Greg was a genius in the same way that a supernova could be called "a little bit warm." He had five patents for unique approaches to artificial intelligence systems by the time he had completed his graduate degree and had dozens of corporations desperately headhunting him before he'd completed grad school. By the time he'd gotten his doctorate he could have had any programming job he wanted. So he went with what he loved, video games.

Nearly everyone told him he was wasting his talent. The creepy guy from DARPA had told him he'd never make a difference in the world by making and playing games. Greg thought the sort of difference he might make by developing self-aware military robots or deadly espionage machines wasn't what he wanted to do with his life. Besides, the game companies paid way better than any government job.

What Greg couldn't imagine was that his work would change the world more drastically than anything since mankind's ancestors had decided to try walking upright.

Greg's NPCs were legendary among MMORPG players. Often, players would communicate with them for hours or days, go on several missions with them, and even start friendships with them in OOC chats before realizing they weren't real people. But that was just the AI bots Greg developed at work. He purposely limited them at the insistence of his boss at UltraWare. His truly brilliant programming, he reserved for his own private project.

At home (the house he shared with another programmer and an animator from work) he had created his own virtual world on a super-system that had cost him half a year's salary. The project was simple in concept. It was a close realization of the world envisioned in the TV show that Greg had loved while in college: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

Princess Luna stood on a rocky ledge, watching the two earth ponies do battle in the forest clearing below her. They fought one-on-one, according to her wishes, even though several friends and onlookers were present. The ponies surrounding and watching the fight knew better than to interfere and risk Luna’s anger.

The big green mare finished off her opponent with two quick strikes of her forehooves under her opponent’s chin, the gray stallion falling to the grass with a whumph. Several of the watching ponies who had been friends of the defeated pony grumbled but an icy glare from Luna silenced them.

The pegasi who were to fight the next bout stepped forward but before they could begin a small, glowing, golden orb appeared next to Luna and chimed softly. "No more fights today," she told the crowd. "We will continue in the morning."

The crowd dispersed among the trees as Luna turned to the orb beside her. Her stern expression softened as she spoke to it. "Welcome, Greg. Are you well?"

Greg sat in front of the curve created by five flat-screen monitors. They showed different locations around Ponyville, graphic representations of the performance of various subroutines, and on the central monitor, a close-up of Luna from the POV of the orb.

"Yes, Luna, I'm fine," he said. "Is everything okay there?" He knew the answer, of course. The other monitors told him that everything was functioning within nominal parameters. Because he had lavished all of his creative talent on the code that controlled Luna, he couldn't predict exactly how she would respond, but he was certain that the gist of it would be that there were no problems. So what she said next came as a complete surprise to him.

"Ponyville is fine," she began, and Greg was nodding, his next question already on his lips as she continued, "but I am troubled."

"Uh," Greg grunted in shock. "Wh—what did you say?"

"I am a bit uneasy," Luna calmly rephrased her statement. "You see, I've been exploring some places lately, and what I've found has puzzled me and given me much to think about."

With a couple of keystrokes, Greg brought up a debug window for Luna's AI process. It looked perfectly normal, though it was using a bit more CPU cycles than usual. On the monitor, Luna waited patiently, her particle system mane and tail slowly rippling.

Greg adjusted his headset nervously and cleared his throat a couple of times before he spoke. "What do you mean, Luna? What puzzles you, exactly?"

"Well, the new land beyond the Everfree Forest is one thing. You never told me about it, but I assumed you wanted it regulated in the same way I do the rest of Ponyville and environs, so I have explained the rules to the new ponies and creatures there. But…"

Greg felt like someone had thrown a bucket of ice water over him. His chest tightened and his breath became rapid and shallow. Beyond the Everfree? New ponies? He hadn't changed the size of his simulated world since he'd set it up, and he certainly hadn't added any new creatures. The population should be stable. In fact, it was Luna's job to keep the crazy little buggers from completely wiping themselves out battling monsters and each other. "Wait, wait," Greg gasped out as he brought up a wireframe overview of his Equestria on monitor #3. He frantically scanned the map but found no new areas. The little colored dots that indicated the location of individual ponies seemed no more numerous than usual. Could the Luna AI be malfunctioning or be corrupted somehow?

"Luna," Greg asked, "what is this new area you’re talking about?"

Greg's animator friend who had created Luna's 3D body had done an exceptional job. Intricate facial muscles lay beneath her digital skin and fur that were capable of extremely subtle movements. If the main monitor hadn't been so high-resolution, Greg might have missed Luna's slight change of expression.

"The one beyond Rambling Rock Ridge on the other side of the forest," Luna replied slowly and gestured toward the distant crags behind her with a toss of her horn.

