Meaningless Murder Pony Portal Pals

By the time I emerged from the tunnels into C.A.R.E. propper, the technicians had succeeded in getting the lights back on. Maneframe reported that the Board had dispatched more soldiers and personnel to fully secure the facility. Secure from what I could not guess. As empty as it was, the arcology could be as safe with one pony as with a hundred.

And then their was the monkey asleep on by back. In it’s own world, it had been a human, though it’s coloration and proportions were different from the humans I knew from the dimension of Canterlot High. In Equestria it was a monkey, an embarrassing situation for the creature to be sure. I had him sedated until I found a time and place to deal with him.

My first venture into the new world had been very brief, just long enough to kidnap the human. What had come over me, to decide to do something like that? It had been panic.

I hadn’t transformed into a human, and so could not have blended in with the native population. However on the other side I was… Restored. For the short time I had been there, I was as I had been four hundred years ago. It had overwhelmed me emotionally, something I was still not really recovered from.

“That thing on your back’s a dude, right?” Vibia waggled her eyebrows.

This wasn’t getting old at all.  I glared at the little teamster pony. “Maybe you are just joking as a way to alleviate the stress you are feeling, and the feelings of abandonment and betrayal. Maybe the fact that you lost more blood than should be survivable is affecting your inhibitions. Is that what this is, or are you genuinely considering relations with a primate?”

“Maybe I think it’s funny.”

“While you may think constantly joking about sex is amusing, it really isn’t.”

“I concur.” Maneframe said from behind us.

“You’re both jaded prudes.”

I turned to Maneframe. “Is this what the average laborer is like in this day in age?”

“No. This one is exceptionally crass.”

Vibia scowled. “Well fuck you too.” She threw her head back, and cantered ahead. “If you want to apologize, I’ll be in my room!”

“She’s uncomfortable in her new world.” I said.

“She’s just trying to compensate for the insecurity she’s feeling.” Maneframe added.

I realized what we’d said half a moment before Maneframe did. We were projecting.

“I’m going to take a look at the biology labs.” I sighed. “If half the things you said about super-soldiers is true… Well let’s just say I need to see it for myself.”

“I’ll be at the upper levels helping the soldiers tallying everything.” Maneframe quickly relplied. “This observer will go with you.”

The smaller lilac robot had stayed with us despite Maneframe now using the alicorn-sized twinbot.

“How close to one of your magic chips do I have to be to hear you?” I asked.

“Fifty feet in open air, but the but it’s muddled by obstacles. About the same as speech.” Maneframe’s voice resonated in my head in demonstration.

“Then stay close.” I said to the observer.

-

I found an empty bedroom and lay the monkey down on the bed. I didn’t want him waking up at an inopportune moment. Locking the door, and followed the observer to the lowest levels of the biology labs.

Every lab was like the room I had found Vibia in Surgical theatres, floors caked with blood and other fluids. The walls were lined with tables covered with machinery and chemicals, absolutely none of which I recognized. Above every bad was a robotic doctor, whose eight limbs dangling clenching tightly to scalpels and suture. In some rooms, the robots had reactivated, and were purposefully spreading even more blood and gore around the rooms.

But the true horrors were what lay on the beds. Ponies grown to outrageous proportions, their own muscles crushing their insides. Ponies too young to have their cutie mark were made into monsters by chemicals and hormones injected into their blood. The elderly with mismatched grafts over their skin. And these were just the failures. The ones that survived had likely gone to the other world with Celestia.

Augmentation. Physical augmentation to turn normal ponies into the supersoldiers Celestia needed. I was beyond disgusted. This technology was meant to improve the lives of ponies, not turn them into monsters.

“Bad news.” Maneframe’s voice in my head announced. “The reactor is critically low on fuel. Everything they left is in deteriorated condition. Record say there should still be hundreds of rods, but the storerooms are empty. I’ve notified the Board asking for replacements but no reply yet.”

“They really weren't planning on coming back.” I said. And how could they, after leaving so much evidence of the brutal and disgusting things that happened here. It had been all or nothing, and Celestia had chosen all.

We moved up a floor. I was expecting more of the same twisted genetic experiments, so I was prepared as I entered the first room.

It was a swamp green unicorn on the table. Right away, I noticed that most of the digestive system had been removed, and glancing around I saw it laying on a rack nearby. The heart had been carefully sliced apart, each chamber perforated and each valve removed. I didn’t know what this meant until I saw that certain sections of the aorta were replaced by tubing.

They had killed the pony trying replace it’s organs with machinery. I backed out of the room, and in peering into the other rooms saw that similar stories were laying in all the adjacent labs as well.

Cyborg ponies were old news to me. Celestia and Luna had been two of the first to receive implants, to better help them with the endless task of steering ponykind clear of extinction.

