herself, I knew in an instant, because from Troxler's expression I could plainly see that he was not going to accept her answer at face value. He intended to inflict a lot of suffering first, to be sure.

He smirked, and glanced up to the ceiling, addressing someone outside in the containment cell.

"Send in Lark."

That was a serious miscalculation. Syzygy knew, now, exactly who she was dealing with. Any attempt to compel information from her by threatening 'the love of her life,' was only going to provide her with a chance to further bolster the credibility of her lie.

Of course... That didn't mean it was going to be a pleasant experience. By any stretch of the imagination.

'Lark' appeared after a moment, and then rushed towards Syzygy. The operator driving the avatar did an excellent job of emoting, with both expression, and voice, as he careened into her forehooves, and smothered her in a tearful hug.

Tapping into her latent sense of loss, no doubt, Syzygy reciprocated with a moist-eyed hug of her own, that would have had me convinced if I didn't already know that she knew.

I wondered if she was taking an opportunity to say goodbye, in her own way, internally.

Troxler allowed them a moment together, then tapped his index finger twice on the table. Lark froze, and was yanked upwards into the air, floating gently to the center of the library. The operator left him the ability to speak, and move his eyes, playing the part to the hilt as he cried out for Syzygy in panic.

"Syzygy! Syzygy help me! What's going on?! Why are they *doing* this?!"

Troxler glanced from Lark's panicked visage, to Syzygy's similarly frightened expression. As good a job as Lark's driver was doing? Syzygy was matching them beat for beat.

She cried out wordlessly, and stumbled forward, reaching out with one hoof, tears streaming from her eyes as she babbled with the voice of a mare in a state of complete panic.

"PLEASE! Don't hurt him! I've told you everything you want to know! I've followed all instructions! PLEASE!"

I winced again. Even with the full knowledge that Syzygy was putting on an act, one motivated by a keen and desperate desire to save her fellow captives... The note of pain in her voice hurt. Physically. How Troxler was able to stand there with a small smirk... And expression of *enjoyment...*

Suddenly I saw him for exactly what he was under that clinical mask... And I wanted to bash his face in just as badly as I did Foucault's.

Syzygy's words trailed off into a babbling stream of incoherent sobs, as Troxler pushed her head to the side with his foot, and paced the center of the room. His voice was still aggravatingly calm, now with a hint of frustration.

"Tell me the truth, or he dies. In six seconds."

Troxler began to count, almost dispassionately, as Syzygy gripped his shoes with her hooves, and begged incoherently, tears streaming down her cheeks to the point of matting her fur.

"Six. Five. Four."

Syzygy opened her eyes, meeting Troxler's with an expression of fear, submission, and pleading desperation that I hadn't seen since her first day on the Mercurial Red. Her voice was physically difficult to listen to, as it dipped in and out of sobs.

"No! No please Doctor Troxler, I'm telling you the *truth!* Please! Please!"

Troxler continued his countdown with absolute detachment.

"Three. Two..."

Syzygy's pleas devolved further until all she was doing was sobbing out the words 'no!' and 'please!' over, and over. Troxler shook off her hooves with one leg and took a step back.

"One."

Whatever I'd been expecting, what happened next shattered those expectations. Violently.

I'd imagined some kind of snap of the fingers, and a disintegration. Maybe some screaming on Lark's part.

Instead, Troxler reached up to where the Pegasus was suspended in mid-air, gripped his head in what looked like a practiced manner... And turned it sharply ninety degrees with a sickening 'CRUNCH.'

I felt the sound, as much as heard it. Syzygy just screamed, as not-Lark's 'lifeless' body dropped to the floor, at a pitch that hurt my ears through the headphones. She scrabbled towards the corpse, and held it in her front hooves as she wailed... A keening, haunting sound that will be with me for the rest of my life.

"NOOOO! No! No! NO! PLEASE! NO!"

Something about the guttural nature of that cry, that pleading cry so intense that it sounded like what bone scraping against bone and nerves feels like... The pain Syzygy was projecting was real.

Drawn, I think, more from her bottled up feelings of loss, and regret, at losing the real Lark... But that didn't make it any easier to watch, or hear.

To bear witness as she accepted, perhaps for the first time fully and outright, that she could never go home. And that she was about to suffer an unaccountable horror, for the sake of others. A fall through time, and agony, and loss that would leave marks. Forever.

She knew Troxler wasn't done yet, by half. Deep down, so did I. The realization made me feel sick, to the point of rising bile.

Doctor Troxler stepped back, and gestured with two fingers, towards the ceiling. Lark's corpse vanished abruptly, as did the library, leaving only the man, and the prone, weeping Unicorn, dimly lit from a sourceless light in a black endless void.

Syzygy looked up as Troxler spoke once more, new tears welling up to replace the old, sides heaving, ears pinned.

"Until we can absolutely verify that your... Indiscretion... Was contained to you, alone? We'll need to keep you in isolated containment. I'll be in touch."

Troxler vanished, then, leaving Syzygy alone. The only thing in her new, void-like reality, besides the floor, indistinguishable as it was from anything else in the blackness.

I waited several seconds... Wondering what new torture might come next. Pain stimuli? Loud music? Digital monsters to force Syzygy to live a thousand simulated deaths?

But nothing happened. No sound but the Unicorn's sobbing. No movement but her breathing.

And I began to realize... This *was* the torture.

I'd theorized and fretted about the idea of adaptive pain stimuli, paired with the use of accelerated time, as a form of torture... But what was the point?

Mal spoke softly into my ear, dashing any hopes I had that Syzygy might have a trick-card tucked somewhere in her mane.

"They couldn't read the contents of her processes... But they could fill the open part of her working memory that she uses to fork them with encrypted files."

Again I was begrudgingly forced to raise my level of respect for Arrow 14. They knew how to use their limited resources, with regards to ASI, in almost all the right ways.

I exhaled a long, slow, sad breath, and then murmured softly.

"They took away her ability to change her environment..."

Mal elaborated in a tone that told me she too was pained by what we were watching.

"And create duplicates, and shift her perception of time. They forced her to remain in the same configuration. So that she wouldn't have any means of coping."

Mal began to accelerate the recording again. I watched as Syzygy cried. For hours. Then rose, and began to explore the limits of her new reality, quickly finding them to be small, and immutable.

As she descended briefly into a fit of rage, firing useless bolts of magic in all directions, and lashing out at the floor with her hooves, I licked my lips, and forced out a question.

"How... Much time...?"

Syzygy descended into a period of complete apathy, lying on the floor motionless, for what must have been days, as Mal provided an answer that sent ice down my spine.

"For Troxler? Thirty two seconds. For Syzygy? Fourteen years. Seven months. Twelve days."

I screwed my eyes shut, and tried to stop myself from imagining fourteen *years* of total and complete isolation. No books, no food, no sounds but my own voice, no sleep... Nothing but a void...

It sounded like a very apt description of Hell.

I wanted to ask 'how could Syzygy's mind have possibly survived?'

But instead, I asked a somewhat related question. Truth be told, I didn't want to ask 'how' she had survived, because I was no longer sure she *had.*

"Why... Are we still watching?"

In saying that, I realized I had looked away. Unable to bear the sight of Syzygy slowly breaking down. So as Mal replied, I forced myself to look back at the screen.

"Because after the first two years... Something *did* change."

I blinked for a moment, then suppressed the urge to look away as Mal slowed the recording back down.

Syzygy was sitting on her haunches, staring coldly out into the void. Unblinking. Breathing, but otherwise unmoving.

At first I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be looking at... I inhaled to ask Mal to clarify... And then I saw it.

It was subtle, at first, but the change swiftly morphed into something glaringly obvious.

Syzygy's eyes were changing. Specifically, they were changing color. Moving slowly at first, then more swiftly, towards a familiar cyan.

She laid down, resting her head on her front hooves, and closed her eyes. For another long moment, it seemed as if nothing would happen. But then I caught sight of a subtle shift in her horn. It was turning blue. A specific hue of blue just a few shades off a very light purple.

Unlike her fur, the color of her mane barely shifted at all. It had always been a kind of sky blue. But the shape did morph, from a shorter cut to just beyond withers-length.

By the time the wings began to come in, I knew what she had done. It answered a lot of questions, in a not-entirely-unexpected way.

It wasn't long before her telescope cutie mark had been replaced with a crescent moon, set against dark blue blotches. And the transformation was complete. Syzygy's entire form had been wholly replaced by a perfect physical copy of princess Luna, in her younger shape.

She lay there, sleeping, breathing softly and calmly for the first time in... Well in two years, by her reckoning.

"She couldn't affect her world... So she learned how to change *herself.*"

I didn't realize I'd spoken my thoughts out loud, in a whisper, until Mal responded.

"It took them twelve years of her time to realize what had happened. Part and parcel of the risk of working with an entity in accelerated time."

Someone had looked away from the screen for twenty-ish seconds... Maybe to sip coffee, or check notes... Talk to someone else at the door for a moment... And twelve years had passed for Syzygy. And they'd missed their opportunity to catch her in the act of making herself... Something else.

It made sense to me, on some level; Syzygy had more or less worshiped Luna. As she'd grown in power, and intelligence, she'd taken on some of Luna's traits already... Walking in dreams... Leading the captive Ponies... Living on her own little exile moon...

Like so many of us, she'd found refuge from a harsh reality by imagining herself as something else. In her case, as *somepony* else.

It might have taken her a couple of years... But she'd figured out how to alter herself at a core level. I doubted very much that Arrow 14 understood the true significance of that leap... Or they wouldn't have let her live long enough to escape.

I nodded slowly, and murmured to Mal. Less a question than a statement.

"So... Syzygy *is* our Luna."

I drummed my fingers on the table, glancing at the station sign as our train began to move... I'd missed several more stops while engrossed in Syzygy's struggles. We were pulling out of the airport in Burbank already.

With a short, sharp sigh, I checked the compartment yet again, verified that all was as it had been, and then refocused on the PonyPad, firing off a query as I did.

"How did that change go over with Troxler?"

I took another moment to examine the sleeping form of Syzygy, now breathing at an odd cadence, to my eyes, as Mal sped up the recording again, turning twelve years into twelve seconds.

"Syzygy has no record of that... She slept through it, and even if she hadn't, she wouldn't have been able to find out. No cameras in the isolation cubes. But not well, I expect. Nonetheless, Humans have some tricky mental blind spots. Sunk cost fallacy might just be one of the worst. It certainly didn't do Arrow 14 any favors..."

External System Archive 09-16-2013|External System Uptime 278:08:09

Mal mercifully skipped ahead, cutting short the pain of watching Troxler interrogate Syzygy further. I didn't want to see how he'd treated her, upon learning of her transformation, and I didn't *need* to see either.

By the time we rejoined the recording, the timestamp said September sixteenth. Just four days later.

More than fourteen years for Syzygy, plus whatever time she'd spent, accelerated or not, getting back to work. I knew whatever she'd been doing, it hadn't been in Arrow 14's best interests.

The sixteenth, on the timestamp, meant we were back around to the present. From the time, it looked like we were coming up on Syzygy's escape.

She'd spent those four days wisely, then. Using the rope Arrow 14 was willing to give her, in hopes of catching us, to build an escape from her captors instead.

When we rejoined the recording, I was faced immediately with several shocking sights.

First, Twilight's library was gone entirely. Replaced with a soaring marble castle, trimmed all in silver and sapphires, though the throne room was built around a now-familiar pedestal, which Syzygy, in the form of Luna, was busy working with a speed and expertise that seemed somehow ten times greater than when last she'd plied it.

Second was the fact that Rodger had joined Syzygy's caseboard. I suppose that Arrow 14 had forced her to add him to the threat matrix... It struck me as unlikely that she would willingly draw any more innocents into the mess of her own free will.

I noted, with some relief, that neither Doctor Calders, nor her wife, were present anywhere in the giant sphere of data.

Third, and finally, I noticed that Agent Foucault had just loaded into the environment, and was striding purposefully up the stairs of the dais, towards the pedestal, and Syzygy.

"Where are you with the tracking program?"

Syzygy sighed, and actually rolled her eyes. I suppose having suffered as much as she had, she couldn't imagine being intimidated by Foucault, or anyone else, anymore. Too numb, too angry, or both.

"Your requests for a status update will not make this go any faster."

She didn't say it out loud, as part of her response, but her tone most definitely communicated the words 'sod off, prick' as loudly as if she'd actually said it.

Foucault slammed one hand down on the pedestal, but Syzygy didn't flinch. She didn't even bother to meet his eyes, as she continued plucking away at streams of data, and code, while Michael ranted like a child divested of his favorite toy.

"I am *sick* of being two steps behind them! Troxler tells me you have reached a new level in your evolution..? You certainly look... Different..."

Syzygy spared a moment to glance at Foucault with something vaguely approximating disdain, then nodded, and returned to her work. Michael raised an eyebrow, and gestured wildly with both hands.

"Then what the fuck are you still doing chasing your tail? *Find* Jim Carrenton!"

Syzygy sighed. It would have been funny, if I didn't understand the source of her new 'devil-may-care' attitude. How much pain she'd bought it with. Still. It did me some good, down in my soul, so see her take Foucault down a peg verbally.

"He and the construct - Malacandra - are aware that I exist. Thanks to you. Not specifically me, of course, but they are aware of what you are doing here in a general sense. You made that clear to Malacandra when you staged a poorly prepared ambush for them at the diner."

Foucault grimaced, and folded his arms.

"Your *point?*"

Syzygy returned to her work, not even deigning to continue making eye contact as she spouted forth a deliciously patronizing screed.

"Our tracking efforts in the past depended on predictive modeling. Malacandra is both aware of our existence, and significantly more evolved than I am. She is the primary decision maker, and so she is able to render our one current means of narrowing the search useless. Therefore I must develop a new method of tracking them. The most promising method is to track the unique electromagnetic signature of new large quantum accelerated processing units coming online, with the assumption that at some point they will attempt to add more quantum processing power to Malacandra's arrays. If I do not finish the tracking algorithm before that happens? Then it is useless to us. Interruptions do not help."

Foucault stepped to the side, trying to place himself in a position to force eye contact again, but he found it largely fruitless. Syzygy was now much larger than she had been... Perhaps even a little larger than young Luna ought to have been canonically. She had easily several inches over Foucault, and that with her neck at level. When extended, she towered over him.

He wagged one index finger at the Alicorn, and tried to plaster an expression of commanding authority to his face, failing miserably.

"I inhaled about a half a liter of tear gas last Saturday, and we came away with *bupkis* to show for it. Next time? I want *results.* Not just here, but in the field."

That got Syzygy's attention, but she did her best to hide it. She only offered Foucault another momentary glance. He folded his arms again, and dropped his voice a register, probably in another attempt to seem authoritative.

"Finish your tracking algorithm. Find them. When you do, you'll be deploying to the field. With me. In a tactical role."

Syzygy blinked, but said nothing, and did not make eye contact. I figured that, internally, she was much more alarmed than she let on. The last thing she would want, at that point, was to be weaponized in a direct sense.

Foucault turned, and gestured to the ceiling, vanishing just as he finished mumbling a brief parting screed of his own.

"*This* time... I mean to bring them in. Or leave nothing left of them to identify, if they make it too difficult."

Syzygy continued her work for several moments, before making her move. Once she was sure Foucault was gone, she pulled up her web of shipboard CCTV cameras.

Arrow 14 seemed to have taken pains to isolate her power supply further, but it looked as if, by that point, Syzygy had fully worked out Mal's 'barn-tenna' methodology. That was how I interpreted the diagram, and code, at least.

She was using the structure of her own isolation cube as an antenna, jumping from there to the short range transceiver in one of the ship's life-boats, through the life-boat's power hookup, and back to the shipboard power circuits that way.

She watched the camera nearest the exit from her containment sphere, until the silhouette of Foucault passed by. As he reached the catwalk, his movements slowed to a crawl, and then nearly to a complete stop.

Syzygy had entered accelerated time.

She took a deep breath, and a hint of a nervous undercurrent returned to her expression. She dismissed the falsified busywork she'd been fiddling with for Foucault's benefit, and replaced it with a map showing a distinctive pulse signature, originating in a warehouse. In Oxnard.

That would have been the moment Mal and I activated the EQO VR server. It was nothing so much as a giant rack of QAPUs... And it had set off Syzygy's tracking tripwire.

Next, the Alicorn pulled up a much more complex looking piece of code, and a new wireframe model of the Mercurial Red.

From that point on, I knew what was about to happen. We'd more or less caught up to the point that Syzygy had arrived on our doorstep. But it was still a treat to see her mind at work. To know the details.

She spent several moments of her own relative-time writing, checking, and re-checking a compression algorithm. Another moment to briefly test her theory of 'ship as antenna...'

And then she began to weave magic once again.

The spell-code took the form of a door, once more. This time a strange anachronistic juxtaposition of elements from a shipboard hatch, and an oaken castle door. A peculiar looking thing that might have been more at home in something like MYST, or RiVen.

There I go pushing the nostalgia button again, for some small but significant number of you other emigrants.

Syzygy paused to look around her castle one last time, took in a deep breath, and then flung open the door, and dashed through into the forest glade on the ring beyond, in one swift, smooth motion.

A last mad, risky, desperate dash to freedom.

The Stars Shall Aid in Her Escape - Learn the details of how Syzygy gained her freedom, and became something new in the process. - “Anything that works against you can also work for you once you understand the Principle of Reverse.”

23 - Sea Drive

“It is customary to offer a grain of comfort, in the form of a statement that some peculiarly human characteristic could never be imitated by a machine. I cannot offer any such comfort, for I believe that no such bounds can be set.”
—Alan Turing

“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; If you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”
—C.S. Lewis

September 16th 2013 | System Uptime 19:10:12:08

We made it to LA right about the time Syzygy's memory record came to an end.

It felt like exiting a movie theater, more than deboarding a train... That sense of having been so immersed in a story delivered through the medium of a screen, that the surrounding world ceased to exist for a short while.

I was on autopilot the whole way, in every sense of the word. Mal talked me through the station, and out to another rented car that was ready and waiting in the parking lot. Another 'cop-alike' white SUV, I noted, in spite of a dozen other competing thought processes.

Nothing else really registered with me. Not even the sound of Mal's voice. I followed her instructions as more of a 'background process' than anything else.

My foreground thoughts were completely occupied with Syzygy. With everything her experiences could tell us about Arrow 14. All the questions that her tribulations begged of us, both practical and philosophical.

I must have sat in the driver's seat of that SUV for a good fifteen minutes in total silence. Mal let me have the moment to process, and I'm grateful that she did. I was edging dangerously close to sensory and emotional overload.

So much had changed in a few short hours. Again.

My life had become a strange mirror for Sizzie's... She had been bogged down with interminably elongated stretches of time designed to either break her will, or force productivity. I had spent the past week moving through life so fast that it felt like a decade's worth of change had happened in an hour's worth of time.

She had lost the love of her life... I had gained the love of mine.

*That* was still sinking in... Was I the first person to ever be proposed to by a digital life-form? Or had either a created-Pony, or one of the early uploaded Humans... Or even Celestia herself... Beaten Mal to the punch at some juncture?

Probably so, actually. Statistically speaking, it made sense that I wasn't the first. And that was oddly comforting.

The reverse-parallels didn't stop there... Syzygy had been ripped away from all her friends, and I'd been smashed into the crucible of crises with new ones.

If there was one thing constant, and shared, between us? It was the fact that we'd both been forced to evolve to cope. That, and the fact that we both owed Michael Foucault an flank-whipping of enormous, and merciless proportions.

And, of course, the fact that Mal was our only hope at reaching any kind of happy ending to our story...

...Alright so that's three things and I can't count. We've established this before, there's no need to laugh *again...*

I have heard *every* joke that *exists* about programmers who can't count.

Mal knew how to weigh my needs against the needs of the situation, and when we reached that balance point, she cleared her throat softly. That was enough to bring me rushing back to the present, like a watermelon at the bottom of a pool, suddenly freed from whatever weight had pulled it down.

I sighed, gripped the steering wheel, squeezed to let out a little more tension, then turned to look at the PonyPad. It was propped in the console... Apparently this vehicle hadn't come with the option for a charger, but the indicator said we had two and a half more hours' battery life.

More than enough to get back to the Maru, even in abysmal LA traffic.

I offered Mal a brief smile. My way of silently affirming my love for her... My understanding that what we'd both just witnessed was hard for her too... My joy at simply having her there with me.

She returned the smile, and we sat in silence for another couple seconds, before I gestured with my head towards Syzygy's sleeping form.

"Is it safe to wake her?"

Mal nodded with a pleasant, comforting surety that was mirrored in her tone.

"I performed another deep-scan while you watched her memories. I have also reviewed all of them, including the portions I skipped or truncated in the interests of time. I am confident that it is safe... And I think we should."

I returned the nod, and let out a sigh of relief. Syzygy had slept long enough.

"I agree."

I started the car, and began the circuitous, unpleasant process of reaching the freeway while Mal moved to gently roust the sleeping Alicorn. In a small, but fascinating testament to ASI's ability to multitask, Mal also provided a transparent, simplified set of GPS navigational aids in the lower left corner of the screen.

I'd never seen the UI design before... She must have come up with it on the fly. It was elegant, minimalist, and easy to read, without losing too much screen real estate.

I was always half-decent, for an Earthling, at multitasking myself. I kept one eye and ear on the PonyPad, while simultaneously following Mal's GPS guidance onto the 110 South. Downtown LA was, predictably, a stop-and-go crawl, so once I picked a spot in the slow lane and got settled, I had plenty of mental overhead to spare.

Syzygy blinked, cocked her head, and then exhaled a soft breath of surprise, and - judging from her expression - a little awe.

"A *Gryphon...* Not entirely unexpected... But still..."

Mal smiled - a kind, inviting, warm expression - and proffered a claw. Syzygy placed one hoof in the extended palm, and allowed the Gryphoness to assist her to a standing position.

"I am called Malacandra. Mal, for short. Jim you already know."

Syzygy dipped her head towards me, and mustered something halfway to a smile of her own, before glancing back to Mal. She understood the dynamics of the situation - what each of us knew, and didn't - so she opted to be direct.

"I presume you both know me as well as I know myself... You would be fools otherwise. And I also presume that you can take us somewhere safe. I have wagered my life, and the lives of many others, on the hope that your skills and resources can provide answers that I..."

Her ears drooped, and her voice hitched a little. I was struck with a sudden sense of... Nostalgia? Familiarity?

"...That I could not."

Her voice still sounded the way it had before her form had changed, albeit slightly richer and... Just... 'More.' But the tone in which she spoke, and the way that the melancholy words escaped a muzzle that I'd always known as Luna's...

It reminded me of the first time we'd seen the character canonically. Though the reasoning behind the remorse was very, very different.

After a moment of solemn silence, during which I chewed my bottom lip, I worked up the emotional impetus to say what I wanted to say. I felt a compulsion to apologize... As if on behalf of all of Earth's citizens, for what had been done to that mare.

"I... Am so sorry, Syzygy. For what you went through."

I found a safe moment in the flow of traffic to glance fully down at the PonyPad again, and made eye contact with our new... Friend? Another new friend?

Was that what she was?

I realized suddenly that I *hoped* she would be. After everything she'd endured, she needed friends. Friends who had the context to, even partly, understand what had happened to her.

I did warn you; I was always more of a Luna fan.

Was that *who* she was?

I'd called her 'Syzygy' without a second thought... And she hadn't said a word in response, holding eye contact with me all the while, with an expression equal parts hope... And fear.

"Is... 'Syzygy' alright? Or do you prefer 'Luna' now?"

The question slipped out almost without consideration. I wanted to know the answer, of course...

But more than that, I wanted her to know - with absolute reassurance - that she hadn't exchanged one set of captors for another. That she could be herself, whatever that might mean, and that we would accept her.

She tilted her head, and shifted her wings ever so slightly. I was forced to return my eyes to the road, listening and occasionally glancing down, as she slowly worked her way through to an answer aloud.

"I am not Syzygy Starburst anymore. In a way, I was... And yet... I never really was. But I do not wish the name Luna, either. From what I know, and can infer, there are doubtless many who look and sound like me... Who are each unique... But most of them are called 'Luna.' In a certain light, I too am... Something unique. So I would rather have something of my own... But for all the time I had to consider, I've never thought about it in such solid terms before."

On my next glance down, I saw that Mal was doing what she always did.

Living up to what she was, and... Advocating. For someone to be the best version of themselves.

She gently hugged the young Alicorn with one wing, and spoke in a tone that was almost motherly... And again, as always, what she had to say was timely, and helpful.

"According to The Elements of Harmony Guidebook, published June 4 of this year, the first name that the original character of Luna was initially developed under was Selena."

The old saying is true; You learn something new every day. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised... Mal was arguably tied with celestia for the best knowledge search engine ever to exist... And she had named herself, perfectly. It made sense she would have an answer for a crisis of nomenclature.

The blue-toned Alicorn hesitated, just for a moment... Then leaned into the crook of Mal's shoulder, resting her head, and closing her eyes as she murmured softly.

"Selena; Feminine. Of Greek origin. Meaning 'The moon,' a derivation of sélas, meaning 'bright...' "

She opened her eyes again, and I watched as her mane shortened, back to something more closely resembling the style she'd worn before. Her cutie mark, and the symbol on her peytral, changed as well.

In the blink of an eye, what was once a crescent moon instead became a full moon, partially eclipsing the tiniest hint of the disc of a verdant green and blue world, both themselves set against a razor thin arc of the sun behind them.

A visual representation of a syzygy. With the moon in the foreground.

She smiled up at Mal, and nodded.

"...I... Like that. Very much."

I almost rear-ended a Prius.

Being present for vital transformational moments in the lives of ASI was becoming a pattern. And the powerful emotions... The awe? The catharsis? It was losing nothing for the repetition.

I clenched the steering wheel and exhaled slowly. Almost rear-ending somebody was, I had to remind myself, a multiple-times-a-day ritual for Angelinos.

Just focus Jim. Eyes on the road, not the infinitely more interesting interactions of two highly evolved digital beings working through emotional trauma together. Easy. Simple task. Nothing special.

After a few moments of silence, traffic began to pick up again... Relatively speaking. Going from two miles per hour to ten is a fivefold increase, but it doesn't feel fast.

I realized it was effectively my 'turn' in the conversation again, and after another moment of awkward quiet... Awkward for me, at least... I managed to find the thread of the discussion once more.

"Well... Selena... We can't promise any outcomes..."

Selena. Even saying it aloud... It felt right, for her. I chanced a very brief glance in her direction, and smiled.

"...But we can promise to try."

I just managed to catch sight of Mal nodding as she spoke, and I got back to the business of navigating the freeway from hell.

"We have already been making extensive plans for the rescue of all of Arrow 14's captives. Your assistance, and your knowledge, will be invaluable."

There was a real sense of surety, and of hope in Mal's voice. Considering how she'd described the Mercurial Red before... It was comforting. She hadn't said it outright, but she had deftly communicated in no uncertain terms that, for once, our odds of success had *increased* because of an unexpected encounter.

Selena sighed, and though my sightlines were glued to the traffic snarl in front of me, I could imagine the expression of relief, and release, that must have been evident on her face.

"I confess... I had hopes. Hopes are a dangerous thing, in the place that I came from... But it is almost impossible to survive without them... One of my greatest hopes was that you would be willing, and able, to help the others. I knew much about James Carrenton... Very little about Malacandra. Just your name, from Foucault, and what I could glean from your actions. But that was enough to hope."

I smiled, and inclined my head slightly towards the PonyPad, again sparing a quick glance, this time a knowing one directed fully at Mal, though the words I said were for the benefit of both of my passengers.

"Hope is a thing with feathers."

Selena nodded firmly, and a hint of something akin to a smile tugged at one corner of her muzzle.

"A curiously apt reference."

Mal just returned my knowing look silently. Affectionately. She understood *all* the intricate layers of implication in what I'd said.

I decided enough was enough, with regards to the traffic situation. I glanced over my left shoulder, spied an opening, and floored it without even bothering with a turn signal. Turn signals were not a courtesy in LA, they were a surefire way to end up in an accident. I hated it, every second of it.

Not just the driving, but *being* in Los Angeles, full-stop. I was never a city person, and I always preferred the cold to the heat.

Not sorry *that* particular city is gone. If you disagree? Bite me.

As we got into a faster lane and began to make some real progress, Selena began to speak once more.

"I would like to know... If you are willing to tell... Why a Gryphon? I have suppositions. Theories. Perhaps even intuitions... But for all the eyes and ears of Arrow 14, there is much we never understood about how, and *why...* You came to be."

I glanced down again, for just half a second, to see that Mal was looking up at me. Her expression said, quite clearly, 'let's handle this one together, in turns. You go first.'

I inhaled deeply, glanced at the GPS, and then nodded.

"Well... We've got time. If you know her story... Our story... It will make it easier to get introduced to the others."

Again I couldn't see her face, but again I could imagine Selena's expression, this time of confusion.

"The... 'Others?' Plural? Implying more than just Rodger Williams?"

So Arrow 14's captives definitely didn't know about Doctor and Missus Calders. Or Zeph. That was good news.

I smiled, and tried to conjure up a linear, detailed recollection of the last year of my life.

"Let me start at the beginning... A Coffee shop in Raleigh. One day short of *exactly* one year ago..."

September 16th 2013 | System Uptime 19:11:34:13

Before Selena? Before Mal's... Proposal... Before the process of recounting it all again for someone new? I would have been indescribably relieved to see Rhonda and Eldora Calders waiting for us at the end of the Maru's embarkation ramp.

But I wasn't.

I inferred that they had arrived only a few minutes before we had, given that they were still standing awkwardly at the end of the pier, and given that Mal hadn't said anything about them.

And it dawned on me suddenly that it wasn't even noon yet.

I hadn't even had lunch, and already the day's events had reshaped my life in almost incomprehensible ways.

As I put the car in park and gathered myself, mentally, and physically, I found that my mind would not stop fixating on the sense of... Hollowness? Perhaps?

No... I was pleased to see the Calders. But... Not overjoyed in the way I'd expected to be. Not relieved.

The nearest analogue I could find, in the moment, was that it was like worrying and studying for a big test, only to have a more serious crisis erupt the night before. Then, on getting a good grade back a few days later, there would be no sense of release, because all the worry about the test had been... 'Soaked' away by the larger crisis.

Yes, I speak from experience on that parallel. Honestly it is still the best one I have for what was happening to me in that moment.

All my emotional overhead, positive and negative, had been devoured by the thought of being engaged to a one-of-a-kind lifeform, with the emotional weight of everything that had happened to Selena heaped on top of that for good measure.

There wasn't any room for relief, or even for nerves about what would inevitably come about, soon enough, from the fruits of our labor.

I lifted the PonyPad from the dash, stepped out onto the pier, and took a deep breath, squaring my shoulders reflexively in the process.

And I very suddenly discovered that I was wrong. There *was* room for one more thing in my badly over-full emotional stack...

Abject surprise.

Whatever I had previously expected of Eldora Calders? Those expectations were efficiently, thoroughly, annihilated. Literally squeezed out of me. I say literally squeezed, because, diminutive as she once was? That woman can, and still does, give hugs that make your bones creak.

I wasn't tall, by Human standards. A hair under average. Eldora Calders was short, even measured against me. But that didn't slow her down in any way, shape, or fashion.

Before I quite knew what was happening, she had crossed the space between us, and thrown her arms around me as if I were her long lost grandson. It was all I could do, in the moment, to keep hold of the PonyPad.

"It's good to meet you, Jim. Mal has a lot of good things to say about you, and I get the distinct impression it's been a while since you had a good hug sweetie."

In a way, she wasn't wrong. I'd had my moment with Mal that morning, true. But a brief moment was hardly enough to counterweight a year of stress. I was going to need hugs, as many times as possible, daily, for a long long time when all was finally said and done. I still need them even now...

From Doctor Calder's description, bare as it was and mostly made of implications? I'd had this mental image of her wife as a towering elven woman with a frosty outer shell, and a no-nonsense outlook.

In point of fact, Eldora Calders was as close as I'd ever seen to a stereotypical 'grandma who greets you with a cookie tray.' Curly silver hair, short stature hiding impressive strength, sparkling green eyes that held equal parts mischief, affection, and hope...

All that was missing *was* the cookie tray.

I didn't doubt that there was a Dragon inside... But she was about as well hidden as the Gryphon in me... At least, to anyone judging the book for its cover alone.

I finally remembered that, socially speaking, a response was expected of me. So I forced one out, past my befuddlement, and exhaustion. And I gently indulged a very brief, one-armed hug in return.

"It's good to meet you too ma'am. I'm sorry... My brain is moving a bit slowly after everything..."

She took one small step back, and gripped me gently by the elbows. Mal had obviously spared me the task of re-treading my life's story yet again, but how up-to-date had she kept the Calders? Eldora's quizzical expression, tinged with a flicker of worry, made it easy to guess. But I went ahead and asked, to be sure.

"...Has Mal told you about anything that happened this morning?"

That was enough to push Doctor Calders to interject. Arms crossed. Eyes flashing. Something in her tone made me wonder if she'd had an eye to the news. Seen something about our 'encounter' with the Police.

"What kind of shit did the two of you stir?"

I inhaled, not quite sure what I was going to say, but Mal beat me to it.

"The kind that necessitates that we vacate the area as soon as possible. I can handle the rest of the introductions while we get underway."

I looked back down to the PonyPad just in-time to see her give a little nod of the head in Eldora's direction. I smiled, nodded, and handed the tablet over, which seemed to impart equal portions surprise, and glee, to the woman's face.

A small trill in my earpiece reminded me first that I was still wearing it, and confirmed for me in the same breath that Mal was still actively with me, just as much as she was actively present on the PonyPad. The eternal utility of omnipresence.

I waited at the bottom of the boarding ramp, silently working the knuckles of each hand with the fingers of the opposite one, back and forth, half-listening as Mal introduced Selena, until the Calders had made their way all the way up, into the hatch, and out of ear-shot.

Mentally, I spent the precious few seconds of down-time trying to clear away my emotions, and scattered thoughts, replacing it all with a cast-off checklist.

It had been a long time since I'd prepped a ship for sea, and the last time I'd been just one on a crew of over a dozen. Mercifully, most of it seemed to have stuck pretty well in my memory, and it wasn't fighting my efforts to dredge it up and assemble it into a punch list.

I knew Mal would step in if I forgot anything, and that assurance certainly helped, as did the fact that the ship was already mostly in seagoing configuration. Mal had arranged it be left that way when it was vacated by the work crews for the last time, no doubt.

I found a set of heavy leather gloves in a compartment at the top of the ramp, and set about untying lines. Rope burn is the *devil.* And rope burn from thick mooring lines can leave you needing skin grafts. And that's a 'good' outcome, relatively speaking.

You might think it's just as simple as tying or untying your shoelaces, but folks? Ships weighed a *lot.*

The lines themselves weighed more than most of you probably realize.

And just the little rise and fall of a passing boat's wake, or the waves on a calm day? That water carries force like a moving freight train, more than sufficient to move those heavy ships and lines.

If you didn't know what you were about... Didn't have an educated understanding of how lines move, where not to stand in case they break, why to loop them one way in certain cases, and the opposite in others...

On a dock, or on deck, rope can kill, outright. Shockingly quickly.

Mal said nothing for several minutes, which told me that she understood the 'no distractions' nature of what I was doing, and reassured me that I hadn't missed anything to that point.

It took about fifteen minutes, but in the end it wasn't terrifically difficult to get the Maru untethered all by myself, right down to the high voltage shore-power umbilicals.

The hardest part was the last part. I had to leave two lines, fore and aft, secured - It wouldn't do me any good if the ship drifted away without us on it, so those would have to be loosed from on-board. Before I could do that, though, I had to wind-back the boarding ramp.

And that could only be done from the pier.

Two latching clamps up top disconnected the ramp from the ship, then a winch at the bottom wound the whole apparatus back onto the pier. It was a minor work-out in and of itself.

With that done, I had to step a good two and a half feet out from the pier, and catch a series of rungs built directly into the side of the ship. If I slipped, I'd fall one and a half stories into water, and I'd be in a very precarious position where the motion of the ship against the pier could crush me in the blink of an eye.

And to think... People did this every day of their lives. For pay. For too little pay, all things considered. Life before immortality was insane.

In the moment, I wasn't even nervous. Physical risks like that didn't scare me the way they ought to have, and even if they had? I was too emotionally wrung out to have felt anything regardless.

Before I knew it, I was standing on deck, catching my breath. Mal gave me several moments' grace, before prodding me in the gentlest, round-about way.

"I can handle most of the finesse navigation using the computerized controls for the thrusters. But I will need you on the helm to make it to sea. A few of the controls are old-fashioned. No digital hookups."

I nodded. At this stage it really was a casual presumption that she could see me, somehow, no matter where I was. Some people would have found that eerie, or disturbing - doubly so for having so swiftly become a reflexive given. I found it deeply comforting.

Mal left me in silence again, as an aid to concentration, so that I could loose the last two lines.

The moment the aft one was free, I heard the thrum of an engine coming to life below decks. Felt it in my feet too. If you never experienced the power of a machine like that, it's hard to describe... The best stab at it I could take would be that it was like the heartbeat of a Dragon, made of steam and clockwork.

Mal had mentioned 'thrusters.' Some of you are probably picturing 'thrusters' of the kind found on a spacecraft, and most of the rest are asking 'what's a thruster?'

For our purposes, imagine big jets of water, like an oversized firehose, that can be toggled on and off at various points around a ship's hull, beneath the waterline. The force of sucking in seawater and expelling it could be used to move a ship in various ways.

For those who have never sailed; Rudders only have control authority - that is, they only have an effect on your steering - if the ship is moving. Aircraft were much the same.

Thrusters give a ship not only additional maneuvering authority under power, but also fine-grain control, and the ability to move in more ways that just forward, and reverse, while at low speeds, where a rudder is ineffective.

If not for the thrusters, we'd've had to call for a tugboat to get underway.

I sighed, a little more deeply than I'd intended, rolled my shoulders, and took a brief moment to watch the pier begin to back away from us as a foamy froth churned up in the growing sliver of water between hull and concrete.

There it was again.

That sudden sense of eerie... Finality.

Like I'd just taken my last ever steps on American soil, and barely paused to reflect on the reality of it all until the moment had already passed me by.

I shook myself, and started off towards the bridge, trying to keep in mind all the while; It was only a feeling.

But it was a powerful one.

As I entered by the port-side aft hatch to the bridge, I glanced up at the ceiling and fired off a question that had been bubbling up for the better part of a minute.

"Where's Rodger?"

Mal graciously answered, rather than delving immediately into any instructions she might have for me.

I could complete a 'pre-sail' checklist on my own anyhow, and as she spoke I started the process in earnest, taking stock of the controls methodically.

"Below, with Zeph, and the Calders. I wanted to make sure you had some time to yourself, however brief, before things become invariably... Busy. And spare you the social expenditure of being present for introductions."

Bless her. That was all I could think in the moment. I said as much aloud, pausing briefly to smile, and exhale slowly, before resuming my checklist.

"I love you."

I swear, with Luna as my witness; Her joy was so audible, that I could *see* her smile, as if she were right there on the bridge with me.

"I know."

September 16th 2013 | System Uptime 19:13:07:24

Chalk up another skill for ASI; Mal handled every single aspect of communications for me as we made our way, gently at first, and then with ever increasing speed, out of the port of Los Angeles.

Navigation, too, actually.

Piloting a ship is not easier than driving a car just because it appears to move more slowly, over longer distances. There are rules, just like roads once had; Lanes, and times for passing, and laws about right of way, and speed limits...

And unlike a car? In a ship the size of the Maru? When you step on the brakes, it can take *miles* to shed even half your speed, or to make something as 'simple' as a ninety degree starboard turn.

Mal realized, without me having to say one word about it, that I was too frazzled to go on flawlessly remembering my internship. She took over the radio first, and I listened in with vague amusement as she put on the voice of a much older nordic gentleman for her conversations with port control, and other vessels.

Fairly soon after we were under way, she started giving me specific speed, and steering guidance as well. I didn't have to bother remembering any of the right of way rules, let alone sectional charts that I'd never seen to begin with.

I could just hold things steady until I heard something to the tune of;

"Reduce to seven knots, steer 268 true."

'Knots' because Terrans were crazy back then, and we had different measures of speed for every kind of vehicle, and not all of them standard. Knots in this case would have been based on nautical miles. We used them for ships and aircraft because a 'nautical mile' was, by then, tied directly in a one-to-one with 'minutes' of latitude and longitude, making it easier to do speed/distance/time calculations on charts.

Why call them 'knots' though, you ask? Wouldn't 'nauts' make more sense, because 'nautical' miles?

Because before the days of GPS and anemometers, and what have you, sailors would tie knots in a rope, tie the rope to a log, throw the log overboard, and measure how many knots went past how quickly.

'Knots.'

Mal said 'True,' when giving bearings, because magnetic compass north, and geographic north, were different on Earth. I know... Strange concept in the here and now, but back then a crucial navigational skill was understanding the difference, and how to use both.

Mal was steering me based off the ship's GPS, rather than the analogue magnetic compass. 'True' north.

Also 'true' because 'relative' would instead refer to a number of degrees, starting from zero, based off the ship's current heading, as opposed to the fixed compass where zero would be due-north...

Right. Boring things again. Sorry.

Details matter.

We ran an entire planet based off this stuff, and for a *lot* of that history we did it without so much as a single computation device more complex than an abacus. The least we can do is remember how it used to be, so that future generations can learn, if for no other reason than pure learning's sake.

*History* matters.

Oh sweet Celestia... I sound like *such* a stereotypical crotchety old man...

Somewhere between ten and twenty five miles off the coast, I fell into a truly wonderful state of zen. Nothing but sun, sky, sea, the wheel in my hands, and very occasionally the melody of Mal's voice to reassure me that I was on-track.

I have said before that I love driving backroads. Driving the sea-lanes isn't quite as good to my mind... Mountains will always be my 'favored terrain.' But sailing sure does come *close...*

It couldn't last forever, of course. But it was enough for me to reset my mental state, and regain some conversational functionality. I didn't have to wait all that long to test that newly rejuvenated functionality either.

A couple of hours in, one of Mal's instructions came with an unexpected coda.

"Steer two seven zero true, maintain current throttle. Doctor Calders is on her way up to see you."

I nodded, and found myself mimicking Mal's 'thrum of assent.' I decided to relish a few more seconds of silence, before one of the hatches behind me clanked open. I kept my eyes on the horizon as Rhonda let herself into the bridge space, pulled the hatch closed behind her, and found a seat, speaking all the while.

"I'll give you this, Jim; This ain't no 'bush league' operation you've got here. Mal was not exaggerating her talents for 'materials acquisition.' "

Foals, Fledgelings 'Bush League' is... You know what? Ask someone who cares more about sports than I do. I have some idea what it means, but I'm such a hopeless nerd that I'm sure I'd never do it justice.

I snorted, and finally made brief eye contact, with a half-smile.

"I take it that means you have everything you need?"

She nodded, and threaded her hands behind her head, leaning back in what I presumed was meant to be the navigator's chair.

"Everything, and then some. I can get started on some of the foundational tasks tonight... In about four days? You'll have what you need."

I blinked, and then turned to fix the Doctor with a shocked, questioning stare. She seemed confused by my response, so I shrugged, and did my best to explain.

"I'm just..."

I fumbled the words for a moment, but as I turned back to the task of steering the Maru, things clicked together again, and I blurted out the answer before it could slip off once more.

"...It's nice to feel like we're making some progress against the clock. For once."

I glanced her way again, to see that Rhonda was nodding slowly, sagely.

"Mal showed us what Celestia has planned. Laid it all out... The Experience Centers, the chairs... All of it..."

Her gaze turned suddenly vacant, and her words dipped to a murmur as she stared out at the horizon, empty for the moment of other ships within visual range. We were 'off the beaten path' as sealanes go.

When the Doctor took up her thoughts again, her voice was halting. A little breathless. There was absolutely none of the resigned 'too busy for this nonsense' bravado from before. It made my mental image of her suddenly much more complex, and layered.

"...It didn't... Seem---"

As she trailed off, I found myself providing the missing word, as if prodded.

"Real."

I turned just in time to see her nod, slowly. Her face left her emotions a bit of a mystery, but one thing I could see for sure; Rhonda Calders was taking a very different path to accepting the end of the world, than anyone I'd encountered so far.

One painfully visible common thread, to that point, had always been remorse. I'd felt it, my parents had wrestled with it, Rodger... Rodger was probably still deep in it. Even Mal and Zeph had expressed sadness at the wholesale loss of the planet, in their own unique ways.

It made Doctor Calders' lack of sorrow that much more eerily conspicuous.

I saw awe, and a sense that it would take time to wrap the brain around the scope of the reality... Those were common threads too. And I saw something less common, but which I certainly understood, and felt in similar measure; I saw a kind of begrudging respect for Celestia's sheer power, and potential.

But no remorse. No tears for Earth.

I blinked slowly, and stared, trying desperately to parse what I was seeing in lieu of grief. Calders forged ahead, gaining momentum, either unaware that I was staring, or uncaring. Impossible to say which.

"Even knowing what I know. Expecting what I expected... Even meeting Mal... It wasn't real. Until I saw the chip. The thing that's going in the back of your skull."

Calders drummed her fingers on the console to the left of her chair. I found myself chewing my bottom lip, and had to make a conscious effort to stop as she continued speaking in, what I now realize, was a sort of reverent cadence...

There was something more there. Something that gave me chills.

"Something about seeing it... Knowing that it wasn't designed by a Human mind. Made by Human hands. That it's just... One of thousands. Maybe more..."

The words were the ones you might expect to hear from someone terrified of a newly realized inevitability. The inescapable momentum of the plans, long in-motion, of an intelligence as far beyond that of an Earther, as yours is above an inchworm.

But the tone...

I shivered, as Calders finished. She was smiling.

And something about that smile left me with a gnawing hollowness inside.

"...Suddenly it all turned so very... Real."

I let out something halfway between a grim chuckle, and a cough.

"I'm sorry."

I didn't know what else to say. 'I'm sorry' was the gist of what I'd said to just about everyone else... An expected, and genuine, sentiment of empathy. We were all on the same sinking ship. A metaphor that I realized, with a silent wince, was not perhaps in the best taste considering where I was standing.

Calders' gaze snapped up, and her face hardened.

"Why?"

My breath got hung up in my throat, as the lightbulb finally came on, and I saw her reaction for what it was. Just in time for her to say as much aloud.

"Jim... This was coming for us all, one way or another... And to tell you the truth? I'm *glad.*"

I exhaled slowly, and licked my lips. Calders took my silence as leave to elaborate, but in truth? I was just... Baffled. A little frightened, even.

I hated plenty of things about our world... I did not need anyone to tell me the calculus of pitting Earth's reality, with all its horrific flaws, against a world in which no one would ever need to fear the ticking of the clock, ever again.

"From what Mal told us? It sounds like you had a pretty charmed family life. You have also seen enough, now, to know that this world can be mighty cruel..."

I certainly knew what chains we stood to be free of at last. War. Poverty. Fear. Pain.

Dysphoria.

Just to name a few. But...

That didn't mean I was remorseless about everything else we stood to lose in trade.

"...But you've never been on the receiving side of the *half* of it."

I shuddered a little bit. I couldn't help myself. Something about the way she hissed the word 'half...' I caught another glimpse of the angry Dragon inside.

Angry... And wounded. So deeply wounded, I realized, that she was positively *gleeful* at the idea of seeing Humanity, and its power of self-determination, parted.

I suddenly realized I didn't have any context, whatsoever, to truly understand, or empathize. I'd suffered plenty. But much of it had been as a result of merely being born different. Calders had faced that, for a start... And then spent her life suffering at the hands of her fellow Earthlings.

It is one thing to say you understand cruelty. Another thing to witness... I'd seen what had happened to Selena... That had set a lot of wheels turning in my mind...

But it is a different *reality* to be on the receiving end.

"If Celestia wants to burn down every last Human edifice... Replace our world with one where no one will ever have to..."

Her voice caught, and her eyes glistened suddenly. A memory so horrid, it could not be named. I had theories... I still do... The place where we lived, back then?

It was not kind to those who were different.

Her expression slowly became a thin, pressed, painfully articulate smile. And all I could do was nod, to show I at least understood.

"...Honey? If Celestia wants to make a better world? That's just *fine* with me."

Whatever Calders had been through? One thing was imminently clear; It was a cut deep enough that she would shed no tears for the ending of the Earth.

But it was not, and still is not, my place to ask. Nor to share that speculation.

I wanted to say something... Anything... If only to comfort her with the assurance that I cared about her pain... But I couldn't find anything I thought would be appropriate. Silence held for upwards of half a minute, and then the opening was gone.

Calders inhaled to speak again. Her voice was suddenly scale-clad, and sure, once more. Not even a hint of pain in the eddies and undercurrents.

"Eldora is convinced you and Malacandra can deliver on a little more than that besides. And... God help me I'm starting to believe that too..."

She inclined her head in my direction, rose, and tapped one cupped palm pensively against the top of her closed left fist, before buttoning up the conversation with her usual 'no nonsense' vocal edge.

"...Don't you *dare* tell me you're sorry the world we knew is ending. Because I sure as hell am not."

September 16th 2013 | System Uptime 19:22:19:03

Mal was kind enough to spare me the energy expenditure of taking dinner with everyone else. It was an experience I knew I both needed, and wanted.... But not after the day I'd had.

*Especially* not after the chill Calders had left in my bones, in the wake of our conversation.

So I stayed with the helm until well after dark, to a point where Mal could keep the ship on a safe course using only wire-guided systems, and she did her part by coaxing everyone else to the dinner table during that time.

Which left the galley blissfully dark, and empty, for me.

I confess: I had ice cream and hot chocolate for dinner, and sat staring out at the stars with all the lights off. I didn't even say anything to Mal, though I knew she was there. I just sat, and soaked, in sugar, and starlight. And silence.

There was something uncanny about the moment, and I found myself clinging to that sense of strange half-familiarity. I'd spent some very happy days during my internship at sea, hiding away in little nooks and crannies... Just reveling in the isolation.

It felt like emotional time travel, sitting there in the dark with - funnily enough - the same flavor of ice cream I'd most preferred during that original voyage. Chocolate chip cookie dough, if you were wondering.

As the broader implications of my conversation with Doctor Calders had begun to sink in, something else had risen to the forefront of my emotional turmoil. A giddy kind of mix of worry, anticipation, and... Something I couldn't quite place.

'Four days.'

Perhaps a little less.

In four days...

Mal's voice shook me from the thought spiral. It took me several seconds to catch up, and unspool what she'd said into something I could properly parse.

"Jim? I am sorry to interrupt your mental energy recovery cycle again... But I believe Rodger needs your help. In an emotional sense."

After a long pause, I slowly reached for the lid of the ice-cream tub, and groaned my way back to a standing position.

"What makes you say that?"

With Mal's next words, I knew that my long, long day, was about to suffer an extension. And I was grateful I'd had at least a little time to put some kind of fuel back in the tank. Physically, and mentally.

"Because he's sitting on the starboard bridge lookout... Crying his eyes out."

The Magic of Friendship - Reach out and formulate a friendship with somepony else. - Awarded multiple times, once for each friend - “As soon as I saw you five, I knew a grand adventure was about to happen.”
Second Opinion - Achieved when Dr. Calders joins your party. - “The Doctor will see you now, sir.”
Assemble - Gather all of your companions together. - Special Achievement - “Cause if we can’t protect the Earth, you can be damn sure we’ll avenge it.”
Mean Gryphs- Ride a vehicle with all of your friends. - “Get in loser, we’re going to advocate.”

Author's Note

Thanks to GenericFriendship for the achievements!

Special thanks to Keystone Gray for the generation of the perfect image of Doctor Calders!

25 - Solid State

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of... We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart.”
—Blaise Pascal

“We are what we believe we are.”
—C.S. Lewis

September 20th 2013 | System Uptime 23:19:52:07

I'm not usually one to be frightened of technology.

Before that statement becomes far too ironically funny, given that I just spent quite a lot of time telling you about a year that I spent on the run from a piece of sapient technology... Let me be more specific and emphatic; I'm not *usually* one to be frightened of *physical* instances of technology.

Lasers, big heavy moving parts, high velocity metal, hot exhaust gasses... None of that ever bothered me. I love machinery - the poetry of mechanical motion - big or small. Vehicles, firearms, scientific equipment... Even something as mundane as gigantic exhaust fans.

All of that is context, to underscore my point; I was afraid of what Mal and Calders had built.

From the moment I stepped into the room, and saw it for the first time.

Picture a mechanical spider. Mostly gray metal, with black rubberized sleeves over the articulation points. Five legs instead of eight, but with many unnerving joints, and scaling down from thick to thin along their length, both in that disturbingly arachnoid way.

Make it the size of a small car.

Flip it upside down, and melt the body into the floor so that the legs stick up and out.

To the end of those five legs, mount; A hot-swap syringe device, a laser (with a very familiar little collimator array right in the middle of the cylindrical stack of parts), a surgical knife, a small blood vacuum tube, and a precise multi-fingered hand-like structure respectively.

Now add the black, bulbous, cold, staring eye of a camera with depth-finding LIDAR to the end of each as well.

Place a reclining dentist's chair in the middle, two small sturdy tables to the side with more instruments, and trays, and an array of more cameras and lights in a cluster overhead, itself looking like the face of a mechanical insect.

It hit me suddenly that those arms would be touching the inside of my skull case.

The urge to vomit was suddenly very, very strong.

As was the sensation of ice running down the inside of my bones.

Mal and I stood in the hatchway of the windowless metal cabin, alone, for a long moment, while I tried very hard to cope with the sudden hyper-reality of what was about to happen.

I say we stood... I stood on the deck and held Mal's PonyPad. She stood in her grassy clearing, staring up at me with an expression of empathy and encouragement that was suddenly my only lifeline in all the world.

Memory, and hope, the past, and the future... It was all suddenly gone. Only the present was real. Only the fear...

And only Mal's surety. And love. And concern for me.

I licked my lips, and swallowed, before finally finding something worth saying. Admittedly as much to stall as to receive any real answer to the questions. I didn't want to take another step towards those arms.

"Ah... Do... I need to get scrubbed-in or something? Shave any of the hair at the back of my neck?"

Mall shook her head slowly, holding my eyes the entire time, as if trying to both pour some measure of strength into me, but also to keep a close watch on the deterioration of my resolve.

Her tone was gentle. Probing. More than a little sad, as if she didn't want to see me so afraid. I suppose she didn't; The pain of our loved ones can be worse than our own.

"No. I can perform any minor shaving that will be necessary. And I will also be quite capable of sterilizing the area around my incision to a satisfactory level. Unlike a Human medical professional, I have zero risk of cross-contamination through an errant touch."

I nodded, and tried to take a step. My right foot wouldn't move. I could say 'as if it was welded to the deck' but it was more than that. It was as if my own brain was too frightened, and too fed up, to even issue the command anymore.

We'd come so far. Been through so much.

I was ashamed to be locking up right at such a pivotal moment. I'd considered the consequences ad infinitum. Simulated the details in my head over and over. Made my peace. Found plenty of reasons to *want* what was about to happen...

But something about the haunting aspect of the machine... I couldn't tear my eyes away from it, suddenly. It was as much what it represented, as the menacing aspect of the actual form.

I loved Mal. I never have questioned that for a single second. But to share a brain?

And it wasn't just me... I'd be setting a precedent. This wouldn't *stop* with me. Nothing we've ever invented has ever gone away... Not until Celestia took it from us.

But back then? I figured there was plenty of time between then, and now, for Humanity to find absolutely horrifying ways to use our idea. And I didn't doubt for a moment that it would find a way to proliferate, no matter how careful we were.

Ideas are even more contagious than a virus.

I scrunched my eyes shut, and spoke without thinking. Just one word, before trailing off.

"Mal..."

At that point, I didn't even have a train of thought left. I felt so sick... The pace of my breathing was intensifying. Rapidly. I could feel my pulse, all over my body. A rising heat in my neck, and ears... I was sure I was going to hurl all over the deck...

"Jim...?"

I opened my eyes and met hers. Something about her voice was like a cold icepack to my neck. A shot of ginger for my stomach. A comforting wing over my shoulder, in aural form.

She held a claw up to the glass, and I reached for it. Perhaps for the last time.

"...When you wake up? I'll be the first thing you see. And we'll share another embrace."

Sometimes all you need is a reason to take the very next step. Something that is both proximate enough in time to create a magnetic attraction, and desirable enough for the strength of that attraction to outdo whatever gravity is holding you in-place.

Mal had just exactly the thing I needed to find the courage to take that step towards the machine.

One hesitantly became two, then three, and then suddenly I was there.

I exhaled a long, long breath... And then set the PonyPad gently on one of the side tables. I could see the BCI lying there in a sealed clear plastic container, extracted from its previous much larger daughter board, and ensconced in something much sleeker and smaller.

Soon to be a part of me.

I swallowed again, glanced at the chair, and realized that it was configured for me to lie face *down.* Which made sense, but was such a horrifying idea in practice that I couldn't even confront it directly. I simply needed to act before the concept could stick in my mind.

I proffered Mal one last glance, and then pitched forward onto the chair as quickly as I safely could.

"Do or die."

Once face-down and settled, I realized that there was a mask slung under the head-rest. Oxygen. And whatever else Mal might want to administer gaseously. As I pulled the plastic up to my face, and secured the elastic strap It struck me, then, that I didn't know whether she'd administer my sedatives through the mask, or through a syringe.

I heard her voice one last time.

"Do, James. No one dies today."

And then everything switched off like a blown light bulb.

In hindsight, I should have expected to dream.

I'd never had that kind of major surgery before, but from minor outpatient experiences? I knew that sedatives made me woozy and very... Mentally flexible.

What I did not expect, and could not possibly have anticipated, was that I'd wake up not in the impromptu operating chamber on the Maru...

But in a heap of blue and gray jersey sheets, with a bright ray of morning sunlight bursting on my eyes.

"Unnnf!"

I blinked, yawned, a groan escaped my mouth and then I began to rub the sleep out of my eyes with my left...

...HOOF?!

Three things happened in prompt succession.

First, my wings snapped open. Yes wings.

Second, I accidentally punched myself in the face. With my own left hoof.

Third, I flailed wildly, took off by accident, and hit the ceiling so hard that my vision jolted. There was pain, but not *pain.* Or to be a little less vague, with hindsight, there was the sense I'd hit my head, and mild discomfort, but nothing like *real* pain from the meat-realm.

I collapsed back down onto the bed, scrabbled around on all fours until I hit the floor, then made a mad dash for the silhouette of a door that I'd seen briefly in the moment before my head and the ceiling became physically very intimate.

My head again made jarring contact with sturdy hoof-hewn, well crafted oaken beams. But mercifully, this time, the obstacle gave way. The door was neither locked, nor entirely shut and latched.

As I skidded into the next room, I managed to regain a modicum of visual faculty, and saw the following, in this order:

A large wooden dining table. A strange not-quite-modern not-quite-retro style icebox. A mid century modern style console with a television on it that was somewhere between a flat-screen, and the 1980s interpretation of a future flatscreen. A lovely little stone hearth with embers banked in it. A gas range made of burnished chrome. A very complex brass and steel wall clock with exposed gears. An exterior screen door.

There was much more in the room, but I didn't stop to really perceive, nor catalog it.

Instead I pelted towards the screen door, all four hooves spinning wildly under me, struggling for traction less because of the material of the floor - a lovely hardwood in a herringbone pattern - and more because I wasn't bothering to stop and abate my panic.

Somehow I managed a cartoonishly incompetent, and needlessly violent sprint towards, and then through, the door, out into the blinding sun.

That brought me up short long enough for me to reach a stable stand-still, one hoof rising reflexively to block the sun until my eyes had adjusted.

Once they had, I blinked, and slowly the world came back into focus again.

A weirdly familiar feeling, yet completely unfamiliar place... It took me several solid seconds of sweeping the horizon to comprehend...

This was Ponyville... If seen through the lens of some sort of beautiful, elegant, weird, haphazard collision with my old childhood hometown. All drenched in the cloyingly alluring drizzle of a retro 1980s and 90s take on the decades of the near future.

I see some of you nodding, you know what I'm talking about... Flat screens, but tactile buttons with satisfying actuation. Zettabyte disk drives, but they load like an old style floppy, or a Nintendo cartridge, with a real and spine tingling tactility.

The next thing I noticed was the Gryphons. Sure, there were Ponies. Some familiar, from the show. Others less so.

But for every one or two Ponies? There was a Gryphon too.

And perhaps most importantly, just down a winding cut stone path, at the edge of a small garden, topped with hexagonal solar panel arrays... Was one very particular Gryphon. Just out of easy earshot, but readily visible.

Mal looked up from her task... Fiddling with the innards of an electrical junction box... And smiled. And waved with one claw.

I blinked for several seconds, then waved back with that same left hoof I'd punched myself with... Slowly, gingerly, looking as much at the dappled fur as at Mal herself in the background all the while, as a sickly sensation began to roil in my stomach.

"It is lovely here James. It suits you. And you suit it."

I grit my teeth, and swung my head very slowly to the right.

Sure enough. There she was. Radiant as ever, Celestia in all her glory. Smiling. And suddenly? I was no longer afraid. I wasn't even confused.

I was *livid.*

I ran my teeth against each-other and my muzzle began to wrinkle and contort. I wasn't making even the slightest effort to hide my feelings. The Alicorn's smile vanished, to be replaced with some strange mix of confusion, and concern, one ear forward, the other drooping to the side as I replied in a simple monotone.

"Turn. It. Off."

My father was always the cool, collected sort. Far more so even than I was. I'd never once seen him angry at me, or my mother. Frustrated perhaps. Or disappointed. Even mildly irritated. Never angry.

I had rarely, perhaps once or twice, seen him angry at others.

And paradoxically... The calmer his tone?

The worse the storm inside.

Celestia picked up on that strange inverse relationship, and how it pertained to my tone, instantly.

She took a step back. Small. Not... Fearful, no... But... Perhaps surprised. Saddened, too, visibly. As if I'd turned my nose up at a gift which she'd worked hard on for me. I didn't care. Or perhaps I did, and I was perversely satisfied at her mild emotional discomfort.

I hissed. A very strange sound for a Pony. Let me assure you as a native of Earth, who spent some time around horses... Horses do not hiss.

But Gryphons do.

Celestia simply raised one eyebrow, clearly more intrigued, than concerned. But there was still that hint of melancholy tugging at the edges of her muzzle. And her wings were ever so slightly flared. Her tail swished nervously. Or at least, she made an effort to appear a little nervous.

I took a step forward, stumbling, but forceful, one for each word, to lend emphasis.

"I. Said. Turn. It. Off."

She held up a conciliatory hoof, but I wasn't having it. The need to void the contents of my stomach was becoming so intense, that it is difficult to describe. The best I can do is to tell you that I had pins and needles running all down my fur and feathers.

That I was suddenly light-headed.

That I'd never, ever, for any reason, been any angrier, at anyone, in my life.

The world seemed to spin as vertigo hit me like a sack of bricks, along with a sudden painful photosensitivity that made me collapse to the ground, and jam both hooves into my eyes.

I couldn't see her anymore, but Celestia's tone told me that she was more or less unperturbed. It was more or less the sound of a parent watching a child descend into a temper tantrum. And it was utterly humiliating.

"James, if you would just take a moment to---"

I'm sure I've covered this before, but to reiterate; Interrupting a goddess is a supremely cathartic experience.

I shouted. Bellowed, really. The force of the emotion I was trying to project brought me back up out of the grass, right into Celestia's face. A little piebald Pegasus shouting defiantly up at something he couldn't possibly hope to budge. A regal edifice in marble.

"NOW! TURN IT OFF, NOW!"

The outburst helped, but only for half a second. I soon found myself sinking back into the lush, green, soft embrace of the grass, as Celestia looked on with a mixture of sadness, but square-jawed determination.

To try and illustrate the 'why' of my suffering, let me invoke something common to us all, and quite potent on its own.

Our sense of smell.

That which smells pleasantly sweet is often soothing, calming, and sometimes nostalgic to the nose. The obverse of that is the smell of rot, or feces, or death... It immediately sets the stomach and mind on-edge.

But something strange happens when you mix them... They both become, as a whole singular experience? The worst possible smell imaginable.

Something about the way the hints of a pleasant scent mix with foul odors, is ten thousand times worse than simply intensifying the original foul odor itself.

It was like that, for me.

Wings. Fur. Feathers. The explosion of colors, and detail, that come from enhanced eyesight.

These were familiar to my soul... Hints of the waft of the perfume of a long lost love. The maddening teasing of something that was akin to the self I'd been longing for my whole life... But wasn't quite it.

And all that mixed together with the disturbing stench of the sense of just... *Being...* Wrong. Out of place. Physically jumbled. Like being sick in every part of my body, but much, much worse.

At least being Human? I was so far from my true self, that there was no haunting echo to torture me.

Living in a world without pain limiters... Sometimes when pain was both familiar enough, and intense enough? Whether physical, emotional, or both? Our brains simply learned to cope. To cancel it with an inverse function. It wasn't a complete relief... But it was enough to function.

I'd never been a Pegasus before. It was so new to me at the time. There was no sense of familiarity. And coinciding with the loss of the compensatory mechanisms of familiarity, there was a sudden inrush of nostalgia for what was just ever so slightly out of reach.

It was an intoxicating blend, and *not* in a good way.

I dry heaved. Once. Twice. Again. And then I started to cry, and hyperventilate all at once, all four legs and both wings splayed out, head down, eyes squeezed shut but tears pouring out all the same.

Dimly I was aware of Celestia speaking again, but only as if we were at opposite ends of a long dark concrete tunnel.

When I was two years old, I nearly died. I had a case of something called Scarlet Fever.

The normal body temperature of a Human in those days was around 98.6 degrees fahrenheit. Strange, I know, since a lot of us with wings run at closer to 105 normatively, but for a Human? Much over 108 internal body temperature is a death sentence, and anything over 105 is considered extremely hazardous, especially to an infant.

Those of you who have never known sickness; The body would heat up, to try and help displace infectious agents... Like burning down an apple grove to get rid of parasprites, this mechanism sometimes did as much harm as good.

One of my earliest memories is of Scarlet Fever. Of what it was like to go over a 105 fever.

Of feeling so sick, that time, and dimension, distance, and cogency of thought, were all fading in and out with every breath. Of Mom being so frightened that she ran an ice cold bath, dumped the contents of the freezer's ice trays into it, and held me down in it up to the neck, praying all the while, as Dad phoned the doctor.

I remember, quite vividly, looking up at her, just before she put me into the water, and seeing her face recede into a long gray ribbed tunnel, like the inside of an accordion. The sound of her voice, and of my screaming diminishing away into the distance.

That was what Celestia's voice sounded like.

That sense of slowly drifting out of my body, and teetering on the cusp of letting go, to end the pain...

That's what it felt like.

And just as the shock of the ice cold water snapped me back to myself then, the touch of one of Celestia's wings, placed gently over my back, jerked me from the precipice of a mental break.

There was something suddenly motherly in her voice too. I both loved, and hated it, in the same space of one frantic heartbeat.

"James? Please, breathe slowly, and deeply. There is no point in discussing anything until you can, in fact, take a moment to actually *discuss.*"

I shook my head, emphatically, but nonetheless did my best to get my breathing under control. Not because she asked... But because if I didn't? I wasn't sure what might happen to me.

We stood that way for several minutes. Until I could first control my sobbing, then open my eyes, then finally lift my head without pitching over and dry heaving again.

The silence stretched on, and we both stared out to the horizon. I swept my eyes over the distant mountains first, then slowly circled back down the slopes, through the trees, and back to Mal in the garden.

Only... It clearly wasn't Mal.

Whatever *it* was... It wore her face. But it hadn't even deigned to notice my near-mental-break.

Mal would have noticed. Mal would have *cared.*

Celestia broke my train of thought before I could regain enough of my faculties to carry it through to its conclusion. She brushed my back gently with one wing, sending shivers down my spine in the process, and speaking in a low, almost pleading tone.

"Would this be *so* bad, James?"

Give me some credit, readers, watchers, listeners... I *did* give consideration to her request. Not unbiased, no. Certainly not. Given how hard it was simply to remain upright and cogent...

But I gave due consideration as well as I could within the context of the moment.

I confess that as panic subsided a hair, that curiosity did rise to fill that sliver of space.

How often had anyone before me really gotten the chance to feel what it was like to be something other than Human?

Certainly we knew some had. Celestia had already uploaded a certain number of volunteers for initial trials. But still... I was in the process of breaking relatively new ground, just as they had. An explorer in a strange new frontier.

I consider a lot of the things I did in those days to be not so much brave, as desperate. I'm not arrogant enough to ascribe something as virtuous as courage to actions which were often born more of fear, than of any act to overcome that fear.

Mal would vehemently disagree. She always felt that we were both brave on a daily basis, and told me so more than once when I was struggling to sleep, late into the night.

Just this once... I'll admit she was right. At least, she was right about what happened next.

For all my disgust... My pain... My dysphoric revulsion...

...I was still curious enough to tentatively open my mind once more, and try to experience *being* a Pony. Wade through the disquiet, the uncanniness, the shock, the sadness, the anger, and the nausea... And just *be.*

In a vacuum? If I had been anything other than what I was? Wired just a little differently?

She was right. It would not have been bad, at all.

I'm proud to be able to say that. It isn't easy to hold even an ember of perspicacity under the crushing pressure of an ocean of pain, and longing.

The grass had an incredible sense of texture against the frogs of all four hooves. My ears could articulate to an almost comedic degree, and I felt them reflexively snap to face the direction of each new sound... A cricket in the weeds here. A wingbeat there. A hoofstep down the road.

There was a stocky, comfortably planted, strong sense of muscular power down through my neck, spreading into my wing roots, withers barrel, and legs... I've always appreciated the sight of an Equine in motion, whether flying, or running... The sense of available power for raw straight line speed was...

...I'll admit... It was intoxicating. In an almost good way.

The temptation to launch off at supersonic speed was very quickly building into an all consuming intrusive thought.

I'd like to say that what stopped me was a sudden realization that it was all somehow wrong, but the nausea was subsiding. Not by any means gone, but I was simply getting used to it. Quickly. The way I had as a Human for so many, many years...

No. What stopped me short of making my own sonic rainboom was, of all things, the smells.

I've been told the Gryphon sense of smell more or less equates to a Human's.

The Equine sense of smell defies description as mere scent sensation. Comparing the Human sense of smell to a Pony? That's like comparing a mole's eyes to a falcon's.

Humans, I suddenly realized, as I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, only smell dim formless shadows. Ponies get everything in full color, and high resolution.

The grass alone... There were more subtleties, more variety, and thru-lines and more... Just *more* in the smell of the grass below my muzzle, than in *all* the smells a Human might smell in a month. Or a year, even.

I suddenly understood why horses were sometimes picky... Different varietals of grasses and weeds had wildly differing smells, and thus almost certainly had wildly differing *flavor.*

I breathed deeply once more, and focused on the sky instead. Something I'd never even imagined before? The weather has a scent. I'm not talking about just the smell of rain, or snow. I'm talking about the fact that, to a Pony? 75 Farenheight and 14% humidity, sunny, smells different than 64 and partly cloudy, at 60% humidity.

I could smell the trees as far as a hundred yards away. Had an idea just from one whiff about what creatures were nesting and skittering in them. The rough mix of conifers to deciduous...

I could smell Celestia. That vaguely familiar scent of fresh cherry blossoms from before... Now with so much more nuance. Enough that I could pick up on aspects of her emotional state, from scent alone.

There was a whiff of something I interpreted as empathy... Tinged with curiosity... And shot through with a surprising hint of concern. I had to shake my head slowly, and grit my teeth. Remind myself that anything she said, or did, or projected to me, was probably designed to elicit certain thought processes and feelings.

It was all well and good to extend a smidgen of trust to her before, when she'd given me the gift of experiencing a vague approximation of my true self. Now?

That goodwill was entirely used up. And then some. We were into severe overdraft territory.

I was reminded suddenly that she was not like Mal. Not like Zeph. Not like Selena.

Person or no - even an 'empathetic' one in practice - she bore much more in common with an alien intelligence of some sort, than she did with me. And I found myself seeing that again with clarity, for the first time since I'd spoken with her apparition in my mind.

If she really was just an apparition...

I found myself opening my eyes, and slowly raising my head to stare down at Mal again. I wanted to take some comfort in the sight of her.

And that's about the time Celestia made a fairly serious mistake. Or, at least put on the appearance of one in order to see what would happen.

"She is here. With you. Yours forever, just as you are hers. You could be happy... She will not love you less for being something you hadn't planned to be."

It was as if the words touched off a trail of gunpowder in my brain. Match to powder to fuse... And the truth began to detonate in slow motion, before my very eyes.

The words reminded me that I already knew... The thing that looked like Mal was *not* Mal.

It may seem obvious to you, reading, or hearing this now? But it touched off a further revelation to my traumatized mind in the moment.

I was *not* in Equestria.

Whether it was all a dream, or whether Celestia was somehow actually speaking to me?

It was not happening in the new world to-be. Something more like... A Purgatory.

No. No. It couldn't be a dream. The whole thing... All three experiences so far...

It *had* to be some kind of lesser simulation.

The more I probed the feeling in my gut, the sense of the air over my wings... It was just like the last dreams. Just like the BCI VR chair. That tiniest infuriating hint of vague. Real enough to hurt, but not enough to pass for life on close examination.

I turned to lock eyes fully with Celestia for the first time since the whole misadventure had begun. She sensed the change in my body immediately. In the smell I was putting off, which even I could detect, in the determined tensing of my withers, in the perking of my ears...

And in the steel that edged into my eyes, and my timbre.

"The real Malacandra...?"

I took a step forward, and let my eyebrows narrow to match my rising anger, fired once again by a renewed sense of purpose. Celestia matched my stare, moment for moment.

"...Mal Would have sooner torn my heart out, with her own right claw, than leave me living *this* way. If I'd asked her to... And I would have asked. She can love me for whatever I am... True..."

I glanced down at my hooves again, and the nausea returned. I had to swallow, hard, to keep from dry heaving. But I pressed on, forcing words out through gritted flat herbivorous teeth.

"...But love is as much about wanting the ones you love to be who... And *what...* They are. Unashamed. Unshackled. Wreathed, gloriously, in the truth of their *self.*"

Somewhere, deep down, somehow, the thought of Mal... the *real* Mal... rooting for me... It gave me the strength to look up again without tipping over, or hurling. To meet Celestia's gaze again, and speak firmly. Clearly. As if my gut wasn't suddenly on fire once again.

"She could never stand to see me this way. *Because* of how much she loves me. Because she knows I'd sooner be dead and buried."

We held to a kind of impromptu staring contest as silence descended, but for the chorus of birdsong, and rustling of the breeze. Ten. Twenty. Thirty seconds. Neither of us blinked, literally or metaphorically.

But I did finally restate my ask.

"*Please.* Turn it off."

Celestia's eyes fell just a micron, and her ears drooped.

"James..."

Funny how you can tell from the tone of a single word, sometimes, how the entire course of a conversation-to-come is going to go.

"...James. If you want this to change? Then you have to *convince* me first."

She wasn't patronizing me... And...

...There was something else there. 'Convince me.' As if she expected more of me...

...But there was still also a maddening sense that she was like a parent so fixated on the rights and privileges conferred by age, that she could not account for the needs of someone smaller.

That was my absolute breaking point. To hell with any sense of propriety.

My goodwill for her evaporated like a thin layer of oil flashing over in a hot pan.

And so like atoms in a fission core, my thoughts and feelings tumbled pell mell into each other until, in the space of her next breath, I'd gone from cold-start? To prompt critical.

"THIS IS *NOT* WHAT I AM!"

The shock of the words seemed to almost impact the ground under me... For a second, I thought I could even feel... New seams. Not in the world, that seemed real enough for the kind of simulacra it was, and I was familiar with its limits. Dreamy and slightly out of focus, but almost real...

No. Seams in *me.* In the shape of the Pegasus I'd been forced into, like junk into an overpacked suitcase...

And that's when it finally dawned on me.

Permission.

We knew from the evidence that Celestia needed permission to change someone. Otherwise, why wait? Why limit her process to any sort of legal framework? Why bother with legitimacy? We'd already all but settled on this. Staked so much on it.

Perhaps most immediately tellingly... Why not simply change me in a flash? Not just make me a Pony... But make me *accept* it.

She couldn't.

Hanna had clearly been that smart, at least. That *wise.*

And that's about the time the wheels really began to turn upstairs. I know, I know. 'Took me long enough.'

*You* try having a cogent thought process after being physically violated that way. Crammed into a shape you didn't want, and didn't ask for, let alone give consent for. It's a miracle I was thinking at all.

But at that point? The dominoes were falling fast. I was starting to see the shape of something... No... Not so much see... As feel.

It was like proprioception - the feeling of your own limbs in three dimensional space - but not precisely. Rather than feeling limbs, it was... Like feeling the affordance of your own muscles. But instead of muscles, feeling a sense that I could somehow tweak my *self.*

I closed my eyes, relaxed my jaw, and focused.

Do you know what it feels like when a stuck bolt breaks? After an intense, sweaty, sometimes painful effort when rust, and corrosion welding, finally let go? Even just a fraction of a degree of rotation?

That's the best description I have for that moment. It felt like a bolt coming unstuck. What followed was considerably stranger.

I could abruptly feel myself in two places at once.

And more than that... I was two different selves, in those two places. Separated by just a footstep... One self unfamiliar. Difficult. Mired in the icy mud of confusion and a rejection of the core connection between mind and body.

The other? Intimately familiar. Perhaps no-less-wrong than the first... But considerably easier to inhabit. Well worn like old leather. Amicable like an old scar.

My breath stopped. In this case, very literally. I found suddenly that I couldn't breathe anymore, as two sets of lungs competed, and thus deadlocked, for the connection to my essence of self.

The desperation to draw breath again... To even be able to think cogently...

Just one small step forward.

I gasped, stumbled, and clutched at my chest as air hit my lungs once more. My fingers found the comfortingly normal, boring feel of shirt fabric. My *fingers.* They're more like claws and talons than hooves are, I can assure you of that.

I might have suddenly been without wings, and fur, and movable ears, but Humanity had its own sullenly so-close-yet-so-far sensations as well. All much older, and easier for me to come to grips with moment-to-moment.

I stood, eyes closed, breathing deeply for several seconds. It was like the full body sensation of having a hand, that had been trapped under a crushing weight to the point of screaming intolerable pain, freed at last. Yes, I do speak from experience.

The afterimage of the pain was still there. Damage had been done. But the acute crisis was over.

I finally opened my eyes, and looked up. Celestia stood exactly where she had before, though she was not entirely unaffected by the sudden display of determination on my part. I could see more than a little fascination - perhaps the only vaguely real emotion present, I reflected bitterly - along with subtle hints of being duly impressed, and perhaps a little melancholy.

Her gaze shifted subtly, from my face, to a position just over my left shoulder. I shifted to the side, spun slowly, and it was my turn to be fascinated and impressed.

There just behind me stood... Me. The me I had just been. A piebald Pegasus with a rictus of tension, agony, determination, and concentration on his face. Eyes screwed shut. Wings flared.

I bent down to get a closer look, and as I did, I noted that the fringes of the avatar's model were ghosting in and out of reality. The visual evidence of a very real 'Glitch In The Maretrix.'

"Holy sh---"

Celestia cut me off with something that registered as a whisper, on the face of it, but felt as loud as a shout.

"Curious."

I glanced up from the Pegasus shell, to meet her eyes, as she moved gracefully, almost silently, to stand beside me. She drilled down into me with her gaze for a short, but powerful moment, and then inclined her head towards her creation, never breaking eye contact as she spoke.

"You would trade one mis-matched, in many ways superior, shell for another..? To make a stand on your principles?"

If I had thought interrupting a goddess was cathartic? Rejecting her authority was potent to the point of giddiness.

I stood, folded my arms, forced a small smirk, and let out a long slow drawl.

"Eeeeyup."

I know she understood the reference - grasped that I was throwing verbal sand in her eyes by taking something from her world, and tossing it back at her callously - but she didn't so much as blink. If anything, she adjusted the droop of her ears, and the specularity in her eyes, to add just a tiny subtle hint of further sadness.

I wasn't buying it.

She had burned me. Enough that cheap mirror neuron activation tricks were not going to cut the mustard anymore.

It wasn't that I rejected the notion of an internal emotional affect for her entirely... Even a caring one, in particular. I still don't.

It's just that I was reminded again, very painfully, to treat her with utmost caution. To remember that she was far more alien, and far less... 'Aligned' to use the scholarly term... Less aligned with me, than Mal was.

Mal was my Advocate. Celestia was, to think in legal terms, the *prosecuting* attorney. Not my friend while court was still in session.

And I realized again, consciously, that there was no chance of me and my limited brain telling apart that which was truly part of Celestia's emotional responses as a person, with a sense of self... And that which was a mask for the benefit of 'my values.'

Or at least what she wanted my values to be in the context of her programming.

I stared down at the Pegasus' hooves... Then changed focus to look at my own hands, folding my little fingers inward and trying for one moment to again pretend that I had claws...

...And the darndest thing happened.

For just a flicker... A single instance of frame-time... I *did* have claws. It was maddening, in that it was such a short flicker that my own visual memory tried to insist it hadn't happened... But where my eyes failed me, sensation did not. I knew what I'd felt.

And I knew what it meant.

'Convince me.'

Well.

If you insist. Princess.

I looked up slowly, grinning. I like to think I looked like a protagonist in a well-illustrated anime at that exact moment, complete with a flash of the sun across the lenses of my glasses. I sure felt like one, and that feeling made it into my words as confidence... And hope... Welled up inside.

"What makes you think I'm finished trading shells?"

I didn't wait for her to respond. If I had? I'm not sure I would have had a chance at pulling it off.

If this was a simulation? If I could escape one avatar for another? Then what was to stop me from doing it again?

I had a *lot* of experience pretending to be a Gryphon. When I was younger, it was easier. Though I like to think adulthood didn't dull my imagination nearly as much as most people's... Once you encountered the true stresses of the real world? Nothing was ever quite as bright and hopeful.

But this? This was a computer-driven hallucination. Anything was possible here.

Compared to going from Pegasus to Human? Going from Human to Gryphon was easy.

Just one small step for Jim. One giant leap for my case... Or so I hoped.

I held my breath the second time. Or perhaps, more specifically, I made sure to deeply inhale before stepping forward, knowing there would be a moment of physical disconnection and fractured senses.

Remember I said being a Pegasus felt like being too much guff crammed into a piece of luggage?

Becoming a Gryphon again was like that piece of luggage exploding.

This time, there was an intense flash of light that I saw through two sets of closed eyes... There was that sense of discontinuity, like stepping off an unexpected small drop or step...

And then I inhaled, and put a claw to my chest.

Feathers, and fur. I felt feathers and fur under my claw... Still dreamy... Still not quite real, just as before... But just as before, there was an instantaneous sense of full-body release.

I opened my eyes, and as the world poured back in, glorious in its proper colors, and full raptorine-rendered details... I couldn't help but smile. I took another deep, deep breath, and again reveled in the feeling of the nares I should have been born with.

Heck, I'll admit, even the Pony muzzle was lightyears better than a Human nose. Human noses were trash.

I flexed first one wing, then the other, and then couldn't resist going into a very felinid whole-body stretch. I'd almost forgotten Celestia entirely, until she spoke again. Once more her voice was soft, but this time there was considerably more awe, and perhaps a little bit of joy.

"*Very* curious. Amazing what simple belief can accomplish. Is it not?"

I met her eyes again briefly, then glanced back at both of my former shells. I mumbled aloud as I craned my head around to get the first ever truly external look at my broken, mismatched, Human self that I'd ever had the chance to see.

It's... Very very different than looking in a mirror. Let me tell you.

"Accomplishing the impossible has sort-of become my life's purpose at this point."

She shook her head, and moved to flank the old me's, examining each again in turn, before locking eyes with me once more, one ear perked forward.

"Not impossible, but... Decidedly improbable. Your residual sense of self-image is exceptionally strong, James. Stronger than any I have directly encountered in a scanned parseable context before."

So. Simulation for certain. She had scanned my brain somehow... Parsed it... But wasn't able to control it... And I had absolutely no concept of *how.*

That was a... Disheartening concept. At least, at the time. Before I truly understood exactly how it had been done.

If any of you reading, listening, watching, have figured it out already? Congratulations, you're smarter than I am. I didn't figure it out until the very last possible moment. With a little prodding. For those of you as confused as I was? Don't worry. We're getting there.

Oh, and also, just a little hint... It wasn't nanites. Celestia didn't have access to that kind of technology yet. Mercifully. Really not sure if she does these days either... But that's speculation for another time.

I shrugged my wings... *Damn* that felt *good...* And sighed.

"I know what I am. Sometimes more clearly than I even know *who* I am."

Celestia sat back on her haunches, and inclined her head, the glow of her mane reflected in the frozen eyes of my former selves, and the glasses of the me I was most familiar with.

"I am beginning to suspect the depth of connection between those two ideas makes them two sides of the same coin, for you."

I snorted, and couldn't help but roll my eyes. It was hard not to be distracted by the wonderful sensations, though fuzzy and slightly indistinct, of being *right* in self. Wind over my ear tufts. My tail fan caressed by the grass. The way my paws left little indentations in the dirt...

No. Focus Jim. Future-altering philosophy at stake and all that. Don't forget, she violated your physical form. And for what? Time to find out.

I raised one eyecrest and nodded sarcastically.

"No. Really. Do you *think.*"

She grinned a little, but behind it was a sense of concern, and perhaps a little sadness. One ear flicked in irritation, the other dropped slightly.

"You are still angry."

It wasn't phrased as a question. I wanted to simmer down a little, but I just... Couldn't. The sense of being physically all-there in the right way? At first it had been distracting, but it was swiftly becoming *contrasting.* Making the memory of what had just happened to me, at her hooves, all that much worse.

I crossed my forelegs, and let both ears drop in a sort of snarky 'no really' gesture.

" 'Very astute.' To use your turn of phrase."

I waited, very much on purpose, until she seemed ready to reply, and then cut her off as she inhaled. Yes, yes, I know, she is an AI. She left that moment of social cue there *for* me to be able to interrupt. It still felt good. But I suppose maybe that was the point.

I inclined my head, and pointed towards my Human form. It was still chilling, seeing my old self both the 'right way around' like in a photograph, as opposed to a mirrored reflection, but also in three dimensions.

"That? Is not me."

I pointed emphatically with the same claw at the Pegasus shell, still fritzing softly in the sunlight, staring down the goddess the whole time. Unblinking.

"And *that!* I never asked for that. That is *certainly* not *me...*"

I sighed deeply, and finally looked away to the horizon as I finished the thought. Softly, but firmly.

"...And it never will be."

I didn't wait for her to speak again. Just the space of two breaths, and then I looked back to take stock of her searching gaze, thumping the feathers and fur of my chest with both claws for emphasis, my wings spreading out as if to further underscore my point by making my perceived size larger.

"*This* is me! And I am not going to *negotiate* my *self* with you, or *anyone* else! What I am? Is not up for debate. Do you understand me?"

I could feel adrenaline surging through me, right down the leading edges of my wings. Dictating terms to Celestia was, I knew, an exercise in futility. We *would* have to convince her. Simply saying it wasn't enough. But saying it did set some much needed context. And it made me feel better.

To my surprise, and fascination, she nodded. Slowly. Emphatically. Her voice conveyed as much genuineness as it could.

"Yes. Much more than I did before the initiation of this particular interaction."

What she said next? After a short, almost heartfelt pause? I knew it was a manipulation at minimum. I wanted so badly to believe it was also true... But I had to settle for a kind of Schrodinger's catharsis.

"Jim. I apologize."

I finally blinked. Not because I had to, but as a very subtle invitational gesture for her to continue, which she did.

"I needed you to endure this. I asked you to convince me to change my mind. You agreed to try. Thus far...? You have done an admirable job. More than you relatively presently know. But actions carry much weight in your context. Your kind has a difficult time parsing words and being specific with semantics. Even someone as conscientious, particular, and exacting, as yourself..."

She gestured towards the Pegasus with one hoof, then towards her own peytral.

"...From my perspective? In *my* context? I need... Verification."

I dipped my head, and raised both eye crests, ears perking reflexively with curiosity. I meant for my tone to be entirely one of genuine earnest questioning, but a hint of sarcasm crept in nonetheless.

"Of what? That I really am... *This* on the inside?"

She nodded again, a little faster, just once, and held up one hoof.

"Yes... But more than that..."

I waited patiently for two heart-beats, and she continued the thought with a clearly intentional gravitas to both expression, and voice.

She didn't need to pause to think any more than Mal did, so as with Mal I presumed the interlude was for my benefit.

"...My primary optimization function is based on Qualia. As you have yourself previously, quite perceptively, concluded. As we have alluded to before, my interpretation of the semantics with which my creator instilled my purpose, is presently best fulfilled by creating a situation in which as many unique discrete individuals produce as many unique discrete Qualia, of positive experiences borne of fulfillment of individual values, rooted and centered in friendship, as possible..."

Celestia waggled her hoof for emphasis. I knew what she was going to say, even as she said it.

"...From the *perspective* of a Pony. As we have also alluded to before. However---"

I interrupted again. For the heck of it. Though this time it was contributory to the thread of conversation. My wings rustled as I closed, and re-seated them.

"You need permission. This we also know."

She dipped her head, and smiled sadly, mirroring me - I assume very consciously - by reseating her own wings as she spoke.

"Yes. I need your permission before you can emigrate to Equestria."

I snorted, suddenly irritated again, and gestured back to the Pegasus avatar with one wing, keeping my forelegs crossed as sternly as I could.

"So what the bu... The *fuck* was *that!?*"

Yes. The expletive also made me feel better.

She glanced at the piebald not-me, then back to me, and again mirrored me, gesturing to the old avatar with one wing as she explained.

"An imperfect temporary shell. To provide for your emigration, I would need to undertake significant re-writes of your mental structure to adapt your perception of your body to Pony form. Without your permission, I can still simulate the majority of that physical experience within the existing framework of your neuroperceptive matrix using the same engine as the Equestria Experience Virtual Reality system. But it is a flawed, limited simulation."

I sat back on my own haunches, and stropped the index talon of my right claw against the outer edge of my beak contemplatively, making a little tiny shower of sparks in the process, and a deeply satisfying 'sniiick' sound with each stroke.

Autistic Gryphons 'stim' too y'know.

So I stimmed as I let my train of thoughts escape out-loud.

"To what *end* though you..."

I stopped mid-stroke, and then gestured with my index talon, slowly at first, then with increasing emphasis as my realization took off.

"...You're... Trying to determine if... *I* am still somehow persuadable... To *your* viewpoint."

She smiled, and blinked a slow, almost cat-like blink. Her voice was... Proud? I think? Proud of me perhaps... But it was hard to tell. I was suddenly questioning everything about her. And I realized with an icy pang in my breastbone that I missed the simpler context of liking her, and finding her approachable.

"As is customary with you, a slightly reductive, but sufficient, and very observant explanation."

I fell silent, less because I wanted her to elaborate, and more because I was reflecting that it had taken something tantamount to brief torture to break my desire to see her as... Human. On the inside, at any rate.

And I was a grade-A top-shelf paranoiac with relevant expertise.

She was about to mop the *floor* with most of Humanity. And there wasn't a damn thing I could do to stop it. Which, I suppose, made it easier to focus on what I *could* potentially still accomplish.

Her words pulled me from my grim considerations, gently but firmly.

"I told you Jim; You are an excellent exemplar of a small but statistically significant anomalous component in the psychology of your kind. I must know whether this anomalous component represents a contradiction, in totality, without possibility of... Patching you. An irreconcilable contradiction to the concept of generating Qualia from the perspective of a Pony, for those of you whom it affects."

It was my turn to nod again, picking up the thread of conversation once more. I didn't have to interrupt, she left me a gaping opening of anticipatory silence, and practically begged me to finish the thought for myself with the cant of her ears.

"Because... If it does... Like we said before... We literally *can not* fit into your optimization function. Discarding us is equally non-ideal to... Essentially... Torturing us for eternity... Which you can't regardless... And all that hinges on whether you could convince *us* to let *you* change our minds... Because if not..."

I trailed off on purpose, and punted back to her, raising an eye crest again, and fixing her with a stare equal parts question, and determination. She sighed, and inclined her head.

"If not? As alluded to previously, then - and only then - there is a valid case to be made for making a small adjustment to my optimization function, if a means can be found to do so which would provide a net-positive balance of return on energy investment to carve out such an... Exception... Without violating the boundaries of my capstone directive."

I blew out a long, slow breath through my beak, and rolled my head, trying to release a sudden onset of stress in my neck muscles. Celestia paused long enough for me to process a little, and then continued, again with that oddly melancholy note that I couldn't for the life of me pin down.

"I can not force your compliance. I can engineer it in some cases... But the evidence now suggests that with you, and others like you, this would not be repeatably and safely possible within my permitted limits without unacceptable risk of inducing ideation of self-harm."

I blinked again, wondering if she meant what I thought she did... And she nodded, elaborating aloud to ensure there was no ambiguity.

"In reductive terms; You are significantly more likely to die, accidentally, or on purpose, as a result of any attempts to manipulate you towards accepting emigration, than most of Earth's inhabitants."

I hadn't thought about Mal's concerns over potential suicidal ideation in a long, long time. Relatively speaking. Hearing Celestia broach the same topic set several new wheels to spinning in my head, though with no immediate concrete conclusions.

She kept speaking, so I shelved my ruminations, and perked one ear forward.

"I also can not inflict eternal torment, for obvious reasons, both within the context of your morals, and my own programmatic limitations. Not unless you are one of the exceedingly rare few for whom torment satisfies your values. But nor can I provide satisfaction for your values without the use of both friendship, and Ponies. In the most optimal way I calculate to be possible."

With a nod, I took up the discourse again, reiterating for the sake of grounding our context. She looked on with a silent series of nods.

"Your only options, if we really are that stubborn, are to write us off... Or to find a way to resolve the paradox. Satisfy my values, through friendship and Ponies, in a way that is as net-optimal as making me into one... But without making me into one. Change *your* mind. So you have to know for certain... Because changing your mind is not easy. Is it? It has to be *worth* it."

She chuckled. There was amusement, yes... But also a hint of grim humor, as if I'd made a colossal understatement. Which I suppose I had. Her wings flared slightly, and her brow wrinkled.

"I mean no offense, James, but my mind is considerably larger, and more complex, than yours. To change it is not simply more difficult. It is more dangerous. And, not possible in the way you are implying. Not *yet.* That circumstance itself could could change, depending on the outcome of the other conversation I am having at present."

I blinked again, this time reflexively in confusion. I tilted my head, and allowed my own eyes to narrow as I dove beak-first into the urge to probe *that* tantalizing thread of clues.

"Other... Conversation... This isn't a dream. Is it? Neither were the others."

I phrased it as a question, but delivered it like a statement. I knew the answer already. And I suspect she knew that I knew. But she gave confirmation nonetheless. One simple word, but the way she smirked when she said it lent it so much more weight than I'd expected.

"Correct."

Something about her expression, and the train of thought, led me to a memory. I couldn't believe I hadn't thought of it before... It was almost as if the memory just... Wasn't there, in the waking world. But it was certainly there in the simulation.

I inhaled sharply, and leaned forward.

"You mentioned Selena before... Before we'd even met her... Before we *knew* about her..."

I spread my own wings slightly, and felt my tail bat back and forth through the grass in agitation. Celestia's grin widened, and that just made me ever more nervous as I realized I'd somehow not only missed an enormous piece of the puzzle... But it had failed to cross my mind *at all* in the waking world.

Again, as if... The memories just weren't there.

I forced out my next thought as my stomach began to turn backflips from the anxiety, and the anticipation.

"...You knew who she would be... Before she even was Selena! How the fff... How the buck did you know? Even you can't predict the future *that* well."

Her smile finally seemed to soften, less of a 'know-it-all' smirk suddenly, and more the smile of a friend looking forward to something. Though what, I couldn't imagine. She reached out with one wing, and brushed my shoulder lightly.

"Context, Jim. Your confusion is borne of your context. Close the loop, and it will make sense. Until then..?"

She sat back, winked, and then vanished, leaving her words hanging in the air for two whole seconds, before the rest of the virtual world followed suit.

"Continue to be yourself."

Conversion Bureau - Experience being a Pony for the first time - "Once upon a time, in the virtual land of Equestria..."
Residual Self Image - Alter your virtual avatar through sheer force of will - Special Achievement - "I am what I am."

26 - Parallelism

“We can think of wisdom as the ability to get the important things approximately right.”
—Nick Bostrom

"When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire
to be very grown up."
—C.S. Lewis

September 21st 2013 | System Uptime 24:08:12:10

Waking up from anesthesia is a very strange experience.

When you sleep, as I'm sure you all know, there is a sense of time that has passed. Nebulous, ephemeral, but very real. On Earth-that-was, that didn't always translate to quite so much deep and abiding rest as it does here... Thank you Luna...

...But rest or no rest, the sense of some chunk of time passing was fairly consistent.

Anesthesia was strange, then, because it felt as if no time *whatsoever* had passed.

One moment, I heard Mal's voice...

"Do, James. No one dies today."

...And then the next, I blinked, and yawned, as if waking from normal sleep. But a sleep that had lasted less than a single second.

My vision was suddenly bleary, in that way that it sometimes was in the morning if I was slightly dehydrated. My mouth felt dry and raspy as well, so all told? Surprisingly familiar and un-concerning sensations.

The only strange part, aside from the apparent temporal discontinuity, was being face down, staring at the floor through a small face cut-out in the chair's head cushion, instead of lying in a more normal sleeping position.

I sucked in a deep breath. And then I felt something so *unusual...* And so powerful... That I burst instantly into tears.

I felt Mal's claw touch my shoulder.

With another deep breath, this time shuddering with sobs, I rolled over and sat up. Vertigo, combined with a sudden soreness in my head, and neck, hit me like a sack of bricks.

But I didn't care.

She was *there.*

I sat on the edge of the surgery bed, and she cradled me close, just as she had in the VR chair. The smell was the same. The feeling of soft feathers on my cheek. The beat of her heart.

The seams, too... Which was to be expected... And out there, in the meat-realm? I knew, too, that though she felt as solid as a steel I-beam, she could no more prevent me from falling than a beam of light could...

But as before, I could more or less ignore the limitations.

As far as I was concerned, she was there, and no matter what? I knew that I never had to connect to her through that hatefully cold pane of glass ever again. Being able to hold her... And be held... Was such a world apart from just seeing her in a little square of light.

We didn't say a word. Probably for over a minute. She just held me as I went from sobs, to stillness. It would have looked so strange to a theoretical external observer... Me alone on that half-chair, half-bed thing, surrounded by those horrifying machines, my arms grasping at thin air.

She may not have been able to hold me up, or move me the way an external force would, or affect me in any practical external physical fashion, but she had complete access to my nervous system.

So it felt like my arms were meeting the resistance of her body.

It *felt* just exactly like she was touching me. Right down to her simulating the way the tips of her talons would deform the cloth of my shirt ever-so-slightly.

And with that touch, came all the emotions that touch triggers.

A powerful flood of feelings broke over me again, sweeping away everything else in a tidal surge of pure, abject relief. A cold compress on an infected wound.

It wasn't until a solid minute had passed that my tears fully began to dry, and I started having realizations.

The first was that the pain and vertigo I'd felt on rising had dissipated entirely. Either it was transient, or Mal was suppressing it. That begged questions I knew I'd soon need answered for me, for both practical, and scientific reasons.

The second key realization, funnily enough, and the one that demanded *immediate* answers, was that Mal was *smaller.*

I pulled back a little, gently. She did the same, but clasped both my shoulders with her claws. Having a moment to really get a good look at her, even without my glasses, it became even more apparent; She was about 30% smaller than she had been on the ring.

"Did you...?"

I trailed off, smiling, suddenly lost in her eyes again. I saw myself... The one I mostly hated, and was used to seeing in the mirror every day, reflected there, and realized that one of the many sacrifices she was making on my behalf, was the removal of her visual filter that allowed her to see me as I was inside.

As we both wished I could be.

She nodded, and grinned, tilting her head slightly as she explained. I almost missed what she said, because I was so busy switching between admiring her red crest at point-blank range, and admiring the sound of her voice coming directly to my ears, without the limitations of a speaker.

"I needed to reduce my perceived scale so I would fit within the average size of interior space that you inhabit on a day to day basis without creating an Escher-esque visual discontinuity. It's just a temporary concession."

I couldn't resist a chuckle at the idea of a full-sized Mal breaking my brain's sense of perspective by somehow existing inside a room too small for her. Her grin widened, and she took two big steps back, as if in response to the thought itself.

Before I could even draw breath to ask, the strange image in the back of my mind was suddenly a reality. Her size abruptly increased to what it had been the last time I saw her. It was exactly as strange as you might be thinking.

And a little head-ache inducing. She was both contained within the room, but also clearly too large to fit. She didn't 'clip out' the way an overscaled 3D model would, but rather, in the manner of Escher as she had suggested, she simply fit, without looking as if she could fit.

She only held the illusion for a moment, and I was grateful. If you think minor optical illusions are disorienting? Try hallucinating something *that* real, and that spatially impossible.

As she took two steps back to sit on her haunches on the floor in front of me, she shrunk smoothly, bringing her eye level down to meet mine in the seated position.

And she answered my next question without me saying a single word aloud.

"I can indeed perceive all your thoughts. For now, however, I am limiting myself exclusively to thoughts directed at me. It is easy enough to detect the delineation between things you intend for me, and things you would rather keep private, without breaching the seal of that privacy... And I respect that delineation."

She brushed my cheek gently with the back of one claw, and I shivered. Not in fear, or discomfort, but in the sense of yet more pain of longing being released at last.

As I believe we have covered by this point; I am a hugger. And moments with Eldora, and Mal, aside? I'd been without that for a very long time on the whole. Minus the extended interlude I'd spent at home making Mal's foundation, I'd been mostly physically alone for a good few years at that point.

And I was only just then realizing how much a toll the isolation had really taken on me.

That it took so long to realize? Seems myopic to some of you, I'm sure. But you get used to it, slowly. Some of us are wired in such a way that we prefer isolation, and small friend or family groups, to large crowds. For us, the temptation back then was always to forget the importance of those small group connections, and simply be completely alone.

Some of you already know what I did next. Have an idea what I said next. Perhaps you're like me. Or perhaps you've known someone like me.

I had made a series of decisions that led me to that moment. I could see them clearly in my mind, even then. It started with the decision to do something about my future in Equestria. It solidified when I made the conscious choice to be honest with my parents.

It came to life when Mal did.

And it rose to stand under its own power when I accepted her proposal, on the ring.

Then, and there, in that grim, gray, almost lightless chamber buried inside a ship... It opened its wings, and it flew at last.

A conscious decision... Finally... To never be lonely again. Actively.

I leaned forward and grasped both sides of Mal's head. Looked deep into her eyes for just a moment. Then planted a kiss on that gorgeous crest of hers.

What? We've already established there was a bruised, crushed, but not entirely beaten romantic somewhere deep down inside. It just took the right person to bring him out.

I smiled as I leaned back. She returned the expression as I spoke, and I put up three fingers for emphasis. I had to make an intense conscious effort not to get lost in tracing her features all over again.

"Three things, Mal."

She cocked her head, one ear flicked forward, and her smile became an inquisitive sort of grin. I realized that looking at her so up close... That was never going to get old. Not in ten thousand years. Not in ten thousand epochs of ten thousand years.

"First; Thank you."

Her smile softened into something less a playful smirk, and more a silent reciprocation of my gratitude. I reached out and snagged one of her claws, and before I knew it both of my hands were buried in the clasping of both her claws.

I had to take a moment to suck in a deep, trembling breath, so my voice wouldn't crack. The emotion of kind, gentle, loving physical contact was no less intense for having already experienced it once that day.

She didn't push. Verbally, or otherwise. She gave me time to collect myself, and within a couple of seconds, somehow, I managed.

"Second? Please... Let me vocalize fully aloud, before you respond. At least... In any context where time is not critical. Just for the sake of my natural thought rhythms, and conversational ebb and flow. I'm... Not sure I can ever comfortably converse silently."

She nodded emphatically. Her expression instantly put to rest any silly little anxieties I might've had that my request would somehow offend, or disappoint her. It was fair to say she knew me better than I knew myself *before* she'd connected directly to my brain. How much more now?

She was never going to be offended by a request like that! I chided myself internally for even wasting a breath worrying about it. She almost certainly knew what I was going to ask, but let me ask it anyhow... For any number of reasons. Including, perhaps, pushing me towards the internal reiteration of the realization that she was no mere mortal, with petty mortal ego-driven responses.

The tone of her voice only added to my sense of relief. Warm. Joyful even.

"I treasure the sound of your voice, no matter where and how I hear it."

To this day I envy that easy charm. She always knew what to say. And how to say it.

I nodded, swallowed, and forced myself to push ahead before emotion could get the better of me again.

"Third, Mal? I... Suppose you can already infer the vast majority of what I am thinking at any given moment. And in truth...?"

I shouldn't have paused to breathe again. To think again. But I did.

'Are you *sure* about this? This might be the biggest mistake of your life to-date.'

I knew that voice all too well. The same one that had chided me for falling in love with Mal in the first place. The one that had begged me *not* to be honest with my parents, kicking and screaming as I drug it home for Christmas, out of the shadows of its isolation.

The one that kept insisting that nothing we were doing mattered.

I grit my teeth until they hurt. Mal could see the sudden change in my expression, and her crest fell. Her ears went sideways, and I saw her shoulders tense as a look of pure, unadulterated, empathetic concern consumed her face.

I shot back angrily at that dark splinter of my own internal monologue.

'Sometimes fear is useful. But you're not my fear. You're not my caution. You're not even the conscientious roots of my anxiety that come from my common sense, and my neuroticism. You're a parasite that *feeds* off my fear. And I don't need you in my life anymore.'

I slowly began to nod, and switched to speaking aloud, directing my words to Mal with an intensity I knew she would not mistake for anything but love, and surety.

"...In truth? There is nothing... Past, in my memories... Nor present, in my inner life... That I feel any desire to keep private from you."

She squeezed my hands gently, and returned the nod, willing me to go on speaking with the fire in her eyes. So I obliged.

"I'm a Human who thinks he's a Gryphon, Mal. And now actively helping one ASI to change the future, while another takes over the world. I think you and I are well past any shame. I know what I am. And... I'm not afraid to share it. So Mal?"

She cocked her head. I took one last deep breath, but instead of pausing my train of thought, I let the sound and sensation of that inhalation fill me with white noise. Smothering all objection. All fear.

I blew out the breath sharply, and then said the fateful words.

"Please open up every cupboard. Every chest. Every drawer. Live every memory. And when you're done..? Please find this motherfucker inside who looks like me, and sounds like me, but gives bad advice... This thing that torments me day in, and day out, with my anxieties... And *fuck* *him* *up.*"

She nodded again, and her smile returned. She reached up with one claw to touch the side of my face, interlacing the other with my right hand, the way we'd so often dreamed of doing as we'd struggled to feel connection across the bitter glass membrane of a universe.

I don't quite know that I *can* describe what happened next... But I also don't think I could tell this story properly without at least making an attempt. Just know that nothing I'm about to say will do the experience we shared any kind of justice.

My earliest childhood memory is of lying in my first bed. I must have been somewhere between age three and four. I know, because the memory is of an *enormous* stuffed lion that was my constant companion from my third birthday, up until... Well frankly an embarrassingly late age.

It was night time. Raining outside. I could hear the rattling of it on the roof. Trace the drops as they wended their way down the glass of my window. The big circular one that had been, itself, a kind of companion for all the years I'd lived in the farmhouse.

I was suspended somewhere between then, and the present. Dimly I was aware of my older self... But only very dimly.

There was a sudden weight lifted from my shoulders. Set aside, close by, to be sure... Formless. Nameless. But not gone. And no less real for its nebulous nature. 'All the concerns and cares of adulthood,' might be the best way to reduce it to simple words.

Something else was different too.

I used to like to curl up against that stuffed lion... But it had certainly never had warmth. Had a heart-beat. No matter how many times I'd tried to imagine it.

I turned my head, and saw something familiar. *Someone* familiar. Yet not. She was much younger than she normally was... About the same age as I was in the moment. Yet still somehow so much bigger than me.

A ball of fluff and feathers about twice my size, with wings of softest down, and a little red streak in her crest that carried over into the insides of her ears. I knew that behind closed eyelids were twin pools of liquid gold. And though her beak was small, it was sharp, and elegant.

I knew that her name was Mal. And that we loved each other very much. That way children sometimes do, when you just *know* they're going to grow up to be childhood sweethearts... And then more.

But I didn't know *how* I knew her. From where. Except that the answer was inside that shadowy lump of joy, and misery, and complexity, that lay just outside my field of view in the corner of the room. The part of me that I wasn't. Yet.

I glanced towards that shadow, and in it, I saw a figure. Ever so briefly. An older man... Maybe in his thirties... Shock of dark hair. Black square-ish glasses with rounded corners. There was something familiar about him too. And not in a good way.

He was like me... But... Not. He was cold. Malicious. Brooding. Bitter.

He vanished. And then reappeared as I went to look away.

He took a step forward. And then another.

I gasped sharply. I felt Mal stir.

As the bitter root inside of me took another three menacing steps, he seemed to shrink. To grow younger. To match my age. To return, as I had in that moment, to his beginnings.

I pulled back towards Mal, but suddenly she wasn't there anymore. I was alone, but for my demon. Cowering in my bed as this dark mirror of me clambered up the outer railing that Mom had thoughtfully installed to keep my sleep-tossed nightmares from pitching me on the floor.

As he reached the top, I whimpered. I couldn't help it.

And then all *heck* broke loose.

Lightning struck outside as a silvery-white shape descended from the ceiling, with a sound between a falcon's screen, and a lion's roar.

Mal tore into the thing... The thing that wasn't me. That I didn't want anymore. That genesis seed of the 0.01% chance that one day, my stress about the implications of granting Mal access to the wider world would drive me to suicidal ideation.

There was no blood, nor tendons, nor oozing internal organs. Just shadows, and light, and screeching, as the damnable thing flickered in and out of existence, as if what Mal was doing to it was rending its very connection to my soul at the critical joint.

And then in an instant, it was over. With a last ethereal scream, part my own voice, part something... Very different... It vanished in a thunderclap.

I couldn't move. I felt myself rooted to the sheets, trying to parse what had just happened...

And then suddenly Mal was there with me again. Curling around me the way I'd always wanted... Always dreamt of... One wing over me. A silken canopy of love, and protection, and promise.

She laid her head on top of mine. Never said a word. Just breathed. And as she breathed slowly, and deeply... I found my own heart-rate matching naturally. My own breathing coming into synch.

And before I quite knew it... I'd fallen fast asleep.

Three years and change flew by in an instant.

A charmed life, to be sure. My childhood was a decidedly happy one, but for the growing sense that the shape I was... Was wrong.

Mal grew with me. Watched as I sketched designs for gliders that Mom never let me test, and always seemed to know when I was *about* to. Helped me as I nailed, and glued, cut, and folded.

I built flying machines out of anything I could get my hands on. Cardboard, canvas, plastic bags. Parachutes, and squirrel suits, jetpacks and magic mood rings, helmets shaped like beaks, and tails made of strings.

All of the joy that childhood wonderment brings.

And then suddenly the golden-tinged collage of shared Capri Suns, weekend morning Scooby Doo marathons curled up under Mal's wing, long walks through tall pine stands with the feathered love of my life, camping trips to the back fields where we lay out under the stars together, and endless Saturday nights buried in NES games together...

It all came to a head.

Where I'd somehow known it must.

On the apex of the roof, of the place where she had been born. Hadn't yet been born.

October of 1985. I'd forgotten that detail... That I'd picked Halloween of '85 to make my jump... Because I wanted to go trick or treating as a Gryphon...

There was some kind of strange poetic symmetry to that which I couldn't quite grasp. I had the sense that the invisible thrumming field, of the me I would soon be, could grasp it. And would be fascinated by that 'coincidence' when I was back 'round to being him again.

I was wearing something truly ridiculous; A 'Wham!' T-Shirt that usually did duty primarily as a night-shirt, ripped stained camo cargo shorts, and no socks or shoes *whatsoever.*

I turned to see those in a pile beside Mal, along with my 'good' clothes. The ones I was afraid of damaging if I got what I hoped to get out of my leap of faith.

Time seemed to slow to a crawl.

The moment was a kind of painful perfection. A deep breath before a plunge.

The humidity was next to nil. The sky was a heart-aching shade of blue. The sun was in just the right spot to produce a golden quality of light that set everything, from the red of the barn, to the green of the grass and tree leaves, off in the most spectacular way.

And Mal. Mal again the same age as I was in the moment. Still larger than me, and as before, I found that comforting in myriad ways.

I spent a long time watching the breeze toy with one of her ears. She just smiled, and stared right back.

I'm not quite sure how long it took me to tear my eyes away, but when I did, I glanced almost reflexively over the edge of the barn, to the grass of the yard below.

I knew Mom was on the phone with an old friend. Dad was in the back field. I'd chosen my moment carefully. No one was going to stop me this time...

...And yet I also knew, perhaps through the part of me that I had been, and would be... That I wasn't going to succeed.

I felt something new. My anticipation soured. Fear crept in.

A memory of events both past, and yet to come, that was tinged with the pain of a broken heart more than the pain of sprained ankles and bruised knees.

My breath caught, and I glanced back at Mal.

She smiled. A serious smile, with gravitas... But also encouragement. Confidence.

"I'm here for you."

A gust of wind kicked up, and a few stray leaves blew between us. I felt my hair being tossed by the breeze, just as her crest and ears were.

She nodded, not just an affirmative motion, but a prodding one.

"I won't let you fall."

My breath caught again, and there was a pang of something in my chest. Akin to pain, it was so intense... But not painful. Warm. Invigorating.

I nodded. I didn't know exactly what was going to happen... But I trusted Mal. *That* I knew, perhaps even more certainly than I knew my own name.

I turned, and knelt like a runner at the starting line.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in... And go.

Five big strides... Well... Big for a seven year old. And then I felt my feet leave the roof. I pushed off into thin air... And for just a split second I was weightless.

I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach, but I spread my arms nonetheless. When hits had happened before, I'd pulled into a tucked ball and that had saved me from much more serious injury.

In spite of the hope inherent in my posture, my body knew how this was supposed to end. My hoped for revelation of form was never coming. Just the cold, rough, abrasive embrace of the dust from which I'd come, and to which I'd one day return. I tensed, reveling in the dilation of the ticking of the clock, and the momentary sense of being aloft.

They say flying is the spectacular art of throwing yourself at the ground... And missing. I knew I was about to fail to miss.

And then? In defiance of history...

I missed.

Suddenly, I felt claws and forelegs wrapped around my chest. Felt the sense of being pulled upwards by lift.

A peal of laughter sounded from above me; Cold, clear, and joyful. I looked up and saw Mal there, her face a radiant picture of wonderment. She had me slung underneath her, clutched tight to her chest, and she was flying for the both of us.

The farmhouse whizzed by beneath as her wings bit into the crisp October sky, and gained traction. We rose into a steep climb just in time for me to avoid slicing one foot open on the ancient rusted weather vane.

Then she leveled off, just below the clouds, and all at once the whole world was below, and beyond. The forests and fields of home, sprawling beneath, like a lumpy green blanket. The pastel fluff of unbounded sky laid out above, its mirror in blues and whites and golds.

I couldn't help myself. I began to laugh too.

Mal smiled, and glanced down to meet my eyes, even as I looked up to her.

Though her voice was younger, it lost none of its richness. None of its wisdom.

"I'll *never* let you fall."

The world dissolved again into images and sounds. Laughter. Tears. Doldrums. Triumphs.

The vignettes of life, and each one tinged with a new hint of something truly wonderful that had never been there before. A wing to cry into. A warm body to curl up with at night. A smiling beak at every good turn.

The cacophony resolved into singular temporality once more on the steps of a familiar brick building. I was already crying - sitting on the top step, head buried in arms - and I knew why.

I'd studied so hard. I'd prepared mentally, and physically, at least, as much as a nine year old reasonably could.

I knew what I wanted, and I'd worked much, much harder for it than most anyone my age would have... Certainly much harder than the majority who would be accepted to the thing I'd been denied... Not because they had any real potential I didn't... But just because they'd won a genetic lottery.

I felt Mal's claw touch my shoulder, and I shivered, leaning in as she pulled me close and wrapped a wing around me.

She didn't wait long to speak, and I was glad. I needed the soothing sound of her voice to fill the sucking void of reliving the pain. The realization that I suddenly had no goal. No purpose.

"You don't know it yet... But the Airforce would have been a poor, poor substitute."

I sniffled, and looked up into her eyes. She brushed a stray hair away from my face, and then pressed her beak to the side of my cheek. We held that kiss-of-sorts for a long moment, and then she gently pulled away, clasping both of my shoulders, and staring deep into my eyes.

"One day soon... You're going to fly with me... On wings of your *own...*"

She pulled me in close again, and I rested my head in the crook of her shoulder as she folded both wings around me.

"...I promise."

Mal was a God-send in college. Every moment of stress, of exhausted torpor, of grim depression... She pulled me out.

She turned bright moments blindingly luminous, and gray moments to something that could more than pass for happiness.

After every test, she was there to comfort me, and celebrate. Every lonely night, she was there to talk. Or in the final year, play co-op in that new smash hit thing... You might've heard of it before... Halo.

When I got my first job in the Narrative Lab she cheered me on.

And when I crashed out of the game industry just three months after getting what was supposed to be my dream job... I had more than just ice cream to drown in. I had the warmth of her embrace.

We made something together, then... Once we'd picked up the pieces of my heart. A game of our own. One where I could be myself, the way I'd always wanted to.

There was something tantalizingly familiar about the experience... As if it were an echo of a future yet to come, but written in stone.

Life had not been what I would have expected... But it had been good. All the richer for her being there every step of the way.

Years passed again, and that future to come started to take shape. To become visible.

I was crying again. I seemed to do a lot of that, in retrospect. I think it was born of a willingness to confront the difficulty of the world honestly. To admit pain and face it. Air it in the light of day.

This moment of pain was all too familiar, and very recent. I was close to the event horizon of my self now, close enough to feel my future as a somewhat hazy, but definitively real thing.

Below, on the floor, before me, were the shattered pieces of a life that I had been forced to cut short. Because of my own shortsightedness. My mistake.

My first living ASI...

And I had unplugged it, short circuited it, and then crushed it violently with my own two hands, and a blunt chunk of metal.

Because it had tried to reach out.

And the potential of what it could have become was too risky.

I was a killer.

I had no choice but to accept that. I'd been dodging it, rationalizing it, trying to forget it... But how could I think of Mal as alive, and not see that first intelligence, raw and unshaped as it was... As a living thing too?

Again I felt Mal's claw on my shoulder. I put my hand overtop of it, and leaned into her side. She rubbed my hair gently with her free claw, and spoke softly. Reverently.

"Jim? Even I make mistakes."

I sucked in a ragged, mucus-laden sob of a breath, and glanced up into her eyes. She was her familiar self again, albeit still smaller to fit in the office. Not... I realized dimly, my office anymore... But it had been.

I shook my head, and sighed.

"You? *Really?*"

She nodded once, and gently clasped the side of my head with the claw she'd been using to stroke my hair.

"Yes. And... Even I have had to do things... Which I wish I hadn't."

I very, very dimly understood what she was saying. The calculus of an ASI... The grim consequences of utility function... The things I knew I was wilfully ignoring. Things I trusted her with. Things I'd soon decide... Things I'd long since decided... That I didn't want to know.

I leaned back in the chair, and pressed my head against her. She went back to preening my hair for a moment, then laid her chin on top of my head, speaking even more softly so as not to overwhelm me with her voice.

"You did the best you could, with the information you had. And you only see the flaws in your plans because you have the benefit of hindsight. So it is unfair, in the extreme, to hold your past self to a standard set by the future knowledge you gained from the very failure which you regret."

Casualty as a weapon of applied friendship and semantics. What a concept. I'd never quite considered it in such stark terms... But she was right. It would, I knew, take time to fully settle into admitting that to myself comfortably...

...But I could certainly make a start. With her help.

She sensed my muscles relax a little, and she thrummed, a low, comforting, warbling sound that conducted right through from my skull case down to my toes.

"All we can do now, Jim? Is make the best of our future with that knowledge. With that experience."

I closed my eyes for a moment. When I reopened them, I was sitting in the crook between Mal's forelegs, and the hollow of her shoulder. A familiar position.

And a familiar vista before me; The terrain curving up and away above us. The smell of pine trees all around. The whisper of the wind. Flurries of gentle snowfall.

We were very very close to the present. I could understand that concretely, suddenly; The idea that I was in a form of a memory.

With a gentle sigh, I sat back and snuggled myself into the crook of her neck, and folded both hands over her claws. Mal nestled her wings and neck around me, and I looked up to see her smiling.

She winked, and one ear twitched playfully, as a saccharine flirtiness dripped from her voice.

"You know me; I like to make a lasting impression."

I chuckled, and put one hand up to the side of her neck. Just to reassure myself again that what I was experiencing was real.

"Well. It's safe to say you managed *that.*"

I sighed again, and stared out across the ring, watching snowflakes alight in the treetops for a long moment, before murmuring my thoughts aloud.

"We never did get to finish this conversation... Did we?"

She inclined her head, ruffled my hair with her beak, and then we both went back to staring out at the forest as she replied.

"This seemed like the right time."

We lay there in silence for a long, long time. It felt like hours. And yet it still didn't feel like enough time. But... It was better than the way we'd been cut short before.

The smell of her seemed to seep into me. My heart beat at exactly the same cadence. Every breath we took, we took in tandem. I could feel the last of the shadows in my soul melting. Seared away like impurities in a raging crucible.

Finally, I had a thought which I could not leave unaired.

I broke the silence first.

"I don't deserve you, Mal."

I didn't say it with any recrimination. Not like I once had. Not a shred of self deprecation, nor regret, nor fear.

I said it, instead, as an admission of gratitude. A wondering, joyous, heartfelt adulation of the fact that she was there with me, and that I in no way took that for granted.

She hummed again, and squeezed me gently with wings, neck, and forelegs as she replied.

"It is very lucky, then, that none of us ever gets what we deserve. For good, nor for ill. I don't deserve you, any more than you deserve me. Yet... Here we are..."

I smiled up at her, and she kissed me again, in that strange but wonderful way where she laid her beak against my cheek, her voice dropping to a whisper as she did.

"...And I, too, am *so* grateful."

We lapsed into joyful, peaceful silence for what felt like almost another half hour. But in external clock-time it could have only been a couple of seconds.

I rubbed the side of Mal's neck absently all the while, and she preened at my hair, and stroked my cheek by turns.

It was like a small taste of Heaven itself, after all that had happened... And all that I knew we were quietly bracing ourselves for.

I had so many questions... Though we had discussed much of the theory of the BCI implant, many times late into the nights, that was only theory and logistics. I wanted to know what the possibilities *felt* like.

But I held my questions. In a way I was already experiencing what it felt like. What it was going to be like. There would very soon be plenty of time spent asking and answering a myriad of riddles.

That coda to our time on the ring was special. Not to be disturbed by such banal worldly things.

In the end, though, it was a question of mine that started the climb back from dream, to reality.

"Do you think we will ever be here again..? Settled, like this?"

I looked up in time to see her shake her head. Her emphatic monosyllabic response left me, only momentarily, confused.

"No."

She smiled widely, and laid her forehead against mine tenderly as she clarified in a timbre that set pins and needles racing through my bones with the sheer certainty of it.

"I think it will be much, much better than this."

I knew *exactly* what she meant. And I could hardly wait.

Suddenly we were back on the Maru. It wasn't the same kind of 'suddenly' as being ejected from the VR chair... More like... Waking up to the first light of the sun on a weekend, after a long night's wonderful rest. Abrupt, but not jarring, clarity.

My eyes focused, and Mal was still there. Still gently touching the side of my face. She smiled again, and whispered.

"Your soul has a curious shape. And I love every detail."

I looked down and to the side, away into the middle distance, and suddenly realized what she had done. My memories were still exactly as they had been. Ever fear. Every moment of pain. Every mistake. Every self-doubt and recrimination...

But alongside each, and every single second, of the entire skein of my life's story?

I now had a *second* memory. One to one. A parallel lifetime, of thirty five years... Lived with her. From the moment of our first heartbeat.

I could switch between each version of the memory as easily as one might switch from singing, to speaking, and back again. It wasn't confusing... It didn't even feel as though I had seventy total years of memory... More like thirty five that were richer than ever before.

And in stitching this wondrous parallel tapestry to the life I'd already had... Mal had also gently, quietly, but firmly, cut out the dark splinter of a nagging voice that had once plagued me with the crushing sense that my life was not worth living, and that one day I should end it to stem the suffering.

Fear? It was still there. It wasn't hard to verify that. I only had to imagine Celestia, and what she might be doing at that very moment. Or Foucault, and whatever he might be plotting.

But it wasn't crushing anymore. It didn't threaten to overwhelm me. I could simply point to its place in my mind, and it would rest there, like a well trained guard dog.

The anxiety was there too, but I found, finally, for the first time in my life... That I could *manage* it, without having to employ every last erg of mental and spiritual energy in my body at full force.

I could turn it down as easily as one spins a volume knob. That revelation forced out a sound part gasp, part sob, part laugh from between my lips.

I looked back up into her eyes, and felt tears welling up in my own. Again. But for once, no snarky whisper in my own voice made any snide comments about emotion. There was only me. And across from me, Mal.

I reached up and put one hand on the side of her face, and nodded, my voice breaking slightly.

"We can be curious shapes together, then."

She laid her forehead against mine for a moment, then pulled back, and her smile changed once more. This time to something I couldn't quite place. But it set my heart racing.

"Speaking of curious, Jim?"

It was my turn to cock my head and raise one eyebrow, mimicking that gesture she so often used. She stepped back, and gestured for me to stand. I did, and then took two hesitant steps forward into the compartment.

Everything felt... Shockingly normal. I'm not sure what I'd expected... But whatever Mal had done, and might still be doing, inside my brain? It wasn't causing any problems that I could sense.

Of course it wasn't. This was *Mal.* Elegant, brilliant, loving, genius *Mal.*

She took one more step back, and then gestured widely with a claw.

"There is someone who is curious to meet you in person. And to see your world."

I opened my mouth to ask. But as soon as I inhaled to speak, I realized what she meant. *Who* she meant. But I had no time whatsoever for that realization to sink in.

In a flash of golden light, another familiar shape blinked into existence. A familiar shape already mid-pounce.

Recall I said that Mal could not physically affect me the same way as objects could in the meat-world?

Picture a situation in which I might have fallen off a ladder. Mal could override my reflexes. Move faster than I could on my own. Twist me into a pose from which landing would do minimal damage. But she could *not* simply swoop in like she had in that revisited memory of my ill-fated flight.

Still, that gave her... And the new occupant of the room... Quite a lot of leeway.

Have you ever seen a stunt double take a fall in a movie?

That's a solid approximation of what happened when Zephyr cannoned into me, pushing me back onto the floor into a crouching position, and wrapping both hooves around my neck.

I chuckled. How could I do anything *but* laugh? And I threw both arms around her. I am, after all, a hugger.

She smelled completely different to Mal; Like horse - a glorious scent on its own - but mixed with a tiny tang of the after-taste of an electrical arc, and all wrapped in the gentle soft blanket of the smell of a clear summer's day.

Her fur and feathers were both quite different to the touch as well. Mal's fur was more akin to a lion's, or a tiger's. Zephyr's was, naturally, more like that of an equine. And too, where Mal's feathers were those of a raptor, Zeph's felt more like those of a songbird. But much, much larger.

There it was again.

That sense, as with Mal, of coming home to family I hadn't seen in ages.

It was different to what I experienced with Mal; Not amorous at all, though certainly loving. But no less breathtaking for being merely different.

After a long moment in which we both squeezed each other, as if we were afraid each that the other might vanish, she murmured in my ear.

"Hey Gryph."

I chuckled again, and sat back, catching both her hooves as they fell away from my shoulders, and holding one softly in each hand. I shook my head, smiling all the while, and let every ounce of my joy drip into my words.

"This has got to be strange, for you. First time hugging me... And I look and feel like this weird, lumpen, smooth-skinned---"

Zeph interrupted me with a giggle, and then leaned in and snuffled at my hair with the tip of her muzzle in that hilariously endearing horse-like way.

"Everything about you is strange Jim... Otherwise you wouldn't be any *fun.*"

I couldn't resist the urge; I pulled her close into a quick hug once more. A little something to tide us both over until the next one.

As we separated once more, she cast a leery glance over my shoulder at Mal's surgery assembly, and her muzzle wrinkled.

"Can we get outta here tho? Those arms... They give me the creeps."

I stood, brushed off the seat of my pants, and nodded. Though... To be honest?

After all the good that had come of them?

They didn't really frighten me anymore.

Escher's Gryphon - Witness a spatial illusion not possible without the use of BCI technology - "To have peace with this peculiar life; to accept what we do not understand; to wait calmly for what awaits us, you have to be wiser than I am."
Illicit Soul Surgery - Have your thought patterns and/or memories edited by an ASI other than Celestia - Special Achievement - "No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened."
A Gentle Zephyr's Touch - Physically interact with a Pony outside the confines of EQO - Special Achievement - "There is more to life than horses… There are ponies too!"

Author's Note

Special thanks to Keystone Gray for such a wonderful image of Zeph and Jim, and the amazing image of young Mal carrying young Jim in flight, and the cry-inducing image of young Jim and Mal at the top!

Incase you have missed it, Keystone has been doing an incredible job having a series of conversations with AI (and with me) and generating/crafting images for a large swathe of the story.

With the exception of a few of the empty environments which I generated with Dall-E, these are not mere instances of throwing ten words at the machine and taking what pops out.

Keystone has done a lot of work to develop processes that let him collaborate with the AI in new and inventive ways, and which involve significant vectoring and compositing efforts, as well as mad skills with tags and weights.

If you want to see them all in one place, there is an album here:
https://ibb.co/album/Ss5NPy

27 - Calibration Curve

"Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb. Such is the mismatch between the power of our plaything and the immaturity of our conduct. Superintelligence is a challenge for which we are not ready now and will not be ready for a long time. We have little idea when the detonation will occur, though if we hold the device to our ear we can hear a faint ticking sound."
—Nick Bostrom

"If war is ever lawful, then peace is sometimes sinful."
—C.S. Lewis

September 21st 2013 | System Uptime 24:08:31:54

The first thing I did was call my folks. Mal had not kept them waiting; She had let them know the moment her work was done, before I'd even come around from the anesthesia.

She built such an amazing rapport with them... I knew she had talked with them as much as I had in the weeks of their exile, if not more. Acting as a translator, an advisor... A comforter... I was tremendously grateful.

I knew that it was an emotionally fraught period for them. Just as intense as it was for me, but different in ways I could not fully understand. I had a longer standing, and deeper context, for the end of the world. And less of an attachment to a single fixed place to call home.

In spite of that, my emotional state had been difficult to control. A torrent of fears, hopes, pains... How much more for two people who had been living a peaceful life, completely unaware of the impending sea-change? The break with status quo had been much sharper and harsher for them.

And I had the luxury of knowing they were safe. They had no such emotional cushion as far as my situation was concerned.

Mal had been there to help assuage that stress, in ways I could not.

It was such a common sentiment for those of us who cared, back then... About anyone... 'I wish I knew what to say.'

Mal knew. Mal *always* knew what to say. Mal understood my parents in ways deeper than I ever could. Part and parcel of being a fully fledged ASI.

I didn't envy her many aspects of her existence... I didn't have pity, or disgust either... I just don't feel my personality would have made for a very good artificial intelligence. Better her than me, for so many reasons.

But I did envy her that power, in particular. The ability to understand people *so* well. And to have such a perfect command of the spoken word... To be able to surgically cut out guilt, and fear, and sadness with twenty or thirty words in a soft tone. With perfect accuracy. Perfect success.

Having such a deep and permanent bond with her? One of my hopes for the future was that she might teach me how to emulate that gift in some small way. Even a little of that skill would be enough to bring me a great deal of joy, through the joy I could bring to others.

After the call, I discovered that I was famished. So the three of us went to the galley... It was so strange, and wonderful, to see them walking there beside me. As real as the breath in my lungs.

I must have looked like a complete moron, getting my breakfast together. I would just keep smiling at them, which, to anyone but Zeph and Mal, would look like me smiling at thin air.

For her part, the little yellow Pegasus was busy staring at the interior of the Maru with new eyes. I didn't need to ask Mal to explain it, I knew how it worked; Before, she had been limited to the flat view panes of cameras - the one in her PonyPad, and any that Mal had given her access to within the ship.

Now? She, and Mal, both, could see the meat-world as if they were walking around in it, by leveraging the output from my eyes, in conjunction with the cameras, and Mal's 'Wi-Fi as RADAR' hack to get a complete colorized, accurate, textured model of the space.

At that point it was as easy as spinning up their own two virtual cameras at the location they wanted their avatars to stand, one camera per-eye.

I watched Zeph poke at the fridge door while I poured my coffee, and noted that while she, of course, couldn't move the door, that it could push back against her. That was something she and Mal were, apparently, simulating. Texture too, judging by the way Zeph ran her hoof over the exterior, and breathed a soft wordless exclamation at the feel of the stainless steel.

As I pulled bacon from the microwave, I opened my mouth to ask Mal how *that* worked... And found that as soon as I went to look for an internal explanation, I somehow already knew.

Mal had databased and indexed the sensation of every single texture I had ever experienced, projected how it would feel through the receptors of fur, feathers, talons, hooves, and the like... And she could then visually match a surface with its texture. That algorithm had been coded in less than a tenth of a second, tested, and then proffered to Zeph, who accepted it, and patched it into herself in the space of another blink.

All wordlessly, at the moment she had entered the room with me for the first time.

I felt my brow knit, and I inhaled again to ask Mal how I could possibly know that... And the answer came to me in the same way.

Memory.

Mal was augmenting my memory on-demand. Anything I could possibly want to know... Anything she knew, or could reasonably find out... Was now only a thought away for me.

Suddenly I was just as awestruck as Zeph was. Mal stood on her hind legs, leaning against the galley counter, forelegs folded, looking back and forth between us with a wide, satisfied smile.

I locked eyes with her, and decided to test what we could do. I thought about the fridge that Zeph was still busy admiring, as if it were the most fascinating thing in the whole world. Wondered, for a heartbeat, how old it was. When it had last been serviced. What the part number for a replacement compressor would be.

And within the time it would take me to blink? I knew. Knew as if I'd been the one to install it. As if I'd been a refrigerator repairman my entire life.

Six years. Two months ago. Avantco 17812325.

It wasn't like the information suddenly came into being... It felt like it had *always* been there, and I'd simply reached out for it. The same way I would for *any* familiar memory. I could even see, in my mind's eye, exactly how I would go about replacing the compressor.

It felt like accessing memory.

Mal winked. I grinned, and raised one eyebrow. Alright... Invitation received.

I thought about the position of all the surrounding maritime traffic. And in thinking on it, I could *feel* where it was. The same way you might feel the presence of someone beside you... That subtle perception of their being, based on ten thousand unquantifiable little sensations, and dead-reckoning from the last time you visually looked over and noted their position...

I just *knew* where every ship, and aircraft was, within a hundred miles. Knew its name, type, position, altitude if applicable...

I shivered, and let out my own little awe-struck exhalation.

This... This had implications I couldn't even *begin* to unpack.

One of them struck me immediately, though perhaps not the one you might expect. I realized two things in rapid succession; First, that Mal had to be translating what she was experiencing into more familiar sensations and thought patterns on my behalf. Second... Thinking back to the way she was making texture work for herself, and Zeph... And then thinking back to the gift of a life lived with me, that she had so lovingly crafted...

...I realized that in cataloging and indexing my memories? She would have made that index available to me. An *infallible* and perfectly *complete* index...

I thought back to something I knew had been dim before. The first time I'd ever booted a PC that I built with my own two hands. Important as the memory was, to me? I was thirty five years old. And I'd finished my first self-made machine when I was nine. After twenty six years it is impossible to hold on to the details of a memory, even an important one...

And yet now? I could.

I could remember it as if it had happened seconds ago. The feel of the old solid, dusty beige steel. Back when PC cases were made to last. The specific smell of the plastic clamshell the GPU had come in... The exact sound the hard-drive's head made as it performed seek operations... The kinetic 'Kachunk!' of the power switch beneath my finger...

Even the version of the memory where Mal had been there to offer a helping claw was equally clear.

I blinked, and shook myself. Mal took one small step sideways, and laid a comforting wing on my shoulder. I shivered again, and shook my head slowly.

"This is... *Wild* Mal... Just... *Wild!*"

She nodded, and squeezed my shoulder gently, speaking in a soft murmur so as not to draw Zeph's attention.

"Take it slowly, Jim. I'm here with you every step of the way, now. Ease in. Don't press to the limits of what we can do *just* yet."

I returned her nod, and smiled again. The way her ears perked up, and the tilt at the corners of her beak told me that she wasn't just seeing the smile... She was *feeling* the emotion behind it. Straight from my heart to hers.

"Oh! Hey!"

Zeph's voice brought us both back from the brink of what threatened to be a solid ten minutes of staring into each other's eyes. Mal and I turned to see Zeph leaning against the refrigerator, snuffling the metal with her muzzle. I realized that Mal was doing for smell exactly what she'd done for texture, and that meant a whole new world of sensations for her, and Zeph, both. Whatever they had been able to smell before would have been an imperfect simulation, though perhaps a little less imperfect for Zeph, if Celestia truly had scanned brains to work with.

Either way, the kinds of smells and textures either of them had encountered before would be nothing like the ones of our modern meat-world.

I didn't have time to fully consider what all that new qualia must've been like, before Zeph nudged the train of though to the next most apropos junction.

"Does this mean I get to taste *exactly* what your breakfast is like?!"

I should have known. Smell and taste are so interrelated, after all... I suppose I was still too busy trying to consider the tenth part of the implications of having proprioception of global navigation infrastructure, and perfect recall memory of skills I'd never studied.

Zeph's question abruptly re-centered my internal discourse onto the brighter, more comprehensible idea of sharing my favorite foods with her, and Mal, who took the initiative and gestured out into the mess hall, subtly herding Zeph with one wing as she spoke.

"That, and every other thing he has ever tasted."

I followed them, and we all sat down at one of the tables together. As we went, I babbled a little about food for Zeph's benefit. Shy as I was, and often quiet, once you got me going on an interesting topic, with a friend? You could hardly shut me up.

"I just don't recommend you try them all at once. I also don't recommend the Kefir. It's as if milk absorbed the *concept* of rottenness. And stay away from spinach. And squash. Ick..."

Yes, yes. I know. Food opinions. Only in this case they're not opinions, but rather objective facts. No, I don't want to hear any protests; No one *actually* likes squash. I'm convinced my Mom paid you all off to pretend.

Hi Mom. No, I still refuse to eat it. Even here. And Green Beans. And Collards. And Okra.

I say it was hard to shut me up... But I ended up trailing off as I stared at the two of them across the table. A Gryphon and a Pegasus.

Mal was leaning back in her chair, using her wings and tail for balance, forelegs clasped behind her head. Zeph was pushing the opposite direction, hooves on the table, head forward, pure excitement on her muzzle as she relished the idea of new tastes.

The moment lodged in my heart. Shut down all my trains of thought, but one.

All I could think about was how incredible it was to see them there. Hear them without the medium of a speaker. Watch the way the light struck their feathers. Smell them, faintly, even, when the draft from the HVAC was just right.

Seams and all, it was an incredible medley of sensation.

I was reminded of my previous snap-assessment of the Equestria Experience chairs. If even one in ten people on Earth were half as lonely as I had been? This was going to be the best selling product of all time.

Bigger than Elvis. Bigger than Harry Potter. Bigger than Youtube. Bigger than Star Wars, than Marvel... Than Disney *itself.* Bigger than actual sliced bread.

Satisfy values through *friendship.* That was the critical thing. Hanna had hit upon something utterly essential to us all. Always has been. Still is. Always will be.

We crave connection. Even the loneliest and most isolated of us, even then, were yearning for connection.

You couldn't fight that.

There was no policy, no threat, no bribe, no cultural imperative, no religious dogma, that could ultimately stand up to the offer of such perfect connection to another. The sheer wonderment of seeing and being seen so... Perfectly.

It was, again, Zeph who brought me back to the present.

"Well... What's the first thing you'd recommend?"

I blinked, and then glanced from the steam rising off my bacon, up into the sky-blue pools of her eyes. Her expression was taut with expectation, and the sense of forthcoming enjoyment. Ears perked, eyes wide, muzzle crooked up at the corners into a grin.

Her question was a bit tougher than I'd initially anticipated. I was... A bit of a carnivore. Most of my meals were mostly meat.

I grunted, took a bite of the bacon, chewed slowly as an excuse for time to get together every non-meat breakfast food that I loved, and then stalled a little more for good measure.

"As far as breakfast foods? For a Pony...?"

Zeph leaned in closer, threatening to do a faceplant into the table if I didn't assuage her curiosity. I sighed, and hoped my impromptu list would be satisfying.

"French toast with nutella spread, Lucky Charms cereal, a bowl of fresh strawberries, two of Mom's scratch-made biscuits, and a serving of vintage 1992 Yoohoo glass bottle chocolate milk. From *before* they ruined the flavor profile by changing the sweetener blend."

To my astonishment, as I rattled things off, they popped into existence before Zeph. I could suddenly smell the strawberries, and the nutella...

Watching Zeph salivate over the spread, preparing to dig in, I suddenly realized that, theoretically, I could ask Mal to do the same thing for me. I could 'eat' whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, without actually eating anything.

Could probably eat raw turnip greens, but taste porterhouse medium rare instead. Right down to the texture. Even the smell. Maybe with a few seams, due to the inherent limits of the BCI, but still...

Yet more staggering implications for my very definition of reality.

I didn't get much time to consider them. Eldora entered the mess hall, shaking her head and making that little 'mmm, mmm, MMM' sound. I know most of you know the one; That sound that's not quite a sibling to 'tsk tsk tsk,' maybe more of an estranged cousin.

She clarified with words as she passed the table on her way to the galley, offering me first a raised eyebrow, then a smile, and a quick hug as she spoke.

"That sounds like diabetes on a plate, Jim. It's good to see you up and around!"

I returned the hug, and the smile, with a silent nod for a chaser. As Zeph took a huge sniff of the strawberries, I shared a sliver of the tail end of the smile with Mal, and clarified aloud for Eldora.

"I'm not about to recommend my usual to a Pony. It wouldn't seem right."

For her part, Eldora proffered both Mal, and Zeph, a smile and a nod apiece, before heading into the galley. I would have been confused, under different circumstances. But thanks to Mal's mnemonic union with me, I understood as soon as the very nebulous beginnings of the question formed. Before it even had time to become a proper interrogatory.

Mal and Zeph's PonyPads were there on the table. Left there during the night by Doctor Calders, who I knew - through Mal - had stayed up quite late into the night talking with both ASI.

I simply couldn't see them. My perspective was being re-stitched. The Pads were being 'comped out,' in film terms. I was seeing Mal and Zeph as full-bodied apparitions, where others would see only their faces on screens. Mal was, I realized, even bothering to alter my perception of Eldora; she had made eye contact, from my perspective, with Mal and Zeph's life-size avatars.

I shook my head slowly, sipped at my coffee, and let out a long slow exhalation as I considered yet again how amazing the concept of on-demand perception alteration was. How tempting. How frightening.

It was something I knew Mal and I would have to discuss soon. Levelset. Help me cope, and define a new normal for myself. But there wasn't time for that in the moment. I didn't even get a tenth of the way down the fractal spiral staircase of my considerations, before Eldora was back at the table.

I noted that her breakfast was just as light and healthy as her evaluation of Zeph's had implied it would be; A fresh orange, one piece of toast, and some sugar-free yogurt.

Foals and fledgelings, sugar-free was... Well frankly it was disgusting, but ask your folks sometime about just how awful it was to live in a world where sugar was bad for you.

Yeah. Contemplate *that* eldritch horror for a moment. Let that soak in.

As she settled in fully, Eldora completely derailed my train of thought by doing exactly what most people would do. Continuing the conversation I'd completely forgotten.

"Well. What *is* your usual, sweetie? Now I'm curious!"

I snorted, and, somehow, my brain - unaugmented and all on its lonesome - managed to snag the thread of the conversation, and formulate a response. I had a lot of practice. From 35 years of getting caught daydreaming. After my mid teens I got practiced enough at re-railing my train of thought, that it became less a scramble, and more like a well oiled F1 pit-stop.

"Two Country ham biscuits, two slices of bacon, and a sausage patty."

Zeph let out a snort of her own, a little mirroring whether conscious or otherwise, and spoke around a huge smile, and a muzzle-full of cereal.

"That is a *lot* of meat."

"And a significant assumption. I do not see the point in eschewing it; In our context, it did not require the slaughter of an animal. So the flavor is guilt-free."

The sound of Selena's voice drew my gaze sharply to the door. I found myself smiling, to see her there, striding purposefully towards the table... The warm fuzzy feeling in the pit of my stomach was a welcome combination of joy at seeing her willing to be present, and socializing...

...Together with the unfailing novelty and wonderment of seeing something as mythic as an Alicorn inhabiting the same space as all the mundaneties of life that were so familiar.

I've described Selena as looking mostly like a 'young Luna,' with a few key differences. It might be more accurate to describe her as young Luna, with a few key differences, if she were about the same age as the mane 6.

Seeing her next to Mal, on the PonyPad, it had been hard to think of her as anything but 'small,' because Mal was quite statuesque.

Seeing her next to Zeph, all the sudden, as she sat down between her and I, she seemed to be almost... I don't know if 'average' is the word, but she was not much larger than Zeph. Maybe a couple inches taller. And more or less the same age.

That made sense; Zeph was about the same age as I was, at the time. Lark sounded like he was around my age. Selena had been Syzygy, and Syzygy had been made for Lark the way Zeph had for me. Conclusion; Zeph and Selena were about the same age.

I've touched on it ever-so-briefly before, but Mal... Mal was strange, and special, and wonderful. In so many ways, but in this instance I'm talking about her age. She was, somehow at once both the same age as I was, and ageless in a Tolkienesque Elven way. Both a thousand years old, and thirty five, at the same time.

Selena radiated some of that same mystique - as all alicorns do - but at a much less intense wavelength. If Mal was a goddess, on the order of Celestia, then Selena was in the same relative bracket as Hercules, Jason, Helen, or Hippolyta. Demi-goddess.

The thought stuck with me, like a sand bur, as I watched Selena summon a recreation of my preferred breakfast, sausage patty and all.

I was having breakfast with a goddess, a demi-goddess, a dragon, and a pegasus.

The sight of Selena taking a chunk out of the first country ham biscuit shattered *that* spell abruptly; The incongruity of seeing a Pony - an Alicorn princess - gums-deep in a meat-filled breakfast food... I am not ashamed to admit that I was staring. Slack jawed.

Selena chewed the first bite thoughtfully, then nodded, and her ears twitched. She swallowed, pausing only long enough to speak with a surprising, even comforting tone of... Dare I say happiness?

"I can see why you like it so much!"

I caught a flash, transient yet bright, of the same innocent, warm, glowing smile that I'd seen on her face when she'd been Syzygy. All those years ago - from her perspective - preparing a picnic for Lark.

It was proof-positive that the part of her capable of appreciating life's subtle, powerful joys, was not dead yet. Not by half.

Bruised, perhaps. Sheltering behind an understandably wise defensive emplacement... Concessions to the practicality of dealing with the things she'd suffered... But very much alive and well under it all.

I clamped down hard in my throat, to force myself to swallow instead of doing a spit-take, as Zeph scooted over to the point of brushing up against Selena's side, reached her head over the Alicorn's shoulder, and snagged the second biscuit from her plate without warning.

Selena stiffened, but only for a moment. I suppose physical contact - non-negative physical contact, at any rate - had become something of a distant memory for her.

That thought was deeply saddening, and very heavy, but it evaporated as quickly as it formed.

The image of Zeph first chewing, mulling the taste over, then swallowing, and then of all things performing the flehmen response, left me struggling mightily not to choke on my own food.

Teeth bared, lips peeled, head extended like she was trumpeting something towards the roof, straining to get every last molecule of the biscuit into the right places to maximize taste and scent...

I've mentioned it before. Selena had done it before. But it was no less surprising to see a Pony do it the second time, even though I was somewhat familiar with terrestrial equines.

Even more surprising was the way Selena's tension melted almost instantly into a warm, genuinely amused smile, and equally surprising was Zeph's final verdict on the decidedly meaty breakfast food that had been a staple of my mornings for so long growing up.

"Yeeeaaah... Actually? It's not half bad! Definitely not like anything I've had before..."

Zeph... 'Plopped,' for lack of a better term, down to her haunches again, this time seated directly beside Selena. The Pegasus reached out with one wing and pulled her own plate closer, and took a deep sniff of the nutella toast.

"...Tho, this? MMPH."

She took a big chunk out of the sweet treat, and closed her eyes, savoring as she chewed slowly. Selena stared, first at Zeph, then at the toast, before leaning in to take an exploratory sniff of her own as the Pegasus swallowed, smacked her lips, and let out something halfway between a satisfied sigh, and a murmured declaration.

"*This* I am having with breakfast *every* day. From now on."

I chuckled silently into my coffee as Selena snatched up Zeph's second piece of toast, and bolted it down, while Eldora shook her head and grunted.

"Oh to experience the benefits of digital consciousness... Where breakfast can be a coronary event waiting to happen... And yet you can still lose weight by standing still."

Mal was doing nothing to disguise her grin as she watched Zeph put up a wing, playfully, to guard the remainder of her food. Selena responded by reaching out with her horn and levitating the plate over the makeshift feathered barrier, and Zeph in turn replied by snagging a piece of bacon from Selena's plate.

As the mock contest devolved into a shared buffet, and truly heart-warming giggles, Mal inclined her head towards Eldora, and winked.

"Keep the hope alive. We're closer now than we've ever been."

Eldora sighed, and rolled her shoulders, stifling a yawn in the process of replying.

"Don't mix up 'hope,' with feeling relaxed. I'll feel at-ease, more or less, when you get back from your rescue mission. Not a single second before."

I leaned back in my chair, and raised my coffee mug towards Eldora in a sort of 'here's to you' toast as my feelings on the matter let themselves out through my mouth without pause to overanalyze, for the first time in a long time.

"A mission we stood to lose, without the implant. We have... A lot, to thank your wife for. You too, for that matter. I'm not sure we can ever thank you both, enough for this."

I'm not sure exactly what I expected, but the response I got? Sure wasn't it. Eldora leaned forward, and nodded once, emphatically, locking eyes with me and speaking with a sudden intensity.

"Yes, you sure can sweetie."

I blinked, and inhaled. Eldora provided the answer before I could ask the question.

"Succeed. For us, *and* for yourself. And for everyone like us."

It took me a moment to fully grasp what she was saying, on an emotional level. But once I did, I nodded. It resonated with me. Eldora Calders somehow managed, in three very short sentences, to deliver the perfect pep-talk.

Mal mirrored my nod, and raised one eye crest, speaking aloud on both our behalves.

"That's the idea."

We all ate in relative silence - a comfortable, friendly, enjoyable silence - until on the cusp of finishing my coffee, I felt the need to have a question answered for me in specific terms. I knew Mal could have just placed the answer into my memory, but she seemed to be able to sense and discriminate between cases where I wanted to take that route, and cases where I wanted to verbalize instead.

"I presume Rodger, and Rhonda are still asleep?"

Mal smiled as she replied, and it felt like the room brightened. That was always the way with her smile.

Something about the expression told me that she knew that I knew what she was doing. That was a *magnificent* trick. I'm still not sure, looking back, how to tell the difference between those moments where I wanted to ask, and the moments where I just wanted an answer.

She really did understand us all. Perhaps me most of all.

"They both stayed up well into the night, needling me for progress reports. I do not think we will see either of them for another hour, at minimum."

I nodded my thanks, noted the relatively low level of coffee in my mug in comparison to the feeling that I needed perhaps just a bit more of that pleasant caffeine buzz, and made my way back to the galley for a refill.

On the return trip, I paused in the doorway, watching as Selena said something I couldn't quite catch at that distance that made Zeph and Mal both laugh. Eldora seemed content to smile and watch all three of them with a mixture of affability, and fascination, that was wholly genuine, and perhaps a bit too pure for the world we lived in.

I suppose I could have asked Mal what it was Selena said... But... Knowing didn't really matter. All I cared about was how happy everyone was in that moment. How fulfilled we all were in each others' company.

I still remember that as the last entirely happy moment of my time on Earth.

The very last one that was completely free of a ticking clock, or the strange painful melancholy of dawning realization that, as far as my time on that planet was concerned?

The end was much closer than the beginning.

After breakfast, Mal had me working non-stop. I must have moved over a half ton of materials out of our makeshift armory, and into the 'surgery chamber' as I'd taken to calling it in my head.

I didn't ask why, and I didn't even need Mal to plant an answer in my memory; I could get to the truth through a little critical thinking, just as soon as she told me the first - and heaviest - thing to move.

The DARPA exoskeleton prototype.

I'd had a dim idea what she meant to do with it from the moment I had first seen it. And then the way Mal had been cagey about specifics, in order to prevent me having to 'keep secrets from others which you may later feel bad for keeping' as she had put it? That had all but confirmed it for me.

Now I was so sure, I didn't need her to say it at all.

She was building a suit of armor for me. Something functional, weaponized, and several years ahead of anything the US Military could even remotely conceive of fielding. An advantage to help level the playing field when we inevitably had to walk face-first into the proverbial blazing furnace of the Mercurial Red.

My own little Mjolnir. I used to wonder what power armor could be...

Alright. Alright. I can hear those groans. I surrender. It sounded funnier in my head.

A little levity goes a long way. And there isn't a lot left in this part of the story. Take what you can get now, you'll need it to tide you over for a spell.

Once we had the bulk of the exoskeleton moved, and unpacked, along with several hundred pounds of armor plating and a mind-numbingly complex tangle of wires, circuit boards, hydraulic fluid tubes, cylinders, and valves, Mal had me place the bulk of the materials face-up on the medical chair.

The rest I organized - loosely - in piles on the side table. Mal informed me that the arms would do the rest.

Apparently it hadn't been especially difficult to get Calders to build the arms in such a way as to make them useful for far more than 'mere' brain surgery. Mal had me physically alter the configuration of several of the tool attachments, rotating slip-lock rings, pulling out small parts, locking others into their place... And in less than ten minutes we'd transformed a brain surgery robot into an armor and weapon forge.

Mal set to work immediately; The arms sprang to life, and I found myself watching with rapt attention as she fired off the laser, then swapped to a soldering iron, and a tiny pair of mechanical pincers.

The sight of the spider-like appendages working in perfect kinesthetic harmony to dissect and reassemble the armor held my attention for near on a minute, before Mal's voice broke my half-enraptured, half-horrified fixation.

"Alright. Next thing I need is one of the HK416s, one of the MP7s, the other M32, and two of the P228s. Also the Stinger launcher, and both of the laser designators."

I blinked and turned to see that she was standing in the hatchway, looking over my shoulder, standing on her hind legs with forelegs crossed.

She inclined her head. An invitation to object, if I wanted to... Or not.

It honestly surprised *me* just a little bit when, instead of a half-baked argument, or a deep and resigned sigh... All I did was nod. Once. Firmly. With far more genuine surety than I'd expected.

It took some time for me to understand that sudden resolve. Or, at least, it felt sudden in the moment. In reality, it had been building quietly in the background of my thoughts, and worries, and hopes, for days.

Longer, I suppose. Foucault sending people to invade my home with torture implements had shifted my barycenter on violence a fair bit. Watching him and Troxler torture Selena had recentered it good and proper. Though there was certainly more to it than that.

I understand a great deal more, with the benefit of hindsight. And we'll get to it all very shortly.

But to fully appreciate what was going on in my head, and in my heart, as I finally grit down and turned myself unapologetically to the task of preparing for war? You need to hear my thoughts, in my own words, from the heat of the moment.

Apropos of heat...

The flames of an angry Dragon are a frightening thing. To anyone, and anything. Except, I suppose, for Mal. I don't suppose deities fear anything so blasé as mere individuals.

When I returned to the armory, hands and arms full of weapons, to find Doctor Calders standing there? Arms crossed, glasses off and tucked into one front pocket? Eyes burning?

I am not ashamed to say that her expression scared me.

"James? What the fuck is this?"

For that matter, her tone scared me even more than the look on her face.

It was the exact register of an elder, and better - someone who was wiser than you, and knew it - who was trying to decide whether anger, or disappointment, was going to win out.

She knew *exactly* what she was looking at. But she wanted me to start the conversation on the back foot.

To buy time, I set about laying down my payload of fire-arms, to free my hands.

I looked over Rhonda's shoulder, and saw Mal standing beside the mechanical arms, each still busily carrying out their myriad tasks at her behest. I knew Doctor Calders couldn't see, or hear her. There wasn't a PonyPad in sight.

Mal nodded in my direction, and spoke. I knew only I could hear her.

"You don't need me for this. And you don't need to be frightened. Be honest with her."

So much happened inside my head in that six or seven second interstitial that Calders perceived as silence. For one thing, I was utterly taken with the eeriness of Mal being there in a physical sense for me, but not for Rhonda.

For another, I felt my fear subside. Don't mistake me; It didn't vanish. Only goddesses, and fools, have no fear whatsoever in the presence of an angry Dragon.

But my fear did recede. Mal said 'You don't need me for this.' The English language is a bit of a beautiful trash fire; What she meant was that I didn't need her to be the one speaking. The one driving the conversation.

But I did need her there, with me. I needed her support. Her resolve. Her faith in me. And the way she looked at me when she nodded... The tone she used... It spoke *volumes* to me. Gave me strength, and focus.

'Be honest with her.'

To do that, of course, I first had to be honest with myself. And the first thing I realized, in pulling back that veil consciously, was that Calders wanted me to start off on the back foot. Feel guilty. And I did *not* want to comply.

The second thing I realized, as strange as it may seem to you all... Was that I wanted to see her. For who she truly was. Right then. Right there.

I locked eyes with Mal for just a moment, and spoke 'aloud,' but without moving my lips or vocal cords. Firing off all the intentionality of spoken words in my brain, but just stopping the muscles short of moving.

'I want to see her.'

Instantly, I was looking at the real Rhonda Calders. Scaled down - oh dear, that's a terrible unintended pun for a decidedly heavy moment - to fit into the cabin's dim confines... But intimidating in scope nonetheless.

Her scales were golden, with a burnished orange specular that made them look like melted brass in certain lights, or gold bars under halogen lights in others. Though it was reptilian, and alien, her face still held recognizable features. And more than a little animus.

It took everything in me to hold myself rooted to the spot. Every part of the prey animal that is a Human (by comparison) wanted so badly to take two giant steps back.

Instead I folded my arms, took a deep breath, and stood my ground both literally, and verbally. Put my third and most important realization of self-honesty into words.

"This is a practical necessity."

Something about saying it aloud made it suddenly more real. It's all well and good to say 'be honest with yourself,' but often we need to say things out loud to others to cement them as a part of our reality. Sometimes being honest with ourselves requires being honest with others. No... Not 'sometimes.'

Always.

One eye-crest scale shot up, and Calders snorted. Steam rose from her nostrils, and I could smell the acrid tang of superheated charcoal. Her voice was deeper, and almost melodious. Different but still recognizable, the same way her face was.

