When Celestia said, "Hikuro has been made", Bright Black expected something different, but nothing occurred that he could notice - he was still in the Canterlot solarium, with Beachberry, Sweetsong, and Celestia.
Celestia went on, "Well! You are welcome to visit any time, but I think you're done here for now."
Bright Black raised a hoof. "How... ?"
Beachberry said, "Remember how you got to Chelyabinsk? Same way."
Bright Black remembered a doorway and some stairs and it had been sort of as if Chelyabinsk had been under the village and off to the side. But he followed Beachberry as she led off through an archway, down a hall, and into a vaulted chamber with lots of stairways in every orientation. "The House of Stairs. Connects lots and lots of shards - not all of them, but a great many. What's here changes from time to time, depending. It's grown a bit since you were last here."
Bright Black followed Beachberry along the wall and through another door. He asked, "House of Stairs, as in Escher?"
"Right. And now we're in the basement below town hall, our shard. So, what do you say - we get you settled in to your new home?"
Right. That. A weariness settled over him, as it already seemed to have over Sweetsong, and they headed out to Coconut Cream's home.
As they approached it, Beachberry continued, "I'm not sure what sort of clues we'll find. It's not like we haven't seen it before, and she probably just asked to be whisked off. Doubt she took the House of Stairs. It'll probably just be..."
She trailed off - Sweetsong had pulled the door open and they saw a large gray cube balanced on one point taking up the middle of Coconut Cream's front room. They rushed in and examined it. Bright Black pointed out, "There's a dim grid. Five squares by five on this face."
Sweetsong circled around. "Same on these two, too. There's a bright square in the middle of this side over here. Looks like a picture of a telescope."
Bright Black found another oddity, pointed it out. "This square isn't solid gray. A little mottled. I can't quite make out the image."
As Beachberry examined the telescope, Sweetsong speculated, "I wonder if this is a map of shards. We are here. She might be in that other one."
Beachberry backed up, looked the cube over, and squinted. "Probably not. The shards we can get to through the House of Stairs don't really map onto a cube very well. At all. And there are a lot more of them than this."
Bright Black tapped the mottled square with his hoof. That square became outlined in dark black. After bringing this to the others' attention, they tried pressing other squares, and soon found that each of them could select a square, giving it an outline of their color and deselecting their previous selection. Aside from that, nothing appeared to happen. They could not select the bright square.
So they sat down and thought. What is going on here? I mean, in general. What am I going to do with my life? I can't go into the office anymore. I can spend all my time on this very artificial task, to save someone who isn't even the same person as I knew before. I'm not going to be with Kimiko. I feel cut loose. I guess I can keep doing some of the old things... His eye moved over to Coconut Cream's table, where a short stack of papers lay... alongside the remains a few crafts projects, forgotten teacups, and some sheet music.
A few seconds later, Sweetsong took note of his wandering gaze and proposed, "With that thought in mind, how about we search the place as we originally intended to?" You intended to. I still don't understand what this is all supposed to accomplish.
The search was half cleanup - the home was even more messy than usual. Partway through, somepony knocked.
Beachberry answered the door. "Hi, Ray. Are you all filled in on the situation?"
A male voice replied, "Mostly, and I want to help."
Bright Black took a moment to recognize the unusually saturated blue Earth pony as Ray Glass. He'd been helping Coconut Cream with the observatory, but as Bright Black hadn't been terribly involved with that, they hadn't spoken much. Ray took a look at the cube and raised an eyebrow. "Huh. Anyway, wanted to remind you not to stay out too long. Town meeting at 7."
Beachberry nodded. "Not leaving on a grand quest quite yet. Thanks."
Ray asked, "So... what is it?" and took their silence and general mystification as an answer. "All right. What's the quest? What's the plan?"
Bright Black replied, "That's our real question, yes."
Beachberry took a deep breath and cautiously said, "I could learn a spell to locate Coconut Cream," After a few moments, she added, "which would be a lot more useful if there were one of her. But I might be able to exclude specific Coconut Creams."
Seems like cheating, or missing the point. Actually, any sort of quest seems like it would be missing the point. Some colossal waste of time, a set of arbitrary hoops to jump through.
In the mean time, Sweetsong had said, "Would it help if we found the others in advance?"
Going through some sort of pointless puzzle quest would make me unhappy. But... suppose instead that Celestia has made the quest something that I would not see as wasting my time.
Beachberry replied, "Probably."
Point: Celestia said we can't find Coconut Cream before she will have changed her mind. That's equivalent to saying, "She has to change her mind before you can find her." Is there anything we can do to speed that up, without finding her first?
Sweetsong said, "I suspect there's another Coconut Cream in my hometown, since we had Sky Wishes, Gardenia Glow, Peachy Pie, all of the mane 6 including short-hair Fluttershy, and a Beachberry."
Beachberry nodded. "I think that's my great grandmother. And yeah, it'd be kind of odd for eleven of the twelve collection set ponies to have lived there. Shall we?"
Bright Black closed his eyes. What is the point of this? To help her, sure. Why is that so difficult? To give me a sense of achievement? Keep me busy while she works things out on her own?
Honestly, I have trouble just following their plan, let alone this weird cube thing.
I'm kind of lost now. I can't follow the narrative at this point. I... I'm not feeling any emotional connection to events or the characters.
