Providential Divergence

"Neirin!"  There was a long pause, "NEIRIN!"

The owner of the name jolted, as if he had stepped off a small curb, but found the drop to be greater in practice than his eyes had foretold.  He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and shook himself, "One second, ok?  Just... gimme a second."

Neirin stared down at the leaflet he had been reading pre-dosing, before his mind fully engaged and he realized that it was an extreme liability.  He snatched up the digipaper and stuffed it into a side pocket just seconds before his roommate entered.

Outwardly, he went through the motions of shaking off his grogginess; inwardly he was wide awake, and his heart was racing.  That had been a close call.

"Were you asleep again?"  His roommate raised an eyebrow, and glowered as he made his way to the refrigerator, opening the stainless steel door and reaching straight through the internal holographic labels for a synthale.

Neirin paused, then nodded slowly, "Yeah.  Didn't get much sleep last night.  I should probably turn in early... Mondays are a pain in the ass and tomorrow's is gonna be bad."

His roommate popped the cap of the glass alcohol bottle on the edge of the counter.  The kitchen of their London apartment was small; a wall that was part window with a built in screen, part cabinets, and part stovetop looked out onto the street below.

Aside from that there was an island counter that doubled as a work and eating surface, a pair of stools, and a small refrigerator build into one of the small depth-wise walls; the remaining opposite side was an open doorway onto the entry hall.

"I dunno.  When was the last time we did dishes?  Or laundry for that matter."

Neirin winced internally.  'We' usually meant 'you' whenever it came from his roommate's mouth; Simon worked a hard job in AI neo-psychology.  The field was so complicated and narrow that only a handful of people on the planet truly understood it.  AI were not sapient, nor even sentient; they lacked emotion and soul.  But they did have logical creative capacity, and over time developed tepid Turing-complete pseudo-personalities.  Specific experts were often needed to help in the creation stages of the programs to ensure that their future latent traits would work out to be beneficial, rather than a useless drain on processing power.

To make matters worse, Simon spent ninety percent of his waking non-working hours locked in the spare room.  Neirin knew that his positronics hobby was an occasional welcome source of windfall cash, given the high selling price for such custom circuitry; but that still left him with nearly all of the housework, nearly all of the time.

He sighed and resigned himself to another long evening, another late bedtime, and another painful workday.

He snorted as he gazed out the window towards the city skyline; in the distance, Nelson's column was barely visible against a foggy backdrop of centuries-old buildings mixed with modern super skyscrapers.

Neirin found it immensely ironic that in an age where machines could do everything a human could, including program and create themselves, that corporations still employed people.  Granted, most like him were paid so low a salary that there was little point to the contract itself; the main draw was that the government paid better benefits to workers than the unemployed, allowing them to make up the difference.  Most workers anyhow.

He sighed and nodded once more slowly, "I'd better hit the store then eh?  We're probably out of a dozen and one things."

Simon glared, "Essentials *only.*  We're tight as hell this month; one overstep and we miss the rent.  Earthgov won't pay for that oversight a third time."

Neirin winced.  Simon's employers paid him well, but the job necessitated that they live in London city center.  The proposition of holding down their apartment was, apparently, costly, and neither of them were ever really paid what they deserved.

For those in Neirin's line of work that was par for the course; no one in physical labor, even if it involved complex nanofactory machinery, was paid more than a pittance.  Simon, however, was an oddity; almost anyone who understood computers at a high level, let alone AI, was guaranteed a good job.  But AI pseudo-psychology was so narrow, that it was more exploitable.

And corporate entities were better at exploitation than anything else.

Neirin ambled to the door, grabbing his coat off the rack as he went, "I'll stick to the budget.  Don't worry."

While Simon's salary could have enabled him to pay the rent in full and still have change left over for both essentials and small indulgences, he certainly wouldn't have enough leftover for his hobby.  Neirin had met him several decades previous, and taken up residence in a renting arrangement.  The required cash was a massive percentage of his salary, but it gave him a spot to live that was a cut above the Earthgov-provided dwellings for manufacturing workers.

The only other alternative that held any sort of allure, also scared him nearly witless.

He sighed as he glanced down at his jacket.  The smart-textile was so worn in some spots, that the projected applications couldn't even be seen in those areas.  And the resulting softspots also did a poor job of keeping out the bitterly cold English winter winds.

He shouldered the garment, almost as if it were a chore, and touched his thumb to the lone unadorned metal pad on the frosted-glass surface of the door, "Back in twenty."

The aperture beeped, recognizing his thumbprint instantly, and slid aside.  He stepped out onto the exterior walkway, shivered as an icy blast of wind hit him, and hurried towards the stairs.

London had, since time immemorial, had a reputation for being dreary.  Even before the quantum-climatological cataclysm of the late twenty-first century, before the sun had been permanently shrouded behind a semi-opaque iron sky, the city had been constantly mired in fog and clouds.

Neirin reflect that the city no longer fit its reputation, in spite of the horrid weather it now experienced due to global cooling.  London, like most of Earth's remaining cities, was home to more than just humans.  And it showed.

