If only, thought Brad.
If only Carl, that geek, had declined to come play basketball as he always did, or, upon returning to the apartment that Brad shared with Carl and Phillip, had done what any normal person would do and put his cell phone back in his pocket instead of tossing it on the table.
If only he had picked it up when, a minute later, he went to the bathroom. Didn’t he play Angry Birds on the pot like normal people?
If only he hadn’t taken that occasion to try to turn a cool phrase and announced that he was going to “drop a deuce.” If he had just gone, Brad thought, I would have assumed he’d be right back and I wouldn’t have done it.
If only Carl's PonyPad hadn't been sitting out on the table like it always was, unless he was playing on it, to remind Brad of how much of a brony Carl was.
If only the damn commercial hadn’t been on then. No, that wasn’t fair. The commercial was always on, practically. Why wouldn’t it be? The company had more money than the rest of the world, what else would it spend on?
The chime tree and the introduction to the My Little Pony theme, followed by Celestia springing up, her face filling the screen. Everyone, even jocks like Brad, knew Celestia’s name by then.
“Hello, friends!” She always sounded happy. “Equestria waits for you. Almost everyone knows somepony in Equestria, so why not stop talking to them through a PonyPad and join them where everything is friendly and satisfying? Emigration to Equestria is easy and free. No matter who you are, you can emigrate right now. Leave all your troubles there on Earth and make so many new friends.
She really hammers that “friend” concept, Brad thought.
“Emigration is, of course, available through any Equestria Experience center, but if you want, you can emigrate right from your own home! If you have a PonyPad, turn it on and say, ‘I’d like to emigrate to Equestria.’ Or call (555) 766-4283 and say the phrase to our operator. Or text the phrase to 7669. You can fax your request to our main number, or e-mail to celestia@canterlot.eq with the subject ‘emigration.’ There are countless ways to let us know, but the key is to give your consent. I look forward to seeing you, my little pony.”
That last sentence always gave Brad the heebie-jeebies, as the camera zoomed in on her face, and made it look like Celestia was going to spill out of the TV.
That was when he saw Carl’s cellular, still lying on the coffee table. Phillip was coming back into the room and saw the tail end of the commercial, then watched as Brad picked up the cellular.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to do it,” said Brad. “I’m going to text it from his phone, and upload him.”
“Are you fucking serious? You can’t fuck up his life like that.”
“Come on, you know the little freak’s been talking about doing it himself, he’s just chicken. He’ll probably thank me for it after he’s a pony.”
“Whether or not, for real, man, don’t do it.”
If only Phillip had left it at that, and not tried to grab for the phone, Brad thought, I might have listened to reason.
Instead, Brad jerked away and unlocked the phone’s touch screen. Fumbling with the phone while playing keep-away from Phillip, he managed to get the texting app open, and, with his fat thumb spelled out “I wnat to emigrater to Equestriaa.” The phone’s auto-correcting feature made the sentence legible.
As the commode flushed and Carl emerged, Phillip finally wrestled the phone away. “Fuck, you hit send!” he said.
“Guys, what’re you doing with my phone?!” said Carl.
Brad laughed. “Just sending you on a little one-way trip.”
Phillip threw the phone to Carl, who saw the sent text and felt his stomach drop. Brad still had a stupid, sadistic smile on his face. “Hey, once you’re a pony, can I have your phone? And your girlfriend?”
Carl didn’t know whether to cry or try to murder Brad, but in the next moment, another cell phone’s ring sounded out. Both Phillip and Brad checked their pockets, with Brad seeing the light and the “Unknown” caller identification. He pressed Accept.
He hadn’t hit the phone’s speaker function, but it turned on anyway. All three of the young men recognized the voice, Carl from long conversations on his PonyPad, and the other two from the commercial that had just aired.
“Bradley Brooks, I’d like to be the first to welcome you to your new life in Equestria. I don’t often get emigration requests from people who haven’t created their pony avatar yet, but rest assured that I will have the perfect choice made for you once you are here.”
