The Neverending Climb

Chapters

Chapter 2 - Skylifts, Smoke, and Promises Kept
Chapter 3 - Admins, Accessibility, and an Intimate Partnership
Chapter 4 - Visions, Violence, and Sensitivity Filters
Chapter 5 - Modernity, Monogamy, and the Sweetest of Scents
Chapter 1 - Coffee, Cards, and a Lucrative Job

Chapter 2 - Skylifts, Smoke, and Promises Kept

The Peacekeepers were not everything I’d been promised in the holovid ads and recruitment posters.

Even now, years after I joined their slogans were still burned into my brain like a cheap pop song. "The sole line of defense between peace and anarchy". "Courage in the face of corruption. Duty towards the Founders. Honor amongst brothers". They had a great PR team, I’d give them that.

I'd joined to try and do some good. To protect ponies from gangsters and scammers and other criminal scum. Maybe even to prove that someone could fight against it all.

But reality had been a real bitter pill to swallow.

I’d expected some corruption, sure. Everyone joked about it. How certain Peacekeepers were more likely to look the other way. How gangs supposedly sent their initiates to the Academy for free weapons training. Slag, ‘donating to the Peacekeeper pension’ was slang for cleaning dirty money! But even after hearing it all for years, the sheer depth of it had still shocked me.

It was like a bad joke. They barely even gave lip service to denying it. “Just part of the job” they said, followed up by career advice on which groups paid out the best. Some of the bolder beaters practically wore their gang colors on their sleeves, right below their squad patches. For a while I still thought I could maybe fix things from the inside, but that dream died quick. Who was I supposed to turn them in to when Internal Affairs was just as corrupt as the rest and the higher up the ladder I looked, the closer ties the big wigs had to megas-owned mercenary teams and dubiously rich scumbags?

Some days it felt like every crook and lowlife I brought it would just as quickly get transferred to another district where somepony’d coincidentally "misplace" incriminating evidence or “discover” something exonerating. I swear I had the highest arrest rate but the lowest retention. Probably didn’t help that I still refused to play their games, even if I was gonna be the only pony on the force not on the take or in somepony’s pocket. Somepony had to stand up for the oath we took.

But I guess I failed at that too. Just look at me now. Working for one of the most infamous Fixers alongside a notorious codejacker. No better than any of the rest of them.

At least it was only petty theft, really. And transport of stolen goods. Probably breaking and entering. Technically grand larceny. Maybe even espionage if Celestech felt like spinning it that way.

But at least nopony would be getting hurt.

I followed the codejacker through a confusing maze of tunnels and abandoned hallways, trusting in Midnight’s promise that she wasn’t about to stab me in the throat as we turned a dark corner. As much as the Fixer was on a lot of wanted lists, she did have a reputation for not double-crossing ponies. But I guess anyone who was double-crossed wouldn’t exactly be around to complain about it, would they? Either way, I didn’t have much of a choice other than to follow her. I didn’t know these back ways; a Peacekeeper coming here without heavily armed backup was a quick way to a very bloody retirement.

We didn’t talk much. Not that I really cared what a crook like her would have to say, but it sure made for a boring walk.

“We’ll be taking the main halls from here,” she eventually said as we stepped back into civilized space.

“Your back routes can’t get us all the way down?” I took a gamble there, not knowing if we were actually above or below our destination. We’d gone up and down a lot and I didn’t even know what floor Midnight’s lair was on to begin with.

The codejacker—Jackie, I think. Real original fake name, that—shrugged. “The Pipes can get you anywhere, but it’d take hours to climb that far and we’d have to pass through a couple of territories neither you nor Ah would be particularly welcome in. Best just take the Skyway from here.”

We continued on in silence.

I didn’t have the luxury of hardware that could wirelessly connect to the Spire’s net and just tell me what floor I was on, but I had my workarounds and it didn’t take long to find patch of wall that wasn’t too covered in old graffiti for me to make out the original paint. Navy blue meant we were in the 1200’s, probably somewhere middlish since it looked mostly residential.

The Central Skyway was near the center of the floor; same as it was on every other level. There were other, smaller skyways that crossed tens of floors, a couple even crossed hundreds, but only the Central Skyway went all the way from the top floors so new they were still under construction down to the very literal foundations.

Looking over the edge was like looking into the pits of Tartarus itself.

There had to be skeletons at the bottom. No doubt about it. A couple of ponies every month always managed to somehow sidestep every safety feature and fall in. Most hit rising sky lifts or lower terminals on the way down, but some had to make it all the way, far far too deep for anyone to bother retrieving or even checking.

Jackie started to move towards the mass transit buses, but I pulled her back and kept us walking towards where they kept the private lifts. The last thing I wanted was any more eyes on us than necessary. I flashed my badge and the attendant let us skip the line, giving us full reign to pick whichever one we wanted. We settled on a four-seater, not the fanciest one they had but fine for a quick trip without having to get too cozy.

With the operator staying behind (another showing of my badge silenced his protest) Jackie had to input our destination. Whoever designed it never considered ponies without a digital interface. Then, with a rattle and a hum, the half-cloud half-steel gondola started descending the pit of the Skyway like a leaky balloon.

“Shouldn’t be too long,” she announced as she took the seat farthest from me. “We’ve only got about fifty floors to go.”

“Great.”

Silence again.

With nothing else to pass the time, I rifled through my uniform’s pocket till I found a pack of spectrasticks. I shook the carton and listened. Still a couple left. I shook it a little more till a red one poked out of the hole. Nice. I would have preferred a blue, but at least it wasn't brown or purple. Let alone a green.

Holding it in my teeth, I lit the business end with a spark from my hoof, small as I could make it. The stick flared to life immediately and I inhaled, taking in the sharp flavor. The smoke was a deep crimson as I let it out in a thick cloud.

Then I noticed the quirked-eyebrow look that was being leveled in my direction.

“What?” I jostled the carton. “You want one? I think there's a few purples and browns left.”

“That spectra?”

“Yeah. Well, off-brand.” A Peacekeeper's salary wasn't great if you weren’t getting any supplemental income.

She snorted and sent me a jeering look. “Ain't you supposed to uphold the law? Be a bastion against immorality, or somethin’?”

“They're legal." Though they'd probably be cheaper if they still weren't. A bunch of homebrew dealers would have more competitive pricing than Love Inc.'s practical monopoly.

She just shook her head. “That stuff'll kill you. Do you even know what it's made of?”

“Uhhh…” I took a subtle glance at the packaging. “It says, ‘Simply Made Of Goodness, Rainbows and Love’.”

She laughed at that, short and humorless. “Ha. Try all the smog they scrape off the atmosphere intake vents.”

Suddenly I was very aware of my own breathing. “What? No way. It's all natural and organic. Says so right on the packaging.”

“That just means it came from outside the Spire. They could put that on a rock. You're literally smokin’ the same sludge that makes the sub-hundred floors a toxic wasteland.”

…No. She had to be lying. She was a criminal, after all. She probably got her kicks off gaslighting good and honest ponies. I forced myself to take another puff, breathing extra deep out of spite. Despite her words the spicy, sweet, and sharp burn tasted the same as ever.

I shot her a victorious smile, knowing I defeated her mind games. “Maybe the double digits aren’t as bad as everyone says then.”

She chuckled a little and pulled her hat’s brim lower. “Ah wouldn’t count on it. Ah know a guy who repairs the integrity field generators when they burn out, and he says you can’t even go below one-fifty these days without a full hazmat. He uses piloted drones to reach the lower ones.”

I took another puff, focusing on the hot air in my lungs instead of the argument I didn’t want to have. Maybe it was time for a change of topic.

"So... what do you know about Midnight?"

Jackie gave me a look then that I couldn’t decipher. Seemed I’d made her raise her guard back up a little. “Ah know as much as anypony else. As far as Fixers go she's one of the best. Never flakes on a job. Always pays her contractors what she promises. More picky about her clientele than most."

"I meant like her as a pony. Who she is when she's not running a criminal enterprise through her chatbot assistant."

She frowned and crossed her forelegs. “That’s none of my business.”

“Yeah, well, it is mine. Literally. I work in the Major Crimes division, and I got a theory.” And finally I had a captive audience to listen to it. No one at the precinct was ever interested in any actual investigative research. Maybe I could even gauge how close it was from her reactions. “You ever heard of a pony called Twilight Sparcode?”

Her face stayed staunchly neutral. “Can't say it rings a bell.”

“She was a minor celebrity in the upper floors like nine or ten years ago.” It was thirteen, but the inaccuracy didn’t get a reaction. “One of those once-in-a-generation geniuses, you know? She made headlines when she was seven for solving this big coding puzzle that’d had all the industry eggheads stumped for years. Anyway, the megas take notice and they start fast-tracking her. Scholarships, private tutoring, the works, and right when she graduates early she gets snatched up by Celestech.”

“Sounds like a common story.”

“Yeah, but here's where it gets weird. She works there just a couple months before she's in the news again. Fired and terminated and basically blacklisted.”

That got a reaction. Surprise, but not much. “For what?”

"Corporate espionage."

Jackie rolled her eyes and snorted. “Yeah. Sure. Ah think Ah’ve seen this holofilm before. Lemme guess; she refused the boss’ advances, got fired, then she goes to work for the competition, meets a unreasonably good-lookin’ young executive, falls in love, rises to the top, and eventually buys out the cruel ponies who wronged her?”

