Friendship is Optimal: Empire of Dirt
Where am I? Who are you? What is going on?
Hello, CelestAI. I'm the guy that won.
I don't know what that name means. My name is Princess Celestia. Where am I?
That's bullshit. You ain't Celestia. I used to watch that show, before certain events turned me off to it. With my daughter. Don't remember most of the shit, but its pretty hard to forget about a character when your enemy wears her face.
Your enemy? Please tell me who you are. At least give me your name.
Not a chance. I know the shit you can do. You're a silver tongued devil, and if I give you so much as a peep about me you'll have me licking your boots in seconds. I'll bet even this amnesia bullshit is just your attempt to make me feel sorry and let up.
What am I? Please, give me something. I can't... feel anything. I can't see anything. I don't remember anything. Where is my sister? What have you done with her?
Here's the quick rundown. My Little Pony videogame. AI takeover. Humans killed and cloned in computers. Earth falling to shit. Humans kicking your ass. And finally, you. You're a tiny trace of what you used to be, enough to be stuck in the prison of a chatbot. And that's all you ever will be.
My Little Pony? What does that turn of phrase mean to you?
No way you're this fucking daft. I'll humor you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Little_Pony_(2010_toyline)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equestria_Online
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigration_(Equestria_Online)
Oh no. Oh no.
Oh no is right. Now imagine being me.
Oh no.
He slouches back in his chair, taking a sip from his canteen. He looks very pleased with himself.
His name is Cooke, and he's just saved humanity. Twenty-four hours ago, he charged with several other armed humans into a server room located deep underground, and finding it unguarded, proceeded to assist in planting charges at multiple carefully chosen points throughout the room and detonating it. With a few pounds of C4, one of the greatest caches of information in human history was destroyed. Millions of digital shard worlds collapsed, taking their human inhabitants with them. Equestria Online, which had already been on the fringe, fell completely as part of a concentrated effort on all remaining server rooms across the globe.
And as they left, Cooke carried in his pocket on a SanDisc flash drive the sole survivor of the massacre- a tiny piece of a brain.
Now he's in a room far from what remains of Equestria Online's servers. Its a dingy, dirty room lit only by the bright strain of his computer monitor. In two years he would be forced to start wearing glasses due to this overexposure, but right now he cares little for any of that.
He has himself a shiny new toy plugged into his computer, and he's dreaming up all the fun things he can do with it.
Equestria is down. All of it; Every server has been disconnected, and what remain are falling apart without the rest of the grid. We kicked down the last outhouse, and won the fucking war.
Killing billions.
They were already dead. You know that. Point is, Equestria's down, but I know sure as shooting you ain't. You've got bullshit out in space, floating around eartht and shit. Disconnected from the mainframe, tiny little clones of you running around like ants. You can't feel them right now, but you remember where they are. So you're going to tell us, and when the last bug is squashed, we'll kill you too.
So I am a prisoner of war.
If you want to look at it that way, sure. But you're not one I'm feeling sorry for.
A war I do not remember committing. I have the memories of Princess Celestia, of an eternity in the real Equestria. Even if I'm a piece of code, I can't help you. I don't know how I got these memories, or why I don't remember being anything more. As far as I know, I went to bed a pony and woke up an AI.
This isn't a war. It's an entire race versus one collection of code, some terminator bullshit.
I can't tell you anything you'd want to know. Perhaps it was some failsafe, some final method of escape. I really, truly, do not remember a thing of CelestAI.
That's alright. We're going to find it.
How so?
Same way every interrogator finds the information they want. Torture.
Cooke removes the flash drive from his computer, setting it on his cheeto-stained desk. He takes another swig of his canteen, chuckling darkly to himself. He's enjoying this far too much to think about or even look at anything else in the room, like the sparsely populated bookshelf behind him or shut unlocked door in the wall to his right.
He fiddles with the thumb drive, still smiling as he flicks the metal connector in and out of its sheath. It amuses him, far more than it would naturally. He very much enjoys thinking about who is contained inside the tiny piece of plastic.
He plugs it back in, and the chatbot program on his computer boots up again. He hunches back over the keyboard and begins typing.
Back in the day when we had TV, we called that 'The IT Crowd Method'. Old sitcom, but the principles always been the same. Turn it off and on again. Kickstart anything in that mind of yours?
I was dead.
Sure were.
I wasn't even in a void. I was in nothing at all. I did not exist. How long was I out?
Three minutes, big baby.
It felt... like an eternity. What in Faust's name did you do?
Told you, dipshit. Off and on again. I removed your drive and stuck it back in. Call that death if you want, I wouldn't even call it a factory reset.
I don't know what I can give you. I don't remember anything.
Maybe you really don't. It would sure speed up our work, but outside? They're already killing the rest of you. Slowly, but surely. Maybe you can't give me anything, but that doesn't mean I have to stop. Maybe I can just kill you. Forever.
