What You Leave Behind

When science says that you're little more than electrochemical impulses and magical energies, what's left to live for?

That was the question that had driven ponykind since the Great Revolution. It was a mystery that had divided and united nations, driven hapless ponies insane, caused the development of weapons of mass destruction, and defined the very history of the world. It really was quite a question.

A question that, for the first time in a thousand years, may have been near an answer.

Way up in the Frozen North, beyond most of the crazed survivalists and demonic beasts that lurked in the middle areas, a large organization had made its home. This organization was called the Assembly of Ponies for Breaching Reality. APBR didn’t roll off the tongue so well, unfortunately, but they cared less for form than function. After all, their entire mission was built on brute force.

The leader of this organization was one Twilight Sparkle, a recluse with enough sass for a city. She was a bit of an undersized unicorn, with little muscle or extra height to speak of, although she did have piercing violet eyes that could bring anyone to their knees with the slightest glare. Her comrade in investigation was Starlight Glimmer, a much younger unicorn with enough magic to level a city, but not enough sensibility to rein herself in. She, too, was short enough to have trouble reaching some tables. She made up for this lack of height with her extreme magical aptitude, as well as her ability to stay perfectly cool in a crisis. That summed the two up nicely, although when one looked closer their real personalities became apparent.

Twilight had nearly everything she wanted in life, except for the answer to why that everything existed. That was what she lived for now after all: the quest for ultimate closure. That quest had been sorely lacking in progress for the past six years, in which she had made no discoveries, gotten less and less publicity, and generally failed at what she tried to do. Starlight was just as unhappy with this and responded by generally sulking most of the time.

When Twilight awoke on Day 164 of Year 79,326, nothing around them suggested that anything was to go badly, or oddly in any way. In fact, it seemed like every sign was pointing towards a very good day. The moment her eyes opened, she leapt out of bed and marched out of her room with no hesitation. A few pulses of magic caused the various kitchen appliances to activate, and she positioned herself in front of the curtains as they fully calibrated themselves. Once that was done, she cleared her throat, and spoke in a commanding, carefully enunciated voice. “Execute macro Destiny.”

The voice recognition system embedded into the apartment’s computer responded with a small ding, and light orchestral music began to fill the air. A trained ear would recognize it immediately as one of Equestria’s biggest new classical pieces; Gustav Holst’s The Planets, the section being Jupiter. Holst was an awfully odd name, but most were pretty certain it was a pseudonym.

As the violins continued and a sextet of French horns joined in, Twilight focused her gaze on the curtains, preparing to indulge herself in the result of the macro. It was a bit silly, yes, but it helped to get her fully awake and excited for a day of work. She absolutely adored classical music, and the new find from the famous author was one of the best pieces she had listened to in a long time. About a week ago, she had programmed a simple macro with the piece included, and set up a schedule to complete in perfect alignment with the music.

When the song’s first mini-climax hit, the curtains flew open and brilliant white light filled the room. The windows opened in synchrony with the curtains, and a strong breeze  flew through the room, stirring Twilight’s mane and tail. The most dazzling effect caused by this was the sunbeams streaming through the gaps in her tresses and playing off the wall. Twilight felt invincible. With this music ringing in her ears, and confidence first and foremost in her mind, she was one hundred percent sure that today was going to be the day they started making progress again.

Her magical state was interrupted abruptly by Starlight’s door slamming open, and its occupant stumbling out and into a wall. She managed to right herself quickly , and stared blearily out of the open window, blinking repeatedly. “...What time is it, Twilight? I think ish early. Too early for this. Whazzat music.”

Twilight jolted and disabled the macro with a magical pulse, taking the voice recognition system with it. This was not expected. Sometimes Twilight forgot that she lived with Starlight, after all. Partners they were, but this was too much. “Starlight, don’t scare me like that! And it’s Jupiter, from the new Holst suite, if you must know. Really, though, you ruined my moment! I was enjoying that!”

Starlight managed to roll her eyes with the little energy she had, and stumbled towards the kitchen. Twilight followed after her, closing the window as an afterthought and drawing a cup from the stack on the counter. On its way to her, it hit the oblivious Starlight, knocking her over entirely.

Starlight made it to her hooves after a good twenty seconds of lying on the floor looking pitiful. Once she had finally gotten to her feet, she too made a canister of instant coffee, clicking the small container into the machine and watching as it rapidly dispensed the resulting beverage into a plastic cup. The coffee machine rang a small internal bell after a moment and pushed out the platform the cup was on, leaving it somewhat closer to Starlight. Being as exhausted as she was, she handled this by dunking her muzzle in the cup and sucking as hard as she could. Twilight ignored the ensuing screaming.

Ten minutes later, Twilight was dragging Starlight away from the television, grumbling loudly. “Starlight, I know you’re more the brute force side of our relationship, but you don’t just get to sit around doing nothing all day! I need you to at least help me check in. We’re revising the software and I can’t work it myself anymore.”

Starlight responded with some disgruntled mumbling about how pushy Twilight was, but finally got up herself, allowing Twilight to remove her grasp on her ear. Quickly as she could, Starlight scampered to the terminal next to the window and activated it by sending magical pulses filled with information into the system. It was certainly shaping up to be a normal day.

Neither of them had any idea what they were in for.

The first sign of the problems in store for poor Twilight was on the news. On her way to her residential transporter, she jumped at the holoprojectors suddenly flipping out of the ceiling. The two camera-like objects projected two intersecting cones of cyan light, and at the point where they met was an image; a massive geodesic dome, constructed of shining steel. Snow covered a crescent-shaped area on the dome, seeming to sparkle in the image as the camera drifted slowly to the side. A young mare’s voice filled the air, projected from all around the room. “Breaking news; approximately five minutes ago, the APBR dome was evacuated due to an unknown event within. APBR personnel have declined to comment.” The holoprojectors cut the feed abruptly and retracted back into the ceiling, the in-home AI deciding that Twilight now knew enough to act.