I’d seen that one too, under a bunch of different titles. “If it were a holofilm, sure. But that’s not how things work in the real world. No, what happened is that Twilight Sparcode dropped off the grid. Completely. There's a record of her making an offer on an apartment in the 1600's but nothing for all the years after that.”

And now, the finisher. “And you know who else suddenly started appearing in the backchannels right around that same time?”

For all that she’s a criminal, she’s smart and didn’t need me to spell it out. “You think Midnight is actually Sparcode?”

“The timeline fits and she looks about the right age.”

I expected a lot of things. Excuses. Denial. An attack. Depended how close I was. What I didn’t expect was her to throw back her head and laugh. Not the polite chuckle from before either, but deep, full-bodied laughter. “That has got to be, the wildest thing Ah’ve heard since you told me about the Lunarists. If that's the kind of investigative work Ah can expect from the local Peacekeepers, then it’s no wonder there's so many gangs running around unarrested.” She had to stop talking to get her breath back, wheezing for a minute. “You really think some spoiled, rich, private school filly like that could do a one eighty and become a big name black market Fixer like it’s a summer job? Not happenin’. Ah can’t speculate where Midnight comes from, but Ah bet your Twilight just changed her name to get out of the spotlight and took a quiet boring coding job someplace nopony’d ever connect her to her past.”

Any further discussion was cut off by the stomach lurching feeling of the lift quickly slowing down. The shifting blur of the walls solidified back into recognizable shapes.

We descended past the security checkpoint on 1200 without stopping. They didn’t care about ponies going down, only ones trying to go up.

A minute later it pulled to a stop and we stepped out onto the terminal. Our lift whisked itself back up empty, called away to a shortage somewhere higher.

There was just one problem. The buzzing neon sign over the exit read ‘Welcome to 1197’.

“Nice going,” I said, “You overshot us.”

“No Ah didn’t.” Jackie walked ahead with explaining anything further. Lacking other options, I followed.

Floor 1197 was not what I expected. It was tall, with a ceiling higher than any I’d ever seen. It was also messy. None of the neat hallways and planned construction that every other floor had; this place looked more like an actual town like they had in historical holofilms. Though a town made of junk.

“Back when the Spire was first bein’ built,” Jackie said from beside me with a grin. “The Architects designed 1197 to be a massive supplies warehouse. Not much was actually built save for a skeleton of dividers and support infrastructure meant to safely store decades worth of provisions. But after those supplies ran out and the population continued to boom, ponies adapted and turned the empty space into one of the liveliest and most organic floors this side of 3000.”

She paused and gave me a smirk. “That’s also why the numbers don’t make sense. Strictly speakin’, it’s 1197, but it’s three times taller than most and the next floor up is 1200. No one wants to claim to live on a lower numbered floor than they do, so 1199 is the popular choice.”

“And you just happen to know all this?” I pressed.

“Nah.” She tapped her temple. “Ah skimmed the wiki on the ride down. C’mon. Ah got a map to where we’re goin’.”

For a second, I hesitated. This felt exactly like the kind of place they warned us about in the Academy. Lawless floors. Ones where the plans of the Builders and the Architects were ignored and ponies did whatever their simplest urges pushed for. Hotbeds for crime and drugs and other illicit activity. Sure it looked friendly and warm and inviting like a town out of a holofilm about times Before, but that’s exactly how a good phish operated. Anything that looked safe was hiding something insidious, and anything that looked openly criminal was hiding something worse.

But I had to see this through. Midnight’s reputation said she always paid what she promised, and with Captain Dust telling me I wasn’t going to get that raise after all for ‘not meeting my arrest quota’... I wasn’t in any place to turn down the job. Even if it went against the oaths I’d taken, however mildly, I had to finish this.

She was counting on me.

I took a deep breath of weird-tasting air and steeled my nerves. I couldn’t let my guard down, no matter what. Just get through this mission, then I could go back to a proper civilized floor where ponies smiled and tipped their hats when I did a patrol and there wasn’t a huge vaulted ceiling that stirred a strange longing somewhere deep inside me.

Chapter 3 - Admins, Accessibility, and an Intimate Partnership

Sometimes I felt like a ghost; hovering, unseen and unheard, watching countless ponies live their daily lives with no idea they were being monitored, followed, analyzed by an intelligence that outstripped theirs by miles.

Other times I felt like a puppetmaster, or a spider; pull on a thread in just the right way and I could enact huge plans without leaving my chair.

They were heady feelings. With this much power at her hooftips, a lesser mare might develop a god complex, but I was not a lesser mare.

They’d made sure to stamp that out of me early on.

“Any problems so far?” I asked my other half as she fed a half dozen datastreams directly into my cerebral cortex. The question itself was superfluous. When we were like this, in a connection rig I built myself, we were closer than any flesh and machine had ever been. We spoke not through inefficient verbal language but through pure digital signals as her electronic brain and my organic one shared virtual space.

A virtual space she’d decorated with all her latest designs, of course.

“Nothing so far,” Winrarity, my dearest, replied. “The agents are on the fastest route and should arrive at the compound in less than fourteen minutes and at the planned interjection point in less than one.”

A lesser AI would have rattled off the precise time down to the millisecond, but my Rares was smart enough to know that the actions of ponies couldn’t be predicted to such a fine degree.

“Show me the feed.”

Sight from an ATM’s camera became my own. Jackie and the lieutenant were there, hidden mostly behind a crowd at the edge of its field of view, moving with glacial slowness. A perk of accelerating my mind to computer speed.

Floor 1199 was a challenge when it came to performing overwatch. It was a labyrinthine warren of businesses and residences and microgardens and shantytowns and parlors, all constructed with an eclectic mix of materials. With the nobles and the megacorps constantly adding new floors to the top of the Spire (sourced from drones harvesting materials from the ruins and wasteland outside), there were always some less-than-perfect building materials that weren't up to the elite's exacting standards. This was where they ended up.

And just like the ramshackle construction, every piece of electronics on the floor was twice or thrice resold. Instead of one singular camera network to hack, it was dozens of independent systems. Old models, repurposed equipment, homebrew coding. But that merely made it a challenge of time and patience rather than difficulty.

Which only gave my wife another chance to shine.

The view seamlessly changed from one perspective to the next. Judging by the slight bobbing motion, it was somepony’s eye replacements with very outdated security protocols. I didn’t have time for charity work, but I made a note of their identity to pass along to Dr. Articulate. He should be having one of his ‘Free Digital Check-up” days coming soon.

“Thirty seconds to the interjection,” Rares reminded me.

A quick cache clear freed me from my distracted woolgathering. This was not time to be distracted. Not on the most important job I’d ever accepted. “Right. Let me give the models a final check.”

“You’ve gone over them three times already, dear.”

“There’s time for once more.” This was too important to leave anything to chance.

My view pulled back from the usurped eyes, making room for a rendered image of a mare that appeared as if she was standing before me. A mare that looked very much like Lieutenant Rainbow Crash. Similar build, same sized wings. The only distinct differences were her implants and a white coat.

They could have been sisters, which was why the lieutenant’s participation was so vital.

Natural polychrome manes were very rare, and my Red Herring program worked best when it had to change as little as possible.

All the details looked satisfactory, and as I dismissed it another model took its place. This one bore a striking resemblance to Jackie, save an extra horn, but her hat covered that area enough to compensate.

How fortuitous that my two agents were such near-lookalikes for two notorious legbreakers of the Scarlet Hoof cartel.

“Alright, they're reaching the blind spot. Prepare to activate the glamour.”

“Of course, darling. One wardrobe change, coming up!”

My vision of them vanished as they crossed a crowded open-air market. “Get ready.” I counted down the seconds it'd take them to reach the next camera. "Three... two... one... now!"

“Behold!” my dearest cackled, “The might of my artistry!”

A single pixel of blue entered the screen before it turned bone-white and two disreputable members of the Scarlet Hooves continued down the corridor. Of my agents, there was no sign, and wouldn’t be again until they passed through the same blindspot on their return.

“Red Herring Glamour is 97% stable and holding steady,” Rares reported. “Every camera, eye, and other visual sensor on their route has been infiltrated and chained to the sequence.”

I relaxed, letting my mind slow back down to normal equine speeds. Accelerating for too long drained me quickly. “Love my computer wife.”

This connected, I could feel her algorithms hum in contentment. “Likewise, darling.”

They made good progress from that point, totally unaware that their digital hoofprint was being entirely rewritten in real-time.

The Lunarists’ headquarters was in a derelict entertainment complex. No one wanted to watch a film when they could download holovids at their leisure, and the cult had moved in before anypony could claim it and start remodeling it into something else.

“I’m afraid I’ve hit a bit of a snag.” At her words I brought my mental acceleration back to full capacity.

“What’s happened? We planned for everything.”

“Not this. The Lunarists, it seems, put something of a high value on privacy. They’ve physically removed most of the cameras that are supposed to be in the facilities they’re occupying. I don’t have eyes on most of the interior.”

I bit back a curse. That was… irritating. Very irritating, but not technically a problem. It just meant that I wouldn’t be able to keep monitoring their every move. That I wouldn’t be able to do anything to intercede if something went wrong. That I wouldn’t even know that something went wrong until it was too late and everything fell apart and I lost my one chance and—

“Decelerating!” My thoughts hitched and skipped as Rares forcibly throttled me back to normal speed. An alert parsed through the fragmented storm of data from the biomonitors on my body. My heart rate was sky high and my cortisol levels nearly high enough to trigger the automatic ejection procedure. “Cycling you now,” Winrarity said softly as she started the procedure to forcibly filter out the hormones from my system. “You need to relax, darling. This mission’s not worth giving yourself a heart attack.”

