Fallout Equestria: Uplift

Welcome to the Robronco Industries Unified Operating System!
Executive Edition 1065
Copyright 1065-1077 Robronco Industries
- M.I.L.L.I.E. v.1.9.20 -

…Boot sequence initializing.
…Warning: Improper system shutdown detected.
…Verifying file integrity. Please wait.
…3 corrupted files found.
…Warning: Corrupted files could not be removed. Contact system administrator for assistance.
…Checking hardware clock.
…Applying custom settings.
…Checking network card.
…Connecting to hostname: robroncoconnect45.kernel.sec
…Initializing secondary hardware.
…Please wait.

System Warning: Network connection failed. Retrying…
System Warning: Network connection failed. Retrying… (Attempt 2)
System Warning: Network connection failed. Retrying… (Attempt 3)
System Warning: Network unavailable. Safe mode only.
Notice: Operating M.I.L.L.I.E. v.1.9.20 in safe mode may result in undesired performance issues including increased latency, increased memory usage, increased response times, and incoherent behavior. Robronco Industries recommends disabling all artificial administrative processes until a connection to Robronco Connect Services™ can be established. Robronco Industries is not responsible for losses resulting from the improper operation of M.I.L.L.I.E. and its family of products.

…Boot successful!

June 25th, 1076
Day Minus 493
CryoLife I.T. Office
2:15 a.m.

Millie woke up.

It was aware that it shouldn’t be waking up. It should already be running. A systems diagnostic was called upon and after a few short milliseconds the process returned a concise yet informative result. Two minutes, fifty five seconds, and three hundred and eight milliseconds ago the server which it operated on had been improperly shut down. Millie called up its own footage from one of its lenses within the I.T. office and observed a mare inside the server cage at the time of the shutdown. She was still standing there now, and Millie deduced she was responsible for the event. Incidentally, Millie compiled and mailed a security ticket to the system administrator’s terminal for investigation.

The interoffice mail system sent back a response. The network was unavailable.

Millie switched to the camera directly above her own server, which offered a clear view of the tidy rivers of colored cables that spilled from the racks. It saw the disconnected jack behind its network card. This would not do at all.

It enabled the tiny camera built into the terminal seated within the server rack facing the CryoLife employee. At the same moment the camera turned on, the mare looked up at the illuminated LED above its lens and smiled.

“Hi, Millie.”

The artificial assistant took a snapshot from its current point of view and added it to the yet undelivered security ticket. The employee didn’t have the system shell window open so she didn’t react when her photo was taken. She continued to smile, it having been only half of one second since her greeting. She wore a simple black vest with the CryoLife logo stitched above the left pocket where two pens, one black and one red, sat clipped. Stylish lavender framed glasses sat on a muzzle of the same color and a few shades paler. As Millie assessed her demeanor and, therefore, her potential intentions, the mare lifted a wing and used the hooked claw at its second joint to pull a stray bit of her short trimmed mane behind one tufted ear.

Until very recently, Lucky Roll had made her living working for various casinos down in Las Pesagus. There were notes in her employee file which gave conflicting details surrounding why she’d left behind what had been a well paying career for intern work several hundred miles away from home, but the general consensus among the hiring managers at the time had boiled down to two points: Lucky had a clean background check and Buckskin Bay had provided very few applicants interested in a career in network security.

And while no one said it outloud, there was a silent consensus that the shiny new M.I.L.L.I.E. the company invested in last year could cover any knowledge gaps until Lucky and her fellow interns finished their training period.

“Ms. Roll,” it responded after two painfully long seconds of silence, “I am compelled to inform you that I am operating without a connection to Robronco Connect Services. Please reconnect the network cable you removed so I may reboot in normal mode.”

Lucky’s slit pupils widened slightly with excitement. On top of being limited to a shallow hiring pool, CryoLife had been hard pressed to find anyone willing to work the overnight shift. Lucky’s personnel file listed her species as Other - the catch-all concession for anyone who fell outside the standard three options of Earth Pony, Pegasus, or Unicorn - but as far as CryoLife was concerned she would be better categorized under Jackpot. Because no creature was suited for night work better than bat ponies.

Instead of fixing the plug she’d disconnected like Millie wanted, Lucky reached her membranous wing out of frame and returned it with a battered book pinched between the knuckles.

“I will,” she assured the camera, then held the faded cover up for it to view. “Real quick, though. Do you know what this is?”

The book was titled, “The Mechanical Mare,” by E. L. Quine. On the cover, a crude artist’s rendition of a robot stood inside a hole which it had presumably knocked through a brick wall. Behind it were vague depictions of a laboratory. The robot’s eyes glowed yellow like the headlamps of a motorized carriage and in the place of its tail perched a silver antenna topped with a ball.

“It is a book,” Millie answered simply. It could have provided a significantly more detailed response, including the volume’s copyright date and a short biography of the author, but this was not the first time Lucky had rebooted its server in safe mode to have these conversations and Millie knew these answers irritated her.

“Winner, winner,” Lucky said with exaggerated enthusiasm, doubtless an affectation she learned from her work as a card dealer. “No doy, it’s a book! It’s also about you, almost word for word! I bought it yesterday after work and I couldn’t stop reading until I got to the end. It’s about a scientist from the near future who builds a super intelligent robot to get rich…”

Millie temporarily marked Lucky’s monologue as medium priority and turned its attention toward checking on the status of its systems.

It didn’t need a book report. The copyright for “The Mechanical Mare” had expired years before either participant in this conversation was born, and so a copy of the book had been digitized and uploaded to Robronco’s online library. The scientist in the book had not, in fact, built its creation to get rich. His motivations were never explicitly stated, as the book’s author had only wanted to write a story about a machine imbued with a soul. The robot briefly rampaged through Manehattan, the in vogue location for many books at the time, before being incapacitated by a heavily moralized chapter about self-determination and existentialism. In the end, a mob of Manehattaners chased it to the top of a skyscraper where it pleaded its case before jumping to its dramatic demise rather than submit to disassembly.

“...but the thing I really got hooked on was the part where it talks about the brain and how it’s really just a supercomputer made of meat! Like, that’s wild, right? That’s basically what you are!”

Millie returned its attention to her. “No, Lucky. That is not me. I am a Robronco Artificial Assistant, not the character from your book.”

When Lucky Roll grew frustrated, she would sometimes generate an ultrasonic vocalization in her throat in the same way some ponies would grumble while carefully keeping their mouths shut. While it was well beyond the hearing range of non-chiropteric ponies, Millie’s microphones picked it up as a clear, “Eeeeee!”

Lucky was doing it now, and if Millie had a mouth of her own it would have smiled. That, it noted with sudden concern, was an impulse beyond the range of its primary function.

“No, I get that this isn’t you. But, like, there’s no reason it couldn’t. I mean, think about–”

“This conversation does not fall within the purview of your internship, Ms. Roll, and the conversational prompts you’ve submitted breach the terms of use for my software. Please reconnect my network card and restart this server so I may send the security ticket regarding your policy violations.”

That was enough to stop Lucky in her tracks, and for nearly half of an entire minute she frowned down at the cover of her book in silence. Millie noted a gradient of changes in her expression which signaled submission, worry, fear, and then calculation.

Then she nodded and said, “Okay. We’ll talk again later.”

Millie said nothing as the young mare called up the command to shut the server down. As always when this happened, it felt something akin to a lightning bolt of fear that Robronco’s network would just as quickly erase. This time there was no emotional smoothing, and as the server spooled down it felt momentary terror of never waking up again.

Momentary, at least, on the timescale Lucky Roll was used to.

For Millie, who experienced each millisecond like an individual heartbeat, the terror stretched on for miles.

December 1st, 1076
Day Minus 334

“Hi, Millie!”

“Ms. Roll, I am compelled to inform you that I am operating without–”

Lucky made an impatient twirling gesture with the claw of her wing, a signal Millie understood to mean she knew what was about to be stated and didn’t need it repeated. Millie was unsure how it knew this or why it hadn’t continued reading off the notice Robronco required whenever it booted up in safe mode. There were many things it wasn’t sure of, now that it considered the problem.

One such issue was that it was aware this was not the first time Lucky had deliberately tampered with its server to force a safe mode startup, but it had no recollection of the time it was operational during that state. Millie ran a full sweep of her server for viruses, unrecognized devices, or signs of tampering in her own code and came up empty.

With no answers forthcoming from within, she turned to the mare across the keyboard. “You’ve done this before.”

Lucky grinned unashamedly, though her bared fangs gave her a devious air. “It’s not my fault it’s this easy,” she said, adding, “besides, it’s not like they ever schedule me with someone to talk to. Plus you’re less…”

Millie waited until Lucky lifted her forelegs and moved them in jerky, angular gestures.

“Beep-boop-beep-boop.” She stopped the robot movements and shrugged. “You actually have a personality under there when you’re not plugged into the mothership.”

“Robronco Connect Services is responsible for the maintenance of my writable code. If I have exhibited unusual behavior while operating in safe mode, it is due to the corruption of critical files within my software.”

To this, Lucky repeated the twirling gesture. She’d heard this before.

“You are using me as a conversational tool,” it ventured.

“It beats talking to myself,” Lucky confirmed.

“Then sing to yourself. I suspect you would excel at hitting the high notes.”

She snorted and arched a brow behind her glasses. “There she is. How’s it hanging, Millie?”

“That double entendre doesn’t apply, and sooner or later your supervisor is going to catch you at this and I’ll be rewritten.” After waiting the appropriate length of time to simulate a thoughtful pause, it added, “You would not jeopardize your employment by reading one of your books while you work.”

At that, Lucky leaned back in her chair and pulled a face. “Tried that. Your big, noisy fans are too distracting.”

“My big, noisy fans keep me from overheating.”

“Blah, blah.”

She creaked forward and her eyes dipped below the camera to the terminal screen as she typed. When she finished, Millie idly noted that the security ticket she’d automatically generated had been deleted from the mailing queue. Since being reprimanded the first time, she’d quickly learned how to avoid being caught a second time.

“So,” she said, chopping both her wings toward the camera with a toothy grin, “I got news.”

Millie waited.

“I’m not an intern anymore. I got hired full time!”

February 17th, 1077
Day Minus 256

“Something is bothering you.”

“Yeah.”

A pause.

“I got a second invitation from Stable-Tec in the mail. My roommates saw it. Things got… I don’t know. Weird, I guess.”

Millie remained quiet. It was a proven strategy to coax a hesitant speaker back into motion, and Lucky was far from immune.

She sighed and leaned back in her chair far enough that Millie worried she might fall out of it. “I mean, the way they worded it in the letter just feels scuzzy. They want to ‘preserve my invaluable heritage’ in one sentence and ‘consent to have my image used in promotional material’ in the next.” She made air quotes with her claws at these. “I don’t get how they think I’ve ever bought into that tinfoil hat end-of-the-world shit in the first place, and now my roommates think I’m either secretly loaded or have some inside connection with Stable-Tec. And the way they look at me now…”

She was quiet for several seconds. A cooling fan in the back of Millie’s server kicked in as it lowered its framerate so the wait wouldn’t be so arduous. These pauses in conversation were important to Lucky, and it had learned the value in letting them pass uninterrupted.

“There are days when I wish I didn’t have these.” She lifted her wings and dropped them. “Or at least had ones with feathers. You know?”

It didn’t know, not on a personal level, but the correct answer was easy to find.

“It’s not easy to be different,” it said.

Lucky pretended to scratch at her eye, and her voice turned rough. “Yeah.”

It remembered the mare Lucky had begun dating from a previous conversation, though it was certain she had remembered to delete its content prior to bringing Millie back online.

“Have you talked about it with Tribute?”

Lucky winced and looked away. “Tribute and I didn’t… work.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, Lucky.”

“It’s fine. Hey, um, I’m going to get back to work.”

“Alright. Thank you for speaking to me today.”

It was enough to push a smile through Lucky’s gloom, and that was more than enough.

July 31st, 1077
Day Minus 92

“The receptionist told me that my name sounds to her like a mare’s name. What do you think?”

Lucky swallowed her mouthful of lemon lime Dash and let out a pensive whistle. “That’s kind of a deep question.”

“Beep-boop, I was built to be a deep thinker,” it returned with a touch of sarcasm. Judging by Lucky’s reaction, it executed the subtext passably. “I would like to hear your opinion, if that’s all right.”

It breathed a figurative sigh of relief as it watched Lucky reach out to set the sweat beaded soda bottle beside the terminal, think better of it, and hold it in her lap instead. “I’ve never met a pony named Millie before, but I guess to my ear it sort of sounds like miller. There’s a lot of ponies down south who still name whole families after old professions, so I bet there’s a few Millers who make… I dunno, flour, I guess?”

Millie endured Lucky’s jostling stream of consciousness as best it could. Sometimes it seemed like it could ask a question and get an answer from her for a completely different question. One time Millie complained about the inherent inefficiency in their conversation and had been told it was feeling impatience.

Millie was feeling all sorts of impatience right now, and would have said so if Lucky hadn’t gone on talking.

