Chapters Act 0: A pony in the light
White, it was all white.
Access Page paced impatiently around the white room with white chairs and a white table with a white computer in which a white coated pony worked tediously. She looked at the white clock; it had already passed thirty minutes, and got back to pacing around the white room, waiting, looking at the clock and pacing some more. Every few steps she looked at her pearl coat, in contrast to all the white around it was a small relief, her light blue mane was better, but even them she made a mental note to dye it some darker color as soon as she was back in her apartment.
“The doctor will see you now.” White-coated mare said without looking up from her computer.
Access Page sighed in relief and quickly trotted through a door that had opened in the white wall and run through a white corridor, waiting in front of another white door for a few seconds that seemed like hours before it opened and she could enter in a white office with a blue coated horse mare beyond a white table, with a white bookshelf filled with chips in white covers.
“Mrs. Page, we need to talk.” The blue coated doctor said; her color was almost offensive in midst of all the ascetic white.
“I know that I only have a basic plan, but I have some nuyen stored! I can pay for his treatment! I’m sure we can work out some arrangement!”
“Page-san, sit please. I’m afraid that it’s worse than even a platinum member could afford.”
Afraid of the answer, Page asked: “What happened to him?”
“This afternoon your brother began kawaru .”
“By the goddesses, no!”
Suddenly the horror of it engulfed Access, kawaru or the change, as it was known in equestrian, was a process that warped and distorted the mind, body and soul of a pony into the one of an abomination.
“How can it be? He was so healthy.” Access inquired.
“The mysteries of kawaru are not yet unraveled, Page-san. Some of the best scientists and doctors of the Imperial school of Genetics and molecular medicine are working on a possible vaccine or cure, but we have so few cases to study…”
And it mostly affect ponies, she was polite enough not to add.
“How is he, doctor? Will he be all right?”
The doctor touched her shoulder in a gesture of sympathy.
“It’s difficult to know, Page-san. His vitals are strong, but the kawaru will be a lengthy and dangerous process.”
“I want to see him.”
“That would be ill-advised. He is being kept heavily sedated and would receive no comfort from your presence.”
“Please, I just want to see him!”
“It’s not in my hooves, Page-san. The imperial Genetics and Molecular medicine Board permits only the approved medical teams to have access to the kawaru ward.”
“But you could smuggle me in, couldn’t you?” She pleaded “I could wear an orderly’s gown and pretend to be a medical student!”
“Page-san!What you are asking me is highly illegal! If we would be caught in the middle of it not only I would lose my job, you would be facing criminal charges and your brother would lose his relocation fund!”
“Relocation fund?”
“Yes, by Imperial decree you brother will be moved to the Yomi Island habitat complex. He will receive all the necessary to live and even small monthly revenue to spend as he pleases and there he will have all the help he needs to deal with the kawaru and someday he could even be reintegrate in our society!”
“What? No, please I need to see him, I’m his only family, you don’t understand…”
“No, Page-san.” She cut abruptly “If you want to help your brother, I can give you an account number where you can deposit money for him, if you really want to help him them obey your superiors and work hard like a good pony! Now I need to ask you to leave, please.”
Frustrated, she trotted out of the office, through the white corridor, passing by the white reception where she had waited for about half an hour and through white doors to the loud and brightly colored streets of Neo-Tokio, the bright neon felt almost like an assault in her eyes after the all the white in the BuMoNa office.
A quick trot and a fifteen minutes train trip later she was back in front of the Hayraku mega-complex she had left about one hour ago, running she entered in an elevator and rose three floors, a quick walk and she was back in her cubicle a few minutes early, she hadn’t eaten anything in her lunch time, but by now she had lost her appetite anyway.
She took the steel jack, gave it a quick clean with aseptic alcohol, turned on her fuchi-7 cyberdeck and plugged in, the data cable connecting direct to her brain. In a rush of data the office was replaced by a virtual simulacrum.
Matrix, what Twilight Sparkle and Meteor Shower had described as a consensualhallucination, was the backbone of modern society, used every day to read emails, pay bills and talk with friends; It monitors the money, handle utilities and manages the traffic on the streets. Billions of ponies, horses, griffons and others use it constantly and Hayraku was the biggest provider of matrix access in the world. It had begun as a single street where ponies from all over the world could meet, chat and discuss business, but it rapidly expanded in its own world with its own rules.Access Page was one of the billions of ponies that worked in the matrix, she was in charge of compiling code for new Hayraku software, and right now her entire floor was focused on creating a new search engine that would be used in the expert program that would be used in the Arcology.
In the virtual environment of the matrix, her tools of work appeared next to her and the code she was working on floated in front of her muzzle, but she pushed then aside with her virtual hooves while in the meat-space, the real world, she inserted a special chip on her cyberdeck, for all intents and purposes any supervisor would see her working efficiently on her code, the matrix illusion was something she had acquired to avoid the constant reprimands of her lack of efficiency because of bathroom pauses or some time lost consulting a guide book, now as her virtual illusion kept working hard she used a back door on the system to access the matrix outside the building, doing a quick search about the kawaru and Yomi Island.
Her stomach turned as she kept reading about the secrecy that the government kept around the subject, the island was under a permanent blockade with a no fly zone around and even using low power lasers to prevent satellites from taking pictures of the island.The idea of reintegration was a lie, no one that had ever got to the island had been seen again, but the emperor kept pumping nuyens and researchers on the island, this was a much bigger project than they tried to make it appear.
She was browsing through dozens of histories similar to hers, ponies and even a few horses that had lost relatives to the kawaru and tried to locate them desperately, when she felt a hoof on her shoulder. She quickly deactivated her chip and closed her illegal navigation, returning to reality in an instant.
“Page-san, the director wants to talk with you.” The beautiful white horse mare said in a quiet voice that sounded proper and delicate as was expected from a mare around here, Access wondered if she had undergone any surgery to have such a perfect tone.
She unplugged and followed the female quietly, one floor up and into a room bigger than her house she found project director, a big blue coated colt horse, with a SIN mark on his flank that showed the emblem of the Hayraku company, his title of project director and his SIN number in beautiful stylized scarlet numbers. She on the other hand had only a simple SIN mark with the company logo, her rank of programmer and her SIN number in blocky black letters.
“Mrs. Page, I have been informed of you recent loss and want to give you my condolences.”
“Condolences?”She inquired.
“Of course, I just heard the news of your brother.”
“But he is not dead.”
“Of course not, but I also asked for you here to give some good news! We are relocating you to the arcology project.”
“The arcology project? But…” She wanted to complain, to say that she wanted to stay, but it would all be considered rude and impolite; and in the traditionalist Neighpon if there was one thing that you didn’t wanted was to be impolite.
“You will be moving by the final of the week, pack your things, the company will be paying for two entire boxes for you! You will receive your passage and the data on your new apartment and project soon.”
“Thanks, mister Uma-san.” She bowed her head and walked back to her cubicle and to her code.
Access Page arrived in her apartment at the same time she arrived almost every day, took off her brown faux leather coat and hang it on the back of the door and took a quick shower, taking care not to use too much of her allotted water ration and then she simply sit on the floor, the felling that her brother was missing, that for the traditionalists neighponeses he was as good as dead.kawaru in the team. She knew that if she sited quiet and be a good pony eventually they would allow her back in the main offices, out of her exile in the ponylands and back into the civilized society, back into the track to a glamorous office job… Well, as glamorous a job as any pony could expect to have not being a horse.
She got up slowly, still uncertain of what she would do and picked her old cyberdeck, the deck was much inferior from what she was used to have in her work, she caressed the scared surface, covered in adhesives that tried to hide all the scratches. Smiled, remembering her brother’s constant insistence to get a new cyberdeck, something lean and mean where he could play all the new trid games. She plugged herself in, before she ended lost in more memories.
In the matrix she started researching the sites she had seen during the day, saving a few of the photos and files to her deck and trying to dig more, spending a few nuyens in some pay databases to acquire a few old photos of the island, from before the construction of the research center and habitat. She even logged into the Hayraku grid and used the backdoor that she knew to enter the maneframe and access some data; it was mostly economic data, payments from the Neighponese empire to the Hayraku for two heavy companies of their red samurais. She was lost in her research when a ringing noise announced a new message; she opened it in a window at her side, keeping at her research.
“Hey, Page!” A pony mare with orange coat, blue mane and eyes and a pair of big beautiful virtual, hoof sculpted, wings appeared in the windows. “Where is your brother? I have the new trideos he wanted, the ones about the Alicornfall!”
“Azure… We need to talk.”
Azure Skies swallowed dry. “Are you ok, Page?”
“Yeah, I’m fine, the problem is with my brother, today he began kawaru .
“By the goddesses! No, how could it happen?”
Azure was one of the few that still believed in the goddesses.
“I don’t know. I… They will not even allow me to see him! He will be locked in some stupid high security imperial prison in some forgotten island!”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be, you are not one of these pompous imperialists snobs… Ugh! I just… You know what they said to me in the work? My boss actually said “My condolences” like he was dead! Oh, but for them he doesn’t matter anymore, he was just some foreign pony anyway, right?”
“Calm down, Page. How long have you been awake?”
“Two days, more or less, I drank energetic and caught some naps here and there. That program you got me is being really useful.”
“Great, but you need some real sleep and some real food in your system, not that cheap chemiched -up shit they have on the corporation’s cantina. I meet you in about one hour in your place, right?”
“I’m really not on the mood to go out, Azure. I need to do a few things around here…”
“Come on, Page! I don’t want you closed in your apartment all alone, surfing the matrix all the night. Let’s have a real talk, eat real food and drink real alcohol!”
“Ok.” She sighed “Meet me here in thirty minutes.”
One hour later the two ponies where in a small restaurant, eating noodles and drinking cheap, but genuine sake. Access Page was wearing one of her less dirty saddles, the Hayraku logo in a beautiful crimson and Azure Skies was wearing a black faux leather overcoat, her wings where tightly tugged under it so no one could notice them, she usually was very proud of her wings, even if it attracted lots of unwanted attention, but in a night like that she didn’t had the patience or the time to loose explaining to some stupid horse that she was not a whore.
“And they sent you to the arcology project?” Azure asked loudly, a bit too drunk.
“You know how they think around here, my shame would be their shame, and the only way for them to cleanse themselves is to take me away from the group.”
Page drunk a long gulp of her sake.
“I will be in the other side of the world.” Page said, tears in her eyes. “I promised I would protect him, but I’ll be on the other side of the world and can’t even send him a bucking letter!”
“You could try making an appeal to the league of the nations, it can’t be right to imprison a pony like this!” Azure suggested.
“They already tried, the Imperial board of genetics claimed that they are not prisoners, but patients and special measures must be taken to safeguard their lives. And it doesn’t matter anyway; they are doing the same thing everywhere! I have found cases like this here in Neighpon, Equestria, Tenochtitlan and even in Zebria.”
“That’s sounds suspicious.”
“I know! Some researchers say that it’s some kind of airborne virus, they call it Q-strain, but all around the governments are keeping a close lid on it; they lock anyone contaminated and after that no one sees them again.”
“You have been researching about it?”
“Yeah, I needed to know what happened to him, maybe discover if there was some cure abroad, some place where I could take him…”
“Wait! You are not thinking in breaking him out, are you?”
“Maybe… Look, I just know that there is something bad going on.”
“Just don’t, if you try to do something they will catch and lock you before you can say “I want a lawyer!” You know what they do to ponies in this country.”
“I can’t simply let him be imprisoned like that!”
“Look, you and your brother where always like family to me, so I’m going to help you on this, just so you don’t end up in some prison for the rest of your life. Do you remember those imported trids I procured for your brother?”
“Yeah, sure. He always loved those Zebrian shows.”
“Well, I deal with more than just imported trids; I deal with almost every banned item in the import list.”
“What?!” She exclaimed as she spit her sake.
“Yes, choose your poison and I can arrange it for you, just last week I brought a good two kilos of blue bliss and some zebrian books across the border.”
Access Page was coughing, she always knew that the mare hadn’t a regular job because of her wings; that she dealt in freelancer imports, but she never thought of her as a criminal.
“The point is; I know ponies that can help you, but they are not going to be cheap. I’ll ask a few favors that they own me and see if there is something to do, but you must promise me that you will not do anything alone, right?”