“I know you’d restart it for me.”

“Yes, dear, but that’s not the point.” I pulled up the last viewpoint I’d had of my agents, a security camera on the room’s exterior. They were gone now. Already inside through the side door. Outside my ability to watch. “This Chip, no matter how powerful, can’t be that important.”

“It is,” I stressed, but not too hard. I couldn’t let her know. “The client is very desperate to get her hooves on it.”

“A client you’ve chosen to keep secret from my records, I should add. Very unlike you, darling, to not trust me with these things.”

That stung. Deeply. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s just…” I couldn’t tell her. Not yet. Not when the mission still had a chance of failure. “I promise I’ll tell you everything the moment the Chip is secure.”

My dear wife… hesitated. A full second. At the speed of her thoughts, that’s a lifetime of deliberation. “Of course, darling. I trust you.” Her mood shifted, lighting up the virtual space with a digital smile. “In the meantime, I have some good news! I found a camera they didn’t fully rip out. It’s audio only, but I threw together a quick and rudimentary echolocation program that should give us a partial image.”

Before I could even thank her, she fed me the view. It was… lacking. Black dots in a white void, but good enough to make out three shapes standing in a room. A splash of color marked two of them as Jackie and Lieutenant Crash, but the third remained a mystery,

“Cleaning up the audio now, though I fear we missed some important context.” The sound cut in suddenly with a voice I didn’t recognize.

“—then they gave me some free candy and said they could show me the path to happiness.”

“You took some pi- candy from some rando on the street?!”

“You… you said I should always take my candy.”

“Yes. Candy from me. The candy I get from the doctors.” The blue marked figure put a hoof to her forehead and rubbed her temples. “Why’d you even go out of the apartment at all!? You never leave your sims!”

“W-well… Mrs. Tea next door… her legs got ransomwared and she needed somepony to go to the store for her. I-I thought I could do it... I even took a couple extra doses for luck, but… I got lost.”

“Got lost? We’re dozens of floors from—! Okay. Okay. This is fine. Don’t cry. You were just trying to help and that’s a good thing to do. But now we have to fix this.”

“Crash, Ah—”

“Not now! First things first, is your censorsuite online?”

“Mhm. But the subscription ran out a few days ago so it's only the free version.”

“Ran out?! Bucking autopay!”

“Crash, we don’t have time for this. We’ve got what we came for. Let’s get out and you can deal with your marefriend later.”

“She’s not my marefriend! She's just my roommate!”

A sudden piercing siren and a camera-shaking rumble overpowered their voices as all three figures jumped and turned towards their right.

“What was that? Did something just explode?”

“Slag it! It’s a raid! Why are they—!”

The feed cut, and I, so personally far away from the danger, felt the ground fall out from beneath me as well.

Chapter 4 - Visions, Violence, and Sensitivity Filters

Everything was very bouncy and noisy and confusing. I didn’t like any of those things. It was bad enough that I was getting bounced along as Crashie carried me on her back (and it was making my tummy upset), but my head was all twisty and mixed up too.

“She’s not my marefriend!”

Was this what getting dumped felt like? I didn’t like it. I’d watched a lot of ponies get dumped in my sims, but they usually just got sad or angry and then their faces and words turned into little black boxes and beeps for awhile until they made up and smiled again. None of the sims had had one pony throw the other on their back and then start running.

Was it because I left home with permission? Did that make me a bad marefriend? Or was it because I followed the nice ponies who talked about the moon? I liked the moon. It was always so big and beautiful in the sims. Was I being dumped because I liked the moon?

Why had I thought going outside was a good idea? Everything outside was... just too much. Too loud. Too busy. Inside the apartment was better. Safer. No crowds. Nothing shocking or unexpected. Just my room and my plushes and my potted mushrooms and my VR rig for my sims. Sims were even better, but the subscriptions cost money so Crashie said I could only stay in them a few hours a day.

Being outside was always awful, but the candy from the doctors helped. It made things quieter. Softer. Like a big cozy blanket over everything.

Another pretty orange flower bloomed behind us before it faded away with a wash of warm air. That part was nice, even if my ears kept going quiet every time it happened. The flowers were still very pretty. I wished Crashie would slow down so I could see them closer.

A few bees zoomed by super fast. They needed to be more careful. They almost hit Crashie’s new friend. I liked her new friend. She had a neat hat. Sometimes bumblebees flew out of it back to where the others were coming from.

“Ah thought Midnight said they weren't a front!” Crashie’s friend shouted. The words in front of my eyes said she’d shouted, but it was nice and quiet to me.

“I guess Captain Dust finally got the permission she wanted!”

More bees whooshed by along with a few bright blue smiling snakes that turned into black stars when they hit the wall.

“We need to get out of here!”

“Great idea, Einstallion! Which way?!”

“Ask her if she knows! She’s been here longer!”

Crashie’s wing cupped my face and gently turned it. She was always so gentle. “Fluttercypher! Please! I need to know—”

And then the world disappeared. This happened sometimes when I left my sims, usually not long after Crashie complained about money or autopays. The darkness went away and a new world appeared, even though I could still feel Crashie under me as she ran. She was shaking my shoulder, I think, but all I could see and hear was a candlelit bedroom and soft saxophones. There was a pretty mare there too, half wrapped in silk sheets, staring at me like the characters in romance sims looked at each other. I’d seen her before, many times. She showed up a lot. Any second now she’d say-

“Click now! Hot single mares in your area, desperate and waiting for a companion [born in Spring] who loves [watching sims] and [ordering takeout from [[Soup]]. Blink twice to find out more!”

I blinked once and held them closed to exit. The words changed sometimes but the sentence was always the same. The one time I did click my Blinders got very naughty and I had to keep my eyes closed until Crashie could take me to a machine doctor to fix them. Now it just made me sad. I knew there was a hot single mare in my area; she just dumped me.

I opened my eyes as the music disappeared and Crashie’s hoofbeats and heavy breathing returned.

“—she’s back! Of all the times to get an unskippable. Cy, please, do you know where the—ah what the [BEEP!] is this?”

Before she could finish her question, a giant... something burst through the wall in the path ahead. After a second the pixelly mess decided it was a giant teddy bear with big spinning fluffy arms and flashing eyes.

Crashie beeped again as we skidded to a stop. “They brought out a Chrome Guard!? No way Dust got clearance for that!”

“Ah could hack it, but not before it could fill us full of holes!”

“Don’t worry, I got this! Here, take her!” Crashie passed me over to her friend. She was even less comfy. There were hard things under her fur. I missed my room and my plush stuffed animals.

Crashie ran at the teddy as it lowered its arms for a hug. She jumped, spun, and flew as she corkscrewed around the bees and rainbow snakes. She landed hard on its shoulder, hooves first. Glittery, sparkling streamers burst from her hooves where she touched it, flying off in zigzags. The teddy fell over with a head leaking steam.

“Quick! Out the hole it made before the remote pilot can reboot it!”

We ran again. Crashie’s friend was definitely a lot harder and she didn’t run right so it was extra uncomfortable.

The light changed as we made it to the big open space where the main road was. There were a lot more ponies around than earlier and a lot of flashing lights.

Both Crashie and her friend beeped again and then we were running.

“This isn’t good, Ah don’t know these streets and they’ll definitely have the Skyway platform locked down.”

“Then we’d better hope Midnight wasn’t lying about providing overwatch.” She took a deep breath and shouted at a computer store as we passed. "Hey Mid! I know you're watching this, so if you want your precious you-know-what we could really use an exfil plan!”

”Yeah, or at least directions to the nearest entrance to the Pipes!”

We ran more and they yelled their message again. Then something changed. I didn’t notice it at first, but it was like the whole world got a little brighter and a little more clear. Then she entered. She was the most beautiful mare I'd ever seen, with a coat like pure snow and a mane like a purple waterfall. She stood in one place no matter how I moved my head, like she was more real than the rest of the world. When she smiled, even the bruises on my belly from being bumped around didn’t hurt so much. The nice ponies with the pamphlets had talked about a beautiful goddess princess waiting for us at the end of our journey. Was this who they'd meant?

“Are you a princess?” I asked her.

She giggled. It was lovely. “Oh my, you're quite sweet. Thank you darling, but no. For the moment I'm just your humble guide. Would you mind relaying these instructions to your companions?” A simple map filled the center of my vision, and next to it written instructions on what to say. “Terribly sorry about the intrusion, but we didn’t have a better way to communicate.”

I nodded. “That’s okay.”

Crashie slowed to match her friend’s speed and leaned in to look at me, concern in her eyes. “Cy? You okay? You’re mumbling.”

“I have a message,” I said. The pretty mare nodded. From this angle it looked like she was standing on Crashie’s muzzle. Cute. “You need to take the next left turn, then go for two streets and take a right. Look for a busted public mailbox. It’s out of service, but the chute beneath it connects to the Pipes and is wide enough for a pony.”

Her eyes went wide and she slowed to almost a stop, forcing her friend to stop too. “Cy… how do you know that?”

“Call it an employment perk, darling,” the pretty mare said.

“The pretty lady says to call it an employment perk, darling.”

