Chapters
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Dakota blinked, and nearly fell over on her shaky legs. She’d seen plenty of drones in her time, plenty of robots. Even her early memories included delivery drones, and little flying things that people would use to record their vacations and sporting events. But this… it was hard to compare this to a little flying box that dropped off a pizza. Something that could stand and walk on two legs, without the awkwardness of the old Boston Dynamics creations.“That screen head thing is… incredibly…-
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She did exactly that. Dakota took it, and found she could drink it too. With steam in her nostrils and warmth flooding into her chest, she found it was a little easier to concentrate on their conversation.“There aren’t many ponies you could ask about that. Anyone who hasn’t had their hands in this thing since they first opened might not know. Everybody’s happy enough to just take what they’re given and call it good. But… there’s the other side too. Mostly ponies there. Most of them don’t…
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The next thing Dakota knew, she was sitting up in Clay’s bed, letting the sheet fall away in front of her. Several hours had passed, and her internal sense of time demanded she get up. There was somewhere she had to be, something she needed to do.Right, the parser! I need to go with Beck, make my case in person.Her whole body ached, and the smell of sweat and other things was thick around her. Not unpleasant, but… she would have to leave them behind.Clay twitched beside her, then opened one eye.…
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“You could still change your mind,” Cinnabar said, his voice cheerful as they walked through Equestria. They had a destination here in Manehattan, though of course it was also possible to transit directly to the system they wanted to visit. But Equestria made you pay in bits for that, and rewarded you when you indulged the world in its verisimilitude.Just now, Dakota wouldn’t mind a little walk. Her limp was finally gone, her breathing clear. Her body was working about as well as could be expected,…
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Dakota rested one hand on the heavy metal door, feeling its smoothly machined surface with her fingers. Here on Abyss station, she could never be sure that she wasn’t just bouncing around the sides of a box. But at least she still had the freedom to walk around her box.Java couldn’t even do that. “How many ponies like her are there, Cinnabar?” she asked, stopping in the hallway, staggering back a few steps. Through that door was waiting the trip she couldn’t return from, but it would wait just a…
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“I, uh…” Dakota blinked. “I’m not really a pony, Pinkie. I don’t know how to fly.”She only grinned in response. “Yeah, I know. I just wanted to see what you’d say.” She bounced back a few steps, then emerged on her other side. “There are systems for immersion training, but they’re in pre-alpha since the number of you who can plug in right now is like…” She looked away, biting her tongue. “Seventy-three. Wait, no. Seventy four now. Still, kinda out of scope for how much time…
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Kayla Rhodes woke with the slight rumble from her phone, shaking her nightstand and making her hand twitch out reflexively to shut it off. This was no terrible surprise—she was on call at Selkie Software, and that meant whenever anyone sneezed on a server wrong, she was the first one they called.If I knew this promotion was going to suck so much ass, I would’ve stuck to frontend.She got up, stretched, and left the phone where it was. “Alexa, wake up,” she said, walking past it on her way to the…
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Kayla Rhodes returned to Abyss station as they’d never experienced it before. Of course, many of their ideas about space and position had been altered—they weren’t quite physical, weren’t quite digital anymore, but understood space as the proper overlapping of ideas that it really was. They had learned incredible things—things that there were no others currently existing who could understand.Don’t be discouraged. There will be others soon. Smarter than we are. They can make those things…
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Harlequin stood against the bugs most broken by the invasion. Even in total darkness, she could feel them coming, clawing their way up through cracks in the rock, shoving aside rubble and piles of the dead. It was probably a mercy that she couldn’t see them. Their shells would’ve gone white by now, their eyes sightless, and their limbs half-transformed into terrible weapons.She imagined what they looked like as they closed in around something that wasn’t strong like themselves, wings spread. She…-
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Harlequin didn’t flee the empty Canterlot Castle hallway. The only thing waiting down that shaft was a prison, and possibly capture at the hooves of the very pony she’d sent to stop Hydrus. And I didn’t even need her help.Hydrus hadn’t ever planned on returning to the hive to gather his power. Once he was revealed… she could only hope that his threats against the ponies she cared about were similarly empty. Thorax and Codex and all the drones didn’t deserve to get blasted by Princess…
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