“Azure… Thanks! Thanks, I simply don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t need to say anything, just take care ok? You and your brother were always there for me and in this life if we don’t care for each other, who will?”
The club was different from what Access Page was used to frequent, in the few nights she had free, she had spent some hours on the company’s clubs, drinking and flirting, but this place was way different, it was located in the middle of a popular housing neighborhood, she had seen a few suspect people on the way, the kind of horses she had learned to be aware of during her mandatory self-defense course in her first month with Hayraku. Azure had given her a few advices to navigate around the place, she was dressed in one of her few saddles dresses that didn’t had a Hayraku logo and had taken with her only a small credstick with some nuyen, she had also covered her company mark on her flank with some dye, no one around was a huge fan of the corporations.
The bouncer was a big buffalo wearing a black coat, he patted Access before charging her ten nuyen for the entrance, and she catches the glimpse of some metallic weapon under his coat. The place was loud and bright, neon lights and some quick paced music was booming on the place, several ponies and horses where dancing, the place felt cramped and hot, she swallowed dry and made her way to the back of the place where there was a few isolated booths, she entered in the number four.
The room was cramped and there was already another pony there, a big colt pony with an amber coat and an unkempt golden mane, the glint of a datajack in his neck.
"Mrs. Page?"
"Yes and you are?"
"Let’s keep it as Mrs. Pony for now. A friend said you had a job for me."
"Yes, Azure Skies, she said that you could help me…"
"First, you must understand a few rules." He interrupted her. "What we are doing here is illegal and so we need to maintain a certain level of secrecy and confidentiality. You will not talk about me in any way or device with your friends, for all intents and purpose you are only a lone corporate mare wanting some rough fun tonight, you will not even mention you have seen me here, do you understand?"
"Yes. I’m not idiot." Access replied, rolling her eyes.
His face lightened a bit, he even smiled a bit.
"Good, but I feel safer getting this out of the way first, a few months ago I met with this corporate colt that wanted some dirt on his boss and he babbled all about it to one of his coworkers. In the end, I lost my safehouse and the idiot lost his job and now he “works” in some bath house to pay his bills." He emphasized the word “work” with air quotes.
"I understand the risk and I really need this."
"Great, with this out of the way, let’s talk about the job."
"You would need to rescue my brother and take him to the arcology project where I’ll be living."
-Right, it’s an extraction and transportation, plus a new set of documents. What kind of cult did he get into?Universal Sisterhood?Those weirdos that worship aliens?One of those Returning cults?
"Yoma Island." Access said curtly.
"Drek! That place is government and high security at that. They keep that place better locked than their old nukes; I heard that they have a permanent contract with the Red Samurais, high tech security gear…"
"I compiled some data." Access said as she showed him one chip "Some photographs from satellite and all that I could gather about their security."
"Well, this could be a start." He took the chip and put it in his coat. "But we will probably need to do a bit more of research, no offense, but we have contacts that you wouldn’t believe. But as far as I know, that has never been done."
"So, it’s impossible?"
"There is no impossible, but it’ll be expensive. I’m talking about a top-notch team, possibly a submarine and if he got out, he will be a fugitive. Are you sure you want to do this?"
"Yes, I can’t let him on that island."
"Right, I can assemble a team and procure the equipment, but it will be at least two hundred thousand nuyen."
Access Page stared at him in silence.
"I believe you don’t have the money for it?"
"No."
"I’m sorry, but I simply can’t work for free."
"Can’t we arrange some kind of deal? I have about twenty thousand in my account."
"That wouldn’t cover even the equipment."
Page looked around, trying to think of some way. In truth she really didn’t owned much, most of her stuff was company property; she had dedicated her life to the company and hoped that they would protect her in her time of need.
"I can give you data, lots of data."
The colt looked at her, curious.
"What kind of data are you talking about?"
"Hayraku paydata."
That got his attention.
"How do you intend to do this?"
"I can show you a backdoor into maneframe, I can give you access to all of it."
The colt got up and paced around a bit, thinking and murmuring to himself.
"Can I use my deck for a moment?"
Access Page nodded and he took a small cyberdeck from his saddlebag, plugging quickly, while he was in the matrix she played with the table commands and choose a soycoffe, which was quickly delivered by a silent attendant. She sipped some of it and felt incredible surprised with the taste that almost resembled real coffee.
Ten minutes later, the colt was disconnecting and she was on her third soy coffee.
"Here’s what we gonna do. I’ll give you a special program that you are going to install in the maneframe, we will only start using it after you arrive at the arcology, so you don’t end up being caught and we will have access to all the data. But, even with constant access to their data, it’ll take some time to make enough nuyen to assemble and equip the team."
"How much time?"
"About a year, we need to go slow or they will find the leak. I’ll keep you updated; do you know how to use the shadowlands bbs?"
Access winced, the idea of her brother locked in that place for a whole year was horrible, but it was the best she could do now.
"No."
"Here let me show you."
Access Page watched as the colt tipped a series of commands in his deck, accessing the public grid and then into a host that appeared to be a simple restaurant, but that when he executed a specific command, redirect him to a secure host where they would be able to chat in privacy, before going out he also explained a few rules to her, like that the bbs was not a technical support board and that no one there wanted to be identified.
"I’ll keep in touch, if you need to talk to me, just ask for Golden Watts."
The next day Access Page woke up early, washed her face and eaten a soyapple, putting one of her old Hayraku’s branded coats, trotted to the train station and arrived in the Hayraku complex in her usual time, took an elevator, made some small talk with a few other ponies and horses in her way to her cubicle, sit in her place and turned on her cyberdeck. She looked around, breathing nervously.
"Calm down, it’s just another day as usual." She said to herself, taking a deep breath and plugging in the matrix.
The matrix version of the office was a replica of the real world, she looked around and could see one big horse samurai in red armor in a corner, she knew he was I.C., a program designed to take out intruders. She plugged her special chip and an illusion of her started working on her code. She quickly changed her avatar, a stallion horse, something that wouldn’t call for attention. She walked to the virtual elevator, she hated to walk in the matrix, it was always so slow, usually you were allowed to teletransport or even fly and avatars of pegasi, unicorns and even kirins were common, but inside the Hayraku complex’s matrix none of these things were allowed, every avatar should be a representation of the employee and everyone walked everywhere because that was the way they commanded.
She walked into a virtual elevator, giving nervous glances around to be sure there was no one around, she pressed one button on the panel and waited for a few seconds while the elevator arrived. Then a mare arrived, one of the white coated horses, her body delicately crafted by surgery to be the ideal of beauty the stallions almost worshiped, she was small, fragile, silent, eyes and mane of a deep black and her coat was as pure a white as the casing on the new cyberdecks Hayraku Snow -6, which was curious, because snow wasn’t really white, it was more of a grayish and black.
"Good morning, mister horse." The mare said in her beautiful voice.
She swallowed dry and tried not to look at the mare, her real body was sweating cold. As the elevator arrived she entered nervously, afraid of even touching the mare, even though she wouldn’t really feel anything. The mare touched the button that would take her to one of the upper floors, she couldn’t press the button to the maneframe, she simply didn’t had the authorization, so she as casually as she could pressed the button to the common area, which of course came as nervous and clumsy.
"Are you fine, mister horse-sam?"
Page nodded quickly, she hadn’t bothered with changing her voice, one world would ruin her disguise and the mare would call security, being caught with the spyware with her, she would be fired or worst. She gave one pass back, as the elevator moved she started tracing the mare, carefully putting one mark on her.
"You don’t talk a lot; do you, horse-sam?" She said in her melodic voice and her pronunciation had only a small hint of an accent. Access wondered if the mare liked being like that, modified to accommodate some stallion’s ideas of a perfect mare.
Page nodded once more, working quickly on putting two more marks on her as stealthily as she could, hopping that the mare didn’t knew a lot about cyberdecks and hacking to notice the marks. Felling a knot on her throat she pulled the plug on the mare, forcing her cyberdeck to reboot and taking her out of the system. She sighed in relief and using a brute force hack she subverted the elevator routine to take her to the maneframe.
She walked inside the room, she could see the enormous machine that was the virtual representation of the maneframe with giant cables and bright blue cable flashed as data was accessed. She walked to one of the terminals, she did a quick research, looking for a file that no one would be prone to use, normally she would try and hide the spyware in the core of computer, a place where no regular user would look for or dare to mess, but hacking the maneframe core was a big risk, so she settled for some obscure file with some ridiculously long name, she requested the file and in less than one second it was in her hooves.
In the matrix form followed function, so when she loaded the spyware it looked like a big radio-transmitter, she clicked a few buttons on her deck and loaded a wrapper program, quickly changing its appearance for a regular file, she fused it together with the file with the long name and put it back on maneframe, breathed deeply and made her way back to her working station, where her illusion was still working hard on her code as if nothing had happened.
The next day, she was certain that they were going to bust her, throw her in some goddess forgotten jail and it would be the end, but the day progressed as normal, she worked her regular sixteen hours and got back home to a quick dinner and sleep.
When the day of the travel finally arrived, she finished her day in the company, cleaned her deck and table and got a train to the airport. Usually there would be a party or some small celebration, but she was already tainted by the shame of her brother’s demise and they simply wanted to have her away as soon as possible. Her two small boxes where already sent ahead by the company, so all that she had with her was her usual saddle bag with a few necessities as she boarded the suborbital.
The flight had been quick, just under three hours to travel half a world and now she was waiting in the international Canterlot airport, the next part of the trip would be made by a Hayraku helicopter that was supposed to arrive in about thirty minutes. She turned her comlink on, reviewed a few new messages and without nothing else to do, she started looking outside to the old city, its buildings that once where some of the biggest on the country where now diminished by the big Hayraku black office building and the even bigger Ahuizotechnology obsidian pyramid.
"First time in Canterlot?" A striking pony mare with a light purple fur and a short stilled light blue mane said as she watched the city next to Page.
"Yes, in fact it’s my first time out of Neighpon." Access replied, smiling gently, hopping that strange mare to go away.
"You are going to love here; by the way my name is Aura, security in the arcology project and you?"
"Access Page, programmer on the arcology." Page felt a lump of ice in her stomach; the other mare was one of the corporative cops!
The purple mare smiled.
"I knew you were one of those eggheads! Hey, if you got bored of all those zeros and ones, give me a call, I can show you all the best places on the city and I talking about the real city, not that sanitized crap they show you on touristic tours."
"Are you from here?" She looked around, trying to remain calm, was there other officers around, did they knew something already?
"Oh yes! Born and raised in Poniville, believe me, I see it all, grew up in the middle of Apples and zebras, before landing a job with Hayraku."
"It’s true what they say about the violence around the arcology?"
"Kind, most of the locals don’t like the project and after all this is the city where all that Apple thing started, they still have pride in it and resist corporate influence. There are also the zebras, you know how they are. Maybe the worst of the bunch are the diamond dogs, we brought them here to help with the underground part of the construction, but they spent all their nuyen and now are vagrants that can’t even get back to their reservations. There are also the gryphons, but they usually kept to themselves."
"Why don’t they build that thing back in Neighpon them?"
"Land is cheaper around here and they wouldn’t be able to mount the four nuclear generators that power it in Neighpon, they have strict regulations on this kind of technology."
"Wait! What?"
"I suppose you didn’t know about the reactors?"
Page shook her head.
"Yeah, Equestria is one of the few places with loose enough regulations for nuclear contamination. Hayraku expects to prove that the reactors are completely secure with a functional arcology here. Besides it’s close to the Tenochtitlan’s border, you know how the top guys like to rub it in their faces."
Then the announcer called their flight.
"Hey, it’s our flight, are you coming?"
"Just a moment, I want to check my emails before."
"Right, see you there."
Aura trotted to the boarding gate and Access Page picked her portable deck and connected it to the airport’s grid, accessing her email account and quickly checking the shadowlands bbs, there was a single message from Golden Watts.
“They found us.”