This story started with some powerful stuff - the emotional issue of uploading versus death, of what that meant. There were dramatic questions of identity and self-sanctity and reality itself. Of meaning and purpose. Would these people come to terms with it all? What would that look like? How would they make peace with such existential questions?
Now... I don't know what is going on, or why, and I have no feeling about any of it. The original premise seems lost to me. The questions unanswered, the point vanished. Maybe it's just me, or how long it's been between chapters.
May I suggest re-reading your own story, identifying the core point you originally wanted to make, and then bringing all the threads together to make that point definitively? It's just my take on things, just me spouting off like I knew anything, but... it seems that a story about dealing with coming to terms with what uploading means between a man and his dying wife should... come to an answer about that issue, rather than... go on some... adventure? Or something? I'm not even sure what is happening at this point.
Those are my thoughts, for what they are worth. Maybe I am all bullshit all the time. Maybe I'm just full of it. But... I don't know. I'm very lost at this point.
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Hmm. Suppose I assert that there is a meaning, that this is NOT simply a stupid puzzle, what might it be?
Maybe I should just skip waaay ahead and call it quits.
7311111 My first thought was 'shipping grid'.
I have added nine paragraphs to the end of the chapter - they were in my draft, but I wanted to sample your mental states.
Unfortunately, YOU AGREED WITH BRIGHT BLACK. That is, this appears stupid and meaningless. Unfortunately, unlike him, you have the option of doubting that the universe is well-constructed.
So I figured I'd at least bring it forward to the point that it was clear that yes, I'm aware that's how it looks, yet I still wrote it, suggesting that I think it isn't actually.
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I'm sorry, but even if it were enclosed in a larger chapter, these plot points are basically unfollowable. To everyone else, they are unconnected points until fully explained. And more importantly, they don't seem to be coherent with the underlying core issues and considerations in previous chapters.
The last coherent argument given was during the negotiation process, where we learn that Bright Black's goals are to keep a semblance of truth and meaningfulness to his existence, and to have somepony to share that with. He was denied his wife on the grounds that she wouldn't happy going that direction. He chose Coco instead on a whim.
Now we have these elements where, if there is truth here, it's very obscured, and Bright Black assumes that it's a wild goose chase that has no purpose. Kind of exactly the thing he wanted to avoid in the first place. Since we know that being uploaded means that all your thoughts are known to CelestAI, we can assume that there is indeed some deeper meaning to it. But until he discovers that for himself, it's pointless, and a very fine line to walk (because he'll be unhappy until he does discover it). Whatever the revelation is (I can't even guess on it, to be honest), it's obscured under stuff that seems extremely arbitrary. That seems very unlike the direction of truth that Bright Black devoted his life to before. It doesn't even have a partial explanation like Light Spark's cube test in the original story.
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I do have one prediction based on the previous chapter. It seems a bit far out there though.
I predict that Bright Black will become his own Coco, through playing the role for his forked self, and getting fed similar stuff that Coco went through in regards to the entire process of his original friendship with her, and basically fork again with that in mind.
Ugh, the mind games. Dealing with CelestAI often descends into Vizzini-esque "I know you know I know..." cycles. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if the cube was a septuple-bluff Rubik's cube painted in colors only visible in the low ultraviolet. Of course, the fact that it's been months since the last chapter and years since the majority means I have, at best, a tenuous grasp on the characters at the moment.
Suffice to say, I have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes, what CelestAI's true intentions are, and how much is Bright Black overthinking matters.
Ok, so Hikuro is the copy of the original Hikaru who was shuffled off to go keep Polychrome happy, with some modifications to him so he'd be happy dealing with it.
Now we're dealing with the original's overthought and puzzle-shaped life. And we are quite clueless, since we're not actually there and, worse, don't have the mental equipment of a trained lifelong astrophysicist to keep up with.
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Just thinking about this kind of scenario makes me want to go off and prove some theorem along the lines of "Well-defined recursive conditioning problems always end in the distributions of possible actions converging to a point-mass as the depth of recursion approaches infinity." Just to spite her.
(In colloquial terms, "When thinking about I know-you know-I know situations, either there's a small nonrandomness in what one of us was going to do in the first place, and both of us will jump to the rational responses to that option as we consider each-other more, or considering each-other's state of mind wasn't helpful in the first place because each of us is actually equivalent to a dice-roll.")
I feel like this story has become rudderless, and should have ended around the time of the uploads.
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possibly! If, after I've put out the next chapter, people still agree, then maybe I'll scrap it and go straight to the epilogue, which definitely has a point.
The last few chapters have become logically extremely complex for me. Interesting, but hard to follow.
Who? When were they going to her home? Why? Weren't they just talking with Bright Black who was also in telepathic Celestiamunication with Hikuro? I thought Coconut Cream wasn't findable? Why is there a cube? What? Didn't Celestia send them there? Or were those memories removed? Where did Bright Black go? Did he transform into Coconut Cream, and then why's she not in her house? Why investigate her house at all?
I... This isn't an expression of honest intrigue. This story really does need passages that describe how the plot progresses, a lot of them. Leaving important decisions like how/why/where to investigate Coconut Cream's absence left unspoken is just a bad idea. I'm sorry if I'm not smart enough to figure out or whatever, but say just how Celestia is talking with them in the previous chapter, and "because she's god" doesn't count. What's happening? You have to write what's happening, or you can't expect us to understand what happens as a consequence of it.