It was a bright cold day in Equestria, and the clock was striking thirteen. Rainbow Dash, nuzzling her face under her wing in an effort to escape the vile winds, slipped quickly through the doors of the Celestian Mansions, yet not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from following in her wake.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it, a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It simply depicted an enormous face, more than a canter wide: the face of a white alicorn mare, with a flowing pastel mane and strikingly angelic features. Rainbow Dash made for the stairs. The flat was three flights up, and Rainbow Dash, whose commute consisted solely of battling the vile winds outside, walked slowly up the sloping steps. On each landing, opposite the stairwell, the poster with the alicorn visage gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. PRINCESS CELESTIA IS WATCHING YOU, the caption below it ran.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of rainclouds. The voice came from a large screen which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Rainbow Dash turned a switch, and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. She moved over to the window: a smallish cyan figure, the toned shape hugged loosely by the uniform of the Solar Empire. Her hair, a vivid prism, striped with all the colors of the rainbow, flowed unkemptly down her neck; her flank, now covered by the uniform of the Party, once held the image of a rainbow streak of lightning coming out of the clouds.
Outside, even through the shut window, the world looked cold. Down in the streets, eddies of wind whirled by, carrying torn paper and debris. Even though the sun shone brightly and the blue of the sky was unhindered by clouds, there seemed to be no colour in anything besides the posters that were plastered everywhere. The alicorn’s visage glared down every street corner, the princess’ watchful gaze patrolling the streets. Down at street level, another poster flapped fitfully in the wind, alternatively covering and uncovering the single word SOLEMP. In the far distance, a group of uniformed pegasi skimmed along the roofs, hovered, and darted away within a moment. It was the police patrol, snooping into the citizens’ windows. The patrols did not matter, though. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Rainbow Dash’s back, the flowery pegasus’ voice on the telescreen was still babbling away about the production of clouds and the overfulfillment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen constantly both transmitted and recieved. Any sound Rainbow Dash made, above the level of a flutter of a wing, could be heard, moreover, so long as she stayed within the field of vision that the metal plaque commanded, she could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing if you were being watched at any given time; how often, or on what system the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everypony at the same time. You had to live - did live, from force of habit that became instinct - as if any sound that you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Rainbow Dash kept her back to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as she well knew, even a back can be revealing. About 500 canters away, the Ministry of Truth, her workplace, towered white and gold over the grimy rooftops. This, she thought with a sort of vague distaste -- this was Ponyville, chief city of the Maneland Strip, itself the third most populous of the provinces of the Solar Empire. She tried to rack her brains for her fillyhood memories, that should tell her if Ponyville always looked like this. Were there always the stark vistas of grimy wooden buildings, their sides patched with chunks of scrapwood, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with hay, their sad garden walls sagging in all directions? It was no use; she couldn’t remember: nothing remained of her childhood except a series of bright, cloud-laden tableaux without any distinguishable backdrop or coherent sense.
The Ministry of Truth -- the Minitrue, in Newspeak -- was startlingly different from any other building in sight. It was an enormous Canterlotian tower of glittering white marble, soaring up, level after level, 200 canters into the air, crowned with a golden bulb and spire. From where Rainbow Dash stood, it was just possible to read, picked out near its marble base in elegant blockish lettering, the slogans of the Solar Empire:
CHAOS IS HARMONY
REVERENCE IS MIGHT
INTOLERANCE IS MERCY
The Ministry of Truth, it was said, contained three thousand rooms above ground level, and possibly even more below. There were only three other buildings in all of Ponyville with a similar appearance in size, so arranged to be the cornerstones of the city, closing it within their four peripheries. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that, even on the roof of the city hall, they would soar high above. They were the homes of the four Royal Ministries, between which the whole of the government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for the weather and economy. Their names in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.
The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows on it at all. Rainbow Dash had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor even within 50 canters of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on Royal business, and even then only by penetrating a maze of barbed wire, steel doors, and hidden magical traps. Even the streets near its outer barriers were patrolled by stone-faced unicorns, each clad in the gilded uniform of the Royal Guard.
Rainbow Dash turned around abruptly. She set her features into the look of quiet optimism, as was advisable to wear while facing the telescreen. Hints of determination played on her face as she made her way to the tiny kitchen. By leaving work at this time of day, she had sacrificed her normal lunch, and she was aware there was no food in the kitchen, save for a hunk of bread. It was imperative that she saved the bread; it would serve as her only breakfast the next morning. She moved to the cupboard and flew up, opening it and taking down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a white label marked HARMONY GIN. It gave off a sticky, oily smell, and the pungent odor made Rainbow Dash scrunch up her nose a little. She poured out a small shot, nerved herself for a shock, and gulped it down. Instantly, a shade of scarlet overtook the cyan complexion on her face. She threw her head forward and coughed violently. The stuff was like drinking acid rain; moreover, in swallowing it, one had the sensation of being bucked in the back of the head. Soon, however, the sensation stopped and the world began to once again look more cheerful. She went back into the living-room and sat down at a small table that stood to the left of the telescreen. She scrunched her brow, and pulled open the table drawer. Out of it, she brought a quill pen, a bottle of ink, and a thick, yet small leather book with creamy pages.
