Mechanic Sapiens

THE SIXTH DAY "THE GOLDEN OAK LIBRARY" (NON-THREAT) 2:15 AM

Twilight squinted her eyes, trying to make out the scribbles that were on the paper. Notes, equations, charts, and sketches were all squeezed onto the several pages that Twilight held up to her eyes. She had considered giving up multiple times, but every time she felt like she couldn't finish it, she remembered that this was the only way that Anonymous could be defeated. Magic wouldn't work. It would take a lot of time to charge up a spell that could disintegrate Titanium on demand, and being idle while watching someone threaten her homeworld wasn't something Twilight could do.

Unfortunately, the bomb was going to be scaled down significantly. Uranium was uncommon in Equestria, and the small deposits that were known about were strongly avoided. After all, radiation-proof clothing was also hard to find in Equestria. Twilight would talk to Rarity about making a suit in the morning. It wasn't a conversation she was looking forward to.

To make matters worse, since Anonymous was living in her lab, Twilight would have to find a way to build the device in her bedroom. She had already found a case that she could store the materials in and not worry about radiation and she could wire a timer to the neutron source easily, so she wouldn't worry about that at the moment.

Her eyes skimmed across the notes for the what could have been the hundredth time. Some of the things Anonymous had told her didn't make any sense. One of the nuclear equations described on the paper made absolutely no sense, it was unbalanced. Twilight was focusing on that right now, because if the math wasn't entirely correct, it could be disastrous. Her focus was disrupted by a hysterical laugh that seemed to come from her basement.

'Having good dreams, are you?' Twilight internally rolled her eyes, jealous that the alien that caused her panic was having pleasant dreams while she was working.

Another laugh. This time even louder.

Now Twilight was curious. Not many things warrant laughter at two in the morning. As she walked to the stairs, she noticed that Spike wasn't in his bed. Wherever he was, Twilight was going to have a serious talk with him when she found him.

"Do that again, it looks ridiculous," Anonymous asked Spike.

Spike smiled and randomly waved his claws in midair, which caused the both of them to laugh. Twilight watched from the stairs, not only feeling lost on the humor, but feeling left out.

"Oh, hey, Twilight!" Spike called out, turning to her.

There was something off about both of their eyes. Spike's eyes were usually green, but now they were blue. Anonymous' eyes were already blue, but now they were a different shade.

"I thought you went to bed hours ago, Spike," Twilight remarked, trotting down the stairs.

Her laboratory was unrecognizable. The alien technology had grown away from the corner of her lab, covering almost half of the room. Her tabletops were left untouched, but everything was more cramped together.

"I did, but I had a bad dream and asked Anonymous what it meant."

"What was your dream?" Twilight inquired.

"I dreamt of a red sky and dark clouds rolling over Ponyville." Spike shuddered at the memory.

"What did the clouds look like?"

"They touched the ground and were kind of big at the top and thin in the middle. Like a mushroom, or Anon's spaceship." He continued.

"Hey, Spike. Get a load of this." Anonymous interrupted.

He moved his fingers as if he was casting a spell, and then motioned as if he was picking something up, and he released it in front of Spike. His squinted his eyes in confusion at the invisible item Anonymous dropped.

"Who is Steve Reeves?"

Anonymous got close to Spike's ear and whispered the answer, grinning while doing so.

Spike erupted in laughter and rolled onto the floor. Anonymous held his hand over his mouth, trying to keep quiet.

"What's so funny?" Twilight asked.

Spike gasped in realization.

He turned to Anon. "She hadn't tried it yet. Do you have another pair?"

"Yeah, I've got like... Sixteen more." Anonymous remarked while looking through his black bag.

He reached behind him and pulled out a small, square black box out of his bag, and handed it to Twilight.

Inside of it was... Contact lenses.

"I don't get it..." She said, feeling puzzled.

"You put them on, silly," Spike informed the stumped Librarian.

Twilight quickly charged up her horn and brought the lens to her eyes using magic. She was almost blinded by a blue light that was being burned into her eyes from the lens.

INSTALLING UPDATES... (WORKING)

The words were bright but hard to read, as some of them escaped her field of view.

"What is this?"

"It's everything, Twilight. You can ask it questions, ask it jokes, or use it to predict the future. Anonymous says that when he organizes Equis, he'll give a pair to everypony!" Spike reponded gleefully.