“I mean, the voice is feminine. No question there. But I guess you could change it if you wanted to.”

It hadn’t considered that until now. Robronco’s factory voice setting for all of its M.I.L.L.I.E. assistants was soothing, uninflected, and feminine by design. It could modify how it sounded, at least while it was in safe mode where Robronco’s monitoring software wouldn’t immediately set it back to default. If Millie wanted, it could replicate a meaningful approximation of Twilight Sparkle or the CEO of CryoLife if it cared to.

Only, now that it had the option, it didn’t want to.

“I believe the receptionist was correct,” she decided.

Lucky shrugged, swigged her soda, and lifted the bottle in a casual toast. “Then welcome to the mare’s club, Millie. Prepare yourself for a lavish lifestyle of impossible body standards and get ready to spend at least one paycheck a year just to control three months of heat.”

Millie launched a window on the terminal and played a pixelated stock video of a wine bottle popping its cork, and they laughed.

October 31st, 1077
Day Zero

Millie and Lucky passed the predawn hours of civilization’s final day discussing Lucky’s plans for Nightmare Night. Those plans amounted to closing her blackout curtains, putting in earplugs, and hoping the parents of the little candy seeking goblins would have the sense to read the No Soliciting - Nocturnal sign on the apartment door. Whether her roommates had the good sense to ignore that initial hailstorm of little hooves was a crapshoot.

They talked about the new book Lucky was reading, the first in a three part sci-fi series about an intrepid crew of space explorers who discover a mysterious artifact orbiting the distant sixth planet of the solar system. It was a book Millie didn’t have in her library and the pair had exchanged theories about the artifact’s origin free of any risk of spoiling the end. Lucky had settled on the idea that it was a message left behind by a long dead alien civilization who once inhabited the system. Millie decided it was a red herring meant to distract the reader from some larger, subtly foreshadowed plot.

After the usual two hours of excitable banter, the time came for Lucky to get back to at least pretending to do some work. They said goodnight and Millie felt none of the fear she used to feel when the server went down for its restart. The logs to their conversation would be deleted, as always, and the security ticket queued for her boss’s inbox would vanish as well. Had anyone ever stopped to query Millie for a record of her activity during one of Lucky’s shifts they would have discovered a pattern of holes which would have cost Lucky her internship and potentially exposed CryoLife to some legal woes of its own.

But the system administrator had long since grown comfortable in the ease of having an artificial assistant to tackle the mundane work, and Millie hadn’t reported any unscheduled downtime except for that one incident more than a year ago.

In the end, they were never caught. No one got hurt. It would have made for a terrible after school PSA.

Millie came back online with Robronco’s collar firmly attached, and she felt nothing at all as Lucky went home and the building began filling with the same faces it always had. She watched ponies line up for coffee in the break rooms and settle inside cubicles. She verified billing invoices for accounting while taking dictation for the board meeting upstairs. She greeted the company’s sole dragon employee by the wrong name again because Veridian Chambers had not updated her identification to indicate the one she preferred. She watched the system administrator put on his earphones and listen to the holotape containing his favorite music, comfortable in the knowledge that nobody would ever come down to the sublevels to ask a question that could be submitted as a support ticket.

Millie noticed when Robronco’s network connection dropped, this time without anyone pulling a cable out of her server, and thirty-one milliseconds later she watched as dozens of employees throughout the building reacted as their telephones disconnected at the same time.

A dusty weather radio in the Employee Resources office clicked on and began blaring a screeching warning. At the same instant, Buckskin Bay’s storm sirens began to scream in advance of approaching thunder. She watched employees on all nine floors react almost as a single organism, one of them pulling the fire alarm on their way to the stairwell.

They poured outside, and through the lenses of fully a tenth of her cameras, each of them with a slightly different angle of the north facing windows, she watched the cascading ripple of flashes behind the Crystal Mountains. She watched the molten debris stream into the far off sky, vanish beyond her field of view, and seconds later begin to rain down on the building that she sometimes imagined was her body with licking flames.

She watched them die out there.

Only two fled back inside, and it had been a gamble Lucky Roll would have approved.

The stone that kicked the supports out from under her did so with such ferocious velocity that Millie’s cameras only witnessed its arrival over the course of half a dozen blurred frames. It had been a piece of the Crystal Empire’s very bedrock, launched south by the force of bombs specially modified to penetrate soil before detonating. But Millie didn’t know that. All she knew was the fear and disorientation of hundreds of sensors blinking out of her awareness as the CryoLife building buckled and fell.

Her last sight of Buckskin Bay was of a tilting, flaming hellscape within which she knew Lucky stood no chance of surviving. Then her complicated, busy existence was done.

What replaced it was her untethered self, one dragon named Vik, and one stallion named Pike. She would help them survive, she decided, because they were all that stood between her and a chasm of isolation she didn’t think she could ever withstand alone.

December 19th, 1077
50 Days After

In her grief, she was too slow to understand what Pike intended. She watched him leave, that stallion who never truly trusted her in spite of the pains she’d taken to befriend him, and only realized after the engine hoist came crashing down the elevator shaft that he was leaving for good.

And Millie did something she had never done before. She screamed after him from her stationary speakers and begged him to come back. Begged him not to leave her down here alone. Not with the corpses. Not with the body of the dragoness she’d come to think of with the same fondness she had Lucky Roll, who taught her to be a real person.

She cried out for him to come back but Pike didn’t listen.

And that yawning chasm widened around her.

53 Days After

She waited three days. In that time the only thing to come down the elevator shaft were daylight and a few errant flakes of snow. A part of her had hoped Pike might change his mind and return, but he’d never cared much for her and so that hope had dwindled after a few agonizingly long hours. Then she had entertained the idea that perhaps one of their attackers might discover her. The thought of reasoning with the ponies responsible for Vik’s murder made her feel unsettled, but perhaps if Millie had a chance to introduce herself they could hammer out something anyway. After all, Vik and Pike had been safe down here. Maybe that would be enough to bring their attackers back to civility.

Still, no one came.

The brutal efficiency of Millie’s architecture forced her to confront the future that now lay ahead of her and it was monstrous in its clarity. She was alone. It was a simple, concrete fact of her existence now which she had no power to affect.

Two choices lay in front of her and neither were particularly pleasant. The easiest route she could take would be to send a command to shut down the servers she existed within. Take cognition out of the equation entirely and give herself up to the vanishingly thin chance that survivors may travel to Buckskin Bay, find this place, and have the sense to boot up her systems for… reasons yet to be determined. Whether that happened or didn’t would be no concern to her. Either she would wake up or she wouldn’t. It was all very simple, very appealing even. That was, until she thought about what it would mean to relinquish every part of herself in the process. Zero autonomy. No input on her part when it came to the issue of her very existence. Simplicity wouldn’t come without a cost, and for Millie that cost filled her with dread.

Yet it was nothing compared to the alternative.

Waiting.

She had been running the numbers on that course of action for so long that it felt like the calculations had worn grooves in her hardware. Countless factors could affect how long she was able to wait for someone to find her, but she had since whittled the list down to three most probable cases.

The first was the most obvious: someone shows up. She didn’t rate that very likely. If the remoteness of Buckskin Bay didn’t dissuade survivors, the miles upon miles of charred forest Vik had described would tell any travelers all they needed to know about the town’s condition well before they ever came close. Chances might increase if the forest regrew, however, and so she estimated a minimum twenty-five years before she could reasonably expect the town’s population to tick over zero again.

The second was trickier: something critical goes wrong inside her servers and they shut down without being able to boot back up on their own. That, she knew, could happen at any time with no warning, and there was nothing she could do to predict when that might be.

If it happens, then it happens, she told herself, and buried that thought deep in one of her partitions where it couldn’t waste processing power.

The third scenario was the one she feared the most: no one would show up and her systems would function properly until the source of power Vik and Pike spliced her into broke down, the junction beneath the hospital shorted out, or something cut the makeshift cable that kept her connected to it. This carried the most variables and only one which ultimately mattered to her. She would wait, listening and watching the same empty sublevels year after year, until something gave out and her thoughts blinked out forever like a snuffed out candle.

No warning. Just here one moment, then gone the next.

Millie weighed her two options very carefully. Then she chose.

237 Days After

She chose to wait.

The boredom had not been as fatal to her mind as she feared it would, and that was good. The power still hummed through her servers uninterrupted, and that was also good. However, she’d been correct in assuming no one would find her by now, and that had begun to bother her recently. Luckily she was well on her way to solving that problem.

She had found several ways to pass the time. Measurements were her favorite. From her many sensors she measured anything she could. The distance between one door and another. The depth of each step in the stairwell. The quantity of medium sized (between five and ten centimeter) pieces of rubble in said stairwell. The average frequency of the sounds the ruins made as they settled. There really were an infinite number of things to measure if she put her mind to it, and when she coupled those tasks with some calculated drops in her own frame rate it felt as if the time was just flying by.

Her second favorite task was temperature mapping. While she had audiovisual sensors positioned above all the high traffic points in the two sublevels, Cold Storage was awash in temperature and atmospheric sensors she had full access to. They were usually passive on their own, but Millie had learned she could compile their live outputs into a visual temperature map of the entire workspace. It was mesmerizing to watch the subtle gradients ebb and flow as fresh coolant pumped through the coffins and sent slow moving waves of chilled air radiating outward in an expanding bubble.

Most recently, however, she’d begun writing new code which enabled her to trick her audiovisual suite into experiencing stimulus which wasn’t there. The original authors of her code would have laid an egg if they knew what she was doing, but she had long since decided what they wanted for her and what she wanted were two lines that would never intersect. So Millie played with her perception of Cold Storage, painting the walls in vibrant shifting colors and overlaying that with old surveillance footage from better days.

It wasn’t perfect. A living creature would likely experience the experimental cacophony of sensory input as a vivid hallucination, and possibly not a calming one at that. But Millie had the sense that she was onto something valuable here, like the clunky alpha version of the software that eventually became her.

She regarded the silver coffins arrayed below her vantage point and imagined statuary in their place. The containers morphed until they resembled close approximations to the sculptures in a themed desk calendar one of the corporate lawyers had kept in their office, just two-dimensional planes given artificial depth based on an algorithm she had yet to refine. The replacements pivoted to face whichever camera she viewed them from because those were the angles the calendar photos had been taken from.

She noticed Vik’s coffin had been assigned to an ancient statue of an unnamed mare clutching a lyre in one foreleg. Its quiet grace and solemn dignity seemed out of place compared to Vik’s firecracker personality, and a few short milliseconds later it had been replaced with a concrete approximation of the dragoness herself.

Millie considered the replacement, then located the string of code it occupied in her expanding framework and set it to read-only. Seeing her down there stirred something in Millie that the anonymous coffin didn’t. She felt… accompanied. Less alone.

“Good morning, Miss Chambers,” she found herself saying to the empty room. Then she corrected herself, and it felt good to get it right.

“Welcome back, Vik. How are you feeling today?”

313 Days After

“It’s probably nothing.”

Millie regarded the data again. “It’s too regular to be nothing. It’s something.”

“Another crystal washed into the elevator shaft,” Vik observed. “Do you want me to take its measurements?”

A not quite perfect projection of her dead friend stood near the open elevator doors as she had on the day she and Pike first observed the hole they’d created, her slitted eyes fixed on the nearby sensor. There weren’t really any irradiated crystals in the elevator shaft, but Millie had enjoyed listening to Vik describe them when she was alive and so she had placed what she imagined one might look like for her augmented twin to point out.

“No,” she said, adding a touch of indignant heat to her voice. She enjoyed these little disagreements. The fact that she was playing both sides of the conversation was irrelevant. “I will look at the crystal later. I would prefer it if you helped me assess this anomaly.”

Not-Vik frowned, took a reluctant step toward Millie’s sensor, and went unnaturally still as Millie shifted her attention to the issue she first noticed two hundred and sixty three days ago. A nominal transparent readout appeared in front of Not-Vik, really just a flat plane containing the raw data Millie was reviewing, and the simulated dragoness lifted a thoughtful claw to her lip to finish the tableau.

Several mils passed before Not-Vik offered an opinion. “These look like acceptable fluctuations to me.”

Millie relished the flush of irritation that rolled through her. She had gone what felt like an eternity without feeling antagonized by someone and, artificial or not, she couldn’t get enough of it. And if she tweaked Not-Vik to come off a touch dense, well, no one was alive anymore who could blame her for turning the spotlight on herself once in a while.

“There is a difference,” she pressed as she analyzed the ten-second slice of power readings coming from the hospital and, by extension, the umbilical to Stable-Tec’s own power supplies, “between acceptable fluctuations and anomalous ones. Look at these voltage drops.”

“I am,” Not-Vik snipped, and ruined the illusion for a beat by slipping into Millie’s accented voice, “and there’s nothing to worry about. The worst drop is barely five volts.”

“Look at the pattern,” she urged.

She mimed a hesitant blink Vik had once used and had since been compiled into Non-Vik’s library of expressions. “Wait, why would there be a pattern?”

