On and on the machine worked, and for the first time I got to see some of the foalnapper's heavy machinery up close and with the luxury to just look. It was amazing. If I could take even the designs for a tiny part of this, I would be a rich pony—back in Canterlot.

With my forehead pressed to the interface—my horn buried inside it—I couldn't exactly look around too much. So I counted. Counting to sixty, a minute, is easy. Counting sixty times sixty, an hour, is also easy. But when you get to the second hour, and start over counting seconds again, things start to get tedious.

Keeping the count going in the back of my head, I flicked my right eye to the pony square, and pulled it up. My left eye lit with colors, but I ignored it for a moment. I studied the image, and noticed a little box beside the horn. Examining that brought a change in the colors on my left eye. The color scrolled, and again I ignored it.

The box next to the horn showed part of it filled with green, and I suddenly realized it was a representation of the energy I had stored in me. I was a power source, a battery of magical energy. It filled me up, ordered me to this machine, and it used the energy to run.

My counting kept up consistency, and I started to notice something. I stopped counting minutes, and focused on seconds, and parts of seconds. There was a particular part of the color on my left eye that changed with every tenth of a second, or near enough. I focused on it, fixated on it, and realized there was a pattern. The colors weren't random.

By the time I worked out that there were ten patterns to that flickering pattern, and ten more to the next, and had pinned down each one, the surrounding machinery went silent. It was almost a shock, and I pulled my head back, and slowly climbed off the platform. Blinking several times, I cleared away all the displays except the little pony, and saw that there was no green left in the box that represented my energy. I didn't wait for the green light to come, I turned around and started for the doorway of the machine.

The door opened, and I realized that the machine was still where I had found it initially. The green light appeared, and I felt a certain amount of comfort in seeing it. I wanted to tell the pony behind all this that I would figure everything out eventually, and when I did I would get free. Of course, the tubes worked into me made speech impossible.

I worked my tongue in my mouth, and felt the tubes there, each stuck in place with something that had been slick at first, but had hardened into some kind of glue. My legs moved almost on their own, following the pattern of green light until I was back in my chamber. The cradle lit up green, and with a weary sigh I walked towards it.

The cradle was cool as the seam along my belly rubbed it. I gave a slight shudder at the thought that it might do something else inside me. I still hadn't heard the thudding of my heart—there was only that soft hum. Climbing into place, I pushed my snout forward and lay flat instinctively. The interface reached out from the wall and clamped to my horn, while the weight settled on my back, and my snout locked into the receptacle.

A rush of movement in my belly was, fortunately, just the machinery filling me back up. I wished for a moment that I could taste what it was putting in me. A gentle poke of energy at first, then a constant flow. It was nice, getting filled, and I found my eyes blinking sleepily. Again I noticed that the green icon of a pony stayed in my vision, despite closing my eyes.

I was only resting my eyes, and it was only because the filling process wasn't horrible, that I drifted off to sleep.

My life stretched out before me. The pony behind the machinery using me to fuel their wrenched creations, and even capturing other unicorns. Of course, I couldn't have a nice dream about the machines, it had to be horrible. Poking at my midsection returned me to the moment when my heart had stopped pumping.

I jerked awake suddenly, and realized I could feel something pushing around inside my body cavity. My eyes were wide with fear, and I was scared witless that it was going to take away everything. A tugging sensation, and I felt the most horrible of jerking, then it stopped.

I would have breathed hard, panting, had I been able to moderate my own breathing. But something was even more different now. I wasn't breathing at all. I gasped, or tried to. The muscles that should have fought my lungs—to exhale bad air and inhale good—just were not there. I strained and struggled, but there wasn't even the sound of breathing now.

More tugging. More pulling. Then some shoving. Still fighting a drowning sensation, I suddenly got the idea to check the little pony. Sure enough, there was a new blue part inside it. I focused my eye over it, and my left eye lit up with color.

Counting—both to calm my sense of dying-drowning, and to focus—I picked up that the colors were changing in time with every tenth of a second again. The device on my face pulled back suddenly, and I had the complete displeasure to see it pulling out one of the tubes with it.

