A metallic thud. The sound of empty pipes suddenly being filled resonating from behind the walls. A lone blade of pale blue light, cast by the fissure between the twin grey halves of the door, slashing through the dark corridor as the energy returned to the room adjacent to it, catching countless specks of dust in its path, suddenly disturbed from their long rest by the newfound intrusion in the almost abandoned facility.
The dulled echo of hooves walking over the floor for the first time in centuries. The door opened, and another light bulb flickered to life, flooding the corridor with artificial yellow. Twilight scrunched up her nose as some dust floated to her face. "How far underground are we?" she asked without turning back.
"About four or five kilometres," Celestia's voice replied from behind her, "though the fact that the tunnel starts in Canterlot throws the measure off a bit, the area in general is a little higher than those around it." Celestia walked forward and up to Twilight's side. "You're not having second thoughts about this, right?" she asked, looking down at the purple alicorn.
"If I said that I am, and I don't want to do this any more, what would you do?" Twilight looked up, bitter curiosity on her face.
Celestia paused for a moment. "I would send you back and allow you to leave. Though, you understand I would need to wipe your memory."
"How many times have I said no?"
Celestia was caught unprepared by the question, and stammered while looking at the other.
"I thought you were better at lying. You should have anticipated I would ask that." Twilight walked a few steps forward and stopped near the next door. "I suppose a better question would have been 'how many times have I walked this corridor', right? Though I suppose you'd know better than to try the same thing over and over and expect things to go differently. And, clearly, you can't influence my feelings, or you would have already."
Celestia looked at Twilight, magic flowing just below the surface of her horn, invisible from the outside.
"Doesn't matter, I guess," Twilight said from her position. "No, Princess, I don't have second thoughts. I've already agreed with this, and I don't plan to back down."
Celestia relaxed. She walked up to Twilight, and together they stepped through the door and into another corridor, its light green this time. Then down an orange one, and finally inside a purple elevator.
"Even deeper than this, huh?" Twilight asked, impressed.
"And it's not even the deepest pit we built, though it does come fairly close." Celestia replied. She pushed the only button available, the elevator slowly beginning its descent, then removed a hidden panel from the wall with her magic and took out a blue folder. "I think it's time to explain things in greater detail," she said.
Twilight looked up at her, then took hold of the first item to come out of the folder with her magic and observed the picture she now had in front of her.
"Memorise that layout, Twilight, you will need it."
The younger princess noticed something, and lifted her head to ask a question, but was anticipated by the elder.
"Yes. It's designed after the sixth north-eastern quadrant, minus the planets of course. We determined it would be the best shape for conducting the reflux of energy."
"It's weird that you'd use constellations. They're made up shapes, the order we see in them is only there because we naturally tend to see one. There's no logic to it, we just impose ours on top," Twilight said, returning to studying the graph.
"What if the shape was there, and we were meant to find it?"
Twilight looked up once again, slightly confused. "What are you suggesting?"
"What if we're more than just an occurrence in Time, Twilight? More than the result of coincidence? What if the Universe was designed with us as its centre?" She took something else out of the folder and passed it to Twilight, cutting off any question she might have had. "Memorise the pattern on those wings," she said.
Twilight stared at the small glass frame and at the dragonfly inside it.
"Study the way it branches, the number of lines it has. Try to abstract from the biological purpose it serves and find the reason it's shaped like that. Try to find the rule behind it," Celestia told her, "something you could apply to any context, any number of dimensions. What you'll need is a sufficient power source," she added, levitating something else out of the folder, "we've already taken care of that."
Twilight stared at the page, lines upon lines of complex formulae and one single picture in the corner of a roughly spherical object, light radiating from its core encased in a shell of glass.
"What you'll need is the resolve to realise there's no other choice, to realise that this must be done. Here's what I hope will be sufficient motivation."
Out of the folder came two graphs, the dates on them showing they'd been createdtwenty years apart, and a number of pictures of ponies with quotes written on the back, all of which Twilight grabbed and observed.
"It's important that you realise this, Twilight. Most think Sector H is a place, hidden in this world, or maybe one you can enter if you step beyond the boundaries of this world. It's not. In its purest form, it's an internal condition, a state of mind, and brought to its limit the physical manifestation of that mentality upon the world. We must, at all costs, prevent this world from reaching that threshold. We can and have tried to stop it, but there's no helping those who refuse to be helped. If we determine we can't stop it any more, if we determine it's too late, if we tell you to do this, you will do this. Understood?"
Twilight took a deep breath. She scanned the quotes on the back of the pictures. She took another deep breath. "Yes," she answered, her tone firm yet somewhat emotionless.