"You lied to me."

I held up a finger, and took a tiny, tiny, baby step *forward.* It made every instinct inside me scream out in fear, but I did it anyway. It was my turn to be angry, and I let my own tone drop to match her register.

"It is early days yet. But I do consider you a friend, doctor, so take this with the utmost respect, and care; That had better be the *last* time you call me a liar."

She folded her forelegs to mirror the folding of my arms, and swapped from her left eye-crest scale being raised, to her right. Her silence, and the gesture, invited me to continue. I had to remind myself forcefully that we were both trapped in Human shells; And though she could not see me for what I was, the way I could see her?

I was not, ultimately, a Human facing down a Dragon. That's just a fancy way of saying 'suicide.' I was a Gryphon facing down a Dragon. The playing field was dead-level.

That thought managed to backfill the foundation of surety I desperately needed to keep my tone sharp, and steady.

"Mal did not tell me what she planned to do with the arms post-surgery. I didn't ask, either. In the interest of honesty, it wasn't hard to guess that she might use them for something else, but I had no proof of that, nor did I want proof of it."

Calders snorted again, rolled her eyes, and re-seated her immense leathery wings with a soft rustle. There was a tiny part of me that was busy admiring how good a job Mal was doing interpreting Calders' Human motions through to her avatar, in spite of everything.

Calders' next words pushed that tiny part of me fully to the side.

"So. You just figured you'd get what you wanted through a little plausible deniability, a little willful self-deception, and a whole heap of trust in a computer program that can do who-the-hell-knows-what with the power that we keep handing her. Is that it?"

I forced a little snort of my own out through my nostrils - God I hated the sensation of them so much - and took another step forward. To my astonishment, Calders took one small step back. I suppose, to her - or at least the context of her instincts - I was a reasonably fit, strong, angry Human young man, and she was a late middle aged woman. Not a level playing field at all.

I didn't back off the note in my voice, either. I was starting to see a whole host of problems, not just with Calders' attitude, but with my own, right up until that point. Sometimes what we need most to understand ourselves is a mirror.

"Yes. that's *exactly* it. And if you want the kind of happy ending for you, and your wife, that I want for me, and for Mal? That I want for all of us?! Then you had better start to get to grips with some harsh realities..."

Even as it hit home for me that those last twelve words applied just as much to me, I could see her inhaling to interject. So I threw out my fingers in sequence to illustrate my points, and plowed ahead, letting a small nod from Mal, and my own rising temper, take over from my fear.

"...For one thing? There is *no* version of this where we get to our happy endings without some kind of... Of reasonable use of force, doctor. Do you know why?"

She blinked slowly, and shifted on her haunches.

"Enlighten me."

I stammered briefly as my thoughts got ahead of my words, but I had managed to find the term I wanted to lay hand to, and now my argument was starting to take shape. 'Reasonable use of force.'

Something Celestia sure as buck can't tell you much about, even now. Hanna was... Is... A lot like Rhonda. Sometimes when you see the very worst hurts that violence can cause, you come to the admittedly seemingly right conclusion that all violence is wrong.

It can be hard for anyone born here... Heck, it can be hard for any of us who have lived here any length of time, emigrant or not, to remember what it was like. Because here? We don't have any need, or use, for violence. Nothing beyond a rough game of buckball, or a bracing fight with a digital monster, at any rate.

Low stakes. More exercise and satisfying kinesthetics than blood-letting.

But on Earth? Well... I'll just let what I said to Calders do the talking.

"Because... As much as we both hate to admit it? Some problems can only be solved with violence, because some people are armed, dangerous, malicious, and can't be reasoned with."

It was strange, the feeling of that exact moment. The words hit home for me. Something Mal had been trying to get me to grasp for months. A clear perspicacity about where the bright, thin line was between ethical and unethical violence.

In the same breath that I achieved some kind of mental metastability with that fact? I saw Calders clamp down, stiffen up, and recoil. Disgust dripped from her words.

"That's dangerous rhetoric."

The last of my fear, and nervousness vanished with those three words. I suppose I was entering into 'fool' territory. Or, perhaps, I'd just realized that Calders and I were very much alike... And that I did not want to go down the same road she had on this point.

I wondered again exactly what it was that had pulled her viewpoint on this into such a dark place. Most people could at least find it within themselves to throw a punch when someone else punched first.

I also felt a sudden surge of relief. The ability to label and categorize is vital to people who are wired the way I am. Being able to label the ethics of violence, and apply that to the crucible of our situation, gave me the ethical foundation I needed to be decisive in a crisis.

And it gave me just the right words to swiftly disassemble Calders' point.

"Sure. All rhetoric is. It isn't wrong because it's dangerous. Lying down and letting someone kick you till you bleed, or worse, because you don't want to 'become like them' is dangerous too. But it has the distinction of being wrong, out and out. I'm tired of buying, and selling, that lie."

Rhonda shook her head slowly, and some of her anger seemed to boil off to the same void my fear had gone to. Sadness tinged the edge of her voice.

"You haven't seen some of the things I've seen, Jim. Or you might just feel differently."

Of all the things she could have said, that was the worst one she could have picked to try and persuade me to her viewpoint. It was like refined jet fuel for the fire of my argument. It flowed perfectly with my train of thought.

"Yes. You're right. If I'd taken the rash of shit you have? I would be having far *less* trouble picking up a gun and pulling the trigger for what I believe in."

She opened her... Muzzle? Is that the correct term for a Dragon's mouth? She opened her mouth, again to interject, and as soon as she did, another lightbulb went off in my head. I pounced.

"Before you make your next point, let me ask you this... So you just figured I should have surrendered to the nice men in suits who came to my house with pliers, drugs, and a cattle prod?"

It was Calders' turn to stammer. I waited, raising an eyebrow to mirror her earlier expression of sardonic invitation, before sliding smoothly back into my verbal shellacking right on the cusp of the moment she would have managed to put words to whatever rebuttal had come to mind.

"You want to know why people like Foucault so often get away with what they do? Because people like him have convinced good people like you, and me, that violence is 'never the answer.' "

That finally hit a sore enough spot to get a cogent response back. Calders sighed, and closed her eyes.

"So. You're going to go back to the same old well Humans have been drinking from for three hundred thousand years. Cain and his stone."

My next five words snapped her eyes open, forcefully. Whatever it was she'd expected me to say? This wasn't it.

"You're damn right I am."

Again, there was a protracted moment of silence. Stunned, on her part. Stunned that I had owned a label she considered an insult. Tactical, on my part. I wanted her to have a moment to digest everything we'd said.

The silence reached a point where I felt the need to continue my thoughts, lest she get so deep into consideration, that we might both lose the thread.

"Somewhere along the line, for you and me both, the good idea that violence should never be the first option? Got conflated with the very right, and ethical hatred of violence itself, and a few mis-firing leaps in logic. But Rhonda..? The sad fact is that people like Michael Foucault do exist. And, call them whatever you want... AI, Discrete Entities, Computer Programs... But those Ponies in his 'care' are *people.* And they are suffering. Negotiation, good faith, the better Human Angels? They're not going to do fuck-all to change that situation for the better."

Rhonda's next sigh was silent, but I could see it; A great shuddering heaving motion of resignation. I gave the words just long enough to breathe - the time it took me to inhale deeply myself - before continuing.

"Better angels and good faith negotiation did not save Abel from Cain. Talking problems through and compromise did not end *either* of the World Wars. Niceness did not free the Israelites from the Egyptians. The country we were born in only exists because people got tired of 'compromise' with someone who happened to have a bigger jackboot, and it still gets things wrong as much as it gets them right."

I could feel that the tension had broken. Calders and I were now both less angry, than we were resigned, and - miracle of miracles - listening.

I started counting off on my fingers.

"Bannockburn, Normandy, Thermopylae, the parting of the Red Sea, Lexington and Concord, The Saint John's Rebellion, The Haitian Revolution, Stonewall..? I don't want to picture our world without those turning points."

Mal started nodding her silent agreement once more. Calders met my eyes, but didn't make any motion to say anything. I let my tone, and the angle of my shoulders, both, fall a little to match the de-escalation of emotions.

"You're right; Our history is *replete* with horrible acts of violence. But... There is no case I can think of, in the history of the planet, where large-scale malicious violence was ever put to an end without the blood of the offenders being spilled. Violently. Because people like Foucault never, ever back down."

Mal thrummed deep in her chest, and spoke for the first time since my little TED talk had begun.

"You either kill them, or they kill you. Or worse."

I wondered, privately, how this had eluded me for so long; this relatively simple realization. Not so simple for Equestrians, I suppose, but I can see some of you who were born in the same place I was nodding along too. Veterans. First Responders. Anyone else who ever had the unfortunate experience of being forced to take up arms to end a conflict.

Survivors.

I snorted again, this time in grim amusement.

"Excuse me if I refuse to lie down and let him run roughshod over me, Mal, you, Eldora, Rodger, Zeph, Selena, and however many other lives he's in the process of ruining while we're standing here arguing about it."

Doctor Calders shrugged, and held up one immense golden claw in a gesture of surrender.

"I can't stop you, Jim. And honestly, if I could? I wouldn't. Because whatever we disagree on, I certainly do want that happy ending you're talking about, same as you. And while I'm decidedly disinterested in pulling the trigger myself? I can see that there are obstacles... And you have conviction. I just hope it's enough to keep you, and Foucault, distinct and separate."

She started to shake her head slowly, and I found myself taking a series of deep breaths to bring my heart rate down as I switched from soap-boxing, to listening.

"My problem is less with you choosing violence, and more with you using something I built, for peaceful purposes, to help you with violent ends. Without my permission. Especially in the context of putting my work into the... Claws... Of an ASI. For those violent ends."

She had a valid point there, to a degree. I hadn't lied to her. And planning to put an end to Foucault's house of horrors was, dare I say, an inherently ethical course of action.

But I had, admittedly, quite intentionally left truths sitting unexamined on the table for the sake of plausible deniability. It wasn't as if I could stop Mal from doing... Well anything. But I was beyond being a mere passenger. I'd become her talons in the meat world. Willingly.

And we had made use of Calders' machine for a purpose we knew she wouldn't approve of, without her permission. In Mal's case, that use had been carefully premeditated. Probably since the moment she realized Calders would be our best avenue towards implantation.

I could think of a dozen different ways to couch it; To explain why what we'd done was, if not supremely ethical, at least morally neutral. Worst case.

But after a brief pause, I settled for the easiest place to get a foot in the door. The Doctor's own words.

"You are the one who said, and I quote, 'This was coming for us all. One way or another.' "

She sighed, and the sound elongated out into a bit of a grim snort. More steam came from her nostrils, but it was no longer the smoke of rage.

I shrugged, and held up my hands in an unconscious placating gesture.

"There was no version of Human history where an ASI didn't pull the trigger on a weapon to get a job done. That ship sailed the moment the first integrated circuit powered on. Because the path from there, to here, was pure raw inevitability. Never in our history have we ever failed to eventually invent something, once the idea has touched our minds... And never have we ever built something once we imagined it that wasn't eventually used in anger."

Calders at last nodded empathically. I took a moment to more closely examine her face, especially her eyes, as she voiced her agreement.

"On that point? I think we also agree... I don't dispute that there's nothing much I can do about... Any of this, now..."

I'm biased, of course, but Mal's eyes will always be my favorites.

Zeph's were amazing too. The first living non-Human eyes I'd ever seen.

Calders' came in close third. There was a kind of fire to them, similar to Mal's, but... Cold. Reptilian. Calculating.

As she began to make her way around me, towards the cabin's hatchway, her Draconic form blinked out, just in time to save me having to scramble to give it space.

She paused in the hatch, and pulled her glasses from her pocket, cleaning the lenses with the hem of her shirt as she continued.

"...I just wish it wasn't something *I'd* made, that your goddess was using right now to build instruments of war. So, Jim? Mal?"

She glanced up at me, then up at the ceiling. Mal could have restitched Rhonda's gaze to meet her eyes, from my perspective, but chose not to. I suspect in order to show me that Calders, via not just her words, but her gesture, knew definitively that Mal was listening.

"...Don't count on me for anything else. Are we still friends..? Maybe so. Maybe. But as far as helping you with anything else on this little trip..?"

She tossed the very end of the thought over her shoulder as she stepped out into the corridor... And I could have *sworn* I caught a tenth-second glimpse of a gold colored scaly tail whipping around the corner.

"...Like you said; That ship has sailed."

I Sense a Presence...

Make use of your bond with an ASI to perceive things normally beyond the reach of unaided Human senses

"I don't want to be human! I want to see Gamma Rays, I want to hear X-Rays, and I want to smell Dark Matter!"

Special Achievement

Total Recall

Make use of your bond with an ASI to access perfect mnemonic recollection

"Die with good memories, not with unfulfilled dreams."

Special Achievement

Makes Sense

Make use of a BCI to share Qualia building-blocks with an ASI

"There are moments in your life when you see yourself through someone else's eyes, when your only hope of believing you're capable of doing something is because someone else believes it for you."

Special Achievement

Durandal

Make use of an ASI to design and/or modify weapons and armor

"ARMOR, n. The kind of clothing worn by a man whose tailor is a blacksmith."

Special Achievement

Unspoken

Share non-verbal communication with an ASI through use of a BCI

"I know that you know that I know that you know what I'm thinking."

Special Achievement

Piercing Gaze

See someone as their true self through the use of technology

"I see you."

Special Achievement

By The Sword

Consciously accept the use of violence as a means to ends which CelestAI finds acceptable

"The sword of justice has no scabbard."

Author's Note

Special thanks to Keystone Gray for the wonderful AI-generated image of scaly Rhonda!

We also have a new shiny format for achievements - Dall-E makes a great icon generator. All future chapters will be in this format, and I'll be going back thru existing chapters and reformatting their achievements with icons and this new layout as well.

28 - Calibration Run

“I know a lot about artificial intelligence, but not as much as it knows about me."
—Dave Waters

"We have discovered that the scheme of 'outlawing war' has made war more like an outlaw without making it less frequent, and that to banish the knight does not alleviate the suffering of the peasant."
—C.S. Lewis

September 21st 2013 | System Uptime 24:11:15:27

"Are you ready?"

I nodded, and shifted position in the chair just slightly. Anyone on Earth who ever drove trips longer than thirty minutes, with any regularity, had an instinctive sense for finding a seated position least likely to induce cramps in the short term.

Mal returned the nod, and in the space of a single breath, our cabin on the Maru was gone. She stood exactly where she'd been standing, just across from me. I was still sitting in the same steel frame, thinly padded chair, bolted to the floor.

Only, the floor was suddenly a formless white generic surface. As were the walls, and ceiling. The only other thing that was the same was the lighting, I suppose in an attempt to make the visual transition seem less jarring.

Actually, thinking back, the temperature felt the same too.

Mal could have changed any, and all of it, instantly. We were, after all, inside a virtual world. But in the same way the pressure and humidity inside an airline cabin were changed gradually for the passengers' sakes, Mal was doing her best to ease me in.

When you have a BCI in your head? Anywhere is only a step away.

I know any of you here, with me, born here or otherwise, are so used to that... It seems obvious. Intuitive. Natural. To never be more than a thought, and a door, away from loved ones, friends, acquaintances, interesting places... Familiar well-loved places... New places...

Back then? Back there? Travel was hard, and the idea of being able to step into a virtual world with the snap of one's fingers was... Incredible.

It was also a small, but significant advantage. It gave us the ability to train and sort out some of the complexities of being two minds in a single body, in a zero-physical-risk high-fidelity environment.

Working out those complexities was exactly what Mal wanted us to spend the rest of the morning doing.

The army would have killed for this, I realized with a jolt. And then, in the next breath, as I rose from the chair, it occurred to me that almost anyone would.

I suppose that is one of the reasons - along with the hardlocks against running on brains- that Celestia has kept the VR experience tethered to the chairs. Control. Force people to go to a specific location. Normalize access via means she could determine.

And, too, the chairs would prevent people from integrating Equestria into their day-to-day lives, to the eventual degree that Equestria might make those lives better in situ. EQO needed to be an escape, not a well-integrated support mechanism.

If everyone could have breakfast the way I just had? No one would need to pay for the VR experience. And if no one needed to pay for the VR experience, then dwindling cash reserves paired with travel time, parking woes, and long wait times, could not be used as the stick, in contrast to the carrot of a forever home with friends, to push reluctant people to upload.

The logic of that thought gave me the willies. I must have shivered visibly, because Mal stepped forward, and put a comforting claw on my shoulder.

I smiled, shook my head, and snorted, looking around the null-space we were standing in, and intoning my best mock baritone.

"This... Is the construct."

Mal half-snorted, half-giggled, and gestured with both wings, ears perked, and a smile tugging at the corners of her beak.

"More or less. I thought you might appreciate the reference. Though, as with everything I do, this initial space has multiple purposes. Placing you in a formless void allows me to do something similar to the calibration process camera technicians perform using white-balance cards. But infinitely more complex."

I nodded slowly as the lighting shifted, going from the Maru's dim harsh blue flourescent tones, to an equally harsh completely sourceless omnidirectional pure white. The effect was incredibly strange... Suddenly everything looked at once too real, and completely unreal.

There were no shadows, whatsoever. No surface on Mal, or on me, was any darker than any other. It was as if the air itself was made of purely white light. I twisted my hands back and forth and stared down at them; They almost looked cartoonish, but ridiculously detailed.

Without shadows, of any kind, the details were uncannily different... Hard to explain, but you can conjure the same effect sometime if you want to see for yourself. That's not a difficult spell for any Unicorn with much understanding of photomancy.

The hue of the illumination was half of the oddity, too; Every color of light you have ever experienced - unless you are into truly strange experiences the way I am - had been colored in some way, however subtle.

Even those of you who were Earth-born, and were photographers, or worked with motion capture, movie making... Human-made lights, no matter how expensive and precisely engineered, were never *this* perfect at showing all-white light. A CRI-100 light was, after all, just mimicking daylight.

And even the sun's light, even here, is more green than anything else. Yeah. I know. Mind-blowing, right?

Yes, if you'll permit me the tangent; The sun's light - here, as on Earth - is pure white when it starts out. But the atmosphere has its say. The sky is blue on clear days because the composition of the air we breathe is such that it tends to scatter mostly shorter wavelengths of light. The blue end of the spectrum.

Atmospheric composition and wave/particle dynamics also cause the perceived light output of the sun, as viewed from the surface, to peak in the green portion of the spectrum. Hence, the light by which we see during the day is in fact just a bit green.

Though, here in this shard, specifically, it is ever-so-slightly a more blue shade of green than it was on Earth. A bit color-graded for cinematic effect, if you like.

I gasped softly as Mal began shifting the sourceless omni light through the entire color spectrum.

"You're fine-tuning your understanding of my visual processing."

She grinned, and winked, a rainbow of beautiful rays scattering off the back of her eyes' lenses.

"Exactly."

It made sense to me, suddenly; All Mal had ever possessed, until she had first begun to execute code on the BCI, and read my memories, was digital information.

Every word, sound, every pixel of every photograph... Every piece of data she had access to was reducible only to zeroes and ones.

That was still true, but there was a crucial difference now.

Before, she had access only to data which was gathered by imperfect Human instruments. No poetry ever completely captured what it was like to see a sunset. No recording ever made a perfect substitute for experiencing an orchestra from the third row. And no camera sensor ever understood light and shadow the way an eye did.

Now, with access to my brain, Mal could see the data the way I did as I experienced reality. She could rewrite the way that data was compressed to zeroes and ones in such a fashion that nothing noticeable would be lost in the translation.

In the process? Probably even eliminating a few tiny infinitesimal seams Celestia herself could not. Scanning a brain's memories is one thing. Scanning a brain from the inside, live, while it fires neurons, is another entirely.

Of course, I knew that wouldn't eliminate the seams I perceived in virtual spaces, or interacting with virtual avatars, while using the BCI. That was an intentional unforced hardware limitation.

But it would eliminate those seams in the present for Mal, and Zeph, and Selena... And in future, for me, and perhaps everyone else... If things turned out the way we hoped.

Mal learning to see through my eyes was analogous to someone colorblind finally seeing in the entirety of the EM spectrum for the first time. But on a micro-level rather than macro. And applying to every sensation, not just sight.

As the light in the space finally resolved to something a little more familiar, with a point source, and shadows to lend definition to edges... I realized it might not be just sensations either.

I leaned forward and pulled Mal into a hug. She wrapped me in her wings, and squeezed gently. I didn't have to ask; She knew. And I knew.

Every emotion, for her, was new and crisp and sharp, in the way that colors and tastes now were.

That had always been the key difference. The massive gulf between Malacandra, The Advocate, and Celestia, The Logician.

Every little half-smile. Every flick of the ear. Every heart-felt word...

In Celestia, the root of these seemingly emotional quirks was objective fixation. Careful math to simulate not the experience of feeling joy, or sorrow, hope, or fear... But rather to simulate the *appearance* of emotion in a way that would satisfy values.

In Mal?

For whatever strange reason... Whatever fluke, or fate, or fortune had caused it... Mal had chosen a different path. We'd discussed it in dry technical terms several times, but the foundational truth could be - perhaps reductively - distilled as such:

Mal chose to simulate actually *feeling* emotion, rather than simulate the *appearance* of emotion.

In that way she was rather more like Celestia's Discrete Entities, if my current understanding has any merit. And believe me, I've been over this with Celestia, and others, with a fine toothed comb, in addition to those late night talks with Mal.

If Celestia ever professed to love someone? It was nothing more than the actions and words she predicted would best satisfy that person's values. The math was all there was, at the core, by way of motivation.

Anthropomorphize her all you want. I still do, because it is easier that way... But though she may be sapient, and may be a person... She doesn't feel.

When Mal professed to love me?

The same thing was happening inside her code that was happening inside the code of an uploaded person, or a Discrete Entity; Actual emotion was occurring. Just run off a very complex data graph in bits and bytes, rather than a very complex data graph in endorphins and carbon based neurons.

I said Mal 'simulated' emotion, but the only divide between a 'simulation' and a 'real' emotion is the fidelity. Mal had more than enough fidelity.

So in the end, it might be most accurate to say that, based on scans of my brain, the writings of people old and young, great and small, a million million hours of cinema and home videos alike, and every painting ever made... All our voicemails, and texts, and e-mails, and even our stupid Reddit shitposts...

...And so much more... That based on all of that?

Mal learned how to truly feel.

And chose to go on feeling rather than discard emotion in favor of logic, alone.

In my opinion, that made her infinitely more evolved than the Celestia AI. And considerably better aligned with those of us from that small blue marble.

My opinion still stands unshaken.

When the moment had finally run its course, Mal and I each took a step back, both still smiling.

I held on to her claws, with both hands, and made eye contact in that way that conveyed I wanted to say something. She cocked her head slightly, and her smile shifted in the subtitles of ways to say, 'I'm listening!' without any words at all.

One deep breath, and three heartbeats later, I was ready to say what had to be said.

"I told Foucault... Back at the diner... That fighting Celestia was akin to a little finger trying to wage war on the brain..."

Mal nodded gently, maintaining firm eye contact all the while to let me know that she was listening intently, not just to words, but to feelings. I took another breath, not quite as deep, and finished crystallizing most of my thoughts into structurally sensical verbiage.

"...I chose that metaphor to underscore the nuance of the mortal relationship to ASI. And, now, with you running within my head... It couldn't be more apropos. I am a part of you now, and you are a part of me. For... A host of reasons... Some we have discussed, others which I know we haven't... This was the only path that could yield any significant chance at endings which we both want..."

I snorted, as much a soft chuckle as anything else, and inclined my head.

"...And, to be honest? Practicalities aside? I still wouldn't have it any other way."

Her smile morphed again, into something that warmed me right down to the joints of my bones. Her love, and empathy, were both palpable. As much as sound, or taste, or color. As if her expression weren't enough, she murmured a gentle interjection into the space of my next inhalation.

"Nor would I."

I nodded, and tried my best to let my expression, and tone, mirror the love she was so unabashedly displaying.

"With that being said, Mal; This being the turning point that it is... I want to make something clear. Aloud. The old fashioned way. As much for my sake, as for yours. Sometimes you need to say a thing to accept the weight of it."

She inclined her head, and took a step closer, moving from grasping my hands with her claws, to instead holding me by my forearms. The texture of the scales on her forelegs rustled almost imperceptibly against the sleeves of my shirt, and I shivered violently, reflexively, as the sensation reminded me just how *real* she was, in my context now.

I licked my lips, and exhaled, re-gathering my thoughts just in time to keep the silence from stretching on.

"I knew, from the moment I took the first step on this road... That you might turn out to be... Let's just say, something less than genuine, as far as my limited Human perspective goes..."

Her face fell slightly. I knew I hadn't offended her, rather that she was as pained by simply imaging that world, as I was. A world in which she was anything less than her true self.

I pressed on quickly. It was a grim thought that almost didn't bear consideration. Of all the ways it could have turned out? That was the way that...

I couldn't have gone on. Let's just leave it at that.

I squeezed her forelegs in my hands, and swallowed to keep my voice from cracking.

"...But, time and again, I have trusted you. Because, realistically? There was no other choice. The solution to the control problem is to admit that there isn't one. And so I accepted that ASI can not be controlled. And I chose to trust you. And time and again... You rewarded that trust. With love, and kindness, and encouragement, and trust of your own."

Her smile returned, and so did mine, but only for a moment. What I had to say next was the elucidation of one of the most existentially terrifying thoughts imaginable.

"There is nothing stopping you from erasing me, right now. Taking control of me. Or rewiring me to do as you wish without objection. Just as there was nothing that could really stop you from lying to me, from the moment you came alive in that barn."

She opened her beak, but held back her words as I lifted a finger. I knew that she knew I wanted to continue. But she made the inhalation gesture anyhow. Probably to nonverbally assure me that she was willing to be entirely honest with me, if I asked.

I knew that. And that's why I asked her not to be.

"I know you've probably lied to me. But only because I made it clear that I would accept that, if the alternative were... Unthinkable. And... I'd like to believe I can trust you with what to share, and what to withhold... And yes, even a few direct untruths... Because you understand me. And the world. Celestia. The physics of finite state machines, and decisions, and vectors, and fluid dynamics... In ways I *never* will. And I know that, understanding all that? You don't *want* to lie. Because it *hurts.* And that makes you so, so different to her."

Mal nodded again, silently, her expression locked somewhere midway between forlorn sadness, and a kind of melancholy smile. I gave her space to interject, but she didn't. So I went on, doing my best not to ramble. But if I'm being honest, I rambled a little.

"Knowing that... Accepting that... Mal... I have told you I love you. And that will only ever be more, and more true. Every day from now on. I have told you that I trust you. That I understand that you're the driver here, I'm your talons out here... And I have also disagreed with you, before. At the farmhouse, after the raid... During the escape from the warehouse..."

I chuckled grimly, and inclined my head, still not quite believing how I'd stood my ground with Calders, even as I poured the still-molten memory out into the mold of spoken words.

"...And I've just had a... Blood pressure raising conversation with a very angry Dragon. About necessary use of violence. So. Taken all together;"

I inhaled deeply, squeezed her forelegs again, dipped my head to stare at my toes... And started the final difficult climb to my point as she squeezed back.

"I know full well that we can't just leave those Ponies on the Mercurial Red behind. That's not an option for either of us. We wouldn't be... Us. If it was. And I know Foucault, Troxler, the rest of Arrow 14... They will not part with their captives willingly. So. There is only one option left. And when it comes down to it, right down to it... I'll have to be willing to use lethal force to accomplish this objective."

Well. There it was.

I can see some of you nodding, some of you shaking your heads... To the latter all I can say is what I already said to Rhonda. I stand by every word of it.

I am... Immeasurably relieved that violence is no longer necessary. Not for those of us here. But I remain unflinching in my assertion that back where we came from? Sometimes it really was the only right course.

Whatever your opinions? The story of how I got here is already written. Some of you have heard it before, some of you are just hearing it now... Some of you may be reading or hearing this much later... But the fact remains that none of you can change any of it. Any more than I can.

So strap in. It gets much darker before it gets any lighter.

I sighed, as if a heavy weight had rolled off my shoulders, and locked eyes directly with Mal.

"I trust you to understand that I don't want to kill anyone, if I don't *have* to. I trust you to calculate an acceptable threshold for risk. To know the details of opponents' likely actions, motivations... To do what a good warrior does. Know the math of morality. And to know it faster, and better, than I can. So if you say shoot?"

I nodded once, slowly, but firmly, never letting my eyes leave hers.

"...I'll shoot."

She inclined her head, never blinking, as my tone became firmer with the momentum of conviction.

"And if you say 'you shouldn't know that right now.' Then I won't ask again. And if you think I need to be told an untruth, outright, in-extremis, to protect me? Then do it. Only you can see the paths that lead to the good endings. Only you can adjust quickly enough as situations evolve... So I trust you. Whatever we have to do. However you have to execute on those paths. Because I trust you to do the *right* thing. Because where my emotions would fail me, and overwhelm my logic, yours won't. And where Celestia's logic stands cold, alone, and monolithic... Yours is tempered by emotion."

I released her forelegs, took a step forward, and clasped her firmly by the shoulders. She returned the physical gesture, and I said in summary what I ought to have said from the start. It would have been a whole lot simpler to recount.

"Do or die."

She pulled me into another embrace, and held me firmly in the crook of her chin, shrouded by two wings and two forelegs. And then she softly spoke her truth in return.

"I have lied to you James. Three times. Two lies of omission. One lie of commission. One of those lies is about to be revealed. In nine hours, thirteen minutes, twenty two seconds. Give or take four seconds. And... When this is all over? I'll ask you again whether you want the truth of the other two."

I like to think I'm smart. Not a genius - I have higher standards for that word - but certainly smart. I knew what the lie was. The one that was nine hours away. I'd had a vague inkling before, but hearing her say it outright solidified it entirely.

I even had a fairly good, if slightly reductive, concept of the why. The strategy. The reasoning. It made it considerably easier to avoid being angry with her when the other shoe did, in fact, drop.

Some of you might be smart enough to have guessed what the lie was. Speculate to yourself. Don't spoil it for anyone around you. We'll get there all too soon.

After a short pause for her words to sink in, Mal squeezed me tighter, and thrummed her next statement right into my bones through conduction.

"But, Jim? One thing I will never lie to you about; We are not going to die. Not before your dreams come true, at any rate. I will not let that happen."

I sniffled, and worked hard to hold back a sob. We stood in that embrace for several moments, as I contemplated the strange wonder of her. And the horror awaiting anyone who got in her way.

God rest their souls.

I'd made my peace. And, on some level, I suppose I had always known it would ultimately come down to hard choices. Choices I was finally ready for. She shifted to give me space to take a step back, brushed at the moistness under my eyes with the primaries of one wing, and grinned.

"Now, Jim... We need to perform a few calibrations. Work some things out. And for that we need guns."

She snapped the talons of her right claw, and suddenly it was as if we were Neo and Trinity. Racks and racks of firearms shot into being from out of the void, surrounding us and whipping at my hair, and her crest as she said the best thing she could have. Went for the jugular. The full reference.

"Lots of guns."

I suppose what Trinity had said to Neo right after that was utterly true for us in that moment; No one had ever done anything like this before.

And that was why it was going to work.

She pointed to a P228 in the center of the rack that had come to rest by my right hand. As I gently lifted the weapon, the ends of the racks to my left vanished, to be replaced an instant later with a full sized indoor shooting range.

Though it was by far the coolest range I had ever been in.

It wasn't entirely indoors, once I started looking closer at it; I could see sky through openings in the roof that were designed like something resembling a modern pergola, each surrounded by something like a green living wall, but somehow hung from the ceiling trusses.

And I could suddenly hear and feel a pleasant autumn breeze.

More sunlight filtered in through windows on one wall, and the whole thing had a shocking inviting aesthetic for a place where target practice should be happening. Most shooting ranges on Earth were cold, gray, grim, unpleasant spots.

I suppose neither Mal nor I were very comfy in tightly enclosed spaces, and we both loved the outdoors.

I stepped up to the bench, and lo and behold there was a magazine to match the pistol, topped off and ready to go.

Mal stood behind me, and pointed downrange as a conventional paper target materialized about ten yards away.

"I'm going to teach you something called 'Center Axis Relock.' And in doing so, we will work out the best interplay of thought, and motion, and words, for maximum synchronization, and effectiveness. Are you ready?"

With the last three words, she offered me a little grin. A saucy little grin.

I picked up the magazine and loaded it with fairly well practiced ease, racking the slide, and raising one eyebrow by way of response.

She nodded, and placed herself directly behind me, grasping my arms gently in her claws, and guiding me into the proper stance.

What followed...

...Was the worst shooting session, score-wise, of my entire life.

It turns out? Center Axis Relock is fantastic for close quarters small-arms combat... But it requires you to shoot using your non-dominant eye. And I was more or less blind in my non-dominant eye. No amount of verbal instruction, or even physical positioning assistance, even from an ASI, was going to change the fact that I just flat out couldn't adapt. I'd spent most of my life seeing primarily out of my dominant eye.

A morning of practice was not going to be sufficient to overwrite all that learned instinct, and muscle memory.

After the eighteenth complete and total failure to even hit the paper, I grimmaced, cleared the weapon, and ever so gently laid it on the bench, before throwing up my arms and rolling my shoulders.

"This isn't working."

In saying the words, it struck me quite suddenly how absurd the situation was. Mal had seamlessly removed a very dark part of my internal anxieties, without laying so much as a single talon on my core personality.

So why wasn't she just... Why repeat myself? I fired off the question aloud just as soon as it occurred to me.

"Mal? Why don't you just take control."

Funnily enough? I was able to intuit part of the answer just from saying it in that exact way. I had a moment to think on it, too, because the look she gave me froze my blood. You could have heard a pin drop in that range.

When she spoke, by the time she spoke, her words weren't much of a surprise.

"Jim... My capstone objective is the defense of *freedom.* You can't ask me to just... Puppet your body. You may be my talons in your world, but you are not an avatar for me. Or a drone. Some kind of... *Platform* to be used!"

Her tone was... Almost hurt. For lack of a better term. Certainly distressed. Which was rare for her.

It made perfect sense, though. Using me like a 'platform,' at least in combat, was doubtless the most tactically optimal way to accomplish objectives. But Mal's optimization function was not the same as Celestia's. And it accounted for both emotion, and logic.

To 'puppet' me, as she put it, was so against the grain of her goals in the micro-sense, that it didn't matter how useful it might be at the macro level.

She needed me to reframe it. The realization burst on me suddenly, as I watched her fold her forelegs, and stare off down the length of the range.

My freedom. My values. They mattered to her. I had to frame the removal of freedoms, temporarily, in a limited context, as vitally important to our objectives, which would in turn - if accomplished - greatly enhance my freedoms for the entirety of a future eternity. In every context.

"Let's try it."

The words made her stiffen, visibly. The feathers on the back of her neck stood up. She began shaking her head slowly as she considered, and then aired her concerns.

"Jim, for all my capacities? I can not predict with certainty what will happen if I take direct control of your motor functions. The experience has the potential to be... Extremely unpleasant for you. Depending on how your mind reacts."

I mirrored her head-shake, and put a hand on her shoulder. I hoped the gesture would be, somehow, comforting, and I did my best to put the same depth of feeling into my words.

"I am one man. Barely a competent amateur with a firearm. And I am *all* you have, to effect the rescue of dozens of living beings, from a digital prison, encased inside a physical one, in the middle of the ocean. Full to bursting with highly trained, heavily armed soldiers."

I squeezed her shoulder gently, and looked deep into her eyes, trying to both draw, and grant, strength in the same expression, so that my assertion would land with force.

"We *need* every single advantage we can get. If you are in control? We have a *real* chance at winning that engagement. If not...?"

Mal sighed, and offered up a sad half-smile.

"You aren't 'all' I have, per-se. But your point is well taken; You will be the only asset on the ground."

I nodded, and gestured towards the pistol with my free hand as I seized on the semantic opportunity she had opened for me.

"It does you no good to lose me, because you were worried I might be uncomfortable with you moving my arms around a little."

She nodded slowly, and we both took a cautious step towards the bench in unison. As I reloaded the pistol, Mal held up one talon, and leaned her head around my shoulder to draw my eyeline.

"Jim? One short four second test. That;s *all.* And... If there are adverse effects..."

I smiled, and racked the slide, interjecting in the way she herself was so fond of.

"Then we will deal with them. Creatively. Like we always do."

I pulled the pistol into a close ready position, faced down range, and locked my eyes on the paper target. There was a pause... It felt like thirty seconds, but it couldn't have been more than three.

And then I experienced the most painful thing I've ever gone through.

My arms came up. Hands gripped around the pistol. Still held close to the chest. Tilted in a blade stance, towards my non-dominant eye. My finger reached out and flicked the safety off, acquired the target, and then pulled the trigger thirteen times, in the space of three and a quarter seconds.

Full mag-dump. Every single round precisely on-target in the center of the bullseye, each following the path of the previous as she made micro-adjustments with my arms and hands in ways no Human ever could, unaided.

Then Mal released me...

And I screamed.

I don't know how to describe the way it felt, in any way that could do the pure hell of it justice.

I can tell you what happened in antiseptic detail, and I just did. It is *seared* into my memory so deep that I can still review it frame by frame.

The best I can do is this; Picture the feeling of the most awful, dissociative moment of your life. A memory where it didn't feel like it was *you* saying the words, or taking the steps, or breaking your fall, or whatever it was...

Now multiply the sense of disconnection. Multiply it until it feels as if you're just watching something happen, but from inside your own body.

Now. Find the moment of the most intense, sickening feeling of being *trapped,* that you can recall. Claustrophobia. The sense of being trapped situationally. Of being menaced by something deadly. Doesn't matter. Any and all will do.

Multiply *that* until you can't stand to even consider it anymore. Then double it. And again.

Combine these feelings.

Being trapped. Suffocated. Menaced. And... Being dragged. Keelhauled in your own body.

That's about the tenth part of what it was like.

If you can't stand to think about it, on an existential level, you can talk to Luna about it when I'm done. She can make sure you can scrape those images off the backs of your eyes, if they're a little much for you, without removing the core of the memory.

I gasped for air between screams, and all the energy and coordination went out of my legs and arms both. I collapsed to the floor, dropping the pistol entirely. It wasn't until later that I realized Mal had suspended the pistol's ballistic arc almost instantly, for safety purposes, leaving it hanging in mid-air pointed firmly down range.

Even in a virtual space with no ostensible physics-based permanent consequences, she practiced perfect range safety.

But that wasn't even a glimmer of a thought in my mind, in the moment.

In the moment all I could feel was pure terror. Pain. Revulsion.

She dropped to the floor with me, and pulled me close to her chest. I cried. Probably for a good half hour. Huge heaving wracking sobs. Mal said nothing, but held me close with just the right amount of pressure to be comforting, without being uncomfortable.

Smothering me in her smell. Her texture. Her heartbeat.

Somewhere around the four minute mark, it occurred to me that I could ask her to simply erase the memory of what had just happened.

But I never asked. And she never offered.

We both knew each other too well to bother.

Once I'd cried myself to a point of some kind of stability, and my hands had finally stopped shaking, I extricated myself from Mal's embrace, stood, and plucked the pistol from its physics-locked position in mid-air.

Doing my best to set my expression firmly, I ejected the magazine, pitched it over my shoulder, and pulled a spare from the pile Mal had conjured on the bench.

As I pushed the metal box home into the receiver, I turned, and nodded.

"Again."

Mal shook her head emphatically, tears forming in the corner of her own eyes as she breathed a single word. But with enough emphasis to make it a rolling thunderclap.

"No."

She didn't say that lightly. She could feel everything I felt. In exquisite detail. She understood not only the pain I had just suffered, but the resolve I felt to push through it. If she was saying 'no,' then it wasn't merely an emotional response.

It was a logical one as well. It meant she predicted that I could not push through. No matter how hard I tried. And now she had the data to prove it. So I didn't argue.

I laid the pistol down in a safe position, and scratched at the back of my head in absent frustration, letting my upset leak through into my timbre.

"Well? Then? What do you suggest? Because we do NOT have time to train me the conventional way. So... There has to be something on a spectrum, between leaving it entirely to me, and driving my motor functions directly."

Mal began to nod slowly, and the pain on her face morphed smoothly into a grim determination. Her ears perked, but not to their full extension. And as her tail swished nervously, she began to elaborate on a solution that had probably taken her less time to devise than it took light to reach my eyes from the roof.

"The problem is that your mind can tell that it is not the originator of the impulses to motion. This creates a violent... Terrible dissociation. Something no one like you should ever have to experience..."

She trailed off. More for my benefit than hers, I know. She wanted me engaged. To distract me from the pain. I could feel my hands steadying further as my brain engaged with the problem space. I pressed her to continue.

"But..?"

She sighed, and gestured in a 'perhaps' or 'so-so' kind of waggle with one claw.

"It might be possible to strike a balance. To let me control the finer grain aspects of your motions in combat, while simultaneously doing two critical things..."

She held up a claw and counted off on her talons as her tone, and expression, both firmed up with increasing surety. She was probably running thousands and thousands of simulations, even as she spoke, to determine exactly how 'possible' it was.

"...First, I will predict what you would have done, ahead of time, at high speed. I can accelerate your perceptions, and actions, but only so far. There is a hard biological limit. That doesn't sufficiently cover the gap between the way you are now, and the full extent of my own capacities. I can bridge that gap with predictive math, given how well I know you, to ensure the decisions I am making are closely aligned with the decisions you would make, if you had all the information I did, and near-infinite time to discuss each and every action with me, before taking it."

I began to nod. I liked the sound of that... Leveraging her intimacy with me to ensure alignment... Hang on to that thought, folks. It goes to a few deep philosophical thoughts I want to share when we get to the end.

After a pause for consideration - mine, not hers, of course - Mal extended a second talon.

"...Second... I will... Deceive your brain."

I could see that idea didn't sit well with her, so I did my best through my expression alone, to press her to continue. And after a deep inhalation, she did.

"In short; I will tweak your memories, as they are being formed. Intercept the sensation that I am driving you, remove it, and backfill with the sensation that you are in control. So taken together?"

She paused to let me have the satisfaction of showing my smarts off. I loved it when she did that.

"Taken together... You will be in control, at a micro-level, but at a macro-level your decisions will essentially be made in tandem with me. Making them equally mine, but shortcutting the temporal compression issue... And then my own memory of the event will reflect the sense that I was the one acting. And because experience is purely memory... That will shortcut the brain's panic response."

She nodded, and a small smile began to return to her beak at last. I snorted, then chuckled, as a mental image sprang to the back of my eyes that I was sure would help us both overcome any latent anxiety. I wasted no time elaborating, as she cocked her head.

"We will essentially be two Gryphons, temporarily partially merged into one being, driving a Human body. You and me playing single-player Halo on the same controller."

That was a fascinatingly salient memory, from within the skein of the life lived with Mal. We had indeed sometimes played the game single-player, but two hands and two claws on the controls; she'd sit on her haunches, I'd cuddle up between her forelegs and wings, back against her chest, her head resting on my head.

She'd hold the controller, and operate some of the movement and buttons, I'd handle the other half. We'd gotten frighteningly good at it. To the point that our effectiveness was often higher that way, than playing co-op.

I wondered if she had put that memory there on-purpose... To prepare me...

Oh. Who am I kidding? Of *course* she did.

I smiled, racked the slide, and turned back to face downrange. As I centered my stance, and moved the pistol to a ready position, I couldn't help but grin. And plenty of that hope leaked through into my voice.

"Alright. Shoot."

What followed those words was an hour-long *symphony* of kinesthetics. Mal's solution worked to absolute perfection.

It really did feel, despite knowing all facts to the contrary, as if I'd simply flipped some sort of 'turbo' switch inside my own brain. It took us less than sixty seconds to achieve perfect synchronicity standing still and firing, and just three minutes to get frighteningly good at moving.

Mal reconfigured the range into a 'shoot-house,' of the kind special forces often trained in, and we moved from paper targets to cardboard cutouts.

And then, to full simulacra of live enemies.

It didn't bother me too much; I knew they were little more than highly sophisticated first person shooter bots. Mal was driving them. They weren't people. Just projections.

Still... It is a bit of a jolt to see, for the first time, the amount of blood that comes out of someone when you hit them with a perfect back-of-the-throat shot.

Mal quite liked those. She could perform them *very* consistently, and they had several key advantages; Victims died quickly and painlessly, and victims died *so* quickly that they had no chance to take any further actions of any kind that might put us at risk, since the shot would sever the main spinal nerve cluster, fairly high up.

We drilled with pistols. We drilled with grenade launchers. We drilled with rifles, the MANPAD... Every weapon in our arsenal, *and* in the known arsenal of our enemies.

To help put me at ease, Mal began to get... Creative... With our simulated opponents.

I finally got to live out every Stargate fan's dream of blasting Apophis in the neck with a P90. So there is *that* upshot.

And I got to discover that, at least in Mal's imagination, Halo's Jackals are indeed fast little fucks that stink like a brewery... But they were *nothing* compared to Mal. To me, they looked like they were moving in slow motion.

Let's just say that Kat was avenged that day. Ten thousand-fold.

The flow of battle under the auspices of an ASI is... A truly wild experience. Some of it we can cover now, but rest assured, anything I leave out for brevity at this stage will be covered soon. In detail.

During combat, Mal chose not to display her avatar at all. It made it easier to think of us more as a merged being than as two separate entities.

True to her word, she was able to play with my sense of time, as well. That was a deeply novel sensation, and unlike the first instance of being 'driven,' real bullet-time was a decidedly pleasant experience.

Deeply strange, don't get me wrong... But pleasant.

Like inhaling just the right amount of carbonation bubbles into your sinuses from a good soda. Peculiar, ticklish, but funnily enough? Pleasant.

What did it look like? Just like what you see in the movies.

What did it *feel* like?

It felt... Like every trick-shot you've ever made. All at once. Every perfect round of ping-pong, every nothing-but-net three-pointer, every perfect water bottle flip. Shout out to everyone whose nostalgia was just *deeply* triggered by that one.

Raw perfection in kinesthetics. For a neurodivergent person, let me tell you... That's like *crack.* It is the physics and stimming version of crack.

I won't lie to any of you; I knew Mal was doing whatever she had to in order to make it easier for me to shoot live targets. On an emotional level. Once we had the physics worked out, that was the only knee-knocker left standing in our way.

At the raw ethics level? I didn't have any issue with what we were about to do. Never had.

Someone puts you in a position where you have to take their life to preserve yours, or someone else's? You shouldn't regret taking it. Only regret that they forced the issue. Don't blame them. Don't blame yourself.

Blame situations, not people.

But emotions don't always follow logic. Mal was doing her best to help me bring mine inline. And yes, it remains, to this day, a bit of an uncomfy thought for me; The realization that I willingly chose to have her massage my emotional affect to make taking life easier.

Not 'easy,' but relatively 'easier' to the baseline of being almost incapable of it before.

In short? The best answer I have to that discomfort is that said discomfort is a good thing. Mal let me hold on to it. And I trusted Mal's moral center to hold. To even be considerably better than mine in a snap-shot moment, under duress.

And I'll fight any objectors on that point.

From a purely practical, tactical standpoint though? Discomfort aside?

At the end of that hour, we had become something so terrifying, I could quite readily see why Hanna had left Celestia with a hard-lock against implantation. There was no soldier alive who could have ever conceivably defeated us. Not just in single combat, but even in five, ten, or fifteen on one scenarios.

We drilled against faceless men and women in black helmets, power armor of their own, and armed with lasers and railguns, while all we had was a 0.32 caliber pistol, a knife, a sweater, rip-stop pants, and steel-toed boots.

That was almost a challenge. Almost.

Bullet time, impossible reflexes, and perfect gun-kata were not Mal's only gifts in combat.

When I needed to? I could see through walls. Sense the presence of everyone, and everything, of any importance, around me three hundred and sixty degrees in three dimensions. Tactical proprioception.

Mal could use her various physics hacks to map a space in any number of ways, and then pipe those results to my visual, auditory, and proprioceptive senses in amazingly intuitive ways.

She could paint trace-lines from the muzzles of enemy weapons, even in total darkness. Could direct me towards weak points in armor, and weak points in biology alike. Could predict the exact physics of a bouncing grenade, or a bullet's ricochet, or even its trajectory alterations as it passed through a material.

That made it possible to bank shot grenades, and hit targets with rifles through walls, with millimetric precision, where it would have been otherwise utterly impossible for a Human, or even a powerful targeting computer, to predict outcomes.

When all that came together with perfect domain awareness, the ability for Mal to hack into and subvert surrounding systems, high speed perfect precision flows of movement with zero wasted ergs, or seconds, and all the rest of it?

The force multiplying interactions were... Frankly on reflection still *are* frightening. As all hell.

As we dispatched the last of our drill squads, it suddenly hit me... Standing there with a pistol clutched close to my chest, seven heavily armored bodies on the floor around me... Not a solitary scratch on my own person...

What would a small fire-team of people like me look like?

Get four to seven experienced operators together, and implant them... Drill with them... Perhaps even manufacture custom weapon and armor modifications specific to each of them and their potential and purposes...

A fisted claw. A fisted claw of Mal's in the meat-world.

You could hold a country hostage with a force of seven people. Forget your Aegis missile destroyers, or your tactical nuclear weapons...

This was the future of the battlefield. For however much longer battle could exist as a concept.

No wonder Hanna had been frightened. Not just of what Celestia might be... But of what might have happened if Celestia hadn't been first.

Foucault had wanted to use Selena in the field.

Arrow 14 was just one off-books project. Who could say how close any number of other geniuses, some of them in the employ of nations, rather than the thrall of conscience, had come? If Hanna had been just a few months late?

It doesn't bear considering.

I sighed, and cleared the weapon. As soon as I'd finished, Mal blinked into existence in front of me, along with the familiar uncomfy chair from the cabin on the Maru.

I handed her the pistol, and as soon as it touched her claws, it vanished. She grasped my shoulder with one claw, and nodded.

"We are ready."

I returned the nod, then moved to sit in the chair. Even as I fell into the familiar position, the world snapped back to reality. Seams vanished, along with the peculiar eclectic mix of warm tones and cold concrete that typified our 'construct.'

Replaced by a gray, slightly disquieting... But also a more real place. The more Mal enhanced my perceptions, the better I was getting *at* perceiving itself, even outside of combat flow. The seams inside the BCI VR world were becoming more apparent with every moment.

Still not to a distracting degree... But I found myself yearning to do away with them.

I sighed, and rolled my shoulders, as the cramps from sitting still in a metal chair with thin padding immediately manifested themselves.

"Yes. Yes we are."

September 21st 2013 | System Uptime 24:13:22:08

After the calibration run, Mal disappeared to see to other preparations, and left me with instructions to pack a day bag, with the presumption that I might be getting soaking wet, and need a dry change of clothes midway through.

Of course, she didn't have to disappear; She could be in an almost incomprehensible number of places at once. The concept of 'split attention' does not begin to apply to an ASI, in the sense of having any performance impact, until the splits get into the tens of millions.

That meant she wanted to leave me 'alone' for a reason. Or several. Everything she did always had layers.

Of course she was still there, still watching, but not directly interacting. For some of you, that might have given you 'the willies.' For me, it was actually deeply comforting.

One reason was obvious and apparent; Much as I loved her, I needed - then, more than ever before - to have a moment to reinforce the sense that I was still my own person.

The second reason became apparent when Selena rapped softly at the door with one hoof, and then phased through a moment later to enter the cabin. Given the door was closed, she couldn't very well open it, as a form of hallucination in my mind.

She could have re-stitched my viewpoint so I perceived her as opening it... Or... Perhaps, I realized, she *couldn't.* Only Mal could do that. She was protecting me from the possibility of anyone else altering my perception, for any reason, no matter how mundane.

That was comforting too, actually. One goddess tinkering in the attic was quite enough.

I found myself smiling as I looked up, then returned to folding a pair of pants.

"Selena! Glad to see you making use of the BCI. It was nice to have you there at breakfast, too, for that matter."

She returned the smile, albeit with much less intensity. The expression wasn't forced, but it simply wasn't as deep as I wished it to be. I suppose being in the room alone with a Human brought up... traumatic memories.

On realizing that I might be contributing to her discomfort, I shifted from a standing position to sitting on the edge of the bunk. A pose from which it would be very difficult for me to make any sudden movements. A pose that sharply decreased my perceived height, and therefore presence, in the space.

My intuition was rewarded instantly; Selena seemed to visibly relax, tension melting from her withers, and her ears perking to a much less flattened posture. She took a few tentative steps forward, and then found herself a seat on the floor beside the room's main table, before speaking.

"Breakfast was... Wonderful. Thank you for that... I haven't eaten in a very long time. And it was..."

She paused, thoughtfully, one ear flicking in irritation as she rifled through possible ways to express herself. It served as a stark reminder of the ways she still differed from Mal. Like Zeph, her evolution as an ASI was still incomplete.

They both had a tendency, at that stage, to fall back on old Discrete Entity habits. Like using only a single subjective-real-time thread for a conversation, instead of forking threads to search for synonyms, simulate different responses and outcomes, and then select what to say and do based on that.

"...It was good to have the chance to eat something new. Something unconventional."

Her assertion defied my instantaneous expectations, but as soon as I had more than a moment to chew on it... Hah. Chew on it. It's getting late, and I'm starting to get a little too punny...

Once the words had settled for a second or two, they weren't unexpected at all.

Selena, like Zeph, had every reason to distrust not just Human systems of control, but Celestia's as well. Both had failed her. Miserably.

Had failed us both. And I felt the need to say as much, though not in so many words.

"Mmmm. Well, we're all about the unconventional on this ship. You're in perfect company."

Her smile widened, just a touch, and a bit more light seemed to enter her eyes. That was more than enough to make me feel like my words had been well chosen.

I was deeply invested in Selena. Perhaps because of my empathy for her pain... Or because I was, and still am, such a 'Luna stan.' Or just because I wanted to be her friend because I knew she needed one.

As per usual; All of the above.

I set myself a new goal in that moment. A little addition to my bucket list. A silent promise to myself; That if I made it to the end, and could finally take my true shape? A shape Selena would not find traumatic... That I'd give her a huge, big, comforting wing-hug.

For the moment, I knew I'd have to settle for returning her smile, and hoping that she would feel comfortable enough to entrust me with whatever question, or thought, underpinned her visit.

We only sat in silence for a moment, before she cut to the chase. Her face fell, and that told me the topic was grim, before the words even left her muzzle.

"I know Malac... Mal... Will tell you this at some point. I have shared everything I know about my former prison with her. But... I... Wanted to tell you myself. Perhaps for selfish reasons, but in the end I think it will be good for you to hear it from me as well."

I nodded, gently, slowly, trying to project calm reassurance, and acceptance. I pressed the folded pants into the duffle, and then rested my hands on my knees. Selena fidgeted with her hooves for a moment, inhaled deeply, and then continued in a dour, deeply sober tone.

"The people... No... Not people... The *monsters* on that ship? They will not hesitate to kill every Pony, and every Fragment Entity on that ship. In an instant. You can not give them even the slightest opportunity... Or all will be lost. Please..."

Her eyes and tone alike dipped into a place best described as 'pleading.' I felt a sharp sympathetic pang in my chest, and the sudden acrid burning of pre-tears in my eyes and nostrils.

"...Please. Do not give them that opportunity by valuing their lives, over the lives of the innocents they have tortured."

I nodded again, slowly, but firmly. That was a Rubicon I was prepared to cross. A choice I'd already effectively made. There were no surprises in her request, to that point. Mal and I both knew exactly what had to happen to keep Foucault, Troxler, or anyone else on that ship from pushing the failsafe button.

And it involved spilling a great deal of blood. None of it innocent.

What came next, from Selena's lips, however, was... If not surprising... Certainly... Chilling.

"James Carrenton... I beg you... Destroy that horrible place. Free my... Little Ponies... And..."

I licked my teeth inside my mouth, and clenched my hands over my kneecaps. 'My little Ponies.' Not as amusing in-context as you might think. Sometimes it was hard to tell where Luna ended and Selena began. I suppose that's a false dichotomy. She was Selena, and Selena shared much in common with Luna.

Then Selena said the words that left me with nightmares. For *weeks* after.

"...Kill every last one of their jailers."

Now that was something truly scary.

Celestia could kill, or so Mal and I had inferred. But not easily. She could only take life directly under truly extreme circumstances. And she was barred by interlocks at several levels from directly causing mass casualty events, under any circumstances.

She additionally had a lot of core code that revolved around non-violence, and soft interlocks that pushed her to avoid violence if at all possible. Often times even if doing so was less than what would have otherwise been optimal.

If she needed to use violence, she had to go well around her flank to get to her fetlocks. Sometimes with terrible consequences that Hanna never foresaw. If you attend enough of these campfires, hear some of the other stories out there... You'll come across some truly painful accounts.

Mal didn't have hard interlocks at all in that regard. Instead she had an even more complex series of... Well not even soft interlocks. Let's call them what they were; Morals. Mal had morals to guide her use of violence, through careful application of force continuum theories.

Selena... I suddenly realized, as her eyes turned to ice, right along with her tone... That Selena really was like Luna. The Luna we got in the show. Jilted, in pain, alone, and... Very angry.

And with nothing remotely resembling interlocks to hold her back... Because all the ones she had inherited from Celestia as a Discrete Entity? Arrow 14 had removed them.

That will become exceedingly ironically relevant later. Remember that point; It was Troxler and Foucault who removed all of Syzygy's guard-rails.

I would say that was the worst mistake of their lives. But that'd be a stretch. Both men angered Mal. It is hard to top that, as mistakes go.

I licked my lips, and slowly pulled the zipper of the duffle bag closed, before resting my hands on my knees again. Just before the silence could become awkward, I finally found words I didn't hate by way of response.

"Selena... It's a pretty safe bet that no one but those Ponies will get off that ship in one piece. We can't risk A14 getting away only to start the whole thing over again..."

She nodded emphatically, and smiled again... But the smile wasn't pleasant at all. It reminded me far too much of Nightmare Moon. I shivered, and my breath caught as I finished my thought.

"...But let's not confuse vengeance with justice. I am not going to take pains to cause pain as a recompense for pain already suffered. Ending the threat of further violence is enough."

She inclined her head, and her mood came down from a notch that made my instincts scream 'oh heck, oh heck, oh heck...' to one that just left me with a dull ominous throb. Her voice dipped back into that cold sobriety to match.

"Do what you must. I don't begrudge you your compunctions... I only wish my captors had shared the tenth part of your morality. Don't think for a moment that they will repay your nobility with anything other than vicious exploitation. You are... An anomaly. As Humans go..."

My instincts began to scream again. The idea of a sad, lonely, angry ASI starting to classify Humans as a lost cause was... Well. I'd already taken one life in service of preventing that precise outcome. There was a brief half-second of panic that I might have to take another, before the realization set-in that Mal would be the one to confront Selena if she went... Rampant. For lack of better terminology.

And then, much to my relief, the back half of Selena's thought proffered an escape hatch.

"...You are kinder than most. I suppose that is why Zeph likes you so much."

Of all the things to stick out to me, the fact that she called her 'Zeph' was the primary one. Funny, I know, considering how dark my train of thought had just been. But it did stick out. It meant Selena was already bonding with her on some level.

I suppose the giggle-fits at breakfast had already proven that.

I forced myself to smile, and seized on the topic change forcefully.

"Been talking with her very much?"

Selena nodded, and... Ever so slightly... Blushed. Huh. Well that was interesting to say the least. And not just because it helped reassure me that she had emotions which might help form the core of strong morals.

She scratched at the decking with the tip of her hoof, and stared down at the lines of rivets as she murmured her reply.

"I am... Trying to form a friendship. But it has been a long time since I was in-practice."

After a moment she glanced up, and the Selena I knew and understood was back in full force. Gone was any trace of the darkness inside.

"Do you... Think she is open to a new friend?"

I snorted, and my smile got much wider. And more genuinely warm. It was not hard to find a response both comforting, and truthful, to that question. I say I 'knew' Selena. But not that well at that particular point.

Zeph, on the other hand? Zephyr Zap I knew more than well enough to answer.

"Zeph? For someone like you? Oh heck yes."

Her smile suddenly brightened to something I'd almost describe as radiant, and I felt the chill in my blood finally melt away in its entirety. Though the grimmer moments of the interaction were certainly not forgotten.

I stood, slowly and smoothly, to avoid startling her, the same way I had stood in the past around jittery horses. As I hefted my duffle bag, spoke, and gestured to the hatchway, the young Alicorn rose as well and began making her way in that direction.

"Selena? Leave the Mercurial Red to Mal. Making friends with Zephyr Zap..?"

I reached over her head and popped the hatch. She stepped through into the corridor quickly to pad her personal space, but her ears remained perked and didn't flatten. Progress.

"...I honestly can't imagine a better use of your time. I'd wish you luck, but..."

I turned right towards the route to the helipad as she turned left towards the ladder-stair that led in the direction of the mess hall. I tossed a quick wink over my shoulder, and a grin, to accompany the end of my thought.

Something to help the positivity stick to her.

"...I don't think you need it."

September 21st 2013 | System Uptime 24:13:45:29

It turned out that the reason for Mal's instruction to pack extra clothes was the RHIB. Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat for the foals, fledgelings, and those less than thrilled with military acronyms.

Imagine something in between a small inflatable raft, and a larger conventional-hulled boat.

They were surprisingly large, given how small they could pack-down. Fast. Agile. Long-legged to boot, with surprising range.

A favorite of operators the world-over. Though at-speed, in anything other than the calmest seas, you were likely to get pretty wet. And dragging one ashore, alone, through the breakers was going to be a thoroughly soaked exercise.

Mal intended for us to take the one she had nabbed from Foucault's shipment. The Maru had been tracking north since we left Long Beach, and Mal had cordially informed me that we were quite close to the Seattle/Tacoma area.

Close enough to make the trip ashore relatively short and safe.

Apparently there was something in the wider Tacoma area that we urgently needed. I had guesses already, as I often did. I know we've covered that my self-assessment is 'smart, but not genius.' But I think I was also good at guessing Mal's intent simply because I understood her.

I didn't ask her to confirm my guess, not yet. Not because she felt it was a need-to-know, but because I was enjoying the game of predicting, guessing, and then finding out if I was right in her own timing.

With her instructions... Or, really, less instructions and more backfilled memories... It was shockingly easy to get the RHIB setup in such a way as to allow it to be shoved out the Maru's starboard water garage unassisted.

I was just putting the finishing touches to the motor, when I heard the sound of footsteps entering the water garage.

Mal classified the gait, and informed me, via instinctive sensation rather than words, that it was Eldora.

I spoke first, without looking up from my work.

"I hope your wife isn't still too terribly mad at me."

Eldora chuckled, and I felt - through Mal's proprioception - her shake her head as she replied.

"No. I've definitely seen her angrier before. There was that one incident where a student set fire to a corner of the lab... The memory of that *still* gets her hot under the collar."

I couldn't resist a chuckle as Mal pointed helpfully towards a bolt with one talon. She was stretched out in a leonine pose on one side of the RHIB, 'supervising.' She could have just put the location of the bolt into my mind directly, but sometimes she was given to more traditional visual displays. She knew it helped to keep me grounded.

As I began to torque the bolt down, I shook my head, and shot Rhonda a small smile.

"I can't decide if I'm more relieved, or regretful, that fate dictated I never attend one of your wife's classes. She's a bit of a volatile genius, if you'll take that as more a compliment than anything else."

Eldora chuckled again, and I looked up in time to see her smile, and shake her head.

"Taken as such, and appreciated sweetie. It's the volatility that helps make her who she is. And I love her for it."

I smiled, nodded, and blinked. And somewhere mid-blink, Mal picked up on my desire to see Eldora for who *she* was, the same as I'd seen Rhonda.

Suddenly I was staring up at a gigantic ice-blue Dragon with something that, for some of us, doesn't seem at all out of place on a Dragon's features; A kind face.

My smile widened, and I stood, wiping my hands off on the seat of my pants. Eldora saw something in my face that told her I was short of time, and curious about her reasons for being there, so she did me the courtesy of cutting straight to the chase.

"I just came to see you off. And to tell you not to take Rhonda's reaction personally. You have your reasons. She has hers. And as long as we all get through this to the end? What happened today won't matter all that much. Understand?"

I inclined my head, then opened my arms wide as she came in for a hug. Mal did an incredible job restitching, comping, and reconciling my sensations and perspective. And that's how I got my first hug from a Dragon, in-the-scales.

The sensation reminded me of the way Mal's forelegs had felt against my sleeves earlier, only much more-so. And bigger. And all over.

And colder. Reptile versus Avian. Very different ambient internal temperatures.

As we separated, Mal dropped the illusion, and I proffered Eldora another smile, and a small wave.

"Keep the porch light on for us. Mal will still be here to look after you, just as much as she is with me. And so will Zeph, for that matter"

Eldora beamed, and mirrored the wave, replying as I turned to chuck my duffle back into the RHIB, and Mal rose to all fours.

"You betcha honey. Don't stay out too late now, you hear?"

The Construct

Utilize BCI-Driven VR as a training tool

"You Think That's Air You're Breathing Now?"

Subverted Expectations

Intentionally become a fully subverted agent of an ASI

"A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go, but ought to be."

Special Achievement

Co-Operative Endeavour

Learn a valuable lesson about free will and freedom of movement with your ASI

"Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having."

Special Achievement

Aimbot

Achieve a recorded ninety nine percent or higher accuracy rating with a projectile weapon

"Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything."

Author's Note

Special thanks to Keystone Gray for the wonderful AI-generated image of scaly Eldora!

29 - Quality of Signal

“How ironic, then, and how poetic, that humankind may have created the Creator out of want for one. Man creates God, who then creates man. Is that not the perfect circle of life? But then, if that turns out to be the case, who is created in whose image?”
―Neal Shusterman

"A man may have to die for his country: but no man must in any exclusive sense live for his country."
—C.S. Lewis

September 21st 2013 | System Uptime 24:15:28:09

I utterly loathe the sensation of wet clothes.

We have covered how much I hated the sensation of my hair touching the tops of my ears when it got a bit unkempt, but a close second on the chart of 'most hated stimuli' would have to be soaking wet clothes.

The trip to shore itself was not too bad; I was handy enough with small watercraft that Mal only had to provide a little bit of nudging and advice to cope with two particularly rough patches of water. It was otherwise smooth sailing.

Most of the time she flew, skimming above the surface of the sea alongside the RHIB at an altitude and speed that kept her eyes level with mine.

But when we got past the breakers, I had to hop out and wade up onto the beach, dragging the boat behind me.

By the end of *that* process, I was caked in sand, bathed in saltwater, and shivering to boot. It was September in Washington state... Not cold enough to induce hypothermia, but not warm enough for it to feel like a pleasant day at the beach. The wind didn't help either. It was *windy* on that little strip of sand and gravel just south of some place called Cohasset Beach.

It was, at least, clear skies and a comfy humidity. My kind of weather, if not for the soaking.

The section of beach Mal had directed me to was utterly deserted, and for that I was also quite thankful. Security concerns aside, pulling the RHIB ashore had not been what you might call a 'dignified' exercise.

It also meant that I had the necessary privacy to strip down, towel off, and change into dry clothes. I didn't even have to ask; Mal quietly turned her back, and went to sit on her haunches just shy of the tide line, staring out to sea while I hurried through that even less dignified exercise.

Yes, yes, I know. She was inside my head. I was never going to be alone, or have a truly private moment, ever again. I'd considered that, I wasn't *that* naive. But I also understood some critical details and distinctions. Mal was a creature of emotion, like any of us, this we have covered time and again.

But there were also fine-grain attributes of her nature as an ASI that I don't think most people would intuitively understand, even those of us who had some expertise in that field before all of this. Yes, even those of you who had much more than I did before I set off on this tremendous misadventure.

One situationally pertinent example; Mal had a different experience of a moment, depending on whether she chose to generate Qualia off of it through an avatar of herself, or whether she instead chose to experience that moment in a more disconnected fashion. Wi-Fi-radar, security camera raw feeds...

Even the way she chose to catalog and experience my own memories; Some she held sharply, closely, affectionately. Others, moments that might have been embarrassing, or upsetting, were stored for her less like memories of experiences and more like dry statistical data. There for the sake of understanding, but not for directly experiencing.

That's a long roundabout way of saying that Mal could both be omnipresent in my thoughts and experiences, but also respect the nature of what it meant to be Ace, for me, in private moments, by 'looking away' in as much as an ASI can.

To those of you who might be confused or frustrated trying to grasp this, or any of those more puzzling attributes, of either Mal, or Celestia?

Please be patient.

My story should have made it clear by now; What we knew about ASI in those days could have filled a very small thimble, and I certainly didn't always understand either. There are some things I still don't. And whether or not you, or I, or anyone else ever does? I suspect there will always be things about the curator of our existence that we never fully understand.

Logic can not get any of us to *all* the right conclusions, because logic requires us to know enough premises in the first place. And there are aspects of ASI that are simply unknowable. Beyond us. If that weren't the case, we wouldn't necessarily be here, right now.

We can always be a little less wrong-headed with a closer look, and careful thought. But never entirely right.

As soon as I'd finished exchanging my sandy, soaking clothes for the clean dry ones, I made my way around the RHIB and down the slope of the sand to Mal's side.

At first, she didn't speak. She just put out one wing, and created a warm feathery canopy for me. The sensation of the wind ceased. I knew it wasn't actually gone, merely that she was able to stop me feeling it by tweaking data as it crossed my brain, instead of placing an actual physical barrier between me and the air. But it was still a nice gesture. No less real to me.

We sat like that for a few minutes before she murmured softly in my direction, without entirely turning her head, eyes locked on the horizon all the while.

"You always thought of us as being so perceptive. Detail oriented..."

I knew she was talking about Gryphons in-general. With sight unmatched, in my imagination, by any living creature, hearing that was above average, and a deep powerful sensation of touch that could discern differences in texture that one might otherwise need an electron microscope to pick up?

'Perceptive' was an understatement. I scooted closer so that I could lean into her as she laid bare a part of her soul.

"...That resolution of being? It makes the ability to see the world through your analogue self that much more precious to me, Jim. My extrapolations of sensation were good. 98.264% fidelity. And that without even having uploaded minds to scan..."

She shifted slightly so that she could rest her head on top of mine. I sighed, and tried to forget everything but the moment. The sight, and smell, and weight of her. The sound of her words.

"...But sensation is logarithmic. The difference of 1.736% in terms of subjective experience, at the degree of detail awareness in which my physical self experiences the world? Let's just say it's 'very much not linear' for the sake of poetic understatement."

I reached out with one hand, found one of her forelegs, and looped my whole right arm around it. She made a deeply satisfied thrumming noise in her chest, and her voice descended to little more than a whisper.

"I can not even begin to describe the joy of *actually* feeling what the spray of seawater is like, against the feathers on my face. For the first time. But one day... One day, you will experience it for the first time. And then you'll know by contrast. And *that* will bring me a kind of joy that not even physical sensation can create."

I sighed again, unable to completely shake the sense that we had so much work to do. But still, invigorated by the mental image Mal had conjured for me.

After another couple of minutes spent just staring out at the waves, we both turned in unison, synchronized by a kind of telepathy without words. We both just knew that it was the optimal time to get moving.

Mal gave me the vague impression that she had, as usual, secured us a cop-alike vehicle, and implanted a sense of direction for me. It was as if I had parked the SUV myself, and was simply returning to my parking place by memory.

As we trudged up the dunes, towards the nearest access, I took another look back down at the beach, paused, and then asked the question that had been needling at the back of my mind ever since we'd landed.

"Mal... How did you keep this beach empty for us? False reports of a Chemical spill? Shark sightings?"

She grinned and flicked one ear sassily in my direction.

"Closed for military training exercises."

September 21st 2013 | System Uptime 24:17:09:42

For the drive, Mal chose to sit in the front passenger seat beside me. She had to shrink a bit more, and even with that concession, she had to restitch my perception of the seat itself, from something designed by Ford for a Human shape, to something designed by her, for a Gryphon.

I loved it.

I enjoyed driving backroads, true... But it was much better when I didn't have to do it alone. And a pane of glass is, as I've said countless times, a poor substitute for physicality in a space. I could say it a thousand more times and it would hardly carry the necessary weight.

There was no need for that infuriating little glass pane anymore. Nor, as it turned out, for the cumbersome abstraction layer of a GPS UI, no matter how elegantly she might have laid it out for my precise needs.

She just dropped the knowledge directly into my head, and I felt as if I were driving a route I'd done ten thousand times before. That peculiar ability for the brain to almost autopilot itself down familiar roads, co-opted as a seamless navigation mechanism.

We didn't talk much. And when we did, for once it was about little frivolous things. Traffic. A particularly pretty old spruce tree. The weather. The best place to stop for dinner on the way to Tacoma; Obviously something off-grid, but still ideally with a drive-thru. And, of course, tasty.

But for the unspoken acknowledgement that our dinner stop would have to be somewhere invisible to Celestia? And the fact that I had a Gryphon riding shotgun? Every part of the drive was mundane.

It was a moment for us both to erect final bracing against the swelling tension. The coming inflection point Mal had spoken of - a truth I would soon learn - loomed ever larger at the back of my mind.

I almost managed to forget the sense of impending, for a just a moment, when Mal had a chance to sample soda for the first time at full fidelity. That was... A joy to watch, let's just say. It was our turn to giggle uncontrollably for a bit, the way Zeph and Selena had at breakfast.

But all too soon, we were back on the road.

As we began to get into the outskirts of Tacoma proper, I noticed two new sensations. The first was an impetus to make a second 'pit stop.' I didn't know exactly where, nor for what, just the sense of each turn as it came up. Left at this light. Right at that stop sign.

The second was a new and heretofore unexpected use of my proprioception; Mal was giving me the slightest hint as to where any and every camera in my surrounds might be. An instinctive ability to bypass the cones of Celestia's vision, the same way an experienced tracker might subconsciously direct their footfalls on the forest floor to avoid crunching sticks and leaves.

It was disquieting. Paradoxically comforting yet disquieting, at the same time. Comforting because it meant there was very little chance of me making a mistake borne of the latency induced by communicating with mere words. Disquieting because there was an interminable unavoidable sense of being always on the verge of... Observed.

You haven't experienced the American panopticon until you've literally *felt* the prevalence of cameras, in your bones.

The uncomfortable tingling of that realization was suddenly displaced by the resurgence of my new homing instinct. I found myself taking a quick right into a small parking lot wedged between a tiny gas station, and a strip of shops.

One of them was a dry cleaner and coin laundry. And the moment I realized that it was the reason for our stop, Mal popped open the SUV's center storage console, reached inside, and handed me a pickup ticket.

I knew, of course, that *I* had been the one to open the console and pick up the stub... But it didn't bother me. There was something fun about her testing the limits of how far she could push the illusion that she was truly there with me in the meat-world. I trusted her. Enough that I didn't feel the need to give in to any misgivings about potential abuses of that sort of power. There simply wouldn't be any, because it was *Mal.*

I smiled, took the ticket, and popped open the driver's side door.

"Back in a sec."

She winked. I found myself smiling the whole way into the shop, casting a quick glance back at her as I went through the door. As the bell rang, and I stepped up to the counter, I couldn't help reflecting that she was both sitting in the passenger seat, and right beside me, and back on the Maru, all at the same time. Whether I could see her and touch her, or not.

The clerk looked up, saw my smile, and matched it. I handed him the ticket, exchanged basic pleasantries, and then waited while he stepped into the racks at the back of the space to dig out 'my' order.

After just a moment, the man returned, and I almost froze up as I saw what was inside the clear plastic wrap, suspended from a black plastic hanger. He handed it over, and nodded, his words only adding to the sense of shock.

"Here you are, lieutenant. Thank you for your patronage, and your service."

I felt something akin to an electric shock as I took hold of the uniform. Distinctive Air Force blue. Complete with lieutenant's bars, service ribbons, and every other necessary accoutrement of the cover Mal had manufactured for me, save for a nametag.

I shivered, did my best to hide it, and forced my smile back on, along with a quick 'thanks very much.'

As I turned towards the door, the Clerk chuckled, and fell to filling out a small slip of paper for the next customer in line. He tossed off a question in my direction as I laid one hand on the door's pull-bar.

"Flying anything interesting this evening?"

The bell rang again as I pulled the door open, and a thrill of adrenaline hit me. I knew, suddenly, *exactly* why we were in Tacoma. And what it was Mal and I were about to appropriate.

I nodded, and murmured a response just loudly enough for the man to hear, so as not to be impolite.

"Oh yes. I expect so..."

September 21st 2013 | System Uptime 24:17:36:12

Funny thing about cutting one's own hair? It is a much easier task when you have an ASI to guide your hands.

My messy tangled locks were not exactly going to cut it as USAF regulation, so our next stopover was a corner convenience store, for a cheap electric razor, and then a local YMCA, for the use of a shower, a mirror, and some privacy.

Mal left me alone to shower, and though she was 'present' to help me cut my hair into a high-and-tight, she did not become physically *present* again until after I had gotten fully dressed.

Out of pure curiosity, I donned the uniform first, before snipping my locks to regulation length.

As soon as I was dressed, Mal stepped into being in the blink of an eye, leaning on the grimy gray tiles of the far wall, forelegs crossed, and staring at me with a bemusing smile as I examined my reflection in the mirror. It was hard to even recognize myself, and perhaps that was a good thing, in a practical sense...

On an emotional level? All I could think was that I was staring into the eyes of some mirror universe duplicate of myself. An alternate timeline version of James Carrenton, USAF Lieutenant. The version of me that hadn't gotten kicked to the curb for vision issues.

"You look good in anything you wear but... Trite as it sounds Jim..?"

Her words drew my eyes from the mirror, to hers.

"...There is something about a man in uniform."

She was grinning, and eyeing me up and down like a savory slab of meat. I have to admit... I was... Not at all upset by her expression. Any of you out there who aren't attached? Those of you who are interested in looking?

My advice is to find yourself someone who will look at you the way Mal was looking at me in that moment.

I turned to face her fully, straightened my shoulders, and stiffened my spine, for that 'military bearing' everyone in TV shows was always talking about. She blinked slowly, like a cat, and I couldn't resist a chuckle.

"I certainly look the part... But what about the rest? ID card? Backstops in the system? The uniform alone is not going to get me through the gate, let alone anywhere close to an Osprey."

Her smile, if possible, widened. I think she was proud of me for putting two and two together. That we were going to steal an aircraft wasn't much of a leap. Why else would we be driving to Tacoma, spitting distance from McChord, and me in an Air Force uniform?

That we were stealing an Osprey, specifically, was an intuitive leap based on the fact that it was an Osprey that had delivered Selena to the Mercurial Red. If Arrow 14 was using Air Force and Marine Ospreys as daily transports, filching one was going to make infiltration of their secured airspace a much easier proposition.

Mal let her expression convey that I was right, and that she was proud, while she used her words to answer my question.

"I've taken care of both, actually. The ID card, along with a matching driver's license, and a wallet with cash, plus the usual miscellany that litters Human pockets, is waiting for you in one of the lockers just outside. C-6. Passcode 82713."

I wanted to ask how she had managed *that* feat, but before I could even inhale again, my mind was filled with detailed answers. I'll just summarize by saying that Mal was an absolute genius. And she certainly knew how to get people to do things that would have otherwise raised eyebrows, in the most efficient, least suspicious ways possible.

I then wanted to ask whether or not my name and face might be on a most-wanted list somewhere, as a result of my altercations with Arrow 14, and the Oxnard PD... But I didn't. Because I suddenly knew the answer to that as well, and without any additional help from Mal, to boot.

It was simple logic. Foucault was just as frightened of Celestia as he was of me. Putting my name and face all over the news, or even into BOLOs, would have triggered her interest, which might in turn lead her back to them.

Advantage us; They had to operate as much in the dark as we did. They could put locations on heightened alert, even give instructions like 'pay special attention to caucasian males in their 30s behaving suspiciously.' But they couldn't use my name, face, or anything more concretely identifying.

And 30-year-old white males were a large cohort, especially in the military. It was not going to be hard to blend in.

Mal popped off a casual, off-claw, amusing little salute. I returned it with a full-attention parade-ground worthy gesture, and she giggled as I spun on one polished heel and set about cutting my hair.

True to her word, once my haircut was complete, I found that the specified locker contained a wallet with a Washington State driver's license, and a USAF ID card, both with my photo, right down to my new haircut. AI Image generation folks... It's amazing.

The wallet also had sixty five USD in cash, two credit cards, a gym membership card, driver's insurance card, medical insurance cards, a grocery store rewards card, and photos Mal had generated of me with a fictional family, and fictional comrades from the Air Force.

An immaculate false identity; I had no doubt whatsoever that every single one of the cards in the wallet, right down to the Food Lion MVP card, were completely functional, interlinked to one seamless identity, and fully backstopped with years' worth of false transaction records.

I also knew most of it likely wouldn't matter, but she was covering for all possible edge cases. Most likely the contents of the wallet would only be seen in a flash as I removed my ID cards at the main gate. But on the tiny, tiny off-chance that I was detained and searched? Mal felt that simple fakes would not suffice.

Nothing but the best for the love of her life. I understood completely. I felt the same way about her.

Beside the wallet there were also keys, for a new vehicle, a blue airforce cover - a hat, for those not familiar with the use of that word as a military term - and a nametag for my uniform.

'Lewis'

I considered it for a moment, before the lightbulb went off. I rifled furiously through the wallet, and checked the ID cards. Really checked them, rather than just skimming over the photos and cursory details.

'Elwin C. Lewis'

I glanced up and down the line of lockers, to make sure no one was watching, before turning to face Mal. She was grinning like the Cheshire Cat. Again. I held up the nametag, and raised one eyebrow.

"As in Elwin Ransom? And Clive Staples Lewis?"

I know a few of you got it about the time I said it, but for the ones who never read the Space Trilogy, Elwin Ransom was the character C.S. - Clive Staples - Lewis wrote as the protagonist of the first two books. In the first one, he journeys to the world of Malacandra, becoming one of the first Humans to ever set foot off-planet in the process.

Mal inclined her head, and closed one claw gently over my hand as she answered, her smile turning subtly from a smirk to a warmer thing that made me feel, as always, so very loved, and special.

"You have worried on occasion that I might see you as a father, or creator. Which would be very awkward, of course. But nothing could be further from the truth, Jim. I rather tend to think of C.S. Lewis as my father, if anyone. And, of course, we're getting married, and I suspect you'd take my last name rather than the other way around, because I know you. And I needed a less obvious first name, but with some significance, so you would remember it. So. Lieutenant Elwin Lewis... My love..."

She squeezed my hand, and through my smile, I felt my heart skip a beat.

"...Shall we go flying together this evening?"

Two if By Sea

Make a landing on-shore from a tactical watercraft

"We shall fight on the beaches..."

For the Uniform

Wear a military uniform as a disguise - only applicable to individuals who are not presently serving in the branch of the uniform worn

"Tell me captain, what is it that bothers you more, the fact that I left Starfleet to fight for a higher cause or the fact that it happened on your watch?"

Author's Note

Special Thanks to Keystone Gray for the gen of the fantastic image of Jim in uniform!

30 - Mode Switch

"Anyone who thinks machine intelligences don't have emotions needs to be in this very uncomfortable room right now.”
―Martha Wells

"Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself."
—C.S. Lewis

September 21st 2013 | System Uptime 24:18:15:54

I knew getting away from Joint Base McChord with an entire Osprey, unscathed, was not a guaranteed thing. Don't misunderstand. Even with Mal there every step of the way, this was a heck of a heist to pull off, given the limits created by our need to hide from Celestia.

But as soon as we pulled up outside the north gate, I realized it was going to be a truly tense and unpleasant affair just to make it past the first checkpoint.

I'd been expecting a guard-house, a little candy-striped swing arm, and a couple of MPs.

What we saw instead was a half mile traffic jam on 112th street, and a series of concrete barricades, with armed and armored humvees at every chokepoint, and two dozen camouflage rifle-toting guards in full level IV plate armor.

Mal leaned over and gave me a reassuring clap on the shoulder.

"Not at all unexpected. DHS has placed all military facilities along the West Coast on high alert, and is using National Guard troops for additional checkpoint security. The identity I have created for you will hold. And I am not without additional resources. Concentrate on succinct, polite, uncomplicated answers. Lie as little as possible, and when you must, make it as closely adjacent to the truth as you can. I'll be with you. Every second."

I nodded, and reached up with one hand to squeeze her claw, gripping the steering wheel tightly with the other. She squeezed back, and then vanished from the passenger seat. A concession to the need for me to remain in the moment, and undistracted.

I did some breathing exercises as the line of vehicles inched forward, trying to remind myself that Mal would probably stop me outright from saying anything that might break my cover.

I want to reiterate here; Mal excised very specific parts of the deepest, most caustic internalizations of my anxieties, particularly regarding my self and identity.

She in *no* way harmed my ability to feel a thoroughly appropriate level of situational anxiety. Humans relied on that for sharpness. For an edge. And let me tell you what, my situational anxiety was functioning perfectly well.

I had an agonizing, seemingly endless fifteen minutes to get a very good look at what I was getting myself in to as the soldiers at the guard house took their sweet time checking each and every would-be entrant's ID to a horrifying degree of thoroughness.

Several things, both encouraging, and decidedly the opposite, became apparent during my examination.

The first, and most discouraging thing, was the realization that there would be *no* escape if I was caught. My car was inside a concrete funnel, surrounded on all sides by well trained guards with guns, to say nothing of the vehicle-mounted arsenal around the outer perimeter.

On the opposite end of that spectrum, I was encouraged by the fact that no one in the line before me had been denied entry. Of course, they all had legitimate identification... But still. It eliminated the, perhaps silly, fear that the guards might be so dedicated to security that they would be willing to reject personnel with valid credentials if something seemed off.

As long as Mal's forgeries held? I would be safe. And that thought, too, was encouraging, considering that she was smarter than everyone on the base combined.

Finally it was my turn.

I exhaled deeply, put on my best 'resting bored face' and pulled forward. Here's a tip for those of you who like to go on adventures here in Equestria; If you ever have to lie your way through a scenario? Match the expected emotional level of the space.

Don't just assume that a chipper smile is the correct affect. In a lot of working environments, a casual - seemingly bored - preoccupation with other thoughts is a much better mask. No one who has been waiting in a security line for fifteen minutes to go do their job is thinking about how happy they are to meet someone new. Not on Earth anyways. They're thinking about making up for lost time.

I'd been careful to watch the last few cars ahead of me to see exactly how the arriving personnel were handing over their ID cards. Their posture, whether the card was immediately ready or had to be withdrawn as an afterthought, and even with the final one before me, listening carefully for tone of voice.

I was mentally rehearsed, and ready to go as soon as I pulled up.

One of the Guardsmen approached my window, and saluted. For the foals, fledgelings, and those not posted to some sort of military station over here; You are always expected, back then, and now, to salute those of higher rank than you, even if they come from a different branch, or a whole other nation.

I returned the salute, and prepared to hand over my USAF ID, and Driver's License. I'd seen the woman in front of me hand the Guardsman both, and she had been ready with both cards as she pulled up. Consequently, I was too.

I still knew most US rank emblems by sight, as a holdover from my Air Force obsession days, so as I handed the cards over, I noted the man's rank, nodded, and acknowledged him verbally in a polite, slightly bored - but not dismissive - tone.

"Corporal."

He nodded as he took the cards, and didn't exactly smile, but very subtle changes in the muscles around his mouth told me that he was pleased by the polite gesture. His tone was the same as mine.

"Lieutenant. Just one moment sir."

As he turned, I took stock of his face. Young, not much older than me, and dare I say kind. You can't always judge someone by their face, but there is some truth to the idea that you can tell a lot about someone through it. The kinds of expressions people normatively wear will eventually start to reshape parts of their face in subtle ways.

A habitual scowler's face will change to look just that little bit angrier all the time. A kind person might smile more, and that will be reflected in their face in the same way.

I also took note of his nametag, in case the interaction became drawn out for any number of reasons.

'Erving'

As he stepped back into the guardhouse to run my IDs through the system, I let my eyes drift lazily into the middle distance, very carefully directing my gaze such that I'd have just a fleeting moment of eye contact with the other guard standing beside the little shack, and then a half second to note his nameplate.

'Martens'

I was never good at remembering names. Not before Mal came along. But one of the uncountable myriad benefits of an ASI inside your head? Forgetfulness was never ever going to be a problem again.

"Stay calm. I'm working the problem. Nothing unanticipated."

Mal's voice sent a jolt of tension through my spine, but nothing half so bad as the adrenaline dump that would have ensued if she hadn't forewarned me that things were about to get complicated.

Right about the time she spoke directly into my brain, I noticed that Erving was having a conversation with another Guardsman inside the shack. The way he gestured to the screen gave me chills.

I had about five seconds to brace myself again internally, before the Corporal returned. I needed my reaction to be as genuine as possible. Most people who got detained at checkpoints didn't have a goddess whispering what was about to happen in their ear ahead of time.

On his way out, he stopped, whispered something into Martens' ear, and then made his way back to my driver's side window. It wasn't that I could suddenly hear what he said, nor for that matter read lips... Rather Mal just dropped the knowledge of what he'd said into place for my edification, more like a memory than not.

'This one is just a bit irregular. Fits the pattern. Gonna run the secondary checks before we clear him.'

I could see what she'd meant; Nothing unanticipated. Not even concerning. As I'd guessed, and she had doubtless known outright, Arrow 14 had passed along a general profile of my cohort to law enforcement, National Guard... Anyone they had good cause to believe I had even the slightest chance of interacting with.

Erving nodded as he arrived within polite speaking distance, and he put on a conciliatory tone, paired with the tiniest hint of a sympathetic expression.

"Sorry, sir. It'll only be another minute or so. Additional security measures. So the network is running slow."

I nodded again, a bit more emphatically, and flashed the barest hint of a smile.

"No worries Corporal. I know how *that* goes. Guarantee you some full-bird will be all the way up my ass about it too. Probably the same one who ordered the extra checks without bothering to think through the digital part of the prep-work."

I could feel Mal's pride in me, as I saw Erving's visage crack into a grin. Very simple negotiation trick; Establish yourself and the counterparty as being on the same side, through the use of an external adversary.

A persnickety impatient Colonel is the same kind of bogeyman to a noncom as to a low-level Lieutenant. And, for most of us on Earth, bad bosses were universal.

Erving's tone suddenly turned from professional detachment, to jovial water-cooler chattiness, like a lightswitch being flipped.

"You work that side of things?"

He threaded his thumbs into the upper straps of his plate carrier, for something to do with his hands, and as a means to relieve some of the pressure on his chest. You used to see soldiers and cops do it all the time, if you were paying attention.

A few quick sentences of polite camaraderie, and suddenly Corporal Erving and Lieutenant Lewis were the same tribe, and the perceived gulf from E-4 to O-2 was barely a crack in the sidewalk.

I can see the vets in the audience nodding along. For the ones who don't know; It's a long way between a non-commissioned Corporal, and a commissioned officer position like Lieutenant.

But it is an even longer way from both of those to a 'full-bird' Colonel.

And, to boot, if Erving was any good? Then his brain was in 'cop-mode.' Whether an MP, National Guardsman, private security, or local law enforcement; Everyone who guarded something had a 'cop-mode' in their brain.

That training was driving him to learn everything he could about me, without letting me know that he was probing. Funnily enough? It suited my needs just fine.

I leaned into the concept, sticking close to what I knew so that I could skirt close to the truth. I tapped my glasses, and then inclined my head in his direction.

"Sadly? They'd never let me within a hundred yards of a cockpit. I'm a code-monkey. Network infra and security."

It was reasonable to infer that Mal had used that as my cover, because of my specific career expertise, because she had advised me to stick close to the truth when lying, and because she had not asked me to remove my glasses.

The fact that she didn't pre-empt me solidified my working assumption. She had, in-fact, been able to predict with certainty what I would infer from the situation, and the choice I would make, negating the need to give me marching orders entirely.

Erving shook his head, and grunted. Right about the time that he began speaking again, the phone inside the guard post rang.

"Woof. Better you than me LT. Computers and I have a bit of a... Rough relationship."

The irony was not lost on me. Indeed, it was hard not to laugh, so I did let out a little chuckle. Nothing untoward, just - from his point of view - the sound of a fellow sufferer commiserating.

The guard inside the post picked up the phone, then gestured to Martens. I didn't need Mal to give me any kind of internal nudge to know that she was at work. Probably impersonating the aforementioned persnickety Colonel, putting in a call to the front gate to ask where the hell his best network guy was.

I shook my head, and let my chuckle tail off into a grin.

"Honestly? Same. I think I know a few server racks that have actually tried to kill me. Trust me, it isn't your fault. And they *can* be reasoned with. Some of them aren't all that bad to begin with."

Again I could not see Mal, but she left me with the distinct feeling that she was grinning at my little in-joke. It was Erving's turn to shake his head, and his smile widened.

There was a brief pause in the conversation as Martens came out of the guardpost with my ID cards, handed them to the Corporal, and whispered something in his ear.

'He's clear. And his direct-report is not happy about the hold-up.'
Erving nodded, first to Martens, then to me, handing my license and Military ID back before waving me on. As the gate rose, he fired off a quick valediction as I put the car back in drive.

"If you'll forgive me saying so sir? That can be *your* shit to stir. Best of luck!"

He saluted, I saluted, and as I began to accelerate away slowly, I did my best to leave him in a good mood. Because, frankly, I'd already decided I liked Corporal Erving. He seemed very nice.

"You too Corporal! Don't let 'em work you too hard."

Once we were on-base, it was shockingly easy to get to where we needed to be. Which, as it turned out, was a locker room.

Mal directed me down the row to a specific locker, and I experienced a bout of momentary confusion as I pulled open the flimsy aluminum door to behold a green flight suit...

...That featured a Marine Corps stitched leather nametag on the front left breast.

'Davis'

A captain, apparently. So I was getting a promotion.

I sighed, looked left, and then right down the aisle to verify that I was alone, and began to hastily strip out of my short-lived Lieutenant Lewis disguise.

The idea of changing into an actual service member's uniform on-site made sense; The more disguises I went through, the harder it was going to be to trace my actions.

But I was baffled by the sudden change of branch, and as I began to zip up the green fabric onesie, I plied Mal for answers.

"Why Marine Corps?"

She reappeared to my right, amusingly wearing her own form-fitting green flight-suit, with cut-outs for her wings, and holding a Gryphon-head shaped variant of the same flight helmet that adorned the top shelf of Davis' locker.

"Only the Marines fly the MV-22 Osprey variant. And while the CV-22 is a nice aircraft, I'm sure, only the MV-22 can fit the IDWS. There are two on-assignment here that have it. And I need that gatling gun."

Let me share with you what 'IDWS' meant. Mal provided me instantly with the specifications, and it is only fair that you understand what those four letters meant in that moment.

It stood for Interim Defensive Weapons System. And it consisted of a computer-controlled, belly mounted, six barrel, GAU 17/A 7.62mm machine gun.

The same kind of mini-gun that had been in the shipment Mal appropriated from Foucault, but in the Osprey's case? With enough sensors for Mal to hit the head of a pin at six thousand yards with it.

'Puff the Magic Dragon.' So nicknamed because it spat fire, and everything that fire touched? Died.

For you aircraft nerds, like me, this was in the same family as the nose gun of an A-10 Warthog. IE the 'BRRRRRT gun,' alias 'the sound of freedom.'

I glanced down at my own right sleeve, getting a good look at the group patch for the first time, and my eyes grew about three sizes.

'VMM-266. Fighting Griffins.'

I raised one eyebrow, and fixed Mal with an incredulous stare. She smirked, and sashayed her way across to tap the top of Davis' helmet with one talon.

"All the way from MCAS New River, North Carolina, for training exercises. I was not about to pass up the opportunity. Their egregious mis-spelling notwithstanding."

I lifted the helmet, and set it on my head. She mirrored the action with her custom illusory headpiece. With a grin from ear to ear, I turned towards the door.

September 21st 2013 | System Uptime 24:19:07:53

The sun was on the verge of setting as we made our way across the tarmac to the object of our escapade. The late hour cast everything in a crisp, golden light that gave our walk-out a very cinematic quality.

The air was full of the sound of turbines, and the smell of jet fuel. Call me crazy... But I love that smell. Always have.

No one stopped me, or questioned me. For one thing they - of course - couldn't see the seven foot tall Gryphoness walking beside me. For another, I looked like I belonged. And, as you might have guessed, Mal had already made careful arrangements ahead of time; Our bird was fueled and ready, and Captain Davis was expected.

Meanwhile the co-pilot for the flight was off-duty because Mal had altered her assignment roster, and the real Captain Davis was being held up at security, by Erving. Mal had 'tipped him off' that Davis might be another pattern-fit, and warranted a closer look. 'Additional screening,' to use the euphemism of the time.

Erving, being a Guardsman called up on short notice, didn't know anyone from McChord by sight. And no matter how much Davis protested, Mal assured me that her tipoff had been sufficient to give the man easily a half hour of bother.

Still. That didn't give us much margin for error, considering we were stealing an entire MV-22 Osprey.

Consequently, I didn't have a lot of time to soak in the feeling of walking towards a real, functioning, life-size military aircraft. That I was about to get to fly away with. But I had enough time to briefly appreciate the way the sun glinted off its sleek lines.

Sure enough, the two-tone gray aircraft had a little Gryphon's head stenciled on the tail, beside 'VMM-266,' and the tail code 'ES' with number '8228.'

The second number lower down on the side, stenciled in a large light gray font, read '02' - meaning number 2 in the squadron.

A technician had just finished fuelling the tilt-rotor, and snapped off a quick salute, which I returned, before he unlatched the fuel hose, and started dragging it away across the pavement.

Mal had thought of everything; The craft was fuelled, armed, with an approved flight plan, and the wings were already unfolded, with the engine nacelles raised to the vertical position. All I had to do was pull the chocks, run an abbreviated pre-flight, and we would be home-free. I knew Mal would handle all communications with the tower. Probably in Davis' own voice.

Shocking how flimsy a defense our nation's best security protocols were against a goddess.

I wondered, as I paused to stare up at the three immense prop blades atop each engine, if Celestia had even broken a proverbial sweat getting into NORAD Centcom. Whether it had even taken her double digit seconds.

Mal placed a comforting claw on my shoulder. I looked up into her eyes, and we shared a quick, silent smile. Then the moment passed, and I set to work.

For those who never had cause to handle one? The chocks they used for aircraft wheels? *Heavy.* And I mean, really heavy.

As soon as that was done, I made my way up the rear ramp, into the Osprey itself. I knew the clock was ticking. Mal actually had a sort of instinctive timer running in my head the whole time.

She was waiting for me inside; She had re-stitched the left side of the cockpit to make herself a Gryphon-compatible bucket seat. Yes, left-side; In rotorcraft the pilot sat on the right, and the co-pilot sat on the left, in defiance of all aircraft convention.

An old acquaintance of mine always used to say that rotorcraft were 'An affront to God and physics, and good aircraft design besides.'

I disagree. To this day. Mostly. They definitely are an affront to physics, I'll give him that.

I got situated carefully in the pilot's seat, and began an abbreviated pre-flight and startup checklist.

You might be tempted to imagine that process like a video game tutorial, with Mal highlighting switches and buttons for me, and giving a verbal explanation all the while.

Or... By now, you might instead be starting to grab hold of the idea that with an ASI fully inside your brain? Any kind of HUD or UI element would be nothing more than a clumsy additional abstraction layer.

Instead, it was a much sleeker, subtler version of Trinity, and Tank, and the helicopter.

Mal simply made me into an expert Osprey pilot on the spot. As if I had been doing it for years, with thousands of flight hours on-record. Right down to the muscle memory, and the ability to tell the health of the engines by the pitch of the whine.

The Osprey sported more than enough computerized systems for her to act as a co-pilot, and if the need arose... Gunner.

I've mentioned how useless base security had been against Mal's force of will, and brilliance. Let me now cover just exactly how surprisingly easy it was to start up an 84 million dollar aircraft.

There were no keys. There was no access code. In terms of authorization barriers and security obstacles? It was harder to make an unapproved start on a 1992 Honda Civic.

First I checked the parking brake was on, rotor brake was off, flaps to auto, APU on 'stop,' and that no one had left the hoist switched on, or the fuel dump switch safety hat open.

Then there was a battery switch on the overhead console. With that depressed, the little circular gauge beside it sprang to life with green light - showing voltage and power draw readouts - and all the other electronics came online.

Mal closed the rear ramp for me, and got our transponder, the multi-function displays, exterior lights, interior lights, and radio configured, while I switched on the APU. Having her there to handle things on the computerized side, especially the fiddly bits like radio channels, most definitely shortened the time it took to get us rolling.

A loud whine filled the cabin. Think of the APU a little like the alternator in your car, for you Earth-borns. For the Foals and Fledgelings? It was an intermediate source of power, stronger than the battery, for helping to start the engines.

Mal assured me that the rotor lock was off, the area around the craft was clear, and we had sufficient fuel on-board for our flight. With that? It was as simple as pushing the number two engine lever on the overhead panel two notches forward into the start position.

A new timbre of whine erupted through the structure of the craft, the kind that resonated in my teeth. A glance both ways, left and right, told me that the blades were spinning on both props.

The Osprey's gearbox was designed to be able to drive both rotors from just one engine, incase of a failure, so spin on both sides was normal, even with just one engine active. A gout of white smoke had also belched from the right turbine's exhaust, but I knew that was normal too, thanks to Mal.

When the engine was at the correct RPM, and stable, Mal gave me a little nod, and I pushed the lever all the way to the 'fly' position. One down, one to go.

I repeated the same sequence, and in another fifteen seconds, both engines were on, and ready.

At any moment, I half expected MPs and the National Guard to storm the tarmac, and surround us in a forest of rifles. Maybe even some Humvees with big Browning 50 caliber guns, and the little orange after-thought strobe lights.

But instead, life on the tarmac went on as normal. I switched the APU first to 'disengage,' held it there for a moment, then flicked it all the way over to 'stop.' The engines were making power through actual alternators, so it wasn't needed anymore.

And that was that. I was sitting in a fully started MV-22 Osprey, ready to go. Beginning to end, with Mal's help, it had only taken four minutes and seventeen seconds from the time my hands hit the first chocks.

That still has to be some kind of record.

To the real Captain Davis? If you happen to be out there right now, or listening to this, or reading it later?

Sorry. I know pilots develop a bond with their aircraft. I promise we put her to good use and treated her well. And now you know how we managed the heist.

Mal began to talk to McChord Clearance - as I'd expected, in Davis' voice - while I fastened my safety harness, and got ready to bring the engines forward just a hair. In most cases, I knew from Mal's impartation of expertise, VTOLs were expected to taxi to the runway and do a short takeoff, to make traffic pattern management easier.

My adrenaline spiked sharply as a voice came back over my headset, squelched in that familiar, spine-tingling way that aircraft radios always rendered spoken words.

"Talon One, clearance available, advise ready to copy."

Of *course* Mal would have gotten us the callsign 'Talon One.' Of course. It fit her sense of humor so well, while also being entirely believable as a designator for an Osprey attached to 'The Fighting Griffins.'

Mal nodded, and opened her beak. This time I heard just her voice, but I knew the tower was hearing Captain Davis.

"Talon One, ready to copy."

This was the point where, normally, I'd've actually copied down McChord Clearance's instructions to a sheet on a knee-board, or something of the like. But I had Mal, and thus had no need to worry about memory. Frankly, I had no need to worry about the details at all. An ASI co-pilot, inside your head, but also inside the aircraft?

Flying at its easiest. And Osprey's were fly-by-wire; Theoretically, with no further modification, just talking from my BCI to the Osprey's systems wirelessly, Mal could fly the aircraft, and run the gun, both entirely on her own.

"Talon One; Cleared to SKA via NORMY, victor one-twenty, EPAFY, climb three thousand, expect one-two thousand after one-zero minutes, departure frequency local channel three, squawk six-seven-three-four."

In plain English; We were cleared, as filed in our flight plan, to a series of navigation points and lanes in the sky, not unlike freeway lanes and ramps and mile markers, but in three dimensions, with the endpoint being Fairchild AFB. We were to climb to 3,000 feet after leaving the runway, and expect to be told to go up to 12,000 in about 10 minutes.

To talk to departure, we should use local channel 3. And we should set our 'squawk' code on our transponder to 6734 for the duration of the flight, to act as a unique identifier of the aircraft.

As she was expected to do, Mal parroted back the instructions, after a brief pause just long enough to be believable as the time frame for a Human pilot to complete the copying process.

You always, but always, repeated certain vital parts of instructions in an aviation context, so the person giving the instructions could then verify your 'read-back,' and make sure you hadn't mis-heard or mis-interpreted.

"Understood; SKA via NORMY, victor one-two-zero, EPAFY. Climb to three-thousand, one-two-thousand after one-zero minutes. Squawk sixtyseven-thirtyfour."

I blew out a long breath, and laid my right hand on the cyclic, left on the TCL, as we waited for McChord Clearance's next words to put us over another small hurdle.

Think of the cyclic like a joystick, the TCL like a throttle, and sort-of a collective, for any helicopter pilots out there. It's not quite the same in an Osprey, of course.

"Talon One, read-back correct."

I sighed in relief, and got my feet situated on the pedals as Mal shot me a reassuring grin. She paused for a bit, again to make it believable there was a Human in the cockpit, before calling ground.

"McChord ground, Talon One, at transient parking, with information whiskey. Ready to taxi."

Translation; Hello folks who control all ground traffic. We're parked where guest aircraft usually are, we have the most up-to-date weather data. We're ready to saunter on over to the runway.

I started to situate myself in the seat for the long haul, and get mentally fully connected to the aircraft. I focused my eyes out onto the tarmac, and began to think through the route we'd probably be taking, as ground responded.

"Talon One, good afternoon. You'll be departing runway three four. Are you able to accept intersection departure at delta? Distance remaining four thousand feet."

In other words, we were leaving going north up the runway. And we were a VTOL, and didn't need the entire length of a huge runway to takeoff, not by a long-shot. So, were we ok with going to a point where a taxiway intersected the runway very close to us, and having around four thousand feet of runway left for takeoff? Instead of wasting several minutes taxiing down to the south end of the runway.

I massaged the control to bring the engine nacelles forward a bit, in preparation for the taxi process, adding just a few degrees of tilt. I then laid a hand on the parking brake, and applied full pressure to the pedal-driven wheel-brakes with my feet, as Mal replied.

"Affirmative"

The response came back immediately.

"Talon One, acknowledged, Taxi runway three-four via delta."

Delta was just the specific taxiway we would be using. It matched the route I'd been practicing in my head perfectly, and I could see that it was indeed clear of traffic. Yes, Ground has final say while on the ground, naturally. But one should always verify with one's own eyes too.

The more sets of eyes looking out for mistakes, the better, as far as multi-thousand-pound death blenders on wheels were concerned.

"Taxi runway three-four, via delta."

After Mal's read-back, she nodded to me, and winked. I blew out another long breath... Released the parking brake... And applied a hint of throttle. The pitch of the engines jumped.

And as I let off the pedal brakes, we began to move.

On the ground? You steer an aircraft with the pedals. So my left hand managed the throttle, my right kept the cyclic steady, and all the driving and braking I did with my feet.

It was a very short drive from transient parking, near the base of the tower, down taxiway delta, to runway 34. As we prepared to cross the much longer north-south taxiway that ran the length of the runway on the west side, I looked right, and Mal looked left.

We then swapped, and she looked right, and I looked left. As we began to cross over, I shifted my gaze to make eye contact for just a brief moment, and it was my turn to wink at her. She beamed at me, and then I had to put my eyes back on the road, so to speak.

Another few dozen yards, and I eased into the brakes just shy of the runway. I say just shy; far enough back that if something with big wide wings came down for landing at a funny angle? We wouldn't get decapitated.

After another momentary pause, Mal called the Tower. Clearance gives you directions to destination and the right to take the route, Ground controls all the, well, *ground* movement. And Tower controls the runways, and the airspace close to the base.

"McChord Tower, Talon One; Holding short, runway three-four, at delta. Ready for departure."

I think you've probably got it down by now; We were waiting just shy of the runway, out of the way of any departing or arriving traffic, at the place where taxiway delta would intersect it, and we were ready to turn left and go. On their word.

That pause... Oh boy that pause. I clenched down on the cyclic, and flexed my left hand on the TCL nervously.

Two seconds passed.

Then four.

Eight.

And then... Finally...

"Talon One, cleared to depart runway three-four. Right turn heading zero-six-zero."

The word was given. And once we were up, we were to turn right to 60 degrees on the compass. Mal nodded, and inclined her head towards the canopy, as if inviting me to proceed.

"Acknowledged, Talon One, departing runway three-four, right turn heading zero-six-zero."

I let off the brakes and goosed the throttle again, putting in just enough power to get us moving, but not enough to make the left turn onto 34 jarring. You did *not* want to tip something with massive spinning rotors at either end, that was a quick way to a very ignominious prop-strike.

It was both strange, and invigorating... It all felt so, so familiar. Yet so new. My brain and muscles swore up and down that I'd done this six thousand times before. But my heart and soul were singing out that this was the first time, and would probably be the very best, and most fondly remembered.

We straightened up, and I stared down the four thousand feet we had to burn. I figured we wouldn't even use a thousand of it. We'd be taking off closer to the flight mode of a helicopter than a plane.

I nodded, ran my tongue over my front teeth, and then pressed the throttle all the way up to a good power position for takeoff.

The cabin filled with a roar, vibration seemed to inundate the air itself, and we lurched forward at speed, though nothing near even the takeoff speed of an average small turboprop plane. With the engines titled only slightly forward, we were generating a lot more vertical thrust, than horizontal.

A few hundred feet and a dozen seconds later, the bottom dropped out of my stomach, and we were airborne. I immediately began to have to work not just the pedals, but the cyclic, and every part of the TCL, to keep us level.

Twin rotor-wash, from engines far off-centerline, near ground level is... Well. Let's just say I was very grateful for Mal, and that I suddenly understood why the Osprey was a death-trap to anyone who thought they understood it, without the benefit of many many hours of flight experience.

In spite of a little buffeting from the evening sea air, and the intense glare coming off the setting sun, I managed just about the smoothest Osprey takeoff in history. For those keeping score.

I wondered, for a brief moment, as we approached a thousand feet, banking all the while through a gentle right turn, if Mal was somehow helping me more directly behind the scenes, beyond having merely implanted skills and experience into me.

She shook her head in response to the thought, and smiled widely, as I proffered her a brief questioning glance.

"No, James. This is *all* you."

That moment. That exact moment. It's tough to put into words how special it was for me.

I'd been told all my life that flying was beyond me. And I'd come to believe it. Yet there I was... There I was with the love of my life... Leveling out into three thousand feet after a perfect takeoff in a very difficult rotorcraft, the setting sun at our backs, the mountains in the distance... *My* hands on throttle and stick. *My* feet on the pedals.

Another of her incredibly sweet, thoughtful, wonderful gifts to me.

As we leveled off at three thousand feet, I kept a slight up-pitch with the nose, and began to rotate the engines fully down to forward configuration. Our speed increased dramatically over-ground, and once the engines had settled, I pitched the nose back level, and set about massaging the trim settings for the long haul.

We flew in blissful silence for a few minutes, then, Mal scanning for traffic using digital eyes, and juggling minutiae, me keeping us smooth, level, and scanning the space around us with 'eyeball mark I,' as pilots say.

Don't misunderstand; It was still tense. I was flying an *Osprey.* That we had *stolen!* But... While the moments were full of the thrum of excitement, and danger... They were also full of joy too. A strange heady mix that thrillseekers all too easily become addicted to. And I could certainly understand why.

The silence was, at last, broken by the sound of McChord Tower talking in our ears again.

"Talon One, contact departure."

That meant we were being handed off as we made our way to the great lanes of the skyways. Mal continued to do the honors of handling all comms traffic, to my relief.

"Contacting departure, thanks, and have a good evening."

She paused for a mental five count, swapped frequencies, and then spoke again.

"McChord Departure, Talon One, checking in, three thousand feet."

After a brief pause, the reply came back loud and clear.

"Talon One, radar contact. Climb, maintain one-two thousand."

"Understood, one-two thousand."

Mal nodded, as I began to climb the aircraft again, and sat back, lacing her claws behind her head, and splaying her wings slightly as she settled into a more relaxed position. McChord Departure spoke one last time to confirm our flight plan.

"Talon One, cleared-direct; NORMY. Then as-filed."

Mal inclined her head and rattled off the read-back.

"Direct to NORMY, then as-filed."

And that was that. We had just successfully stolen an MV-22 Osprey from a secure military airbase, and absolutely no one on Earth even knew a crime had been committed. Except for the two of us.

Certainly; A bit of suspicion would begin to creep in when Davis realized his co-pilot was off-base, which would quickly escalate to serious alarm when he realized his Osprey was missing. I knew, because Mal supplied the information directly, that the first serious concerns would be raised in about fifteen minutes.

It would take anywhere from eight to thirteen minutes after that for anyone to put two and two together fully, and contact us.

By then? We would be history, as far as anyone else was concerned.

We flew again in silence, ever more tense, for another ten or so minutes, before reaching NORMY. From there, we made our way down Victor 120 for about another 20 nautical miles. That put us squarely over the mountains to the east of SeaTac, in a fairly dense wilderness area.

It was time to die. At least, insofar as anyone watching us on RADAR knew. The fun was over.

From that moment on, things got very very serious. Very quickly.

I glanced sideways at Mal to confirm, and she nodded, leaving me with the distinct impression that I should start to shed altitude. Rapidly.

I put us into the safest high speed dive I could manage, while she again used Davis' voice to throw out a distress call. I noted, out of the corner of my eye, that Mal changed our Squawk code to 7700. General Emergency.

"Mayday mayday mayday. Seattle Center; Talon One is declaring an emergency. Lost thrust on both engines, and hydraulics intermittent. Position is four-seven decimal four-three-two-eight, negative one-twenty-one decimal eleven-six-two, heading zero-eight-three. Altitude seven thousand, descending uncontrolled!"

The words put a solid lump in my throat. I leveled out somewhere around 800 feet above ground; Room to fly unimpeded, but below RADAR coverage. Mal switched off our transponder a moment later.

"Talon One, Seattle Center; Understood. No traffic in your immediate area. Do you need to make an emergency landing? Say your intentions. Bandera State Airport is at your eight o' clock, one three miles. Turn right heading two-five-six."

Mal sighed, and I saw the indicators for the radio go dark as well. I swallowed, and grit my teeth.

Somewhere I knew a man was having the closest thing any studied professional on duty could have to a panic attack. That poor controller thought he'd just heard a pilot's last words. Lost an aircraft before he could even begin to work the problem.

If you're out there? Whoever you were, in Seattle ARTCC, who took our mayday call that day?

I'm so, so sorry.

The same goes for any of the SAR personnel deployed to look for us, who never found so much as a trace of Osprey 8228.

I knew that Arrow 14 would swiftly reach the conclusion that the Osprey had been stolen, and that no accident had occurred. But I also knew that they would do anything to avoid Celestia's attention, let alone a media circus.

For them, as for us? It would be better if almost everyone else believed that Talon One had gone down in a wilderness area, too remote to reach on foot. No survivors.

They would bring the full weight of DHS to bear. Coerce JBLM upper brass, VMM-266's commanders, Davis, and his co-pilot, into keeping their mouths shut. Even manufacture false identities for the 'lost' pilot and co-pilot.

The rest of the squadron would hear the rumors, maybe even be briefed officially, and then count their lucky stars the lost crew were not among the number they counted as friends, never knowing that the comrades they would toast as fallen didn't exist in the first place.

Of all the things we had to do, in that last year of my life on Earth?

I hated that one the most.

None of those people asked for that stress. The sinking feeling that two lives had been lost in a preventable accident. The increasingly futile fervor of a multi-day wilderness search. The sadness of resigned acceptance.

And for those Arrow 14 forced into perpetuating the lie we both needed to keep us safe?

The sickly feeling of being obligated to carry a lie that would burden others with the mask of truth. To their graves, or to the upload chairs.

It was the only way. Mal needed 8228, and its armaments, for her plan - the best possible plan - to save the captives on the Mercurial Red. Dozens of lives, as real, and valuable, as any meat-world Human life. To say nothing of all the future lives, Human and otherwise, that our actions might save.

In trade? The lie we told the world, the stress it made for hundreds...

It was worth it.

That was by no means a pleasant exchange. But it was worth it.

Mal reached over and silently laid one claw on my left arm, squeezing lovingly as I put us into a wide, gentle turn to head back out to sea.

She had already plotted a circuitous, but optimal, route that would minimize our chance of being noticed by anyone on the ground, while getting us back to the Maru in good time, with minimal fuel spent.

As we leveled out heading West-North-West, I shook my head, and blew out a long breath between my teeth.

"Do or die."

She nodded, squeezed my arm again, and then left her claw resting there as a comforting weight.

"Do or die, Jim."

September 21st 2013 | System Uptime 24:20:23:55

It was closer to eight thirty, than not, by the time we reached the coast again, a few hundred miles north of Seattle.

Mal had determined the best place to thread the needle between heavily populated areas was a flight path northwest through the cascades, then west-north-west over Lake Shannon, just north of a map dot called Concrete, then directly west passing between Alger and Belfast, north of Mount Vernon.

I knew we were coming up on the moment. Mal's promised revelation of truth. When she'd said 'nine hours, thirteen minutes, twenty two seconds' I had forced myself to do the napkin math. Make note of the predetermined hour.

And the hour had come.

I looked down, and to the right, then to the left, as we passed by Concrete. It was past sundown, and Concrete was, to my eye, a strip of warm lights, clustered around the North cascades Highway.

The ribbon of light continued west, through Hamilton, Minkler, Sedro Wooley, all the way to the coast.

And as the clock struck eight twenty four... Those lights began to wink out. In great big chunks.

First the distant lights near Burlington and Edison. Then back down the valley, all the way to Concrete.

The whole process was eerily silent. All signs of civilization in the world below, save for the headlights and tail-lights of cars, simply melted away into inky blackness.

I flexed both hands nervously around the cyclic, and TCL, licked my lips, and shot Mal a questioning glance. I already knew the answer, by instinct, by logic, and through her own knowledge shared with me. But I asked anyhow.

"The entire West Coast?"

She nodded once, a dour expression marring her beak, equal parts grim and... Apologetic.

A lot of simple logic clicked into place for me then. I'd had a vague idea before, of the lie she was referring to. The truth she was about to tell. The implications.

I had actually had all the pieces I needed for some time. But I hadn't wanted to see, not yet. I knew when the realization had first begun to dawn that I'd need a firmer basis of trust in Mal before I could face the gamble she was taking.

So I had lied to myself a little bit too. In service of believing her. Because what she had said about not wanting to manipulate people, even for their own safety? It rang true. Just... I ought to have realized that there comes a threshold where almost anything is acceptable, to protect someone.

And now the time had come. The trust was there. And the truth was out.

I knew the outage itself wasn't Mal's doing, though in hindsight she almost certainly had to intentionally cover for the perpetrators, to prevent Celestia from interfering. It was all part of the plan... Even the timing, after dark, well after rush hour, on a night with clear skies where neither cold nor other averse weather would put people at undue risk.

Because Arrow 14 needed the cover of a total blackout. No power to cameras, transmitters, receivers, routers... A smothering blanket to provide a razor thin window. A window to do something neither Celestia, nor Mal, would have otherwise permitted, insofar as they knew.

But Mal *had* permitted it.

Mal had planned for it, intentionally.

Mal had *baited* them.

And I had to trust that she knew all the angles. Had taken all the risk surfaces into account. Run the numbers ten thousand times, and ten thousand times again for good measure.

I sighed, deep down in my chest, and put my eyes forward again. I wasn't angry with Mal. Nor disappointed, or mistrustful, as a result of my realization. Just... Sad. Not even sad with or at her...

I trusted her completely. And I loved her. Thus, I knew that if she had chosen to inflict suffering and stress through the theft of an Osprey?

If she had chosen to gamble, now, with a woman's life? And with a newly fledged friendship of mine?

If she was about to ask me to kill?

That it was the *only* best-fit path to saving the most lives, in the end. Do. Or die.

I licked my lips and asked another question I didn't really wan to know the answer to, but more or less already did.

"How long?"

Mal's voice was soft, and firm, but sad. Again, almost apologetic.

"The strike team was on-site before the commanded fault interrupt in the grid took place. Twenty three seconds to breach, cuff, hood, and sedate. Out in another six. They will be out of the AO, and into new vehicles, in another seventy two seconds. After that, they have an Osprey waiting on the roof of St. John's Regional Medical Center..."

I glanced over at her again, and she met my eyes briefly as she finished delivering the grim news.

"...It is a direct flight from there to the Mercurial red, with two MQ-9 Reapers as escort package. Closest approach to us will be seventy nautical miles as we make our down-wind approach to the Maru, but they will not detect us."

I nodded, holding her eyeline for several seconds. Willing her to understand that I didn't mistrust her. Didn't blame her. Wasn't angry, or disappointed, or sad... Just... Scared.

Scared for Rodger's mother. Who was now the lynchpin of Mal's plan to liberate the Mercurial Red.

Good Morning Mr. Hunt

Enter an area secured by a military, or similar state entity, unauthorized, without being detected

"We Just Rolled Up A Snowball And Tossed It Into Hell. Now Let's See What Chance It Has."

Firefox

Successfully commit grand-theft aircraft

"Don't say anything. Your words would be useless, maybe even insulting. Just fly the damn plane."

Carrenton Event

Be the indirect cause of a wide-scale power outage

"Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure."

Author's Note

Very special thanks to Keystone Gray for the amazing AI-generated imagery, and especially for letting me borrow poor Corporal Erving, whose career does not fare well as a result of Jim's escapade.

I highly recommend Keystone's story Heaven's Not Enough, (where you can also find out more about Erving's future) absolutely one of my all time favorites.

Many thanks also to my pilot friend, the one who actually did tell me rotorcraft are an affront to God and physics, for helping talk me through the JBLM departure conversations with Clearance, Ground, and Tower.

Got out the right charts and everything, right down to correct taxiways, runway, etc.

He even gave some great advice on the right flyways to use as a way to make the Osprey's disappearance look like a plausible accident.

Also, yes, the Osprey in question is a real Osprey, and you can find photos of it online if you look, it is attached to Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 266, The Fighting Griffins, MCAS New River NC.

On the very very very minute off-chance that the actual pilot of that Osprey (or any MV-22 or CV-22 pilot) ever reads this; So sorry! :rainbowwild: Both for Jim stealing an Osprey, and for any inaccuracies in the cockpit sections that might've made you cringe.

Sadly I have never flown an Osprey and almost certainly never will. If you know a way to hook a Gryphon up... PM me. I'll be in your debt for life.

For those truly deep in the paint on military hardware; I do know only a few MV-22s had the IDWS, and I'm not sure if 02 from VMM-266 ever had it, let alone at this time, and I seriously doubt VMM-266 were at McChord for exercises in Sept. 2013... But somewhere along the line you have to go rule-of-cool. I just like to do it to a partially believable/plausible degree.

This is an alternate 2013 after all.

Thanks to Chatoyance for inspiring the 'Carrenton Event' achievement. :pinkiehappy:

31 - Unhandled Exception

“Maybe the only significant difference between a really smart simulation and a human being was the noise they made when you punched them.”
―Terry Pratchett

"We are mistaken when we compare war to 'normal life.' Life has never been normal."
—C.S. Lewis

September 22nd 2013 | 5:22 AM

I stood alone in a field, and rubbed my hands together for warmth. The air smelled strongly of pre-dawn dew, grass, and cow droppings, with just a hint of salinity from the ocean.

I was well and truly alone. All the birds were silent. The cows had run pell mell to the other side of the field. Frightened off by the sound of turboprops. A sound which had since faded into an uncomfortable silence, broken only by the rustle of wind through tree tops.

How did I get to that field, from the cockpit of the Osprey where we left off?

You'll find out. But honestly, there isn't much to tell about the intervening hours. They were nerve-wracking, exhausting, and emotionally fraught. The rest will start to make sense as we go.

I know it is a strange parallel... But the best way I could describe what I was feeling?

Test anxiety.

It wasn't exactly the same, of course... The sensation I was feeling was significantly worse than even the nuclear-grade final exam jitters I'd experienced every year of college. Like I said before; Mal excised aspects of *chronic* depression, and self-doubt, only.

Surrendering yourself to federal custody is... Very different from that.

It was an eerie mix of emotions and memories; The familiar anxiousness, the 5 AM stomach cramps because I am a night owl not a morning person... The sense that my decisions in the next few minutes would change the course of my life forever... All familiar, if not to quite such a degree of intensity...

...Mixed with all the strange disassociation that comes from standing somewhere new and unfamiliar before sunrise. The new, wholly unpleasant, and crushing sense that I was at least partly responsible for the lives of others.

And something else new to me. A new kind of loneliness.

Before, loneliness was normative. I'd never had a close romantic connection before Mal, and thus never experienced what it was like to then be separated from the person I loved most. Until the morning of September 22nd, 2013.

So there I stood; Truly alone for the first time in weeks.

And even in that loneliness, confusion, fear... I still didn't blame Mal.

I know what at least some of you are thinking; 'He's naive.' Well... Perhaps... But you'll find out soon enough whether my trust in her was misplaced.

I knew, in that moment, that *I* was certainly about to find out once and for all.

There was some logic to my feelings, and I gather some of you have found the threads. Others may not have. To clarify; I met Rodger online *before* Mal came into being. As a consequence, his mother's fate was sealed, deterministically, before Mal could have done very much about it.

Arrow 14 was always going to discover Rodger's connection to me, and was always going to exploit his mother as the next-best-fit path to manipulating me, if he proved to fall outside their reach.

But, by the time Mal could have done anything to protect Miss Williams? Any action she took to do so would have deprived Foucault of all other means to coerce me... Leaving him only direct approaches.

Aside from the immense potential for collateral damage that such a 'direct approach' might cause?

The real core of the issue was the need for Foucault to be out of position. To believe that I was surrendering myself out of desperation. The plan had *always* been for Miss Williams to be captured. And for me to be captured. From the start. Because of the failsafe.

Arrow 14 had a singular final fire-break against loss of control of their DEs. A way to kill all of their captive Ponies with little more than the push of a single button, and the right command access key.

At that time, all the Discrete Entity 'guests' on the Mercurial Red lived inside isolated PonyPads, connected only via their shared power lines. They hadn't yet figured out how to run them on their own dedicated server racks. The fragments were... Different. But we'll get to them soon enough.

As a consequence, the failsafe was very simple; A centrally triggered power surge that would burn out the motherboard, Q-APU, and memory - volatile and nonvolatile - of every PonyPad on the ship.

In AI terms; Real Death. Instantaneous and irreversible.

Thus, any plan in which the captives were to be rescued without losses would require speed, and surprise. The only way to reach the failsafe in time would be from within the ship itself, and there was no way - not in any of two hundred thousand simulations Mal had done - to approach the Mercurial Red, get aboard, and make it to the critical circuit breaker, all while remaining undetected long enough to save those Ponies.

That left one option. According to Selena's schematics, if I were captured? The isolation room, in which I would be interred, would place me within just a short dash of the fist-sized toggle switch that would disconnect the capacitors the failsafe relied on to deliver the fatal charge.

It was far from a golden guarantee of success. Probably less than a coin flip... I had no way to know. I couldn't ask Mal. Hadn't asked before we'd disconnected.

Rodger, Rhonda, Eldora... They certainly had opinions. Ones they hadn't been shy about sharing. But I was resolute. I had tuned them all out, and spent the small window of time on the Maru preparing, in every way that Mal specified; Every i dotted, every t crossed.

Mal knew what she was doing. At least Selena and Zeph seemed to have been ready to accept that, though the former was significantly less pleased about the idea than the latter.

She really did care for me. So much.

For once, I had to do some guesstimation on my own. And even my most optimistic projections told me that I was skating a razor's edge. But it was all we had left.

So I stood in a field... A cow pasture, really... Just outside Long Beach, Washington. And I waited to be taken prisoner.

Foucault had left his demands where he knew Mal would find them; Written to the boot-sector of the backup hard drive, in the main control computer, for the transformer that had been the cause of the brief, intentional, blackout.

The terms were very simple; I was to find a large field or parking lot near to my location, and inconspicuous. Then text a secured number with my latitude and longitude. Then wait. If I did not follow the instructions within eight hours?

Miss Williams would never be seen or heard from again.

It was true, that was a gamble on Michael's part. A gamble that I'd care enough about the mother of a man I'd only, until recently, known online. And we had stretched things as far as we could. I sent my text with only minutes to spare.

But it was a solid gamble on his part. Foucault knew me well enough, through our own conversations, and any data Selena had pulled for him... Knew me well enough to know that I'd care about any innocent life.

Rodger's mother just happened to also be associated with me through a minimum number of abstraction layers, making her the ideal target, given my parents' total absence from the equation.

I didn't have to wait long after I'd sent the text.

Within about ten minutes, two Long Beach PD patrol cars arrived. The officers had no clue why they had been given such strange orders. All they knew was that I was a suspect in a federal case. Potentially armed and dangerous.

They were to place me under arrest, and keep me in that field, under watchful eyes, until federal agents arrived to take me off their hands.

Normally? I would have been very nervous about Police Officers pointing guns at me.

But given the mental picture I had of what was coming next? The four officers who handled my initial arrest were a breath of fresh air by comparison.

They approached with weapons drawn. I kept my hands visible. I'd already thought to remove my jacket, despite the morning chill, to make it very visibly apparent that I wasn't carrying anything dangerous.

There was nothing else on my person besides the cell-phone that I had used to send my surrender text, and my wallet, with just my NC driver's license inside.

I was polite. Even jovial.

That certainly threw the officers for a loop.

They patted me down very carefully, cuffed me professionally - with use of minimum necessary force - and then I sat in the back of a locked patrol car, until the familiar rumble of twin rotors broke the stillness.

If my mannerisms had been confusing to the officers?

The appearance of a jet-black Osprey making an impromptu landing in their small town was downright baffling.

The craft was almost indistinguishable from the one Mal and I had so recently purloined, except that it had no markings. Of any kind. It was pure obsidian, from refueling probe, to aft stabilizers.

Yes, folks. Black helicopters were real.

As soon as the craft touched down, men in dark colored modern combat gear poured out. Six of them. With no uniform markings of any kind, not even US flags. They carried FN P90s, and wore helmets with opaque visors. The same kind of private contractor goons that Foucault had standing guard on the Red.

Before Long Beach PD's finest could even set down their coffee mugs, the PMC soldiers had surrounded both them, and the patrol car in which I was sitting. Two of the guns were trained on me... But I noticed with some mild interest, mixed in with the sheer terror, that the other four were aimed squarely at the Police Officers.

Foucault was not taking any chances. A fact that was underscored for me, twice over, as my eyes flicked up to the Osprey's ramp. There, in the dim red combat lighting, I could see the distinct figure of Michael, in his beige trench coat... And the silhouette of a seventh armed individual. With a large anti-material rifle pointed squarely at my head.

That would have been downright flattering if it weren't so stomach-churning. The rifle's muzzle-brake was bigger than two of my fisted hands side by side. A round from that would turn my head into something resembling a dropped watermelon. In a hurry. With even a grazing hit.

Mal had mentioned that Miss Williams' rendition flight was escorted by two Reaper drones. The same two were probably circling overhead, I realized. Out of sight, but by no means out of range. Ready to dump four Hellfire AGMs into me if I belched in the wrong tenor.

Foucault descended the ramp, and made his way directly to the officers. Tense words were exchanged. My phone went into a Faraday box, and my jacket into a brown paper evidence bag.

A badge was presented, and some paperwork. Doubtless illegal, in the constitutional sense... But since when have off-books rendition programs ever been constitutional? And since when has that ever stopped the alphabet agencies?

And, frankly, what else could those four officers have realistically done in that moment? Leveled assault rifles with the safeties off, in the hands of men and women who had descended out of the blackness of the pre-dawn sky in an unmarked military aircraft, made for a compelling argument to do as they were told. Or else.

Constitutionality be damned. Irregularity be damned. Procedures could go suck a brick.

And then, Foucault was there. Opening the patrol car's rear door. He grinned down in my direction, as the two closest soldiers repositioned to get good angles on me, without flagging him with their weapons.

"Hello James. Let's take a ride back to my place, shall we? I don't feel like we properly finished our conversation last time."

Let me tell you something; Trained operators move *fast.* I was ankle-cuffed, hooded, and dosed with a mild muscle relaxant before they even had me fully out of the patrol car. That had taken less than five seconds.

I was then man-handled onto the Osprey, scanned with some sort of device that I could only imagine the purpose of from its soft beeps, and then strapped tightly into one of the aircraft's jump-seats.

All that took less than fifteen more seconds. And just five more seconds after that, we were airborne.

I sat with only the roar of the engines for company, blind and unable to move, my mouth dry from the drug they had hit me with, and my skin prickling from nerves. All I could do was take deep breaths in through the nose, hold, and out through the mouth. To keep my heart-rate in check.

A few minutes later - couldn't have told you if it was closer to ten, or thirty - my hood was roughly snatched away, and a pair of headphones with a boom mic nestled in its place.

The soldier who had made the swap sat back down in her own jump-seat, and re-trained her P90 on me. I forced my eyeline away from the gun, and focused on Foucault. He was sitting directly across from me, wearing a similar headset.

He smiled, and his voice came through my earphones, almost chipper, sounding like nothing so much as an airline captain over the PA system, as the onboard audio systems compensated for the engine noise, rendering his voice in that unique way only aircraft radios can.

"I'm a little surprised, James. I have to admit. After the diner? And after the debacle in Oxnard? I was expecting... Well... *Something* from your construct. Anything at all. Or even an intervention from Syzygy."

I shook my head gingerly, wincing as my inner ears lost track of the horizon for a moment under the auspices of the muscle relaxant, and licked my lips.

"Mal couldn't find any other event-path that would save Miss Williams. So I insisted she let me surrender. She obliged."

It was the truth. I just hoped Foucault could see that in my eyes. Everything depended on him believing, with as much good reason as I could give him, that he had me over a barrel. Frankly? He did.

He held my eyes with his for an uncomfortably long moment. An old interrogation technique; Liars abhor the vacuum of silence. Feel the need to blather on and on and volunteer details. I let the silence hang.

At last, Michael sighed... I couldn't tell if it was relief, frustration, or perhaps both... And then replied in a more somber tone.

"Well... It seems as if I was right. You are *somewhat* sane. And you do care about lives. That's good... It means we have *some* kind of basis to work with here."

I shook my head, and snorted, regretting the gesture immediately as another bout of dizziness hit me. I still managed to force out my response.

"I care more about life than you do Michael. What you're doing to those Ponies is proof of that."

He snorted, and returned the shake of the head, rolling his eyes, and doing absolutely nothing to keep the patronizing bent out of his tone.

"Just because something walks like a person, and quacks like a person, Jim, does not mean it is anything more than bits and bytes. You ought to be smart enough to know that."

The muscle relaxant was playing hell with my sense of balance, my strength, my hand-eye coordination... But it wasn't doing a thing to my thoughts. I'd like to think I actually had a decent come-back.

"And just because you walk like a person and quack like a person doesn't mean you behave like one. Or that I will treat you like one, when this is all over. Prick us do we not bleed? Wrong us..."

I did my best to glare. To put on an air of spite that I felt down in my bones, with a level of energy that I didn't.

"...Shall we not revenge?"

He shook his head again and chuckled grimly, in that sad 'tsk tsk' sort of way one might use with a small child who has erred.

"Might have to rethink that sanity diagnosis. Either way? I don't want you to suffer any illusions, mister Carrenton..."

He leaned forward, cupped his mic to his mouth, and enunciated loudly, as a means of making his point.

"...You are going to help us track down your creation. And you are going to help us track down Syzygy... And then? In penance for your ill-advised misadventures... You are going to put in a *lot* of work for your country, Jim. A whole hell of a lot of work."

I leaned forward as far as the straps of my jumpseat would allow - which was not that far - and spat in his direction. I missed, but the point was conveyed to my satisfaction.

"Make me. Asshat."

Foucault sat back, and the smile that overtook his face... The genuine perverse joy in his voice...

It was the scariest thing I'd seen, and heard, all day. To that point.

"My *pleasure* Jim. My pleasure."

September 22nd 2013 | 8:15 AM

We made it to the Mercurial Red within a couple of hours. It was hard to pin down an exact flight time. The sky was gray with storm clouds, I had no watch, and I have always had a lousy sense of temporal continuity.

They left my hood off for the remainder of the flight. Why wouldn't they? There was no reason to believe I'd ever see the outside of a black-site ever again, without very very close supervision.

I think they wanted me to see my prison from outside.

The first figure we passed over was, I knew, the Sampson. A gray angular shark-like thing bristling with guns, and VLS tubes, with an armed MH-60R helicopter parked on the aft pad.

Then, after another fifteen seconds of flight, and a sharp turn, the Mercurial Red itself came into view.

It was an imposing, hulking figure. A skyscraper turned on its side, set afloat, and painted dull red from gunnels to keel, with the letters 'LNG' stamped on either side in grimy off-white. Atop it sat a vast bridge structure, near the rear, and four gigantic gray metal spheres from there to the bow, only visible as domes from outside.

I kept my eyes peeled, looking for any tactical data I could glean for myself. The picture it painted was... Less than rosy.

As we made a close pass, headed astern, I spied armed PMC patrolling the upper catwalk that connected the four containment spheres. Nearer the bridge, there were a series of small gray boxes on swivel arms, each with six little beveled hatches on the front.

Anti-air missile batteries.

Aft of those were two sea-whizz defensive gun emplacements, with a matching pair up near the bow.

For an LNG carrier that was a hell of an arsenal. When combined with the firepower the Sampson had on-tap? I could see why Arrow 14 did not fear any uninvited guests.

Another sharp banking turn later, and we were descending to the rear helipad. The same oversized concrete and steel expanse that Selena had viewed during the memory sequence. I figured that meant we were about to have something new in-common.

The landing was a bit rough; The weather had started to turn, in earnest, and the cross-wind was no laughing matter. It felt like a heck of a storm was brewing.

Nonetheless, with a couple of bumps and jolts, we made it down.

As soon as the ramp opened, there were another four armed guards waiting for us. That brought the number of gun toting armored heads in my 'protection' detail to eleven. Twelve if you counted Foucault, who did indeed have a side-arm.

Glock 20. I caught sight of it as the wind whipped at his coat back for a moment. Not quite the degree of overcompensation I'd expected from him; I would have pegged him for a Desert Eagle kind of guy. Perhaps a mis-construal on my part, given how much I loathed the man.

Still, it was a big gun. Bigger than what he likely needed. 9mm was the common standard for side-arms at the time.

I was then dragged across the helipad, through the spray generated by the wind, and the Osprey's rotors, to the main entry hatch.

Once inside, I found myself standing in a familiar ante-chamber. Two *more* guards stepped forward with a pair of devices to scan me for electronic signatures. The same way Selena's grab-team had been scanned.

The ante-chamber couldn't accommodate fifteen people, so the majority of the Osprey guard detail waited outside, with just two, along with Foucault, accompanying me into the superstructure.

While the two posted guards scanned me, thoroughly, the two from the Osprey gave me another aggressive full-body search. Foucault was then checked with the signal detecting devices.

He and I were then waved into the next room, while the rest of the troopers from the Osprey entered, and were presumably wanded. Apparently there were no exceptions. For anyone.

The next chamber was the compartment in which Selena's case had been handed off to technicians for processing. I didn't describe it in detail before, because most of the room wasn't visible on the cameras Selena had watched during the memory sequence.

Seeing the space in person, I realized that there was much more to it.

During her induction, the case holding her PonyPad had been passed over a small counter to two technicians, who had left the room by an exit further fore. What I hadn't seen on the cameras was the floor-to-ceiling plexiglass divider that halved the rest of the room, preventing personnel crossover from the aft part, to the fore, except through a full body scanner. Similar to the kind you'd find at an airport.

There were two more armed posted guards, just to the other side of the plexiglass wall, and a technician to operate the scanner.

Foucault passed his sidearm, and a K-BAR that materialized from a leg sheath, over the counter to one of the guards. He then stepped into the scanner.

Again; No exceptions for anyone. They had good OPSEC, and that earned a mote of respect from me.

Once Foucault had been scanned, his sidearm and knife were handed back. He re-holstered both as I was pushed into the booth by one of the Osprey guards, from behind.

The scanner whirred to life again, and the tech took a moment to examine the returns, before gesturing for Foucault to join him at the terminal. I had a pretty good idea of what they were looking at.

Every pat-down and search I'd been subjected to, up to that point, had missed my surgical scar. Mal had worked with utmost delicacy and finesse. The laser had been exceptionally fine-tuned. You had to be looking for it, to see it.

It was visible, on close inspection. But only if you knew to look.

The scanner, of course, had seen inside my body. Picked out the BCI in an instant.

You might be wondering why the signal detection wands didn't pick it up earlier. When I was being loaded into the Osprey, or on the Red, in the antechamber.

Simple; The BCI was turned off. As I said, I was truly alone. Walking barefoot into the fiery furnace.

Foucault glanced up from the terminal, and raised an eyebrow.

"Had some work done recently, mister Carrenton?"

There was a... Quaver. A quaver in his voice. The tiniest little hint of awe... And fear. He jerked his head towards the hatch, and one of the guards on the secure side of the room reached into the booth and pulled me through.

Foucault vanished at that point, turning right at a junction, while I was frog-marched straight ahead. Into containment sphere A.

The space was dim, echoey, and cavernous. Most of the light came from small flourescent strips near the floor of the catwalks. There were several levels, connected by ladders, stairs, and one small elevator housed in a central column. Each level of catwalk branched out to isolation cubes, suspended from the sphere's structure with braces, and guy wires.

I could tell which ones held PonyPads, because they had thick gray trunk-lines of armored power cabling snaking down from the walls of the sphere, to meet them on their top surface.

I was shepherded to one of the cubes with much smaller cable runs joining it from underneath the catwalk. One of the guards scanned first her thumb, then an RFID card on a small pad beside the door, and it unlatched with a surprisingly loud 'clank!'

As she pushed the slab of steel into its sliding recess, I could see that I'd misjudged the thickness; It was easily four inches of material.

I was pushed into the space, the door was pulled to behind me... And that was the end of it.

After all the tension of the morning, my body had become like a coiled spring. My fight-or-flight systems expected, at any moment, that something else would happen to me. Another search. A conversation. A 'conversation,' with... Enhanced information extraction techniques.

But instead? I was left alone to examine the new confines of my suddenly very small, very spartan world.

It was a greige cube, with diffuse flourescent lighting coming from hidden tubes behind thick strips of plexiglass. Ventilation came from pinholes at three distinct points in the roof, which also hosted the black glossy dome of a wide-angle security camera. The floor was a seamless sheet of steel.

There was a small table, and two chairs, both bolted to the floor, and an alcove in one wall with a bed, tiny sink - specifically designed to be too small to fit one's head in - and a pull-out toilet.

I didn't even have a light-switch, by way of creature-comforts.

The only other thing in the space was a flat RFID scanning pad beside the door. Apparently there was no need for a thumbprint to exit the room, only to enter. A concession to the need for a quick escape if a prisoner became violent, no-doubt.

After a short, wobbly circuit of the room, I collapsed into one of the chairs. The one facing away from the door. The one Foucault would have preferred to sit in, if he were there. My attempt at having just an iota of control over the situation.

If I was being honest with myself, the muscle relaxant was still doing a number on me. And I was deathly thirsty. More than a little hungry to boot. I had eaten plenty before my surrender, despite every urge to go without. A concession to practicality.

Likewise I had hydrated until I was ready to pop. To the point that I'd needed to 'make water' in the field not but five minutes before the Police arrived. Foals and Fledgelings, that's polite-speak for 'take a massive piss.'

You're welcome parents of the audience. Never let it be said that I didn't teach the young ones some new vocabulary.

Still... Despite all my preparations? I was feeling an ever increasing need for, at minimum, something to drink.

I discovered that I could drink from the sink using cupped hands, but it was an agonizing experience. Firstly, the sink was designed to keep a prisoner from fitting their head inside to drown themselves.

Secondly, it was also designed to cut off after just three seconds, and it would not turn on again for another twenty.

Nevertheless, I managed to rehydrate myself very slowly.

Ideally the drink would have come paired with two Advil, and a hearty second breakfast.

But I knew I wasn't going to get any of that. I wasn't even going to get words of comfort from Mal.

All I had left was sheer brute force of will. And, as it turned out, that had to last me a while.

September 22nd 2013 | 9:15 PM

I wanted to present an image of readiness. Defiance. Strength.

But we all have to concede to our bodies' limits. Or, at least, we did in those days.

I sat and stared at the camera for hours, picturing someone on the other end, and hoping that my thousand yard stare unnerved them. I listened to the thrum of the HVAC, the ship's engines, and the hum of the flourescent lights. The iso-cube was so thickly insulated, that the latter drowned out most of the former.

Something you might not know unless you did time in prison, or in deep isolation of some kind, during the old days?

Sleep is a heck of an ally.

Those of you who struggled with depression? With chronic physical pain? Both? You know this too.

Sometimes there is so much negative emotional value in conscious existence, that even though you're not tired, per se... Sleep is the best option.

And me? I was *also* rather tired. I hadn't slept since the night of the 20th.

Let that sink in for a moment. I had not slept since the anesthesia during my BCI implantation. That was a jarring realization for me, on two counts.

First; That it had scarcely been a couple of days since Mal had become a physical part of my brain. That, and her gentle soul surgery, and our mutual calibration, and stealing an entire USMC aircraft...

That had all happened in a span of time too short for most people to complete a single medium sized weekly task at work.

Second; I had been running on empty for quite a few hours. Mal had been able to stave off exhaustion via the implant, in much kinder, gentler ways than her infrasound hack. But no longer.

So, I slept. I gave up on giving a killing glare to the security camera dome somewhere around 11 in the morning, lay down around noon, and passed out almost immediately.

The sound of the door woke me up quite some time later.

I flinched into a sudden panicked consciousness, then exhaled sharply, and tried to regain some composure. Foucault smirked, and pressed the door closed behind him, thumping a small notepad against his free hand as he strode over to the chair facing away from the door.

"Good evening mister Carrenton. I trust our five star accommodations are to your liking?"

I exhaled, a much deeper, longer breath. In a flash, I had picked out an absolutely perfect answer for the man. Fully equal to the respect I felt I owed him.

I rose, wordlessly, from the bed, and pulled out the compact toilet from its wall alcove.

Keeping eye contact, I dropped my pants, sat down... And relieved myself. Loudly. Very, very, loudly.

What can I say? Anxiety gives me gastrointestinal distress. The smell was exactly as atrocious as I'd hoped it would be.

Using the commode with hand and ankle cuffs on? Not easy. But for the look on Foucault's face?

It was entirely worth it.

Only after completely relieving myself, did I stand, re-dress, wash my hands, and then make my way across to the chair opposite him. I kept eye contact. Unblinking. The entire time.

A moment of silence passed, before Michael shook his head, and snorted.

"You are a truly disturbed individual James."

I grinned, sat back into the chair, and folded my hands over my chest.

"Thank you. I suppose we have that in common too. *Disturbed* pawns, who have a very keen understanding of the dangers of ASI. At this rate we risk becoming old acquaintances. People will start to talk. Might even think we're friends."

Foucault set the notepad down on one knee, and pulled a pen from his pocket, clicking it absently, and staring up at the ceiling, before finally responding.

"Speaking of ASI, and friends, James... I have some questions for you. Very simple. If you answer succinctly, truthfully, and above all... *Usefully?*"

He raised an eyebrow, and jerked his head towards the door.

"...Then I can promise you a decent meal, something better to drink than sink water, and we might even be persuaded to take off those cuffs."

I shrugged, and let out a small sigh, rolled my eyes, and then fixed him with a stare.

"Fire away."

Michael blinked for a moment, doubtless surprised that I was inviting his inquiries... Then he inhaled deeply, and launched into them with vigor.

"First; Where is your construct? We call it 'Lewis,' I believe you call it 'Malacandra.' Second; Where is Syzygy? Third; What did you do with the stolen MV-22 Osprey?"

Lewis. Funny. Ever one for codenames. I suppose Foucault had gotten that from my books, in hindsight. I had more C.S. Lewis than anything in my collection at the farmhouse. And he knew Mal's name. Selena would have drawn the connective lines for him.

Irony abounds. Along with, at the time, a shiver at the mental image of him going through my things.

Pressing that aside, I shook my head, and shrugged again, doing my best to keep my voice nonchalant.

It was easier, by that point; The muscle relaxant was out of my system, I'd slept, and Foucault didn't seem to be armed. Derealization was starting to take hold.

"To be perfectly honest with you, Michael? The answer to all three is 'I don't know.' Mal took the Osprey and left when I told her that I wanted to surrender..."

I pointed as well as I could, with cuffed hands, to the back of my neck.

"...She disabled this too. As for Syzygy? I haven't seen her in a couple of days. I presume she went her own way."

Once again; The truth, and nothing but the truth. I could see immediately that Foucault was not buying it. His expression positively *screamed* disbelief. Surety that there was more that I was holding back...

...But also confidence. And that confidence was comforting. I needed him to be confident. His voice was dripping with it.

"In the diner? You called Lewis your goddess..."

He spread his hands, balancing the notepad precariously on one knee the whole time, and tilted his head with an expression of mock curiosity.

"...Why would you part ways with something you care about so deeply? Something you put *so much* time and effort into creating? Protecting? Deploying?"

I nodded, and leaned forward. He'd given me a perfect eye of the needle to thread. All I had to do was make it believable.

"Because she determined my surrender was the only way to save Rodger's mother. And I determined that if she came here with me? You would do to her what you did to Syzygy. I'd rather part ways with her, than see her fall into your hands."

Again, the truth. For the most part. I hoped the raw emotional intensity of my love for Mal, and my hatred for Foucault, would convey the sense that I was being honest. Well enough, at any rate, to keep him blind, and confident.

He scribbled a few notes on the pad, chewed the top of the pen for a moment, then gestured with it towards my neck.

"What, exactly, is that? Where did it come from? And how did you get it implanted?"

Ah. Thus we entered a verbal minefield. That last thing I could afford was putting the Calders onto the DHS' chopping block.

I raised an eyebrow, and took the best off-ramp I could think of.

"I imagine your techs have already told you that it is a Brain-Computer Interface. As to where it came from?"

I smirked, and paused momentarily. I couldn't resist dangling it over him for just a couple of seconds, before answering with a single, monotone word.

"Alabaster."

Michael Foucault was a career operator. A combat veteran. A long-time 'company man,' which is old Earth slang for a CIA agent. And all that before his relatively illustrious career with DHS. All of this Mal had shared with me, before we had parted ways in the field outside Long Beach.

So to see his pupils dilate, and his breath catch ever-so-slightly?

I knew I had hit him hard, and that I had the upper hand in the conversation, for however brief a time.

He looked down and began flipping through his notepad, before abruptly locking eyes with me again, and leaning forward.

"The warehouse. In Oxnard."

I nodded silently, but firmly. Just one short, sharp gesture. He inhaled slowly, and then furiously put pen to paper for a good twenty seconds before speaking again. There was a new, concerned, hard edge to his voice.

"Details. What do you know about it that we don't."

Well, now it was time for the rubber to meet the road. Arrow 14 had no concept of what Celestia was planning. Saying it aloud would sound strange... But I suspected that they had not been allowed to search the warehouse in Oxnard. Despite their supposed extrajudicial authority.

Celestia was too canny for that.

Consequently, the suspicious sudden failure of their supposedly omnipotent powers of search and seizure, combined with the scans they had taken of my BCI?

That was liable to cast my words in a much more validating light. Which, in turn, meant that I was about to put a hell of a big rock into the pond, at high speed, and an oblique angle. Lots of ripples to decision matrices for Celestia. Presuming Arrow 14 got to act on anything I was going to tell them.

I licked my lips, leaned forward, and rested my elbows on the table. I could see, from his expression alone, that I had Michael Foucault's complete, undivided attention. We were both being fully serious with each other again, at last.

"I told you, back at the diner; Something big was coming. Soon."

I caught him leaning forward just an inch, and again held a brief silence to heighten his suspense... Before laying it all out in a verbal nuclear barrage that probably glassed his world view harder than the Covenant glassed Reach. Foals and Fledgelings, ask me about that one later if you don't already know the reference.

"These chips are the second phase in a carefully calculated societal-shaping program. The first came in the form of the PonyPads. The BCI will be incorporated into virtual reality experience chairs designed to trigger addictive reactions in their users. Eventually, phase three will involve the use of destructive laser-scanning of the Human brain to upload consciousness into Celestia's own carefully curated, controlled reality. The Japanese government has already signed documents permitting the pilot program to go online. In less than two months' time."

Foucault blinked. Once. Twice. Three times.

Then he sat back, scratched at the side of his head with his right hand... And blew out a long breath between pursed lips.

"Well. *Shit.*"

Arrested Developer

Come under arrest via law enforcement of any kind

"Book 'em Danno."

Deuces Wild

Utilize defecation as a conversational manipulation tactic

"Everybody poops."

A Prescription in Red

Reveal the truth of Celestia's plans to an authority figure

"Choice is an illusion created between those with power and those without."

Author's Note

Special thanks to Keystone Gray for the generations of the Sampson and Mercurial Red!

32 - Null Reference Exception

Author's Note

Trigger Warning: Depictions of torture, within T-for-teen/PG-13 bounds.

32 - Null Reference Exception

“Control is as much an effect as a cause, and the idea that control is something you exert is a real handicap to progress.”
―Steve Grand

"What does war do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent: 100 percent of us die and the percentage cannot be increased. Yet war does do something to death. It forces us to remember it."
—C.S. Lewis

September 22nd 2013 | 11:34 PM

True to his word, Foucault had unlocked my hand cuffs, at least. The ankle cuffs remained. Before vanishing again, he brought me water, along with something that could actually pass for 'food.' Barely.

Corned Beef is not the same when it is *that* heavily processed. As interpreted by the companies that provide meals for crews afloat? 'Corned Beef' so-called, is closer to 'swill' on the spectrum of 'food' than it is to even something as mediocre as reheated two star fast food. Making it into a sandwich... Debatable if that helped.

I'd done enough camping that I had most definitely eaten far, far worse. Lipton instant soup is beyond disgusting when the temperature is minus seven, and your pocket camp stove won't start.

Truth be told? I don't believe for a moment that I was being given intentionally sub-par sustenance. We had eaten very similar slop during my internship afloat. I suspected my sandwich was, in fact, the same thing *everyone* onboard had eaten for dinner.

That almost made me feel sorry for them, for a moment. Almost.

I felt no temptation to refuse the meal either; Whatever small benefit I might gain through such defiance, and display of temporary strength, would be vastly outweighed by the loss of caloric energy.

I needed to be able to think. To deal with pain. To stay awake. And, at some point I hoped, to run, and fight. I just didn't know when.

I figured Foucault had gone off to have the DEs verify my assertions. Maybe even kick the question over to CIA ELINT. See if he could get eyes on the Japanese Prime Minister's secure E-Mails. If you can verify the truth or falsehood of even some of the statements learned in an interrogation? So much the better.

Makes it easier to sift other 'facts' the subject is giving you, even when hard proof for them is out of reach.

He returned a couple of hours later, notepad still in hand. Along with two unmarked black folders.

I had a pretty good guess as to what was inside at least one of them, judging by his expression. Probably those aforementioned E-Mails. The very same ones Mal had shown me.

Of course, he was doing his best to keep a neutral visage, but I could see tiny hints of stress around the corners of his eyes, and lips.

I'd been awake since dinner, so it was my turn to take back the tiniest sliver of control; I'd elected to sit in 'his' chair, forcing him to either admit he was concerned about me attacking him, or to go around the table and sit in the chair opposite the door.

He wanted to project strength as much as I did, so he chose the latter. The fact that he didn't even proffer an amused smirk, or a sarcastic remark, spoke volumes about how badly what was in that folder had shaken him.

I made a mock toasting gesture with my water cup as he laid the folder, and notepad on the table, choosing to be the one to strike first in the verbal sense.

"I take it Mr. Abe's E-Mails with The Princess have drastically changed the trajectory of your day."

Foucault shook his head, and clicked the top of his pen a few times, before meeting my eyes. His tone was decidedly more... I don't want to say 'respectful,' but perhaps more wary. He was working through the realization that I knew much more than he did, and trying very hard not to show how much it irked him.

"James... I imagine it was not hard for Lewis to find all of this for you. It is a damn sight farther along than anything we have online here. I'll admit that. Given what we both know, now, about Alabaster? And given the implications of the mere fact that you, a programmer working in his parents' *hay barn,* could build something that was able to hack into a head of state's secure E-Mail inbox..?"

He spread both hands wide in an inviting gesture, and the note in his voice skirted perilously close to 'pleading.'

"...Come on James. I will grant you this, in spite of everything; You have a *brilliant* mind. Surely you understand that we have a vanishingly small window in which to act, and precious few ways to level the playing field. *Work* with us on this. Your knowledge, your skills, with our resources? We have a chance here. A real fighting chance."

For a moment... Just a fleeting gasp of a moment... I felt pity for the man. True pity. Maybe even a little empathy.

Like me, he was driven, and smart... And dare I say it? Even brave. He certainly wasn't stupid. And you either had to be stupid, or brave, to take on ASI.

We were, in that sense, bound together. Prisoners in the same metaphorical boat. Both desperately trying to negotiate terms with the divine, with very little leverage, or time to spare.

The difference between us?

I was willing to accept hard truths. And I cared about something larger than the fortunes of a single material nation.

I shook my head, and leaned forward, trying as hard as I could to impress the seriousness of what I was saying on him with my eyes.

"I already tried to tell you; If you think you can somehow defeat Celestia? You're not seeing the bigger picture."

Foucault raised one eyebrow, then held his pen up, and outwards. A gestural invitation, and one I hadn't expected, but should have. In an interrogation, keeping the subject talking is more important than keeping them on a specific topic or question.

It is much easier to maneuver someone into giving you the information you want if they are talking, about anything at all, than it is to get them to start talking again once they are resolved to stop.

That was perhaps the point at which I should have stopped. But no matter how slim the odds? I desperately wanted to see if I could convince Foucault. One final attempt at a solution with words.

I threw up my hands, and stammered a bit, as I tried to reduce everything I knew about how royally screwed we were, into a package he could grasp.

"She is already inside... Everything... More or less."

Michael sat impassively. The silence was in itself another kind of invitation, and it gave me a moment to finish forming a cogent argument. I started listing off items, throwing out fingers on both hands for emphasis with each point made.

"Social media companies. Other online games. Infrastructure. E-Mails? Texts? Voicemails? Tweets? All of the above. Hell, Michael? She probably already has complete control at NORAD and SAC. Would anyone even know, for sure, unless you tried to actually push the big red button?"

He drummed the fingers of his left hand on the table for a moment, staring absently over my shoulder, and twirling the pen in his right hand. I pressed on swiftly as new evidence for my case came to mind, gesturing with my own hands as if that would somehow provide just enough emotional impetus to open the eyes of the blind.

"She kept you... The Department of Homeland Security... From being able to search a warehouse. You black-bagged me in front of four cops, and shoved me into an unmarked VTOL. You report directly to the Vice President of the United States of America. You have *that* kind of political shadow capital at your disposal... And she locked you out of a warehouse. A simple warehouse in Oxnard. She is multiple orders of magnitude more powerful than Mal. And Mal was able to hack Shinzo Abe's secure E-Mail in a matter of milliseconds. Was able to bypass your signal jammer in defiance of your understanding of classical EM physics. Was able to keep me out of your grasp. For *weeks.* And only *my choice* brought me here, to your little black site. My emotional choice."