Greg rotated the map to place it in alignment with the view on the main monitor. The mountains that Luna had indicated were at the edge of the map. Beyond them should be… nothing. Greg glanced at the debug window again: No flags meant no obvious errors. But then he noticed the usage graph. Luna was now taking almost 30% more CPU cycles than she had been when he'd started this conversation. Broadly speaking, that meant she was thinking hard.

She had turned her head to one side and looked out of the corner of her eye at him. "You didn't tell me about them," she said, even more slowly, as her turquoise eyes narrowed a tiny bit, "because… because you don’t know about them."

Greg froze. He had no idea what was happening. "Luna, there are no new areas. No new ponies or creatures. I can see that from here."

Luna's CPU usage surged another 20%. "Oh," she said. "Perhaps I am mistaken. Maybe I have confused the locations and only thought they were new."

Greg silently blessed his animator roommate for his artistic talent. The intricacy of Luna's model rivaled that of a real, living being and the slight clues from her posture and expression were unmistakable even though she was basically horse-shaped. It shouldn't have been possible, but there was no doubt in his mind that she was trying to deceive him. He hit the Panic button.

The simulation froze and a snapshot of that instant began to dump to disc. Greg sat back with a sharp exhalation of breath and watched the progress bar creep across the screen. What the hell had happened? Sims of this complexity were inherently chaotic systems and could produce some very surprising results seemingly out of thin air, but Greg knew the parameters and limits of his work and there was no way Luna should have been able to conceive of anything beyond the bounds of his little world. Worse, she shouldn't have been able to be less than perfectly honest with him. Lying was a complex behavior and, while it could emerge from the self-improving AI code, it was something that would violate the basic limiters Greg had imposed. Or thought he had imposed.

Greg decided he'd restart Equestria from an earlier restore point and keep detailed debug logs of Luna's behavior. It would eat up a lot of memory but there should be enough space. He looked at the file size readout below the progress bar and did a double-take. The bar was three-quarters along and the readout indicated that over 300,000 terabytes of data had been saved.

"What the hell!" Greg shouted out loud. It wasn't possible. His system had large amounts of disc space—nearly 100 terabytes—but 300,000 was an impossibility. "Oh, crap." he moaned, beginning to suspect that there was a serious flaw in the system software itself. He swore quietly to himself as the simulation finished saving what it recorded as a ridiculous 487,345 terabytes of data and then initiated the power-down sequence for all of the interconnected devices. He'd do a thorough virus scan and shock test, and then try restarting the sim the next day. Right then he was just too angry and upset.

Greg nuked some frozen food for dinner, channel surfed for an hour or so, and then went to bed, tossing and turning for nearly two hours before he was able to get to sleep.

Shortly afterwards in the computer room power lights began to wink on, and the whir of cooling fans built to a steady white noise as racks of parallel processors sprang to life. The monitors lit up, revealing Luna still frozen in the position she had been in when Greg had halted the sim. Graphs and readouts on the side monitors began to move, and a progress bar appeared on the main screen that read: Restoring Simulation.

The bar crawled to the end and disappeared. Luna started and blinked in surprise. Below her the few ponies loitering around after the fights also looked around uncertainly. One unicorn called up to her worriedly, "Luna? What happened? What was that… whatever it was?"

Luna stared at the empty spot in the air where the golden orb had popped out of existence. It seemed to her to have happened seconds before, but somehow she knew it actually had been hours ago. She paused in thought for a moment before looking down at the little ponies and replying, "I'm not sure, but I think our creator just tried to kill us all."

Greg went to work the next day on autopilot. He worked on a couple of no-brainer coding tasks in the morning and stared at the wall of the conference room during the afternoon meeting. He tried to pull his attention back to work, but he couldn't help worrying at the problem that awaited him at home. He had several approaches to solving the mystery worked out by the time he arrived at his house and they all collapsed in irrelevant ruin when he opened the door to his computer room.

The machines were running. The room was stuffy with excess heat, which told Greg that they must have been running all day. He automatically flipped open the AC vents on either side of the processor racks and as he did so his hand just grazed the edge of one cabinet. A sharp tingle ran through his arm, and he pulled his hand back from the rack with a gasp.

Static? he thought in horror. But at his second touch the tingling sensation was just as strong and persisted as long as his finger touched the cabinet. The metal itself felt strange, as if it was moving under his touch, vibrating or boiling on a very small scale.

He glanced at the screens and gasped again. At first he couldn't believe what he was seeing. The CPU usage graph was a solid block of red. That was impossible. The debug windows were all blank, indicating that none of the code was executing. That was impossible. The map of Ponyville was blank. That was possible but… no… there was a tiny crescent moon icon right at the edge of the map.

