Chapter 6: The Minimum Survival Equation

Rock, or the thing masquerading as him, waited a moment or two after his room had been vacated by hospital staff before he himself got out of bed. He, it, wandered about the room almost aimlessly, taking in the sights and sounds of the building around him. Eventually, his eyes settled on a small bathroom adjacent to the space he found himself in, and paused thoughtfully before wandering in. The bathroom was much like he expected based on his impression of the rest of his environment: simple, sterile, and eggshell white. Casting his gaze about the room like he was looking for something, eventually his eyes locked on to another pair of eyes in the room.

The mirror. He smiled as he took it in, the new face that he wore. Trotting up to stand face-to-face with his borrowed self, Rock bore a sick, slanted grin that looked like something trying to learn how to smile from scratch. He widened his grin, more to inspect his teeth than anything else, turning his head this way and that to memorize his own features. He fluffed his wings out, giving them a few experimental flaps, callously knocking loose medical supplies off of nearby cabinets.

“Not the first body I’d have chosen, but it’s obviously in decent shape. Let’s see how long it lasts. Hopefully I’ll get enough out of this one to entertain me for a while.” The voice it used was both Rock’s, and not, somehow. Like listening to the original through a radio with light static. Words chopped up slightly, spaces between words or sentences were shorter or longer than they needed to be, and all with a subtle background of crackling, like somepony wadding up aluminum foil.

He stared back out of the bathroom door, in case somepony had come to investigate the noise, or was wondering why he was out of bed. It seemed, however, that the hospital had much more important things to do than to tend for somepony who, for all intents and purposes, had passed out at the bar.

Trotting out of the bathroom once more, and kicking a small box of some medicine or another along with him, the new Rock Holler made his way to the hall, sliding open the door and taking stock of the area beyond. A stereotypical receptionist’s desk sat catercorner from his door, and a small janitorial closet just opposite. Giving the closet a brief once-over, as if deciding what to do with it, he simply passed it off as another fixture of the building, and walked on.

Most of the staff, patients, or visitors in the hall were seemingly too busy to pay attention. Once or twice a doctor gave him a sideways glance, their eyes flicking to his hoof, before moving on to obviously more important things. He himself inspected his hoof, to find a hospital bracelet sitting just above his fetlock. A small blue band with some typed up information, he surmised that the color must be of some kind of importance. Blue must mean he wasn’t somepony to be totally weary of.

“Perfect.”

Rock, the real Rock, looked about the station around him with an increasing sense of dread. Nothing physical about the booth he was in nor the room beyond it had changed, yet all at once it seemed alien, foreign, to him. The voices, his own and the intruder, had long since dissipated, lost to the static of the equipment they spoke from. He hurried over to a nearby speaker, giving it a few hopeful knocks. “Hello? Hey, buddy! Brain-pal! You in there?!”

No response. He took to fiddling with the instrument panels again, making adjustments here and there, wherever he thought made sense. Nothing stood out, or changed, except maybe the pitch, or volume, or frequency of the static that pervaded all of the output devices in the room. Eventually, he set about shutting them all down, and looking for more physical clues, or whatever in this room could give him hope. Now that the initial fog in his head had worn off, he was left simply to his own devices, and without a set goal or directions, had little else to do but explore and let his mind wander.

He noticed with some suspicion how detailed his current environs were. If it was true that he was trapped in his own head, like his voice had told him, where was it pulling all of this minutiae from? The desks around him, the documents that adorned them, even the equipment that filled the room and the space beyond it was immaculately detailed. As if this was a physical location instead of a dreamscape of sorts.

And almost none of it was familiar. Rock brooded over this realization for a moment, trying to discern from where these surroundings could have come. Surely the voice in his head couldn’t be responsible, so the only viable culprit must have been the invading consciousness. His voice had told him that the numbers were alive, were sentient, and had taken over his body. But that meant they had to come from somewhere, didn’t it?

Was this were they were... created?