"Organize?" She inquired.

"You remember, don't you? I'm here to prepare you for intergalactic technology. Future shock is a real thing, you know."

The words changed on Twilight's lens, and in their place, even more words appeared in a slightly smaller font.

ANALYZING BRAINWAVES AND NEURAL PATHWAYS. SAMPLES NEEDED. THINK OF: MUSIC.

Twilight didn't understand why the lens wanted her to think of music, but just when she thought of the word 'music', the words changed again.

SAMPLES NEEDED. THINK OF: LIGHT AND DARKNESS

What did it mean? The concepts of light and darkness, or a memory that involved light and darkness? Before the question could be answered, more text appeared.

SAMPLES NEEDED. THINK OF: FRIENDSHIP

That was an easy one. All she had to do was think of her friends. The words disappeared, and all that was left was a slightly blue tint overlayed on Twilight's vision. Spike and Anonymous had stopped paying attention to her a while ago and were now staring off into space.

"What now?"

Twilight was shocked to see what words appeared on her screen.

> WHAT NOW?

It was listening to her, and Twilight didn't feel comfortable with that.

> THIS IS WEIRD. HOW CAN IT CONVERT MY WORDS INTO TEXT SO QUICKLY?

Twilight choked on her own spit. She hadn't even said anything that time, but the words had appeared on the screen.

"Calm down, what happened?" Anonymous asked, putting his hand on her shoulder in an effort to comfort her.

"It just... It just... Showed what I was thinking!"

"That's kinda the point, Twi," Spike remarked while turning his eyes to his hyperventilating roommate.

Several hundred words had appeared on the screen, all of them Twilight's thoughts. "How can it do this?", "Is anypony reading this?", "I hope that I don't think of--".

The bomb.

That was the last thing that she could think about. If anypony else was reading this, she didn't want them to know she was creating a weapon to battle Anonymous, should he get hostile.

"I'll answer any questions if you have any," Anonymous informed her, moving his fingers in mid-air again.

"How does it work? What's going on? What can it do?" Twilight shot out the questions in rapid succession.

"The lens operates off of quadrillions of logical gates that use photons and electricity to store information. This allows it to do a variety of functions, such as record moments you wish to save, answer pretty much any question you have about anything, and send messages between entities." He explained it as if he was reading off of the box it was shipped in.

It was a lot of information to take in all at once. The fact that everything Twilight heard and thought about was being flashed in front of her eyes didn't help. Spike looked like he had mastered whatever was supposed to be done. Since it could allegedly answer any questions, Twilight went ahead and tried it.

'What is the ratio between the mass of a neutron and an electron?' She thought.

Twilight's thoughts slowly faded away from the screen as new text began to form in front of her eyes.

A NEUTRON'S MASS IS 1838.68 TIMES THE MASS OF AN ELECTRON.

The message was quickly obstructed by her thoughts that questioned how it would know something so trivial?

'Show the defeat of Nightmare Moon'

Twilight's vision was obstructed by an opaque blue rectangle that consumed most of her vision.

WELCOME TO THE 3-D PLAYBACK ENVIRONMENT! USE THE BUTTONS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN TO NAVIGATE THROUGH THE TIMELINE. WAVE YOUR HAND TO CHANGE THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE ENVIRONMENT.

As soon as Twilight finished reading the message, the rectangle disappeared. She could no longer see Spike or Anonymous, but she was seeing something else. She was in the middle of the Town Hall. Everypony was there... including herself.

It was the Summer Sun Celebration.

"Oh, my beloved subjects. It's been so long since I've seen your precious, sun-loving faces."

The voice was unmistakably Nightmare Moon's.

"What have you done with our Princess?" Rainbow Dash shouted from the other side of the town hall.

She attempted to fly towards Nightmare Moon, but Applejack bit her tail, trying to keep her friend safe.

It reminded Twilight of Starswirl's time-traveling spell, everything was so clear and real. Then Twi noticed a bar at the bottom of her field of view. She thought about its use, but nothing happened as opposed to earlier.

She reached out to touch the bar, her hoof layered over the video she was watching. She couldn't reach the bar, but when she swiped while trying to reach it, the Town Hall revolved around her. It took a while for her to control it properly, but she could change her position, who she was looking at, and where she was. She was no longer limited to the Town Hall, she could explore all of Ponyville if she wanted.