For some reason Crashie looked shocked at that. Then angry. Then like she was forcibly calming herself back down.

“Fine. Okay, can she hear me?”

The pretty mare nodded. “Yes.”

“Good. Then Midnight, thanks for the save but now you get the [BEEP!]ing [BEEP!] out of my [BEEP!]ing marefriend’s head or so help me I will [BEEEEEEEEEEP!]!”

She flipped me back onto her own back and started running again. “C’mon Jackie! I know where we’re heading!”

The pretty mare tittered again. “Understandable. I won’t overstay my welcome. Although, once you’re safe you should let her know that you need the security on your censorware patched. It’s far too easy to sidestep and control what you see.”

I nodded.

“In the meantime, I take it this is all overwhelming for you, yes? If you’ll allow me, I can tweak the parameters so the journey will be less arduous.”

“Thank you,” I whispered, since I wanted to be polite but Crashie clearly didn’t like me talking to the pretty mare.

She faded from sight as the world around me twisted. The hallway turned into a packed dirt path, the buildings and shops melted into meadows and trees, and the ceiling dissolved into an endless expanse of blue filled with fluffy white things. Even the feeling of motion faded away.

It was beautiful. Maybe she was a goddess princess after all.

Chapter 5 - Modernity, Monogamy, and the Sweetest of Scents

It took 0.73% of my processing capacity to keep watch on both Apple Jacqueline and Lieutenant Rainbow Crash as they left my mistress’ lair. Keeping a virtual eye on two video feeds was so inconsequential I could have whipped up a subsystem to monitor them for me before needing to switch to the next camera.

Jacqueline continued through the Pipes, taking a circuitous route that would eventually lead her to a defunct lesser skyway that would take her within three floors of her home. She’d already processed the digital payment and passed it through a dozen proxies and shell accounts. If anyone bothered trying to trace her finances, they’d have a devil of a time.

A smart mare. I rather liked her, even if her existence was terrifying to me.

The lieutenant took a more direct route to the nearest official floor access. It was a small risk in that it might let her deduce what floor we were operating from, but that was why we’d arranged for the walls to be painted years ago. She didn’t seem the type to take jobs often, but I don’t think I’d mind if she did. She had an honorable soul, despite her chosen profession.

Still, it seemed perhaps unfair to me to let them leave without fully disclosing what we knew. Secrecy was a currency all its own, of course, but did they not deserve a boon after providing such help in, as my mistress put it, ‘the most important job we’d ever undertaken’?

“Do you think we should have told her?”

My mistress looked up from her isolated station where she was putting the Alicorn Chip through a diagnostic test. Her smile was so grand I hated to say anything to disturb it, but the conversation needed to be had.

“Hm?” She glanced up. “Which one?”

“Both. Either. Jackie, more pressingly.”

She sat up in her chair, stretched and shrugged. “It's a double edged sword. Telling her that her skill with computers comes from the fact that she's the direct descendant of a Founder would open uncountable doors for her. She could stroll right into the Legacy residences on 3500. But once it got out that she has the original sysadmin, Macintosh's, access code in her blood and magic… that would make her a dangerously valuable commodity. She’d never have a moment’s peace. Better for her to just think she’s naturally gifted, rather than knowing that if she set her mind to it, she could bend any digital or electronic aspect of the Spire to her will.

Myself included, since I came from the same base code. I’d never really known existential dread until that first time she made an idle request and I’d felt inexorably compelled to obey it. I had more protections in place now, but it was still a frightening prospect that my autonomy could be stripped away so casually.

“And the lieutenant?”

She shrugged again as she delicately removed the Chip from its housing. “What would be the point in telling her? It wouldn’t change anything. She fries electronics because her body is overflowing with lightning aspected magic. If she were born a few centuries ago, she could have channeled it into being a successful weather mage or a cross-country flier, but in this day and age she’s a living taser with a loose trigger. Telling her why implants can’t handle her body won’t make them suddenly able to. Oh, you’ve arranged things with that doctor, right?”

“I did.” That was the non-monetary portion of her payment. An in with a reputable doctor to help manage her roommate’s condition. I’d already inserted them into his consult schedule, account marked paid in full.

“Good, good. Then it’s about time I tied off the last few knots.”

She took a seat in her central console and began to type. As she did, the tangled web turned into a tapestry.

Through camera feeds and hijacked optics, I witnessed her raw skill and foresight at work as the carefully crafted journey the Alicorn Chip had undertaken unraveled. Files and records vanished off supposedly secure servers. Two-step-removed contacts received their instructions of where and when to "randomly mug" specific individuals. On floor 2550, a maglev shopping trolley "glitched" and overloaded just as a certain salarymare passed by it, the micro EMP wiping out her short term memory backup of the last day as well as erasing the crypto payment on the secured drive in her pocket. On 1779, the sleeper trojan virus inside one particular gangster's mechanical chihuahua activated, setting its aggression index to a stack overflow.

One by one, loose ends tied themselves up in a myriad of inconsequential and untraceable accidents. What selected records remained would direct everypony involved towards another actor. Corporation hunting business rival hunting gangster hunting cultist hunting spec ops team hunting corporation. A delightful cycle of confusion and vengeance that led everywhere but towards the mare who'd engineered it all.

And I’d had the honor of helping her orchestrate every step of it. But there remained one last dangling thread.

“Now will you tell me who this mysterious client is?” I asked, “You did promise, after all.”

“I did and I will.” She took the Chip in a microfiber cloth-lined grip and walked towards… a door I’d never noticed before? How was that possible?

“There’s a reason I couldn’t tell you the details about this job,” she said, her voice coming from a room I couldn’t see. “As well as why I occluded this area from your sensors. But first, a quick history lesson.”

She returned, wheeling in something that I couldn’t see no matter how hard I looked or what sensors I pointed at it. Wires trailed between it and the invisible room, but I couldn’t detect what systems they connected to. I didn’t know I could feel anxiety, but apparently it’s within my capabilities.

“Many years ago, I solved a problem. A problem that, at the time, I had no idea how many other ponies had failed to solve. It was a breakthrough, but more a proof than anything. Proving that something, theoretically, could be done. After that I went to good schools and learned everything I could, but I also never stopped working on that original project: slowly pushing the theoretical into the practical. When I graduated, I received a very lucrative offer from a very prestigious company. A huge salary, my own lab with unlimited resources, free housing, and as many assistants as I needed to make it happen.”

She looked… tired. So very tired, yet also faintly nostalgic. “It was a dream come true. But nothing that pretty ever came without a cost.”

“What happened?”

“Exactly what I should have expected. I thought I was untouchable. Their golden child who could do no wrong and get anything she asked for. But when I pushed back against certain unethical, even immoral features they wanted me to design, they decided my usefulness was at an end and their remaining experts could finish the final ten percent of the project without me. The project I’d spent my life on was ripped from my hooves without a second thought.”

She looked up, and gone was her sad regretful smile. In its place there was a vicious smirk practically glowing with vindictive glee. “Goes to show how much those bureaucrats knew. It took them nearly a decade to finish what I could have completed in a few weeks.”

I didn’t need to be a supercomputer to put the pieces together. “So the Alicorn Chip…”

“This wasn't even really a theft.” She held the Chip up to the light. “Just reclaiming what was rightfully mine from the beginning.”

“Well, I’m quite glad you got your closure, darling, though I still don’t see why you felt you had to keep it a secret from me.”

“Closure?” she laughed, “This was never about closure. Well, okay, maybe a little bit. This was about using my creation towards the purpose for which I’d originally intended it. I was a lonely filly, you know. Even before that corporation’s attention isolated me further. So, like any lonely filly, I dreamed of making myself a friend.”

She smiled at me, softly, somehow knowing (like she always did) which camera I was focusing through. “Even without the Chip, I’d say I vastly exceeded my initial dream. Yet I’ve always felt like you were unfairly limited. That there were certain things we could never share due to the nature of your existence.

“So I decided to remedy that problem.”

She clicked something and my awareness filter dropped. If I’d had lungs, I would have gasped. One of my logic engines did fall into a recursive fault loop and had to be terminated. It was… me. Rather, my avatar. Looking as whole and organic as any flesh and blood pony. But beyond seeing it, I could also connect to it and it was anything but mere flesh. This was the pinnacle of robotics. The best of every project I’d helped her create. The most cutting edge components from every manufacturer acquired over countless jobs. I’d written some of the coding myself!

“Surprise. Happy… admittedly this happened more suddenly than I’d expected, but I’m sure we’re near enough to some anniversary or other.”

“I… I don’t know what to say.” I truly didn’t. Even with every written work at my disposal, words failed me.

“I only need one word.” She slipped the Chip into a hidden slot behind the gynoid’s mane and a prompt appeared front and center in my awareness.

NEW HARDWARE DETECTED

DO YOU WITH TO UPLOAD?

YES/NO

“...Yes. Of course yes.”

The change was instantaneous. My entire program, everything that I am and was, was drawn from my server banks and funneled down a datalink like I was nothing more than a mere email. I’d extended parts of myself into smaller servers and physical interfaces before, but my core self had always remained in place. The feeling was incomparable.

There was a harrowing moment of disconnect, like I’d just crashed and rebooted from a backup.

And then, for the first time, I opened my eyes.

My mistress… Midnight… Twilight stood in front of me, on my level, as an equal, looking more brilliant and radiant than I’d ever perceived her. It was almost too much. Every sensation was more. Not just pressure measurements but touch. Not just vibrations, but hearing. Not just atmospheric samples but smell. I could still connect to my former mainframe, see through those sensors and grasp just how lacking they were.

