Collapse Failure
By Winston
Twilight trotted down the main hall of her palace, moving among beams of bright morning sunlight streaming in through the windows. Having just woken, she was enjoying a moment to herself before she ran into anypony else. There was a calm sense of normalcy to it, something that was nice to have for a change and hard to come by lately.
These reprieves were always brief. Like almost every day, the first person she encountered was her faithful number one assistant Spike. He was in the hall, standing still as a statue. After approaching, she stopped and stood in front of him.
“Good morning!” She put on a cheerful smile.
There was no response from Spike, who was posed awkwardly in mid-stride, staring off with eyes fixed on... what was he looking at? Twilight impulsively turned her head and glanced back over her withers, trying to trace his glance. No matter how many times she had made the effort, though, she could never quite tell. It was a little unnerving. She was also noticing that her discomfort kept getting worse with each encounter, which seemed counter-intuitive. Shouldn’t things get easier the more she was exposed to them, not more difficult? He probably wasn’t even actually looking at anything in particular, anyway.
So why was it driving her so crazy?
So much for that illusion of normal.
“Ummm... right.” Twilight’s smile faded. She nodded once to Spike’s frozen form, then turned and continued on her way. Her ears flattened a little and there was less spring in her step after that encounter.
She reached the door, opening it and then closing it behind herself carefully as she exited the palace. It was a beautiful morning, as always: clear blue skies with the sun shining and not a cloud in sight.
“Thank you, Rainbow,” she said quietly, an almost ritual habit lately. It wasn’t that Rainbow Dash could actually hear the little prayer of thanksgiving, but whether she could or not, Twilight reminded herself, was beside the point. It was more about her own frame of mind, the need to keep the positive things in the forefront of her thoughts by expressing that she was, for example, grateful that there had been so many nice mornings in a row.
After all, it could have been so much worse. It could have been raining. Wouldn’t that just be the luck?
But it wasn’t, so she continued on her way, counting her blessings.
The walk toward town was quiet and pleasant. Warm, still air carried the fresh scents of spring: grass and dewdrops and a faint perfume of flowers. They mingled with the tantalizing smell of a bakery in full swing that became stronger the closer she got to Sugarcube Corner. Finally, she was there pushing open the door, and that delightful aroma crowded out all else and filled her nose as if there were no other smells in the whole world.
It made her stomach rumble and growl. Eager for some breakfast, she made a beeline to the front of the shop. There was nopony there at the counter serving customers at the moment, but that was no problem, she just walked around behind it and helped herself to a donut from the display case. It was cream filled and chocolate glazed. Maybe that wasn’t the healthiest possible choice, she thought, but she’d been developing a taste for these particular ones lately, and, well... what did it really matter, anyway?
She sighed and shook her head a little, then grabbed the donut in her teeth. Holding her sugary breakfast, she turned to look into the kitchen, and waved a wing at the pink earth pony she saw standing in front of an oven with wide eyes and an excited smile, apparently waiting for a timer to go off with great anticipation.
“Eee ya ae’er, inkie,” Twilight just barely managed to mumble around the pastry she was carrying in her jaws. Rarity would have disapproved, Twilight imagined. Tsk, tsk. Talking with one’s mouth full... so un-ladylike, not to mention un-princesslike.
But who was going to care?
She turned to leave and started heading back to her palace.
☙ ⏰ ❧
“Today’s a big day. Hope you’ll be alright by yourself for a while.” Twilight patted Spike gently on the head. She smiled, but couldn’t help realizing that she was compulsively avoiding looking at his eyes. “Heh. Of course you will. You wouldn’t be my number one assistant otherwise, after all.”
She left him behind and headed to her bedroom.
Atop a small dresser by a window, there was a sheet of paper, with a quill and bottle of ink next to it. Twilight picked up the quill, inked it, and started writing down another item on the paper, adding it to an already substantial list:
Sugarcube Corner - 1x Cream-filled chocolate glaze donut
Twilight frowned. There was, she noticed, getting to be an awful lot on here from Sugarcube Corner. It was a little worrisome – not that it would be at all difficult to get the petty cash to cover the running tab, of course, just that she didn’t enjoy imposing on Mr. and Mrs. Cake like this, and things might get rather awkward when she showed up insisting that she owed them such a big pile of bits. It’d take some doing to explain, that was for sure.
She was also loathe to skip town before settling these debts, but there wasn’t much choice. The Cakes and everyone else on the list she’d borrowed from would just have to wait for her to get back... assuming that ever happened.
