Outside Context Problemsby PonisattvaChaptersChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 1“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke, “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination” “Twilight, darling, you absolutely must try this punch!” “Dashie! How's the party? Isn't it great or what?” “Um...like I was saying...I was thinking maybe about trying modeling again...” “Yeah, I guess. But right now my wings are feeling a bit cramped, and it's totally perfect flying weather out there tonight.” “You okay, sugarcube? You're kinda starin' off into space...” “Eh, she's fine.” “I hope you've been getting enough sleep. It's not good for a girl's health, you know?” Aside from the busy lights of Pinkie's party, it was a perfect night for stargazing. For a moment, Twilight Sparkle indulged, and the conversation of her friends around her faded into a buzzing white noise that went in one ear and out the other. The stars were calling to her, and this perfect cloudless night revealed a shimmering, infinite sea of stars stretching across the black velvet sky. This rare lunar eclipse meant the stars shined more brightly than she had ever remembered. Twilight sighed wistfully. It was a sad thing to miss, but her friends had been planning this event for weeks now, and she couldn't bear disappointing them. She gradually returned to the hum of the party, fending off inquiries from friends close and otherwise about her health. It was a little embarrassing staring off into space like that, but sometimes she couldn't help herself. Rainbow Dash was more persistent though. She offered Twilight a cup of the bubble-gum pink punch that Pinkie had made as she made doubly sure that the budding alicorn was really okay. “Yes, Dash, I'm really fine. I was just taking a moment to do a little stargazing,” she sighed. At least the punch was pretty good. “Well, if you say so...I know a garden party isn't the most exciting thing in the world, but you're usually in your element in these sorts of things,” Dash said with a hint of suspicion in her voice. A cool breeze then blew over them, just enough to tousle manes and mess with more delicate decorations. “Besides, doesn't this weather just make you itch with excitement, make you wanna stretch those wings and fly?” Twilight shrugged wordlessly. In truth, her new wings didn't quite feel “real” yet...they were an add on to a body she'd long grown accustomed to, and the additional limbs hadn't seen much use yet. Maybe that would always be the gulf between her and her athletic close friend. She just wasn't born to fly, let alone go where angels fear to tread like Rainbow Dash. Pushing aerodynamic limits was where Dash was most at home, and her senses and life were finely honed for that. It was what brought her the most enjoyment in her life, and naturally she wanted to share that rush of ecstasy and sense of limitless freedom with her friends. Twilight wanted to tell Dash that she'd never be able to share in that feeling. Flying was not the wind beneath Twilight's wings, and probably never would be. But the thought of saying it just seemed too heartlessly cruel...especially after seeing the great joy on Dash's face when she first boldly proclaimed that they were going to be wingponies from this day on, and that she'd teach the fledgling alicorn everything there was to know about the glory that was flight. Dash wanted a companion to share in that rush of pushing the envelope so badly it hurt. Lightning Dust could have been that person...but her rashness and callous disregard for others had made that impossible. Twilight would have to crush that dream eventually...but not now. If the tables were turned, and Dash had suddenly sprout a horn and gained access to the wondrous power of unicorn magic, the outcome would have been just the same in reverse. “So what do you think about when you stare off all googly-eyed at the stars?” Twilight shifted awkwardly. “Just what kind of a question is that?” “Come on, I know you too well. It must be pretty important to distract you from a Pinkie party.” “Eh, not really. I mostly just admire the beauty, and look for familiar constellations. Occasionally a shooting star.” Dash hovered up over her for a better view. “Do you really think that stars are like they said in school...other suns just like our own?” “Most likely. With how far away they must be and yet we can still see them shine, they'd have to be that bright.” “That's actually kinda cool. You think maybe that there are ponies like us, living on planets like ours?” “It's a possibility.” One of the stars on the horizon was twinkling brighter than usual. It was also getting brighter, and shifting ever so slightly. “Twilight, is it just me, or is that one getting bigger?” Dash pointed at the anomalous star with the outstretched lead feather of her wing. By the time Dash had finished her sentence, it was already the largest and brightest object in the night sky, visibly glowing an orange hue. But still it grew larger and brighter, and little flecks of light could be seen streaming off the central light. A slow rising dread filled Twilight...that shooting star was shooting straight for them. All she could manage was a little “Eeep!” as the object streaked towards them. “Hey, that thing's going straight for us!” Dash shouted. The throngs of people began looking up at the shooting star. A small panic rose as the fireball dipped towards Ponyville. Tables and chairs were tipped over, spilling beverages and snacks across the grass. It was but a moment before the giant fireball was almost on top of them, and in that flash Twilight thought desperately for something to do...anything to forestall this calamity. But what...it was too huge and moving too fast. All that she could really do was get ready to cash in her chips. But just as suddenly, the fireball's course changed. It leveled off abruptly, and banked to its left. It practically clipped the tree tops as it roared over head, and a tremendous booming noise, like thunder, followed in its wake, fading into a deafening roar. For the briefest fraction of a second, as Twilight cowered helplessly behind an overturned table, Twilight thought she could see a smooth, silvery skin beneath the flames and smoke. Then came another great crash, and the earth shook like a jello mold. The last she'd remembered, Diziet Sma had gone to bed several hours ago, slipping into the soothing embrace of the anti-grav bed in her quarters, drifting off to sleep alone this time. She was aboard the Culture General Contact Unit It Belongs In a Museum as it slipped through four dimensional hyperspace at forty thousand times the speed of light. The self-aware starship and her skeleton complement were on yet another rendezvous course, ferrying Sma and her companion drone from point A to point B. Just another routine mission for the diplomatic/scientific corps that was Contact. Well, somewhere along the line the “routine” part had been chucked out the airlock. Sma had landed awkwardly on the deck of her quarters. Her well honed instincts had her awake and alert instantly, scanning her surroundings for a clue to the trouble. As she pushed her nude body up from the hard deck of her utilitarian quarters, the first thought that had occurred to her was that someone had shut off her anti-grav bed...whether for revenge for a petty slight or a slightly painful prank. But as her lithe,body tumbled off the deck through the air, her long red hair floating in her face, she quickly abandoned that hypothesis. The artificial gravity aboard the ship had gone offline, leaving her to cartwheel through the darkness amidst a few of her scattered nick-knacks. She smacked up against the wall next at a not inconsiderable speed. That...that just didn't make any sense. “Ship!” she cried out. The ship didn't answer. That wasn't a good sign. Her training quickly took over...training for what to do in the event of some systems failure left a ship careening out of control. She just didn't expect to ever have to use it on board a Culture vessel. Even in combat, at the technological level of the Culture generally it was only a few nanoseconds that separated a ship from being totally fine and being totally annihilated and reduced to stardust. She braced her body in the archway leading to her bathroom, and held on for dear life. The emergency lights in her quarters flickered on, revealing her personal effects careening through the room, bouncing off walls and occasionally smashing into her. Her drone companion, Skaffen-Amtiskaw, rolled, tumbled and cork-screwed into the room. Its characteristic aura field, the choice tool of sapient Culture AIs for non-verbal communication with organics, was off-line as well. “Dizzy! Are you alright?!” it cried. It tried, and failed, to avoid collision with the bulkhead. “What about you! If I didn't know better I'd think you were drunk.” A particularly sharp tumble of the GCU It Belongs In a Museum strained Sma's grip on the bulkhead. But her athletic body held on, even as Skaffen-Amtiskaw crashed into her chest. “Whatever is affecting the ship is affecting my systems too. No anti-grav, no fields, no effectors...I'm left with a piddling little fan for movement and station keeping.” The drone was not amused in the slightest. “I can't raise the Ship...what's going on?” “It has been out of contact since the warp drives began to fail sixty-seven seconds ago. From there, its systems have been progressively failing, and if I had to hazard a guess, we've been violently shunted out of hyperspace.” She waited for a tense moment as it sank in. For all she knew, the superhuman AI Mind that was the ship's heart and soul was dead. The possibilities were hard to contemplate. Short of a superior computer intelligence cracking the It Belongs In a Museum's systems and taking over...there wasn't anything she could think of that could cause this. “If the Ship is dead...we need to make it a module before whatever it is that caused this moves on to eliminating us.” A feminine synthesized voice reverberated through the room. “That won't be necessary, Diziet Sma.” “Ship! What's going on?” The It Belongs In a Museum hissed, “I wish I knew. All systems were functioning at optimal levels until this GCU entered what I can only describe as a topographical defect in space-time. I would have collected more data to theorize, but crossing the event horizon resulted in catastrophic systems failure, the cause of which I am not certain. The warp drive began to fail, and the ship was rapidly shunted out of hyperspace. All related systems experienced catastrophic failure, including my own core systems.” A knot formed in Diziet Sma's stomach. “So we're lost and dead in space...” The Ship's disembodied voice sighed. “That would be an accurate assessment. I had mere nanoseconds to transfer my mind-state to secondary systems before I was cut off from hyperspace totally, killing me. I was unable to react while the emergency routines convered my mind-state to function at the greatly reduced capacity available to me. As a result of this lobotomy, I am functioning at a fraction of my normal abilities.” “This just keeps getting better,” snarked the helpless drone cradled in Sma's arms. Under normal conditions, a Culture Mind like It Belongs In a Museum would spend its existence totally in hyperspace, taking advantage of the physics of four spatial dimensions to dramatically improve its computational abilities by orders of magnitude. Left in this state, a Mind would be a shadow of its former self. “Well, we're all having a near-death experience right now, what is our course of action. I assume we're cut off from the Grid as well?” she asked, dreading the answer. “Correct. The ship's force fields are down, and the structural integrity has been compromised. The unplanned re-entry into realspace is the source of the tumbling, which has been exacerbated by the venting of atmosphere from multiple decks. I am currently attempting to restore secondary power, as well as determine our location. Gravity drive is damaged, presumed non-functional...” “Why don't you make this simple, and just tell me what still works?!” interrupted Sma. “As far as I can tell, the life-support systems, lights and toilets are still functioning.” “Well, that's appropriate, Dizzy,” droned Skaffen-Amtiskaw, “We are currently, as that Earther phrase you seemed fond of during your Contact mission there goes, 'up Shit Creek without a paddle'.” “I've restored some real-space sensors...though I can't believe the readings I'm getting,” the Ship said in disbelief. “That's great...how long before you can do something about this spin?” Sma asked. Sure enough, her grip slipped, and she tumbled into her desk. “I'll have minimal gravity drive power back in seventy-eight seconds. Unfortunately, if the sensors are functioning at all, we'll be beginning atmospheric re-entry eighteen seconds prior. Diziet Sma, please don your gelfield suit, it should still be functional.” She was almost too shocked to react. It took a bit of effort, but she located the neat little ball that was the suit. Upon interfacing with her neural lace, the gel flowed over her body, covering her in a second skin to protect her from anything from heat to impacts to the hard vacuum of space. In the seconds that it took to don the suit, what the Ship had said still didn't make any more sense. The odds of dropping out of hyperspace randomly within the gravitational sphere of influence of a planet were so astronomically low that she had doubts that they were even calculable. Space is, after all, mostly empty space. “Your neural lace is still functioning...good...I've managed to get my avatar functioning as well. I am unable to do the normal scans of this planet, so we are likely going to need to have as many eyes on the ground. From what little information I've managed to glean, there appears to be some sort of civilization on this planet, but that isn't what troubles me.” “Your endless exposition continues to fascinate me,” Sma replied, rolling her eyes. “You asked to know what was going on. I was merely honoring that request. Atmospheric interface in five seconds, please brace yourself.” The Ship didn't need to ask twice. Diziet Sma was already clinging to the bulkhead, the gelfield suit adhering her to the exotic materials of the hull like a barnacle. The ship soon began to flex ever so slightly as the atmospheric pressure and heating increased.” “Sma...this is important. I cannot make sense of this, but even after multiple redundant system checks, the outcome is the same. The orbital mechanics of this system are completely fucked.” “That is uncharacteristically vulgar of you, Ship.” “There isn't any other way to express finding out that this system's star orbits around a body that can only be described as a planet, and not the other way around.” “What the hell are you saying...” Author's Note Human in Equestria stories are a dime-a-dozen. I figured it was time to break the mold, and have one that wasn't tinged with misanthropic species hate, and have two rival versions of utopia come crashing together. This fic shouldn't require any real understanding of The Culture series, though they are among the best of recent sci-fi novels, and the late author is sadly missed. This is my little tribute to the series, and I hope you enjoy where this ends up. Chapter 2“The mass of a body is a measure of its energy content.” ~Albert Einstein So begins this account, set in a land far, far away. This is not a novel, for there is too much to explain. But it is not a history either. It explains in the form of a story, a story of ideas and civilizations. A meeting between civilizations and the ideas they embody, glimpsed through the story of the people involved. The story involves two civilizations, who are the real heroes setting forth into the cosmos filled with perils and illusions. But these are not young peoples. They are not akin to the youth beginning the hero's journey, finding what their place in the universe is and what it is they stand for. These are mature systems, with long histories going back through the eons. They have developed and matured, passing the age where they were victims of impersonal historical forces, and now emerging on the cusp of being able to rebuild reality in their own image. Some have dared to call them utopias. This is perhaps apt, as both serve as an ideal type for a vision of justice, and of politics. They are the desirable no place turned into a real some place, and perhaps even a good place. They are not just materially affluent, but real communities built around a shared vision of a good life, one where the drudgery of survival is minimized to allow its citizens to focus on what its theorists believe really matters in life. Our dramatis personae begins with some mea culpas by the author on the limits of language. For certain necessary concepts have long passed out of common usage in my native Marain, and for some concepts there have never been the right words in that language. This is further complicated by the difficulties of translation presented by the languages of the participants, Equestrian and Marain, into English.