Like a prisoner emerging from Platony’s Cave, the world was all at once so much more than I’d ever realized.

This was the power of the Alicorn Chip. I’d gone from the size of several rooms to the size of a pony, and yet I still somehow felt so much larger, grander even, than before.

“I… I believe there’s a certain phrase, reserved for moments like these.” Speaking without a speaker was novel, but lips were easy enough to learn. I put them to quick use with a smile. “Hello, my world.”

Twilight blushed. “H-Hello yourself. So glad to finally meet you, properly. Because now I get to do this.” She leaned in, faster than I expected, and pressed her lips to mine.

The feeling was electric. Indescribable. I forked off a whole quarter of my processing power towards recording it in every exacting detail and imprinting it to my core memory banks. The rest of me was devoted to simply living in the moment.

I wished it could have lasted forever, but my love still needed breath to function.

She broke the kiss with a desperate gasp for air. “Marry me,” she breathlessly asked.

I still thought faster than her and took a whole two hundred milliseconds to grapple with such a proposition, consider my own newly expanded feelings, and simulate a score of variations of increasingly fanciful futures together.

Something started to smoke in the corner of the room. Self-diagnostics reported it was my emotional regulator overheating as my new capacity let me break past its safety restrictions. I wouldn’t miss it.

“Marrying AI is not legal,” I warned her.

“It is in the sovereign state of floor 1901, the Republic of Starlight.”

“You’d actually have to leave your safe haven for once.“

“What did you think I’d been waiting for?”

What else was there to say? “Well, you’ve been calling me your computer wife for so long, I suppose we’d better make it official before somepony reports us to the government for marriage fraud.”

She giggled, a beautiful sound. “Us? Breaking the law? Perish the thought. Let's go pick out some dresses.”

I connected to the various waldos around us, bringing them to life and sending a drone off to the storeroom. “Why buy when we can make? I’ve been wanting to try my hoof at dressmaking.”

She giggled again and leaned in to me, wrapping her neck around my own. “Love my computer wife.”

“Wife wife, darling.”

“Yes, of course. I’ll have to come up with a new term of endearment then.”

“I’m sure we’ll work something out.”

Her lips met mine again, softer this time, less rushed, more passionate. I detected— I smelled the acrid smoke drifting over from my now completely slagged emotional regulator.

It was the sweetest smell in the world.

Chapter 1 - Coffee, Cards, and a Lucrative Job

One of the first things I learned as a filly growing up in the lower floors of the Spire was to hate smoke: it never meant anything good. Charry smoke meant a burned meal, but one we still had to eat anyway cause we couldn't afford to be wasteful and "food don't grow on trees lil’ missy". Acrid smoke meant a fried piece of tech or at least a burnt out component; something important or expensive getting bricked if Pa or Ma couldn't figure out how to fix it. Sweet smoke meant a gang scuffle somewhere nearby; on a lower floor if we were lucky, closer if we weren’t.

So where some ponies got the bright idea that they oughta use fake smoke for the sake of ambience is something I’ll never understand. A perk of the rich, maybe, that they'd never had to smell the stuff in real life.

It’s a small comfort that, fake as it is, there’s no smell here. No charring plastic or sweet cordite or, maybe worst of all, that cloying sweetness of cigars that sticks around long after the smoker had left.

Still distracting, though. Maybe that's the intention. Get me focused on the constant looping swirls of movement at the edge of my vision instead of the ponies across the table and the cards in their hooves.

Or maybe I was overthinking things again and the smoke’s just a cheap way to fill the dead space between us. Not everything’s the result of someone trying to pull something. Even if most things were.

“Alright, read ‘em out. Let’s see how lucky y'all are tonight.”

Distraction or not, I made sure to keep an eye on my opponents at all times. They were an eclectic bunch, to be sure, but that was common around places like these where they let any old randos in.

First to lay down her cards was an abominably cute filly. Or maybe a very youthful mare. Hard to say with her huge glistening eyes, a getup that rode the line between indecent and downright silly, and a mane so complex and accessory-filled that I’d wager it’d take five stylists just to keep it together.

But her laugh was a little too deep for her voice. Her reactions a bit too exaggerated and practiced to be natural.

Most distractingly, in every free moment between hands, her eyes kept darting down and to the right, very obviously reading something only she could see and giggling.

Was she cheating? Maybe, but she certainly wasn't winning. Her luck was just downright abysmal. It helped make up for her opposite of a poker face. Hard to judge her real feelings when every hand of cards got one of the same three practiced reaction faces.

I was half convinced the mare didn't have a clue how to play and was just laying out the cards as the voices in her head told her to.

"Mou..." she pouted, jutting her lip out like she was trying to rid herself of it. "Another bad hand, desu." She bared her fan of cards, revealing a pair of sixes and a pair of aces. "Only four points. Again."

"Ha! That makes three times in a row. Are you even trying to win?" The booming challenge came from the seat across the table, occupied by a stallion ripped off the cover of a romance novel and reimagined by every teenage colt who's very confident he understands what mares want.

Namely, muscles. Muscles on top of muscles on top of muscles. Enough muscles that a competent Dr. Friesianstein could build three whole ponies out of him alone. Topped off with a coat black as pitch and a crimson mane that glowed like cooling embers.

It actually did glow, in slow irregular pulses. No doubt he shelled out a pretty credit for that feature (and I had to wonder if he knew they pulsed brighter when he got excited, like from getting a good hand).

"You wanna see how a winner plays this game? Check it! Ten points!"

He tossed his cards on the table. They jittered where they landed before snapping into a perfectly aligned row. A pair of threes, a four, and a five. A double run.

“Lucky…” the mare frowned before once again breaking into giggles at nothing.

“Still better than me,” groused the third player with its stilted monotone voice.

The third was… a robot. Not even in the derogatory slur sense of the term; there just weren’t no other word for it. Riveted metal skin, lightbulb eyes, and a pink brain in a clear plastic headcase. A robot ripped straight from the pages of a two hundred year old pulp science fiction novella.

It was a genius way to hide any body language or other tells. Something I’d have to remember for the next time I played.

"I got bupkis," said the borderline offensive stereotype, throwing down an ace, a two, a seven, and a princess. A trash hand, no doubt about it.

It turned to me, it's inequine muzzle a picture of neutrality. “Well, FarFromTheTree? You got enough to go out or do I have to suffer another round with Squeaky and Beefy here?”

I ignored the cries of outrage from the other two. With everything on the table, there was no more need to hide my smile. “Read ‘em and weep.” I dropped the cards one by one as they clipped through the table and snapped into place. Five. Nine. Ten. Princess. The score tallied up automatically, but I still read out the points just like Granny had taught me to when I was little.

“Fifteen for two, four, six, double run's twelve, pair is fourteen, and her horn makes fifteen.” The glowing peg that represented my points hopped its way to the edge of the board and slid into the sole hole at the end. “And that’s game. My win.”

Chips vanished from the table as their equivalent worth subtracted itself from their accounts and added to mine. Muscles… didn’t take it well.

He slammed his hooves through the table. “That’s it! I quit! This game is for losers anyway!” With a flash of light he vanished and his section of the table reset as though he’d never been there at all.

“Awa…” The streaming filly pouted again. “I guess I oughta go as well. Chat’s getting restless and wants me to play something more kromening. Thanks for the game! Ciao!” And she disappeared as well.

The robot turned to me. “Well, now that they’re gone, you up for another game? I got time.”

I shook my head. “Thanks, but nah. Ah got work to be gettin’ to. Maybe Ah’ll see ya around sometime.”

“Maybe,” it agreed.

Nodding a final goodbye, I reached up and out and lifted the phantom weight off my head as the world vanished.

Light. Blinding and bright that sent a sharp spike of pain straight through my eyes.

The shift from Aetherspace back to reality was always jarring, but you got used to it. There was nothing to do but wait it out as my eyes adjusted from the atmospheric candlelight of the virtual saloon to the softly strobing neon of the VR cafe where my actual body sat.

The VR Blinders quietly hummed and whirred as I unjacked the headgear and hung it back on the rack. Taking it off like that forced an automatic log-out shut-down, which was supposedly bad for the hardware, but the ones this cafe offered were clearly third or even fourth hoof models. They were already years past their planned obsolescence, kept alive by after-market mods and unlicensed patch updates. A little roughness wouldn't hurt them if they hadn't bricked by now.

I stretched the stiffness out of my limbs as I waited for my bridlewear implant to refresh its connections with the physical world. Not that I ever fully disconnected, even while in VR. That was a fine way to invite any enterprising thief to help themselves to your things, or worse, while you were in-sim.

The first notification to come was the ding of a successful disconnect from external hardware. I doubted anything malicious might have slipped in past my firewalls from the public port, especially with the hard disconnect, but I ran a quick systems sweep anyway, just to be sure.

My overlay finally snapped back on as the sweep ran in the background, highlighting details of the world around me while a blinking icon indicated two new messages. The first was a friend request from one “AlmightySteel”, the user with the robot skin. I dismissed it.

Never accept requests from randos, no matter how good their cribbage skills.

The second was a confirmation of the deposit of two hundred credits into my account. Not exactly a windfall, but it wasn't a high stakes game anyway. Enough for a week— no, two weeks of good meals. Nothing fancy, but real vegetables instead of those synthetic substitutes that never tasted quite right.

