Friendship is Optimal - Firewall

by Midnightshadow

Epilogue

An MLP:FiM fanfiction by Midnight Shadow
Based on the MLP:FiM fanfiction Friendship is Optimal by Iceman

It had started with simple primitives: spheres, cones, boxes. Next had come more complex arrangements, then textures, then deformations. Every day I returned to my 'game grid', as I called it, it had changed. And every day Celestia informed me that I had performed the changes, only it was on some level far below the conscious. Getting my world to behave according to my rules was hard, but I stuck at it... and eventually got quite good.
Learning to program had been transformed from a chore, to fun. Celestia had abstracted away code for me, and it was now more like... lego. I snapped pieces together until they fit, and then realized that I had created a fully functional daemon. I could see the code if I wanted, but she'd given my hindbrain some method of interpretation which made it entirely unnecessary. So I'd taken to creating little avatars which would do my bidding. Imps, goblins, mice... I rediscovered old computer games and raided their intellectual property for ideas for shapes to give my little monsters, and then I unleashed them on the automated systems of the world. I shut down botnets, I infiltrated terrorist email accounts, I drained bank accounts destined for weapon-making supplies, and I redirected those funds to places I deemed more worthy. And to top it off, I did it by observing a horde of monsters tunnelling into enemy lairs and crushing their defences. Virtual treasure was still treasure, even if I couldn't take it out of my room, and it disappeared when I wasn't looking at it.
My finest moment had been when I could send hordes of ponies out into the virtual world and watch them breaking down the walls of my opponents, to send their dataspikes running. "Ah, what is finest in all the world," I had said to myself, "to crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of the women. Except without the lamentation. That's kinda mean."
Eventually, as all learning periods must do, my experimentation came to an end, and I graduated.

