Chapter 1- Forgive and Forget
FALLOUT EQUESTRIA: ÆONS by 4Dpon3
CHAPTER ONE:
Forgive and Forget
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Tap tap tap.
Tap tap tap tap tap tap. Stonk.
I had just finished writing up a report regarding stable 64’s terminal network’s continuing maintenance. I had to replace two network cables and repair a switch this week. That was my job, making sure the different parts of the stable could talk to each other. Oh, and showing ponies how to turn their terminals on, which took up more time in total than it took to maintain the network. This left me with much time to do pretty much whatever I wanted. I was one of the fortunate ones in this regard. Ponies were supposed to be working nonstop, bar a lunch break, for fourteen hours a day as dictated by the overmare.
‘In order to secure our survival, everypony must put their effort in for the benefit of us all’ was a phrase the Overmare often used in her morning broadcast, which was more of a wake-up alarm for the ponies with day shifts, only considerably more annoying.
The overmare and a select group of other ponies were seemingly exempt from the fourteen-hour rule. Though they tried to hide this fact, it was clear that the amount of things they did on a daily basis took far less than fourteen hours. Not even half. This group often spent a lot of time in the overmare’s office. The group also included the head of maintenance, Grinded Gears, who was also the overmare’s brother, as well as the leaders of all the other subdivisions of stable 64. Despite his position, Grinded Gears knew naff all about maintenance, he probably didn’t know the difference between an Allen key and a wrench
Understandably, the overmare and her group were not very popular. Though I didn’t remember this, when I was three years old a group of maintenance and security ponies took it upon themselves to stage a coup to remove the overmare from power. Unfortunately for them, most of the security force remained loyal to the overmare and her friends, most likely out of the fear of the punishment they’d receive if they did otherwise. The rebels were shown no mercy. Every year since, the day has been marked ‘Forgiveness Day’, where she would put on a lengthy speech about the extent of her forgiveness to spare the lives of those who weren’t directly involved, but had sympathised with the rebellion. It also included a 16-hour workday for the inhabitants as a form of thanks for the overmare’s forgiveness. By the end of the day, you get sick of the word ‘forgiveness’ after it being repeated so many times.
I submitted the report to the head of maintenance. One would think that such a ruthless overmare and her supporters would have noticed that I had nothing to do for much of the day and would have immediately punished me for not bringing it to their attention. They would also likely have put me in a labour intensive job. Fortunately for me, Grinded Gears’ incompetence meant I never got caught. He couldn’t tell you why a network switch is different from a router, let alone be able to understand that what I was doing on a terminal for hours every day wasn’t anything productive. In the eyes of the stable management, that is.
The network had been almost completely cleared of bugs from the 150 years of ponies like me working in it. Most of the time I spent messing around with my terminal, the stable’s maneframe, and on occasion, other ponies’ terminals.
If anypony ever asked me about what I was doing, all I’d need to do is string some long arcano-tech related words together in a sentence and they would just nod their heads in feigned understanding and leave me alone
To a normal pony, it might seem incredibly boring to stare at a terminal for fourteen hours a day every day since age ten, though I enjoyed it thoroughly. I could never figure out why other ponies never seemed to share my enthusiasm for such beautifully crafted pieces of arcano-tech; a perfect blend of earth pony engineering and unicorn magic.
If terminals were to be described as beautiful, then maneframes would be simply on par with the sun and the moon. Our stable hosted a model 560 Phoenix MkII Mini-Maneframe by Robronco. It was designed to handle all of the more resource-intensive requests made by the stable dwellers. Luckily for me, I was one of very few ponies who actually knew how to operate it, let alone had any sort of use for it. Most of the time I could do anything I wanted with it.
The immense processing power could mean that it could be used to crack the password with relative ease on any terminal in the stable. However, perhaps only in the very early years of the stable being inhabited. In the many years since then, the stable’s anti-tampering and security software, PincCaffee, had been perfected and refused any such attempt. Believe me, I had tried everything.
Now don’t take that the wrong way, the only reason i tried was sheer curiosity and a sense of a challenge. I don’t want to break into ponies’ private information to rifle through it, tamper with it, or deleted. Maybe I just like the idea of being able to go places I normally shouldn’t. Perhaps if our stable was outfitted with one of those ultra fancy Crusader Maneframes by stable-Tec, I might have succeeded. Sadly, only a couple were ever made and our stable didn’t get the honour of being the host of one.