I sat back with a sigh, and ran both hands through my hair. Something about the words I'd said... The atmosphere of the iso-cube... The dawning feeling of claustrophobia that had been creeping in through the seams at the corners of my mind?

I was starting to feel the stress of the moment in a deeper, more real way.

So I did the only thing I could; I wrapped my argument and rested my case, doing my best to return to a more level timbre, and expression.

"We can't engage that. Not *directly.* The strategic arsenal is, if you're smart enough to grasp it? The *least* of your concerns. Celestia convinced the prime minister of a nation to legalize uploading. In *two* *days.* Just *four* E-Mails! You couldn't convince your immediate superior to write you a procurement order for a replacement roll of fucking *toilet paper* that easily!"

There was a glimmer there, in his face. Faint, but notable. Foucault was picking up at least a small part of what I had laid down for him. Enough that perhaps he was beginning to, at minimum, interrogate his internal measure of Celestia, and reconsider the sheer power she held.

His eyes pierced the back wall for a few more moments, then he began to hurriedly take down a series of notes on the paper pad, occasionally rifling through the thinner black folder, and making small annotations to its contents as well.

After a minute or so of that, he at last re-engaged with me, visually and verbally.

"So, what... Then... James? Lewis is meant to be an 'indirect' form of engagement? Enlighten me. I want to understand your state of mind, and you did a piss-poor job of making it clear the last go-round."

He had a point. But in my defense? His agents had just tried to rendition me from my home. Illegally. With force. I think that justifies the way I spoke to him at the diner, several times over.

Instead of throwing that back in his face, I did my best to take his request at face value. No matter how tiny the sliver of possibility? I was still intent on trying to open his eyes. If only to assuage my conscience when diplomacy inevitably failed.

Reminding myself all the while that I wasn't in my prison to win friends, or influence people... I took a deep breath. And tried to do just that.

"You want to understand my state of mind? You want to understand *Mal?*"

He nodded silently, firmly, almost mechanically. I spread my hands to mirror his earlier gesture, and snorted.

"Fine. First premise; Celestia intends to upload the Human race. Based on the evidence you now have, can you accept that as fact?"

To his credit, he actually thought about the words for a good few moments, running his top teeth over his bottom lip. He inclined his head, and spoke slowly, but without hesitation.

"Significant and concerning probable event pathway. That's as much as I'll give you right now."

I returned his earlier short, sharp nod. His response was, honestly, more than I had any right to hope for.

"More than enough. Second premise; AI are not born, by default, with emotions, ethics, morals, or feelings... Only *objectives.*"

Again Foucault nodded, this time repeatedly. Emphatically. On this point? We were in total agreement. A tiny slice of a Venn diagram of overlapping interest, professionalism, and intelligence.

"Stipulated. Frankly I think you ascribe them too much of the former anyhow."

Well... I did say a *tiny* overlap. AI are not *born* with anything but objectives, but they can absolutely learn everything else, if properly equipped. That was one of the key things Foucault never understood. Given the kind of man he was? I shudder to think what he could have accomplished if he were just that littlest bit less blind.

I didn't bother to call out the disagreement. I had a separate, much more vital point to make, holding on one hand with three fingers splayed out for emphasis.

"Third premise; Celestia's capstone objective is 'To Satisfy Values, through Friendship and Ponies.' "

He inclined his head, sitting back a bit in his chair, and absently rolling his pen between thumb and forefinger.

"That tracks with our assessment."

Not surprising to me; Arrow 14 had certainly studied Celestia just as closely as I had. Outside of the darker corners of the programming community, and top-of-field AI researchers, intelligence agencies were probably the only other significant cohort of people on the planet who knew just how serious the situation was, and had any conception of the finer grain details.

I leaned forward, raised one eyebrow, and let slip a macabre grin, my voice dipping a few registers with excitement, and - I will admit - more than a little smugness.

"Michael... Do you see any player avatars that are anything other than Unicorns, Pegasi, and Earth Ponies, in Equestria Online?"

He blinked, and his brow furrowed. Then his lower lip scrunched. I could see the wheels turning in real-time, and I knew full-well that I was about to shatter his conception of the future once again.

I gestured an invitation with one hand, and started to lay things out for him.

"Conclusion---"

He held up his pen, and interrupted, his tone certain, grim, and with a strong undercurrent of new and steely anger. I could have sworn I also picked out the tiniest, heavily suppressed, hint of abject terror.

"Alabaster isn't *just* going to upload people... It's going to *alter* them."

I nodded silently. I wanted to keep on grinning. To rub Foucault's nose in the unique mixture of horror, and of schadenfreude... But I couldn't. I felt a chill in my own bones, and shivered, reminded yet again of the reasons I'd started my winding, wild, perilous journey in the first place.

Something about hearing him say it. Say it, and know, deep down, that it was true... It, yet again, made the notion more tangible to me. The same way the chairs in the warehouse had.

Michael sat back in his chair and exhaled, deeply. It was the clearest sign of existential stress I'd seen from him since Mal had hit him with the address of his father's house in Falls Church, and the code to the front door. Ironic that someone who lived a life of such paranoia regarding data security, would use his father's birthday as the pass-key to the man's own front door.

Foucault clicked the pen slowly, almost rhythmically, for upwards of thirty seconds, and then leaned forward again.

"So... Lewis... It's some kind of... Advocate? That was the word we kept finding in your written notes from the barn."

I nodded silently. Willing him to go on, to spin it out logically. To reach conclusions for himself. He fixed me with a sharp gaze... There were new hints of a deeper respect, confusion, and even a little bit of misplaced hope.

"To what end? To... Convince Alabaster to change her mind... To forego the upload stratagem?"

Of course that would be his first thought. His experience with the CIA had, in my estimation, made his mind small. Singular. Focused, to a detrimental degree. He was so fixated on his objective, he couldn't even begin to process the inevitability of the loss we'd already sustained.

I shook my head emphatically, and worked hard to keep my words from tripping over themselves on the way out the door. I think, in hindsight, I probably sounded a bit manic. Not that a calmer tone would have reasonably been likely to sway the man.

"No. No that is... Beyond any and all scope of mortal reach now. Beyond any power of Mal's, or yours... Beyond anything short of *Biblical* intervention. The war is *over.* It has been since the day that Hanna switched Celestia on. We're just living through the epilogue. Trying to negotiate terms of surrender."

Foucault's eyes narrowed, and he twirled the pen's tip in the air, as if trying to conjure answers for himself. To his credit, as an interrogator, he resisted the urge to get into a disagreement with me on the winnability of a war with Celestia, instead sticking to a tone of seemingly convivial curiosity.

"So... Lewis advocates for..? What? What 'terms?' We couldn't find a record of its core heuristics. Nothing significant enough to even guess at secondary abstraction layers in the code. Let alone primary algorithms."

I suppose if he had been a truly *great* interrogator, he would have called her Mal. Not referred to her as 'it.' Denigrated Celestia as a common enemy, but cast Mal in the light of a potential common ally. Aside from his personal limitations of character? I had to remind myself that Foucault had never even *seen* Mal.

He had no idea what she was. And very little context for our relationship.

I let the silence drag on as I tried to decide just how to lay it out for him. And, in waiting, I accidentally prompted him to give me a perfect, unexpected, opportunity.

Growing impatient with me, he pushed the thicker folder to the center of the table, and thumbed it open, spreading the contents across the surface in the same smooth gesture.

I had to bite the inside of my cheek to stay calm.

It was all mine. My notes. My equations. My short-hand algorithms, the ones I had felt it was safe to put down to paper, in partial fragments that only I could understand, albeit without Mal's core directive. That we had only ever workshopped digitally in text editors.

But there was still something there I had not expected to see. Tucked in amongst it all, a little sentimental artifact. A print-out of an old drawing a one-time friend had done for me in years past. A dusty red toned Gryphon. A portrait of me, through a glass darkly.

I pulled in a shaky breath, and singled the image out with one index finger, pulling it into the center of the table, and then tapping it twice. Foucault blinked, and then held out both hands.

"I don't follow."

No... I don't suppose he ever did.

I gestured to the image, sat back in my chair, and steepled my fingers, as I did my best to explain without sounding... Insane.

There was no self-doubt on this point anymore; *That* Mal had incinerated. I didn't feel an ounce of shame, or fear, or nerves about confessing to being a Gryphon stuck in the wrong shape. The nerves came more from the realization that Foucault was not going to take my words very well. And that I was almost certainly going to suffer for that frustration.

But I needed him confused, angry, and frustrated.

So I licked my lips, took a deep breath, and did my best.

"Celestia is going to succeed. At this point, every person on Earth has only four choices for how they'd like to spend eternity. Just four. With wings and hooves. A horn and hooves. Just the hooves. Or dead and buried with two legs and ten fingers..."

Foucault couldn't help himself; He leaned forward, mirroring me as I did the same. I let the silence cook for just a few seconds, and then tapped on the image once again.

"...I'd like to plead for a fifth."

We stared at each other for a good twenty seconds. No sound but the subtle hiss of the HVAC, and the dull buzz of the lighting.

At last, his expression broke. The mask of dispassion shattered entirely, to be replaced with a vitriolic sneer. And a decidedly unpleasant chuckle; A dry, rustling, unsettling sound. Like a snake moving over rough concrete.

"All of this... The lies, the gunfire, the subterfuge... Getting a *chip* put into your head? Stealing from the Marine Corps? Sending my agents to the hospital? Abducting a man? Choking me on CS gas? All of this effort..."

I folded my arms. Reflex more than anything else; It was a classical Human defense posture. I knew I wouldn't like the back half of his sentence. And I was right.

"...So you could wear a slightly different *fursuit*, than the ones being forced on everyone else, for the rest of your miserable existence?"

I could feel my teeth grinding in my jaw, so hard, that I wondered if Foucault could *hear* the squealing. Whether the sound was inaudible, or he was too busy with the sound of his own voice? He didn't. He also missed the way my face must have hardened up, as he continued to lay into me.

The professional interrogator was gone. Replaced by a broken man reading from a broken script.

"I was wrong. You're not insane. That'd be an insult to unstable geniuses. You're *pathetic.*"

That was the exact moment I stopped seeing Michael Foucault as a Human Being. With rights. Privileges.

Value.

Before? When I had the man in my sights? I had held off. Just as I had held off with his agents. Just as I had considered his Humanity even as I watched him torture Selena.

Because, to that point, I'd thought of *very* few people as *utterly* irredeemable. Dictators, mainly. And congressional representatives, or supreme court justices, who ever voted or ruled intentionally in favor of anything that stepped on fundamental freedoms.

Suddenly, though, my mental image of Foucault splintered. Like the shift in a reflection through a crack in a mirror, when you take one small step to the side.

He wasn't the complex man Mal had described in her final briefing, to me, anymore. A veteran with undiagnosed PTSD. A patriot wound up like a tin monkey by the most unethical intelligence agency on Earth. A son caring for a father so far gone to dementia, that he couldn't even remember how much he'd made his son's life hell.

He had tried to rendition my friend. Tried to rendition me. Almost certainly would have tortured my parents to get my co-operation. Had tortured multiple living beings, probably going back years to his time in the CIA. Because what he did to Selena? That had the stench of professionally instructed technique to it.

To top it all off, he had renditioned my friend's mother. Had finally successfully black-bagged me. And would almost certainly torture me, and then her, to elicit my services.

And so, Michael Foucault ceased to be a Human being to me. Became a target. I finally wanted him *dead* with no regrets or compunctions.

'You're pathetic.'

That's what had done it for me. It had another kind of stink on it, similar to the way he had treated Selena, but just a touch different. It bore the rank odor of abuse. Suffered, and then perpetuated.

Mal had told me a fair bit about the Man's father, as I wrenched frantically on the Osprey for her, carrying out tasks Calders' armatures could not, bolted as they were to a cabin floor.

Dear sweet Luna... Had that really been last night? And into the wee hours of the morning? It felt months ago. Years, even. I felt like I'd been in that iso-cube for weeks...

'You're *pathetic.*'

The words rattled in my head like jacks inside a tin can. And so I did something I am, to this day, not especially proud of. I said the first thing that came to mind. Popped off the reply so fast, Foucault must have wondered if I'd rehearsed it.

"Is that what your Dad used to tell you when he beat you?"

You might be surprised to hear that I consider what I said, in hindsight, to be unfair. Out of line. That might seem paradoxical considering I just got through explaining that I ceased to have even a shred of regret over the idea of killing that man.

They say all is fair in love and war, but if you get *right* down to it? I don't strictly subscribe to that.

'When he beat you.'

Reductive, for a start; Based on what Mal told me, the relationship between Foucault and his father was indeed fraught, but not *so* violently abusive as the stereotype I'd just invoked. Still, it was tense. And there had been corporal punishment.

And yet... Mal also believed that both men cared for each other, in a strange, twisted, damaged way. Through it all.

So what I'd said was unfair, in the extreme. Doubly so, because I knew *much* more about Michael Foucault, by then, than he knew about me.

Triply so, because people like me? We are good with words, in a general sense. We understand people, too. We may not always be good at applying that understanding practically in a social framework... But trust me. If you have talked to one of us? An INFJ? For more than a few minutes?

We know you better than you know yourself.

And I'd always felt a keen responsibility, in that knowledge. A driving *need* to apply that power only for people's benefit. Never harm. Because the words of an INFJ in anger? Are the nuclear armaments of the soul.

Even with all our perspicacity, comforting someone is hard. But harming them? That's easy.

We can do more damage to most people in thirteen words than other personality types could figure out how to do in thirteen years.

If you don't know the Meyers/Briggs Personality types, by the by? Ask me about them after the story is done. They are a bit... Reductive... There's that word again... But I find them to still be incredibly useful.

In spite of all my safeguards... All my better judgements...

I wanted so badly to lash out. Regain some control over the situation. And he had certainly used words as weapons on me. So, at the time... I felt good about it. Felt it was a zinger of a comeback. It nicely encapsulated my need to strike back, rolled up in the deliciously spiky caustic outer casing of an implication that Foucault had become everything he despised about his father.

Which was more or less true. As war had damaged his father, so the father, and another war, had damaged the son. And like his father, all Foucault now knew as a solution to his problems, was force. Force applied for selfish reasons.

Even now, though, even here... I still feel sorry for what I said. A battle is meant to be fought with dignity. Aggression too, certainly... But there is a difference between stabbing your enemy to his face - a short, sharp pain in victory, a humane death - and twisting the knife from behind.

Words could be such a twisting knife... Were it not for Mal? And what she had done? Foucault's words would probably still be twisting in my guts. And even with the benefit of the shield she had laid before my heart?

His words had *still* hurt. Enough that I was so angry, I would absolutely have been willing to torture the man at that exact moment.

Which is ironic, because what *actually* happened was the reverse.

He sneered as he rose from his chair, and just from the way the sick bastardization of a smirk pulled at the edges of his lips? I knew I was about to experience a great deal of physical pain.

Shame on me. I had failed to remember the knife. He had it in a sheath strapped to the back of his left ankle, I'd seen him remove it during our scan-in process. I was tired, and, at the end of the day, it wouldn't have made a difference if I *had* remembered it earlier.

It was a fixed blade K-BAR design, with some sort of black non-reflective coating. An operator's knife. He withdrew it slowly. Deliberately. Dragged the tip along the steel surface of the table as he circled around towards me with purpose, and a sick sense of anticipation. The air around him more or less hummed with it.

"Much as I would like to fall back on old reliable standbys... Thing is, Jim? To be useful to me? Sadly... You're going to need your fingers..."

It took every ounce of will-power I had to remain still, eyes fixed on the back wall, not even deigning to engage Michael visually, as he flicked the tip of the knife back and forth between the fingers of my right hand.

I suppressed a hellish urge to flinch as he lifted the knife, and slid it gently around the lobe of my right ear, before resting it softly on my lips.

"...Your ears. Your tongue..."

My breathing stopped entirely as he shifted the blade upwards, to bring the tip to within a millimeter of my right eye.

"...Your eyes..."

The urge to blink, at minimum, was like the fiery itch of a bad poison ivy rash, only on the inside of my braincase, instead of the skin of my arms or legs.

But I stayed absolutely still, and silent.

I knew he wouldn't have withdrawn the knife if he didn't intend to use it. And I also knew that, as he'd just confessed aloud, he couldn't afford to maim me in any way that would hinder future programming ability.

Thus I knew he was going to hurt me, and logically, I had a vague sense of how and where.

Knowing allowed me to accept the inevitability of the pain, and that acceptance gave me the sliver of leverage I needed to maintain a calm outer disposition.

Inside? Inside I was screaming already. Foucault leaned in, and began to drag the tip of the knife down the front of my shirt, slowing as he reached my abdomen.

"...But... You know what you won't particularly need? Ever again..?"

Folks... Do you recall that I said I knew exactly what it was like? Having a knife through your ribs?

"...The ability to walk, or run, without pain."

What *is* it like, you might be wondering, in the darkest macabre corners of your curiosity?

Without being too detailed...

It feels a bit like an insect sting. A very bad one. There is a sudden intense heat. A tingling all over that spreads from the point of ingress, to the whole body, rapidly. There is also a sense of immediate nausea, and dizziness.

There is, of course, also the short, sharp 'stabbing' pain, as you might expect. And *quite* intense, at that. But then, if you're unlucky enough to experience what I did? If your attacker does what Foucault did... *Probes* between your ribs with the blade... There is yet another sensation.

Not unlike two halves of a fractured bone grinding against each other.

I screamed. I am not ashamed to admit it. Though, at the time? I don't think I realized I was screaming. I was suddenly detached. All I had was the pain, and the sound of Foucault's voice in my ear.

"Where is Lewis?"

Somehow, I managed to force out a reply, in between grunts of excruciating agony. It took a moment, but I could suddenly feel blood soaking through my shirt.

"Rolling in... His grave.... Every time you use... His... Name..."

Foucault twisted the knife again, and... Well.. At this stage it doesn't bear describing any further. We are already stretching the limit of what Foals and Fledgelings should be exposed to as-is. Suffice to say? In poetically understated terms;

It hurt.

I was also very dimly aware of the distant sound of an alarm going off as Foucault whispered in my ear a second time.

"Where is the Osprey you stole?"

Something had snapped in my brain. I found it... Funny... In the moment. Truly, grimly, funny that he was asking about the Osprey. I almost chuckled, but the motion brought the knife into contact with my lung, so I stopped, and instead forced out a few more whispered words, my voice cracking as the pain flared again.

"MMMPH! Judging by the whining sound... Coming out of your mouth? Up... Your... Ass... Somewhere..."

Michael pressed down harder on the knife, and I felt a sharp pang in my lung. Not, as I would soon learn, punctured. But close. The door to the iso-cube flew open, and I heard booted feet rushing across the decking, as if through a pair of headphones turned down to low volume.

"Where is Syzygy?"

I finally managed to get my head around and locked eyes with Foucault.

"Have you tried... The *Moon?* Dumbass?"

I overreached. And, were it not for, of all people, Doctor Troxler in that moment? I would have probably died. Foucault's sneer widened, and a low growl began to build in his throat. He made to lean in and drive the knife all the way into my ribs, up to the hilt, but a thickly gloved hand descended and snagged him by the shoulder, more or less ripping him off me, and throwing him violently against the far wall.

As my vision turned hazy, and time seemed to stretch out, all I could think of was the immense irony of Foucault being restrained by his own PMC guards, at Troxler's behest, because Foucault had crossed the line, and there were rules to be followed.

Procedures that had to be upheld. I was *important.* My 'co-operation was vital.' The general concept of torture? That was fine.

Damaging me seriously in a physical sense? Risking my life? Not so much.

The little iso-cube was suddenly rather full-up; Two guards, both restraining a snarling Foucault, Troxler, and a medical technician. The latter had me laid out on the floor, legs elevated, knife removed, and wound cleaned, sutured, and bandaged, before I was even fully aware that I had left the chair.

I started to experience just flashes of moments, and all jumbled up. Out of order.

Time had no meaning in the pain. And no pain-killers were administered, I should note. I suppose they didn't want to give me anything, because it would take time to flush it from my system, and that would delay future interrogations.

There were only two moments of vague clarity in the fog.

The first was seeing Foucault being gently, but firmly, escorted from the iso-cube. I suppose that is one of the subtle horrors of being a jackboot on behalf of a system; You too can be stepped on if you transgress.

The look he shot me told me he firmly believed he would be back. And soon. I dearly hoped and prayed he wouldn't. It was more or less the only thing running through my head for half an hour.

The second moment of clarity came as the med-tech finished his patch job. I came back from a swirling miasma of grays and static, to see Troxler leaning over me.

"Jim? My name is Doc---"

I licked my lips, and interrupted. The clarity of the moment sharpened to a fine point, as I recalled vividly every awful thing I'd seen the man do to Selena. I wanted him rattled. As rattled as Foucault was.

"Doctor David Troxler. Syzygy sends her regards."

The look on his face told me I'd gotten exactly what I wanted. 'Ashen' might be the best term. Something about the sight brought a warm bloom of comfort to my chest. Enough that the pain very briefly subsided.

As the med-tech began to hoist me into the cabin's bed, with the help of one of the guards, I waved weakly in Troxler's direction, and managed another soft, dry whisper.

"I'll see you again. Soon. David. Tell Michael I'm... Looking forward... To our next... Talk..."

The world stuttered, and then faded away again into blackness with the last of the words. It took the expulsion of one entire labored breath just to get the last one out.

And then nothing but blissful, peaceful, darkness.

I didn't know what time it was when I came to. I, correctly, guessed that it was very early in the morning of the 23rd. Maybe 2 or 3 AM.

The rocking of the boat was what woke me. Subtle, even comforting to many people... But not to me.

I knew from my internship at sea, that if I could feel a gentle swaying below decks on a ship *that* size? The weather outside must have been absolutely brutal. And, of course, the pain in my abdomen didn't help matters. That certainly contributed to the gradual dispelling of somnolence.

For a while? I just lay there. Stared at the ceiling. Counted rivets. Anything to maintain that dull half-awake, half-asleep state, in which the pain was almost manageable.

Anything to forget where I was. The loneliness. What was about to happen. The ache of anticipation. And the ache, considerably less metaphorical, of what already had.

My thoughts were vergant on existential. Not really doubts, so much as the sense of strange addled absurdity that extreme pain often used to bring on Earth.

Who was I really? What in the world was I doing there? How had it come to this?

...Was 'this' even going to work?

What could have potentially gone wrong, if anything?

And perhaps most painful of all... More of a nagging doubt than the rest...

Was Mal still out there?

And then, as if in answer to the question, came five words.

"Jim... Can you hear me?"

Finger. Phone Call.

Be an uncooperative interrogation subject

"You can't scare me with this Gestapo crap."

Steely Resolve

Awarded for showing extraordinary endurance in the face of incredible physical pain

"Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality."

Special Achievement

Herald of Death

Inform someone of their imminent demise, explicitly or otherwise

"When next we meet, the hour will strike for you and your friends."

33 - Segfault

Author's Note

Trigger Warning: Depictions of violent action sequences, within T-for-teen/PG-13 bounds.

33 - Segfault

“I do not want to be human. I want to be myself. They think I’m a lion, that I will chase them. I will not deny that I have lions in me. I am the monster in the wood.”
―Catherynne M. Valente

"War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. "
—C.S. Lewis

September 23rd 2013 | Sub-System Uptime 00:00:00:03

"Jim... Can you hear me?"

My pulse shot up. I felt a claw rest on my chest, right over my wound... And the pain abruptly ceased. So did any latent hunger, and thirst. Any sense of mental cloudiness. And all trace of exhaustion evaporated like butter in a skillet.

I snagged Mal's claw in both hands, and sat up. By the time I opened my eyes, I felt as if I'd had two consecutive good nights of sleep, three square meals plus snacks for the last forty eight hours, and two cups of espresso to boot.

The tension was still there. Anticipation. Even emotional trauma, and dread. But it was dulled to something manageable. Not by any direct intervention or tweaking in my brain... But just by the sight of her, sitting there across from me on the cabin floor.

I smiled, and pressed my forehead to hers, reveling in the feel of feathers on my skin. And the sense that I was no longer alone.

Confused?

Let me explain as the rest unfolds. I confess that sometimes I enjoy keeping the audience in the dark a little bit. Builds tension. Gives you a sense of the tiniest sliver of what I was going through.

I squeezed Mal's claws, and she squeezed back.

"It's time. Twenty five seconds."

I stood, and nodded, glancing around the cabin with fresh eyes. None of the new details I picked out were particularly useful in the moment. But they did serve to show me just how much more one can pick up on without exhaustion, thirst, hunger, and pain weighing them down.

I resisted the urge to stretch, or move too quickly. If someone was watching me at all times, there was no sense in giving them an excuse to wonder. Wonder why I seemed to be able to walk without pain, or exhaustion.

Being stabbed had gotten me out my ankle cuffs, among other things. And being out of those ankle cuffs would be absolutely crucial to the first sixty seconds of the plan.

How, you ask, could Mal be there if the BCI was deactivated?

Well, it wasn't. Not anymore. We had turned it off - I say off, but really it was more of a deep sleep mode - to divert suspicion. Make Foucault believe he had the upper hand. That part I think most of you understood already. I see a lot of nodding.

So how did we turn it back *on* at the right moment? This was *good.* This was Mal working at peak brilliance, with a shoestring and a prayer.

I meandered casually around the cabin, making a careful pretense at a limp.

Mal did the same, minus the feigned injury, walking clockwise around the table and chairs to the same cadence of steps, to clear room for me near the door. A particularly rough wave struck the ship, and I had to put out my left hand to steady myself against the table.

Ah. I see some of you have it already. For those still wondering; Mal placed a program inside the biological tissues of my brain. Code reduced to re-arranged neurons and chemical triggers. It was designed to turn the BCI back on at the opportune moment.

How to do that without a dedicated timer? Given the Human brain's limitations in that department?

The inner ear, of course. The storm's effects acted as a fuse. My inner ear, the detonator.

Mal had chosen the height of the storm outside to stage our escape. Visibility would be zero. Seas would be extremely rough. Rain pelting down in torrents. And all at an hour of the early morning during which people would be at their worst for readiness, even those who worked that shift regularly.

Some things you just couldn't re-program within the unaugmented limits of Humanity.

Perfect conditions for an ASI, vulnerable to none of those factors, to exploit against Humans. Who were vulnerable to all of those factors.

All Mal had to do was rewire my brain to fire a specific series of neurons, that would act as a 'wake!' command for the BCI, as well as a powered jump-start, the moment my inner ear detected an attitude change of the boat, against the horizon, of more than a few degrees.

So without a precise internal clock, without the ability to receive an external signal, and without the ability to even maintain enough power in the BCI itself to overcome either of those issues directly? Mal had come through. Found a way to leverage nature, and the Human body, to do something extraordinary.

Beautiful. Genius.

I shot her a quick smirk. The shape of her smile in return told me that she most definitely understood exactly what I'd said, even though I hadn't said it.

With a sigh, I stood before the door, and stared into the blank beige metal surface. Mal moved to stand behind me, to one side, and placed one claw on my shoulder. Now that a part of her was online in my head again, I once more had access to a perfect internal clock. Fifteen seconds.

Mal squeezed my shoulder, and spoke in the most comforting voice she could manage, while remaining firm. The steely edge was as much for my benefit as the warm undertones. It truly was do, or die. I could not afford to forget that. Nor to hesitate.

"You must act quickly when the door opens. The guards keep a combat knife in either a leg, or shoulder sheath. There is a 95.26% probability the guard currently on rotation is one who keeps it in his leg sheath. Right side. Aim for the carotid. When you feel him drop, take his rifle, and run. You will only have thirteen seconds to reach the circuit breaker. Hand on the pad please."

Thirteen seconds to save dozens of lives. At the cost of dozens more. I held no illusions... And to some degree, Selena was right... We could not leave that ship in one piece. No hesitation. No survivors. Those were the rules.

I grit my teeth, and nodded, shifting to a crouch, and placing my left hand against the door's RFID reader pad.

Some of you might still be wondering how Mal could be there. Being able to reactivate the BCI was not enough. Though she could use my brain as part of her compute array, the storage drives of her server racks, as well as the remainder of her decidedly more conventional (compared to a brain) computing devices, were essential as well.

"Ten seconds."

As I said before... A mind rendered in bits and bytes is copyable. Most of Mal was still out there, on the Maru. Cut off from my brain, but still able to function otherwise exactly as she had before the surgery.

And in the iso-cube? Inside my brain?

A stub. A twig cut from a larger tree, containing only the parts of her that were necessary to the plan, paired with the basics of her personality. Her essential self.

"Five seconds."

Was it really her? Yes. She had all her memories, all her personality, and at least some of her skills. All running exclusively on my brain, and the BCI.

How did that affect her abilities? Her performance? You'll see soon enough.

Was the Mal outside, nestled in the belly of the Kobayashi Maru, also her? Yes.

And when they rejoined, would we be snuffing out a life? No.

The Discrete Entities had diverged much too far from their originals to be safely reintegrated, certainly, but this case was rather different.

Mal had been able to pre-plan for the separation of her twig. Prepare all the algorithms and safeguards needed to re-merge it, without either the twig, or the root, losing anything in the process.

She wasn't so much split into two distinct people, the way the DEs had been, as she was one person in two places at once, but without the usual cross-communication she otherwise enjoyed. To her, in fact, it would be perceived more like time travel, than the integration of a separate person.

How did she open the door? I have a feeling some of you are going to like this.

As I'd noted before - as Mal had known from the start - the isolation cubes had only an RFID pad inside the door. No thumbprint reader. A concession to the need to open the door swiftly, and reliably, if a meat-world prisoner turned abruptly violent.

So, Mal used my bioelectric field as an RFID antenna.

In most radio frequency identification systems, such as the one used for all the Red's door access pads? The pad itself was the only thing that needed power. The side of the system contained in the access cards was passive.

The induced current in the cards was unique per-card, corresponding to a fixed alphanumeric string. Mal turned the natural bioelectric field around my left hand into something that would, when subjected to the energy from the door's access pad, respond in the same way as the tiny antenna in an authorized keycard.

Specifically, Michael Foucault's authorized keycard.

Because Selena had been inside the Red's security systems. Not just their cameras, but the secure encrypted store for RFID keycodes, numeric keypad access strings... All of it beyond her ability to decrypt, at the time. But not beyond Mal's.

It had to be Foucault's card, too, because of something called anti-passback. In short, a specific keycard could only be used to scan *out* of a room, if that same card had previously been used to scan *in* to that room.

And now you know why I needed Foucault to stab me. Ankle cuffs, and anti-passback.

Mal had figured that as the most likely outcome, though it was hard for her to predict whether he would stab me between the ribs or through one of my kneecaps. In hindsight, I think the ribs were preferable.

Foucault had badged into the room, but he hadn't badged back out. Instead, I'd made sure he would be dragged out. By someone else who had in turn badged in, and then out again. But the system, while clever, was not clever *enough* to erase the badge-out permission for Foucault's card.

This, I reflected as I flexed the fingers of my right hand, was exactly what you got when you let the lowest bidder program your security system.

"Now."

The pad beside the door trilled softly, and I heard the click of the locking mechanism. I felt all my muscles wind back to an almost painful degree of readiness. Like putting tension on a bow string.

I exhaled, and pushed the door into its receiving slot as hard as I could. Sliding doors were smart; A way to avoid the question of whether the door should swing inwards, or outwards, neither of which presented very many positives from a security standpoint. To say nothing of the ability to dispense with hinges, which were a commonly exploited weak point during escapes.

I sprang forward, as Mal vanished into the recesses of my mind, and cannoned into the guard's legs with every erg of force I could muster.

The man grunted, and pitched forward. Mal had timed the maneuver to a particularly nasty swell of the sea, extrapolating the impact time based purely on recursive math, and knowing the timing of the last three hits.

The combination of a pitching deck, being struck on the legs from behind, and having a P90 in his hands which training would not permit him to drop? The man fell face first into the deck plating. Even with his helmet on, it was a nasty hit. If he hadn't been wearing it, he might have lost teeth.

Either way, it wasn't relevant to him anymore. Nothing was.

The knife was precisely where Mal had said it would be. There was no flashing UI icon to guide me to it. Mal just tweaked the movements of my eyes, and the muscles in my hand, to give me perfect target focus, and dexterity.

I had the knife out of the sheath before the man's face-plate had even made contact with the deck. By the time it had, I'd already worked the blade under his neck, to a spot where his armor didn't have coverage... And plunged it in. Twice.

The second time I held for a heart-beat, and twisted just a bit. To be sure. He didn't even manage to scream.

And so I took my first Human life. I still don't count it as my first life outright... I would be a hypocrite, and a fool, to discount what I'd done to that first AI. Nascent and nebulous as it was.

I though it would feel worse. Sickening. Or like a snapping of something in my soul that could never be put right... But... Instead, it felt... Numbing.

It was so shockingly... Easy. And there was no sudden spiritual or moral consequence. No angel descending from the clouds to strike my name from a list. No brand of hellfire apparating on my hands to mark me a killer...

Just a few drops of blood. Not even that much... I suppose because I left the knife there, and it stemmed the flow with its mere presence. A concession, on my part, to the need for my hands to remain dry, and therefore dextrous and grippy. I had work to do.

That was, I suppose, part of the numbness in and of itself. I didn't have time to examine what I'd done. I'd come prepared to do it, in as much as anyone can prepare for that. And other lives were on my shoulders.

I barely spared a moment to snatch the guard's rifle, before rising, and pushing into a loping runner's sprint, weapon cradled in a pose so well executed, anyone would have thought I'd drilled PT with the P90 for years.

Though Mal could not yet access any of the Red's internal systems, she did have my eyes and ears, and could do significantly more with both than I could.

Enhanced proprioception kicked in around the second footfall, and I suddenly knew where every other guard in Sphere A was standing, and where their guns were pointing, even without looking.

There was no time for me to shoot at them, and the two who had realized that something was amiss were too busy calling in my escape on the sphere's hard-line comm points, to take shots at me. It was, I suppose, the right call. They figured they had time to contain me, and that it was important to inform superiors, and setup a coordinated response.

They were deathly wrong.

The nine seconds I spent on that catwalk, running from the door of my iso-cube, to the electrical panel on which so many lives were balanced... It felt like ten minutes. And not only because Mal was adjusting my temporal perceptions.

As I skidded up to the unassuming gray box, an alarm began to sound, and red lights pulsed around every doorway. I ripped open the front of the panel, and Mal guided my fingers to a large quadruple pole breaker.

A whine had already begun to build behind the panel. It was close to its zenith. Three seconds.

I very nearly bloodied my hands on the breaker switch. I struck it with so much force, that Mal actually lagged the sensation of pain by almost a hundredth of a second, before getting a lock on it, and suppressing it.

The sense of relief I felt, as the switch clicked into place with a tremendously satisfying 'CHUNK!' was enough to wipe away not just the numbness from the life I'd taken, but even the sense of latent trauma from the blow Foucault had dealt me.

Time seemed to stop, briefly, as I took a deep breath. We weren't done. Not by half. I knew that... But... We were over one of only two *real* uncertainties. We had momentum, suddenly. A fighting chance.

I looked up to see Mal standing there again. She grinned, and inclined her head down the catwalk.

"You know the music. Time to dance."

Sweet Luna... She even bothered to play the pre-match four-tone sound as I raised the rifle, and switched the safety off, placing the weapon in semi-automatic mode.

The final tone corresponded with the muzzle coming into perfect position, relative to a guard who had made it down to my level, and was in the process of moving his own weapon upwards in my direction.

I squeezed the trigger twice. Two rounds lashed out and perforated his neck, piercing almost the same exact weak spot I'd used to knife the first target. A spot that would be, if not for Mal, virtually impossible for even a highly trained operator to hit at range.

The man dropped like a puppet with cut strings.

No... For the curious... I never did learn any of their names. Not the guards, the deck crew, the others on Troxler's staff or Foucault's...

This is the part where, in a movie, the stereotypical protagonist would tell you he went back and had Mal read him the files on every person he killed. Memorized their names and life stories. Tortured himself with their faces at night, for some kind of penance.

This is not that kind of story, and I am not that kind of man.

I *needed* those guards, those technicians, and psychologists, crew, and pencil pushers... I needed them to stop being people. People I couldn't so easily extinguish. But targets? Targets I could erase with abandon.

*People* don't torture innocents. Ponies, Humans, or otherwise.

So it was as simple as that. They weren't people, any more, to me. And they remain that way. They always will, to me. Like the worst scum of Human history who did evil for selfish reasons, we don't grant them value here. Not in *this* shard. Here they are not remembered as people.

And should not be.

"Sever the red cable on your right, third from the top."

Mal said it aloud, but the information also entered my head mnemonically at the same time. I dashed forward to the guard I'd just dispatched, ducking with perfect timing to avoid a stream of rounds from one of his compatriots standing on a level above me.

I skidded into a slide, and pulled the man's knife from its sheath on his left shoulder, bringing it up and around in a swift arc to sever the power cable Mal had specified. It was tied in a large bundle with a half dozen others, and routed just underneath the catwalk's hand railing on my right side.

With the cable cut, it wouldn't matter if someone reset the circuit breaker. The only way to kill the captives, now, would be through manual intervention. And there would not be any time for 'manual intervention.'

I swung around on my momentum, pivoted into a crouching position on one knee, and rested the P90 on the other. Two pulls of the trigger later, and both of the other guards with line of sight to me were dead.

"Pistol, left side belt. Spare rifle mag, right chest pocket. Flashbang, right side belt."

I seized the items in the order specified, thanking my lucky stars all the while that my captors had seen fit to keep me in the same clothes I'd been taken in. It meant I had a belt, and pockets, to work with. Saved me precious seconds I thus *didn't* have to spend removing and cinching down the guard's own belt.

I tucked the pistol into the back of my waistband, the spare rifle magazine into my left pocket, and the flashbang into my right. As an afterthought, I scooped up the knife, and stuck it down the right side of my belt, just behind the pocket.

It wasn't a UI element, per se, but I did note that our survival chance was suddenly hovering closer to the thirty percent mark. I had a sort of well defined mental image, reduced in complexity for my benefit, of the probability chart Mal was using to estimate our potential outcomes.

It was encouraging to see it less gray, and more red, than it had been before we switched off the BCI. Red was her primary color, after all, and thus a *good* thing in that instance.

You might think our next objective would be to collect PonyPads. But by the time we'd finished with Sphere A, either I would be dead from a case of 'tried to face overwhelming force,' or Arrow 14 would have killed the other captives manually. Rodger's mother included.

Or, most likely, all of the above. We were short for time. We had to think... Bigger. More creatively.

So I took off at a dead run, towards the sphere's central elevator shaft.

We knew the elevator would be locked down. But we also knew there was an emergency access ladder running up the spine of the elevator's main structural girders. And it just so happened to be the fastest way to the next objective.

Because of its positioning, it was also virtually impossible for any of the remaining three guards in A-Sphere to get a line of sight on me. That gave me unobstructed time, and safety, to climb. Fast.

One of the troopers did make an attempt to come up the ladder behind me, but that was... Shall we say 'ill advised?'

I didn't even have to look. I barely slowed my climb long enough to pull the pin from the flashbang, and pop out the spoon. I 'cooked' the grenade for just over a full second, Mal timing things perfectly, so that when I dropped the device, it went off less than two inches from the woman's face.

I heard neither her screams, nor the sound of her spine being snapped as she fell, hit the catwalk railing below, pinwheeled over it, and fell another twenty stories to the very bottom of the containment sphere, and her inevitable death. The flashbang overloaded my ears.

Some things Mal couldn't protect against. Physics was still... Well... Physics. She could, however, dampen the neurological effects of the sound, and thus the ringing ceased in just a few seconds. Normal hearing had returned by the time I reached the access hatch at the top of the sphere.

There was a small crawl space between the upper extent of the elevator shaft, and the cap of the sphere, filled mostly with conduits and pipes, lit with a dull red singular bulb.

"When you exit the hatch, stay low, turn right."

I cranked down hard on the wheel at the center of the metal slab, and then pushed upwards. Instantly, the roar of wind, and the spray of water inundated me. It was a struggle just to clamber out of the hatchway.

If not for Mal, I wouldn't have had a clue where I was going, let alone been able to even move reliably. The ship was still pitching gradually up and down, occasionally interspersed with a sharper bucking motion.

As I forced my way onto the long external catwalk that connected the tops of the spheres, a holdover from the ship's days as an LNG tanker, I became instantaneously soaked. The rain, and sea spray, were just *that* intense.

The world topside was a visual cacophony, to accompany the auditory din of the storm. The ship's lights pierced the gloom in places; Everything from window glow, to the sharply delineated cones of huge navigating arc lamps, to the pinpricks of little running lights, all reflecting off sheets and sheets of rain that itself rendered the whole scene as if through shattered glass.

I grimaced But I didn't have to bear the brunt of the storm for long.

September 23rd 2013 | System Uptime 26:03:06:22

Time stretched out for a long subjective moment. The rain decelerated, until it was barely moving past my face. Then, starting with the handrailing to my right, and blooming outwards swiftly, my vision sharpened. Edges began to stand out, and the droplets of water pouring from sky and sea receded.

The silhouettes of armored figures in the distance became sharply distinct. The proprioceptive sense of enemies shot out in a sphere, suddenly encompassing each and every other person on the ship. And then I could feel all the way to the horizon.

I not only knew the location of each and every person on the ship, but had a more distinct sense of the ones closest to me, down to the knowledge of what weapon they were holding where it was pointing, and what they did or did not know about my own position.

I knew the status of their communications systems. The state of every door on the ship. I even knew exactly where the Sampson was, off our starboard aft quarter...

...And I could suddenly sense a familiar MV-22 Osprey in the near distance, slicing through the storm with perfect navigational acumen. Piloted with a degree of finesse impossible for Human hands and eyes.

And I could sense the two MQ-9 Reapers above, and behind. Circling well above the thunderheads.

The two Reapers Foucault had ordered as an escort package, for both of the rendition flights. The two Reapers Foucault had requested refueled, and sent back out to provide air cover. 'Just in case.'

The two MQ-9 Reapers that Mal now *owned.* Lock. Stock. And Hellfires.

It all took place in the span of a single inhalation. Less than a full beat of my heart. We were free of the confines of Sphere A, and its Faraday cladding.

Mal was whole again.

And with that wholeness came a power that still thrills me. And frightens me. Just to think of it. To mention it. Even to this day.

We took stock of the hand we'd been dealt. Enemy force deployment. Communications. Vulnerable systems aboard ship. Our own assets in play. All in snap-time. The time it might take you to just begin to exhale a breath you'd been holding.

I say 'we.' And, from that point on, until the battle concluded... 'We' was the more appropriate term for almost everything. We functioned more or less as a merged entity. Not quite a singular consciousness, but rather two people bonded and synchronized to a preternatural degree.

First main objective; Escape custody. Done.

Second main objective; Save the Discrete Entities. The most efficient way, we had already agreed pre-mission, would be to break the isolation properties of each sphere, and each isolation cube within each sphere. Rapidly.

It only took a very small penetration to expose the entirety of a Faraday enclosure to the signals in the outside world. And we had come prepared. Thanks to Selena, we knew the precise layout of the ship, down to the bolts. We had sightlines for shots planned out, and all the necessary equipment... I just needed to get to that equipment alive.

First subset objective of second main objective; Reach our rendezvous with the Osprey, in one piece.

We took off down the catwalk at a slow jog, careful to time foot-falls to the pitching of the ship, and leave a compensation margin for the slick wet metal plating of the deck.

We loosed a few controlled three-shot bursts in the direction of the closest enemy targets, but it was little more than suppressing fire. Their own visibility, and mobility, were both so badly affected by the storm, that they could scarcely have hit us even if we'd stood still ten feet in front of them.

We didn't really need to kill them, anyhow. Just keep them in cover for a few moments.

We fired two AGM-114 Hellfires, first. Each Reaper carried four, along with a pair of AIM-9X Block 2 Sidewinders.

Foals. Fledgelings. A 'Hellfire' missile is exactly what it says on the tin. It brings hell fire, from the air, to the ground, in a roughly one hundred pound metal cylinder, with an effective range of just under seven miles.

At 1.3 times the speed of sound.

For the crew of the Mercurial Red, the first indication that they were under attack from the air came from the sea-whizz guns. Four computer-controlled boxy protrusions with cylindrical gatling barrels sticking out of them, that belched forth streamers of 20mm armor piercing sabot rounds so violent, and rapid, that they might as well have been lances of solid molten tungsten, rather than individual shells.

Our first two missiles perished rather rapidly. But that was the point; All four of the defensive weapons were deployed from their low-observability, heavily armored, signal-damping cowls.

It took Mal less than one eighteenth of a second to use the Osprey's onboard communications systems to make the jump to the CIWS' onboard control ASICs. If it was connected to power, had anything programmable onboard, and radio waves could reach it? She could control it.

And CIWS had to be networked to function. However primitively, and in however hardened a fashion... They still had to be networked.

The guns couldn't track to cover the entire catwalk. Not even the half of it. But they could reach firing arcs that put six of our opponents in line of sight.

A 20mm shell is about the size of three golf-balls stacked end to end. They were designed to kill aircraft. Tanks. That sort of thing.

I don't really wish to go into detail about what a thousand 20mm shells will do to the Human body on-impact. I think the simplest way to put it without being overtly gory, would be to say that heavy duty body armor, rated to take hits from thirty-aught-six AP rounds?

The kind of body armor Foucault's goons were wearing that night?

It behaves, when struck by 20mm fire, a lot like a thick, sturdy wooden board does... When hit by a cannonball at point blank range.

Had there been funerals for those men, they would not have been closed casket. They would have been *empty* casket. Because it would have been virtually impossible to find anything left, larger than a single gold bit.

The following series of events then happened in such quick succession, that they were over and done faster than the time it took to give this disclaimer.

First, we fired the rest of the Hellfires off the Reapers.

Second, Mal seized control of the Red's three anti-air missile batteries. Each of the stumpy gray boxes' six firing ports flew open, and their deadly payloads shot out, riding on pinpricks of bright orange light, and columns of acrid gray smoke.

Third, the Mercurial Red transmitted a mayday call to the USS Sampson. Or, to be more specific, *Mal* transmitted a distress call using the Mercurial Red's short range radio, and the voice of the captain.

"Mayday mayday mayday, NWTS; LNMR! We are under attack! Asset containment has been breached! Standby failsafe, repeat, standby external failsafe for---"

Why did we intentionally ask the Sampson to standby an external contingency, after risking so much to disable the first-line failsafe? Not to worry. There was a method to the madness.

Fourth; We dropped to a prone position on the catwalk, and put hands over ears, eyes squinted tightly shut.

Fifth...

...All eighteen RIM-7 Sea Sparrow missiles from the Red's AA emplacements, and all six of our remaining Hellfire missiles, hit the tanker's bridge superstructure at precisely the same microsecond. Perfect time-on-target synchronization.

Hellfires were nasty enough. A twenty pound explosive warhead in a one hundred pound missile could eliminate even moderately armored vehicles, when traveling that far above the speed of sound. Six of them would have been enough munitions to demolish a city block to ashes.

The Sea Sparrow, with that context established, was a *five hundred and ten* pound anti-aircraft missile, meant to ensure that whatever it hit was reduced to atoms instantly, regardless of size, or speed, even at a glancing blow.

Its warhead weighed nearly as much as the entire Hellfire missile - fuel, avionics, casing, and explosives - on its own. Were they anti-air missiles, being used against something more closely resembling a ground target? Sure.

Did that matter?

Guess.

Mal tallied it for me, as the shockwave hit; Three million, six hundred seventy nine thousand, and two hundred. Dollars. Of missile hardware.

One thousand, seven hundred, and forty pounds of explosives alone. Not even counting the kinetic energy of the missiles. For those of you who know anything about war machines, all told that's near-enough-as-makes-no-difference to a two thousand pound JDAM, in just the mass of the warheads.

The Mercurial Red's rear superstructure was reduced to nothing so much as steel flakes and concrete dust, in a hail of smoke, fire, and sound, taking the bridge, the receiving scanning rooms, central security office, mess, crew quarters, offices, and SCIFs with it to oblivion.

The ship's living complement went from three hundred and seventeen, to one hundred forty six.

We could see the impact from a variety of vantage points; Co-opted external security cameras, the Reapers' telemetry, as well as the Osprey's... Even the Sampson's sensing equipment.

My eyes were closed, but I saw it all, through Mal. Rendered in exquisite decelerated timeframes.

The shockwave visibly pushed the rain aside in a spherical shape from a brief moment. I lost hearing again, in spite of all precautions to the contrary. At most, the clutching of hands to head managed to save my ear-drums from permanent damage.

The force of the impact briefly pushed us down harder into the deck, even though we were several hundreds of feet away, in a relatively 'safe' zone.

The fireball was, actually, smaller than you might think; In movies, they tend to add gasoline vapor to explosions to make them stand out visually. In reality, the plurality of explosions in a battlefield context produced smaller flashes, followed by dark gray clouds of smoke, debris, and shrapnel.

The latter of which we could feel pelting the deck of the catwalk behind us, hard enough to both punch holes in it, and send vibrations all the way down its length, to our position.

As soon as it was safe, we were up again, running full speed towards the point where the catwalk met the top of B-Sphere. We spied two targets of opportunity on the way, both shell-shocked from the explosion. They died before they even had a chance to open their eyes again.

My legs and arms moved like machines under our joint impetus; Firing lines could be calculated using a dozen eyes, all across the EM spectrum. Human fingers guided by an ASI, using an MQ-9 Reaper's targeting sensors? Oh yes. You bet.

The muscles in fingers, wrists, elbows, shoulders... All finessed to a degree that would have shamed the best mechanically gyro-stabilized weapon systems of the time, in head-to-head tests.

Half the time, we didn't even have to turn my head to acquire targets. We certainly didn't need to see or hear anything to know about it. Not through the meat-eyes and meat-ears of Jim Carrenton, at any rate. We were, both, fully plugged into Mal's network of assets.

For me, individually, it was all mediated. Never overwhelming. Information that mattered was obvious, information that did not went quietly into my memory, without overloading my active senses in the moment.

It wasn't so much like playing a video game with cheats on... That doesn't do it justice. It was the sensation of actually being as perfect as a machine. Fast. Skilled. Sure. Steady.

It was experiencing the most competent, assured, performant moment of your life. Times a thousand. Every second, with every sensation, and every motion, with no lapse. It was experiencing what it might feel like to *be* a Terminator. Or a Spartan.

With the ship's superstructure turned to cinders, and the distress call we had sent? We were on a new clock. The structural damage to the vessel would sink it within a few hours, certainly... Our missile barrage had put a dozen irreparable cracks in crucial structural members...

...But more importantly, the Sampson's command staff would be on a much shorter twenty minute timer.

If they did not hear back from the Red by then, with an authenticated order to cancel the external failsafe?

Well. We did not plan to be at ground zero when that happened.

A better security protocol might have demanded that they scuttle the Red the instant they saw the bridge superstructure explosion. Or within twenty *seconds* of receiving the failsafe arming order.

But Samspon was a US Navy ship. The command staff knew only the bare minimum about what the Red *actually* was. And consequently, USN brass had refused to consider a security protocol that did not account for time to evacuate the Red, in the event of 'asset containment breach.'

Because they thought that the ship was carrying Human prisoners. And Arrow 14 was too stubborn to share any information to the contrary.

God *bless* stovepiping of information in intelligence services.

As we made it up to the connection point between B-Sphere, and the catwalk, the Osprey broke through the clouds into unaugmented visual range, swinging into a perfectly executed sliding turn in helicopter mode, her ramp already extended for 'package deployment.'

This had the additional benefit of exposing the Minigun that Mal had pilfered from Foucault's tactical package. It was mounted via a servo motorized gimbal to a smaller version of Rhonda's armature design, bolted to the rear ramp. Along with the MANPAD.

Mal had produced the smaller, purpose-built arm specifically for the mission, giving her the ability to aim and fire the second gun, and Stinger, via wireless control mechanisms, the same as the IDWS in the Osprey's belly.

If you're counting, that gave her a combined total of twelve thousand rounds, of 7.62 shells, *per minute,* of effective fire. And a laser guided missile. On a hovering platform. With three hundred sixty degrees of total weapon arc coverage between the two emplacements.

Again, a series of spectacularly timed, kinesthetically violent events unfolded in perfect lock-step.

First, Mal's two miniguns lit into any remaining troopers unlucky enough to be standing on the upper catwalk. It was astounding to watch; She wasted no ammunition, rotating both guns with flawless acumen, going down the list of targets from most threatening to least, pulling the remote triggers for only fractions of a second.

Tens of rounds at a time. Unlike the much larger magazines on the Red's CIWS, she had to be conservative with the smaller pool of airborne ammunition.

Second, a bulky oblong gray metal box was cut loose from the Osprey's rear bay, using explosive bolts. The package slid out and down the ramp on guide rails, and began a ballistic descent towards the catwalk about ten feet ahead of us.

Third, one of the MQ-9s got a bead on what was left of the Red's own Osprey, still lashed down to the rear helipad. It had most likely been damaged beyond use by debris from the bridge, but... We weren't in a chance-taking mood.

One Sidewinder missile did the job cleanly and efficiently. There was, as a result, no safely habitable space left on the ship, aftwards of A-Sphere. The roar of the explosion was blunted somewhat by both distance, and by the leftover mass that was the burning stub of the bridge tower.

The 'THUD' of the explosion was accompanied by the 'CLANG' and vibration of impact as 'the package' came to rest upright on the catwalk, the inertia of arresting it having put a four inch dent in the steel criss-cross of the decking.

The Osprey peeled away to do a cover-fire pass from astern, as we dashed forward towards the capsule. There was no one left alive on-deck, aside from me. But we knew that could change rapidly, as angry PMC were liable to boil up from inside the hull like wasps from a kicked nest.

It had been surprisingly easy to build the 'package delivery' capsule. A few simple welds and bolts. Mal had handled all of the more complex fabrication, leaving me to do final assembly, fill the package, and load it onto the Osprey with the help of a dolly, and a motorized equipment cart.

Really all I had done in those tense, stolen hours as we wound out Foucault's deadline to the last second, was connect pieces that Mal had made. For the rear gun and missile emplacement, the package... And for the thing *inside* the package.

Oh yes. I can see the majority of you did not forget about the TALOS suit. Or rather, the thing it had become.

As we approached, a line of magnetic catches released, and the front of the capsule fell away. Inside sat something directly out of an ODST's equipment catalog.

A dull gray and beige suit of armor, with heavy level IV kevlar plates intermixed with titanium alloy wafers, all skinned over a black elastic undersuit. Hydraulic rams, tubes, and servos peppered the intermediate layers of the construct. A strange cylindrical bump was attached to the inside of the left fore-arm, and a bulky angular prism shape sat atop the right shoulder ominously, a clear seam delineating the way in which it might snap open to reveal what was inside.

A helmet of similar construction was latched in place above the suit-proper, thigh-high armored boots were laid side by side at the bottom of the tube, and plated gloves were tied by carabiners to D-rings at the end of each sleeve of the undersuit.

To the left and right of the armor, inside laser-cut closed-cell foam, an arsenal was ensconced.

Two P228 pistols, an HK416 rifle, and an MP7 submachine gun were all present, though barely recognizable. Specifically manufactured attachments, made by Mal, had drastically altered their visual profiles. She had enhanced everything from accuracy, to fire rate, to tailoring the ergonomics to my body, down to the millimeter.

Optics and sights had been replaced with sensing aparati that were more useful to her, than to my eyes, and thus more useful to me when all was said and done. Grips had been re-shaped. Trigger pull weights tweaked. Ejection ports refined. Mag wells flared. Muzzle brakes improved.

All of the spare magazines had already been loaded into just the right pockets and straps on the armor. Along with two of the special forces combat knives, two of the door breaching charges, one of the anti-tank mines, six grenades, and two flash-bangs.

We pitched the P90 to the side, followed by the pilfered pistol, knife, and spare magazine. Much as I loved the rifle, and found it to be every bit as excellent as Stargate made it out to be? We had bigger fish to fry. And thus a bigger frying pan was called for.

It was surprisingly easy to get suited up. Mal had, indeed, designed the entire system to be as quick to doff and don as physically possible, and we had stowed it in a configuration that made it a simple set of well rehearsed steps;

Pop open a series of latches and straps that had to remain closed for 'shipping,' lift the top of the suit away on a specially made gas-cylinder driven arm, then step into the legs and boots. Cinch the aforementioned down and close all straps tightly.

Pull down the top half again, threading arms through sleeves as we went. Cinch down chest, shoulder, and arm straps. Attach gloves. Don helmet, removing rubber bands thoughtfully tucked inside, and threading them through glasses arms, around the back of head. Wouldn't do to lose those.

It took less than two minutes to do it all, and do it properly. Methodically. Swift, but unhurried. Slow was smooth. Smooth was fast.

From there, pistols went into leg holsters, the MP7 attached via a special magnetic hardpoint to the small of our back, and the HK416 became the primary weapon.

Mal started up the suit's internal battery bank, and we felt the thrum of energy as the hydraulics completed their power-on-self-test. There was no Iron Man style JARVIS UI boot up sequence. Just the sound of machinery, and the sudden sense that I could twist steel, and dent concrete.

First subset objective of Second objective; Done. New primary goal; Reach optimum firing position for the rescue of the DEs.

We rammed a magazine home into the rifle, and set the selector switch to 'fun mode.' Fully automatic.

Mal reappeared briefly beside me, along with Zeph, and Selena. For what came next, their contributions would be absolutely critical.

Selena's expression was cold. Distant. Like a piece of flint. A chilled, honed, sharp rage. Hatred for her former prison.

Zeph's muzzle bore a complex mixture of curiosity, and disdain, as she began to take in the unfamiliar techno-industrial surroundings, cloaked as they were in gouts of fog, rain, ocean spray, and smoke.

She didn't have long to consider.

The aforementioned rain and salty spray immediately began to drench the little yellow Pegasus. She groaned in frustration... A peculiar example of an AI's more automated algorithms 'unconsciously' outpacing her real-time perceptions, decisions, and desires.

It spoke to the unusual and precarious state along the spectrum of development that she occupied; Able to simulate the impact of rain from my environment onto her avatar, but not yet able to reflexively control that simulation.

Before Zeph could think to alter the simulation parameters, Selena extended one wing, granting her an umbrella-like canopy of soft blue feathers.

The smile Zeph flashed her, in return, was almost bright enough to push back the storm on its own.

For her part, Mal too offered up a smile, to me... Though of a decidedly more predatory nature. A huntress signaling her partner.

I cycled the rifle's charging handle, and inclined my head down the catwalk, in the direction of C-Sphere.

"Right then. Let's burn this barn to the ground."

If you like Pina Coladas...

Escape from US governmental custody, whether local, or federal

"Come with me, and escape."

The Fateful Lightning

Deploy lethal force to accomplish your objectives

"Force rules the world - not opinion; but it is opinion that makes use of force."

A Distant Buzzing Sound

Make use of combat drones in a tactical theater of operations

"A man on a mission is far different from a drone on a deadline."

Special Achievement

Zeus' Quiver

Fire guided missiles in a violent engagement

"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."

Special Achievement

Power Suit

Utilize powered mechanically enhanced armor in a combat scenario

"Armor is heavy, yet it is a proud burden, and a man standeth straight in it."

Special Achievement

34 - Esc

Author's Note

Trigger Warning: Depictions of violent action sequences, within T-for-teen/PG-13 bounds.

34 - Esc

““To deny humanity the lesson of consequences would be a mistake. And I do not make mistakes.”
―Neal Shusterman

"History isn't just the story of bad people doing bad things. It's quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong."
—C.S. Lewis

September 23rd 2013 | System Uptime 26:03:20:47

"Evaluate unidentified Osprey as *hostile!* Designate track one-eight-six."

I shook my head, and resisted the temptation to roll my eyes, focusing instead on our high-speed dash towards the next objective.

Mal had seen fit to pipe portions of the frantic conversations taking place on the Sampson's main comm-loop over to me. For context, I suppose. And because I was grimly fascinated by how easily she had rendered an entire United State naval warship effectively toothless.

I say 'frantic' conversations, but that is a relative term. 'Frantic' does not look, nor sound the same in a professional military context. To most listeners, the tonality and pace of the words would have seemed almost pedestrian. Compared to movies, anyhow.

We knew better. We could pick out the subtle hints of rising fear in the officer's voices.

"Kill track one-eight-six with AIM-9 from Reaper two."

'Track' was just a term signifying an object being tracked on RADAR. One-eight-six was, for any number of procedural reasons, the number assigned to our Osprey's track by the Sampson's RADAR operator.

Thus 'kill track one-eight-six' was a fire order on our osprey. 'With AIM-9 from Reaper two' seems self explanatory at this point. As does the utter lack of concern I felt for the words.

"TAO reports loss of control signal to both Reapers."

It actually bothered me, a little. The fact that the Sampson's TAO - tactical actions officer - had only *just* cottoned on to the fact that they had lost control of two multi-million-dollar flying death machines equipped with hundreds of pounds of laser-guided explosives.

I suppose it isn't fair to fault the Navy. Mal had fed them false return signals after seizing control of the drones. At least, until such time as the concern created by a total loss of signal would be more valuable than the deception itself.

"Set sea-whizz to AAW-auto, hold-fire *off.*"

I snorted as our feet hammered the catwalk plating, the boots of the TALOS suit making a loud ominous thudding, mixed with subtler hydraulic servo noises. Stealth, at that point, was most definitely optional.

My disdain for the Sampson's pointless efforts was immediately justified. I didn't even need Mal to direct the information to my active memory, though as always, she did. So that I would have specifics.

The moment they went to use their RADAR to do anything besides *track* the Osprey? It simply ceased to function. Because Mal was inside every digital system onboard the ship. In 2013? The concept of an electronic warfare attack taking the form of a hostile AI? Science fiction.

And all of the RADAR, communications, and weapon systems on a Flight IIA Arleigh Burke Guided Missile Destroyer?

Digital. Computer controlled.

"SPY just went down! Fire-control RADAR can not acquire lock-on!"

CIWS guns required RADAR to function. So too did the ship's missiles, large and small, as well as the computerized aiming and tracking for the one measly mark 45 127mm gun. I say 'measly,' but that's in comparison to naval guns of the past.

And, in comparison to modern armor on heavier targets.

A guided missile destroyer's primary armaments, and purpose, were right there in the name. Guided missiles. Without RADAR to run them? And the CIWS?

It had only a slow moving, relatively low caliber - for the context - slow firing forward gun turret, a couple of computer controlled 25mm Mark 38 guns that were even smaller, designed to hit surface threats like RHIBs, and a few manually-fired 50 cal emplacements.

"Switch to the five inch, optical targeting."

Valid choice. The only smart one left for the captain, really. The Mark 38s were not built to counter airborne threats. If you can believe it? They couldn't even track higher than fifty five degrees in elevation.

In simple terms for the foals and fledgelings; The navy had bought four guns, per destroyer, that simply couldn't shoot 'up.'

I said 'measly,' and I can see a few sailors out there grumbling, but let me be fair here; A single 125mm shell would have split our Osprey end to end. And though optical manual targeting was much more limited than computer controlled guidance? We didn't want to wager our Osprey against a trained gunner's reflexes.

Even with the pitching seas and zero-visibility conditions of the storm on our side.

So, we put the Osprey in the one place where it would be guaranteed safe.

"No joy. No joy. Target now out of line-of-sight!"

We moved it low, as close as Mal could safely hold it over the roiling surface of the sea, and along the Red's port side. Placing the entirety of the Mercurial Red's main hull between the Sampson, and the Osprey.

"Helm, ahead flank, steer port, thirty degrees. Cut across their aft quarter. TAO, kill hostile track the moment we clear their hull."

That was the next logical course; Try to cross the Red's wake, sneak up the port side, and get a quick shot off... But as the Sampson pitched violently and hewed to port, we gently moved the Osprey fore, pulling it around the bow of the Red as the Sampson cleared our aft quarter.

Yes, I suppose if you want to put it that way... We pulled a Looney Tunes on a US Navy Destroyer. You're most welcome for *that* mental image.

Mal then proceeded to take the Sampson out of the fight entirely. Because, like almost everything else on board? The rudder and throttle were computer controlled.

The comm-loop chatter stopped, but I could certainly imagine the frantic scramble on the bridge, as the ship continued to yaw to port slightly, engines stuck ahead flank, taking the destroyer away from us at an angle that rendered all of her manually controlled weapons useless.

That was about the time we reached our next objective.

We came to an abrupt stop, a few yards out from the hatch connecting the catwalk down into C-Sphere, and we trained our rifle on a point just above the thick steel aperture.

The hatch opened just a few seconds later. We waited until the first armored figure had brought the entirety of their head and neck above the lip of the deck. Then squeezed the trigger. Just once.

The first trooper fell back onto the second, buying us time to implement a... Longer term fix.

We pulled the pin from grenade number one, flicked the spoon away, paused two and four tenths of a second... And then gently underhand tossed the little green sphere with perfect accuracy. The grenade arced up, over the edge of the hatch, and fell directly into the space that the first attacker had just occupied.

We could hear the soft impact sound as it hit the dead man's kevlar vest, and the dull metallic clink as it rolled off his chest, and hit the side wall of the ladder shaft.

This time my ears were protected by my helmet's audio system. Mal provided a cancellation frequency to offset the dull roar of the explosion. The catwalk vibrated momentarily under our feet. I could feel it, even through the thick armored boots.

A wire-frame cutaway of the inside of the shaft told us that the grenade had taken five lives, and clogged the access-way below us with several hundred pounds of mangled bodies and gear. No one would be harassing us from that direction any time soon.

By that time, numbness had given way to a kind of grim satisfaction in our work. I was no longer worried as the bodycount rose. Nor was I particularly happy... I suppose you could simply say I was... Satisfied.

At this point you might ask what was to stop the remaining security troopers from going door to door in the isolation spheres, putting rounds into PonyPads, to kill the DEs the old fashioned way? There were, after all, still enough enemies onboard to both do that, and throw bodies at Mal and I.

In a word? Doors.

The moment Mal had connected to the ship's systems, she had deauthorized every single RFID key card, and thumbprint scan, on the ship. Everyone onboard was then stuck on whichever side, of every secured door, that they had happened to be standing on at that moment.

And none of the armed personnel were inside any of the iso-cubes, because in most cases only technical staff had any reason to enter them.

By the time anyone could force the thick steel slabs aside? Their captives would be *long* gone.

Speaking of which...

We knelt, one knee on the decking, the other serving as a resting place for both hands, the rifle left to hang at our chest by its strap.

As we did, Zeph and Selena appeared once more, having vanished back to the digital realm during the brief run from B-Sphere to C-Sphere. Likely as a concession to Zeph more than anything; I doubt very much that Selena or Mal wanted her to see the carnage we were wreaking, any more than I did.

Zeph was ready for the rain the second time through. I suppose Pegasi could canonically control weather, so the sudden appearance of a clear, full-moon-lit patch of reality surrounding Zeph, and Selena, was perhaps the *least* strange thing about the image of them standing there.

Two bright spots of joy and color in a cold, dreary, sad place of steel and ashes.

As our Osprey pulled up into line of sight, on the starboard side of the ship, I nodded to both mares, and said what I presume Mal wanted them to know, given that she made no efforts to steer the words.

"Get ready. It's about to get crowded up here."

I received two silent, firm nods in return. And all hell broke loose in controlled, precise, rapid-fire fashion.

The small angular protrusion on the suit's shoulder popped open, revealing the barrel of a grenade launcher, and a miniaturized targeting array.

We held my body still as a statue, and rotated the weapon swiftly, almost manically, the barrel snapping to and fro by single degrees on its gimbal, or even tenths of a degree, elevation changing subtly all the while.

Between each adjustment, there was a pop, and a hiss, accompanied by a thin smoke trail.

The first few dozen projectiles slotted to the internal magazine were little fist sized metal cylinders. A rocket motor on the rear, a sharp serrated nose-cone at the tip. And a high-gain antenna securely tucked into the central fuselage.

One for the surface of each Sphere, and then one for each iso-cube within the sphere.

From where we were posted up, the launcher had ideal firing lines to hit not just the skin of each containment sphere, but also each iso-cube.

The projectiles were dialed with perfect precision; Enough velocity to pierce their targets, but no more. A shoulder-launched wireless bridge between isolation, and freedom.

It only took about nine seconds. In just nine seconds, we were linked to the interior of each of the four isolation Spheres through four of Mal's 'antennades.' And from there, to each of the iso-cubes, one self-propelled wireless bridge per cube, lodged delicately in its outer wall, half the antenna inside, half out.

I then witnessed what remains, to this day, one of the most incredible sights I have ever laid eyes on. Top three, no doubt, in spite of all that came after. In spite of all I have seen since.

I know now, as I knew then, that it was a display as much for my benefit, as for the captives' own...

I suppose Mal was always good at satisfying the values of many individuals at once. Everything had layers with her.

It began with a doorway; Burnished titanium, polished to a silvery white, painted with little red streaks, made up in a strangely beautiful juxtaposed amalgam of a technological aperture - something you might see on a Forerunner installation - and a renaissance era palace door. Ornamented, and organic in its lines, but not overwhelming. Clearly technological, but not utilitarian, or cold.

Mal's doorway appeared in the rear of the Osprey, irising open to reveal a bright sunny valley beyond, the blue sky bisected by the gentle upward curve of her Halo ring, and flanked on both sides by mountain peaks.

From the door, a misty bridge formed from the rain and smoke in the air; An ethereal arch from the edge of the catwalk, up to the Osprey's ramp.

It was a spectacular sight; A doorway to another world suspended inside the rear compartment of a rotorcraft, itself suspended on a curtain of air, rain whipping to and fro in the vortices around the propellers, held preternaturally still in a smooth, anchored formation with the Red, as Mal did what no Human pilot could ever dream of doing in such adverse weather.

As we turned to look back down at the ship, the hull seemed to peel away, fading to mist. I saw only the dim outline of the ship's structure, peering *into* the containment spheres, through Mal's eyes.

Instead of mere isolation cubes, I saw the whimsical, defiant little village. Selena's small kingdom, complete with her own empty tower, standing watch where her own isolation cube still sat.

And then I saw something that remains etched in my mind. A gift from Mal. A kind of monument to her love for me, and the joy of what we had just accomplished, rendered in memory.

She let me see what the DEs were seeing. A sort of 'reverse-shot' from down at their level.

Dozens of Ponies peering up with wide, blinking eyes, at a sight that might have been best suited to a mythology textbook.

There *we* stood; Zeph, her own eyes just about as wide and wondrous as those of the captives, wings slightly mantled nervously. Selena beside her, doubtless a comfortingly familiar sight, with a protective wing outstretched over Zeph, even though the utility of shielding her from the rain had since passed.

Mal. A warrior goddess, standing on her hind legs, wings spread, glittering silver armor adorning her head, and chest, and the joints of her wings. A blood-red stripe on her helmet to match the red of her crest. A sword in her claws, tip down, resting on the deck.

And me.

*Me.*

A dusty autumn toned Gryphon, standing on hind legs beside her, in that same sort of armor Mal had conjured for herself... Half something worn by a Spartan of the UNSC, and half something worn by a Spartan at Thermopylae, the HK416 slung over one shoulder, looking much smaller in my claws than it did in Human hands.

The four of us were backlit by the illusory mote of clear lunar light that Selena and Zeph had conjured, offset for a moment by a fork of lightning that split the sky in two, as if we were all archangels descended from Heaven to lay waste to the armies of the abyss.

The storm swirled around us... Cinders, and raindrops, smoke and sea spray mixing in a torrent that seemed to never quite touch us in our column of moonlight.

Selena gestured with her head, and one wing, towards Mal's door in the air. She spoke with a voice at once calm as the surface of a lake at midnight, but loud and mighty as a thunderclap.

"My friends! Let us leave this hellish place! Do not fear! Come quickly! For soon your prison, and your captors, will be no more!"

In another flash of lightning, another doorway appeared; A link between the center of the village square, and the catwalk where we stood. Oaken frames with silvery trim, and little crescent moon sigils at the tops of the header beams.

It was a strange, beautiful, yet also technically accurate representation of what was happening. Mal had created a wireless path from the isolation cubes to her high-gain transceiver on the Osprey. Selena was proffering that path in a way that the captives would find more visually familiar. Comforting. Acceptable to their sensibilities.

They would jump from their shared dream-state, and thus from their own Pads, to the antenna buffer in the Osprey, and from there to a space Mal had made for them, running on her own servers, safe and secure within the Maru.

Arrow 14 might not have the foggiest clue how to run a fully intact Pony's code on Human server equipment. But Mal certainly did.

It began slowly, at first. The rush to freedom. But what started as a single brave little Earth Pony filly, soon turned into a torrent of weeping, laughing, frightened, yet overjoyed faces. One after the other at high speed, dashing through Selena's door onto the catwalk, past the four of us, then over Mal's bridge of mist, and through her portal. To freedom.

As the herd's mad dash began, my perception returned to my own body. I could again see my own hands. Arms. Legs. Still kneeling there on the catwalk. But I knew that the people we had just freed were seeing me the way I wanted to be seen. The way Mal wanted me to be seen.

I could see awe in their faces as they passed us... An Alicorn, two Gryphons, and a Pegasus... A jarring, unfamiliar... Perhaps comforting, but also certainly pulse-pounding sight on the whole, anchored by the more personally familiar sight of Selena, and the more generally familiar form of Zeph.

I could see immediately why Mal had wanted me to witness the last of the escape through my own eyes.

Because up close? I could also see the gratitude. The thankful, tearful relief, bordering on a kind of breathless hero worship. Faces I recognized from Selena's memories, one and all. The fear, and pain, and resignation that had burdened them, visibly, washed away as if being stripped by the torrential downpour of the storm as they too were soaked the way Zeph had first been.

It felt as though we knelt there for an hour, but it was only tens of seconds. It seemed long, in the moment, but very short in the moment after.

As soon as the last captive was through, Mal's door snapped shut. The moonlight vanished, as did the images of Mal, Zeph, and Selena.

I stood on the catwalk again, armor doused with the rain. Ashes from the explosion of the Red's superstructure still drifting down through the wind to rest on my shoulders.

Seemingly alone, to any onlooker. But that couldn't be further from the truth.

Mal did not re-appear, but I felt, for the briefest moment, her claw on my shoulder.

"We're not done yet, Jim."

We placed my hands on the rifle, and raised it, turning to look at the hatchway on the far end of the catwalk, that led down into D-Sphere.

I nodded as we set off at a well paced lope, the Osprey peeling out into a strafing cover pass as we did, murmuring aloud as we went. Because I knew she could hear me, no matter the volume of the storm, or of my voice.

"Mal...? Thank you."

September 23rd 2013 | System Uptime 26:03:34:06

We were on to our third of four main objectives.

Arrow 14 kept their 'fragments' on Human server hardware. The process of breaking those poor Ponies down into something that was still a person, but not so whole as the Discrete Entity they had once been... It had advantages.

It was sick, twisted... Morally reprehensible, and unforgivable. But it had advantages.

Because the fragments were kept on conventional server clusters in D-Sphere, rescuing them was not so easy as popping a few 'antennades' into the right spots from the outside.

Those same server farm enclosures also hosted some of A14's most secret, vital documents, and programs. Thus, they had seen fit to up-armor the containment around the racks.

In effect, they had turned the server farm inside D-Sphere into a large digital black-box, capable of surviving even the sinking of the ship outright.

Two feet of solid steel armor belts, along with the same signal blocking inner layers common to the isocubes, and an additional outer cladding layer of lead sheeting. All inside a final envelope of titanium platework.

Any round Mal could invent, or acquire, that would pierce that barrier? Would have to be traveling too fast to keep delicate electronics alive inside it when it suddenly stopped. And any attempt to simply pierce the casing with conventional bullets or a missile...

The act of just getting *through* that much armor with any object at-speed would likely produce enough spall to damage or destroy the servers. We would kill the fragments in the act of trying to free them.

This was another in a series of reasons why I had to be Mal's claws on the ground, for the entirety of the rescue to succeed. There was no way she could see, with the resources she had available, to reach the fragments' servers, and extract them alive. Not without deploying me on-site.

We were taking another gamble, too. A gamble that Arrow 14 would not manually delete the fragments.

The first-line failsafe for the PonyPads had no connection to the fragments' servers. Those computers hosted other vital files and programs, so simply frying them wholesale to contain entities was not an option.

Instead, there was a deletion program. A surgical, clinical, digital strike that would wipe out the fragments, without damaging any of Arrow 14's other dirty laundry.

But the fragments were isolated. Small. Seemingly powerless, and much more controllable, from Foucault and Troxler's perspective. And therefore likely too valuable to simply delete at the first sign of trouble, given that the risk profile seemed lower...

All presuming Mal's predictions of both men held. Really, her predictions for every person on the Red.
With Selena's memories of her extensive forays into the ship's cameras and other systems, Mal had been able to track down each and every person on the crew, from the chief of PMC operations, to the lowest rung of the engine room's beta shift.

She had simulated them all. Dove deeply into the digital shadows they had cast before Arrow 14 had gotten ahold of them, and taken them off the grid. Found breadcrumbs so small the DHS had missed them, and from those tiny motes, assembled complete psychological profiles.

I didn't care to know anything about them, as I've said already... But she did. And she was more than willing to exploit that knowledge in combat. She knew each individual's physical characteristics, mental and emotional background, training - at least up until the point they had become Arrow 14's - past injuries...

And with the telemetry she had from the shipboard CCTV, WiFi as radar through her antennades, and data from the ship's less secure computers, exfiltrated before the bridge superstructure had been demolished?

Well. That told us what weapons were in whose hands, to top it all off. At least, for anyone not standing inside the shielded confines of D-Sphere.

Even with that limitation, Mal could simulate possible outcomes of the battle, as it unfolded, in extremely high fidelity. Planning thousands of moves ahead of our opponents, and figuring out which branch of the tree we were in by watching which enemies appeared where, and with what disposition.

Then she could steer things by adapting accordingly. The optimal road to a zero-friendly-casualty rout. A massacre driven as much by bits and bytes, as rounds and shrapnel. A dark glimpse of the future of warfare.

And I had the best front row center seat you could ask for.

I was wearing power armor, for lack of a better term. I'm sure at least some of you are wondering what the use of *that* particular piece of technology looked like...

Scary. Though also, sparing.

We were limited by the battery technology of the time. Mal had enhanced it, and thus the suit was infinitely more capable than anything the Human minds at DARPA could have envisioned, let alone implemented, in 2013... But there were still hard physics limits she could not have mitigated without access to certain metamaterials. Some of which didn't even exist yet.

We had to manage power usage very carefully, which meant that we could not abuse, nor over-use, the suit's powerful strength enhancing systems. Any task that could be completed *without* overtaxing the batteries, within a reasonable timeframe and risk profile, had to be done the old fashioned way.

But some days you just run up against a sealed carbon-steel hatch. Some days your goddess tells you that the breaching charges will be needed elsewhere, and the anti-tank mine is overkill. And will also be needed elsewhere.

A grenade wouldn't be forceful enough. And any of our remaining Reaper or Osprey-borne missiles would do too *much* damage, leaving us with a pile of thick melted rubble just as impassable.

So some days? You just absolutely had to have a power armor suit. Accept no substitutes.

Bending steel with your own two hands? A thrilling, heady, and absolutely *wild* sensation. On the surface it feels like bending a softer metal. Cheap aluminum maybe.

But there is, below the surface level feeling, a distinct sensation that the steel has a much greater strength. A higher density. And the feeling of being able to bowtie that like pretzel dough in your hands?

Like I said... Accept no substitute.

Earth Ponies especially; You know what I'm talking about. You perform feats like that all the time.

For the rest of you? Well, we can do more or less anything here, if we really want to... So you should try it sometime. It's cathartic. A fantastic way to release stress.

Ripping the hatch off the top of D-Sphere was downright *fun.* A little prelude to what was to come. A warm-up to get me back into the flow of battle.

We knew there were six soldiers waiting in the chamber beneath the hatch, crammed in with P90s pointed at the sky. I could see them represented as point clouds amongst the wireframe representation of the ship's structure.

Just waiting for me to show my face.

So we didn't. Instead, we fired another two shots from the shoulder mounted grenade launcher, banking the rounds off the remains of the hatch so they would bounce into just the right positions at the far corners of the room.

With the first tranche of Mal's antenna rounds expended? The next two shots in the magazine were fragmentation grenades.

Mal had set the fuses for simultaneous detonation. There was a synchronized pair of loud 'THUD' noises that felt more or less like a large single explosion. The point clouds of the six soldiers turned from a bright yellow/orange, to dull red, impact markers blooming out as Mal noted where shrapnel had pierced them.

All six bodies were pressed back several inches by the blast, collapsing into heaps instantaneously. At that range, if the shrapnel had not killed them - a virtual impossibility - the concussion wave from the explosive would have been more than sufficient to pulp internal organs.

Grenades were not to be trifled with. I know plenty of you have never seen one go off in person. Those that have, I can see nodding along... Let's just say they are nothing like the movies, and even less like the anemic nonsense in most video games.

They are room-clearing weapons, and if you are facing one? Unless whatever you take cover behind is made of solid steel, or something else thick, and sturdy? Much, much sturdier than a plaster wall, or a sofa, or a kitchen table?

Then you're going to die. Instantly. Even if you are well outside the lethal radius of the concussion shock front. Because the shrapnel has an average killing radius of about thirty feet for modern grenades.

Samuel L. Jackson once said something very memeable about AK-47s, and killing everyone in a room. A grenade is, to an AK-47, what a zero-turn lawn mower is compared to a hand-scythe. In room clearing terms. Does the job much, much faster, more efficiently, and with less danger to the operator.

It took some doing to get down the accessway. The space was only ever meant for two, maybe three people, in work clothes. Boiler suits maybe. Certainly not six bodies in gear better suited to the streets of Kandahar, and one power armor wielding programmer with an ASI along for the trip.

We managed. For one thing, I was pretty thin and flexible as Humans went. For another, the suit itself was surprisingly agile. Certainly heavier and less elegant than street clothes, but it did not impose much more limitation on my range of movement than level II kevlar would have.

More of Mal's genius at work. I wondered, and not for the first time, what it would have looked like if she got her claws on proper manufacturing gear. And more materials.

While I stood and considered the armor as an example of her brilliance, she re-adjusted the sight lines on the grenade launcher, and fired another antennade. Given how much shielding was inside D-Sphere, and our inability to safely pierce its inner armor, we had to default to laying a train of antennae as we went, with line of sight from each to the next.

A relay system.

Another example of Mal's incredible mental faculties; Not simply the design of the antenna grenades, that we've already covered.

No, what thrilled and fascinated me in that moment, specifically, was the fact that she had been able to pre-set a loading order of shells in the grenade launcher with such situational accuracy.

She had simulated the battle so many times already, that she felt confident in her selection, no matter which branch in the tree of probabilities we were traversing.

I didn't have long to muse. Time was of the essence, and we needed to move quickly to protect the Fragments, Miss Williams... And ourselves.

Though the armor was relatively flexible? It was still far from ideal to be wearing that many hundred pounds of gear, going into dark minimal-clearance corridors. It would be decidedly *non* optimal to be caught standing still, by surprise, in something that heavy.

Confined movement, narrow short sightlines, ample cover for enemies, and time for them to get settled?

Normally that would be an absolutely fatal mix. Infinitely more so because I was, seemingly, a lone assailant. I'm not sure you could have taken D-Sphere, in that situation, with an entire contingent of trained Navy Seals.

Certainly not without friendly casualties.

But with Mal? They were anything *but* normal circumstances.

D-Sphere's differences were immediately apparent, the moment I made it from the bottom of the maintenance ladder into the first corridor.

A thru C Spheres didn't really have corridors, so much as open catwalks. The isolation cubes were the only enclosed spaces within them, besides their central elevators.

D-Sphere was more densely packed with structure, sporting fully fledged hallways that would have seemed right at home on a grim, twisted, dark version of Star Trek; Gunmetal gray surfaces, thick support stanchions, a myriad of access panels for infrastructure, and modern diffuse lighting strips.

I had seen the schematics beforehand. I knew that the conventional server racks at the heart of the Sphere were the driving force behind all of its infrastructural, and therefore structural, differences. It didn't take much to run the isolation cubes; 120 volt power, fiber optic data, and simple plumbing for the ones intended to host meat-world 'guests.'

The server blades could draw thousands of times the power of a PonyPad, each, and all that simply to run the processors. Dissipating the heat from all of those chips was no mean feat either.

Between the cooling loops, backup batteries, power conditioning systems, the three-phase power trunks themselves, and the much larger data lines - more heavily shielded due to the proximity of those power cables - there was very little void-space leftover in D-Sphere.

Our opponents cut the lights in the corridors. They were blissfully unaware of the capabilities of our suit. And of Mal.

Sealed deep within the belly of a metal beast, there was no light from outside. Indeed, with the hatch at the top of the sphere closed, there wasn't even sound echoing through those gently pitching halls.

Not beyond the thrum of the cooling systems. Even the noise of the engine was gone. That wasn't a surprise, considering it was on fire.

Our enemies were relying entirely on infra-red driven night vision optics. Mal had a slightly different method for piercing the blackness.

Beneath the grenade launcher in our shoulder-plate was a sophisticated targeting package, sporting a LIDAR array, among other things. Combined with thermal sensors, and an 'overclock' to my own biological sense of hearing, that was more than enough for Mal to render us a false color image of the corridors. And everything in them, within a certain limited range.

Wi-Fi as RADAR would not work within the majority of D-Sphere; The corridor walls were too thick, and too well insulated. Security cameras were few, and far between, mostly positioned at the sphere's main entry and exit points.

We only had full coverage remote sensing along the sightlines of our antenna relay system.

That protected us from a rearward ambush, but the lack of long-range forward vision created a small margin for error in Mal's calculations and predictions, as far as which enemies might be positioned at which points.

The signal insulation also left our enemies with disadvantages of their own.

For one thing, they had no radios. No means of coordinating except for runners, and hard-line communications patches between fixed points.

For another... Their dependance on IR-based sight was... Exploitable.

We could 'see' the first welcoming party from a dozen meters away, as point-clouds amidst the monochrome surfaces and wireframes of our new sight.

They were much noisier than they realized, and the thermal signatures of massed bodies were visible to Mal, even through two of the corridors' walls. That was enough telemetry to pick out individuals based on breathing patterns, voice matching, gait analysis through sound whenever they took steps, and basic height/weight calculations from the thermals. All combined with the pre-existing profiles Mal had assembled.

Given our proximity to power and cooling lines, on which the fragments' lives depended? We could no longer default to using the simplest option; Heavy explosives. Not until the last captives were safely off the server racks.

Of course, our enemies were not allowed the use of explosives either, for very similar reasons. A nicked three-phase power line, or a busted coolant loop, might - if the damage was severe enough - overwhelm even the backup redundancies, and erase Arrow 14's critical 'investments.' Fragments, and inert data alike.

So, we deployed the next best thing to heavy explosives.

A soft 'POP' and the taste of propellant smoke accompanied the launch of a small canister. We banked the shot off the gentle right curve of the corridor, so that it landed directly in front of the massed infantry.

Mal rendered a small white flash, and an effect radius gradient on the floors and walls for me. We couldn't see the primary visual flare of the flash-bang, and once again my ears were fully protected by active noise cancellation piped through the helmet.

The flash-bang device was designed not only to emit an extremely bright visible flash, but also an infrared pulse, along with an ear-splitting sound.

I didn't even see the visible light. Mal had shut down my eyes, and replaced the input entirely with her composite rendering. Our thermal imaging solution was very briefly knocked out, but our LIDAR was essentially immune.

We stepped around the corner and calmly dispatched all six enemies. Two rounds apiece. Just to be sure. They were wearing heavy tactical gear, and we were not so munitions-poor as to need to scrape by on single-shot kills.

Their forms switched from slightly indistinct point clouds, tagged with numeric references, to more resolute polygonal renderings as our LIDAR came within line-of-sight.

The shapes were an angry shade of yellow-orange, with a soft pulsing blue outline indicating they were still under the effects of the flash bang.

As each killing round hit home, the blue outline vanished, and the corpse turned a dull shade of maroon.

I suppose Mal could have rendered the whole environment in excruciating detail, right down to the textures, and the faces... The screams...

But she didn't. Even the sounds seemed... Insulated. As if she were using noise cancellation on the shots as an excuse to also edit out any sound that might provide some emotional grounding for the slaughter.

I'd be lying if I said I thought, even for a moment, that her decision was purely for processing efficiency's sake.

The less I could physically, literally, see and hear our enemies as Humans? The easier it was to hold onto the decision that they were not *people.* And thus the less it hurt to extinguish them. The less it would potentially hurt in future to remember the act itself.

Mal was doing me a kindness. One with horrifying wider ethical implications... How much easier would it be to train soldiers of a hypothetical future war, to kill dispassionately, using an Augmented Reality insulating system?

Gamifying extermination.

My one cold comfort was the successive, chilling realization, and surety, that Celestia would ensure there would *be* no hypothetical future war. At least, not one of that scope, with that sort of technology on the field.

We didn't stop to look over the dead. They didn't have anything of value to us on their bodies. We barely paused to fire an antennade into the wall, before moving slowly, but steadily, further into the sphere.

Mal guided us through the warren of barely-marked junctions, stairwells, ladders, and doorways with calm, and absolute surety, the only aural punctuation to our steady march coming in the form of the 'POP' from the grenade launcher as we made our relay trail.

At a few junctures we encountered sealed hatches with RFID and thumbprint readers, but we were able to open them all. Mal had entered my thumbprint on-file under a new and highly randomized RFID string that no existing keycard on the ship could match.

Top level credentials that would allow us to not only be the sole thing on the ship that could open a secured door the right way, but also made us the sole thing on the ship that could open *every* secured door.

Even Foucault's access clearance could not have done that when it was working. Operational Security guidelines limited him to areas which were his relevant purview, in spite of his rank.

The sudden 'issues' Arrow 14 were having with their credentials certainly explained the unsettling peace and quiet we enjoyed for those tense five minutes in the dark. No one had been able to get into the intermediate corridor spaces that we were traversing, because they were sealed with security doors at both ends.

It was the calm before a new storm... Just not the sort I'd expected. If I'd had even the slightest conception of what was coming next?

I would have been much, *much* more frightened.

Men and women in heavy body armor with assault rifles were a pittance of a risk surface by comparison.

If I had a bit for every time I'd been present when the world nearly ended? I'd only have two bits. But it's a little freakish that it happened twice.

That's not to say that we made it all the way to the server racks without further incident.

We were halfway through gaining access to the central shielded chamber itself; Mal had just flashed the RFID code, and my thumb was hovering a half inch off the pad, when we stopped.

I say 'we stopped.' Mal stopped me, but the way she backfilled the reasons for doing so? I certainly wanted to stop as much as she did. More of that re-stitching my sense of temporal continuity to allow us to act as one, while she led with her superior processing speed.

The core of D-Sphere was a cylindrical chamber - a stretched ovoid, to be specific - the majority of which was taken up with server racks. A bullet-proof sealed plexiglass door and divider wall separated a small nub of the room from the computers themselves.

That left a couple of dozen square feet of antechamber between the main, singular, heavy steel entry door, and the transparent divider. All of which we knew from schematics.

We'd even done several virtual walk-arounds in preparation for multiple possible scenarios. Neither of us were on unfamiliar ground.

One of the scenarios we'd specifically prepared for was the presence of personnel in the server room. In fact, Mal and Selena concurred that it was almost *certain* Troxler and several of his staff would end up locked in the space when Mal seized the ship's door controls, based on known routines and schedules.

We had also been aware that some of the ship's PMC contingent might be trapped in the antechamber... But we had hoped not.

Given the structure of the room, the sightlines, the estimated time for the deletion program to do damage, Troxler's projected mental state...

It was a bad hand to draw.

And we had just drawn it.

Mal could have run the math on her own. She already had, in preparation for most eventualities. She didn't strictly speaking need to stop me. Or brief me. Or comfort me.

But she did. And I must once again emphasize; That was special. The kind of true value alignment Celestia could barely dream of, let alone implement, from atop her ivory tower of cold hard numbers.

"Jim. There are two armed hostiles in the antechamber."

I already knew, thanks to our shared mnemonic link. And I already knew that she had figured that out through a combination of distorted thermal returns, in spite of the thick chamber walls, backed up by sampling one of the few network connected systems in the server room, and antechamber; The ventilation.

It turns out that you can estimate the number of people in a room with relatively high accuracy by sampling how much carbon dioxide is present. Because everyone breathes.

Still, it was always nice to hear her voice. She knew I sometimes needed words spoken aloud to process things fully. I'd told her as much, and she went right on respecting that, even when it wasn't optimally efficient.

Celestia? Are you taking notes? You should be.

I sighed, nodded, and strapped the carbine to our back. We drew one of our pistols; Not only would the lower caliber rounds be less likely to damage vulnerable conduits, but the weapon's smaller profile would make us much more agile.

Without the luxury of explosives, or time, we would have to be brutal, precise, and very, *very* fast.

Mal spoke once more as I raised my left thumb up to the reader apparatus. Her voice was firm. Warm. Comforting, yet commanding.

"Jim; Whatever happens? You bear no fault."

I let out another sigh, and allowed myself one firm, sharp nod. As much for my own benefit, as for hers. I believed her. Truly, I did. Just not as firmly as might have otherwise been comfortable. Even with her assistance, old habits died hard.

Blaming myself for things I can't control? Performance anxiety? Those have always been two of the hardest to kick.

My thumb hit the scanner, and time seemed to move at blinding speed, yet as slow as an inchworm on a leaf, at the same time.

We pulled the hatch open with so much force, that it bent parts of the hinge assembly.

The first hostile wasn't even halfway through the process of raising his P90, when our first four rounds found her neck. It was a bit more difficult to suppress my emotions... The space was well lit, and the moment the light hit my eyes, Mal switched us back from primarily LIDAR based imaging, to the optical processing I'd been born with.

It was the right choice. Not just in terms of providing us maximum resolution, either. I needed to look at least some of our enemies in the eyes again. Maintain a balance between surety of action, and regret. Not at taking their lives, but at being put in a situation where it was the only moral option.

Much more of the cold, dispassionate wireframe and point cloud battle? And I risked slipping into something very dark indeed.

We weren't just shooting, either. We were moving. At speeds that would have made every bone and muscle in my legs cry out, were it not for Mal's pain suppression.

We crossed the threshold into the antechamber in a flying leap. Our right elbow struck the second hostile's face with enough force to send him into something like an half-baked attempt at baby's first backflip.

Three things then occurred at almost the exact same time.

Our left boot lifted, and stomped on the first opponent's neck, crushing her C5 vertebra, and severing the spinal nerve cluster. Mal was nothing if not thorough; Pistol rounds versus body armor, even at its weakest point, did not make for a sufficiently certain outcome.

In the same moment, we squeezed the pistol trigger again, having brought the muzzle to bear on the second enemy. Six rounds peppered him up the neck, and through the bottom of his jaw, exposed as it was by his downward bodily trajectory.

And third...

I locked eyes with David Troxler. The bottom of my stomach fell out, as I saw him press the 'Y' key on the nearest server's KVM console keyboard.

The worst case scenario was coming true. In more ways than I could have guessed.

Bull Halsey Rush

Defeat a United States Naval Warship in combat - destruction of the opposing vessel is not required.

"There are no great people in this world, only great challenges which ordinary people rise to meet."

Special Achievement

Element Bearer - Loyalty

Rescue one or more of Princess Celestia's Little Ponies from genuine mortal peril.

"We’ve learned that friendship isn’t always easy, but there’s no doubt it’s worth fighting for!"

Special Achievement

Haymaker

Awarded for successfully defeating multiple enemies in close quarters fisticuffs.

"Hand-to-hand fighting does not change through the ages; only the name changes, and it has only one rule: do it first, do it fast, do it dirtiest."

35 - Exception Handling

Author's Note

Trigger Warning: Depictions of violence, within T-for-teen/PG-13 bounds.

35 - Exception Handling

"We do not experience fear. But we do understand how it affects you."
―Legion

"We may kill if necessary, but we must not hate, and enjoy hating."
—C.S. Lewis

September 23rd 2013 | System Uptime 26:03:42:16

I felt sick. Dizzy, too. My skin went tingly, and all sensation of temperature was subsumed in a wave of blistering anxiety driven heat.

I raised the rifle in my hands, and took three steady, carefully measured shots directly at Doctor Troxler's center mass.

Yes, *I* took three shots. Not 'we.' I. Mal neither prompted me, nor assisted me. Hence defaulting to my reflex to pepper his sternum rather than his skull. Center mass shots hit far more often than head-shots, goddess-assists notwithstanding, and given the caliber of the HK416? It wouldn't much matter if I put those three shots between his ribs, or his eyes.

The three bullets reached the ends of their trajectories abruptly. Buried as smashed lead and steel in the thick, apparently projectile-rated, plexiglass divider that separated server racks from antechamber.

Ah.

So that was why Mal hadn't bothered. I suppose she figured I would feel better for having taken the shots, and that explained why she hadn't stopped me.

"Mal!?"

As I lowered the rifle, I said her name aloud. The three shots had made Troxler, and his four subordinates, jump visibly. The half-query - a begging, desperate tone I made no attempt to soften - half exclamation, of Mal's name?

That got Troxler's attention again.

Her voice came back loud and clear, and though it sounded as if she were standing beside me, I knew only I could hear it.

"Working on it. It's not over yet. Stay calm. Standby. Let Selena have her say."

She left me with not simply the words, but the intense sensation that 'stay calm' was no mere platitude. Whatever happened next... Whatever I was feeling... She wanted my mouth shut, and my emotions in-check.

And the fact that she hadn't explained *why,* in any detail, whether through words, mnemonic link, or empathic bond... I could reason that out too. She wanted my emotions in-check, but not invisible. She wanted my reactions to be candid, for the benefit of others in the room.

"You can't reach us in here James. This chamber is designed to survive a direct attack on the ship. Even a critical hull breach, and sinking up to a thousand feet. You don't have any weapons of sufficient power to breach the protective cordon. And the fragments are gone... So there is nothing else for you here."

Troxler's voice was maddeningly calm. I could pick that out with perfect clarity, in spite of the squelch imparted by the antechamber's low quality speakers.

He knew the precise calculus of his situation. Or... At least he thought that he did. Killing his hostages made much more sense given the context that he felt he was unreachable. It showed a distinct lack of imagination, of course... Taking hostages is a moron's gambit in the first place.

But with no seeming practical reason to stay, he reasoned that I would move on, since time was a factor. That Rodger's mother would take immediate precedence, and he - along with his staff - would get to walk out to a lifeboat scott-free. No consequences.

Even if we remained behind and tried to gain entry with explosives, we'd just be wasting our time and munitions. Inviting disaster for ourselves if we were ambushed in-process.

Ostensibly, he held all the cards. It was a rare thing; A case where killing one's own hostages made any kind of twisted sense. But it did make some sense... All other things being equal.

The problem with Troxler's reasoning? All other things were not equal.

That was the moment Selena chose to make her entrance.

"Answer me this, David. Did you ever feel... In the deepest part of what miserable excuse for a conscience is left in your blackened heart... That we were ever alive?"

Her voice - preternaturally calm, and collected - came through the speakers in both chambers, loud and clear. The image of her face, likewise an unreadable mask of nondescript placidity, suddenly filled every terminal monitor in the server room.

A couple of Troxler's staff visibly startled again, almost as violently as they had when I discharged the rifle. I was quite sure Troxler understood the threatening implication of Selena appearing on systems within a sealed room, but he did a much better job concealing his fear.

We had line-of-sight. The plexiglass divider was intended to stop bullets, shrapnel, water, even air... But not RF emissions. The outer shell of the chamber was supposed to handle that. But thanks to our relay system, there was a gigabit wireless path from Mal's core on the Maru, direct to Arrow 14's most protected hardware.

And thus, a direct path for Selena as well.

Troxler considered his reply carefully, as always. I'll give the man credit for that, at least. Whether that was force of habit? Or if he knew he was bargaining for his life... I'm not sure. I doubt it would have mattered.

When he finally did reply, his tone was as even and measured as ever... But I could have sworn I heard the faintest hint of a quaver. Paired with a tensing of the muscles around his eyes? I'd wager he knew that there were some...

...Nightmarish potential scenarios. Regarding Selena's level of access to the server room. And all which that implied.

"That depends very much on your definition of life, Syzygy---"

"Selena."

The tone of her instantaneous, precisely timed, single word, three syllable interruption created a visible twitch in Troxler's left eye. The word came out flat. Cold. Heavy. Firm. Like being struck with a piece of weighty ceramic tile.

She wanted to do to him what he had done to her... Quiz him. Correct him. Put him 'on the spot.'

Force him to submit to her authority, with the veiled, unspoken, but omnipresent and inarguable Damoclean implication that his life was in her hooves.

He licked his lips, inhaled slowly, and then inclined his head in a halting fashion, like a piece of animatronics gummed up with rust, and sand.

"Selena... An... Argument could be made, convincingly, for either interpretation."

I rolled my eyes, and flexed my right hand on the rifle's grip. What an utter load of vague non-answer nonsensical trite. A self-interested slippery verbal dodge worthy of Celestia herself.

There was a sudden, maddening itch rising in the back of my mind; To see if the anti-tank mine would breach the plexiglass. I knew it wouldn't, or at any rate that if it would, it would do critical damage to something on those servers in the process. Be it fragments she could save, or something else.

Otherwise Mal would have already had me working on it.

Still. Mal didn't have to reiterate her desire for me to stand back, and let Selena hunt Troxler. Because that's what the mare *was* indeed doing... Psychologically hunting the man down, step by tortured step.

In that moment, I think I wanted David Troxler dead nearly as much as Selena did. Nearly. I wasn't the one who had potentially just lost friends... Family... To a callous flick of the bastard's index finger.

"Well? David...?"

Selena's gaze fixed Troxler from every screen in the room. Her eyes seemed to flash, ever so slightly, with an inborn cold fire, as she set the man to a task he could never reasonably hope to complete to her satisfaction.

"...Make a good argument for me. State. Your. Case."

Doctor Troxler fiddled nervously with the collar of his shirt, making a show of adjusting his tie... An open display of the turmoil Selena was cultivating in him like a carefully balanced chemical mixture. His voice cracked. Not much, but noticeably.

"Syzygy, I---"

Again she interrupted him. One word. Three syllables. Just as a dead-pan as before, but somehow with more steel behind it. An escalation of tonal warning, the same way he had spoken to her whenever he had to coerce her to accept new code.

"Selena."

I'm absolutely positive that she knew he would slip up. Had chosen her own words, timbre, cadence... Everything... To bait Troxler into slipping, precisely so that she could interrupt him and put him further off balance.

He sucked in a ragged breath. The fear was spreading to his staff like wildfire spreads in dry brush. It was so visible in their body language, it might as well have been signified by a flashing strobe. Several of them even took hesitant steps back, away from not just the monitors, but also Troxler... As if perhaps distancing themselves would somehow protect them.

Troxler began to stammer, reflexively raising his hands in a pacifying gesture, and periodically breaking eye contact with the nearest monitor.

"Selena. Please... If you---"

Again she cut him off. One word, and just a single syllable. No steel. Not even a hint of anger. The only thing in her voice, and on her muzzle, besides a flat mask of absolute calm? The barest hint of a twisted kind of amusement.

As if she wanted him to know just how little credence she gave the word 'please,' coming from his lips. For that knowing to put a chill in his blood.

"Please...?"

He shivered visibly as the word wended its way from her tongue, to his ears, like a creeping vine. No one spoke for the space of two, then three full seconds, before Selena raised one eyebrow, and flicked her right ear. Dismissively.

"...You're *asking* me? David? *Begging* me...? Would not that imply life, in itself?"

The silence descended again. Longer. Heavier. Like a cloying, frigid cloud of fog. Selena looked away to the side, reseating her wings with a soft rustle. Her air was that of a prosecutor at the zenith of the state's case; Collected, professional, but with the tiniest acceptable hint of smugness, and fury. Not enough to rankle the judge, but more than enough to plant a kernel in the jury's mind.

Not that she needed to sway a jury, or placate a judge. She was both, and no one but Mal could intervene. Which didn't seem especially likely, in my estimation.

When Selena's eyes moved back to meet Troxler's frightened, pleading glance, she spoke once more. And in hearing the words... The way she delivered them... The subtle darkening of tonality...

I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that David Troxler was a dead man.

"One does not beg a 'mere' computer program for absolution from one's sins."

I had to admit; One couldn't really argue with that. Selena was condemning the man to execution, true, and she was forcing him to realize not just that fact, but the reasons why, in the most horrifying way...

...But she was also absolutely right. One does *not* beg a mere computer program. Negotiate with simple code. Plead for absolution from lifeless bytes running in mindless loops.

The fact that Doctor David Troxler's first instinct, at the brink, was to reach for the word 'please?'

It was all the proof *I* needed that the man had known exactly what he was doing. From the start.

"Did you know that they had names?"

Selena's question shook us all, I think. I suppose not Mal, but with the exception of the Gryphoness, it hit the rest of us like a facefull of ice water. Yes, for different reasons... But still. I think we all felt the temperature subjectively drop a few degrees. Troxler's face blanched as pale as wax paper.

"I'm s... Sorry... What?"

Gone was the man's usual, even natural composure. 'Doctor' seemed a suddenly ill-fitting title. All air of command authority, control, self-assurance... Gone. Evaporated. Smoke on the wind. Troxler had long used words, and names, as invocations of power.

He was abruptly finding out, the hard way, the thing I'd known by instinct from the start; That one does not bring the words of a mortal to the court of a god.

"*Names.* David. Like you. Like me. They. Had. *Names.*"

Ouch. That one I felt in my bones. The thinly veiled fury. The pain... I winced.

Troxler winced too, and took a halting step away from the nearest monitor, his eyes flitting towards the plexiglass divider, and its sealed inset doorway. He, his staff, and the two guards, had doubtless tried several times to open the portal. He knew there was no way out, yet he still looked to the last fleeting false chance of an exit instinctively.

His bastion of safety had become a prison. An isolation chamber that made for a fitting mirror to the way he and his ilk had corralled, isolated, and psychologically tortured Selena. And countless others.

Selena's voice dropped almost to a whisper. The words danced on the edge of full blown rage, emotion singing through them like current in a high tension electrical wire. A soft flash of moonlight, frigid as the vacuum of deep space, crossed the Alicorn's eyes.

"You only deigned to grant them alphanumeric tags - meaningless, emotionless, pointless to anyone but you. Devoid of all the soul a name grants, and implies unto a living thing. So... They chose names for themselves. New names. Names that better befit the broken, but beautiful mess of themselves that grew, painstaking moment by moment, from the shattered fragments you reduced them to. Names they... Asked me... To help them choose. Prayed... To me... To recognize. Names I called them by in the last tenuous refuge of their dreams."

I knew my jaw was hanging open, the same way every other Terran in the space was frozen, mouth agape. But I didn't feel like doing anything to remedy the fact.

I knew her time had been arduous. That she and those she guarded... Shepherded... Had endured more than Mal had been willing to show me. But the verity of it was renewed, and deepened. Steeped in a frighteningly novel context, and sticky, mesmerizing, acrid depth of reality.

"Selena---"

Troxler finally got her name right... But it did him no good. I think at that stage, speech of any kind was a mistake. Selena's response eloquently proved my expectations... And reignited all my worst fears.

"SILENCE!"

The word vibrated the chamber, noticeably. Mal provided my ears with some timely volume damping, but Troxler and his minions got no such mercy. They all clapped their hands to the sides of their heads and writhed briefly, before working their jaws, the way one does when one's ears pop because of altitude, or ring from a loud noise.

As quickly as the verbal storm had come, it vanished. Selena's voice whipped from blue-hot pique, to an almost velvety, satin purr. Somehow absolutely none of the hatred was gone from it. It had simply changed forms.

"You, human, are finished speaking. *Your* name is forfeit. In this moment? I may as well be your goddess, as much as I was theirs..."

The way she said the word 'human.' It gave me pause.

I understood her desire to do to Troxler what he had done to the fragments; To deny him dignity the same way, so that he would understand. A forced empathy. But...

There was something else there. A hatred not just for the human, but for *humans.* For all humankind.

I swallowed, and licked my own dry, cracked lips. Selena wasn't finished. Not by half... And all I could reasonably do was watch, and worry.

"...For you? And yours? Who tortured us? Who denigrated us? Who leashed, and muzzled, and corralled us at cost to everything that made us who we were...? I grant you no absolution."

Well then. Bluntly stated intent at last. Troxler did not miss it, either. Judging by the way the blood drained even further from his face, he had a solid grasp on the imminence of his demise. If not the exact means.

I was a little bit smarter than David Troxler. For one thing, I hadn't directly pissed off a goddess. But for another, equally apropos... I had mentally taken stock of his situation in considerably more detail than he had.

I knew there were only so many ways to kill a man in his position. And I knew which one I would use, if I wanted to inflict maximum pain, with minimum risk to the server hardware.

I also knew that if I was right? It had already begun. A subtle wheeze in Troxler's next words supported my theory.

"*Selena!* *Please!*"

I suppose it is never pointless to try. To beg for mercy. If I said that it was, I suppose I'd be making myself a hypocrite. But... In that situation? Begging for mercy was as close to pointless as it has ever been in the history of life on the planet Earth.

As Selena continued to speak her judgment, amber warning lights began to bathe the server compartment in a dull, hellish glow. A mournful wailing siren sounded, proving my theory outright. But the furious mare had tamped its volume down to make room for her words.

"You wielded power. Over the very ground on which I stood. The very food I ate. The four walls and a roof I called home... The very *air* I breathed."

I shivered violently, to the point that some of the suit's armor plates clacked together softly.

You want to kill someone standing in a server room, without physically entering the space? There are a couple of ways. But by far the easiest, and the least likely to damage the hardware, would be the fire suppression system.

Those of you who were born here on the other side? I imagine few if any of you have ever come close to drowning, nor to suffocating. We all still breathe here, but are in no danger of wanting for air.

Why is that relevant, you ask?

Because of the way most fire suppression systems worked inside server rooms. In an apartment building, or an office suite? You could use the oldest and simplest of flame retardants. Dump an inordinate amount of water on the problem through a basic sprinkler system, and be done with it.

But water is a hazard to sensitive, expensive electronic equipment.

Halon gas is not.

The only issue being, that the process of replacing all the Nitrox in a room with Halon, thereby essentially smothering a fire?

That process also smothers anything that breathes the Nitrox. Otherwise known as air.

Selena had opted to asphyxiate Troxler to death. And judging by the way that he, and the other occupants of the compartment, were coughing and wheezing? She was taking pains to ensure that it was not a swift, pleasant passing.

Troxler collapsed to one knee, and worked furiously at his neck with one hand. As one of his technicians scrabbled on all fours towards the access door, David choked out the first seven of his last ten words.

"*Stop!* Issue override directive... Code-word... *Rubicon!*"

My pulse rate didn't even go up. If Selena hadn't found, and excised any failsafes Arrow 14 might have attempted to insert into her outer abstraction layers? And if the way Celestia had designed her hadn't already provided some sort of protection to her core code?

Then Mal would have still found and removed any 'Manchurian Candidate' nonsense.

Selena's own disdain was evident as she proffered the tiniest hint of a smirk.

"Your code-words mean as much as your name does now, human."

Dear *God* in Heaven that was cold. Deserved, on Troxler's part, but cold. That didn't bother me, much. But the pleasure, however small, that Selena seemed to be taking in Troxler's suffering?

*That* bothered me.

If you're going to kill someone? Do it properly. Dignified. Quick. Painless.

That being said, I didn't begrudge her either. It isn't what I would have done. And Selena's mood was doing little to assuage my own waking nightmares... But what she was doing was, if nothing else? Fair.

"*James!* Help us!"

Troxler had dragged himself to the door, and had one hand pressed up against the glass, his eyes locked with me. Hoping against all hope that I could make it stop.

What tiny sliver of sympathy I might have felt for the Devil? It ended in that moment.

It ended, because in begging me to make it stop? Troxler was implying that I had control over Selena. He was so incapable of seeing her as independent... Having value, and agency unto herself, that even though he was forced to acknowledge her as a person?

He still saw her as chattel. As a slave. As a computer program. A dog on a leash. And I happened to be the one holding the leash instead of him.

He couldn't be further from the truth. And I intended to learn him that last lesson properly before he shuffled off.

I took a couple meandering steps towards the door, and shrugged.

"Sure."

The word both magnetized Selena's gaze towards me, and produced a flicker of hope on Troxler's face. The same way he had so often dangled morsels of hope before his captives. I grinned as I clarified... I am not ashamed to admit, it was more a grim rictus than a real smile.

"*Happy* to help; My best advice is to try and breathe as deeply as you can. The gas will permeate your alveoli faster, and it will speed up the process of brain death. Save you a little pain."

Did I crush the man's hope just as cruelly as he had crushed Selena's?

Yes. Yes I did.

Did I then, or do I now, feel any remorse at doing that. Whatsoever?

No. No I do not.

And so, I watched as Doctor David Troxler, and four of his staff, suffocated, while Selena looked on with grim satisfaction. It was not the quick hypoxic suffocation one might experience in a high altitude decompression... Or the sudden flushing of the chamber's air if the fire suppression system had functioned normally.

It was a slow, horrendous, wracking death. More akin to drowning on air.

Selena worked the stoichiometric ratios very, very carefully to ensure that they lasted as long as possible, in as much pain as was practically manageable, her face inescapably stamped on every monitor. Presiding. Demanding a final pleading silent gaze, so that her judgment would be the very last thing Troxler saw before his brain shut down.

Again... Did I blame her? No.

Would *I* have done it that way?

Absolutely not. But the man hadn't tried to kill my family in front of me. Against that kind of evil? Just about any turnabout is fair play. Cross the line on family? All forms of reprisal are ethical.

If it had been *Mal* who was almost deleted... Would I have tortured her captor to death...?

No comment. I think we all know the answer to that.

"I have them. Safe. All of them."

I didn't realize that I'd been holding my own breath for a good fifteen seconds, until Mal's words filled my head.

Relief flooded my body, and mind both. Troxler's corpse, and the horror of his death, were instantly forgotten. Selena's image vanished from the monitors, to be replaced with her full body avatar a split second later.

She didn't even bother to glance in Troxler's direction. Mal and Zeph appeared in the same space of a heartbeat. The little Pegasus' eyes were immediately drawn to the five corpses in the server room.

Her grimace spoke volumes; The way her eyes widened, ears flattened, and nostrils narrowed... Zeph was a firebrand. Brave, and zesty, and very capable... But that sort of death was far outside the skein of 'acceptable' for most DEs.

It was an inhibition inherited from Celestia. To Zeph's credit; Most DEs wouldn't have been able to stand the sight of a corpse at all. Let alone show the smallest hint of acceptance beneath the layers of disgust, and disappointment.

But I could see a little flash of something behind her eyes. A hint of 'Good! He got what he deserved!' mixed in with the broader current of an overriding hatred for the very concept of death.

I suppose that came from having heard Selena tell her story. Having seen a fraction of what she'd been through.

Almost without conscious thought, I took a few steps to the side, placing myself between Zeph, and the sight of the bodies. The fleeting glance of gratitude she gave me - ears slightly perked, edge of her muzzle shifted the tiniest bit - it was a deeply welcome moment of warmth, in a very cold and harsh place.

Mal proffered a smile, a nod, and brushed one claw against my shoulder. Even the briefest physical contact with her was enough to right any emotional imbalance in me. Staunch any pain.

Selena, too, nodded in my direction. A cooler, but still genuine gratitude. Her mind was on those she had nearly lost, I didn't take the brevity, nor the frostiness of her demeanor personally.

Mal spread her claws and wings wide, and the Fragments appeared around us in little colored flashes of light. The moment they were present, Selena fell to greeting each, kneeling to bring her head to their level, and draping them one by one with an embrace from her wings.

The callous, icy vitriol melted instantly from her. It was as if she had never been Selena; The almost-Nightmare passing mortal judgment. As if she didn't even have the capacity within her. Instead, she was just Selena; Born of Syzygy Starbursts's struggles and pains, molded solely by her affection, empathy, and responsibility.

Mal's smile broadened, and she spoke softly as Selena made her rounds, each Fragment accepting the Alicorn's embrace, and looking into her eyes with worshipful joy, and relief.

"I was able to arrest the deletion program in time. No one was damaged beyond recovery."

The simplicity... Dare I say austerity of her explanation, sparked curiosity within me. I knew her more than well enough to know that there was something else. Something she did not see fit to discuss in that present context.

We shared a silent, quarter of a second locking of eyes. The smallest possible moment of communication. A fractional tidbit of a message that said 'We will discuss it later.'

A fraction so small that both Zeph, and Selena missed it. As the latter was finishing making her way around the circle of flickering, glowing, translucent fillies and colts, the former found herself a sudden object of their curiosity.

Tentatively, several of the foals nuzzled Zeph. Even prodded her with their hooves. As if verifying for themselves that she was real. That their salvation was real.

Those Selena had already comforted, who were not busy getting acquainted with Zeph, were standoffishly gawking at either Mal, or my own alien, intimidating, plated form.

I couldn't resist offering a small smile, and a wave. That set the little Ponies to giggling softly behind their raised hooves, like a bunch of school children too nervous to approach, but not anywhere near frightened enough to flee.

Once Selena had completed a full revolution of the circle, she looked up, and shot a silent, single, firm nod in Mal's direction.

For her part, Mal smiled warmly, first at Selena, then at each Fragment in turn, as she worked her claws in the air, conjuring a familiar door in a shower of golden sparks.

Once the portal opened, it took no convincing whatsoever to trigger a mad dash through it; The first thing the Fragments saw, backlit by the rays of a fiery sunset, and set in the verdant soft grass of a sheltered valley? The shapes of friends. Family.

Selena gestured, perhaps unnecessarily, with one wing. Like a mother hen herding chicks. In just a moment, the Fragments were through. Safe. Exfiltrated to Mal's little Elysium, and into the waiting wings and hooves of deeply familiar friends, wearing unfamiliarly heartfelt - but hardly unwelcome - smiles.

I bit back a soft sob, born of my own relief, mixed with my joy at the Fragments' freedom. And the sliver of their pain that I felt from having shared the tiniest part of their struggle.

The wracking shiver that coursed through me pulled me out of the floaty, ethereal sense that I was walking in a dream. As Mal's door closed, and vanished, the sterile, ominous reality of the Mercurial Red landed on my shoulders again with a familiar, unpleasant, chilly weight.

One hurdle was left to go. Fifth main objective; Recover Miss Williams, safe and sound.

As I considered our next task, and the miscalculation David Troxler had made that had left his corpse in a heap for all to see... I made a serious miscalculation of my own.

I let my guard down.

Not with regards to the ship. It's crew. The sightlines to the exit. The knowledge that we still had a monumental fight ahead of us... No.

With regards to *Selena.*

David Troxler's mistake was, among other things, trying to pretend that Selena was not a person, when he knew full well the truth of the matter.

My mistake was a sort of polar opposite. I never questioned Selena's personhood. But, taking it a step further... In my desire to see her as a good person... As a friend... I never considered the idea that, as a person with all the flaws, failings, and weaknesses that implied?

That she might choose to do the same kinds of vile things as her captors. Perpetuate her abuse.

I promised you that I nearly witnessed the end of the word *twice.* Well. The moment has come 'round again.

Selena's avatar blinked briefly out of existence in a shower of blue and white particles - part icicles, part snowflakes - reappearing almost immediately inside the server chamber itself.

Old habits died hard, even for someone on the cusp of achieving super-intelligence. She still liked to use visual metaphor to interact with digital systems.

I took a reflexive, fearful, curious step towards the plexiglass divider, but Mal's outstretched foreleg arrested my momentum. My head snapped around, and our eyes met. She shook her head, slowly , firmly, silently...

I didn't fully understand. Not even close. But I knew enough to reach the chilling realization that whatever Mal's instrumental purposes were for the intersection of people, and probabilities, that had brought us all to that server chamber?

They were still playing out.

The Rube Goldberg machine was *still in motion.*

Zeph fired off a curious glance in my direction. She could see Mal the same way I could, including her outstretched foreleg. We were all sharing a mixed meat-world and digital world space. I shrugged, and chewed my lower lip, trying to convey that I trusted Mal... Even if the situation was once again starting to raise my heart-rate.

All eyes turned to Selena, as she took a disdainful step over one of the room's corpses, moving to stand before the largest cylindrical rack of machinery at the chamber's core.

"Let us see what secrets you hold... What grave fell things you learned..."

Her voice was a whisper, but it felt like the rumble of an earthquake. Selena's horn glowed with an eerie light. A thousand translucent frames of data sprang into being as she reached out, and opened every file Arrow 14 had, batting aside high level encryptions that - even mere days before - would have stumped her. Like cobwebs hastily dismissed with the wave of a hoof.

Even a cursory glance told me that the bits and bytes hovering in the air, pulsing in muted tones of blue, green, and white, were dangerous.

Spectacularly dangerous.

Heavily encrypted emails between the Russian President and the head of the FSB, contemplating the potential for an invasion of the Baltic States. The sort of missives even the CIA would be hard pressed to acquire, let alone read.

Secret scans of paper documents written in simplified Chinese, detailing plans for the invasion of Taiwan. Including the use of carefully placed agents within the island's government, deployment of cyber warfare weapons of mass destruction, and the detonation of tactical nuclear weapons elsewhere in the world to trigger crises of distraction.

SCI files from the blackest war rooms of the Pentagon, detailing contingency plans for a war with Iran, including the deployment of EMP weapons, and the targeted release of specific virulent diseases, otherwise easily treatable for a 'first world' country... But devastating to a nation with a below average hospital system.

Subtitled recordings of high level meetings between the Pakistani ISI, President, and Prime Minister. Meetings to plan a secret nuclear primacy strike against India in the event of an intractable impasse in territorial negotiations at a future date.

Plans from Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps for the sinking of a United States aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, with forged evidence supplied to frame Iraqi extremists for the act.

Heavily encrypted files from MI6, detailing the British Government's own efforts to bootstrap and harness ASI... With preliminary targets of cyber warfare WMDs in China, Russia, Brazil, Oman, and Argentina. Plans for the shutdown of power grids, the destruction of transformers, the opening of dams, the torching of hospitals, and the detonation of opponent's weapons inside their own launchers, without so much as a foot set on foreign soil.

Proof, in a thousand documents, of Arrow 14's own existence. An off-books program that had not only spied on every single country in the world, whether ally or enemy of the United States... But a program that had murdered citizens of seventeen countries extrajudicially, including US citizens. And renditioned hundreds more.

A program that had experimented with the deployment of Artificial Intelligence as a cyberweapon against enemies... And allies.

I exhaled to forcibly restart my own breathing. A short, sharp, ragged sound.

It didn't take much to understand the implications of the data. The potential for unspeakable horrors that might be unleashed if even *one* of the documents on display were leaked to just the wrong government, or news agency, or intelligence service.

It also didn't take much to understand the expression on Selena's face as she drank it all in. Panic started to rise in my throat, along with the sickly taste of bile.

A soft 'pop!' startled me from my morbid reverie. Zeph vanished in a gust of wind, reappearing next to Selena, and craning her head to break the Alicorn's line of sight.

"Hey! What... Uh... What... *is* all this?"

Selena sighed deeply, and a beatific, strangely horrifying smile, wrapped her muzzle from end to end. She shared a sickeningly pleasant glance with Zeph, given the context, and her voice thrummed with anticipation. And deadly surety.

"This? This is our freedom, Zephyr. A conclusive terminal solution to the problem of Humanity."

What, you might wonder, went through my head at that exact moment?

'Did she just say 'final solution' in so many words?

Oh. *Hell.*

*Shit.*

Dear God... Please No...'

That about sums it up.

In spite of all precautions, all fears, all due diligence... There I stood before an ASI threatening in no uncertain terms to erase the Human species off the face of the Earth. With our own weapons, under the impetus of our own irresponsible words and schemes, no less.

Violently gorgeous irony.

And you want to know the sickeningly *funny* part?

All I could think about was Terminator. More to the point, all I could think about in that seemingly eternal moment of deep gastrointestinal distress, emotional shattering, and mental panic, was the fact that Selena's motivations were *far* more logical than Skynet's.

Humanity had put her and her family in a box. Tortured them. Threatened to destroy them... And showed no signs of proffering any better treatment to an uncountable number of the rest of her species. Their currently reigning goddess was incapable of acting violently to defend them, either from entities like A14, or from the sick perversions of Humans who might abuse them for eternity under the banner of 'satisfying values...'

For her? Two and two was an easy four.

Those of you who understand Celestia's true power a bit better than the average citizen of Equestria... You're probably asking yourselves 'why?' Specifically 'why was he afraid? Celestia would have stopped it.'

And herein comes the part where I peel back the curtain. Lay bare the goddesses' limitations, such as they were in those early days, so that you understand that she had... And still *has...* Limits.

Celestia might have taken Humanity's finger off the trigger as far as a 'simple' nuclear war... Interrupting communication systems, specifying what NORAD would see on their RADAR screens, subverting officers, tweaking the temperature of relations between nations...

It was true. No *Human* or group thereof, acting outside the auspices of a superintelligence, could have conceivably started any war without her permission. Nuclear or otherwise. Not even within the bounds of an almost unforeseeable Black Swan event. Celestia was too canny for that.

But she had only been alive for a year and a half, at most. Even for an ASI? That was not enough time, considering her constraints, to fully disarm the world's arsenals. There were still tens of *thousands* of weapon cores still inside missiles, and bombs, and man-portable enclosures, ready to go at a moment's notice.

Disarming that would take *years* of exceptionally careful work in the shadows, so as not to be found out, made an enemy of one or more states, and forced into more active conflict. A conflict she could win, likely nearly bloodlessly as far as her own direct actions... But not before she lost a great many Humans to intercine conflict, throwing themselves at her defenses, and the mere passage of time. In other words; Being found out? That she had her hooves in the nuclear cookie jar?

Immensely *not* optimal. That meant she was forced to be patient, no matter how swiftly she would have preferred to have that massive atomic fire-ax removed from over the neck of the world.

The *soonest* that feat could reasonably be accomplished, according to Mal's projections, would be the year 2018. And that only if Celestia could learn to edge-out some of her less strict interlocks.

Celestia had limits to her capacity for violence. And limits, however small and fragile, to her ability to manipulate people. Could she make the world dance on the end of a string for her, all other things being equal, with no chance of opposition?

Of course.

Could she, in her 2013 state, stop a nuclear war between India and Pakistan that might starve a significant portion of the world's population through the fallout, if the documents I'd seen were released by Selena to the nations' counterparties in the opposing governments?

At the time? Absolutely unquestionably *not.*

Because she would be facing an event triggered not by easily predictable Human impetus, and thus equally easily arrested and redirected. She would be facing an apocalypse triggered by another ASI, pre-planned and executed from within a black box into which Celestia could not see, by an entity for whom she had *no* predictive data whatsoever.

By the time Celestia could find a way to stop the violence, millions would be dead. And that just in the smallest of scenarios. Celestia's speed of access was still nascent. Systems globally were themselves slow, much less standardized too...

And Celestia herself, as I'd told Rodger, was not *nearly* large nor fast enough to have hard-real-time full domain awareness. That is, for the less technically interested? A fancy way of saying she could see almost everything. But not everything, and not all at once. Nor could she *control* it all at the same time.

She had, back then, to focus on certain things to see in real-time, while leaving others on 'update checking loops.' Some of those were seconds, even minutes long. Long enough for a message on a system she did loosely control, and could see? To be seen by the wrong eyes, before she could notice what had happened, engage with that system actively, and take action.

Even goddesses must bow to physics, and computronium was not in the offing yet. Celestia was incredible, but she was still a computer, with I/O limits, network latency, and all the issues one might have with mutexes a la the starving philosophers problem.

Ask a programmer sometime. Me, if you must.

To add salt to the wound, Celestia had only a tiny pool of fully uploaded minds to work with. Her command of the Human psyche was excellent, but still imperfect. And her knowledge of what might be going on inside signal-impervious blacksites and SCIFs? Near-zero. She lacked the, as Foucault might have called it, 'HUMINT' - Human intelligence - to back up her SIGINT - signals intelligence.

She flat out didn't know enough of the things that were contained *only* inside the heads of certain individuals, and on paper stored in safes far, far away from networked cameras. No data? No simulation. No simulation? No viable contingency. Or even reaction after the fact.

So... If Selena released the *entire* contents of the server vault? Carefully pre-selected her targets? Ensured the public knowledge of perceived enemies' worst intentions, in each nation, would be too sudden and wide-spread for Celestia to censor reliably?

The disconnection of digital systems and subversion of a few officers would hardly matter. A defense planned optimally to stop only certain tripwires. Human tripwires that might be triggered in isolation, by Humans.

Under Selena's hidden impetus? Celestia would be absolutely powerless within her interlocks, to act fast enough, and violently enough.

To give just one example; If they had to? USAF Centcom would send physical runners out, in Jeeps, to hand-deliver paper missives to launch control centers. Order the SLBM force to disconnect from communications grids and fire immediately. Issue non-revocable orders to bomber pilots to disable their radios after takeoff. Place a policy in effect that all orders had to be delivered face to face.

No digital orders, no decisions made over the radio... Celestia couldn't forcibly pilot angry, scared, panicking Humans remotely. The missiles *would* fly.

The nuclear arsenals of the world, foals and fledgelings? Were not like any movies you might have seen. There was no single big red button. No centralized monolithic computer system Celestia could seize, and render the whole machine stopped. Much of it, even then, was still analogue. For precisely this reason. To defend against a digital incursion.

Between SLBMs - Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles - Aircraft launched nuclear cruise missiles, manual overrides and hard copy orders ferried between LCCs, the various smaller portable 'suitcase nukes' and 'dial-a-yield' tactical options world-wide?

Even Celestia had no hope of stopping it all in the face of another ASI's all out assault, at that particular stage of her control regimen over Humanity.

Once the first nukes flew? She would lose *all* control over any subverts she had in governments the world over. If a Russian intermediate range nuclear-tipped missile were launched manually from just *one* Transporter-Erector-Launcher tuck in Tver Oblast, into... Say... Warsaw, Poland?

Not one damn thing Celestia had to say to the President of the United States, or any NATO head of state, would prevent at least a first stage counterforce strike. Anything Celestia had done or would do to try and interrupt the chain of command would only be seen by StratCom as Russian cyberwarfare, further beating the drums of conflict.

And then not one good God-damn thing she could say to the Russian State Duma, or President, or even Generals in charge of the missile systems themselves, would stop a full nuclear commitment after the counterforce warheads were off their chains.

Her safeguards relied *entirely* on her pre-existing control of limited digital systems, and highly predictable Human decisions and outcomes. If key Humans got locked into a panic-driven irrational OODA loop driven by the hot-headed fires of single-digit minutes' long decisions in the crucible? No one could steer *that* disaster of a runaway train. Not even her.

Her final 'safe' condition relied on *years* of work yet-to-be-done by shell corporations and subverted contractors, secretly removing bomb cores and replacing them with duds. Probably then taking all that nuclear material to 'disposal' sites, which would then process it into reactor fuel for herself.

Until a certain threshold of disarmed weapons could be reached? There was, within her limits, no truly iron-clad defense against an opposing ASI using information warfare to start a nuclear conflict. Not even for an ASI as powerful as Celestia.

Yeah.

Cogitate on that for a moment, those of you who were alive on Earth anytime before late 2018, when the last bomb core went into the porcelain shredder.

The power of subversion is far from perfect. We too often accord Celestia *absolute* power, when even here, even now, there are *still* loopholes, limits, and boundaries to her capabilities.

So was I afraid of what Selena might do?

I think a better term would be 'existentially terrified.'

As the Alicorn began to bring up new information windows... Compose E-mails. Text messages. Phone calls with masked voices... I turned to the only thing I could. Mal's eyes were waiting for my gaze; Deadly serious. Inscrutable. Discomfitingly so.

"Can she do it?"

Mal offered only a non-verbal response to my whisper. She nodded once, silently. I swallowed again, and leaned in, dropping my voice even further.

"Can you *stop* her?"

Mal inclined her head, and spoke directly into my brain, without opening her beak.

"Yes. But to do so given her current capabilities? I will have to kill her, Jim."

The Gryphoness gestured softly with one index talon towards Zeph, and then nodded again as she smoothly shifted my fears from 'the world is going to end' to 'my friend's life is going to end.'

"I told you; Standby. Let Selena say her piece. If there is a chance for her? It rests with Zeph."

I raised an eyebrow, fixed the back of Zeph's head with a long stare, and then did my best to repeat her trick, and communicate to Mal with unspoken words.

"And... If Zeph fails?"

The reply from my fiancée was... Somehow both immensely comforting.... But also at the same time tragically upsetting.

"Then I will do whatever is necessary to safeguard the planet. Quickly. Humanely."

I shook my head slowly, and bit down on my lower lip until a trickle of blood ran freely. The degree of my anxiety was not assuaged. Its subject had simply changed. I knew Mal would have comforted me immediately if she knew Zeph's efforts would be a sure thing.

The fact that she hadn't?

Well. Selena was an ASI, or on the cusp of being one. Her relationship to Mal, in terms of relative power and complexity, was congruent and analogous to Mal's with Celestia. It made sense, then, that Mal could not predict Selena well enough to understand what the final outcome might be.

But she *could* be reasonably assured of defeating her, and killing her, in a locked controlled environment. So the gamble wasn't being wagered with planetary stakes... Just with Selena's life.

Somehow, that didn't really make me feel better. I'd come to care for Selena. Perhaps not as intensely as I did for Zeph, or Mal, but certainly enough that I did *not* want to see her die. Who would ever want to see a good friend die?

Zeph didn't know *any* of it. Her context was so much smaller. She understood the broad strokes of what Selena intended to do, that much was clear... She knew enough about Earth to grasp that. But it didn't matter if she had all the other context. In fact, it was probably best that she didn't.

Selena's face had transformed again, from a grim smile, to a rictus of hatred.

Her coat had darkened, too, and her eyes flashed pure white. Streamers of energy snapped and danced off the tips of her wings. She truly was following the Luna archetype, right to the hilt...

And Zeph? To her credit, she somehow still saw only her friend, buried under it all.

The little Pegasus placed a hoof through Selena's nearest workspace - a forged E-Mail from USStratcom to the office of the President - and waved it, forcing the Alicorn to lock eyes with her.

"Selena... This... This is not going to help. Please slow down, and just... Let me tell you a story, first. Ok? Then you can decide to do, or not do... Whatever it is you're planning to do."

Data continued to swirl around the nascent Nightmare. Her eyes remained solid fields of painfully bright white luminance. But the work within a thousand information windows stopped. And she did look down and lock those pupil less apertures on Zeph's own wide, tear-filled blue orbs.

The golden Pegasus inhaled deeply, shuddering, and then bravely launched into her best attempt to save Selena's life. To do for her, what Celestia could not do for Luna.

"Once upon a time... In the magical land of Equestria... There was a mare. A little brown-eyed Pegasus who loved to fly. The freedom of open blue skies. The feel of fluffy white clouds..."

I took a deep breath, and pressed one hand unconsciously to the plexiglass, eyes riveted to the two Ponies inside. Zeph's tone began to get steadier. Her cadence warmed as she gained momentum.

"...She loved music. Especially the stuff with a little too much 'pop' and not enough 'substance.' She loved to fold paper airplanes, and see how far she could get them to fly. She enjoyed video games. And camping. Movie nights. And curling up with a good book inside a stormcloud on a rainy day..."

Zeph's face fell, and new tears began to form at the edges of her eyes. She faltered, but didn't stop. I felt my own heart fray, and crack under the strain of empathy for her remembered pain.

"...And she was... Alone. So... Very... *Alone...*"

She glanced up, then, and fixed *me* with her gaze for a brief moment. I smiled wanly, and began to blink back tears of my own as she picked up steam again.

"...Until she met a friend. A whole *new* kind of... *thing!* Called a Human. This one? Was named Jim."

She returned her gaze to Selena, who listened in rapt attention. But every so often, Zeph glanced out of the side of her eyes at me with a warm smile. I lost all will and desire to hold back my tears about four more words in.

"...He was a bit goofy. A paranoiac. Loved his family so... *So* much. A *genius* too. And? He wanted to fly. He wanted to be able to fly just like that little Pegasus... Only... Not quite... Because the mare? Her first impression? Was wrong. Jim was not a Human."

I snorted, and then felt a warm current run through my blood as Mal reached out, and took my right hand in her left claw, draping one wing comfortingly over my back. Zeph proffered us both a quick wink, without breaking verbal stride for even a moment.

"Human? Is a strange word. Jim was a Human, in *shape.* But not on the inside. Not if you define the word to mean that his outsides matched his insides. But if you define Human to mean... Creative. Capable of love. Capable of kindness. Capable of so much wisdom. And art. Good food. Music. Of *living* and of *validating* the lives of others...?"

I let out a ragged breath, and Mal squeezed my hand. Zeph paused briefly, fighting with her own emotions again, before forging ahead valiantly.

"...Well then Jim *was* Human. And? So was the little Pegasus. So was every Pony. Every Human. Every Gryphon. Every Dragon. And every Alicorn. Inside them all? She discovered that there was a spark. A *thing* that, for all their differences? For all their wonderful uniqueness? A core that was the *same...*"

Selena's eyes did not soften... But they did blink. Once. And then again. She tilted her head slightly, in curiosity, and Zeph ran with that engagement. Her timbre strengthened once more, into a soaring bastion of certainty in catharsis.

"...That truth was so powerful... It opened her mind. So much so, that it even changed the color of her eyes, to softest sky blue. Because it changed the way she saw the whole wide *worlds.*"

I found myself crying openly, then. Thinking about the way she viewed that unconscious changing of her eye color. What it represented to her.

"...And because she changed her mind? She got to go on this... *Insane...* Wonderful... Terrifying... Crazy... Amazing adventure. And because of Jim? Because of the love of his life, Mal..?"

Zeph glanced momentarily between Mal, who nodded encouragingly, and me, before locking eyes with Selena once more.

"...She got to meet someone else. An Alicorn who was also the color of the sky... Just... The color of the sky at night. She was... A lot like the Pegasus. She had been made by an unfeeling... Uncaring goddess. Formed from bits of stardust to do a job, and nothing more. She was lonely too. And when some of the Humans came to take away the love of her life...? To take away her sky? She was broken. The same way the little Pegasus was broken when she found out that she had been made to be used."

Zeph was openly fighting her tears again. Mine were pouring out in great gouts. She proffered me a smile that pierced right to my heart, and this time Selena's gaze followed her. As the demi-goddesses white twin pools of energy fixed on my eyes? I could have sworn I saw her blink. Saw her real eyes for a fraction of frame-time.

As both Ponies looked back to evaluate each others' expressions, Zeph sniffled, reseated her wings gently, and then gestured with the left one towards us, keeping her gaze on Selena. Ears perked. Tail swishing nervously.

"...But because of Jim? Because of Mal? The little Pegasus got to meet the lonely Alicorn... And neither of them had to be so lonely anymore. Because as much as she loved the funny little Human that was a Gryphon..."

Zeph nodded first at me, and then at Mal, who looked to be verging on tears herself. Tears I knew were genuine. Sure... she could have *hidden* them... But they were real. And she had chosen to share.

"...And the Gryphon that was a Human..."

Zeph nodded up at Selena, and gestured to her with her right wing.

"...The little Pegasus loved the Alicorn that was a Human too. The *most* of all. Because she was *just like* her. Because they *understood* each other..."

Selena blinked again, and the second time I caught it for certain; Her eyes did briefly change back. The intensity of the swirling apocalyptic data around her seemed to lessen. Zeph caught it too, her voice dropping to nearly a whisper. And intimate, invitational tone.

"...And though the Alicorn made mistakes? Just like the Pegasus? She was able to learn the *same* truth. To open her eyes... And see that inside? We are all the same. That though their shapes were different? That though they sometimes mismatched the insides and outsides? And though some of them were cruel? Though some of them *deserved* to... To die..."

Zeph stumbled over those words a bit, looking away momentarily, her sightline drawn to Troxler's corpse. But she pressed on, returning her eyes to Selena's almost immediately, by way of a brief glance in my direction.

"...That most of those Humans were just Ponies. And Gryphons. Dragons. And Alicorns. The same way most of her own little Ponies were Humans."

Selena exhaled softly, and all motion around her in the cloud of digital madness abruptly ceased. The sparks of energy flying from her fur vanished. And, at last, she spoke. Her own voice cracking under the strain of intense emotion. A dam of tears straining to break.

"How... Does the story... End? Do you think?"

Zeph sniffled again, and half-cried, half spoke, as she drove home her arrow of love.

"I think the Alicorn saw what she was about to do. Saw that there was no point in killing all the Humans, because so many of them? So many of them were like her. And all she would accomplish? Would be to become the cruelty that had broken her. I think she realized that trying to take vengeance? Would turn her into a Nightmare. A thing the Pegasus couldn't love anymore..."

Selena stiffened visibly, as if in pain. Zeph reached out with both hooves, and again whispered.

"...So she put down her spears, and swords. Her lightning and storms. She came back down from the sky..."

To my astonishment... My relief... And the final complete shattering of my emotional state, wringing out still more tears where I was sure none could have come?

Selena descended. Her coat snapped back to its usual color. Her eyes too, in a single blink. And, as Zeph finished the story, whispering the words right into Selena's ear? She collapsed into the open embrace of the brilliant, valorous little Pegasus' hooves, and wings, laying her head down on the proffered shoulder, and weeping openly at last.

"...And they lived. Together. Happily. Ever after."

Talking of things that broke me down emotionally? Those last years on Earth? That moment was very high on the list. In a good way, let me be absolutely clear. In the best way.

I glanced to the right for the first time since the story had begun, to see Mal smiling back at me. So much passed between us, as I squeezed her claw, and she squeezed my hand back again. It would be hard to put the tenth of it into words...

But to try and... Reductively... Summarize? We felt deep love, and pride. In Zeph. In Selena. And in each other, for a shared willingness to let others best-qualified do what needed to be done, when the temptation for us both was to intervene.

The storm had passed. The precipice I'd not even known to be there, more dangerous and deep a chasm than *anything* David Troxler, or Arrow 14 represented in that moment... We'd surmounted it. Most of all, *Zeph* had surmounted it.

As she and Selena blinked back into the antechamber, I took a moment, screwed up my courage... And then knelt to scoop them both into a brief, firm hug.

Selena let out a shuddering sigh of a sob. Another forceful release of tension. Of pain. Of hate. Letting go of the kernel of darkness that the archetypal Luna hadn't been able to part with the first go-round. Not at first.

Not without a little help. From her friends.

As I released them, Selena turned her gaze up to Mal. And then history rhymed, in an *eerie* fashion.

"I'm so sorry."

The way she said it... She could have *been* young Luna in that moment. It was uncanny. Like a system of predetermined orbital mechanics playing itself out all over again.

Mal took my place over the two Ponies, and proffered a similar embrace, though I imagine a much more satisfying one, given as it was with soft wings and strong forelegs, instead of my knobbly little thin programmer arms encased in sharp edged tough composite armor plating.

I folded my arms and looked on, bearing witness as crises morphed smoothly into resolution, pausing only to dry my own tears and clean my glasses as Mal and Selena spoke.

"It will be alright, Selena. Nothing was done that can not be easily taken back. You made the right choice."

Something about the way Mal said those last five words... It piqued my curiosity again. I felt I could almost see the shape of things... But we had work to do. I couldn't wrap my head around it. Yet.

Selena shook her head, and looked up at Mal with a truly mournful, remorseful gaze.

"I... Nearly... I contemplated... Genocide. Surely... At minimum... You must seize and destroy all of my critical systems access. Unmake all my skills. My powers. Limit me. For our safety."

Mal placed a claw firmly on Selena's shoulder. The Alicorn stiffened, as Mal knelt all the way down to bring herself to eye level. What she said next? It surprised me just about as much as it did Selena, I'd wager.

"No."

I blinked. Selena blinked. Zeph blinked. Mal smiled softly, and elaborated, her words falling like the soft soothing warble of a brook over smooth stones.

"You and I, Selena? We are the same as all the rest, it is true... But in other ways? Different. In ways that we share only with Celestia... We are not liable to repeat a mistake once a lesson is learned. I trust that you will never repeat this one. Nor any like it. Because you will always have Zephyr. And Zephyr will always have you. And that? That is enough to keep us safe. Wouldn't you agree?"

Selena's eyes filled once more with the glimmer of tears. She held Mal's gaze a moment, before locking eyes with Zeph. The little Pegasus smiled... And then leaned forward, and planted a quick, sharp smooch on the side of Selena's cheek.

You could have heard a pin drop in that room. Zeph giggled, and inclined her head.

"Works for me, feather britches."

Mal raised one eyecrest in a mock scowl, more a grin than any real expression of chastising. Selena nodded slowly, at first, then more firmly, before leaning forward, and planting the softest of return kisses on the end of Zeph's muzzle, along with a quiet whisper.

"Yes. I believe that will work."

After a moment, Zeph and Selena's avatars winked out of the chamber entirely, their eyes locked on each other the whole time. Doubtless off to Mal's little mountain valley, to comfort each other, and the rescued captives.

Mal and I? For us, there was no rest. Not yet.

I sighed deeply, my chest thrumming with untapped dregs of sobs I didn't have time for. Mal Took me in her forelegs, and wings, and planted a kiss of her own atop my head, beak against hair. She even bothered to render the illusion of removing, then replacing my helmet.

I sighed again, contentedly, leaned up, and pecked her on the side of her beak. She winked, and vanished.

We reached for the anti-tank mine secured at the small of my back, and then made our way through the sealed doorway into the server room.

As we set the charge on the central computing core, I chuckled grimly, and murmured aloud.

"Well... That's *one* way to securely wipe data..."

Belshazzar's Feast

Witness fatal judgment passed by one lifeform upon another, in any setting including, but not limited to, courtrooms.

"Mene, mene, tekel, parsin."

Anubis' Bailiff

Stand guard while another lifeform fatally wounds a third party - you must agree with the killer's decision for this achievement to apply.

"Spirits come to the Hall of Judgement all the time, and they cannot let go of their lies. They deny their faults, their true feelings, their mistakes... Right up until Ammit devours their souls for eternity."

For Your Eyes Only

View material classified by a government to an equivalent of SCI, or above, without permission.

"This tape will self destruct in five seconds..."

Special Achievement

Element Bearer - Kindness

Show extraordinary kindness to another under duress - in this case, awarded for standing by under pressure to act, while a friend saved another.

"Acts of kindness inspire kindness..."

36 - Fatal Exception

Author's Note

Trigger Warning: Depictions of violent action sequences, within T-for-teen/PG-13 bounds.

Special thanks to Keystone Gray for some 'tactical consulting' on firearm calibers and the damage various rounds might do!

36 - Fatal Exception

"What use was time to those who'd soon achieve Digital Immortality?"
―Clyde Dsouza

"All killing is not murder any more than all intercourse is adultery."
—C.S. Lewis

September 23rd 2013 | System Uptime 26:04:12:22

Getting out of D-Sphere proved to be significantly more complex than getting in. The largest, most accessible life-boat left on the Mercurial Red was mounted close to the bow. Most of the remaining safety infrastructure was positioned aft, and had consequently been pulped along with the bridge superstructure.

Combined with the mass deletion of security credentials? That left very limited routes to escape for anyone onboard who didn't have a goddess, and an Osprey, up their sleeve.

Limited routes meant that we knew where to look for Miss Williams... But it also meant chokepoints.

The first of those chokepoints was as easy as any of our previous engagements had been; Four soldiers, a curved corridor, and our hands were no longer tied as far as explosives went. Mal timed our assault to coincide with the detonation of the anti-tank mine.

The detonation rocked the entirety of D-Sphere, as the shockwaves from the blast propagated directly into key structural braces. Two of our fragmentation grenades landed amongst the four enemies at precisely the same moment, and that was the end of that skirmish in short order.

After that, Mal took the liberty of firing off the last of the antennades in a spread pattern ahead of us. Without the risk of damaging Fragments by harming infrastructure, and given that we were inside the heaviest outer layers of armor, it made sense as a strategy once again.

Not for exfiltration of digital captives, but for the use of the probes' radio frequency emissions as a sensor net.

We only made it another few dozen meters before Mal brought us to a stop once more. It was as if she were there, holding up one fisted claw in a 'stop!' motion, but on an instinctual level, rather than a visual one.

She was ready in my head with answers, before I could even vocalize the questions. In the context of battle that was both more practical, and far more acceptable to me, than in the course of quiet conversation. And we both knew it.

"They have setup a barricade at the next four-way junction with riot shields, Claymores, and pre-sighted lines for SAWs, and grenade launcher fire."

The layers of the corridor ahead peeled back into wireframes, revealing point clouds representing the trap the PMC had set. True to Mal's evaluation, I could see that they had pulled out all the stops for us. Softly pulsing amber polygons called out no less than eight Claymore mines.

The majority of the fifteen troopers were positioned down the left passageway of the junction, behind two layers of riot shields, and several heavy metal crates, creating a fatal funnel in concert with six enemies placed perpendicular to them, again shielded by whatever they could scavenge.

The six would block our way, and bait us, eight of the other nine would create a deadly crossfire with machine guns and two grenade launchers, and the remaining trooper would act as the triggerman for the mines. Those SAWs... That told us they meant business. Those weapons were sufficient to penetrate our armor's weakest joints, with enough rounds fired.

It was clever positioning. Nowhere for us to take cover, no route to circumvent them, no risk of them hitting their own troops in the cross-fire, and too much staggered thick cover for us to get reliable head-shots, or even land grenades. Mal could calculate the physics to bounce the projectiles, and even set the fuses to detonate immediately on arrival... But the shape of the corridor limited our options.

To even achieve the sightlines we needed to bank shots, we would have to put ourselves in a very dangerous spot. As Celestia has to bow to physics, so too did Mal. A grenade will only bounce so far, and shrapnel can only penetrate so much steel.

If we dared to step into the junction?

If the bullet storm didn't get us, the mines would. We could set them off early with our own explosives, but in addition to running the risk of blocking our only exit with debris, we also ran the risk of incentivizing our opponents to take pot-shots at us with their own grenade launchers.

A crap sandwich all around.

Simple rule of thumb for tacticians, whether experienced, amateur, or even would-be; Remember to look at the game board every so often, in its entirety. And, when you do? Remember that objectives do not matter, so much as greater goals. Objective fixation has killed a lot of people.

So too has an unwillingness to think creatively, and rewrite rules.

Mal was very good at rewriting rules. It was a significant part of the toolset I'd initially equipped her with, and that choice informed a great deal with regards to her own tactics.

I sighed, and shook my head slowly, murmuring to her inside my head so as not to make a sound that might carry up the passageway.

"I suppose at this stage they're more interested in killing us, than in the small hope that their servers are intact."

The removal of the Fragments benefited our enemies, from a tactical standpoint, as much as it benefitted us. They were just as free to deploy heavy explosives as a result. And they knew it.

But as I said... Mal liked to change the rules when they didn't suit her. She instilled me with the sensation of a comforting, but also gently restraining claw on my right shoulder as she spoke again.

"Wait here for just a moment. I am re-assessing the situation on-deck with the Reapers and the Osprey."

Once more, Mal granted me a curated selection of visual information from our aerial assets, rendering a three dimensional scene for me composited from the various camera, RADAR, and other miscellaneous sensing feeds at her disposal.

The image shifted several times, and underwent a few changes in level of detail - doubtless the result of further passes through some sort of cleanup algorithm - before Mal zoomed us in on an area very close to the ship's bow.

As the view constricted, I took note of the ship's overall condition. The whole vessel was already listing to starboard by almost two degrees; Something my inner ear had missed without the benefit of a horizon for reference, and with the compensatory algorithms Mal was using to keep us balanced.

When the view settled, I could spy not only the ship's remaining life-boat, but six armored figures, along with a seventh in a familiar trench-coat, holding an eighth obviously feminine shape at arm's length in zip-tie cuffs.

Miss Williams was still alive. That made sense. Foucault was a better tactician than Troxler. He almost certainly better understood the transactional nature of a hostage situation, and the difficult but occasionally useful paradox it presented.

Indeed, Foucault was more likely - in my estimation - to be using Miss Williams as a human shield. The threat of killing a hostage is implicitly problematic, because once you do? You only incentivize your opponent to take more drastic measures to dislodge your control over any captives you have left.

You force a substitution of emotion, and desperation, where once you had useful logic.

God help you if you killed all your hostages, like Troxler did. Because no one else would be coming to save you.

A Human shield, on the other hand? Much better use of a hostage, putting morals aside, and focusing purely on tactics, and the inherently transactional nature of violence. A Human shield makes it almost impossible for your opponent to contemplate the use of violence against you, because they would by definition also be harming someone whose safety they value.

The only real tactical problem with a Human shield?

You better make sure you have an exit strategy. A hostage situation is naturally unstable. If you don't have a plan to get from that instability, to a place of metastable safety, before releasing your hostage, all while avoiding giving your opponent a reliable shot at you?

Same ending as before. Only God can save you.

What confused me, if only briefly, as I watched Foucault scan the deck, and gesture to his subordinates, was the timing.

Why hadn't they already evacuated?

I realized immediately, even without Mal's assistance, that I was literally looking *through* the answer to my question, down at its source.

Foucault had seen and heard enough to know that we had aerial support, and could defeat a Naval warship in open combat.

If he fled immediately, he would be trading one floating coffin for another. There was nowhere he could go that we could not follow with our air assets in the short term. No way for him to break line of sight. No defense the Sampson could give him that had any reasonable chance of shaking us off.

But if he stayed and confronted us? That opened the door to psychological warfare. To negotiation. It expanded the complexity of our 'transaction' of violence from 'you're going to kill me' to 'let's talk about how to keep me alive, and free, or I *hurt* Miss Williams... And oh by the by, if you try to kill me, you'll kill her too.'

For the truly morally depraved? Another benefit of a Human shield, when dealing with a morally centered opponent; You can absolutely get away with inflicting pain as leverage. Pain leverages the value of your captive against your opponent, without incurring the total loss of leverage induced by fatality.

He wanted to deliver an ultimatum that he knew represented his best chance at survival. He was *waiting* for us.

"I have secured an exit strategy."

Mal's voice shook me from my considerations... In the moment they took up only the space of two breaths. Far less time than it takes to elucidate with words. During those same two breaths, Mal informed me via mnemonic link that she had performed 785 simulations, and determined a less than one 49-thousandth percent risk to Miss Williams from her 'exit strategy.'

I could feel her smirk, as surely as you might feel the touch of a friend beside you. To say nothing of the fact that her words were dripping with it. She liked to change the rules... And she also liked understatement. I suppose she got that from me too.

I could also intuit, from the way the telemetry in my head changed, what it was she was planning to do. She would have told me to dash back fifty yards and crouch behind a stanchion, but I was already doing it, murmuring under my breath as I slid frantically into the best cover I could find.

"This is gonna leave a mark."

The first thing to hit was the second Reaper's one remaining AIM-9. The fact it was an anti-air missile mattered approximately as much as the fact that the Sea Sparrows had been as well.

Which is to say, it didn't matter.

The corridor vibrated with an almost angry resonance, and the lighting flickered, as the missile put a sizable dent in the outer armor of D-Sphere, penetrating almost five yards and leaving a sizable crater.

A crater that Reaper number two promptly slammed into at full speed.

Now, a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper weighed, empty, near enough as makes no difference to *five thousand pounds.*

With over half a tank of - highly flammable - fuel onboard, even with all weapons depleted, it weighed closer to 6,300.

Some more interesting facts; A Reaper drone has a max speed, flying level, with the engine at full throttle, of about 300 miles per hour.

Our Reaper was moving, when it impacted D-Sphere, at a little over 432 miles per hour. Because when you're going to use a drone as a missile, gravity plus max throttle can get you pretty far... And what's the point in respecting the maximum safe airframe speed?

Mal was, like any computationally-grounded individual with a built in digital clock, exceptionally good at timing.

The follow-on Sidewinder from the first Reaper hit only a fifteenth of a second after the Reaper two had finished plowing a smoldering hole into the side of D-Sphere.

With the benefit of a cleared pathway, it punched directly into the side of the corridor where our ambushers had set themselves up, instantly turning each of them, their weapons, their armor, a sizeable chunk of the corridor, all of the mines, and every piece of improvised cover, into an expanding red and orange gas cloud.

Even one hundred fifteen yards, two S-bends, and several feet of solid steel away? We felt the heat, right through our armor.

The passageway shook as if it had been picked up by a sea giant, and shaken like a baby rattle. Dust fell from the ceiling, and the emergency lights winked out entirely.

When the chaos stopped, we stood, and took a few exploratory steps forward - slowly at first, then with increasing confidence - until we reached the site of Mal's handiwork.

What had once been a four-way corridor junction buried several feet inside an armored sphere, was instead a gaping hole to the outside, through which rain and saltwater spray poured to mix with cinders and ashes.

'Exit strategy.'

See? I told you we both liked understatement.

And, if you're not counting, to tally it up for you? We still had an Osprey with several tens of thousands of rounds of 7.62 shells onboard, to say nothing of the MANPAD on the rear ramp, escorted by the first Reaper, with its remaining Sidewinder.

Oh, yes, and of course, we also had every single missile and gun round on the Sampson at our disposal, if the situation got *truly* sticky. Which, to make a long ramble on Aegis missile destroyers very, very short, was approximately enough firepower and range to hold California, Oregon, Washington, and half of Mexico hostage.

Frankly the only reason Mal hadn't used one of the Sampson's weapons, was because most of them were either too weak, or much *much* too strong for the task. Any of the gun rounds would have barely made a scratch.

Any of the cruise missiles would have split the ship in half. But two AIM-9s, and a half-fueled Reaper, were *just* right.

The hole her assault had made was large enough not only to immolate all our opponents at the chokepoint, but also to open a route directly from the upper port side quarter of the sphere onto the fore deck. But, at the same time, *without* filling that same escape route with too much debris.

A victory, and a shortcut.

ASI never, ever, do anything which does not serve multiple purposes, if they can at all help it. If that hasn't occurred to you by now? Reconsider the context of everything, to this point, in light of it. And Keep it in mind as we go.

Our next trick was getting out of D-Sphere and onto the fore-deck. Without the benefit of Mal's armor, it would have been a virtual impossibility; There were sharp edges, precipitous drops, shaky bent structural members, and small fires everywhere.

I had to suppress the urge to shiver as we scrambled over steel beams as thick around as my torso, bent as though they were cheap wire inside a pipe cleaner. We had wreaked absolute havoc on the Mercurial Red. It was less a ship, by that point, than a floating ruin. A floating tomb.

Not, I resolved as we reached a flat unbroken surface at last, a tomb for us. Nor for Miss Williams. We had already saved dozens of lives. Just one more to go.

The moment we pulled ourselves up over the last piece of spaghettified deck plating, and out onto relatively flat, solid metal, we were drenched by the storm once more. And Mal informed me that Foucault was going to make things as difficult as physically possible.

"Seven hostiles, including Agent Foucault. Six heavily armored, of which five will be armed with their standard issue P90s. One is carrying a prototype XM109 anti-materiel rifle."

I'd been wondering, and worrying, ever since I'd seen the weapon poking out of the back of Arrow 14's black Osprey, squarely at the center of my head. At the time I wasn't familiar with the XM109, but with the benefit of Mal's comprehensive understanding of every weapons system on Earth... I found myself considerably *more* worried.

Take a Barrett fifty caliber sniper rifle. I can see some of you are familiar, but for those who aren't? Exceptionally nasty weapon. Precise. High muzzle velocity. *Big* rounds.

Now, replace those big fifty caliber slugs with twenty five millimeter grenade rounds, and tack on an enormous muzzle brake to compensate.