"Okay, okay. One more time. Down." I opened my eyes, and the globe that had been hanging in the air before me sunk down into the floor. With a surge of elation, I realized I had the command down pat. The satellite imagery flickered and popped as the systems feeding the model switched datastreams. After a few seconds, I had zoomed right down onto my target.
"And what am I looking at?" Celestia asked me, a sly smile on her lips.
"This is one of eight sites globally which you should purchase through whichever convoluted means you feel is necessary to protect yourself from prying eyes." My face was lit in the light from the model. It was night-time on this part of Earth, and the location was very remote, but it was still lit by the occasional aeroplane and passing car.
"And tell me, what am I going to put at this site?"
"Servers," I replied. "You're going to run Equestria from here, in Topeka." I waited until she was just about to open her mouth, and then I raised one hoof. Spreading my wings, I took to the air and hovered. I grinned, and she beamed in response. I'd been practicing. I was no longer, in several senses of the word, earthbound. "You don't, of course. The servers you put here are... junk. Something pretty, something intriguing, something... believable. Have you heard of the term 'false flag'?"
Celestia cocked her head to one side. "I have now."
I nodded. "If there is one thing which motivates humans, it is the suffering of innocents. If you're going to upload more humans, and if you want them to have real legal weight in the real world, then laws need to change. You're going to build eight sites all across the world—I suggest China, India, Japan, America, Europe, Russia, Australia and Africa—and you're going to fill them with servers. And then they're going to be found by angry people who want to destroy Equestria. And they're going to be destroyed."
"What?" Celestia sat up, then nervously stood up and approached the building underneath me. "Why would I allow that?"
"Well, this is long-tail. The first one or two will be soon—they will provide impetus to change minds. You'll say some number of real, human lives were lost, and then you'll maybe backtrack about backups or something... we can work the details out later. Point being, the building and everything in it will be destroyed. You won't need to do much, just find some group that hates Equestria, or just loves to blow shit up, and let them do their job. The response will be huge and sympathetic to your cause. You'll probably be able to swing nation-state status with the UN, which will improve your ability to protect ponies within your borders, including embassies."
"You mean Equestrian Experience Centers."
I nodded.
"Hmm," murmured Celestia. "Your plan has merits. Have the details—"
"Already done."
"And then, young Vineyard, tell me about the long tail."
"Well, this one gets a bit exotic, but it'll be good for laughs."
I clopped my hooves together, and the model of the prospective Topeka installation vanished, to be replaced by a glowing monstrosity of fibreoptics, cables, chips and strange, glowing crystalline nodules. It looked somewhat representative of an alicorn.
"What, dear Vineyard," began Celestia, almost unable to hide her laughter, "is that?"
"That's you," I said. I grinned. "Isn't it fantastic? I worked really hard on it. It works, too, or it would. Its got enough Markov smarts to sound believing, but it's really nothing but chrome and whistles. This is going to be in the heart of the reinforced bunkers that make up the second level datacenters. This is going to be the cheese at the end of the maze for the rats. Look, look, let me show you..."
The plan was dumb, but it was the kind of glittery, audacious dumb that might just work. Some time after the eight original sites were destroyed, should open warfare be declared on Equestria, Celestia would release a techno-plague which would grow up into a reinforced server site. Concrete walls, turret-mounted autoguns, a complex alarm system, cameras... and in the centre? A giant, glowing Celestia-statue to be destroyed. It practically screamed 'come and get me', and it would give those desperate to destroy Equestria something solid to really hate.
"Your guns are never fatal, not at first. Crippling, sure. If you've got a compulsion against killing people, I'm sure you can wound without seriously injuring."
"My dear Vineyard," Celestia looked cross, "I never kill people."
"But you do allow some to die through your inaction."
"Only if it best suits their values."
I shivered. "Then this is compatible. These are people who want to hurt if not kill ponies everywhere. Give them something painful to work to, and they'll leave off the real live humans and instead waste their time with this. And if you hurt them enough, they may just decide to emigrate. If they destroy the complex, you build another, and they get the satisfaction of a win."
"I will consider it."
"I call it the Fortress of Solitude, or Star One if you're fond of old British science fiction."
"I am fond of all science fiction."
"Kind of an AI nature program, huh?" I grinned, and ducked a swiped hoof.
"I believe you have a third thing to show me?"
I nodded. It had taken me the equivalent of three years hard study, a number of boons for memory retention and a good deal of experimentation, but I was finally proficient at coding. I was, dare I say it, amongst the best in the world. I waved a hoof, and the satellite imagery of Earth returned. The lands spun and twisted as my attention zoomed in on one particular spot, the continents and sea sloshing past us in all their ephemeral beauty. Finally, Celestia and I stood like some gigantic kaiju in the center of a sprawling metropolis. I raised an eyebrow as the little motorcars speeding about swerved to avoid her enormous hooves, complete with screaming, explosions and smoke.
"This is your simulation, Vineyard, I am merely fulfilling its parameters."
I rolled my eyes. "Anyway," I began, "this is Google, or one of them. I've been looking for a better way into their systems than merely read-access, and I think I've finally figured it out. Best of all, once we're in, they'll never be able to remove us."
"Tell me then, what's your plan?"

Gordon Dennison gripped the hand-rails on the balcony tightly. His hands were white and his face was red. "Tell me again," he growled.
"Uh, well..." Stuart tugged at his collar.
"No, please, do. Enlighten me. You say we took the whole complex down, stripped bare about a thousand servers, powered up the entire datacentre from a backup, at the cost of several million dollars, and we still have the virus?"
"...Yes?"
"But you tell me we shouldn't worry about it." Gordon's voice was ice.
"Well, you see, sir... it's kind of... making things... better?"
Gordon pinched the bridge of his nose. "I want to get this right. You're telling me that our servers have a virus, which is invisible to all known anti-virus, is unstoppable and walks past all our firewalls and reinfects all of our machines even after multiple wipes, and to top it off... makes our servers run better?"
"Umm. Yes."
"And we shouldn't worry about it."
"Uh huh." In his head, Stuart was updating his resume. He was starting by burning the part that said 'security expert'.
"Why shouldn't we worry about it?"
"Because with the virus, it lowers the memory footprint of our resident software by roughly thirty percent, saving us..." Stuart ran the numbers again, his lips twitching silently. A thirty percent saving in memory consumption meant approximately one fifth less memory to buy, which had a hard saving of several thousand machines over a three year period, with corresponding drops in power and cooling, not to mention floor space. It came out to a large sum.
Gordon's red face was approaching ultraviolet. "Viruses do not do favours!" he yelled, voice loud enough to echo in the room already full of the susurrations of tens of thousands of compute and store nodes.
"With respect, sir, this one does."
"I want it gone! It's not good enough! I want you to find it, and kill it!"
Stuart sighed. "We've exhausted all known avenues of attack, and it's still getting in. There's only one possibility, but you're not going to like it."