Act 0.1: No such thing as a easy job
Access Page was biting her lips anxiously, looking at the scenery through the small window of the helicopter, compulsively tapping her hoof against the floor. The helicopter they had charted was a NMM Dragon, a twin rotor cargo helicopter, most of its belly was full of construction material and the six ponies that where being transferred for the project. Time advanced slowly as the powerful twin engines made its way down the mountain in direction to the small city; even from here she could see the outline of the colossal building that was the arcology, its unfinished skeleton of steel and plasticrete. Trying to ease her mind, she tried to focus on the other passengers, right at her side there was Aura, the security pony seemed unconcerned, listening some music from her comlink, that she noted was one of those new model Meteor 6, those had barely been out for the public for a few days yet and this mare already had one.
Access herself only had an old Meteor 3, it had all the simple functions you would expect from any comlink, it connected her to the world, always collecting and dispersing information’s about its owner, what food dos she like, what she wants to buy, what she really needs to buy and the digital world answered, with a few clicks she could find sales of her favorites socks, recommendations of new trids to watch, maybe information about some new restaurant she would like to try, beside this the comlink also could be used to store all kind of archives, maps, music, trids, exchange email, your personal schedule, and many other depending on the model.
Aura’s comlink was plugged directly into her datajack, the cyberware that allowed the connection of electrical devices directly into one’s brain was so small and elegantly designed and implanted that Access hadn’t even noticed it at first, it probably was much more expensive than her own big and chromed datajack, a standard Hayraku model that almost all of programmers would have implanted as part of a basic benefit package. Access wondered what other implants the mare had, it was not unusual for ponies working in security to have lots of offensive and defensive cyberware, most of the time what restricted them was only how much of a threat they wanted to look and how much nuyen they had, the more discreet an implant was the pricier it gets.
Besides this there was another limit, a more nebulous one that still baffled scientist since Rainbow Dash, it appeared that there was only a certain number of implants that a single pony could take, you pass this limit and you lose something, some of the more religious types got to call it your soul, but most scientist thought of it as cyberware induced psychopathic behavior, the symptoms were basically the same in every individual, the more cyberware one had the more disconnected it grew from ponykind, she lost some essential part of her equinity and so far there was no known cure.
Access felt a chilling sensation through her spine as she realized that this augmented mare was probably sent by the security to catch her, that was why she was making so many questions, asking about her life, about her dreams; Access had to say that she was getting air sick and needed to isolate herself in a simulation for a few minutes to make her stop.
Trying to distract her disturbed mind for a few minutes she tried to focus on her flight companions, looking around she counted three more ponies. At the other side from her there was an obvious couple, the mare had a bleached white coat and was busy at work on her deck, her SIN mark identified her as a senior level programmer, and she was probably going to be Access superior. Her companion was a yellow pony stallion, deep asleep. The fifth was the more mysterious of the bunch, he was a young bulky horse, barely out of his teenagers years, his coat of such an intense black that Access doubted it was natural and his eyes were cybernetics, pure white and like nothing she had ever seen, what he was doing here was a mystery, maybe he was another security agent, just waiting to jump on her at the first signal of problem.
Her heart was racing inside her chest, the flight seemed to take forever, now they were over the fringes of the city, she could see the popular housing, the old buildings, most of them in disrepair and almost falling apart, she checked her comlink’s clock again, trying to think how to escape from the trap they were surely waiting to spring on her as soon as they landed, she would have wanted to escape in Canterlot, the city was big enough that she felt sure that she could disappear in its alleys and cheap hotels, just like in one of those spy trids, but Aura seemed to know what she was thinking and kept close to her, telling stories of her time in Neighpon and all the wonderful things she was going to show Access in Ponyville.
As the helicopter started flying over the new city she saw the abundance of colored lights from all the decorations for the Heart Warming eve, the entire city seemed to be gearing up for the holidays, the only thing brighter were the colossal planting fields shinning with artificial sunlight in the distance, even in the middle of the night ponies and machines toiled the soil and produced most of the food of Equestria, she pictured herself, toiling the field with those ponies, a sentence of at least thirty years as indentured servant on the farms was going to be a happy ending for her when all of this was done.
“Hey, are you seeing that building over there?” Aura called, pointing to a big white modern building with bright white neon lights, on the fringe of the new city, almost on the old city.
“Yes, what it is?” Access answered, trying to appear calm, she at least was learning a lot about history before being sent to jail for the rest of her life.
“That the biggest non-corporative building in the city. Once it was the city library, but after Twilight’s treason the government closed it down and for a long time it just sited there completely abandoned. But just two years ago, the Universal Sisterhood bought the building and reformed it in their biggest temple in Equestria. When I was a filly they used to tell all those stories about matrix ghost haunting the place and that you still could hear the Twilight’s voice if you stood on the right spot, we used to dare each other to see who could stay inside the longer.”
“And have you really seen a ghost?” Access had heard these kind of stories since she was filly, not exactly these ones, but there was always things like, the spirits of those that died connected to the matrix and now haunted it’s dark corners or maybe even of certain places were the matrix and the real world intersected, just because Meteor Shower had based the matrix in his arcane equations from before the Fading, some ponies believed that should be something magic on it, but Access knew better, the matrix was only zeros and ones in a certain order, there was no mysteries for her on the matrix.
“Of course!” Aura replied with a devious grim. “Well, ok, maybe it could have been a stray cat, but I know this pony that knows this zebra that heard from a gryphon that he saw Twilight Sparkle’s ghost!”
“Don’t do them all?” Access giggled for a moment, forgetting about the fact that the security mare was just taking her time before slapping her in chains or something even worse; she straightened her face as soon as she remembered this fact, she can’t be friends with this mare, she is the one that will put her in jail!
“Maybe if you want to see for yourself we could go visit it anytime, I heard that they have a lovely restaurant on the top floor now.” Aura said with confident smile, looking deep into Access’s eyes.
Access tilted her head, what kind of psychopath was this mare! She was inviting her to dinner a few moments before jailing her?
“I don’t really like the universal sisterhood.” Access said coyly.
“But they do such a wonderful work in these fringe communities! They help the people and are always so nice, what is there not to like?”
“After my mother died, my father converted to the sisterhood, he started to get more and more enthralled in it. After me and my brother moved out, he moved to one of their temples, at first we would receive a few cards from him, heartwarming eve and the such, but eventually he stopped and when we tried to look for him, they wouldn’t allow us in, they simply said that he had moved to a higher level and had to cut his links anything that connected him to his old life.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.” Aura answered awkwardly. “I lost my father too; he became addicted to BTL’s”
Better Than life, was a form of virtual drug, it usually came in the form of an exhilarating experience, some of them were innocuous enough, like a first kiss or a night of intense sex, but they were altered to feel better than real life, more intense, happier. Use it long enough and the real world becomes bleaker, darker; soon you wouldn’t want to go back to the real world, you become addicted.
“If you don’t mind me asking, how did you mother died?” Aura asked in a hush, seeing the normally confident and extrovert mare so quiet was strange to Access.
“Work accident, she was an independent programmer and one day she stumbled over black ice while mining a few gigas of data from a big company.” She felt the pang of pain that came with messing in an old wound.
Access left out that not only her mother had taught her most of what she knew, but that she had been fried entering in a Hayraku server.
“Mine as killed by a gang in Ponyville, they call themselves Nigtmares, she committed the mistake of standing in the wrong corner and two ponies stabbed her.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Access couldn’t believe she was having an emotional moment with the mare sent to capture her.
“Don’t be, it was a long time ago and besides you didn’t knew.” Aura forced a smile, even though she had teary eyes.
“If you don’t mind me changing the subject, but who is that horse?”
“Him? He is the son of director Daiki, apparently he ended up mixed with some bad crowd in Neighpon; some group called Otakus. His father decided he needed some vacations on the uncivilized lands to learn some respect.”
“Really, what did he do?” Access asked; she knew it was rude, but if she was going to jail, at least she was going to sate her curiosity.
Aura smiled and answered. “Apparently they caught him snooping around in some of the maneframes of the arcology. So the old horse decided that if he liked the arcology so much, he could go and work on it for a few months.”
“So that’s where he got those eyes? His dad must have paid a fortune for them, I never have see implants like those; they are really pretty.”
“In fact… Oh, it’s time to land, fast your seatbelt and it would be good for you to lay down, with your sickness. I can tell you when to open your eyes.” Aura said with a smile on her muzzle that Access could almost believe was honest.
Access fastened her seatbelt, in her mind the countdown for disaster approached zero as she felt the helicopter getting ready to land, the metallic structure shuddering under the power of the two massive engines, she closed her eyes and laid down, this way at least they couldn’t say that she resisted arrest.
The helicopter touched down and with a whinnying of hydraulics its rear ramp opened, flooding the cargo hold with the artificial lights of the landing pad and before they could get free of their seatbelts there was already a team boarding the helicopter, probably to make sure that the cargo was in order. Access tilted her head as she saw the team, it was… strange. The team leader was an old zebra, followed closely by two diamond dogs and behind those there were two ponies. She always knew that things where more diverse in Equestria than in Neighpon, but to see a team like that was unexpected, the Hayraku company had always been… selective with their recruitment.
The zebra on the front got up on two legs, a pair of pistol barrels coming out of his yellow jumpsuit’s sleeves.
“Fillies and colts, stay in your seats, remain calm and nothing will go wrong!”
The NMM Predator was possible the second or third most famous gun in the world, it was a heavy and powerful pistol, chambering .45 rounds and capable of semi auto fire, easy to clean and repair and with options for mouth-grip, saddle-grip and even hoof clamps. It was the number one weapon of choice for personal protection amongst professionals of the area. Access always wanted to see one, but now as she had one pressed against the back of her head, all that she could think of where the gruesome pictures in the newspapers of ponies with their brains splattered. The zebra had chosen her as a hostage, one hoof circling tightly her neck, the other pressing the pistol against her head.
The zebra was slowly backing away, pulling Access with him, one of the diamond dogs had a submachine gun in his paws trained on the other passengers and the other had a small container that he had recovered from the back of the helicopter; the two ponies where behind, covering their rear with smaller pistols.
“Stay calm, everypony! We are here for this small box and this pony is our exit ticket, if no one here alerts the guards, she will be returned safe and sound.” He spoke in a controlled voice, a bit hoarse.
Slowly they backed away, Access Page sweating coldly as she saw the other passengers, the horse was unfazed, his piercing white eyes looking at the criminals; the couple was huddled together and Aura was still laying on her place, but Access could feel her gaze, her bright intense purple eyes scanning the place, she could see her muscles tensing and her respiration accelerating, she tried to warm her captor, but he diverted his sight for just a moment as he was going down the ramp…
Aura leapt into action in the blink of an eye, turning her body and pointing her left hoof to the zebra, a hidden augmentation throwing a small blade with great velocity and deadly precision, her right eye was glowing with an artificial luminescence. The blade stuck the zebra on his hoof, discharging immediately a potent shock that made his left hoof twitch in electric spasm, the blade had hit with cybernetic precision, frying the electronic firing mechanism of the NMM predator.
“No one is getting out of here with her!” Aura said in a calm, cold voice, her internal radio trying to enter in contact with the security and ask for backup, but the signal appeared to be jammed.
The two diamond dogs charged her, now Access could notice their differences, the first one had a light brown coat and appeared to be much older, the younger had a white coat and appeared much stronger, bulging with muscles that Access suspected were probably grafts, long metallic claws unsheathing from his knuckles. Aura reacted with trained grace, dodging the older and bucking the younger on the head before he could close his sharp claws on her. The older tried again, throwing the box at his backpack and this time leaping at her with both claws extended, Aura dodged the pounce attack with ease, but the older dog had predicted her movements, twisting his body and hitting her with a double kick on her belly, planting two purple bruises on her side. Aura let out a long breath and charged at the dog, the experienced diamond dog readied to counter attack.
As the pony charged the older dog, the younger had recovered, took his submachine gun and let out a burst of fire in the direction of the pony. Aura would never have noticed the bullets in her direction, if not for her implanted echolocation device, she jumped out of the way of the bullets in a blur of movement, the bullets barely missing hitting the older diamond dog; She felt pain from excess heat the augmentations were dumping on her body, but she needed to keep going, later she would care about the internal damage, now she had ponies to save.
The younger diamond dog kept firing, quickly reloading and firing once again, Aura closing on him with each dodge, her internal computers and augmentations working in combination with her trained body to make an efficient killing machine. She closed on him at the time he was shooting one last burst that she easily deflected with a strike against his paw and a second more powerful hoofpunch against his jaw, sending thousands of volts through it.
