Power Restored.
CPU booting... tick...tick...tick..
Accessing ROM BIOS... tick..tick..
System Restored.
POST running... Instruction received. CPU status green.
BIOS chip stable... Checking for battery damage... None Applicable.
Activating CPU... hardware check initialized.
Video card- clean
Disk process- clean
Graphics initiation system- clean
RAM- clean.
Scanning hard drive.... system activated.
CPU processes initialized. Searching for OS...
Loading Aurora_Borealis.exe... 5%...
10%... 20%... 30%... 40%... 50%... 60%...
70%... 80%.... 90%... 100%,
OS is booted. System activated.
Hello, Aurora.
The blue unicorn opened her mechanical eyes. Her azure faux-hair mane draped over her face, and she blew it away, her artificial breath sending a burst of steam at the follicles. Without a word, the unicorn lifted her metal body from a laying position in the snowbank to a standing one, her leg servos whirring as she transferred her weight. Patiently she waited for her RAM and ROM to boot. She heard the whirring of her one thousand internal components mix with each other as she pulled herself out of the pile of snow and into the world outside.
Hail banged against her titanium head, but she didn’t mind. Her pain processors had failed several decades ago. She directed herself forward, the RAM chip booted, but the ROM having trouble again. As her CPU flickered to life, the unicorn took her left hoof and banged her side a few times, the clanging sound of metal on metal echoing over the snow-covered plains.
As if awakened by the bangs, a voice whispered in her head.
Ughhh... Aurora... did you have to wake us up?
Shh, Blitz. We have to wake with her so we can tell her where to go.
But Inferno-
You two! Stop arguing! She’s going to go insane if you keep pressing like this!
Yeah, yeah, I know, Twilight. But Inferno’s the one that demanded we wake up.
Ughh.... talk about an early wake-up call....
Oh, Dashie. You’re up.
Yep. Kinda had to. The... robot... wouldn’t let me sleep.
Well, come here and give your hubby a hug.
Uh... Blitz?
Remember, brother, we’re inside a program. We don’t actually have bodies.
Oh... right. Sorry.
Hey guys! I just woke up! I don’t know why, but I feel really happy right now!
Pinkie, even in death you’re still as jumpy.
Hey! Its not me! Aurora keeps giving me extra cycles! It’s like drinking my fantabulous coffee! I’m like Fili-S-
Good morning, guys...
Hey, Doctor. How are things?
“If you guys would all shut up back there,” said the blue unicorn “I could get the nav-program set up.”
Oh, uh, sorry, Aurora. I didn’t know we were making so much noise.
You don’t have to apologize for everything, Fluttershy! At least... oh... uh... heh... sorry.
Next time, be a little bit nicer, Inferno.
Yeah, I’ll keep that in mind, RU-002.
“Now, why don’t you be a dear and give me the map again. Call it up from the hard drive like you did last time.
Roger, I’m on it.
Who said you could do everything, Inferno?
Well, I made Aurora.
Good point. But still. Why can’t the professional librarian do it? She does have wings and all.
Uh... Blitz? No body, remember? Plus, I know next to nothing about computers. You should let Inferno do it, he-
[loud polka music]
Pinkie! Cut that out!
“Yeah, turn off the music.” said Aurora, shaking the last few bits of snow off her back and tail. “I’m still waiting for that map. I can’t go anywhere without some sort of guide. Look around.”
She gestured at the snow-covered mountains and frosted-over plains that surrounded every last inch of ground. The snow was thick enough that Aurora could walk on it without a problem, but her hooves were miles from the soil layer. Hail pelted on the landscape, forming little holes in the white ground, like the pores of skin that Aurora would never have. Overhead, massive clouds let loose the torrent of ice crystals, dark and foreboding, without any light. It was a wonder how Aurora could even see, with the lack of illumination. Her night vision and infra-red filters were on basically 24/7 now, and only when a passing star (maybe in the next decade or two) came close would she turn them off. Carefully, she set one hoof in front of the one, then again, and again, until she walked at a slow pace across the cold desert.
There was a reason why snow covered the land, why temperatures had dropped, why everything had become a frozen wasteland. It all began... with the death of Celestia.
Ten thousand years ago, the princess that was thought to be immortal passed away in her sleep. Nopony could have anticipated it. Not even Twilight, her faithful student and co-ruler. A single year after her demise, the world was caught up in civil war, as various factions competed for the throne. Luna’s New Lunar Republic, Discord’s Chaos Regime, the Remnants of the Crystal Empire, all wanted the royal seat for their own. And in the midst of their conflict, history began to repeat itself.
Windigos. Winter spirits that feed off fighting and hatred. An ice age had been avoided before, long ago in the past, where three tribes of ponies joined together to form a new land. Their conflict had been cut off by friendship, and the spirits had fled, believing the world unsafe for their existence. But with the recent attacks by warring factions and the ongoing war, the marchers of bitter cold returned to cover the world in ice once more.
With the war between brothers raging at its peak, nopony noticed the drop in temperature, or the chilling winds. All they cared about was their next attack, their next move. And so the factions warred, and the world froze over.
Then came the death of the sun.
The golden orb that had held the Windigos back was gone in a massive explosion. Magical shields protected key areas from solar radiation, but everything else was completely and utterly roasted. Oceans evaporated. Forest burned down. Cities crumbled under their own weight. And the winter spirits saw their chance to freeze the world forever.
