If or The Power of Toast
My name is princess Erroria. I’m probably the most powerful pony in all of Equestria, and I doubt you’ve heard my name.
I think about power a lot, what it means to have power, who has it and why. For example, who has more power, princess Celestia, or the combined forces of the ponies she surveys? Your first answer would probably be ”the ponies”, right? I mean, Celestia is powerful, but she’s just one pony, if all her subjects decided to rise up, she’d be toast.
Chew on that word for a while… no, not the word ”toast”, but if you want, I can make you one. No, the word ”if”. ”If” covers a lot of grounds. If I got out more often, I’d probably have more friends, if I was ten stories tall and had a lantern on my head, ponies might confuse me for a lighthouse. But the fact still remains that I’m not, that I don’t and that they don’t.
Why is that? I thought we just said that it’s fully within their power, so why does a more powerful entity (Equestrias ponies) allow a less powerful entity (Celestia) to rule over them? One solution to this conundrum is to say ”What makes you so sure they don’t?” It is possible that what seems like a position of power over her subject is really nothing more than an elaborate prison. She’s bound by public opinion more effectively than if she was bound in chains and this whole business with the crowns and the palaces might just be a ruse to keep her complacent. After all, nopony is as enslaved as the ones who falsely believe themselves to be free.
A likelier scenario is that it’s the other way around. Do you enjoy your toast by the way? I made it especially for you. There is something about pony nature that makes us want to belong, to submit and to obey. Simply not having that urge might make you more powerful than all of them combined.
So, in conclusion, it is at least a possibility that Celestia’s power isn’t defined by what she can do, but rather, what she can’t. Maybe her strength is not an ability, but an error, a glitch that turns the entire system on its head. But enough about that, let’s talk about me.
I am a young filly just entering marehood, I am an old pony waiting to die. I am a colt about to be born. I am everyone and everything that will ever be in one massive atom-sized singularity surrounded by an empty cosmos. I am the last conscious thing witnessing the heat death of the universe, and I am the one who sees what’s come after it.
The events of my life still has to happen in chronological order, as powerful as I am, I still have to obey casuality, but nothing says I have to experience them as such. I could wake up tomorrow an old mare with my friends (if I had any) dead and buried and the day after that I’d be a newborn foal somewhere, if I wanted to.
But I spend most of my days playing with cards.
Really small probabilities fascinate me, if I shuffle a deck of card and I spread it out on the table, the probability that I get that particular arrangement of cards is:
1 in 80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000.
Even for as long as I have lived – or will live, I may never see that particular sequence ever again. It’s always sad when I have to reshuffle the deck and sometimes I’m tempted to take a picture or write down the combination, something. Then I remember that I couldn't write down every single combination even if I had all the paper in all of Equestria to work with.
So I shuffle the deck and one beautiful and unique combination disappears to be replaced by another. I had to shuffle it, you see, or else the new one, which may very well be even more beautiful to me, would never had appeared. I could stare at one combination until the universe tears itself apart, but then there’d be countless others I never get to experience. And no matter how many decks I buy and how often I shuffle, I’m never gonna see them all. I cry a little about that sometimes.
I could, if I wanted to, just arrange the cards in any combination I chose, but that’s not the point. Whether I’m the one who arranged them or they where randomly generated, any combination, no matter how unremarkable, is rarer than diamonds.
You look puzzled, is it about the toast thing? Yes, I know it looks like I made it appear out of thin air, but in fact, it was there all along. The atoms that makes up the toast was there already, I just put them in the right combination. Don’t worry, it doesn't affect the taste or anything, in fact, I could make it taste any way you want to, do you prefer your toasts to taste like cinnamon or lemon?
I just wish I could engage with other ponies more, but to be honest, they scare me a little. It’d be like one of my card sequences suddenly started talking at me. If that happened, how could I shuffle the deck in good conscience? Would destroying one consciousness be justified if it meant drawing another that might be happier, or smarter or more pleasant?
I could do that, y’know? I could make a pony live for as long I arranged their atoms the right way. If there was a pony I wanted to be with forever, I could make it so. But then, what about all the possible ponies that will never get a chance to exist because I spent all the time staring at one combination? Ponies are perhaps the most beautiful combinations in all the universe, but I’m afraid to talk to them, or I may fall in love.
So, I spend most of my life playing with cards, and though I am the most powerful pony in all of Equestria, I feel like I’m a slave to the universe.