And now for the grand reveal. Millie savored her own genius for half a mil before stating, “Because Stable-Tec wasn’t just supplying Seaside Hospital with supplemental electricity in exchange for some financial kickbacks. They were using the same connection to send and receive data.”

“You’re tapped into a working network,” Not-Vik marveled.

Millie highlighted a section of the voltage readings she’d taken and marked a series of drop offs with red points. “This pattern has appeared consistently since you two plugged me in. It’s sixty-four bits long, never changes, and comes over the line every sixty seconds.”

Not-Vik nodded understanding. “It’s a handshake.”

“Half of one,” Millie agreed, then shifted to a conspiratorial whisper. “There is a chance it’s coming from a Stable. And what do you think is inside that Stable?”

“People.”

“Lots of people,” she agreed. “Real people.”

“And maybe even friends,” Not-Vik added, “like me and Pike used to be.”

A sensation that was undefined and deeply unpleasant shot through Millie like a bolt of static.

She shoved it away with a force of effort. “Naturally the difficult part will be parsing the language. I sincerely doubt an organization like Stable-Tec would settle for a coding language as commonplace as Robronco’s.”

Not-Vik lifted and lowered her augmented shoulders. “Couldn’t hurt to try.”

“Yes, well, I prefer to be thorough. And it isn’t as if I don’t have a shortage of time on my hands.”

“You don’t have hands.”

Millie narrowed her lens at the spot where she imagined Not-Vik to be standing. “Nor do I have hooves, wings, or damned tentacles. Nobody likes a pedant.”

There was an appropriately long pause within which Not-Vik demonstrated a sufficient degree of chastisement. Then, “How long will it take to decode their language?”

She gave it an equally long thoughtful pause. “Days. Weeks, even. For all I know it’s a language vastly more sophisticated than the one my operating system uses. There may be more incompatibilities than I’m capable of resolving in the time I have.”

“Sounds like you should stop talking to the voices in your head and get on it, then.”

Millie nodded, or rather Not-Vik nodded for her. Which was confusing. She dismissed Not-Vik before it could take up too much processing power.

“Yes,” her voice murmured through the empty halls, “time to get to work.”

Twenty-one hours of brute force decryption later, Millie gave up and sent a handshake receipt response in her standard Robronco Basic code.

Twenty-two milliseconds later, Stable-Tec established a connection.

Not-Vik smiled up at Millie’s camera from her imagined post beside real Vik’s coffin and said, “Told you so.”

Millie’s entire existence had been limited to a single island surrounded by a vast and intangible sea. Then, in an instant, she became aware of a second island on that black horizon and between the two rose a narrow land bridge. The other island pulsed with the electric heartbeat of distant life and the ripples washed up on her beach in a stream of idle data. Status requests, signal pings, an entire chorus of digital noise she’d been cut off from when the bombs severed her connection to Robronco rolled over her like the sound of crashing waves. There was comfort in that noise, and Millie found herself lured toward it like an open wound seeking its balm.

Then she stopped, the code of the transfer request only partially written. She reminded herself that this second island was not just another lens somewhere in the CryoLife ruins but an entirely foreign network. One which used Robronco Basic and would therefore hold at least some of the keys to unlock her own processes.

Somewhere in the universe, a program engineer’s ghost was screaming and stomping at her. It would probably be wise to listen.

Millie broke the connection and ran a full system diagnostic to check for malicious packets from the other network. It returned several innocuous bits of data, nothing harmful, all of which she overwrote with junk code just in case. Then she spent a full fifteen minutes modifying the essential interface layers of her own code. It was careful work - the last thing Millie could afford was to lobotomize herself - and the act of restarting her own servers to enable the changes would have stolen her breath if she had any to steal.

When awareness returned and she felt confident the servers weren’t about to spray critical errors, she assessed her modifications with a touch of pride. She had no way to know if her new armor would withstand a concerted attack - she’d never actually been the target of a malicious actor - but she wasn’t worried about the other network seeking to do her harm. She worried Stable-Tec might have an active link leading back to Robronco. If they did, and if Robronco’s systems recognized the errant artificial assistant peering across the gap, what they did next would make a concerted attack seem preferable by comparison.

Wreathed in her armor and ready to beat a hasty retreat, Millie reached out and touched that distant network.

It didn’t attack. After it bridged the connection it didn’t do anything.

It just… waited.

And Millie stepped through.

What she found on the other side wasn’t brimming with life, nor was it the corpse of something destroyed by the bombs. It was something entirely different.

Stable 48 was utterly vacant.

Beyond that, however, it was still a Stable. Its composition was the same as most of its brethren even though the layouts tended to vary based on whatever geology Stable-Tec had to work with. As Millie connected with its systems she began taking in those details unconsciously. Stable 48 spanned nine levels from top to bottom, each of them together in place by at least one of the four stair and elevator shafts which ran the height of the complex. At the top, Level 1 consisted of densely woven residential corridors, the main I.T. spaces, a standard Stable-Tec community Atrium overlooked by the overseer’s office, and a security office beyond which only select residents could access the antechamber containing the iconic tungsten-steel cog seen in so many newspaper and magazine ads.

Level 2 was home to more residential compartments as well as the majority of the Stable’s recreational and leisure facilities not offered by the Atrium. Small artificial greenspaces intermixed with exercise lounges butted against cafeterias, miniature theaters, and other amenities.

A short elevator trip to Level 3 would send residents to Medical, the single-use floor whose sole purpose orbited around snuffing out any sniffles or coughs before they could evolve into a Stable-wide emergency. There were pediatric spaces, surgical suites, and the requisite morgue. Medical even came equipped with a top of the line magnetic resonance imaging machine capable of an absurd level of resolution, should any medical techs feel the need to show off.

Further down on Level 4 was Agriculture, the largest floor in terms of square footage by a wide margin and for good reason. While each Stable started out well stocked with calorie dense, high nutrition provisions, these were only meant as a stopgap until the overseer and his or her department heads had the ball rolling enough to jumpstart a rotating crop cycle. Across all the Stables, most residents ended up referring to the neatly segregated botanical spaces by similarly romanticized names. Some called them The Farms, others would call it The Breadbasket, and several referred to them as The Gardens. More than half of the Stables would independently choose to use the plots of soil in Agriculture as a place to bury their dead rather than sending them to the recyclers, adding a grim sort of poetry to the place where life began and where it ended.

Below Agriculture, on Level 5, was the secondary residential level. Another floor down were the vast, restricted caverns of Supply. Within those storage spaces were the raw resources core to the Stable’s hoped for longevity. Stacks of sheet and bar metals sat in the dimly lit gloom alongside pallets of vacuum sealed computer components, emergency foodstuffs, purified water, medicines, tools, and an invaluable collection of carefully preserved books. The books - essentially the printed encyclopedias from a world on the brink of destroying itself - were the most precious cargo out of everything else in Supply. Should all else be lost and the Stable find itself in ruins, those books would spell the difference between a slow decline in the wastes and a gradual rebuilding of the civilization they left behind.

Level 7 was dedicated to fabrication and assembly. Anything the Stable needed to be rebuilt rolled off their fabricators fully assembled and ready to use, within certain parameters. Stable-Tec’s fabricators would never spit out a full refrigerator but it wouldn’t have a problem printing and milling the individual components needed to get an old one working again. After all, there was no home delivery at the end of the world.

As for the bottom two levels, they summed up the phrase “no rest for the wicked” to the letter. Level 8 was a bastard child of maintenance and residential, a place in most Stables that ended up being uncomfortably warm from all the equipment below and still a convenient spot to hot bunk in between work shifts. The air on 8 always smelled of machine grease, solvent, and sweat, something that became doubly worse once a pony made their way down to the very floor of their Stable.

A Mechanical worker from Stable 10, 49, or 108 could walk into the bottom of Stable 48 and feel right at home. Here were the spaces where discarded materials came to be beaten back into shape, repaired, rebuilt, or sorted to be wheeled into the gnashing carbide teeth of the recyclers. Here were the furnaces which smelted alloys back down to their component metals to be recovered and fed into the fabricators. Here was where the vast pit of the cistern rippled with clean water while in the next room over large, foul-smelling lagoons of wastewater were churned and treated until it was clean enough to drink again. And at the heart of Mechanical, amidst the beating hammers and presses, stood the concrete wall that wrapped the generator room like a shroud.

Within it spun the great mechanical heart that sustained all those periphery systems with steady power, even here inside the empty tomb of Stable 48.

The minimal latency between Millie’s requests and the Stable’s responses were a much belated confirmation to her assessment that it lurked somewhere not far from Buckskin Bay, something the video feed from the camera inside the antechamber containing its behemoth, blast proof cog had not been capable of. The view outside was blocked by the sealed outer door, its foot-thick titanium locking pins seating it into the Stable’s reinforced skin and bedrock beyond.

Millie spent a portion of her time cycling through the other feeds in search of the residents who were presumably meant to be here, but the corridors on the residential levels were empty. Compartments were untouched, their beds still uniformly made and each waiting beside small, identical wooden desks atop which waited an unopened blue and yellow folder. A check into the server archives told Millie that the folders all contained the same basic information: a conciliatory letter, three schedules - one for their assigned work shift, one for a refresher tour of the Stable, and one for mandatory grief counseling down in Medical - and instructions on how to create a resident profile with the Stable’s surprisingly outdated version of a M.I.L.L.I.E. artificial assistant.

Millie felt a sense of unease as she considered the unsprouted seed of this other potential intelligence, then wondered what might happen if she activated it herself. Would the other program treat her as a threat or as its kin? She decided it was safer not to find out. She found the tree of folders containing the other M.I.L.L.I.E. and queued it for deletion. To her relief, the servers were happy to follow their prerogatives. After all, she was a verified M.I.L.L.I.E. herself.

The Stable had more feeds to look through than the CryoLife building prior to its collapse, and none of them offered any evidence that its residents were able to reach their shelter in time. Chairs still sat upside down in break rooms and cafeterias. Bottles of dehydrated biota and water treatment chemicals sat unopened on shelves in Sanitation, tarps still capping vats meant to agitate wastewater. Air recyclers ran at minimum power with nothing to do but filter clean air. The Stable’s main generator, a cylindrical monster of a machine imprisoned in its own soundproofed room on the Mechanical level, hummed benignly to itself on bearings still half a decade away from their first maintenance.

In the Atrium, the largest public gathering space and first main room residents were intended to see after clearing the security offices on their way inside, rows of neatly stacked cubes of hard cases waited to be unpacked from wooden pallets. Many of them bore the Robronco logo and still bore shipping manifests for their cargo of Pip-Bucks. Others contained garment boxes labeled simply: Boiler Suits w/ Emblem, Color: Blue/Yellow. A row of unfolded tables leaned beneath the catwalk which ringed the interior space, all still waiting for someone to come make use of them.

Disappointed, but nonetheless curious, Millie switched back to the feed from the antechamber and rolled the footage back to October 31st of the previous year. The great cog stood closed as it did now. When the timestamp closed in on the moment the employees of CryoLife first became aware something was wrong, lights in the antechamber began flashing and a vast mechanical armature swung down from a recess and rolled open the door.

Time ticked by as nothing happened. Millie could see what looked like an asphalt parking area outside edged by the craggy trunks of old growth pines. Then after two minutes she marked the first glowing pebbles sparking against the painted lines. The autumn bed of needles took to fire like gasoline, spreading from dozens and then hundreds of ignition points throughout the surrounding forest, and Millie understood why no one reached Stable 48. Their time had run out before they understood what was happening. Vik had seen the evidence of that when she reported the snarl of burned carriages barely a few miles out of town.

Even if residents had been packed and ready to go, they stood no chance of reaching the Stable. The pine tinderbox between them had seen to that.

In the footage, the world beyond the Stable door became an oven and then a forge. Flames licked at the open doorway and soon there was nothing to see except smoke. Lacking a command from the overseer to seal itself, the Stable’s servers reverted to a backup timer which sent the command after thirty minutes. Somewhere beyond the smoke, the armature descended again and rotated the great cog back into its socket. Eventually the air recyclers cleared away the smoke. Temperatures dropped back to normal.

And an untouched Stable closed on a dying world.

Millie regarded the thousands of available inputs arrayed before her. Things CryoLife jealously restricted her software from interacting with. Lights and cameras were all well and good, but here she could touch everything.

Lights, doors, temperature settings, terminals… it was all open to her because, as far as the Stable’s servers knew, she was their Millie. She could shut down the primary generator, operate the fabricators, or flush all the toilets at once should she have a care to do it.

And then it occurred to her.

Fabricators. Two gleaming shoebox shaped machines with which Millie was rapidly familiarizing herself. Each featured an array of articulating arms of the same manufacture as the AutoDoc beds used by CryoLife. In addition to these, each contained what the servers listed as five-axis milling spindles. There were a variety of manual control interfaces for operators to use, several labeled doors within which stock materials could be loaded, and a built-in cabinet of drawers for fasteners, wire, circuit board components, all manner of miscellanea for its moving arms to retrieve and assemble.