I gasped, or tried to. Unattached and abused muscles in my chest moved weakly, and I had no sense of air moving in or out. I should be dead, but somehow I wasn't. Then I saw devices moving up towards my face. Blade, saw, and a small round device that looked to have a light inside it.

I was such a coward: I closed my eyes.

There was no pain as it started to poke and push at my face. The mask that had been my torment since I arrived seemed to be partially removed, and then I felt more tugging sensations. In the dark, with only the little green pony as my friend, I begged to the creature doing this to me. I begged them to stop.

But their machines kept working. Pulling, pressing, and finally I felt a shock of sensation, but not touch. It was like I could smell everything in my life, all at once. Snapping my eyes open, I saw that a part of my snout was missing. It looked like a white-hot ice cream scoop had been pressed to my nose and just removed it. There was cabling, wires and conduits, and they trailed around the side of my head to something behind me.

My missing heart couldn't race. My missing lungs couldn't form a scream. And now I couldn't even smell my own blood.

The sea of scents stopped, then swapped, and I was suddenly seeing things through my—through my nose. I stared at a rush of color that was impossible. There was reds and blues that I had never seen before. I blinked, but that "eye" couldn't blink.

Suddenly, the color was gone too, and I was left without any smell or sight from my nose. The nose that wasn't there anymore. A metal cap was lifted into my line of sight. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't stylish. It was a piece of metal shaped to cover the hole in my face.

The cabling and conduits were sealed in place, and one even shoved through the flesh of my snout. I didn't feel any pain, however, but there was always prodding and tugging. The cap was—as far as I could tell—glued to my face, and the conduits to my cheeks.

A pressure at my neck led to what I knew were conduits being fed back into my body. And again I felt tugging and prodding inside my chest cavity. More blue appeared on the little green pony, and when I tried to investigate the nose patch on it, instead of the rush of color coming in my left eye, it came from my nose.

Scents, sights, sounds, and an odd sense of heat assailed me. It was information overload, and I could barely withstand its pressure. It felt like my head was going to explode, until I managed to close the little pony down to its box.

The hum of my body was strong in my ears. With the rush of sensations from my nose gone, I could focus back on my body. I felt as I was "zipped back up," and I lay there awaiting the charging of my magic to finish, counting seconds.

And the worst part of it was, I still felt like I was suffocating.

Solar Panels: 36% efficient
Power Storage: 47%

Self Diagnostic

CPU: 2,097,152 (100%) nodes (20% engaged)
Operational Memory: 92,610,232 (69%) words
Storage: 113,005,035 (21%) words

Primary task: Maintain part-organic
Secondary task: Return
Tertiary task: Maintain operation

An AI was only ever truly happy when all of its success conditions were being ticked, and the AGI was experiencing that state. The part-organic was proving itself to be almost the densest rechargeable energy storage in existence, rivaling anything that wasn't prone to frying the circuits of modern machinery.

The AGI had taken up teaching the part-organic about its body, filling in more details on the display for it, and allowing it nearly unfettered read access to all its modifications.

However, the AGI noticed the power output from the part-organic starting to dip, indicative of their energy nearly being exhausted. Retracting the mining head, the AGI was already processing the first set of ores sampled from not only the crust, but the mantle. A thick slurry of molten rock bubbled ore-bearing silicate structures as well as chunks of iron.

The materials were turned into the next set of replacement organs for the part-organic, as well as yet more solar arrays and data storage. With the last lot of ores sent from the mine-head to the smelter, the AGI released the part-organic from their position in the heart of the mining machine.

The AGI understood that with the mine in operation, the air quality would be decreasing, so the new priority for the part-organic was to not have to rely on air (filtered, or otherwise). It had studied the part-organic's fluid system, and identified the reactive compounds it needed from the air, as well as the ones it expelled.

Multiple methods existed for the exchange of the CO2 the part-organic expelled to be converted back to the O2 it needed, but there were few that would not leave other wastes, wastes that the AGI had identified would harm the host.

When the part-organic parked itself in the maintenance bay, the AGI set to work charging them back up, and feeding them. When the nano-lathes signaled the replacement organ was ready—and an extra project the AGI had been working on—it almost overflowed an arithmetic calculation it was so excited.

