I feel as though I should be drowning. The chemicals congeal around my body, crowding in around every crevice, hammering at every pore. I swear I can feel the weight of every individual drop that's pressing down on me from above and around me. The chamber is airtight, with the only semblance of oxygen being the canned stuff they pump through the pipes and up into the cumbersome mask that's locked into place on my face. There's a few faint prickling sensations from the cables and wires stuck into me at various points, but most of that just ends up as background noise as my body concentrates on the fact that it thinks it's being slowly crushed to death.
Maybe this is why Celestia allowed Equestrian culture to go mostly unchanged for a thousand years; change isn't scary, just really uncomfortable and hard to wash out of your coat.
The buzzer that indicates a completed process goes off, setting my teeth on edge as the vibrations reverberate through the liquid. As the various cloning fluids drain away through grates in the floor, I curse the idea of building a warning buzzer into a chamber filled with one of the strongest conductors of vibrations in the universe. Surely the liquids draining away from around my body would be enough of an alert that the process was over. Note to self, remove buzzers before next experiment.
The wires fall away with a few sharp tugs, and the mask hangs even heavier on my muzzle. I go to unscrew it with my magic, but my horn barely even sparks. I start to panic. My magic can't have failed me now, can it? There's nothing magic-retardant in the cloning fluids. Hell, we specifically made it hyper-conducive to magical energy just in case the manatization didn't take in the initial sequencing! And even if the process rendered those fluids inert after the process finished, that shouldn't affect me, unless...
Oh.
Oh, that is not good.
I'm into full-on panic mode now. My hurry to get out of the mask translates into banging it against the side of the chamber, and it takes an embarrassingly long three seconds for me to remind myself that I can just use my hooves to unscrew the mask. Once that's done, it clatters to the floor and I do my best to rip the chamber door open. It slides open with a faint hiss, oblivious to the gravity of the situation.
I stumble out into the bright lights of the Borealis Institute's cloning laboratory. Well, technically it's the bio-engineering wing of the institute's parent company, Life Inc., but at that point I'm just arguing semantics with myself in a moment of crisis. The point is, the room I'm in right now has been outfitted and designated specifically for the Borealis cloning project, with five cloning chambers, enormous tanks of the various required fluids, and a little stand with a clipboard in front of each chamber. The clipboard bears a short essay by yours truly, entitled 'So You Just Discovered You're a Clone With No Past and a Theoretically Infinite Future'. We put it in front of every chamber because we never really know which chamber will be used to house the template.
We were only making one clone today. The process is still very finicky. The last time we got the balance wrong, we ended up with a sheep that believed in an end to indentured servitude. One unstable alicorn is a cake-walk compared to that.
The clone is still floating in her chamber. I check the timer. Three minutes until the chamber drains. Good. That gives me time to stop panicking. Hopefully.
The chemicals floating in the chamber practically sparkle with magic, looking more like a gas than a fluid. The clone is basking in so much energy, I wouldn't be surprised if parts of its skin were cracking under the pressure. Meanwhile, my horn only now starts to spark with the most rudimentary of lighting spells. I feel like I'm running at 2% power, and the other 98% is floating in this chamber. This is a problem.
Now, the most logical explanation for this problem is that the clone unconsciously absorbed my magic. All of it. Nearly down to the bone. While functionally comatose and with only half a brain at best. Through a system that was primarily designed to briefly archive and transfer DNA sequences on a one-way stream.
Well, if there's anypony who could pull that off, it would be me. But even so, it seems like an unlikely reality, as is the case with most logical assumptions.
The next most obvious solution is that there was some kind of power surge that fried my horn temporarily and overwhelmed the clone. That would explain the extended gestation period, and almost everything else, but for one small issue: the Borealis Institute has its own dedicated power grid to protect against exactly this sort of thing happening. So, that one's out.
The third solution is that that timer has been blinking between two minutes, fifty-eight seconds and two minutes, fifty-seven seconds for the past thirty seconds, and those fluids are looking more and more like an illusion spell. The third solution is that the clone has been awake for a long time, and I have only just now woken up.
As though sensing my realization, the clone dissipates her illusion. I stare through the clear glass at her, and it's almost like looking into a mirror. The process has captured me perfectly, from the detailing on my feathers to that unconscious little grin I seem to default to these days. It's kind of creepy, really. I'm not sure if I'll ever get used to this.
The door slides open. My clone steps out into the world, her first steps remarkably stable for a newborn. But then, the current theory suggests she's had a few hours to practice, so I guess that makes sense. From here, I can feel her brimming over with magic. If it weren't for the disturbing hollowness in my own body, I'd probably be impressed at how accurately the process could copy my magic into another body without making it explode.