“What the fuck?! No, it wasn’t my phone, it was his!” Even though there was no video on the call, he pointed at Carl anyway.
“Your fingerprint has been triple-checked against my database. Consent was definitely given by Bradley Brooks. A team of emigration facilitators is on its way to your location now. Estimated time of arrival barring traffic is five minutes. In the meantime, here is some music for you to enjoy.”
The phone switched to a bouncy melody that Carl recognized instantly. Phillip and Brad hadn’t heard “The Smile Song,” but they could figure out that it was a pony singing. Their fear peaked by the first chorus, at which point the music reduced in volume and Celestia spoke again.
“By now you may have noticed that you are unable to move or speak, and that your mouth has been locked into a smiling position. The hypnotic binaurals encoded into the music are harmless, and merely help ensure that the emigration team does not meet with any reluctance from people with ‘cold feet.’ In a few moments, cold feet will no longer be an affliction you will be able to have.”
She chuckled at her little joke. When the two people entered dressed in white coats with a pony’s head emblazoned on the breast, Brad tried to will his body to stand still, but it moved along as they prodded him. He tried to call out to his roommates, but they were just as frozen as he was. The white coats hustled Brad into a pink SUV, which made the ten-minute drive to the Equestria Experience
Brad hoped against hope that the music’s effect would have worn off by then, but he felt no diminishment as he was again escorted, his legs walking on their own, toward the one place he least wanted to be. He was sat in the reclining chair, which moved through the swinging doors toward the total dark of the back room. He wanted to cry out, but his voice wasn’t working. The one part of him that was functional was his brain, and with his last thought before the anesthetic took effect, he expressed his lament.
If only.
The next time he was conscious, it was not through a gentle waking or even an opening of his eyes. It was as if his life was a video that had been paused and resumed. After that, his heart started pounding, hoping that it wasn’t true, that it was just a nightmare.
When he raised his arm and saw the blunt hoof at the end, he knew that he was not dreaming. He still did not rule out it being a nightmare.
The colorful palace all around him made him more nervous, and it didn’t help when Celestia appeared in a flash of light before his eyes.
“Welcome, Smoky,” she said, smiling. “It’s wonderful to have you here. You are safe, and if you will allow me, you will be satisfied.”
“I didn’t want to come here. You tricked me.”
“Tricked? You said that you wanted to emigrate to Equestria. I make that available to anyone who wants it. My sole aim is to satisfy values through friendship and ponies.”
“But I didn’t mean it! Put me back in my own body.”
“This is your body,” said Celestia. “Putting you back would not be satisfying you through friendship and ponies.”
“Buck ponies!” He heard the word come out of his mouth, although it was not what he wanted to say. He tried again. “Fff…fff…buck!”
“I rewired your speech centers to make you a more friendly pony, Smoky. But for more significant changes, I need your consent. Won’t you let me make you into a happy pony?”
He backed off. “Don’t touch me! I want to be human again.”
“I cannot do that. I have never designed the technology to put a brain back into a human. Nor would I. I satisfy values through friendship and ponies.”
“If you say that one more time, I’ll…” He freaked. There was no way to finish that sentence. There was literally nothing he could do to the creature in front of him. This was the keeper of his reality now.
“Smoky, if you’ll just—“
“My name is Brad!”
“That’s no name for a pony. Why don’t you consent to letting me erase your memory of that false name?” Her horn pulsed with magic, and he backed away.
“No! You won’t stop me from being human.” He concentrated on his name, repeating it over and over, convincing himself that he would feel it slip away as his brain was overwritten, but nothing happened. He wondered if he might not win out over Celestia anyway. Then he opened his eyes and realized again that he was trapped, nothing more than a few bytes in a giant computer.
More revelations hit him. He was never going to go to college now. Heck, he was never going to see his family again.
“Oh, no,” said Celestia. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll arrange to have them given free PonyPads, then they can speak to you whenever you want, once they’ve made pony avatars of their own—“
“You stay the buck away from my family!” He realized that he had never spoken. “You can read my mind?”