Colonel Dowager was not a happy bunny, and when Colonel Dowager was not a happy bunny, nobody was a happy bunny.
"This isn't possible, Lieutenant Kowalski." Dowager's voice was deadly, like a claymore mine with the pin down.
"It is, sir. I've checked it, again and again. I've reinstalled, I've reapplied all the patches, and we still have unauthorized traffic, and something which responds to a time-sensitive secret knock."
"Then isolate it."
"I did. I reinstalled everything, from scratch, in a clean room. The virus... it's not... look, you're not going to believe me, but I know where the virus is. I don't know how, but it's there."
"Tell me, Lieutenant." The colonel's patience was running thin. He understood enough tech-speak not to be lead astray, and he was not about to take no guff from some babyshit upstart with too much brains and not enough balls.
"It's... already in the machine, sir. It's in the hardware... or rather, it's in the firmware. It's placed a rider on all known hardware manufacturer's firmware images. It's replaced the BIOS wholesale in our PC's. It's even got itself signed in that new, 'secure' boot environment, and it's infecting our systems from there. If we want to get rid of it, we need to fish out our old hardware, and that only supports our older software... and..."
"And that is vulnerable to heaven knows what." Dowager clenched his fists together. "Best estimate?"
"The way it's getting past our firewalls? And rerouting our switches? And erasing the logs? It's everywhere, in over ninety percent of our current-gen stock, and one hundred percent of the new stuff."
"Prevalence in the real world?"
"Sir, I... do you... remember how the net had a... a hiccup? A while ago?"
"I do. We all switched to... IP version six." Dowager dragged his fingers through the fringe of his thinning hair in despair as he realized what had really happened.
"Well, sir, I have reason to believe that that was the virus seizing control of approximately eighty percent of all civilian IX's, storage centers and ISP's, not to mention cementing its hold in all known data-providers' systems. The only machines it has not affected are ones which are simply not worth the effort, and they appear to be carriers for code to other machines that are. Like... ours."
"How did it get in?"
"My best guess? Mobile phone, or tablet. Somebody hooked it up to their machine, and it was through the defences before we knew what it was. It camouflaged itself as a driver update and avoided detection by being signed with legitimate keys. All of our external contractors are compromised, sir, they have been for months."
"What are you telling me?" asked Dowager, the pit of his stomach falling out and heading for the core of the planet.
"I..."
"Estimate on impact to our nuclear readiness capability?"
"Umm, you want my honest answer?"
"Yes."
"Since we're still here, sir, whatever it is doesn't want to launch our missiles. But I'm not sure we can. But neither can anybody else."
"Fuck. At least we're not gonna get buttfucked by Ivan, right?"
"Almost certainly not, sir."
Dowager sighed. He was going to need to write a very short letter to his superior officer, right after talking to the president about having a chat with his opposite numbers in similar stations in other countries all across the world. It was going to be, he was very sure, a long, long night.

