After everything under the sun
One fine morning, Princess Celestia announced her plan to privatize the sun.
Then she assured the laughing audience that she was not joking, and did, indeed, have plans to sell the astral spring from which all life in Equestria flowed.
Then she went into her palace, located the legal documents describing the purchase of the origin of life and matter on this blasted and unloved rock, and presented them to the crowd who were almost too busy checking their calendars to notice the documents presented to them by their monarch. It was not, actually, April 1st. Confusion spread across the crowd like pond scum on water in a pond.
Then Celestia returned indoors, located a notary and a lawyer, and brought them out to confirm that, yes, this was not an elaborate prank. She also confirmed that she was not repeating herself, despite all evidence to the contrary that she was, in truth, repeating herself.
Then she found a psychoanalyst who asked her, the lawyer, and the notary a series of intrusive sexual questions. After a long and public exploration of just what goes on in one’s childhood to make them a notary, the psychoanalyst confirmed that all were neurotic in the usual way, and all appeared to be speaking the truth, or at least as far as they believed what they were speaking was within .001 Wittgensteins of their world of facts, and the citizens of Equestria found themselves convinced. Then concerned.
The sun was to be sold. Also, Celestia was not repeating herself, or at least she didn't believe herself to be so, and she certainly couldn't believe anything stupider than the ponies that believed her.
This announcement was met with furor in the streets and stress in the roads. The highways had had about enough of this, and even the sidewalks were well passed through with that. The rail lines--already privatized--were the one transit option immune to public distress, chiefly because just-in-time maintenance and cuts to worker hours meant that the tracks rusted quietly and unmolested by actual trains, performing the chief function of all things beneath--and apparently including--the sun: generating value for stockholders.
Ponies insisted that what was being done could not be done, and therefore wasn't being done, only to loop back around to the inescapable reality that it was being done, while the grinning media psychopaths--whose job it was to evaluate the political feasibility of all things from mass murder to candy to mass murder by candy in the same detached and bored way an engineer measures the speed of a falling ball--wondered if the sun was government property or Celestia’s demesne, and if it had always been Celestia’s then her decision to place it on the market was the opposite of privatization, although using a different definition of the word privatization from the definition used through the rest of the story and, indeed, a different definition of the word privatization outside of this sentence which has run on for too damn long so let’s just put a period right.
Gryphons, Saddle Arabians, and other delegates of foreign nations poured into Canterlot, demanding to know why they weren't getting cut in on this deal. Celestia rebuffed them that she was here to make Equestria great again, not to deal with some frivolous foreigners and their idea of a right to exist or at least to profit in the death throes of their civilizations. She had decided she owned the sun, and then she had decided to sell the sun and she had the muscle to make both things happen.
And Princess Cadence rushed to insure that her copyright on “Land of the Midnight Sun” would hold up in court even though it turned out that the sun was private property. Her lawyers assured her it would, since Celestia probably didn't own the word sun, just the center of all known existence that the word represented. Cadence was relieved.
And dragons rolled over and belched and went back to sleep, dreaming darkly of the day they would at last be free of this stupid planet covered in flea-like mortals.
Twilight Sparkle expressed moderate indignation at not being allowed to read the terms of the agreement to sell the sun. Not on any principle of transparent government, but because there was something she was being specifically forbidden from reading. She was given a naughty picture book to read instead, one that Celestia had previously forbidden.
And Twilight was entertained for a moment and forgot what she had been doing.
Protesters swarmed the streets of Canterlot, demanding that they continue to be given free access to the bounty of nature. Celestia regarded them with the dim confusion that all members of the ruling class experience when they discover the nature of the public. Like a piece of gum stuck to her hoof, utterly inert and insistent, idiotic and clinging. She couldn't understand what they didn't understand. There had never been such a thing as a free lunch, except for the time before primitive accumulation of capital had deliberately destroyed the commons and hunting areas where everyone had once worked to obtain their food without being forced to sacrifice a portion of it to self-appointed masters.
But that was a time before her, and before the great plans and her great deal to sell the sun. Especially, she couldn’t understand the clamor since she was saying she didn’t want ponies chased underground to live forever in darkness, which is something that she wasn’t hearing anyone else saying. Perhaps because they hadn't thought to privatize the sun before she did. Perhaps because they hadn’t understood how their seperate enjoyment of the sun had been destroying communities which had not yet been crammed together cheek to cheek. In any case, Celestia had understood what they would not yet understand, and all ponies unable to pay for their astronomic portion would still be permitted to live under the sun.
The only requirement for free access to the most fundamental requisite for life and the birthplace of matter, was that everyone stare directly into the sun once every 24 hours and watch an advertisement from one of the companies that had purchased the right to hold the entire world hostage.
Unfortunately, the world was nearly saved. The sun deal hit a snag when it was discovered that the sun didn't have speakers. Capital had a genuine power of refusal, one that had always trumped trumps and their polls. If they didn’t want the sun they couldn’t be forced to buy it, unlike the billions who relied upon the sun and could be forced to accept if being sold.
Eventually Luna was enlisted, renting the stars and with it their perfect music to the cause of privatizing the sun. When the advert played, she shifted the formerly harmonious music of the spheres, a song so beautiful and constant that all were rendered deaf to it before they had language to express what they heard, instead the turning of the cosmos would generate sound effects for short videos advertising underwear.
On the first day after the privatization of the sun everyone stared up into the light. Children cried and tried to look away, as tearful parents held their heads and pried open their eyes. The stars tilted madly and invisibly, their former song disrupted as they blared down at the world below. A nebbish, teenaged stallion was turned into a confident, smartly dressed go-getter by an atrocious body spray. The sight of him stepping out of his dingy, deliberately messy bathroom and into a party where he was immediately covered in cooing mares was the last thing then the audience experienced before going blind and deaf.
Some blessed their blindness, for taking away the horror only to curse as they realized the last sight forever seared into their retinas would be the logo resembling sharp-edged vomit. Now unable to see or hear, they could never cleanse themselves of the last ideas propagated into them. It was impossible to tell how many of the deaths that day were suicides, and how many of them were accidents on the part of a suddenly insensate population.
The next day after almost all of Equestria was rendered unable to see or hear anything ever again, tragedy struck. The second ad broadcast by the sun was seen and heard by no one. Shares in the sun plummeted. The once serene and distant body that marked the center of their solar system was bankrupt by evening. There was a brief discussion that night about bailing out the sun, but it came to nothing. Equestria was just too exhausted from this last insult to try and save itself.
On the third day, when there was no day, those who had paid for their sun and avoided blindness were all relieved by the terrifying blackness. The blind paid it no mind, scurrying in the now perpetual gloom.
Luna wasn't sure how to feel about her sister bringing about eternal night. She eventually decided upon jealousy, since it came natural to her and it wasn't fair that Celestia was better than her at even this.
So the sun was privatized, and six weeks later all life in Equestria had perished.