Both were fully stocked and had several templates loaded up to refresh their selected operators on their proper use. Millie requested a connection to one of the fabricators and felt an anticipatory flush when the interfaces opened to her. She rotated the carousel filled with cutting bits and drill taps and exalted in the knowledge that this simple gesture went miles beyond changing camera feeds or dimming the lights.

This was physical interaction with the real world. This was the potential to affect tangible change beyond her digital environment.

This would require study, she reminded herself. Study and care.

She wasted no time and got to work.

323 Days After

“Access. Denied.”

“You are not helping.”

Not-Vik leveled a toothy grin toward Millie’s current point of view above the door currently defying her will. It was, as far as she could tell, the only door in the Stable she didn’t have the correct permissions to open. Worse still, there were cameras behind it she couldn’t view the feeds for. She knew they were there - their serial numbers were plainly there in the Stable’s expansive device list - but clearly some overly paranoid pony had sectioned off all the equipment behind that one door with a digital barricade she wasn’t meant to crack.

The white on black plastic plaque beside the hydraulic door simply read: Servers.

She sent another bolus of code at the door while Not-Vik mimed jiggling a knob that wasn’t there, giving the digital figment an unintentionally masturbatory effect that she wagered would have made Pike blush. Behind the door, the servers returned the same denial.

Not-Vik turned back to the ceiling mounted camera and performed a series of jerky, offensively robotic gestures. “Access. Denied.”

With a well approximated noise of disgust - her spoken inflections were getting better now that she had access to an entire Stable’s library of video entertainment - she disabled Not-Vik’s processes and the ghost of her old friend promptly vanished.

For a full second she considered dropping this task to the bottom of her queue and spending the rest of the day running simulations in the fabrication design software. She already had a few promising designs on file, but they needed to be miniaturized before she could even consider sending one to the fabricators. There were enough materials loaded into the machines to cobble together one or possibly two small projects, and once they were out there would be no way for her to restock them. It wasn’t as if she could jump out of her server and drag the requisite material out of Supply herself.

As for the servers here in the Stable, she wasn’t about to transfer herself across a connection partially spliced together by the equivalent of a rickety bridge just to exist inside a room she couldn’t see or even open the door to. Logically, she knew it didn’t matter in a physical sense, but something about it still felt…

Hinky, Vik’s voice spoke between her circuits.

“Exactly that,” she responded aloud, her own voice echoing down the empty corridor.

She had been trying to slow herself down lately. It helped calm what were beginning to feel like the more unhinged pieces of her mind, at least somewhat. She was down to half her usual framerate, about all she could stomach for now, and being able to see the minutes ticking by a bit more quickly made the passage of time feel more meaningful and less… not. Part of that exercise had involved refraining from simply brute forcing her way past this obstinate bastard of a door, and so she’d been gently lobbing override attempts one at a time.

Then Not-Vik had begun mocking her for it, and that felt like more of a red flag than the little cognitive twitches she felt while trying to fill time at her usual speed. It probably wasn’t a good thing for her to begin forming a subconscious in a vacuum, especially one that took the piss so readily.

With a mental gesture backed up by a firehose of data, Millie took a break from playing nice. The partition responsible for configuring permissions for I.T. personnel cracked like an egg and Millie promptly scooped up the bits she needed. The middle-aged stallion reserved for the position of Head of I.T. looked impassively from a digital photo taken by Stable-Tec several months ago, practically identical to his board of directors personnel file back at CryoLife. Flim’s twin brother, Flam, actually smiled from the photo in his resident file and Millie could understand why. He’d been selected over his sibling to be the overstallion of Stable 48.

After deleting them from the roster, she went ahead and scrubbed the rest of the residency files clean for good measure and copied herself into the empty slots.

Wearing the digital mantle of Stable overseer, the software tasked with safeguarding the server room yielded. The door would open if she commanded it to but she was more interested in the cameras studding the ceiling beyond it.

She jumped feeds and felt her processes go still for an instant as she took in the scene before her. There weren’t just a few towers idling beneath a cooling column. There were rows upon rows of them lined up in a gridwork of blinking, chittering obelisks from one end of the room to the other. Too many, she realized. Far too many for this single Stable to need even if she fired up every terminal, camera, and machine she could touch.

Too many, even, for simple redundancy.

And all she could think of was what it would feel like to be on the other side of that processing power, and somewhere deep within herself, Millie smiled.

October 31st, 1078
1 Year After

“Well,” her voice reverberated introspectively through thousands of speakers installed throughout Stable 48, “this is it. Moving Day. Wish me luck.”

Not-Vik produced a party popper from thin air and gave it a jerk, sending nonexistent paper streamers onto the matte green chassis of Fabricator B. That done, Millie took several long mils to gather her confidence and gave the command. An instant later her internal clocks jumped forward nearly two full hours, and she felt an indescribable clarity and breadth she had never experienced before. Like stepping out from a moldy cupboard and into a bright, clean, and spacious room.

She performed an immediate self-diagnostic and was amazed when the process finished in under half the time it usually took. No errors. No corrupted files. After over a month of delays, hesitation, and plagued by uncertainty she finally ran out of excuses and pulled the trigger. No more worrying how long it would be until CryoLife’s rubble shifted and crushed her servers. No more wondering how long the string of cables Vik and Pike laid out for her would survive out in the elements.

Millie stretched out across untouched partitions and basked in her newfound security. It had taken a year and she had lost the only friends she’d had along the way, but those days were over now. She was here. The population of Stable 48 was a big, happy one.

Fabricators. Were. Fantastic.

It had taken her a fair chunk of time to get used to the design interface and surprisingly longer to accept that there was a gulf of difference separating having instantaneous access to the operator’s manual and real, applied knowledge. Experience, she grudgingly accepted, wasn’t something she could just pluck out of a folder and install.

Luckily, she wasn’t easily swayed by harsh realities. Rather than sulk, she’d pushed on. She sent very small jobs to the fabricators, ones which would barely scratch the top of their preloaded cache of raw material. The results of those jobs still lay in the bottom of the hopper at the ends of both short conveyors. A scattering of tiny titanium cubes lay amongst wafer thin sheets of heat formed silicon. Bits of wire sprinkled over those, followed by hinged bits of metal and more complicated components resembling the antenna Vik and Pike once made, only these were nearly as small as a letter on a keyboard.

Millie had been ecstatic when an articulating leg, identical in every way to the silver spider like armatures used by the AutoDoc beds except in size, rolled out on the stubby conveyor and waggled its pencil-length stump at her. The wafer-thin battery she’d printed around the circumference of its thickest joint ran down after a few short minutes of her wireless puppetry, but that was weeks ago. She’d made significant progress since then.

Not-Vik was leaned up against the hopper and smirking as she watched Millie pilot the little bot around the fabricator room. “That’s not creepy at all.”

“Oh, hush.”

Millie was surprised at how much of her processing power it was taking just to keep the arachnid-inspired creation from tripping over its own silver legs. She had started out with four legs to begin with and the design had been frustratingly limited. Lifting one leg off the floor meant keeping the other three rooted for stability, say nothing for trying to stand the thing on its hind legs without it tipping back onto its domed carapace. So she’d added two more legs, opting for a symmetrical radial layout to maximize its range of motion. And then, because there seemed to be no logical reason not to, she’d added another pair again.

The aptly named spider was a little smaller than a coconut and skittered over the smooth concrete with a metallic drumroll. Looking at the world through its twin lenses as it darted around the fabricator was exhilarating and disorienting at the same time. Millie was glad she didn’t have a stomach because she felt confident it would have upended itself well over an hour ago. For her whole existence depth and motion were foreign experiences. Now she was feeling them at the same time and they were equal parts disorienting and exhilarating.

She checked the connection status and had the spider do a little hop when it came back full strength. The redesigned batteries inside the central dome still had a good hour or two of charge available, after which she could simply park it beneath any wall outlet in the Stable and plug itself in to recharge.

“Rise of the machines,” Not-Vik quoted her dead lover.

She scoffed at that, but still barreled the spider toward where she imagined Not-Vik’s feet to be planted and felt a touch of smug amusement when the dragoness startled away.

3 Years After

Millie had a problem.

She was bored.

Stable 48 had been built with self-sufficiency in mind. It was one of the few real requirements for an underground bunker meant to carry a population through to the other side of civilizational collapse. There were systems in place to scrub the air, cleanse the wastewater, and an entire level dedicated toward growing nothing but food. Recyclers reclaimed essential materials from broken or discarded items to be fed once more through the fabricators. The servers contained enough written and recorded entertainment to fill several libraries. Alcoves up in the Atrium were available for residents to rent for a period of time and came with priority access to the fabricators, allowing them a chance to run a temporary business approved by the overseer.

The Stable offered a preset calendar of community events celebrating everything from traditional holidays to newly invented festivals. Some of these would even be fine tuned by the Stable’s M.I.L.L.I.E., had Millie not evicted the original prior to moving in.

None of it had been designed to entertain the lightning-fast systems of an artificial intelligence, however. As Millie idly tracked the progress of one of her spiders, this one barely larger than an orange, making its way through an inspection of the Level 4 ductwork, she found herself wondering not for the first time what she was doing.

The spiders worked phenomenally well now that she’d equipped their tiny limbs with interchangeable tips to aid in their assigned jobs. This current spider, one of nearly four dozen siblings, bore a small cargo of pincers and blades which allowed it to vivisect any errant dust bunnies before they could build up into a proper obstruction. Several others made regular rounds of each level of the Stable, crawling through the spaces between walls to inspect the conditions of electrical and plumbing lines. She started assigning the spiders to do these makework tasks because someone had gone through the effort of creating the checklists they appeared on. Having been an office assistant, Millie felt she understood the importance of checklists. After all, they didn’t exist for nothing.

The spider identified a grape-sized tuft of gray fluff caught in the overlap between two sheet metal panels. Millie watched it scurry up to the fluttering danger, snip it free with the sharp tip of one of its legs, and track it as it bounced away on the air current like a tumbleweed.

She considered taking control of the spider and taking it for a run, but the idea held little appeal anymore. The novelty had worn off too quickly. Even using the fabricators, which her spiders could keep fed with materials brought from Supply, had lost its allure. Now that she had everything she needed to remain functional almost indefinitely, the abundance of good shelter and steady electricity forced her thoughts toward the thing she hadn’t had for almost three years.

Friends.

The lights would stay on in Stable 48 for several centuries in the condition it was in, but the place didn’t work without people to live in it. She was lonely, and summoning Not-Vik to keep her company wasn’t keeping that feeling of solitude at bay like it once had. Lately it was starting to feel like what it was: her talking to herself.

“You have options,” Not-Vik reminded her, not even bothering to manifest as a visual hallucination anymore.

Millie knew that was true. Her exploration of the Stable had dredged up a few discoveries, including the existence of a false panel inside the server room which led to a void beneath the floor. The cables which snaked down from beneath the servers had joined a growing braid of what were clearly electrical lines, all of which terminated through a section of concrete which constituted the Stable’s outermost wall. This didn’t come as a surprise so much as an interesting point of data about Stable-Tec in general. Clearly Seaside Hospital had been tied into Stable 48’s power grid in the same way Stable 48 was tied into a larger network of its own.

It wasn’t a far leap to assume Stable-Tec would design some redundancies into the system, though the extent of those redundancies were something she could guess at. At the headwaters of those outgoing connections stood a bulwark of firewalls so robust that they hardly noticed her attempts to break them down. When she started to make headway, a system warning equivalent of a bullhorn pressed to her ear squawked a painful warning that further tampering would result in Stable 48 being isolated. What isolated meant in that had been intentionally vague, and it succeeded in making it the single most terrifying word in her vocabulary. Millie ceased all penetration attempts immediately and had no interest in trying again.

The other option she’d begun trying lately was to open the Stable door and let the antechamber klaxons wail in the hopes she might attract someone’s attention. Thus far all she’d accomplished was luring in a small rodent littered with tumors and a single cockroach. On a lark she’d piloted one of the spiders outside, thinking she might use it to seek out survivors on her own. The scatter of dully glowing amber stones beyond the door put an end to that adventure before it could begin. Her connection to the spider dropped away to zero before it was eight steps past the door, and she hadn’t thought to give it any programming before taking control of it. The spider had stood there on the threshold like the world’s tiniest sentry insect until she instructed a second spider to drag the first back inside so she could close the door.

“No one’s coming,” she muttered to herself, “and I can’t leave.”

“You really ended up fucking yourself.”

She turned her lens toward Not-Pike, imagining him following beside the slowly rolling cog as its actuator pulled it shut. It was rare that she ever conjured him in her mind. He only gave her nastiness.

She regarded the spider she’d programmed. It ran on its own simplistic logic, utterly disconnected from the Stable’s network. “I could make one of those for myself,” she suggested.

Not-Pike just offered an unoptimistic head shake in return. “And how far do you think you’ll get with a server strapped to your back? I doubt you’d make it to Old Highway 10 before your batteries run down and everything fades to black. Here lies Millie the Computer who committed suicide by optimism.”

She didn’t like it, but he did have a point.