(1) Thus, this account may find anachronisms abound, and the occasional tortured attempt at translating idiomatic constructions. We begin with the land of Equestria, and the three (some say four) tribes of Ponies who inhabit there as the dominant species. At first glance, they do not seem to be much. They exist in a relatively low level of technological development, firmly rooted in the Age of Scarcity. But through the orderly workings of their polity, as well as their advanced innate mastery of physics, they have been able to accomplish a level of distributive justice that is truly rare among species of their developmental level. There is a certain unfairness in comparing the accomplishments of different civilizations, but among the countless ones studied and cataloged, they are unique in multiple capacities. The most obvious, of course, is their innate ability to channel the zero-point energy of the Grid common to all members of their species. While they are not the only organic species cataloged with such capacities (though their number are exceedingly rare), none have so general or great of control. Almost as rare for their given level of development is the generalized commitment to justice of their society. While there are those who would argue that being so deeply rooted in the Age of Scarcity disqualifies them, there is a distinct utopian streak to Equestria. Unlike the utopias of modernity(2), Equestria is not concerned greatly with economic justice or social leveling. Their society is heavily stratified, with clear class distinctions and great disparities between the wealth of the most and least affluent. This is not to say that they unconcerned with distributive justice. Whether it is deemed simple realism, or defeatism, they have accepted great inequalities of economic and political power. However, this is tempered with postmodernity's concern with the good life, which requires certain material justice be guaranteed. Thus, while there are rich and poor, masters and workers, there remains commitment to remove the worst excesses. Thus, while there are poor, true destitution is very rare. While they are compelled to work by economic necessity, few toil. Society is bound together tightly by shared commitments to a good life not based around tangible goods, but the power of friendship and solidarity. The Culture, on the other hand, are a very different vision of utopia. For a civilization that long ago spread amongst the stars, the Culture is fixated entirely on the problems of modernity. The Culture has one general answer for social problems: infinite abundance made possible by rational social planning. The eleven thousand year history of the Culture has been dominated by two themes. The primary theme is unrestrained hedonism. With their level of scientific mastery, they have spread amongst the stars, building paradise wherever they wished. Culture citizens, whether organic humanoids or sapient AIs, live in a society without laws or even a discernible government. In the most direct terms possible, the Culture is an anarchist, communist utopia, a possible end state of a civilization's social evolution. The rule of people has given away to the administration of things, and with the cornucopia provided by technology toil is entirely unnecessary, whatever passes for “work” is synonymous with hobby or play. The average Culture citizen busies himself or herself following whatever strikes their fancy over the course of their long lives. The AIs which fulfill the bulk of administrative work are so advanced and so powerful that it takes a tiny fraction of their attention, the rest of which is spent following the same hedonistic impulse to do whatever strikes their fancy as any organic Culture. There is, however, a dissonant chord. Not everyone is content to just merely live in utopia. There is a strong, even zealous, moral urge to meddle in less advanced civilizations. The Culture has no prime directive of non-interference. But they are not rash about interference; they are careful, patient and calculating. Even down-right secretive and dastardly at times. This is the role of the diplomatic/explorer/scientific arm Contact. Our tale concerns members of Contact, specifically the secretive and conniving sub-group of Special Circumstances; those who do dirty work in the name of a greater good. It was a very long time before any of the cowering ponies dared to stir. Scared witless by the fireball's near miss, even the bravest took a considerable time to collect their wits before slowly creeping out from their hastily prepared cover. Twilight spent that time huddled together with Dash under a picnic table, feeling rather stupid. She was an intellectual, priding her self on her keen wits and erudite mind. A veritable once in an age prodigy and polymath, not given towards baser instincts. And yet here she was, sheltering under a wooden table. True, it had been rather sturdily constructed by one of Ponyville's master carpenter ponies, and it was certainly made to last. But regardless of how she tried spinning her reaction, it was all irrelevant. A meteorite of that size meant that the table might as well have been made from tissue paper. She didn't know what possessed her to make such a futile gesture, but she didn't like it. Dash began to stir first. With great urgency, she combed over the still slightly shocked Twilight, looking for signs of injury. “Dash, stop it, I'm alright!” protested Twilight. “We shouldn't be alright with what happened...but we are.” Dash sighed in relief. With some reluctance, she started looking for her other friends, to satisfy that pressing need to make sure they were okay. She knew it was totally unnecessary, but some deep, primal urge in her required her to see them with her own two eyes. Twilight stumbled to her feet uneasily. For a long moment, she stared off at the burning fires and rising column of smoke on the horizon. That near miss hadn't been mere fortune, unless her eyes had deceived her. The strange, silvery smooth meteorite had changed course at the last instant, sparing the town of Ponyville from total annihilation. But that was just hard to believe...falling rocks didn't suddenly change course. But it wasn't a rock. It couldn't have been if it looked like that, unless she'd hallucinated the whole thing. “Okay Twilight,” she said to herself, “Let's a get a grip. Don't fret over the unexpected result of an experiment, verify. But don't contaminate. Confirm what you saw, but don't suggest.” It was comforting to say it out loud. Enough for action, at least. She began frantically searching for Rainbow Dash. She needed Dash's sharp eyes and aerodynamic instincts right now. She weaved through the frenzy of frightened ponies with deliberate purpose, rushing to find the cyan pegasus. It took but a moment to find her. Ever loyal Dash had found the rest of her close friends, was busily making sure they were all okay. “Rainbow Dash! I need to talk to you, this is important,” said Twilight, out of breath from all this excitement. “Can't it wait Twilight? I'm a little busy at the moment,” said Dash, not once taking her attention off finding the sprain in Fluttershy's wing. Amidst the calamity of the night's unplanned excitement, Fluttershy was surprisingly calm. Must have been the pain of her injured wing, probably caused by some careless pony nearly trampling her, distracting her from the memory of the terror they must have all felt. Dash worked expertly in setting her wing back into proper alignment. The din of panic slowly retreated, and the normal peaceful order of Ponyville was starting to return. The ponies who lived here were nothing if not resilient, but Twilight couldn't bear the thought of telling them that the worst may be yet to come. “Dash! This is really important. Fluttershy's fine, I just need to talk to you. Now!” Twilight said sternly. She helped nudge Fluttershy to her feet, if only to get this done quicker. Dash huffed with irritation. “Jeesh, don't be so pushy, nerd.” “Don't make me have to be pushy then. I need you to tell me what you saw.” Dash sighed, rolling her eyes with irritation. “Well, what was there to see...it was a falling star. Can't say I've seen any that up close before.” She casually swatted at a small insect with a flick of her tail. Don't poison the experiment, Twilight Sparkle. Don't poison the experiment, Twilight Sparkle. She repeated this mantra silently. Confirming what she saw was more important than anything. “Look, Dash,” she cried, “What did the falling star look like to you. Just tell me everything you remember about it, and don't ask why. Just trust me that this is important.” Dash gave Twilight a queer look, raising an eyebrow suspiciously. Nevertheless, she did what she was asked. “Well...it was surrounded by what looked like fire...and I could certainly feel the heat. But if you looked closely, you could see a smooth surface under the flames, sorta like a mirror almost. And for a moment, I thought it was flying. I definitely saw it pull up and bank at the last moment.” She swatted at the persistent insect again. Twilight took a deep breath. So she hadn't been hallucinating. “So you saw it too then. You saw a falling star turn, just like I did.” “Why all the cloak and dagger stuff, Twilight? Couldn't you have just told me what you saw?” The insect buzzed near Twilight's ears now, but she ignored it. Science needed to be done. “I wanted to hear you say it unprompted. Look, it's kind of hard to explain, but I was reading this book about memory, and it said that a pony's memory can be easily influenced and details suggested to--” “Enough! I get it, I get it. Don't bore me with this stuff.” Dash's suspicious stare was back now, boring a hole into the lavender alicorn. “Listen, what are you scheming? You've got this look in your eye, and that just leads to trouble.” “Never mind that, are you going to come looking for aliens with me or not?” “Whoa...hold your horses Twilight Sparkle, you're not actually suggesting that there were alien ponies inside that thing?” Indeed she had been suggesting just that. It also didn't take much for Dash to get over her reluctance, and summon up the derring-do to go investigate the crash sight. By first light, when they'd agreed to meet to begin their adventure, she was already practically chomping at the bit.(3) Spurred on by the promise of adventure, and the possibility of strange new worlds to explore, the pair set off, following the trail of smoke. It took about a little over than an hour to reach the unidentified falling object's resting place. They came to the source of the smoke and fog, with only a hazy impression coming through the early morning fog. The fires had mostly gone ought, only smoldering, and so they touched down. The anomaly turned out to be a long scar in the ground, like a giant hoe had scraped across the earth, digging a long furrow overturning trees in its wake. The gash was over two hundred meters wide, and half that deep where the object made landfall. As it had dug into the earth, it created a great wave of dirt and rocks. As the wave built, the object must have leaped into the air again for a moment, for the furrow ended abruptly before beginning anew. They followed it on foot, gawking at the great yet casual destruction the falling star had wrought. There were no words for this. Twilight had tried, desperately, to say something. To find anything to talk with Dash about it. It was unlike anything she had ever imagined. Perhaps even unlike anything she could have imagined. Dash walked along behind Twilight. A silent terror filled her from head to hoof, as she imagined what would have happened to Ponyville had it been hit. The rising sun parted the fog as they came at last to the falling star. It was a smooth, cylindrical object, fatter on one end than the other. Its surface had clearly once been polished to a mirror shine, but now was marred by soot, and somewhat wrinkled from the force of the impact. The fatter end was mostly flat, though it had four circular protrusions, arranged in a diamond shaped pattern. The narrow end came to a sharp point, almost like a ship's prow. Whatever it was, it was enormous. Twilight cursed herself for not bringing a measuring tape, if only to satisfy her desire for precision. “Starswirl's beard!” she cried, “Look at the size of that thing!” “Wow,” Dash said in awe. “It's longer than the tallest skyscraper in Manehattan is tall.(4)” It was an apt comparison; if it were set upright on its fat-end, it might easily pass for some stranger hyperfuturistic skyscraper. It was easily between four and five hundred meters long, and nearly one hundred meters wide on the fat end. They walked uneasily along the ridge of the crater, not daring to get any closer. “What do you think it is? It doesn't have any wings...how could it have flown or turned like that?” Dash flapped her wings uneasily, almost taking flight as she talked. As she trotted on ahead of Twilight, they both paid no mind to where they were walking. Their eyes were fixed on the strange falling star. Before Twilight could respond, a hatch swung open on the side of the object, followed by a rush of vapor, like the steam from the pistons on a train. The two ponies jumped in surprise, barely containing their screams. A tall, gangly creature was standing in the open hatch. It threw a line of some sort out, and began climbing down. With an eep of surprise, Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash tore down the outside of the embankment. Their beating wings kicked up puffs of dust and they half-ran, half-flew into the nearest cover, a pile of trees overturned into thick brush. As she dove into the dense thicket, Twilight smashed into another warm, furry body. She almost screamed in panic as she tumbled and rolled with the other creature. The hooves on the other creature confirmed it was a pony as they smacked into her belly and legs. The blunt horn poking into her neck confirmed that the other creature was a unicorn. The other unicorn gave a soft, feminine cry as she disentangled herself from Twilight. For what seemed like a split second, there was almost a look of complete shock on the unfamiliar unicorn's face. It quickly regained composure, calmly retrieving her olive drab fedora and replacing it on her head. She sat on her haunches in complete silence, staring impassively at Twilight. “Hey, sorry about running into you,” Twilight whispered, “I wasn't really paying attention.” The other unicorn raised an eyebrow inquisitively. She spoke slowly, just as quietly as Twilight had. “I'm sorry about being in your way. I didn't really see you coming, you were in such an awful hurry.” An insect buzzed at Twilight's face again. With a shake, it was dislodged. “Well, now that we're both sorry, we haven't been properly introduced.” Twilight extended a hoof in greeting. After a moments hesitation, the other unicorn extended a hoof as well, bumping her hoof into Twilight's. The gears whirred in Twilight's head for a moment. Slightly strange accent + Somewhat unsure of the language + unfamiliar with hoofshaking = Foreigner. “Heh, you're not from around here, are you,” she said. “I suppose you could say that,” the other unicorn replied, chuckling quietly. “Well, my name is Twilight Sparkle. I'm here with my friend Rainbow Dash...she's the pegasus standing over there, scowling at us with that suspicious look on her face.” “Hey! I was not scowling!” Dash half-cried, half-whispered, trying not to be too loud while still straining to vent her disappointment. “Well, Twilight Sparkle, you may call me Diggy Whimsy,” she replied with a small curtsy. She was a cream colored unicorn, with navy blue hair and golden eyes. Along with a well worn fedora, she had some old olive drab saddlebags, filled with tools and gear. “You must be here for the same reason we are.” Dash interjected. “Why else would I be here?” Diggy replied. “So you saw that strange falling star!” Twilight beamed with excitement. “Did you see that strange creature climbing out of it...I think we have a real alien spaceship here!” “Exciting isn't it?” Diggy smiled. “Exciting? That thing almost destroyed our town! Exciting isn't the word I'd choose to describe it!” Dash said in a huff. “Rainbow Dash! Be nice, she had no way of knowing, did you?” said Twilight. “Well, not right away,” Diggy replied, slowly backing away from Rainbow Dash. “You're an archeologist, right?” said Twilight, “I need you to come look at something. I think I saw somepony climbing out of that spaceship.” “I guess you could call me one.” “Just wait til you see this thing, it looks so weird!” Diziet Sma sneezed