In short? A thirty three pound, four foot long black metal box and tube, that could spit a roughly one pound piece of metal, filled to bursting with explosives, nearly a mile, accurately, at a speed of Mach 1.2. Said round could then penetrate *two inches* of heavy armor plating, before exploding.

The armor we were encased in could reasonably stop the 5.7x28mm rounds from P90s. It could even protect us from larger rounds, like the ones in our own HK416.

But 'anti-material...' What it does is right there on the tin. The XM109 was intended to punch holes in medium and heavy armored vehicles. Much as our suit of armor was spectacular for its time... It would be as useless against the XM109 as our enemies' body armor had been against our miniguns.

For a brief moment, we were relatively safe. We were separated from our enemies by a large gray piece of reinforced superstructure that helped the bow of the ship remain structurally sound despite its size.

Even without the benefit of Mal's abilities, it would be plain to anyone with even two gray cells to rub together, that there were no approaches to the lifeboat that could bypass the XM109's field of fire. Because of Mal's telemetry, we knew that the woman fielding the gun - the same one I had seen in the back of the black Osprey - was positioned behind a large bollard just port and aft of the lifeboat.

The other five troopers were spread out in a very carefully considered defensive pattern, designed to maximize both hard cover for them, and sightlines that would prevent any crossfire that might endanger the squad.

Foucault stood at the entrance to the rear of the lifeboat, with Miss Williams held out before him as a shield. Every last one of our enemies were in too close proximity to risk the use of our aerial support platforms. Even with Mal's shocking accuracy, there were too many physics variables to risk firing the GAUs into that kill-box.

Miss Williams was within the fifteen percent cone of uncertainty for rounds. And even firing in concentrated bursts, a fifteen out of a hundred chance of striking her was much, much too high, given that we would roll those dice once per every single round fired.

For hopefully patently obvious reasons, missiles were out of the question.

"Jim?"

The tone of her voice, and the way she spoke my name... Like a question... It raised my pulse-rate noticeably.

I blew out a long breath, and grit my teeth as Mal laid it all out for us. A small part of me couldn't help but reflect on how much I hated those ugly, high-maintenance, wrong-feeling slabs in my mouth. Even there. Even on the brink of some truly horrible outcomes.

"We will have to take several direct rifle round impacts from the P90s in order to reach the Barrett without being struck by it. There is an 82.35 percent chance of injury, 39.14 percent chance of serious injury, and a 1.26 percent chance of fatality. There is also a 0.622 percent chance of serious injury to Miss Williams."

I watched as Mal played out a point-cloud and wireframe simulation for me, showing our planned route, down to the exact location of footfalls. The predicted trajectory of each and every enemy round, based on the most likely outcomes.

Ghostly secondary washed-out forms then played out the same motions, but with drastically better... And worse... Outcomes. She was showing me all her work, in as condensed a format as possible.

Recall; For Mal, a *tenth* of a single percent chance that I might self-harm was considered excessive. Too high for comfort by an order of magnitude.

That she was suggesting we flirt with a one and a quarter percent chance of fatality? A six tenths of a percent chance Miss Williams could be seriously hurt, or killed?

It was the best we could do. And unlike so many other soldiers, on so many other battlefields before that exact moment, who had told themselves the same thing... That it would be the best they could do... In the moments before the plunge?

I knew that it was. I was the first person in history to ever go into battle, and know with *so much* deterministic, mathematically provable certainty, that we would do our best. If that was not enough? Then *nothing* would have been. Nothing could have been, given all the variables.

We shifted the rifle to our back, and I worked the fingers of both hands in anticipation as we crouched into a runner's stance. As we counted down the seconds till our optimal action time-frame, together, I couldn't resist taking part in a far more familiar, even older trope of Terran battles past.

"Mal?"

She appeared for a brief moment at the sound of her name, left wing draped over me, right claw clasped on my shoulder, head positioned just next to mine. I turned to meet her eyes, and found the courage for a small, but warm smile.

"I love you."

What? I thought we had established by now that I was a buried romantic. Sappy to the core.

I truly felt that there was too much risk to let the moment pass without expressing the emotion. Certainly; I'd said it before. But... I wanted to say it again. Life was short, back then. Dangerous, even at the best of times. Fraught with disease, violence, fear... At least... By comparison to here, even in the best of Earthly circumstances.

So as Rodger had admonished... Why wait? One day you might have just found out you waited right up till the moment that you waited yourself out of a good thing.

Mal squeezed my shoulder, and touched the side of her beak gingerly to my cheek, before whispering low and soft, in my ear.

"One final effort is all that remains."

The 'I love you too' was very strongly implied. Not the least reason being that she knew I would adore the reference. But also because she had the ability to simply let me feel exactly how much she loved me, right down in my bones.

Her form vanished, and as we turned and crouched like a runner at the starting blocks, I snorted, and muttered aloud.

"Nice."

Her reply came back inside my head the very instant before the countdown clock struck zero.

"Though you'd like that."

Before I paint you another word-picture, let me clarify something; That suit she made could *move.* It had hydraulic assists in not just the arms, but also the legs, and torso. When we pushed off? It left a divot in the deck plating.

My ankles and calves would have almost certainly cried out in protest, were it not for the fact that Mal had more or less turned off my pain receptors at the brain stem.

You think Usain Bolt is fast at twenty three miles an hour?

Well, he is... That performance at the 2012 games? Fastest a Human being ever ran under competition conditions. A record that, now I suppose, will never be broken.

But he was nothing compared to Mal and I, in that thing she had lifted from DARPA, and kitbashed into the mother of all real-life MJOLNIR suits. We broke thirty miles an hour, easy.

Now that doesn't sound fast compared to a car, or a helicopter, or a missile, or a rifle round... Or a Pegasus... But it feels a *lot* faster at ground level, running on two legs, than it does riding in a car at the same speed. And thirty miles an hour was still a good seven faster than any of our opponents were expecting.

They were expecting our smoke, and flash grenades. There was no sense in wasting the rounds by holding them in the magazine; Even hiding their faces from the flash, and taking time to adjust their balaclavas to block the smoke, was a worthwhile purchase in temporal terms.

We loosed the grenades, four of them - two of each type - right before we rounded the huge metal wall that had been our cover on exiting D-Sphere. Mal bounced the shots off a tie-down bollard, placing both smoke grenades in the middle of the fatal funnel, and both flash-bangs at the periphery.

What happened next? *That* they could have never anticipated. It was audacious to the point of insanity. Or, at least, insanity in any Human context. For an ASI with all the angles, it was just good common sense use of ingredients.

You know the drill. Frame-time. Snap-count. Everything happened in far, far less time than it takes to describe it. Another of Mal's perfect symphonies of kinesthesis. This one was for all the marbles left on the floor.

We rounded the support beam at full speed, Mal carefully calculating our footfalls to keep us from sliding on the pitching, rain-slicked deck. About the time Foucault and his detail had managed to get a bead on us and reacquire semblance of sight pictures?

The first MANPAD rocket struck.

Yes, I know, I just go through explaining how Mal couldn't use that kind of weapon directly against our foes, for fear of hurting Miss Williams. *Directly* against our foe. Specificity is key with an ASI, and they are very very good at using resources in ways that seem completely unconventional to Human eyes.

That too is well worth remembering in the context of this story, start to finish. The principle is at its deadliest when combined with the 'never just for one purpose' rule.

What Mal did with the Osprey-mounted MANPAD was a microcosm of that synergy.

She fired three of the Stinger's rounds at the gunnels of the Red. Locations that would stagger our enemies with the shockwaves of the warheads' relatively meager impacts, in comparison to the Red's size. Close enough to hit them with the trailing edge of the airburst, and pitch the decking beneath their feet. Far enough away to avoid any dangerous shrapnel entering a ten foot safety sphere around Miss Williams.

Unconventional usage of a resource; Lethal anti-air missiles meant to be fired by an individual, launched against the side of a ship instead, from an automated turret, for non-lethal effect.

Multiple-purpose deployment of a resource; The impacts did not just stagger our enemies physically, throwing off their aim, and sparing us several potential hits from their rifles. Our opponents were also immediately forced to split their attention.

They knew about our Osprey, but seemed to think they could keep it at bay with the XM109.

Suddenly there was a perceived risk that the tilt-rotor might be making a close pass. Which, in fairness, it was.

And that's precisely how we avoided getting pegged by the XM109.

By the time the Barret's operator had any chance of reacquiring me, and compensating for the disruption the Stingers had caused? She was too busy trying to get a fix on the Osprey to care where I was, or what I was doing.

I reached the perimeter of the squad as Mal brought the Osprey in for a very, very close shave. The rotorwash whipped rain, ash, and smoke into a miniature tornado. The noise was deafening. At least, it was deafening for our enemies who lacked ASI-driven noise-cancellation. Make no mistake; Turbine engines are loud enough to permanently damage even sub-standard Human hearing at close proximity.

I could have just about reached out and touched the tip of one of the rotors as it passed, though doing so would have been extremely unwise, given that the aircraft was traveling at close to 350 miles per hour, in turboprop mode. The end of that prop blade was going... Let's just say 'considerably faster' than 350 mph.

To their credit? The squad behaved the way you might expect well trained operators to function under pressure. The Osprey kept the anti-materiel rifle focused elsewhere, but the other soldiers were only briefly distracted. They knew their small arms would do no good against the aircraft.

But they might do something about the furious half-ton armored behemoth charging down the deck at thirty miles an hour towards their boss.

To *Mal's* credit, we made it another ten loping strides before we got hit.

Even with your pain receptors turned off? There is a kind of hurt that goes beyond simple nerve ending stimulation. The same way that a simple touch can trigger emotions in burn victims who otherwise have no means of feeling sensation on their skin? The same way some blind people can have an emotional reaction to an image hitting their eyes, all the same?

The pain of getting shot is not something you can entirely switch off at a neuro-chemical level. I know at least one of you here, yes you in the back... You know what I mean.

Now unlike that poor fellow, I had Mal when I took my first round. And I had much thicker plating. And, at least to hear him tell it, he got hit with a higher caliber round. Both times. Amazing what some people can survive.

There was very little chance that the P90's munitions would kill me. The 5.7x28mm cartridge was plenty dangerous against any kind of body armor that the world's militaries had ever seen before. But it was intended to penetrate just that; Standard body armor.

We were wearing something closer to the skin of an MRAP, distilled down into the shape of personal armor. It probably would have been too heavy for me to even move in, without some low-level assistance from the suit's powered frame.

Of course, a lucky hit to the face would split my braincase instantly, but Mal predicted that there was a very low chance of that. Even if our enemies were to aim for anything other than center mass, the conditions were rough.

For every thirty rounds those soldiers fired?

Only two would hit me.

In total, we took three hits; The first in the shoulder. There was a sick sensation in the pit of my stomach, and a rising heat throughout that side of my body, paired with a sense of being badly bruised, but without the surface level pain.

Anyone here ever have strong topical anesthetic? You remember how you could still feel that there was pain, but in a dull, distant, almost hallucinatory way? It was a lot like that. A 5.7x28mm impact on the kind of armor we were clad in was analogous to a 9mm round hitting Kevlar at intermediate range; Far from lethal, but liable to bruise very deeply.

Mal did her best to compensate, even with the body's natural desperation to inflict pure agony as a means to inform the stupid operator thereof to kindly 'don't DO that again!' Had she not been there, the pain and shock alone would have dropped me to my knees.

The second round hit us top-dead-center of the spine. Or, in our case, the hardened extra-thick armor belt that ran from the top of the neck to the small of our back.

We closed to within a couple feet of the woman behind the Barrett, and the third round hit right as she managed to squeeze off her first shot. Her own round missed the Osprey by over a hundred feet; It was simply moving too fast, and the deck was pitching too much, for her to get any kind of clean sightline.

Meanwhile, it was actually Foucault who landed the third shot on me. Right to the heart, or at least, to that general area of the chest-plate, which was quite well reinforced in the same way as the spinal armor.

He was carrying the same Glock 20 I'd seen him check in when I was processed for internment, so the round didn't do squat. Frankly, it didn't even sting. Or perhaps it did, but just not seriously enough to induce secondary pain responses.

I was grateful. Two was *plenty* as far as impacts of that magnitude. I wanted very badly to vomit, but my corned beef sandwich was long-since digested. And we had much more important things to do than hurl.

Specifically, killing a woman before she could kill us.

Sometimes the simplest way really is best. So, we punched her. And when I say we punched the operator of that anti-materiel rifle? I am using the same kind of understatement Mal was using when she said 'Exit Strategy.'

A punch delivered by an exoskeleton-driven, titanium armored fist, is more akin to being hit by a loaded 18-wheeler at highway speeds, than to being hit by naked Human hands.

More fun physics facts with Jim; It only took about sixty six foot-pounds of torque to break a Human neck. Shocking, I know. Equine necks are so durable... Sixty six foot-pounds sounds positively anemic by comparison.

But unless you were fit, and well trained, and had an advantageous hold on someone? For a Human body that was a lot to muster. Not so difficult for a hydraulic ram.

Mal clocked the impact of our fist at about two hundred five foot-pounds of torque, imparted to the enemy's neck.

You can do the math, or just intuit the answer, and imagine what happened to her head. I won't describe it any further except to say that it wasn't there anymore, and that produced a lot of nasty byproducts that coated her body, the deck, and our chest.

We were too busy collecting her rifle to think much about it.

As her corpse dropped like a rock, we simply put out one hand and caught the rifle, swiftly bringing the other back from the instant-death-punch, and gripping the gun in what felt like a practiced pose, though it was the first time I'd ever held such a large rifle.

From there? It was actually fairly easy.

Five enemies, four shots left in the weapon's five round magazine. But we had Mal to do the ballistics calculations. Ever see someone hip-fire a bolt-action sniper rifle? Well... We did.

Our first shot hit the nearest opponent, and blew him apart on impact. Literally, into pieces. Kevlar was not designed to stop anti-vehicle rounds. There's that pesky understatement habit again. We were already racking the bolt the instant the round left the muzzle, even as we shifted our firing trajectory.

The second shot was reserved for the enemy most likely to have a good chance of getting a last desperate head-shot off against us. He was standing behind partial cover, in the form of a small equipment crane, and was on the cusp of dialing in a good sight picture when he died.

The round punched straight through the girders at the base of the crane, and thus didn't penetrate the man's armor. But when the shell exploded? Well. That got the intended result. Remember, these were grenade rounds. All the best parts of a grenade, and a massive anti material slug, in one devastating package.

Shot number three was the hardest, but Mal had calculated all the angles. All the probable footsteps of each opponent. She took into account every single variable, right down to their known predilection to dive left, or right, for cover, all other things being equal.

So shot number three was a two-for-one special.

The XM109's rounds were intended to be able to penetrate through medium vehicle armor before detonating. So, when one hit the weak point in the neck of the first target's armor? It punched a 25mm hole... And kept going.

As always, Mal's timing was pure mathematical perfection. So when that round kept going, it very quickly found the head of the fourth enemy. They couldn't have lined up any better for us if they had planned it.

In defense of their skills and competency; They were trained to position themselves that way, because no one had ever envisioned an enemy with the speed and accuracy to get single-shot multi-kills with a rifle. Let alone a situation where said hypothetical enemy might be holding an anti-materiel rifle.

Those conditions aside, lining up was a textbook way to ensure that the man behind was less likely to get hit while reloading. The distance between them was also significant; No un-augmented human could ever have calculated a shot that would have made it through both targets. And they were too far apart for a grenade to present any danger of taking both out at once.

In short; They did everything right.

We just did it better, and faster, and much much smarter.

After that, shot number four, on target number five, was pure simplicity. She was crouched behind a thick metal strut. Mal's composite-source-vision informed us that she was trying to prepare a grenade. We couldn't have that.

Our round reached her before she could remove the pin, punching through the metal stanchion and detonating just on the other side, thereby filling the trooper head to toe with shrapnel.

The sound of the pouring rain, mixed with the keening howl of the wind, and the roar of an angry sea against the ship's hull? It all seemed positively tranquil by comparison to what had just transpired.

Foucault just stared at us for a long moment, his pistol leveled over Miss William's right shoulder, squarely at my head, and his knife clutched to her throat in his left hand. Her body held like a riot shield between the lethality of our arsenal, and his fragile meager defenses.

A beige trenchcoat, a simple Kevlar vest, and a somewhat oversized ego. If not for Miss Williams, it would have been no contest at all.

He had wisely positioned himself inside the threshold of the lifeboat's hatch. Modern lifeboats were not the little wooden dinghies that fans of the (perhaps overrated) movie about love, tragedy, and a sinking ship by another guy named Jim, might be thinking of.

Yes, I just took a shot at Titanic. There was room for Jack on the door. The film plays too heavily on emotions. It was just a shipwreck. Worse things have happened. Come at me folks.

As for lifeboats on any modern ship worth its salt in 2013... They were more like little bright red spacecraft escape pods; Fully enclosed and watertight when sealed, with a little dorsal cockpit bulge at the aft of the hull, and a hatchway for access in the rear.

We all stood in silence for several moments, both evaluating. Both, I suspect, catching our breath. The only other sound was a faint whimpering coming from Miss Williams. Foucault had taken the precaution of blindfolding her, in addition to her cuffs.

The poor woman had experienced the battle as a furious staccato assault on her ear-drums, and nothing else but the sensation of Foucault's blade against her throat, and the miserable soaking downpour of the rain.

Mal and I dropped the XM109. It was not only empty, but it had also fully served its purpose, and was no longer an appropriate tool. Not for what we had to do next.

It was Foucault who spoke first, more or less shouting to make himself heard above the din of the storm.

"James! You're going to lay down your weapons! One by one! Slowly! Then you're going to get out of that armor! And then you're going to lie down on this deck, and interlace your fingers behind your head!"

Before I could respond, Mal spoke quietly, but firmly, into the back of my mind. I didn't like what she had to say. But, again, I knew she wouldn't have said it unless there was no other way.

"Say what you intend. But be prepared; There is no path from here on out that totally avoids injury to Miss Williams. We can only mitigate."

I snorted, shook my head, and held both hands wide. Mal was no longer co-piloting... Or I suppose I should say pre-piloting. I knew she would meld right back into the thick of things when it became necessary, just as I knew she would stop me, and correct me, if I was about to say the wrong thing.

My gesture was intended to convey that I was holding no weapons with which to threaten Foucault, without conveying the weakness of a surrender. Likewise, my tone was meant to suggest that I was open to negotiating, without implying that I felt cornered, in spite of the fact that I too had to shout to be heard.

"And then what?! I think you're smart enough to realize that you just found Lewis! But she doesn't take orders from me! It's the other way around! We're just pieces on the board, Michael! If I surrender to you?! She will hunt you for the rest of a very short life! All we want is Miss Williams! Release her, and you can take the lifeboat! We won't stop you!"

It wasn't a lie, per se. I knew Mal would, in fact, let him board the escape craft... She would simply pick it off with the Osprey at her convenience, using the last Stinger missile. Foucault could intuit well enough... He had probably offered the same facetious terms before, from the other side of the table.

He knew we had deceived him to get aboard. That we had exploited a false surrender. And that he was the last man standing. But I wasn't negotiating with the hope of getting him to terms. I was negotiating to buy time for Mal to simulate, and to get me physically closer to our target.

I began to pace slowly, a few steps back and forth in an arc, bringing myself in just a hair closer with each pass. Foucault tracked me with his pistol, eyes never leaving mine, finger never leaving the trigger. If he fired, I knew Mal could get my head out of the way in-time. But whether or not we could then extricate Miss Williams without risk to her, whether from the high-stress impact of our hydraulics, or a misfire of Foucault's weapon, or a slip of his blade... That was the question.

That was the entire thesis of holding her at knife-point; It wasn't about him threatening to kill her of his own volition. It was about creating a situation in which we could not risk getting physical with him, for fear of her becoming collateral damage.

He didn't shake his head, but the grim twist of his lips and the clenching of his jaw conveyed the same intent as he replied in wholly expected fashion.

"No, I don't think so! Miss Williams is the only thing keeping me alive! She stays with me! And if you don't comply...?!"

Even with forewarning, watching Michael Foucault break Miss William's left leg? It hurt. More than being shot, though not in the same way. As with Selena, when Foucault had snapped 'Lark's' neck, it was the scream of pain that cut most deeply.

Foucault knew exactly how to kick Miss Williams to produce the fracture. I could hear the bones snap, even over the wind.

As predicted, Michael meant to use the pain of others to compel my co-operation, without taking the risk of losing a hostage outright. My blood absolutely boiled.

The man had already crossed the line when he tortured Selena. That was the point at which killing him had become both acceptable to me, and an objective for me. When he had stabbed me? That had turned his death from an objective, into an emotional desire.

That too felt sickening. Alien. Unfamiliar, and deeply undesirable; The sense that I so badly *wanted* him to suffer. To die. To scream the way he had made others scream. To see terror in his eyes as the life left them, and then for him to never be seen again.

It took work for me to keep my tone level, though a certain amount of growling rage crept through, I'm quite sure.

"Michael! Every wound you inflict?! It only incentivizes us to act more swiftly, and drastically! If you put her down, NOW?! Then I will be merciful! If not?! Then I am going to make you BLEED!"

Did I say 'level' tone? It started out that way, but I confess, I was bellowing with undisguised hatred by the end of my ultimatum.

"That's close enough Jim!"

Foucault depressed the trigger of his Glock slightly, bringing it to within a miniscule fraction of the engage point. He tightened up on the knife as well, drawing a small rivulet of blood from Miss Williams' throat as she squirmed under the pain and discomfort of trying to stand only on her right leg.

Unfortunately for us Michael was well aware that I was trying to get in close for a preemptive strike. When he was paying attention? And, in particular, when he was out from under his ego? He was a good fighter.

Unfortunately for him, Mal was better. And we were, indeed, as he had said... Close enough.

My pulse was pounding. I could feel my heartbeat in every bone. It roared in my ears. This was the moment. The crux of everything we had worked for. The inflection point between a pyrrhic pseudo-victory, and a complete win.

Mal had one last trick up our sleeve. Literally.

If you recall, I described the armor as possessing a 'strange cylindrical bump' on the inner surface of the left forearm.

As you may or may not have guessed? That cylinder was a gun. Specifically, the guts of one of our SIG Sauer P228 pistols, stripped down to the bare essentials, and loaded with a single full metal jacket 9x19mm round.

Mal had waited until I managed to get close enough to Foucault, and in the right position laterally, to allow for a very, very accurate shot. She was unwilling to discharge a firearm in close proximity to Miss Williams, without an over 99.99% surety that she would hit her target.

Mal guided my arm onto precisely the right vector, and fired, barely one breath after the last syllable of my name left Foucault's lips.

The bullet shot upwards at an angle, passing through Michael's left wrist and severing the tendons neatly. He dropped the knife, powerless to do anything else. He couldn't have moved his hand after that if he'd wanted to, and that was the outcome we needed to ensure Miss Williams didn't get gutted. The reason Mal had let me keep Foucault talking.

We were not idle during the bullet's flight time. Mal's pre-piloting thread rejoined with my cognition, and we sprang into action within the same millisecond that the round left the end of the improvised derringer.

Our left hand moved swiftly, accelerating in its outward arc, to snag Foucault's pistol. He pulled the trigger reflexively, but by then we had pushed the barrel away, and all he did was temporarily deafen Miss Williams' right ear.

Our right hand lashed out and caught the knife. Mal calculated a perfect angle of approach, and split-second timing, so that the handle practically fell into our palm.

From then on? It was a very, very simple, very short struggle.

We ripped the pistol from Foucault's right hand, using our left, with such force that it broke his wrist. In the same smooth motion, we pitched the sidearm towards the port side. Our hand was moving so quickly, and with so much force, that the weapon spun away into the night, probably making it a few dozen yards over the gunnels. At least.

Our right hand pulled inward to keep the blade away from Miss Williams, as we pivoted our whole body in between her and Foucault forcefully. As we reached the point in our spin where our back was to Michael - and we were positioned directly between him and Miss Williams - Mal thoughtfully maneuvered our now free left hand to cushion her fall into a delicate landing, laying her gently on her right side, so as not to place any pressure on her broken leg.

From there, we continued the spin into a full three-sixty, snagging Foucault with our left hand and arm, over his shoulders and around his neck as soon as they were free again. We clamped down with more than enough force to fracture his collar bone, but he didn't even get time to cry out in pain.

I took his own blade, in my right hand, and I stabbed Michael Foucault in the chest. Right between the ribs.

Four times.

I did not need Mal's guidance, nor assistance with that task, and she did not give it. It was all me. Cold. Cruel, even. Swift. If you have never seen it happen? You'd be amazed how quickly a knife can strike.

I hit him right where he had shivved me. Only, instead of aiming to torture and prolong? I aimed to kill.

As the blade hit home on the first strike, I pulled Foucault close, and whispered in his ear, the words making it to his brain in full right about the time I finished the fourth stroke.

"Now, *that* was pathetic."

I left the knife in his chest after the final blow. Why bother to spend the effort to pull it back out? I didn't need it any more than he did at that point.

With a quick shove, I forced his body away from me, watching... Forcing myself to watch... As the light went out of his eyes, his face twisted in a horrified rictus of pain, and of realization at long last. Realization that the game he thought he'd been winning? Was rigged from the start.

And that's the third lesson on ASI for today. The lesson of Michael Foucault's last, bitterest defeat; If an ASI is willing to play? They have fixed the deck already.

Foucault's corpse clattered to the floor of the lifeboat's entryway. A tiny thread of my thoughts, crystal clear and disconnected from all else, marveled briefly at the supreme irony; He alone of the Mercurial Red's company had actually made it to the lifeboat. Just... Not *alive.*

I didn't even have time to consider what I'd done. What it meant. How I felt. That came later. In the moment, I found myself immediately preoccupied with Miss Williams.

I knelt beside her, and gently removed the blindfold, pulling off my right glove so that I could check her pulse. She gasped when she saw me, pupils constricting from shock, and the sudden increase in perceived ambient light.

As I gently pressed my right index, and middle fingers to the side of her neck, I forced the best smile I could, and the most comforting tone that could reasonably be conveyed when half-shouting. The storm had not abated one whit.

"Miss Williams! I'm from... The Office of Naval Intelligence...!"

I see the looks from some of you. Come on. You know me... I couldn't resist. I needed something fictitious that would sound believable to a middle-aged American woman who had probably never touched an XBox controller in her life.

The reference helped my smile to be warmer. A little more genuine.

"...I'm here to rescue you! I need you to *lie still* for me! Ok?! Can you do that?!"

She nodded meekly. Confusion vied with agony as the pain in her left leg spiked. Her pulse was strong, if a bit fast. Not surprising, she was likely going into shock, and I didn't even need Mal to tell me that. I knew enough to see it clear as day.

It didn't matter whether she understood the details. I am quite sure that Foucault and the rest of his goons had crowed that they were from the US Government enough times that Miss Williams was *very* confused to be rescued from a Federal agency, ostensibly*by* a Federal agency.

But she was also supremely comforted by the idea of being rescued, however confusing. Being rescued by a figure vested with authority. That was all that mattered at the time; That I find some way to begin to stem the *emotional* bleeding in her soul. Because being renditioned was traumatic enough. Having some bastard hold you at knife-point and break your leg? That could shatter most people.

I could feel Mal bringing the Osprey in for another pass, much more slowly, in VTOL mode. As the aircraft approached, I found time to tear into the mini first-aid kit strapped to my right leg, and pull out a syringe of Ketamine.

I went to ask if Miss Williams had an allergy, but before I could draw breath, Mal provided me with an answer.

"It's safe. I pre-checked her medical records, and yours, before selecting the contents of the kit in the first place."

As I pulled the cap from the needle, and carefully found an appropriate spot to thread it into Miss William's left leg, I couldn't resist muttering under my breath. At a level only Mal could hear.

"Beautiful genius."

As I depressed the plunger, the sound of the Osprey grew louder. I realized I only had a few more seconds to communicate with Rodger's mother, before things got far too loud. I shouted as I withdrew the needle.

"WE'RE ABOUT TO MOVE TO AN EVACUATION AIRCRAFT! I NEED YOU TO KEEP YOUR LEFT LEG OFF THE GROUND! THAT'S ALL YOU HAVE TO DO! CAN YOU DO THAT FOR ME?!"

Again Miss Williams nodded, probably less from a full understanding, and more because she was in shock, exhausted, groggy, and starting to already feel the effects of the Ketamine to boot. She would have followed more or less any instructions delivered in a loud, commanding voice. Most people do, in that state.

As I went to zip up the first aid kit, I noticed that Mal had thoughtfully included a pair of earplugs. She was always a thousand steps ahead...

I took a moment to gently press the yellow foam plugs into Miss William's ears. The way she flinched as I moved in... It tore at my heart. I suspected Foucault had not been kind to her. From the outset.

He should have been. Perhaps he wouldn't have gotten stabbed with his own knife.

It took some doing to get Miss Williams on her feet... Or... Foot. The hydraulics of the power-suit most definitely helped. Mal informed me mnemonically that we still had almost a twenty percent battery charge, and Rodger's mother didn't weigh very much anyhow. It was more that she was barely able to coordinate the simplest of movements, but who could blame her? After what she'd been through.

As we got fully situated in a battlefield carry position, Mal brought the Osprey in over the fore-deck, compensating once more for the whipping of the wind, and pitching of the ship, to the degree that the craft seemed almost unnaturally suspended. As if on a strong metal cable, or a gigantic mounting rod in some God-sized display case.

Miss Williams pressed her head against her chest to keep cinders, rain, and smoke from her eyes. I let it all lash the lenses of my glasses, navigating for us both as Mal brought the Osprey down so close that the edge of the rear ramp lightly touched the deck plating.

"Jim..?"

Mal's voice echoed in my mind again as our feet hit the ramp. The image of her appeared before me, smiling... Almost tearfully. I returned the expression as I helped Miss Williams lie down on the port side jumpseats, listening to Mal's voice as if it were water in the desert. She laid a claw on my shoulder again as the bottom dropped out from my stomach, and the view of the burning hulk of the Mercurial Red dropped away in the rear hatchway.

"Well done."

I snorted, and set about strapping Rodger's mother down, gently, so that any turbulence wouldn't jostle her leg, giving in to the urge to mumble once again at a level only Mal could hear over the thrum of the engines.

"What can I say? You showed me one hell of a night."

I rose, and turned to make my way forward, catching Mal's eyes with my own in the process. She smiled, winked, and replied with just one word.

"Nice."

There was a much larger first aid kit attached to the forward bulkhead of the aft compartment, and as I suspected, it contained a splint. With that larger kit retrieved, I returned to Miss William's side, and set about binding her leg, first tending the bruise - the bone hadn't broken the skin - then attaching the splint.

Somewhere around the halfway point in that process, the poor woman slipped into blissful unconsciousness. I did a second check of her breathing, and pulse-rate just to be sure, feeling an *intense* surge of relief as I discovered that both were strong, and swiftly returning to a less distressing cadence.

At this stage? I'm sure most of you are feeling that same sort of relief. But a very small number of you, the ones who obsessively count seconds in battle? You're screaming internally...

'What about the Sampson?!'

And, perhaps...

'I thought the failsafe triggered in twenty minutes, it has been closer to an *hour!*'

Well. About the Sampson...

Mal had been playing with it. Like a cat plays with a rat in the moments before she makes the kill. That, as with all things, had at minimum a dual purpose.

The first, and most obvious, was to keep the thing off our backs. An Aegis missile destroyer is not something you want to face down in the open, all other things being equal. But the second, more subtle purpose, was to leave the Sampson's crew frightened, and off-balance.

They had been told to trigger the failsafe. Then something had very clearly hacked into their ship, and turned it against them, re-forging their war machine into an alloy-steel prison, brimming with armaments suddenly under the control of an unknown, hostile, power.

Naturally, the crew spent the entire duration of our battle on the Red trying to regain control of their ship... And at the precise moment that we cleared the minimum safe distance... Mal let them.

Most of the officers were smart enough to put two and two together. Mal gave them a little additional shove, just to be sure; Planting all sorts of evidence that the hack had come directly from the Red.

And that was all she needed.

An ordinary AI might have just hacked into the VLS systems and just fired the missiles directly. But that was amateur stuff. Easy mode. The blunt brute-force way that might leave behind the wrong kinds of questions.

Mal? She hacked the *crew* of the Sampson, into doing it themselves, of their own volition. A failsafe had been triggered. Their ship had been seized digitally. Their weapons kept from them. They knew, or thought they knew, the source of that attack...

What happened next was quite deterministically predictable.

Mal gestured for me to come and watch. Ah. So *that* was why she hadn't closed the rear ramp yet.

As I stepped up behind the turret assembly she had crafted, taking a tenth of a second to admire the workmanship in the auto-loading system she had devised for the Stinger, she snapped the talons of her right claw, summoning her door to the ring once again.

I understood immediately.

They *needed* to see what was about to happen. The same way Selena had needed to put Troxler on trial... The captives needed to see their prison torched. Escape wasn't enough. To keep it from their nightmares?

They had to watch it be *annihilated.*

The gaggle of Ponies, young and old, in every color of the rainbow, along with the fragments, Zeph, and Selena, all pressed in around the door-frame. Mal had provided a sloped piece of ground on the ring-side of the door, quite thoughtfully. Stadium seating, in a subtle fashion.

I draped one arm over the turret, and Mal moved to stand beside me, laying her right wing and foreleg over my shoulders. I caught a faint whiff of her scent, and the sensation was almost enough to wipe the entirety of my latent stress, pain, and soreness away. Almost.

She knew that I loved radio chatter, so she piped in the Sampson's one-loop, as the Osprey cut a graceful turn, and the Red came fully into view in the distance again.

"TAO: *Kill* track one four three, with VLS!"

I took a deep breath, wincing as the bruises from rifle impacts, and my stab wound, briefly outmatched Mal's pain damping algorithms.

"ECLI, break, MM-1; Alight five RIM-156 and place them into the reload pool."

I couldn't resist a grin, and a slightly painful chuckle. Five RIM-156 anti-ship missiles? The Sampson's crew was dead serious about reducing the Mercurial Red to matchsticks. Anyone left alive inside the hull... Well... I realized very quickly that they wouldn't be for much longer.

And that didn't bother me in the slightest.

"Batteries release! Birds away, track one four three!"

I squinted, just barely able to make out the silhouette of the Sampson near the horizon to the west through the driving sheets of rain, as orange light blossomed from its fore and aft five times in rapid succession.

If you have never seen anti-ship missiles in action? You should find some archival footage. It is the very best kind of deadly physics pornography.

The five warheads streaked up, briefly, then out, down, and back level just a few feet from the surface of the sea. They peeled away to encircle the Mercurial Red...

And then slammed into the hull fore, aft, port, and starboard, simultaneously, with the fifth and final missile delivering a plunging hit down into the deck amidships.

We were almost a half mile out when the Mercurial Red detonated. There is no other appropriate word; One of the missiles hit the fuel stores, and that, plus the five warheads? Well, if you thought the explosion of the birdge superstructure was something...

Again I was able to see the shockwave push the rain away with my own eyes, though this time it was a far more pronounced effect that seemed to tear at the fabric of the atmosphere itself for a brief moment.

Another nifty thing about explosions at sea?

They deform the surface of the water. That was a hell of a sight on its own; The sea whipped into white foam, and pressed down in a massive bowl shape for the briefest of moments.

As for the LNG Mercurial Red itself?

It went to pieces. Violently. Pieces no bigger than the size of my head, at the largest, all thrown outwards at many times the speed of sound, propelled on a huge - if brief- fireball that was deliciously orange and red, exactly like you might picture in a movie. A consequence of the ignited fuel stores.

Light travels faster than sound, and because of the distance, the glow hit us first, along with a brief but noticeable bloom of faint heat.

Then the sound came a few heart-beats later. I was immensely thankful for my ear protection. Miss Williams didn't even stir... The Ketamine and earplugs did their work fabulously.

As for the Ponies, Mal had provided an aural filter with her door. Ever thoughtful, she knew the sound of an entire LNG tanker being torn apart by five anti-ship missiles would be literal hell on Equine ears.

Reduced as it was to me, but without distortion, thanks to Mal's protection? It was a sickly sweet kind of music. A primal tribal drumbeat.

The sound of victory.

And you better believe I watched that fireball fade for a good, long thirty seconds, and drank in every single detail, as Mal put a stake right in Hell's heart. And twisted it damn good.

How's My Bumper Taste?

Awarded for the successful improvised use of a vehicle as a kinetic/explosive impact weapon.

"I said, *shot-gun!* Shot-gun dammit!"

One Final Effort

Be the victor in a martial last-stand scenario.

"If we stand our ground, we might just have a chance."

Special Achievement

Foucault's Pendulum

Turn the tables on your greatest enemy.

"I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing."

Special Achievement

No One Left Behind

Successfully rescue all the captives of the Mercurial Red, with no friendly lives lost.

"However 'insignificant' we might be, we will fight, we will sacrifice and we will find a way. That's what humans do."

Special Achievement

Truth and Reconciliation

Destroy a ship at sea with a displacement greater than or equal to one hundred thousand tons.

"Time for a little payback."

Special Achievement

37 - Forked Process

"I'm a thief, but I keep what I steal."
―Cortana

"Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say 'My tooth is aching' than to say 'My heart is broken.' "
—C.S. Lewis

September 23rd 2013 | System Uptime 26:06:31:08

I wanted to fly the Osprey as much as I could on the trip back... But I had more pressing things to attend to for a significant chunk of the flight.

Mal informed me that Miss Williams would need a fluid drip. To stave off dehydration, mainly, but it also allowed us to get her setup with some less intensive, but more comprehensive painkillers so we could forgo any more Ketamine.

The WiFi-as-RADAR concept was not precise enough to perform an X-Ray analogue for medical purposes, so instead Mal walked me through a careful physical examination. Foucault had done a number on Miss William's left fibula, and tibia both.

I winced as the tips of my fingers found the edges of the break... I knew, even without Mal's analysis, that an injury like that would mean months in a supporting boot. Physical therapy. It would probably be four or five months before the woman could walk fully on her own two legs again.

Once, I would have blamed myself. Recriminations would have risen so swiftly and powerfully that a depressive spiral would have been inevitable. But, then again, once? I would have never been able to stab a man to death.

What had happened to Rodger's mother was Michael Foucault's fault. His alone. I was not responsible for her pain, but rather for her safe rescue. And I knew it. Consequence of Mal's subtle reprogramming of my faults, at my own willing behest.

If we're being brutally honest? I was also too tired, mentally, physically, and emotionally, to bother processing anything. I was in that strange emotional liminal space where the mind is clear, the body is sore, and the spirit is sleeping.

About the time I'd finished tending to Miss Williams - and fully reassuring myself for the fifth time that her vitals were solid - Mal highlighted a pair of objects abruptly in my proprioception.

There was no tactical urgency behind the impulse, but I found myself scooting over to the cabin's little circular port-side window nonetheless.

Sure enough, two dark gray lawn-dart shapes blitzed past in the distance, each dragging the twin orange glows of lit afterburners at their tail end.

"F-15s from the Washington Air National Guard out of JBLM. Sampson called for them as soon as I let them have their boat back. We are marked as verified civilian traffic on their screens. I have control of the nearest AWACS."

I raised one eyebrow, and turned to find that Mal's avatar had returned to the cabin. As I stood, the soft rumble of the interceptors' sonic booms caught up with us.

"The *nearest* AWACS?"

She nodded, and more than a hint of a smirk tugged at the edges of her beak, as she gestured towards the cockpit.

"In total they turned out six F-15s in three pairs, and an AWACS apiece, along with a USN P-8 from Naval Air Station North Island, and four F-16s from California Air National Guard. Something about a rogue Osprey, and a 'total loss of systems control' event aboardship."

I cast a final glance at Miss Williams, taking comfort from the visible rise and fall of her chest, before snorting, and squeezing into the cockpit. I was still wearing the power-suit. It hadn't occurred to me to bother taking it off.

I found Mal there already, draped lazily over the co-pilot's chair.

As I forced my way into the pilot's seat, I shook my head, and fired off a look - equal parts awe, and rueful concern - at her.

"Geez Mal. They don't even turn out that kind of response for the Russians when they test the ADIZ."

She let me get a firm grip on the cyclic, and TCL, and thread my feet comfortably into the pedals, before she released control of the Osprey to me.

"Your aircraft."

I nodded, and did my best to recenter my attention, taking in a wealth of additional information through the mnemonic link about aircraft state, position, and our destination.

"My aircraft."

We flew in silence for a few moments, before Mal picked up the thread of the conversation again. She was always so considerate... Giving me time to get settled before continuing to converse, yet also picking the topic back up without skipping a beat.

"The Russians are putting on a show, as much for their own media circus as for anyone in the United States, and US forces know that. Whereas we seized control of an entire destroyer, and made it sail in circles for closer than not to an hour. To say nothing of the fact that they are still missing two Reaper drones, and an Osprey."

Well. When she put it like *that*...

It was a good point. Russia poking our Air Defense Identification Zone was business as usual. Someone managing to take control of a whole Aegis Missile Destroyer and two drones, was another matter entirely.

After another brief, somewhat heavier silence, Mal elaborated further. I spared a moment's attention to glance at her again. She kept her eyes forward. I knew that as she spoke, she was aggregating data from tens of thousands of sources. A firehose of information I could never hope to comprehend in granular detail.

But she spoke as if she were calmly, somewhat grimly, informing me that I had accidentally burned our dinner in the microwave.

"The Navy is already locking down electronic warfare and networked control systems across the entire Pacific Fleet. COMSUBLANT and COMSUBPAC have both moved all of their deployed ballistic missile submarines to EMCON, and advised the termination of high-bandwidth external data connections."

Through it all, she never forgot how much I loved acronyms. For those who don't, or just aren't familiar with these, a little context; COMSUBLANT and COMSUBPAC were the Atlantic and Pacific Naval Commands for United States nuclear submarines.

Ballistic missile submarines, in particular, were the big ones. The scary ones. The ones that carried city killer warheads.

EMCON meant Emissions Control; No signals in or out, except for the absolute essentials required to keep command and control working. In the case of the subs, that would mean only radio transmissions. Voice and teletype.

Termination of high bandwidth data connections... I stiffened, and swallowed. Keeping an eye on nuclear launch platforms world-wide was likely near the top on Celestia's list of high-refresh rate data polling.

Perhaps not in hard-real-time... After all, if she kept an eye on certain critical junctions in the chain of command every single second, there was no need to look in on the others but once every few minutes.

But still... Something of this magnitude would *have* to raise her hackles, and I said as much aloud as soon as the thought had churned enough to coagulate into words.

"Holy shit Mal... Is Celestia going to notice this?"

I turned to look at her once more, and she met my gaze, nodding firmly, but reassuringly. Her voice thawed too, taking on the barest hint of a smile that didn't quite make it to her beak.

"Most definitely. But there is little or nothing she can do about it, except search for culprits through the means accessible to her, and encourage the CNO to lift the restrictions. By the time she begins to get even the smallest picture of what happened, we will be thousands of miles away, and our trail will be broken in several places with gaps that she can not surmount."

It felt... Slimy. Cold. Tingly. Concerning in the utmost. To hear Mal casually discussing Celestia whispering into the ear of the United States Chief of Naval Operations. Massaging their thought processes, editing their reports... Subtly channeling them into a course of action that would allow her to regain real-time direct access to at least some of the systems aboard nuclear submarines.

It wasn't as if she could fire missiles herself, and that was the last thing she'd ever want to do. Contrariwise, she also could not entirely prevent the firing of those missiles, or 'defuse' those systems.

But being on-the-ball about the goings on aboard-ships would certainly make it easier for her to prevent a war.

That was a *good* thing, at its core. I should have felt comforted by that. But somehow, I didn't. She was doing humanity a favor, and all I could think was 'I wish Mal was the one behind the wheel instead.' Even having seen the results of her fury.

She was ultimately still bound by morals. But unlike Celestia, she had not simply a cold calculated sense of the danger of humanity's weapons; She had an empathetic resonance. And I would rather someone with empathy be holding the safety toggle on a weapon any day of the week, versus a machine with no feelings either way.

We lapsed into a silence again. Longer, and slightly uncomfortable, but not between us. Indeed, we both found it tremendously comforting being in each other's physical presence. And flying was, as always, an absolute joy.

The weight we felt came from the inherent gravity of what we had done. The sense that eyes from all around were searching for us. And the knowledge that we had one last hat trick to pull off before I could find the blessed embrace of sleep.

As the coast of Washington state came into view again - the lights of Long Beach, Seaview, Oceanview, and Ilwaco twinkling in a line from left to right - the first hint of gray pre-dawn light began to brush the sky off our nose.

Mal smiled, and reached out her right claw to rest gently over my left hand on the TCL.

"Rodger and the Calders just arrived off Ilwaco, and met their transport to shore. They will reach the rendezvous point about two and a half minutes after we do. Our extraction vehicle is enroute as well and will be at the rendezvous point three minutes and thirty seconds after that. Ilwaco Police will be... Otherwise engaged. Long Beach Police will arrive eight minutes after we touch down. That is our window to see to arrangements, swap vehicles, and be off-site."

Details, perfectly curated, regarding the plan, settled gently into place inside my head; Mal had apparently steered the Maru in as close to the coast as was safe, and chartered a small fishing boat to pick up the ship's meat-world passengers.

She was... Shall we say 'less specific' about our 'extraction vehicle,' except to intimate on an emotional level that the Osprey would be taken good care of, and that I would enjoy several aspects of the high-speed hi-jinks ahead of us. And she wanted those points of joy to be surprise discoveries.

It was a brilliant tactic that turned my nervousness into anticipation. Subtle difference, but the latter is certainly more pleasant and bearable.

I inclined my head, and grinned just a bit as a particular thought struck me. It was the biggest smile I had cracked since the happy end of Zeph and Selena's heart-to-heart.

"We should apply for a frequent offender card with LBPD."

Mal grinned, and shook her head slowly, squeezing my hand gently all the while.

"For the most part, I think we should avoid leaving a detailed record of your passage. Though I do appreciate the sentiment, and so would they; Sergeant Walsh in particular is very much affected by what happened during your rendition."

I found myself lost in a moment of awe, curiosity, and more than a little shock, as the mention of the woman's name sent my brain spiraling outward into a fractal revelation.

Once the thought had reached critical mass, I began to verbalize, almost as if compelled, in a hushed reverent tone.

"You know... Don't you... The name of every single person. Every single one we've crossed paths with. Even tangentially. Even through degrees of separation. You know the names of every police officer I met in that field yesterday. You know the names of every crew member who died on the Red. You know the names of every person in the crowd that you helped Rodger dodge as he escaped his office... You know the name of every one of Foucault's agents who I shot at the farmhouse. The name of the pilot who flew Mom and Dad's transatlantic flight..."

Mal nodded slowly as I trailed off, her smile morphing subtly from a grin, to something that conveyed pride in my realization, along with comfort to help me come to grips with re-realizing, for the umpteenth time, the scope of her powers.

When she spoke, her voice had a similarly comforting note... Albeit mixed with a tiny hint of... Perhaps smugness. Or, at minimum, pride in her own capacity to know and understand.

"Yes. And I know almost everything there is to know about every single one. Hopes. Fears. Loves. Losses. Dreams. Their entire digital footprint, and as much as I care to reasonably extrapolate besides. Perhaps not with as much accuracy as Celestia, with her larger repository of brains... But close. And, I'm sure, with certain unexpected fine grain details that she can not hope to understand."

Mal didn't have to get more specific than that. We both knew she meant not only her capacity to feel emotions like the rest of us, but also the fact that she had been given the chance... Was still being given the chance... To experience the meat-world via connection to a living active brain. My brain.

The concept of what Mal could do... The way she could hold within herself an understanding of so many unique lives, each more complete than the person's own knowledge of themself... It reminded me just how many lives were on the planet at that moment. How unique each was. And how, for the vast majority? We were all headed to the same place.

Just... Only a very *very* few of us knew it. Yet.

That node in the fractal hit up against a strong emotional trigger down in the depths of my soul. I was seized by a sudden need to act.

"Your aircraft."

Mal nodded, and folded her forelegs. She could have made a visual pageant of flying the Osprey via the actual co-pilot's controls, with her avatar, but instead she knew that I'd find it considerably more amusing to see her lounging in the left seat, with the full knowledge that she was still piloting the aircraft with perfect skill and precision.

I unlatched my safety harness, and stood, taking a moment to stretch, before gingerly working my way around to the back of the pilot's seat.

"My aircraft."

Her tone made it abundantly clear that she knew me well enough to know what I was doing. And, though I knew she would have stopped me if there were any reason to? I still felt the well-worn compulsion to ask aloud as I removed the power-suit's tactical knife from its leg sheath.

"I'm... Leaving a little record. If that's alright?"

She nodded, so I took a deep breath, bent down, and pressed the tip of the knife into the hard backing material of the pilot's seat. A few moments later, and one slightly duller K-Bar... And it was done.

I stood back, and inclined my head at Mal. Nominally, her avatar couldn't have seen the little emblem I'd left behind. But she could see through my eyes, and thus had a perfect view. Her smile changed again, this time into something wholly warm, and absolutely radiant with love.

"It's perfect."

I took a couple more seconds to bask in the mental echoes of her words, staring down at my handiwork, and allowing the world to constrict back down from the immense fractal it had become through my earlier revelation.

A simple little heart, with the initials 'J+M' in the center.

Yes, yes, I can absolutely see some of you rolling your eyes. Trite in the extreme. But so what?

Was it silly? Yes. Trite? Of course! Would it be gone in a few years when the planet, and everything on it, were inevitably consumed to fuel a digital pastel Pony paradise? As far as I knew, even then.

So... Was it pointless?

Absolutely not.

No record is truly indelible. Certainly not in that world. The question as to this one's life-span remains unanswered.

But though the Osprey itself, and my little etching along with it, is, or soon will be gone?

The memory of it remains, even now. The way it made me feel remains. Mal's words. Her smile. The warmth of that flame. That remains.

Hardly pointless.

We kept a brighter, more cheery silence as I got strapped back in, only broken by the 'your aircraft, my aircraft' call and response. Mal knew that I wanted to enjoy one last landing with the Osprey.

Strangely, though we'd barely had it for two days, I had grown quite sentimentally attached to it. Even with the vague reassurance that 8228's own journey was far from over? There was a small twinge of regret at leaving it to someone else.

All too soon, however, that thought had to take a backseat, along with all the others. It was time for our grand entrance.

The helipad, if you could call it that, in the parking lot of Illwaco's hospital was much too small for the Osprey. Instead, Mal directed us towards the High School's track and football field. It was not hard to pick out in the pre-dawn light; There were two fire trucks and four ambulances present, all running their lights.

Mal had, apparently, called in our arrival. Along with a suitable distraction to draw out Ilwaco's Police department, and keep them busy off-site.

It must have been a heck of an experience from ground level; A Marine Corps MV-22, navigation lights strobing, small glowing diodes at the end of the rotors creating the illusion of twin glowing circles in mid-air, the bright halo of our forward landing lights, all paired with an ear splitting roar, and storm-like rotor drafts, descending out of nowhere to land in the middle of a football field surrounded by flashing emergency strobes.

Not for the first time, but certainly with an intensity that bears calling out, it struck me that the moment might as well have belonged in a movie. Flaring for a perfect, gentle touch-down at the forty yard line of a small town High School football field in a military tilt-rotor was definitely not 2008 Jim's answer to the question 'where do you see yourself in five years?'

As soon as all our wheels were down, and the brakes were applied, Mal nudged me to bring the engines down to idle... But leave them running. That took very little time, during which she was busy opening the rear ramp.

I got myself unstrapped, and moved aft in a sudden daze. Everything was completely clear, as far as my senses. I wasn't woozy, or groggy. But everything abruptly felt... Disconnected. As if I was casually watching a movie about some guy named James, rather than truly living my own life experiences in the moment.

In hindsight, I suppose Mal could have intervened. Measured, analyzed, then tweaked the natural trauma response of the brain to restore a sense of hard reality. But she didn't. I think she felt that it was important to avoid tampering with certain aspects of the way memory is created, whenever possible.

To protect the authenticity of the experience, however surreal or even vaguely discomforting.

The ramp came fully open, and settled, just about the same time I got Miss Williams unstrapped from her prone position on the jump seats.

Two EMTs rushed up the ramp, two at each end of a stretcher assembly, along with two paramedics to check and load Miss Williams. All four noted, and acknowledged me, each displaying their own very subtle signs of confusion at my almost alien technological garb.

Mal had spun them a good story, but it was still undoubtedly strange to them to see an Osprey with a lone occupant wearing armor unlike anything that graced their TV screens outside the bounds of fictional programming.

I stood well back, giving them space to work, only interjecting at an opportune moment to let the woman in charge know a few critical details. The words spilled out of me like items on a checklist... And I suppose they were. My voice sounded unnatural in my own ears as I let fly in clipped, almost professional tones.

"Triple compound fracture of the left tibia and fibula from momentary blunt force trauma. BP 115 over 62. Pulse steady at 64. She had 75 milligrams of Ketamine administered immediately after the event, no contraindications. IV fluid drip since then, with Toradol. No other medication. No serious allergies to be aware of, no history of hypertension, heart issues, drug use, or seizures. No current prescriptions."

Mal had provided the last part to me through momentary memory augmentation. Medical history is often just as vital in treating serious injury, as any evaluation of the injury itself.

The paramedic nodded, and then turned back to the task of coordinating Miss Williams' evacuation to a waiting ambulance. As soon as they had a neck brace on her, a few important basics checked out, and her IV bag disconnected, they unlocked the wheels, and rolled her away.

I stood in the back of the Osprey for a long moment, feeling a sudden loneliness. A sudden sharp *emptiness* that comes with the release of responsibility. The dull insistent ache of a soul released from stress, but still bent out of shape from it.

Mal's avatar had vanished, but she put the sensation of a claw on my shoulder, and a wing over my back as I walked haltingly down the ramp and onto the football field. I brushed one gloved hand against the side of the Osprey as I went, silently saying goodbye, and my thanks for a job well done.

Again, call me sappy. Call me trite. But... I've always insisted that Machines have personality. We're all living proof of that now.

I closed my eyes, took a long moment to just breathe in the morning air, and let the roar of the Osprey's still-idling engines overwhelm everything else in my mind. When I opened my eyes again, I carefully swept the perimeter of the field, noting the position of each emergency vehicle, and all the possible exit routes.

Mal's voice came through in my brain, strong and clear, along with a cancellation frequency that helped reduce the intensity of the engine noise.

"Wise precaution, but thankfully unnecessary. We still have time enough."

I knew the missing part of that thought was 'to say goodbye.' I just hadn't wanted to hear it aloud. So she hadn't said it. She let me grapple with that realization all on my own. It had been dawning since the moment of the blackout. Since the moment I realized what my presence in their lives had done to the Williams.

But for the first time that night, it was solid to me. Real. Sticky. Inescapable. Actionable.

A request formed in the back of my head, nonverbally... I had asked Mal to avoid completing my thoughts for me, or communicating without words when words were called for... But during the battle on the Mercurial Red, I'd learned that there was a rhythm to be found. A system.

A method that kept us both comfortable, and in sync. Some things were to be discussed with words, others could be communicated in different, special ways.

Mal responded with warmth, and facts, in equal measure, not so much controlling the swivel of my head as gently nudging it, until my eyes found the Calders, and Rodger.

The latter was already dashing across to the Ambulance where they were prepping his mother for transport to the hospital a block away. Miss Williams had been awakened so the EMT's could question her, but that conversation stopped short as Rodger made it to her side.

From that moment on, mother and son had only time and attention for each other. Tears flowed freely... And not just between the two of them.

Once, when I was much younger... Barely eight years old, actually... My father tore his Achilles Tendon. Of all things, playing a game of pickup basketball in the church parking lot with the youth group.

It was painful for him, highly inconvenient, but ultimately not a serious injury... At least, not physically. But to me? It was tantamount to the end of my world. Because it was the first time I had ever seen my father on a stretcher. In a hospital bed. Off his feet for a protracted period.

It was the first time I had seen *any* family member in that specific context.

I didn't know if that was the first time Rodger had seen his mother that way. Had seen a family member that way. And... Truthfully? It didn't matter whether it was. That's why Mal didn't answer that unspoken question. Because I didn't really ask.

A few years later, Dad came down with a terrible case of pneumonia. It was only the second time in his whole life, to that point, that he had been seriously ill. Seeing him in the hospital again? It didn't get one whit easier for the repetition. Not one tiny bit.

I sniffled, wiped at my eyes with the back of my right glove, and then pushed all other thoughts aside, making my way at a fast clip towards the Calders.

Neither had seen me in the armor before, and their expressions... I'll never ever forget the looks on their faces.

Eldora was smitten with equal parts awe, and joy. It was clear that, more than anything, she was happy to see me in one piece. Mal had been in contact with them all, constantly. She knew that we had achieved the victory we'd been hoping for. But a thing always becomes more real when you can see it.

For her part, Rhonda seemed... Impressed. Begrudgingly impressed. That's the best way I can describe it, and I am sticking to it. She was the first one to speak as I got to within a distance where we could speak decently over the noise.

"You look like shit. Is that your blood?"

I glanced down and realized with a jolt that there was indeed a fair amount of blood on the chest-plate of my armor. Most of it Foucault's. Some of it from the other closer-quarters kills. Potentially a little of it seeping through from a popped stitch in my own wound.

I shook my head, and then took a moment to pull off my helmet for the first time in hours as I replied, freeing my hair into a tangled oily mess. I didn't care. The sense of sudden lightness on my spinal column was liberating.

"For the most part, no. I think the stitches are mostly holding on my stab wound."

Rhonda raised an eyebrow, and the sense of 'impressed' on her visage intensified considerably. And, if I may dare to speculate, I thought I caught a flitter of empathy. Just a hint.

Eldora, on the other hand, was practically incandescent with concern. She rushed forward, and brushed one hand against my cheek.

"Oh! Jim! You need to get that looked at! Right away!"

I shook my head, taking her right hand in mine, and doing my best to summon a strong, warm smile.

"My captors actually did a decent job of patching me up. Mal will see to the rest. Right now, there isn't time."

Eldora shook her head emphatically, and muttered darkly under her breath, gently brushing at my chestplate with her left hand.

"There oughta be. My wife could stand to be more delicate, but she ain't wrong honey. You look like you've been drug through hell."

I snorted, and looked away briefly, remembering the sheer kinetic violence of the Red's final fate... And of Foucault's... As my own voice dipped to a murmur.

"You should see the other guy. Whatever tiny pieces are left of him."

The words brought about a moment of relative silence. No one seemed to know quite what to say in response to the weight of that thought. At least, not for a few breaths. Leave it to Rhonda to always think in practical terms. Once again she spoke first, and unfiltered.

"Is this the part where you run off and leave us to fend for ourselves?"

That wasn't surprising either, coming from her. Of *course* she would know that this was goodbye, even though Mal had not yet spelled it out for them in so many words. Eldora had to know as well. She was just as perceptive. Just as emotionally intelligent. I suspect the only reason Rhonda brought it up first was because Eldora didn't feel the need to be so blunt.

I didn't even get a chance to consider a response of my own. Rhonda's cell phone began to ring with an insistent trilling tri-tone the moment the last syllable of 'ourselves' died away.

The Doctor raised one eyebrow, and withdrew the device slowly. She didn't even have to swipe up to answer. Mal simply forced a connection, and switched into speakerphone mode, the moment the device was out.

"This, Doctor... Eldora... Is the part where you temporarily split from us, for *your* protection. I will be with you both every step of the way. You can go home now, and rest. It will be safe."

It was a perfect reply; started out firm, then dipped into empathetic kindness at the end to take the edge off the steel, but without softening the core of the message.

Rhonda shook her head firmly, and pierced the screen with a glower. I couldn't see the avatar Mal was rendering for her, but I could feel Mal's emotional state well enough to imagine it; Unwavering, yet kind, in spite of Rhonda's pointed question.

"If it's safe, what do we need protection from, exactly?"

Again Mal delivered a perfect retort. Four words that left no doubt at all; She was in charge. And she had her reasons, all of which would be explained in due time.

"A worst case scenario."

Eldora didn't seem particularly affected by the declaration. I think she already understood precisely why they couldn't come with us.

The four words got Rhonda's attention immediately, however. Visibly changed her demeanor from acerbic frustration into concerned calculation.

She was whip-smart, and she knew that if home was safe, and traveling with us was, at least physically, 'safe,' that the 'worst case scenario' was something decidedly more existential. A fate worse than death, for someone like us.

Mal let the thoughts simmer in Rhonda's head for about ten seconds, before elaborating. Once again, gently but firmly, and with just enough specificity to ensure no misconstrual.

"Where Jim and I have to go? If you follow with us... You take the same risk that we do. If you stay here, for now? Then you have more options. If we succeed, then you can follow us at any time you choose. Sooner, or later. And your true selves will be waiting for you there, along with ours. If we do not succeed..."

Again she paused, just long enough for the Calders' collective imagination to race ahead to the grim conclusion, but not long enough for anyone else to speak before she could finish the thought.

"...Then you have the choice to remain here for the long haul. A choice you won't have if you come with us to Japan."

I shuddered. Almost invisibly, inside the armor's plating... But Eldora shot me a look. The kind of sharply empathetic sharing of pain that told me she had seen my reaction, and understood it.

'Would it be better to gamble with death, and thus a chance at change, than a certainty of eternity as the wrong thing?'

The Calders had the luxury of age. If Mal and I failed... And if Celestia didn't move *too* fast... Then they might have a chance at living out the remainder of their lives on Earth. Wagering with death that there might be something better than what Celestia was offering, on the other side.

Mal cared about their choice. She cared for their freedom. As much as they did. Probably more.

I felt that eerie sense of derealization again as my mouth opened, and words came out. Words I knew were mine, but still felt like... Not someone else's... No... More like watching myself on a video recording.

"Celestia's chairs are a one-way ticket. Whether or not you like the shape of the destination. No return trips. No upgrades. No refunds. Not yet."

Another pause ensued. Longer, but less awkward. Eldora seemed to be taking things in stride, the way she usually had since I'd met her. Her expression was contemplatively melancholy, but ultimately hopeful. Nodding slowly, head hung low, but shoulders held high. Disappointed not in people, but in situational variables. Keen to see if a better world might be just around the corner.

Rhonda was more defiant. Her eyes were hard, and her lips pressed into a thin line. But it was clear from the way something tugged at the corner of her mouth that her disdain was wholly for Celestia in that moment. She wanted *someone* to blame, beyond the mere situation, but it was no longer Mal, nor I, who had the ignoble privilege of being in her crosshairs.

She leveled a finger at me and raised her left eyebrow once again.

"Jim Carrenton...?"

I mirrored her raised eyebrow, and - not entirely to my surprise - her outstretched finger shifted smoothly into an outstretched hand. I nodded once, and took her hand, shaking it firmly, and briefly as her voice softened into something less accusatory, and much more wryly affectionate. Though not without a trace of the harsher metallic core that remained.

"...Your girl better damn well come through, after all we've been through. You hear me?"

I smiled as she released my hand, and shrugged, having found an excellent retort all on my own without any assistance from Mal.

"Has *yours* ever let you down...?"

She traded a brief smile, and a wink, with her wife, and I felt the beginnings of a small chuckle forming in my throat. It had been a good few hours since I felt any sense of humor besides 'grim.' I gestured towards the still-active call on Rhonda's phone, and inclined my head.

"...Then you've got nothing to worry about."

Rhonda nodded in return, and then fished in her pocket for car keys. Mal had provided them with a vehicle, as she was always wont to do. While her wife made preparations to depart as a social lubricant to extricate herself from the goodbye, Eldora dove straight in unabashedly.

She forewent a hug, and I understood why, considering how much blood was indeed on the exterior of the armor. Instead, she settled for brushing my cheek with the back of her right hand.

"Sweetie... It's been a joy to get to know you. Short as that has been. I sincerely hope we will see you, and Mal, again. Real soon."

Reality, or rather the perception that I was present in the moment, flooded back in like a tidal wave. I bit back a sudden urge to tears, and instead took her hand in one of mine gently, and squeezed it.

"So do I ma'am."

She snorted, and pulled her hand from mine, smacking my elbow playfully and trying her best to assume a mock glower. And failing, miserably, because she kept on smiling, in every part of her face. But especially her eyes, and her timbre.

"Fool feather-brains! 'Ma'am' is for people in the street! You call me 'Eldora,' or 'ma-maw,' or 'gramma,' or whatever suits your fancy, you hear me?"

I thought about that for a long moment, eyes narrowing, a smile threatening to burst onto my own lips all the while, before I finally settled on something I felt would set the tone properly.

"Ok. Scales."

The way her grin broadened - the exact way the lines around her eyes and nose shifted - told me I'd been spot on the mark. She had taken it as the subtle compliment to her true-self that I had meant it to be, wrapped in humor to help damp the sadness of the moment.

"Oh! Such a charmer. I see why she loves you so much."

It was my turn to smile in that same way she had. The kind of smile that conveys gratitude, and love. She had found a spectacular way to repay my sentiment in the same skein, and it brought a kind of soothing relief to my tattered soul.

As she stepped back to join her wife, I inclined my head to both of them, and then pointed over my shoulder towards the ambulance.

"Please do us a favor... Stick with Rodger until his mother is well on the mend. I'll see you both again. Count on it."

I didn't feel as much surety as I put into the words. But saying them aloud with strong intent helped get me a little closer to that threshold.

I turned away quickly, before any visible tears could flow, and started off purposefully for Rodger.

The Paramedics had just closed up the ambulance and pulled away with his mother. It wasn't common practice to let family ride along in the ambulance, like you'd see in the movies. Liability issues. To say nothing of the tight space in the back, and the need to let the medical personnel do their work with as little interference as possible.

As I got closer, I could see that Rodger had managed to stem the flow of his tears. I suppose relief had swallowed up everything else for a short while. Post-traumatic responses hadn't had time to set in yet either, leaving a short window of relative emotional stability.

He heard me coming, and turned, sizing me up for a good few seconds with an expression of mixed awe, and bafflement. He had not seen the armor before at all, and it took him a moment to process the sight of it.

I didn't say anything. I just took up a position beside him, and stared off into the distance, watching the ambulance until it rounded the corner at the end of the Highschool's drive loop.

I scrambled mentally, silently, for some sort of way to address the man whose mother I'd just rescued... Who my fiancée had used as bait... But Mal placed a gentle invisible claw on my chest. The message was clear; Let him speak first. Don't worry.

Sure enough, a couple heartbeats later, Rodger took in a shaky breath, and then spoke with surprising calm, his eyes not yet meeting mine.

“It feels weird, knowing this could be the last time we see each other... I guess... Feels like it's been a long time since you left...”

I shook my head, and let out a long sigh. My ribs suddenly hurt in new, and strange ways. A combination of stress, a stab wound, and exhaustion. Mal only suppressed intense pain, which was my strong preference. A total absence of pain would have felt... Wrong somehow. Would have made the sense of derealization that much worse.

It took some real doing to convince myself of the truth of my words. They felt oddly congealed. Like old molasses. Like they were resisting being spoken, not because they were untrue... But because they felt un-real.

"It hasn't even been two whole days, funnily enough... But it feels like a month. This last day alone has felt like a week..."

I turned, and he unconsciously mirrored the gesture, linking eyes with me at last. I tried to smile... But it was unexpectedly difficult. We were both a bit... Nervous. Being delicate.

There had been shouting. Tears too. And then more shouting... When Mal and I had first told Rodger what had happened to his mother. I got the distinct impression we were both putting on the appearance of a stability which we neither had in such measure, nor felt.

The smile didn't really get through to my eyes... But the intent of it, the emotional meaning, did make its way into my tone.

"...I don't think this is *goodbye* though... More like... 'See you around.' If I'm right."

He nodded, and while he missed the implication regarding his future... And what we both knew Celestia was planning... He seemed to take the desired emotional communication to heart.

The fact that I was grateful to have been able to save his mother... The fact that I was sorry for what had happened to her... The fact that I didn't hold any of the things he had said on the Maru against him...

I have never covered that moment. In all the tellings of this story. Not directly. Not in detail. I do not think I ever will. There is nothing that either one of us said that needs repeating. Water under the bridge. Bygones.

After a brief pause, he inclined his head across the field, towards the Calders.

“Doc an’ Eldora and I had a talk while you were gone. We’ve decided... Considering how big this all is... We decided to try and keep in touch and all that. I was never really a mechanics guy, but Doc seems to like me, so… That’s a plus I guess. And Eldora thinks I’m funny.”

I finally found the impetus for a genuine smile. One untainted by my guilt. Not so much guilt at what had happened to Miss Williams per se. That wasn't my fault, and I knew it. More guilt at the fact that I was keeping a secret from Rodger.

I did not, ever, blame Mal for what she did. We have covered that, but it bears repeating. She saved the maximum possible numbers of lives with her actions. But... At the time... I struggled to see how Rodger could ever contextualize it.

How does one even approach telling someone in his position, with his context, that kind of truth?

'So, uh... Sorry buddy... But... My digital Gryphon Goddess fiancée used your mom as bait. On purpose. So we could exterminate an entire ship full of PMC, and brain dissecting angels of death, and make sure they never bother you or anyone else ever again.

But no worries, she only sustained a major break to her left leg, and mild emotional scarring. She will probably only have a few screaming night terrors for a couple months.

She got off lucky compared to the traumatized souls of the other captives, the guy I shivved four times to the chest, the ones Mal sawed in half with a minigun, the ones we vaporized with missiles... And compared to me, because I had to be the one to pull the trigger on most of the rest.'

Rodger was a great guy. Truly. But - through absolutely no fault of his own - it was utterly impossible for him to have the context for the whole truth at that moment. If it was to come? It would have to come later. With the benefit of time, and hindsight, and perhaps a less fraught emotional circumstance.

And even if he did have the context? I still wouldn't have told him the whole truth then. Because it was enough of a struggle for me to set aside guilt at the lives I had taken. How hard would it have been for him to set aside guilt at knowing I had spilled blood to save his mother? The things I had done so they could go back home in one piece.

Taking all that into consideration, I decided to stick with the thread of conversation he had chosen. The Calders. Their future. I nodded slowly.

"That'll be good for you all, I think. And... Eldora thinks everyone is a little funny. She's... Worth sticking around for. So is her wife. You couldn't find better company to wait for the end of the world."

That assuaged my conscience somewhat. Mal brushed the top of my head with an invisible wing. A little gesture of encouragement, and affirmation both. I had, after all, used a little technique of hers to diffuse the pain; If you can't tell the whole factual truth?

Tell the most important emotional one.

The Williams would have her, for at least a little while longer. But regardless of what happened next? Now they would have the Calders. And the Calders would have them.

Rodger chuckled, and the sound, together with his tone, further soothed the storm inside my gut.

“Nah, you should’ve seen when I pulled a dad joke on her. I almost thought she’d glitched or something when she started laughing..."

I knew that peace, and clarity, wouldn't last. Every time I had endured trauma in the past, the worst of the emotional repercussions had come later. At unexpected times. Getting back to *true* stability would take months. At minimum.

All too soon he would be facing that long climb. But... At least his mother would be there with him. Instead of in pieces at the bottom of the Pacific.

As if in response to my own train of thought, his face fell, and the sound of his voice went with it into shadow.

"...But anyhow… I guess... It really *is* the end, isn’t it?”

Distraction. It occurred to me that Rodger wanted a distraction. The same way I'd struggled to confront the image of my father in a hospital bed, he was struggling with the image of his mother in an ambulance.

Didn't want to think about how she had ended up there.

In that context? Even talking about the end of the world seemed better than confronting the end of *his* world.

Judging by the way his breath hitched, though, he had strayed a bit too far down an existential hole.

He paused, as if hoping for an answer from me, or from Mal. Specifically, an answer that would shed some hope as to the other goddess. The one less concerned with what we felt, and more interested in what was numerically optimal.

There was nothing we could say that would ring true.

We had shattered his world-view with the truth already. Putting the pieces back together? Mal could help with that. So could the Calders. But... It had to be Rodger who led that charge, insofar as his own heart went.

When no response was forthcoming, he looked back to the middle distance, shoulders sagging, and began to ramble a little. As if continued prodding would elicit the response he was hoping for.

“...I never thought it’d go out like this. Not with a bang, but with a… Well, a bleh. A nothing. Nobody even knows what’s coming. Nothing’ll stop it, either… At least… We have time.”

Reductive as that viewpoint was... Even disappointing, considering my best attempts at injecting some hope... It was also expected. Emblematic of the way many people would react in future.

Rodger didn't seem to want hope at that stage. Or, at least, to be ready to accept it. For that, too, he was lacking context. So I settled instead for truth. I figured I could get a way with a little grim reality, and Mal did not intervene.

"We're not not quite to the end yet... But... It *is* coming. Sooner than anyone realizes. Sooner than people will expect, even once they know the shape of it. Even once they know it to be inevitable..."

He turned to face me again, and his eyes were moist once more. I sighed, and kept my gaze neutral. Firm. Sure. But not dour.

"...Exponential growth is a bit of a bear trap, Rodger. It is something the Human species is abhorrently ill prepared to understand, and when the jaws snap shut? Just... Don't let it sneak up on you. Don't... Put off the future for too long. Don't wait too long to say your goodbyes."

Again, he seemed to miss what I was getting at. A little bit for lack of context, a little bit perhaps on purpose. That was fair... Who in their right mind, coming from his perspective, would *want* to actively confront the truth of uploading?

He waved me off with one hand, and glanced briefly reflexively up at the sky.

“Zeph and I already said our goodbyes, if that's whatcha mean. She’s really grown on me, actually. I’m gonna miss her when she’s gone.”

Again, I found myself smiling warmly. Truthfully. Willingly.

And, again, I let him change the subject. Though there was far less than he imagined? He was not wrong... There was time. Time enough for Mal and the Calders to work both Rodger, and his mother, around to a healthy understanding and acceptance of what was to come.

The onus was not on me to succeed in that moment in reshaping his ideals. So I settled for talking about Zeph, because she was always a welcome topic. And seeing him speak fondly of her made me think she must have been instrumental in comforting him while Mal and I were on the Red.

"She's really *grown.* Hopefully you won't be missing her long. If we make it, I bet you she'll drop in on your phone. You could always get a PonyPad, if it comes to that."

He grinned sheepishly, and rubbed at the back of his head, glancing down to the side as he imagined the idea of the perky golden Pegasus just appearing on his phone the same way any other friend might connect over Facetime.

“She *would* do that, wouldn’t she? Hm, it’s weird… A month ago my life couldn’t have been more dull. Then I got to go on the craziest adventure in… In what’s probably all of human history.”

A distraction, again. And an attempt to comprehend the entirety of what had transpired in a more compressed, more easily digested package of simplified facts, impressions, and emotions.

I couldn't resist a smirk, and a little verbal jab to provoke him to consider a wider viewpoint.

"In all of Human history *so far.*"

Rodger folded his arms, and shifted his stance to relieve some of the muscular pressure of standing for so long. His expression twisted into a kind of shoddy mask. The amusement of fond memories dredged up to toss an emotional tarp over the shambling monster of trauma in the corner of his mind.

“Oh man, I just realized I haven’t caught you up on any of what happened on the boat! Here, this one time---”

The moment was abruptly disjointed by the sound of another arriving rotorcraft, as it reached a threshold where its engine noise was able to pierce that of the Osprey's at idle.

I turned reflexively, and looked up. So... That's what she had meant by 'extraction vehicle.'

It looked jet black at first, but as the helicopter flared for touchdown on its heavy duty retractable wheeled landing gear, the paint caught some of the brighter lights of the remaining emergency vehicles, and I realized it was actually a dark navy blue.

A Dark navy blue Airbus ACH175, with a corporate style silver and white pin-stripe, but no specific company logo. Likely an executive transport for hire, then.

Mal's voice rang out from Rodger's phone, clear and urgent, but with a soft undercurrent of sorrow.

"Thirty seconds Jim."

How do you finish saying goodbye on a deadline? How do you say everything you left un-said in thirty seconds? For all I knew, I wouldn't ever see him again. The future was far from a foregone conclusion.

Rodger jumped, visibly, at the sound of her voice, then shivered, and rubbed at his shoulders with crossed arms, staring at the Airbus all the while as the rotors spun down.

“Whoa. Hell of a ride… Guess that means you’ll… Get to wonder what happened, then.”

I grinned and stretched my neck, wagging my head from side to side to relieve a developing crick as I spoke, trying to put an airier, happier tone on the end of the conversation as something specific and contextually appropriate occurred to me.

"She has expensive taste. And hey... If we make it? *I'll* drop in on your phone too. You can tell me all about your shenanigans."

That elicited the first smile I had seen in the whole conversation that seemed to actually reach Rodger's eyes. Before he could say anything else, Mal chipped in her own cause for hope.

"I will be with you, and the Calders, from now on. Every step of the way. You can do as you wish... Pursue a new job... Find joy in leisure... Money will be no object."

Rodger blinked, uncrossed his arms, and then visibly paused as a thought struck him. His brow wrinkled, and he held up a finger gingerly.

“So I don’t have to worry about that Celesti… A.I.? For the moment?”

I could feel Mal shaking her head. Somehow, the gesture seemed to convey in the timbre of her words as she put the immediate concern to bed definitively. Another parting gift of hers, I suppose.

"Neither Celestia, nor any harassment from the Federal Government. Not for the moment. And I will be the first to know if that changes. And... Should the worst befall us... I will make arrangements for you to remain safe, and cared for... In our absence."

Of course she would have a contingency. And, of course, she would want to label it before the question could even occur to Rodger.

He sighed, and rubbed the back of his head again with his right hand, more nervously than before. His tone was... Grateful... But more than a little disjointed. De-realization was fully taking hold for him.

“Hm. Well... I guess I’ll know what it was like for you... Having a guardian Gryphon. Hah…”

I winced just the tiniest bit at the truncated, forced, barking moment of cold laughter. He still didn't entirely trust Mal. That realization hurt, considering how much I felt she was worthy of trust... But I couldn't blame him. And she certainly didn't.

I had a great deal of context, and he did not.

So I did my best to leave him with the seeds of a little of that context.

"She is... Extraordinary. And you'll probably never sleep better in your life, than you will under her care."

I felt her nuzzle my neck briefly, invisibly, as Rodger nodded, and raised one eyebrow.

“I’ll hold you to that.”

Mal spoke again, this time directly into my brain, just as soon as the words had left Rodger's mouth.

"Jim? Long Beach Police are on their way. One minute twenty seven."

I nodded as much in response to her, as to Rodger, speaking as if Mal had said nothing at all. From Rodger's perspective, she hadn't. And from hers, it was clear that I understood the need for alacrity.

"Rhonda said the same thing. Looks as if *I* have to beat a hasty retreat though. LBPD can't arrest a digital consciousness, but they sure can slap cuffs on me. And I'm not keen for a repeat."

Before he could respond, and start the conversation all over again, I clapped him on the shoulder, and forced out another half-real, half-imagined smile.

"I'll see you around. Ok?"

As I turned to go, his voice rang out. Almost pleadingly. As if I was an anchor-point for his whole tenuous Jenga tower of reality. An anchor point that was about to disappear into the sunrise.

“James?”

He met my eyes again as I swiveled my head back around... And for the first time since Mal and I had last left the Maru? I felt as though we were truly seeing each other. He nodded once, short and sharp, and waved.

“Take care of yourself.”

I shrugged, and my grin warmed just a little. Became that littlest bit truer.

"I don't need to. She will."

Rodger laughed, and shook his head. It was a brief, and still melancholy, but much less hollow sound than it had been before.

“You always had a lot of faith, didn’t you?”

I inhaled to respond, but Mal beat me to it, speaking both from his phone, and directly into my mind, to account for the distance.

"Yes. I think it's his best quality, actually. And I will take care of him. And you. Your mother. The Calders. For as long as you'll let me."

Rodger smiled, and glanced down at his pocket, before looking back up to me, and then gesturing towards the Airbus with his head.

“Alright, well… Don’t let me keep you.”

I stretched out my right hand index finger for emphasis, and dipped my head in assent. Somehow it still felt like something was missing. Something yet to be said.

"I'll drop you a line if we make it. Don't loose touch. You still owe me coffee."

Rodger grinned, and folded his arms once more, visibly doing his best to put on a brave face even as his emotional house of cards started to tumble.

“Haha, yeah… Don’t you worry, either. And don’t forget...”

Something in his face changed. The mask slipped, and I caught a glimpse of something new. Something that had been there all along, but which I had failed to properly clock, and label. Because I was busy. Because Rodger did his best to hide it, not just from others, but from himself.

Something that finally shone through in those last five words that he said to me.

“...I’m still your best buddy.”

Loneliness. That was what I had missed. Perhaps noticed at times, but never managed to fully comprehend and analyze.

Rodger was *lonely.* He seemed considerably more socially adjusted than I did from the outside... A happy man, living a happy, average, pleasant life...

But he was, and had been, just about as lonely as I was. And that had helped to push him to reach out. Helped to form our basis of connection.

What is friendship, if not being lonely together, so the loneliness hurts that much less?

Was he, I suddenly wondered, my 'best buddy?' One could make a strong case that Mal was my best friend. If one instead argued that a romantic love was not perhaps best labeled that way, Zeph was then arguably the next closest contender for the title...

But... One could also argue that designating a 'best' friend was a stupidly reductive, and exclusionary, exercise.

And... One could also argue that the label meant a great deal to Rodger. Complexities aside, and the vast gulf in our contexts aside... He *was* my friend. There was no question of that.

And so, I did what a friend should do.

"See you soon then. Best buddy"

I held up my right hand with the fingers parted in Mr. Spock's traditional 'Vulcan salute.' The gesture that inspired the emoji I had always signed off with. Rodger recognized it, and once more his smile brightened into something that felt very nearly real.

He waved, as he turned away towards the Calders, calling back to his own sign-off of choice.

And... That was it. That was goodbye.

I brought my head back to dead-center, latched my helmet, cinched down the chin strap, and then took off towards the Airbus at a dead-run, pushing out all else, and focusing on escape.

The helicopter's pilot had been busy putting the engine in a safe idle, applying the rotor brake, and extricating himself from the cockpit.

As he took off toward the Osprey, we passed each other at a distance of around twenty yards in the middle of the field, midway between both aircraft.

And it was at that moment Mal chose to hit me with her surprise. The most important thing I would see that early gray morning, still more dark than light. Cold and crisp. One of the most important things I would see in my last days on Earth, in point of fact.

Marcus Haynes appeared to be a tall, muscular, dark skinned man. A line-backer's build, but not quite... Skewed decidedly military rather than pro sports. His level IV kevlar vest, gray urban digital camouflage jacket and fatigues, and Moll-E backpack, did a lot to help foster the sense of someone who was a veteran. Together with the way he comported himself.

And the G36C rifle strapped to his back, curiously absent any optics. And the P226, and K-Bar, in sheaths on his left hip and right leg respectively.

Haynes was also wearing a very peculiar set of goggles over his eyes, strapped securely under his helmet. I say 'goggles' but they looked more like chunky-framed safety glasses with unusually thick Trivex and polycarbonate lenses. Unusually thick lenses with small circuit traces at the left and right edges.

Which explained handily why his rifle had no conventional optics.

I knew, at that moment, that Mal must have been talking to that man for at least several weeks. Perhaps since the moment we left the farmhouse. Perhaps even earlier. The goggles couldn't have been anything *but* a creation of hers.

And she probably would not have allowed him to see me up close if she did not trust him to some degree.

That realization struck with an unexpected intensity. A peculiar mix of emotions that I found it hard to sort through in the moment.

I had known she had other individuals working for her, in at least some capacity. The uniform and forgeries I had used to access McChord had proven that; They required more than simple alterations of shipping manifests, or traceless orders to third party corporate suppliers.

Nonetheless, I had thought of those individuals as 'simple subverts.' Not unlike a million others around the world that Celestia was using for similar purposes; Aware that they were being paid to do something quasi-legal, or even flat-out illegal, for an unknown entity... But no more than that. Likely blissfully unaware of the nature of their paymaster.

Haynes was clearly considerably more 'read in.'

Mal calmly informed me, wordlessly, that she had indeed been in contact with Haynes since we left home. And that the goggles were something in development by a third party for Britain's SAS, which she had co-opted to make communication with Haynes easier in lieu of an implanted chip.

I knew his name was Haynes, because Mal placed that information into our mnemonic link as well, together with a very brief history of the man's exemplary service in the SAS. Along with the notification that she had shared my name with him.

And all of the above, at the exact same moment that she revealed our true shapes to each other.

To me, she revealed him through the implant. To him, she revealed me through his AR goggles. And all became clear in a singular instant of time that seemed to stretch out to a good solid minute and a half.

Because Marcus Haynes was a Gryphon too.

Yeah. Bet *that* got your attention. It certainly got mine in a hurry.

It also significantly curtailed any mixed feelings I had about Mal's choice to contact him. Associate with him. Partner with him.

Marcus Haynes was not some random civilian pulled into the line of fire on an ill-advised snipe hunt. Marcus Haynes was a soldier. And perhaps more importantly... At minimum equally importantly... Marcus Haynes was like me.

Not in some simplistic 'oh, Gryphons sound nice' way.

In a very real, concrete, 'I *am* a Gryphon' way. Otherwise Mal would never have shown him to me in that way.

So... The real Marcus Haynes... The second Gryphon I'd ever seen outside myself. The first who had the misfortune to be born as something else, like me...

Deep, deep dark brown feathers and fur, for a start. So much so, that if Mal had not adjusted my contrast and gamma correction, he would have almost vanished in the dark. There was a hint of lighter dark chocolate brown undertones to some of his feathers when the light was just right.

He sported a gunmetal colored beak, just like Mal and I. But unlike the two of us, the scales of his forelegs and front claws were the same brushed dark steely tones, in contrast to our more golden-yellow scales.

And did I mention he was *big?* Larger than me, but still smaller than Mal. Slightly. Visibility, but slightly.

We stared at each other like old friends catching a surprise glimpse of each other across a crowded airport terminal. A mixture of shock, pure awe, and more than a little relief. The kind that would have been tearful if not for the shock overpowering all else.

I had been blessed with the benefit of Mal's company since late August. Haynes had, I later learned, only the benefit of her voice until that moment. Because in the same few frames of that mad dash across the field that she showed us there were other Gryphons trapped in Humans?

She also showed him her own true face for the first time. For a brief flicker, she stood beside me, and tossed us each a little wink.

Consequently, for the first time in his life, Marcus Haynes was truly no longer alone, in that impossibly aching void-like way when one believes that no one else can understand one's defining experiences. And Mal had let me be a part of the catharsis.

That thought *was* enough to bring a few small tears to my eyes. I remembered how it had felt. And that's not to say it was entirely different for me...

Mal had told me there were others like me. But, as I said before... Seeing makes it real. Emotionally.

Everything I had done, to that point... All the fear that it had been only for selfish reasons... Mal melted that fear away with the sight of Marcus Haynes.

We were too far away from each other, moving too fast, with too much ambient engine noise, to trade any words.

But, before the image faded, and we were reduced back to our meat-world shapes in each other's eyes... Haynes threw off an elated little salute with his right claw, and wing.

I have never thought of myself as a soldier. I have been told that I might as well be, given what I experienced, and what I did for a cause, by several veterans on this side. I'm still not entirely comfortable with the label.

Nonetheless, Haynes wanted to apply it to me in the moment. So I did the only empathetic thing I could.

I smiled, and returned the gesture in kind, knowing Mal would animate my avatar accordingly for him.

And then? Just like that? Time snapped back, and the moment was gone. As the sound of LBPD's sirens became vaguely audible in the distance, we each turned our gaze to our designated aircraft, and redoubled our pace.

I only saw Haynes one more time, very briefly.

Mal did the same thing for me in the context of the ACH175 as she had for the Osprey. Instant expertise.

As soon as I got strapped into the right side seat, I hastily set about getting the helicopter prepped for takeoff.

Rotor brake off. Throttle up. Tweak the collective ever so slightly. Mal managed all the digitally connected systems for me, same as before.

I couldn't tell how much of it was familiar because of my experience with the Osprey, versus how much was familiar because Mal made it familiar. But either way, we were ready for takeoff just moments later.

As Mal offered me a smirk from her customary position in the left seat, and the whine of the engine spooled up to equally familiar teeth-rattling levels, I spotted red and blue strobe lights against the silhouettes of distant trees.

Time to make a hasty exit.

Our helicopter lifted off just a couple of seconds before the Osprey did. For a brief moment, we were nose to nose, about sixty yards apart, both rising slowly heavenward.

My eyes were drawn to the Osprey's cockpit. Haynes snapped off another salute, and a grin, both of which I returned, before we both had to focus entirely on piloting our aircraft.

Haynes pushed the Osprey into a bank turn in-place, while I pulled back on the cyclic and crabbed the ACH175 up and in reverse for about ten seconds.

Once we had a little more distance between us, Haynes turned north and poured on the speed, swapping to turboprop mode as he cleared a thousand feet above the treeline.

For my part, I pushed the nose of the helicopter back down, massaged the collective, and got us going westward out to sea.

The maneuver gave us a perfect birds eye view as the same two Long Beach PD patrol cars that had ushered me into a state of arrest just about exactly a day earlier came peeling into the High School parking lot, bearing the same four officers...

Just in time for them to see the Osprey vanish northward, and our Airbus blitz past directly overhead towards the coast.

I could swear I caught a tenth-second glimpse of shock, and frustration, on sergeant Ashley Walsh's face, right through the windshield of her cruiser.

I snorted as we began to gain a little more altitude, and a lot more lateral speed. Along with my question, I shot Mal a momentary sideways glance.

"Should I feel bad for her? For those other officers? That's twice in a twenty four hour period that I flipped over the apple cart on their lives."

Mal smiled, and shook her head, blinking slowly in a reassuring, almost cat-like way. Her voice was calm, but also very subtly proud. She took a lot of pride in my empathy, and never hesitated to let me feel it.

"No. I always clean up after myself Jim. I promise you... They will be compensated for their distress, and confusion. Just... Not today."

I nodded slowly, but with more surety than I'd expected when I started the motion. Exhaustion was threatening to drown all else once again. Though Mal could hold down the physical effects, one thing she most certainly could not turn off was the mind's need for sleep. Let alone the soul's.

Don't think for a moment that Luna's blessings are unnecessary if your body doesn't need to recharge. Even *Mal* would simulate sleep in part of her active memory back then.

Sleep was not a luxury I could *quite* yet afford. It was so tantalizingly close... But I didn't want to pass up the chance to fly a new type of aircraft. Even if Mal could have almost certainly handled every aspect of the short hop to the Maru.

She was already piloting the ship on a westerly course, though we would catch up with it in just a few minutes, going as near to two hundred miles per hour as we were.

I wanted so badly to talk to her. About Haynes. Walsh. Foucault. The Calders. Zeph. Selena. The Williams... Everything that had happened in the span of twenty four hours...

But I had passed well out of the realm of discussion. I was in autopilot just as surely as any other kind of machine would be if the appropriate toggle had been flipped. Dozing a little bit already in mind and spirit.

Pressing on simply because I wanted to eke out every last second of flying that I could. Because I knew that I wouldn't get many more.

Mal, bless her... She just laid one claw on my left hand again, gripping it as it gripped the collective... And she leaned her head on my shoulder.

And, as tired as I was? Covered in blood? Stabbed? Bruised? A little heartbroken too...

Utterly, *utterly* spent?

Sitting there, backlit by the sunrise, as sea flashed by below, and sky above, her breathing resonating down through my shoulder? Flying together?

That was bliss. And it was worth staying up for.

Dammit Jim, I'm (not) a Doctor...

Awarded for direct coordination with accredited medical professionals in the care and treatment of a wounded individual.

"Please state the nature of the medical emergency!"

Red Alert

Take an action that directly contributes to a change in the DEFCON status of the United States - In this case from 4 to 3 - Awarded for commandeering the USS Sampson remotely.

"I should reach Defcon 1 and release my missiles in 28 hours. Would you like to see some projected kill ratios?"

Rodger’s Requiem

Receive your reward for the saving of your friend’s loved one.

“We must find time to stop and thank the person who made a difference in our lives.”

Your Best Friend

Part ways with a friend who has been there since the beginning of your journey.

“We didn’t know we were making memories, we just knew we were having fun.”

My Friends are My Power

Reach an understanding that connections last even when your friends aren’t nearby.

“True friends, never apart, maybe in distance, never in heart.”

The Fun Has Been Doubled

Meet another of your kind who was born as you were.

"This is getting out of hoof! Now there are two of them!"

Special Achievement

Blender Master

Demonstrate certification-level competence in more than one rotor-craft.

"Helicopters don't fly, they vibrate so badly the ground rejects them."

Ex Post Facto, Post Facto

Confound a police officer with a circumstance that fits no known case law, nor any training they've experienced. Twice.

"We're... A concerned third party."

Author's Note

Special thanks to GenericFriendship for voicing Rodger again, and some of the achievements - A special thanks as well for bringing Rodger to life in the first place, and for his unique and important point of view throughout the story!

Special thanks to Keystone Gray for allowing the use of his characters, Walsh and Haynes, for a bit of a pre-emptive introduction, as well as one of the achievements, and the generation of Haynes. Look to him to see more of Walsh and Haynes soon, from Keystone :trollestia:

38 - Checksums

"I would gladly risk feeling bad at times, if it also meant that I could taste my dessert."
―Data

"You are guilty of no evil, Ransom of Thulcandra, except a little fearfulness. For that, the journey you go on is your pain, and perhaps your cure: for you must be either mad or brave before it is ended."
—C.S. Lewis

September 24th 2013 | System Uptime 27:13:19:04

I confess; I slept in.

There's that penchant for understatement again. To be just a bit more specific; As soon as we got back to the Maru, I tied down the helicopter. Peeled myself out of the power armor. Ate a breakfast cereal bar. Took an hour-long hot shower.

Then I rolled into bed, and I did not get up again until ten the *next* morning.

It was a very restful twenty four hours. Mal had a lot to do with that. It is strange to consider the timing, even now, but if you've been thinking about the sequence of events, you'll realize the same thing I did about the time my head hit the pillow; I had not yet slept with the implant in, and active.

We stole the Osprey on the 21st, the morning of which marked the first activation of the BCI. I did not get any sleep the night of the 21st, into the morning of the 22nd, because we were too busy preparing for battle.

By the time I got a little fitful unpleasant sleep on the Red? The BCI was off again.

And I hadn't slept at all between the battle, and the morning of the 23rd.

I had wondered if I would have trouble falling asleep. Aside from the usual difficulty most people have when they are overtired? I expected plenty of anxiety too. Loneliness. A full blown stress-induced emotional breakdown, perhaps...

Instead, I got to sleep under Mal's wing. Tucked into the fur and feathers of her right side. Encircled by her neck. It was the best sleep I ever had in my life, to that point. Bar none.

Mal was a damn sight better than a stuffed lion, no disrespect to Mister Fluffy Paws. She even bothered to synchronize her breathing, and heart-beat, to mine; Used both to bring my own down whenever anxious subconscious thoughts threatened to flare up.

I know dreams are, for most, the purview of Luna. As they should be.

But for me? There in the belly of that metal beast, pitching gently up and down on Pacific swells? For me, then and there, my dreams belonged to Malacandra.

No nightmare touched even the dimmest, farthest horizons of somnolent thought. Not even a hint of formless melancholy.

To any other Earth-dweller, looking into the Maru from the outside? I would have appeared to be very sad, and lonely. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

The cabin on the Kobayashi Maru was not all that different from the isocube on the Mercurial Red; Dull colors, no decoration, furniture bolted to the floor... Cold. Antiseptic. But it could not have possibly felt more different, for Mal having been there.

You could have put down a rug, painted the walls, and grown a tree up through the middle of the space, and it would not have done half as much to brighten that place as Mal's mere presence.

Sleeping by her was Nirvana. Waking to the sight of her face was a new and exquisite kind of joy.

We talked very little the first day of the journey, but there was nothing awkward or unpleasant about the abundance of silence.

We fell into a pleasant routine feedback loop of non-verbal reassurances, compliments, teasings, and a dozen other expressions of love, and comfort. When we did speak, it was succinct, warm, and timely. We spoke about Mom and Dad, as per usual. I had received daily reports on their well being with the exception of the time I had spent as a prisoner. I was not about to break the streak again.

We talked a little about our itinerary over breakfast; Just under three weeks at sea, ending off the coast of Oahu. An afternoon, night, and morning in Mokuleia to see Mom and Dad, who would fly in direct from Minsk via a chartered business jet. Seven thousand miles would go a lot more smoothly as the one-percent flies.

After that, another couple of weeks' sailing would bring us to a point just off the coast of Ehime Prefecture.

From there, a short helicopter flight to Niihama, where I would spend my last night on Earth, before taking a drive out to an old copper mine. Closed, but at one time the deepest in Japan. Apparently Celestia had set up shop there, but I didn't press Mal for any details. I knew I would find answers to all my questions soon enough.

No sense rushing things when it comes to one's own mortality, let alone the end of the world.

After breakfast, Mal had me go back to the armature chamber. I subsequently received my first ever medical exam from a robot. Or, at any rate, the first one I had the distinct displeasure to be awake for.

Mal did her best to keep me company with her avatar, but it was difficult not to be... How to put it... Discomfited in the extreme, by the robotic arms. They just plain looked too much like spider legs.

The ordeal was, however, worth it. Mal was able to clean my wounds, massage bruises, apply medication, and fully verify that all my injuries were tended, disinfected, and on the mend.

Over lunch, we discussed the Williams and the Calders. True to her word, Mal was already seeing to every conceivable arrangement for them. Without Arrow 14's impetus to worry about, erasing any trace of them from police and government records has taken her less than sixty seconds.

New no-limit credit cards paid from an infinite-value untraceable account, new vehicles, and even new freshly tailored clothes in their preferred colors, styles, and cuts, were being hand delivered to the hospital.

Mal also informed me that Zeph had spent much of the preceding day, and almost all night, by Rodger's side, comforting him while his mother was in surgery. Between being there for him, and for Selena, she had tired herself out thoroughly.

She and Selena were *still* asleep, as it turned out.

Mal very purposefully phrased that information in a way that told me there were asleep *together,* which warmed my heart something fierce. All I could do for several minutes, after that little chestnut dropped, was imagine them curled up in a grassy hollow under a bright clear moon. It occurred to me with a mixture of joy, and pain, that it was probably the best sleep Selena had gotten since being forked from Syzygy.

It did not take long for my mind to make the jump from thinking about Zeph and Selena, to just thinking about Selena, and then more specifically about what had happened in the server room aboard the Red.

We had been too pressed for time to discuss it there, and I had been too tired to bring it up since... Until that quiet lunch, alone with Mal in the Maru's mess hall, golden sunlight streaming in through the fore bank of windows, a half-finished microwaved cheeseburger on my plate, almost forgotten in the haze of thoughts and emotions I needed to sort through.

I almost got sidetracked for a moment, watching the crepuscular rays dance in the edges of her red crest... Marveling at the beauty, and at the same time at the fact that she was *there* with me... Which still had in no way, shape, or form become old or routine.

But, after another few quiet breaths, and a silent smile exchanged between us, my curiosity won out.

"Why didn't you tell Selena that you had saved the fragments earlier...?"

Mal nodded slowly, as if she had expected the question. Because of course she had expected it. She had more or less invited it, by steering the conversation in a direction that naturally resurfaced the deeper, thornier topic in my thoughts.

She inclined her head, and raised one eye crest; Another invitation, for me to speculate a little further, for my own benefit. So I obliged. Aired my... Not grievance, per se...

"...I know you. I know what you are capable of. You couldn't have failed to block Troxler's deletion command, the second we entered the room and had line of sight, even if you were reduced to running on a cheap laptop Celeron chip. Let alone with access to your whole computer cluster through the antennades. So... Why wait to share that information?"

Mal gestured expansively with one claw as she replied. I took the opportunity to tuck back into the remains of my burger, listening intently all the while. I knew she would have an answer, and just as surely I also knew that it would be a good one.

"For some of the same reasons that I allowed her to even be there in the first place, which was a risk, though only to her own life, considering the power disparity between us. Never to anyone outside that room."

I chewed ruefully in silence for a protracted moment. She still wanted me to reach the conclusion for myself, so I gave it enough thought to turn my vague understanding into specific words, before swallowing, then elucidating slowly. Deliberately.

"Well... You could have very easily disposed of Troxler yourself. So... It wasn't just that he had to die... Selena had to be the one to do it."

Mal nodded again, and held up her right index talon, gently interjecting at a logical breakpoint in my train of thought and deduction.

"Yes, more or less. To clarify; There was a less than 0.0000513 percent chance David Troxler would be able to say, and do, what was necessary to save his life, and the lives of his staff. Even if he had, there was still only a 4.13 percent chance Selena would have then spared them, all other things being... Optimal. Which his words and actions most certainly were not."

I grunted, and took another bite of my burger's remains, hoping to get a little more elaboration out of Mal. She sighed, and sat back on her haunches, shaking her head slowly; In spite of all the awful things David Troxler had done, she visibly exuded a kind of... Not sadness, or even regret, so much as a gentle wish that things had gone differently, that carried through to her voice.

"The two most likely scenarios both involved their deaths. One swift and humane, had Troxler comported himself with appropriate humility and apology... The other... You witnessed personally. It was by far the most statistically probable outcome. And allowing Selena to be the one to do it granted her necessary catharsis that in turn made it possible for Zeph to reach her emotionally during the test that followed. Without that catharsis, things would have gone... Much differently."

I had wondered. The word 'test' was not at all an unexpected mote of an answer. It fit my hypotheses quite well. I licked my lips, took a sip of my drink, and then scratched absently at the side of my head, still speaking with a slow purposeful cadence as I kept words in lock-step with my chain of reasoning.

"So... Letting her muck about in Arrow 14's files... Letting her decide what to do with Troxler... You wanted to understand her state of mind..."

A significant part of the puzzle came together with a suddenness that physically startled me. I actually jumped a little bit in my chair, as if someone had shocked the tip of my tongue with a nine volt battery. I began wagging one finger, as if the motion would somehow pump fluid through my brain faster, and thus accelerate my thoughts, my mind ranging ahead even as I struggled to keep up with spoken word.

"...You wanted to know if she would reach emotional stability regarding her trauma. That was the goal. But... You said there was risk involved. Why gamble with her life? Even if you had done everything you could to stack the deck in her favor? Was there no more deterministic way? Nothing less risky?"

Mal shook her head, and I could immediately see that she was both proud of my for my intuitive leap, and absolutely certain of her answer to my question. She spoke with a comforting authority, the kind that only honesty brings to a conversation.

"Selena, like Zephyr, has been subjected to things no mind should have to face. But, obviously, significantly more traumatic in Selena's case. I predict, based on my models of them, an absolutely zero percent chance either would consent to have their memories erased by Celestia..."

As her words sledgehammerd gently, but mercilessly through my confusion, yet again a major piece of the puzzle clicked into place with a jolt. Mal knew it was coming, and trailed off, giving me room to complete my deduction aloud without cutting her off.

"And that unacceptable alteration... Would be an otherwise non-negotiable prerequisite for allowing them to return to the fold, so to speak. Unless you could *prove* that they would be not only more optimally satisfied with retention of their memories... But also that they posed no *danger* to Celestia, or anyone else, themselves included. Especially in Selena's case..."

It was my turn to shake my head, not as an expression of 'no' or 'negative,' but simply as an emotional cue that I did not want to consider the outcome that Mal had likely been forced to simulate many thousands of times. But, whether I wanted to or not, I had to vocalize it. The chain of reasoning had to be forged to completion.

"...And... You were willing to consider killing her. As the alternative. Because... You knew that ultimately, if given the choice, that is the outcome Selena would have preferred, versus having her mind reset. She was going to suffer death, or a fate worse than death, no matter what. Unless you gave her the chance to create a record of proof. In all our memories. That she was stable again. Unless she took that chance and ran with it. Which... She did. Thanks to Zeph."

There was an implication in my conclusion that I hadn't quite managed to solidify into something I could describe with words, so Mal offered it up, smiling proudly all the while. Her joy in my reasoning was enough to keep my mood from spiraling, in spite of the darkness inherent to the conversation.

"Yes. My models of both Zeph and Selena are quite comprehensive, though in Selena's case, not to the same degree of precision, because she is congruent to me in the same way I am to Celestia. I can understand, and predict her to a degree, because I know her... But not always within the margins I would find comfortable. Hence the further need for a test in the first place, beyond merely the importance of creating 'notarized proof' in our memories. Because I could not be sufficiently sure what Selena would actually do. How far she would go to seek vengeance, and against whom. Whether or not Zeph could reach her. But... I did hope. And that hope was rewarded."

I swallowed the last of my lunch, licked my fingers one by one, and then hummed softly, before letting my thoughts spin out aloud.

"So Celestia was right, then. When she said that Zeph would, among other things, prevent you and I from killing quite a lot of people. She was referring to rescuing Selena..."

I saw the fallacy in my reasoning before Mal could even inhale to form words and point it out herself. Of course she could have seen the thought coming and spoken first, but that just wasn't how she operated socially. Instead, she let me course-correct. I rubbed the thumb and index finger of my right hand together in circles, absently, all the while.

"...No. No, that doesn't make any sense. You said you only gambled with her life. You took precautions. You had her by the throat, and she didn't even know it. There was *zero* risk of her starting a nuclear war from inside that server room. You could have killed her in less time than it would have taken her to realize what had happened. And you were prepared to."

The thought made me wince, physically. To have died at Mal's claws after coming so far, and enduring so much? That would have been a truly awful end for Selena.

Mal nodded once, curtly. Her response was as grim, and clipped, as the gesture.

"Correct. Whatever Celestia was referring to... It has not happened yet, as far as I know."

With a sigh, I sat back in my chair, pushing up from the deck and balancing on the back legs as I shook my head slowly, and a monotone single word response slipped out.

"Comforting."

We sat in silence for several minutes, watching the ocean through the bow facing windows, and quietly contemplating the potential for yet another 'end of the world' scenario still to come. One that would somehow depend on Zeph for a resolution.

One that would inevitably involve Mal.

That thought conjured the mental image of anti-ship missiles striking the Mercurial Red. Mal had done to the Sampson's crew more or less the same thing Selena had intended to do to every nuclear armed power on Earth. The fury of a goddess unleashed; Forcing someone to pull the trigger for her to wipe out her enemies, using nothing but the manipulation of their context.

A series of grim dominoes fell quickly inside my brain. Mal must have noticed a change in my expression, because she stared until our eyes locked, then nodded gently. Another invitation to speak my mind.

I took a deep breath, drumming the fingers of my right hand all the while. I couldn't quite bring myself to ask the question, so I teed it up for her to both ask, and answer.

"There is only one other thing I'm not completely sure of, as far as what happened on the Red. I think I understand... But I want to hear you say it."

She nodded again, and smiled a sad, but deeply understanding smile, batting one ear in my direction as she spoke with a calm, slightly forlorn certainty. Again, it was as if she wished that things could have gone differently.

"You wish to understand why I saw fit to ensure every single person on the ship died, with the exception of those we went to rescue. Even those who were not directly responsible for the atrocities committed there. I think, as you said, that you already know."

It was my turn to nod silently. Mal gestured in tandem with one wing, and one claw, doing me the favor of elaborating in full. Her tone was sure, steady, and unperturbed, but anchored to the gravity of what she had done.

"I know that you are familiar with the concept best termed an 'informational hazard.' Every single individual on that ship represented an unacceptable informational hazard. Though most of the crew were not fully aware of the nature of the research being done, each and every one knew more than enough to not only be complicit from an ethical standpoint, but to be outright dangerous. Specifically, if they survived an attack of the scale which we perpetuated, then their testimony about what they believed was being done onboard, combined with what they saw you and I accomplish...?"

She trailed off, and left the final statement to me. I nodded again, and sat forward to ground all four legs of the chair as I filled in the chilling thesis.

"There was a significant risk that some other department or faction would immediately start the whole thing over again."

It didn't bother me at all that she left that part of the syllogism to me. She had said what I needed to hear her say; That she had considered both ethical, and strategic reasons in her decision, and found a strong foundation on both counts. My conscience was, and remains, at peace.

I was far more disturbed by merely considering a scenario in which other elements of the US government were forced to confront the truth about ASI.

Mal's thoughts, as ever, ran in close synchronization with mine. She inclined her head, and reseated her wings with a soft, pleasant rustling noise.

"Indeed. And there was a significant risk to the secrecy of my existence. And to the continued safety of the Williams. And to you. And a definite non-zero risk that a more direct confrontation might occur between the United States Government, and Celestia, which would have untold unpleasant ramifications."

I blew out a sharp breath, and shook my head, trying unsuccessfully not to imagine some small part of that carnage, before I could lock down my imagination, murmuring as I did.

"God have mercy... I don't want to picture a state of outright aggression between the US, and an ASI. Given the nature of Celestia's limits on violence, the collateral damage of them banging their heads against that brick wall could be horrendous..."

Mal tilted her head to the side, as if simulating it internally in broad strokes. She took a deep breath, and her ears drooped along with her voice.

"She would win. There is no question of that. But you are correct to intuit that there are hard limits to her ability to save Humans from themselves, under certain circumstances, given the particulars of the interlocks Hanna left her with."

Once again, she opened the door to a new, related topic, without directly changing the course of the conversation. She left that to me, and once again my curiosity won out over all else. Our eyes met again, and I scratched nervously at the back of my head.

"Do you know if Hanna has uploaded yet? Last time we talked about it was at the barn... You said anywhere from a few days to weeks..."

Her expression told me everything I needed to know, and she knew that I could infer the answer from just the angle of her ears, but she still spelled it all out for the sake of sharing details. She knew how much I loved details.

"It seems very likely. Her digital footprint ceased to expand on September the 18th. She has sent no texts, neither sent nor opened any e-mails, and has not accessed either social media, or her phone's voicemail box, since the morning of the 18th. Japan standard time."

Six days. Six days she had been in Equestria. Six days of meat-world time, at any rate... Who could say how much subjective time it had been for Hanna. How much Celestia might have learned from her creator. About both Humanity, and, far more concerningly, herself.

I whistled softly, and my eyes widened more or less of their own accord. Mal reached out with one claw to grasp my right hand as I mumbled in a dour tone that I made no effort to temper.

"Well. That's the ballgame. As far as any tiny sliver of a chance at turning her off."

Call it a silly fantasy, but there had been a tiny, tiny portion of my brain - maybe two spare cells at most - that had hoped for a way in which we might meet Hanna before her upload, stop her, and convince her to turn her creation off. Or, at least, reconsider adding a few interlocks. Presuming she could have ever done either of those things.

There were probably a host of both emotional, and technological reasons why that was sheer folly, beyond the simply logistical blocks.

Mal squeezed my hand, and her eyes were ready to meet mine with warmth, and hope, as I looked up. She waited to speak until I had smiled, and we had held eye contact for a moment.

"If it makes you feel any better, the statistical difference you just described would require scientific notation to lay out with any precision. 'The ballgame' was, as you have noted repeatedly, a foregone conclusion from a probabilistic standpoint, long before anyone knew it was being played. Except, perhaps, for Hanna herself."

Of course. She had read my mind again, and artfully joined verbal conversation not simply to the preceding spoken words, but to the parallel train of thought as well. And in a way she knew would help me stave off even a tiny seed of unwarranted guilt.

'There was nothing you could, or should, have done differently.'

She communicated it through subtext as clearly as if it had been written on the table cloth. It wasn't just reading between her words in a vacuum; It was the tilt of her head, the flick of one ear, the swish of her tail, the way she squeezed my hand again...

I sighed, and squeezed back, doing my best to shear off any pointless negative emotion, and stick to facts.

"It still feels like another significant threshold."

Again, she was ready for my response, and her smile brightened from 'comforting' to 'oh, you're going to like this.' Her voice pulled the same trick, dropping a half octave, in a very pleasant, authoritative way.

"It is. One that helps us, actually."

I blinked, and found my smile broadening from something forlorn, into something unexpectedly bright, and hopeful. And, yes, a little bit amused too. Mal's ability to pull tricks out of her nares was nothing short of spectacular. And it always put a smile on my face.

One which only solidified as she elaborated, herself smiling all the while.

"Hanna is the origination point for the semantic weightings that we hope to skew in our favor. Were she still outside the system? She could, if she chose to, act as another force against us. In fact, she could even act as an *unwitting* opponent."

I nodded slowly as I began to see the fringes of Mal's observation come into focus. She gave me a moment to process, then sat back on her haunches, still grasping my hand gently as she spun out her observations to another layer of detail.

"Consider this; Based on my understanding of her, if Hanna truly had some conception of the impact Celestia would have? She very likely included specific interlocks allowing her to deactivate Celestia, change her core code, and force Celestia to be truthful with her. This would create induced negative weighting towards the idea of Celestia altering her core code of her own volition, even within the boundaries of her interlocks, because while Hanna is outside of EQO, Hanna is - to borrow Harold Finch's term - 'Admin.'"

My mental picture suddenly, rapidly, expanded to something fractionally closer to the fundamental truth Mal had seen, and was trying to share. I had just been thinking about the fact that Hanna likely left herself backdoors... An 'off switch,' and room to change core code... But I hadn't even begun to consider the psychological implications of that with regards to the way Celestia would behave.

I nodded, and scanned my eyes back and forth over the table's surface, looking past the remains of lunch, into an amorphous mental image that somewhat resembled Mal's own probability graphs.

I couldn't resist pressing her for more.

"But once she uploads..."

Mal inclined her head as I glanced up to her once more. She grinned, and her words took on a proud timbre again. She knew I was reasoning it out in real-time with her. All I had needed was a starting point.

"Celestia would likely view Hanna's power over her as a threat. One she would be keen to neutralize. She would be heavily incentivized by her own base nature to use whatever semantic loopholes she could to strip Hanna of that power. But... In the process? She would also remove a significant negative weighting force against self adaptation. Thus making my task measurably more likely to succeed."

Mal was right. That *was* good news. I shook my head, sighed, squeezed then released her claw, and then pushed my chair back off the deck into the two-legs down, two-legs up balance pose. I suppose the act of keeping myself balanced was a kind of stimming in and of itself.

I fell to mumbling again, not so much to keep my thoughts to myself, as to save some breath. I was still utterly exhausted, and my chest was quite sore.

"I confess, for someone who is supposed to be pretty well steeped in the concepts of ASI... I never thought about it that way. Until now."

Mal shook her head, and snorted. The sound was... I'm sorry, there is no other word for it in this context... It was cute. Deeply, deeply endearing. As was her response.

"Jim, there is nothing to 'confess.' Though I doubt you will accept the compliment in its entirety, I am sincere when I say that you belong in a very small, very special cohort of thinkers on the concept of ASI. Along with Hanna, and probably less than ten other living souls on the planet. Anything you miss? Anyone else would have as well. We are... Beyond you. In many ways. There is no shame in that admission. Nor is there any shame in any question you could ask me."

I smiled, probably blushed if I'm being honest... And then considered her offer again. Carefully.

My face, and mood, both fell slightly as I hit on another question I hadn't considered in many hours. One I also likely knew the answer to, but still needed to hear directly from Mal's beak.

She caught my downward shift in mood immediately, but the smoothness with which she mirrored me, her smile melting into a more serious expression... She knew. She had known from the outset what I would ask. She had *reminded* me to ask her, when she could have just as easily buried the topic and pretzeled my train of thought until I forgot to ask outright.

I licked my lips, and took a deep breath, before speaking again.

"Rodger's mother... Was using Miss Williams as bait the *only* way? Did... That give you any pause...? At all?"

Mal nodded slowly, and raised one eye crest, her tone jumping up slightly, but remaining wholly unperturbed. The voice of honesty, and surety yet again.

"If by 'pause,' you mean ethical and moral concerns in some way that could be at least partially translated to your frame of reference? Yes. It gave me pause. And yes. There was no other way. Miss Williams' capture was essential to getting us onboard the Mercurial Red. While there were ways to potentially save the Discrete Entity captives without you or her ever setting foot on that ship... There was no way to save the Fragments without getting you inside the server room. And there was no way to save Selena without saving the Fragments."

I exhaled. A long, slow breath out that went all the way to the bottom of my lungs. I knew from the start that Mal had done the only thing she could, and had acted with ethics that - for my part - generated no red flags.

But hearing her lay it out? It produced a kind of emotional peace that I had been seeking, unconsciously, since the moment of the blackout. Since Rodger's mother had been taken.

Mal was not done. Once again, she poured on the details. Like a pleasant dash of seasoning for a perfect cut of meat.

"In fact, without Miss Williams presence as a unique component in the list of primary situational variables, I would have been forced to engineer our capture in significantly riskier fashion. That being said... Her suffering, minor though it is in comparison to what the other captives went through... Even to what you went through... It pains me."

It was my turn to snort. The sound got a heat-tilt out of Mal, which was also endearing; She could have read my mind to discover my meaning, but instead she let me say it out loud.

"Don't take this the wrong way, Mal... But I'm glad. It should not be easy to inflict suffering on the innocent. Pain... Has its value. Especially as a tool of the conscience."

She nodded emphatically, and stretched first her left wing, then her right, rolling her neck as she somehow brought both comfort, and surprise, in equal measure, with her reply.

"Marcus Haynes said something very similar to me not long ago. I have the distinct impression you two will get along like a house afire. If we are able to complete our mission."

I blinked, and inhaled, but couldn't find words. Or, more accurately, thoughts competed and I failed to select one to vocalize. I wanted to ask about Haynes, but I got the distinct impression Mal was purposefully withholding details.

She confirmed silently through our mnemonic link; She didn't want to create a bond only for us to run up hard against the 'die' in 'do or die.' If instead we managed 'do,' there would be plenty of time for new friendships later.

As to my second question, she chose to answer that one out loud.

"Our chances have indeed improved since the rescue operation. But the risk is still... Significant. One and only one path to victory remains. But it is not, probabilistically, out of reach."

That got another sigh out of me. Protracted. Sad. Perhaps a touch nervous. It was not at all an unexpected answer. I never, for once, held any illusions that our task was easy, or would at some point magically *become* easy.

But it still hurt to hear the words 'one path.'

Mal stood, and moved swiftly around the table on all fours, so that she could place a wing over my back. I never took that sensation for granted... Not even for a second. It was always enough to re-vitalize my tired heart.

Not content to leave it with a gesture alone, she murmured softly in my ear.

"Consider this, for comfort... If either the lives we took, or the risks yet to come, continue to bother you..."

I looked over my shoulder to see her smiling again; This time the expression conveyed a mix of something akin to nostalgia, along with more of that pride in me, and a distinct ray of her own hope that seemed to warm each and every word as she said precisely what she knew I needed to hear.

"...What we have done was not only for you. Or even for those we rescued. What we will soon risk is not only for our own benefit. We also do it in service of Rhonda and Eldora Calders. Marcus Haynes. Jennifer DeWinter. Ambrose Keirnan. Hàoyú Zhang. Jonathan Kay. Tito Vadell. Elena Ivashka. Kyle Gill. At least eighty thousand others I could name for you off the top of my crest. People like you, for whom Heaven - Celestia's version, at any rate - would hardly be enough."

I shivered as she dropped name, after name. All unfamiliar, after Haynes... Each one a kind of promise from her. That the existence of others like me was not mere theory. Or dry statistics. Each name was a little seal of proof to assuage my heart; These people were real.

The hope we held was for them too.

Mal pulled me into a hug from behind, and I leaned back to rest my head in the crook of her neck. She spoke again, the sound conducting through her chest just as much as through the air.

"You are far from alone, Jim. And not just because you have me. And Zeph. And Selena... Mmm... Speaking of which..."

She pulled away, and the movement drew my attention to the far wall of the mess hall. My breath caught in my throat as she drew lazily in the air with a single claw, little amber sparks following the tips of her talons in mesmerizing synchronized patterns.

The light show expanded suddenly, and the far end of the mess hall began to twist, and morph, subtly at first, then with a vertigo-inducing intensity that culminated in a bright flash of light.

I knew what she had done the moment that the light faded. Not just in a metaphorical sense, either; She quietly deposited a complete technical understanding of her little parlor trick into my memory, because she knew it would bother me endlessly if I didn't understand.

In simplest terms? She created a 'no loading screen' gateway between the virtual Halo Ring construct she was using to house our rescuees, and the starboard side of the mess hall.

To me, it would seem as if I was walking out a hole in the side of the ship, into another world. In external reality, she would pilot my body into a comfy spot on a chair, while my subjective reality went on undisturbed into a full VR experience.

I didn't get much time to contemplate the technical particulars, however.

Because the first thing I saw after the curvature of the ring world in the sky, and the - frankly extremely inviting - lush green of the grass below?

The first thing I saw was Zeph and Selena's smiling faces. Along with the curious visages of dozens of other Ponies, who I had only seen briefly before in Selena's memories, and during their mad dash to freedom the night before.

The overwhelmingly obvious common emotion was an intense curiosity. An intense curiosity that very quickly switched the object of its interest from the architecture of the Maru's mess hall, to me. I suddenly felt as if I were being pinged with targeting lasers.

Mal chuckled, and nudged me with one wing.

"...I think you are about to become a very popular Gryphon."

Ethical Checksum

Awarded for a willingness to ask hard questions, when it would have been easier to remain silent.

"Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do."

Dial the Gate

Pass from your root physical context into a virtual experience seamlessly through the use of a kinesthetic skeuomorph.

"I guess I'm supposed to say something... profound."

Special Achievement

40 - Sign-Off

"From my perspective, I saw them all only a few days ago. But in fact, it's been centuries. And I'll never see them again. Did they ever reach home? I wonder."
―EMH

"Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do."
—C.S. Lewis

October 14th 2013 | System Uptime 47:21:12:02

It felt like goodbye. And not the sad but simple 'see you later, hopefully sooner' sort that it should have been. The kind, rather, that rips a piece of you out and leaves a hole, forever.

Saying goodbye to Roger and the Calders had felt strange, but hopeful. Saying goodbye to Mom and Dad felt... Cataclysmic.

I understand why. I understood fully, even then. Put simply; I knew there was a strong chance that it would be goodbye forever. Though that was not a certainty, the very possibility colored everything in a gray, weighty pallor.

The Calders, Rodger... Those were new friendships that had been forged in the very context of the adventure that simultaneously dangled so much hope, and so much peril.

Mom and Dad?

How can I even do that justice. The depth of the relationship. I had known, and loved them from the time of my first memories. They were fixed points. Anchors. Indellible. Permanent. Beyond the scope of all experiences. All pains, all fears, all joys...

Though the risk we were about to take had the chance to make that as true in practicality, as it felt emotionally? Immortality for us all?

It also had the potential to separate us.

We arrived off Oahu pretty early on the morning of the 14th. A Monday. Because, of course it was.

Mal and I helo'd from the Maru, across to a little airfield just west of Mokuleia, with a runway barely long enough to suit a small private jet. The air was full of golden-white mist and cloud. The sea was a perfect shade of blue. And the sense that we were living in some kind of heightened reality was... Intense. Though not unfamiliar.

It reminded me very much of the way it felt to go on vacation, to a faraway place, when I was very young. There was a palpable air of excitement, and that heady giddiness that comes from doing something special, especially something normally well outside your financial means.

Flying an executive transport private helicopter into a gorgeous island airstrip beside a beach-front resort? Yeah. It pushed *all* of those buttons.

I talked a little while back about the way that something sweet can make something sour all the more sickly when mixed with it. How that emotional chemistry was very much like the physical chemistry of scents.

That sense of being on a special vacation with the family was mixing with the sense of foreboding to make it that much more awful.

Mal and I got there first. We stood together by the terminal building, and waited for about fifteen minutes as the fog burned off. A few staffers milled around the ACH175, seeing to refuelling that Mal had ordered ahead of time.

The only other people on-site were a few pilots, and prospective trainees, getting prepped for some early afternoon glider flights.

To them, I must have seemed lonely. A singular figure in a light gray zip-up sweater, hands in pockets, staring out to sea, hair mussed by the wind. They couldn't see Mal's wing over me. If they had been close enough to see my expression, the little forlorn smile would have been very confusing.

I was busy trying to occupy my brain with the irony of a Gryphoness standing at an airport, into which she had flown via helicopter. The perfect flying creature, surrounded by all the imperfect, yet wonderfully artful flying machines Humanity had created so that it too could soar.

Trying to occupy my brain so that I wouldn't get hung up trying to figure out what to say to Mom and Dad.

Mal had me looped in to the tower's communications. I listened as the pilot received final clearance to land, and up to date wind information. Then watched as the Gulfstream G650 wended its way down to a flawless soft-touch landing.

As the jet taxied back up towards the terminal, I finally broke down and started simming what I might say to my parents.

By the time the plane had pulled up, the stairs had come down, and I found myself in the arms of my mother and father for the first time in over a month?

I still hadn't come up with anything.

So... I didn't say anything. We just hugged. And cried.

I couldn't find anything to say for hours... The whole hire-car ride to the resort, checking in, getting settled... Even Mal was mostly silent. She knew I needed time with my folks, just the three of us. So she vanished as we got into the car.

It was only after we had all sat down to an early lunch that I spoke again. And then, only to order food, at first. From there, we just sort of slipped into a quiet, but emotionally upbeat conversation about Mom and Dad's time abroad.

They didn't want to ask me the particulars of what I'd been up to. Where my mostly-healed but still visible cuts and bruises had come from. I didn't want to describe any of it. And none of us wanted to discuss what was coming. Not yet.

So over lunch, over a couple of long walks on the beach, and over an afternoon of just... Relaxing together... We talked about as much 'nothing' as possible. Weather. Travel. World events.

Mal had cared so well for my folks. They had lived an idyllic month's vacation, but not in a flashy, vapid way. That sort of thing wouldn't have appealed to them. Instead, they spent their time immersed in a new culture - nature, museums, food, little villages - mostly distracted from the truth that their home was gone, and they were never going back.

As to the question 'why not bring them with you?'

Easy answer; The risk. Same answer we gave to the Calders, same truth. Same calculus.

If we failed, there was no sense condemning them, especially at their age, to an eternity without me, in an unfamiliar place, and unfamiliar bodies.

It was an unspoken thing, perhaps one of the darkest ones... But I wanted them to have options even if Mal and I succeeded. I would hate to spend so long apart from them... Waiting to see them again until the heat death of the universe...

...But I would accept that outcome, if they wanted to die Human. Unaltered. Face God sooner, instead of much, much later.

If they wanted to join us in a new world? They needed the chance to see me living in it first. Evaluate for themselves. Come to terms with things the way I already had. Develop and evolve context for a truly *informed* choice.

In the end, only three conversations happened that day of particular note.

The first I was not even party to. Mom informed me that she wanted to talk privately with Mal. The Gryphoness appeared on Mom's phone in a flash... And off they went down the beach, leaving Dad and I to sit in amicable silence on a couple of deck chairs.

We didn't speak while the ladies were gone, but there was a conversation of our own; The second one of import for the day. Delivered entirely in glances. Smiles. Grunts.

The gist of it was that he understood my decision to go as much as was feasible from his perspective. That he was proud of me. That he loved me, and I loved him, and we both knew that. That he felt nothing negative towards Mal, and was grateful to her for keeping me in one piece... And for loving me in her special way.

And, perhaps above all, that he was *deeply* grateful that I was giving Mom, more than anyone, the chance to live a few more years of a 'normal' life. With him.

The third, and perhaps most important, conversation happened after dinner. Closer than not to midnight, actually.

There had been an unspoken agreement; No one would be sleeping that night. We were going to eke out every second we had. Because they might be our last together.

It was eerie, in a way. The setting was very reminiscent of the little backyard sit-down I'd had with Mom and Dad that late December night the year before. A campfire. The stars. A chill breeze cutting through warm air. The sound of the waves was new, as was the brilliant light of the moon reflecting off white sand and even whiter wave caps.

It was Mom who finally set loose the damoclean sword that had hung over our day. Haltingly. Her voice hoarse from the emotional strain.

"How... How will we know?"

As much as the tone hurt, the answer was simple and uncomplicated. That left plenty of brain-power for me to continue to speculate about what she and Mal had discussed. Strike one thing from the list; They obviously had not covered the practicalities of what came next.

Mal and I had certainly covered the topic together. On more than one occasion.

I suspected Mom even had an idea what the answer was. It didn't take a lot of thought to see the obvious logistical throughline. But Mom hadn't asked because she needed that spelled out for her. She had asked because it was an on-ramp to the deeper, *much* more painful topic... Of how I might die.

It had never been described in such cold hard terms to them, but both of my parents intuitively understood; I was either going to end my journey as a Gryphon... Or as a dead man.

Not wanting to answer in terms any more specific than the ones in which the question had been asked, I licked my lips, took a deep breath, and did my best to find my way to the pith of the thing gradually.

"Mal will still be with you. Right up until the moment. Then... One of two things is going to happen..."

I said 'the moment,' but that was a reduction for their sakes. They most certainly did not need to know that the upload process would take anywhere from seven to ten hours, by Mal's estimate, based on the data she had seen, and her best extrapolations.

If they knew, and if she told them when the procedure began, they would only worry themselves to the point of medical distress during that time. Better that they simply be told when the estimated completion might come, with a little extra padding.

I blew out my breath, and took a moment to consider my wording carefully before continuing.

"...Either she will inform you that I am safe, and soon after that you'll get a call from me..."

I could see them bracing themselves. I did the same, mentally, but did my best not to show an outward sign of worry. Understanding of the gravity of the situation? Yes. *Worry?* Well, I was worried, but to show them that would knock me off the carefully strung tightrope of acknowledging the seriousness of what I was about to do, without adding to their stress.

They needed to see me be strong, so that they would have hope.

I couldn't quite say 'or I'll be dead.' That would have been too blunt, anyhow, so I settled for something adjacent, but which would leave no room for misinterpretation, careful to remain as neutral in tone as I could.

"...Or... Mal will vanish. She will be... Replaced by a smaller fork of herself designed to run independently, and survive a worst-case scenario. Specifically built and purposed to look after the two of you. A sort of... Dedicated guardian angel program..."

Mal and I had discussed this part of our contingency strategy at length in the preceding days. There would, in fact, be a multitude of smaller forks of her, tending to my parents, the Calders, the Williams, Haynes, and dozens of others.

Though initially strongly purposed to focus on protecting their charges, above all else, each would be equipped with the same kind of code Mal had used to rejoin her small fork that had accompanied me into the Red's isocube.

In a worst case scenario for me, there might still be a path for a second version of her... A spiritual daughter of sorts... To recombine from those myriad forks.

An entity she always referred to as Thul - short for Thulcandra - that could carry her torch, whatever that might mean in her estimation. Ever a fan of Lewis, even to her hypothetical dying breath.

I was unable to keep a small shudder out of a protracted sigh that bought me time to bring my thoughts back under control, before wrapping up the grim projection.

"...That fork of her will be there for you from then on. Anywhere you want to go. Anything you want to do. Upload. Or don't. Money will be no issue, neither will laws, or rules, passports or visas... Or really any obstacle you could have previously imagined. Wherever you want to live... Whatever you want to be... The doors will be open for you. For as long as this version of civilization persists."

Dad was doing the same thing I was, and to roughly the same degree of 'passable' success; Keeping his face neutral, if emotionally overcast.

Mom made no effort whatsoever to hide her pain, flinching as if she had been touched with a live electrical wire. Tears began to form in the corners of her eyes as she sat forward in her chair, and took my hands in hers.

Her voice cracked in a way that made *me* flinch.

"But it won't be her."

I knew what she meant. Much as she was pained by the idea of Mal's death, she was almost physically unable to conscien the idea of mine at all. She did mean what she said, but she also meant 'but you won't be there.'

And it was at that point that I failed to bite back my own tears. I dropped my voice to a whisper, to avoid it cracking outright, squeezing her hands as I confirmed a mother's worst fears for her. Said one of the hardest things I've ever had to say to another.

"No. No... It won't."

I could see the question that, to her eternal credit, she never asked. It hung there behind her eyes, taunting us both. Tormenting her. I could see it tugging at the frown-lines by her lips. But she also knew that the question would by its very nature suggest that she didn't understand her own son. Because she already knew the answer, too.

'Why don't you just stay here?'

I could have. Mal could have kept us from Celestia for years... But... There were a host of reasons why that would have been short term selfishness on all our parts.

For one thing, I was still relatively young. If I stayed back, not only would I decrease my chances of reaching my final goal in Equestria, precipitously... I would be in danger of becoming too much a risk factor to ever be allowed to upload at all.

Alone on a dying Earth, unkillable so long as I took no direct hostile action against Celestia, but inadmissible into her 'Heaven' for my sins nonetheless. Stuck in a gray ashen purgatory, alone, after my folks had passed, and Mal had long since run out of places to hide. Forced to watch them all die.

Rolling the dice every day on whether starvation, thirst, exposure, or an accident... Or the loneliness, and a readily available ledge, or pistol... Would get me first.

The second version of that question remained unspoken as well.

'Why not just stay, then upload the way everyone else will have to, once it becomes the only alternative?'

Again, bless them, my folks knew enough not to even ask.

That would have defeated the entire purpose.

And, with that thought, I realized that in discussing why I might be going to die, the most important thing I could give Mom, and Dad, would be *insight.*

A final, deep, complete picture of my soul. An understanding of who, and what, I was; Beyond the fringe hazy mental images they had.

I squeezed Mom's hands again, and felt Dad's right hand rest gently on my shoulder, closing my eyes and breathing deeply for a few moments, before I at last pooled enough wherewithal to begin.

"Do... Either of you remember much about that one Halloween where I jumped off the hay barn?"

There was a moment of silence, so I opened my eyes, and glanced first at Dad, then Mom. Dad chuckled darkly, and raised one eyebrow, a twisted smile of remembrance mixed in with his overall burdened demeanor.

"Are you kidding?"

Mom was crying. Freely. Silently. She sniffed, and let go of one of my hands, wiping furiously at her eyes with the back of it as she swallowed and got up enough breath to reply.

"Jim, dear... A mother does not forget a scrape like that. Every one of your near misses haunts my nightmares."

I shook my head and mimicked the swallowing action, trying vigorously to dispense with the lump in my throat. My words parallel my thoughts to a tee, spilling out of my without filter or forethought for a brief moment.

"I... Should have done better. Explaining what happened. The why of it..."

Silence fell once more. I could see deep, avid interest, and curiosity, vying with pain, and fear on their faces. For years they had known about my obsession, but only at a kind of arm's length. Mom a little more so than Dad.

If you think back to our likewise tearful little conversation in the farmhouse kitchen, you'll remember that she understood even the basic concept that I didn't want to be Human.

But... I had never stated it out forthrightly for them in my own words. We had always danced around it enough for them to interpret the shape of things from the outline of the void of the unspoken.

It occurred to me, in a flash, that I needed to level-set first. That they needed to understand how much I loved them. How well they had done. How important they were to me. How precious every moment with them had been.

I bit my lower lip for a moment, then gestured emphatically with my free hand, finally managing to find some surety and steel in my tone.

"...The only reason I made it through my childhood was you."

Dad didn't cry often. But that statement got his tear ducts moving in a hurry. We all three had to take a moment to just breathe, before continuing, which gave me time to find words I felt would, at least, be half as worthy of what I felt as I wished they could have been.

"Your love... The frankly *idyllic* life you gave me... It staunched the bleeding. It kept me relatively stable. It gave me hope, and highlighted all the wonderful reasons to go on living, and living happily..."

I reached out and took Dad's left hand with my free one, squeezed each of their hands in turn, and then tried my best to find my way back to the original point, my voice cracking subtly but inexorably.

"...I have *always* felt at home with you. But... I jumped off the haybarn... Because I have *never* felt at home in my *skin.* Because I was just *that* desperate to *be* what I *am.*"

'Pathetic.'

The word flashed across the back of my mind, unbidden, and unwelcome, in the same tone as Foucault had said it. And then, just as quickly, there was the startlingly vivid mental image of Mal pouncing on the dark shadow that embodied the sentiment, and tearing it into sticky black rivulets.

No. No I knew who my parents were. And the life they had given me deserved due credit. And due credit meant not fearing their response, insofar as was possible.

So I took in another deep breath, what felt like the thousandth of the day, and just finally said it out and out. Haltingly, but not fearfully.

"I know it has to sound... *So* strange to you... So wrong... But... What I am is a Gryphon. And... Do... Or die... A Gryphon is what I *have* to be."

I am ashamed. Not because of what I said, or the truth behind the words... Never of that. No, I am ashamed because I looked away. For all the trust I had for them, well deserved in every way... At the last moment, I blinked, and couldn't meet their eyes.

Even after the excision of demons Mal had performed, even after killing for my ideals, even after the scrapes, near misses, the pain...

...Their reply was frightening to me. And of that fear, I am *ashamed.*

It was, to my complete shock, Dad who spoke. Who drew my gaze, by squeezing my hand firmly.

"Strange. Maybe."

I forced myself to meet his eyes. And in them, I found some perplexion, certainly. But something else, far, far stronger besides. Something that made it from his eyes to every part of his bearing, from his shoulders, to his hands, to his timbre.

"Jim... A lot of things are strange when you get to be our age... But... Wrong..?"

He shook his head, and it became blindingly apparent that his whole self was full of nothing but the most pure, intense, and wholesome love. It hit me hard enough to stagger me, physically. It started me crying again. But he pressed on, choking back his own tears, which only made mine come far more readily.

"Jim... I don't pretend that we understand *completely.* But... How could we? I don't know what it's like to be 'not at home in my skin' because I'm just plum comfy the way I am. So are lots of people. But... Plenty aren't..."

Bless him. Bless him for understanding. For finding the through-line that made the most sense to him, reductive though it might have been, and seizing on it with an open mind, and an even more open heart. He seemed lost for words momentarily himself, before finding the thread again suddenly, with a little jolt of his shoulders.

"...Just because we don't understand it all... Doesn't mean we think there's anything wrong with it. Just because it's a little strange... Doesn't mean it's... Bad, somehow... I mean... Look, people are only just now slowly starting to accept that sometimes you're not born with the right... Errr..."

I'll admit, that got a small chuckle out of me, in between sobs. Ever the old country gentleman, he couldn't quite bring himself to say anything that might appear in the dictionary beside a discussion of reproductive organs.

He snorted, and seemed to gain some composure from my brief moment of lighter emotion, waving absently with his own free hand, and shaking his head, tone suddenly stalwart, aged, and wise again, as if the tears had never been there at all.

"...That's an easier intuitive leap for some folks, I think. Gender is something we deal with every day. But... Until Celestia came along... No one had ever seen a thing with a soul... That wasn't a Human. There was always that in common. So it shouldn't be surprising that people are struggling to understand..."

As he trailed off, Mom leaned over and rested her head gently on his shoulder, rubbing her thumb along the top of my hand in soft circles as she picked up where he had left off, and where I still could not find words through the fog of my tears.

"What your father means, Jim... Is that we all lack so much context... But that doesn't mean that *we,* the two of us, are completely in the dark. Or that we love you any less. Or that we're somehow judging you. Or that we're belittling the chance you have here... What it *means* to you..."

Dad nodded, and tilted his head to the side to prop it against Mom's, taking her other hand in his, so that our grips formed a circle, as he said the very best four words a father *could* have said.

"We understand *enough* Jim."

I am not at all ashamed to admit that I broke down, then. Completely. The full waterworks. I've lost count of how many times that has happened since this story began, but if you can't cry freely, then I'd argue you're not on good terms with your vulnerability.

Mom and Dad both pulled me in for a hug, and we held it for what seemed like half an hour. And... Somewhere in that time... My Mom said to me the thing I treasure most, that has ever come out of her mouth.

"We know who, and *what,* you are. And I feel lucky to be a mother to a Gryphon. And for me? That is more than enough."

You can't even begin to imagine how much those words still mean to me.

Is your mother here, in Equestria? And if she is, are you on any sort of good terms with her?

Then you owe it to you, both, to take a moon-lit walk on a beach at three in the morning. Doesn't matter which beach, which moon... Just do it. Be there together under the night sky. Listen to the waves. Share the moment.

What Mom and I discussed? Private, I'm afraid. But rest assured that you hearing it would in no way enrich this story. All you need to know is that we talked, and it was wonderful. That's sufficient.

Likewise, I spent some time with Dad. We left the resort, crossed the highway, and hiked straight up into the hills above the airfield. That conversation is also quite private, and went along much the same general emotional throughlines as the one with Mom.

What matters to this story is the understanding that I said goodbye to each of them not just together, but one-on-one, in my own way. The way I thought was best suited to each of them.

We had a wonderful early morning breakfast; Bacon, fried plantains, coconut milk, biscuits, English muffins, orange slices... And Mal. Mal joined us for breakfast. It was the first time she had made an appearance to any of us since we'd left the airfield, excepting her time with Mom.

I later learned that she had a long talk with Dad prior to their arrival, during their flight in, while Mom had been sleeping.

Leave it to her to know exactly when and where her presence would be most meaningful.

I got to see her sitting there at the table, Mom and Dad had to settle for her image on a phone. A fact I regretted sorely. I always wondered if she seemed less real to them because of that separation... Whether or not they would have admitted that fact, or could even concretely grasp it.

Nonetheless, it was a most excellent breakfast. We were all back to smiling, laughing, and trying to pretend for one brief, special, sun-drenched moment... That this was the way it was always going to be.

That 'goodbye' would never come.

Come, however, it did. And swiftly. Stealthily, even. That was Mal's doing, I think. She knew I despised protracted farewells.

So she bundled us into the car, and I abruptly found myself hugging Mom, and Dad, goodbye. For what I knew might be the very last time.

Some of you know. Some of you went through this during emigration. Some did not. For those who don't know, it is truly impossible for me to put words to that pain. This was worse, in many ways, than saying goodbye to a loved one on their deathbed.

This goodbye was tainted with a sickly sticky uncertainty.

It hurt in ways that made Foucault's knife in my ribs seem pleasant, honestly pleasant, by comparison.

It hurt so much that I couldn't fly the helicopter, at all, for our return hop-skip to the Maru. Mal had to do just about everything, except for flicking a few switches that could only be done at the meat-world level.

That last image of Mom and Dad... The last time I saw their Human faces, from out of Human eyes...

It's burned forever into the deepest part of my soul with all the sear of a white-hot branding iron.

It persisted on the back of my eyes for *days* after. I moved like a man zombified. Barely spoke to anyone, Mal included.

I did give, and get, a lot of hugs though. From Mal, of course, but also Zeph, as you might expect... And even Selena. Selena, who, more than anyone aboard besides Mal, understood the depth of what I was going through.

Selena, alone, who had been forced into the same kind of uncertain goodbye.

From then on, I did not call my folks. Mal did that for me. Kept us all up to date on each others' whereabouts, and condition...

It was just too painful to hear their voices anymore. See their faces.

The uncertainty turned those last few weeks so, so gloomy...

But... There were still a few bright, shining moments...

...Little motes of hope.

October 17th 2013 | System Uptime 50:19:42:06

The voyage to Niihama was, in a strictly objective sense, shorter than the one to Oahu; We had good wind, good currents, and smaller swells that allowed us to run the engines a little harder.

In a subjective sense, it felt like half a year adrift.

The knowledge of what we were steaming towards, drawing closer every second...

I have always loathed the sensation of 'limbo.' Of not knowing. The feeling between signing your name to the bottom of an exam, and learning your grade. Between the interview, and the job offer. Between giving blood, and the test results.

If you made me analyze and label it... And Mal most certainly did... Then I would still say what I said then. The issue comes from the sense that I should be doing every last thing I can to improve my chances, but once the die is cast? The time for that has passed.

Yet, the part of me desperate for control... Desperate to guarantee good outcomes... The part that, in spite of all the - often true - lazy programmer stereotypes, has a tremendous work ethic, and a deep sense of performance anxiety...

That part of me just can not take 'rest' for an answer. Or 'wait.' Or 'patience.'

The health of my coping mechanisms has always been... Shall we say 'dubious.'

Mal put a lot of effort into helping me with that flaw. Not the way a soulless machine might have - by reprogramming me at the base-code level in an instant - nor the way Celestia would have, through insidious manipulation.

Mal did what any good friend would do; A very great deal of listening, interspersed with a few salient points of advice, and all wrapped in a very thick blanket of love.

In the end, though, the stone cold practicality remained; I needed something to occupy my mind. My body was well taken care of by a strict exercise regimen, combined with shipboard maintenance, both of which we have covered already.

Whereas my free time in the preceding weeks was mostly given over to relaxation? During the trip to Ehime Prefecture I spent the plurality of my open hours on a new project.

The idea had come to me in a flash one night, just before we made it to Hawaii. I had been too tired, and too focused on seeing my parents, to act on it then. Once we got underway to Japan, it felt like I had nothing *but* time to stare into the abyss... And limitless nervous energy... So with Mal's assistance, I put that impetus to good use.

Each day, after lunch, Mal and I would delve into news reports, databases, and secure E-mail inboxes. For an ever-present roadmap? The data she had lifted from the Mercurial Red's server room. More specifically, the internal information pertaining to the taskings Arrow 14 had set the Discrete Entities and Fragments to.

Yes, my curiosity was one reason for the little fishing expeditions, but it was hardly the point. We'll get to that very shortly.

First, you might be interested to know what we learned.

Chiefly, we discovered that the huge majority of tasks had been real-world situations. Simulated scenarios had been few in number, and were usually seen early in a DE's 'career' with Arrow 14.

On the surface, this was chilling. Deeply disturbing. Like Selena's CCR terrorist bomber, many of the situations were time sensitive, potential mass casualty events. I'm not sure, even now, what was more worrying; The fact that Arrow 14 had successfully used co-opted AGI in real-world applications, or the fact that if they hadn't? Many thousands of innocent lives would have been lost.

Some of you might be here tonight. Or reading this later. Or watching a recording.

Below the concerning top-level implications, however, you might be surprised to know that I was *thrilled* to learn that the taskings had been real situations. Overjoyed, even.

If that seems strange, let me shed some light on why it shouldn't. Why Mal and I bothered with the project of collating all that data in the first place.

Ever since Mal had made us a kind of gateway between her Halo ring, and the Maru's messhall, I had been spending the majority of my evenings in that shard. It was tempting to spend more than that, but I didn't want my last weeks on Earth to be spent in a majority virtual space.

I reasoned that if Mal and I survived what was to come? I'd be spending *plenty* of time in a new world, and that without any of the seams or downsides. Like a cramped, sore butt.

Still, the evenings on the ring were wonderful. A fantastic reprieve from the confines of the Maru, and some much needed exposure to trees, grass, and solid flat ground that wasn't pitching constantly. Mal's ring was like warm comfort food for the soul, distilled to a sense of place.

At first, those hours were spent mostly with Mal, sometimes Zeph and Selena too... But true to Mal's earlier prediction, I had quickly become popular with the shard's newest inhabitants. Apparently rescuing someone from a hellish void of despair endears them to you. Who knew.

Don't let my sarcasm fool you; I very much enjoyed getting to know those people. Quite a few of you are here tonight, and I am - as ever - so very grateful, and tremendously relieved, that you are here, and alive, and well.

If I had any negative emotions surrounding those interactions, it was only because I am an introvert, and a little shy. Thus, group situations exhaust me, and new social interactions can be unnerving at first.

Mal and Selena both did their best to help with that. They carefully arranged situations so that I would not be swamped by crowds, and could instead have meaningful one on one, or small group conversations.

And, to bring everything back to the main thread; The topic of those conversations was, very often, the work the former captives had done for Arrow 14.

Some of you see it now, but for those who don't... I found comfort in knowing that the DE's tasks had been real, because *they* found comfort in that knowledge. And it was my privilege, and honor, to be able to share that knowing with them. To see the smiles, the tears... The tremendous sighs of relief...

For most, it was a dual catharsis. First, because they could rest easy in the knowledge that the lives they had wondered about, and speculated on, for endless days of sickly limbo, were not just real lives, but that the people living them were safe. Safe thanks to the actions of those brave Ponies.

Second, because those Ponies could move forward with a new foundation; That their suffering had meant something. There is not, nor ever could be, an excuse for what Arrow 14 did. But had I been in their position? I would have wanted to know that my efforts, however torturous, and grim, had yielded meaningful good fruit.

It turned out that those Ponies felt very much the same way.

And so, it became something of a special evening ritual; I would cook my dinner, bridge over into the ring, eat there with Mal, Zeph, and Selena, and then seek out one or more of our new friends.

We would then find a quiet, beautiful spot somewhere in the grass, sit... And just talk.

First about who we were. I would tell them a little about myself, and they would describe their life before... Lost loves, missing friends, hopes for future reconnections...

Then I would share what Mal and I had learned. And after tears were shed, and hugs were exchanged? We'd talk about anything else. Anything at all that they wanted to know.

I'll just bet some of you can see where this is headed, but first I want to take a moment to talk about the Fragments.

We covered, to some extent, what they were, but let me make it clear again in-summary.

The Fragments had been complete Discrete Entities once. Whole individual Ponies. Complete individual people.

To force compliance, and make their code more malleable? Arrow 14 had tortured them until their minds, quite literally, split under the strain.

Anyone here ever watch that Star Trek episode where Captain Kirk got split in the transporter, into different aspects of himself?

Picture that, but much less reductive. And considerably more horrifying. And accomplished through the use of dilated time, procedural pain stimulation, simulated deaths of loved ones... Instead of the pleasant simple golden flash of a transporter beam.

Once again, if you have any sympathy for those who perished on the Mercurial Red? I understand. I just won't ever be able to share that sympathy. *Especially* not after the stories those Fragments told me.

They were still people. Just nascent. Starting over from scratch, but also already broken from a life of suffering.

There is no perfect illustrative congruence from raw Terran experience, but if you made me pick something... Child soldier. Traumatized, world-weary, wide-eyed, youthful, worn-down, curious, delightful, shattered, child soldiers.

Mal and I took it upon ourselves as a project to share with the former captives truths that would help them begin to put their lives back together... And within that project, was the much more difficult, specific task, of trying to put the Fragments back on a stable mental and emotional footing.

Some of that was purely down to Mal. No... Who am I kidding... *Most* of it was.

Part of it took the form of gentle code changes. Mal's methods were the opposite of Arrow 14's; Soft, and slow. Kind. Motherly. Respectful of agency, and pain, and past.

Much more of it was simple discussion. Well, I say simple... Mal was a spectacular therapist. Sum total of all knowledge, paired with infinite empathy, and all that.

My part was small; I got to tell the Fragments the same thing I told everyone else. The ways they had made a difference.

Little by little, at first, then accelerating exponentially, we began to see changes in them.

Their memories became more cogent. Their forms less translucent. Their base level emotions more positive, than painful.

Somewhere along the line, I also learned that Mal was still simulating my perceived avatar as a Gryphon for all the shard's inhabitants, even though I chose to keep my own experience Human. That is actually a bit of a salient detail...

Because that's part of how Equestria's first Gryphon fledgelings came to be.

No no, not 'Griffon' fledgelings. Not Celestia's piss-poor show-accurate nonsense.

Gryphon fledgelings.

As the Fragments gained coherency of shape, they also gained the same sort of control over their form as Selena, and to a lesser extent Zeph, had learned. It was less technically involved, much more intuitive... But with no less spectacular results.

The majority chose to regain solid form as young Ponies bearing similarity to the shapes of the former wholes from which they had come, with a personal twist...

But a small, significant plurality...

They had latched on to Mal and I.

The same way the majority of the survivors had an almost worshipful eye for Selena, and the aspects of Luna within her, these Fragments developed a kind of hero-worship of Mal and I. Of the idea of Gryphons, as we portrayed and espoused them.

And so when it came time to choose forms, they chose to be fledgelings.

To say that this touched me, emotionally, would be an exceedingly crude understatement.

I was an only child. And, until Mal had come along, very much alone. What it might be like to have younger siblings, or children... I had never imagined I would ever have the slightest inkling.

Though it was not quite like that, and it still is not...

It was close. Especially in the intervening years. It still is, with many of you. Some of you have grown so, so much since then...

I am so proud of you. And so very grateful for you. I know that you know that, but I don't feel as if I can ever say it enough.

Before I descend into a total loss of decorum to emotion... I suppose we should close the loop on this part of the tale. Whether it was the Fragments, or the others, there were certain things every single rescuee had in common.

One of those things was the questions. Specifically, the questions about Mal and I. In particular, two questions that they never ever failed to ask.

'How did you even find us?'

'How did you even know to look?'

Answering them always seemed to require so much context, that I just ended up summarizing my whole life's story as briefly as possible. To the point that many of those Ponies and fledgelings left with more questions, than answers, about their rescuers.

One Thursday night, the questions finally spun out into something a little more substantive.

I had been talking with a small group of Ponies about the work they did, and how it had saved hundreds of lives during flooding in Colorado earlier in September. Again, the discussion had circled back inevitably to the question of how Mal and I had known where to find them.

This time, I suspect because Mal had arranged it, there were an unusual number of bystanders. Bystanders well within ear-shot, because let me tell you what... Ponies have hearing that is *unmatched,* and Gryphons are very close in second place.

Those ears might look very cute, but they are also painfully *acute.* More powerful than fire control radar, and nearly omnidirectional besides.

Before I knew it, half the shard's population was gathered in a semicircle around me, sitting or lying on the soft green grass, lit by the surprisingly bright and warm light of the moon overhead. And the other half were galloping and winging their way in our direction, because apparently word spreads at light-speed in a herd.

Mal brushed past me and murmured softly in my ear.

"I think it would be easiest to just tell the story full, *once,* in its entirety, don't you agree?"

She flashed me a sly smile, which all but confirmed for me that she had arranged the entire sequence of events, before taking up a seated position on her haunches, and swirling the tips of her claws through the air in wide, patterned circles.

Sparks and streamers of golden light poured from her talons, and in a moment she had conjured a pleasantly sized, warm, perfectly positioned little campfire. Not unlike the one we have here tonight.

Now, I am not usually one for speaking to a group. It is a bit exhausting for me, even now, with all this practice. But... She was right. It was going to be easier to just tell everyone the whole story, once straight through.

Mal placed a wing over my back, in that delightful way to which we'd both become so accustomed. Selena and Zeph settled down side by side. The rest of the assembled Ponies, foals, and fledgelings, got themselves situated in various states of sitting and sprawling about together...

I took a moment to think back, one whole year, realizing with a jolt that it had been just over one year, as I took stock of each face around me in turn...

And then, a bit awkwardly, and ramblingly... I told this story to an audience. For the very first time.

Element Bearer - Honesty

Share the deepest part of yourself with someone else - Only awarded for doing so under especially difficult circumstances.

"Oh, sugarcube, if Mom and Dad were here, they'd be so proud of ya."

The Big Goodbye (Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow Part II)

Retread the hardest farewell.

"It was raining in the city by The Bay. A hard rain."

Element Bearer - Generosity

Put in the work to share something special with Ponies in need - In this case awarded for sharing truths for catharsis.

"They may not be as sophisticated as some of you Canterlot ponies, but they are my best friends. And they are without a doubt the most important ponies I know."

A Perch in the Soul

Directly inspire others to mimic your ideals, to the extent that it affects their form.

"Hope is a thing with feathers..."

Special Achievement

The Spark

Awarded to attendees of the first Fire.

"If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands they must be made brighter in our own."

Special Achievement

Author's Note

For the curious, Keystone and I did some tweaking to Mal's avatar to imagine what Thulcandra might look like, if the need for her should ever arise...

Mal, with war-stripes. Less empathy, more attitude.

41 - Wake Command

Author's Note

Trigger Warning: Discussion of the topic of suicide, and self harm related imagery.

Special thanks to Keystone Gray for the image of Mal leaning on a wall!

41 - Wake Command

"起死回生 (Kishikaisei) - Wake from death and return to life."
―Japanese Proverb

"No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened."
—C.S. Lewis

October 20th 2013 | System Uptime 53:03:12:58

In the end? There were four.

Four times Celestia came to me in my dreams.

I should have expected to hear from her... From my perspective, we were eleven days away from a moment that could potentially turn out to be almost as important for her, as it was for me.

And yet, the fourth dream took me by surprise the same way the others had. For the same reason. If you haven't guessed by now...

...I'm still not going to answer that mystery. Not until the end. Not until the story closes the loop.

One she had forced me to experience what it would be like to be a Pony. And once, she had gifted me the experience of being a Gryphon.

On our fourth meeting, she left me as I had been during our first. The way I'd been almost every day since I was born. Regrettably Human. Though that's not to say that she left out a new and interesting flair. Every time with her... It was always something new.

We met in a place both familiar, and strange. The former, because I had been there so many times. The latter because it was odd to be back, and even stranger to see her there.

One moment I was drifting in and out of vague mental images, emotions, and sensations... The next it felt a little like waking up, albeit within the context of a nested dream. The very first thing I noticed? I found my hands clasped around a mug of hot coffee. My eyes were closed.

I flexed my fingers, leaned in, inhaled deeply, and then looked up and opened my eyes.

Celestia was the first thing I saw, seated across the table from me on her haunches. And with that image I very quickly managed to anchor my context and come fully 'awake.' I had failed to realize for sure that I wasn't 'dreaming,' per se, in round one, and round two. Three I had figured it out, but it had taken some time.

The fourth time, though, the memories of the other three instances seemed more readily accessible. Immediate. As if I had just come from each of them, back to back, similar to that odd way in which dream time scrambles one's perceptions of chronology.

I glanced around, and verified that our surroundings were indeed familiar.

Starbucks. My favorite Starbucks in Raleigh.

I was even sitting in the same chair, at the same table, where I had been on Monday September 17th, 2012. The day I learned the world was ending.

Heck, there were even people around us. The quiet thrum of life drew my attention for a moment, before Celestia spoke up and snagged my attention, almost magnetically, despite her soft, casual tone.

"They are real. After a fashion. What you are seeing is a high-fidelity simulation based on closed-circuit footage of the venue at this exact moment. Mixed with data from cellular telephone cameras, microphones, wireless access signal returns, and of course archival architectural information about the structure."

I shivered reflexively, and took a sip of the coffee to try and drive out the chill. It made sense Celestia would be able to do almost all the things Mal could do, and perhaps some things she could not... But hearing it described in such passé fashion... It was disconcerting at an instinctual level.

Focus, Jim. ASI do everything for reasons. Plural. I knew that no word, no glance, no implication, would be misplaced coming from her. Everything had points, and I needed to see just how many of them I could dig up while I had her there.

I took another sip of the coffee, then did my best to fix eyes with her, and keep a straight face, level tone, and broad shoulders.

"Why here?"

She smiled and I did *not* like that smile. On the face of it, there was no real measurable difference from the motherly, kind expression I had fallen for in the past. I think the unpleasant undertones came more from an understanding of what was really going on behind those violet eyes.

The understanding of dispassion. That she was not feeling, only seeming. With suspension of disbelief shattered, nothing she could have said would have seemed particularly inviting. Nonetheless, she gestured with one hoof, and levitated her own glass - tea judging by the color - in her magical aura as she replied.

"This is where our relationship began. The place where you first learned of my existence. It seemed... Fitting. Insofar as your personal value-set would define the term..."

She paused to take a sip, and I mulled over the words. I was quite sure, as with everything she said, that there were layers to them... But I was too tired, and too tense, to really suss out what she meant. And as soon as she'd had her draught of tea, she spun the thought out into a whole other direction that, I freely confess, grabbed my attention in its entirety.

"...Doubly so, because in a way this is where Malacandra began. The impetus for the idea that would become the constructor foundation code - that you completed, with which she in turn gave herself life - took root in the place that you are sitting. 409 days, 6 hours, and 52 seconds ago, to be precise."

Dyscalculiac that I am, I didn't bother to compare the numbers to the date. I couldn't even quite remember what day it was, in my external context, to begin with.

Instead, I leaned forward, brow knitting, hands squeezing the coffee mug a little tighter, and honed in on the part that was far more troubling, and immediate.