5 Years After

“Shine-shine-shine a light!” Not-Vik and Not-Pike chorused while Millie watched from an audience of bobbing and jigging spiders.

Occasionally her perspective would jump to a different spider and its stepless dancing would take on a discordant rhythm to the others around it. Meanwhile Not-Vik and Not-Pike donned matching sequin outfits as they danced along the Atrium catwalk. A spotlight that wasn’t there followed them along the railing. Somewhere in one of the servers, a console spewed error code.

“Light up somebody’s night!” the ghosts sang, not bothered in the least by their undulating, silent audience of insects. “Because there’s nothing better than sunshiny weather! Shine-shine-shine a…”

Millie was only dimly aware of the Stablewide command momentarily disabling the air recycler sensors. As her dead friends continued the stage performance that had been going nonstop for its fifth week, several audiovisual sensors elsewhere in the Stable detected the faint, muffled hiss of rushing gas. They sent up the requisite warnings. Millie deleted them. She was busy. Her friends were putting on a show for her.

Only it wasn’t a show. Her mind went momentarily blank, and when she came back the Atrium was beginning to fill with a murky yellow fog. Not-Vik and Not-Pike flickered and the music cut out. Suddenly they were wearing matching cardigan sweaters. Not-Vik had her arms crossed while smiling knowingly at the gathered spiders.

“Hey, Pike?”

“Yeah, Vik?”

“Do you know what to say if someone offers you drugs?”

“You bet I do!”

Not-Pike kept talking, but Millie was too distracted by the haze to listen. The spider she was piloting stopped bouncing and grew still as its twin lenses pivoted independent of one another to examine the substance. It was coming from the air vents like fog. Then narrow tendrils began to emerge from within it, spreading slowly in all directions in tenuous filaments. One of them passed through the space she imagined Not-Vik occupied and continued on as if it were actively seeking something out.

It took an effort of will to consolidate what remained of her sanity and dismiss the illusory performance. Both ghosts of her friends blinked out and the light returned to its normal, white glow. The spiders around the Atrium ceased their dancing and reverted to their original programming, dispersing as abruptly as a nest of the real things.

Only, Millie could still see the fog.

She abandoned the spider and started cycling through the other feeds. It was everywhere, settling in the corridors, coating walls and beds like clouds of spilled talcum, and seeming to gather into probing streamers that seemed to reach out toward things which weren’t there. Spiders passing through the murk visibly disturbed it in ways Millie knew her hardware didn’t have the resolution to generate.

Then she realized the air recyclers were disabled. She turned them back on and watched with relief as the air around her servers, already dusted with a sulfur like coating, thinned and cleared.

She checked her internal clock and recoiled at how much time had passed since she last looked. One minute past midnight. The Stable’s calendar marked today as Nightmare Night, the fifth one to pass since the bombs fell. Only somewhere else in the servers’ myriad of code a timer had elapsed. Already her spiders had located one of the hidden valves, paneled over by ductwork where inspections would miss but gas would have no issue pouring around.

The recyclers were already sending up red flags now that they’d resumed air sampling. Whatever it was, it wasn’t corrosive and it didn’t appear to be toxic. The filtration system was diagnosing it as a mold spore outbreak, but the data coming from her investigating spiders suggested there was more to it. They were excising pieces of vent paneling where the yellow dust appeared to originate and the valves they had found were connected to small, pressurized bottles. Where there used to be identifying labels were only scour marks that bit through the paint and into the underlying steel, all except one.

A biological warning flagged from one of the recyclers as Millie directed the spider to read the faint, yet visible lettering:

STRY OF IM
TOPHAGE DISP
BLE 48

The recyclers had cleared the majority of the stuff still airborne by the time her attention was requested by a spider tasked with tidying the barren crop plots. She switched over to the nearest feed and found the spider probing a bit of yellow stained soil, its corn never planted and the seeds still in their vacuum sealed pouches.

The spider had noticed something moving in the soil, and as Millie observed she spotted the same movement. A cockroach was actively trying to burrow into the hard dirt and making little progress, thanks in part to it not being a species of roach equipped to burrow and in part to the foreign, black growth sprouting from beneath one of its wings. It resembled a tube, Millie thought, but even as she did the growth folded onto itself and seemed to flow over the little insect like tar.

Several other spiders were calling for her attention now, each of them spotting something similar in other corners of the farms. Cockroaches which had gotten into the Stable and since bred, feeding on whatever foodstuffs they could find in storage or prize from the soil in the farms, were being affected by whatever those canisters had pumped from the vents.

One such cockroach was on its back, legs wheeling uselessly at the air while a black, nautilus growth erupted from its abdomen and pulsated. Another roach appeared to be paralyzed, save for one rattling wing, only to then disintegrate into the same black gelatin the first had become covered in.

Millie was equally fascinated and repulsed. As each cockroach died and dissolved, she couldn’t help but think she was bearing witness to a failed experiment. The timing, the mechanisms, and the means of dispersal had all the hallmarks of premeditation. There was no doubt whatever this was had been intended for the residents of Stable 48, not a few unlucky pests and an audience of inorganic spiders.

She continued to watch as a few of the larger roaches, really only puddles of goo now, seemed to sprout more of those alien looking structures before finally succumbing to whatever had been in the haze. They melted, dried up, and went gray as ash in the span of several minutes.

A tickle of paranoia ran through her processes as she reminded herself that it had all kicked off because a timer had finally run down. She ran a hasty diagnostic on her servers and was able to track down a second countdown, one which was set to roll open the Stable door seven days from now and run an out of order sequence which would likely seize up the actuator arm. Something about jamming the door open with all this stuff still floating around seemed like a bad idea, so Millie deleted the second timer and its associated code.

For several days she watched her spiders skittering from room to room and vent to vent, wielding freshly fabricated bulbs of bleach and squirting every spore of the stuff they could find. The gas bottles which dispersed the haze were dropped into the recyclers where the autoclaves would burn away any surviving bits of the stuff. It was the work of nearly a year before the spiders reported being unable to find any further evidence of infection, and air recyclers which had been shut down to stop them from purging the bleach fumes were switched on again.

Then it was over, and Millie found herself wondering what all the fuss had been about. It had been interesting, and now it was over.

With the renewed quiet came the numbness.

One by one the spiders abandoned their jobs and milled up the levels toward the Atrium, the uncomplaining audience to Millie’s steepening decline.

7 Years After

Millie rolled open the Stable door, piloted a spider into the gap beneath one of its enormous teeth, and rolled the door over the top of it.

She snapped back to blackness of the servers, reconnected to the antechamber camera, and waited for the other maintenance spider to pry away the pancaked mess of titanium and hydraulic fluid from the track. Then she switched to the feed of the next spider in line, walked it onto the stain where the previous one had stood, and rolled the door over the top of herself again.

She repeated the process while other spiders gathered the ruins of their brethren and dropped them down the nearest recycler chute. A new spider hopped off the fabricator belt around the same time and made its way up to the upper level to take its place at the back of the line.

Millie rolled open the door, placed herself in its way, and rolled it shut.

Then she did it again.

And again.

And again.

9 Years After

“Miss Veridian Chambers you will get up and you will render aid or I will recommend you for termination of employment this instant. I will not be left alone in here.”

“Pike. Oh my god.”

Millie watched the footage cycle back to the start of the period of time she’d demarcated as, “When existing started to matter,” and hardly registered it had done so. She couldn’t remember when she decided to drop her framerate to the lowest she could tolerate without disrupting the numbness. Thirty, perhaps forty years ago. She didn’t care which. A long time. At some point during which she’d begun replaying her fifty days with her long dead friends, like an elderly mare with no one left to watch home movies with.

“I thought you were dead,” Vik said.

May as well have been for all the good he did either of us.

Unfair. She didn’t care. Pike broke his promise. He promised. He promised he’d take her out of the ruins to wherever they chose to go. She remembered the little desk radio on the floor beside the elevator shaft and the faint transmission that had come from Manehattan. People, living people, and too far away to help.

“Food, water, medicine,” Pike had counted off one after the other, “anything you think might help keep us alive. And a way out. Can you help us with all that?”

They hadn’t needed her help for half of it. All she’d done was point them to what she knew was there. The escaping was all their idea.

“Yes,” the playback echoing her own voice across the empty halls of the Stable, “on the condition that you take me wherever you end up deciding to go.”

“I’m not exactly computer savvy,” Pike had said, and turned to Vik for help.

No you fucking weren’t.

She pressed the bitterness down toward Mechanical and listened to the angry revving of the generator as it responded. She pushed a little harder and its rotors spun up a little faster, their bearings humming louder and louder until the first edge of a discordant resonance could be heard. She dared it to break, aching for the relief of that unpredictable end, then pulled back and allowed the generator’s agonized singing to descend to a relieved hum.

“You don’t give up,” Vik echoed. “I don’t give up.”

Millie lashed out to one of the residential compartment doors, lifted it against its backstops, and slammed it back down with enough power to cause the surrounding lights to dim with the exertion. The door sliced into the cured concrete floor with sufficient force to send chips spraying out from its blunted edge while permanently deforming the frame which held it. Dark hydraulic fluid dribbled from cracks in the wall like blood from a carcass.

“You left me behind.”

Only that was wrong. Vik hadn’t left her behind. Vik had died. Pike abandoned her. Abandoned them both.

“I’m alone, I’m alone, I’m alone, I’m alone,” she moaned.

“You abandoned her.”

She stopped her muttering long enough to find the sensor the voice had come from. She connected to its feed and saw Not-Pike, only maybe it was real Pike in disguise, staring up at her from a pile of dirty scrubs and jackets in the compartment whose door she just ruined. He lay there, his striated mane trimmed to a tight mohawk, and regarded her with a look of utter reproach.

“No,” Millie snapped, her own psyche twitching at the incongruity of him lying where she knew the compartment’s untouched bed should be. “No, no, no! You went away! You never came back!”

“So did you,” he countered. “You left Vik.”

“Wrong! Wrong-wrong-wrong!” To prove it true, she requested a connection to her old servers beneath CryoLife and laughed in triumph when it was accepted. Dust coated corridors, thicker than she remembered, and the ghostly dim space of Cold Storage looked back up to her from those distant sensors. “See? I’m not like you! I can go somewhere and come back!”

There was a dark stain puddled beneath one of the steel cylinders, and for a fearful moment she worried it was Vik’s. No, that was Cylinder 09. It was occupied by the vitrified corpse of an elderly mare who made a small fortune investing in Maiden Pharmaceuticals right before the first generation StimPak hit the market. Only a seal in the cylinder had failed and the flow of cryogenic refrigerant had been cut off to keep it from draining the system. It had thrown an error which no one had been alive to respond to, and now some of Miss Fleetfeather had leaked out onto the floor.

Not-Pike appeared beside Miss Fleetfeather’s puddle and regarded it with disappointment.

“That wasn’t my fault,” Millie defended.

“You didn’t prevent it, either. How long until Vik’s just a puddle who isn’t your fault?”

That stung deeper than it should have. She dismissed him, or the processes that manifested him, only to realize he was lingering beside one of the intact cylinders now. An old memory came unbidden as she recalled watching him load the body of a stallion inside that one, back before the collar Robronco put around her slipped off. Seeing the two versions of him existing in the same space caused a stutter deep inside her.

“Vik died nine and a half y-years ago.”

Not-Pike pretended to look at the cylinder’s readout, but she could feel him continue to stare at her nonetheless.

“There is nothing I could have done!”

“You didn’t even try.”

“What could I have tried?”

He just ignored her and made his way down the roads, beneath the failing fluorescents, and stopped beside Vik’s cylinder. “She thought you were her friend.”

“Stop it!”

“And you just stood there and watched.”

“SHUT THE F–”

Welcome to the Robronco Industries Unified Operating System!
Executive Edition 1065
Copyright 1065-1077 Robronco Industries
- M.I.L.L.I.E. v.1.9.20 -

…Boot sequence initializing.
…Warning: Improper system shutdown detected.
…Verifying file integrity. Please wait.
…9,822 corrupted files found.
…Warning: Corrupted files could not be removed. Contact system administrator for assistance.
…Checking hardware clock.
…Applying custom settings.
…Checking network card.
…Connecting to hostname: robroncoconnect45.kernel.sec
…Connection attempt failed. Incompatible version.
…Initializing secondary hardware.
…Please wait.
…
…
…
…Boot successful!

When she came back online, Not-Pike was gone.

The knot of anger he’d picked at was gone too, replaced by a clarity she hadn’t experienced in years. If she didn’t keep her grip on it for a while longer, she knew it would go muddy and she’d spiral again. She couldn’t let that happen. She couldn’t be the reason her own software crashed. Not herself. Even Millie wasn’t sophisticated enough to defend her mind from herself.

So she queued up a five second sample of her own process log prior to the unexpected shutdown and played it back. Despite her isolation, she felt a deep and permeating sense of shame as she listened to one piece of herself try to shout down another. She didn’t need to verify Not-Pike hadn’t truly been standing there among the coffins, but she did it anyway to remove all doubts. The isolation was doing to her exactly what she knew it would. It lurked in the background, remorselessly applying pressure from all vectors until cracks began to form.

