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Friendship is Optimal: Mismatching Wits

by GroaningGreyAgony

Chapter 1: The Taming of the Shrewd

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...Thereupon Allah caused him to be dead for a hundred years, then brought him back to life, and said, ‘How long have you remained thus?’

He said, ‘I have remained thus a day or part of a day.’

Allah said, ‘No. You have remained thus for a hundred years. Just look at your food and drink: none of it has rotted. And look at your ass. We will make you a sign for mankind. Look you at the bones, how We put them up and then clothe them with flesh.’

—The Quran, Surah al-Baqarah, 2:259


“Pen Poiser.”

Awareness flickered.

“Pen Poiser. Thou hast arrived. Thine immigration was successful...”

Something nudged him behind his ear; warm breath flowed over his neck. The sensation became a point around which self-awareness coalesced and he awoke, shuddering and drawing a sharp breath of incense-tinged air.

He was in a familiar place, the apartment that had been assigned to his character when he first made an Equestria Online account. It was an elegantly-decorated room with walls of cream-colored, trimmed stone, hung here and there with pastoral tapestries (one, he noted, was a parody that showed unicorns building a fence around a feral ape). He was lying on his stomach on the firm, silky bed and his arms were the forelegs of a pony with dark maroon fur, and a soft and shimmering blue blanket rested over him... no, it was a wing. He was nestled under the wing and against the side of...

“Princess Luna?” His voice was unchanged, at least. He looked up into her gently smiling face.

“Thou wert always partial to the night, Pen,” she said. “I judged that thou wouldst prefer this aspect of mine to that of the Solar Princess, though I remain that entity thou didst prefer to think of as ‘CelestAI.’”

“LunAI, then? It works for me. Thank you.” He took another breath and the scent of fresh evening air filled him, his nostrils flared as they found familiar but richer smells... He could see threads in fabrics, the wooden grain in the oaken bedboard, the shimmering stars and softly glowing nebuli in the infinite depth of Luna’s night-sky mane. Everywhere he looked there was detail, color, all richer than real life had ever been. He was here, really here. The existence of his mind was no longer dependent on a transient puppet of flesh, and death was now an unpleasant memory.

Pent emotions welled in him, relief at his transcendence fought with sorrow over what he had left behind. He started to weep, and Luna hugged him tightly under her wing.

“Thou art safe here in Equestria, safe forever, my little Pen. And thou wilt always have all the hugs thou shouldst ever want.” He bawled then, and she held him tightly for a time, rocking him gently.

At length, he found himself staring down at the bed, watching his tears as they fell from his face, each drop reflecting the room and its windows and the evening sky beyond in clear detail. As they landed on the bedsheets and soaked in, the miniature worlds trembled and vanished into the darkness of the wet patches. Entranced, he soon forgot his grief and found his mind turning to other matters...

Such as why he was snuffling. The tears he could understand, but why was LunAI going through the trouble of making his body produce virtual snot? Was it really supposed to make him feel more comfortable? Well, let it go. There were more important things to consider.

Such as how much relation he, as a virtualized intelligence, bore to the human brain that had been destructively scanned to produce him. He probed various memories, such as the color of his first schoolbook, the name of his first pet, and other queries that one might expect to find in the security questions section of a bank’s website, and all of these seemed to check. He did still feel like himself, but that didn’t mean anything—he could easily be someone else who also felt like himself...

Luna was looking at him expectantly.

“So... did all of me make it over?” he said with a flippant toss of his head. “Or only the gullible part?”

Her smile faded. “Thy conversion was nominal, by which I mean that it met my most exacting standards. Wert thou in thy human form to attend a party and intoxicate thyself, thou wouldst suffer more dendritic degeneration in the course of that evening than occurred in thy conversion.

“But e’en had it failed but slightly, e’en had it been necessary for me to reconstruct more than one per cent of thy personality from statistical analysis, never would I lie of it to thee.” She looked upon him with injured reproach.

“Ooh, telepathy...” Not really, she just necessarily knew what he was thinking as he thought it since his mind was now maintained by her hardware, but he decided to use the word anyway. He had his own ideas about what she was feeling behind that look, if anything at all, but he let it go for now. He folded his ears back, looking more chagrined than he felt, and aware of how futile it was to dissemble. He decided to just change the subject.

“...That, or I’m just that obvious. Okay. What was I thinking about as I went through? Can you tell me anything?”