I checked the time, it was two minutes to midnight, or rather two minutes to the end of my shift. I powered off my terminal and studied the reflection in my screen. A pimple from this morning had disappeared from my chin. I lifted up my short, green mane to study my forehead, my acne having seemed to hide for a while, only to come back at a later date with a vengeance. My pale yellow coat did not help with covering it up. I pushed my round-rimmed glasses further up the bridge of my nose and readjusted the collar on my stable utility barding.
* * *
I entered the elevator and looked at the button panel. It showed floors negative eight through negative one, with the exception of negative three, which was a blank metal circle. Nopony knew about this missing level negative three. There wasn’t even a door in the stairwell on the floor where it should have been. I pushed the button for negative two and the doors slid shut with a jarring clank and the carriage ascended.
I had scanned through the endless lines of code contained in the many network-connected devices, I had found snippets that pertained to negative three. Routines that controlled air ventilation, lift access, light strip controls, et cetera. I wasn’t sure whether this meant that it existed, or if the code had simply been directly copied from other stable designs and hadn’t been cut out. My best guess was that there was a particularly hard rock layer that couldn’t be dug out completely, so they scrapped a whole floor in its entirety, presumably re-allocating its functions to other places.
The doors reopened slowly, slightly sticking halfway through. I stepped out into the chilly air of floor negative one’s main corridor. I trotted down the dim, grey hallway towards my living quarters. All the lights blinked off for a second, causing me to pause, then returned. The lights in this corridor had been doing this for as long as I could remember. The white light of the fluorescent strips highlighted the grimy stains on the steel sheets of the walls.
I stepped up to the door to the left of the wall at the end of the hallway. It opened automatically with a squeaky shklrrr-click.
I entered my tiny cubical room. My bed was squeezed into the far right corner; the pillows and sheets neatly made. My small desk sat immediately next to my bed and also functioned like a bedside table. A mineral-stained glass of water rested on its edge.
My pencil pot of pristinely sharpened pencils sat on the corner of my desk. The rest of the area was taken up by books. Two stacks of badly worn engineering manuals and Equestrian Science Chronicles were placed neatly at one end. An opened book showed a diagram of the internals of a crusader maneframe. It was my favourite, I often drooled over the immaculate design for hours on end. I loved finding the little details hidden within it. I had read Crusader Maneframe Design and Function Volumes 1, 2, and 3 back to back tens of times.
My room was illuminated by a solitary halogen light bulb which flickered from time to time. It really needed replacing, but maintenance deemed it a low priority issue and would not spare the time nor stock to fix it. Grime had built up on the metal-clad walls from years of neglect. I would have cleaned it if I could myself, however the cleaning ponies refused to share their sacred equipment and cleaning fluids.
I placed the open book back on top of the stack. I pulled out a keychain from a pocket in my barding and inserted it into the lock of a tall drawer under my desk. With a click, it slid open revealing a skeletal terminal. I placed it on top of my desk. The terminal was missing its metal plates that formed the outer shell, exposing all of its intricate workings. I plugged its power cable into an outlet above my desk and its network cable into port right next to it.
Ponies were not supposed to have terminals just for themselves in stable 64. The stable had a policy of ensuring that no resources were wasted, and as such prevented me from acquiring a terminal of my own. Sure, I had one that only i ever used that was downstairs in the maintenance offices, but other ponies had access to that so I could never try doing anything that may potentially break it.
I considered stealing a terminal, but a missing terminal would be obvious in stable 64 where all stock was carefully catalogued. Plus, stealing would land you with a hefty prison sentence and ten lashings.
So, I made a plan. Over the course of three months, every so often when somepony’s terminal stopped working, I would take a perfectly functional part and replace it with a spare. I would pretend that the replacement fixed the issue, while at the same time performing the actual repair. The replacement part would be documented, and the old one would be thrown away. Except it wouldn’t. In order to not attract suspicion, genuinely broken parts would continue to be thrown into the recycler, a machine that macerated and melted old waste to be turned into useful material. I was able to walk away with the parts by just putting them into some saddlebags and walking away. I stored the pieces in the locked drawer beneath my desk until I had all that I needed to build a functioning terminal.