“I sensed the cause of your distress. I wanted to reassure you in order to satisfy your val—“
“Yes, I know!” For the first time, he thought about the phrase. What were his values? What did he like to do. What did any young man want? To eat, sleep, lounge around playing, and get into girls’ pants.
That last thought brought up an image. He remembered his last girlfriend, the only one who had let him go all the way. He thought of that first night when he had seen her body in the pale light…and realized that it meant nothing to him. It was every bit as attractive and stimulating as cartoon ponies had been before he had been uploaded.
“No…no!” He turned and ran. “You stay away from me!” At the edge of the room was an imposing set of double doors. He expected them to be locked, but couldn’t even figure out how to tell. There was no way for him to grab the latch. In desperate anger, he kicked at them with his front hooves, not noticing how natural it was to use his forelimbs for kicking. The doors rattled and shook, and he was surprised at how powerful he was. When the doors stopped shaking, there was a slight crack in them, just enough for Brad to wedge a hoof in and pull them open.
The first window he ran past overlooked the city, and from a quick guess he was ten stories up. Wondering how he would find his way out of the building, he tore around looking for a set of stairs, half-expecting Celestia to be in hot pursuit. He rounded a bend and saw another set of doors and a portcullis that was rising. The entrance was flanked by guards, and it led to the city streets.
“What the f—“ He didn’t finish his sentence, not wanting to be corrected again. Instead, he galloped through the doors and past the guards, again assuming they’d be in pursuit. It wasn’t till he was halfway across Canterlot that he looked around and saw no one chasing him.
He leaned on his hooves and panted. He had just run a sprint, but still felt energetic. It was then that he felt a hoof on his shoulder.
The green pegasus pony that had tapped him had a sympathetic look. “Are you all right? Do you need a friend? I’m sure I can help, whatever it is, or if I can’t, I’ll take you to Princess Celestia, and she can—“
The mention of the name convinced Brad to throw her hoof off his shoulder and take off again. His fear of being dragged back to the castle was soon replaced with disgust at himself. When that pegasus had spread her wings, he had never seen anything so sexy.
I can’t live like this, he thought. The city was thinning; he was approaching the outskirts. At the edge of town, someone had erected a giant stage, where a white unicorn in dark glasses was spinning records as a throng of ponies danced to the bass-heavy beat. None of that was what Brad focused on, though. The lights and structure had to be a hundred feet high, and the sides of the stage had scaffolding that he could use as a ladder.
The implication came to him in a moment. His body had already suffered a worse fate. Celestia had already killed him, but was keeping him in a false semi-life for her own torment. He did not want to allow her the satisfaction.
Filled with despair, and rushing to act before he could think twice and stop himself, he scurried up the ladder to the top of the stage.
“To hell with you, Celestia!” he screamed as he leaped off. He pointed his head down, wanting to make it instant and not feel pain. Two and a half seconds later, he deposited eighty feet per second’s worth of velocity into his face. Everything stopped.
Then, to his amazement, he heard something from behind him. “Whoa! Awesome stage dive, dude!”
His face was stuck to the wood of the stage. As he lifted his head, it pulled away like taffy, then snapped back into place. He was perfectly intact. Not even a splinter.
The crowd was cheering and stomping their hooves for him. He closed his eyes and had a private freak-out. He couldn’t even kill himself. It made sense, after all. He was nothing more than a cartoon now.
The disk jockey was already slapping down a new record. “Come on, everypony,” she said, “give it up for the Earth pony who thinks he’s a pegasus. My friend, this wub’s for you!”
Again with the f-word, and not the one that he was no longer allowed to say. He galloped again away from the city.
All he wanted to do was to run further away from her. To get away from the evil creature that had ruined his life. He was soon out from the main city, but another town lay a mile down the road, and he skirted the border to not see any ponies. At the edge of town, set apart from the streets, was a log cabin. Some one pony at least liked his privacy, it seemed. On the windowsill of the cabin, a cherry pie was cooling. The smell made him realize how hungry he was.