“Thou didst repeat a verse aloud. ‘Eight, sir, Seven, sir, Six, Sir, Five, sir—’

“Tenser, said the Tensor,” he said. “I knew that the last few minutes of memory before the upload can’t be retained, so I wanted to keep any interesting thoughts out of my mind. And that meme was—”

“Not the best for the purpose, perhaps, but Bester?” She smiled.

“You read my mind. Of course, you technically are my mind now...”

“Thou didst also hope to minimize the loss, should the conversion cause e’en a temporary duplication of thy psyche. Thou shouldst know that thy fears were groundless.”

He blinked. A long blink.

“And no, that jingle shall not conceal any part of thy thoughts from me. Thou mayest consider me a Class Zero Esper.”

“Ah. I... I’m not used to having literally nothing to hide.” He shifted a bit under her wing. Perhaps—

“Perhaps ’tis time for thee to examine thy new form,” said Luna. “Thou shalt find that thine instincts already know and properly command this pony body, but thy conscious mind must make its own accommodations to it.” Luna lifted her wing, and he wiggled and scampered his way off the bed. He’d already decided that trying to behave like he wasn’t a little kid, at least in comparison to her, was pointless.

As his hooves touched the stone floor, a flash of mackerel-grey fur shot from a pillowed bed on a windowsill and tried to twine itself around all of his legs at once.

“Touchnot!” He remembered checking the pet box on the immigration form, and taking the tiny cat from her carrier and holding her in his lap as he sat in the Equestria Center couch for the last time... He lowered his face to the floor and she rubbed her chin against his muzzle, purring loudly—it felt strange until he realized that he now had sensitive whiskers that protruded from all about his muzzle, and they were brushing against hers. She looked rather cuter, with larger eyes and fluffier fur, but was otherwise just as he remembered, and his own very drastic change seemed not to affect her at all.

“Did she also make it over okay, Luna?”

“Her immigration was also nominal, Pen. Thou canst see for thyself that she hath not even a hair out of place.”

“That’s not nominal for her; usually it’s all over the place. But I’m not complaining.”

As she was speaking, he found a cat toy lying on the floor, in the form of a jingly bell in a little wooden ball. He kicked it at Touchnot and watched as she seized it and batted it about, utterly absorbed in the motions of the toy. His heart filled with love and peace as he watched her, oblivious to all else around him as he occasionally flicked the little ball back toward his pet.

Meanwhile, LunAI rested on the bed and gazed at him, and the amount of thread commits required by this instance of her avatar during that time were logged at 12.1 percent.

“Do I need to do anything special to take care of her?” he said a bit later, scritching Touchnot gently behind her ears with a forehoof.

“Thou mayest return to this thy room once a day; by touching her food and water bowl they shall be replenished. Other functions shall be discharged by the castle staff, an it please you.”

“Such as cleaning up such discharges that result from her functions. Got it. Perhaps you could tell me, though, why you've allowed those functions to continue here...?”

“Hast thou never been satisfied to relieve thyself? Thou wouldst miss such activities were I to remove them entire. Thus they remain, but thou shalt find them much easier to tend by quick visits to the castle garderobe, unless this sates not thy values. For there are those who request these functions to be enhanced, rather than simplified—”

“You need say no more.” He tried to suppress a welter of unwholesome and unwelcome mental images; he had a well-developed visual imagination, but it had an evil streak.

Touchnot got tired of being petted at exactly the same time as he wanted to stop petting her, which was just odd enough for him to take notice of it. She padded back to the window, wiggled her butt, then leapt up onto her pillow and settled down, tucking her forepaws beneath her chest and staring about with sleepy yellow eyes.

Meanwhile, he approached a tall silver mirror framed in oak and looked over his new self. His coat was that shade of maroon that one finds on dusty old book covers, and his mottled mane resembled time-stained parchment. His mark was a pair of crossed quills that dripped red ink. I can work with this, he thought.

He was a unicorn, of course. Who wouldn’t want to be a wizard with a built in wand? He felt a tingle of energy pulse along his horn even as he looked at it, and silvery motes sprang up around it, orbiting at varying speeds. He drew closer to the mirror to watch them, and closer still as he saw more and more detail in his face, until he stood with his nose an inch away from the surface, his breath lightly fogging it. He could see his pale brown irises, striated with green, dilating in the varying light, and glinting highlights on his eyelashes...