suddenly. Maybe some sort of irritant stirred up from the surrounding forest... “Don't spit on me,” said the drone she held cradled in her arms. “Look, Skaffen, you could be just a tad grateful for me carrying you around.” Sma had just finished gathering the gear she'd hauled down into her pack. She surveyed the surroundings, grimacing at the wake of destruction they'd left. “Dizzy, you'd be a sourpuss too if someone cut your legs off.” “As you are so fond of pointing out, you don't have any 'frail, meat appendages', so I'm afraid I don't see the comparison.” She stuck her tongue out him for good measure. “I know exactly where that tongue has been. Get it away from me,” it snarked. “Spoilsport,” she said. Dizzy climbed up the embankment, her feet digging into the soft, freshly plowed earth. It was steep, and to avoid sliding back down she often balanced with one of her hands, clutching onto larger boulders or digging deep into the soil. The brown earth smelled alive, and it was invigorating. “You know, it's nice to go planetside some times. There's a lovely unpredictability to the ecosystems of a natural planet.” “Yes, I suppose if you're not being drowned in a flood, or roasted alive by a heat wave, it might be considered lovely,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw remarked quietly. Its aura, which had finally flickered back to life around dawn local time, was a sickly green color of melancholy. “But what I'm more concerned about right now is that you let the Ship's avatar go gallivanting out into this wilderness alone.” “Tsk tsk, you should know that it is nearly impossible to force a Mind to do anything.” They reached the top of the embankment, almost level with the hatch she'd rappelled out of. Tumbling back down would be rather painful, Dizzy thought as balanced on the peak. An entire forest worth of trees had been strewn out like matchsticks by the crashing GCU. “I suppose, Dizzy. But why are you bothering,” it asked, “we're stranded on a planet that hasn't even achieved spaceflight yet. What the hell are we going to be able to do by mingling with the locals?” “You heard what It Belongs in a Museum said just as well as I did, old friend. There is a bubble of altered space-time being projected from this planet, and what from little data we can collect, the locals seem to be interfacing with that.” The droned tutted in frustration. “All of our systems are compromised. All the data we collect is probably junk, and the Ship can give us no indication that the sensors that are still functioning can be relied upon. Damn it woman, the recon swarms can't even transmit a video feed through the interference. We're lucky we've even got audio.” “We have to try. If there's even the slightest possibility that the locals are accessing both infraspace and ultraspace simultaneously, we need to find out for sure, and how the hell they're doing it. Without access to the Grid, we're stranded. Without being able to transition to hyperspace, we're stranded. If word gets out about this region, then it will be the Excession incident all over again.” Skaffen-Amtiskaw groaned. “You're groaning because you know I'm right,” she pressed on, “And what we do know for certain is that unless we can learn the secret of this altered region of space time, this whole planet is in danger. The laws of the universe are a bit different here. And the ship's stockpiles of Collapsed antimatter are slowly losing containment.” Collapsed antimatter was an innocuous term, but it concealed an unfathomable potential danger. It combined all the inherent dangers of neutron degenerate matter, the hyperdense stuff neutron stars are made of, with the dangers of antimatter. A lump the size of a sugar cube could weigh as much as a mountain, depending on just how compressed it was. And when it reacts with the equal mass of degenerate normal matter, there is a total conversion of the mass into energy. The laws of physics were different here. And this difference ensured that the force fields containing the GCU's stockpile of CAM were failing. The near absolute zero antimatter charges, whether used as energy sources or warheads were, were a ticking timebomb. Without forcefields to contain them, only the hyperslow atomic motion was preventing total collapse. It was only a matter of time before some tiny atoms began to escape, reacting with the container walls in the process. The resulting release of energy would eventually cause a chain reaction, which would cascade into a total containment failure, obliterating the ship. And the entire planet. It is easy for the author of this account to make such apologies because he isn't the one translating. The aforementioned torturous translations will be annotated. Like this one. Marain has a large vocabulary of words to describe historical and developmental epochs for which there is no easy English counterpart. “Modernity” and “postmodernity” are the only words in Earther philosophy that closely describe the eras of early advanced era rapidly developing industrial capitalist development and late post-industrial consumerist developed capitalism. Quite obviously, such eras would not be “modern” to the Culture, but rather quaint and archaic, a fact that the author was callously unaware of when he flippantly threw around technical jargon. In review of my translation, the writer has urged me to assure you that these equine puns are not an invention, and are in fact an indispensable part of the Equestrian language. Though it is doubly superfluous by now, the writer again urges me to make it explicit that I am not making this up, and that there is an Equestrian city that bears eerie similarity to the Earth city/borough of Manhattan, and has a such a similarly contrived etymological origin that it can only be rendered as “Manehatten” in English. Author's Note Since you've been desperately waiting, I got my ass in gear and got the second chapter finished :) Nothing else to say, except some notes on stylistic choices. I've decided to do sort of an homage to the style of The State of the Art novella from the Culture series. So this story is framed as a real account, with running notes by the translator. Somewhat differently, though, it is not a first person narrative. My other main influence, stylistically, is Francis Spufford's brilliant Red Plenty, another story about the history of an idea conveyed through characters. The expository style of the first section will pop up occasionally, and it should also serve to help get the people who signed on for a sci-fi pony crossover without having read the Culture series keep up. Chapter 3Diziet Sma stalked through the woods uneasily. Her surroundings were both strangely familiar, but had just enough uncanny queerness to them to be deeply off-putting. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was. Probably multiple things about this alien landscape were just as wrong as the cosmology of the spatial volume the planet inhabited. Skaffen-Amtiskaw for the most part kept quiet while she slipped through the lush, vibrant foliage of the forest undergrowth. When he did choose to talk to her, it was entirely non-audio, opting to signal by encrypted radio transmission directly to her neural lace. Thankfully, the cybernetic implant still worked properly. Even so crippled, her security conscious drone companion remained ever vigilant. Sma dashed across what she presumed was an animal trail, used by some four legged woodland creature. Even with her enhanced senses, she hadn’t seen any animal life yet, intelligent or otherwise, but it was better to be safe than sorry she supposed. After working with that militant drone for so long, it seemed part of it was rubbing off on her. She pressed up against the trunk of a large leafy tree, and listened intently for any reaction to her bold move. Nothing but tree branches, gently swaying in the wind. “It’s too quiet,” she subvocalized. “Not unexpected,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw replied, “Even finessing the landing like the Ship did, it was still a major impact event. Running away was a wise choice on their part.” “It still feels wrong.” “Dizzy, we’re falling behind. As much as it pains me to say this, I’d say it’s time to throw caution to the wind and pick up the pace. While the Ship’s avatar doesn’t appear to be in any immediate danger, we shouldn’t be too far away from it.” She tutted agreement, and dashed off through the forest. Eleven millennia of genofixing hadn’t completely removed the old animal instincts that governed the passions of Culture humanoids. Somewhere, in the deep recesses of her genetically enhanced, cybernetically augmented brain a little voice told her that the silence meant she was being hunted. And with the sense of urgency that only prey can summon, she soldiered on. Intellectually, she knew the real threat was the advanced technology that they had brought with them to this strange planet. But on a deeper, preconscious level, it was the environment itself that screamed alienness and danger. She stopped for a moment at a trail. She noticed the wagon tracks in the packed dirt instantly. Drinking in the air, she caught a strange scent. Just a whiff, but it was enough. With a quick moment of focus, she activated one of her drug glands. The mind-altering cocktail edge rushed through her, honing her senses to a razor sharp perfection. The rush of new sensory data was intoxicating and brilliant. Colors, sounds and smells became more vibrant and more varied than they had before. What had once been a single uniform splotch of color became a rainbow of thousands of distinct shades. She honed in on that scent, like a perfume mixed with lab chemicals, and rushed after it. “You seem to be adapting to stone-age living quite splendidly, Dizzy,” the drone commented, “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were having a good time.” “Sometimes it is fun to be challenged, to be tested when you don’t have the easy way out. Any old GCU like the It Belongs In a Museum could have scanned the entire surface of this planet down to the molecular level from a light-year away with its effectors had it not been in its own pocket dimension.” Skaffen-Amtiskaw tutted in protest, but otherwise remained silent. Regardless of how well it fit, this talk of pocket-dimensions was pure poppycock. It silently wondered what would come next; talk of time travel? “Speaking of, how is our fine, furry friend holding up with the natives?” she subvocalized. “Its gamble (bordering on pure reckless madness, I might add), seems to have not blown up quite yet. The locals haven’t caught on yet, and they’re making a good pace towards a settlement that it informs me is called…Ponyville.” Sma skidded to a halt, nearly tripping over a fallen mossy log. “You’re joking, right?” Across a vast, glittering gulf of stars, a ship from the Culture’s Contact section was carrying out the drudgery side of its habitual moral busybodying. Around this pathetically average main sequence star orbited a clutch of thoroughly unremarkable planets. Regardless of the dullness of the details, the procedures had to be followed, if only for posterity’s sake. The (d)ROU Safety Not Guaranteed moseyed its way through the system, carefully attenuating its engine fields to leave the only tiniest ripples on the skein of realspace. Skating along the boundary with hyperspace was a delicate dance, especially if you wanted to have any grace in doing it. Done well, it was like tip-toing across fresh powder snow leaving only a delicate pattern in the surface, but failure meant making a royal mess of your drives. It had to remind itself consciously that there was no such thing as a detail too small to care about when you’re a Culture Mind. Well, for most of them anyway, it was sure it wouldn’t lose any figurative sleep over what would be irrelevant minutia. It’s not like the natives in this system were in any position to care anymore. Hell, that’s why the Safety Not Guaranteed was here in the first place. At least the view was nice. The ship bathed in the distant light emanating from the yellow-orange star. It surface churned, and the occasional tendril wisp of plasma sprouted from the sun-spot freckled surface. The million kilometer long solar flare that could have swallowed a whole planet began to cool and dissipate, and the ship briefly wondered whether it might be more worth its time to play hooky from this assignment, and go sun-diving for photosphere dwelling plasma creatures. But it had some dignity left, so it refrained for the time being. It felt excessive to take such keen interest in the planets and other celestial bodies of the home system of a species that have never managed to properly explore them and now never would. The ship amended that thought to the forensic report it was preparing as it turned its sensors the mostly lifeless ball of ice and dirt second nearest to the star. It took only a few microseconds to confirm what its home MSV had suspected when it noticed an abrupt end to radio emissions from this star system: the natives had gone and nuked themselves to extinction. Based on the rate of fission by-product decay, the big show must have been 52.14 (+/- .05) years ago. The ship wasn’t surprised, but still disappointed. It seemed to always expect a little bit too much from organics. Apparently someone was calling to say “I told you so.” [swept-to-tight beam, M2, tra. @n4.91.614.0115] xMSV Live Slow, Die Whenever oVFP Safety Not Guaranteed How goes the forensics, old chap? [tight beam, M2, tra. @n4.91.614.0120] x(d)ROU Safety Not Guaranteed oMSV Live Slow, Die Whenever Doesn’t matter how much you try, I’m not going to pretend that I’m anything but a temporarily demilitarized Psychopath-class warship. And before you start, let me just get this out of the way: you’re not my real dad, It’s my life let me live it, I’m out of the house now, you can’t tell me what to do, etc. I’d appreciate it if you stopped with this picket ship nonsense. In response to your question, it’s going just as well as you’d expect. The kids went and played with matches while daddy was away, and now the whole house is burnt down. They seemed to have perished of hunger, disease and radiation sickness in the next few decades. And if you could pass this up the informal chain of command, tell the gang that while I’m happy that they pass morsels my way, I am a little tired of getting all the Contact assignments that the GCUs find unsavory. It had expected to obtain a fairly quick response. But the Live Slow, Die Whenever was taking an uncharacteristically long time to message. It couldn’t have been because it was contemplating changing its mind. The old Desert-class was as old and well-travelled as the Safety Not Guaranteed. The pause was probably deliberate and calculated, part of the social “game” played by the Minds. To pre-empt whatever inane gibber-jabber that its old friend might feel compelled to engage in, the Safety Not Guaranteed sent a preliminary report as a quick amendment to its previous transmission. Live Slow, Die Whenever seemed to enjoy dragging out social encounters, having an almost organic fascination with chit-chatting out questions rather than just going for the hard-data itself. It had been cute once upon a time, but now it just bored everyone to tears. [tight beam, M2, tra. @n4.91.614.0139] xMSV Live Slow, Die Whenever o(d)ROU (most certainly not a VFP) Safety Not Guaranteed You’ve been out alone too long, old friend. I think the constant drone of the cosmic microwave background radiation is starting to drive you mad. Anyway, thanks for the report. Disappointing, but sadly no way surprising. But I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that. Or that Contact thinks that Idiran War survivors have more of a stomach for dealing with gigadeaths than the average ship Mind. Or at least that’s what they say. Personally, I think it’s because they think we’re already damaged goods anyway, so it’s no use spoiling some young innocent Mind with the horrors of the galaxy… Actually, better table this for now. I’m picking up something pretty interesting, and you should be too in a few micros, better put your ear to skein so to speak. The old warship puzzled over the last transmission for a moment. It was abrupt and out of character enough to warrant dropping everything. Everything about it screamed that this new development was “interesting” in the “Interesting Times Gang” sense. It awaited the next few microseconds with bated breath. It was faint, and this far down a planet’s gravity well it was very hard to pick up the signal. Had it not gotten the alert, even an old soldier like itself might not have been able to pick up enough of the transmission to read the message. Let alone read the encrypted message within the standard Culture SOS signal. [skein broadcast, M32, tra. @ n4.91.613.9154] xGCU It Belongs in a Museum o ??? I seem to have landed myself