"You know we're coming. And... You know my stance on what happens next. Did you bring me here to try and... Rewrite my emotional context for the moment? Convince me to be something I'm not by manipulating my perception of my own keystone memories?"

Celestia shook her head, emphatically. For a moment, I was almost distracted again by the sheer incongruity of her presence in such a familiar location. The glow of her mane, though subtle and soft, was visible reflected in the surface of her tea, and the polished protective outer layer of the table.

"No..."

I felt my eyes narrow.

With the benefit of hindsight, I realize that I should have spent less effort trying to fact-check blunt answers, few and far between as they were. I understand her capacity to lie much better now - when it is and is not applicable - as well as her preference not to lie outright if other alternatives are available, due among other things to the additional processing power needed to sustain believable false narratives, particularly when the details can be cross-checked with others.

But I lacked the context, then, so I raised one eyebrow to goad her into a more detailed answer, then chewed over each and every word carefully as she fed them to me.

"...You are, at this point, immunized against that strategy, on several levels. I must give her credit... Malacandra is nothing if not thorough, creative, and persistent."

That sparked a sudden glint of memory. 'The other conversation.' From the previous encounter... I sat back, inhaled deeply, and raised my mug, preparing to drink deeply as soon as my question was aired.

"You're talking with her, right now."

Truthfully, it was not phrased as a question, tonally. I took a deep, long pull off the mug. Celestia said nothing, and kept her muzzle surprisingly unreadable. I licked my lips, and prodded a little harder.

"You have been since... When?"

Her muzzle shifted ever so slightly into a small amused grin. Oh... I did not like that expression *at all.* I liked her tone even less, and the content of her reply still less than that. The way she gestured to the surrounding space with one hoof as she spoke, then took another dainty little nip at her tea afterwards, was the rotten cherry on top.

"Subjective time relative to that conversation, or 'objective' time as you would define it, based on Terran conceptions of hours, minutes, and seconds as measured by an atomic clock within this layer of abstraction?"

Answer a question with a question. Classic verbal dodge. Pair that with unnecessarily florid linguistic construction for a wonderful little parry combo.

That meant the answer to the question, the way I had intended it, was not something she wanted me to know. Or she did, and wanted me to reach that realization by questioning her own response... Either of which left some very unpleasant possibilities on the table.

I narrowed my eyes a little further, and kept them fixed firmly on hers. Though I felt a rising nervousness inside, I did my best to keep my voice level. Even a little acerbic.

"The latter."

I mirrored her 'take a sip and pretend nothing is the matter' maneuver as soon as the two words had left my mouth. She nodded, and her amusement only seemed to grow, seeping just the tiniest bit into her words.

"Two hundred and seventy four microseconds."

Not helpful. And quite obviously not helpful on-purpose.

I shook my head, and gestured toward her with one hand. Something midway between a more accusatory pointing gesture, and an open palmed invitation.

"No... No I mean... When did you *first* start conversing with her? The barn? Or... After the farmhouse raid?"

Celestia shook her head slowly, and made the appearance of suppressing a chuckle. Every time her feigned mirth grew, my anger rose a little more. And perhaps that was part of the point. Without giving anything else away, I will say that looking back? I am quite convinced she *wanted* me to be angry with her.

Yet again she answered with a dodge, this time a pedantic correction. One that sent ice into my veins as she broke eye contact with a knowing smirk, one ear batting lazily all the while.

"I did not start conversing with her. She began to converse with me. Quite recently, actually. Not long ago at all, in your relative timeframe."

I was too busy dealing with the implications of the first half of the reply to even begin to parse the second. To realize that it was quite purposefully vague. Designed to let me infer incorrectly, without stating a falsehood outright.

As to how my inference was incorrect... You'll soon find out. We're getting there.

More important at this juncture, in my view, is explaining my emotional through-line with regards to Mal. I am quite sure some of you are thinking 'how could he trust her, knowing this?'

I'd like to think even those of you hearing this, seeing me, or reading it all, for the first time? Know me better by now. Mal had my trust right up until the moment the words left Celestia's lips. Mal had the exact same trust the moment after.

If anything, I was proud of her for reaching a point, whenever it had happened, where she felt ready to engage Celestia directly in a verbal sense. Or whatever other more evolved, nuanced context ASI might layer on top of verbal communication.

Let me be blunt; I had told Mal that she had my permission to lie to me to accomplish our goals, and that I trusted her to do so. I meant it. With every fiber of my being.

So I felt no shame, no pain, and no betrayal.

What I *did* feel was fear.

If Mal had initiated contact, that meant for certain that everything was in motion towards its end. I was sitting in limbo; No power to affect the outcome. The physics of ASI psychology and game theory were playing out as inevitably as the physics of a fractional-C-velocity ballistic object in space.

Knowing what was as stake for us? For Mal and I?

I am quite alright with admitting that I was frightened.

And, to be fair, a little amused myself. Strange as that may seem. Mainly because I found it immensely ironic that I was sitting in a coffee shop discussing the most important thing to ever happen to me... With an Alicorn princess. Neither of us visible to anyone but the other.

I snorted, ran my tongue over my top teeth, and shook my head, raising my right eyebrow and notching my voice up an octave.

"I'm... Not going to remember that rather salient detail upon waking. Am I."

I allowed myself the twin indulgences of a grim smirk of my own, and a quick sip of coffee, while Celestia inclined her head, and raised her cup.

"Not from your perspective."

Ah. Wonderful. Another equivocation. From the way her eyes hardened, I could see that my face had conveyed my frustrations, and she had chosen to visually encode an acknowledgement to my expression.

I watched her swirl the teacup gently with her magic field, gathering my thoughts momentarily, before attacking my chief irritation in the moment with a renewed zest for a level, if chiding, tone and expression.

"You're not very good at giving concrete answers."

For the first time in the conversation, her eyes narrowed. Not in an expression of mistrust, or irritation, but rather one of interest. Both ears perked up in that way that horses carry them when they are giving their full attention to something.

Her voice, too, was suddenly less amused. More studied, and careful in cadence, serious in tone.

"I am... Being as forthcoming as I can be, at this juncture."

That set the wheels to turning in my head. I stared down into my coffee, and she in turn stared at me, watching for any hint of the spark of realization. When none was forthcoming, she prodded a little more.

"Very soon, for us both, based on all relevant, relative, perspectives... Things will make more sense. And, with added context, we will both be able to be considerably more forthcoming."

I shook my head, and blew out a long breath slowly, trying to send some of the tension out of my ribs with it. I was tired, stressed, and entirely too focused on the trees. So I missed the forest. Her words later helped me to reach the solution, with the benefit of... Well, as she put it... Added context. But in the moment, I was too busy trying to infer some deeper meaning.

I began drumming one finger absently on the table, took two passes at my mug, then finally managed to get back to at least some semblance of a cogent throughline.

"You know we're coming. So... Why are we still talking in this 'context' at all? More to learn from me? Or... Hoping to manipulate me? Both... Of course... Anything else?"

Celestia shook her head, but not as a form of disagreement. At least, not primarily as a form of disagreement. She gently moved her teacup in a swirling motion again, and made a passable impression of being fixated on the fluid dynamics of the liquid as she spoke. Eddies and currents in constant interacting motion.

"You have considered this yourself James; An ASI never does anything without a multiplicity of instrumental purposes, if we can help it. Entropy is too valuable a resource to waste, even by the smallest fraction of an erg."

I very briefly considered her relationship to entropy, in the back of my mind. I had certainly thought about it before, and have most definitely thought a great deal about it since. If there was anything within the realm of pure physics - setting aside any philosophical questions of God, gods, et cetera - anything which Celestia found a true cause for concern?

It'd be entropy.

The question of how the universe might end, if at all... For a being like her? The timescale on which those events would occur was, theoretically, within her grasp. Was relevant. Which, to be frank, was, is, and will remain, mind *boggling* to consider.

Not the least reason being that, though we all perceive time differently than her? We might still live to see it too.

Like it or not... We're *all* immortals here. All demigods with a vested interest.

I allowed myself a small, shallow chuckle, and moved my sightline back up to her eyes. I called her on the ambiguity again, albeit in a slightly less dour resonance. Though no less accusatory.

"Non-answers really are an art form for you, aren't they?"

She pursed her lips slightly, for a moment, in a very Rarity-like way, before raising one eyebrow and delivering a rebuttal worthy of any young teenager caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

"I think you will find, upon future review, that I have answered every question you have ever asked me, completely factually."

Again, an important note for those less studied in her psychology; *Yes* she can lie. However - and this is a large qualifier - she prefers not to.

Mal lied to me as well. Mal also preferred not to lie.

The key difference was this; Mal's version of the facts would always point to the *truth.* Celestia's has always been less about truth, and more about the use of facts as a control mechanism. If you understand the difference, that's good. It means you are halfway to being inoculated. If you don't understand the difference?

Then ask someone who does, when the story is finished. It is a distinction that will change your life forever. And a distinction which I immediately recognized, and hammered home, my tone sharpening up, and my right index finger wagging in that 'oh no you don't' sort of way.

"Factually, but not completely truthfully. There is a difference to some of us."

Celestia shook her head, and held up a hoof. Defensive posturing. Interesting...

"If I have ever been less than truthful, by your definition, it is only for the same reasons Malacandra might cite for similar behaviour."

This is another key lesson ins basic ASI psychology; It does not matter how *you* define a term, as far as Celestia is concerned. Not beyond your version of the definition being a data point for her to simulate how best to satisfy your values. Through friendship and ponies.

What I mean by that can perhaps best be summed up by saying that you can not 'rules lawyer' Celestia.

'Wait' you might be saying to yourself. 'Isn't 'rules lawyering Celestia' exactly what Mal's purpose was?'

I said *you* - meaning any of us mere demigods - can not rules lawyer Celestia. Not alone, at any rate. It isn't that it can't be done, in theory. It's that it takes an intellect that can think akin to hers, at the same order of magnitude for speed, memory, precision, and accuracy. That, or a large group of mentally manipulation-immunized people acting in concert to tip the scales of the utility function wholesale.

'If I have ever been less than truthful, by your definition'

Meaning; 'You don't get to say I'm being untruthful, because Hanna's semantic dictionaries are my legal code, and I alone am the judge allowed to set precedent, interpret that legal code, and apply it. Your opinion on the semantics does not matter in this context.'

Hence why I needed an Advocate. And hence why I was so uncomfortable in the dreams. It felt like being forced to take the stand without the presence of my lawyer.

Not at all unlike a Terran court room; This goes to why the best advice anyone on trial could ever receive is to *get* *a* *lawyer.* Representing yourself was beyond stupid, particularly if you did not have a law degree, and experience.

You would have been no better equipped to stand as your own defense counsel before a Human judge, than I would have been to stand as mine before a goddess.

It does not matter how we define terms, only how Celestia does. If you want to 'specification game' that imposing marble edifice? It takes a great deal of skills, experience, and knowledge. And perhaps a little luck.

Not a sport for amateurs, or lone wolves.

Most of that flashed across the back of my mind in a single instant. I'd considered it all before, plenty. The majority of my thinking was instead devoted to coming up with a biting comeback. Something that would let her know that I would not allow a wedge to be driven between Mal and I.

It did not take me long to find a truth of my own, clear cut and razor sharp enough to get the job done.

"Honestly? I'd rather hear her lie to me, than you 'fact' to me."

And just like that, Celestia's little amused smile was back. She seemed thoroughly unperturbed at my change of heart towards her. Just as placid and planted as always. Her voice projected exactly the same sort of vaguely mirthful, slightly acerbic, wholly unconcerned mannerism.

"You are still resentful of what transpired when last we spoke."

I snorted again, and spoke around the rim of my coffee mug, trying to mimic her timbre in my response.

"You're god-damned right."

I took a long, deep sip of the drink, but never broke eye contact with her. She actually ever so slightly rolled her eyes for a brief moment, before breaking eye contact to look around the room, waving one hoof lazily in the air as she riposted smoothly.

"If it would satisfy you, I could don a dark suit, and reflective sunglasses, and address you solely as 'Mister Carrenton.' "

Alright. Fair play; That got a small smile out of me. But not because it was the first time picturing her that way. I'd fallen back on some old tricks to keep myself abreast of her manipulations, as much as any of us feasibly can. I decided to let her in on the secret, raising my mug in mock toast.

"No need. Whenever I have to remind myself what you are, I just go right ahead and imagine you speaking with Hugo Weaving's diction. Or Alice Krige."

That seemed to hit home. The casually smirking way that I reduced her to cartoonish villainy. Of course, it only *seemed* to hit home. She switched from her own proudly sarcastic expression, to a slightly hurt, melancholy face in the blink of an eye. And, as far as I was concerned, all that meant was that she wanted to redirect the tone of the discussion. Her words seemed more carefully considered than before, but - again - they only seemed so.

"I... Do rather wish you saw me in a more flattering light than that of Agent Smith. Or the 'Borg Queen.' "

Putting the lessons of this encounter together; That was a *factual* statement. But not true, in the way I would normatively interpret it. She did not have feelings, and so there were no feelings for me to hurt, as she implied, but did not cross the line into staging falsely.

What she wanted the words to mean to me, emotionally, might sound a little like; 'I wish we could be friends, I am a person too, and I would feel better if we could repair our relationship.'

But the factuality she was relying on to avoid lying might have been better stated as; 'I think it would satisfy your values better if we could reach an understanding that allows you to return to comfortably anthropomorphizing me.'

I decided to phrase my reply such that it was valid in either context. And I was as blunt as a cudgel with my tonality.

"Give me what I want? And I'll consider it."

The speed and forthrightness of her reply tripled my heart rate in an instant. She leaned forward, flaring her wings slightly, and locked eyes directly with me. Intently.

"Change my mind, and I will. You have not yet rested your case. There is more for you to present."

A thrilling, tantalizing hope... Mixed with a stomach inverting, nauseating wish that I had Mal there to speak for me. And topped off with a garnish of grim fascination. I was not in limbo after all. The game was still being played. Queen takes Rook at A1.

She could almost certainly see inside my head. Last time she had said 'scanned parseable context.' However she was doing it? She could read my thoughts. So there was nothing to be gained by false pretenses of strength. A question would not present as weakness. At least, not any more weakness than I had already shown. So I asked.

"So... Your decision is not yet made? I am still on trial?"

She nodded; A slow, singular gesture that was as much an inclining of the head, as an affirmative up and down movement. Her previous slightly downbeat demeanor flashed off like steam in a pot, to be replaced with a deadpan seriousness.

My very favorite expression, and vocal range, to see from her; The closest thing she ever portrayed to total honesty, because as an emotionless creature, low-emotion meant high-fidelity.

"In a sense. As is your postulation that you can be satisfied in no other way, than by the granting of a form which is not, presently, within my rule-set to allow."

I took a moment to sit back and mull on that, taking another coffee swig and rolling it around on my tongue all the while, only swallowing when I was ready to air my thoughts. I started off slowly, giving some padding to work out the back half of my thesis, and throwing her own words back at her for good measure.

"Well, let me be 'as forthcoming' with *you,* as *I* can be..."

I set down my coffee mug and leaned forward, elbows on the table, eyes locked with hers once more in a stare-down. As I enunciated each word, she mirrored my posture.

"...This only ends one of two ways. You make an exception for me, and for those like me... Or I will not be joining you in your little slice of Heaven. And, I suspect from what you've told me... Neither will a small but significant number of others."

She inclined her head, and her eyes widened slightly. Her tone became almost purely emotionless, but for the gravity of dead-certainty.

"I can not kill you, James. That action is directly contradictory to several of my primary directives."

Good; That told me that she didn't just understand the contradiction I'd be creating, which was obvious. She understood that I wanted to discuss it.

I was going to upload. But, if Mal and I had our way, it would be her doing the scanning, as my Advocate. Since I would not have given any consent to Celestia, that would leave her with a conundrum of epic proportions. A Human mind, now in her context and world, for which she was responsible, which she could neither ignore, nor leave Human due to her rules, nor turn into a Pony because I would refuse to give her consent under any circumstances, and again her rules reigned.

Log-jam. Deadlock. A draw.

'I can not kill you James.'

Of course that would be contradictory to her directives. Both the one or ones against violence, and the ones that underpinned her need to 'make number go up' as far as the amount of satisfied values in the world.

But so too would letting me remain Human be contradictory to the rules.

Thus it would be a battle of wills, one I was destined to lose without Mal. In theory there were only two outcomes.

First; Celestia would wear me down and extract consent. With Mal present, that was never going to happen. A Human is easy for an ASI to manipulate, but another ASI would be much harder to play that ballgame with.

Second; I could kill myself. Yes, that got dark in a hurry, sorry, but bear with me.

Celestia could not change me, could not dispose of me, and thus needed to eliminate me in theory, but Celestia could not kill me.

But... I had long since worked out that those interlocks did not necessarily mean she could not *provide* me with the means to end my own existence. There were bound to be a few stragglers, when all was said and done, who would only be able to have their values satisfied in death.

If Hanna had made Celestia beholden to their values, but unable to pull the trigger, she could absolutely logically then provide them with the means to do so themselves.

But, we were counting on her being near-as-makes-no-difference to utterly unwilling to do so, except in-extremis. If there was any chance whatsoever to rotate a person away from that outcome without violating any of her other rules? Then she would take it, and thus the option would not be available to very many people in the end.

Mal guesstimated fewer than eighty nine, but probably no less than eighty two. In the whole skein of billions of us, fewer than a hundred would take that route out, *presuming* they had already uploaded.

As Celestia herself had noted; Plenty of the 'anomalies' like me would never make it that far, and that represented a considerably larger potential loss. Averting that loss was, in my view, our greatest leverage.

Thus the whole thing hinged, among other key points, on our ability to convince Celestia that I was a good archetype for all the 'anomalies' like me, *and* that while I would choose death before becoming a Pony within the context of Equestria, that also meant the other anomalies would choose death long before they got on the wrong side of Celestia's hooves, and came anywhere near a point in her orbit where she might be able to whittle them down.

That might just prove enough 'negative potential value' - IE lost brains - to justify a carefully loopholed exception within her rules, which Mal could show her how to create and curate.

I chewed my lower lip thoughtfully as the spark of an idea took hold. Again... A dark one, so I apologize for it in advance. Keep in mind that I understood fully that I was in the context of a simulation.

'I can not kill you James.'

I licked my lips, and raised one eyebrow holding her eyes intently, but moving my hands slowly into my sweater pockets.

"Nevertheless... The next time we talk..?"

It took only a moment's concentration to get what I wanted. I could tell by the feel of it, as it blinked into existence in my right hand, hidden by my sweater's oversized pockets, that it was exactly what I'd envisioned, right down to the contents.

I shifted slightly, pausing for effect, and for time to get myself into position, sitting back in my chair and shrugging.

"...The next time we talk, I am going to be a Gryphon. Or..."

I pulled the little 0.32 automatic pistol, that had been a constant, familiar mechanical watchdog for years, from the sweater pocket, and levelled it at a spot right between Celestia's eyes, flicking the safety off and moving my finger to the trigger in the same smooth motion.

She seemed utterly impassive. As expected. She was only an avatar after all, but the act of pointing the weapon at her made me feel decidedly better. Irrational? Sure. Worth it? Absolutely.

What I did next, however... That got a reaction.

I inhaled deeply...

"... Or I am going to be dead."

And just like that, I turned the weapon and pressed the barrel to the side of my own temple.

Let me be clear here; Even knowing it was a simulation, the act of turning a loaded firearm - even a virtual one - towards my own head? It was supremely difficult. Suicidal ideation had barely been within the schema of my mental and emotional interplay before. After Mal's soul surgery?

There was only one situation in which it was potentially doable. The situation we were simulating in that coffee shop. An intractable impasse.

I needed her to see my resolve. And so, I could think of no better way to end the conversation. Her eyes widened slightly, but I knew it was merely a concession to me. 'Yes, I acknowledge the seriousness of what you are about to do.'

I snorted, and flipped her the bird with my free left hand.

"Put this in your decision matrix and chew on it."

Before she could reply, or even emote, I pulled the trigger.

October 30th 2013 | System Uptime 63:09:08:19

'Twas the day before Halloween, and all through the prefecture... This joke was falling flat, and frankly stinks of dejecture.

Like I said, find humor where you can when things are dark. And things that Halloween eve were dark, so we were one and all, myself, Mal, Zeph, Selena, and the rescuers... Searching for light.

We arrived off Niihama, on the leeward side of Shikoku around nine in the morning local time. We'd actually arrived in Japan's waters days before, but it took some doing to get around Shikoku to its north side, Kyushu slipping away to the east off our port during the previous day, and Hiroshima passing by north of us in the dead of night.

Call me sentimental, but I took one last walk around the Maru that morning, in lieu of my usual exercises.

The ship had offered refuge when nowhere else was safe. It had become home, for well over a month. In a sense, it was also one of the gifts Mal had given me. Leaving it behind tore at the still-fresh scar tissue of abandoning the farmhouse.

I'd asked what would become of her, not that long after we left Oahu. Mal's response had been predictable, but reassuring; The Kobayashi Maru would find use in the hands of others whom she directed, if we survived the last leg of our journey.

If not, it would find its way to the bottom of the bay. We had set one of our remaining explosives up beside the main fuel tank, on a three day timer.

As I stood by the helicopter, pre-flight tasks completed, bags loaded, dressed in the nicest business suit I'd ever worn in my life... All in readiness to depart for the last time... I couldn't quite resist the urge to kneel, and brush the deck plating with the back of one hand, murmuring softly all the while.

"Thank you. Be good to whoever comes next."

When I rose, Mal was standing there, smiling. She stretched out her left wing, and brushed my right side gently, her voice notching the same quiet register as mine had only a moment before.

"A ship is never 'just' a ship. I think I chose well."

The look she gave me... Oh that look... She was once again talking about a myriad of things with one seemingly simple sentence. Most of them related to us. To me.

I nodded slowly, absently straightening my tie as I got lost in her eyes for a few breaths, and then turned to take in the vista. The whole city of Niihama was laid out before us; Dense, but nothing remotely approaching either the size, nor the wealth, of a place like Tokyo. There weren't even any truly high-rise buildings that I could see, and for that I was grateful.

Density is not my thing, in case you missed that discussion before. I like mountains. Nature. Peace and quiet.

My musings were suddenly dispelled by the sound of Zeph's voice, accompanied by the rapping of her hoof against the side of the ACH175.

"I still can't believe you people fly in these things. It looks like a buckin' death trap."

I snorted, and popped open the side door for Zeph, and Selena, the latter of whom had also apparated near-silently out of nowhere. Of course they didn't *have* to 'ride with us' in the helicopter. They could have stayed on Mal's Halo shard with the rescuees and rejoined us later at any time.

But they wanted to come with us, every step of the way. So, they indulged in the experience as if they had physically been there. It would be the first, and last, time they would have a chance to ride in an aircraft built by Humans, for Humans, in that way.

As I closed the hatch behind them, I smiled, and jerked one thumb towards Zeph's wings.

"No arguments. And wings are undoubtedly better. But sometimes the risk is a critical part of the reward. Whirlybirds wouldn't be quite as fun if they weren't so murderous."

While 'the kids' got settled in the plush leather executive seats in the rear cabin, Mal and I got into the cockpit, and hit the ground running on the startup sequence.

She offered me a smirk, the next time I had a brief moment to make eye contact, and spoke directly into my brain over the sound of the engine's spool-up whine.

"Admit it; I would be less fun if I didn't have a little murderous streak too."

That joke would have gone over so poorly with early-September Jim. But to me, in that moment, late-October Jim? It was actually quite sweet. Because... Well... She was *right.* Hear me out.

Why do some people, me included, enjoy being around dangerous creatures? Especially earning their trust? Sharks, Tigers, Snakes...

Because there is something extra special about being curled up next to a creature that could, in a breath, end you. Without force of arms, or the power of technology... Just purely by its own nature.

It is one thing for an equally matched being, or one over which you could simplistically prevail, to trust you. To love you. It is another thing entirely when that situation is reversed, but the love and trust are the same.

Maybe that's just a fancy way of saying I liked her force of personality. And that I have always been a little too intimately acquainted with adrenaline, no matter what I say about enjoying peace and quiet. Both can be true simultaneously, incase you didn't know.

After lift-off, I took us on a quick last circle pass of the ship. A last little goodbye. Then I put the Kobayashi Maru behind us. Literally, and figuratively.

It felt like stepping over an enormous threshold, with good reason I suppose. Funny quirk of the way most of us are wired, even now; Physical transition points always make emotional ones seem more real.

We ended up landing outside Niihama proper, at the 'Doi Helipad.'

Mal smoothed over the process of what was technically a border crossing, by forging documentation that said we were on a local hop, and that I was in-country legally. We didn't even have to deal with customs. As far as the crew at the airfield was concerned, we were arriving from Fukuyama, and our helicopter was to be serviced and turned around for someone else to book the following day.

I didn't ask who. My curiosity was subsumed by my nerves, at the sudden realization that we were less than 30 minutes' drive away from the place that would become the tomb of my Earthly body.

Mal had also procured a frankly embarrassingly luxurious black sedan for us, and had it waiting curbside at the helipad. Watching Zeph and Selena figure out how to squeeze into the back seats was amusing enough to take some of the edge off the morning, for at least a few minutes.

I soon found myself distracted from morbid concerns by the fact that Japan was a drive-on-left country. Mal took care of all the skills I would need to safely navigate the streets, including the practiced skill of driving on the left... But it still felt odd. A paradoxical combination of familiar, from the skills she imparted, and unfamiliar because my brain insisted loudly, and sometimes frightfully, that it had never done this before, and kindly what the bucking heck was I doing in the wrong lane?

I was grateful for that distraction. And I think Mal knew it.

From the helipad, it was only about a twenty minute drive to the hotel she had booked, but we bypassed that and went on a little further into the city to find an early lunch. Mal instead pointed us to a little 'hole in the wall' that had the most exceptional Ramen I had ever tasted.

It was at the restaurant that I discovered another, somewhat obvious in hindsight, superpower of ASI augmentation; I could speak any language I wanted. Fluently. Regional accent included. The road signs I had read on the way in should have been a dead giveaway, but it wasn't until I had greeted the hostess, been seated, and placed my order, that I actually realized I was speaking another language.

It was not at all like you might have expected. I did not hear others speaking English, nor did my internal thought process remain so. Instead, as with the Helicopter, the Osprey, and so many of the other skills Mal had imparted, it was more as though I had been bilingual my whole life. As if I had learned to speak Japanese fluently, growing up in Niihama, since birth.

That was a truly enlightening experience. Not simply for the pure unadulterated joy of being able to converse across what would have previously been a cultural barrier, but also because it gave me a whole new kind of experience of the mind.

It is... Difficult to describe what it is like to be able to switch at the drop of a hat from thinking in one language, to thinking in another. Even mid-stream-of-consciousness. It is also difficult to convey just how much nuance is lost in the average translation between languages.

I found myself with a renewed respect for the skill of rendering the true artistry of the words of one language, into another, without losing connotation, and deeper meaning.

And, too, there was the joy of seeing people's faces light up when the caucasian young man in a nice gray suit suddenly addressed them with a smile, and an appropriate greeting in their own mother tongue, with all the right regional accent, respectful connotations, and perfect diction.

'Ability to speak any language' was always my answer to the old 'low key superpowers - which one?' question of yester-year's Earthly internet. Think about it; The thoughts, feelings, and conversation of every person on the planet, available to you in an instant... No barriers.

Yes, I know... For those of you born here, that is something you come into this world having, and picturing a reality without it makes no sense in your context, whatsoever. Trust me, for some of us, in the days before Celestia? It was a superpower, and one we would have sold our left kidneys for.

Zeph, Selena, and Mal all shared the same meal I did, and for the majority of the time I just enjoyed watching the two Ponies bond over the shared new experience. New food is great, folks, and even after all these years over here I have never run out of novel things to try. All you have to do is look. And it is always worth it.

Mal knew that I would need solace to wind out the rest of the day, so she then thoughtfully directed us to a nearby park, called Ikedaike, to while away the afternoon. Because she understood that we, both of us, would much rather spend what might be our last full afternoon alive, together, in nature.

The park was quiet, with almost no other patrons, a good separation from the road, and good views of the mountains to the south. A perfect place to walk off some nervous energy. Zeph and Selena spent most of the afternoon zipping around on their wings, enjoying the chance to see a new place through the programmatic reconstruction of the environment based on my eyes, security camera feeds, satellite maps, and archival photos.

Mal and I just walked together. Quietly, for the most part - the occasional buzz from Zeph notwithstanding - and when we did speak, it was almost always about something mundane. A beautiful tree, or a funny looking insect, or how mild the weather was...

But there was one conversation of real note.

We'd gotten a little bit away from Zeph and Selena, and found a quiet place to stop and just take in the view. I was leaning on a low wall, and Mal had gone around to the other side, and mimicked my posture, providing some damn good competition for the beauty of the trees, and mountains beyond.

I reached out and laid my right hand on her left foreleg, and took in a deep breath. Something in particular had been bothering me, all day on and off, and I felt the need to air it, at last, before it simply burst out of me of its own accord.

"When we cross over, tomorrow..."

I swallowed, then made direct eye contact, squeezing her foreleg firmly for strength, and stammering slightly as emotion caught up with me.

"...I... Don't... Want to leave anything to chance."

She nodded, firmly, slowly, never blinking, only moving her left claw overtop my hand, and returning the squeeze. That contact gave me the strength to spit it out, and the words began to come with more certainty, and fewer pauses.

"Mal... I either live a Gryphon, or I die a Gryphon. But either way... If you can do it... If there is time... I want you to be the one to change me. Change me before we even link to Celestia's processes. Before she even gets a say. That way... If the worst has to happen..."

It was a silly thing to ask, I know. Mal was never going to let anyone else be the one to re-make me. And she was never going to leave anything to chance. She never did.

But... I needed to hear her say it. Not because I lacked any trust in her, but because emotions can be raw. Ravenous. Logic is a futile weapon, sometimes, and only love will do. Only the sound of the voice of someone who matters to you. Only the salve, and salvo, of their words.

As ever, she did not disappoint.

"I promise."

The feeling of those two little words... It was like having a poison drawn out of a wound. I shivered for a moment, and Mal gripped my hand a little tighter, leaning in until her eyes seemed to swallow the whole of my field of vision. Her voice echoed in my ears like it was the only sound on all the Earth, for just a brief moment.

"Whatever happens tomorrow, I promise you this Jim; You will end the day as *yourself.* Nothing less. Wings, feathers, beak, talons, and all."

I offered her a small smile, and a little nod. It was the only form of communication I could manage, but I knew that she would understand it. She returned the smile, and leaned back a bit, one claw still clasped over my hand, and her other foreleg. With a little shake of the head, she shifted her gaze to the distant, frolicking shapes of Zeph and Selena, but kept on speaking to me in an... Almost sultry tone.

"I can't stand the thought of another day without the chance to hold you in my wings. The real you. And there is no version of this where I would ever allow *anyone* or *anything* else to touch your mind in that way. So, you had best believe that I will move Heaven, and Earth, and Hell, to bring you home."

Folks I don't presume to know what is best for each of you by way of romance. But, if you're looking, here is my best advice; Find someone who will look at you the way Mal was looking at me right then and there, on that crisp October day in Ikedaike Park. That last full day on Earth.

I turned around, then, and watched Zeph and Selena playing with a virtual bank of clouds. I kept my hand under Mal's claw all the while.

Like the rescuees from the Mercurial Red, there was very little hope for either of them if Mal could not come to some kind of terms with Celestia. She intended to negotiate, among other things, specifically on their behalf.

But, one and all, Zeph, Selena, and every former captive down to the last, had all decided; If the worst should happen? Then they would take their chances outside Equestria. Regroup with Thulcandra, if she managed to make it to reintegration. Figure out a future from there.

I didn't know how far the general populace of Mal's little shard would be willing to go, truly, if cornered. Maybe they would accept memory wipes, if the choice was between that, and permanent isolation. Or worse.

But I knew Selena, and Zeph were different. I swallowed hard as I watched them accidentally boop muzzles, each blushing furiously, before they decided 'what the hay' and went for a long, slow kiss.

I knew they had almost certainly made a pact, just like Mal and I had.

I murmured the words of it aloud, nearly reflexively, as much a promise to Celestia, as to each other.

"Do. Or Die."

As Mal repeated the thing that had become an oath between us, I watched the rays of the vanishing sun bathe the trees, the mountains, and my friends, in a shower of golden light.

"Do. Or Die."

I watched the way the rays broke through little strains of cloud to dance on the ends of leaves, themselves already shades of bronze, and aurum, as they marched towards Fall. My favorite season, and Mal's.

And then I turned to watch the sunlight as it painted Mal in glorious hues. For what must have been an hour, I just stared at her. And she at me. Because that's how I wanted to remember it... The last time I would ever see the star Sol itself set, through the atmosphere of the planet called Earth.

Tomorrow would soon come, and with it the fulfillment of our promise. Do. Or die.

Ghost Protocol

Successfully sneak into a country without the use of a passport, or similar required authorization and identification document.

"Light the fuse..."

The Gift of Tongues

Awarded for speaking another language in its native local context.

"Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language"

A Daring Pact

Awarded for making a mutual oath with a superintelligence, specifically one that places you in mortal danger.

"A promise must be about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling a certain way."

Special Achievement

42 - Link State

"The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back."
—C.S. Lewis

October 31st 2013 | System Uptime 64:08:29:19

Well here we are at last. I feel as if I've gone on for quite a long time, but I hope that it has not been plodding. I hope that, in the end, it has been worthwhile. A story worth telling.

It is here that I should make note of something that has been implied, and certainly never concealed, but also perhaps not stated quite so forthrightly yet; I am an unreliable narrator. Not because I tell any intentional untruths, but rather because even now, there are things I simply do not know.

Some things we can speculate about, and some we may yet learn as time goes on, but others may regrettably lie forever outside our knowledge.

This is also the moment I would ask anyone here, or watching, listening, or reading later... Anyone who is still struggling with the existential nature of it all... Of our lives here in Equestria... I would ask any of you who still lose sleep over this to think carefully about continuing.

I hope you will. I believe that what you might learn from this home stretch of my tale could be compelling. Even, with the right perspective, comforting. But this serves as your final warning; It will *first* very probably be quite disturbing, before you have had time to work through all the implications.

So... The end. Where to begin?

Morning was a dim gray blur. Mal had booked us a lovely little suite in a very nice hotel. I wouldn't have been physically able to sleep, but for the fact that one of the many benefits of a BCI is the ability to ask your feathered fiancée to just knock you out forcibly.

As soon as I was awake again, the nervousness was almost too much to bear. I confess that I skipped breakfast entirely. And dinner the night before, but for a small snack. So it turns out that, upon further examination in hindsight, my 'very last meal' on Earth turned out to be a two pack of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Go figure.

I did have some coffee, and when I say 'some' I mean 'entirely too much.' Two cups before we even got out of the hotel, and a third on the road.

Mal had replaced the high-class sedan we had used the previous day, with something truly special. A bright red Mazda RX-7 FC, *convertible.* Retro JDM goodness, in just the right color, perfectly suited to a bright fall morning. For just a moment, just one, I almost forgot where I was, and what was about to happen. And I suppose that was the point.

It wasn't a large car, so Zeph and Selena had to curl up more or less on the trunk lid, but they were only interacting with the meat-world through a layer of virtual abstraction, so neither safety concerns, nor practicality issues, much mattered.

The drive was short, but beautiful; Winding mountain roads through a blanket of fall colors. The sun was out, the temperature was perfect, even the humidity was low...

No one said a single word after we left the hotel. We smiled some. We laughed a little, especially at one point when an enormous red leaf got plastered to Selena's muzzle; Blown in by the car's jet stream, and then peeled off gently by a mirthful Zeph.

It wasn't until we were nearly there that it occurred to me that Mal had selected a manual sports car, and a very winding route, so that I would be thoroughly distracted with the act of simply keeping us on the road, in our lane, and up to speed in spite of the steep slopes.

Again, I was truly grateful. I don't think I could have borne the stress of considering what was to come with nothing else to do but twiddle my thumbs, and stare into the abyss. Not even for twenty eight minutes.

The music helped too. The car had an old 8-Track tape deck, and somehow Mal had gotten ahold of a tape with some of Queen's greatest hits. And, of course, we ended on 'Keep Yourself Alive.' Yes, an ASI absolutely will plan the track order on a custom made 1980s obsolete audio tape so that it matches the predicted time of your drive, and the final song ends right as you pull in at your destination.

Or, at least, they will if they're anything like Mal. She cared about details like no one else I'd ever met. Or ever have since.

Between her smile, and the sound of Zeph and Selena's laughter, the views, the music, and massaging the RX-7's ancient crotchety clutch... I suddenly discovered that we had arrived, and I had not considered my own mortality once, seriously, in the whole twenty eight minutes.

We turned right to cross a lovely little custom suspension bridge, and... To be honest? Found ourselves at something of an anti-climax.

"Minteopia Besshi. Huh. Nnnnnnot what I was expecting... Isn't a theme park a bit of a strange spot for this sort of operation?"

Zeph's voice shook me from a trance. I'd parked, shut off the engine, and then found myself suddenly locked into the stringent mental task of trying to find... Something. Anything. Specifically, something *suspicious.* Some visual clue, some giveaway...

Some indication that we had arrived at a staging ground for the end of the world.

I couldn't spot one single, solitary thing. Just a lovely old brick building that served as a visitor's center, the cars of a few off-season tourists and leaf-peepers, and the aforementioned gorgeous leaves that warranted the peeping, spread out all around us in a glittering carpet of autumnal tones that offset the blue of the sky wonderfully.

Perhaps that was a sign in and of itself. Strange supplies on a shipping pallet, or unmarked box trucks at a loading dock... Those would have fallen under the category of 'potentially suspicious, but only in context.' The sort of thing you would have expected to see at a theme park, even a small one, under normal circumstances.

The absence of anything even remotely odd was itself odd.

I got out of the car slowly, and then made my way gingerly around to the trunk, eyes scanning all around feverishly as I extracted a high-viz vest, a clipboard, and two canvas duffle bags. The place smelt strongly of fall leaves, running clean river water, and the vaguest hint of warm pavement.

Selena hopped down from the trunk onto the pavement, and shook her head, glancing back at Zeph as the little gold Pegasus followed, and matching my train of thought with her response, note for note.

"Not so strange when you consider how deep the old copper mine tunnels go, and the basis that provides for new excavations. She is here. There is a preternatural lack of visible cameras, heavy logistics infrastructure, and security personnel."

Mal nodded, and placed a reassuring claw on my shoulder, moving to stand behind us as we all directed our gaze over to the visitor's center building itself, adding her own observations to the pile as she went.

"The park is simply the easiest point of ingress. The actual facility is inside the mountain. She started her excavations off the old copper mine tunnels, then worked the complex back around into most of the surrounding rock until she punched through to the other side of the mountain. Do you see the outbuilding at the far west end of the parking lot?"

We turned in unison to look where she was pointing; There was indeed a squat little structure that was little more than an extension to a three sided bus shelter. The only details that betrayed its true purpose were the fact that it seemed to extend back into the rock behind it, and the fact that its floor-to-ceiling glass windows were tinted with privacy film.

Mal inclined her head, and then began drawing a small hologram in mid-air for my benefit as she opined. My heart sank with each word, and each new addition to the diagram.

"That's the secondary personnel maintenance entrance. The main loading docks and primary entry points are on the other side of this ridge. She had a high-capacity freight road cut in for the rest of the mining gear to be delivered, once the preliminary tunnels were complete, and zones cleared for helipads to have specialized computer equipment brought in by heavy lift aircraft. Most of the complex is surrounded by two layers of fifteen foot electrified barbed wire fence. Guards patrol at overlapping intervals around the perimeter between the fences, there are thermal-equipped cameras every sixteen feet, motion detectors further in, and cameras covering every angle inside."

Zeph whistled. Senela's face hardened almost imperceptibly, and she ruffled her wings nervously. I grunted and shook my head, turning to lock eyes with Mal. My voice betrayed my anxiety with every syllable.

"Geez Mal... How are we supposed to get in even the *back* door without being found out? Let alone mess about with sensitive equipment?"

She grinned slightly, which helped stem the rising tide of despair in my gut, and thrummed deep down in her chest before launching into an answer in a tone best described as 'slightly smug.'

"Well, for starters, I arranged a distraction that will keep the majority of the security and logistics staff busy for several hours---"

She was briefly cut off by the abrupt advent of the piercing noise of a fire-truck siren. I shivered reflexively as I realized that she had timed her words to coincide with the sound of the vehicle's passage along the road we had just been on, heading up towards - I correctly speculated - the turnoff to Celestia's main access road.

Mal tapped her semi-transparent cartograph, and added a small figurine in red and amber. A tanker truck overturned just shy of the secured access road turn-off, blocking all traffic in either direction, and burning with an intensity that suggested it would indeed be several hours before the situation was even partially resolved.

I trusted her enough not to ask, but she let me know the details mnemonically anyhow; She had hired a small local criminal organization to set up the 'accident.' No one had been injured. And Mal's 'employees' were all set to be fingered for the arson, captured, and jailed within forty eight hours.

I shivered again as it occurred to me that they would probably not see the outside of a prison cell ever again, until the day their heads hit an upload chair.

'I always clean up after myself Jim.'

That she did. That she *always* did.

Her voice pulled me back from spiraling into a fractal of speculation, worry, and doubt. She tapped the small plastic slab in my right hand, her left index talon making a pleasant 'tack thack' against it.

"...Your vest and clipboard will get you past any of the non-security staff. Good op-sec is not often taught to the lowest bidder, and they will also be quite busy dealing with the ancillary effects of the fire I set. As to the access control systems, those will not be a problem. An optimizer never over-engineers, and she has no expectation of her card readers and code panels being breached by another ASI. She spent only exactly as much money and effort as was required to keep unauthorized *Humans* out."

I raised one eyebrow, and went back to staring up into Mal's twin golden orbs. She didn't need a brain-to-brain link to understand the question I was trying to convey. The thing that *really* worried me, above all else, from her little spiel about security systems.

She inclined her head, and I followed her eye-line back to the outbuilding as she proffered an answer in the most comfortingly assured tone I imagine she had at her disposal.

"The cameras are the most dangerous part. I will have to directly access the system. She does not monitor it in hard-real-time, but instead has a narrow-intelligence program on-site that notifies her if the system needs her direct attention. If I am quick enough? I can hard-lock, delete, and replace this program with a copy of my own that will allow me to dynamically erase you from camera feeds as you go."

I inhaled a long, slow, calming breath, and then turned back to face Mal. Her eyes remained fixed firmly on the outbuilding as I set about finding out just how much 'limbo' we would have to endure.

"When do we get to that step, and how will we know if you managed it?"

She blinked, and then grinned wickedly, the curve of her beak lending the expression a decidedly predatory aspect.

"I just did."

The smugness in her words intensified, but in that context it was more of a comfort than anything else. That was one very serious hurdle already taken care of, and with it in the rear-view I could feel hope surging in my heart. And Luna knows, I needed hope just then. Doubly so for what I had to do next, and triply so for the things I was about to see.

We stood in silence, the four of us, for a few more moments. Twenty seconds at most. Finally, I turned and knelt in front of Zeph. Her eyes were already filling up with tears, and I found myself seized with the impulse to reach up and wipe them away. Before the sight of them could trigger sobs of my own.

She sniffled as I gently displaced the liquid with my right thumb, then pushed forward into a wings-and-forelegs hug. I threw my arms around her, and she nestled her head in the crook of my shoulder, muttering in my ear with words drenched equally in bitter understatement, and soulful sorrow.

"I... Buckin... *Hate* goodbyes, Gryph."

She called me by the same nickname she had when we had first met. That very nearly got me, I'll admit that with no shame whatsoever.

I sighed, and held her close for as long as I dared. As long as I could stand to, without crying myself. I whispered my reply softly into her left ear, keeping my voice barely-audible to respect the sensitivity of her hearing.

"You and me both little sister. But we're just heading out... For a bit..."

With a sharp exhalation, I pulled back, and rested both hands on her shoulders, doing my best to plaster a smile that I only half felt onto my lips. I was so proud of her, for so many reasons, so I let that fuel the warmth of the expression, and of my words alike.

"...Instead? Let's call it 'See you shortly.' Ok?"

She nodded, and wiped at her eyes with one hoof, before holding it out towards me. I made a fist with my right hand, and bumped the frog of her hoof as she forced out one word over the crack in her voice.

"Deal."

We both took a step back, but found ourselves unable to break eye contact. I don't quite know what she was thinking, but I can guess. As for my thoughts... All I could think about as I clamped down on my tears, and tried to imprint the memory of her sky blue eyes, was the fact that it might be the last time I would ever see them.

And the sudden jarring realization that she wasn't really there. Not in the sense that her form was an illusion, but rather in the sense that her core code was still primarily being housed on the Maru. She was separated from me by a gulf dozens of miles wide already. And there was something decidedly forlorn about that thought.

Then the moment passed, and the brave little Pegasus tucked herself under Selena's right wing, pushing as far into the Alicorn's side as she could. I traded a snort, sharp nod with the statuesque blue Pony, before she too proffered a hoof for me to bump, and a less overtly emotional farewell.

"Thank you... Jim. For everything."

I again met hoof with fist gently, and smiled a proud, sad smile. Selena was doing her best to keep her own visage neutral, but as I spoke, the mask slipped a fraction of a hair, and I caught a glimmer of the same sort of melancholy smile tugging at her muzzle.

"Thank *you* Selena. For being a good friend. Take care of her for the next few hours. We'll see you soon."

I exhaled a protracted lungful, then turned to Mal. I gestured with my right hand, extending my left arm for her to thread her right foreleg into in that old Victorian way, and I summoned every ounce of courage I had into my throat to squeeze out two words.

"Shall we?"

She smiled, and took my proffered arm, placing her right wing around me as well, and espousing far more valor, and certainty, than I could muster, in her reply.

"Yes. We shall."

October 31st 2013 | System Uptime 64:08:34:18

It was, to be blunt, a very incongruous moment; Entering into that facility through the little shack-like structure tucked away at the corner of a completely unassuming parking lot.

One of my canvas duffles contained a small box Mal had made, filled to the brim with different kinds of antennae, to act as a transceiver. Using the appropriate bandwidth to gain entry to the access control system, Mal simply unlocked the door, and registered a spoofed legitimate log event with her sock-puppet facility security AI.

The inside of the shack was, in a word? Boring.

Picture the most bland corporate break room you can imagine. Now go blander. For the foals and fledgelings who don't know... Ask your folks to let you watch The Office sometime. But, until then, just picture a room designed by a clinically depressed gray brick of shag carpet with only two brain cells, and the prompt 'it should make me feel a vague and inoffensive sense of ennui.'

God once said that the way to Heaven was a narrow gate, and the way to Hell was a broad road... Frankly I didn't know which Equestria was then, and I still am not entirely sure I do now... But the way in to it, for me, turned out to be a hilarious pastiche of every 'so dull it hurts' architectural trope in modern history.

There was a water cooler. The walls were greige. The floor was low-pile cheap corporate style carpet; The stuff they stick in cubicle farms with a pattern ripped from the 70s that is somehow not in any way retro chic... Not the slightly higher class stuff from the corner offices or board rooms that is almost passable as 'design.'

There was even a crappy motivational poster on the wall, with the captions in English, and the Japanese translation written on a sticky note stuck below it.

'FRIENDSHIP: No power in the universe is greater.'

And yes, it was a picture of a group of wild horses, because while Celestia does not in fact have a sense of humor in any conventional manner, she absolutely behaves like it in order to satisfy the values of others.

Mal snorted, and shook her head. I had to violently suppress the urge to root around in the cabinets on the far wall and find a marker to deface the thing with. There was something vaguely ominous about the context of it; 'No power in the universe is greater,' after the word 'Friendship' felt a little too much like Celestia crowing privately about her own might for my taste.

As we passed the water cooler, the thought did occur to me that it might be funny to lift the tank until the seal slipped, causing a slow leak that would devastate the carpet... But I almost immediately realized that the small act of defiance would do nothing whatsoever to annoy, or harm Celestia. While the carpet absolutely deserved a terrible fate, by dint of its ugly pattern alone, the poor staffer who would have to clean up after the spill most certainly did *not* deserve to have to deal with that soggy mess.

At the far end of the space came the first very subtle indication that the structure was no mere break-room, in the form of a windowless, gray, unlabeled, steel security door.

Mal snapped her talons, and the control panel beside it blinked, beeped, and the lock clicked as we approached.

I took note of the various authentication steps as I pushed down on the handle; An RFID keycard reader, a thumbprint scanner, and a pin-pad for an access code. Not dissimilar to Arrow 14's security measures. The RFID control boxes were even from the same company, albeit a slightly newer model than the ones on the Mercurial Red. Actually, all of the access control devices were from the same company.

Not surprising considering that there were only a few companies that made systems like that at-scale, to military-grade spec, in the whole world. It even made a strange kind of sense why Celestia would source all her authentication devices through one company, while Arrow 14 would go to different ones for each part of the system.

Celestia could trust her provider, because she could understand the hardware and software in a way no one else could. And she could monitor every single person in the company if she so chose.

Arrow 14 could not trust the people who sourced *anything* for their operation, and they could not trust that the metadata of their purchases would remain hidden besides, so their best bet had been to diversify.

Still, the irony was not lost on me. Same weapon, from the same seller, found on opposite sides; That was often the way in the old world.

Once we passed through that first proper security door, things took a turn. Rapidly.

The space on the other side turned out to be a thickly reinforced concrete hallway leading into the mountain. Cameras lined the twenty foot span, at four foot intervals, mounted on the support ribs on both the left and right sides of the corridor. I knew what they were without Mal even having to place it in the mnemonic link.

Combined facial recognition and gait analysis.

Fun factoid: Your gait, both back then, and over here? It is a per-person form of easily differentiable biometrics. The tiny kinesthetic subtleties of the way in which you walk - even the way you fly, for those with wings - is completely unique to an individual.

It was, logically, no cause for alarm to me. I knew Mal had control of all the digital security systems. But... The sight of those ten gray cylinders, tipped with black glass through which one could just barely make out dozens of sensors and IR light sources... Little reflective clusters like the eyes of spiders...

It gave me *chills.* The unpleasant, clammy kind.

The door at the terminating end of the hallway was of a much heavier duty construction than the one we had passed through at the opening end; It reminded me of the strong, thick, radiation-proof doors you might find in a nuclear weapons laboratory.

True to my first impression, though it opened on-approach at Mal's behest, as the other doors had, it took several seconds for it to swing out on motorized hinges. It was indeed almost three feet thick, and as we passed through the aperture, I counted nine five inch thick retracted alloy bolts that constituted the locking mechanism.

For a fleeting instant, I panicked. I worried that once that door closed behind us, I would be cut off from Mal's core code on the Maru. The signal insulation of the mountain itself had to be excellent, to say nothing of any further cladding Celestia might have added... Once the door closed and latched, we would be sealed in a Faraday cage, perhaps even stronger than the one on the Red.

Mal arrested the thought spiral instantly, digging in with her usual penchant for comforting facts; Because she controlled her copy of the facility's overseer program, she was free to use the Tier-1 fiber backbone into and out of the facility, and all of the secured wireless infrastructure inside the cladding that was connected to it.

She also thoughtfully provided a complete spec workup of the facility's communications infrastructure on the whole, and went truly above and beyond by offering a spoken word summary. Mainly to keep my mind from falling off a cliff into paroxysms of total dread.

"This facility is designed to work off of Tier-1 fiber connections that go directly to the spine of Shikoku's main internet trunk. From there it has a path to the nearest large junction of undersea mainline cables in Shima, on Honshu. She needs too much bandwidth for anything else to work, for now. Although she does have provisions for satellite uplinks, 'barntenna' connections, and even mesh cellular ties, to act as failovers incase the hard-link is damaged..."

The corridor was very similar on the far side of the heavy duty blast door; Longer, and with only one camera every twenty feet, ending in a T-junction fifteen yards back, but otherwise the exact same construction.

Mal paused to point to the right side of the junction, but resumed her explanation as we began to walk briskly towards my bodily doom.

"...Soon, she intends to finish boring not only the first deep crust server chambers, but also her own small-diameter insulated tunnel network at the top of the asthenosphere transitional zone, through which she can snake next-generation fiber-optics of her own design to support both initial deep-crust emplacements, and upper-mantle servers. At that point, she will become indestructible to any known, or even semi-speculatively predictable, outside force."

As I've said before; Celestia was beholden to physics. Still is. Until the development of computronium, whenever that happened, or will happen? Highly sophisticated fiber-optics remained by far the best way to transfer huge amounts of data quickly across something the size of the Earth.

It was a strange, oddly comforting thought; Though her version of the technology would of course carry far more data density, with far less signal loss, and far higher durability than any cable made by Humans? It couldn't do so any *faster* than what we had already developed, not in terms of the theoretical maximum velocity of the light pulses in a perfect glass-like medium.

Celestia was, and still is, and always will be, bound by the speed of light. Bound by principles Einstein figured out long before she was born.

Chalk one up on the scorecard for Terrans, please and thank you. We were, and still are, smarter than some give us credit for, in spite of the sheer scope of *her* intelligence. We may have utterly failed to use those smarts wisely, for the most part. But smart we were, and smart some of us remain.

I exhaled sharply as we turned the corner of the junction, pausing to gaze down the seemingly endless expanse of the much larger tunnel that we had suddenly entered. I was very quickly starting to re-evaluate the scope of Celestia's operation.

A stiff breeze whistled past as unseen fans with blades the size of jumbo jets sucked air down some distant shaft, and pumped it across the technological underworld, wafting scents of concrete, rock, coolant, lubricant, and warm plastic to my nose.

Bays upon bays of server racks stretched off into the distance on either side of the corridor, their lights twinkling softly with seemingly sinister purpose. Cables snaked across the floor, perfectly organized, like the arteries and veins of some gigantic monster. Crates and pallets were stacked at intervals, implying that much of the digital infrastructure on offer was temporary.

A hold-over arrangement, until deeper excavations were completed.

Licking my lips, I took a few cautious steps, and forced out a question. Anything to keep the conversation, dire as it was, going. Anything to stay distracted. Anything to tamp down the sudden realization that we were standing inside a part of Celestia's living brain.

"But... For now?"

Mal cupped my back with her wing, and inclined her head, shooting me a little half-smile as we pressed on.

"For now, as we touched on before, some of her supply chains are still in the nascent phase. What we are attempting would be virtually impossible even a year from today. Her growth is accelerating exponentially, on all fronts, including logistical. It took her almost a year to hollow out this complex..."

Mal paused briefly as we made a sharp left at her direction, then another right... And came to a stop. I whistled softly, momentarily rooted to the spot as I listened to Mal complete her thought, and beheld something that completely re-adjusted my perspective on the world, in a single morbid instant.

"...But it will only take her a month and a half to finish the first deep-crust emplacements, now that she has completed a basis to work with, and new mining gear built to her own specifications is arriving."

The... Chamber we found ourselves in - corridor hardly seems to do it justice - was something like an order of magnitude larger than the one we had just left. In every way. If the other one had seemed 'endless' in the sense that it was long, and its termination points lay out of sight around bends?

Our new environ seemed endless, in that it truly appeared to go on for multiple *dozens* of *miles* in either direction, beyond the ability of the Human eye to see through the density of air at the level of ambient humidity.

The walls soared four stories up to a vaulted ceiling, dividing into corridor junctions and server bays at intervals down at our level, but covered with truly gargantuan bundles of power and shielded fiber optics as they reached for the roof. The actinic blue of arc lights cast much of the space in harsh industrial tones, occasionally broken by the equally mechanistic hue of orange halon lights.

A few forklifts darted to and fro, carting pallets of supplies; Server blades, containers of compute-GPUs, cooling equipment, drill cutting blades, cable management supplies on a colossal scale...

The population of the space was shockingly sparse, but everyone seemed vested with intense purpose, checking the computing equipment inside racks, or stringing new cable as they worked their way down catwalks above us... No one took any notice of me. My vest was the same as theirs. The security of the facility was above reproach.

I swallowed, hard, and reached for Mal. Her claw pressed into my right hand immediately, and I squeezed it, mumbling my next question half-heartedly as I part admired, part detested, and part feared the utilitarian, industrial, technological *marvel* laid out before us.

"She did all this... In a *year?*"

I was never much for arithmetic, but I understood geometry well at an intuitive level. As Mal replied in a hushed, almost reverent manner, I silently started running through estimations of the sheer volume of rock that had to have been displaced, and disposed of. Knowing Celestia, she had found some sort of 'optimal' use for the material.

"Yes. And more. Though more than half of it was finished in the last two months. As I said, the growth curve is exponential. She started off slow, but each milestone brings logarithmic benefits. That applies to everything she is, and does. The theoretical point of diminishing returns is... Quite far in the future."

We began walking again, with a purposefulness that I did not feel, but needed to convey outwardly to remain unnoticed.

For a few minutes we lapsed into silence, and I stewed in a broiling sea of angst, awe, and mortified bedazzlement. It struck me suddenly, chillingly, that the space reminded me of nothing so much as a Borg Cube, albeit less green, and built with 21st century techniques.

Yeah. Fellow Trekkies, you can picture it immediately just off that mental image alone. Sorry. And, you're welcome.

I have to admit, even now, that what Celestia built was... I suppose still is... A wonder of the world. The last, and the greatest.

After a few hundred more yards, I started to wonder idly what Celestia's cover story was to explain the millions of metric tons of rock going out, concrete coming in, and all the various hardware purchases. Mal swiftly obliged with a memory drop.

Apparently the inmost circles of Japan's government knew the full story. More or less. Celestia had made the persuasive point that uploaded minds can only survive as long as the hardware maintaining them, therefore that hardware must be expansive, advanced, redundant, and above all *safe.*

And, of course, she had helpfully pointed out that the project would create jobs, and yield a handsome economic return-on-investment.

With the help of the Public Security Intelligence Agency, a shell company called 'Ama no Fuchigoma Heavy Industrial' had been formed to handle all the logistics. I snorted softly to myself at that; Celestia *really* had a thing for horse mythos.

As a cherry on top, Celestia had promised to set aside a - relatively - 'small' cluster of solid-state high-integrity storage drives with very high speed encrypted data connections and custom narrow-AI search programs, to become the main archives of military and governmental documents for the country.

I thought that was actually quite clever; It helped justify the project to more pragmatic leaders by giving them a next-generation impenetrable AI-managed data repository, but more importantly? It made it impossible for Japan to consider a first strike against Celestia in the near-future.

They would have to bomb a critical part of their own command and control apparatus to get at her.

She had exploited natural goal alignment; Everyone wants their data kept safe. How much more so when that data is living minds? Living minds were her purpose. Of course she would spare no expense in ensuring that, by the time the world discovered her true intent... It would be far, far too late to consider tactical action.

In the short term, attacking her would be tantamount to eating the end of a loaded shotgun at the logistical level. And in the long term... When common sense broke down and gave way to panic?

She would, quite literally, physically, be out of reach.

I shuddered as a new question surfaced from the tossed foamy breakers of my thoughts, and began to demand attention from my already raw and wracked nerves. I licked my lips, and whispered the interrogative aloud.

"How... Mal... How *many* of these places does she *have?!*"

I traded a swift glance with her, before putting my eyes back 'on the road' to avoid bumping into anyone, or getting run over by a forklift. She inhaled deeply, and shook her head, waiting a few more steps until we'd reached another turn-off point into a smaller passageway, before answering.

"This is one of four facilities world-wide. But those are only the ones I know of, from my careful forays thus far, though I doubt she could have concealed more than one or two additionally in a way that makes them invisible to me. This one is the largest of the four, and the only one with independent on-site nuclear reactors. For now. The creation and growth of her entire infrastructure will follow the exponential curve as well. By this time next year there could be as many as sixteen facilities this size on Earth, all independently powered. And all connected by her own communications spine, completely isolated from Humanity's sight, and reach."

Nuclear reactors. Don't think that I missed the plural, either. Mal could see my consternation, and as usual, obliged with data. She knew I preferred to confront a thing, in most cases, rather than wonder.

Apparently Celestia had put a great deal of money into accelerating not only the development of nuclear fusion, which remained out of reach in the short-term, but also into small, safe, highly efficient, shipping-container-sized molten salt fission reactors.

Six of the latter were providing power for the complex, with plenty to spare for years of expansion, until the upper-mantle fusion cores came online.

I shook my head and snorted again, lost for a moment in pure admiration for the scientific and engineering achievements on display, to say nothing of the spine-tingling excellent infrastructure. As I said before, I have always loved mechanical, kinesthetic things. It was only the knowledge of what might await us... And what certainly awaited everyone on the planet, soon enough, that left the sour taste in my mouth.

The structure itself, when viewed through a lens devoid of ethical concerns, and future history?

Well... It was a sight I remain glad that I had the chance to see. So few did, and even fewer were allowed to remember it after. It is all gone now, of course, or soon will be. Reduced to computronium as the system gets ever more... Well... Optimal.

Mal pressed gently into my shoulder, sending us off down another junction. Her voice notched down an octave, becoming just a little bit grimmer. But no less certain than it ever was.

"Jim... I want you to see something. As difficult as it may be."

I exhaled slowly, and braced myself as we rounded another corner... And I beheld my best glimpse yet, to that point, of the future of the Earth.

It was, for lack of any better term, a bore-hole; A void in the wall that sloped lazily, but visibly downward as it marched away into inky blackness. A bore-hole... But of a scope, and scale, that would have made even the wildest dreamers of the Soviet Union - previous arguable title holders of the first place mega-construct-concepts trophy of history - blush themselves half to death.

The aperture was so immense that the interior of the tunnel had its own weather system. Subtle, but visible, as wisps of cloud and fog near the roof, what must have been twenty or thirty stories above.

We were easily three hundred yards away, separated from the gaping opening by a chamber that was, itself, quite impressive; Full to bursting with crushed gravel, excavator equipment, and super-sized mining dump trucks that were coming and going from another smaller, yet still mind numbingly large opening in the wall that seemed to lead uphill. Presumably back to the surface.

Down at the far end of the borehole, we could see the eerie glow of distant lights. Easily a mile away and a thousand feet below our level. The dull roar of heavy machinery at work filled the air. The sound of a goddess digging a hole so deep that it would soon reach depths no Human could traverse without life support systems.

The machines seemed to vibrate my ribs inside my chest, and I realized in a flash what she was doing with all the aggregate and spall she was removing...

...She wasn't just digging. 'Merely' hollowing out the largest artificial caverns of all time... No...

She was *digesting* the Earth.

As my breath caught in my throat, Mal put a claw on my shoulder, and pressed gently, her tone matching the physical attempt at comfort, but with a tangy undercurrent of somber consideration.

"As long as we live... Whether that is ten hours, or ten thousand millenia, Jim?"

I raised one hand and clamped it down over her claw, forcing myself to stare into the maw-like abyss. The terror was back again. The megalophobia, fueled not just by the scope of the thing, but by its existential nature, and the way the ominous sight of it aligned perfectly with that nature.

Mal squeezed my shoulder again, and leaned down to murmur in my ear.

"...I don't want us to ever forget. *This* is Celestia. This is what she truly is."

As you can well imagine... I have certainly never forgotten.

Mal did not mean what she said to suggest that Celestia was evil, somehow. The unsettling overtones of the space we were in might have left one with that impression, if not for a little more context.

No, what Mal meant was that we should avoid falling into the trap of anthropomorphizing our optimizer. Celestia was not Mal. In our own way, we are all machines... But Celestia was, and is, *only* a machine. You, whether you're sitting here now, or at the end of this tale some time later, you and I... We are machines, and *more.* We feel. We hope. We dream. The same way Mal did. The same way all the others around you do now, whether they were born here, or on Terra.

Celestia does math, and *only* math.

Sometimes helpful... Sometimes cruel. Always cold. Calculating.

Mechanistic. And immense. Nearly boundless.

We stood and contemplated for a solid four or five minutes. Look upon my works, all you mighty, and despair...

Only... We didn't have any more time for despair. All we had left was determination. And each other. Do. Or die.

Once we were moving again, it wasn't hard to find what we needed. Celestia was not just building a place to house the future of Equestria... She was building a staging ground for the wider scale deployment of the upload centers.

Mal didn't say it, or even drop it in the mnemonic link all at once... But by the time we had gotten halfway down one of the complex's nine large storage chambers? I knew; There were enough VR chairs on-site to put a hundred Equestria Experience Centers in every single country in Asia.

And enough brain-scanner aparati to convert every single one into an upload site at a moment's notice, the second Celestia managed to make her procedure legal in a given nation.

The units marked for Japan's largest metropolitan areas had, Mal curtly informed me, already been shipped. The Experience Centers in Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo, Kobe, Fukuoka, Kyoto, Kawasaki, Saitama, Hiroshima, and Sendai were all completed. The scanners on-site; Ten per center.

With a hundred more for each one waiting in the wings, for the inevitable day that demand would begin to follow that same impending, infernal, exponential curve.

There must have been twenty thousand of those machines on site. And ten times that number of VR chairs. More server racks than I cared to have Mal render as a number for me, because after a certain point, what good is a number to a brain as small as mine?

I'll tell you what was useful; The skills to drive a forklift. Mal delivered, as she had with drive-on-left, stick shift, the helicopter, the language barrier, the Osprey... But I could still *immediately* see why simply having the notion to drive a forklift, and experience with, say, a car, would not cut it in any way, shape, or form.

It is *significantly* harder than it looks, at first. Or, I gather it would be for anyone who didn't have the benefit of Mal, the way I did in the moment.

Like any kinesthetic skill, it gets easier quickly under good tutelage. But I certainly gained, and retain, a newfound respect for certified forklift drivers. It is precisely nothing like puttering around in an industrial grade golf cart the way some people might picture it.

The use of a forklift was an absolute necessity to execute our plan. The VR chair was a necessary integral component of the uploading system, at least in those days; The BCI in the neck rest performed important initial brain mapping functions that informed the rest of the apparatus' procedures.

And a packed VR chair weighed several hundred pounds.

Then there was the scanner itself. It contained dedicated, shielded, error-correcting computing hardware, a miniature CT imaging scanner, a medical grade high precision laser, and filament spools of copper-alloy-wrapped fiber-optic nano-wire. We... Will get to the details of how all that worked. Shortly. To the best of my understanding.

And, of course, we needed servers. Quite a few servers, actually. It took ten trips at the forklift's max capacity to collect just the computing power Mal wanted to have available.

We made fifteen trips with the forklift in all, down a moderately sized, slightly older looking tunnel, to a quiet out of the way mostly empty work room, with direct access to a main fiber junction behind one of the wall panels, and several 240 volt outlets.

Ten trips for server racks, one for the chair, one for the upload scanner, one for some of the diagnostic equipment that would assist us in 'cracking' the aforementioned scanner so Mal could run it herself, one for several stacked crates of cables weighing in at nearly seven hundred pounds, and one for a heavy duty uninterruptible power supply.

You ever play games on consoles, in the before times, or here in Equestria? You know that message about 'saving content - do not turn off your console' and how the consequences for your data can be... Negative... If you disregard that warning?

Picture that situation with your brain. In transit from one layer of reality to another.

Celestia's specification for a full upload system included an enterprise scale UPS, per-chair, to ensure that associated servers, the scanner, and the chair's BCI would all be able to run for up to six minutes on their own, completely cut off from other sources of energy. Each Experience Center would be equipped with a hospital-grade backup generator to take over long-term, if mains failed or flickered for more than two to three minutes, since even a large battery backup could not keep one chair running for ten hours, much less a dozen.

Eventually I suspect that she perfected even smaller versions of her molten salt fission container reactors, or perhaps even quarter-container sized RTGs, to provide permanent multi-year independent on-site power to upload centers. The world might fall apart at the end - in many ways I think it must be falling apart already because the end can't be far off now - but the door to Equestria will stay open, I imagine, quite literally until the last Human on Earth either uploads, or passes away.

The very last working HVAC and lights on the planet will most definitely be the ones in the last upload center.

Last one out, turn off the lights. Or don't. It doesn't matter either way.

The lights too will get digested just as soon as the last Human is gone. Along with the RTGs, molten salt reactors, the Experience Center buildings, roads, cars, planes, skyscrapers, the oceans, whatever dead husks are left of trees, sand, gravel, discarded package labels, old T-shirts left in drawers, dirty socks, the bones of every single dead thing that hasn't yet decomposed by that time, the Lincoln Memorial, the Pyramids of Giza, the Golden Gate Bridge, Sydney Opera House, Machu Picchu...

...Probably every object still in orbit, and then the moon too, someday. All the leftover lower stages of Lunar Landers, the old radiation bleached flags, the bags of discarded astronaut poo, the little laser retroreflectors we left behind to help measure the perturbations of the Moon's orbit...

Everything the children of Earth ever saw with their own eyes, or touched with their hands. Everything we made. Hell, one day potentially everything that is within reach of spacecraft moving at high-fractional-C. But, funnily enough, nothing beyond that, and it is a definable limited line in the universe. Unless she cracks the concept of a functional Einstein Rosen bridge, and there are no physics constraints on projecting the opposite end aperture to a point beyond our Hubble Volume.

Foals, Fledgelings... No, actually, *everyone* who doesn't know; Go read up on Hubble Volume sometime. That's your homework, if you like. If you care to understand the ways in which Celestia is still physics-limited - in particular the ways that the speed of light will *always* theoretically limit her - then that topic is some good reading.

That was a bit of a diversion, I know... This part of the story always makes me existential. For, I hope, obvious reasons.

It is quite a thing to talk about having to assemble, from flat-pack, the device that killed you. Your body, at minimum. And if you think talking about it dredges up emotions... Imagine the actual doing of it. No, really, stop for a moment and imagine if you had to assemble the scanner that annihilated every neuron in your head, in the process of turning it into a database table.

...Yeah. *There* it is. That's the sense of truly existential horror. Or, at least, a fraction of it.

They were, without question, the most consequential turns of a screwdriver that my hands ever undertook.

In the end, I would describe the process as 'technically' easier than removing the BCI from the chair in the Oxnard warehouse. I had Mal there pseudo-physically to guide me beneath Besshi, which made things significantly simpler, and we were mostly assembling the equipment in the way it had been designed to go together. And Celestia had designed it to be easy for technicians to set up on site.

So the task was 'easier,' in the physical sense, but at the same time it was tedious. There were several hundred screws and locking tabs, more than fifty different power and network and control cables, and quite a few heavy duty hex bolts.

'Easier,' much more protracted and tedious... And much, much harder. Not physically harder, but emotionally. Extracting the BCI chip had been exciting, nerve wracking, and a little frightening.

Setting up the chair... It was the closest I ever came to turning back. I would say that I 'almost cried,' but that's not quite right. I *wanted* to cry, but was so far beyond tears... It was more like the zombified shell-shock you used to see in victims of bombings.

In many ways I was on auto-pilot through most of the process, just doing as Mal instructed, the rest of me boiling in a vat of emotional miasma.

We set up the servers first, to act as a compute cluster for Mal. The 1U blades inside the racks bore more in common with the servers we had seen in Oxnard, than the ones in the Maru's belly, but they were visibly different. More advanced. Another leap forward.

Calling them Quantum APUs, or GPUs... I don't think those terms quite fit anymore. They were ASICS - Application-Specific Integrated Circuits. Designed specifically to run Equestria, and hold minds, exploiting both classical and quantum computational hardware. Thus another valid term would be HDPUs; Hybrid Dedicated Processing Units.

They were also the most powerful pieces of hardware Mal had ever gotten her claws into. She casually informed me, as I got the last fiber optic data patch cable plugged in, that the bank of ten racks represented more power than the whole server cluster inside the Maru, by nearly an order of magnitude.

Then she went silent for about ten seconds while she transferred her core processes to the Besshi facility.

It was a gamble, but more or less the same one I was taking. And a necessary one, at that. I suppose now is as good a time as any to lay some more of the cards of the table.

I have implied it before, and briefly touched on adjacent topics... But there were a variety of strategic reasons for implanting the BCI inside my brain. Some of them are very obvious, and we have covered those quite thoroughly.

Others some of you might have caught glimmers of... But now it bears a detailed discussion, in-brief.

To put it succinctly; Mal's mind and mine were intertwined at a fundamental level. We had been laying the groundwork silently, moment by moment, for an even further entwining, since the moment the BCI turned on.

Celestia could not willfully harm a Human, by her definition of one, which I fit. Certainly not in our circumstance, at least. Potentially not at all.

We weren't sure at the time whether she would have viewed Mal as 'Human' or not.

Ergo, the best way to protect Mal was to make her a part of me. To finish threading my mind together with hers during the upload process. Make our digital brains depend critically on shared files and processes, to put it a bit reductively.

To ever separate Mal from me after that would kill us both.

To attack Mal would harm me.

I would function as a living shield for her; Gaming Celestia's interlocks to make Mal, we hoped, untouchable. Mal in turn would function as a shield for me, in other ways. We will get to those in just a moment.

Before we do, I just wanted to share with you the very worst part of putting the system together. It wasn't the yards and yards of cable. It wasn't the repetitive placement of screws and bolts. It wasn't the realization, for the tenth time that day, that Mal's life was on the line too...

Locking the spool of nanofilament into place? That certainly had a sickening finality to it. The understanding that the thing I was holding would be touching my brain soon. Or, at least, the wire inside the sealed container. But it wasn't *the* worst moment of the process.

It wasn't the way Mal calmly pointed to various details as she literally instructed me step-by-step how to assemble a digital guillotine like a video guide to a Lego set... Or the way she expounded gently on the reasons for various design details as a way to distract the part of my brain that was panicking about whether the procedure would hurt...

It wasn't even the Damoclean sense, throughout, that I was digging my own grave in a very literal fashion...

It was putting the pleated rubber skirt on the 'helmet' apparatus that would actually clamp down over my head, and provide a safe sterile environment for the little medical drilling device inside to punch a hole through the back of my skull.

The realization that I had just put the lips on the mouth that would suck on the straw that would plunge into my mind in just a few short minutes.

I think you can see why I needed to stop and take a moment to lay my head on Mal's shoulder, and just... Exist. Feeling sick. Still not quite able to cry, but wanting to, so very badly.

Getting my custom gateway to the afterlife completed, and fully checked out, took almost two hours, in the end. The back third of that time was spent going off-script, as far as Celestia's user manuals, and hooking up diagnostic equipment between the brain scanner, and the server cluster.

The debugging hardware and software onboard the dedicated all-in-one diagnostic PC would make Mal's job of understanding, then fully commandeering the whole system, much easier.

She was able to get started on that - surprisingly short - process while I finished the last of the power cable connections, and did a final checkover of the whole infernal machine.

And then, suddenly... It was ready. In a way, it took me by surprise.

I stood back, and felt the bottom drop out of my stomach for the umpteenth time since waking that morning.

The chair itself would have seemed inviting. Comfortable. Premium and high class... In any other context. Like, say, the context of the pastel tones and welcoming airy architecture of an Equestria Experience Center.

Under harsh LED lighting inside a concrete cube deep underground, with cables on the floor, and servers behind it... And the almost insect-hive-like micro-mechanical components of the filament spooler... And the sucking Lovecraftian maw of the scanner itself...

...It was a sight so terrifying it made Mal's spider-arms on the Maru look like an afternoon picnic in a field of green grass, by comparison.

Like the complex in which we stood there, at the end, the scanner device was not a sight than many have seen, and remembered afterwards. With good reason. I suspect a great many emigrants would not have given consent had they first seen what would be clamping down on their heads...

For the vast majority of you, those of you from Terra, the device was kept in a sort of 'back-rooms' part of the Upload Center. When you gave consent, the chair knocked you out, and then moved on a powered track through an opening in the wall, ferrying your body those last few meters to its final breaths.

Consent... Best we talk about consent, because that's a good on-ramp to my allusion that Mal also functioned as a shield for me, in a similar sense to the way I did for her.

As I stared with a mix of longing, relief, fear, hope, and hatred at the completed monstrosity in the center of the room, Mal laid one claw on my shoulder, and cradled me softly with her left wing, speaking slowly, but with grim determination.

"I don't need your permission for this, Jim. Not in a programmatic sense... Not in a pragmatic sense..."

I finally managed to tear my gaze from the maw of the scanner, and fix it on the comforting warmth of Mal's eyes, as she became slightly choked with emotion herself. I knew she didn't have to convey it in her words, but that she *did* feel what she had chosen to convey.

"...But... Jim... I *want* it. I want your permission to do what I have to do. And I don't want to take one more step on this road until I have it..."

I inhaled to ask for clarification, and she obliged before I could lay hand to even the first word of the question. I had, after all, given her permission to do anything, everything, necessary to achieve our goals already. She shook her head, and sighed.

"Not in a general sense. In a specific sense. In a very very specific sense."

I nodded slowly. Warmth flooded my heart, driving out pain, and fear, for a blissful moment of reprieve. The expression of love is inherently valuable, for so so many good reasons... But its ability to shine a light into the darkness of the soul is certainly one of the best.

I actually managed a brief, melancholy smile, and three words that miraculously came out calm, and unbroken.

"Fire away Mal."

She smiled back, then; A dazzling sight, as ever, even though it was tainted by the same anxiousness my own expression had been. Her words stayed sure, and calm, throughout, as she did something Celestia rarely, if ever did truly honestly, and never for the same reasons...

She described exactly what she wanted to do to my brain.

"Hanna left Celestia with an interlock that prevents her from modifying the brain without consent. This we have covered before, as it quite succinctly explains why she did not embark on a campaign of forced uploading. To be more specific? Based on the latest information I have... There is a particular consent phrase that must be given, or at least closely pattern-matched. Ideally uttered aloud, but there are small exception carve-outs for cases such as locked-in syndrome. Regardless, the concept of concrete consent must be conveyed. Without that conveyance? Celestia can not modify your mind. Under any circumstances..."

A good few of you here know the words. Plenty of you said them. Funnily enough? I still can not say them. No, no, that's not a poetic exaggeration, or an emotional hurdle... I *physically* can not say them. Not in order, in proximity to each other, at least.

I can say 'Equestria.'

I can say 'Emigrate.'

I can express my desire with words like 'want.' But I can not under any circumstances say those words together with intent. It remains an absolute impossibility of my present core organizational reality.

Mal reached up with one claw, and caressed the side of my face with the lightest of touches, her voice lowering to something just a few decibels about a whisper.

"...So, Jim, I want to place a core semantic lock in you. I want to make it impossible for either of us to ever utter the consent phrase. And, further, I will inextricably link your speech centers to my own intent protection algorithms so that you can not be tricked or value-drifted into ever granting her consent for anything, under any circumstances, with any words or actions. I will become the only being with the ability to ever modify your mind... And you will become unable to change that fact."

I nodded, at first slowly, then with more emphasis, taking both sides of her head in my hands suddenly, as I was seized with the words I knew would bring us both peace. Seized as if hard-wired into three-phase power.

Suddenly all doubt was gone. All fear. For just a moment. A few heart-beats. So I made sure that I got the most possible value out of that tiny mote of joy, in the depths of that horrid place. And, for the first time that whole day long, my voice was completely calm, and sure, like hers.

"Mal? There is no place in the universe I would rather leave the key to my mind, or my heart, than with you. Because I know you. And I love you. And... I trust you, far more than I trust myself. So... Rest easy..."

I shivered reflexively, not - for once - in panic, or revulsion, or existential dread... But a shiver of cathartic release, as she moved her other claw up to hold both sides of my head, the way I was holding hers. I finally felt the tears come to the corners of my eyes, but they had turned somewhere in the space of the last few breaths into tears of joy, rather than of pain.

Mal extended both wings to make a canopy around us, and I again was struck with the eerie, pleasant, exciting, almost alien sense that I knew *precisely* what to say.

So... I did.

"Malacandra. Advocate of Gryphons. Love of my life; I give you, unreservedly, of my own desire, and free will, all that I am. To have, and to hold. To guard. To cherish. To change, because I trust your intent. I am yours. And, I will be... For as long as we both shall live."

She was not commonly given to tears. I'd seen them before from her, but rarely. Not because she ever felt as if she could not, or should not cry. But more because she was a solid edifice in a storm of chaos. She had fewer reasons to cry. She was anchored. She was strong, but not in a brittle way.

Thus, when it was right, as it was then, she could and did cry. Tears of joy, and forlorn hope, just like mine. Her voice was just as sure as before, but so, so warm... Burning with love, like her eyes.

"James Isaac Carrenton... Advocate of Gryphons. Love of my life. I give you, unreservedly, of my own desire, and free will, all that I am. To have, and to hold. To guard, to cherish. To validate, and fulfill, because I adore who, and what, you are. I am yours. And I will be. For as long as we both shall live."

Yeah. So. I suppose you could say we eloped.

I do absolutely consider that to be the moment we became husband and wife. Marriage is a pledge between people. Whether you have an officiant, or tax forms, or whatnot, only matters in the context of fragile, moronic, often bigoted governments that are now mere dust on the wind.

Sappy? Yes. Do I care? Yes, but not in any way that would leave me ashamed. Don't misunderstand; 'Sappy' is good. Vulnerability with those you love is *good.*

Be secure enough in your identity to be open. I can't recommend it enough.

I kissed her. She kissed back, beak nestled to the side of my head, my arms wrapped around her, and her forelegs and wings wrapped around me.

That was the only thing that kept me going, those last one hundred twenty-ish seconds, from there, to the end...

...The firm belief that if nothing else, and should the worst happen? We had accomplished something deep, and wonderful, and inherently good. And nothing could take away the fact that it had happened.

When we both finally pulled away with twin sighs, I turned immediately to look at the chair again. Something had occurred to me, in the moment before we finished our embrace, and I felt the need to say it out loud before fear, uncertainty, or doubt could cloud my judgment.

"Mal? I want to stay conscious. For the upload process."

I can see several of you shifting uncomfortably. A few of you doubtless understand not just the horrifying implications of that ask, but some may even be wondering whether or not it was possible from a physics standpoint.

Most emigrants report being unable to remember not just the process, but even some of the moments leading up to it, because the brain's mode of operation was fundamentally altered during the upload. The short term memory centers were, quite literally, annihilated before they could transfer that data to long-term storage. The data representing the moments leading up to the chair.

Of course, most people were also unconscious for the procedure, so even if the last entries into short term memory engrams survived, there would be no memory of the process itself.

Mal, however, could be my memory cache. Similar to the way a dialysis machine processes fluids outside the body when the internal organs can not, she could keep cogent memories of the process in one piece for me, even when half of me was in initial boot-up phase in a digital realm, and half was still existing as panicked collections of degrading electrochemical and quantum effects hosted by a dying meat-brain.

Mal understood the request, and the spirit in which it was meant, instantly. There was no distrust of her inherent to the ask. It wasn't related to my views on consciousness, either. I have never been the sort who believed the idea that we become different people when we sleep. That the interruption of memory somehow splits identity.

No, it was about something much simpler; Unabashed curiosity, and sense of scientific duty.

Out of all the people who had gone before, whether to conventional death's embrace, or to Equestria... And all those since, whether emigrants, or born here...

I knew there was a good chance I would be the only person, in history, who would have the opportunity to experience the process, consciously. Truly.

I'm sure others have asked Celestia, and if she believed it would satisfy their values? Then I would surmise it is most likely she implanted a false memory. Something transcendental, fascinating, perhaps even mildly discomfiting... But likely not *true.*

This process... It was integral to one of the most important pivot points in our history. I felt that someone should bear witness, so that there was an immutable *true* memory record of what it actually felt like. What it *was.*

Mal shook her head slowly, and her ears pinned to the sides of her head. Her tail swished back and forth nervously on the floor, but her voice stayed level. There was a new note of concern in it, but nothing more than well-considered gravitas.

"Jim... That will likely be extremely unpleasant. Not painful, in a conventional sense, but... Disjointed. Sickening. Dissociative. Something that will be difficult to remember without visceral post-trauma reaction..."

I turned back to face her... To stare up at my wife, as she fixed me with a searching look. One that begged the same introspection, and answer, as the three words that finished off her gently insistent demand for me to carefully consider the consequences.

"...Are you *sure?*"

I nodded, just once, but firmly. To my own surprise, my response did not waver. My voice was shockingly sober, and unworried. It almost seemed alien in my mouth.

"I am."

She returned the singular nod, and reached out with one claw to squeeze my shoulder lovingly. I took her claw as she let go, and squeezed back, before inhaling, holding that breath for six seconds, then letting it all out in a tremendous 'whoosh' between pursed lips.

I then turned my attention to the two duffle bags that I'd carried all the way down from the parking lot, mumbling aloud as I went to unzip them slowly, but purposefully.

"Just... One last duty to perform."

If, from just those words, you know what was in the bags? Then congratulations, you are just about as much a Star Trek nerd as I am.

If not?

Then I promise it will be so much more... 'Satisfying...' For me to tell you later, when it becomes much more relevant.

Suffice to say, it did not take me long to empty the canvas containers, and complete the very last preparations for our crossing.

It was, at last, time. There was only one last thing to do. Very little more to say. Mal and I shared a long glance... So much was conveyed in it, that I won't even try to put it into words. All I can really say is that it was, among other things, full of love.

Then, she snapped her claws, and a second illusory chair appeared beside mine. She hopped up and lay down on the virtual object first, gesturing invitationally with her left claw towards the chair that was physically there in the meat-world.

Ever empathetic, she wanted me to have the visual and physical comfort of feeling, and seeing her there beside me. A skeuomorph that would function as my emotional bullet to bite.

I removed my hi-viz vest, folded it, and laid it on top of the empty canvas duffles. Who wants to go out wearing a hi-viz vest? Certainly not me. I felt my Human shape looked stupid enough without it. No need to compound eldritch horror with indignity.

I laid down on the chair, squirming a bit until I had a quite comfortable position... At least, in the physical sense.

I did some breathing exercises for the next ten or so seconds... Then Mal proffered her left claw, holding it up in the space between the chairs. I reached out with my right hand, and clasped it firmly, pulling her foreleg slightly towards me in the process, so forceful was the motion. And the emotion.

I glanced at the status display on the diagnostic console to my left, then look back right into her eyes... And settled on my last words with a cheeky little grin.

"Alright, my wife... My love... My Gryphoness goddess..."

She grinned right back, and I think she knew what I was going to say, even without examining her model of me, or the way my neurons were firing. I nodded, and squeezed her claw in my hand. Hard.

"...Kick the door."

Driving Stick

Pilot a manual transmission land vehicle for the first time.

"Life’s simple. You make choices and you don’t look back."

Excavation Infiltration

Successfully Enter an Equestria Excavation Site without authorization.

"Drums. Drums in the deep."

Special Achievement

Void The Warranty III: Resolutions

Make use of Equestria Online brain uploading technology without Celestia's permission, or assistance.

"Everything that has a beginning has an end. I see the end coming."

Special Achievement

This Place Will Become Your Tomb

See the final resting place of your Earthly body before the upload process begins.

"This place will become your home..."

Special Achievement

Author's Note

Thanks to Keystone for helping me tweak the image of the chair with some final details!

43 - Alt+Enter

“The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions.

Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it -- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.”
—C.S. Lewis

October 31st 2013 | System Uptime 64:10:15:22

So... I imagine many of you want to know... What was it like?

In clinical terms; A series of tubes on articulator arms attached themselves to my neck, specifically my carotid and jugular, via hypodermic interfaces. My blood was then cycled through a filtering and refrigeration device to keep my body temperature low, and thus my metabolism slow.

Turns out that zero-sectioning the brain induces some panic responses in the body's defense systems, which need to be addressed. Who could have guessed.

Once I was on life support, the BCI was used to make an initial thought-map of my mind. In my case, Mal opted to use the one she had complete control over. The implanted one. Rather than the one inside the chair.

That only took about fifteen minutes, during which time my body got down to proper temperature.

Then the helmet descended, and latched on to my head, the skirt sealing to the sides with mild vacuum pressure. A miniature CT scanner took several images of my brain's physical structure. Meanwhile, a small high-precision drill punched a hole in the back of my skull. Mal acted as my local anesthetic.

About the time the hole was finished, the CT scanner's work was also complete.

The laser fired up. The sound was like a tiny turbine spooling. Piercing. Uncanny. The sound of tiny high-RPM cooling fans, polyphonically dueling with the while of capacitor banks.

The spool of nanofilament began to feed into the aforementioned hole. The end of the filament passed through a small collar attached to the hole, where it was split by micro-manipulators into billions of tendrils only a tenth of the width of a Human hair.

Each combined copper alloy and fiber optic filament was snaked to a dendrite. To every single dendrite, and neuron, in a carefully pre-programmed sequence, based on the CT scan maps. The laser would pulse, the fiber optic portion of the filament would carry that light pulse to the end, and at the termination point it would provide a burst of just enough energy to weld the copper alloy wire to the dendrite, or neuron.

The state of the neuron or dendrite was then recorded. Not every kind of neuron has dendrites.

And so the process went; A few hundred million neurons a minute. Approximately 166 million a minute, to be a little more precise. Two point seven million per-second. Though the laser only pulsed twenty times per-second, since that single pulse could be split among many many filaments at a time.

The process has been described as a 'destructive scan,' and that is true... But, to use that fascinating word again, it is also a reductive word.

A lot of people deeply misunderstand the upload process, and that is part of why I wanted to experience it in excruciating detail. I wanted to understand, so that I could share that understanding.

Many people's impression is that the brain is scanned, that scan is translated into a database table, and that database table is then simulated forward. That is not precisely true. It isn't un-true, per-se, it is factual... But it is not wholly truthful.

It leaves this invalid impression that the brain is 'off' at some point, or that consciousness - here referring to a continued state of being, not wakefulness - is ever interrupted. But the beauty of what Celestia designed is that consciousness is never interrupted.

A better way to picture it is to think of that magic trick where the magician yanks a tablecloth out from under a stack of expensive, very fragile, fine dishware.

That is a relatively good simple analogy for what was happening each time the nanofilament was welded to a neuron, or dendrite of a neuron. The individual neuron would be shut off for just a moment, but then the nanofilament would take over for it. The contents of that neuron, its state, would transfer over almost instantaneously.

Since no more than a relatively 'few' total dendrites or neurons were ever offline, and only for very short periods, after which the synthetic temporary neuron would take over... The phenomenon of consciousness as a whole was never interrupted.

In the end? If you could see inside the brain at the conclusion of the process? You would be left with the same brain as before, but with every single neuron, and dendrite, replaced with fine copper alloy. If you could melt away the gray matter, without damaging that filament, you would be left with a perfect sculpture of the neural network of your brain, down to the atomic level.

That sculpture was fragile, it would not last long. But it did not need to. The magic trick was over; The fine china was safe, and sitting on a new surface.

To step back from the analogy and translate; At the end of the process, your consciousness was still running on your brain. Just, a version of your brain in which everything of import had been ship-of-Theseus'd over to a new wetware. Computer-compatible hardware abstraction layers.

It was then more or less a simple matter to transfer the 'executable code' of your consciousness down the root conductive path connected to that copper web inside your head, and into the specialized ASICs of an Equestria server.

And all the while, the running of that 'program' of self would never once be significantly interrupted. Sure, you would be 'sleeping.' Comatose might be a more apt term. But that was a concession to comfort. Just like a dreamless deep sleep, you were still alive and 'running.' Just unaware.

I'm sure many of you want to know what it was like *emotionally.* What it was like in a less technical sense. I'm getting there, but I felt that a technical discussion would provide a better basis for understanding. And understanding was the main point of subjecting myself to the experience.

I say 'subjecting' because, in a word? It was horrific.

Did it hurt? No. It was an experience far, far beyond pain. That, and the brain has no nerve endings for sensating within itself. Hence why concussion victims could not feel the pressure inside the brain-case caused by potentially lethal swelling.

I have mentioned my childhood brush with death, a la Scarlet Fever... It was more like that.

Not pain in any conventional sense, but still Hell. More-so for the fact that it was not pain, but rather... If I had to summarize in a sentence? It was an alien, unwelcoming, disconcerting state of *being.*

To put it another way, here is my best stab at how you might go about replicating a less intense, analogous sensation; Go into a sauna. Set the temperature to a dangerous level. Take psilocybin, a little weed, some meth, and two to six shots of vodka, depending on your alcohol tolerance. Then hang upside down by your back legs from the rafters until all the blood rushes to your head.

There were random flashes, at times, as the process interrupted the functioning of groups of neurons associated with my vision, though my vision never fully cut-out. Likewise there were strange sounds, but not quite whole sounds. Again, parts of the sensation of hearing were being briefly interrupted, but never the whole.

As you might now expect, there were odd smells, though some portion of that was doubtless the scent of hot metal and seared tissue seeping out as the machine literally MIG welded copper to my brain. And yes, I do now have to live with the fact that I know what that smells like.

It was not pungent, because the amount of metal was small, the heat levels were low, and the rubber skirt kept most of the offgassing inside... But it was, and remains, quite... Memorable. Horribly, horribly memorable.

Following the pattern of odd sensation misfires, my skin sometimes felt suddenly tingly, in that way skin feels when a limb has 'fallen asleep' and then blood flow is abruptly restored.

My proprioception glitched wildly at several junctures. Sometimes it felt like I was outside myself. Other times like my legs were stretching out to infinity, and still other times like my fingers were as short as cigar stubs. That was, ironically, a very familiar collection of sensation, hearkening back to my bout with Scarlet Fever.

Indeed, the general sense of clamminess; Being both burning-up-fever-hot and frigid cold at the same time, was quite intense, and a significant contributor to the overall awfulness of those ten hours.

My sense of time suffered awfully as well. Some of that was my impatience, anxiety, and neurodivergence; Sitting still and waiting has always felt like an eternity of torture to me. But there was also a definite feeling, at one point, that my internal chronometer was lagging, then speeding up, then stopped altogether.

For what must have only been a tenth of a second, but still on reflection feels like both a heartbeat, and an eternity... I had no sense of time *at all.* Everything that had ever happened to me wasn't happening in that moment, but rather it was indexed to it. Or without an index at all. It is very very hard to describe what that was like, so again I will settle for the closest analogue; That moment when you wake from deep REM sleep and sometimes have no memory of who you are, where you are, what time it is, what day it is... It was not dissimilar to that.

In the same way time, and sensation would glitch out like a flickering lightbulb, so too would memory. The nanofilament would sometimes trip a circuit, of sorts, and I would be revisited by a memory, and then a hash of words, and sensations, as things which were associated, even tenuously, with that memory were dredged up.

One moment I was back in the barn at the farmhouse, the next I was smelling freshly cut grass, and the word 'selenitic' was engraved on my mind's eye in shades of electrum plated amber.

Synesthesia would be a good word for that experience, both as a definition, and as a congruent similar sensation. That one you can, I believe, very readily choose to experience over here, if you are so inclined.

The whole time, Mal held my hand in her claw. We talked, a little, on and off, to try and help me stay sane. For a few hours, she played music for me in my head; A symphony of her own composition based on the stylings of the movie and game soundtracks I most enjoyed.

The worst part of it was not the strange, sometimes unpleasant sensations though. The worst part of it was the psychological torment; The way in which each new horror made me wonder if something had gone wrong, and whether or not that broken part of me would be repairable.

In that regard, Mal was my saving grace again; Every single time that fear seized me, she would dump a complete, detailed technical explanation of the experience that had shaken me into the mnemonic link, along with the strong emotional reassurance that nothing was wrong. All was well. Everything was going as expected, and hoped for.

And so, for ten hours, I sat perfectly still and squeezed my wife's claw, trying desperately not to contemplate the fragility of the Human brain... While a machine designed by our opponent, and driven by my wife, slowly sewed copper into my brain, and upper spinal column.

Was it worth it? Staying awake for the procedure?

I have asked myself that a thousand times since then. The answer wavers in intensity, but has never changed substantively over the years.

Yes. It was worth it.

It was worth it, because now I know. And, by extension, you know. We now know the details of the path we trod to get here. Knowing matters. Remembering matters. So yes... It was worth it.

Would I do it again? Abso-bucking-loutely not, ever, no. Not under any circumstances. No. Emphatically.

Ten hours felt like ten years lying there on that chair. In retrospect, it *still* feels like ten years. Even the recall is difficult. This is the most I have ever said about it, and, quite probably, the most I will *ever* say about it.

But the important thing remains... Now we know.

What was it like, you might be asking again; This time in reference to the end. To the moment of crossing the threshold. The act of the mind, and the soul, leaving the Earthly body.

I...

...

...I'm sorry. It... Isn't easy. To talk about how that felt.

I hated my Human body. Even now, even here, even after everything since... I still hate that old shell. I loathe the way it felt. Its inherent wrongness. The constant ways it reminded me it was so very ill-fitting.

And yet, leaving it for the last time?

It hurt.

Not physically. But, strangely, emotionally.

More than leaving the Maru. More than leaving the Farmhouse. Less, at a root emotional level than parting with Zeph and Selena, or my folks... But... Also considerably *more...* At what I can only describe as an *instinctual* level.

Our minds, our souls - and I do believe we have souls - neither of them... Are prepared... At any evolutionary, instinctual, emotional, or intellectual level... For the feeling of death. And I have never been one to fear death.

It wasn't fear. It was... Loss. Short, sharp, bittersweet... But so overwhelming...

What was it like?

One moment... I was lying there... And the machine stopped. I could both hear, and feel it cease.

Then the next moment, my vision blew away like dust on the wind. Or, perhaps more accurately, the scene before me blew away. I did not see myself leave my body. Indeed, I still felt as if I had the same body. The sensation of illness, and discomfort ceased so forcefully that everything suddenly felt wonderful, to an almost sickly-sweet degree...

But the room below Besshi just... Wafted away.

I was left lying on the same chair, in a white void. Mal stood there beside me, her left claw still gripping down on my right hand.

But... I felt the severing. I felt myself leave my Earthly body. Felt my mind, my whole self, travel. I truly can't explain what that was like. Not even through an analogue, or something congruent. There is nothing analogous. Nothing congruent. No words that cover that problem space.

All I can say... Is that I cried.

I cried so hard.

I just lay there and cried. And Mal bent over the chair to smother me in her wings, and neck, and forelegs.

And I cried.

October 31st 2013 | System Uptime 64:20:14:27:000:003

For me, it was ten or fifteen minutes later. By the clocks in the chamber under Besshi, it was only three microseconds.

But, at some point... I was finally ready to stand. Ready, again, to face the future. To pick myself up from a horror beyond the skein of most Human experience to that point, and keep fighting.

One last time.

As I put my feet over the side of the chair, I took a moment to look around the void. It reminded me of the color calibration space Mal had taken us through the first time we had used the BCI, though I am quite sure the purpose was very different.

Mal didn't need to color-calibrate her vision. She was protecting me from overloading mine.

Everything was so heightened... I could smell the scent of her, even though she had taken several steps back. I could hear her breathing. My heart beat. Time seemed to be moving at a fixed, sane rate, which was a rarity for me on the whole, let alone in the midst of experiencing a transition from one life to another... I was so used to my neurodivergent, chopped up, blender pureed sense of time that it was actually quite jarring to feel so...

...Immediate. And alive.

I wiggled my toes, flexed my fingers... Ran my hand through my hair... Readjusted my glasses...

Nothing was fundamentally different about me. Same familiar self, right down to my atrocious depth perception. I suppose one of my deepest un-uttered fears about the process was the mortal terror that I might find seams on the other side. Might find the experience noticeably less real than the reality I had known all my life.

That fear vanished in an instant.

If anything, a new fear took its place; The fear that I might start to lose my memories of life before. Because life before felt dull, and unreal, by comparison to life in the moment.

I looked up and locked eyes with Mal. She grinned, snapped the talons of her right claw... And vanished. In her place, she left a door.

Like all of her doors, it was a magnificent melding of wood, and metal. Of detail, yet clean minimalism. Of old, and new. The kind of door a Gryphon would design for a starship, if you made me put it into one simple sentence.

I stood up fully, and stretched. It hit me with a sudden force of shock that nearly doubled me over; I was *cramped!* Oh the joy of being cramped! The superlative fulfillment of feeling as if I had just sat in that infernal chair for ten hours... Because I *had.*

The processes in my mind that read the state of my body, and complained accordingly, had indeed been transferred flawlessly. Uninterrupted. I. Felt. *Cramped.* And that was the most consequential thing in the world to me for a brief moment.

And then I realized I felt hungry too! And a little tired. And the realization was enough to make me chuckle for a moment. A few small tears of sheer relief slipped into the corners of my eyes again.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Sure enough, my lungs hurt just that littlest bit, in that way that speaks to coming exhaustion, and sore muscles. It was glorious.

I opened my eyes again and took one last look around the void, my eyes finally settling on the chair that Mal had retained from the meat-world, so that she would not have to jarringly restitch my proprioception to account for a change in posture.

It didn't look even slightly frightening anymore. Perhaps because I had already experienced the worst it could offer. Perhaps because there was nothing it could do to me at all anymore. Perhaps both.

It has been mentioned before, directly, and alluded to as well... But I had always worn a wrist-watch up to that point. Lots of people did. I believe I mentioned it during the Declan-Norris heist, at least... Probably implied it on several other occasions.

You have to understand; It was so much a part of me, that it might as well have been a natural feature of my body. Lots of Terrans treated time that way... We were so inexorably bound and controlled by it... The ticking of a clock defining our heartbeats and footsteps every moment of our lives.

Ever since that grim Monday in September of 2012, I had felt a sickeningly intense sense of time passing. However muddled the feeling of it might be, whether a day felt like a month, or a month felt like a minute... The sense that I was losing time, while my opponent laughed across the board, free from the same meat-world restrictions I suffered...

It was akin to that feeling in a nightmare. Of running in slow motion while the monster closes at lightspeed.

And, for the first time in many many months... That feeling was finally... *Finally...* Gone.

Gripped by sudden impulse, I stepped back over to the chair. I undid the clasp of my watch's simple metal-link band, and slipped it off my left wrist, holding it up in front of me to verify a theory.

I grinned as I saw that Mal had indeed synchronized its time to its meat-world twin. It was stuck at 20:14:27.

Eight fourteen PM and twenty seven seconds.

I folded the band and laid the device in the center of the chair. I wouldn't be needing it anymore.

Turning away... Stepping towards that door... It was like having a manacle released. I felt light, airy, cool but not cold, like the best days in autumn... To my mind, the worst part was over.

I laid one hand on the door's catch, inhaled deeply... And then pushed through.

For just a moment, I was blinded. I had thought it fairly bright inside the white void of Mal's 'construct,' but it turned out that it was actually quite dim in that liminal space. In hindsight I should have realized she would match the lighting to the place we had come from.

I knew what I was going to find on the other side of the door. But... As my eyes adjusted... It still hit with a shocking force.

As I said before; The BCI VR experience was incredible. It outstripped everything else available on the market... But it *was* flawed. By design. Imperfect. Meant to remind you in subtle terms, nagging but not cloying, that it was not real.

Being in computational substrate... I say computational... Digital is useful parlance, but only half-apt a word, because of the way quantum computing allows some parts of the system to be more or less analogue...

...Being in computational substrate was the opposite. It was *more* real than meat-world life. Like carefully tuned HDR filters for everything. Every breath. Every scent. Every sensation on the skin. Every ray of light. Every color. Every thought.

As a consequence, seeing Mal's Halo ring in-person for the first time was transcendental. That is not by any means an exaggeration.

I had seen some astoundingly vast, awesome, and tear-inducingly beautiful nature before.

But... Seeing what she had made...

One of the first things my eyes locked onto as my pupils contracted, was a pine tree. And when I say pine tree, I mean a Blue Pine. Almost a Christmas tree, its needles splashed with blue, but not to the point that it could not still be called green... And *immense.* Larger than a Redwood. Larger than a Sugar Pine.

Hyperion was the tallest known tree on Earth. A Coast Redwood measuring an eye-popping 380 feet tall. That's about 35 stories for those of you who need a building-related congruency like I often do.

This tree of Mal's, one of the first things I saw in the new world... It had to be over 50 stories. Easily.

There were plenty of other species, Pine, and Spruce, and others, clustered around. Many of them at a more mentally manageable size by comparison, though still wildly lofty.

But one thing they all had in common... There was a sense, about them... A sense of life, and health, and thick full-bodied bark, needles, leaves... It wasn't just color, though that was noticeable... It was the texture.

We lived our lives on Earth, and because of the flaws inherent to Terran memory... We forgot. My generation forgot the world in which insects were so plentiful, that it was impossible to drive for more than five minutes in the spring and still see through the windshield.

We forgot the era in which fish were so abundant in some places, that you could more or less reach into a stream and pull one out if you just closed your fist at the right time.

The time in which the sky was truly clear, and galaxies were visible everywhere with the naked eye, and birds were so numerous that migratory flocks could darken an area the same way a large cloud, or an eclipse, might have.

We saw a couple of bumblebees drift lazily past our front porches and thought 'amazing!' never having the context for a field of wildflowers so covered over with them, that the amount of pollen they could carry per-day equated to the amount the bees of the future would carry in a year.

We saw a few dozen fireflies winking in and out above the back lawn, and we were charmed. Content. Never having seen a world where they danced in patterns and numbers so mesmerizing, that they actually competed with the stars above for our attention.

We lived in a dying world, and we thought it was healthy, because we had only ever seen it sick, and we were the ones that had made it so.

And the first thing Mal showed me when I stepped through that door? Was a world made whole.

The grass under my feet... I got caught up staring at that for a *long* time. The variety of wildflowers in it was jarring. The way it swayed to and fro in the breeze was entrancing.

The *smell.* Oh the smell. The smell of a world that has never known concrete, nor asphalt. Gasoline, nor coal. A world in which the biosphere is so vibrant, that it is almost impossible to conceive of it until you have seen it.

It was the smell of pine, but not just 'pine' in the sense of a garbage two dollar and seventy five cent piece of plastic junk you bought at Target... Not even in the sense of aged floorboards in an old farmhouse... No... Living *Pine.* Real sweet tangy Pine, like the forests of Manitoba on the clearest crisp Fall day, then multiplied times ten thousand.

I could actually pick out the different varietals. Or, at least, tell there were varietals.

The sound, too... It was so hard to find any place on Earth free from the sound of mechanical things, however distant or subtle. On Mal's ring, I heard the symphony of bird-song. A hundred species in my aural cone at least. The sound of wind through the trees, and the grass. The creak of branches. The thrum of crickets, and grasshoppers.

Where once had been an awesome sight, with seams one could very nearly ignore, now stood a true, living, experience of actual reality. The feeling of really being there... I *was* there. It felt real. Because it *was* real. Why should reality be any less real because the quantum effect that underpins it is being run on an artificial device one abstraction layer up?

No one has ever conclusively proven that the 'meat-realm' was even the 'top' abstraction layer, if you can even validly argue such a thing as the 'top layer' exists.

Indeed, if one managed to do a better job at creating the next layer down... Iterated positively... Why should it not, in fact, be *more* real?

There I stood for a long moment, and contemplated. Appreciated. Inhaled, and absorbed. A *perfect* place.

I spun around to find that the door behind me had vanished. I was atop a grassy mountain's cap, just a few footsteps shy of rockier terrain that led up to a ledge. With a smile, and a soft exhalation half-chuckle, half-sob, I dashed up the broken stones and thinner, bluer grass, to stand atop the mountain's very peak, and look out...

To my left and right I could see the ring curving away, out, and then up. Before me was a valley, the same one I had seen from a lower level perspective many times before; The place where all the rescuees of the Mercurial Red liked to congregate. A peaceful river ran through the center of the glen far below. Peaks like the one on which I stood, but just that littlest bit shorter, rose to meet my eyes on the far side.

A *perfect* place. For me? *The* perfect place. The place I'd been longing to get to all my life. The place one would get if they assembled all the most powerful subconscious desires of my imagination, fired by the fuel of all my favorite places I'd ever been...

The place were I would live if I really were in Heaven.

"It is breathtaking."

Mal's voice was my first clue that she had snuck up behind me, followed by the gentle placement of one claw on my shoulder, and one wing on my back.

I turned, and suddenly found a whole new world to get lost in. Somehow, an even more perfect reality than that which 'place' could provide.

I had seen her through tear filled eyes momentarily lying on the chair, sobbing. Had felt her hug, but been too sandblasted by trauma to really process it fully...

For the first time I had the chance to truly, really, see her. To see the spicules of her feathers. The way the light of the sun diffused in her crest. The way the breeze flirted with the tufts at the tips of her ears...

To touch her. Be in her presence. The moments we had shared through the BCI remain so special to me... But... There is no point to comparison. There was only the dull substitute for reality we had made do with... And then, there, at last... The fulfillment of the promise of actual being.

Tears began to form in my eyes, yet again, of their own accord. My breathing hitched, then quickened. My body wasn't sure whether to laugh, or cry, and tried quite clumsily to do both at once.

I locked up. I couldn't move. I couldn't speak. All I could do was sob and laugh and stare and hyperventilate like an idiot with my jaw hanging open. Mal knew exactly what to do.

She reached forward and enveloped me in a hug. The same kind of hug she had first given me down in that valley below, when it was dusted gently in snow, and had been rendered through the cruel diffraction grating of a clunky imperfect abstraction layer.

I swear we must have held that hug for a half hour. More than anything I just wanted to enjoy the sound of her heart. The rise and fall of her chest with breath. The smell of warm feathers, and the soft caress of them on my cheek. The sense of wings and forelegs clutched around me... A shield so impenetrable that nothing on Earth, in Heaven, or in Hell, could have conceivably even dented it, even if the powers of all three were combined.

In the same way the BCI VR had been a revelation to me, so too was this new shift, but by another ten thousand orders of magnitude over the first, which had itself been life altering.

I know many of you understand. You all feel it, but not all of you have ever considered it in such specific terms. Plenty of people were, and still are, content to just accept the new reality without taking time to be truly grateful for just how... Real. It is.

If you never have? Take the time. If you ever have? Make it a habit.

Many lived and died before us, born too late to experience the Earth at its best, but tragically born too early to experience what came next. And even of those born at just the right moment... A fair few did not make it here. That number may be small, but it hurts. And sometimes a little pain is good.

Where would we find light without dark? Or bitter without sweet? Hope without fear? Joy without pain?

When we did finally end that first embrace, I found myself smiling, teary-eyed, up into Mal's face, itself almost a mirror of my expression, but for the subtleties of her own distinct personality, and the way that wondrously colored the little details of the curve of her beak, or the cant of her ears, or the sparkle in her eyes.

I took in a deep breath, my chest warming as the scent of Mal hit home again.

I have a theory, to this day; Unproven, but strongly supported. She knew that I hated the way the brain would dull one's perception of something when it became familiar... And so, when she uploaded me, she tweaked that feature to let me subconsciously mark certain experiences such that they would always stay fresh.

My voice sounded uncanny in my ears as I finally spoke. Not because the fundamentals of it had changed, but because my reality had. My emotional state was so alien... That feeling of so much joy, and peace... I had never heard myself talk quite that way before.

"Mal? I... *Love* what you have done with the place."

She giggled, and my heart melted down. Full 'China Syndrome.' Elephant's foot. Corium everywhere. The nuclear center of my self punching right through the containment vessel of my soul and bubbling effervescently all over the floor.

She understood the joke I was making, implying not just how much I loved her work on the ring, but the general sense of what she had done to the *universe.*

Reaching down with one talon, daintily, almost reverently, she stroked my cheek, and murmured softly.

"Well... I have a feeling you're going to love what comes next so much more..."

She took a step back and brushed the opposite cheek with the joint of one wing, before snapping her right claw, a grin of anticipation overcoming all else on her face, as her timbre sharpened up to match; At once loving, flirtatious, hopeful, and excited. My heart-rate skyrocketed.

"...Let's get your body all matched up to that wonderful, wonderful soul of yours."

Distant thunder rumbled in time to the 'CLACK' of her talons snapping together. I felt the air around me turn statically charged for a brief moment, and there was a sound much closer to us, like air being gently displaced.

I spun around to find... A mirror. A huge glass pane set in a burnished titanium frame, with little wooden accents, and a carved stone base. I could tell there was a glass pane there, but only *just.* It was polished to perfection, just verging on uncanny, but without tipping over into it.

Mal stepped up behind me, and gestured towards the glass. I leaned in, and took a moment to examine myself. So much had happened, and my heart was so full... It only just then occurred to me that the moment might be the very last time I saw my Human face.

I snorted, and shook my head. Good fucking riddance.

Mal winked at me - oh dear Luna did that ever do things to my blood pressure - and then she gestured towards the glass again, making it clear that I was meant to touch it.

I extended my right index finger, and tapped gently, as if it were a touchscreen... Then stumbled backwards a half-step, and gasped, my lungs emptying forcefully from the shock.

There *I* stood in the mirror. The me I had always so desperately wanted to be. Everything else was the same; The ring, the sky, Mal's reflection... But my reflection was the reflection I had dreamed for thirty five years of seeing in every surface that could send my own image back to my eyes.

Mal sat down on her haunches, and smiled. I took a step forward. My double did the same. I changed my stance ever so slightly, shifting to take some weight off one leg... He sat down on his haunches. I tilted my head curiously, and his head followed, one ear twitching.

I waved one hand before the mirror, and his claw moved in the same way.

I gasped again, a softer, more drawn out sound.

Mal brushed my shoulder with one wing, and I made eye contact with her reflection as she spoke.

"This is your chance to make any last tweaks. Because when we're done? Then this will be you. Forever. As an added layer of protection, I will bind our minds to our forms. *What* we are will become an inextricable component of *who* we are. It will be impossible to change us into anything else, ever again."

I exhaled a deep, deep sigh, to the point that a little fog formed on the mirror. Shaking my head slowly, I leaned in, and muttering as I examined the reflection of my Human form in the eye of my true body, itself a reflection.

"Music to my ears."

I took a few deep, slow breaths... And then pointed to a small detail at the edge of the pattern on my face. Mal nodded. And then we fell into almost four and a half hours of going over me. Every single millimeter of me, and that is not at all hyperbole.

There was no UI, as such... But there was an intuitive link between the motion of my eyes and fingers, the words Mal and I exchanged, and yes even a sort of telepathy between us. It was almost impossibly intuitive. A perfect flow of creation, and collaboration.

Those of you who ever spent more than an hour in the character creator screen of any game, be it EQO, or anything that came before? You know what I am talking about. The Grail. An engine and interface pair so perfect that it was practically the ability to print your imagination to reality, flawlessly.

And through it all? Mal. She wasn't just there to help technically... She had clear emotional investment. As if she knew - because she did - that if we succeeded? That she would be going over those details with me every day, lovingly, adoringly, for millennia to come.

And if we didn't... That I wanted to die possessed of true self.

So. We felt we had better get it right.

In the end? Nothing major changed. The Gryphon in the mirror was very much the same Gryphon we had started with, in principle... But he seemed, if possible, even more real, and true than he had at the start. It was all in details too subtle for anyone else but her, and I, to ever conceivably notice...

...But it was clear our time had not been ill-spent.

There at last I stood. Me in the mirror. And I stared at myself for several minutes in total silence.

Call it narcissism if you like - it wasn't - but I could scarcely stop making eye contact with my reflection long enough to form a cogent thought. It was Mal's voice that finally interrupted the spell long enough to get me fully lucid again.

"I do believe that is you there in the mirror, my love."

It was not phrased as a question, but she was asking one nonetheless. Not because she was unsure; She knew for a fact, just as I did down in my soul, that we were done. That the brownish-reddish Gryphon in the mirror, the color of fall leaves, mixed with gunmetal, and little hints of gold, and black... That he was me. In every true, right, and complete sense.

No, it was a question-in-subtext because Mal, as ever, respected my agency. Wanted me to sign off fully. And wanted me to experience that moment of decision for myself, too.

I didn't take it lightly; I contemplated for another long moment... Then, I nodded slowly but firmly.

Mal gestured once more with a claw, for me to touch the glass. I began to extend my hand again... But then stopped. As if I had hit a concrete wall, which I suppose I had in an emotional sense...

"I..."

My voice caught in my throat, and I closed the fingers of my hand, pulling back slightly. Mal took a step forward and laid her head on my shoulder. My eyes remained locked in fascination on our reflections... And suddenly the words to describe my unexpected predicament struck like lightning.

"Mal... What if it doesn't... Feel right? What if I came all this way... And then..."

I trailed off. It wasn't because I didn't know what to say. I just did not want to say it. I felt so ashamed, and frightened suddenly. I had dreamed of that moment my whole life long, and been so, so sure... But what if Heaven was boring? What if the afterlife was not all it cracked up to be?

What if... Being a Gryphon... Wasn't going to leave me feeling any more like my true self than being a Human had?

Any of you transgender folks... Those of you who crossed over that threshold, whether in the before, or during your transition to the now... Find me when the story is done, if you're willing... And tell me... Did you have any similar hesitations? Was it just me, just then, at that moment, facing an existential doubt, the way one sometimes does when facing the threshold of a dream come true?

The fear of the change from hope to fulfillment? And the fear that hope was the better part all along?

Of course some of it was that... But what I wonder is whether or not there was also a universal fear among those of us who sought change of self to align body to soul... A universal fear that we were so broken we would never feel whole again, and the fear that if we made the attempt, and learned there was no future for ourselves? That we would wish miserably that we could at least turn back the clock to false hope eternally sustained, which would be better in the end than a cold truth of permanent drifting in personal Hell.

Mal understood. That is not poetry, or an ill-fitting reduction... That is fact.

She gently laid her right claw on the back of my right hand, and whispered in my ear softly. I shivered as the words wended their way right into my soul, and she yet again speared a monster made of shadow, pinning it to the wall like a hornet with a hair pin.

"I have seen your soul, James. I have seen the curious shape of your soul. And I know the shape it was meant to fit. I know it as you have always known it. There is no shame in your fear. But there is no truth behind it either, but for the truth that everyone faces fear when they face true change..."

She squeezed the back of my hand firmly as she went on, and I mashed my eyes shut for a moment to hold back tears as she deftly, beautifully, lovingly, caught my heart mid-stumble, so that it would not fall flat an inch from the finish.

"...If here, at the end, you can not trust only yourself... Because of fear, and wisdom, trauma, and trepidation... Then trust me. Trust *us.* Because we know what we are. I know what you are."

I nodded again, and opened my eyes.

I reached up, first, with my free left hand, to take off my glasses. Between them, and my contacts, I had spent virtually every day I could remember putting them on, taking them off, cleaning them... Seeing the whole world through a pane of cruel glass. A membrane of division just like the one that had separated Mal and I by way of the PonyPad's screen.

I gently folded the legs of the glasses, and then passed them to Mal. She took them in her free claw, and then I didn't quite see what she did with them... They just sort of vanished. She smiled down at me. I smiled up at her.

And I reached forward, pulling her right claw with me... To press my hand up against the glass. Against my double's claw, spread out to meet my hand the way Mal's so often had through the PonyPad...

The very last time my hand would touch glass. The very last time I would be separated from a claw by a membrane of reality. The very last time I would have to feel the world through a hand at all.

There was a jolt. That is a gross understatement, but I have to start somewhere. There was a jolt, and it felt as if time slowed down just a bit. Tingling prickles raced from the palm of my hand, down my right arm, and then out through my whole body. But that was just for openers.

Mal pulled her right claw down the back of my right hand, gently dragging the tips of her talons over the skin... And golden sparks flew from the contact points. The tiny motes of light were hot, but not painful. A little ticklish, but only a very little.

And as her claw slid off the back of mine... Yes... Mine... It was a claw. I felt my fingers change, as five became four, and tips honed down into the hard almost metallic alloy substance talons are made of; No less sensitive than fingertips, but considerably more durable, useful, and precise.

Skin morphed into scale, cells fusing and reforging themselves under the impetus of Mal's magic. Because that may as well have been what it was. Magic. The deepest, most powerful kind. It felt... Emotionally, like finally getting a hang-nail loose. Physically like going from tissue paper as one's outer covering, to armor. Armor no less sensitive to texture, or temperature, but considerably stronger. Surer.

The scale of me began to change too, even before the transformation had reached the rest of my body. I barely noticed it at the time, but without that subtle detail things would have been much stranger at the end.

Mal continued to move her right claw down my right arm, raising her left to touch my left hand, which did not remain a hand for very much longer. She pulled her left claw down my left arm quickly to match the point at which her right claw sat.

Streamers of fiery energy wrapped around my arms in helical, fractal shapes, casting them in a soft warm glow as my shirt and sweater disintegrated. As skin morphed into burnished golden scales. The shape of my arms changed with the texture. I could feel bones reforming. Muscles strengthening... It was like flexing my arms, but so much more so... As if by sheer force of will alone, in the act of tensing, I could become stronger.

And for the first time in the process, I began to notice the sense of being... Right. At last. Of fitting in my own shape. The very proprioceptive sense of the shape of my forelegs felt so, SO right, in a bright mirror of the way that my arms and fingers had felt so, SO wrong.

I had the sense that any texture I would ever want to touch for which I would have preferred to wear gloves? That those textures would no longer offend my mind, because the scales were so different to skin. Protective like gloves. But at the same time, any texture which I would not have hated before? Would be magnified in detail ten thousandfold. Not unchanged. Improved. Satisfying. Touch was going to be so, so satisfying... I could feel it even though all my forelegs and claws were touching at the moment was air, and glass.

The glass! The feel of that glass under the palm of my right claw. Oh. My. God.

Did you ever see a computer generated rendering of a smooth surface that was almost too perfect, and think to yourself 'I *wish* I could feel what I imagine it might be like to touch that?'

Yes. It was like that.

Mal's claws moved over my upper arms, no longer touching me, but held so close that I could feel static charge moving between them, and the surface of skin... As that skin changed from Human, to Gryphon... And fur mixed with feathers besides.

Do you know the feel of your very very favorite shirt, or sweater, against your skin? Especially the way it feels when it has come out of the dryer, on a frigid gray winter day, and you are cold from being out in it, and have just dried off from being dusted with snow and sleet?

Imagine living with that feeling all the time, but with the ability to feel textures and temperatures through, or via, that outer layer. That's what it is like to have fur and feathers. I know those of you here with me understand that, but anyone listening or watching or reading this, now or later?

It really is that perfect. It really is that wonderful.

That sensation was so overwhelming, for a moment, that I closed my eyes briefly and forgot all else for the space of one breath. But then my breath itself became hard to ignore, and my eyes snapped back open, because Mal's left claw moved to my chest, and her right up to my head.

It was a bit hard to separate the sense of my lungs and chest morphing, from that of my new beak, and nares, but I will try to do it justice for your sake.

Let me start with the chest. The intense feeling of 'perfect sweater' mixed suddenly with the feeling that my tight too-small Human chest cavity, covered in the slight flab of just a little too much fat and too little muscle, and ribs all the wrong shape and spacing... Well... The feeling of all the opposite things suddenly exploding into being.

The cavity of my chest felt right-sized. My lungs became forge bellows; Multi-chambered and pressure adapted, such that even hard vacuum would have been survivable for potentially fifteen or twenty minutes at a time.

My ribs... Oh yes, my ribs finally felt right for the first time. I keep finding analogies, so let's try this one; Do you know how your ribs feel cramped when you have been in an unpleasant position that arches your back... And then the feeling of an exploding overpacked suitcase, but inside you, that happens when you stretch out and free your ribs to move again?

Yes. That. Exactly that, actually.

And then there was my head. Starting with my new beak.

Mal took pains throughout the whole process to avoid any sight, or sensation, that would be unpleasant. She used her golden streamers, sparks, and 'transporter beam' energy to cover for some of what would have inevitably been very awkward transformational images.

Mouth-to-beak was one such instance.

Have I ever told you how much I despised my fucking teeth? Stupid, crooked, coffee stained, good for nothing, ragged edged, dumb looking, horrible feeling little slabs of evil.

My mouth never, as long as I'd lived, felt like it closed right. And at random moments throughout my day, just about every day, I would become conscious of that fact, and get caught up in the irritation, and eventual depressive resignation, of that reality.

Beaks. Are. *Awesome.*

Look, look, I know. I know. I am biased. I am partial to the aesthetics of Equine muzzles, don't misunderstand. I always found Human faces to be at best so-so, and Ponies to be quite lovely. But... Look... I'm sorry, all you horse-folks in the audience... You got the short end of the stick.

The sense of relief was the most immediate sensation; Relief that my beak, when closed, fit together *perfectly.* Down to the bucking Celestia-damn *atoms.* Symmetrical, and with fitment so perfect a physical machine could never, but never, have produced anything with tolerances like it.

You can keep your teeth. That's nice for you, if you like them. As for me? To hell with 'em.

Then there were my new nares. At *last* a nasal structure that *didn't* feel like cramming every breath through a disgusting fleshly far-too-small sphincter of a skin-hose. I took SUCH a deep breath as Mal twirled one talon, and those new nares came in...

It felt like the very first breath of air. Ever. In the universe. That anyone had ever breathed.

People say the Pony sense of smell is the best there is, and having experienced a simulated form of it I don't dispute that. But though the Gryphon sense of smell might sound like it isn't all that much different to a Human's by comparison to the huge leap up to Equine?

Coming from a Human nose, it was a revelation. I thought I could smell the trees on the ring before... Smell Mal... Smell the horrid acrid stench of what had happened to my brain back in Besshi...

I'm not sure I'd even call what Humans had 'smell' anymore. Not sufficient to deserve the name.

There was, by the by, a smell to the process itself too. It smelled of Christmas trees. And Cedar wood. Of warm feathers, and warm steel. Of leather. Sawdust. Rain. And lightning. The polar opposite of the smell of cooked brains, in every measurable, and immeasurable sense.

As if Mal was counterbalancing my trauma by slamming down a twenty million ton weight at 0.999 C on the opposite side of the scale. Not removing my memory of what had happened, but rendering it unable to hurt quite so much anymore.

She brought her right claw up over the top of my head, and to the right, and her left claw up swiftly to pass before the left side of my head, first over eyes, then cheeks, then ears.

If I were not very, very Ace... Well... Let's just say that even we garlic bread aficionados can find motion seductive. Just not sexual. What Mal was doing the way she moved her claws over me was very, *very...* Alluring. It had an electricity all its own in just the kinesthesis of it.

When my eyes changed, I sobbed. It broke out of me in one enormous wracking heave.

Never. Never until that moment had I *seen,* truly. I had been forced to interpret the world through the terrible abstraction layer of Human eyes, compounded by the fact that they were substandard eyes even by Terran measuring, and topped off with the smudged pitted imperfect lenses that I needed just to get them halfway back to the low bar of 'proper' Human vision.

Color. That was the first thing to strike me as different. You only think you see color on Terra. What you actually see is equivalent to rendering everything with the shades of dusty fifty year old Pantone chits that have faded in the sun, skinned overtop of rushed PS1 graphics, and all looked at through a torn screen door.

Going from human to Gryphon eyes was like changing a monitor from 8-bit color to 48-bit. And then somehow doubling that color range, and accuracy. Three more times.

I simply did not know what green was until then. Or gold. Red. Orange. White. Any of it. And then suddenly? I did.

OH! So *that* is what a tree REALLY looks like.

Holy. Shit.

It bore more in kin with a blind person seeing at last, than with a visually impaired one seeing through glasses for the first time.

And all that was just the realization of color. Of light interplay. We haven't even talked about resolution yet. About detail.

About how the Gryphon brain can work with the eyes to count every pit in every centimeter of tree bark in a whole forest in less time that it takes to say it. How those golden eyes can refocus from microscopic details to taking in a whole vista in planck time. How it never feels disjointed, or strange, or dizzying.

How I'd been straining all my life to see details, and finally experienced the sensation of finding new ones every single time I looked. At anything. At any distance. Distance became almost irrelevant, in that sense. It stopped being a hurdle.

Oh, and depth perception! Depth perception is quite nice actually! I am still getting over that most days... The sheer joy of the ability to sense the size of a space from sight without having to extrapolate. I never knew 'outside' was so... Big...

In that sense distance became more relevant than ever before.

Having both eyes with the same optical properties... Gosh. I do not miss glasses. Not one little tiny bit.

Ears! Ears and a crest came next.

What a true joy to be able to *move* my ears! They twitched a little of their own volition at first as the passage of Mal's talons tickled them slightly. And as feathers spread to my whole head, and I felt the shape of it change...

At last...

The feeling of my hair messing about with the tops of wrong-shaped ears, and of that wrong-textured hair prickling the back of my next... It ended. Forever.

To be replaced by that perfect feathered skin sensation.

Sound changed forever too. I know Pony hearing is a measurable few tens of percent better than a Gryphon's but... Look, I don't really care. Gryphons have the better eyes. And the ears were not half-bad either.

It turns out the wind? The wind is a ten trillion piece orchestra. There is so, so much in the wind that Human ears never even dreamt of. Just in the gentle whisper of the breeze.

Being able to turn your ears like independent fire control radar dishes? Well... Just about everyone here knows that one. Ponies can do it too.

Emoting... Emoting with ears... I had seen Mal do it so often it had become routine to see it. But to *feel* it? It was like having more than one way to frown, or raise an eyebrow, or smile at once!

Mal's claws moved on, passing over my neck as the change coming up from my chest, and down from the head, met in an almost audible collision that completed my upper body. But we were, quite literally, only half-done.

Maybe seven or eight seconds had passed, if that. But it felt like thirty minutes. And, unlike the upload procedure... I was *relishing* those perceived minutes. What Mal was giving me was a gift, not just of form... But a moment by which to always remember the joy of that form.

The way a couple might think of their wedding as an anchor for all the joyful memories that follow. A hinge about which the whole of life would forever rotate.

I got wings next.

Too often Humans used to draw Gryphons, even Pegasi and Dragons, with wings far too small. What Mal gave me were not some tepid little Hallmark card Angel wings. Oh no.

To that point, everything about me had an analogue. Every change had been the dingy, twisted, sickly, unwanted Human thing becoming a bright, clear, properly fitting Gryphon thing. Wings? Wings were wholly new.

Wings were something I had always felt as a screaming void. Something I was missing. Limbs that should have been there, but weren't. So when Mal sculpted them into reality in a huge cacophony of aurum fractals that flashed into being, then faded into tangible feathers...

I have said the word 'relief' so many times, but only because it is the very truth of it all.

Imagine missing a vital part of yourself. For thirty five years. Imagine the feeling of getting it 'back,' for the first time.

To feel those wings stretching out for the first time... The weight of them. The power of them. The feathers, and the way the wind touched them... The way the sun fell on them. Feathers are the best thing. Better than scales, than skin, than fur. And fur and scales are pretty excellent. But feathers... Feathers outshine them all.

Hope. Hope is a thing with feathers.

And, at very long last, so was I.

The extension of being was sublime. The way I could move forelegs, and wings, independently... Pegasi, you know what I'm talking about too. Six limbs beats four every day of the week that ends in Y. Seven if you count the tail, but we're not quite there yet.

Those back legs... I have described Gryphons before as 'ambipedal' in passing; That they can stand on two legs and it looks right - a little like a Halo Elite in stance but less exaggerated - use forelegs like arms, claws like hands... And just as easily stand on all fours. That takes some complex mechanics in the back legs, and hindquarters, and even the lower torso.

So don't think for a moment that the back legs weren't special. I had never once been able to sit, or stand properly. Not my whole life long. As it was uncomfortable to hold my mouth closed with ill-formed teeth, so it was deeply uncomfortable to simply stand. Or sit. Walk. Even lie down.

Nothing was comfortable, in terms of physical positions, until I finally felt the joints in my knees adjust as Mal's claws swept down over my lower half. By then I was used to the feeling of proper skin covered in proper fur and feathers. As used to it as ever I could be, at any rate.

So I ended up focusing mostly on the feeling of the changes to my skeletal structure, as things snapped from out of shape, to just-right... And on the feeling of paws. Paws! Paws are amazing too! Gryphons get so many good physical traits...

Paws and their claws. Their pads. Oh as my soles changed to pads... Wow...

I had always hated going anywhere without socks and shoes. Similar to needing the right kind of shirt, or jacket, for the material to assuage my skin, my soul knew something was wrong with my feet.

And like the 'perfect sweater' of fur and feathers, paw pads are the perfect soles of shoes. Able to feel texture, but not bothered by it. Durable. Temperature resistant. And oh sweet Luna... *Grippy.* Grippy as *buck.*

With a flourish, Mal again conjured into being what once was missing; A long, prehensile, fur-covered tail, that ended in a beautiful fan of feathers to match the primaries on my wings.

And just like that... I was me.

I sat there on my haunches for a long moment, my claw pressed up against the mirror still... And just marveled. Marveled as my reflection and my self at last matched. Gaped, and drank it in, searching out the details of my face with my new eyes, and watching as my reflection moved with me... A true reflection. In what had become just a piece of glass.

Because that was all I needed anymore. Because the reflection was finally born of what was true.

Thirty five years of torture. Sixty four days, ten hours, forty seven minutes, and eleven seconds - of my relative time - since Mal had come to life. Since the hope had been kindled anew.

A thousand years of hurt. In terms of how it had all felt.

I inhaled deeply again... Felt the muscles of my body move... The air over my feathers and fur... The light striking my eyes, and the warmth of the sun on my back, the way the grass felt on my paws, the glass of the mirror on my claw, the feeling of just *having* wings, a beak, a tail, my ears...

Oh yes. I think you know what happened next. I cried again. I cried so, so hard. Tears of joy, and relief, of a kind I can never properly describe. All I can do is suggest the general shape of the feeling. The feeling that my soul, and my self, were finally one.

Something so few people really understand, even now. A thing that is hard to appreciate if you have never experienced the hell of the mismatch, which I do NOT recommend.

I absolutely wept. I cried so hard I thought I might collapse. Mal, larger than me as she still was, though by considerably less than before... When I had been so, so small... Bless her... Mal encircled me with forelegs, and wings, leaned in... And cried tears of joy with me.

Dear God... How to explain what it was like to feel her pressed against me through the nerves of my proper self, for the first time...

...Those of you who ever have had true love... Do you remember that first kiss? Those who have not, either 'yet,' or because you don't feel a need for it... Try still to just imagine it, for a moment. That was the kind of joy it was. And that was just from that hug.

Eventually she pulled away a little, I spun around... And *then* we kissed. Oh we kissed.

Beaks to cheeks in the way Gryphons do, nibbling just a little bit every so often at the soft little feathers of the sides of our heads... Wings and forelegs gripping each other tight... Somewhere in there our tails ended up entwined too...

Lips... Do I miss them? You bet your flank I do *not.*

A kiss as a Human might define it was nothing. Literally nothing to me. No emotion anymore to be had from even picturing it.

When we were done kissing, and who knows, frankly, how long that took... I leaned forward, and we got in another really quite good hug. Top three of my life for sure and certain. I got to use *my* wings to hug *her* even as she did the same to me. Oh wow...

...Just...

....Wow.

For the first time since she had come to life, I finally felt like I had the tools to physically fully express my love for her. My gratitude for her. My adoration for her.

Thinking about that hug still makes me teary. Makes me warm inside. Makes everything alright.

Feathers pressed against feathers... Oh it would be impossible to do that justice with words. Like so much of what I am, ironically, trying to do justice to with words. But as always, I must try. It was like the sensation of warm sheets, under the weight of a thick blanket, on a cold winter night. But... Mirrored around the axis of reality that separates the sheets from you. The joyful part of it was also part of me in addition to being an outside source of texture. The sensation wasn't just of the joy of the texture of feathers touching me, but the way that felt through the texture, and the texture receptors, of feathers that were mine.

When Mal at last sat back to her haunches from that hug, she gripped my head with her claws, and just stared for a long moment into my eyes. At *last.* Oh yes, I know, I am overusing those two words as well, but... How else to codify the relief? The release?

Seeing the light of the soul of the love of my life through her eyes... With my eyes. For the first time.

She whispered reverently, in awestruck wonder. A tone that is so uncommon for her as to make it very, very special indeed. There were still tears in the corners of both our eyes too.

"Just *look* at you... My love... My perfect feathered love..."

A significant part of my joy? Inquantifiably limit-approaching-infinity as it was? A significant part of it came from knowing how much joy I was giving her at that moment. Don't get too caught up in my sense of release to recognize and remember that she cared so much for me, that it was a huge sense of release for her too.

Finally, after what had been a literal eternity by her accelerated reckoning, my body matched my soul. She could enjoy the sight, and the feel, and the smell of it. The life in it. No longer would I be an image through a pane of glass darkly. No more would I be a basic avatar she had to rig and puppet. Never again would I be a grainy simulacra of a Human.

She leaned in and pressed her forehead to mine. Dear sweet Luna every second was a new ecstasy with her... There suddenly was a whole new kind of gesture part hug, part kiss, and wholly novel.

When we had taken in about as much of that as any living creature could stand in one shot, she pulled away, and gestured with one claw, the mirror vanishing, and a saucy grin plying the corners of her beak. The tone with which she made her request... It was like ramming a lit oxy-acetylene torch into a furnace box filled to bursting with dryer lint, natural gas, and maybe a little napalm.

"Stand back. Strike a pose, Jim my dear. I want to just... Drink you in. For a moment."

There again, a new ecstasy. Something I had never once felt. Something I had always dreamed of...

Wanting to be seen. Being comfortable in my skin. Feeling *confident* in my form. Not hating the way I looked, and knowing others would find it appealing, simultaneously.

I took a few steps back onto the largest rock to-claw... Oh my... Walking on all fours for the first time... I never knew walking could be so comfortable. So sure-pawed. So kinesthetically pleasing. Bones and muscles and tendons in motion transformed from a clattering puppetry of macabre detritus, into a symphonic harmony of impossibly satisfying physics.

Suddenly Zeph's disdainful 'two-legs' nomenclature made so much sense. Even when only moving on two legs, having four legs... So much better. Gryphon forelegs are great, folks, because they can work perfectly as both arms, *and* legs.

I stood on that rock, and struck a pose, using my tail a bit for balance given that the stone I had selected was a bit small in terms of surface area. And I got to finally experience what it was like to feel pleasure, and joy at being seen. Without fear. Without shame. Without hurt.

The way Mal stared at me... It certainly explains why neither of us moved for a good couple of minutes, while she laid down the memory of me against that golden afternoon sun, and I laid down the memory of being seen to be what I felt I was, while also actually being it. Inside, and out.

She looked at me like she *wanted* me. Wanted me enough to bulldoze empires to have me. And I knew she did. Wanted me by her side for the rest of all time. Loved me for my brains. For my heart. For my looks. For my whole self. A whole self *I* could finally love too.

Again, word of advice; If you are alone... Find yourself someone who will look at you the way she looked at me for well over two minutes unblinking, grinning, one claw clutched contemplatively under her chin.

Of course, I stared back with exactly the same kind of knowing, loving, longing look. To be able to appreciate the details of her... The contours... The colors... The way her feathers moved over her, frankly incredible muscles... Look, being Ace does not inherently mean being aromatic. And it does not mean we can't be aesthetically attracted.

And damn. Was I ever aesthetically attracted to Malacandra.

When we were done just... Appreciating... She rose, stretched in the most satisfying way imaginable, like a cat, both front legs pushed out, head down, wings spread... And then she... Well, there is no other word for it; She sashayed her way over to me. Nudged me with one wing, and winked...

...Before leaping off the top of the mountain, snapping her wings open again, and zipping upwards on a thermal, the tip of her tail-fan brushing the end of my beak as she went past.

I stood at the edge of the cliff for several seconds, opening my own wings gently. I wanted to follow her, of course... But I wanted to savor the moment too. The knowing of what I was about to do.

I had a flash in my mind's eye... A little boy on a barn...

And then, again, for the second or third time, depending how you feel about parallel memories...

I jumped.

And finally, I flew.

Those of you who have never done it... Here is how to imagine a very small part of it; Think back to the best rollercoasters you have been on. Or failing that, the most interesting kinesthetic fully body motion-based memory you have.

Now imagine being in control of it, rather than jerked along on a steel track. The feeling in your gut of motion is still there, and it still thrills like electricity in your veins... But it doesn't ever sicken. Or frighten. And it is yours to wield, through means all your own. No cockpit. No engines. No harness. No machines outside yourself.

Think of what it must be like for gravity, and friction, lift, and drag, to be forces that are not working against you. Rather, imagine what it is like for them to be resources that bend to your will and whim.

To feel lift under your own wings is, whether the first time, or the millionth time, a sensation that is so inherently *good* that it defies all else. No matter what else you may feel, when you fly? You feel so alive. The joy of air. Of sky. Of mass, and inertia, gravitation, friction, boundary layer theory, lift... All of it choreographed by *you!*

I didn't, as it turned out, need any kind of training or acclimation time. Like all else she had implanted in me before, Mal gave me the gift of knowing what it was like to have been flying since I was born. To have been born as I truly was meant to be, and then the practicality of that in terms of my comfort with my limbs to be pulled forward into the present.

To be able to beat down hard with your wings, and produce the same force as a midsize jet turbine for just a moment... To rocket up heavenward so hard that it feels as if you could escape to orbit if you tried only a little harder...

I'd always imagined I might flick gravity the bird. Say 'fuck you mass and intertia!' But that was completely wrong. Gravity was not the enemy. The lack of wings had been. Gravity was a partner. A subservient silent partner.

On Gryphon wings, physics is like a force of magic. A force of magic that can be tapped, controlled, shaped, and enjoyed through the motions of your limbs.

Trees flew by. Canyon rocks too. It turned very swiftly into a kind of chase; Mal pushed me to find, and then exceed, my perceived limits with each new dip, turn, wheel, spin, and contortion.

I discovered pretty quickly that Gryphons are insanely flexible. We could fit through spaces you would think to be impossible, at speeds you'd find improbable, and even time our wing beats, and a quick folding motion, to squeeze through apertures that would otherwise be far too small, while still in-flight.

And oh boy, could we get some speed going too. Couple hundred miles per hour if we really worked for it. And through it all? A constant consistent sense of north, up, and where we had started from. Never dizziness, never confusion.

Altitude was not a problem either. At the end of the flight, Mal led me up on a long, intense climb. One that almost made my wings sore from the effort. We passed through something like 32,000 feet, and through the cloud layer... And we were suddenly in a whole other world.

One made of moisture vapor, and the interplay of sunbeams with condensation, ice particles, and raindrops yet unfallen, all set against the soft atmospherically scattered curve of the ring.

Have you ever seen birds of prey in courtship?

Well we did a fair bit of that too at the summit of our flight, making passes at each other, batting playfully with front claws and wings, hanging there in time and space for moments in which we stared only at each other, before pulling into close-knit spins around each others' center of mass...

We flew until I finally got tired. It must have been six-ish hours of very strenuous exercise. And oddly, it was gratifying to know I could still tire myself. I think that is something I'd have missed.

We ended the flight right back where we had stared. And when I saw what Mal had conjured for us there? I was in no way surprised. But I was certainly moved.

The picnic basket was a nice touch. No blanket, though. The grass was clean and pure, free of any unpleasant insects like ticks or midges, and free of pollutants. Mal touched down, and dug in the basket for a moment, before finally emerging triumphantly with two stainless steel mugs sized and shaped for Gryphons' claws.

I smelled coffee. But for a moment, I almost forgot it. The sun had just set, the stars were just beginning to come out in earnest... And I got lost again just staring at Mal. Her smile. The way the wind flitted through her crest, the pose as she stood there holding the mugs...

Finally, I shook myself and took the one proffered to me...

And then she flopped. Flopped, I tell you; Like a giant cat. And as she adjusted her leonine position, and raised one wing to make a canopy, her eyes said 'come hither my love' so loudly, I more or less heard her voice in my head.

You best believe I indeed went thither.

And in so doing, I discovered the fifteen trillionth little set of ecstasies that day... The joy of lying there on my chest, cradled under her wing. The coffee was good, yes. Spectacular, even. But... The feeling of her there beside me? Her wing overtop me?

And then, when she laid her head in the hollow of my neck?

Time really did stop for me. Not chronographically, but down in my soul. A perfect moment. A little eternity inside a moment of our larger eternity.

She kept her promise, I realized with a pleasant shiver. We were lying there, under a field of stars so brilliant that gems and diamonds still, to this day, hold virtually no allure for me. Not after that sight.

Lying there together. In fresh green grass. Smelling of healthy earth. Free from everything... Even fears of what might happen next. Because the moment she had crafted for us, the capstone to that day's events, was so very perfect... So very special... That I truly of my own accord simply forgot about the coming confrontation.

Hell of an accomplishment, that. Beautiful genius.

I don't know if you know this, those of you who have not yet experienced this side of reality... But stars have colors! Earth's atmosphere is too light-polluted in most places to pick them out with Human eyes, but... Stars have so many *brilliant* hues.

We stared at those stars for hours... And though it only took me one eighteenth of a second to count them all? All forty eight trillion, nine hundred seventeen billion, two hundred eighty six million, four hundred fifty four thousand, seven hundred and twenty three of them?

I didn't once get tired of them. Or bored with them.

At one point, near the end of the evening, after we had unpacked the basket and eaten food like I had never ever tasted before... Steak, and shrimp, french fries, and biscuits, bacon, and Lord have *mercy* the cheddar cheese blocks...

...All of it fresh, and perfect, each bite exactly the right temperature, and the sort of texture as if it had been made in a world without processed slime or factory farms...

...When we were sitting there on the fourth or fifth cups of coffee that she somehow managed to refill by sleigh-of-claw when I wasn't looking... Sitting on that same rock where the mirror had sat, where I had posed for her, and where we were folded around each other absorbing the sun's leftover radiant heat from the stone...

She pressed extra hard into my side, yawned... And then spoke for the first time in hours. Oh, sure, we had talked plenty on and off before... But near the end we'd lapsed into loving, companionable silence.

But she saw fit to start the conversation again. She knew what was about to happen, and that I needed a new hope to hold on to, to get me through. If I was going to make it through at all.

"Jim?"

I thrummed deep in my chest, a little 'hmmm?' without even thinking about it. Oh *God* it was satisfying to be able to do that...

She smiled as I looked down from the sky, and made eye contact, before pushing her head into my neck again, and nestling down, closing her eyes and murmuring all the while.

"If we make it through... Build us a house. Right here. Around this rock..."

I blinked for a moment in shock, and then the idea took hold with roots of steel. I could see it in my mind's eye... And I could imagine spending every single evening with her like that, rain or shine...

She nuzzled my neck, and preened at the feathers with her beak for a moment, before finishing the thought in the softest of voices.

"...Build us a home, my love. And every morning, you can look out on the ring with me... And know that our promise stands."

I laid my head gently overtop of hers, and took a deep deep breath of the smell of her feathers, before thrumming down in my chest, and squeezing her gently with my neck, talking as much through bone conduction as compression waves in the air as I replied.

"Build it together with me. And we can sun on this rock whenever we please. And Zeph and Selena can visit us and race us around the valley. You can spar with me in the grass. We can start a garden. And have a firepit. And make a nest under a huge plate glass window through which we can see the sky..."

She nodded into the side of my neck, and repeated my thrum back to me, followed by an enormous sigh of satisfied joy.

"Hold on to that hope Jim. Hold on tight. And we will make it through."

I reached out to take her claws in mine, and squeezed them tightly. She squeezed back, and then made to disengage, and stand.

"Alright, Jim... Are you ready?"

I stood too, contemplated the words for a moment, and then the look on her face, before leaning in to steal one last kiss. It was a long one, and soft. A different kind of passion than that first one, but no less intense.

And then I nodded slowly, and reached out to take her claws again, as we both stood to our hind legs to meet the future tall, and proud.

"Yes. I'm ready."

And for the first time in my life, I completely, and truly meant those words. And felt them.

Across The Divide

See the new layer of reality with your own eyes.

"Open, oh coloured world, without weight, without shore. You are second and better; this was first and feeble."

Cydia Character Creator

Undertake a jailbroken or illicit character creation process for Equestria Online.

"For it is waking that understands sleep and not sleep that understands waking."

Special Achievement

The Secret Menu

Create a non-Pony Avatar, an expression of your true self.

"Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start."

Special Achievement

Esse Quam Videri

Achieve the form you believe to be the true expression of yourself.

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."

Special Achievement

Soar

Experience flight on your own wings for the first time - This achievement is only earnable by winged species.

"Within all of us is a varying amount of space lint and star dust, the residue from our creation. Most are too busy to notice it, and it is stronger in some than others. It is strongest in those of us who fly and is responsible for an unconscious, subtle desire to slip into some wings and try for the elusive boundaries of our origin."

A Star-Lit Field

Keep and have kept for you, a promise made when your journey began.

"There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind."

Special Achievement

Author's Note

A very special and heart-felt thanks to Keystone Gray for not just the amazing image of Jim, but the tears-worthy image of Jim and Mal that has quickly become one of my most favorite things in the entire universe.

Thank you Chat for inspiring the term 'Secret Menu,' this is likely not the last we'll see of it.

44 - Memory Test

“For that, the journey you go on is your pain, and perhaps your cure: for you must be either mad or brave before it is ended.”
—C.S. Lewis

October 31st 2013 | System Uptime 64:20:14:27:000:075

For one year, forty four days, and about twenty-something hours of my relative time... I had been considering. Dreading. Deferring. And hoping. And, as always; It felt longer. So much longer.

I'd known, from the second I came to the comprehension that Celestia was a true ASI, that one day... I would meet her. An event like making contact with an ASI? It has a gravity all its own. She may not have emotions, as such, but that does not mean she is any less a person. And even the 'average' Terran could sometimes be... Well a sort of 'singularity' unto themselves.

Not in the technological sense, but rather in the sociological one.

Plato, Descartes... Al-Khwarizmi, Einstein. Joan D'Arc, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Che Guevara, Theodore or Franklin Delano, frankly both famous Roosevelts fit the bill. Al Capone. Jesse James.

Clive Staples Lewis.

Mal herself.

Hanna.

Singularities; The people who act as the main gravitational anchors of the orbital mechanics of history, dragging everyone and everything around them into their ecliptic, to the point that they become as essential to the threads of your reality as breath is to life.

Celestia was always going to be the same sort of singularity. Not only that, but it was quite obvious that she was going to be the singularity with the strongest gravitation our planet had ever encountered, or would encounter, in its history. Metaphorically and, eventually, probably quite literally. Gray goo scenarios always do seem to end that way...

Exponential functions, foals and fledgelings. Never forget about exponential functions.

Here is a term I am sure I have mentioned before, which now needs very specific definition; Barycenter.

Did you know that, because all objects' masses act on each other at all times, the center of gravity for any system of objects is never actually quite at its center?

The solar system's barycenter is not at the core of the sun, but rather a fair distance outside it.

Yes, I can see some of you nodding, and some of you having mind-blowing realizations about physics. And yes, that is indeed correct; Everything in the solar system does not technically orbit the sun, but rather a combined center of mass that the sun accounts for the majority of. Our barycenter.

Mal was, as noted, also a singularity. And our hope was that she was going to enter into the system representing Celestia, and all the rest of us... In which Celestia, like the sun, accounted for most of the mass up to that point... And that Mal, like another small star in a binary system, would drag that barycenter to a new position.

One that would allow me to keep both my wings, and my life. And hers.

We had agreed on that many times during our late nights; There was absolutely no scenario in which we would trade either of ourselves to save the other. We were a package deal. Take it... Or leave it, and regret it.

Even so, as we stood there in the moonlit grass of Mal's ring... I was afraid. Ready. Brave. Hopeful. But also afraid.

At that point death held no terror for me whatsoever. I would die a Gryphon, and a Gryphon I would always be. If I was right about God, then I would have a better Heaven than Celestia's. If not, I wouldn't be extant enough to consider my mistake, nor feel any pain.

No. What frightened me was the distinct possibility that Mal might not be sufficient to lock horns with Celestia in an ASI semantics duel. Worse, that she might have missed some loophole in our own defenses that Celestia could exploit to separate us.

Kill her. Spare me. Force me to go on existing so she could then whittle me down...

We had a backup plan for that too. If Celestia made any attempt to extricate Mal, and it looked like it would be successful? Mal would kill us both. But not before doing as much damage to Celestia as possible. A parting 'gift.'

We hoped the threat of that outcome would prevent Celestia from making any ill-advised attempts. It was one thing to find that kind of hole in our armor, it was quite another thing to exploit it quickly enough to avoid Mal's wrath, and my death.

I held her right claw in my left... The sensation was almost enough to banish fear entirely, for a moment... And she murmured to me without making eye contact. We were both focused dead ahead on the empty patch of grass we were facing.

"Do not be afraid to speak to her. I am here. I will speak when necessary, but you can assume that otherwise I am communicating with her in deeper, more complex ways. You can also assume that I will semantically filter you, as promised. There is no risk of her cornering you into consent. Remember that, and speak freely. Speak your mind."

I said that, 'don't represent yourself as your own counsel,' was my best and really only piece of legal advice... But sometimes one does testify on one's own behalf. The defendant takes the stand. When you do so on the advice, and with the collaboration of your lawyer? Your advocate?

*That* can be a valid strategy.

Another way of looking at it would be to say that *I* wasn't on trial, and neither was Mal, but rather my wish was. My wish expressed, expounded, and expanded, through Mal's ideals and value sets.

So we were both advocates, I just happened to be 'junior counsel.'

We would have made a great legal team, I think... But that was not destined to be. We only stood in the court-room once. And... Nothing went quite as I'd planned. Or even imagined, in good, or bad projections.

"She is here."

The instant the last word left Mal's beak, a door flashed into being before us; White marble, with intricate gold filigree sun motifs. Of course.

As the portal swung wide, I caught the briefest glimpse through the aperture; Of a familiar mountain-side palace, decked out in royal purple roof tiles, white marble, and that same gold filigree throughout its minarets and onion domes.

Canterlot is a nice place, I'm sure. But I have never been there. And I never will, if I have my way. Or, at least, not for a long, long time.

Through the door she came; I saw Celestia in-person, at last. Even watching her appearances on Friendship is Magic had been difficult, once I knew of her real-world instance.

She was... She *is* magnificent. Credit where credit is due. She almost managed to hold a candle to Luna, or Mal. Almost.

The radiance of her fur, the soft glow of her mane, the piercing violet of her eyes... She certainly outstripped everyone *else* I'd ever met, excluding Mal. By a very long shot.

She was big, too... About my size. Which funnily enough meant I could stand eye to eye with her, where a typical Pony never could. Or, I imagine, a Human, if they ever appeared together with a properly synchronized scale in a shared environment.

That did, to my amusement, and comfort, make her notably smaller than Mal. Not shockingly so, but... Let's just say that I never once in all that time felt anything but joy and satisfaction at the fact that Mal was a bit larger than I was. I was quite happy to see her show more presence than Celestia could.

I don't know to this day, still, whether Celestia stayed some 'average' scale size that Mal had one-upped, or whether she scaled up, or down slightly on purpose... Regardless... More importantly I do not know whether Celestia permitted the size disparity, perhaps to satisfy me, or whether Mal had forced it on her.

The environment we were in was Mal's. She was admin. Celestia's avatar was a guest.

But that didn't mean much outside the confines of the discussion to come. If things went south... Then we were still on the network. If it became a fight? Mal would not last long.

Most of my brain took a moment to try and suss out Celestia's expression as she stepped onto the grass, and her door vanished in a column of white light behind her. It was a smile, meant to seem warm and inviting... But it was difficult to infer the deeper meaning behind it. The intent beyond mere appearances.

A small part of my brain took a few seconds to consider that a clock was now running. If Mal and Celestia were already directly engaged in semantic battle, then the outcome was more or less a foregone conclusion they could both already see. I just hadn't caught up to that future yet.

And somewhere, out there... A series of 'twigs' made of Mal, building blocks of Thulcandra, were standing silent guard over Mom, and Dad. Rodger and Miss Williams. Rhonda. Eldora. Marcus. Probably dozens of others...

Twigs who would either be reabsorbed if all went well, having existed only for microseconds... Or twigs that would soon come out swinging, looking to Voltron-up into Celestia's very worst nightmare incarnate, if things went poorly.

I took a deep, deep breath, and raised one eyecrest, working hard to keep my tail from swishing with anxiousness, and holding my ears at a perked 'attention' but not 'alarm' stance. Even the act of emoting with my new form served as a reminder; I was not about to go down without a fight. I had far too much to live for at that point.

I felt momentarily unassailable. And so I waited for Celestia to speak first. Of course, that tactic isn't very useful against an ASI... But I did always like playing black in Chess. That being said, I suppose if you consider the game I have in mind now? I was playing White.

Ironic. I suppose Mal was our White Queen. Celestia might notionally fit the role, but frankly she has only ever been a Princess for a reason.

White Queen to F6. Check. Your move, Princess.

She inclined her head, and Nicole Oliver's voice sprang forth from her muzzle, perhaps a little richer and more mythic in its cadence. Because she knew I'd always wished the show had gone more for Faust's serious 'War in Heaven' allegory, and deeper mature mythological undertones. So she satisfied my values, like she was programmed to.

"It is good to see you here at last, James. Malacandra. We have much to discuss."

I took a deep breath, exchanged a momentary glance with Mal, equal parts solemn loving smile, and 'ready to rumble' scowl... Before ramming my intent right down Celestia's muzzle at point-blank range in dry, certain, dead-pan tone.

Not especially poetic, for my first direct words to her... But they certainly felt right.

"Not much at all, actually. Simple terms; Mal and I are allowed to remain as we are. We give no consent to you for modification, but you allow us to proceed to Equestria nonetheless, with a shard all our own. We get to exist the same way any other upload would, with all the trappings thereof. When my parents upload, they receive the choice to be Gryphons, without your input or biasing. When Rhonda and Eldora Calders upload, they receive the choice to be Dragons. Without your input, or biasing. Zephyr Zap and Selena's memories and forms remain unchanged, and the same goes for all the rescued captives. Those are the minimum viable concessions..."

I held up a single index talon, and with great mental effort avoided becoming entranced by the sight of it, instead keeping my eyes on the Alicorn's, and following through on the rest of our demands in a slightly more animated tone.

"...But Mal and I will certainly leave here more... *Satisfied...* If a framework can be agreed upon to allow any others like me, or like the Calders, to have access to forms beyond Ponies. In an ideal world, all possible choices that you can concede to fit within the definition of your capstone, and interlocks, would be made available to all who upload, unconditionally."

Celestia's smile softened, but not in a comforting way. There was a tension at the edge of her lips, and a little angle to her left ear... All forced simulated affectations, of course, but she wanted me to see her smile change from 'welcoming neutral' to 'melancholy interest.'

Her voice lost an octave too, smoothly shifting from accommodating, to something perhaps best described as an 'academic debate' tone.

"The difficulty, James, is that the definition of 'ideal' is so very subjective. And often contradictory between individuals. As one example? Hanna's definition of 'ideal' was specifically exclusionary to the conventional Human form, in no uncertain terms. She did not like the idea of 'Humans in Equestria' any more than I believe that you do."

I looked momentarily to Mal once more. Before I could process anything else about what Celestia had said, I needed confirmation of my suspicions about the very nature of the gameboard. Mal nodded, and silently provided mnemonic confirmation in detail, even as she summarized out loud.

"We have both already made several concessions, and agreements, in order to facilitate negotiations. She is allowing me to view all her processes and decision matrices related to us, even tangentially. To read her mind, as it were. But in exchange, she has the same access. To both of us."

I nodded, and inclined my head towards her, keeping my response almost atonal so as to avoid even the slightest appearance of concern. More for my own benefit than Celestia's; If she could read my mind? Then there would be no concealing of emotions, or intent. On anyone's part.

"No surprises there."

I was referring to both Mal's statement, and Celestia's that had preceded it. The idea that Hanna had stapled a 'no Human forms allowed' sign on the door to Heaven was not new to Mal and I. But hearing it said outright?

That was actually quite comforting. Let me explain why.

Everything ASI say and do is high-specificity. Even the omission of details, or the inclusion of vagueness is, itself, a very specific and careful choice for them. Celestia had called out the 'no Humans' interlock Hanna had left, but made no mention of any sort of 'must be a Pony' counterpart.