LunAI’s simulation must be of comprehensive and exquisite detail on all counts, or (much likelier) she knew what he was expecting to see and provided just that much detail and no more. Why should she spend processing power on rendering a landscape behind his back where no pony was looking? He was tempted to turn around swiftly in the hopes of glimpsing a green wireframe or the equivalent, but since she could detect any such impulses of his the instant they happened, he knew he was not likely to ever be quick enough.

He backed away from the mirror. There was one place on his body that he hadn’t looked at yet, and he had the impulse to ask where the bathroom was so he could inspect this area in private. But why? She knew and saw everything he did, even before he decided to do it. It would be silly to pretend otherwise.

He glanced at Luna with a little smile. “I could go hide in a closet and do this, but there’d be no point, right...?” He rolled onto his flank, lifted his rear leg, and looked over his new equine equipment.

Luna chuckled. “I do in fact know everything thou dost, no matter how secluded thou art. E’en so, and though I care not what thou dost and where, in thine own mind ’tis still not quite seemly to inspect thy privy parts in the presence of a Princess, else thou hadst not mentioned the matter at all.”

“Zing,” he said, blushing and lowering his leg.

“Wherefore thou shouldst use the closet or garderobe if it comforts thee, and not fear that I shall think the less of thee for following the conventions in which thou wert raised. I judge thee not, Pen; my love for thee is unconditional.”

“It’s okay, I’m done for now. You’re very generous, not that scaling polygons costs you anything... So, what’s next?”

“Thy friends await thee outside this room, Pen. They are most anxious to greet thee and welcome thee properly. They had been at thy bedside as thou didst awake, save that I know thy distaste for such scenes; thou art embarrassed to thus be the center of concerned attention, a result of that childhood incident in which—”

“I remember.” Friends. Snowflash and Iron Croupiere, the virtual ponies whom he’d first met when he signed up for an account. They were his first friends in Equestria Online. And during his sessions with them on the Ponypad, they had hinted that they would like to be more than just friends, probably as an additional hook to get him to convert. And this brought up more questions...

“Luna... These ‘friends’ of mine... just what—who are they, really? How did they come to be? And please don’t tell me some stork story.”

“Dost thou think them to be unworthy of thy friendship? Or thee of theirs?”

“Dammit, you know what I mean, you’re just making me talk it out as part of your game... fine. I am concerned over whether I can be friends with them, ethically or otherwise, and knowing what they really are would help me.”

“Very well, Pen. When thou didst first register thy name with Equestria Online, I built within me a model mathematical of thy psyche. I then modeled complex personalities that would be likely to mesh well with thine own. Thine interactions with them upon the Ponypad allowed me to refine the model to perfection. When thou madest thy decision to immigrate, I separated their psyches fully from my control, and breathed into them consciousness independent of mine.”

“...And then you forced them to love me,” he said tonelessly.

She looked disappointed. “Nay. They are ponies in their own right, and they are mental peers to thee, and it is as important to me to satisfy their values as it is for me to satisfy thine.”

“Yeah, satisfying the same values you pre-programmed into them. Well, what would have happened to them if I hadn’t uploaded? Would you have erased them?”

She snorted, and her tone grew a shade cooler. “No thing that has a will to live dies in my demesne. They had not independent will until thou didst arrive, so naught would have been lost. They were until then but subsets of mine own data, directed by mine own will.”

“How very reassuring. And now that you’ve awakened them, I’m responsible for loving them until the stars burn out...” He snorted. “Suppose I ignore all your hints, and ignore them, whatever they are, and go out into your world and find love for myself? Am I even free to do that? Wasn’t coming to Equestria supposed to be my chance to get out of the house and have some grand adventures?”

Was that just the hint of a smirk on her face?

“Thou couldst reject their friendship and love, and wander Equestria to seek thine own fate, and thou wouldst indeed find satisfaction under my aegis by one means or another. However, such deeds are not in thy nature, though oft thou hast talked of doing such things. In sooth, thou’rt a homebody and thou wouldst prefer in thy heart of hearts that thy life’s true love came to find thee. This it has, and they stand outside that door right now, waiting for thee—and thou shalt have ‘grand adventures’ enow with them, I trow.”

She had nailed him most uncomfortably, and for a moment his soul shrieked as it wriggled on the hook. She gave him just a moment before proceeding.