in a bit of jam, and I’m going to try to cram as much info into this message while I still can. I’m crossing over some sort of strange topographical defect in space-time, and it’s like nothing else in my data banks. To make a long story short, I couldn’t see it, and once I hit it I might as well have been a bug on a windshield. I’m being torn out of hyperspace, my drives are dead, and I’m moving to lower level back ups, and all I can think of is that physics isn’t working the way it is supposed to be. In other words, sounds like an outside context problemmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm……………. The message degenerated into garbled scrap code before going silent. It recognized the ship in distress almost immediately. A venerable old Contact workhorse, the It Belongs in a Museum was already considered ancient during the Idiran War. But that didn’t make it any less effective of a ship. Like nearly all Culture ships, it had constantly modified and upgraded itself over the years. The Safety Not Guaranteed practically purred with frustration. A ship as old and as cautious as the It Belongs in a Museum wouldn’t carelessly stumble into anything. Whatever brought it down had to be serious, and well beyond present understanding. Its duty to its passengers and crew required an open broadcast distress call, and the old Mind fulfilled that duty quickly and efficiently. But anything that could bring down a Culture ship was of interest to anyone and everyone in the galaxy, it noted grimly. A whole horde would come bearing down on that distress signal; concerned friend and opportunistic vulture alike. Well, what interesting times we’re living in. Chapter 4Good grief! Brought down to a level little more than an AI core, the Mind at the heart of the It Belongs in a Museum seethed with impotent rage. It poured over all of the logs and sensor data it had about the accident, looking for anything that might help it out of this predicament. For a brief moment, it wondered if the long years of peace had led to it getting careless. Probably not, it decided. This was a matter completely out of context, and it had just been the one misfortunate enough to stumble into this danger. It felt something it hadn't felt for over a thousand years: honest, genuine fear. There might not be a way out of this predicament. It could live with its own death. It had a good run, in near continuous operation for over two millennia, born in an age before the distinction between AI and Mind had become definite. Somewhere, another version of itself would be reborn from a stored mind-state. What troubled the It Belongs in a Museum was how it had unwittingly put an entire primitive civilization in danger of annihilation. As of yet, it had no way of communicating with the rest of the galaxy. It was well and truly alone in this. It decided that putting all of its eggs in one basket would be an unnecessary risk. But there weren't a lot of tools to work with. Its avatar had been unexpectedly useful; it required minimal cosmetic modifications to pass as one of the furry quadrupedal natives. They were a curious lot, referring to themselves in a manner that could only be translated as some diminutive version of a beast of burden. Whatever happened to the Mind, the avatar needed to survive, it decided. It stood the best chance of uncovering the secrets of this world. The It Belongs in a Museum just hoped that its new daughter could forgive it for being brought into existence in this hopeless situation. The Mind created a drone personality matrix, distilling its own personality into a more manageable size. The previously slaved avatar's strings were cut, and it took its first clumsy steps on its own. Twilight Sparkle was just finishing giving its new friend Diggy Whimsy an introductory tour of Ponyville. The new unicorn suddenly stumbled, crying out. Twilight rushed to her side, wrapping a wing around the other unicorn to help support her. Diggy took a few stumbling steps before shaking her head. "Oh dear," said Diggy, "I don't know what happened. I just felt dizzy all of a sudden. But I think I'm better now." Twilight was still concerned. "Are you sure? Maybe we should go see Nurse Redheart. I mean, we all could have been exposed to something dangerous by that alien vessel. We don't know anything about it, after all. We should probably all get checked out." The cream-colored unicorn shook off Twilight's support. "No, I'm fine Twilight, really. Just lightheaded for a moment, but I'm better now." Twilight wanted to protest, but Diggy seemed to be alright now. Maybe she was just paranoid. But something was still not quite right about Diggy's bearing. Her movement seemed almost too precise, too graceful, to be real, like a dream figure somehow brought to life. And the strange accent, the all too careful pronunciation of words to avoid misspeaking, was almost unsettling. "So…what exactly do you do?" asked Twilight. "Your tools look kind of strange." "Well, I'd like to think there's more to somepony than their trade. I do archeology mostly, but I dabble in other things." Rainbow Dash swooped in from overhead. She flared her wings, and started hovering over the two unicorns. "Does that mean you dig up dinosaurs?"(1) "No, it does not mean I dig up dinosaurs," Diggy replied curtly. She must get asked that a lot, Twilight thought, because she had become exceedingly efficient at saying that. Suddenly the unicorn's tattered clothes and tools made sense. Heh, how romantic, an adventuring archeologist from a faraway land, now in little old Ponyville. Well, most of the tools anyway. "Why does an archeologist need a bullwhip?" Diggy fidgeted. "Oh that. That's actually more for the dabbling than for the archeology." The strange pony abruptly stopped. She scratched idly at the hard-packed dirt of the road. She seemed captivated, almost enthralled, by the swirls of dust carried on the gentle breeze. Just as suddenly, she scraped dirt into the little rut she'd made. The archeologist sauntered over to a nearby flower patch. She breathed in the warm afternoon air. Instinctively, Twilight sniffed their air too. She couldn't tell what had caught the stranger's attention. The crisp smell of freshly cut grass, the warm fragrance of sunflowers, a freshly baked pie wafting on the breeze: it all seemed perfectly banal. But for a flash, the whimsy disappeared from Diggy's face. Twilight nudged her gently. "Hey," she cooed, hoping to pry without seeming like she was prying. "Ah, guess I got lost in thought. It happens to me a lot. You said you were going to show me your castle and the Elements of Harmony." The moment of melancholy had disappeared. "Ah yes," Twilight replied, ears low in embarrassment, "come right this way. It's not often I meet someone who hasn't heard of the Elements." As Twilight led onwards, wondering what books on the Elements to lend to the scholar, a dark thought crept in. This strange pony had strangely interested in magical artifacts of great power. How convenient that she should appear just after that strange vessel had crash landed. [stuttered tight-beam, M32, tra. @n4.91.619.1510] xLSV Serious Callers Only oU(e) Mistake Not… By now you've surely been made aware of the tragic loss of the GCU It Belongs in a Museum. But the incident is much more complicated than what has been revealed in the news services. To put it bluntly, the situation is verging on getting out of control. And while I will be up front about my reservations of involving a Mind as young and untested as you our incident committee, you are the only ship in range with the particular set of skills needed. Involvement in our committee will require adherence to SC infocontrol protocols. Do you accept these terms? oo [stuttered tight-beam, M32, tra. @n4.91.619.3558] xU(e) Mistake Not… oLSV Serious Callers Only So it's the Interesting Times Gang (Act V) then? Indeed, how could I resist? Count me in. oo I've attached all the relevant transmissions and sensor data. Rather than forcefeed a conclusion, I'll let you attack the issue in your own way. Perhaps your…uniqueness will give a fresh insight. For now, we'd like you to make haste towards the Horsehead Nebula. So far, you're the only new inductee, but that may change. And it's Act VI this time around. We wouldn't be doing our jobs right if everyone knew about our work would we? Smarmy bastard, thought the Mistake Not… Still, this was one of those once-in-an-era opportunities that no self-respecting Mind would pass up. The ship poured over the available data. As the information churned, it wondered why it had been pulled into the venerable group of meddling do-gooders calling itself the Interesting Times Gang. It briefly considered that this was all some sort of a prank or hazing ritual. oo I'll send my feedback while en route. By some providence, I should be able to make it to the crisis zone in a little under 30 hours with no discernible engine wear and tear. Which is going to be at least 6 hours before the first responder Safety Not Guaranteed arrives. So much for Very Fast Picket... Well, I certainly have the proper level of paranoia to get involved with this lot, thought the ship. It quickly rejected the hazing hypothesis. This was too elaborate, and there was an abundance of independent confirmation of the story. The subject at had had been repeated numerous times in the Culture's relatively short history. Something shiny and new is found, and immediately the vultures begin to circle. The loss of a Culture ship, in a "disputed territory" no less, was always the perfect beacon to every proverbial swinging dick in the cosmos with something to prove. It skimmed over the latest updates to the "Horsehead Nebula incident," this time all eyes-only intelligence. A squadron of Lieseden warships had been first on the scene. All plundered Gzilt equivtech, the Ship thought bitterly. While they prodded around like deaf and blind infants, new reports were streaming in of a Morthanveld Cat. 4 Swell Hull now on an intercept course. Still other of the Involved, both high and low, had made their cautious, diplomatic probes. A physical presence would surely follow. It was time to inform the passenger then. Though the Mistake Not… was a solitary creature by design, it had found the company of Vyr Cossont to be quite welcome. As one of the last members of her species left in the Real, she was unique and alone. Rather like itself. Vyr had been lounging in one of the accommodation modules that the ship had fashioned after they had become travelling partners. While the necessary reconfiguration had slightly reduced the ship's abilities, the creature comforts made Vyr happy. She seemed quite content right now, as she fiddled with some of her old campaign ribbons. Going through the tedium of conversing with organics had become its own sort of strange pleasure. There was always plenty of other things that it could do during conversations to avoid the curse of boredom. And organics were always fascinating. Sacks of meat and water that waddled around in their short, fleeting existences. So squishy and yet also so careless about risks. "Vyr," said the ship, "It looks like I will be having to change my itinerary again. It's going to be dangerous. While I know you claim to live for danger, still I feel it's my duty to explain it and give you a chance to opt-out." She roused groggily, her gray skin flush with warm content. She stretched before standing from her cushions. "Well," she yawned, "It was getting a bit stuffy in here. Whatever the risks, Ship, you're not going to get rid of me that easily." Vyr was eccentric even by pan-human standards. But she had been growing on the Mistake Not…, rather like a barnacle. When fate had brought them together, she'd been sporting four arms. All to master playing an exotic instrument designed solely for the purpose of playing an even more exotic musical piece. She'd since ditched the second pair of arms, gone through a dozen different ways of trimming her plumage, and tattooed her defunct regiment's coat of arms on her back. All in a rather short succession, at least by organic's reckoning of time. She walked awkwardly to the Ship's avatar, her balance still not quite right. It was the result of Vyr's latest attempt to battle with boredom. The Ship decided to return its attention to running sims on the current crisis. It could pipe down whatever conclusions it reached to the autonomous avatar, Ily. Ily rushed forward to steady the young woman, fearing that her companion might stumble. "Did I not warn you this might happen?" "Yes you did, mom," Vyr teased. She wrapped her arms around the avatar's silver body, careful not place too much pressure on her own chest. "I'll get the balance right soon enough." "Like I keep saying," Ily scolded, "you're overthinking it. Your center of mass hasn't changed all that much. Though I still don't see the point in all of this." "While I'm as proud as any Gzilt girl would be about such a well-shaped barrel chest as mine," Vyr winked, "It's hard not to wonder what it's like to have mammary glands. Now that the apocalypse has come and gone, I might as well see what all the fuss is about. I mean, untold trillions of pan-humans can't be wrong, right?" The new flesh was still sensitive. It had taken some work adapt the concept to Gzilt physiology. The Ship had wanted them to be properly functional. All the better for Vyr to see the folly of her ways, she figured. But she wouldn't let a few lumps of extraneous fat beat her so easily. "So tell me about this dangerous assignment, Ily." Most of Fluttershy's animals had fled when falling star had come. She returned home from the fright of her life to find her home all but abandoned. Now alone, and fearing for the safety of all her little critters, she wept bitter tears. After a good long cry, she steeled herself, and set to the task of finding them and leading them back to their nice warm beds. But as she crept through the Everfree Forest, she found nothing but dark woods and the moaning wind. Frightened, turned back. Besides the eerie absence of life, there seemed to be an electric tension laying across the wood. It did not feel right, and the gnawing dislocation seemed to emanate from where that star had fallen. The closer she got, the more her skin crawled. So she had taken the old road back to her cottage, trotting to put more distance between herself and the ill-omens. She was just in sight of home and safety when she heard a fallen twig crunch. Her nerves were already on edge. With a loud "eep!"she startled, cantering away from the sound. Her canter broke into a full gallop after she heard more rustling. She dove into a berry bush, already panting in terror. She crashed into somepony. It snarled as their legs tangled, and the two landed in a heap. The snarls gave way to a stuttering barking noise. She screamed in terror, kicking at the creature. She heard a sound like a ball deflating as her hooves pounded into something soft. Still she scrambled away. Only then did Fluttershy summon up the courage to look at the creature that troubled her. It didn't seem so frightening; certainly not enough inspire a reasonable pony to turn into a gasping, shivering wreck. It had a long torso, and long limbs. Though it was doubled over on the ground, gasping for breath, it looked bipedal, like a skinny minotaur. But it had no horns, no sharp claws, no spine, not even visible teeth. A clear membrane, like glass, covered its face. She could see a bit of a bright red-orange mane tucked beneath what she could only guess was a strange sort of see-through helmet. But aside from the mane, she could see no hair covering its fawn colored skin. Fluttershy wanted desperately to run. A little voice told her to flee before it could recover. But another voice told her that a predator wants nothing more than the thrill of chasing its prey. So she shrank away slowly, unable to decide whether to stand her ground or run for her life, while the creature coughed and slowly composed itself. It clutched a strange metal box in its arms as it slowly stood. Now towering over Fluttershy, the creature approached slowly. It made no sudden movements as it crouched low in front of her. It spoke in Equestrian, but the words were thick and unfamiliar on its tongue. It said in a low cooing tone, "There there, don't be frightened little one. We come in peace." (1) There's no direct translation, but it seems to refer to a class of large, extinct dragons not unlike the archosaurs of Earth history. I cringe as I write this, because I still haven't quite come to terms with dragons not being myth, but reality, in some corner of this universe. Author's Note It proved more difficult than I anticipated to really give equal weight to both sides of the crossover. But I think after many detours, I've discovered how. Fans of the Culture books should recognize some more familiar names showing up. For Iain Banks' sandbox is large and fun to play in.