For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, on the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was on the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side, there was a shallow alcove, in which Rainbow Dash was sitting, and which, when the houses on the block had been built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping herself well back, Dash could remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. She could be heard, of course, but so long as she stayed in his present position she could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that suggested her to do the thing she would do now.
But it had also been suggested by the book in the drawer. It was a particularly beautiful book. Its smooth, creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. She could guess, however, that the book was much older than that. She had seen it on a stand in the more slummy section of the market and had been stricken immediately with an overwhelming desire to possess it. Members of the Solar Party were not supposed to buy from some of these shops -- dealing on the free market, it was called -- but there were no rules against it; various things, such as horseshoes and saddlebag straps, were impossible to get any other way. She had given a quick glance around at the other ponies and slipped the merchant two bits. At the time, she was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. She carried it guiltily home in her saddlebags. Even with nothing in it, it was a compromising possession.
The thing she was going to do -- determined to do, as it were -- was to open a diary. This act wasn’t illegal; after all, there were no laws anymore. But if she was detected, she would, without hesitation, be put to death. Or - she thought with a shudder - sent off to some factory in Cloudsdale. She took the quill in her mouth and leaned over to dip it in the ink well. The quill was somewhat of an archaic instrument -- in the past, only those with magic, or some other form of manipulation, could or ever would use it. The closest modern equivalent would be the ink-pencils that were commonly found in an office. But Dash seldom used them; in fact, she hadn’t written by mouth in quite a long time. She was more used to dictating everything into the speakwrite which was quite obviously impossible to use for the present purpose. She faltered for a second, the nib slowly sliding a thin drop of ink ever closer to the edge. A tremor rippled across her spine. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In clumsy, uneven letters, she wrote:
April 4, 1984.
She sheathed the quill. A sense of helplessness descended upon her. To begin with, she didn’t have any sense of certainty whether or not this was 1984. It must have been around that date, since she was fairly sure her age was sixteen, and she believed she had been born around 1968 or 1967. Most everypony knew that Nightmare Moon had been banished a bit before the first millennium, and Celestia had ruled for a thousand years since. But even so, it was never possible nowadays to actually pin down any date within a year or two.
It suddenly occurred to her -- for whom was she writing this diary? For the future, she supposed - for the unborn. She was not a deep thinker, but the Newspeak word “doublethink” came to mind. How could she communicate with the future? It was in its nature impossible. Either the future would be exactly the same, and wouldn’t listen; or, it would be so much more different that her reality that her predicament would mean nothing.
She spent some time gazing stupidly at the paper. It was interesting that she seemed to have not only lost the power of expressing her thoughts, but even to have forgotten what she had intended to say. She groaned, and began to lean back in the chair. She stopped abruptly. She had paid so little attention to the telescreen that she had, just for a moment, forgot it was there. She leaned forward once more. For weeks, she had been preparing for this moment, the emotions building in her. The writing would be easy. All she had to do was transfer the restless monologue that had been running in her head for months - if not years.
Suddenly she picked up the quill again, beginning to write quickly and frantically. Her childish and illegible handwriting scraggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:
April 4, 1984.
Went to the movies last night. All of them war films. One really super good one had a boat full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the sea. Bunch of the audience loved this one scene with this great big fat guy trying to swim away with these pegasi chasing him, first he was flailing his arms like a fish, then you saw him through the eyes of the pegasi, and they swooped down at him, and next you saw him sinking down into the water and the water around him was pink, and the audience laughed when he sank. then there was a lifeboat full of foals, and an older earth pony mare was sitting up in front with her filly under her chin. little filly screaming with fright and burying her head in her breast like she was trying to bore into her and the mare tucking her head in to protect her and comfort her as much as possible as if she could save herself from the guards. then the pegasi charged towards her with these spears and you saw all them flying through the air and there was a terrific shot of her foreleg and hoof going into the air and there was a lot of applause from the audience but a mare down in the mule section started kicking up a fuss and saying they shouldnt show it in front of foals it aint right not in front of foals it aint right but the police took her away i don’t think anyone cared what the mule said typical reaction they never --
Rainbow Dash stopped writing, partially because her neck was sore from the craning over the diary. She had no idea why she was writing down this stream of nonsense. She didn’t even really like the war films anyway: the pegasus’ movements were fast and exciting, but she never could get over the gore. The second reason why she stopped -- and most likely the more important reason -- was because a memory had resurfaced in her mind; it was, she remembered, the main reason why in fact she decided to start the diary today, rather than any other.