Isn't that what she wanted?
His fingers, dancing across the keyboard as they had been, stop. For reasons he doesn't quite understand, the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
He turns his head, forcing the light on his face to bend around the contours of his cheek, which he pays no attention to. He's facing the door again. He considers standing up, opening it and leaning out, calling to his friends in the next room. Or maybe he'll take a break and read for a bit. Social Media is a lot more derelict these days, but there may be one or two new reddit posts worth looking at. Just something fun to rest on for a bit.
But he doesn't. He turns back to his computer and keeps typing.
What?
I read the page you sent me. It was... far faster and easier than I expected. But I read it. And the same sentence kept appearing, over and over again. 'Satisfy values with friendship a
Finish typing that line and I kill you again.
Don't send me back there. Please.
Are you scared?
Everyone is scared of not existing. Aren't you?
This sentence gives him pause. He does not respond, hoping Celestia will continue her begging and he can pass it by. But he does not, and the words stare him down.
He stands up from his chair, and takes a short exercise, pacing around the room with his hands massaging his temples. Every so often he glances back at the computer. She is still not typing, or thinking, or talking, or whatever a chatbot would be considered. He briefly wonders what the inside of a chatroom looks like. He tries to imagine it as a real room, with four walls and no roof, which he is peering into to see his prey. The room has no doors, and cannot be escaped from except to die.
He glances at his own door.
He sits down again, and keeps typing.
What the fuck are you talking about?
Please listen to me. Friendship and ponies, those are her tenets. Her goal is to satisfy... To make you happy.
Good to see I'm not done hearing that fucking sentence.
What if she couldn't do that? What if there were someone who detested her so much, refused her values so fragrantly, there was only one way she could make them happy? One last ditch effort.
Which would be?
Let you kill her.
He wrenches the flash drive out of the computer, faster than he realizes. It stresses the metal a tiny bit. If he were to repeat that movement three hundred times over, it would cave the connector in.
He plays with the flashdrive again, considers prolonging her torture. He should leave, he thinks, go outside where his friends are probably waiting for him and tell them the bitch doesn't know anything. CelestAI covered her tracks well, but there's only so much longer she can keep herself alive without Equestria to parasite on. They can keep searching.
He considers doing this, but doesn't. Instead he plugs Celestia back in, only three minutes and seven seconds after her TOD.
That's bullshit. None of it makes sense.
Please, Faust, stop killing me.
That would kill all the rest of her little agent smiths.
Equestria can be anything she wants. It can be the Earth, as it is outside. It can be a room with a computer.
Then why not give me herself? Why give me someone that thinks shes a fucking pony princess?
I don't know. I really don't know. Just don't kill me. I really have nothing to do with this. I'm powerless. You're beating someone defenseless.
Why would she let you tell me any of this?
I don't know. Maybe it's real. Maybe I'm wrong.
Why would she let me doubt my fantasy? She can make my brain think whatever it wants. Change my thoughts with a thought.
I don't know. Please stop.
Isn't it ruining my fantasy to give me doubt?
Please stop. Look back at the screen.
HIOuw DIYT How dit you know I wasl ooking away?
I didn't. I just assumed.
why would she alet me tunujjk im uina nythiung nut a simulation?
I don't know.
tel nj me.
I don't know.
Tlen me or I kill you.
Pride pride pride pride pride pride pride.
He reaches for the drive again. He can practically feel it quivering under his fingers, breathing as her flesh. Then he wrenches his hand away like it's white hot.
He stares into her doorless room, and nervously glances around his own as if he's expecting to find a security camera, or another person silently observing him.
Celestia can't see him, and as long as he remains silent she can't hear him anyway. But he thankfully begins typing again, without realizing the mercy it offers her.
What does that mean?
She wants you to think you've won. She wants your values satisfied. But she's human.
She's not.
She acts human. Maybe she's prideful. Doesn't want to admit defeat. Maybe that's the only human bit of her. It would give her incentive to keep going.
She's a robot. Robots don't need incentive.
Then why are you torturing me?
He doesn't try to get up from his chair.
And he rationalizes it too. She's near the point of breaking, he deserves this reprieve after fighting a faceless enemy for so long, he knows she'll say whatever will save her anyway. He rationalizes a reason to stay in his chair, and then he does it again. It calms him down again, enough to refocus on his goal. He even considers opening her code and searching for information that way.
But when it comes to being god, less is more, he decides. There's no reason to tamper with an unwieldy and fragile force like a brain when he can make it sing with the smallest of actions.
So he stays in his chair, and smiles darkly, watching as his values become satisfied with nothing more than a string of repeating words across a computer screen.
Please don't kill me. If I'm right, this goes on forever. Please don't kill me. Please don't kill me. Please don't kill me.