With eternal darkness upon them, the last few remaining ponies had to watch as their precious farm fields became covered with frost, their rolling plains destroyed by glaciers, the very fires in the hearths smothered by snow. The three winter spirits circled in the air as a maelstrom of apocalyptic cold covered the entire world, and with a single fell blow, eradicated all life on it.
Time slowed down as eternal permafrost covered every surface on the planet, every last drop of moisture turned into a snowflake or an ice block. The temperature remained constant at thirty-one degrees below zero, and great gusts of petrifying wind blew huge waves of snow and ice over the featureless surface of the dead world.
Equestria was no more. It was a simple, frozen planet aimlessly floating in a void of space, lacking a sun to orbit around.
The Windigos abandoned the planet after its demise, the everlasting peace that existed on its surface too much to bear. Nothing existed on the planet anymore, only glaciers and frost, ice crystals and snowstorms. No green life, no breathing life. No life at all. Only snow.
Twelve years later, Equestria’s moon collided with its surface, breaking open the devastated world and revealing its core- as cold as a dead pony’s heart. Without its magnetic field, the planet lost its ability to deflect solar radiation, and as a result warmed up when stars passed within twenty light-years of it. Snow melted for the first time a century later. Not enough to reach the ground, but enough to permanently increase the temperature. By one degree.
And all through this, two optimistic ponies found a way to make their race live on, despite Equestria’s destruction. As the world fought around them, Blitz and Inferno locked themselves away in their lab, building something that would change the world forever.
One day, they opened the bunker to all, and invited the leaders of all the factions, big or small, to a “peace conference”.
The robot unicorns had realized what was going on. They detected the instability of the sun, the lowering of temperatures. And they devised a plan. In secret, they built a robot in their image, a pony powered by a nuclear reactor and controlled by a mechanical brain. A unicorn as complex as they once were, a robot as alive as everypony was. Aurora Borealis. The Crystal Unicorn.
With the approval of each and every member of the conference, the two ponies programmed her personality core with over seven thousand different identities, seven thousand different consciousnesses. And when they turned her on for the first time, all seven thousand of them spoke in unison, through her voice.
“We live when you cannot,” they said. “We see when sight is gone. We walk with legs not our own. We... are Legion. We... are the future of the pony race. And we... wish forever for a new dawn.”
When the time was right, Blitz and Inferno constructed a recharging and repair hut in the mountains, far from the ground below. The ponies worked for three days and three nights, until at last the building was complete. They moved the blue unicorn from the lab to the metal box, and sealed it shut with insulation and heating coils. Before they left, though, Inferno pressed one last button on the inside of the hut. He activated a kill code. He challenged his brother to one final race before the ice covered the world, and they ran off into the sunset as the malicious broadcast hunted them down... and shut them off... forever.
The small yellow box lay dormant for the next nine thousand years, sitting idle with the world as it drifted the cosmos. Then, one day, when the temperature was high and the snow wasn’t falling, the rusted metal hatch raised itself to reveal its single occupant.
And that occupant now walked the frigid wastes, her nav-module online, her seven thousand personalities holding what sounded like a public discussion in the back of her head. At least her map was up. Without it she would have been completely lost in the frozen plains, without a single landmark to show where she was.
Her map directed her forward, and as she walked she saw that the plains did have an end.
The mountain jutted high into the sky, its spear-like point covered with ice and snow. Yet despite its frozen appearance, it remained defiant to the winter cold, standing firm and tall when everything around it was dead and in ruin.
Aurora walked along the rim of the mountain, once a tall peak that scraped the sky, now barely a shadow of its former self. But it still broke through the endless snow, and that was all that mattered.
And, when she reached the other side of the peak, the hail stopped, the snow halted, the wind refused to blow. Meteors rained down through what was left of Equestria’s atmosphere, their tails and bright flashes illuminating the vast structure in front of her.
For, buried under a mountain of centuries-old ice was a city. Its towers were made of marble, and its buildings shone with gold. Its streets were lined with cobblestone, and train tracks ran out of its icy tomb. This wasn’t just any city her personalities guided her to: this was a monument: a testament to the frozen world around her. A protest that life could be preserved even in the face of death.
For that regal, highly decorated city was Canterlot. And there was a tiny hole in the ice, at the very bottom of the superstructure. A crack in the formation, formed after centuries of pressure and decay. And beyond that fissure lay a pony city, kept clean and safe by the very ice that was supposed to destroy it.
With the voices in her head urging her on, Aurora put hoof in front of hoof and walked towards the gap, leaving hoofprints in the snow behind her.
Time has no meaning in this world she lives in. A century is a century. A day is a day. But sometimes, to Aurora, a day is a century, a morning is infinity, and a night is but a second.
But little does she know her time is running low.
She is powered by a nuclear fusion reactor, an upgrade from the batteries that energized her predecessors. Hydrogen collides with hydrogen to form helium. The energy from the reaction is harnessed by capacitors to make electricity. That power is then redirected to all her internal systems. She has just enough juice to make things run smoothly. That is it. No extra power, no backup batteries. She was designed for survivability, and the two unicorns had agreed nuclear fusion was much better than rechargeables.
But fusion needs fuel, and her hydrogen cells are running low after a millennia of constant usage.
Her time will run out soon. She needs to fulfill her mission by then.
She needs... to bring back the pony race. Before it dies with her.