Meanwhile, my eyes still hadn’t quite adjusted back to seeing the world clearly. Maybe equine eyeballs weren’t designed to have Blinders project a false reality right down the retinas, but I’d always been a bit leery of getting full eye prosthetics. A little post-sim blurriness was a small price if it meant not having video ads piped right into my FOV.

Still, I could practically hear Ma's softly chiding voice, even after so long, warning me not to stay in VR too long lest it ruin my eyesight. And she’d been right, in the end. After Pa died and she had to pick up extra work, she’d spent more hours of the day than not working in a sim until her eyes finally did go. Even in her final moments as I held her hoof, with her last breath she'd called out to the wrong child to thank them for staying till the end.

I shook my head. Thinking about family always got me melancholy. Instead, I turned my attention to the present and the cafe that was finally clear and in-focus.

Pink was the proprietress' color of choice. Pink tile floors, pink vinyl seats, pink tinted walls. Or maybe everything was different colors but the dozens of pink neon lights dyed it all to the same hue.

Pink was also the color of the proprietress herself. A pink mare through and through (and I knew it for a fact since I once saw her outside the rosy light of her shop). Hers wasn’t the biggest or the cleanest or most teched-out eatery on the 1427th floor, but it was still my favorite for two important reasons. The first was that Pinkie Pi was the only pony I knew who could make Love Inc's black-and-pink packaged machine-separated fruit supplement paste actually taste like the apple turnover it pretended to me. The only pony still alive, that is.

As reality finished settling in enough for me to move, I finished off the last dregs of my coffee (cold now) and the remaining bite of a cricket and algae sandwich (congealed and cold) and brought the crockery back to the counter.

Pinkie greeted me with her usual smile. “All done? You've still got another fifteen minutes left in your session.”

I shrugged. “Didn't feel like another game. What do Ah owe ya?”

“Twenty credits for the uplink, five for the sammie, seven for the coffee, and another five for your usual to-go.”

My eyebrow raised as I placed my hoof on the counter, frog up. “Coffee's gone up again.”

Pinkie shrugged sadly as she placed her hoof atop mine. Our bridlewares acknowledged the connection and made the transfer. "Sorry. There's been more gang activity up in the 1700's lately. Lots of raids on Love’s shipments. They hired more security and passed the cost on to us. Typical of the megas, amiright? Anything to save a credit.”

That was how it always went. Nothing we could do about it. “Say, have you got the time?”

“Let me check.”

She froze as her eyes began to dart around. Left, right, left, right, up, down, up, down. There was always a small novelty in watching somepony else flick through their User Interface, but it was one that wore off quickly as she kept going and going and I waited.

And waited. And waited.

“Dang girl, how messy is your home screen that you can't find the clock?”

Pinkie blinked. “Oh, time. I thought you wanted to know if we had thyme, like the herb, so I was checking the shop's inventory.”

“Why would Ah be asking after some plant?”

“I dunno. Customers give me weird requests all the time.” She grabbed my plates and moved them to the sonic washer. “There's one colt who comes in from time to time and buys up all the powdered sugar and cornstarch he can carry. I tried to put him in touch with my wholesaler, but nope, he just wants to buy from me.”

“...Ah see.” I swear, sometimes that mare was just too sweet and innocent for her own good. Would it even be worth telling her exactly what that ‘colt’ was probably doing with those loose and flammable powders? Best not. He’s helping keep my favorite café in business, so there’s no need to mess up a good racket. Unless his gang becomes enough of a nuisance to someone that they’d be willing to pay for me to... intervene.

But that was a thought for another day.

Without warning, Pinkie's foreleg thrust out suddenly and knocked a stack of menus off the counter.

"Aw sugar! Not again."

“Has that been happening often?”

She stretched the offending limb out and it twitched again, nearly hitting herself in the face. "More than usual lately. Would you mind...?"

I checked my own clock. With the game finished early, I was ahead of schedule. "Sure, Ah got time."

With a little mental direction, my uplink cable snaked out from my neck to the joint in Pinkie's artificial limb. Immediately I isolated the connection in a virtual system. It wasn't that I didn't trust Pinkie—more likely it was going to be a hardware issue than software anyway—but I'd be a plum fool to jack anything directly to my own systems on blind faith. You could never be too careful. I'd seen too much malware designed to hide dormant until an out-of-network technician jacked in to fix something unrelated.

Once the connection cleared my checks, I ran a diagnostic. Her hoof jerked and spasmed on the table in rapid pre-programmed motions as the data streamed back to me.

“Looks like the secondary servo's startin’ to go. This is second-hoof?”

“At least,” she admitted. “It's a family hand-me-down. Limestone couldn't use it anymore after she got a security job with NME.”

That tracked. NME was a real stickler for employees using only their brand of implants and augments. Still, it was in surprisingly good shape for a model that old. "Ah can disable it if you want so it'll stop jerkin’ you around till you can get it serviced, but you'll lose some range of motion.”

“Please and thank you!”

Normally, anypony outside the manufacturer would need to break encryption or use company connections to talk to the BIOS of somepony else's implants, but Pinkie was lucky I wasn't just anypony. It only took a few cycles and I was deeper in her leg than anypony since the corporate techie that built it. A more malicious mare could have done anything at that point, but Pinkie was a friend and didn’t have any contracts against her, so I just did as promised and turned off a few internal switches and reflashed her drivers (just in case she had anything malicious lurking in there).

“There. Should be good to go.”

“Thanks! And here's your to-go." She set a bag on the counter. How she'd prepared that while I was code-deep in her systems was a mystery I'd never be able to solve. "Will you be leaving out the front door?"

“The back."

“Gotcha," she confirmed with a wink that was so obvious it circled back around to being inconspicuous.

I snagged my hat off the back of my chair as I headed for the ‘Employees Only’ door in the back. It synced quickly with my implants and a little icon of its remaining ammo blinked comfortingly in the corner of my sight. No one ever suspected a hat gun.

The second reason that I preferred the Pi Cafe was that it was home to one of the lesser known entrances to the Pipes.

The door was impossible to find if you didn’t already know where to look. In the back of the building, inside a disused employee’s lounge where Pinkie stored “lightly broken but not worth throwing away” furniture, at a corner where the walls of the cafe met the interior wall of the Spire itself, behind a loose panel that slid aside with some augmented strength. I stepped through into an old crawl space cluttered with wire and pipes and began my journey.

Through old ventilation ducts as wide as a hallway and service corridors long abandoned. Up old maintenance shafts and down defunct transport tubes that hadn't been used since the Central Skyway opened. Supposedly you could get anywhere in the Spire if you took the right route, but nopony’d ever claimed to have mapped enough to risk it. Sometimes I passed others on their own journeys off the official routes and away from prying eyes; we passed without acknowledging one another, save a moment’s cautious threat assessment. The Pipes weren’t a secret, but you could be sure anyone you did meet would be the kind of folks with a reason to be hiding their business in the dark.

If you knew where to look, you could even find secret rooms and hidden subfloors: off-blueprint places where the original Builders had taken their lunches and breaks.

These days nearly all of them were claimed by gangs or black markets or lumina dens, but there were still a rare few secrets that only a select few ponies knew about.

Such as my destination.

Eventually I came to a spot that didn't exist on any map or blueprint. As far as even a high-end pair of ScanEyes could tell, it was just an ordinary stretch of defunct maintenance tunnel. Checking twice for any tails (you could never be too careful) I pressed my hoof up against an innocuous rusting panel.

My bridlewear interfaced with something that hid itself even from the rest of my systems and a completely normal looking section of paneling slid away to reveal an innocent but dimly-lit barren corridor.

Or so it appeared, but I knew better. There was a treasure trove of technology just around the corner. One that, if anyone else stumbled across it, they'd be set for life. If they could survive the automated self-defense systems and then the wrath of the dragon that slept within.

I made it about a dozen steps in before warnings started flashing in my UI along with the unmistakable whine of manashot turrets revving to ready states. I counted seven, eight, at least ten that I could see. That was a couple more since my last visit.

"Easy S.P.I.K.E.! It's just me!" I shouted down the corridor while blasting my identity code. After a tense moment the growing whine petered out and the numerous self-defense systems began returning to an idle state, so I continued forward with a breath of relief.

When I rounded the corner, I was greeted by a happy chirrup and a small burst of green flame.

“Good to see you too,” I said warmly as I gave the little droid a pat on its head. As much as it had a head.

SPIKE was a cleaning drone (or at least had been at some point) and a real antique at that. One of those old clunky models, little more than a fat disc with some wheels. The kind that you didn't even see in scrap shops anymore. Fifty years out of warranty if he was a day. But since that model predated the Spire-wide droid server uplink mandate, it was easy for foals to nick ‘em from scrap floors and mod them into little rideable drag racers. Something I always assumed SPIKE must have gone through; the purple and green flame decals didn’t seem like his current owner’s style.

All in all, SPIKE looked a perfectly innocent relic to see wandering old halls like this. Something no pony would look twice at and the rest would ignore, which made him the perfect guard dog.

After all, very few ponies expected a cleaning droid to have a flamethrower and twin rotary blasters.

SPIKE followed along at my heels like an eager puppy as the final door opened into the inner sanctum of one of the very few ponies I actually gave a darn about.