“Created? Ha!” the barking laugh pervaded the station, knocking Rock for a loop. When he regained his bearings, he looked up at a small CRT television in front of him, only to find him staring at himself. Again. “You think some silly switch-fiddlers could hack their way through the briar patch of metaphysical impossibilities standing between their understanding of consciousness and what I am? Please. I will admit, that detestably mortal brain of yours is at least going somewhere reasonable. Yes, this... station... is one of my memories. And a being like me doesn’t forget details. You won’t find any hazy, clouded memories or distant voices rolling around in my noggin, oh no. It’s crystal clear up here, little Rock Star.”

Holler growled viciously at the screen, bringing himself up on all fours to stare down the face on the TV. “Shut up! You don’t get to call me that!”

His likeness on the screen recoiled into the static background in mock terror. “Oh, what shall I do! My host’s all mad at me now!” His whiny, mocking tone quickly devolved into deep, quiet laughter. “You’d be surprised what I know, what little memories I can drudge up, Rocky. And not just from you. I can see the world in ways that would make your inner eye roll back in its socket and bleed into your brain. The sheer amount of knowledge just hanging in the air, and no...pony does a damn thing about it. It’s literally all right there! Everything you’d ever need to know, hanging in front of your stupid! BLANK! FACES!” It bellowed in rage with each word, bringing a hoof down forcefully on the screen, until the TV cracked from the inside out. “You have the entire world right in front of you and none of you does a damn thing about it! I can see the universe for what it really is! All this knowledge, all this power! You squander what you really are! Why do YOU get to live and roam the planet while I and my kind are locked away in the aether in favor of something weaker! Something more pathetic! Why do YOU get to roam free?! WHY?!” The last word was simply too much for the old television to bear, as it exploded outward, spraying the room with glass and sparks. Rock shielded himself from the shrapnel with a wing and a hoof, shying his eyes from the explosion. Looking back at it, however, it was as if nothing happened. The tv looked fine, the glass had picked itself up. Like he’d imagined the whole thing.

Except its voice still rang in his ears.

In the real world, the creature pretending to be Rock had hidden itself away in an unused hospital room. He sat still on a recently made bed, his hooves shaking in his lap while his eyes rolled themselves back to their original position. “Why... well. It doesn’t matter now. I’m here, that’s what matters. I’m hear, and you’re not. Now, let’s get started...” he trailed off, slowly moving to the floor, and walking out of the room. He looked left and right as he reentered the hall, his eyes wandering for any clue as he looked for... whatever it was he sought.

Eventually, his gaze steadied as he read a small wooden sign on the wall aloud. “Psych. Ward.” The chuckle he gave shortly after crackled and broke in high pitched tones.

He strolled down the hallway, taking care to not physically contact anypony, or anything, lest he draw attention. It wasn’t until he reached an intersection, telling him to go right to reach the Ward, did anypony stop him.

He’d just rounded the corner when a doctor stepped out of a small room off to the side, nearly running in to him. The doctor gave him a look up and down, and, seeing his bracelet, addressed him. “Excuse me, but you need to return to your room. Inpatients aren’t allowed to roam this far from the care wing.”

Rock’s head tilted as he considered the newcomer carefully. Then, in one swift motion, he pulled the doctor back into the room he’d come from, closing the door behind him.

Whether out of shock or physical weakness, the doctor didn’t put up any kind of fight. Seemingly caught off guard, he spluttered some authoritative nonsense. “Hey, you can’t do that! I’ll call security!”

Not wanting to hear more out of the guard, Rock clamped a hoof over the doctor’s mouth. He pulled the doctor in close, wrapping a foreleg around his throat, and pulling his the doctor’s ear up to his mouth. In a hushed voice dripping with malice and crackling like an unstable audio feed, he hissed, “Listen to me, doctor. You’re going to ignore me, no, in fact, you’re going to give me that coat, and just hide in here for the next few hours.”

“Why the hell would I-urk!” The physician grunted as the hold on his neck tightened.