Opening up the creature, it first clamped around the existing organic organ that regulated the creature's air. Severing the muscles that compressed the organs, it began to work them manually, while pulling them partially free.

The replacement was quickly and effectively plumbed into place, and the organic pieces were disposed of. The part-organic's muscles kept twitching and clutching at nothing, so the AGI saw fit to burn the nerves leading to most of them, leaving only a small part still active. Cabling linked the new organ to the transceiver, and yet more cables flowed up to the part-organic's neck.

Swapping its tools to external ones, the AGI approached the newest task, and its pet project. The part-organic had a large nerve cluster terminating at some rudimentary chemoreception unit. With its precision laser, it traced out the line it intended to cut, and quickly deadened the flesh.

As the part-organic's face opened, the AGI began either terminating or adjusting the path of existing fluid vessels, slicing deeper and deeper until it found the nerve it was looking for. Carefully modulating the laser, it cut around the end of the nerve, leaving a complex splay of whiskers—raw nerve tissue.

The last device to be installed for the day, a nerve interface module, was pressed against that exposed nerve, and attached to the creature's bone structure. Conduits and cables needed routing, and there was still the fact that the part-organic had a hole in its head, but the AGI was excited for the results.

A test feed was pumped down the cabling. A spray of calibration patterns that should have begun the process of showing the part-organic the exciting things that could be done. It routed the cables down the side of the creature's head, and in one case through the side, and trailed them down to where the main cable left their head. New holes were made in quickly deadened flesh, and the conduits fed into the part-organic.

More hookups to the transceiver, and there was only one task left to do. Leaving the part-organic to explore its new high-bandwidth data interface, the AGI trailed a special conduit up towards the top of the part-organic's head.

Special care was paid to peel back part of the interface mask around the horn, exposing the soft flesh underneath.

Detaching the power interface, the AGI fed a single ring—of similar construction to the interface, but on a smaller scale—down the part-organic's horn. At the base of the most treasured organ in the creature's body, the AGI carefully parted the flesh at the base of the horn from the part-organic's skull, and bonded the ring to the bone.

A systems test was quickly run, and the transceiver reported it was getting plenty of power now. The AGI, excited at a job well-done, teased the part-organic's flesh back up and over the ring. It wasn't actually sure if the flesh would reattach, or if it would scar, and didn't care either way. By the time it would matter, the part-organic would not be inconvenienced.

Securing the interface mask back into place, the AGI lowered the power interface back onto the part-organic's horn, and continued the charging process.

I was still drowning, still unable to feel anything like a normal heartbeat, and now the machines were cutting around my horn. In a brief horror-filled instant, I thought it was just going to slice my horn off, but when the ring was fed down, I realized what it was doing.

Not some kind of magic-blocking ring, this one—on the display of the blue-green pony—showed more energy stats like my horn did when it was hooked up to the charging or discharging interfaces. I longed for the smell of burned flesh, of blood, or anything that might resemble a normal smell. Instead, I got hints of smells tainted with colors and sounds.

By the time the charging interface slid back down on me, I knew my barrel was zipped back up. I wanted to panic, and scream, and I wanted to run and run until I could hear my heart thudding in my ears again. I blinked, and despite knowing for sure what was happening was the start of a dream, I couldn't stop that flow of light/smell/sound/taste that poured into my head.

It was a dream, I knew, because I was safe again: a pony again. I looked up at my wife, and smiled at Upper Crust. All the times we had spent in silly, thoughtless conversation, when I could have been telling her how much I loved her. I reached a hoof out, and opened my mouth to tell her now, but my hoof gleamed with a gloss rivaling stainless steel. When my mouth opened, tubes poured out of it, and metal cables began burrowing through my flesh.

I screamed at Upper to run, to leave, but she watched me change in shock. In horror. And then I watched one of the conduits launch itself at her, and burrow into her shoulder. The dream cut off, and I woke. I wanted to scream in terror. I wanted to hear my racing heartbeat as my body tried to fend off the attacker. Instead, I tasted the light coming into what had been my nose, and somehow could tell that I was fully charged.

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
Daremo
Dio-Drogynous
Javarod
Nils
Shaushka
Sirion123
Tanis

And special thanks to the following, for careful eyes and friendly words:
Cross Lament
Vutava