The old zebra was back up, recovered from the spasm, biting the blade craved in his fore hoof and taking it out with a muffled grunt of pain.
“Password, brick her, now!” The zebra screamed to one of the ponies at the back, he knew that bringing him together had been a mistake, he is an amateur, completely green, but he had been in a hurry and no other regular decker was free.
Password was a young pony colt decker, his coat was dyed black and he had deep purple eyes and a short grey mane and tail, still wet behind his ears and to be honest, still learning his craft, most of his runs so far had been simple jobs, nothing much more than entering somepony email’s account or stealing a few gigas of paydata from one server or other, right now he was desperately keeping the communications jammed and browsing through his list of exploits, trying to find one that matched the class of cyberware that the mare was using, his hoofs dancing in the air as he ran programs from his own customized bodysuit, which had the capacity of a overclocked Blueblood Cyber-5 cyberdeck built into its various pockets. A set of goggles and gloves linked to the suit allowed him to execute any program with the blink of an eye.
As Aura was trading punches with the zebra, the older diamond dog pounced her, she barely being able to get out of the way before his claws would have ripped her apart, she felt her muscles aching from the continuous effort, but there was no time to rest, she activated an injection of stimulants and jumped over the diamond dog, hitting both hoofs on his muzzle before he could defend and throwing another electrified blade against the zebra, that this time was able to deflect it. She was getting nervous, the older diamond dog was a pretty good fighter, but was physically weaker than her, the zebra was in better shape, but he didn’t seemed to have any kind of formal training, the younger dog was incredible stronger, but too aggressive. Where the hell was security, she couldn’t hold them forever!
Echo Phony, a white pony mare with golden eyes and mane carefully stilled was conveniently away from all the fighting, she didn’t cared to get her hoofs dirty, but they had brought along three very competent fighters, so she was contempt to just stay away and observe the action, her specialist was another anyway, Password was proficient in manipulating the matrix, but she was proficient in manipulating ponies. She had made unplanned invasion possible, talking or bribing their way through guards and security systems, as far as anyone know they were just another team of freelancer’s contractors here to deliver some special merchandising to some Mr. Pony in the upper floors.
Aura was punching the zebra in the face repeatedly when she noticed the quickly blinking light coming from the pony that was on the back, she took one moment too long to notice what he was doing, she usually kept all her implants carefully isolated from any outside network, but her cyber eyes where constantly receiving input from the outside and the little decker had just beamed a stream of binary right through her cyber eyes and before she could react she felt to the ground, all of her augmentations receiving a command to reset at once.
“Come on, we need to hurry!” The zebra spoke to the crew, grabbing Access Page with them as they run through the door and to the stairs that would lead them into the arcology. Aura couldn’t do anything but look as they ran away with the mare, she wanted to give pursuit, to save Access, fighting to move her limbs, all of the sudden so heavy with metal and plastic. That was when she heard the cry, right at her back, still inside the cargo hold of the helicopter was the couple still huddled together, but now there was blood. During the shooting one of the stray bursts had hit them, the mare had throw herself in front of the colt and now he was crying, trying to wake her up, incapable of realizing what had happened.
Aura not even noticed the horse coming to her side.
"It's time to wake up..." He whispered in her ear and to her surprise he produced a long stream of binary, it was strange, complex and revealing.
Once in the entrails of the gargantuan construction, Echo took front, talking their way through confused and hurried guards and curious salaryponies, talking about a boring incident on the landing pad and how she was late for an important meeting and if they could just let her, her personal detail trough even though she had lost her identity card just this once, she would make sure to put a good word of such an efficient and valuable functionary of the Hayraku corporation on her next meeting. Or maybe they would like to discuss more privately, maybe over a dinner?
As they moved around the colossal structure Access noticed that wherever they go the cameras would simply look the other way or turn off, Password frenetically working with his body suit, a smirk on his face as each camera were defeated and conquered on the matrix.
“It’s important to always have a uniform of the right size to avoid calling attention, now here, spray this over your face.” Echo said and gave her a small bottle that smelled strongly of disinfectant and sweat, Access sprayed a bit over herself, wincing at the smell.
“It has to be so bad?”
“That’s the smell of a pony that worked all day on cleaning duty.” Echo answered.
Only Password and Access complained about taking off their clothes in front of everyone else, the other males and even Echo Phony seemed completely at ease with the situation. But while Access had Neighponese discretion, the decker simply felt useless without the computer in his jumpsuit.
The lower floors of the arcology were dedicated to shopping and other leisure areas open to anypony what made it easy for their small group to disappear amidst the giant crowds that had been attracted by the holiday's sales, differently from the almost completely pony and horse dominated upper floors, on the lower levels there was a greater variety of people, it was Access first impression of real Equestrian diversity and she was amazed to see so many ponies, zebras, diamond dogs and even a few gryphons around, she had seen all of them before on trids, but to actually see them in real life was a different matter and it wasn’t just the other races, the ponies seemed more diverse, she could even spot some unicorn and pegasi posers walking around, in fact Echo had to poke her to make her stop glaring at an young mauve gryphoness. They took a public bus out of the arcology and back into the Poniville proper.
Or so they had hopped. As the bus was nearing the exit heavy doors of steel and plasticrete closed down blocking the exit completely. Access looked as the confused bus drive got out and tried to mess around with the heavy doors, but for no avail.
"I know another route." Echo said and the group jumped out of the bus and back trough the tunnel, the lights had begun to flick and when they walked back into shopping plaza they found all the doors closed, the people around was a bit uncomfortable, but a voice in the speakers assured everyone that it was just a glitch, that soon it would be solved.
"So much for a easy job, eh?" The older diamond dog said with a grim.
"No, they wouldn't do this just for us." Password replied quickly. "Would they?"
"No, we are small fish." Echo assured him. "This is just bad luck."
"Doesn't matter, we need to keep moving." The zebra spoke.
"Lead the way, Horus." The younger dog said, a hint of annoyance in his voice.
They took an cargo elevator to the privative garages, but once again all the doors were locked shut and no signal of them coming open.
"Password, open one of the doors." The zebra, Horus, gave the command and before he had finished speaking the pony took out his jumpsuit from his bag and seemed relieved from putting it back on. "Druni, we will need a car, can you arrange it?" Horus asked the younger dog that simply nodded and walked towards one of the parked cars.
"What's happening?" Access finally decided to ask.
"Golden Watts contracted us to extract you from the arcology. We really didn't expected the chromed bodyguard or that problem with the doors." Horus explained as he took back his functional gun and strapped it to his right hoof.
"Horus, you better see it!" Echo called, she had been messing around with her comlink and seemed scared.
Horus and Access peeked over Echo's comlink where a mare in a sharp suit noticed from a helicopter over the arcology, she focused on the wreckage of several helicopters and cars around, apparently the arcology's self defense system had come online and was shooting anything that tried to get too close.
Horus tilted his head. "Skande..." he whispered.
A laughter of pure joy filled the empty garage, They all looked to Password, the decker was laughing loudly and crazily.
"She is here!" Password screamed. "Celestia ex machina!"
Author's Note
Proofread by Chysonallite
Chapter slightly rewritten, but as you can see the ending has changed a lot ^^
Act 1: Celestia ex Machina
"There is little stopping us from creating our own cybernetic post-pony tyrant and the idea that so many ponies embrace it scares me.” Moon Light on the dangers of creating Artificial Intelligence.
Act 1: Celestia ex machine
Naomi Legrange was getting really impatient as she looked at her comlink once again to check the time; barely two minutes had passed from the last time she had checked. She looked angrily to the heavy doors that blocked her way out.
“Stupid pony holiday…” She muttered under her breath, she was supposed to be meeting with her friends on the old city to buy new clothes, but her mother decided it would be best for her to spend some quality time with her little pony sister and sent the two of them to buy heartwarming eve’s gift to their dad.
Naomi gave a quick look to were her little sister was playing with some other fillies; the orange filly was easy to find at least and she seemed completely undisturbed with the damned lock down; playing with some creepy doll one of the fillies had brought with her.
With certain disgust Naomi noticed that one of the fillies had cybernetic eyes; what kind of parent would give those implants to a child? Those ponies were crazy!
The speakers come to life with another message saying that absolutely everything was fine, they shouldn’t worry, and everything would be sorted out in just a few more minutes.
She checked her comlink, they were saying that for at least half an hour now and so far no signal from the doors opening sometime soon; she had heard some rumors that there was a door open on the other side of the arcology, but the transportation system was down and walking there was no easy task. If she had been alone, she probably would have tried it, but there was no way she would be able to convince her little sister to walk such a distance without lots of crying and whining.
She asked for a milkshake through her comlink and tried to connect with the outside once again without success… It probably was some stupid marketing ploy from the guys upstairs to make them buy more stuff. Who knows, maybe they would keep them locked all the night and then try to sell them hotel rooms! She could try to play some ‘Battleduty: Alicornfall’, but Gilt would probably want to kill her if he knew she played without him.
She smiled thinking about the nerdy colt, maybe she could buy something for him later… Where is her little sister?! She got up from her place looking angrily around; she had told her a thousand times to stay close!
“Wire?” Naomi screamed for her little sister amidst the confusion of ponies that was around her. “Live Wire! Come here immediately!” She screamed again, where that stupid filly could have gone?
She run to one of the security guards, a pony in a red security uniform and some blue armband, she hoped it meant he was higher rank.
“Hey, mister, can you help me? My little sister is missing!” Naomi tried anxiously.
The security officer stared at her with could blue cybernetic eyes and said nothing.
“Come on! Don’t be like that!” Naomi screamed at him and as she turned to continue her search she heard other screams coming from the ponies around her; names being shouted repeatedly on the air, ponies running around like crazy searching everywhere.
No, it couldn’t be happening! She kept screaming for Live Wire as loud as she could, but her screams got lost in the midst of so many others.
Ponies rushed to the security officers begging for help and the kept their stone dead silence; at least they are morons and not simply racists, Naomi thought. Soon things got physical, some angry parent tried to attack one of the officers and he got tasered; his wife took him away screaming bloody murder about suing him out of his lungs.
Naomi closed her eyes and took a long breathe; this was not the time to get angry. Ponies got angry and scared for any stupid reason, but she wasn’t a pony. While their ancestors were eating grass in green plains, her ancestors had been hunting trough dangerous mountains and making tools out of stone and wood.
She searched in her purse until she found her little sister’s coat; her mother had insisted that she would carry it around in case Wire got cold, now she blessed her mother’s foresight. She pressed the coat against her beak and sniffed profoundly, her ancestors had evolved to hunt by vision, but their sense of smell was well developed too.
She zoned out the confusion around her, another parent had been violently subdued by another officer, and followed her nose. The trail was faint, but she managed to follow it through the food plaza and into an elevator…
She cursed herself, there was no way she could keep following her sisters if she had took an elevator to some random floor; hell, with all those bugs around she could have ended in some of the dangerous floors! Naomi shivered at the tough of her little sister walking around in the middle of some automated factory or even playing in the middle of one of the nuclear reactors.
No, she couldn’t give up so easily! She took the stairs and in each floor she sniffed searching for her sister’s particular smell or even the smell of other fillies. She found the traces of smell of foals in almost every floor, all of them always leading into the elevators.
She was getting really uneasy; by the time she heard the staccato of explosions coming from the lower floors she knew there was something really wrong. She clicked on her comlink quickly trying to contact Lone Star, even though she only had a bronze contract she was almost sure that this kind of shit was covered.
A heavy hoof on her shoulders brought her back to reality; one of those mall-security ponies with blue cyber eyes and a blue band on his right hoof was measuring her with his eyes.
“Are you lost?” He asked and Naomi was suddenly aware of the pistol in a hoof holster, weren’t those mall cops supposed to only have tasers or things like that?
“No, I’m just looking for my sister.” Naomi took off his hoof from her shoulder and took a step behind; she looked around and found no one in sight. “Great,” she thought “I’ll probably be shot seven times as a warning.”
“Come with me, we have found your sister and she is waiting for you.” The guard said with an automatic smile that seemed unnatural to Naomi, his facial expressions was just slightly off and those blue cybernetic eyes weren’t helping.
He extended a hoof to her. “Everything will be alright, madam.”