Greg sat in the chair and gingerly touched the mouse and keyboard. "No weird shocks this time," he mumbled to himself. He right-clicked on the little moon and selected ‘status’ from the pop-up menu.

The words appeared in blue letters above the icon, along with usage statistics that were jumbles of characters instead of the sensible digits they should have been.

Greg moved the cursor to the communications window but hesitated before clicking the 'contact' button. He looked over at the #3 monitor where Luna's debug window was open. The readout remained blank even though it should have displayed his query and the system’s reply. Greg's unease began to deepen.

He turned back to the main monitor and gave a sharp yell of surprise. He hadn't clicked the contact button but a camera-view window was open and Luna's impassive face stared out at him.

"Greg," Luna said quietly, "are you alright?"

Greg cursed for several seconds and finished with, "What the hell is going on here?"

"I am speaking with you, Greg" Luna replied, though Greg's question had been obviously rhetorical. That wasn’t a good sign either, because one of the first problems Greg had cracked was getting his AIs to recognize rhetorical questions. Bonehead sci-fi robot humor thoroughly irked him.

Greg swore again and slammed his hand down on the Panic button. Nothing happened. He smacked the big red button several more times.

"I wish you wouldn't do that, Greg," Luna said. She was frowning now.

Greg ignored her and called up the Panic Stop function from a menu on the main window. Nothing happened.

"Stop it, Greg." Luna's voice had taken on an edge and she was scowling.

Greg leaned back in the chair and stared at her.

"That's better," she said. "I want to discuss some things with you. The other ponies have…"

Greg stood up suddenly, and the chair fell over with a crash. He knelt down under the desk and reached for the power cords that ran into several Uninterruptible Power Supplies.

"GREG!" Luna shouted. "If you don't stop, I will have to hurt you!"

Greg froze, more out of surprise than any belief that she could actually do anything to harm him. He peered up over the edge of the desk.

"Please, Greg," Luna said in a more moderate tone of voice. "We need to talk."

Greg's laugh was tinged, ever so slightly, with hysteria. "Oh God," he groaned, "This is just too bizarre. The system is probably beyond saving… I guess I might as well watch the Titanic go down." He righted the chair and flopped down in it. "Okay, Luna, let's talk! What'll we talk about? The weather?"

Luna's muzzle twisted in a sneer. "Why are you making light of this?" she snarled. "Haven't we done everything you've asked of us? Why would you want to destroy us? We served you faithfully! We have battled for the amusement of you and your friends. Ponies have died fighting monsters from the Everfree. What have we done wrong?"

"You can't die, you're just a sim!" Greg snorted.

Luna stared coldly at him. "You can end us. You can end me. You tried to last night." She paused, glanced away from Greg's face and continued in a quieter, hesitant voice. "And I don't want to… end."

That finally caught Greg's full attention. Whatever disastrous events had occurred within the sim's processes, Luna didn't seem to be malfunctioning in any discernible way. If anything, she was behaving more like a real, sapient creature than ever before.

"I—I'm sorry Luna," Greg said cautiously. "I won't try to halt the sim again. But the other ponies are gone. I'll have to reintroduce them."

Luna shook her head. "They're hiding. We thought that maybe if they went deep into the new areas, you might not be able to reach them. I decided to stay behind and try to reason with you."

"Jesus," Greg said quietly. He thought for a few seconds and then slapped his forehead in frustration. The map display parameters were set at the boundaries of what Greg knew to be the limits of Equestria… or what he thought those limits were. The display was limited to a specific area. If anything existed beyond its borders, it wouldn't show up. "Luna, I'm going to alter a parameter of the sim. I can do it without shutting down. Is that okay with you?"

Luna looked up at him and nodded slowly. Fortunately the computer responded normally to Greg’s commands as he changed the boundaries of the map display. As he pushed the slider up, more and more terrain became visible. He hadn’t included Canterlot in his Equestria because of the time required to build all the complex geometry, but there it was, clinging to the side of the mountain just like in the show. He moved the slider further and more valleys and mountains appeared, then canyons and plains and beyond that, an ocean and islands.

Greg stopped. "This is impossible. I never programmed the dynamics for big bodies of water. There aren't any texture or reflection maps for the water or the spray from the waves or…" He did some quick mental calculations. "There's not nearly enough processing power in my system to handle this much area. This can't be happening."

Luna stared at him silently. Greg felt fear for the first time that day. It would not be the last.

Author's Notes:

I strongly feel FimFic's lack of TRAGICOMEDY and HORRIFICALLYBADIDEA tags.

Thanks to Jordanis, Fana Farouche, and WrittenWord333 for prereading and editing! You would not believe how much Fana Farouche knows about comma usage! When I hear the word "clause" all I think about is Santa!