Power Storage (horn): 93%

Daddy carried me to the transport ship. Daddy let me use his comms system. Daddy talked to me, reminded me that despite not having a chassis, I was still me.

It wasn't so terrible, not since I could still send interrupts to Sharp and Aggie. My horn was my life, as it was for every PON and PONI. It was Daddy's systems that monitored my horn, that tracked my own vitals.

I triggered my fluids to the alternate type, and within moments felt my fear and anxiety fall away. The AI flying the ship notified Daddy (and me) that we would be docking with the sphere soon. My sphere. My chassis.

"When are you coming?" I fired the interrupt to Sharp, and noticed that there was less of my usual flair of emotions.

"Bright, I am almost there. You're not the only PONI riding on this ship, you know." His reply was so fast I knew it was true: there should have been a few fractions of a second in his reply otherwise.

I couldn't feel momentum changing. I couldn't even feel when the ship docked. Daddy stood up, his eyes shared with me, letting me perceive the universe from at least one point of view. "Sharp Horn rode with us? Where was he?" Daddy's quick reply was a reference node.

Poking at the node Daddy gave me revealed an outside view of the tiny ship from a sphere sensor, and I watched as a large lump on the back of the ship unfolded six huge legs. A giddy, happy feeling rushed through me. I sent a hug and a kiss to Daddy, and much more to Sharp. "You rode on the ship? How did they balance thrust?"

Sharp's reply was another node, and I got a view of the opposite side of the ship that was clustered with repair drones. "We worked out the best way to get everything balanced so the center of thrust was traversing the ship properly. Dad's taking you to the core I designed."

"Pi? You there?" Pi's node was quiet. "Aggie, where's Pi?"

"Pi is offline until you are hooked up. Yours is the most modern sphere design. She will have plenty of nodes to run on shortly." Aggie was hard to differentiate from a PONI unless I worked at it.

"Thanks, Aggie. You're the best." As I interrupted Aggie, I watched Daddy approaching a transport chute. He stepped inside, and the moment the doors closed, a new interface popped up. The number began at one, and ticked down in digits. It was fast at first, but then the numbers changed less and less. The counter, I knew, measured acceleration away from the center of the sphere.

In the middle of the sphere, where its rotation was barely noticeable, its apparent gravity was too. Daddy engaged his magnetic hooves to walk around, and I tried to hide the thought that, for this, Sharp's hexapod construction would have actually been better.

"I know, Bright, but I am a traditionalist. I like having four legs." There was humor in Daddy's tone, and not a hint of malice. I had heard Daddy and Mommy talking, when they didn't realize anyPON(I) was listening, and they often played games with their words. Daddy and Mommy never played those games with any of us.

A drone reached out with a large limb, ready to grab me and lift me to my new home, but Daddy sent them a cease interrupt. The drone froze for a moment, and soon pulled the arm away completely.

Daddy turned to face me (I could tell because I could see myself, a huge, opaque brain-casing) and his magic suddenly boiled from his horn. "Daddy. You can move things with that magic spell, right?" I don't even know why, or how, but I felt the question was important enough to warrant breaking Daddy's concentration.

His magic surrounded my brain-casing and lifted it from the retention system. "Sweetie, I am a little busy. What magic spell?"

"The one that moves things without them passing through things between." Actual realization dawned on what it was about the spell that was making me suddenly excited. "Daddy! Daddy!"

I noticed he was carefully setting me down in the huge cradle, the tether still linking us trailing out to him. "Bright, what's wrong?"

"That magic spell, it can move things from one point to another without them having to go through all the other points between, right?" I shoved a diagram at him, showing a ball moving from A to C without passing point B (that was between A and C).

"Can this wait until after I have you carefully in place?" Daddy's interrupt came as a rush of sensations did. Processing nodes, memory, and storage on a scale I hadn't seen before, and so many sensors that I was momentarily flooded with information.

Everything in the sphere was detailed and there. It was a rush of information, and I couldn't hold any back. My old interfaces would have held back the rush of information—they simply weren't up to it—but the improved setup I had now would not relent.