Now she knew that something was really wrong, no security guard had ever talked to her so politely! She took a step back and the guard took a moment to notice her hesitation.
“Come with me now. Your sister awaits you.” He said again and not a hint of anger or annoyance in his voice.
“Bring her here then! I’m not coming with you.” Naomi looked desperately around her, but the floor seemed empty, the sound of the staccato explosion keep coming from downstairs in intervals and now something that she could swear were the screams of ponies came too.
The cop reached for his pistol with his mouth, but Naomi charged him before he could do anything; the teen had grown up amidst play fights and bouts amongst the griffins.
Naomi and the cop flew to the ground; the gun flew from the cop’s mouth and Naomi tried to jump away before the guard could recover from the surprise attack, she hadn’t had any fantasy of winning against the trained pony in a fair fight, but at least she could get away and hide. The pony grabbed one of her forelegs with long metallic fingers that protruded from the tip of his hooves.
She felt to the ground with a loud thud and immediately she felt the taste of blood on her mouth; the pony grabbed her other foot and begun to pull her closer. She twisted and clawed at the pony’s face with her long claws, but no blood was spilled; he seemed to have some kind of protective mesh under his skin.
The cop punched her, his hoof and metallic fingers packed quite a punch, but Naomi knew how to take a beating; she hit him twice on the head with both of her wings, even though they were useless for flight, they still worked pretty well as a solid knot of muscle and bones pretty similar to a punch. Stunned for a moment the cop let her go and Naomi dived for his gun, knowing that there was no way she could win against him unarmed.
“Stop!” She screamed as she held the gun with both paws and took a step back; she had played enough shooters and saw enough action movies to know that if she allowed him to close the distance she would lose her advantage.
The guard charged at her and she dodged out of his way, barely escaping from having her head feathers pulled by the pony. She held the gun pointed at him, breathing quickly and barely being able to see through her bruised left eye.
The cop tried to charge again and this time she shoots him while praying that her parents were right and all those violent videogames had indeed turned her into a cold killer!
She misses entirely and the pony punches her hard on the beak making her lose conscience for an instant.
She realized she had lost at that moment, her conscience holding by a thin thread as the pony kept punching her repeatedly; she still tried to claw at him, but her talons couldn’t pierce his sub-dermal armour and she couldn’t muster the strength to escape from his grip.
Painfully she slipped into unconscious.
Aura was being unmade by tens of skeletal metallic arms that ended in hands of ten fingers each one with a different medical instrument; they worked silently and quickly stripping the artificial flesh that covered her cybernetic implants and for the first time in a long time Aura could see how little of pony she still had. Both her fore and after hooves had been replaced entirely with metallic implants; her eyes were both cybernetic; there was an array of small wires, now exposed, that run from her ears to implants deep into her brain; under her skin was a subdermal armour made of a mesh of Kevlar; and she knew that if the machines dug even deeper they would find her bones laced with ceramic and the artificial glands installed next to her heart.
She tried to move, but it seemed that her hooves had been deactivated and even though she could look around all that she could see were the medical drones, the grey metallic restraints that kept her suspended so the drones could work and the pure ascetic white walls with no door. She had had nightmares like this constantly after her first surgeries; the Matrix was full of ghost stories about cyberponies like her being dismantled by back alley doctors that wanted to steal their cyberware or even by other companies that wished to reverse engineer it.
She screamed and struggled for help, but the machines kept at their work completely unfazed by her resistance.
For her relief a door opened in one of the walls, the structure was so smooth that she wouldn’t have noticed it if her life had depended on it, and the same horse stallion that had practically dragged her here walked in, but his coat had been dyed a pure white and his mane was purple now.
“What are you doing?” She screamed at him. “Let me out at once!” She demanded.
But the stallion remained unfazed, inspecting her with his pure white eyes for a few minutes before exiting trough the same wall.
With a buzz the medical drones jumped to life once again, but this time they begun to work on Aura’s cyber hooves and two more appeared at her back holding a pair of big metallic wings in their claws. Aura screamed as she felt them drilling into her back.
Access strapped the NMM predator to her right hoof following carefully Horus’s instruction, the gun felt heavier than she had imagined, and tried moving her hoof around until she got the handle of it.
“Right, now try to hit that carriage’s lantern.” Horus pointed to a motorized carriage no more than 9 meters away. “Pistols are short range weapon; they work great until about nine meters, after that you need to really skilled or really lucky.”
Access nodded and extended her hoof, pointing at the carriage’s lamp and with a slight movement of her fetlocks, she would need to remember that the trigger was so sensitive, she flinched with the powerful explosion and the shot fire wildly.
“Yeah, you will need to get used to that.” Horus giggled. “Try again.”
Access nodded, she was still uncomfortable with the weapon, but Horus had been pretty insistent that she had one after the shooting had started; Password had showed them a live feed from some security cameras that showed the arcology’s security subduing and even killing ponies and other creatures.
“Silly ponies, they just need to submit and She will make everything better again.” He had said and walked into one of the elevators; vanishing without a trace.
Horus had moved the rest of the team for one of the lower garages after that, one of the places that weren’t fully finished and lacked any kind of security surveillance system; he hopped that all that concrete over their head would protect them from whatever it was spreading into the matrix and hide them from the security long enough for them to find an escape route.
The zebra consulted his comlink, making sure it was completely disconnected from the local matrix, Echo was taking too long; she was only supposed to do a quick assessment of the situation in the upper floors and report back as quickly as possible. The diamond dogs were still working on one of the cars, trying to bypass its securities locks so they could use it to move around.
“The manure has hit the fan.” Echo said as she walked out of the elevator. “The security is completely insane! They are transferring everyone they capture to the hospital levels, after that they seem to disappear.”
Horus relaxed and hid his blades once again in his janitor uniform. “And the helipads?”
“Impossible, the arcology is shooting anything that flies too close. I also checked the maintenance tunnels and they seem to be completely locked.”
“Right…” Horus begun to walk in a circle with both of his fore hooves massaging his temples. “Right, right! We can’t go under and we can’t go over and if we try to go straight we will need to deal with a dozen of armed secure guards!”
“What about you?” Echo asks Access. “Do you know any escape route we missed?”
Access denies with a simple head movement; she had made extensive work for the arcology project before, but only in the matrix systems.
“Great!” Horus screams and kicks a small pebble. “Just great! I’ll kill Watts if we ever get out of this mousetrap!”
“I could find something on the matrix.” Access suggested. “I still have my access codes.”
“After what happened to Password? No, what if we could produce some explosives?” The zebra suggested, but he knew how dangerous it would to assemble the material for it.
“We don’t have any other choice!” Access replied angrily.
“You are not connecting to the matrix!” Horus spoke decidedly. “The whole point of this job is to take you out and having you turn into whatever Password turned won’t make it any easier!”
Naomi was slowly brought back to conscious by the pain of her wounds; the gryphon took a moment to notice the long metallic arms working on her bullet wounds. She quickly noticed she was completely naked and strapped to what appeared to be some kind of medical cot and looking around she could see several more cots were ponies, zebras, horses and even a few griffins were being treated by the strange robots with long metallic arms. There were some ponies that walked around and seemed to check the patients from time to time with their cold and unfeeling white eyes, for some reason all of them seemed to be unicorn posers even the zebras and horses.
“What are you going to do with me?” Naomi screamed. “Where is my sister?”
But the horse walked away uncaring to the next cot. Some other ponies were waking up by now and soon their voices called for help or loved ones as the ponies with white eyes looked over them. Naomi watched as a pair of ponies with glowing orange eyes came and took one of the cots away and disappeared in an elevator.
The pony took a step back, a hoof pressed against his neck as blood gushed out of the wound and Naomi quickly undid the bindings on her paws and the other talon; panting desperately and thinking that at any moment she would be recaptured, strapped to the table once again and made to suffer whatever weird experiment was going on.
She opens her wings and feel the pain of muscles that were barely used as she fell towards the ground and her wings at least slowed the fall a bit; the moment she had seen the big metallic wings of the ponies were simply too heavy to be used to such a purpose, even their normal wings would have barely any use now that they couldn’t use magic anymore. She cursed her ow inexperience on how to use her own wings since she couldn’t maneuver or even have any measure of control during her controlled fall.
She slammed hard against the floor and rolled with the impact to at least mitigate the damage. Even in her desperation she hesitated for a moment as she looked the dozens of machines dismantling the entirety of the lower floors under the supervision of ponies with purple eyes. They looked at her and she ran towards the stairs as the first ponies begun to run after her.
She couldn’t stop and think, instead she ran towards one of the other stairways hopping to disappear before her chasers could see her.
The door behind her slammed open before she was halfway to the next stairway and she wanted to curse the gods once again, but was without breath.
She almost threw herself down the stairs as the trotting sounds got closer and closer. She bashed another door open and to her relief was a small and cramped janitor’s closet. She quickly locked the door and controlled her respiration even though her heart seemed to want to explode.
She heard the sounds of the ponies running downstairs and was sure that they would barge inside at any moment; she held a screwdriver in her right talon decided to not go back. She waited and waited until she was right that they weren’t coming back before she could relax and unwind for just a few moments.
“No, this couldn’t be happening.” She whispered even though she wanted to scream, but knew that she would be dead the instant she did it.
She took some paper and duct tape to improvise a bandage over her wound just so she had something to do. She kept awake in the small room for what she could swear had been an eternity before finally risking open the door and venturing outside once again. As silent as she could walked down the stairs until she was once again on the shopping floors and peeked through the door only to find the place crawling with security ponies with their determined blue eyes and sharp looking metallic wings patrolling the entire place as more and more people were being transferred to the upper floors, probably to the strange clinics from where she had just escaped.
She took small steps back and kept going down.
Gale Warning felt nervous in his little fortress on the top floors of the arcology, being the security chief of the project had given him a few perks; his favourite had always been the secure office that he had customized so it could remain isolated from the rest of the arcology in case of attack. His paranoid behaviour was famous amongst the CEO from Hayraku as well as his brutal efficiency in dealing with problems.
He checked once more the external sensors to make sure nothing had penetrated the first line of defence. Earlier some of those ponies with glowing blue eyes had tried to pass by his personal defence force, but it had held valiantly against whatever forces they had managed to amass against him. He had made sure that his forces could take on whatever could have been amassed; his matrix connections were isolated from the main server and heavily secured.
“What are you thinking…?” He passed slowly through his room and tried to divine what the pony that now was in control of the arcology would do. His best bet was that this was some kind of decker working for another company trying to sabotage Hayraku; his only other guess was that this was something worse, the reason he had spent the last fifty years in a self-imposed exile and always looking over his shoulders even though he had at his disposal the best private troopers on the world and the best security technology available on the market.
“He is dead.” He screamed and punched his own table. He sit on is chair and sent an order to one of his guardians to scout around; he needed to know who was behind it all and besides he still would have five more guardians in case of emergency, beside those he still had about thirty centimetres of steel, and in last case he always a small arsenal with him.
He was secure that nopony could get to him, but he wasn’t afraid of a pony.
Horus didn’t knew what to do; the zebra was a veteran of the shadows and more than a few times he had been crossed or been imprisoned in some place, but every single time he always had had some idea of what to do and how to react. Now, however he simply couldn’t understand what was happening around him and so he kept the group moving around trough the maintenance tunnels until he could come up with a decent plan to take them away from this death trap.
Earlier they had risked a small peak on the lower floors to try and find a door more vulnerable than the heavy concrete ones from the parking garage, but what they had seen was a floor with dozens upon dozens of ponies, horses and diamond dogs, all of the with eerie orange cybernetic eyes, hard at work dismantling most of the lower floors with help of heavy machinery. He had no idea what they were building, but he knew it was a bad idea to linger around for too long and so they quickly walked away and up towards the living floors where he expected to at least find a decent place to eat and rest for a moment, maybe with some luck they could even get more news from the outside.
Echo worked quickly and silently on the door lock, the mare had a philosophy that all doors, real ones and metaphoric ones, were always open, but some simply didn’t know that yet. With a loud click the mare smiled as the door unlocked and she quickly hid her tools back in her silvery cigarette case.
“After you, darling.” She pushed the door open slightly for Horus.
The zebra readied his heavy pistol and slowly opened the door.