At first it was incredibly nerve-wracking to be intentionally misplacing, or rather stealing, stable property for my own use. Though sheer curiosity and the prospect of building my very own terminal made me excited enough to go through with it. Eventually, I got used to the fact that I almost certainly would never get caught, so by the time I was getting the last few pieces, I felt no panic at all. I did have to make some compromises though. I couldn’t exactly say that a terminal wasn’t working because its case was broken. Plus, the metal chunks that were used as the shell were far too big to hide in my saddlebags. As such, my finished terminal had no case. I didn’t mind, I loved to gaze at all the circuits and wires.
I flipped the power switch on the back and the screen flickered to life. I waited a few seconds for it to load, and then I logged in. Soon after I had constructed my terminal, I had found out that the system that controlled almost all the automatic doors in stable 64 was able to receive commands. I ran a program which overrode the access to my door, which would normally open to whomever was standing in front of it.
The negative first floor was so poorly maintained, it didn’t surprise people that my door was a little ‘sticky’. It always gave me the chance to hide my stolen stable property before somepony came in.
After two and a half hours I perfected some code that could crack a hill cipher in five seconds. I had a lot of fun doing it, researching, coding, solving problems, and eventually getting it to work.
I unlocked the ‘sticky’ door to my room and hid away my terminal. It was approaching 03:00 and my eyelids felt like they weighed tonnes. I placed my glasses on the desk and flopped onto my creaky, lumpy mattress. I pulled my blanket over me, curling up into a ball to keep myself warm.
* * *
“Hello and good morning everypony! Another happy day in our happy stable! Remember, ponies that we forgive and forget the past mistakes of others” came the ever so slightly too loud voice of the overmare,
“Especially since our forgiveness day is tomorrow. I am so very excited, and I am certain all of you are too. I believe all of you should have received your instructions on your roles in the preparations today. This year, as you all know, is very special. It will have been fifteen years of forgiveness tomorrow, which means that I will be giving everyone a special treat! I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise for all of you, so have an enjoyable day of preparations today.”
A crack of static signified the end of the broadcast. I groaned, never having gotten used to the overmare’s morning tradition. She used the stable radio that was chronically enabled on everypony’s PipBucks to send out her messages and her voice.
I rolled out of bed, pulling my blanket onto the floor with me.
“Fdgn ovrmrr”, I mumbled, my face full of blanket. I slowly picked myself up onto all four hooves. My vision was blurry and it took me a few seconds to find my glasses. I had been so tired the previous night that i had forgotten to take off my stable uniform. I readjusted my collar and collected some screwdrivers and cables that had fallen out of my utility belt in my bed.
Tomorrow was forgiveness day. I had completely forgotten, usually never bothering to check the date on my PipBuck, since every day was almost the same. The event itself, apart from the overmare’s speech, included songs and a forgiveness chain. The songs were either about praising the overmare or, unsurprisingly, forgiveness.
I quickly trotted outside, my door shklrrr-clicking behind me. I rode a level down to get to the cafeteria; my stomach felt like an angry bull. This floor (negative two) was more for leisure, if you could call it that. Apart from the cafeteria, there was a small stage, a bar, and a table tennis room. I found no enjoyment whatsoever from going to these places, but many ponies liked to come here a lot for some reason.
I walked into a room full of ponies looking a little more saddened than usual. There were twenty stained, plastic tables with benches either side each in four rows in a large rectangular room. The cafeteria was poorly lit, some of the light strips having failed and not been replaced. Some of the ceiling tiles were also missing and others had large, black patches of mould.
I went over to the servery, a long table with a glass covering and small lights inside. I picked up a plastic tray and a steel bowl. There was hay bacon, synthetic apples, radishes, and lettuce. Same breakfast as always. The most bearable was the hay bacon, it was the only breakfast food that didn’t make me gag. I approached the counter. A brown stallion in a white uniform and funny hat took a spatula and scooped some into my bowl.
I sat down at a table in the corner of the room with my bland-coloured and bland-flavoured breakfast. I sat alone, as always. I took the opportunity to take a look at what the overmare demanded I do to prepare for the Forgiveness Day. I took a look at my PipBuck.