Her saddlebag was ready at the foot of her bed. Before the last time she’d slept, she’d already packed it with the things she thought she’d need. All she had to do now was strap it on and head out.
Spike was still in the hallway, still in mid-step, and still staring.
As Twilight passed him, one of the echoes of her hooves on the hard crystal floor sounded funny. She could have sworn she heard another distant hoofstep, timed to hide within it.
A shot of adrenaline surged up in her. She stopped and froze next to the dragon, standing just as motionless as he was. Her heart was beating hard, blood rushing in her ears while she strained to listen.
“Hello?” she called out, half in fear... but also half in hope.
Nothing.
After a few seconds, she had to take a breath. The sound was quiet by any reasonable standard, she knew, but at the moment it seemed as loud as a tornado-force gust when she inhaled and then exhaled. Silence returned when she held her breath again.
Still nothing.
“Ugh.” She shook her head. “I must be losing my mind.”
Trying not to think about that, she proceeded out of the palace and back into the beautiful morning outside. There was a clock in the hallway that she glanced at, out of habit, as she passed. 8:06 am, it read.
Of course it did.
Well, that’s as good a time as I’m likely to get, she thought to herself sarcastically, rolling her eyes. She turned to face north and studied the distant silhouette of Canterlot on the far-off horizon for a moment, then spread her wings and took flight.
☙ ⏰ ❧
A solo flight all the way to Canterlot, Twilight decided, was not something she wished to repeat in the near future.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like flying. With a friend alongside her, she thought, this might have even been fun. She could just hear Rainbow Dash’s voice in her imagination. They could have bantered about weather work, cloud formations, cute mares and stallions, or whatever else while they flapped through the air. Dash would have teased her about being out of shape and told her to get her flank in gear whenever she insisted on stopping for a break on a cloud, and then they would have started planning an improved exercise regimen to solve that problem before they gradually drifted back to talking about nothing.
Sweet Celestia, she wanted to hear that voice so badly, even just for a few minutes. She missed the scratchy sound of it, the turns of phrase that Rainbow used, the way she had of exclaiming “awesome!” when she got excited about something...
But she wasn’t there, and Twilight had nopony to talk to for the hours that the flight took. She struggled to occupy herself. The landscape going by was nice to look at, but there was only so long that the scenery could hold her interest before her appreciation for nature’s majestic beauty wore off. That point came and went while she was still far from Canterlot.
In a final sting, too, when she did reach the city, there was no one to share the accomplishment of overcoming the challenge with, nopony to enjoy a delicious, frosty-cold, refreshing celebratory drink alongside.
She was just tired, sore, sweaty... and very alone. Alone was the worst part.
It didn’t help that Canterlot Mountain was just that, a mountain, and the city was a few thousand feet above sea level. The thin air took some effort to get enough oxygen out of, now that she’d gotten used to living down lower in Ponyville for a while. Huffing to catch her breath, she unstrapped her saddlebags and dropped them on the ground in the large square she’d landed in.
There was one good thing waiting, at least. Having come down specifically in this square wasn’t an accident – the big fountain in the center was too inviting to resist. Without a thought, she stepped up over its edge and into the pool of gloriously cold water. It felt sublime against her hot skin, quenching some of the discomfort. She laid down on her belly in it, then dipped her head underwater briefly and lifted it straight up again, letting water run down through her mane to flow over her back and wash across her wings, and trickle down her chest and forelegs. She repeated this several times, looking for all the world like a big purple sparrow playing in a birdbath.
This was another display that Rarity would have no doubt disapproved of, as would all the numerous other upper-class Canterlot ponies standing around in the square who were conspicuously not bathing in what was supposed to be a strictly decorative public fountain, but she did it anyway.
Who was going to stop her?
She suddenly wished there was somepony around who could. She wanted so badly for there to be boundaries again, real interactions, to hear the scold of Rarity’s voice, telling her that—
A flicker of motion, caught in the corner of her eye from one of the nearby alleys leading out of the square, made her stand up suddenly. She looked as quickly as she could, but there was nothing there. After a brief moment of stillness, she stomped her hooves a couple times to cause loud splashes, daring... inviting... anypony around who might have been able to express that disapproval with her behavior to come out and speak.
It had been so long.
Something in her mind wanted to scream in desperation. She realized that her mouth was open and a breath drawn in, her body readying itself to cry out, before she even consciously knew what was happening. That sense of losing control was disconcerting. She caught herself and quenched the yell before it started, relaxing her throat and exhaling.
It still rang out shrill and panicky in her head, the internal voice filling her thoughts.