It had happened earlier that day, at work. In the Records Department, where she worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and positioning them in the hall opposite the giant telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate. Rainbow Dash had taken her place in the hall when two ponies, whom she knew by sight but almost never spoke to, came into the room. One of them was a mare she often passed by in the corridors. She was unnaturally quiet; really, shy would be a better term, as she seemed to avoid talking to any ponies as much as she could. She was a pegasus, like herself, but with a long, pink mane that flowed gracefully over her pastel-yellow fur. A long scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound around her waist, tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her flanks. Rainbow Dash had always disliked her, from the moment she saw her. Maybe it was her movements; the graceful nature that resided around her. Maybe it was the way that she always hid away from the world within the folds of her mane. Perhaps, it had even crossed her mind, it was that she was a member of the Thought Police. But even a Thought Police member wouldn’t be that bashful; socialization was required for some of the more intimate knowledge of certain people, and the thought police thrived off of a false sense of trust. Still, she continued to feel a particular disgust whenever she was anywhere near him.
The other pony was a mare named Twilight Sparkle, apprentice of the Princess herself, and holder of many responsibilities so important and remote that Dash never paid any mind to them. A momentary hush passed over some in the group of chairs as they saw the mare approaching. Twilight was a lavender unicorn pony with thin features and a delicate, studious face. She had a certain charm of manner not many can claim to have; the way she would flip her bangs to reset them on her face was curiously disarming -- in some indefinable way, curiously civilized. Dash had always been somewhat drawn to her; in a way, she felt that - if you could get her alone, cheat the telescreen - she would shed the political orthodoxy she seemed to so embody. It was as if she could talk to her about anything. She never had any way to verify this guess; indeed, there was no way of doing so.
The next moment, a hideous, grinding speech slid forth through the giant telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and made one’s fur stand up on end. The Hate had started.
As usual, the face of Nightmare Moon, the Defiler of Sunlight, had flashed onto the screen. Hisses of anger were heard here and there among the audience. A mare with a curly pink and indigo mane near the front gave a squeak of fear and disgust. Nightmare Moon was the rebellious mare who had once been a key leader of Equestria -- almost at odds with, if not equal to, Celestia herself, and had tried to rise up against the Princess. She was banished; sent to the moon for time immemorial. But even so, every act of sabotage, heresy, deviation of any kind -- all of them came, by extension from Nightmare Moon. It was often rumoured that she had escaped long ago from her banishment and went into hiding, so to hatch her conspiracies: somewhere beyond the sea, deep in the Everfree Forest, perhaps in broad daylight, blending in with the ponies around her using a clever disguise.
It was nearly impossible to maintain your composure during the Hate. Within thirty seconds, the whole room broke into unimaginable and outlandish exclamations of rage, all directed at the mare on the telescreen, spouting nonsense and fury, prophesying the end of Celestia’s reign. The mare with the pink and indigo mane had started opening and shutting her mouth like a landed fish. Twilight’s face was bright red, and she was growling at the screen from her chair. From behind Rainbow Dash, the yellow mare with the pink mane began to cry out: “...you... big... dumb... MEANIE!”, and grabbed a dictionary in her mouth, flinging it at the screen. It struck Nightmare Moon’s muzzle and bounced off; her ranting speech continued, unfazed. Rainbow Dash did harbor some anger towards Nightmare Moon, but during the Hate, one was not only obliged to feel anger, but to enact it violently. A strange, overwhelming feeling would always descend on the mares and stallions in the room; an inexorable desire to crush, to kill, to destroy; to want to maim anything that stood in your way. It was as if the feeling was a disease that numbed the mind, an inescapable state where euphoria was derived from fear and hate. And yet, the rage was an abstract, undirected emotion. At any moment, a person could just as easily turn all his rage against the door he had stubbed his toe on, or the lamp in his office. At this moment, Rainbow Dash had moved her anger away from the mare on the scree, and refocused it on the tyranny of society. The Thought Police, The Party, even Celestia herself.
In the next moment, she transferred it once again, to a singularly more easily targeted figure: the pink-haired mare behind her. Vivid, horrifying hallucinations flew through her mind, beautiful exclamations of rage. She would tie her to a stake, flog her to death with a spiked mallet. She would rip off her wings, cut her flanks with knives, hack against her flesh. She would ravish her painfully and cut her throat at climax. Better than before, moreover, she finally realized why she hated her so much. It wasn’t the bashfulness, or the manner of secrecy she managed to hold; it was the inescapable fact that she was young and pretty and sexless, and she would never have her. Not merely because intercourse between the same sex was outlawed; but because of the scarlet sash around her waist, which seemed to ask you to look towards her supple flank, and then brutally betray you with the cold truth of her self-imposed chastity.