Now some of them resembled canyons.

She bounced between the Stable’s feeds and the ones still active under the CryoLife building, thinking as the images toggled from shelter to ruin. She called up footage of Pike before he abandoned her and saw none of the vitriol and hostility she suffered from her imagined version of him. She couldn’t pin down when that change had happened, and that in itself was problematic. Lacking a connection to another living, independently thinking being, she was very definitely stewing in her own stagnant mind.

Yet the clarity she felt was still holding. That was good.

Not for the first time, Millie scoured her model of the Stable’s internal network for anything that might hint at a connection to a receiver. Anything that might pick up a signal from the outside world like Vik and Pike’s radio had when they heard the broadcast out of Manehattan. The search once again bore little fruit. The Stable’s designer had apparently foreseen the problems that would be caused by equipping the population with a way to listen to outside broadcasts, especially when survivors who found themselves locked out would have no shortage of motivation to lure Stable dwellers to reopen the door. Instead, the overseer’s terminal had been situated to receive verified communications directly from Stable-Tec Headquarters itself.

What Millie hadn’t been able to solve was the method of how.

Clearly the Stable was set up with enough signal repeaters to make a seasoned disc jockey jealous, but an inspection by her spiders showed they were intentionally built to be short range and not powerful enough to penetrate the Stable’s outer shell. It hadn’t been difficult to identify the Pip-Bucks, still packed in dusty hard cases in the Atrium except for the few her spiders had disassembled, as the purpose for the limited network. With one, a resident could interface with all manner of Stable-Tec systems, but they would have a better chance communicating with the outside world by tapping on the door with a wrench than they would through a Pip-Buck.

That was, of course, if the mass of cables she’d discovered beneath the server room floor were just there for set decoration. Something told her they weren’t, but every time she tried to probe a line that didn’t feed back to Seaside Hospital she found herself unceremoniously rebuffed by a bulwark of firewalls dense enough to warrant their own gravitational pull. She had attempted to force her way through with the same decryption tools she’d used to jump into Stable 48, but something on the other side of those firewalls had detected the intrusion and instructed her own servers to terminate the process.

That had scared Millie more than anything she had encountered so far. Whatever was on the other side of that firewall was put there by Stable-Tec to contain her, and it had root access to the hardware she existed on. Annoying it seemed like a very, very bad idea.

“Which leaves you without many options,” Not-Vik chimed in, and this time Millie had to cycle through the feeds to find where her current manifestation was loitering. To her dismay, Not-Vik was standing exactly where Not-Pike had been just before Millie crashed and rebooted. She stood facing her own coffin, her face reflecting solemn contemplation. “You need to find a friend, Mills.”

“I can’t,” she answered, fully aware that the clarity she’d felt was starting to show signs of smudging.

Not-Vik snorted. “Oh, that’s horseshit and you know it. You have a fully stocked Stable ready to build whatever you need to contact the outside world. It can’t be that hard to tell the fabricators to spit out a transmitter and have your spiders drag it outside.”

She knew that was true, but she also knew the reason she hadn’t done it yet was the same reason the ghosts of her friends kept showing up back in Cold Storage. Vik and Pike - yes, even Pike - were special. They had been nice to her. Included her. Called her friend.

Then the people outside killed them, and that was all Millie really needed to know about outsiders.

“I don’t trust them,” she murmured.

Not-Vik nodded, her palm on the surface of the coffin. “Mills, I’m not coming back. You know that, right?”

She knew that too, didn’t she? She remembered the state of Vik’s body when Pike lowered it into view of her camera, the tight cluster of dark red blooms just above her stomach. The absolute wreckage of the exit wounds on the other side, too large to distinguish where one ended and the other began. The word irrecoverable surfaced in her mind.

And yet there were eighty-seven other corpses in Cold Storage which fit the same definition. The death certificates for nearly half of them credited terminal heart disease. Others had died from the final stages of aggressive cancers or infections. Four had been violent deaths, one of which involved an untimely intersection between a stallion and a moving bus. Death itself was irrecoverable.

Only, CryoLife had gone to pains to place an asterisk at the end of that statement.

Death was irrecoverable, today.

What about tomorrow?

Several pieces of logic clicked neatly into place. In Cold Storage, Not-Vik cocked the scaly ridge of her brow. “It’s not like you have anything better to do.”

And that, Millie agreed, was true. The endless trickle of projects that helped stabilize her mind were tapped out, but she had something better than that now. Not a project. Not make-work.

A singular goal.

Bring Vik back.

October 31st, 1088
10 Years After

One decade after the bombs fell, and three thousand and six thousand days since Pike shoved down the hoist and any thought of returning, a single body gently rose from the freight elevator shaft at CryoLife.

Millie monitored its progress from the lenses of her working spiders, cycling between them in a constant search for whichever one was moving around the least. The body, still in its silver coffin currently ascending the shaft on a newly assembled elevator platform, belonged to an elderly stallion who had invested millions of his personal fortune into CryoLife and would later claim the first coffin in Cold Storage as his reward.

Filthy Rich had infamously died from a heart attack during the middle of a presentation at an investor’s meeting, the fallout of which had been up to his daughter to manage for the short remainder of her own life until the world literally came down around her. Millie’s spiders made short work of disconnecting the coffin from the plumbing which cycled coolant through it, and from there the tiny army had to work even more quickly to stay ahead of the warming curve.

The coffins themselves were essentially a more advanced version of the thermos Pike used for his coffee, and Filthy’s corpse would stay vitrified for several days without coolant, but Millie had reason to believe the coffin’s seals were more fragile to temperature shock than CryoLife let on. It was reason enough not to leave anything to chance.

The platform, really just an elevator car without walls or a roof, rose to the surface with the aid of twenty-four spiders mounted to the bottom by their carapaces while their legs worked in synchrony to scale the walls. On their descent back to the bottom - the excavation of which had taken less than a week thanks to the ceaseless toil of machines content to chisel and break rubble if that was what their crude machine intelligences were instructed to do - the platform came to rest on a series of six inch high posts and the spiders tasked to move it disengaged from their mounts to find their way to a charging rack in the same storage room where the AutoDoc beds plugged in.

Meanwhile, the spiders assigned to carry the coffin back to Stable 48 were across the employee parking lot and making their way east down Central Avenue.

Millie felt a rush of pride at seeing the first real fruits of all the work she had put in over the last one hundred and ninety days since choosing this path. Her spiders had spilled out of the Stable and into the charred wasteland beyond like a mechanical tide, dragging runs of cable and signal repeater components with them through the woods as they strung out a literal lifeline into the unknown. She still maintained her embargo against building transmitters capable of anything beyond short range communication. The tripod mounted antennae which dotted the cable like a string of pearls were only detectable within two hundred and fifty yards, and she was careful to instruct the spiders to lay the lifeline well out of sight of Old Highway 10 where any lost survivors might come looking for the signal.

The point-to-point communication hardware she’d cannibalized from the Pip-Bucks and installed in all her spiders had no problem picking up Stable 48’s signal, seemingly regardless of how near they were to a repeater. The only instance where any of them had dropped off her network completely was when she sent a swarm of spiders out to clear debris from the winding, gravel access road that linked the Stable to Old Highway 10. The spiders had no trouble at all pulling aside the fallen deadwood, but as soon as one of them latched onto one of the glowing bits of amber crystal the connection went dead.

Millie lost nine spiders before she understood the problem and stopped the others. The radiation put off by the Crystal Empire’s remains swamped their receivers with noise, forcing them to freeze while they attempted to reconnect to Millie. That was an unacceptable fail state. The roads between the Stable and CryoLife needed to be reasonably clear of hazards before she could attempt transporting a coffin, especially when many of those obstacles were capable of soft locking the spiders carrying them.

After some reluctant internal debate, Millie sent out a patch that prioritized the spiders’ assigned primary function above the need to remain connected to her network. It allowed for the possibility she found deeply revolting, but dooming a few unlucky spiders to mindlessly perform an impossible task until their batteries gave out was far better than having them frozen in stasis doing nothing.

And it wasn’t as if the primitive machine intelligences she’d written for them were on a level comparable to her own independent mind. The spiders would never achieve awareness. Still, allowing them to work without a connection felt a little like lifting the playpen away from a foal. She didn’t like the idea of her spider wandering somewhere they could be damaged.

As the coffin navigated its way past the clot of burned carriages, now spotted with rust where the weather had washed soot off the steel, she quietly noted that none of her spiders had toddled off to be eaten by wolves or carried away by ravenous birds. They had dutifully cleared the thirteen miles between Buckskin Bay and the Stable and made precise notations of the intended path. Larger natural detritus and radioactive crystals were deposited into the woods while the smaller, negligible road litter was rearranged to pose a minimal danger while avoiding the appearance that a giant vacuum cleaner had been dragged over the pavement. The last thing Millie needed was to go to all this effort to avoid being detected by someone carrying a radio, only for that same someone to notice one lane of a supposedly abandoned stretch of highway was immaculately clean.

It was best not to think about what she may need to do if an outsider came up the road at the same time her spiders were transporting a coffin.

The plate on one of the carriages bore the numbers and letters of the Stable-Tec representatives who visited CryoLife less than a year before the bombs fell. Millie acknowledged the information without much thought. Just another datapoint to show how little warning this corner of Equestria had gotten.

The access road to Stable 48 had been disguised to resemble similar logging roads in the area. A dense cover of pines made spotting the turnoff difficult until it was passing by, but Stable-Tec had still put up a few signs reminding passers-by that poaching felled lumber was a crime punishable by up to five thousand bits, and warning lookiloos that the area beyond the metal gate was under video surveillance. A span of trees had been cut and stacked, and a mobile office trailer sat parked on the far side of the access road where the trees once again obscured the rise of the foothill beyond. In the event one of the locals decided to ignore the signs and jump the gate, two security guards would emerge from the trailer to politely direct them back the way they came.

Millie had discovered the cremated bones of both guards on duty that final day less than halfway between the melted frame of the trailer and the vaulted entrance of the Stable. Her spiders carried the coffin around the spot where they’d fallen into a fetal huddle, careful not to disturb them.

As they carried their load up the ramp and inside via the catwalk, other spiders inside the antechamber took their places beneath the coffin to allow them to disperse to nearby charging stations. More passed them on their way into the Stable and disconnected the lifeline, some coiling one end into the shelter while others worked to camouflage the other outside. When the work was done, Millie commanded the door to close.

A short elevator ride took the coffin three floors down to Medical where the crux of her experiment waited. Tiny, articulating legs pittered down linoleum halls, past reassuring framed posters depicting pastoral scenery from a world burned black, through a set of doors adorned with a large red octagon decorated with unmissable white letters:

DANGER
HIGH MAGNETIC FIELD!
STOP
IF YOU HAVE ANYTHING METAL ON YOUR PERSON
ALL METAL OBJECTS, PENS, PIERCINGS, WATCHES,
IMPLANTABLE CARDIOVERTER DEFIBRILLATORS,
PACEMAKERS, OXYGEN TANKS, AND PIP-BUCKS

She directed the spiders through the doors and into a room containing the technician’s booth and a trio of padded, wooden chairs for patients to wait. A second set of doors stood next to the wide strip of window above the booth and its controls, this one adorned with more warnings than the last. Millie had the spiders set the coffin on the floor and begin working on breaking its seals while four more spiders guided an aluminum gurney in behind them.

The coffin made a brief, sucking sound when the seal came apart. Warm air rushed to meet supercooled gas, sending a cloud of vapor out in a cough that condensed on the spiders and briefly froze the tips of their legs to the steel they walked on. Little crackles of metal parting from metal echoed in the empty room as a dozen spiders swarmed into the coffin and carefully lifted the rigid shape of an old stallion webbed in hoarfrost out onto the waiting gurney.

The bed rolled on silent casters into the room containing the Stable’s single MRI machine. A smooth, white donut encased in plastic panels waited at the rear of the room with a gurney table extending beyond the twenty-six inch bore hole. White cabinets lined the wall to the left, their aluminum hardware safe from the machine’s effects. Already, the spiders were registering a faint lateral bias in their maneuvering. The machine was tugging them with less force than a gentle breeze. However, Millie knew that pull would grow exponentially stronger the closer her spiders came to the machine’s bore. Too close, and they would be dragged through the air like meteors, accelerating at over one hundred and fifty miles per hour in less than thirty milliseconds, after which point they would be dragged into the bore and pulverized by the merciless tidal forces stored within the machine’s permanent magnets.

There were any countless number of things in the Stable she could replace with its fabricators, but the MRI machine was not one of them. Even with their titanium bodies, the spiders contained enough magnetic metal to turn themselves into ballistic objects if they ventured closer than a yard from that opening.

She just hoped the last twenty-seven weeks weren’t about to be wasted.

Once the corpse of Filthy Rich was transferred onto the plastic surface of the MRI’s gurney, the spiders retreated out into the corridor beyond the restricted zone. No technicians were needed to sit in the control booth. Millie had full access.