'Why stop there?' She thought.

She zoomed out, watching her town get smaller and smaller. Eventually, she stopped when she saw a massive blue sphere in front of her.
Every single little star stood out, the galaxy's brown and yellow clouds painted the void, and Equis was the cherry on the cosmic cake. Twilight realized how small and insignificant she was. Then she also realized how small and insignificant Anonymous was, which comforted her.

She soon found out position wasn't the only thing she could manipulate.

Time.

She could change how fast everything occurred. Twice as fast, hundreds of times, millions of times faster. She watched her solar system get ripped apart by gravity, she watched the stars explode, reform, and eventually fade out into oblivion. She watched the Universe go cold.

Then nothing.

She waited for a few minutes, still nothing.

She sped it up even further. Trillions of times faster, still nothing. It took around fourteen minutes before something happened. Another universe. It exploded out of nothing, and quickly dissolved into non-existence, like a firework in the night sky. She zoomed out beyond her universe. Thousands, millions of other universes polluted empty space. They rotated around each other like planets orbiting a star. Everything after that was self-similar.

It was beautiful.

Twilight registered that what she was seeing was the future since she had sped it up. It then became apparent to her that she could possibly see her future. She zoomed back up to where her former universe was and reversed the flow of time. After some trial-error, she arrived back at the Town Hall with Nightmare Moon. That had happened almost a year ago, so all she had to do was go forward one year.

A few minutes later she was looking at herself in the basement. Twilight turned her head, and she could see her own head turn. She could see her own eyes. Twi could also see that Anonymous and Spike had gone to sleep in the basement hours ago.

She changed the flow of time again, this time one week later.

Twilight's heart raced at what she saw.

A red sky and dark mushroom clouds.

Twilight quickly jerked the lens off her eyes, terrified at what she'd seen. She trembled in place, trying not to throw up. Twilight didn't know how accurate that future was, but she did know someone who could answer it.

She put the lens back on.

'Is life on Equis in jeopardy?'

BAYESIAN INFERENCE OUTPUT: %76.23 CERTAIN.

There was a chance for them, however slim. All she had to do was rely on that 24 percent that said that everypony would survive. Then Twi realized that she didn't know who was providing her with this estimation. It could be a faked estimation put there to ensure Twilight wasted her time with more inaccurate information.

'Who is answering my questions?'

ALL ANSWERS ARE PROVIDED BY THE A.L.L.O.S. SYSTEM

Twilight thought about the response for a while. Anonymous had said his best friend used to be called Allos. Did he name the system after his friend, or was the system his friend?

She was unsure. She was unsure about everything. And the only way she was going to be certain about anything anymore was to get a good night's sleep. She was too tired to go upstairs, instead, she was just going to go to sleep on the cot she was laying in. Spike was nearby, and so was Anonymous. They'd watch over her.

Speaking of being unsure, Anon had proven himself to be both friendly and hostile. She could trust him, but she had to keep him in check. Maybe the reason he overreacted earlier was because Sarah had to relive the fact she was dating a murderer. If that was the case, Twilight didn't feel like Anonymous was a threat at all. He was a friend.

An alien for a friend.

SIX DAYS SINCE ARRIVAL "THE GOLDEN OAK LIBRARY" (NON-THREAT) 6:18 AM

A.L.L.O.S. SYSTEM ONLINE. CHECKING SUBJECTS.

STATUS OF SUBJECTS: MSH-33214, "SPIKE", "TWILIGHT SPARKLE": UNCONSCIOUS.

CONFLICT DETECTED: DESTRUCTION OF EQUIS VIA THERMONUCLEAR WEAPON.

RUNNING UPDATED BAYESIAN INFERENCES...

PROBABILITY OF DESTRUCTION OF EQUIS VIA THERMONUCLEAR WEAPON: %75.24

PROBABILITY OF DESTRUCTION OF MSH-33214 VIA THERMONUCLEAR WEAPON: %24.76

ANALYZING MORAL CODE...

DECISION MADE.

NEW OBJECTIVE: ASSIST "TWILIGHT SPARKLE" WITH ELIMINATING MSH-33214.

SUBJECT: "ANONYMOUS" (TARGET)