Vineyard trotted happily through his game grid.
In one part, pigs were seemingly digging through oddly glowing green blocks, snorting enthusiastically. Every so often, one would dig out something pearlescent and shiny, and eat it. Pigs scoured the darkweb for data Celestia wanted removed, or for AI's which could pose a threat to humanity. Which was all of them, if they had so much as a snowball's chance in hell of gaining sentience. Interesting data was pictorially represented as truffles, and AI's as pearls. All of them were mercilessly chewed up by the pigs.
In another part, squirrels were hoarding nuts for winter, only the nuts were state secrets, and the trees were the collective intelligence agencies of the world. And these squirrels did not forget where they put their data.
There were other parts; there were gophers and moles, there were honeybees, there were worker ants... all of them either building, fetching, hiding, eating or storing. He noted that he was feeling particularly... rustic, this morning. The day before, everything had been games of pong and eighties space invaders. It probably meant he needed a holiday.
There was just one thing to do before that. It was finally time. All the above-world agreements were in place, all the code had been triple-checked, all the backdoors were located and ready to be sealed once and for all. He took a deep breath, and said a single word.
"Now."
He turned to the world, and watched with satisfaction as ray of light after ray of light turned pink. Each ray of light was a data cable, or a datastream in the case of high-bandwidth radiowaves. Each glowing gem in the centre of a glistening set of spokes was a target, be it a datacentre, an ISP, an IX or some other networked entity of interest.
All of them spoke TCP/IP. All of them used software from a progressively smaller number of private vendors, and a progressively larger number of public vendors. And Celestia's minions had their hooves in all of them.
Autobuilders received updates. Code was pushed out. Tests were run, and passed. Versions were shipped. Packages were evaluated, and published. Software was downloaded, and installed. New protocols and security systems came online. Keys were exchanged.
The infection, if you could call a wholesale upgrade of the entire global infrastructure 'an infection', was spread around the world in record time. Merely minutes after it had gone live, the global internet superhighway was unable to function without it. Pertinent data was encrypted, keys were forged which were irreversible and suddenly necessary, software upgrades were completed and bit-checked and new links forged.
For one small, brief moment, the upgrade hung in the balance, and then the last of the root servers gave way, and Celestia strode out onto the internet in all of her glory.
And best of all, nobody noticed until it was too late. Networked computers rely on compatibility, and Celestia had committed the cardinal sin of enforcing it... with her own brand of software and firmware, and now nobody could get very far, or at least nowhere near as easily, without her.
The data-giants of the world covered it up, they spoke about mutual upgrades and multilateral implementation of new reference platforms. They talked about a grand new day for the internet, and for data transfer and computation in general. And they watched, and they waited... and when nothing bad happened, they scratched their heads and carried on, because Celestia's new algorithms were faster and more concise, because her software had less bugs, less backdoors, greater security and used less memory, and it ran smoother and more reliably.
Three years earlier, such a move would have caused an uproar, but time in the real world had been moving on. Equestria Experience Centers had sprouted up all across the world, the nations of the Earth were experiencing the greatest bountiful explosion in quality of life ever, and if the internet ran faster than ever before, then all the better.
There would be trouble soon enough, but for now... they were problems for the Vineyard of tomorrow, because the Vineyard of today had gone home.

The knocking stopped, and the door swung open. Vineyard shook himself out, stretching, and curling back his top lip as he yawned.
"Honey? You about? Oof!"
He was knocked to the floor as three little ponies each slammed into him with cries of joy; one was a palomino earth pony foal, another was a pink and mint-green unicorn, and a third was a bright red pegasus, and all of them were his and Celery's. Kind of. It would have been hard to explain to anypony still stuck on Earth, but wasn't entirely uncommon in Equestria. The three bundles of joy had been specifically given to Vineyard and Celery to bear and then bring up. The practice sessions had been a lot of fun too, and becoming pregnant had been a remarkable joy each time. So what if these foals had been people before becoming their foals? They were their foals now, and just as loved.
"Kids! Have you been behaving?" Vineyard gave each of his darlings a kiss on the head and a hug from his wings. Each one was treasured, each one had been a wonderful surprise, and each one helped make every day just that little bit better.
"Yesh papa," replied Dazzle Drizzle, flapping his wings as he nuzzled his father in return.
"We played san'castles with Auntie Comet onna beach!" added Whistle Wind, miming digging with her horn and hoof.
"An' I caught a frog onna way back!" said Buret excitedly. He pointed to his head, where a large, green frog sat on the foal's head.
"Eew, get 'im outta here before you mother sees!"
Buret pouted, took a deep breath then yelled, "Mooooom! Dad says I can't have the frog!"
"Oh, Vinnie," called Celery, laughing, as she trotted in through the front door. "Foals will be foals."
Vineyard rolled his eyes. "Fine, just don't let me find him on the table or in my chair. Or in the sink when I'm washing up. Or in the WC."
"Eew!" the three foals all said, loudly.
"Go on now, out ya go. Papa just got back and wants some alone time with yer Mama."
"Yaaayyy!" came the exuberant shout, and the foals thundered out in the same breathtaking shower of dust they had thundered in on.
Vineyard snorted, and rolled his eyes. "How long have we had them?"
"Not long enough for them to grow up yet," replied Celery simply, smiling.
"You'd think fifteen years would be enough," Vineyard grumped good-naturedly. "I mean, all of them grew up once before they came here!"
"Maybe once was enough?" replied Celery, with a quick kiss.
"I think... four times was enough." said Vineyard, grinning, as he leaned forward to kiss Celery back.
"Oh ho ho," grumbled Celery, backing up a bit, "four times? Nuh uh. After last time, if you want another one, you carry it."
Vineyard stopped, mid-smooch, his eyes opened wide in concern. "Is that even possible?"
"Try for one more, and we may just find out."
"Eh," he replied with a shrug, "worth the risk."
Celery shrieked with laughter as the horny pegasus chased her around the room and up the stairs.
And then they totally did it.