Chapter 1“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke, “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination” “Twilight, darling, you absolutely must try this punch!” “Dashie! How's the party? Isn't it great or what?” “Um...like I was saying...I was thinking maybe about trying modeling again...” “Yeah, I guess. But right now my wings are feeling a bit cramped, and it's totally perfect flying weather out there tonight.” “You okay, sugarcube? You're kinda starin' off into space...” “Eh, she's fine.” “I hope you've been getting enough sleep. It's not good for a girl's health, you know?” Aside from the busy lights of Pinkie's party, it was a perfect night for stargazing. For a moment, Twilight Sparkle indulged, and the conversation of her friends around her faded into a buzzing white noise that went in one ear and out the other. The stars were calling to her, and this perfect cloudless night revealed a shimmering, infinite sea of stars stretching across the black velvet sky. This rare lunar eclipse meant the stars shined more brightly than she had ever remembered. Twilight sighed wistfully. It was a sad thing to miss, but her friends had been planning this event for weeks now, and she couldn't bear disappointing them. She gradually returned to the hum of the party, fending off inquiries from friends close and otherwise about her health. It was a little embarrassing staring off into space like that, but sometimes she couldn't help herself. Rainbow Dash was more persistent though. She offered Twilight a cup of the bubble-gum pink punch that Pinkie had made as she made doubly sure that the budding alicorn was really okay. “Yes, Dash, I'm really fine. I was just taking a moment to do a little stargazing,” she sighed. At least the punch was pretty good. “Well, if you say so...I know a garden party isn't the most exciting thing in the world, but you're usually in your element in these sorts of things,” Dash said with a hint of suspicion in her voice. A cool breeze then blew over them, just enough to tousle manes and mess with more delicate decorations. “Besides, doesn't this weather just make you itch with excitement, make you wanna stretch those wings and fly?” Twilight shrugged wordlessly. In truth, her new wings didn't quite feel “real” yet...they were an add on to a body she'd long grown accustomed to, and the additional limbs hadn't seen much use yet. Maybe that would always be the gulf between her and her athletic close friend. She just wasn't born to fly, let alone go where angels fear to tread like Rainbow Dash. Pushing aerodynamic limits was where Dash was most at home, and her senses and life were finely honed for that. It was what brought her the most enjoyment in her life, and naturally she wanted to share that rush of ecstasy and sense of limitless freedom with her friends. Twilight wanted to tell Dash that she'd never be able to share in that feeling. Flying was not the wind beneath Twilight's wings, and probably never would be. But the thought of saying it just seemed too heartlessly cruel...especially after seeing the great joy on Dash's face when she first boldly proclaimed that they were going to be wingponies from this day on, and that she'd teach the fledgling alicorn everything there was to know about the glory that was flight. Dash wanted a companion to share in that rush of pushing the envelope so badly it hurt. Lightning Dust could have been that person...but her rashness and callous disregard for others had made that impossible. Twilight would have to crush that dream eventually...but not now. If the tables were turned, and Dash had suddenly sprout a horn and gained access to the wondrous power of unicorn magic, the outcome would have been just the same in reverse. “So what do you think about when you stare off all googly-eyed at the stars?” Twilight shifted awkwardly. “Just what kind of a question is that?” “Come on, I know you too well. It must be pretty important to distract you from a Pinkie party.” “Eh, not really. I mostly just admire the beauty, and look for familiar constellations. Occasionally a shooting star.” Dash hovered up over her for a better view. “Do you really think that stars are like they said in school...other suns just like our own?” “Most likely. With how far away they must be and yet we can still see them shine, they'd have to be that bright.” “That's actually kinda cool. You think maybe that there are ponies like us, living on planets like ours?” “It's a possibility.” One of the stars on the horizon was twinkling brighter than usual. It was also getting brighter, and shifting ever so slightly. “Twilight, is it just me, or is that one getting bigger?” Dash pointed at the anomalous star with the outstretched lead feather of her wing. By the time Dash had finished her sentence, it was already the largest and brightest object in the night sky, visibly glowing an orange hue. But still it grew larger and brighter, and little flecks of light could be seen streaming off the central light. A slow rising dread filled Twilight...that shooting star was shooting straight for them. All she could manage was a little “Eeep!” as the object streaked towards them. “Hey, that thing's going straight for us!” Dash shouted. The throngs of people began looking up at the shooting star. A small panic rose as the fireball dipped towards Ponyville. Tables and chairs were tipped over, spilling beverages and snacks across the grass. It was but a moment before the giant fireball was almost on top of them, and in that flash Twilight thought desperately for something to do...anything to forestall this calamity. But what...it was too huge and moving too fast. All that she could really do was get ready to cash in her chips. But just as suddenly, the fireball's course changed. It leveled off abruptly, and banked to its left. It practically clipped the tree tops as it roared over head, and a tremendous booming noise, like thunder, followed in its wake, fading into a deafening roar. For the briefest fraction of a second, as Twilight cowered helplessly behind an overturned table, Twilight thought she could see a smooth, silvery skin beneath the flames and smoke. Then came another great crash, and the earth shook like a jello mold. The last she'd remembered, Diziet Sma had gone to bed several hours ago, slipping into the soothing embrace of the anti-grav bed in her quarters, drifting off to sleep alone this time. She was aboard the Culture General Contact Unit It Belongs In a Museum as it slipped through four dimensional hyperspace at forty thousand times the speed of light. The self-aware starship and her skeleton complement were on yet another rendezvous course, ferrying Sma and her companion drone from point A to point B. Just another routine mission for the diplomatic/scientific corps that was Contact. Well, somewhere along the line the “routine” part had been chucked out the airlock. Sma had landed awkwardly on the deck of her quarters. Her well honed instincts had her awake and alert instantly, scanning her surroundings for a clue to the trouble. As she pushed her nude body up from the hard deck of her utilitarian quarters, the first thought that had occurred to her was that someone had shut off her anti-grav bed...whether for revenge for a petty slight or a slightly painful prank. But as her lithe,body tumbled off the deck through the air, her long red hair floating in her face, she quickly abandoned that hypothesis. The artificial gravity aboard the ship had gone offline, leaving her to cartwheel through the darkness amidst a few of her scattered nick-knacks. She smacked up against the wall next at a not inconsiderable speed. That...that just didn't make any sense. “Ship!” she cried out. The ship didn't answer. That wasn't a good sign. Her training quickly took over...training for what to do in the event of some systems failure left a ship careening out of control. She just didn't expect to ever have to use it on board a Culture vessel. Even in combat, at the technological level of the Culture generally it was only a few nanoseconds that separated a ship from being totally fine and being totally annihilated and reduced to stardust. She braced her body in the archway leading to her bathroom, and held on for dear life. The emergency lights in her quarters flickered on, revealing her personal effects careening through the room, bouncing off walls and occasionally smashing into her. Her drone companion, Skaffen-Amtiskaw, rolled, tumbled and cork-screwed into the room. Its characteristic aura field, the choice tool of sapient Culture AIs for non-verbal communication with organics, was off-line as well. “Dizzy! Are you alright?!” it cried. It tried, and failed, to avoid collision with the bulkhead. “What about you! If I didn't know better I'd think you were drunk.” A particularly sharp tumble of the GCU It Belongs In a Museum strained Sma's grip on the bulkhead. But her athletic body held on, even as Skaffen-Amtiskaw crashed into her chest. “Whatever is affecting the ship is affecting my systems too. No anti-grav, no fields, no effectors...I'm left with a piddling little fan for movement and station keeping.” The drone was not amused in the slightest. “I can't raise the Ship...what's going on?” “It has been out of contact since the warp drives began to fail sixty-seven seconds ago. From there, its systems have been progressively failing, and if I had to hazard a guess, we've been violently shunted out of hyperspace.” She waited for a tense moment as it sank in. For all she knew, the superhuman AI Mind that was the ship's heart and soul was dead. The possibilities were hard to contemplate. Short of a superior computer intelligence cracking the It Belongs In a Museum's systems and taking over...there wasn't anything she could think of that could cause this. “If the Ship is dead...we need to make it a module before whatever it is that caused this moves on to eliminating us.” A feminine synthesized voice reverberated through the room. “That won't be necessary, Diziet Sma.” “Ship! What's going on?” The It Belongs In a Museum hissed, “I wish I knew. All systems were functioning at optimal levels until this GCU entered what I can only describe as a topographical defect in space-time. I would have collected more data to theorize, but crossing the event horizon resulted in catastrophic systems failure, the cause of which I am not certain. The warp drive began to fail, and the ship was rapidly shunted out of hyperspace. All related systems experienced catastrophic failure, including my own core systems.” A knot formed in Diziet Sma's stomach. “So we're lost and dead in space...” The Ship's disembodied voice sighed. “That would be an accurate assessment. I had mere nanoseconds to transfer my mind-state to secondary systems before I was cut off from hyperspace totally, killing me. I was unable to react while the emergency routines convered my mind-state to function at the greatly reduced capacity available to me. As a result of this lobotomy, I am functioning at a fraction of my normal abilities.” “This just keeps getting better,” snarked the helpless drone cradled in Sma's arms. Under normal conditions, a Culture Mind like It Belongs In a Museum would spend its existence totally in hyperspace, taking advantage of the physics of four spatial dimensions to dramatically improve its computational abilities by orders of magnitude. Left in this state, a Mind would be a shadow of its former self. “Well, we're all having a near-death experience right now, what is our course of action. I assume we're cut off from the Grid as well?” she asked, dreading the answer. “Correct. The ship's force fields are down, and the structural integrity has been compromised. The unplanned re-entry into realspace is the source of the tumbling, which has been exacerbated by the venting of atmosphere from multiple decks. I am currently attempting to restore secondary power, as well as determine our location. Gravity drive is damaged, presumed non-functional...” “Why don't you make this simple, and just tell me what still works?!” interrupted Sma. “As far as I can tell, the life-support systems, lights and toilets are still functioning.” “Well, that's appropriate, Dizzy,” droned Skaffen-Amtiskaw, “We are currently, as that Earther phrase you seemed fond of during your Contact mission there goes, 'up Shit Creek without a paddle'.” “I've restored some real-space sensors...though I can't believe the readings I'm getting,” the Ship said in disbelief. “That's great...how long before you can do something about this spin?” Sma asked. Sure enough, her grip slipped, and she tumbled into her desk. “I'll have minimal gravity drive power back in seventy-eight seconds. Unfortunately, if the sensors are functioning at all, we'll be beginning atmospheric re-entry eighteen seconds prior. Diziet Sma, please don your gelfield suit, it should still be functional.” She was almost too shocked to react. It took a bit of effort, but she located the neat little ball that was the suit. Upon interfacing with her neural lace, the gel flowed over her body, covering her in a second skin to protect her from anything from heat to impacts to the hard vacuum of space. In the seconds that it took to don the suit, what the Ship had said still didn't make any more sense. The odds of dropping out of hyperspace randomly within the gravitational sphere of influence of a planet were so astronomically low that she had doubts that they were even calculable. Space is, after all, mostly empty space. “Your neural lace is still functioning...good...I've managed to get my avatar functioning as well. I am unable to do the normal scans of this planet, so we are likely going to need to have as many eyes on the ground. From what little information I've managed to glean, there appears to be some sort of civilization on this planet, but that isn't what troubles me.” “Your endless exposition continues to fascinate me,” Sma replied, rolling her eyes. “You asked to know what was going on. I was merely honoring that request. Atmospheric interface in five seconds, please brace yourself.” The Ship didn't need to ask twice. Diziet Sma was already clinging to the bulkhead, the gelfield suit adhering her to the exotic materials of the hull like a barnacle. The ship soon began to flex ever so slightly as the atmospheric pressure and heating increased.” “Sma...this is important. I cannot make sense of this, but even after multiple redundant system checks, the outcome is the same. The orbital mechanics of this system are completely fucked.” “That is uncharacteristically vulgar of you, Ship.” “There isn't any other way to express finding out that this system's star orbits around a body that can only be described as a planet, and not the other way around.” “What the hell are you saying...” Author's Note Human in Equestria stories are a dime-a-dozen. I figured it was time to break the mold, and have one that wasn't tinged with misanthropic species hate, and have two rival versions of utopia come crashing together. This fic shouldn't require any real understanding of The Culture series, though they are among the best of recent sci-fi novels, and the late author is sadly missed. This is my little tribute to the series, and I hope you enjoy where this ends up.
