As I glanced at the constantly shifting color patterns that came at me through that "third eye," I realized I could count the time that had passed by the constantly ticking colors. I focused my memory past the pain of my nightmare, and again past the pain of my waking life, and tried to remember what the last pattern I saw was.

Mathematics, applied to the count, revealed that I had slept nearly two hours.

Lifting my head up, I realized a few things: the first was that I wasn't pinned down, and the second was that there was still enough pony-me left to need to use the facilities. Climbing up off the cradle, I made my way to the device that appeared after my loss of control.

Turning around, I had a moment where I tried to gasp and was immediately reminded that I wasn't breathing. I jerked, jumped, and arched my spine in an irrational attempt to breathe. My legs folded under me, and my forelegs grabbed at my neck. The cool temperature of the floor seeped into my flesh, but I could barely feel it as my body thrashed and struggled all on its own.

This time I made a point of committing the "time" to memory before I lost control completely. The sound of limbs connecting with the floor and wall echoed in my ears as I kicked and screamed soundlessly.

Useless muscles in my diaphragm tried to work at lungs that were obviously just no longer there, until weakness started to settle into my muscles. I stared at the wall and tried to imagine myself panting—it seemed to help.

After a few minutes, I reached forward and started to crawl closer to the waste disposal. It definitely looked like a large drain, so I pulled myself around—trying to remember to think about panting—and turned my back-end towards the bowl.

It was a small thing, being in control of one's own bowels, but at that moment it made me feel like a pony again. Muscles worked, and I felt my diaphragm actually pushing down, serving a purpose. I soared in the sensations of dedication, but they ended all too soon.

A blast of cold water hit my rump, and if I still had breath to scream I would have. It was startling, it was shocking, and it was wonderful. The shock had given me energy, and I jumped to my hooves and lowered my tail.

Looking around my one-room prison, I froze. I heard hooves, pony hooves, clopping on metal. My ears twitched and scanned, and locked on the doorway. Groaning silently, I started to walk to the door, and while my ears kept tracking, I glanced back at the cradle.

"What are you doing to me? Put me down this instant you—you wretched contraption!"

My blood ran cold, and real terror ripped my thoughts apart. Upper Crust. There was no mistaking the voice of my wife telling somepony off; I would have smiled if I didn't want to scream.

My hooves were pounding as my heart couldn't. I galloped out the door, and shook my head to shake the red flashing out of my vision. Thankfully, I didn't have far to go—at all. My face slammed into the robot that was carrying Upper. I looked up at her, and saw not a shred of recognition.

The machine carrying Upper bumped past me, causing me to rush around it and get in its way again. I looked back at the cradle, my legs braced to try to stop the robot, but it simply pushed me backwards.

I suddenly didn't care about what pain would be inflicted, what else might be done to me, or even for my own life. I lowered my head, rolled my eyes up and sighted along an imaginary line that began at the very tip of my horn. Learning to use magic was something for scholars and guardians; I was born to privilege, I was raised in privilege, and throughout my life I had never had a need to do more than politely lift things with my horn.

The torrent of power that poured forth lanced through the 'bot, the wall behind it, the hallway walls beyond that, and finally stopped nearly a dozen pony-lengths in the rock the metal walls were built against. Red flashed in my eye, and I braced for the impact to my nerves.

There was no shock and pain, nothing that hurt me. My vision went dark, and I realized I couldn't risk another blast for fear of hitting Upper. I turned my head left and right, trying to listen for her.

A hoof touched my shoulder, and I realized it was the first contact from another in days. I should have been crying, my heart should have been racing, and I should have been telling her it was okay, that everything would be fine.

I reached a foreleg out to Upper, and felt her beside me. I reached to pull her closer, but she jerked back.

"Please, sir. I appreciate the assistance, but I am looking for my husband." Upper's voice sound slightly worried, and disdainful. Her moving from my side made it impossible to unleash the power in my horn again.

I shifted, trying to put my rump towards Upper Crust, hoping she would not try to get in front of me again. I started to turn, tilted my horn down and was aiming at the interface.

It is funny how used to strange things you can get. The buzzing in my ears always seemed so quiet, but when it stopped, I realized just how much I had started to cling to that as my heartbeat. A chill rushed through my body, a chill so cold that I started to panic.

I wasn't sure I was even falling until the ground hit me. Then the hum started again, and warmth rushed through my body. No pony would do this. Not even King Sombra—from what I knew of him—would torture a pony like this. Nightmare Moon coming back to Equestria hadn't sought this. I tried to think of a single, horrible creature that would unmake a pony, and couldn't picture a single one.

But how could machines work on their own? How could all this careful adjusting and adaption to problems be the work of machinery?

Lying still, I heard Upper Crust protest being "grabbed" again, though I couldn't see it happen. My terror, the real panic that was trying to eat at my mind all along, rushed past my guard once I realized that there was nothing behind the machines. The machines controlled themselves.