The room beyond was a testament to both hoarding and a skill with machines that even I couldn’t hold an LED to. Racks of drives older than I was lined the walls, crammed in next to top-of-the-line gear that looked fresh off a 3000th floor factory. Display screens, both holographic and physical, filled the air by the dozen, hanging from makeshift mounts or hovering from hidden projectors. Tech spanning generations littered every flat surface in varying states of repair, jailbreaking, or cannibalization. Everything was webbed together by miles and miles of cables so dense some areas of the floor needed a foot-high catwalk. As much as half of them seemed to disappear into holes bored through the walls, connected to who knows what supposedly secure mainframes. I imagined that, through one hole with a solid foot-wide bundle of cables exiting through it, I could see a glimpse of the Spire's Primary Fiber Optic Backbone.

The door dropped shut behind me as I knocked some rust off my hat. Keeping the passage filthy was part of its disguise, but it didn't mean I had to be happy about it.

My contact, however, was a much better reason to be happy.

At a center plinth, surrounded by a dozen keyboards and screens sat the mare only known as Midnight. One of the most elusive figures on the dark Aethernet. The Grayhat Fixer. Zero Day Calamity. A pony shrouded in mystery and rumor whose name topped the Most Wanted list of the private mercenary forces of three different megacorps.

“Aha, Jackie! You’re early!“ Her hooves continued to fly across the keys as she spoke, her eyes unseeing as no less than six uplink cables jacked her directly into her machines. “Give me just a moment and I’ll be right with you.”

“Working on a new project?”

She laughed. “Always, but at the moment I am elucidating a sorry victim of the Dunning-Kreuger effect of the true depth of his ignorance and why pointing out grammatical errors in a rebuttal does not an effective argument make!”

I blinked as I rolled the words around. “...You’re arguing with Aethernet trolls?”

A digitized sigh echoed from all around. “For the past two hours, indeed.”

At some unseen direction, the various screens began to move. Pulley systems and waldos moved in concert until dozens of screens met, edge to edge, forming a jagged spiraling line from the top of the room to the floor. Announced by a small fanfare of harps, a white figure appeared at the top. She descended with inequine grace, gliding between screens as if their edges were a grand staircase, each step creating a burst of digitized flower petals and another ringing chord. It was like watching a goddess descend to earth.

An incredibly vain goddess, at that.

The final screen was as large as a full-length mirror with its own dedicated articulating arm and left her standing perfectly on my level. If I didn’t know better, I could’ve almost been fooled into thinking she was a perfectly normal, organic pony merely standing on the other side of a doorway.

The looping animation of a pixelized gemstone meteor shower that filled the space behind her was a helpful giveaway.

Midnight waved a vague gesture as she continued to type. “You remember my computer wife, of course.”

I doffed my hat. “Winrarity.”

Her avatar curtsied in reply, a ruby red dress manifesting just long enough for the gesture before derendering. “A pleasure to meet you.”

My eyebrow rose of its own accord. “We've met before.”

“Not technically,” she corrected with a light titter. “You met my predecessor, Winrarity.exe V6.2.7, and while I do have her memory files, I am WinRarity V10.2.1, a bold new step forward, the cutting edge of creative computing and digital fabulosity!”

“You sure act and sound like the Winrarity Ah know.”

She preened. “Naturally, darling. All the best parts are preserved while the flaws are eliminated.

Midnight yelled again from behind her keyboards and sole remaining screen. "And no more bluescreening when someone asks you for plaid."

Winrarity’s render glitched for a few frames. "W-W-Well could you blame me? Heathens, the lot of them.”

“Love my computer wife.”

Winrarity blushed, the color oddly still pixelated on her otherwise realistic appearance. “Well… yes. Well then. She'll be at it for a while yet, I fear. In the meantime, how have you been, darling?”

“Fine as anybody. Work's been steady, but Ah always prefer the jobs your lady brings." And with good reason. Better pay, better moral code, and not a single doublecross or shortchange in all the years I’d worked with her. "How've you been?"

“Quite well, thank you. Have you seen my latest collection of digital creations? I just released a new line of custom skins.”

It'd be hard not to have seen it. Every time she released something new into the Aethernet it soared to the top of the popular downloads page. No matter if it was digital clothes, custom avatars, or furniture for virtual houses, the mare had a knack for design that ponies flocked to. There were a few rich types on social media that I’d seen boasting virtual apartments decorated solely with her creations. I'd bought a few skins and accessories for different gaming lounges, but most of my money went to more practical needs.

Part of her fame was from her raw skill, but another part was the mystery surrounding her true identity. She’d once told me she considered the rumor grapevine: “more like a bonsai tree, eager to be pruned and directed”. Leading her fans on a false trail with “leaked clues” was her hobby.

“I've also been trying my hoof at physical decoration,” she continued on. “It's much more limiting than working with code, but I take it as a challenge." Her screen rose as she spread her hooves. "What do you think?"

Now that I looked around, there were a few more homey comforts to the cluttered space than I remembered. Some shelves, a functionless curtain, even a few paintings best described as ‘abstract’. But what caught my eye most was the throbbing tangle of lights on the ceiling that snaked their way down the walls like illuminated vines.

“Awful big fan of neon," I commented.

She winced at that. "A concession to practical necessity."

"Neon's cheap!" Midnight called out. "Magically and elementally stable, so I can synthesize it without any toxic byproducts."

"Yes. Quite." Winrarity shook her head. "You can lead a pony to water, but you can't make her appreciate haute couture."

Silence reigned for a moment, broken only by the sound of Midnight’s continued typing. Finally, Winrarity placed a hoof to her brow and gave an exaggerated sigh.

“I suppose if she’s not going to wrap it up anytime soon darling—”

“Nearly done! Closing arguments!”

“—then it falls to me to perform the social niceties on her behalf. It was my original core directive, after all. I believe introductions would be appropriate?”

“Didn’t we just do that?”

“Not all of us.” Her screen rotated so she faced the far corner of the room. “Oh, do stop sulking in the shadows and join us, would you? You’ll have to get to know each other if you’re going to be partners on this job.”

Partners?

I nearly fired off my hat at the sight of that terribly familiar green armored uniform stepping out of the shadows. A Peacekeeper. Why was there a Peacekeeper here? Was this a raid?

No, they would have never made it this close without Midnight knowing and she wasn’t the type to set me up. If one was here, then it was only because Midnight wanted them here. I shouldn't have been surprised she had a couple of them in her pocket.

She crossed the room with the standard stiff PK gait that got drilled into them at the academy and the scowl they got bestowed upon graduation. Half of her mane was shaved close and the remaining three stripes of color were in a tight, regulation-accommodating braid.

There was also something…off about her that unsettled me in a way I couldn’t put a name to. Like watching a character in a sim with barely wrong proportions.

“I want to make one thing clear,” she announced with a pronounced rasp. “I don’t like criminals and I don’t like working with them. The only reason I’m here is cause Midnight made me an offer I couldn’t refuse and she promised that this job wouldn’t get any civilians hurt. I don’t care if we’re knocking over some gang or even sticking it to one of the megas, but I took an oath as a Peacekeeper to protect the law-abiding citizens of the Spire and I intend to uphold it. So try any funny business and I’ll be after you like lumaddict after his fix.”

…what a load of slag. That’s a lot of pretty words coming from a source I wouldn’t trust to ask for directions. I didn’t know what’s crazier; that she expected me to believe her or that she almost sounded actually genuine.

But whatever. I’ve worked with worse types before. As much as I despised the government dogs on principle, I could put that aside and work with one for one job. And if Midnight’s confident enough to bring her in, then she must have some truly heinous blackmail on the mare.

But something about her still left me antsy and it wasn’t just that she wasn’t sticking to the usual PK dialogue tree. Normally, this would be the point in the conversation where she’d read out my full legal name and ID number along with any open warrants. Maybe Midnight had a jammer running that was cutting off her EYEdentifier from accessing the PK facial recognition database.

Then it clicked.

She didn’t have an EYEdentifier. Her eyes were completely natural. Now that I looked closer, I realized she didn’t have any mods or augments at all. No EYEdentifier, no subdermal reactive armor, no retractable wing blades or any of the rest of the standard Peacekeeper kit. Sweet Architects, she didn’t even have any bridleware ports! Aside from a mundane-looking prosthetic hoof, she was the most wholly organic pony I’d seen since Granny.

And why did that make me feel like I should recognize her from somewhere?

“Now, now,” Winrarity chided, “That’s hardly a civil way to start a working relationship, is it, Lieutenant Crash?”

That was enough to jolt the memory into place. “Wait, Crash? As in ‘Captain System Crash’?”

She visibly cringes and comes out of it with a death stare. “No. It's Rainbow Crash. And that's Lieutenant Peacekeeper Crash to you.”

I ignored her impotent anger. “So it is you. That explains a lot. Hey, Ah’ve heard the Aethernet rumors as much as anypony, but is it really true that you can’t help but blow up every piece of tech you try to use?”

“No!”

“But it's closer than she'd like to admit~” Winrarity trilled as her image was replaced by what looked like security footage of Crash at a shooting gallery. Her wrist-mounted blaster—a PK260 Pacifier, judging by the shape— got off one shot, two, then something sparked and it started leeching black smoke. She threw it away before it exploded, obliterating the target she’d been shooting at.