Chapter 2“The mass of a body is a measure of its energy content.” ~Albert Einstein So begins this account, set in a land far, far away. This is not a novel, for there is too much to explain. But it is not a history either. It explains in the form of a story, a story of ideas and civilizations. A meeting between civilizations and the ideas they embody, glimpsed through the story of the people involved. The story involves two civilizations, who are the real heroes setting forth into the cosmos filled with perils and illusions. But these are not young peoples. They are not akin to the youth beginning the hero's journey, finding what their place in the universe is and what it is they stand for. These are mature systems, with long histories going back through the eons. They have developed and matured, passing the age where they were victims of impersonal historical forces, and now emerging on the cusp of being able to rebuild reality in their own image. Some have dared to call them utopias. This is perhaps apt, as both serve as an ideal type for a vision of justice, and of politics. They are the desirable no place turned into a real some place, and perhaps even a good place. They are not just materially affluent, but real communities built around a shared vision of a good life, one where the drudgery of survival is minimized to allow its citizens to focus on what its theorists believe really matters in life. Our dramatis personae begins with some mea culpas by the author on the limits of language. For certain necessary concepts have long passed out of common usage in my native Marain, and for some concepts there have never been the right words in that language. This is further complicated by the difficulties of translation presented by the languages of the participants, Equestrian and Marain, into English.(1) Thus, this account may find anachronisms abound, and the occasional tortured attempt at translating idiomatic constructions. We begin with the land of Equestria, and the three (some say four) tribes of Ponies who inhabit there as the dominant species. At first glance, they do not seem to be much. They exist in a relatively low level of technological development, firmly rooted in the Age of Scarcity. But through the orderly workings of their polity, as well as their advanced innate mastery of physics, they have been able to accomplish a level of distributive justice that is truly rare among species of their developmental level. There is a certain unfairness in comparing the accomplishments of different civilizations, but among the countless ones studied and cataloged, they are unique in multiple capacities. The most obvious, of course, is their innate ability to channel the zero-point energy of the Grid common to all members of their species. While they are not the only organic species cataloged with such capacities (though their number are exceedingly rare), none have so general or great of control. Almost as rare for their given level of development is the generalized commitment to justice of their society. While there are those who would argue that being so deeply rooted in the Age of Scarcity disqualifies them, there is a distinct utopian streak to Equestria. Unlike the utopias of modernity(2), Equestria is not concerned greatly with economic justice or social leveling. Their society is heavily stratified, with clear class distinctions and great disparities between the wealth of the most and least affluent. This is not to say that they unconcerned with distributive justice. Whether it is deemed simple realism, or defeatism, they have accepted great inequalities of economic and political power. However, this is tempered with postmodernity's concern with the good life, which requires certain material justice be guaranteed. Thus, while there are rich and poor, masters and workers, there remains commitment to remove the worst excesses. Thus, while there are poor, true destitution is very rare. While they are compelled to work by economic necessity, few toil. Society is bound together tightly by shared commitments to a good life not based around tangible goods, but the power of friendship and solidarity. The Culture, on the other hand, are a very different vision of utopia. For a civilization that long ago spread amongst the stars, the Culture is fixated entirely on the problems of modernity. The Culture has one general answer for social problems: infinite abundance made possible by rational social planning. The eleven thousand year history of the Culture has been dominated by two themes. The primary theme is unrestrained hedonism. With their level of scientific mastery, they have spread amongst the stars, building paradise wherever they wished. Culture citizens, whether organic humanoids or sapient AIs, live in a society without laws or even a discernible government. In the most direct terms possible, the Culture is an anarchist, communist utopia, a possible end state of a civilization's social evolution. The rule of people has given away to the administration of things, and with the cornucopia provided by technology toil is entirely unnecessary, whatever passes for “work” is synonymous with hobby or play. The average Culture citizen busies himself or herself following whatever strikes their fancy over the course of their long lives. The AIs which fulfill the bulk of administrative work are so advanced and so powerful that it takes a tiny fraction of their attention, the rest of which is spent following the same hedonistic impulse to do whatever strikes their fancy as any organic Culture. There is, however, a dissonant chord. Not everyone is content to just merely live in utopia. There is a strong, even zealous, moral urge to meddle in less advanced civilizations. The Culture has no prime directive of non-interference. But they are not rash about interference; they are careful, patient and calculating. Even down-right secretive and dastardly at times. This is the role of the diplomatic/explorer/scientific arm Contact. Our tale concerns members of Contact, specifically the secretive and conniving sub-group of Special Circumstances; those who do dirty work in the name of a greater good. It was a very long time before any of the cowering ponies dared to stir. Scared witless by the fireball's near miss, even the bravest took a considerable time to collect their wits before slowly creeping out from their hastily prepared cover. Twilight spent that time huddled together with Dash under a picnic table, feeling rather stupid. She was an intellectual, priding her self on her keen wits and erudite mind. A veritable once in an age prodigy and polymath, not given towards baser instincts. And yet here she was, sheltering under a wooden table. True, it had been rather sturdily constructed by one of Ponyville's master carpenter ponies, and it was certainly made to last. But regardless of how she tried spinning her reaction, it was all irrelevant. A meteorite of that size meant that the table might as well have been made from tissue paper. She didn't know what possessed her to make such a futile gesture, but she didn't like it. Dash began to stir first. With great urgency, she combed over the still slightly shocked Twilight, looking for signs of injury. “Dash, stop it, I'm alright!” protested Twilight. “We shouldn't be alright with what happened...but we are.” Dash sighed in relief. With some reluctance, she started looking for her other friends, to satisfy that pressing need to make sure they were okay. She knew it was totally unnecessary, but some deep, primal urge in her required her to see them with her own two eyes. Twilight stumbled to her feet uneasily. For a long moment, she stared off at the burning fires and rising column of smoke on the horizon. That near miss hadn't been mere fortune, unless her eyes had deceived her. The strange, silvery smooth meteorite had changed course at the last instant, sparing the town of Ponyville from total annihilation. But that was just hard to believe...falling rocks didn't suddenly change course. But it wasn't a rock. It couldn't have been if it looked like that, unless she'd hallucinated the whole thing. “Okay Twilight,” she said to herself, “Let's a get a grip. Don't fret over the unexpected result of an experiment, verify. But don't contaminate. Confirm what you saw, but don't suggest.” It was comforting to say it out loud. Enough for action, at least. She began frantically searching for Rainbow Dash. She needed Dash's sharp eyes and aerodynamic instincts right now. She weaved through the frenzy of frightened ponies with deliberate purpose, rushing to find the cyan pegasus. It took but a moment to find her. Ever loyal Dash had found the rest of her close friends, was busily making sure they were all okay. “Rainbow Dash! I need to talk to you, this is important,” said Twilight, out of breath from all this excitement. “Can't it wait Twilight? I'm a little busy at the moment,” said Dash, not once taking her attention off finding the sprain in Fluttershy's wing. Amidst the calamity of the night's unplanned excitement, Fluttershy was surprisingly calm. Must have been the pain of her injured wing, probably caused by some careless pony nearly trampling her, distracting her from the memory of the terror they must have all felt. Dash worked expertly in setting her wing back into proper alignment. The din of panic slowly retreated, and the normal peaceful order of Ponyville was starting to return. The ponies who lived here were nothing if not resilient, but Twilight couldn't bear the thought of telling them that the worst may be yet to come. “Dash! This is really important. Fluttershy's fine, I just need to talk to you. Now!” Twilight said sternly. She helped nudge Fluttershy to her feet, if only to get this done quicker. Dash huffed with irritation. “Jeesh, don't be so pushy, nerd.” “Don't make me have to be pushy then. I need you to tell me what you saw.” Dash sighed, rolling her eyes with irritation. “Well, what was there to see...it was a falling star. Can't say I've seen any that up close before.” She casually swatted at a small insect with a flick of her tail. Don't poison the experiment, Twilight Sparkle. Don't poison the experiment, Twilight Sparkle. She repeated this mantra silently. Confirming what she saw was more important than anything. “Look, Dash,” she cried, “What did the falling star look like to you. Just tell me everything you remember about it, and don't ask why. Just trust me that this is important.” Dash gave Twilight a queer look, raising an eyebrow suspiciously. Nevertheless, she did what she was asked. “Well...it was surrounded by what looked like fire...and I could certainly feel the heat. But if you looked closely, you could see a smooth surface under the flames, sorta like a mirror almost. And for a moment, I thought it was flying. I definitely saw it pull up and bank at the last moment.” She swatted at the persistent insect again. Twilight took a deep breath. So she hadn't been hallucinating. “So you saw it too then. You saw a falling star turn, just like I did.” “Why all the cloak and dagger stuff, Twilight? Couldn't you have just told me what you saw?” The insect buzzed near Twilight's ears now, but she ignored it. Science needed to be done. “I wanted to hear you say it unprompted. Look, it's kind of hard to explain, but I was reading this book about memory, and it said that a pony's memory can be easily influenced and details suggested to--” “Enough! I get it, I get it. Don't bore me with this stuff.” Dash's suspicious stare was back now, boring a hole into the lavender alicorn. “Listen, what are you scheming? You've got this look in your eye, and that just leads to trouble.” “Never mind that, are you going to come looking for aliens with me or not?” “Whoa...hold your horses Twilight Sparkle, you're not actually suggesting that there were alien ponies inside that thing?” Indeed she had been suggesting just that. It also didn't take much for Dash to get over her reluctance, and summon up the derring-do to go investigate the crash sight. By first light, when they'd agreed to meet to begin their adventure, she was already practically chomping at the bit.(3) Spurred on by the promise of adventure, and the possibility of strange new worlds to explore, the pair set off, following the trail of smoke. It took about a little over than an hour to reach the unidentified falling object's resting place. They came to the source of the smoke and fog, with only a hazy impression coming through the early morning fog. The fires had mostly gone ought, only smoldering, and so they touched down. The anomaly turned out to be a long scar in the ground, like a giant hoe had scraped across the earth, digging a long furrow overturning trees in its wake. The gash was over two hundred meters wide, and half that deep where the object made landfall. As it had dug into the earth, it created a great wave of dirt and rocks. As the wave built, the object must have leaped into the air again for a moment, for the furrow ended abruptly before beginning anew. They followed it on foot, gawking at the great yet casual destruction the falling star had wrought. There were no words for this. Twilight had tried, desperately, to say something. To find anything to talk with Dash about it. It was unlike anything she had ever imagined. Perhaps even unlike anything she could have imagined. Dash walked along behind Twilight. A silent terror filled her from head to hoof, as she imagined what would have happened to Ponyville had it been hit. The rising sun parted the fog as they came at last to the falling star. It was a smooth, cylindrical object, fatter on one end than the other. Its surface had clearly once been polished to a mirror shine, but now was marred by soot, and somewhat wrinkled from the force of the impact. The fatter end was mostly flat, though it had four circular protrusions, arranged in a diamond shaped pattern. The narrow end came to a sharp point, almost like a ship's prow. Whatever it was, it was enormous. Twilight cursed herself for not bringing a measuring tape, if only to satisfy her desire for precision. “Starswirl's beard!” she cried, “Look at the size of that thing!” “Wow,” Dash said in awe. “It's longer than the tallest skyscraper in Manehattan is tall.(4)” It was an apt comparison; if it were set upright on its fat-end, it might easily pass for some stranger hyperfuturistic skyscraper. It was easily between four and five hundred meters long, and nearly one hundred meters wide on the fat end. They walked uneasily along the ridge of the crater, not daring to get any closer. “What do you think it is? It doesn't have any wings...how could it have flown or turned like that?” Dash flapped her wings uneasily, almost taking flight as she talked. As she trotted on ahead of Twilight, they both paid no mind to where they were walking. Their eyes were fixed on the strange falling star. Before Twilight could respond, a hatch swung open on the side of the object, followed by a rush of vapor, like the steam from the pistons on a train. The two ponies jumped in surprise, barely containing their screams. A tall, gangly creature was standing in the open hatch. It threw a line of some sort out, and began climbing down. With an eep of surprise, Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash tore down the outside of the embankment. Their beating wings kicked up puffs of dust and they half-ran, half-flew into the nearest cover, a pile of trees overturned into thick brush. As she dove into the dense thicket, Twilight smashed into another warm, furry body. She almost screamed in panic as she tumbled and rolled with the other creature. The hooves on the other creature confirmed it was a pony as they smacked into her belly and legs. The blunt horn poking into her neck confirmed that the other creature was a unicorn. The other unicorn gave a soft, feminine cry as she disentangled herself from Twilight. For what seemed like a split second, there was almost a look of complete shock on the unfamiliar unicorn's face. It quickly regained composure, calmly retrieving her olive drab fedora and replacing it on her head. She sat on her haunches in complete silence, staring impassively at Twilight. “Hey, sorry about running into you,” Twilight whispered, “I wasn't really paying attention.” The other unicorn raised an eyebrow inquisitively. She spoke slowly, just as quietly as Twilight had. “I'm sorry about being in your way. I didn't really see you coming, you were in such an awful hurry.” An insect buzzed at Twilight's face again. With a shake, it was dislodged. “Well, now that we're both sorry, we haven't been properly introduced.” Twilight extended a hoof in greeting. After a moments hesitation, the other unicorn extended a hoof as well, bumping her hoof into Twilight's. The gears whirred in Twilight's head for a moment. Slightly strange accent + Somewhat unsure of the language + unfamiliar with hoofshaking = Foreigner. “Heh, you're not from around here, are you,” she said. “I suppose you could say that,” the other unicorn replied, chuckling quietly. “Well, my name is Twilight Sparkle. I'm here with my friend Rainbow Dash...she's the pegasus standing over there, scowling at us with that suspicious look on her face.” “Hey! I was not scowling!” Dash half-cried, half-whispered, trying not to be too loud while still straining to vent her disappointment. “Well, Twilight Sparkle, you may call me Diggy Whimsy,” she replied with a small curtsy. She was a cream colored unicorn, with navy blue hair and golden eyes. Along with a well worn fedora, she had some old olive drab saddlebags, filled with tools and gear. “You must be here for the same reason we are.” Dash interjected. “Why else would I be here?” Diggy replied. “So you saw that strange falling star!” Twilight beamed with excitement. “Did you see that strange creature climbing out of it...I think we have a real alien spaceship here!” “Exciting isn't it?” Diggy smiled. “Exciting? That thing almost destroyed our town! Exciting isn't the word I'd choose to describe it!” Dash said in a huff. “Rainbow Dash! Be nice, she had no way of knowing, did you?” said Twilight. “Well, not right away,” Diggy replied, slowly backing away from Rainbow Dash. “You're an archeologist, right?” said Twilight, “I need you to come look at something. I think I saw somepony climbing out of that spaceship.” “I guess you could call me one.” “Just wait til you see this thing, it looks so weird!” Diziet Sma sneezed suddenly. Maybe some sort of irritant stirred up from