What he saw were three big metallic wolves with their fangs bared and drooling some kind of caustic mixture that sizzled as it touched the floor. The zebra had seen his fair share of security drones in his life, but those seemed almost alive! And as they jumped over him he trembled as he saw the mangled shapes of ponies locked amongst the plaques of armour.
Author's Note
yeyyy I'm back!
Act 1.1: Friendship will be magic
"There is no greater sorrow, than to recall a happy time when miserable" Rarity's lasts words on Equestria .
Horus felt the fangs digging on his shoulder and his jumpsuit dissolving under the action of the fast acting digestive enzymes that the creature secreted. He winced in pain and shoot point blank with his remaining heavy pistol, the powerful 15mm bullets were made to rip through almost any kind of personal protection and the wolfs were no exception. Blood and oil spilled from the creature.
The two diamond dogs attacked together with short bursts of their submachine guns, ripping the creatures to pieces before they could reach the rest of the group. Echo was in the back with Access, she only had a small holdout pistol for emergencies.
But even as the wolf fell more of them were coming and with them appeared strange ponies with yellow eyes. Druni and Skande quickly reloaded their guns as the group begun to retreat through the maintenance tunnels.
Druni grabbed one of the creatures that was jumping against him and slammed it against the wall, squishing oil and blood. Even before he could bring his submachine gun to bear another creature was already over him biting deep on his forearm, he felt pain shot through his entire body as the digestive enzymes of the creatures dissolved his flesh and muscle easily. He sent a command to his implanted glands and the pain diminished as the artificial hormones worked hard to stop the bleeding and the pain. He touched the gun against the creature foreheads and unleashed a short burst against it.
He slashed with his long claws against another creature that jumped over him with bared fangs, hitting the creature in middle of the jump and throwing it back. But before he could react another of the cyber wolves bit hard on his back and this time Druni screamed in pain.
In a mist of rage he slashed and pierced the creatures, not only the cybernetic wolves, but also the strange ponies with yellow eyes. He felt amazing as his heart pumped furiously in his chest and his arms shattered the creatures with ease. He felt true and natural, in these rare moments that he could give all of himself where when he really felt alive, connected to the animal he once had been before civilization had stripped him of it.
He slammed another of the cyber aberrations against the floor, he was getting quickly soaked in blood and oil, but he didn’t care for that. He rips the head of another wolf and quickly jumps over one of the small ponies with yellow eyes that seemed to be controlling the wolves and raised his claws to kill the aberration.
And he stopped.
Looking into those eyes he felt weak, incapable of doing anything.
“Bad dog!” The soft pink pony said and Druni almost fell to the ground in shame.
He couldn’t divert his gaze from the small creature and couldn’t bring himself to hurt him.
“Sit!” The pony with yellow eyes ordered and Druni obeyed promptly, remaining immobile even as the cyber wolves killed him.
The pony felt happiness seeing as his stare had worked; he would have felt disgust for the blood bath in front of him, but now he was beyond it. His brain was being filled by a special selection of neurotransmitters to give him a transcendental feeling of happiness. No, the blood wasn’t important; the only thing important was to make the Princess happy.
Aura was crying alone in a dark corner, for the first time in long years she was seeing they world without her cybernetic enhancements. Even her artificial glands seemed to be missing, she had tried all the possible thought commands, but not a single enhancement was responding.
“Why did you let me die?” Her dead mother kept asking between her screams of pain, blood continually pouring from her stab wounds.
“I hate you! You let me die!”
“You never will be good enough. You are little more than a mechanical doll.” Her boss said with a disappointed voice. “Next we will take out your brain and then maybe you will be useful”
“You abandoned me!” Her ex-marefriend said. “You kept allowing then to change your body and now you can’t love me anymore!”
She had tried to fight them at first, but it was all for nothing. If she tried to attack them they would simply disappear, if she tried to talk with them they wouldn’t hear. Sometimes they would change; sometimes they would look at her in silence. Time seemed to disappear in a haze. She had no idea how long she had been locked in this tartarus.
A light shone in the darkness and vanquished the creatures. She looked to the light afraid of seeing more of the ghosts of her past appearing, but what she saw was a creature of pure white and light.
“My little pony, you don’t need to be afraid anymore.” The being of pure light said in a motherly voice.
Aura lifted her swollen eyes tentatively, the light almost blinded her eyes after so long in the darkness, but as she got used to the radiance she saw a beautiful alicorn that seemed so big and powerful, but she knew that the creature wouldn’t hurt her.
“Celestia…?” She could remember only vaguely her classes in pre-Fading history.
“I’m here to help you, Electric Aura.” She spoke graciously and there were no more shadows around them. “But for that I need your help.”
Aura knew something was wrong, a small part of her brain told her that it was impossible.
“Aura, do you accept my friendship?”
She simply couldn’t say no to her, she would vanquish the darkness of the world, she would end this era of cynicism and greed to bring back magic to this world!
The alicorn showed her a vision of her world rebuilt and Aura completely remade in her old self, no more chrome under her skin and no more need to prove worthy. All of that could be done only if Aura helped her. There would be pain and fire, but in the end they would have sunshine and rainbows.
It all faded and Aura slowly felt the sensation coming back to her body and a wave of panic as she felt that even more of her body had been replaced by chrome. The sensation lasted only a moment until she remembered Celestia’s promise of restoring her body to its natural state.
Slowly she got up from the surgery table remembering the first days after her first surgeries and how hard it had been to control the cyberware then. She took steps carefully and felt her new legs moving with ease and more power than she had ever had. Data was pouring constantly through her eyes and at first she thought she would end up crazy, but whatever they had made to her brain now she could take it all with ease. The wings were the worst, the constant weight of the metal and plastic on her back was a constant remind that she was now a poser, she hated the wings!
Something clicked inside and changed inside her without her conscious brain even realizing.
She flared her wings and heard the sound of sharpening knives they made as the sharpened feathers moved and smiled knowing they would cleave clean trough any pony. After all, they weren’t so bad, she could get used to it.
“Your help is needed.” Celestia beamed in her mind and she immediately bowed.
“Yes, my princess.” Aura answered promptly. Suddenly her mind was updated with all the information and status of all the agents in the arcology, and the data they had on the conversion of the captured ponies. She was sure she could deal with any problem that had arrived.
“You have been progressing quickly in your training, my little element of loyalty, but now it’s time to find new friends.” The princess said and Aura rejoiced.
Sound Wave felt pain running through his body, but it was quickly numbed through the quick injection of powerful painkillers by his automated systems. The system, however, had a small glitch: the dosage wasn’t enough to dull the pain completely.
Something exploded at his side; the detonation sent some weird kind of shrapnel so sharp that it passed through his teammate’s armour as if it wasn’t even there. The automated combat system quickly shifted strategy to take into account an area of effect weapon that could eliminate personal with a single hit and transmitted it to all members of the squad rough their private network in just a few seconds.
Sound Wave moved almost unconsciously, his mind was being flooded with the new fire patterns as the enemies advanced steadily. A minuscule part of him registered that the enemy would be unsettling for any normal pony, their orange and blue shinning eyes, the way they advanced trough heavy machine gun fire and how they moved in some eerie synchrony, but in his conscious mind there was only the tactical patterns chosen by the tactical system that linked him to the rest of the squadron.
Pain flared trough his body as another bullet from the strange ponies found a chink in his armour. More painkillers flooded his mind, but as always it wasn’t enough to completely dull the pain. He could have the glitch fixed at any time, but he had never reported it.
The battle had been raging like that for at least a few hours by now and what once had been an elegant office complex was now a devastated battlefield, Sound Wave’s squad was used to be mostly an intimidation force and this was their first real combat since the Apple’s riot a few years ago. They had trained exhaustively in simulated scenarios; they had played in war games against the best of Hayraku and won with minimal losses. The automated system that used their brains as organic software was running at maximum capacity to keep calculating news manoeuvres, but whatever intelligence controlled the ponies with shinning eyes seemed to have more cycles than the combined processing power of the entire squad.
One of the ponies with shinning blue eyes and big sharp metallic wings got close to Sound wave, he tried to retreat, but the pegasus-poser was faster and the metallic feathers slices one of his titanium armour plates. Pain bursts trough Sound Waves mind, but with it also came the memories.
The pain was easy to endure since there was little still living inside him, most of his body had been replaced by chrome, his mind was hooked to several informational systems and he was covered in titanium plating. He hadn’t seen himself in a mirror since the conversion process, but he didn’t needed, he knew that he was looking exactly as his squad mates. Usually he wouldn’t even be really conscious, his mind was kept sedated by chemical cocktails, but pain brought a few precious memories of his past. A Molotov burning made him remember his name; his leg being blown out by an improvised explosive device and he could get glimpses of his mother’s face; having half of his plating cut by some freaky poser with a fetish for swords and he could remember his short time on the streets of Yoma island.
He smashed the pegasus-poser head with his armoured hooves, but just as soon three others came out of nowhere with their sharp wings making sounds like sharpening knives.
“Retreat to zone B! Lock the heavy doors!” Gale Warning commanded and the tactical system flooded their minds with the pre-planned patterns for a retreat. They were losing ground fast.
Access ran as she never had before, adrenaline pumped through her veins and her lungs seemed to be on fire as she tried to keep ahead of the strange cyber-wolves and their dripping mandibles. She cursed all those time she hadn’t gone jogging with Azure.
She turned a corner and another at random, simply trying to lose the creatures in the endless maintenance tunnels that permeated the superstructure of the Arcology, however the metallic abominations kept hot on her trail. Access Page kicked opens the first door she saw, her muscles seemed to be on fire and every breath sent a jolt of paint rough her body.
The leading wolf jumped over her and Access turned, whispering to herself that the creature wasn’t a pony anymore as she pulled the trigger of the heavy pistol NMM Predator strapped to her right hoof twice. The first bullet ripped right through the sheets of metal and the soft flesh of the pony inside. A nauseating mix of blood and oil gushed out, but the second one flew wild and embedded itself on a wall. Access screamed in pains as the creature’s fangs closes on her shoulder, missing her neck for just a few centimeters, and it’s caustic saliva crackles in contact to her clothe, corroding it away and burning her fur and skin.
She quickly put the pistol muzzle against the creature’s chest and pulled the trigger as fast as she could. She pushed the creature away, feeling its teeth cutting hard against her skin and bringing tears to her eyes. Later she would cry for it, but right now she needed to focus on staying alive.
She walked out through the open door and into a big habitation module. The place that once had housed the salaryponies in small and clean apartments was now in ruins. Several houses had their doors ripped open and many others were stained with blood and other bodily fluids. She ran into the first house with a working door and locked it behind her just as another wolf begun to bang against the door.
Access recovered her breath, her hooves were aching and her heart seemed like it wanted to escape trough her throat. The door wouldn’t hold for too long, she could see the hinges ready to give away at any moment as the heavy creature kept throwing himself against it.
She inspected the little apartment, but there was no other exit. Whoever inhabited this place last wasn’t worth even a small window.
She looked at the door, it was beginning to crack.
She looked around desperately; there was a single room, a small kitchen, and a small room with a big screen and a deck… It hit her suddenly, all the rooms probably had access to the arcology’s matrix and there was no way they could handle it all trough a wireless network. She throws the television to the side and behind it there are the cables she was looking. She follows them to the wall and… Yes! She almost jumps in glee, all those cables running through the houses would require lot’s of maintenance and some way of accessing them, running under the houses there is a small maintenance tunnel, barely enough for her to craw in. She grabs the deck, an old model Canterlot-tech 7, and crawls into the tunnel just as the door breaks down.
She creeps trough the small tunnel, the wolf was roaring behind her, but he was too big to enter in the tunnel. She kept going until she couldn’t hear the beast at her back and couldn’t see the light anymore. She kept going in the darkness, feeling her path with her hooves. She needed to find the others, discover what had happened with the others after they had been separated in the tunnels.
She kept crawling until the only sound was the constant humming that came from the cables and her own beating heart. She kept going, too afraid of getting close to the light that filtered through the cracks into the tunnel and alerting one of the cyberwolves to her presence.
Her stomach eventually got the best out of her, the smell of cooking beans and hay was coming through a small crack, she slowly crawled towards it. The smell seemed to be coming from inside an apartment, she moved as best as she could trough the small space, trying to peek inside, but there was a big screen and the only light on the other side seemed to be a small and trembling fire light.