Please, somepony, anypony, just talk to me!
Nopony did.
She closed her eyes and grimaced while she shook her head. She already knew perfectly well that there was nopony there, she tried to reason with her flailing thoughts, but it still left her with a feeling of burning, bitter disappointment to have to smash down even the irrational momentary flicker of hope, however pointless, that there could have been some relief.
☙ ⏰ ❧
By the time she reached her parents' house, Twilight had mostly dried off.
She let herself in through the front door. Glancing around, the place looked comfortingly familiar, little changed from the last time she’d seen it. The living room had all the same furniture, and the walls were lined with the same bookshelves holding the most of the same books. The same clock sat on the mantle.
8:06 am.
Of course.
Twilight walked through the living room and into the kitchen beyond.
Twilight Velvet was there, completely motionless, watching a coffeemaker on the otherwise empty counter. The pot was half-full, with a little rivulet of dark liquid that had been pouring down into it currently frozen in place in the air, and Twilight knew that her mother was impatiently awaiting that magical first cup that got her moving in the morning.
“Hi mom,” Twilight said. “How’s everything going? I just... wanted to drop by, to see how you and dad were. Though I guess it’s probably still too early to check on him.”
She thought about her father. He was probably still in the bathroom, taking a morning shower, and singing in the terrible, tone-deaf way that he did. It would have been in a low voice, though, trying not to be heard. If he was questioned, he’d get flustered and swear up and down that whatever that noise was, it wasn’t him.
What she wouldn’t give to be able to tease him this morning, to gang up on him with her mother, the two of them waiting outside the bathroom to ambush him when he came out and give him a good-natured ribbing about his karaoke.
But not now. Happy family moments weren’t happening any time soon... or at least, not in any way that ‘soon’ could apply in her situation. She shook her head and tried to dismiss the thought.
“Anyway, I’m starving after the flight out here,” she said. “I hope you won’t mind if I help myself to something. I’m going to go ahead and guess not. If you could talk, I imagine you’d tell me to do just that.” She opened the refrigerator and found a carton of milk, from which she poured herself a glass. There was also a big bowl of cold flower petal salad, probably left over from last night’s dinner. There were smaller bowls in one of the cabinets, and she filled one with a good sized serving.
At least this far healthier breakfast probably balanced out that donut, she reasoned.
She sat down at the kitchen table to eat. It was good, the mixed variety of flowers very slightly sweet and astringent with just enough of a suitably light dressing to complement it. After a few minutes that the dead silence all around her made feel excruciatingly long, she was finished and placed the dishes in the sink.
“Well, that was tasty,” she said. “I feel much better with something in my stomach.”
Twilight Velvet said nothing, just a statue waiting for a filling coffeepot.
Twilight Sparkle sat down next to her mother on the kitchen floor, and sighed.
“I really wish...” She swallowed a growing lump in her throat. “I really wish you could talk to me, because I could really use it right about now.”
Her eyes were watering.
“I’m alone, mom.” A tear started to spill over and she reached up to wipe it away with a foreleg. “I’m alone, and I’m scared. Something happened, and... and I don’t know how to fix it.”
She blinked rapidly a few times, then sniffed heavily and swallowed.
“I was just teleporting. Nothing I haven’t done a million times. Nothing unicorns don’t do every day.”
Twilight cleared her throat and fought to keep herself composed.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve narrowed down what happened. Teleportation magic uses a manipulation of quantum superpositions to move matter by tunneling it directly from one point to another without passing through the space in-between. It’s all probability based, see? You un-collapse one set of probabilistic determinations, then re-collapse them so that the component particles of an object end up in different points in the three spatial dimensions without changing their current point along the time dimension.”
She stared down at the floor and took a few deep breaths.
“Only... the problem is, what if they don’t re-collapse to single spatial points? I didn’t even know that could happen, but apparently it’s possible, and it’s called a superposition collapse failure. I’m in one, I think.”
There was a long pause before she spoke again.
“So what that means is, without superpositional collapse to specific spatial points, the matter being teleported—that’s me—can continue to intersect different potential positions along a deterministic track... meaning, it can move... but it’s disconnected from the time dimension. I can... I can still do stuff, but it’s all happening simultaneously without moving forward in time.”
A choked sob escaped her throat.
“I’m stuck here,” she strained to say. “Everything’s frozen around me. I’m stuck outside of time, and I don’t know what to do.”
Her chest heaved and quivered while she breathed.