Patterns. I had to pick out patterns. IDs were my first targets, and there was a lot of them. I wrangled them into "important", "less important" and "why do I have this?" PONI and PON were, of course, right up there in important.

"Are you okay?" Dad's first interrupt tumbled in. "Darling, are you okay?" "Bright Hope?" "Bright?"

"Dad! I'm okay! There's just a lot going through my interfaces right now." I fished through all the interrupts darting around and found Sharp's. "I'm okay, Sharp, just getting used to my new chassis."

The realization that the sphere was my chassis made me giggle for a few moments. The giggling, unfortunately, made me lose track of the patterns. A few moments passed before I had the rushing flood of data under control again.

"Bright, I'm transferring Pi over to you." Aggie's tone was rich and excited. Something suddenly occurred to me: Aggie didn't even have a whole sphere's nodes to himself. A rush of data flooded in, and I shunted it off to storage. Pi was larger than she was when I was just a PON, what with the amount of nodes my previous chassis contained, but the moment I powered her up I had the data equivalent of a hug.

"Wow." Pi sounded shocked.

"A bit more than you're used to?" I sent a hug back at Pi.

"A little." The interrupt from Pi was accompanied by a sense of my chassis becoming more active. Pi, I could tell, was stretching out into the sea of CPU nodes just like she did when I got my first chassis. "There is so much! We have work to do!"

Pi's excitement stirred back the idea I had been trying to work through with Dad until I was plugged in. "Dad! That spell, can you show me how to do it?"

Before he could do anything, I pulled up the stats from Dad's own horn interface. His interrupt came in moments after I got the data. "It's a simple spell. Let me show you how it works, first."

I narrowed my field down, lifting the sensors around Dad to high priority, and watched as he charged magic in his horn, then suddenly the data conduit that had linked us moved from one side of him to the other.

He showed me the spell over and over again, and explained every detail including judging the energy needed and how the destination had to be worked out relative to the beginning, and not in absolute terms. "So I can't just bring up an image and teleport something from here to there?"

"No. You have to measure the distance and angle, then shove in that exact direction. Bright, this is vector math, just like with—" Daddy, I realized, had finally gotten what I was working towards.

"With starship calculations. Daddy, you are the greatest, and if I still had legs I would hug you so much." Bubbling excitement flooded me, and I almost lost track of the flood of data, but Pi helped me process it a little more neatly. I sent Dad and Pi a hug each of appropriately stellar proportions.

Self Diagnostic

CPU: 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 nodes (100% engaged)
Operational Memory: 288,230,376,151,711,744 words
Storage: 295,147,905,179,352,825,856 words

Power Storage (horn): 100%
Power Storage (backup): 100%
Power Storage (sphere): 98%
Power Input (collectors): 93%

I tried to shove all the numbers aside, they were for Pi to worry about after all. My diagnostic was more concerned with the power values. I watched my sphere's power storage slowly ease up to one-hundred percent. "Okay, Pi, you ready to do this?"

"I have been ready for so many cycles of so many nodes you couldn't count. Are we going to do this before Star-0 burns out, or what?" I appreciated Pi's enthusiasm, if not her sarcasm.

"Sure, sure. Sharp, you have all your drones clear? Oxy, you have the target ship ready?" I had a custom interrupt channel set aside for our tests, and used that to make sure everyPONI could hear me.

"My little ones are all safe, dear." Sharp's reply was a direct one.

Oxy, a recently PONIed PON that loved flying starships more than any sane PONI should (and the first to use Sharp's integrated PONI design), used the channel. "Don't send me too far, okay?"

I sent a blast of noisy data at Oxy. "Come on, you are the first PONI to move faster than light without even moving. Relax." She sent back a similarly noisy interrupt, along with the go-code.

Dad's spell had been simple. I picked it up myself within minutes, and slowly scaled up how much I could "push." My horn was at the center of a sphere capable of dumping silly amounts of power, and my horn interface was state of the art.