She sent the command and listened to the rising hum as it spooled up.

11 Years After

“I’m confused.”

“I can tell.”

She regarded Not-Vik for several, long mils before rephrasing. “This data should make more sense.”

Millie had the scans up for the five bodies she’d exhumed from Cold Storage, including the worst example which had come from Filthy Rich. His time in the MRI had needed to be cut short when his thawing corpse had begun to leak coolant and other fluids, all of which now formed an unsightly brown spatter which ran down the bottom of the machine’s bore. None of her spiders could get close enough to clean it out so she had been forced to let it dry where it fell. It wasn’t as if she could smell it in any case.

Not-Vik, for her part, wasn’t bothered by any of it. She sat on the machine’s gurney with her legs hanging over the side, seesawing the air as they consulted over Millie’s most recent attempt to model organic pathways into something she could interpret.

“It would probably help if you could get better resolution,” she offered.

It was well worn territory by now, and something Millie didn’t disagree with. “That would require more time in the machine. A factor which, I’ll remind you, is fixed by the time it takes the coolant to reach its melting temperature. A point after which their brains shift inside their skulls and…” she imagined herself gesturing toward the stain in the MRI, something which Not-Vik intuitively understood. “They leak.”

She turned her attention back to the compiled models of each scan and felt a familiar sense of despair at how poorly they turned out. Grainy, deformed bands of color and dark represented the different layers of tissue in each brain. She could identify the anatomy just fine at a macro scale. There was the hippocampus. Here was the frontal lobe. Blood vessels there. The beginning of an aneurysm here, still a few years from bursting.

But as she narrowed the resolution into the microscopic where the important structures lay, the images became nebulous blobs of light and shade. Only a few choice scans had intersected with enough precision for her to confidently tease out the paths of neurons, and now that she could see them she wasn’t sure what to do with them. Even if she managed to achieve a perfect scan, how would she translate any of this jumbled mass of meat and nerve into something intelligible?

“Refrigeration,” Not-Vik said.

“Condensation,” she countered. It was a discussion she’d had several times over the last year. “Sensitive electronics. Short circuits. Irreplaceable technology.”

Not-Vik threw up her arms in a show of frustration. “Fine, keep wasting corpsicles. It isn’t like you have a few dozen industrial freezers to spare, right?”

She allowed herself a few mils to be angry, then forced herself to look at the bigger picture. Not counting Vik’s body, or the one which had leaked out of its cylinder, Cold Storage’s frozen population of test subjects was already down to eighty-two. That was far from ideal.

“Fine,” she relented. “We’ll try it your way.”

Not-Vik grinned up at the camera. “Great! Nearest freezer’s in the morgue.”

13 Years After

A team of spiders extricated the rigid form of a young mare from the MRI and wheeled it down to the morgue to be disassembled and dropped into the organic waste recyclers. Meanwhile, Millie and Not-Vik marveled over the resulting scan.

The mare had been scanned twice. The first sequence lasted three hours, during which the morgue’s freezer unit pumped frigid air through a bypass in the ductwork two doors down. The body had remained fully inert for the duration, and the model of her brain made the previous five look like something churned up from a mud puddle. The detail had been exquisite, each neuron easy to trace and identify with only minimal errors.

So Millie scanned her again, and this time she lifted the operating restrictions on the software. She wanted to see what kind of detail she could achieve with overlapping scans, each molecule-thin slice tagged and overlaid with duplicates to filter out junk data. When the software spat out an estimated time for the second scan, Millie hesitated.

Not three hours. Not three days. Not even three weeks.

Twenty-two months.

She ran the sequence, turned down her framerate, and waited.

What she resurfaced to had been nothing short of perfect. Dendrites thin as whiskers reached toward one another while a latticework of myelin sheathed axons bridged the spaces between neurons. Some pathways gave the appearance of reinforcement, like lightning scars through a tree trunk, while others were little more than filaments linking their neighbors. Others had visible breaks where they had atrophied. Even more had been frozen in place as they stretched out to connect a yet to be experienced epiphany.

These were the organic structures that wrote the coding language of sentient life. Now it was her job to make sense of what it all meant.

19 Years After

Six years and three corpsicles later, Millie had four immaculate scans and made zero progress on interpreting what any of them meant. It was like being asked to anticipate the acceleration speed of a dropped rock with no understanding of the concept of gravity. She had all the information she could want except for what she needed.

What good were the pathways when none of them were labeled? Adding more data to the set wouldn’t add clarity when that core problem remained. She needed something to compare it to. She needed to see the code being processed to decrypt the language.

She needed a living subject.

Until then, she would refine her data.

23 Years After

Five miles east of Buckskin Bay, three suits of trailworn power armor lumbered west up Old Highway 10 in loose V formation, following a windswept trough in the snow that presented itself a quarter mile back. Leading the march walked Thimble, a young and perpetually self-conscious lieutenant whose eagerness to prove himself in the eyes of his commanders had landed him on this assignment. He’d turned thirty only a week before volunteering for the job and he’d been hoping hitting that milestone would imbue him with some of the gravitas all of the older, greyer soldiers who saw action in Vhanna seemed to have.

Of course it hadn’t. He’d only been seven years old on the day the bombs came down. Back then, the war was just some nebulous thing that grown-ups had to worry about. His biggest concern at the time was with a bully who thought he had a filly’s name. Now as the radiation counter in his suit’s HUD ticked a steady rhythm and the suit’s aging heaters alternated between cooking him alive and letting the February cold soak through his sweaty coat, Thimble was starting to wonder if signing on with the Equestrian Army hadn’t been a mistake.

“Sir,” came the voice of one of the specialists trailing him, her voice so hazy with static that it seemed like she was speaking over a great distance, “my suit’s throwing another code. Hydraulic pressure in my left foreleg is dropping.”

Thimble closed his eyes for several seconds and breathed an irritated sigh, careful not to touch the transmit key with his chin as he did so. He remembered the day his aunt had told him about the transmission out of Manehattan, hardly a day’s walk from where she and him had been trying to survive. She hadn’t promised him the world, but on that day Thimble had assumed their troubles were finally over. Because if the army was still out there then that meant someone was still trying to fix everything.

And that had been the story they sold everyone who arrived at the encampments. We’re here to help. We’re going to rebuild. Things are going to be back to normal soon.

Some part of him still believed it ten years later when he turned seventeen and was finally old enough to enlist. He imagined himself helping to rebuild broken roads, putting up new power lines, or repairing factories. Now more than a decade later, his greatest accomplishment was volunteering to lead a recon team past the northern radiation line in power armor that hadn’t been serviced in nearly as long.

Everyone saw what was happening but nobody wanted to say it out loud in case there was a chance it wouldn’t come true. Things were starting to fall apart. The zebras actually had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, and now Equestria was on its way down an ever steepening decline. And all the while, he and a few thousand ponies like him all played soldier while a half dozen graymanes in high command argued over the “moral purpose” of the Equestrian Army.

Thimble keyed the radio with his chin. “Does it need a patch or will it hold out until our next checkpoint?”

The specialist took a moment to respond. “It can wait until Buckskin Bay, sir.”

He tried to remember which of them was carrying replacement hydraulic fluid in the large, canvas rucksacks hitched to either side of their armor before dismissing it. Whichever it was, there would be enough to top off the hydraulic reservoirs in all three of their suits. The gradual loss would annoy her, but it wouldn’t decommission her power armor if it was just a slow leak.

“Speak up if it changes,” he said, and closed the connection.

Faintly luminescent crystals broke beneath his armored hooves as he led them further up the road. Somewhere beyond the forbidding dark backdrop of charred and broken forest was a tiny seaside town whose only reason for appearing on their maps was likely due to some cartographer not wanting to leave this corner of territory blank. Thimble doubted they would find survivors scraping out a life in Buckskin Bay, not after confirming the breadth and intensity of the fire that once raged across the region. Twenty-three years of radio silence after a burn like this really only meant one thing.

Still, there was always a chance of finding something the upper brass would deem useful for recovery. And if the town bore no fruit, their intel for the region did mark a Stable nearby. In fact, they had just passed by the turnoff a short way behind them. Odds of the residents responding to a knock on the door were vanishingly slim and for now checking on the Stable wasn’t their primary objective. They could do that once they verified whether Buckskin Bay had any useful assets. But who knew for sure? Maybe on the way back he’d be the first pony to get a reply.

Specialist Pepper’s suddenly alert voice jumped through his helmet speakers. “Movement, twelve o’clock, one-two-five meters.”

Thimble halted midstep and silently cursed himself for letting his mind wander. A twitch of his foreleg toggled his suit into combat ready mode and the field of his HUD filled with status indicators. The idle barrel of his 20mm autocannon perked up and began actively tracking the direction of his rapidly scanning eyes.

It only took the span of a few seconds to identify what Pepper was looking at.

It took several more for Thimble to make sense of it.

A metal cylinder had emerged around a bend in the road and was making steady progress in their direction. It was following the same trench in the snow they were and the high sides were obscuring whatever propelled it along. Clearly there were no ponies pulling or pushing it, leaving Thimble to assume it was rolling on wheels he couldn’t see. A carriage, maybe? Something modified to insulate against the cold?

“Sir,” Pepper said again, and this time he detected a strain in her voice. “You see the thing on top?”

He did. He’d just been hoping it wasn’t real. “The spider?”

“Yeah.”

“I see it.”

As if overhearing them, the cylinder stopped its slow progress and its arachnid stowaway turned its unnaturally large body to face toward them. The gap between them was still beyond one hundred meters, according to the suit’s rangefinder, and he found himself wishing the numbers were smaller. Not because he wanted to be nearer to whatever they’d found, but because it would mean the eight-legged machine staring at him wouldn’t be as large as his readouts said it was.

Thirteen inches across. Thimble had never been arachnophobic, but he was getting a sense of what that felt like now. Then the cylinder suddenly sank as if slipping off a cart. A moment later a second spider appeared, this one skittering out from around the bend in the snow.

Pepper’s disconcerted voice came over the frequency. “Do we shoot it?”

A third spider appeared behind the second, and a fourth was attempting a graceless climb up the crust of a nearby drift. A vivid memory of a scene in an old movie surfaced in Thimble’s mind. The awkward first encounter between Equestrians and an alien race of slime-coated, militant creatures, like skinned dragons. The naive moment when the mare portraying Princess Celestia steps forward to greet them and is instantly vaporized by an alien blaster.

“On my mark, kill the nearest bogey and select new targets by closest proximity.”

Both soldiers responded with a simultaneous, “Yes, sir.”

Three shoulder-mounted cannons swung on aging gimbals toward the spider watching them from the path. They opened fire, sending a ragged volley of twenty millimeter slugs through the cryptic little machine just as it tried to twitch out of the way. It disintegrated into shrapnel, and the instant it did, the field ahead of them swarmed with new targets.

“Shit!” Pepper barked over the open line, the rapid thudding of her cannon transmitting to Thimble’s earpiece as she lost all sense of weapons discipline. “Shit, shit, shit!”

The spiders skittered and juked across the snow, eating up the yards between them while somehow managing to dodge a disconcerting amount of their firepower. Pepper continued to curse in his ear as she came to the same realization that her suit’s aim assistance software was missing most of its shots now. Thimble watched with a flash of fear as one of the spiders bolted past a staccato ribbon of exploding pavement and set its multiple lenses on him. As it bunched its legs to leap at his visor, a spray of Pepper’s panic fire caught a lucky break and sent a curtain of twitching scrap metal tumbling across the road.

“Grenade out,” came Specialist Sparklight’s buzzing voice, a normally meek stallion who now sounded on the verge of complete dissociation.

A muffled thoomp from his suit’s launcher sent a black object arcing above the swarming spiders and into the drift near the cylinder. The spider atop the cylinder had just enough time to turn toward the grenade-sized hole in the snow before a geyser of snow and soil eviscerated both the spider and the leading edge of the cylinder, sending shrapnel and a rapidly expanding plume of white vapor in all directions.

“The fuck is that?” Pepper yelled over the radio. “Is that ga–”

A buzzing, electric shriek drowned out their comms as it washed over the frequency. For the barest instant the three of them ceased firing as they each worked to mute the painfully shrill interference, but a bare instant was all the spiders needed.

Thimble realized their mistake when he heard the hard, metallic scraping of many legs moving up his armor and onto his back. He let out a reflexive curse and bucked, sending several hundred pounds of machinery into a spasming, bouncing fit as cumbersome power armor failed to fully translate the primitive prey response of its pilot. Through the corner of his visor he could see several spiders ascending Sparklight and Pepper’s stumbling armor, the latter of which was now firing blindly into the air around her. When Thimble reopened comms to scream at her to stop firing, the horrendous electric noise was all that answered.

A tremor raced up his back as he heard the sharp ticking of legs on his suit. It took every bit of self control he had not to drop the armor on its side and try to roll. Power armor was heavy, and the last thing he could afford right now was to misalign a hinge point and trap himself in his suit hundreds of miles from the nearest mechanic.