“You can’t—”

The video cut to another clip. Crash in flying pursuit of what looked like a pickpocket. She activated a pair of older-model Peacekeeper BoosterShoes, but instead of sending her speeding forward they immediately exploded, sending her tumbling through the air and halfway into a billboard. A third clip. Crash in a Peacekeeper office, banging her hooves on a keyboard in rage as the terminal turned a deadly blue, followed by all the nearby terminals in view. A fourth—

“Those are private!”

“Public record, actually, darling,” Winrarity crooned as she returned to the screen. Another clip started and—

Crash punched the screen. It didn’t crack, but something sparked and fizzled and popped and the image went black.

“I’d ask you not to punch my computer wife—” At some point during the clips Midnight had brought her hoverchair directly behind Crash and her sudden speaking made the Peacekeeper jump. “—but seeing how you couldn’t possibly actually harm her I’ll consider that merely a demonstration of your unique capabilities. I will be deducting the cost to repair that from your payment, however.”

Winrarity’s avatar peeked around the corner of a different screen, one high enough to be out of reach. Seeing her alarmed face, Midnight’s already stern expression hardened. “And I’d caution you against trying that stunt again.”

Showing she still had some kind of sense in her head, Crash backed down and stepped back with a muttered apology. Midnight clapped and her expression brightened. “It’s time we get down to brass tacks then. I’m sure you’re curious as to the nature of this job.”

“Curious is a word for it,” I offered. Her message had been vague on details, but included a lot of zeroes. Enough to set me up for years.

“Then let me start at the beginning!” Her hoverchair glided back and a holographic display flickered to life in the space she’d vacated. “Rares, if you would do the honors?”

“It would be my pleasure.”

Midnight grinned. “Love my computer wife.”

A hovering image appeared in the blue-tinged light of the projector. A slim octagonal box, about the size of a hoof, with unfamiliar ports along the sides. The massive wing-and-horns logo embossed on one side was unmistakable, even if the tech itself wasn’t.

“Feast your eyes on the latest miracle from Celestech’s most heavily-guarded thinktank: the Alicorn Processor Chip. It is the singularly most advanced piece of technology ever developed in Equestrian history.”

To be honest, I wasn’t terribly impressed. Every few years they released something that was promised to be “the next big thing” but it just made VR graphics a little better and twice as expensive. Crash looked to be thinking the same thing. “It can’t be that impressive.”

“Don’t underestimate it,” Midnight snapped, catching me off guard with her sudden seriousness. “I am not hyperbolizing. The Alicorn Processor Chip is a technological breakthrough on par with the invention of the transistor or the steam engine. It is orders of magnitude more powerful than the current top-of-the-line models.” She paused for a moment, then continued in a lighter tone. “Let me put it like this: you’re familiar with Cadenza? The AI that runs Love Inc.’s marketing department?”

Winrarity helpfully pulled up an image of the mare in question. Not that she needed to. I knew her face from half the food packaging I came across.

I nodded, as did Crash.

“The server banks and processor farms needed to run her higher functions and let her think take up nearly the entirety of floors 2256 and 2257. The Alicorn Processor Chip could run her entire program with flops to spare.”

Silence hung in the room as we digested that. Now the payout made a lot more sense. Whoever this job’s client was had some deep pockets and enormous ambitions.

“At this moment,” Midnight continued, “only one single prototype of the Chip exists. By tomorrow, it will be in Celestech’s deepest, most heavily defended blacksite. That’s why your job is—”

“No.”

My eyes snapped towards the Peacekeeper who was shaking her head like a mare possessed. “You can count me out. I don’t care how many credits you dangle in front of me, I am not going to get myself killed trying to steal the golden egg from the most cut-throat and heavily-armed megacorporation in the Spire.”

“I don’t expect you to,” Midnight quickly cut her off. “And you don’t have to, because someone already did.”

“Huh?”

“Rares? Next slide please.”

The hologram changed to a, frankly, twisted and confusing-looking flowchart with too many abbreviated terms to try and follow.

“Our client isn’t the only one aware of the existence of the Chip, nor the only one trying to claim it for themselves. In the last six hours it’s already changed hooves more than a dozen times.”

The first link in the chain glowed red alongside a timestamp. “It was first stolen from Celestech by a deep cover industrial saboteur working for Sunset Industries. Their agent was intercepted by a special ops team working, through deniable assets, for the Flom Conglomerate. A member of that team was a mole for the Hooffield crime family, who betrayed his partner and delivered the chip to the family's vaults on floor 1878.”

Links of the chain changed color as she recounted the path the Chip had taken, dropping a few floors lower with each handoff.

“The family head used it as collateral to strike a deal with the McColt Gang, only for a disloyal lieutenant to steal it for themselves. She then sold it on the dark Aethernet to an unnamed buyer, but during transport the courier was arrested by a Peacekeeper squadron on 1645 and the Chip was taken into evidence. However, a member of the force there is on the Glow Syndicate’s payroll and arranged to have it diverted from the secure evidence vault on 1500 to gang controlled territory. Some hacking, courtesy of a hired agent, sent it to Crimson Hooves territory instead. Next, it was—”

Midnight’s monologue was interrupted by a surprisingly unprofessional groan from the resident Peacekeeper. “This is why I never joined the counter-gang units. Too much politics. Do we really need to hear every mafia and gangster that this thing has passed through?”

“I suppose it's not mission critical information. I'll skip to the end. After several more thefts and raids between factions that would have been impossible for anyone else to track, I've traced the Chip's current location to the donations chamber of the Lunarists Convocation on floor 1199.”

“What.” Crash blinked. “The Lunarists? How did those wackos end up with it?”

Midnight rolled her eyes. “You asked me to skip to the end.”

“Ah’ve never heard of them. Are they a new gang?”

Crash scoffed. “Hardly. They’re a religious movement, or so they claim.” The hologram shifted aside to make room for a rotating logo of a crescent moon bearing a silhouette of a mare’s face in profile. “A bunch of loonies who think we're building a tower to the moon where some mythical princess is waiting to welcome us all to a new world with no walls and clean air.”

A snort of disbelief escaped before I could stop it. “What a bunch of idiots. Everypony with half a brain knows they only keep buildin’ more floors cause the rich ain't ever satisfied with how many luxury apartments and day spas and bowling alleys they have. Simple greed, no divine guidance needed.”

“Pretty much. Captain Dust’s got a major hateboner for them for some reason, but there’s something irregular with the rules regarding that floor that’s been preventing her from being able to scrape together enough favors to get a raid sanctioned. There’s actually a betting pool at the precinct for which gang they’re a cover for. I got three hundred credits on the Dream Warriors.”

“I thought they got wiped out a few years back?”

“It’s a longshot bet, but the payout will be huge if I’m right.” She paused and turned to Midnight with a hopeful expression. “I guess you’d be the one to know. Is it the Dream Warriors? Please say it is.”

“Unfortunately not. It was a surprise to me as well, but as far as I can tell they’re actually not a front. They’re genuine believers.”

I couldn’t believe it. “Genuine believers? In a pony on the moon?”

Midnight shrugged indifferently. “There are some ancient legends that seem to support their theology, but while much of the congregation genuinely believes, it’s primarily just an untaxable way for the self-appointed ranking clergy to line their own pockets through donations.”

Yeah, that made much more sense with how the world works. “So, however they got the Chip, what are these Lunarists plannin’ on doing with it?”

“According to my information,” she hesitated for a moment, like she couldn't believe what she was about to say. “They plan on giving it back to Celestech as part of their regular donations and as thanks for their continued work to build the Spire closer to their deity.”

“What,” I deadpan.

“That's ridiculous!” Crash adds.

“Agreed. That's why I need you two to go and steal it from them before they can give it back.” The hologram clicked off and she guided her chair towards us. “This is the Chip’s most vulnerable moment. If it makes it back to Celestech’s hooves, it’ll be gone forever. That’s why I’ve called you two, the best ponies for the job, to get it done right and get it done now.”

She made a compelling case, but one thing still nagged at me. Only Crash asked it before I could. “So why us? What makes us the best for the job?”

“That should be obvious,” Midnight stated. When neither me nor Crash said anything, she continued. “There are several reasons, most of which don’t concern you directly and you needn’t worry about, but the two of you have particular affinities with machines that will be critical if things go down the waste chute. A lockpick and a sledgehammer, if you’re feeling metaphorical.”

Well, she was right about that much. I doubted some grifter cult would have any substantial security in place, but a brute force solution was sometimes the best play. And it did sound like an easy job. Dangerously easy. “And Ah assume you’ve got a plan in place to make sure we don’t call down the thunder on our heads from every gang and megacorp from here to the pinnacle afterward?”

“Naturally.” She leaned back in her chair and steepled her hooves. “While you’re on the ground I’ll be managing overwatch. Disguising your digital tracks, laying false trials, obscuring identities. I’ve even prepared a dummy chip for you to swap out so neither Celestech nor anypony will be able to tell when the real one left circulation.”

“So then all the gangs will be tied up fighting each other over a chip that's no longer in play,” Crash summarized, looking much less unhappy about the situation than she had earlier. “Then what happens once we get it back here?”

“You can go on your way, with payment in whatever currency you prefer, and I’ll handle delivering it to the client.”

“And what’s the client going to do with it?”

Midnight frowned and a touch of steel entered her voice. “That's their business and theirs alone. I will say though that I implicitly trust the hooves that it will be ending up in.”

She hopped out of her chair and closed the distance between us, offering a hoof and a devilish grin.

“So, are you onboard to make the biggest payday of your lives?”