It was a model 2500 mkV PipBuck made by stable-Tec. It was like a miniature terminal strapped to my left forehoof. Its shell was a dirty grey and the screen displayed blue characters on a black background. Admittedly, they were pretty cool, but highly limited. They let our location be known to the higher-ups of the stable and allowed the overmare to be able to communicate with us whenever she wanted. Apart from that, they did little other than show the ambient radiation on a small dial and tell the time. I had read in a book that they had far more many features that just seemed to be blocked. This had made me incredibly angry, though my PipBuck had managed to resist everything I had thrown at it.
I munched my tasteless food while I scrolled through a paragraph that had appeared on my screen.
TASKS FOR: MS. TWISTED CABLES [MNTC: IT] [1] Report to GUMMY CANDY for poster distribution at 0900 in ATR. [2] Report to DANDELION DECOR for leaflet distribution at 1100 in CFT. [3] Report to LAMPSHADE NOIR for cleaning assignment at 1300 in ATR. [4] Report to OVERMARE GOLDEN LEAF at 1600 in OVM-OFC.
I briefly skimmed over the message. Wait, hold on a minute. The overmare?! I stopped chewing.
I stared at the word ‘OVERMARE’. I nearly crapped myself. Why in equestria did she want to speak with me? I had never spoken to her before in my life. Oh celestia, had she found out about my stolen terminal? I would certainly be in a lot of trouble… Though, if she did find out, surely she would just have sent some security ponies after my arse instead of telling me to meet her in her office. I felt a little relieved, but what did I do that meant that she needed to talk to me?
“Hello? Are you alright?” said a gentle voice in front of me. I had gone into a stupor, staring at my screen. I shook my head and focused on the voice. It had come from a young, brown buck with a darker brown mane and tail. The same one who had served me my breakfast, I noted. He had sat down in front of me with his own plate of hay bacon, they must have stopped serving now and he was also having breakfast. I started getting anxious, I wasn’t good at talking to ponies.
“Yeah… erm. I mean, yes I am alright, why do you ask?” I replied, a touch of awkwardness in my voice. The buck looked at me weirdly for a second, then smiled.
“It just seems that you just got some bad jobs to do today,” he chuckled, “You were gaping and some food fell out of your mouth.”
Some wet, chewed up hay bacon was on the table in front of me, it must have dropped out of my mouth because my mouth was open in shock. Oh dear, I had embarrassed myself in front of a stranger. I instantly blushed.
“Oh, y-yes. No! I mean no. W-what? Nothing is wrong! I am ok.” I stammered out. I internally face-hoofed, this was quick becoming a trainwreck of a conversation. I blushed even harder. He laughed a little, oh celestia did that make me feel worse. Great, another pony wanted to make fun of me.
“No no, it’s quite alright. I just saw you take some food and you looked kind of lonely so I thought you could do with some company.”
My embarrassment quickly turned into confusion. Nopony had ever directly talked to me unless they wanted something. He had demanded nothing. He seemed to be playing nice, perhaps he needed a favour done. That’s usually why ponies were nice to me.
“Do… you need something?” I asked.
“No, nothing in particular…” he replied. Oh dear, here it comes.
“You seemed very shocked at something, I was just wondering if you were alright,”
I was clearly missing something, he hadn’t said he wanted something from me. He might be wanting to have a casual conversation, something which I avoid at all costs. It isn’t fun, or productive, or interesting. Not to mention generally uncomfortable. I wasn’t alright at that moment, but I didn’t want to talk to this buck
“N-nope, all is ok!” I said, “I… really should go.”
“Wait, are you sure…?”
I picked up my tray in a hurry, seeking to avoid any further conversation. I climbed over the bench, but my rear hoof hooked on the edge. I fell forward, face planting into the floor, scattering my tray. The room went dead silent, except for my metal bowl slowly spinning to a stop on the ground. For the second time, I went completely red. I picked up myself and ran out the door.
* * *
I stopped crying once I had convinced myself that I had overreacted and that nothing had happened. I unstuck my face from my sodden pillow and looked at the time on my PipBuck. Oh crap, it was 9:04! I had never had the habit of being late, only Luna knows what punishment lay ahead of me. I ran out of my room so fast that my door didn’t have enough time to slide upwards and I hit the top of my head. Ouch, did that hurt. If I had been a unicorn my horn could have snapped off.