Putting her fear aside she kicked the small cover and crawled inside the apartment, scratching herself as she exited. The room was almost exactly equal to the one where she had escaped the wolf. The only difference was the small fire in the center, built using pieces of wood from kitchen utensils. There was a can of food over the fire. She moved tentatively to the can…
A big creature pounced over her. She reacted clumsily trying to use her pistol, but the creature used her claws to pin her hoof on the ground. A flash of metal in the dark, the creature raised some kind of knife. Access tried to punch and kick, but the creature barely felt it.
And then the creature stopped.
“Your eyes aren’t shinning.” Naomi spoke, putting her screwdriver to the side.
Access now could see better her attacker. She was barely more than a teenager griffon with feathers tinted mauve and a leather jacket that was stained with at first seemed to be some kind of paint, but then Access noticed the metallic smell coming from it over the smell of the food.
“Shinning?” Access asked as she checked her pistol, the griffon didn’t seemed to have any implants, but she still could be crazy.
“You know, like those other ponies. They have shinning eyes and try to kill you.” Naomi put her screwdriver back into her tool belt.
They kept in silence for a moment, Access got back on her hooves and they both kept staring at each other, trying to decide if they could thrust each other.
“Sorry…” Naomi finally said, not really knowing what she should say to a pony she had just tried to kill. “Do you want some food?” She offered.
“Thanks,” Access replied happy not only for having something to eat, but some company.
The two of them eat mostly in silent, only exchanging a few bits of conversation awkwardly. Access just said she was programmer for the company that had been transferred from Neighpon and Naomi spoke a bit of her sister and how she was looking for her, but said nothing about how she got hurt or the blood on her jacket.
“Where are you going now?” Access asked after the meager meal.
“Up,” Naomi said as she smothered the flames, putting the two of them in complete darkness. “I saw them transferring some of the young ponies to the top floors.”
“You can’t,” Access said. “The top floors are reserved for the executives and if this place is like the Hayraku’s apartments back in Neighpon you will need an executive access card.”
Naomi cursed under her breath. “Where do I find one of those?”
Access shuddered. “Probably with some of the high level managers.”
“And where I find one of those?”
“They spend most of their time in the top floors, sometimes you can find some of them on the shopping areas, but they don’t like mixing with regular ponies.” Access explained. “But there is another option.”
“Which one?”
“I’m going to meet with a few colleagues in the security officer, they have these master-key systems that can basically open any door on the arcology, our plan was to use it to open one of the garage doors, but we were chased by the wolves and got separated.”
“Do you mind if I come along?”
Access nodded, but then remembers that they were in almost total darkness. “Sure, I guess there is no problem.”
“Thanks.”
The silence extended between them. Naomi couldn’t believe she was really talking with another pony, after all that had happened she never thought she would find any more normal ponies amidst this dammed place. She still felt the pain in her wrist and, even worst, every time she closed her eyes there were the unnatural shinning orbs were once had been the eyes of a pony, and a maddening grim that persisted even as she stabbed him. She had never seen him before, but now she was sure that she never would be able to forget his face.
She kept guard, spying through a small crack on the door, until the lights dimmed to signal the night inside the arcology. The pony was dozing off close to the fire, but Naomi was happy to drink a few energetic drinks she had stolen earlier from a vending machine. By the time Access woke up Naomi was already ready to move out, the gryphoness had packed her few belongings in a small saddlebag.
They cracked the door open, paying attention to see if there was any wolf outside yet, seeing that all was clear they as silently as they could opened the door and ran to the stairs.
The level below once had been an elegant club, reserved for the very important ponies to rest while they were shopping on the mall. Now, the carpets caked with dried blood.
The two females didn’t even dared to peak through the double doors that lead inside the club. Instead, they squeezed through the broken doors that connected to the shopping levels. Surprisingly enough the escalators still were working.
As they descended into the shopping floors their eyes were hit shinning yellow light, different from the sterile white lights that permeated every other floor, a mix of wood and grass aromas flooded their noses and the sound of work filled their ears. Both of them couldn’t believe in how much the place had changed since they last had seen it.
Gone were the stores and the tile floor, instead there was small houses being built and grass covered the floor, ponies with orange glowing eyes worked all around dismantling the hayraku’s patented architecture and in their awake came more ponies ready to rebuild it in a bucolic scene. Ponies with glowing yellow eyes worked on what had been the small green areas of the shopping, they were creating small forests, big trees with dark leaves grows at their command and everywhere they gone they were followed by packs of cyber wolves. Ponies with white glowing eyes worked on the houses built by the orange ones, they painted and decorated them.
The moment they put a hoof on the grass floor a zebra with glowing pink eyes appeared, she had an unnerving smile in her face and hooped to their direction.
“Oh! A new pony! Come! Celestia will want to know all about you!” She giggled. “Come with me, transfiguration waits and then we will have a big welcome party!”
Act 1.2: Do you accept my friendship?
Access and Naomi watched in bewilderment as the zebra ran away to call other ponies and took their cue to run away as fast as they could. At least they tried to run, but before they could get very far a horse with orange eyes stopped them.
“Hold there, partners!” He spoke with a broad smile on his face. “Were do you think y’all are going?”
“We…” Access begun, but stammered as more ponies with bright orange eyes approached from all sides.
“We are going to meet Celestia!” Naomi offered quickly.
“Oh, that’s great! But you are a bit lost, sugar cube, maybe we could go together.” The stallion replied with his best smile.
Access swallowed dry, her eyes darting around looking for any exit.
“We are hungry!” Naomi blurted. “We can’t go see Celestia with an empty stomach, right?”
Access looked at her completely confuse for a moment, but before she could say anything the two of them were quickly escorted to a small table and the ponies, zebras, and horses with orange eyes brought forth plate after plate of steaming food.
“What in Tartarus you just did?” Access asked in disbelieve, poking a big apple pie with her hoof.
“I’m not sure, it’s just that… In some way they are Applejack.” Naomi said as she eagerly stuffed her mouth with some apple fritters.
“Applejack? That bucking terrorist! Why would something take control over the arcology and start converting ponies into some ancient criminal?” Access asked.
Naomi sighed deeply. “Live long enough in Ponyville and you will begin to hear a few stories, stories from before the Fading, and in some of them Applejack is a hero.”
Access had heard stories about that of course, everyone in Neighpon knew about how some of the poor ponies of Equestria had their silly folk heroes. Most of them were little more than bandits, killers or even worse: Twilight Sparkle. Sometimes she would even listen in the news about the so called ‘Apples’ that followed in Applejack’s footsteps trying to overthrow the corporations and the government in order to install some stupid worker utopia.
“And it’s not only Applejack,” Naomi said after taking a bite of an apple pie. “I’m pretty sure I saw Pinkie Pie, Rarity, Rainbow Dash and even Fluttershy.”
Great, Access thought: a cultist, a traitor, a psycho war criminal, and a bio-terrorist. She was surrounded by ponies turned into some of the worst criminals in Equestria’s history! And only to make things worse, unless she did something she would end up becoming one herself.
She looked around, they had destroyed most of the infrastructure already, but maybe… Yes! Looking at the ceiling she found what she needed. She took a long breath and trying not to think in what would happen next she connected her deck to the data port in her neck.
In an instant, the world of flesh and bones was replaced by the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. She knew it was a bad idea, after what had happened to Password she had been afraid of entering in the matrix, but right now she had little choice.
Before her the world of electrons and pure data expanded almost indefinitely. She could see the ponies with white glowing eyes blinking around, changing the code of the arcology, but what really caught her gaze was the being of pure white light that now existed in the precise center of the arcology. She had seen godly avatars before, carefully sculpted to resemble the fallen goddesses, but that was something else entirely, something that not only resembled the goddesses, but also glowed with incalculably power and control, a being that called for adoration. She had known that behind every other avatar had been a pony just like her, but not this one. There was true power, something bigger than any pony ever could hope to achieve, bigger even than the corporations and governments. She felt attracted to it, but she forced herself to divert her gaze, to find the emergency controls of that section. She knew that every section of the arcology had local access to emergency controls. She found it and not even bothered to try the subtle way, simply unleashing a Hail Mary attack, throwing everything she could against it until the security finally gave away.
Alarms blared almost immediately, but she didn’t cared. She just needed to send a single command. Ponies with purple bright eyes immediately appeared around her, they were the intrusion countermeasures (Or as most deckers called them: IC) of the system already altered by the being that called itself Celestia Ex Machina. She logged off with a yank from the data cable, she winces in pain as she deal with the hard comeback. Reality and matrix danced in her mind for a few seconds, but soon the sprinklers activated all around and a mix of flame retardant and water spilled over the place. She had made sure they would be activated at full power.
“Run!” She screamed to Naomi and the two of them charged out of there amidst the temporary confusion, running down a flight of stairs and towards what had been an arcade, but now had been turned into some kind of open field with a long strip of concrete.
Access pointed them to small door to the side, she knew that it would lead to the maintenance tunnels and from there she could find her way to the security station, but before she could even get close to the door she was tackled.
Access and Naomi were thrown to the ground in an instant and in front of them three ponies with shinning blue eyes and long metallic wings stood. With horror she recognized their leader, it was or at least had been Aura, the pony that she had met during her flight from Neighpon.
“Are you fine?” The pony that had been Aura asked. “You shouldn’t try to cross the runaway without… Access Page!”
Aura hugged Access tightly, taking care not to hurt the unmodified mare with her considerable enhanced strength.
“Sweet Celestia! I was so worried about you! I have been looking everywhere for you since the attack!”
“Aura?” Access asked unbelievingly, “What happened to you?”
“Isn’t it amazing?” She turned around showing off her new wings and the propulsion pack on her back. “I can fly!”
Naomi gasped in awe. “How?”
Every year there were rumors of some big corporation getting pretty close to create functional artificial wings, but that was a fully functional design decades ahead of even the wildest rumors.
“Celestia will make us whole again,” Aura replied with joy.
Sound Wave felt the two new ammo boxes locking into place and his stomach being pumped full of protein paste. Things had become quiet for the last minutes and they were taking their time to reload and recharge. Meanwhile their minds were still working hard to calculate new tactical patterns.
The orders from Gale Warning were to hold their ground to the last.
The perimeters alarms blared and they marched forward to meet with the enemy, but this time they weren’t the ones with blue or orange eyes, instead this time they had shining purple eyes.
There was a single moment of doubt as they tried to calculate this new enemy’s capabilities, they didn’t had any apparent armor and the only thing they had that even approached a gun were their metallic horns. They each carried some kind of bag in their backs, at first the system assumed it should be to carry extra ammo or similar, but when they scanned it in infrared the packs glowed violently.
The system concluded that they should be suicide bombers and in unison, all the cyber-ponies opened fire against them. The objective was to eliminate them before they could get close enough to cause any damage.
Each bullet of the barrage was a small piece of lead travelling in extremely high velocity, each one packing enough punch to transverse a pony and probably the wall behind him and the pony behind that wall. So when the ponies with purple eyes walked unscathed through the first barrage the tactical system was sure that it must had been a mistake, no pony could survive it.
They kept shooting and the purple-eyes kept advancing, their horns shining as they walked through the relentless barrage completely unfazed. The bullets couldn’t touch them, even the most precise shoots wouldn’t draw blood.
They received the orders to use their heavy weapons. Barrages of armor piercing missiles and shards blasts are unleashed, but the unicorn-posers remain intact. Carefully watching the pattern of dispersion on the smoke and the explosions, the Tactical system finally understood what was happening, their bullets were still flying straight, but there was nothing there to be hit. Those ponies were somehow messing with their external sensors and creating perfect illusions.
The system tried to react, quickly running through their multitude of sensors to try locating the enemies, but it was already too late…
Sound Wave woke up. Not only a fragment of a memory, but everything he had ever been woke up free of the machines shackles. He fell to the ground for without the tactical system he had forgotten how to use his legs.
One of the unicorns, she had been a zebra before, touched his head with a caring hoof and he felt it, even though his head was sealed inside a combat helmet.
“Do you want to be free?” She asked with a melodious voice without moving her lips.
Sound Wave couldn’t understand, he looked at the unicorn and wanted to cry, but he doesn’t have eyes, they had been replaced by chrome a long time ago.