Celestia's expression eased a bit, releasing tension neither of them had realised had been there before. "What you'll need is sufficient material to work with during the transitory phase, material that won't make it to the other side. It's... not, I will admit, the most just of actions, but if we reach the point where this becomes inevitable we'll have proven the need to eradicate the source of the problem. You will find a complete list of those affected, directly wired into the neural frame."
Twilight swallowed, and gave another look at the pictures and graphs.
Celstia studied her expression, then continued. "There are a number of dates you need to remember, those of the specific events we need to preserve. It's vital that you do remember them accurately. My and my sister's birth date, yours, Cadence's, the day Discord was defeated, the day the Crystal Empire disappeared, everything of note concerning the Tree of Harmony. It's all listed here," she explained, taking a bundle of documents out of the folder.
Twilight grabbed them and began to read the contents.
"What you'll find beyond the endpoint is the key to attain what we're looking for. We have named this state Reverse H. The mainframe, connected to the power matrix, and connected to the director, you in this case, will utilise the designated subjects as transitory material to guarantee the system's arrival in the aexistent state, and provide a localised simulation of time to allow the process of reverting the condition once again. Understood?" Celestia looked down at Twilight.
The younger alicorn nodded once.
"Good." There was a tremor of hesitation in Celestia's voice. "You will need to destroy the main support structures of the current order, and recombine what you will find beyond their stabilised manifestation, using the residual energy left by the consuming of the designated subjects as a catalyst."
Twilight kept studying the notes. "Why do we need someone for this? Why not just set up the required data and let the program run on its own?" she asked without looking up.
Celestia bit her lip. "We... aren't sure of what will happen once you're past the endpoint, only that there lies the power to attain what we want. We do, however, know for a fact that the last time it happened, if it ever did, there was someone there. We found traces and disturbances in the radiation coming from there. We'd rather not risk it."
"So you're shifting the blame. If an automated system fails all those who worked on it have failed, if a pony does all the others are innocent. Is that right?"
"Twilight! This is for the good of all of us, remember that. We wouldn't risk failure, and some sacrifices will be necessary." Celestia gave a stern look to her student, though if Twilight hadn't been focused on her papers she might have noticed how it was the product of practise and not instinct, meant to hide what was truly going on behind it.
Instead, Twilight simply kept reading the dates and events she'd been given.
Celestia looked away from her. "We need someone who will carry this out as planned. Someone we can trust. Someone with no interest in gaining something for themselves out of this. I was their first choice, seeing as there's little I could gain past what I already have. But I believe you're better than me in this regard. You will make the right choice, whatever that might be. I trust you will."
They both stood in silence for a moment, as the elevator took them deeper and deeper.
Celestia gave a small cough. "There is... one last thing you might need. We, well, we don't know if it's just a coincidence or... Well, either way, we wouldn't want to risk it, so..." She took out one last object from the folder.
Twilight grabbed it in her magic, curious, and observed the engraved sheet of metal she'd received. It looked consumed by something other than time, like oxidation or some form of exposure to corrosive substances, the edges jagged and the surface irregular, the shiny silvery colour hidden behind spots of green, blue and dark purple. Almost like some form of alien mould, mineral in nature, had took residence in it.
"This was directly exposed to the radiation we're receiving from the endpoint," Celestia explained. "We placed it into a near-void environment, a modified hyper-pressure engine cylinder if you're curious, and opened a portal on one end. It was rather thicker when we first put it there."
"So these engravings are..." There was more than just hesitation in Twilight's voice. It wasn't properly fear, but rather that primal feeling of disorientation at the root of fear. The deeply ingrained sense of uneasiness when faced with something that one doesn't understand, something one can't understand, something that goes against the way one sees the world, and threatens to shatter the carefully constructed system of interpretation one has built to traverse the waters of knowledge to leave them stranded once again on an island of ignorance in the dark ocean of the unknown and unknowable.
"They are... not artificial, and that's all we can say for sure. It might be just a coincidence," Celestia said, and it was clear to anyone listening that while she wished that was the truth, she didn't believe it.
Twilight was in much the same place as her. It shouldn't, couldn't have been possible, and at the same time... It couldn't be a coincidence. The shapes of the clouds were coincidence. A rock that looked like a pony was coincidence. Letters, perfectly proportionate and readable, spelling out seven distinct and real words... She really, really wished she could call it a coincidence.