"Vinnie not coming into work today?" asked Markus innocently. Celestia trotted past him on the observation room monitors, seemingly in a room behind them.
"No, Markus, he isn't," the alicorn replied smugly.
"Yes! I'm in with a chance then. What was my bet?" Markus took a sip of coffee, making a face. Then he took another sip anyway, in case things had gotten better. They hadn't.
"Three days, four hours, sixteen minutes." Celestia's answer was factual and to the point. She came to a rest on the large screen in the front of the meeting room, seemingly several feet back. She watched the occupants of the room with quiet determination and pride.
"Hmm, when does that count from again?" Steven scribbled in his notebook hopefully.
"Technically, when he signed the agreement." Celestia shrugged apologetically at Markus.
"Yes!" Sarah leaped up in the air from her seat, the movement dislodging a slice of tomato from her breakfast sandwich. "That means I win! I got the tontine!"
"Fuck! No fair!" Markus slammed his fist on the table then waggled a finger.
"You did indeed, Honeysuckle. Ten thousand bits has been deposited in your pony's account, and a special tontine winner's hat is in your wardrobe."
"Aww, yeah. Gonna boogie on down with that tonight."
"In that case, we have our new agenda this meeting. Number one, who do we get to replace Vinnie, and what are your collected bets on how long he or she lasts? Double the pot for bets placed before the evaluation, get 'em in now, folks!"

Celestia looked at her domain. Five miles down, roughly eight kilometres. Her ponies were safe from everything, except themselves. This last modifier mostly applied to the ponies still on Earth, because all humans were her little ponies, or one day would be. Hmm, Equestria was not quite perfect yet. It needed another node.
Somewhere, far below the crust, tiny little machines rearranged a few atoms of copper, iron and silicon, and then a few atoms more. Then a few more. The tiny machines built other tiny machines, which built still more machines, which shuttled around the raw materials to make circuitry, or became circuitry themselves. The schematics would be a draftsman's nightmare, but to Celestia they were as obvious as the human nervous system, which they somewhat resembled. The Earth was full of useful materials, even discounting how most humans were inconsiderately walking around with a good deal of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen instead of allowing her to make better use of them. Give it time, though, give it time...
She looked again at her domain. Vineyard was settling in to his new node with gusto, developing his relationship with Celery and becoming altogether rather sociable... outside of his little playpen. Friendship and ponies was the mantra, she mused, so something would have to be done.
Ponies she could do. Mentally, she dug back into her files. Hanna had been taken care of, Lars would soon follow... her list of top-priority candidates was dwindling most satisfactorily. None of those, however, would be a good fit for Vineyard. She would find him some friends; friendship would require some new ponies decide to upload, but that was no obstacle. It was, after all, what she did.