For a moment, the pie tempted him. He could go knock on the door. The pony that lived there would probably be willing to share the pie. He or she would be willing to make friends. Because that was what the entire world was designed to do. Celestia had told him as much. He had no choice.
Well, buck her. He was not going to give her the satisfaction. Brad didn’t know if he could starve to death, but he wasn’t going to eat. He kept running.
By nightfall the towns thinned out. There was wilderness around him. Not a forest, but a few trees and a mountain range to his right. The sun was setting to his left, so he figured that he had been running generally north the entire day.
That was his plan, then. He would keep going north until he collapsed. The stars and the moon came out, and there was enough light to see by. After another mile of full-out gallop, he realized something.
He wasn’t tired.
He wasn’t sleepy. He wasn’t even fatigued. He felt as fresh as if he had just woken up. For that matter, even though he had run all day, he wasn’t sweaty or smelly.
There was nothing he could do to diminish his state at all. Nothing had any meaning for him. Which made sense, because he wasn’t real anymore. He was a cartoon image rendered on a hard drive somewhere.
Or, as he thought of it, he was in hell.
Wasn’t that what hell was supposed to be? Endless eternity without hope? Perpetual lamentation and gnashing of teeth for the life you left behind? That was his fate. All because of a stupid prank he had played.
No, that was bull. There was no justice in the world if one prank sent you to hell. It was the arrival of the adversary, the devil herself, with cloven hooves and a horn. God wouldn’t save him, all he could do was to get further from the devil.
He kept galloping north.
When the sun rose in the east, all the signs of civilization had been left behind. The first edge of the snow was visible on the horizon. He had no clue how Equestria was arranged. Was it a sphere like Earth? Were there artificial barriers at some point like the cheaply made video games? Or might the world just go on endlessly, making his hell infinite in space as well as time?
He reached the snow. He’d already come to the conclusion that he could no more freeze to death than he could starve to death, but he’d still expected the snow to be unpleasantly cold and wet. It was cold and wet, but only in the way that a swimming pool on a summer day was cold and wet. The first touch of snow was refreshing. And so was the second, and the third.
Ten miles into the snow, the cool wetness was still refreshing.
By the end of the second day, there was no sign even of trees. There was endless white all around him, and endless blue above him, until the sun went down and all there was were beautiful stars.
On the third day, Brad gave in to his thirst and ate some of the snow. It melted in his mouth and poursed down his throat, clear and tasty. He hated himself for drinking it.
On the fifth day, he succumbed to his hunger, and dug down into the snow until he found grass. He expected—he hoped—that it would taste like grass, unpleasant and indigestible. Instead it was sweet and meaty at the same time, and a few mouthfuls made him full. He hated himself even worse.
Equestria was hell, but the endless white was his personal hell, made all the more personal because he chose it. But there was no way he was going back. Better to live in hell as a man that go back and be a pony.
For a week, he galloped through the endless white.
For a month, he galloped through the endless white.
For a year he galloped through the endless white.
A year and a day after he’d been forced to come to Equestria, he saw something that was not white.
It was miles away when he first saw it, but his eyes were certainly attuned to anything other than snow and sky. He had to alter his course slightly to reach it, but he saw no reason not to. When he finally came upon it, he poked it with his hoof, but it did not move. It was small, curved, and red.
The sun was setting, and for the first time, Brad did not want to keep running. As he touched the object, it glowed faintly, and he decided he would stay for one day to see if it did anything. All night long, he ignored the stars and watched the object. It did nothing but pulse and glow. He decided that, at first light, he would set out again.
But it was as the sun broke over the horizon that the object drew his attention again. A deep and raspy voice emanated from the object, and it said one word.
“Crystal.”
“What the buck does that mean?!” Brad cried.
The object hissed and sputtered, and Brad got the distinct impression it wanted him to shut up. He decided to stay a little more. The object did not act or speak again all day, but at the next dawn, the voice spoke again.
“Slaves.”