I reached the atrium, breathing heavily and with a headache, wiping off the last of the tears from my eyes. There were some ponies setting up a platform in the Atrium with some sort of large chair in the centre. Above the platform, inset into the wall on the higher floor, was the round window of the office of the overmare. There were several stalls with tables of supplies and ponies behind them telling others what to do. There were so many conversations; it was hard to hear anything in particular.
I looked for somepony who would look like a Gummy Candy, as my PipBuck had instructed.
“You must be Twisted,” a female voice said from behind me. I jumped a little. I spun around to see a grinning bright-orange unicorn mare.
“Sorry, didn’t mean ta scare ya there,” she said, “Come with me, there’s lots to do!”
She had a red gummy worm as her cutie mark. Her hair bounced enthusiastically as she walked; it was the same colour as the gummy worm on her flank. I followed her.
“I am so sorry I’m late. I was in my room…”
“Nah, don’t worry about it, we’re still waitin’ on tha otha half of the helpers,” she interrupted. Good thing she did, I didn’t want to explain.
For the next hour or so, I carried around a stack of posters on my back with the words ‘Forgive and Forget’. A unicorn, who called himself Skylight, went around the stable with me in tow and stuck the posters on the walls. He carried a large can of Turner’s Multipurpose Liquid Adhesive and a roller, which he dipped into the can and rolled onto the back of each poster before applying it to the wall. We didn’t talk, he just motioned me to follow him when he was done.
All throughout, I kept thinking back to all of the judging eyes of the ponies in the cafeteria when I dropped my tray. Now the whole stable thought I was stupid. I hated when ponies called me stupid, even though I secretly knew it was true. Though at times it was clear that the pony calling me stupid was probably more stupid than me. I kept trying to reassert to myself that nothing really had happened and that ponies would forget within a day. The logical part of my brain didn’t want to listen.
After we had finished, I checked my PipBuck again. Crap, I had forgotten that I was supposed to meet the overmare in the afternoon. My heartrate spiked for the second time today. I continued my day with constant anxiety.
My second task, along with two other ponies, whom I didn’t recognise, was to place leaflets to everypony’s living quarters. It took us three quarters of an hour to go into all the rooms and place a single leaflet onto each bed. The leaflets contained the list of events for the next day as well as a big obligatory ‘forgive and forget’. I hadn’t paid any attention towards any of the rooms.
Lampshade Noir, the supervisor for my third job that day, just needed some help attaching banners to the ceiling of the atrium. I was an earth pony, so I wasn’t of much use. All of the ponies who were the supervisors were in Golden Leaf Party, a group of ponies that essentially the overmare’s henchponies. They did whatever she said, and in return, they got some degree of power in the stable. Some did it out of admiration for our overmare, others did it for the superior position. There were only about twenty of them in total.
* * *
I stood in front of the door to the overmare’s office at 15:58. The door was made of mahogany and was the only hinged door in stable 64. My insides felt like they were imploding and compressing into an infinitesimally small point. I waited nervously for the door to open. What did the overmare want with me? I strongly suspected my wrong-doings had been found out, but maybe she needed me for something else.
A second later, I realised that the door was slightly ajar. I tried knocking, but in doing so I pushed the door open.
“Oh, Ms. Cables, do come in,” said a slightly strained voice. The room was almost completely dark. I hesitantly pushed the door completely open.
“Oh don’t be so shy, come on in.”
My heart was beating so fast that I thought I could be having a heart attack. I walked in slowly, my eyes finding it hard to adjust to the dark.
BLAM!
The door slammed shut behind me. I panicked, looking around, not seeing anything at all. Even the round window that looked out onto the atrium had been covered up. I tried to ask a question about what was happening, but all that came out of my mouth was a frightened squeak.
The darkness completely encircled me. I thought I could hear breathing behind me. A foreleg suddenly found itself gripping me around the throat. I thrashed and tried to scream, but the grip was too strong and I couldn’t breathe. A second hoof put a cloth up to my nose and mouth. The first leg released enough so that I could inhale. I took a sharp, deep breath, but there was something in that cloth and it smelled funny. I tried coughing, but all my muscles loosened and I collapsed. I passed out.