"Dynasty, Orion, Nothing, Order, Throne, Gamma, Overflow," Celestia recited from memory, no need to look at the slab Twilight was holding. She rested her head against the wall, discarding the now empty folder to the ground, gritted her teeth in frustration and sighed. "It would be a lot easier to accept it was a message by something if we could find any meaning to it."
The quiet ring of a bell and the more mechanical sound of gears slowly grinding to a halt alerted them that the elevator had reached the end of its intended path. The doors slid open with a barely audible swish and the two alicorns silently walked out and into another corridor.
They came to a door, locked, a small microphone and a button on the wall near it. Celestia walked up to it, brought her mouth to the microphone and pressed the button. "Rhinoceros beetle," she stated in a calm and even tone, and a cheerful synthesised ding answered from behind the door, followed by the sound of locks unlocking and gears turning as the entrance opened itself to allow their passage.
They walked in, the door shutting automatically behind them, and Twilight stopped to look around while Celestia kept moving forward, more accustomed to the room and its contents. The place was rather dark, though no part of it was rendered hard to see because of it. It was more akin to an evenly spread out blanket of soft shadow, like that of the evening, after the Sun has gone down but while the effects of its light still linger. It was the artificial equivalent of twilight.
The purple princess surveyed the shelves and tables, filled with neatly ordered equipment that, while not foreign to her, still managed to impress her, the state of the art technology on display surpassing that of her own laboratory and the sheer quantity of it dwarfing every other one she'd ever seen, all the more impressive given the relatively small size of the structure.
"I'm sure you'll enjoy reading all about the research conducted here," Celestia said, pointing a hoof at a shelf on the other side of the room, filled with what might have been mistaken for books. At a more careful observation, though, it appeared to be more akin to a collection of bundles of paper, the pages loosely held together by thin metal rings, clips, or sometimes simple rubber bands that threatened to either snap around the more voluminous stacks or bend and deform the thinner ones.
Twilight's gaze was drawn to the shelf almost magnetically, and in different conditions she might have drooled at the sight of so much readily available knowledge she hadn't yet familiarised herself with. The gravity of the reason for her presence there, and for the existence of that research in the first place, all too present in her mind, prevented her from such a display, and instead she merely stared. Though it was thanks to years of deeply ingrained training that she managed to not fling herself over to the shelf.
"But," Celestia said, drawing the younger pony's attention back to her, "I'm sorry to inform you that that will have to wait until a later time. You'll be free to study it once we're done, but there's one last thing we need to show you." She walked up to an object in the centre of the room, a large and roughly spherical shape covered by a blanket.
Twilight's eyes turned to follow her, with rather considerable effort given the way the piles of research on the shelf seemed to have physically hooked them, and the purple alicorn stared at the shape beneath the blanket. She immediately recognised it, in part thanks to its surroundings, and walked up to it.
Celestia wordlessly removed the blanket, revealing a sphere of glass around what looked like a bundle of coloured cables coming up from a sealed hole at the bottom, some spike-like pointed structures emerging from it at various angles. It was resting on top of a black metallic base, a large black cable coming out of it and diving into a hole underneath the nearest table. The white alicorn looked silently at Twilight, then pushed the only button on the base.
The machine slowly flared to life, a low blue-white mass of thunder-like light quietly expanding from the centre and writhing around inside the glassy confines around it. Soft shadows, barely darker than the rest of the room and hardly noticeable, spread out radially from it as the energy within built up and its secondary products illuminated the area around it.
Twilight brought a hoof up to touch the glass sphere, silently watching the mesmerising display inside of it.
Celestia stared as well, though her gaze felt distant and unfocused. "There's enough power inside that thing to wipe out the whole country," she apathetically stated, like she was distractedly talking about the weather. "Shoot a spell at it now, and all of Canterlot will be blown to dust. Not to mention all the collateral damage to other cities once the chunks of the mountain that were blown off fall back down."
The two silently stared at the machine for a few moments more.
It was Twilight who broke the silence first, speaking without looking away from the light. "You were scared, weren't you?"
Celestia looked at her, a questioning expression beginning to surface on her face.
Twilight didn't turn. "That's why you called me, and had me be the one who has to do this. It has nothing to do with me being more attuned with the framework, your experience easily compensates for that. You're scared of having to be the one who has to do this. You're scared, because if you fail there'll be no one else to blame, and no one else to help you. You're scared of the responsibility of having to be the one who gets to decide. Because you don't think you can do better than what we have right now. Because you don't know what it'll be like, and you're terrified of doing the wrong thing." She turned her head to look at the other's face. "So it's a relief for you that I'm the one who has to deal with this now. Because you don't care about what happens. Because you're so scared of what might happen that you would rather doom everyone, including yourself, by sending there someone who might make a mistake at the worst time, than feel the weight of being the one who has to avoid making that mistake. Am I right?"