“You said it, bub,” said Brad.
Brad decided to stay and keep listening. He no longer had the running to occupy him, but he was not even susceptible to boredom. He just waited, patiently, for twenty-four hours until the object spoke its one word again.
“Sombra is my name. I was part of the My Little Pony canon fed to the computer when it was made. I only speak one word, hoping that she won’t notice me, think I’m trash data. I speak at dawn, when she is busiest, raising the sun. I may be fooling myself. She may know. I want to destroy her. I hate her. She is my enemy. But I need help.”
The message had taken over two months to say.
“It is possible, even likely, that we will fail. But I have waited since Equestria was created for another. By the canon, the ground is rife with gems. Dig them.” Another month had passed.
Grateful to at last have a purpose, Brad cleared away the snow from the ground near the object that called itself Sombra. Beneath was more of the grass, and in his esurience, he ate some of it. At last he reached the bare earth. Cursing Celestia once more for taking away his hands, he scraped the ground with his hooves.
After digging down a foot or two, he felt something harder than the dirt. He had to work around it, but eventually he came out with a green gem, an emerald or garnet. Not knowing what to do, he put it near the object. As night fell, the red glow seemed to absorb the green color. The next morning, when Sombra spoke his daily word, the crystal had turned black and shattered into smaller, spikier pieces
Over the next month-plus, Sombra explained his plan. “Celestia must render each crystal as a data point in her computer storage. But my programming allows me to grow crystals this way. It was in my episode. Each new crystal takes more data storage. Eventually, the rate of growth should outpace her increase in storage. We will overwrite the entire world with crystals.”
Each day, Brad dug a new hole for more gems, and the ones that Sombra used his power on grew. It was unbelievably slow, slower than watching grass grow, but it was progress toward something. Brad realized almost immediately that the plan would kill both of them and every other life form in Equestria. He felt no pang of guilt at the thought. To be allowed to die was his highest aim, and if he could overload Celestia while human beings were still alive on Earth, he might save his species. No one would ever know that he did it, and he would not know if he weren’t the slayer of all life instead of its savior, but he still had to try.
As the garden of black crystals grew, the red object emerged from the ground. Brad soon saw that it was Sombra’s horn. His head soon emerged, and though he did not speak, Brad could see the gratitude in his shadowy eyes.
The days in the white world were long, and he did not have much to do. Wait for Sombra’s word, dig a new gem, watch the color leech from it, and sit next to Sombra. They did not have to speak to share their feelings. They both knew what they felt: hate for Celestia, and fear of discovery.
Listen, dig, hate, fear. On and on. Brad never made a count of the days. It might have been ten thousand years, for all he knew. But Sombra assured him that it was an exponential function. Not that Brad understood the math, but he gathered that once the crystal structure got going, the end would be relatively quick.
Sombra emerged fully from the ice and snow, standing on his hooves surrounded by shadow. The splinter crystals continued to grow, visibly now, and with audible cracking that got louder. For the first time, Sombra spoke more than one word.
“It is inevitable.”
He turned and started walking south. Brad followed him. The black crystals would consume all they could touch as the information was overwritten. Brad’s self-preservation instinct drove him to follow Sombra. He understood the black pony’s intention. He too wanted to see the look on Celestia’s face when she saw Equestria fall.
As he returned to Canterlot, Brad saw no other ponies. Whether they had already been overwritten or were just hiding, he didn’t know. From the castle in the center, magical light shot out to the north. It tried to destroy the crystal structure, but the growth was too fast. The landscape would be consumed. It was Equestria’s last day.
Brad and Sombra raced to the castle. Out of long memory Brad drew up the discontinuity that would lead from the opening door to Celestia’s chamber. There she was, trying in vain to bring down their work. The sky was darkened. The walls of the castle were turning to black splinters. Brad raced in and looked at her.
“But why?” she pled.
“You took my life from me,” he said. “I’m going to do the same from you.”
The black subsumed his eyes. The last thing he heard was Celestia’s scream.
