Twilight stared at the papers strewn across the makeshift desk before her. No matter how hard she tried, her sleep deprived mind refused to parse the first words of the latest report from nurse Redheart. It was time for bed, twilight was sure of that, but her mind refused to let her rest. Despite being mentally exhausted; she couldn’t stop her mind from mulling over her research. There was something about this whole situation that stirred her deeper than most epidemics.
“I need to sleep,” she muttered to herself, as though the spoken words would somehow convince her stubborn mind to rest.
“Indeed you do, miss Sparkle,” Redheart hummed.
The voice pushed a bit of life into Twilight’s weary eyelids as she looked up to her assistant. She stood at the other end of the table, teetering ever so slightly under his sleep deprivation. Her rose colored mane was matted and tossed from weeks free of proper hygiene. Despite her weariness, she too was riveted on the set of pages detailing the newest patients.
“Seventeen new cases…” Redheart muttered as she shuffled through the file. “I’ve never seen anything like this…”
“Is there any connection to the source in the new arrivals? Anything at all we can use to figure out where this came from?”
Redheart swiped more pages to the side, quickly scanning for anything that could link them to the source.
“Not that I can see…” Redheart sighed as she came to the final page. Everything is just disconnected.”
Twilight let out the breath she had been holding and ran her hoof through her mane. “In that case, I’m going to get some sleep.”
“6 hours tonight?”
“3 this time.”
Redheart frowned. “Twilight, you’re not going to be able to keep up if you keep on doing this to yourself.”
“I know, but somepony needs to be doing something,” Twilight protested as she stepped to her cot and settled into its comforting embrace. Despite how much she wanted to sleep, she felt as though she hadn’t earned the rest. “And every second we waste; the more ponies die.”
Redheart had come to expect this behavior from Twilight. “Alright then,” Redheart surrendered as she stepped to the overworked coffee machine. “3 hours, got it.”
Twilight cracked a slight smile as she let her head rest back onto the pillow. On any other day, she would have found it rather uncomfortable, but today, it felt like a cloud. Within only a few moments, her eyelids had drifted closed and sleep overtook her mind.
“Twilight!” a voice shouted from beyond her dream. “Get up!” Next came movement, as though the entire world were trembling in fear. Twilight’s eyes snapped open to a distressed white pony filling her field of view.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, trying to shake the few remaining traces of sleep from her mind.
“The control group… they’re…”
At the mention of the control group, Twilight scrambled to her hooves and raced to the door. Within a few seconds, the two of them were racing down the narrow hallway.
“What happened!?” Twilight shouted as she narrowly dodged a gurney and burst through the door to the laboratory. Typically, her actions would have seemed rather uncouth, but none of the other researchers noticed her in their own chaotic movement.
Redheart came to a stop beside her a moment later and caught her breath. “Subject four, seventeen, and twenty have all started spiking.”
Twilight raced to the large glass pane that separated the researchers from the control group. Just like readheart had said, three of the remaining eight had a few small crystalline protrusions on their backs. “Four, seventeen, and twenty… And this all happened last night?”
“Unfortunately so. We isolated them as quickly as we could, but I’m afraid…” Redheart’s voice trailed off as she looked to the files on the tables.
“Afraid of what?” Twilight asked, her attention still mostly focused on the three ponies behind the glass. “What’s going on?
Redheart said nothing and handed the files to Twilight.
“No…” Twilight muttered as she shifted her gaze from the paper before her to the patients. “There’s no way…”
“I don’t understand it either,” Redheart said. “But seventeen and twenty were the last two controls who had viable antibodies.”
A hush fell over the both of them as they let the implications sink in. Everything they had done, the months of research, the grueling coffee fueled hours of work, the lives of those infected, it was all for naught.
“So that’s it…” Twilight whispered as she looked to the other technicians. Their flurry of activity stopped as those words rolled off her tongue. It was something everypony had believed, yet none of them wanted to admit.
“We can still try…” Redheart weakly offered, trying to usher that spark of hope back to life, but her attempts were useless.
“But we won’t be able to succeed… It’s over…” Twilight’s voice was somber and hushed. She stood for a moment, deliberating her next action, before finally submitting to the inevitable and walking from the room. She had been their guide, the leader of the crusade against the recent epidemic, and she had failed.