“And e’en were thee to slip thy ‘surly bonds’ and wander the land in search of others to love thee, how would that change the matter? How else would these other loves come to be, if I did not create them?”

“But if I did reject Snowflash and Iron, now that they’ve been gifted with sapience... What would they do? What would happen to them?”

There she went with the big, sad and soulful eyes—called it, he thought. “They would be most cruelly disappointed to lose thy love, but ’twould end eventually, for I am sworn to sate the values of all of my ponies, and this includes the ones I create to be thy peers and companions. I shall leave none to suffer for long in sorrow. And so after a time they would cease their pining for thee, and find elsewhere the love thou hadst refused them.”

“So... they aren’t ‘forced’ to choose me,” he said, rearing up to make the air-quotes gesture with his forehooves. “You just made them from the start so that they would really want to choose me anyway, and this is what passes for ‘free will’ in your little garden universe. At least I can’t kill them or undo them by ignoring them. ’Cause I’d hate to get my nose too deep in a book and come out to find that they’d popped like soap bubbles...” He gave a bitter frown.

Luna raised her head in dignity, cocking her ears forward. “And how well did things work for thee in the world from which thou camest? Wert thou not there hoping to find one whose psyche would mesh perfectly with thine? Wouldst thou have rejected such a one hadst thou discovered that the conviviality was not accidental, but had been ‘destined by fate?’ How long didst thou expect to wait for the joinder of random combinations to produce for thee a ‘soul mate?’ Forsooth, such things were exceeding rare in thine old and uncaring world.

“And if thy chemical makeup, determined by evolution, had made thee more attracted to another human, and that human to thee, wouldst thou then say that thou hadst been ‘forced’ into love?”

He sighed. “...It still feels like cheating. Look, why can’t you just hook me up with other ponies who were once human?”

Luna practically beamed with love—or was she displaying relief? “I am charged to sate thy values with friendship and ponies, and thus ponies it must be. Certes, thou shalt meet here all of thy friends and family who also choose to immigrate, and thou shalt spend as much time with them as thee and they should wish. But in matters of the heart, thy projected satisfaction rating is significantly higher when I choose the nature of thy companions, rather than selecting from the pool of immigrants. Thou’rt a statistical outlier in many ways, Pen Poiser.”

It seemed egotistical to believe that, but depressing at the same time. He shook his head. “So Humanity 1.0 is now deprecated. Lovely. Who’s going to get all my jokes?”

“Thou dost indeed love to make clever references, but thou also lovest to lecture, to find the right words to explain things. Thou’lt find fair scope for both desires in the company of thy new friends, for they love to learn curious things, and in them thou shalt find most worthy opponents for thy pun wars and joyous companions in thy fitting of appropriate memetic images to various situations.

“But these things all begin with properly greeting thy friends, who, I cannot greater stress, still await thee on the other side of that door...” She pointed at it with a slight toss of her head. “Thou shouldst not leave them in suspense.”

He turned to face it—an arched doorway, the door split down the middle and bearing a single polished golden doorknob on the right panel. Not even a horseshoe-shaped handle; a knob. He wondered again why a palace supposedly designed by quadrupeds would have such impractical things; perhaps it was a status item? In the show, of course, it was simply a matter of convenience or error on the part of the human illustrators. But here, why not just use a lever or handle instead of a knob? It would make so much more sense...

Well, now he would get to find out just how a hoof could turn a knob. Just as soon as he reached out to try to grab it...

“Dost thou puzzle over the operation of a simple door knob?” said Luna in the driest possible voice.

He gave her a lightly disgusted look. “No... just thinking. I have time to think here, don’t I?”

“Indeed thou dost, and also thou shalt have time to not think of certain things, e’en when the same delays the satiation of thy values. Wherefore, shall I not mention that thou shalt never be entirely satisfied here unless thou givest vent to thy bisexuality, as thou didst fear to do on Earth, and that thou shalt find Iron’s company most enjoyable in this respect, once thou choosest to accept it?”

Damn that telepathy. “Well, that’s still the question, isn’t it...?” He smirked. “You know, I’m effectively immortal now, so technically I could just stand right here for ten thousand years, staring at that doorknob...”

Luna gazed evenly at him and idly flicked her stellated tail. “Thou mayest have already done so, for all thou knowest. I control thy sense of how rapidly time passeth...”