The Hate rose to its climax. The face of Nightmare Moon had become even sterner and larger than before, mocking the principles of society Celestia had put down. More and more was the self-absorbed voice on the screen becoming like a goat’s bleat; in fact, it seemed, for a short time, her face became that of a goat’s. Then, from behind the goat-mare’s face, faded quickly into view thousands of Lunar soldiers, uniform dark as night, flying towards the screen, ever advancing with their cruel, heartless faces. The soldiers continued forward, even until it seemed they would transcend the telescreen and impale them all with brutal, sharp instruments. Some of the ponies in the front row flinched back in their seats, bracing for the worst. But then, at that very moment, the soldiers’ images melted into the face of Celestia herself, her shimmering mane flowing in front of her, and her stern, but comforting eyes gazing out into the audience. Nobody heard what the voice on the screen said. It was merely words of encouragement, uttered as if in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually, but offering confidence and peace at each syllable. The face of Celestia faded away softly, revealing the slogans of the Solar Empire in bold capitals:
CHAOS IS HARMONY
REVERENCE IS MIGHT
INTOLERANCE IS MERCY
The face of the Princess never really went away, though: the regal visage seemed to persist on the screen as if its impact on the audiences’ eyeballs was too vivid to wear off. At that moment, the entire group of people broke into a slow, rhythmic chant: “Prin-cess! ... Prin-cess!” -- over and over again. It was almost savage; in the background, one seemed to hear the stomp of hooves and the beating of drums. The refrain was all too common: it was recited often at such moments of intense emotion. Partly, it was a short hymn, to the majesty and power of Princess Celestia. But still more, it was an act of self-hypnosis, a way to drown out unorthodox thoughts with noise and rhythm. As with the exclamations of rage during the Hate, it was next to impossible to avoid chanting with the rest. To dissemble your feelings, control your face, and to do what everypony else did was instinct, engrained by habit. But there was a space during which the expression in her eyes may have conceivably betrayed her. And that was when the significant thing happened, if indeed it happened at all.
Momentarily, he caught Twilight’s eye. Twilight had gotten out of her chair. She had begun the act of resetting her straight bangs in the usual manner so characteristic of her. But in a fraction of that second, their eyes met, and a message seemed to flow, invisibly, across the room between them. It seemed - no, it was certain! - that Twilight shared her exact thoughts in that moment, and as though the contents of their minds were open to each other. She seemed to say, “I’m with you. I know precisely what you’re feeling, your hatred, your disgust. But don’t worry, I am on your side!” And with that, the feeling was disconnected, and Twilight’s face regained the same composure and studiousness that it would normally.
Rainbow Dash sat up and shook her head. A belch, loud and satisfying, left her lips. The gin was rising from her stomach.
She grinned slyly and focused back on the page. Suddenly, a pang of fear shot through her. While she had been in the dream-like daze of memory, she had also been writing, almost involuntarily. And it was no longer the same childish, scrawled handwriting as before. The writing had slid voluptuously over the paper, printing in large, neat capitals:
DOWN WITH PRINCESS CELESTIA
DOWN WITH PRINCESS CELESTIA
DOWN WITH PRINCESS CELESTIA
DOWN WITH PRINCESS CELESTIA
DOWN WITH PRINCESS CELESTIA
over and over again, filling a half a page.
Her brow began to sweat. Panic encircled her. For a moment, she was tempted to rip out the contents of the page and abandon the diary altogether.
But she did not do so. She knew it was useless; whether or not she wrote DOWN WITH PRINCESS CELESTIA, or whether she never wrote anything at all, made no difference. The very act of having the diary, and the pen, in conjunction, was enough. The Thought Police would get her. She had committed - still would have committed, even had she never purchased the diary at all - the essential crime that contained all other conceivable crimes. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime could never truly be concealed forever; you could dodge it successfully for months, even years, but sooner or later they would get you.
It was always at night -- the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hooves shaking you awake, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces around the bed. In almost every case, there was no public trial, no report of the arrest. Ponies simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the archives, every record of everything you ever did erased from history, your one-time existence denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual term.
Rainbow Dash was suddenly seized by a kind of hysteria. She grabbed the pen in her mouth and scrawled untidily onto the page:
theyre going to kill me i dont care theyll hang me by the neck i dont care down with celestia they always hang you by the neck i dont care down with celestia --
She sat back again, a pained expression working across her face. Suddenly, a noise made her start violently in her chair and drop her pen. There was a knocking at the door.
She sat still as a mouse, in the futile hope that whoever it was would just go away. But, to her dismay, the knocking repeated. The worst thing of all would be to delay. She bit her lip for a second, her heart thumping in her chest. But after about a second’s time, she had put on a cool, composed expression, masking the anticipation beneath. She flew slowly to the door.