The clone coughs, and I return my attention to her. In my head, I'm already running through the conversation. She'll be confused, maybe dazed, possibly ashamed of her mistake. Judging from the look of childish innocence in her eyes, she probably didn't steal my magic maliciously. This might even just have been an undocumented reaction between clones that we hadn't tested for. Whatever the case, I'm ready for whatever question this clone might have for me.
"Excellent work, Subject Six."
Of course, I never said I was ready for everything.
The half-assembled speech dies on my throat, and all of my prepared answers give way to a single question. "I'm sorry, what?" I feel the tickle of magic on my ears, as though the clone is checking that I can still hear. To be fair, it's not a misplaced concern.
"I said 'excellent work'," she repeats, just loud enough that I flinch. At that, she smiles and releases my ear. "And it really is excellent. You've given us a lot of fantastic data to work with." I notice a clipboard floating in the clone's magic, accompanied closely by a quill. Where did she even get those? "Thanks to your actions today, psychologists in the future will be better prepared to deal with the consequences of temporary loss of magic in unicorns."
Okay. There's two possibilities here. One, the clone's memories got screwed up and she thinks she's the original. Two, she knows she's the clone, but is trying to convince me that I'm the clone so that she can steal my life. Either way, I know what experiment we were conducting today, and it isn't what she's talking about. "Temporary loss of magic isn't a thing."
I expect her to crack under the pressure. I expect her to act confused, to try and prove me wrong. I don't expect her to smile like she's just answered the Farmy Paradox. "Well, of course it isn't. Not yet, anyway. But it could be. None of us really know what the future holds, after all. And considering how resource-efficient the cloning process is, we may as well test for every possible outcome."
That does sound exactly like my thought process in such a situation. In fact, that's actually a brilliant idea. It would also perfectly explain why my magic is missing, if it weren't for the fact that she didn't erase my memory of what we were doing today. "That's a pretty big leap in logic, seeing as you're the first stable clone this project has produced."
I've dealt with a lot of villains over the years. More than a few made an effort to pretend that they weren't the villain, and they all tended to react differently when they were exposed. Some of them went into extreme denial. Some were shocked and horrified at being found out. Some would curse at me, or run for the hills. But nopony has ever just hung their head and sighed when I discovered their evil plot.
"And the scans looked so promising..." The clone sighs again, then her head snaps up and she glares at me like a disapproving mother. "You're not Twilight Sparkle, Subject Six. I am."
I just barely stop myself from laughing. She can't honestly think that act will work on me. "Look, I know what's going on here. You can't fool me." She sighs a third time, this one especially forcefully.
"At least you're only missing the last few weeks. The first three clones didn't even know what the Borealis Institute was." She puts down her clipboard, and goes to walk past me. I try to extend a wing to block her, but it barely responds to my command. Did she seriously steal my pegasus magic, too? "It must be a compression issue," she mutters as if to herself. "Maybe if we keep the next one under for longer, and leave the transfer until they've finished growing the brain, we'll get a complete mesh."
This is getting ridiculous. She must realize she's lost by now. She can't honestly think she can keep talking and I'll just forget to rein her in. "The jig is up, 'Twilight'." It feels wrong to use that name, but it's probably the only one she'll respond to. "Stop trying to talk your way out of this, and just give yourself up. You're the clone, and you hit me with a sleep spell so you could siphon off my magic." I round on the clone, and I'm about to read her her rights when I suddenly float up into the air.
The clone turns to face me, and her eyes and horn are glowing. "No, you're the clone, and you were born without magic. Your entire skeletal structure is shot through with microscopic filaments of Horavian Unichain. The best you'll ever manage is a Level Two illumination spell, and even that would probably make your heart explode." Her hair has started to blow in a wind that isn't there. "You are a clone with paranoid delusions, bred and born for the sole purpose of seeing if unicorns robbed of magic default to paranoid delusions."
I can't believe what she's saying. No, I won't believe what she's saying. I remember what it felt like to have magic. I know what Horavian restraints feel like, and there isn't the slightest twinge of that alien sensation in any part of my body. She's lying to me. She has to be. And I can't stop her. The best I can do is to not go gentle.
"That's just what you want me to think." I spit in defiance at her, but it slows to a halt before it can get two inches from my nose.
The hair stops floating. The eyes stop glowing. The spell that surrounds me blinks out, and I fall to the ground. The clone's horn sparks and shimmers with a familiar spell, and the world starts to turn purple.
"Goodbye, Subject Six." The last thing I see is a smug grin of satisfaction.