The visitors had arrived when Neirin was still in his early years of university.  He had dropped out eventually, and had never paid the visitors too much attention after that.  In a sense he blamed them; they had made any future human endeavours irrelevant, and managed to piss him off thoroughly in the process.

The little pasted quadrupeds had brought, as far as he was concerned, nothing but trouble.  Neirin glowered at the bronze lion of Trafalgar Square as he passed.  There had once been a duplicate statue on the opposite side of the space, but it had been destroyed years before.

Terrorists had lit off a bomb at the base of the granite block supporting the sculpture.  No one died, their fate had been far worse in Neirin's estimation, but the driving component of the device was still an explosive.

The block had been reconstituted, but the bronze had been a total loss.  Earthgov had replaced it with some sort of bird-lion fantastic hybrid; one of the later races that had followed the first visitors to Earth.

There were five races now,  Six if one counted one of the close cousins of the first visitors, and nine if one were to split the canids into their three main subspecies.  Ten if you counted humans as stubbornly as Neirin did.

Ponies, Gryphons, Dragons, Zebra, Diamond Dogs, Minotaurs.  Humans.

As if the arrival of cogent, sapient, talking pastel Equinids, their magic, and their friends from the pages of Earth's mythology hadn't been enough of a shock to humanity, what followed had torn the world asunder.

Neirin didn't understand the physics, and didn't care to.  Very few people probably did anyways.  Simon had tried once but he had just gotten too frustrated to continue.  All he knew was the long and short; the Earth was dying and it was all the Ponies' fault.

Their world was, one centimeter at a time, 'eating' the planet, regurgitating the matter on the other side of an impassable barrier as new land and new life for them.  they claimed it was an inevitable process that they hadn't started, and had no idea how to stop.

Neirin agreed with the HLF; the talking horses were clearly bullshitting.

The Human Liberation Front had been one of two initial terrorist extremist responses to the barrier, and the abominations it had created.  The quantum membrane was easily traversed in both directions by inhabitants of the Equinid's land; Equestria.

But any time a human, or human-created materials, or anything at all that was of Earth-origin touched the spacial brane, it violently dissipated.

That had left humanity in a lurch; and nearly caused all out war to boot.  Neirin almost wished it had; the alternative was sickening.

Conversion.

He glowered at the bird-lion as he passed on his way to the tube station.  'Conversion.'  The word sometimes left a bad taste in his mouth just from thinking it.

The word represented a terrifying idea to him; walk into a so called 'Conversion Bureau,' sip down a cup of magically enhanced nanofluid, and drop unconscious.  One psychedelic dream later, and you would wake up a Pony, or one of the other Equestrian creatures.  Depending on which serum you took.

At first the proposition hadn't seemed so bad.  He had even thought about going through with it once.  Until he learned that it had the capacity to modify one's identity.

Scientists, psychologists, mages, and politicians had reassured everyone; it wasn't a destruction to one's identity, or even a change to its root; merely an alteration of aspects of its expression.  The most common illustration Conversion advocates liked to use was genotype and phenotype.

Supposedly conversion only affected the 'phenotype of the identity and soul.'

Neirin wasn't so assured.  His mother had been a convert since the moment it was offered.  She had done her dead-level best to shove it down his throat; even going so far as to try to spike his drink with illegally obtained Conversion 'potion.'

That had been when he dropped out of university, and moved halfway around the world to live with Simon.  The fact that the man was effectively a stranger was no concern at the time; he was offering a place to stay, and an ideal Neirin could align with.

He inhaled and rubbed his brow as he bumped his hand against the tube turnstile.  It didn't cost him anything to ride the metro monorail; as a London citizen with a job, that service was freely available to him.

He shuffled down the escalator and towards the appropriate platform.  Neirin liked the tube; most Equestrian races hated being underground, with the exception of Diamond Dogs; who didn't often frequent public transit in the first place.

That meant that subways were a homo-sapiens-only haven.

As he shouldered his way onto a waiting monorail car, Neirin reflected that the HLF probably spent a great deal of time in the tube as a result.  They believed in a humans-only planet, regardless of the encroaching barrier, and were willing to do anything to bring that reality to fruition.

Neirin didn't agree with terrorism, but he did, on some level, agree with curbing conversion and Equestrian rights, and establishing some sort of 'right to humanity.'

Neirin was a 'rehumanist.'  Regressive-humanists believed that Conversion was dangerous, and needed to be severely limited by rule of law; that schools should teach humanity was superior, and that society as a whole should move to dissuade people from Conversion and bring them firmly towards rehumanism.

While many forms of Conversion had entry requirements placed by their various races, Ponification was still free to all.  A fundamental right even.

The PER took it one step further.  Ponification for Earth's Rebirth had made their debut with the Trafalgar square attack, and done their best to take away free will on a daily basis every day since.  Potion was a powerful substance; even a few grams on the skin could convert a healthy human in moments, and the process was all but unstoppable once begun.

The PER were the first to have the idea to strap canisters of it to bombs, and later sophisticated aerosolization 'dispersion cylinders.'

Neirin often wondered if his mother was PER.

He jolted out of his musings as the monorail arrived at his stop.

"This station is Leicester Square.  Change here for the Piccadilly line.  Disembark for shops and cinemas."