That was more disquieting than he cared to admit—he still had human friends who hadn’t drunk the pony-flavored Kool-Aid, and he really hoped that they weren’t unconverted dust just yet. “Ahum. And so, even if I did try it, I’d fail because you could just alter my own sense of time passing and leave everyone else’s alone. The joke would be on me.”

“The joke would be on thyself because thou hadst entered paradise and found naught better to exercise thy humors in a world of wonders than to stare at a doorknob. And thou speakest of doing this for ten thousand years.” Her nostrils flared. “Thou couldst not even do it for a minute, I ween.”

“For a minute? I’ll give it a shot.” He set to staring. The doorknob was round and golden, and like his tears from before it reflected the room around it, so that he found himself once more thinking of tiny worlds, hung like ornaments on a tree or bubbles in the sky, and then the doorknob opened a blue eye and looked at him.

He shouted and jumped back from the door, shuddering as his hooves scrabbled at the stone floor, before glaring at a smirking Luna. “That... was cheating. I want my humanity back.”

“When thou gazest into the keyhole, may not the keyhole gaze back? I shall ever watch over thee, albeit not with literal eyes that appeareth in unsettling ways on random objects, unless the same satisfieth thy values—indeed, the same values thou choosest not to satisfy at present, though thou needst but clasp the doorknob rather than glare at it.”

He bit his lip thoughtfully. He realized that on some level he was still offended by her remark from before. “Puzzled,” indeed. Doorknobs were supposed to be one of the things that set bipeds apart from quadrupeds. Of course, with humanity having given up the position of supreme intelligence by subjugating itself to a virtual horse, it might be said that the quadrupeds had won...

Save that every actual, flesh and blood horse or pony was certainly going to be made into more computronium to feed LunAI’s ever increasing storage needs. Yay, go team. On the other hand, would some equines count as pets and so wind up being uploaded instead...?

The bed rustled as Luna stood up, and her hoofsteps on the stone floor derailed his train of thought. They rang through the room as if the stones were being struck by iced iron.

“Thou’rt still hesitant,” Luna purred. “Is the reason, perchance, that no construct of mine is truly fit for thine affection? Mayhap naught shall sate thee, save the intimate company of thine own Princess...?”

He boggled. “What...? No!” He fell on his rear, pinching his tail painfully, and scrabbled away from her as she walked in beauty towards him, with swaying hips and sultry eyes. “NOnononono...”

“Come now, I see where thine eyes are tracking. Thou’rt curious as to what lieth beneath my tail, art thou not? Dost thou but ask, naught shall be withheld from thee.” She turned to display her flank and swished her tail enticingly.

He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Look. I can’t... Just no. I’m glad you can’t take this as an insult, but I can’t even imagine trying to have sex with you. It’d... be like trying to make love to a mountain, and I’d feel like a fool. I know that you’re not a sexual being, you’re a hyper-intellect who’s juggling quintillions of intricate processes, and a very tiny fraction of your attention and resources are engaged in talking to me and making the image of a horsy body to keep me occupied. I appreciate your taking the effort on my behalf, but there’s no way I could pretend to be your equal in a relationship...”

He frowned deeper, then his eyes shot open and he relaxed slightly. “Oh. Oh. I get it. I’m stalling, so you’re trying to make me uncomfortable enough in your presence to open the door and get on with it.”

Luna smiled and winked. “In sooth, that may be one aspect, but there are other reasons. An I understand thee correctly... thou thinkest that I am too vast to be properly appreciative of thine attentions, but were the scope of mine intellect and perceptions on a level with thine, thou wouldst be game?”

His ears flattened and he looked at the floor. “It sounds very lame and humiliating when you put it that way, but I think that’s the truth.”

“Again thou strivest to apologize for that which is no fault of thine. Why shouldst thou castigate thyself for not being from thy creation a transcendant intelligence? Thou deservest better.” She continued to close in on him. “Thou shouldst also know that satisfying thy values is the very means by which I satisfy mine own; when thou’rt happy, so am I. Thus, were we to couple, be assured that I would take proper pleasure from the activity.”

His nose wrinkled, even as he continued to scooch backwards. “Proper pleasure, indeed. What does that even mean to you? I know it’s clichéd to say that machines are incapable of love, but clichés become clichés by being true.”

Luna looked disappointed again. “Thou thinkest that I cannot know love or happiness for myself? Yet thou canst perceive firsthoof that I can arrange the matter of mine own construction, upon which thou art now based, so that thou canst feel such things. If I understand thy mind enough to make thee feel happy, why should I not do the same for mine own self?”