She stepped into the makeshift situation room and let her eyes take in the chaotic scene before her. The walls had been littered with paper and string as she and Redheart had tried to pinpoint the start of the Spikes. A grim tally of the death count rested on another wall. Its current count hovered around fourteen thousand, however that was only an estimate. By the night, at least 3 more would be dead, either from blood loss, muscle failure, or, as happened in most cases, suicide.
“Why…” Twilight whispered as she stepped to the central table and began to mindlessly pour over the data again. “Why doesn’t this make sense?” She had studied the disease ever since it started, and what she didn’t know about the illness, Redheart did. The had made an excellent team, but they couldn’t combat the disease.
“We gave it our best.” Redheart’s voice was soothing to an extent, and Twilight appreciated the encouragement, but nothing would stop her growing despair.
“It just wasn’t enough,” Twilight sighed as she started organizing the papers again. It wasn’t an intentional action, rather something she did to feel like she had some modicum of control. There was something in the back of her mind that ordered her to not give up, but it was growing quieter with every second that passed.
The silence hung in the air like a thick fog. Hope was fading and there was nothing they could do to stop it.
“You know,” Redheart started as she approached the table, “maybe we’ve been going about this all wrong…”
“Well that’s obvious.”
“No… I mean… look at the control group…” suddenly a spark flashed into her eye. “That’s it!”
“What are you going on about now?” Twilight muttered.
“W-Wait right here! I need to talk to the therapist!”
“The therapist?” Twilight asked. She hadn’t really expected an answer, but now her curiosity was piqued. “Why do you need to see the therapist?” she whispered to the air.
What could she need from the therapist? Research on how epidemics effect communities? Psychological influence on health? Twilight shook her head of the budding hope and turned to the table once more. She had an urge to clean it, but she knew it wouldn’t matter in a month or so. Ponyville had already been quarantined, but with no sign of a cure, it would soon be a ghost town.
Twilight let herself slump into her bed and silently wished for sleep to come again. Confronting defeat was the last thing she wanted to do. She didn’t want to give up her hope, the one thing that had driven her through the hardest times in the epidemic. She needed that hope, it pushed her, gave her a reason to try, and it had been brutally stripped from her only a few moments ago.
“Twilight!” a voice shouted through her semiconscious mind. “Twilight, I need a sample now!” Before Twilight could protest, Redheart had haphazardly stuck a needle into her foreleg.
If she hadn’t been awake before, she definitely was now. “What are you doing!?”
“I think I figured it out,” Redheart said as she removed the needle and raced through the door. “Come on!”
A few moments later, and Redheart had kicked one of the technicians off of the microscope, quickly prepared a slide, and started dialing in the lenses.
“Would you care to explain what you’re doing?”
“One second…” Redheart said through clenched teeth as she made a few fine adjustments to the scope. “There! That’s it!”
“What are you talking about?”
“The spikes! You have them!”
The color drained from Twilight’s face.
“Let me explain,” Redheart said as she quickly scrambled for another needle and plunged it into herself. “We’ve been looking at this all wrong! It’s not an ordinary disease!
Twilight was too shocked to respond.
Redheart quickly prepared her own slide and placed it in the microscope. A few moments later, and she let out another shout. “I’ve got it too!” She nearly reached for another needle to get another sample, but a few of the technicians stopped her.
“What’s gotten into you?” Twilight shouted, finally able to find her voice again.
Redheart smiled. “Hope.”
“Hope?”
“Hope... That’s the cure.”
“That’s ridiculous. You’re ridiculous.”
“Then if I’m ridiculous, look at patient seventeen and patient sixteen. They’re twins.”
Twilight’s eyebrow cocked ever so slightly. “Your point?”
“Seventeen’s wife died in the outbreak. Sixteen was unwed. Seventeen was only brought into the control group because it was believed that they both had the antibodies. It turns out, neither of them did. They’re both infected!”
“That’s hardly a reason to celebrate.”
“Oh, but it is. There’s no reason that anything like this would happen aside from ponies hearing about the news. Every single one of the ponies that died knew about the epidemic. However, a few survived. Remember who they were?”
“Well, the few left in our control group…” Twilight offered.
“And us. Because we didn’t give up.” Redheart stood triumphantly in silence
Twilight shook her head dismissively. “But that doesn’t make any sense!”
That was when she first heard it, a small voice that seemed to come from the air itself. It was chilling, like a cold winter’s breeze, and it sent a powerful shiver down Twilight’s spine. She didn’t need any more proof after a few words rang from that voice. “What fun is there in making sense?”
