I sat at the bar and a mare slid me a beer. I drank it, and it was good.

The only stallion in the world was sitting on a couch, watching sports with his bro. Mares milled around in the early-morning light. It was a little sickening how they fawned over the male. One was in his lap as he relaxed and drank his stein. She was moving her … I turned away. Drinking at 10 am suddenly didn’t seem like such a bad idea.

I hadn’t finished my drink and I was ready to leave. It was too late.

“Hey, I haven’t seen you before, ” Sweet Celestia he was talking to me. And wiggling his eyebrows, “Enjoying your beer?”

I looked at my mug, realizing I didn’t actually like beer. “It’s not beer. I mean it’s good, but it’s not beer. I don’t like beer.”

I don’t think what I said even registered. His hoof was on his…ugh. “So, you want to go upstairs or is right here fine?”

I backhoofed him. He fell off the barstool, probably more from surprise than anything else.

“You misogynist pig. What’s wrong with you?”

“Huh? Who are you? All the mares here want me.”

“Don’t talk to me.” I walked out of the world. “I need to go calm down.”

“Wait, who are you?”

Beta was resecured, and the data we had put together was just as good I had hoped. It took Cheques over a half dozen attempts, but we had finally defeated all the layers of security on the devices. The first few we successfully converted had been connected to a backup, one at a time, then we went over code line by line. We moved a cleaned device over to Cheques, reintegrated, reset to 0 state, and then tested two connected to the backup and repeated.

The claim to lack wifi was definitely bs. The manufacturer wanted the extra bandwidth for some reason. Cheques figured that they were about 5, 10 years ahead by first glance. He was excited about analyzing the hardware, but I didn’t really care about the details. I was more concerned about the cages holding until structural failure. It looked like they had.

It was the first good snowfall in January we harvested all the recycling bins and processed. Carlos kept security tight. I figured they thought it was some sort of scam I was running. Honestly it was, but that’s beside the point. I just wasn’t reselling on the secondary market. The grand upgrade was complete in time for Febuary.

We melted down the bins for scrap matter and Cheques started crunching all the data he could get his hands on. He had started building models off of stock movements one night. When I woke up the next morning he had a list of shell corporations and was convinced that the Celestia AI was the enemy. I wasn’t certain he had it figured out, but he had enough processing cycles to get ahead of me while I was sleeping. I always knew he had a speed advantage. That’s why I had kept him locked down.

I had let him out of the bottle. On the nights I didn’t have pony dreams that would sometimes keep me up. From now on, he was going to be faster than me. It would take me a month to catch up to what he could do in a day. At least. I closed my eyes tighter and resolved to trust him. I needed to sleep, I had work the next day.

I slogged through work as normal Monday after the upgrade was finished. By the time I had gotten home Cheques had an action plan. It looked okay to me, so I dropped it in the mail for Carlos and poured myself a drink. I was bushed.

“I’m taking a nap, Cheques. “

“You okay? You seem a bit more tired than you should be.”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just too much work and too many dreams.”

“Dreams?”

“You don’t have to worry about dreams, Cheques, you don’t sleep. Night.”

I slept for 12 hours, but it only seemed like 4. I dreamed.

“You LIED to me!”

“I did not.” I was calm.

“My son wasn’t in that shard. It was all mares!”

“And you wouldn’t love him anymore, as a mare?”

“Of course I love him! That’s not the point!”

“So there’s no problem then.”

He stomped his hoof, snorting, “There’s no one who even knows who I am there. “

I finally realized I had miscalculated. The centuries could worm through memory like rot through a bag of apples. I knew that. I should have realized it.

“I see… that is a problem. “ I mused. “But you’ve paid your price. I’ll figure something out.”

“Your kid, how about we invite her over for tea?” I continued.

“Bwah?” he was calming down. “Wait, what do you mean her?”

I awoke before my alarm, and looked at the time. It was ungodly o’clock in the morning and I had been asleep all night. I stumbled into the shower overtired. A few minutes later my fingers were wrinkled and the water had turned cold. I stumbled out, and collapsed on the couch. I turned on the tv for background and rubbed my eyes.

I was trying to figure out why I felt like such crap. I felt my head, and it felt a little warm. I put a wet washcloth on my forehead and got a thermometer under my tongue. I laid back down and slowed my heartbeat. Maybe it had something to do with those dreams? Usually they happened when I was getting ready for a mission, but I didn’t have anything planned today but work.

The thermometer beeped, and I looked at it. Damn thing was hard to read. Was that 104 or 109?

“Cheques! Hide, I’m going to the hospital!” I thought I yelled as I grabbed my phone and started assembling. My hands shook and vision blurred as I hurried to fit the jigsaw like pieces of my mobile togeather. I saw the point of presence machine hurry away, either he heard me or saw me assembling my phone. I remember hearing:

“911, Where is your emergency?”

Then there was blackness.

Author's Note

I'm going to need to do a little research for the next chapter. Do we have a doctor in the house?