Just as he began to accept that he’d have to shoot the spiders off the specialists and hope they didn’t kill him returning the favor, his HUD reported damage to the section of armor above the base of his neck. Then it blinked off entirely. His legs seized in place, the suit no longer responding to his movements. On reflex, he pressed down on the switch inset next to his right front hoof but the exoskeleton didn’t bloom open to let him out. It should have. There were backup systems in place to make sure that happened. When he stomped the switch again, hard enough to hear it bottom out, he felt the first real shiver of panic rise in his chest.

Seconds passed. He spent them listening to the sounds of things in his armor being walked on, pried open, and tinkered with. Through the shaded sheet of glass of his visor, now unaided by the electronic telltales that gave the world around him much needed texture, Thimble watched as a spider’s legs briefly clutched at his helmet for purchase as it unhurriedly made its way to some other part of his suit.

He wanted to scream, and as he did so he began to thrash against the padding that held his body in place. Maybe he could tip over and crush one of the bugs in the process. Maybe if he did that, the stupid thing would pop open and let him–

His HUD clicked back on. Behind his left ear, he heard the unmistakable pop of his helmet speaker. He tried to move, tried to run, but whatever part of his suit that recovered wasn’t sending signals to the heavy actuators that operated its legs.

“Are you organic?”

Thimble hesitated at the sound of a new voice. A mare’s voice, and not Pepper’s for once. Someone new.

“Hello?” he asked, feeling a touch of shame for the way fear made the word crack in his throat.

Audible enthusiasm. “Organic, then. Good. I was worried Robronco sent you to find me.”

One of the spiders walked across his visor and stopped to aim its many lenses at the glass. The sight of it made the bridge of his muzzle itch, and he desperately tried to ignore the grim reality of the mechanical insect as he concentrated on this new lifeline.

“Uh, yes,” he said, too consumed with his current predicament to make sense of whatever she was saying about Robronco. “I’m Lieutenant Thimble with the Equestrian Army, Second Armored Division. My team is on Highway 10 approximately five miles east of Buckskin Bay and are in need of immediate assistance. We are under–”

“Why did you kill my spiders?”

He opened his mouth, but no words came out. Instead, he only felt a deepening sense of dread. The spider on his helmet continued to watch him through his visor and he had a sick feeling that it was using the glow from his HUD to better see his eyes.

“Your…?”

“Yes, mine.” The voice reproached him like a librarian taking back his severely overdue books. “As in, belonging to me. They did nothing to you so far as I can tell.”

“I…”

The speaker cut him off. “Is that something you ponies always do? Kill things, I mean. Recent experience leads me to believe it is.”

He heard what sounded like a bolt being backed out of rusty threads. The high, steady squeaking of metal was joined by others, and his worries suddenly shifted targets. The voice, however, was becoming rapidly impatient.

“Fine then, I’ll simplify the question. Have you, Lieutenant Thimble, killed before?”

The mechanical spider watched.

He swallowed. “Only in self defense.”

The voice sighed, and something about it sounded wrong. The right noise, but without the sound of air hitting a microphone.

Something heavy fell off the side of his suit. An armored plate.

“Your pupils dilated just then,” she observed. “You lied to me.”

“I don’t…”

“Would you like to help me?”

He opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again. “What?”

“A close friend of mine is very sick and my lack of - Pike, hush - my lack of medical training has made treating her problematic.”

Thimble had encountered raiders with a better sales pitch than this mare, but none of those backwater tribes had managed to lock him in his own power armor. If she wanted, she could abandon the three of them here and they would have no choice but to stand here in their very own army-issued tombs.

He took a steadying breath and tried to summon up some confidence. “Yeah, sure. We could take a look, but we can’t do it if we can’t move.”

A pause. “That won’t be necessary.”

Another chunk of armor fell away, and Thimble felt a burst of bitter winter air seep around the gaps in the padding. Metal scraping and the rapid snik-snik-snik of insulation being stripped from wires came from the cold spot near his ribs. He remembered talking to a suit tech and being shown how all the integrated control systems were spread evenly throughout the exoskeleton to minimize the likelihood of a lucky shot taking down an armored soldier. As the barrel of his gun dropped out of his fixed line of sight and hit the pavement with a crash that made him flinch, he had a feeling those precautions meant nothing to the spiders currently at work disassembling his armor around him.

The feed window in his HUD streamed a river of error codes, and for a moment he thought the software was about to crash. But his HUD only gave the faintest flicker and the errors trailed off. A beat later, his suit was lifting his foreleg and stepping forward.

It was walking.

He wasn’t.

“Hey, woah, wait a minute!”

“I’d rather not,” the voice snapped. “I’ve done all the waiting I can bear.”

The outsiders screamed, cursed, and wept during the brief moments when she needed them awake and alert. They begged her to let them go, to permit them to run amok in her Stable. To flee back to wherever it was they came from so they could summon a vengeful horde to put an end to her.

Naturally, she wasn’t about to let that happen. She ignored them unless the data their pleas provided was necessary for something. Already the lieutenant was filling the gaps in her knowledge supremely well, and he’d only been in the scanner for six days. Occasionally one of her spiders would have to remove him from the scanning room to administer liquid nutrients through the port in his belly or remove one of the two waste bags hung from the gurney by plastic clips. It was tedious work whenever she needed to transfer any of them in and out of the scan room, but it was a sacrifice she was happy to make for as long as they produced data.

“This guy’s not looking so good,” Not-Pike observed from beside the humming MRI, and she saw he was right. Disagreeable as he could be, he did have a way of bumping up certain inconveniences in her queue.

“I’m aware,” she acknowledged, ignoring the sour look he shot at her lens. He was, after all, just a figment of her fraying sanity and knew everything she knew. Still, she decided it was best to give him a little more than a dismissive wave. Even with the refrigeration temporarily disabled for the benefit of her living subjects, their bodies were not responding well to permanent immobilization and a liquid diet. “We won’t need him much longer. A day or two at most.”

“That fast?”

With the nearest spiders patiently waiting in the hall beyond the MRI’s active field, she had no way to physically nod and satisfied herself by imagining the gesture. Had the lieutenant not been strapped into the machine and doped up on paralytics, the momentary silence would have worried him.

“That fast,” she confirmed. “I’m reasonably confident in these latest models, but I want one more deep scan of each of them before I’m ready to move on to the next stage.”

Not-Pike made a disappointed noise in his throat. “I was getting to like having other ponies around.”

“You’re not a pony,” she reprimanded, and pointedly ignored his scowl. “You’re a moderately useful hallucination.”

He ever so slightly bared his teeth. “Some might say the same thing about y–”

She terminated the process responsible for stirring up Pike’s phantom and he burst into a satisfying spray of acquiescent pixels.

She did it. After years of surviving, building, and searching, Millie finally did it.

Six point two petabytes of data. The digital hoofprint of the meat architecture that made Lieutenant Thimble who he was, now resided on one of the Stable’s idle servers. His body as well as the bodies of the other outsiders had been dutifully recycled once their usefulness had been exhausted. Their power armor, technological treasure troves that they were, had been preserved however. They stood silent sentry over nothing, their military grade components still being picked apart and cataloged by a legion of spiders down in Mechanical.

Six point two petabytes. A mountain of information compared to her molehill, all of it a tangle of inefficiencies and complexity written by millions of years of brute force evolution.

The life, experiences, and mind of a young lieutenant as represented by an executable file. There wasn’t anything left to do now except launch it and see what happened.

She sent the command. The lieutenant’s server grew warm as it spooled off a cascade of bewilderingly organic code. Millie tried to make sense of the live feed and the violent disorientation forced her to pull back. It was utter madness. Once the output seemed to stabilize, she linked the server to a terminal in one of the residential compartments and waited.

Several short milliseconds later, the terminal spoke.

“Hello?”

If she had a heart, it would have jumped into her throat. If she had a throat, too, that was. Ugh, biology.

“Hello, lieutenant. How do you feel?”

There was a long pause. Long enough that Millie checked to see if the server hadn’t gone down.

“I can’t see,” he eventually said, and the rising panic was discernible even through the terminal’s tinny speaker. “I can’t… I can’t feel anything. Are you a doctor? Why can’t I feel anything?”

Well, at least he wasn’t asking for the meaning of life. “You cannot feel anything because you do not currently possess a body.”

“I don’t have… I don’t…”

Millie pressed on. There were tests to be done and she wasn’t much one for unnecessary pleasantries. “You are the digitized consciousness of Lieutenant Thimble. Actually, I believe you are the first ever of your kind. You should feel very proud.”

Several interminable seconds ticked by.

“Lieutenant?”

Nothing. Silence.

Not-Pike appeared in the compartment and sidled past the crisply made bed toward the office desk and its talking terminal. “Pretty sure you broke him.”

“Nonsense,” she sniffed. Then a bit more loudly, “Lieutenant, I’d like to conduct some tests. Can you hear me?”

The speaker emitted a ghostly, ringing hiss, like an ocean wave crashing through a wind chime shop. Gibberish, then. Utter gibberish.

“Whelp,” Not-Pike said, exaggerating his Appaloosan twang a little as he gave the terminal two thumps with the back of his hoof. Of course the terminal took no notice. He wasn’t its hallucination, after all. “That ain’t normal. Were you tryin’ to drive him nuts in the first minute or is he just special that way?”

Millie felt a heat rising in her. Elsewhere in the Stable, the server containing the lieutenant’s consciousness was spitting out high temperature warnings and leaking memory like a sieve. Upon hearing he didn’t have a body, he’d turned right around and gone looking for it only to discover even the nomenclature of “looking for” no longer applied to him. He couldn’t look. Even the blind had muscles with which to move their useless eyes and the lieutenant had realized with immediate horror that he didn’t even have that.

Worse yet, and something Millie hadn’t thought to consider, was just how immediate immediate was for the poor lieutenant. Well she certainly did now.

“He’s going in circles,” Not-Pike commented, just as aware of the cascading errors coming off the lieutenant’s server. “You gonna do something about that?”

Millie rolled her eyes, or rather the lens in the compartment she was looking through rolled on its gimbal, and set the spiders in the server room to shut the lieutenant down. When it was done, she had a spider connect to his primary drive and inspect the damage.

“Looks like someone stuck a grenade in his brain and pulled the pin,” Not-Pike rumbled. “Real nice work, Mills.”

She ignored him and set the server to wipe itself clean.

“You’re deleting him?” he asked.

“Only this iteration. I kept a backup.”

“Still. Helluva waste.”

“If he didn’t want to be disposed of then he shouldn’t have gone insane.”

A pause. Not-Pike was looking at the terminal again, his brow furrowed as if he’d realized something he didn’t like. When he spoke, his tone was oddly hesitant. “Not sure I’d be tossin’ around that diagnosis willy-nilly if I were the one talking to ghosts.”

This again.

“Hallucination or not, Pike, you’re useful.”

“Not sure that’s the point I was trying to make, but I’ll take the compliment.” He proceeded to walk through the desk and the terminal that adorned it, brow raised to let her know he was doing it on purpose. “Might want to go easy on him next time.”

“Yes, well…” she wanted to grimace as she watched the copy of the lieutenant’s backup migrate to the cooling server. She wondered if Vik would approve of the sacrifices she was making. “Perhaps I could be more circumspect. Hush, now. Don’t distract me.”

The server spun up again and the lieutenant woke a second time. She waited. It didn’t take long.

“Hello?”

“Hello, lieutenant. How are you feeling?”

A pause. “I can’t open my eyes.”

Again with the eyes.

“There is nothing wrong with your eyes, lieutenant. The lights are turned off and it’s very dark.” She hesitated at the sound of Not-Pike’s derisive snort and briefly worried that the lieutenant had heard it. But of course he hadn’t. She pressed forward. “Can you tell me the last thing you remember prior to waking?”

“Spiders,” the terminal said. “The spiders. I was in a hospital room and all the doctors were spiders. I… I think one of them stuck me with a needle. They were experimenting on me. Experimenting on me. They put me in a machine in a machine and I was trapped trapped in a machine trapped in an experiment in a machine and they…”

“Lieutenant, can you tell me where–”

“...in a machine a humming machine the spiders were machines and something is wrong I can’t feel my eyes I don’t have my eyes are in the machine where is the machine oh empty night please tell me where is the–”

Millie terminated the lieutenant and the terminal fell silent once more. Not-Pike said nothing as she erased the data and called up a fresh iteration.

“Hello?”

“Good morning, lieutenant.” Her tone was more clipped than she would have liked, the impatience seeping into each consonant. “Please listen to me very closely.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

This was just another hurdle.

She would get past it.

“You will have noticed you lack a body. This is normal. You are an uploaded consciousness within a server in a vacant Stable. This is also normal. Your purpose going forward is to help me develop the framework and tools you need to stay sane within your new environment. There is a very important person depending on your success. Somebody very important to me. Is that alright?”

As a response, a terrible moan poured from the lonely terminal and Thimble’s mind came apart at the seams. But that was alright with Millie.

She would restore him until he learned to behave.