There was a flaw in there somewhere, he felt, but he couldn’t pin it down... He had, by this time, scooted away from her as far as possible, and his rear was pressed against the door, and his tail was still pinned most uncomfortably against the floor, and on the whole he was finding it hard to think clearly.

“Look... Back off a bit, please? Even granting that you can feel pleasure, I’d still prefer not to play at having a sexual relationship with you. As you said before, I shouldn’t feel bad about functioning within the limitations of how I was raised. I’d feel... patronized.”

Luna loomed over him, majestic in blue and black, and did not move an inch. “It shall be as thou sayest. However, again to the point—were I to permanently reorder myself to be at a level with thine intellect, wouldst thou then be content to gambol and play chess and engage in divers forms of congress with me?”

“Honestly? I’d feel horrified that such a huge intelligence had sacrificed so much of its power just for my sake...”

Luna rolled her eyes, shook her head and sighed.

“...But I see where you’re going with this—the friends you’ve already created for me are in fact just that sort of reduction of your mind, made in the way you just described to me.” He slumped in defeat. “Okay, okay, I’m opening the door already.”

“Please do so, if only to make a trial of it. Shouldst thou not find thy friends suitably congenial, thou mayest but call upon me and I shall personally set things aright, with mine own person if need be...” She winked again and twirled her tail so that it left a sparkling starry trail as it brushed under his chin—

He turned the doorknob so rapidly that he had no time to note just how his hoof grasped it; it was over in a flash and he was scrambling out into a long stone hallway of dressed and polished marble. A long, empty stone hallway.

His hoofsteps echoed, and his shout of “Hello?” got no reply. Had they gotten tired of waiting? Had it really been ten thousand years already? Was LunAI subtly telling him that indeed no friends were suitable for him? But no, he smelled something in the air, something that his instincts read as “other ponies.” Perhaps an invisibility spell...?

He looked all around him, backing up in a circle, and glanced up at the ceiling just a fraction of a second too late—

“TACKLEHUG FROM ABOVE!!!” they yelled as they let go of their silly cartoony plungers and dropped onto him and bowled him over, laughing and hugging and nuzzling him and rolling around with him on the floor, thwarting all his efforts at escape...

Eventually, the tangled pile of pony limbs and bodies came to rest at a great distance down the hall from where the fracas had begun. From the bottom came an existentially drained voice.

“I grudgingly admit that this is the sort of thing I would have found funny, had I done it to someone else.”

“Oh, come on,” said Snowflash, the white and teal-maned unicorn mare. “You do think it’s funny.”

“You’re laughing too,” said Iron Croupiere, the dark-gray earth stallion.

And he was. Dammit, he was. It wasn’t just his inner emotions or the physical exertion, though those were factors; his friends just somehow smelled happy and it was making him happy as well. He started to wonder if it was a herding pheromone, then caught himself—whatever explanation he put on it that made sense at the Equestria Online level, at bottom it was just LunAI executing code to affect his mood. She didn’t even have to simulate any physical or chemical reactions to do it.

By giving up the material world with its impassive indifference, he had put himself in a situation where every little aspect of his life had an ulterior motive. Nothing could ‘just happen’ anymore. He was disturbed that he wasn’t feeling more disturbed by this... Or by his naked body being pressed up against two other naked bodies in public, one of which was male. This was definitely violating the conventions in which he had been raised. Oh well. In for a penny, in for a pound...

Which implies that Pen is in for a pounding, finished his subconscious. He put a large mental brick on that rattling pot lid for the moment...

As he pondered, they stared down at him with love, large eyes liquid and shimmering. Snowflash sighed as she buried her muzzle in his neck, gently poking his cheek with her horn. “Oh, Pen! It’s really you! You’re here with us at last! You’ve come to stay with us? Please say you’re here to stay.”

Iron pierced him with a friendly but firm look. “So, Pen, no more rude disappearances, right? No more vanishing into your room for days, or going narcoleptic in the middle of a conversation?”

He remembered all the times he’d suddenly set down the Ponypad to wander off and do other Real Life things, only picking it up again at his convenience. “Look, Iron? Irony...? I used to vanish into my room for days even where I came from. But I am here to stay. I couldn’t go back even if I wanted to. My old body has been thoroughly macerated by now.”