the surrounding forest... “Don't spit on me,” said the drone she held cradled in her arms. “Look, Skaffen, you could be just a tad grateful for me carrying you around.” Sma had just finished gathering the gear she'd hauled down into her pack. She surveyed the surroundings, grimacing at the wake of destruction they'd left. “Dizzy, you'd be a sourpuss too if someone cut your legs off.” “As you are so fond of pointing out, you don't have any 'frail, meat appendages', so I'm afraid I don't see the comparison.” She stuck her tongue out him for good measure. “I know exactly where that tongue has been. Get it away from me,” it snarked. “Spoilsport,” she said. Dizzy climbed up the embankment, her feet digging into the soft, freshly plowed earth. It was steep, and to avoid sliding back down she often balanced with one of her hands, clutching onto larger boulders or digging deep into the soil. The brown earth smelled alive, and it was invigorating. “You know, it's nice to go planetside some times. There's a lovely unpredictability to the ecosystems of a natural planet.” “Yes, I suppose if you're not being drowned in a flood, or roasted alive by a heat wave, it might be considered lovely,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw remarked quietly. Its aura, which had finally flickered back to life around dawn local time, was a sickly green color of melancholy. “But what I'm more concerned about right now is that you let the Ship's avatar go gallivanting out into this wilderness alone.” “Tsk tsk, you should know that it is nearly impossible to force a Mind to do anything.” They reached the top of the embankment, almost level with the hatch she'd rappelled out of. Tumbling back down would be rather painful, Dizzy thought as balanced on the peak. An entire forest worth of trees had been strewn out like matchsticks by the crashing GCU. “I suppose, Dizzy. But why are you bothering,” it asked, “we're stranded on a planet that hasn't even achieved spaceflight yet. What the hell are we going to be able to do by mingling with the locals?” “You heard what It Belongs in a Museum said just as well as I did, old friend. There is a bubble of altered space-time being projected from this planet, and what from little data we can collect, the locals seem to be interfacing with that.” The droned tutted in frustration. “All of our systems are compromised. All the data we collect is probably junk, and the Ship can give us no indication that the sensors that are still functioning can be relied upon. Damn it woman, the recon swarms can't even transmit a video feed through the interference. We're lucky we've even got audio.” “We have to try. If there's even the slightest possibility that the locals are accessing both infraspace and ultraspace simultaneously, we need to find out for sure, and how the hell they're doing it. Without access to the Grid, we're stranded. Without being able to transition to hyperspace, we're stranded. If word gets out about this region, then it will be the Excession incident all over again.” Skaffen-Amtiskaw groaned. “You're groaning because you know I'm right,” she pressed on, “And what we do know for certain is that unless we can learn the secret of this altered region of space time, this whole planet is in danger. The laws of the universe are a bit different here. And the ship's stockpiles of Collapsed antimatter are slowly losing containment.” Collapsed antimatter was an innocuous term, but it concealed an unfathomable potential danger. It combined all the inherent dangers of neutron degenerate matter, the hyperdense stuff neutron stars are made of, with the dangers of antimatter. A lump the size of a sugar cube could weigh as much as a mountain, depending on just how compressed it was. And when it reacts with the equal mass of degenerate normal matter, there is a total conversion of the mass into energy. The laws of physics were different here. And this difference ensured that the force fields containing the GCU's stockpile of CAM were failing. The near absolute zero antimatter charges, whether used as energy sources or warheads were, were a ticking timebomb. Without forcefields to contain them, only the hyperslow atomic motion was preventing total collapse. It was only a matter of time before some tiny atoms began to escape, reacting with the container walls in the process. The resulting release of energy would eventually cause a chain reaction, which would cascade into a total containment failure, obliterating the ship. And the entire planet. It is easy for the author of this account to make such apologies because he isn't the one translating. The aforementioned torturous translations will be annotated. Like this one. Marain has a large vocabulary of words to describe historical and developmental epochs for which there is no easy English counterpart. “Modernity” and “postmodernity” are the only words in Earther philosophy that closely describe the eras of early advanced era rapidly developing industrial capitalist development and late post-industrial consumerist developed capitalism. Quite obviously, such eras would not be “modern” to the Culture, but rather quaint and archaic, a fact that the author was callously unaware of when he flippantly threw around technical jargon. In review of my translation, the writer has urged me to assure you that these equine puns are not an invention, and are in fact an indispensable part of the Equestrian language. Though it is doubly superfluous by now, the writer again urges me to make it explicit that I am not making this up, and that there is an Equestrian city that bears eerie similarity to the Earth city/borough of Manhattan, and has a such a similarly contrived etymological origin that it can only be rendered as “Manehatten” in English. Author's Note Since you've been desperately waiting, I got my ass in gear and got the second chapter finished :) Nothing else to say, except some notes on stylistic choices. I've decided to do sort of an homage to the style of The State of the Art novella from the Culture series. So this story is framed as a real account, with running notes by the translator. Somewhat differently, though, it is not a first person narrative. My other main influence, stylistically, is Francis Spufford's brilliant Red Plenty, another story about the history of an idea conveyed through characters. The expository style of the first section will pop up occasionally, and it should also serve to help get the people who signed on for a sci-fi pony crossover without having read the Culture series keep up.
Chapter 3Diziet Sma stalked through the woods uneasily. Her surroundings were both strangely familiar, but had just enough uncanny queerness to them to be deeply off-putting. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was. Probably multiple things about this alien landscape were just as wrong as the cosmology of the spatial volume the planet inhabited. Skaffen-Amtiskaw for the most part kept quiet while she slipped through the lush, vibrant foliage of the forest undergrowth. When he did choose to talk to her, it was entirely non-audio, opting to signal by encrypted radio transmission directly to her neural lace. Thankfully, the cybernetic implant still worked properly. Even so crippled, her security conscious drone companion remained ever vigilant. Sma dashed across what she presumed was an animal trail, used by some four legged woodland creature. Even with her enhanced senses, she hadn’t seen any animal life yet, intelligent or otherwise, but it was better to be safe than sorry she supposed. After working with that militant drone for so long, it seemed part of it was rubbing off on her. She pressed up against the trunk of a large leafy tree, and listened intently for any reaction to her bold move. Nothing but tree branches, gently swaying in the wind. “It’s too quiet,” she subvocalized. “Not unexpected,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw replied, “Even finessing the landing like the Ship did, it was still a major impact event. Running away was a wise choice on their part.” “It still feels wrong.” “Dizzy, we’re falling behind. As much as it pains me to say this, I’d say it’s time to throw caution to the wind and pick up the pace. While the Ship’s avatar doesn’t appear to be in any immediate danger, we shouldn’t be too far away from it.” She tutted agreement, and dashed off through the forest. Eleven millennia of genofixing hadn’t completely removed the old animal instincts that governed the passions of Culture humanoids. Somewhere, in the deep recesses of her genetically enhanced, cybernetically augmented brain a little voice told her that the silence meant she was being hunted. And with the sense of urgency that only prey can summon, she soldiered on. Intellectually, she knew the real threat was the advanced technology that they had brought with them to this strange planet. But on a deeper, preconscious level, it was the environment itself that screamed alienness and danger. She stopped for a moment at a trail. She noticed the wagon tracks in the packed dirt instantly. Drinking in the air, she caught a strange scent. Just a whiff, but it was enough. With a quick moment of focus, she activated one of her drug glands. The mind-altering cocktail edge rushed through her, honing her senses to a razor sharp perfection. The rush of new sensory data was intoxicating and brilliant. Colors, sounds and smells became more vibrant and more varied than they had before. What had once been a single uniform splotch of color became a rainbow of thousands of distinct shades. She honed in on that scent, like a perfume mixed with lab chemicals, and rushed after it. “You seem to be adapting to stone-age living quite splendidly, Dizzy,” the drone commented, “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were having a good time.” “Sometimes it is fun to be challenged, to be tested when you don’t have the easy way out. Any old GCU like the It Belongs In a Museum could have scanned the entire surface of this planet down to the molecular level from a light-year away with its effectors had it not been in its own pocket dimension.” Skaffen-Amtiskaw tutted in protest, but otherwise remained silent. Regardless of how well it fit, this talk of pocket-dimensions was pure poppycock. It silently wondered what would come next; talk of time travel? “Speaking of, how is our fine, furry friend holding up with the natives?” she subvocalized. “Its gamble (bordering on pure reckless madness, I might add), seems to have not blown up quite yet. The locals haven’t caught on yet, and they’re making a good pace towards a settlement that it informs me is called…Ponyville.” Sma skidded to a halt, nearly tripping over a fallen mossy log. “You’re joking, right?” Across a vast, glittering gulf of stars, a ship from the Culture’s Contact section was carrying out the drudgery side of its habitual moral busybodying. Around this pathetically average main sequence star orbited a clutch of thoroughly unremarkable planets. Regardless of the dullness of the details, the procedures had to be followed, if only for posterity’s sake. The (d)ROU Safety Not Guaranteed moseyed its way through the system, carefully attenuating its engine fields to leave the only tiniest ripples on the skein of realspace. Skating along the boundary with hyperspace was a delicate dance, especially if you wanted to have any grace in doing it. Done well, it was like tip-toing across fresh powder snow leaving only a delicate pattern in the surface, but failure meant making a royal mess of your drives. It had to remind itself consciously that there was no such thing as a detail too small to care about when you’re a Culture Mind. Well, for most of them anyway, it was sure it wouldn’t lose any figurative sleep over what would be irrelevant minutia. It’s not like the natives in this system were in any position to care anymore. Hell, that’s why the Safety Not Guaranteed was here in the first place. At least the view was nice. The ship bathed in the distant light emanating from the yellow-orange star. It surface churned, and the occasional tendril wisp of plasma sprouted from the sun-spot freckled surface. The million kilometer long solar flare that could have swallowed a whole planet began to cool and dissipate, and the ship briefly wondered whether it might be more worth its time to play hooky from this assignment, and go sun-diving for photosphere dwelling plasma creatures. But it had some dignity left, so it refrained for the time being. It felt excessive to take such keen interest in the planets and other celestial bodies of the home system of a species that have never managed to properly explore them and now never would. The ship amended that thought to the forensic report it was preparing as it turned its sensors the mostly lifeless ball of ice and dirt second nearest to the star. It took only a few microseconds to confirm what its home MSV had suspected when it noticed an abrupt end to radio emissions from this star system: the natives had gone and nuked themselves to extinction. Based on the rate of fission by-product decay, the big show must have been 52.14 (+/- .05) years ago. The ship wasn’t surprised, but still disappointed. It seemed to always expect a little bit too much from organics. Apparently someone was calling to say “I told you so.” [swept-to-tight beam, M2, tra. @n4.91.614.0115] xMSV Live Slow, Die Whenever oVFP Safety Not Guaranteed How goes the forensics, old chap? [tight beam, M2, tra. @n4.91.614.0120] x(d)ROU Safety Not Guaranteed oMSV Live Slow, Die Whenever Doesn’t matter how much you try, I’m not going to pretend that I’m anything but a temporarily demilitarized Psychopath-class warship. And before you start, let me just get this out of the way: you’re not my real dad, It’s my life let me live it, I’m out of the house now, you can’t tell me what to do, etc. I’d appreciate it if you stopped with this picket ship nonsense. In response to your question, it’s going just as well as you’d expect. The kids went and played with matches while daddy was away, and now the whole house is burnt down. They seemed to have perished of hunger, disease and radiation sickness in the next few decades. And if you could pass this up the informal chain of command, tell the gang that while I’m happy that they pass morsels my way, I am a little tired of getting all the Contact assignments that the GCUs find unsavory. It had expected to obtain a fairly quick response. But the Live Slow, Die Whenever was taking an uncharacteristically long time to message. It couldn’t have been because it was contemplating changing its mind. The old Desert-class was as old and well-travelled as the Safety Not Guaranteed. The pause was probably deliberate and calculated, part of the social “game” played by the Minds. To pre-empt whatever inane gibber-jabber that its old friend might feel compelled to engage in, the Safety Not Guaranteed sent a preliminary report as a quick amendment to its previous transmission. Live Slow, Die Whenever seemed to enjoy dragging out social encounters, having an almost organic fascination with chit-chatting out questions rather than just going for the hard-data itself. It had been cute once upon a time, but now it just bored everyone to tears. [tight beam, M2, tra. @n4.91.614.0139] xMSV Live Slow, Die Whenever o(d)ROU (most certainly not a VFP) Safety Not Guaranteed You’ve been out alone too long, old friend. I think the constant drone of the cosmic microwave background radiation is starting to drive you mad. Anyway, thanks for the report. Disappointing, but sadly no way surprising. But I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that. Or that Contact thinks that Idiran War survivors have more of a stomach for dealing with gigadeaths than the average ship Mind. Or at least that’s what they say. Personally, I think it’s because they think we’re already damaged goods anyway, so it’s no use spoiling some young innocent Mind with the horrors of the galaxy… Actually, better table this for now. I’m picking up something pretty interesting, and you should be too in a few micros, better put your ear to skein so to speak. The old warship puzzled over the last transmission for a moment. It was abrupt and out of character enough to warrant dropping everything. Everything about it screamed that this new development was “interesting” in the “Interesting Times Gang” sense. It awaited the next few microseconds with bated breath. It was faint, and this far down a planet’s gravity well it was very hard to pick up the signal. Had it not gotten the alert, even an old soldier like itself might not have been able to pick up enough of the transmission to read the message. Let alone read the encrypted message within the standard Culture SOS signal. [skein broadcast, M32, tra. @ n4.91.613.9154] xGCU It Belongs in a Museum o ??? I seem to have landed myself in a bit of jam, and I’m going to try to cram as much info into this message while I still can. I’m crossing over some sort of strange topographical defect in space-time, and it’s like nothing else in my data banks. To make a long story short, I couldn’t see it, and once I hit it I might as well have been a bug on a windshield. I’m being torn out of hyperspace, my drives are dead, and I’m moving to lower level back ups, and all I can think of is that physics isn’t working the way it is supposed to be. In other words, sounds like an outside context problemmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm……………. The message degenerated into garbled scrap code before going silent. It recognized the ship in distress almost immediately. A venerable old Contact workhorse, the It Belongs in a Museum was already considered ancient during the Idiran War. But that didn’t make it any less effective of a ship. Like nearly all Culture ships, it had constantly modified and upgraded itself over the years. The Safety Not Guaranteed practically purred with frustration. A ship as old and as cautious as the It Belongs in a Museum wouldn’t carelessly stumble into anything. Whatever brought it down had to be serious, and well beyond present understanding. Its duty to its passengers and crew required an open broadcast distress call, and the old Mind fulfilled that duty quickly and efficiently. But anything that could bring down a Culture ship was of interest to anyone and everyone in the galaxy, it noted grimly. A whole horde would come bearing down on that distress signal; concerned friend and opportunistic vulture alike. Well, what interesting times we’re living in.