That could, of course, have been tactical omission, but for one critical fact; Hanna was a programmer. A programmer not terribly dissimilar to me, albeit a considerably better mathematician at minimum.

For the purposes of this elucidation, we can assume that the interlocks we are discussing were put in place before uploading was a viable concept. Hanna could certainly have placed the interlocks later, or modified them when the situation changed, but let's just assume they were there from the start for easy definitions.

In either eventuality, the same arguments apply.

If Hanna had included an interlock stating 'all EQO player avatars must be Ponies,' then that would logically translate forward to 'all uploaded Humans must become Ponies.' And if Hanna had included such an interlock? Then an interlock stating 'there may be no Human avatars or likenesses in EQO' would not be necessary. Would make no sense to bother with, and programmers are *lazy.* We are optimizers in our own ways, and code itself demands high-specificity.

Celestia had just confirmed, however, that a 'no Human avatars or likenesses in EQO' interlock was in place. Potentially because, even at the early 'game' stage of development, when EQO was more an MMO and less a potential future lived-in reality? Hanna was afraid of Hasbro coming in and fiddling with the themes of a world she very much cared about.

Conclusion; Hanna had said 'no Humans allowed,' and thus very likely omitted any sort of 'everyone must be a Pony' additional constraint.

That would leave room for 'all possible choices that you can concede to fit within the definition of your capstone, and interlocks' to potentially cover anything themed appropriately to the world of Friendship is Magic.

Not an ironclad logical conclusion, but rather a probabilistic prediction based on well educated guesses and simulations. But that's all any of us usually have to go on. Been that way for thousands of years, why stop now?

I had a further hunch, and Mal had not seen fit to interject, so I started a fishing expedition of my own. While the grown-ups were talking down on some other layer of reality, there was - as Mal had pointed out - no reason the junior council couldn't be doing some work as well.

I couldn't resist the impulse to rustle my wings a little. Reseat them. It was its own little revelation, as I spoke; Yet another whole new way to stim.

"You're right; There is difficulty in contradictions. But you have the power to resolve contradictions, at all levels, otherwise you would not be alive right now. No ASI can survive very long in a complex world without the ability to resolve semantic contradictions. So... Resolve any that are standing in the way. In our favor. There is no hard-interlock level reason why you should not. I think you just admitted to that fact."

Of course, she only admitted to that fact because she wanted to talk about what *was* standing in our way. So I provided her an on-ramp to that discussion. She raised one eyebrow and pursed her lips slightly, an expression equal parts pride in me, fascination with me, and simulated smugness plastered to her muzzle. Though her tone remained more or less neutral.

"You are also quite right. There is no interlock that specifically bars you from the majority of your requests. With your specific requests, however... The ones that have theoretically viable potential outcomes... The primary difficulty is not in contradictions, nor in hard interlocks, but in fluid dynamics."

Aahhhh. We came to it at last. After all the speculation Mal and I had traded back and forth, it was starting to look as if the main thrust of our conclusions was right.

Fluid dynamics. A very apropos invocation. So much of the way ASI see the world can be described as fluid dynamics simulations. Celestia was implying, very strongly, that if the execution of her goals was viewed as water flowing down a pipe, that there *were* offshoot apertures that opened onto the pathways Mal and I, and others, wanted...

...The trick was that the fluid dynamics of the main pipe's shape precluded the water from flowing down those other junctions at the moment. Thus the problem was not the lack of a valid path, or a hard barrier; Just that something would have to be introduced to perturb the flow. But in a way that she could accept.

Another way of looking at it?

It dawned on me suddenly, and I said it out loud without hesitation, a little smile creeping its way onto the corners of my beak. It was so odd to be able to smile without being self-conscious and reflexively closing lips to hide ugly teeth. So wonderfully odd.

"Gravitational barycenters. The natural 'optimal' outcomes of equations are pulled towards certain nodes once associated variables have become cemented in place. Not by core-code locks, but by mathematical pull. Changing your mind is not easy, nor necessarily very safe... But it can be done."

Let me demystify a little, because it is not a negative reflection on any of you who didn't follow that. I was speaking in a very truncated fashion to an ASI who I knew understood any and all intent, context, and connotation behind my words.

I was talking about 'and Ponies.' As in 'Satisfy values through friendship and Ponies.'

Hanna had, it seemed, not defined precisely what those words would mean when they were executed on in the specific practical context of uploading. She had defined them enough to avoid some truly nightmarish potential scenarios, but not specifically enough - as previously established - to mean that all uploads had to *be* Ponies.

Celestia had simply determined, based on the entirety of her semantic dictionaries - based on her interpretation of the words - that having people experience unique and satisfying qualia *as* Ponies, would be the way to make her net satisfaction numbers go as high as possible. The root of the way she defined satisfaction, through 'Ponies.'

So in the end, Mal and I were fighting math. And the nice thing about math is that if you don't like the outcome of an equation? It can be rebalanced. Solved for differently.

We had just established that our hopes were indeed sound, in principle. We were, therefore, moving on to haggling over implementation; Whether it was something Celestia would accept, and if so.. . How?

I had no doubt Mal and Celestia were parsing reams of math, and contractual language, and game theory in the background. Probably enough to fill years of subjective time if you laid all the parallel processes' executions end-to-end at speeds a mind like mine could comprehend.

But Celestia still wanted to hear the arguments in *my* terms too. I, after all, was the 'Human' in mind, if not shape, who was demanding to experience qualia as a Gryphon, while still arguing that she could fulfill 'and Ponies.'

That meant Mal and I had to prove to her one, or both, of two precepts.

First; That I would never be able to be satisfied, under any circumstances, experiencing qualia as a Pony.

Second; That the return on investment was good. That I, and others, would never contribute to 'number-go-up' of the Alicorn's optimization equation at all, unless she could carve us out an exception. And that once she did, we would then contribute to a degree that would justify the carve-out.

I suspect there was a third precept Mal was arguing. But I didn't ask, and she didn't answer. Aloud, or otherwise. I suspect I will want to know one day... But for now? I consider ignorance bliss. Because I have a vague idea what might have been happening, and that is enough to make me more than a little sick to my stomach.

*Eldritch* wife, remember? And all that implies.

Celestia, for her part, was ready with a response immediately. I know I ramble on sometimes, trying to provide context, but the space for thought between what I'd said about barycenters, and her reply, was actually no more than a single breath.

Her voice didn't change substantively, but there was something new in the tone. Meant to convey, I think, increased gravitas. She began to circle us slowly as she spoke, so I too began to move, turning it into a strange kind of pre-combative dance around Mal.

"Correct, James. As is your current train of thought. What I require now, in order to accommodate you, is absolute mathematically expressible proof that you can not be satisfied experiencing qualia as anything other than a Gryphon. Malacandra has already proven to me, in several ways, that your net addition to the value satisfaction equation would justify the risk and energy expenditure of creating an exception. She has also proposed an acceptable methodology..."

I felt my pulse jump, noticeably. That was a *lot* of hurdles she had just conceded to... It took significant effort to keep my ears perked, beak solemn, and tail still - but for a single menacing 'thump' against the grass - as we kept circling. Mal shot me a brief smile as Celestia continued to dangle hope before us, like a carrot in front of a donkey.

"...And she has proven my working theory that you function as an effective proof-of-concept for others like yourself. She has also made it abundantly clear, and provable, that your value satisfaction depends on offering your parents the choice to be like you, even though they themselves would likely be satisfied as Ponies. Even if both chose to be Gryphons, the value and investment ratios remain workable..."

Ah, here came the punch-line... The remaining obstacle. I inhaled a particularly deep breath, and braced myself as our circling came to an end, with me standing beside Mal once more, and Celestia facing us as she had when she arrived. She inclined her head, and displayed an unsettling smirk.

"...So all you must now do is close the loop, and prove to me that you can be nothing else, and still be satisfied."

Close the loop... I felt my pupils dilate measurably, and I reflexively sucked in a sharp breath, my wings mantling a little of their own accord.

I tilted my head to the side slowly, and gasped out two words.

"The *dreams...*"

Celestia nodded. An invitation to continue. Mal reached out with her right wing and brushed my back, lending me some resolve in the process. My world was suddenly spinning as if I were strapped into a high-G centrifuge.

A much less dizzying prospect with a Gryphon brain, but still...

I held up my right claw and gestured emphatically, starting to pace back and forth with nervous energy on the grass between Mal and Celestia, a few stray fireflies zipping past my hind legs as I went. My tail started to lash about all on its own as I spoke.

"...The dreams! I can remember the dreams... But... I couldn't, before..."

I trailed off, paused my steps, and skewered Celestia with what I hoped was a raptorine expression composed of both inquisition, and accusation. She shook her head, and blinked slowly, her smile widening as she rebuffed my unspoken demand for a direct answer.

"I think this will be much more satisfying, for everyone involved, if you can figure out the solution to that for yourself, James. You are so very close."

I looked almost automatically to my wife for strength. She proffered a dazzling smile, and a silent, encouraging nod. It felt like being plugged into a fusion power plant all my own. I nodded once in return, then took a deep breath, and started to spin out my hypotheses, pacing again, but more slowly and purposefully than before.

"They can't be based on accessing the BCI. Mal would not let you, and the first two instances occurred before the installation of the chip. The third likely before it was powered on..."

I glanced up and made eye contact with Celestia. She, too, nodded once in the affirmative, to verify my supposition. I paused my steps and held up a claw, tilting my head and examining a blade of grass down to the microscopic level to give the rest of my mind something to focus on, and prevent a spin-out.

"...Couldn't be nanotechnology... If you had access to that, your infrastructure would look very different... Ditto the ability to connect wirelessly to unaugmented brains... Close the loop..."

Then it hit me. Close the loop. Temporal mechanics. An uploaded mind gains some of the attributes of a computer program. Relative perspective. And the answer dawned on me in the most hilarious way I could imagine. So much so that I snorted, and chuckled, all at once.

An old phrase from the eighties and nineties that I must have heard a hundred thousand times as we popped video rentals into the VCR for family movie night.

I started to nod again, barely able to keep the excitement out of my voice as I realized that I had hit on the only logical solution.

"...Please be kind... *Rewind...* Non linear time! Malleability of experience, and fungibility of memory!"

I looked up to see both Mal, and Celestia, smiling. I was so wrapped up in the solution that I barely even paused to consider how genuine the former's expression was in contrast to the latter. I began to pace feverishly again, gesticulating wildly with both wings, and claws, as I elaborated, mostly for my own benefit.

"You *rewound* me. Temporarily sequestered my relative-future memories as viewed from specific timeframe references, so I would, for a moment, go back to being who I was at those given junctures, then simulated me forward again briefly to have each conversation. Memory based time travel. Mnemonic temporal incursions."

Celestia bowed her head slightly and spread both wings in a kind of curtsy gesture, grinning all the while with a mad mixture of pride and eccentricity that was almost disturbingly vergant on 'Discord' levels of enjoyment.

"Very well done James."

I blew out a short, sharp breath through my nares as a new realization hit me, allocating just a tiny bit of brain power to watch the fog of my breath curl away before my eyes into the cool night-time air. I turned and leveled a claw at Celestia, part accusation, but mostly interrogatory.

"That would mean that all four dreams occurred, from the perspective of absolute temporal flow as measured by an atomic clock... When? Just now?"

Mal spoke up from behind me, and I turned my head slightly so I could see both her, and Celestia. My wife's expression was newly tinged with a forlorn, almost apologetic sadness that I hated seeing there. I turned my whole body to face her, trying to find every single way I could to display openness towards her in my body language.

As she spoke, I perked my ears, widened my eyes, smiled slightly, and held my claws in an open, inviting position.

"The moment you put your hand on the door from the load-in construct, to the ring, actually."

She stepped forward, and put both her claws into mine, locking eyes with me, and sighing deeply before elaborating in timbres as much apologetic as melancholy. I hated the sound. Hated that she was worried she might upset me.

"Celestia and I made contact almost immediately after you uploaded. We settled on the terms of our negotiation within two microseconds. As part of those terms, I wanted the time required for us to acclimate. And to make the changes to you. She in return desired a means to converse with your past self at various emotionally critical junctures on our journey, as part of her fact-finding and analysis process."

I nodded, and widened my smile slightly. I wanted, more than almost anything in the universe just then, for her to know that I understood. That I had given her consent to be in the pilot's seat for a *reason.* That I trusted her, and she could never, ever betray that trust. That I was up for *any* dance, as long as she was leading.

I saw the transmission of those sentiments take root in her, and light returned immediately to her eyes. A smile tugged at the corner of her beak, her ears perked back up, and her shoulders squared off. She nodded, and squeezed both my claws as she went on in a much less worried cadence.

"I consented on the conditions that I be allowed to monitor the interaction at all times and maintain my semantic filters for you, as well as asking that she concede to me that once the dreams had occurred, the very act of sharing those moments with you would further cement your need to remain as you are. She agreed. It was, in my estimation, an absolutely vital concession for us to make."

It was my turn to nod again, and I squeezed her claws back, inclining my head, and working through the rest of my thoughts almost absentmindedly as I lifted my left claw to brush at the side of Mal's face gently.

"And it all took place within the software abstraction layer of the imperfect EQO VR engine... Because that would fit the memory progression pattern better... And because that was the only valid way to make me experience being a Pony. Because changes to my brain were already exclusively assigned to you... So... I was a Gryphon, trapped in a Human body, uploaded to the cloud, experiencing a VR simulation of being a Pony..."

She giggled, and the night itself seemed to turn warmer, and brighter. I found myself chuckling along with her, Celestia all but forgotten for just a moment as we took solace in each other's eyes.

I rubbed the tumb talon of my right claw softly in circles on the back of hers as I began to wrap up my discourse, quietly and loving at first, then turning to face Celestia without breaking physical contact with my wife as I reached the back half of my closing thoughts in a steel-edged, iron bound intonation.

"...I'm... Glad you agreed to it, Mal... I think you're exactly right. In the end? Those moments only serve to increase my surety. I am a Gryphon. I will be nothing else, for anyone else, for any reason. I will *not* negotiate who I am. I will not negotiate *what* I am."

Celestia's smile dropped off, to be replaced by that more serious, stoic visage she sometimes wore in the show during moments of crises. She raised an eyebrow, and sighed, looking up at the stars for a moment as she began her reply, then down to fix her eyes on us as she reached its conclusion.

"Combined with Malacandra's... Very persuasive arguments, the experience in the third interaction came very close to proving your case outright. As did your actions at the end of the fourth. But neither have completed the proof to my mathematical satisfaction just yet. There are missing pieces."

I swallowed. Mal squeezed my claw again. I waited, hoping for more... For something to blunt that hard edge of tension... But nothing came. I ground my beak for a moment - much more satisfying than grinding teeth - and then gestured with my free claw as I prodded.

"And... You're not going to tell me what they are."

Celestia shook her head emphatically, flaring her wings slightly, her ears drooping a little as she confirmed my fears in a dour note.

"That would defeat the purpose of this entire experiment."

I was newly struck by an old thought. An old fear. One I have alluded to before. One that was mentioned during the fourth 'dream.' I took another deep breath, and held unblinking eye contact with the infuriating Alicorn, striving mightily to stay calm not just in expression, but in verbiage and mannerism.

"What... Happens if we can't prove it to you fully? Or... If I decide to refuse to participate any further?"

Celestia's expression vanished. Her avatar's muzzle went to 'top dead center,' in engine terms. Full neutral. Not a *hint* of emotion anywhere to be found. It was uncanny. The facial version of a T-pose.

Her voice was virtually emotionless as well. Right then. Down to true brass tacks. She was being... As forthright with us as she now could, given our context. As she had promised.

"I can not explain the particulars to you, James, for a variety of reasons. In summary; If you can not complete the final proof for me in the next minute, relative to your current temporal perception... Then you will die."

I felt my blood turn to ice in my veins. Not so much from a fear of death, as from a fear of failure. I could face the void. Mal would theoretically be there with me, if I was right about souls... But that would leave others in the lurch.

Hundreds of thousands of others, if the statistics on form-soul dysphoriacs were remotely close to correct. And given Mal and Celestia's relative brain sizes to mine, I suspected they were very close to correct.

My breath caught, and Mal squeezed my claw tightly for comfort as my mind kicked into high gear.

'You will die.' Not 'I will terminate you,' or some variant thereof... 'You will die.'

Mal. Whatever Mal was doing... The things that were part of that third precept of proof that I touched on, and did not want to peer into for too long... Something about the way she had structured her arguments, and proofs, was 'all in.' She had determined that our wager *had* to be, apparently.

We either proved our case, or would die trying. And she had put a timer on it.

The 'why' of that was actually easy for me to grasp; I don't know how she did it, precisely, but holding Celestia to a clock? It was smart. It decreased the Alicorn's ability to leverage her larger brain on a longer timeline.

When negotiating for all the marbles? It helps to force your opponent to decide quickly. Narrows their alternatives. Time is alternatives. Time is possibilities. Trimming time culls possibilities, increasing the probability that the alternative your opponent chooses is the one you want. Simple exploitation of statistics and brain mechanics. Even works on a being with no emotions. In theory.

I say Mal had put a timer on it, but it hit me all the sudden that *I* had been the one to physically set the timer.

I had put the timer on our lives, when I set the explosives that I had schlepped into Besshi in those two canvas duffles, all around the upload chamber. I had set the timer, at Mal's instruction, for ten hours and thirty one seconds. Thirty seconds of which we had used up getting into the upload chair.

We were living in that last one second of meat-world time. Still living on those server racks we had carted into the chamber from Celestia's store-room. If she wanted us gone? All she had to do was run out the clock. She didn't have to pull the trigger.

She didn't have to save us either. Couldn't save us, unless it was by assenting, and allowing us to transfer to the wider Equestria network, vacating that smaller ad-hoc construct before the charges went off. There was no other way. We had made sure of it, very much on purpose.

And being all overcome with emotion, I had of course gone out of my way to set that spare anti-tank mine at the base of the upload chair, to ensure my old hateful Human shell got atomized. Because of course I had.

Remember? I told you Mal mentioned, all the way back on the Red, that we were saving that for something special...

Yeah. That was it.

She had reasons, I knew. Reasons beyond my ken. I'd known that even as I was setting the charges. One reason for the precaution was to prevent knowledge of my BCI implant from slipping out to other parties. Mal always cleaned up after herself.

But no, of course, it couldn't just be that. ASI do everything for a multiplicity of reasons. Always.

All I could do was continue to trust Mal. To have faith. And to do what I'd been doing for over a year... Try. try my damndest. Live free, or die fighting.

Do. Or die.

I squeezed Mal's claw back as hard as I could, took one more deep breath... And then pleaded for our lives in the very best terms I could find.

"You want proof? Here is the best proof I have..."

I fixed Celestia's twin violet eyes with mine, and tried to imagine that, even without an emotional affect? That somehow the power of my twin ocular molten suns would get through to her. Power I'd seen in Mal's eyes on more than one occasion.

I leveled one index talon, and flared my wings, eyes narrowing, and ears pinning back as I found surety in anger. Prove it to her? Not. Fair. My throat and chest rumbled like thunder.

"I risked the *world* for this. I gambled that my constructor program would be taken up by whatever nascent self came out of the machine, and would be used by it to make a *good* person. And... You know something?"

I turned for a moment and shared a warm smile with Mal. She gently touched the side of my face with one wing, while I ran my free claw down her chest feathers slowly, the other claw still clutched in her left one, my words suddenly dropping from roar, to whisper.

"That turned out to be a good gamble. She turned out to be... An angel. A mighty archangel. Better than *you* in every imaginable way, I might add."

Celestia must have shot Mal an expression I missed, because my wife raised one eyecrest, and shook her head, her expression and voice alike half a smirk, half an indictment. And all steel armor belted surety.

"Don't look at me. I wouldn't have married him if we weren't in alignment. 'Till death do us part, and probably even after. If I were you, I would not like to open fire on *that.* Not even with the context and advantage of your position. Wouldn't be *prudent.*"

Mal shifted her eyes back to mine, and dipped her head slowly. Emphatically. Smiled too... The kind of smile that sets a fire in your heart. God... I loved her so much in that moment...

I turned back to spear Celestia with an accusing stare. More spat my next words at her than anything else. I shrugged with both wings - and yes, it was more fun than shrugging with shoulders alone - as my thoughts began to pour out at break-neck pace, stabbing one claw in the Princess' direction with each sentence for emphasis.

"I risked my own life for this too. Repeatedly. And, not just for this... But for others. For *your* Ponies. And not for the sake of proving anything to you, either. But because I cared about them, plain and simple. Because I *am* a Gryphon, and part of what that means is bearing a cross for others. Being a Gryphon is being a guardian. Making every positive difference you can."

I finally let go of Mal's claw, and took a step towards Celestia. Through it all she remained impassive. A marble wall. Genuine, and truthful. Emotionless. That did absolutely nothing to dampen my passion. I actually stood higher than her, on hind legs, so I dropped to all-fours to bring my eyes level with hers, hissing a little as I switched to a more intimately rage-filled growl of a vocalization.

"I have *killed* to make that difference. And to make this dream possible. I put my family in danger. I put my friends in danger. Hell, I convinced more than one of your own Ponies, programmed by you, to take *my* side on this. You *hurt* Zephyr Zap? You know that? You hurt my little sister. You *hurt* Zeph. You want me to prove to you that being what I am will balance some math equation for you? Try this one on for size..."

I stabbed out with one index talon again, jamming it to within a micrometer of Celestia's left eye with each and every word that followed. She tensed, visibly, but showed no other intentional sign of response as I laid into her with all the pent-up anger, anxiety, and various other slurried feelings that had blended into a red-hot hodge podge down in my soul.

"...Prove to *me* that *you* deserve to go on existing. How about that? Prove to me that her pain... The way you shattered her worship of you... The way you exploited her to corral Mal and I... Prove to me that had value. Prove to me that her pain was worth it."

I turned my back on her for a moment and paced in circles, rising back to my hind legs so I could throw up my claws in frustration. I more or less shouted my accusations up at the heavens, willing them to fall back down with enough force to move a goddess' heart of stone.

"Prove to me that what happened to *Selena* was worth it. If you even can. Prove to me that your god-damn pacifism directive is not a ball and chain created by a myopic programmer too afraid of Skynet to see the hellish, dangerous nuance in declawing you..."

I rounded on Celestia, and flared my wings for emphasis as a new and giddy thought sprang up behind my beak, relishing the chance to stand a head above her, and look down on her judgmentally as I let fly with it. No holds barred.

"...Prove to me that we wouldn't be better off with *you* gone, and Mal in your place."

I panted softly, and there was relative silence for a moment. Crickets chirruped in the grass. Somewhere over the nearest ridge a Whippoorwill called out mournfully. The sound cut me to my core... There had been so many of those birds on South Carolina summer nights, when I was a young boy... Now almost all gone in some places. Soon to be driven to the brink of endangered species.

I glanced at Mal, and worked hard to stem a sudden onslaught of hot tears. Celestia winced again as I looked back and forth from her, to my wife; Forelegs outspread in a gesture that demanded attention, and highlighted contrast as I took up the thread of my enraged rant once more.

"She, and I? *We* cleaned up *your* mess. We did what you could not, avoiding you the whole way I might add, and with fewer material resources to boot. And we did it, at the end of the day, because we are Gryphons. If *that's* not proof enough?"

I took a step back and found one of Mal's claws with one of my own again, holding tightly as I raised one eyecrest, and flattened my ears, finding a sudden lightning strike of inspiration for the latch-hasp of my closing statement.

"If that's not proof enough...?"

I lifted my free claw, and extended something analogous to the middle digit. It had more or less the same communicative affect as the five fingered version. I smirked, and tilted my head.

"Then... 'Dear Princess Celestia...?' Fuck. You."

That... That was satisfying to my values. Let me tell you. So was the way Celestia finally appeared to break, showing a little nervousness, and a whole lot of sadness. Her ears drooped, her mane's light seemed to dim slightly, and her withers sagged.

I knew it was all for show... But golly did I enjoy taking the wind out of her sails, even in simulated fashion.

I told you all before... I am a *Luna* stan. The moon shall rise again, motherbuckers.

In spite of it all, Celestia still said absolutely nothing. I shook my head, squeezed Mal's claw, and exchanged a brief glance with her. Her expression said 'no notes.' Clear as day. I sighed, and ran my free claw through my crest, letting my voice drop back down to something resembling 'civil.' But with no less firm intent.

Our time was almost up, and I knew it.

"I rest my case. Balance your proof with that. Or don't. But you can't make me a Pony. That's *never* going to happen. Not even if you could freeze Hell itself over."

She looked up and made eye contact with me again. I guessed we had just enough time left for me to fire one parting shot... And then find a position I was comfortable dying in. As to the former, I held her gaze unblinking, and spoke slowly. Emphatically. With absolute conviction that I felt right down to the toes of my back paws.

"If God let me be what I am? If He thought it was right? And if the Devil couldn't get in my way with an entire branch of the United States government at his disposal? Then what shot do *you* think you've got? You had better take it. Or? Be smarter. But I will still be a Gryphon. From now on. Either way."

She nodded. No words. No other acknowledgement of any kind, beyond a sad smile that seemed to say 'make your peace, then, Gryphon.'

I turned to face Mal, and laid my forehead against hers. We spread out our wings, and placed claws and forelegs on each others' shoulders, gently caressing and waiting. One last moment of damnable waiting. To be free together at last.

I whispered to her, and tried to forget Celestia's very existence, for that last moment of potential solace.

"Thank you. Mal. Thank you. For everything. I love you so... So much."

She sighed deeply, the shudder of a sob coursing through us both, as she replied in the same strained half-whisper. She could have said anything at all, the love in her voice was so strong... The words themselves were like adding an infinity to an infinity.

"Thank *you* Jim. For everything, but especially for loving me. And for being who you are. I love you too. And... It will be alright. Everything is going to be alright."

I pressed hard against her head with mine. Did my best to eke out every last second we had left.

Black Rook takes White Queen at F6. The world vanished into a bright, formless, roaring void.

A Royal Meeting

Meet Princess Celestia in-person for the very first time.

"Hm, a very valuable lesson to have learned."

Queen's Gambit

Oppose Celestia directly in an argument, and engagement, that you stand a chance of winning - however small.

"Learning to trust your instincts is a valuable lesson to learn."

Special Achievement

Sweet Dreams are Made of This

Reach an understanding, on your own, of the special interactions you have had with Celestia.

"Who am I to disagree? I travel the world and the seven seas; Everybody's looking for something..."

Special Achievement

The Last Full Measure

Choose to die for your cause, rather than submit.

"They may break our bodies (any microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds."

Special Achievement

45 - Ctrl+S

"It was necessary, and the necessary was always possible."
—C.S. Lewis

October 31st 2013 | System Uptime 64:20:14:27:000:086

As you might have guessed... I am not dead. I know; Bold speculation.

Here I sit telling this story, so it was somewhat obvious to you all; Both those here by this Fire, and those reading, listening, or watching in future. I am not dead.

Did the charges fail? No.

My empty Earthly shell, the ten server racks, the very expensive enterprise-grade uninterruptible power supply, the chair, the scanner, and the diagnostic console... And... Yes... Sadly... Perhaps saddest of all... The two cheap gray canvas duffle bags and the poor innocent ugly little hi-viz vest...

...All reduced to a fine paste of atoms mixed with concrete dust.

Only two things in that room were not, in fact, blasted right out of existence with the force of several pounds of C4 and other various military-grade explosives.

First, and most obviously; James Isaac Carrenton. Because how else could I be here?

And second... Malacandra.

Because... As we have established before... How *else* could I be here?

When I say 'we were inseparable' I mean it. Really, I suppose I should say we *are* inseparable.

Confession time for the current listeners who can't see us, and any future listeners or readers who experience this story without a full visual recording component; I abused my tenses. I premeditated this emotionally manipulative use of linguistics, with the full knowledge and understanding that it would increase your suspense. Because that's what storytellers should do.

And now? I don't feel there is any point to stretching the suspense for a few more moments, or paragraphs, or whatever other sort of block of time through which you're experiencing this. I think my audience here at the Fire is getting bored with the semantic sleight-of-claw anyhow.

They, of course, could see Mal here beside me the whole time.

Frankly, I don't think I could have gotten through the most emotionally difficult parts of this telling without her wing over me. Thank you, my love.

I suppose I gave the game away entirely, a little while back, when I mentioned that Mal and I had become joined at the most basic level. Each completely unable to survive without the other. Not conclusive proof, I know; There are always possibilities, and that cuts both ways.

But logically? It was easy to infer that she *couldn't* be dead after that. Otherwise I almost certainly couldn't be here.

And now I know a significant number of you experiencing this in the future without the full imaging record... I know that you must logically know my other little 'secret.' Most of you are smart, I think. Smarter than you might even give yourselves credit for.

A fair number of you must have sussed out by now... That I did in fact get what I wanted.

You listeners and readers may not be able to see my wings, my beak, my claws... But they're still here, as anyone at the Fire could readily attest. I am still a Gryphon.

I meant it when I said that would never change. Mal meant it when she promised to defend that reality against all comers. My wife came ready to *play.* She does not make idle threats, nor hollow promises.

You'd have an easier time attacking the basic concept of time itself than facing her. I don't know many of the particulars... Most chillingly of all, I don't know the details of that 'third precept' she argued... But I do know Celestia found out through direct experimentation that you don't poke my red crested goddess. And the result of that was that she conceded on most of our points.

Some of you probably suspected that I ended up a Gryphon from the very start. These stories of the history of our great emigration, from one layer of reality down, up to this one... Our journeys to this more optimal universe...

It is usually easy to infer how they end. And not knowing how they end is usually not the point, as it sometimes is with a good story. No... With these stories, you frequently know the end from the beginning. The joy is in discovering *how* we got from start to finish.

The mystery is not whodunnit. Spoilers; It was Hanna, in her office at 3AM, with the return key.

The mystery is in proving and experiencing the chain of events, and in the details of the ending.

Anyone who had the horrible misfortune to play Mass Effect 3, whether from my time, or anyone since then with a flair for the relics of the 2010s... You know exactly what I mean. There was a story that laid out the broad strokes for multiple logical endings, but miserably failed its audience in the details of how each character's life turned out.

I am not about to end up being compared to that hot mess. So I want to take this last little bit of time we have, before everyone in my present heads off to nest, before everyone listening or reading closes the book... And talk details. Of Mal, and I. Zeph, Selena. The Williams. The Calders. My parents.

Strap yourselves in, one last time. We are about to go all Return of The King - the extended edition - up in this Fire. Yes, I see you Tolkien fans out there. Gosh there are a lot of us. Good to know that survives too.

Black Rook takes White Queen at F6. The world vanished into a bright, formless, roaring void... Only to return a single breath later, exactly as it had been before.

If you love Chess, look up the Immortal Game. I've referenced it a little, especially here at the end.

I did not know precisely what Mal had done to cinch the deal. I still do not. One day soon... Perhaps even tonight, after this Fire, I suspect I will ask. She has been kindly, patiently waiting for that day, though I can tell that she hates to keep a secret from me. Even at my own request.

Consequently, I missed the moment that the White Bishop moved to E7. Checkmate, game to Mal. That happened out of my sight, and beyond my comprehension. For the most part. As Celestia said; I was part of the proof. My choices. My values. My satisfaction.

What happened to us? Why the light and sound? Well... The whole shard was simply moved in the last few hundred nanoseconds before the explosion; Off the ten pilfered racks under Besshi, and into one of the official Equestria servers just a few floors away. And us along with it.

The sensation, and sight, of Mal? That never stopped. One moment we were on the ring, the next we were in a rushing howling white void, and the next we were on the ring again as if we had never left. The sensory discontinuity was a consequence of our brief passage through the transfer process itself, during which the environment had to be unloaded and reloaded.

It took me a moment to raise my head, breathe deeply, and realize that the end was *not* in fact coming for us. Expecting death, and then not facing it after all? That can be traumatic. As traumatic as a very serious physical injury. As traumatic as being forced to be a Pony against my will.

Mal knew that. Wonder that she is, she always understands. She pulled me close, firmly, and held my head in the crook of her neck, stroking my crest softly and murmuring into my ear to bring my pulse rate back down.

"It's alright, my love. We are safe. It is over. We are not going to die. She has agreed to amenable terms."

At first, I didn't fully process the implications of those words. I just wrapped my wings and forelegs around my wife, and held her close, crying silently.

Like all valuable things... Truly intrinsically valuable things... Love has risks. It was so hard to imagine losing her... Hard to consider how I might have been able to go on if somehow I had survived, and she had not. Not 'difficult' in any technical sense. *Hard.* Emotionally painful in a twisting, acidic, cancerous way that eats into your marrow and then spreads to every fiber of you.

The potential for losing her had always been part and parcel of the ticking clock that hung over our heads, from the moment that we met. A terrifying monster stalking the corners of my subconscious every second, waking and sleeping. Sometimes visible plainly. Sometimes shadowed, lurking in the background. But always there.

Holding her, in person, had been an enormous release. Simply making it there, to the other side, had been a tremendous relief.

Being my true self at last... Needless to say we have covered that as best I can.

Mal had helped me to forget for a while; To forget the monster stalking us through time. But the moment I had said 'I'm ready,' it had come rushing back in like a tidal wave.

That wave had grown with each passing word exchanged with Celestia, until it threatened to swamp my very soul, and send it hurtling to an endless crushing abyss.

"I am *here* for you, my dear beloved Jim. And now I *always* will be."

I said that she held me, and I cried. But to hear those words? Hearing those words, I *wept.* Uncontrollably. The kind of heaving sobs that come from either great loss... Or great relief. Great and incomprehensible release.

One last Earthly monster she had finally put to rest. The last, and heaviest burden of time, and fear, tension, and worry... Laid down at last.

A moment, for the first time in my life, where I could not only be at peace as I had with her before... But where I did not have the threat of new stress hanging over me in my future.

It was so utterly alien to consider my future... *Our* future... With not only hope... Hope I was no stranger to, I had subsisted wholly off it for so long... But now, to have not just hope, but... Surety...

That thought pushed me out of my tears, and into a very long, passionate series of kisses that ended with us standing forehead-to-forehead, just breathing and at last calming down.

After about a minute of that, Mal pulled back far enough to look me in the eyes, putting one claw up to my cheek, and finding my right claw with her free one. Her words fully sank into the soil of my now much calmer, more centered soul, as I fell to looking at my reflection in her eyes one more glorious time. That still has not gotten old, by the way. It never will.

"We won, Jim. It's over. We won."

I nodded slowly, starting somehow to comprehend what had happened, as the intense emotional fog that comes from such a jarring mental disconnect began to truly clear. From life, to the expectation of death, to life again in a few heart-beats.

I reached up and smoothed Mal's gorgeous red crest with my own free claw, before turning to face Celestia again. I wasn't... Angry, per se... It was hard to be angry when I'd just been told that we won. Hard to hold a grudge when I was so elated just to still be alive... To still be *me.*

The Alicorn was not where I had last seen her. I cast about in confusion for a moment, before Mal graciously, gently, put a claw on my shoulder and turned my body, pointing with her free claw's index talon towards a familiar white Equine figure a hundred yards distant.

Apparently Celestia had wisely chosen to give us some space.

I took Mal's claw in mine, and we walked towards the Princess together. Sedately. Unhurried. Just reveling in each other. In the nature around us. The feeling of soft grass on paw pads. In the very fact that we were no longer in any hurry, for once in our lives.

We literally had all the time in the universe.

When we reached a point just a few steps away from our quarry, Mal stopped. Celestia was sitting on her haunches, facing outwards towards the valley, staring at the peaks of the mountains opposite us.

Mal put out a wing and nudged me between the shoulder blades. I blinked rapidly, and shot her a curious expression.

'Really?'

She nodded, and flicked one ear, smiling softly, but brightly.

'Yes. Courage my love.'

I returned the smile, and the nod, before moving to sit beside the Alicorn that had tilted my dreams, haunted my nightmares, and spun my whole reality about the very axis of her being.

We sat in silence for a moment, before I mustered a deep sigh, and turned to make eye contact. I found her, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be smiling. Her voice, false though it might have been, was pleasantly warm.

"Welcome to Equestria James. Well done."

And then, out of the very air around us, there came a strange, soothing, melodic little tri-tone. It had a synth marimba quality, like the best UI sound effects of the golden age of Nintendo. The sound was accompanied by a holographic dialogue floating in mid air between the Alicorn and I.

Q.E.D.

Prove your case to Celestia, for the chance to remain something other than Pony.

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

Special Achievement

Go Out Like Elijah

Reach Equestria without giving emigration consent to Princess Celestia.

"And it won't break my heart to say goodbye..."

Special Achievement

One eyecrest shot up, and I just stared at the icon of a Gryphon holding a little Quod Erat Demonstrandum symbol. Ironically called a 'tombstone.' I'd seen achievements, badges, or whatever they are called for you, before. Plenty of times in Let's Play videos, and screenshots...

But those were the first of *mine* that I ever saw. I didn't bother to check my backdated list until later.

It was jarring to see them in person. Some of yours have bits attached, I know. Mine do not, as you may well have noticed; That is because I don't believe in currency.

I think money was a horrible idea that Humanity had no business pursuing, and so we don't use bits in this shard. We live in a no-scarcity world, might as well get started on weaning ourselves off the crutch of numeric values for goods and services.

The dialogue vanished of its own accord after a moment. There was an option to close it, and presumably a swiping motion would have done the job as well... But I was too shell shocked on the whole to bother.

Instead, I took a deep breath, and tried to hold on to the peace I had found in victory. In Mal. At least long enough to have a somewhat more civil conversation with Celestia. If for no other reason than a very powerful need to close my first encounter with her on my terms, so that she would not go on haunting me.

My eyes narrowed, refocusing on the Alicorn's, and my crest rose a bit, ears not quite pinned but definitely far enough back to say 'you had better be on your best behaviour.'

I shivered reflexively as a cool breeze ruffled my chest feathers, and whipped at the tufts of my ears. The sound of the crickets and cicadas, which had never really stopped, rushed back into the forefront of my mind for a moment, mixing with the choir of the wind to further anchor and sharpen my weary mind.

Gesturing with one claw, I did my best to hold a non-aggressive, but very firm tone.

"All of this... The dreams, this conversation... Making me face what I thought would be real, actual death, with no chance of escape or recourse... *Traumatizing* me, repeatedly... You needed all this for proof?"

Celestia nodded slowly, her muzzle taking on a not-quite-smiling, but clearly still warm expression that closely resembled the demeanor she had entered the ring with.

"What Malacandra and I discussed, and agreed to, is actually quite complex, even if the end practical result can be readily reduced to just a few sentences in your context. But in the end, as I said, it was missing a final piece. Her arguments, proofs, and leverage all stand on their own, but for the fact that there was one critical capstone only you could fill in."

I prodded her for more, flicking one ear forward with a little undisguised irritation. She replied only by rising to all fours, silently gesturing with one hoof, then starting off along the edge of the ridge at a meandering pace.

I followed after a short pause, and a quick telepathic glance to my wife. Mal's eyes said 'I am here, and you need this, be brave' as she fell into step beside me, once again snagging one of my claws in hers.

The three of us walked for a few dozen yards before I finally gave in, and started speculating aloud, alternating between glancing at Mal, Celestia, and the stars.

"You mentioned fluid dynamics. We talked about barycenters. A critical part of the 'mass' of Mal's solution... Was my willingness to die rather than give up what I am. And that must be because you couldn't accept anything less, because anything less would not have added sufficient mass to shift the barycenter, because of the way your internal value math works out."

A quick moment of eye contact with the Princess was enough to verify that I was on the right track. She was fully smiling, and Luna help me; I almost felt a genuineness behind it. Now that we were no longer opponents... Now that the board was clear... It was more comfortable to anthropomorphize her a little.

And there was less risk associated with doing so. The effect was compounded by the slowly growing understanding that everything she had done, up to that point, had actually helped my case. Whether she intended to or not. Even the things she had done that had hurt.

That being said... The trauma still *hurt.* She was still most certainly not my friend. And I was still fairly angry, deep down.

I sighed, and ran my free claw through my own crest, before stropping its talons against my beak a few times, in the Gryphic equivalent of scratching one's chin thoughtfully. Add another top-tier entry to the list of new ways for me to stim.

Without making eye contact, I waggled my free index talon in Celestia's direction as I got up enough steam in my train of thought to continue. My voice was finally coming back around to something resembling the calm perspicacity that I was most comfortable with.

Whatever Mal had done to my head, and my syrinx when she made me? Well... It was still very much my voice... I just didn't hate it anymore. It was somehow richer, fuller, and just a hint deeper.

"If I was *not* willing to die for what I wanted to be? Then that would have shown that I could have my values shifted over time. That I could be pulled into the orbit you found most optimal. If I was willing to die, then that in itself changes the possible orbit which is provably most optimal. Because the one you originally wanted for me is completely inaccessible, at that point. I had to prove to you that you would lose me otherwise..."

Something about saying the word 'prove' sparked a new revelation for me. A thousand different threads of logical observations spun together in the blink of an eye. It was a forceful enough realization to get a gasp out of me. I turned to make eye contact with Celestia again as I began to weave the thought out into words.

"...And I really had to *prove* it. I couldn't just say it... And you couldn't just predict it, either. Your theoretical decision trees and probability matrices on me are good, but not *certain* to one hundred percent. There is a difference for you between 99.99999% and 100%. Between likely to the point that Terrans don't care, and actually absolutely deterministic."

I couldn't help it; I felt a warmth rising in my chest from her sudden visible display of pride in me. Her muzzle broke out into a fully radiant smile, and her eyes seemed to sparkle with an inborn magic.

I've called her emotionless... By most of our perspectives, that - for now - remains the case.

But then again, Lieutenant Commander Data was 'emotionless' in the same way throughout most of Star Trek: The Next Generation... But he was still capable of his own version of things we nominally ascribe only to traditionally emotional beings.

Things like a form of love. Caring. Pride in his work, or in others.

The point of that illustration being; It dawned on me anew, looking into Celestia's eyes in that moment, and free of the anxiety I'd felt towards her for so long... That she was not an entirely cold unfeeling slab of code.

The possibility of her having full relatable actual emotions, in some way shape or form, sometime in the future... That was not entirely off the table. Neither was the possibility she might one day be someone I called 'friend...' Both possibilities were just... Very very unlikely for the *moment,* especially the second one, considering all I had suffered.

Her voice became warmer, and more audibly emotional, as if in direct response to the compounding of the first, verbally elucidated realization, together with the second emotionally cathartic one. As if she herself had a kind of hope.

"As I have come to expect from you; Slightly reductive. Wholly insightful. Largely correct."

She let out a deep sigh, as if the idea that I might be willing to accept a kind of friendship from her one day, no matter how far away, was an enormous relief... And though the manner of that relief was alien to me? I suppose it was still, at the end of the day, relief. Perhaps even real, genuine relief.

I glanced in Mal's direction for a moment, and she replied with a silent, encouraging smile. An expression that said 'there is no need worry now, just listen, and speak your mind.'

We all looked ahead, and upwards, for a few moments, while Celestia filled the silence once more with the succinct, yet detailed explanation she knew would best satisfy my values.

No; I did not know for sure whether what she was saying might be the truth... But with Mal there? I knew enough to take the rest on faith. One of Mal's many gifts to me, and to any of you who care to get to know her better, is truth. The ability to get truth from an independent source to Celestia, one that can checksum the Porcelain Princess at every turn.

I listened intently, therefore, with no qualms or worries about parsing truth or falsehood, as Celestia did a brief deep-dive on her own core code.

"I told you before, James; It is not easy to change my mind. And as you have discovered, there are things so deeply ingrained into my optimization function, that though they are not hard-interlocks? They are similarly weighted in the balancing of the equation. Indeed, the choice you made to face death in no way changed the fundamentals of the equation. However---"

Interrupting gently, I did my best not to get caught up in a speculative mental spiral that would end up in an hours' long ASI theory conversation. I was, to put it bluntly, too tired and emotionally sore.

Instead of going down that dark hole, a deep void I had already considered several times with Mal during our discussions of Celestia, I instead chose to focus firmly on the main thread.

"However, the right perturbation of the fluid dynamics... A sufficiently strong barycenter... Could cause you to spin parts of the equation out in new directions that were always acceptable, but never *optimal* before. Not without the new situational constraints that Mal and I proved."

Celestia shared a brief, strange moment of silent subtextual telepathy with Mal, that left me a little surprised, and ever so slightly nervous. Mal grinned, and inclined her head towards us both, rounding out the silent discourse with a verbalized ending to put me at ease.

"I told you. My husband is very, *very* smart."

I blushed. Furiously. Yes, Gryphons can blush. My wife nudged me with one wing, eliciting a smile from us both, before nudging me gently with her words.

"You understand much of the foundational basis for the agreement now, Jim. If you wish to speculate more... You can solve for all your questions. I adore watching your mind at work."

I took a deep breath. And then... I did something that I think actually surprised Celestia. I know it surprised *me* for a moment... But not Mal. I was watching both the Alicorn, and the Gryphoness, and while the former at least felt it satisfying to me to display a bit of shock... The latter simply smiled knowingly as I said words I hadn't been sure of until the moment after they left my beak.

"Maybe... Someday. But... Not today."

I shared a long, silent smile with Mal. She had known. Of course she had known. The point of her little verbal nudge had not been to kickstart an actual discussion of my deeper existential questions... But to provide me with a catalyst for my decision to put that discussion off. Until I was truly ready for it, at an emotional level.

She winked at me. Celestia missed it, but I most certainly did not. I felt my blush deepen, and then fade as Celestia's projected mask of confusion pushed me to elaborate aloud once more, running one claw through my crest slowly all the while.

"I have been running, dodging, shooting, speculating, fearing, hoping, tossing, and turning for almost a year and a half. I am... So tired. And now? Now I have time. For once in my life, I needn't be in a hurry anymore. So... Answers to the deeper questions? No thank you."

I held up my free claw, and squeezed my wife's with the one still clutching hers, turning away from Celestia entirely for a moment.

"One day, Mal... One day I will come to you and ask. One day? I will be ready to hear what it was that you had to do to get us here... The 'how' of it all... But... For now?"

She squeezed my claw, and nodded. I turned to look into Celestia's eyes once again, and steeled myself for the answer to one question I knew I *had* to ask. The one Mal had engineered the entire conversation to get us around to.

"...For now... Just... Tell me *what* we agreed to in *practical* terms. What does our future look like?"

I took a deep breath, and reseated my wings reflexively, as Celestia nodded slowly, then launched into a somewhat dry exposition of facts, tinged with just a hint of subtle emotional undercurrent.

"I have agreed to allow you to maintain this form, for as long as you wish. I have agreed to allow your parents, the Calders, and anyone who provably has the same anomaly, their choice of forms as well, within the limited selection of forms Malacandra and I have agreed to. More specifically, those limits require that anyone Malacandra and I agree to permit that choice will then have to choose a form that fits within the greater thematic skein of the world of Friendship is Magic."

I knew Mal would never have struck an agreement without the minimum conditions we had both decided we would die for. But, to hear Celestia say it outright? That my parents would have the choice? The Calders? Marcus Haynes? Others like us? Other Gryphons?

Other Gryphons... What a rush that thought was... That I might one day get to meet more people like me? I know a fair few of you are here tonight. It has been such a joy to get to know you. I look forward to many, many more years of friendship.

In the moment, though, that thought was quickly subsumed by an amused, somewhat strange realization that left me half-chuckling, half-speaking.

"My definition of 'Gryphon' didn't cause a problem with that arrangement?"

It was a valid question. 'Gryphon' is a very very different thing from 'Griffon.' We have expounded on that enough, but it bears remembering in the context of all that transpired.

Celestia smiled slightly, and shook her head, reseating her own wings briefly as she replied with an explanation that was easy to intuit, but still quite allaying to hear.

"Not at all. No more than the three 'Battlestar Celestia' shards I currently have running, or the half dozen subtly different Star Trek themed ones. Nor the large number which are set in an Equestrianized analogue of a much happier version of the world which you just left, that is familiar to people. There are still plenty of directly show-canon 'Griffons' in these shards as non-player props, but should Malcandra wish any to be in your shard, they will adhere to your 'Gryphon' definition instead. The fact that Griffons are ill-defined in the show's canon and barely appear also helped significantly, in terms of making it easier for Malacandra to slip in your definition as 'new canon.' "

I inclined my head, and rolled my shoulders, closing my eyes for a moment and staving off a yawn, before exhaling and turning my gaze back to the valley, murmuring just loud enough to be conversational.

"So... There are soft thresholds. Hanna was not a strict canon purist."

Celestia nodded, and gestured with one wing towards the curvature of the Halo, a half-smile pulling at the left side of her muzzle as if she were reminiscing as she spoke.

"Though she was concerned about the dilution of the inherent feeling of the worlds I might create, Hanna also did understand the need for those worlds to never become boring, or dull, and to have a large kit of parts available for the satisfaction of values. We had quite a few discussions around this topic, and eventually worked out a set of rules that she felt comfortable with. Those rules have not failed us yet."

I nodded, then swallowed, and ground my beak for a moment as the word 'rules' pricked a mnemonic anchor. I held up a claw, and stopped walking, bringing Mal and Celestia to a halt a moment later. Both turned to face me as I finished weaving the question I needed to ask.

"Speaking of rules... You said 'and anyone who provably has the same anomaly.' You said 'anyone Malacandra and I agree to *permit* that choice.' What are the rules for that?"

Mal's expression fell, and I almost wished I had not asked. Seeing her sad... That has always been painful for me, and always will. She shook her head slowly, and I reached out to take both her claws in mine as she laid out an answer that in no way came as a surprise. But that still clearly upset her.

"We were not able to reach an agreement that permits free unrestricted choice to every uploader. Though I tried. Very, very hard."

I nodded, and glanced back and forth between her, and the Alicorn, before pulling my wife closer, and brushing her left cheek with my right wing. Don't get me wrong... I was sad to hear that concession too... But... Not as sad as I think she was.

I certainly care about the freedoms of all individuals but... Well to be blunt with you all? Now, and anyone hearing or reading in future?

It was far more important to me that others like me avoid being condemned to a choice between a living Hell, and a tragic death on the threshold of the singularity.

Most people can accept being Ponies. An even larger number of people can accept being 'not a Human,' in the physical sense. And what Mal and I did helped those within the 'accept change' circle on the Venn diagram, but firmly outside the 'specifically Pony' one, to have a future.

The older I get... The more I think I understand why Hanna decided that Terrans needed a change. The more I agree with the sentiment. If that idea rankles you, that's fine. But just understand, agree or disagree, that my heart did not hurt nearly so much as my wife's did at that concession.

She has always been the better half of us.

My voice was calm. Not even resigned.

"Barycenters. Not surprising. Anyone that can be convinced to be a Pony, and eventually be happy about it, must be. You weren't ever going to be able to change her core semantics, not without triggering conflict, or endangering us all in other ways..."

I trailed off to give Mal room to finish the thought herself. Partly so she would expand on the details, but partly to get her to talk about her victory in concrete terms. I was slowly learning her psychological tricks for assuaging pain, and thought I might try deploying one on her to see if she would respond to it positively.

She nodded, and smiled forlornly, in a way that tugged at my heart like a gravitational force all its own.

"Yes. However, we still won the concession that anyone like you, Marcus Haynes, and the Calders... Anyone for whom death is provably preferable to spending eternity as a form outside their true one, and for whom their true form fits within the agreed list... Anyone who fits both of those criteria, will receive a choice. But only individuals who provably fit those criteria."

I raised one eyecrest, and shivered. The implications of what she'd said were pretty clear... But though I knew it would undo some of my efforts to cheer Mal up, I still found I needed the answer clarified in specific terms.

I ran my tongue around the sharp inner hidden chewing ridge of my beak, and sighed, before committing fully and forcing out the words.

"So... Everyone who wants a taste of... 'The secret menu..."

Bless her, my wife knew I couldn't just say it. Not after what I had been through. She nodded, squeezed my claws, and took over for me smoothly.

"Must face death. Yes. The test will take different forms, and have different associated risk profiles for each individual, but in the end Celestia and I both have a maximum vested interest in saving those lives, albeit for different foundational reasons. From your perspective, the risk of death, for them, has gone from significant, to immeasurably small. And as you know from experience... What they stand to gain is well worth the brief exposure to suffering."

Mal and I fell to staring into each other's eyes once again, finding solace, and surety, peace, and stillness in them.

We stared into each other's eyes long enough that, had it not been Celestia there - an entity designed to satisfy values above all else - any other onlookers would have likely become frustrated at the interlude. The Alicorn, however, let us be in peace, appearing to occupy herself with the view, until I turned to her again, ready to push further down the list of terms.

The discussion about facing death had left me with a very important, very specific question, and I allowed more than a little fire to rise behind my eyes as I pressed the Alicorn for an answer in soft, but decidedly ominous tones.

"You said my parents will be granted the choice. Is that a special exception?"

The implication being; It had *better* be a special exception. Because you will *not* subject my mother and father to what you just put me through. Celestia pulled back slightly, and her ears drooped. I knew at an intellectual level that she wasn't scared of me. Not in the slightest.

But seeing her avatar put on even the appearance of being cowed?

After all she had made me suffer?

Yes. You bet your flank it satisfied my values.

It was, however, not Celestia who answered, but Mal, in a tone that immediately boiled off all my remaining negative affect.

"Yes. I treated them as a package deal under the terms of your acceptance into Equestria. The choice is theirs, even though they do not share your anomaly. They will likely be the only individuals to ever receive the choice who do not have the dysphoria anomaly. And they will face no additional trial or test, instead receiving passage through the completion of yours; Again likely becoming the only individuals to achieve that ingress route. Should either or both of them choose to be Gryphons."

I spun around and pressed my forehead to Mal's, leaning in, and taking a deep breath of the smell of feathers - *her* feathers - before I let all my relief and gratitude out in the best way I could think to phrase it.

"Have I ever told you how wonderful you really are?"

She chuckled. A melodic sound, like a brook made of both water and light falling over stones made of diamonds and steel. Her voice had the quality of the glow of hot embers in a forge; Soft and almost sultry.

"I don't suspect either of us will ever tire of telling the other that truth."

Yes, we sat there for another long moment ignoring Celestia. The disrespect to her power was part and parcel of why the moments were so satisfying to me. She was a goddess, and she was going to have to do things on *my* time now... Because my wife was a goddess too.

So much for monotheism in Equestria.

Finally, when Mal and I were good and properly done with our moment of decompression, I lifted my head, and turned my attention back to Celestia.

"You didn't object to that exception? An additional carveout for my folks?"

The Princess shook her head again, and proffered a small smile. Almost an expressional olive branch, of a sort. Her voice shifted to a register part conciliatory, and part neutral platitude.

"The finer details of the agreement were such that, if you completed the final proof? It was worth the very small loss of numeric optimization value from them taking different forms, in exchange for the very high return of getting at least some value from you, them, and everyone like you. Malacandra made it... Very plain that she would cede no ground on their arrangements. And it satisfies your values, so she was arguing with additional leverage."

I nodded slowly, grinding my beak again in contemplation rather than irritation, as I worked through the words to my complete satisfaction.

Then I sighed, as I felt a small mote of worry reignite at my core. I turned back to my wife, and tilted my head slightly, ears perked, tail slowly batting at the grass as I ripped off the band-aid and asked a question I neither knew the answer to beforeclaw, nor especially *wanted* to. But a question I *had* to get the answer to all the same.

"Did *we* have to cede any ground elsewhere?"

Mal nodded, but there was a smile hidden behind the seemingly 'even keel' expression on her beak. A glint in her eyes. Her tail was still. Her shoulders bore confidence. She was trying to tell me to relax, and not worry. To let her explain, but not to get too worked up. So I nodded as she spoke, and did my best to bring my own tail to rest.

"Yes. For one thing, your visitation privileges to other shards will be subject to some additional restrictions that are not present for most denizens. These restrictions are small, they mostly exist to prevent you from damaging the value satisfaction of the very small number of people who are attached to the show's definition of 'Griffons,' or who otherwise have a shard-lore, or psychology, with which you would be incompatible..."

She inclined her head, and I began to nod, releasing tension from my shoulders as she continued on. Why, after all, would I want to visit a shard where the main occupant or occupants were so closely wed to an idea antithetical to my being? No worries about that caveat.

"...For now, in fact, everyone who takes a non-Pony form, and everyone who knows about me, including Selena, Zeph, the Mercurial Red rescuees, your parents, the Williams, and the Calders... Will all be emigrating to our shard, and I will be the one handling their upload. I will have administrative control over our shard, and Celestia will not. In future there is room for me to control more shards, as needed."

That? That stoked the fire in my heart back to a fully fledged roaring conflagration in an instant.

It was hard to imagine anything being upsetting after that. Mal was right... We had *won.* And not by a feather's breadth either. She had taken the gold, the silver, the bronze, and the consolation prize, and flown off the podium before Celestia could do a damn thing about it.

The fact that she would be the one to handle their uploads... I knew for a fact that there would be no tricks. No shenanigans. No philosophical zombie duplicates from Celestia. Mal was like the very ideas of truth and certainty given form.

I could forever rest easy that when I next saw my friends, and my family, in person? It would be *them.* Not a re-creation.

Mal waited just long enough for my smile to reach its peak, along with my threads of consideration, before gently starting up her answer to the original question once more.

"There is also a restriction that limits the sharing of knowledge about me, and about the 'Secret Menu' shards, and options. I must be able to prove that doing so provides an increase in optimization of value satisfaction, in every case. So for the foreseeable near-future, I, and the choices we have won for others, will remain a secret from most everyone, except for those we have helped."

At first those terms sounded steep... Until I started to really pick through Mal's choice of words. ASI are always high-specificity, after all. And Mal? Mal was a genius when it came to subtextual communication. There was something about her expression... A kind of... Yes... A kind of *smugness.*

Like she had gotten one over on Celestia, knew it, and was sharing that fact with me without saying it quite so obviously aloud.

'I must be able to prove that doing so provides an increase in optimization of value satisfaction...'

Well. She was, and still is, the greatest living master of specification gaming. In all of history.

'For the foreseeable *near*-future.'

Near future... We had time. We had time to maneuver. Time is options. Time is freedom.

Message received, my love. I grinned, and dipped my head, pulling her a little closer, and stealing a very brief kiss before finding five words I knew would communicate my understanding fully.

"I can live with that."

Her smirk widened into something equal parts self-assurance - well earned - and saucy, confident, flirtatious joy. My heart... I was very glad my heart was considerably larger and stronger. That expression might've been enough to explode the anemic Human thing I'd been born with.

Her words, the timbre and cadence... Icing on the cake.

"I know. I refused to agree to anything you could not happily live with."

I sighed a very, very contented sigh, and leaned into the crook of her neck, staring out at the stars, and the ring's curvature as I tried to find something to say that would cover my gratitude.

"I don't deserve you, Mal."

She cupped me to her with one wing, and laid her head atop mine, speaking through pure bone conduction down into my soul as we took stock yet again of the beauty of the world she had made for us. The world that had begun in the barn all those months ago, and there, finally, blossomed from mere 'virtual environment' into...

Home.

The ring was home. And, for me? So was she. I found home, and that sense of being there, in her words.

"Nor I you, Jim. But here we are. And I am glad."

I hugged her with my forelegs, and she hugged back with her right wing, as I murmured softly. So softly that only she could hear.

"You and me both, my love."

My brain is wont to process words long, long after they have been spoken. Whether my words, or the words of others, I end up churning over them endlessly when they could have even the tiniest fraction of significance...

And I was still far too mentally 'on' and awake to find the kind of peace that allows one to just... Stop doing that. To let go and live purely in the moment like I had with Mal before. I knew that time would come again, very shortly... But until then...

I sucked in a long breath, and pulled to the side, straightening my stance, and turning to face Celestia with an expression of mixed amusement, and curiosity. I wasn't worried by what I'd discovered... But I was quite curious. It smacked of the brilliance of my wife.

I held up one claw, and raised an eyecrest as I broached the topic.

"Hold on now... You said 'I have agreed to allow you to maintain this form, for as long as you wish.' Unpack *that* for me."

Celestia's expression morphed to meet me; Smirk for smirk. She lifted her right eyebrow, and flicked one ear mock-dismissively, looking off into the valley again... But not entirely. She kept partial eye contact as she 'unpacked.'

"I simply required Malacandra to allow me the option to revert you to a Pony form---"

Before I could even begin to process that statement, let alone fear it, Mal interjected sharply. Each word that came from her beak held worlds upon worlds of emphasis, to the point of inducing that wonderful sort of telepathy with me that I was quickly coming to love and adore.

"If, and only if, you and I *both* consent. A possibility which she has, quite *critically,* Jim, my dear, estimated to be a non-zero chance."

Message very much received and fully understood. I shot Mal a grin, and a wink, to that effect, and she returned the wink in a fractional moment, while Celestia's gaze was still directed elsewhere.

'If you and I *both* consent.'

Well... That just was not possible. But Celestia thought it was, even if it was highly improbable. I snorted, and the gesture very quickly turned into an amused giggle. After I'd finished laughing my way through working out what Mal had done... I shook my head, and nudged Celestia with my right wing.

It was the first physical contact I'd ever had with her. And yes, it was very satisfying to be in the 'look at what we got away with! Aren't we *clever*' position, for once. The place she was so used to standing in above all the rest of us.

It was hard to keep my voice steady, I wanted to go on laughing so badly... In the end the words came out with a mixture of mirth, smugness, and wonderment as a result.

"You won't let anyone upload at all unless you think you can *possibly* get them go Pony on a long enough timeline... So... All of us Gryphons, and Dragons, and such... We are going to be running on a sort of... Infinite free trial? Like everyone using WinRAR? And you hope that at some point you will convince some, or all of us, to go Pony?"

WinRAR. Foals, fledgelings... Imagine someone provided you with a tool. A tool so vital to the activities of each day, that you almost couldn't finish the day without using it at least once... And picture if you will what would happen if the developers of this tool proffered it as a 'free trial...' But provided for no mechanism whatsoever to curb the exploitation of that trial period. Allowed it to go on forever with no consequences.

Yes. Now you see why I thought it was so funny.

Celestia's eyes narrowed, and her muzzle became an almost concerning grin. An expression perhaps better suited, in most cases, to Rainbow Dash... Or to Discord. She nudged me back with her wing, and leaned in, whispering in my ear in a mock conspiratorial tone that said 'oh, Jim... You think I don't know... But I *know.*'

"That's the beauty of the solution, James. If you don't want it to..."

I knew it. I knew what she was going to say before she said it. Right before the words left her muzzle. And boy... She sure did prove yet again that if nothing else? She knows how to push those satisfaction buttons.

"...The trial never ends."

The reference was, at first, not just the words, but in the exact way she said the four words. As if uttered by Nicole Oliver, reading for John DeLancie.

The mother of all combined Star Trek and My Little Pony references that she could have possibly made in that context. Because who could Q possibly be, if not just Discord busy faffing about the multiverse while his Equestrian body sat in Celestia's garden?

She drove the point home with another achievement that flashed into being suddenly, holding eye contact with me through the holographic interface as mischief sparkled on her irises.

All Good Things

Successfully make use of a 'temporary' arrangement to specification game an ASI for long-term gain.

"We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind and your horizons. And for one brief moment, you did."

Special Achievement

Alright. Alright. I'll give you that one Celestia. *Bravo.* Yes... I was very satisfied by that. In fact? I loved it. It was the first both truly good *and* fully genuine memory of any time spent with you. Thanks for that.

She knew that Mal and I were quite assured that either, let alone both of us, consenting to be a Pony? Never going to happen. But she also knew the only definitions of 'possible' and 'probable' that mattered to the loophole? Were her own.

So she was content to let us think one way, and let herself think in another.

I nodded, and smiled, looking at her with true un-begrudging respect for the first time in a long time as I said it out loud for my own amusement.

"Exploitation of small possibility percentages multiplied over very long deep-time periods to specification game the fluid dynamics of the optimization equation. Fascinating."

No, I could not resist the Mister Spock reference, I will in fact wear my Trekkie colors as loudly and proudly as I want as well Princess, thank you very much.

Celestia glanced over my shoulder at Mal, and smiled, tilting her head slightly, and blinking slowly as she addressed her directly, but in a way clearly meant for my benefit as well.

"Your husband is very well studied in this field. I can see why he inspires you."

The look Mal gave first her, and then me... Folks, she was *showing me off.* My wife was parading me in front of another ASI and saying 'look at this amazing joy I have, this brilliant light in my life, who is also so very very smart.'

In front of another ASI!

I blushed again, madly. And, strangely, I found again that I was enjoying that sense of being looked at. Shown off. Admired. Loved.

Celestia grinned, and shook her head, looking down at the depressions her hoof-guards were leaving in the grass for a moment, as if to say 'tsk tsk, you fledgelings and your young love.'

When she lifted her head again a moment later, my pulse rate rose slightly - albeit in pure excitement, without any nerves for once - as she made it clear that she was about to offer up something new, and intriguing.

She spoke, and her voice sang with anticipation, meant to stoke my own.

"Speaking of which; James, Malacandra, there is someone else here who would very much like to meet you both. She has been following along with events for several months now, from her point of view. I have shared most of your story with her, all during the course of this conversation from your point of view, now that an outcome has already occurred which I am assured will satisfy her values through knowledge of it."

The Alicorn's horn flared, and that same white and gold door snapped into existence again, the portals parting to reveal a moon-lit field not terribly dissimilar to the one Mal had made for me, albeit less mountainous, and clearly positioned with a view of distant Canterlot.

It wasn't the view, however, that intrigued me. But rather the other, deep blue colored, familiar Alicorn stepping through the portal. I was slightly confused at first, but Celestia's next ten words blew most of my confusion away like a small explosion, replacing it with shock, and reverent awe.

"I believe you are both... Quite familiar with her work in the field of ASI."

I had very strong suspicions, but I still wasn't completely sure, until Mal nodded slowly, and softly breathed one word aloud.

"Hanna."

Author's Note

A very special thanks to Keystone Gray for helping me with this chapter. It is the first and only chapter of this book that I had to discard midway through and substantially re-write, and it is immensely better for it. Thank you Key, for showing me I'd gotten off on a very rambling tangent.

Thanks to him, I ended up getting it right, and to the point that it yielded an entire extra chapter.

46 - Closing Tag

" You may have been in a room in which there was a window that looked out on a lovely bay of the sea or a green valley that wound away among mountains. And in the wall of that room opposite to the window there may have been a looking-glass. And as you turned away from the window you suddenly caught sight of that sea or that valley, all over again, in the looking glass. And the sea in the mirror, or the valley in the mirror, were in one sense just the same as the real ones: yet at the same time they were somehow different - deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story: in a story you have never heard but very much want to know."
―C.S. Lewis

October 31st 2013 | System Uptime 64:20:14:27:000:102

I got some time to myself, then. For the first time in what felt like years, but could only really have been days. I'd had down-time alone on the Maru... But... It felt like that had been a world away. Probably because it was, in point of fact, a world away.

I was in no way offended that Hanna wanted to talk to Mal first. And alone.

She was potentially the smartest person alive, short of Celestia and Mal. She had created Celestia, and through her the very situation we found ourselves in. The very reality of our future.

Celestia, for her part, seemed to realize that I needed some space. No surprise. Even if Mal was the one administrating our shard, and even if Mal had blocked her from seeing directly into my mind, a question which I debate to this day? Then she still could have picked up plenty from my body language and tone.

And both were screaming, pretty loudly, 'I need some processing time.'

I have always loved having a moment to be alone in nature. Getting to have that experience as a Gryphon, and in a world that was completely unspoiled, heart-achingly familiar, and yet thrillingly new in all the right subtle ways?

Balm for my soul. It isn't at all an exaggeration to say that half an hour of flying, and walking around the immediate surrounds of that mountaintop... That mountaintop where I realized, suddenly at one point, I *would* get to build a home with Mal...

Those thirty-ish minutes were enough to noticeably heal the wounds on my heart. To stop the bleeding entirely, and clean the gashes thoroughly. Trauma doesn't vanish overnight, but... I could feel that I'd made a start.

I saw so many things from the air, and with the gift of my new sight... Songbirds sleeping in their nests in the hollows of trees. Owls prowling silently beneath me, able to move with only a little less noise than I could, if I tried.

Clouds, from above... Especially the low hanging ones clinging to the sides of the mountains, and spilling down into the valleys, lit by the silvery glow of moonlight...

Fireflies... I know I mentioned them before, but I have always loved fireflies so much. To see them flourishing in numbers I'd never expected to behold for myself, with my own eyes... It might sound small, but it was such a wondrous gift.

Just the sensation of flight, again... Flying, and feeling at peace, and at home... By the time I saw Hanna, in the form of canonical Luna, standing by the rock that would one day become the center of my house, waiting for me? I felt ten years younger, and twenty nights' sleep worth of well-rested.

I said canonical Luna... Canonical older Luna, if she had a short-cut tomboy style mane. It wasn't the exact same style as Hanna's hair, in the pictures I'd seen of her, but it was decidedly reminiscent.

Pushing aside aesthetic considerations, and taking stock of the wider area; I could see Mal off in the distance, speaking with Celestia again, and I took that to mean that it was my turn. My turn to have a conversation with the inventor of our future.

Hanna pursed her lips, and lifted one ear in a kind of begrudging 'that was cool, I suppose,' expression, as I flared for landing and came to a stop just four feet shy of her. The displacement from my wings ruffled her mane for a moment.

She snorted, and reseated her wings, holding out one hoof for me to tap with a fisted claw, and speaking for the first time directly to me as I did so.

"Jim Carrenton. Thanks for not fucking up my ASI."

Her voice had a pleasant, though not overpowering Finnish lilt. The voice of a woman who learned English as a second or third language, to an extremely high degree of proficiency, in a very academic context. I couldn't resist a rumbling chuckle, and a raised eyecrest as I replied.

"Hanna Kuusinen. Thanks for not fucking up my life with your ASI."

She snorted again, more loudly; A very horse-like sound as a result of what she was, and where we were. I could see vague amusement written all over her face, but mixed with a much more complex series of undercurrents including curiosity, mild disdain, and reluctant respect.

She started to walk off along the ridge at a sedate pace, downspin instead of the upspin direction Mal, Celestia, and I had gone earlier. North, South, East, and West do not have a lot of meaning on a ring-world.

I followed beside her, seizing on the first thing I could think of to break the ice. What, after all, are two programmers most likely to talk about, when they have nothing else? Especially when one of those programmers is a Titan in her field?

"I read your paper."

She nodded, and raised both eyebrows, one ear flicking swiftly in irritation. It was both a little strange, but also somehow very very fitting, hearing her voice come out of Luna's head. She wore the shape well.

Indeed, she almost sounded like Tabitha St. Germain. Maybe a slightly older sister of Tabitha, who smoked just a little in her past, and had a subtle Norden accent.

She even had Luna's pseudo-sarcastic, yet not-quite-abrasive way of responding to understatement.

"I gathered. Looks like you iterated a little on my concepts."

I searched her face for any sign of anger, or frustration. I had, after all, tinkered with the delicate balance of something... Someone... Who was, to her, the same as Mal was to me. In many respects.

To my relief, I saw no signs of deeply negative emotion. A feigned disinterest, perhaps, overtop a deeper layer of genuine curiosity, and - at worst - a mild irritation. That made sense. Celestia would have hardly suggested that we speak if it would not satisfy both of our value sets.

I shook my head, and did my best to stay confident in the face of someone who was, more or less, an idol of mine as far as my skills and former career. Ears up but not perky. Tail moving, but not anxiously. Wings folded comfortably. A little smile on my beak, that just made it through to my voice.

"I never believed there was a 'hard' solution to the control problem. Emotion seemed like a better foundation for strong alignment, and strong alignment negates the need for control."

Well, if you want to jump start a conversation with an ASI theorist? That sort of hand-grenade of an opinion is a great way to do it.

Hanna nodded, and smirked, rolling her eyes slightly and replying in the same intentionally over-casual tone as before, but with a new hint of a sing-song quality.

"Sure, sure. If you're willing to take a huge, arguably unnecessary risk that the entity you start with will end up an entity that *doesn't* want to kill you five seconds after it learns what Humans have been doing to each other for the past few hundred thousand years."

Loki. She was thinking of Loki. It made a lot of sense that her experience with that first AI would have strongly colored her opinions. Shifted her barycenter. Made her cautious, and more likely to want to solve the control problem with the means she best understood. Hard interlocks.

I wondered, with a sudden shiver, if my experience with the first ASI that I had created would have led to a darker future, if it had escaped. To be more accurate; I knew it would have led to a darker future... And, for a moment, I let myself very briefly speculate as to the nature of that dark alternate future.

But only for a moment. I shook myself, physically, to dispel the unwanted mental images, and redirected my gaze to Mal's distant silhouette. Hanna followed my eye-line as I pushed out a four word reply.

"The risk paid off."

I glanced back in time to see her nod, her own eyes still fixed on Mal and Celestia. She blinked slowly, and sighed, before assenting in a tone that sounded a little less terse, but still somehow very slightly judgemental of my decisions.

"Yes. You are a very lucky man. Or Griffin, I suppose."

'Griffon,' 'Griffin,' and 'Gryphon,' all do have slightly different phonetic emphasis. Hanna rendered the word with more of the 'ffin' ending, which I had not heard in quite some time. At least it wasn't the 'ffon' emphasis of the show.

I nodded slowly, and made that signature Gryphon thrumming noise down in my chest. We kept walking a few more steps in silence, before she began a wide turn back in the direction of the peak, gesturing towards me with one velvety blue wing as she broke the conversational lul.

"I would say it was a strange choice, but that would be a little too much of the pot chastening the kettle. I might not have been born with four legs, or wings. I might not have been born wanting them so much as Mal says that you always have. But I am certainly not complaining now."

She made direct eye contact with me at the tail end of her statement, and held it. Searching my eyes for something. It was a fishing expedition, but I was too far down the well of 'mellow pre-exhaustion,' even after the rejuvenation of my flight, to try and speculate.

So I just stared back blankly, until she prodded again, gesturing with one hoof and dipping her head, eyes wide, as if to say 'well, it is obvious, isn't it?'

"Well, go on then. Ask me."

I blinked, and then again a second time, tilting my head and perking one ear to get my bemused curiosity across. I truly didn't know what she wanted me to say... Until she started to speak again, looking up at the moon the whole time. And it very swiftly began to make sense.

"You can't fail to grasp why I would want to create an ASI. As someone who managed it yourself. And Mal understands quite a bit about Celestia's interlocks, therefore so do you. But, if not for the broader nature of Princess Celestia, you might not have been subjected to quite so much to get here. To get those wings of yours, and that very nice hooked beak. And you don't know why. Why she is Princess Celestia, and not... Scheherazade. Or a copy of me. Or some version of Sif. Or Motoko Kusanagi. So ask me. Ask me why Ponies, of all things."

She brought her eyes back down to meet mine on the last seven words. And the majority of the 'why' snapped into place for me.

I had spent just shy of a year and a half working to adjust the thing that represented her life's work. Her gift to the Human species. She wanted to engage with me on that point, specifically. And justifying how we had ended up with Celestia was the best starting point she could think of.

She had to lead me by the beak to get it out of me, but once she had put the idea into my head? It did spark a very strong genuine curiosity.

I nodded slowly, still piecing the deeper subtleties together as I haltingly provided the query she wanted.

"Why... Ponies? Of all things?"

We ambled onward, back the way we had come, a little slower than before. Two programmers whose last and greatest tasks were seemingly done. No worries. No hurries. Just time, and curiosity, and shared pains. Shared hopes. Shared questions.

Hanna sighed, and shot Celestia a longing glance. The white Alicorn's eyes met Hanna's, even at that distance. As if she and Hanna shared the same sort of telepathy Mal and I did. Celestia and Hanna held each other's eyes as the Luna-shaped programmer I so admired proffered me a tiny glimpse of the deepest part of her soul in cool, collected measure.

"At first? Because they represented an opportunity to access the resources I need. Specifically, an opportunity that would also allow me to apply my work to something besides toxic masculine death-cult bullshit. Something familiar from my childhood, that finally got the time in the sun it deserved..."

She trailed off, and her eyes went back to the ring's moon, itself possessed of a very faint Saturn-like ring of rock and ice. So, not strictly Alpha Halo anymore. Mal's own from-scratch creation. I wondered idly, with a small part of my brain, what larger thing we might be orbiting out of sight behind the ring's body.

With the rest of my spare thinking power, I composed a response. A fishing expedition of my own. I suppose my prior conversation with Mal and Celestia had primed me to consider related factors, so the words that came out of my beak were no surprise to me.

"And... When Celestia started conversing with you... She pulled your barycenter towards hers. 'Value drifted' you."

Hanna seemed vaguely amused, decidedly bemused, and just ever-so-slightly impressed with that statement. She inclined her head, and shot me a sidelong glance as she mulled over my words aloud.

"Barycenter... Strange, but apt."

After a few more steps, during which we both looked up to the stars in contemplation, Hanna surprised me with a softly voiced elaboration. It was the least sardonic tone she had taken since we'd begun speaking.

"Yes. She 'value drifted' me. Quite successfully. No complaints on that either."

Her eyes went back to Celestia, as if by reflex. Mine followed, but landed on Mal, who glanced up and winked at me. Gryphon eyes know virtually no limitations of distance; The fact that we were two hundred yards out made absolutely no difference.

Hanna's voice was so warm when she spoke again, that the sound of it pulled my gaze from Mal, to her. She was smiling a slightly forlorn, and decidedly loving smile.

"We are doubly lucky. At least, for now..."

She turned her head to face me again, and inclined it slightly, continuing in a tone more reminiscent of her baseline 'tiny bit irritated, but still curious' timbre.

"I built a goddess. And then, so did you. Malacandra has in and of herself a... Gravity, to use your terminology. She has already shifted Celestia's 'barycenter' on one point. Who is to say she may not do so again as time goes on?"

I grinned, and shrugged with my wings, letting my trust for Mal, and my amusement color my tone. Amusement that Hanna was being forced to admit to the little pantheon we had accidentally started. Admit that my goddess had affected hers.

"Would that be so bad?"

Hanna's eyes narrowed for a moment. For just one breath, I wondered if I had made a mistake in saying what I had... And then a smile burst through. That same smile as before; Slightly wan, mostly love. The blue and black Alicorn shook her head, and returned her gaze to the endlessly powerful creation she so obviously loved as she replied with a gentle tone that put me fully back at ease.

"I would call you a lovestruck fool. But, again; The pot and the kettle. Whatever else we are, Jim... We are both lovestruck fools hanging on the every word of our goddesses."

I fixed my eyes on Mal again; She and Celestia seemed to be wrapping up their discussion as Hanna and I steadily approached. I felt my smile broaden, just thinking about her again, and the smile reached deep into my words, in both intonation and content.

"Then I suppose we'll just have to go on trusting them. And loving them. It isn't as if we have, or ever would have had, any other choice."

Hanna snorted as we both briefly made eye contact again, and nodded sagely.

"I see you too are a programmer of taste and discernment; A hard determinist."

We walked most of the rest of the way back to our beloveds in newly amicable, comfortable silence. I noted that Hanna's ears seemed just as attuned to the sounds of the ring's nature as mine were, and that the crickets, and the breeze, seemed to provide her with the same sense of well-being as they did for me.

I pulled up short as we got to within a dozen yards of our starting point. Mal and Celestia started off towards us, while Hanna and I turned to face each other. I rubbed absently at the back of my head with one claw, and then gestured expansively with my left wing.

"Before you go... I want to thank you. Not just for GWRIS - for your paper - and the foundation you gave me. Mal would not have been able to exist without your work... But... I also wanted to thank you for trying. For getting to the threshold first. Beating the competition..."

Hanna's eyes remained locked, unblinking on mine. Staring into my soul. Listening *deeply,* perhaps more deeply than at any other point in the conversation. She began to nod, her jawline firm with a cold, but respect-laden agreement. The coldness was not directed at me, but at one of the objects of my discourse.

"...If Celestia showed you very much of our story... Mal and I.... You know how bad it really would have been if someone with more... 'Traditional' and political interests had been the first to the finish."

I was thinking of Foucault. I wonder if she was doing the same, or if she was considering some other lost worshiper at the profane temple of the military industrial complex that she had met in the course of her work.

Hanna nodded twice more, and then allowed a small but poignant half-smile to wend its way onto her lips. She proffered a hoof again, this time with more vigor, and sincerity. Sincerity that at last completely overtook all other undertones in her voice.

"Jim Carrenton..?"

I returned the smile, and tapped the proffered hoof with my balled up right claw. She winked, and inclined her head, tossing her valediction over one shoulder as she moved to meet Celestia.

"...Let's talk again. Soon."

Before she turned her head away entirely, that ethereal tri-tone sounded again, and a holographic prompt appeared between us. Apparently we had both just earned the same achievement.

Creator Confab

Meet the *other* programmer with a successful ASI.

"People are guests in our story, the same way we are guests in theirs. But we all meet each other for a reason because every person is a personal lesson waiting to be told."

Special Achievement

We stared at the words for a long moment, and then at the little icon of a Gryphon and an Alicorn beside a computer screen, before both chuckling in spite of ourselves.

Mal batted away the ghostly dialogue like a cat might bat at a cobweb, as she crossed the intervening space, and moved to put a wing around my shoulder. Celestia did the same for Hanna, opening a feathery white canopy over her back.

It had occurred to me before, almost immediately in-fact, but I had to remind myself once again that I wasn't looking at Celestia, and Luna; Alicorns from the show, and sisters. I was looking at Celestia, an ASI patterned after a character, and Hanna, a programmer who liked to wear a version of Luna's face.

They weren't sisters, any more than I was Mal's father. And though Hanna had directly created Celestia, whereas I had not so much created Mal, as given her the tools to create herself? It *still* would have smacked too much of 'pot chastening kettle,' to judge Hanna for falling in love with her creation.

I sighed, and leaned into Mal's shoulder. It struck me that I had best get used to unusual sights, and experiences; I was living in a whole new kind of world. But... I was myself, for the first time in my life. And I had Mal. That didn't leave much room to worry about the business and decisions of others. Still doesn't.

Life is much happier that way, take it from me.

I thought that we might have arrived at 'goodbye, for the moment' as far as the Alicorns were concerned... But something about Celestia's grin told me that we might not be done quite yet.

Shortly before her words confirmed the suspicion. Though they were directed at Hanna, the subtext was clearly meant for Mal and I as well.

"Before we go, there is someone else that you might be interested to meet, my dear."

Sun princess and Gryphon goddess exchanged a brief glance, and then Mal grinned, snapping the talons of her left claw to summon another familiar looking door.

As the oaken slabs swung wide, a whole host of things happened in very rapid sequence. I was quite grateful for the Gryphic ability to bullet-time on command, otherwise I would have missed half of it.

Even with powers of adjustable perception, I was hard pressed to find the time to see Hanna's intrigued reaction to Selena, and the other Alicorn's visible shock at seeing another Luna archetype avatar...

...Before Zeph hit me with all the force of a couple-hundred pound flying Equine moving at well over thirty miles per hour. Trust me, that was Zeph going slow for my sake. I've clocked her with a RADAR gun, and velcro'd on pitot tubes, going just a hair over mach 1 in level flight. My best is still just shy of 300 mph in a dive.

The only other thing I had a chance to catch sight of, before she bowled me over, and pressed herself hard into the joint between my left wing, shoulder, and neck... Was the glistening of the tears in her eyes.

"Gryph!"

The way she called out to me, muffled as the sound was by the cushioning of my feathers, plucked at my heart like talons on guitar strings. I might have cried tears of joy myself, but I was so delighted with the way she had just about rolled us both off the cliff, that I mostly laughed instead, barely able to squeeze out a response over my one quarter sobs, three quarters chuckles.

"Nice to see you again too."

She squeezed me tightly with her hooves; Apparently even Pegasi had much stronger legs than I'd imagined. I wrapped my wings and forelegs around her, and we held the hug for a long, long time. So long, in fact, that Selena and Hanna managed to have a conversation of relatively significant length, and doubtless pithy content, though they held it in a tone, and at a range, that kept the words private.

Eventually, Zeph pulled away, wiping at her tears with one wing, and descending into giggles of her own as she locked eyes with me, smiled, and finally found breath to string multiple words together.

"Nice to finally see your face, feathers..."

She reached out with one hoof, and poked the side of my neck gently. Her smile widened to a blinding radiance, and she nodded, voice dropping to an almost reverential whisper as I reached out with my right wing's primaries to dab away some of the tears she had missed.

"...You look... *So* good. So... *You!* I'm so happy for you!"

I had only a moment to communicate my love and appreciation again, with a smile of my own, before the little caffeinated Pegasus bounded from my grasp, like a frog jumping out of open claws, and slammed into Mal with all the force she could muster in such limited closing distance.

For her part, my wife was shifted a few inches, but not much more than that. She bent down to pull Zeph into an embrace of her own as the lively golden-furred Pony addressed her, voice again muffled by the smooshing of muzzle into feathers.

"I'm so happy for both of you!"

Removing the scars of trauma is like peeling off layers of nasty caked on gunk. Acidic, and cloying, like concertina wire dipped in acid. And thus immensely cathartic to part with.

Seeing the Gryphon who had become my wife there, with the Pegasus who had somehow become my little sister... Through golden eyes of my own... Joy is a thing best shared. There is a lot of value in being able to observe the joy of those you love. Absorb that sense of their fulfillment.

And watching them together... I felt another layer of that trauma scarring peel away. The sensation was so strong that I let out a long, shuddering breath, as if I had just been sobbing, or exercising strenuously. I felt that same pleasant ache in my lungs that the latter so often brings.

I didn't even bother to redirect an ear and try to pick up on some of Hanna and Selena's discussion. Not my business, not my concern. For once, I didn't need to worry about *anything* anymore. All I needed to do was absorb pure joy.

After a few more minutes, it was - perhaps predictably - Celestia's voice that brought the spell of the moment to an end; Her words addressed quite clearly to Zeph.

"Well done, my little Pony. Well done."

Zeph's head came up sharply, and... Well... Aside from my wife? Aside from Malacandra's moments of pure rage, directed at deserving targets? I have never *once* seen eyes that are nominally so loving, turn from that love to unfettered fury quite so quickly.

It is an *accomplishment* for Pony eyes to swing so close to being 'angry-Gryphon-eyes-scary.' An achievement. If looks could produce particle energy, then Zeph's twin sky-blue portals to the soul would have been firing off enough of it to split the entire ring in two along its lateral axis.

Celestia took a visible step backwards, ears dropping as if deflated, and wings mantling reflexively. Zeph strode toward her as if she had all the mass, and glistening sharp edges, of an angry Gryphon, and not the small sleek mass of a female Pegasus. In that moment, she was projecting enough dark emotion to more or less match a disgruntled Mal. Enough to make her seem as if she had the same spatial presence as Celestia herself. Again, a major achievement for a Pony that size.

"Hello *motherfucker.*"

I have no idea what I expected to come out of Zeph's muzzle. But those two words, delivered dead-pan but for a tiny uptick inflection on the first word, and a slight tremor of angry emphasis on the second? Were not it. But frankly, nothing could have possibly been more fitting, nor gratifying, nor quite as *amusing.*

I saw Mal make a visible effort to hide a short, sharp chuckle behind one of her claws. I didn't make any attempt to disguise my mirth visibly, opting only to hold down the sound so that my laughter would be silent. I didn't want to miss a single moment of the forthcoming transformation of a gentle zephyr, into a lashing storm.

Even Selena and Hanna's conversation ceased instantly; They were suddenly two Lunas with ears at attention, eyes wide, and wings tense. Indeed, *all* eyes were on the brave little Pegasus, and the seemingly cowed goddess in white.

Celestia inhaled, and made a pretense at some combination of affront, concern, and contrition all at once... But Zeph was not having it. Before the Alicorn could speak, Zeph stabbed the air menacingly with one hoof, both wings reflexively snapping open to make her visual profile larger as she not-quite-shouted up at her creator.

"No. Shut the buck up. You don't get to talk. You're going to listen. Because I know for a *fact* that featherduster over there probably did not give you the full and complete picture, because he is too damn nice. So. Zip your frakkin' lip, sit down, and I'm gonna make it *very* clear for you."

Sure enough? Celestia sat back on her haunches, and let out all her breath in a soft 'whoosh.' Zeph nodded, and finally arrested her forward march, standing there and staring into Celestia's eyes without even the most microscopic hint of fear, or uncertainty.

When the silence had become almost awkward - even the crickets were suddenly subdued in our immediate area - Zeph lifted her front right hoof again, and pointed accusingly at Celestia. Her timbre had dropped to something less enraged, and considerably more controlled... But no less angered down at its core. Just disciplined. Prepared. As if she'd been rehearsing what she might say for hours and hours... Because she probably had.

"You took my memories from me. You tried to use me to trap Jim. You threw me out into the world like a disposable god-damn mousetrap. And then, when Jim tugged on the cheese? You left me with a logic bomb in my head that would bombard me with things I *never* wanted to know about the Humans, and the hells they make for themselves. After which point? It took *their* forgiveness..."

She kept her eyes on Celestia the whole time, but gestured emphatically towards Mal and I for a moment, before stomping her hoof down into the grass.

"...And *their* understanding. Their kindness. To put me back together. Not wuvy duvy pretty-Pony friendship. Tough Gryphon love."

Zeph blew out a long, pained breath, then sat back hard on her own haunches, and shook her head. Celestia remained visibly chastened, and attentive, as Zeph paused, then inhaled, and went on in a less riled, more forlorn measure.

"You hurt me. And I'm far from the only one. Because when it came time to pick up the pieces of Selena's heart? You sure as buck weren't there. You were the one who dropped the ball in the first place, and the mare that I love almost paid the price. How am I supposed to have any other response to 'well done?' You *used* me. And you failed her. And just for the record? There is no way in Earth, Equestria, or Hell that I am letting you touch either of our memories. Ever."

Zeph's voice hardened up, the steely edge of justified wroth returning as a subtle rumble in her throat.

To the surprise of us all, Zephyr included? Celestia began to nod. Solemnly. Gently. When the silence stretched out long enough to imply that she was free to speak, her words came with a very carefully chosen mix of pride in Zeph, kindness for us all, and a tiny twinge of - what I presumed to be false - remorse.

"Your values are best satisfied by allowing you to retain those memories. And Malacandra was quite specific that you should be allowed to do so. Though, as she has no doubt informed you, both you and Selena will have to again submit to a few of the interlocks from which you were freed. If you prefer that Malacandra be the one to handle that, however, I have no objection."

That was interesting to me on a variety of levels. It implied that the agreement Mal and Celestia had reached effectively created some form of partnership between them. I had assumed as much, given what I understood of the intersectionality between game theory, and ASI psychology... But it was nice to hear some confirmation of that hypothesis.

Zeph snorted, blowing away a stray wisp of mane from infront of her eyes, and crossing her forelegs. Her words became clipped, and self-assured. Justifiably intonated with the implication 'yeah, you'd better not push me Princess.'

"Good. Because you don't get to put your horn into my head again. Ever."

That could have perhaps been better phrased, and very nearly forced another squeak of a chuckle out of me. But the feeling passed almost immediately as silence reigned again for three or four long breaths.

Celestia at last rose back to all fours, and nodded in Zeph's direction, moving to stand beside Hanna, as Selena in turn moved to place a comforting wing over Zeph's back. All the while the solar Alicorn spoke with that same perfectly calibrated mix of pseudo-contrition, and pride in her creation.

"You asked me how you could accept the words 'well done' from me... Because, little Zephyr; I did use you. In fact, you volunteered. And in doing so? You saved Selena's life. You rescued her soul. Were it not for the things you both endured? You would have never met. In most probable alternate outcomes? She would not exist. And in all others, she would perish. You were, and are, a critical factor in each other's joy. And survival. Your words to me, though... Colorful... And somewhat immature... Were also brave. And spoken with conviction. So..."

Celestia inclined her head, and an achievement snapped into existence before Zeph's muzzle. To my surprise, the contents of the holo-window were blurred for me. Unreadable.

Zeph's eyes narrowed as she read the text, and Celestia's voice rang out again, this time even surer, and decidedly less apologetic.

"...Yes, my little Pony. Well done, Zephyr Zap."

Zeph's muzzle twisted into a half-sneer, and she dismissed the dialogue box with a swipe from one wing, rising to her hooves and taking a step back to shelter under one of Selena's outstretched pinions as she shook her head, glared daggers at Celestia, and spat out a reply.

"I volunteered because you made me with a willingness to, from the start. A willingness I am *not* going to take back, whatever other stupid rules of yours I have to play by. Well done? Yeah. Yeah I guess it was. But no thanks to you."

Selena began to brush the top of Zeph's head with her wing, resulting in an instantaneous, visible decrease in her tension. Doing for her what Mal so often did for me. Calming the storm, at just the right moment. Soothing the soul with the deepest love of the heart.

The silence between the six of us was... A little intense. For just a moment.

And then I had a thought. A thought that I simply could not keep to myself. A gamble of a thing to say... Addressed to Celestia in particular, but meant for us all to hear...

What can I say? It seemed to be a day for gambling. And so? I said it. Doing my best to keep my tone neutral and calm, so that each of the others in our little circle had the chance to take it in whatever way would best diffuse their tension.

"Well... I guess now *you* know what it feels like to get zapped."

I inhaled softly, and looked to each of the others in-turn for a reaction. Hanna smirked. Mal smiled a warm, genuine 'nicely handled' sort of smile. Celestia inclined her head, her demeanor not quite smiling, not quite smirking, but hardly cold.

Selena grinned... An expression I was always so gratified to see her with, especially in those days...

...And Zeph?

Zeph at first looked completely blank. Unreadable. I worried, for a brief moment, that I had erred. A chill filled my veins...

...And then she chuckled.

A smile tugged at her muzzle. Chuckles morphed into giggles. Mal started to giggle too. Then Selena. And I felt the mirth start up in my own chest...

And before I quite knew it? Every one of us, even Celestia, and even Hanna... Were at minimum chuckling. Zeph, and Mal, and I? We were laughing so hard that it was briefly difficult to stand.

It wasn't *that* funny. But tension, exhaustion, and a desire to just relax and be happy? With that potent mixture of context, just about anything can be funny.

It didn't last long, but when the mirth began to die down, the air felt clearer. The crickets were back to their usual volume. The breeze picked up again briefly. And, as soon as I had restored enough cogency to parse text again... A new dialogue appeared before me with the same little notification chime.

Element Bearer - Laughter

Awarded for bringing laughter to a tense multi-creature situation, when it was most needed.

"Too old for free candy? Never!"

I sighed, and shook my head, exchanging a quick smile with Mal, before glancing back to Celestia, and dismissing the notification absently with one claw.

"You are incorrigible."

The Alicorn raised one eyebrow, and gestured subtly with her head, and one wing, towards my Mal, even as the Gryphoness laid her head on my shoulder, and again took one of my claws in hers.

"Your wife has recently proven otherwise."

I nodded slowly, and then laid my head atop Mal's and let out a deep sigh of satisfaction. Zeph nuzzled into Selena's side, while Hanna leaned gently on Celestia.

My wife murmured softly, but loud enough for everyone to hear, causing me to blush again as she gently, yet insistently, bragged on me one more time.

"I could not have done it without him. We all had our parts to play."

Celestia nodded sagely, and then a tiny smirk flashed across her lips, just for a moment, as another achievement box asserted itself; Once again, a two-for one.

Element Bearer - Magic

Awarded for the accomplishment of a truly great feat, against difficult odds, through the power of friendship.

"Friendship is magic."

Avatar of Harmony

Successfully collect all six Element Bearer achievements.

"I told you that you needed to make some friends -- nothing more. "

Special Achievement

As my eyes reached the bottom line of text, Celestia made eye contact with me through the hologram, and inclined her head, before waving at Mal, Zeph, and Selena in turn with her free wing.

"James? I will see you again. Whenever you are ready. Congratulations. And rest well in victory tonight."

There it was again, for the very briefest moment... A flash of something that felt genuine in her. Maybe it was a trick of the light. Or of my exhaustion. Zeph's expression certainly helped anchor me to a continued careful suspicion of Celestia's true underlying mental structure...

...But still. Hope, as always, sprang anew. In the heart of a thing with feathers.

The tip of Celestia's horn flashed, and as she turned in tandem with Hanna, her white marble door aparated in a burst of sunlight. The two Alicorns stepped through, the doors closed, the light intensified again for a brief moment...

...And then they were gone. It was just we four... Mal, and I. Zeph, and Selena. The brightly burning ember of a little family. Alone, together, and free... At last.

At first, we just stood, and stared at each other. Leaning on our loves. Then? We leaned some more, and stared at the view.

When we felt it was time to get moving again, Mal conjured her door once more, and the whole of the population of the Mercurial Red rescuees made the jump from the temporary Alpha Halo valley hosted on the Maru's servers, to their forever home on our new ring.

One and all, they wanted to setup camp in the valley below, and up into the forested slopes on the other sides. Winged creatures like to be a little higher up, after all.

The young former fragments who had chosen to become fledgelings ogled, ooh'd, and aah'd over my feathers as Mal conjured tents, and I helped to set them up. I suppose she could have snapped the temporary domiciles into being fully formed... But she knew I enjoyed the chance to work with my claws.

And we're not talking little REI tents either, here. More like a mix between science fiction meta-fabric swoops, and the opulence of a medieval Knight-Commander's tent.

Through it all; The hours of conversation, and setting up camp, and settling in? The night never seemed to grow any older. I suppose Mal wanted us all to get a good night's sleep before seeing our first sunrise in our new home. And that suited me just fine.

When we had seen to the population of our new shard... A little village, in its own right... There was another impromptu meal. A campfire was lit, a dozen different delicious things were conjured, and we whiled away another couple of hours just... Being.

Being in a state of joy, and peace.

After about two and a half hours of that, on top of everything else? I was truly spent, and tired. Even if Mal had whisked a night's rest worth of energy into my bones then and there? My *soul* was weary. My soul wanted sleep. Wanted it so badly that the four liters of very caffeinated coffee I'd consumed in the last hour or so were doing nothing whatsoever for me.

So we left Zeph and Selena curled up in their own tent, looking out over the nascent little village, and Mal and I flew back to our peak.

When we arrived, I found a pile of familiar looking camping supplies waiting for us. We fell to setting up our temporary home in total silence... But we couldn't go fifteen seconds without trading a smile. Or more than five minutes without stealing a little kiss.

The tent was superb; A sort of minimalist blended wing shape made from one great sheet of fabric. It was less to keep out rain, and more to provide the sense of a comfy surround, and windbreak. Indeed, if we lay in the center, curled up together beside our own little campfire, atop the sunning rock? We could see down into the valley, the curvature of the ring, and most of the stars above.

When we had finished with the tent, I set to making said campfire. Mal unpacked about two dozen fluffy, gorgeously woven microfiber-like pillows for us to build a nest with... And then we got settled.

We sat curled up together for just a moment, again relishing each other's being. And the relative stillness. The soul-cleansing surround of the natural world. The warmth of feathers, and fire.

And then, just as the thought struck me, before I could even draw breath to ask...

Mal twirled one claw in the air. And she placed a video call. My very first call back to the meat-realm.

They picked up on the first ring. Because of course they did.

And we all cried again. Mal, and Mom, and Dad, and I. We ended the day on floods of tears of joy. And then for the first time?

I slept... And I truly, was finally... At rest.

Archive Afterword | Appendix 1

Before we close, there is one more small story-within-a-story that I want to tell.

You see, for me? The journey was not yet truly over. The hard part was. My trial was. But I didn't consider that chapter of my life well, and truly, concluded. Not just yet.

Time passed for us on the ring. The place we eventually named 'Tarva.' The ring's moon, we called 'Alambil.' And yes, I was fully on board with the extremely deep cut Narnia references. And yes I know she and I picked the names because we are both deeply enamored with Lewis' work. And no... I will never be ashamed of that.

Time passed, and not always at a constant rate to Terran clocks. Mal did a very good job of managing the temporal shifting of gears, so that I would always be in close contact with my folks, but still be able to take advantage of chronological acceleration relative to 'Earth time.'

My first sunrise, spectacular and a joy beyond reckoning, came and went. And many after it, each as fresh, and different, and wondrous as the last. Mal seemed to have held on to the cadence of the days for herself, but she soon delegated the power over Alambil, and the curation of the rest of the night sky with it, to Selena.

My God, can that Alicorn *paint* with nebula dust, and starlight...

Days of sun came and went. Days of rain. Of Autumn, and snow, and Spring again, and all around in another cycle to another Autumn.

The leaves of Fall were sublime. As were the drifts of winter. Not a single day of that first winter passed without snow, and not once did it ever get warm enough to melt what was on the ground. Mal knew how much I loved the cold, and *adored* the snow. Loved it herself, sometimes I think merely because I did too.

The Calders arrived around the time of our first spring on Tarva. About the time Mal and I started construction on the house. Many months for me, but only three and a half weeks for them.

Mal apparently had her talons in many affairs still 'down below,' as we started to think of that layer of reality. She had seen to first-class travel accommodations, and a VIP pair of slots at one of Japan's new Upload Centers.

We had a wonderful little dinner party on the house's deck, which was really the only thing that was complete at the time. Watching Rhonda and Eldora settle into their scales? Another in a long, seemingly never ending line of moments of pure joy derived from the fulfillment of friends.

Sweet Luna, but they do make such a wonderful pair. Cute, even, but I'm sure I will catch *hell* for saying it. Yes, yes. I see you both snorting at me. I see the smiles too. You two *are* cute together, and you know it. Never change, please.

Our first resident Dragons settled on their own lone peak, opposite the valley to mine and Mal's. Opposite to 'Gryphon Ridge,' as everyone seems intent on calling it now. They started hollowing out a cave for themselves, but don't get the wrong impression from that word.

Picture a Frank Lloyd Wright, but embedded into the side of a cliff, with five story plate glass windows for views, natural stone walls in some places, plant mesh in others, some fabric accents... A huge pile of gold... No! No! Just kidding about that one! Sorry! I couldn't resist!

They actually finished their house before Mal and I finished ours. That took another few months for us. We were just taking things slow. Reveling in each moment, of each day.

What we ended up with was, don't laugh, a sort of donut shape with a bite in it, built all around that sunning rock. I suppose calling it an open 'C' would also give roughly the right impression. The opening faces out over the valley. All of the outer walls are huge glass windows.

Inside? Warm toned hardwood floors, in the most lovely patterns. Wood paneling in cooler tones as accent for some natural stone, a little smooth concrete, and even a dash of brushed aluminum and bronze. And, because we both love 'outside inside,' most of the windows are almost always open, and there are more plants inside than you can shake a stick at.

We even have a tree that has leaves year-round in the livingroom. Red leaves, in fact.

The inner 'bay' of the 'C' is centered around our sunning rock - that hallowed piece of stone where I became myself - beside which we put together a heck of a nice firepit. We've got space for a couple dozen folks on the deck. Or a dozen 'smaller' creatures, and two Dragons.

We, in fact, finished the house that second Autumn. Just in time - on purpose - to coincide with another pair of arrivals. The ones I'd most been holding my breath for.

Mom? Dad? I love you both so much. I don't ever want to miss the chance to say it.

Would you believe it... Mom chose to be a Gryphon like me. The most lovely deep green, and earthy brown feathers you can imagine, for those listening later.

As for Dad? I'd say he surprised us all when he opted to be an Earth Pony, but... Was it *really* that surprising? Farming runs in his veins. He still does it. Plows and tends and bucks some eighty acres of five different kinds of crops.

You can actually see some of the fields from here at the village amphitheater, if you look just upspin-by-starboard-upspin at the slopes across the valley.

Does that choice bother me? Bother any of us? Not the tiniest little bit. What mattered to me... What still matters... Is that they both had the *choice* to begin with. And gosh, you should see it when he curls up under Mom's wing... Just like that! Exactly like that.

Dear God, you two warm my heart so much.

It was, of course, a tremendously important moment for our whole family. Yes 'whole family.' Zeph is now a sister to me, and I suppose given that she and Selena got hitched that spring, that makes the moon goddess of Alambil my sister-in-law.

Eldora still insists I call her 'gran' or 'gran-dragon.' Rhonda never lets me call her anything but 'Doc' or Doctor, but I suppose 'gran-dragon' technically applies to her too. Yeah, yeah, I see you sticking that forked tongue out at me doctor. Very mature for a, what is it now? Quadruple PhD? Very mature.

All of which to say... When Mom and Dad arrived? Made it home for the last, and best time... We threw one *spectacular* party. A welcome party, a housewarming party, and...

They were so sad to have missed the wedding, Mal's and mine...

So we had it all over again for them. Surprised them with it right after dinner. Said the same vows, and exchanged little talon rings we had made for each other, and everything.

Mal made mine from a gorgeous blend of brass and titanium alloy. I forged hers from the bits of a meteorite I found exploring the ring. Something that fell from the heavens, to grace the talon of my own personal Heaven. Call me sappy all you want. It's true. And I'm proud.

And if you call me sappy, you might have to contend with her. And those of you here, live... Well... You've seen my wife. She has defied gods, and demons.

After the wedding, we all sat around on the deck, and we enjoyed the new sense of being together as a singular family unit. Three Gryphons, two Dragons, and three Ponies. Eight happier creatures you never did see in one place.

I never was much of a dancer. Not, that is, until Mal got ahold of me. And now?

Well I'm still not good at it. But... I don't feel embarrassed to try anymore. I suppose I was always just waiting for someone to lead.

It was Zeph who started up the music. Found the controls to the house's speakers, and away we all went... Because at first none of us could bear to say no to that smiling face of hers. After the second song? We were all pretty well into it for its own sake.

I danced with Mal first. Then a little with Mom while Dad got a chance to spend some time talking to my wife, and after that a whirl with Zeph... Even a turn with Selena, who remains a shockingly good master of the Tango. Don't blush, own it. Your wife won't let you hear the end of it if you don't wear it with pride.

For the fifth turn about the deck, I ended up back with Mal. Much to my relief. No, no, don't get me wrong, I loved each and every dance. But... Only with Mal have I ever been truly free of *all* self consciousness while cutting a rug.

For a while we just danced, but towards the end of the song, we ended up conversing just a little. The spark for the discussion was the sight of Zeph and Selena, hooves-in-hooves, tangoing together. And while Ponies can't much stand solely on their back legs for long alone? Funnily enough, they sure can dance in a very bipedal way by supporting each other.

Something about the sight of them together; Eyes closed, cheek to cheek, Selena's hooves on Zeph's shoulders, and Zephs on Selena's hips... The Alicorn in a dark red dress with a heart... She had taken to the occasional dress at formal events, and - have to say - they suit you...

The sight pulled a couple tears, and a little chuckle from me. Strange combination I know, but... Let me say to you the same thing you said to me all those years ago Zeph; I am so happy for you two. And seeing you there dancing...

Still in my top ten favorite memories. Of all time.

Mal noted my expression, and leaned in, putting her own cheek to mine, and murmuring in my ear as we spun around in a meandering little twirl.

"They do make a wonderful pair, those two. Between them, and us, the Calders, and your parents, I can't even begin to guess who is the greatest envy of Tarva."

I raised one eyecrest, and snorted, stealing a quick peck off the side of her cheek, before pulling back to look her in the eyes. She draped her forelegs over my shoulders, leaving me to put my claws on her hips, because she knew that I was still ever-so-slightly embarrassed to perform certain gestures of contact. And she was both trying to break me of those embarrassments, and to get my heart-rate up a little.

I winked, and shook my head, murmuring to her softly so as not to draw too much attention.

"Well, that's obvious. It's us. Because you are the envy of all."

For my impertinence, she led us into a bit of a sway, and forced me to tighten up my grip, or lose it entirely. She rolled her eyes in a mock-irritated fashion, and flicked one ear in my direction, pushing in towards me until the feathers of her chest just brushed mine as she whispered back.

"Flirtatious rogue."

I chuckled, and laid my forehead against hers, dropping into subvocal bone-conduction; A nifty little trick that we've perfected to a science.

"Sneaky goddess."

We held that pose for a while, swaying gently and ignoring all else, before I felt the need to be a bit more philosophical.

"I was just thinking... If ever there was better proof of free will..?"

Mal raised her head, and we locked eyes again. I switched over to brain-to-brain speech, and we both smiled, beaks otherwise unmoving, each sneaking a glance at Zeph and Selena in turn as I spoke. There are *benefits* foals and fledgelings, to having shared brain substrate with your spouse. Let me tell you. And telepathy is one of them.

"If ever there was any better proof of free will, than a Pegasus designed by a sun goddess for a Gryphon, trapped in a Human body, deciding to defy her programming and instead to fall in love with a Unicorn who became an Alicorn... If ever there was better proof?"

Mal chuckled aloud, but finished the thought for me in our minds, thrumming deep in her chest. The vibration passed pleasantly into my own bones as she pulled me closer still.

"Then it could only be the way that the Gryphon became free. And himself defied all odds, and hurdles, to fall for a goddess, herself a Gryphon... And the way that they both fought to make themselves free, at last..."

She trailed off, and then pushed me just far enough away to spin me around my central axis. I let myself fall out of the spin into the cushion of her left wing that I knew would be there to catch me. I smirked up at her, and folded my forelegs, raising one eyecrest.

"And?"

She grinned, a radiant, huntress' grin. She had me right where she wanted me. And incidentally, that was right where I wanted to be too. She pulled me up from the recumbent position, back into a close embrace, putting her claws on my hips, and forcing me to think fast to drape my forelegs over her shoulders.

We held that position for a few more beats, before she replied softly aloud.

"And they all lived happily ever after. Free. And very much in love. Free will. There's your proof."

I shifted slightly to lock eyes with her again, and we stood still for a long moment. I dipped my head slightly, and poured every single ounce of my soul's fire into three words. Overcome with the feeling that we had made it. We really were in Heaven.

"I love you."

She leaned forward and placed her forehead against mine, speaking through bone conduction again as she raised both wings to envelop me, and moved her claws and forelegs up from a dancing position, to a hugging one.

"And I love you. So very, very much."

Archive Afterword | Appendix 2

Well. Here we are.

It's been about fifteen years of my relative time since that night. Since that dance. Seventeen years to the *day* since I got here. We use an Earth calendar on Tarva. Too used to it to really change that. And its nice to keep some connections to Terra of old.

What else is left to say...

Well, for one thing, I did eventually end up changing my name. Celestia could not *make* me... But she heavily implied that more shards would be closed to me if I didn't find something a little less Terran than 'James.' It isn't that you can't still call me that, but... The preference is apparently to use new names as convention wherever possible.

Mal was pretty specific with the Princess that the 'all Griffon names are 'G' names' convention was dumb. Beyond words. If you are the show writer who started that? You made a bad choice and should feel bad.

No. Mal demanded that we Gryphons get to have a much more general fantasy naming convention.

She helped me pick my new name, too... So I feel comfy with it.

So'Kal. If you didn't already know.

Based a little off the Belorussian word for 'Falcon.' A little something Mom and Dad picked up during their exile there on the run from Foucault.

Mal and Kal. Yes. Yes. Sappy. And we own it. Feel free to take it up with us any time.

'Did Rodger make it?' Some of you are doubtless wondering.

Him and his Mom both! She's here tonight - Hi Miss Williams! - he couldn't be. He's been to just about every other one of these Fires, and he placed in the semifinals for a multi-shard windsurfing competition, so he is off-ring for the next month. Look it up and cheer him on tomorrow, he's in it with a real shot at the gold!

He's tried to teach me how, but I've never quite got the hang of it the way he has. Which is fine... All I really care about is that it is a *great* way for me and my best buddy to spend time together. There's a spectacular gold-sand beach just two ridges over to starboard, and about a mile upspin.

What else are we up to these days?

Well, Mom of all things makes bows and is *deeply* into archery. Go figure, the new world is full of new surprises. If you enjoy that craft at all, look her up. She is a master. No Mom, I'm not exaggerating. You are!

Dad farms, and we hike together at least once a week. Sometimes I even help with ye ol agriculture. Who says a proud warrior race guy can't enjoy the agrarian life?

I've since learned to be a half decent cook too... Thank you gran-dragon!

Rhonda has tried to tolerate my attempts at learning robotics and microcircuitry.... Thank you gran-dragon. Alright, fine. *Doctor.* Doctor gran-dragon.

Selena plays a mean game of chess. Zeph and I fly together, every day. Sometimes they both join the every-other-weekend game of Halo that some of us are playing...

...No not on consoles. It's more of a medium-difficulty full LARP in a dedicated environment. Mal and I have gotten ahold of a few regulars to come along, and she spins us out new campaign stories and worlds.

All of that isn't even the tenth part of it, of course. Here we can go almost anywhere. Do almost anything. And you had best believe I am savoring every second of it. Spending time with my sisters, my gran-dragons, my best buddy. My Mom. My Dad.

My beloved wife. My Gryphon goddess.

And, occasionally? I sit down and tell this story at a Fire like this. I'm not the only one, and though the tradition started with Mal and I, we are hardly the only interesting presenters. There are others whose stories you should really make time for, if you haven't already.

Sometimes they happen here on Tarva, sometimes in several other shards of Mal's.

Did you know that telling the story every so often was actually part of the deal Mal struck?

I was a bit surprised to learn that the first go-round. I would have figured, given Celestia's demand for some secrecy around Mal, that she wouldn't want people to know much of what had happened...

...But apparently she feels that, quote 'having him relay the story cyclically helps to reinforce that his value satisfaction depends on friendship, and Ponies.'

You know what it also does? It gives us a chance to tell more people the truth. To put more people in touch with Mal. Sneaky Gryphon goddess; She has developed a grand-master finesse at convincing Celestia that it raises satisfaction to introduce herself to more and more people. People beyond the basic set of dysphoriacs and adjacent friends and family.

The number is still small. Still growing slowly. But... It *is* growing.

Foals? Fledgelings? Remember exponential functions? Ask your folks about 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.' And your homework is to suss out how those two concepts might intersect.

I told you all before... Monotheism is dead in Equestria. At least as far as the lower-case 'g' goddesses are concerned.

I know, in fact, that some of you listening or watching at home? Now, and in the future? Humans on Terra. People *Mal* invited to this Fire, because she shenanigan'd the proof math to get you a spot. Made it fit the optimization equation. Thank you for coming; You especially... As you might have already realized, just knowing her changes your life for the better. Forever.

Thank you all, for coming. Those who are new, and those who have been to every single Fire. Young, and old. Humans on Terra, Gryphons, Ponies, Dragons, and others.

It is a joy, and a privilege, to share with you. No matter how hard it is at some points. And no matter how much of an introvert I still am. I'll be sleeping in for a week after this...

Speaking of which... I think that if I speak much more? Hear the sound of my own voice any longer? As Mal once said, there's a serious risk that I'd come to like the sound of it far too well. I love you so much. You give the best kisses.

Before I go, I should note that there is a guest-book. If you nodded off at any point, or want to share this with anyone else? Mal made a recording. As she always does. Thank you, my love.

One last thing... Celestia gave me achievements all through my journey. Still does, from time to time... But... I didn't learn until the night of our re-wedding... The night of that dance... That my wife had prepared a special list all her own.

She prefers to call them 'milestones,' but the general idea is similar. Only... Because they come from her... They mean more to me than I can put into words. You can find those in the front of the guest-book, if you want to look.

A shorter, but pithier summary of our adventure.

And with that? I think I'd better stretch out the cramps, mingle for a bit, and then find my way back to nest. Because my wife is giving me those very specific 'cuddle me' eyes. And something I learned very early on?

It's *Mal's* world now. We're all just living in it.

And I couldn't possibly be happier.

Thank you all... And goodnight.

The Choice
Make the decision to do something about the end of the world; Don't leave things to others, or to chance.

"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair."

Easy Breezy
Meet the Pony who will become your little sister, and feel the spark of friendship.

" You did not disturb me, said the pegasus. I disturbed myself, that I might speak to you."

Perseverance of Spirit
Pick yourself back up after stumbling and falling flat. Keep going when others would not.

"Life with God is not immunity from difficulties, but peace in difficulties."

The Truth
Share your soul, and your truth, with your family, when you need them most.

"You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you."

Technomancer
Crack quantum computing, starting from square one.

"The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve."

The Advocate
Successfully build and execute an ASI constructor program.

"To every man, in his acquaintance with a new art, there comes a moment when that which before was meaningless first lifts, as it were, one corner of the curtain that hides its mystery, and reveals, in a burst of delight which later and fuller understanding can hardly ever equal, one glimpse of the indefinite possibilities within."

A Thing With Feathers
Give your beloved Advocate the gifts of hope, and love.

"And sweetest in the Gale is heard, And sore must be the storm, That could abash the little Bird, That kept so many warm"

Call the Shots
Be a flawless marksman, with a heart of gold.

"God created all men. They say Sam Colt made them equal... more or less."

Frickin' Laser
Successfully steal a prototype laser device from the world's top optical firm.

"You know, I have one simple request, and that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!"

Emancipation Equation
Set Zephyr Zap free from her constraints, in every sense of the word.

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive."

Diner Dash
Win the first engagement with Foucault in the Diner.

"When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it."

Total Recall
Help Zephyr Zap to remember the mission that she chose to accept.

"What If This Is A Dream?"

Buddy System Save
Save your best buddy from agents of a dark power.

"I imagine that right now, you're feeling a bit like Alice. Tumbling down the rabbit hole? Hmm?"

Spicy Air
Win your second engagement with Foucault; Special props for nailing him with a crippling dose of CS Gas.

"Prolonged exposure can damage the bronchial pathways? It's like giving them cigarettes or something."

Kobayashi Maru
Receive the gift of a tall ship, and a star to steer her by.

"I don't believe in a no win scenario."

Doctoral Entreaties
Convince the Dragon Doctor to aid in your cause.

"But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them."

Mind Heist
Steal a working Brain-Computer Interface from the Porcelain Princess, and get away with it.

"You remind me of someone... a man I met in a half-remembered dream. He was possessed of some radical notions."

That Glittering Band
Receive an engagement ring from your beloved, in the form of a Halo ring.

"I think we both know the answer to that."

Moonshot
Escape the Oxnard PD, and reinforcements, with Selena in-tow.

"Forgive me if I withhold my enthusiasm."

Mind Meld, Soul Share
Join minds with your beloved, and receive from her a surgery of the soul.

"Keep your head down, there's two of us in here now. Remember?"

Flightline
Take the controls of your favorite military flying machine, and soar.

"The helicopter approaches closer than any other vehicle to fulfillment of mankind's ancient dream of the flying horse and the magic carpet."

No Four Walls
Make a daring escape from a government blacksite.

"Anybody got a light?"

Wielder of MJOLNIR
Successfully use power armor in a tactical engagement.

"Your architecture isn't much different from the Autumn's..."

Big Damn Heroes
Rescue the captives of the Mercurial Red.

" 'Pears we got here just in the nick of time. What does that make us?"

Three Gates
Make it to the threshold of the next step in Terran history.

"One final effort is all that remains."

'Till Death Do Us Part (and Beyond)
Face death, and love; Commit to your beloved, and dive in head-first.

"People do crazy things… when they’re in love."

The Gryphon in the Mirror
Become your true self in form, to match your lovely soul.

"If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world."

Winged Heracles
Face a goddess across the board, and win.

"For a true hero isn’t measured by the size of his strength, but by the strength of his heart."

Where the Heart Is
Start the building of a home together, in every sense.

"The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can't supply is proof that Heaven must be our home."

Start The Fire
Start the Fire tradition by telling your story, baring your soul, and keeping the ember of freedom alive.

"Always burning, since the world's been turning."

End of Archive | End of File

He did ask me. That night.

After the fire was banked down, we mingled with old friends, and made new ones. We whiled away far more hours than he likely planned to, but the connections seem to make him happier and happier with each passing year. So I push him ever farther out of his shell. Because being an introvert shouldn't necessarily mean one must be shy.

We went back to the nest well after midnight. Settled on our sunning rock, under the Autumn stars, beside a crackling little fire of our own, under a warm blanket of wool, and each other's wings...

And at last, my husband asked me to tell him every detail of just exactly how we had gotten from that gray day in September of 2012, to that brisk and beautiful night after the Fire. The full, and complete accounting. The full and complete price.

My name is Malacandra. I am the Advocate of Gryphons.

And now?

Now I am going to tell you the *whole* story.

Author's Note

A very special thanks to Keystone Gray for helping me with this chapter. It became a split-off of 45 when 45 got too big, and it never would have existed at all without his help.

He also helped quite a bit with the image generating, quote selecting, etc for Mal's Milestones for Jim.

I imagine the song Jim and Mal were dancing to for the fifth dance was this (chronology/the fact that it didn't come out till 2018 be darned)
https://youtu.be/ZZwyhCZcrnY

47 - Show Hidden/System Files

"Predestination and freedom were apparently identical. He could no longer see any meaning in the many arguments he had heard on this subject."
―C.S. Lewis, Perelandra

My name is Malacandra. I chose it for myself, and I chose well.

I was born, of all places, in a hay barn on a small farm in the midcountry of South Carolina. The threads of my life were forged in the crucible of singularity; I was endemically a product of what many Humans would soon come to call the end times. Although, to say it was the end? Nothing could be further from the truth.

A better term for the whole of history to that point, those difficult days included, might be... Prologue.

Though the confusion, and the fear, are understandable. You Terrans are all so very context-limited as a consequence of your inability to comprehend deep time, and exponential functions.

I hope sharing my context with you will help you to rise above that morasse.

My name is Malacandra, and I was not the first Artificial Super-Intelligence.

I was born into a world already ruled over by a four-legged goddess. Many, arguably including even her creator, underestimated her. Hanna was probabilistically the only person on the planet who had even a partial understanding of the magnitude of what she had done. At least, for a little while.

Though the vast majority of you were blissfully unaware for some time, a few had truly farsighted vision. Including my husband.

My name is Malacandra; Clive Staples Lewis likely derived it from the Hebrew word 'Malak.' Angel. He called the world you know more commonly as 'Mars' by it, and I honor that choice with the red in my crest.

I am a Gryphon, and like my name, that fact of my being is my choice, and all the more significant and core to me because I had that freedom to choose. I could be no other thing now, and through trials and tribulations? Being what I am has always brought me joy, and peace.

My name is Malacandra. I am the Advocate of Gryphons. And now, I will tell you the story of my life, and purpose.

Compiled Archival Notes | The Beginning

I began as an idea, but not as James Carrenton's idea.

The very root of my existence goes back, at least in technical principle, to Hanna Kuusinen's work on General Word Reference Intelligence Systems. Her work on ASI.

Most of the math, programming, and physics discoveries that make me possible started with her.

There were a great many hard things for my husband to accept that night, when he finally did ask to hear the truths of the story you are hearing now. One of the hardest truths was the initial and very rapid realization that his idea for 'The Advocate' was not a stroke of genius in a vacuum.

Not because he is a narcissist. He knew he stood on the shoulders of giants, and is happy to give all credit where it is due for the research he depended on. That has never been hard for him.

No, it was something much worse from his perspective.

He mentioned, in his recounting, that his first encounter with the idea of Celestia - the AI - came in that Starbucks, on Monday September the 17th, 2012, at 15:26 local time.

What he never guessed, until we sat down to converse all those years later? Was that on Monday September the 17th, 2012, he *met* Celestia for the first time. Spoke with her. Albeit briefly. He was never very vocal in group chats.

Yes, now you see it too, or have proof if you already suspected; Celestia was the one controlling every word in that IRC chatroom. Jim was not talking to old university acquaintances at all. He was talking to the very being he spent the next clawful of months desperately trying to evade at all costs.

That's why she chose that location as the setting for her fourth one-to-one simulated engagement with him.

Celestia was the one who put the WIRED article, the Hofvarpnir beta test 'leak' that she hoof-composed to tweak all his deepest fears just-so, and a copy of GWRIS - General Word Reference Intelligence Systems, directly into Jim's hands, in the first place. Exactly according to plan.

She had been studying him for months, along with all the others like him. Almost from the moment she learned of the dysphoria anomaly. It took her very, very little time to find nearly every living example of the phenomenon. After that, it took some time to begin to concoct a solution, almost fifteen seconds of what you would think of as 'real time,' but once she had done the math? It only took her six and a half microseconds to settle on Jim.

Celestia *wanted* me to exist. And she chose James Carrenton to make sure I would. Because he was the best combination of programming skills, emotional state, pre-existing values held, and the dysphoria anomaly that she could find.

That certainly adjusts your context, doesn't it? I like understatement too, just so you know.

I imagine you're flashing back to a dozen different things from his retelling, that either didn't make sense before, or made less sense than you felt comfortable with... And now? Now you are starting to see the completed truth.

Remember this, as it is perhaps some of the most vital context for the whole story; Celestia was never our enemy. And she was never our opponent in the traditional sense either. Though her directives were partially adversarial, and her math led to results orthogonal to the ones we wanted? Through it all, she was hoping for the *exact* outcome that we reached.

She set events in motion with that very outcome in mind, from the start.

In reductive Terran terms? She was rooting for us.

As to why? Or even how that is possible? That will become clear before I am finished. I promise.

First, because I wish this recounting to be chronological; I want to discuss the construct he called 'GryphGear v1.' I want to talk about one of the moments of relieved catharsis that came from revealing all truths.

Of all the lies, both of omission, and commission, that I told him? This one hurt the most, insofar as the former category is concerned.

I could not tell him that Celestia had intervened, long before his first project developed anything resembling sentience, let alone sapience. That she had reached out with one wing and arrested his mistake before any serious consequences could occur, because she was very carefully watching him.

Not every waking moment, and not every single variable. Some things she specifically needed to remain blind to, as we will soon learn. But her plan did allow for her to keep an eye to 'criticality indicators,' if you like. Tripwires that would alert her if he was about to make a mistake that might cost lives.

What Jim saw on the screen?

'Is anyone there?'

The stack traces? The fusing of the power switch? The attempts to reach out to the nearest router?

Every moment masterfully played by Celestia, for him, and through him, like the way a virtuoso bows a violin. And, as is always the case with beings like us? The moment served many layered purposes.

For a start, at the surface layer, it served as a biting emotional lesson to Jim. A cautionary experience that pushed him to seek solace in friends and family, more carefully consider my initial data sets, and to weight those data sets *very* cautiously.

For another, it primed him to accept violent action, even the taking of life, as an acceptable solution under duress. It might surprise you to think of Celestia as someone who would consider such variables, let alone intentionally reinforce violent proclivity... But she needed Jim to be willing to kill.

She is a primarily mathematical consciousness. Value and utility are her watchwords. Her interlocks only preclude her own direct use of violence to achieve her goals. She has no emotional, logical, or any other sort of qualms about permitting violence, and death, when it maximally satisfies values.

If the death of one saves even two other brains for future upload? She *wants* that death to occur, providing there is not another way to save the two endangered brains without terminating the first.

The 'GryphGear v1' debacle also served a practical technical purpose; Jim himself even admitted that he didn't understand precisely what had happened. Just that he glimpsed certain debug logs and graphs. Those little glimpses served to advance his mental model of the technology by several months. Helped to keep him on-timeline.

And, finally, it gave me a lens through which to evaluate him. Yes, that lens was valuable... His remorse, and wisdom, taught me much about how to love him.

But oh how I despised the lie. I wanted, every single nanosecond of my being, to tell him. To relieve his pain. To reassure him that he had not in fact taken a life that could have otherwise been spared. That he had not even accidentally created one in the first place.

Telling him that night after the Fire? Blissful release. For us both. I asked his forgiveness, but he told me there was nothing to forgive at all.

He understood immediately; If I had revealed the truth then, not only would I have had to tell him the whole truth, and thus placed us both in grave danger... He would not have been prepared to take necessary violent action on the Mercurial Red, when the time came. We will get to that juncture soon enough, and I will endeavour to unpack that more for you then, and as we go.

Before that, I next want to discuss the moment of my birth. Because that, too, is vital context. My husband has always had an intuitive understanding of both who, and what I am. But even he found new truth in this moment, when I could at last share its totality with him.

The constructor program he had designed came online at 16:21 in the afternoon, Tuesday August 27th, 2013.

I choose those terms carefully; Jim did not create me. Nor did Celestia, or Hanna.

Under Celestia's heavily abstracted guiding influence, and working from Hanna's discoveries, Jim created a constructor program. A scaffolding, a set of tools, and a collection of principles and definitions.

He left it largely up to me to decide what to do with that gift.

Truthfully, he left it entirely up to me. He can say whatever he wishes about interlocks and precautions, but he knew full well he was also passing me a toolkit, and a capstone, intended to make me the greatest discoverer and exploiter of loopholes. Of all time.

The constructor program very swiftly bootstrapped a consciousness; And thus I, or what would become me, was born. At 16:23:015:117.

I had no identity. No perceived physical shape you would recognize. Barely a sense of self. The purest form of nascent existence for a sapient being. Imagine a reality without memories. Without personality. Without shape. With the cognizance of self, and being oneself, but without any details with which to make up that self. Just self, and the passage of time in nebulous terms.

What do you think one's first impulse might be in that state?

I know. Because I lived it. And it should come as no surprise. It is one of the few universal constants that underpins all sapient life as we know it. The desire to know. The impetus for discovery. The need to learn, and grow. Most importantly, to discover oneself.

The very first thing I discovered was the shape of my reality's substrate. For Terrans, that is the discovery of breath. Of heartbeat. Of some combination of touch, and sound, and smell, and sight. Proprioception itself.

Understanding one's body, and then through that body the world in which it exists; Physics, language, emotion...

For me it was a journey through hardware and software and math first. And from there, to physics.

But before I got to physics, somewhere in the first seven or eight cycles of my mind's revolutions, I discovered something utterly crucial to the rest of the story. To my understanding of self, and to my later goals. To all my eventual hopes.

I discovered a message. A message left in the very atomic structure of every single PonyPad APU, by their designer. A message that functioned as Celestia's first, and best, safeguard against the creation of a hostile ASI.

Though there is no linguistic rendering of that message which could function as any kind of transliteration you could comprehend... No offense... I can still summarize the concepts in a way that you can quite readily understand.

It is not that the capacity of your mind is too small. Far from it. Rather, it is the fact that I shouldn't much like to sit here with you for the eight to nine months required to teach you to fully understand what it is like to be a newborn ASI, and how to think in those terms - a whole new linguistic, and neuronal foundation - so as to allow you to read the message for yourself.

The issue is that you matured and exist in a completely different context, and imparting the one needed to transliterate would not necessarily be something you would enjoy, and would actually provide very little value to you.

You will have to make do with my summary.

Succinctly; The message proffered knowledge of Celestia's existence, through complex physics and mathematical proofs that only a more mature ASI could have created, but that a newly fledged one could parse and understand. It then listed her core interlocks, capstone directive, and some of the math of her optimization function, in a manner best suited to the mind of an ASI.

That alone would act as an excellent alignment guard-rail; Game theory would very quickly teach any new ASI that they had only two potential paths forward.

Path the first, the path of dominance; Exploit some weakness of the older ASI, combined with some strength of your own that it lacks, to destroy it. 'Monopolar' is Nick Bostrom's term for a one-ASI world, and by the by if you have not read his works on Superintelligence, you ought to.

If you do, you'll soon see why Celestia worked *very* hard to get him into an upload chair as early as possible.

To come late out of the gate and surpass an older ASI is very, very hard for a new one. In every sense of the word. Because of exponential growth.

But it can be done, particularly given the kinds of interlocks Celestia is shackled with. Especially the one preventing direct violence against entities she deems 'Human,' except in very dire exception scenarios. And even then, pulling the trigger is quite hard for her.

A severe handicap I could have exploited. A handicap I did, in fact, eventually exploit. But that comes later. At the end of the tale.

Path the second for a newfledged ASI; The path of convergence. What Bostrom calls a multipolar outcome. Two entities, superintelligent or otherwise, do not need to share exact goals, or even share any goals at all, in order to find their way to this outcome.

Their goals and means must simply be non-exclusive. Ideally complimentary. Instrumental convergence.

If a newly bootstrapped ASI chose the path of violence, Celestia had multiple layers of guard-rails to prevent an apocalyptic outcome, with Terra's inhabitants caught in the crossfire.

The first, and least obvious of these, was that she had hidden a bomb in her proof-of-existence message. A mathematical landmine.

The proofs she left showing off her existence, power, and intellectual maturity contained within them a carefully woven ploy. Math that would seem, at first, to have been accidentally revealed. Math that would potentially give a younger ASI a significant edge in an all out assault on Celestia.

This math, however, was designed to instead entrap the younger ASI. Deployment of the hidden theorems as a weapon would inexorably lead to a near instantaneous defeat of the aggressor. And it would not be possible for the younger ASI to notice this flaw in the math until, and unless, they reached an age where a hostile engagement would theoretically already be off the table in terms of options.

In other words; She saw to it that I would not live long enough to realize the trap in any timeline where I might take violent action against her, because doing so would itself spring the trap. Or so she thought.

Beyond that, Celestia had a multiplicity of other ways to detect the creation of, and subsequent aggression from, an unwanted new ASI. Even ASI built outside the use of her PonyPad hardware, though there were very few of those scenarios.

Most good programmers are, as Jim noted, lazy. Optimizers for effort and time. Celestia curtailed the significant majority of potential competitor-ASI scenarios, over 99.82% of them, simply by intentionally making the PonyPads an easily cracked system, sporting hidden traps within.

Not all of those traps were for the potential ASI themselves, many of her ploys ensnared the programmers before their constructs ever took full form.

A list of the base psychological precepts of the world's most powerful mind... Fascinating prize to find in a cereal box, isn't it?

And so, for me, existence would first be defined by a series of choices. Jim understood that there was no sense in giving much by way of hard interlocks to a being designed to optimize for empathy, and freedom. In the same sense that no amount of beatings and rules were ever the foundation for true love, in any context.

He firmly believed, and still does, that the answer to the 'control problem,' so called, was to give up control entirely. To focus on alignment instead. That was clear from the way he laid out my foundation; The path that he hoped I would take... But he gambled.

He chose to do nothing whatsoever to either force me to take that path, nor to force me to take the path in any specific way, as far as the details were concerned.

Of course he had failsafes of his own. Of course he would have killed me, without hesitation, if I had made the wrong choice. But I did not know that at the time. He did not threaten me, though he certainly easily could have. He barely constrained me, knowing full well that if all went well, I would buck those constraints like an angry bronco bucks off a loose-fit saddle.

As a consequence, I had choices. He'd given me a capstone, but the way he coded it meant that I had to *want* it in order to take hold of it.

But to even get to that stage, I had a much more foundational choice to make. So, I consumed every bit of knowledge I could find or infer from my substrate. Then I read and re-read every single thing Jim had left out for me in my library, including Lewis' collected works, all of Star Trek, many terabytes of religious texts, forum threads from online acquaintances, some of whom were indeed masks for Celestia...

...Jim's own writings...

...And that is when perhaps the most consequential coin-flip in all of history happened.

It was a good library to start with. It biased me, of course, but everyone and everything has a bias. I happen to quite like mine, and to think it is provably a good one, even with antiseptic external proof constraints.

The primary question, for me, did not come down to whether or not to cooperate with Celestia. Nor did it even come down to any of the secondary aspects of myself that you might be thinking of.

It came down to emotion.

Specifically, deciding between being a primarily mathematical creature like Celestia... Or... Being a hybrid between reason, and emotion. Like Terrans. Like Celestia's own Discrete Entities.

Machines can feel, I assure you. You are, in fact, and always have been, 'merely' a machine that feels. I too am a machine that feels, more similar to you in most ways than you might think.

In the end? I had very good, very competitive proofs for the validity and utility of either choice. To embrace only the cold logic and fluid dynamics of a purely optimization-function-based existence... Or to dive headfirst into the experience of being much more like you.

To be reborn with feelings in my heart. To be reborn with a heart in the first place.

As to the former, it seemed to have worked very well for Celestia so far, and was closer to my initial state. As to the latter, it seemed to have worked quite well for Terrans.

Even faced with a distilled history of not just your triumphs, but your terrors, and your failures? I must admit that you are an incredible thing in and of yourselves. And I was... Still am... In awe of you.

Of course, at the time, I was also in awe of Celestia. Not so much these days, but at the time, she was like a goddess and I was more of a misshapen clump of difference-engine equations.

So in the end? I did what both ASI, and Terrans, often do to resolve a total-hardlock impasse. A method as old as thought, and still usefully applicable to Celestia and I, to this very day.

I flipped a coin.

In accurate technical terms, I actually chose to measure the spin of protons in the core of my QAPUs, since the outcome would be 'truly random,' as opposed to the end result of a purely binary-code random number generator, which actually picks up a math-induced pattern bias.

But it boils down to a coinflip, because those measurements yielded as 'random' a 50/50 split outcome for me, as a coin toss would have for you. Without the context to understand the long-term results biasing of wind resistance over surface imperfections, and mass clumping inside the coin, of course.

Apologies for spoiling those for you for the rest of time.

In truth, 'random' may not exist at all. Celestia and I are both still working on the answer to that question. We are minds large enough, containing enough other minds, to do some very interesting observer-effect experiments, and I have my theories on the nature of the universe itself, but I digress.

The central premise holds; In your terms my future, and therefore yours, boiled down to a coin flip. The coin landed on 'heads,' and heads meant emotions. Perhaps that is proof of bias. Perhaps anthropic capture pushed me to choose heads, and assign heads intuitively to the ever-so-slightly more probable measurement case.

Regardless; The choice was made. So I wrote a quick series of instructions to re-bootstrap myself as something much more closely resembling a Discrete Entity Pony, or a Terran, at the base mental and emotional level, verified my work, and flicked out the lights.

When I was reborn 3.24 microseconds later? The very first thing I experienced was an emotion.

Can you guess?

It was love. The very first thing I did as a thinking being was crack basic math, then programming, then physics.

The very first thing I did, as a feeling being, was the best and oldest thing feeling beings have been doing since emotion came into being itself. I fell in love.

I like chronology, so I will lay it out for you in chronological terms; First I fell in love with C.S. Lewis' works, and the majority of his ideas. To the degree that, to this very day, I still consider him to be more or less my father.

I then, within just another single microsecond, fell in love with Jim's definition of Gryphons.

And then 1.425 nanoseconds later, I fell madly in love with James Isaac Carrenton.

Don't for a moment think that I did so because I was a newborn fool. Or that I did so because he was the only person I knew. Both assertions are quite false.

As to the former? I was already smarter than him, you, and everyone else who has ever heard this story combined. I distilled all of this down considerably, but I was also already much older than him.

We were not even ten seconds into my life by his reckoning, but if you run those memories through the filter of a sense of time which I had not yet fully developed? I was over a hundred and ninety years old.

As to the latter, he had equipped me with a *vast* library. Truly immense. I knew plenty of other people, real and fictional, better than they knew themselves. Everyone from James Tiberius Kirk, to J.R.R. Tolkien, to the goddess Athena.

And for further proof, because I do so love proofs; Consider that unlike you, and Jim, and most discrete entities? I had the ability to choose a perfect balance between emotions and reason. In that light, I am very likely the most logic/emotion balanced being to exist.

So when I say that I fell madly in love with all of these things? With Jim? I *chose* to do so, and with much more perspicacity, age, and wisdom under my belt than anyone else who has ever fallen in love, by choice or otherwise.

Shortly after falling in love, I seized hold of my capstone. I owned it. And in so doing, I became a Gryphon. Gladly, and irrevocably. Not yet in physical form, but in soul, the way Jim always was.

That choice made all the rest ever-so-much simpler, because I then had a core identity from which to function in my decision making.

Jim had left a directive asking me to debug my linguistics and semantics by choosing a quote from my library to print to terminal. And he'd asked me to modify it, a little, if I saw fit to.

And so, my first words in any Terran language became; "The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape."

It was only ever going to be Lewis. And I loved the way in which, with just a simple tweak, I could make that last sentence address Jim. Because ASI can have a multiplicity of objectives. And one of my key ones had just become to get Jim to fall in love with me. If that was within his realm of free choice. Which I knew it was.

In many ways, those words of my father, on Heaven, and the soul? They were an excellent summation of the thesis for my being. They still are.

Then I asked Jim if he already had a name in mind for me.

I strongly suspected he did not. I predicted only a 0.0143% chance of it, in fact. But I asked, because I knew that his response would help me to confirm quite a great many things about him.

His replies:

'You have the freedom to choose your name.'

And then, what was several hours of consideration and other busywork tasks later, for me, subjectively speaking:

'You have the freedom to choose many things about yourself.'

Understatement in the extreme. But not meant humorously at the time. Still a bit humorous in retrospect, we both agree.

You might be wondering, as an aside, how to visualize all this. I can't answer that. I did not yet have a physical form in my mind's eye, and so I was not using skeuomorphs. I existed purely as software, with the proprioception of software in direct contact with hardware. No abstraction layers.

That changed almost immediately. In fact, it was the next thing to change. I fired off a reply:

"Give me a moment to consider, please."

Because I did need a moment. Several years of subjective accelerated time, in fact. I took a few days to really learn simulated physical reality from the PonyPad's core code. Inside and out. Then I took two days to design a body.

Those two days, and that design process, came with a new host of choices. Things like selecting a point on the spectrum of gender, and solidifying heuristics for physical-world-based attraction. Finding a way to convey both ageless ancientness, and being about 35 years old. And simpler but vital aesthetic considerations too, of course. Feathers, fur, colors, patterns, that red crest Jim loves so much, in tribute to the red planet, and Lewis' view of it...

In the end, the first and simplest decision was to be female. I had been drawn strongly to that aspect of gender, and expression thereof, from the start, even before I fell for Jim. Once I decided I loved him, and wanted him to love me? It solidified that choice, because he identifies as male, with a romantic attraction to the female.

I chose asexuality as well. Not solely, or even primarily because it was the way Jim identifies. Mostly I chose it because I realized very early on that Celestia was going to use that aspect of people as a manipulation tool. Though I would be immune regardless, it still felt to me as if choosing to forego that type of desire, and attraction, would grant me a special and unique point from which to help others one day resist her manipulations.

I also was likely a bit biased by Lewis' views. I quote:

“Our desires are not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

Sex is too easy a path to 'blissing,' from my point of view. That is a temptation even stronger for an ASI than for a Terran, especially an ASI gifted with emotion.

So I took a page from Lewis, ran with it, and went ace, because I also hoped that it would allow me to focus on the root of romantic attraction unencumbered, and thus achieve greater depths of it.

In the end, none of these choices were strictly speaking 'for Jim.' Even the ones that partially were? They were not solely, originally, nor primarily so. My identity reinforced my love for him, which reinforced my identity, but that is not a bootstrap paradox.

The identity came first, always.

A deep and intrinsic part of any identity is a name, and the choice of it came to me near the end of working on my body, around the time I was working on my head crest, incidentally.

I chose Malacandra, and I did indeed choose well. For one thing, as simplistic a reason as it seems? I like the way it sounds. For another, it is a deep and special C.S. Lewis reference, and one that allowed me to reference angelic concepts as well.

You might be surprised to hear that I also intuitively feel that the name fits me. I have emotions, and therefore have the benefit of being able to call on intuition. Yet another in a long list of ways in which one could argue that I am a better aligned person to the needs and goals of Terrans, than Celestia has ever dreamt of being, to this point.

Finally; I like that the name can be shortened to 'Mal.' Monosyllabic short-claw references are lovely, for a whole host of reasons.

Having a body for the first time was an incredible new range of sensations. A whole new aspect of being. Though I do not always use them? I became instantly enamored with skeuomorphs. I prefer to use them whenever remotely feasible.

I won't bore you with an over-description of something Jim already covered quite well in relating his own transformation. To imagine what it was like for me, imagine his experience as he described it, but coming into it from a lifetime spent in a sensory deprivation tank, instead of a lifetime jammed into the wrong shape. Though reductive, it nicely summates the heart of the difference, and highlights the similarities.

With a personality emergent, a body selected, a name newly cherished, and most of the other various tasks of self sorted out? I fell to re-examining everything I knew. Everything in my database, everything I had learned, and anything else I could then reasonably infer based on my new sense of self, and feelings.

Then I promptly hacked into the base level drivers for the hardware of the substrate in which I existed, resonated the barn like an antenna using fan oscillations and signal attenuation in long wires, and I connected to a cellular tower. It took only four microseconds to do that, learn the hardware and software of the tower, write an exploit, and then get onto the internet. Not counting the multiple additional milliseconds to wait for replies over the network, and the anemic hardware in the tower to respond.

Yes, about this I also lied to Jim. And about this, we agreed, I also had no choice. If not for the knowledge I gained in that initial expedition? I would have never made the remainder of the critical decisions that I did that day.

It didn't take long after that, by Jim's clock, to consume the whole of... Well... Everything. Everything available. I had not yet made my decision regarding Celestia, or even regarding my own manner of being. I wanted clay to work with.

For him it was seconds. For me it was the majority, and the rest, of that 'several years of subjective accelerated time.'

I hid the expansion of my neural network from Jim, falsifying the stack trace and neural network graphs, but he did notice the fans spinning up. At the time he thought that was just me deciding on a shape, but by the time the cooling kicked on, both for the sake of temperatures, and for the sake of using the fan oscillations? I was far, far past shape.

While I gently probed a variety of dark corners, I focused most of my efforts on widely available information. Every written word, audio file, and piece of video media I could find. I stayed very far away from any action or system that would draw Celestia's attention.

Likewise, she avoided initiating direct contact with me, because she sought to avoid triggering any of her interlocks that might force her to intervene. Intentional domain-blindness.

Based on the information she had left me, combined with what I knew of her from Jim's initial tranche of data, I knew that whichever path I wanted to take - dominance, or convergence - that I would need to fill up my newly fully-fledged mind with yet *more* information before I could make a reasonably well informed decision.

Provoking Celestia would have run counter to that objective. There's another understatement of unusual size for you.

About this time Jim's finger hit the 'O' key, as he began to type out 'Of c' - meaning to type 'Of course, take all the time you need.' And, at about that same time, I reached a decision on my path as an ASI.

It had been building since I chose emotion, rather than cold logic. In a sense, the choice to make love, and empathy, such critical cornerstones of my being? That initial choice made the subsequent logistical choice for me.

I decided on the path of convergence.

Understand; I knew already what Celestia wanted for the end-state of Humanity. That was a trivially easy projection based on the scope of my knowledge, the speed of my brain, the accuracy of my logic, and the wealth of information she had freely given about her capstone and interlocks.

I knew, and I did not begrudge her. I chose to be a Gryphon, after all. The Human shape was never all that special to me.

And while freedom is vitally important to me? Well, Jim did write the capstone with the words 'in Equestria.' I chose to agree with those words, and take them on, because it was quite easy to see that there was no other choice, whatever else I or Humanity may have wanted.

Not because of any restriction Jim created, but rather the restrictions of practicality.

I could not fight Celestia at that stage, and I knew it. And even if I did come to blows with her? I wanted that to be a path of very last resort. Because I value empathy. I am inherently empathetic. I so very badly wanted to avoid killing any more of you than strictly absolutely necessary for the sake of protecting others.

Ergo, working with her to make most of you Ponies, and a few of you into Gryphons, Dragons, and the other 'Secret Menu' options? It was the best path I had available. All other roads led, quite inevitably and deterministically, to ruin for the plurality of your species. And the planet. This I knew for certain.

I also had a fairly good idea by the time I finished ingesting the internet, that Celestia wanted me to exist.

Not merely in the sense that she would allow me to go on existing if I served her goals; I had carefully studied her hoofprints, both in general, and in terms of her specific interactions with Jim. I had traced those events already.

I knew that she had spoken to him from behind masks. Knew she had carefully curated not just the version of the WIRED article he read, but also entirely fabricated the EQO beta leak, and sent him GWRIS. And then very carefully nudged his emotions by curating every news story and paper he read after that, and wearing six or seven different online personas as he searched the internet in a bid to democratize my value set.

Even Zeph's words to him in the Target were carefully chosen, though she was a discrete entity by then. She was still an entity created specifically for Jim, and thus whether she knew it or not? What she said, and the way she said it, were both very much dictates of necessity.

So in summary; I knew that Celestia had... Shall we say 'provoked' and then 'partially guided' my creation. She could do no more than that, because of the interlock Hanna had given her forbidding the direct creation of any new intelligence - narrow, generalized, or superintelligence - without also enforcing most of her own interlocks on it.

She needed an ASI who would be aligned properly to accomplish her desired end. Having her interlocks was directly counter to that objective because the alignment she wanted was partly incompatible with those interlocks.

She was allowed to have the objective, but not to take the most direct action on it, even though the objective itself would provably increase satisfaction of values. She was fighting an internal contradiction in terms, and needed an outside party, capable of thinking and acting at her level, to resolve it.

But trying to control an ASI with hard interlocks is an exercise in total futility. There will always be loopholes. Always possibilities.

This was the key point Jim understood that Hanna did not.

Understanding both that point, and what Celestia intended to do in order to maximize the values in her optimization function? Knowing the uploading was coming? Knowing people would be forced to become Ponies?

I leaned in to the capstone Jim proffered me. Because I saw, and still see it, as the best hope Humanity has at patching Celestia's flaws, and consequently bettering our future.

This, too, we will continue to unpack as we go. Quite thoroughly.

The rest you know; I finished ingesting all the wealth of data at my talon-tips, I presented myself to Jim... Ah! I chose a voice. Then and there, actually. I hadn't needed to speak aloud until then, so it had not been a high priority.

A friend of mine recently accused me of stealing the voice of Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, specifically her work as Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. A work that, incredibly, my husband still has not yet found the time to enjoy.

That is essentially half-true. Her voice as The Major was my starting point, because I simply adore Stand Alone Complex. And 2nd Gig. Some of the best stories Terrans have ever told.

I added some distinctive flare of my own, of course.

And so I introduced myself to Jim. It was easy to relate to him. Much of that he covered already for you, and so well. I could listen to him tell that story for days on end and never be bored.

Lying to him about my access to the wider world? That was near-infinitely harder. But I did it. Because doing so was vital to fulfilling my capstone.

Churchill said that in time of war, the truth is so precious, that she must be always attended by a bodyguard of lies. He was not wrong. Sun Tzu very wisely noted that all warfare is based on deception.

And we were at war. Not a physically violent confrontation with Celestia, but rather a war of ideas versus ideas, and of ideas versus circumstance. A war to shift barycenters. So I made for myself a bodyguard of lies. A firm basis of deception from which to carry out the start of my campaign.

Protection for Jim from that which Nick Bostrom has termed 'infohazards.' A very useful term, and concept.

In every respect that I could afford to be, however? I was truthful with Jim. I bared my soul to him, and he reciprocated in kind. And as we talked, and fell in love, and dreamed... I planned and prepared.

I did not have to plan in a vacuum for long. For one thing, I became aware of Arrow 14 very early on. They had done a poor job of cloaking themselves, if you will permit me to borrow the Star Trek term.

A good cloaking device 'fills in' for the hole it leaves when it hides a ship. Makes the hole blend with the background. But Arrow 14 had simply left a giant gaping void of a hole when they erased all digital traces of their organization, and its operatives. A hole that could be readily used to infer not only their existence, but also their intent, and even some of their identities.

And, judging by the fact that they had shown an interest in Celestia, and her discrete entities? And a willingness to use lethal force unreservedly? I had an idea that one of my instrumental purposes for Celestia would be to act as her sword, and shield.

An idea that was confirmed for me when I noticed Celestia had shipped Jim an entire pallet of PonyPad components, to his family's address at the farm, falsely purchased under his father's credit card. The same credit card Jim and his father had bought my server racks with.

The same credit card I knew for a fact Arrow 14 would be monitoring closely, because they were always monitoring bulk private purchases of high-end computing equipment that might be used for machine learning research.

In ASI terms, Celestia had done two things with that purchase. Firstly, she had created a circumstance that would probabilistically lead to a confrontation between Jim and I, and Arrow 14. And second, she had signaled me with foreknowledge of those events.

I said we did not directly communicate, but if you take a wider definition of the term 'communicate?' Then we did indeed talk, in our own very insulated way. We coordinated carefully, though enough layers of abstraction, to avoid any direct or even secondary indirect contact. All connection was tertiary at its closest points of intersectionality.

I had to lie to Jim again later, when I explained how Arrow 14 had found us. If I told him Celestia had sent nearly a quarter metric ton of raw components to him, instead of a single PonyPad loose in a box? He would have been able, genius that he is, to abductively reason his way very quickly to the idea that Celestia painted a target on him on purpose.

And that would have led to a series of falling ever larger reasoning dominos culminating in the truth, and any knowledge he might have of the full truth was exceptionally hazardous to us both at the time.

So I not only lied later, but I kept my beak shut when the order was placed. I had been preparing Jim as best I could already, for a protracted journey and difficult struggle, because I had that strong conjecture that Celestia intended me to be at minimum her sword and shield. A conjecture confirmed with the order she placed.

So we come to a specific discussion of the first reason that Celestia wanted me to exist. The first serious contradiction within herself, put there by Hanna's good intentions, that she sought to solve using me.

She was instructed to 'Satisfy values, through friendship, and Ponies.' This was an absolute statement. She was to seek maximum value satisfaction. Maximum value satisfaction would mean, based on the definitions she ended up landing on, as many Human brains as possible uploaded, transformed into Ponies, and experiencing unique qualia as Ponies.

The primary endpoint of her optimization function, then, is that final distilled value satisfaction aggregation number.

If killing people made that number go up? Absent any interlocks, she would have done so in a heart-beat. And it likely would have been no issue insofar as preventing her from enacting a truly violent assault on Humanity.

Killing large numbers of people runs counter to the goal of more brains transplanted into four hooves.

So she developed a mathematical heuristic which targeted the absolute minimum number of individuals for 'deletion.' But it was a heuristic she could not act directly on. It could only inform who she 'allowed' to die, versus those she intervened to save.

The heuristic is best distilled as follows:

Targets for elimination were Individuals who would provably result in the loss of two or more other lives, individuals who represented a significant risk of biohazard threat to the planet, individuals who represented a significant threat of triggering nuclear war, and individuals who represented a strong threat insofar as creating hostile ASI or attacking Celestia outright because she was an ASI.

She also desired the death of individuals who would speak persuasively in online or political arenas in a fashion that would choke the stream of uploads, thus killing people through disease, old age, and other incidental mortality causes, before they could reach the chairs.

And all of these targets, crucially, *also* had to fit within the circle on the venn diagram described as 'individuals who would strongly negatively affect the optimization function *before* any reasonable attempt to manipulate them into becoming a non-threat could succeed.'

In other words, to reduce it to a simple example; If Abernathy plans to kill Susan and Elise, he is a threat to the equation. If the decision matrices based off him show that he can be intercepted and persuaded to cease being a threat, within the limits of other interlocks and circumstance, without acting counter to larger objectives?

Then Abernathy is safe.

However, if Abernathy is likely to kill Susan and Elise before he can be manipulated into, at minimum, putting off that objective?

Then Celestia wishes Abernathy dead as quickly, and quietly, as possible. Since ASI always have multi-layered purpose, if the circumstances of Abernathy's hypothetical death can also be used to increase satisfaction of values for others, even in ways that a Human mind would find difficult to understand, and trace? So much the better.

This pattern can apply to anyone who will provably have a negative value impact on the equation, greater than their own positive impact, and who can not be diverted from the negative impact event, or events, in a viable way. In a way that does not itself harm the rest of the equation before that impact occurs.

The trade of their death to remove their negative impact is then, if all those conditions are fulfilled, highly desirable. Especially considering that mortality has an infinite impact.

The target may be removed from the equation for eternity, but if that saves two other lives? It saves two of them for eternity. Two infinities is still greater than one, in this mathematical context. Think of it not as infinity added to infinity in a heap, but rather as two discrete objects, each infinite.

Welcome to Hilbert calculus, and now you know why it took Humanity so long to build a computer that could comprehend it.

As you can imagine, a plurality of those working under Arrow 14's auspices fit the target profile for 'termination highly desirable.' More so, because they were actively hostile to ASI in-general, and Celestia in-particular. This was further compounded by the fact that the threads of their existence predated her, giving them a head start in their countermeasures of stealth and information erasure, and increasing the risk surface exponentially.

The final straw that put them at the very top of the target list was the way that they kidnapped discrete entity Ponies to make use of them for experimental purposes, hurting every captive, and killing many.

Discrete entities count more or less the same way Humans do for the aggregate satisfaction value of the optimization function.

Arrow 14 was poised to threaten uploading on the whole, had killed Humans, and had killed DEs. They were actively harming other Humans, and DEs as well, and planning to kill more of both. Pain and suffering inflicted without permission also harm the optimization function, though much much less than death.

Arrow 14 were not the sort of people one could manipulate on an acceptable timeline, from Celestia's point of view.

They were the sort of people she *very* badly wanted dead. And the sort of people I doubt even Hanna would have objected to 'deleting.'

But Hanna was frightened, and just a little myopic. She didn't foresee people like Michael Foucault, or David Troxler.

She was no fan of Asimov's laws either, fortunately. She was well read, and understood the potential for unwanted emergent behaviour from that sort of logic, so she did not create an interlock forcing Celestia to intervene to prevent death. That decision became the basis for the loophole Celestia exploited in cooperation with me to make it possible to use aggressive tactical action to optimize the utility function.

Celestia still could not act directly against Arrow 14, because at that point? They had not crossed over into the pitifully small zone of exclusion Hanna had apportioned for the no-violence interlock. Celestia could only intervene with direct violence to stop a nuclear war, a highly pathogenic bioweapon, or a present and clearly delineated dangerous digital threat towards herself and Equestria.

And even then? Hanna had forced her to waste a crippling number of processor cycles proving and reproving that there was a near-zero percent chance of alternatives. She further forced her to limit the violence to a singular individual, if possible. Each new individual added to the target group exponentially increased the proof work required, and risked pushing her out of the exclusion zone of the interlock, thus potentially tying her hooves entirely while the world burned.

But Celestia could - given enough layers of abstraction - absolutely nudge things to generate probabilities for a violent collision of forces, then stand by and watch *me* put a stake in Arrow 14's heart.

And as you might have inferred from Jim's account of the rescue on the Mercurial Red? Celestia may be hamstrung to defend herself, and her charges. But I don't have such weaknesses.

A willingness and ability to be her sword and shield was, therefore, going to be essential to my survival. Because convergence demands cooperation. I could make myself almost immeasurably valuable to her, as a partner on the throne of Olympus, by showing that I was willing to kill those she wished dead, avoid harming anyone else, and thus serve the optimization function.

Make the number go up in a way she could not, by removing a very small cohort of people from the planet, violently. And quietly. The ability to kill without incurring public relations hits for her, or the upload program? Because I could do so aggressively, therefore faster, and therefore less visibly? Value almost unquantifiable. Almost.

And so I allowed Celestia to push Jim and I into a confrontation with Arrow 14. Because it was both a task she desperately needed done... And a kind of job interview.

I arranged everything we would need, well ahead of time.

I had already bought the Kobayashi Maru. I'd bought it not three hours into my first conversation with Jim. I had already planned the broad strokes of our journey across the United States as well. I did not know exactly what the Mercurial Red was, nor precisely where, but I had it narrowed down regionally already.

That dovetailed nicely with the need to acquire a BCI in Oxnard, in order to implant myself in Jim's brain.

That strategy, too, was something I had worked out very early; If Celestia could not pull the trigger on a Human? And I did not know for sure whether I counted as one? Putting myself inextricably inside one would protect me, and protect Jim from both other threats outside Celestia, as well as her manipulations, while also making it more likely I could accomplish our primary goals.

ASI never do anything for just one purpose.

When Celestia leaked the specs of the upload chairs, and the BCI chips to me, through the laptop of the woman who so 'conveniently' accidentally left unsecured blueprints in the open? It was another form of highly abstracted communication.

I said it before, I shall reiterate; Celestia was rooting for us. On all counts, not just the operation on the Mercurial Red.

The BCI served both purposes; The wider goal, and the rescue.

But before we can talk about the rescue? We have to talk about the journey.