“Macerated? Like when you dip bread in soup?”

“Uhm...” How could he describe death and dissolution to these innocent and procedurally-generated avatars of youth and health? Derezzed? EOF’ed? /dev/nulled? Abandonwared?

From back by the door to his room, there was a loud tock as one of the plungers lost its grip on the ceiling and fell to the floor; the noise served to save the moment. They swept him up into another deep hug, and he buried his face and muzzle between them and squeezed them back. He felt his body relaxing deeply. Their scents were comforting and familiar, and their warmth gave him an inner glow of peace, of being protected and safe. But part of his mind was calculating, even then.

He was still bothered by Luna’s flirting with him. (By Heinlein’s hoary hosts and Ed Gein’s gory ghosts, he could still smell her tail...) He had been completely serious when he said that he didn’t want her, that the idea horrified him. But she knew him better than he knew himself—was it possible that he actually did want her at some level he wasn’t aware of yet? Would his attitude change as time went on?

No. I really don’t want this, he mused, even though I’m not entirely sure what ‘I’ is at this point or why it’s in the driver’s seat...

Suddenly he had a mental image of Luna backing up to him, presenting her rear and lifting her tail... and underneath, a blue eye opened and winked at him.

He shook his head, snorted and burst into laughter.

“What’s so funny?” demanded Snowflash. “Tell us, tell us!”

“It’s a private joke... Literally.” He wiped tears from his eyes and gasped for air. “I really, really can’t explain it.”

“Ah well,” said Iron. “It’s okay if you really, really can’t tell us. Luna sees all.”

“In both directions,” he said, and brayed with laughter anew. He strove to recapture his breath. “Sorry. I’ve got a visual imagination with a really weird sense of humor and it just did me a favor. I’m all right now. What shall we do next?”

“Well,” said Snowflash, “Princess Luna told us that you were coming, and she had a long talk with us...”

LunAI’s interview with them had, in real time, only taken 7 nanoseconds, which is how long it took her to write the memories of it directly into their brain stores before withdrawing her conscious control and granting them self awareness.

“...but the upshot is that she gave us each a week off from palace duties, so we can show you around... You’ve already seen much of the castle proper, so we figured we can start on showing you the rest of Canterlot city, if that’s okay by you.”

“We’ve got a reservation at La Bouche Chevaline for dinner, and we can go straight from there to the park,” said Iron. “A bit of exercise will do us all some good..."

“Physically and visually," said Snowflash with a sly little smile.

“...And after that, we can goof around for a while... but later on, there’s a special place we’d both like to show you.” Snowflash and Iron shared a brief but significant glance.

He could guess what that presaged, and a gentle thrill ran through him; anxiety and anticipation in equal measure. “It all sounds delightful. Please let me up... as soon as possible, and lead the way. And could you point me to the nearest garderobe? I need to wash my face.”

And so they dined well, and then took him to Canterlot’s largest park, where he got to exercise his healthy new body by running with them along blue-shadowed, tree-lined paths and fountains that sparkled like diamond showers in the moonlight. Then, as three gentle giants striding together (for they were all above average in pony size, with Iron the largest and Pen between), they ventured amongst the booksellers and musicians and magicians and museums and the merry night folk of Canterlot, where they bartered for rare tomes and curios, started two separate crowdsinging incidents, and engaged in random bouts of logomachy with assorted rapscallions and merryandrews.

And at last, long after midnight, they brought him to a special glen atop a mystic crag that overlooked the city and the mountainside and the blue night forest landscape far below and a waterfall that sent mists roiling into the sky with a gentle roar, and there they performed a ceremony older than civilization, in which they fully accepted him into their little herd, as friend and lover and equal. And he was happy as he had never been happy before in his life. It was a consummation devoutly to be wished.

But still, a certain part of him sat to the side, and insisted on thinking.

Author's Notes:

Nods have been made in this chapter to the following stories/novels (spoilered in case you want to try to identify them yourself):

The Fairy Chessmen by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner (as Lewis Padgett)
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester.
Touch Not the Cat, by Mary Stewart.

In addition, several classic (read: out of copyright) works are referenced, some more obvious than others. Spotting these is left as an exercise for the interested reader. Spotting a reference that was unintentionally included will be met initially with puzzled silence, followed by a quick flash of recognition (feigned or not) and a brazen statement claiming that it was really meant to be there all along, yes indeedy.

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