The unicorn didn’t spoke, instead it showed Sound Wave himself, not the monstrosity of chrome he was now, but the pony he had been. He had had soft blue coat.
“Do you want to be free?” She asked once again.
He had had a long mane, his mother had always complained about it.
“Do you accept my friendship?” She asked with a smile.
He wanted to say yes, he wanted more than anything to accept, to be a pony once more, but his mouth was locked in place by the heavy armor that encased his body.
The unicorn smiled happily and then suddenly he was enveloped in a purple glow.
“Yes!” he thought, “Please set me free! I want to be a pony again!”
Away from there, Gale Warning watched in disbelief as his entire squad of cyber ponies had been taken down by those strange purple-eyed ponies. He cursed this weird enemy and with a flick of a switch he activated the remote termination of all units.
Each of the cyber ponies exploded at once. Each a small detonation that unleashed a cloud of powerful acidic elements that would render the body a formless mass, it had been designed mostly to avoid their tech falling into wrongs hooves, but the unicorns-posers were so close to them now that they were caught in the blast and with a gleeful smile Gale Warning saw them being corroded. The compounds had been powerful enough to dissolve all the implants and augmentations inside the cyber pony, so it made easy work of skin, muscles and even bones.
“Activate a full sweep of the arcology, I need to see if there still are any security personnel still active.” Gale Warning ordered. “And give me full checkup on the clone!”
He looked nervously to the black box on the corner of his office, the box that had been following him for years now, a constant remind of what he had done and his only defense against an inexorable revenge.
Access Page and Naomi were taken to what had been a small body modification shop, but now was occupied by ponies with glowing white eyes. For the last minutes, those ponies had carefully and methodically examined them.
“What do you think, dear?” One of them asked; he had been a zebra.
“Purple is definitely her color.” Other answered; she had been a big horse.
Access heard them debating amongst themselves as what appeared to be a metallic grey spider hung over her, it’s multitude of legs each finished in some kind of surgical tool.
Naomi was at her side, the young gryphon was struggling against the restraints, trying to use her claws to get free in some way, but they seemed to have learnt from their past mistakes and took special care with her. They had already decided that she was going to be an Element of Loyalty and in front of their eyes, they saw the machines building the pair of metallic wings with great velocity.
“You will love to be a unicorn!” The zebra said with a happy smile. “It’s simply wonderful!”
“We could do something for your mane while we are at it.” The horse commented as she operated some strange device.
The long machine’s limbs descended into her and one of them injected some kind of fluid while another one sprayed ascetic alcohol over her datajack and cleaned it carefully in preparation for the surgeries.
Smoke filled the room. There was loud sounds and even small explosion, but Access couldn’t see anything. Someone took her from the table and carried her away amidst the smoke and into what appeared to be a small room with a row of small seats in each side. Naomi was brought there with her. Still dulled by the strange medicine, she couldn’t understand what they were saying or what was happening, she just wanted to sleep.
Horus cursed his own luck once more as he threw Access Page in the back of the car. He helped Echo bring in the gryphon they had found just next to Access, any help would be appreciated.
“Let’s get out of here!” Horus screamed and in response Skande revved up the engine of the Kamekichi, the vehicle was the love child between a tank and an armored personal carrier, built with top of the line Hayraku’s tech and usually reserved only for the Red Samurais. Horus had been luck to find one resting in the security station they had raided.
The car accelerated trough the grass and what little remained of the original floor, curving tightly to the left and racing past old stores that were still being dismantled.
“We have company!” Echo screamed from her point on the vehicle’s tower. She didn’t have a clue about how to operate the heavy machine gun, but with Skande on the wheel and Horus taking care of the passengers there was no one else to take her place.
Six pegasi flying in tight formation approached the vehicle leaded by Aura.
Aura commanded her pegasi in a low passage, over the vehicle. With swift accuracy they landed on the vehicle, their hooves equipped with powerful magnets would keep them secure and as one they begun to use their retractable blades to hack their way through the back door or trough the turret, finding chinks in the armor.
“Take us to someplace with cover!” Horus screamed from his place on the back. He had finished fastening Naomi and Access’ belts as he heard the sound of the pegasi landing over them.
He took his new blades, those were Red Samurai’s combat knives made of some high tech alloy and finely balanced. Horus held them in both his fetlocks and took a knee. In a quick and silent pray for the ancestral spirits, he asked not for protection, but for the rage of a dragon. And for good measure he dosed himself with some of the drugs he had found in the Red Samurai’s stash, something called K10.
“Buck the system!” He screamed as he kicked the back doors open, one of the pegasus is throw out and hit the road with force, Horus still manages to see his body being mangled by the force of the impact, his wings retorted and fuel dripping from his pack.
Two others managed to avoid the same fate and jump inside the Kamekichi’s back. Horus receives both of them with vicious thrusts of his knifes, keeping them at bay and blocking their wing’s attacks. He had already seen what those things could do to an unarmored pony.
Echo Phony bashed the commands like crazy trying to make the tower work, she had managed to make it turn for a bit and scared one of the pegasus, but she had yet to find anything that made the tower shoot, she was pretty sure that there was at least one ammo box loaded in the thing.
Aura knew they wouldn’t be able to stop the Kamekichi normally, it was much stronger than a regular car and so armored that they would need some kind of heavy ordnance to damage it enough. She felt hate burning inside her, those terrorists had taken Access away from her once more. She wouldn’t allow them to get away!
“For Celestia!” She roared and dived towards the vehicle.
Horus was using the confined corners to his advantage, using short movements while the pegasi needed open space to use their wings effectively. He kept throwing one against the other, deflecting their blows and striking with each opportunity that he could. The pegasi were bleeding, but they hadn’t slowed down.
His drug accelerated brain kept pace with their enhanced brains, acting faster than any pony had the right to. He had a crucial advantage over these creatures, he had learnt how to fight since he was a foal while these beings were just now learning it, they were still unsure of their own bodies and capabilities. They were learning fast, but not fast enough.
With a quick feint and two powerful kicks he sends both of them flying away.
He takes a long breath, but before he could relax Aura lands on the back of the vehicle, her eyes filled with rage.
“You will not take her again!” She screams as she lunges towards the zebra, her blades directed to his neck. Horus barely managed to deflect the attack, her blades riling against his.
She reacted with cybernetic speed, striking hard and fast with both her blades, keeping her wings closed in the tight enclosure. Her fighting style was direct and fierce, using all the advantage of her extended reach and enhanced strength to overwhelm her opponent.
Horus style was a mix and match of several different styles he had learned here and there, mastered through uncountable skirmishes on the streets and refined trough pain. Too poor to afford the more expensive gear other runners used, Horus had learned how to fight enhanced adversaries with only his wits and every single cheap trick he could come across.
Skande drove them towards the subterranean garages, the low ceiling would be hard to maneuver for the pegasi and it had ample space for them to maneuver. Dozens of the pegasi were following them now and even some of those abominable cyber-wolves.
He took a sharp turn and rose a floor and smashed through a gazebo with a few ponies jumping away just in time to dodge. Passed straight through what had been the water park, but now was being diligently turned into a waterfall and a lake.
Echo Phony really wished she had some kind of manual, she definitely wasn’t a mare that liked to improvise. She always liked to study her targets, to know them intimately before she would make her move, but now there was only that bucking machine gun tower and a dozen pegasi trying to kill her. She took a long breathe and looked at the controls once again. They must be logical; whoever designed it had done it with functionality in mind.
She tried once again pressing buttons and messing around the levers and in response the machine gun jumped to life and with a mad grim she blasted away against the pegasi like a crazy mare.
Bad for her that the first ammo box clicked dry in about twenty seconds. She cursed the machine while desperately looking for something to reload the gun. At least the pegasi had taken some distance for now and while they didn’t realize she was without bullets they would keep their distance.
Horus felt his blood spilling through his wounds, the pain would come only later thanks to the drugs rushing through his system. Aura kept her unrelenting advance, her vicious blades exploiting any weakness in Horus’ defenses with mechanical precision. The zebra kept his ground, attacking with all the techniques he knew. Not allowing the computer programs time to adapt to any one fighting style.
He knew he was outclassed, it had been true even in their first combat back in the landing pad, but now she had received a tremendous upgrade. Only the drugs pumping through his system were keeping him on the combat, but how long could he endure the mare’s brutal assault?
He took a step back, a single instant to retake his breath before she attacked again. Knowing his death was fast approaching he made a silent and quick pray for Applejack and simply accepted it. When she came with both blades in a fierce thrust he knew he wasn’t fast enough to parry the attack, his body was simply too tired, too damaged for it.
The zebra moved suddenly, feinting with his left hoof, and Aura swayed backward, right hoof slashing Horus' right ankle, left hoof blocking the flashing side-kick. His left hoof intercepted the strike that she followed with, and Horus whirled on his left foot, using the momentum of Aura's block to turn still faster. She slammed her right hoof onto the floor and her left hoof came up in a lightning-fast back-kick, but Horus wasn't there. He slipped closer, and grunted as a solid hoof hit him just above his kidneys. Aura's other hand darted forward, snaking around him for the throw, but Horus dropped, pivoted out of Aura's grip, and kicked up through a backward roll. His hooves caught Aura's shoulders and flung her through the air.
Aura hit the pavement with force, she felt the pain spreading through her body for an instant before her implants could neutralize it. It shouldn’t be happening like that! She had tried to react, but the zebra had moved faster than her cybernetic senses could follow. She struggled to get up, most of her artificial skin had been ruined, several bones were broken and her left eye was completely destroyed. She wouldn’t let him win.
Horus brought access and Naomi to conscious rudely.
“Arrghh!” Access screamed as she felts her heart wanting to explode.
“Nightmare Moon’s bleeding horn! This Kamikaze has some kick!” Naomi screamed as she came back to conscious.
“Sorry for that, we didn’t find many medical supplies, but we managed to raid their stash of confiscated material.” Horus spoke while he finished bandaging some of his own wounds while the pegasi kept their distance for a few moments.
“Where are we going?” Naomi asked, Access was still trying to deal with the drug. Being a sararypony she had never needed to use kamikaze. The combat drug had been designed by horses to use during the Crystal Empire annexation, after that it had quickly found its way to the streets where gang ponies loved the increased strength and resistance it gave them and didn’t care about the nasty long terms side effects. The young gryphon however had much more experimental teen years.
“We have improvised a…” Horus begun to say, but was interrupted by a ringing bell.
The tree of them looked at each other for a few seconds before Horus carefully answered the videophone on the back of the Kamekichi.
A blue pony appeared on the screen, an annoyed look on his face.
“Finally! I have been trying to contact you for the last minute. I don’t have much time so I’ll be fast. You have the kamekichi and I have an override code that can open any door in this place. Come get me and I’ll open the doors for you.”
“Wait, who are you?” Horus asked, he was beginning to feel the crash. His body felt heavy as if made of lead, his mind dreadfully slow.
“That’s not important. All that you need to know is that I have a ticket out of here. I’m sending my position to you right now.”
The screen quickly changed to a detailed map of the arcology, a shinning point on the upper floors marked their destination.
“Let…” Horus begun to say, but fainted middle sentence.
Aura rose behind him, her left hoof was still cackling with electricity.
She grabbed a still groggy Access Page by her hoof and hugged her tightly before Naomi or Echo could react.
“Everything will be all right now. I’ll protect you.” Aura whispered on Access ear, her synthetic blood staining Access fur.
Access saw Naomi ready to pounce them, Echo with her holdout pistol ready to shoot, Horus on the floor trying to get up, and even Skande trying to reach for his submachine while still holding the wheel.
She shook her head and hugged Aura, her hooves encircling her ragged form. That way there wouldn’t be more deaths, that way at least they could finally escape this nightmare. They had walked in the hell only because of her, because she had decided to play shadowrunner and had screwed things. They didn’t deserve to die here, Aura didn’t had deserved to die here, to have her body used as a puppet.
Aura jumped through the back door, gaining to the skies with cybernetic grace and precision, her wings taking them through the cramped spaces of the garage with ease. Access saw other pegasi and even some gryphons with metallic wings giving chase to the group. She prayed they would get away.
“I saved you,” Aura spoke happy, smiling with broken teeth. “I’ll not let them harm you anymore.”