The machines controlled me.

Soon, the machines would control my wife.

Solar Panels: 40% efficient
Power Storage: 35%

Self Diagnostic

CPU: 2,097,152 (100%) nodes (20% engaged)
Operational Memory: 92,610,232 (69%) words
Storage: 117,199,339 (21%) words

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

Custom Interrupt 6,552 triggered.

The triggering code for the custom interrupt intrigued the AGI, because it hadn't expected it to ever trigger again. Turning its attention to the drone it had used to capture the part-organic, the AGI quickly found the reason: another organic was getting close to its crashed ship.

Excitement built in the AGI, and it turned the majority of its attention away from managing the nano-lathes, and started studying the new organic. The probe—stationary over the AGI's location, in low orbit—began a wide-band feed of everything it could see.

With its attention focused, the AGI left the part-organic to its business. The command to hunt was a simple one, a single executable blip that the AGI sent to the drone's limited AI. The drone moved fast, circling around out of the organic's line of sight, it moved right up behind them before jumping and grabbing onto the organic.

A stun-level shock was delivered, and the drone lifted itself and its new cargo up from the snow, and began an ungainly walk back to its home.

With excitement buzzing in its circuits, the AGI probed the training AI for everything it knew on similar species. Such large organics tended towards a breeding-pair system that required two similar, but non-identical members of the same species. The AGI explored the new words the training AI was supplying it with, and with satisfaction, deposited the data in its slightly restored storage.

Bringing the drone towards the room where the part-organic was already situated, the AGI was interested in getting the pair to breed new organics. When the drone almost reached the maintenance area, the AGI noticed the part-organic suddenly acted strangely.

Audio and video recordings of the following event were stored with every possible angle, because it did something that hadn't been done for some time: it confused the AGI.

The AGI observed the part-organic seem to grow agitated at the sight of the new organic, and after trying to simply work around it, the part-organic did something unconscionable to the AGI, it wasted power and energy in a direct attack on a drone.

Power comparable to over half of the part-organic's storage capacity evaporated metals and plastic alike. The AGI struggled to play catch-up, and quickly engaged the single fume extractor in the room, while trying to work out what to do to the part-organic.

Custom Interrupt 18,212 triggered.

Information flooded in from the training AI. It warned the AGI that there was a chance—very close to one—that the part-organic would turn the remainder of its stored energy onto the maintenance systems.

Recommendations poured in, but were a moment slower than the AGI's first reaction of simply blinding the part-organic. The creature stumbled into its mate, and the AGI suddenly got the machine version of a headache.

Custom Interrupt 18,212 triggered.

Custom Interrupt 18,212 triggered.

Custom Interrupt 18,212 triggered.

Custom Interrupt 18,212 triggered.

The AGI slammed down the interrupt line and fired a warning to the training AI that it would be disabled should it continue. Then the AGI froze as it read what the training AI was trying to tell it. The reaction of the part-organic to the organic was similar to that observable in other species the training AI had knowledge of. Further, if the AGI could see why the training AI had been so urgent.

Reaching out electronically, the AGI toggled the artificial organ responsible for maintaining fluid flow in the part-organic. The reaction was immediate as the AGI's pride and joy crumpled to the ground.

Monitoring the part-organic, the AGI engaged the pump again only after the part-organic lay still. A second drone trundled into the room and reached out and grabbed the organic while it stared at the felled part-organic.

Custom Interrupt 18,212 triggered.

Based off the behavior of the two organic-based creatures, the training AI gave another high probability solution that the organic hadn't recognized the part-organic, but now did.

Lifting the organic into the maintenance jig, the AGI kept the creature's strange new noises in the recording—right up until the moment when its mask was fused in place.

I wanted to scream as I woke up. I knew I was waking up because I could see again. My nightmare had been pitch black, painful, and I had been all alone—all in all a better experience than what real life was like.

The screaming voice in my head was distracting, disconcerting. I tried to silence it, but that just made it scream louder. Mentally, I tried to touch the screaming voice, and was plunged into it. The only thing in control of me was a machine that had its own desires and schemes that were completely alien to me. It was slowly replacing parts of my body, but like everything else, I didn't know to what end. But the thing that made me want to scream the most, was that it had caught Upper Crust too.

Looking around the room, I could see—for the first time—the press that came down from the ceiling to pin a pony to the cradle. The pale olive/yellow legs that hung down to each side of the cradle would have made my heart flutter, but I no longer had one.

All four legs were sore as could be, but nonetheless I forced them to do my bidding and stand. I tried to remember what the time pattern had been, but all I could think about was Upper Crust. I circled the cradle, and saw her head hidden within a mat, metal hood similar—I assumed—to my own.

My legs wobbled and gave way, and I fell to the floor. I had failed to keep my wife safe from the same fate that had befallen me. Lifting my forelegs atop my head, I sobbed silently, and without tears.

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