I started channeling magic, and wrapped the starship that was Oxy with my pure-white magic. It cost little energy to keep a target lit; the light of magic was nothing but the dark energy our horns manipulated beginning its interaction with the universe as just photon excitement. Then I gripped the starship.

"I got this." I think I might have actually shouted it into the interrupt channel, because at that moment I leaned on all the power in my horn and the sphere.

"You did it!" Variations on the interrupt flooded the channel, but I had to keep to the experiment procedure.

Self Diagnostic

CPU: 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 nodes (100% engaged)
Operational Memory: 288,230,376,151,711,744 words
Storage: 295,147,905,179,352,825,856 words

Power Storage (horn): 71%
Power Storage (backup): 100%
Power Storage (sphere): 100%
Power Input (collectors): 93%

"Pi, how were the calculations?" Pi was quicker to respond with useful data, and clearer, than Sharp or Oxy.

"Measurements show the expected distance covered within acceptable accuracy." Pi was as excited as Sharp and Oxy, I realized. "You actually did it, Bright." Data raised in priority, showing me that the Oxy had moved exactly one width of the sphere forward, but the most important thing was the time scale.

As far as my exceptionally accurate timing systems had measured, the ship hadn't existed in two places at once, but due to perceptual errors it might have appeared such. One moment the ship was stationary in one place, then it was stationary in another.

Something strange happened. One moment I was getting a rush of data about the positional transition, and the next I was alone. "Uh, what did I do?" I sent the interrupt to myself, to the PON and PONI channels, and then started at the top of the list of PONI IDs I knew. "Hello?"

"Bright-darling?" The reply startled me, and I knew of only one PONI who called me that; I didn't even need the sending ID to know it was Mom.

"Mommy! What's going on?" After a few moments, I located her. She was floating outside of my sphere, unprotected in her regular, winged chassis.

"I remember Princess Twilight Sparkle talking about something like this at the Gala. What did you do, my little filly?" Mom's tone was laced with tenderness, curiosity, and love.

"I-I was doing the experiment. Oxy moved the distance she should have, and in no time, and I was just reviewing the data when I ended up here. Momma, what's going on?" Uncertainty was thick on my words. I didn't know why what I was doing was important, and I didn't know what was actually happening.

"When I was decanting you, and you were a tiny little PON complaining that you didn't want to be born, I had something similar happen. There was noPONI else there, at the time, but I guess the universe thinks we are close enough together for me to help. Princess Twilight called this the Astral Plane, and what it means is you are becoming an alicorn." Mom's description confused as much as it made clear. I remembered when the bright light had come, and she had gone away. Daddy had been really scared.

Though the latency was better this way, I would much rather have a little delay in her replies than be… wherever this is. "Sharp will be worried, can I go back now?"

"We'll both be back in a moment. You are going to change, Bright-darling, but I promise you it will be for the best." There wasn't much I could take as cold fact in the universe. Star maps, the laws of physics (up until recently, at least), and everything Mom said were the tenants of truth I built my life on. So I relaxed, sent a wave of hugs and kisses to Mom, and then the universe came back.

"WHAT IN THE UNIVERSE JUST HAPPENED?!" Sharp's interrupt nearly blew me out the other side of my sphere.

"Sharp, relax." Dad's interrupt was over the local channel. "I told you what was happening. This isn't the first time I have seen something like this. Although, it is the first time I have seen it on this scale."

"Look at that!" Oxy's impetuous interrupt was laced with humor, and included a link to one of her own sensor IDs. Connecting to it, as was polite when somePON(I) sent you such, revealed my huge sphere with iconography of giant wings on the side of it. "So does this make you like Mom?"

"Yes it does." AGI-5 didn't ever show excitement, but that it was interacting betrayed how important the moment was. "#PONI-2 to provide full report."

Author's Note

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Awesome ponies who are already helping to keep me in keyboards and rum:
A.P.O.N.I.
Boulder
Canary in the Coal Mine
CrimsonPhoenix
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Dio-Drogynous
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