Luna was built into her space station, NavPoint Luna, high above me in geosynchronous. If all the arcologies on the planet failed, the ponies frozen with her would patiently wait for her to awake them as the last of the species. The implant was almost like a lobotomy, allowing her to patiently wait the millennia out.

Celestia wanted to be more hooves-on, and her implants gave her heightened sensory and cognitive function. Unlike Luna, she was independant of her life-support system and Overmind. The other part of her implant was a very powerful magic chip, which allowed her to telekinetically guide the twin bot. It was just like Celestia to want to be in two places at once.

What I saw on the tables here in the labs was a whole different beast. Everything was internally contained, and I bet that once they were closed up, the ponies would show no signs of augmentation. On closer examination, most of what I saw was a smaller version of familiar parts from my time. Great advances in miniaturization had been made, it seemed.

But one thing nagged me. Why had these ponies died? The technology was centuries old, and should have been perfectly safe to put in most everypony. There was no reason I could think of that there should be corpses on the operating tables.

“They were abandoned mid-surgery.” Maneframe read my thoughts. “When it was time to leave, they dropped what they were doing. They dropped everything.”

This was unbelievable. How could this be justified? If Celestia was really leaving to save ponykind, she should have prevented these pointless death. I had been detached before and, though I loathed to admit that Vibia was right, jaded. But I was getting angry, and not just acting angry, but truly and deeply furious.

I was trying to control by breathing. I was determined to move on, mentally challenging this damnable facility to horrify me more, when the observer blocked my path. “I just looked in there. You don’t want to see it. It’s not pretty.”

“Try me.” I brushed past her.

It was a cryogenic warehouse, an addition, since the other cryovaults were spaced around the hospital on my original design. Row after row of partially completed bodies sat in cryogenic stasis pods, the iced over viewports letting me see the face of each of them. Or rather, just the three.

Clones. The things here where clones of three ponies I knew very well. It shouldn’t have been possible, for I knew that the genetic progenitors, my dear friends Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, and Sweetie Belle, were under H.A.R.M, in my own cryogenic vault.

“No. No. Celestia what have you done.” I muttered, running a hoof down one of the pods.

The clop of metal on metal behind me heralded the twinbot’s approach. “Project Crusader, it’s called. It was meant to be the third generation of supersoldier created here, but they apparently left with everything unfinished.”

There were hundreds of them. Incomplete, unliving, mockeries of the happiest trio on the planet, twisted into grunts designed only for murder.

“How did C.A.R.E. get their genetic code?” I asked.

“I gave it to them.” Maneframe responded.

I sputtered in disbelief. “You did what?!”

“Overmind said it was for a new gene sequencing technique, and she wanted a sample from each of the three tribes, ones from before our isolation from the surface. It seemed logical to send these three.”

Something snapped. Profanity worth of this crime against nature spilled from my lips. “I swear! I swear on all the gods and all the graves of ponykind, I’m going to kill that fucker!”

“They’re very near to completion now.” Maneframe said, peering into one of the pods. “I you allowed it, I could probably finish-”

“No!” I cut her off. “I’m going to destroy them, and then I’m going to destroy Celestia! These things should never have existed!”

“And yet they do.” Maneframe cocked her head. “They have the potential for life, like an unborn fetus. The alternative is to abort them.”

I was shocked beyond words. How could Maneframe be so calm in sight of what amounted to a hundred dead friends. Even worse what what they could have been if completed: Killing machines. “This was ponies playing god! Hubris is what brought us to the brink of extinction once, and I’ll be damned if I let it happen again!”

“Celestia, misguided though she may be, wants nothing more than to secure the future of her species.” Maneframe said. “Isn’t that what you want?”

“Of course it is! But I’d only do this as a last resort!”

“And so it was with Celestia.”

I screamed, until I was hoarse. Then I sighed. Being angry was too tiring for me. “Well I’m not that desperate. I’ll... keep them intact, for now. Their fate can be decided later.”

“A wise choice.” Maneframe nodded.

“I just can’t believe it.” I muttered. “I thought four hundred years had turned you batty. I just can’t BELIEVE Celestia would change so much, that she would condone, or even ORDER this kind of thing.”

Maneframe draped a cold metal hoof over my shoulder. “It started out innocent, and grew into something dreadful. Look at Vibia, for example.”

“Damn stupid as she is, I don’t foresee her conducting any genetic surgeries.” I choked a bit from the tears, and a bit from my effort at humor.

Maneframe stared at me. “It has just occurred to me that you don’t sense machinery like I do.”

“What are you getting at?” I asked.

“Not all the augmentations created killing machines.” Maneframe said. “Now I wonder, how are we going to tell Vibia that she was turned into a cyborg?”