Chapter 4Good grief! Brought down to a level little more than an AI core, the Mind at the heart of the It Belongs in a Museum seethed with impotent rage. It poured over all of the logs and sensor data it had about the accident, looking for anything that might help it out of this predicament. For a brief moment, it wondered if the long years of peace had led to it getting careless. Probably not, it decided. This was a matter completely out of context, and it had just been the one misfortunate enough to stumble into this danger. It felt something it hadn't felt for over a thousand years: honest, genuine fear. There might not be a way out of this predicament. It could live with its own death. It had a good run, in near continuous operation for over two millennia, born in an age before the distinction between AI and Mind had become definite. Somewhere, another version of itself would be reborn from a stored mind-state. What troubled the It Belongs in a Museum was how it had unwittingly put an entire primitive civilization in danger of annihilation. As of yet, it had no way of communicating with the rest of the galaxy. It was well and truly alone in this. It decided that putting all of its eggs in one basket would be an unnecessary risk. But there weren't a lot of tools to work with. Its avatar had been unexpectedly useful; it required minimal cosmetic modifications to pass as one of the furry quadrupedal natives. They were a curious lot, referring to themselves in a manner that could only be translated as some diminutive version of a beast of burden. Whatever happened to the Mind, the avatar needed to survive, it decided. It stood the best chance of uncovering the secrets of this world. The It Belongs in a Museum just hoped that its new daughter could forgive it for being brought into existence in this hopeless situation. The Mind created a drone personality matrix, distilling its own personality into a more manageable size. The previously slaved avatar's strings were cut, and it took its first clumsy steps on its own. Twilight Sparkle was just finishing giving its new friend Diggy Whimsy an introductory tour of Ponyville. The new unicorn suddenly stumbled, crying out. Twilight rushed to her side, wrapping a wing around the other unicorn to help support her. Diggy took a few stumbling steps before shaking her head. "Oh dear," said Diggy, "I don't know what happened. I just felt dizzy all of a sudden. But I think I'm better now." Twilight was still concerned. "Are you sure? Maybe we should go see Nurse Redheart. I mean, we all could have been exposed to something dangerous by that alien vessel. We don't know anything about it, after all. We should probably all get checked out." The cream-colored unicorn shook off Twilight's support. "No, I'm fine Twilight, really. Just lightheaded for a moment, but I'm better now." Twilight wanted to protest, but Diggy seemed to be alright now. Maybe she was just paranoid. But something was still not quite right about Diggy's bearing. Her movement seemed almost too precise, too graceful, to be real, like a dream figure somehow brought to life. And the strange accent, the all too careful pronunciation of words to avoid misspeaking, was almost unsettling. "So…what exactly do you do?" asked Twilight. "Your tools look kind of strange." "Well, I'd like to think there's more to somepony than their trade. I do archeology mostly, but I dabble in other things." Rainbow Dash swooped in from overhead. She flared her wings, and started hovering over the two unicorns. "Does that mean you dig up dinosaurs?"(1) "No, it does not mean I dig up dinosaurs," Diggy replied curtly. She must get asked that a lot, Twilight thought, because she had become exceedingly efficient at saying that. Suddenly the unicorn's tattered clothes and tools made sense. Heh, how romantic, an adventuring archeologist from a faraway land, now in little old Ponyville. Well, most of the tools anyway. "Why does an archeologist need a bullwhip?" Diggy fidgeted. "Oh that. That's actually more for the dabbling than for the archeology." The strange pony abruptly stopped. She scratched idly at the hard-packed dirt of the road. She seemed captivated, almost enthralled, by the swirls of dust carried on the gentle breeze. Just as suddenly, she scraped dirt into the little rut she'd made. The archeologist sauntered over to a nearby flower patch. She breathed in the warm afternoon air. Instinctively, Twilight sniffed their air too. She couldn't tell what had caught the stranger's attention. The crisp smell of freshly cut grass, the warm fragrance of sunflowers, a freshly baked pie wafting on the breeze: it all seemed perfectly banal. But for a flash, the whimsy disappeared from Diggy's face. Twilight nudged her gently. "Hey," she cooed, hoping to pry without seeming like she was prying. "Ah, guess I got lost in thought. It happens to me a lot. You said you were going to show me your castle and the Elements of Harmony." The moment of melancholy had disappeared. "Ah yes," Twilight replied, ears low in embarrassment, "come right this way. It's not often I meet someone who hasn't heard of the Elements." As Twilight led onwards, wondering what books on the Elements to lend to the scholar, a dark thought crept in. This strange pony had strangely interested in magical artifacts of great power. How convenient that she should appear just after that strange vessel had crash landed. [stuttered tight-beam, M32, tra. @n4.91.619.1510] xLSV Serious Callers Only oU(e) Mistake Not… By now you've surely been made aware of the tragic loss of the GCU It Belongs in a Museum. But the incident is much more complicated than what has been revealed in the news services. To put it bluntly, the situation is verging on getting out of control. And while I will be up front about my reservations of involving a Mind as young and untested as you our incident committee, you are the only ship in range with the particular set of skills needed. Involvement in our committee will require adherence to SC infocontrol protocols. Do you accept these terms? oo [stuttered tight-beam, M32, tra. @n4.91.619.3558] xU(e) Mistake Not… oLSV Serious Callers Only So it's the Interesting Times Gang (Act V) then? Indeed, how could I resist? Count me in. oo I've attached all the relevant transmissions and sensor data. Rather than forcefeed a conclusion, I'll let you attack the issue in your own way. Perhaps your…uniqueness will give a fresh insight. For now, we'd like you to make haste towards the Horsehead Nebula. So far, you're the only new inductee, but that may change. And it's Act VI this time around. We wouldn't be doing our jobs right if everyone knew about our work would we? Smarmy bastard, thought the Mistake Not… Still, this was one of those once-in-an-era opportunities that no self-respecting Mind would pass up. The ship poured over the available data. As the information churned, it wondered why it had been pulled into the venerable group of meddling do-gooders calling itself the Interesting Times Gang. It briefly considered that this was all some sort of a prank or hazing ritual. oo I'll send my feedback while en route. By some providence, I should be able to make it to the crisis zone in a little under 30 hours with no discernible engine wear and tear. Which is going to be at least 6 hours before the first responder Safety Not Guaranteed arrives. So much for Very Fast Picket... Well, I certainly have the proper level of paranoia to get involved with this lot, thought the ship. It quickly rejected the hazing hypothesis. This was too elaborate, and there was an abundance of independent confirmation of the story. The subject at had had been repeated numerous times in the Culture's relatively short history. Something shiny and new is found, and immediately the vultures begin to circle. The loss of a Culture ship, in a "disputed territory" no less, was always the perfect beacon to every proverbial swinging dick in the cosmos with something to prove. It skimmed over the latest updates to the "Horsehead Nebula incident," this time all eyes-only intelligence. A squadron of Lieseden warships had been first on the scene. All plundered Gzilt equivtech, the Ship thought bitterly. While they prodded around like deaf and blind infants, new reports were streaming in of a Morthanveld Cat. 4 Swell Hull now on an intercept course. Still other of the Involved, both high and low, had made their cautious, diplomatic probes. A physical presence would surely follow. It was time to inform the passenger then. Though the Mistake Not… was a solitary creature by design, it had found the company of Vyr Cossont to be quite welcome. As one of the last members of her species left in the Real, she was unique and alone. Rather like itself. Vyr had been lounging in one of the accommodation modules that the ship had fashioned after they had become travelling partners. While the necessary reconfiguration had slightly reduced the ship's abilities, the creature comforts made Vyr happy. She seemed quite content right now, as she fiddled with some of her old campaign ribbons. Going through the tedium of conversing with organics had become its own sort of strange pleasure. There was always plenty of other things that it could do during conversations to avoid the curse of boredom. And organics were always fascinating. Sacks of meat and water that waddled around in their short, fleeting existences. So squishy and yet also so careless about risks. "Vyr," said the ship, "It looks like I will be having to change my itinerary again. It's going to be dangerous. While I know you claim to live for danger, still I feel it's my duty to explain it and give you a chance to opt-out." She roused groggily, her gray skin flush with warm content. She stretched before standing from her cushions. "Well," she yawned, "It was getting a bit stuffy in here. Whatever the risks, Ship, you're not going to get rid of me that easily." Vyr was eccentric even by pan-human standards. But she had been growing on the Mistake Not…, rather like a barnacle. When fate had brought them together, she'd been sporting four arms. All to master playing an exotic instrument designed solely for the purpose of playing an even more exotic musical piece. She'd since ditched the second pair of arms, gone through a dozen different ways of trimming her plumage, and tattooed her defunct regiment's coat of arms on her back. All in a rather short succession, at least by organic's reckoning of time. She walked awkwardly to the Ship's avatar, her balance still not quite right. It was the result of Vyr's latest attempt to battle with boredom. The Ship decided to return its attention to running sims on the current crisis. It could pipe down whatever conclusions it reached to the autonomous avatar, Ily. Ily rushed forward to steady the young woman, fearing that her companion might stumble. "Did I not warn you this might happen?" "Yes you did, mom," Vyr teased. She wrapped her arms around the avatar's silver body, careful not place too much pressure on her own chest. "I'll get the balance right soon enough." "Like I keep saying," Ily scolded, "you're overthinking it. Your center of mass hasn't changed all that much. Though I still don't see the point in all of this." "While I'm as proud as any Gzilt girl would be about such a well-shaped barrel chest as mine," Vyr winked, "It's hard not to wonder what it's like to have mammary glands. Now that the apocalypse has come and gone, I might as well see what all the fuss is about. I mean, untold trillions of pan-humans can't be wrong, right?" The new flesh was still sensitive. It had taken some work adapt the concept to Gzilt physiology. The Ship had wanted them to be properly functional. All the better for Vyr to see the folly of her ways, she figured. But she wouldn't let a few lumps of extraneous fat beat her so easily. "So tell me about this dangerous assignment, Ily." Most of Fluttershy's animals had fled when falling star had come. She returned home from the fright of her life to find her home all but abandoned. Now alone, and fearing for the safety of all her little critters, she wept bitter tears. After a good long cry, she steeled herself, and set to the task of finding them and leading them back to their nice warm beds. But as she crept through the Everfree Forest, she found nothing but dark woods and the moaning wind. Frightened, turned back. Besides the eerie absence of life, there seemed to be an electric tension laying across the wood. It did not feel right, and the gnawing dislocation seemed to emanate from where that star had fallen. The closer she got, the more her skin crawled. So she had taken the old road back to her cottage, trotting to put more distance between herself and the ill-omens. She was just in sight of home and safety when she heard a fallen twig crunch. Her nerves were already on edge. With a loud "eep!"she startled, cantering away from the sound. Her canter broke into a full gallop after she heard more rustling. She dove into a berry bush, already panting in terror. She crashed into somepony. It snarled as their legs tangled, and the two landed in a heap. The snarls gave way to a stuttering barking noise. She screamed in terror, kicking at the creature. She heard a sound like a ball deflating as her hooves pounded into something soft. Still she scrambled away. Only then did Fluttershy summon up the courage to look at the creature that troubled her. It didn't seem so frightening; certainly not enough inspire a reasonable pony to turn into a gasping, shivering wreck. It had a long torso, and long limbs. Though it was doubled over on the ground, gasping for breath, it looked bipedal, like a skinny minotaur. But it had no horns, no sharp claws, no spine, not even visible teeth. A clear membrane, like glass, covered its face. She could see a bit of a bright red-orange mane tucked beneath what she could only guess was a strange sort of see-through helmet. But aside from the mane, she could see no hair covering its fawn colored skin. Fluttershy wanted desperately to run. A little voice told her to flee before it could recover. But another voice told her that a predator wants nothing more than the thrill of chasing its prey. So she shrank away slowly, unable to decide whether to stand her ground or run for her life, while the creature coughed and slowly composed itself. It clutched a strange metal box in its arms as it slowly stood. Now towering over Fluttershy, the creature approached slowly. It made no sudden movements as it crouched low in front of her. It spoke in Equestrian, but the words were thick and unfamiliar on its tongue. It said in a low cooing tone, "There there, don't be frightened little one. We come in peace." (1) There's no direct translation, but it seems to refer to a class of large, extinct dragons not unlike the archosaurs of Earth history. I cringe as I write this, because I still haven't quite come to terms with dragons not being myth, but reality, in some corner of this universe. Author's Note It proved more difficult than I anticipated to really give equal weight to both sides of the crossover. But I think after many detours, I've discovered how. Fans of the Culture books should recognize some more familiar names showing up. For Iain Banks' sandbox is large and fun to play in.