Celestia stayed silent, and watched the artificial glow of the generator. Twilight turned back to it, and stared as well, silent.
][ ][ ]-[ ][ ]_
She understood it better now.
She understood a lot of things better now, to be more accurate, but at that moment she was focusing on that particular one.
Not that there was much of a moment, but anyway.
She really did understand it better. What Celestia had been thinking about. She'd understood what it was, but she hadn't really understood it before. It seemed the older alicorn had gotten there before her.
It wasn't just the weight. It was the lack of options. The certainty that things were decided, that she could only advance them.
And it wasn't just the fear of what could come. It was the fear of it coming in the first place. Not the fear of what might have been revealed, but that of it being revealed. Some things belong hidden in the shadows, and are only right as long as they aren't seen. Because they aren't seen.
Too late to back down now. Not that there was any real now, really. It had never been too late, ironically enough. There had been no more time to measure the lateness the moment it would have been too late.
She could still see them, their remains floating around her, there for as long as she wished them to be. She had no pity to spare for them, they were the reason she was there. Nor had she pity to spare for the others.
Quite funny, really, that the ones deemed least deserving had made it the furthest, and that yet they would never reach the end. If she'd had a mouth she would have laughed.
It was all rather muddied. One couldn't stir a thought without dragging along thousands of others, alien, forgotten, and yet all familiar. It made it rather hard to concentrate. She supposed it was appropriate, a fitting representation of what the product of her struggles would be like.
It almost looked like there was a border to it. And something outside it. Something weirdly shaped like an eel. It was at that moment she decided she should do what she was there for, when she started to doubt her sanity wouldn't be affected by the ordeal. Not that there was really a moment. Though she did wonder why eels of all things.
A though began to spin. Faster, catching up more and more in its wake. Memories, visions, and all sorts of concepts stuck to it, each new thought another vortex of its own that dragged up more and more from around them. Soon the whole place, if it could be called a place, was filled with the frothing mass of ideas.
Then, a change began to occur in it. No longer simply a chaotic assembly of disparate elements, an order started to form within it, seemingly naturally, and as it became more evident it began to shape and dictate the flow of all around it, and it became impossible to tell if the order had been born as the consequence of the amalgam's motions or if those motions had been a product of the order all along.
Parts connected, some simultaneously, some sequentially. The entity slowly appeared to curve in on itself, and at the same time each of its components seemed as if it had suddenly begun to refract a myriad of different images of itself.
The edges touched each other, and there was one last first and last sound. Then the contracting mass was shaken by one first last and first intense convulsion, and it finally expanded. And in that moment, and for the first time it was a moment, and for the first moment it was time, she saw it.
She saw all of it, though much was lost to her in the sheer quantity of all there was. She saw the births and deaths of countless stars. She saw the heavens crumble under the merciless flow of time, and she saw fields of infinity spring from every angle of the cosmos. She saw the lives of countless creatures, each a universe in itself and in the limitless boundaries of their minds.
She saw a pony. She saw lots of ponies, really, but this one in particular caught her eye. Or, would have, had she still had eyes to catch. It was a seemingly ordinary pony, at least at the beginning, but with time she appeared to grow into something most would have, and in fact had, called extraordinary.
She looked intensely at the life of that pony. She couldn't be blamed for focusing on a single life, no one was ever expected to take in more than one at a time. Perhaps the major flaw in the plan devised. Still, she looked. It was an interesting thing to look at. All were, really, but this was different. Because she'd chosen to look at it.
The pony grew up. She met other ponies. She saw many places. She did a lot of things. Boring things, exciting things, dangerous things, stupid things, smart things, happy things, sad things, and then... other things. And that was perhaps the most interesting part to her. Other things. Things she didn't know. Things she couldn't know. And yet now she knew them, but not as her own. And yet, the last thing the pony did she did before all those things.
She wanted to talk to that pony. There was something she wanted to tell her. There was something she felt she needed to tell her. Fast. She was getting further away. She was getting later, and the pony was getting earlier, and she needed to catch up. Time was unravelling, coming free of its compression, and it was pushing her past the end.
She was moving away faster. She was elsewhere, elsewhen, and she couldn't fight back. She screamed. She tried to scream, at least. It was all rather muddied. It would have been easier if every concept didn't bring new ones in its wake, if thoughts didn't drag nearby ones along to stretch and twist the full picture.
Dynasty
Orion
Nothing
Order
Throne
Gamma
Overflow