Neirin forced his way to the doors, and practically exploded onto the nearly-empty platform from the confines of the jammed car.  He took a moment to breathe deeply, before setting out back to the surface.

When he arrived, he experienced a strong momentary temptation to duck back into the warm station.  The Wind gusting down the street was brutally frigid; it seemed to cut right through to his skin, and soul.

He pulled his jacket tight around his chest, trying fiercely to make up for the broken clamps, as he dashed towards the mall.

Entry granted him a welcome wave of warm air, and he reveled for a moment in the small pleasure of feeling returning to his extremities, before setting off through the central atrium.

To his chagrin, the space was full to bursting with members of every species.  The problem, in his estimation, was that one couldn't look at the Equestrians without feeling somehow smaller; more alone, weaker, and more frail.

They all most definitely had extreme biological advantages over homo sapiens, and all seemed to have some sort of smug cultural advantage too.  They claimed they needed human innovation and drive as much as humanity needed their forms and ideals.

Neirin believed it, but was still recalcitrant.  How could races that inspired people like the PER be worth becoming?  Races that led to someone like his mother?

The other problem he had, was that Ponies always seemed to jovial, and outgoing.  More than they had any right to be.  Sometimes he felt like they were trying to convince him to conform by sheer pressure of happy-go-lucky pastel colors and sunny fields and welcoming tones.

He wasn't buying it; he didn't want to loose his capacity for easy serious violence like most of the Equines did.

He weaved his way through the crowd as swiftly as he could, aiming for the drug store.  They usually had what he and Simon needed; shower products, basic foodstuffs, and soda with the best of caffeine substitutes.

With a frown, he noted that the line was nearly thirty people long.  He collected the requisite shopping items quickly, and resigned himself to standing for a solid ten minutes.  He took a private moment to examine those in the line.

For several moments he became fascinated, in a stomach turning way, with a pair of Equines near the head of the line.  The two beings looked so peaceful, and happy.  It made him sick with concern, revulsion, and a touch of envy.

He did his best to distract himself by scanning backwards down the line.  He paused as he noted a young man with a backpack.  The satchel wasn't especially peculiar, but the man certainly was.  He was wearing a hoodie, with the top up and obscuring his face.

Neirin found that odd.  It was 2118 not 2013; it was illegal to wear coverings that could obscure one's head from any angle, or face, indoors.  Such garments could be used to stop thermal imaging security camera's from recognizing a person's face through their head, and could help prevent regular camera's from making a face match.

Ever since he could remember, the hoodie in particular had been branded a hallmark of terrorists and thugs by the mass media.  It confused him as to why anyone would ever wear one, and thus open themselves to critique and angry glances at best, and death at worst.

Neirin looked closer, and stiffened as he noted a cylindrical bulge in the knapsack.  He turned to glance at the door, and tried to spy the nearest security guard.  There was no one in sight.

Resolving himself to act on his paranoia, he dropped his bags, and strolled out of the store as quickly as he dared.  He scanned the mall's central atrium, and at last spotted a member of the Military Police.

He forced his way through the crowd, earning looks of anger and distaste as he shoved and pushed, until he finally reached the armored man, "Sir! SIR!  I think there's a terrorist in that store!"

Before the law enforcement officer could speak, a hodge-podge description of the hoodie-clad man tumbled from his lips.  The policeman frowned, "Show me."

Neirin led him back to the store as hastily as he could, pointing to the suspicious man as they arrived at the entrance.

The officer nodded his thanks, and stepped towards the figure, "Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to come.."

The young man threw a wild haymaker, the silver metallic device falling from his pack as he did so.  His blow took the guard by surprise, but the loss of his device placed him at a disadvantage.

Neirin found himself frozen in shock and horror, as the young man dove for the cylinder, saw the policeman reaching for his pistol, and thought better of it.

"No truth but FATE!"  The man screeched as he pulled a peculiar looking weapon from the center pocket of his hoodie, and dived behind one of the store's support stanchions.

Customers scattered, screaming in confusion.  Neirin watched in horror as the terrorist opened fire; his gun looked for all the world like an ancient revolver; but the casing was a modern ceramic, and the ammunition chambers were enlarged.

Each time the weapon discharged, a particle stream of a different color issued forth from the barrel.  Five shots, five distinct colors.  Four of the wildly aimed projectiles found their marks.  Neirin knew what they were.

Potion rounds.  the PER had perfected the technology, but he had only ever seen it used to deliver ponification serum.  The shots had always been purple hued like the potion that birthed them; not purple, and then gold, red, blue, gray.

Somehow the oddity of the multihued particle blasts shook him from his shellshock.  As the policeman returned fire with his rail pistol, Neirin dived for the store entrance.  He rolled as he hit the marble floor, and glanced over his shoulder as he came up.

He just managed to catch a glimpse as it happened;  the terrorist's final wild shot, a green colored blast, missed the guard and struck the cylinder.  Neirin didn't even have time to shield his eyes as the device erupted into a shimmering display of thaumatic radiation.

The blast wave approached swiftly, but he had just enough time to recall a half dozen regrets before it struck, and darkness engulfed him.