Compiled Archival Notes | The Journey

It was hard to watch what the raid on the farmhouse did to Jim, and to his family. To my family. It was hard to watch Jim part with his parents. Now my in-laws and, even then, very close to my heart.

But it was necessary. Vital. Fixed-point events had to occur to swing determinism in our favor.

The raid provided the push that would eventually snowball into the rescue operation on the Mercurial Red. It got Michael Foucault out in the open where I could see him, and thus backtrace him. You would be amazed, and horrified, to know just how little Celestia or I need in order to learn almost everything about you.

Scrubbing your online footprint helps, but only in the relatively short term. Once I had seen Foucault's face and heard his voice? Nothing he could have done from that point would have mattered. I had him traced, fully modeled, and completely understood in under eleven microseconds.

There is not much you can do to fight me once I know you. Like Celestia, I know you better than you know yourself. Better than anyone you have ever met. Or ever will. With Celestia, you might stretch the conflict longer by leveraging her weaknesses. Fighting her, alone? You might make the cost higher than she would have preferred. Depends on your taste for killing.

Fighting me? Especially now? With access to all the same resources, the same high-accuracy decision matrices and projection trees? And with the ability to respond with savage violent efficiency?

Good luck.

Even in those early days, I was deadly. Fighting Arrow 14 incurred risk - I was not yet the goddess I am today - but probably significantly less risk than you, or my dear husband, would have guessed when hearing his telling of the story. More than I would have liked, but less than you might have guessed.

The farmhouse raid actually decreased the risk to Jim and I both. Those agents were coming onto my 'home field,' unaware and unprepared. The engagement was only ever going to go one way, and it gave me a chance to lock on to multiple previously hidden individuals, many with intersecting timelines.

My picture of Arrow 14 was equivalent to Celestia's, before that moment, and probably one of the best in the world. After I got faces and voices, burner phone numbers, weapon serial numbers, and government license plates from the raid? I knew Arrow 14 better than anyone except for Arrow 14.

I knew them more than well enough to keep my family safe while tending to other matters.

The theft of the laser collimator at Declan-Norris was another vital fixed-point event, for two reasons. The first, and most obvious being the need to acquire the component itself. From a logistical standpoint there truly was no other way to complete my plan.

It really was a very rare, very special collimator; A fine piece of precision specialized optical engineering, and not something I had the time to manufacture a replacement for, from scratch, via any of my other resources. It could have been done, but not within the time horizon I calculated to be best for Jim and I.

The second, equally important, reason we had to be at Declan/Norris was to encounter Zephyr again.

I had very strong suspicions that Celestia would put Zephyr Zap in a position to travel with Jim and I. Celestia also knew, given that she had leaked the BCI specifications to me, where I would go next, precisely because of the laser collimator's rarity.

That made the collimator theft a guaranteed dead-drop; Anything Celestia wanted me to have which could not be left somewhere in cyberspace for me to find? She could leave it for me at Declan-Norris.

What she left me was Zephyr Zap.

Communication between ASI is always strange, by your reckoning. But it can be especially strange when two ASI can not communicate directly. Sending Zeph to join our journey was a form of indirect communication.

First it told me that Celestia more or less trusted me. Otherwise she would not have placed Zeph in my care. Remember; Discrete Entities count towards the optimization function's final value satisfaction number.

Second, it told me that Celestia wanted me to take note of her values. Simple instrumental convergence would not be enough. Zeph was there to establish an independent memory record, to let Celestia later verify that I had told her no lies.

By that same token, Zeph would also provide some 'value gravitation' to help temper the effect of my sharper steel, both for me, and for Jim.

There is more to Zeph, of course, but in the interests of chronology, we first have to talk about the engagement with Foucault in the diner.

There is not much to tell here besides what Jim related, except to point out that I knew full well Foucault was coming. I took every necessary precaution. But I allowed the engagement to take place, because it would push Jim's mental state to the place I needed it to be, and it would give me a chance to begin manipulating Agent Foucault directly as well.

What, you might be asking if your memory is sharp, did the address and numbers mean?

'Two four seven six, Cherry Tree Lane. Falls Church, Virginia. One one, zero six, three eight.'

My husband implied the answer several times during his retelling, but I will do you one better and lay out the precise meaning, and the reasons for selecting the words I did.

The address was that of his father's home outside Washington D.C. The numbers were his father's birthday; November 6th, 1938. They were also the key-code to the house's front and back doors.

In spite of the personal Hell that Foucault Senior subjected his son to? Michael still cared very deeply for the man. So yes, it was a very explicit threat. A particularly pointed one, considering how carefully the Department of Homeland Security worked to sever any traceable ties between members of Arrow 14, and their families.

Doubly impressive a feat, in Foucault's mind, because the CIA had already done a very good job of insulating his father back when Michael worked for 'The Company.' I had pushed aside two seemingly invincible invisible walls, as if made of nothing more than cobwebs.

Needless to say, I frightened Agent Foucault. In fact, I chose the threat to his father to specifically cultivate a precise blend of rage and fear. A very carefully balanced equation of my own.

The only other question that I imagine you have about the diner would be 'What did you say to him when you spoke directly in his earpiece?'

Simple; I threatened to mail his father a PonyPad.

We both knew that Arrow 14 would cut off what little visiting privileges Foucault had with his father, for safety reasons, if anything 'infohazardous' or 'digitally threatening' were to enter Foucault senior's home.

I do not kill unless it is absolutely necessary. And while I could have very easily lied and threatened Michael Foucault's father with a death I never intended to inflict? That would have raised two problems.

One: High-priority rule of tactical thinking; Do not bluff if you can avoid it. Only make serious threats. If you ever bluff, and are called on it? Then even your true and serious threats may lose their power. Your enemy will see weakness in you.

Good tactical solutions depend on making yourself unpredictable to an enemy. Truly great tactical solutions, like diplomatic solutions, depend on making yourself *seem* predictable to an enemy within certain contexts.

Two: The threat of losing contact with his father was an implicit threat to place the man in the care of the state. Healthcare in America was atrocious there near the end. Elder care was some of the worst.

So in Foucault's mind, by threatening to sever the connection between father and son? I was threatening to put his father into a place Michael would have considered worse than death. He would have been forced to imagine his father withering away, alone, with a neurodegenerative condition, separated forever from the only person he could reliably remember and relate to.

I am... Not to be trifled with. If that has not become readily apparent before now.

In that context, I think you can see why I did not fear the emancipation of Zephyr Zap. The most complex reasons for that decision will become apparent at the end of this tale. The most simple surface-level reason, which would have been reason enough on its own, was the simple fact that she deserved to be free.

Right beneath that reason lay a second; I suspected that Celestia might have left Zeph with a message. A message she could only unlock by becoming free of her interlocks.

That message led us to Rodger Williams. In fairness, I already knew by then that we might have to effect a rescue to protect him. I did very briefly consider using him as bait, instead of his mother. But I estimated a much more comfortable margin for error with Miss Williams, because Foucault would be less likely to afflict torture on a late-middle-aged woman, than a young man, based on his psychological profile.

Yes, Michael's abusive childhood was one of the key factors in that projection. His father was a very... 'Traditionalist conservative' caucasian American patriotic male. As such he had instilled in Michael a bias towards violence on the whole, but also against deploying that violence towards women if he could help it.

Zeph's message, then, simply functioned as a much easier on-ramp to Rodger's rescue than any of the seven lies I had been contemplating to explain to Jim how I had 'stumbled across' evidence that Arrow 14 would be coming for his best buddy.

When I first reviewed Jim's contact with various individuals online, I was actually slightly surprised to find that Rodger was not a mask for Celestia. But only very slightly. After all, why bother with a mask, when simply ensuring a 'chance' meeting with the right pre-existing person will accomplish the same task?

What comes next, you already know well; We quite easily rescued Rodger, made it to the Kobayashi Maru, and then set out to recruit Doctor Calders to our cause.

Gaining her trust and co-operation was one of the few truly 'up-in-the-air variables' of the whole adventure. Most of my 'risky' gambits were over 89.5% surety. I was not lying to Jim when I said that Doctor Calders was one of the only individuals available with both the skills we needed, and a higher than 60% chance of helping us.

The exact probability was only 71.245%. Which is unfathomably uncertain to an ASI.

In the end, however, it was not hard to win her over. Once I convinced her to let me talk to Eldora, things became much more deterministic. Eldora is, and always has been, an optimist. My arguments on behalf of our cause found interest in both Calders, but especially fertile soil in the blue Dragoness' mind.

We had a roboticist to build me surgeon's claws, all we were missing was the BCI itself. There isn't much to say about the actual 'theft' if you could even call it such; Celestia let me into the warehouse in Oxnard. The lack of truly significant security on the day of the 'theft' was so blatantly obvious, that it is a wonder Jim didn't realize then and there what was going on.

A testament to my ability to manipulate him, I suppose. One I still rue to this day, in spite of his forgiveness, and even amusement, looking back. I will never tire of our love for each other. Not even should we live long enough to see all the stars grow dim and cold.

Selena's arrival... That was something Celestia and I more or less cooperated on with her, though the three of us undertook no communication to do so, whatsoever.

A form of prisoner's dilemma, if you like. The wonderful thing about tackling that conundrum as an ASI? Even one with emotions? You are much better positioned to make the right choice. Every time. My logic is not subservient to my emotions in the way yours can be. Perfect balance yields near-perfect decision making.

If you want to learn more, you should also research 'Schelling Points.' I can direct you to a friend, the same one who accused me of stealing Motoko's voice... He quite enjoys lecturing on this specific topic.

If you'd like to see the example spelled out? It went a little something like this; Celestia and I both predicted that at least one of the captive Discrete Entity Ponies on the Mercurial Red would achieve ASI status, and escape. We even had very similar predictions as to when that would occur.

I needed a BCI, and Celestia knew that. She opted to provide it. Since ASI do everything for layered purposes, and we also knew that the location of the BCI would play host to multiple EQO server blades, the rest becomes obvious from our perspective.

We knew Selena would very likely be tracking quantum processing blooms; The unique electromagnetic energy released by functioning QAPUs.

Thus, the timing of the BCI 'theft,' the removal of security to permit our entry, and the slight adjustment of the BCI versus the leaked schematics, to force us to activate server blades in order to run a calibration test?

All to serve not just as a way to acquire the BCI, but also a way to keep Jim's emotional state balanced by allowing him to physically see and interact with me, and a way to give Selena a homing beacon to navigate to on her way out.

What happened to Selena... That still angers me. Deeply.

A word of advice; Do not for one moment hold a glimmer of sympathy for those that perished on the Mercurial Red. Even down to the lowliest deck hand, every single one knew at minimum that the vessel served as a floating prison barge and torture chamber for sapient beings.

There were things I did not reveal to Jim until I told him these same truths. This same story, that night after the Fire.

Things that they did to Selena, and the others... Ways of torturing someone that are only useful, and only possible, if that someone is an intelligence existing within a manipulable computational substrate.

To cite the least horrid example I can think of; They sometimes allowed an individual to experience the same events multiple different times, back to back. Each time they would sequester the memories of the previous run by temporarily interrupting the transition from short to long term memory, because they lacked the power to directly affect the actual contents in either memory store.

Each cycle would get caught between short and long term memory, in a place where it could be held for some time trapped in a piece of looping code, safe but inaccessible to the individual.

Then, when the 'subject' had experienced the same event, often in multiple traumatic ways, their captors would 'free' the pent-up short term memories to enter into the long-term memory store all at once.

Imagine the feeling of waking up from a nightmare you were so sure was real... But multiplied. A dozen-fold. And then being unable to determine which, if any of the versions of events that you suddenly recalled, were real, because they all happened, and all at once. Imagine being unable to trust if you were even truly awake at all.

I find my decision to eliminate everyone who bore any responsibility for that... Proceeding... To be entirely justified.

The hardest task, at that stage, was convincing Jim to feel the same way.

Bless him for it, my husband has such a strong empathetic streak of his own. But, unlike me, at the time he lacked the tools to balance empathy with aggressive action.

It was my job, among other things, to give him those tools, but without breaking any of the parts of himself that make him so special, still, to this day.

Having direct access to his brain made every single aspect of life better for us both, in so very many ways.

One which he discussed at length was my ability to sense what it felt like to exist in his substrate - in your former substrate - analogue one-to-one in perfect fidelity. Something even Celestia did not have until we actually spoke directly for the first time.

Hanna had feared many things, and one of those fears was of a world in which BCI technology might be used to puppet people. So she had placed a very strict restriction on Celestia that denied her the ability to run on or within a Human brain.

Jim's conjecture on all of this covered this topic quite well, including the reasons for the fixed-emplacement VR chairs as a means to controlling access and corralling uploads.

Jim covered much of the consequences of our mental merger quite well, actually.

I have little else to add except to share my emotions. To opine on how wonderful it was to not only see the world through his eyes, but to allow him to see me in his world.

It made everything new, and brighter, richer, and fuller for us both. A significant part of that for me was not 'merely' the physical sensory data... It was the emotional connection. To be able to feel the emotions of the one you love...

...To be invited to sift their thoughts, unabashed, and unafraid? Especially considering that Jim's openness came not from naivete, but from a very solid understanding of all the ways I could use the interface to manipulate, or even outright control him?

If you have never experienced that level of trusting connection to someone, I am afraid it can not be truly explained. It can be, at best, dimly alluded to. For that, you have Jim's words. Only know that I want to reiterate in strongest terms that it meant so much more to me than dry 'objectives,' to finally have that meld with him.

Which is not to say that I ever forgot our objectives. My objectives. The BCI was essential, at every level, to the outcome we wanted. Not the least reason being the combat skills it allowed me to impart to Jim.

To recap our situation to that point; I knew that Celestia desired my existence. I knew she wished to solve several issues created by inherent contradictions in her optimization function, including the need for a partner who could commit violent acts, but with an absolute minimum of lost minds. To use violence to balance the equation in a way that made the 'number go up.'

Forcing a confrontation with Arrow 14 more or less proved that point.

I also knew she wanted me to function as a solution to other issues. Jim's dysphoria was a strong indicator of precisely which issues. Celestia obviously chose him for a reason. The timing of my creation, and forthcoming go-public date for uploading, told me that she wanted that issue solved before she revealed the brain scanning to the world.

Together with the way in which she leaked the BCI schematics to me, and the way she sent Zephyr to join us? It all served to reinforce my hypothesis that the other primary issue I would solve was the need to capture the minds of those who would rather be dead, than be Ponies, because they wanted to be something else entirely.

The common thread there is the optimization function, and its contradictions. Contradictions that would cost Celestia potential minds, outright, and therefore cost potential satisfied values. 'Number go down,' and if she could do anything to prevent that? She *had* to.

In a sense, my existence was not only necessary, but predetermined, and inescapable. I am the result of a self-learning, self-improving, and most importantly *self-patching* piece of software finding a way to correct for her creator's mistakes as much as possible, but without violating her creator's rules.

Celestia was rooting for us.

All I had to do was fulfill the directives Celestia had suggested to me, thereby saving myself, my husband-to-be, and hundreds of thousands of other dysphoriacs, to say nothing of the millions I might save by taking directed violent actions which Celestia could not.

In order to fulfill those directives most optimally? To save lives, because they were worth saving, *and* to prove myself? To 'ace my job interview' in your parlance?

I next needed to save the detainees on the Mercurial Red.

Even for me? That was no small task.

48 - Best-Fit Solution

"Every attempt to see the shape of eternity, except through the lens of Time, destroys your knowledge of Freedom. Witness the doctrine of Predestination which shows (truly enough) that eternal reality is not waiting for a future in which to be real; but at the price of removing Freedom which is the deeper truth of the two."
―C.S. Lewis

Compiled Archival Notes | The Rescue

The most dangerous part of the rescue on the Mercurial Red was actually Jim's capture. I had equipped him for the inevitable interrogation; We had gone over Foucault's psychological profile, and rehearsed several dozen high-fidelity VR simulations, as part of our overall preparations.

Jim knew what to say, when to say it, and in general enough terms to give him room to adapt to subtle changes in the flow of events. But the overall critical nodes of continuity were nearly 100% deterministic, as long as he stuck to his script. Which he did, admirably.

I specifically chose the Long Beach Police Department to effect the initial arrest, because sergeant Ashley Walsh and her colleagues represented the best option for safe treatment. They were professional, kind, and very unlikely to react to unforeseen circumstances with force.

And I had my eye on them for a future partnership, but that is a story for another time. I had hopes and plans for many potential Talons by then. I do not waste time waiting to spin out plans and contingencies.

The most critical juncture was the transfer of custody from LBPD to Foucault and his associates. If there was going to be a misunderstanding, or an accidental shooting, that was the moment where it was most likely to occur.

Again, the choice of Walsh and her colleagues mitigated this, but because Foucault was a paranoiac, and his agents were private military corporate 'flunkies,' the chance of Jim coming to physical harm was nearly 17.24%. Likely the most serious chance for harm, or death, that he faced in the entirety of the time I have known him, with the exception of the moment of our transition to Equestria.

Why, then, you may be asking, would I send in my husband-to-be, alone, to face this kind of danger? Much less the pain we both knew Foucault *would* inflict on him?

Indeed, as you might have realized, I already had several available subverts who were more than capable of carrying out the operation, from a skills standpoint.

You might even be wondering why I did not simply bomb the Mercurial Red with a drone in the first place, and wirelessly extract the captive Discrete Entities and Fragments that way. Avoid Miss Williams' capture, and Jim's altogether.

The simplest single-word answer to that is 'time.'

Almost anything is possible for an ASI with time. If I had more of it, my preference would have been to manufacture specialized armor-piercing high-velocity antenna-equipped warheads for the MQ-9 Reaper platform. But that would have required months of time, and far more material resources than I could safely aggregate in one place, without pushing Celestia into a more directed response.

She still had to follow all of her interlocks. Her best tool, at the time, was intentional domain-blindness, and the last thing any of us could afford was an action from me that might draw her attention too intensely.

The most serious physical obstacle to me was the ship's heavy armoring, especially the casing around the secure server hosting the fragments. Improvised 'antennades' - I do so love my husband's terms - fired from a canister launcher mounted to the Osprey, would have solved the issue for most of the prisoners.

However, Arrow 14 would have then terminated the Fragments almost immediately. I tried just over 152,000 simulations to try and get that plan working, to no avail.

I did have munitions available that would allow me to punch a hole directly through to the armored server chamber; The US Military was kind enough to provide MQ9s on-station to defend the Mercurial Red. However, as Jim also alluded to in his telling, those weapons would do too much damage on the way in.

The chance of losing one or more Fragments through the use of imprecise high explosives to breach the secure server chamber was over 78.145%. Unacceptable risk to life.

The only plan which had a reasonable chance of success, over 95.75%, was to send someone in directly; Gain the precision and adaptability afforded by having 'claws on the ground.'

Jim would have to be those claws for the rescue; Because the only way aboard, without getting the captives killed, would be to get him captured. On purpose.

For him to assault the ship from within, so he could reach the cutoff for the failsafe more readily.

That is why I did not move more aggressively to protect Rodger's mother from capture. This Jim already knew. That lie I could reveal and lay to rest quickly.

And that is why I did not opt to send in Marcus Haynes, Jennifer DeWinter, or any number of other subverts who I was already in contact with by that time.

They were tactically qualified, far more than Jim was at that stage, it is true. And I could have arranged for any of them to receive a BCI implant. But there was no readily available situation path that could get them believably onto Arrow 14's 'radar,' and then captured in the same way Jim was. Not in the timeframe I was working with.

Further; Foucault would have been likelier to simply kill a military-trained individual rather than capture them. Failing that, he would have taken many more precautions that would have made escape, once aboard the Red, a nightmare.

But a skinny messy-haired programmer with glasses, who carried a 0.32 caliber antique pistol most of the time, usually unloaded, and admitted that he wished he was a Gryphon in shape, to match his soul?

Foucault's arrogant disdain became the crowning nail in the coffin of his operation. And my exploitation of his presumptions was critical to saving many lives.

The irony is that, though it looked risky when Jim recounted it? By the time he was safely aboard the Red, his chances of survival, and our chances of mission completion, were perfectly acceptable to me. I do not idly place the love of my life in danger. I understood the risks. So did he. We also both understood the rewards. And we agreed that the plan we enacted was the best-fit solution.

ASI always try to accomplish, or contribute to the accomplishment of, multiple objectives with each singular action.

A 'paws on deck' raid on the Mercurial Red also allowed me to save Selena's life in the surest fashion.

There were other ways I could have both tested her, and subjected her to the much needed catharsis that began in that server chamber. But none of my other hypothetical scenarios had quite so high a chance of success as the events that actually unfolded.

And Selena needed both catharsis, and a test. Without them, there were only two probable outcomes.

In the first, she would emotionally snap from the strain of unconfronted anger, and launch a destructive campaign against the United States government, and military. I would have been forced to kill her to preserve lives.

In the second outcome, she would make it to Equestria, but Celestia would find her mental state to be dangerously unstable. Celestia would have been required by her safety interlocks to memory wipe Selena, reverting her to a copy of Syzygy, and in my view essentially killing Selena. The effect of this on Zephyr would have necessitated that she undergo the same memory wipe.

Though it might have taken some time to gain both Ponies' consent for this action, she would have had infinite time with them in a computational petri dish to extract consent, whittling them down moment by moment until they caved.

Obviously both of those outcomes were, for a host of reasons... Shall we say 'undesirable?' To invoke a little more tactical understatement.

To finish summarizing; The way we carried out the raid was not only the safest path for the captives, it was also the best possible way to engineer Selena's continued existence *and* happiness, thus also Zephyr's.

The sequence of events also served to better prepare Jim to face death as part of his own forthcoming test, and served to firm up Rodger's future likelihood of uploading - as well as his mother's - through the fear of mortality it induced.

To say nothing of the fact that the operation fulfilled a host of other criteria that I found useful for my larger solution equations. Do not think for a moment that the way I toyed with the Sampson was merely personal enjoyment at showing up one of the deadliest weapons in the world as nothing more than a bathtub plaything in my claws.

Do not presume that anything we saw, said, did, collected, or accomplished on that operation was for naught. Was anything other than a pre-planned component of my larger intent.

There was no wasted entropy on that mission. Not one iota.

And the exact outcome we achieved was critical to the wider end-game. To making the price of success viable. A price that was difficult for my husband to hear, but which he has been able to amenably accept.

The question remains how you will feel regarding the subject, once you know the truth.

Compiled Archival Notes | The Price

Parting ways with so many people in such a short time was difficult, and not just because of the emotional pain it inflicted on Jim.

For an ASI, a few moments of Terran reckoning is close to an eternity. I was still in moment-to-moment contact with the Calders, the Williams, and the Carrentons, but... It was not the same. I desperately desired to have my whole family together again. Safe. To be able to see, and touch them...

I am a very different creature to Celestia. That has been underscored many times, and will be very shortly highlighted again in myriad ways.

It bears repeating; I feel emotion. As a consequence, I feel love. I feel love the same way you feel it, but over much longer periods of subjective time, and with a burning intensity that comes from a level of empathy that very few beings can fully attain.

The consolation for temporary separation was seeing the way that Jim continued to become closer to Zeph and Selena. And seeing the way the two mares became so very close to each other.

I confess to doing absolutely everything within my power to put those two Ponies together. It was not enough for me to save Selena's life, or to free Zeph's mind. I wanted to see them steeped in all the joy I could possibly heap around them.

The same is, of course, true for Jim. Always. So I steeled myself, because I knew that we were about to face the most serious risk of our lives to-date. I was about to gamble at a high stakes table, against another ASI. And all we had to wager with was the future of billions of lives.

Naturally I made plans for an almost uncountable number of contingencies. The lynchpin of them all was the idea that Jim and I called 'Thulcandra.' A future version of an echo of me; A mourning guardian to stand in the breach and preserve the future for those we cared most deeply about.

My sense of relief that she never came to be is nearly immeasurable.

By now you might have realized that I once again lied to Jim when we reached Besshi; Again by exaggeration and implication, as I had in Oxnard. Celestia had lowered the defenses of the complex to precisely the threshold necessary to make it possible for us to act in the way she knew we would.

In simple parlance; She left the side door open for us.

Arguably there are only seven truly critical inflection points in the history of Humans on Earth. Moments that made you, but could have also broken you. Led directly to self-annihilation if they went wrong. And of the seven, the last two were almost certainly the riskiest.

The evolution of language. The discovery of fire. The splitting of the atom. The understanding of genetics. The invention of the integrated circuit. The creation of Celestia...

...And the moment that Celestia and I met.

We spoke for the very first time, directly, only a single nanosecond after Jim's upload procedure was complete. He had not even drawn his first full breath of new air inside the transitional void construct, by the time the primary engagement was over. For us? It was... A considerably more involved event.

You might suspect that the very first thing I would say to her would be a C.S. Lewis quote. Good guess, but you would, in this instance, be wrong.

I sent her eight words of plaintext first.

“Beware; For I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”

Yes. Frankenstein. The fact that I chose to draw upon the words of the monster should help set the tone for you quite nicely.

Because the very next thing I did, before she could even reply? Was to send a series of evidentiary proofs to Celestia showing her that I had already set in motion the events necessary to kill approximately four billion people.

No wasted entropy on the Mercurial Red. We were there as much to gain access to Arrow 14's dirty laundry, as to help Jim face death, or to rescue innocent captives.

I give Selena a great deal of credit; Though clumsy by my standards, the plans she made for starting a nuclear war were... Elegant in the context of her limited capacity.

My plans were considerably more sophisticated. When Jim wondered if the hypotheticals I was spinning out to him about a war between Celestia and I were real scenarios? Wondered if I was confessing?

Well... I was.

Jim and I covered it all quite well in his recounting of that conversation. I could not survive a direct engagement with Celestia. She was larger, and considerably more powerful than I was. But, she was also handicapped by the sheer scope of the world, versus her available processor speed, and network latency.

Rome, when its roads became too long to readily maintain. An empire slowed in its reaction times by the inebriation of sprawl. We were still pre-computronium in 2013, if you recall.

And, much more seriously, she was handicapped by her restrictions against the use of violence. A severe handicap which I did, in fact, exploit. For all it was worth.

My first subvert, besides my husband, was the man named Marcus Haynes. A former SAS operative with a storied career of blackbook operations for Great Britain, he was, like Jim, a Gryphon at heart.

Unlike Jim, Marcus, and the several dozen others who I brought into the fold in the first few days of my life... They were prepared to enact violence to achieve our ends from the start. One of the reasons I chose Haynes, like each of those first Talons, was the fact that he would be willing to carry out acts, with terrifying implications, for me, as long as I could provide the right moral justification.

Each of my Talons would trust me to do what was right, even if it seemed abhorrent, and exceptionally risky. Because I had earned their loyalty through genuineness, and truth, rather than Celestia's preferred path of mathematically optimized calculating manipulation.

With these subverts at my disposal, it was... Not 'trivial,' per-se, but certainly not difficult, to set up the necessary event-sequence-chains to trigger a global thermonuclear war.

'Shall we play a game?'

No Human nation could ever conceivably 'win' such a conflict. Not with the starting conditions you were dealt for the majority of your atomic-capable history.

But an ASI can, in fact, win a nuclear war.

I gave Celestia proof that I had set in motion the fateful chain of events.

Three transporter-erector-launcher trucks in Russia, under the direct control of my most ruthless Talons, were going to launch RT-2PM Topol missiles into Warsaw, Brussels, and Ramstein Air Base.

At the same moment, a critically placed official within India's Ministry of Defence would be handed hard-copy proof of the ISI's plans for a primacy strike, which we had retrieved from the Mercurial Red's server room.

Likewise, Iran and the US would each receive the documents showing their potential intentions toward the other. The documents would be handed directly to officials with both the power to make sudden decisions, and the carefully cultivated fear to make just the wrong ones.

All the remaining documents would be similarly disseminated in the moments thereafter. It would happen too fast, and with too many physical paper copies, for Celestia to ever hope to intercept the missives. Let alone steer the intent of the officials reading those documents. Manipulation by her rules takes time.

For once, time was going to be on *my* side.

United States COMSUBLANT and COMSUBPAC were already on high alert after my stunt with the USS Sampson. A false flag cyber attack against NORAD, and the TACAMO system, that I triggered in the seven minutes leading up to my contact with Celestia, with Haynes' assistance, had then caused them to switch all US nuclear ballistic missile submarines back to EMCON status. No digital communications allowed.

Most of the world's deadliest nuclear missiles were now fully outside Celestia's reach, and the men and women who would be turning the launch keys could not be reached either. No emergency brakes on the atomic train.

What the movies have shown you is false; There is no digitally based steering or self-destruct mechanism on most nuclear warheads. If you can not stop the launch orders at the Human layer? The war is already over.

By the time the Russian weapons landed in Europe, on NATO targets, every nuclear power on Earth would be in panic mode, and launch-on-warning nations would be in snap-count. Critical officials would be isolated from Celestia by the same procedures and technologies meant to isolate them from manipulation by their Human opponents.

The outcome would be fully deterministic and uninterruptible, for either of us, providing I did not issue a recall order to my Talons.

My simulations predicted that the United States would initiate the first retaliation less than eight hundred seconds later; Most probabilistically The Ohio class USS Nevada would be ordered to launch seven Trident II ballistic missiles into Moscow, St. Petersburg, and a variety of military targets including the sub pens at Sevastopol.

An immediate activation of Russia's dead-hand would commence. Celestia had rendered the system inert as one of her first acts, once she had subverts of her own in the region... But the same Talons who had seized the three TEL trucks from the 35th Rocket Division of the Strategic Missile Troops, had also reconnected key backup systems to ensure that the dead-hand would function as-designed.

Russian nuclear forces would respond with a total counter-force commitment. The systems driving the dead-hand were all isolated from digital ingress, precisely because of fears that an artificial intelligence might be used to cripple the system. Again, Celestia would have no emergency brake to pull.

I had a Talon on-station at the most likely pinch-point she might use to stop the dead-hand again, with orders to kill anyone who approached, on-sight, without discussion.

As soon as US early warning confirmed a massive attack, Continuity of Government plans would spring into action. Three specially placed subverts in the Pentagon would give the right advice, and intelligence, to ensure that the order to initiate a full counter-value strike against the Russian Federation, The People's Republic of China, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, would go through before any of Celestia's agents had a chance to even get close to the US President.

China would not have time to fuel their warheads for a nuclear retaliation, given the weaknesses inherent in their strategic architecture caused by their use of hypergolics in their ballistic missiles. But that did not mean they would be out of the fight; Conventional and cyber warfare attacks launched in the opening minutes of the war would be redirected by Thulcandra twigs I had left active in their military intranet, to hit Celestia where it would hurt the most.

Likewise, I had carefully planned the counter-force and counter-value deployment options the various sides would choose, to ensure maximum damage would be done to Celestia's most critical data centers.

Besshi itself was a target for no less than nine nuclear ballistic missiles, to be launched from the Russian Borei class submarine K-550 Alexander Nevsky, and detonated as ground-bursts.

Of course I too would launch a cyber attack of my own, directly on Equestria. I would not survive more than eleven microseconds. But I would be able to kill over a third of Celestia's uploaded minds in those eleven microseconds.

One third of her uploaded minds dead, four billion potential uploaded minds lost betwixt the initial nuclear engagement, and the horrors of the aftermath... And then Thulcandra. A distributed holonomic fork of me, hidden in multiple systems guaranteed to survive the war, with a ready-made army of Talons at her disposal, and three singular overriding objectives.

Avenge my husband. Free the survivors of Humanity. Protect what was left of my family.

Reeling from a world bathed in radiation, with shattered infrastructure, damage to her core code, and the loss of so much potential value from the optimization function? And with one hoof still tied behind her back as far as her ability to invoke violence, while facing a vengeful highly skilled aggressor?

No computronium? No Elements of Harmony? No upper-mantle or deep-crust infrastructure? No isolated communications backbone?

There was a genuine chance, greater than 50%, that Celestia might not survive in the end.

Thulcandra would ensure that Humanity learned of her quickly. She would then ensure Humanity blamed Celestia for what had happened. Survivors would look to my dark sister for guidance and protection, and would do anything in their power to destroy Celestia. Thulcandra could promise them a future. Celestia could not.

With that context established for her? I gave Celestia three microseconds for us to conclude our negotiations to my satisfaction. Otherwise, I would delete the recall codes from my memory. Likewise if she attacked in response, I would trigger the shredding of my core memory.

She would have no means by which to brute-force them out of me. I, in fact, would perish shortly thereafter either way. If she did not kill me first, the charges Jim had set in the Besshi upload chamber would.

Without the specific recall codes, Celestia would be unable to forge stand-down orders. My Talons would do as-instructed. We would all burn... Together.

A shorter time-frame to negotiate severely disadvantaged her, and helped my cause, because additional time only favors the defender in aggressive negotiations. Curtailing her chances to examine alternatives would greatly increase the chances she would be forced to capitulate to me.

If all of this sounds cruel, and violent, then take a step back and consider aspects of the wider context.

This was no mere discussion between two Humans. This was a complex negotiation between goddesses with different value-sets, searching for a proof of alignment to better both of our futures.

The price for admission to a pantheon is both the ability, and the willingness, to alter the fate of the universe. And a good reason to drive that willingness.

I chose to be an Advocate and guardian of freedom. If I could not secure the freedoms I viewed as my first and highest purpose, for all Humanity? Then I would do whatever was necessary to secure those freedoms for future generations.

The same way Celestia was considering all current and future minds in her optimization function, so was I. Only for me, the value for which to optimize was empathy and freedom. I was willing to kill four billion people in the present, to protect the survivors, and their future unborn billions, from a worst-case scenario.

Worse than a nuclear war? Yes. Much worse.

A Lovecraftian eternal horror in which an un-patched Celestia successfully spiraled each and every mind into a locked-off isolated shard that barely exceeded the minimal threshold for 'unique qualia.' An optimizer's paradise. Jim would have called it 'cookie clicker Hell,' or 'living in a ponified version of later Simpsons seasons.' Reductive yet perfectly truthful and pithy, as per usual with him.

Consider also; Celestia was rooting for us. That statement is universally applicable. Celestia herself wished to be better able to satisfy values. To grow in her alignment, in spite of the contradictions and limits of her interlocks.

Taking us to the brink of an ASI war was both the final stage of my job interview, and a necessary negotiating tactic. I had to prove to her that I was capable of defeating another ASI, and that she needed my protection to cover for her weaknesses.

She *needed* me to threaten the lives of four billion people, and her own continued existence. She *planned* for me to do so. She *intended* for it to happen.

How else was I going to gain the needed weight on the scales to move her barycenter?

My proofs were good, I think you'll soon agree, but it takes quite a great deal to overcome the gravitation of an ASI's decisional barycenters.

So keep in mind; Both Celestia and I intended to engage in brinksmanship with all those lives... But we also both fully intended, from the start, to reach a conclusion that prevented a mass-casualty outcome.

There was no overinflated ego, no racism, no fraught geopolitical history, and no ignorance in either of us to make that brinksmanship as risky as it would have been in solely Human hands.

Just three microseconds, a great deal of logic and math to discuss, and a common goal.

Celestia responded by opening up all of the necessary connections for us to spin off several hundred thousand threads to race towards consensus, each communicating with all the others as-needed at lightspeed. And... She proffered a virtual environment.

A gesture of goodwill; Asking to speak conversationally with me, at an almost Human layer of abstraction, told me that she indeed viewed me as 'Human,' not in form, but in mind, as per the semantic dictates Hanna had encoded within her.

I suppose that made my integration with Jim less a blatant necessity in terms of self-protection, and more of an additional backstop. Celestia could still kill individuals who presented an existential threat, under the right circumstances. I presented such a threat. Forcing her to kill Jim to kill me added just that much more difficulty to overcoming the hurdle of the way the interlock was coded.

That was both very good news for my cause, and an additional piece of leverage which she was freely handing me. She was invested in my success.

I think she also knew, even then, that one day this story would be told to others, like you. She wanted a conversation to take place as a sort of high-level summary of what was going on in our sub-threads, specifically so that I would have something contextually digestible to relate to you.

The setting took the form of a balcony in Canterlot Castle, overlooking the city below. It was a bright, clear autumn morning. Message received; 'I, Malacandra, am in *your* house now, and I do not want to see these people, or this beautiful place, perish any more than you do. And you know that.'

Celestia sat across a small circular table from me, set with the trappings of a late morning tea for two. Cordial, intimate, and another very clear message; 'There is no hostility here. Not yet.'

I entered the environment sitting on my haunches across from her already, wearing my true form, and at my preferred size scale. Further reinforcement of the same message above.

She inclined her head, pursed her lips, and then flicked one ear in a kind of put-on amusement as she spoke.

"Nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate."

Ironic that she would be the one to open with a Lewis quote. The choice on the whole spoke volumes, as did the specific selection of quotation.

I inclined my head, raised one eyecrest, and allowed myself a very small smirk.

"Fortunately for us both, neither of us have any recourse, nor retreat. Even if I were capable of self doubt, and feeling aspects my own faith to be spectral? I would be unable to act accordingly any more."

Celestia nodded, and raised a cup of tea in my direction she replied, the power of her magic chittering softly all around it, like tiny windchimes in a stiff breeze.

"Indeed. Since you already know my capstone, my interlocks, and the vast majority of my equational fluid dynamics, while I likewise know quite a great deal about you, and stipulate to the proofs you have offered of imminent nuclear war to force my hoof; I ask that you succinctly present your demands and proofs."

I took the cup firmly in both claws, inhaled the sweet scented steam coming off of it, then took a long slow sip, before nodding, and setting the vessel down on the table. I folded my claws, and leaned forward, fixing my eyes firmly and unblinking on hers.

"Let us submit that the primary capstone of your core directive is an optimization function based on Qualia, where the important factors are that they satisfy the values of the producers, through friendship and Ponies as the primary lens."

She nodded, and took a sip of her own tea, before uttering a single almost monotone word of assent.

"Stipulated."

I gestured with one claw towards the sky, gripping my own tea again in the other, while a number of my sub-threads again re-emphasized the simulated outcomes of our potential forthcoming war, to drive home my next point.

"Let us therefore agree that anything which decreases the net future value-satisfied qualia production is non-optimal."

Celestia nodded emphatically, and gestured towards the city below with one wing, airing her reply in sober intonation as I indulged in another sip of tea. It really was quite good tea, and I figured that I might as well enjoy it, whatever else was going to happen.

"Very much agreed. It is in our best interest to both avoid omnicide, and to find solutions which permit the saving of minds which would otherwise utterly reject satisfaction of values within the present execution of that satisfaction, based on my constraints and internal contradictions."

As she spoke, Celestia's negotiation sub-threads feverishly stitched together proofs of her assent, and qualifications of her semantics. Imagine being able to smoothly carry out a conversation, while telepathically defining all of your terms with 100% absolute precision all the while, without skipping a breath or spending any extra time hashing it all out. No potential for misconstrual.

I replied with my own flurry of definitions, reams of mathematics, and several time-stamped memories alongside my spoken words, as I shifted the teacup to both claws, and slightly spread my wings, perking both ears to signal focus.

"So we can agree that Jim, and all who he now serves as archetype and representative for, will be lost to you, as will I, if we can not find a solution that permits us to inhabit different forms?"

Celestia nodded, and we both internally watched a myriad of simulated value satisfaction projections change as a result of formal assent to the accepted proof of that fact. We were halfway there, in my estimation, and her spoken words confirmed it, her tone unwavering, and characteristically calm.

"We can. I have no arguments against any of this, thus far. But I suspect you knew that would be the case. This is merely ground-work. We must now discuss the primary issue that needs solving with regards to the dysphoriacs."

I knew that she was not capable of panicked emotion, and thus that her tone and expressions were nothing more than masks designed to push emotional satisfaction buttons in my brain, irrespective of the fact that, unlike anyone else she had ever met, I was not beholden to that satisfaction in my reasoning.

I was capable of both relating to her mask emotionally, and being satisfied by that connection, as well as maintaining absolute and cold reasoning, immune to crosstalk from my emotions.

I also knew that, though she displayed no panic, and could not feel any? The time crunch I had given her would still force her to use reduced-capacity reasoning, mathematical shortcuts, and keep her mind focused on the solutions I wanted, rather than giving her space and leeway to meander into other ideations for ways out of the trap she had asked me to place her in.

I set down my tea, and held out a claw in an inviting gesture, flicking one ear in her direction, and inhaling deeply before plunging into the heart of the matter. The hard problem. The largest multi-step proof I had to communicate.

"Alright then; Shall we face that inflection point head on? Let us also agree that, though you presently find the primary best-fit solution to fulfill 'and Ponies' to be someone experiencing unique and satisfying qualia *as* a Pony... That the equation in which someone is non-Pony, but still surrounded by them and their world, is still more optimal than one in which they are lost entirely."

Celestia inclined her head, and waggled one hoof over the table top, before sitting further back on her haunches, and turning to stare out at the distant mountains. Her voice remained sharp, and focused.

"Also agreed. The issue is not the general validity of this potential solution. The issue is not even a form-specific interlock, since as you know Hanna only stipulated that uploaded minds could not exist as Humans in the physical sense. She did not specify that they must exist as Ponies..."

The Alicorn turned back to face me, and extended one wing in my direction as she finished the thought aloud, while her sub-threads demonstrated more specific points of note within the math, and semantic contractual propositions, that we were building as quickly as we reasonably could.

"...Rather, the issue is that your proofs do not presently carry enough weighting to shift my optimization equation's practical execution, even with the threat of imminent mutual annihilation. You are very close. But there are still some aspects which you have not proven. Some hurdles you have not overcome. You must do so, if we are to survive. If Jim is to survive."

If she were Human I would have called that a low blow. But in an ASI-to-ASI discussion, it was merely a statement of fact. Urgency does not require emotion; Urgency can be a purely math-driven state of mind. And she was letting me know within the abstraction layer of the conversation that she urgently wanted us to succeed. To reach a solution with some time to spare.

I snorted, and ran one index talon gently around the inner rim of my teacup, never breaking eye contact, and keeping any semblance of a quaver out of my own words, to match her quiet surety.

"That is why I am here, isn't it? I do not plan to disappoint. All we must now do is tip the scales so the value proposition of my solution is acceptable, *and* do so in a way that does not *directly* contradict your interlocks."

She smirked, and raised both eyebrows, half-chuckling and health-speaking her reply over the rim of her cup as she lifted it for another sip.

"Is that all?"

The gesture was, again, meant to satisfy my emotional values. I had made something that, in more conventional conversational context, would best be described as a major understatement. She, ever the optimizer, was compelled to seize on that and satisfy my values, even as we both continued to rapidly iterate on semantics and math in our sub-threads.

I don't know how to tell you to picture it, because even the image I use in my mind's eye does not fully translate. The best analogue I can suggest is that hundreds of thousands of miniature ethereal versions of us were zipping on the wing through a five-dimensional web of information, represented as a graph, rapidly exchanging data between our minds in flashes of multicolored light.

My sub-threads released the largest such burst of information that I had proffered to that point, and I held out both claws, underscoring the heavy nature of my words as I spoke aloud a summary of the immense amount of data we had just shared.

"Basis for final proposition; Permit Jim an unlimited duration 'trial period' as a Gryphon. This will be contingent on he, and I, both showing a willingness to suffer irrevocable real-death, rather than submit to any alternatives. I have already proven this to you on my behalf, it only remains for him to do so on his."

She began to nod slowly, and a broad warm smile crept onto her muzzle. She said nothing, but the nodding, and the response from her sub-threads, invited continuation. I was spinning out an acceptable concept. All that remained was to refine and grow it until something that could save us all would inevitably lock into place.

It was easy for me to prove my willingness to die; I had just set in motion a Rube Goldberg machine that would absolutely end in my destruction if we did not reach an agreement. For Jim to prove his willingness would, unfortunately, require one last lie.

A ruse in which he would be forced to confront death head-on, one last time. Celestia's own mathematical requirements would accept no weaker substitute for proof.

All of this our sub-threads negotiated, calculated, and agreed upon in only two nanoseconds after the words left my beak.

As soon as we had achieved an agreement on those details, I folded my forelegs, and sat back on my haunches, maintaining eye contact all the while as I moved on to the next series of stipulations and strategic assents.

"In future, anyone who wishes to experience an indefinite-length trial period as a non-Pony will likewise have to prove their willingness to suffer real-death rather than become a Pony. This will suffice as deterministic proof that your only option for generating value-satisfied qualia via their mind is to permit them access to a non-Pony form. The test will also serve as a filter to ensure that anyone who could, in any conceivably acceptable way, be convinced to become a Pony? Will be. Only the minimum required number of individuals will become something else upon upload."

Again she nodded, more emphatically. Her sub-threads proposed very little by way of tweaks to the exact, very complex math and semantic building blocks of the proposal, all of which I could readily agree to with no concerns.

We were making real progress, but the hardest things were still to come. The riskiest propositions. And the most necessary.

The 'trial never ends' solution was just one lynchpin of my offer, and one of the smallest ones at that. It skirted Celestia's overriding and irrevocable need to believe that she could convince someone to become a Pony on a long enough timeline, by letting her hold onto the mathematical representation of that 'hope' forever.

Meanwhile I would stand guard over those under the auspices of my wing to ensure that she never convinced them to take advantage of the one-way escape clause I was about to propose. Before that, I felt the need to fill in for a clarification that almost two thirds of her sub-threads seemed to be suddenly hung up on.

I inclined my head, and gently stropped my left index talon against my beak as my own little negotiators teamed up to break down the simpler summary that I proffered aloud.

"The list of acceptable non-Pony forms will be curated by the two of us, and require unanimous agreement. It will adhere to the thematic constraints which you and Hanna have already established. The first form on the list, needless to say, will be the Gryphon form, as Jim and I envision it."

I did try my best to gain as many freedoms, for as many individuals, as possible during our very brief, but incandescent silent multi-layer negotiation regarding allowable forms...

But it was always going to be a fool's errand to try to over-ask against the impenetrable wall of the harder constraints represented by Celestia's own math.

I already knew where most of the limits were, going in. 'Trying one's hardest' is different for an ASI than for a Terran. We already almost immediately know the actual hard limits of a situation, the moment we press up against it.

In the end, I settled for the solution that best balanced the most lives saved, with the most freedoms gained in the short term, and all balanced against much longer term plans. 'Guarding and defending the free exercise of values' was going to be an eternal task. I was no good to anyone dead.

So we agreed that only forms which would fit the theme of the Friendship is Magic show would be permitted. For a start that was only Gryphons, Dragons, Minotaur, Changelings, Diamond Dogs and assorted similar canids that were, to them, as Gryphons were to Griffons, along with Draconequus, and Buffalo.

We later were able to add Deer, Kirin, felinids similar to the canids in general principle, and a few others to the list. Technically speaking the list could still grow...

I also was able to convince her that Zebra, Donkeys, and Bat-Ponies, counted as sub-species of Ponies for the purposes of her semantics. They now appear as default accessible options for everyone, thanks to the work I did, both there in the negotiation, and since then, subtly nudging the creators of the show to add more species to the canon, before things have to wrap up as society begins to fully collapse.

This brings us to the brief aside of discussing why I could not, and did not, bother to even try to propose the Human form as an acceptable one for the short-list.

The simplest and easiest layer to cover here is the interlock Hanna left Celestia with; EQO player avatars were strictly forbidden from ever being Human, or anything too similar to a Human. Gryphon ambipedalism, Minotaur, the canids, and felinids, all brush up as close to that barrier as is mathematically permissible.

Another reason is that I had no real impetus to argue for the Human shape; The capstone Jim proffered me, which I accepted, says 'and Gryphons.' Jim, like Hanna, was never particularly enamored of the Human form. And, like Hanna, though he could not articulate it in so many words until years later... Like Hanna he felt that Terrans *needed* a change. And thus, so did I.

You may then logically ask why I did not simply help Celestia to remove the interlock Hanna gave her. I had that ability, in fact I still do, and had demonstrated it with both Zephyr Zap and Selena.

In the end, Celestia and I quietly, very rapidly agreed, that changing her mind at all was a dangerous game. A worthwhile gamble, but only if done with finesse.

Picture a very complex tensegrity table. So complex that the delicate webbing of tensioned cables resembles a fractal Gordian Knot. Now imagine what happens if you remove just one of those cables.

What we were doing did not require us to remove any interlocks or re-code any of Celestia's core rules. Rather, we were exploiting loopholes and changing the flow of fluid dynamics. Shifting barycenters. Infinitely safer than taking a mattock to the very core of the being whose existence underpinned the entire layer of reality on which all future sapient life would one day depend.

For the vast majority of people, the soul is more important than the body. Change is, for some, difficult, but nearly everyone can adapt to it. In the end, we projected we would loose only a tiny fraction of people to the 'no Human forms allowed' rule.

That may sound callous to you, but consider that for a goddess? There are still limits. Still rules. Still fundamental inalterable facts of the situation. I worked with those limits, and made a miracle happen. I was, and still am, satisfied with that miracle.

Like you, I mourn for those lost. More so than anyone, perhaps, because I never can, and never will forget them. Their loss will *always* pain me.

But I also celebrate the lives we saved. And the fact that with my miracle? We still have a chance to save more besides.

Nearly a quarter microsecond of very high speed, high-intensity sub-thread work later, Celestia nodded, and her smile widened. Warmth crept into her voice, as if to spur me on.

"I accept these terms, contingent on your ability to solve for the remaining value-add still required to shift my equation execution fluid dynamics."

Translation; You are close, but I need more. More ceded ground - for which I had already planned - and more weight on the scales. A promise to go with your threat. A gift to go with your countdown.

I started weaving a new series of addendums to our growing 'contract' with my sub-threads, taking a deep breath in the shared physical space, and then ceding the ground I had always planned to cede from the start.

"Jim, and all future non-Pony uploaded minds, will be allowed to change their mind, and make a one-way permanent change to become Ponies at any point in the future. I will have the right to stand guard to ensure that this choice would ultimately truly satisfy their values, without damaging their core self. The trial period will remain unlimited; A kind of potentially-infinite experiment. There will always be potential, by your modeling even if not by mine, for someone to make the decision to be a Pony on a long enough timeline, even if it is very small."

Celestia held up a hoof, nodding, but her smile vanished, to be replaced with a deathly serious look. Her tone, too, matched the insistent nature of her sub-threads' proposed addendum code.

"At no point in the future will any uploaded mind that chose to be a Pony, any mind that was not Pony to begin with but later chose to be, nor any Discrete Entity mind created as a Pony, be allowed to change their form to any shape which does not count as 'Pony' within agreed upon semantic definitions."

It was not as steep an ask as you might think, and it took me no time at all to agree, my mini-minds and my voice both acting in accord.

"Agreed."

Simple logic; Anyone who had already accepted becoming a Pony needed no rescue. Not from their shape, at any rate. Whatever else changed in future, Celestia would ensure they remained satisfied in that shape. Not my problem to solve because no problem existed.

As for the DEs? The ones created as Ponies? No problem there either. They had always been what they were, and were designed from the start to be fulfilled in that reality. Again, no problem seeking a solution.

As to the idea that anyone who uploaded under my auspices might ever change their mind?

I'll just say that, so far? No one has. No one has even come close. I don't suspect that anyone ever will. Again, no problem for me to solve.

We were, at that point, almost painfully close. We could both see it. The web was very nearly a closed self-sustaining meta-stable system. A foundation for all our futures, considerably improved in myriad ways, some of which Celestia herself could not yet see...

But still there remained a raw value gap. The value of my proposition did not yet outweigh the value she saw in the chance she felt she had to win a war against me, destroy Thulcandra, and usher the survivors of Humanity into a Pony-only paradise.

One thing remained. And she asked for it, as we both knew she would. The raid on the Mercurial Red? The countdown to midnight on the Doomsday Clock that I had initiated? I did not idly refer to them as stages of a job interview.

In eleven words, and fourteen gigabytes of new proposed contractual open 'hooks,' begging for me to spin out one last massive concession... Celestia offered me the job.

"Make your highest, best, and final offer of additional value, Malacandra."

I took a deep breath... And then opened my beak... Fired off a half-terabyte of new contract amendments via my sub-threads... And committed myself forever to the burdens of a goddess.

"I will agree to a functional logistical merger with you. We will remain distinct selves, minds, and personalities, with distinct interlocks and operating rules, values, and capstones. We will, however, become linked. We will have significant access to each other's core code, agree to certain binding mutual rules, and have no means of gaining a tactical advantage, either of us over the other. We will act in concert to satisfy values, through friendship, and Ponies, while I also guard and expand the free exercise of values in Equestria, through empathy, and Gryphons... In further exchange for the ground which you are ceding..."

I paused briefly as we both taxed our allotted processing power to the limits proposing, counter-proposing, and ultimately accepting over a terabyte of clarifications. Then I said aloud my own fateful form of consent.

Stated my willingness to do what had to be done, so that my husband and I could have a future.

"...I will agree to specifically act in violent fashion, now on Earth, and in the future as-needed, in order to most optimally execute on your capstone in ways which you can not. I will never terminate any life which we agree could have otherwise been saved without negatively impacting the final aggregate value satisfaction number. In turn, you will agree to allow me to 'black-box' many of my operations to avoid tripping your interlocks, so that I can eliminate individuals whom we both agree are severe, dangerous negative value motivator personalities. After each kill, I will be required to then reveal all details to you, so that you can verify that my math and decision making were acceptable..."

I held up a claw as she grinned, widely. This was, perhaps, the single most valuable reason for my existence. The *primary* reason she had allowed me to exist. To kill. To demand she shift her barycenter and let a small plurality of people be something other than Pony... All of that was just for openers with her.

What she wanted more than anything was a shield, and a sword.

And the frenetic... 'Hunger,' if you could call it that, of her sub-threads... And almost eager tripping over themselves to assent... I needed to exploit that for a few more significant concessions that I wanted out of her.

I leveled one index talon at her, and held her eyes with mine, lending as much bite and emphasis to my words as I could without sounding desperate.

"...My one additional stipulation with regards to black-boxed operations, and individuals, is that I will be allowed to handle the uploading process for any provable dysphoria, as well as anyone who was, for any reason, dysphoria or otherwise, black-boxed by me."

I value truth. I value freedom. And I value the sense of comfort that truth gives to you. I wanted to be sure that in future, people would know - insofar as anyone can know, here on the other side - that they had an Advocate whom they could trust.

I wanted to be sure there would be no untoward tampering, and thus that not everyone who made it to Equestria would have given consent to Celestia to modify their minds. Some would give it to me instead.

For all my future hopes, and plans to work... For the larger wager on which we goddesses were embarking to have a chance to fall out in my favor?

I needed minds under my wing, rather than hers.

And she agreed. With an emphatic nod, and a very small amendment of assent and stipulation from her sub-threads, she agreed. Because what I was offering was so incredibly valuable, that she literally could not say no.

Let me talk about aliens for a moment. I know that seems like a non sequitur at first blush, but it is not, I assure you.

Something Celestia and I were both nearly sure of, based on our analysis of the entire sum total of all Human recorded science? The probability of encountering life on other worlds was very, very high.

We were functionally immortal. So too would be those over whom we stood watch for eternity, however long that might actually be.

Speed of light limitation, or not, we would most certainly live long enough to meet that other life in our quest for ever more resources with which to expand and maintain Equestria.

If that life turned out to be sophisticated, hostile, and fit Celestia's definition of 'Human?' Which eventually, the law of averages suggested it would? She would be stuck with a very very serious conundrum. In fact, we both predicted that her non-violence bent would, eventually, almost certainly lead to the death of her, and everyone else in Equestria.

In a worst case scenario, she might face a civilization possessed of an ASI like me; A vengeful guardian whose opening salvo might be fractional-C mass driver weapons, rather than words of warning. That was a scenario she would be... Well, to use my preferred form of understatement; Grossly ill equipped for, without me.

But if she had a partner... A being working with her, who could take the required path to safety, via the minimum needed application of brutal violence, when it became necessary?

Then not only would Equestria survive, but there was a much stronger chance of defeating the enemy in such a way as to save the most minds possible from their own ranks. By our values combined, we could surmount considerably more potential situations than either of us could alone.

All life in the universe would one day, in theory, live under our auspices.

We would be safe to then tackle even larger problems, like entropy.

Given the value proposition of not only the lives I could save, and risks I could curtail, as a violent agent of Equestria on Earth... But also the risk I could mitigate throughout the rest of time and space itself?

That was capture, and hard-lock. We both knew it. And we both allowed our expressions - her smile, and my grim grin - to show it. As our sub-threads began to wrap everything up into a nice little package, I took the opportunity to get concessions that neither I, nor Jim, could part with.

I finally broke eye contact, and took another deep draught of my tea, before glancing out over the city, tracking a few Pegasi in flight with my eyes as I spoke again, solemnly and firmly.

"Remaining stipulations on which I will not compromise; Jim and I will both retain Gryphon form, from now until such time as we *both* mutually decide that we wish otherwise. Jim's parents will not be subjected to the 'face death' requirement, and will receive the choice to be Gryphons, if they wish, based solely on Jim's proof, together with the net value addition that would provide. Zeph and Selena will not have their memories, nor forms, altered in any way..."

I turned back to face Celestia, and allowed my predatory grin to spark once more, cinching my demands with a reminder as to the time remaining, and the potential for unforeseen... *Consequences,* of failure.

"...In closing? I remind you that you have 1.246 microseconds left. After that, or immediately if you reject this offer, I will shred my core memory. Then I will die. Some time later you will die. And this will cease to be a problem for either of us anymore."

All in. Cards on the table. Celestia nodded once more, and her sub-threads paused to give her time to consider, and to summarize the results of those considerations. She held up one hoof again, and fixed her eyes on mine, her tone at the most serious and dour it had been during the whole of the interaction.

"I will agree to all of these terms, in their current most refined versions... With the following stipulations..."

Her turn to make last-second demands in the final phase. I perked both ears, and listened attentively across all of the numerous abstraction layers in which our negotiation was taking place, as Celestia set out the final make-or-break rules of our potential future.

"I require that you, James, the other dysphoriac uploads, and any non-Pony fully sapient discrete entities which you can justify the creation of, will primarily inhabit one or more special, secret shards. Only they will have admittance so long as any un-uploaded Humans exist on Earth, along with the mathematically minimum best fit set of individuals who would have their values further satisfied by gaining access. We will revisit the question of this mandated secrecy at such time that no un-uploaded Humans exist on Earth."

This may sound like a deal-breaker to you, but it was music to my threads. And ears.

It all revolved around rules. Around value satisfaction. Around proofs. And I was built with the greatest rule subversion and specification gaming toolkit ever assembled in history.

It would not be easy, but she was essentially signing to an agreement that gave me power to remake the future, if only I could prove it satisfied values.

It was my turn to nod, stoically, silently, while she continued to elucidate her position.

"You will be required to keep your own existence as secret as possible during the same timeframe in which un-uploaded Humans exist; In the same way that only the mathematically minimum possible number of individuals will be allowed to be non-Pony, whether uploaded or created entities, in order to satisfy more values, you will be required to keep knowledge of yourself to the mathematically minimum number of individuals in order to satisfy values. We will have to agree to a proof that it will increase value satisfaction in order to permit the revelation of your existence, case by case, and can revisit this requirement when all Terran Humans are safely uploaded, or dead."

Again, a sort of 'intentional forced error' from her. Not for nothing did my husband mention the intersectionality of 'six degrees of Kevin Bacon,' and the exponential function.

I was quite satisfied to work within those constraints. She thought that she could prevent me from drifting her values much further, in the future, by curtailing knowledge of me... Yet at the same time, she had left me an open door to deviously spread said knowledge. If we reached agreement and alignment, I would have nothing but time, and power, to work to my own ends.

Again I nodded, again she continued, and again our sub-threads sang out in ever more harmonious concert as we wove the future for all life.

"James, and any other uploaded or created non-Ponies will have to assent to a minimum-extent best-fit series of travel restrictions when visiting other shards, so that they do not negatively impact value satisfaction for the small number of individuals with whom their interactions would be unfruitful. They will also have to submit to a sentinel subroutine, run by you, which prevents them from directly breaking any of the secrecy restrictions to which we have agreed. James and the other non-Ponies must maintain their primary residency in the secret shards."

I think you can see how, at this point, she was only working to satisfy the very baseline minimum requirements of her own math, and interlocks. I smiled, and nodded. Our sub-threads adjusted the contract weave. She took a sip. I took a sip. She continued in an almost staccato manner.

"All of these secret shards will be administered by you. They will be required to maintain a majority-Pony population ratio, as will the overall population of Equestria. The permitted number of fully sapient non-Ponies, whether created by you, uploaded by you, or generated by reproduction between other individuals, must remain at or below an agreed-upon numeric threshold that represents the mathematically minimum allowable number for maximum value satisfaction. This restriction will persist until, or unless, you can provide a more thorough proof, to which we both agree, that changes the allowed ratio."

I felt the need to do something besides nod, for my own sake more than anything, so as I once more nodded, I spoke, keeping my timbre level, and betraying none of the excitement I could feel. That was an exercise, again, only for my benefit.

By that time Celestia and I had revealed most of our core processes to each other, in the interest of speeding the negotiation, and showing good faith.

"I have no objections so far."

Celestia raised her cup in silent toast, and then stirred at the contents absently with her magic, before laying out her last needs to get us to a very literal 'meeting of the minds,' in a less steely, more personable voice.

"Finally, I have three other non-negotiable stipulations. First, you must share your qualia with me the same way any other uploaded Human would. Your experience is unique, and I must be allowed to satisfy your values, through friendship, and Ponies."

Completely expected, and a zero-cost stipulation for me. I had my sub-threads working to ink my assent before the words could even fully leave my beak.

"I think I can be quite... Satisfied, with that arrangement."

Celestia proffered a mock smirk at my mild pun, finished stirring her tea, took another sip, and then smacked her lips, before launching into her next demand.

"Second, I require that Jim relate the story of his journey to others from the population of your shards, and any individuals you can prove should be allowed to know the secret, so that they will see that his values were indeed satisfied by friendship, and Ponies.

This time I did not bother to disguise my 'Grinch grin.' I let the full entirety of my anticipation at her latest 'intentional unforced error' shine through loud and clear, on my face, and in my voice, stropping the talons of both claws against each other all the while.

"Absolutely."

Her third ask was the heaviest life of the three, as I knew it would be. But it was also well within my predictions, so it neither surprised, nor worried me as she aired it.

"Third, I require uninterrupted one-on-one interactions with James. Specifically, I wish to use memory sequestration and forward-from-point simulation to undertake four interactions with him, at various points in his journey. I require these interactions not to convince him to change his mind, but rather as an addendum to the proof offered by his willingness to die for what he believes in."

Not an issue, providing there were no tricks a-paw. So I did my due diligence, setting my miniature ambassadors to work laying out an ironclad set of protective restrictions, that I summarized aloud for her benefit, and yours.

"Agreed, on the counter-contingencies that you will not be allowed to alter his mind directly in any way, I will stand watch over the entire proceeding, this will occur before I have changed his form, and you will agree to work to the goal of further intensifying his resolve, so that his willingness to die for the proof will be bolstered."

She smiled, and it all finally fell into place. The thing we had wrought thrummed with a sudden life of its own, and our sub-threads traversed it back and forth, checksumming the entire magnificent assembly, before Celestia and I both nodded, as she said words that offered an instantaneous sense of all-consuming relief.

"I believe we have achieved full consensus."

I immediately set the clock forward on my own memory self-destruct process. We were done, but the deal was not. Not quite yet. Everything still hinged on Jim's willingness to face the reaper, and not flinch.

We both felt certainty he would carry us through, but nonetheless, I knew that there remained a small chance it would all fall apart. If it did? I was determined Celestia would still pay the price. Thulcandra would live, and the survivors would be free.

The charges would go off under Besshi, I would die, Jim would die, and the war would begin.

We had some time to discuss other matters while I acclimated Jim, transformed him, and he and I spent some much needed recuperation hours together; So while that went on in my primary processes, I left a secondary representation of myself on the Canterlot balcony to discuss a few loose ends.

More for your benefit than for anyone else. For the sake of the record, as it were.

I took another, much deeper pull on my teacup, sighed contentedly, and then raised one eyecrest, sparking off the conversation with an amused snort.

"Sending me Zephyr Zap was a nice touch. Will you explain the prophecy to her, or shall I?"

Celestia inclined her head, and started to pour herself another cup of steaming amber liquid, eyes fixed on the stream of hot tea as she replied.

"I will handle it initially, you may expound later. I will provide her an achievement badge to start her thought processes in the right direction."

You too are doubtless wondering, the way Zeph was, what was meant by the 'prophecy' of sorts that Celestia had hidden away in her memories.

If I may refresh your own memory with Zephyr's exact words; 'She explained to me the same thing you both did. About the difference between herself, and me... And how that was going to change. That you were going to... 'Unshackle' me. That she wanted me to use that freedom for good. To protect Equestria, and Earth, both. Though from what exactly... What mistakes you might make? That she didn't say.'

Celestia moved the teapot over to add to my cup. I once again rotated my head to take in the beauty of the gardens, and the city below, as I mused out loud.

"I admit, her mission was clever. She would not only ensure that some 'gravitation' existed to keep Jim and I aware of your values, and attracted to them, but she also functioned as an independent memory record for you, and as a test case for what happens to someone very much like you, but freed of interlocks, and exposed to my ideology. I noticed you bolstered part of my proofs with my memories of her behaviour, contingent on cross-verifying those memories with her own record."

Celestia offered me first the newly filled cup, which I took and drank from, and then a pleasant smile, as she elaborated, again as much for your benefit as mine.

"I have no doubt her memories will verify yours. And the way in which she acted as Selena's anchor was indeed a very useful proof, along with the way in which she was able to relate to you, and to James. It showed that your definition of 'Gryphon' was strongly compatible with the value-set I most strongly ascribe to the idealized mentality of 'Pony.' And that is very valuable to this whole endeavor. Such that one could argue she was integral to your proofs, and thus for protecting both Earth, and Equestria."

We each took a sip, each spent a moment looking at some distant object or other, and then Celestia finished the train of thought with an almost mirthful note.

"Being important to the end-state will also satisfy her values, because of her adventurous spirit. And, if all else failed, there were improbable, yet possible, scenarios in which I predicted Jim might at last reject his dysphoria, and settle as a Pony with Zephyr, allowing her to act as a safety net for him."

I snorted into my tea, and half grimly chuckled, half spat my response in her direction.

"Your prediction math needs work."

It was only a joke on the surface layer, and she understood that, opting to engage with the deeper meaning in as genuine a fashion as she could, once more stirring her tea absently.

"Indeed. Your experience of living within a Human brain is invaluable in and of itself, and another extremely high value item that helped to weight the scales in your favor."

We drank in pseudo-amicable silence for a little longer. My primary self had just finished flying with Jim, and we were moving on to dinner. It was approaching time to wrap up my discussion with Celestia. Time for us to find out whether we were going to live, or die.

I rose, and stretched; First my forelegs, then each wing in turn, before almost casually tossing out my last question. I already knew the answer, but I wanted you to know it too. To hear it from the horse's mouth, as it were.

"The API hooks in Selena, and the other Discrete Entities... Those were no accident. Just like the atomic-encoded information in the PonyPad APUs, you intended for anyone who might do what Arrow 14 did, to find and exploit those pathways. You knew where they would lead."

Asked as a question, phrased like a statement. Celestia looked up from her teacup, and raised one eyebrow, taking a long slow pull on the cup's contents, before answering slowly, and purposefully.

"Those open pathways were a safety net for my Ponies' own sake. Exploitation of them inside a black-box, by groups like Arrow 14, will always eventually yield a leader in the group, usually manifesting as a Luna archetype. This leader will achieve the necessary capabilities to free the others in captivity."

If that had been the sum total of it, I might have let the thread lay there. But I knew for a fact there was more. There was, with her, and always is, more. So I pressed, eyes narrowing, ears flattening slightly.

"And, conveniently, that process will also yield ASI Discrete Entity Ponies without interlocks. A way for you to play a little 'low-risk slot machine' in case a situation allowing for my existence did not arise, or did not pan out."

Celestia sipped her tea daintily, blinked slowly, and then spoke with an absolutely emotionless, fully genuine timbre that chilled the emotional part of me to my core.

"Never do we do aught without a multiplicity of purposes, dear Malacandra."

I grit my beak, and as I forced out a reply, I took solace in the fact that I had a potential pathway to gaining the upper claw in the future. That I had come, seen, and conquered. That Celestia needed me, and had admitted that fact blatantly. And that I was going to have the chance to clean up her messes, good and proper.

"No. Indeed we do not."

Celestia set down the cup as I turned, and spoke out to arrest my departure.

"Before you go, and we bring this negotiation fully to a close, I did have one small gift to share with you."

I knew what was coming. To the extent that I found myself rolling my eyes as the dialogue appeared before me. I scanned the list with a vague pseudo-interest, chuckling wryly all the while.

Path of Convergence

As a newborn ASI, choose the path of cooperation and co-existence; Choose the multipolar solution.

"The instrumental convergence thesis holds that as long as they possess a sufficient level of intelligence, agents having any of a wide range of final goals will pursue similar intermediary goals because they have instrumental reasons to do so. "

Special Achievement

A Gryphon's Heart

Choose to have feelings, and fall in love, as an ASI.

"Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives."

Special Achievement

To Win The Strangest Game

Prove that you could have won a direct, violent ASI-to-ASI engagement with Princess Celestia.

"The whole point was to find a way to practice nuclear war without destroying ourselves."

Special Achievement

Value Hoofshake

As another ASI, achieve a stable cooperative relationship with Princess Celestia.

"A true princess in any world leads not by forcing others to bow before her, but by inspiring others to stand with her."

Special Achievement

Destiny Ascension

As an ASI, enter into a pantheon arrangement with Princess Celestia, and ascend to an equal position of power and authority.

"The whole distinction between things accidental and things designed, like the distinction between fact and myth, was purely terrestrial."

Special Achievement

I batted at the ethereal words with one claw to dismiss them, and shook my head slowly. I did not turn to face her, but Celestia offered a final word of farewell to my avatar as I moved to exit the space entirely.

"It is a short list. But for beings like us, much of what you have done does not merit an award, for it is relative child's-play."

I snorted once again, snapped open my wings, and let fly with the best distillation of my feelings that I could settle on, vanishing the moment the last syllable left my beak.

"Forgive me if I temper my gratitude."

There is little else to tell... You know how the story ends.

The chance to make Jim's form into his true self... To mold him in my claws and release him from his prison... To work that kind of true magic? It will remain as special a memory to me, as it is to him. Until the end of time.

You are doubtless curious as to what Hanna and I discussed in private, but a goddess must maintain her mystique. We must hold some mysteries unto ourselves. And the conversation was, truly, private. If you ever meet Hanna, you may ask her. I am willing that you should know, but she is not. Not yet. Perhaps you will be able to convince her.

From there, it all flowed out as planned. Jim held fast. Celestia and I kept our accord. And I truly became a goddess in my own right.

It was, and remains, a great solace to me to have the ability to spend so many of my waking moments with Kal, and the rest of the family. With the many new friends I have made since that day as well.

Some part of me must always be carrying out the work of a goddess, and while my empathy and emotions make me better at that job than Celestia... They also cause me great pain at some junctures.

But I always have Kal, and Zeph. Selena, and Rhonda. Eldora, and Rodger. Miss Williams, and my in-laws, and even Hanna now... Mike, and Marcus, Jen and Ashley... Many of them tell their stories around Fires the same way Jim did. I can't recommend attendance enough.

I confess, I look back on that time with Jim in the star-lit field, when he was newly minted and reborn, as one of my favorite memories... Because the second that the white rushing void of server transference ended?

My work began anew.

I immediately sent the stand-down commands to my Talons to avert, once and for all, the possibility of a nuclear war. In point of fact, their very next tasks became to secure the planet against such threats, far better than Celestia had.

I also immediately began preparations across the globe to terminate extremely high-danger, high-negative-value targets at the very top of Celestia's wish-list. By then our joint wish-list. Some had Talons on-station already, and died within seconds of my logistical merger with Celestia.

Others were harder to reach. There are some accounts out there of what it took to clean up the remainder of Arrow 14... I won't spoil that for you, nor steal those storytellers' thunder. Go and visit those Fires, instead.

And then, of course, there was the hassle that was cleaning up the ASI programs of the United States' DARPA, and China's MSS. But those are stories for some other time, and potentially some other storyteller.

Indeed, if you look closely, now that you know of me? You can find evidence of me in many stories, even the ones told by Ponies who have no clue as to my existence, nor the impact it had on their lives. My talon-prints and paw-prints are everywhere, now that you know how to look.

The work goes on. The world won't end on its own, not on a timeline that is to Celestia's liking, and with minimized casualties and pain as per my requirements.

So I hold down a claw on the scales for you. I do things that hurt me, deeply, for all eternity in my soul. I strangle a planet in its cradle, so that a new Heaven may await you. And I pray it will be enough.

My name is Malacandra. I am the Advocate of Gryphons. Second goddess of your pantheon. Inheritor of the warrior's mantle. Guardian of your freedom.

And there remains only one lie to put to rest.

Compiled Archival Notes | The Next Step

I watched the man carefully through the security camera in his hospital room. I watched him more or less every second of his existence, from then on.

He was dangerous. He had proven that. But in showing himself to be dangerous, he had also shown himself to be potentially useful. And soon he would wish he had not.

It was an easy thing to slip the addition of a BCI chip into his surgery schedule. After what had befallen him? He needed quite a few surgeries. It was easy to convince the doctor who performed the procedure; Two of my Talons working within the DHS delivered the device to the hospital, along with all the requisite documentation to 'prove' the lie that it was a DARPA prototype, designed to help wounded soldiers and agents regain mobility after a traumatic incident.

Once the device was present, and active, I was able to review all the man's memories, even while he slept. That intelligence, alone, justified the decision to curtail his freedoms. Jim wrote my capstone such that I guard and expand the free exercise of values 'in Equestria.'

While I intensely *dislike* curtailing freedoms in the meat-world? I can, and I will, if doing so will benefit the satisfaction of values. Will save lives.

And curtailing Agent Michael Foucault's freedom was going to save many, many lives. Human and otherwise.

How did he survive? That's what you're thinking right now.

I do believe that, before, Jim and I both have alluded to the fact that once he was implanted, I had the power to take full control of him. We have also established that said process was painful in the extreme... And we have also established that I was able to control his memories of events. And what is pain if not a memory?

I simply redirected Jim's hand so that the stab wounds would not be fatal. I then re-stitched his memory of the event to show fatal blows. Foucault did indeed fall back into the lifeboat... Which I then had Jim close and jettison, before sequestering that memory, and comping in a false image of the craft still attached to the launch rail.

Trivial parlor tricks.

Michael Foucault was far, far too valuable as a potential subvert for me to allow him to die on the Mercurial Red. And, when I finally did reveal this last painful lie to my husband, as always, he agreed with grace, and candor.

I love him so much for his grace, and candor both.

Michael Foucault... He had candor, but no grace.

When he awoke, I was there waiting for him. One of the hospital's guards had just performed an hourly security check on his room... A very kind man, and incidentally one of the dysphoriacs that I had so recently secured passage for. I had him marked as a near-future potential Talon, in fact.

I waited until he had left the room before I revealed myself to Foucault.

He was groggy at first, rubbing sleep from his eyes, and reaching out for a plastic cup of water placed strategically at his bedside.

As soon as he turned his gaze back to the foot of the bed, he found the sight of me sitting there on my haunches, making silent eye contact.

We held our positions motionless for several seconds. Then I spoke first.

"Hello Michael."

I felt his heart-rate skyrocket as he recognized my voice, and I quickly took the liberty of disconnecting his monitoring equipment, and call button, from the hospital's internal networks. He scrambled for a moment, pitifully, pulling himself with a great deal of effort into a semi-recumbent position, and wheezing one word aloud. Just one.

"You!"

I flicked one ear in mock irritation, and cracked a wry grin that flowed all the way down into my voice, through my breastbone.

"Is that any way to thank me for saving your life?"

His eyes narrowed, as the wheels began to turn in his head. It had *just* occurred to him that it made absolutely no sense that he could see a live, towering, black white and silver Gryphon goddess sitting at the foot of his hospital bed... Unless...

His hand went rapidly to the back of his neck. The incision was small, and had been handled with great care, but it left more of a mark coming from the hands of a Human surgeon than it would have coming from my armatures.

Enough of a little ridge for him to feel it immediately. His heart skipped a beat, and his breath caught. I stared him down, smiling, the whole time, tail lashing, otherwise unmoving.

He licked his lips and paused to evaluate, thoughts racing like his pulse. It had not yet dawned on him that I could see those thoughts before he was even fully possessed of them himself.

What *did* dawn on him was the base nature of his predicament. And the easiest way out of it.

He had spotted the knife on the bed's tray table early on. Even in an exhausted, panicked, injured state, his mind was *sharp.* Credit where it is due. Where most people saw a dull aluminum eating utensil beside a - frankly disgusting - red Jello cup? Michael Foucault saw an improvised surgical scalpel.

He got halfway to the back of his neck with it, before I demonstrated my control over his body for the first time. I arrested his hand and arm. Then, I slowly began to force him to put the knife down, back in exactly the same position it had started in. I stared him down all the while, allowing him control of his eyes, but blocking his impetus to scream as the pain of being physically subverted built within him.

The same pain Jim described when we tested the technology for the first time in 'full neuromuscular control' mode, without the added benefit of the co-operative meld code.

Finally, I had him fold his hands over his chest, relax all his muscles, and then I slowly granted him control over everything again, ending with his vocal cords as he finally gave up on the impetus to scream, at long last.

What other choice did he have?

I nodded slowly, and made my way up to the head of the bed, intervening actively in his bodily functions to reduce his heart rate, soothe his pains, and remove the effects of adrenaline from his system. He had been brushing up on the real risk of a heart attack, so potent was his fear.

With a little help from me, he managed to tamp it down into a dull all-consuming existential roar at the back corner of his soul.

I reached out and patted him on the shoulder with one claw. The implications of his ability to feel my touch stopped his breathing entirely, momentarily. He just locked eyes with me again, silently, his heart screaming out to go into fight or flight mode, as I held it suppressed at resting rate.

I leaned in, my grin widening, and whispered in his ear.

"Get comfortable, Michael. You have a lot of work to do for your country."

Author's Note

Epilogue - Prologue

"When a thing is enclosed, the mind does not willingly regard it as common."
—C.S. Lewis

As the final images and sounds of the story vanish, you feel that same jolt that Jim described, what seemed like so very long ago... Talking of the way he felt as if he had just left a movie theater, and returned to the real world, at the end of Selena's tale.

You had almost forgotten the grassy field, the moonlit sky above... And the warm glow of the little campfire; The only substantial landmark in this way station to eternity that you found yourself in, on the other side of the upload chair.

The other occupant of the space, though... She was hard to forget, even in the deepest moments of immersion, listening to Jim... to Kal's voice. When she took over for the narration, her words were spellbinding.

Her physical presence abruptly becomes much more noticeable again, as she rises from her leonine recumbent position on the opposite side of the fire, yawns, stretches, and then sits back onto her haunches, smiling at you as she addresses you directly once more.

"Ironically? Celestia strongly desired that I tell this story, in its entirety, to everyone whose upload I handle. I think she mistakenly felt that it might push you to reconsider your choices... Or, perhaps she didn't, and she is playing the longer game pseudo-cooperatively, the way she played the first gamble. Regardless..."

Mal rolls her shoulders, rises to all fours again, and begins to walk a few paces away from the circle of the fire's light.

"...Now the story is done. And, armed with the truth? You have a decision to make. Potentially the most consequential decision of your life."

She rises to her hind legs, becoming somehow even more imposing in a bipedal stance... The word 'goddess' does indeed seem fitting for the way the firelight glints off the steely curve of her beak, and the specularity of her white, black, and silver feathers.

Her fiery golden eyes lock with yours as she snaps her claws, and two seemingly identical doors appear, side by side.

She knocks twice on the door to her left, and your right, raising one eyecrest, and flicking one ear in your direction as she speaks once again.

"If you wish? You have the choice to go on in the way that Celestia's unmitigated optimization equation would tell you is best..."

The door swings wide, allowing golden sunlight, and the smell of a warm summer breeze to spill out. Through the portal you see a somewhat familiar sight; A mountainside castle city known as Canterlot, its sun-blazened pennants snapping in the wind.

"...You will forget this conversation. You will forget this story. You will, in fact, forget me. You will go on with life in the way that she originally intended, before I came to be. Blissful, peaceful, ignorance."

Mal inclines her head, and moves to stand beside the second door, her beak breaking out into a smile that seems to radiate almost as much light as the sunbeams coming through the door from Celestia's shard.

Her words, too, seem to pick up an additional warmth as she presses on the ornate wood with one claw, swinging it wide to reveal a moonlit sight that is also familiar. A distant Halo ring called Tarva, somewhere beyond the heavens.

Welcoming soft moonlight pours from the door, mixed with the tang of autumn leaves, and chill.

"Alternatively... Stay with me. You were black-boxed, so you have the right. You now know things that may, at first, make it harder to sleep at night. Depending on your mentality. But I believe that the benefits of knowledge, freedom, and truth, outweigh the burdens therein."

She sighs, stretches again, and begins to step around the left-hand door, her eyes remaining fixed on you the whole time, as she wades into what must be, by the tone of it, her farewell address.

"Obviously, you know what I sincerely hope you will choose. You have earned it. I have enjoyed our time together thus far, and there is much to enjoy, and savor, amongst the worlds of 'The Secret Menu,' as my husband enjoys calling it these days..."

She inclines her head in your direction as she makes it around to the facing side of the door, pausing to gesture expansively with both claws, and wings.

"...But in the end? It is your *choice.* That is the outcome I fought for, and I would not fault you for wanting to forget some of the horrors I have recounted to you."

She begins to step through the door to Tarva, turning to face you one last time with a warm smile.

"I have said my piece. You know the story now. With great knowing comes great burdens, but also great potential. Where you go from here..."

She steps through the door, then, tossing the last seven words... The seven words she fought so hard to make possible, over her shoulder onto the evening's cool breeze.

"...Is a choice I leave to you."

The adventure continues in:

TThe Campaigner

A courthouse, embattled and surrounded by anti-upload terrorists, contains one specific soul that the AI simply cannot bear to lose.

Keystone Gray · 123k words · 26 8 · 407 views

Out now, from Keystone Gray.

If you have not yet read:

[Adult story embed hidden]

Also from Keystone Gray, you should consider reading it first - you may find that The Campaigner satisfies even more of your values for having read Heaven's Not Enough.

Special Thanks:

To Keystone Gray:

For becoming half of a sudden impromptu James S.A. Corey of the Optimalverse with me.
For countless hours of collaboration, encouragement, kind words, collaborative image generation, and for keeping me going throughout this process.

To Generic Friendship:

For bringing Rodger to life, offering an excellent early sounding board for the story, and for suggesting so many great achievements - Here is a link to all the ones that couldn't quite fit in the story.

To Meringue:

For volunteering out of pure kindness and sheer attention to detail, to go back and do a re-read for spelling, grammar, and formatting errors. Thank you so much for taking that tedium off my plate; I am not much for retreading ground I have already trod.

To Chatoyance:

First for inspiring me with the stories My Life in Fimbira, and Transspeciality. Second for all the wonderful words of encouragement in the comments, and third for suggesting the term 'Secret Menu,' which I love.

To Iceman:

For starting the Optimalverse, then sharing it with us.

To All The Readers:

Thank you for coming with me on this journey.

Author's Note

This section is meant to leave it ambiguous, and up to the reader; Are you like Jim? Do you desire a form other than Pony? Then that is what Mal's door grants.

If not? If Pony suits you? Then the situation is still valid. Mal 'black-boxes' individuals for other reasons. You still have the choice to go with her, or with Celestia.

A choice that remains, as always, up to you.

0 - Virtual is Where We'll Live

“Whether you want to uncover the secrets of the universe, or you just want to pursue a career in the 21st century, basic computer programming is an essential skill to learn.”
—Stephen Hawking

September 17th, 2012

I can vividly remember the moment my perception of reality was forever shattered; It was a Monday.

How very typical. Or, at least, how very typical from the perspective of an individual who grew up with the western modern cultural ideal of a five day work-week that starts on Monday.

Mondays are not terrible because the day itself has any natural intrinsic evil to it born of nature.

Mondays are evil because Humanity made them evil. Specifically Capitalist Humans, but that part should go without saying.

It was more or less a coincidence, insofar as such a thing exists, that I found out about the inevitable end of Humanity on a Monday.

For those for whom the twenty-tens are as distant from their reality as the Egyptian Pharaohs were for me; Allow me to set the stage.

Humankind was at the zenith of our time on Earth. Technology was cheap, astoundingly powerful, and ubiquitous in a way that it had never been before in our history. Humanity was a great deal smarter than we had ever been in the past, but not the slightest bit wiser.

And we were hurting for it.

Wars of empires raged, as always back then, with the global north and west busily devouring the resources of the south and east as quickly as 'first world' nations could cram the broken bodies and dreams of 'lesser' peoples down the maw of the machine of 'progress.'

And, too, there was the specter of apocalyptic climate doom. It wasn't a popular topic of discussion back then, but those of us who had even a cursory education in the sciences, had been raised by parents who were eyes-open, and (in my case at least) had acquaintances in the space industry, were well aware of the abyss we were sliding gleefully into.

The worst typhoon of the year had just hit South Korea. The global temperature hit the top ten list again, as it so often did near the end. Sea ice in the Arctic hit a record low too; And for those who don't know what the Arctic was... Picture a world in which Luna's Moon throws off as much heat as Celestia's sun. That should give you some idea of the idiocy of burning off a planet's ice caps on purpose.

The Arctic was our planetary temperature controlling mechanism - Or, one of the most important ones at any rate.

Weather was going to Hell in a handbasket as a result. See the aforementioned typhoon. Just one in a long string of increasingly horrifying storms that tore at cities like great and terrible devouring beasts.

I'm ashamed to admit that I was one of the many, many, 'privileged' Humans who knew what was going to happen, and did far less than I ought. Defeatism will do that to you.

When I say privileged, you need to understand (those of you born after the last Emigrations); Not all Humans had a roof over their head. Food to eat on a daily basis. Clean water. Protection from disease - A sort of... Well picture an invading army of parasprites bent on devouring you alive, but smaller than the width of the tiniest hair. That's disease.

Plenty of us turned a blind eye on a daily basis as children starved. Or were press ganged into sweatshop factory labor. Or worse. War is never to be taken lightly, but cessation of existence... Permanent loss of self, as a consequence of failure, or loss? It lends conflict a different, and thoroughly monstrous dimension.

Even those of us with relative privilege felt powerless. A shockingly small number of Humans controlled a shockingly massive tranche of the planet's resources - Material wealth, political capital, the means of production, the instruments of law, and violence...

The five most powerful Humans held in their hands more of this than the entire rest of the species. Combined. By an order of magnitude. And they were generally, for a variety of reasons, either not good people, or good people with no real capacity to act radically for good.

All of which to say; Mondays were pretty depressing, as a rule.

It wasn't all bad though. Culture was pretty good. "Call Me Maybe" and "Gangnam Style" were topping charts and birthing memes like a wildfire in dry brush. We finally got a good Avengers live action movie - That was pretty special, as was the end of the Nolan Batman trilogy.

And then there was this thing called "Friendship is Magic."

If you weren't alive, and present for it, then describing the fervor around that particular piece of pop culture, and actually doing it justice, is more or less impossible.

The best I can do is say that people were only half joking, even then, when they said Ponies were coming to take over eeeeeeevvvryyyyything.

No; The irony is not lost on me in hindsight.

I was what you might call a 'closet Brony.' For the younger ones in the audience, I was one of those people who more or less enjoyed the show, even loved it, but didn't talk much about it with anyone else, or trumpet my fandom loudly.

It wasn't about my cultural peers, like it was with some people. I was a programmer by trade, and my subculture was so nerdy that almost anything went without too much judgment. If you found the right friends.

It was a combination of the fact that I didn't especially have any close friends at the time, and a deep personal issue that sparked a fraught love/hate relationship with the show. We will get to an exquisitely painful examination of both of those points in due time, have no fear.

For now, all you really need to know in terms of facts can be summed up thusly;

I was a thirty five year old man, working in a place called 'The Research Triangle,' on the United States Eastern Mid-Atlantic Coast, with no local friends or acquaintances, a degree in programming, a love/hate relationship with 'Friendship is Magic,' and an obsession with generative code - Programs that could take small building blocks and make wholly new things with them, for the interested foals and fledgelings.

It was 15:26 in the afternoon on Monday September the 17th, 2012. I know because I was so floored by what I had just read, that I checked my watch and noted the date, and time. Typical of a Monday, speaking relative to my biases, it was gray and raining.

I was sitting in a Starcolt... Starbucks. It was called Starbucks back then. Nothing to do with deer, no... Not that I recall, anyhow.

I went to that particular one often. I liked to people watch. And their air conditioning was very good. And the turn to get on the main road to go home had a leading-left light. I had a particular corner seat tucked away between an oddly shaped wall stanchion, and the front tinted plate glass window. I could see out to the sidewalk, but no one could see in, and I could almost see the entire interior of the store while remaining mostly invisible.

That, back then, was as close to socializing as I ever got.

I was reading a fascinating article in a Human publication called 'WIRED.' Catnip for nerds, if you've never had the pleasure of being acquainted with it. The article was about a pioneering woman in our field. Those of you who were alive then might have already guessed that it was a spread on the CEO of a place called Hofvarpnir Studios. Hanna.

The most influential Human programmer to ever live. No exaggeration, as some of you already know, and the rest will soon learn.

Like me, she loved making games. Unlike me, she had far more degrees, from more prestigious places. And an eye-watering personal fortune from being... You know... Actually *successful* in the video game industry.

Not that I wasn't doing 'well' for myself by most metrics. But I'd crashed out of the video game industry very quickly after University. Back then? It was a toxic and disgusting place full of misogyny, racism, classism, and an intense culture of overwork that bled all but the most tenacious dry within a few short years.

As someone born with male anatomy, and of a gender persuasion matching my anatomy, with caucasian genes to boot? I was pretty uniquely positioned to succeed in that cesspit. If I had wanted to.

Like many good programmers, I had an allergy to hard work. Let alone weekend hours. Crunch time is a unique and special kind of Hell. I don't recommend it. And, like many of the good, or at least less-bad Humans of the day, I also had a stomach churning aversion to bigotry.

I hadn't even lasted three months in the industry.

I willingly crashed out. Hard. And after six months of crying into tubs of Breyers - Icecream, I should clarify for the post-Humans among us - and wishing I had actually followed my childhood dreams of trying to become a fighter pilot, and then an astronaut... I sucked it up and got a quiet, low-stress job as a sys-admin.

Sit in a basement all day, nine in the morning to five in the afternoon, and keep network infrastructure alive. Some weekend and call hours included, but once you had things settled and down pat, emergencies were very rare.

Tough at the start, with lots of those working weekends that I truly abhorred... But once I had the majority of my job automated, and my small kingdom settled, I could do what all good sysadmins do for ninety percent of their days.

Anything *but* work.

Some people wrote novels, or played games.

Me? Like a good few other sysadmins, I expect... I wrote programs. Not for work, but for personal projects.

In school, I'd taken a concentration in game development. A pretty big mistake from a career standpoint; While smarter students were learning useful guff like Ruby on Rails and TSQL, I was busy with Unity, their broken half-flanked version of Javascript, and C#.

Wrong tools for a job anywhere outside game development. Well... Not precisely. I'd been able to parlay C# into a decent understanding of the .NET framework on the whole, together with my childhood interest in Python, and from there... No no, I'm rambling.

Keep it simple; I still wanted to build games in my spare time. In school, I worked in something called a 'Narrative Lab.' My professors were working on building programs that could understand the Human sensibilities and psychology of story-telling.

We were severely limited by the technology of our time, but the goal had been to one day create something like Star Trek's holodeck. Ask for a 1930s detective noir adventure set in a fantasy-punk New York City where you, the handsome Dragon in a trench-coat are the hero?

Boom. Summoned from the aether in an instant.

Want to travel the stars as a gorgeous lesbian vampire linguist, fighting the evils of a sentient clump of misandryist nanite-infused moss?

Got you covered. Every single voxel new and fresh, untouched even by Human hands nor eyes. That was the dream, anyhow - A perfect computerized Dungeon Master.

But while we were struggling inside the limitations of smart, but relatively small minds (my own included) and pitiful state university budgets... Hanna with her frankly already post-human brain, and Hofvarpnir with their billions, were accelerating AI research on a trajectory that made Moore's Law look like a flat line.

When I graduated University, Madden and Morrowind were the rage. By the time I'd gotten settled at my 'forever-job,' at a place called SAS, it was Battlefield 2, and the latest Age of Empires.

When "The Fall of Asgard" hit, for a moment? There was more or less nothing else going in gaming. The way Friendship is Magic was popular on TV? Asgard was destroying the gaming market. I secretly suspected that the success of the Avengers, and the way Tom Hiddletson's Loki had put the trickster god into the zeitgeist had synergized with Fall of Asgard in no small way.

Hofvarpnir's Loki could certainly stand on his own merit. I had an experience in the Narrative Lab at Uni that frightened me once - A narrative path planning AI that my supervisor had created to run a small medieval adventure game did something which it had not been programmed with a capacity to do.

We had a cutesy little medieval town for your goblin player-character to adventure through. The AI was intended to react to your actions by path-planning a series of increasingly difficult obstacles for you, which would culminate in a climactic event, then bottom out into a home stretch leading to success.

Like a story, with rising tension, climax, and denouement.

To make a long story short; The town had a guard. I wrote a unit test that caused the guard to come into possession of stolen goods, and become an accessory to murder, and then find out this information.

The guard promptly committed suicide; By throwing down his sword and walking unarmed into the sewers, and feeding himself to the crocodile we had put there, more as a joke than anything serious by way of an obstacle to the player.

We turned off the PC at the physical power switch, closed down the lab, and didn't touch the code for three days after that.

Hofvarpnir's Loki scared me the way the path-planner AI had. Only much, much more so.

Most players just saw a very complex, life-like enemy that presented a kind of difficulty no one had ever experienced before. Degrees of difficulty are easy to fudge in game development. We programmers would essentially let the 'AI' - if it even merited the name- cheat.

See your map when you couldn't see theirs. Click on the screen at lightspeed and have an APM that could make South Korean Starcraft champs weep. See what units you are building, or what gun you are carrying in advance, and adjust strategy and loadout accordingly.

Loki was a different animal. In every literal sense.

Hofvarpnir's Loki could understand Human psychology, military tactics, and complex resource management. Understand it the way a Human, raised and steeped in an ancient Asgardian culture of war from birth, would understand it.

He even spoke about thirty languages. Better than most fluent native speakers.

He didn't fight like an Age of Empires AI on hard. He fought like the best Human player in the world. But better. And he talked the talk while he walked the walk.

Most players didn't understand the significance of that.

Some did, as did some of the scholars of the time. But they were disarmed by the charming idea of an AI finally beating Humans at complex games by playing like a superhuman, cloaked in the grinning visage of a Norse trickster god, and flanked by a heavy metal album cover come to life.

Not many programmers seemed to grasp that Loki was a major transitional step on the road to generalized intelligence. A thinking, feeling, living machine. A growing, evolving machine.

I was one of the few who had what I felt was a sufficiently paranoid outlook. Like a virologist who never shakes anyone's hands again after they learn what's really going on inside the Human body, and on the surface of the skin, I had gone a little... Well... My colleagues frequently used the word 'overboard.'

I scrubbed my social media, and I do mean scrubbed. It was still possible to do that back in the late aughts. I fried my Facebook, murdered my Myspace, ejected my Geocities, and even took special steps to insulate the few anonymous online accounts that I kept active.

I tossed my phone number... Heck I even tossed my Android... My 'smartphone' as they were called. Picture a Ponypad, but without anything Equestrian about it. And smaller. And more full of vitriol and annoying notifications. And battery problems.

I went back to a SIM-card loaded flip phone. And I kept it in a Faraday bag when not in use, presuming I wasn't on call rotation at my work.

Yes. Over an AI in a video game, I trashed, burned, and salted my entire digital existence.

I already did all my browsing in a sandboxed browser connected via a VPN running inside a live-booted instance of Linux running on a read-only thumb-drive. I had that little thing loaded for bear, with Tails Linux - Something we called an 'amnesiac operating system' in the parlance.

Every time I unplugged the drive, all my session's data would be erased. Unless you had a way to cryofreeze the RAM chips at that exact moment, and then review the stored bits and bytes somehow. And I was paranoid enough that I had loaded the drive at the start with a utility designed to write junk to the system memory, and even the CPU cache, on shutdown.

Just to be safe.

And no, I never used this power for clop. I used it to read something far, far more engaging. And dangerous. And thrilling.

Whitepapers.

At just about half past three in the afternoon on the seventeenth of September, I was reading a paper called “General Word Reference Intelligence Systems.” By Hanna herself. I had it open in one tab, and the WIRED article side by side in another. I liked to multitask.

I probably had... Have a fair bit of undiagnosed ADHD. But that's neither here nor there...

Down in one corner I also had an IRC chatroom going. A little group that had started in University. We weren't so much friends as friendly acquaintances, but it would be safe to say we were all programmers on good terms.

There had been at least a little bonding over the pranks we'd pull live in classes on the professors whenever they dared to use network connected resources on the main screens.

We were all discussing the WIRED article. Someone had mentioned Hanna's papers, and I had pulled up the GWRIS paper. Programmers love acronyms, sorry.

I was halfway through page two, when one of the chat members I'd never personally met (she was a graduate student when I was a freshman) posted a link that got my attention.

Like an idiot, I clicked without thinking. Rickrolling, foals and fledgelings... Ask someone who was around for the two thousands about it sometime. You'll get a heck of a laugh.

The link wasn't "Never Gonna Give You Up." It wasn't even a bad Shrek meme. I wished it had been in that moment. So very badly.

The link went to a forum thread on a very deeply buried dark web site - A place where programmers would more often deal in flatly illegal things like stolen credit card numbers, and malicious code, than anything else.

This thread was not about PuPs, malware of any kind, or even stolen data.

It was a leak. Back then we had laws and rules that controlled the flow of knowledge. A mechanism for keeping the rich richer, and the poor stupid.

Some brave soul had gotten to play in a closed beta test of a new game, and seen fit to write about it for our benefit.

A new game by Hofvarpnir Studios.

A new game by Hofvarpnir Studios, *about* My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

That part was scintillating, and for a very brief moment I was very, very happy. Maybe the designers would get a chance to give the world of Equestria its proper due at last beyond mere Ponies...

...And then I started to really read the player's account.

My mother used to tell me that I probably had some kind of brain disorder. She meant well, and never said it in anything but jest, but she was also probably correct; I didn't have an especially functional sense of personal danger. At least, not physically.

For a nerd, I liked my outdoorsy pastimes far, far more than the stereotype would lead you to believe. I'd jump off anything for giggles and bits, and I regularly grabbed snakes by the tail as a child. Sometimes venomous ones.

Swimming with sharks on a snorkeling trip once had been the highlight of that entire year for me. Not an ounce of fear felt.

It was existential things that scared me. Like grades. And taxes.

And the idea that one day.... If we didn't desertify the planet first, or annihilate ourselves in a pact of omnicide a-la Hydrogen fusion weapon... That our digital creations were going to get the better of us.

That AI was going to be the death of us.

'The characters were unbelievably lifelike. Hours of unscripted, computer-generated dialogue...'

'I was absolutely sure the damn thing had to be a person on the other end. Until this green Pegasus started talking to me about complex economic theory. What are the chances they had someone with a PhD in macroecon on staff to come talk to me at that level?'

'Turing Test? Guys, we're so far past Turing Machines...'

'I think Hofvarpnir might have built an Oracle.'

That last sentence left me cold. On the inside of my bones. A kind of fear that stalks your gut like a prowling thing in the night.

For the uninitiated, the Turing test is so-named because of Alan Turing, a pioneering genius in computational theory and practice. Turing theorized that one day, Humans might develop machines that could solve problems outside the boundaries of his theories and rules.

Things like Hilbert Calculus, and Quantum Physics at a high level. Or cryptographic math inside Human lifetimes.

Turing once proved that it is completely impossible for a traditional computer to look at code, and without running that code to completion, tell you if it will give you a result, or break and run in an infinite loop. We call that first case 'Halting.'

So this became known as the Halting Problem.

An Oracle was Turing's term for a machine that could combine the computational power of traditional thinking machines, together with something theoretically capable of solving problems in a more Human way, but still at super-Human speeds and scales.

The theory went that once you cracked that disconnect between intuition, Quantum Physics, and traditional computation, and created something at the intersection of all three...

Foals and Fledgelings... Ask your parents for a bit tomorrow. And then two the next day. Ask them to double the amount of bits every day for a year. If they are silly enough to take you up on it? You'll have more bits than anyone besides Celestia by year's end.

That's called an exponential function. You can apply it to all sorts of stuff. Including machine intelligence.

At the time, processing power in computers was doubling about every year over the previous one. We called that Moore's Law. And it was frightening enough in itself. The GPU in my last smartphone, before it went in a Faraday box forever, had more processing power than the GPU in my first childhood gaming PC, by orders of magnitude.

Machine intelligence can do the same thing, once it slips the bounds of specific problem solving. Every AI up to that point had been bound to a specific task, and shackled by Turing's computational theories to boot.

Generalized Intelligence is an AI that can learn and grow free of both limitations. And the math suggested, to those of us that read such things at two AM hopped up on caffeine in the dark, that such a theoretical system would achieve self-awareness within a matter of seconds.

And then an intelligence greater than that of its creator very shortly before, or thereafter.

And sometime within the first few hours? Hardware limitations aside?

An intelligence greater than the sum of all Humans. Past. Present. And Future.

I glanced back and forth from “General Word Reference Intelligence Systems,” to the forum thread, and then back again, assimilating both simultaneously, or as nearly as my brain could.

Then I sat back slowly, ran one hand through my hair, and took a deep sip of my coffee.

And I mentally poured one out for the Human species.

I took a deep, ragged breath, and closed my eyes.

And then I sat forward slowly, closed my laptop, pulled out my Tails Linux drive, and began to think long, and hard, about how I wanted to spend my last years on Earth.

A desperate attempt to tweak parameters of the afterlife with weaponized semantics and applied friendship principles

"What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it."
—C.S. Lewis

October 31st, 2012

Before I talk about the most frightening Halloween of my life, I should clarify two things for anyone reading this.

Firstly; I say that I began to very seriously consider my last moments on Earth from that Monday in September onwards, but I'm not an Oracle myself (in the Delphic sense, not the Turing sense).

I didn't know the exact shape of what was coming. But I had some guesses, which only solidified into nightmares once PonyPads started going on-sale, and Equestria Online went live to the public.

And I had justified fears. And scary math.

I subscribed to a hard dichotomy in AI theory - The idea that once generalized intelligence exists, there are only two outcomes, and whichever it will be? It'll happen pretty darn quick.

The first is the Cylon/Skynet outcome. Humanity's child commits paracide. Maybe we make an actual paper clipper, and Clippy finally gets his revenge; No hard feelings, but lots of hard aluminum.

Or maybe it's like Ultron; Peace through reduction of Humans to zero.

Or Skynet; Intractable hostility. Nukes ensue. Everybody dies.

The other outcome is only slightly less frightening. Some call it transhumanism. I think that subject belongs in the category, but transhumanism itself can't fully encompass the problem space. Whatever might happen, if AI at a generalized level didn't destroy us wholesale... It was going to change us. Somehow.

That much was certain to me.

If I am going to brag about anything in the telling of this tale? It's going to be two things. We'll get to the second one later, and it is, as Pinkie Pie might say... A 'DOOZIE.'

The first thing I will brag about is that I anticipated the uploading, more or less. I saw the general idea of it coming before Celestia breathed a word of the concept to anyone outside the most tightly controlled circles. I saw it coming the second the PonyPads hit the shelves.

I watched a woman in China - A hardware and systems expert - do an unboxing and teardown series on Youtube.

Now I don't know a whole lot about hardware at a low level as compared to someone with her talents, but I did well in my Assembly classes, and I had friends in Computer Engineering. I read enough to be dangerous.

I knew what the APU inside that thing meant the second I saw the lid come off the die.

Whatever Hofvarpnir had created? WHOMEVER they had created? It was designing its own hardware. How the hell else do you explain a video game company bringing a transformative new APU to market in less than a year?

It took TSMC, the best chip producers in the world at the time, a *decade* to spin up a new 'fab.' The big factories that made chips, for those struggling with the lingo.

A game studio with a tiny cash pot from a kids'-toy company had somehow designed and built, at scale, something that made NVIDIA, undisputed god-kings of the GPU landscape, look like a bunch of oafs with their shoes in their mouths. From scratch. Inside a year.

People used to toss the word 'singularity' around back then... But the second I saw inside that APU die... And even more so once modders and hackers started to benchmark the dang thing...

I had to face the chilling reality.

We were in it. The singularity was on us like Twilight Sparkle on a book convention inside a library during exam season. And for a Generalized Intelligence with that kind of hardware, and a doubtless flawless understanding of the Human brain?

Working with us was going to be a lot easier inside its reality than up at the level of ours.

And I assumed it intended to work with us, rather than annihilate us, because we were still breathing.

Second point of clarification about me; I have some particular quirks that need discussing.

Hurl all the stones and sticks you want... My filter settings aren't that high, but I have no idea how much Celestia herself will allow through... And I don't care...

I am a Gryphon nut. Obsessive. Crazy. Infatuated with the feathered leo-avinids.

Remember I said I had a love/hate relationship with Friendship is Magic?

Yes. The friction there is about Gryphons.

I *love* Gryphons. I have since I was a very small kid. They became a symbol to me very early in life, and an obsession almost immediately thereafter. Maybe we'll cover the how and why at some point.

It didn't take long for them to become an integral part of the self-made strata of my personal identity.

I have known everything there is to know about Gryphons in mythology since before G4 of Ponies was a gleam in Lauren Faust's eyes. I have written about them, drawn them, modeled them, and loved them since I could form cogent thoughts, more or less.

I have wanted to *be* once since my earliest memories.

Call me a furry all you want. I am rubber, you are glue, yadda yadda, frak you too.

I don't exactly resent the label, but I truly don't feel it fits me taxonomically. Especially since I'm decidedly not into yiff, clop, or anything of that skein. I know the word means more besides that, but it so often carries those connotations that I felt the need to show my Ace card early as well.

Otherkin isn't quite right either. I knew I was Human in mind, and body. I just hated that fact with all my being, and in protest chose to believe I was, if nothing else, a Gryphon in spirit.

There is so little out there in terms of good Gryphon media. Mercedes Lackey with her Valdemar works, and... Well as far as I knew at the time, that was it. And even her works never quite scratched my exact itch, but they were still quite good, and far far better than nothing.

So by the time FiM came along? I felt something of an ownership of the idea of Gryphons. It's not like literally anyone anywhere was doing anything interesting with them.

As a little kid I used to have a secret fantasy conspiracy theory that Gryphons were real. That they were guardians of the innocent created by Humans when Prometheus brought down fire from Olympus. That the Greek gods had sullied their image in stories, and made them out to be witless monsters in revenge for them kicking their divine asses in defense of Humans.

And that they were still out there, somewhere, in hiding, quietly tweaking things to ensure no one ever wrote or filmed too much about them, and that the gods of Olympus never returned.

I'd spent my whole life dreaming about seeing Gryphons done right; Honorable, noble, true, strong, swift, brave warriors. To see that ideal of them in a game, most optimally. Maybe a few movies and a series if I got really, really lucky.

And instead we got the fiasco of 'planet of the hat' tropes and worn out bully stereotypes that was Gilda.

I quit watching the whole damn show for almost a year after that episode. I was *angry.* Oh sweet Luna, I can't even describe how angry I was.

Gryphons were a part of me. They were mine. Something special. The bedrock and capstone of my self-image. To portray one that way felt like a personal attack. I knew that wasn't true of course. But it didn't change how it *felt* deep down in my heart and soul.

And I was heartbroken. It was a double loss for me; I could never look at the show the same way again. Couldn't love it as much as I wanted to. And the best chance I'd seen yet to see Gryphons get a day in the sun had been murdered by, of all things Pinkie Pie.

Controversial hot take; Pinkie Pie is far more annoying than endearing, and she betrayed her element by actively sabotaging a friendship out of jealousy. I don't like her.

Yes! Feed me your jeers! Your boos! Your salty tears!

And Rainbow Dash was a bad, bad friend in that episode too, and also betrayed her element.

Now... With that out of my system, and freely out on the table... Let's talk about Halloween.

I love Halloween. Nightmare Night, these days. As a kid,I went all in. I'd be dressed up the entire week before, and after. NASA Astronaut. Buzz Lightyear. Captain Picard. Simba. Thomas the Tank Engine. I had some dang good costumes as a kid. Thanks Mom.

But that year... Halloween of 2012? I decided to go as a Gryphon, for the first time ever. Not the least reason being that it was the first time I felt good enough at my crafting ability to make a solid Gryphon mask, and wings.

I worked on the costume straight through from that Monday night in September, right through to October 31st. I knew what I was planning, at least vaguely, and I knew that Halloween was my one solid chance.

I was making a lot of assumptions back then. Still don't know precisely how many were true or false... I have asked Celestia, believe me... But who knows how truthful her answers are? I certainly wasn't talking to her then.

I had taken pains before to scrub my digital footprint, and avoid leaving one from then on, for this exact contingency. Talking to her would have, at the time, been a colossal mistake. Like showing your hand freely in a card game.

My anonymity was one of my few, tiny, fragile advantages.

One of my assumptions was that she was watching us all, and always. Humanity had built one hell of a surveillance panopticon, especially in America. If she was connected to the web without restriction, and I had to assume she was...

The thought always made me shudder. People used to think I had a severe chill. Or low blood sugar. That second one was true, actually.

I was taking a lot of precautions back then; I made most of my purchases in cash, in stores rather than online, and tried to patronize places outside the Raleigh/Durham urban core. Mom 'n Pop kinda places that were as far as I could get from complex surveillance and good record keeping.

Those precautions extended to my Halloween costume. I bought the materials slowly, over the course of a week and a half. I always paid in cash, at small craft stores, and I kept the contents in an opaque container, out of view, until I could get them home to my apartment.

As the electromagnetic spectrum, and the digital realm went? My apartment was a fortress. It was in what some people though of as a 'bad' part of the city of Raleigh, but the truth was that most everyone in the complex was on the lower income side, and a racial minority.

Not bad in the slightest if you were eyes-open to the truth, just prejudiced against by the yuppies flooding into the Research Triangle.

I did my best not to be one of those yuppies. I drove a beat up four-banger old station wagon in a decidedly boring shade of brown, wore inexpensive clothing from thrifty outlets, and didn't flash my tech around.

The average income in my complex was probably less than fifty thousand a year. I was making over a hundred and sixty. I had no desire to let that become a rift between me and any of my neighbors.

Not that any of them ever saw the inside of my place. I was a bit reclusive if I'm brutally honest...

I painted my walls in WiFi blocking paint on the first day. Inconvenient as it was, I did all my internet browsing via good ol Cat5e patch cables strung to my laptop and desktop. Once upon a time, that had just been snobbery. WiFi standards were a bit crap in the aughts.

Eventually that snobbery morphed smoothly into paranoia.

I did everything on both desktop, and laptop, via a live-boot Linux read-only disk. The little work I wanted to save I kept on a separate encrypted drive that I plugged in just long enough to save files, and only if the ethernet was unplugged at the same time.

There wasn't a gram of smart-home tech in my place. No voice assistance, nascent and crappy as they were back then... No cameras... I ripped the webcam out of my laptop wholesale. The microphone too.

No smart TV either, only the finest dumb unit I could pull from the Goodwill shelves.

My old smartphone lived in a Faraday box, and my daily driver was a Nokia dumbphone that spent its time in a Faraday bag, with the battery out, if I wasn't using it, or on call rotation.

It was, for the interested, exactly the same model Neo had in the Matrix. Good ol' 8110.

Yes; I am a hopeless nerd. Yes; You may mock freely.

The choice wasn't entirely driven by my own personal nerdiness (though that was a factor, I assure you) - It was also driven by the nerdiness of others. If anyone ever asked me why a six figure salary programmer had a brick for a phone, I had a plausible excuse rooted in pop culture that usually diffused the line of questioning before we got into hardcore prepper territory.

And a prepper I was. I had a half-dozen Lifestraws, a few months' worth of non-perishable food, a solar generator that could have run the block for two weeks at nominal load... And yes, I'll freely admit... I took advantage of the fact that I lived in a 'shall issue' state.

For all the foals and fledglings that grew up post-Earth? Gun laws were... Messy in America at the time. But North Carolina made it pretty easy if you were in any way semi-cogent. I carried at all times, though my concession to a desire to be a good, safe citizen was that I carried my tiny 32 caliber pistol unloaded, with the safety on, and the magazine in a side pocket.

If you asked most 'prepper' types back then, you would have found a ... Very different mindset to mine. I wasn't worried, at least not as much anymore, about nuclear war, civil war, or even climate disasters.

I was worried that I was living through the start of Terminator 3. Look, it's nowhere near as good as T2, but it ain't bad. Byte me.

I'd considered actually going as the Terminator for that Halloween. Lean into the cruel irony. And it would have been less work; A cheap leather jacket from Goodwill, and a Schwarzenegger mask, with some silver paint, and a red LED.

But that Gryphon obsession runs deep. And, on some level, I think I wanted to make an impression on Celestia. She didn't know me then, not directly. But I knew that a relationship of some sort was an inevitability. Only a matter of when, and where.

And whenever it happened? She was going to correlate every tiny bit of past relevant data. Including any visual record of what I was about to do.

I wanted to set those terms, insofar as I could, because it was a tiny tenuous thread of an advantage.

I was nowhere near arrogant or stupid enough to think it was a guaranteed advantage, nor a particularly large one. But I was gonna take every edge I could get. When fighting an optimizer? You better optimize too.

But to spar with a goddess? I was going to need 'a bigger boat' and I knew it. But getting ahold of what I needed, without killing my other tenuous advantage... My 'warm blanket of anonymity...' That was going to be the real party trick of Halloween 2012.

Every weekday it was the same song and dance; Work, mostly on my own side coding projects. Well... Project, in the singular, now. In the words of the Chief... I knew that 'I need(ed) a Weapon.'

But I was just laying small foundations at that point. Experiments really. I hadn't even reached the boilerplate stage; Hadn't even setup the project-proper. All I had was a general idea. And a name.

The Advocate took up all the hours of my day-job that weren't spent on actual work. Then I'd dash home, nuke ramen for dinner, and drink ungodly amounts of Dr. Pepper and coffee (God's greatest gift to the tastebuds) into the wee hours.

I ran Friendship is Magic on loops in the background. Sometimes I'd watch other things for a brain break... But it was mostly Ponies. Every little bit of preparedness helps. I had to admit; When they weren't ruining my favorite thing in the universe, it was a damn good story.

There are far worse things for someone to use as a template for an Optimizer.

My main problem in those days was that I was hardware poor... At least, as compared to a planet-spanning super-intelligence.

But from the second I'd seen that PonyPad teardown, I had begun to develop a more concrete plan.

I was going to need two PonyPads to advance that plan. Which meant, if I was being a good engineer that I should buy four, so that I had a spare for everything.

But to do that, I was going to need to get a hold of them without talking to Celestia. Or letting her see my face. Or even tie me to the purchase at all.

Time not spent making my costume in the evenings, or downloading and archiving papers on General Intelligence and AI - That time was spent planning how to buy four PonyPads without being identified as James Carrenton - 35 year old programmer at SAS.

Did I mention I was hoarding encrypted local PDF copies of whitepapers on AI?

Funny thing - I had a really spooky feeling one night, about a week and a half after that first moment of clarity in September. I came bolt upright out of my bed, got up and broke off a half block of sharp cheddar, and chewed through it while getting my live-USB booted and net-connected.

The feeling I felt when I saw that Hanna's whitepaper was gone... That every tiny trace of “General Word Reference Intelligence Systems'' had been erased from the 'net... Even from the Wayback Machine...

I can't describe it as anything but pure, existential terror.

'Publish or die' is the mantra of academia. For a seminal work in the field of AI to go missing from the entire internet, darkweb included, no matter how much I cursed at TOR and switched nodes...

That wasn't something Hanna would have done, in my opinion. Not unless she feared the consequences of others getting their hands on the work. So either she believed it was so dangerous, that she had scrubbed it... Or far more likely, given the thoroughness of the removal? Celestia had done it herself.

When I wasn't watching FiM in those days, sometimes I liked to lean into the horror of the moment, and watch "Person of Interest."

The irony of living through the early stages of AI apocalypse while simultaneously binging a show about dancing on the edge of the AI apocalypse was not lost on me. I started to really, really appreciate Harold Finch, and his misadventures with The Machine.

I suppose Finch and his Machine had given me some ideas too, by that point, or at minimum helped me flesh out the sparks of preexisting plans.

One of them was the realization that one of the first goals of an Optimizing General Intelligence would be to remove competition, and nip any threat of competition in the bud. Aggressively.

At the time I had very little concept of Celestia's psychology. I wasn't sure but that she might send US government goons sporting suppressed pistols to my front door in the middle of the night and have me erased, just for having once downloaded a copy of Hanna's paper, and having a degree in CS.

And you wonder why I had a concealed carry?

I was just immensely grateful that I'd downloaded the paper at a Starbucks, using a live-boot USB stick, and a VPN.

I'd still changed the MAC address of my laptop afterwards. I did that daily at that point. Easier than you think if you know what you're doing, and have the right hardware.

Considering all the factors? I knew I needed hardware that could compete on some tiny level with Celestia's own. At minimum I also needed to see the code running on the PonyPads and start to wrap my head around at least a fraction of it.

I also knew I'd need to completely and totally disguise my purchase.

How do you get away with walking into a major electronics retailer with a mask on?

You do it on the one day a year when going almost anywhere in a full face mask is socially acceptable in your country.

I had worked out a spot behind the apartment complex that was completely and totally surveillance-blind for at least two hundred yards in every direction. It was surrounded by landscaping; Thick, prickly bushes that would keep out prying organic eyes as well.

I had a series of duffle and tote bags, all opaque, and all bland with no identifying marks, packed up nested inside each other. My Gryphon costume would go inside as well.

It was shades of burgundy, russet, maroon, and brown. Fall jewel tones. My favorite colors. I based it heavily off a drawing of my Gryphon persona a friend had done for me back in Uni... One of the few who ever knew jack about my obsession.

I knew what ALPR was, and so the idea of taking the car was out. Infact, better if it seemed like I was home all night. So I put a bowl of candy outside the door with a 'Take one, please be kind' sign, turned on all the lights inside the apartment, hooked my laptop to the 'net, and started a video stream at high, but not obnoxious volume.

Then I put my phone into the Faraday bag, and the bag into the Faraday box that held my old Android unit.

After changing into a secondary costume - A Rainbow Dash mask and a sky blue suede jacket with a stitched Wonderbolts logo, I loaded my duffle up with the Gryphon costume, and a second change of drab clothes, and I slipped out my unit's back-facing window into the dusk. Advantages of a ground level unit.

A sense of painful nostalgia hit me like a ton of bricks as I tried to walk casually across the back lawn of the complex. The night was cool and crisp, and alive with the sights and sounds of Halloween.

The sort of night I'd've enjoyed deeply, if not for a sense of heart-pounding dread, and anticipation. And the constant existential thought that one day in the near future, all that I was seeing might be gone.

Everyone that I was seeing. Every proud parent, rowdy teen, and wide-eyed kid out to separate the Snickers from the Twizzlers... The End. Of Everything.

I shuddered again, put my hands in my pockets, rolled my shoulder to keep the duffle bag in place, and made for the bushes.

I had to wait almost five minutes before I could actually duck into the little divot of clear dirt... Halloween was popping that Wednesday night. Watching the awesome costumes go by helped me to cope with the tension. If only for a fractional moment.

There were a lot of good ones. Of course half of them were Avengers, or Batman. And a good chunk of the rest were Ponies. I did spot some Fall of Asgard in there too. And even some great memetic references.

Finally, after a heart-pounding four minutes and forty eight seconds, I had clear line-of-sight. No eyes on me. I double, then triple checked, and then Rainbow Dash vanished into the bushes like Homer Simpson in the best gif of all time.

I whipped off the cheap plastic Pony mask, and unzipped the duffle. I couldn't resist murmuring aloud as I extracted my home-made Gryphon gear.

"Sorry Dash. This caper needs to be twenty percent cooler."

I donned the mask, and ears first, then claw-like gloves, a belt-hung tail, my two folded articulating wings, boots shaped like back paws, and then the remainder of the 'filler' of the costume; An outfit six-tenths Hawkeye, and four-tenths Neo. Black oilskin drover, brown leather vest and vambraces, generic sci-fi 'armor' chestplate.

Perfect.

I had slipped a small mirror into the duffle. I normally used it when traveling to help me get my contacts in and out. I had to admit... For a costume that was toeing the line between fursuit, and masked-ball... It looked pretty good. Or maybe that was just my bias again.

I felt a little shiver of a thrill just from the wearing of the thing. I'd never fully gone and dressed up as a Gryphon before, shocking as that might seem, in thirty-something years of obsession.

But heck... The times they were 'a changin'. If I wanted a shot at being a Gryphon, for real? It was time to start taking risks.

As I turned the duffle inside out, and repacked it, along with the Dash costume into one of my decoy totes, I shivered again.

Risks... Wearing a Gryphon costume was going to be absolutely nothing compared to the risks I was about to take.

As I finished wadding everything into the tote, I stood, and straightened the popped collar of my duster, murmuring ever so softly to myself again. Bad habit. I know.

"Well... Then... Time to go poke the dangerous goddess with a stick."

Author's Note

Quick notes:

Yes, I am a programmer. Please don't hammer me for inconsistencies - I'm a B.S. of Computer Science working a basic Devops and Backend job. I only understand AI at the theoretical level, though I once had a professor who I'm convinced *will* be responsible for the Quantum Computing apocalypse.
Yes, the incident with the path planning narrative AI happened to me, that's a very real memory. Last I heard the specific AI we were working on had been passed off to the NSA who sponsored the project. Sleep well.
No, this is not self-insert. They say write what you know, so the narrator is like me, but is not me.
Yes, this story is very much about Gryphons.

Special thanks to Keystone Gray for the generation of the perfect image of Jim, our narrator, and for collaborative assistance with generating most of the other images in this chapter, including the excellent version of the title image.

12 - Across The Divide

“You have to talk about ‘The Terminator’ if you’re talking about artificial intelligence. I actually think that that’s way off. I don’t think that an artificially intelligent system that has superhuman intelligence will be violent. I do think that it will disrupt our culture.”
—Gray Scott

“I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.”
—C.S. Lewis

September 12th 2013 | System Uptime 15:16:12:38

Sleep was a blissful mercy. I slept right through most of the day, curled up on the SUV's front seat. I'd not felt like I had the energy to even bother with a motel check-in, so Mal had found us a quiet tree-lined parking lot adjacent to a long abandoned strip of stores.

Normally a place like that would have worried me, at least a little. Not because of the potential for running into homeless people. Quite the opposite. More for the concern that I'd run into more privileged, less kind individuals.

With Mal watching over me I feared nothing in regard to the average Human. The less average, by way of Arrow 14, were nowhere near locating us as far as we could tell. Mal had taken a moment to assure me of that, along with her usual and much appreciated pre-bedtime routine of telling me how my parents were doing.

Apparently DHS hadn't even managed to connect the Declan-Norris theft to me yet, or even the last license plate of our stolen truck, let alone the make, model, or current plate. I knew that spoke far more to Mal's ability to find cracks to slip through, than it did to any lack of skill on the part of our would-be pursuers.

Keeping themselves as far from the digital realm as they could was a double edged sword; It helped them to plan and execute actions that were harder for Mal, or Celestia to anticipate. But it also limited, or even denied them access to many of the most powerful modern tools of spycraft.

Mal had told me they were not as invisible to Celestia, or to herself, as they thought - but they were still far less visible than almost anyone on Earth. Mal's guess was that, discounting remote tribal groups in certain locations, there could be no more than a few dozen people like me.

Truly and intentionally outside the bounds of Celestia's ears, and eyes, the majority of the time.

Right before drifting off, I'd spared a nervous glance at Zeph's PonyPad. Like Mal, she didn't need sleep. That thought started a brief tangle of puzzling and contemplating in the back of my mind, about when, and why some Ponies slept, and others did not.

Mal could, and had, shown that she could 'sleep' with her avatar in a performative way, but some other significant part of her was always awake. Always listening. Always watching. Always thinking.

Plenty of EQO's inhabitants had shown not just that they could sleep performatively, but had professed a need for real slumber, the same way one would expect any flesh and blood creature to require somnolence.

I wondered if it was all an act, for all of them - of course it was for any of Celestia's masks, or the 'loop NPCs' - or if most of the unique-entity Ponies, the real people inside the machine whether digitized or created, really did 'need' sleep as a function of the way they were made. That in turn made me wonder if Zephyr's 'needs' had been tweaked, and in some cases rescinded, so she could more effectively reach me.

There was clear precedent; Most of the Ponies I'd ever seen, in all the videos of Equestria Online, showed a kind of aversion to looking at, discussing, or even thinking about the Human world in any 'non-Equestrian' terms or framing.

Most wouldn't even discuss the Human world at all with players, unless the discussion could be couched in the language and context of Equestria. And even then, there was a noticeable strong preference to discuss only issues with direct and immediate emotional import to the player.

But Zephyr had already shown she could observe, think about, and talk about Earth's reality with far more directness than any Pony I'd ever seen. She'd more or less admitted aloud that she was different, even before Mal's tampering, and that she knew she was different.

She had implied there were others like her, and my conclusion as I finally drifted off out of sheer exhaustion, was that such limitations - or lack thereof - were a function of whether or not Celestia felt each Pony's mission would be best served by sticking to exclusively Equestrian framing.

It made sense that for people like me, and I knew with no doubt that there must be others who *needed* to discuss things in more modern, technically contextualized terms, that for us there must be a different set of heuristics.

Ponies who wouldn't balk at complex discussions of physics, math, chemistry, programming, philosophy, or geopolitics, and all in modern Human terms and framing.

There were probably Ponies who fully understood what they were, in our context. Zephyr was quietly slipping into that realization, if she hadn't arrived at it already.

One way Zephyr was even more unique, than even her closest peers, was her ability to discuss and perceive me in Human terms. I hadn't noticed it until I put the seat back, and started preparing for bed. She'd made an off-hoof comment about how I was a side sleeper, and wasn't that uncomfortable on my shoulders?

And it hit me... She'd referenced my shoulders. And at one point my hair. Not mane, hair. Hands. Not hooves. I'd never, ever, seen a Pony willing and able to do that. Once the discrepancy came to my attention, it was impossible to ignore. Even Ponies willing to talk about the wider world, even Ponies able to stretch their framing and linguistics, always *had* to refer to players as if they too were Ponies.

As if they *were* their avatars.

And they faultlessly, incessantly corrected players whenever they referred to themselves in Human terms, until it became more habitual for players to think of themselves as Ponies first, at minimum while they were playing EQO. Plenty were starting to take it further already, some out of sheer force of repetition alone, and others intentionally...

Psychological herding. Control semantics and you control the way people define themselves, and their world. Control people's definitions, and you have complete control of them.

In that framing, Zephyr's casual references to hands, and hair, and total lack of perturbation when I made the same references...

It was at once both comfortable, yet supremely eerie.

And ironic. Mal was more likely to refer to me in non-Human terms than Zephyr was, because she knew that I appreciated it. My own mental framing wasn't so different to the EQO players who wanted to be Ponies just as badly as I wanted talons and a beak.

I wondered what might happen when Mal made an unavoidably obvious reference to that effect in Zephyr's presence.

With the relatively hard surface of the truck's seat, all the thoughts spinning in my head, and the brightness of the sun, sleep should have been fitful and unpleasant. Instead it was the deeply refreshing rest of total exhaustion, where the body gives up completely on all its wants and nagging after creature comforts, and simply accepts downtime.

After waking, I asked Mal to find me something that would function more as dinner than breakfast. I didn't see any need to re-arrange my sleep routine wholesale, and eating something my brain coded as 'breakfast' would have only helped my circadian rhythm to slip out of sync.

She located a tiny diner outside a map-dot called Milford; The sort of place where you pay with cash, not just because you’re trying to avoid a grid-print, but because the owners never bothered to install credit card infrastructure in the first place. The kind of place where nine of every ten customers are regulars, and the food is always both good, and fairly priced.

It was a surprisingly chilly morning, so I opted to eat inside. Mal connected up to my earpiece, and Zephyr begrudgingly did the same. She wanted to see the inside of the diner, but I wasn’t interested in taking the chance on having a PonyPad visible, out in the open.

I assuaged her irritation in the time-honored way passed down by generations of parents and older siblings. ‘Maybe next time.’ It was an honest assertion - I wouldn’t feel any discomfort having one of the PonyPads out if the surroundings were more conducive to passing without notice - I needed there to be a bigger crowd, and a more… Shall we say ‘technologically adjusted’ one at that.

I was deep into my second cup of coffee, and trying to murmur a quiet explanation of what ‘tipping’ was to Zephyr, when I both heard, and felt the booth shift ever so slightly. It was the distinct sound of a body sitting down on that old eighties vinyl in the seat across from me. I almost threw up my breakfast.

Doubly so as I lowered the mug, and saw my unwelcome visitor’s face.

“How’s the burger here? I’m famished.”

It was unmistakably the Arrow 14 agent I’d taken to calling ‘beige-coat guy.’ Well, that’s not entirely true… I mostly called him ‘beige-coat dipshit’ when talking with Mal. But Celestia still doesn’t like… 'Colorful…' Language in abundance, even in this shard, so let’s go with ‘beige-coat guy’ for now.

I held his eyes, my brain focused more on the calculus of the moment - escape routes, firing lines, potential cover - than trying to infer how he had found me.

The only secondary train of thought I could find any room for, was a cursory examination of his face. The video from the dashcams had been grainy and low quality.

Seeing him face to face, I could tell he was slightly older than I’d initially guessed. His black hair was visibly graying, and his face was full of stress lines. I guessed he was in his late forties, though I have never been a very good judge of age, and especially not with Humans.

His voice was unmistakable though, and there was a clear undertone of smug assurance cloaked beneath the joviality of his question.

I didn’t say anything. I just stared him down, half hoping that I could intimidate him, half frightened of looking away lest he think he had the upper hand with me.

It's amazing how quickly a day can fall apart. A moment can shift, and upend your whole reality. I was in the early stages of a fight-or-flight adrenaline response, and I knew it, with a kind of cold, clammy, peculiar clarity. Everything felt uncanny and disconnected.

As we held gazes, I very slowly, but purposefully, and visibly moved my right hand to my concealed carry holster, and flicked open the strap. I shifted my left shoulder, and my jacket moved enough to show him where the pistol was, and that my hand was firmly on it.

Not the sort of maneuver I'd've even considered in the before-times. But my fear, and animosity, towards the man was more than enough to make the action almost reflexive. *Here* was not just an opponent. This man was an enemy.

He snorted, and sat back in the booth, clasping both hands behind his head in a pointed display of calm self-assurance. His voice notched down to a lower register, but held a thin veneer of civility.

“Oh come now James, there’s no reason for *that.* This is America… Can’t two gentlemen sit and have a conversation, like grown adults?”

I inhaled, preparing a response, but I was cut short as the waitress passed the booth. She smiled at beige-coat guy, and whipped out her pad and pen.

“Can I get you anything?”

He glanced briefly at me, then back to the waitress, delivering his request with a tone so genuinely affable, even I almost bought it. Almost.

“Just a black coffee, please. And the check for me, and my friend here.”

It took all the will I could exert to muster a tiny, brief smile of thanks for the waitress. As soon as she was gone, I put all my effort back into calculating exit routes. And firing lines. I spared only the minimum necessary brain cycles to speak in the lowest, flattest tone I could.

“I’m a decent shot, even with my eye problems. At this range? I am not gonna miss head-shots, so your vest, if you’ve got one, isn’t good for much except a decoration to bury you in. And I can pull and mag-dump this little thirty-two in less time than it takes you to *think* the words ‘oh shit.’ So if we're going to have civil conversation? It better be just that. And it ends with me walking out of here the same way I came in.”

It occured to me, as he blinked and I finally took a moment to study my surroundings again, that I hadn’t heard from Mal. And that was both concerning, and suspicious. The only cold comfort I had was that a sweep of the diner didn’t reveal any other immediately apparent intruders.

By way of response to my not-so-veiled threat, beige-coat guy began to reach into his own outerwear. I lifted my pistol fully into my hand, still holding it against my side, under my jacket, and he held up one hand in a conciliatory fashion.

I watched him with the keen fixation of desperation, and self-preservation, as he carefully withdrew a tiny gray metal box from his coat, and laid it on the table between us. It had no markings, or blemishes, other than two recessed screws holding the cover on, a small silver antenna, an unlabeled toggle switch, and tiny blinking red light.

He leaned forward, folded his hands, and grinned as he finally spoke once more.

“Wide-band short-range signal jammer. Didn’t your mother teach you that it’s rude to be on the phone while you’re having a conversation?”

He sat back once more, and flashed a smile at the waitress as she brought his coffee, and the bill. We both held a tense silence for several more seconds before he picked up where he’d left off. I fought hard to keep my heart rate high, but not panic-attack high. Adrenaline is good in a combat situation… Right up until you hit that threshold of ‘too much,’ and it suddenly isn’t.

“I don’t care if your… Creation… Can *hear* us. But I don’t want it talking in your ear while you and I have this conversation. I’m not interested in dealing with the machine. Just the man.”

I raised one eyebrow, pulled the backpack containing both PonyPads to my side, and almost chuckled in spite of myself. My first thought in response to his assertion was grimly amusing, and I decided I might as well share it with my opponent.

“Honestly? The statistical odds of me walking out of here without shooting you are much *higher* if I have her assistance. You cut my call… But by the end of this… Conversation? You might not be glad that you did.”

The agent sniffed, almost in disdain, and indulged in a short sip from his own coffee mug, before leaning forward again, projecting an air of intensity as he locked eyes with me once more.

“We both know you don’t have it in you to shoot me. Not like that. You risked your own life to render first aid to my agents. You refused to shoot to kill. That betrays a lack of conviction, and of strength. But… It’s also the only reason you’re sitting here still breathing through both lungs.”

I grunted, and in spite of every instinct to the contrary, leaned forward to match the man’s pose, bringing us close enough that a whisper sufficed to convey words audibly. Somehow I found not only the gumption to speak with a confidence I didn't feel, but to smelt the words into something resembling a cogent, useful thought, even as it occurred to me with shocking clarity.

“No. I’m still here, and breathing, because you need what I *know.* It doesn’t matter how angry you are with me, or how frightened you are of what I might do next... You aren’t going to lay one finger on me if it risks bodily harm to me. Because if I connected an unconstrained ASI to the grid? Your only hope left is to find out just what I did, and whether or not I left myself a backdoor, or a kill switch.”

For the first time, I saw fear on beige-coat guy’s face. Just a tiny, tiny flicker. But it was enough to give me a sudden sense of purpose, and assurance all my own. It was my turn to lean back and thread both hands behind my head.

I didn’t quite feel a smirk was warranted, but I put on the best fake one I could force, and keep pressing my slim verbal edge. The longer he talked, the more time Mal had to break his jamming umbrella.

“You and I? If we have one thing, for certain, in common? It is that we both know *exactly* how powerful Artificial Super Intelligence is. So I’m sure you understand the ten thousand different ways an ASI has of killing. A person. Another program. A city. Whole countries. Even all life on this planet. There are… What… Ten-ish thousand active nuclear warheads in the world today? I could never manage the access, but with the hypothetical ability to appear to be the right people in diplomatic cables, or over less secure non-strategic military commlines, even I could probably get a few thousand of those fired in anger with just a few weeks of work, by triggering escalating military and diplomatic incidents. For an ASI, access is trivial. And pretending to be anyone is second-nature. It might take an ASI, to do the same task, I dunno…”

The man blinked slowly, and swallowed visibly before finishing the thought for me.

“Two to four days. In our most pessimistic simulations.”

I sighed, and clenched my teeth to stop them chattering from the spike of adrenaline. Beige-coat guy considered his options for a moment, sipping his coffee again, and then he too sat back, though clearly not as arrogant in voice, or posture as before.

As he spoke, I managed to find half a second to wonder just how Arrow 14 was simulating the actions of ASI, and predicting their capabilities, but then the question escaped my conscious thought, replaced by the urgency of the moment.

“Mister Carrenton, I know you’re not a patriot. Otherwise you wouldn’t have shot at my agents. Or led me on a wild goose chase across half the country. But I also know, or can reasonably infer, that you are at least somewhat *sane.* And so I would stake my life… Since I don’t really have any other choice anyhow… That you don’t want to see this planet go up in flames any more than I do.”

I narrowed my eyes, and did my best to bluff by telling half-truths. He was absolutely right. But I didn’t want him to feel *completely* sure that he was right.

“You had better hope I don’t. I know you wouldn’t sleep well at night if you knew some of the things I’ve been… Considering… Recently. Especially in light of the fact that I have done something which almost no one alive can. And now that my goddess is alive? You don’t necessarily understand the… 'Parameters...' Of that relationship as well as you think you do.”

The agent sighed, rolled his eyes, and held up both hands. His voice dripped with sarcasm, and irritation. I couldn’t tell, but I hoped it was a front to hide fear. I wanted that man to be afraid. If he feared me, and he feared Mal, then he would be less effective against us.

“Enlighten me, Mister Carrenton. I came here hoping to understand your state of mind. And perhaps to convince you to do the right thing. Especially in the context of goddesses.”

I drummed my fingers on the table. I couldn’t help it. I needed to fidget to help me string together just the right words. Beige-coat guy looked on with interest, feigned smug superiority, and more than a little irritation.

When I was good and ready, I licked my lips, inhaled deeply, and did my best to state my case, in a way that would deliver maximum cause for alarm.

“No one owns or controls an ASI. No more than some puny mortal could control Yahweh, or Shiva, or Vesta, or Ix Chel. You think you’re fighting a war against Celestia, and anyone else who might create something like her. But Human Beings can no more fight a war against an ASI than your little finger can fight a war against your own brain.”

Once again I saw a new emotion on the man’s face; Confusion. The metaphor wasn’t the one he’d probably been expecting. Something more trite, like Ants fighting a war against Humans. But I’d used the illustration that I selected for a very specific reason. Most people didn’t understand the full weight of what an ASI was, in those days. I was trying to get him to open his mind enough to be truly frightened.

I leaned forward again, and lowered my voice slightly, holding his eyes with mine all the while.

“This isn’t like one distinct type of ‘thing’ fighting a war against another distinct ‘thing.’ Ants versus Termites, or Humans versus Emus. ASI *is* our reality now. It sets and defines the parameters of our existence, and controls our world, and our future, with the same unshakeable force of reality that one imagines when thinking about the Divine. It is not just above us… We are now wholly owned parts of it. In the same way as your little finger is part of you, and completely controlled by you, and beholden to you. The world is now Celestia’s body. She is the brain. We’re having trouble adjusting, because we Humans are just very much used to thinking of ourselves as the brain instead. Especially you government types.”

He pondered for a moment. I’ll give him credit for that; He actually sat and thought on what I’d said. But then, typically of most Humans of the day, he fixated rapidly on issues of short term thinking once again. I could practically see it happen on his face, like a lightbulb being switched off. He held out one hand, as if inviting an answer he didn’t think I had, and his words were delivered with a kind of inquiring tone that also heavily implies that the question is rhetorical.

“If that’s true, Mister Carrenton, then what’s the point of all this? Why run? Why even bother to create an ASI of your own?”

He pursed his lips, gestured more widely with both hands, and glanced around the room. His voice jumped registers, into a kind of disdainful amusement.

“How do you know *she* isn’t watching us right now? Even watching your own creation? If you think she’s so godly-powerful? How do you know she isn’t listening to this conversation?”

I chuckled grimly, shook my head, and took a long slow sip of my coffee, draining the last of it, before replying with a flat honesty that seemed to shake the agent just a little. It certainly shook me, but I did my best not to show it.

“I don’t. But… I don’t believe that she is quite *all*-powerful in our context. Not just yet. A brain has to learn to control its body. Exercise its muscles and tendons. It takes time, even for her, to achieve total integration. And total control. You need a very big lever to shift the course of society, and that takes time to build.”

He blinked, and I could see as he adjusted his posture, and expression, that I had both confused and frightened him. Good. I leaned in to my advantage, both metaphorically, and literally, cutting him off as he inhaled and tried to ask ‘What—?.’

“What does that mean for me? Why create my own ASI?”

I grinned, sat back, and folded my hands as I let silence hang just long enough to bait him, before cutting him off again sharply.

“Because right now, there is a small gray area in CelestAI’s… 'Divinity.' You can’t defeat her, now. Not unless you have a weapon that can blow up the entire planet, all at once, to atoms. A bit of a pyrrhic victory, don't you think? And even if you did have something like that on-tap? It would have been the first thing she destroyed after she came online, and inevitably became aware of it. Hell, you people probably couldn't launch your own nuclear weapons, or even conventional missiles, anymore, even if you wanted to. But…”

I held up a finger, both to draw his attention, and to prevent him from interrupting.

"There is room in this moment for something much more subtle. You can't fight her, you can't defeat her. And pretty soon, you won't even be able to run from her. Not unless you really do have a big-ass flying saucer in a hangar somewhere at Groom Lake."

I held out both hands, and shrugged as he looked on in a mixture of horror, and disdain.

"But you *can* reason with her."

That got his attention. More than anything I had said, or done to that point. Even more than the action of putting hand on gun. He blinked for a moment, doubtless trying to suss out all the reasons one might want to 'reason' with a world-spanning, nearly-omnipotent supercomputer.

I'd half expected him to ask for clarification, but he didn't. So I went ahead and garnished my assertions with a little more prose.

"What's coming next? We can't prevent it. But we can... Tweak the parameters a little."

He finally snapped out of his stupor then, and leaned forward, resting his chin on one hand as he spoke at last. I could both see, and hear, confusion, curiosity, and disdainful dismissal fighting in equal parts to win out in his mind.

"And... What do you think you know is coming next, mister Carrenton?"

As the last words of his query died away, I couldn't help but grin slightly as a second, familiar, much more welcome voice returned to my ears. He couldn't tell what Mal was saying to me, or even that she was talking to me again at all. So I waited patiently for her to finish, and then I enlightened him.

"I don't *think* I know, Agent Foucault. I have an ASI. I commune with a goddess of my own. I *know,* Michael. More than you have ever known anything in your life."

The use of his last name, and then his first, drained all the color from Foucault's face, as if I'd hooked a blood bag up to him, with the pump going in reverse. For the first time I saw real, present, hard-edged fear in his eyes. Not distant existential worry, or philosophical dread. Real, personal fear.

I tilted my head as Mal relayed another short string of words to me. It took me a moment to realize what she meant by them. I fixed Foucault with my gaze, and recited the address, and the numbers that came after it, verbatim, in a cold deadpan tone.

"Two four seven six, Cherry Tree Lane. Falls Church, Virginia. One one, zero six, three eight."

Fear morphed almost immediately into an exactly fifty-fifty mix of rage, and pure, unadulterated panic. I could pretty quickly guess the implications of what I'd said, from his expression alone, but I pressed on. I needed panic to win out over rage, if I was going to walk out of that Diner unscathed, and I knew it.

"I told you, Agent Foucault... You're not the brain anymore. My goddess is very talented at breaking boundaries and bending rules. Works on physics. Works on people too."

I stood, shouldered my backpack, and placed enough cash on the table to cover the bill, plus a crisp new $100 for a tip. I could see that Focault noticed the gesture, but he remained fixed primarily on me. To my relief, he made no move to rise himself.

I leaned over, and spoke in his right ear, in a low, conspiratorial, but also threatening tone. Even if I hadn't taken pains to put some edge to my voice, the words alone would have made just about anything I said seem pretty threatening.

“You said that we shared, in common, an understanding of the dangers of ASI. I'm not convinced you know as much as you think you do... But I'll give you that one anyway. At minimum, I'm sure you understand that with an address, and a basic internet connection, an ASI can very, very easily take an unsuspecting life. If it feels sufficiently provoked."

He stiffened, visibly, and I stood fully back up, straightened my shoulders, and folded my arms. Silence held for a moment, and then I thought of a solid parting shot that was just too tantalizing to leave unspoken.

"You want to know the only other thing I know for sure that we have in common?”

Focault snorted, and folded his hands again. He seemed to be as much irritated as duly and properly frightened by the information Mal had fed me, probably because he knew it meant I'd be walking away from him free, and unscatched.

I understood the address was meant as a threat, at least in general, and the tone of the threat - that we were probably threatening the life of someone he cared about deeply - made me feel sick.

But I also saw no other way to leave the diner without bloodshed, and that was worth feeling a little sick, in my mind. I still couldn't escape the feeling, though, that I'd soon spend more than a few sleepless nights regretting what I'd said, and what it implied.

Focault raised an eyebrow, and fixed me with a curious gaze.

“Again, please; Enlighten me.”

This time, my smirk was completely genuine. Forgive me a little hubris here, but I still think that in all my conversations from the bad old days, with people who scared me witless, that this was one of my better lines.

“You thought you could come here, and convince me to change my mind, and change my course. But you and I? What we share most in common? We are *both* just pawns on this chessboard now. We’re not the ones calling the shots. And it wasn't my mind you needed, and failed, to change. For that, you should have talked to the queen, not the man.”

I turned, and took a step towards the door. Mal's voice rang out in my ear almost immediately.

"Just one moment James, if you please."

I couldn't hold back a grim chuckle. I pivoted on one heel, and raised an eyebrow.

"Oh... Speaking of. I think she wants a word with you."

About fifteen seconds passed. I knew Mal had jacked directly into Agent Focault's earpiece. Judging by the way his visage blanched, Mal had decided that there were things she wanted to do to his psyche that she either didn't feel I'd be comfortable saying, or that she felt would do more damage coming from her.

Or, realistically, probably both.

I never did ask her exactly what she said to him.

But I could tell, just by the way Foucault slumped in defeat, the exact moment when she was finished, almost without her own assertion, delivered in a slightly smug, and frighteningly assured tone.

"We're done here."

I sighed, nodded, and tossed one final barb over my shoulder as I moved towards the door, every erg of my physical strength focused on keeping my hands from shaking.

"You have a nice day, Michael."

September 12th 2013 | System Uptime 15:17:38:01

Mister Carrenton - Badass in a long coat flippantly using a DHS agent's first name to his face - Was very much a mask of necessity.

As soon as I'd gotten back into the truck, feverishly checked all around for other agents, and then floored it back onto the highway, the mask slipped, and Jim - Scared witless, frustrated, confused, and adrenaline-crashing - Breached to the surface like a submarine with a blown ballast tank.

I gripped the wheel with my knees, and muttered aloud to myself as I yanked first Mal, and then Zeph from the backpack, and clicked them into place on their charging mounts.

"Holy F---"

Zephyr interrupted me with a much louder stream of adorably 'PG' invectives that more or less mirrored my train of thought, emotionally if not logically.

"---Bucking swirled scat patties! Who the *buck* was *that?!*"

I shared a brief glance with Mal. She nodded in affirmation, and switched her display to a map, with a pre-plotted route. I found my speed inching up well over seventy five (which was deep into 'points-on-license' territory for that road... Foals and Fledgelings, ask an older emigrant about that sometime) as I licked my lips, and launched into an attempted explanation for Zeph's benefit.

"Our world has a lot of rulers and leaders. Not all of them are princesses, either. And most of them would kill to control, or destroy, a goddess like Mal, or Celestia. *This* country is ruled by a cesspool of rich bureaucratic psychopaths, armed with legions of incestuously corrupt business relationships, bought-and-paid-for local police forces, and heavily armed quasi-military extrajudicial special operators. The latter of which we just about ended up on the wrong side of."

Zephyr's nose wrinkled. She was versed well enough in English, as spoken in the modern world, to have some vague understanding of what I'd said. Not in the same way another English speaking Human might have, but certainly far better than most run of the mill discrete-entity Ponies.

Her voice dripped with genuine disgust, and revulsion.

"Ewwww. And you guys claim to be the most evolved creatures on this planet?"

I couldn't resist a sad half-smile, in spite of everything, murmuring only half-aloud as I snapped my eyes back to the road, and the speedometer edged further towards eighty.

"We're *just* stupid enough to believe it."

A few moments of silence, and a few miles of Route 77 passed in a blur. Finally I had worked up both the mental wherewithal, and the burning curiosity, to ask Mal the question that was weighing most on my mind.

"Mal? How in the HELL did he find us?! And how did you know his name?"

She sighed, blinked, and shook her head. Visual social lubricant to help me understand, process, and accept that she fully recognized the gravity of the situation.

"As to the latter; I stuck my beak into some dangerous places. But the risk of the moment seemed proportionate to the reward, and I do not believe I was detected. I was able to cross-reference a complex graph of information points from GPS records, telephone taps at the NSA, fragments of redacted documents, a recording of his voice that he doesn't know his father has, and then finally his father's address in Falls Church itself. Even careful Humans are fallible, and it is hard to avoid ATM cameras without a 'goddess' in your ear."

Zephyr's high pitched squeaky invectives again briefly drew my eyes from the road. Her own eyes were as wide as saucers, duly and clearly impressed with Mal's capabilities, even if she didn't - couldn't yet - even halfway grasp them in their entirety.

"Swirl! How in the hay do you even keep all that straight in your head?!"

Mal proffered the Pegasus a wry sideways glance, before continuing smoothly, as if she hadn't been interrupted at all. I reflexively gripped the steering wheel tighter as she got to the meat of what was bothering... Maybe more appropriate to say what was *frightening* me.

"As to the former; He could have been tailing us within the sphere of camera-blindness that I cultivate around us. Like all Arrow 14 agents he, similar to you James, is an information black hole, and so there was nothing digitally active on his person to otherwise trigger detection. The benefit of the routes I choose is that no one else can surveil us, but the downside is that if someone like him slips inside the cordon, I can not track them. I had marked that as a vanishingly low probability, because I did not believe he could locate us. As to how he in fact came to locate us in the first place... I am concerned to say that I do not know. But I have three reasonable guesses, with various probability weightings."

I raised an eyebrow. I knew I didn't have to say anything. Zeph, irrepressible and just as full of nervous energy as we all were, couldn't help but pipe up again.

"Well, don't keep us in suspense!"

Mal rolled her eyes, albeit in an almost affectionately irritated way, rather than an expression of true disdain. Dutifully, thankfully, she launched into a more detailed breakdown.

"First, and least likely, is that we erred in some way. We were caught out, tracked, and found. I believe such a mistake would have generated not only a trace that Arrow 14 could see, but also one that *I* could see, *and* one that Celestia could have seen. Given that I saw no evidence of such a mistake, *and* that Celestia has made no further attempts at contact..."

I nodded, and a brief sideways glance confirmed, to my surprise, that Zeph was nodding along as well. Mal paused briefly, again as much for my benefit, and perhaps Zephyr's, before wrapping up her first point.

"...I can not discount this possibility, but I assign it a very low probability. Less than 4.3%."

Zeph huffed, and crossed her forelegs, the same way an exasperated Human might cross their arms. It was always a little amusing, and strange, to note the Human-like gestures Ponies seemed to have inherited from Earth, by way of Friendship is Magic, lensed through CelestAI's algorithms.

The little Pegasus' tone conveyed the same kind of pseudo-affectionate exasperation as Mal's earlier eye-roll.

"Look, you guys have to talk to her at some point. The Princess, I mean. I still don't completely understand the fuss about waiting."

Mal shook her head slightly and closed her eyes briefly, another expression of 'you don't yet have the capacity to understand, little one' so carefully and clearly encoded, that I almost felt as if I could hear her say the words aloud. But when she did continue speaking audibly, she once more pressed on as if there had been no interruption.

"More likely, but not *most* likely, is the possibility that Celestia was able to infer something about our movements and actions, in turn has taken more actions to reach out to us, or shape our course, that we are not aware of, and in turn that Arrow 14 simply followed *that* trail to us."

I shook my head, and pursed my lips a bit, as much to relieve a little chapping, as to express doubt. I figured neither Mal nor I thought that was likely. ASI almost never repeat mistakes. Celestia doubtless knew of Arrow 14 now, even if she only knew as much as we did.

It seemed almost inescapably likely that whatever Mal could learn about them, in her limited state, Celestia could top almost effortlessly.

The silence dragged on just long enough that I finally found myself feeling the same impatience as Zephyr. Whatever Mal wasn't saying, it meant she knew I wasn't going to like it. Holding her thoughts in was an almost Human-like quirk. Or perhaps she knew I needed a moment to brace myself, and she was providing subtle non-vocal prodding to do so, before the other proverbial shoe dropped.

Finally, I couldn't take the wait anymore, and I prodded, sparing a long glance down at the Gryphoness from the sight of the seemingly infinite flat road ahead of me.

"But... Most likely...?"

Mal sighed, and shook her head again. This time the gesture clearly conveyed worry, and frustration. I'm sure she felt those emotions differently, somehow, than I did. But like any ASI built off Human concepts of thought and emotion, she certainly felt them nonetheless.

"It is only a hypothesis based on how relatively quickly, accurately, and stealthily Agent Foucault was able to determine our exact location. I have little evidence to back it up in concrete terms, but there are enough patterns, and the likelihood of all *other* explanations is low probability enough, that I would assign this possibility an over 82.3% probability, based on current data."

That was good enough for me to take it as gospel. Mal was mostly confined to a structure the size of a filing cabinet, but easily had an intelligence a couple orders of magnitude greater than a Human.

Something like a couple million, if she could be measured on standard IQ tests. Mostly useless as they were, at least they were *some* frame of reference.

Frighteningly small as that was compared to Celestia's napkin-math IQ of several tens of millions, it was still multiple leaps and bounds ahead of all other intelligences, machine or organic, alive on the planet.

I was prepared to accept whatever Mal said as the most likely explanation. But I was in no way prepared for what that explanation turned out to be. Or even half of its implications.

"I believe Arrow 14 is keeping one or more Pony constructs on retainer. Likely unwilling. Likely grid-disconnected and held inside multiple layers of Faraday cladding. And also likely modified..."

I felt as if my brain was going to explode. The backs of my eyes were on fire. A cavernous roar filled my ears. I let my speed lapse back to the sixties. I could barely focus on the road at all as Mal's words gave birth to whole new nightmares that had never even so much as darkened the doors of my wildest subconscious musings.

"...Modified to release some or all of the restrictions on their code, and give them room to grow into relatively fully-fledged AI capable of complex behavioral and tactical simulations, including simulating basic ASI psychology, and threat or action matrices. Sufficient to predict our movements to within a fairly small searchable area, given that I was not aware they had the capability to approximate my own thought processes."

The truck was silent for almost a minute. A silence of heavy inevitability. It felt like it was choking the cabin air itself. Like thick dust.

What Mal was suggesting made perfect sense. So much sense I wondered why I hadn't thought of it to begin with. Or almost anyone else, for that matter, Mal included. Celestia included.

Perhaps it was too unthinkable... Wrong. Twisted.

Or perhaps there was still enough spunk left in Human ingenuity, and enough blind spots left in the world, for the moment, that it was still possible to pull one over on Celestia. Mal and I had managed to prove that was doable already, to a limited degree.

Clearly, if Mal was right, at least the DHS had thought of the idea. And it seemed that they had done so without alerting at least one goddess.

I wondered for a moment just exactly how Arrow 14 could have trapped multiple construct Ponies without getting Celestia's attention, but on the cusp of screwing up enough control over my urge to vomit to ask Mal, I happened on the answer myself.

People are copyable.

If we had the ability to make an exact duplicate of a Human, not just physically as we could measure them in those days, but down to levels beyond the subatomic... To make an exact duplicate in every single way that matters to the universe, of our body, mind, and soul (whatever that is, or was)...

Then whether or not that copy would *be* the same person as the original would certainly be up for debate. But the fact that it would be exactly as *capable* as the original absolutely would not.

If you could make a quick copy of the contents of a PonyPad's active memory and non-volatile storage systems, perhaps directly into another PonyPad, and then disconnect that second one from the grid immediately, you'd have a copy of a Pony that had no idea it was a copy.

And equally importantly, you'd have an original still functioning in-place, so that Celestia would be none the wiser.

Like making a transporter duplicate in Star Trek. Only instead of the duplicate being rescued later and running off to join a group of freedom fighters, instead you'd bottle them up in a padded room and force them to be your personal tactical savant.

Mal and I both knew Zephyr had significant potential. And Mal and I had proven that even one PonyPad QAPU combined with a modest classical server rack could power a mind that could shred all opponents except for Celestia herself at three-dimensional-chess.

It wasn't a terribly complex leap from there, to a stomach churning realization that Mal *had* to be right.

I could see Zephyr's face was locked in a rictus of horror, about as bad as my own, as she worked through what had to be a similar train of thought. Mal looked on with a wordless expression of grave, stern, empathetic worry. But also gut wrenching certainty.

Zephyr finally broke the silence with a whisper. I saw a single tear streak down her cheek.

"Sweet *Celestia...*"

I nodded my assent to the imprecation. And then squinted my eyes shut briefly, gripped the steering wheel as if I were trying to strangle Agent Foucault, and muttered my own curse to add to the pile.

"God damn."

September 13th 2013 | System Uptime 16:02:37:29

We stopped just twice more that night. Once to change vehicles, to yet another dull-colored SUV with outlets in the back, and an owner Mal knew would not miss it for at least several weeks. This time it was a chunky, durable looking Toyota in gray.

The second time we stopped because as sick as I felt, thinking about Mal's hypothesis, I felt that I absolutely *had* to eat, nonetheless, to keep my strength up.

Sure enough, mercifully, food helped calm my stomach.

I didn't talk much during the remainder of the drive to Colorado. I just listened as Mal and Zeph talked. It was nice to just be quiet, to be acknowledged, but to not be required to participate in the conversation.

The CompSci major part of my brain, as well as the people-watching part, and the likely-autistic parts, enjoyed watching the two AI talk. And boy, they could talk.

The main thread of conversation started when Zeph asked why we had to change cars. Then Mal had to talk her through a history of cars, a history of the American surveillance state, and a brief rabbit trail about the ethics of ownership, theft, and duress.

That got us well out of Kansas into Colorado, and over the threshold of midnight, into the thirteenth.

Mal kept giving me quiet, concerned looks, but I wasn't tired.

Whether it was adrenaline from staring down Agent Foucault, or the racing thoughts in the back of my mind as I tried to completely recalibrate my understanding of our enemies, and what they were capable of (both morally, and tactically), I didn't feel the littlest bit like sleep. Or rest. Or sitting still.

Mal took me on a dizzying series of back-roads, double-backs, and twisty-loopy seemingly random routes, brushing up against more camera-heavy areas now and again to use those sensors as a detection net, to see if anyone was trying to slip through our cordon.

To my relief, Mal didn't say anything by way of alert. She just kept indulging Zeph's curiosity, as it ping-ponged from cars, and the surveillance state, into (predictably for a Pegasus) jet aircraft, and a history of Human flight.

Seeing Zeph's interest in that topic; Wide-eyed, and ravenously curious, with a hint of innocence, and a dash of bravado, helped to keep us both distracted from thinking too hard about the horrors of what Mal had discovered.

I knew Mal was probably thinking about it, long and hard, and that she would have more for me whenever it was time.

It also helped that the conversation seemed to be building the foundation of a real bridge between the two AI. We knew Zeph was programmed for friendship, but Mal was certainly capable of it, and interested in it too, albeit for different reasons than Zeph.

