Location: Black Neighsa, Time: August 26th, 1466
“Maybe we should shut it off?”
“Of course not. This is the highest reading we’ve gotten all month. Keep it running.”
There was a thump, and then a responding whirr. There was the mare and the stallion, standing in front of the machine.
Standing in front of three meters of titanium-reinforced heavy duty glass, the two watched intently. They never took their eyes off the machine, save to look at the data being printed in front of them at a ridiculously fast rate. It was another day at work.
“Dilation of around… six. Around the continuum in area A.” The mare took off her glasses and closed her eyes. “That’s still not enough. It won’t work at this rate.”
Her colleague sighed in turn, and shook his head. “We have to shut it off.”
“I won’t let that happen,” The mare said, with a sudden steel to her voice. “If we turn the machine off we might not ever be able to balance the four-vectors, and that’ll be another three months of us standing around again.”
Her colleague scoffed, and threw a coat over his back. “The directors are going to be pissed. They were expecting tangible results last week and yet we still can’t make this thing work within a damn eighth within expected results.”
A heavy blast door opened behind the mare, and the stallion paused. “Welp, I’m going home. Tell me if you manage to solve the secrets of the universe without me.”
Hoofsteps were heard on the cold tiled floor, and the heavy door sealed shut with a click.
The mare barely even reacted, staring intensely at the readings in front of her. Spacial fluctuations, EM detections, constantly changing mathematical structures. To other ponies, what they would have seen was a tangled mess of lines and numbers sprawled across a console, but to this mare, it all made complete sense to her.
This was exactly what was making her so exasperated.
“I don’t get it…” she whispered to herself. “Everything is running within operational limits, so why isn’t anything changing?”
Her piercing gaze was alternating between the readings in front of her and the machine behind the glass; inside the white-walled test chamber stood a giant machine with a glass panel. Dead center in this contraption was what the mare's team had been testing on so feverishly for the past year - a pendulum, swinging back and forth, caught in a controlled perpetual loop.
The mare's hooves darted around the control panel as she made a series of micro-adjustments to the machine’s output, increasing the intensity of the disturbance inside the test chamber. A small warning played, indicating that the energy output of the machine was becoming so high that the almost absolute-zero temperature inside the chamber was barely enough to contain the heat emitted.
“The directors don’t know what the hell they’re asking for,” the mare spat. “Oh, yeah, bend the laws of physics for us, would’ya? Thanks!” Her hooves still barely skimming across the control panel, buttons being pressed faster than a machine gun could ever hope to fire.
And then suddenly, the rapid tap-tap-tap of her inputs slowed. The brown-coated mare leaned forward in her seat, squinting through the thick, protective glass at the center of the chamber.
“Did that pendulum just stop moving for a second, or was that just me?”
With a renewed sense of purpose, the mare input a flurry of commands into the machine, boosting its output by four hundred percent. She drew upon the auxiliary coolant tanks, balancing the temperature inside the chamber, and pulled up a log.
“Coffee Pot, August 26th 1466, control test 76-B, lab 3. I could have sworn I just saw the control stop in mid-swing, just for a second...”
She watched intently as the machine drew upon more and more power from the lab’s titanic underground reactor system, and projected waves of electromagnetic force upon the swinging pendulum. A smile lit upon the mare’s face as the total output of the generators hit 640%.
The pendulum stopped moving in mid-swing.
“Yes!” Screamed the mare, jumping out of her chair. “Hah! That’ll show him! I did it! The control has stopped moving. Dilation has reached one hundred. That’s a perfect temporal plume if I’ve ever seen one!”
The mare walked away from her console, chittering into her log, pumping her forelegs in celebration. In fact, she was so happy, she failed to see the output of the machine climb higher and higher.
Seven hundred percent output.
Eight hundred and ninety percent output.
One thousand, two hundred percent output.
A shrill alarm blared and warning lights lit up, the automated computer recognising the danger placed upon the lab by the now rapidly overheating machine. The mare turned around, and saw the pendulum start moving again.
“Oh no.”
She sprang back into her chair, eyes darting.
The numbers kept climbing.
The alarm screamed its warning across the entire complex, warning everypony.
But nobody came, for on this day, the mare was alone.
Sweat streamed down the mare's forehead as the pendulum began to swing faster and faster, and the white walls of the testing chamber began to char as the temperatures rose to almost a thousand degrees.
“No, no, no, no…”
Four thousand percent output.
Nine thousand, five hundred percent output.
The pendulum melts.
Coffee Pot barely had time to react before the machine exploded.
Location: ???, Time: ???? ???? ????
Out of all the strange things that had happened to me, that day had definitely been the strangest. Not because, mind you, it was as such at the time, but because it would most likely be the only time it would ever happen, in the entirety of the universe.
A white-hot pain shot through my head, drowning out all of my other senses. I couldn't feel the ground under my hooves. The whole planet was out of sync with me.
Where am I?
And so, not wanting to cause any further injury to myself, I flopped onto the floor, waiting for the screaming pain to subside within my skull. And as I waited for that to happen, something much more immediate came to the forefront of my mind.
Who am I?
Yeah, that fixed the problem. The noises and stars within my cranium ceased their banging, as if this sudden knowledge was a predator and they were scared of it. I definitely was.
I didn't know who I was!
Logic dictates in this kind of situation you should calm down. Wait patiently, and maybe the memories will come flooding back! Or at least, somebody finds you having a manic episode on the street and calls the authorities.
But imagine this, if you will:
- I have no idea who I am.
- I have no idea where I am.
- Everything hurts.
- Also, yeah, on that day, I was pretty hungry. You can't blame a mare for that.
- That brung another thought to my mind. I am a mare, right…? Well, can- oh, no. Definitely a mare. Yup.
So begins the sad story of me, waking up with a pounding headache in the middle of the street, surrounded by debris. I can remember that day quite clearly, because I was actually really angry at myself because I had probably just gotten really drunk on cider or something and then blew up something.
I mean, I couldn’t be THAT angry at myself, because I didn’t know who that was.
First things first. Identity. To survive in a foreign world, I would first require to get a grip on myself. Looking around for anything that might provide a clue to who I am, two things catch my immediate attention within the flaming wreckage that I regained consciousness in -
A slightly soot-dirtied lab coat, and this electronic gizmo thing.
You know, ponies don’t normally wear clothes, and that’s perfectly fine because we all respect each other’s personal space. But I was cold despite everything else being on fire, so I felt inclined to put it on.
And it felt good to put on, almost as if it belonged to me.
Stuff normally figures itself out, and I didn’t see any dead ponies lying around, so by process of elimination… this is mine, right?
Great. I was a nerd.
Second of all, was the rectangular box in front of me. It had a lot of buttons, but it was the only thing there that wasn’t on fire. The display was slightly cracked and the entire thing was covered in soot, but that wasn’t about to stop me. I was determined to find out who I was! Or am. Whatever.
Unfortunately, being an amnesiac carries with it a certain amount of not-being-able-to-remember-anything, and if I didn’t even know what this metal rectangle with all the pushy things was, I sure as hell wasn’t going to know how to work it.
Beep, boop. Push a few buttons. Maybe it’s, like, an ID tag? Scientists have ID tags, right? And pocket protectors, and nerd glasses. Maybe it’ll tell me what my name is!
6710xx)sin-1)\X
SYNTAX ERROR.
Aha! Syntax Error. What a great name. Really rolls off the tongue, that one. My parents must have been geniuses too!
Clutching her labcoat, mulling over those two words, Syntax Error walks out of the flaming wreckage, into the town of Ponyville.