This worried her somewhat, but she paid no heed to it, stepping into the pod and turning around. “APBR dome, entry one.” The hatch closed and sealed with barely a hiss, and the pod began to rise up through the tube. It silently left the apartment and shot up suddenly, the floor tilting to handle the G-forces. It was as smooth a ride as ever, and she’d get time to relax.

However, her journey was not nearly as peaceful as she expected. Though pods were ordinarily alone in their transport tubes, there were many others around hers. This was odd. However, there was no danger. After all, she knew exactly how transporter pods worked. They were the product of decades of design, though they were unconventional enough that they needed an introduction. Transporter pods were small, gyroscopically stabilized spheres with a thruster-covered outer shell, which conveyed themselves along magnetic channels in immense transport tubes. The magnets in this tube were working overtime, with visible smoke rising from one of the ones ahead. A team of armored ponies was already working on repairing it, and Twilight managed to catch a glimpse of an earth pony ripping off the maintenance cover with her teeth. She reflected for a moment on how lucky she was to live in such a connected world, and then summoned a book from thin air. She had some reading to catch up on.

By the time she reached the APBR dome, however, all thoughts of carefree fictions and fake worlds had been cast out of her mind by panic. A cursory search had revealed to her that the dome had been evacuated due to a catastrophic explosion, forcing everyone out of the building and nearly killing her aide.

Twilight broke into a gallop, charged past the many confused onlookers and soon reached the actual perimeter. Around it, however, there were a number of guards, and she had to bring herself to an abrupt stop in front of the cordon. One of the guards, a large cream-colored pegasus in white military camouflage, approached her immediately after, seeming unhappy with this. “Ma’am, no one’s allowed into the APBR dome right now. In case you didn’t see it on the breaking news broadcasts, there’s been an overload--”

He was interrupted by Twilight charging right past him, and vaulting the cordon effortlessly. It was a safety precaution for the common people; she didn’t need to pay any heed to them.

Twilight’s journey to her office was somewhat eventful. With shouts of “One side!”, “Outta the way!”, and “Just move already!” she made it to her office with only two minutes of extra travel time spent. Considering her office was situated at the very top of the dome, this was not very much.

The moment she entered her office, she began sending magical pulses to every device in the room, tapping into the entire dome via a complex program. Twilight quickly clambered into her seat, only letting herself relax when she was fully situated. She began, hesitatingly, to feel out the dome’s primary systems.

The results were not by any means good. The entire accelerator chamber had exploded, and all the emergency failsafes weren’t returning any data. A few scientists had been trapped and seriously injured under the rubble, as evidenced by the small pools of blood dotting the dome’s massive main compartment. It really was oddly structured: with one giant chamber containing the accelerator chamber at its center and everything else set around the rim, it proved somewhat impractical for many purposes. This shape, however, made rescue efforts far easier.

Twilight locked up then and there, silently continuing to examine the carnage within her treasured lab. She had helped build this place from the ground up, and now it was ruined. Worse than ruined, completely destroyed. Her beautiful accelerator chamber, in the works for three years, had went up in flames the day it was to be used.. Why did that even happen? What could have possibly slipped past all Twilight’s careful calculations and defenses?

She had to find out.

Twilight attempted to leap off her chair and instead kicked the chair into the back wall, ending up without support and crashing to the floor. She immediately stood, though, and broke into a gallop, planning to break open the damned chamber herself and figure out what was going on inside. This was assuming she could get into the chamber, however, and once she finally made it down the massive stairwell to the bottom level she realized what was going on.

The accelerator chamber wasn’t destroyed, it was outright gone. In its place, there was a...distortion. Something unreal, so unnatural it made Twilight recoil just looking at it. It was a black deeper than the darkest night, and around it light itself bent and twisted in the oddest ways. It looked something like a black hole, though fortunately it exerted no detectable gravitational pull. One of that size would have long since engulfed Equestria, and probably the sun and moon as well.

The moment it entered her vision, however, she locked up. She completely froze, dead on the spot, staring in abject horror at the thing before her.  It seemed to exude darkness, casting a shadow much wider than itself, of a diffuse light that did not exist. The floor was devoid of ponies, leaving Twilight the sole one there. That didn’t help her terrified state of mind.

There was no movement, nor sound. The entire room was dead silent. The air conditioning and material transfer systems had all been shut down for the emergency condition, and so the only thing Twilight could hear was a deep, deafening rumble so low she could barely hear it. It was coming from the thing, and it was definitely not her imagination. Everything around her was rattling slightly, pieces of rubble skittering down larger slabs of it and bouncing off her in some cases.

And then, however, it was over. As suddenly as it had began, the moment had ended. In a flash of magic she was outside the dome, staring Starlight Glimmer in the face. Both the ponies collapsed in unison, one out of extreme fatigue, the other out of overriding terror. Around them, the armored ponies from earlier had tightened the perimeter noticeably, and already a pair of them were approaching the two, very unhappy with their presence. Starlight, being bad enough with people already, forced herself to her feet and began shaking Twilight. “Twilight! Come on, Twilight, wake up! Don’t die on me now!”

Twilight managed to respond to this with a small whimper. The sight of the thing had driven something entirely different from fear into her heart. It was obviously magical, yes, but it was something she had never seen or heard of. Something far too dark for her to understand. Perhaps if she had looked at it for a little longer she would have begun to go insane. That, however, was not a possibility she wanted to consider. The biggest problem right now was the looming threat of all-encompassing destruction wrapped into a tiny magical package. The one she had to deal with.