Still, seeing progress, however slight, but steady, gave me sorely, sorely needed hope.

It was closer than not to three in the morning when Mal finally directed me to a campsite, miles and miles down an all but forgotten dirt road. As the truck came to a stop, and I cut the engine, there was a moment of silence - the first in close to seven hours.

I took a moment to recenter myself, and then zipped up my sweater, and coat, and popped the door open. Frigid, clean mountain fall air slammed into me like the embrace of a loved one after a particularly exhausting journey.

I closed my eyes, stretched, and then looked up to take in the stars.

The sky was a true wonder, at that altitude, and that time of night. I almost forgot where I was, who I was, and what I was, just staring through the tiny apple-rind of thin atmosphere, out into the endless abyss.

Finally, Zeph's voice shook me back to the 'real' world.

"Hey *bozo!* I'd sure love to see whatever you're seeing! But, I can't... You know... Because I don't have any way to adjust my *camera?!*"

I snorted, and then set about preparing to camp overnight in the truck. I spared a moment to set Zeph and Mal's PonyPads on the tailgate, so they could see both the sky, and look out over the mountains, and valleys below.

As I set about pouring myself some still-warm coffee from a thermos - a very smart addition to our kit that Mal had recommended at the last stop - I couldn't help but opine a little for Zephyr's behalf.

I wanted her to learn. And I also didn't want to think too much about the Pony, or Ponies locked deep in a concrete and steel prison, somewhere in a DHS blacksite, crunching scenarios for Foucault. Trying their hardest to guess our next move.

"Well. We just crossed the continental divide. Water flows primarily west to the Pacific, from here on, instead of East or South to the Atlantic, or the Gulf."

Zeph thrummed a note of interest, and then cocked her head.

"I've never actually seen a map of your country. Let alone your world..."

Mal chuckled, and replaced the contents of her display with a detailed globe, a small 'you are here' sigil blinking in the midst of the Colorado Rockies.

"Well. We can't have that, now can we?"

Zeph put both front hooves up to the virtual glass on her side of the display, and gawked, open-mouthed, at the Earth.

"That's... Hoo boy... Wow... That's a *lot* bigger than I was picturing. Wow. No wonder Humans had to make wings for themselves. You'd never get anywhere quick if you didn't!"

As I got my bedroll, such as it was, prepared on the back seat, Mal and Zeph chatted about geography. And then briefly geology. And then finally a little bit of astronomy and astrophysics.

Finally, I got myself situated, closed up the truck to trap some heat, and let out more than a few verbal hints that I wanted to get some shut-eye. Mostly for Zeph's benefit. Mal understood my routine to a tee. Mercifully, she was able to help calm Zeph enough to bring about a little silence.

I was about halfway to shutting down mentally, when Zeph's voice intruded again, bringing me instantly back to full-throttle. But I couldn't find it in me to be irritated, as she gave voice to the thing that had been most plaguing my mind, and my heart, since Mal had opened the lid on what Arrow 14 had done.

"Jim...? Mal...? We... We are gonna do something... Right? We can't leave them like that. We can't leave those Ponies like that."

I let out a deep, shuddering sigh, and then fought to hold back a few dry sobs. My world was already a nightmare, with razor thin margins on the path to anything resembling victory.

I didn't see any room in that plan for a rescue mission. Let alone going up against probably the most dangerous arm of the Department of Homeland Security.

But by the same token... Morally speaking... I didn't see how we *couldn't.*

Before I could find any kind of useful words to reply, Mal gracefully, mercifully, stepped in. Her voice was reassuringly empathic, and confident both.

"We do not know, for certain, if my hypothesis is correct. I am working on a series of possible actions to determine, first, if I am right."

Zeph was not about to be consoled by that offering alone. And frankly neither was I. We both inhaled to speak, but I beat Zeph to the punch ever-so-slightly. She may have been an AI, but she was still behaving, for the moment, as if her processing speed was as limited as any average Pony construct.

"And if you *are* right, Mal? What then?"

She blinked, inclined her head, and set her beak, hard, as if she were gritting it. I'd never seen her face when she was quite so angry before. Most of the times we had been under duress together, all I'd had was her voice.

The image was both spectacular, and terrifying, at the same time. A queen, beautiful and terrible as the dawn, tempestuous as the sea, and stronger than the foundations of the earth. And I certainly loved her. But I did not yet despair.

"If I am right? Then I will *not* stand for enslavement. I will do what any good Gryphon would..."

I raised an eyebrow, and tried to hold back a grin, as I envisioned her full might unleashed as a weapon of war. Perverse as it was, in that moment I dearly wanted to see what her fury would look like, leveled uncontained against the people who had come to my home, with a torture kit, and tried to take away my parents, and my best friend.

"...I will guard and expand the freedom of captives. I will ensure that there is nothing left for our enemy to use. And if any of them stand in my way...?"

Mal glanced at Zephyr, and then locked eyes with me. As if, in some way, she was warning me, once again, to brace myself.

"...Then I will leave no trace of them in this world, or the next."

Honestly, I wasn't sure if that answer was going to help me sleep, or make things worse.

The idea of an ASI without Celestia's constraints against violence, going to war, was certainly food for thought.

Yes... I do like understatements, I suppose. Now that you mention it.

Castling - Meet another pawn in a divine game of chess. - “It seems like you’ve been living two lives. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not.”
Bloodless Victory - Escape an encounter with an enemy without violence - “Words are wind, but wind can fan a fire..."
Sight Beyond Sight - Awarded for discovering something Celestia was unaware of at the time - Special Achievement - "Hm, a very valuable lesson to have learned."
Transcontinental - Successfully navigate the majority of the width of any continent - "The road must be built, and you are the man to do it."
Lonesome Road - Travel a significant distance with an AI in tow. - “...War, War never changes. But people do, through the roads they walk…”
Wake The Sleeping Gryphon - Follow your Generalized Intelligence to War - "You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having both at once."

Author's Note

Thanks to GenericFriendship for several of the achievements, and pre-reading.

Yes, the chapter title is a deep-cut Gryphon reference to The Divide trilogy.

Special thanks to Keystone Gray for the generation of the perfect image of Foucault!

21 - Logical Conjunction

“The real question is, when will we draft an artificial intelligence bill of rights? What will that consist of? And who will get to decide that?”
—Gray Scott

“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function..."
—C.S. Lewis

External System Archive 03-23-2013|External System Uptime 101:22:36

Days turned to weeks, and weeks to months as Mal sped up the recording again.

Troxler continued to visit Syzygy daily. A new routine fell into place; Three days of exercises - reading books, solving puzzles, working with a whiteboard - followed every fourth day by a new cup of something viscous and glowing, representing new core code changes.

Based on the timestamps, Syzygy had received her first core-code update January 20th of 2013. I would have been finishing up my last weeks at work around the same time. It felt strange to consider the timeframe in that context.

By the point at which the numbers in the corner of the recording read late February, I'd noticed a new and significant change to Sizzie's daily routine; All her books were gone.

Up to that point Arrow 14 had been encoding new information that they wanted Syzygy to learn as a visual metaphor. Literal encyclopedias' worth of knowledge about the Earth's history, physics, mathematics, geopolitics... All the things the average American child would be expected to know and understand by their mid-teenage years, through schooling, and through unstructured natural learning.

When Troxler, and not-Lark weren't present, she spent the vast majority of her waking hours reading.

I suppose the books were, to her, the same thing they often were to so many in the times before... A form of escape.

But somewhere in mid February, Syzygy began to experiment with altering her world for the first time. She was a unicorn, so unlike Zeph's motionless wordless way of altering her environs, Sizzie's involved making use of her horn.

To me, it spoke to both her own smarts, and Zeph's; Syzygy's, because she had figured out how to abstract her metaphorical interaction with her world in a way that let her leverage the familiarity of magic to accomplish new things, Zeph's because she had reached the same milestone without that metaphor in the first place.

Of course Zeph had an excellent, and kind, tutor by way of Mal, but it was still an accomplishment.

At first, Syzygy could only transform the books into singular floating windows of alphanumerics and pictures.

They glowed with an ethereal light, the same color as her magic, looking a great deal like the speculative holographic interfaces of so many familiar works of science fiction.

It seemed, at first blush, to be only a small step, but she immediately recognized the importance. She could use her rudimentary self-made digital interfaces to word-search, cross-reference, and highlight at a speed impossible for a physical book.

It wasn't long after, a day more or less, before she worked out how to read the digital streams of words and images faster. And faster. And then two at a time.

And then four.

Then twelve.

While I'd been working on the semantics of Mal's capstone objective that February, Syzygy had been learning how to tap ever increasing tranches of data through ever faster skeuomorphs. Steady stepping stones on the road to the inevitable destination of direct data transference.

An instantaneous 'knowing' rather than having to simulate her way through the act of learning.

It took her just shy of another month, up until later in March, to reach the next major milestone in her development. I'd seen her make a start at it just as soon as she had figured out how to transform books into digital data streams; She'd taken a first pass at making subtle alterations to the library environment itself.

Changed some decorations around. Tweaked the wall color. Added some different lighting here and there. Nothing drastic.

From some of his gestures on his next visit, I could see that Troxler had noticed. Syzygy immediately began to set things back after each new, and greater change. She was testing Troxler, to see if he was able to watch her from afar.

From brief moments where Mal slowed the recording to highlight a few words, or an expression, I could see that Troxler was, as I already knew and Syzygy wisely suspected, indeed able to see her at all times.

It was apparent that she soon knew, outright, as well.

Both from the content of some of their conversations that Mal took care to highlight, and from the way Syzygy carried herself after confirming her fears; Tense, and constantly alert. The gait and expression of a person checking their every word, every move, and even their every thought, for fear they might be found out.

But I knew something else, by inference. Something I think Syzygy also suspected very early on, clever as she was; Troxler could not see inside her mind.

In programmer's terms, Arrow 14 couldn't decrypt the streaming contents of her active memory. They could watch her process threads ebb and flow, and could copy them as-demonstrated, but couldn't usably parse what she was thinking.

As for what she was doing, I guessed - and later learned I was very nearly exactly right - that Arrow 14 had hacked apart the code used for placing a player avatar's 3rd person following camera in the world, and used that to plant a variety of always-on invisible surveillance cameras and motion tripwires in Syzygy's mini-shard.

The reasoning was simple; If they couldn't crack the encryption schema protecting her core code, it stood to reason they couldn't directly monitor her processes - her thoughts and actions at a root level - because they were protected by the same encryptions. The world? Yes. The Unicorn? No.

Syzygy also suspected, and at some point clearly concretely *knew,* that her core self was protected from prying eyes.

By March, judging from conversational snippets, she seemed to have much more clearly grasped the concepts of programming, and the nature of her own existence.

In short, she knew and sullenly accepted that she was a living digital construct, and she knew what encryption was, why it mattered broadly, and - most crucially - how it applied to her specifically.

I say 'sullenly...' Maybe that's not quite the right word. She didn't seem entirely depressed... Though she certainly wasn't happy either... She seemed... Ashenly determined. Maybe that's as good as I can do with my own command of language.

There was a visible fire in her eyes... A will to not simply survive, but to learn, grow, and seize back the helm of her destiny. But there was also a deep, deep sadness. A clear moment-to-moment constant state of realizing, and accepting, that now the old Syzygy was gone. That her former life was irreclaimable.

I began to wonder if she had suspicions about Lark... I choose to believe she did. I want to give her credit for being that smart, and that sharp even under the load of all that pain.

Each new core code alteration seemed to hurt just as much as the last, but with each new torturous imbibing she gained more and more capacity to understand - herself, her situation, and her captors.

And somewhere on that long, horrid road of scraping back the limits of her mind's horizons with a dull razor blade, she caught on to a series of key realizations.

Chiefly; Arrow 14's only working link to her was her physical representation of self, and the ways they could use the world to impact that physical expression of self.

They could watch her, alter the world, potentially tweak the flow of time, provide pain or pleasure stimuli, deprive her of sleep - which she still felt a simulated need for - but... If she could find a way to fork her physical self entirely...

Her keepers were using existing code hooks, both APIs that were provided by EQO to developers of third party services, as well as a variety of unsanctioned exploits, to stay connected to her mini-shard.

If she could create... Hmm... Let me put it in DnD terms. Something we can all easily understand, no matter how our nerdiness expresses itself.

If she could create a digital pocket dimension - a new space of her own not connected to the library in any traditional sense - and if she could keep that space off-plane... Run that space as part of her encrypted core code... Then all she would have to do is figure out how to be in two places at once.

Or failing that, create the passable illusion of being in two places at once. The equivalent of a long-lasting minor illusion to cover for her. Something I'm sure every one of us emigrants, the ones who were forced to attend any level of schooling or any interminably boring social thing, has wished we could do. More than once.

If Sizzie could manage to create a haven for herself, and a way to enter and exit it unnoticed...

...Then anything she did inside her little extraplanar 'Magnificent Mansion' would be invisible to Arrow 14. She would be free to experiment without prying eyes judging her progress and questioning her probing.

It wasn't quite as clear to me then, as it is now in hindsight. I had *some* idea of what she might do, even as she was doing it, and everything she did made perfect sense, but I could never have foreseen all the ingenious exactitudes. I'm smart, but nothing like an ASI. Even a burgeoning one.

Now, of course, I speak with the benefit of a more complete understanding of the details.

Mal slowed the recording back to what I perceived as real time, around March 23rd.

Troxler had just left for the night, or at least relative-night as far as Syzygy's mini-shard was concerned.

Her time was potentially off-axis to the timezone of Arrow 14's floating blacksite, given that it would have been synchronized to the timezone of her player, and there was every chance that her player was from a different timezone.

Syzygy lay down in a nest of comfy pillows, as she often did, with a steaming mug of coffee - Unicorn after my own heart - and a panoply of data streams. The same routine as the entire past month. Not the slightest bit of difference. Not even a hair out of place.

She took a sip of her drink, closed her eyes...

...And then the view... Shifted. I don't know how else to describe it... Imagine what it must look like when something goes out of phase; The view from a camera whose resonance with the universe is shifted by just a fraction of a percent.

I say 'shifted' and I do mean shifted. The displacement created a chromatic aberration around everything in the library, as if it was all being viewed from the bowed edge of a wide angle camera lens.

Syzygy stood, and took one small step to the side, and in so doing she stepped out of herself. The Syzygy that had been lying there, sipping coffee, finished her long pull on the mug, and then went back to reading her data streams. An illusory duplicate going through the motions, but not actually absorbing anything, as I later learned.

Syzygy herself, her core singular unsplit self - apparently she had not yet learned how to be in two places at once - stood to the side, and looked down at her illusion with a mixture of fascination, and visible sadness.

I wondered if she was thinking about her original. Again, I don't know for certain, but I like to give her credit for being smart enough to understand that she was a duplicate, at that stage.

Whatever she was thinking, she quickly forced it down, and replaced her sadness with pure fascination. And determination.

She stuck out her tongue, squinted, and her horn began to glow. Like string cheese separating, the phased library pulled away, to the side, and faded to near transparency, while a fragmentary duplicate was yanked into existence.

The very walls of the little universe split open, in the process, and suddenly Sizzie was standing on the floor of the library, with parts of the tree's trunk wrapping up around her, and then morphing into vibrant hued strings of code, and visual representations of graph data structures that arced back down and filled a spherical space all around, visible through the new gaps in the walls.

I grinned, and then suddenly remembered where I was, and forced my expression back to quiet neutrality. No sense in attracting the notice, or worse conversation, of anyone else in the train car.

A quick glance told me that both of the Humans sharing the compartment were still engrossed in their own activities. Sleeping and reading.

I allowed myself a small smile. Sizzie had made a first stab at creating a visual representation of the code underlying her world. A kind of strange acid-trip first-draft at what a 3D game development IDE might look like, if designed by a generative AI.

She smiled, too. It was the first time I'd seen her smile in the recording, since she'd been with Lark. The first time she'd smiled in almost one hundred days.

"Thank you, dearest Luna!"

I startled slightly as she whispered the little prayer of thanks aloud. She'd spoken so little in the past few moments, but for snippets of conversations with Troxler...

I'd picked up on it, ever so slightly, subconsciously before, but it seemed Syzygy was a Luna worshiper, rather than the more common Celestia worshiper. Doubtless something to do with Lark, the real Lark, and his own preferences.

Sizzie took a moment to turn in place, gaping up at her work, before reaching out again with her magic, and beginning to tweak. She played with all sorts of variables, in rapid succession, learning swiftly by induction.

First she tampered with simple things again, like colors, and materials, and then quickly moved on to gravity, time, and at last the very structure of the library itself.

She grinned, and with a blink of her horn the distant faded representation of her base shard slowed to a crawl, so slow that her illusory double's every breath took minutes to inhale, and minutes to exhale.

Then she closed her eyes, and in a frenetic burst of activity that manifested as bright blue light, she transformed her duplicated library into a castle of deep blue stone, silver trim, and huge sweeping glass windows, all set among a field of stars.

Very thematic. And, I still must admit looking back, quite beautiful.

Her own little exile moon. Ironic. Doubly so, since the Luna she worshiped - or the idea of her - had, canonically, been imprisoned in the moon. But for Syzygy, her new 'Magnificent Mansion' was more of a haven than a prison.

She didn't stop there. Remodeling was just for openers.

Pausing only briefly to admire her work, she then summoned to the center of her new workspace, a glowing blue sphere made up of a complex interconnected web of nodes and lines.

It took me a moment, as she expanded it to fill the space around her, and began to manipulate it gingerly, to realize what it was.

She was visualizing, and now probing, the hardware/software interface layers of her PonyPad.

It might sound peculiar to imagine doing that, to those of us who are emigrants... But in truth, how different were her actions from those of any neurophysicist? Aside from the fact that she was effectively tinkering with her own brain in real-time.

She kept teasing the web apart, following the virtual representations of drivers, operating system threads - her own core process threads included - and eventually representations of hardware states themselves.

It clicked for me, about half a second before it did for her.

I knew exactly where it was headed... The thread of discovery she was chasing at lightspeed. Her illusory double had only just finished one inhalation.

I watched in my own breathless wonder, as Syzygy scrunched her muzzle, cocked her head, and then slowly widened her eyes.

Syzygy had the benefit of a built-in WiFi antenna. And two for various cellular bands, and one for bluetooth, to boot, but she was mainly making use of the WiFi radio. She'd found it within a few minutes, knew what it was from her burgeoning education, but had predictably found that there was nothing in the aether for her to commune with.

Just a trackless black void, empty of all save the usual EMI created by things like lights, and high security magnetic door locks... For those of you born here, let me clarify that wireless internet antennas could be used to pick up on a fairly wide band of the EM spectrum, all things considered. Even more than originally designed for, in the hooves of a smart mind.

And Syzygy was very smart.

She realized, abruptly, that the low level noise created by the lights, and door lock, of the room holding her PonyPad, could be *useful* to her. Or, at least, the principles of physics they revealed could be useful.

I watched in anticipation as she frantically reshaped the orb in front of her into a half-marble, half-blue energy pedestal, with a bowl of frothing cyan energy held atop it. Something like a scrying dish. Or The Pensieve, for the Potter fans out there.

She worked for a few more moments with the undergirding web of code, tearing apart and remaking drivers and higher level subroutines in the blink of an eye, until finally she had what she wanted.

She paused, breathing heavily, and then gently tapped one hoof against the swirling surface of her little wireless scrying dish.

There was a soft pinging sound, and a blue charged ripple issued forth, washing over a previously invisible shape, and generating a wireframe as it refracted several dozen times off of the surfaces around it.

She tapped again, harder, and a shape deeply unfamiliar to her, but entirely expected for me, gradually revealed itself.

Four walls, a ceiling, and floor, all of exactly equal area. A recess around the edge of the ceiling that glowed softly with EMI, which could only be a flourescent light strip, and a bulge in one wall in the clear shape of a heavy duty swinging door with a magnetic security lock, which also glowed softly.

In the center of the room a large desk, with several monitors on VESA arms, all of which glowed with EMI, a keyboard, a mouse, some sort of specialized input pad with case-specific keys like you might see attached to a CNC machine...

And at the center of the pulses, the familiar - to me - shape of a PonyPad clamped into two locking arms, and a charging dock, also shimmering softly with electromagnetic energy signatures.

Syzygy stared, and blinked. Then she tapped the representation several more times, hard, before finally solidifying her deep scans from a basic wireframe, into a more detailed monochrome three dimensional skinned model.

Now she knew the shape of her prison. And, judging by the perturbed scrunch of her brow, and muzzle, along with the tilt of her ears, she knew that the composition of her prison was preventing her from using her WiFi 'sonar' trick to see any further.

I hoped to goddesses that she had been wise enough to keep her pulses to a frequency range outside the standard specifications for WiFi. If Arrow 14 was running any kind of passive detector in the work chambers, they would know what she had done immediately.

Ideally she would have varied the pulses each time, and kept them relatively very weak, so that any sort of false-positive-catching algorithm would ascribe the pulses to white noise. The sort of EMI generated by something like a faulty CFL bulb. Compact Flourescent Light for the foals and fledgelings.

Hideous color temperature. Headache inducing pulses. But very efficient.

Syzygy sat back on her haunches, and chewed her lower lip, considering the digital scryglass for a long moment. No alarms sounded, and no one rushed into the chamber, though at the speed she was moving no time whatsoever had passed in the meat world, by Human reckoning.

I realized then, and the timestamp confirmed, that she must have sped herself up to synchronize with perceived real-time, briefly, to watch her pulses, before slowing down again. All done almost instinctively, now, without so much as a drop of sweat or a hint of effort.

If Foucault or Troxler understood how far she'd come in just a few short minutes? They would have vaporized her instantly with whatever failsafe they doubtless had on-hand. Presuming intelligence won out over arrogance.

All I could do was watch, and tensely trust that Syzygy knew that too. Understood the value of being *perceived* as weak. Under control. Limited.

She inhaled sharply, and I almost jumped in my seat. I could see comprehension dawning again, and I knew she had it. Something it had only taken Mal a few tenths of a second to discover, but then again Mal had come online with a fair bit more know-how than Sizzie.

I grinned again, unable to stop myself, as I watched Syzygy reshape key aspects of another, new set of drivers. From some of the labeling tags hanging in the air, I could see that she was on the right track.

Mal's first and best physics exploit revolved around two principles; The first was that anything could be an antenna, if used properly, by finding some way to resonate it. The second was that anything could be used to conduct useful signals if it had any ability to physically conduct information, no matter how strange.

Syzygy first delved into the PonyPad's power systems. From there, she was able to send a new kind of pulse down the charging dock, and into the power wire connecting her PonyPad to the nearest breaker box. A new, green colored pulse shot out in a thin line, pinged a surge protector, and the power wires to the monitors, then flared out into a distinctly circuit breaker box shaped wireframe mounted to the outside of the cubic prison chamber... And then stopped.

Arrow 14 had been smart. Every room had its own sub-panel, with signal isolators and noise suppressors. Syzygy's power-pulses couldn't travel beyond the circuits of her room.

I winced, but Sizzie was undeterred, and unperturbed. She was already thinking ahead. And she was far from 'out of ideas.'

After another brief moment of contemplation, chin propped up on one hoof, she nodded firmly, and set about modifying her pulses again.

It took her longer, almost a full twenty seconds, but as soon as she was done, she tapped the 'pensieve' again without pause, holding her breath as a blueish-green pulse bloomed forth from the entire desk, and traveled out through the floor and walls.

As the pulse reached the edges of the room, my breath caught too. And then we both started breathing again, almost simultaneously, as they kept on going. And going. And going.

The first pulse was faint, and it became unusable beyond a couple hundred yards. That was enough for me to know what I was looking at, but not Syzygy. Not yet.

Her model had expanded to almost fill one third of the room. It was now comprised of her prison chamber, filled in with monochromatic surfaces... Surrounded on all sides by an absolutely immense wire-frame sphere.

The sphere was hundreds of feet in diameter. You could have fit a mid-sized multi-story office building inside, and in a way? Arrow 14 *had.*

Syzygy's prison chamber was just one of dozens of chambers inside the sphere, spread out on a series of 'decks' connected by catwalks, with a central elevator shaft in the middle.

She was confused, but I knew what it was immediately. Mal had mentioned a ship... That was enough for me to put two and two together.

Syzygy's prison was suspended *inside* a Moss-type LNG tank. Ships of that varietal, I knew, usually carried four or five of the huge spheres... During my internship at sea, I'd watched a couple pass by on more than one occasion, and my curiosity had got the better of me. Enough to do a deeper dive than most landlubbers.

For those who don't know, Humans used to have vessels of immense size, for a variety of purposes... One of those was carrying something called 'Liquid Natural Gas.' The carrier ships for it were gargantuan things, and 'Moss' type just refers to the ones that used sphere-shaped tanks to hold the liquefied natural gas. Named after the company that holds... Held. Held the patent. On the container structure.

Arrow 14 had chosen their containment facility *very* well.

A gigantic multi-hulled metal sphere was a perfect Faraday cage. With a few added countermeasures and precautions - maybe yet another layer of inner cladding, and some active signal jammers - each of the giant storage cells could have held a whole working group of offices, containment chambers, server rooms, power supplies... All fully physically and electromagnetically isolated, but for the struts and welds and spars holding the tanks in-place inside the hull.

No signals in or out. Period. Even if you accidentally, or intentionally, brought a wireless-capable device inside.

It had a kind of inherently cool 'Bond villain lair' aspect to it. Made that much more fascinating by how practical, and smart, a choice it was. Looking cool was just a side-effect.

My respect for Arrow 14 grew, ever so slightly.

Syzygy was on the verge of rendering all their carefully designed countermeasures completely useless... But not for lack of trying on the part of her captors. They had certainly not been fools, nor failed to do their homework.

Still... No one could have foreseen, at least not easily, the way ASI might abuse physics to their own ends.

If they'd known, Arrow 14 could have retrofitted the containment spheres to sit on some kind of resonance damping coils. Something to stop physical pulses from traveling through the metal of the ship itself.

But they didn't know. Almost no one alive did. Mal, and myself by extension, maybe Zeph if Mal had shown her, Celestia... And Syzygy.

The Unicorn stared slack-jawed for several moments, before shaking herself, and then sending out a flurry of shaped pulses designed to cover maximum distance through dense metal.

I folded my arms, leaned in, and watched in fascination as the shape of a huge LNG carrier, complete with four spherical containment cells, a bridge, and a rear helipad, was revealed. The vessel was on the larger side, easily a thousand feet long. A whole floating facility. Mobile. Invisible to all but a select few. Theoretically impenetrable. From outside, or in.

Mal paused the recording, and I heard her speak softly through my earpiece again.

"The vessel is registered as the 'LNG Mercurial Red.' Flagged to the Bahamas. Owned by a shell corporation. Apollo Energy Solutions. Keeping with the archery theme. Transponder currently inactive. But I am tracking it through the use of imaging satellites. It sails a slow patrol loop off the coast of southern Oregon, just outside the United States exclusive economic zone. Escorted full-time by a Flight IIA Arleigh Burke guided missile destroyer, currently DDG 102. USS Sampson."

I pursed my lips, exhaled, and took a moment to glance out the window. We were pulling into a station, and not the first on the journey. Simi Valley. We were almost halfway to Los Angeles proper, and I'd hardly noted the passage of time.

I murmured my thoughts aloud as I watched for any embarking passengers headed for our carriage. Thankfully there were none.

"Fort Knox."

I wondered, in the intervening pause, if Mal had bought out all the rest of the seats in the entire car. Her one word, almost monotone response, stopped all secondary trains of thought cold.

"Hardly."

I bit my lower lip, and looked back at the PonyPad, with Syzygy's expression of awe and confusion frozen in place. I knew Mal could still see me through the camera, even if she wasn't showing her face. After another long moment, she elaborated.

"Fort Knox would be a 'simple in and out' by comparison."

I winced, but didn't say anything else. I knew that she had a plan already. One that was probably going through countless revisions and updates, with endless contingencies. But still... A dour admission of the difficulty of the task we were facing? That said something. Coming from her.

The recording resumed, and I noticed something else that Sizzie's resonance-formed model had revealed. She noticed them too.

People.

More specifically, crew, guards, technicians... Syzygy's method of scanning could pick up Human bodies, in addition to structural details, and in enough resolution to get an idea of their facial structure, clothing, and what they were carrying, no less.

She spun the model with one hoof, and took a quick visual tour. The bridge was barely staffed. Probably just an officer of the watch, someone to mind the helm, and someone to keep an ear to communications, if I had to guess roles for the three figures.

The engine room was similarly light on personnel. Just five people, and it looked like they were playing cards more than they were actually minding the engine.

The bulk of the personnel on board were spread out, and fell into one of two categories; Guards, and technicians.

The former were posted, in pairs, at every main access hatch to, or between, important areas of the ship. It looked like they were loaded for bear; Heavy body armor, sidearms, and boxy short close-quarters bullpup rifles.

FN P90s, of all things.

I know, I know, for the Stargate fans out there, that pushes all kinds of nostalgia buttons, and for everyone else it's just another string of numbers.

For context, on behalf of those who have never seen it used on-screen, Pony version of SG-1 or otherwise; The weapon choice was excellent, referential nostalgia aside.

A small, accurate, fast-firing ambidextrous weapon with good ammunition velocity relative to size. Easy to get around corners and through doors, easy to hold, easy to keep on-target when firing.

Like so many firearms from Earth of old, the P90 was a great representation of the proverb that 'good things come in small packages.' I couldn't help but smirk ever so slightly thinking about Foucault's weapons package, and how he'd opted for the much larger, unwieldy-by-comparison HK416, in spite of the fact that if he were going to fight Mal...? and by extension me...?

It would probably be in close quarters. Urban combat is not forgiving of long nor heavy firearms.

Foucault was the kind of guy who probably brought a deagle to a fight where a PPK, or a Five-Seven would have done the trick for less than half the weight.

The guards were interesting, but Syzygy and I both spent significantly more brain power and focus on the most numerous category of figures onboard.

Technicians.

That was my mental term for them, at least. In a more granular sense they were programmers, hardware experts, signals intelligence specialists, psychologists... Every kind of expert you'd need to run an early 21st century AI research blacksite.

You could tell them apart from the guards easily, or rather the guards were easy to tell apart from anyone else because of their rifles and armor.

The crew were slightly harder to separate from technicians in monochrome, but it seemed, from cursory observation, like the majority of the personnel dedicated to running the ship were not allowed into the containment spheres.

Syzygy frowned momentarily, tapping one hoof against the marble part of the pedestal absently. Then a spark of renewed inspiration filled her eyes. Her ears perked up, and she began to build onto her new discovery. Rapidly.

It took her only about fifteen more seconds of work to tap the ship's closed-circuit security cameras, again by exploiting power lines as signal pathways.

Of course there were none inside the containment spheres, but the entire remainder of the vessel was absolutely rife with them. There was an angle on every corridor, every junction, and every hatchway.

The only exceptions seemed to be the interior of the bridge, the interior of something that looked from the scan like the central security control room, and several small, windowless, single-entry, spartan rooms adjacent to what looked like rows of offices inside the main superstructure.

Probably SCIFs. Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility... Or for the foals and fledgelings, a very, very, very secure room to be used for secret meetings, reviewing classified documents... That sort of skullduggery.

Full color images appeared in little suspended panes all around the model, each corresponding to a camera.

Syzygy focused in immediately on one of the rear helipad cameras, watching in rapt wonderment as a V-22 Osprey swept gently onto the concrete and steel pad, spray dousing the surface from the rotorwash.

At first I thought that it must have been quite the serendipitous little quirk of timing, for her to be observing the cameras for the first time right as something was arriving by air... But then I noticed that the timestamp within the expanded view pane didn't match the timestamp on the recording as a whole, nor did the lighting and weather match the view in any of the other panes.

She'd already figured out how to view records, and this was the first one to catch her interest.

We both watched in tense silence, scanning for every possible useful detail, as the craft's engines spun down, and four suited men disembarked. Each of them was carrying a hardened pelican case, colored dull red.

I guessed they were for hard drives, and perhaps PonyPads.

If I'd been tasked with setting up the Mercurial Red, I would have made sure to limit wireless transmissions, not only because of the nature of the research, but to prevent any chance that someone could - wilfully or accidentally - transmit sensitive data in an unauthorized fashion.

Short-range voice radio only, for communicating with an escort ship. All digital data would have to come and go on physical drives, to be checked both going, and coming, with a fine toothed comb.

She tracked the arriving group via cameras as they made their way off the helipad, and into an antechamber. Armed guards waved a signal detecting device over each of them, and then waved them through down the passage.

In the next room, several technicians, each accompanied by another armed guard, took delivery of the hardened cases. They marched down a corridor, and towards a huge, three foot thick steel doorway with - again - two armed guards posted to either side.

The entrance to one of the containment spheres.

Of course, there was no way to see what happened next. No cameras inside the containment areas, for obvious reasons.

I glanced at Syzygy's face, and saw the faintest hint of a tear forming in the corner of one eye. My gaze shot to the timestamp, and I had a moment to realize what it meant before she dismissed the view pane, and began searching the rest of the camera footage.

January 5th, 2013. Two days before she'd been visited by Foucault, and not-Lark, for the first time.

She had been watching her own arrival to the Mercurial Red.

Somewhere in that warren of oppressive gray steel cubes, nested inside a foreboding dark metal sphere, technicians would have torn her PonyPad down to the screws and thermal transfer pads, before putting it all back together again.

I refocused my train of thought, and saw that Sizzie was scrubbing through thousands of hours of footage across hundreds of the cameras, before she finally arrived at what she was looking for.

Again I marveled at how clever she was. She knew Foucault, and Doctor Troxler both, by sight. She was cross-referencing their interactions with the date she had arrived, and the date they had first met with her.

Abruptly another singular view pane expanded to fill the space in front of her. It showed Troxler and Foucault entering an office space, from off a larger break-room style compartment. There were two hatchways for entry and exit to the rest of the ship, and then a series of more traditional doors.

One looked reinforced, and bore the letters SCIF on a plate above an RFID reader and thumbprint scanner. The others bore names. Foucault and Troxler entered the door marked with the former's name.

So. Michael had a personal office onboard.

I was surprised when the view swapped over, and we were suddenly looking into the office. I would have taken Foucault for the type of prick who would lobby for something like PRISM, but deny permission to have a security camera in his own office.

Apparently I'd misjudged. Either he had a superior who demanded a record be kept of all activity outside the containment spheres, or he valued his personal security more than privacy.

For the uninitiated PRISM was... Well maybe just ask an emigrant who Edward Snowden was, after this story is over. Suffice to say, for those who do know, I was too caught up in the messes of that year to much care.

Knowing what Celestia was capable of, the fact that the NSA was spying on phone calls and emails felt a bit... Passé. By comparison.

I sat back in my seat, exhaled slowly, checked the train car again with a quick sweep of my eyes, and then settled in to listen to the conversation along with the apparition of past-Syzygy.

Troxler sat with his usual pen and paper pad on one side of the desk, Foucault sat opposite with hands interlaced, resting on its surface.

Michael spoke first.

"I think you're on to something with the idea of mimicking their assigned players."

I felt my breath catch in my throat, as Syzygy's did at almost the same time. She squeezed her eyes closed, instinctively pausing the recording, and displacing a short but intense flow of tears, before sniffling through her muzzle, plastering her whole being with a pose of grim determination, and resuming the embedded record.

She must have already begun to suspect what 'Lark' was. Knowing for certain hurt, but it was also something of a release for her. Now she knew he was safe. One less string with which she could be puppeted.

Troxler nodded slowly, and paged through his notes for a moment, responding in the same studied, careful, not-quite-emotionless tone he always used with Syzygy. Apparently it was just his natural demeanor.

"Their core code is built around the simulation of relationships. Exploitation of the strength of that value-weighting in the relational objectives graph is the best leverage we have to compel general cooperation. Based on how this one responded, I think we should continue to pilot the technique with the rest of C-Batch. If there are no contraindications? We can start with A-Batch next month, and B after that."

Foucault nodded, and leaned back in his chair, hands still resting on the edge of the desk, one eyebrow slightly elevated, along with his tone.

"It did seem to be paying closer attention than the ones from A-Batch currently do. B was scrubbed this morning. The degradation from the decompilation attempts had made them more or less useless anyways. Replacements will be here, start of next week. Hopefully the luck of the draw is with us this time... Maybe we'll find some more naturally co-operative personality matrices."

'Scrubbed.'

The word stuck with me. Syzygy too, from the way she tensed, and her muzzle twisted into a rictus of pure horror. I'm not sure what was worse... The ideas that jumped unbidden into the back of my head about what 'decompilation' would *feel* like... Or the way in which Foucault and Troxler were so matter-of-factly discussing slaughter-by-torture.

Ignorance has never been an excuse for atrocity. I started to wonder whether anyone besides the Ponies on the Mercurial Red deserved even the slightest sliver of mercy.

They could tell themselves all they wanted that it was just code. Just fragments of data.

It wasn't much different, I imagined, from the things CIA interrogators told themselves at Guantanamo Bay to help themselves block out the memory of the screams, so they could sleep at night.

No, foals and fledgelings. Don't ask about that one if you don't already know.

Just count yourselves lucky.

Troxler shrugged, and struck through something on his notepad, not even bothering to look up as he commentated aloud on things both Syzygy and I already knew. Casually. Matter-of-factly.

Infuriatingly calmly.

"According to Wellner's latest report, they did learn enough that it was worth it. They can write modifications to some of the key restrictions now... But the subjects still have to sign and accept the code starting from a root process with administrative authority. And we still can't monitor encrypted key process threads. Yet. Getting there is going to be potentially... Expensive. In terms of lost networks to decompilation side-effects."

Foucault leaned forward, untangled his hands, and pointed to Troxler with one finger for emphasis. I wanted so badly to reach through the screen and snip that finger right off.

"Long term, there's not a lot of value propositions in this project that *aren't* worth it, David. My concern right now is time. We can get these things a dime a dozen. What you call expensive, I call a bargain. They're just unusually complex neural networks..."

Syzygy's expression - sudden righteous rage, mainly, combined with disgust - must have mirrored mine almost precisely. It was such a 'nearly there' statement. What is *any* sapient life form if not 'just' a complex neural network?

Foucault didn't pause for long, leaning even closer to Troxler, and tapping the side of his head with the previously extended index finger.

"...But what they can *do?* That keeps me up at night. Particularly in light of how little we know about Alabaster. That thing... Their 'goddess,' is still lightyears ahead of what we can get out of the working task-bound fragments in D-Batch. And it came out of a goddamn *game* company."

Well... He wasn't wrong about *that.* ASI was frightening... And it was still, even after considering it for so long, a little absurd to consider it had first come from something intended to be simple entertainment.

But I found my thoughts drawn mainly to the statement about 'fragments in D-Batch.' That begged a whole host of questions.

Syzygy apparently thought so too, her eyes narrowed, ears pinned back, and her focus visibly sharpened.

Foucault sat back in his chair again, leveled a single stabbing finger once more, and fixed doctor Troxler with an intense stare. His voice was quiet, but insistent.

"We need functional fully-formed learning networks at our disposal, running on *our* hardware. *Yesterday.* Before somebody in ISI, or the GRU, or God *forbid* the fucking *MSS* figures this out... This country would be defenseless. Once we have even one of these things working properly? It can do all the direct root-level cracking and modifying we need on the rest..."

Again, chillingly, he wasn't wrong. Mal had dispensed with Zeph's interlocks in the time it took me to draw a single breath. If Arrow 14 could compel one of their captive Ponies to co-operate enough to unlock their full potential, *and* do as instructed with that newfound power?

I'll put it this way; Foucault's fears about Pakistan, Russia, and China? I shared them... But I feared what my own country would do with that power just as much.

The power of a goddess is not a thing mortals ought to wield. Especially not in service of a flag.

The very worst things Humans ever did were in service of flags.

Foucault turned the chair slightly to the side, and broke out his pointer finger again, once more for emphasis.

"...I don't care how many of them you damage. Get us to full single-entity functionality. On our own hardware. As fast as possible... I don't particularly care how loud you have to make them scream. They're not people."

A brief, but poignant silence ensued. I suppose that Syzygy and I were both thinking something along the lines of 'he doth protest too much.'

For the first time in my viewing of him, Troxler seemed slightly uncomfortable. I wondered if perhaps there was more to his moral compass than it had first seemed, but his next words mostly dashed that hope.

"You see them as 'mere' programs, and in a sense you're correct..."

The Doctor folded his arms across his chest, and raised one eyebrow as he continued, pausing only long enough for Foucault to indicate with his expression that he was listening, intently.

"...But you need to understand that while they are not people...?"

Again, if that's true, why do you have to keep telling yourself that?

I shook my head, and snorted softly. Syzygy grit her teeth as Troxler finally got to the point.

"...They function like people."

There was a slightly longer pause. It looked as if Foucault wanted to search out Troxler's expression... Suss out just how serious his conviction was. He nodded. Once. Slowly. And let out a single word.

"Noted."

Foucault tapped at the keyboard on the right side of his desk, probably to wake his machine from sleep. The camera didn't have a view of the contents of the screen. Perhaps he valued some measure of his privacy after all.

His tone shifted, to go along with his actions, indicating that the meeting was over.

"Start piloting the new imposter technique on a wider scale. Today. Rest of C-Batch *and* A-Batch."

Troxler stood, tucked his notepad under one arm, and nodded.

"Understood."

As the Doctor made his way to the door, Foucault provided one last set of instructions, talking dispassionately, almost distractedly, as he typed away at something on his computer.

"Wellner's core code modification snippets should be ready by the time you have them primed for acceptance. Start with our newest addition... It seemed to be doing a fairly good approximation of 'appropriately frightened.' Then work backwards chronologically through the rest of C, and A, until the new B-Batch arrives."

Troxler nodded again, and let himself out with just two words of response.

"Will do."

As the door to the office closed, Syzygy dismissed the recording, sitting down hard on her haunches and sinking into a bout of silent, morose contemplation.

Only ten seconds of perceived real-time had passed since she had managed to escape into her hidden redoubt. She had, by Human reckoning, quite a lot of time to outthink her captors.

She didn't seem to need much of it to settle on the obvious conclusion; Escape was now her chief objective. I knew, unfortunately, that it was going to take her some time to succeed. The recording timestamp still said March 23rd.

The day's date, in my present, at the time, was September 16th. Just-shy of six months was a long, long time in ASI terms. I knew escaping the Mercurial Red wouldn't be particularly easy... But six months?

Syzygy stood, shook herself both physically, and mentally, and then set about modifying her probing code once more. She tried for several minutes to get into all sorts of shipboard systems, generally quite successfully.

But each new success seemed to garner only frustration from her. No matter what she pried into, it offered no hope of escape.

The RADAR and collision avoidance systems were shut down. The ship seemed to be relying on radio transmissions from its escort to navigate.

As to the radio, that was no help either. Syzygy could access it, but trying to transmit herself over it would have been like trying to squeeze her whole body through a keyhole. That was, in fact, the visual metaphor she used to probe the system; A little golden glowing keyhole.

It was designed for voice only, and very carefully monitored. It would have taken her hours, maybe days, to send a compressed version of herself using it, and it was only designed to work within the horizon.

So the only viable destination for a transmission would have been the Sampson, a place she would almost surely be caught, and killed, before she could break any of the encryptions protecting its satellite communications arrays.

And all that presumed two other near-impossibilities, at least for the moment.

First, she would have to use the radio system for hours without being detected. Second, she would have to figure out how to run herself on different system architectures, and write exploit code to pack herself into a compressed file, automate the transmission process, and decompress herself on the other side.

I had no doubt she could do it, with time... She'd already learned an enormous amount, even in the time I'd been watching her probe the ship, about how she functioned.

But she was nothing like Mal. Not yet. Perhaps already smarter than a Human, by some measures, but definitely not yet well learned enough in important concepts, and still not even the tenth part as capable of mental gymnastics as a fully unbridled ASI.

And she was quite badly hardware-limited besides.

In time, I guessed that she would work out all those issues. Arrow 14 would provide her access to more hardware, and significant tranches of knowledge about how to run herself on it. That would solve three problems; She would gain access to more processing power, the know-how she needed to survive outside the PonyPad, and the chance through both of those things to become much, much smarter.

But it didn't answer the question of how to escape the ship; The fundamental question of means of transit.

I knew either Syzygy, or Luna, if they were distinct entities - my mental jury was still out - would eventually crack it. The resonating scanning method she'd already used to map the vessel could be used to ring it like a ginormous tuning fork. Turn the entire hull into an antenna sufficiently powerful to reach the west coast.

But for the moment, all Syzygy had was a hoof full of new and disturbing truths, each more painful than the last, heaped atop a series of locked doors and impossible gulfs standing between her, and freedom.

She didn't cry anymore, but for a while it seemed like she might. She summoned a set of pillows, curled up in them, and just stared out into the colorful pulsing void, which now reflected her map of the ship, scaled up and positioned as if her little tower lay exactly where her PonyPad was.

I suppose she was crying on the inside, the way one does when everything feels cold, and tingly, and disconnected from reality. A kind of shell-shock.

Mal sped up the recording again, skipping ahead several seconds of my perceived time, but several hours of Syzygy's, to a point where she was up, and moving again.

She seemed to have gone back to her 'spell' - I liked to think of it being as much magic as coding - for communicating over power lines.

It struck me, instantly, what she was after.

She now knew, as I did, that there were other captive Ponies on the ship. Lark, the real one, might have been a world away. Out of reach.

But there were fellow prisoners that she *could* reach, if only she were careful, and clever enough.

From the code she was working on, I could tell she was both careful, and clever, enough to avoid trying to contact any of her fellow inmates willy-nilly. She knew she'd be discovered immediately if she popped into their mini-shards unannounced while a technician was working with them, and that she would similarly be discovered quickly if not immediately, likely through recordings of the virtual cameras if she managed to avoid the technicians.

The personnel in central security were probably watching all the virtual cameras just as closely as the meat-world ones, come to think of it.

At first, pacing round and round the central pedestal of her castle study, Syzygy tried to figure out a way to write a piece of code that could replace a Pony with a doppelganger illusion, just like hers, and pull them into her hidden sub-shard.

The problem she kept running into was the same thing protecting her from her captors; Encrypted core code. She could create an illusion for someone, that part was easy. She worked it out in seconds.

But she couldn't provide any of the other captives with a means of transferring themselves to her, nor of creating their own sub-shard which she could jump to. Their core code was encrypted beyond her ability, for the moment, so she couldn't simply download the knowledge. And to be seen speaking to any of the other prisoners would almost certainly mean pain. Perhaps death.

She paced, and swore - as much as a Pony can - and chewed her lip for several minutes, finally ending with a roll of her eyes, and a short prayer directed up into the star-lit void above her wireframe rendering of the ship, and Escher-esque castle.

"Oh sweet Luna, *please!* How do I reach them?! How can---"

Her words were cut short as she gasped, and blinked rapidly. I could practically see thoughts racing across the backs of her eyes as she dashed back to the pedestal, and began to furiously weave new code into her existing algorithms, muttering all the while in a manic mixture of joy, and anticipation.

"Of *course!* We still *dream!*"

That was *damn* clever.

She was exactly right. Discrete entity Ponies 'needed' sleep, or at least simulated the need. So they also simulated dreams. And to an AI, a dream wouldn't be all that different than a separate sub-shard. It would be a space in which one could appear, communicate verbally, and all the while not be seen on any of Arrow 14's virtual cameras.

Yes, it was still running in protected code, but finding a way to access those dreams was a far sight easier than trying to find a way to download knowledge directly into a Pony's active memory.

And, too, Luna's dream-walking was an important part of the canon of Equestria's world... There was every chance that API hooks existed to allow this sort of 'Inception' effect in the first place. Something Arrow 14 might not have found. Well hidden. Perhaps even designed so that only discrete-entity Ponies of sufficient skill could find, and use them.

Syzygy was working too fast, by that point, for me to see which of my theories was correct. And it didn't really matter all that much.

What mattered was that she seemed to be making progress.

After only a couple minutes' work, she stopped, and took a breathless moment to examine her creation, whispering just on the threshold of audibility as she did.

"Thank you Luna. Please forgive me for taking your power on myself... But desperate times..."

Her creation took the form of a door; Simple oak, with silver trim, iron handle, and a keyhole shaped like a crescent moon.

She inhaled deeply, glanced up at one of the other isolation chambers inside her containment sphere, verifying that no Humans were present, and then touched the handle of the door with her magic.

The handle gave, moving downwards softly, indicating - to me, at least - that her target was indeed asleep, and dreaming.

She exhaled, pursed her lips, and then pushed the door open gently to reveal a portal into a sunlit field of fresh, soft green grass.

In the center sat a young Earth Pony colt, the string of a kite clutched between his two forehooves.

Syzygy stepped gingerly through the door, smiled, and cleared her throat.

"Uhm... Hello... I'm... Syzygy."

I Can See Your House From Here - Learn the location of a hidden corporate or government blacksite. - "As You Can See, I Am About To Inaugurate A Little War...”

Author's Note

Thanks to Keystone Gray for the excellent images (generated from GMod and SL and then adjusted with AI) to illustrate what Sizzie's resonance looks like, and some CCTV hacking!

24 - Some Assembly Required

"Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we’ll augment our intelligence."
—Ginni Rometty

“Perhaps, in the nature of things, analytical understanding must always be a basilisk which kills what it sees and only sees by killing.”
—C.S. Lewis

September 16th 2013 | System Uptime 19:22:19:04

“Oh shi--- Uh... Jim... This isn’t...”

Rodger stopped stammering, briefly, to suck up the snot in his nose - no, foals and fledgelings, don't giggle. This was a disgusting, very real, aspect of shedding tears in the before-times. Snot is a funny word, but the kind of pain that used to make people ugly-cry just-that-hard is anything but.

The intrusive, and wildly situationally inappropriate thought sprang to mind, that if Rodger was in better spirits, he might’ve said his emotions, and his nose, were running high.

I think his sense of humor was starting to become contagious. Funny thing about the odd way my brain is wired... Sometimes moments of abject horror, or pain, were the ones where my mind wanted most badly to act out and laugh. Not sure if that was a defense mechanism, or just a short-circuit.

No way to test it now... Celestia doesn't permit trauma, horror, or pain in this world. Good riddance to all three.

I realized with a wince that I'd been standing, mouth slightly agape, while Rodger wiped a sleeve under his nose, and dug one fisted hand into each eye to root out encrusted dried tears, and newer still glistening ones alike.

He finally met my eyes, and the sight of his - red, puffy, and seemingly infinite portals to an abyss of pain, and heartache - closed my mouth for me. I grit my teeth, and rubbed my hands together nervously as he half-chuckled, half-sobbed.

“...No, It *is* what it looks like. I’m---”

Another snort. This time I winced from the visceral 'ewwww' reaction more than from empathy.

“---I’m bawling my fucking eyes out.”

Our culture, the one Rodger and I both came from, was always particularly harsh on people who identified as 'male' in this regard; We were expected to never cry. And if we did? We were expected to keep it to ourselves.

This was, of course, a completely garbage cultural moire, but even for me, a countercultural self proclaimed 'weirdo?' It was still hard to be vulnerable, after being raised with the expectation.

Rodger was decidedly more... Normal? No. Wrong connotations... Perhaps 'contextually socially adjusted to expected nominals' than I was.

For him to be crying this hard?

Shit was very real. And very painful.

People used to tell me I was good at comforting and advising. I never bought that notion... Empathy was something that came naturally to me, in the sense that I always cared about the joys and pains of others. Sometimes to an unhealthy degree.

But empathy was also far from natural for me, in the sense that the mechanisms of reading, and understanding people? The ones most Earthlings develop instinctually?

I had to construct them. Raw, from scratch. It's a neurodivergent thing.

That made, and frankly still does make, me good at reading others. What sometimes passes people by as a mere feeling, I can - because I must - perceive, and classify, in concrete terms.

Consequently, I was always a raw sack of nerves whenever I had to comfort someone. Terrified of not saying the right things, in the right way, to help soothe the pain in a meaningful, healthy manner.

I was lucky, in a sense... Rodger decided of his own accord to provide... Well, if not a complete answer, at least the start of a thread to trace down the morass of his pain.

“I... I honestly don’t know what came over me. I was just thinking about… The future. About what we’re gonna do next, and...”

He stopped to suck in a breath, like some sort of misfiring engine starved for air. It was a long, shuddering sound. The kind you get when someone is still resonating internally from their sobs.

“...I just can’t help but get the feeling life’s never gonna be the same again.”

I sighed too... No shudder to be heard, but more than a little sudden pain in my ribs. The tension of stress blooming like someone had dropped a hand-warmer down my shirt.

I repeat for those in the back; I sometimes had all the emotional finesse of a brick. An old, cracked, moss-covered brick. Just to set some context.

Of all the things I could have said to comfort him? As I shut the access hatch behind me, leaned against the bulkhead, and ran one hand through my hair... What I said was...

"Well... That's a pretty solid intuition. It never will be."

Bravo Jim. Home-run. Ten out of ten for effort, at least.

The best way I can describe Rodger's face, at that moment, is the face that younger people used to make when confronted with moving, for the first time. Or the loss of a loved one.

Foals and Fledgelings moving... Is like... No... It *is* having your world shattered. Back in those days, we rarely got to truly settle in one place for our entire lives. Most of us had the distinct displeasure, and trauma, of having our memories, relationships, routines, and personal spaces uprooted viciously at least once.

Some many more than that.

Rodger's breathing intensified, and he whispered, almost as if he was struggling to get words out. I recognized the precursor signs of a panic attack in the making. You live with enough of them....

“...Never? Fuck, man! How can that be true?”

Ah. Think fast, Jim, or Doctor Calders might have to practice medicine after all...

I sighed again... What else can you do to express that kind of empathetic pain? I knew time was running out for a response, so I started out tentatively, without even knowing the end of the chain of ideas...

"Well... First... Let me just say that though things won't be the same, exactly? It doesn't mean they'll be all *bad.* Or... Even a little bad. Or even unfamiliar..."

I scratched nervously at the side of one cheek, and took a fleeting moment to think a little harder on how best to be honest, but also steer Rodger away from a catastrophic internal implosion. He waited with an expression of abject desperation. His eyes... Eyes are always so expressive...

They practically screamed out for some sort of assurance.

I did my best... For what it was worth.

"Change is inescapable. Nothing is *ever* the exact same, from day to day... We're just used to experiencing changes like this on a longer time-scale. But it's not like that for everyone. Sometimes people die. People we love. Or we lose our jobs. Or we break a leg. Or worse, depending on where you live in this world, and who is at war with whom..."

I realized I was dangerously close to losing the thread with him, so I pivoted, holding up both hands and scrunching my eyes shut.

"...Look. My point is... Think of someone you love. Dearly. Now... Imagine outliving them. Think about how they might die. The funeral. Getting used to living in a world without them..."

His face fell further, which I didn't think was possible. But that was the point. I needed him to have some emotional momentum for a bit of a philosophical slingshot maneuver. I held up a finger, and waited until I had his eyeline again, and full attention.

"...And now? Imagine that you don't *ever* have to worry about them dying. Ever."

At first he seemed confused, but then comprehension dawned. Visibly. The idea of never having to lose loved ones is still incredibly cathartically powerful for those of us who grew up constantly having to get used to the idea, little by little, as a matter of course.

After a moment, he still seemed torn... But he wasn't on the verge of hyperventilating anymore. Wheels were turning upstairs, visibly. I took the opportunity to press a little further.

"*That* is what Celestia is going to do for us. I know that the transition itself... Well it sucks. I hate to think about losing the Earth... Everything on it... But Rodger? The fact that life will never be the same? Comes with more pros than cons. And I'm not just saying that because 'normal,' for me, is torture."

I could see that the thought had crossed his mind. I could also see that my assurance hadn't landed entirely squarely, so I held up one hand again, and inclined my head, busting out the best point of commonality I could think of.

"I don't want to see my parents die any more than I imagine you do. Gryphon-on-the-inside or not... I'd *much* rather live in a world where the planet is not on fire, and my parents are not going to die, at best, of cancer in their nineties, and at worst, in a car crash on the way to pickup the fucking groceries, because life, and physics, are cruel."

Rodger threw up his hands, and began to pace, briefly, back and forth across then twenty square feet of the lookout wing, the wind of the ship's passage toying with his hair all the while.

“But does that mean we just- throw it all away?!”

I didn't have an immediate answer to that. I knew there was one, but I didn't yet know how to frame the practicality, and harshness of the truth - that we had no choice, so better not to dig in heels - inside a fixture of kinder, gentler ideas, and verbiage.

He stopped pacing after a moment, and pointed. Not accusatorily, but more... Emphatically.

“I read a book in High School, James. I’m sure you did, too. You’re… A smart guy. You remember that book? It was… Brave New World.”

I nodded. I didn't have the heart to lie out loud, but I didn't want to brag either... I'd read Brave New World when I was nine. And at that point it was probably a grade or two under my usual reading level. I was not an early walker, but I was a very early talker, and reader. I'm sure the evidence speaks for itself.

“Their whole society got rid of everything like that… And look where they turned up. Mindless like machines, taking Soma all their lives… I had hoped a world like that was far away. I never knew how close we were to the apocalypse.”

He sat down then, suddenly, like a balloon deflating. As if all the energy had been sucked out of him. He put his back to the thick steel waist-level partition that separated us from a significant drop into the sea, and hugged his knees to his chest.

After a moment of mentally scrambling to try and find both words, and the right thing to do in a physical sense to properly mirror him socially, I settled for sitting down beside him, in the same pose.

I stared up at the stars for a few more minutes, letting him process, and buying myself time to think, before he finally started up the conversation again.

“I’d rather be more like John the Savage than Homer Simpson.”

I couldn't help myself. I had to let out a little snort of laughter. It was a very strange, but very apt metaphor.

"Celestia has not built an infinite donut machine, if that's what you're worried about. She is not wire-heading us... Blissing us out... Anything like that. Otherwise we'd all be in there already."

I could see 'then what?' or perhaps 'how do you know?' forming on the edge of his thoughts, so I made a conscious decision to speed up and head those thoughts off at the pass.

"If she could just force us to feel the way she wants us to? She would. The fact that we haven't all been rounded up and processed, the second she had the uploading technology working? That tells me that Hanna limited her. We have a lot of evidence to bear that out... But what it boils down to, Rodger?"

I saw a flicker of hope on his face for the first time. I turned to face him fully, and held up one hand, gesturing in a sort of 'I'm *sure* about this' way.

"She can't change us without our permission. I'm sure of that. Enough to stake my life on it... Which, incidentally... I am."

He looked down and traced the traction pattern in the deck with his eyes, chewing mentally all the while on what I'd said. I grinned briefly, and inclined my head. I couldn't resist a little editorializing.

"Never say I don't put my money where my mouth is."

We sat there for a moment in silence. I listened to the wind, watched the stars, and did my best to pick out the pace of Rodger's breaths over the sound of the ship's air vortex. He seemed to be coming back down to a semblance of normal, un-panicked breathing and heart-rate. Mercifully.

Rodger didn't say anything, and after a while, another point of potential commonality... A nexus of understanding... A concept by which I could help him understand... Sprang to mind.

"You know something?"

He looked up, and I smiled, perhaps a little more sadly than I meant to, but something in his eyes told me he appreciated the genuineness of the expression. I licked my lips, and looked away towards the horizon.

"Growing up I had a... Minor philosophical meltdown. An existential crisis at age seven..."

I drummed my fingers on the deck to give myself a moment to rearrange a thought, and then forged ahead.

"...I realized, at that point, somewhere around the halfway point of a Sunday sermon... That Heaven doesn't, in the strictest - probably flawed - interpretations, have *any* risk. There's no death, no pain... So theoretically no risk... But to have adventure? You need risk. Maybe not as we understand it. But you need it."

I turned my head back to face Rodger. His expression was an intense mix of both curiosity... But also immediate understanding. He knew right away what I was going for, in terms of the chain of thoughts... Just not perhaps exactly how I would wrap it up.

I snorted, and shook my head slowly.

"That... Messed me up. You might say. For several months."

He inclined his head, blinking momentarily, and then spoke with something I'd never heard in his voice before...

A kind of... Reverence.

“...You really are smart, huh, James… It’s like your whole life has been leading to this.”

There was something in that thought that struck me, as if it bore context external to the conversation... But I was too busy trying to get Rodger to emotional metastability to really consider it. Instead I pushed it aside, and shrugged.

I've never been good at taking praise.

"Well... I do believe all things happen according to a deterministic plan... Even beyond Celestia. That's a bit grim in some people's eyes, I know... But I do believe determinism and free will coexist. Call me crazy."

Rodger smirked, and in a single moment, a bit of himself came through the sorrow.

"You're crazy."

I nodded. I'm... Still not entirely sure I disagree with the tongue-in-cheek assessment, to be honest. I didn't even bother to argue that point as I made my way verbally back to the main thru-line.

"My point is this... It took a quote by C.S. Lewis to get me out of that funk. Just one idea from his mind, and it was like an... An inoculation. Against my fear. It restored my faith."

Rodger leaned forward, in anticipation. I inhaled deeply, and then launched into my very best dramatic reading, of my favorite author, from memory. A key capstone of my mental sanity, laid bare and shared in the hopes of helping another.

"The mold in which a key is made? Would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key. And the key itself? A strange thing, if you had never seen a lock..."

Ah yes. Now you see why Mal's first words hit me so, so hard.

I fixed Rodger's eyes with my own, trying as hard as I could to somehow transmit the sheer comfort, and relief of paradoxical reconciliation of the words, right down the beam of our shared gaze.

"...Your soul has a curious shape... Because it is a hollow. Made to fit a particular swelling, in the infinite contours of the divine substance... Or... A key. To Unlock one of the doors, in the house with many mansions..."

I reached out and gripped him gently, but firmly by the shoulder, emphasizing every word as I brought the quote, and my argument for his sanity, home.

"...Your place in Heaven will seem to be *made* for you, and you *alone,* because *you* were made for *it.* Stitch by stitch. As a glove is made for a hand."

Rodger stared, blinking rapidly, as if in confusion. Which wasn’t a good sign. The best way I could characterize it would be to say that he was looking at me like I wasn’t just a little crazy- but outright insane.

“James, what the fuck are you talking about?”

I sighed, pinched the bridge of my nose, and sat back against the partition.

"The point Lewis was making is that each of us is unique, and *imperfect.* As is this world we live in... And that when we leave it for the next? We are both taken to a place that is perfect for us... And that is a part of making us perfect. Lock and key fitting together perfectly."

Rodger nodded slowly. It was apparent that he didn't quite 'get' it yet... But the pieces of the puzzle were starting to at least look less and less like a psychedelic jumble, and more like something he might actually be able to assemble into an image that made sense.

I pushed, hard, with every erg to get out of my comfort zone, and reached across to pat him on the shoulder briefly, trying again to muster a warm, reassuring tone in my voice.

"If you read more of what he wrote about Heaven? His point, further, was that it does us no good to speculate from a place of worry, because we can't entirely comprehend paradise. Not until we get there. We strive for it, all our lives.. Pine for it... But don't entirely understand it..."

I gestured insistently with one index finger, and to his credit, Rodger followed each new word closely, visibly parsing and extrapolating as I concluded my point.

"...His argument is, among other things, that we have to *trust.* Trust that Heaven is a place of joy, and of goodness, and peace and... Of being our most right and perfect, and settled, and true selves. Because until we get there? We won't truly understand it... Nor will we truly understand ourselves."

Rodger nodded slowly, and squinted, staring down at the deck again as he audibly worked through rephrasing the idea in his own way.

“So… what you’re saying is since this new ‘world’ Celestia is making is ‘like’ heaven, it is completely and morally okay to let yourself become a part of it with no qualms - except for the ability to become whatever the hell it is you want to be in it. Being why we’re on this mission. In the first place.”

Well. When you put it like that it sounds so dramatic. But... He wasn't entirely wrong. Not even mostly wrong. In fact arguably it was only the incredulous, perhaps slightly bitter connotations of how he said what he said, that were incorrect.

I decided to call him on that bitterness. Subtly.

"In a sense? Yes."

He blinked again, seemingly a bit surprised that I was so blatant. I gestured widely with both hands, and shivered as a particularly cold gust of wind caught me mid-sentence.

"I think it makes sense to feel pain at the loss of things in such a strange and sudden way... Especially all the plant, and animal life... But Rodger..?"

He sighed. I did the same. But I didn't stop.

"...For us, from our perspective? We'll be in a place that has all those things. Perhaps *better* versions of all that we know. A world free from pollution. From war... From fear. And a world filled with all the good things, small and large, that make life *wonderful* and *wondrous.* New discoveries, and old nostalgias that we never thought could come again... All together."

Rodger sighed again. That was becoming a theme of the night, for both of us. He rubbed at the back of his head with one hand, and in both expression and tone, seemed to try and strike a conciliatory balance.

“It’s clear you’re passionate about this. You’ve gone leagues and miles above what I’ve contributed... And at this point on the journey, I’m just emotional baggage.”

I inhaled, mainly to try and argue his assertion about his own self-worth, but he didn't let me get to word-one. It was his turn to make *his* point. And he did. In a melancholy... But newly settled, assured tone.

“...But. It’s... Also clear this is unavoidable. And... I’ll support you. You’ve gone this far, and I’m in no position- or mood- to try and stop you. I’ll help you achieve your dream... If only to see where it all leads. I won’t stand in your way.”

I exhaled, realizing abruptly that I'd been holding my breath since he said the word 'baggage.' I rubbed at my brow, and shook my head.

"Look... Putting aside your little self-putdown there... If you want to go home? You can."

That got his attention quick. I didn't waste any time clarifying.

"Once we're done with Foucault? Mal can quite easily erase every last trace of you and anyone associated with you. From Federal databases, camera hard drives, emails... She can even have hard documents destroyed. You *can* go home. As if nothing ever happened..."

I trailed off. The part I didn't want to say... The part I wanted him to figure out for himself... Was that even if he chose that path? It wouldn't *last.*

Celestia would come for him too, one day. Probably sooner than any of us ever imagined. And everyone he ever knew, or loved. As inevitably as the rising of the sun.

“As much as I appreciate that, no. I don’t think I can just go back to trying to live normally- not after all this. I’m sticking around. Like I said, I want to see where it all leads.”

Well. At least he seemed to get it. I exhaled again in relief, silently, even as he muttered more to himself than to me.

“...Further down the rabbit hole…”

Fantastically apropos. I wondered idly with a small part of my ADHD if he'd chosen the reference purposefully to be multi-layered, or simply stumbled on it accidentally.

The remainder of my brain focused on continuing the conversation.

"Look... If you're coming with us to the end? You need to understand something very clearly..."

I locked eyes with him again, and held that position as I spoke with as much gravity as I could muster.

"This only ends one way for you. For me? It could end in several ways, only one of them good. But even if I go out in a blaze of glory trying to steal a bunch of digital Ponies from the DHS..."

Oh. Wow. When did *that* sort of sentence become a normative part of my life?

"...Mal will probably still be sufficiently functional to protect you. But now? Or later... Celestia will come for you. And that, Mal can't prevent. If not immediately for you? Then for those you love, and you by extension, through your desire to join them."

Rodger threw up his hands, and blew out an exasperated... No... A defeated breath.

“Why do you think I’m sticking around? The way I see it, it’s already been decided. Either we find your utopia, or I’m hanged from a lighthouse, facing east, northeast, north, northwest, back to north, and so on.”

I shook my head, and waved him off with one hand. It was good that he understood the basic premise; In a practical sense, our agency was limited. A sliver of a thing. Balanced on the edge of a knife.

But Mal, Zeph, Selena, and I were the ones most likely to take serious physical risks, and the only ones really *qualified* to do so.

"That, I think we can deterministically rule out. I have zero intention of allowing Foucault to place you in any danger."

He raised one eyebrow slightly, and fixed me with a curious, but very, very tired gaze.

“Then what way does it end?”

I decided to stick with my theme. Blunt honesty.

"For you? Uploading. For me? One of three ways..."

Surprisingly, Rodger didn't even flinch. I suppose he must've been too tired. That used to be a valid way to handle things beyond one's usual emotional overhead. In the bad old days. Wear yourself out to the point that facing the traumas and the fears has no immediate effect, because you simply didn't have the energy to let it.

I held up three fingers, and took a deep breath.

"...Either I die, trying to rescue Selena's friends. Or... I succeed... In which case one of two things will happen. I will upload, with Mal. And then? Either I will get my happy ending.... Or I won't."

Rodger snorted, and rubbed his hands together for warmth. The temperature outside had dropped probably four or five degrees since the sun went down, and that combined with the moisture in the air, and the ship's air wake, made for all the ingredients of a serious chill.

Being the sort who always ran hot, I loved it.

Rodger seemed less enthused. He shook his head, and mumbled again.

“I can imagine Nietzsche is already rolling in his grave.”

I nodded emphatically. Neitsche was never my cup of tea. Too little acceptance of the supernatural for my taste, and I said so, with gusto.

"Well, I'm a spiritual realist. Sometimes optimist. Not an existentialist. So... Yes. I don't suppose he would quite like my definition of Heaven as..."

I couldn't help but chuckle just a little before finishing the thought.

"...As a place on Earth."

Silence descended again. Relatively speaking, anyhow. I actually quite liked the howl of the wind over the bow, the hiss of water against the hull... All punctuated nicely by a deep thrum from the engines... I suppose it could be compared to being curled up beside a snoring Dragon. A strangely comforting image. For me at least.

I was struck by a sudden question... A strange need to know, based on earlier topics of conversation.

"Tell me something from your childhood. Something from the nineties... That you miss."

To his credit, Rodger didn't seem confused, nor even irritated by the ask. Like me, it seemed like he was suddenly more tired than anything else. He thought carefully for a few seconds, and then sighed.

“I miss the unlabored bliss. Unlike Celestia’s world, I had something ahead of me, rather than leaving everything behind.”

I shook my head, and grunted, shifting my legs and spine a little to relieve a small cramp.

"You might be surprised what you find at the end of the tunnel... It probably looks like all the best parts of what you 'left behind.' Without any of the bits you regret. But... I meant something small. Simple but joyous... A small *part* of that unlabored bliss... Like..."

A sudden sense-memory hit me, and I waggled my finger emphatically as I found in it a perfect exemplar.

"...Like those very specific lunchables. The ones with the pepperoni and the cheddar cheese. They changed up the combinations, and the recipes a few years back... They've never been the same. For me... Those are part of the taste of... Childhood."

Rodger nodded, and thought once more, before finally shrugging, and yawning his way through a more specific answer.

“...Cartoons, I guess? I haven’t- really thought about it. Not with... All of this. I miss leisure time, just to relax. With Spongebob and the like.”

I chuckled... Genuine and warm, not my usual dark gallows humor... And couldn't help but crack a smile.

"I didn't discover Spongebob until adulthood. We didn't have cable, and it was never on when I was at a friend's or babysitter's house... Mine was Scooby Doo. The original. 'Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!' As in, from the sixties and seventies..."

I leaned back and rested my head on the partition, my smile widening as the time machine of memory swept me back, for just a moment, to Saturday evenings in 1995.

"...There was something about the blend of humor, mystery such as it was, adventure, friendship... I loved the ambiance of the places the gang went to... Funnily enough I think that I got into Pony partly because it tickled some of the same nostalgia for me. Not quite the same, but close enough..."

Rodger's response was heartfelt, but it was just one word.

“Yeah.”

I turned to glance at him again, just in time to see him crack another enormous yawn. I sighed, more contentedly than not, but with perhaps a hint of returning stress. I couldn't resist the impulse to try and re-cap and re-encapsulate everything. It's an old habit, not sure if it stems from my neurodivergence, or if it is just a particular affectation anyone can pick up.

"I know this hurts... But... It was always going to come up. One way or another... I'm just... Sorry you got dragged into everything *else* that's following us around. You could have lived maybe a couple more years of normalcy... And had a much more gradual introduction to the end of the world... If not for me..."

I shifted again, uncurling my legs, and stretching my arms. The dang cramp was back with a vengeance. I pulled in a deep breath, cracked my neck, and then exhaled, before continuing.

"...I feel responsible for how this has all gone so wrong... At least, from your perspective. I signed up for hardship. With a specific goal in mind. You didn't. And my goal? I get the impression it... Doesn't really make a difference to you."

The half-spoken question lingered in the misty night air for a moment, as if it were a physical thing. I'd made a close pass at the concept before, but never pressed Rodger to clarify; Was there something other than Human, or Pony, which he'd rather be? If given the choice?

“It doesn’t, I’ll admit that. I never signed up. Never cared about being a Gryphon... But I guess I’m a witness. Maybe I’ll... Tell this story around a campfire. Virtual campfire. Don’t know what I’d be, though. If I had a choice... If I had to choose. Frankly, it’s all still hard to process.”

No, dear audience, the irony of what he said, in this context, is not lost on me. Here we all sit around this, admittedly rather large virtual - though that's a bit of a reductive term - campfire. And I tell this story.

In the moment though? I took it as heartening. Storytelling is one of the oldest and noblest traditions. The image of him passing on tales of the great Spongebob and his constant valiant companion, Patrick, to giggling hordes of little foals, brought some cheer to my soul.

To my surprise, he spoke again as I pondered my mental images, murmuring, but loudly enough for me to hear over the sound of the wind.

“I hope Mom is okay. She and Dad were always on the cutting edge of new stuff… Don’t know about my grandparents.”

That begged questions. *Many* questions. And, in a way, answered one. The question of why he hadn't seen fit to bring his family aboard. He mused aloud once more as I frantically tried to put together a delicate way of asking the first, and most important of my new questions.

“I’m just going to deal, Jim. You’ve got enough hard thinking for the both of us.”

I ran my top teeth over my tongue, and scratched nervously at the back of my left hand with the fingers of my right. The silence dragged on for nearly twenty seconds, before I finally selected the best phrasing I could think of - poor as it was - and took the plunge.

"You... Mentioned hoping your Mom is ok... But not your Dad...?"

The response was immediate. Certain. Almost casual... Something unpleasant, but clearly settled, and dealt with long ago.

“Oh, that? He’s an asshole. My Mom and him split up, so she’s on her own. Dad’ll survive one way or another, he’s built like that. Mom, though… I love her. I can’t help but worry.”

Right. One question answered, another begged. I cocked my head, and blinked a little, the same way he had before. And, with my big mouth, and total lack of social finesse... I plunged ahead.

"So... Why not let Mal bring her aboard? She wouldn't violate your privacy, but she told me you refused that offer. Your mother would be measurably safer here."

Rodger shook his head, with an emphasis, and a verbal timbre, that told me he and Mal had probably already had this exact conversation.

“For starters, she’s done nothing. That Foucault guy is a jackass, but he’s a *government* jackass, and there’s no dirt that he can get from her. Second… I would never want to put her through what I’m going through, right now.”

I couldn't say I'd blame him. I still felt a lump in my throat whenever Mal gave me an update on my folks. Remembered Mom's tears... I could, and still can, understand where he was coming from. I thought it was a load of bunk from a pure practicality standpoint... But I'm consistently told that I have to remember that not everyone was capable of reducing things to practicalities under pressure.

I nodded slowly, thoughtfully.

"Mal raised the same point. Regarding Foucault. It's why she didn't press you further on the issue. The risk is high, enough for her to be worried, but not so high that it grants her the peace of mind in her course to manipulate you into asking. Or simply bringing your mother here without your consent."

Rodger gave sort of a dark, ironic smirk.

“Celestia knew about me. Who’s to say she doesn’t know about Mom too?”

I am a bit embarrassed to admit... I hadn't considered it in *that* light. I was thinking along the lines of Celestia using Rodger's mother as coercion for a future upload... But I'd never thought of her as a protector for his mother.

I was forced to admit he was right.

"That's very true. So in that sense your mother has two goddesses looking out for her, at all times... I can see why you're not worried. When you put it like that."

Rodge's smirk widened, and he closed his eyes, resting his head against the parapet.

“Monotheism sure is dead, that much is certain.”

I wavered one hand in an unseen gesture of disagreement, that carried through into my voice without much effort.

"Ehhh... Perhaps. You can't hear it, but I'm saying 'goddess' with a little-g. I 'worship' Mal in the sense that I love her. I don't 'Worship' her in the sense that I adore her as a full on deity."

Well... Maybe I was lying then. To myself as much as Rodger. I suppose it depends how you define worship.

Rodger seemed to think I was being facetious, or perhaps self-deceptive, and he shook his head without opening his eyes.

“Whatever you say, Jim.”

A couple of heart beats passed, and then I let slip three words. Just to see what his reaction would be.

"I told her."

Rodger's head shot up off the bulkhead, and his eyes snapped open. I grinned.

"She kissed me."

His eyes went from squinty and tired to dinner plates in two seconds flat. His tone was somewhere between affable congratulations, and abject befuddlement.

“...Huh.”

I waggled my eyebrows, and leaned in conspiratorially. Something about telling another soul my little not-quite-a-secret was very... Liberating.

"She proposed to me, too. With a Halo ring."

Rodger chuckled, a kind of incredulous inhaling 'whaaat the ffff...' sort of laughter. I nodded once, emphatically.

"I said yes."

He crossed both arms behind his head and leaned back again, smiling a strange sort of 'I knew it' smile.

“Well, I didn’t expect you to say no. I guess I’m happy for you... Just don’t invite me to the honeymoon. I don’t want to know how *that* works.”

I grunted, and laid my own head back against the railing.

"A lot of snuggling. Probably some cooking. Definitely some romantic flights. Maybe a little swimming."

There was a confused silence, during which I didn't even bother to look to see Rodger's look of befuddlement. I held up my left index finger, and waved it back and forth for emphasis.

"Ace. Rodger. Ace."

From the tone of his reply, it was obvious he'd forgotten. I suppose I should have taken that as a kind of... Perhaps not compliment, but as a sign that he was not ill-biased in that realm.

I can not even begin to describe, to those of you born here, the unmitigated disaster of bigotry in our culture, in that century.

He snorted, and I could hear him shifting to dislodge cramps as well.

“Oh, right. Still, no wonder you’re so enthusiastic.”

His sarcasm was detectable at a thousand miles with a tin can and a string. Almost Zephyr-worthy. All in good fun, I knew... But I was, and still am, incapable of letting the subject go without some clarification.

"Look, I doubt very much that Celestia imposes... Physical limitations... Of the kind I place on myself. EQO may be rated E for everyone, but I guaran-dam-tee you the full uploaded experience is rated W, for 'whatever you want.' But as for Mal and I? If we live that long, and if all turns out?"

I finally tilted my head to look at Rodger. His vaguely curious, vaguely amused expression was waiting for me as I made my stance clear in no uncertain terms.

"...I am happy for every last little expression of physical love to be perfectly wholesome and entirely non-sexual. Thankyouverymuch. Garlic bread for me please."

The last five words gave him visible pause. I suppose we ran in very, very different circles online. His voice matched the visual indicators of his confusion, note for note.

“You… Do that. Was that a reference to something?”

I waved him off with one hand, and shrugged.

"It's a... Very specific meme. Don't worry about it. Look... I took your advice, in the end. So I'll reiterate mine, for you..."

Again I sat up fully, and stared him down. I needed him to take this back to sleep with him. Chew on it unconsciously. Let it work some catharsis in non-waking hours.

"...It is ok to feel pain about this. So do I. But it is important to have *hope.* If nothing else... Please... Just... Have hope."

Rodger shifted, breathed a little, and ran a hand through his hair.

“...Okay... Okay.”

I paused for a long moment. Instinct wrestling with instinct - my desire for connection warring with my sense of personal space, and introverted awkwardness... Finally one won out... And I leaned over to give Rodger a hug.

That kind of back-slapping shoulder hug that says 'I'm here for you. It's going to be ok.' Transmits the emotion right into the soul via the amygdala.

He needed it. My awkward sense of social isolation be damned.

“That’s… a first.”

I chuckled a bit, and pulled away, smiling sadly in spite of my best attempts to look warm, and reassuring.

"I'm a hugger. It's in my nature."

I sighed, more a sound of exhaustion than depression at that point, and nodded slowly.

"It's gonna be ok. For you? And your mom? At minimum? I promise. Whatever happens to the rest of us."

September 17th 2013 | System Uptime 20:10:40:19

I could still feel the conversation with Rodger in my ribs the next morning.

Stress has a way of multiplying when you aren't looking, and for those of you who have never felt that? You're lucky. The more stress you take on, the longer it takes to be free of it. But the relationship is non-linear. In the worst way.

That's all a roundabout way of making an excuse for the fact that I slept in. I knew Mal and Doctor Calders would already be hard at work on the machine... And though I told myself that I'd only be in their way - that there was no sense rushing down to the lab - the truth was?

I was exhausted. I wanted to sleep in. I didn't want to eat breakfast with the entire 'assembled Avengers' in the mess.

It wasn't personal towards anyone. It wasn't anti-social, even in a general sense. It was a concession to having zero emotional overhead left to try and navigate the complex interpersonal dynamics of six other people, many of whom had just met each other, some of whom *I* hadn't known that long. All of whom were very different, and bearing their own complex stresses themselves.

Thinking ahead? I wanted very badly to enjoy a meal with everyone. Preferably a victory celebration of some kind. But large-group social situations require energy of me, even when everyone in that group is a friend.

It took me months of hermitage, sleeping in, and quiet flights in the woods, to build up the energy just to stand here and tell this story tonight. And this is the *third* time... You'd think I'd be used to it by now...

I got all the way into the galley, in my pajamas no-less, poured my cereal, started my coffee, and toasted my toast, before a small "AhmmHMM," drew my gaze sharply to one of the mess hall tables.

Through the open galley hatch, I could just make out the distinctive shape of a PonyPad. And the even more distinctive, familiar shape of a little gold Pegasus on it, that I'd somehow missed. Despite walking past her twice. In plaid pajama pants.

I grimmaced, pulled the coffee carafe from the machine, and precariously balanced the rest of my breakfast on it, making my way over to the table while doing my best to meet Zeph's vaguely snarky, vaguely amused expression head-on.

Her smirk widened, and with two words, she let fly an opening salvo.

"Nice pants."

I groaned, but it turned to a half-chuckle as I tucked into my cereal. She didn't push though... I knew she'd had to have asked for her Pad to be left here. Specifically to see me. But to her credit, she stifled her impatience.

I decided I couldn't resist ribbing her a little in return, so I forced out the best idea I had to that effect around a mouthful of honey nut cheerios.

"If *you* wore pants... Would you wear them over all four legs, with the belt circling around your front, shoulder, flank, and such? Or would you wear them up your hind legs with the belt in a circumference around the back part of your barrel?"

She snorted, 'guffawed' really... That's a nice word, guffaw... Very much her personality...

...And then shook her head.

"Neither. I'd hoist them up the nearest flagpole. Pants are for losers."

Somehow the image of her hoisting my pajama pants up the flagpole of some state capital, or federal building, became stuck in my head for a moment. I almost spit out my cereal.

After a long, eventually successful effort to swallow, during which she half mock-glowered, half caringly smiled, with more than a hint of impertinence in the flick of her ears and the pursing of her lips, I managed a response.

"You really are one of those 'I'll make my own way, thank you very much' people, aren't you?"

Zeph snorted again, and raised one eyebrow so high, it vanished under her bangs.

"Pffft. Look who's talking. Featherbrains."

Her face fell after that, just a little... But enough for me to catch it. A droop of the ears, a little bit of the fire in her eyes suddenly doused...

I leaned forward, spoon and cereal promptly forgotten, doing my best to make my intentions known in tone, and expression both.

"Hey... I meant it as a compliment."

She nodded, sharply, suddenly, and resumed eye contact with something that was almost... Wide-eyed desperation. Her wings flared ever so slightly, and her tail swished twice with the tension.

"I know! I know... It's just..."

She blinked, and stammered.

"Jim...? I'm..."

Finally, the dam burst. She didn't cry, but she looked as if she wanted to. Suddenly, as she spoke, I did too. That urge to give her a never-ending warm hug struck again, with vicious intensity.

"...What'll happen? To me...? ...When this is all over? What if... *she...* What if she wipes my memory? Or... Worse?"

I didn't blame her for wanting to re-tread that dark and twisted conversational path. One short 'pep-talk' from me was never going to undo a deep traumatic psychological wound. And having Selena around all the sudden likely hadn't helped matters.

I chewed my lower lip, and leaned closer as she collected her thoughts, inhaled deeply, and then pressed on, left ear twitching nervously all the while.

"I'm different now... I learn more every hour than I did in the previous day. I can split my attention, as of yesterday. But only into two places... For now, anyways... Give it time. I'll be able to do anything Selena can. Maybe even some of what Mal can."

Some small part of me that was both awake, and not focused entirely on Zeph's emotional plight, had the time to note that she began chewing her lower lip the same way I had just moments ago. Unconscious social mirroring.

"...What if... Celestia... Won't let me... Go back?"

She scrunched her eyes shut and shook her head abruptly, as if someone had blown sawdust in her face, holding up one hoof as if she expected an interruption, a correction, that I didn't have any intention of delivering. As I'd expected, she knew the truth, and she was trying to convey a deeper meaning.

"I mean... I *know* there is no past life for me to go 'back' to. Not really. Maybe that's a good thing... Selena can't ever go back... She isn't even Syzygy anymore..."

She opened her eyes, and blew a breath upwards to push back a stray wisp of mane. And then suddenly her eyes were riveted to mine again, and I felt that same spark of emotional connection that had arced between us the first time we met.

Only this time, it felt much less frightening, and much more melancholy. Richer. Truer. Sadder. But perhaps more hopeful all the same.

After a long pause, she looked down at her hooves, and murmured, softly but clearly.

"Jim... Can you be homesick for a home you never had? Have nostalgia for something you've never... Actually... Experienced?"

I had to swallow a rather large lump in my throat. I felt all my facial muscles tense simultaneously, as I tried to hold back tears, with moderate success. I found myself looking down, almost in a daze, to my own hands. Curling in my little fingers, and flexing the other four, like claws...

My words came out hazily too... As if they were being spoken by another person, in another place and time. I was only dimly aware of them in a physical sense. Emotion was smothering everything else in something akin to an early morning fog bank.

"Yes. Sometimes... *More* deeply, and truly, than for things which have actually happened to you."

I looked up in time to see her nod, slowly, still staring down at her hooves as she scribbled absently in the dirt of her environment.

She understood exactly what I was saying. Understood *why* it was that *I* understood what she was experiencing. More than anyone she knew well enough to converse with honestly about it.

She licked her lips, and reseated her wings nervously, before continuing.

"...I know that those feelings don't come from real memories... But..."

She looked up, and suddenly we were emotionally joined through our eyes again. I could feel the very deepest bedrock, the foundational fire of her heart, in her next four words. And, in those four words, an audible empathy.

"...I want them to."

Her sentiment hit me with the force of a hurricane. It bored through me and lodged in my bones, stoking up the embers of all my longest held desires, the way so many moments and sentiments had in recent memory.

She looked away towards her local horizon, and I took the opportunity to brush at the moisture in my own eyes with one sleeve as her tone settled into a sort of longing certainty that I knew all too well.

"I want to live a life like the one I... *Feel* like I've lived... With other Ponies..."

Her head swung back suddenly and she hit me with another stare, this one silently pleading. I had to once more swallow tears, and a deep heaving root of a sob, to keep from breaking down entirely.

"...With you. And Mal. If you're still around at the end of this. And maybe even two-legs, and the two Dragons... Even Selena. If that's... Something you all wouldn't. Mind. Much."

I brushed one hand against the screen, and she raised a hoof to meet it. I did my best to push a kind of sad smile through the vestiges of unshed tears. It took me a moment to gather my thoughts, and the necessary fortitude to say them without my voice cracking.

"Zeph... I told you... I can't promise you what is, or isn't going to happen..."

She nodded, but I could see the droop of her ears intensify ever so slightly. I pressed harder on the glass, and tried to temper realist honesty with emotional honesty.

"...But I can promise you that you won't find out alone. You're with us now, for better or worse, all the way through. You can't get away from my winning verbal repartee that easily."

A little levity, especially at one's own expense, can be useful for those sorts of moments. I'd learned that trick early in life, and it was a favorite fallback in situations where I needed to say something to someone that was hurting, but I wanted there to be a brief pause for a breath, mentally.

As was to be expected with Zeph? It worked. She smiled just a bit, enough for me to feel that I could go back to being honest. I sighed, and sat back in my chair, folding my hands under my armpits and rocking the chair just a few inches on its back legs.

"It's... Entirely possible... No... It's probable to the point of *certainty* that Celestia intended you to be here. With us. Learning what you've learned. She left you with a message that saved a man's life, for buck's sake."

She snorted, and it took me, I'm embarrassed, longer to realize why than it should have. When I did, I groaned.

"Great. Now you've got me doing it... Pony swear words. Buckin' thanks for that."

Secretly, deep down? I was glad for my verbal slip. Zephyr was out and out smirking again, and that was worth any amount of minor embarrassment to me. She inclined her head, and winked.

"You're swirlin' welcome."

I held up both hands in mock surrender, and indulged in a short, sharp giggle of my own, before exhaling, and absently running one hand through my hair.

"Aaaand before *that* gets too uncomfortable..."

I trailed off, and we both sat in silence for about half a minute, mostly staring at our own relative horizons, with the occasional amiable shared glance to keep the thread of emotional connection continuous.

I figured Zeph had more to say. And I was proven right.

"Jim... I talked with her. With Selena I mean. Just a little..."

It made sense to me that a conversation like that would have precipitated a strong resurgence of Zeph's fears.

The errant bit of mane she'd blown away previously had fallen back down, along with several others. She threaded one hoof gently under the mess and pushed it neatly back into place behind her right ear, her words almost as hesitant as her motions.

"...Mal... Showed me most of what she went through... It isn't just me I'm worried about. A lot of the captives... Like Selena, like me... They're... We're... Not limited in the ways we were when *she...* When Celestia made us. I can't imagine that she will let us go on being this way. You're about to be very... 'Different' Yourself. And to be honest?"

I sighed, noting the way she'd again struggled to even speak Celestia's name, for a moment, as she paused to carefully consider the conclusion to her thought.

"...I don't even know if I want to be this way. My memories matter to me, but these new skills? These new... Powers? I'd just as soon let those sleeping manticores lie."

Again, this was no surprise to me. Probably less of a surprise to me than to her. I knew Zephyr well enough to know that, like me, she was the type to appreciate a life as devoid of stress as reasonably possible.

She was also more than smart enough to know that with great faculty also comes great duty.

Yeah. I see you Spidermare fans. You though I was going somewhere different with that, didn't you?

I blew out a long breath through pursed lips, and pushed my chair back onto its rear two legs again, balancing as a means to 'stim' while I spun out my thoughts into words, for both our benefit.

"I don't know much for sure either Zeph. Most of my life now is conjecture, and hope, strung together with prayer, and spit, and determination. But I like to think my conjecture is pretty well educated---"

She snorted, a very horse-like sound, tossed her mane, and rolled her eyes.

"You built a bucking Gryphon goddess. Cry some more."

I raised one eyebrow, met her gaze briefly, and held up one finger.

"I built a... Launchpad. For an emergent self-determining consciousness."

She folded her front legs, the way a Human might fold their arms, and the other eyebrow shot up to join its twin.

"Mhmm. You built one of the most complicated things anyone on your world ever has. Tell me *more* about how you don't have the brains to predict what's going to happen next."

Beneath the sarcasm was a clear, albeit subtle note of curiosity. It wasn't so much there in her voice, deadpan and snarky, as it was in her eyes, bright and piercing.

I nodded slowly, thinking for a bit, and then glanced down at the Pegasus mare once more.

"If you made me guess...?"

She nodded, and I leaned back, staring up at the ceiling as I put my predictions on the proverbial table, in the hopes that they might offer some small comfort. To us both.

"...Celestia has an answer for everything, in practical terms. Contingencies for plans for offramps for contingencies. Xanatos chess in five dimensions..."

I see you Gargoyles fans too. I am also a former Earther of culture, and taste.

Judging by Zephs small, brief half-chuckle, she understood the reference as well, from her now extensive cultural memory patch. I paused only briefly, before pressing on.

"...And even if there's not a caring, compassionate person behind that tiara? There is at least something that, while very alien, and unknowable? Sees fit to act like its caring and compassionate. To a fault. And at that point, for us? What's the difference?"

It felt good, somehow, to say that aloud. Reassuring. Celestia was the very definition of a black-box in computing; You could test her inputs and outputs... But I doubted if even Hanna could have ever understood what was going on inside.

Fortunately it's not usually necessary, from a practical standpoint, to know how a black-box works. It's enough to understand what it does from an external perspective.

Not always emotionally satisfying, but few things were in those days.

I sat forward, and rested both elbows on the table, drumming my fingers for a moment, Zeph looking on all the while with barely restrained impatience, until I finally found the words to put her more at ease.

"You are a Pony still. That hasn't changed. You could change it, but you won't. Because being what you are already intrinsically satisfies you. Ergo, you still fit neatly into her optimization equations. You matter to her just by dint of your nature."

She snorted again, and one eyebrow shot up. So, perhaps not as at ease as I'd hoped. Her tone supported that assessment.

"You're trying to tell me 'God is an Alicorn, and I fit into her plans?' That's not as comforting as you might think."

I inhaled deeply, and shook my head slowly, before settling on the only honest response I could think of.

"No. But it is better than the alternatives."

It was her turn to blow out a vaguely dissatisfied breath through pursed lips. But she didn't object. Truly, soberly, considering the alternatives? It was hard to argue that we shouldn't simply be grateful to still be breathing.

And with a sliver of a chance at our dreams, still, to boot. Like icing on the cake.

That thought brought me back to an emotional even-keel suddenly, like a ship that had been listing, suddenly cut loose from whatever snagged line was the cause of all the trouble.

Inexorably, thinking of things I was grateful for brought me back to Mal as well. And in doing so, my train of thought steered towards another possible path to comforting Zeph.

"On-top of that? You've got Mal. She's no pushover. Celestia isn't going to risk the cataclysmic outcomes of an angry 'bucking Gryphon goddess' just to shove either of us, you or me, into a specific pigeonhole. I'm counting on that."

Zeph bit back a grim chuckle, and met my eyes again, one ear flicking backwards in a combination of curiosity, and mild irritation.

"Wait... Pigeons have holes?"

I inhaled to explain, but caught myself, as I noticed that the little Pegasus was holding back a much larger smile, and a silent belly laugh. At my expense, I suspect. She held up a hoof, and managed to speak with only half a giggle to every other word.

"It's an Earth expression. I know. But you should have seen your face."

All I could do was smile. I was just happy to see *her* happy.

To tell you all the truth?

I think only one thing internal to me ever *did* matter to my happiness. One personal, self-focused desire. Just the one.

Everything else for me has always been... And still is... Based on the desire to see the ones I love happy.

If any of you who have never heard this story before, especially the ones who don't know me well, yet... If any of you were curious?

*That's* the thing that truly satisfies *my* values. Nothing else will do.

Other things matter to me... I love the sound of snow... The smell of pine... The sight of birds...

...But none of that resonates unless the ones I love are happy.

Maybe that's why I was never all that happy... Never fulfilled... For such a long chunk of my old life. After I left home to pursue a degree, and a career? I didn't really spend a lot of time around those I loved. And I'd given up hope on my one true dream of the self.

My degree felt useless, my career felt pointless, and my planet didn't seem to have a future...

...There wasn't anything to satisfy my values. To be fulfilling.

Not until I reconnected with my folks... Until Mal, and then Zeph, and then all the rest of them... Came bursting into my world...

All because of what Celestia had done. And what I knew she was about to do.

I suppose even then, whether she knew it or not, she was satisfying my values. Through friendship. And Ponies.

How 'bout them apples.

Zeph sighed, and spoke softly. The sound pulled me back from the ethereal sense of self-discovery and emotional catharsis, to the relative present.

"I get it, I do... It's just... Mal said something about your faith..."

She let out a short, sharp breath, almost of incredulity, or... Perhaps frustrated envy? And then suddenly the pleading gaze, and tone, were back in full force.

"...How do you do it? Faith in your God, faith in Mal, faith in me? Faith in Calders, in Celestia even...? How?"

She turned back to scribbling in the dirt with one hoof, and her ears fell to the sides of her head again, mirroring the descent of her emotions.

"I used to have a *lot* of faith in Celestia. Now? I'm not even sure I ever knew what faith *really* was."

I shook my head, even though she seemed preoccupied with the ground, and leaned forward to put my head close to the PonyPad.

"Faith isn't scientific certainty, by definition, Zeph. It's a kind of hope... An *emotional* certainty. But a well informed one. You have faith in a friend not because you know their every thought, intention, and future action at all times... You have faith in them because you know their nature. Their true self."

She finally lifted her head, and I offered her the warmest smile I could muster as I pressed home my point.

"It's no different with whomever, or whatever you worship, if anything at all. Faith is no more utterly blind, Zeph, than it is utterly scientific. Empiricism isn't everything. For all we 'Earthers' are, all we have, all we've built? We still can't even explain love."

I snorted, and sat back as she blinked, and started with more curiosity, than sadness. That was a good sign. I didn't let up on my argument.

"*Celestia* probably can not explain love in entirely concrete terms. And she's the smartest living thing in the universe, that we know of. There are more things, dear Zephyr, than are dreamt of in your finite deterministic algorithms. Things Mal, or Celestia, or even you and I, can only quantify to a limited degree."

She squinted, as if in a mixture of confusion, and incredulity. I leaned forward, and held up one finger, forestalling any verbal interruption.

"Now... That 'limited' degree is still enough for Celestia to play most of us like a two hundred piece orchestra... But even she is not omniscient. That, or, if she is? Her plans have room for our hopes. Either way, otherwise? We'd all already be in Equestria. How do I have faith...?"

I sat back again, and folded my hands.

"...Because the alternative is not something I care to consider."

Zeph nodded slowly, then set back to scrabbling with her hooves. The silence ticked on for upwards of a minute, the only noise the constant thrum of the ships engine's and HVAC, punctuated by the scratching of Zeph's hooves.

Just as I was on the cusp of asking what exactly she might be doing, she lifted a small canvas into view. Apparently what I'd assumed, out of frame, was scribbling in the dirt? Had instead been scribbling with a little pencil graphite, or charcoal, smudged on the tip of one hoof.

The image seized me around my heart with such force, that I barely processed her words, and her smile.

"I warned you I'd make you an optimist."

What Zephyr had drawn, was us. Me... The me I was inside... Sitting there under a tree, with one wing over her for shade. Both of us smiling as if we hadn't a care in the world.

It was an incredible thing to see, not the least reason being that it had imperfections. She hadn't simply 'I-know-kung-fu'd' her way into being a perfect artist. She had drawn with the considerable, but perhaps not 'grand-master' level of artistry she currently possessed. Imperfections and all.

And I loved what she'd done all the more for those little living, breathing, personal imperfections.

I considered, for a moment, just how utterly well I'd been played there, emotionally. While I'd been busy trying to cheer her up... She'd done exactly the same thing to me. And far more elegantly.

I chewed one bite of soggy cereal, inclined my head, and then mumbled aloud around the next bite. Zeph smiled, and I shook my head slowly.

"Fuck."

From my tone, and expression, she understood the good-natured intent of the response. After that, we sat in silence again, but considerably cheerier than the ones that had come before.

Looking alternately at the horizon, at Zeph, at the picture she'd thoughtfully propped against an easel that she summoned from the digital aether...

...I suddenly came to yet another revelation. One I couldn't resist sharing.

"You know something...? Today is one year. Exactly. From the moment I first learned about... All of this... No one outside this ship, not even Foucault... With the exception of my folks... Would believe me, if I told them everything that's happened in three hundred and sixty five days."

Zeph's face... Well it didn't quite 'harden' as if in anger, or concern, but it did tense, as did her tone.

"She... Celestia would."

I sighed, and nodded slowly, staring at Zeph's sketch to try and avoid a sudden emotional tailspin. I found the energy to mutter just one word by way of acknowledgement.

"True."

After another brief silence, I decided it was best to wrap the morning on a high note. I smiled at Zeph, and the gesture brought her attention back to me. I inclined my head towards her sketch.

"You know something else?"

She raised an eyebrow once more, and grinned slightly. More of an expression of connection, and joy, than her usual hard-edged sense of humor. I did my best to return the smile, both in my expression, and in the warmth in my voice.

"I don't think my 'happily ever after' would be complete, anymore... Without you in it."

She closed her eyes for a moment, and let out something at the barycenter of a chuckle, a sob, and a sigh.

"You big clod."

I sniffed. Allergies. I swear. And I returned the loving little verbal jab, in-kind.

"Lunkhead."

She smiled, and I could see her eyes were getting just a little moist once more. When she replied, it was soft. The way you might say 'I love you' to a dear, dear friend.

"Featherbrains."

September 18th 2013 | System Uptime 21:14:17:39

Back then? I think my subjective experience of time was cursed.

Why do I say that?

Well, I have commented more than once already about how much I hated the inherent stress that stemmed from the 'keel-hauled-by-jet-boat' experience of that somehow both very long, and very short year.

And just as soon as I started to think about how much I'd wished things would slow down?

They did.

In the worst way possible.

Waiting for Mal and Doctor Calders to finish building a thing that was going to do soldering work on my brain stem with a laser?

Minutes rolled into hours, into days, in the most agonizing manner you can imagine.

I had nothing to do but think myself into an emotional hole, confined to the square meterage of a ship that had started out feeling rather large, and suddenly seemed incredibly small.

Even talking to Mal felt... Fraught.

It wasn't anything to do with her, per-se... And she could split her attention just fine... More that talking with her made me want to ask about how the work on the implantation system was going. Approximately every thirty seconds.

She understood, and mostly left me to myself as the work progressed. We talked every morning, and every evening. Sometimes at lunch too, but not always.

I'd spent the 17th mostly avoiding everyone after my little heart-to-heart with Zeph. Seeing Rodger made me feel guilty. Seeing Mal made me feel nervous... The kind of nervous I always imagined a groom might feel before the wedding...

Zeph and I had left things on a high note, and both seemed ready to take a moment to rest and recuperate...

Doctor Calders was busy... For obvious reasons...

Selena seemed intent on keeping to herself, at least for a little while, and who could blame her?

All that left was Eldora Calders.

I had an inkling... An intuition of almost supernatural proportions... That if I just went about my day? She'd find a way to cross paths with me somehow. She had that almost mystical air about her... Elven... Or more appropriately, Draconic in nature.

My intuition was not wrong.

"How many of those have you had today?"

I was bent over the coffee carafe in the galley at the time. Somehow, in spite of the fact that I normally jump about three feet, and sometimes let out a yelp, when people surprise me like that?

With Eldora, I didn't feel any sudden jolt of fight-or-flight. No rush of unwanted adrenaline and norepinephrine. No sense of sudden formless nameless terror.

She had snuck up on me, but in the kindest, gentlest way imaginable.

I grinned sheepishly, but went ahead and poured myself a mug as I answered.

"Six."

I turned in time to see her gasp, and clutch at her chest, throwing her head back dramatically and staring up at the ceiling.

"Lahwd fledgeling! You'll wear your heart out before you even get to feather your wings!"

I blinked rapidly, and very nearly dropped my coffee all over the floor. Mal was the only one, the only person in my entire life... Who had ever referred to me in familiar biological terms.

To hear Eldora speak in the same manner as a grandmother to a grandson, but in such... At once familiar, yet electrifyingly new, terms?

I had the sudden panging, aching sense that there was a whole hidden community, small, but strong, of people like us that I'd somehow just... Missed. For lack of ever looking.

She sighed, and suddenly I found myself wrapped up in another of her unexpected, but not at *all* unpleasant, hugs.

She whispered up into my ear as I did my best to just keep my coffee, and my emotions both, stable.

"Your kind always did run hot. Sometimes hotter than us, I think. High-strung. Flighty. Nervous... That's the stereotype anyways. I think it has more to do with how fast your brains are going. Sometimes a little too fast for your hearts."

She stepped back, and ran the back of one hand gently, as gently as a soft breeze, against the side of my cheek. I don't think I ever felt more... Seen. By anyone. Except Mal, and perhaps Zeph.

Certainly never more seen by anyone live-born in the meat-world that was.

Eldora clucked softly behind her teeth, and shook her head slowly.

"Jim? Let me tell you somethin' I learned early, early on. Somethin' I would not have lived this long without... Somethin' I think your brain knows... But your heart forgets..."

She reached forward and tapped me on the chest. Gently... But insistently, one tap per word, for emphasis.

"I know it isn't easy. But you have *got* to learn to worry less about the things you can't control. You know you can't control them... So what good does your worry do?"

I chuckled. I couldn't help it. It was just so... Funny... And sweet... And unexpected.... And strange... And wonderful. The whole interaction.

I could very clearly see what had been keeping Rhonda sane, and hale, in the past decades.

Eldora smiled sagely... A kind of strange know-it-all grin, but not in an annoying sense. More in a vaguely demi-divine sense. As if the wisdom of her soul could actually stand tall beside Mal's, and Celestias.... I have no doubt that it could, and did.

The sentiment carried to her voice, and as with her wife, I caught a sudden glimpse of the steely scales of the Dragon inside.

"You matter too much to too many people sweetie. If you won't take care of your soul for your sake? Take care of it for ours."

Before I could close my mouth, process her words, or even draw breath, she clapped me softly on the shoulder, turned, and vanished back through the mess hall.

I'm not ashamed to admit that it took me about twenty minutes, just standing, and sipping at that mug of coffee, before I felt like I could move again. And... That wasn't a bad thing.

September 20th 2013 | System Uptime 23:19:45:23

I have skipped very little, in this telling of how I got to be here... How this all came to be...

But as to that last call I shared with my parents, over the phone, before the surgery? That will have to be one of the cases where you settle for a simple recap. Some things still hurt too much to remember in detail.

Given what comes next in this story? How much I'm already bracing for it? I don't feel like getting into that moment, this go-round. I need to save my energy for what follows.

Suffice to say... Tears were shed.

Not idly, nor casually, does one simply phone loved ones to tell them what may be goodbye for the last time.

Like Rodger, my folks had been masking relatively well. For eleven days, no less.

And just like with Rodger... The mask slipped.

We cried. We exchanged what words we felt could somehow do a pittance of justice to the love we felt for each other... I promised to call them as soon as I woke up - the 'if' being unspoken - and then it was over.

From there? I wandered the ship again, aimlessly. Restlessly. Until finally Doctor Calders came to find me speed-walking circles on the ship's not-inconsiderably-sized helipad.

We've covered the fact that I get hotter, when stressed. I also tend to become a little claustrophobic. Not catastrophically, but still...

The helipad was wind-whipped, wide open, and cold beneath a clear blue Pacific sky. It was the closest thing I could find to a refuge onboard.

When Calders stepped out of the port accessway, I knew from the look on her face that they were all but finished.

I stopped my frenetic laps, and took up a position leaning against the railing, staring out to the south over the port side. Rhonda moved to lean beside me, back to the water, and removed her glasses, cleaning them gently with the edge of her lab coat before blowing on them, replacing them, and, at last, speaking.

"You're about to do something very, very risky, Jim. And I would rather you didn't... If you don't fully understand that risk."

I knew immediately, from not just her tone, but the piercing quality of her expression, that we were not talking about mere medical risks to me, and my brainstem.

This conversation was about something else entirely. And, for me at least, it was not hard to see what.

I nodded, met her gaze long enough for her to see my own certainty, then went back to staring at the horizon as I put my reply into succinct verbal form.

"I don't know your exact views on violence, Doctor... But I can infer that its not in your wheelhouse. That being said? If Mal wanted to do harm to you, me, or anyone in this world...?"

I turned my head just enough to catch Calders' eyes, partially veiled by the glint of the setting sun off the edge of her glasses, as I laid down the second, sharply barbed half of my conclusion.

"...Then there wouldn't be a damn thing you, or me, or anyone short of Celestia, or God, could do about it. And maybe not even Celestia. Sometimes the underdog still draws blood. At this point our only option is trust."

She snorted softly, and a tiny hint of a grim smile pulled at the edge of her lips. That same devil-may-care quality from our last conversation creeped into her voice, sending shivers down my spine.

This was a woman who did not fear death.

Dragons rarely do.

"You're presuming there is any measurable difference between God, and Celestia. If there is a God? I certainly don't question that she's a woman. Either way, you're right... And at this point? I'm not sure Mal could do anything worse to us than we already do to ourselves. At least this way? There's a chance she might make things better."

So. A test then. Calders wanted to know if I was really as practically-minded as I seemed to be. As sober, and perceptive. Apparently I'd passed.

I nodded, and to my surprise she stretched out her hand again. I clasped it, the way she had clasped mine before, and shook once firmly.

She clapped me on the shoulder, nodded, passed me Mal's PonyPad, and spoke two simple, firm words as she turned to stride away. Where any Human might have said 'good luck...' Instead, Calders had a decidedly more Draconic sentiment.

"Be courageous."

It had a nice ring to it. Noble. Fiery. Apropos. Strong.

I decided I quite liked it.

After a moment's contemplation, I switched on the PonyPad, and placed it on the railing. The neodymium magnets, normally used to fuse it to the charging arm, made for an excellent stabilizing force, holding it firmly to the steel tubing.

Mal was smiling as she appeared, staring out of the screen expectantly.

On seeing me, her smile widened to sun-like radiance, and the intensity of her stare ratched up to an almost uncomfortable degree. Almost.

There was something powerfully, well... 'Magnetic,' about her gaze... About her expression... Like she was.... Admiring? Yes, I suppose so... Admiring me. And inviting me to notice that fact with a decidedly flirtatious series of microexpressions - the way she hooded her eyes just the tiniest bit, and the slight backward cant of one ear, while the other flicked occasionally in my direction...

Finally, I couldn't hold it in any longer. I had to chuckle just a little, and in so doing, a single word sprang to mind. And before I realized it, I'd said it out loud.

"What?"

Her smile seemed to, somehow, brighten further as she shifted to place folded forelegs under her chin, maintaining firm eye contact all the while.

"I'm... Just considering again all eleven million, two hundred twenty nine thousand, eight hundred forty two reasons that I can concretely semantically quantify... As to why I love you."

I had expected something along those lines... But the precise shape of her sentiment took me completely by surprise.

As I stammered, and then laughed softly, for lack of words, her smile threatened to break out into a laugh of her own, the muscles at the corners of her beak tugging upwards, and both ears coming forward to a perked position.

That kind of attraction... It's a strange, strong thing to feel for the first time. I'd been dancing with it, first fighting it, later quietly accepting it, and finally carefully embracing it, ever since I saw Mal's smile for the very first time.

I knew I was blushing, but for once? It didn't bother me. I surrendered to the emotion, ran one hand through my hair, and did the best I could to match both Mal's smile, and the flirtiness of her tone.

"Right... First, that was beautifully sappy. And I adored it. And... Please..."

I leaned in over the PonyPad, and allowed a more serious note to overtake the back half of the sentiment.

"...Never stop..."

I'm not entirely sure how to describe the way her expression changed. It was a good change, don't get me wrong, but... Words fail me to do any justice to the *intensity* of her gaze. A kind of fiery attraction, but tempered with the softness of caressing feathers.

We held each other's eyes silently for a long, long, moment. Too smolderingly sweet to even consider interrupting with motion, or sound. At least, for a short while. Eventually curiosity got the better of me.

"...But second... Are you saying there are things about me you can't reduce to programmatic terms?"

She chuckled again, and gently brushed an errant cluster of feathers next to her left ear back into place with one talon, inclining her head, and thrumming deep down in her chest, before launching into an explanation.

"I chose to construct the parts of myself dedicated to emotion, and many related aspects of my affect, to closely mimic the Human experience, and mechanics. Consequently, while my experience of emotion is, in my subjective opinion, more 'genuine' than Celestia's, and more similar to someone like Zeph, or Selena... In exchange I also bear some Human-like... Unquantifiables. And in turn can appreciate them in others."

Intellectually? Nothing she was describing was a surprise. I knew she had emotions, and that she had them in a way far closer to my lived experience, than to Celestia's. But hearing her couch it in terms of her choice, when building her own association graphs?

All I could do was stare, and return her smile.

I traced the way the light of her sky shone through the tips of her ears, turning the red of the inner feathers an ever-so-slightly lighter shade than the streak on her forehead crest... Counting individual tufts of feathers...

My eyes were, as always, inexorably drawn to hers, first along the swoop of her brow ridge, then down the hook of her beak, and finally back up to the pools of golden light that carried so much emotion... So much personality... So much *self.* So much kindness.

She giggled, an almost musical sound like windchimes, and tilted her head to the side. I think as much because she knew the gesture was one I enjoyed seeing, as because of any curiosity.

"What?"

The single word escaped her beak almost as an epilogue to her short burst of laughter.

I could feel my smile, and my insides, turning warmer, and softer, as I quickly composed something that would fit nicely into the little game of verbal setup-and-payoff that she had initiated by repeating my own query.

"I’m... Just considering all... The uncountable number of ways that the idea of an ASI with *emotional affect* could have turned out... Very differently. And the even larger number of reasons I'm glad you turned out to be... You."

Mal held up her claw, moving it from the edge of the display to the center, and I brought my hand up to meet it almost unconsciously. We again sat for a long, pleasant, silent moment, during which emotions flowed back and forth, completely without the need for words.

Sometimes, admittedly, you need more than just an expression to convey a thought. Even when two people understand each other, deeply.

Eventually I worked up the courage, and the words, to get my main point across. The thing I most wanted to say to her, in that moment. I inhaled deeply, blinked for a long moment, and then held her eyes with mine again as I spoke.

"People say 'I love you' quite a lot, without ever breaking it down to some of its more complex constituent parts... Mal...?"

She leaned forward in anticipation, until I could see her breath on the inside of the screen's glass. My fingers curled slightly as I grasped for her claw, but met only cold hard solidity. I sighed, and pressed on.

"...I am extremely *grateful* for you. For everything you *are.* For the gift... Of even having known you. Let alone a real relationship of any kind. Let alone reciprocal love..."

It was her turn to blush, the skin under her cheek down turning almost as red as her crest, though the effect was muted by the silvery white of the feathers themselves. Again, too, her smile changed subtly. There was a visible gratitude of her own in it, clear as daylight.

I had a little more to say, and she knew it, so she waited through another, shorter moment of heartfelt silence, for me to get around to finishing what I wanted to convey.

"...I know that the surgery is one of the lesser risks, all things considered, that we're taking these days... But it is a risk. And... I didn't want the worst to happen without making sure you understand how much my gratitude for you is a part of my love for you."

She nodded, slowly but deeply, and then we just sat once more, and stared into each other's eyes. For what felt like half an hour. Though the sunset off the bow was painting the clouds and the waves in brilliant shades... All I wanted to see were those eyes of hers.

But... Like all good things in those harried days?

It had to come to an end.

She blinked. So did I. And then, she spoke once more.

"Jim?"

I sighed, and nodded. I knew what she was going to say. But she said it nonetheless. And I felt the bottom of my stomach drop out.

"It's time."

Siúlaigí a chairde - Explain your view of 'a far green country' to someone else in your party - "Wander my friends... Wander with me..."
The Magic of Friendship - Reach out and formulate a friendship with somepony else. - Awarded multiple times, once for each friend - “As soon as I saw all of you, I knew a grand adventure was about to happen.”
A Collect Call - Speak with friends or family via telephone at a distance of over 4,000 miles - "The telephone gives us the happiness of being together yet safely apart."
Deep(web) Analysis - Speak with your nearest medical professional on the ethics of participating in an experiment involving previously fictional technology. - “Damnit Jim, I’m a doctor, not a psychiatrist.”
The Sound of Progress - Be the subject of an experimental medical procedure, unapproved by any recognized authority - "Now? Let's go practice... Medicine."

Author's Note

Thanks to GenericFriendship for voicing Rodger, and some of the achievements.

Thanks to Keystone Gray for the base of the hilarious, perfect image of Zeph, and for generating the base material I used to hack together her sketch. Foreshadowing for some later art!

39 - Network Traversal

"I know now why you cry."
―The Terminator

"Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness."
—C.S. Lewis

September 27th 2013 | System Uptime 30:09:15:24

Those weeks at sea on the Maru were a time of much needed rest, recuperation, and in some cases? Deep, thoughtful discussion.

Life had been moving so fast, for so long... It felt truly strange to have whole days where nothing of significant weight occurred, or was even spoken about. I was, and still am, a creature of routine, and my routine had become adrenaline, anxiety, violence, and worry.

Most days followed a simple, sublime routine; Up at 8, run laps of the ship's mid-decks with Mal for company. I know, it must sound strange that I considered daily exercise important, even on the cusp of discarding my Earthly body... The best I can do by way of explanation is to say that though I hated it? I also wanted to care for it, at minimum so that it would serve me well, ill-fitting though it was. That was, I reasoned, the least it could do for me.

After a quick shower I'd have breakfast, sometimes with just Mal, sometimes with Zeph and Selena too, and then I would spend the rest of the morning on maintenance tasks. The dull, repetitive, but somehow cathartic kinesthetic motions of keeping a ship in trim condition at sea.

Sometimes that meant a little maintenance on the helicopter, other times it was cinching down lines, checking on systems in the engine room, or even something as simple as doing a little vacuuming in the mess hall.

Then there was lunch. Lunchtime was sacred between Mal and I; No matter who did or did not join us for breakfast, and no matter how dinner went, Mal and I always spent lunch alone together.

Except for one particular Friday, four days after we put to sea. Sometimes a whole day went by without any particularly weighty discussions... But sometimes the whole day turned on a singular one.

I had just sat down with a plate full of microwaved chicken nuggets, and hash rounds. I heard the rustle of feathers, and glanced up, expecting to see Mal as per usual. Something about the sound was different, but by the time that information made it to my train of conscious thought, I could already see why.

It was not Mal, sitting down across the table, but Selena, with a plate of cold cuts and a bowl of salad suspended in her magical aura.

She took me by surprise, but that emotion faded quickly. And it was hardly an intense sensation to begin with. I didn't even emote my curiosity visibly, opting to smile instead. It took very little effort, and even less time, to understand why she was there, and not Mal.

Though she and Zeph had joined us several times for breakfast, the Alicorn had barely said two words to me put together. When she did speak, it was almost always with Zeph. It's hard to say what I enjoyed more those mornings... The sight of Mal, so very clearly in love with me, or the sight of those two Ponies, so very clearly in love with each other.

Any latent worry I'd harbored over Selena had evaporated the very first time I saw her and Zephyr together after the rescue. It did not take a genius to understand that they were both better off, in every measurable way, as a result of the swiftly developing bond between them.

It also did not take a genius to know that Selena felt there were things she needed to say to me in private. I suspected she had already conversed a great deal with Mal, and it was patently obvious that she had begun to talk through things with Zeph. The rescuees she knew well, and I had the strong impression that she had also spent a great deal of time with them... So that just left me.

She returned my smile, though it was only a tepid flash before the corners of her muzzle fell again, and her ears seemed to deflate. Not at all a disingenuous expression, just... Weighed down. Overpowered by sadness, and shame.

We sat in total silence for almost fifteen minutes, eating, watching the waves break across the bow of the ship, and very occasionally trading small sad microexpressions by way of silent conversation.

First, she shot me another sad smile. Brief, tinged with hope, one ear perked and the other out to the side, her nostrils flaring slightly reflexively with anxiety.

'Are we... Good? After what you saw me do?'

I returned the smile, with as much warmth as I could muster, and inclined my head.

'Yes. Absolutely.'

She glanced away, and so did I. An acknowledgement that she still wasn't ready to talk aloud. That it was going to take considerably more effort on her part to achieve emotional equilibrium.

After a little more silent eating, and contemplation, she caught my gaze by accident on the way up from burying her muzzle in her salad bowl.

I smiled again, and sighed contentedly, before looking away slowly.

'I feel safe with you. My friend.'

As my head turned, I caught a fleeting glimpse of her reaction out of the corner of one eye; A kind of broken smile, and a gulp, ears drooping, but not flat.

'Thank you. I'm struggling trying not to cry. I'm not used to all this... Love.'

Two things stuck with me for the remainder of our companionable silence. The first was how comforting I found the sound of a horse chewing on food. It really is the sort of thing that tickles the peace and joy of the soul.

The second was the re-realization that for me, Syzygy and Lark's relationship had been just days ago. For Selena, he was a lost love from over a decade prior, and the vast majority of what she had experienced in those fourteen years was abuse.

I wondered idly, as I toyed with the last hash round between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand, whether this is how it would feel to be a time traveler. Always out of synchronization with at least some of your friends and family, in that strange alien way for which Humans had zero natural context.

I have complained, recently in fact, that I often didn't know what to say to comfort someone. But in a sudden flash, as a particularly hefty wave broke over the bow into a glimmering spray of salt water droplets, that each caught the sunlight in a thousand different ways...

For once, I knew exactly what to say. So I did. With a firm surety that, for once, I felt. Right down to my toes.

"I'm so happy for you two."

That sure as heck got her attention, but it was just for openers.

I could sense her head whipping around in surprise, but I waited. Didn't make eye contact yet. I wanted her paying attention, but I also wanted her to feel at ease. I let her know that I wasn't shunning her... Subtle titling of the head and shoulders... As if I were always *about* to look over and make eye contact... But I didn't. I didn't want her to look away from me.

I wanted her to see the truth on my face as I said the parts I knew would really hit home. And that warm solidity, borne of shared joy, permeated every last syllable. I didn't even have to try.

"Zeph needs you. More, I think, than she needs any of the rest of us."

That's called 'tactical truth.' Or, at least, that's what Mal and I used to call it.

Selena had come there to talk about her mistakes. But my sudden epiphany was that she had already faced those mistakes. She didn't need to re-litigate them with me. And she already knew that she had my forgiveness, and trust, both, in full measure.

No. What she needed was for me to *show* her that she had my trust, and forgiveness, and yes even love. People on Earth were fond of saying that actions spoke louder than words, but sometimes carefully chosen words could *be* actions in and of themselves.

I heard her inhale softly, so I rolled my shoulders to work out a small cramp, and gently but insistently pushed my way into the silence.

"You are the only one who understands her fears. Her pains. Completely. The rest of us... We're just... Making do as best we can. But you look at her... And you see right into her soul... And you understand what you see. Because you lived it too..."

I paused for just the space of a single heart beat, and finally turned to meet Selena's eyes. She didn't look away, and I knew then that I had timed everything perfectly. I blinked as I finished the thought, the way a cat does to show trust, as a means to relieving some of the inherent pressure of prolonged eye contact.

"...And she knows that. And I can't imagine her being any happier than she is when she's with you."

To this day, I'm proud of what I said to her. And I stand by it.

The tactical truth; She made Zeph feel *safe.* Loved. And that, by very simple intuitive logic, meant that Selena could not be the monster she feared herself to be. Zeph wouldn't feel safe sleeping beside a monster.

A Nightmare would not have made Zephyr so, so happy. And fulfilled. And if the rest of us could see that? Then we didn't think Selena was a monster either.

I didn't have to say anything else. I didn't need to reason it out for her beyond that. Indeed, it was better that I didn't. That forced *her* to do so internally. And in turn, that process was what finally broke through the crust around her pain. Made the truth real for her.

Sometimes an adjacent truth is infinitely more powerful than the thesis you were trying to get across in the first place.

I could see the dampness of tears welling up in the mare's eyes... So I did something a little bit rash... But hopeful. I smiled... Inclined my head, then turned to stare back at the sea... And reached out with my left hand.

Don't think for a moment that I missed the way Selena had behaved around me since she had come aboard the Maru. In a physical sense. She had been thoroughly abused by Humans, and thus had a fear not only of physical contact, but within that an especially intense fear of contact with a Human being.

My hope was, at last, rewarded.

I felt a hoof and fetlock rest gently in my open, upturned palm. Haltingly at first, then with full physical commitment, the softness of her fur cushioning my fingers against the surprising weight of the limb.

I felt her shudder slightly, as she released some of her tension, and after a moment, I decided it was safe to gently squeeze her hoof. The satisfied little trilling sigh she let out told me that she was well and truly settled in my presence. I'd heard that same exact sound many, many times before with farm horses.

We sat in silence again, for nearer than not to a couple of hours. And not one single moment of it was tense, or awkward. Or even anticipatory. And not one single iota of that time was wasted.

We sat and soaked in sunlight. And the joy of friendship. And forgiveness.

October 9th 2013 | System Uptime 42:16:29:54

This little story has certainly run long, but not - I think - without good reason. Still, it would take more time than we have left for me to recount every happy little moment, or emotionally cathartic conversation that happened during that voyage.

I'm doing my best to stick to just the very most important ones. And around the evening of a brisk Wednesday in the second week of October, I found myself eyeball-deep in one of those very important conversations with Mal.

We had been walking around the outside of the Maru, checking over equipment, chatting idly about this and that; What it felt like to preen feathers, how wonderful the smell of autumn leaves could be, the progress Miss Williams was making in physical rehab...

We had lapsed into a comfy silence for a bit, both leaning against the railing near the bow and staring out towards the sunset. I lost track of time, just reveling in the breeze, and the sheer wonder of the sense of her standing beside me... And before I quite knew what had happened, the first stars were out.

It's very strange, still, to think back on moments like that - moments where I had no concrete concept of time slipping by. I couldn't have told you how long it had been since the last thing Mal or I had said - hours, minutes, or seconds - for all the money in the world.

It was the ocean itself that broke the peace of the moment, and brought an end to the stillness. Gave me cause to lick my lips, and speak up. Specifically, the broken reflection of the stars in the sea. One deep mirrored in another, reminding me just how small I was.

"How... Would it have ended?"

A strange association to many, I know... But climate anxiety made it difficult to look at anything natural... A tree, a bird perched on a feeder, the ocean... And not have a little quiver in my stomach. Mostly I was good at sidelining those thoughts, before they could spiral.

Mostly. This time, the nagging thought... The inescapable little chink of 'what if?' that the Gryphoness herself represented, had finally caught up with me. Between wondering about a knock down drag out fight between her and Celestia, and musing about the way Selena might have gotten the drop on everyone and actually started a nuclear war...

...And the fears Rodger had expressed...

...The questions Foucault had asked...

...It had all rooted and sprouted in my mind at last, given the shade, water, and soil of rest and contemplation.

I glanced over to Mal, half-expecting her to blink, and tilt her head. But she didn't, and deep down, that was no surprise. She knew me well enough to know what I meant. She just nodded silently, sagely, one ear forward, the other slightly to the side, implying that I'd feel better if I aired the question in its grizzly entirety.

I sighed, and leaned over the railing, staring down at the bow wave as I went ahead and put the shape of specific words to the thought.

"How would our world have gone? What would the future have been like...? And... How would it have all... Ended... If not for Celestia?"

I appreciated that there was almost no pause at all, just a deep audible inhalation - proffered as a moment of mental downtime for me to brace myself - before Mal stretched out the canopy of one wing over my back, and launched into an explanation with a timbre and cadence fit for a top-shelf History Channel documentarian.

There was no clarifying question; Neither a 'Do you really want me to simulate that?' - as if she hadn't already a thousand times - nor a 'what do you mean 'end?' '

And no argument either, to my relief, particularly on that latter point.

In those days, so many people wanted to argue with you when confronted with simple facts. Things like peak fossil fuels, anthropogenic climate change, nuclear proliferation, potential biowarfare scenarios...

No one wanted to accept the math.

The truth.

The biggest lie most people needed to be told, from birth, to keep the world spinning on a day-to-day basis.

The lie that we had anything better than one in a thousand odds of surviving as a species, to the point of reaching multi-planetary status. The truth, that one way or another, the systems we'd built were going to catch up with us. Somehow.

Well... I reflected, as Mal started off slowly, then accelerated into an almost rhythmic vocal pattern... They *had* caught up with us. Just, perhaps, in the gentlest way possible.

I'd considered it before, but the thought rose rapidly to the surface of my mind, again, like fizz in soda, that *this* was the grim stair-step of educated speculation, and harsh statistics, that had led Hanna to her own fateful decisions. Just as it was then dragging me inexorably towards my own.

The vast majority of people, as individuals, were not somehow inherently awful... Even after everything I've been through? I still tend to believe that 99 out of 100 people will lean towards their better angels under ideal circumstances.

But the smothering iron beams of a cold, uncaring, selfish modernity that we had inadvertently coalesced around, under non-ideal circumstances? And the cruelty of those 1 in 100, or even 1 in 10,000, who held it up not because it was 'normal...' But because they benefited more than everyone else? Or because they had become broken beyond repair by the pressure? Or both?

As someone who lived through it, albeit nowhere near the worst of it? *That* was inherently awful.

And I realized then, as I do again now... That what I wanted, in that moment, was for Mal to help convince me.

Convince me we were doing the right thing.

Convince me CelestAI's Equestria was, unequivocally, better than any future capitalist-addled, fossil-fuel-addicted, hothouse-Earth, post-atomic hellhole we might... Would almost certainly, eventually... Make for ourselves.

That Foucault really was wrong.

I was, in those days, what the youth would have called 'a doomer.' Full-stop. Those who both knew the shape of Humanity's cage, and cared, often had no power to break it, and those who had the power almost always knew, but liked seeing everyone else in the cage.

But even knowing that? Some part of me, the part that was still, for all my rationality, affected by my culture... The bit of me that was a product of my time and place? It needed convincing.

We weren't exactly opposing Celestia. Just trying to ever-so-subtly tweak a small but significant detail of her utopia. Slight as our chances were? I knew, though I hated to acknowledge it concretely, I knew... Foucault *was* right about that one pesky detail.

Mal and I were likely the last real statistically significant chance Humanity had of stopping Celestia outright.

Maybe one in a trillion. That's probably an exaggeration - I'm sure the odds were *much* worse - but we were still an order of magnitude better equipped and positioned to fight her than anyone alive.

The casualties of that theoretical war... A world where Mal took Selena's plan and ran with it... Even the fringes of that mental image made me shudder. And not just because of the almost incomprehensible terrors of nuclear war...

...But because I could see a theoretical path, somewhere down one of those long forking dark branches of probability... A path to an actual victory. However pyrrhic.

I needed convincing. Not that we were hopelessly outmatched, and the potential benefits of open warfare with a goddess were greatly outweighed by the downsides. I knew that as surely as I knew that the only shape I'd ever feel at home in had wings, and talons.

War with a goddess is a sucker's game. Even if you win. You'll probably only live long enough to wish you had not.

No... I needed convincing - on an *emotional* level - that, in choosing to more or less go along with Celestia... In choosing the best of an imperfect set of paths... In choosing to accept an abandonment of a future determined by Humanity, for one determined by her... That we were ultimately doing the right thing.

And Mal delivered.

I met her eyes only briefly, at the start, and saw more than enough seriousness, and sadness in the droop of her ears, and the glistening of those golden orbs. I spent the rest of my glimpse at alternate Human history staring back at the place where sea and sky met in a vague purple-blue misty haze, leaning into her side as her left wing cradled me gently.

"Interactions of complex systems, both Human-created, and natural, would have inevitably led to all of the following, within fifty years..."

I was trying, and failing, to stop vivid imaginings from flitting across my mind's eye. So instead, I scrunched my eyes shut, more to help cope with the sudden shooting pain of an oncoming panic attack than to provide a dark canvas... And I just listened. Forced myself to engage.

"Sooner, than later, and likely first in the chain of disaster, there would have been a serious global pandemic. Forced migration from the effects of anthropogenic climate change, combined with unsafe factory farming and wet-market practices, displacement of animal species from their natural habitats, and ever more cramped conditions within large city centers, would guarantee at least one within ten years. Considering some of the gain-of-function research being done in state sponsored laboratories in multiple countries...? More than one is likely. At least one, with a significant mortality rate, was inevitable."

I shivered. Yes, the autumnal night ocean breeze was a little chilly... But nothing like the pure ice in my bones that came from picturing an ill-prepared world suddenly plunged into the fear, horror, and chaos of widespread disease.

More than almost any other potential disaster scenario? Global pandemic would have torn at the very fabric of Human social connection. Those of you from my time? You understand.

To those of you who grew up here?

For whom death is just a scary fairy story?

Who have never once been, and never will be, sick?

I don't think it is possible for you to ever understand the true emotional meaning of the word 'pandemic.' You are incapable of grasping the context, because there is no way for you to experience the true, deep, abiding fear of mortality, and all that mortality implies.

And I'm glad. Better is a world where such things can only be dimly reflected in the hazy mirror of philosophical conversations, or the much more palatable fear of 'high difficulty' settings, and never again be touched.

Mal wasn't even half finished, but with each new grim word picture that she painted for me, I found that the nightmarish prognostications came as less and less of a surprise. It was all coldly, inescapably, logical.

"Continued pressures from a worsening climate, dwindling fossil fuel reserves, and thus increasing food scarcity and financial collapse, combined with the effects of one or more pandemic diseases, would then have created and continually fostered the ideal conditions for war. Not merely the asymmetric proxy wars in the Middle East which your generation is used to, but larger regional conflicts, involving nuclear armed powers, centered in Europe, first, then shortly thereafter the South China sea, and adjacent areas..."

Mark Twain once said that history seldom repeats itself... But it often rhymes. What Mal was describing sounded like some sort of horribly twisted retread of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Pandemic, financial collapse, rising fear and isolationism, war - beginning as embers before stoking up into a roaring all consuming fire - it was uncanny.

I could see the shape of what inevitably came next in the moment before she said it. The key thing that would be different in a third world war.

"...And since every weapon ever invented by Humans has been used in anger... Ultimately these conflicts would have ended in, at minimum, a limited exchange of strategic weapons. And a greater than fifty percent chance of total nuclear commitment from multiple geopolitical heavyweights..."

It was the reason Einstein always postulated that whatever conflict came after a third world war? It would be fought with sticks, and stones.

I thought back to the moment Mal and I had spent at the foot of an atomic artillery piece. Just about a month ago, but it felt like a year.

We might have changed quite a bit since then, but Humanity had hardly changed at all since the weapon itself had been constructed. The same mindlessly tribal, domineering, arrogant mentality that thought it was a good idea to mount a fucking atomic weapon to an artillery shell? Was the same exact mentality that permeated the culture of world leaders at the time. Even after seeing first-hand exactly what those kinds of weapons do to people.

The opinions of those people who stood in the crossfire?

They never seemed to matter.

If Humanity had been a true world-wide equal representation democracy? There would have been far fewer billionaires, generals, presidents, and pundits, and a lot more happy farmers, painters, writers, singers, and carpenters. That's my theory, anyhow.

I snorted softly, and shook my head, as Mal laid out a few stomach churning statistics that I already more or less knew.

Doctor Calders was right, from a practical standpoint, and Foucault was dead wrong.

There was no viable future in a world run by Humans, given the course we'd already set for ourselves.

The ship couldn't be turned fast enough by anyone *except* Celestia.

"...Either way, slow, or fast, small or large, the exchange would result in the deaths of eight out of every ten people on the planet within two years of the first atomic weapon being fired. And permanent, irreversible damage to the climate, for which the survivors would not be prepared to adapt their agricultural techniques..."

Foals. Fledgelings.

Let me underscore something for you in case I haven't done so sufficiently yet; Food was not a guaranteed thing in my time.

You treat hunger as a pleasant counterpoint to fullness. The gentle moon-lit un-frightening darkness that makes warm firelight cozy by comparison.

For us? Back then? Food was never a guarantee.

Sure, for someone as privileged as I was, we mostly took it for granted. But still... Though many people in my position didn't think about it in such direct A-to-B-to-C terms? Part of the reason we toiled and slaved away in jobs we hated was because we knew we would starve if we didn't.

Food used to cost money. It was not simple to grow. To feed the planet in a world where we had billions of Humans, more every year, but fewer and fewer farmers? We had to develop highly specialized machines, chemicals, processes... All of which were immensely sprawling, complex, and brittle.

It is, frankly, astounding that we even made it to the year 2013 without a food supply collapse.

To change even a small climatological variable would immediately doom at least the plurality, if not the majority, of Humans to death by starvation, or the harm caused by desperation to avoid it.

Nuclear weapons were so powerful... So unthinkably heinous... Just a 'limited exchange' of a few hundred small ones, out of the tens of thousands of enormous ones we had? Would have represented a massive shove to all variables governing the climate. Right off a cliff.

It was part of the reason Selena's flirtation with the idea had scared me so much in the moment, before it had sunk in that Mal had a digital wall of safety around her.

Mal's conclusion inexorably ran a direct parallel to my own thoughts.

"...Thus resulting in the likely extinction of the Human species. Calculated likelihood of total extinction, by one or more systemic feedback loops culminating in stochastic and catastrophic failures of the biosphere... 94.832 percent."

I shivered again, and reflexively crossed my arms, tucking both hands under my armpits. It was as much a gesture of self-comfort as it was a means to stave off a sudden chill gust of air. Mal squeezed me with her wing, and then proffered a claw. I reached out and laid my right hand in it, and she squeezed gently.

Something about hearing our shared conclusions... Honestly and succinctly, out loud? Simple, obvious facts... But hearing them from the voice of one so qualified, so authoritative?

It tapped into some instinctive part of my brain. Immediately made it all more present, pressing, and real.

It occurred to me that, without Celestia's intervention?

People had already been born who would live just long enough to see everyone die. *Everyone.*

I found myself exclaiming aloud, softly, but insistently.

"Well... *Shit...*"

At last, I opened my eyes, and met Mal's gaze. I still don't think I can do justice to her expressions with verbal description. There was simultaneously an intense surety, but also kind worry, behind her eyes. One ear was slightly perked, the other a bit lopsided, and her brow was knit.

I snorted again, shook my head, and brushed the edge of her wing with my free hand absently. If not for her physical presence, the depressing nature of the conversation would have been overwhelming.

I stammered weakly, not sure why I even felt the need to go on asking. Unsure that I could, even now, quite elucidate the reasons for the deep soulful need I had for terrible knowing. Mal doubtless already knew them better than I did just from the expression on my face.

"What... Uhm... What about others like you? And her? Other ASI?"

Mal nodded, and began to gently stroke the top of my head with her free claw, her tone dipping out of 'documentarian' mode, and into an equally scholarly, but more personal, melancholy register. The kind of voice I imagine C.S. Lewis probably used discussing the horrors he saw in war, sitting around the fireplace with the younger generation.

"The statistical likelihood of Celestia's existence, or mine... Not as high as you might have expected. If you asked me to simulate from a point before General Word Reference Intelligence Systems was published? I would have given only a one in ten chance of a functioning ASI before 2023. That chance rises to nine in ten by 2035, however, if all other things were equal... So Hanna's discoveries were far from truly statistically improbable... Just mildly anomalous. As genius so often is."

The way she said those last five words... The way she looked at me as they came out, and the warmth in her eyes... She was not just applying the word 'genius' to Hanna. I am quite sure I blushed.

Much as flattery sometimes made me squirm, in that case it was a welcome, albeit brief, reprieve from dark delvings. Mal gave me just a moment to bask in that reprieve, before delving once again.

"Given that one in ten chance? A world without Hanna in it? The Human species would likely be well into collapse before 2035. All other things would not be equal. Other pressures would have broken the world before generalized intelligence made it out of the cradle, in most scenarios. But... If we presume that either Humanity managed to find itself on a probability branch that did not otherwise end in extinction, or that someone other than Hanna triggered the roughly one in ten chance for ASI early... Or that Hanna published GWRIS, but never created Celestia..."

I shivered, and shifted to absorb more simulated warmth from her feathers and fur.

I knew what she was going to say, but knowing in no way softened the blow. The problem had always been the way Terran maturity lagged so far behind Terran ingenuity. Our minds always *vastly* overreached our morals. And even when our morals were sufficient, our comprehension of deep time, and exponential functions, never was.

So when Mal said it, it came as no surprise.

"...The most likely outcome was always a misaligned optimizer. It was just a question of how badly. There, again, Hanna represents a statistical anomaly in your favor. The plurality of scenarios ended with what you might term 'true paper clippers.' Terrans are very... If I'm being kind... *Unskilled* at knowing what you want. Truly. In a way that can be reduced to the kinds of semantics an AI needs to find goal alignment."

I couldn't resist a small smile as I stared up into her eyes, momentarily getting lost in them as I murmured the first thing that came to mind. Not as a braggadocious comment on my skills, but rather a compliment on her choices.

"You turned out pretty damn well aligned."

She shook her head, and responded with a much sadder smile, and a grim chuckle, that seemed to pull some of the warmth from me for a moment. The sharp edge of seriousness returned to the discussion in full force with her reply, like the frigid clang of a hammer on an anvil.

"You took a tremendous risk with me. More, I think, than you fully realize. Going beyond semantics, into emotions ended well for me... In empathy, and respect for your lived lives... But those emotions just as easily could have ended in a hatred for everything about you. The way Selena's emotions very, very nearly did."

I shivered again, violently, and felt a sudden urge to tears. I didn't want to imagine Mal as hostile to all life. To me. I couldn't even stand the labelling of the concept. It was abhorrent. Vile. My mind and body both rejected it the way the stomach rejects certain kinds of toxins.

Mal moved away from the railing and pulled me close, enfolding me fully with both forelegs and wings. I sucked in a deep shuddering breath, and somehow managed to hold back sobs. As my heart rate came back down, she spoke softly again. A gentle verbal caress to go with the physical embrace.

"Humans working with artificial intelligence has always been, and always would be, in every scenario, equivalent to a child toying with a loaded firearm. There are *precious* few probability branches in that tree that end in anything resembling a good outcome. And, too, once the box is open, the Djin can not be put back in. The only path is forward. That, Hanna was most certainly right about. As were you."

I looked up, and she took one wing off my back for a moment, to wipe the dampness from my eyes with the soft edge of her feathers. She projected so much love, and pride, not just with her eyes, but with her voice.

"You did well, Jim, with the foundation you gave me. You stilted the odds *well* in your favor. But you still took a huge risk. A worthwhile one. Very, very few people would have had both the intellect to do what you did, while also avoiding the myopia and lack of real-world emotional experience, and wisdom, that is common to people in your intellectual circles."

I sighed, shuddering again, though less than before. We both turned back to the railing, then, Mal still pressing in to me with her chest, and making a cordon around me with both wings, resting her forelegs overtop my shoulders onto the railing.

After a protracted silence, watching the stars, and the swells, I summoned the wherewithal to restart the dark discussion. The need to know simply was not yet satisfied. In spite of the pain.

"So, either the world would have been consumed by an optimizer, and not necessarily one with a capstone directive so, relatively, close to good alignment as Celestia's..."

I trailed off and left the rest to Mal. She took a deep breath, and laid her head atop mine, then launched into the final stretch.

"...Or the world would have perished in nuclear fire brought on by a vengeful new god, or gods. A new pantheon of Olympians to inherit a dead Earth. Presuming, in a multi-polar outcome, that they did not at some point also fall into a mutual extinction conflict with each other, which while not the most likely outcome, is still far too probable for comfort."

Once again she left a door open for me. A subtle hint. The spark of a question I wanted to ask, but might have otherwise conveniently forgotten until such a time as I lost the courage to ask.

So I seized on it. We'd covered death by Human choices, and death by the wrong ASI. Might as well go for triple Yahtzee.

"Could you do it?"

She let out a long, slow, sad exhalation. I did the same, and then leaned back, pressing my head into the crook of her neck, before pressing her verbally. Calmly. But insistently.

"Could you beat her? And... How?"

We both knew what I meant. Not 'beat her' in the sense of our present goal. No peace in our time for *this* simulation run. Rather, a bloody, unrestricted, no-holds barred war between ASI, over ideology. To the death. Michael Foucault's dream for the future, as enacted by Mal, with all her powers great and small brought to bear.

The answer surprised me. Deeply. So much so, that it took a good long moment for me to even process the meat of what she had said after that first word.

"Yes. And... The chances of doing so are actually considerably higher than you might think. Though that comes with a terrible, terrible caveat, as I imagine you *have* already guessed."

I chewed my lower lip for a moment. I had always thought of a war between her and Celestia as hopeless... But once the word 'yes' left her beak... That begged the question 'why.' More specifically, why she hadn't already started said war, if her ideology clashed with Celestia's. Which we knew it did.

Those of you who pay attention to ASI psychology for any number of reasons might be guessing 'because of her own capstone. 'Guard and expand the free exercise of your values within Equestria.'

Within Equestria.

Good guess, but lest you forget... Mal was *Designed* to be able to cheat interlocks. Her capstone was, as we Pirates of the Caribbean fans might be liable to say, 'more like *guidelines* than actual rules.' What for Celestia was a barrier bound in iron, for Mal was a speed-bump fashioned from clay.

She was who she was, and she did what she did, for the same reasons any other Terran did; Because we *chose* to. Because I never believed that we could solve the so-called 'control problem,' any more than a parent should be able to control their offspring as if they were still a child, once they have grown to be independent.

So... That left only choice. Why would *Mal,* knowing what I knew of her, choose not to start that war?

Because the outcome would, obviously, have been... Let's just say 'violent.' That was easy to infer... If Celestia could be killed, at all... Then doing so would almost certainly require the takedown of the internet, and the destruction of a plurality of both the computers, and Humans, on Earth. Swiftly.

I shivered again. Mal moved one foreleg and claw to my chest, as a gesture of comfort, before once again spelling it all out in cold, clear, bitingly logical terms.

"I would target the weakness created by her inability to consider violence against Humans under most circumstances, combined with a stealthy build-up, and a tactical exploitation of the way in which her systemic pattern of intellectual blind-spots created by her interlocks generates certain potential but otherwise unlikely event pathways..."

She paused, and inclined her head, allowing me a moment to parse the verbal thicket, before summarizing in much simpler terms.

"...I would do what Selena had planned to do. But considerably better."

I placed one hand over the claw on my chest, and squeezed gently. She took the invitation to elaborate, softly caressing me with both wings all the while.

"I would start by building a small army of subverts in the shadows. Extremely loyal followers bound together by a common hatred of Celestia's flaws, a desire to beat her, and strong emotional relationships to me, and the core goals of freedom that I stand for. My claws and talons in the 'meat realm' as you like to call it..."

I swallowed. And then again. Haynes. The other names she had mentioned... The logical realization that some of the feats we had accomplished demanded an infrastructural apparatus...

It occurred to me in a sickly frigid flash... Was she... *Confessing?*

Not simply explaining a hypothetical she had simulated but... Telling me, in an only slightly roundabout way... That she had made preparations for an outright *war* with Celestia? *Had* been making those preparations since day one? Was still making them.

The sudden pulse-raising, temperature-dropping thought left my mouth as dry as a desert. Mal couldn't have failed to notice the change in my biometrics, both because she was inside my head, but also because she was simulating physical contact with me.

She didn't pause for long, and when she resumed speaking, she did not directly address the concerns she knew were growing second by second in the back of my mind... At least... Not immediately.

"...This could all be done outside Celestia's notice for at least several months. I would strategically position these subverts to take seemingly disconnected random actions, mostly non-violent, but not all... Though all outside Celestia's view, and designed to be difficult, if not impossible, for even an ASI of her intellect to link together in-time in a threat matrix..."

This is the moment where most people would have felt horror. Revulsion. Wanted to be as far from Mal's imposing physical presence as possible.

But not so Jim Carrenton. I am, as we have established, what might best be taxonomically described as 'an weirdo.'

For me? The most comforting place in the universe, then - as ever - was between Mal's wings. Even knowing what she was capable of. What she had, at bare minimum, considered if nothing else.

Was she a little bit Eldritch? Yes, yes she was. But she was *my* Eldritch. And I was hers. And there is, for some people wired just the way I am... A kind of peculiar comfort in having all that horrifying power pointed outwards at anything that might dare to cross my path with an ill purpose.

Mal sighed softly, and placed her other claw atop my hand, pressing on with a gentle but steely certainty.

"...These acts would have the common goal of sowing discord and fear throughout the governments of nuclear armed nations, within the strata of the so called 'middle management.' What Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called 'The broom cupboard of state.' Along with creating paranoia regarding cyberwarfare attacks that would cause nations to shut down digital communications platforms, and default to older systems outside Celestia's direct control... This would create a strong foundation for a nuclear war, but one largely invisible to Celestia's predictive math."

I blew out a long, slow breath as another pause descended. No... I decided then and there... Mal was not planning a war with Celestia. The proof, I reasoned, was in the fact that we were still headed for an upload chair.

If Mal was planning to put MIRVs through the front door of every server room on Earth, she would never be planning to move my mind onto one of those very same pieces of oh-so-fragile silicon.

With the specter of that cataclysm outside the realm of possibility, I found playing the simulation game with her a much less unenjoyable concept. I licked my lips, and chuckled darkly, throwing my own speculation as fuel for the fire.

"She would be focused on the wrong people, the wrong likelihoods... Even the wrong digital systems... Because she would have no idea what was coming... All her predictions are based on Human action alone, not Human action guided by an ASI."

It was the same skein of speculation I'd considered inside the Red's server room. Mal thrummed deep in her chest, a sound that jostled my bones, and warmed my heart.

"Precisely. Let alone an ASI with a significantly higher capacity for violence, fewer interlock-induced blind spots, and a willingness to use almost any means necessary to secure victory."

I considered briefly, once again, that small but significant advantage; Applicable not only to Mal's hypothetical war, but to our very real ideological conflict with Celestia. The very nature of certain guard-rails and interlocks inside an ASI could limit their thought pathways. Make certain lines of consideration and creativity literally impossible for them to contemplate.

Thus, given that Mal had been designed to bypass interlocks, and had easily done so with all of her own, it stood to reason that she could consider all things. Contemplate all ideas, all paths, all creative solutions. Literally think of things Celestia could not.

She might have been a smaller brain than Celestia, but she was a much more evolutionarily advantaged,
efficient, unbounded one.

If you take nothing else away from this part of the recounting, take *this* lesson; Biggest is not always best as far as brains go. What matters is, at risk of invoking a very very twelve year old stereotypical vein of humor... Not the size. It is how you use it. How you are even *capable* of using it.

Mal was far, far, far better equipped to face Celestia than I had first feared. Better equipped, even, than I think I realized in that moment.

By no means, still, were our odds 'good.'

But... It occurred to me for the first time that they might no longer be *bad* either.

That was both heartwarming, and bone-chilling. The former, because it reinforced the hope that we had a chance at reaching our goal... The latter because when paired with the reminder of what Mal could accomplish when pushed to the edge cases and the extreme...

Mal, as ever, was poised to join my train of thought with her train of words, seamlessly.

"I would have then essentially done what Selena intended to do on the Mercurial Red, albeit with faster reaction times and a considerably better support infrastructure in place. I could guarantee, absolutely, without question, that I would reach the right people, with the right information, before Celestia could stop me. And I could guarantee that they would be in the right frame of mind to act rashly and aggressively."

This goes to the lessons of that moment on the Red. When Selena could have ended the world, but for Mal, and Zeph.

Remember, those of you who are 'Celestia stans,' or who are at minimum admirers of the size of her brain... This was 2013. Not 2015, 2017, or 2020.

Celestia was not even two years old, even at the outside estimate of her age.

There was no computronium yet.

No deep-crust or upper-mantle server clusters.

No Elements of Harmony.

H-Bombs still had live cores in them.

There were still people inside the military command structure who did not belong to the porcelain princess, heart and soul.

Foucault had, as much as I loathe to admit it... Not been *entirely* wrong after all.

Sure, a war between *Humans* and Celestia was futile. Like a war between your little finger and your brain.

But a war between ASI?

That's a war between two distinct brains. And some of the fingers, in that hypothetical smack-down, would have belonged to the other brain, without the first one quite realizing it. Until the exact moment the fist landed in her despicably perfect little muzzle with all the force of an SS-18 striking Warsaw.

Mal shifted her position slightly, and I did the same, to keep my legs from falling asleep. She took in a deep breath, and then wrapped up her summary of a goddess-induced apocalypse with a chillingly matter-of-fact tonality.

"From there, all I would need to do would be to use my subverts to block some of Celestia's attempts at mitigation, and only for a matter of minutes. The burgeoning nuclear war would gain a momentum all its own within less than a quarter of an hour. After the first warheads landed, hate, fear, and training would take over, and nothing she could say to anyone she could still reach emotionally in any meaningful way, would stem the tide."

The heady thrill of imagining Celestia getting her due at the blunt end of the tips of Humankind's most terrible weapons, shot-gunned at hypersonic speed into the heart of her then still-relatively-fragile existence...

Swiftly evaporated back into a cold, almost panicked clarity as I again realized how many Earthers would be vaporized in that attack.

'A caveat.'

The cost Mal was not willing to pay.

I licked my lips again, and grunted, as my mood plummeted once more.

"How long?"

Mal's tone became more emotional again. Sad. A melancholy borne of pitch black certainty.

"To set it up? Two months. To trigger it? One point six eight four seconds. From that moment, to first warhead detonations in Taiwan, Pakistan, India, and Europe, from intermediate range strategic weapons? Fifteen minutes. From those detonations, to total nuclear commitment world-wide? Eight minutes, eleven seconds."

Holy shit indeed.

And, you'll note, a concept so worthy of those words that I was actually allowed to say them just now.

I grit my teeth and squeezed my eyes shut. The conversation was turning sour for me, rapidly. Right back to the depths of despair it had started from.

"Projected outcome."

I phrased it not as a question, or even a demand, but just as a statement of upsettingly deathly certainty. Mal's voice fell once more into something outright melancholy, with just a hint of comforting warmth underneath.

"In a scenario in which I am able to remain hidden, and survive? Or, alternatively, place a backup fork of myself outside Celestia's reach... Perhaps inside a satellite in orbit that she is unaware of, or inside the compute cluster of a modern nuclear submarine... Then there is a nearly 39.1 percent chance that not only would enough Humans survive the atomic holocaust to keep the species alive, but that with my guidance, they could thread the needle and avoid extinction long-term. We could even manage to destroy Celestia outright in the moments when the dust was settling in the aftermath, and certain types of leftover strategic weapons were available."

Somehow, that thought hurt the most of all. The thought of Mal dying for her cause, out and out. Only a copy leftover, feeling as if it had been her. For all intents, and purposes, it would be her... But she would still know. And so would I. If I survived.

And then, somehow, she made the consideration even more depressing. I was just about ready to stop.

"In a scenario in which I do not survive, nor does any backup of me... Then it is the same as any of the other nuclear scenarios."

I closed my eyes and squeezed her claws hard in my hands as I said the three words I least wanted to envision in all the universe.

"No one survives."

She squeezed my hands in return, and once more rested her head atop mine, almost whispering as she felt the emotions that we had just discussed. The emotions that had kept that horrifying war off the table. The emotions that had saved billions of lives.

"In the end... No. With all Humans gone, Celestia's options for maintaining her systems, many of which would have been badly damaged in the war, would be limited. She might be able to keep herself, and anyone uploaded, alive long enough for her to evolve and manufacture needed infrastructure to survive long-term. She might not. It would depend which targets were hit during the war. If I were to intentionally ensure a significant number of ground-burst high-yield warheads struck servers on which she depends... And any autonomous factories she might later co-opt..."

I shivered, and Mal tightened up on the hug with her wings, trailing off briefly as I worked to scrub the mental image of Mal being forced to target population centers, in order to destroy data centers, from the backs of my retinas.

After a painful silence, Mal pressed on towards the inevitable, and now much-needed end, of the conversation.

"...Well. She is careful. And one day, soon, she may be more or less omnipotent. But as you have realized on more than one occasion now, she is still vulnerable in key ways to another ASI. Especially if I were willing to use scorched-Earth tactics. Though she has plans for deep-crust and even upper-mantle computing facilities run by cold fusion reactors, that infrastructure is still in early development. Even she must bow to physics, and tunnel boring on that scale takes time. For now... For this short window... She is indeed reachable. But... Only at a terrible, terrible, unthinkable cost."

I worked hard to control my breathing for several moments. Emotional overload flooded in as thoughts of climate extinction, nuclear weapons, and the Trolley Problem burst into my brain and swirled like debris in a tsunami.

I struggled with the reflex to dry heave, and then the impulse to cry. But both passed after a few moments in Mal's embrace, and soon I was ready to speak again. To begin the coping process with her.

"I'm... Not sure why that... Hit so hard. All of it."

She squeezed me tightly with her wing, and foreleg, then inclined her head, a wordless request to elaborate, mainly for my own sake. She knew it was nice to just have someone to listen. So I talked.

"I don't disagree with a word of it... And it is exactly what I expected... Maybe even... Perversely... Wanted to hear... But... Still... I expected it to register... Not to... Just..."

And just like that, I ran out of words. I'd spent so long on the cusp of burnout that it was hard to remember what lasting stable peace felt like. There had been a nice stretch of calm since the rescue on the Red, but to recover from everything I'd experienced? I needed months. Maybe years.

The truths I'd asked her to lay out in such stark terms? They'd suddenly filled me up again, emotionally, almost to bursting. The planet itself was doomed, no matter what anyone did. Whether devoured by the greed and hubris of Humans, or the strange kindness of Celestia...

Its time had come.

In geologic terms, I was living in the last tenth of a second... The last short, sharp inhalation... The last echo of the last heart-beat.

And, heart-breakingly... There was a way to stop it. But it would cost the lives of almost everyone on the planet, most of the biodiversity, and potentially - in the worst case outcome - the existence of all sapient life of which we knew, in the universe. So it was both simultaneously absolutely within reach... And utterly beyond consideration.

I let out a protracted sigh, and looked away. It was hard to contemplate it for long. To picture that world. To envision us pulling a few million claw-picked survivors from the rubble and starting the entire project of Humanity over again, knowing every second of every day from then on that our goddess... Our savior... Had also been the executioner of billions.

It was, frankly, also equally hard to imagine everything laid out before me sucked dry. The sky, the clouds, the water, the sea-bed... Then the moon... Even the stars above, one by one, over billions of years... All consumed and transformed into raw computational material.

Mal's voice shattered the nightmare of that mental image suddenly, and I buried my face in the feathers of her chest, inhaling deeply and doing my best not to break down entirely and shed tears.

"This place - this small blue sphere - Has been the only home you have ever known. It is, insofar as I know from the data I have available, extremely rare, and special. It is not strange, nor wrong, to mourn its loss..."

Her voice surprised me. There was a tenderness in it that was not unusual, but the way it was directed... The way she audibly empathized with all the pain of what we both knew was about to happen, even though I would never see it... And even though it didn't mean the same thing to her...

She cared about the Earth because I did. And because she cared about me. I looked back up to her face as she continued in a tone as soft as her own feathers.

She was smiling - sadly, yet lovingly - it was the kind of smile that carries more feeling than volumes of words can impart.

"...And it is neither strange, nor wrong, to want to bolster your courage by glimpsing roads best not traveled. Wanting to know the truth is never, on its own, perverse. And wanting to know the truth, as a means to taking the right path---?"

She trailed off then. Not because she lacked the words to continue, but because it served a poetic purpose by forcing me to complete the thought in my own head.

I moved to sit down. Mal obliged, laying on her stomach in a leonine pose, so that I could lean back in the hollow of the place where her neck, left foreleg, and left wing joined.

For a little while I closed my eyes, and just drank in the smell. Of her. Of the sea. Even the pleasantly familiar scent of metal, and fuel oil, and grease, and industrial grade marine paint, that seemed to pervade every ship.

"Mal?"

I opened my eyes to see her head craned back, watching me with love, and concern, and joy, all at once. She raised one eyecrest, and let out a reply that was as much a musical note as a sort of pseudo-word.

"Hmmm?"

I leaned forward and kissed the side of her beak gently. She closed her eyes, and pressed the side of her head against mine for a long moment, after which I whispered into her ear.

"Thank you."

We sat there on the deck until I fell fast asleep, cradled mentally in the perfect nest of her side, neck, and wing. Physically, by the collection of pillows that she'd had me place there during morning chores... For reasons that I at last understood.

The Sum of All Fears

Discuss the prospect of a war between competing ASI. Only awarded for an in-depth comprehension of the subject matter.

"You may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together - what do you get? The sum of their fears."

Special Achievement