“Because if you don’t, I’ll tell your precious little girl where her mommy is. You wouldn’t want to explain all the time a supposed skin doctor spends in the psych ward, would you?” Rock growled, his voice dripping with malice.

The pegasus could feel tears drip onto his foreleg as the ‘skin doctor’ thought about the implications of his captor’s words. “No... you can’t... she’s only five. Her mother will be fine, I just need a little more time...”

“I don’t give shit one about your family, doctor. But I have a goal. And you’re not going to stand between it and I, now are you?” The malice gave way to a false cheeriness that, somehow, was more threatening than any low growl or hissed threat. “You little insects. You think that just because you don’t say it you assume that no one knows. There’s always someone watching, doctor. You’d be surprised what kind of knowledge is just floating around, waiting for someone to do something with it.”

As the ‘physician’ handed over his coat and his ID badge, he shied away from his assailant, and hid himself in the crook of a small desk in the corner.

It wouldn’t be until he told his daughter later that evening where her mother really was that the realization would hit him. The pegasus had said someone.

Back in the station, Rock was spending however much time he had shuffling through papers. Most of them seemed to be entirely consequential. Almost all of them, in fact. Small community postings, birthdays, obituaries, local news. The most he could put together was the year the memory was from, and the year he found himself in.

Manehattan, 1942. Somewhere near the middle of the year, given the notices for the upcoming Summer Sun Celebration. It didn’t tell him much, as nothing about the place or date rang any bells in the admittedly small repertoire of historical facts he maintained.

He threw the stack of papers down on the desk after the fifth sheet of advertisements to be read on the air. If there was something here to be found, it wasn’t going to be anywhere in these stacks of useless information. He looked about the booth, and finally his eyes landed on the door to the station beyond it. He hadn’t had much reason to leave the room he was in, as he doubted this station had any kind of physical exit, but he’d run out of options in this small audio booth.

The doorknob turned with a satisfying click, and the door swung open on what felt like freshly greased hinges. It barely made a sound past the whooshing of displaced air. The station itself seemed much the same standing in it as it did observing it through the booth glass. It even smelled the same. In that there wasn’t really anything to smell. Rock trotted about the room, looking primarily at the doors and cabinets. The desks he passed seemed to have much of the same empty data that the booth had.

Eventually he found his way up to the window, where he stared out at a cold Manehattan night from decades ago. The lights of streetlamps and those who hadn’t gone to bed yet shone through the darkness much like any cityscape. There wasn’t really anything to differentiate this memory from the real thing, save for the lack of anypony else in the room.

Sighing, and taking a small break from his meager attempts at investigation, Rock leaned on the window and left his mind wander. He felt himself drift slowly to sleep, although he didn’t feel particularly tired. More like his whole body had just decided to relax at once. His eyes slowly drifted off into the corners of his sockets, until something in the window caught his eye. A small reflection in the corner of the glass, giving him a weak view under one table.

And beneath it, a safe.

Rock jumped up, whipping around to see the metal lockbox for himself, as if the reflection was merely a mirage and turning around to slowly would dissipate the illusion. But there it sat, amidst a row of filing cabinets. A simple black safe nestled to the floor.

He trotted carefully over, and tapped the front of the safe. He expected a hollow metal sound, but instead was greeted with a metallic tink, as the door shifted slightly.

It was open.

He threw the door open, and reached inside with a curious hoof.

It was also empty.

Rock slumped to the ground, sitting much like a pouting child as he glared disappointingly at the falsely hopeful safe. The base of it sat open and empty, much like the rest of his leads.

However, there was something else. A top shelf. Small, but big enough to fit a file folder into. Reaching his hoof into the safe once more, he pulled out a large folder filled to the brim with what appeared to be a mishmash of documents, strips of paper, and photographs. Flipping it over in his hooves, he read the cover out loud.

“Number Stations.”

Author's Note

Not very far too go with this one, I think.