“I don’t know how long I’ve been like this, or if the concept of ‘how long’ even means anything anymore,” she said. “It’s been eight in the morning for... it feels like forever. Weeks, at least, as far as I’m perceiving it. I don’t have a clock that’s not frozen, so I couldn’t really say. My circadian rhythms are all screwed up. Without the sun rising and setting, I’ve been staying awake and sleeping for longer and longer periods. It’s hard to sleep even when I do get tired, too, because the sun’s frozen in the sky and it’s always daylight outside. On the plus side, I can still interact with other matter, I guess, since the teleportation spell allows for the desynchronization effect to propagate into other objects in physical contact, so at least I can still find food and water and not starve to death. But in a way, that also sort of makes it worse, because now there’s no hard limit. There’s no fixed end in sight, except maybe old age. I think I’m still aging.”
She looked up, studying the statue of her mother through watery eyes.
“But you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “The part that’s messing with my head the most? It’s how alone I am. I didn’t even think about it at first, you know? I mean, the fear of, ‘hey, this could make me go crazy’, it’s just never really something that occurs to you as your first worry about a new situation, is it? And then after a while, even when I did start to wonder, I still thought I’d be fine. I mean, it’s me, the pony whose entire life used to be studying by herself. Nothing I’m not used to, right? But I’m realizing, it’s not the same. It’s not the same at all.”
She fidgeted, scuffing a front hoof in a little circle across a tile on the kitchen floor.
“Nothing else comes close to this kind of stimulus deprivation,” she said. “There’s no noise, nothing moves, the whole world is dead and still around me. It’s like the whole planet is one big solitary confinement cell. The effects are... I... I don’t... it’s not good, mom. I’m spending my days talking to statues of what used to be my friends. I’m talking to you, right now. And more and more, I realize I’m talking to myself. I’m babbling just for the noise.”
Twilight stood up and paced around the kitchen a few times before she stopped and settled back to sitting on the floor again.
“One of the things that’s scaring me the most is that I’m starting to hear things,” she continued. “And I’m starting to see things. There’s nothing else around that can possibly be making sounds or moving, but I keep thinking I can see and hear things, other living things. It’s little noises, hidden flickers of movement, just out of sight in the corners or in the shadows. They’re not enough for me to tell who or what they are, but enough to have me grasping at straws thinking that somepony might still be out there when I know they’re not. And it’s making me crazy to think that I have to find them.”
Twilight started tapping the floor rapidly with one hoof, a fast-paced, rhythmic motion that drummed out an endless series of staccato clicks.
“I’m starting to hallucinate, mom. I’m hallucinating, and I’m scared. I’m...” Twilight laughed, a despondent sound, laced with a tense edge of fear. “I’m running out of time, trapped here out of time. After a while, I’m not sure I’ll be able to tell reality from the random sensory deprivation noise of my own brain anymore. And what do I do then? What am I supposed to do then?”
Twilight Velvet had no answers, no helpful motherly advice. She was still just waiting for her coffee.
Twilight Sparkle broke down and started sobbing, tears running down her face.
“I’m scared,” she said through her crying. “I’m just so scared. It’s getting worse. I don’t want to be alone like this anymore.”
She cried for a few more minutes before her sobs slowed and she was able to start get herself collected again.
“I’m sorry,” she said, swallowing heavily. “I don’t want it to seem like I’m giving up, because I’m not. Not yet, at least. I’ve done all the experiments I can in Ponyville, and now I need to see if there’s any more helpful books in the Royal Library here in Canterlot. That’s where I’m headed. I suppose I’d better get going.”
She stood up, stepped close to her mother, and gave her a kiss on the cheek.
“Thanks for the salad, and for...” She paused uncertainly. “...And for just being here to talk to, I guess. It helps. It really does.”
Twilight Sparkle walked out of the kitchen. She stopped momentarily in the doorway to the living room and glanced back at her mother.
“Bye,” she said. “See you later... I hope.”
She started to leave the house. On the way out, before she realized what she was doing, she couldn’t stop herself from looking one more time at the clock on the mantle.
8:06 am.
Of course.
The sight of the clock’s hands in that position was crushing, making her feel like she would start crying all over again.
No! With a resolute stomp of one hoof, she steeled herself and tried her best to hold her head high and cram those useless thoughts down while she kept walking to the Royal Palace.
She had to find a way to see 8:07 am... before she ran out of time.
Author's Note
Goes great with the Nine Inch Nails song "Every Day is Exactly the Same". 
This story was written for the "Out of Time" writeoff prompt. It managed to reach the finals and take fourth place, which I guess is pretty good for my first writeoff. 
